The Aldous Huxley Fiction Collection

Table of Contents

Limbo

Farcical History of Richard Greenow

Happily Ever After

Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers

Happy Families

Cynthia

The Bookshop

The Death of Lully

Crome Yellow

Mortal Coils

The Gioconda Smile

Permutations Among the Nightingales

The Tillotson Banquet

Green Tunnels

Nuns at Luncheon

Antic Hay

Point Counter Point

Brave New World

Eyeless in Gaza

After Many a Summer

Ape and Essence

The Genius and the Goddess

Island

Limbo

First Published 1920

Farcical History of Richard Greenow

I

THE most sumptuous present that Millicent received on her seventh birthday was a doll's house. "With love to darling little Mill from Aunty Loo." Aunt Loo was immensely rich, and the doll's house was almost as grandiose and massive as herself.

It was divided into four rooms, each papered in a different colour and each furnished as was fitting: beds and wash-stands and wardrobes in the upstair rooms, arm-chairs and artificial plants below. "Replete with every modern convenience; sumptuous appointments." There was even a cold collation ready spread on the dining-room table—two scarlet lobsters on a dish, and a ham that had been sliced into just enough to reveal an internal complexion of the loveliest pink and white. One might go on talking about the doll's house for ever, it was so beautiful. Such, at any rate, was the opinion of Millicent's brother Dick. He would spend hours opening and shutting the front door, peeping through the windows, arranging and rearranging the furniture. As for Millicent, the gorgeous present left her cold. She had been hoping—and, what is more, praying, fervently, every night for a month—that Aunty Loo would give her a toy sewing-machine (one of the kind that works, though) for her birthday.

She was bitterly disappointed when the doll's house came instead. But she bore it all stoically and managed to be wonderfully polite to Aunty Loo about the whole affair. She never looked at the doll's house: it simply didn't interest her.

Dick had already been at a preparatory school for a couple of terms. Mr. Killigrew, the headmaster, thought him a promising boy. "Has quite a remarkable aptitude for mathematics," he wrote in his report. "He has started Algebrathis term and shows a" — "quite remarkable "scratched out (the language of reports is apt to be somewhat limited) — "a very unusual grasp of the subject.'' Mr. Killigrew didn't know that his pupil also took an interest in dolls: if he had, he would have gibed at Dick as unmercifully and in nearly the same terms as Dick's fellow-schoolboys—for shepherds grow to resemble their sheep and pedagogues their childish charges. But o£ course Dick would never have dreamt of telling anyone at school about it. He was chary of letting even the people at home divine his weakness, and when anyone came into the room where the doll's house was, he would put his hands in his pockets and stroll out, whistling the tune of, "There is a Happy Land far, far away, where they have Ham and Eggs seven times a day," as though he had merely stepped in to have a look at the beastly thing—just to give it a kick.

When he wasn't playing with the doll's house, Dick spent his holiday time in reading, largely, devouringly. No length or incomprehensibility could put him off; he had swallowed down Robert Elsmere in the three-volume edition at the age of eight. When he wasn't reading he used to sit and think about Things in General and Nothing in Particular; in fact, as Millicent reproachfully put it, he just mooned about. Millicent, on the other hand, was always busily doing something: weeding in the garden, or hoeing, or fruit-picking (she could be trusted not to eat more than the recognized tariff—one in twenty raspberries or one in forty plums); helping Kate in the kitchen; knitting mufflers for those beings known vaguely as The Cripples, while her mother read aloud in the evenings before bedtime. She disapproved of Dick's mooning, but Dick mooned all the same.

When Dick was twelve and a half he knew enough about mathematics and history and the dead languages to realize that his dear parents were profoundly ignorant and uncultured. But, what was more pleasing to the dear parents, he knew enough to win a scholarship at Aesop College, which is one of our Greatest Public Schools.

If this were a Public School story, I should record the fact that, while at Aesop Dick swore, lied, blasphemed, repeated dirty stories, read the articles in John Bull about brothels disguised as nursing-homes and satyrs disguised as curates; that he regarded his masters, with very few exceptions, as fools, not even always well-meaning. And so on. All which would be quite true, but beside the point. For this is not one of the conventional studies of those clever young men who discover Atheism and Art at School, Socialism at the University, and, passing through the inevitable stage of Sex and Syphilis after taking their B.A., turn into maturely brilliant novelists at the age of twenty-five. I prefer, therefore, to pass over the minor incidents of a difficult pubescence, touching only on those points which seem to throw a light on the future career of our hero.

It is possible for those who desire it— incredible as the thing may appear—to learn something at Aesop College. Dick even learnt a great deal. From the beginning he was the young Benjamin of his mathematical tutor, Mr. Skewbauld, a man of great abilities in his own art, and who, though wholly incapable of keeping a form in order, could make his private tuition a source of much profit to a mathematically minded boy. Mr. Skewbauld's house was the worst in Aesop: Dick described it as a mixture between a ghetto and a home for the mentally deficient, and when he read in Sir Thomas Browne that it was a Vulgar Error to suppose that Jews stink, he wrote a letter to the School Magazine exploding that famous doctor as a quack and a charlatan, whose statements ran counter to the manifest facts of everyday life in Mr. Skewbauld's house. It may seem surprising that Dick should have read Sir Thomas Browne at all. But he was more than a mere mathematician. He filled the ample leisure, which is Aesop's most precious gift to those of its Alumni who know how to use it, with much and varied reading in history, in literature, in physical science, and in more than one foreign language. Dick was something of a prodigy.

"Greenow's an intellectual," was Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger's contemptuous verdict. "I have the misfortune to have two or three intellectuals in my house.

They're all of them friends of his. I think he's a Bad Influence in the School." Copthorne-Slazenger regarded himself as the perfect example of mens sana in corpore sano, the soul of an English gentleman in the body of a Greek god. Unfortunately his legs were rather too short and his lower lip was underhung like a salmon's.

Dick had, indeed, collected about him a band of kindred spirits. There was Partington, who specialized in history; Gay, who had read all the classical writings of the golden age and was engaged in the study of mediaeval Latin; Fletton, who was fantastically clever and had brought the art of being idle to a pitch never previously reached in the annals of Aesop. These were his chief friends, and a queer-looking group they made—Dick, small and dark and nervous; Partington, all roundness, and whose spectacles were two moons in a moonface; Gay, with the stiff walk of a little old man; and Fletton, who looked like nobody so much as Mr. Jingle, tall and thin with a twisted, comical face.

"An ugly skulking crew," Copthorne-Slazenger, conscious of his own Olympian splendour, would say as he saw them pass. With these faithful friends Dick should have been — and indeed for the most part was—very happy. Between them they mustered up a great stock of knowledge; they could discuss every subject under the sun. They were a liberal education and an amusement to one another. There were times, however, when Dick was filled with a vague, but acute, discontent. He wanted something which his friends could not give him; but what, but what? The discontent rankled under the surface, like a suppressed measles. It was Lord Francis Quarles who brought it out and made the symptoms manifest.

Francis Quarles was a superb creature, with the curly forehead of a bull and the face and limbs of a Graeco-Roman statue. It was a sight worth seeing when he looked down through half-shut eyelids, in his usual attitude of sleepy arrogance, on the world about him. He was in effect what Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger imagined himself to be, and he shared that gentleman's dislike for Dick and his friends. "Yellow little atheists," he called them. He always stood up for God and the Church of England; they were essential adjuncts to the aristocracy. God, indeed, was almost a member of the Family; lack of belief in Him amounted to a personal insult to the name of Quarles.

It was half-way through the summer term, when Dick was sixteen, on one of those days of brilliant sunshine and cloudless blue, when the sight of beautiful and ancient buildings is peculiarly poignant. Their age and quiet stand out in melancholy contrast against the radiant life of the summer; and at Aesop the boys go laughing under their antique shadow; "Little victims "—you feel how right Gray was. Dick was idly strolling across the quadrangle, engaged in merely observing the beauty about him — the golden-grey chapel, with its deep geometrical shadows between the buttresses, the comely rose-coloured shapes of the brick-built Tudor buildings, the weathercocks glittering in the sun, the wheeling flurries of pigeons. His old discontent had seized on him again, and to-day in the presence of all this beauty it had become almost unbearable. All at once, out of the mouth of one of the dark little tunnelled doors pierced in the flanks of the sleeping building, a figure emerged into the light. It was Francis Quarles, clad in white flannels and the radiance of the sunshine. He appeared like a revelation, bright, beautiful, and sudden, before Dick's eyes. A violent emotion seized him; his heart leapt, his bowels were moved within him; he felt a little sick and faint—he had fallen in love.

Francis passed by without deigning to notice him. His head was high, his eyes drowsy under their drooping lids. He was gone, and for Dick all the light was out, the beloved quadrangle was a prison-yard, the pigeons a loathsome flock of carrion eaters. Gay and Partington came up behind him with shouts of invitation. Dick walked rudely away. God! how he hated them and their wretched, silly talk and their yellow, ugly faces.

The weeks that followed were full of strangeness. For the first time in his life Dick took to writing poetry. There was one sonnet which began :

Is it a vision or a waking dream? Or is it truly Apollo that I see, Come from his sylvan haunts in Arcady to laugh and loiter, sing and saunter by an English stream. . . .

He kept on repeating the words to himself, "Sylvan haunts in Arcady," "laugh and loiter "(after much thought he had adopted that as more liquidly melodious than "sing and saunter "). How beautiful they sounded!—as beautiful as Keats—more beautiful, for they were his own.

He avoided the company of Gay and Fletton and Partington; they had become odious to him, and their conversation, when he could bring himself to listen to it, was, somehow, almost incomprehensible. He would sit for hours alone in his study; not working—for he could not understand the mathematical problems on which he had been engaged before the fateful day in the quadrangle—but reading novels and the poetry of Mrs. Browning, and at intervals writing something rather ecstatic of his own. After a long preparatory screwing up of his courage, he dared at last to send a fag with a note to Francis, asking him to tea; and when Francis rather frigidly refused, he actually burst into tears. He had not cried like that since he was a child.

He became suddenly very religious. He would spend an hour on his knees every night, praying, praying with frenzy. He mortified the flesh with fasting and watching. He even went so far as to flagellate himself—or at least tried to; for it is very difficult to flagellate yourself adequately with a cane in a room so small that any violent gesture imperils the bric-a-brac. He would pass half the night stark naked, in absurd postures, trying to hurt himself. And then, after the dolorously pleasant process of self-maceration was over, he used to lean out of the window and listen to the murmurs of the night and fill his spirit with the warm velvet darkness of midsummer. Copthorne-Slazenger, coming back by the late train from town one night, happened to see his moon-pale face hanging out of window and was delighted to be able to give him two hundred Greek lines to remind him that even a member of the Sixth Form requires sleep sometimes.

The fit lasted three weeks. "I can't think what's the matter with you, Greenow," complained Mr. Skewbauld snufflingly. "You seem incapable or unwilling to do anything at all. I suspect the cause is constipation. If only everyone would take a little paraffin every night before going to bed! . . ." Mr. Skewbauld's self-imposed mission in life was the propagation of the paraffin habit. It was the universal panacea—the cure for every ill.

His friends of before the crisis shook their heads and could only suppose him mad. And then the fit ended as suddenly as it had begun.

It happened at a dinner-party given by the Cravisters. Dr. Cravister was the Headmaster of Aesop—a good, gentle, learned old man, with snow-white hair and a saintly face which the spirit of comic irony had embellished with a nose that might, so red and bulbous it was, have been borrowed from the properties of a music-hall funny man. And then there was Mrs. Cravister, large and stately as a galleon with all sails set. Those who met her for the first time might be awed by the dignity of what an Elizabethan would have called her "swelling port." But those who knew her well went in terror of the fantastic spirit which lurked behind the outward majesty. They were afraid of what that richly modulated voice of hers might utter. It was not merely that she was malicious—and she had a gift of ever-ready irony; no, what was alarming in all her conversation was the element of the unexpected. With most people one feels comfortably secure that they will always say the obvious and ordinary things; with Mrs. Cravister, never. The best one could do was to be on guard and to try and look, when she made a more than usually characteristic remark, less of a bewildered fool than one felt.

Mrs. Cravister received her guests— they were all of them boys — with stately courtesy. They found it pleasant to be taken so seriously, to be treated as perfectly grown men; but at the same time, they always had with Mrs. Cravister a faint uncomfortable suspicion that all her politeness was an irony so exquisite as to be practically undistinguishable from ingenuousness.

"Good evening, Mr. Gay," she said, holding out her hand and shutting her eyes; it was one of her disconcerting habits, this shutting of the eyes. "What a pleasure it will be to hear you talking to us again about eschatology."

Gay, who had never talked about eschatology and did not know the meaning of the word, smiled a little dimly and made a protesting noise.

"Eschatology? What a charming subject!" The fluty voice belonged to Henry Cravister, the Headmaster's son, a man of about forty who worked in the British Museum. He was almost too cultured, too erudite.

"But I don't know anything about it," said Gay desperately.

"Spare us your modesty," Henry Cravister protested.

His mother shook hands with the other guests, putting some at their ease with a charming phrase and embarrassing others by saying something baffling and unexpected that would have dismayed even the hardiest diner-out, much more a schoolboy tremblingly on his good behaviour. At the tail end of the group of boys stood Dick and Francis Quarles. Mrs. Cravister slowly raised her heavy waxen eyelids and regarded them a moment in silence.

"The Graeco-Roman and the Gothic side by side!" she exclaimed. "Lord Francis is something in the Vatican, a rather late piece of work; and Mr. Greenow is a little gargoyle from the roof of Notre Dame de Paris. Two epochs of art—how clearly one sees the difference. And my husband, I always think, is purely Malayan in design— purely Malayan," she repeated as she shook hands with the two boys.

Dick blushed to the roots of his hair, but Francis' impassive arrogance remained unmoved. Dick stole a glance in his direction, and at the sight of his calm face he felt a new wave of adoring admiration sweeping through him.

The company was assembled and complete, Mrs. Cravister looked round the room and remarking, "We won't wait for Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger," sailed majestically in the direction of the door. She particularly disliked this member of her husband's staff, and lost no opportunity of being rude to him. Thus, where an ordinary hostess might have said, "Shall we come in to dinner ": Mrs. Cravister employed the formula, "We won't wait for Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger"; and a guest unacquainted with Mrs. Cravister's habits would be surprised on entering the dining-room to find that all the seats at the table were filled, and that the meal proceeded smoothly without a single further reference to the missing Copthorne, who never turned up at all, for the good reason that he had never been invited.

Dinner began a little nervously and uncomfortably. At one end of the table the Headmaster was telling anecdotes of Aesop in the sixties, at which the boys in his neighbourhood laughed with a violent nervous insincerity. Henry Cravister, still talking about eschatology, was quoting from Sidonius Apollinarius and Commodianus of Gaza. Mrs. Cravister, who had been engaged in a long colloquy with the butler, suddenly turned on Dick with the remark, "And so you have a deep, passionate fondness for cats," as though they had been intimately discussing the subject for the last hour. Dick had enough presence of mind to say that, yes, he did like cats— all except those Manx ones that had no tails.

"No tails," Mrs. Cravister repeated— "no tails. Like men. How symbolical everything is! "

Francis Quarles was sitting opposite him, so that Dick had Cample opportunity to look at his idol. How perfectly he did everything, down to eating his soup! The first lines of a new poem began to buzz in Dick's head:

"All, all I lay at thy proud marble feet— My heart, my love and all my future days. Upon thy brow for ever let me gaze, For ever touch thy hair: oh (something) sweet. . ."

Would he be able to find enough rhymes to make it into a sonnet? Mrs. Cravister, who had been leaning back in her chair for the last few minutes in a state of exhausted abstraction, opened her eyes and said to nobody in particular:

"Ah, how I envy the calm of those Chinese dynasties!"

"Which Chinese dynasties?" a well-meaning youth inquired.

"Any Chinese dynasty, the more remote the better. Henry, tell us the names of some Chinese dynasties."

In obedience to his mother, Henry delivered a brief disquisition on the history of politics, art, and letters in the Far East.

The Headmaster continued his reminiscences.

An angel of silence passed. The boys, whose shyness had begun to wear off, became suddenly and painfully conscious of hearing themselves eating. Mrs. Cravister saved the situation.

"Lord Francis knows all about birds," she said in her most thrilling voice. "Perhaps he can tell us why it is the unhappy fate of the carrion crow to mate for life."

Conversation again became general. Dick was still thinking about his sonnet. Oh, these rhvmes!—praise, bays, roundelays, amaze: greet, bleat, defeat, beat, paraclete. ... . .

"... to sing the praise In anthems high and solemn roundelays Of Holy Father, Son and Paraclete."

That was good—damned good; but it hardly seemed to fit in with the first quatrain. It would do for one of his religious poems, though. He had written a lot of sacred verse lately.

Then suddenly, cutting across his ecstatic thoughts, came the sound of Henry Cravister's reedy voice.

"But I always find Pater's style so coarse" it said.

Something explosive took place in Dick's head. It often happens when one blows one's nose that some passage in the labyrinth connecting ears and nose and throat is momentarily blocked, and one becomes deaf and strangely dizzy. Then, suddenly, the mucous bubble bursts, sound rushes back to the brain, the head feels clear and stable once more. It was something like this, but transposed into terms of the spirit, that seemed now to have happened to Dick.

It was as though some mysterious obstruction in his brain, which had dammed up and diverted his faculties from their normal course during the past three weeks, had been on a sudden overthrown. His life seemed to be flowing once more along familiar channels.

He was himself again.

"But I always find Pater's style so coarse"

These few words of solemn foolery were the spell which had somehow performed the miracle. It was just the sort of remark he might have made three weeks ago, before the crisis. For a moment, indeed, he almost thought it was he himself who had spoken; his own authentic voice, carried across the separating gulf of days, had woken him again to life!

He looked at Francis Quarles. Why, the fellow was nothing but a great prize ox, a monstrous animal. "There was a Lady loved a Swine. Honey, said she . . ." It was ignoble, it was ridiculous. He could have hidden his face in his hands for pure shame; shame tingled through his body. Goodness, how grotesquely he had behaved!

He leaned across and began talking to Henry Cravister about Pater and style and books in general. Cravister was amazed at the maturity of the boy's mind; for he possessed to a remarkable degree that critical faculty which in the vast majority of boys is—and from their lack of experience must be—wholly lacking.

"You must come and see me some time when you're in London," Henry Cravister said to him when the time came for the boys to get back to their houses. Dick was flattered; he had not said that to any of the others. He walked home with Gay, laughing and talking quite in his old fashion. Gay marvelled at the change in his companion; strange, inexplicable fellow! but it was pleasant to have him back again, to repossess the lost friend. Arrived in his room, Dick sat down to attack the last set of mathematical problems that had been set him. Three hours ago they had appeared utterly incomprehensible; now he understood them perfectly. His mind was like a giant refreshed, delighting in its strength.

Next day Mr. Skewbauld congratulated him on his answers.

"You seem quite to have recovered your old form, Greenow," he said. "Did you take my advice? Paraffin regularly . . ."

Looking back on the events of the last weeks, Dick was disquieted. Mr. Skewbauld might be wrong in recommending paraffin, but he was surely right in supposing that something was the matter and required a remedy. What could it be? He felt so well; but that, of course, proved nothing. He began doing Miiller's exercises, and he bought a jar of malt extract and a bottle of hypo-phosphites. After much consultation of medical handbooks and the encyclopaedia, he came to the conclusion that he was suffering from anaemia of the brain; and for some time one fixed idea haunted him: Suppose the blood completely ceased to flow to his brain, suppose he were to fall down suddenly dead or, worse, become utterly and hopelessly paralysed. . . . Happily the distractions of Aesop in the summer term were sufficiently numerous and delightful to divert his mind from this gloomy brooding, and he felt so well and in such high spirits that it was impossible to go on seriously believing that he was at death's door. Still, whenever he thought of the events of those strange weeks he was troubled. He did not like being confronted by problems which he could not solve. During the rest of his stay at school he was troubled by no more than the merest velleities of a relapse. A fit of moon-gazing and incapacity to understand the higher mathematics had threatened him one time when he was working rather too strenuously for a scholarship. But a couple of days' complete rest had staved off the peril. There had been rather a painful scene, too, at Dick's last School Concert. Oh, those Aesop concerts! Musically speaking, of course, they are deplorable; but how rich from all other points of view than the merely aesthetic! The supreme moment arrives at the very end when three of the most eminent and popular of those about to leave mount the platform together and sing the famous Farewell." Greatest of school songs! The words are not much, but the tune, which goes swooning along in three-four time, is perhaps the masterpiece of the late organist, Dr. Pilch.

Dick was leaving, but he was not a sufficiently heroic figure to have been asked to sing, "Aesop, Farewell." He was simply a member of the audience, and one, moreover, who had come to the concert in a critical and mocking spirit. For, as he had an ear for music, it was impossible for him to take the concert very seriously. The choir had clamorously re-crucified the Messiah; the soloists had all done their worst; and now it was time for "Aesop, Farewell." The heroes climbed on to the stage. They were three demi-gods, but Francis Quarles was the most splendid of the group as he stood there with head thrown back, eyes almost closed, calm and apparently unconscious of the crowd that seethed, actually and metaphorically, beneath him. He was wearing an enormous pink orchid in the buttonhole of his evening coat; his shirt-front twinkled with diamond studs; the buttons of his waistcoat were of fine gold. At the sight of him, Dick felt his heart beating violently; he was not, he painfully realized, master of himself.

The music struck up—Dum, dum, dumdidi, dumdidi; dum, dum, dum, and so on. So like the Merry Widow. In two days' time he would have left Aesop forever. The prospect had never affected him very intensely. He had enjoyed himself at school, but he had never, like so many Aesopians, fallen in love with the place. It remained for him an institution; for others it was almost an adored person. But to-night his spirit, rocked on a treacly ocean of dominant sevenths, succumbed utterly to the sweet sorrow of parting. And there on the platform stood Francis. Oh, how radiantly beautiful! And when he began, in his rich tenor, the first verse of the Valedictory:

"Farewell, Mother Aesop, Our childhood's home! Our spirit is with thee, Though far we roam ..."

he found himself hysterically sobbing.

II

CANTELOUP COLLEGE is perhaps the most frightful building in Oxford—and to those who know their Oxford well this will mean not a little. Up till the middle of last century Canteloup possessed two quadrangles of fifteenth-century buildings, unimpressive and petty, like so much of College architecture, but at least quiet, unassuming, decent. After the accession of Victoria the College began to grow in numbers, wealth, and pride. The old buildings were too small and unpretentious for what had now become a Great College. In the summer of 1867 a great madness fell upon the Master and Fellows. They hired a most distinguished architect, bred up in the school of Ruskin, who incontinently razed all the existing buildings to the ground and erected in their stead a vast pile in the approved Mauro-Venetian Gothic of the period. The New Buildings contained a great number of rooms, each served by a separate and almost perpendicular staircase; and if nearly half of them were so dark as to make it necessary to light them artificially for all but three hours out of the twenty-four, this slight defect was wholly outweighed by the striking beauty, from outside, of the Neo-Byzantine loopholes by which they were, euphemistically, "lighted."

Prospects in Canteloup may not please; but man, on the other hand, tends to be less vile there than in many other places. There is an equal profusion at Canteloup of Firsts and Blues; there are Union orators of every shade of opinion and young men so languidly well bred as to take no interest in politics of any kind; there are drinkers of cocoa and drinkers of champagne. Canteloup is a microcosm, a whole world in miniature; and whatever | your temperament and habits may be, whether you wish to drink, or row, or work, or hunt, Canteloup will provide you with congenial companions and a spiritual home.

Lack of athletic distinction had prevented Dick from being, at Aesop, a hero or anything like one. At Canteloup, in a less barbarically ordered state of society, things were different. His rooms in the Venetian gazebo over the North Gate became the meeting-place of all that was most intellectually distinguished in Canteloup and the University at large. He had I had his sitting-room austerely upholstered and papered in grey. A large white Chinese figure of the best period stood pedestalled in one corner, and on the walls there hung a few uncompromisingly good drawings and lithographs by modern artists. Fletton, who had accompanied Dick from Aesop to Canteloup, called it the "cerebral chamber "; and with its prevailing tone of brain-coloured grey and the rather dry intellectual taste of its decorations it deserved the name.

To-night the cerebral chamber had been crammed. The Canteloup branch of the Fabian Society, under Dick's presidency, had been holding a meeting. "Art in the Socialist State "was what they had been discussing. And now the meeting had broken up, leaving nothing but three empty jugs that had once contained mulled claret and a general air of untidiness to testify to its having taken place at all. Dick stood leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece and absent-mindedly kicking, to the great detriment of his pumps, at the expiring red embers in the grate. From the depths of a huge and cavernous arm-chair, Fletton, pipe in mouth, fumed like a sleepy volcano.

"I liked the way, Dick," he said, with a laugh—" the way you went for the Arty-Crafties. You utterly destroyed them."

"I merely pointed out, what is sufficiently obvious, that crafts are not art, nor anything like it, that's all." Dick snapped out the words. He was nervous and excited, and his body felt as though it were full of compressed springs ready to jump at the most imponderable touch. He was always like that after making a speech.

"You did it very effectively," said Fletton. There was a silence between the two young men.

A noise like the throaty yelling of savages in rut came wafting up from the quadrangle on which the windows of the cerebral chamber opened. Dick started; all the springs within him had gone off at once—a thousand simultaneous Jack-in-the-boxes.

"It's only Francis Quarks' dinner-party becoming vocal," Fletton explained. "Blind mouths, as Milton would call them."

Dick began restlessly pacing up and down the room. When Fletton spoke to him, he did not reply or, at best, gave utterance to a monosyllable or a grunt.

"My dear Dick," said the other at last, "you're not very good company to-night," and heaving himself up from the arm-chair, Fletton went shuffling in his loose, heel-less slippers towards the door. "I'm going to bed."

Dick paused in his lion-like prowling to listen to the receding sound of feet on the stairs. All was silent now: Gott sei dank. He went into his bedroom. It was there that he kept his piano, for it was a piece of furniture too smugly black and polished to have a place in the cerebral chamber. He had been thirsting after his piano all the time Fletton was sitting there, damn him! He drew up a chair and began to play over and over a certain series of chords. With his left hand he struck an octave G in the base, while his right dwelt lovingly on F, B, and E. A luscious chord, beloved by Mendelssohn—a chord in which the native richness of the dominant seventh is made more rich, more piercing sweet by the addition of a divine discord. G, F, B, and E—he let the notes hang tremulously on the silence, savoured to the full their angelic overtones; then, when the sound of the chord had almost died away, he let it droop reluctantly through D to the simple, triumphal beauty of C natural— the diapason closing full in what was for Dick a wholly ineffable emotion.

He repeated that dying fall again and again, perhaps twenty times. Then, when he was satiated with its deliciousness, he rose from the piano and opening the lowest drawer of the wardrobe pulled out from under his evening clothes a large portfolio. He undid the strings; it was full of photogravure reproductions from various Old Masters. There was an almost complete set of Greuze's works, several of the most striking Ary Scheffers, some Alma Tadema, some Leighton, photographs of sculpture by Torwaldsen and Canova, Boecklin's "Island of the Dead," religious pieces by Holman Hunt, and a large packet of miscellaneous pictures from the Paris Salons of the last forty years.

He took them into the cerebral chamber where the light was better, and began to study them, lovingly, one by one. The Cezanne lithograph, the three admirable etchings by Van Gogh, the little Picasso looked on, unmoved, from the walls.

It was three o'clock before Dick got to bed. He was stiff and cold, but full of the satisfaction of having accomplished something. And, indeed, he had cause to be satisfied; for he had written the first four thousand words of a novel, a chapter and a half of Heartsease Fitzroy: the Story of a Toung Girl.

Next morning Dick looked at what he had written overnight, and was alarmed. He had never produced anything quite like this since the days of the Quarles incident at Aesop. A relapse? He wondered. Not a serious one in any case; for this morning he felt himself in full possession of all his ordinary faculties. He must have got overtired speaking to the Fabians in the evening. He looked at his manuscript again, and read: "'Daddy, do the little girl angels in heaven have toys and kittens and teddy-bears?'

"'I don't know,' said Sir Christopher gently. 'Why does my little one ask?'

"'Because, daddy,' said the child— 'because I think that soon I too may be a little angel, and I should so like to have my teddy-bear with me in heaven.'

"Sir Christopher clasped her to his breast. How frail she was, how ethereal, how nearly an angel already! Would she have her teddy-bear in heaven? The childish question rang in his ears. Great, strong man though he was, he was weeping. His tears fell in a rain upon her auburn curls.

"'Tell me, daddy,' she insisted, 'will dearest God allow me my teddy-bear?'

"'My child,' he sobbed, 'my child

The blushes mounted hot to his cheeks; he turned away his head in horror. He would really have to look after himself for a bit, go to bed early, take exercise, not do much work. This sort of thing couldn't be allowed to go on.

He went to bed at half-past nine that night, and woke up the following morning to find that he had added a dozen or more closely written pages to his original manuscript during the night. He supposed he must have written them in his sleep. It was all very disquieting. The days passed by; every morning a fresh instalment was added to the rapidly growing bulk of Heartsease Fitzroy. It was as though some goblin, some Lob-lie-by-the-Fire, came each night to perform the appointed task, vanishing before the morning. In a little while Dick's alarm wore off; during the day he was perfectly well; his mind functioned with marvellous efficiency. It really didn't seem to matter what he did in his sleep provided he was all right in his waking hours. He almost forgot about Heartsease, and was only reminded of her existence when by chance he opened the drawer in which the steadily growing pile of manuscript reposed.

In five weeks Heartsease Fitzroy was finished. Dick made a parcel of the manuscript and sent it to a literary agent. He had no hopes of any publisher taking the thing; but he was in sore straits for money at the moment, and it seemed worth trying, on the off-chance. A fortnight later Dick received a letter beginning: "DEAR MADAM, —Permit me to hail in you a new authoress of real talent. Heartsease Fitzroy is GREAT," — and signed "EBOR W. SIMS, Editor, Hildebrand's Home Weekly."

Details of the circulation of Hildebrand's Home Weekly were printed at the head of the paper; its average net sale was said to exceed three and a quarter millions. The terms offered by Mr. Sims seemed to Dick positively fabulous. And there would be the royalties on the thing in book form after the serial had run its course.

The letter arrived at breakfast; Dick cancelled all engagements for the day and set out immediately for a long and solitary walk. It was necessary to be alone, to think. He made his way along the Seven Bridges Road, up Cumnor Hill, through the village, and down the footpath to Bablock Hithe, thence to pursue the course of the "stripling Thames "—haunted at every step by the Scholar Gipsy, damn him! He drank beer and ate some bread and cheese in a little inn by a bridge, farther up the river; and it was there, in the inn parlour, surrounded by engravings of the late Queen, and breathing the slightly mouldy preserved air bottled some three centuries ago into that hermetically sealed chamber—it was there that he solved the problem, perceived the strange truth about himself.

He was a hermaphrodite.

A hermaphrodite, not in the gross obvious sense, of course, but spiritually. Two persons in one, male and female. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: or rather a new William Sharp and Fiona MacLeod —a more intelligent William, a vulgarer Fiona. Everything was explained; the deplorable Quarles incident was simple and obvious now. A sentimental young lady of literary tastes writing sonnets to her Ouida guardsman. And what an unerring flair Mr. Sims had shown by addressing him so roundly and unhesitatingly as "madam "!

Dick was elated at this discovery. He had an orderly mind that disliked mysteries. He had been a puzzle to himself for a long time; now he was solved. He was not in the least distressed to discover this abnormality in his character. As long as the two parts of him kept well apart, as long as his male self could understand mathematics, and as long as his lady novelist's self kept up her regular habit of writing at night and retiring from business during the day, the arrangement would be admirable. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed an ideal state of affairs. His life would arrange itself so easily and well. He would devote the day to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, to philosophy and mathematics, with perhaps an occasional excursion into politics. After midnight he would write novels with a feminine pen, earning the money that would make his unproductive male labours possible. A kind of spiritual souteneur. But the fear of poverty need haunt him no more; no need to become a wage-slave, to sacrifice his intelligence to the needs of his belly. Like a gentleman of the East, he would sit still and smoke his philosophic pipe while the womenfolk did the dirty work. Could anything be more satisfactory?

He paid for his bread and beer, and walked home, whistling as he went.

III

TWO months later the first instalment of Heartsease Fitzroy: the Story of a Young Girl, by Pearl Bellairs, appeared in the pages of Hilde-brand's Home Weekly. Three and a quarter millions read and approved. When the story appeared in book form, two hundred thousand copies were sold in six weeks; and in the course of the next two years no less than sixteen thousand female infants in London alone were christened Heartsease. With her fourth novel and her two hundred and fiftieth Sunday paper article, Pearl Bellairs was well on her way to becoming a household word.

Meanwhile Dick was in receipt of an income far beyond the wildest dreams of his avarice. He was able to realize the two great ambitions of his life—to wear silk underclothing and to smoke good (but really good) cigars.

IV

DICK went down from Canteloup in a blaze of glory. The most brilliant man of his generation, exceptional mind, prospects, career. But his head was not turned. When people congratulated him on his academic successes, he thanked them politely and then invited them to come and see his Memento Mori. His Memento Mori was called Mr. Glottenham and could be found at any hour of the day in the premises of the Union, or if it was evening, in the Senior Common Room at Canteloup. He was an old member of the College, and the dons in pity for his age and loneliness had made him, some years before, a member of their Common Room. This act of charity was as bitterly regretted as any generous impulse in the history of the world. Mr. Giottenham made the life of the Canteloup fellows a burden to them; he dined in Hall with fiendish regularity, never missing a night, and he was always the last to leave the Common Room. Mr. Glottenham did not prepossess at a first glance; the furrows of his face were covered with a short grey sordid stubble; his clothes were disgusting with the spilth of many years of dirty feeding; he had the shoulders and long hanging arms of an ape—an ape with a horribly human look about it. When he spoke, it was like the sound of a man breaking coke; he spoke incessantly and on every subject. His knowledge was enormous; but he possessed the secret of a strange inverted alchemy — he knew how to turn the richest gold to lead, could make the most interesting topic so intolerably tedious that it was impossible, when he talked, not to loathe it.

This was the death's-head to which Dick, like an ancient philosopher at a banquet, would direct the attention of his heartiest congratulators. Mr. Glotten-ham had had the most dazzling academic career of his generation. His tutors had prophesied for him a future far more brilliant than that of any of his contemporaries. They were now Ministers of State, poets, philosophers, judges, millionaires. Mr. Glottenham frequented the Union and the Canteloup Senior Common Room, and was—well, he was just Mr. Glottenham. Which was why Dick did not think too highly of his own laurels.

V

"WHAT shall I do? What ought I to do?" Dick walked up and down the room smoking, furiously and without at all savouring its richness, one of his opulent cigars.

"My dear," said Cravister—for it was in Cravister's high-ceilinged Bloomsbury room that Dick was thus unveiling his distress of spirit—" my dear, this isn't a revival meeting. You speak as though there were an urgent need for your soul to be saved from hell fire. It's not as bad as that, you know."

"But it is a revival meeting," Dick shouted in exasperation—"it is. I'm a revivalist. You don't know what it's like to have a feeling about your soul. I'm terrifyingly earnest; you don't seem to understand that. I have all the feelings of Bunyan without his religion. I regard the salvation of my soul as important.

How simple everything would be if one could go out with those creatures in bonnets and sing hymns like, ' Hip, hip for the blood of the Lamb, hurrah! ' or that exquisite one :

"'The bells of Hell ring tingalingaling

For you, but not for me.

For me the angels singalingaling;

They've got the goods for me.'

Unhappily it's impossible."

"Your ideas," said Cravister in his flutiest voice, "are somewhat Gothic. I think I can understand them, though of course I don't sympathize or approve. My advice to people in doubt about what course of action they ought to pursue is always the same: do what you want to."

"Cravister, you're hopeless," said Dick, laughing. "I suppose I am rather Gothic, but I do feel sometimes that the question of ought as well as of want does arise."

Dick had come to his old friend for advice about Life. What ought he to do? The indefatigable pen of Pearl Bellairs solved for him the financial problem. There remained only the moral problem: how could he best expend his energies and his time? Should he devote himself to knowing or doing, philosophy or politics? He felt in himself the desire to search for truth and the ability—who knows?—to find it. On the other hand, the horrors of the world about him seemed to call on him to put forth all his strength in an effort to ameliorate what was so patently and repulsively bad. Actually, what had to be decided was this: Should he devote himself to the researches necessary to carry out the plan, long ripening in his brain, of a new system of scientific philosophy; or should he devote his powers and Pearl Bellairs' money in propaganda that should put life into the English revolutionary movement? Great moral principles were in the balance. And Cravister's advice was, do what you want to!

After a month of painful indecision, Dick, who was a real Englishman, arrived at a satisfactory compromise. He started work on his new Synthetic Philosophy, and at the same time joined the staff of the Weekly International, to which he contributed both money and articles. The weeks slipped pleasantly and profitably along. The secret of happiness lies in congenial work, and no one could have worked harder than Dick, unless it was the indefatigable Pearl Bellairs, whose nightly output of five thousand words sufficed to support not only Dick but the Weekly International as well. These months were perhaps the happiest period of Dick's life. He had friends, money, liberty; he knew himself to be working well; and it was an extra, a supererogatory happiness that he began at this time to get on much better with his sister Millicent than he had ever done before. Millicent had come up to Oxford as a student at St. Mungo Hall in Dick's third year. She had grown into a very efficient and very intelligent young woman. A particularly handsome young woman as well. She was boyishly slender, and a natural grace kept on breaking through the somewhat rigid deportment, which she always tried to impose upon herself, in little beautiful gestures and movements that made the onlooker catch his breath with astonished pleasure.

"Wincing she was as is a jolly colt, Straight as a mast and upright as a bolt:"

Chaucer had as good an eye for youthful grace as for mormals and bristly nostrils and thick red jovial villainousness.

Millicent lost no time in making her presence at St. Mungo's felt. Second- and third-year heroines might snort at the forwardness of a mere fresh-girl, might resent the complete absence of veneration for their glory exhibited by this youthful bejauna; Millicent pursued her course unmoved. She founded new societies and put fresh life into the institutions which already existed at St. Mungo's to take cocoa and discuss the problems of the universe. She played hockey like a tornado, and she worked alarmingly hard. Decidedly, Millicent was a Force, very soon the biggest Force in the St. Mungo world. In her fifth term she organized the famous St. Mungo general strike, which compelled the authorities to relax a few of the more intolerably tyrannical and anachronistic rules restricting the liberty of the students. It was she who went, on behalf of the strikers, to interview the redoubtable Miss Prosser, Principal of St. Mungo's. The redoubtable Miss Prosser looked grim and invited her to sit down, Millicent sat down and, without quailing, delivered a short but pointed speech attacking the fundamental principles of the St. Mungo system of discipline.

"Your whole point of view," she assured Miss Prosser, "is radically wrong. It's an insult to the female sex; it's positively obscene. Your root assumption is simply this: that we're all in a chronic state of sexual excitement; leave us alone for a moment and we'll immediately put our desires into practice. It's disgusting. It makes me blush. After all, Miss Prosser, we are a college of intelligent women, not an asylum of nymphomaniacs."

For the first time in her career, Miss Prosser had to admit herself beaten. The authorities gave in—reluctantly and on only a few points; but the principle had been shaken, and that, as Millicent pointed out, was what really mattered.

Dick used to see a good deal of his sister while he was still in residence at Canteloup, and after he had gone down he used to come regularly once a fortnight during term to visit her. That horrible mutual reserve, which poisons the social life of most families and which had effectively made of their brotherly and sisterly relation a prolonged discomfort in the past, began to disappear. They became the best of friends.

"I like you, Dick, a great deal better than I did," said Millicent one day as they were parting at the gate of St. Mungo's after a long walk together.

Dick took off his hat and bowed. "My dear, I reciprocate the sentiment. And, what's more, I esteem and admire you. So there."

Millicent curtsied, and they laughed. They both felt very happy.

VI

"WHAT a life!" said Dick  with a sigh of weariness as the train moved out of Euston.

Not a bad life, Millicent thought.

"But horribly fatiguing. I am quite outreined by it."

"Outreined "was Dick's translation of ereintt. He liked using words of his own manufacture; one had to learn his idiom before one could properly appreciate his intimate conversation.

Dick had every justification for being outreined. The spring and summer had passed for him in a whirl of incessant activity. He had written three long chapters of the New Synthetic Philosophy, and had the material for two more ready in the form of notes. He had helped to organize and bring to its successful conclusion the great carpenters' strike of May and June. He had written four pamphlets and a small army of political articles. And this comprised only half his labour; for nightly, from twelve till two, Pearl Bellairs emerged to compose the masterpieces which supplied Dick with his bread and butter. Apes in Purple had been published in May. Since then she had finished La Belle Dame sans Morality, and had embarked on the first chapters of Daisy's Voyage to Cythera. Her weekly articles, "For the Girls of Britain," had become, during this period, a regular and favourite feature in the pages of Hildebrand's Sabbath, that prince of Sunday papers. At the beginning of July, Dick considered that he had earned a holiday, and now they were off, he and Millicent, for the North.

Dick had taken a cottage on the shore of one of those long salt-water lochs that give to the west coast of Scotland such a dissipated appearance on the map. For miles around there was not a living soul who did not bear the name of Campbell—two families only excepted, one of whom was called Murray-Drummond and the other Drummond-Murray. However, it was not for the people that Dick and Millicent had come, so much as for the landscape, which made up in variety for anything that the inhabitants might lack. Behind the cottage, in the midst of a narrow strip of bog lying between the loch and the foot of the mountains, stood one of the numerous tombs of Ossian, a great barrow of ancient stones. And a couple of miles away the remains of Deirdre's Scottish refuge bore witness to the Celtic past. The countryside was dotted with the black skeletons of mediaeval castles. Astonishing country, convulsed into fantastic mountain shapes, cut and indented by winding fiords. On summer days the whole of this improbable landscape became blue and remote and aerially transparent. Its beauty lacked all verisimilitude. It was for that reason that Dick chose the neighbourhood for his holidays. After the insistent actuality of London this frankly unreal coast was particularly refreshing to a jaded spirit.

"Nous sommes ici en plein roman-tisme," said Dick on the day of their arrival, making a comprehensive gesture towards the dream-like scenery, and for the rest of his holiday he acted the part of a young romantic of the palmy period. He sat at the foot of Ossian's tomb and read Lamartine; he declaimed Byron from the summit of the mountains and Shelley as he rowed along the loch. In the evening he read George Sand's Indiana; he agonized with the pure, but passionate, heroine, while his admiration for Sir Brown, her English lover, the impassive giant who never speaks and is always clothed in faultless hunting costume, knew no bounds. He saturated himself in the verses of Victor Hugo, and at last almost came to persuade himself that the words, Dieu, infinite, eternite, with which the works of that deplorable genius are so profusely sprinkled, actually possessed some meaning, though what that meaning was he could not, even in his most romantic transports, discover. Pearl Bellairs, of course, understood quite clearly their significance, and though she was a very poor French scholar she used sometimes to be moved almost to tears by the books she found lying about when she came into existence after midnight. She even copied out extracts into her notebooks with a view to using them in her next novel.

"Les plus desesperes sont les chants les plus beaux, Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots,"

was a couplet which struck her as sublime.

Millicent, meanwhile, did the housekeeping with extraordinary efficiency, took a great deal of exercise, and read long, serious books; she humoured her brother in his holiday romanticism, but refused to take part in the game.

The declaration of war took them completely by surprise. It is true that a Scotsman found its way into the cottage by about lunch-time every day, but it was never read, and served only to light fires and wrap up fish and things of that sort. No letters were being forwarded, for they had left no address; they were isolated from the world. On the fatal morning Dick had, indeed, glanced at the paper, without however noticing anything out of the ordinary. It was only later when, alarmed by the rumours floating round the village shop, he came to examine his Scotsman more closely, that he found about half-way down the third column of one of the middle pages an admirable account of all that had been so tragically happening in the last twenty-four hours; he learnt with horror that I Europe was at war and that his country too had entered the arena. Even in the midst of his anguish of spirit he could not help admiring the Scotsman's splendid impassivity—no headlines, no ruffling of the traditional aristocratic dignity. Like Sir Rodolphe Brown in Indiana, he thought, with a sickly smile.

Dick determined to start for London at once. He felt that he must act, or at least create the illusion of action; he could not stay quietly where he was. It was arranged that he should set out that afternoon, while Millicent should follow a day or two later with the bulk of the luggage. The train which took him to Glasgow was slower than he thought it possible for any train to be. He tried to read, he tried to sleep; it was no good. His nervous agitation was pitiable; he made little involuntary movements with his limbs, and every now and then the muscles of his face began twitching in a spasmodic and uncontrollable tic. There were three hours to wait in Glasgow; he spent them in wandering about the streets. In the interminable summer twilight the inhabitants of Glasgow came forth into the open to amuse themselves; the sight almost made him sick. Was it possible that there should be human beings so numerous and so uniformly hideous? Small, deformed, sallow, they seemed malignantly ugly, as if on purpose. The words they spoke were incomprehensible. He shuddered; it was an alien place—it was hell. The London train was crammed. Three gross Italians got into Dick's carriage, and after they had drunk and eaten with loud, unpleasant gusto, they prepared themselves for sleep by taking off their boots. Their feet smelt strongly ammoniac, like a cage of mice long uncleaned. Acutely awake, while the other occupants of the compartment enjoyed a happy unconsciousness, he looked at the huddled carcasses that surrounded him. The warmth and the smell of them was suffocating, and there came to his mind, with the nightmarish insistence of a fixed idea, the thought that every breath they exhaled was saturated with disease. To be condemned to sit in a hot bath of consumption and syphilis—it was too horrible! The moment came at last when he could bear it no longer; he got up and went into the corridor. Standing there, or sitting sometimes for a few dreary minutes in the lavatory, he passed the rest of the night. The train roared along without a stop. The roaring became articulate: in the days of his childhood trains used to run to the tune of "Lancashire, to Lancashire, to fetch a pocket-handkercher; to Lancashire, to Lancashire . . ." But to-night the wheels were shouting insistently, a million times over, two words only—" the War, the War; the War, the War." He tried desperately to make them say something else, but they refused to recite Milton; they refused to go to Lancashire; they went on with their endless Tibetan litany— the War, the War, the War.

By the time he reached London, Dick was in a wretched state. His nerves were twittering and jumping within him; he felt like a walking aviary. The tic in his face had become more violent and persistent. As he stood in the station, waiting for a cab, he overheard a small child saying to its mother, "What's the matter with that man's face, mother?"

"Sh—sh, darling," was the reply. "It's rude."

Dick turned and saw the child's big round eyes fixed with fascinated curiosity upon him, as though he were a kind of monster. He put his hand to his forehead and tried to stop the twitching of the muscles beneath the skin. It pained him to think that he had become a scarecrow for children.

Arrived at his flat, Dick drank a glass of brandy and lay down for a rest. He felt exhausted—ill. At half-past one he got up, drank some more brandy, and crept down into the street. It was intensely hot; the pavements reverberated the sunlight in a glare which hurt his eyes; they seemed to be in a state of grey incandescence. A nauseating smell of wetted dust rose from the roadway, along which a water-cart was slowly piddling its way. He realized suddenly that he ought not to have drunk all that brandy on an empty stomach; he was definitely rather tipsy. He had arrived at that state of drunkenness when the senses perceive things clearly, but do not transmit their knowledge to the understanding. He was painfully conscious of this division, and it needed all the power of his will to establish contact between his parted faculties. It was as though he were, by a great and prolonged effort, keeping his brain pressed against the back of his eyes; as soon as he relaxed the pressure, the understanding part slipped back, the contact was broken, and he relapsed into a state bordering on imbecility. The actions which ordinarily one does by habit and without thinking, he had to perform consciously and voluntarily. He had to reason out the problem of walking—first the left foot forward, then the right. How ingeniously he worked his ankles and knees and hips! How delicately the thighs slid past one another!

He found a restaurant and sat there drinking coffee and trying to eat an omelette until he felt quite sober. Then he drove to the offices of the Weekly International to have a talk with Hyman, the editor. Hyman was sitting in his shirtsleeves, writing.

He lifted his head as Dick came in. "Greenow," he shouted delightedly, "we were all wondering what had become of you. We thought you'd joined the Army."

Dick shook his head, but did not speak; the hot stuffy smell of printer's ink and machinery combined with the atrocious reek of Hyman's Virginian cigarettes to make him feel rather faint. He sat down on the window-ledge, so as to be able to breathe an uncontaminated air.

"Well," he said at last, "what about it?"

"It's going to be hell."

"Did you suppose I thought it was going to be paradise?" Dick replied irritably. "Internationalism looks rather funny now, doesn't it?"

"I believe in it more than ever I did," cried Hyman. His face lit up with the fervour of his enthusiasm. It was a fine face, gaunt, furrowed, and angular, for all that he was barely thirty, looking as though it had been boldly chiselled from some hard stone. "The rest of the world may go mad; we'll try and keep our sanity. The time will come when they'll see we were right."

Hyman talked on. His passionate sincerity and singleness of purpose were an inspiration to Dick. He had always admired Hyman—with the reservations, of course, that the man was rather a fanatic and not so well-educated as he might have been—but to-day he admired him more than ever. He was even moved by that perhaps too facile eloquence which of old had been used to leave him cold. After promising to do a series of articles on international relations for the paper, Dick went home, feeling better than he had done all day.

He decided that he would begin writing his articles at once. He collected pens, paper, and ink and sat down in a businesslike way at his bureau. He remembered distinctly biting the tip of his penholder; it tasted rather bitter.

And then he realized he was standing in Regent Street, looking in at one of the windows of Liberty's.

For a long time he stood there quite still, absorbed to all appearance in the contemplation of a piece of peacock-blue fabric. But all his attention was concentrated within himself, not on anything outside. He was wondering—wondering how it came about that he was sitting at his writing-table at one moment, and standing, at the next, in Regent Street. He hadn't—the thought flashed upon him —he hadn't been drinking any more of that brandy, had he? No, he felt himself to be perfectly sober. He moved slowly away and continued to speculate as he walked.

At Oxford Circus he bought an evening paper. He almost screamed aloud when he saw that the date printed at the head of the page was August I2th. It was on August 7th that he had sat down at his writing-table to compose those articles. Five days ago, and he had not the faintest recollection of what had happened in those five days.

He made all haste back to the flat. Everything was in perfect order. He had evidently had a picnic lunch that morning —sardines, bread and jam, and raisins; the remains of it still covered the table. He opened the sideboard and took out the brandy bottle. Better make quite sure. He held it up to the light; it was more than three-quarters full. Not a drop had gone since the day of his return. If brandy wasn't the cause, then what was?

As he sat there thinking, he began in an absent-minded way to look at his evening paper. He read the news on the front page, then turned to the inner sheets. His eye fell on these words printed at the head of the column next the leading article:

"To the Women of the Empire. Thoughts in War-Time. By Pearl Bellairs." Underneath in brackets: "The first of a series of inspiring patriotic articles by Miss Bellairs, the well-known novelist."

Dick groaned in agony. He saw in a flash what had happened to his five missing days. Pearl had got hold of them somehow, had trespassed upon his life out of her own reserved nocturnal existence. She had taken advantage of his agitated mental state to have a little fun in her own horrible way.

He picked up the paper once more and began to read Pearl's article. "Inspiring and patriotic ": those were feeble words in which to describe Pearl's shrilly raucous chauvinism. And the style! Christ! to think that he was responsible, at least in part, for this. Responsible, for had not the words been written by his own hand and composed in some horrible bluebeard's chamber of his own brain? They had, there was no denying it. Pearl's literary atrocities had never much distressed him; he had long given up reading a word she wrote. Her bank balance was the only thing about her that interested him. But now she was invading the sanctities of his private life. She was trampling on his dearest convictions, denying his faith. She was a public danger. It was all too frightful.

He passed the afternoon in misery. Suicide or brandy seemed the only cures. Not very satisfactory ones, though. Towards evening an illuminating idea occurred to him. He would go and see Rogers. Rogers knew all about psychology—from books, at any rate: Freud, Jung, Morton Prince, and people like that. He used to try hypnotic experiments on his friends and even dabbled in amateur psychotherapy. Rogers might help him to lay the ghost of Pearl. He ate a hasty dinner and went to see Rogers in his Kensington rooms.

Rogers was sitting at a table with a great book open in front of him. The reading-lamp, which was the only light in the room, brightly illumined one side of the pallid, puffy, spectacled face, leaving the other in complete darkness, save for a little cedilla of golden light caught on the fold of flesh at the corner of his mouth. His huge shadow crossed the floor, began to climb the wall, and from the shoulders upwards mingled itself with the general darkness of the room.

"Good evening, Rogers," said Dick wearily. "I wish you wouldn't try and look like Rembrandt's f Christ at Emmaus' with these spectacular chiaroscuro effects."

Rogers gave vent to his usual nervous giggling laugh. "This is very nice of you to come and see me, Greenow."

"How's the Board of Trade? "Rogers was a Civil Servant by profession.

"Oh, business as usual, as the Daily Mail would say." Rogers laughed again as though he had made a joke.

After a little talk of things indifferent, Dick brought the conversation round to himself.

"I believe I'm getting a bit neurasthenic," he said. "Fits of depression, nervous pains, lassitude, anaemia of the will. I've come to you for professional advice. I want you to nose out my suppressed complexes, analyse me, dissect me. Will you do that for me? "

Rogers was evidently delighted. "I'll do my best," he said, with assumed modesty. "But I'm no good at the thing, so you mustn't expect much."

"I'm at your disposal," said Dick.

Rogers placed his guest in a large armchair. "Relax your muscles and think of nothing at all." Dick sat there flabby and abstracted while Rogers made his preparations. His apparatus consisted chiefly in a notebook and a stop-watch. He seated himself at the table.

"Now," he said solemnly, "I want you to listen to me. I propose to read out a list of words; after each of the words you must say the first word that comes into your head. The very first, mind, however foolish it may seem. And say it as soon as it crosses your mind; don't wait to think. I shall write down your answers and take the time between each question and reply."

Rogers cleared his throat and started.

"Mother." he said in a loud, clear voice. He always began his analyses with the family. For since the majority of kinks and complexes date from childhood, it is instructive to investigate the relations between the patient and those who surrounded him at an early age. "Mother."

"Dead," replied Dick immediately. He had scarcely known his mother.

"Father."

"Dull." One and a fifth seconds' interval.

"Sister." Rogers pricked his ears for the reply: his favourite incest-theory depended on it.

"Fabian Society," said Dick, after two seconds' interval. Rogers was a little disappointed. He was agreeably thrilled and excited by the answer he received to his next word: "Aunt."

The seconds passed, bringing nothing with them; and then at last there floated into Dick's mind the image of himself as a child, dressed in green velvet and lace, a perfect Bubbles boy, kneeling on Auntie Loo's lap and arranging a troop of lead soldiers on the horizontal projection of her corsage.

"Bosom," he said.

Rogers wrote down the word and underlined it. Six and three-fifths seconds: very significant. He turned now to the chapter of possible accidents productive of nervous shocks.

"Fire."

"Coal."

"Sea."

"Sick."

"Train."

"Smell."

And so on. Dull answers all the time. Evidently, nothing very catastrophic had ever happened to him. Now for a frontal attack on the fortress of sex itself.

"Women." There was rather a long pause, four seconds, and then Dick replied, "Novelist." Rogers was puzzled.

"Breast."

"Chicken." That was disappointing. Rogers could find no trace of those sinister moral censors, expurgators of impulse, suppressors of happiness. Perhaps the trouble lay in religion.

"Christ," he said.

Dick replied, "Amen," with the promptitude of a parish clerk.

"God."

Dick's mind remained a perfect blank. The word seemed to convey to him nothing at all. God, God. After a long time there appeared before his inward eye the face of a boy he had known at school and at Oxford, one Godfrey Wilkinson, called God for short.

"Wilkinson." Ten seconds and a fifth.

A few more miscellaneous questions, and the list was exhausted. Almost suddenly, Dick fell into a kind of hypnotic sleep. Rogers sat pensive in front of his notes; sometimes he consulted a text-book. At the end of half an hour he awakened Dick to tell him that he had had, as a child, consciously or unconsciously, a great Freudian passion for his aunt; that later on he had had another passion, almost religious in its fervour and intensity, for somebody called Wilkinson; and that the cause of all his present troubles lay in one or other of these episodes. If he liked, he (Rogers) would investigate the matter further with a view to establishing a cure.

Dick thanked him very much, thought it wasn't worth taking any more trouble, and went home.

VII

MILLICENT was organizing a hospital supply depot, organizing indefatigably, from morning till night. It was October; Dick had not seen his sister since those first hours of the war in Scotland; he had had too much to think about these last months to pay attention to anyone but himself. To-day, at last, he decided that he would go and pay her a visit. Millicent had commandeered a large house in Kensington from a family of Jews, who were anxious to live down a deplorable name by a display of patriotism. Dick found her sitting there in her office— young, formidable, beautiful, severe—at a big desk covered with papers.

"Well," said Dick, "you're winning the war, I see."

"You, I gather, are not," Millicent replied.

"I believe in the things I always believed in."

"So do I."

"But in a different way, my dear—in a different way," said Dick sadly. There was a silence.

"Had we better quarrel? "Millicent asked meditatively.

"I think we can manage with nothing worse than a coolness—for the duration."

"Very well, a coolness."

"A smouldering coolness."

"Good," said Millicent briskly. "Let it start smouldering at once I must get on with my work. Good-bye, Dick. God bless you. Let me know sometimes how you get on."

"No need to ask how you get on," said Dick with a smile, as he shook her hand. "I know by experience that you always get on, only too well, ruthlessly well."

He went out. Millicent returned to her letters with concentrated ardour; a frown puckered the skin between her eyebrows.

Probably, Dick reflected as he made his way down the stairs, he wouldn't see her again for a year or so. He couldn't honestly say that it affected him much. Other people became daily more and more like ghosts, unreal, thin, vaporous; while every hour the consciousness of himself grew more intense and all-absorbing. The only person who was more than a shadow to him now was Hyman of the Weekly International. In those first horrible months of the war, when he was wrestling with Pearl Bellairs and failing to cast her out, it was Hyman who kept him from melancholy and suicide. Hyman made him write a long article every week, dragged him into the office to do sub-editorial work, kept him so busy that there were long hours when he had no time to brood over his own insoluble problems. And his enthusiasm was so passionate and sincere that sometimes even Dick was infected by it; he could believe that life was worth living and the cause worth fighting for. But not for long; for the devil would return, insistent and untiring. Pearl Bellairs was greedy for life; she was not content with her short midnight hours; she wanted the freedom of whole days. And whenever Dick was overtired, or ill or nervous, she leapt upon him and stamped him out of existence, till enough strength came back for him to reassert his personality. And the articles she wrote! The short stories! The recruiting songs! Dick dared not read them; they were terrible, terrible.

VIII

THE months passed by. The longer the war lasted, the longer it seemed likely to last. Dick supported life somehow. Then came the menace of conscription. The Weekly International organized a great anti-conscription campaign, in which Hyman and Dick were the leading spirits. Dick was almost happy. This kind of active work was new to him and he enjoyed it, finding it exciting and at the same time sedative. For a self-absorbed and brooding mind, pain itself is an anodyne. He enjoyed his incessant journeys, his speechmaking to queer audiences in obscure halls and chapels; he liked talking with earnest members of impossible Christian sects, pacifists who took not the faintest interest in the welfare of humanity at large, but were wholly absorbed in the salvation of their own souls and in keeping their consciences clear from the faintest trace of blood-guiltiness. He enjoyed the sense of power which came to him, when he roused the passion of the crowd to enthusiastic assent, or breasted the storm of antagonism. He enjoyed everything—even getting a bloody nose from a patriot hired and intoxicated by a great evening paper to break up one of his meetings. It all seemed tremendously exciting and important at the time. And yet when, in quiet moments, he came to look back on his days of activity, they seemed utterly empty and futile. What was left of them? Nothing, nothing at all. The momentary intoxication had died away, the stirred ant's-nest had gone back to normal life. Futility of action! There was nothing permanent, or decent, or worth while, except thought. And of that he was almost incapable now. His mind, when it was not occupied by the immediate and actual, turned inward morbidly upon itself. He looked at the manuscript of his book and wondered whether he would ever be able to go on with it. It seemed doubtful. Was he, then, condemned to pass the rest of his existence' enslaved to the beastliness and futility of mere quotidian action? And even in action his powers were limited; if he exerted himself too much—and the limits of fatigue were soon reached— Pearl Bellairs, watching perpetually like a hungry tigress for her opportunity, leapt upon him and took possession of his conscious faculties. And then, it might be for a matter of hours or of days, he was lost, blotted off the register of living souls, while she performed, with intense and hideous industry, her self-appointed task. More than once his anti-conscription campaigns had been cut short and he himself had suddenly disappeared from public life, to return with the vaguest stories of illness or private affairs—stories that made his friends shake their heads and wonder which it was among the noble army of vices that poor Dick Greenow was so mysteriously addicted to. Some said drink, some said women, some said opium, and some hinted at things infinitely darker and more horrid. Hyman asked him point-blank what it was, one morning when he had returned to the office after three days' unaccountable absence.

Dick blushed painfully. "It isn't anything you think," he said.

"What is it, then?" Hyman insisted.

"I can't tell you," Dick replied desperately and in torture, "but I swear it's nothing discreditable. I beg you won't ask me any more."

Hyman had to pretend to be satisfied with that.

IX

A TACTICAL move in the anti-conscription campaign was the foundation of a club, a place where people with pacific or generally advanced ideas could congregate.

"A club like this would soon be the intellectual centre of London," said Hyman, ever sanguine.

Dick shrugged his shoulders. He had a wide experience of pacifists.

"If you bring people together," Hyman went on, "they encourage one another to be bold — strengthen one another's faith."

"Yes," said Dick dyspeptically. "When they're in a herd, they can believe that they're much more numerous and important than they really are."

"But, man, they are numerous, they are important!" Hyman shouted and gesticulated.

Dick allowed himself to be persuaded into an optimism which he knew to be ill-founded. The consolations of religion do not console the less efficaciously for being illusory.

It was a longtime before they could think of a suitable name for their club. Dick suggested that it should be called the Sclopis Club. "Such a lovely name," he explained. "Sclopis—Sclopis; it tastes precious in the mouth." But the rest of the committee would not hear of it; they wanted a name that meant something. One lady suggested that it should be called the Everyman Club; Dick objected with passion. "It makes one shudder," he said. The lady thought it was a beautiful and uplifting name, but as Mr. Greenow was so strongly opposed, she wouldn't press the claims of Everyman. Hyman wanted to call it the Pacifist Club, but that was judged too provocative. Finally, they agreed to call it the Nov-embrist Club, because it was November and they could think of no better title.

The inaugural dinner of the Novembrist Club was held at Piccolomini's Restaurant. Piccolomini is in, but not exactly of, Soho, for it is a cross between a Soho restaurant and a Corner House, a hybrid which combines the worst qualities of both parents—the dirt and inefficiency of Soho, the size and vulgarity of Lyons. There is a large upper chamber reserved for agapes. Here, one wet and dismal winter's evening, the Novembrists assembled.

Dick arrived early, and from his place near the door he watched his fellow-members come in. He didn't much like the look of them. "Middle class" was what he found himself thinking; and he had to admit, when his conscience reproached him for it, that he did not like the middle classes, the lower middle classes, the lower classes. He was, there was no denying it, a bloodsucker at heart— cultured and intelligent, perhaps, but a bloodsucker none the less.

The meal began. Everything about it was profoundly suspect. The spoons were made of some pale pinchbeck metal, very light and flimsy; one expected them to melt in the soup, or one would have done, if the soup had been even tepid. The food was thick and greasy. Dick wondered what it really looked like under the concealing sauces. The wine left an indescribable taste that lingered on the palate, like the savour of brass or of charcoal fumes.

From childhood upwards Dick had suffered from the intensity of his visceral reactions to emotion. Fear and shyness were apt to make him feel very sick, and disgust produced in him a sensation of intolerable queasiness. Disgust had seized upon his mind to-night. He grew paler with the arrival of every dish, and the wine, instead of cheering him, made him feel much worse. His neighbours to right and left ate with revolting heartiness. On one side sat Miss Gibbs, garishly dressed in ill-assorted colours that might be called futuristic; on the other was Mr. Something in pince-nez, rather ambrosial about the hair. Mr. Something was a poet, or so the man who introduced them had said. Miss Gibbs was just an ordinary member of the Intelligentsia, like the rest of us.

The Lower Classes, the Lower Classes...

"Are you interested in the Modern Theatre?" asked Mr. Something in his mellow voice. Too mellow—oh, much too mellow 1

"Passably," said Dick.

"So am I," said Mr. Thingummy. "I am a vice-president of the Craftsmen's League of Joy, which perhaps you may have heard of."

Dick shook his head; this was going to be terrible.

"The objects of the Craftsmen's League of Joy," Mr. Thingummy continued, "or rather, one of the objects— for it has many—is to establish Little Theatres in every town and village in England, where simple, uplifting, beautiful plays might be acted. The people have no joy."

"They have the cinema and the music hall," said Dick. He was filled with a sudden senseless irritation. "They get all the joy they want out of the jokes of the comics and the legs of the women."

"Ah, but that is an impure joy," Mr. What's-his-name protested.

"Impure purple, Herbert Spenser's favourite colour," flashed irrelevantly through Dick's brain.

" Well, speaking for myself," he said aloud, "I know I get more joy out of a good pair of legs than out of any number of uplifting plays of the kind they'd be sure to act in your little theatres. The people ask for sex and you give them a stone."

How was it, he wondered, that the right opinions in the mouths of these people sounded so horribly cheap and wrong? They degraded what was noble; beauty became fly-blown at their touch. Their intellectual tradition was all wrong. Lower classes, it always came back to that. When they talked about war and the International, Dick felt a hot geyser of chauvinism bubbling up in his breast. In order to say nothing stupid, he refrained from speaking at all. Miss Gibbs switched the conversation on to art. She admired all the right people. Dick told her that he thought Sir Luke Fildes to be the best modern artist. But his irritation knew no bounds when he found out a little later that Mr. Something had read the poems of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. He felt inclined to say, "You may have read them, but of course you can't understand or appreciate them."

Lower Classes . . .

How clear and splendid were the ideas of right and justice! If only one could filter away the contaminating human element. . . . Reason compelled him to believe in democracy, in internationalism, in revolution; morality demanded justice for the oppressed. But neither morality nor reason would ever bring him to take pleasure in the company of democrats or revolutionaries, or make him find the oppressed, individually, any less antipathetic.

At the end of this nauseating meal, Dick was called on to make a speech. Rising to his feet, he began stammering and hesitating; he felt like an imbecile. Then suddenly inspiration came. The great religious ideas of Justice and Democracy swept like a rushing wind through his mind, purging it of all insignificant human and personal preferences or dislikes. He was filled with pentecostal fire. He spoke in a white heat of intellectual passion, dominating his hearers, infecting them with his own high enthusiasm. He sat down amid cheers. Miss Gibbs and Mr. Thingummy leaned towards him with flushed, shining faces.

"That was wonderful, Mr. Greenow. I've never heard anything like it," exclaimed Miss Gibbs, with genuine, unflattering enthusiasm.

Mr. Thing said something poetical about a trumpet-call. Dick looked from one to the other with blank and fishy eyes. So it was for these creatures he had been speaking!

Good God!...

X

DICK'S life was now a monotonous nightmare. The same impossible situation was repeated again and again. If it were not for the fact that he knew Pearl Bellairs to be entirely devoid of humour, Dick might have suspected that she was having a little quiet fun with him, so grotesque were the anomalies of his double life. Grotesque, but dreary, intolerably dreary. Situations which seem, in contemplation, romantic and adventurous have a habit of proving, when actually experienced, as dull and daily as a bank clerk's routine. When you read about it, a Jekyll and Hyde existence sounds delightfully amusing; but when you live through it, as Dick found to his cost, it is merely a boring horror.

In due course Dick was called up by the Military Authorities. He pleaded conscientious objection. The date of his appearance before the Tribunal was fixed. Dick did not much relish the prospect of being a Christian martyr; it seemed an anachronism. However, it would have to be done. He would be an absolutist; there would be a little buffeting, spitting, and scourging, followed by an indefinite term of hard labour. It was all very unpleasant. But nothing could be much more unpleasant than life- as he was now living it. He didn't even mind very much if they killed him. Being or not being—the alternatives left him equally cold.

The days that preceded his appearance before the Tribunal were busy days, spent in consulting solicitors, preparing speeches, collecting witnesses.

"We'll give you a good run for your money," said Hyman. "I hope they'll be feeling a little uncomfortable by the time they have done with you, Greenow."

"Not nearly so uncomfortable as I shall be feeling," Dick replied, with a slightly melancholy smile.

The South Marylebone Tribunal sat in a gloomy and fetid chamber in a police station. Dick, who was extremely sensitive to his surroundings, felt his fatigue and nervousness perceptibly increase as he entered the room. Five or six pitiable creatures with paralytic mothers or one-man businesses were briskly disposed of, and then it was Dick's turn to present himself before his judges. He looked round the court, nodded to Hyman, smiled at Millicent, who had so far thawed their wartime coolness as to come and see him condemned, caught other friendly eyes. It was as though he were about to be electrocuted. The preliminaries passed off; he found himself answering questions in a loud, clear voice. Then the Military Representative began to loom horribly large. The Military Representative was a solicitor's clerk disguised as a lieutenant in the Army Service Corps. He spoke in an accent that was more than genteel; it was rich, noble, aristocratic. Dick tried to remember where he had heard a man speaking like that before. He had it now. Once when he had been at Oxford after term was over. He had gone to see the Varieties, which come twice nightly and with cheap seats to the theatre after the undergraduates have departed. One of the turns had been a Nut, a descendant of the bloods and Champagne Charlies of earlier days. A young man in an alpaca evening suit and a monocle. He had danced, sung a song, spoken some patter. Sitting in the front row of the stalls, Dick had been able to see the large, swollen, tuberculous glands in his neck. They wobbled when he danced or sang. Fascinatingly horrible, those glands; and the young man, how terribly, painfully pathetic. . . . When the Military Representative spoke, he could hear again that wretched Nut's rendering of the Eton and Oxford voice. It unnerved him.

"What is your religion, Mr. Greenow? "the Military Representative asked.'

Fascinated, Dick looked to see whether he too had tuberculous glands. The Lieutenant had to repeat his question sharply. When he was irritated, his voice went back to its more natural nasal twang. Dick recovered his presence of mind.

"I have no religion," he answered.

"But, surely, sir, you must have some kind of religion."

"Well, if I must, if it's in the Army Regulations, you had better put me down as an Albigensian, or a Bogomile, or, better still, as a Manichean. One can't find oneself in this court without possessing a profound sense of the reality and active existence of a power of evil equal to, if not greater than, the power of good."

"This is rather irrelevant, Mr. Greenow," said the Chairman.

"I apologize." Dick bowed to the court.

"But if," the Military Representative continued—" if your objection is not religious, may I ask what it is?"

"It is based on a belief that all war is wrong, and that the solidarity of the human race can only be achieved in practice by protesting against war, wherever it appears and in whatever form."

"Do you disbelieve in force, Mr. Greenow? "

"You might as well ask me if I disbelieve in gravitation. Of course, I believe in force: it is a fact."

"What would you do if you saw a German violating your sister?" said the Military Representative, putting his deadliest question.

"Perhaps I had better ask my sister first," Dick replied. "She is sitting just behind you in the court."

The Military Representative was covered with confusion. He coughed and blew his nose. The case dragged on. Dick made a speech; the Military Representative made a speech; the Chairman made a speech. The atmosphere of the court-room grew fouler and fouler. Dick sickened and suffocated in the second-hand air. An immense lassitude took possession of him; he did not care about anything—about the cause, about himself, about Hyman or Millicent or Pearl Bellairs. He was just tired. Voices buzzed and drawled in his ears —sometimes his own voice, sometimes other people's. He did not listen to what they said. He was tired—tired of all this idiotic talk, tired of the heat and smell. . . .

Tired of picking up very thistly wheat sheaves and propping them up in stooks on the yellow stubble. For that was what, suddenly, he found himself doing. Overhead the sky expanded in endless steppes of blue-hot cobalt. The pungent prickly dust of the dried sheaves plucked at his nose with imminent sneezes, made his eyes smart and water. In the distance a reaping-machine whirred and hummed. Dick looked blankly about him, wondering where he was. He was thankful, at any rate, not to be in that sweltering courtroom; and it was a mercy, too, to have escaped from the odious gentility of the Military Representative's accent. And, after all, there were worse occupations than harvesting.

Gradually, and bit by bit, Dick pieced together his history. He had, it seemed, done a cowardly and treacherous thing: deserted in the face of the enemy, betrayed his cause, He had a bitter letter from Hyman. "Why couldn't you have stuck it out? I thought it was in you. You've urged others to go to prison for their beliefs, but you get out of it yourself by sneaking off to a soft alternative service job on a friend's estate. You've brought discredit on the whole movement." It was very painful, but what could he answer? The truth was so ridiculous that nobody could be expected to swallow it. And yet the fact was that he had been as much startled to find himself working at Crome as anyone. It was all Pearl's doing.

He had found in his room a piece of paper covered with the large, flamboyant feminine writing which he knew to be Pearl's. It was evidently the rough copy of an article on the delights of being a land-girl: dewy dawns, rosy children's faces, quaint cottages, mossy thatch, milkmaids, healthy exercise. Pearl was being a land-girl; but he could hardly explain the fact to Hyman. Better not attempt to answer him.

Dick hated the manual labour of the farm. It was hard, monotonous, dirty, and depressing. It inhibited almost completely the functions of his brain. He was unable to think about anything at all; there was no opportunity to do anything but feel uncomfortable. God had not made him a Caliban to scatter ordure over fields, to pick up ordure from cattle-yards. His role was Prospero.

"Ban, Ban, Caliban "—it was to that derisive measure that he pumped water, sawed wood, mowed grass; it was a march for his slow, clotted feet as he followed the dung-carts up the winding lanes. "Ban, Ban, Caliban—Ban, Ban, Ban . . ."

"Oh, that bloody old fool Tolstoy," was his profoundest reflection on a general subject in three months of manual labour and communion with mother earth.

He hated the work, and his fellow-workers hated him. They mistrusted him because they could not understand him, taking the silence of his overpowering shyness for arrogance and the contempt of one class for another. Dick longed to become friendly with them. His chief trouble was that he did not know what to say. At meal-times he would spend long minutes in cudgelling his brains for some suitable remark to make. And even if he thought of something good, like—" It looks as though it were going to be a good year for roots," he somehow hesitated to speak, feeling that such a remark, uttered in his exquisitely modulated tones, would be, somehow, a little ridiculous. It was the sort of thing that ought to be said rustically, with plenty of Z's and long vowels, in the manner of William Barnes. In the end, for lack of courage to act the yokel's part, he generally remained silent. While the others were eating their bread and cheese with laughter and talk, he sat like the skeleton at the feast—a skeleton that longed to join in the revelry, but had not the power to move its stony jaws. On the rare occasions that he actually succeeded in uttering something, the labourers looked at one another in surprise and alarm, as though it were indeed a skeleton that had spoken.

He was not much more popular with the other inhabitants of the village. Often, in the evenings, as he was returning from work, the children would pursue him, yelling. With the unerringly cruel instinct of the young they had recognized in him a fit object for abuse and lapidation. An outcast member of another class, from whom that class in casting him out had withdrawn its protection, an alien in speech and habit, a criminal, as their zealous schoolmaster lost no opportunity of reminding them, guilty of the blackest treason against God and man—he was the obviously predestined victim of childish persecution. When stones began to fly, and dung and precocious obscenity, he bowed his head and pretended not to notice that anything unusual was happening. It was difficult, however, to look quite dignified.

There were occasional short alleviations to the dreariness of his existence. One day, when he was engaged in his usual occupation of manuring, a familiar figure suddenly appeared along the footpath through the field. It was Mrs. Cravister. She was evidently staying at the big house; one of the Manorial dachshunds preceded her. He took off his cap.

"Mr. Greenow! "she exclaimed, coming to a halt.. "Ah, what a pleasure to .see you again! Working on the land: so Tolstoyan. But I trust it doesn't affect your aesthetic ideas in the same way as it did his. Fifty peasants singing together is music; but Bach's chromatic fantasia is mere gibbering incomprehensibility."

"I don't do this for pleasure," Dick explained. "It's hard labour, meted out to the Conscientious Objector."

"Of course, of course," said Mrs. Cravister, raising her hand to arrest any further explanation. "I had forgotten. A conscientious objector, a Bible student. I remember how passionately devoted you were, even at school, to the Bible."

She closed her eyes and nodded her head several times.

"On the contrary "Dick began; but it was no good. Mrs. Cravister had determined that he should be a Bible student and it was no use gainsaying her. She cut him short.

"Dear me, the Bible. . . . What a style! That alone would prove it to have been directly inspired. You remember how Mahomet appealed to the beauty of his style as a sign of his divine mission. Why has nobody done the same for the Bible? It remains for you, Mr. Greenow, to do so. You will write a book about it. How I envy you! "

"The style is very fine," Dick ventured, "but don't you think the matter occasionally leaves something to be desired?"

"The matter is nothing," cried Mrs. Cravister, making a gesture that seemed to send all meaning flying like a pinch of salt along the wind—" nothing at all. It's the style that counts. Think of Madame Bovary."

"I certainly will," said Dick.

Mrs. Cravister held out her hand. "Good-bye. Yes, I certainly envy you. I envy you your innocent labour and your incessant study of that most wonderful of books. If I were asked, Mr. Greenow, what book I should take with me to a desert island, what single solitary book, I should certainly say the Bible, though, indeed, there are moments when I think I should choose Tristram Shandy. Good-bye."

Mrs. Cravister sailed slowly away. The little brown basset trotted ahead, straining his leash. One had the impression of a great ship being towed into harbour by a diminutive tug.

Dick was cheered by this glimpse of civilization and humanity. The unexpected arrival, one Saturday afternoon, of Millicent was not quite such an unmixed pleasure. "I've come to see how you're getting on," she announced, "and to put your cottage straight and make you comfortable."

"Very kind of you," said Dick. He didn't want his cottage put straight.

Millicent was in the Ministry of Munitions now, controlling three thousand female clerks with unsurpassed efficiency. Dick looked at her curiously, as she talked that evening of her doings. "To think I should have a sister like that," he said to himself. She was terrifying.

"You do enjoy bullying other people!" he exclaimed at last. "You've found your true vocation. One sees now how the new world will be arranged after the war. The women will continue to do all the bureaucratic jobs, all that entails routine and neatness and interfering with other people's affairs. And man, it is to be hoped, will be left free for the important statesman's business, free for creation and thought. He will stay at home and give proper education to the children, too. He is fit to do these things, because his mind is disinterested and detached. It's an arrangement which will liberate all man's best energies for their proper uses. The only flaw I can see in the system is that you women will be so fiendishly and ruthlessly tyrannical in your administration."

"You can't seriously expect me to argue with you," said Millicent.

"No, please don't. I am not strong enough. My dung-carrying has taken the edge off all my reasoning powers."

Millicent spent the next morning in completely rearranging Dick's furniture. By lunch-time every article in the cottage was occupying a new position.

"That's much nicer," said Millicent, surveying her work and seeing that it was good.

There was a knock at the door. Dick opened it and was astonished to find Hyman.

"I just ran down to see how you were getting on," he explained.

"I'm getting on very well since my sister rearranged my furniture," said Dick. He found it pleasing to have an opportunity of exercising his long unused powers of malicious irony. This was very mild, but with practice he would soon come on to something more spiteful and amusing.

Hyman shook hands with Millicent, scowling as he did so. He was irritated that she was there; he wanted to talk with Dick alone. He turned his back on her and began addressing Dick.

"Well," he said, "I haven't seen you since the fatal day. How is the turnip-hoeing? "

"Pretty beastly," said Dick.

"Better than doing hard labour in a gaol, I suppose? "

Dick nodded his head wearily, foreseeing what must inevitably come.

"You've escaped that all right," Hyman went on.

"Yes; you ought to be thankful," Millicent chimed in.

"I still can't understand why you did it, Greenow. It was a blow to me. I didn't expect it of you." Hyman spoke with feeling. "It was desertion; it was treason."

"I agree," said Millicent judicially. "He ought to have stuck to his principles."

"He ought to have stuck to what was right, oughtn't he, Miss Greenow?" Hyman turned towards Millicent, pleased at finding someone who shared his views.

"Of course," she replied— "of course. I totally disagree with you about what is right. But if he believed it right not to fight, he certainly ought to have gone to prison for his belief."

Dick lit a pipe with an air of nonchalance. He tried to disguise the fact that he was feeling extremely uncomfortable under these two pairs of merciless, accusing eyes.

"To my mind, at any rate," said Millicent, "your position seems quite illogical and untenable, Dick."

It was a relief to be talked to and not about.

"I'm sorry about that," said Dick rather huskily—not a very intelligent remark, but what was there to say?

"Of course, it's illogical and untenable, Your sister is quite right." Hyman banged the table.

"I can't understand what induced you to take it up "

"After you'd said you were going to be one of the absolutes," cried Hyman, interrupting and continuing Millicent's words.

"Why? " said Millicent.

"Why, why, why?" Hyman echoed.

Dick, who had been blowing out smoke at a great rate, put down his pipe. The taste of the tobacco was making him feel rather sick. "I wish you would stop," he said wearily. "If I gave you the real reasons, you wouldn't believe me. And I can't invent any others that would be in the least convincing."

"I believe the real reason is that you were afraid of prison."

Dick leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. He did not mind being insulted now; it made no difference. Hyman and Millicent were still talking about him, but what they said did not interest him; he scarcely listened.

They went back to London together in the evening.

"Very intelligent woman, your sister," said Hyman just before they were starting. "Pity she's not on the right side about the war and so forth."

Four weeks later Dick received a letter in which Hyman announced that he and Millicent had decided to get married.

"I am happy to think," Dick wrote in his congratulatory reply, "that it was I who brought you together."

He smiled as he read through the sentence; that was what the Christian martyr might say to the two lions who had scraped acquaintance over his bones in the amphitheatre.

One warm afternoon in the summer of 1918, Mr. Hobart, Clerk to the Wibley Town Council, was disturbed in the midst of his duties by the sudden entry into his office of a small dark man, dressed in corduroys and gaiters, but not having the air of a genuine agricultural labourer.

"What may I do for you?" inquired Mr. Hobart.

"I have come to inquire about my vote," said the stranger.

"Aren't you already registered?"

"Not yet. You see, it isn't long since the Act was passed giving us the vote."

Mr. Hobart stared.

"I don't quite follow," he said.

"I may not look it," said the stranger, putting his head on one side and looking arch—" I may not look it, but I will confess to you, Mr.—er—Mr.—er "

"Hobart."

"Mr. Hobart, that I am a woman of over thirty."

Mr. Hobart grew visibly paler. Then, assuming a forced smile and speaking as one speaks to a child or a spoiled animal, he said:

"I see — I see. Over thirty, dear me."

He looked at the bell, which was over by the fireplace at the other side of the room, and wondered how he should ring it without rousing the maniac's suspicions.

"Over thirty," the stranger went on. "You know my woman's secret. I am Miss Pearl Bellairs, the novelist. Perhaps you have read some of my books. Or are you too busy?"

"Oh no, I've read several," Mr. Hobart replied, smiling more and more brightly and speaking in even more coaxing and indulgent tones.

"Then we're friends already, Mr. Hobart. Anyone who knows my books, knows me. My whole heart is in them. Now, you must tell me all about my poor little vote. I shall be very patriotic with it when the time comes to use it."

Mr. Hobart saw his opportunity.

"Certainly, Miss Bellairs," he said. "I will ring for my clerk and we'll—er —we'll take down the details."

He got up, crossed the room, and rang the bell with violence.

"I'll just go and see that he brings the right books," he added, and darted to the door. Once outside in the passage, he mopped his face and heaved a sigh of relief. That had been a narrow shave, by Jove. A loony in the office—dangerous-looking brute, too.

On the following day Dick woke up and found himself in a bare whitewashed room, sparsely furnished with a little iron bed, a washstand, a chair, and table. He looked round him in surprise. Where had he got to this time? He went to the door and tried to open it; it was locked. An idea entered his mind: he was in barracks somewhere; the Military Authorities must have got hold of him somehow in spite of his exemption certificate. Or perhaps Pearl had gone and enlisted. ... He turned next to the window, which was barred. Outside, he could see a courtyard, filled, not with soldiers, as he had expected, but a curious motley crew of individuals, some men and some women, wandering hither and thither with an air of complete aimlessness. Very odd, he thought—very odd. Beyond the courtyard, on the farther side of a phenomenally high wall, ran a railway line and beyond it a village, roofed with tile and thatch, and a tall church spire in the midst. Dick looked carefully at the spire. Didn't he know it? Surely—yes, those imbricated copper plates with which it was covered, that gilded ship that served as wind vane, the little gargoyles at the corner of the tower—there could be no doubt; it was Belbury church. Bel-bury—that was where the . . . No, no; he wouldn't believe it. But looking down again into that high-walled courtyard, full of those queer, aimless folk, he was forced to admit it. The County Asylum stands at Belbury. He had often noticed it from the train, a huge, gaunt building of sausage-coloured brick, standing close to the railway, on the opposite side of the line to Belbury village and church. He remembered how, the last time he had passed in the train, he had wondered what they did in the asylum. He had regarded it then as one of those mysterious, unapproachable places, like Lhassa or a Ladies' Lavatory, into which he would never penetrate. And now, here he was, looking out through the bars, like any other madman. It was all Pearl's doing, as usual. If there had been no bars, he would have thrown himself out of the window.

He sat down on his bed and began to think about what he should do. He would have to be very sane and show them by his behaviour and speech that he was no more mad than the commonalty of mankind. He would be extremely dignified about it all. If a warder or a doctor or somebody came in to see him, he would rise to his feet and say in the calmest and severest tones: "May I ask, pray, why I am detained here and upon whose authority?" That ought to stagger them. He practised that sentence, and the noble attitude with which he would accompany it, for the best part of an hour. Then, suddenly, there was the sound of a key in the lock. He hastily sat down again on the bed. A brisk little man of about forty, clean shaven and with pince-nez, stepped into the room, followed by a nurse and a warder in uniform. The doctor! Dick's heart was beating with absurd violence; he felt like an amateur actor at the first performance of an imperfectly rehearsed play. He rose, rather unsteadily, to his feet, and in a voice that quavered a little with an emotion he could not suppress, began:

"Pray I ask, may . . ."

Then, realizing that something had gone wrong, he hesitated, stammered, and came to a pause.

The doctor turned to the nurse.

"Did you hear that?" he asked. "He called me May. He seems to think everybody's a woman, not only himself."

Turning to Dick with a cheerful smile, he went on:

"Sit down, Miss Bellairs, please sit down."

It was too much. Dick burst into tears, flung himself upon the bed, and buried his face in the pillow. The doctor looked at him as he lay there sobbing, his whole body shaken and convulsed.

"A bad case, I fear."

And the nurse nodded.

For the next three days Dick refused to eat. It was certainly unreasonable, but it seemed the only way of making a protest. On the fourth day the doctor signed a certificate to the effect that forcible feeding had become necessary. Accompanied by two warders and a nurse, he entered Dick's room.

"Now, Miss Bellairs," he said, making a last persuasive appeal, "do have a little of this nice soup. We have come to have lunch with you."

"I refuse to eat," said Dick icily, "as a protest against my unlawful detention in this place. I am as sane as any of you here."

"Yes, yes." The doctor's voice was soothing. He made a sign to the warders. One was very large and stout, the other wiry, thin, sinister, like the second murderer in a play. They closed in on Dick.

"I won't eat and I won't be made to eat!" Dick cried. "Let me go!" he shouted at the fat warder, who had laid a hand on his shoulder. His temper was beginning to rise.

"Now, do behave yourself," said the fat warder. "It ain't a bit of use kicking up a row. Now, do take a little of this lovely soup," he added wheedlingly.

"Let me go! "Dick screamed again, all his self-control gone. "I will not let myself be bullied."

He began to struggle violently. The fat warder put an arm round his shoulders, as though he were an immense mother comforting an irritable child. Dick felt himself helpless; the struggle had quite exhausted him; he was weaker than he had any idea of. He began kicking the fat man's shins; it was the only way he could still show fight.

"Temper, temper," remonstrated the warder, more motherly than ever. The thin warder stooped down, slipped a strap round the kicking legs, and drew it tight. Dick could move no more. His fury found vent in words—vain, abusive, filthy words, such as he had not used since he was a schoolboy.

"Let me go," he screamed—" let me go, you devils! You beasts, you swine! beasts and swine!" he howled again and again.

They soon had him securely strapped in a chair, his head held back ready for the doctor and his horrible-looking tubes. They were pushing the horrors up his nostrils. He coughed and choked, spat, shouted inarticulately, retched. It was like having a spoon put on your tongue and being told to say A-a-h, but worse; it was like jumping into the river and getting water up your nose—how he had always hated that!—only much worse. It was like almost everything unpleasant, only much, much worse than all. He exhausted himself struggling against his utterly immovable bonds. They had to carry him to his bed, he was so weak.

He lay there, unmoving—for he was unable to move—staring at the ceiling. He felt as though he were floating on air, unsupported, solid no longer; the sensation was not unpleasant. For that reason he refused to let his mind dwell upon it; he would think of nothing that was not painful, odious, horrible. He thought about the torture which had just been inflicted on him and of the monstrous injustice of which he was a victim. He thought of the millions who had been and were still being slaughtered in the war; he thought of their pain, all the countless separate pains of them; pain incommunicable, individual, beyond the reach of sympathy; infinities of pain pent within frail finite bodies; pain without sense or object, bringing with it no hope and no redemption, futile, unnecessary, stupid. In one supreme apocalyptic moment he saw, he felt the universe in all its horror.

They forcibly fed him again the following morning and again on the day after. On the fourth day pneumonia, the result of shock, complicated by acute inflammation of the throat and pleura, set in. The fever and pain gained ground. Dick had not the strength to resist their ravages, and his condition grew hourly worse. His mind, however, continued to work clearly—too clearly. It occurred to him that he might very likely die. He asked for pencil and paper to be brought him, and putting forth all the little strength he had left, he began to make his testament.

"I am perfectly sane," he wrote at the top of the page, and underlined the words three times. "I am confined here by the most intol. injust." As soon as he began, he realized how little time and strength were left him; it was a waste to finish the long words. "They are killing me for my opins. I regard this war and all wars as utter bad. Capitalists' war. The devils will be smashed sooner later. Wish I could help. But it won't make any difference," he added on a new line and as though by an afterthought. "World will always be hell. Cap. or Lab., Engl. or Germ.— all beasts. One in a mill, is GOOD. I wasn't. Selfish intellect. Perhaps Pearl Bellairs better. If die, send corp. to hosp. for anatomy. Useful for once in my life! "

Quite suddenly, he lapsed into delirium. The clear lucidity of his mind became troubled. The real world disappeared from before his eyes, and in its place he saw a succession of bright, unsteady visions created by his sick fantasy. Scenes from his childhood, long forgotten, bubbled up and disappeared. Unknown, hideous faces crowded in upon him; old friends revisited him. He was living in a bewildering mixture of the familiar and the strange. And all the while, across this changing unsubstantial world, there hurried a continual, interminable procession of dromedaries—countless high-domed beasts, with gargoyle faces and stiff legs and necks that bobbed as though on springs. Do what he could, he was unable to drive them away. He lost his temper with the brutes at last, struck at them, shouted; but in vain. The room rang with his cries of, "Get away, you beasts. Bloody humps. None of your nonconformist faces here." And while he was yelling and gesticulating (with his left hand only), his right hand was still busily engaged in writing. The words were clear and legible; the sentences consecutive and eminently sane. Dick might rave, but Pearl Bellairs remained calm and in full possession of her deplorable faculties. And what was Pearl doing with her busy pencil, while Dick, like a frenzied Betsy Trotwood, shouted at the trespassing camels? The first thing she did was to scratch out all that poor Dick had said about the war. Underneath it she wrote:

"We shall not sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly . . ." And then, evidently finding that memorable sentence too long, particularly so since the addition of Poland and Czecho-Slovakia to the list of Allies, she began again.

"We are fighting for honour and the defence of Small Nationalities. Plucky little Belgium! We went into the war with clean hands."

A little of Pearl's thought seemed at this moment to have slopped over into Dick's mind; for he suddenly stopped abusing his dromedaries and began to cry out in the most pitiable fashion, "Clean hands, clean hands! I can't get mine clean. I can't, I can't, I can't. I contaminate everything." And he kept rubbing his left hand against the bedclothes and putting his fingers to his nose, only to exclaim, "Ugh, they still stink of goat!" and then to start rubbing again.

The right hand wrote on unperturbed. "No peace with the Hun until he is crushed and humiliated. Self-respecting Britons will refuse to shake a Hunnish hand for many a long year after the war. No more German waiters. Intern the Forty-Seven Thousand Hidden Hands in High Places! "

At this point, Pearl seemed to have been struck by a new idea. She took a clean page and began:

"To the Girls of England. I am a woman and proud of the fact. But, girls, I blushed for my sex to-day when I read in the papers that there had been cases of English girls talking to Hun prisoners, and not only talking to them, but allowing themselves to be kissed by them. Imagine! Clean, healthy British girls allowing themselves to be kissed by the swinish and bloodstained lips of the unspeakable Hun! Do you wonder that I blush for my sex? Stands England where she did? No, emphatically no, if these stories are true, and true—sadly and with a heavy bleeding heart do I admit it—true they are."

"Clean hands, clean hands," Dick was still muttering, and applying his ringers to his nose once more, "Christ," he cried, "how they stink! Goats, dung . . ."

"Is there any excuse for such conduct?" the pencil continued. "The most that can be said in palliation of the offence is that girls are thoughtless, that they do not consider the full significance of their actions. But listen to me, girls of all ages, classes and creeds, from the blue-eyed, light-hearted flapper of sixteen to the stern-faced, hard-headed business woman —listen to me. There is a girlish charm about thoughtlessness, but there is a point beyond which thoughtlessness becomes criminal. A flapper may kiss a Hun without thinking what she is doing, merely for the fun of the thing; perhaps, even, out of misguided pity. Will she repeat the offence if she realizes, as she must realize if she will only think, that this thoughtless fun, this mawkish and hysterical pity, is nothing less than Treason? Treason—it is a sinister word, but . . ."

The pencil stopped writing; even Pearl was beginning to grow tired. Dick's shouting had died away to a hoarse, faint whisper. Suddenly her attention was caught by the last words that Dick had written—the injunction to send his body, if he died, to a hospital for an anatomy. She put forth a great effort.

"NO. NO," she wrote in huge capitals. "Bury me in a little country churchyard, with lovely marble angels like the ones in St. George's at Windsor, over Princess Charlotte's tomb. Not anatomy. Too horrible, too disgus . . ."

The coma which had blotted out Dick's mind fell now upon hers as well, Two hours later Dick Greenow was dead; the fingers of his right hand still grasped a pencil. The scribbled papers were thrown away as being merely the written ravings of a madman; they were accustomed that sort of thing at the asylum.

The End

Happily Ever After

I

AT the best of times it is a long way from Chicago to Blaybury in Wiltshire, but war has fixed between them a great gulf. In the circumstances, therefore, it seemed an act of singular devotion on the part of Peter Jacobsen to have come all the way from the Middle West, in the fourth year of war, on a visit to his old friend Petherton, when the project entailed a single-handed struggle with two Great Powers over the question of passports and the risk, when they had been obtained, of perishing miserably by the way, a victim of frightfulness.

At the expense of much time and more trouble Jacobsen had at last arrived; the gulf between Chicago and Blaybury was spanned. In the hall of Petherton's house a scene of welcome was being enacted under the dim gaze of six or seven brown family portraits by unknown masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Old Alfred Petherton, a grey shawl over his shoulders—for he had to be careful, even in June, of draughts and colds—was shaking his guest's hand with interminable cordiality.

"My dear boy," he kept repeating, "it is a pleasure to see you. My dear .boy . . ."

Jacobsen limply abandoned his forearm and waited in patience.

"I can never be grateful enough," Mr. Petherton went on—" never grateful enough to you for having taken all this endless trouble to come and see an old decrepit man—for that's what I am now, that's what I am, believe me."

"Oh, I assure you ..." said Jacobsen, with vague deprecation. "Le vieux cretin qui pleurniche," he said to himself. French was a wonderfully expressive language, to be sure.

"My digestion and my heart have got much worse since I saw you last. But I think I must have told you about that in my letters."

"You did indeed, and I was most grieved to hear it."

"Grieved "—what a curious flavour that word had! Like somebody's tea which used to recall the most delicious blends of forty years ago. But it was decidedly the mot juste. It had the right obituary note about it.

"Yes," Mr. Petherton continued, "my palpitations are very bad now. Aren't they, Marjorie? "He appealed to his daughter who was standing beside him.

"Father's palpitations are very bad," she replied dutifully.

It was as though they were talking about some precious heirloom long and lovingly cherished.

"And my digestion. . . . This physical infirmity makes all mental activity so difficult. All the same, I manage to do a little useful work. We'll discuss that later, though. You must be feeling tired and dusty after your journey down. I'll guide you to your room. Marjorie, will you get someone to take up his luggage? "

"I can take it myself," said Jacobsen, and he picked up a small gladstone-bag that had been deposited by the door.

"Is that all?" Mr. Petherton asked.

"Yes, that's all."

As one living the life of reason, Jacobsen objected to owning things. One so easily became the slave of things and not their master. He liked to be free; he checked his possessive instincts and limited his possessions to the strictly essential. He was as much or as little at home at Blaybury or Pekin. He could have explained all this if he liked. But in the present case it wasn't worth taking the trouble.

"This is your humble chamber," said Mr. Petherton, throwing open the door of what was, indeed, a very handsome spare-room, bright with chintzes and cut flowers and silver candlesticks. "A poor thing, but your own."

Courtly grace! Dear old man! Apt quotation! Jacobsen unpacked his bag and arranged its contents neatly and methodically in the various drawers and shelves of the wardrobe.

It was a good many years now since Jacobsen had come in the course of his grand educational tour to Oxford. He spent a couple of years there, for he liked the place, and its inhabitants were a source of unfailing amusement to him.

A Norwegian, born in the Argentine, educated in the United States, in France, and in Germany; a man with no nationality and no prejudices, enormously old in experience, he found something very new and fresh and entertaining about his fellow-students with their comic public-school traditions and fabulous ignorance of the world. He had quietly watched them doing their little antics, feeling all the time that a row of bars separated them from himself, and that he ought, after each particularly amusing trick, to offer them a bun or a handful of pea-nuts. In the intervals of sight-seeing in this strange and delightful Jardin des Plantes he read Greats, and it was through Aristotle that he had come into contact with Alfred Petherton, fellow and tutor of his college.

The name of Petherton is a respectable one in the academic world. You will find it on the title-page of such meritorious, if not exactly brilliant, books as Plato's Predecessors, Three Scottish Metaphysicians, Introduction to the Study of Ethics, Essays in Neo-Idealism. Some of his works are published in cheap editions as text-books.

One of those curious inexplicable friendships that often link the most unlikely people had sprung up between tutor and pupil, and had lasted unbroken for upwards of twenty years. Petherton felt a fatherly affection for the younger man, together with a father's pride, now that Jacobsen was a man of world-wide reputation, in having, as he supposed, spiritually begotten him. And now Jacobsen had travelled three or four thousand miles across a world at war just to see the old man. Petherton was profoundly touched.

"Did you see any submarines on the way over?" Marjorie asked, as she and Jacobsen were strolling together in the garden after breakfast the next day.

"I didn't notice any; but then I am very unobservant about these things."

There was a pause. At last, "I suppose there is a great deal of war-work being done in America now?" said Marjorie.

Jacobsen supposed so; and there floated across his mind a vision of massed bands, of orators with megaphones, of patriotic sky-signs, of streets made perilous by the organized highway robbery of Red Cross collectors. He was too lazy to describe it all; besides, she wouldn't see the point of it.

"I should like to be able to do some war-work," Marjorie explained apologetically. "But I have to look after father, and there's the housekeeping, so I really haven't the time."

Jacobsen thought he detected a formula for the benefit of strangers. She evidently wanted to make things right about herself in people's minds. Her remark about the housekeeping made Jacobsen think of the late Mrs. Petherton, her mother; she had been a good-looking, painfully sprightly woman with a hankering to shine in University society at Oxford. One quickly learned that she was related to bishops and country families; a hunter of ecclesiastical lions and a snob. He felt glad she was dead.

"Won't it be awful when there's no war-work," he said. "People will have nothing to do or think about when peace comes."

"I shall be glad. Housekeeping will be so much easier."

"True. There are consolations."

Marjorie looked at him suspiciously; she didn't like being laughed at. What an undistinguished-looking little man he was! Short, stoutish, with waxed brown moustaches and a forehead that incipient baldness had made interminably high. He looked like the sort of man to whom one says: "Thank you, I'll take it in notes with a pound's worth of silver." There were pouches under his eyes and pouches under his chin, and you could never guess from his expression what he was thinking about. She was glad that she was taller than he and could look down on him.

Mr. Petherton appeared from the house, his grey shawl over his shoulders and the crackling expanse of the Times between his hands.

"Good morrow," he cried.

To the Shakespearian heartiness of this greeting Marjorie returned her most icily modern "Morning." Her father always said "Good morrow"' instead of "Good morning," and the fact irritated her with unfailing regularity every day of her life.

"There's a most interesting account," said Mr. Petherton, "by a young pilot of an air fight in today's paper," and as they walked up and down the gravel path he read the article, which was a column and a half in length.

Marjorie made no attempt to disguise her boredom, and occupied herself by reading something on the other side of the page, craning her neck round to see.

"Very interesting," said Jacobsen when it was finished.

Mr. Petherton had turned over and was now looking at the Court Circular page.

"I see," he said, "there's someone called Beryl Camberley-Belcher going to be married. Do you know if that's any relation of the Howard Camberley-Belchers, Marjorie? "

"I've no idea who the Howard Camberley-Belchers are," Marjorie answered rather sharply.

"Oh, I thought you did. Let me see. Howard Camberley-Belcher was at college with me. And he had a brother called James—or was it William?—and a sister who married one of the Riders, or at any rate some relation of the Riders; for I know the Camberley-Belchers and the Riders used to fit in somewhere. Dear me, I'm afraid my memory for names is going."

Marjorie went indoors to prepare the day's domestic campaign with the cook. When that was over she retired to her sitting-room and unlocked her very private desk. She must write to Guy this morning. Marjorie had known Guy Lambourne for years and years, almost as long as she could remember. The Lambournes were old family friends of the Pethertons: indeed they were, distantly, connections; they "fitted in somewhere," as Mr. Petherton would say—somewhere, about a couple of generations back. Marjorie was two years younger than Guy; they were both only children; circumstances had naturally thrown them a great deal together. Then Guy's father had died, and not long afterwards his mother, and at the age of seventeen Guy had actually come to live with the Pethertons, for the old man was his guardian. And now they were engaged; had been, more or less, from the first year of the war.

Marjorie took pen, ink, and paper. "DEAR GUY," she began—("We aren't sentimental," she had once remarked, with a mixture of contempt and secret envy, to a friend who had confided that she and her fiance never began with anything less than Darling.)—"I am longing for another of your letters. ..." She went through the usual litany of longing. "It was father's birthday yesterday; he is sixty-five. I cannot bear to think that some day you and I will be as old as that. Aunt Ellen sent him a Stilton cheese—a useful war-time present. How boring housekeeping is. By dint of thinking about cheeses my mind is rapidly turning into one—a Gruyere; where there isn't cheese there are just holes, full of vacuum . . . '

She didn't really mind housekeeping so much. She took it for granted, and did it just because it was there to be done. Guy, on the contrary, never took anything for granted; she made these demonstrations for his benefit.

"I read Keats's letters, as you suggested, and thought them too beautiful . . ."

At the end of a page of rapture she paused and bit her pen. What was there to say next? It seemed absurd one should have to write letters about the books one had been reading. But there was nothing else to write about; nothing ever happened. After all, what had happened in her life? Her mother dying when she was sixteen; then the excitement of Guy coming to live with them; then the war, but that hadn't meant much to her; then Guy falling in love, and their getting engaged. That was really all. She wished she could write about her feelings in an accurate, complicated way, like people in novels; but when she came to think about it, she didn't seem to have any feelings to describe.

She looked at Guy's last letter from France. "Sometimes," he had written, "I am tortured by an intense physical desire for you. I can think of nothing but your beauty, your young, strong body. I hate that; I have to struggle to repress it. Do you forgive me? "It rather thrilled her that he should feel like that about her: he had always been so cold, so reserved, so much opposed to sentimentality—to the kisses and endearments she would, perhaps, secretly have liked. But he had seemed so right when he said, "We must love like rational beings, with our minds, not with our hands and lips." All the same. . . .

She dipped her pen in the ink and began to write again. "I know the feelings you spoke of in your letter. Sometimes I long for you in the same way. I dreamt the other night I was holding you in my arms, and woke up hugging the pillow." She looked at what she had written. It was too awful, too vulgar! She would have to scratch it out. But no, she would leave it in spite of everything, just to see what he would think about it. She finished the letter quickly, sealed and stamped it, and rang for the maid to take it to the post. When the servant had gone, she shut up her desk with a bang. Bang— the letter had gone, irrevocably.

She picked up a large book lying on the table and began to read. It was the first volume of the Decline and Fall. Guy had said she must read Gibbon; she wouldn't be educated till she had read Gibbon. And so yesterday she had gone to her father in his library to get the book.

"Gibbon," Mr. Petherton had said, "certainly, my dear. How delightful it is to look at these grand old books again. One always finds something new every time."

Marjorie gave him to understand that she had never read it. She felt rather proud of her ignorance.

Mr. Petherton handed the first of eleven volumes to her. "A great book," he murmured—"an essential book. It fills the gap between your classical history and your mediaeval stuff."

"Your" classical history, Marjorie repeated to herself, "your "classical history indeed! Her father had an irritating way of taking it for granted that she knew everything, that classical history was as much hers as his. Only a day or two before he had turned to her at luncheon with, "Do you remember, dear child, whether it was Pomponazzi who denied the personal immortality of the soul, or else that queer fellow, Laurentius Valla? It's gone out of my head for the moment." Marjorie had quite lost her temper at the question—much to the innocent bewilderment of her poor father.

She had set to work with energy on the Gibbon; her bookmarker registered the fact that she had got through one hundred and twenty-three pages yesterday. Marjorie started reading. After two pages she stopped. She looked at the number of pages still remaining to be read—and this was only the first volume. She felt like a wasp sitting down to eat a vegetable marrow. Gibbon's bulk was not perceptibly diminished by her first bite. It was too long. She shut the book and went out for a walk. Passing the Whites' house, she saw her friend, Beatrice White that was, sitting on the lawn with her two babies. Beatrice hailed her, and she turned in.

"Pat a cake, pat a cake," she said. At the age of ten months, baby John had already learnt the art of patting cakes. He slapped the outstretched hand offered him, and his face, round and smooth and pink like an enormous peach, beamed with pleasure.

"Isn't he a darling!" Marjorie exclaimed. "You know, I'm sure he's grown since last I saw him, which was on Tuesday."

"He put on eleven ounces last week," Beatrice affirmed.

"How wonderful! His hair's coming on splendidly . . ."

It was Sunday the next day. Jacobsen appeared at breakfast in the neatest of black suits. He looked, Marjorie thought, more than ever like a cashier. She longed to tell him to hurry up or he'd miss the 8.53 for the second time this week and the manager would be annoyed. Marjorie herself was, rather consciously, not in Sunday best.

"What is the name of the Vicar? "Jacobsen inquired, as he helped himself to bacon.

"Trubshaw. Luke Trubshaw, I believe."

"Does he preach well?"

"He didn't when I used to hear him. But I don't often go to church now, so I don't know what he's like these days."

"Why don't you go to church?" Jacobsen inquired, with a silkiness of tone which veiled the crude outlines of his leading question.

Marjorie was painfully conscious of blushing. She was filled with rage against Jacobsen. "Because," she said firmly, "I don't think it necessary to give expression to my religious feelings by making a lot of" — she hesitated a moment—" a lot of meaningless gestures with a crowd of other people."

"You used to go," said Jacobsen.

"When I was a child and hadn't thought about these things."

Jacobsen was silent, and concealed a smile in his coffee-cup. Really, he said to himself, there ought to be religious conscription for women—and for most men, too. It was grotesque the way these people thought they could stand by themselves—the fools, when there was the infinite authority of organized religion to support their ridiculous feebleness.

"Does Lambourne go to church?" he asked maliciously, and with an air of perfect naivete and good faith.

Marjorie coloured again, and a fresh wave of hatred surged up within her. Even as she had said the words she had wondered whether Jacobsen would notice that the phrase "meaningless gestures "didn't ring very much like one of her own coinages. "Gesture "—that was one of Guy's words, like "incredible," "exacerbate," "impinge," "sinister." Of course all her present views about religion had come from Guy. She looked Jacobsen straight in the face and replied:

"Yes, I think he goes to church pretty regularly. But I really don't know: his religion has nothing to do with me."

Jacobsen was lost in delight and admiration.

Punctually at twenty minutes to eleven he set out for church. From where she was sitting in the summer-house Marjorie watched him as he crossed the garden, incredibly absurd and incongruous in his black clothes among the blazing flowers and the young emerald of the trees. Now he was hidden behind the sweet-briar hedge, all except the hard black melon of his bowler hat, which she could see bobbing along between the topmost sprays.

She went on with her letter to Guy. "... What a strange man Mr. Jacobsen is. I suppose he is very clever, but I can't get very much out of him. We had an argument about religion at breakfast this morning; I rather scored off him. He has now gone off to church all by himself; — I really couldn't face the prospect of going with him—I hope he'll enjoy old Mr. Trubshaw's preaching! "

Jacobsen did enjoy Mr. Trubshaw's preaching enormously. He always made a point, in whatever part of Christendom he happened to be, of attending divine service. He had the greatest admiration of churches as institutions. In their solidity and unchangeableness he saw one of the few hopes for humanity. Further, he derived great pleasure from comparing the Church as an institution—splendid, powerful, eternal — with the childish imbecility of its representatives. How delightful it was to sit in the herded congregation and listen to the sincere outpourings of an intellect only a little less limited than that of an Australian aboriginal! How restful to feel oneself a member of a flock, guided by a good shepherd—himself a sheep! Then there was the scientific interest (he went to church as student of anthropology, as a Freudian psychologist) and the philosophic amusement of counting the undistributed middles and tabulating historically the exploded fallacies in the parson's discourse.

To-day Mr. Trubshaw preached a topical sermon about the Irish situation. His was the gospel of the Morning Post, slightly tempered by Christianity. It was our duty, he said, to pray for the Irish first of all, and if that had no effect upon recruiting, why, then, we must conscribe them as zealously as we had prayed before.

Jacobsen leaned back in his pew with a sigh of contentment. A connoisseur, he recognized that this was the right stuff.

"Well," said Mr. Petherton over the Sunday beef at lunch, "how did you like our dear Vicar?"

"He was splendid," said Jacobsen, with grave enthusiasm. "One of the best sermons I've ever heard."

"Indeed? I shall really have to go and hear him again. It must be nearly ten years since I listened to him."

"He's inimitable."

Marjorie looked at Jacobsen carefully. He seemed to be perfectly serious. She was more than ever puzzled by the man.

The days went slipping by, hot blue days that passed like a flash almost without one's noticing them, cold grey days, seeming interminable and without number, and about which one spoke with a sense of justified grievance, for the season was supposed to be summer. There was fighting going on in France — terrific battles, to judge from the headlines in the 'Times; but, after all, one day's paper was very much like another's. Marjorie read them dutifully, but didn't honestly take in very much; at least she forgot about things very soon. She couldn't keep count with the battles of Ypres, and when somebody told her that she ought to go and see the photographs of the Vindictive, she smiled vaguely and said Yes, without remembering precisely what the Vindictive was—a ship, she supposed.

Guy was in France, to be sure, but he was an Intelligence Officer now, so that she was hardly anxious about him at all. Clergymen used to say that the war was bringing us all back to a sense of the fundamental realities of life. She supposed it was true: Guy's enforced absences were a pain to her, and the difficulties of housekeeping continually increased and multiplied.

Mr. Petherton took a more intelligent interest in the war than did his daughter. He prided himself on being able to see the thing as a whole, on taking an historical, God's-eye view of it all. He talked about it at meal-times, insisting that the world must be made safe for democracy. Between meals he sat in the library working at his monumental History of Morals. To his dinner-table disquisitions Marjorie would listen more or less attentively, Jacobsen with an unfailing, bright, intelligent politeness. Jacobsen himself rarely volunteered a remark about the war; it was taken for granted that he thought about it in the same way as all other right-thinking folk. Between meals he worked in his room or discussed the morals of the Italian Renaissance with his host. Marjorie could write to Guy that nothing was happening, and that but for his absence and the weather interfering so much with tennis, she would be perfectly happy.

Into the midst of this placidity there fell, delightful bolt from the blue, the announcement that Guy was getting leave at the end -of July. "DARLING," Marjorie wrote, "I am so excited to think that you will be with me in such a little—such a long, long time." Indeed, she was so excited and delighted that she realized with a touch of remorse how comparatively little she had thought of him when there seemed no chance of seeing him, how dim a figure in absence he was. A week later she heard that George White had arranged to get leave at the same time so as to see Guy. She was glad; George was a charming boy, and Guy was so fond of him. The Whites were their nearest neighbours, and ever since Guy had come to live at Blaybury he had seen a great deal of young George.

" e shall be a most festive party," said Mr. Petherton. "Roger will be coming to us just at the same time as Guy."

"I'd quite forgotten Uncle Roger," said Marjorie. "Of course, his holidays I begin then, don't they?"

The Reverend Roger was Alfred Petherton's brother and a master at one of our most glorious public schools. Marjorie hardly agreed with her father in thinking that his presence would add anything to the "festiveness "of the party. It was a pity he should be coming at this particular moment. However, we all have our little cross to bear.

Mr. Petherton was feeling playful. "We must bring down," he said, "the choicest Falernian, bottled when Gladstone was consul, for the occasion. We must prepare wreaths and unguents and hire a flute player and a couple of dancing girls . . ."

He spent the rest of the meal in quoting Horace, Catullus, the Greek Anthology, Petronius, and Sidonius Apollinarius. Marjorie's knowledge of the dead languages was decidedly limited. Her thoughts were elsewhere, and it was only dimly and as it were through a mist that she heard her father murmuring— whether merelv to himself or with the hope of eliciting an answer from somebody, she hardly knew—" Let me see: how does that epigram go?—that one about the different kinds of fish and the garlands of roses, by Meleager, or is it Poseidippus? . . ."

II

GUY and Jacobsen were walking in the Dutch garden, an incongruous couple. On Guy military servitude had left no outwardly visible mark; out of uniform, he still looked like a tall, untidy undergraduate; he stooped and drooped as much as ever; his hair was still bushy and, to judge by the dim expression of his face, he had not yet learnt to think imperially. His khaki always looked like a disguise, like the most absurd fancy dress. Jacobsen trotted beside him, short, fattish, very sleek, and correct. They talked in a desultory way about things indifferent. Guy, anxious for a little intellectual exercise after so many months of discipline, had been trying to inveigle his companion into a philosophical discussion. Jacobsen consistently eluded his efforts; he was too lazy to talk seriously; there was no profit that he could see to be got out of this young man's opinions, and he had not the faintest desire to make a disciple. He preferred, therefore, to discuss the war and the weather. It irritated him that people should want to trespass on the domain of thought— people who had no right to live anywhere but on the vegetative plane of mere existence. He wished they would simply be content to be or do, not try, so hopelessly, to think, when only one in a million can think with the least profit to himself or anyone else.

Out of the corner of his eye he looked at the dark, sensitive face of his companion; he ought to have gone into business at eighteen, was Jacobsen's verdict. It was bad for him to think; he wasn't strong enough.

A great sound of barking broke upon the calm of the garden. Looking up, the two strollers saw George White running across the green turf of the croquet lawn with a huge fawn-coloured dog bounding along at his side.

"Morning," he shouted. He was hatless and out of breath. "I was taking Bella for a run, and thought I'd look in and see how you all were."

"What a lovely dog!"Jacobsen exclaimed.

"An old English mastiff—our one aboriginal dog. She has a pedigree going straight back to Edward the Confessor."

Jacobsen began a lively conversation with George "on the virtues and shortcomings of dogs. Bella smelt his calves and then lifted up her gentle black eyes to look at him. She seemed satisfied.

He looked at them for a little; they were too much absorbed in their doggy conversation to pay attention to him. He made a gesture as though he had suddenly remembered something, gave a little grunt, and with a very preoccupied expression on his face turned to go towards the house. His elaborate piece of by-play escaped the notice of the intended spectators; Guy saw that it had, and felt more miserable and angry and jealous than ever. They would think he had slunk off because he wasn't wanted—which was quite true—instead of believing that he had something very important to do, which was what he had intended they should believe.

A cloud of self-doubt settled upon him. Was his mind, after all, worthless, and the little things he had written— rubbish, not potential genius as he had hoped? Jacobsen was right in preferring George's company. George was perfect, physically, a splendid creature; what could he himself claim?

"I'm second-rate," he thought — "second-rate, physically, morally, mentally. Jacobsen is quite right."

The best he could hope to be was a pedestrian literary man with quiet tastes.

NO, no, no! He clenched his hands and, as though to register his resolve before the universe, he said, aloud:

"I will do it; I will be first-rate, I will."

He was covered with confusion on seeing a gardener pop up, surprised from behind a bank of rose-bushes. Talking to himself—the man must have thought him mad!

He hurried on across the lawn, entered the house, and ran upstairs to his room.

There was not a second to lose; he must begin at once. He would write something—something that would last, solid, hard, shining. . . .

"Damn them all! I will do it, I can . . ."

There were writing materials and a table in his room. He selected a pen— with a Relief nib he would be able to go on for hours without getting tired—and a large square sheet of writing-paper.

"HATCH HOUSE, BLAYBURY, WILTS.

Station: Cogham, 3 miles; Nobes Monacorum, 4.5 miles."

Stupid of people to have their stationery printed in red, when black or blue is so much nicer! He inked over the letters.

He held up the paper to the light; there was a watermark, "Pimlico Bond." What an admirable name for the hero of a novel! Pimlico Bond. . . .

"There's be-eef in the la-arder And du-ucks in the pond; Crying dilly dilly, dilly dilly . . ."

He bit the end of his pen. "What I want to get," he said to himself, "is something very hard, very external. Intense emotion, but one will somehow have got outside it." He made a movement of hands, arms, and shoulders, tightening his muscles in an effort to express to himself physically that hardness and tightness and firmness of style after which he was struggling.

He began to draw on his virgin paper. A woman, naked, one arm lifted over her head, so that it pulled up her breast by that wonderful curving muscle that comes down from the shoulder. The inner surface of the thighs, remember, is slightly concave. The feet, seen from the front, are always a difficulty.

It would never do to leave that about. What would the servants think? He turned the nipples into eyes, drew heavy lines for nose, mouth, and chin, slopped on the ink thick; it made a passable face now—though an acute observer might have detected the original nudity. He tore it up into very small pieces.

A crescendo booming filled the house. It was the gong. He looked at his watch. Lunch-time, and he had done nothing. O God! . . .

III

IT was dinner-time on the last evening of Guy's leave. The uncovered mahogany table was like a pool of brown unruffled water within whose depths flowers and the glinting shapes of glass and silver hung dimly reflected. Mr. Petherton sat at the head of the board, flanked by his brother Roger and Jacobsen. Youth, in the persons of Marjorie, Guy, and George White, had collected at the other end. They had reached the stage of dessert.

"This is excellent port," said Roger, sleek and glossy like a well-fed black cob under his silken clerical waistcoat. He was a strong, thick-set man of about fifty, with a red neck as thick as his head. His hair was cropped with military closeness; he liked to set a good example to the boys, some of whom showed distressing "aesthetic "tendencies and wore their hair long.

"I'm glad you like it. I mayn't touch it myself, of course. Have another glass." Alfred Petherton's face wore an expression of dyspeptic melancholy. He was wishing he hadn't taken quite so much of that duck.

"Thank you, I will." Roger took the decanter with a smile of satisfaction. "The tired schoolmaster is worthy of his second glass. White, you look rather pale; I think you must have another." Roger had a hearty, jocular manner, calculated to prove to his pupils that he was not one of the slimy sort of parsons, not a Creeping Jesus.

There was an absorbing conversation going on at the youthful end of the table. Secretly irritated at having been thus interrupted in the middle of it, White turned round and smiled vaguely at Roger.

"Oh, thank you, sir," he said, and pushed his glass forward to be filled. The "sir "slipped out unawares; it was, after all, such a little while since he had been a schoolboy under Roger's dominion.

"One is lucky," Roger went on seriously, "to get any port wine at all now. I'm thankful to say I bought ten dozen from my old college some years ago to lay down; otherwise I don't know what I should do. My wine merchant tells me he couldn't let me have a single bottle. Indeed, he offered to buy some off me, if I'd sell. But I wasn't having any. A bottle in the cellar is worth ten shillings in the pocket these days. I always say that port has become a necessity now one gets so little meat. Lambourne! you are another of our brave defenders; you deserve a second glass."

"No, thanks," said Guy, hardly looking up. "I've had enough." He went on talking to Marjorie — about the different views of life held by the French and the Russians.

Roger helped himself to cherries. "One has to select them carefully," he remarked for the benefit of the unwillingly listening George. "There is nothing that gives you such stomach-aches as unripe cherries."

"I expect you're glad, Mr. Petherton, that holidays have begun at last?"said Jacobsen.

"Glad? I should think so. One is utterly dead beat at the end of the summer term. Isn't one, White? "

White had taken the opportunity to turn back again and listen to Guy's conversation; recalled, like a dog who has started off on a forbidden scent, he obediently assented that one did get tired at the end of the summer term.

"I suppose," said Jacobsen, "you still teach the same old things—Caesar, Latin verses, Greek grammar, and the rest? We Americans can hardly believe that all that still goes on."

"Thank goodness," said Roger, "we still hammer a little solid stuff into them. But there's been a great deal of fuss lately about new curriculums and so forth. They do a lot of science now and things of that kind, but I don't believe the children learn anything at all. It's pure waste of time."

"So is all education, I dare say," said Jacobsen lightly.

"Not if you teach them discipline. That's what's wanted—discipline. Most of these little boys need plenty of beating, and they don't get enough now. Besides, if you can't hammer knowledge in at their heads, you can at least beat a little in at their tails."

"You're very ferocious, Roger," said Mr. Petherton, smiling. He was feeling better; the duck was settling down.

"No, it's the vital thing. The best thing the war has brought us is discipline. The country had got slack and wanted tightening up." Roger's face glowed with zeal.

From the other end of the table Guy's voice could be heard saying, "Do you know Cesar Franck's ' Dieu s'avance a travers la lande '? It's one of the finest bits of religious music I know."

Mr. Petherton's face lighted up; he leaned forward. "No," he said, throwing his answer unexpectedly into the midst of the young people's conversation. "I don't know it; but do you know this? Wait a minute." He knitted his brows, and his lips moved as though he were trying to recapture a formula. "Ah, I've got it. Now, can you tell me this? The name of what famous piece of religious music do I utter when I order an old carpenter, once a Liberal but now a renegade to Conservatism, to make a hive for bees?"

Guy gave it up; his guardian beamed delightedly.

"Hoary Tory, oh, Judas! Make a bee-house," he said. "Do you see? Oratorio Judas Maccabeus"

Guy could have wished that this bit of flotsam from Mr. Petherton's sportive youth had not been thus washed up at his feet. He felt that he had been peeping indecently close into the dark backward and abysm of time.

"That was a good one," Mr. Petherton chuckled. "I must see if I can think of some more."

Roger, who was not easily to be turned away from his favourite topic, waited till this irrelevant spark of levity had quite expired, and continued: "It's a remarkable and noticeable fact that you never seem to get discipline combined with the teaching of science or modern languages. Who ever heard of a science master having a good house at a school? Scientists' houses are always bad."

"How very strange! "said Jacobsen.

"Strange, but a fact. It seems to me a great mistake to give them houses at all if they can't keep discipline. And then there's the question of religion. Some of these men never come to chapel except when they're on duty. And then, I ask you, what happens when they prepare their boys for Confirmation? Why, I've known boys come to me who were supposed to have been prepared by one or other of these men, and, on asking them, I've found that they know nothing whatever about the most solemn facts of the Eucharist.—May I have some more of those excellent cherries please, White? —Of course, I do my best in such cases to tell the boys what I feel personally about these solemn things. But there generally isn't the time; one's life is so crowded; and so they go into Confirmation with only the very haziest knowledge of what it's all about. You see how absurd it is to let anyone but the classical men have anything to do with the boys' lives."

"Shake it well, dear," Mr. Petherton was saying to his daughter, who had come with his medicine.

"What is that stuff?" asked Roger,

"Oh, it's merely my peptones. I can hardly digest at all without it, you know."

"You have all my sympathies. My poor colleague, Flexner, suffers from chronic colitis. I can't imagine how he goes on with his work."

"No, indeed. I find I can do nothing strenuous."

Roger turned and seized once more on the unhappy George. "White," he said, "let this be a lesson to you. Take care of your inside; it's the secret of a happy old age."

Guy looked up quickly. "Don't worry about his old age," he said in a strange harsh voice, very different from the gentle, elaborately modulated tone in which he generally spoke. "He won't have an old age. His chances against surviving are about fourteen to three if the war goes on another year."

"Come," said Roger, "don't let's be pessimistic."

"But I'm not. I assure you, I'm giving you a most rosy view of George's chance of reaching old age."

It was felt that Guy's remarks had been in poor taste. There was a silence; eyes floated vaguely and uneasily, trying not to encounter one another. Roger cracked a nut loudly. When he had sufficiently relished the situation, Jacobsen changed the subject by remarking:

"That was a fine bit of work by our destroyers this morning, wasn't it?"

"It did one good to read about it," said Mr. Petherton. "Quite the Nelson touch."

Roger raised his glass. "Nelson!" he said, and emptied it at a gulp. "What a man! I am trying to persuade the Headmaster to make Trafalgar Day a holiday. It is the best way of reminding boys of things of that sort."

"A curiously untypical Englishman to be a national hero, isn't he?" said Jacobsen. "So emotional and lacking in Britannic phlegm."

The Reverend Roger looked grave. "There's one thing I've never been able to understand about Nelson, and that is, how a man who was so much the soul of honour and of patriotism could have been—er—immoral with Lady Hamilton, I know people say that it was the custom of the age, that these things meant nothing then, and so forth; but all the same, I repeat, I cannot understand how a man who was so intensely a patriotic Englishman could have done such a thing."

"I fail to see what patriotism has got to do with it," said Guy.

Roger fixed him with his most pedagogic look and said slowly and gravely, "Then I am sorry for you. I shouldn't have thought it was necessary to tell an Englishman that purity of morals is a national tradition: you especially, a public-school man."

"Let us go and have a hundred up at billiards," said Mr. Petherton. "Roger, will you come? And you, George, and Guy? "

"I'm so incredibly bad," Guy insisted, "I'd really rather not."

"So am I," said Jacobsen.

"Then, Marjorie, you must make the fourth."

The billiard players trooped out; Guy and Jacobsen were left alone, brooding over the wreckage of dinner. There was a long silence. The two men sat smoking, Guy sitting in a sagging, crumpled attitude, like a half-empty sack abandoned on a chair, Jacobsen very upright and serene.

"Do you find you can suffer fools gladly?" asked Guy abruptly.

"Perfectly gladly."

"I wish I could. The Reverend Roger has a tendency to make my blood boil."

"But such a good soul," Jacobsen insisted.

"I dare say, but a monster all the same."

"You should take him more calmly. I make a point of never letting myself be moved by external things. I stick to my writing and thinking. Truth is beauty, beauty is truth, and so forth: after all, they're the only things of solid value." Jacobsen looked at the young man with a smile as he said these words. There is no doubt, he said to himself, that that boy ought to have gone into business; what a mistake this higher education is, to be sure.

"Of course, they're the only things," Guy burst out passionately. "You can afford to say so because you had the luck to be born twenty years before I was, and with five thousand miles of good deep water between you and Europe. Here am I, called upon to devote my life, in a very different way from which you devote yours to truth and beauty—to devote my life to—well, what? Pm not quite sure, but I preserve a touching faith that it is good. And you tell me to ignore external circumstances. Come and live in Flanders a little and try . . ." He launched forth into a tirade about agony and death and blood and putrefaction.

"What is one to do?" he concluded despairingly. "What the devil is right? I had meant to spend my life writing and thinking, trying to create something beautiful or discover something true. But oughtn't one, after all, if one survives, to give up everything else and try to make this hideous den of a world a little more habitable? "

"I think you can take it that a world which has let itself be dragooned into this criminal folly is pretty hopeless. Follow your inclinations; or, better, go into a bank and make a lot of money."

Guy burst out laughing, rather too loudly. "Admirable, admirable!" he said. "To return to our old topic of fools: frankly, Jacobsen, I cannot imagine why you should elect to pass your time with my dear old guardian. He's a charming old man, but one must admit" He waved his hand.

"One must live somewhere," said Jacobsen. "I find your guardian a most interesting man to be with. — Oh, do look at that dog! ': On the hearth-rug Marjorie's little Pekingese, Confucius, was preparing to lie down and go to sleep. He went assiduously through the solemn farce of scratching the floor, under the impression, no doubt, that he was making a comfortable nest to lie in. He turned round and round, scratching earnestly and methodically. Then he lay down, curled himself up in a ball, and was asleep in the twinkling of an eye.

"Isn't that too wonderfully human!" exclaimed Jacobsen delightedly. Guy thought he could see now why Jacobsen enjoyed living with Mr. Petherton. The old man was so wonderfully human.

Later in the evening, when the billiards was over and Mr. Petherton had duly commented on the anachronism of introducing the game into Anthony and Cleopatra, Guy and Marjorie went for a stroll in the garden. The moon had risen above the trees and lit up the front of the house with its bright pale light that could not wake the sleeping colours of the world.

"Moonlight is the proper architectural light," said Guy, as they stood looking at the house. The white light and the hard black shadows brought out all the elegance of its Georgian symmetry.

"Look, here's the ghost of a rose." Marjorie touched a big cool flower, which one guessed rather than saw to be red, a faint equivocal lunar crimson. "And, oh, smell the tobacco-plant flowers. Aren't they delicious! "

"I always think there's something very mysterious about perfume drifting through the dark like this. It seems to come from some perfectly different immaterial world, peopled by unembodied sensations, phantom passions. Think of the spiritual effect of incense in a dark church. One isn't surprised that people have believed in the existence of the soul."

They walked on in silence. Sometimes, accidentally, his hand would brush against hers in the movement of their march. Guy felt an intolerable emotion of expectancy, akin to fear. It made him feel almost physically sick.

"Do you remember," he said abruptly, "that summer holiday our families spent together in Wales? It must have been nineteen four or five. I was ten and you were eight or thereabouts."

"Of course I remember," cried Marjorie. "Everything. There was that funny little toy railway from the slate quarries."

"And do you remember our goldmine? All those tons of yellow ironstone we collected and hoarded in a cave, fully believing they were nuggets. How incredibly remote it seems! "

"And you had a wonderful process by which you tested whether the stuff was real gold or not. It all passed triumphantly as genuine, I remember! "

"Having that secret together first made us friends, I believe."

"I dare say," said Marjorie. "Fourteen years ago—what a time! And you began educating me even then: all that stuff you told me about gold-mining, for instance."

"Fourteen years," Guy repeated reflectively, "and I shall be going out again to-morrow . . ."

"Don't speak about it. I am so miserable when you're away." She genuinely forgot what a delightful summer she had had, except for the shortage of tennis.

"We must make this the happiest hour of our lives. Perhaps it may be the last we shall be together." Guy looked up at the moon, and he perceived, with a sudden start, that it was a sphere islanded in an endless night, not a flat disk stuck on a wall not so very far away. It filled him with an infinite dreariness; he felt too insignificant to live at all.

"Guy, you mustn't talk like that," said Marjorie appealingly.

"We've got twelve hours," said Guy in a meditative voice, "but that's only clockwork time. You can give an hour the quality of everlastingness, and spend years which are as though they had never been. We get our immortality here and now; it's a question of quality, not of quantity. I don't look forward to golden harps or anything of that sort. I know that when I am dead, I shall be dead; there isn't any afterwards. If I'm killed, my immortality will be in your memory. Perhaps, too, somebody will read the things I've written, and in his mind I shall survive, feebly and partially. But in your mind I shall survive intact and whole."

"But I'm sure we shall go on living after death. It can't be the end." Marjorie was conscious that she had heard those words before. Where? Oh yes, it was earnest Evangeline who had spoken them at the school debating society.

"I wouldn't count on it," Guy replied, with a little laugh. "You may get such a disappointment when you die." Then in an altered voice, "I don't want to die. I hate and fear death. But probably I shan't be killed after all. All the same ..." His voice faded out. They stepped into a tunnel of impenetrable darkness between two tall hornbeam hedges. He had become nothing but a voice, and now that had ceased; he had disappeared. The voice began again, low, quick, monotonous, a little breathless. "I remember once reading a poem by one of the old Provencal troubadours, telling how God had once granted him supreme happiness; for the night before he was to set out for the Crusade, it had been granted him to hold his lady in his arms— all the short eternal night through. Ains que j'aille oltre mer: when I was going beyond sea." The voice stopped again. They were standing at the very mouth of the hornbeam alley, looking out from that close-pent river of shadow upon an ocean of pale moonlight:

"How still it is." They did not speak; they hardly breathed. They became saturated with the quiet.

Marjorie broke the silence. "Do you want me as much as all that, Guy?" All through that long, speechless minute she had been trying to say the words, repeating them over to herself, longing to say them aloud, but paralysed, unable to. And at last she had spoken them, impersonally, as though through the mouth of someone else. She heard them very distinctly, and was amazed at the matter-of-factness of the tone.

Guy's answer took the form of a question. "Well, suppose I were killed now," he said, "should I ever have really lived?"

They had stepped out of the cavernous alley into the moonlight. She could see him clearly now, and there was something so drooping and dejected and pathetic about him, he seemed so much of a great, overgrown child that a wave of passionate pitifulness rushed through her, reinforcing other emotions less maternal. She longed to take him in her arms, stroke his hair, lullaby him, baby-fashion, to sleep upon her breast. And Guy, on his side, desired nothing better than to give his fatigues and sensibilities to her maternal care, to have his eyes kissed fast, and sleep to her soothing. In his relations with women—but his experience in this direction was deplorably small—he had, unconsciously at first but afterwards with a realization of what he was doing, played this child part. In moments of self-analysis he laughed at himself for acting the "child stunt," as he called it. Here he was—he hadn't noticed it yet—doing it again, drooping, dejected, wholly pathetic, feeble . . ,

Marjorie was carried away by her emotion. She would give herself to her lover, would take possession of her helpless, pitiable child. She put her arms round his neck, lifted her face to his kisses, whispered something tender and inaudible.

Guy drew her towards him and began kissing the soft, warm mouth. He touched the bare arm that encircled his neck; the flesh was resilient under his fingers; he felt a desire to pinch it and tear it.

It, had been just like this with that little slut Minnie. Just the same —all horrible lust. He remembered a curious physiological fact out of Havelock Ellis. He shuddered as though he had touched something disgusting, and pushed her away.

"No, no, no. It's horrible; it's odious. Drunk with moonlight and sentimentalizing about death. . . . Why not just say with Biblical frankness, Lie with me —Lie with me?"

That this love, which was to have been so marvellous and new and beautiful, should end libidinously and bestially like the affair, never remembered without a shiver of shame, with Minnie (the vulgarity of her!)—filled him with horror.

Marjorie burst into tears and ran away, wounded and trembling, into the solitude of the hornbeam shadow. "Go away, go away," she sobbed, with such intensity of command that Guy, moved by an immediate remorse and the sight of tears to stop her and ask forgiveness, was constrained to let her go her ways.

A cool, impersonal calm had succeeded almost immediately to his outburst. Critically, he examined what he had done, and judged it, not without a certain feeling of satisfaction, to be the greatest "floater ' of his life. But at least the thing was done and couldn't be undone. He took the weak-willed man's delight in the irrevocability of action. He walked up and down the lawn smoking a cigarette and thinking, clearly and quietly — remembering the past, questioning the future. When the cigarette was finished he went into the house.

He entered the smoking-room to hear Roger saying, ". . . It's the poor who are having the good time now. Plenty to eat, plenty of money, and no taxes to pay. No taxes—that's the sickening thing. Look at Alfred's gardener, for instance. He gets twenty-five or thirty bob a week and an uncommon good house. He's married, but only has one child. A man like that is uncommonly well off. He ought to be paying income-tax; he can perfectly well afford it."

Mr. Petherton was listening somnolently, Jacobsen with his usual keen, intelligent politeness; George was playing with the blue Persian kitten.

It had been arranged that George should stay the night, because it was such a bore having to walk that mile and a bit home again in the dark. Guy took him up to his room and sat down on the bed for a final cigarette, while George was undressing. It was the hour of confidence— that rather perilous moment when fatigue has relaxed the fibres of the mind, making it ready and ripe for sentiment.

"It depresses me so much," said Guy, "to think that you're only twenty and that I'm just on twenty-four. You will be young and sprightly when the war ends; I shall be an old antique man."

"Not so old as all that," George answered, pulling off his shirt. His skin was very white, face, neck, and hands seeming dark brown by comparison; there was a sharply demarcated high-water mark of sunburn at throat and wrist.

"It horrifies me to think of the time one is wasting in this bloody war, growing stupider and grosser every day, achieving nothing at all. It will be five, six—God knows how many—years cut clean out of one's life. You'll have the world before you when it's all over, but I shall have spent my best time."

"Of course, it doesn't make so much difference to me," said George through a foam of tooth-brushing; "I'm not capable of doing anything of any particular value. It's really all the same whether I lead a blameless life broking stocks or spend my time getting killed. But for you, I agree, it's too bloody. . . ."

Guy smoked on in silence, his mind filled with a languid resentment against circumstance. George put on his pyjamas and crept under the sheet; he had to curl himself up into a ball, because Guy was lying across the end of the bed, and he couldn't put his feet down.

"I suppose," said Guy at last, meditatively—" I suppose the only consolations are, after all, women and wine. I shall really have to resort to them. Only women are mostly so fearfully boring and wine is so expensive now."

"But not all women!" George, it was evident, was waiting to get a confidence off his chest.

"I gather you've found the exceptions."

George poured forth. He had just spent six months at Chelsea—six dreary months on the barrack square; but there had been lucid intervals between the drills and the special courses, which he had filled with many notable voyages of discovery among unknown worlds. And chiefly, Columbus to his own soul, he had discovered all those psychological intricacies and potentialities, which only the passions bring to light. Nosce tei-psum, it has been commanded; and a judicious cultivation of the passions is one of the surest roads to self-knowledge. To George, at barely twenty, it was all so amazingly new and exciting, and Guy listened to the story of his adventures with admiration and a touch of envy. He regretted the dismal and cloistered chastity — broken only once, and how sordidly! Wouldn't he have learnt much more, he wondered—have been a more real and better human being if he had had George's experiences? He would have profited by them more than George could ever hope to do. There was the risk of George's getting involved in a mere foolish expense of spirit in a waste of shame. He might not be sufficiently an individual to remain himself in spite of his surroundings; his hand would be coloured by the dye he worked in. Guy felt sure that he himself would have run no risk; he would have come, seen, conquered, and returned intact and still himself, but enriched by the spoils of a new knowledge. Had he been wrong after all? Had life in the cloister of his own philosophy been wholly unprofitable?

He looked at George. It was not surprising that the ladies favoured him, glorious ephebus that he was.

"With a face and figure like mine," he reflected, "I shouldn't have been able to lead his life, even if I'd wanted to." He laughed inwardly.

"You really must meet her," George was saying enthusiastically.

Guy smiled. "No, I really mustn't. Let me give you a bit of perfectly good advice. Never attempt to share your joys with anyone else. People will sympathize with pain, but not with pleasure. Good night, George."

He bent over the pillow and kissed the smiling face that was as smooth as a child's to his lips.

Guy lay awake for a long time, and his eyes were dry and aching before sleep finally came upon him. He spent those dark interminable hours thinking —thinking hard, intensely, painfully. No sooner had he left George's room than a feeling of intense unhappiness took hold of him. "Distorted with misery," that was how he described himself; he loved to coin such phrases, for he felt the artist's need to express as well as to feel and think. Distorted with misery, he went to bed; distorted with misery, he lay and thought and thought. He had, positively, a sense of physical distortion: his guts were twisted, he had a hunched back, his legs were withered. . . .

He had the right to be miserable. He was going back to France to-morrow, he had trampled on his mistress's love, and he was beginning to doubt himself, to wonder whether his whole life hadn't been one ludicrous folly.

He reviewed his life, like a man about to die. •• Born in another age, he would, he supposed, have been religious. He had got over religion early, like the measles— at nine a Low Churchman, at twelve a Broad Churchman, and at fourteen an Agnostic—but he still retained the temperament of a religious man. Intellectually he was a Voltairian, emotionally a Bunyanite. To have arrived at this formula was, he felt, a distinct advance in self-knowledge. And what a fool he had been with Marjorie! The priggishness of his attitude—making her read Wordsworth when she didn't want to. Intellectual love — his phrases weren't always a blessing; how hopelessly he had deceived himself with words! And now this evening the crowning outrage, when he had behaved to her like a hysterical anchorite dealing with a temptation. His body tingled, at the recollection, with shame.

An idea occurred to him; he would go and see her, tiptoe downstairs to her room, kneel by her bed, ask for her forgiveness. He lay quite still imagining the whole scene. He even went so far as to get out of bed, open the door, which made a noise in the process like a peacock's scream, quite unnerving him, and creep to the head of the stairs. He stood there a long time, his feet growing colder and colder, and then decided that the adventure was really too sordidly like the episode at the beginning of Tolstoy's Resurrection. The door screamed again as he returned; he lay in bed, trying to persuade himself that his self-control had been admirable and at the same time cursing his absence of courage in not carrying out what he had intended.

He remembered a lecture he had given Marjorie once on the subject of Sacred and Profane Love. Poor girl, how had she listened in patience? He could see her attending with such a serious expression on her face that she looked quite ugly. She looked so beautiful when she was laughing or happy; at the Whites', for instance, three nights ago, when George and she had danced after dinner and he had sat, secretly envious, reading a book in the corner of the room and looking superior. He wouldn't learn to dance, but always wished he could. It was a barbarous, aphrodisiacal occupation, he said, and he preferred to spend his time and energies in reading. Salvationist again! What a much wiser person George had proved himself than he. He had no prejudices, no theoretical views about the conduct of life; he just lived, admirably, naturally, as the spirit or the flesh moved him. If only he could live his life again, if only he could abolish this evening's monstrous stupidity. . . .

Marjorie also lay awake. She too felt herself distorted with misery. How odiously cruel he had been, and how much she longed to forgive him! Perhaps he would come in the dark, when all the house was asleep, tiptoeing into the room very quietly to kneel by her bed and ask to be forgiven. Would he come, she wondered? She stared into the blackness above her and about her, willing him to come, commanding him— angry and wretched because he was so slow in coming, because he didn't come at all. They were both of them asleep before two.

Seven hours of sleep make a surprising difference to the state of mind. Guy, who thought he was distorted for life, woke to find himself healthily normal. Marjorie's angers and despairs had subsided. The hour they had together between breakfast and Guy's departure was filled with almost trivial conversation. Guy was determined to say something about last's night incident. But it was only at the very last moment, when the dog-cart was actually at the door, that he managed to bring out some stammered repentance for what had happened last night.

"Don't think about it," Marjorie had told him. So they had kissed and parted, and their relations were precisely the same as they had been before Guy came on leave.

George was sent out a week or two later, and a month after that they heard at Blaybury that he had lost a leg—fortunately below the knee.

"Poor boy!" said Mr. Petherton. "I must really write a line to his mother at once."

Jacobsen made no comment, but it was a surprise to him to find how much he had been moved by the news. George White had lost a leg; he couldn't get the thought out of his head. But only below the knee; he might be called lucky. Lucky — things are deplorably relative, he reflected. One thanks God because He has thought fit to deprive one of His creatures of a limb.

"Neither delighteth He in any man's legs," eh? Nous avons change tout cela.

George had lost a leg. There would be no more of that Olympian speed and strength and beauty. Jacobsen conjured up before his memory a vision of the boy running with his great fawn-coloured dog across green expanses of grass. How glorious he had looked, his fine brown hair blowing like fire in the wind of his own speed, his cheeks flushed, his eyes very bright. And how easily he ran, with long, bounding strides, looking down at the dog that jumped and barked at his side!

He had had a perfection, and now it was spoilt. Instead of a leg he had a stump. Moignon, the French called it; there was the right repulsive sound about moignon which was lacking in "stump." Soignons le moignon enl'oignantd'oignons.

Often, at night before he went to sleep, he couldn't help thinking of George and the war and all the millions of moignons there must be in the world. He had a dream one night of slimy red knobbles, large polyp-like things, growing as he looked at them, swelling between his hands— moignons, in fact.

George was well enough in the late autumn to come home. He had learnt to hop along on his crutches very skilfully, and his preposterous donkey-drawn bath-chair soon became a familiar object in the lanes of the neighbourhood. It was a grand sight to behold when George rattled past at the trot, leaning forward like a young Phoebus in his chariot and urging his unwilling beast with voice and crutch. He drove over to Blaybury almost every day; Marjorie and he had endless talks about life and love and Guy and other absorbing topics. With Jacobsen he played piquet and discussed a thousand subjects. He was always gay and happy—that was what especially lacerated Jacobsen's heart with pity.

IV

THE Christmas holidays had begun, and the Reverend Roger was back again at Blaybury. He was sitting at the writing-table in the drawing-room, engaged, at the moment, in biting the end of his pen and scratching his head. His face wore an expression of perplexity; one would have said that he was in the throes of literary composition. Which indeed he was: "Beloved ward of Alfred Petherton ..." he said aloud. "Beloved ward . . ." He shook his head doubtfully.

The door opened and Jacobsen came into the room. Roger turned round at once.

"Have you heard the grievous news?' he said.

"No. What?"

"Poor Guy is dead. We got the telegram half an hour ago."

"Good God!" said Jacobsen in an agonized voice which seemed to show that he had been startled out of the calm belonging to one who leads the life of reason. He had been conscious ever since George's mutilation that his defences were growing weaker; external circumstance was steadily encroaching upon him. Now it had broken in and, for the moment, he was at its mercy. Guy dead. . . . He pulled himself together sufficiently to say, after a pause, "Well, I suppose it was only to be expected sooner or later. Poor boy."

"Yes, it's terrible, isn't it?" said Roger, shaking his head. "I am just writing out an announcement to send to the limes. One can hardly say c the beloved ward of Alfred Petherton,' can one? It doesn't sound quite right; and yet one would like somehow to give public expression to the deep affection Alfred felt for him. c Beloved ward '— no, decidedly it won't do."

"You'll have to get round it somehow," said Jacobsen. Roger's presence somehow made a return to the life of reason easier.

"Poor Alfred," the other went on. "You've no idea how hardly he takes it. He feels as though he had given a son."

"What a waste it is!" Jacobsen exclaimed. He was altogether too deeply moved.

"I have done my best to console Alfred. One must always bear in mind for what Cause he died."

"All those potentialities destroyed. He was an able fellow, was Guy." Jacobsen was speaking more to himself than to his companion, but Roger took up the suggestion.

"Yes, he certainly was that. Alfred thought he was very promising. It is for his sake I am particularly sorry. I never got on very well with the boy myself. He was too eccentric for my taste. There's such a thing as being too clever, isn't there? It's rather inhuman. He used to do most remarkable Greek iambics for me when he was a boy. I dare say he was a very good fellow under all that cleverness and queerness. It's all very distressing, very grievous."

"How was he killed?"

"Died of wounds yesterday morning. Do you think it would be a good thing to put in some quotation at the end of the announcement in the paper? Something like, ' Dulce et Decorum,' or ' Sed Miles, sed Pro Patria,' or ' Per Ardua ad Astra '?"

"It hardly seems essential," said Jacobsen.

"Perhaps not." Roger's lips moved silently; he was counting. "Forty-two words. I suppose that counts as eight lines. Poor Marjorie! I hope she won't feel it too bitterly. Alfred told me they were unofficially engaged."

"So I gathered."

"I am afraid I shall have to break the news to her. Alfred is too much upset to be able to do anything himself. It will be a most painful task. Poor girl! I suppose as a matter of fact they would not have been able to marry for some time, as Guy had next to no money. These early marriages are very rash. Let me see: eight times three shillings is one pound four, isn't it? I suppose they take cheques all right? "

"How old was he?" asked Jacobsen.

"Twenty-four and a few months."

Jacobsen was walking restlessly up and down the room. "Just reaching maturity! One is thankful these days to have one's own work and thoughts to take the mind off these horrors."

"It's terrible, isn't it?—terrible. So many of my pupils have been killed now that I can hardly keep count of the number."

There was a tapping at the French window; it was Marjorie asking to be let in. She had been cutting holly and ivy for the Christmas decorations, and carried a basket full of dark, shining leaves.

Jacobsen unbolted the big window and Marjorie came in, flushed with the cold and smiling. Jacobsen had never seen her looking so handsome: she was superb, radiant, like Iphigenia coming in her wedding garments to the sacrifice.

"The holly is very poor this year," she remarked. "I am afraid we shan't make much of a show with our Christmas decorations."

Jacobsen took the opportunity of slipping out through the French window. Although it was unpleasantly cold, he walked up and down the flagged paths of the Dutch garden, hatless and overcoatless, for quite a long time.

Marjorie moved about the drawing-room fixing sprigs of holly round the picture frames. Her uncle watched her, hesitating to speak; he was feeling enormously uncomfortable.

"I am afraid," he said at last, "that your father's very upset this morning." His voice was husky; he made an explosive noise to clear his throat.

"Is it his palpitations?" Marjorie asked coolly; her father's infirmities did not cause her much anxiety.

"No, no." Roger realized that his opening gambit had been a mistake. "No. It is—er—a more mental affliction, and one which, I fear, will touch you closely too. Marjorie, you must be strong and courageous; we have just heard that Guy is dead."

"Guy dead?" She couldn't believe it; she had hardly envisaged the possibility; besides, he was on the Staff. "Oh, Uncle Roger, it isn't true."

"I am afraid there is no doubt. The War Office telegram came just after you had gone out for the holly."

Marjorie sat down on the sofa and hid her face in her hands. Guy dead; she would never see him again, never see him again, never; she began to cry.

Roger approached and stood, with his hand on her shoulder, in the attitude of a thought-reader. To those overwhelmed by sorrow the touch of a friendly hand is often comforting. They have fallen into an abyss, and the touching hand serves to remind them that life and God and human sympathy still exist, however bottomless the gulf of grief may seem. On Marjorie's shoulder her uncle's hand rested with a damp, heavy warmth that was peculiarly unpleasant.

"Dear child, it is very grievous, I know; but you must try and be strong and bear it bravely. We all have our cross to bear. We shall be celebrating the Birth of Christ in two days' time; remember with what patience He received the cup of agony. And then remember for what Cause Guy has given his life. He has died a hero's death, a martyr's death, witnessing to Heaven against the powers of evil." Roger was unconsciously slipping into the words of his last sermon in the school chapel." You should feel pride in his death as well as sorrow. There, there, poor child." He patted her shoulder two or three times." Perhaps it would be kinder to leave you now."

For some time after her uncle's departure Marjorie sat motionless in the same position, her body bent forward, her face in her hands. She kept on repeating the words, "Never again," and the sound of them filled her with despair and made her cry. They seemed to open up such a dreary grey infinite vista— "never again." They were as a spell evoking tears.

She got up at last and began walking aimlessly about the room. She paused in front of a little old black-framed mirror that hung near the window and looked at her reflection in the glass. She had expected somehow to look different, to have changed. She was surprised to find her face entirely unaltered: grave, melancholy perhaps, but still the same face she had looked at when she was doing her hair this morning. A curious idea entered her head; she wondered whether she would be able to smile now, at this dreadful moment. She moved the muscles of her face and was overwhelmed with shame at the sight of the mirthless grin that mocked her from the glass. What a beast she was! She burst into tears and threw herself again on the sofa, burying her face in a cushion. The door opened, and by the noise of shuffling and tapping Marjorie recognized the approach of George White on his crutches. She did not look up. At the sight of the abject figure on the sofa, George halted, uncertain what he should do. Should he quietly go away again, or should he stay and try to say something comforting? The sight of her lying there gave him almost physical pain. He decided to stay.

He approached the sofa and stood over her, suspended on his crutches. Still she did not lift her head, but pressed her face deeper into the smothering blindness of the cushion, as though to shut out from her consciousness all the external world. George looked down at her in silence. The little delicate tendrils of hair on the nape of her neck were exquisitely beautiful.

"I was told about it," he said at last, "just now, as I came in. It's too awful. I think I cared for Guy more than for almost anyone in the world. We both did, didn't we? "

She began sobbing again. George was overcome with remorse, feeling that he had somehow hurt her, somehow added to her pain by what he had said. "Poor child, poor child," he said, almost aloud. She was a year older than he, but she seemed so helplessly and pathetically young now that she was crying.

Standing up for long tired him, and he lowered himself, slowly and painfully, into the sofa beside her. She looked up at last and began drying her eyes.

"I'm so wretched, George, so specially wretched because I feel I didn't act rightly towards darling Guy. There were times, you know, when I wondered whether it wasn't all a great mistake, our being engaged. Sometimes I felt I almost hated him. I'd been feeling so odious about him these last weeks. And now comes this, and it makes me realize how awful I've been towards him." She found it a relief to confide and confess; George was so sympathetic, he would understand. "I've been a beast."

Her voice broke, and it was as though something had broken in George's head. He was overwhelmed with pity; he couldn't bear it that she should suffer.

"You mustn't distress yourself unnecessarily, Marjorie dear," he begged her, stroking the back of her hand with his large hard palm. "Don't."

Marjorie went on remorselessly. "When Uncle Roger told me just now, do you know what I did? I said to myself, Do I really care? I couldn't make out. I looked in the glass to see if I could tell from my face. Then I suddenly thought I'd see whether I could laugh, and I did. And that made me feel how detestable I was, and I started crying again. Oh, I have been a beast, George, haven't I?"

She burst into a passion of tears and hid her face once more in the friendly cushion. George couldn't bear it at all. He laid his hand on her shoulder and bent forward, close to her, till his face almost touched her hair. "Don't," he cried. "Don't, Marjorie. You mustn't torment yourself like this. I know you loved Guy; we both loved him. He would have wanted us to be happy and brave and to go on with life— not make his death a source of hopeless despair." There was a silence, broken only by the agonizing sound of sobbing. "Marjorie, darling, you mustn't cry."

"There, I'm not," said Marjorie through her tears. "I'll try to stop. Guy wouldn't have wanted us to cry for him. You're right; he would have wanted us to live for him—worthily, in his splendid way."

"We who knew him and loved him must make our lives a memorial of him." In ordinary circumstances George would have died rather than make a remark like that. But in speaking of the dead, people forget themselves and conform to the peculiar obituary convention of thought and language. Spontaneously, unconsciously, George had conformed.

Marjorie wiped her eyes. "Thank you, George. You know so well what darling Guy would have liked. You've made me feel stronger to bear it. But, all the same, I do feel odious for what I thought about him sometimes. I didn't love him enough. And now it's too late. I shall never see him again." The spell of that "never "worked again: Marjorie sobbed despairingly.

George's distress knew no bounds. He put his arm round Marjorie's shoulders and kissed her hair. "Don't cry, Marjorie. Everybody feels like that sometimes, even towards the people they love most. You really mustn't make yourself miserable."

Once more she lifted her face and looked at him with a heart-breaking, tearful smile. "You have been too sweet to me, George. I don't know what I should have done without you."

"Poor darling!" said George. "I can't bear to see you unhappy." Their faces were close to one another, and it seemed natural that at this point their lips should meet in a long kiss. "We'll remember only the splendid, glorious things about Guy," he went on— "what a wonderful person he was, and how much we loved him." He kissed her again.

"Perhaps our darling Guy is with us here even now," said Marjorie, with a look of ecstasy on her face.

"Perhaps he is," George echoed.

It was at this point that a heavy footstep was heard and a hand rattled at the door. Marjorie and George moved a little farther apart. The intruder was Roger, who bustled in, rubbing his hands with an air of conscious heartiness, studiously pretending that nothing untoward had occurred. It is our English tradition that we should conceal our emotions. "Well, well," he said. "I think we had better be going in to luncheon. The bell has gone."

The End

Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers

"I HAVE made a discovery," said Emberlin as I entered his room.

"What about?" I asked.

"A discovery," he replied, "about Discoveries" He radiated an unconcealed satisfaction; the conversation had evidently gone exactly as he had intended it to go. He had made his phrase, and, repeating it lovingly—" A discovery about Discoveries" —he smiled benignly at me, enjoying my look of mystification— an expression which, I confess, I had purposely exaggerated in order to give him pleasure. For Emberlin, in many ways so childish, took an especial delight in puzzling and nonplussing his acquaintances; and these small triumphs, these little "scores "off people afforded him some of his keenest pleasures. I always indulged his weakness when I could, for it was worth while being on Emberlin's good books. To be allowed to listen to his post-prandial conversation was a privilege indeed. Not only was he himself a consummately good talker, but he had also the power of stimulating others to talk well. He was like some subtle wine, intoxicating just to the Meredithian level of tipsiness. In his company you would find yourself lifted to the sphere of nimble and mercurial conceptions; you would suddenly realize that some miracle had occurred, that you were living no longer in a dull world of jumbled things but somewhere above the hotch-potch in a glassily perfect universe of ideas, where all was informed, consistent, symmetrical. And it was Emberlin who, godlike, had the power of creating this new and real world. He built it out of words, this crystal Eden, where no belly-going snake, devourer of quotidian dirt, might ever enter and disturb its harmonies. Since I first knew Emberlin I have come to have a greatly enhanced respect for magic and all the formules of its liturgy. If by words Emberlin can create a new world for me, can make my spirit slough off completely the domination of the old, why should not he or I or anyone, having found the suitable phrases, exert by means of them an influence more vulgarly miraculous upon the world of mere things? Indeed, when I compare Emberlin and the common or garden black magician of commerce, it seems to me that Emberlin is the greater thaumaturge. But let that pass; I am straying from my purpose, which was to give some description of the man who so confidentially whispered to me that he had made a discovery about Discoveries.

In the best sense of the word, then, Emberlin was academic. For us who knew him his rooms were an oasis of aloofness planted secretly in the heart of the desert of London. He exhaled an atmosphere that combined the fantastic speculativeness of the undergraduate with the more mellowed oddity of incredibly wise and antique dons. He was immensely erudite, but in a wholly unencyclopaedic way—a mine of irrelevant information, as his enemies said of him. He wrote a certain amount, but, like Mallarme, avoided publication, deeming it akin to "the offence of exhibitionism." Once, however, in the folly of youth, some dozen years ago, he had published a volume of verses. He spent a good deal of time now in assiduously collecting copies of his book and burning them. There can be but very few left in the world now. My friend Cope had the fortune to pick one up the other day—a little blue book, which he showed me very secretly. I am at a loss to understand why Emberlin wishes to stamp out all trace of it. There is nothing to be ashamed of in the book; some of the verses, indeed, are, in their young ecstatic fashion, good. But they are certainly conceived in a style that is unlike that of his present poems. Perhaps it is that which makes him so implacable against them. What he writes now for very private manuscript circulation is curious stuff. I confess I prefer the earlier work; I do not like the stony, hard-edged quality of this sort of thing—the only one I can remember of his later productions. It is a sonnet on a porcelain figure of a woman, dug up at Cnossus:

"Her eyes of bright unwinking glaze All imperturbable do not Even make pretences to re ard The jutting absence of her stays Where many a Syrian gallipot Excites desire with spilth of nard. The bistred rims above the fard Of cheeks as red as bergamot Attest that no shamefaced delays Will clog fulfilment nor retard Full payment of the Cyprian's praise Down to the last remorseful jot. Hail priestess of we know not what Strange cult of Mycenean days!"

Regrettably, I cannot remember any of Emberlin's French poems. His peculiar muse expresses herself better, I think, in that language than in her native tongue.

Such is Emberlin; such, I should rather say, was he, for, as I propose to show, he is not now the man that he was when he whispered so confidentially to me, as I entered the room, that he had made a discovery about Discoveries.

I waited patiently till he had finished his little game of mystification and, when the moment seemed ripe, I asked him to explain himself. Emberlin was ready to open out.

"Well," he began," these are the facts—a tedious introduction, I fear, but necessary. Years ago, when I was first reading Ben Jonson's Discoveries, that queer jotting of his, ' Eupompus gave splendour to Art by Numbers,' tickled my curiosity. You yourself must have been struck by the phrase, everybody must have noticed it; and everybody must have noticed too that no commentator has a word to say on the subject. That is the way of commentators—the obvious points fulsomely explained and discussed, the hard passages, about which one might want to know something passed over in the silence of sheer ignorance. 6 Eupompus gave splendour to Art by Numbers'—the absurd phrase stuck in my head. At one time it positively haunted me. I used to chant it in my bath, set to music as an anthem. It went like this, so far as I remember"—and he burst into song: "' Eupompus, Eu-u-pompus gave sple-e-e-endour . . .'" and so on, through all the repetitions, the dragged-out rises and falls of a parodied anthem.

"I sing you this," he said when he had finished, "just to show you what a hold that dreadful sentence took upon my mind. For eight years, off and on, its senselessness has besieged me. I have looked up Eupompus in all the obvious books of reference, of course. He is there all right—Alexandrian artist, eternized by some wretched little author in some even wretcheder little anecdote, which at the moment I entirely forget; it had nothing, at any rate, to do with the embellishment of art by numbers. Long ago I gave up the search as hopeless; Eupompus remained for me a shadowy figure of mystery, author of some nameless outrage, bestower of some forgotten benefit upon the art that he practised. His history seemed wrapt in an impenetrable darkness. And then yesterday I discovered all about him and his art and his numbers. A chance discovery, than which few things have given me a greater pleasure.

"I happened upon it, as I say, yesterday when I was glancing through a volume of Zuylerius. Not, of course, the Zuylerius one knows," he added quickly, "otherwise one would have had the heart out of Eupompus' secret years ago."

"Of course," I repeated, "not the familiar Zuylerius."

"Exactly," said Emberlin, taking seriously my flippancy, "not the familiar John Zuylerius, Junior, but the elder Henricus Zuylerius, a much less—though perhaps undeservedly so — renowned figure than his son. But this is not the time to discuss their respective merits. At any rate, I discovered in a volume of critical dialogues by the elder Zuylerius, the reference, to which, without doubt, Jonson was referring in his note. (It was of course a mere jotting, never meant to be printed, but which Jonson's literary executors pitched into the book with all the rest of the available posthumous materials.) ' Eupompus gave splendour to Art by Numbers '—Zuylerius gives a very circumstantial account of the process. He must, I suppose, have found the sources for it in some writer now lost to us."

Emberlin paused a moment to muse. The loss of the work of any ancient writer gave him the keenest sorrow. I rather believe lie had written a version of the unrecovered books of Petronius. Someday I hope I shall be permitted to see what conception Emberlin has of the Satyricon as a whole. He would, I am sure, do Petronius justice—almost too much, perhaps.

"What was the story of Eupompus? ': I asked. "I am all curiosity to know."

Emberlin heaved a sigh and went on.

"Zuylerius' narrative," he said, "is very bald, but on the whole lucid; and I think it gives one the main points of the story. I will give it you in my own words; that is preferable to reading his Dutch Latin. Eupompus, then, was one of the most fashionable portrait-painters of Alexandria. His clientele was large, his business immensely profitable. For a half-length in oils the great courtesans would pay him a month's earnings. He would paint likenesses of the merchant princes in exchange for the costliest of their outlandish treasures. Coal-black potentates would come a thousand miles out of Ethiopia to have a miniature limned on some specially choice panel of ivory; and for payment there would be camel-loads of gold and spices. Fame, riches, and honour came to him while he was yet young; an unparalleled career seemed to lie before him. And then, quite suddenly, he gave it all up—refused to paint another portrait. The doors of his studio were closed. It was in vain that clients, however rich, however distinguished, demanded admission; the slaves had their order; Eupompus would see no one but his own intimates."

Emberlin made a pause in his narrative.

"What was Eupompus doing?" I asked.

"He was, of course," said Emberlin, "occupied in giving splendour to Art by Numbers. And this, as far as I can gather from Zuylerius, is how it all happened. He just suddenly fell in love with numbers—head over ears, amorous of pure counting. Number seemed to him to be the sole reality, the only thing about which the mind of man could be certain. To count was the one thing worth doing, because it was the one thing you could be sure of doing right. Thus, art, that it may have any value at all, must ally itself with reality—must, that is, possess a numerical foundation. He carried the idea into practice by painting the first picture in his new style. It was a gigantic canvas, covering several hundred square feet—I have no doubt that Eupompus could have told you the exact area to an inch—and upon it was represented an illimitable ocean covered, as far as the eye could reach in every direction, with a multitude of black swans. There were thirty-three thousand of these black swans, each, even though it might be but a speck on the horizon, distinctly limned. In the middle of the ocean was an island, upon which stood a more or less human figure having three eyes, three arms and legs, three breasts and three navels. In the leaden sky three suns were dimly expiring. There was nothing more in the picture; Zuylerius describes it exactly. Eupompus spent nine months of hard work in painting it. The privileged few who were allowed to see it pronounced it, finished, a masterpiece. They gathered round Eupompus in a little school, calling themselves the Phil-arithmics. They would sit for hours in front of his great work, contemplating the swans and counting them; according to the Philarithmics, to count and to contemplate were the same thing.

Eupompus' next picture, representing an orchard of identical trees set in quincunxes, was regarded with less favour by the connoisseurs. His studies of crowds were, however, more highly esteemed; in these were portrayed masses of people arranged in groups that exactly imitated the number and position of the stars making up various of the more famous constellations. And then there was his famous picture of the amphitheatre, which created a furore among the Philarithmics. Zuylerius again gives us a detailed description. Tier upon tier of seats are seen, all occupied by strange Cyclopean figures. Each tier accommodates more people than the tier below, and the number rises in a complicated but regular progression. All the figures seated in the amphitheatre possess but a single eye, enormous and luminous, planted in the middle of the forehead: and all these thousands of single eyes are fixed, in a terrible and menacing scrutiny, upon a dwarf-like creature cowering pitiably in the arena. ... He alone of the multitude possesses two eyes.

"I would give anything to see that picture," Emberlin added, after a pause. "The colouring, you know; Zuylerius gives no hint, but I feel somehow certain that the dominant tone must have been a fierce brick-red—a red granite amphitheatre filled with a red-robed assembly, sharply defined against an implacable blue sky."

"Their eyes would be green," I suggested.

Emberlin closed his eyes to visualize the scene and then nodded a slow and rather dubious assent.

"Up to this point," Emberlin resumed at length, "Zuylerius' account is very clear. But his descriptions of the later philarithmic art become extremely obscure; I doubt whether he understood in the least what it was all about. I will give you such meaning as I manage to extract from his chaos. Eupompus seems to have grown tired of painting merely numbers of objects. He wanted now to represent Number itself. And then he conceived the plan of rendering visible the fundamental ideas of life through the medium of those purely numerical terms into which, according to him, they must ultimately resolve themselves. Zuylerius speaks vaguely of a picture of Eros, which seems to have consisted of a series of interlacing planes. Eupompus' fancy seems next to have been taken by various of the Socratic dialogues upon the nature of general ideas, and he made a series of illustrations for them in the same arithmo-geometric style. Finally there is Zuylerius' wild description of the last picture that Eupompus ever painted. I can make very little of it. The subject of the work, at least, is clearly stated; it was a representation of Pure Number, or God and the Universe, or whatever you like to call that pleasingly inane conception of totality. It was a picture of the cosmos seen, I take it, through a rather Neoplatonic camera obscura — very clear and in small. Zuylerius suggests a design of planes radiating out from a single point of light. I dare say something of the kind came in. Actually, I have no doubt, the work was a very adequate rendering in visible form of the conception of the one and the many, with all the intermediate stages of enlightenment between matter and the Fons Deitatis. However, it's no use speculating what the picture may have been going to look like. Poor old Eupompus went mad before he had completely finished it and, after he had dispatched two of the admiring Phil-arithmics with a hammer, he flung himself out of the window and broke his neck. That was the end of him, and that was how he gave splendour, regrettably transient, to Art by Numbers." Emberlin stopped. We brooded over our pipes in silence; poor old Eupompus!

That was four months ago, and to-day Emberlin is a confirmed and apparently irreclaimable Philarithmic, a quite wholehearted Eupompian.

It was always Emberlin's way to take up the ideas that he finds in books and to put them into practice. He was once, for example, a working alchemist, and attained to considerable proficiency in the Great Art. He studied mnemonics under Bruno and Raymond Lully, and constructed for himself a model of the latter's syllogizing machine, in hopes of gaining that universal knowledge which the Enlightened Doctor guaranteed to its user. This time it is Eupompianism, and the thing has taken hold of him. I have held up to him all the hideous warnings that I can find in history. But it is no use.

There is the pitiable spectacle of Dr. Johnson under the tyranny of an Eupompian ritual, counting the posts and the paving-stones of Fleet Street. He himself knew best how nearly a madman he was.

And then I count as Eupompians all gamblers, all calculating boys, all interpreters of the prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse; then too the Elberfeld horses, most complete of all Eupompians.

And here was Emberlin joining himself to this sect, degrading himself to the level of counting beasts and irrational children and men, more or less insane. Dr. Johnson was at least born with a strain of the Eupompian aberration in him; Emberlin is busily and consciously acquiring it. My expostulations, the expostulations of all his friends, are as yet unavailing. It is in vain that I tell Emberlin that counting is the easiest thing in the world to do, that when I am utterly exhausted, my brain, for lack of ability to perform any other work, just counts and reckons, like a machine, like an Elberfeld horse. It all falls on deaf ears; Emberlin merely smiles and shows me some new numerical joke that he has discovered. Emberlin can never enter a tiled bathroom now without counting how many courses of tiles there are from floor to ceiling. He regards it as an interesting fact that there are twenty-six rows of tiles in his bathroom and thirty-two in mine, while all the public lavatories in Holborn have the same number. He knows now how many paces it is from any one point in London to any other. I have given up going for walks with him. I am always made so distressingly conscious by his preoccupied look, that he is counting his steps.

His evenings, too, have become profoundly melancholy; the conversation, however well it may begin, always comes round to the same nauseating subject. We can never escape numbers; Eupompus haunts us. It is not as if we were mathematicians and could discuss problems of any interest or value. No, none of us are mathematicians, least of all Emberlin. Emberlin likes talking about such points as the numerical significance of the Trinity, the immense importance of its being three in one, not forgetting the even greater importance of its being one in three. He likes giving us statistics about the speed of light or the rate of growth in fingernails. He loves to speculate on the nature of odd and even numbers. And he seems to be unconscious how much he has changed for the worse. He is happy in an exclusively absorbing interest. It is as though some mental leprosy had fallen upon his intelligence.

In another year or so, I tell Emberlin, he may almost be able to compete with the calculating horses on their own ground. He will have lost all traces of his reason, but he will be able to extract cube roots in his head. It occurs to me that the reason why Eupompus killed himself was not that he was mad; on the contrary, it was because he was, temporarily, sane. He had been mad for years, and then suddenly the idiot's self-complacency was lit up by a flash of sanity. By its momentary light he saw into what gulfs of imbecility he had plunged. He saw and understood, and the full horror, the lamentable absurdity of the situation made him desperate. He vindicated Eupompus against Eupompianism, humanity against the Philarithmics. It gives me the greatest pleasure to think that he disposed of two of that hideous crew before he died himself.

The End

Happy Families

THE scene is a conservatory. Luxuriant tropical plants are seen looming through a greenish aquarium twilight, punctuated here and there by the surprising pink of several Chinese lanterns hanging from the roof or on the branches of trees, while a warm yellow radiance streams out from the ball-room by a door on the left of the scene. Through the glass of the conservatory, at the back of the stage, one perceives a black-and-white landscape under the moon —expanses of snow, lined and dotted with coal-black hedges and trees. Outside is frost and death: but within the conservatory all is palpitating and steaming with tropical life and heat. Enormous fantastic plants encumber it; trees, creepers that writhe with serpentine life, orchids of every kind. Everywhere dense vegetation; horrible flowers that look like bottled spiders, like suppurating wounds; flowers with eyes and tongues, with moving, sensitive tentacles, with breasts and teeth and spotted skins.

The strains of a waltz float in through the ball-room door, and to that slow, soft music there enter, in parallel processions, the two families which are respectively Mr. Aston J. Tyrrell and Miss Topsy Garrick.

The doyen of the Tyrrell family is a young and perhaps too cultured literary man with rather long, dark brown hair, a face well cut and sensitive, if a trifle weak about the lower jaw, and a voice whose exquisite modulations could only be the product of education at one of the two Great Universities. We will call him plain Aston. Miss Topsy, the head of the Garrick family, is a young woman of not quite twenty, with sleek, yellow hair hanging, like a page's, short and thick about her ears; boyish, too, in her slenderness and length of leg—boyish, but feminine and attractive to the last degree. Miss Topsy paints charmingly, sings in a small, pure voice that twists the heart and makes the bowels yearn in the hearing of it, is well educated, and has read, or at least heard of, most of the best books-in three languages, knows something, too, of economics and the doctrines of Freud.

They enter arm in arm, fresh from the dance, trailing behind them with their disengaged hands two absurd ventriloquist's dummies of themselves. They sit down on a bench placed in the middle of the stage under a kind of arbour festooned with fabulous flowers. The other members of the two families lurk in the tropical twilight of the background.

Aston advances his dummy and makes it speak, moving its mouth and limbs appropriately by means of the secret levers which his hand controls.

ASTON'S DUMMY.

What a perfect floor it is to-night!

TOPSY'S DUMMY.

Yes, it's like ice, isn't it? And such a good band.

ASTON'S DUMMY.

Oh yes, a very good band.

TOPSY'S DUMMY.

They play at dinner - time at the Necropole, you know.

ASTON'S DUMMY.

Really! (A long, uncomfortable silence.)

(From under a lofty twangum tree emerges the figure of CAIN WASHINGTON TYRRELL, ASTON'S negro brother—for the TYRRELLS, I regret to say, have a lick of the tar-brush in them and CAIN is a Mendelian throwback to the 'pure 'Jamaican type. CAIN is stout and his blackface shines with grease. The whites of his eyes are like enamel, his smile is chryselephantine. He is dressed in faultless evening dress and a ribbon of seals tinkles on his stomach. He walks with legs wide apart, the upper part of his body thrown back and his belly projecting, as though he were supporting the weight of an Aristophanic actor's costume. He struts up and down in front of the couple on the seat, grinning and slapping himself on the waistcoat.)

CAIN.

What hair, nyum nyum! and the nape of her neck; and her body—how slender! and what lovely movements, nyum nyum! (Approaching ASTON and speaking into his ear.) Eh? eh? eh?

ASTON.

Go away, you pig. Go away. (He holds up his dummy as a shield: CAIN retires discomfited.)

ASTON'S DUMMY.

Have you read any amusing novels lately?

TOPSY.

(Speaking over the head of her dummy.) No; I never read novels. They are mostly so frightful, aren't they?

ASTON.

(Enthusiastically.) How splendid! Neither do I. I only write them sometimes, that's all. (They abandon their dummies, which fall limply into one another's arms and collapse on to the floor with an expiring sigh.)

TOPSY.

You write them? I didn't know. . . .

ASTON.

Oh, I'd very much rather you didn't know. I shouldn't like you ever to read one of them. They're all awful: still, they keep the pot boiling, you know. But tell me, what do you read?

TOPSY.

Mostly history, and philosophy, and a little criticism and psychology, and lots of poetry.

ASTON.

My dear young lady! how wonderful, how altogether unexpectedly splendid.

(CAIN emerges with the third brother, SIR JASPER, who is a paler, thinner, more sinister and aristocratic ASTON.)

CAIN.

Nyum nyum nyum. . . .

SIR JASPER.

What a perfect sentence that was of yours, Aston: quite Henry Jamesian! "My dear young lady "—as though you were forty years her senior; and the rare old-worldliness of that "altogether unexpectedly splendid "! Admirable. I don't remember your ever employing quite exactly this opening gambit before: but of course there were things very like it. (To CAIN.) What a nasty spectacle you are, Cain, gnashing your teeth like that!

CAIN.

Nyum nyum nyum.

(ASTON and TOPSY are enthusiastically talking about books: the two brothers, finding themselves quite unnoticed, retire into the shade of their twangum tree. BELLE GARRICK has been hovering behind TOPSY 'for some time 'past. She is more obviously pretty than her sister, full-bosomed and with a loose, red, laughing mouth. Unable to attract TOPSY'S attention, she turns round and calls, "HENRIKA." A paleface with wide, surprised eyes peeps round the trunk, hairy like a mammoth's leg, of a kadapoo tree with magenta leaves and flame - coloured blossoms. This is HENRIKA, TOPSY'S youngest sister. She is dressed in a little white muslin frock set off with blue ribbons.)

HENRIKA.

(Tiptoes forward.) Here I am; what is it? I was rather frightened of that man. But he really seems quite nice and tame, doesn't he?

BELLE.

Of course he is! What a goose you are to hide like that!

HENRIKA.

He seems a nice, quiet, gentle man; and so clever.

BELLE.

What good hands he has, hasn't he? (Approaching TOPSY and whispering in her ear.) Your hair's going into your eyes, my dear. Toss it back in that pretty way you have. (Topsy tosses her head; the soft, golden bell of hair quivers elastically about her ears.) That's right!

CAIN.

(Bounding into the air and landing with feet apart, knees bent, and a hand on either knee.) Oh, nyum nyum!

ASTON.

Oh, the beauty of that movement! It simply makes one catch one's breath with surprised pleasure, as the gesture of a perfect dancer might.

SIR JASPER.

Beautiful, wasn't it?—a pleasure purely aesthetic and aesthetically pure. Listen to Cain.

ASTON.

(To TOPSY.) And do you ever try writing yourself? I'm sure you ought to.

SIR JASPER.

Yes, yes, we're sure you ought to. Eh, Cain?

TOPSY.

Well, I have written a little poetry—or rather a few bad verses—at one time or another.

ASTON.

Really now! What about, may I ask?

TOPSY.

Well . . . (hesitating) about different things, you know. (She fans herself rather nervously.)

BELLE.

(Leaning over TOPSY'S shoulder and addressing ASTON directly.) Mostly about Love. (She dwells long and voluptuously on the last word, pronouncing it "low "rather than "luvv")

CAIN.

Oh, dat's good, dat's good; dat's dam good. (In moments of emotion CAIN'S manners and language savour more obviously than usual of the Old Plantation.) Did yoh see her face den?

BELLE.

(Repeats, slowly and solemnly.) Mostly about Love.

HENRIKA.

Oh, oh. (She covers her face with her hands.) How could you? It makes me tingle all over. (She runs behind the kadapoo tree again.)

ASTON.

(Very seriously and intelligently.) Really. That's very interesting. I wish you'd let me see what you've done some time.

SIR JASPER.

We always like to see these things, don't we, Aston? Do you remember Mrs. Towler? How pretty she was! And the way we criticized her literary productions. . . .

ASTON.

Mrs. Towler. . . . (He shudders as though he had touched something soft and filthy.) Oh, don't, Jasper, don't!

SIR JASPER.

Dear Mrs. Towler! We were very nice about her poems, weren't we? Do you remember the one that began :

"My Love is like a silvern flower-de-luce Within some wondrous dream-garden pent: God made my lovely lily not for use, But for an ornament."

Even Cain, I believe, saw the joke of that.

ASTON.

Mrs. Towler—oh, my God! But this is quite different: this girl really interests me.

SIR JASPER.

Oh yes, I know, I know. She interests you too, Cain, doesn't she?

CAIN.

(Prances two or three steps of a cake-walk and sings.\'7d Oh, ma honey, oh, ma honey.

ASTON.

But, I tell you, this is quite different.

SIR JASPER.

Of course it is. Any fool could see that it was. I've admitted it already.

ASTON.

(To TOPSY.) You will show them me,, won't you? I should so much like to see them,

TOPSY.

(Covered with confusion.) No, I really couldn't. You're a professional, you see.

HENRIKA.

(From behind the kadapoo tree.) No, you mustn't show them to him. They're really mine, you know, a great many of them.

BELLE.

Nonsense! (She stoops down and moves TOPSY's foot in such a way that a very well-shaped, white-stockinged leg is visible some way up the calf. Then, to TOPSY.) Pull your skirt down, my dear. You're quite indecent.

CAIN.

(Putting up his monocle.) Oh, nyum nyum, ma honey! Come wid me to Dixie Land.

SIR JASPER.

H'm, a little conscious, don't you think?

ASTON.

But even professionals are human, my dear young lady. And perhaps I might be able to give you some help with your writings.

TOPSY.

That's awfully kind of you, Mr. Tyrrell.

HENRIKA.

Oh, don't let him see them. I don't want him to. Don't let him.

ASTON.

(With heavy charm.) It always interests me so much when I hear of the young—and I trust you won't be offended if I include you in their number—when I hear of the young taking to writing. It is one of the most important duties that we of the older generation can perform—to help and encourage the young with their work. It's a great service to the cause of Art.

SIR JASPER.

That was what I was always saying to Mrs. Towler, if I remember rightly.

TOPSY.

I can't tell you, Mr. Tyrrell, how delightful it is to have one's work taken seriously. I am so grateful to you. May I send you my little efforts, then?

CAIN.

(Executes a step dance to the furious clicking of a 'pair of bones.)

SIR JASPER.

I congratulate you, Aston. A most masterful bit of strategy.

BELLE.

I wonder what he'll do next. Isn't it exciting? Topsy, toss your head again. That's right. Oh, I wish something would happen!

HENRIKA.

What have you done? Oh, Topsy, you really mustn't send him my poems.

BELLE.

You said he was such a nice man just now.

HENRIKA.

Oh yes, he's nice, I know. But then he's a man, you must admit that. I don't want him to see them.

TOPSY.

(Firmly.) You're being merely foolish, Henrika. Mr. Tyrrell, a very distinguished literary man, has been kind enough to take an interest in my work. His criticism will be the greatest help to me.

BELLE.

Of course it will, and he has such charming eyes. (A pause. The music, which has, all this while, been faintly heard through the ball-room door, becomes more audible. They are flaying a rich, creamy waltz.) What delicious music! Henrika, come and have a dance. (She seizes HENRIKA round the waist and begins to waltz. HENRIKA is reluctant at first, but little by little the rhythm of the dance takes possession of her till, with her half-closed eyes and languorous, trance-like movements, she might figure as the visible living symbol of the waltz. ASTON and TOPSY lean back in their seats, marking the time with a languid beating of the hand. CAIN sways and swoons and revolves in his own peculiar and inimitable version of the dance.)

SIR JASPER.

(Who has been watching the whole scene with amusement.) What a pretty spectacle! "Music hath charms. . . ."

HENRIKA.

(In an almost extinct voice.) Oh, Belle, Belle, I could go on dancing like this for ever. I feel quite intoxicated with it.

TOPSY.

(To ASTON.) What a jolly tune this is!

ASTON.

Isn't it? It's called "Dreams of Desire," I believe.

BELLE.

What a pretty name!

TOPSY.

These are wonderful flowers here.

ASTON.

Let's go and have a look at them.

(They get up and walk round the conservatory. The flowers light up as they pass; in the midst oj each is a small electric globe.)

ASTON.

This purple one with eyes is the assafoetida flower. Don't put your nose too near; it has a smell like burning flesh. This is a Cypripedium from Sumatra. It is the only man-eating flower in the world. Notice its double set of teeth. (He puts a stick into the mouth of the flower, which instantly snaps to, like a steel trap.) Nasty, vicious brute! These blossoms like purple sponges belong to the twangum tree; when you squeeze them they ooze blood. This is the Jonesia, the octopus of the floral world: each of its eight tentacles is armed with a sting capable of killing a horse. Now this is a most interesting and instructive flower—the patchouli bloom. It is perhaps the most striking example in nature of structural specialization brought about by Evolution. If only Darwin had lived to see the patchouli plant! You have heard of flowers specially adapting themselves to be fertilized by bees or butterflies or spiders and such-like? Well, this plant which grows in the forests of Guatemala can only be fertilized by English explorers. Observe the structure of the flower; at the base is a flat, projecting pan, containing the pistil; above it an overarching tube ending in a spout. On either side a small crevice about three-quarters of an inch in length may be discerned in the fleshy lobes of the calix. The English traveller seeing this plant is immediately struck by its resemblance to those penny - in - the - slot machines which provide scent for the public in the railway stations at home. Through sheer force of habit he takes a penny from his pocket and inserts it in one of the crevices or slots. Immediate result — a jet of highly scented liquid pollen is discharged from the spout upon the pistil lying below, and the plant is fertilized. Could anything be more' miraculous? And yet there are those who deny the existence of God. Poor fools!

TOPSY.

Wonderful! (Sniffing.) What a good scent.

ASTON.

The purest patchouli.

BELLE.

How delicious! Oh, my dear . . . (She shuts her eyes in ecstasy)

HENRIKA.

(Drowsily.) Delicious, 'licious. . . .

SIR JASPER.

I always like these rather canaille perfumes. Their effect is admirable.

ASTON.

This is the leopard-flower. Observe its spotted skin and its thorns like agate claws. This is the singing Alocusia— Alocusia Cantatrix—discovered by Humboldt during his second voyage to the Amazons. If you stroke its throat in the right place, it will begin to sing like a nightingale. Allow me. (He takes her by the wrist and guides her fingers towards the 'palpitating throat of a gigantic flower shaped like a gramophone trumpet. The Alocusia bursts into song; it has a voice like Caruso's.)

CAIN.

Oh, nyum nyum! What a hand! Oh, ma honey. (He runs a thick black finger along TOPSY'S arm.)

TOPSY.

What a remarkable flower!

BELLE.

I wonder whether he stroked my arm like that by accident or on purpose.

HENRIKA.

(Gives a little shiver.) He's touching me, he's touching me! But somehow I feel so sleepy I can't move.

TOPSY.

(She moves on towards the next flower: BELLE does not allow her to disengage her hand at once.) What a curious smell this one has!

ASTON.

Be careful, be careful! That's the chloroform plant.

TOPSY.

Oh, I feel quite dizzy and faint. That smell and the heat . . . (She almost falls: ASTON puts out his arm and holds her up.)

ASTON.

Poor child!

CAIN.

Poh chile, poh chile! (He hovers round her, his hands almost touching her, trembling with excitement: his white eyeballs roll horribly.)

ASTON.

I'll open the door. The air will make you feel better. (He opens the conservatory door, still supporting TOPSY with his right arm. The wind is heard, fearfully whistling: a flurry of snow blows into the conservatory. The flowers utter piercing screams of rage and fear; their lights flicker wildly; several turn perfectly black and drop on to the floor writhing in agony. The floral octopus agitates its tentacles; the twangum blooms drip blood; all the leaves of all the trees dap together with a dry, scaly sound.)

TOPSY.

(Faintly.) Thank you; that's better.

ASTON.

(Closing the door.) Poor child! Come and sit down again; the chloroform flower is a real danger. (Much moved, he leads her back towards the seat.)

CAIN.

(Executes a war dance round the seated couple.) Poh chile, poh chile! Nyum nyum nyum.

SIR JASPER.

One perceives the well-known dangers of playing the Good Samaritan towards an afflicted member of the opposite sex. Pity has touched even our good Cain to tears.

BELLE.

Oh, I wonder what's going to happen! It's so exciting. I'm so glad Henrika's gone to sleep.

TOPSY. It was silly of me to go all faint like that.

ASTON.

I ought to have warned you in time of the chloroform flower.

BELLE.

But it's such a lovely feeling now—like being in a very hot bath with lots of verbena bath-salts, and hardly able to move with limpness, but just ever so comfortable and happy.

ASTON.

How do you feel now? I'm afraid you're looking very pale. Poor child!

CAIN.

Poh chile, poh chile! . . .

SIR JASPER.

I don't know much about these things, but it seems to me, my dear Aston, that the moment has decidedly arrived.

ASTON.

I'm so sorry. You poor little thing . . . (He kisses her very gently on the forehead.)

BELLE.

A—a—h.

HENRIKA.

Oh! He kissed me: but he's so kind and good, so kind and good. (She stirs and falls back again into her drowsy trance?)

CAIN.

Poh chile, poh chile! (He leans over ASTON 's shoulder and begins rudely kissing TOPSY'S trance-calm, parted lips. TOPSY opens her eyes and sees the blacky greasy face, the chryselephantine smile, the pink, thick lips, the goggling eyeballs of white enamel. She screams. HENRIKA springs up and screams too. TOPSY slips on to the floor, and CAIN and ASTON are left face to face with HENRIKA, pale as death and with wide-open, terrified eyes. She is trembling in every limb.)

ASTON.

(Gives CAIN a push that sends him sprawling backwards, and falls on his knees before the pathetic figure of HENRIKA.) Oh, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. What a beast I am! I don't know what I can have been thinking of to do such a thing.

SIR JASPER.

My dear boy, I'm afraid you and Cain knew only too well what you were thinking of. Only too well . . .

ASTON.

Will you forgive me? I can't forgive myself.

HENRIKA.

Oh, you hurt me, you frightened me so much. I can't bear it. (She cries.)

ASTON.

O God! O God! (The tears start into his eyes also. He takes HENRIKA'S band and begins to kiss it.) I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.

SIR JASPER.

If you're not very careful, Aston, you'll have Cain to deal with again. (CAIN has picked himself up and is creeping stealthily towards the couple in the centre of the conservatory.)

ASTON.

(Turning round.) Cain, you brute, go to hell! (CAIN slinks back.) Oh, will you forgive me for having been such a swine? What can I do?

TOPSY.

(Who has recovered her self-possession, rises to her feet and pushes HENRIKA into the background.) Thank you, it is really quite all right. I think it would be best to say no more about it, to forget what has happened.

ASTON.

Will you forgive me, then?

TOPSY.

Of course, of course. Please get up Mr. Tyrrell.

ASTON.

(Climbing to his feet.) I can't think how I ever came to be such a brute.

TOPSY.

(Coldly.) I thought we had agreed not to talk about this incident any further, (There is a silence.)

SIR JASPER.

Well, Aston? This has been rather fun.

BELLE.

I wish you hadn't been quite so cold with him, Topsy. Poor man! He really is very sorry. One can see that.

HENRIKA.

But did you see that awful face? (She shudders and covers her eyes.)

ASTON.

(Picking up his dummy and manipulating it.) It is very hot in here, is it not? Shall we go back to the dancing-room?

TOPSY.

(Also takes up her dummy.) Yes, let us go back.

ASTON'S DUMMY.

Isn't that "Roses in Picardy "that the ' band is playing?

TOPSY'S DUMMY.

I believe it is. What a very good band, don't you think?

ASTON'S DUMMY.

Yes; it plays during dinner, you know, at the Necropole. (To JASPER.) Lord, what a fool I am! I'd quite forgotten; it was she who told me so as we came in.

TOPSY'S DUMMY.

At the Necropole? Really.

ASTON'S DUMMY.

A very good band and a very good floor.

TOPSY'S DUMMY.

Yes, it's a perfect floor, isn't it? Like glass. . . . (They go out, followed by their respective families. BELLE supports HENRIKA, who is still very weak after her shock.)

BELLE.

How exciting it was, wasn't it, HENRIKA?

HENRIKA.

Wasn't it awful—too awful! Oh, that face. . . . (CAIN follows ASTON out in silence and dejection. SIR JASPER brings up the rear of the procession. His face wears its usual expression of slightly bored amusement. He lights a cigarette.)

SIR JASPER.

Charming evening, charming evening. . . . Now it's over, I wonder whether it ever existed. (He goes out. The conservatory is left empty. The flowers flash their luminous pistils; the eyes of the assa-fcetida blossoms solemnly wink; leaves shake and sway and rustle; several of the flowers are heard to utter a low chuckle, while the Alocusia, ofter whistling a few derisive notes, finally utters a loud, gross Oriental hiccough.)

THE CURTAIN SLOWLY DESCENDS.

The End

Cynthia

WHEN, some fifty years hence, my grandchildren ask me what I did when I was at Oxford in the remote days towards the beginning of our monstrous century, I shall look back across the widening gulf of time and tell them with perfect good faith that I never worked less than eight hours a day, that I took a keen interest in Social Service, and that coffee was the strongest stimulant in which I indulged. And they will very justly say—but I hope I shall be out of hearing. That is why I propose to write my memoirs as soon as possible, before I have had time to forget, so that having the truth before me I shall never in time to come be able, consciously or unconsciously, to tell lies about myself.

At present I have no time to write a complete account of that decisive period in my history. I must content myself therefore with describing a single incident of my undergraduate days. I have selected this one because it is curious and at the same time wholly characteristic of Oxford life before the war. My friend Lykeham was an Exhibitioner at Swellfoot College. He combined blood (he was immensely proud of his Anglo-Saxon descent and the derivation of his name from Old English lycam, a corpse) with brains. His tastes were eccentric, his habits deplorable, the range of his information immense. As he is now dead, I will say no more about his character.

To proceed with my anecdote: I had gone one evening, as was my custom, to visit him in his rooms at Swellfoot. It was just after nine when I mounted the stairs, and great Tom was still tolling.

"In Thomae laude

Resono him bam sine fraude,"

as the charmingly imbecile motto used to run, and to-night he was living up to it by bim-bamming away in a persistent basso profondo that made an astonishing background of discord to the sound of frantic guitar playing which emanated from Lykeham's room. From the fury of his twanging I could tell that something more than usually cataclysmic had happened, for mercifully it was only in moments of the greatest stress that Lykeham touched his guitar.

I entered the room with my hands over my ears. "For God's sake "I implored. Through the open window Tom was shouting a deep E flat, with a spread chord of under- and over-tones, while the guitar gibbered shrilly and hysterically in D natural. Lykeham laughed, banged down his guitar on to the sofa with such violence that it gave forth a trembling groan from all its strings, and ran forward to meet me. He slapped me on the shoulder with painful heartiness; his whole face radiated joy and excitement.

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

"You are perspiring," I said coldly.

Lykeham mopped himself, but went grinning.

"Well, what is it this time?" I asked. "Are you engaged to be married again?"

Lykeham burst forth with the triumphant pleasure of one who has at last found an opportunity of disburdening himself of an oppressive secret. "Far better than that," he cried.

I groaned. "Some more than usually unpleasant amour, I suppose." I knew that he had been in London the day before, a pressing engagement with the dentist having furnished an excuse to stay the night.

"Don't be gross," said Lykeham, with a nervous laugh which showed that my suspicions had been only too well founded.

"Well, let's hear about the delectable Flossie or Effie or whatever her name was," I said, with resignation.

"I tell you she was a goddess."

"The goddess of reason, I suppose."

"A goddess," Lykeham continued; "the most wonderful creature I've ever seen. And the extraordinary thing is," he added confidentially, and with ill-suppressed pride, "that it seems I myself am a god of sorts,"

"Of gardens; but do come down to facts."

"I'll tell you the whole story. It was like this: Last night I was in town, you know, and went to see that capital play that's running at the Prince Consort's. It's 'one of those ingenious combinations of melodrama and problem play, which thrill you to the marrow and at the same time give you a virtuous feeling that you've been to see something serious. Well, I rolled in rather late, having secured an admirable place in the front row of the dress circle. I trampled in over the populace, and casually observed that there was a girl sitting next me, whom I apologized to for treading on her toes. I thought no more about her during the first act. In the interval, when the lights were on again, I turned round to look at things in general and discovered that there was a goddess sitting next me. One only had to look at her to see she was a goddess. She was quite incredibly beautiful—rather pale and virginal and slim, and at the same time very stately. I can't describe her; she was simply perfect—there's nothing more to be said,"

"Perfect," I repeated, "but so were all the rest."

"Fool! "Lykeham answered impatiently. "All the rest were just damned women. This was a goddess, I tell you. Don't interrupt me any more. As I' was looking with astonishment at her profile, she turned her head and looked squarely at me. I've never seen anything so lovely; I almost swooned away. Our eyes met "

"What an awful novelist's expression!" I expostulated.

"I can't help it; there's no other word. Our eyes did meet, and we both fell simultaneously in love."

"Speak for yourself."

"I could see it in her eyes. Well, to go on. We looked at one another several times during that first interval, and then the second act began. In the course of the act, entirely accidentally, I knocked my programme on to the floor, and reaching down to get it I touched her hand. Well, there was obviously nothing else to do but to take hold of it."

"And what did she do?"

"Nothing. We sat like that the whole of the rest of the act, rapturously happy and"

"And quietly perspiring palm to palm. I know exactly, so we can pass over that. Proceed."

"Of course you don't know in the least; you've never held a goddess's hand. When the lights went up again I reluctantly dropped her hand, not liking the thought of the profane crowd seeing us, and for want of anything better to say, I asked her if she actually was a goddess. She said it was a curious question, as she'd been wondering what god I was. So we said, how incredible: and I said I was sure she was a goddess, and she said she was certain I was a god, and I bought some chocolates, and the third act began. Now, it being a melodrama, there was of course in the third act a murder and burglary scene, in which all the lights were turned out. In this thrilling moment of total blackness I suddenly felt her kiss me on the cheek."

"I thought you said she was virginal."

"So she was — absolutely, frozenly virginal; but she was made of a sort of burning ice, if you understand me. She was virginally passionate—just the combination you'd expect to find in a goddess. I admit I was startled when she kissed me, but with infinite presence of mind I kissed her back, on the mouth. Then the murder was finished and the lights went on again. Nothing much more happened till the end of the show, when I helped her on with her coat and we went out together, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and got into a taxi. I told the man to drive somewhere where we could get supper, and he drove there."

"Not without embracements by the way?"

"No, not without certain embracements."

"Always passionately virginal?"

"Always virginally passionate."

"Proceed."

"Well, we had supper—a positively Olympian affair, nectar and ambrosia and stolen hand-pressures. She became more and more wonderful every moment. My God, you should have seen her eyes!

The whole soul seemed to burn in their depths, like fire under the sea

"For narrative," I interrupted him, "the epic or heroic style is altogether more suitable than the lyrical."

"Well, as I say, we had supper, and after that my memory becomes a sort of burning mist."

"Let us make haste to draw the inevitable veil. What was her name? "

Lykeham confessed that he didn't know; as she was a goddess, it didn't really seem to matter what her earthly name was. How did he expect to find her again? He hadn't thought of that, but knew she'd turn up somehow. I told him he was a fool, and asked which particular goddess he thought she was and which particular god he himself.

"We discussed that," he said. « We first thought Ares and Aphrodite; but she wasn't my idea of Aphrodite, and I don't know that I'm very much like Ares."

He looked pensively in the old Venetian mirror which hung over the fireplace. It was a complacent look, for Lykeham was rather vain about his personal appearance, which was, indeed, repulsive at first sight, but had, when you looked again, a certain strange and fascinating ugly beauty. Bearded, he would have made a passable Socrates. But Ares—no, certainly he wasn't Ares.

"Perhaps you're Hephaestus," I suggested; but the idea was received coldly.

Was he sure that she was a goddess? Mightn't she just have been a nymph of sorts? Europa, for instance. Lykeham repudiated the implied suggestion that he was a bull, nor would he hear of himself as a swan or a shower of gold. It was possible, however, he thought, that he was Apollo and she Daphne, reincarnated from her vegetable state. And though I laughed heartily at the idea of his being Phoebus Apollo, Lykeham stuck to the theory with increasing obstinacy. The more he thought of it the more it seemed to him probable that his nymph, with her burning cold virginal passion, was Daphne, while to doubt that he himself was Apollo seemed hardly to occur to him.

It was about a fortnight later, in June, towards the end of term, that we discovered Lykeham's Olympian identity. We had gone, Lykeham and I, for an after-dinner walk. We set out through the pale tranquillity of twilight, and following the towpath up the river as far as Godstow, halted at the inn for a glass of port and a talk with the glorious old female Falstaff in black silk who kept it. We were royally entertained with gossip and old wine, and after Lykeham had sung a comic song which had reduced the old lady to a quivering jelly of hysterical laughter, we set out once more, intending to go yet a little farther up the river before we turned back. Darkness had fallen by this time; the stars were lighted in the sky; it was the sort of summer night to which Marlowe compared Helen of Troy. Over the meadows invisible peewits wheeled and uttered their melancholy cry; the far-off thunder of the weir bore a continuous, even burden to all the other small noises of the night. Lykeham and I walked on in silence. We had covered perhaps a quarter of a mile when all at once my companion stopped and began looking fixedly westward towards Witham Hill. I paused too, and saw that he was staring at the thin crescent of the moon, which was preparing to set in the dark woods that crowned the eminence.

"What are you looking at?" I asked.

But Lykeham paid no attention, only muttered something to himself. Then suddenly he cried out, "It's she!" and started off at full gallop across the fields in the direction of the hill. Conceiving that he had gone suddenly mad, I followed. We crashed through the first hedge twenty yards apart. Then came the backwater; Lykeham leapt, flopped in three-quarters of the way across, and scrambled oozily ashore. I made a better jump and landed among the mud and rushes of the farther bank. Two more hedges and a ploughed field, a hedge, a road, a gate, another field, and then we were in Witham Wood itself. It was pitch black under the trees, and Lykeham had perforce to slacken his pace a little. I followed him by the noise he made crashing through the undergrowth and cursing when he hurt himself. That wood was a nightmare, but we got through it somehow and into the open glade at the top of the hill. Through the trees on the farther side of the clearing shone the moon, seeming incredibly close at hand. Then, suddenly, along the very-path of the moonlight, the figure of a woman came walking through the trees into the open. Lykeham rushed towards her and flung himself at her feet and embraced her knees; she stooped down and smoothed his ruffled hair. I turned and walked away; it is not for a mere mortal to look on at the embracements of the gods.

As I walked back, I wondered who on earth—or rather who in heaven—Lykeham could be. For here was chaste Cynthia giving herself to him in the most unequivocal fashion. Could he be Endymion? No, the idea was too preposterous to be entertained for a moment. But I could think of no other loved by the virgin moon. Yet surely I seemed dimly to recollect that there had been some favoured god; for the life of me I could not remember who. All the way back along the river path I searched my mind for his name, and always it eluded me.

But on my return I looked up the matter in Lempriere, and almost died of laughing when I discovered the truth. I thought of Lykeham's /enetian mirror and his complacent side glances at his own image, and his belief that he was Apollo, and I laughed and laughed. And when, considerably after midnight, Lyke-ham got back to college, I met him in the porch and took him quietly by the sleeve, and in his ear I whispered, "GOAT-FOOT," and then I roared with laughter once again.

The End

The Bookshop

IT seemed indeed an unlikely place to find a bookshop. All the other commercial enterprises of the street aimed at purveying the barest necessities to the busy squalor of the quarter. In this, the main arterial street, there was a specious glitter and life produced by the swift passage of the traffic. It was almost airy, almost gay. But all around great tracts of slum pullulated dankly. The inhabitants did their shopping in the grand street; they passed, holding gobbets of meat that showed glutinous even through the wrappings of paper; they cheapened linoleum at upholstery doors; women, black-bonneted and black-shawled, went shuffling to their marketing with dilapidated bags of straw plait. How should these, I wondered, buy books? And yet there it was, a tiny shop; and the windows were fitted with shelves, and there were the brown backs of books. To the right a large emporium overflowed into the street with its fabulously cheap furniture; to the left the curtained, discreet windows of an eating-house announced in chipped white letters the merits of sixpenny dinners. Between, so narrow as scarcely to prevent the junction of food and furniture, was the little shop. A door and four feet of dark window, that was the full extent of frontage. One saw here that literature was a luxury; it took its proportionable room here in this place of necessity. Still, the comfort was that it survived, definitely survived.

The owner of the shop was standing in the doorway, a little man, grizzle-bearded and with eyes very active round the corners of the spectacles that bridged his long, sharp nose.

"Trade is good?" I inquired.

"Better in my grandfather's day," he told me, shaking his head sadly.

"We grow progressively more Philistine," I suggested.

"It is our cheap press. The ephemeral overwhelms the permanent, the classical."

"This journalism," I agreed, "or call it rather this piddling quotidianism, is the curse of our age."

"Fit only for "He gesticulated clutchingly with his hands as though seeking the word.

"For the fire."

The old man was triumphantly emphatic with his, "No: for the sewer."

I laughed sympathetically at his passion. "We are delightfully at one in our views," I told him. "May I look about me a little among your treasures?"

Within the shop was a brown twilight, redolent with old leather and the smell of that fine subtle dust that clings to the pages of forgotten books, as though preservative of their secrets—like the dry sand of Asian deserts beneath which, still incredibly intact, lie the treasures and the rubbish of a thousand years ago. I opened the first volume that came to my hand. It was a book of fashion-plates, tinted elaborately by hand in magenta and purple, maroon and sol-ferino and puce and those melting shades of green that a yet earlier generation had called "the sorrows of Werther." Beauties in crinolines swam with the amplitude of pavilioned ships across the pages. Their feet were represented as thin and flat and black, like tea-leaves shyly protruding from under their petticoats. Their faces were egg-shaped, sleeked round with hair of glossy black, and expressive of an immaculate purity. I thought of our modern fashion figures, with their heels and their arch of instep, their flattened faces and smile of pouting invitation. It was difficult not to be a deteriorationist. I am easily moved by symbols; there is something of a Quarles in my nature. Lacking the philosophic mind, I prefer to see my abstractions concretely imaged. And it occurred to me then that if I wanted an emblem to picture the sacredness of marriage and the influence of the home I could not do better than choose two little black feet like tea-leaves peeping out decorously from under the hem of wide, disguising petticoats. While heels and thoroughbred insteps should figure—oh well, the reverse.

The current of my thoughts was turned aside by the old man's voice. "I expect you are musical," he said.

Oh yes, I was a little; and he held out to me a bulky folio.

"Did you ever hear this?" he asked.

Robert the Devil: no, I never had. I did not doubt that it was a gap in my musical education.

The old man took the book and drew up a chair from the dim penetralia of the shop. It was then that I noticed a surprising fact: what I had, at a careless glance, taken to be a common counter I perceived now to be a piano of a square, unfamiliar shape. The old man sat down before it. "You must forgive any defects in its tone," he said, turning to me. "An early Broadwood, Georgian, you know, and has seen a deal of service in a hundred years."

He opened the lid, and the yellow keys grinned at me in the darkness like the teeth of an ancient horse.

The old man rustled pages till he found a desired place. "The ballet music," he said: "it's fine. Listen to this."

His bony, rather tremulous hands began suddenly to move with an astonishing nimbleness, and there rose up, faint and tinkling against the roar of the traffic, a gay pirouetting music. The instrument rattled considerably and the volume of sound was thin as the trickle of a drought-shrunken stream: but, still, it kept tune and the melody was there, filmy, aerial.

"And now for the drinking-song," cried the old man, warming excitedly to his work. He played a series of chords that mounted modulating upwards towards a breaking-point; so supremely operatic as positively to be a parody of that moment of tautening suspense, when the singers are bracing themselves for a burst of passion. And then it came, the drinking chorus. One pictured to oneself cloaked men, wildly jovial over the emptiness of cardboard flagons.

"Versiam' a tazza piena

Il generoso umor . . ."

The old man's voice was cracked and shrill, but his enthusiasm made up for any defects in execution. I had never seen anyone so wholeheartedly a reveller. He turned over a few more pages. "Ah, the 'Valse Infernale,' "he said.

"That's good." There was a little melancholy prelude and then the tune, not so infernal perhaps as one might have been led to expect, but still pleasant enough. I looked over his shoulder at the words and sang to his accompaniment.

"Demon! fatali

Fantasmi d'orror,

Dei regni infernali

Plaudite al signer."

A great steam-driven brewer's lorry roared past with its annihilating thunder and utterly blotted out the last line. The old man's hands still moved over the yellow keys, my mouth opened and shut; but there was no sound of words or music. It was as though the fatal demons, the phantasms of horror, had made a sudden irruption into this peaceful, abstracted place.

I looked out through the narrow door. The traffic ceaselessly passed; men and women hurried along with set faces. Phantasms of horror, all of them: infernal realms wherein they dwelt. Outside, men lived under the tyranny of things. Their every action was determined by the orders of mere matter, by money, and the tools of their trade and the unthinking laws of habit and convention. But here I seemed to be safe from things, living at a remove from actuality; here where a bearded old man, improbable survival from some other time, indomitably played the music of romance, despite the fact that the phantasms of horror might occasionally drown the sound of it with their clamour.

"So: will you take it?" The voice of the old man broke across my thoughts. "I will let you have it for five shillings." He was holding out the thick, dilapidated volume towards me. His face wore a look of strained anxiety. I could see how eager he was to get my five shillings, how necessary, poor man! for him. He has been, I thought with an unreasonable bitterness—he has been simply performing for my benefit, like a trained dog. His aloofness, his culture—all a business trick. I felt aggrieved. He was just one of the common phantasms of horror masquerading as the angel of this somewhat comic paradise of contemplation. I gave him a couple of half-crowns and he began wrapping the book in paper.

"I tell you," he said, "I'm sorry to part with it. I get attached to my books, you know; but they always have to go."'

He sighed with such an obvious genuineness of feeling that I repented of the judgment I had passed upon him. He was a reluctant inhabitant of the infernal realms, even as was I myself.

Outside they were beginning to cry the' evening papers: a ship sunk, trenches captured, somebody's new stirring speech. We looked at one another— the old bookseller and I—in silence. We understood one another without speech. Here were we in particular, and here was the whole of humanity in general, all faced by the hideous triumph of things. In this continued massacre of men, in this old man's enforced sacrifice, matter equally triumphed. And walking homeward through Regent's Park, I too found matter triumphing over me. My book was unconscionably heavy, and I wondered what in the world I should do with a piano score of Robert the Devil when I had got it home. It would only be another thing to weigh me down and hinder me; and at the moment it was very, oh, abominably, heavy. I leaned over the railings that ring round the ornamental water, and as unostentatiously as I could, I let the book fall into the bushes. I often think it would be best not to attempt the solution of the problem of life. Living is hard enough without complicating the process by thinking about it. The wisest thing, perhaps, is to take for granted the "wearisome condition of humanity, born under one law, to another bound," and to leave the matter at that, without an attempt to reconcile the incompatibles. Oh, the absurd difficulty of it all! And I have, moreover, wasted five shillings, which is serious, you know, in these thin times.

The End

The Death of Lully

THE sea lay in a breathing calm, and the galley, bosomed in its transparent water, stirred rhythmically to the slow pulse of its sleeping life. Down below there, fathoms away through the crystal-clear Mediterranean, the shadow of the ship lazily swung, moving, a long dark patch, very slowly back and forth across the white sand of the sea-bottom —very slowly, a scarcely perceptible advance and recession of the green darkness. Fishes sometimes passed, now hanging poised with idly tremulous fins, now darting onwards, effortless and incredibly swift; and always, as it seemed, utterly aimless, whether they rested or whether they moved; as the life of angels their life seemed mysterious and unknowable.

All was silence on board the ship. In their fetid cage below decks the rowers slept where they sat, chained, on their narrow benches. On deck the sailors lay sleeping or sat in little groups playing at dice. The fore-part of the deck was reserved, it seemed, for passengers of distinction. Two figures, a man and a woman, were reclining there on couches, their faces and half-bared limbs flushed in the coloured shadow that was thrown by the great red awning stretched above them.

It was a nobleman, the sailors had heard, and his mistress that they had on board. They had taken their passage at Scanderoon, and were homeward bound for Spain. Proud as sin these Spaniards were; the man treated them like slaves or dogs. As for the woman, she was well enough, but they could find as good a face and pair of breasts in their native Genoa. If anyone so much as looked at her from half the ship's length away it sent her possessor into a rage. He had struck one man for smiling at her. Damned Catalonian, as jealous as a stag; they wished him the stag's horns as well as its temper.

It was intensely hot even under the awning. The man woke from his uneasy sleep and reached out to where on a little table beside him stood a deep silver cup of mixed wine and water. He drank a gulp of it; it was as warm as blood and hardly cooled his throat. He turned over and, leaning on his elbow, looked at his companion. She on her back, quietly breathing through parted lips, still asleep. He leaned across and pinched her on the breast, so that she woke up with a sudden start and cry of pain.

"Why did you wake me?" she asked.

He laughed and shrugged his shoulders. He had, indeed, had no reason for doing so, except that he did not like it that she should be comfortably asleep, while he was awake and unpleasantly conscious of the heat.

"It is hotter than ever," he said, with a kind of gloomy satisfaction at the thought that she would now have to suffer the same discomforts as himself. "The wine scorches instead of cooling; the sun seems no lower down the sky."

The woman pouted. "You pinched me cruelly," she said. "And I still do not know why you wanted to wake me,"

He smiled again, this time with a good-humoured lasciviousness. "I wanted to kiss you," he said. He passed his hand over her body possessively, as a man might caress a dog.

Suddenly the quiet of the afternoon was shattered. A great clamour rose up, ragged and uneven, on the air. Shrill yells pierced the dull rumbling growl of bass voices, pierced the sound of beaten drums and hammered metal.

"What are they doing in the town?" asked the woman anxiously of her lover.

"God knows," he answered. "Perhaps the heathen hounds are making some trouble with our men."

He got up and walked to the rail of the ship. A quarter of a mile away, across the smooth water of the bay, stood the little African town at which they had stopped to call. The sunlight showed everything with a hard and merciless definition. Sky, palms, white houses, domes, and towers seemed as though made from some hard enamelled metal. A ridge of low red hills rolled away to right and left. The sunshine gave to everything in the scene the same clarity of detail, so that to the eye of the onlooker there was no impression of distance. The whole thing seemed to be painted in flat upon a single plane.

The young man returned to his couch under the awning and lay down. It was hotter than ever, or seemed so, at least, since he had made the exertion of getting up. He thought of high cool pastures in the hills, with the pleasant sound of streams, far down and out of sight in their deep channels. He thought of winds that were fresh and scented— winds that were not mere breaths of dust and fire. He thought of the shade of cypresses, a narrow opaque strip of darkness; and he thought too of the green coolness, more diffused and fluid and transparent, of chestnut groves. And he thought of the people he remembered sitting under the trees—young people, gay and brightly dressed, whose life was all gaiety and deliciousness. There were the songs that they sang—he recalled the voices and the dancing of the strings. And there were perfumes and, when one drew closer, the faint intoxicating fragrance of a woman's body. He thought of the stories they told; one in particular came to his mind, a capital tale of a sorcerer who offered to change a peasant's wife into a mare, and how he gulled the husband and enjoyed the woman before his eyes, and the delightful excuses he made when she failed to change her shape. He smiled to himself at the thought of it, and stretching out a hand touched his mistress. Her bosom was soft to his fingers and damp with sweat; he had an unpleasant notion that she was melting in the heat.

"Why do you touch me?" she asked.

He made no reply, but turned away from her. He wondered how it would come to pass that people would rise again in the body. It seemed curious, considering the manifest activities of worms. And suppose one rose in the body that one possessed in age. He shuddered, picturing to himself what this woman would be like when she was sixty, seventy. She would be beyond words repulsive. Old men too were horrible. They stank, and their eyes were rheumy and rosiny, like the eyes of deer. He decided that he would kill himself before he grew old. He was eight-and-twenty now. He would give himself twelve years more. Then he would end it. His thoughts dimmed and faded away into sleep.

The woman looked at him as he slept. He was a good man, she thought, though sometimes cruel. He was different from all the other men she had known. Once, when she was sixteen and a beginner in the business of love, she had thought that all men were always drunk when they made love. They were all dirty and like beasts; she had felt herself superior to them. But this man was a nobleman. She could not understand him; his thoughts were always obscure. She felt herself infinitely inferior to him. She was afraid of him and his occasional cruelty; but still he was a good man, and he might do what he liked with her.

From far off came the sound of oars, a rhythmical splash and creak. Somebody shouted, and from startlingly close at hand one of the sailors hallooed back.

The young man woke up with a start.

"What is it?" he asked, turning with an angry look to the girl, as though he held her to be responsible for this breaking in upon his slumbers.

"The boat, I think," she said. "It must be coming back from the shore."

The boat's crew came up over the side, and all the stagnant life of the ship flowed excitedly round them. They were the centre of a vortex towards which all were drawn. Even the young Catalonian, for all his hatred of these stinking Genoese shipmen, was sucked into the eddy. Everybody was talking at once, and in the general hubbub of question and answer there w r as nothing coherent to be made out. Piercingly distinct above all the noise came the voice of the little cabin-boy, who had been to shore with the boat's crew. He was running round to everyone in turn repeating: "I hit one of them. You know. I hit one. With a stone on the forehead. Didn't he bleed, ooh! didn't he just!" And he would dance with uncontrollable excitement.

The captain held up his hand and shouted for silence. "One at a time, there," he ordered, and when order had a little been restored, added grumblingly, "Like a pack of dogs on a bone. You talk, boatswain."

"I hit one of them," said the boy. Somebody cuffed him over the head, and he relapsed into silence.

When the boatswain's story had rambled through labyrinths of digression, over countless obstacles of interruptions and emendations, to its conclusion, the Spaniard went back to join his companion under the awning. He had assumed again his habitual indifference.

"Nearly butchered," he said languidly, in response to her eager questions. "They" — he jerked a hand in the direction of the town —" they were pelting an old fellow who had come there preaching the Faith. Left him dead on the beach. Our men had to run for it."

She could get no more out of him; he turned over and pretended to go to sleep.

Towards evening they received a visit from the captain. He was a large, handsome man, with gold ear-rings glinting from among a bush of black hair.

"Divine Providence," he remarked sententiously, after the usual courtesies had passed, "has called upon us to perform a very notable work,"

"Indeed?" said the young man.

"No less a work," continued the captain, "than to save from the clutches of the infidels and heathen the precious remains of a holy martyr."

The captain let fall his pompous manner. It was evident that he had carefully prepared these pious sentences, they rolled so roundly off his tongue. But he was eager now to get on with his story, and it was in a homelier style that he went on: "If you knew these seas as well as I—and it's near twenty years now that I've been sailing them —you'd have some knowledge of this same holy man that — God rot their souls for it!—these cursed Arabs have done to death here. I've heard of him more than once in my time, and not always well spoken of; for, to tell the honest truth, he does more harm with his preachments to good Christian traders than ever he did good to black-hearted heathen dogs. Leave the bees alone, I say, and if you can get a little honey out of them quietly, so much the better; but he goes about among the beehives with a pole, stirring up trouble for himself and others too. Leave them alone to their damnation, is what I say, and get what you can from them this side of hell. But, still, he has died a holy martyr's death. God rest his soul! A martyr is a wonderful thing, you know, and it's not for the likes of us to understand what they mean by it all.

"They do say, too, that he could make gold. And, to my mind, it would have been a thing more pleasing to God and man if he had stopped at home minting money for poor folks and dealing it round, so that there'd be no need to work any more and break oneself for a morsel of bread. Yes, he was great at gold-making and at the books too. They tell me he was called the Illuminated Doctor. But I know him still as plain Lully. I used to hear of him from my father, plain Lully, and no better once than he should have been.

"My father was a shipwright in Minorca in those days—how long since? Fifty, sixty years perhaps. He knew him then; he has often told me the tale. And a raffish young dog he was. Drinking, drabbing, and dicing he outdid them all, and between the bouts wrote poems, they say, which was more than the rest could do. But he gave it all up on the sudden. Gave away his lands, quitted his former companions, and turned hermit up in the hills, living alone like a fox in his burrow, high up above the vines. And all because of a woman and his own qualmish stomach."

The shipmaster paused and helped himself to a little wine. "And what did this woman do?" the girl asked curiously.

"Ah, it's not what she did but what she didn't do," the captain answered, with a leer and wink. "She kept him at his distance—all but once, all but once; and that was what put him on the road to being a martyr. But there, I'm outrunning myself. I must go more soberly.

"There was a lady of some consequence in the island—one of the Castellos, I think she was; her first name has quite slipped my memory—Anastasia, or something of the kind. Lully conceives a passion for her, and sighs and importunes her through I know not how many months and years. But her virtue stands steady as the judgment seat. Well, in the end, what happens was this. The story leaked out after it was all over, and he was turned hermit in the mountains. What happened, I say, was this. She tells him at last that he may come and see her, fixing some solitary twilight place and time, her own room at nightfall. You can guess how he washes and curls and scents himself, shaves his chin, chews anises, musks over whatever of the goat may cling about the body. Off he goes, dreaming swoons and ecstasies, foretasting inconceivable sweets. Arrived, he finds the lady a little melancholy— her settled humour, but a man might expect a smile at such a time. Still, nothing abashed, he falls at her feet and pours out his piteous case, telling her he has sighed through seven years, not closed an eye for above a hundred nights, is forepined to a shadow, and, in a word, will perish unless she show some mercy. She, still melancholy — her settled humour, mark you—makes answer that she is ready to yield, and that her body is entirely his. With that, she lets herself be done with as he pleases, but always sorrowfully. ' You are all mine,' says he — ' all mine '—and unlaces her gorgeret to prove the same. But he was wrong. Another lover was already in her bosom, and his kisses had been passionate—oh, burning passionate, for he had kissed away half her left breast. From the nipple down it had all been gnawed away by a cancer.

"Bah, a man may see as bad as that any day in the street or at church-doors where beggars most congregate. I grant you that it is a nasty sight, worm-eaten flesh, but still — not enough, you will agree, to make yourself a hermit over. But there, I told you he had a queasiness of the stomach. But doubtless it was all in God's plan to make a holy martyr of him. But for that same queasiness of his, he would still be living there, a superannuated rake; or else have died in very foul odour, instead of passing, all embalmed with sanctity, to Paradise Gate.

"I know not what happened to him between his hermit-hood and his quest for martyrdom. I saw him first a dozen years ago, down Tunis way. They were always clapping him into prison or pulling out his beard for preaching. This time, it seems, they have made a holy martyr of him, done the business thoroughly with no bungling. Well, may he pray for our souls at the throne of God. I go in secretly to-night to steal his body. It lies on the shore there beyond the jetty. It will be a notable work, I tell you, to bring back so precious a corpse to Christendom. A most notable work. . . ."

The captain rubbed his hands.

It was after midnight, but there was still a bustle of activity on board the galley. At any moment they were expecting the arrival of the boat with the corpse of the martyr. A couch, neatly draped in black, with at its head and foot candles burning two by two, had been set out on the poop for the reception of the body. The captain called the young Spaniard and his mistress to come and see the bier.

"That's a good bit of work for you," he said, with justifiable pride. "I defy anyone to make a more decent resting-place for a martyr than that is. It could hardly have been done better on shore, with every appliance at hand. But we sailors, you know, can make anything out of nothing. A truckle-bed, a strip of tarred canvas, and four tallow dips from the cabin lanterns—there you are, a bier for a king."

He hurried away, and a little later the young man and the girl could hear him giving orders and cursing somewhere down below. The candles burned almost without a tremor in the windless air, and the reflections of the stars were long, thin tracks of fire along the utterly calm water.

"Were there but perfumed flowers and the sound of a lute," said the young Spaniard, "the night would tremble into passion of its own accord. Love should come unsought on such a night as this, among these black waters and the stars that sleep so peacefully on their bosom."

He put his arm round the girl and bent his head to kiss her. But she averted her face. He could feel a shudder run her through the body.

"Not to-night," she whispered." I think of the poor dead man. I would rather pray."

"No, no," he cried. "Forget him. Remember only that we are alive, and that we have but little time and none to waste."

He drew her into the shadow under the bulwark, and, sitting down on a coil of rope, crushed her body to his own and began kissing her with fury. She lay, at first, limp in his arms, but gradually she kindled to his passion.

A plash of oars announced the approach of the boat. The captain hallooed into the darkness: "Did you find him?"

"Yes, we have him here," came back the answer.

"Good. Bring him alongside and we'll hoist him up. We have the bier in readiness. He shall lie in state to-night."

"But he's not dead," shouted back the voice from the night.

"Not dead?" repeated the captain, thunderstruck. "But what about the bier, then?"

A thin, feeble voice came back. "Your work will not be wasted, my friend. It will be but a short time before I need your bier."

The captain, a little abashed, answered in a gentler tone, "We thought, holy father, that the heathens had done their worst and that Almighty God had already given you the martyr's crown."

By this time the boat had emerged from the darkness. In the stern sheets an old man was lying, his white hair and beard stained with blood, his Dominican's robe torn and fouled with dust. At the sight of him, the captain pulled off his cap and dropped upon his knees.

"Give us your blessing, holy father," he begged.

The old man raised his hand and wished him peace.

They lifted him on board and, at his own desire, laid him upon the bier which had been prepared for his dead body. "It would be a waste of trouble," he said, "to put me anywhere else, seeing I shall in any case be lying there so soon."

So there he lay, very still under the four candles. One might have taken him for dead already, but that his eyes, when he opened them, shone so brightly.

He dismissed from the poop everyone except the young Spaniard. "We are countrymen,'" he said, "and of noble blood, both of us. I would rather have you near me than anyone else."

The sailors knelt for a blessing and disappeared; soon they could be heard weighing the anchor; it was safest to be off before day. Like mourners at either side of the lighted bier crouched the Spaniard and his mistress. The body of the old man, who was not yet dead, lay quiet under the candles. The martyr was silent for some time, but at last he opened his eyes and looked at the young man and the woman.

"I too," he said, "was in love, once. In this year falls the jubilee of my last earthly passion; fifty years have run since last I longed after the flesh—fifty years since God opened my eyes to the hideous-ness of the corruption that man has brought upon himself.

"You are young, and your bodies are clean and straight, with no blotch or ulcer or leprous taint to mar their much-desired beauty; but because of your outward pride, your souls, it may be, fester inwardly the more.

"And yet God made all perfect; it is but accident and the evil of will that causes defaults. All metals should be gold, were it not that their elements willed evilly in their desire to combine. And so with men: the burning sulphur of passion, the salt of wisdom, the nimble mercurial soul should come together to make a golden being, incorruptible and rustless. But the elements mingle jarringly, not in a pure harmony of love, and gold is rare, while lead and iron and poisonous brass that leaves a taste as of remorse behind it are everywhere common.

"God opened my eyes to it before my youth had too utterly wasted itself to rottenness. It was half a hundred years ago, but I see her still, my Ambrosia, with her white, sad face and her naked body and that monstrous ill eating away at her breast.

"I have lived since then trying to amend the evil, trying to restore, as far as my poor powers would go, some measure of original perfection to the corrupted world. I have striven to give to all metals their true nature, to make true gold from the false, the unreal, the accidental metals, lead and copper and tin and iron. And I have essayed that more difficult alchemy, the transformation of men. I die now in my effort to purge away that most foul dross of misbelief from the souls of these heathen men. Have I achieved anything? I know not."

The galley was moving now, its head turned seaward. The candles shivered in the wind of its speed, casting uncertain, changing shadows upon his face. There was a long silence on the poop. The oars creaked and splashed. Sometimes a shout would come up from below, orders given by the overseer of the slaves, a curse, the sound of a blow. The old man spoke again, more weakly now, as though to himself.

"I have had eighty years of it," he said— "eighty years in the midst of this corroding sea of hatred and strife. A man has need to keep pure and unalloyed his core of gold, that little centre of perfection with which all, even in this declination of time, are born. All other metal, though it be as tough as steel, as shining-hard as brass, will melt before the devouring bitterness of life. Hatred, lust, anger—the vile passions will corrode your will of iron, the warlike pomp of your front of brass. It needs the golden perfection of pure love and pure knowledge to withstand them.

"God has willed that I should be the stone—weak, indeed, in virtue—that has touched and transformed at least a little of baser metal into the gold that is above corruption. But it is hard work—thankless work. Man has made a hell of his world, and has set up gods of pain to rule it. Goatish gods, that revel and feast on the agony of it all, poring over the tortured world, like those hateful lovers, whose lust burns darkly into cruelty.

"Fever goads us through life in a delirium of madness. Thirsting for the swamps of evil whence the fever came, thirsting for the mirages of his own delirium, man rushes headlong he knows not whither. And all the time a devouring cancer gnaws at his entrails. It will kill him in the end, when even the ghastly inspiration of fever will not be enough to whip him on. He will lie there, cumbering the earth, a heap of rottenness and pain, until at last the cleansing fire comes to sweep the horror away.

"Fever and cancer; acids that burn and corrode. ... I have had eighty years of it. Thank God, it is the end.''

It was already dawn; the candles were hardly visible now in the light, faded to nothing, like souls in prosperity. In a little while the old man was asleep.

The captain tiptoed up on to the poop and drew the young Spaniard aside for a confidential talk.

"Do you think he will die to-day?" he asked.

The young man nodded.

"God rest his soul," said the captain piously. "But do you think it would be best to take his body to Minorca or to Genoa? At Minorca they would give much to have their own patron martyr. At the same time it would add to the glory of Genoa to possess so holy a relic, though he is in no way connected with the place. It's there is my difficulty. Suppose, you see, that my people of Genoa did not want the body, he being from Minorca and not one of them. I should look a fool then, bringing it in in state. Oh, it's hard, it's hard. There's so much to think about. I am not sure but what I hadn't better put in at Minorca first. What do you think?"

The Spaniard shrugged his shoulders. "I have no advice to offer."

"Lord," said the captain as he bustled away, "life is a tangled knot to unravel."

The End

Crome Yellow

First Published 1921

CHAPTER I

ALONG THIS PARTICULAR stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains – the few that there were – stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water. Camlet was where he always got out, leaving the train to creep indolently onward, goodness only knew whither, into the green heart of England.

They were snorting out of West Bowlby now. It was the next station, thank Heaven. Denis took his chattels off the rack and piled them neatly in the corner opposite his own. A futile proceeding. But one must have something to do. When he had finished, he sank back into his seat and closed his eyes. It was extremely hot.

Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours in which he might have done so much, so much – written the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book. Instead of which – his gorge rose at the smell of the dusty cushions against which he was leaning.

Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible. Denis groaned in the spirit, condemned himself utterly with all his works. What right had he to sit in the sunshine, to occupy corner seats in third-class carriages, to be alive? None, none, none.

Misery and a nameless nostalgic distress possessed him. He was twenty-three, and oh! so agonizingly conscious of the fact.

The train came bumpingly to a halt. Here was Camlet at last. Denis jumped up, crammed his hat over his eyes, deranged his pile of baggage, leaned out of the window and shouted for a porter, seized a bag in either hand, and had to put them down again in order to open the door. When at last he had safely bundled himself and his baggage on to the platform, he ran up the train towards the van.

‘A bicycle, a bicycle!’ he said breathlessly to the guard. He felt himself a man of action. The guard paid no attention, but continued methodically to hand out, one by one, the packages labelled to Camlet. ‘A bicycle!’ Denis repeated. ‘A green machine, cross-framed, name of Stone. S-T-O-N-E.’

‘All in good time, sir,’ said the guard soothingly. He was a large, stately man with a naval beard. One pictured him at home, drinking tea, surrounded by a numerous family. It was in that tone that he must have spoken to his children when they were tiresome. ‘All in good time, sir.’ Denis’s man of action collapsed, punctured.

He left his luggage to be called for later, and pushed off on his bicycle. He always took his bicycle when he went into the country. It was part of the theory of exercise. One day one would get up at six o’clock and pedal away to Kenilworth, or Stratford-on-Avon – anywhere. And within a radius of twenty miles there were always Norman churches and Tudor mansions to be seen in the course of an afternoon’s excursion. Somehow they never did get seen, but all the same it was nice to feel that the bicycle was there, and that one fine morning one really might get up at six.

Once at the top of the long hill which led up from Camlet station, he felt his spirits mounting. The world, he found, was good. The far-away blue hills, the harvests whitening on the slopes of the ridge along which his road led him, the treeless sky-lines that changed as he moved – yes, they were all good. He was overcome by the beauty of those deeply embayed combes, scooped in the flanks of the ridge beneath him. Curves, curves: he repeated the word slowly, trying as he did so to find some term in which to give expression to his appreciation. Curves – no, that was inadequate. He made a gesture with his hand, as though to scoop the achieved expression out of the air, and almost fell off his bicycle. What was the word to describe the curves of those little valleys? They were as fine as the lines of a human body, they were informed with the subtlety of art. . . .

Galbe. That was a good word; but it was French. Le galbe évasé de ses hanches: had one ever read a French novel in which that phrase didn’t occur? Some day he would compile a dictionary for the use of novelists. Galbe, gonflé, goulu: parfum, peau, pervers, potelé, pudeur: vertu, volupté.

But he really must find that word. Curves, curves. . . . Those little valleys had the lines of a cup moulded round a woman’s breast; they seemed the dinted imprints of some huge divine body that had rested on these hills. Cumbrous locutions, these; but through them he seemed to be getting nearer to what he wanted. Dinted, dimpled, wimpled – his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.

Becoming once more aware of the outer world, he found himself on the crest of a descent. The road plunged down, steep and straight, into a considerable valley. There, on the opposite slope, a little higher up the valley, stood Crome, his destination. He put on his brakes; this view of Crome was pleasant to linger over. The façade with its three projecting towers rose precipitously from among the dark trees of the garden. The house basked in full sunlight; the old brick rosily glowed. How ripe and rich it was, how superbly mellow! And at the same time, how austere! The hill was becoming steeper and steeper; he was gaining speed in spite of his brakes. He loosed his grip of the levers, and in a moment was rushing headlong down. Five minutes later he was passing through the gate of the great courtyard. The front door stood hospitably open. He left his bicycle leaning against the wall and walked in. He would take them by surprise.

CHAPTER II

HE TOOK NOBODY by surprise; there was nobody to take. All was quiet; Denis wandered from room to empty room, looking with pleasure at the familiar pictures and furniture, at all the little untidy signs of life that lay scattered here and there. He was rather glad that they were all out; it was amusing to wander through the house as though one were exploring a dead, deserted Pompeii. What sort of life would the excavator reconstruct from these remains; how would he people these empty chambers? There was the long gallery, with its rows of respectable and (though, of course, one couldn’t publicly admit it) rather boring Italian primitives, its Chinese sculptures, its unobtrusive, dateless furniture. There was the panelled drawing-room, where the huge chintz-covered arm-chairs stood, oases of comfort among the austere flesh-mortifying antiques. There was the morning-room, with its pale lemon walls, its painted Venetian chairs and rococo tables, its mirrors, its modern pictures. There was the library, cool, spacious, and dark, book-lined from floor to ceiling, rich in portentous folios. There was the dining-room, solidly, portwinily English, with its great mahogany table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its eighteenth-century pictures – family portraits, meticulous animal paintings. What could one reconstruct from such data? There was much of Henry Wimbush in the long gallery and the library, something of Anne, perhaps, in the morning-room. That was all. Among the accumulations of ten generations the living had left but few traces.

Lying on the table in the morning-room he saw his own book of poems. What tact! He picked it up and opened it. It was what the reviewers call ‘a slim volume.’ He read at hazard:

‘. . . But silence and the topless dark

Vault in the lights of Luna Park

And Blackpool from the nightly gloom

Hollows a bright tumultuous tomb.’

He put it down again, shook his head, and sighed. ‘What genius I had then!’ he reflected, echoing the aged Swift. It was nearly six months since the book had been published; he was glad to think he would never write anything of the same sort again. Who could have been reading it, he wondered? Anne, perhaps; he liked to think so. Perhaps, too, she had at last recognized herself in the Hamadryad of the poplar sapling; the slim Hamadryad whose movements were like the swaying of a young tree in the wind. ‘The Woman who was a Tree’ was what he had called the poem. He had given her the book when it came out, hoping that the poem would tell her what he hadn’t dared to say. She had never referred to it.

He shut his eyes and saw a vision of her in a red velvet cloak, swaying into the little restaurant where they sometimes dined together in London – three quarters of an hour late, and he at his table, haggard with anxiety, irritation, hunger. Oh, she was damnable!

It occurred to him that perhaps his hostess might be in her boudoir. It was a possibility; he would go and see. Mrs Wimbush’s boudoir was in the central tower on the garden front. A little staircase corkscrewed up to it from the hall. Denis mounted, tapped at the door. ‘Come in.’ Ah, she was there; he had rather hoped she wouldn’t be. He opened the door.

Priscilla Wimbush was lying on the sofa. A blotting-pad rested on her knees and she was thoughtfully sucking the end of a silver pencil.

‘Hullo,’ she said, looking up. ‘I’d forgotten you were coming.’

‘Well, here I am, I’m afraid,’ said Denis deprecatingly. ‘I’m awfully sorry.’

Mrs Wimbush laughed. Her voice, her laughter, were deep and masculine. Everything about her was manly. She had a large, square, middle-aged face, with a massive projecting nose and little greenish eyes, the whole surmounted by a lofty and elaborate coiffure of a curiously improbable shade of orange. Looking at her, Denis always thought of Wilkie Bard as the cantatrice.

‘That’s why I’m going to

Sing in op’ra, sing in op’ra,

Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-popera.’

Today she was wearing a purple silk dress with a high collar and a row of pearls. The costume, so richly dowagerish, so suggestive of the Royal Family, made her look more than ever like something on the Halls.

‘What have you been doing all this time?’ she asked.

‘Well,’ said Denis, and he hesitated, almost voluptuously. He had a tremendously amusing account of London and its doings all ripe and ready in his mind. It would be a pleasure to give it utterance. ‘To begin with,’ he said . . .

But he was too late, Mrs Wimbush’s question had been what the grammarians call rhetorical; it asked for no answer. It was a little conversational flourish, a gambit in the polite game.

‘You find me busy at my horoscopes,’ she said, without even being aware that she had interrupted him.

A little pained, Denis decided to reserve his story for more receptive ears. He contented himself, by way of revenge, with saying ‘Oh?’ rather icily.

‘Did I tell you how I won four hundred on the Grand National this year?’

‘Yes,’ he replied, still frigid and monosyllabic. She must have told him at least six times.

‘Wonderful, isn’t it? Everything is in the Stars. In the Old Days, before I had the Stars to help me, I used to lose thousands. Now’ – she paused an instant – ‘well, look at that four hundred on the Grand National. That’s the Stars.’

Denis would have liked to hear more about the Old Days. But he was too discreet and, still more, too shy to ask. There had been something of a bust up; that was all he knew. Old Priscilla – not so old then, of course, and sprightlier – had lost a great deal of money, dropped it in handfuls and hatfuls on every racecourse in the country. She had gambled too. The number of thousands varied in the different legends, but all put it high. Henry Wimbush was forced to sell some of his Primitives – a Taddeo da Poggibonsi, an Amico di Taddeo, and four or five nameless Sienese – to the Americans. There was a crisis. For the first time in his life Henry asserted himself, and with good effect, it seemed.

Priscilla’s gay and gadding existence had come to an abrupt end. Nowadays she spent almost all her time at Crome, cultivating a rather ill-defined malady. For consolation she dallied with New Thought and the Occult. Her passion for racing still possessed her, and Henry, who was a kind-hearted fellow at bottom, allowed her forty pounds a month betting money. Most of Priscilla’s days were spent in casting the horoscopes of horses, and she invested her money scientifically, as the Stars dictated. She betted on football too, and had a large notebook in which she registered the horoscopes of all the players in all the teams of the League. The process of balancing the horoscopes of two elevens one against the other was a very delicate and difficult one. A match between the Spurs and the Villa entailed a conflict in the heavens so vast and so complicated that it was not to be wondered at if she sometimes made a mistake about the outcome.

‘Such a pity you don’t believe in these things, Denis, such a pity,’ said Mrs Wimbush in her deep, distinct voice.

‘I can’t say I feel it so.’

‘Ah, that’s because you don’t know what it’s like to have faith. You’ve no idea how amusing and exciting life becomes when you do believe. All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. It makes life so jolly, you know. Here am I at Crome. Dull as ditchwater, you’d think; but no, I don’t find it so. I don’t regret the Old Days a bit. I have the Stars . . .’ She picked up the sheet of paper that was lying on the blotting-pad. ‘Inman’s horoscope,’ she explained. ‘(I thought I’d like to have a little fling on the billiards championship this autumn.) I have the Infinite to keep in tune with,’ she waved her hand. ‘And then there’s the next world and all the spirits, and one’s Aura, and Mrs Eddy and saying you’re not ill, and the Christian Mysteries and Mrs Besant. It’s all splendid. One’s never dull for a moment. I can’t think how I used to get on before – in the Old Days. Pleasure? – running about, that’s all it was; just running about. Lunch, tea, dinner, theatre, supper, every day. It was fun, of course, while it lasted. But there wasn’t much left of it afterwards. There’s rather a good thing about that in Barbecue-Smith’s new book. Where is it?’

She sat up and reached for a book that was lying on the little table by the head of the sofa.

‘Do you know him, by the way?’ she asked.

‘Who?’

‘Mr Barbecue-Smith.’

Denis knew of him vaguely. Barbecue-Smith was a name in the Sunday papers. He wrote about the Conduct of Life. He might even be the author of What a Young Girl Ought to Know.

‘No, not personally,’ he said.

‘I’ve invited him for next week-end.’ She turned over the pages of the book. ‘Here’s the passage I was thinking of. I marked it. I always mark the things I like.’

Holding the book almost at arm’s length, for she was somewhat long-sighted, and making suitable gestures with her free hand, she began to read, slowly, dramatically.

‘“What are thousand pound fur coats, what are quarter million incomes?”’ She looked up from the page with a histrionic movement of the head; her orange coiffure nodded portentously. Denis looked at it, fascinated. Was it the Real Thing and henna, he wondered, or was it one of those Complete Transformations one sees in the advertisements?

‘“What are Thrones and Sceptres?”’

The orange Transformation – yes, it must be a Transformation – bobbed up again.

‘“What are the gaieties of the Rich, the splendours of the Powerful, what is the pride of the Great, what are the gaudy pleasures of High Society?”’

The voice, which had risen in tone, questioningly, from sentence to sentence, dropped suddenly and boomed reply.

‘“They are nothing. Vanity, fluff, dandelion seed in the wind, thin vapours of fever. The things that matter happen in the heart. Seen things are sweet, but those unseen are a thousand times more significant. It is the Unseen that counts in Life.”’

Mrs Wimbush lowered the book. ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said.

Denis preferred not to hazard an opinion, but uttered a non-committal ‘H’m.’

‘Ah, it’s a fine book this, a beautiful book,’ said Priscilla, as she let the pages flick back, one by one, from under her thumb. ‘And here’s the passage about the Lotus Pool. He compares the Soul to a Lotus Pool, you know.’ She held up the book again and read. ‘“A Friend of mine has a Lotus Pool in his garden. It lies in a little dell embowered with wild roses and eglantine, among which the nightingale pours forth its amorous descant all the summer long. Within the pool the Lotuses blossom, and the birds of the air come to drink and bathe themselves in its crystal waters . . .” Ah, and that reminds me,’ Priscilla exclaimed, shutting the book with a clap and uttering her big profound laugh – ‘that reminds me of the things that have been going on in our bathing-pool since you were here last. We gave the village people leave to come and bathe here in the evenings. You’ve no idea of the things that happened.’

She leaned forward, speaking in a confidential whisper; every now and then she uttered a deep gurgle of laughter. ‘. . . mixed bathing . . . saw them out of my window . . . sent for a pair of field-glasses to make sure . . . no doubt of it, . . .’ The laughter broke out again. Denis laughed too. Barbecue-Smith was tossed on the floor.

‘It’s time we went to see if tea’s ready,’ said Priscilla. She hoisted herself up from the sofa and went swishing off across the room, striding beneath the trailing silk. Denis followed her, faintly humming to himself:

‘That’s why I’m going to

Sing in op’ra, sing in op’ra,

Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-popera.’

And then the little twiddly bit of accompaniment at the end: ‘ra-ra.’

CHAPTER III

THE TERRACE IN front of the house was a long narrow strip of turf, bounded along its outer edge by a graceful stone balustrade. Two little summer-houses of brick stood at either end. Below the house the ground sloped very steeply away, and the terrace was a remarkably high one; from the balusters to the sloping lawn beneath was a drop of thirty feet. Seen from below, the high unbroken terrace wall, built like the house itself of brick, had the almost menacing aspect of a fortification – a castle bastion, from whose parapet one looked out across airy depths to distances level with the eye. Below, in the foreground, hedged in by solid masses of sculptured yew trees, lay the stone-brimmed swimming-pool. Beyond it stretched the park, with its massive elms, its green expanses of grass, and, at the bottom of the valley, the gleam of the narrow river. On the farther side of the stream the land rose again in a long slope, chequered with cultivation. Looking up the valley, to the right, one saw a line of blue, far-off hills.

The tea-table had been planted in the shade of one of the little summer-houses, and the rest of the party was already assembled about it when Denis and Priscilla made their appearance. Henry Wimbush had begun to pour out the tea. He was one of those ageless, unchanging men on the farther side of fifty, who might be thirty, who might be anything. Denis had known him almost as long as he could remember. In all those years his pale, rather handsome face had never grown any older; it was like the pale grey bowler hat which he always wore, winter and summer – unageing, calm, serenely without expression.

Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world by the almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She was perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink-and-white complexion, and wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her ears. In the secret tower of her deafness she sat apart, looking down at the world through sharply piercing eyes. What did she think of men and women and things? That was something that Denis had never been able to discover. In her enigmatic remoteness Jenny was a little disquieting. Even now some interior joke seemed to be amusing her, for she was smiling to herself, and her brown eyes were like very bright round marbles.

On his other side the serious, moon-like innocence of Mary Bracegirdle’s face shone pink and childish. She was nearly twenty-three, but one wouldn’t have guessed it. Her short hair, clipped like a page’s, hung in a bell of elastic gold about her cheeks. She had large blue china eyes, whose expression was one of ingenuous and often puzzled earnestness.

Next to Mary a small gaunt man was sitting, rigid and erect in his chair. In appearance Mr Scogan was like one of those extinct bird-lizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had the shining quickness of a robin’s. But there was nothing soft or gracious or feathery about him. The skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry and scaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movements were marked by the lizard’s disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; his speech was thin, fluty, and dry. Henry Wimbush’s schoolfellow and exact contemporary, Mr Scogan looked far older and, at the same time, far more youthfully alive than did that gentle aristocrat with the face like a grey bowler.

Mr Scogan might look like an extinct saurian, but Gombauld was altogether and essentially human. In the old-fashioned natural histories of the ‘thirties he might have figured in a steel engraving as a type of Homo Sapiens – an honour which at that time commonly fell to Lord Byron. Indeed, with more hair and less collar, Gombauld would have been completely Byronic – more than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of Provençal descent, a black-haired young corsair of thirty, with flashing teeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. He was jealous of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauld painted pictures! Still more, at the moment, he envied Gombauld his looks, his vitality, his easy confidence of manner. Was it surprising that Anne should like him? Like him? – it might even be something worse, Denis reflected bitterly, as he walked at Priscilla’s side down the long grass terrace.

Between Gombauld and Mr Scogan a very much lowered deck-chair presented its back to the new arrivals as they advanced towards the tea-table. Gombauld was leaning over it; his face moved vivaciously; he smiled, he laughed, he made quick gestures with his hands. From the depths of the chair came up a sound of soft, lazy laughter. Denis started as he heard it. That laughter – how well he knew it! What emotions it evoked in him! He quickened his pace.

In her low deck-chair Anne was nearer to lying than to sitting. Her long, slender body reposed in an attitude of listless and indolent grace. Within its setting of light brown hair her face had a pretty regularity that was almost doll-like. And indeed there were moments when she seemed nothing more than a doll; when the oval face, with its long-lashed, pale blue eyes, expressed nothing; when it was no more than a lazy mask of wax. She was Henry Wimbush’s own niece; that bowler-like countenance was one of the Wimbush heirlooms; it ran in the family, appearing in its female members as a blank doll-face. But across this dollish mask, like a gay melody dancing over an unchanging fundamental bass, passed Anne’s other inheritance – quick laughter, light ironic amusement, and the changing expressions of many moods. She was smiling now as Denis looked down at her: her cat’s smile, he called it, for no very good reason. The mouth was compressed, and on either side of it two tiny wrinkles had formed themselves in her cheeks. An infinity of slightly malicious amusement lurked in those little folds, in the puckers about the half-closed eyes, in the eyes themselves, bright and laughing between the narrowed lids.

The preliminary greetings spoken, Denis found an empty chair between Gombauld and Jenny and sat down.

‘How are you, Jenny?’ he shouted at her.

Jenny nodded and smiled in mysterious silence, as though the subject of her health were a secret that could not be publicly divulged.

‘How’s London been since I went away?’ Anne inquired from the depth of her chair.

The moment had come; the tremendously amusing narrative was waiting for utterance. ‘Well,’ said Denis, smiling happily, ‘to begin with . . .’

‘Has Priscilla told you of our great antiquarian find?’ Henry Wimbush leaned forward; the most promising of buds was nipped.

‘To begin with,’ said Denis desperately, ‘there was the Ballet . . .’

‘Last week,’ Mr Wimbush went on softly and implacably, ‘we dug up fifty yards of oaken drain-pipes; just tree trunks with a hole bored through the middle. Very interesting indeed. Whether they were laid down by the monks in the fifteenth century, or whether . . .’

Denis listened gloomily. ‘Extraordinary!’ he said, when Mr Wimbush had finished; ‘quite extraordinary!’ He helped himself to another slice of cake. He didn’t even want to tell his tale about London now; he was damped.

For some time past Mary’s grave blue eyes had been fixed upon him. ‘What have you been writing lately?’ she asked. It would be nice to have a little literary conversation.

‘Oh, verse and prose,’ said Denis – ‘just verse and prose.’

‘Prose?’ Mr Scogan pounced alarmingly on the word. ‘You’ve been writing prose?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not a novel?’

‘Yes.’

‘My poor Denis!’ exclaimed Mr Scogan. ‘What about?’

Denis felt rather uncomfortable. ‘Oh, about the usual things, you know.’

‘Of course,’ Mr Scogan groaned. ‘I’ll describe the plot for you. Little Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future.’

Denis blushed scarlet. Mr Scogan had described the plan of his novel with an accuracy that was appalling. He made an effort to laugh. ‘You’re entirely wrong,’ he said. ‘My novel is not in the least like that.’ It was a heroic lie. Luckily, he reflected, only two chapters were written. He would tear them up that very evening when he unpacked.

Mr Scogan paid no attention to his denial, but went on: ‘Why will you young men continue to write about things that are so entirely uninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists? Professional anthropologists might find it interesting to turn sometimes from the beliefs of the Black-fellow to the philosophical preoccupations of the undergraduate. But you can’t expect an ordinary adult man, like myself, to be much moved by the story of his spiritual troubles. And after all, even in England, even in Germany and Russia, there are more adults than adolescents. As for the artist, he is preoccupied with problems that are so utterly unlike those of the ordinary adult man – problems of pure aesthetics which don’t so much as present themselves to people like myself – that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of literature, just as Professor Radium of Comic Cuts is its stock man of science.’

‘I’m sorry to hear I’m as uninteresting as all that,’ said Gombauld.

‘Not at all, my dear Gombauld,’ Mr Scogan hastened to explain. ‘As a lover or a dipsomaniac, I’ve no doubt of your being a most fascinating specimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you’re a bore.’

‘I entirely disagree with you,’ exclaimed Mary. She was somehow always out of breath when she talked, and her speech was punctuated by little gasps. ‘I’ve known a great many artists, and I’ve always found their mentality very interesting. Especially in Paris. Tschuplitski, for example – I saw a great deal of Tschuplitski in Paris this spring. . . .’

‘Ah, but then you’re an exception, Mary, you’re an exception,’ said Mr Scogan. ‘You are a femme supérieure.’

A flush of pleasure turned Mary’s face into a harvest moon.

CHAPTER IV

DENIS WOKE UP next morning to find the sun shining, the sky serene. He decided to wear white flannel trousers – white flannel trousers and a black jacket, with a silk shirt and his new peach-coloured tie. And what shoes? White was the obvious choice, but there was something rather pleasing about the notion of black patent leather. He lay in bed for several minutes considering the problem.

Before he went down – patent leather was his final choice – he looked at himself critically in the glass. His hair might have been more golden, he reflected. As it was, its yellowness had the hint of a greenish tinge in it. But his forehead was good. His forehead made up in height what his chin lacked in prominence. His nose might have been longer, but it would pass. His eyes might have been blue and not green. But his coat was very well cut and, discreetly padded, made him seem robuster than he actually was. His legs, in their white casing, were long and elegant. Satisfied, he descended the stairs. Most of the party had already finished their breakfast. He found himself alone with Jenny.

‘I hope you slept well,’ he said.

‘Yes, isn’t it lovely?’ Jenny replied, giving two rapid little nods. ‘But we had such awful thunderstorms last week.’

Parallel straight lines, Denis reflected, meet only at infinity. He might talk for ever of care-charmer sleep and she of meteorology till the end of time. Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than most.

‘They are very alarming, these thunderstorms,’ he said, helping himself to porridge. ‘Don’t you think so? Or are you above being frightened?’

‘No. I always go to bed in a storm. One is so much safer lying down.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ said Jenny, making a descriptive gesture, ‘because lightning goes downwards and not flat ways. When you’re lying down you’re out of the current.’

‘That’s very ingenious.’

‘It’s true.’

There was a silence. Denis finished his porridge and helped himself to bacon. For lack of anything better to say, and because Mr Scogan’s absurd phrase was for some reason running in his head, he turned to Jenny and asked:

‘Do you consider yourself a femme supérieure?’ He had to repeat the question several times before Jenny got the hang of it.

‘No,’ she said rather indignantly, when at last she heard what Denis was saying. ‘Certainly not. Has anyone been suggesting that I am?’

‘No,’ said Denis. ‘Mr Scogan told Mary she was one.’

‘Did he?’ Jenny lowered her voice. ‘Shall I tell you what I think of that man? I think he’s slightly sinister.’

Having made this pronouncement, she entered the ivory tower of her deafness and closed the door. Denis could not induce her to say anything more, could not induce her even to listen. She just smiled at him, smiled and occasionally nodded.

Denis went out on to the terrace to smoke his after-breakfast pipe and to read his morning paper. An hour later, when Anne came down, she found him still reading. By this time he had got to the Court Circular and the Forthcoming Weddings. He got up to meet her as she approached, a Hamadryad in white muslin, across the grass.

‘Why, Denis,’ she exclaimed, ‘you look perfectly sweet in your white trousers.’

Denis was dreadfully taken aback. There was no possible retort. ‘You speak as though I were a child in a new frock,’ he said, with a show of irritation.

‘But that’s how I feel about you, Denis dear.’

‘Then you oughtn’t to.’

‘But I can’t help it. I’m so much older than you.’

‘I like that,’ he said. ‘Four years older.’

‘And if you do look perfectly sweet in your white trousers, why shouldn’t I say so? And why did you put them on, if you didn’t think you were going to look sweet in them?’

‘Let’s go into the garden,’ said Denis. He was put out; the conversation had taken such a preposterous and unexpected turn. He had planned a very different opening, in which he was to lead off with, ‘You look adorable this morning,’ or something of the kind, and she was to answer, ‘Do I?’ and then there was to be a pregnant silence. And now she had got in first with the trousers. It was provoking; his pride was hurt.

That part of the garden that sloped down from the foot of the terrace to the pool had a beauty which did not depend on colour so much as on forms. It was as beautiful by moonlight as in the sun. The silver of water, the dark shapes of yew and ilex trees remained, at all hours and seasons, the dominant features of the scene. It was a landscape in black and white. For colour there was the flower-garden; it lay to one side of the pool, separated from it by a huge Babylonian wall of yews. You passed through a tunnel in the hedge, you opened a wicket in a wall, and you found yourself, startlingly and suddenly, in the world of colour. The July borders blazed and flared under the sun. Within its high brick walls the garden was like a great tank of warmth and perfume and colour.

Denis held open the little iron gate for his companion. ‘It’s like passing from a cloister into an Oriental palace,’ he said, and took a deep breath of the warm, flower-scented air. ‘“In fragrant volleys they let fly . . .” How does it go?

‘“Well shot, ye firemen! O how sweet

And round your equal fires do meet;

Whose shrill report no ear can tell,

But echoes to the eye and smell . . .”’

‘You have a bad habit of quoting,’ said Anne. ‘As I never know the context or author, I find it humiliating.’

Denis apologized. ‘It’s the fault of one’s education. Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else’s ready-made phrase about them. And then there are lots of lovely names and words – Monophysite, Iamblichus, Pomponazzi; you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you’ve clinched the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That’s what comes of the higher education.’

‘You may regret your education,’ said Anne; ‘I’m ashamed of my lack of it. Look at those sunflowers! Aren’t they magnificent?’

‘Dark faces and golden crowns – they’re kings in Ethiopia. And I like the way the tits cling to the flowers and pick out the seeds, while the other loutish birds, grubbing dirtily for their food, look up in envy from the ground. Do they look up in envy? That’s the literary touch, I’m afraid. Education again. It always comes back to that.’ He was silent.

Anne had sat down on a bench that stood in the shade of an old apple tree. ‘I’m listening,’ she said.

He did not sit down, but walked backwards and forwards in front of the bench, gesticulating a little as he talked. ‘Books,’ he said – ‘books. One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the world. Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics. You’ve no idea how many there are. I must have read twenty or thirty tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination. Weighted with that, one’s pushed out into the world.’

He went on walking up and down. His voice rose, fell, was silent a moment, and then talked on. He moved his hands, sometimes he waved his arms. Anne looked and listened quietly, as though she were at a lecture. He was a nice boy, and today he looked charming – charming!

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one’s philosophy to fit life. . . . Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? Denis came to a halt in front of the bench, and as he asked this last question he stretched out his arms and stood for an instant in an attitude of crucifixion, then let them fall again to his sides.

‘My poor Denis!’ Anne was touched. He was really too pathetic as he stood there in front of her in his white flannel trousers. ‘But does one suffer about these things? It seems very extraordinary.’

‘You’re like Scogan,’ cried Denis bitterly. ‘You regard me as a specimen for an anthropologist. Well, I suppose I am.’

‘No, no,’ she protested, and drew in her skirt with a gesture that indicated that he was to sit down beside her. He sat down. ‘Why can’t you just take things for granted and as they come?’ she asked. ‘It’s so much simpler.’

‘Of course it is,’ said Denis. ‘But it’s a lesson to be learnt gradually. There are the twenty tons of ratiocination to be got rid of first.’

‘I’ve always taken things as they come,’ said Anne. ‘It seems so obvious. One enjoys the pleasant things, avoids the nasty ones. There’s nothing more to be said.’

‘Nothing – for you. But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying laboriously to make myself one. I can take nothing for granted, I can enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, women – I have to invent an excuse, a justification for everything that’s delightful. Otherwise I can’t enjoy it with an easy conscience. I make up a little story about beauty and pretend that it has something to do with truth and goodness. I have to say that art is the process by which one reconstructs the divine reality out of chaos. Pleasure is one of the mystical roads to union with the infinite – the ecstasies of drinking, dancing, love-making. As for women, I am perpetually assuring myself that they’re the broad highway to divinity. And to think that I’m only just beginning to see through the silliness of the whole thing! It’s incredible to me that anyone should have escaped these horrors.’

‘It’s still more incredible to me,’ said Anne, ‘that anyone should have been a victim to them. I should like to see myself believing that men are the highway to divinity.’ The amused malice of her smile planted two little folds on either side of her mouth, and through their half-closed lids her eyes shone with laughter. ‘What you need, Denis, is a nice plump young wife, a fixed income, and a little congenial but regular work.’

‘What I need is you.’ That was what he ought to have retorted, that was what he wanted passionately to say. He could not say it. His desire fought against his shyness. ‘What I need is you.’ Mentally he shouted the words, but not a sound issued from his lips. He looked at her despairingly. Couldn’t she see what was going on inside him? Couldn’t she understand? ‘What I need is you.’ He would say it, he would – he would.

‘I think I shall go and bathe,’ said Anne. ‘It’s so hot.’ The opportunity had passed.

CHAPTER V

MR WIMBUSH HAD taken them to see the sights of the Home Farm, and now they were standing, all six of them – Henry Wimbush, Mr Scogan, Denis, Gombauld, Anne, and Mary – by the low wall of the piggery, looking into one of the styes.

‘This is a good sow,’ said Henry Wimbush. ‘She had a litter of fourteen.’

‘Fourteen?’ Mary echoed incredulously. She turned astonished blue eyes towards Mr Wimbush, then let them fall on to the seething mass of élan vital that fermented in the sty.

An immense sow reposed on her side in the middle of the pen. Her round, black belly, fringed with a double line of dugs, presented itself to the assault of an army of small, brownish-black swine. With a frantic greed they tugged at their mother’s flank. The old sow stirred sometimes uneasily or uttered a little grunt of pain. One small pig, the runt, the weakling of the litter, had been unable to secure a place at the banquet. Squealing shrilly, he ran backwards and forwards, trying to push in among his stronger brothers or even to climb over their tight little black backs towards the maternal reservoir.

‘There are fourteen,’ said Mary. ‘You’re quite right. I counted. It’s extraordinary.’

‘The sow next door,’ Mr Wimbush went on, ‘has done very badly. She only had five in her litter. I shall give her another chance. If she does no better next time, I shall fat her up and kill her. There’s the boar,’ he pointed towards a farther sty. ‘Fine old beast, isn’t he? But he’s getting past his prime. He’ll have to go too.’

‘How cruel!’ Anne exclaimed.

‘But how practical, how eminently realistic!’ said Mr Scogan. ‘In this farm we have a model of sound paternal government. Make them breed, make them work, and when they’re past working or breeding or begetting, slaughter them.’

‘Farming seems to be mostly indecency and cruelty,’ said Anne.

With the ferrule of his walking-stick Denis began to scratch the boar’s long bristly back. The animal moved a little so as to bring himself within easier range of the instrument that evoked in him such delicious sensations; then he stood stock still, softly grunting his contentment. The mud of years flaked off his sides in a grey powdery scurf.

‘What a pleasure it is,’ said Denis, ‘to do somebody a kindness. I believe I enjoy scratching this pig quite as much as he enjoys being scratched. If only one could always be kind with so little expense of trouble. . . .’

A gate slammed; there was a sound of heavy footsteps.

‘Morning, Rowley!’ said Henry Wimbush.

‘Morning, sir,’ old Rowley answered. He was the most venerable of the labourers on the farm – a tall, solid man, still unbent, with grey side-whiskers and a steep, dignified profile. Grave, weighty in his manner, splendidly respectable, Rowley had the air of a great English statesman of the mid-nineteenth century. He halted on the outskirts of the group, and for a moment they all looked at the pigs in a silence that was only broken by the sound of grunting or the squelch of a sharp hoof in the mire. Rowley turned at last, slowly and ponderously and nobly, as he did everything, and addressed himself to Henry Wimbush.

‘Look at them, sir,’ he said, with a motion of his hand towards the wallowing swine. ‘Rightly is they called pigs.’

‘Rightly indeed,’ Mr Wimbush agreed.

‘I am abashed by that man,’ said Mr Scogan, as old Rowley plodded off slowly and with dignity. ‘What wisdom, what judgment, what a sense of values! “Rightly are they called swine.” Yes. And I wish I could, with as much justice, say, “Rightly are we called men.”’

They walked on towards the cowsheds and the stables of the cart-horses. Five white geese, taking the air this fine morning, even as they were doing, met them in the way. They hesitated, cackled; then, converting their lifted necks into rigid, horizontal snakes, they rushed off in disorder, hissing horribly as they went. Red calves paddled in the dung and mud of a spacious yard. In another enclosure stood the bull, massive as a locomotive. He was a very calm bull, and his face wore an expression of melancholy stupidity. He gazed with reddish-brown eyes at his visitors, chewed thoughtfully at the tangible memories of an earlier meal, swallowed and regurgitated, chewed again. His tail lashed savagely from side to side; it seemed to have nothing to do with his impassive bulk. Between his short horns was a triangle of red curls, short and dense.

‘Splendid animal,’ said Henry Wimbush. ‘Pedigree stock. But he’s getting a little old, like the boar.’

‘Fat him up and slaughter him,’ Mr Scogan pronounced, with a delicate old-maidish precision of utterance.

‘Couldn’t you give the animals a little holiday from producing children?’ asked Anne. ‘I’m sorry for the poor things.’

Mr Wimbush shook his head. ‘Personally,’ he said, ‘I rather like seeing fourteen pigs grow where only one grew before. The spectacle of so much crude life is refreshing.’

‘I’m glad to hear you say so,’ Gombauld broke in warmly. ‘Lots of life: that’s what we want. I like pullulation; everything ought to increase and multiply as hard as it can.’

Gombauld grew lyrical. Everybody ought to have children – Anne ought to have them, Mary ought to have them – dozens and dozens. He emphasized his point by thumping with his walking-stick on the bull’s leather flanks. Mr Scogan ought to pass on his intelligence to little Scogans, and Denis to little Denises. The bull turned his head to see what was happening, regarded the drumming stick for several seconds, then turned back again satisfied, it seemed, that nothing was happening. Sterility was odious, unnatural, a sin against life. Life, life, and still more life. The ribs of the placid bull resounded.

Standing with his back against the farmyard pump, a little apart, Denis examined the group. Gombauld, passionate and vivacious, was its centre. The others stood round, listening – Henry Wimbush, calm and polite beneath his grey bowler; Mary, with parted lips and eyes that shone with the indignation of a convinced birth-controller. Anne looked on through half-shut eyes, smiling; and beside her stood Mr Scogan, bolt upright in an attitude of metallic rigidity that contrasted strangely with that fluid grace of hers which even in stillness suggested a soft movement.

Gombauld ceased talking, and Mary, flushed and outraged, opened her mouth to refute him. But she was too slow. Before she could utter a word Mr Scogan’s fluty voice had pronounced the opening phrases of a discourse. There was no hope of getting so much as a word in edgeways; Mary had perforce to resign herself.

‘Even your eloquence, my dear Gombauld,’ he was saying – ‘even your eloquence must prove inadequate to reconvert the world to a belief in the delights of mere multiplication. With the gramophone, the cinema, and the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift, more precious even than these – the means of dissociating love from propagation. Eros, for those who wish it, is now an entirely free god; his deplorable associations with Lucina may be broken at will. In the course of the next few centuries, who knows? the world may see a more complete severance. I look forward to it optimistically. Where the great Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward, Swan of Lichfield, experimented – and, for all their scientific ardour, failed – our descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.’

‘It sounds lovely,’ said Anne.

‘The distant future always does.’

Mary’s china blue eyes, more serious and more astonished than ever, were fixed on Mr Scogan. ‘Bottles?’ she said. ‘Do you really think so? Bottles. . . .’

CHAPTER VI

MR BARBECUE-SMITH ARRIVED in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He was a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck, but was comforted by reading in Balzac’s Louis Lambert that all the world’s great men have been marked by the same peculiarity, and for a simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and heart; the shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs approach one another; argal . . . It was convincing.

Mr Barbecue-Smith belonged to the old school of journalists. He sported a leonine head with a greyish-black mane of oddly unappetizing hair brushed back from a broad but low forehead. And somehow he always seemed slightly, ever so slightly, soiled. In younger days he had gaily called himself a Bohemian. He did so no longer. He was a teacher now, a kind of prophet. Some of his books of comfort and spiritual teaching were in their hundred and twentieth thousand.

Priscilla received him with every mark of esteem. He had never been to Crome before; she showed him round the house. Mr Barbecue-Smith was full of admiration.

‘So quaint, so old-world,’ he kept repeating. He had a rich, rather unctuous voice.

Priscilla praised his latest book. ‘Splendid, I thought it was,’ she said in her large, jolly way.

‘I’m happy to think you found it a comfort,’ said Mr Barbecue-Smith.

‘Oh, tremendously! And the bit about the Lotus Pool – I thought that so beautiful.’

‘I knew you would like that. It came to me, you know, from without.’ He waved his hand to indicate the astral world.

They went out into the garden for tea. Mr Barbecue-Smith was duly introduced.

‘Mr Stone is a writer too,’ said Priscilla, as she introduced Denis.

‘Indeed!’ Mr Barbecue-Smith smiled benignly, and looking up at Denis with an expression of Olympian condescension, ‘And what sort of things do you write?’

Denis was furious, and, to make matters worse, he felt himself blushing hotly. Had Priscilla no sense of proportion? She was putting them in the same category – Barbecue-Smith and himself. They were both writers, they both used pen and ink. To Mr Barbecue-Smith’s question he answered, ‘Oh, nothing much, nothing,’ and looked away.

‘Mr Stone is one of our younger poets.’ It was Anne’s voice. He scowled at her, and she smiled back exasperatingly.

‘Excellent, excellent,’ said Mr Barbecue-Smith, and he squeezed Denis’s arm encouragingly. ‘The Bard’s is a noble calling.’

As soon as tea was over Mr Barbecue-Smith excused himself; he had to do some writing before dinner. Priscilla quite understood. The prophet retired to his chamber.

Mr Barbecue-Smith came down to the drawing-room at ten to eight. He was in a good humour, and, as he descended the stairs, he smiled to himself and rubbed his large white hands together. In the drawing-room someone was playing softly and ramblingly on the piano. He wondered who it could be. One of the young ladies, perhaps. But no, it was only Denis, who got up hurriedly and, with some embarrassment as he came into the room.

‘Do go on, do go on,’ said Mr Barbecue-Smith. ‘I am very fond of music.’

‘Then I couldn’t possibly go on,’ Denis replied. ‘I only make noises.’

There was a silence. Mr Barbecue-Smith stood with his back to the hearth, warming himself at the memory of last winter’s fires. He could not control his interior satisfaction, but still went on smiling to himself. At last he turned to Denis.

‘You write,’ he asked, ‘don’t you?’

‘Well, yes – a little, you know.’

‘How many words do you find you can write in an hour?’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever counted.’

‘Oh, you ought to, you ought to. It’s most important.’

Denis exercised his memory. ‘When I’m in good form,’ he said, ‘I fancy I do a twelve-hundred word review in about four hours. But sometimes it takes me much longer.’

Mr Barbecue-Smith nodded. ‘Yes, three hundred words an hour at your best.’ He walked out into the middle of the room, turned round on his heels, and confronted Denis again. ‘Guess how many words I wrote this evening between five and half-past seven.’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘No, but you must guess. Between five and half-past seven – that’s two and a half hours.’

‘Twelve hundred words,’ Denis hazarded.

‘No, no, no.’ Mr Barbecue-Smith’s expanded face shone with gaiety. ‘Try again.’

‘Fifteen hundred.’

‘No.’

‘I give it up,’ said Denis. He found he couldn’t summon up much interest in Mr Barbecue-Smith’s writing.

‘Well, I’ll tell you. Three thousand eight hundred.’

Denis opened his eyes. ‘You must get a lot done in a day,’ he said.

Mr Barbecue-Smith suddenly became extremely confidential. He pulled up a stool to the side of Denis’s arm-chair, sat down in it, and began to talk softly and rapidly.

‘Listen to me,’ he said, laying his hand on Denis’s sleeve. ‘You want to make your living by writing; you’re young, you’re inexperienced. Let me give you a little sound advice.’

What was the fellow going to do? Denis wondered: give him an introduction to the editor of John o’ London’s Weekly, or tell him where he could sell a light middle for seven guineas? Mr Barbecue-Smith patted his arm several times and went on.

‘The secret of writing,’ he said, breathing it into the young man’s ear – ‘the secret of writing is Inspiration.’

Denis looked at him in astonishment.

‘Inspiration . . .’ Mr Barbecue-Smith repeated.

‘You mean the native wood-note business?’

Mr Barbecue-Smith nodded.

‘Oh, then I entirely agree with you,’ said Denis. ‘But what if one hasn’t got Inspiration?’

‘That was precisely the question I was waiting for,’ said Mr Barbecue-Smith. ‘You ask me what one should do if one hasn’t got Inspiration. I answer: you have Inspiration; everyone has Inspiration. It’s simply a question of getting it to function.’

The clock struck eight. There was no sign of any of the other guests; everybody was always late at Crome. Mr Barbecue-Smith went on.

‘That’s my secret,’ he said. ‘I give it you freely.’ (Denis made a suitably grateful murmur and grimace.) ‘I’ll help you to find your Inspiration, because I don’t like to see a nice, steady young man like you exhausting his vitality and wasting the best years of his life in a grinding intellectual labour that could be completely obviated by Inspiration. I did it myself, so I know what it’s like. Up till the time I was thirty-eight I was a writer like you – a writer without Inspiration. All I wrote I squeezed out of myself by sheer hard work. Why, in those days I was never able to do more than six-fifty words an hour, and what’s more, I often didn’t sell what I wrote.’ He sighed. ‘We artists,’ he said parenthetically, ‘we intellectuals aren’t much appreciated here in England.’ Denis wondered if there was any method, consistent, of course, with politeness, by which he could dissociate himself from Mr Barbecue-Smith’s ‘we.’ There was none; and besides, it was too late now, for Mr Barbecue-Smith was once more pursuing the tenor of his discourse.

‘At thirty-eight I was a poor, struggling, tired, overworked, unknown journalist. Now, at fifty . . .’ He paused modestly and made a little gesture, moving his fat hands outwards, away from one another, and expanding his fingers as though in demonstration. He was exhibiting himself. Denis thought of that advertisement of Nestlé’s milk – the two cats on the wall, under the moon, one black and thin, the other white, sleek, and fat. Before Inspiration and after.

‘Inspiration has made the difference,’ said Mr Barbecue-Smith solemnly. ‘It came quite suddenly – like a gentle dew from heaven.’ He lifted his hand and let it fall back on to his knee to indicate the descent of the dew. ‘It was one evening. I was writing my first book about the Conduct of Life – Humble Heroisms. You may have read it; it has been a comfort – at least I hope and think so – a comfort to many thousands. I was in the middle of the second chapter, and I was stuck. Fatigue, overwork – I had only written a hundred words in the last hour, and I could get no further. I sat biting the end of my pen and looking at the electric light, which hung above my table, a little above and in front of me.’ He indicated the position of the lamp with elaborate care. ‘Have you ever looked at a bright light intently for a long time?’ he asked, turning to Denis. Denis didn’t think he had. ‘You can hypnotize yourself that way,’ Mr Barbecue-Smith went on.

The gong sounded in a terrific crescendo from the hall. Still no sign of the others. Denis was horribly hungry.

‘That’s what happened to me,’ said Mr Barbecue-Smith. ‘I was hypnotized. I lost consciousness like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘When I came to, I found that it was past mid-night, and I had written four thousand words. Four thousand,’ he repeated, opening his mouth very wide on the ou of thousand. ‘Inspiration had come to me.’

‘What a very extraordinary thing,’ said Denis.

‘I was afraid of it at first. It didn’t seem to me natural. I didn’t feel, somehow, that it was quite right, quite fair, I might almost say, to produce a literary composition unconsciously. Besides, I was afraid I might have written nonsense.’

‘And had you written nonsense?’ Denis asked.

‘Certainly not,’ Mr Barbecue-Smith replied, with a trace of annoyance. ‘Certainly not. It was admirable. Just a few spelling mistakes and slips, such as there generally are in automatic writing. But the style, the thought – all the essentials were admirable. After that, Inspiration came to me regularly. I wrote the whole of Humble Heroisms like that. It was a great success, and so has everything been that I have written since.’ He leaned forward and jabbed at Denis with his finger. ‘That’s my secret,’ he said, ‘and that’s how you could write too, if you tried – without effort, fluently, well.’

‘But how?’ asked Denis, trying not to show how deeply he had been insulted by that final ‘well.’

‘By cultivating your Inspiration, by getting into touch with your Subconscious. Have you ever read my little book, Pipe-Lines to the Infinite?’

Denis had to confess that that was, precisely, one of the few, perhaps the only one, of Mr Barbecue-Smith’s works he had not read.

‘Never mind, never mind,’ said Mr Barbecue-Smith. ‘It’s just a little book about the connection of the Subconscious with the Infinite. Get into touch with the Subconscious and you are in touch with the Universe. Inspiration, in fact. You follow me?’

‘Perfectly, perfectly,’ said Denis. ‘But don’t you find that the Universe sometimes sends you very irrelevant messages?’

‘I don’t allow it to,’ Mr Barbecue-Smith replied. ‘I canalize it. I bring it down through pipes to work the turbines of my conscious mind.’

‘Like Niagara,’ Denis suggested. Some of Mr Barbecue-Smith’s remarks sounded strangely like quotations – quotations from his own works, no doubt.

‘Precisely. Like Niagara. And this is how I do it.’ He leaned forward, and with a raised forefinger marked his points as he made them, beating time, as it were, to his discourse. ‘Before I go off into my trance, I concentrate on the subject I wish to be inspired about., Let us say I am writing about the humble heroisms; for ten minutes before I go into the trance I think of nothing but orphans supporting their little brothers and sisters, of dull work well and patiently done, and I focus my mind on such great philosophical truths as the purification and uplifting of the soul by suffering, and the alchemical transformation of leaden evil into golden good.’ (Denis again hung up his little festoon of quotation marks.) ‘Then I pop off. Two or three hours later I wake up again, and find that inspiration has done its work. Thousands of words, comforting, uplifting words, lie before me. I type them out neatly on my machine and they are ready for the printer.’

‘It all sounds wonderfully simple,’ said Denis.

‘It is. All the great and splendid and divine things of life are wonderfully simple.’ (Quotation marks again.) ‘When I have to do my aphorisms,’ Mr Barbecue-Smith continued, ‘I prelude my trance by turning over the pages of any Dictionary of Quotations or Shakespeare Calendar that comes to hand. That sets the key, so to speak; that ensures that the Universe shall come flowing in, not in a continuous rush, but in aphorismic drops. You see the idea?’

Denis nodded. Mr Barbecue-Smith put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a notebook. ‘I did a few in the train today,’ he said, turning over the pages. ‘Just dropped off into a trance in a corner of my carriage. I find the train very conducive to good work. Here they are.’ He cleared his throat and read:

‘The Mountain Road may be steep, but the air is pure up there, and it is from the Summit that one gets the view.’

‘The Things that Really Matter happen in the Heart.’

It was curious, Denis reflected, the way the Infinite sometimes repeated itself.

‘Seeing is Believing. Yes, but Believing is also Seeing. If I believe in God, I see God, even in the things that seem to be evil.’

Mr Barbecue-Smith looked up from his notebook. ‘That last one,’ he said, ‘is particularly subtle and beautiful, don’t you think? Without Inspiration I could never have hit on that.’ He re-read the apophthegm with a slower and more solemn utterance. ‘Straight from the Infinite,’ he commented reflectively, then addressed himself to the next aphorism.

‘The flame of a candle gives Light, but it also Burns.’

Puzzled wrinkles appeared on Mr Barbecue-Smith’s forehead. ‘I don’t exactly know what that means,’ he said. ‘It’s very gnomic. One could apply it, of course, to the Higher Education – illuminating, but provoking the Lower Classes to discontent and revolution. Yes, I suppose that’s what it is. But it’s gnomic, it’s gnomic.’ He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. The gong sounded again, clamorously, it seemed imploringly: dinner was growing cold. It roused Mr Barbecue-Smith from meditation. He turned to Denis.

‘You understand me now when I advise you to cultivate your Inspiration. Let your Subconscious work for you; turn on the Niagara of the Infinite.’

There was the sound of feet on the stairs. Mr Barbecue-Smith got up, laid his hand for an instant on Denis’s shoulder, and said:

‘No more now. Another time. And remember, I rely absolutely on your discretion in this matter. There are intimate, sacred things that one doesn’t wish to be generally known.’

‘Of course,’ said Denis. ‘I quite understand.’

CHAPTER VII

AT CROME ALL the beds were ancient hereditary pieces of furniture. Huge beds, like four-masted ships, with furled sails of shining coloured stuff. Beds carved and inlaid, beds painted and gilded. Beds of walnut and oak, of rare exotic woods. Beds of every date and fashion from the time of Sir Ferdinando, who built the house, to the time of his namesake in the late eighteenth century, the last of the family, but all of them grandiose, magnificent.

The finest of all was now Anne’s bed. Sir Julius, son to Sir Ferdinand, had had it made in Venice against his wife’s first lying-in. Early seicento Venice had expended all its extravagant art in the making of it. The body of the bed was like a great square sarcophagus. Clustering roses were carved in high relief on its wooden panels, and luscious putti wallowed among the roses. On the black groundwork of the panels the carved reliefs were gilded and burnished. The golden roses twined in spirals up the four pillar-like posts, and cherubs, seated at the top of each column, supported a wooden canopy fretted with the same carved flowers.

Anne was reading in bed. Two candles stood on the little table beside her. In their rich light her face, her bare arm and shoulder took on warm hues and a sort of peach-like quality of surface. Here and there in the canopy above her carved golden petals shone brightly among profound shadows, and the soft light, falling on the sculptured panel of the bed, broke restlessly among the intricate roses, lingered in a broad caress on the blown cheeks, the dimpled bellies, the tight, absurd little posteriors of the sprawling putti.

There was a discreet tap at the door. She looked up. ‘Come in, come in.’ A face, round and childish within its sleek bell of golden hair, peered round the opening door. More childish-looking still, a suit of mauve pyjamas made its entrance.

It was Mary. ‘I thought I’d just look in for a moment to say good-night,’ she said, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Anne closed her book. ‘That was very sweet of you.’

‘What are you reading?’ She looked at the book. ‘Rather second-rate, isn’t it?’ The tone in which Mary pronounced the word ‘second-rate’ implied an almost infinite denigration. She was accustomed in London to associate only with first-rate people who liked first-rate things, and she knew that there were very, very few first-rate things in the world, and that those were mostly French.

‘Well, I’m afraid I like it,’ said Anne. There was nothing more to be said. The silence that followed was a rather uncomfortable one. Mary fiddled uneasily with the bottom button of her pyjama jacket. Leaning back on her mound of heaped-up pillows, Anne waited and wondered what was coming.

‘I’m so awfully afraid of repressions,’ said Mary at last, bursting suddenly and surprisingly into speech. She pronounced the words on the tail-end of an expiring breath, and had to gasp for new air almost before the phrase was finished.

‘What’s there to be depressed about?’

‘I said repressions, not depressions.’

‘Oh, repressions; I see,’ said Anne. ‘But repressions of what?’

Mary had to explain. ‘The natural instincts of sex . . .’ she began didactically. But Anne cut her short.

‘Yes, yes. Perfectly. I understand. Repressions; old maids and all the rest. But what about them?’

‘That’s just it,’ said Mary. ‘I’m afraid of them. It’s always dangerous to repress one’s instincts. I’m beginning to detect in myself symptoms like the ones you read of in the books. I constantly dream that I’m falling down wells; and sometimes I even dream that I’m climbing up ladders. It’s most disquieting. The symptoms are only too clear.’

‘Are they?’

‘One may become a nymphomaniac if one’s not careful. You’ve no idea how serious these repressions are if you don’t get rid of them in time.’

‘It sounds too awful,’ said Anne. ‘But I don’t see that I can do anything to help you.’

‘I thought I’d just like to talk it over with you.’

‘Why, of course; I’m only too happy, Mary darling.’

Mary coughed and drew a deep breath. ‘I presume,’ she began sententiously, ‘I presume we may take for granted that an intelligent young woman of twenty-three who has lived in civilized society in the twentieth century has no prejudices.’

‘Well, I confess I still have a few.’

‘But not about repressions.’

‘No, not many about repressions; that’s true.’

‘Or, rather, about getting rid of repressions.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So much for our fundamental postulate,’ said Mary. Solemnity was expressed in every feature of her round young face, radiated from her large blue eyes. ‘We come next to the desirability of possessing experience. I hope we are agreed that knowledge is desirable and that ignorance is undesirable.’

Obedient as one of those complaisant disciples from whom Socrates could get whatever answer he chose, Anne gave her assent to this proposition.

‘And we are equally agreed, I hope, that marriage is what it is.’

‘It is.’

‘Good!’ said Mary. ‘And repressions being what they are. . .’

‘Exactly.’

‘There would therefore seem to be only one conclusion.’

‘But I knew that,’ Anne exclaimed, ‘before you began.’

‘Yes, but now it’s been proved,’ said Mary. ‘One must do things logically. The question is now . . .’

‘But where does the question come in? You’ve reached your only possible conclusion – logically, which is more than I could have done. All that remains is to impart the information to someone you like – someone you like really rather a lot, someone you’re in love with, if I may express myself so baldly.’

‘But that’s just where the question comes in,’ Mary exclaimed. ‘I’m not in love with anybody.’

‘Then, if I were you, I should wait till you are.’

‘But I can’t go on dreaming night after night that I’m falling down a well. It’s too dangerous.’

‘Well, if it really is too dangerous, then of course you must do something about it; you must find somebody else.’

‘But who?’ A thoughtful frown puckered Mary’s brow. ‘It must be somebody intelligent, somebody with intellectual interests that I can share. And it must be somebody with a proper respect for women, somebody who’s prepared to talk seriously about his work and his ideas and about my work and my ideas. It isn’t, as you see, at all easy to find the right person.’

‘Well,’ said Anne, ‘there are three unattached and intelligent men in the house at the present time. There’s Mr Scogan, to begin with; but perhaps he’s rather too much of a genuine antique. And there are Gombauld and Denis. Shall we say that the choice is limited to the last two?’

Mary nodded. ‘I think we had better,’ she said, and then hesitated, with a certain air of embarrassment.

‘What is it?’

‘I was wondering,’ said Mary, with a gasp, ‘whether they really were unattached. I thought that perhaps you might . . . you might . . .’

‘It was very nice of you to think of me, Mary darling,’ said Anne, smiling the tight cat’s smile. ‘But as far as I’m concerned, they are both entirely unattached.’

‘I’m very glad of that,’ said Mary, looking relieved. ‘We are now confronted with the question: Which of the two?’

‘I can give no advice. It’s a matter for your taste.’

‘It’s not a matter of my taste,’ Mary pronounced, ‘but of their merits. We must weigh them and consider them carefully and dispassionately.’

‘You must do the weighing yourself,’ said Anne; there was still the trace of a smile at the corners of her mouth and round the half-closed eyes. ‘I won’t run the risk of advising you wrongly.’

‘Gombauld has more talent,’ Mary began, ‘but he is less civilized than Denis.’ Mary’s pronunciation of ‘civilized’ gave the word a special and additional significance. She uttered it meticulously, in the very front of her mouth, hissing delicately on the opening sibilant. So few people were civilized, and they, like the first-rate works of art, were mostly French. ‘Civilization is most important, don’t you think?’

Anne held up her hand. ‘I won’t advise,’ she said. ‘You must make the decision.’

‘Gombauld’s family,’ Mary went on reflectively, ‘comes from Marseilles. Rather a dangerous heredity, when one thinks of the Latin attitude towards women. But then, I sometimes wonder whether Denis is altogether serious-minded, whether he isn’t rather a dilettante. It’s very difficult. What do you think?’

‘I’m not listening,’ said Anne. ‘I refuse to take any responsibility.’

Mary sighed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I think I had better go to bed and think about it.’

‘Carefully and dispassionately,’ said Anne.

At the door Mary turned round. ‘Good-night,’ she said, and wondered as she said the words why Anne was smiling in that curious way. It was probably nothing, she reflected. Anne often smiled for no apparent reason; it was probably just a habit. ‘I hope I shan’t dream of falling down wells again tonight,’ she added.

‘Ladders are worse,’ said Anne.

Mary nodded. ‘Yes, ladders are much graver.’

CHAPTER VIII

BREAKFAST ON SUNDAY morning was an hour later than on week-days, and Priscilla, who usually made no public appearance before luncheon, honoured it by her presence. Dressed in black silk, with a ruby cross as well as her customary string of pearls round her neck, she presided. An enormous Sunday paper concealed all but the extreme pinnacle of her coiffure from the outer world.

‘I see Surrey has won,’ she said, with her mouth full, ‘by four wickets. The sun is in Leo: that would account for it!’

‘Splendid game, cricket,’ remarked Mr Barbecue-Smith heartily to no one in particular; ‘so thoroughly English.’

Jenny, who was sitting next to him, woke ‘up suddenly with a start. ‘What?’ she said. ‘What?’

‘So English,’ repeated Mr Barbecue-Smith.

Jenny looked at him, surprised. ‘English? Of course I am.’

He was beginning to explain, when Mrs Wimbush vailed her Sunday paper, and appeared, a square, mauve-powdered face in the midst of orange splendours. ‘I see there’s a new series of articles on the next world just beginning,’ she said to Mr Barbecue-Smith. ‘This one’s called “Summer Land and Gehenna.”’

‘Summer Land,’ echoed Mr Barbecue-Smith, closing his eyes. ‘Summer Land. A beautiful name. Beautiful – beautiful.’

Mary had taken the seat next to Denis’s. After a night of careful consideration she had decided on Denis. He might have less talent than Gombauld, he might be a little lacking in seriousness, but somehow he was safer.

‘Are you writing much poetry here in the country?’ she asked, with a bright gravity.

‘None,’ said Denis curtly. ‘I haven’t brought my typewriter.’

‘But do you mean to say you can’t write without a typewriter?’

Denis shook his head. He hated talking at breakfast, and, besides, he wanted to hear what Mr Scogan was saying at the other end of the table.

‘. . . My scheme for dealing with the Church,’ Mr Scogan was saying, ‘is beautifully simple. At the present time the Anglican clergy wear their collars the wrong way round. I would compel them to wear, not only their collars, but all their clothes, turned back to front – coat, waistcoat, trousers, boots – so that every clergyman should present to the world a smooth façade, unbroken by stud, button, or lace. The enforcement of such a livery would act as a wholesome deterrent to those intending to enter the Church. At the same time it would enormously enhance, what Archbishop Laud so rightly insisted on, the “beauty of holiness” in the few incorrigibles who could not be deterred.’

‘In hell, it seems,’ said Priscilla, reading in her Sunday paper, ‘the children amuse themselves by flaying lambs alive.’

‘Ah, but, dear lady, that’s only a symbol,’ exclaimed Mr Barbecue-Smith, ‘a material symbol of a h-piritual truth. Lambs signify . . .’

‘Then there are military uniforms,’ Mr Scogan went on. ‘When scarlet and pipeclay were abandoned for khaki, there were some who trembled for the future of war. But then, finding how elegant the new tunic was, how closely it clipped the waist, how voluptuously, with the lateral bustles of the pockets, it exaggerated the hips; when they realized the brilliant potentialities of breeches and top-boots, they were reassured. Abolish these military elegances, standardize a uniform of sack-cloth and mackintosh, you will very soon find that . . .’

‘Is anyone coming to church with me this morning?’ asked Henry Wimbush. No one responded. He baited his bare invitation. ‘I read the lessons, you know. And there’s Mr Bodiham. His sermons are sometimes worth hearing.’

‘Thank you, thank you,’ said Mr Barbecue-Smith. ‘I for one prefer to worship in the infinite church of Nature. How does our Shakespeare put it? “Sermons in books, stones in the running brooks.”’ He waved his arm in a fine gesture towards the window, and even as he did so he became vaguely, but none the less insistently, none the less uncomfortably aware that something had gone wrong with the quotation. Something – what could it be? Sermons? Stones? Books?

CHAPTER IX

MR BODIHAM WAS sitting in his study at the Rectory. The nineteenth-century Gothic windows, narrow and pointed, admitted the light grudgingly; in spite of the brilliant July weather, the room was sombre. Brown varnished bookshelves lined the walls, filled with row upon row of those thick, heavy theological works which the second-hand booksellers generally sell by weight. The mantelpiece, the overmantel, a towering structure of spindly pillars and little shelves, were brown and varnished. The writing-desk was brown and varnished. So were the chairs, so was the door. A dark red-brown carpet with patterns covered the floor. Everything was brown in the room, and there was a curious brownish smell.

In the midst of this brown gloom Mr Bodiham sat at his desk. He was the man in the Iron Mask. A grey metallic face with iron cheek-bones and a narrow iron brow; iron folds, hard and unchanging, ran perpendicularly down his cheeks; his nose was the iron beak of some thin, delicate bird of rapine. He had brown eyes, set in sockets rimmed with iron; round them the skin was dark, as though it had been charred. Dense wiry hair covered his skull; it had been black, it was turning grey. His ears were very small and fine. His jaws, his chin, his upper lip were dark, iron-dark, where he had shaved. His voice, when he spoke and especially when he raised it in preaching, was harsh, like the grating of iron hinges when a seldom-used door is opened.

It was nearly half-past twelve. He had just come back from church, hoarse and weary with preaching. He preached with fury, with passion, an iron man beating with a flail upon the souls of his congregation. But the souls of the faithful at Crome were made of india-rubber, solid rubber; the flail rebounded. They were used to Mr Bodiham at Crome. The flail thumped on india-rubber, and as often as not the rubber slept.

That morning he had preached, as he had often preached before, on the nature of God. He had tried to make them understand about God, what a fearful thing it is to fall into His hands. God – they thought of something soft and merciful. They blinded themselves to facts; still more, they blinded themselves to the Bible. The passengers on the Titanic sang ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ as the ship was going down. Did they realize what they were asking to be brought nearer to? A white fire of righteousness, an angry fire . . .

When Savonarola preached, men sobbed and groaned aloud. Nothing broke the polite silence with which Crome listened to Mr Bodiham – only an occasional cough and sometimes the sound of heavy breathing. In the front pew sat Henry Wimbush, calm, well-bred, beautifully dressed. There were times when Mr Bodiham wanted to jump down from the pulpit and shake him into life, – times when he would have liked to beat and kill his whole congregation.

He sat at his desk dejectedly. Outside the Gothic windows the earth was warm and marvellously calm. Everything was as it had always been. And yet, and yet . . . It was nearly four years now since he had preached that sermon on Matthew xxiv. 7: ‘For nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.’ It was nearly four years. He had had the sermon printed; it was so terribly, so vitally important that all the world should know what he had to say. A copy of the little pamphlet lay on his desk – eight small grey pages, printed by a fount of type that had grown blunt, like an old dog’s teeth, by the endless champing and champing of the press. He opened it and began to read it yet once again.

‘“For nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.”

‘Nineteen centuries have elapsed since Our Lord gave utterance to those words, and not a single one of them has been without wars, plagues, famines, and earthquakes. Mighty empires have crashed in ruin to the ground, diseases have unpeopled half the globe, there have been vast natural cataclysms in which thousands have been overwhelmed by flood and fire and whirlwind. Time and again, in the course of these nineteen centuries, such things have happened, but they have not brought Christ back to earth. They were “signs of the times” inasmuch as they were signs of God’s wrath against the chronic wickedness of mankind, but they were not signs of the times in connection with the Second Coming.

‘If earnest Christians have regarded the present war as a true sign of the Lord’s approaching return, it is not merely because it happens to be a great war involving the lives of millions of people, not merely because famine is tightening its grip on every country in Europe, not merely because disease of every kind, from syphilis to spotted fever, is rife among the warring nations; no, it is not for these reasons that we regard this war as a true Sign of the Times, but because in its origin and its progress it is marked by certain characteristics which seem to connect it almost beyond a doubt with the predictions in Christian Prophecy relating to the Second Coming of the Lord.

‘Let me enumerate the features of the present war which most clearly suggest that it is a Sign foretelling the near approach of the Second Advent. Our Lord said that “this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” Although it would be presumptuous for us to say what degree of evangelization will be regarded by God as sufficient, we may at least confidently hope that a century of unflagging missionary work has brought the fulfilment of this condition at any rate near. True, the larger number of the world’s inhabitants have remained deaf to the preaching of the true religion; but that does not vitiate the fact that the Gospel has been preached “for a witness” to all unbelievers from the Papist to the Zulu. The responsibility for the continued prevalence of unbelief lies, not with the preachers, but with those preached to.

‘Again, it has been generally recognized that “the drying up of the waters of the great river Euphrates,” mentioned in the sixteenth chapter of Revelations, refers to the decay and extinction of Turkish power, and is a sign of the near approaching end of the world as we know it. The capture of Jerusalem and the successes in Mesopotamia are great strides forward in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire; though it must be admitted that the Gallipoli episode proved that the Turk still possesses a “notable horn” of strength. Historically speaking, this drying up of Ottoman power has been going on for the past century; the last two years have witnessed a great acceleration of the process, and there can be no doubt that complete desiccation is within sight.

‘Closely following on the words concerning the drying up of Euphrates comes the prophecy of Armageddon, that world war with which the Second Coming is to be so closely associated. Once begun, the world war can end only with the return of Christ, and His coming will be sudden and unexpected, like that of a thief in the night.

‘Let us examine the facts. In history, exactly as in St John’s Gospel, the world war is immediately preceded by the drying up of Euphrates, or the decay of Turkish power. This fact alone would be enough to connect the present conflict with the Armageddon of Revelations and therefore to point to the near approach of the Second Advent. But further evidence of an even more solid and convincing nature can be adduced.

‘Armageddon is brought about by the activities of three unclean spirits, as it were toads, which come out of the mouths of the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet. If we can identify these three powers of evil much light will clearly be thrown on the whole question.

‘The Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet can all be identified in history. Satan, who can only work through human agency, has used these three powers in the long war against Christ which has filled the last nineteen centuries with religious strife. The Dragon, it has been sufficiently established, is pagan Rome, and the spirit issuing from its mouth is the spirit of Infidelity. The Beast, alternatively symbolized as a Woman, is undoubtedly the Papal power, and Popery is the spirit which it spews forth. There is only one power which answers to the description of the False Prophet, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the agent of the devil working in the guise of the Lamb, and that power is the so-called “Society of Jesus.” The spirit that issues from the mouth of the False Prophet is the spirit of False Morality.

‘We may assume, then, that the three evil spirits are Infidelity, Popery, and False Morality. Have these three influences been the real cause of the present conflict? The answer is clear.

‘The spirit of Infidelity is the very spirit of German criticism. The Higher Criticism, as it is mockingly called, denies the possibility of miracles, prediction, and real inspiration, and attempts to account for the Bible as a natural development. Slowly but surely, during the last eighty years, the spirit of Infidelity has been robbing the Germans of their Bible and their faith, so that Germany is today a nation of unbelievers. Higher Criticism has thus made the war possible; for it would be absolutely impossible for any Christian nation to wage war as Germany is waging it.

‘We come next to the spirit of Popery, whose influence in causing the war was quite as great as that of Infidelity, though not, perhaps, so immediately obvious. Since the Franco-Prussian War the Papal power has steadily declined in France, while in Germany it has steadily increased. Today France is an anti-papal state, while Germany possesses a powerful Roman Catholic minority. Two papally controlled states, Germany and Austria, are at war with six anti-papal states – England, France, Italy, Russia, Serbia, and Portugal. Belgium is, of course, a thoroughly papal state, and there can be little doubt that the presence on the Allies’ side of an element so essentially hostile has done much to hamper the righteous cause and is responsible for our comparative ill-success. That the spirit of Popery is behind the war is thus seen clearly enough in the grouping of the opposed powers, while the rebellion in the Roman Catholic parts of Ireland has merely confirmed a conclusion already obvious to any unbiased mind.

‘The spirit of False Morality has played as great a part in this war as the two other evil spirits. The Scrap of Paper incident is the nearest and most obvious example of Germany’s adherence to this essentially unchristian or Jesuitical morality. The end is German world-power, and in the attainment of this end, any means are justifiable. It is the true principle of Jesuitry applied to international politics.

‘The identification is now complete. As was predicted in Revelations, the three evil spirits have gone forth just as the decay of the Ottoman power was nearing completion, and have joined together to make the world war. The warning, “Behold, I come as a thief,” is therefore meant for the present period – for you and me and all the world. This war will lead on inevitably to the war of Armageddon, and will only be brought to an end by the Lord’s personal return.

‘And when He returns, what will happen? Those who are in Christ, St John tells us, will be called to the Supper of the Lamb. Those who are found fighting against Him will be called to the Supper of the Great God – that grim banquet where they shall not feast, but be feasted on. “For,” as St John says, “I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried in a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the Great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great.” All the enemies of Christ will be slain with the sword of him that sits upon the horse, “and all the fowls will be filled with their flesh.” That is the Supper of the Great God.

‘It may be soon or it may, as men reckon time, be long; but sooner or later, inevitably, the Lord will come and deliver the world from its present troubles. And woe unto them who are called, not to the Supper of the Lamb, but to the Supper of the Great God. They will realize then, but too late, that God is a God of Wrath as well as a God of Forgiveness. The God who sent bears to devour the mockers of Elisha, the God who smote the Egyptians for their stubborn wickedness, will assuredly smite them too, unless they make haste to repent. But perhaps it is already too late. Who knows but that tomorrow, in a moment even, Christ may be upon us unawares, like a thief? In a little while, who knows? the angel standing in the sun may be summoning the ravens and vultures from their crannies in the rocks to feed upon the putrefying flesh of the millions of unrighteous whom God’s wrath has destroyed. Be ready, then; the coming of the Lord is at hand. May it be for all of you an object of hope, not a moment to be looked forward to with terror and trembling.’

Mr Bodiham closed the little pamphlet and leaned back in his chair. The argument was sound, absolutely compelling; and yet – it was four years since he had preached that sermon; four years, and England was at peace, the sun shone, the people of Crome were as wicked and indifferent as ever – more so, indeed, if that were possible. If only he could understand, if the heavens would but make a sign! But his questionings remained unanswered. Seated there in his brown varnished chair under the Ruskinian window, he could have screamed aloud. He gripped the arms of his chair – gripping, gripping for control. The knuckles of his hands whitened; he bit his lip. In a few seconds he was able to relax the tension; he began to rebuke himself for his rebellious impatience.

Four years, he reflected; what were four years, after all? It must inevitably take a long time for Armageddon to ripen, to yeast itself up. The episode of 1914 had been a preliminary skirmish. And as for the war having come to an end – why, that, of course, was illusory. It was still going on, smouldering away in Silesia, in Ireland, in Anatolia; the discontent in Egypt and India was preparing the way, perhaps, for a great extension of the slaughter among the heathen peoples. The Chinese boycott of Japan, and the rivalries of that country and America in the Pacific, might be breeding a great new war in the East. The prospect, Mr Bodiham tried to assure himself, was hopeful; the real, the genuine Armageddon might soon begin, and then, like a thief in the night . . . But, in spite of all his comfortable reasoning, he remained unhappy, dissatisfied. Four years ago he had been so confident; God’s intention seemed then so plain. And now? Now, he did well to be angry. And now he suffered too.

Sudden and silent as a phantom Mrs Bodiham appeared, gliding noiselessly across the room. Above her black dress her face was pale with an opaque whiteness, her eyes were pale as water in a glass, and her strawy hair was almost colourless. She held a large envelope in her hand.

‘This came for you by the post,’ she said softly.

The envelope was unsealed. Mechanically Mr Bodiham tore it open. It contained a pamphlet, larger than his own and more elegant in appearance. ‘The House of Sheeny, Clerical Outfitters, Birmingham.’ He turned over the pages. The catalogue was tastefully and ecclesiastically printed in antique characters with illuminated Gothic initials. Red marginal lines, crossed at the corners after the manner of an Oxford picture frame, enclosed each page of type; little red crosses took the place of full stops. Mr Bodiham turned the pages.

Soutane in best black merino. Ready to wear; in all sizes.

Clerical frock-coats. From nine guineas. A dressy garment, tailored by our own experienced ecclesiastical cutters.

Half-tone illustrations represented young curates, some dapper, some Rugbeian and muscular, some with ascetic faces and large ecstatic eyes, dressed in jackets, in frock-coats, in surplices, in clerical evening dress, in black Norfolk suitings.

A large assortment of chasubles.

Rope girdles.

Sheeny’s Special Skirt Cassocks. Tied by a string about the waist . . . . When worn under a surplice presents an appearance indistinguishable from that of a complete cassock. . . . Recommended for summer wear and hot climates.

With a gesture of horror and disgust Mr Bodiham threw the catalogue into the waste-paper basket. Mrs Bodiham looked at him; her pale, glaucous eyes reflected his action without comment.

‘The village,’ she said in her quiet voice, ‘the village grows worse and worse every day.’

‘What has happened now?’ asked Mr Bodiham, feeling suddenly very weary.

‘I’ll tell you.’ She pulled up a brown varnished chair and sat down. In the village of Crome, it seemed, Sodom and Gomorrah had come to a second birth.

The sermon attributed to ‘Mr Bodiham’ in Chapter IX is a reproduction of the substance of an Address, given by the Rev. E. H. Home, in A.D. 1916, to a meeting of clergy, and then published. It is now reprinted as an Appendix in a small book by him, entitled The Significance of Air War (Marshall, Morgan & Scott).

CHAPTER X

DENIS DID NOT dance, but when ragtime came squirting out of the pianola in gushes of treacle and hot perfume, in jets of Bengal light, then things began to dance inside him. Little black nigger corpuscles jigged and drummed in his arteries. He became a cage of movement, a walking palais de danse. It was very uncomfortable, like the preliminary symptoms of a disease. He sat in one of the window-seats, glumly pretending to read.

At the pianola, Henry Wimbush, smoking a long cigar through a tunnelled pillar of amber, trod out the shattering dance music with serene patience. Locked together, Gombauld and Anne moved with a harmoniousness that made them seem a single creature, two-headed and four-legged. Mr Scogan, solemnly buffoonish, shuffled round the room with Mary. Jenny sat in the shadow behind the piano, scribbling, so it seemed, in a big red notebook. In arm-chairs by the fireplace, Priscilla and Mr Barbecue-Smith discussed higher things, without, apparently, being disturbed by the noise of the Lower Plane.

‘Optimism,’ said Mr Barbecue-Smith, with a tone of finality, speaking through strains of the ‘Wild, Wild Women’ – ‘optimism is the opening out of the soul towards the light; it is an expansion towards and into God, it is a h-piritual self-unification with the Infinite.’

‘How true!’ sighed Priscilla, nodding the baleful splendours of her coiffure.

‘Pessimism, on the other hand, is the contraction of the soul towards darkness; it is a focusing of the self upon a point in the Lower Plane; it is a h-piritual slavery to mere facts, to gross physical phenomena.’

‘They’re making a wild man of me.’ The refrain sang itself over in Denis’s mind. Yes, they were; damn them! A wild man, but not wild enough; that was the trouble. Wild inside; raging, writhing – yes, ‘writhing’ was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly – baa, baa, baa.

There they were, Anne and Gombauld, moving together as though they were a single supple creature. The beast with two backs. And he sat in a corner, pretending to read, pretending he didn’t want to dance, pretending he rather despised dancing. Why? It was the baa-baa business again.

Why was he born with a different face? Why was he? Gombauld had a face of brass – one of those old, brazen rams that thumped against the walls of cities till they fell. He was born with a different face – a woolly face.

The music stopped. The single harmonious creature broke in two. Flushed, a little breathless, Anne swayed across the room to the pianola, laid her hand on Mr Wimbush’s shoulder.

‘A waltz this time, please, Uncle Henry,’ she said.

‘A waltz,’ he repeated, and turned to the cabinet where the rolls were kept. He trod off the old roll and trod on the new, a slave at the mill, uncomplaining and beautifully well bred. ‘Rum; Tum; Rum-ti-ti; Tum-ti-ti. . . .’ The melody wallowed oozily along, like a ship moving forward over a sleek and oily swell. The four-legged creature, more graceful, more harmonious in its movements than ever, slid across the floor. Oh, why was he born with a different face?

‘What are you reading?’

He looked up, startled. It was Mary. She had broken from the uncomfortable embrace of Mr Scogan, who had now seized on Jenny for his victim.

‘What are you reading?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Denis truthfully. He looked at the title page; the book was called The Stock Breeder’s Vade Mecum.

‘I think you are so sensible to sit and read quietly,’ said Mary, fixing him with her china eyes. ‘I don’t know why one dances. It’s so boring.’

Denis made no reply; she exacerbated him. From the armchair by the fireplace he heard Priscilla’s deep voice.

‘Tell me, Mr Barbecue-Smith – you know all about science, I know—’ A deprecating noise came from Mr Barbecue-Smith’s chair. ‘This Einstein theory. It seems to upset the whole starry universe. It makes me so worried about my horoscopes. You see . . .’

Mary renewed her attack. ‘Which of the contemporary poets do you like best?’ she asked. Denis was filled with fury. Why couldn’t this pest of a girl leave him alone? He wanted to listen to the horrible music, to watch them dancing – oh, with what grace, as though they had been made for one another! – to savour his misery in peace. And she came and put him through this absurd catechism! She was like ‘Mangold’s Questions’: ‘What are the three diseases of wheat?’ – ‘Which of the contemporary poets do you like best?’

‘Blight, Mildew, and Smut,’ he replied, with the laconism of one who is absolutely certain of his own mind.

It was several hours before Denis managed to go to sleep that night. Vague but agonizing miseries possessed his mind, It was not only Anne who made him miserable; he was wretched about himself, the future, life in general, the universe. ‘This adolescence business,’ he repeated to himself every now and then, ‘is horribly boring.’ But the fact that he knew his disease did not help him to cure it.

After kicking all the clothes off the bed, he got up and sought relief in composition. He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words. At the end of an hour, nine more or less complete lines emerged from among the blots and scratchings.

‘I do not know what I desire

When summer nights are dark and still,

When the wind’s many-voicèd quire

Sleeps among the muffled branches.

I long and know not what I will:

And not a sound of life or laughter stanches

Time’s black and silent flow.

I do not know what I desire,

I do not know.’

He read it through aloud; then threw the scribbled sheet into the waste-paper basket and got into bed again. In a very few minutes he was asleep.

CHAPTER XI

MR BARBECUE-SMITH WAS gone. The motor had whirled him away to the station; a faint smell of burning oil commemorated his recent departure. A considerable detachment had come into the courtyard to speed him on his way; and now they were walking back, round the side of the house, towards the terrace and the garden. They walked in silence; nobody had yet ventured to comment on the departed guest.

‘Well?’ said Anne, at last, turning with raised inquiring eyebrows to Denis. ‘Well?’ It was time for someone to begin.

Denis declined the invitation; he passed it on to Mr Scogan. ‘Well?’ he said.

Mr Scogan did not respond; he only repeated the question, ‘Well?’

It was left for Henry Wimbush to make a pronouncement. ‘A very agreeable adjunct to the week-end,’ he said. His tone was obituary.

They had descended, without paying much attention where they were going, the steep yew-walk that went down, under the flank of the terrace, to the pool. The house towered above them, immensely tall, with the whole height of the built-up terrace added to its own seventy feet of brick façade. The perpendicular lines of the three towers soared up, uninterrupted, enhancing the impression of height until it became overwhelming. They paused at the edge of the pool to look back.

‘The man who built this house knew his business,’ said Denis. ‘He was an architect.’

‘Was he?’ said Henry Wimbush reflectively. ‘I doubt it. The builder of this house was Sir Ferdinando Lapith, who flourished during the reign of Elizabeth. He inherited the estate from his father, to whom it had been granted at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries; for Crome was originally a cloister of monks and this swimming-pool their fish-pond. Sir Ferdinando was not content merely to adapt the old monastic buildings to his own purposes; but using them as a stone quarry for his barns and byres and outhouses, he built for himself a grand new house of brick – the house you see now.’

He waved his hand in the direction of the house and was silent. Severe, imposing, almost menacing, Crome loomed down on them.

‘The great thing about Crome,’ said Mr Scogan, seizing the opportunity to speak, ‘is the fact that it’s so unmistakably and aggressively a work of art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and rebels against it. It has no likeness to Shelley’s tower, in the “Epipsychidion,” which, if I remember rightly—

‘“Seems not now a work of human art,

But as it were titanic, in the heart

Of earth having assumed its form and grown

Out of the mountain, from the living stone,

Lifting itself in caverns light and high.”

No, no; there isn’t any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilized, and sophisticated man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish life. Since the days of William Morris that’s a fact which we in England have been unable to comprehend. Civilized and sophisticated men have solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts, cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaint imitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance, and a limited range of materials produced the hovel, which possesses undoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own “as it were titanic” charm. We now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich variety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitation hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go further?’

Henry Wimbush took up the thread of his interrupted discourse. ‘All that you say, my dear Scogan,’ he began, ‘is certainly very just, very true. But whether Sir Ferdinando shared your views about architecture or if, indeed, he had any views about architecture at all, I very much doubt. In building this house, Sir Ferdinando was, as a matter of fact, preoccupied by only one thought – the proper placing of his privies. Sanitation was the one great interest of his life. In 1573 he even published, on this subject, a little book – now extremely scarce – called, Certaine Priuy Counsels by One of Her Maiestie’s Most Honourable Priuy Counsel, F. L. Knight, in which the whole matter is treated with great learning and elegance. His guiding principle in arranging the sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the ground. It must not be thought that Sir Ferdinando was moved only by material and merely sanitary considerations; for the placing of his privies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritual reasons. For, he argues in the third chapter of his Priuy Counsels, the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe. To counteract these degrading effects he advised that the privy should be in every house the room nearest to heaven, that it should be well provided with windows commanding an extensive and noble prospect, and that the walls of the chamber should be lined with bookshelves containing all the ripest products’ of human wisdom, such as the Proverbs of Solomon, Boëthius’s Consolations of Philosophy, the apophthegms of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the Enchiridion of Erasmus, and all other works, ancient or modern, which testify to the nobility of the human soul. In Crome he was able to put his theories into practice. At the top of each of the three projecting towers he placed a privy. From these a shaft went down the whole height of the house, that is to say, more than seventy feet, through the cellars, and into a series of conduits provided with flowing water tunnelled in the ground on a level with the base of the raised terrace. These conduits emptied themselves into the stream several hundred yards below the fish-pond. The total depth of the shafts from the top of the towers to their subterranean conduits was a hundred and two feet. The eighteenth century, with its passion for modernization, swept away these monuments of sanitary ingenuity. Were it not for tradition and the explicit account of them left by Sir Ferdinando, we should be unaware that these noble privies had ever existed. We should even suppose that Sir Ferdinando built this house after this strange and splendid model for merely aesthetic reasons.’

The contemplation of the glories of the past always evoked in Henry Wimbush a certain enthusiasm. Under the grey bowler his face worked and glowed as he spoke. The thought of these vanished privies moved him profoundly. He ceased to speak; the light gradually died out of his face, and it became once more the replica of the grave, polite hat which shaded it. There was a long silence; the same gently melancholy thoughts seemed to possess the mind of each of them. Permanence, transience – Sir Ferdinando and his privies were gone, Crome still stood. How brightly the sun shone and how inevitable was death! The ways of God were strange; the ways of man were stranger still . . . .

‘It does one’s heart good,’ exclaimed Mr Scogan at last, ‘to hear of these fantastic English aristocrats. To have a theory about privies and to build an immense and splendid house in order to put it into practice – it’s magnificent, beautiful! I like to think of them all: the eccentric milords rolling across Europe in ponderous carriages, bound on extraordinary errands. One is going to Venice to buy La Bianchi’s larynx; he won’t get it till she’s dead, of course, but no matter; he’s prepared to wait; he has a collection, pickled in glass bottles, of the throats of famous opera singers. And the instruments of renowned virtuosi – he goes in for them too; he will try to bribe Paganini to part with his little Guarnerio, but he has small hope of success. Paganini won’t sell his fiddle; but perhaps he might sacrifice one of his guitars. Others are bound on crusades – one to die miserably among the savage Greeks, another, in his white top hat, to lead Italians against their oppressors. Others have no business at all; they are just giving their oddity a continental airing. At home they cultivate themselves at leisure and with greater elaboration. Beckford builds towers, Portland digs holes in the ground, Cavendish, the millionaire, lives in a stable, eats nothing but mutton, and amuses himself – oh, solely for his private delectation – by anticipating the electrical discoveries of half a century Glorious eccentrics! Every age is enlivened by their presence. Some day, my dear Denis,’ said Mr Scogan, turning a beady bright regard in his direction – ‘some day you must become their biographer – “The Lives of Queer Men.” What a subject! I should like to undertake it myself.’

Mr Scogan paused, looked up once more at the towering house, then murmured the word, ‘Eccentricity,’ two or three times.

‘Eccentricity. . . . It’s the justification of all aristocracies. It justifies leisured classes and inherited wealth and privilege and endowments and all the other injustices of that sort. If you’re to do anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric itself – often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others. The eccentricities of the artist and the newfangled thinker don’t inspire it with that fear, loathing, and disgust which the burgesses instinctively feel towards them. It is a sort of Red Indian Reservation planted in the midst of a vast horde of Poor Whites – colonials at that. Within its boundaries wild men disport themselves – often, it must be admitted, a little grossly, a little too flamboyantly; and when kindred spirits are born outside the pale it offers them some sort of refuge from the hatred which the Poor Whites, en bons bourgeois, lavish on anything that is wild or out of the ordinary. After the social revolution there will be no Reservations; the Redskins will be drowned in the great sea of Poor Whites. What then? Will they suffer you to go on writing villanelles, my good Denis? Will you, unhappy Henry, be allowed to live in this house of the splendid privies, to continue your quiet delving in the mines of futile knowledge? Will Anne . . .’

‘And you,’ said Anne, interrupting him, ‘will you be allowed to go on talking?’

‘You may rest assured,’ Mr Scogan replied, ‘that I shall not, I shall have some Honest Work to do.’

CHAPTER XII

‘BLIGHT, MILDEW, AND Smut. . . .’ Mary was puzzled and distressed. Perhaps her ears had played her false. Perhaps what he had really said was, ‘Squire, Binyon, and Shanks,’ or ‘Childe, Blunden, and Earp,’ or even ‘Abercrombie, Drink-water, and Rabindranath Tagore.’ Perhaps. But then her ears never did play her false. ‘Blight, Mildew, and Smut.’ The impression was distinct and ineffaceable. ‘Blight, Mildew . . .’ she was forced to the conclusion, reluctantly, that Denis had indeed pronounced those improbable words. He had deliberately repelled her attempt to open a serious discussion. That was horrible. A man who would not talk seriously to a woman just because she was a woman – oh, impossible! Egeria or nothing. Perhaps Gombauld would be more satisfactory. True, his meridional heredity was a little disquieting; but at least he was a serious worker, and it was with his work that she would associate herself. And Denis? After all, what was Denis? A dilettante, an amateur. . . .

Gombauld had annexed for his painting-room a little disused granary that stood by itself in a green dose beyond the farmyard. It was a square brick building with a peaked roof and little windows set high up in each of its walls. A ladder of four rungs led up to the door; for the granary was perched above the ground, and out of reach of the rats, on four massive toadstools of grey stone. Within, there lingered a faint smell of dust and cobwebs; and the narrow shaft of sunlight that came slanting in at every hour of the day through one of the little windows was always alive with silvery motes. Here Gombauld worked, with a kind of concentrated ferocity, during six or seven hours of each day. He was pursuing something new, something terrific, if only he could catch it.

During the last eight years, nearly half of which had been spent in the process of winning the war, he had worked his way industriously through cubism. Now he had come out on the other side. He had begun by painting a formalized nature; then, little by little, he had risen from nature into the world of pure form, till in the end he was painting nothing but his own thoughts, externalized in the abstract geometrical forms of the mind’s devising. He found the process arduous and exhilarating. And then, quite suddenly, he grew dissatisfied; he felt himself cramped and confined within intolerably narrow limitations. He was humiliated to find how few and crude and uninteresting were the forms he could invent; the inventions of nature were without number, inconceivably subtle and elaborate. He had done with cubism. He was out on the other side. But the cubist discipline preserved him from falling into excesses of nature worship. He took from nature its rich, subtle, elaborate forms, but his aim was always to work them into a whole that should have the thrilling simplicity and formality of an idea; to combine prodigious realism with prodigious simplification. Memories of Caravaggio’s portentous achievements haunted him. Forms of a breathing, living reality emerged from darkness, built themselves up into compositions as luminously simple and single as a mathematical idea. He thought of the ‘Call of Matthew,’ of ‘Peter Crucified,’ of the ‘Lute Players,’ of ‘Magdalen,’ He had the secret, that astonishing ruffian, he had the secret! And now Gombauld was after it, in hot pursuit. Yes, it would be something terrific, if only he could catch it.

For a long time an idea had been stirring and spreading, yeastily, in his mind. He had made a portfolio full of studies, he had drawn a cartoon; and now the idea was taking shape on canvas. A man fallen from a horse. The huge animal, a gaunt white cart-horse, filled the upper half of the picture with its great body. Its head, lowered towards the ground, was in shadow; the immense bony body was what arrested the eye, the body and the legs, which came down on either side of the picture like the pillars of an arch. On the ground, between the legs of the towering beast, lay the foreshortened figure of a man, the head in the extreme foreground, the arms flung wide to right and left. A white, relentless light poured down from a point in the right foreground. The beast, the fallen man, were sharply illuminated; round them, beyond and behind them, was the night. They were alone in the darkness, a universe in themselves. The horse’s body filled the upper part of the picture; the legs, the great hoofs, frozen to stillness in the midst of their trampling, limited it on either side. And beneath lay the man, his foreshortened face at the focal point in the centre, his arms outstretched towards the sides of the picture Under the arch of the horse’s belly, between his legs, the eye looked through into an intense darkness; below, the space was closed in by the figure of the prostrate man. A central gulf of darkness surrounded by luminous forms . . .

The picture was more than half finished. Gombauld had been at work all the morning on the figure of the man, and now he was taking a rest – the time to smoke a cigarette. Tilting back his chair till it touched the wall, he looked thoughtfully at his canvas. He was pleased, and at the same time he was desolated. In itself, the thing was good; he knew it. But that something he was after, that something that would be so terrific if only he could catch it – had he caught it? Would he ever catch it?

Three little taps – rat, tat, tat! Surprised, Gombauld turned his eyes towards the door. Nobody ever disturbed him while he was at work; it was one of the unwritten laws. ‘Come in!’ he called. The door, which was ajar, swung open, revealing, from the waist upwards, the form of Mary. She had only dared to mount half-way up the ladder. If he didn’t want her, retreat would be easier and more dignified than if she climbed to the top.

‘May I come in?’ she asked.

‘Certainly.’

She skipped up the remaining two rungs and was over the threshold in an instant. ‘A letter came for you by the second post,’ she said, ‘I thought it might be important, so I brought it out to you.’ Her eyes, her childish face were luminously candid as she handed him the letter. There had never been a flimsier pretext.

Gombauld looked at the envelope and put it in his pocket unopened. ‘Luckily,’ he said, ‘it isn’t at all important. Thanks very much all the same.’

There was a silence; Mary felt a little uncomfortable. ‘May I have a look at what you’ve been painting?’ she had the courage to say at last.

Gombauld had only half smoked his cigarette; in any case he wouldn’t begin work again till he had finished. He would give her the five minutes that separated him from the bitter end. ‘This is the best place to see it from,’ he said.

Mary looked at the picture for some time without saying anything. Indeed, she didn’t know what to say; she was taken aback, she was at a loss. She had expected a cubist masterpiece, and here was a picture of a man and a horse, not only recognizable as such, but even aggressively in drawing. Trompe-l’œil – there was no other word to describe the delineation of that foreshortened figure under the trampling feet of the horse. What was she to think, what was she to say? Her orientations were gone. One could admire representationalism in the Old Masters. Obviously. But in a modern . . .? At eighteen she might have done so. But now, after five years of schooling among the best judges, her instinctive reaction to a contemporary piece of representation was contempt – an outburst of laughing disparagement. What could Gombauld be up to? She had felt so safe in admiring his work before. But now – she didn’t know what to think. It was very difficult, very difficult.

‘There’s rather a lot of chiaroscuro, isn’t there?’ she ventured at last, and inwardly congratulated herself on having found a critical formula so gentle and at the same time so penetrating.

‘There is,’ Gombauld agreed.

Mary was pleased; he accepted her criticism; it was a serious discussion. She put her head on one side and screwed up her eyes. ‘I think it’s awfully fine,’ she said. ‘But of course it’s a little too . . . too . . . trompe-l’œil for my taste.’ She looked at Gombauld, who made no response, but continued to smoke, gazing meditatively all the time at his picture. Mary went on gaspingly. ‘When I was in Paris this spring I saw a lot of Tschuplitski. I admire his work so tremendously. Of course, it’s frightfully abstract now – frightfully abstract and frightfully intellectual. He just throws a few oblongs on to his canvas – quite flat, you know, and painted in pure primary colours. But his design is wonderful. He’s getting more and more abstract every day. He’d quite given up the third dimension when I was there and was just thinking of giving up the second. Soon, he says, there’ll be just the blank canvas. That’s the logical conclusion. Complete abstraction. Painting’s finished; he’s finishing it. When he’s reached pure abstraction he’s going to take up architecture. He says it’s more intellectual than painting. Do you agree?’ she asked, with a final gasp.

Gombauld dropped his cigarette end and trod on it. ‘Tschuplitski’s finished painting,’ he said. ‘I’ve finished my cigarette. But I’m going on painting.’ And, advancing towards her, he put his arm round her shoulders and turned her round, away from the picture.

Mary looked up at him; her hair swung back, a soundless bell of gold. Her eyes were serene; she smiled. So the moment had come. His arm was round her. He moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, and she moved with him. It was a peripatetic embracement. ‘Do you agree with him?’ she repeated. The moment might have come, but she would not cease to be intellectual, serious.

‘I don’t know. I shall have to think about it.’ Gombauld loosened his embrace, his hand dropped from her shoulder. ‘Be careful going down the ladder,’ he added solicitously.

Mary looked round, startled. They were in front of the open door. She remained standing there for a moment in bewilderment. The hand that had rested on her shoulder made itself felt lower down her back; it administered three of four kindly little smacks. Replying automatically to its stimulus, she moved forward. ‘Be careful going down the ladder,’ said Gombauld once more.

She was careful. The door closed behind her and she was alone in the little green close. She walked slowly back through the farmyard; she was pensive.

CHAPTER XIII

HENRY WIMBUSH BROUGHT down with him to dinner a budget of printed sheets loosely bound together in a cardboard portfolio.

‘Today,’ he said, exhibiting it with a certain solemnity, ‘today I have finished the printing of my History of Crome. I helped to set up the type of the last page this evening.’

‘The famous History?’ cried Anne. The writing and the printing of this Magnum Opus had been going on as long as she could remember. All her childhood long Uncle Henry’s History had been a vague and fabulous thing, often heard of and never seen.

‘It has taken me nearly thirty years,’ said Mr Wimbush. ‘Twenty-five years of writing and nearly four of printing. And now it’s finished – the whole chronicle, from Sir Ferdinando Lapith’s birth to the death of my father William Wimbush – more than three centuries and a half: a history of Crome, written at Crome, and printed at Crome by my own press.’

‘Shall we be allowed to read it now it’s finished?’ asked Denis.

Mr Wimbush nodded. ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘And I hope you will not find it uninteresting,’ he added modestly. ‘Our muniment room is particularly rich in ancient records, and I have some genuinely new light to throw on the introduction of the three-pronged fork.’

‘And the people?’ asked Gombauld. ‘Sir Ferdinando and the rest of them – were they amusing? Were there any crimes or tragedies in the family?’

‘Let me see,’ Henry Wimbush rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I can only think of two suicides, one violent death, four or perhaps five broken hearts, and half a dozen little blots on the scutcheon in the way of misalliances, seductions, natural children, and the like. No, on the whole, it’s a placid and uneventful record.’

‘The Wimbushes and the Lapiths were always an unadventurous, respectable crew,’ said Priscilla, with a note of scorn in her voice. ‘If I were to write my family history now! Why, it would be one long continuous blot from beginning to end.’ She laughed jovially, and helped herself to another glass of wine.

‘If I were to write mine,’ Mr Scogan remarked, ‘it wouldn’t exist. After the second generation we Scogans are lost in the mists of antiquity.’

‘After dinner,’ said Henry Wimbush, a little piqued by his wife’s disparaging comment on the masters of Crome, ‘I’ll read you an episode from my History that will make you admit that even the Lapiths, in their own respectable way, had their tragedies and strange adventures.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Priscilla.

‘Glad to hear what?’ asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation, smiled, nodded, cuckooed a last ‘I see,’ and popped back, clapping shut the door behind her.

Dinner was eaten; the party had adjourned to the drawing-room.

‘Now,’ said Henry Wimbush, pulling up a chair to the lamp. He put on his round pince-nez, rimmed with tortoise-shell, and began cautiously to turn over the pages of his loose and still fragmentary book. He found his place at last. ‘Shall I begin?’ he asked, looking up.

‘Do,’ said Priscilla, yawning.

In the midst of an attentive silence Mr Wimbush gave a little preliminary cough and started to read.

‘The infant who was destined to become the fourth baronet of the name of Lapith was born in the year 1740. He was a very small baby, weighing not more than three pounds at birth, but from the first he was sturdy and healthy. In honour of his maternal grandfather, Sir Hercules Occam of Bishop’s Occam, he was christened Hercules. His mother, like many other mothers, kept a notebook, in which his progress from month to month was recorded. He walked at ten months, and before his second year was out he had learnt to speak a number of words. At three years he weighed but twenty-four pounds, and at six, though he could read and write perfectly and showed a remarkable aptitude for music, he was no larger and heavier than a well-grown child of two. Meanwhile, his mother had borne two other children, a boy and a girl, one of whom died of croup during infancy, while the other was carried off by smallpox before it reached the age of five. Hercules remained the only surviving child.

‘On his twelfth birthday Hercules was still only three feet and two inches in height. His head, which was very handsome and nobly shaped, was too big for his body, but otherwise he was exquisitely proportioned and, for his size, of great strength and agility. His parents, in the hope of making him grow, consulted all the most eminent physicians of the time. Their various prescriptions were followed to the letter, but in vain. One ordered a very plentiful meat diet; another exercise; a third constructed a little rack, modelled on those employed by the Holy Inquisition, on which young Hercules was stretched, with excruciating torments, for half an hour every morning and evening. In the course of the next three years Hercules gained perhaps two inches. After that his growth stopped completely, and he remained for the rest of his life a pigmy of three feet and four inches. His father, who had built the most extravagant hopes upon his son, planning for him in his imagination a military career equal to that of Marlborough, found himself a disappointed man. “I have brought an abortion into the world,” he would say, and he took so violent a dislike to his son that the boy dared scarcely come into his presence. His temper, which had been serene, was turned by disappointment to moroseness and savagery. He avoided all company (being, as he said, ashamed to show himself, the father of a lusus naturae, among normal, healthy human beings), and took to solitary drinking, which carried him very rapidly to his grave; for the year before Hercules came of age his father was taken off by an apoplexy. His mother, whose love for him had increased with the growth of his father’s unkindness, did not long survive, but little more than a year after her husband’s death succumbed, after eating two dozen of oysters, to an attack of typhoid fever.

‘Hercules thus found himself at the age of twenty-one alone in the world, and master of a considerable fortune, including the estate and mansion of Crome. The beauty and intelligence of his childhood had survived into his manly age, and, but for his dwarfish stature, he would have taken his place among the handsomest and most accomplished young men of his time. He was well read in Greek and Latin authors, as well as in all the moderns of any merit who had written in English, French, or Italian. He had a good ear for music, and was no indifferent performer on the violin, which he used to play like a bass viol, seated on a chair with the instrument between his legs. To the music of the harpsichord and clavichord he was extremely partial, but the smallness of his hands made it impossible for him ever to perform upon these instruments. He had a small ivory flute made for him, on which, whenever he was melancholy, he used to play a simple country air or jig, affirming that this rustic music had more power to clear and raise the spirits than the most artificial productions of the masters. From an early age he practised the composition of poetry, but, though conscious of his great powers in this art, he would never publish any specimen of his writing. “My stature,” he would say, “is reflected in my verses; if the public were to read them it would not be because I am a poet, but because I am a dwarf.” Several MS books of Sir Hercules’s poems survive. A single specimen will suffice to illustrate his qualities as a poet.

“In ancient days, while yet the world was young,

Ere Abram fed his flocks or Homer sung;

When blacksmith Tubal tamed creative fire,

And Jabal dwelt in tents and Jubal struck the lyre;

Flesh grown corrupt brought forth a monstrous birth

And obscene giants trod the shrinking earth,

Till God, impatient of their sinful brood,

Gave rein to wrath and drown’d them in the Flood.

Teeming again, repeopled Tellus bore

The lubber Hero and the Man of War;

Huge towers of Brawn, topp’d with an empty Skull,

Witlessly bold, heroically dull.

Long ages pass’d and Man grown more refin’d,

Slighter in muscle but of vaster Mind,

Smiled at his grandsire’s broadsword, bow and bill,

And learn’d to wield the Pencil and the Quill.

The glowing canvas and the written page

Immortaliz’d his name from age to age,

His name emblazon’d on Fame’s temple wall;

For Art grew great as Humankind grew small.

Thus man’s long progress step by step we trace;

The Giant dies, the hero takes his place;

The Giant vile, the dull heroic Block:

At one we shudder and at one we mock.

Man last appears. In him the Soul’s pure flame

Burns brightlier in a not inord’nate frame.

Of old when Heroes fought and Giants swarmed,

Men were huge mounds of matter scarce inform’d;

Wearied by leavening so vast a mass,

The spirit slept and all the mind was crass.

The smaller carcase of these later days

Is soon inform’d; the Soul unwearied plays

And like a Pharos darts abroad her mental rays.

But can we think that Providence will stay

Man’s footsteps here upon the upward way?

Mankind in understanding and in grace

Advanc’d so far beyond the Giants’ race?

Hence impious thought! Still led by GOD’S own Hand,

Mankind proceeds towards the Promised Land.

A time will come (prophetic, I descry

Remoter dawns along the gloomy sky),

When happy mortals of a Golden Age

Will backward turn the dark historic page,

And in our vaunted race of Men behold

A form as gross, a Mind as dead and cold,

As we in Giants see, in warriors of old.

A time will come, wherein the soul shall be

From all superfluous matter wholly free:

When the light body, agile as a fawn’s,

Shall sport with grace along the velvet lawns.

Nature’s most delicate and final birth,

Mankind perfected shall possess the earth.

But ah, not yet! For still the Giants’ race.

Huge, though diminish’d, tramps the Earth’s fair face;

Gross and repulsive, yet perversely proud,

Men of their imperfections boast aloud.

Vain of their bulk, of all they still retain

Of giant ugliness absurdly vain;

At all that’s small they point their stupid scorn

And, monsters, think themselves divinely born.

Sad is the Fate of those, ah, sad indeed,

The rare precursors of the nobler breed!

Who come man’s golden glory to foretell,

But pointing Heav’nwards live themselves in Hell.”

‘As soon as he came into the estate, Sir Hercules set about remodelling his household. For though by no means ashamed of his deformity – indeed, if we may judge from the poem quoted above, he regarded himself as being in many ways superior to the ordinary race of man – he found the presence of full-grown men and women embarrassing. Realizing, too, that he must abandon all ambitions in the great world, he determined to retire absolutely from it and to create, as it were, at Crome a private world of his own, in which all should be proportionable to himself. Accordingly, he discharged all the old servants of the house and replaced them gradually, as he was able to find suitable successors, by others of dwarfish stature. In the course of a few years he had assembled about himself a numerous household, no member of which was above four feet high and the smallest among them scarcely two feet and six inches. His father’s dogs, such as setters, mastiffs, greyhounds, and a pack of beagles, he sold or gave away as too large and too boisterous for his house, replacing them by pugs and King Charles spaniels and whatever other breeds of dog were the smallest. His father’s stable was also sold. For his own use, whether riding or driving, he had six black Shetland ponies, with four very choice piebald animals of New Forest breed.

‘Having thus settled his household entirely to his own satisfaction, it only remained for him to find some suitable companion with whom to share this paradise. Sir Hercules had a susceptible heart, and had more than once, between the ages of sixteen and twenty, felt what it was to love. But here his deformity had been a source of the most bitter humiliation, for, having once dared to declare himself to a young lady of his choice, he had been received with laughter. On his persisting, she had picked him up and shaken him like an importunate child, telling him to run away and plague her no more. The story soon got about – indeed, the young lady herself used to tell it as a particularly pleasant anecdote – and the taunts and mockery it occasioned were a source of the most acute distress to Hercules. From the poems written at this period we gather that he meditated taking his own life. In course of time, however, he lived down this humiliation; but never again, though he often fell in love, and that very passionately, did he dare to make any advances to those in whom he was interested. After coming to the estate and finding that he was in a position to create his own world as he desired it, he saw that, if he was to have a wife – which he very much desired, being of an affectionate and, indeed, amorous temper – he must choose her as he had chosen his servants – from among the race of dwarfs. But to find a suitable wife was, he found, a matter of some difficulty; for he would marry none who was not distinguished by beauty and gentle birth. The dwarfish daughter of Lord Bemboro he refused on the ground that besides being a pigmy she was hunchbacked; while another young lady, an orphan belonging to a very good family in Hampshire, was rejected by him because her face, like that of so many dwarfs, was wizened and repulsive. Finally, when he was almost despairing of success, he heard from a reliable source that Count Titimalo, a Venetian nobleman, possessed a daughter of exquisite beauty and great accomplishments, who was but three feet in height. Setting out at once for Venice, he went immediately on his arrival to pay his respects to the count, whom he found living with his wife and five children in a very mean apartment in one of the poorer quarters of the town. Indeed, the count was so far reduced in his circumstances that he was even then negotiating (so it was rumoured) with a travelling company of clowns and acrobats, who had had the misfortune to lose their performing dwarf, for the sale of his diminutive daughter Filomena. Sir Hercules arrived in time to save her from this untoward fate, for he was so much charmed by Filomena’s grace and beauty, that at the end of three days’ courtship he made her a formal offer of marriage, which was accepted by her no less joyfully than by her father, who perceived in an English son-in-law a rich and unfailing source of revenue. After an unostentatious marriage, at which the English ambassador acted as one of the witnesses, Sir Hercules and his bride returned by sea to England, where they settled down, as it proved, to a life of uneventful happiness.

‘Crome and its household of dwarfs delighted Filomena, who felt herself now for the first time to be a free woman living among her equals in a friendly world. She had many tastes in common with her husband, especially that of music. She had a beautiful voice, of a power surprising in one so small, and could touch A in alt without effort. Accompanied by her husband on his fine Cremona fiddle, which he played, as we have noted before, as one plays a bass viol, she would sing all the liveliest and tenderest airs from the operas and cantatas of her native country. Seated together at the harpsichord, they found that they could with their four hands play all the music written for two hands of ordinary size, a circumstance which gave Sir Hercules unfailing pleasure.

‘When they were not making music or reading together, which they often did, both in English and Italian, they spent their time in healthful outdoor exercises, sometimes rowing in a little boat on the lake, but more often riding or driving, occupations in which, because they were entirely new to her, Filomena especially delighted. When she had become a perfectly proficient rider, Filomena and her husband used often to go hunting in the park, at that time very much more extensive than it is now. They hunted not foxes nor hares, but rabbits, using a pack of about thirty black and fawn-coloured pugs, a kind of dog which, when not overfed, can course a rabbit as well as any of the smaller breeds. Four dwarf grooms, dressed in scarlet liveries and mounted on white Exmoor ponies, hunted the pack, while their master and mistress, in green habits, followed either on the black Shetlands or on the piebald New Forest ponies. A picture of the whole hunt – dogs, horses, grooms, and masters – was painted by William Stubbs, whose work Sir Hercules admired so much that he invited him, though a man of ordinary stature, to come and stay at the mansion for the purpose of executing this picture. Stubbs likewise painted a portrait of Sir Hercules and his lady driving in their green enamelled calash drawn by four black Shetlands. Sir Hercules wears a plum-coloured velvet coat and white breeches; Filomena is dressed in flowered muslin and a very large hat with pink feathers. The two figures in their gay carriage stand out sharply against a dark background of trees; but to the left of the picture the trees fall away and disappear, so that the four black ponies are seen against a pale and strangely lurid sky that has the golden-brown colour of thunder-clouds lighted up by the sun.

‘In this way four years passed happily by. At the end of that time Filomena found herself great with child. Sir Hercules was overjoyed. “If God is good,” he wrote in his day-book, “the name of Lapith will be preserved and our rarer and more delicate race transmitted through the generations until in the fullness of time the world shall recognize the superiority of those beings whom now it uses to make mock of.” On his wife’s being brought to bed of a son he wrote a poem to the same effect. The child was christened Ferdinando in memory of the builder of the house.

‘With the passage of the months a certain sense of disquiet began to invade the minds of Sir Hercules and his lady. For the child was growing with an extraordinary rapidity. At a year he weighed as much as Hercules had weighed when he was three. “Ferdinando goes crescendo,” wrote Filomena in her diary. “It seems not natural.” At eighteen months the baby was almost as tall as their smallest jockey, who was a man of thirty-six. Could it be that Ferdinando was destined to become a man of the normal, gigantic dimensions? It was a thought to which neither of his parents dared yet give open utterance, but in the secrecy of their respective diaries they brooded over it in terror and dismay.

‘On his third birthday Ferdinando was taller than his mother and not more than a couple of inches short of his father’s height. “Today for the first time,” wrote Sir Hercules, “we discussed the situation. The hideous truth can be concealed no longer: Ferdinando is not one of us. On this, his third birthday, a day when we should have been rejoicing at the health, the strength, and beauty of our child, we wept together over the ruin of our happiness. God give us strength to bear this cross.”

‘At the age of eight Ferdinando was so large and so exuberantly healthy that his parents decided, though reluctantly, to send him to school. He was packed off to Eton at the beginning of the next half. A profound peace settled upon the house. Ferdinando returned for the summer holidays larger and stronger than ever. One day he knocked down the butler and broke his arm. “He is rough, inconsiderate, unamenable to persuasion,” wrote his father. “The only thing that will teach him manners is corporal chastisement.” Ferdinando, who at this age was already seventeen inches taller than his father, received no corporal chastisement.

‘One summer holidays about three years later Ferdinando returned to Crome accompanied by a very large mastiff dog. He had bought it from an old man at Windsor who found the beast too expensive to feed. It was a savage, unreliable animal; hardly had it entered the house when it attacked one of Sir Hercules’s favourite pugs, seizing the creature in its jaws and shaking it till it was nearly dead. Extremely put out by this occurrence, Sir Hercules ordered that the beast should be chained up in the stable-yard. Ferdinando sullenly answered that the dog was his, and he would keep it where he pleased. His father, growing angry, bade him take the animal out of the house at once, on pain of his utmost displeasure. Ferdinando refused to move. His mother at this moment coming into the room, the dog flew at her, knocked her down, and in a twinkling had very severely mauled her arm and shoulder; in another instant it must infallibly have had her by the throat, had not Sir Hercules drawn his sword and stabbed the animal to the heart. Turning on his son, he ordered him to leave the room immediately, as being unfit to remain in the same place with the mother whom he had nearly murdered. So awe-inspiring was the spectacle of Sir Hercules standing with one foot on the carcase of the gigantic dog, his sword drawn and still bloody, so commanding were his voice, his gestures, and the expression of his face, that Ferdinando slunk out of the room in terror and behaved himself for all the rest of the vacation in an entirely exemplary fashion. His mother soon recovered from the bites of the mastiff, but the effect on her mind of this adventure was ineradicable; from that time forth she lived always among imaginary terrors.

‘The two years which Ferdinando spent on the Continent, making the Grand Tour, were a period of happy repose for his parents. But even now the thought of the future haunted them; nor were they able to solace themselves with all the diversions of their younger days. The Lady Filomena had lost her voice and Sir Hercules was grown too rheumatical to play the violin. He, it is true, still rode after his pugs, but his wife felt herself too old and, since the episode of the mastiff, too nervous for such sports. At most, to please her husband, she would follow the hunt at a distance in a little gig drawn by the safest and oldest of the Shetlands.

‘The day fixed for Ferdinando’s return came round. Filomena, sick with vague dreads and presentiments, retired to her chamber and her bed. Sir Hercules received his son alone. A giant in a brown travelling-suit entered the room. “Welcome home, my son,” said Sir Hercules in a voice that trembled a little.

‘“I hope I see you well, sir.” Ferdinando bent down to shake hands, then straightened himself up again. The top of his father’s head reached to the level of his hip.

‘Ferdinando had not come alone. Two friends of his own age accompanied him, and each of the young men had brought a servant. Not for thirty years had Crome been desecrated by the presence of so many members of the common race of men. Sir Hercules was appalled and indignant, but the laws of hospitality had to be obeyed. He received the young gentlemen with grave politeness and sent the servants to the kitchen, with orders that they should be well cared for.

‘The old family dining-table was dragged out into the light and dusted (Sir Hercules and his lady were accustomed to dine at a small table twenty inches high). Simon, the aged butler, who could only just look over the edge of the big table, was helped at supper by the three servants brought by Ferdinando and his guests.

‘Sir Hercules presided, and with his usual grace supported a conversation on the pleasures of foreign travel, the beauties of art and nature to be met with abroad, the opera at Venice, the singing of the orphans in the churches of the same city, and on other topics of a similar nature. The young men were not particularly attentive to his discourses; they were occupied in watching the efforts of the butler to change the plates and replenish the glasses. They covered their laughter by violent and repeated fits of coughing or choking. Sir Hercules affected not to notice, but changed the subject of the conversation to sport. Upon this one of the young men asked whether it was true, as he had heard, that he used to hunt the rabbit with a pack of pug dogs. Sir Hercules replied that it was, and proceeded to describe the chase in some detail. The young men roared with laughter.

‘When supper was over, Sr Hercules climbed down from his chair and, giving as his excuse that he must see how his lady did, bade them good-night. The sound of laughter followed him up the stairs. Filomena was not asleep; she had been lying on her bed listening to the sound of enormous laughter and the tread of strangely heavy feet on the stairs and along the corridors. Sir Hercules drew a chair to her bedside and sat there for a long time in silence, holding his wife’s hand and sometimes gently squeezing it. At about ten o’clock they were startled by a violent noise. There was a breaking of glass, a stamping of feet, with an outburst of shouts and laughter. The uproar continuing for several minutes, Sir Hercules rose to his feet and, in spite of his wife’s entreaties, prepared to go and see what was happening. There was no light on the staircase, and Sir Hercules groped his way down cautiously, lowering himself from stair to stair and standing for a moment on each tread before adventuring on a new step. The noise was louder here; the shouting articulated itself into recognizable words and phrases. A line of light was visible under the dining-room door. Sir Hercules tiptoed across the hall towards it. Just as he approached the door there was another terrific crash of breaking glass and jangled metal. What could they be doing? Standing on tiptoe he managed to look through the keyhole. In the middle of the ravaged table old Simon, the butler, so primed with drink that he could scarcely keep his balance, was dancing a jig. His feet crunched and tinkled among the broken glass, and his shoes were wet with spilt wine. The three young men sat round, thumping the table with their hands or with the empty wine bottles, shouting and laughing encouragement. The three servants leaning against the wall laughed too. Ferdinando suddenly threw a handful of walnuts at the dancer’s head, which so dazed and surprised the little man that he staggered and fell down on his back, upsetting a decanter and several glasses. They raised him up, gave him some brandy to drink, thumped him on the back. The old man smiled and hiccoughed, “Tomorrow,” said Ferdinando, “we’ll have a concerted ballet of the whole household.” “With father Hercules wearing his club and lion-skin,” added one of his companions, and all three roared with laughter.

‘Sir Hercules would look and listen no further. He crossed the hall once more and began to climb the stairs, lifting his knees painfully high at each degree. This was the end; there was no place for him now in the world, no place for him and Ferdinando together.

‘His wife was still awake; to her questioning glance he answered, “They are making mock of old Simon. Tomorrow it will be our turn.” They were silent for a time.

‘At last Filomena said, “I do not want to see tomorrow.”

‘“It is better not,” said Sir Hercules. Going into his closet he wrote in his day-book a full and particular account of all the events of the evening. While he was still engaged in this task he rang for a servant and ordered hot water and a bath to be made ready for him at eleven o’clock. When he had finished writing he went into his wife’s room, and preparing a dose of opium twenty times as strong as that which she was accustomed to take when she could not sleep, he brought it to her, saying, “Here is your sleeping-draught.”

‘Filomena took the glass and lay for a little time, but did not drink immediately. The tears came into her eyes. “Do you remember the songs we used to sing, sitting out there sulla terrazza in summer-time?” She began singing softly in her ghost of a cracked voice a few bars from Stradella’s “Amor, amor, non dormir piu.” “And you playing on the violin. It seems such a short time ago, and yet so long, long, long. Addio, amore. A rivederti.” She drank off the draught and, lying back on the pillow, closed her eyes. Sir Hercules kissed her hand and tiptoed away, as though he were afraid of waking her. He returned to his closet, and having recorded his wife’s last words to him, he poured into his bath the water that had been brought up in accordance with his orders. The water being too hot for him to get into the bath at once, he took down from the shelf his copy of Suetonius. He wished to read how Seneca had died. He opened the book at random. “But dwarfs,” he read, “he held in abhorrence as being lusus naturae and of evil omen.” He winced as though he had been struck. This same Augustus, he remembered, had exhibited in the amphitheatre a young man called Lucius, of good family, who was not quite two feet in height and weighed seventeen pounds, but had a stentorian voice. He turned over the pages. Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero: it was a tale of growing horror. “Seneca his preceptor, he forced to kill himself.” And there was Petronius, who had called his friends about him at the last, bidding them talk to him, not of the consolations of philosophy, but of love and gallantry, while the life was ebbing away through his opened veins. Dipping his pen once more in the ink he wrote on the last page of his diary: “He died a Roman death.” Then, putting the toes of one foot into the water and finding that it was not too hot, he threw off his dressing-gown and, taking a razor in his hand, sat down in the bath. With one deep cut he severed the artery in his left wrist, then lay back and composed his mind to meditation. The blood oozed out, floating through the water in dissolving wreaths and spirals. In a little while the whole bath was tinged with pink. The colour deepened; Sir Hercules felt himself mastered by an invincible drowsiness; he was sinking from vague dream to dream. Soon he was sound asleep. There was not much blood in his small body.’

CHAPTER XIV

FOR THEIR AFTER-LUNCHEON coffee the party generally adjourned to the library. Its windows looked east, and at this hour of the day it was the coolest place in the whole house. It was a large room, fitted, during the eighteenth century, with white painted shelves of an elegant design. In the middle of one wall a door, ingeniously upholstered with rows of dummy books, gave access to a deep cupboard, where, among a pile of letter-files and old newspapers, the mummy-case of an Egyptian lady, brought back by the second Sir Ferdinando on his return from the Grand Tour, mouldered in the darkness. From ten yards away and at a first glance, one might almost have mistaken this secret door for a section of shelving filled with genuine books. Coffee-cup in hand, Mr Scogan was standing in front of the dummy book-shelf. Between the sips he discoursed.

‘The bottom shelf,’ he was saying, ‘is taken up by an Encyclopaedia in fourteen volumes. Useful, but a little dull, as is also Caprimulge’s Dictionary of the Finnish Language. The Biographical Dictionary looks much more promising. Biography of Men who were Born Great, Biography of Men who Achieved Greatness, Biography of Men who had Greatness Thrust upon Them, and Biography of Men who were Never Great at All. Then there are ten volumes of Thom’s Works and Wanderings, while the Wild Goose Chase, a Novel, by an anonymous author, fills no less than six. But what’s this, what’s this?’ Mr Scogan stood on tiptoe and peered up. ‘Seven volumes of the Tales of Knockespotch. The Tales of Knockespotch,’ he repeated. ‘Ah, my dear Henry,’ he said, turning round, ‘these are your best books. I would willingly give all the rest of your library for them.’

The happy possessor of a multitude of first editions, Mr Wimbush could afford to smile indulgently.

‘Is it possible,’ Mr Scogan went on, ‘that they possess nothing more than a back and a title?’ He opened the cupboard door and peeped inside, as though he hoped to find the rest of the books behind it. ‘Phooh!’ he said, and shut the door again. ‘It smells of dust and mildew. How symbolical! One comes to the great masterpieces of the past, expecting some miraculous illumination, and one finds, on opening them, only darkness and dust and a faint smell of decay. After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one’s mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking. Still – the Tales of Knockespotch . . .’

He paused, and thoughtfully drummed with his fingers on the backs of the non-existent, unattainable books.

‘But I disagree with you about reading,’ said Mary. ‘About serious reading, I mean.’

‘Quite right, Mary, quite right,’ Mr Scogan answered. ‘I had forgotten there were any serious people in the room.’

‘I like the idea of the Biographies,’ said Denis. ‘There’s room for us all within the scheme; it’s comprehensive.’

‘Yes, the Biographies are good, the Biographies are excellent,’ Mr Scogan agreed. ‘I imagine them written in a very elegant Regency style – Brighton Pavilion in words – perhaps by the great Dr Lemprière himself. You know his classical dictionary? Ah!’ Mr Scogan raised his hand and let it limply fall again in a gesture which implied that words failed him. ‘Read his biography of Helen; read how Jupiter, disguised as a swan, was “enabled to avail himself of his situation” vis-à-vis to Leda. And to think that he may have, must have written these biographies of the Great! What a work, Henry! And, owing to the idiotic arrangement of your library, it can’t be read.’

‘I prefer the Wild Goose Chase,’ said Anne. ‘A novel in six volumes – it must be restful.’

‘Restful,’ Mr Scogan repeated. ‘You’ve hit on the right word. A Wild Goose Chase is sound, but a bit old-fashioned – pictures of clerical life in the fifties, you know; specimens of the landed gentry; peasants for pathos and comedy; and in the background, always the picturesque beauties of nature soberly described. All very good and solid, but, like certain puddings, just a little dull. Personally, I like much better the notion of Thom’s Works and Wanderings. The eccentric Mr Thom of Thom’s Hill. Old Tom Thom, as his intimates used to call him. He spent ten years in Tibet organizing the clarified butter industry on modern European lines, and was able to retire at thirty-six with a handsome fortune. The rest of his life he devoted to travel and ratiocination; here is the result.’ Mr Scogan tapped the dummy books. ‘And now we come to the Tales of Knockespotch. What a masterpiece and what a great man! Knockespotch knew how to write fiction. Ah, Denis, if you could only read Knockespotch you wouldn’t be writing a novel about the wearisome development of a young man’s character, you wouldn’t be describing in endless, fastidious detail, cultured life in Chelsea and Bloomsbury and Hampstead. You would be trying to write a readable book. But then, alas! owing to the peculiar arrangement of our host’s library, you never will read Knockespotch.’

‘Nobody could regret the fact more than I do,’ said Denis.

‘It was Knockespotch,’ Mr Scogan continued, ‘the great Knockespotch, who delivered us from the dreary tyranny of the realistic novel. My life, Knockespotch said, is not so long that I can afford to spend precious hours writing or reading descriptions of middle-class interiors. He said again, “I am tired of seeing the human mind bogged in a social plenum; I prefer to paint it in a vacuum, freely and sportively bombinating.”’

‘I say,’ said Gombauld, ‘Knockespotch was a little obscure sometimes, wasn’t he?’

‘He was,’ Mr Scogan replied, ‘and with intention. It made him seem even profounder than he actually was. But it was only in his aphorisms that he was so dark and oracular. In his Tales he was always luminous. Oh, those Tales – those Tales! How shall I describe them? Fabulous characters shoot across his pages like gaily dressed performers on the trapeze. There are extraordinary adventures and still more extraordinary speculations. Intelligences and emotions, relieved of all the imbecile preoccupations of civilized life, move in intricate and subtle dances, crossing and recrossing, advancing, retreating, impinging. An immense erudition and an immense fancy go hand in hand. All the ideas of the present and of the past, on every possible subject, bob up among the Tales, smile gravely or grimace a caricature of themselves, then disappear to make place for something new. The verbal surface of his writing is rich and fantastically diversified. The wit is incessant. The . . .’

‘But couldn’t you give us a specimen,’ Denis broke in – ‘a concrete example?’

‘Alas!’ Mr Scogan replied, ‘Knockespotch’s great book is like the sword Excalibur. It remains stuck fast in this door, awaiting the coming of a writer with genius enough to draw it forth. I am not even a writer, I am not so much as qualified to attempt the task. The extraction of Knockespotch from his wooden prison I leave, my dear Denis, to you.’

‘Thank you,’ said Denis.

CHAPTER XV

‘IN THE TIME of the amiable Brantôme,’ Mr Scogan was saying, ‘every debutante at the French Court was invited to dine at the King’s table, where she was served with wine in a handsome silver cup of Italian workmanship. It was no ordinary cup, this goblet of the debutantes; for, inside, it had been most curiously and ingeniously engraved with a series of very lively amorous scenes. With each draught that the young lady swallowed these engravings became increasingly visible, and the Court looked on with interest, every time she put her nose in the cup, to see whether she blushed at what the ebbing wine revealed. If the debutante blushed, they laughed at her for her innocence; if she did not, she was laughed at for being too knowing.’

‘Do you propose,’ asked Anne, ‘that the custom should be revived at Buckingham Palace?’

‘I do not,’ said Mr Scogan. ‘I merely quoted the anecdote as an illustration of the customs, so genially frank, of the sixteenth century. I might have quoted other anecdotes to show that the customs of the seventeenth and eighteenth, of the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, and indeed of every other century, from the time of Hammurabi onward, were equally genial and equally frank. The only century in which customs were not characterized by the same cheerful openness was the nineteenth, of blessed memory. It was the astonishing exception. And yet, with what one must suppose was a deliberate disregard of history, it looked upon its horribly pregnant silences as normal and natural and right; the frankness of the previous fifteen or twenty thousand years was considered abnormal and perverse. It was a curious phenomenon.’

‘I entirely agree.’ Mary panted with excitement in her effort to bring out what she had to say. ‘Havelock Ellis says . . .’

Mr Scogan, like a policeman arresting the flow of traffic, held up his hand. ‘He does; I know. And that brings me to my next point: the nature of the reaction.’

‘Havelock Ellis . . .’

‘The reaction, when it came – and we may say roughly that it set in a little before the beginning of this century – the reaction was to openness, but not to the same openness as had reigned in the earlier ages. It was to a scientific openness, not to the jovial frankness of the past, that we returned. The whole question of Amour became a terribly serious one. Earnest young men wrote in the public prints that from this time forth it would be impossible ever again to make a joke of any sexual matter. Professors wrote thick books in which sex was sterilized and dissected. It has become customary for serious young women, like Mary, to discuss, with philosophic calm, matters of which the merest hint would have sufficed to throw the youth of the sixties into a delirium of amorous excitement. It is all very estimable, no doubt. But still’ – Mr Scogan sighed – ‘I for one should like to see, mingled with this scientific ardour, a little more of the jovial spirit of Rabelais and Chaucer.’

‘I entirely disagree with you,’ said Mary. ‘Sex isn’t a laughing matter; it’s serious.’

‘Perhaps,’ answered Mr Scogan, ‘perhaps I’m an obscene old man, for I must confess that I cannot always regard it as wholly serious.’

‘But I tell you . . .’ began Mary furiously. Her face had flushed with excitements. Her cheeks were the cheeks of a great ripe peach.

‘Indeed,’ Mr Scogan continued, ‘it seems to me one of the few permanently and everlasting amusing subjects that exist. Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.’

‘I entirely disagree,’ said Mary. There was a silence.

Anne looked at her watch. ‘Nearly a quarter to eight,’ she said. ‘I wonder when Ivor will turn up.’ She got up from her deck-chair and, leaning her elbows on the balustrade of the terrace, looked out over the valley and towards the farther hills. Under the level evening light the architecture of the land revealed itself. The deep shadows, the bright contrasting lights gave the hills a new solidity. Irregularities of the surface, unsuspected before, were picked out with light and shade. The grass, the corn, the foliage of trees were stippled with intricate shadows. The surface of things had taken on a marvellous enrichment.

‘Look!’ said Anne suddenly, and pointed. On the opposite side of the valley, at the crest of the ridge, a cloud of dust flushed by the sunlight to rosy gold was moving rapidly along the sky-line. ‘It’s Ivor. One can tell by the speed.’

The dust cloud descended into the valley and was lost. A horn with the voice of a sea-lion made itself heard, approaching. A minute later Ivor came leaping round the corner of the house. His hair waved in the wind of his own speed; he laughed as he saw them.

‘Anne darling,’ he cried, and embraced her, embraced Mary, very nearly embraced Mr Scogan. ‘Well, here I am. I’ve come with incredulous speed.’ Ivor’s vocabulary was rich, but a little erratic. ‘I’m not late for dinner, am I?’ He hoisted himself up on to the balustrade, and sat there, kicking his heels. With one arm he embraced a large stone flowerpot, leaning his head sideways against its hard and lichenous flanks in an attitude of trustful affection. He had brown, wavy hair, and his eyes were of a very brilliant, pale, improbable blue. His head was narrow, his face thin and rather long, his nose aquiline. In old age – though it was difficult to imagine Ivor old – he might grow to have an Iron Ducal grimness. But now, at twenty-six, it was not the structure of his face that impressed one; it was its expression. That was charming and vivacious, and his smile was an irradiation. He was for ever moving, restlessly and rapidly, but with an engaging gracefulness. His frail and slender body seemed to be fed by a spring of inexhaustible energy.

‘No, you’re not late.’

‘You’re in time to answer a question,’ said Mr Scogan. ‘We were arguing whether Amour were a serious matter or no. What do you think? Is it serious?’

‘Serious?’ echoed Ivor. ‘Most certainly.’

‘I told you so,’ cried Mary triumphantly.

‘But in what sense serious?’ Mr Scogan asked.

‘I mean as an occupation. One can go on with it without ever getting bored.’

‘I see,’ said Mr Scogan. ‘Perfectly.’

‘One can occupy oneself with it,’ Ivor continued, ‘always and everywhere. Women are always wonderfully the same. Shapes vary a little, that’s all. In Spain’ – with his free hand he described a series of ample curves – ‘one can’t pass them on the stairs. In England’ – he put the tip of his forefinger against the tip of his thumb and, lowering his hand, drew out this circle into an imaginary cylinder – ‘in England they’re tubular. But their sentiments are always the same. At least, I’ve always found it so.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it,’ said Mr Scogan.

CHAPTER XVI

THE LADIES HAD left the room and the port was circulating. Mr Scogan filled his glass, passed on the decanter, and, leaning back in his chair, looked about him for a moment in silence. The conversation rippled idly round him, but he disregarded it; he was smiling at some private joke. Gombauld noticed his smile.

‘What’s amusing you?’ he asked.

‘I was just looking at you all, sitting round this table,’ said Mr Scogan.

‘Are we as comic as all that?’

‘Not at all,’ Mr Scogan answered politely. ‘I was merely amused by my own speculations.’

‘And what were they?’

‘The idlest, the most academic of speculations. I was looking at you one by one and trying to imagine which of the first Caesars you would each resemble, if you were given the opportunity of behaving like a Caesar. The Caesars are one of my touchstones,’ Mr Scogan explained. ‘They are characters functioning, so to speak, in the void. They are human beings developed to their logical conclusions. Hence their unequalled value as a touchstone, a standard. When I meet someone for the first time, I ask myself this question: Given the Caesarean environment, which of the Caesars would this person resemble – Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero? I take each trait of character, each mental and emotional bias, each little oddity, and magnify them a thousand times. The resulting image gives me his Caesarean formula.’

‘And which of the Caesars do you resemble?’ asked Gombauld.

‘I am potentially all of them,’ Mr Scogan replied, ‘all – with the possible exception of Claudius, who was much too stupid to be a development of anything in my character. The seeds of Julius’s courage and compelling energy, of Augustus’s prudence, of the libidinousness and cruelty of Tiberius, of Caligula’s folly, of Nero’s artistic genius and enormous vanity, are all within me. Given the opportunities, I might have been something fabulous. But circumstances were against me. I was born and brought up in a country rectory; I passed my youth doing a great deal of utterly senseless hard work for a very little money. The result is that now, in middle age, I am the poor thing that I am. But perhaps it is as well. Perhaps, too, it’s as well that Denis hasn’t been permitted to flower into a little Nero, and that Ivor remains only potentially a Caligula. Yes, it’s better so, no doubt. But it would have been more amusing, as a spectacle, if they had had the chance to develop, untrammelled, the full horror of their potentialities. It would have been pleasant and interesting to watch their tics and foibles and little vices swelling and burgeoning and blossoming into enormous and fantastic flowers of cruelty and pride and lewdness and avarice. The Caesaraean environment makes the Caesar, as the special food and the queenly cell make the queen bee. We differ from the bees in so far that, given the proper food, they can be sure of making a queen every time. With us there is no such certainty; out of every ten men placed in the Caesarean environment one will be temperamentally good, or intelligent, or great. The rest will blossom into Caesars; he will not. Seventy and eighty years ago simple-minded people, reading of the exploits of the Bourbons in South Italy, cried out in amazement: To think that such things should be happening in the nineteenth century! And a few years since we too were astonished to find that in our still more astonishing twentieth century, unhappy blackamoors on the Congo and the Amazon were being treated as English serfs were treated in the time of Stephen. Today we are no longer surprised at these things. The Black and Tans harry Ireland, the Poles maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti slaughter their poorer countrymen: we take it all for granted. Since the war we wonder at nothing. We have created a Caesarean environment and a host of little Caesars has sprung up. What could be more natural?’

Mr Scogan drank off what was left of his port and refilled the glass.

‘At this very moment,’ he went on, ‘the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not. We feel sympathy, no doubt; we represent to ourselves imaginatively the sufferings of nations and individuals and we deplore them. But, after all, what are sympathy and imagination? Precious little, unless the person for whom we feel sympathy happens to be closely involved in our affections; and even then they don’t go very far. And a good thing too; for if one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other people, one would never have a moment’s peace of mind. A really sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness. But luckily, as I’ve already said, we aren’t a sympathetic race. At the beginning of the war I used to think I really suffered, through imagination and sympathy, with those who physically suffered. But after a month or two I had to admit that, honestly, I didn’t. And yet I think I have a more vivid imagination than most. One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.’

There was a pause. Henry Wimbush pushed back his chair.

‘I think perhaps we ought to go and join the ladies,’ he said.

‘So do I,’ said Ivor, jumping up with alacrity. He turned to Mr Scogan. ‘Fortunately,’ he said, ‘we can share our pleasures. We are not always condemned to be happy alone.’

 CHAPTER XVII

IVOR BROUGHT HIS hands down with a bang on to the final chord of his rhapsody. There was just a hint in that triumphant harmony that the seventh had been struck along with the octave by the thumb of the left hand; but the general effect of splendid noise emerged clearly enough. Small details matter little so long as the general effect is good. And, besides, that hint of the seventh was decidedly modern. He turned round in his seat and tossed the hair back out of his eyes.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s the best I can do for you, I’m afraid.’

Murmurs of applause and gratitude were heard, and Mary, her large china eyes fixed on the performer, cried out aloud, ‘Wonderful!’ and gasped for new breath as though she were suffocating.

Nature and fortune had vied with one another in heaping on Ivor Lombard all their choicest gifts. He had wealth and he was perfectly independent. He was good looking, possessed an irresistible charm of manner, and was the hero of more amorous successes than he could well remember. His accomplishments were extraordinary for their number and variety. He had a beautiful untrained tenor voice; he could improvise, with a startling brilliance, rapidly and loudly, on the piano. He was a good amateur medium and telepathist, and had a considerable first-hand knowledge of the next world. He could write rhymed verses with an extraordinary rapidity. For painting symbolical pictures he had a dashing style, and if the drawing was sometimes a little weak, the colour was always pyrotechnical. He excelled in amateur theatricals and, when occasion offered, he could cook with genius. He resembled Shakespeare in knowing little Latin and less Greek. For a mind like his, education seemed supererogatory. Training would only have destroyed his natural aptitudes.

‘Let’s go out into the garden,’ Ivor suggested. ‘It’s a wonderful night.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Scogan, ‘but I for one prefer these still more wonderful arm-chairs.’ His pipe had begun to bubble oozily every time he pulled at it. He was perfectly happy.

Henry Wimbush was also happy. He looked for a moment over his pince-nez in Ivor’s direction and then, without saying anything, returned to the grimy little sixteenth-century account books which were now his favourite reading. He knew more about Sir Ferdinando’s household expenses than about his own.

The outdoor party, enrolled under Ivor’s banner, consisted of Anne, Mary, Denis, and, rather unexpectedly, Jenny. Outside it was warm and dark; there was no moon. They walked up and down the terrace, and Ivor sang a Neapolitan song: ‘Stretti, stretti’ – close, close – with something about the little Spanish girl to follow. The atmosphere began to palpitate. Ivor put his arm round Anne’s waist, dropped his head sideways on to her shoulder, and in that position walked on, singing as he walked. It seemed the easiest, the most natural, thing in the world. Denis wondered why he had never done it. He hated Ivor.

‘Let’s go down to the pool,’ said Ivor. He disengaged his embrace and turned round to shepherd his little flock. They made their way along the side of the house to the entrance of the yew-tree walk that led down to the lower garden. Between the blank precipitous wall of the house and the tall yew trees the path was a chasm of impenetrable gloom. Somewhere there were steps down to the right, a gap in the yew hedge. Denis, who headed the party, groped his way cautiously; in this darkness, one had an irrational fear of yawning precipices, of horrible spiked obstructions. Suddenly from behind him he heard a shrill, startled, ‘Oh!’ and then a sharp, dry concussion that might have been the sound of a slap. After that, Jenny’s voice was heard pronouncing, ‘I am going back to the house.’ Her tone was decided, and even as she pronounced the words she was melting away into the darkness. The incident, whatever it had been, was closed. Denis resumed his forward groping. From somewhere behind Ivor began to sing again, softly:

‘Phillis plus avare que tendre,

Ne gagnant rien à refuser,

Un jour exigea à Silvandre

Trente moutons pour un baiser.’

The melody drooped and climbed again with a kind of easy languor; the warm darkness seemed to pulse like blood about them.

‘Le lendemain, nouvelle affaire:

Pour le berger, le troc fut bon . . .’

‘Here are the steps,’ cried Denis. He guided his companions over the danger, and in a moment they had the turf of the yew-tree walk under their feet. It was lighter here, or at least it was just perceptibly less dark; for the yew walk was wider than the path that had led them under the lea of the house. Looking up, they could see between the high black hedges a strip of sky and a few stars.

‘Car il obtint de la bergère . . .’

went on Ivor, and then interrupted himself to shout, ‘I’m going to run down,’ and he was off, full speed, down the invisible slope, singing unevenly as he went:

‘Trente baisers pour un mouton.’

The others followed. Denis shambled in the rear, vainly exhorting everyone to caution: the slope was steep, one might break one’s neck. What was wrong with these people, he wondered? They had become like young kittens after a dose of cat-nip. He himself felt a certain kittenishness sporting within him; but it was, like all his emotions, rather a theoretical feeling; it did not overmasteringly seek to express itself in a practical demonstration of kittenishness.

‘Be careful,’ he shouted once more, and hardly were the words out of his mouth when, thump! there was the sound of a heavy fall in front of him, followed by the long ‘F-f-f-f-f of a breath indrawn with pain and afterwards by a very sincere, ‘Oo-ooh!’ Denis was almost pleased; he had told them so, the idiots, and they wouldn’t listen. He trotted down the slope towards the unseen sufferer.

Mary came down the hill like a runaway steam-engine. It was tremendously exciting, this blind rush through the dark; she felt she would never stop. But the ground grew level beneath her feet, her speed insensibly slackened, and suddenly she was caught by an extended arm and brought to an abrupt halt.

‘Well,’ said Ivor as he tightened his embrace, ‘you’re caught now, Anne.’

She made an effort to release herself. ‘It’s not Anne. It’s Mary.’

Ivor burst into a peal of amused laughter. ‘So it is!’ he exclaimed. ‘I seem to be making nothing but floaters this evening. I’ve already made one with Jenny.’ He laughed again, and there was something so jolly about his laughter that Mary could not help laughing too. He did not remove his encircling arm, and somehow it was all so amusing and natural that Mary made no further attempt to escape from it. They walked along by the side of the pool, interlaced. Mary was too short for him to be able, with any comfort, to lay his head on her shoulder. He rubbed his cheek, caressed and caressing, against the thick, sleek mass of her hair. In a little while he began to sing again; the night trembled amorously to the sound of his voice. When he had finished he kissed her. Anne or Mary: Mary or Anne. It didn’t seem to make much difference which it was. There were differences in detail, of course; but the general effect was the same; and, after all, the general effect was the important thing.

Denis made his way down the hill.

‘Any damage done?’ he called out.

‘Is that you, Denis? I’ve hurt my ankle so – and my knee, and my hand. I’m all in pieces.’

‘My poor Anne,’ he said. ‘But then,’ he couldn’t help adding, ‘it was silly to start running downhill in the dark.’

‘Ass!’ she retorted in a tone of tearful irritation; ‘of course it was.’

He sat down beside her on the grass, and found himself breathing the faint, delicious atmosphere of perfume that she carried always with her.

‘Light a match,’ she commanded. ‘I want to look at my wounds.’

He felt in his pockets for the match-box. The light spurted and then grew steady. Magically, a little universe had been created, a world of colours and forms – Anne’s face, the shimmering orange of her dress, her white, bare arms, a patch of green turf – and round about a darkness that had become solid and utterly blind. Anne held out her hands; both were green and earthy with her fall, and the left exhibited two or three red abrasions.

‘Not so bad,’ she said. But Denis was terribly distressed, and his emotion was intensified when, looking up at her face, he saw that the trace of tears, involuntary tears of pain, lingered on her eyelashes. He pulled out his handkerchief and began to wipe away the dirt from the wounded hand. The match went out; it was not worth while to light another. Anne allowed herself to be attended to, meekly and gratefully. ‘Thank you,’ she said, when he had finished cleaning and bandaging her hand; and there was something in her tone that made him feel that she had lost her superiority over him, that she was younger than he, had become, suddenly, almost a child. He felt tremendously large and protective. The feeling was so strong that instinctively he put his arm about her. She drew closer, leaned against him, and so they sat in silence. Then, from below, soft but wonderfully clear through the still darkness, they heard the sound of Ivor’s singing. He was going on with his half-finished song:

‘Le lendemain Phillis plus tendre,

Ne voulant déplaire au berger,

Fut trop heureuse de lui rendre

Trente moutons pour un baiser.’

There was a rather prolonged pause. It was as though time were being allowed for the giving and receiving of a few of those thirty kisses. Then the voice sang on:

‘Le lendemain Phillis peu sage

Aurait donné moutons et chien

Pour un baiser que le volage

A Lisette donnait pour rien.’

The last note died away into an uninterrupted silence.

‘Are you better?’ Denis whispered. ‘Are you comfortable like this?’

She nodded a Yes to both questions.

‘Trente moutons pour un baiser.’ The sheep, the woolly mutton – baa, baa, baa . . .? Or the shepherd? Yes, decidedly, he felt himself to be the shepherd now. He was the master, the protector. A wave of courage swelled through him, warm as wine. He turned his head, and began to kiss her face, at first rather randomly, then, with more precision, on the mouth.

Anne averted her head; he kissed the ear, the smooth nape that this movement presented him. ‘No,’ she protested; ‘no, Denis.’

‘Why not?’

‘It spoils our friendship, and that was so jolly.’

‘Bosh!’ said Denis.

She tried to explain. ‘Can’t you see,’ she said, ‘it isn’t . . . it isn’t our stunt at all.’ It was true. Somehow she had never thought of Denis in the light of a man who might make love; she had never so much as conceived the possibilities of an amorous relationship with him. He was so absurdly young, so . . . so . . . she couldn’t find the adjective, but she knew what she meant.

‘Why isn’t it our stunt?’ asked Denis. ‘And, by the way, that’s a horrible and inappropriate expression.’

‘Because it isn’t.’

‘But if I say it is?’

‘It makes no difference. I say it isn’t.’

‘I shall make you say it is.’

‘All right, Denis. But you must do it another time. I must go in and get my ankle into hot water. It’s beginning to swell.’

Reasons of health could not be gainsaid. Denis got up reluctantly, and helped his companion to her feet. She took a cautious step. ‘Ooh!’ She halted and leaned heavily on his arm.

‘I’ll carry you,’ Denis offered. He had never tried to carry a woman, but on the cinema it always looked an easy piece of heroism.

‘You couldn’t,’ said Anne.

‘Of course I can.’ He felt larger and more protective than ever. ‘Put your arms round my neck,’ he ordered. She did so and, stooping, he picked her up under the knees and lifted her from the ground. Good heavens, what a weight! He took five staggering steps up the slope, then almost lost his equilibrium, and had to deposit his burden suddenly, with something of a bump.

Anne was shaking with laughter. ‘I said you couldn’t, my poor Denis.’

‘I can,’ said Denis, without conviction. ‘I’ll try again.’

‘It’s perfectly sweet of you to offer, but I’d rather walk, thanks.’ She laid her hand on his shoulder and, thus supported, began to limp slowly up the hill.

‘My poor Denis!’ she repeated, and laughed again. Humiliated, he was silent. It seemed incredible that, only two minutes ago, he should have been holding her in his embrace, kissing her. Incredible. She was helpless then, a child. Now she had regained all her superiority; she was once more the far-off being, desired and unassailable. Why had he been such a fool as to suggest that carrying stunt? He reached the house in a state of the profoundest depression.

He helped Anne upstairs, left her in the hands of a maid, and came down again to the drawing-room. He was surprised to find them all sitting just where he had left them. He had expected that, somehow, everything would be quite different – it seemed such a prodigious time since he went away. All silent and all damned, he reflected, as he looked at them. Mr Scogan’s pipe still wheezed; that was the only sound. Henry Wimbush was still deep in his account books; he had just made the discovery that Sir Ferdinando was in the habit of eating oysters the whole summer through, regardless of the absence of the justifying R. Gombauld, in horn-rimmed spectacles, was reading. Jenny was mysteriously scribbling in her red notebook. And, seated in her favourite arm-chair at the corner of the hearth, Priscilla was looking through a pile of drawings. One by one she held them out at arm’s length and, throwing back her mountainous orange head, looked long and attentively through half-closed eyelids. She wore a pale sea-green’ dress; on the slope of her mauve-powdered décolletage diamonds twinkled. An immensely long cigarette-holder projected at an angle from her face. Diamonds were embedded in her high-piled coiffure; they glittered every time she moved. It was a batch of Ivor’s drawings – sketches of Spirit Life, made in the course of tranced tours through the other world. On the back of each sheet descriptive titles were written: ‘Portrait of an Angel, 15th March ’20’; ‘Astral Beings at Play, 3rd December ’19’; ‘A Party of Souls on their Way to a Higher Sphere, 21st May ’21.’ Before examining the drawing on the obverse of each sheet, she turned it over to read the title. Try as she could – and she tried hard – Priscilla had never seen a vision or succeeded in establishing any communication with the Spirit World. She had to be content with the reported experiences of others.

‘What have you done with the rest of your party?’ she asked, looking up as Denis entered the room.

He explained. Anne had gone to bed, Ivor and Mary were still in the garden. He selected a book and a comfortable chair, and tried, as far as the disturbed state of his mind would permit him, to compose himself for an evening’s reading. The lamplight was utterly serene; there was no movement save the stir of Priscilla among her papers. All silent and all damned, Denis repeated to himself, all silent and all damned. . . .

It was nearly an hour later when Ivor and Mary made their appearance.

‘We waited to see the moon rise,’ said Ivor.

‘It was gibbous, you know,’ Mary explained, very technical and scientific.

‘It was so beautiful down in the garden! The trees, the scent of the flowers, the stars . . .’ Ivor waved his arms. ‘And when the moon came up, it was really too much. It made me burst into tears.’ He sat down at the piano and opened the lid.

‘There were a great many meteorites,’ said Mary to anyone who would listen. ‘The earth must just be coming into the summer shower of them. In July and August . . .’

But Ivor had already begun to strike the keys. He played the garden, the stars, the scent of flowers, the rising moon. He even put in a nightingale that was not there. Mary looked on and listened with parted lips. The others pursued their occupations, without appearing to be seriously disturbed. On this very July day, exactly three hundred and fifty years ago, Sir Ferdinando had eaten seven dozen oysters. The discovery of this fact gave Henry Wimbush a peculiar pleasure. He had a natural piety which made him delight in the celebration of memorial feasts. The three hundred and fiftieth anniversay of the seven dozen oysters. . . . He wished he had known before dinner; he would have ordered champagne.

On her way to bed Mary paid a call. The light was out in Anne’s room, but she was not yet asleep.

‘Why didn’t you come down to the garden with us?’ Mary asked.

‘I fell down and twisted my ankle, Denis helped me home.’

Mary was full of sympathy. Inwardly, too, she was relieved to find Anne’s non-appearance so simply accounted for. She had been vaguely suspicious, down there in the garden – suspicious of what, she hardly knew; but there had seemed to be something a little louche in the way she had suddenly found herself alone with Ivor. Not that she minded, of course; far from it. But she didn’t like the idea that perhaps she was the victim of a put-up job.

‘I do hope you’ll be better tomorrow,’ she said, and she commiserated with Anne on all she had missed – the garden, the stars, the scent of flowers, the meteorites through whose summer shower the earth was now passing, the rising moon and its gibbosity. And then they had had such interesting conversation. What about? About almost everything. Nature, art, science, poetry, the stars, spiritualism, the relations of the sexes, music, religion. Ivor, she thought, had an interesting mind.

The two young ladies parted affectionately.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE NEAREST ROMAN Catholic church was upwards of twenty miles away. Ivor, who was punctilious in his devotions, came down early to breakfast and had his car at the door, ready to start, by a quarter to ten. It was a smart, expensive-looking machine, enamelled a pure lemon yellow and upholstered in emerald green leather. There were two seats – three if you squeezed tightly enough – and their occupants were protected from wind, dust, and weather by a glazed sedan that rose, an elegant eighteenth-century hump, from the midst of the body of the car.

Mary had never been to a Roman Catholic service, thought it would be an interesting experience, and, when the car moved off through the great gates of the courtyard, she was occupying the spare seat in the sedan. The sea-lion horn roared, faintlier, faintlier, and they were gone.

In the parish church of Crome Mr Bodiham preached on 1 Kings vi. 18: ‘And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops’ – a sermon of immediate local interest. For the past two years the problem of the War Memorial had exercised the minds of all those in Crome who had enough leisure, or mental energy, or party spirit to think of such things. Henry Wimbush was all for a library – a library of local literature, stocked with county histories, old maps of the district, monographs on the local antiquities, dialect dictionaries, handbooks of the local geology and natural history. He liked to think of the villagers, inspired by such reading, making up parties of a Sunday afternoon to look for fossils and flint arrow-heads. The villagers themselves favoured the idea of a memorial reservoir and water supply. But the busiest and most articulate party followed Mr Bodiham in demanding something religious in character – a second lich-gate, for example, a stained-glass window, a monument of marble, or, if possible, all three. So far, however, nothing had been done, partly because the memorial committee had never been able to agree, partly for the more cogent reason that too little money had been subscribed to carry out any of the proposed schemes. Every three or four months Mr Bodiham preached a sermon on the subject. His last had been delivered in March; it was high time that his congregation had a fresh reminder.

‘And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops.’

Mr Bodiham touched lightly on Solomon’s temple. From thence he passed to temples and churches in general. What were the characteristics of these buildings dedicated to God? Obviously, the fact of their, from a human point of view, complete uselessness. They were unpractical buildings ‘carved with knops.’ Solomon might have built a library – indeed, what could be more to the taste of the world’s wisest man? He might have dug a reservoir – what more useful in a parched city like Jerusalem? He did neither; he built a house all carved with knops, useless and unpractical. Why? Because he was dedicating the work to God. There had been much talk in Crome about the proposed War Memorial. A War Memorial was, in its very nature, a work dedicated to God. It was a token of thankfulness that the first stage in the culminating world-war had been crowned by the triumph of righteousness; it was at the same time a visibly embodied supplication that God might not long delay the Advent which alone could bring the final peace. A library, a reservoir? Mr Bodiham scornfully and indignantly condemned the idea. These were works dedicated to man, not to God. As a War Memorial they were totally unsuitable. A lich-gate had been suggested. This was an object which answered perfectly to the definition of a War Memorial: a useless work dedicated to God and carved with knops. One lich-gate, it was true, already existed. But nothing would be easier than to make a second entrance into the churchyard; and a second entrance would need a second gate. Other suggestions had been made. Stained-glass windows, a monument of marble. Both these were admirable, especially the latter. It was high time that the War Memorial was erected. It might soon be too late. At any moment, like a thief in the night, God might come. Meanwhile a difficulty stood in the way. Funds were inadequate. All should subscribe according to their means. Those who had lost relations in the war might reasonably be expected to subscribe a sum equal to that which they would have had to pay in funeral expenses if the relative had died while at home. Further delay was disastrous. The War Memorial must be built at once. He appealed to the patriotism and the Christian sentiments of all his hearers.

Henry Wimbush walked home thinking of the books he would present to the War Memorial Library, if ever it came into existence. He took the path through the fields; it was pleasanter than the road. At the first stile a group of village boys, loutish young fellows all dressed in the hideous ill-fitting black which makes a funeral of every English Sunday and holiday, were assembled, drearily guffawing as they smoked their cigarettes. They made way for Henry Wimbush, touching their caps as he passed. He returned their salute; his bowler and face were one in their unruffled gravity.

In Sir Ferdinando’s time, he reflected, in the time of his son, Sir Julius, these young men would have had their Sunday diversions even at Crome, remote and rustic Crome. There would have been archery, skittles, dancing – social amusements in which they would have partaken as members of a conscious community. Now they had nothing, nothing except Mr Bodiham’s forbidding Boys’ Club and the rare dances and concerts organized by himself. Boredom or the urban pleasures of the county metropolis were the alternatives that presented themselves to these poor youths. Country pleasures were no more; they had been stamped out by the Puritans.

In Manningham’s Diary for 1600 there was a queer passage, he remembered, a very queer passage. Certain magistrates in Berkshire, Puritan magistrates, had had wind of a scandal. One moonlit summer night they had ridden out with their posse and there, among the hills, they had come upon a company of men and women, dancing, stark naked, among the sheep-cotes. The magistrates and their men had ridden their horses into the crowd. How self-conscious the poor people must suddenly have felt, how helpless without their clothes against armed and booted horsemen! The dancers are arrested, whipped, gaoled, set in the stocks; the moonlight dance is never danced again. What old, earthy, Panic rite came to extinction here? he wondered. Who knows? – perhaps their ancestors had danced like this in the moonlight ages before Adam and Eve were so much as thought of. He liked to think so. And now it was no more. These weary young men, if they wanted to dance, would have to bicycle six miles to the town. The country was desolate, without life of its own, without indigenous pleasures. The pious magistrates had snuffed out for ever a little happy flame that had burned from the beginning of time.

‘And as on Tullia’s tomb one lamp burned clear,

Unchanged for fifteen hundred year . . .’

He repeated the lines to himself, and was desolated to think of all the murdered past.

CHAPTER XIX

HENRY WIMBUSH’S LONG cigar burned aromatically. The History of Crome lay on his knee; slowly be turned over the pages.

‘I can’t decide what episode to read you tonight,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Sir Ferdinando’s voyages are not without interest. Then, of course, there’s his son, Sir Julius. It was he who suffered from the delusion that his perspiration engendered flies; it drove him finally to suicide. Or there’s Sir Cyprian.’ He turned the pages more rapidly. ‘Or Sir Henry. Or Sir George. . . . No, I’m inclined to think I won’t read about any of these.’

‘But you must read something,’ insisted Mr Scogan, taking his pipe out of his mouth.

‘I think I shall read about my grandfather,’ said Henry Wimbush, ‘and the events that led up to his marriage with the eldest daughter of the last Sir Ferdinando.’

‘Good,’ said Mr Scogan. ‘We are listening.’

‘Before I begin reading,’ said Henry Wimbush, looking up from the book and taking off the pince-nez which he had just fitted to his nose – ‘before I begin, I must say a few preliminary words about Sir Ferdinando, the last of the Lapiths. At the death of the virtuous and unfortunate Sir Hercules, Ferdinando found himself in possession of the family fortune, not a little increased by his father’s temperance and thrift; he applied himself forthwith to the task of spending it, which he did in an ample and jovial fashion. By the time he was forty he had eaten and, above all, drunk and loved away about half his capital, and would infallibly have soon got rid of the rest in the same manner, if he had not had the good fortune to become so madly enamoured of the Rector’s daughter as to make a proposal of marriage. The young lady accepted him, and in less than a year had become the absolute mistress of Crome and her husband. An extraordinary reformation made itself apparent in Sir Ferdinando’s character. He grew regular and economical in his habits; he even became temperate, rarely drinking more than a bottle and a half of port at a sitting. The waning fortune of the Lapiths began once more to wax, and that in despite of the hard times (for Sir Ferdinando married in 1809 in the height of the Napoleonic Wars). A prosperous and dignified old age, cheered by the spectacle of his children’s growth and happiness – for Lady Lapith had already borne him three daughters, and there seemed no good reason why she should not bear many more of them, and sons as well – a patriarchal decline into the family vault, seemed now to be Sir Ferdinando’s enviable destiny. But Providence willed otherwise. To Napolebn, cause already of such infinite mischief, was due, though perhaps indirectly, the untimely arid violent death which put a period to this reformed existence.

‘Sir Ferdinando, who was above all things a patriot, had adopted, from the earliest days of the conflict with the French, his own peculiar method of celebrating our victories. When the happy news reached London, it was his custom to purchase immediately a large store of liquor and, taking a place on whichever of the outgoing coaches he happened to light on first, to drive through the country proclaiming the good news to all he met on the road and dispensing it, along with the liquor, at every stopping-place to all who cared to listen or drink. Thus, after the Nile, he had driven as far as Edinburgh; and later, when the coaches, wreathed with laurel for triumph, with cypress for mourning, were setting out with the news of Nelson’s victory and death, he sat through all a chilly October night in the box of the Norwich Meteor with a nautical keg of rum on his knees and two cases of old brandy under the seat. This genial custom was one of the many habits which he abandoned on his marriage. The victories in the Peninsula, the retreat from Moscow, Leipzig, and the abdication of the tyrant all went uncelebrated. It so happened, however, that in the summer of 1815 Sir Ferdinando was staying for a few weeks in the capital. There had been a succession of anxious, doubtful days; then came the glorious news of Waterloo. It was too much for Sir Ferdinando; his joyous youth awoke again within him. He hurried to his wine merchant and bought a dozen bottles of 1760 brandy. The Bath coach was on the point of starting; he bribed his way on to the box and, seated in glory beside the driver, proclaimed aloud the downfall of the Corsican bandit and passed about the warm liquid joy. They clattered through Uxbridge, Slough, Maidenhead. Sleeping Reading was awakened by the great news. At Didcot one of the ostlers was so much overcome by patriotic emotions and the 1760 brandy that he found it impossible to do up the buckles of the harness. The night began to grow chilly, and Sir Ferdinando found that it was not enough to take a nip at every stage: to keep up his vital warmth he was compelled to drink between the stages as well. They were approaching Swindon. The coach was travelling at a dizzy speed – six miles in the last half-hour – when, without having manifested the’ slightest premonitory symptom of unsteadiness, Sir Ferdinando suddenly toppled sideways off his seat and fell, head foremost, into the road. An unpleasant jolt awakened the slumbering passengers. The coach was brought to a standstill; the guard ran back with a light. He found Sir Ferdinando still alive, but unconscious; blood was oozing from his mouth. The back wheels of the coach had passed over his body, breaking most of his ribs and both arms. His skull was fractured in two places. They picked him up, but he was dead before they reached the next stage. So perished Sir Ferdinando, a victim to his own patriotism. Lady Lapith did not marry again, but determined to devote the rest of her life to the well-being of her three children – Georgiana, now five years old, and Emmeline and Caroline, twins of two.’

Henry Wimbush paused, and once more put on his pincenez. ‘So much by way of introduction,’ he said. ‘Now I can begin to read about my grandfather.’

‘One moment,’ said Mr Scogan, ‘till I’ve refilled my pipe.’

Mr Wimbush waited. Seated apart in a corner of the room, Ivor was showing Mary his sketches of Spirit Life. They spoke together in whispers.

Mr Scogan had lighted his pipe again. ‘Fire away,’ he said.

Henry Wimbush fired away.

‘It was in the spring of 1833 that my grandfather, George Wimbush, first made the acquaintance of the “three lovely Lapiths,” as they were always called. He was then a young man of twenty-two, with curly yellow hair and a smooth pink face that was the mirror of his youthful and ingenuous mind. He had been educated at Harrow and Christ Church, he enjoyed hunting and all other field sports, and, though his circumstances were comfortable to the verge of affluence, his pleasures were temperate and innocent. His father, an East Indian merchant, had destined him for a political career, and had gone to considerable expense in acquiring a pleasant little Cornish borough as a twenty-first birthday gift for his son. He was justly indignant when, on the very eve of George’s majority, the Reform Bill of 1832 swept the borough out of existence. The inauguration of George’s political career had to be postponed. At the time he got to know the lovely Lapiths he was waiting; he was not at all impatient.

‘The lovely Lapiths did not fail to impress him. Georgiana, the eldest, with her black ringlets, her flashing eyes, her noble aquiline profile, her swan-like neck, and sloping shoulders, was orientally dazzling; and the twins, with their delicately turned-up noses, their blue eyes, and chestnut hair, were an identical pair of ravishingly English charmers.

‘Their conversation at this first meeting proved, however, to be so forbidding that, but for the invincible attraction exercised by their beauty, George would never have had the courage to follow up the acquaintance. The twins, looking up their noses at him with an air of languid superiority, asked him what he thought of the latest French poetry and whether he liked the Indiana of George Sand. But what was almost worse was the question with which Georgiana opened her conversation with him. “In music,” she asked, leaning forward and fixing him with her large dark eyes, “are you a classicist or a transcendentalist?” George did not lose his presence of mind. He had enough appreciation of music to know that he hated anything classical, and so, with a promptitude which did him credit, he replied, “I am a transcendentalist.” Georgiana smiled bewitchingly. “I am glad,” she said; “so am I. You went to hear Paganini last week, of course. ‘The Prayer of Moses’ – ah!” She closed her eyes. “Do you know anything more transcendental than that?” “No,” said George, “I don’t.” He hesitated, was about to go on speaking, and then decided that after all it would be wiser not to say – what was in fact true – that he had enjoyed above all Paganini’s Farmyard Imitations. The man had made his fiddle bray like an ass, cluck like a hen, grunt, squeal, bark, neigh, quack, bellow, and growl; that last item, in George’s estimation, had almost compensated for the tediousness of the rest of the concert. He smiled with pleasure at the thought of it. Yes, decidedly, he was no classicist in music; he was a thoroughgoing transcendentalist.

‘George followed up this first introduction by paying a call on the young ladies and their mother, who occupied, during the season, a small but elegant house in the neighbourhood of Berkeley Square. Lady Lapith made a few discreet inquiries, and having found that George’s financial position, character, and family were all passably good, she asked him to dine. She hoped and expected that her daughters would all marry into the peerage; but, being a prudent woman, she knew it was advisable to prepare for all contingencies. George Wimbush, she thought, would make an excellent second string for one of the twins.

‘At this first dinner, George’s partner was Emmeline. They talked of Nature. Emmeline prótested that to her high mountains were a feeling and the hum of human cities torture. George agreed that the country was very agreeable, but held that London during the season also had its charms. He noticed with surprise and a certain solicitous distress that Miss Emmeline’s appetite was poor, that it didn’t, in fact, exist. Two spoonfuls of soup, a morsel of fish, no bird, no meat, and three grapes – that was her whole dinner. He looked from time to time at her two sisters; Georgiana and Caroline seemed to be quite as abstemious. They waved away whatever was offered them with an expression of delicate disgust, shutting their eyes and averting their faces from the proffered dish, as though the lemon sole, the duck, the loin of veal, the trifle, were objects revolting to the sight and smell. George, who thought the dinner capital, ventured to comment on the sisters’ lack of appetite.

‘“Pray, don’t talk to me of eating,” said Emmeline, drooping like a sensitive plant. “We find it so coarse, so unspiritual, my sisters and I. One can’t think of one’s soul while one is eating.”

‘George agreed; one couldn’t. “But one must live,” he said.

‘“Alas!” Emmeline sighed. “One must. Death is very beautiful, don’t you think?” She broke a corner off a piece of toast and began to nibble at it languidly. “But since, as you say, one must live . . .” She made a little gesture of resignation. “Luckily a very little suffices to keep one alive.” She put down her corner of toast half eaten.

‘George regarded her with some surprise. She was pale, but she looked extraordinarily healthy, he thought; so did her sisters. Perhaps if you were really spiritual you needed less food. He, clearly, was not spiritual.

‘After this he saw them frequently. They all liked him, from Lady Lapith downwards. True, he was not very romantic or poetical; but he was such a pleasant, unpretentious, kind-hearted young man, that one couldn’t help liking him. For his part, he thought them wonderful, wonderful, especially Georgiana. He enveloped, them all in a warm, protective affection. For they needed protection; they were altogether too frail, too spiritual for this world. They never ate, they were always pale, they often complained of fever, they talked much and lovingly of death, they frequently swooned. Georgiana was the most ethereal of all; of the three she ate least, swooned most often, talked most of death, and was the palest – with a pallor that was so startling as to appear positively artificial. At any moment, it seemed, she might loose her precarious hold on this material world and become all spirit. To George the thought was a continual agony. If she were to die . . .

‘She contrived, however, to live through the season, and that in spite of the numerous balls, routs, and other parties of pleasure which, in company with the rest of the lovely trio, she never failed to attend. In the middle of July the whole household moved down to the country. George was invited to spend the month of August at Crome.

‘The house-party was distinguished; in the list of visitors figured the names of two marriageable young men of title. George had hoped that country air, repose, and natural surroundings might have restored to the three sisters their appetites and the roses of their cheeks. He was mistaken. For dinner, the first evening, Georgiana ate only an olive, two or three salted almonds, and half a peach. She was as pale as ever. During the meal she spoke of love.

‘“True love,” she said, “being infinite and eternal, can only be consummated in eternity. Indiana and Sir Rodolphe celebrated the mystic wedding of their souls by jumping into Niagara. Love is incompatible with life. The wish of two people who truly love one another is not to live together but to die together.”

‘“Come, come, my dear,” said Lady Lapith, stout and practical. “What would become of the next generation, pray, if all the world acted on your principles?”

‘“Mamma! . . .” Georgiana protested, and dropped her eyes.

‘“In my young days,” Lady Lapith went on, “I should have been laughed out of countenance if I’d said a thing like that. But then in my young days souls weren’t as fashionable as they are now and we didn’t think death was at all poetical. It was just unpleasant.”

‘“Mamma! . . .” Emmeline and Caroline implored in unison.

‘“In my young days—” Lady Lapith was launched into her subject; nothing, it seemed, could stop her now. “In my young days, if you didn’t eat, people told you you needed a dose of rhubarb. Nowadays . . .”

‘There was a cry; Georgiana had swooned sideways on to Lord Timpany’s shoulder. It was a desperate expedient; but it Was successful. Lady Lapith was stopped.

‘The days passed in an uneventful round of pleasures. Of all the gay party George alone was unhappy. Lord Timpany was paying his court to Georgiana, and it was clear that he was not unfavourably received. George looked on, and his soul was a hell of jealousy and despair. The boisterous company of the young men became intolerable to him; he shrank from them, seeking gloom and solitude. One morning, having broken away from them on some vague pretext, he returned to the house alone. The young men were bathing in the pool below; their cries and laughter floated up to him, making the quiet house seem lonelier and more silent. The lovely sisters and their mamma still kept their chambers; they did not customarily make their appearance till luncheon, so that the male guests had the morning to themselves. George sat down in the hall and abandoned himself to thought.

‘At any moment she might die; at any moment she might become Lady Timpany. It was terrible, terrible. If she died, then he would die too; he would go to seek her beyond the grave. If she became Lady Timpany . . . ah, then! The solution of the problem would not be so simple. If she became Lady Timpany: it was a horrible thought. But then supose she were in love with Timpany – though it seemed incredible that anyone could be in love with Timpany – suppose her life depended on Timpany, suppose she couldn’t live without him? He was fumbling his way along this clueless labyrinth of suppositions when the clock struck twelve. On the last stroke, like an automaton released by the turning clockwork, a little maid, holding a large covered tray, popped out of the door that led from the kitchen regions into the hall. From his deep arm-chair George watched her (himself, it was evident, unobserved) with an idle curiosity. She pattered across the room and came to a halt in front of what seemed a blank expanse of panelling. She reached out her hand and, to George’s extreme astonishment, a little door swung open, revealing the foot of a winding staircase. Turning sideways in order to get her tray through the narrow opening, the little maid darted in with a rapid crablike motion. The door closed behind her with a click. A minute later it opened again and the maid, without her tray, hurried back across the hall and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. George tried to recompose his thoughts, but an invincible curiosity drew his mind towards the hidden door, the staircase, the little maid. It was in vain he told himself that the matter was none of his business, that to explore the secrets of that surprising door, that mysterious staircase within, would be a piece of unforgivable rudeness and indiscretion. It was in vain; for five minutes he struggled heroically with his curiosity, but at the end of that time he found himself standing in front of the innocent sheet of panelling through which the little maid had disappeared. A glance sufficed to show him the position of the secret door – secret, he perceived, only to those who looked with a careless eye. It was just an ordinary door let in flush with the panelling. No latch nor handle betrayed its position, but an unobtrusive catch sunk in the wood invited the thumb. George was astonished that he had not noticed it before; now he had seen it, it was so obvious, almost as obvious as the cupboard door in the library with its lines of imitation shelves and its dummy books. He pulled back the catch and peeped inside. The staircase, of which the degrees were made not of stone but of blocks of ancient oak, wound up and out of sight. A slit-like window admitted the daylight; he was at the foot of the central tower, and the little window looked out over the terrace; they were still shouting and splashing in the pool below.

‘George closed the door and went back to his seat. But his curiosity was not satisfied. Indeed, this partial satisfaction had but whetted its appetite. Where did the staircase lead? What was the errand of the little maid? It was no business of his, he kept repeating – no business of his. He tried to read, but his attention wandered. A quarter-past twelve sounded on the harmonious clock. Suddenly determined, George rose, crossed the room, opened the hidden door, and began to ascend the stairs. He passed the first window, corkscrewed round, and came to another. He paused for a moment to look out; his heart beat uncomfortably, as though he were affronting some unknown danger. What he was doing, he told himself, was extremely ungentlemanly, horribly underbred. He tiptoed onward and upward. One turn more, then half a turn, and a door confronted him. He halted before it, listened; he could hear no sound. Putting his eye to the keyhole, he saw nothing but a stretch of white sunlit wall. Emboldened, he turned the handle and stepped across the threshold. There he halted, petrified by what he saw, mutely gaping.

‘In the middle of a pleasantly sunny little room – “it is now Priscilla’s boudoir,” Mr Wimbush remarked parenthetically – stood a small circular table of mahogany. Crystal, porcelain, and silver, – all the shining apparatus of an elegant meal – were mirrored in its polished depths. The carcase of a cold chicken, a bowl of fruit, a great ham, deeply gashed to its heart of tenderest white and pink, the brown cannon ball of a cold plum-pudding, a slender Hock bottle, and a decanter of claret jostled one another for a place on this festive board. And round the table sat the three sisters, the three lovely Lapiths – eating!

‘At George’s sudden entrance they had all looked towards the door, and now they sat, petrified by the same astonishment which kept George fixed and staring. Georgiana, who sat immediately facing the door, gazed at him with dark, enormous eyes. Between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand she was holding a drumstick of the dismembered chicken; her little finger, elegantly crooked, stood apart from the rest of her hand. Her mouth was open, but the drumstick had never reached its destination; it remained, suspended, frozen, in mid-air. The other two sisters had turned round to look at the intruder. Caroline still grasped her knife and fork; Emmeline’s fingers were round the stem of her claret glass. For what seemed a very long time, George and the three sisters stared at one another in silence. They were a group of statues. Then suddenly there was movement. Georgiana dropped her chicken bone, Caroline’s knife and fork clattered on her plate. The movement propagated itself, grew more decisive; Emmeline sprang to her feet, uttering a cry. The wave of panic reached George; he turned and, mumbling something unintelligible as he went, rushed out of the room and down the winding stairs. He came to a standstill in the hall, and there, all by himself in the quiet house, he began to laugh.

‘At luncheon it was noticed that the sisters ate a little more than usual. Georgiana toyed with some French beans and a spoonful of calves’-foot jelly. “I feel a little stronger to-day,” she said to Lord Timpany, when he congratulated her on this increase of appetite; “a little more material,” she added, with a nervous laugh. Looking up, she caught George’s eye; a blush suffused her cheeks and she looked hastily away.

‘In the garden that afternoon they found themselves for a moment alone.

‘“You won’t tell anyone, George? Promise you won’t tell anyone,” she implored. “It would make us look so ridiculous. And besides, eating is unspiritual, isn’t it? Say you won’t tell anyone.”

‘“I will,” said George brutally. “I’ll tell everyone, unless . . .”

‘“It’s blackmail.”

‘“I don’t care,” said George. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours to decide.”

‘Lady Lapith was disappointed, of course; she had hoped for better things – for Timpany and a coronet. But George, after all, wasn’t so bad. They were married at the New Year.

‘My poor grandfather!’ Mr Wimbush added, as he closed his book and put away his pince-nez. ‘Whenever I read in the papers about oppressed nationalities, I think of him.’ He relighted his cigar. ‘It was a maternal government, highly centralized, and there were no representative institutions.’

Henry Wimbush ceased speaking. In the silence that ensued Ivor’s whispered commentary on the spirit sketches once more became audible. Priscilla, who had been dozing, suddenly woke up.

‘What?’ she said in the startled tones of one newly returned to consciousness; ‘what?’

Jenny caught the words. She looked up, smiled, nodded reassuringly. ‘It’s about a ham,’ she said.

‘What’s about a ham?’

‘What Henry has been reading.’ She closed the red notebook lying on her knees and slipped a rubber hand round it. ‘I’m going to bed,’ she announced, and got up.

‘So am I,’ said Anne, yawning. But she lacked the energy to rise from her arm-chair.

The night was hot and oppressive. Round the open windows the curtains hung unmoving. Ivor, fanning himself with the portrait of an Astral Being, looked out into the darkness and drew a breath.

‘The air’s like wool,’ he declared.

‘It will get cooler after midnight,’ said Henry Wimbush, and cautiously added, ‘perhaps.’

‘I shan’t sleep, I know.’

Priscilla turned her head in his direction; the monumental coiffure nodded exorbitantly at her slightest movement. ‘You must make an effort,’ she said. ‘When I can’t sleep, I concentrate my will: I say, “I will sleep, I am asleep!” And pop! off I go. That’s the power of thought.’

‘But does it work on stuffy nights?’ Ivor inquired. ‘I simply cannot sleep on a stuffy night.’

‘Nor can I,’ said Mary, ‘except out of doors.’

‘Out of doors! What a wonderful idea!’ In the end they decided to sleep on the towers – Mary on the western tower, Ivor on the eastern. There was a flat expanse of leads on each of the towers, and you could get a mattress through the trap doors that opened on to them. Under the stars, under the gibbous moon, assuredly they would sleep. The mattresses were hauled up, sheets and blankets were spread, and an hour later the two insomniasts, each on his separate tower, were crying their good-nights across the dividing gulf.

On Mary the sleep-compelling charm of the open air did not work with its expected magic. Even through the mattress one could not fail to be aware that the leads were extremely hard. Then there were noises: the owls screeched tirelessly, and once, roused by some unknown terror, all the geese of the farmyard burst into a sudden frenzy of cackling. The stars and the gibbous moon demanded to be looked at, and when one meteorite had streaked across the sky, you could not help waiting, open-eyed and alert, for the next. Time passed; the moon climbed higher and higher in the sky. Mary felt less sleepy than she had when she first came out. She sat up and looked over the parapet. Had Ivor been able to sleep? she wondered. And as though in answer to her mental question, from behind the chimney-stack at the farther end of the roof a white form noiselessly emerged – a form that, in the moonlight, was recognizably Ivor’s. Spreading his arms to right and left, like a tight-rope dancer, he began to walk forward along the roof-tree of the house. He swayed terrifyingly as he advanced. Mary looked on speechlessly; perhaps he was walking in his sleep! Suppose he were to wake up suddenly, now! If she spoke or moved it might mean his death. She dared look no more, but sank back on her pillows. She listened intently. For what seemed an immensely long time there was no sound. Then there was a patter of feet on the tiles, followed by a scrabbling noise and a whispered ‘Damn!’ And suddenly Ivor’s head and shoulders appeared above the parapet. One leg followed, then the other. He was on the leads. Mary pretended to wake up with a start.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he explained, ‘so I came along to see if you couldn’t. One gets bored by oneself on a tower. Don’t you find it so?’

It was light before five. Long, narrow clouds barred the east, their edges bright with orange fire. The sky was pale and watery. With the mournful scream of a soul in pain, a monstrous peacock, flying heavily up from below, alighted on the parapet of the tower. Ivor and Mary started broad awake.

‘Catch him!’ cried Ivor, jumping up. ‘We’ll have a feather.’ The frightened peacock ran up and down the parapet in an absurd distress, curtseying and bobbing and clucking; his long tail swung ponderously back and forth as he turned and turned again. Then with a flap and swish he launched himself upon the air and sailed magnificently earthward, with a recovered dignity. But he had left a trophy. Ivor had his feather, a long-lashed eye of purple and green, of blue and gold. He handed it to his companion.

‘An angel’s feather,’ he said.

Mary looked at it for a moment, gravely and intently. Her purple pyjamas clothed her with an ampleness that hid the lines of her body; she looked like some large, comfortable, unjointed toy, a sort of Teddy bear – but a Teddy bear with an angel’s head, pink cheeks, and hair like a bell of gold. An angel’s face, the feather of an angel’s wing. . . . Somehow the whole atmosphere of this sunrise was rather angelic.

‘It’s extraordinary to think of sexual selection,’ she said at last, looking up from her contemplation of the miraculous feather.

‘Extraordinary!’ Ivor echoed. ‘I select you, you select me. What luck!’

He put his arm round her shoulders and they stood looking eastward. The first sunlight had begun to warm and colour the pale light of the dawn. Mauve pyjamas and white pyjamas; they were a young and charming couple. The rising sun touched their faces. It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical. Profound and beautiful truth!

‘I must be getting back to my tower,’ said Ivor at last.

‘Already?’

‘I’m afraid so. The varletry will soon be up and about.’

‘Ivor. . . .’ There was a prolonged and silent farewell.

‘And now,’ said Ivor, ‘I repeat my tight-rope stunt.’

Mary threw her arms round his neck. ‘You mustn’t, Ivor. It’s dangerous. Please.’

He had to yield at last to her entreaties. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll go down through the house and up at the other end.’

He vanished through the trap door into the darkness that still lurked within the shuttered house. A minute later he had reappeared on the farther tower; he waved his hand, and then sank down, out of sight, behind the parapet. From below, in the house, came the thin wasp-like buzzing of an alarum-clock. He had gone back just in time.

CHAPTER XX

IVOR WAS GONE. Lounging behind the wind-screen in his yellow sedan he was whirling across rural England. Social and amorous engagements of the most urgent character called him from hall to baronial hall, from castle to castle, from Elizabethan manor-house to Georgian mansion, over the whole expanse of the kingdom. Today in Somerset, tomorrow in Warwickshire, on Saturday in the West Riding, by Tuesday morning in, Argyll – Ivor never rested. The whole summer through, from the beginning of July till the end of September, he devoted himself to his engagements; he was a martyr to them. In the autumn he went back to London for a holiday. Crome had been a little incident, an evanescent bubble on the stream of his life; it belonged already to the past. By tea-time he would be at Gobley, and there would be Zenobia’s welcoming smile. And on Thursday morning – but that was a long, long way ahead. He would think of Thursday morning when Thursday morning arrived. Meanwhile there was Gobley, meanwhile Zenobia.

In the visitors’ book at Crome Ivor had left, according to his invariable custom in these cases, a poem. He had improvised it magisterially in the ten minutes preceding his departure. Denis and Mr Scogan strolled back together from the gates of the courtyard, whence they had bidden their last farewells; on the writing-table in the hall they found the visitors’ book, open, and Ivor’s composition scarcely dry. Mr Scogan read it aloud:

‘The magic of those immemorial kings,

Who webbed enchantment on the bowls of night,

Sleeps in the soul of all created things;

In the blue sea, th’ Acroceraunian height,

In the eyed butterfly’s auricular wings

And orgied visions of the anchorite;

In all that singing flies and flying sings,

In rain, in pain, in delicate delight.

But much more magic, much more cogent spells

Weave here their wizardries about my soul.

Crome calls me like the voice of vesperal bells,

Haunts like a ghostly-peopled necropole.

Fate tears me hence. Hard fate! since far from Crome

My soul must weep, remembering its Home.’

‘Very nice and tasteful and tactful,’ said Mr Scogan, when he had finished. ‘I am only troubled by the butterfly’s auricular wings. You had a first-hand knowledge of the workings of a poet’s mind, Denis; perhaps you can explain.’

‘What could be simpler,’ said Denis. ‘It’s a beautiful word, and Ivor wanted to say that the wings were golden.’

‘You make it luminously clear.’

‘One suffers so much,’ Denis went on, ‘from the fact that beautiful words don’t always mean what they ought to mean. Recently, for example, I had a whole poem ruined, just because the word “carminative” didn’t mean what it ought to have meant. Carminative – it’s admirable, isn’t it?’

‘Admirable,’ Mr Scogan agreed. ‘And what does it mean?’

‘It’s a word I’ve treasured from my earliest infancy,’ said Denis, ‘treasured and loved. They used to give me cinnamon when I had a cold – quite useless, but not disagreeable. One poured it drop by drop out of narrow bottles, a golden liquor, fierce and fiery. On the label was a list of its virtues, and among other things it was described as being in the highest degree carminative. I adored the word. “Isn’t it carminative?” I used to say to myself when I’d taken my dose. It seemed so wonderfully to describe that sensation of internal warmth, that glow, that – what shall I call it? – physical self-satisfaction which followed the drinking of cinnamon. Later, when I discovered alcohol, “carminative” described for me that similar, but nobler, more spiritual glow which wine evokes not only in the body but in the soul as well. The carminative virtues of burgundy, of rum, of old brandy, of Lacryma Christi, of Marsala, of Aleatico, of stout, of gin, of champagne, of claret, of the raw new wine of this year’s Tuscan vintage – I compared them. I classified them. Marsala is rosily, downily carminative; gin pricks and refreshes while it warms. I had a whole table of carmination values. And now’ – Denis spread out his hands, palm upwards, despairingly – ‘Now I know what carminative really means.’

‘Well, what does it mean?’ asked Mr Scogan, a little impatiently.

‘Carminative,’ said Denis, lingering lovingly over the syllables, ‘carminative. I imagined vaguely that it had something to do with carmen-carminis, still more vaguely with caro-carnis, and its derivatives, like carnival and carnation. Carminative – there was the idea of singing and the idea of flesh, rose-coloured and warm, with a suggestion of the jollities of mi-Carême and the masked holidays of Venice. Carminative – the warmth, the glow, the interior ripeness were all in the word. Instead of which . . .’

‘Do come to the point, my dear Denis,’ protested Mr Scogan. ‘Do come to the point.’

‘Well, I wrote a poem the other day,’ said Denis; ‘I wrote a poem about the effects of love.’

‘Others have done the same before you,’ said Mr Scogan. ‘There is no need to be ashamed.’

‘I was putting forward the notion,’ Denis went on, ‘that the effects of love were often similar to the effects of wine, that Eros would intoxicate as well as Bacchus. Love, for example, is essentially carminative. It gives one the sense of warmth, the glow.

“And passion carminative as wine . . .”

was what I wrote. Not only was the line elegantly sonorous; it was also, I flattered myself, very aptly and compendiously expressive. Everything was in the word carminative – a detailed, exact foreground, an immense, indefinite hinterland of suggestion.

“And passion carminative as wine . . .”

I was not ill-pleased. And then suddenly it occurred to me that I had never actually looked up the word in a dictionary. Carminative had grown up with me from the days of the cinnamon bottle. It had always been taken for granted. Carminative: for me the word was as rich in content as some tremendous, elaborate work of art; it was a complete landscape with figures.

“And passion carminative as wine . . .’

It was the first time I had ever committed the word to writing, and all at once I felt I would like lexicographical authority for it. A small English-German dictionary was all I had at hand. I turned up C, ca, car, carm. There it was: “Carminative: windtreibend.” Windtreibend!’ he repeated. Mr Scogan laughed. Denis shook his head. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘for me it was no laughing matter. For me it marked the end of a chapter, the death of something young and precious. There were the years – years of childhood and innocence – when I had believed that carminative meant – well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my life – a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtriebend.

“Plus ne suis ce que j’ai été

Et ne le saurai jamais être.”

It is a realization that makes one rather melancholy.’

‘Carminative,’ said Mr Scogan thoughtfully.

‘Carminative,’ Denis repeated, and they were silent for a time. ‘Words,’ said Denis at last, ‘words – I wonder if you can realize how much I love them. You are too much preoccupied with mere things and ideas and people to understand the full beauty of words. Your mind is not a literary mind. The spectacle of Mr Gladstone finding thirty-four rhymes to the name “Margot” seems to you rather pathetic than anything else. Mallarmés envelopes with their versified addresses leave you cold, unless they leave you pitiful; you can’t see that

“Apte à ne point te cabrer, hue!

Poste, et j’ajouterai, dia!

Si tu ne fuis onze-bis Rue

Balzac, chez cet Heredia,”

is a little miracle.’

‘You’re right,’ said Mr Scogan. ‘I can’t.’

‘You don’t feel it to be magical?’

‘No.’

‘That’s the test for the literary mind,’ said Denis; ‘the feeling of magic, the sense that words have power. The technical, verbal part of literature is simply a development of magic. Words are man’s first and most grandiose invention. With language, he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them! With fitted, harmonious words the magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats and spirits from the elements. Their descendants, the literary men, still go on with the process, morticing their verbal formulas together and, before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe. Rabbits out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds. Formulated by their art, the most insipid statements become enormously significant. For example, I proffer the constatation, “Black ladders lack bladders.” A self-evident truth, one on which it would not have been worth while to insist, had I chosen to formulate it in such words as “Black fire-escapes have no bladders,” or, “Les échelles noires manquent de vessie.” But since I put it as I do, “Black ladders lack bladders,” it becomes, for all its self-evidence, significant, unforgettable, moving. The creation by word-power of something out of nothing – what is that but magic? And, I may add, what is that but literature? Half the world’s greatest poetry is simply “Les échelles noires manquent de vessie,” translated into magic significance as, “Black ladders lack bladders.” And you can’t appreciate words. I’m sorry for you.’

‘A mental carminative,’ said Mr Scogan reflectively. ‘That’s what you need.’

CHAPTER XXI

PERCHED ON ITS four stone mushrooms, the little granary stood two or three feet above the grass of the green close. Beneath it there was a perpetual shade and a damp growth of long, luxuriant grasses. Here, in the shadow, in the green dampness, a family of white ducks had sought shelter from the afternoon sun. Some stood, preening themselves, some reposed with their long bellies pressed to the ground, as though the cool grass were water. Little social noises burst fitfully forth, and from time to time some pointed tail would execute a brilliant Lisztian tremolo. Suddenly their jovial repose was shattered. A prodigious thump shook the wooden flooring above their heads; the whole granary trembled, little fragments of dirt and crumbled wood rained down among them. With a loud, continuous quacking the ducks rushed out from beneath this nameless menace, and did not stay their flight till they were safely in the farmyard.

‘Don’t lose your temper,’ Anne was saying. ‘Listen! You’ve frightened the ducks. Poor dears! no wonder.’ She was sitting sideways in a low, wooden chair. Her right elbow rested on the back of the chair and she supported her cheek on her hand. Her long, slender body drooped into curves of a lazy grace. She was smiling, and she looked at Gombauld through half-closed eyes.

‘Damn you!’ Gombauld repeated, and stamped his foot again. He glared at her round the half-finished portrait on the easel.

‘Poor ducks!’ Anne repeated. The sound of their quacking was faint in the distance; it was inaudible.

‘Can’t you see you make me lose my time?’ he asked. ‘I can’t work with you dangling about distractingly like this.’

‘You’d lose less time if you stopped talking and stamping your feet and did a little painting for a change. After all, what am I dangling about for, except to be painted?’

Gombauld made a noise like a growl. ‘You’re awful,’ he said, with conviction. ‘Why do you ask me to come and stay here? Why do you tell me you’d like me to paint your portrait?’

‘For the simple reasons that I like you – at least, when you’re in a good temper – and that I think you’re a good painter.’

‘For the simple reason’ – Gombauld mimicked her voice – ‘that you want me to make love to you and, when I do, to have the amusement of running away.’

Anne threw back her head and laughed. ‘So you think it amuses me to have to evade your advances! So like a man! If only you knew how gross and awful and boring men are when they try to make love and you don’t want them to make love! If you could only see yourselves through our eyes!’

Gombauld picked up his palette and brushes and attacked his canvas with the ardour of irritation. ‘I suppose you’ll be saying next that you didn’t start the game, that it was I who made the first advances, and that you were the innocent victim who sat still and never did anything that could invite or allure me on.’

‘So like a man again!’ said Anne. ‘It’s always the same old story about the woman tempting the man. The woman lures, fascinates, invites; and man – noble man, innocent man – falls a victim. My poor Gombauld! Surely you’re not going to sing that old song again. It’s so unintelligent, and I always thought you were a man of sense.’

‘Thanks,’ said Gombauld.

‘Be a little objective,’ Anne went on. ‘Can’t you see that you’re simply externalizing your own emotions? That’s what you men are always doing; it’s so barbarously naïve. You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire. You have the mentality of savages. You might just as well say that a plate of strawberries and cream deliberately lures you on to feel greedy. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred women are as passive and innocent as the strawberries and cream.’

‘Well, all I can say is that this must be the hundredth case,’ said Gombauld, without looking up.

Anne shrugged her shoulders and gave vent to a sigh. ‘I’m at a loss to know whether you’re more silly or more rude.’

After painting for a little time in silence Gombauld began to speak again. ‘And then there’s Denis,’ he said, renewing the conversation as though it had only just been broken off. ‘You’re playing the same game with him. Why can’t you leave that wretched young man in peace?’

Anne flushed with a sudden and uncontrollable anger. ‘It’s perfectly untrue about Denis,’ she said indignantly. ‘I never dreamt of playing what you beautifully call the same game with him.’ Recovering her calm, she added in her ordinary cooing voice and with her exacerbating smile, ‘You’ve become very protective towards poor Denis all of a sudden.’

‘I have,’ Gombauld replied, with a gravity that was somehow a little too solemn. ‘I don’t like to see a young man . . .’

‘. . . being whirled along the road to ruin,’ said Anne, continuing his sentence for him. ‘I admire your sentiments and, believe me, I share them.’

She was curiously irritated at what Gombauld had said about Denis. It happened to be so completely untrue. Gombauld might have some slight ground for his reproaches. But Denis – no, she had never flirted with Denis. Poor boy! He was very sweet. She became somewhat pensive.

Gombauld painted on with fury. The restlessness of an unsatisfied desire, which, before, had distracted his mind, making work impossible, seemed now to have converted itself into a kind of feverish energy. When it was finished, he told himself, the portrait would be diabolic. He was painting her in the pose she had naturally adopted at the first sitting. Seated sideways, her elbow on the back of the chair, her head and shoulders turned at an angle from the rest of her body, towards the front, she had fallen into an attitude of indolent abandonment. He had emphasized the lazy curves of her body; the lines sagged as they crossed the canvas, the grace of the painted figure seemed to be melting into a kind of soft decay. The hand that lay along the knee was as limp as a glove. He was at work on the face now; it had begun to emerge on the canvas, doll-like in its regularity and listlessness. It was Anne’s face – but her face as it would be, utterly unillumined by the inward lights of thought and emotion. It was the lazy, expressionless mask which was sometimes her face. The portrait was terribly like; and at the same time it was the most malicious of lies. Yes, it would be diabolic when it was finished, Gombauld decided; he wondered what she would think of it.

CHAPTER XXII

FOR THE SAKE of peace and quiet Denis had retired earlier on this same afternoon to his bedroom. He wanted to work, but the hour was a drowsy one, and lunch, so recently eaten, weighed heavily on body and mind. The meridian demon was upon him; he was possessed by that bored and hopeless post-prandial melancholy which the coenobites of old knew and feared under the name of ‘accidie.’ He felt, like Ernest Dowson, ‘a little weary.’ He was in the mood to write something rather exquisite and gentle and quietist in tone; something a little droopy and at the same time – how should he put it? – a little infinite. He though of Anne, of love hopeless and unattainable. Perhaps that was the ideal kind of love, the hopeless kind – the quiet, theoretical kind of love. In this sad mood of repletion he could well believe it. He began to write. One elegant quatrain had flowed from beneath his pen:

‘A brooding love which is at most

The stealth of moonbeams when they slide,

Evoking colour’s bloodless ghost,

O’er some scarce-breathing breast or side . . .’

when his attention was attracted by a sound from outside. He looked down from his window; there they were, Anne and Gombauld, talking, laughing together. They crossed the courtyard in front, and passed out of sight through the gate in the right-hand wall. That was the way to the green close and the granary; she was going to sit for him again. His pleasantly depressing melancholy was dissipated by a puff of violent emotion; angrily he threw his quatrain into the waste-paper basket and ran downstairs. ‘The stealth of moonbeams,’ indeed!

In the hall he saw Mr Scogan; the man seemed to be lying in wait. Denis tried to escape, but in vain. Mr Scogan’s eye glittered like the eye of the Ancient Mariner.

‘Not so fast,’ he said, stretching out a small saurian hand with pointed nails – ‘not so fast. I was just going down to the flower garden to take the sun. We’ll go together.’

Denis abandoned himself; Mr Scogan put on his hat and they went out arm in arm. On the shaven turf of the terrace Henry Wimbush and Mary were playing a solemn game of bowls. They descended by the yew-tree walk. It was here, thought Denis, here that Anne had fallen, here that he had kissed her, here – and he blushed with retrospective shame at the memory – here that he had tried to carry her and failed. Life was awful!

‘Sanity!’ said Mr Scogan, suddenly breaking a long silence. ‘Sanity – that’s what’s wrong with me and that’s what will be wrong with you, my dear Denis, when you’re old enough to be sane or insane. In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don’t exist. I am just Vox et praeterea nihil.’

Denis made no response; he was thinking of other things. ‘After all,’ he said to himself – ‘after all, Gombauld is better looking than I, more entertaining, more confident; and, besides, he’s already somebody and I’m still only potential. . . .’

‘Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen,’ Mr Scogan went on. Denis tried not to listen, but the tireless insistence of Mr Scogan’s discourse gradually compelled his attention. ‘Men such as I am, such as you may possibly become, have never achieved anything. We’re too sane; we’re merely reasonable. We lack the human touch, the compelling enthusiastic mania. People are quite ready to listen to the philosophers for a little amusement, just as they would listen to a fiddler or a mountebank. But as to acting on the advice of the men of reason – never. Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory – reason.’

They entered the garden; at the head of one of the alleys stood a green wooden bench, embayed in the midst of a fragrant continent of lavender bushes. It was here, though the place was shadeless and one breathed hot, dry perfume instead of, air – it was here that Mr Scogan elected to sit. He thrived on untempered sunlight.

‘Consider, for example, the case of Luther and Erasmus.’ He took out his pipe and began to fill it as he talked. ‘There was Erasmus, a man of reason if ever there was one. People listened to him at first – a new virtuoso performing on that elegant and resourceful instrument, the intellect; they even admired and venerated him. But did he move them to behave as he wanted them to behave – reasonably, decently, or at least a little less porkishly than usual? He did not. And then Luther appears, violent, passionate, a madman insanely convinced about matters in which there can be no conviction. He shouted, and men rushed to follow him. Erasmus was no longer listened to; he was reviled for his reasonableness. Luther was serious, Luther was reality – like the Great War. Erasmus was only reason and decency; he lacked the power, being a sage, to move men to action. Europe followed Luther and embarked on a century and a half of war and bloody persecution. It’s a melancholy story.’ Mr Scogan lighted a match. In the intense light the flame was all but invisible. The smell of burning tobacco began to mingle with the sweetly acrid smell of the lavender.

‘If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about persuading them in a maniacal manner. The very sane precepts of the founders of religions are only made infectious by means of enthusiasms which to a sane man must appear deplorable. It is humiliating to find how impotent unadulterated sanity is. Sanity, for example, informs us that the only way in which we can preserve civilization is by behaving decently and intelligently. Sanity appeals and argues; our rulers persevere in their customary porkishness, while we acquiesce and obey. The only hope is a maniacal crusade; I am ready, when it comes, to beat a tambourine with the loudest, but at the same time I shall feel a little ashamed of myself. However’ – Mr Scogan shrugged his, shoulders and, pipe in hand, made a gesture of resignation – ‘it’s futile to complain that things are as they are. The fact remains that sanity unassisted is useless. What we want, then, is a sane and reasonable exploitation of the forces of insanity. We sane men will have the power yet.’ Mr Scogan’s eyes shone with a more than ordinary brightness, and, taking his pipe out of his mouth, he gave vent to his loud, dry, and somehow rather fiendish laugh.

‘But I don’t want power,’ said Denis. He was sitting in limp discomfort at one end of the bench, shading his eyes from the intolerable light. Mr Scogan, bolt upright at the other end, laughed again.

‘Everybody want & power,’ he said. ‘Power in some form or other. The sort of power you hanker for is literary power. Some people want power to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust for power in persecuting words, twisting them, moulding them, torturing them to obey you. But I divagate.’

‘Do you?’ asked Denis faintly.

‘Yes,’ Mr Scogan continued, unheeding, ‘the time will come. We men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities to the service of reason. We can’t leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We can’t allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on casually appearing and turning everything upside-down. In the past it didn’t so much matter; but our modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world’s maniacs is canalized into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo. . . .’

‘Making electricity to light a Swiss hotel,’ said Denis. ‘You ought to complete the simile.’

Mr Scogan waved away the interruption. ‘There’s only one thing to be done,’ he said. ‘The men of intelligence must combine, must conspire, and seize power from the imbeciles and maniacs who now direct us. They must found the Rational State.’

The heat that was slowly paralysing all Denis’s mental and bodily faculties seemed to bring to Mr Scogan additional vitality. He talked with an ever-increasing energy, his hands moved in sharp, quick, precise gestures, his eyes shone. Hard, dry, and continuous, his voice went on sounding and sounding in Denis’s ears with the insistence of a mechanical noise.

‘In the Rational State,’ he heard Mr Scogan saying, ‘human beings will be separated out into distinct species, not according to the colour of their eyes or the shape of their skulls, but according to the qualities of their mind and temperament. Examining psychologists, trained to what would now seem an almost superhuman clairvoyance, will test each child that is born and assign it to its proper species. Duly labelled and docketed, the child will be given the education suitable to members of its species, and will be set, in adult life, to perform those functions which human beings of his variety are capable of performing.’

‘How many species will there be?’ asked Denis.

‘A great many, no doubt,’ Mr Scogan answered; ‘the classification will be subtle and elaborate. But it is not in the power of a prophet to go into details, nor is it his business. I will do no more than indicate the three main species into which the subjects of the Rational State will be divided.’

He paused, cleared his throat, and coughed once or twice, evoking in Denis’s mind the vision of a table with a glass and water-bottle, and, lying across one corner, a long white pointer for the lantern pictures.

‘The three main species,’ Mr Scogan went on, ‘will be these: the Directing Intelligences, the Men of Faith, and the Herd. Among the Intelligences will be found all those capable of thought, those who knew how to attain to a certain degree of freedom – and, alas, how limited, even among the most intelligent, that freedom is! – from the mental bondage of their time. A select body of Intelligences, drawn from among those who have turned their attention to the problems of practical life, will be the governors of the Rational State. They will employ as their instruments of power the second great species of humanity – the men of Faith, the Madmen, as I have been calling them, who believe in things unreasonably, with passion, and are ready to die for their beliefs and their desires. These wild men, with their fearful potentialities for good or for mischief, will no longer be allowed to react casually to a casual environment. There will be no more Caesar Borgias, no more Luthers and Mohammeds, no more Joanna Southcotts, no more Comstocks. The old-fashioned Man of Faith and Desire, that haphazard creature of brute circumstance, who might drive men to tears and repentance, or who might equally well set them on to cutting one another’s throats, will be replaced by a new sort of madman, still externally the same, still bubbling with a seemingly spontaneous enthusiasm, but, ah, how very different from the madman of the past! For the new Man of Faith will be expending his passion, his desire, and his enthusiasm in the propagation of some reasonable idea. He will be, all unawares, the tool of some superior intelligence.’

Mr Scogan chuckled maliciously; it was as though he were taking a revenge, in the name of reason, on the enthusiasts. ‘From their earliest years, as soon, that is, as the examining psychologists have assigned them their place in the classified scheme, the Men of Faith will have had their special education under the eye of the Intelligences. Moulded by a long process of suggestion, they will go out into the world, preaching and practising with a generous mania the coldly reasonable projects of the Directors from above. When these projects are accomplished, or when the ideas that were useful a decade ago have ceased to be useful, the Intelligences will inspire a new generation of madmen with a new eternal truth. The principal function of the Men of Faith will be to move and direct the Multitude, that third great species consisting of those countless millions who lack intelligence and are without valuable enthusiasm. When any particular effort is required of the Herd, when it is thought necessary, for the sake of solidarity, that humanity shall be kindled and united by some single enthusiastic desire or idea, the Men of Faith, primed with some simple and satisfying creed, will be sent out on a mission of evangelization. At ordinary times, when the high spiritual temperature of a Crusade would be unhealthy, the Men of Faith will be quietly and earnestly busy with the great work of education. In the upbringing of the Herd, humanity’s almost boundless suggestibility will be scientifically exploited. Systematically, from earliest infancy, its members will be assured that there is no happiness to be found except in work and obedience; they will be made to believe that they are happy, that they are tremendously important beings, and that everything they do is noble and significant. For the lower species the earth will be restored to the centre of the universe and man to pre-eminence on the earth. Oh, I envy the lot of the commonalty in the Rational State! Working their eight hours a day, obeying their betters, convinced of their own grandeur and significance and immortality, they will be marvellously happy, happier than any race of men has ever been. They will go through life in a rosy state of intoxication, from which they will never awake. The Men of Faith will play the cup-bearers at this lifelong bacchanal, filling and ever filling again with the warm liquor that the Intelligences, in sad and sober privacy behind the scenes, will brew for the intoxication of their subjects.’

‘And what will be my place in the Rational State?’ Denis drowsily inquired from under his shading hand.

Mr Scogan looked at him for a moment in silence. ‘It’s difficult to see where you would fit in,’ he said at last. ‘You couldn’t do manual work; you’re too independent and unsuggestible to belong to the larger Herd; you have none of the characteristics required in a Man of Faith. As for the Directing Intelligences, they will have to be marvellously clear and merciless and penetrating.’ He paused and shook his head. ‘No, I can see no place for you; only the lethal chamber.’

Deeply hurt, Denis emitted the imitation of a loud Homeric laugh. ‘I’m getting sunstroke here,’ he said, and got up.

Mr Scogan followed his example, and they walked slowly away down the narrow path, brushing the blue lavender flowers in their passage. Denis pulled a sprig of lavender and sniffed at it; then some dark leaves of rosemary that smelt like incense in a cavernous church. They passed a bed of opium poppies, dispetaled now; the round, ripe seed-heads were brown and dry – like Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads stuck on poles. He liked the fancy enough to impart it to Mr Scogan.

‘Like Polynesian trophies. . . .’ Uttered aloud, the fancy seemed less charming and significant that it did when it first occurred to him.

There was a silence, and in a growing wave of sound the whir of the reaping machines swelled up from the fields beyond the garden and then receded into a remoter hum.

‘It is satisfactory to think,’ said Mr Scogan, as they strolled slowly onward, ‘that a multitude of people are toiling in the harvest fields in order that we may talk of Polynesia. Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. Let us be duly thankful for that, my dear Denis – duly thankful,’ he repeated, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

Denis was not listening. He had suddenly remembered Anne. She was with Gombauld – alone with him in his studio. It was an intolerable thought.

‘Shall we go and pay a call on Gombauld?’ he suggested carelessly. ‘It would be amusing to see what he’s doing now.’

He laughed inwardly to think how furious Gombauld would be when he saw them arriving.

CHAPTER XXIII

GOMBAULD WAS BY no means so furious at their apparition as Denis had hoped and expected he would be. Indeed, he was rather pleased than annoyed when the two faces, one brown and pointed, the other round and pale, appeared in the frame of the open door. The energy born of his restless irritation was dying within him, returning to its emotional elements. A moment more and he would have been losing his temper again – and Anne would be keeping hers, infuriatingly. Yes, he was positively glad to see them.

‘Come in, come in,’ he called out hospitably.

Followed by Mr Scogan, Denis climbed the little ladder and stepped over the threshold. He looked suspiciously from Gombauld to his sitter, and could learn nothing from the expression of their faces except that they both seemed pleased to see the visitors. Were they really glad, or were they cunningly simulating gladness? He wondered.

Mr Scogan, meanwhile, was looking at the portrait.

‘Excellent,’ he said approvingly, ‘excellent. Almost too true to character, if that is possible; yes, positively too true. But I’m surprised to find you putting in all this psychology business.’ He pointed to the face, and with his extended finger followed the slack curves of the painted figure. ‘I thought you were one of the fellows who went in exclusively for balanced masses and impinging planes.’

Gombauld laughed. ‘This is a little infidelity,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mr Scogan. ‘I for one, without ever having had the slightest appreciation of painting, have always taken particular pleasure in Cubismus. I like to see pictures from which nature has been completely banished, pictures which are exclusively the product of the human mind. They give me the same pleasure as I derive from a good piece of reasoning or a mathematical problem or an achievement of engineering. Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and incomprehensible. I am at home with the works of man; if I choose to set my mind to it, I can understand anything that any man has made or thought. That is why I always travel by Tube, never by bus if I can possibly help it. For, travelling by bus, one can’t avoid seeing, even in London, a few stray works of God – the sky, for example, an occasional tree, the flowers in the window-boxes. But travel by Tube and you see nothing but the works of man – iron riveted into geometrical forms, straight lines of concrete, patterned expanses of tiles. All is human and the product of friendly and comprehensible minds. All philosophies and all religions – what are they but spiritual Tubes bored through the universe! Through these narrow tunnels, where all is recognizably human, one travels comfortable and secure, contriving to forget that all round and below and above them stretches the blind mass of earth, endless and unexplored. Yes, give me the Tube and Cubismus every time; give me ideas, so snug and neat and simple and well made. And preserve me from nature, preserve me from all that’s inhumanly large and complicated and obscure. I haven’t the courage, and, above all, I haven’t the time to start wandering in that labyrinth.’

While Mr Scogan was discoursing, Denis had crossed over to the farther side of the little square chamber, where Anne was sitting, still in her graceful, lazy pose, on the low chair.

‘Well?’ he demanded, looking at her almost fiercely. What was he asking of her? He hardly knew himself.

Anne looked up at him, and for answer echoed his ‘Well?’ in another, a laughing key.

Denis had nothing more, at the moment, to say. Two or three canvases stood in the corner behind Anne’s chair, their faces turned to the wall. He pulled them out and began to look at the paintings.

‘May I see too?’ Anne requested.

He stood them in a row against the wall. Anne had to turn round in her chair to look at them. There was the big canvas of the man fallen from the horse, there was a painting of flowers, there was a small landscape. His hands on the back of the chair, Denis leaned over her. From behind the easel at the other side of the room Mr Scogan was talking away. For a long time they looked at the pictures, saying nothing; or, rather, Anne looked at the pictures, while Denis, for the most part, looked at Anne.

‘I like the man and the horse; don’t you?’ she said at last, looking up with an inquiring smile.

Denis nodded, and then in a queer, strangled voice, as though it had cost him a great effort to utter the words, he said, ‘I love you.’

It was a remark which Anne had heard a good many times before and mostly heard with equanimity. But on this occasion – perhaps because they had come so unexpectedly, perhaps for some other reason – the words provoked in her a certain surprised commotion.

‘My poor Denis,’ she managed to say, with a laugh; but she was blushing as she spoke.

CHAPTER XXIV

IT WAS NOON. Denis, descending from his chamber, where he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in particular, found the drawing-room deserted. He was about to go out into the garden when his eye fell on a familiar but mysterious object – the large red notebook in which he had so often seen Jenny quietly and busily scribbling. She had left it lying on the window-seat. The temptation was great. He picked up the book and slipped off the elastic band that kept it discreetly closed.

‘Private. Not to be opened,’ was written in capital letters on the cover. He raised his eyebrows. It was the sort of thing one wrote in one’s Latin Grammar while one was still at one’s preparatory school.

‘Black is the raven, black is the rook,

But blacker the thief who steals this book!’

It was curiously childish, he thought, and he smiled to himself. He opened the book. What he saw made him wince as though he had been struck.

Denis was his own severest critic; so, at least, he had always believed. He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul; he was Brown Dog to himself. His weaknesses, his absurdities – no one knew them better than he did. Indeed in a vague way he imagined that nobody beside himself was aware of them at all. It seemed, somehow, inconceivable that he should appear to other people as they appeared to him, inconceivable that they ever spoke of him among themselves in that same freely critical and, to be quite honest, mildly malicious tone in which he was accustomed to talk of them. In his own eyes he had defects, but to see them was a privilege reserved to him alone. For the rest of the world he was surely an image of flawless crystal. It was almost axiomatic.

On opening the red notebook that crystal image of himself crashed to the ground, and was irreparably shattered. He was not his own severest critic after all. The discovery was a painful one.

The fruit of Jenny’s unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A caricature of himself, reading (the book was upside-down). In the background a dancing couple, recognizable as Gombauld and Anne. Beneath, the legend: ‘Fable of the Wallflower and the Sour Grapes.’ Fascinated and horrified, Denis pored over the drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious Rouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The expression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered by a feeble envy; the attitude of the body and limbs, an attitude of studious and scholarly dignity, given away by the fidgety pose of the turned-in feet – these things were terrible. And, more terrible still, was the likeness, was the magisterial certainty with which his physical peculiarities were all recorded and subtly exaggerated.

Denis looked deeper into the book. There were caricatures of other people: of Priscilla and Mr Barbecue-Smith; of Henry Wimbush, of Anne and Gombauld; of Mr Scogan, whom Jenny had represented in a light that was more than slightly sinister, that was, indeed, diabolic; of Mary and Ivor. He scarcely glanced at them. A fearful desire to. know the worst about himself possessed him. He turned over the leaves, lingering at nothing that was not his own image. Seven full pages were devoted to him.

‘Private. Not to be opened.’ He had disobeyed the injunction; he had only got what he deserved. Thoughtfully he closed the book, and slid the rubber band once more into its place. Sadder and wiser, he went out on to the terrace. And so this, he reflected, this was how Jenny employed the leisure hours in her ivory tower apart. And he had thought her a simple-minded, uncritical creature! It was he, it seemed, who was the fool. He felt no resentment towards Jenny. No, the distressing thing wasn’t Jenny herself; it was what she and the phenomenon of her red book represented, what they stood for and concretely symbolized. They represented all the vast conscious world of men outside himself; they symbolized something that in his studious solitariness he was apt not to believe in. He could stand at Piccadilly Circus, could watch the crowds shuffle past, and still imagine himself the one fully conscious, intelligent, individual being among all those thousands. It seemed, somehow, impossible that other people should be in their way as elaborate and complete as he in his. Impossible; and yet, periodically he would make some painful discovery about the external world and the horrible reality of its consciousness and its intelligence. The red notebook was one of these discoveries, a footprint in the sand. It put beyond a doubt the fact that the outer world really existed.

Sitting on the balustrade of the terrace, he ruminated this unpleasant truth for some time. Still chewing on it, he strolled pensively down towards the swimming-pool. A peacock and his hen trailed their shabby finery across the turf of the lower lawn. Odious birds! Their necks, thick and greedily fleshy at the roots, tapered up to the cruel inanity of their brainless heads, their flat eyes and piercing beaks. The fabulists were right, he reflected, when they took beasts to illustrate their tractates of human morality. Animals resemble men with all the truthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, the red notebook!) He threw a piece of stick at the slowly pacing birds. They rushed towards it, thinking it was something to eat.

He walked on. The profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed him. Like a great wooden octopus, it spread its long arms abroad.

‘Under the spreading ilex tree . . .’

He tried to remember who the poem was by, but couldn’t.

‘The smith, a brawny man is he,

With arms like rubber bands.’

Just like his; he would have to try and do his Muller exercises more regularly.

He emerged once more into the sunshine. The pool lay before him, reflecting in its bronze mirror the blue and various green of the summer day. Looking at it, he thought of Anne’s bare arms and seal-sleek bathing-dress, her moving knees and feet.

‘And little Luce with the white legs,

And bouncing Barbary . . .’

Oh, these rags and tags of other people’s making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was truly his own, or was it simply an education?

He walked slowly round the water’s edge. In an embayed recess among the surrounding yew trees, leaning her back against the pedestal of a pleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus, executed by some nameless mason of the seicento, he saw Mary pensively sitting.

‘Hullo!’ he said, for he was passing so close to her that he had to say something.

Mary looked up. ‘Hullo!’ she answered in a melancholy, uninterested tone.

In this alcove, hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of the pubic goddess. There was a prolonged silence.

At breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture postcard of Gobley Great Park. A stately Georgian pile, with a façade sixteen windows wide; parterres in the foreground; huge, smooth lawns receding out of the picture to right and left. Ten years more of the hard times and Gobley, with all its peers, will be deserted and decaying. Fifty years, and the countryside will know the old landmarks no more. They will have vanished as the monasteries vanished before them. At the moment, however, Mary’s mind was not moved by these considerations.

On the back of the postcard, next to the address, was written, in Ivor’s bold, large hand, a single quatrain.

‘Hail, maid of moonlight! Bride of the sun, farewell!

Like bright plumes moulted in an angel’s flight,

There sleep within my heart’s most mystic cell

Memories of morning, memories of the night.’

There followed a postscript of three lines: ‘Would you mind asking one of the housemaids to forward the packet of safety-razor blades I left in the drawer of my washstand. Thanks. – IVOR.’

Seated under the Venus’s immemorial gesture, Mary considered life and love. The abolition of her repressions, so far from bringing the expected peace of mind, had brought nothing but disquiet, a new and hitherto unexperienced misery. Ivor, Ivor. . . . She couldn’t do without him now. It was evident on the other hand, from the poem on the back of the picture postcard, that Ivor could very well do without her. He was at Gobley now; so was Zenobia. Mary knew Zenobia. She thought of the last verse of the song he had sung that night in the garden.

‘Le lendemain, Phillis peu sage

Aurait donné moutons et chien

Pour un baiser que le volage

A Lisette donnait pour rien.’

Mary shed tears at the memory; she had never been so unhappy in all her life before.

It was Denis who first broke the silence. ‘The individual,’ he began in a soft and sadly philosophical tone, ‘is not a self-supporting universe. There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when he is forced to take cognizance of the existence of other universes beside himself.’

He had contrived this highly abstract generalization as a preliminary to a personal confidence. It was the first gambit in a conversation that was to lead up to Jenny’s caricatures.

‘True,’ said Mary; and, generalizing for herself, she added, ‘When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she – or he, of course, as the case may be – must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.’

‘One is apt,’ Denis went on, ‘to be so spellbound by the spectacle of one’s own personality that one forgets that the spectacle presents itself to other people as well as to oneself.’

Mary was not listening. ‘The difficulty,’ she said, ‘makes itself acutely felt in matters of sex. If one individual seeks intimate contact with another individual in the natural way, she is certain to receive or inflict suffering. If, on the other hand, she avoids contacts, she risks the equally grave sufferings that follow on unnatural repressions. As you see, it’s a dilemma.’

‘When I think of my own case,’ said Denis, making a more decided move in the desired direction, ‘I am amazed how ignorant I am of other people’s mentality in general and, above all and in particular, of their opinions about myself. Our minds are sealed books only occasionally opened to the outside world.’ He made a gesture that was faintly suggestive of the drawing off of a rubber band.

‘It’s an awful problem,’ said Mary thoughtfully. ‘One has to have had personal experience to realize quite how awful it is.’

‘Exactly.’ Denis nodded. ‘One has to have had first-hand experience.’ He leaned towards her and slightly lowered his voice. ‘This very morning, for example . . .’ he began, but his confidences were cut short. The deep voice of the gong, tempered by distance to a pleasant booming, floated down from the house. It was lunch-time. Mechanically Mary rose to her feet, and Denis, a little hurt that she should exhibit such a desperate anxiety for her food and so slight an interest in his spiritual experiences, followed her. They made their way up to the house without speaking.

CHAPTER XXV

‘I HOPE YOU all realize,’ said Henry Wimbush during dinner, ‘that next Monday is Bank Holiday, and that you will all be expected to help in the Fair.’

‘Heavens!’ cried Anne. ‘The Fair – I had forgotten all about it. What a nightmare! Couldn’t you put a stop to it, Uncle Henry?’

Mr Wimbush sighed and shook his head. ‘Alas,’ he said, ‘I fear I cannot. I should have liked to put an end to it years ago; but the claims of Charity are strong.’

‘It’s not charity we want,’ Anne murmured rebelliously; ‘it’s justice.’

‘Besides,’ Mr Wimbush went on, ‘the Fair has become an institution. Let me see, it must be twenty-two years since we started it. It was a modest affair then. Now . . .’ he made a sweeping movement with his hand and was silent.

It spoke highly for Mr Wimbush’s public spirit that he still continued to tolerate the Fair. Beginning as a sort of glorified church bazaar, Crome’s yearly Charity Fair had grown into a noisy thing of merry-go-rounds, cocoa-nut shies, and miscellaneous side shows – a real genuine fair on the grand scale. It was the local St Bartholomew, and the people of all the neighbouring villages, with even a contingent from the county town, flocked into the park for their Bank Holiday amusement. The local hospital profited handsomely, and it was this fact alone which prevented Mr Wimbush, to whom the Fair was a cause of recurrent and never-diminishing agony, from putting a stop to the nuisance which yearly desecrated his park and garden.

‘I’ve made all the arrangements already,’ Henry Wimbush went on. ‘Some of the larger marquees will be put up tomorrow. The swings and the merry-go-round arrive on Sunday.’

‘So there’s no escape,’ said Anne, turning to the rest of the party. ‘You’ll all have to do something. As a special favour you’re allowed to choose your slavery. My job is the tea tent, as usual, Aunt Priscilla . . .’

‘My dear,’ said Mrs Wimbush, interrupting her, ‘I have more important things to think about than the Fair. But you need have no doubt that I shall do my best when Monday comes to encourage the villagers.’

‘That’s splendid,’ said Anne. ‘Aunt Priscilla will encourage the villagers. What will you do, Mary?’

‘I won’t do anything where I have to stand by and watch other people eat.’

‘Then you’ll look after the children’s sports.’

‘All right,’ Mary agreed. ‘I’ll look after the children’s sports.’

‘And Mr Scogan?’

Mr Scogan reflected. ‘May I be allowed to tell fortunes?’ he asked at last. ‘I think I should be good at telling fortunes.’

‘But you can’t tell fortunes in that costume!’

‘Can’t I?’ Mr Scogan surveyed himself.

‘You’ll have to be dressed up. Do you still persist?’

‘I’m ready to suffer all indignities.’

‘Good!’ said Anne; and turning to Gombauld, ‘You must be our lightning artist,’ she said. ‘“Your portrait for a shilling in five minutes.”’

‘It’s a pity I’m not Ivor,’ said Gombauld, with a laugh. ‘I could throw in a picture of their Auras for an extra sixpence.’

Mary flushed. ‘Nothing is to be gained,’ she said severely, ‘by speaking with levity of serious subjects. And, after all, whatever your personal views may be, psychical research is a perfectly serious subject.’

‘And what about Denis?’

Denis made a deprecating gesture. ‘I have no accomplishments,’ he said. ‘I’ll just be one of those men who wear a thing in their buttonholes and go about telling people which is the way to tea and not to walk on the grass.’

‘No, no,’ said Anne. ‘That won’t do. You must do something more than that.’

‘But what? All the good jobs are taken, and I can do nothing but lisp in numbers.’

‘Well, then, you must lisp,’ concluded Anne. ‘You must write a poem for the occasion – an “Ode on Bank Holiday.” We’ll print it on Uncle Henry’s press and sell it at twopence a copy.’

‘Sixpence,’ Denis protested. ‘It’ll be worth sixpence.’

Anne shook her head. ‘Twopence,’ she repeated firmly. ‘Nobody will pay more than twopence.’

‘And now there’s Jenny,’ said Mr Wimbtish. ‘Jenny,’ he said, raising his voice, ‘what will you do?’

Denis thought of suggesting that she might draw caricatures at sixpence an execution, but decided it would be wiser to go on feigning ignorance of her talent. His mind reverted to the red notebook. Could it really be true that he looked like that?

‘What will I do,’ Jenny echoed, ‘what will I do?’ She frowned thoughtfully for a moment; then her face brightened and she smiled. ‘When I was young,’ she said, ‘I learnt to play the drums.’

‘The drums?’

Jenny nodded, and, in proof of her assertion, agitated her knife and fork, like a pair of drumsticks, over her plate. ‘If there’s any opportunity of playing the drums . . .’ she began.

‘But of course,’ said Anne, ‘there’s any amount of opportunity. We’ll put you down definitely for the drums. That’s the lot,’ she added.

‘And a very good lot too,’ said Gombauld. ‘I look forward to my Bank Holiday. It ought to be gay.’

‘It ought indeed,’ Mr Scogan assented. ‘But you may rest assured that it won’t be. No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment.’

‘Come, come,’ protested Gombauld. ‘My holiday at Crome isn’t being a disappointment.’

‘Isn’t it?’ Anne turned an ingenuous mask towards him.

‘No, it isn’t,’ he answered.

‘I’m delighted to hear it.’

‘It’s in the very nature of things,’ Mr Scogan went on; ‘our holidays can’t help being disappointments. Reflect for a moment. What is a holiday? The ideal, the Platonic Holiday of Holidays is surely a complete and absolute change. You agree with me in my definition?’ Mr Scogan glanced from face to face round the table; his sharp nose moved in a series of rapid jerks through all the points of the compass. There was no sign of dissent; he continued: ‘A complete and absolute change; very well. But isn’t a complete and absolute change precisely the thing we can never have – never, in the very nature of things?’ Mr Scogan once more looked rapidly about him. ‘Of course it is. As ourselves, as specimens of Homo Sapiens, as members of a society, how can we hope to have anything like an absolute change? We are tied down by the frightful limitation of our human faculties, by the notions which society imposes on us through our fatal suggestibility, by our own personalities. For us, a complete holiday is out of the question. Some of us struggle manfully to take one, but we never succeed, if I may be allowed to express myself metaphorically, we never succeed in getting farther than Southend.’

‘You’re depressing,’ said Anne.

‘I mean to be,’ Mr Scogan replied, and, expanding the fingers of his right hand, he went on: ‘Look at me, for example. What sort of a holiday can I take? In endowing me with passions and faculties Nature has been horribly niggardly. The full range of human potentialities is in any case distressingly limited; my range is a limitation within a limitation. Out of the ten octaves that make up the human instrument, I can compass perhaps two. Thus, while I may have a certain amount of intelligence, I have no aesthetic sense; while I possess the mathematical faculty, I am wholly without the religious emotions; while I am naturally addicted to venery, I have little ambition and am not at all avaricious. Education has further limited my scope. Having been brought up in society, I am impregnated with its laws; not only should I be afraid of taking a holiday from them, I should also feel it painful to try to do so. In a word, I have a conscience as well as a fear of gaol. Yes, I know it by experience. How often have I tried to take holidays, to get away from myself, my own boring nature, my insufferable mental surroundings!’ Mr Scogan sighed. ‘But always without success,’ he added, ‘always without success. In my youth I was always striving – how hard! – to feel religiously and aesthetically. Here, said I to myself, are two tremendously important and exciting emotions. Life would be richer, warmer, brighter, altogether more amusing, if I could feel them. I tried to feel them. I read the works of the mystics. They seemed to me nothing but the most deplorable claptrap – as indeed they always must to anyone who does not feel the same emotion as the authors felt when they were writing. For it is the emotion that matters. The written work is simply an attempt to express emotion, which is in itself inexpressible, in terms of intellect and logic. The mystic objectifies a rich feeling in the pit of the stomach into a cosmology. For other mystics that cosmology is a symbol of the rich feeling. For the unreligious it is a symbol of nothing, and so appears merely grotesque. A melancholy fact! But I divagate.’ Mr Scogan checked himself. ‘So much for the religious emotion. As for the aesthetic – I was at even greater pains to cultivate that. I have looked at all the right works of art in every part of Europe. There was a time when, I venture to believe, I knew more about Taddeo da Poggibonsi, more about the cryptic Amico di Taddeo, even than Henry does. Today, I am happy to say, I have forgotten most of the knowledge I then so laboriously acquired; but without vanity I can assert that it was prodigious. I don’t pretend, of course, to know anything about nigger sculpture or the later seventeenth century in Italy; but about all the periods that were fashionable before 1900 I am, or was, omniscient. Yes, I repeat it, omniscient. But did that fact make me any more appreciative of art in general? It did not. Confronted by a picture, of which I could tell you all the known and presumed history – the date when it was painted, the character of the painter, the influences that had gone to make it what it was – I felt none of that strange excitement and exaltation which is, as I am informed by those who do feel it, the true aesthetic emotion. I felt nothing but a certain interest in the subject of the picture; or more often, when the subject was hackneyed and religious, I felt nothing but a great weariness of spirit. Nevertheless, I must have gone on looking at pictures for ten years before I would honestly admit to myself that they merely bored me. Since then I have given up all attempts to take a holiday. I go on cultivating my old stale daily self in the resigned spirit with which a bank clerk performs from ten till six his daily task. A holiday, indeed! I’m sorry for you, Gombauld, if you still look forward to having a holiday.’

Gombauld shrugged his shoulders. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘my standards aren’t as elevated as yours. But personally I found the war quite as thorough a holiday from all the ordinary decencies and sanities, all the common emotions and preoccupations, as I ever want to have.’

‘Yes,’ Mr Scogan thoughtfully agreed. ‘Yes, the war was certainly something of a holiday. It was a step beyond Southend; it was Weston-super-Mare; it was almost Ilfracombe.’

CHAPTER XXVI

A LITTLE CANVAS village of tents and booths had sprung up, just beyond the boundaries of the garden, in the green expanse of the park. A crowd thronged its streets, the men dressed mostly in black – holiday best, funeral best – the women in pale muslins. Here and there tricolour bunting hung inert. In the midst of the canvas town, scarlet and gold and crystal, the merry-go-round glittered in the sun. The balloon-man walked among the crowd, and above his head, like a huge, inverted bunch of many-coloured grapes, the balloons strained upwards. With a scythe-like motion the boat-swings reaped the air, and from the funnel of the engine which worked the roundabout rose a thin, scarcely wavering column of black smoke.

Denis had climbed to the top of one of Sir Ferdinando’s towers, and there, standing on the sun-baked leads, his elbows resting on the parapet, he surveyed the scene. The steam-organ sent up prodigious music. The clashing of automatic cymbals beat out with inexorable precision the rhythm of piercingly sounded melodies. The harmonies were like a musical shattering of glass and brass. Far down in the bass the Last Trump was hugely blowing, and with such persistence, such resonance, that its alternate tonic and dominant detached themselves from the rest of the music and made a tune of their own, a loud, monotonous see-saw.

Denis leaned over the gulf of swirling noise. If he threw himself over the parapet, the noise would surely buoy him up, keep him suspended, bobbing, as a fountain balances a ball on its breaking crest. Another fancy came to him, this time in metrical form.

‘My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretched

Over a bubbling cauldron.’

Bad, bad. But he liked the idea of something thin and distended being blown up from underneath.

‘My soul is a thin tent of gut. . . .’

or better –

‘My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane. . . .’

That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual vortex. He went down slowly. ‘My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane. . . .’

On the terrace stood a knot of distinguished visitors. There was old Lord Moleyn, like a caricature of an English milord in a French comic paper: a long man, with a long nose and long, drooping moustaches and long teeth of old ivory, and lower down, absurdly, a short covert coat, and below that long, long legs cased in pearl-grey trousers – legs that bent unsteadily at the knee and gave a kind of sideways wobble as he walked. Beside him, short and thick-set, stood Mr Callamay, the venerable, conservative statesman, with a face like a Roman bust, and short white hair. Young girls didn’t much like going for motor drives alone with Mr Callamay; and of old Lord Moleyn one wondered why he wasn’t living in gilded exile on the island of Capri among the other distinguished persons who, for one reason or another, find it impossible to live in England. They were talking to Anne, laughing, the one profoundly, the other hootingly.

A black silk balloon towing a black-and-white striped parachute proved to be old Mrs Budge from the big house on the other side of the valley. She stood low on the ground, and the spikes of her black-and-white sunshade menaced the eyes of Priscilla Wimbush, who towered over her – a massive figure dressed in purple and topped with a queenly toque on which the nodding black plumes recalled the splendours of a first-class Parisian funeral.

Denis peeped at them discreetly from the window of the morning-room. His eyes were suddenly become innocent, childlike, unprejudiced. They seemed, these people, inconceivably fantastic. And yet they really existed, they functioned by themselves, they were conscious, they had minds. Moreover, he was like them. Could one believe it? But the evidence of the red notebook was conclusive.

It would have been polite to go and say, ‘How d’you do?’ But at the moment Denis did not want to talk, could not have talked. His soul was a tenuous, tremulous, pale membrane. He would keep its sensibility intact and virgin as long as he could. Cautiously he crept out by a side door and made his way down towards the park. His soul fluttered as he approached the noise and movement of the fair. He paused for a moment on the brink, then stepped in and was engulfed.

Hundreds of people, each with his own private face and all of them real, separate, alive: the thought was disquieting. He paid twopence and saw the Tattooed Woman; twopence more, the Largest Rat in the World. From the home of the Rat he emerged just in time to see a hydrogen-filled balloon break loose for home. A child howled up after it; but calmly, a perfect sphere of flushed opal, it mounted, mounted. Denis followed it with his eyes until it became lost on the blinding sunlight. If he could but send his soul to follow it! . . .

He sighed, stuck his steward’s rosette in his buttonhole, and started to push his way, aimlessly but officially, through the crowd.

CHAPTER XXVII

MR SCOGAN HAD been accommodated in a little canvas hut. Dressed in a black shirt and a red bodice, with a yellow-and-red bandana handkerchief tied round his black wig, he looked – sharp-nosed, brown, and wrinkled – like the Bohemian hag of Frith’s Derby Day. A placard pinned to the curtain of the doorway announced the presence within the tent of ‘Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana.’ Seated at a table, Mr Scogan received his clients in mysterious silence, indicating with a movement of the finger that they were to sit down opposite him and to extend their hands for his inspection. He then examined the palm that was presented him, using a magnifying glass and a pair of horn spectacles. He had a terrifying way of shaking his head, frowning and clicking with his tongue as he looked at the lines. Sometimes he would whisper, as though to himself, ‘Terrible, terrible!’ or ‘God preserve us!’ sketching out the sign of the cross as he uttered the words. The clients who came in laughing grew suddenly grave; they began to take the witch seriously. She was a formidable-looking woman; could it be, was it possible, that there was something in this sort of thing after all? After all, they thought, as the hag shook her head over their hands, after all . . . And they waited, with an uncomfortably beating heart, for the oracle to speak. After a long and silent inspection, Mr Scogan would suddenly look up and ask, in a hoarse whisper, some horrifying question, such as, ‘Have you ever been hit on the head with a hammer by a young man with red hair?’ When the answer was in the negative, which it could hardly fail to be, Mr Scogan would nod several times, saying, ‘I was afraid so. Everything is still to come, still to come, though it can’t be very far off now.’ Sometimes, after a long examination, he would just whisper, ‘Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise,’ and refuse to divulge any details of a future too appalling to be envisaged without despair. Sesostris had a success of horror. People stood in a queue outside the witch’s booth waiting for the privilege of hearing sentence pronounced upon them.

Denis, in the course of his round, looked with curiosity at this crowd of suppliants before the shrine of the oracle. He had a great desire to see how Mr Scogan played his part. The canvas booth was a rickety, ill-made structure. Between its walls and its sagging roof were long gaping chinks and crannies. Denis went to the tea-tent and borrowed a wooden bench and a small Union Jack. With these he hurried back to the booth of Sesostris. Setting down the bench at the back of the booth, he climbed up, and with a great air of busy efficiency began to tie the Union Jack to the top of one of the tent-poles. Through the crannies in the canvas he could see almost the whole of the interior of the tent. Mr Scogan’s bandana-covered head was just below him; his terrifying whispers came clearly up. Denis looked and listened while the witch prophesied financial losses, death by apoplexy, destruction by air-raids in the next war.

‘Is there going to be another war?’ asked the old lady to whom he had predicted this end.

‘Very soon,’ said Mr Scogan, with an air of quiet confidence.

The old lady was succeeded by a girl dressed in white muslin, garnished with pink ribbons. She was wearing a broad hat, so that Denis could not see her face; but from her figure and the roundness of her bare arms he judged her young and pleasing. Mr Scogan looked at her hand then, whispered, ‘You are still virtuous.’

The young lady giggled and exclaimed, ‘Oh, lor’!’

‘But you will not remain so for long,’ added Mr Scogan sepulchrally. The young lady giggled again. ‘Destiny, which interests itself in small things no less than in great, has announced the fact upon your hand.’ Mr Scogan took up the magnifying-glass and began once more to examine the white palm. ‘Very interesting,’ he said, as though to himself – ‘very interesting. It’s as clear as day.’ He was silent.

‘What’s clear?’ asked the girl.

‘I don’t think I ought to tell you.’ Mr Scogan shook his head; the pendulous brass ear-rings which he had screwed on to his ears tinkled.

‘Please, please!’ she implored.

The witch seemed to ignore her remark. ‘Afterwards, it’s not at all clear. The fates don’t say whether you will settle down to married life and have four children or whether you will try to go on the cinema and have none. They are only specific about this one rather crucial incident.’

‘What is it? What is it? Oh, do tell me!’

The white muslin figure leant eagerly forward.

Mr Scogan sighed. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘if you must know, you must know. But if anything untoward happens you must blame your own curiosity. Listen. Listen.’ He lifted up a sharp, claw-nailed forefinger. ‘This is what the fates have written. Next Sunday afternoon at six o’clock you will be sitting on the second stile on the footpath that leads from the church to the lower road. At that moment a man will appear walking along the footpath.’ Mr Scogan looked at her hand again as though to refresh his memory of the details of the scene. ‘A man,’ he repeated – ‘a small man with a sharp nose, not exactly good looking nor precisely young, but fascinating.’ He lingered hissingly over the word. ‘He will ask you, “Can you tell me the way to Paradise?” and you will answer, “Yes, I’ll show you,” and walk with him down towards the little hazel copse. I cannot read what will happen after that.’ There was a silence.

‘Is it really true?’ asked white muslin.

The witch gave a shrug of the shoulders. ‘I merely tell you what I read in your hand. Good afternoon. That will be sixpence. Yes, I have change. Thank you. Good afternoon.’

Denis stepped down from the bench; tied insecurely and crookedly to the tent-pole, the Union Jack hung limp on the windless air. ‘If only I could do things like that!’ he thought, as he carried the bench back to the tea-tent.

Anne was sitting behind a long table filling thick white cups from an urn. A neat pile of printed sheets lay before her on the table. Denis took one of them and looked at it affectionately. It was his poem. They had printed five hundred copies, and very nice the quarto broad-sheets looked.

‘Have you sold many?’ he asked in a casual tone.

Anne put her head on one side deprecatingly. ‘Only three so far, I’m afraid. But I’m giving a free copy to everyone who spends more than a shilling on his tea. So in any case it’s having a circulation.’

Denis made no reply, but walked slowly away. He looked at the broadsheet in his hand and read the lines to himself relishingly as he walked along:

‘This day of roundabouts and swings,

Struck weights, shied cocoa-nuts, tossed rings,

Switchbacks, Aunt Sallies, and all such small

High jinks – you call it ferial?

A holiday? But paper noses

Sniffed the artificial roses

Of round Venetian cheeks through half

Each carnival year, and masks might laugh

At things the naked face for shame

Would blush at – laugh and think no blame.

A holiday? But Galba showed

Elephants on an airy road;

Jumbo trod the tightrope then,

And in the circus armèd men

Stabbed home for sport and died to break

Those dull imperatives that make

A prison of every working day,

Where all must drudge and all obey.

Sing Holiday! You do not know

How to be free. The Russian snow

Flowered with bright blood whose roses spread

Petals of fading, fading red

That died into the snow again,

Into the virgin snow; and men

From all the ancient bonds were freed

Old law, old custom, and old creed,

Old right and wrong there bled to death:

The frozen air received their breath,

A little smoke that died away;

And round about them where they lay

The snow bloomed roses. Blood was there

A red-gay flower and only fair.

Sing Holiday! Beneath the Tree

Of Innocence and Liberty,

Paper Nose and Red Cockade

Dance within the magic shade

That makes them drunken, merry, and strong

To laugh and sing their ferial song:

“Free, free. . .!”

But Echo answers

Faintly to the laughing dancers,

“Free” – and faintly laughs, and still,

Within the hollows of the hill,

Faintlier laughs and whispers, “Free,”

Fadingly, diminishingly:

“Free,” and laughter faints away . . .

Sing Holiday! Sing Holiday!’

He folded the sheet carefully and put it in his pocket. The thing has its merits. Oh, decidedly, decidedly! But how unpleasant the crowd smelt! He lit a cigarette. The smell of cows was preferable. He passed through the gate in the park wall into the garden. The swimming-pool was a centre of noise and activity.

‘Second Heat in the Young Ladies’ Championship.’ It was the polite voice of Henry Wimbush. A crowd of sleek, seal-like figures in black bathing-dresses surrounded him. His grey bowler hat, smooth, round, and motionless in the midst of a moving sea, was an island of aristocratic calm.

Holding his tortoise-shell-rimmed pince-nez an inch or two in front of his eyes, he read out names from a list.

‘Miss Dolly Miles, Miss Rebecca Balister, Miss Doris Gabell . . .’

Five young persons ranged themselves on the brink. From their seats of honour at the other end of the pool, old Lord Moleyn and Mr Callamay looked on with eager interest.

Henry Wimbush raised his hand. There was an expectant silence. ‘When I say “Go,” go. Go!’ he said. There was an almost simultaneous splash.

Denis pushed his way through the spectators. Somebody plucked him by the sleeve; he looked down. It was old Mrs Budge.

‘Delighted to see you again, Mr Stone,’ she said in her rich, husky voice. She panted a little as she spoke, like a short-winded lap-dog. It was Mrs Budge who, having read in the Daily Mirror that the Government needed peach stones – what they needed them for she never knew – had made the collection of peach stones her peculiar ‘bit’ of war work. She had thirty-six peach trees in her walled garden, as well as four hot-houses in which trees could be forced, so that she was able to eat peaches practically the whole year round. In 1916 she ate 4200 peaches, and sent the stones to the Government. In 1917 the military authorities called up three of her gardeners, and what with this and the fact that it was a bad year for wall fruit, she only managed to eat 2900 peaches during that crucial period of the national destinies. In 1918 she did rather better, for between January 1st and the date of the Armistice she ate 3300 peaches. Since the Armistice she had relaxed her efforts; now she did not eat more than two or three peaches a day. Her constitution, she complained, had suffered; but it had suffered for a good cause.

Denis answered her greeting by a vague and polite noise.

‘So nice to see the young people enjoying themselves,’ Mrs Budge went on. ‘And the old people too, for that matter. Look at old Lord Moleyn and dear Mr Callamay. Isn’t it delightful to see the way they enjoy themselves?’

Denis looked. He wasn’t sure whether it was so very delightful after all. Why didn’t they go and watch the sack races? The two old gentlemen were engaged at the moment in congratulating the winner of the race; it seemed an act of supererogatory graciousness; for, after all, she had only won a heat.

‘Pretty little thing, isn’t she?’ said Mrs Budge huskily, and panted two or three times.

‘Yes,’ Denis nodded agreement. Sixteen, slender, but nubile, he said to himself, and laid up the phrase in his memory as a happy one. Old Mr Callamay had put on his spectacles to congratulate the victor, and Lord Moleyn, leaning forward over his walking-stick, showed his long ivory teeth, hungrily smiling.

‘Capital performance, capital,’ Mr Callamay was saying in his deep voice.

The victor wriggled with embarrassment. She stood with her hands behind her back, rubbing one foot nervously on the other. Her wet bathing-dress shone, a torso of black polished marble.

‘Very good indeed,’ said Lord Moleyn. His voice seemed to come from just behind his teeth, a toothy voice. It was as though a dog should suddenly begin to speak. He smiled again, Mr Callamay readjusted his spectacles.

‘When I say “Go,” go. Go!’

Splash! The third heat had started.

‘Do you know, I never could learn to swim,’ said Mrs Budge.

‘Really?’

‘But I used to be able to float.’

Denis imagined her floating – up and down, up and down on a great green swell. A blown black bladder; no, that wasn’t good, that wasn’t good at all. A new winner was being congratulated. She was atrociously stubby and fat. The last one, long and harmoniously, continuously curved from knee to breast, had been an Eve by Cranach; but this, this one was a bad Rugens.

‘. . . go – go – go!’ Henry Wimbush’s polite level voice once more pronounced the formula. Another batch of young ladies dived in.

Grown a little weary of sustaining a conversation with Mrs Budge, Denis conveniently remembered that his duties as a steward called him elsewhere. He pushed out through the lines of spectators and made his way along the path left clear behind them. He was thinking again that his soul was a pale, tenuous membrane, when he was startled by hearing a thin, sibilant voice, speaking apparently from just above his head, pronounce the single word ‘Disgusting!’

He looked up sharply. The path along which he was walking passed under the lee of a wall of clipped yew. Behind the hedge the ground sloped steeply up towards the foot of the terrace and the house; for one standing on the higher ground it was easy to look over the dark barrier. Looking up, Denis saw two heads overtopping the hedge immediately above him. He recognized the iron mask of Mr Bodiham and the pale, colourless face of his wife. They were looking over his head, over the heads of the spectators, at the swimmers in the pond.

‘Disgusting!’ Mrs Bodiham repeated, hissing softly.

The rector turned up his iron mask towards the solid cobalt of the sky. ‘How long?’ he said, as though to himself; ‘how long?’ He lowered his eyes again, and they fell on Denis’s upturned curious face. There was an abrupt movement, and Mr and Mrs Bodiham popped out of sight behind the hedge.

Denis continued his promenade. He wandered past the merry-go-round, through the thronged streets of the canvas village; the membrane of his soul flapped tumultuously in the noise and laughter. In a roped-off space beyond, Mary was directing the children’s sports. Little creatures seethed round about her, making a shrill, tiny clamour; others clustered about the skirts and trousers of their parents. Mary’s face was shining in the heat; with an immense output of energy she started a three-legged race. Denis looked on in admiration.

‘You’re wonderful,’ he said, coming up behind her and touching her on the arm.

‘I’ve never seen such energy.’

She turned towards him a face, round, red, and honest as the setting sun; the golden bell of her hair swung silently as she moved her head and quivered to rest.

‘Do you know, Denis,’ she said, in a low, serious voice, gasping a little as she spoke – ‘do you know that there’s a woman here who has had three children in thirty-one months?’

‘Really,’ said Denis, making rapid mental calculations.

‘It’s appalling. I’ve been telling her about the Malthusian League. One really ought . . .’

But a sudden violent renewal of the metallic yelling announced the fact that somebody had won the race. Mary became once more the centre of a dangerous vortex. It was time, Denis thought, to move on; he might be asked to do something if he stayed too long.

He turned back towards the canvas village. The thought of tea was making itself insistent in his mind. Tea, tea, tea. But the tea-tent was horribly thronged. Anne, with an unusual expression of grimness on her flushed face, was furiously working the handle of the urn; the brown liquid spurted incessantly into the proffered cups. Portentous, in the farther corner of the tent, Priscilla, in her royal toque, was encouraging the villagers. In a momentary lull Denis could hear her deep, jovial laughter and her manly voice. Clearly, he told himself, this was no place for one who wanted tea. He stood irresolute at the entrance to the tent. A beautiful thought suddenly came to him: if he went back to the house, went unobtrusively, without being observed, if he tiptoed into the dining-room and noiselessly opened the little doors of the side-board – ah, then! In the cool recess within he would find bottles and a siphon; a bottle of crystal gin and a quart of soda water, and then for the cups that inebriate as well as cheer. . . .

A minute later he was walking briskly up the shady yew-tree walk. Within the house it was deliciously quiet and cool. Carrying his well-filled tumbler with care, he went into the library. There, the glass on the corner of the table beside him, he settled into a chair with a volume of Sainte-Beuve. There was nothing, he found, like a Causerie du Lundi for settling and soothing the troubled spirits. That tenuous membrane of his had been too rudely buffeted by the afternoon’s emotions; it required a rest.

CHAPTER XXVIII

TOWARDS SUNSET THE fair itself became quiescent. It was the hour for the dancing to begin. At one side of the village of tents a space had been roped off. Acetylene lamps, hung round it on posts, cast a piercing white light. In one corner sat the band, and, obedient to its scraping and blowing, two or three hundred dancers trampled across the dry ground, wearing away the grass with their booted feet. Round this patch of all but daylight, alive with motion and noise, the night seemed preternaturally dark. Bars of light reached out into it, and every now and then a lonely figure or a couple of lovers, interlaced, would cross the bright shaft, flashing for a moment into visible existence, to disappear again as quickly and surprisingly as they had come.

Denis stood by the entrance of the enclosure, watching the swaying, shuffling crowd. The slow vortex brought the couples round and round again before him, as though he were passing them in review. There was Priscilla, still wearing her queenly toque, still encouraging the villagers – this time by dancing with one of the tenant farmers. There was Lord Moleyn, who had stayed on to the disorganized, pass-overish meal that took the place of dinner of this festal day; he one-stepped shamblingly, his bent knees more precariously wobbly than ever, with a terrified village beauty. Mr Scogan trotted round with another. Mary was in the embrace of a young farmer of heroic proportions; she was looking up at him, talking, as Denis could see, very seriously. What about? he wondered. The Malthusian League, perhaps. Seated in the corner among the band, Jenny was performing wonders of virtuosity upon the drums. Her eyes shone, she smiled to herself. A whole subterranean life seemed to be expressing itself in those loud rat-tats, those long rolls and flourishes of drumming. Looking at her, Denis ruefully remembered the red notebook; he wondered what sort of a figure he was cutting now. But the sight of Anne and Gombauld swimming past – Anne with her eyes almost shut and sleeping, as it were, on the sustaining wings of movement and music – dissipated these preoccupations. Male and female created He them. . . . There they were, Anne and Gombauld, and a hundred couples more – all stepping harmoniously together to the old tune of Male and Female created He them. But Denis sat apart; he alone lacked his complementary opposite. They were all coupled but he; all but he. . . .

Somebody touched him on the shoulder and he looked up. It was Henry Wimbush.

‘I never showed you our oaken drain-pipes,’ he said. ‘Some of the ones we dug up are lying quite close to here. Would you like to come and see them?’

Denis got up, and they walked off together into the darkness. The music grew fainter behind them. Some of the higher notes faded out altogether. Jenny’s drumming and the steady sawing of the bass throbbed on, tuneless and meaningless in their ears. Henry Wimbush halted.

‘Here we are,’ he said, and, taking an electric torch out of his pocket, he cast a dim beam over two or three blackened sections of tree trunk, scooped out into the semblance of pipes, which were lying forlornly in a little depression in the ground.

‘Very interesting,’ said Denis, with a rather tepid enthusiasm.

They sat down on the grass. A faint white glare, rising from behind a belt of trees, indicated the position of the dancing-floor. The music was nothing but a muffled rhythmic pulse.

‘I shall be glad,’ said Henry Wimbush, ‘when this function comes at last to an end.’

‘I can believe it.’

‘I do not know how it is,’ Mr Wimbush continued, ‘but the spectacle of numbers of my fellow-creatures in a state of agitation moves in me a certain weariness, rather than any gaiety or excitement. That fact is, they don’t very much interest me. They aren’t in my line. You follow me? I could never take much interest, for example, in a collection of postage stamps. Primitives or seventeenth-century books – yes. They are my line. But stamps, no. I don’t know anything about them; they’re not my line. They don’t interest me, they give me no emotion. It’s rather the same with people, I’m afraid. I’m more at home with these pipes.’ He jerked his head sideways towards the hollowed logs. ‘The trouble with the people and events of the present is that you never know anything about them. What do I know of contemporary politics? Nothing. What do I know of the people I see round about me? Nothing. What they think of me or of anything else in the world, what they will do in five minutes’ time, are things I can’t guess at. For all I know, you may suddenly jump up and try to murder me in a moment’s time.’

‘Come, come,’ said Denis.

‘True,’ Mr Wimbush continued, ‘the little I know about your past is certainly reassuring. But I know nothing of your present, and neither you nor I know anything of your future. It’s appalling; in living people, one is dealing with unknown and unknowable quantities. One can only hope to find out anything about them by a long series of the most disagreeable and boring human contacts, involving a terrible expense of time. It’s the same with current events; how can I find out anything about them except by devoting years to the most exhausting first-hand study, involving once more an endless number of the most unpleasant contacts? No, give me the past. It doesn’t change; it’s all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and decorously and, above all, privately – by reading. By reading I know a great deal of Caesar Borgia, of St Francis, of Dr Johnson; a few weeks have made me thoroughly acquainted with these interesting characters, and I have been spared the tedious and revolting process of getting to know them by personal contact, which I should have to do if they were living now. How gay and delightful life would be if one could get rid of all the human contacts! Perhaps, in the future, when machines have attained to a state of perfection – for I confess that I am, like Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility of machinery – then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in a dignified seclusion, surrounded by the delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure from any human intrusion. It is a beautiful thought.’

‘Beautiful,’ Denis agreed. ‘But what about the desirable human contacts, like love and friendship?’

The black silhouette against the darkness shook its head. ‘The pleasures even of these contacts are much exaggerated,’ said the polite level voice. ‘It seems to me doubtful whether they are equal to the pleasures of private reading and contemplation. Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce. The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium. At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet. The proper study of mankind is books.’

‘I sometimes think that it may be,’ said Denis; he was wondering if Anne and Gombauld were still dancing together.

‘Instead of which,’ said Mr Wimbush, with a sigh, ‘I must go and see if all is well on the dancing-floor.’ They got up and began to walk slowly towards the white glare. ‘If all these people were dead,’ Henry Wimbush went on, ‘this festivity would be extremely agreeable. Nothing would be pleasanter than to read in a well-written book of an open-air ball that took place a century ago. How charming! one would say; how pretty and how amusing! But when the ball takes place today, when one finds oneself involved in it, then one sees the thing in its true light. It turns out to be merely this.’ He waved his hand in the direction of the acetylene flares. ‘In my youth,’ he went on after a pause, ‘I found myself, quite fortuitously, involved in a series of the most phantasmagorical amorous intrigues. A novelist could have made his fortune out of them, and even if I were to tell you, in my bald style, the details of these adventures, you would be amazed at the romantic tale. But I assure you, while they were happening – these romantic adventures – they seemed to me no more and no less exciting than any other incident of actual life. To climb by night up a rope-ladder to a second-floor window in an old house in Toledo seemed to me, while I was actually performing this rather dangerous feat, an action as obvious, as much to be taken for granted, as – how shall I put it? – as quotidian as catching the 8.52 from Surbiton to go to business on a Monday morning. Adventures and romance only take on their adventurous and romantic qualities at second-hand. Live them, and they are just a slice of life like the rest. In literature they become as charming as this dismal ball would be if we were celebrating its tercentenary.’ They had come to the entrance of the enclosure and stood there, blinking in the dazzling light. ‘Ah, if only we were!’ Henry Wimbush added.

Anne and Gombauld were still dancing together.

CHAPTER XXIX

IT WAS AFTER ten o’clock. The dancers had already dispersed and the last lights were being put out. Tomorrow the tents would be struck, the dismantled merry-go-round would be packed into waggons and carted away. An expanse of worn grass, a shabby brown patch in the wide green of the park, would be all that remained. Crome Fair was over.

By the edge of the pool two figures lingered.

‘No, no, no,’ Anne was saying in a breathless whisper, leaning backwards, turning her head from side to side in an effort to escape Gombauld’s kisses. ‘No, please. No.’ Her raised voice had become imperative.

Gombauld relaxed his embrace a little. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘I will.’

With a sudden effort Anne freed herself. ‘You won’t,’ she retorted. ‘You’ve tried to take the most unfair advantage of me.’

‘Unfair advantage?’ echoed Gombauld in genuine surprise.

‘Yes, unfair advantage. You attack me after I’ve been dancing for two hours, while I’m still reeling drunk with the movement, when I’ve lost my head, when I’ve got no mind left but only a rhythmical body! It’s as bad as making love to someone you’ve drugged or intoxicated.’

Gombauld laughed angrily. ‘Call me a White Slaver and have done with it.’

‘Luckily,’ said Anne, ‘I am now completely sobered, and if you try and kiss me again I shall box your ears. Shall we take a few turns round the pool?’ she added. ‘The night is delicious.’

For answer Gombauld made an irritated noise. They paced off slowly, side by side.

‘What I like about the painting of Degas . . .’ Anne began in her most detached and conversational tone.

‘Oh, damn Degas!’ Gombauld was almost shouting.

From where he stood, leaning in an attitude of despair against the parapet of the terrace, Denis had seen them, the two pale figures in a patch of moonlight, far down by the pool’s edge. He had seen the beginning of what promised to be an endlessly passionate embracement, and at the sight he had fled. It was too much; he couldn’t stand it. In another moment, he felt, he would have burst into irrepressible tears.

Dashing blindly into the house, he almost ran into Mr Scogan, who was walking up and down the hall smoking a final pipe.

‘Hullo!’ said Mr Scogan, catching him by the arm; dazed and hardly conscious of what he was doing or where he was, Denis stood there for a moment like a somnambulist. ‘What’s the matter?’ Mr Scogan went on. ‘You look disturbed, distressed, depressed.’

Denis shook his head without replying.

‘Worried about the cosmos, eh?’ Mr Scogan patted him on the arm. ‘I know the feeling,’ he said. ‘It’s a most distressing symptom. “What’s the point of it all? All is vanity. What’s the good of continuing to function if one’s doomed to be snuffed out at last along with everything else?” Yes, yes. I know exactly how you feel. It’s most distressing if one allows oneself to be distressed. But then why allow oneself to be distressed? After all, we all know that there’s no ultimate point. But what difference does that make?’

At this point the somnambulist suddenly woke up. ‘What?’ he said, blinking and frowning at his interlocutor. ‘What?’ Then breaking away he dashed up the stairs, two steps at a time.

Mr Scogan ran to the foot of the stairs and called up after him. ‘It makes no difference, none whatever. Life is gay all the same, always, under whatever circumstances – under whatever circumstances,’ he added, raising his voice to a shout. But Denis was already far out of hearing, and even if he had not been, his mind tonight was proof against all the consolations of philosophy. Mr Scogan replaced his pipe between his teeth and resumed his meditative pacing. ‘Under any circumstances,’ he repeated to himself. It was ungrammatical to begin with; was it true? And is life really its own reward? He wondered. When his pipe had burned itself to its stinking conclusion he took a drink of gin and went to bed. In ten minutes he was deeply, innocently asleep.

Denis had mechanically undressed and, clad in those flowered silk pyjamas of which he was so justly proud, was lying face downwards on his bed. Time passed. When at last he looked up, the candle which he had left alight at his bedside had burned down almost to the socket. He looked at his watch; it was nearly half-past one. His head ached, his dry, sleepless eyes felt as though they had been bruised from behind, and the blood was beating within his ears a loud arterial drum. He got up, opened the door, tiptoed noiselessly along the passage, and began to mount the stairs towards the higher floors. Arrived at the servants’ quarters under the roof, he hesitated, then turning to the right he opened a little door at the end of the corridor. Within was a pitch-dark cupboard-like boxroom, hot, stuffy, and smelling of dust and old leather. He advanced cautiously into the blackness, groping with his hands. It was from this den that the ladder went up to the leads of the western tower. He found the ladder, and set his feet on the rungs; noiselessly, he lifted the trapdoor above his head; the moonlit sky was over him, he breathed the fresh, cool air of the night. In a moment he was standing on the leads, gazing out over the dim, colourless landscape, looking perpendicularly down at the terrace seventy feet below.

Why had he climbed up to this high, desolate place? Was it to look at the moon? Was it to commit suicide? As yet he hardly knew. Death – the tears came into his eyes when he thought of it. His misery assumed a certain solemnity; he was lifted up on the wings of a kind of exaltation. It was a mood in which he might have done almost anything, however foolish. He advanced towards the farther parapet; the drop was sheer there and uninterrupted. A good leap, and perhaps one might clear the narrow terrace and so crash down yet another thirty feet to the sun-baked ground below. He paused at the corner of the tower, looking now down into the shadowy gulf below, now up towards the rare stars and the waning moon. He made a gesture with his hand, muttered something, he could not afterwards remember what; but the fact that he had said it aloud gave the utterance a peculiarly terrible significance. Then he looked down once more into the depths.

‘What are you doing, Denis?’ questioned a voice from somewhere very close behind him.

Denis uttered a cry of frightened surprise, and very nearly wept over the parapet in good earnest. His heart was beating terribly, and he was pale when, recovering himself, he turned round in the direction from which the voice had come.

‘Are you ill?’

In the profound shadow that slept under the eastern parapet of the tower, he saw something he had not previously noticed – an oblong shape. It was a mattress, and someone was lying on it. Since that first memorable night on the tower, Mary had slept out every evening; it was a sort of manifestation of fidelity.

‘It gave me a fright,’ she went on, ‘to wake up and see you waving your arms and gibbering there. What on earth were you doing?’

Denis laughed melodramatically. ‘What, indeed!’ he said. If she hadn’t woken up as she did, he would be lying in pieces at the bottom of the tower; he was certain of that, now.

‘You hadn’t got designs on me, I hope?’ Mary inquired, jumping too rapidly to conclusions.

‘I didn’t know you were here,’ said Denis, laughing more bitterly and artificially than before.

‘What is the matter, Denis?’

He sat down on the edge of the mattress, and for all reply went on laughing in the same frightful and improbable tone.

An hour later he was reposing with his head on Mary’s knees, and she, with an affectionate solicitude that was wholly maternal, was running her fingers through his tangled hair. He had told her everything, everything: his hopeless love, his jealousy, his despair, his suicide – as it were providentially averted by her interposition. He had solemnly promised never to think of self-destruction again. And now his soul was floating in a sad serenity. It was embalmed in the sympathy that Mary so generously poured. And it was not only in receiving sympathy that Denis found serenity and even a kind of happiness; it was also in giving it. For if he had told Mary everything about his miseries, Mary, reacting to these confidences, had told him in return everything, or very nearly everything, about her own.

‘Poor Mary!’ He was very sorry for her. Still, she might have guessed that Ivor wasn’t precisely a monument of constancy.

‘Well,’ she concluded, ‘one must put a good face on it.’ She wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t allow herself to be weak. There was a silence.

‘Do you think,’ asked Denis hesitatingly – ‘do you really think that she . . . that Gombauld . . .’

‘I’m sure of it,’ Mary answered decisively. There was another long pause.

‘I don’t know what to do about it,’ he said at last, utterly dejected.

‘You’d better go away,’ advised Mary. ‘It’s the safest thing, and the most sensible.’

‘But I’ve arranged to stay here three weeks more.’

‘You must concoct an excuse.’

‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘I know I am,’ said Mary, who was recovering all her firm self-possession. ‘You can’t go on like this, can you?’

‘No, I can’t go on like this,’ he echoed.

Immensely practical, Mary invented a plan of action. Startlingly, in the darkness, the church clock struck three.

‘You must go to bed at once,’ she said. ‘I’d no idea it was so late.’

Denis clambered down the ladder, cautiously descended the creaking stairs. His room was dark; the candle had long ago guttered to extinction. He got into bed and fell asleep almost at once.

CHAPTER XXX

DENIS HAD BEEN called, but in spite of the parted curtains he had dropped off again into that drowsy, dozy state when sleep becomes a sensual pleasure almost consciously savoured. In this condition he might have remained for another hour if he had not been disturbed by a violent rapping at the door.

‘Come in,’ he mumbled, without opening his eyes. The latch clicked, a hand seized him by the shoulder and he was rudely shaken.

‘Get up, get up!’

His eyelids blinked painfully apart, and he saw Mary standing over him, bright-faced and earnest.

‘Get up!’ she repeated. ‘You must go and send the telegram. Don’t you remember?’

‘O Lord!’ He threw off the bed-clothes; his tormentor retired.

Denis dressed as quickly as he could and ran up the road to the village post office. Satisfaction glowed within him as he returned. He had sent a long telegram, which would in a few hours evoke an answer ordering him back to town at once – on urgent business. It was an act performed, a decisive step taken – and he so rarely took decisive steps; he felt pleased with himself. It was with a whetted appetite that he came in to breakfast.

‘Good morning,’ said Mr Scogan. ‘I hope you’re better.’

‘Better?’

‘You were rather worried about the cosmos last night.’

Denis tried to laugh away the impeachment. ‘Was I?’ he lightly asked.

‘I wish,’ said Mr Scogan, ‘that I had nothing worse to prey on my mind. I should be a happy man.’

‘One is only happy in action,’ Denis enunciated, thinking of the telegram.

He looked out of the window. Great florid baroque clouds floated high in the blue heaven. A wind stirred among the trees, and their shaken foliage twinkled and glittered like metal in the sun. Everything seemed marvellously beautiful. At the thought that he would soon be leaving all this beauty he felt a momentary pang; but he comforted himself by recollecting how decisively he was acting.

‘Action,’ he repeated aloud, and going over to the side-board he helped himself to an agreeable mixture of bacon and fish.

Breakfast over, Denis repaired to the terrace, and sitting there, raised the enormous bulwark of The Times against the possible assaults of Mr Scogan, who showed an unappeased desire to go on talking about the Universe. Secure behind the crackling pages, he meditated. In the light of this brilliant morning the emotions of last night seemed somehow rather remote. And what if he had seen them embracing in the moonlight? Perhaps it didn’t mean much after all. And even if it did, why shouldn’t he stay? He felt strong enough to stay, strong enough to be aloof, disinterested, a mere friendly acquaintance. And even if he weren’t strong enough . . .

‘What time do you think the telegram will arrive?’ asked Mary suddenly, thrusting in upon him over the top of the paper.

Denis started guiltily. ‘I don’t know at all,’ he said.

‘I was only wondering,’ said Mary, ‘because there’s a very good train at 3.27, and it would be nice if you could catch it, wouldn’t it?’

‘Awfully nice,’ he agreed weakly. He felt as though he were making arrangements for his own funeral. Train leaves Waterloo 3.27. No flowers. . . . Mary was gone. No, he was blowed if he’d let himself be hurried down to the Necropolis like this. He was blowed. The sight of Mr Scogan looking out, with a hungry expression, from the drawing-room window made him precipitately hoist The Times once more. For a long while he kept it hoisted. Lowering it at last to take another cautious peep at his surroundings, he found himself, with what astonishment! confronted by Anne’s faint, amused, malicious smile. She was standing before him, – the woman who was a tree, – the swaying grace of her movement arrested in a pose that seemed itself a movement.

‘How long have you been standing there?’ he asked, when he had done gaping at her.

‘Oh, about half an hour, I suppose,’ she said airily. ‘You were so very deep in your paper – head over ears – I didn’t like to disturb you.’

‘You look lovely this morning,’ Denis exclaimed. It was the first time he had ever had the courage to utter a personal remark of the kind.

Anne held up her hand as though to ward off a blow. ‘Don’t bludgeon me, please.’ She sat down on the bench beside him. He was a nice boy, she thought, quite charming; and Gombauld’s violent insistences were really becoming rather tiresome. ‘Why don’t you wear white trousers?’ she asked. ‘I like you so much in white trousers.’

‘They’re at the wash,’ Denis replied rather curtly. This white-trouser business was all in the wrong spirit. He was just preparing a scheme to manoeuvre the conversation back to the proper path, when Mr Scogan suddenly darted out of the house, crossed the terrace with clockwork rapidity, and came to a halt in front of the bench on which they were seated.

‘To go on with our interesting conversation about the cosmos,’ he began. ‘I become more and more convinced that the various parts of the concern are fundamentally discrete. . . . But would you mind, Denis, moving a shade to your right?’ He wedged himself between them on the bench. ‘And if you would shift a few inches to the left, my dear Anne. . . . Thank you. Discrete, I think, was what I was saying.’

‘You were,’ said Anne. Denis was speechless.

They were taking their after-luncheon coffee in the library when the telegram arrived. Denis blushed guiltily as he took the orange envelope from the salver and tore it open. ‘Return at once. Urgent family business.’ It was too ridiculous. As if he had any family business! Wouldn’t it be best just to crumple the thing up and put it in his pocket without saying anything about it? He looked up; Mary’s large blue china eyes were fixed upon him, seriously, penetratingly. He blushed more deeply than ever, hesitated in a horrible uncertainty.

‘What’s your telegram about?’ Mary asked significantly.

He lost his head. ‘I’m afraid,’ he mumbled, ‘I’m afraid this means I shall have to go back to town at once.’ He frowned at the telegram ferociously.

‘But that’s absurd, impossible,’ cried Anne. She had been standing by the window talking to Gombauld; but at Denis’s words she came swaying across the room towards him.

‘It’s urgent,’ he repeated desperately.

‘But you’ve only been here such a short time,’ Anne protested.

‘I know,’ he said, utterly miserable. Oh, if only she could understand! Women were supposed to have intuition.

‘If he must go, he must,’ put in Mary firmly.

‘Yes, I must.’ He looked at the telegram again for inspiration. ‘You see, it’s urgent family business,’ he explained.

Priscilla got up from her chair in some excitement. ‘I had a distinct presentiment of this last night,’ she said. ‘A distinct presentiment.’

‘A mere coincidence, no doubt,’ said Mary, brushing Mrs Wimbush out of the conversation. ‘There’s a very good train at 3.27.’ She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘You’ll have nice time to pack.’

‘I’ll order the motor at once.’ Henry Wimbush rang the bell. The funeral was well under way. It was awful, awful.

‘I’m wretched you should be going,’ said Anne.

Denis turned towards her; she really did look wretched. He abandoned himself hopelessly, fatalistically to his destiny. This was what came of action, of doing something decisive. If only he’d just let things drift! If only . . .

‘I shall miss your conversation,’ said Mr Scogan.

Mary looked at the clock again. ‘I think perhaps you ought to go and pack,’ she said.

Obediently Denis left the room. Never again, he said to himself, never again would he do anything decisive. Camlet, West Bowlby, Knipswich for Timpany, Spavin Delawarr; and then all the other stations; and then, finally, London. The thought of the journey appalled him. And what on earth was he going to do in London when he got there? He climbed wearily up the stairs. It was time for him to lay himself in his coffin.

The car was at the door – the hearse. The whole party had assembled to see him go. Good-bye, good-bye. Mechanically he tapped the barometer that hung in the porch; the needle stirred perceptibly to the left. A sudden smile lighted up his lugubrious face.

‘“It stinks, and I am ready to depart,”’ he said, quoting Landor with an exquisite aptness. He looked quickly round from face to face. Nobody had noticed. He climbed into the hearse.

The End

Mortal Coils

First Published 1922

I: THE GIOCONDA SMILE

I

"Miss Spence will be down directly, sir."

"Thank you," said Mr. Hutton, without turning round. Janet Spence's parlourmaid was so ugly—ugly on purpose, it always seemed to him, malignantly, criminally ugly—that he could not bear to look at her more than was necessary. The door closed. Left to himself, Mr. Hutton got up and began to wander round the room, looking with meditative eyes at the familiar objects it contained.

Photographs of Greek statuary, photographs of the Roman Forum, coloured prints of Italian masterpieces, all very safe and well known. Poor, dear Janet, what a prig—what an intellectual snob! Her real taste was illustrated in that water-colour by the pavement artist, the one she had paid half a crown for (and thirty-five shillings for the frame). How often his had heard her tell the story, how often expatiate on the beauties of that skilful imitation of an oleograph! "A real Artist in the streets," and you could hear the capital A in Artist as she spoke the words. She made you feel that part of his glory had entered into Janet Spence when she tendered him that half-crown for the copy of the oleograph. She was implying a compliment to her own taste and penetration. A genuine Old Master for half a crown. Poor, dear Janet!

Mr. Hutton came to a pause in front of a small oblong mirror. Stooping a little to get a full view of his face, he passed a white, well-manicured finger over his moustache. It was as curly, as freshly auburn as it had been twenty years ago. His hair still retained its colour, and there was no sign of baldness yet—only a certain elevation of the brow. "Shakespearean," thought Mr. Hutton, with a smile, as he surveyed the smooth and polished expanse of his forehead.

Others abide our question, thou art free.... Footsteps in the sea ... Majesty ... Shakespeare, thou shouldst be living at this hour. No, that was Milton, wasn't it? Milton, the Lady of Christ's. There was no lady about him. He was what the women, would call a manly man. That was why they liked him—for the curly auburn moustache and the discreet redolence of tobacco. Mr. Hutton smiled again; he enjoyed making fun of himself. Lady of Christ's? No, no. He was the Christ of Ladies. Very pretty, very pretty. The Christ of Ladies. Mr. Hutton wished there were somebody he could tell the joke to. Poor, dear Janet wouldn't appreciate it, alas?

He straightened himself up, patted his hair, and resumed his peregrination. Damn the Roman Forum; he hated those dreary photographs.

Suddenly he became aware that Janet Spence was in the room, standing near the door. Mr. Hutton started, as though he had been taken in some felonious act. To make these silent and spectral appearances was one of Janet Spence's peculiar talents. Perhaps she had been there all the time, had seen him looking at himself in the mirror. Impossible! But, still, it was disquieting.

"Oh, you gave me such a surprise," said Mr. Hutton, recovering his smile and advancing with outstretched hand to meet her.

Miss Spence was smiling too: her Gioconda smile, he had once called it, in a moment of half-ironical flattery. Miss Spence had taken the compliment seriously, and had always tried to live up to the Leonardo standard. She smiled on his silence while Mr. Hutton shook hands; that was part of the Gioconda business.

"I hope you're well," said Mr. Hutton. "You look it."

What a queer face she had! That small mouth pursed forward by the Gioconda expression into a little snout with a round hole in the middle as though for whistling—it was like a penholder seen from the front. Above the mouth a well-shaped nose, finely aquiline. Eyes large, lustrous, and dark, with the largeness, lustre, and darkness that seems to invite sties and an occasional blood-shot suffusion. They were fine eyes, but unchangingly grave. The penholder might do its Gioconda trick, but the eyes never altered in their earnestness. Above them, a pair of boldly arched, heavily pencilled black eyebrows lent a surprising air of power, as of a Roman matron, to the upper portion of the face. Her hair was dark and equally Roman; Agrippina from the brows upward.

"I thought I'd just look in on my way home," Mr. Hutton went on. "Ah, it's good to be back here"—he indicated with a wave of his hand the flowers in the vases, the sunshine and greenery beyond the windows —"it's good to be back in the country after a stuffy day of business in town."

Miss Spence, who had sat down, pointed to a chair at her side.

"No, really, I cant sit down," Mr. Hutton protested. "I must get back to see how poor Emily is. She was rather seedy this morning." He sat down, nevertheless. "It's these wretched liver chills. She's always getting them. Women—" He broke off and coughed, so as to hide the fact that he had uttered. He was about to say that women with weak digestions ought not to marry; but the remark was too cruel, and he didn't really believe it. Janet Spence, moreover, was a believer in eternal flames and spiritual attachments. "She hopes to be well enough," he added, "to see you at luncheon to-morrow. Can you come? Do!" He smiled persuasively. "It's my invitation too, you know."

She dropped her eyes, and Mr. Hutton almost thought that he detected a certain reddening of the cheek. It was a tribute; he stroked his moustache.

"I should like to come if you think Emily's really well enough to have a visitor."

"Of course. You'll do her good. You'll do us both good. In married life three is often better company than two."

"Oh, you're cynical."

Mr. Hutton always had a desire to say "Bow-wow-wow" whenever that last word was spoken. It irritated him more than any other word in the language. But instead of barking he made haste to protest.

"No, no. I'm only speaking a melancholy truth. Reality doesn't always come up to the ideal, you know. But that doesn't make me believe any the less in the ideal. Indeed, I believe in it passionately the ideal of a matrimony between two people in perfect accord. I think it's realisable. I'm sure it is."

He paused significantly and looked at her with an arch expression. A virgin of thirty-six, but still unwithered; she had her charms. And there was something really rather enigmatic about her. Miss Spence made no reply but continued to smile. There were times when Mr. Hutton got rather bored with the Gioconda. He stood up.

"I must really be going now. Farewell, mysterious Gioconda." The smile grew intenser, focused itself, as it were, in a narrower snout. Mr. Hutton made a Cinquecento gesture, and kissed her extended hand. It was the first time he had done such a thing; the action seemed not to be resented. "I look forward to to-morrow."

"Do you?"

For answer Mr. Hutton once more kissed her hand, then turned to go. Miss Spence accompanied him to the porch.

"Where's your car?" she asked.

"I left it at the gate of the drive."

"I'll come and see you off."

"No, no." Mr. Hutton was playful, but determined. "You must do no such thing. I simply forbid you."

"But I should like to come," Miss Spence protested, throwing a rapid Gioconda at him.

Mr. Hutton held up his hand. "No," he repeated, and then, with a gesture that was almost the blowing of a kiss, he started to run down the drive, lightly on his toes, with long, bounding strides like a boy's. He was proud of that run; it was quite marvellously youthful. Still, he was glad the drive was no longer. At the last bend, before passing out of sight of the house, he halted and turned round. Miss Spence was still standing on the steps, smiling her smile. He waved his hand, and this time quite definitely and overtly wafted a kiss in her direction. Then, breaking once more into his magnificent canter, he rounded the last dark promontory of trees. Once out of sight of the house he let his high paces decline to a trot, and finally to a walk. He took out his handkerchief and began wiping his neck inside his collar. What fools, what fools! Had there ever been such an ass as poor, dear Janet Spence? Never, unless it was himself. Decidedly he was the more malignant fool, since he, at least, was aware of his folly and still persisted in it. Why did he persist? Ah, the problem that was himself, the problem that was other people.

He had reached the gate. A large, prosperous-looking motor was standing at the side of the road.

"Home, M'Nab." The chauffeur touched his cap. "And stop at the cross-roads on the way, as usual," Mr. Hutton added, as he opened the door of the car. "Well?" he said, speaking into the obscurity that lurked within.

"Oh, Teddy Bear, what an age you've been!" It was a fresh and childish voice that spoke the words. There was the faintest hint of Cockney impurity about the vowel sounds.

Mr. Hutton bent his large form and darted into the car with the agility of an animal regaining its burrow.

"Have I?" he said, as he shut the door. The machine began to move. "You must have missed me a lot if you found the time so long." He sat back in the low seat; a cherishing warmth enveloped him.

"Teddy Bear...." and with a sigh of contentment a charming little head declined on to Mr. Hutton's shoulder. Ravished, he looked down sideways at the round, babyish face.

"Do you know, Doris, you look like the pictures of Louise de Kerouaille." He passed his fingers through a mass of curly hair.

"Who's Louise de Kera-whatever-it-is?" Doris spoke from remote distances.

"She was, alas! Fuit. We shall all be 'was' one of these days. Meanwhile...."

Mr. Hutton covered the babyish face with kisses. The car rushed smoothly along. McNab's back, through the front window was stonily impassive, the back of a statue.

"Your hands," Doris whispered. "Oh, you mustn't touch me. They give me electric shocks."

Mr. Hutton adored her for the virgin imbecility of the words. How late in one's existence one makes the discovery of one's body!

"The electricity isn't in me, it's in you." He kissed her again, whispering her name several times: Doris, Doris, Doris. The scientific appellation of the sea-mouse, he was thinking as he kissed the throat, she offered him, white and extended like the throat of a victim awaiting the sacrificial knife. The sea-mouse was a sausage with iridescent fur: very peculiar. Or was Doris the sea cucumber, which turns itself inside out in moments of alarm? He would really have to go to Naples again, just to see the aquarium. These sea creatures were fabulous, unbelievably fantastic.

"Oh, Teddy Bear!" (More zoology; but he was only a land animal. His poor little jokes!) "Teddy Bear, I'm so happy."

"So am I," said Mr. Hutton. Was it true?

"But I wish I knew if it were right. Tell me, Teddy Bear, is it right or wrong?"

"Ah, my dear, that's just what I've been wondering for the last thirty years."

"Be serious, Teddy Bear. I want to know if this is right; if it's right that I should be here with you and that we should love one another, and that it should give me electric shocks when you touch me."

"Right? Well, it's certainly good that you should have electric shocks rather than sexual repressions. Read Freud; repressions are the devil."

"Oh, you don't help me. Why aren't you ever serious? If only you knew how miserable I am sometimes, thinking it's not right. Perhaps, you know, there is a hell, and all that. I don t know what to do. Sometimes I think I ought to stop loving you."

"But could you?" asked Mr. Hutton, confident in the powers of his seduction and his moustache.

"No, Teddy Bear, you know I couldn't. But I could run away, I could hide from you, I could lock myself up and force myself not to come to you."

"Silly little thing!" He tightened his embrace.

"Oh, dear, I hope it isn't wrong. And there are times when I don't care if it is."

Mr. Hutton was touched. He had a certain protective affection for this little creature. He laid his cheek against her hair and so, interlaced, they sat in silence, while the car, swaying and pitching a little as it hastened along, seemed to draw in the white road and the dusty hedges towards it devouringly.

"Good-bye, good-bye."

The car moved on, gathered speed, vanished round a curve, and Doris was left standing by the sign-post at the cross-roads, still dizzy and weak with the languor born of those kisses and the electrical touch of those gentle hands. She had to take a deep breath, to draw herself up deliberately, before she was strong enough to start her homeward walk. She had half a mile in which to invent the necessary lies.

Alone, Mr. Hutton suddenly found himself the prey of an appalling boredom.

II

Mrs. Hutton was lying on the sofa in her boudoir, playing Patience. In spite of the warmth of the July evening a wood fire was burning on the hearth. A black Pomeranian, extenuated by the heat and the fatigues of digestion, slept before the blaze.

"Phew! Isn't it rather hot in here?" Mr. Hutton asked as he entered the room.

"You know I have to keep warm, dear." The voice seemed breaking on the verge of tears. "I get so shivery."

"I hope you're better this evening."

"Not much, I'm afraid."

The conversation stagnated. Mr. Hutton stood leaning his back against the mantelpiece. He looked down at the Pomeranian lying at his feet, and with the toe of his right boot he rolled the little dog over and rubbed its white-flecked chest and belly. The creature lay in an inert ecstasy. Mrs. Hutton continued to play Patience. Arrived at an impasse, she altered the position of one card, took back another, and went on playing. Her Patiences always came out.

"Dr. Libbard thinks I ought to go to Llandrindod Wells this summer."

"Well—go, my dear—go, most certainly."

Mr. Hutton was thinking of the events of the afternoon: how they had driven, Doris and he, up to the hanging wood, had left the car to wait for them under the shade of the trees, and walked together out into the windless sunshine of the chalk down.

"I'm to drink the waters for my liver, and he thinks I ought to have massage and electric treatment, too."

Hat in hand, Doris had stalked four blue butterflies that were dancing together round a scabious flower with a motion that was like the flickering of blue fire. The blue fire burst and scattered into whirling sparks; she had given chase, laughing and shouting like a child.

"I'm sure it will do you good, my dear."

"I was wondering if you'd come with me, dear."

"But you know I'm going to Scotland at the end of the month."

Mrs. Hutton looked up at him entreatingly. "It's the journey," she said. "The thought of it is such a nightmare. I don't know if I can manage it. And you know I can't sleep in hotels. And then there's the luggage and all the worries. I can't go alone.

"But you won't be alone. You'll have your maid with you." He spoke impatiently. The sick woman was usurping the place of the healthy one. He was being dragged back from the memory of the sunlit down and the quick, laughing girl, back to this unhealthy, overheated room and its complaining occupant.

"I don't think I shall be able to go."

"But you must, my dear, if the doctor tells you to. And, besides, a change will do you good."

"I don't think so."

"But Libbard thinks so, and he knows what he's talking about."

"No, I can't face it. I'm too weak. I can't go alone." Mrs. Hutton pulled a handkerchief out of her black silk bag, and put it to her eyes.

"Nonsense, my dear, you must make the effort."

"I had rather be left in peace to die here." She was crying in earnest now.

"O Lord! Now do be reasonable. Listen now, please." Mrs. Hutton only sobbed more violently. "Oh, what is one to do?" He shrugged his shoulders and walked out of the room.

Mr. Hutton was aware that he had not behaved with proper patience; but he could not help it. Very early in his manhood he had discovered that not only did he not feel sympathy for the poor, the weak, the diseased, and deformed; he actually hated them. Once, as an undergraduate, he spent three days at a mission in the East End. He had returned, filled with a profound and ineradicable disgust. Instead of pitying, he loathed the unfortunate. It was not, he knew, a very comely emotion; and he had been ashamed of it at first. In the end he had decided that it was temperamental, inevitable, and had felt no further qualms. Emily had been healthy and beautiful when he married her. He had loved her then. But now—was it his fault that she was like this?

Mr. Hutton dined alone. Food and drink left him more benevolent than he had been before dinner. To make amends for his show of exasperation he went up to his wife's room and offered to read to her. She was touched, gratefully accepted the offer, and Mr. Hutton, who was particularly proud of his accent, suggested a little light reading in French.

"French? I am so fond of French." Mrs. Hutton spoke of the language of Racine as though it were a dish of green peas.

Mr. Hutton ran down to the library and returned with a yellow volume. He began reading. The effort of pronouncing perfectly absorbed his whole attention. But how good his accent was! The fact of its goodness seemed to improve the quality of the novel he was reading.

At the end of fifteen pages an unmistakable sound aroused him. He looked up; Mrs. Hutton had gone to sleep. He sat still for a little while, looking with a dispassionate curiosity at the sleeping face. Once it had been beautiful; once, long ago, the sight of it, the recollection of it, had moved him with an emotion profounder, perhaps, than any he had felt before or since. Now it was lined and cadaverous. The skin was stretched tightly over the cheekbones, across the bridge of the sharp, bird-like nose. The closed eyes were set in profound bone-rimmed sockets. The lamplight striking on the face from the side emphasised with light and shade its cavities and projections. It was the face of a dead Christ by Morales.

Le squelette était invisible

Au temps heureux de l'art païen.

He shivered a little, and tiptoed out of the room.

On the following day Mrs. Hutton came down to luncheon. She had had some unpleasant palpitations during the night, but she was feeling better now. Besides, she wanted to do honour to her guest. Miss Spence listened to her complaints about Llandrindod Wells, and was loud in sympathy, lavish with advice. Whatever she said was always said with intensity. She leaned forward, aimed, so to speak, like a gun, and fired her words. Bang! the charge in her soul was ignited, the words whizzed forth at the narrow barrel of her mouth. She was a machine-gun riddling her hostess with sympathy. Mr. Hutton had undergone similar bombardments, mostly of a literary or philosophic character—bombardments of Maeterlinck, of Mrs. Besant, of Bergson, of William James. To-day the missiles were medical. She talked about insomnia, she expatiated on the virtues of harmless drugs and beneficent specialists. Under the bombardment Mrs. Hutton opened out, like a flower in the sun.

Mr. Hutton looked on in silence. The spectacle of Janet Spence evoked in him an unfailing curiosity. He was not romantic enough to imagine that every face masked an interior physiognomy of beauty or strangeness, that every woman's small talk was like a vapour hanging over mysterious gulfs. His wife, for example, and Doris; they were nothing more than what they seemed to be. But with Janet Spence it was somehow different. Here one could be sure that there was some kind of a queer face behind the Gioconda smile and the Roman eyebrows. The only question was: What exactly was there? Mr. Hutton could never quite make out.

"But perhaps you won't have to go to Llandrindod after all," Miss Spence was saying. "If you get well quickly Dr. Libbard will let you off."

"I only hope so. Indeed, I do really feel rather better to-day."

Mr. Hutton felt ashamed. How much was it his own lack of sympathy that prevented her from feeling well every day? But he comforted himself by reflecting that it was only a case of feeling, not of being better. Sympathy does not mend a diseased liver or a weak heart.

"My dear, I wouldn't eat those red currants if I were you," he said, suddenly solicitous. "You know that Libbard has banned everything with skins and pips."

"But I am so fond of them," Mrs. Hutton protested, "and I feel so well to-day."

"Don't be a tyrant," said Miss Spence, looking first at him and then at his wife. "Let the poor invalid have what she fancies; it will do her good." She laid her hand on Mrs. Hutton's arm and patted it affectionately two or three times.

"Thank you, my dear." Mrs. Hutton helped herself to the stewed currants.

"Well, don't blame me if they make you ill again."

"Do I ever blame you, dear?"

"You have nothing to blame me for," Mr. Hutton answered playfully. "I am the perfect husband."

They sat in the garden after luncheon. From the island of shade under the old cypress tree they looked out across a flat expanse of lawn, in which the parterres of flowers shone with a metallic brilliance.

Mr. Hutton took a deep breath of the warm and fragrant air. "It's good to be alive," he said.

"Just to be alive," his wife echoed, stretching one pale, knot-jointed hand into the sunlight.

A maid brought the coffee; the silver pots and the little blue cups were set on a folding table near the group of chairs.

"Oh, my medicine!" exclaimed Mrs. Hutton. "Run in and fetch it, Clara, will you? The white bottle on the sideboard."

"I'll go," said Mr. Hutton. "I've got to go and fetch a cigar in any case."

He ran in towards the house. On the threshold he turned round for an instant. The maid was walking back across the lawn. His wife was sitting up in her deck-chair, engaged in opening her white parasol. Miss Spence was bending over the table, pouring out the coffee. He passed into the cool obscurity of the house.

"Do you like sugar in your coffee?" Miss Spence inquired.

"Yes, please. Give me rather a lot. I'll drink it after my medicine to take the taste away."

Mrs. Hutton leaned back in her chair, lowering the sunshade over her eyes, so as to shut out from her vision the burning sky.

Behind her, Miss Spence was making a delicate clinking among the coffee-cups.

"I've given you three large spoonfuls. That ought to take the taste away. And here comes the medicine."

Mr. Hutton had reappeared, carrying a wineglass, half full of a pale liquid.

"It smells delicious," he said, as he handed it to his wife.

"That's only the flavouring." She drank it off at a gulp, shuddered, and made a grimace. "Ugh, it's so nasty. Give me my coffee."

Miss Spence gave her the cup; she sipped at it. "You've made it like syrup. But it's very nice, after that atrocious medicine."

At half-past three Mrs. Hutton complained that she did not feel as well as she had done, and went indoors to lie down. Her husband would have said something about the red currants, but checked himself; the triumph of an "I told you so" was too cheaply won. Instead, he was sympathetic, and gave her his arm to the house.

"A rest will do you good," he said. "By the way, I shan't be back till after dinner."

"But why? Where are you going?"

"I promised to go to Johnson's this evening. We have to discuss the war memorial, you know."

"Oh, I wish you weren't going." Mrs. Hutton was almost in tears. "Can't you stay? I don't like being alone in the house."

"But, my dear, I promised weeks ago." It was a bother having to lie like this. "And now I must get back and look after Miss Spence."

He kissed her on the forehead and went out again into the garden. Miss Spence received him aimed and intense.

"Your wife is dreadfully ill," she fired off at him.

"I thought she cheered up so much when you came."

"That was purely nervous, purely nervous. I was watching her closely. With a heart in that condition and her digestion wrecked—yes, wrecked—anything might happen."

"Libbard doesn't take so gloomy a view of poor Emily's health." Mr. Hutton held open the gate that led from the garden into the drive; Miss Spence's car was standing by the front door.

"Libbard is only a country doctor. You ought to see a specialist."

He could not refrain from laughing. "You have a macabre passion for specialists."

Miss Spence held up her hand in protest. "I am serious. I think poor Emily is in a very bad state. Anything might happen at any moment."

He handed her into the car and shut the door. The chauffeur started the engine and climbed into his place, ready to drive off.

"Shall I tell him to start?" He had no desire to continue the conversation.

Miss Spence leaned forward and shot a Gioconda in his direction. "Remember, I expect you to come and see me again soon."

Mechanically he grinned, made a polite noise, and, as the car moved forward, waved his hand. He was happy to be alone.

A few minutes afterwards Mr. Hutton himself drove away. Doris was waiting at the cross-roads. They dined together twenty miles from home, at a roadside hotel. It was one of those bad, expensive meals which are only cooked in country hotels frequented by motorists. It revolted Mr. Hutton, but Doris enjoyed it. She always enjoyed things. Mr. Hutton ordered a not very good brand of champagne. He was wishing he had spent the evening in his library.

When they started homewards Doris was a little tipsy and extremely affectionate. It was very dark inside the car, but looking forward, past the motionless form of M'Nab, they could see a bright and narrow universe of forms and colours scooped out of the night by the electric head-lamps.

It was after eleven when Mr. Hutton reached home. Dr. Libbard met him in the hall. He was a small man with delicate hands and well-formed features that were almost feminine. His brown eyes were large and melancholy. He used to waste a great deal of time sitting at the bedside of his patients, looking sadness through those eyes and talking in a sad, low voice about nothing in particular. His person exhaled a pleasing odour, decidedly antiseptic but at the same time suave and discreetly delicious.

"Libbard?" said Mr. Hutton in surprise. "You here? Is my wife ill?"

"We tried to fetch you earlier," the soft, melancholy voice replied. "It was thought you were at Mr. Johnson's, but they had no news of you there."

"No, I was detained. I had a breakdown," Mr. Hutton answered irritably. It was tiresome to be caught out in a lie.

"Your wife wanted to see you urgently."

"Well, I can go now." Mr. Hutton moved towards the stairs.

Dr. Libbard laid a hand on his arm. "I am afraid it's too late."

"Too late?" He began fumbling with his watch; it wouldn't come out of the pocket.

"Mrs. Hutton passed away half an hour ago."

The voice remained even in its softness, the melancholy of the eyes did not deepen. Dr. Libbard spoke of death as he would speak of a local cricket match. All things were equally vain and equally deplorable.

Mr. Hutton found himself thinking of Janet Spence's words. At any moment—at any moment. She had been extraordinarily right.

"What happened?" he asked. "What was the cause?"

Dr. Libbard explained. It was heart failure brought on by a violent attack of nausea, caused in its turn by the eating of something of an irritant nature. Red currants? Mr. Hutton suggested. Very likely. It had been too much for the heart. There was chronic valvular disease: something had collapsed under the strain. It was all over; she could not have suffered much.

III

"It's a pity they should have chosen the day of the Eton and Harrow match for the funeral," old General Grego was saying as he stood, his top hat in his hand, under the shadow of the lych gate, wiping his face with his handkerchief.

Mr. Hutton overheard the remark and with difficulty restrained a desire to inflict grievous bodily pain on the General. He would have liked to hit the old brute in the middle of his big red face. Monstrous great mulberry, spotted with meal! Was there no respect for the dead? Did nobody care? In theory he didn't much care; let the dead bury their dead. But here, at the graveside, he had found himself actually sobbing. Poor Emily, they had been pretty happy once. Now she was lying at the bottom of a seven-foot hole. And here was Grego complaining that he couldn't go to the Eton and Harrow match.

Mr. Hutton looked round at the groups of black figures that were drifting slowly out of the churchyard towards the fleet of cabs and motors assembled in the road outside. Against the brilliant background of the July grass and flowers and foliage, they had a horribly alien and unnatural appearance. It pleased him to think that all these people would soon be dead, too.

That evening Mr. Hutton sat up late in his library reading the life of Milton. There was no particular reason why he should have chosen Milton; it was the book that first came to hand, that was all. It was after midnight when he had finished. He got up from his armchair, unbolted the French windows, and stepped out on to the little paved terrace. The night was quiet and clear. Mr. Hutton looked at the stars and at the holes between them, dropped his eyes to the dim lawns and hueless flowers of the garden, and let them wander over the farther landscape, black and grey under the moon.

He began to think with a kind of confused violence. There were the stars, there was Milton. A man can be somehow the peer of stars and night. Greatness, nobility. But is there seriously a difference between the noble and the ignoble? Milton, the stars, death, and himself—himself. The soul, the body; the higher and the lower nature. Perhaps there was something in it, after all. Milton had a god on his side and righteousness. What had he? Nothing, nothing whatever. There were only Doris's little breasts. What was the point of it all? Milton, the stars, death, and Emily in her grave, Doris and himself—always himself....

Oh, he was a futile and disgusting being. Everything convinced him of it. It was a solemn moment. He spoke aloud: "I will, I will." The sound of his own voice in the darkness was appalling; it seemed to him that he had sworn that infernal oath which binds even the gods: "I will, I will." There had been New Year's days and solemn anniversaries in the past, when he had felt the same contritions and recorded similar resolutions. They had all thinned away, these resolutions, like smoke, into nothingness. But this was a greater moment and he had pronounced a more fearful oath. In the future it was to be different. Yes, he would live by reason, he would be industrious, he would curb his appetites, he would devote his life to some good purpose. It was resolved and it would be so.

In practice he saw himself spending his mornings in agricultural pursuits, riding round with the bailiff, seeing that his land was farmed in the best modern way—silos and artificial manures and continuous cropping, and all that. The remainder of the day should be devoted to serious study. There was that book he had been intending to write for so long—The Effect of Diseases on Civilisation.

Mr. Hutton went to bed humble and contrite, but with a sense that grace had entered into him. He slept for seven and a half hours, and woke to find the sun brilliantly shining. The emotions of the evening before had been transformed by a good night's rest into his customary cheerfulness. It was not until a good many seconds after his return to conscious life that he remembered his resolution, his Stygian oath. Milton and death seemed somehow different in the sunlight. As for the stars, they were not there. But the resolutions were good; even in the daytime he could see that. He had his horse saddled after breakfast, and rode round the farm with the bailiff. After luncheon he read Thucydides on the plague at Athens. In the evening he made a few notes on malaria in Southern Italy. While he was undressing he remembered that there was a good anecdote in Skelton's jest-book about the Sweating Sickness. He would have made a note of it if only he could have found a pencil.

On the sixth morning of his new life Mr. Hutton found among his correspondence an envelope addressed in that peculiarly vulgar handwriting which he knew to be Doris's. He opened it, and began to read. She didn't know what to say; words were so inadequate. His wife dying like that, and so suddenly—it was too terrible. Mr. Hutton sighed, but his interest revived somewhat as he read on:

"Death is so frightening, I never think of it when I can help it. But when something like this happens, or when I am feeling ill or depressed, then I can't help remembering it is there so close, and I think about all the wicked things I have done and about you and me, and I wonder what will happen, and I am so frightened. I am so lonely, Teddy Bear, and so unhappy, and I don't know what to do. I can't get rid of the idea of dying, I am so wretched and helpless without you. I didn't mean to write to you; I meant to wait till you were out of mourning and could come and see me again, but I was so lonely and miserable, Teddy Bear, I had to write. I couldn't help it. Forgive me, I want you so much; I have nobody in the world but you. You are so good and gentle and understanding; there is nobody like you. I shall never forget how good and kind you have been to me, and you are so clever and know so much, I can t understand how you ever came to pay any attention to me, I am so dull and stupid, much less like me and love me, because you do love me a little, don't you, Teddy Bear?"

Mr. Hutton was touched with shame and remorse. To be thanked like this, worshipped for having seduced the girl—it was too much. It had just been a piece of imbecile wantonness. Imbecile, idiotic: there was no other way to describe it. For, when all was said, he had derived very little pleasure from it. Taking all things together, he had probably been more bored than amused. Once upon a time he had believed himself to be a hedonist. But to be a hedonist implies a certain process of reasoning, a deliberate choice of known pleasures, a rejection of known pains. This had been done without reason, against it. For he knew beforehand—so well, so well—that there was no interest or pleasure to be derived from these wretched affairs. And yet each time the vague itch came upon him he succumbed, involving himself once more in the old stupidity. There had been Maggie, his wife's maid, and Edith, the girl on the farm, and Mrs. Pringle, and the waitress in London, and others—there seemed to be dozens of them. It had all been so stale and boring. He knew it would be; he always knew. And yet, and yet.... Experience doesn't teach.

Poor little Doris! He would write to her kindly, comfortingly, but he wouldn't see her again. A servant came to tell him that his horse was saddled and waiting. He mounted and rode off. That morning the old bailiff was more irritating than usual.

Five days later Doris and Mr. Hutton ware sitting together on the pier at Southend; Doris, in white muslin with pink garnishings, radiated happiness; Mr. Hutton, legs outstretched and chair tilted, had pushed the panama back from his forehead, and was trying to feel like a tripper. That night, when Doris was asleep, breathing and warm by his side, he recaptured, in this moment of darkness and physical fatigue, the rather cosmic emotion which had possessed him that evening, not a fortnight ago, when he had made his great resolution. And so his solemn oath had already gone the way of so many other resolutions. Unreason had triumphed; at the first itch of desire he had given way. He was hopeless, hopeless.

For a long time he lay with closed eyes, ruminating his humiliation. The girl stirred in her sleep, Mr. Hutton turned over and looked in her direction. Enough faint light crept in between the half-drawn curtains to show her bare arm and shoulder, her neck, and the dark tangle of hair on the pillow. She was beautiful, desirable. Why did he lie there moaning over his sins? What did it matter? If he were hopeless, then so be it; he would make the best of his hopelessness. A glorious sense of irresponsibility suddenly filled him. He was free, magnificently free. In a kind of exaltation he drew the girl towards him. She woke, bewildered, almost frightened under his rough kisses.

The storm of his desire subsided into a kind of serene merriment. The whole atmosphere seemed to be quivering with enormous silent laughter.

"Could anyone love you as much as I do, Teddy Bear?" The question came faintly from distant worlds of love.

"I think I know somebody who does," Mr. Hutton replied. The submarine laughter was swelling, rising, ready to break the surface of silence and resound.

"Who? Tell me. What do you mean?" The voice had come very close; charged with suspicion, anguish, indignation, it belonged to this immediate world.

"A—ah!"

"Who?"

"You'll never guess." Mr. Hutton kept up the joke until it began to grow tedious, and then pronounced the name "Janet Spence."

Doris was incredulous. "Miss Spence of the Manor? That old woman?" It was too ridiculous. Mr. Hutton laughed too.

"But it's quite true," he said. "She adores me." Oh, the vast joke. He would go and see her as soon as he returned—see and conquer. "I believe she wants to marry me," he added.

"But you wouldn't ... you don't intend...."

The air was fairly crepitating with humour. Mr. Hutton laughed aloud. "I intend to marry you," he said. It seemed to him the best joke he had ever made in his life.

When Mr. Hutton left Southend he was once more a married man. It was agreed that, for the time being, the fact should be kept secret. In the autumn they would go abroad together, and the world should be informed. Meanwhile he was to go back to his own house and Doris to hers.

The day after his return he walked over in the afternoon to see Miss Spence. She received him with the old Gioconda.

"I was expecting you to come."

"I couldn't keep away," Mr. Hutton gallantly replied.

They sat in the summer-house. It was a pleasant place—a little old stucco temple bowered among dense bushes of evergreen. Miss Spence had left her mark on it by hanging up over the seat a blue-and-white Della Robbia plaque.

"I am thinking of going to Italy this autumn," said Mr. Hutton. He felt like a ginger-beer bottle, ready to pop with bubbling humorous excitement.

"Italy...." Miss Spence closed her eyes ecstatically. "I feel drawn there too."

"Why not let yourself be drawn?"

"I don't know. One somehow hasn't the energy and initiative to set out alone."

"Alone...." Ah, sound of guitars and throaty singing. "Yes, travelling alone isn't much fun."

Miss Spence lay back in her chair without speaking. Her eyes were still closed. Mr. Hutton stroked his moustache. The silence prolonged itself for what seemed a very long time.

Pressed to stay to dinner, Mr. Hutton did not refuse. The fun had hardly started. The table was laid in the loggia. Through its arches they looked out on to the sloping garden, to the valley below and the farther hills. Light ebbed away; the heat and silence were oppressive. A huge cloud was mounting up the sky, and there were distant breathings of thunder. The thunder drew nearer, a wind began to blow, and the first drops of rain fell. The table was cleared. Miss Spence and Mr. Hutton sat on in the growing darkness.

Miss Spence broke a long silence by saying meditatively.

"I think everyone has a right to a certain amount of happiness, don't you?"

"Most certainly." But what was she leading up to? Nobody makes generalisations about life unless they mean to talk about themselves. Happiness: he looked back on his own life, and saw a cheerful, placid existence disturbed by no great griefs or discomforts or alarms. He had always had money and freedom; he had been able to do very much as he wanted. Yes, he supposed he had been happy—happier than most men. And now he was not merely happy; he had discovered in irresponsibility the secret of gaiety. He was about to say something about his happiness when Miss Spence went on speaking.

"People like you and me have a right to be happy some time in our lives."

"Me?" said Mr. Hutton surprised.

"Poor Henry! Fate hasn't treated either of us very well."

"Oh, well, it might have treated me worse."

"You re being cheerful. That's brave of you. But don't think I can't see behind the mask."

Miss Spence spoke louder and louder as the rain came down more and more heavily. Periodically the thunder cut across her utterances. She talked on, shouting against the noise.

"I have understood you so well and for so long."

A flash revealed her, aimed and intent, leaning towards him. Her eyes were two profound and menacing gun-barrels. The darkness re-engulfed her.

"You were a lonely soul seeking a companion soul. I could sympathise with you in your solitude. Your marriage ..."

The thunder cut short the sentence. Miss Spence's voice became audible once more with the words:

"... could offer no companionship to a man of your stamp. You needed a soul mate."

A soul mate—he! a soul mate. It was incredibly fantastic. Georgette Leblanc, the ex-soul mate of Maurice Maeterlinck. He had seen that in the paper a few days ago. So it was thus that Janet Spence had painted him in her imagination—a soul-mater. And for Doris he was a picture of goodness and the cleverest man in the world. And actually, really, he was what?—Who knows?

"My heart went out to you. I could understand; I was lonely, too." Miss Spence laid her hand on his knee. "You were so patient." Another flash. She was still aimed, dangerously. "You never complained. But I could guess—I could guess."

"How wonderful of you!" So he was an âme incomprise.

"Only a woman's intuition...."

The thunder crashed and rumbled, died away, and only the sound of the ram was left. The thunder was his laughter, magnified, externalised. Flash and crash, there it was again, right on top of them.

"Don't you feel that you have within you something that is akin to this storm?" He could imagine her leaning forward as she uttered the words. "Passion makes one the equal of the elements."

What was his gambit now? Why, obviously, he should have said "Yes," and ventured on some unequivocal gesture. But Mr. Hutton suddenly took fright. The ginger beer in him had gone flat. The woman was serious—terribly serious. He was appalled.

Passion? "No," he desperately answered. "I am without passion."

But his remark was either unheard or unheeded, for Miss Spence went on with a growing exaltation, speaking so rapidly, however, and in such a burningly intimate whisper that Mr. Hutton found it very difficult to distinguish what she was saying. She was telling him, as far as he could make out, the story of her life. The lightning was less frequent now, and there were long intervals of darkness. But at each flash he saw her still aiming towards him, still yearning forward with a terrifying intensity. Darkness, the rain, and then flash! her face was there, close at hand. A pale mask, greenish white; the large eyes, the narrow barrel of the mouth, the heavy eyebrows. Agrippina, or wasn't it rather—yes, wasn't it rather George Robey?

He began devising absurd plans for escaping. He might suddenly jump up, Pretending he had seen a burglar—Stop thief, stop thief!—and dash off into the night in pursuit. Or should he say that he felt faint, a heart attack? or that he had seen, a ghost—Emily's ghost—in the garden? Absorbed in his childish plotting, he had ceased to pay any attention to Miss Spence's words. The spasmodic clutching of her hand recalled his thoughts.

"I honoured you for that, Henry," she was saying.

Honoured him for what?

"Marriage is a sacred tie, and your respect for it, even when the marriage was, as it was in your case, an unhappy one, made me respect you and admire you, and—shall I dare say the word?—"

Oh, the burglar, the ghost in the garden! But it was too late.

"... yes, love you, Henry, all the more. But we're free now, Henry."

Free? There was a movement in the dark, and she was kneeling on the floor by his chair.

"Oh, Henry, Henry, I have been unhappy too."

Her arms embraced him, and by the shaking of her body he could feel that she was sobbing. She might have been a suppliant crying for mercy.

"You mustn't, Janet," he protested. Those tears were terrible, terrible. "Not now, not now! You must be calm; you must go to bed." He patted her shoulder, then got up, disengaging himself from her embrace. He left her still crouching on the floor beside the chair on which he had been sitting.

Groping his way into the hall, and without waiting to look for his hat, he went out of the house, taking infinite pains to close the front door noiselessly behind him. The clouds had blown over, and the moon was shining from a clear sky. There were puddles all along the road, and a noise of running water rose from the gutters and ditches. Mr. Hutton splashed along, not caring if he got wet.

How heartrendingly she had sobbed! With the emotions of pity and remorse that the recollection evoked in him there was a certain resentment: why couldn't she have played the game that he was playing the heartless, amusing game? Yes, but he had known all the time that she wouldn't, she couldn't play that game; he had known and persisted.

What had she said about passion and the elements? Something absurdly stale, but true, true. There she was, a cloud black bosomed and charged with thunder, and he, like some absurd little Benjamin Franklin, had sent up a kite into the heart of the menace. Now he was complaining that his toy had drawn the lightning.

She was probably still kneeling by that chair in the loggia, crying.

But why hadn't he been able to keep up the game? Why had his irresponsibility deserted him, leaving him suddenly sober in a cold world? There were no answers to any of his questions. One idea burned steady and luminous in his mind—the idea of flight. He must get away at once.

IV

"What are you thinking about, Teddy Bear?"

"Nothing."

There was a silence. Mr. Hutton remained motionless, his elbows on the parapet of the terrace, his chin in his hands, looking down over Florence. He had taken a villa on one of the hilltops to the south of the city. From a little raised terrace at the end of the garden one looked down a long fertile valley on to the town and beyond it to the bleak mass of Monte Morello and, eastward of it, to the peopled hill of Fiesole, dotted with white houses. Everything was clear and luminous in the September sunshine.

"Are you worried about anything?"

"No, thank you."

"Tell me, Teddy Bear."

"But, my dear, there's nothing to tell." Mr. Hutton turned round, smiled, and patted the girl's hand. "I think you'd better go in and have your siesta. It's too hot for you here."

"Very well, Teddy Bear. Are you coming too?"

"When I've finished my cigar."

"All right. But do hurry up and finish it, Teddy Bear." Slowly, reluctantly, she descended the steps of the terrace and walked towards the house.

Mr. Hutton continued his contemplation of Florence. He had need to be alone. It was good sometimes to escape from Doris and the restless solicitude of her passion. He had never known the pains of loving hopelessly, but he was experiencing now the pains of being loved. These last weeks had been a period of growing discomfort. Doris was always with him, like an obsession, like a guilty conscience. Yes, it was good to be alone.

He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and opened it; not without reluctance. He hated letters; they always contained something unpleasant—nowadays, since his second marriage. This was from his sister. He began skimming through the insulting home-truths of which it was composed. The words "indecent haste," "social suicide," "scarcely cold in her grave," "person of the lower classes," all occurred. They were inevitable now in any communication from a well-meaning and right-thinking relative. Impatient, he was about to tear the stupid letter to pieces when his eye fell on a sentence at the bottom of the third page. His heart beat with uncomfortable violence as he read it. It was too monstrous! Janet Spence was going about telling everyone that he had poisoned his wife in order to marry Doris. What damnable malice! Ordinarily a man of the suavest temper, Mr. Hutton found himself trembling with rage. He took the childish satisfaction of calling names—he cursed the woman.

Then suddenly he saw the ridiculous side of the situation. The notion that he should have murdered anyone in order to marry Doris! If they only knew how miserably bored he was. Poor, dear Janet! She had tried to be malicious; she had only succeeded in being stupid.

A sound of footsteps aroused him; he looked round. In the garden below the little terrace the servant girl of the house was picking fruit. A Neapolitan, strayed somehow as far north as Florence, she was a specimen of the classical type—a little debased. Her profile might have been taken from a Sicilian coin of a bad period. Her features, carved floridly in the grand tradition, expressed an almost perfect stupidity. Her mouth was the most beautiful thing about her; the calligraphic hand of nature had richly curved it into an expression of mulish bad temper.... Under her hideous black clothes, Mr. Hutton divined a powerful body, firm and massive. He had looked at her before with a vague interest and curiosity. To-day the curiosity defined and focused itself into a desire. An idyll of Theocritus. Here was the woman; he, alas, was not precisely like a goatherd on the volcanic hills. He called to her.

"Armida!"

The smile with which she answered him was so provocative, attested so easy a virtue, that Mr. Hutton took fright. He was on the brink once more—on the brink. He must draw back, oh! quickly, quickly, before it was too late. The girl continued to look up at him.

"Ha chiamito?" she asked at last.

Stupidity or reason? Oh, there was no choice now. It was imbecility every time.

"Scendo" he called back to her. Twelve steps led from the garden to the terrace. Mr. Hutton counted them. Down, down, down, down.... He saw a vision of himself descending from one circle of the inferno to the next—from a darkness full of wind and hail to an abyss of stinking mud.

V

For a good many days the Hutton case had a place on the front page of every newspaper. There had been no more popular murder trial since George Smith had temporarily eclipsed the European War by drowning in a warm bath his seventh bride. The public imagination was stirred by this tale of a murder brought to light months after the date of the crime. Here, it was felt, was one of those incidents in human life, so notable because they are so rare, which do definitely justify the ways of God to man. A wicked man had been moved by an illicit passion to kill his wife. For months he had lived in sin and fancied security——only to be dashed at last more horribly into the pit he had prepared for himself. Murder will out, and here was a case of it. The readers of the newspapers were in a position to follow every movement of the hand of God. There had been vague, but persistent, rumours in the neighbourhood; the police had taken action at last. Then came the exhumation order, the post-mortem examination, the inquest, the evidence of the experts, the verdict of the coroner's jury, the trial, the condemnation. For once Providence had done its duty, obviously, grossly, didactically, as in a melodrama. The newspapers were right in making of the case the staple intellectual food of a whole season.

Mr. Hutton's first emotion when he was summoned from Italy to give evidence at the inquest was one of indignation. It was a monstrous, a scandalous thing that the police should take such idle, malicious gossip seriously. When the inquest was over he would bring an action for malicious prosecution against the Chief Constable; he would sue the Spence woman for slander.

The inquest was opened; the astonishing evidence unrolled itself. The experts had examined the body, and had found traces of arsenic; they were of opinion that the late Mrs. Hutton had died of arsenic poisoning.

Arsenic poisoning.... Emily had died of arsenic poisoning? After that, Mr. Hutton learned with surprise that there was enough arsenicated insecticide in his green-houses to poison an army.

It was now, quite suddenly, that he saw it: there was a case against him. Fascinated, he watched it growing, growing, like some monstrous tropical plant. It was enveloping him, surrounding him; he was lost in a tangled forest.

When was the poison administered? The experts agreed that it must have been swallowed eight or nine hours before death. About lunch-time? Yes, about lunch-time. Clara, the parlour-maid, was called. Mrs. Hutton, she remembered, had asked her to go and fetch her medicine. Mr. Hutton had volunteered to go instead; he had gone alone. Miss Spence—ah, the memory of the storm, the white aimed face! the horror of it all!—Miss Spence confirmed Clara's statement, and added that Mr. Hutton had come back with the medicine already poured out in a wineglass, not in the bottle.

Mr. Hutton's indignation evaporated. He was dismayed, frightened. It was all too fantastic to be taken seriously, and yet this nightmare was a fact it was actually happening.

M'Nab had seen them kissing, often. He had taken them for a drive on the day of Mrs. Hutton's death. He could see them reflected in the wind-screen, sometimes out of the tail of his eye.

The inquest was adjourned. That evening Doris went to bed with a headache. When he went to her room after dinner, Mr. Hutton found her crying.

"What's the matter?" He sat down on the edge of her bed and began to stroke her hair. For a long time she did not answer, and he went on stroking her hair mechanically, almost unconsciously; sometimes, even he bent down and kissed her bare shoulder. He had his own affairs, however, to think about. What had happened? How was it that the stupid gossip had actually come true? Emily had died of arsenic poisoning. It was absurd, impossible. The order of things had been broken, and he was at the mercy of an irresponsibility. What had happened, what was going to happen? He was interrupted in the midst of his thoughts.

"It's my fault—it's my fault!" Doris suddenly sobbed out. "I shouldn't have loved you; I oughtn't to have let you love me. Why was I ever born?"

Mr. Hutton didn't say anything but looked down in silence at the abject figure of misery lying on the bed.

"If they do anything to you I shall kill myself."

She sat up, held him for a moment at arm's length, and looked at him with a kind of violence, as though she were never to see him again.

"I love you, I love you, I love you." She drew him, inert and passive, towards her, clasped him, pressed herself against him. "I didn't know you loved me as much as that, Teddy Bear. But why did you do it—why did you do it?"

Mr. Hutton undid her clasping arms and got up. His face became very red. "You seem to take it for granted that I murdered my wife," he said. "It's really too grotesque. What do you all take me for? A cinema hero?" He had begun to lose his temper. All the exasperation, all the fear and bewilderment of the day, was transformed into a violent anger against her. "It's all such damned stupidity. Haven't you any conception of a civilised man's mentality? Do I look the sort of man who'd go about slaughtering people? I suppose you imagined I was so insanely in love with you that I could commit any folly. When will you women understand that one isn't insanely in love? All one asks for is a quiet life, which you won't allow one to have. I don't know what the devil ever induced me to marry you. It was all a damned stupid, practical joke. And now you go about saying I'm a murderer. I won't stand it."

Mr. Hutton stamped towards the door. He had said horrible things, he knew—odious things that he ought speedily to unsay. But he wouldn't. He closed the door behind him.

"Teddy Bear!" He turned the handle; the latch clicked into place. Teddy Bear! The voice that came to him through the closed door was agonised. Should he go back? He ought to go back. He touched the handle, then withdrew his fingers and quickly walked away. When he was half-way down the stairs he halted. She might try to do something silly—throw herself out of the window or God knows what! He listened attentively; there was no sound. But he pictured her very clearly, tiptoeing across the room, lifting the sash as high as it would go, leaning out into the cold night air. It was raining a little. Under the window lay the paved terrace. How far below? Twenty-five or thirty feet? Once, when he was walking along Piccadilly, a dog had jumped out of a third-storey window of the Ritz. He had seen it fall; he had heard it strike the pavement. Should he go back? He was damned if he would; he hated her.

He sat for a long time in the library. What had happened? What was happening? He turned the question over and over in his mind and could find no answer. Suppose the nightmare dreamed itself out to its horrible conclusion. Death was waiting for him. His eyes filled with tears; he wanted so passionately to live. "Just to be alive." Poor Emily had wished it too, he remembered: "Just to be alive." There were still so many places in this astonishing world unvisited, so many queer delightful people still unknown, so many lovely women never so much as seen. The huge white oxen would still be dragging their wains along the Tuscan roads, the cypresses would still go up, straight as pillars, to the blue heaven; but he would not be there to see them. And the sweet southern wines—Tear of Christ and Blood of Judas—others would drink them, not he. Others would walk down the obscure and narrow lanes between the bookshelves in the London Library, sniffing the dusty perfume of good literature, peering at strange titles, discovering unknown names, exploring the fringes of vast domains of knowledge. He would be lying in a hole in the ground. And why, why? Confusedly he felt that some extraordinary kind of justice was being done. In the past he had been wanton and imbecile and irresponsible. Now Fate was playing as wantonly, as irresponsibly, with him. It was tit for tat, and God existed after all.

He felt that he would like to pray. Forty years ago he used to kneel by his bed every evening. The nightly formula of his childhood came to him almost unsought from some long unopened chamber of the memory. "God bless Father and Mother, Tom and Cissie and the Baby, Mademoiselle and Nurse, and everyone that I love, and make me a good boy. Amen." They were all dead now all except Cissie.

His mind seemed to soften and dissolve; a great calm descended upon his spirit. He went upstairs to ask Doris's forgiveness. He found her lying on the couch at the foot of the bed. On the floor beside her stood a blue bottle of liniment, marked "Not to be taken"; she seemed to have drunk about half of it.

"You didn't love me," was all she said when she opened her eyes to find him bending over her.

Dr. Libbard arrived in time to prevent any very serious consequences. "You mustn't do this again," he said while Mr. Hutton was out of the room.

"What's to prevent me?" she asked defiantly.

Dr. Libbard looked at her with his large, sad eyes. "There's nothing to prevent you," he said. "Only yourself and your baby. Isn't it rather bad luck on your baby, not allowing it to come into the world because you want to go out of it?"

Doris was silent for a time. "All right," she whispered. "I won't."

Mr. Hutton sat by her bedside for the rest of the night. He felt himself now to be indeed a murderer. For a time he persuaded himself that he loved this pitiable child. Dozing in his chair, he woke up, stiff and cold, to find himself drained dry, as it were, of every emotion. He had become nothing but a tired and suffering carcase. At six o'clock he undressed and went to bed for a couple of hours' sleep. In the course of the same afternoon the coroner's jury brought in a verdict of "Wilful Murder," and Mr. Hutton was committed for trial.

VI

Miss Spence was not at all well. She had found her public appearances in the witness-box very trying, and when it was all over she had something that was very nearly a breakdown. She slept badly, and suffered from nervous indigestion. Dr. Libbard used to call every other day. She talked to him a great deal—mostly about the Hutton case.... Her moral indignation was always on the boil. Wasn't it appalling to think that one had had a murderer in one's house. Wasn't it extraordinary that one could have been for so long mistaken about the man's character? (But she had had an inkling from the first.) And then the girl he had gone off with—so low class, so little better than a prostitute. The news that the second Mrs. Hutton was expecting a baby the posthumous child of a condemned and executed criminal—revolted her; the thing was shocking an obscenity. Dr. Libbard answered her gently and vaguely, and prescribed bromide.

One morning he interrupted her in the midst of her customary tirade. "By the way," he said in his soft, melancholy voice, "I suppose it was really you who poisoned Mrs. Hutton."

Miss Spence stared at him for two or three seconds with enormous eyes, and then quietly said, "Yes." After that she started to cry.

"In the coffee, I suppose."

She seemed to nod assent. Dr. Libbard took out his fountain-pen, and in his neat, meticulous calligraphy wrote out a prescription for a sleeping draught.

The End

II: PERMUTATIONS AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES

A PLAY

It is night on the terrace outside the Hotel Cimarosa. Part of the garden façade of the hotel is seen at the back of the stage—a bare white wall, with three French windows giving on to balconies about ten feet from the ground, and below them, leading from the terrace to the lounge, a double door of glass, open now, through which a yellow radiance streams out into the night. On the paved terrace stand two or three green iron tables and chairs. To the left a mass of dark foliage, ilex and cypress, in the shadow of which more tables and chairs are set. At the back to the left a strip of sky is visible between the corner of the hotel and the dark trees, blue and starry, for it is a marvellous June evening. Behind the trees the ground slopes steeply down and down to an old city in the valley below, of whose invisible presence you are made aware by the sound of many bells wafted up from a score of slender towers in a sweet and melancholy discord that seems to mourn the passing of each successive hour. When the curtain rises the terrace is almost deserted; the hotel dinner is not yet over. A single guest, COUNT ALBERTO TIRETTA, is discovered, sitting in a position of histrionic despair at one of the little green tables. A waiter stands respectfully sympathetic at his side, ALBERTO is a little man with large lustrous eyes and a black moustache, about twenty-five years of age. He has the pathetic charm of an Italian street-boy with an organ—almost as pretty and sentimental as Murillo's little beggars.

ALBERTO (making a florid gesture with his right hand and with his left covering his eyes). Whereupon, Waiter (he is reciting a tale of woes), she slammed the door in my face. (He brings down his gesticulating right hand with a crash on to the table.)

WAITER. In your face, Signore? Impossible!

ALBERTO. Impossible, but a fact. Some more brandy, please; I am a little weary. (The waiter uncorks the bottle he has been holding under his arm and fills Alberto's glass.)

WAITER. That will be one lira twenty-five, Signore.

ALBERTO (throwing down a note). Keep the change.

WAITER (bowing). Thank you, Signore. But if I were the Signore I should beat her. (He holds up the Cognac bottle and by way of illustration slaps its black polished flanks.)

ALBERTO. Beat her? But I tell you I am in love with her.

WAITER. All the more reason, then, Signore. It will be not only a stern disciplinary duty, but a pleasure as well; oh, I assure you, Signore, a pleasure.

ALBERTO. Enough, enough. You sully the melancholy beauty of my thoughts. My feelings at this moment are of an unheard-of delicacy and purity. Respect them, I beg you. Some more brandy, please.

WAITER (pouring out the brandy). Delicacy, purity.... Ah, believe me, Signore ... That will be one lira twenty-five.

ALBERTO (throwing down another note with the same superbly aristocratic gesture). Keep the change.

WAITER. Thank you, Signore. But as I was saying, Signore, delicacy, purity.... You think I do not understand such sentiments. Alas, Signore, beneath the humblest shirt-front there beats a heart. And if the Signore's sentiments are too much for him, I have a niece. Eighteen years old, and what eyes, what forms!

ALBERTO. Stop, stop. Respect my feelings, Waiter, as well as the ears of the young lady (he points towards the glass doors). Remember she is an American. (The Waiter, bows and goes into the hotel.)

SIDNEY DOLPHIN and MISS AMY TOOMIS

come out together on to the terrace. MISS AMY supports a well-shaped head on one of the most graceful necks that ever issued from Minneapolis. The eyes are dark, limpid, ingenuous; the mouth expresses sensibility. She is twenty-two and the heiress of those ill-gotten Toomis millions. SIDNEY DOLPHIN has a romantic aristocratic appearance. The tailoring of 1830 would suit him. Balzac would have described his face as plein de poésie. In effect he does happen to be a poet. His two volumes of verse, "Zeotrope and 'Trembling Ears," have been recognised by intelligent critics as remarkable. How far they are poetry nobody, least of all Dolphin himself, is certain. They may be merely the ingenious products of a very cultured and elaborate brain. Mere curiosities; who knows? His age is twenty-seven. They sit down at one of the little iron tables, ALBERTO they do not see; the shadow of the trees conceals him. For his part, he is too much absorbed in savouring his own despair to pay any attention to the newcomers. There is a long, uncomfortable silence. DOLPHIN assumes the Thinker's mask—the bent brow, the frown, the finger to the forehead, AMY regards this romantic gargoyle with some astonishment. Pleased with her interest in him, DOLPHIN racks his brains to think of some way of exploiting this curiosity to his own advantage; but he is too shy to play any of the gambits which his ingenuity suggests. AMY makes a social effort and speaks, in chanting Middle Western tones. AMY. It's been a wonderful day, hasn't it?

DOLPHIN (starting, as though roused from profoundest thought). Yes, yes, it has.

AMY. You don't often get it as fine as this in England, I guess.

DOLPHIN. Not often.

AMY. Nor do we over at home.

DOLPHIN. So I should suppose. (Silence. A spasm of anguish crosses DOLPHIN'S face; then he reassumes the old Thinker's mask. AMY looks at him for a little longer, then, unable to suppress her growing curiosity, she says with a sudden burst of childish confidence:)

AMY. It must be wonderful to be able to think as hard as you do, Mr. Dolphin. Or are you sad about something?

DOLPHIN (looks up, smiles, and blushes; a spell has been broken). The finger at the temple, Miss Toomis, is not the barrel of a revolver.

AMY. That means you're not specially sad about anything. Just thinking.

DOLPHIN. Just thinking.

AMY. What about?

DOLPHIN. Oh, just life, you know—life and letters.

AMY. Letters? Do you mean love letters.

DOLPHIN. No, no. Letters in the sense of literature; letters as opposed to life.

AMY. (disappointed). Oh, literature. They used to teach us literature at school. But I could never understand Emerson. What do you think about literature for?

DOLPHIN. It interests me, you know. I read it; I even try to write it.

AMY (very much excited). What, are you a writer, a poet, Mr. Dolphin?

DOLPHIN. Alas, it is only too true; I am.

AMY. But what do you write?

DOLPHIN. Verse and prose, Miss Toomis. Just verse and prose.

AMY (with enthusiasm). Isn't that interesting. I've never met a poet before, you know.

DOLPHIN. Fortunate being. Why, before I left England I attended a luncheon of the Poetry Union at which no less than a hundred and eighty-nine poets were present. The sight of them made me decide to go to Italy.

AMY. Will you show me your books?

DOLPHIN. Certainly not, Miss Toomis. That would ruin our friendship. I am insufferable in my writings. In them I give vent to all the horrible thoughts and impulses which I am too timid to express or put into practice in real life. Take me as you find me here, a decent specimen of a man, shy but able to talk intelligently when the layers of ice are broken, aimless, ineffective, but on the whole quite a good sort.

AMY. But I know that man already, Mr. Dolphin. I want to know the poet. Tell me what the poet is like.

DOLPHIN. He is older, Miss Toomis, than the rocks on which he sits. He is villainous. He is ... but there, I really must stop. It was you who set me going, though. Did you do it on purpose.

AMY. Do what on purpose?

DOLPHIN. Make me talk about myself. If you want to get people to like you, you must always lead the conversation on to the subject of their characters. Nothing pleases them so much. They'll talk with enthusiasm for hours and go away saying that you're the most charming, cleverest person they've ever met. But of course you knew that already. You re Machiavellian.

AMY. Machiavellian? You're the first person that's ever said that. I always thought I was very simple and straight-forward. People say about me that.... Ah, now I'm talking about myself. That was unscrupulous of you. But you shouldn't have told me about the trick if you wanted it to succeed.

DOLPHIN. Yes. It was silly of me. If I hadn't, you'd have gone on talking about yourself and thought me the nicest man in the world.

AMY. I want to hear about your poetry. Are you writing any now?

DOLPHIN. I have composed the first line of a magnificent epic. But I can't get any further.

AMY. How does it go?

DOLPHIN. Like this (he clears his throat). "Casbeen has been, and Moghreb is no more." Ah, the transience of all sublunary things! But inspiration has stopped short there.

AMY. What exactly does it mean?

DOLPHIN. Ah, there you re asking too much, Miss Toomis. Waiter, some coffee for two.

WAITER (who is standing in the door of the lounge). Si, Signore. Will the lady and gentleman take it here, or in the gardens, perhaps?

DOLPHIN. A good suggestion. Why shouldn't the lady and gentleman take it in the garden?

AMY. Why not?

DOLPHIN. By the fountain, then, Waiter. We can talk about ourselves there to the tune of falling waters.

AMY. And you shall recite your poetry, Mr. Dolphin. I just love poetry. Do you know Mrs. Wilcox's Poems of Passion? (They go out to the left. A nightingale utters two or three phrases of song and from far down the bells of the city jangle the three-quarters and die slowly away into the silence out of which they rose and came together.)

(LUCREZIA GRATTAROL has come out of the hotel just in time to overhear Miss Toomis's last remark, just in time to see her walk slowly away with a hand on SIDNEY DOLPHIN's arm. LUCREZIA has a fine thoroughbred appearance, an aquiline nose, a finely curved sensual mouth, a superb white brow, a quivering nostril. She is the last of a family whose name is as illustrious in Venetian annals as that of Foscarini, Tiepolo, or Tron. She stamps a preposterously high-heeled foot and tosses her head.)

LUCREZIA. Passion! Passion, indeed. An American! (She starts to run after the retreating couple, when ALBERTO, who has been sitting with his head between his hands, looks up and catches sight of the newcomer.)

ALBERTO. Lucrezia!

LUCREZIA (starts, for in the shade beneath the trees she had not seen him). Oh! You gave me such a fright, Alberto. I'm in a hurry now. Later on, if you....

ALBERTO (in a desperate voice that breaks into a sob). Lucrezia! You must come and talk to me. You must.

LUCREZIA. But I tell you I can't now, Alberto. Later on.

ALBERTO (the tears streaming down his cheeks). Now, now, now! You must come now. I am lost if you don't.

LUCREZIA (looking indecisively first at ALBERTO and then along the path down which AMY and SIDNEY DOLPHIN have disappeared). But supposing I am lost if I do come?

ALBERTO. But you couldn't be as much lost as I am. Ah, you don't know what it is to suffer. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt weiss wass ich leide. Oh, Lucrezia.... (He sobs unrestrainedly.)

LUCREZIA (goes over to where ALBERTO is sitting. She pats his shoulder and his bowed head of black curly hair). There, there, my little Bertino. Tell me what it is. You mustn't cry. There, there.

ALBERTO (drying his eyes and rubbing his head, like a cat, avid of caresses, against her hand). How can I thank you enough, Lucrezia? You are like a mother to me.

LUCREZIA. I know. That's just what's so dangerous.

ALBERTO (lets his head fall upon her bosom). I come to you for comfort, like a tired child, Lucrezia.

LUCREZIA. Poor darling! (She strokes his hair, twines its thick black tendrils round her fingers, ALBERTO is abjectly pathetic.)

ALBERTO (with closed eyes and a seraphic smile). Ah, the suavity, the beauty of this maternal instinct!

LUCREZIA (with a sudden access of energy and passion). The disgustingness of it, you mean. (She pushes him from her. His head wobbles once, as though it were inanimate, before he straightens into life.) The maternal instinct. Ugh. It's been the undoing of too many women. You men come with your sentimental babyishness and exploit it for your own lusts. Be a man, Bertino. Be a woman, I mean, if you can.

ALBERTO (looking up at her with eyes full of doglike, dumb reproach). Lucrezia! You, too? Is there nobody who cares for me? This is the unkindest cut of all. I may as well die. (He relapses into tears.)

LUCREZIA (who has started to go, turns back, irresolute). Now, don't cry, Bertino. Can't you behave like a reasonable being? (She makes as though to go again.)

ALBERTO (through his sobs). You too, Lucrezia! Oh, I can't bear it, I can't bear it.

LUCREZIA (turning back desperately). But what do you want me to do? Why should you expect me to hold your hand?

ALBERTO. I thought better of you, Lucrezia. Let me go. There is nothing left for me now but death. (He rises to his feet, takes a step or two, and then collapses into another chair, unable to move.)

LUCREZIA (torn between anger and remorse). Now do behave yourself sensibly, Bertino. There, there ... you mustn't cry. I'm sorry if I've hurt you. (Looking towards the left along the path taken by AMY and DOLPHIN.) Oh, damnation! (She stamps her foot.) Here, Bertino, do pull yourself together. (She raises him up.) There, now you must stop crying. (But as soon as she lets go of him his head falls back on to the iron table with an unpleasant, meaty bump. That bump is too much for LUCREZIA. She bends over him, strokes his head, even kisses the lustrous curls.) Oh, forgive me, forgive me! I have been a beast. But, tell me first, what's the matter, Bertino? What is it, my poor darling? Tell me.

ALBERTO. Nobody loves me.

LUCREZIA. But we're all devoted to you, Bertino mio.

ALBERTO. She isn't. To-day she shut the door in my face.

LUCREZIA. She? You mean the French-woman, the one you told me about? Louise, wasn't she?

ALBERTO. Yes, the one with the golden hair.

LUCREZIA. And the white legs. I remember: you saw her bathing.

ALBERTO (lays his hand on his heart). Ah, don't remind me of it. (His face twitches convulsively.)

LUCREZIA. And now she's gone and shut the door in your face.

ALBERTO. In my face, Lucrezia.

LUCREZIA. Poor darling!

ALBERTO. For me there is nothing now but the outer darkness.

LUCREZIA. Is the door shut forever, then?

ALBERTO. Definitively, for ever.

LUCREZIA. But have you tried knocking? Perhaps, after all, it might be opened again, if only a crack.

ALBERTO. What, bruise my hands against the granite of her heart?

LUCREZIA. Don't be too poetical, Bertino mio. Why not try again, in any case?

ALBERTO. You give me courage.

LUCREZIA. There's no harm in trying, you know.

ALBERTO. Courage to live, to conquer. (He beats his breast.) I am a man again, thanks to you, Lucrezia, my inspirer, my Muse, my Egeria. How can I be sufficiently grateful. (He kisses her.) I am the child of your spirit. (He kisses her again.)

LUCREZIA. Enough, enough. I am not ambitious to be a mother, yet awhile. Quickly now, Bertino, I know you will succeed.

ALBERTO (cramming his hat down on his head and knocking with his walking-stick on the ground). Succeed or die, Lucrezia. (He goes out with a loud martial stamp.)

LUCREZIA (to the waiter who is passing across the stage with a coffee-pot and cups on a tray). Have you seen the Signorina Toomis, Giuseppe?

WAITER. The Signorina is down in the garden. So is the Signore Dolphin. By the fountain, Signorina. This is the Signore's coffee.

LUCREZIA. Have you a mother, Giuseppe?

WAITER. Unfortunately, Signorina.

LUCREZIA. Unfortunately? Does she treat you badly, then?

WAITER. Like a dog, Signorina.

LUCREZIA. Ah, I should like to see your mother. I should like to ask her to give me some hints on how to bring up children.

WAITER. But surely, Signorina, you are not expecting, you—ah....

LUCREZIA. Only figuratively, Giuseppe. My children are spiritual children.

WAITER. Precisely, precisely. My mother, alas! is not a spiritual relation. Nor is my fiançée.

LUCREZIA. I didn't know you were engaged.

WAITER. To an angel of perdition. Believe me, Signorina, I go to my destruction in that woman—go with open eyes. There is no escape. She is what is called in the Holy Bible (crosses himself) a Fisher of Men.

LUCREZIA. You have remarkable connections, Giuseppe.

WAITER. I am honoured by your words, Signorina. But the coffee becomes cold. (He hurries out to the left.)

LUCREZIA. In the garden! By the fountain! And there's the nightingale beginning to sing in earnest! Good heavens! what may not already have happened? (She runs out after the waiter.)

(Two persons emerge from the hotel, the VICOMTE DE BARBAZANGE and the BARONESS KOCH DE WORMS. PAUL DE BARBAZANGE is a young man—twenty-six perhaps of exquisite grace. Five foot ten, well built, dark hair, sleek as marble, the most refined aristocratic features, and a monocle, SIMONE DE WORMS is forty, a ripe Semitic beauty. Five years more and the bursting point of overripeness will have been reached. But now, thanks to massage, powerful corsets, skin foods, and powder, she is still a beauty—a beauty of the type Italians admire, cushioned, steatopygous. PAUL, who has a faultless taste in bric-à-brac and women, and is by instinct and upbringing an ardent anti-Semite, finds her infinitely repulsive. The Baronne enters with a loud shrill giggle. She gives PAUL a slap with her green feather fan.)

SIMONE. Oh, you naughty boy! Quelle histoire. Mon Dieu! How dare you tell me such a story!

PAUL. For you, Baronne, I would risk anything even your displeasure.

SIMONE. Charming boy. But stories of that kind.... And you look so innocent, too! Do you know any more like it?

PAUL (suddenly grave). Not of that description. But I will tell you a story of another kind, a true story, a tragic story.

SIMONE. Did I ever tell you how I saw a woman run over by a train? Cut to pieces, literally, to pieces. So disagreeable. I'll tell you later. But now, what about your story?

PAUL. Oh, it's nothing, nothing.

SIMONE. But you promised to tell it me.

PAUL. It's only a commonplace anecdote. A young man, poor but noble, with a name and a position to keep up. A few youthful follies, a mountain of debts, and no way out except the revolver. This is all dull and obvious enough. But now follows the interesting part of the story. He is about to take that way out, when he meets the woman of his dreams, the goddess, the angel, the ideal. He loves, and he must die without a word. (He turns his face away from the Baronne, as though his emotion were too much for him, which indeed it is.)

SIMONE. Vicomte—Paul—this young man is you?

PAUL (solemnly). He is.

SIMONE. And the woman?

PAUL. Oh, I can't, I mayn't tell you.

SIMONE. The woman! Tell me, Paul.

PAUL (turning towards her and falling on his knees). The woman, Simone, is you. Ah, but I had no right to say it.

SIMONE (quivering with emotion). My Paul. (She clasps his head to her bosom. A grimace of disgust contorts Paul's classical features. He endures Simone's caresses with a stoical patience.) But what is this about a revolver? That is only a joke, Paul, isn't it? Say it isn't true.

PAUL. Alas, Simone, too true. (He taps his coat pocket.) There it lies. To-morrow I have a hundred and seventy thousand francs to pay, or be dishonoured. I cannot pay the sum. A Barbazange does not survive dishonour. My ancestors were Crusaders, preux chevaliers to a man. Their code is mine. Dishonour for me is worse than death.

SIMONE. Mon Dieu, Paul, how noble you are! (She lays her hands on his shoulder, leans back, and surveys him at arm's length, a look of pride and anxious happiness on her face.)

PAUL (dropping his eyes modestly). Not at all. I was born noble, and noblesse oblige, as we say in our family. Farewell, Simone, I love you—and I must die. My last thought will be of you. (He kisses her hand, rises to his feet, and makes as though to go.)

SIMONE (clutching him by the arm). No, Paul, no. You must not, shall not, do anything rash. A hundred and seventy thousand francs, did you say? It is paltry. Is there no one who could lend or give you the money?

PAUL. Not a soul. Farewell, Simone.

SIMONE. Stay, Paul. I hardly dare to ask it of you—you with such lofty ideas of honour—but would you ... from me?

PAUL. Take money from a woman? Ah, Simone, tempt me no more. I might do an ignoble act.

SIMONE. But from me, Paul, from me. I am not in your eyes a woman like any other woman, am I?

PAUL. It is true that my ancestors, the Crusaders, the preux chevaliers, might in all honour receive gifts from the ladies of their choice—chargers, swords, armour, or tenderer mementoes, such as gloves or garters. But money—no; who ever heard of their taking money?

SIMONE. But what would be the use of my giving you swords and horses? You could never use them. Consider, my knight, my noble Sir Paul, in these days the contests of chivalry have assumed a different form; the weapons and the armour have changed. Your sword must be of gold and paper; your breastplate of hard cash; your charger of gilt-edged securities. I offer you the shining panoply of the modern crusader. Will you accept it?

PAUL. You are eloquent, Simone. You could win over the devil himself with that angelic voice of yours. But it cannot be. Money is always money. The code is clear. I cannot accept your offer. Here is the way out. (He takes an automatic pistol out of his pocket.) Thank you, Simone, and good-bye. How wonderful is the love of a pure woman.

SIMONE. Paul, Paul, give that to me! (She snatches the pistol from his hand.) If anything were to happen to you, Paul, I should kill myself with this. You must live, you must consent to accept the money. You mustn't let your honour make a martyr of you.

PAUL (brushing a tear from his eyes). No, I can't.... Give me that pistol, I beg you.

SIMONE. For my sake, Paul.

PAUL. Oh, you make it impossible for me to act as the voices of dead ancestors tell me I should.... For your sake, then, Simone, I consent to live. For your sake I dare to accept the gift you offer.

SIMONE (kissing his hand in an outburst of gratitude). Thank you, thank you, Paul. How happy I am!

PAUL. I, too, light of my life.

SIMONE. My month's allowance arrived to-day. I have the cheque here. (She takes it out of her corsage.) Two hundred thousand francs. It's signed already. You can get it cashed as soon as the hanks open to-morrow.

PAUL (moved by an outburst of genuine emotion kisses indiscriminately the cheque, the Baronne, his own hands). My angel, you have saved me. How can I thank you? How can I love you enough? Ah, mon petit bouton de rose.

SIMONE. Oh, naughty, naughty! Not now, my Paul; you must wait till some other time.

PAUL. I burn with impatience.

SIMONE. Quelle fougue! Listen, then. In an hour's time, Paul chéri, in my boudoir; I shall be alone.

PAUL. An hour? It is an eternity.

SIMONE (playfully). An hour. I won't relent. Till then, my Paul. (She blows a kiss and runs out: the scenery trembles at her passage.)

(PAUL looks at the cheque, then pulls out a large silk handkerchief and wipes his neck inside his collar.) (DOLPHIN drifts in from the left. He is smoking a cigarette, but he does not seem to be enjoying it.)

PAUL. Alone?

DOLPHIN. Alas!

PAUL. Brooding on the universe as usual? I envy you your philosophic detachment. Personally, I find that the world is very much too much with us, and the devil too; (he looks at the cheque in his hand) and above all the flesh. My god, the flesh.... (He wipes his neck again.)

DOLPHIN. My philosophic detachment? But it's only a mask to hide the ineffectual longings I have to achieve contact with the world.

PAUL. But surely nothing is easier. One just makes a movement and impinges on one's fellow-beings.

DOLPHIN. Not with a temperament like mine. Imagine a shyness more powerful than curiosity or desire, a paralysis of all the faculties. You are a man of the world. You were born with a forehead of brass to affront every social emergency. Ah, if you knew what a torture it is to find yourself in the presence of someone a woman, perhaps—someone in whom you take an interest that is not merely philosophic; to find oneself in the presence of such a person and to be incapable, yes, physically incapable, of saying a word to express your interest in her or your desire to possess her intimacy. Ah, I notice I have slipped into the feminine. Inevitably, for of course the person is always a she.

PAUL. Of course, of course. That goes without saying. But what's the trouble? Women are so simple to deal with.

DOLPHIN. I know. Perfectly simply if one's in the right state of mind. I have found that out myself, for moments come alas, how rarely!—when I am filled with a spirit of confidence, possessed by some angel or devil of power. Ah, then I feel myself to be superb. I carry all before me. In those brief moments the whole secret of the world is revealed to me. I perceive that the supreme quality in the human soul is effrontery. Genius in the man of action is simply the apotheosis of charlatanism. Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Mr. Gladstone, Lloyd George—what are they? Just ordinary human beings projected through the magic lantern of a prodigious effrontery and so magnified to a thousand times larger than life. Look at me. I am far more intelligent than any of these fabulous figures; my sensibility is more refined than theirs, I am morally superior to any of them. And yet, by my lack of charlatanism, I am made less than nothing. My qualities are projected through the wrong end of a telescope and the world perceives me far smaller than I really am. But the world—who cares about the world? The only people who matter are the women.

PAUL. Very true, my dear Dolphin. The women.... (He looks at the cheque and mops himself once more with his mauve silk handkerchief.)

DOLPHIN. To-night was one of my moments of triumph. I felt myself suddenly free of all my inhibitions.

PAUL. I hope you profited by the auspicious occasion.

DOLPHIN. I did. I was making headway. I had—but I don't know why I should bore you with my confidences. Curious that one should be dumb before intimates and open one's mind to an all but stranger. I must apologise.

PAUL. But I am all attention and sympathy, my dear Dolphin. And I take it a little hardly that you should regard me as a stranger. (He lays a hand on Dolphin's shoulder.)

DOLPHIN. Thank you, Barbazange, thank you. Well, if you consent to be the receptacle of my woes, I shall go on pouring them out.... Miss Toomis.... But tell me frankly what you think of her.

PAUL. Well....

DOLPHIN. A little too ingenuous, a little silly even, eh?

PAUL. Now you say so, she certainly isn't very intellectually stimulating.

DOLPHIN. Precisely. But ... oh, those china-blue eyes, that ingenuousness, that pathetic and enchanting silliness! She touches lost chords in one's heart. I love the Chromatic Fantasia of Bach, I am transported by Beethoven's hundred-and-eleventh Sonata; but the fact doesn't prevent my being moved to tears by the last luscious waltz played by the hotel orchestra. In the best constructed brains there are always spongy surfaces that are sensitive to picture postcards and Little Nelly and the End of a Perfect Day. Miss Toomis has found out my Achilles's heel. She is boring, ridiculous, absurd to a degree, but oh! how moving, how adorable.

PAUL. You're done for, my poor Dolphin, sunk—spurlos.

DOLPHIN. And I was getting on so well, was revelling in my new-found confidence, and, knowing its transience, was exploiting it for all I was worth. I had covered an enormous amount of ground and then, hey presto! at a blow all my labour was undone. Actuated by what malice I don't know, la Lucrezia swoops down like a vulture, and without a by-your-leave or excuse of any kind carries off Miss Toomis from under my very eyes. What a woman! She terrifies me. I am always running away from her.

PAUL. Which means, I suppose, that she is always pursuing you.

DOLPHIN. She has ruined my evening and, it may me, all my chances of success. My precious hour of self-confidence will be wasted (though I hope you'll not take offence at the word)—wasted on you.

PAUL. It will return.

DOLPHIN. But when—but when? Till it does I shall be impotent and in agony.

PAUL. I know the agony of waiting. I myself was engaged to a Rumanian princess in 1916. But owing to the sad collapse in the Rumanian rate of exchange I have had to postpone our union indefinitely. It is painful, but, believe me, it can be borne. (He looks at the cheque and then at his watch.) There are other things which are much worse. Believe me, Dolphin, it can be borne.

DOLPHIN. I suppose it can. For, when all is said, there are damned few of us who really take things much to heart. Julie de Lespinasses are happily not common. I am even subnormal. At twenty I believed myself passionate: one does at that age. But now, when I come to consider myself candidly, I find that I am really one of those who never deeply felt nor strongly willed. Everything is profoundly indifferent to me. I sometimes try to depress myself with the thought that the world is a cess-pool, that men are pathetic degenerates from the ape whose laboriously manufactured ideals are pure nonsense and find no rhyme in reality, that the whole of life is a bad joke which takes a long time coming to an end. But it really doesn't upset me. I don't care a curse. It's deplorable; one ought to care. The best people do care. Still, I must say I should like to get possession of Miss Toomis. Confound that Grattarol woman. What on earth did she want to rush me like that for, do you suppose?

PAUL. I expect we shall find out now. (PAUL jerks his head towards the left. LUCREZIA and AMY are seen entering from the garden, LUCREZIA holds her companion's arm and marches with a firm step towards the two men. AMY suffers herself to be drugged along.)

LUCREZIA. Vicomte, Miss Toomis wants you to tell her all about Correggio.

AMY (rather scared). Oh, really—I....

LUCREZIA. And (sternly)—and Michelangelo. She is so much interested in art.

AMY. But please—don't trouble....

PAUL (bowing gracefully). I shall be delighted. And in return I hope Miss Toomis will tell me all about Longfellow.

AMY (brightening). Oh yes, don't you just love Evangeline?

PAUL. I do; and with your help, Miss Toomis, I hope I shall learn to love her better.

LUCREZIA (to DOLPHIN, who has been looking from AMY to the VICOMTE and back again at AMY with eyes that betray a certain disquietude). You really must come and look at the moon rising over the hills, Mr. Dolphin. One sees it best from the lower terrace. Shall we go?

DOLPHIN (starts and shrinks). But it's rather cold, isn't it? I mean—I think I ought to go and write a letter.

LUCREZIA. Oh, you can do that to-morrow.

DOLPHIN. But really.

LUCREZIA. You've no idea how lovely the moon looks.

DOLPHIN. But I must....

LUCREZIA (lays her hand on his sleeve and tows hint after her, crying as she goes). The moon, the moon.... (PAUL and AMY regard their exit in silence.)

PAUL. He doesn't look as though he much wanted to go and see the moon.

AMY. Perhaps he guesses what's in store for him.

PAUL (surprised). What, you don't mean to say you realised all the time?

AMY. Realised what?

PAUL. About la belle Lucrezia.

AMY. I don't know what you mean. All I know is that she means to give Mr. Dolphin a good talking to. He's so mercenary. It made me quite indignant when she told me about him. Such a schemer, too. You know in America we have very definite ideas about honour.

PAUL. Here too, Miss Toomis.

AMY. Not Mr. Dolphin. Oh dear, it made me so sad; more sad than angry. I can never be grateful enough to Signorina Grattarol.

PAUL. But I'm still at a loss to know exactly what you're talking about.

AMY. And I am quite bewildered myself. Would you have believed it of him? I thought him such a nice man.

PAUL. What has he done?

AMY. It's all for my money, Miss Grattarol told me. She knows. He was just asking me to marry him, and I believe I would have said Yes. But she came in just in the nick of time. It seems he only wanted to marry me because I'm so rich. He doesn't care for me at all. Miss Grattarol knows what he's like. It's awful, isn't it? Oh dear, I wouldn't have thought it of him.

PAUL. But you must forgive him, Miss Toomis. Money is a great temptation. Perhaps if you gave him another chance....

AMY. Impossible.

PAUL. Poor Dolphin! He's such a nice young fellow.

AMY. I thought so too. But he's false.

PAUL. Don't be too hard on him. Money probably means too much to him. It's the fault of his upbringing. No one who has not lived among the traditions of our ancient aristocracy can be expected to have that contempt, almost that hatred of wealth, which is the sign of true nobility. If he had been brought up, as I was, in an old machicolated castle on the Loire, surrounded by ancestral ghosts, imbued with the spirit of the Crusaders and preux chevaliers who had inhabited the place in the past, if he had learnt to know what noblesse oblige really means, believe me, Miss Toomis, he could never have done such a thing.

AMY. I should just think he couldn't, Monsieur de Barbazange.

PAUL. You have no idea, Miss Toomis, how difficult it is for a man of truly noble feelings to get over the fact of your great wealth. When I heard that you were the possessor of a hundred million dollars....

AMY. Oh, I'm afraid it's more than that. It's two hundred million.

PAUL. ... of two hundred million dollars, then ... it only makes it worse; I was very melancholy, Miss Toomis. For those two hundred million dollars were a barrier, which a descendant of Crusaders and preux chevaliers could not overleap. Honour, Miss Toomis, honour forbade. Ah, if only that accursed money had not stood in the way.... When I first saw you oh, how I was moved by that vision of beauty and innocence—I wanted nothing better than to stand gazing on you for ever. But then I heard about those millions. Dolphin was lucky to have felt no restraints. But enough, enough. (He checks a rising tide of emotion.) Give poor Dolphin another chance, Miss Toomis. At bottom he is a good fellow, and he may learn in time to esteem you for your own sake and to forget the dazzling millions.

AMY. Never. I can only marry a man who is entirely disinterested.

PAUL. But, can't you see, no disinterested man could ever bring himself to ask you? How could he prove his disinterestedness? No one would believe the purity of his intentions.

AMY (much moved). It is for me to judge. I know a disinterested man when I see him. Even in America we can understand honour.

PAUL (with a sob in his voice). Good-bye Miss Toomis.

AMY. But no, I don't want it to be good-bye.

PAUL. It must be. Never shall it be said of a Barbazange that he hunted a woman for her money.

AMY. But what does it matter what the world says, if I say the opposite?

PAUL. You say the opposite? Thank you, thank you. But no, good-bye.

AMY. Stop. Oh! you're forcing me to do a most unwomanly thing. You're making me ask you to marry me. You're the only disinterested man I've ever met or, to judge from what I've seen of the world, I'm ever likely to meet. Haven't you kept away from me in spite of your feelings? Haven't you even tried to make me listen to another man—a man not worthy to black your boots? Oh, it's so wonderful, so noble! It's like something in a picture play. Paul, I offer myself to you. Will you take me in spite of my millions?

PAUL (falling on his knees and kissing the hem of AMY'S skirt). My angel, you're right; what does it matter what the world says as long as you believe in me? Amy, amie, bien-aimée.... Ah, it's too good too, too good to be true! (He rises to his feet and embraces her with an unfeigned enthusiasm.)

AMY. Paul, Paul.... And so this is love. Isn't it wonderful?

PAUL (looking round anxiously). You mustn't tell anyone about our engagement, my Amy. They might say unpleasant things in the hotel, you know.

AMY. Of course I won't talk about it. We'll keep our happiness to ourselves, won't we?

PAUL. Entirely to ourselves; and to-morrow we'll go to Paris and arrange about being married.

AMY. Yes, yes; we'll take the eight o'clock train.

PAUL. Not the eight o clock, my darling. I have to go to the bank to-morrow to do a little business. We must wait till the twelve thirty.

AMY. Very well, then. The twelve-thirty. Oh, how happy I am!

PAUL. So am I, my sweetheart. More than I can tell you. (The sound of a window being opened is heard. They look up and see the BARONESS dressed in a peignoir of the tenderest blue, emerging on to the right hand of the three balconies.)

AMY. Oh, my soul! I think I'd better go in. Good-night, my Paul. (She runs in.)

SIMONE. Has that horrid little American girl gone? (She peers down, then, reassured, she blows a kiss to PAUL.) My Romeo!

PAUL. I come, Juliet.

SIMONE. There's a kiss for you.

PAUL (throwing kisses with both hands). And there's one for you. And another, and another. Two hundred million kisses, my angel.

SIMONE (giggling). What a lot!

PAUL. It is; you re quite right. Two hundred million.... I come, my Juliet. (He darts into the hotel, pausing when just inside the door and out of sight of the BARONESS, to mop himself once again with his enormous handkerchief. The operation over, he advances with a resolute step, The BARONESS stands for a moment on the balcony. Then, seeing DOLPHIN and LUCREZIA coming in from the left, she retires, closing the window and drawing the curtains behind her. DOLPHIN comes striding in; LUCREZIA follows a little behind, looking anxiously up at him.)

LUCREZIA. Please, please....

DOLPHIN. NO, I won t listen to anything more. (He walks with an agitated step up and down the stage. LUCREZIA stands with one hand resting on the back of a chair and the other pressed on her heart.) Do you mean to say you deliberately went and told her that I was only after her money? Oh, it's too bad, too bad. It's infamous. And I hadn't the faintest notion that she had any money. Besides, I don't want money; I have quite enough of my own. It's infamous, infamous!

LUCREZIA. I know it was a horrible thing to do. But I couldn't help it. How could I stand by and see you being carried off by that silly little creature?

DOLPHIN. But I cared for her.

LUCREZIA. But not as I cared for you. I've got red blood in my veins; she's got nothing but milk and water. You couldn't have been happy with her. I can give you love of a kind she could never dream of. What does she know of passion?

DOLPHIN. Nothing, I am thankful to say. I don't want passion; can't you understand that? I don't possess it myself and don't like it in others. I am a man of sentimental affections, with a touch of quiet sensuality. I don't want passion, I tell you. It's too violent; it frightens me. I couldn't possibly live with you. You'd utterly shatter my peace of mind in a day. Oh, how I wish you'd go away.

LUCREZIA. But Sidney, Sidney, can't you understand what it is to be madly in love with somebody? You can't be so cruel.

DOLPHIN. You didn't think much of my well-being when you interfered between Miss Toomis and me, did you? You've probably ruined my whole life, that's all. I really don't see why you should expect me to have any pity for you.

LUCREZIA. Very well, then, I shall kill myself. (She bursts into tears.)

DOLPHIN. Oh, but I assure you, one doesn't kill oneself for things like that. (He approaches her and pats her on the shoulder.) Come, come, don't worry about it.

LUCREZIA (throws her arms round his neck). Oh, Sidney, Sidney....

DOLPHIN (freeing himself with surprising energy and promptitude from her embrace). No, no, none of that, I beg. Another moment and we shall be losing our heads. Personally I think I shall go to bed now. I should advise you to do the same, Miss Grattarol. You're overwrought. We might all be better for a small dose of bromide. (He goes in.)

LUCREZIA (looking up and stretching forth her hands). Sidney.... (DOLPHIN does not look round, and disappears through the glass door into the hotel, LUCREZIA covers her face with her hands and sits for a little sobbing silently. The nightingale sings on. Midnight sounds with an infinite melancholy from all the twenty campaniles of the city in the valley. From far away comes the spasmodic throbbing of a guitar and the singing of an Italian voice, high-pitched, passionate, throaty. The seconds pass, LUCREZIA rises to her feet and walks slowly into the hotel. On the threshold she encounters the VICOMTE coming out.)

PAUL. You, Signorina Lucrezia? I've escaped for a breath of fresh, cool air. Mightn't we take a turn together? (LUCREZIA shakes her head.) Ah, well, then, good-night. You'll be glad to hear that Miss Toomis knows all about Correggio now.

(He inhales a deep breath of air. Then looking at his dinner-jacket he begins brushing at it with his hand. A lamentable figure creeps in from the left. It is ALBERTO. If he had a tail, it would be trailing on the ground between his legs.)

PAUL. Hullo, Alberto. What is it? Been losing at cards?

ALBERTO. Worse than that.

PAUL. Creditors foreclosing?

ALBERTO. Much worse.

PAUL. Father ruined by imprudent speculations?

ALBERTO. No, no, no. It's nothing to do with money.

PAUL. Oh, well, then. It can't be anything very serious. It's women, I suppose.

ALBERTO. My mistress refuses to see me. I have been beating on her door for hours in vain.

PAUL. I wish we all had your luck, Bertino. Mine opens her door only too promptly. The difficulty is to get out again. Does yours use such an awful lot of this evil-smelling powder? I'm simply covered with it. Ugh! (He brushes his coat again.)

ALBERTO. Can't you be serious, Paul?

PAUL. Of course I can ... about a serious matter. But you can't expect me to pull a long face about your mistress, can you, now? Do look at things in their right proportions.

ALBERTO. It's no use talking to you. You're heartless, soulless.

PAUL. What you mean, my dear Alberto, is that I'm relatively speaking bodiless. Physical passion never goes to my head. I'm always compos mentis. You aren't, that's all.

ALBERTO. Oh, you disgust me. I think I shall hang myself to-night.

PAUL. Do. It will give us something to talk about at lunch to-morrow.

ALBERTO. Monster! (He goes into the hotel, PAUL strolls out towards the garden, whistling an air from Mozart as he goes. The window on the left opens and LUCREZIA steps on to her balcony. Uncoiled, her red hair falls almost to her waist. Her nightdress is always half slipping off one shoulder or the other, like those loose-bodied Restoration gowns that reveal the tight-blown charms of Kneller's Beauties. Her feet are bare. She is a marvellously romantic figure, as she stands there, leaning on the balustrade, and with eyes more sombre than night, gazing into the darkness. The nightingales, the bells, the guitar, and passionate voice strike up. Great stars palpitate in the sky. The moon has swum imperceptibly to the height of heaven. In the garden below flowers are yielding their souls into the air, censers invisible. It is too much, too much.... Large tears roll down LUCREZIA's cheeks and fall with a splash to the ground. Suddenly, but with the noiselessness of a cat, ALBERTO appears, childish-looking in pink pajamas, on the middle of the three balconies. He sees LUCREZIA, but she is much too deeply absorbed in thought to have noticed his coming, ALBERTO plants his elbows on the rail of the balcony, covers his face, and begins to sob, at first inaudibly, then in a gradual quickening crescendo. At the seventh sob LUCREZIA starts and becomes aware of his presence.)

LUCREZIA. Alberto. I didn't know.... Have you been there long? (ALBERTO makes no articulate reply, but his sobs keep on growing louder.) Alberto, are you unhappy? Answer me.

ALBERTO (with difficulty, after a pause). Yes.

LUCREZIA. Didn't she let you in?

ALBERTO. No. (His sobs become convulsive.)

LUCREZIA. Poor boy.

ALBERTO (lifting up a blubbered face to the moonlight). I am so unhappy.

LUCREZIA. You can't be more unhappy than I am.

ALBERTO. Oh yes, I am. It's impossible to be unhappier than me.

LUCREZIA. But I am more unhappy.

ALBERTO. You re not. Oh, how can you be so cruel Lucrezia? (He covers his face once more.)

LUCREZIA. But I only said I was unhappy Alberto.

ALBERTO. Yes, I know. That showed you weren't thinking of me. Nobody loves me. I shall hang myself to-night with the cord of my dressing-gown.

LUCREZIA. NO, no, Alberto. You mustn't do anything rash.

ALBERTO. I shall. Your cruelty has been the last straw.

LUCREZIA. I'm sorry, Bertino mio. But if you only knew how miserable I was feeling. I didn't mean to be unsympathetic. Poor boy. I'm so sorry. There, don't cry, poor darling.

ALBERTO. Oh, I knew you wouldn't desert me, Lucrezia. You've always been a mother to me. (He stretches out his hand and seizes hers, which has gone half-way to meet him; but the balconies are too far apart to allow him to kiss it. He makes an effort and fails. He is too short in the body,) Will you let me come onto your balcony, Lucrezia? I want to tell you how grateful I am.

LUCREZIA. But you can do that from your own balcony.

ALBERTO. Please, please, Lucrezia. You mustn't be cruel to me again. I can't bear it.

LUCREZIA. Well, then.... Just for a moment, but for no more, (BERTINO climbs from one balcony to the other. One is a little reminded of the trousered monkeys on the barrel organs. Arrived, he kneels down and kisses LUCREZIA'S hand.)

ALBERTO. You've saved me. You've given given me a fresh desire to live and a fresh faith in life. How can I thank you enough, Lucrezia, darling?

LUCREZIA (patting his head). There, there. We are just two unhappy creatures. We must try and comfort one another.

ALBERTO. What a brute I am! I never thought of your unhappiness. I am so selfish. What is it, Lucrezia?

LUCREZIA. I can't tell you, Bertino; but it's very painful.

ALBERTO. Poor child, poor child. (His kisses, which started at the hand, have mounted, by this time, some way up the arm, changing perceptibly in character as they rise. At the shoulder they have a warmth which could not have been inferred from the respectful salutes which barely touched the fingers.) Poor darling! You've given me consolation. Now you must let me comfort your unhappiness.

LUCREZIA (with an effort). I think you ought to go back now, Bertino.

ALBERTO. In a minute, my darling. There, there, poor Lucrezia. (He puts an arm round her, kisses her hair and neck. LUCREZIA leans her bowed head against his chest. The sound of footsteps is heard. They both look up with scared, wide-open eyes.)

LUCREZIA. We mustn't be seen here, Bertino. What would people think?

ALBERTO. I'll go back.

LUCREZIA. There's no time. You must come into my room. Quickly.

(They slip through the French window, but not quickly enough to have escaped the notice of PAUL, returning from his midnight stroll. The VICOMTE stands for a moment looking up at the empty balcony. He laughs softly to himself, and, throwing his cigarette away, passes through the glass door into the house. All is now silent, save for the nightingales and the distant bells. The curtain comes down for a moment to indicate the passage of several hours. It rises again with the sun. LUCREZIA's window opens and she appears on the balcony. She stands a moment with one foot over the threshold of the long window in a listening pose. Then her eyes fall on the better half of a pair of pink pyjamas lying crumpled on the floor, like a body bereft of its soul; with her bare foot she turns it over. A little shudder plucks at her nerves, and she shakes her head as though, by this symbolic act, to shake off something clinging and contaminating. Then she steps out into the full glory of the early sun, stretching out her arms to the radiance. She bows her face into her hands, crying out loud to herself.) LUCREZIA. Oh, why, why, why? (The last of these Why's is caught by the WAITER, who has crept forth in shirt-sleeves and list-slippers, duster in hand, to clean the tables. He looks up at her admiringly, passes his tongue over his lips. Then, with a sigh, turns to dust the tables.)

CURTAIN.

The End

III: THE TILLOTSON BANQUET

I

Young Spode was not a snob; he was too intelligent for that, too fundamentally decent. Not a snob; but all the same he could not help feeling very well pleased at the thought that he was dining, alone and intimately, with Lord Badgery. It was a definite event in his life, a step forward, he felt, towards that final success, social, material, and literary, which he had come to London with the fixed intention of making. The conquest and capture of Badgery was an almost essential strategical move in the campaign.

Edmund, forty-seventh Baron Badgery, was a lineal descendant of that Edmund, surnamed Le Blayreau, who landed on English soil in the train of William the Conqueror. Ennobled by William Rufus, the Badgerys had been one of the very few baronial families to survive the Wars of the Roses and all the other changes and chances of English history. They were a sensible and philoprogenitive race. No Badgery had ever fought in any war, no Badgery had ever engaged in any kind of politics. They had been content to live and quietly to propagate their species in a huge machicolated Norman castle, surrounded by a triple moat, only sallying forth to cultivate their property and to collect their rents. In the eighteenth century, when life had become relatively secure, the Badgerys began to venture forth into civilised society. From boorish squires they blossomed into grands seigneurs, patrons of the arts, virtuosi. Their property was large, they were rich; and with the growth of industrialism their riches also grew. Villages on their estate turned into manufacturing towns, unsuspected coal was discovered beneath the surface of their barren moorlands. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Badgerys were among the richest of English noble families. The forty-seventh baron disposed of an income of at least two hundred thousand pounds a year. Following the great Badgery tradition, he had refused to have anything to do with politics or war. He occupied himself by collecting pictures; he took an interest in theatrical productions; he was the friend and patron of men of letters, of painters, and musician. A personage, in a word, of considerable consequence in that particular world in which young Spode had elected to make his success.

Spode had only recently left the university. Simon Gollamy, the editor of the World's Review (the "Best of all possible Worlds"), had got to know him—he was always on the look out for youthful talent—had seen possibilities in the young man, and appointed him art critic of his paper. Gollamy liked to have young and teachable people about him. The possession of disciples flattered his vanity, and he found it easier, moreover, to run his paper with docile collaborators than with men grown obstinate and case-hardened with age. Spode had not done badly at his new job. At any rate, his articles had been intelligent enough to arouse the interest of Lord Badgery. It was, ultimately, to them that he owed the honour of sitting to night in the dining-room of Badgery House.

Fortified by several varieties of wine and a glass of aged brandy, Spode felt more confident and at ease than he had done the whole evening. Badgery was rather a disquieting host. He had an alarming habit of changing the subject of any conversation that had lasted for more than two minutes. Spode had found it, for example, horribly mortifying when his host, cutting across what was, he prided himself, a particularly subtle and illuminating disquisition on baroque art, had turned a wandering eye about the room and asked him abruptly whether he liked parrots. He had flushed and glanced suspiciously towards him, fancying that the man was trying to be offensive. But no; Badgery's white, fleshy, Hanoverian face wore an expression of perfect good faith. There was no malice in his small greenish eyes. He evidently did genuinely want to know if Spode liked parrots. The young man swallowed his irritation and replied that he did. Badgery then told a good story about parrots. Spode was on the point of capping it with a better story, when his host began to talk about Beethoven. And so the game went on. Spode cut his conversation to suit his host's requirements. In the course of ten minutes he had made a more or less witty epigram on Benvenuto Cellini, Queen Victoria, sport, God, Stephen Phillips, and Moorish architecture. Lord Badgery thought him the most charming young man, and so intelligent.

"If you've quite finished your coffee," he said, rising to his feet as he spoke, "we'll go and look at the pictures."

Spode jumped up with alacrity, and only then realised that he had drunk just ever so little too much. He would have to be careful, talk deliberately, plant his feet consciously, one after the other.

"This house is quite cluttered up with pictures," Lord Badgery complained. "I had a whole wagon-load taken away to the country last week; but there are still far too many. My ancestors would have their portraits painted by Romney. Such a shocking artist, don't you think? Why couldn't they have chosen Gainsborough, or even Reynolds? I've had all the Romneys hung in the servants' hall now. It's such a comfort to know that one can never possibly see them again. I suppose you know all about the ancient Hittites?"

"Well...." the young man replied, with befitting modesty.

"Look at that, then." He indicated a large stone head which stood in a case near the dining-room door. "It's not Greek, or Egyptian, or Persian, or anything else; so if it isn't ancient Hittite, I don't know what it is. And that reminds me of that story about Lord George Sanger, the Circus King...." and, without giving Spode time to examine the Hittite relic, he led the way up the huge staircase, pausing every now and then in his anecdote to point out some new object of curiosity or beauty.

"I suppose you know Deburau's pantomimes?" Spode rapped out as soon as the story was over. He was in an itch to let out his information about Deburau. Badgery had given him a perfect opening with his ridiculous Sanger. "What a perfect man, isn't he? He used to...."

"This is my main gallery," said Lord Badgery, throwing open one leaf of a tall folding door. "I must apologise for it. It looks like a roller-skating rink." He fumbled with the electric switches and there was suddenly light—light that revealed an enormous gallery, duly receding into distance according to all the laws of perspective. "I dare say you've heard of my poor father," Lord Badgery continued. "A little insane, you know; sort of mechanical genius with a screw loose. He used to have a toy railway in this room. No end of fun he had, crawling about the floor after his trains. And all the pictures were stacked in the cellars. I can't tell you what they were like when I found them: mushrooms growing out of the Botticellis. Now I'm rather proud of this Poussin; he painted it for Scarron."

"Exquisite!" Spode exclaimed, making with his hand a gesture as though he were modelling a pure form in the air. "How splendid the onrush of those trees and leaning figures is! And the way they re caught up, as it were, and stemmed by that single godlike form opposing them with his contrary movement! And the draperies...."

But Lord Badgery had moved on, and was standing in front of a little fifteenth-century Virgin of carved wood.

"School of Rheims," he explained.

They "did" the gallery at high speed. Badgery never permitted his guest to halt for more than forty seconds before any work of art. Spode would have liked to spend a few moments of recollection and tranquillity in front of some of these lovely things. But it was not permitted.

The gallery done, they passed into a little room leading out of it. At the sight of what the lights revealed, Spode gasped.

"It's like something out of Balzac," he exclaimed. "Un de ces salons dorés où se déploie un luxe insolent. You know."

"My nineteenth-century chamber," Badgery explained. "The best thing of its kind, I flatter myself, outside the State Apartments at Windsor."

Spode tiptoed round the room, peering with astonishment at all the objects in glass, in gilded bronze, in china, in leathers, in embroidered and painted silk, in beads, in wax, objects of the most fantastic shapes and colours, all the queer products of a decadent tradition, with which the room was crowded. There were paintings on the walls—a Martin, a Wilkie, an early Landseer, several Ettys, a big Haydon, a slight pretty water-colour of a girl by Wainewright, the pupil of Blake and arsenic poisoner, a score of others. But the picture which arrested Spode's attention was a medium sized canvas representing Troilus riding into Troy among the flowers and plaudits of an admiring crowd, and oblivious (you could see from his expression) of everything but the eyes of Cressida, who looked down at him from a window, with Pandarus smiling over her shoulder.

"What an absurd and enchanting picture!" Spode exclaimed.

"Ah, you've spotted my Troilus." Lord Badgery was pleased.

"What bright harmonious colours! Like Etty's, only stronger, not so obviously pretty. And there's an energy about it that reminds one of Haydon. Only Haydon could never have done anything so impeccable in taste. Who is it by?" Spode turned to his host inquiringly.

"You were right in detecting Haydon," Lord Badgery answered, "It's by his pupil, Tillotson. I wish I could get hold of more of his work. But nobody seems to know anything about him. And he seems to have done so little."

This time it was the younger man who interrupted.

"Tillotson, Tillotson...." He put his hand to his forehead. A frown incongruously distorted his round, floridly curved face. No ... yes, I have it. He looked up triumphantly with serene and childish brows. "Tillotson, Walter Tillotson—the man's still alive."

Badgery smiled. "This picture was painted in 1846, you know."

"Well, that's all right. Say he was born in 1820, painted his masterpiece when he was twenty-six, and it's 1913 now; that's to say he's only ninety-three. Not as old as Titian yet."

"But he's not been heard of since 1860," Lord Badgery protested.

"Precisely. Your mention of his name reminded me of the discovery I made the other day when I was looking through the obituary notices in the archives of the World's Review.(One has to bring them up to date every year or so for fear of being caught napping if one of these t old birds chooses to shuffle off suddenly.) Well, there, among them—I remember my astonishment at the time—there I found Walter Tillotson's biography. Pretty full to 1860, and then a blank, except for a pencil note in the early nineteen hundreds to the effect that he had returned from the East. The obituary has never been used or added to. I draw the obvious conclusion: the old chap isn't dead yet. He's just been overlooked somehow."

"But this is extraordinary," Lord Badgery exclaimed. "You must find him, Spode—you must find him. I'll commission him to paint frescoes round this room. It's just what I've always vainly longed for a real nineteenth-century artist to decorate this place for me. Oh, we must find him at once—at once."

Lord Badgery strode up and down in a state of great excitement.

"I can see how this room could be made quite perfect," he went on. "We'd clear away all these cases and have the whole of that wall filled by a heroic fresco of Hector and Andromache, or 'Distraining for Rent', or Fanny Kemble as Belvidera in 'Venice Preserved' anything like that, provided it's in the grand manner of the 'thirties and 'forties. And here I'd have a landscape with lovely receding perspectives, or else something architectural and grand in the style of Belshazzar's feast. Then we'll have this Adam fireplace taken down and replaced by something Mauro-Gothic. And on these walls I'll have mirrors, or no! let me see...."

He sank into meditative silence, from which he finally roused himself to shout:

"The old man, the old man! Spode, we must find this astonishing old creature. And don't breathe a word to anybody. Tillotson shall be our secret. Oh, it's too perfect, it's incredible! Think of the frescoes."

Lord Badgery's face had become positively animated. He had talked of a single subject for nearly a quarter of an hour.

II

Three weeks later Lord Badgery was aroused from his usual after-luncheon somnolence by the arrival of a telegram. The message was a short one. "Found.—SPODE." A look of pleasure and intelligence made human Lord Badgery's clayey face of surfeit. "No answer," he said. The footman padded away on noiseless feet.

Lord Badgery closed his eyes and began to contemplate. Found! What a room he would have! There would be nothing like it in the world. The frescoes, the fireplace, the mirrors, the ceiling.... And a small, shrivelled old man clambering about the scaffolding, agile and quick like one of those whiskered little monkeys at the Zoo, painting away, painting away.... Fanny Kemble as Belvidera, Hector and Andromache, or why not the Duke of Clarence in the Butt, the Duke of Malmsey, the Butt of Clarence. ... Lord Badgery was asleep.

Spode did not lag long behind his telegram. He was at Badgery House by six o'clock. His lordship was in the nineteenth-century chamber, engaged in clearing away with his own hands the bric-à-brac. Spode found him looking hot and out of breath.

"Ah, there you are," said Lord Badgery. You see me already preparing for the great man's coming. Now you must tell me all about him.

"He's older even than I thought," said Spode. "He's ninety-seven this year. Born in 1816. Incredible, isn't it! There, I'm beginning at the wrong end."

"Begin where you like," said Badgery genially.

"I won't tell you all the incidents of the hunt. You've no idea what a job I had to run him to earth. It was like a Sherlock Holmes story, immensely elaborate, too elaborate. I shall write a book about it some day. At any rate, I found him at last."

"Where?"

"In a sort of respectable slum in Holloway, older and poorer and lonelier than you could have believed possible. I found out how it was he came to be forgotten, how he came to drop out of life in the way he did. He took it into his head, somewhere about the 'sixties, to go to Palestine to get local colour for his religious pictures—scapegoats and things, you know. Well, he went to Jerusalem and then on to Mount Lebanon and on and on, and then, somewhere in the middle of Asia Minor, he got stuck. He got stuck for about forty years."

"But what did he do all that time?"

"Oh, he painted, and started a mission, and converted three Turks, and taught the local Pashas the rudiments of English, Latin, and perspective, and God knows what else. Then, in about 1904, it seems to have occurred to him that he was getting rather old and had been away from home for rather a long time. So he made his way back to England, only to find that everyone he had known was dead, that the dealers had never heard of him and wouldn't buy his pictures, that he was simply a ridiculous old figure of fun. So he got a job as a drawing-master in a girl's school in Holloway, and there he's been ever since, growing older and older, and feebler and feebler, and blinder and deafer, and generally more gaga, until finally the school has given him the sack. He had about ten pounds in the world when I found him. He lives in a kind of black hole in a basement full of beetles. When his ten pounds are spent, I suppose he'll just quietly die there."

Badgery held up a white hand. "No more, no more. I find literature quite depressing enough. I insist that life at least shall be a little gayer. Did you tell him I wanted him to paint my room?"

"But he can't paint. He's too blind and palsied."

"Can't paint?" Badgery exclaimed in horror. "Then what's the good of the old creature?"

"Well, if you put it like that...." Spode began.

"I shall never have my frescoes. Ring the bell, will you?"

Spode rang.

"What right has Tillotson to go on existing if he can't paint?" went on Lord Badgery petulantly. "After all, that was his only justification for occupying a place in the sun."

"He doesn't have much sun in his basement."

The footman appeared at the door.

"Get someone to put all these things back in their places," Lord Badgery commanded, indicating with a wave of the hand the ravaged cases, the confusion of glass and china with which he had littered the floor, the pictures unhooked. "We'll go to the library, Spode; it's more comfortable there."

He led the way through the long gallery and down the stairs.

"I'm sorry old Tillotson has been such a disappointment," said Spode sympathetically.

"Let us talk about something else; he ceases to interest me.

"But don't you think we ought to do something about him? He's only got ten pounds between him and the workhouse. And if you'd seen the black-beetles in his basement!"

"Enough enough. I'll do everything you think fitting."

"I thought we might get up a subscription amongst lovers of the arts."

"There aren't any," said Badgery.

"No; but there are plenty of people who will subscribe out of snobbism."

"Not unless you give them something for their money."

"That's true. I hadn't thought of that." Spode was silent for a moment. "We might have a dinner in his honour. The Great Tillotson Banquet. Doyen of the British Art. A Link with the Past. Can't you see it in the papers? I'd make a stunt of it in the World's Review. That ought to bring in the snobs."

"And we'll invite a lot of artists and critics—all the ones who can't stand one another. It will be fun to see them squabbling." Badgery laughed. Then his face darkened once again. "Still," he added, "it'll be a very poor second best to my frescoes. You'll stay to dinner, of course."

"Well, since you suggest it. Thanks very much."

III

The Tillotson Banquet was fixed to take place about three weeks later. Spode, who had charge of the arrangements, proved himself an excellent organiser. He secured the big banqueting-room at the Café Bomba, and was successful in bullying and cajoling the manager into giving fifty persons dinner at twelve shillings a head, including wine. He sent out invitations and collected subscriptions. He wrote an article on Tillotson in the World's Review—one of those charming, witty articles couched in the tone of amused patronage and contempt with which one speaks of the great men of 1840. Nor did he neglect Tillotson himself. He used to go to Holloway almost every day to listen to the old man's endless stories about Asia Minor and the Great Exhibition of '51 and Benjamin Robert Haydon. He was sincerely sorry for this relic of another age.

Mr. Tillotson's room was about ten feet below the level of the soil of South Holloway. A little grey light percolated through the area bars, forced a difficult passage through panes opaque with dirt, and spent itself, like a drop of milk that falls into an inkpot, among the inveterate shadows of the dungeon. The place was haunted by the spur smell of damp plaster and of woodwork that has begun to moulder secretly at the heart. A little miscellaneous furniture, including a bed, a washstand and chest of drawers, a table and one or two chairs, lurked in the obscure corners of the den or ventured furtively out into the open. Hither Spode now came almost every day, bringing the old man news of the progress of the banquet scheme. Every day he found Mr. Tillotson sitting in the same place under the window, bathing, as it were, in his tiny puddle of light. "The oldest man that ever wore grey hairs," Spode reflected as he looked at him. Only there were very few hairs left on that bald, unpolished head. At the sound of the visitor's knock Mr. Tillotson would turn in his chair, stare in the direction of the door with blinking, uncertain eyes. He was always full of apologies for being so slow in recognising who was there.

"No discourtesy meant," he would say, after asking. "It's not as if I had forgotten who you were. Only it's so dark and my sight isn't what it was."

After that he never failed to give a little laugh, and, pointing out of the window at the area railings, would say:

"Ah, this is the plate for somebody with good sight. It's the place for looking at ankles. It's the grand stand."

It was the day before the great event. Spode came as usual, and Mr. Tillotson punctually made his little joke about the ankles, and Spode, as punctually laughed.

"Well, Mr. Tillotson," he said, after the reverberation of the joke had died away, "to-morrow you make your re-entry into the world of art and fashion. You'll find some changes."

"I've always had such extraordinary luck," said Mr. Tillotson, and Spode could see by his expression that he genuinely believed it, that he had forgotten the black hole and the black-beetles and the almost exhausted ten pounds that stood between him and the workhouse. "What an amazing piece of good fortune, for instance, that you should have found me just when you did. Now, this dinner will bring me back to my place in the world. I shall have money, and in a little while—who knows?—I shall be able to see well enough to paint again. I believe my eyes are getting better, you know. Ah, the future is very rosy."

Mr. Tillotson looked up, his face puckered into a smile, and nodded his head in affirmation of his words.

"You believe in the life to come?" said Spode, and immediately flushed for shame at the cruelty of the words.

But Mr. Tillotson was in far too cheerful a mood to have caught their significance.

"Life to come," he repeated. "No, I don't believe in any of that stuff not since 1859. The 'Origin of Species' changed my views, you know. No life to come for me, thank you! You don't remember the excitement of course. You re very young Mr. Spode."

"Well, I'm not so old as I was," Spode replied. "You know how middle-aged one is as a schoolboy and undergraduate. Now I'm old enough to know I'm young."

Spode was about to develop this little paradox further, but he noticed that Mr. Tillotson had not been listening. He made a note of the gambit for use in companies that were more appreciative of the subtleties.

"You were talking about the 'Origin of Species,'" he said.

"Was I?" said Mr. Tillotson, waking from reverie.

"About its effect on your faith, Mr. Tillotson."

"To be sure, yes. It shattered my faith. But I remember a fine thing by the Poet Laureate, something about there being more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in all the ... all the ...: I forget exactly what; but you see the train of thought. Oh, it was a bad time for religion. I am glad my master Haydon never lived to see it. He was a man of fervour. I remember him pacing up and down his studio in Lisson Grove, singing and shouting and praying all at once. It used almost to frighten me. Oh, but he was a wonderful man, a great man. Take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again. As usual, the Bard is right. But it was all very long ago, before your time, Mr. Spode."

"Well, I'm not as old as I was," said Spode, in the hope of having his paradox appreciated this time. But Mr. Tillotson went on without noticing the interruption.

"It's a very, very long time. And yet, when I look back on it, it all seems but a day or two ago. Strange that each day should seem so long and that many days added together should be less than an hour. How clearly I can see old Haydon pacing up and down! Much more clearly, indeed, than I see you, Mr. Spode. The eyes of memory don t grow dim. But my sight is improving, I assure you; it's improving daily. I shall soon be able to see those ankles." He laughed like a cracked bell—one of those little old bells, Spode fancied, that ring, with much rattling of wires, in the far-off servants quarters of ancient houses. "And very soon," Mr. Tillotson went on, "I shall be painting again. Ah, Mr. Spode, my luck is extraordinary. I believe in it, I trust in it. And after all, what is luck? Simply another name for Providence, in spite of the Origin of Species and the rest of it. How right the Laureate was when he said that there was more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in all the ... er, the ... er ... well, you know. I regard you, Mr. Spode, as the emissary of Providence. Your coming marked a turning-point in my life, and the beginning, for me, of happier days. Do you know, one of the first things I shall do when my fortunes are restored will be to buy a hedgehog."

"A hedgehog, Mr. Tillotson?"

"For the blackbeetles. There's nothing like a hedgehog for beetles. It will eat blackbeetles till it's sick, till it dies of surfeit. That reminds me of the time when I told my poor great master Haydon—in joke, of course—that he ought to send in a cartoon of King John dying of a surfeit of lampreys for the frescoes in the new Houses of Parliament. As I told him, it's a most notable event in the annals of British liberty—the providential and exemplary removal of a tyrant."

Mr. Tillotson laughed again—the little bell in the deserted house; a ghostly hand pulling the cord in the drawing-room, and phantom footmen responding to the thin, flawed note.

"I remember he laughed, laughed like a bull in his old grand manner. But oh, it was a terrible blow when they rejected his design, a terrible blow. It was the first and fundamental cause of his suicide."

Mr. Tillotson paused. There was a long silence. Spode felt strangely moved, he hardly knew why, in the presence of this man, so frail, so ancient, in body three parts dead, in the spirit so full of life and hopeful patience. He felt ashamed. What was the use of his own youth and cleverness? He saw himself suddenly as a boy with a rattle scaring birds rattling his noisy cleverness, waving his arms in ceaseless and futile activity, never resting in his efforts to scare away the birds that were always trying to settle in his mind. And what birds! widewinged and beautiful, all those serene thoughts and faiths and emotions that only visit minds that have humbled themselves to quiet. Those gracious visitants he was for ever using all his energies to drive away. But this old man, with his hedgehogs and his honest doubts and all the rest of it—his mind was like a field made beautiful by the free coming and going, the unafraid alightings of a multitude of white, bright-winged creatures. He felt ashamed. But then, was it possible to alter one's life? Wasn't it a little absurd to risk a conversion? Spode shrugged his shoulders.

"I'll get you a hedgehog at once," he said. "They're sure to have some at Whiteley's."

Before he left that evening Spode made an alarming discovery. Mr. Tillotson did not possess a dress-suit. It was hopeless to think of getting one made at this short notice, and, besides, what an unnecessary expense!

"We shall have to borrow a suit, Mr. Tillotson. I ought to have thought of that before."

"Dear me, dear me." Mr. Tillotson was a little chagrined by this unlucky discovery. "Borrow a suit?"

Spode hurried away for counsel to Badgery House. Lord Badgery surprisingly rose to the occasion. "Ask Boreham to come and see me," he told the footman, who answered his ring.

Boreham was one of those immemorial butlers who linger on, generation after generation, in the houses of the great. He was over eighty now, bent, dried up, shrivelled with age.

"All old men are about the same size," said Lord Badgery. It was a comforting theory. "Ah, here he is. Have you got a spare suit of evening clothes, Boreham?"

"I have an old suit, my lord, that I stopped wearing in let me see was it nineteen seven or eight?"

"That's the very thing. I should be most grateful, Boreham, if you could lend it to me for Mr. Spode here for a day."

The old man went out, and soon reappeared carrying over his arm a very old black suit. He held up the coat and trousers for inspection. In the light of day they were deplorable.

"You've no idea, sir," said Boreham deprecatingly to Spode you've no idea how easy things get stained with grease and gravy and what not. However careful you are, sir—however careful.

"I should imagine so." Spode was sympathetic.

"However careful, sir."

"But in artificial light they'll look all right."

"Perfectly all right," Lord Badgery repeated. "Thank you, Boreham; you shall have them back on Thursday."

"You re welcome, my lord, I'm sure." And the old man bowed and disappeared.

On the afternoon of the great day Spode carried up to Holloway a parcel containing Boreham's retired evening-suit and all the necessary appurtenances in the way of shirts and collars. Owing to the darkness and his own feeble sight Mr. Tillotson was happily unaware of the defects in the suit. He was in a state of extreme nervous agitation. It was with some difficulty that Spode could prevent him, although it was only three o'clock, from starting his toilet on the spot.

"Take it easy, Mr. Tillotson, take it easy. We needn't start till half-past seven, you know."

Spode left an hour later, and as soon as he was safely out of the room Mr. Tillotson began to prepare himself for the banquet. He lighted the gas and a couple of candles, and, blinking myopically at the image that fronted him in the tiny looking-glass that stood on his chest of drawers, he set to work, with all the ardour of a young girl preparing for her first ball. At six o'clock, when the last touches had been given, he was not unsatisfied.

He marched up and down his cellar, humming to himself the gay song which had been so popular in his middle years:

"Oh, oh, Anna, Maria Jones!

Queen of the tambourine, the cymbals, and the bones!"

Spode arrived an hour later in Lord Badgery's second Rolls-Royce. Opening the door of the old man's dungeon, he stood for a moment, wide-eyed with astonishment, on the threshold. Mr. Tillotson was standing by the empty grate, one elbow resting on the mantelpiece, one leg crossed over the other in a jaunty and gentlemanly attitude. The effect of the candlelight shining on his face was to deepen every line and wrinkle with intense black shadow; he looked immeasurably old. It was a noble and pathetic head. On the other hand, Boreham's out-worn evening-suit was simply buffoonish. The coat was too long in the sleeves and the tail; the trousers bagged in elephantine creases about his ankles. Some of the grease-spots were visible even in candlelight. The white tie, over which Mr. Tillotson had taken infinite pains and which he believed in his purblindness to be perfect, was fantastically lop-sided. He had buttoned up his waistcoat in such a fashion that one button was widowed of its hole and one hole of its button. Across his shirt front lay the broad green ribbon of some unknown Order.

"Queen of the tambourine, the cymbals, and the bones," Mr. Tillotson concluded in a gnat-like voice before welcoming his visitor.

"Well, Spode, here you are. I'm dressed already, you see. The suit, I flatter myself, fits very well, almost as though it had been made for me. I am all gratitude to the gentleman who was kind enough to lend it to me; I shall take the greatest care of it. It's a dangerous thing to lend clothes. For loan oft loseth both itself and friend. The Bard is always right."

"Just one thing," said Spode. "A touch to your waistcoat." He unbuttoned the dissipated garment and did it up again more symmetrically.

Mr. Tillotson was a little piqued at being found so absurdly in the wrong.

"Thanks, thanks," he said, protestingly, trying to edge away from his valet. "It's all right, you know; I can do it myself. Foolish oversight. I flatter myself the suit fits very well."

"And perhaps the tie might...." Spode began tentatively. But the old man would not hear of it.

"No, no. The tie's all right. I can tie a tie, Mr. Spode. The tie's all right. Leave it as it is, I beg."

"I like your Order."

Mr. Tillotson looked down complacently at his shirt front. "Ah, you've noticed my Order. It's a long time since I wore that. It was given me by the Grand Porte, you know, for services rendered in the Russo-Turkish War. It's the Order of Chastity, the second class. They only give the first class to crowned heads, you know—browned heads and ambassadors. And only Pashas of the highest rank get the second. Mine's the second. They only give the first class to crowned heads...."

"Of course, of course," said Spode.

"Do you think I look all right, Mr. Spode?" Mr. Tillotson asked, a little anxiously.

"Splendid, Mr. Tillotson—splendid. The Order's, magnificent."

The old man's face brightened once more. "I flatter myself," he said, "that this borrowed suit fits me very well. But I don't like borrowing clothes. For loan oft loseth both itself and friend, you know. And the Bard is always right."

"Ugh, there's one of those horrible beetles!" Spode exclaimed.

Mr. Tillotson bent down and stared at the floor. "I see it," he said, and stamped on a small piece of coal, which crunched to powder under his foot. "I shall certainly buy a hedgehog."

It was time for them to start. A crowd of little boys and girls had collected round Lord Badgery's enormous car. The chauffeur, who felt that honour and dignity were at stake, pretended not to notice the children, but sat gazing, like a statue, into eternity. At the sight of Spode and Mr. Tillotson emerging from the house a yell of mingled awe and derision went up. It subsided to an astonished silence as they climbed into the car. "Bomba's," Spode directed. The Rolls-Royce gave a faintly stertorous sigh and began to move. The children yelled again, and ran along beside the car, waving their arms in a frenzy of excitement. It was then that Mr. Tillotson, with an incomparably noble gesture, leaned forward and tossed among the seething crowd of urchins his three last coppers.

IV

In Bomba's big room the company was assembling. The long gilt-edged mirrors reflected a singular collection of people. Middle-aged Academicians shot suspicious glances at youths whom they suspected, only too correctly, of being iconoclasts, organisers of Post-Impressionist Exhibitions. Rival art critics, brought suddenly face to face, quivered with restrained hatred. Mrs. Nobes, Mrs. Cayman, and Mrs. Mandragore, those indefatigable hunters of artistic big game, came on one another all unawares in this well-stored menagerie, where each had expected to hunt alone, and were filled with rage. Through this crowd of mutually repellent vanities Lord Badgery moved with a suavity that seemed unconscious of all the feuds and hatreds. He was enjoying himself immensely. Behind the heavy waxen mask of his face, ambushed behind the Hanoverian nose, the little lustreless pig's eyes, the pale thick lips, there lurked a small devil of happy malice that rocked with laughter.

"So nice of you to have come, Mrs. Mandragore, to do honour to England's artistic past. And I'm so glad to see you've brought dear Mrs. Cayman. And is that Mrs. Nobes, too? So it is! I hadn't noticed her before. How delightful! I knew we could depend on your love of art."

And he hurried away to seize the opportunity of introducing that eminent sculptor, Sir Herbert Herne, to the bright young critic who had called him, in the public prints, a monumental mason.

A moment later the Maître d'Hôtel came to the door of the gilded saloon and announced, loudly and impressively, "Mr. Walter Tillotson." Guided from behind by young Spode, Mr. Tillotson came into the room slowly and hesitatingly. In the glare of the lights his eyelids beat heavily, painfully, like the wings of an imprisoned moth, over his filmy eyes. Once inside the door he halted and drew himself up with a conscious assumption of dignity. Lord Badgery hurried forward and seized his hand.

"Welcome, Mr. Tillotson—welcome in the name of English art!"

Mr. Tillotson inclined his head in silence. He was too full of emotion to be able to reply.

"I should like to introduce you to a few of your younger colleagues, who have assembled here to do you honour."

Lord Badgery presented everyone in the room to the old painter, who bowed, shook hands, made little noises in his throat, but still found himself unable to speak. Mrs. Nobes, Mrs. Cayman, and Mrs. Mandragore all said charming things.

Dinner was served; the party took their places. Lord Badgery sat at the head of the table, with Mr. Tillotson on his right hand and Sir Herbert Herne on his left. Confronted with Bomba's succulent cooking and Bomba's wines, Mr. Tillotson ate and drank a good deal. He had the appetite of one who has lived on greens and potatoes for ten years among the blackbeetles. After the second glass of wine he began to talk, suddenly and in a flood, as though a sluice had been pulled up.

"In Asia Minor," he began, "it is the custom when one goes to dinner, to hiccough as a sign of appreciative fullness. Eructavit cor meum, as the Psalmist has it; he was an Oriental himself."

Spode had arranged to sit next to Mrs. Cayman; he had designs upon her. She was an impossible woman, of course, but rich and useful; he wanted to bamboozle her into buying some of his young friends' pictures.

"In a cellar?" Mrs. Cayman was saying, "with, blackbeetles? Oh, how dreadful! Poor old man! And he's ninety-seven, didn't you say? Isn't that shocking! I only hope the subscription will be a large one. Of course, one wishes one could have given more oneself. But then, you know, one has so many expenses, and things are so difficult now."

"I know, I know," said Spode, with feeling.

"It's all because of Labour," Mrs. Cayman explained. "Of course, I should simply love to have him in to dinner sometimes. But, then, I feel he's really too old, too farouche and gâteux; it would not be doing a kindness to him, would it? And so you are working with Mr. Gollamy now? What a charming man, so talented, such conversation...."

"Eructavit cor meum," said Mr. Tillotson for the third time. Lord Badgery tried to head him off the subject of Turkish etiquette, but in vain.

By half-past nine a kinder vinolent atmosphere had put to sleep the hatreds and suspicions of before dinner. Sir Herbert Herne had discovered that the young Cubist sitting next him was not insane and actually knew a surprising amount about the Old Masters. For their part these young men had realised that their elders were not at all malignant; they were just very stupid and pathetic. It was only in the bosoms of Mrs. Nobes, Mrs. Cayman, and Mrs. Mandragore that hatred still reigned undiminished. Being ladies and old-fashioned, they had drunk almost no wine.

The moment for speech-making arrived. Lord Badgery rose to his feet, said what was expected of him, and called upon Sir Herbert to propose the toast of the evening. Sir Herbert coughed, smiled and began. In the course of a speech that lasted twenty minutes he told anecdotes of Mr. Gladstone, Lord Leighton, Sir Almo Tadema, and the late Bishop, of Bombay; he made three puns, he quoted Shakespeare and Whittier, he was playful, he was eloquent, he was grave.... At the end of his harangue Sir Herbert handed to Mr. Tillotson a silk purse containing fifty-eight pounds ten shillings, the total amount of the subscription. The old man's health was drunk with acclamation.

Mr. Tillotson rose with difficulty to his feet. The dry, snakelike skin of his face was flushed; his tie was more crooked than ever; the green ribbon of the Order of Chastity of the second class had somehow climbed tip his crumpled and maculate shirt front.

"My lords, ladies, and gentlemen," he began in a choking voice, and then broke down completely. It was a very painful and pathetic spectacle. A feeling of intense discomfort afflicted the minds of all who looked upon that trembling relic of a man, as he stood there weeping and stammering. It was as though a breath of the wind of death had blown suddenly through the room, lifting the vapours of wine and tobacco-smoke, quenching the laughter and the candle flames. Eyes floated uneasily, not knowing where to look. Lord Badgery, with great presence of mind, offered the old man a glass of wine. Mr. Tillotson began to recover. The guests heard him murmur a few disconnected words.

"This great honour ... overwhelmed with kindness ... this magnificent banquet ... not used to it ... in Asia Minor ... eructuvit cor meum."

At this point Lord Badgery plucked sharply at one of his long coat tails. Mr. Tillotson paused, took another sip of wine, and then went on with a newly won coherence and energy.

"The life of the artist is a hard one. His work is unlike other men's work, which may be done mechanically, by rote and almost, as it were, in sleep. It demands from him a constant expense of spirit. He gives continually of his best life, and in return he receives much joy, it is true much fame, it may be—but of material blessings, very few. It is eighty years since first I devoted my life to the service of art; eighty years, and almost every one of those years has brought me fresh and painful proof of what I have been saying: the artist's life is a hard one."

This unexpected deviation into sense increased the general feeling of discomfort. It became necessary to take the old man seriously, to regard him as a human being. Up till then he had been no more than an object of curiosity, a mummy in an absurd suit of evening-clothes with a green ribbon across the shirt front. People could not help wishing that they had subscribed a little more. Fifty-eight pounds ten it wasn't enormous. But happily for the peace of mind of the company, Mr. Tillotson paused again, took another sip of wine, and began to live up to his proper character by talking absurdly.

"When I consider the life of that great man, Benjamin Robert Haydon, one of the greatest men England has ever produced...." The audience heaved a sigh of relief; this was all as it should be. There was a burst of loud bravoing and clapping. Mr. Tillotson turned his dim eyes round the room, and smiled gratefully at the misty figures he beheld. "That great man, Benjamin Robert Haydon," he continued, "whom I am proud to call my master and who, it rejoices my heart to see, still lives in your memory and esteem, that great man, one of the greatest that England has ever produced, led a life so deplorable that I cannot think of it without a tear."

And with infinite repetitions and divagations, Mr. Tillotson related the history of B.R. Haydon, his imprisonments for debt, his battle with the Academy, his triumphs, his failures, his despair, his suicide. Half-past ten struck. Mr. Tillotson was declaiming against the stupid and prejudiced judges who had rejected Haydon's designs for the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament in favour of the paltriest German scribblings.

"That great man, one of the greatest England has ever produced, that great Benjamin Robert Haydon, whom I am proud to call my master and who, it rejoices me to see, still lives on in your memory and esteem—at that affront his great heart burst; it was the unkindest cut of all. He who had worked all his life for the recognition, of the artist by the State, he who had petitioned every Prime Minister, including the Duke of Wellington, for thirty years, begging them to employ artists to decorate public buildings, he to whom the scheme for decorating the Houses of Parliament was undeniably due...." Mr. Tillotson lost a grip on his syntax and began a new sentence. "It was the unkindest cut of all, it was the last straw. The artist's life is a hard one."

At eleven Mr. Tillotson was talking about the pre-Raphaelites. At a quarter past he had begun to tell the story of B.R. Haydon all over again. At twenty-five minutes to twelve he collapsed quite speechless into his chair. Most of the guests had already gone away; the few who remained made haste to depart. Lord Badgery led the old man to the door and packed him into the second Rolls-Royce. The Tillotson Banquet was over; it had been a pleasant evening, but a little too long.

Spode walked back to his rooms in Bloomsbury, whistling as he went. The arc lamps of Oxford Street reflected in the polished surface of the road; canals of dark bronze. He would have to bring that into an article some time. The Cayman woman had been very successfully nobbled. "Voi che sapete," he whistled—somewhat out of tune, but he could not hear that.

When Mr. Tillotson's landlady came in to call him on the following morning, she found the old man lying fully dressed on his bed. He looked very ill and very, very old; Boreham's dress-suit was in a terrible state, and the green ribbon of the Order of Chastity was ruined. Mr. Tillotson lay very still, but he was not asleep. Hearing the sound of footsteps, he opened his eyes a little and faintly groaned. His landlady looked down at him menacingly.

"Disgusting!" she said, "disgusting, I call it. At your age."

Mr. Tillotson groaned again. Making a great effort, he drew out of his trouser pocket a large silk purse, opened it, and extracted a sovereign.

"The artist's life is a hard one, Mrs. Green," he said, handing her the coin. "Would you mind sending for the doctor? I don't feel very well. And oh, what shall I do about these clothes? What shall I say to the gentleman who was kind enough to lend them to me? Loan oft loseth both itself and friend. The Bard is always right."

The End

IV: GREEN TUNNELS

"In the Italian gardens of the thirteenth century...." Mr. Buzzacott interrupted himself to take another helping of the risotto which was being offered him. "Excellent risotto this," he observed. "Nobody who was not born in Milan can make it properly. So they say."

"So they say," Mr. Topes repeated in his sad, apologetic voice, and helped himself in his turn.

"Personally," said Mrs. Topes, with decision, "I find all Italian cooking abominable. I don't like the oil—especially hot. No, thank you." She recoiled from the proffered dish.

After the first mouthful Mr. Buzzacott put down his fork. "In the Italian gardens of the thirteenth century," he began again, making with his long, pale hand a curved and flowery gesture that ended with a clutch at his beard, "a frequent and most felicitous use was made of green tunnels."

"Green tunnels?" Barbara woke up suddenly from her tranced silence. "Green tunnels?"

"Yes, my dear," said her father. "Green tunnels. Arched alleys covered with vines or other creeping plants. Their length was often very considerable."

But Barbara had once more ceased to pay attention to what he was saying. Green tunnels—the word had floated down to her, through profound depths of reverie, across great spaces of abstraction, startling her like the sound of a strange-voiced bell. Green tunnels—what a wonderful idea. She would not listen to her father explaining the phrase into dullness. He made everything dull; an inverted alchemist, turning gold into lead. She pictured caverns in a great aquarium, long vistas between rocks and scarcely swaying weeds and pale, discoloured corals; endless dim green corridors with huge lazy fishes loitering aimlessly along them. Green-faced monsters with goggling eyes and mouths that slowly opened and shut. Green tunnels....

"I have seen them illustrated in illuminated manuscripts of the period," Mr. Buzzacott went on; once more he clutched his pointed brown beard—clutched and combed it with his long fingers.

Mr. Topes looked up. The glasses of his round owlish spectacles flashed as he moved his head. "I know what you mean," he said.

"I have a very good mind to have one, planted in my garden here."

"It will take a long time to grow," said Mr. Topes. "In this sand, so close to the sea, you will only be able to plant vines. And they come up very slowly very slowly indeed." He shook his head and the points of light danced wildly in his spectacles. His voice drooped hopelessly, his grey moustache drooped, his whole person drooped. Then, suddenly, he pulled himself up. A shy, apologetic smile appeared on his face. He wriggled uncomfortably. Then, with a final rapid shake of the head, he gave vent to a quotation:

"But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near."

He spoke deliberately, and his voice trembled a little. He always found it painfully difficult to say something choice and out of the ordinary; and yet what a wealth of remembered phrase, what apt new coinages were always surging through his mind!

"They don't grow so slowly as all that," said Mr. Buzzacott confidently. He was only just over fifty, and looked a handsome thirty-five. He gave himself at least another forty years; indeed, he had not yet begun to contemplate the possibility of ever concluding.

"Miss Barbara will enjoy it, perhaps—your green tunnel." Mr. Topes sighed and looked across the table at his host's daughter.

Barbara was sitting with her elbows on the table, her chin in her hands, staring in front of her. The sound of her own name reached her faintly. She turned her head in Mr. Topes's direction and found herself confronted by the glitter of his round, convex spectacles. At the end of the green tunnel—she stared at the shining circles—hung the eyes of a goggling fish. They approached, floating, closer and closer, along the dim submarine corridor.

Confronted by this fixed regard, Mr. Topes looked away. What thoughtful eyes! He couldn't remember ever to have seen eyes so full of thought. There were certain Madonnas of Montagna, he reflected, very like hen mild little blonde Madonnas with slightly snub noses and very, very young. But he was old; it would be many years, in spite of Buzzacott, before the vines grew up into a green tunnel. He took a sip of wine; then, mechanically, sucked his drooping grey moustache.

"Arthur!"

At the sound of his wife's voice Mr. Topes started, raised his napkin to his mouth. Mrs. Topes did not permit the sucking of moustaches. It was only in moments of absent-mindedness that he ever offended, now.

"The Marchese Prampolini is coming here to take coffee," said Mr. Buzzacott suddenly. "I almost forgot to tell you."

"One of these Italian marquises, I suppose," said Mrs. Topes, who was no snob, except in England. She raised her chin with a little jerk.

Mr. Buzzacott executed an upward curve of the hand in her direction. "I assure you, Mrs. Topes, he belongs to a very old and distinguished family. They are Genoese in origin. You remember their palace, Barbara? Built by Alessi."

Barbara looked up. "Oh yes," she said vaguely. "Alessi. I know." Alessi: Aleppo—where a malignant and a turbaned Turk. And a turbaned; that had always seemed to her very funny.

"Several of his ancestors," Mr. Buzzacott went on, "distinguished themselves as vice-roys of Corsica. They did good work in the suppression of rebellion. Strange, isn't it"—he turned parenthetically to Mr. Topes—"the way in which sympathy is always on the side of rebels? What a fuss people made of Corsica! That ridiculous book of Gregorovius, for example. And the Irish, and the Poles, and all the rest of them. It always seems to me very superfluous and absurd."

"Isn't it, perhaps, a little natural?" Mr. Topes began timorously and tentatively, but his host went on without listening.

"The present marquis," he said, "is the head of the local Fascisti. They have done no end of good work in this district in the way of preserving law and order and keeping the lower classes in their place."

"Ah, the Fascisti," Mrs. Topes repeated approvingly. "One would like to see something of the kind in England. What with all these strikes...."

"He has asked me for a subscription to the funds of the organisation. I shall give him one, of course."

"Of course." Mrs. Topes nodded. "My nephew, the one who was a major during the war, volunteered in the last coal strike. He was sorry, I know, that it didn't come to a fight. 'Aunt Annie,' he said to me, when I saw him last, 'if there had been a fight we should have knocked them out completely—completely.'"

In Aleppo, the Fascisti, malignant and turbaned, were fighting, under the palm trees. Weren't they palm trees, those tufted green plumes?

"What, no ice to-day? Niente gelato?" inquired Mr. Buzzacott as the maid put down the compote of peaches on the table.

Concetta apologised. The ice-making machine in the village had broken down. There would be no ice till to-morrow.

"Too bad," said Mr. Buzzacott. "Troppo male, Concetta."

Under the palm trees, Barbara saw them: they pranced about, fighting. They were mounted on big dogs, and in the trees were enormous many-coloured birds.

"Goodness me, the child's asleep." Mrs. Topes was proffering the dish of peaches. "How much longer am I to hold this in front of your nose, Barbara?"

Barbara felt herself blushing. "I'm so sorry," she mumbled, and took the dish clumsily.

"Day-dreaming. It's a bad habit."

"It's one we all succumb to sometimes," put in Mr. Topes deprecatingly, with a little nervous tremble of the head.

"You may, my dear," said his wife. "I do not."

Mr. Topes lowered his eyes to his plate and went on eating.

"The marchese should be here at any moment now," said Mr. Buzzacott, looking at his watch. "I hope he won't be late. I find I suffer so much from any postponement of my siesta. This Italian heat," he added, with growing plaintiveness, "one can't be too careful."

"Ah, but when I was with my father in India," began Mrs. Topes in a tone of superiority: "he was an Indian civilian, you know...."

Aleppo, India—always the palm trees. Cavalcades of big dogs, and tigers too.

Concetta ushered in the marquis. Delighted. Pleased to meet. Speak English? Yés, yéss. Pocchino. Mrs. Topes: and Mr. Topes, the distinguished antiquarian. Ah, of course; know his name very well. My daughter. Charmed. Often seen the signorina bathing. Admired the way she dives. Beautiful—the hand made a long, caressing gesture. These athletic English signorine. The teeth flashed astonishingly white in the brown face, the dark eyes glittered. She felt herself blushing again, looked away, smiled foolishly. The marquis had already turned back to Mr. Buzzacott.

"So you have decided to settle in our Carrarese."

Well, not settled exactly; Mr. Buzzacott wouldn't go so far as to say settled. A villine for the summer months. The winter in Rome. One was forced to live abroad. Taxation in England.... Soon they were all talking. Barbara looked at them. Beside the marquis they all seemed half dead. His face flashed as he talked; he seemed to be boiling with life. Her father was limp and pale, like something long buried from the light; and Mr. Topes was all dry and shrivelled; and Mrs. Topes looked more than ever like something worked by clockwork. They were talking about Socialism and Fascisti, and all that. Barbara did not listen to what they were saying; but she looked at them, absorbed.

Good-bye, good-bye. The animated face with its flash of a smile was turned like a lamp from one to another. Now it was turned on her. Perhaps one evening she would come, with her father, and the Signora Topes. He and his sister gave little dances sometimes. Only the gramophone, of course. But that was better than nothing, and the signorina must dance divinely—another flash—he could see that. He pressed her hand again. Good-bye.

It was time for the siesta.

"Don't forget to pull down the mosquito netting, my dear," Mr. Buzzacott exhorted. "There is always a danger of anophylines."

"All right, father." She moved towards the door without turning round to answer him. He was always terribly tiresome about mosquito nets. Once they had driven through the Campagna in a hired cab, completely enclosed in an improvised tent of netting. The monuments along the Appian Way had loomed up mistily as through bridal veils. And how everyone had laughed. But her father, of course, hadn't so much as noticed it. He never noticed anything.

"Is it at Berlin, that charming little Madonna of Montagna's?" Mr. Topes abruptly asked. "The one with the Donor kneeling in the left-hand corner as if about to kiss the foot of the Child." His spectacles flashed in Mr. Buzzacott's direction.

"Why do you ask?"

"I don't know. I was just thinking of it."

"I think you must mean the one in the Mond Collection."

"Ah yes; very probably. In the Mond...."

Barbara opened the door and walked into the twilight of her shuttered room. It was hot even here; for another three hours it would hardly be possible to stir. And that old idiot, Mrs. Topes, always made a fuss if one came in to lunch with bare legs and one's after-bathing tunic. "In India we always made a point of being properly and adequately dressed. An Englishwoman must keep up her position with natives, and to all intents and purposes Italians are natives." And so she always had to put on shoes and stockings and a regular frock just at the hottest hour of the day. What an old ass that woman was! She slipped off her clothes as fast as she could. That was a little better.

Standing in front of the long mirror in the wardrobe door she came to the humiliating conclusion that she looked like a piece of badly toasted bread. Brown face, brown neck and shoulders, brown arms, brown legs from the knee downwards; but all the rest of her was white, silly, effeminate, townish white. If only one could run about with no clothes on till one was like those little coppery children who rolled and tumbled in the burning sand! Now she was just underdone, half-baked, and wholly ridiculous. For a long time she looked at her pale image. She saw herself running, bronzed all over, along the sand; or through a field of flowers, narcissus and wild tulips; or in soft grass under grey olive trees. She turned round with a sudden start. There, in the shadows behind her.... No, of course there was nothing.

It was that awful picture in a magazine she had looked at, so many years ago, when she was a child. There was a lady sitting at her dressing-table, doing her hair in front of the glass; and a huge, hairy black monkey creeping up behind her. She always got the creeps when she looked at herself in a mirror. It was very silly. But still. She turned away from the mirror, crossed the room, and, without lowering the mosquito curtains, lay down on her bed. The flies buzzed about her, settled incessantly on her face. She shook her head, flapped at them angrily with her hands. There would be peace if she let down the netting. But she thought of the Appian Way seen mistily through the bridal veil and preferred to suffer the flies. In the end she had to surrender; the brutes were too much for her. But, at any rate, it wasn't the fear of anophylines that made her lower the netting.

Undisturbed now and motionless, she lay stretched stiffly out under the transparent bell of gauze. A specimen under a glass case. The fancy possessed her mind. She saw a huge museum with thousands of glass cases, full of fossils and butterflies and stuffed birds and mediæval spoons and armour and Florentine jewellery and mummies and carved ivory and illuminated manuscripts. But in one of the cases was a human being, shut up there alive.

All of a sudden she became horribly miserable. "Boring, boring, boring," she whispered, formulating the words aloud. Would it never stop being boring? The tears came into her eyes. How awful everything was! And perhaps it would go on being as bad as this all her life. Seventeen from seventy was fifty three. Fifty three years of it. And if she lived to a hundred there would be more than eighty.

The thought depressed her all the evening. Even her bath after tea did her no good. Swimming far out, far out, she lay there, floating on the warm water. Sometimes she looked at the sky, sometimes she turned her head towards the shore. Framed in their pinewoods, the villas looked as small and smug as the advertisement of a seaside resort. But behind them, across the level plain, were the mountains. Sharp, bare peaks of limestone, green woodland slopes and grey-green expanses of terraced olive trees—they seemed marvellously close and clear in this evening light. And beautiful, beautiful beyond words. But that, somehow, only made things worse. And Shelley had lived a few miles farther up the coast, there, behind the headland guarding the Gulf of Spezia. Shelley had been drowned in this milk-warm sea. That made it worse too.

The sun was getting very low and red over the sea. She swam slowly in. On the beach Mrs. Topes waited, disapprovingly. She had known somebody, a strong man, who had caught cramp from staying in too long. He sank like a stone. Like a stone. The queer people Mrs. Topes had known! And the funny things they did, the odd things that happened to them.

Dinner that evening was duller than ever. Barbara went early to bed. All night long the same old irritating cicada scraped and scraped among the pine trees, monotonous and regular as clockwork. Zip zip, zip zip zip. Boring, boring. Was the animal never bored by its own noise? It seemed odd that it shouldn't be. But, when she came to think of it, nobody ever did get bored with their own noise. Mrs. Topes, for example; she never seemed to get bored. Zip zip, zip zip zip. The cicada went on without pause.

Concetta knocked at the door at half-past seven. The morning was as bright and cloudless as all the mornings were. Barbara jumped up, looked from one window at the mountains, from the other at the sea; all seemed to be well with them. All was well with her, too, this morning. Seated at the mirror, she did not so much as think of the big monkey in the far obscure corner of the room. A bathing dress and a bath-gown, sandals, a handkerchief round her head, and she was ready. Sleep had left no recollection of last night's mortal boredom. She ran downstairs.

"Good morning, Mr. Topes."

Mr. Topes was walking in the garden among the vines. He turned round, took off his hat, smiled a greeting.

"Good morning, Miss Barbara." He paused. Then, with an embarrassed wriggle of introduction he went on; a queer little falter came into his voice. "A real Chaucerian morning, Miss Barbara. A May-day morning—only it happens to be September. Nature is fresh and bright, and there is at least one specimen in this dream garden"—he wriggled more uncomfortably than ever, and there was a tremulous glitter in his round spectacle lenses of the poet's 'yonge fresshe folkes.' He bowed in her direction, smiled deprecatingly, and was silent. The remark, it seemed to him, now that he had finished speaking, was somehow not as good as he had thought it would be.

Barbara laughed. "Chaucer! They used to make us read the Canterbury Tales at school. But they always bored me. Are you going to bathe?"

"Not before breakfast." Mr. Topes shook his head. "One is getting a little too old for that."

"Is one?" Why did the silly old man always say 'one' when he meant 'I'? She couldn't help laughing at him. "Well, I must hurry, or else I shall be late for breakfast again, and you know how I catch it."

She ran out, through the gate in the garden wall, across the beach, to the striped red-and-white bathing cabin that stood before the house. Fifty yards away she saw the Marchese Prampolini, still dripping from the sea, running up towards his bathing hut. Catching sight of her, he flashed a smile in her direction, gave a military salute. Barbara waved her hand, then thought that the gesture had been too familiar—but at this hour of the morning it was difficult not to have bad jolly manners—and added the corrective of a stiff bow. After all, she had only met him yesterday. Soon she was swimming out to sea, and, ugh! what a lot of horrible huge jelly-fish there were.

Mr. Topes had followed her slowly through the gate and across the sand. He watched her running down from the cabin, slender as a boy, with long, bounding strides. He watched her go jumping with great splashes through the deepening water, then throw herself forward and begin to swim. He watched her till she was no more than a small dark dot far out.

Emerging from his cabin, the marquis met him walking slowly along the beach, his head bent down and his lips slightly moving as though he were repeating something, a prayer or a poem, to himself.

"Good morning, signore." The marquis shook him by the hand with a more than English cordiality.

"Good morning," replied Mr. Topes, allowing his hand to be shaken. He resented this interruption of his thoughts.

"She swims very well, Miss Buzzacott."

"Very," assented Mr. Topes, and smiled to himself to think what beautiful, poetical things he might have said, if he had chosen.

"Well, so, so," said the marquis, too colloquial by half. He shook hands again, and the two men went their respective ways.

Barbara was still a hundred yards from the shore when she heard the crescendo and dying boom of the gong floating out from the villa. Damn! she'd be late again. She quickened her stroke and came splashing out through the shallows, flushed and breathless.

She'd be ten minutes late, she calculated; it would take her at least that to do her hair and dress. Mrs. Topes would be on the war-path again; though what business that old woman had to lecture her as she did, goodness only knew. She always succeeded in making herself horribly offensive and unpleasant.

The beach was quite deserted as she trotted, panting, across it, empty to right and left as far as she could see. If only she had a horse to go galloping at the water's edge, miles and miles. Right away down to Bocca d'Arno she'd go, swim the river—she saw herself crouching on the horse's back, as he swam, with legs tucked up on the saddle, trying not to get her feet wet—and gallop on again, goodness only knew where.

In front of the cabin she suddenly halted. There in the ruffled sand she had seen a writing. Big letters, faintly legible, sprawled across her path.

O CLARA D'ELLÉBEUSE.

She pieced the dim letters together. They hadn't been there when she started out to bathe. Who?... She looked round. The beach was quite empty. And what was the meaning? "O Clara d'Ellébeuse." She took her bath-gown from the cabin, slipped on her sandals, and ran back towards the house as fast as she could. She felt most horribly frightened.

It was a sultry, headachey sort of morning, with a hot sirocco that stirred the bunting on the flagstaffs. By midday the thunderclouds had covered half the sky. The sun still blazed on the sea, but over the mountains all was black and indigo. The storm broke noisily overhead just as they were drinking their after-luncheon coffee.

"Arthur," said Mrs. Topes, painfully calm, "shut the shutters, please."

She was not frightened, no. But she preferred not to see the lightning. When the room was darkened, she began to talk, suavely and incessantly.

Lying back in her deep arm-chair, Barbara was thinking of Clara d'Ellébeuse. What did it mean and who was Clara d'Ellébeuse? And why had he written it there for her to see? He—for there could be no doubt who had written it. The flash of teeth and eyes, the military salute; she knew she oughtn't to have waved to him. He had written it there while she was swimming out. Written it and then run away. She rather liked that—just an extraordinary word on the sand, like the footprint in Robinson Crusoe.

"Personally," Mrs. Topes was saying, "I prefer Harrod's."

The thunder crashed and rattled. It was rather exhilarating, Barbara thought; one felt, at any rate, that something was happening for a change. She remembered the little room half-way up the stairs at Lady Thingumy's house, with the bookshelves and the green curtains and the orange shade on the light; and that awful young man like a white slug who had tried to kiss her there, at the dance last year. But that was different—not at all serious; and the young man had been so horribly ugly. She saw the marquis running up the beach, quick and alert. Copper coloured all over, with black hair. He was certainly very handsome. But as for being in love, well ... what did that exactly mean? Perhaps when she knew him better. Even now she fancied she detected something. O Clara d'Ellébeuse. What an extraordinary thing it was.

With his long fingers Mr. Buzzacott combed his beard. This winter, he was thinking, he would put another thousand into Italian money when the exchange was favourable. In the spring it always seemed to drop back again. One could clear three hundred pounds on one's capital if the exchange went down to seventy. The income on three hundred was fifteen pounds a year, and fifteen pounds was now fifteen hundred lire. And fifteen hundred lire, when you came to think of it, was really sixty pounds. That was to say that one would make an addition of more than one pound a week to one's income by this simple little speculation. He became aware that Mrs. Topes had asked him a question.

"Yes, yes, perfectly," he said.

Mrs. Topes talked on; she was keeping up her morale. Was she right in believing that the thunder sounded a little less alarmingly loud and near?

Mr. Topes sat, polishing his spectacles with a white silk handkerchief. Vague and myopic between their puckered lids, his eyes seemed lost, homeless, unhappy. He was thinking about beauty. There were certain relations between the eyelids and the temples, between the breast and the shoulder; there were certain successions of sounds. But what about them? Ah, that was the problem—that was the problem. And there was youth, there was innocence. But it was all very obscure, and there were so many phrases, so many remembered pictures and melodies; he seemed to get himself entangled among them. And he was after all so old and so ineffective. He put on his spectacles again, and definition came into the foggy world beyond his eyes. The shuttered room was very dark. He could distinguish the Renaissance profile of Mr. Buzzacott, bearded and delicately featured. In her deep arm-chair Barbara appeared, faintly white, in an attitude relaxed and brooding. And Mrs. Topes was nothing more than a voice in the darkness. She had got on to the marriage of the Prince of Wales. Who would they eventually find for him?

Clara d'Ellébeuse, Clara d'Ellébeuse. She saw herself so clearly as the marchesa. They would have a house in Rome, a palace. She saw herself in the Palazzo Spada—it had such a lovely vaulted passage leading from the courtyard to the gardens at the back. "MARCHESA PRAMPOLINI, PALAZZO SPADA, ROMA"—a great big visiting-card beautifully engraved. And she would go riding every day in the Pincio. "Mi porta il mio cavallo" she would say to the footman, who answered the bell. Porta? Would that be quite correct? Hardly. She'd have to take some proper Italian lessons to talk to the servants. One must never be ridiculous before servants. "Voglio il mio cavallo. Haughtily one would say it sitting at one's writing-table in a riding-habit, without turning round. It would be a green riding-habit, with a black tricorne hat, braided with silver.

"Prendero la mia collazzione al letto." Was that right for breakfast in bed? Because she would have breakfast in bed, always. And when she got up there would be lovely looking glasses with three panels where one could see oneself sideface. She saw herself leaning forward, powdering her nose, carefully, scientifically. With the monkey creeping up behind? Ooh. Horrible! Ho paura di questa scimmia, questo scimmione.

She would come back to lunch after her ride. Perhaps Prampolini would be there; she had rather left him out of the picture so far. "Dov' è il Marchese?" "Nella sala di pranza, signora." I began without you, I was so hungry. Pasta asciutta. Where have you been, my love? Riding, my dove. She supposed they'd get into the habit of saying that sort of thing. Everyone seemed to. And you? I have been out with the Fascisti.

Oh, these Fascisti! Would life be worth living when he was always going out with pistols and bombs and things? They would bring him back one day on a stretcher. She saw it. Pale, pale, with blood on him. Il signore è ferito. Nel petto. Gruvamente. E morto.

How could she bear it? It was too awful; too, too terrible. Her breath came in a kind of sob; she shuddered as though she had been hurt. E morto, E morto. The tears came into her eyes.

She was roused suddenly by a dazzling light. The storm had receded far enough into the distance to permit of Mrs. Topes's opening the shutters.

"It's quite stopped raining."

To be disturbed in one's intimate sorrow and self-abandonment at a death-bed by a stranger's intrusion, an alien voice.... Barbara turned her face away from the light and surreptitiously wiped her eyes. They might see and ask her why she had been crying. She hated Mrs. Topes for opening the shutters; at the inrush of the light something beautiful had flown, an emotion had vanished, irrecoverably. It was a sacrilege.

Mr. Buzzacott looked at his watch. "Too late, I fear, for a siesta now," he said. "Suppose we ring for an early tea."

"An endless succession of meals," said Mr. Topes, with a tremolo and a sigh. "That's what life seems to be—real life."

"I have been calculating"—Mr. Buzzacott turned his pale green eyes towards his guest—"that I may be able to afford that pretty little cinque cassone, after all. It would be a bit of a squeeze." He played with his beard. "But still...."

After tea, Barbara and Mr. Topes went for a walk along the beach. She didn't much want to go, but Mrs. Topes thought it would be good for her; so she had to. The storm had passed and the sky over the sea was clear. But the waves were still breaking with an incessant clamour on the outer shallows, driving wide sheets of water high up the beach, twenty or thirty yards above the line where, on a day of calm, the ripples ordinarily expired. Smooth, shining expanses of water advanced and receded like steel surfaces moved out and back by a huge machine. Through the rain-washed air the mountains appeared with an incredible clarity. Above them hung huge masses of cloud.

"Clouds over Carrara," said Mr. Topes, deprecating his remark with a little shake of the head and a movement of the shoulders. "I like to fancy sometimes that the spirits of the great sculptors lodge among these marble hills, and that it is their unseen hands that carve the clouds into these enormous splendid shapes. I imagine their ghosts"—his voice trembled—"feeling about among superhuman conceptions, planning huge groups and friezes and monumental figures with blowing draperies; planning, conceiving, but never quite achieving. Look, there's something of Michelangelo in that white cloud with the dark shadows underneath it." Mr. Topes pointed, and Barbara, nodded and said, "Yes, yes," though she wasn't quite sure which cloud he meant. "It's like Night on the Medici tomb; all the power and passion are brooding inside it, pent up. And there, in that sweeping, gesticulating piece of vapour—you see the one I mean—there's a Bernini. All the passion's on the surface, expressed; the gesture's caught at its most violent. And that sleek, smug white fellow over there, that's a delicious absurd Canova." Mr. Topes chuckled.

"Why do you always talk about art?" said Barbara. "You bring these dead people into everything. What do I know about Canova or whoever it is?" They were none of them alive. She thought of that dark face, bright as a lamp with life. He at least wasn't dead. She wondered whether the letters were still there in the sand before the cabin. No, of course not; the rain and the wind would have blotted them out.

Mr. Topes was silent; he walked with slightly bent knees and his eyes were fixed on the ground; he wore a speckled black-and-white straw hat. He always thought of art; that was what was wrong with him. Like an old tree he was; built up of dead wood, with only a few fibres of life to keep him from rotting away. They walked on for a long time in silence.

"Here's the river," said Mr. Topes at last.

A few steps more and they were on the bank of a wide stream that came down slowly through the plain to the sea. Just inland from the beach it was fringed with pine trees; beyond the trees one could see the plain, and beyond the plain were the mountains. In this calm light after the storm everything looked strange. The colours seemed deeper and more intense than at ordinary times. And though all was so clear, there was a mysterious air of remoteness about the whole scene. There was no sound except the continuous breathing of the sea. They stood for a little while, looking; then turned back.

Far away along the beach two figures were slowly approaching. White flannel trousers, a pink skirt.

"Nature," Mr. Topes enunciated, with a shake of the head. "One always comes back to nature. At a moment such as this, in surroundings like these, one realises it. One lives now—more quietly, perhaps, but more profoundly. Deep watery. Deep waters...."

The figures drew closer. Wasn't it the marquis? And who was with him? Barbara strained her eyes to see.

"Most of one's life," Mr. Topes went on, "is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking. Your father and I, we collect pictures and read about the dead. Other people achieve the same results by drinking, or breeding rabbits, or doing amateur carpentry. Anything rather than think calmly about the important things."

Mr. Topes was silent. He looked about him, at the sea, at the mountains, at the great clouds, at his companion. A frail Montagna madonna, with the sea and the westering sun, the mountains and the storm, all eternity as a background. And he was sixty, with all a life, immensely long and yet timelessly short, behind him, an empty life. He thought of death and the miracles of beauty; behind his round, glittering spectacles he felt inclined to weep.

The approaching couple were quite near now.

"What a funny old walrus," said the lady.

"Walrus? Your natural history is quite wrong." The marquis laughed. "He's much too dry to be a walrus. I should suggest some sort of an old cat."

"Well, whatever he is, I'm sorry for that poor little girl. Think of having nobody better to go about with!"

"Pretty, isn't she?"

"Yes, but too young, of course."

"I like the innocence."

"Innocence? Cher ami! These English girls. Oh, la la! They may look innocent But, believe me...."

"Sh, sh. They'll hear you."

"Pooh, they don't understand Italian."

The marquis raised his hand. "The old walrus...." he whispered; then addressed himself loudly and jovially to the newcomers.

"Good evening, signorina. Good evening, Mr. Topes. After a storm the air is always the purest, don't you find, eh?"

Barbara nodded, leaving Mr. Topes to answer. It wasn't his sister. It was the Russian woman, the one of whom Mrs. Topes used to say that it was a disgrace she should be allowed to stay at the hotel. She had turned away, dissociating herself from the conversation; Barbara looked at the line of her averted face. Mr. Topes was saying something about the Pastoral Symphony. Purple face powder in the daylight; it looked hideous.

"Well, au revoir."

The flash of the marquis's smile was directed at them. The Russian woman turned back from the sea, slightly bowed, smiled languidly. Her heavy white eyelids were almost closed; she seemed the prey of an enormous ennui.

"They jar a little," said Mr. Topes when they were out of earshot—"they jar on the time, on the place, on the emotion. They haven't the innocence for this ... this...."—he wriggled and tremoloed out the just, the all too precious word—"this prelapsarian landscape."

He looked sideways at Barbara and wondered what she was so thoughtfully frowning over. Oh, lovely and delicate young creature! What could he adequately say of death and beauty and tenderness? Tenderness....

"All this," he went on desperately, and waved his hand to indicate the sky, the sea, the mountains, "this scene is like something remembered, clear and utterly calm; remembered across great gulfs of intervening time."

But that was not really what he wanted to say.

"You see what I mean?" he asked dubiously. She made no reply. How could she see? "This scene is so clear and pure and remote; you need the corresponding emotion. Those people were out of harmony. They weren't clear and pure enough." He seemed to be getting more muddled than ever. "It's an emotion of the young and of the old. You could feel it, I could feel it. Those people couldn't." He was feeling his way through obscurities. Where would he finally arrive? "Certain poems express it. You know Francis Jammes? I have thought so much of his work lately. Art instead of life, as usual; but then I'm made that way. I can't help thinking of Jammes. Those delicate, exquisite things he wrote about Clara d'Ellébeuse."

"Clara d'Ellébeuse?" She stopped and stared at him.

"You know the lines?" Mr. Topes smiled delightedly. "This makes me think, you make me think of them. 'F'aime dans les temps Clara d'Ellébeuse....' But, my dear Barbara, what is the matter?"

She had started crying, for no reason whatever.

The End

V: NUNS AT LUNCHEON

"What have I been doing since you saw me last?" Miss Penny repeated my question in her loud, emphatic voice. "Well, when did you see me last?"

"It must have been June," I computed.

"Was that after I'd been proposed to by the Russian General?

"Yes; I remember hearing about the Russian General."

Miss Penny threw back her head and laughed. Her long ear-rings swung and rattled corpses hanging in chains: an agreeably literary simile. And her laughter was like brass, but that had been said before.

"That was an uproarous incident. It's sad you should have heard of it. I love my Russian General story. 'Vos yeux me rendent fou.'" She laughed again.

Vos yeux—she had eyes like a hare's, flush with her head and very bright with a superficial and expressionless brightness. What a formidable woman. I felt sorry for the Russian General.

"'Sans coeur et sans entrallies,'" she went on, quoting the poor devil's words. "Such a delightful motto, don't you think? Like 'Sans peur et sans reproche.' But let me think; what have I been doing since then?" Thoughtfully she bit into the crust of her bread with long, sharp, white teeth.

"Two mixed grills," I said parenthetically to the waiter.

"But of course," exclaimed Miss Penny suddenly. "I haven't seen you since my German trip. All sorts of adventures. My appendicitis; my nun."

"Your nun?"

"My marvellous nun. I must tell you all about her."

"Do." Miss Penny's anecdotes were always curious. I looked forward to an entertaining luncheon.

"You knew I'd been in Germany this autumn?"

"Well, I didn't, as a matter of fact. But still—"

"I was just wandering round." Miss Penny described a circle in the air with her gaudily jewelled hand. She always twinkled with massive and improbable jewellery.

"Wandering round, living on three pounds a week, partly amusing myself, partly collecting material for a few little articles. 'What it Feels Like to be a Conquered Nation'—sob-stuff for the Liberal press, you know—and 'How the Hun is Trying to Wriggle out of the Indemnity,' for the other fellows. One has to make the best of all possible worlds, don't you find? But we mustn't talk shop. Well, I was wandering round, and very pleasant I found it. Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig. Then down to Munich and all over the place. One fine day I got to Grauburg. You know Grauburg? It's one of those picture-book German towns with a castle on a hill, hanging beer-gardens, a Gothic church, an old university, a river, a pretty bridge, and forests all round. Charming. But I hadn't much opportunity to appreciate the beauties of the place. The day after I arrived there—bang!—I went down with appendicitis—screaming, I may add."

"But how appalling!"

"They whisked me off to hospital, and cut me open before you could say knife. Excellent surgeon, highly efficient Sisters of Charity to nurse me—I couldn't have been in better hands. But it was a bore being tied there by the leg for four weeks—a great bore. Still, the thing had its compensations. There was my nun, for example. Ah, here's the food, thank Heaven!"

The mixed grill proved to be excellent. Miss Penny's description of the pun came to me in scraps and snatches. A round, pink, pretty face in a winged coif; blue eyes and regular features; teeth altogether too perfect—false, in fact; but the general effect extremely pleasing. A youthful Teutonic twenty eight.

"She wasn't my nurse," Miss Penny explained. "But I used to see her quite often when she came in to have a look at the tolle Engländerin. Her name was Sister Agatha. During the war, they told me, she had converted any number of wounded soldiers to the true faith—which wasn't surprising, considering how pretty she was."

"Did she try and convert you?" I asked.

"She wasn't such a fool." Miss Penny laughed, and rattled the miniature gallows of her ears.

I amused myself for a moment with the thought of Miss Penny's conversion—Miss Penny confronting a vast assembly of Fathers of the Church, rattling her earrings at their discourses on the Trinity, laughing her appalling laugh at the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, meeting the stern look of the Grand Inquisitor with a flash of her bright, emotionless hare's eyes. What was the secret of the woman's formidableness?

But I was missing the story. What had happened? Ah yes, the gist of it was that Sister Agatha had appeared one morning, after two or three days absence, dressed, not as a nun, but in the overalls of a hospital charwoman, with a handkerchief instead of a winged coif on her shaven head.

"Dead," said Miss Penny; "she looked as though she were dead. A walking corpse, that's what she was. It was a shocking sight. I shouldn't have thought it possible for anyone to change so much in so short a time. She walked painfully, as though she had been ill for months, and she had great burnt rings round her eyes and deep lines in her face. And the general expression of unhappiness—that was something quite appalling."

She leaned out into the gangway between the two rows of tables, and caught the passing waiter by the end of one his coat-tails. The little Italian looked round with an expression of surprise that deepened into terror on his face.

"Half a pint of Guinness," ordered Miss Penny. "And, after this, bring me some jam roll."

"No jam roll to-day, madam."

"Damn!" said Miss Penny. "Bring me what you like, then."

She let go of the waiter's tail and resumed her narrative.

"Where was I? Yes, I remember. She came into my room, I was telling you, with a bucket of water and a brush, dressed like a charwoman. Naturally I was rather surprised. 'What on earth are you doing, Sister Agatha?' I asked. No answer. She just shook her head, and began to scrub the floor. When she'd finished, she left the room without so much as looking at me again. 'What's happened to Sister Agatha?' I asked my nurse when she next came in. 'Can't say.'—'Won't say,' I said. No answer. It took nearly a week to find out what really had happened. Nobody dared tell me; it was strengst verboten, as they used to say in the good old days. But I wormed it out in the long run. My nurse, the doctor, the charwomen—I got something out of all of them. I always get what I want in the end." Miss Penny laughed like a horse.

"I'm sure you do," I said politely.

"Much obliged," acknowledged Miss Penny. "But to proceed. My information came to me in fragmentary whispers. 'Sister Agatha ran away with a man.'—Dear me.—'One of the patients.'—You don't say so.—'A criminal out of the jail.'—The plot thickens.—'He ran away from her.'—It seems to grow thinner again.—'They brought her back here; she's been disgraced. There's been a funeral service for her in the chapel—coffin and all. She had to be present at it—her own funeral. She isn't a nun any more. She has to do charwoman's work now, the roughest in the hospital. She's not allowed to speak to anybody, and nobody's allowed to speak to her. She's regarded as dead.'" Miss Penny paused to signal to the harassed little Italian. "My small 'Guinness,'" she called out.

"Coming, coming," and the foreign voice cried "Guinness" down the lift, and from below another voice echoed, "Guinness."

"I filled in the details bit by bit. There was our hero, to begin with; I had to bring him into the picture, which was rather difficult, as I had never seen him. But I got a photograph of him. The police circulated one when he got away; I don't suppose they ever caught him." Miss Penny opened her bag. "Here it is," she said. "I always carry it about with me; it's become a superstition. For years, I remember, I used to carry a little bit of heather tied up with string. Beautiful, isn't it? There's a sort of Renaissance look about it, don't you think? He was half-Italian, you know."

Italian. Ah, that explained it. I had been wondering how Bavaria could have produced this thin-faced creature with the big dark eyes, the finely modelled nose and chin, and the fleshy lips so royally and sensually curved.

"He's certainly very superb," I said, handing back the picture.

Miss Penny put it carefully away in her bag. "Isn't he?" she said. "Quite marvellous. But his character and his mind were even better. I see him as one of those innocent, childlike monsters of iniquity who are simply unaware of the existence of right and wrong. And he had genius—the real Italian genius for engineering, for dominating and exploiting nature. A true son of the Roman aqueduct builders he was, and a brother of the electrical engineers. Only Kuno—that was his name—didn't work in water; he worked in women. He knew how to harness the natural energy of passion; he made devotion drive his mills. The commercial exploitation of love-power, that was his specialty. I sometimes wonder," Miss Penny added in a different tone, "whether I shall ever be exploited, when I get a little more middle-aged and celibate, by one of these young engineers of the passions. It would be humiliating, particularly as I've done so little exploiting from my side."

She frowned and was silent for a moment. No, decidedly, Miss Penny was not beautiful; you could not even honestly say that she had charm or was attractive. That high Scotch colouring, those hare's eyes, the voice, the terrifying laugh, and the size of her, the general formidableness of the woman. No, no, no.

"You said he had been in prison," I said. The silence, with all its implications, was becoming embarrassing.

Miss Penny sighed, looked up, and nodded. "He was fool enough," she said, "to leave the straight and certain road of female exploitation for the dangerous courses of burglary. We all have our occasional accesses of folly. They gave him a heavy sentence, but he succeeded in getting pneumonia, I think it was, a week after entering jail. He was transferred to the hospital. Sister Agatha, with her known talent for saving souls, was given him as his particular attendant. But it was he, I'm afraid, who did the converting."

Miss Penny finished off the last mouthful of the ginger pudding which the waiter had brought in lieu of jam roll.

"I suppose you don't smoke cheroots," I said, as I opened my cigar-case.

"Well, as a matter of fact, I do," Miss Penny replied. She looked sharply round the restaurant. "I must just see if there are any of those horrible little gossip paragraphers here to-day. One doesn't want to figure in the social and personal column to-morrow morning: 'A fact which is not so generally known as it ought to be is, that Miss Penny, the well-known woman journalist, always ends her luncheon with a six-inch Burma cheroot. I saw her yesterday in a restaurant—not a hundred miles from Carmelite Street—smoking like a house on fire.' You know the touch. But the coast seems to be clear, thank goodness."

She took a cheroot from the case, lit it at my proffered match, and went on talking.

"Yes, it was young Kuno who did the converting. Sister Agatha was converted back into the worldly Melpomene Fugger she had been before she became the bride of holiness."

"Melpomene Fugger?"

"That was her name. I had her history from my old doctor. He had seen all Grauburg, living and dying and propagating for generations. Melpomene Fugger why, he had brought little Melpel into the world, little Melpchen. Her father was Professor Fugger, the great Professor Fugger, the berümter Geolog. Oh, yes, of course, I know the name. So well.... He was the man who wrote the standard work on Lemuria—you know, the hypothetical continent where the lemurs come from. I showed due respect. Liberal-minded he was, a disciple of Herder, a world-burgher, as they beautifully call it over there. Anglophile, too, and always ate porridge for breakfast—up till August 1914. Then, the radiant morning of the fifth, he renounced it for ever, solemnly and with tears in his eyes. The national food of a people who had betrayed culture and civilisation—how could he go on eating it? It would stick in his throat. In future he would have a lightly boiled egg. He sounded, I thought, altogether charming. And his daughter, Melpomene—she sounded charming, too; and such thick, yellow pig-tails when she was young! Her mother was dead, and a sister of the great Professor's ruled the house with an iron rod. Aunt Bertha was her name. Well, Melpomene grew up, very plump and appetising. When she was seventeen, something very odious and disagreeable happened to her. Even the doctor didn't know exactly what it was; but he wouldn't have been surprised if it had had something to do with the then Professor of Latin, an old friend of the family's, who combined, it seems, great erudition with a horrid fondness for very young ladies."

Miss Penny knocked half an inch of cigar ash into her empty glass.

"If I wrote short stories," she went on reflectively "(but it's too much bother), I should make this anecdote into a sort of potted life history, beginning with a scene immediately after this disagreeable event in Melpomene's life. I see the scene so clearly. Poor little Melpel is leaning over the bastions of Grauburg Castle, weeping into the June night and the mulberry trees in the garden thirty feet below. She is besieged by the memory of what happened this dreadful afternoon. Professor Engelmann, her father's old friend, with the magnificent red Assyrian beard.... Too awful—too awful! But then, as I was saying, short stones are really too much bother; or perhaps I'm too stupid to write them. I bequeath it to you. You know how to tick these things off."

"You're generous."

"Not at all," said Miss Penny. "My terms are ten per cent commission on the American sale. Incidentally there won't be an American sale. Poor Melpchen's history is not for the chaste public of Those States. But let me hear what you propose to do with Melpomene now you've got her on the castle bastions."

"That's simple," I said. "I know all about German university towns and castles on hills. I shall make her look into the June night, as you suggest; into the violet night with its points of golden flame. There will be the black silhouette of the castle, with its sharp roofs and hooded turrets, behind her. From the hanging beer-gardens in the town below the voices of the students, singing in perfect four-part harmony, will float up through the dark-blue spaces. 'Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot' and 'Das Ringlein sprang in zwei'—the heart-rendingly sweet old songs will make her cry all the more. Her tears will patter like rain among the leaves of the mulberry trees in the garden below. Does that seem to you adequate?"

"Very nice," said Miss Penny. "But how are you going to bring the sex problem and all of its horrors into the landscape?"

"Well, let me think." I called to memory those distant foreign summers when I was completing my education. "I know. I shall suddenly bring a swarm of moving candles and Chinese lanterns under the mulberry trees. You imagine the rich lights and shadows, the jewel-bright leafage, the faces and moving limbs of men and women, seen for an instant and gone again. They are students and girls of the town come out to dance, this windless, blue June night, under the mulberry trees. And now they begin, thumping round and round in a ring, to the music of their own singing.

"Wir können spielen

Vio-vio-vio-lin

Wir können spielen

Vi-o-lin

"Now the rhythm changes, quickens.

"Und wir können tanzen Bumstarara,

Bumstarara, Bumstarara,

Und wir können tanzen Bumstarara,

Bumstarara-rara.

"The dance becomes a rush, an elephantine prancing on the dry lawn under the mulberry trees. And from the bastion Melpomene looks down and perceives, suddenly and apocalyptically, that everything in the world is sex, sex, sex. Men and women, male and female—always the same, and all, in the light of the horror of the afternoon, disgusting. That's how I should do it, Miss Penny."

"And very nice, too. But I wish you could find a place to bring in my conversation with the doctor. I shall never forget the way he cleared his throat, and coughed before embarking on the delicate subject. 'You may know, ahem, gracious Miss,' he began—'you may know that religious phenomena are often, ahem, closely connected with sexual causes.' I replied that I had heard rumours which might justify me in believing this to be true among Roman Catholics, but that in the Church of England —and I for one was a practitioner of Anglicanismus—it was very different. 'That might be,' said the doctor; he had had no opportunity in the course of his long medical career of personally studying Anglicanismus. But he could vouch for the fact that among his patients, here in Grauburg, mysticismus was very often mixed up with the Geschlechtsleben. Melpomene was a case in point. After that hateful afternoon she had become extremely religious; the Professor of Latin had diverted her emotions out of their normal channels. She rebelled against the placid Agnosticismus of her father, and at night, in secret, when Aunt Bertha's dragon eyes were closed, she would read such forbidden books as The Life of St. Theresa, The Little Flowers of St. Francis, The Imitation of Christ, and the horribly enthralling Book of Martyrs. Aunt Bertha confiscated, these works whenever she came upon them; she considered them more pernicious than the novels of Marcel Prévost. The character of a good potential housewife might be completely undermined by reading of this kind. It was rather a relief for Melpomene when Aunt Bertha shuffled off, in the summer of 1911, this mortal coil. She was one of those indispensables of whom one makes the discovery, when they are gone, that one can get on quite as well without them. Poor Aunt Bertha!"

"One can imagine Melpomene trying to believe she was sorry, and horribly ashamed to find that she was really, in secret, almost glad." The suggestion seemed to me ingenious, but Miss Penny accepted it as obvious.

"Precisely," she said; "and the emotion would only further confirm and give new force to the tendencies which her aunt's death left her free to indulge as much as she liked. Remorse, contrition—they would lead to the idea of doing penance. And for one who was now wallowing in the martyrology, penance was the mortification of the flesh. She used to kneel for hours, at night, in the cold; she ate too little, and when her teeth ached, which they often did,—for she had a set, the doctor told me, which had given trouble from the very first,—she would not go and see the dentist, but lay awake at night, savouring to the full her excruciations, and feeling triumphantly that they must, in some strange way, be pleasing to the Mysterious Powers. She went on like that for two or three years, till she was poisoned through and through. In the end she went down with gastric ulcer. It was three months before she came out of hospital, well for the first time in a long space of years, and with a brand new set of imperishable teeth, all gold and ivory. And in mind, too, she was changed—for the better, I suppose. The nuns who nursed her had made her see that in mortifying herself she had acted supererogatively and through spiritual pride; instead of doing right, she had sinned. The only road to salvation, they told her, lay in discipline, in the orderliness of established religion, in obedience to authority. Secretly, so as not to distress her poor father, whose Agnosticismus was extremely dogmatic, for all its unobtrusiveness, Melpomene became a Roman Catholic. She was twenty-two. Only a few months later came the war and Professor Fugger's eternal renunciation of porridge. He did not long survive the making of that patriotic gesture. In the autumn of 1914 he caught a fatal influenza. Melpomene was alone in the world. In the spring of 1915 there was a new and very conscientious Sister of Charity at work among the wounded, in the hospital of Grauburg. Here," explained Miss Penny, jabbing the air with her forefinger, "you put a line of asterisks or dots to signify a six years' gulf in the narrative. And you begin again right in the middle of a dialogue between Sister Agatha and the newly convalescent Kuno."

"What's their dialogue to be about?" I asked.

"Oh, that's easy enough," said Miss Penny. "Almost anything would do. What about this, for example? You explain that the fever has just abated; for the first time for days the young man is fully conscious. He feels himself to be well, reborn, as it were, in a new world—a world so bright and novel and jolly that he can't help laughing at the sight of it. He looks about him; the flies on the ceiling strike him as being extremely comic. How do they manage to walk upside down? They have suckers on their feet, says Sister Agatha, and wonders if her natural history is quite sound. Suckers on their feet—ha, ha! What an uproarious notion! Suckers on their feet—that's good, that's damned good! You can say charming, pathetic, positively tender things about the irrelevant mirth of convalescents the more so in this particular case, where the mirth is expressed by a young man who is to be taken back to jail as soon as he can stand firmly on his legs. Ha, ha! Laugh on, unhappy boy. It is the quacking of the Fates, the Parcæ, the Norns!"

Miss Penny gave an exaggerated imitation of her own brassy laughter. At the sound of it the few lunchers who still lingered at the other tables looked up, startled.

"You can write pages about Destiny and its ironic quacking. It's tremendously impressive, and there's money in every line."

"You may be sure I shall."

"Good! Then I can get on with my story. The days pass and the first hilarity of convalescence fades away. The young man remembers and grows sullen; his strength comes back to him, and with it a sense of despair. His mind broods incessantly on the hateful future. As for the consolations of religion, he won't listen to them. Sister Agatha perseveres—oh, with what anxious solicitude!—in the attempt to make him understand and believe and be comforted. It is all so tremendously important, and in this case, somehow, more important than in any other. And now you see the Geschlechtsleben working yeastily and obscurely, and once again the quacking of the Norns is audible. By the way," said Miss Penny, changing her tone and leaning confidentially across the table, "I wish you'd tell me something. Tell me, do you really—honestly, I mean—do you seriously believe in literature?"

"Believe in literature?"

"I was thinking?" Miss Penny explained, "of Ironic Fate and the quacking of the Norns and all that."

"'M yes."

"And then there's this psychology and introspection business; and construction and good narrative and word pictures and le mot juste and verbal magic and striking metaphors."

I remembered that I had compared Miss Penny's tinkling ear-rings to skeletons hanging in chains.

"And then, finally, and to begin with—Alpha and Omega—there's ourselves, two professionals gloating, with an absolute lack of sympathy, over a seduced nun, and speculating on the best method of turning her misfortunes into cash. It's all very curious, isn't it?—when one begins to think about it dispassionately."

"Very curious," I agreed. "But, then, so is everything else if you look at it like that."

"No, no," said Miss Penny. "Nothing's so curious as our business. But I shall never get to the end of my story if I get started on first principles."

Miss Penny continued her narrative. I was still thinking of literature. Do you believe in it? Seriously? Ah! Luckily the question was quite meaningless. The story came to me rather vaguely, but it seemed that the young man was getting better; in a few more days, the doctor had said, he would be well—well enough to go back to jail. No, no. The question was meaningless. I would think about it no more. I concentrated my attention again.

"Sister Agatha," I heard Miss Penny saying, "prayed, exhorted, indoctrinated. Whenever she had half a minute to spare from her other duties she would come running into the young man's room. 'I wonder if you fully realise the importance of prayer?' she would ask, and, before he had time to answer, she would give him a breathless account of the uses and virtues of regular and patient supplication. Or else, it was: 'May I tell you about St. Theresa?' or 'St. Stephen, the first martyr—you know about him, don't you?' Kuno simply wouldn't listen at first. It seemed so fantastically irrelevant, such an absurd interruption to his thoughts, his serious, despairing thoughts about the future. Prison was real, imminent and this woman buzzed about him with her ridiculous fairy-tales. Then, suddenly, one day he began to listen, he showed signs of contrition and conversion. Sister Agatha announced her triumph to the other nuns, and there was rejoicing over the one lost sheep. Melpomene had never felt so happy in her life, and Kuno, looking at her radiant face, must have wondered how he could have been such a fool as not to see from the first what was now so obvious. The woman had lost her head about him. And he had only four days now—four days in which to tap the tumultuous love power, to canalise it, to set it working for his escape. Why hadn't he started a week ago? He could have made certain of it then. But now? There was no knowing. Four days was a horribly short time."

"How did he do it?" I asked, for Miss Penny had paused.

"That's for you to say," she replied, and shook her ear-rings at me. "I don't know. Nobody knows, I imagine, except the two parties concerned and perhaps Sister Agatha's confessor. But one can reconstruct the crime, as they say. How would you have done it? You're a man, you ought to be familiar with the processes of amorous engineering."

"You flatter me," I answered. "Do you seriously suppose—" I extended my arms. Miss Penny laughed like a horse. "No. But, seriously, it's a problem. The case is a very special one. The person, a nun, the place, a hospital, the opportunities, few. There could be no favourable circumstances—no moonlight, no distant music; and any form of direct attack would be sure to fail. That audacious confidence which is your amorist's best weapon would be useless here."

"Obviously," said Miss Penny. "But there are surely other methods. There is the approach through pity and the maternal instincts. And there's the approach through Higher Things, through the soul. Kuno must have worked on those lines, don't you think? One can imagine him letting himself be converted, praying with her, and at the same time appealing for her sympathy and even threatening—with a great air of seriousness—-to kill himself rather than go back to jail. You can write that up easily and convincingly enough. But it's the sort of thing that bores me so frightfully to do. That's why I can never bring myself to write fiction. What is the point of it all? And the way you literary men think yourselves so important—particularly if you write tragedies. It's all very queer, very queer indeed."

I made no comment. Miss Penny changed her tone and went on with the narrative.

"Well," she said, "whatever the means employed, the engineering process was perfectly successful. Love was made to find out a way. On the afternoon before Kuno was to go back to prison, two Sisters of Charity walked out of the hospital gates, crossed the square in front of it, glided down the narrow streets towards the river, boarded a tram at the bridge, and did not descend till the car had reached its terminus in the farther suburbs. They began to walk briskly along the high road out into the country. 'Look!' said one of them, when they were clear of the houses; and with the gesture of a conjurer produced from nowhere a red leather purse. 'Where did it come from?' asked the other, opening her eyes. Memories of Elisha and the ravens, of the widow's cruse, of the loaves and fishes, must have floated through the radiant fog in poor Melpomene's mind. 'The old lady I was sitting next to in the tram left her bag open. Nothing could have been simpler.' 'Kuno! You don't mean to say you stole it?' Kuno swore horribly. He had opened the purse. 'Only sixty marks. Who'd have thought that an old camel, all dressed up in silk and furs, would only have sixty marks in her purse. And I must have a thousand at least to get away. It's easy to reconstruct the rest of the conversation down to the inevitable, 'For God's sake, shut up,' with which Kuno put an end to Melpomene's dismayed moralising. They trudge on in silence. Kuno thinks desperately. Only sixty marks; he can do nothing with that. If only he had something to sell, a piece of jewellery, some gold or silver anything, anything. He knows such a good place for selling things. Is he to be caught again for lack of a few marks? Melpomene is also thinking. Evil must often be done that good may follow. After all, had not she herself stolen Sister Mary of the Purification's clothes when she was asleep after night duty? Had not she run away from the convent, broken her vows? And yet how convinced she was that she was doing rightly! The mysterious Powers emphatically approved; she felt sure of it. And now there was the red purse. But what was a red purse in comparison with a saved soul—and, after all, what was she doing hut saving Kuno's soul?" Miss Penny, who had adapted the voice and gestures of a debater asking rhetorical questions, brought her hand with a slap on to the table. "Lord, what a bore this sort of stuff is!" she exclaimed. "Let's get to the end of this dingy anecdote as quickly as possible. By this time, you must imagine, the shades of night were falling fast—the chill November twilight, and so on; but I leave the natural descriptions to you. Kuno gets into the ditch at the roadside and takes off his robes. One imagines that he would feel himself safer in trousers, more capable of acting with decision in a crisis. They tramp on for miles. Late in the evening they leave the high road and strike up through the fields towards the forest. At the fringe of the wood they find one of those wheeled huts where the shepherds sleep in the lambing season.

"The real 'Maison du Berger.'"

"Precisely," said Miss Penny, and she began to recite:

"Si ton coeur gémissant du poids de notre vie

Se traine et se débat comme un aigle blessé....

"How does it go on? I used to adore it all so much when I was a girl.

"Le seuil est perfumé, l'alcôve est large et sombre,

Et là parmi les fleurs, nous trouverons dans l'ombre,

Pour nos cheveux unis un lit silencieux.

"I could go on like this indefinitely."

"Do," I said.

"No, no. No, no. I'm determined to finish this wretched story. Kuno broke the padlock of the door. They entered. What happened in that little hut?" Miss Penny leaned forward at me. Her large hare's eyes glittered, the long ear-rings swung and faintly tinkled. "Imagine the emotions of a virgin of thirty, and a nun at that, in the terrifying presence of desire. Imagine the easy, familiar brutalities of the young man. Oh, there's pages to be made out of this—the absolutely impenetrable darkness, the smell of straw, the voices, the strangled crying, the movements! And one likes to fancy that the emotions pulsing about in that confined space made palpable vibrations like a deep sound that shakes the air. Why, it's ready-made literature, this scene. In the morning," Miss Penny went on, after a pause, "two woodcutters on their way to work noticed that the door of the hut was ajar. They approached the hut cautiously, their axes raised and ready for a blow if there should be need of it. Peeping in, they saw a woman in a black dress lying face downward in the straw. Dead? No; she moved, she moaned. 'What's the matter?' A blubbered face, smeared with streaks of tear-clotted grey dust, is lifted towards them. 'What's the matter?'—'He's gone!' What a queer, indistinct utterance. The woodcutters regard one another. What does she say? She's a foreigner, perhaps. 'What's the matter?' they repeat once more. The woman bursts out violently crying. 'Gone, gone! He's gone,' she sobs out in her vague, inarticulate way. 'Oh, gone. That's what she says. Who's gone?'—'He's left me.'—'What?'—'Left me....'—'What the devil...? Speak a little more distinctly.'—'I can't,' she wails; 'he's taken my teeth.'—'Your what?—'My teeth!'—and the shrill voice breaks into a scream, and she falls back sobbing into the straw. The woodcutters look significantly at one another. They nod. One of them applies a thick yellow-nailed forefinger to his forehead."

Miss Penny looked at her watch. "Good heavens!" she said, "it's nearly half-past three. I must fly. Don't forget about the funeral service," she added, as she put on her coat. "The tapers, the black coffin, in the middle of the aisle, the nuns in their white-winged coifs, the gloomy chanting, and the poor cowering creature without any teeth, her face all caved in like an old woman's, wondering whether she wasn't really and in fact dead—wondering whether she wasn't already in hell. Good-bye."

The End

Antic Hay

First Published 1923

CHAPTER I

GUMBRIL, THEODORE GUMBRIL Junior, B.A. Oxon., sat in his oaken stall on the north side of the School Chapel and wondered, as he listened through the uneasy silence of half a thousand schoolboys to the First Lesson, pondered, as he looked up at the vast window opposite, all blue and jaundiced and bloody with nineteenth-century glass, speculated in his rapid and rambling way about the existence and the nature of God.

Standing in front of the spread brass eagle and fortified in his convictions by the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy (for this first Sunday of term was the Fifth after Easter), the Reverend Pelvey could speak of these things with an enviable certainty. ‘Hear, O Israel,’ he was booming out over the top of the portentous Book: ‘the Lord our God is one Lord.’

One Lord; Mr Pelvey knew; he had studied theology. But if theology and theosophy, then why not theography and theometry, why not theognomy, theotrophy, theotomy, theogamy? Why not theophysics and theo-chemistry? Why not that ingenious toy, the theotrope or wheel of gods? Why not a monumental theodrome?

In the great window opposite, young David stood like a cock, crowing on the dunghill of a tumbled giant. From the middle of Goliath’s forehead there issued, like a narwhal’s budding horn, a curious excrescence. Was it the embedded pebble? Or perhaps the giant’s married life?

‘. . . with all thine heart,’ declaimed the Reverend Pelvey, ‘and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.’

No, but seriously, Gumbril reminded himself, the problem was very troublesome indeed. God as a sense of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the eyes, God as a rush of power or thought – that was all right. But God as truth, God as 2 + 2 = 4 – that wasn’t so clearly all right. Was there any chance of their being the same? Were their bridges to join the two worlds? And could it be that the Reverend Pelvey, M.A., foghorning away from behind the imperial bird, could it be that he had an answer and a clue? That was hardly believable. Particularly if one knew Mr Pelvey personally. And Gumbril did.

‘And these words which I command thee this day,’ retorted Mr Pelvey, ‘shall be in thine heart.’

Or in the heart, or in the head? Reply, Mr Pelvey, reply. Gumbril jumped between the horns of the dilemma and voted for other organs.

‘And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.’

Diligently unto thy children . . . Gumbril remembered his own childhood; they had not been very diligently taught to him. ‘Beetles, black beetles’ – his father had a really passionate feeling about the clergy. Mumbo-jumbery was another of his favourite words. An atheist and an anti-clerical of the strict old school he was. Not that, in any case, he gave himself much time to think about these things; he was too busy being an unsuccessful architect. As for Gumbril’s mother, her diligence had not been dogmatic. She had just been diligently good, that was all. Good; good? It was a word people only used nowadays with a kind of deprecating humorousness. Good. Beyond good and evil? We are all that nowadays. Or merely below them, like earwigs? I glory in the name of earwig. Gumbril made a mental gesture and inwardly declaimed. But good in any case, there was no getting out of that, good she had been. Not nice, not merely molto simpatica – how charmingly and effectively these foreign tags assist one in the great task of calling a spade by some other name! – but good. You felt the active radiance of her goodness when you were near her . . . And that feeling, was that less real and valid than two plus two?

The Reverend Pelvey had nothing to reply. He was reading with a holy gusto of ‘houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not.’

She had been good and she had died when he was still a boy; died – but he hadn’t been told that till much later – of creeping and devouring pain. Malignant disease – oh, caro nome!

‘Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God,’ said Mr Pelvey.

Even when the ulcers are benign; thou shalt fear. He had travelled up from school to see her, just before she died. He hadn’t known that she was going to die, but when he entered her room, when he saw her lying so weakly in the bed, he had suddenly begun to cry, uncontrollably. All the fortitude, the laughter even, had been hers. And she had spoken to him. A few words only; but they had contained all the wisdom he needed to live by. She had told him what he was, and what he should try to be, and how to be it. And crying, still crying, he had promised that he would try.

‘And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes,’ said Mr Pelvey, ‘for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day.’

And had he kept his promise, Gumbril wondered, had he preserved himself alive?

‘Here endeth the First Lesson.’ Mr Pelvey retreated from the eagle and the organ presaged the coming Te Deum.

Gumbril hoisted himself to his feet; the folds of his B.A. gown billowed nobly about himself as he rose. He sighed and shook his head with the gesture of one who tries to shake off a fly or an importunate thought. When the time came for singing, he sang. On the opposite side of the chapel two boys were grinning and whispering to one another behind their lifted Prayer Books. Gumbril frowned at them ferociously. The two boys caught his eye and their faces at once took on an expression of sickly piety; they began to sing with unction. They were two ugly, stupid-looking louts, who ought to have been apprenticed years ago to some useful trade. Instead of which they were wasting their own and their teacher’s and their more intelligent comrades’ time in trying, quite vainly, to acquire an elegant literary education. The minds of dogs, Gumbril reflected, do not benefit by being treated as though they were the minds of men.

‘O Lord, have mercy upon us: have mercy upon us.’

Gumbril shrugged his shoulders and looked round the chapel at the faces of the boys. Lord, indeed, have mercy upon us! He was disturbed to find the sentiment echoed on a somewhat different note in the Second Lesson, which was drawn from the twenty-third chapter of St Luke. ‘Father, forgive them,’ said Mr Pelvey in his unvaryingly juicy voice; ‘for they know not what they do.’ Ah, but suppose one did know what one was doing? suppose one knew only too well? And of course one always did know. One was not a fool.

But this was all nonsense, all nonsense. One must think of something better than this. What a comfort it would be, for example, if one could bring air cushions into chapel! These polished oaken stalls were devilishly hard; they were meant for stout and lusty pedagogues, not for bony starvelings like himself. An air cushion, a delicious pneu.

‘Here endeth,’ boomed Mr Pelvey, closing his book on the back of the German eagle.

As if by magic, Dr Jolly was ready at the organ with the Benedictus. It was positively a relief to stand again; this oak was adamantine. But air cushions, alas, would be too bad an example for the boys. Hardy young Spartans! it was an essential part of their education that they should listen to the word of revelation without pneumatic easement. No, air cushions wouldn’t do. The real remedy, it suddenly flashed across his mind, would be trousers with pneumatic seats. For all occasions; not merely for church-going.

The organ blew a thin Puritan-preacher’s note through one of its hundred nostrils. ‘I believe . . .’ With a noise like the breaking of a wave, five hundred turned towards the East. The view of David and Goliath was exchanged for a Crucifixion in the grand manner of eighteen hundred and sixty. ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’ No, no Gumbril preferred to look at the grooved stonework rushing smoothly up on either side of the great east window towards the vaulted roof; preferred to reflect, like the dutiful son of an architect he was, that Perpendicular at its best – and its best is its largest – is the finest sort of English Gothic. At its worst and smallest, as in most of the colleges of Oxford, it is mean, petty, and, but for a certain picturesqueness, almost wholly disgusting. He felt like a lecturer: next slide, please. ‘And the life everlasting. Amen.’ Like an oboe, Mr Pelvey intoned: ‘The Lord be with you.’

For prayer, Gumbril reflected, there would be Dunlop knees. Still, in the days when he had made a habit of praying, they hadn’t been necessary. ‘Our Father . . .’ The words were the same as they were in the old days; but Mr Pelvey’s method of reciting them made them sound rather different. Her dresses, when he had leaned his forehead against her knee to say those words – those words, good Lord! that Mr Pelvey was oboeing out of existence – were always black in the evenings, and of silk, and smelt of orris root. And when she was dying, she had said to him: ‘Remember the Parable of the Sower, and the seeds that fell in shallow ground.’ No, no. Amen, decidedly. ‘O Lord, show thy mercy upon us,’ chanted oboe Pelvey, and Gumbril trombone responded, profoundly and grotesquely: ‘And grant us thy salvation.’ No, the knees were obviously less important, except for people like revivalists and housemaids, than the seat. Sedentary are commoner than genuflectory professions. One would introduce little flat rubber bladders between two layers of cloth. At the upper end, hidden when one wore a coat, would be a tube with a valve: like a hollow tail. Blow it up – and there would be perfect comfort even for the boniest, even on rock. How did the Greeks stand marble benches in their theatres?

The moment had now come for the Hymn. This being the first Sunday of the Summer term, they sang that special hymn, written by the Headmaster, with music by Dr Jolly, on purpose to be sung on the first Sundays of terms. The organ quietly sketched out the tune. Simple it was, uplifting and manly.

One, two, three, four; one, two THREE – 4.

One, two-and three-and four-and; One, two THREE – 4.

ONE – 2, THREE – 4; ONE– 2 – 3 – 4,

and-ONE – 2, THREE – 4; ONE – 2 – 3 – 4.

One, two-and three, four; One, two THREE – 4.

Five hundred flawed adolescent voices took it up. For good example’s sake, Gumbril opened and closed his mouth; noiselessly, however. It was only at the third verse that he gave rein to his uncertain baritone. He particularly liked the third verse; it marked, in his opinion, the Headmaster’s highest poetical achievement.

(f)For slack hands and (dim.) idle minds (mf)Mischief still the Tempter finds. (ff)Keep him captive in his lair. At this point Dr Jolly enriched his tune with a thick accompaniment in the lower registers, artfully designed to symbolize the depth, the gloom and general repulsiveness of the Tempter’s home.

(ff)Keep him captive in his lair. (f)Work will bind him. (dim.) Work is (pp) prayer. Work, thought Gumbril, work. Lord, how passionately he disliked work! Let Austin have his swink to him reserved! Ah, if only one had work of one’s own, proper work, decent work – not forced upon one by the griping of one’s belly! Amen! Dr Jolly blew the two sumptuous jets of reverence into the air; Gumbril accompanied them with all his heart. Amen, indeed.

Gumbril sat down again. It might be convenient, he thought, to have the tail so long that one could blow up one’s trousers while one actually had them on. In which case, it would have to be coiled round the waist like a belt; or looped up, perhaps, and fastened to a clip on one’s braces.

‘The nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, part of the thirty-fourth verse.’ The Headmaster’s loud, harsh voice broke violently out from the pulpit. ‘All with one voice about the space of two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’

Gumbril composed himself as comfortably as he could on his oaken seat. It was going to be one of the Headmaster’s real swingeing sermons. Great is Diana. And Venus? Ah, these seats, these seats!

Gumbril did not attend evening chapel. He stayed at home in his lodgings to correct the sixty-three Holiday Task Papers which had fallen to his share. They lay, thick piles of them, on the floor beside his chair: sixty-three answers to ten questions about the Italian Risorgimento. The Risorgimento, of all subjects! It had been one of the Headmaster’s caprices. He had called a special masters’ meeting at the end of last term to tell them all about the Risorgimento. It was his latest discovery.

‘The Risorgimento, gentlemen, is the most important event in modern European history.’ And he had banged the table; he had looked defiantly round the room in search of contradictors.

But nobody had contradicted him. Nobody ever did; they all knew better. For the headmaster was as fierce as he was capricious. He was for ever discovering something new. Two terms ago it had been singeing; after the hair-cut and before the shampoo, there must be singeing.

‘The hair, gentlemen, is a tube. If you cut it and leave the end unsealed, the water will get in and rot the tube. Hence the importance of singeing, gentlemen. Singeing seals the tube. I shall address the boys about it after chapel to-morrow morning; and I trust that all house-masters’ – and he had glared around him from under his savage eyebrows – ‘will see that their boys get themselves regularly singed after cutting.’

For weeks afterwards every boy trailed behind him a faint and nauseating whiff of burning, as though he were fresh from hell. And now it was the Risorgimento. One of these days, Gumbril reflected, it would be birth control, or the decimal system, or rational dress.

He picked up the nearest batch of papers. The printed questions were pinned to the topmost of them.

‘Give a brief account of the character and career of Pope Pius IX, with dates wherever possible.’

Gumbril leaned back in his chair and thought of his own character, with dates. 1896: the first serious and conscious and deliberate lie. Did you break that vase, Theodore? No, mother. It lay on his conscience for nearly a month, eating deeper and deeper. Then he confessed the truth. Or rather he had not confessed; that was too difficult. He led the conversation, very subtly, as he thought, round through the non-malleability of glass, through breakages in general, to this particular broken vase; he practically forced his mother to repeat her question. And then, with a burst of tears, he had answered, yes. It had always been difficult for him to say things directly, point-blank. His mother had told him, when she was dying... No, no; not that.

In 1898 or 1899 – oh, these dates! – he had made a pact with his little cousin, Molly, that she should let him see her with no clothes on, if he would do the same by her. She had fulfilled her part of the bargain; but he, overwhelmed at the last moment by a passion of modesty, had broken his promise.

Then, when he was about twelve and still at his preparatory school, in 1902 or 1903 he had done badly in his exams, on purpose; he had been frightened of Sadler, who was in the same form, and wanted to get the prize. Sadler was stronger than he was, and had a genius for persecution. He had done so badly that his mother was unhappy; and it was impossible for him to explain.

In 1906 he had fallen in love for the first time – ah, much more violently than ever since – with a boy of his own age. Platonic it had been and profound. He had done badly that term, too; not on purpose, but because he had spent so much time helping young Vickers with his work. Vickers was really very stupid. The next term he had ‘come out’ – Staphylococcus pyogenes is a lover of growing adolescence – with spots and boils all over his face and neck. Gumbril’s affection ceased as suddenly as it had begun. He finished that term, he remembered, with a second prize.

But it was time to be thinking seriously of Pio Nono. With a sigh of disgusted weariness, Gumbril looked at his papers. What had Falarope Major to say of the Pontiff? ‘Pius IX was called Ferretti. He was a liberal before he was a Pope. A kindly man of less than average intelligence, he thought that all difficulties could be settled by a little goodwill, a few reforms and a political amnesty. He wrote several encyclicals and a syllabus.’ Gumbril admired the phrase about less than average intelligence; Falarope Major should have at least one mark for having learnt it so well by heart. He turned to the next paper. Higgs was of opinion that ‘Pius the Ninth was a good but stupid man, who thought he could settle the Risorgimento with a few reforms and a political armistice.’ Beddoes was severer. ‘Pius IX was a bad man, who said that he was infallible, which showed he had a less than average intelligence.’ Sopwith Minor shared the general opinion about Pio’s intelligence, and displayed a great familiarity with the wrong dates. Clegg-Weller was voluminous and informative. ‘Pius IX was not so clever as his prime minister, Cardinal Antonelli. When he came to the tiara he was a liberal, and Metternich said he had never reckoned on a liberal pope. He then became a conservative. He was kindly, but not intelligent, and he thought Garibaldi and Cavour would be content with a few reforms and an amnesty.’ At the top of Garstang’s paper was written: ‘I have had measles all the holidays, so have been unable to read more than the first thirty pages of the book. Pope Pius IX does not come into these pages, of the contents of which I will proceed to give the following précis.’ And the précis duly followed. Gumbril would have liked to give him full marks. But the business-like answer of Appleyard called him back to a better sense of his duty. ‘Pius IX became Pope in 1846 and died in 1878. He was a kindly man, but his intelligence was below the . . .’

Gumbril laid the paper down and shut his eyes. No, this was really impossible. Definitely, it couldn’t go on, it could not go on. There were thirteen weeks in the summer term, there would be thirteen in the autumn and eleven or twelve in the spring; and then another summer of thirteen, and so it would go on for ever. For ever. It wouldn’t do. He would go away and live uncomfortably on his three hundred. Or, no, he would go away and he would make money – that was more like it – money on a large scale, easily; he would be free and he would live. For the first time, he would live. Behind his closed eyes, he saw himself living.

Over the plushy floors of some vast and ignoble Ritz slowly he walked, at ease, with confidence: over the plushy floors and there, at the end of a long vista, there was Myra Viveash, waiting, this time, for him; coming forward impatiently to meet him, his abject lover now, not the cool, free, laughing mistress who had lent herself contemptuously once to his pathetic and silent importunity and then, after a day, withdrawn the gift again. Over the plushy floors to dine. Not that he was in love with Myra any longer: but revenge is sweet.

He sat in his own house. The Chinese statues looked out from the niches; the Maillols passionately meditated, slept, and were more than alive. The Goyas hung on the walls, there was a Boucher in the bathroom; and when he entered with his guests, what a Piazzetta exploded above the dining-room mantelpiece! Over the ancient wine they talked together, and he knew everything they knew and more; he gave, he inspired, it was the others who assimilated and were enriched. After dinner there were Mozart quartets; he opened his portfolios and showed his Daumiers, his Tiepolos, his Canaletto sketches, his drawings by Picasso and Lewis, and the purity of his naked Ingres. And later, talking of Odalisques, there were orgies without fatigue or disgust, and the women were pictures and lust in action, art.

Over the empty plains forty horses impelled him towards Mantua: rubadub – adubadub, with the silencer out. Towards the most romantic city in all the world.

When he spoke to women – how easily and insolently he spoke now! – they listened and laughed and looked at him sideways and dropped their eyelids over the admission, the invitation, of their glance. With Phyllis once he had sat, for how long? in a warm and moonless darkness, saying nothing, risking no gesture. And in the end they had parted, reluctantly and still in silence. Phyllis now was with him once again in the summer night; but this time he spoke, now softly, now in the angry breathless whisper of desire, he reached out and took her, and she was naked in his arms. All chance encounters, all plotted opportunities recurred; he knew, now, how to live, how to take advantage of them.

Over the empty plains towards Mantua, towards Mantua, he slid along at ease, free and alone. He explored the horrors of Roman society; visited Athens and Seville. To Unamuno and Papini he conversed familiarly in their own tongues. He understood perfectly and without effort the quantum theory. To his friend Shearwater he gave half a million for physiological research. He visited Schoenberg and persuaded him to write still better music. He exhibited to the politicians the full extent of their stupidity and their wickedness; he set them working for the salvation, not the destruction, of humanity. Once in the past when he had been called upon to make a public speech, he had felt so nervous that he was sick; the thousands who listened to him now bent like wheat under the wind of his eloquence. But it was only by the way and occasionally that he troubled himself to move them. He found it easy now to come to terms with everyone he met, to understand all points of view, to identify himself with even the most unfamiliar spirit. And he knew how everybody lived, and what it was like to be a mill-girl, a dustman, an engine-driver, a Jew, an Anglican bishop, a confidence-trickster. Accustomed as he was to being swindled and imposed upon without protest, he now knew the art of being brutal. He was just dressing down that insolent porter at the Continental, who had complained that ten francs wasn’t enough (and had got, as a matter of historic fact, another five in addition), when his landlady gave a knock, opened the door and said: ‘Dinner’s ready, Mr Gumbril.’

Feeling a little ashamed at having been interrupted in what was, after all, one of the ignobler and more trivial occupations of his new life, Gumbril went down to his fatty chop and green peas. It was the first meal to be eaten under the new dispensation; he ate it, for all that it was unhappily indistinguishable from the meals of the past, with elation and a certain solemnity, as though he were partaking of a sacrament. He felt buoyant with the thought that at last, at last, he was doing something about life.

When the chop was eaten, he went upstairs and, after filling two suit-cases and a Gladstone bag with the most valued of his possessions, addressed himself to the task of writing to the Headmaster. He might have gone away, of course, without writing. But it would be nobler, more in keeping, he felt, with his new life, to leave a justification, a denouncement. He picked up his pen and denounced.

CHAPTER II

GUMBRIL SENIOR OCCUPIED a tall, narrow-shouldered and rachitic house in a little obscure square not far from Paddington. There were five floors, and a basement with beetles, and nearly a hundred stairs, which shook when any one ran too rudely down them. It was a prematurely old and decaying house in a decaying quarter. The square in which it stood was steadily coming down in the world. The houses, which a few years ago had all been occupied by respectable families, were now split up into squalid little maisonettes, and from the neighbouring slums, which along with most other unpleasant things the old bourgeois families had been able to ignore, invading bands of children came to sport on the once-sacred pavements.

Mr Gumbril was almost the last survivor of the old inhabitants. He liked his house, and he liked his square. Social decadence had not affected the fourteen plane-trees which adorned its little garden, and the gambols of the dirty children did not disturb the starlings who came, evening by evening in summer-time, to roost on their branches.

On fine evenings he used to sit out on his balcony waiting for the coming of the birds. And just at sunset, when the sky was most golden, there would be a twittering overhead, and the black, innumerable flocks of starlings would come sweeping across on the way from their daily haunts to their roosting-places, chosen so capriciously among the tree-planted gardens of the city and so tenaciously retained, year after year, to the exclusion of every other place. Why his fourteen plane-trees should have been chosen, Mr Gumbril could never imagine. There were plenty of larger and more umbrageous gardens all round; but they remained birdless, while every evening, from the larger flocks, a faithful legion detached itself to settle clamorously among his trees. They sat and chattered till the sun went down and twilight was past, with intervals every now and then of silence that fell suddenly and inexplicably on all the birds at once, lasted through a few seconds of thrilling suspense, to end as suddenly and senselessly in an outburst of the same loud and simultaneous conversation.

The starlings were Mr Gumbril’s most affectionately cherished friends; sitting out on his balcony to watch and listen to them, he had caught at the shut of treacherous evenings many colds and chills on the liver, he had laid up for himself many painful hours of rheumatism. These little accidents did nothing, however, to damp his affection for the birds; and still on every evening that could possibly be called fine, he was always to be seen in the twilight, sitting on the balcony, gazing up, round-spectacled and rapt, at the fourteen plane-trees. The breezes stirred in his grey hair, tossing it up in long, light wisps that fell across his forehead and over his spectacles; and then he would shake his head impatiently, and the bony hand would be freed for a moment from its unceasing combing and clutching of the sparse grey beard to push back the strayed tendrils, to smooth and reduce to order the whole ruffled head. The birds chattered on, the hand went back to its clutching and combing; once more the wind blew, darkness came down, and the gas-lamps round the square lit up the outer leaves of the plane-trees, touched the privet bushes inside the railings with an emerald light; behind them was impenetrable night; instead of shorn grass and bedded geraniums there was mystery, there were endless depths. And the birds at last were silent.

Mr Gumbril would get up from his iron chair, stretch his arms and his stiff cold legs and go in through the french window to work. The birds were his diversion; when they were silent, it was time to think of serious matters.

To-night, however, he was not working; for always on Sunday evenings his old friend Porteous came to dine and talk. Breaking in unexpectedly at midnight, Gumbril Junior found them sitting in front of the gas fire in his father’s study.

‘My dear fellow, what on earth are you doing here?’ Gumbril Senior jumped up excitedly at his son’s entrance. The light silky hair floated up with the movement, turned for a moment into a silver aureole, then subsided again. Mr Porteous stayed where he was, calm, solid and undishevelled as a seated pillar-box. He wore a monocle on a black ribbon, a black stock tie that revealed above its double folds a quarter of an inch of stiff white collar, a double-breasted black coat, a pair of pale checked trousers and patten-leather boots with cloth tops. Mr Porteous was very particular about his appearance. Meeting him casually for the first time, one would not have guessed that Mr Porteous was an expert on Late Latin poetry; and he did not mean that you should guess. Thin-limbed, bent and agile in his loose, crumpled clothes, Gumbril Senior had the air, beside Mr Porteous, of a strangely animated scarecrow.

‘What on earth?’ the old gentleman repeated his question.

Gumbril Junior shrugged his shoulders. ‘I was bored, I decided to cease being a schoolmaster.’ He spoke with a fine airy assumption of carelessness. ‘How are you, Mr Porteous?’

‘Thank you, invariably well.’

‘Well, well,’ said Gumbril Senior, sitting down again, ‘I must say I’m not surprised. I’m only surprised that you stood it, not being a born pedagogue, for as long as you did. What ever induced you to think of turning usher, I can’t imagine.’ He looked at his son first through his spectacles, then over the top of them; the motives of the boy’s conduct revealed themselves to neither vision.

‘What else was there for me to do?’ asked Gumbril Junior, pulling up a chair towards the fire. ‘You gave me a pedagogue’s education and washed your hands of me. No opportunities, no openings. I had no alternative. And now you reproach me.’

Mr Gumbril made an impatient gesture. ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ he said. ‘The only point of the kind of education you had is this, it gives a young man leisure to find out what he’s interested in. You apparently weren’t sufficiently interested in anything –’

‘I am interested in everything,’ interrupted Gumbril Junior.

‘Which comes to the same thing,’ said his father parenthetically, ‘as being interested in nothing.’ And he went on from the point at which he had been interrupted. ‘You weren’t sufficiently interested in anything to want to devote yourself to it. That was why you sought the last refuge of feeble minds with classical educations, you became a schoolmaster.’

‘Come, come,’ said Mr Porteous. ‘I do a little teaching myself; I must stand up for the profession.’

Gumbril Senior let go his beard and brushed back the hair that the wind of his own vehemence had brought tumbling into his eyes. ‘I don’t denigrate the profession,’ he said. ‘Not at all. It would be an excellent profession if every one who went into it were as much interested in teaching as you are in your job, Porteous, or I in mine. It’s these undecided creatures like Theodore, who ruin it by drifting in. Until all teachers are geniuses and enthusiasts, nobody will learn anything, except what they teach themselves.’

‘Still,’ said Mr Porteous, ‘I wish I hadn’t had to learn so much by myself. I wasted a lot of time finding out how to set to work and where to discover what I wanted.’

Gumbril Junior was lighting his pipe. ‘I have come to the conclusion,’ he said, speaking in little jerks between each suck of the flame into the bowl, ‘that most people . . . ought never . . . to be taught anything at all.’ He threw away the match. ‘Lord have mercy upon us, they’re dogs. What’s the use of teaching them anything except to behave well, to work and obey? Facts, theories, the truth about the universe – what good are those to them? Teach them to understand – why, it only confuses them; makes them lose hold of the simple real appearance. Not more than one in a hundred can get any good out of a scientific or literary education.’

‘And you’re one of the ones?’ asked his father.

‘That goes without saying,’ Gumbril Junior replied.

‘I think you mayn’t be so far wrong,’ said Mr Porteous. ‘When I think of my own children, for example . . .’ he sighed, ‘I thought they’d be interested in the things that interested me; they don’t seem to be interested in anything but behaving like little apes – not very anthropoid ones either, for that matter. At my eldest boy’s age I used to sit up most of the night reading Latin texts. He sits up – or rather stands, reels, trots up – dancing and drinking. Do you remember St Bernard? “Vigilet tota nocte luxuriosus non solum patienter” (the ascetic and the scholar only watch patiently); “sed et libenter, ut suam expleat voluptatem.” What the wise man does out of a sense of duty, the fool does for fun. And I’ve tried very hard to make him like Latin.’

‘Well, in any case,’ said Gumbril Junior, ‘you didn’t try to feed him on history. That’s the real unforgivable sin. And that’s what I’ve been doing, up till this evening – encouraging boys of fifteen and sixteen to specialize in history, hours and hours a week, making them read bad writers’ generalizations about subjects on which only our ignorance allows us to generalize; teaching them to reproduce these generalizations in horrid little “Essays” of their own; rotting their minds, in fact, with a diet of soft vagueness; scandalous it was. If these creatures are to be taught anything, it should be something hard and definite. Latin – that’s excellent. Mathematics, physical science. Let them read history for amusement, certainly. But for Heaven’s sake don’t make it the staple of education!’ Gumbril Junior spoke with the greatest earnestness, as though he were an inspector of schools, making a report. It was a subject on which, at the moment, he felt very profoundly; he felt profoundly on all subjects while he was talking about them. ‘I wrote a long letter to the Headmaster about the teaching of history this evening,’ he added. ‘It’s most important.’ He shook his head thoughtfully, ‘Most important.’

‘Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus,’ said Mr Porteous, in the words of St Peter Damianus.

‘Very true,’ Gumbril Senior applauded. ‘And talking about bad times, Theodore, what do you propose to do now, may I ask?’

‘I mean to begin by making some money.’

Gumbril Senior put his hands on his knees, bent forward and laughed, ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ He had a profound bell-like laugh that was like the croaking of a very large and melodious frog. ‘You won’t,’ he said, and shook his head till the hair fell into his eyes. ‘You won’t,’ and he laughed again.

‘To make money,’ said Mr Porteous, ‘one must be really interested in money.’

‘And he’s not,’ said Gumbril Senior. ‘None of us are.’

‘When I was still uncommonly hard up,’ Mr Porteous continued, ‘we used to lodge in the same house with a Russian Jew, who was a furrier. That man was interested in money, if you like. It was a passion, an enthusiasm, an ideal. He could have led a comfortable, easy life, and still have made enough to put by something for his old age. But for his high abstract ideal of money he suffered more than Michelangelo ever suffered for his art. He used to work nineteen hours a day, and the other five he slept, lying under his bench, in the dirt, breathing into his lungs the stink and the broken hairs. He is now very rich indeed and does nothing with his money, doesn’t want to do anything, doesn’t know what one does do with it. He desires neither power nor pleasure. His desire for lucre is purely disinterested. He reminds me of Browning’s “Grammarian”. I have a great admiration for him.’

Mr Porteous’s own passion had been for the poems of Notker Balbulus and St Bernard. It had taken him nearly twenty years to get himself and his family out of the house where the Russian furrier used to lodge. But Notker was worth it, he used to say; Notker was worth even the weariness and the pallor of a wife who worked beyond her strength, even the shabbiness of ill-dressed and none too well-fed children. He had readjusted his monocle and gone on. But there had been occasions when it needed more than the monocle and the careful, distinguished clothes to keep up his morale. Still, those times were over now; Notker had brought him at last a kind of fame – even, indirectly, a certain small prosperity.

Gumbril Senior turned once more towards his son. ‘And how do you propose,’ he asked, ‘to make this money?’

Gumbril Junior explained. He had thought it all out in the cab on the way from the station. ‘It came to me this morning,’ he said, ‘in chapel, during service.’

‘Monstrous,’ put in Gumbril Senior, with a genuine indignation, ‘monstrous these medieval survivals in schools! Chapel, indeed!’

‘It came,’ Gumbril Junior went on, ‘like an apocalypse, suddenly, like a divine inspiration. A grand and luminous idea came to me – the idea of Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.’

‘And what are Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?’

‘A boon to those whose occupation is sedentary’; Gumbril Junior had already composed his prospectus and his first advertisements: ‘a comfort to all travellers, civilization’s substitute for steatopygism, indispensable to first-nighters, the concert-goers’ friend, the . . .’

‘Lectulus Dei floridus,’ intoned Mr Porteous.

‘Gazophylacium Ecclesiae,

Cithara benesonans Dei,

Cymbalum jubilationis Christi,

Promptuarium mysteriorum fidei, ora pro nobis.

Your Small-Clothes sound to me very like one of my old litanies, Theodore.’

‘We want scientific descriptions, not litanies,’ said Gumbril Senior. ‘What are Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?’

‘Scientifically, then,’ said Gumbril Junior, ‘my Patent Small-Clothes may be described as trousers with a pneumatic seat, inflateable by means of a tube fitted with a valve; the whole constructed of stout seamless red rubber, enclosed between two layers of cloth.’

‘I must say,’ said Gumbril Senior in a tone of somewhat grudging approbation, ‘I have heard of worse inventions. You are too stout, Porteous, to be able to appreciate the idea. We Gumbrils are all a bony lot.’

‘When I have taken out a patent for my invention,’ his son went on, very business-like and cool, ‘I shall either sell it to some capitalist, or I shall exploit it commercially myself. In either case, I shall make money, which is more, I may say, than you or any other Gumbril have ever done.’

‘Quite right,’ said Gumbril Senior, ‘quite right’; and he laughed very cheerfully. ‘And nor will you. You can be grateful to your intolerable Aunt Flo for having left you that three hundred a year. You’ll need it. But if you really want a capitalist,’ he went on, ‘I have exactly the man for you. He’s a man who has a mania for buying Tudor houses and making them more Tudor than they are. I’ve pulled half a dozen of the wretched things to pieces and put them together again differently for him.’

‘He doesn’t sound much good to me,’ said his son.

‘Ah, but that’s only his vice. Only his amusement. His business,’ Gumbril Senior hesitated.

‘Well, what is his business?’

‘Well, it seems to be everything. Patent medicine, trade newspapers, bankrupt tobacconist’s stock – he’s talked to me about those and heaps more. He seems to flit like a butterfly in search of honey, or rather money.’

‘And he makes it?’

‘Well, he pays my fees and he buys more Tudor houses, and he gives me luncheons at the Ritz. That’s all I know.’

‘Well, there’s no harm in trying.’

‘I’ll write to him,’ said Gumbril Senior. ‘His name is Boldero. He’ll either laugh at your idea or take it and give you nothing for it. Still,’ he looked at his son over the top of his spectacles, ‘if by any conceivable chance you ever should become rich; if, if, if . . .’ And he emphasized the remoteness of the conditional by raising his eyebrows a little higher, by throwing out his hands in a dubious gesture a little farther at every repetition of the word, ‘if – why, then I’ve got exactly the thing for you. Look at this really delightful little idea I had this afternoon.’ He put his hand in his coat pocket and after some sorting and sifting produced a sheet of squared paper on which was roughly drawn the elevation of a house. ‘For any one with eight or ten thousand to spend, this would be – this would be . . .’ Gumbril Senior smoothed his hair and hesitated, searching for something strong enough to say of his little idea. ‘Well, this would be much too good for most of the greasy devils who do have eight or ten thousand to spend.’

He passed the sheet to Gumbril Junior, who held it out so that both Mr Porteous and himself could look at it. Gumbril Senior got up from his chair and, standing behind them, leant over to elucidate and explain.

‘You see the idea,’ he said, anxious lest they should fail to understand. ‘A central block of three stories, with low wings of only one, ending in pavilions with a second floor. And the flat roofs of the wings are used as gardens – you see? – protected from the north by a wall. In the east wing there is the kitchen and the garage, with the maids’ rooms in the pavilion at the end. The west is a library, and it has an arcaded loggia along the front. And instead of a solid superstructure corresponding to the maids’ rooms, there’s a pergola with brick piers. You see? And in the main block there’s a Spanish sort of balcony along the whole length at first-floor level; that gives a good horizontal line. And you get the perpendiculars with coigns and raised panels. And the roof’s hidden by a balustrade, and there are balustrades along the open sides of the roof gardens on the wings. All in brick it is. This is the garden front; the entrance front will be admirable too. Do you like it?’

Gumbril Junior nodded. ‘Very much,’ he said.

His father sighed and taking the sketch put it back in his pocket. ‘You must hurry up with your ten thousand,’ he said. ‘And you, Porteous, and you. I’ve been waiting so long to build your splendid house.’

Laughing, Mr Porteous got up from his chair. ‘And long, dear Gumbril,’ he said, ‘may you continue to wait. For my splendid house won’t be built this side of New Jerusalem, and you must go on living a long time yet. A long, long time,’ Mr Porteous repeated; and carefully he buttoned up his double-breasted coat, carefully, as though he were adjusting an instrument of precision, he took out and replaced his monocle. Then, very erect and neat, very soldierly and pillarboxical, he marched towards the door. ‘You’ve kept me very late to-night,’ he said. ‘Unconscionably late.’

The front door closed heavily behind Mr Porteous’s departure. Gumbril Senior came upstairs again into the big room on the first floor smoothing down his hair, which the impetuosity of his ascent had once more disarranged.

‘That’s a good fellow,’ he said of his departed guest, ‘a splendid fellow.’

‘I always admire the monocle,’ said Gumbril Junior irrelevantly. But his father turned the irrelevance into relevance.

‘He couldn’t have come through without it, I believe. It was a symbol, a proud flag. Poverty’s squalid, not fine at all. The monocle made a kind of difference, you understand. I’m always so enormously thankful I had a little money. I couldn’t have stuck it without. It needs strength, more strength than I’ve got.’ He clutched his beard close under the chin and remained for a moment pensively silent. ‘The advantage of Porteous’s line of business,’ he went on at last, reflectively, ‘is that it can be carried on by oneself, without collaboration. There’s no need to appeal to any one outside oneself, or to have any dealings with other people at all, if one doesn’t want to. That’s so deplorable about architecture. There’s no privacy, so to speak; always this horrible jostling with clients and builders and contractors and people, before one can get anything done. It’s really revolting. I’m not good at people. Most of them I don’t like at all, not at all,’ Mr Gumbril repeated with vehemence. ‘I don’t deal with them very well; it isn’t my business. My business is architecture. But I don’t often get a chance of practising it. Not properly.’

Gumbril Senior smiled rather sadly. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I can do something. I have my talent, I have my imagination. They can’t take those from me. Come and see what I’ve been doing lately.’

He led the way out of the room and mounted, two steps at a time, towards a higher floor. He opened the door of what should have been, in a well-ordered house, the Best Bedroom, and slipped into the darkness.

‘Don’t rush in,’ he called back to his son, ‘for God’s sake don’t rush in. You’ll smash something. Wait till I’ve turned on the light. It’s so like these asinine electricians to have hidden the switch behind the door like this.’ Gumbril Junior heard him fumbling in the darkness; there was suddenly light. He stepped in.

The only furniture in the room consisted of a couple of long trestle tables. On these, on the mantelpiece and all over the floor, were scattered confusedly, like the elements of a jumbled city, a vast collection of architectural models. There were cathedrals, there were town halls, universities, public libraries, there were three or four elegant little sky-scrapers, there were blocks of offices, huge warehouses, factories, and finally dozens of magnificent country mansions, complete with their terraced gardens, their noble flights of steps, their fountains and ornamental waters and grandly bridged canals, their little rococo pavilions and garden houses.

‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ Gumbril Senior turned enthusiastically towards his son. His long grey hair floated wispily about his head, his spectacles flashed, and behind them his eyes shone with emotion.

‘Beautiful,’ Gumbril Junior agreed.

‘When you’re really rich,’ said his father, ‘I’ll build you one of these,’ And he pointed to a little village of Chatsworths clustering, at one end of a long table, round the dome of a vaster and austerer St Peter’s. ‘Look at this one, for example.’ He picked his way nimbly across the room, seized the little electric reading-lamp that stood between a railway station and a baptistery on the mantelpiece, and was back again in an instant, trailing behind him a long flex that, as it tautened out, twitched one of the crowning pinnacles off the top of a sky-scraper near the fireplace. ‘Look,’ he repeated, ‘look.’ He switched on the current, and moved the lamp back and forth, up and down in front of the miniature palace. ‘See the beauty of the light and shade,’ he said. ‘There, underneath the great, ponderous cornice, isn’t that fine? And look how splendidly the pilasters carry up the vertical lines. And then the solidity of it, the size, the immense, impending bleakness of it!’ He threw up his arms, he turned his eyes upwards as though standing overwhelmed at the foot of some huge precipitous façade. The lights and shadows vacillated wildly through all the city of palaces and domes as he brandished the lamp in ecstasy above his head.

‘And then,’ he had suddenly stooped down, he was peering and pointing once more into the details of his palace, ‘then there’s the doorway – all florid and rich with carving. How magnificently and surprisingly it flowers out of the bare walls! Like the colossal writing of Darius, like the figures graven in the bald face of the precipice over Behistun – unexpected and beautiful and human, human in the surrounding emptiness.’

Gumbril Senior brushed back his hair and turned, smiling, to look at his son over the top of his spectacles.

‘Very fine,’ Gumbril Junior nodded to him. ‘But isn’t the wall a little too blank? You seem to allow very few windows in this vast palazzo.’

‘True,’ his father replied, ‘very true.’ He sighed. ‘I’m afraid this design would hardly do for England. It’s meant for a place where there’s some sun – where you do your best to keep the light out, instead of letting it in, as you have to do here. Windows are the curse of architecture in this country. Your walls have to be like sieves, all holes, it’s heart-breaking. If you wanted me to build you this house, you’d have to live in Barbados or somewhere like that.’

‘There’s nothing I should like better,’ said Gumbril Junior.

‘Another great advantage of sunny countries,’ Gumbril Senior pursued, ‘is that one can really live like an aristocrat, in privacy, by oneself. No need to look out on the dirty world or to let the dirty world look in on you. Here’s this great house, for example, looking out on the world through a few dark portholes and a single cavernous doorway. But look inside.’ He held his lamp above the courtyard that was at the heart of the palace. Gumbril Junior leaned and looked, like his father. ‘All the life looks inwards – into a lovely courtyard, a more than Spanish patio. Look there at the treble tiers of arcades, the vaulted cloisters for your cool peripatetic meditations, the central Triton spouting white water into a marble pool, the mosaic work on the floor and flowering up the walls, brilliant against the white stucco. And there’s the archway that leads out into the gardens. And now you must come and have a look at the garden front.’

He walked round with his lamp to the other side of the table. There was suddenly a crash; the wire had twitched a cathedral from off the table. It lay on the floor in disastrous ruin as though shattered by some appalling cataclysm.

‘Hell and death!’ said Gumbril Senior in an outburst of Elizabethan fury. He put down the lamp and ran to see how irreparable the disaster had been. ‘They’re so horribly expensive, these models,’ he explained, as he bent over the ruins. Tenderly he picked up the pieces and replaced them on the table. ‘It might have been worse,’ he said at last, brushing the dust off his hands. ‘Though I’m afraid that dome will never be quite the same again.’ Picking up the lamp once more, he held it high above his head and stood looking out, with a melancholy satisfaction, over his creations. ‘And to think,’ he said after a pause, ‘that I’ve been spending these last days designing model cottages for workmen at Bletchley! I’m in luck to have got the job, of course, but really, that a civilized man should have to do jobs like that! It’s too much. In the old days these creatures built their own hovels, and very nice and suitable they were too. The architects busied themselves with architecture – which is the expression of human dignity and greatness, which is man’s protest, not his miserable acquiescence. You can’t do much protesting in a model cottage at seven hundred pounds a time. A little, no doubt, you can protest a little; you can give your cottage decent proportions and avoid sordidness and vulgarity. But that’s all; it’s really a negative process. You can only begin to protest positively and actively when you abandon the petty human scale and build for giants – when you build for the spirit and the imagination of man, not for his little body. Model cottages, indeed!’

Mr Gumbril snorted with indignation. ‘When I think of Alberti!’ And he thought of Alberti – Alberti, the noblest Roman of them all, the true and only Roman. For the Romans themselves had lived their own actual lives, sordidly and extravagantly in the middle of a vulgar empire. Alberti and his followers in the Renaissance lived the ideal Roman life. They put Plutarch into their architecture. They took the detestable real Cato, the Brutus of history, and made of them Roman heroes to walk as guides and models before them. Before Alberti there were no true Romans, and with Piranesi’s death the race began to wither towards extinction.

‘And when I think of Brunelleschi!’ Gumbril Senior went on to remember with passion the architect who had suspended on eight thin flying ribs of marble the lightest of all domes and the loveliest.

‘And when of Michelangelo! The grim, enormous apse . . . And of Wren and of Palladio, when I think of all these –’ Gumbril Senior waved his arms and was silent. He could not put into words what he felt when he thought of them.

Gumbril Junior looked at his watch. ‘Half-past two,’ he said. ‘Time to go to bed.’

CHAPTER III

‘MISTER GUMBRIL!’ SURPRISE was mingled with delight. ‘This is indeed a pleasure!’ Delight was now the prevailing emotion expressed by the voice that advanced, as yet without a visible source, from the dark recesses of the shop.

‘The pleasure, Mr Bojanus, is mine.’ Gumbril closed the shop door behind him.

A very small man, dressed in a frock-coat, popped out from a canyon that opened, a mere black crevice, between two stratified precipices of mid-season suitings, and advancing into the open space before the door bowed with an old-world grace, revealing a nacreous scalp thinly mantled with long, damp creepers of brown hair.

‘And to what, may I ask, do I owe this pleasure, sir?’ Mr Bojanus looked up archly with a sideways cock of his head that tilted the rigid points of his waxed moustache. The fingers of his right hand were thrust into the bosom of his frock-coat and his toes were turned out in the dancing-master’s First Position. ‘A light spring great-coat, is it? Or a new suit? I notice,’ his eye travelled professionally up and down Gumbril’s long, thin form, ‘I notice that the garments you are wearing at present, Mr Gumbril, look – how shall I say? – well, a trifle negleejay, as the French would put it, a trifle negleejay.’

Gumbril looked down at himself. He resented Mr Bojanus’s negleejay, he was pained and wounded by the aspersion. Negleejay? And he had fancied that he really looked rather elegant and distinguished (but, after all, he always looked like that, even in rags) – no, that he looked positively neat, like Mr Porteous, positively soldierly in his black jacket and his musical-comedy trousers and his patent-leather shoes. And the black felt hat – didn’t that add just the foreign, the Southern touch which saved the whole composition from banality? He regarded himself, trying to see his clothes – garments, Mr Bojanus had called them; garments, good Lord! – through the tailor’s expert eyes. There were sagging folds about the overloaded pockets, there was a stain on his waistcoat, the knees of his trousers were baggy and puckered like the bare knees of Hélène Fourmont in Rubens’s fur-coat portrait at Vienna. Yes, it was all horribly negleejay. He felt depressed; but looking at Mr Bojanus’s studied and professional correctness, he was a little comforted. That frockcoat, for example. It was like something in a very modern picture – such a smooth, unwrinkled cylinder about the chest, such a sense of pure and abstract conic-ness in the sleekly rounded skirts! Nothing could have been less negleejay. He was reassured.

‘I want you,’ he said at last, clearing his throat importantly, ‘to make me a pair of trousers to a novel specification of my own. It’s a new idea.’ And he gave a brief description of Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.

Mr Bojanus listened with attention.

‘I can make them for you,’ he said, when the description was finished. ‘I can make them for you – if you really wish, Mr Gumbril,’ he added.

‘Thank you,’ said Gumbril.

‘And do you intend, may I ask, Mr Gumbril, to wear these . . . these garments?’

Guiltily, Gumbril denied himself. ‘Only to demonstrate the idea, Mr Bojanus. I am exploiting the invention commercially, you see.’

‘Commercially? I see, Mr Gumbril.’

‘Perhaps you would like a share,’ suggested Gumbril.

Mr Bojanus shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t do for my cleeantail, I fear, Mr Gumbril. You could ‘ardly expect the Best People to wear such things.’

‘Couldn’t you?’

Mr Bojanus went on shaking his head. ‘I know them,’ he said, ‘I know the Best People. Well.’ And he added with an irrelevance that was, perhaps, only apparent, ‘Between ourselves, Mr Gumbril, I am a great admirer of Lenin . . .’

‘So am I,’ said Gumbril, ‘theoretically. But then I have so little to lose to Lenin. I can afford to admire him. But you, Mr Bojanus, you, the prosperous bourgeois – oh, purely in the economic sense of the word, Mr Bojanus . . .’

Mr Bojanus accepted the explanation with one of his old-world bows.

‘. . . you would be among the first to suffer if an English Lenin were to start his activities here.’

‘There, Mr Gumbril, if I may be allowed to say so, you are wrong.’ Mr Bojanus removed his hand from his bosom and employed it to emphasize the points of his discourse. ‘When the revolution comes, Mr Gumbril – the great and necessary revolution, as Alderman Beckford called it – it won’t be the owning of a little money that’ll get a man into trouble. It’ll be his class-habits, Mr Gumbril, his class-speech, his class-education. It’ll be Shibboleth all over again, Mr Gumbril; mark my words. The Red Guards will stop people in the street and ask them to say some such word as “towel”. If they call it “towel”, like you and your friends, Mr Gumbril, why then . . .’ Mr Bojanus went through the gestures of pointing a rifle and pulling the trigger; he clicked his tongue against his teeth to symbolize the report . . . ‘That’ll be the end of them. But if they say “tèaul”, like the rest of us, Mr Gumbril, it’ll be: “Pass Friend and Long Live the Proletariat.” Long live Tèaul.’

‘I’m afraid you may be right,’ said Gumbril.

‘I’m convinced of it,’ said Mr Bojanus. ‘It’s my clients, Mr Gumbril, it’s the Best People that the other people resent. It’s their confidence, their ease, it’s the habit their money and their position give them of ordering people about, it’s the way they take their place in the world for granted, it’s their prestige, which the other people would like to deny, but can’t – it’s all that, Mr Gumbril, that’s so galling.’

Gumbril nodded. He himself had envied his securer friends their power of ignoring the humanity of those who were not of their class. To do that really well, one must always have lived in a large house full of clockwork servants; one must never have been short of money, never at a restaurant ordered the cheaper thing instead of the more delicious; one must never have regarded a policeman as anything but one’s paid defender against the lower orders, never for a moment have doubted one’s divine right to do, within the accepted limits, exactly what one liked without a further thought to anything or any one but oneself and one’s own enjoyment. Gumbril had been brought up among these blessed beings; but he was not one of them. Alas? or fortunately? He hardly knew which.

‘And what good do you expect the revolution to do, Mr Bojanus?’ he asked at last.

Mr Bojanus replaced his hand in his bosom. ‘None whatever, Mr Gumbril,’ he said. ‘None whatever.’

‘But Liberty,’ Gumbril suggested, ‘equality and all that. What about those, Mr Bojanus?’

Mr Bojanus smiled up at him tolerantly and kindly, as he might have smiled at some one who had suggested, shall we say, that evening trousers should be turned up at the bottom. ‘Liberty, Mr Gumbril?’ he said; ‘you don’t suppose any serious-minded person imagines a revolution is going to bring liberty, do you?’

‘The people who make the revolution always seem to ask for liberty.’

‘But do they ever get it, Mr Gumbril?’ Mr Bojanus cocked his head playfully and smiled. ‘Look at ’istory, Mr Gumbril, look at ’istory. First it’s the French Revolution. They ask for political liberty. And they gets it. Then comes the Reform Bill, then Forty-Eight, then all the Franchise Acts and Votes for Women – always more and more political liberty. And what’s the result, Mr Gumbril? Nothing at all. Who’s freer for political liberty? Not a soul, Mr Gumbril. There was never a greater swindle ’atched in the ‘ole of ’istory. And when you think ’ow those poor young men like Shelley talked about it – it’s pathetic,’ said Mr Bojanus, shaking his head, ‘reelly pathetic. Political liberty’s a swindle because a man doesn’t spend his time being political. He spends it sleeping, eating, amusing himself a little and working – mostly working. When they’d got all the political liberty they wanted – or found they didn’t want – they began to understand this. And so now it’s all for the industrial revolution, Mr Gumbril. But bless you, that’s as big a swindle as the other. How can there ever be liberty under any system? No amount of profit-sharing or self-government by the workers, no amount of hyjeenic conditions or cocoa villages or recreation grounds can get rid of the fundamental slavery – the necessity of working. Liberty? why, it doesn’t exist! There’s no liberty in this world; only gilded caiges. And then, Mr Gumbril, even suppose you could somehow get rid of the necessity of working, suppose a man’s time were all leisure. Would he be free then? I say nothing of the natural slavery of eating and sleeping and all that, Mr Gumbril; I say nothing of that, because that, if I may say so, would be too ‘air-splitting and metaphysical. But what I do ask you is this,’ and Mr Bojanus wagged his forefinger almost menacingly at the sleeping partner in this dialogue: ‘would a man with unlimited leisure be free, Mr Gumbril? I say he would not. Not unless he ’appened to be a man like you or me, Mr Gumbril, a man of sense, a man of independent judgment. An ordinary man would not be free. Because he wouldn’t know how to occupy his leisure except in some way that would be forced on ’im by other people. People don’t know ’ow to entertain themselves now; they leave it to other people to do it for them. They swallow what’s given them. They ’ave to swallow it, whether they like it or not. Cinemas, newspapers, magazines, gramophones, football matches, wireless, telephones – take them or leave them, if you want to amuse yourself. The ordinary man can’t leave them. He takes; and what’s that but slavery? And so you see, Mr Gumbril,’ Mr Bojanus smiled with a kind of roguish triumph, ‘you see that even in the ‘ypothetical case of a man with indefinite leisure, there still would be no freedom . . . And the case, as I have said, is purely ‘ypothetical; at any rate so far as concerns the sort of people who want a revolution. And as for the sort of people who do enjoy leisure, even now – why I think, Mr Gumbril, you and I know enough about the Best People to know that freedom, except possibly sexual freedom, is not their strongest point. And sexual freedom – what’s that?’ Mr Bojanus dramatically inquired. ‘You and I, Mr Gumbril,’ he answered confidentially, ‘we know. It’s an ’orrible, ’ideous slavery. That’s what it is. Or am I wrong, Mr Gumbril?’

‘Quite right, quite right, Mr Bojanus,’ Gumbril hastened to reply.

‘From all of which,’ continued Mr Bojanus, ‘it follows that, except for a few, a very few people like you and me, Mr Gumbril, there’s no such thing as liberty. It’s an ’oax, Mr Gumbril. An ’orrible plant. And if I may be allowed to say so,’ Mr Bojanus lowered his voice, but still spoke with emphasis, ‘a bloody swindle.’

‘But in that case, Mr Bojanus, why are you so anxious to have a revolution?’ Gumbril inquired.

Thoughtfully, Mr Bojanus twisted to a finer point his waxed moustaches. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘it would be a nice change. I was always one for change and a little excitement. And then there’s the scientific interest. You never quite know ’ow an experiment will turn out, do you, Mr Gumbril? I remember when I was a boy, my old dad – a great gardener he was, a regular floriculturist, you might say, Mr Gumbril – he tried the experiment of grafting a sprig of Gloire de Dijon on to a black currant bush. And, would you believe it? the roses came out black, coal black, Mr Gumbril. Nobody would ever have guessed that if the thing had never been tried. And that’s what I say about the revolution. You don’t know what’ll come of it till you try. Black roses, blue roses –’oo knows, Mr Gumbril, ’oo knows?’

‘Who indeed?’ Gumbril looked at his watch. ‘About those trousers . . .’ he added.

‘Those garments,’ corrected Mr Bojanus. ‘Ah, yes. Should we say next Tuesday?’

‘Let us say next Tuesday.’ Gumbril opened the shop door. ‘Good morning, Mr Bojanus.’

Mr Bojanus bowed him out, as though he had been a prince of the blood.

The sun was shining and at the end of the street between the houses the sky was blue. Gauzily the distances faded to a soft, rich indistinctness; there were veils of golden muslin thickening down the length of every vista. On the trees in the Hanover Square gardens the young leaves were still so green that they seemed to be alight, green fire, and the sooty trunks looked blacker and dirtier than ever. It would have been a pleasant and apposite thing if a cuckoo had started calling. But though the cuckoo was silent it was a happy day. A day, Gumbril reflected, as he strolled idly along, to be in love.

From the world of tailors Gumbril passed into that of the artificial-pearl merchants, and with a still keener appreciation of the amorous qualities of this clear spring day, he began a leisured march along the perfumed pavements of Bond Street. He thought with a profound satisfaction of those sixty-three papers on the Risorgimento. How pleasant it was to waste time! And Bond Street offered so many opportunities for wasting it agreeably. He trotted round the Spring Exhibition at the Grosvenor and came out, a little regretting, he had to confess, his eighteenpence for admission. After that, he pretended that he wanted to buy a grand piano. When he had finished practising his favourite passages on the magnificent instrument to which they obsequiously introduced him, he looked in for a few moments at Sotheby’s, sniffed among the ancient books and strolled on again, admiring the cigars, the lucid scent-bottles, the socks, the old masters, the emerald necklaces – everything, in fact, in all the shops he passed.

‘Forthcoming Exhibition of Works by Casimir Lypiatt.’ The announcement caught his eye. And so poor old Lypiatt was on the warpath again, he reflected, as he pushed open the doors of the Albemarle Galleries. Poor old Lypiatt! Dear old Lypiatt, even. He liked Lypiatt. Though he had his defects. It would be fun to see him again.

Gumbril found himself in the midst of a dismal collection of etchings. He passed them in review, wondering why it was that, in these hard days when no painter can sell a picture, almost any dull fool who can scratch a conventional etcher’s view of two boats, a suggested cloud and the flat sea should be able to get rid of his prints by the dozen and at guineas apiece. He was interrupted in his speculations by the approach of the assistant in charge of the gallery. He came up shyly and uncomfortably, but with the conscientious determination of one ambitious to do his duty and make good. He was a very young man with pale hair, to which heavy oiling had given a curious greyish colour, and a face of such childish contour and so imberb that he looked like a little boy playing at grown-ups. He had only been at this job a few weeks, and he found it very difficult.

‘This,’ he remarked, with a little introductory cough, pointing to one view of the two boats and the flat sea, ‘is an earlier state than this.’ And he pointed to another view, where the boats were still two and the sea seemed just as flat – though possibly, on a closer inspection, it might really have been flatter.

‘Indeed,’ said Gumbril.

The assistant was rather pained by his coldness. He blushed; but constrained himself to go on. ‘Some excellent judges,’ he said, ‘prefer the earlier state, though it is less highly finished.’

‘Ah?’

‘Beautiful atmosphere, isn’t it?’ The assistant put his head on one side and pursed his childish lips appreciatively.

Gumbril nodded.

With desperation, the assistant indicated the shadowed rump of one of the boats. ‘A wonderful feeling in this passage,’ he said, redder than ever.

‘Very intense,’ said Gumbril.

The assistant smiled at him gratefully. ‘That’s the word,’ he said, delighted. ‘Intense. That’s it. Very intense.’ He repeated the word several times, as though to make sure of remembering it for use when the occasion next presented itself. He was determined to make good.

‘I see Mr Lypiatt is to have a show here soon,’ remarked Gumbril, who had had enough of the boats.

‘He is making the final arrangements with Mr Albemarle at this very moment,’ said the assistant triumphantly, with the air of one who produces, at the dramatic and critical moment, a rabbit out of the empty hat.

‘You don’t say so?’ Gumbril was duly impressed. ‘Then I’ll wait till he comes out,’ he said, and sat down with his back to the boats.

The assistant returned to his desk and picked up the gold-belted fountain pen which his aunt had given him when he first went into business, last Christmas. ‘Very intense,’ he wrote in capitals on a half-sheet of notepaper. ‘The feeling in this passage is very intense.’ He studied the paper for a few moments, then folded it up carefully and put it away in his waistcoat pocket. ‘Always make a note of it.’ That was one of the business mottoes he had himself written out so laboriously in Indian ink and old English lettering. It hung over his bed between ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’, which his mother had given him, and a quotation from Dr Frank Crane, ‘A smiling face sells more goods than a clever tongue’. Still, a clever tongue, the young assistant had often reflected, was a very useful thing, especially in this job. He wondered whether one could say that the composition of a picture was very intense. Mr Albemarle was very keen on the composition, he noticed. But perhaps it was better to stick to plain ‘fine’, which was a little commonplace, perhaps, but very safe. He would ask Mr Albemarle about it. And then there was all that stuff about plastic values and pure plasticity. He sighed. It was all very difficult. A chap might be as willing and eager to make good as he liked; but when it came to this about atmosphere and intense passages and plasticity – well, really, what could a chap do? Make a note of it. It was the only thing.

In Mr Albemarle’s private room, Casimir Lypiatt thumped the table. ‘Size, Mr Albemarle,’ he was saying, ‘size and vehemence and spiritual significance – that’s what the old fellows had, and we haven’t . . .’ He gesticulated as he talked, his face worked and his green eyes, set in their dark, charred orbits, were full of a troubled light. The forehead was precipitous, the nose long and sharp; in the bony and almost fleshless face, the lips of the wide mouth were surprisingly full.

‘Precisely, precisely,’ said Mr Albemarle in his juicy voice. He was a round, smooth, little man with a head like an egg; he spoke, he moved with a certain pomp, a butlerish gravity, that were evidently meant to be ducal.

‘That’s what I’ve set myself to recapture,’ Lypiatt went on: ‘the size, the masterfulness of the masters.’ He felt a warmth running through him as he spoke, flushing his cheeks, pulsing hotly behind the eyes, as though he had drunk a draught of some heartening red wine. His own words elated him, and drunkenly gesticulating, he was as though drunken. The greatness of the masters – he felt it in him. He knew his own power, he knew, he knew. He could do all that they had done. Nothing was beyond his strength.

Egg-headed Albemarle confronted him, impeccably the butler, exacerbatingly serene. Albemarle too should be fired. He struck the table once more, he broke out again:

‘It’s been my mission,’ he shouted, ‘all these years.’

All these years . . . Time had worn the hair from his temples; the high, steep forehead seemed higher than it really was. He was forty now; the turbulent young Lypiatt who had once declared that no man could do anything worth doing after he was thirty, was forty now. But in these fiery moments he could forget the years, he could forget the disappointments, the unsold pictures, the bad reviews. ‘My mission,’ he repeated; ‘and by God! I feel, I know I can carry it through.’

Warmly the blood pulsed behind his eyes.

‘Quite,’ said Mr Albemarle, nodding the egg. ‘Quite.’

‘And how small the scale is nowadays!’ Lypiatt went on, rhapsodically. ‘How trivial the conception, how limited the scope! You see no painter-sculptor-poets, like Michelangelo; no scientist-artists, like Leonardo; no mathematician-courtiers, like Boscovitch; no impresario-musicians, like Handel; no geniuses of all trades, like Wren. I have set myself against this abject specialization of ours. I stand alone, opposing it with my example.’ Lypiatt raised his hand. Like the statue of Liberty, standing colossal and alone.

‘Nevertheless,’ began Mr Albemarle.

‘Painter, poet, musician,’ cried Lypiatt. ‘I am all three. I . . .’

‘. . . there is a danger of – how shall I put it – dissipating one’s energies,’ Mr Albemarle went on with determination. Discreetly, he looked at his watch. This conversation, he thought, seemed to be prolonging itself unnecessarily.

‘There is no greater danger in letting them stagnate and atrophy,’ Lypiatt retorted. ‘Let me give you my experience.’ Vehemently, he gave it.

Out in the gallery, among the boats, the views of the Grand Canal, and the Firth of Forth, Gumbril placidly ruminated. Poor old Lypiatt, he was thinking. Dear old Lypiatt, even, in spite of his fantastic egotism. Such a bad painter, such a bombinating poet, such a loud emotional improviser on the piano! And going on like this, year after year, pegging away at the same old things – always badly! And always without a penny, always living in the most hideous squalor! Magnificent and pathetic old Lypiatt!

A door suddenly opened and a loud, unsteady voice, now deep and harsh, now breaking to shrillness, exploded into the gallery.

‘. . . like a Veronese,’ it was saying; ‘enormous, vehement, a great swirling composition’ (‘swirling composition’ – mentally, the young assistant made a note of that), ‘but much more serious, of course, much more spiritually significant, much more –’

‘Lypiatt!’ Gumbril had risen from his chair, had turned, had advanced, holding out his hand.

‘Why, it’s Gumbril. Good Lord!’ and Lypiatt seized the proffered hand with an excruciating cordiality. He seemed to be in exuberantly good spirits. ‘We’re settling about my show, Mr Albermarle and I,’ he explained. ‘You know Gumbril, Mr Albemarle?’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Mr Albermarle. ‘Our friend, Mr Lypiatt,’ he added richly, ‘has the true artistic temp –’

‘It’s going to be magnificent.’ Lypiatt could not wait till Mr Albemarle had finished speaking. He gave Gumbril a heroic blow on the shoulder.

‘. . . artistic temperament, as I was saying,’ pursued Mr Albemarle. ‘He is altogether too impatient and enthusiastic for us poor people . . .’ a ducal smile of condescension accompanied this graceful act of self-abasement . . . ‘who move in the prosaic, practical, workaday world.’

Lypiatt laughed, a loud, discordant peal. He didn’t seem to mind being accused of having an artistic temperament; he seemed, indeed, to enjoy it, if anything. ‘Fire and water,’ he said aphoristically, ‘brought together, beget steam. Mr Albemarle and I go driving along like a steam engine. Psh, psh!’ He worked his arms like a pair of alternate pistons. He laughed; but Mr Albemarle only coldly and courteously smiled. ‘I was just telling Mr Albemarle about the great Crucifixion I’ve just been doing. It’s as big and headlong as a Veronese, but much more serious, more . . .’

Behind them the little assistant was expounding to a new visitor the beauties of the etchings. ‘Very intense,’ he was saying, ‘the feeling in this passage.’ The shadow, indeed, clung with an insistent affection round the stern of the boat. ‘And what a fine, what a –’ he hesitated for an instant, and under his pale, oiled hair his face became suddenly very red – ‘what a swirling composition.’ He looked anxiously at the visitor. The remark had been received without comment. He felt immensely relieved.

They left the galleries together. Lypiatt set the pace, striding along at a great rate and with a magnificent brutality through the elegant and leisured crowd, gesticulating and loudly talking as he went. He carried his hat in his hand; his tie was brilliantly orange. People turned to look at him as he passed and he liked it. He had, indeed, a remarkable face – a face that ought by rights to have belonged to a man of genius. Lypiatt was aware of it. The man of genius, he liked to say, bears upon his brow a kind of mark of Cain, by which men recognize him at once – ‘and having recognized, generally stone him,’ he would add with that peculiar laugh he always uttered whenever he said anything rather bitter or cynical; a laugh that was meant to show that the bitterness, the cynicism, justifiable as events might have made them, were really only a mask, and that beneath it the artist was still serenely and tragically smiling. Lypiatt thought a great deal about the ideal artist. That titanic abstraction stalked within his own skin. He was it – a little too consciously, perhaps.

‘This time,’ he kept repeating, ‘they’ll be bowled over. This time . . . It’s going to be terrific.’ And with the blood beating behind his eyes, with the exultant consciousness and certainty of power growing and growing in him with every word he spoke, Lypiatt began to describe the pictures there would be at his show; he talked about the preface he was writing to the catalogue, the poems that would be printed in it by way of literary complement to the pictures. He talked, he talked.

Gumbril listened, not very attentively. He was wondering how any one could talk so loud, could boast so extravagantly. It was as though the man had to shout in order to convince himself of his own existence. Poor Lypiatt; after all these years, Gumbril supposed, he must have some doubts about it. Ah, but this time, this time he was going to bowl them all over.

‘You’re pleased, then, with what you’ve done recently,’ he said at the end of one of Lypiatt’s long tirades.

‘Pleased?’ exclaimed Lypiatt; ‘I should think I was.’

Gumbril might have reminded him that he had been as well pleased in the past and that ‘they’ had by no means been bowled over. He preferred, however, to say nothing, Lypiatt went on about the size and universality of the old masters. He himself, it was tacitly understood, was one of them.

They parted near the bottom of the Tottenham Court Road, Lypiatt to go northward to his studio off Maple Street, Gumbril to pay one of his secret visits to those rooms of his in Great Russell Street. He had taken them nearly a year ago now, two little rooms over a grocer’s shop, promising himself goodness only knew what adventures in them. But somehow there had been no adventures. Still, it had pleased him, all the same, to be able to go there from time to time when he was in London and to think, as he sat in solitude before his gas fire, that there was literally not a soul in the universe who knew where he was. He had an almost childish affection for mysteries and secrets.

‘Good-bye,’ said Gumbril, raising his hand to the salute. ‘And I’ll beat up some people for dinner on Friday.’ (For they had agreed to meet again.) He turned away, thinking that he had spoken the last words; but he was mistaken.

‘Oh, by the way,’ said Lypiatt, who had also turned to go, but who now came stepping quickly after his companion. ‘Can you, by any chance, lend me five pounds? Only till after the exhibition, you know. I’m a bit short.’

Poor old Lypiatt! But it was with reluctance that Gumbril parted from his Treasury notes.

CHAPTER IV

LYPIATT HAD A habit, which some of his friends found rather trying – and not only friends, for Lypiatt was ready to let the merest acquaintances, the most absolute strangers, even, into the secrets of his inspiration – a habit of reciting at every possible opportunity his own verses. He would declaim in a voice loud and tremulous, with an emotion that never seemed to vary with the varying subject-matter of his poems, for whole quarters of an hour at a stretch; would go on declaiming till his auditors were overwhelmed with such a confusion of embarrassment and shame, that the blood rushed to their cheeks and they dared not meet one another’s eyes.

He was declaiming now; not merely across the dinner-table to his own friends, but to the whole restaurant. For at the first reverberating lines of his latest, ‘The Conquistador’, there had been a startled turning of heads, a craning of necks from every corner of the room. The people who came to this Soho restaurant because it was, notoriously, so ‘artistic’, looked at one another significantly and nodded; they were getting their money’s worth, this time. And Lypiatt, with a fine air of rapt unconsciousness, went on with his recitation.

‘Look down on Mexico, Conquistador’ – that was the refrain.

The Conquistador, Lypiatt had made it clear, was the Artist, and the Vale of Mexico on which he looked down, the towered cities of Tlacopan and Chalco, of Tenochtitlan and Iztapalapan symbolized – well, it was difficult to say precisely what. The universe, perhaps?

‘Look down,’ cried Lypiatt, with a quivering voice.

‘Look down, Conquistador!

There on the valley’s broad green floor,

There lies the lake; the jewelled cities gleam;

Chalco and Tlacopan

Await the coming Man.

Look down on Mexico, Conquistador,

Land of your golden dream.’

‘Not “dream”,’ said Gumbril, putting down the glass from which he had been profoundly drinking. ‘You can’t possibly say “dream”, you know.’

‘Why do you interrupt me?’ Lypiatt turned on him angrily. His wide mouth twitched at the corners, his whole long face worked with excitement. ‘Why don’t you let me finish?’ He allowed his hand, which had hung awkwardly in the air above him, suspended, as it were, at the top of a gesture, to sink slowly to the table. ‘Imbecile!’ he said, and once more picked up his knife and fork.

‘But really,’ Gumbril insisted, ‘you can’t say “dream”. Can you now, seriously?’ He had drunk the best part of a bottle of Burgundy and he felt good-humoured, obstinate and a little bellicose.

‘And why not?’ Lypiatt asked.

‘Oh, because one simply can’t.’ Gumbril leaned back in his chair, smiled and caressed his drooping blond moustache. ‘Not in this year of grace, nineteen twenty-two.’

‘But why?’ Lypiatt repeated, with exasperation.

‘Because it’s altogether too late in the day,’ declared precious Mr Mercaptan, rushing up to his emphasis with flutes and roaring, like a true Conquistador, to fall back, however, at the end of the sentence rather ignominiously into a breathless confusion. He was a sleek, comfortable young man with smooth brown hair parted in the centre and conducted in a pair of flowing curves across the temples, to be looped in damp curls behind his ears. His face ought to have been rather more exquisite, rather more refinedly dix-huitième than it actually was. It had a rather gross, snouty look, which was sadly out of harmony with Mr Mercaptan’s inimitably graceful style. For Mr Mercaptan had a style and used it, delightfully, in his middle articles for the literary weeklies. His most precious work, however, was that little volume of essays, prose poems, vignettes and paradoxes, in which he had so brilliantly illustrated his favourite theme – the pettiness, the simian limitations, the insignificance and the absurd pretentiousness of Homo soidisant sapiens. Those who met Mr Mercaptan personally often came away with the feeling that perhaps, after all, he was right in judging so severely of humanity.

‘Too late in the day,’ he repeated. ‘Times have changed. Sunt lacrymae rerum, nos et mutamur in illis.’ He laughed his own applause.

‘Quot hominess, tot disputandum est,’ said Gumbril, taking another sip of his Beaune Supérieure. At the moment, he was all for Mercaptan.

‘But why is it too late?’ Lypiatt insisted.

Mr Mercaptan made a delicate gesture. ‘Ça se sent, mon cher ami,’ he said, ‘ça ne s’explique pas.’ Satan, it is said, carries hell in his heart; so it was with Mr Mercaptan – wherever he was, it was Paris. ‘Dreams in nineteen twenty-two . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders.

‘After you’ve accepted the war, swallowed the Russian famine,’ said Gumbril. ‘Dreams!’

‘They belonged to the Rostand epoch,’ said Mr Mercaptan, with a little titter. ‘Le Rève – ah!’

Lypiatt dropped his knife and fork with a clatter and leaned forward, eager for battle. ‘Now I have you,’ he said, ‘now I have you on the hip. You’ve given yourselves away. You’ve given away the secret of your spiritual poverty, your weakness and pettiness and impotence . . .’

‘Impotence? You malign me, sir,’ said Gumbril.

Shearwater ponderously stirred. He had been silent all this time, sitting with hunched shoulders, his elbows on the table, his big round head bent forward, absorbed, apparently, in the slow meticulous crumbling of a piece of bread. Sometimes he put a piece of crust in his mouth and under the bushy black moustache his jaw moved slowly, ruminatively, with a sideways motion, like a cow’s. He nudged Gumbril with his elbow. ‘Ass,’ he said, ‘be quiet.’

Lypiatt went on torrentially. ‘You’re afraid of ideals, that’s what it is. You daren’t admit to having dreams. Oh, I call them dreams,’ he added parenthetically. ‘I don’t mind being thought a fool and old-fashioned. The world’s shorter and more English. Besides, it rhymes with gleams. Ha, ha!’ And Lypiatt laughed his loud Titan’s laugh, the laugh of cynicism which seems to belie, but which, for those who have understanding, reveals the high, positive spirit within. ‘Ideals – they’re not sufficiently genteel for you civilized young men. You’ve quite outgrown that sort of thing. No dream, no religion, no morality.’

‘I glory in the name of earwig,’ said Gumbril. He was pleased with that little invention. It was felicitous; it was well chosen. ‘One’s an earwig in sheer self-protection,’ he explained.

But Mr Mercaptan refused to accept the name of earwig at any price. ‘What there is to be ashamed of in being civilized, I really don’t know,’ he said, in a voice that was now the bull’s, now the piping robin’s. ‘No, if I glory in anything, it’s in my little rococo boudoir, and the conversations across the polished mahogany, and the delicate, lascivious, witty little flirtations on ample sofas inhabited by the soul of Crébillon Fils. We needn’t all be Russians, I hope. These revolting Dostoievskys.’ Mr Mercaptan spoke with a profound feeling. ‘Nor all Utopians. Homo au naturel –’ Mr Mercaptan applied his thumb and forefinger to his, alas! too snout-like nose, ‘ça pue. And as for Homo a la H. G. Wells – ça ne pue pas assez. What I glory in is the civilized, middle way between stink and asepsis. Give me a little musk, a little intoxicating feminine exhalation, the bouquet of old wine and strawberries, a lavender bag under every pillow and potpourri in the corners of the drawing-room. Readable books, amusing conversation, civilized women, graceful art and dry vintage, music, with a quiet life and reasonable comfort – that’s all I ask for.’

‘Talking about comfort,’ Gumbril put in, before Lypiatt had time to fling his answering thunders, ‘I must tell you about my new invention. Pneumatic trousers,’ he explained. ‘Blow them up. Perfect comfort. You see the idea? You’re a sedentary man, Mercaptan. Let me put you down for a couple of pairs.’

Mr Mercaptan shook his head. ‘Too Wellsian,’ he said. ‘Too horribly Utopian. They’d be ludicrously out of place in my boudoir. And besides, my sofa is well enough sprung already, thank you.’

‘But what about Tolstoy?’ shouted Lypiatt, letting out his impatience in a violent blast.

Mr Mercaptan waved his hand. ‘Russian,’ he said, ‘Russian.’

‘And Michelangelo?’

‘Alberti,’ said Gumbril, very seriously, giving them all a piece of his father’s mind – ‘Alberti was much the better architect, I assure you.’

‘And pretentiousness for pretentiousness,’ said Mr Mercaptan, ‘I prefer old Borromini and the baroque.’

‘What about Beethoven?’ went on Lypiatt. ‘What about Blake? Where do they come in under your scheme of things?’

Mr Mercaptan shrugged his shoulders. ‘They stay in the hall,’ he said. ‘I don’t let them into the boudoir.’

‘You disgust me,’ said Lypiatt, with rising indignation, and making wilder gestures. ‘You disgust me – you and your odious little sham eighteenth-century civilization; your piddling little poetry; your art for art’s sake instead of for God’s sake; your nauseating little copulations without love or passion; your hoggish materialism; your bestial indifference to all that’s unhappy and your yelping hatred of all that’s great.’

‘Charming, charming,’ murmured Mr Mercaptan, who was pouring oil on his salad.

‘How can you ever hope to achieve anything decent or solid, when you don’t even believe in decency or solidarity? I look about me,’ and Lypiatt cast his eyes wildly round the crowded room, ‘and I find myself alone, spiritually alone. I strive on by myself, by myself.’ He struck his breast, a giant, a solitary giant. ‘I have set myself to restore painting and poetry to their rightful position among the great moral forces. They have been amusements, they have been mere games for too long. I am giving my life for that. My life.’ His voice trembled a little. ‘People mock me, hate me, stone me, deride me. But I go on, I go on. For I know I’m right. And in the end they too will recognize that I’ve been right.’ It was a loud soliloquy. One could fancy that Lypiatt had been engaged in recognizing himself.

‘All the same,’ said Gumbril with a cheerful stubbornness, ‘I persist that the word “dreams” is inadmissible.’

‘Inadmissible,’ repeated Mr Mercaptan, imparting to the word an additional significance by giving it its French pronunciation. ‘In the age of Rostand, well and good. But now . . .’

‘Now,’ said Gumbril, ‘the word merely connotes Freud.’

‘It’s a matter of literary tact,’ explained Mr Mercaptan. ‘Have you no literary tact?’

‘No,’ said Lypiatt, with emphasis, ‘thank God, I haven’t. I have no tact of any kind. I do things straightforwardly, frankly, as the spirit moves me. I don’t like compromises.’

He struck the table. The gesture startlingly let loose a peal of cracked and diabolic laughter. Gumbril and Lypiatt and Mr Mercaptan looked quickly up; even Shearwater lifted his great spherical head and turned towards the sound the large disk of his face. A young man with a blond, fan-shaped beard stood by the table, looking down at them through a pair of bright blue eyes and smiling equivocally and disquietingly as though his mind were full of some nameless and fantastic malice.

‘Come sta la Sua Terribiltà?’ he asked; and, taking off his preposterous bowler hat, he bowed profoundly to Lypiatt. ‘How I recognize my Buonarroti!’ he added affectionately.

Lypiatt laughed, rather uncomfortably, and no longer on the Titanic scale. ‘How I recognize my Coleman!’ he echoed, rather feebly.

‘On the contrary,’ Gumbril corrected, ‘how almost completely I fail to recognize. This beard’ – he pointed to the blond fan – ‘why, may I ask?’

‘More Russianism,’ said Mr Mercaptan, and shook his head.

‘Ah, why indeed?’ Coleman lowered his voice to a confidential whisper. ‘For religious reasons,’ he said, and made the sign of the cross.

‘Christlike is my behaviour,

Like every good believer,

I imitate the Saviour,

And cultivate a beaver.

There be beavers which have made themselves beavers for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. But there are some beavers, on the other hand, which were so born from their mother’s womb.’ He burst into a fit of outrageous laughter which stopped as suddenly and as voluntarily as it had begun.

Lypiatt shook his head. ‘Hideous,’ he said, ‘hideous.’

‘Moreover,’ Coleman went on, without paying any attention, ‘I have other and, alas! less holy reasons for this change of face. It enables one to make such delightful acquaintances in the street. You hear some one saying, “Beaver,” as you pass, and you immediately have the right to rush up and get into conversation. I owe to this dear symbol,’ and he caressed the golden beard tenderly with the palm of his hand, ‘the most admirably dangerous relations.’

‘Magnificent,’ said Gumbril, drinking his own health. ‘I will stop shaving at once.’

Shearwater looked round the table with raised eyebrows and a wrinkled forehead. ‘This conversation is rather beyond me,’ he said gravely. Under the formidable moustache, under the thick, tufted eyebrows, the mouth was small and ingenuous, the mild grey eyes full of an almost childish inquiry. ‘What does the word “beaver” signify in this context? You don’t refer, I suppose, to the rodent, Castor fiber?’

‘But this is a very great man,’ said Coleman, raising his bowler. ‘Tell me, who he is?’

‘Our friend Shearwater,’ said Gumbril, ‘the physiologist.’

Coleman bowed. ‘Physiological Shearwater,’ he said. ‘Accept my homage. To one who doesn’t know what a beaver is, I resign all my claims to superiority. There’s nothing else but beavers in all the papers. Tell me, do you never read the Daily Express?’

‘No.’

‘Nor the Daily Mail?’

Shearwater shook his head.

‘Nor the Mirror? nor the Sketch? nor the Graphic? nor even (for I was forgetting that physiologists must surely have Liberal opinions) – even the Daily News?’

Shearwater continued to shake his large spherical head.

‘Nor any of the evening papers?’

‘No.’

Coleman once more lifted his hat. ‘O eloquent, just and mighty Death!’ he exclaimed, and replaced it on his head. ‘You never read any papers at all – not even our friend Mercaptan’s delicious little middles in the weeklies? How is your delicious little middle, by the way?’ Coleman turned to Mr Mercaptan and with the point of his huge stick gave him a little prod in the stomach. ‘Ça marche – les tripes? Hein?’ He turned back to Shearwater. ‘Not even those?’ he asked.

‘Never,’ said Shearwater. ‘I have more serious things to think about than newspapers.’

‘And what serious thing, may I ask?’

‘Well, at the present moment,’ said Shearwater, ‘I am chiefly preoccupied with the kidneys.’

‘The kidneys!’ In an ecstasy of delight, Coleman thumped the floor with the ferrule of his stick. ‘The kidneys! Tell me all about kidneys. This is of the first importance. This is really life. And I shall sit down at your table without asking permission of Buonarroti here, and in the teeth of Mercaptan, and without so much as thinking about this species of Gumbril, who might as well not be there at all. I shall sit down and –’

‘Talking of sitting,’ said Gumbril, ‘I wish I could persuade you to order a pair of my patent pneumatic trousers. They will –’

Coleman waved him away. ‘Not now, not now,’ he said. ‘I shall sit down and listen to the physiologue talking about runions, while I myself actually eat them – sautés. Sautés, mark my words.’

Laying his hat and stick on the floor beside him, he sat down at the end of the table, between Lypiatt and Shearwater.

‘Two believers,’ he said, laying his hand for a moment on Lypiatt’s arm, ‘and three black-hearted unbelievers – confronted. Eh, Buonarroti? You and I are both croyantes et pratiquants, as Mercaptan would say. I believe in one devil, father quasi-almighty, Samael and his wife, the Woman of Whoredom. Ha, ha!’ He laughed his ferocious, artificial laugh.

‘Here’s an end to any civilized conversation,’ Mr Mercaptan complained, hissing on the c, labiating lingeringly on the v of ‘civilized’ and giving the first two i’s their fullest value. The word, in his mouth, seemed to take on a special and a richer significance.

Coleman ignored him. ‘Tell me, you physiologue,’ he went on, ‘tell me about the physiology of the Archetypal Man. This is most important; Buonarroti shares my opinion about this, I know. Has the Archetypal Man a boyau rectum, as Mercaptan would say again, or not? Everything depends on this, as Voltaire realized ages ago. “His feet”, as we know already on inspired authority, “were straight feet; and the soles of his feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot.” But the viscera, you must tell us something about the viscera. Mustn’t he, Buonarroti? And where are my rognons sautés?’ he shouted at the waiter.

‘You revolt me,’ said Lypiatt.

‘Not mortually, I ‘ope?’ Coleman turned with solicitude to his neighbour; then shook his head. ‘Mortually I fear. Kiss me ’Ardy, and I die happy.’ He blew a kiss into the air. ‘But why is the physiologue so slow? Up, pachyderm, up! Answer. You hold the key to everything. The key, I tell you, the key. I remember, when I used to hang about the biological laboratories at school, eviscerating frogs – crucified with pins, they were, belly upwards, like little green Christs – I remember once, when I was sitting there, quietly poring over the entrails, in came the laboratory boy and said to the stinks usher: “Please, sir, may I have the key of the Absolute?” And, would you believe it, that usher calmly put his hand in his trouser pocket and fished out a small Yale key and gave it him without a word. What a gesture! The key of the Absolute. But it was only the absolute alcohol the urchin wanted – to pickle some loathsome foetus in, I suppose. God rot his soul in peace! And now, Castor Fiber, out with your key. Tell us about the Archetypal Man, tell us about the primordial Adam. Tell us all about the boyau rectum.’

Ponderously, Shearwater moved his clumsy frame; leaning back in his chair he scrutinized Coleman with a large, benevolent curiosity. The eyes under the savage eyebrows were mild and gentle; behind the fearful disguise of the moustache he smiled poutingly, like a baby who sees the approaching bottle. The broad, domed forehead was serene. He ran his hand through his thick brown hair, scratched his head meditatively and then, when he had thoroughly examined, had comprehended and duly classified the strange phenomenon of Coleman, opened his mouth and uttered a little good-natured laugh of amusement.

‘Voltaire’s question,’ he said at last, in his slow, deep voice, ‘seemed at the time he asked it an unanswerable piece of irony. It would have seemed almost equally ironic to his contemporaries, if he had asked whether God had a pair of kidneys. We know a little more about the kidneys nowadays. If he had asked me, I should answer: why not? The kidneys are so beautifully organized; they do their work of regulation with such a miraculous – it’s hard to find another word – such a positively divine precision, such knowledge and wisdom, that there’s no reason why your archetypal man, whoever he is, or any one else, for that matter, should be ashamed of owning a pair.’

Coleman clapped his hands. ‘The key,’ he cried, ‘the key. Out of the trouser pocket of babes and sucklings it comes. The genuine, the unique Yale. How right I was to come here tonight! But, holy Sephiroth, there’s my trollop.’

He picked up his stick, jumped from his chair and threaded his way between the tables. A woman was standing near the door. Coleman came up to her, pointed without speaking to the table, and returned, driving her along in front of him, tapping her gently over the haunches with his stick, as one might drive a docile animal to the slaughter.

‘Allow me to introduce,’ said Coleman. ‘The sharer of my joys and sorrows. La compagne de mes nuits blanches et de mes jours plutôt sales. In a word, Zoe. Qui ne comprend pas le français, qui me déteste avec une passion égale à la mienne, et qui mangera, ma foi, des rognons pour fair honneur au physiologue.’

‘Have some Burgundy?’ Gumbril proffered the bottle.

Zoe nodded and pushed forward her glass. She was dark-haired, had a pale skin and eyes like round blackberries. Her mouth was small and floridly curved. She was dressed, rather depressingly, like a picture by Augustus John, in blue and orange. Her expression was sullen and ferocious, and she looked about her with an air of profound contempt.

‘Shearwater’s no better than a mystic,’ fluted Mr Mercaptan. ‘A mystical scientist; really, one hadn’t reckoned on that.’

‘Like a Liberal Pope,’ said Gumbril. ‘Poor Metternich, you remember? Pio Nono.’ And he burst into a fit of esoteric laughter. ‘Of less than average intelligence,’ he murmured delightedly, and refilled his glass.

‘It’s only the deliberately blind who wouldn’t reckon on the combination,’ Lypiatt put in, indignantly. ‘What are science and art, what are religion and philosophy but so many expressions in human terms of some reality more than human? Newton and Bohme and Michelangelo – what are they doing but expressing, in different ways, different aspects of the same thing?’

‘Alberti, I beg you,’ said Gumbril. ‘I assure you he was the better architect.’

‘Fi donc!’ said Mr Mercaptan. ‘San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane –’ But he got no further. Lypiatt abolished him with a gesture.

‘One reality,’ he cried, ‘there is only one reality.’

‘One reality,’ Coleman reached out a hand across the table and caressed Zoe’s bare white arm, ‘and that is callipygous.’ Zoe jabbed at his hand with her fork.

‘We are all trying to talk about it,’ continued Lypiatt. ‘The physicists have formulated their laws, which are after all no more than stammering provisional theories about a part of it. The physiologists are penetrating into the secrets of life, psychologists into the mind. And we artists are trying to say what is revealed to us about the moral nature, the personality of that reality, which is the universe.’

Mr Mercaptan threw up his hands in affected horror. ‘Oh, barbaridad, babaridad!’ Nothing less than the pure Castilian would relieve his feelings. ‘But all this is meaningless.’

‘Quite right about the chemists and physicists,’ said Shearwater. ‘They’re always trying to pretend that they’re nearer the truth than we are. They take their crude theories as facts and try to make us accept them when we’re dealing with life. Oh, they are sacred, their theories. Laws of Nature they call them; and they talk about their known truths and our romantic biological fancies. What a fuss they make when we talk about life! Bloody fools!’ said Shearwater, mild and crushing. ‘Nobody but a fool could talk of mechanism in face of the kidneys. And there are actually imbeciles who talk about the mechanism of heredity and reproduction.’

‘All the same,’ began Mr Mercaptan very earnestly, anxious to deny his own life, ‘there are eminent authorities. I can only quote what they say, of course. I can’t pretend to know anything about it myself. But –’

‘Reproduction, reproduction,’ Coleman murmured the word to himself ecstatically. ‘Delightful and horrifying to think they all come to that, even the most virginal; that they were all made for that, little she-dogs, in spite of their china-blue eyes. What sort of a mandrake shall we produce, Zoe and I?’ he asked, turning to Shearwater. ‘How I should like to have a child,’ he went on without waiting for an answer. ‘I shouldn’t teach it anything; no language, nothing at all. Just a child of nature. I believe it would really be the devil. And then what fun it would be if it suddenly started to say “Bekkos”, like the children in Herodotus. And Buonarroti here would paint an allegorical picture of it and write an epic called “The Ignoble Savage”. And Castor Fiber would come and sound its kidneys and investigate its sexual instincts. And Mercaptan would write one of his inimitable middle articles about it. And Gumbril would make it a pair of patent trousers. And Zoe and I would look parentally on and fairly swell with pride. Shouldn’t we, Zoe?’ Zoe preserved her expression of sullen, unchanging contempt and did not deign to answer. ‘Ah, how delightful it would be! I long for posterity. I live in hopes. I stope against Stopes. I –’

Zoe threw a piece of bread, which caught him on the cheek, a little below the eye. Coleman leaned back and laughed and laughed till the tears rolled down his face.

CHAPTER V

ONE AFTER ANOTHER, they engaged themselves in the revolving doors of the restaurant, trotted round the moving cage of glass and ejected themselves into the coolness and darkness of the street. Shearwater lifted up his large face and took two or three deep breaths. ‘Too much carbon dioxide and ammonia in there,’ he said.

‘It is unfortunate that when two or three are gathered together in God’s name, or even in the more civilized name of Mercaptan of the delicious middle,’ Mercaptan dexterously parried the prod which Coleman aimed at him, ‘it is altogether deplorable that they should necessarily empest the air.’

Lypiatt had turned his eyes heavenwards. ‘What stars,’ he said, ‘and what prodigious gaps between the stars!’

‘A real light opera summer night.’ And Mercaptan began to sing, in fragmentary German, the ‘Barcarolle’ from the Tales of Hoffman. ‘Liebe Nacht, du schone Nacht, oh stille mein tumpty-tum. Te, tum, Te tum . . . Delicious Offenbach. Ah, if only we could have a third Empire! Another comic Napoleon! That would make Paris look like Paris again. Tiddy, tumpty-ti-tum.’

They walked along without any particular destination, but simply for the sake of walking through this soft cool night. Coleman led the way, tapping the pavement at every step with the ferrule of his stick. ‘The blind leading the blind,’ he explained. ‘Ah, if only there were a ditch, a crevasse, a great hole full of stinging centipedes and dung. How gleefully I should lead you all into it!’

‘I think you would do well,’ said Shearwater gravely, ‘to go and see a doctor.’

Coleman gave vent to a howl of delight.

‘Does it occur to you,’ he went on, ‘that at this moment we are walking through the midst of seven million distinct and separate individuals, each with distinct and separate lives and all completely indifferent to our existence? Seven million people, each one of whom thinks himself quite as important as each of us does. Millions of them are now sleeping in an empested atmosphere. Hundreds of thousands of couples are at this moment engaged in mutually caressing one another in a manner too hideous to be thought of, but in no way differing from the manner in which each of us performs, delightfully, passionately and beautifully, his similar work of love. Thousands of women are now in the throes of parturition, and of both sexes thousands are dying of the most diverse and appalling diseases, or simply because they have lived too long. Thousands are drunk, thousands have overeaten, thousands have not had enough to eat. And they are all alive, all unique and separate and sensitive, like you and me. It’s a horrible thought. Ah, if I could lead them all into that great hole of centipedes.’

He tapped and tapped on the pavement in front of him, as though searching for the crevasse. At the top of his voice he began to chant: ‘O all ye Beasts and Cattle, curse ye the Lord: curse him and vilify him for ever.’

‘All this religion,’ sighed Mercaptan. ‘What with Lypiatt on one side, being a muscular Christian artist, and Coleman on the other, howling the black mass . . . Really!’ He elaborated an Italianate gesture, and turned to Zoe. ‘What do you think of it all?’ he asked.

Zoe jerked her head in Coleman’s direction. ‘I think ’e’s a bloody swine,’ she said. They were the first words she had spoken since she had joined the party.

‘Hear, hear!’ cried Coleman, and he waved his stick.

In the warm yellow light of the coffee-stall at Hyde Park Corner loitered a little group of people. Among the peaked caps and the chauffeurs’ dust-coats, among the weather-stained workmen’s jackets and the knotted handkerchiefs, emerged an alien elegance. A tall tubed hat and a silk-faced overcoat, a cloak of flame-coloured satin, and in bright, coppery hair a great Spanish comb of carved tortoiseshell.

‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Gumbril as they approached. ‘I believe it’s Myra Viveash.’

‘So it is,’ said Lypiatt, peering in his turn. He began suddenly to walk with an affected swagger, kicking his heels at every step. Looking at himself from outside, his divining eyes pierced through the veil of cynical je-m’en-fichisme to the bruised heart beneath. Besides, he didn’t want any one to guess.

‘The Viveash, is it?’ Coleman quickened his rapping along the pavement. ‘And who is the present incumbent?’ He pointed at the top hat.

‘Can it be Bruin Opps?’ said Gumbril dubiously.

‘Opps!’ Coleman yelled out the name. ‘Opps!’

The top hat turned, revealing a shirt front, a long grey face, a glitter of circular glass over the left eye. ‘Who the devil are you?’ The voice was harsh and arrogantly offensive.

‘I am that I am,’ said Coleman. ‘But I have with me’ – he pointed to Shearwater, to Gumbril, to Zoe – ‘a physiologue, a pedagogue and a priapagogue; for I leave out of account mere artists and journalists whose titles do not end with the magic syllable. And finally,’ indicating himself, ‘plain Dog, which, being interpreted kabbalistically backwards, signifies God. All at your service.’ He took off his hat and bowed.

The top hat turned back towards the Spanish comb. ‘Who is this horrible drunk?’ it inquired.

Mrs Viveash did not answer him, but stepped forward to meet the newcomers. In one hand she held a peeled, hard-boiled egg and a thick slice of bread and butter in the other, and between her sentences she bit at them alternately.

‘Coleman!’ she exclaimed, and her voice, as she spoke, seemed always on the point of expiring, as though each word were the last, uttered faintly and breakingly from a death-bed – the last, with all the profound and nameless significance of the ultimate word. ‘It’s a very long time since I heard you raving last. And you, Theodore darling, why do I never see you now?’

Gumbril shrugged his shoulders. ‘Because you don’t want to, I suppose,’ he said.

Myra laughed and took another bite at her bread and butter . . . She laid the back of her hand – for she was still holding the butt end of her hard-boiled egg – on Lypiatt’s arm. The Titan, who had been looking at the sky, seemed to be surprised to find her standing there. ‘You?’ he said, smiling and wrinkling up his forehead interrogatively.

‘It’s to-morrow I’m sitting for you, Casimir, isn’t it?’

‘Ah, you remembered.’ The veil parted for a moment. Poor Lypiatt! ‘And happy Mercaptan? Always happy?’

Gallantly Mercaptan kissed the back of the hand which held the egg. ‘I might be happier,’ he murmured, rolling up at her from the snouty face of a pair of small brown eyes. ‘Puisje espérer?’

Mrs Viveash laughed expiringly from her inward death-bed and turned on him, without speaking, her pale unwavering glance. Her eyes had a formidable capacity for looking and expressing nothing; they were like the pale blue eyes which peer out of the Siamese cat’s black-velvet mask.

‘Bellissima,’ murmured Mercaptan, flowering under their cool light.

Mrs Viveash addressed herself to the company at large. ‘We have had the most appalling evening,’ she said. ‘Haven’t we, Bruin?’

Bruin Opps said nothing, but only scowled. He didn’t like these damned intruders. The skin of his contracted brows oozed over the rim of his monocle, on to the shining glass.

‘I thought it would be fun,’ Myra went on, ‘to go to that place at Hampton Court, where you have dinner on an island and dance . . .’

‘What is there about islands?’ put in Mercaptan, in a deliciously whimsical parenthesis, ‘that makes them so peculiarly voluptuous? Cythera, Monkey Island, Capri. Je me demande.’

‘Another charming middle.’ Coleman pointed his stick menacingly; Mr Mercaptan stepped quickly out of range.

‘So we took a cab,’ Mrs Viveash continued, ‘and set out. And what a cab, my God! A cab with only one gear, and that the lowest. A cab as old as the century, a museum specimen, a collector’s piece.’ They had been hours and hours on the way. And when they got there, the food they were offered to eat, the wine they were expected to drink! From her eternal death-bed Mrs Viveash cried out in unaffected horror. Everything tasted as though it had been kept soaking for a week in the river before being served up – rather weedy, with that delicious typhoid flavour of Thames water. There was Thames even in the champagne. They had not been able to eat so much as a crust of bread. Hungry and thirsty, they had re-embarked in their antique taxi, and here, at last, they were, at the first outpost of civilization, eating for dear life.

‘Oh, a terrible evening,’ Mrs Viveash concluded. ‘The only thing which kept up my spirits was the spectacle of Bruin’s bad temper. You’ve no idea, Bruin, what an incomparable comic you can be.’

Bruin ignored the remark. With an expression of painfully repressed disgust he was eating a hard-boiled egg. Myra’s caprices were becoming more and more impossible. That Hampton Court business had been bad enough; but when it came to eating in the street, in the middle of a lot of filthy workmen – well, really, that was rather too much.

Mrs Viveash looked about her. ‘Am I never to know who this mysterious person is?’ She pointed to Shearwater, who was standing a little apart from the group, his back leaning against the park railings and staring thoughtfully at the ground.

‘The physiologue,’ Coleman explained, ‘and he has the key. The key, the key!’ He hammered the pavement with his stick.

Gumbril performed the introduction in more commonplace style.

‘You don’t seem to take much interest in us, Mr Shearwater,’ Myra called expiringly. Shearwater looked up; Mrs Viveash regarded him intently through pale, unwavering eyes, smiling as she looked that queer, downward-turning smile which gave to her face, through its mask of laughter, a peculiar expression of agony. ‘You don’t seem to take much interest in us,’ she repeated.

Shearwater shook his heavy head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I do.’

‘Why don’t you?’

‘Why should I? There’s not time to be interested in everything. One can only be interested in what’s worth while.’

‘And we’re not worth while?’

‘Not to me personally,’ replied Shearwater with candour. ‘The Great Wall of China, the political situation in Italy, the habits of Trematodes – all these are most interesting in themselves. But they aren’t interesting to me; I don’t permit them to be. I haven’t the leisure.’

‘And what do you allow yourself to be interested in?’

‘Shall we go?’ said Bruin impatiently; he had succeeded in swallowing the last fragment of his hard-boiled egg. Mrs Viveash did not answer, did not even look at him.

Shearwater, who had hesitated before replying, was about to speak. But Coleman answered for him. ‘Be respectful,’ he said to Mrs Viveash. ‘This is a great man. He reads no papers, not even those in which our Mercaptan so beautifully writes. He does not know what a beaver is. And he lives for nothing but the kidneys.’

Mrs Viveash smiled her smile of agony. ‘Kidneys? But what a memento mori! There are other portions of the anatomy.’ She threw back her cloak, revealing an arm, a bare shoulder, a slant of pectoral muscle. She was wearing a white dress that, leaving her back and shoulders bare, came up, under either arm, to a point in front and was held there by a golden thread about the neck. ‘For example,’ she said, and twisted her hand several times over and over, making the slender arm turn at the elbow, as though to demonstrate the movement of the articulations and the muscular play.

‘Memento vivere,’ Mr Mercaptan aptly commented. ‘Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus.’

Mrs Viveash dropped her arm and pulled the cloak back into place. She looked at Shearwater, who had followed all her movements with conscientious attention, and who now nodded with an expression of interrogation on his face, as though to ask: what next?

‘We all know that you’ve got beautiful arms,’ said Bruin angrily. ‘There’s no need for you to make an exhibition of them in the street, at midnight. Let’s get out of this.’ He laid his hand on her shoulder and made as if to draw her away. ‘We’d better be going. Goodness knows what’s happening behind us.’ He indicated with a little movement of the head the loiterers round the coffee-stall. ‘Some disturbance among the canaille.’

Mrs Viveash looked round. The cab-drivers and the other consumers of midnight coffee had gathered in an interested circle, curious and sympathetic, round the figure of a woman who was sitting, like a limp bundle tied up in black cotton and mackintosh, on the stall-keeper’s high stool, leaning wearily against the wall of the booth. A man stood beside her drinking tea out of a thick white cup. Every one was talking at once.

‘Mayn’t the poor wretches talk?’ asked Mrs Viveash, turning back to Bruin. ‘I never knew any one who had the lower classes on the brain as much as you have.’

‘I loathe them,’ said Bruin. ‘I hate every one poor, or ill, or old. Can’t abide them; they make me positively sick.’

‘Quelle âme bien-née,’ piped Mr Mercaptan. ‘And how well and frankly you express what we all feel and lack the courage to say.’

Lypiatt gave vent to indignant laughter.

‘I remember when I was a little boy,’ Bruin went on, ‘my old grandfather used to tell me stories about his childhood. He told me that when he was about five or six, just before the passing of the Reform Bill of ‘thirty-two, there was a song which all right-thinking people used to sing, with a chorus that went like this: “Rot the People, blast the People, damn the Lower Classes”. I wish I knew the rest of the words and the tune. It must have been a good song.’

Coleman was enraptured with the song. He shouldered his walking-stick and began marching round and round the nearest lamp-post chanting the words to a stirring march tune. ‘Rot the People, blast the People . . .’ He marked the rhythm with heavy stamps of his feet.

‘Ah, if only they’d invent servants with internal combustion engines,’ said Bruin, almost pathetically. ‘However well trained they are, they always betray their humanity occasionally. And that is really intolerable.’

‘How tedious is a guilty conscience!’ Gumbril murmured the quotation.

‘But Mr Shearwater,’ said Myra, bringing back the conversation to more congenial themes, ‘hasn’t told us yet what he thinks of arms.’

‘Nothing at all,’ said Shearwater. ‘I’m occupied with the regulation of the blood at the moment.’

‘But is it true what he says, Theodore?’ She appealed to Gumbril.

‘I should think so.’ Gumbril’s answer was rather dim and remote. He was straining to hear the talk of Bruin’s canaille, and Mrs Viveash’s question seemed a little irrelevant.

‘I used to do cartin’ jobs,’ the man with the teacup was saying. ‘’Ad a van and a nold pony of me own. And didn’t do so badly neither. The only trouble was me lifting furniture and ’eavy weights about the place. Because I ’ad malaria out in India, in the war . . .’

‘Nor even – you compel me to violate the laws of modesty – nor even,’ Mrs Viveash went on, smiling painfully, speaking huskily, expiringly, ‘of legs?’

A spring of blasphemy was touched in Coleman’s brain. ‘Neither delighteth He in any man’s legs,’ he shouted, and with an extravagant show of affection he embraced Zoe, who caught hold of his hand and bit it.

‘It comes back on you when you get tired like, malaria does.’ The man’s face was sallow and there was an air of peculiar listlessness and hopelessness about his misery. ‘It comes back on you, and then you go down with fever and you’re as weak as a child.’

Shearwater shook his head.

‘Nor even of the heart?’ Mrs Viveash lifted her eyebrows. ‘Ah, now the inevitable word has been pronounced, the real subject of every conversation has appeared on the scene. Love, Mr Shearwater!’

‘But as I says,’ recapitulated the man with the teacup, ‘we didn’t do so badly after all. We ’ad nothing to complain about. ‘Ad we, Florrie?’

The black bundle made an affirmative movement with its upper extremity.

‘That’s one of the subjects,’ said Shearwater, ‘like the Great Wall of China and the habits of Trematodes, I don’t allow myself to be interested in.’

Mrs Viveash laughed, breathed out a little ‘Good God!’ of incredulity and astonishment, and asked, ‘Why not?’

‘No time,’ he explained. ‘You people of leisure have nothing else to do or think about. I’m busy, and so naturally less interested in the subject than you; and I take care, what’s more, to limit such interest as I have.’

‘I was goin’ up Ludgate ’Ill one day with a vanload of stuff for a chap in Clerkenwell. I was leadin’ Jerry up the ‘ill – Jerry’s the name of our ole pony . . .’

‘One can’t have everything,’ Shearwater was explaining, ‘not all at the same time, in any case. I’ve arranged my life for work now. I’m quietly married, I simmer away domestically.’

‘Quelle horreur!’ said Mr Mercaptan. All the Louis Quinze Abbé in him was shocked and revolted by the thought.

‘But love?’ questioned Mrs Viveash. ‘Love?’

‘Love!’ Lypiatt echoed. He was looking up at the Milky Way.

‘All of a sudden out jumps a copper at me. “’Ow old is that ’orse?” ’e says. “It ain’t fit to drawr a load, it limps in all four feet,” ’e says. “No, it doesn’t,’ I says. “None of your answerin’ back,” ’e says. “Take it outer the shafts at once.”’

‘But I know all about love already. I know precious little still about kidneys.’

‘But, my good Shearwater, how can you know all about love before you’ve made it with all women?’

‘Off we goes, me and the cop and the ’orse, up in front of the police-court magistrate . . .’

‘Or are you one of those imbeciles,’ Mrs Viveash went on, ‘who speak of women with a large W and pretend we’re all the same? Poor Theodore here might possibly think so in his feebler moments.’ Gumbril smiled vaguely from a distance. He was following the man with the teacup into the magistrate’s stuffy court. ‘And Mercaptan certainly does, because all the women who ever sat on his dix-huitième sofa certainly were exactly like one another. And perhaps Casimir does too; all women look like his absurd ideal. But you, Shearwater, you’re intelligent. Surely you don’t believe anything so stupid?’

Shearwater shook his head.

‘The cop, ’e gave evidence against me. “Limping in all four feet,” ’e says. “It wasn’t,” I says, and the police-court vet, ’e bore me out. “The ’orse ’as been very well treated,” ’e says. “But ’e’s old, ’e’s very old.” “I know ’e’s old,” I says. “But where am I going to find the price for a young one?”’

‘x²–y²,’ Shearwater was saying, ‘=(x+y)(x-y). And the equation holds good whatever the values of x and y . . . It’s the same with your love business, Mrs Viveash. The relation is still fundamentally the same, whatever the value of the unknown personal quantities concerned. Little individual tics and peculiarities – after all, what do they matter?’

‘What indeed!’ said Coleman. ‘Tics, mere tics. Sheep ticks, horse ticks, bed bugs, tape worms, taint worms, guinea worms, liver flukes . . .’

‘“The ’orse must be destroyed,” says the beak. “’E’s too old for work.” “But I’m not,” I says. “I can’t get a old age pension at thirty-two, can I? ‘Ow am I to earn my living if you take away what I earns my living by?”’

Mrs Viveash smiled agonizingly. ‘Here’s a man who thinks personal peculiarities are trivial and unimportant,’ she said. ‘You’re not even interested in people, then?’

‘“I don’t know what you can do,” ’e says. “I’m only ’ere to administer the law.” “Seems a queer sort of law,” I says. “What law is it?”’

Shearwater scratched his head. Under his formidable black moustache he smiled at last his ingenuous, childish smile. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I suppose I’m not. It hadn’t occurred to me, until you said it. But I suppose I’m not. No.’ He laughed, quite delighted, it seemed, by this discovery about himself.

‘“What law is it?” ’e says. “The Croolty to Animals law. That’s what it is,” ’e says.’

The smile of mockery and suffering appeared and faded. ‘One of these days,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘you may find them more absorbing than you do now.’

‘Meanwhile,’ said Shearwater . . .

‘I couldn’t find a job ’ere, and ’aving been workin’ on my own, my own master like, couldn’t get unemployment pay. So when we ’eard of jobs at Portsmouth, we thought we’d try to get one, even if it did mean walkin’ there.’

‘Meanwhile, I have my kidneys.’

‘“’Opeless,” ’e says to me, “quite ‘opeless. More than two hundred comes for three vacancies.” So there was nothing for it but to walk back again. Took us four days it did, this time. She was very bad on the way, very bad. Being nearly six months gone. Our first it is. Things will be ‘arder still, when it comes.’

From the black bundle there issued a sound of quiet sobbing.

‘Look here,’ said Gumbril, making a sudden irruption into the conversation. ‘This is really too awful.’ He was consumed with indignation and piety; he felt like a prophet in Nineveh.

‘There are two wretched people here,’ and Gumbril told them breathlessly what he had overheard. It was terrible, terrible. ‘All the way to Portsmouth and back again; on foot, without proper food; and the woman’s with child.’

Coleman exploded with delight. ‘Gravid,’ he kept repeating, ‘gravid, gravid. The laws of gravidity, first formulated by Newton, now recodified by the immortal Einstein. God said, Let Newstein be, and there was light. And God said, Let there be Light; and there was darkness o’er the face of the earth.’ He roared with laughter.

Between them they raised five pounds. Mrs Viveash undertook to give them to the black bundle. The cabmen made way for her as she advanced; and there an uncomfortable silence. The black bundle lifted a face that was old and worn, like the face of a statue in the portal of a cathedral; an old face, but one was aware, somehow, that it belonged to a woman still young by the reckoning of years. Her hands trembled as she took the notes, and when she opened her mouth to speak her hardly articulate whisper of gratitude, one saw that she had lost several of her teeth.

The party disintegrated. All went their ways: Mr Mercaptan to his rococo boudoir, his sweet barocco bedroom in Sloane Street; Coleman and Zoe towards goodness only knew what scenes of intimate life in Pimlico; Lypiatt to his studio off the Tottenham Court Road, alone, silently brooding and perhaps too consciously bowed with unhappiness. But the unhappiness, poor Titan! was real enough, for had he not seen Mrs Viveash and the insufferable, the stupid and loutish Opps driving off in one taxi? ‘Must finish up with a little dance,’ Myra had huskily uttered from that death-bed on which her restless spirit for ever and wearily exerted itself. Obediently, Bruin had given an address and they had driven off. But after the dancing? Oh, was it possible that that odious, bad-blooded young cad was her lover? And that she should like him? It was no wonder that Lypiatt should have walked, bent like Atlas under the weight of a world. And when, in Piccadilly, a belated and still unsuccessful prostitute sidled out of the darkness, as he strode by unseeing in his misery when she squeaked up at him a despairing ‘Cheer up, duckie,’ Lypiatt suddenly threw up his head and laughed titanically, with the terrible bitterness of a noble soul in pain. Even the poor drabs at the street corners were affected by the unhappiness that radiated out from him, wave after throbbing wave, like music he liked to fancy, into the night. Even the wretched drabs. He walked on, more desperately bowed than ever; but met no further adventure on his way.

Gumbril and Shearwater both lived in Paddington; they set off in company up Park Lane, walking in silence. Gumbril gave a little skip to get himself into step with his companion. To be out of step, when steps so loudly and flat-footedly flapped on empty pavements, was disagreeable, he found, was embarrassing, was somehow dangerous. Stepping, like this, out of time, one gave oneself away, so to speak, one made the night aware of two presences, when there might, if steps sounded in unison, be only one, heavier, more formidable, more secure than either of the separate two. In unison, then, they flapped up Park Lane. A policeman and the three poets, sulking back to back on their fountain, were the only human things besides themselves under the mauve electric moons.

‘It’s appalling, it’s horrible,’ said Gumbril at last, after a long, long silence, during which he had, indeed, been relishing to the full the horror of it all. Life, don’t you know.

‘What’s appalling?’ Shearwater inquired. He walked with his big head bowed, his hands clasped behind his back and clutching his hat; walked clumsily, with sudden lurches of his whole massive anatomy. Wherever he was, Shearwater always seemed to take up the space that two or three ordinary people would normally occupy. Cool fingers of wind passed refreshingly through his hair. He was thinking of the experiment he meant to try, in the next few days, down at the physiological laboratory. You’d put a man on an ergometer in a heated chamber and set him to work – hours at a time. He’d sweat, of course, prodigiously. You’d make arrangements for collecting the sweat, weighing it, analysing it and so on. The interesting thing would be to see what happened at the end of a few days. The man would have got rid of so much of his salts, that the blood composition might be altered and all sorts of delightful consequences might follow. It ought to be a capital experiment. Gumbril’s exclamation disturbed him. ‘What’s appalling?’ he asked rather irritably.

‘Those people at the coffee-stall,’ Gumbril answered. ‘It’s appalling that human beings should have to live like that. Worse than dogs.’

‘Dogs have nothing to complain of.’ Shearwater went off at a tangent. ‘Nor guinea-pigs, nor rats. It’s these blasted antivivisection maniacs who make all the fuss.’

‘But think,’ cried Gumbril, ‘what these wretched people have had to suffer! Walking all the way to Portsmouth in search of work; and the woman with child. It’s horrifying. And then, the way people of that class are habitually treated. One has no idea of it until one has actually been treated that way oneself. In the war, for example, when one went to have one’s mitral murmurs listened to by the medical board – they treated one then as though one belonged to the lower orders, like all the rest of the poor wretches. It was a real eye-opener. One felt like a cow being got into a train. And to think that the majority of one’s fellow-beings pass their whole lives being shoved about like maltreated animals!’

‘H’m,’ said Shearwater. If you went on sweating indefinitely, he supposed, you would end by dying.

Gumbril looked through the railings at the profound darkness of the park. Vast it was and melancholy, with a string, here and there, of receding lights. ‘Terrible,’ he said, and repeated the word several times. ‘Terrible, terrible.’ All the legless soldiers grinding barrel-organs, all the hawkers of toys stamping their leaky boots in the gutters of the Strand; at the corner of Cursitor Street and Chancery Lane, the old woman with matches, for ever holding to her left eye a handkerchief as yellow and dirty as the winter fog. What was wrong with the eye? He had never dared to look, but hurried past as though she were not there, or sometimes, when the fog was more than ordinarily cold and stifling, paused for an instant with averted eyes to drop a brown coin into her tray of matches. And then there were the murderers hanged at eight o’clock, while one was savouring, almost with voluptuous consciousness, the final dream-haunted doze. There was the phthisical char-woman who used to work at his father’s house, until she got too weak and died. There were the lovers who turned on the gas and the ruined shopkeepers jumping in front of trains. Had one a right to be contented and well-fed, had one a right to one’s education and good taste, a right to knowledge and conversation and the leisurely complexities of love?

He looked once more through the railings at the park’s impenetrable, rustic night, at the lines of beaded lamps. He looked, and remembered another night, years ago, during the war, when there were no lights in the park and the electric moons above the roadway were in almost total eclipse. He had walked up this street alone, full of melancholy emotions which, though the cause of them was different, were in themselves much the same as the melancholy emotions which swelled windily up within him to-night. He had been most horribly in love.

‘What did you think,’ he asked abruptly, ‘of Myra Viveash?’

‘Think?’ said Shearwater. ‘I don’t know that I thought much about her. Not a case for ratiocination exactly, is she? She seemed to me entertaining enough, as women go. I said I’d lunch with her on Thursday.’

Gumbril felt, all of a sudden, the need to speak confidentially. ‘There was a time,’ he said in a tone that was quite unreally airy, off-hand and disengaged, ‘years ago, when I totally lost my head about her. Totally.’ Those tear-wet patches on his pillow, cold against his cheek in the darkness; and oh, the horrible pain of weeping, vainly, for something that was nothing, that was everything in the world! ‘Towards the end of the war it was. I remember walking up this dismal street one night, in the pitch darkness, writhing with jealousy.’ He was silent. Spectrally, like a dim, haunting ghost, he had hung about her; dumbly, dumbly imploring, appealing. ‘The weak, silent man,’ she used to call him. And once for two or three days, out of pity, out of affection, out of a mere desire, perhaps, to lay the tiresome ghost, she had given him what his mournful silence implored – only to take it back, almost as soon as accorded. That other night, when he had walked up this street before, desire had eaten out his vitals and his body seemed empty, sickeningly and achingly void; jealousy was busily reminding him, with an unflagging malice, of her beauty – of her beauty and the hateful, ruffian hands which now caressed, the eyes which looked on it. That was all long ago.

‘She is certainly handsome,’ said Shearwater, commenting, at one or two removes, on Gumbril’s last remark. ‘I can see that she might make any one who got involved with her decidedly uncomfortable.’ After a day or two’s continuous sweating, it suddenly occurred to him, one might perhaps find sea-water more refreshing than fresh water. That would be queer.

Gumbril burst out ferociously laughing. ‘But there were other times,’ he went on jauntily, ‘when other people were jealous of me.’ Ah, revenge, revenge. In the better world of the imagination it was possible to get one’s own back. What fiendish vendettas were there carried to successful ends! ‘I remember once writing her a quatrain in French.’ (He had written it years after the whole thing was over, he had never sent it to any one at all; but that was all one.) ‘How did it go? Ah, yes.’ And he recited, with suitable gestures:

‘“Puisque nous sommes là, je dois

Vous avertir, sans trop de honte,

Que je n’égale pas le Comte

Casanovesque de Sixfois.”’

Rather prettily turned, I flatter myself. Rather elegantly gross.’

Gumbril’s laughter went hooting past the Marble Arch. It stopped rather suddenly, however, at the corner of the Edgware Road. He had suddenly remembered Mr Mercaptan, and the thought depressed him.

CHAPTER VI

IT WAS BETWEEN Whitfield Street and the Tottenham Court Road, in a ‘heavenly Mews’, as he liked to call it (for he had a characteristic weakness for philosophical paronomasia), that Casimir Lypiatt lived and worked. You passed under an archway of bald and sooty brick – and at night, when the green gas-lamp underneath the arch threw livid lights and enormous architectural shadows, you could fancy yourself at the entrance of one of Piranesi’s prisons – and you found yourself in a long cul-de-sac, flanked on either side by low buildings, having stabling for horses below and, less commodiously, stabling for human beings in the attics above. An old-fashioned smell of animals mingled with the more progressive stink of burnt oil. The air was a little thicker here, it seemed, than in the streets outside; looking down the mews on even the clearest day, you could see the forms of things dimming and softening, the colours growing richer and deeper with every yard of distance. It was the best place in the world, Lypiatt used to say, for studying aerial perspective; that was why he lived there. But you always felt about poor Lypiatt that he was facing misfortune with a jest a little too self-consciously.

Mrs Viveash’s taxi drove in under the Piranesian arch, drove in slowly and as though with a gingerly reluctance to soil its white wheels on pavements so sordid. The cabman looked round inquiringly.

‘This right?’ he asked.

With a white-gloved finger Mrs Viveash prodded the air two or three times, indicating that he was to drive straight on. Halfway down the mews she rapped the glass; the man drew up.

‘Never been down ’ere before,’ he said, for the sake of making a little conversation, while Mrs Viveash fumbled for her money. He looked at her with a polite and slightly ironic curiosity that was frankly mingled with admiration.

‘You’re lucky,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘We poor decayed gentlewomen – you see what we’re reduced to.’ And she handed him a florin.

Slowly the taxi-man unbuttoned his coat and put the coin away in an inner pocket. He watched her as she crossed the dirty street, placing her feet with a meticulous precision one after the other in the same straight line, as though she were treading a knife edge between goodness only knew what invisible gulfs. Floating she seemed to go, with a little spring at every step and the skirt of her summery dress – white it was, with a florid pattern printed in black all over it – blowing airily out around her swaying march. Decayed gentlewoman indeed! The driver started his machine with an unnecessary violence; he felt, for some reason, positively indignant.

Between the broad double-doors through which the horses passed to their fodder and repose were little narrow human doors – for the Yahoos, Lypiatt used to say in his large allusive way; and when he said it he laughed with the loud and bell-mouthed cynicism of one who sees himself as a misunderstood and embittered Prometheus. At one of these little Yahoo doors Mrs Viveash halted and rapped as loudly as a small and stiff-hinged knocker would permit. Patiently she waited; several small and dirty children collected to stare at her. She knocked again, and again waited. More children came running up from the farther end of the mews; two young girls of fifteen or sixteen appeared at a neighbouring doorway and immediately gave tongue in whoops of mirthless, hyena-like laughter.

‘Have you ever read about the Pied Piper of Hamelin?’ Mrs Viveash asked the nearest child. Terrified, it shrank away. ‘I thought not,’ she said, and knocked again.

There was a sound, at last, of heavy feet slowly descending steep stairs; the door opened.

‘Welcome to the palazzo!’ It was Lypiatt’s heroic formula of hospitality.

‘Welcome at last,’ Mrs Viveash corrected, and followed him up a narrow, dark staircase that was as steep as a ladder. He was dressed in a velveteen jacket and linen trousers that should have been white, but needed washing. He was dishevelled and his hands were dirty.

‘Did you knock more than once?’ he asked, looking back over his shoulder.

‘More than twenty times,’ Mrs Viveash justifiably exaggerated.

‘I’m infinitely sorry,’ protested Lypiatt. ‘I get so deeply absorbed in my work, you know. Did you wait long?’

‘The children enjoyed it, at any rate.’ Mrs Viveash was irritated by a suspicion, which was probably, after all, quite unjustified, that Casimir had been rather consciously absorbed in his work; that he had heard her first knock and plunged the more profoundly into those depths of absorption where the true artist always dwells, or at any rate ought to dwell; to rise at her third appeal with a slow, pained reluctance, cursing, perhaps, at the importunity of a world which thus noisily interrupted the flow of his inspiration. ‘Queer, the way they stare at one,’ she went on, with a note in her dying voice of a petulance that the children had not inspired. ‘Does one look such a guy?’

Lypiatt threw open the door at the head of the stairs and stood there on the threshold, waiting for her. ‘Queer?’ he repeated. ‘Not a bit.’ And as she moved past him into the room, he laid his hand on her shoulder and fell into step with her, leaving the door to slam behind them. ‘Merely an example of the mob’s instinctive dislike of the aristocratic individual. That’s all. “Oh, why was I born with a different face?” Thank God I was, though. And so were you. But the difference has its disadvantages; the children throw stones.’

‘They didn’t throw stones.’ Mrs Viveash was too truthful, this time.

They halted in the middle of the studio. It was not a very large room and there were too many things in it. The easel stood near the centre of the studio; round it Lypiatt kept a space permanently cleared. There was a broad fairway leading to the door, and another, narrower and tortuously winding between boxes and piled-up furniture and tumbled books, gave access to his bed. There was a piano and a table permanently set with dirty plates and strewed with the relics of two or three meals. Bookshelves stood on either side of the fireplace, and lying on the floor were still more books, piles on dusty piles. Mrs Viveash stood looking at the picture on the easel (abstract again – she didn’t like it), and Lypiatt, who had dropped his hand from her shoulder, and had stepped back the better to see her, stood earnestly looking at Mrs Viveash.

‘May I kiss you?’ he asked after a silence.

Mrs Viveash turned towards him, smiling agonizingly, her eyebrows ironically lifted, her eyes steady and calm and palely, brightly inexpressive. ‘If it really gives you any pleasure,’ she said. ‘It won’t, I may say, to me.’

‘You make me suffer a great deal,’ said Lypiatt, and said it so quietly and unaffectedly, that Myra was almost startled; she was accustomed, with Casimir, to noisier and more magniloquent protestations.

‘I’m very sorry,’ she said; and, really, she felt sorry. ‘But I can’t help it, can I?’

‘I suppose you can’t,’ he said. ‘You can’t,’ he repeated, and his voice had now become the voice of Prometheus in his bitterness. ‘Nor can tigresses.’ He had begun to pace up and down the unobstructed fairway between his easel and the door; Lypiatt liked pacing while he talked. ‘You like playing with the victim,’ he went on; ‘he must die slowly.’

Reassured, Mrs Viveash faintly smiled. This was the familiar Casimir. So long as he could talk like this, could talk like an old-fashioned French novel, it was all right; he couldn’t really be so very unhappy. She sat down on the nearest unencumbered chair. Lypiatt continued to walk back and forth, waving his arms as he walked.

‘But perhaps it’s good for one to suffer,’ he went on, ‘perhaps it’s unavoidable and necessary. Perhaps I ought to thank you. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?’ He halted in front of her, with arms extended in a questioning gesture. Mrs Viveash slightly shrugged her shoulders. She really didn’t know; she couldn’t answer. ‘Ah, but that’s all nonsense,’ he burst out again, ‘all rot. I want to be happy and contented and successful; and of course I should work better if I were. And I want, oh, above everything, everything, I want you: to possess you completely and exclusively and jealously and for ever. And the desire is like rust corroding my heart, it’s like moth eating holes in the fabric of my mind. And you merely laugh.’ He threw up his hands and let them limply fall again.

‘But I don’t laugh,’ said Mrs Viveash. On the contrary, she was very sorry for him; and, what was more, he rather bored her. For a few days, once, she had thought she might be in love with him. His impetuosity had seemed a torrent strong enough to carry her away. She had found out her mistake very soon. After that he had rather amused her: and now he rather bored her. No, decidedly, she never laughed. She wondered why she still went on seeing him. Simply because one must see some one? or why? ‘Are you going to go on with my portrait?’ she asked.

Lypiatt sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose I’d better be getting on with my work. Work – it’s the only thing. “Portrait of a Tigress”.’ The cynical Titan spoke again. ‘Or shall I call it, “Portrait of a Woman who has never been in love”?’

‘That would be a very stupid title,’ said Mrs Viveash.

‘Or, “Portrait of the Artist’s Heart Disease”? That would be good, that would be damned good!’ Lypiatt laughed very loudly and slapped his thighs. He looked, Mrs Viveash thought, peculiarly ugly when he laughed. His face seemed to go all to pieces; not a corner of it but was wrinkled and distorted by the violent grimace of mirth. Even the forehead was ruined when he laughed. Foreheads are generally the human part of people’s faces. Let the nose twitch and the mouth grin and the eyes twinkle as monkeyishly as you like; the forehead can still be calm and serene, the forehead still knows how to be human. But when Casimir laughed, his forehead joined in the general disintegrating grimace. And sometimes even when he wasn’t laughing, when he was just vivaciously talking, his forehead seemed to lose its calm and would twitch and wrinkle itself in a dreadful kind of agitation. ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Heart Disease’ – she didn’t find it so very funny.

‘The critics would think it was a problem picture,’ Lypiatt went on. ‘And so it would be, by God, so it would be. You are a problem. You’re the Sphinx. I wish I were Oedipus and could kill you.’

All this mythology! Mrs Viveash shook her head.

He made his way through the intervening litter and picked up a canvas that was leaning with averted face against the wall near the window. He held it out at arm’s length and examined it, his head critically cocked on one side. ‘Oh, it’s good,’ he said softly. ‘It’s good. Look at it.’ And, stepping out once more into the open, he propped it up against the table so that Mrs Viveash could see it without moving from her chair.

It was a stormy vision of her; it was Myra seen, so to speak, through a tornado. He had distorted her in the portrait, had made her longer and thinner than she really was, had turned her arms into sleek tubes and put a bright, metallic polish on the curve of her cheek. The figure in the portrait seemed to be leaning backwards a little from the surface of the canvas, leaning sideways too, with the twist of an ivory statuette carved out of the curving tip of a great tusk. Only somehow in Lypiatt’s portrait the curve seemed to lack grace, it was without point, it had no sense.

‘You’ve made me look,’ said Mrs Viveash at last, ‘as though I were being blown out of shape by the wind.’ All this show of violence – what was the point of it? She didn’t like it, she didn’t like it at all. But Casimir was delighted with her comment. He slapped his thighs and once more laughed his restless, sharp-featured face to pieces.

‘Yes, by God,’ he shouted, ‘by God, that’s right! Blown out of shape by the wind. That’s it: you’ve said it.’ He began stamping up and down the room again, gesticulating. ‘The wind, the great wind that’s in me.’ He struck his forehead. ‘The wind of life, the wild west wind. I feel it inside me, blowing, blowing. It carries me along with it; for though it’s more than I am, it’s a force that comes from somewhere else, it’s Life itself, it’s God. It blows me along in the teeth of opposing fate, it makes me work on, fight on.’ He was like a man who walks along a sinister road at night and sings to keep up his own spirits, to emphasize and magnify his own existence. ‘And when I paint, when I write or improvise my music, it bends the things I have in my mind, it pushes them in one direction, so that everything I do has the look of a tree that streams north-east with all its branches and all its trunk from the root upwards, as though it were trying to run from before the Atlantic gale.’

Lypiatt stretched out his two hands and, with fingers splayed out to the widest and trembling in the excessive tension of the muscles, moved them slowly upwards and sideways, as though he were running his palms up the stem of a little wind-wizened tree on a hilltop above the ocean.

Mrs Viveash continued to look at the unfinished portrait. It was as noisy and easy and immediately effective as a Vermouth advertisement in the streets of Padua. Cinzano, Bonomelli, Campari – illustrious names. Giotto and Mantegna mouldered meanwhile in their respective chapels.

‘And look at this,’ Lypiatt went on. He took down the canvas that was clamped to the easel and held it out for her inspection. It was one of Casimir’s abstract paintings: a procession of machine-like forms rushing up diagonally from right to left across the canvas, with as it were a spray of energy blowing back from the crest of the wave towards the top right-hand corner. ‘In this painting,’ he said, ‘I symbolize the Artist’s conquering spirit – rushing on the universe, making it its own.’ He began to declaim:

‘Look down, Conquistador,

There on the valley’s broad green floor,

There lies the lake, the jewelled cities gleam,

Chalco and Tlacopan

Await the coming Man;

Look down on Mexico, Conquistador,

Land of your golden dream.

Or the same idea in terms of music –’ and Lypiatt dashed to the piano and evoked a distorted ghost of Scriabin. ‘You see?’ he asked feverishly, when the ghost was laid again and the sad cheap jangling had faded again into silence. ‘You feel? The artist rushes on the world, conquers it, gives it beauty, imposes a moral significance.’ He returned to the picture. ‘This will be fine when it’s finished,’ he said. ‘Tremendous. You feel the wind blowing there, too.’ And with a pointing finger he followed up the onrush of the forms. ‘The great south-wester driving them on. “Like leaves from an enchanter fleeing.” Only not chaotically, not in disorder. They’re blown, so to speak in column of four – by a conscious wind.’ He leaned the canvas against the table and was free again to march and brandish his conquering fists.

‘Life,’ he said, ‘life – that’s the great, essential thing. You’ve got to get life into your art, otherwise it’s nothing. And life only comes out of life, out of passion and feeling; it can’t come out of theories. That’s the stupidity of all this about art for art’s sake and the aesthetic emotions and purely formal values and all that. It’s only the formal relations that matter; one subject is just as good as another – that’s the theory. You’ve only got to look at the pictures of the people who put it into practice to see that it won’t do. Life comes out of life. You must paint with passion, and the passion will stimulate your intellect to create the right formal relations. And to paint with passion, you must paint things that passionately interest you, moving things, human things. Nobody, except a mystical pantheist, like Van Gogh, can seriously be as much interested in napkins, apples and bottles as in his lover’s face, or the resurrection, or the destiny of man. Could Mantegna have devised his splendid compositions if he had painted arrangements of Chianti flasks and cheeses instead of Crucifixions, martyrs and triumphs of great men? Nobody but a fool could believe it. And could I have painted that portrait if I hadn’t loved you, if you weren’t killing me?’

Ah, Bonomelli and illustrious Cinzano!

‘Passionately I paint passion. I draw life out of life. And I wish them joy of their bottles and their Canadian apples and their muddy table napkins with the beastly folds in them that look like loops of tripe.’ Once more Lypiatt disintegrated himself with laughter; then was silent.

Mrs Viveash nodded, slowly and reflectively. ‘I think you’re right,’ she said. Yes, he was surely right; there must be life, life was the important thing. That was precisely why his paintings were so bad – she saw now; there was no life in them. Plenty of noise there was, and gesticulation and a violent galvanized twitching; but no life, only the theatrical show of it. There was a flaw in the conduit; somewhere between the man and his work life leaked out. He protested too much. But it was no good; there was no disguising the deadness. Her portrait was a dancing mummy. He bored her now. Did she even positively dislike him? Behind her unchanging pale eyes Mrs Viveash wondered. But in any case, she reflected, one needn’t always like the people with whom one associates. There are music-halls as well as confidential boudoirs; some people are admitted to the tea-party and the tête-à-tête, others, on a stage invisible, poor things! to themselves, do their little song-and-dance, roll out their characteristic patter, and having provided you with your entertainment are dismissed with their due share of applause. But then, what if they become boring?

‘Well,’ said Lypiatt at last – he had stood there, motionless, for a long time, biting his nails, ‘I suppose we’d better begin our sitting.’ He picked up the unfinished portrait and adjusted it on the easel. ‘I’ve wasted a lot of time,’ he said, ‘and there isn’t, after all, so much of it to waste.’ He spoke gloomily, and his whole person had become, all of a sudden, curiously shrunken and deflated. ‘There isn’t so much of it,’ he repeated, and sighed. ‘I still think of myself as a young man, young and promising, don’t you know. Casimir Lypiatt – it’s a young, promising sort of name, isn’t it? But I’m not young, I’ve passed the age of promise. Every now and then I realize it, and it’s painful, it’s depressing.’

Mrs Viveash stepped up on to the model’s dais and took her seat. ‘Is that right?’ she asked.

Lypiatt looked first at her, then at his picture. Her beauty, his passion – were they only to meet on the canvas? Opps was her lover. Time was passing; he felt tired. ‘That’ll do,’ he said, and began painting. ‘How young are you?’ he asked after a moment.

‘Twenty-five, I should imagine,’ said Mrs Viveash.

‘Twenty-five? Good Lord, it’s nearly fifteen years since I was twenty-five. Fifteen years, fighting all the time. God, how I hate people sometimes! Everybody. It’s not their malignity I mind; I can give them back as good as they give me. It’s their power of silence and indifference, it’s their capacity for making themselves deaf. Here am I with something to say to them, something important and essential. And I’ve been saying it for more than fifteen years, I’ve been shouting it. They pay no attention. I bring them my head and heart on a charger, and they don’t even notice that the things are there. I sometimes wonder how much longer I can manage to go on.’ His voice had become very low, and it trembled. ‘One’s nearly forty, you know . . .’ The voice faded huskily away into silence. Languidly and as though the business exhausted him, he began mixing colours on his palette.

Mrs Viveash looked at him. No, he wasn’t young; at the moment, indeed, he seemed to have become much older than he really was. An old man was standing there, peaked and sharp and worn. He had failed, he was unhappy. But the world would have been unjuster, less discriminating if it had given him success.

‘Some people believe in you,’ she said; there was nothing else for her to say.

Lypiatt looked up at her. ‘You?’ he asked.

Mrs Viveash nodded, deliberately. It was a lie. But was it possible to tell the truth? ‘And then there is the future,’ she reassured him, and her faint death-bed voice seemed to prophesy with a perfect certainty. ‘You’re not forty yet; you’ve got twenty, thirty years of work in front of you. And there were others, after all, who had to wait – a long time – sometimes till after they were dead. Great men; Blake, for instance . . .’ She felt positively ashamed; it was like a little talk by Doctor Frank Crane. But she felt still more ashamed when she saw that Casimir had begun to cry, and that the tears were rolling, one after another, slowly down his face.

He put down his palette, he stepped on to the dais, he came and knelt at Mrs Viveash’s feet. He took one of her hands between his own and he bent over it, pressing it to his forehead, as though it were a charm against unhappy thoughts, sometimes kissing it; soon it was wet with tears. He wept almost in silence.

‘It’s all right,’ Mrs Viveash kept repeating, ‘it’s all right,’ and she laid her free hand on his bowed head, she patted it comfortingly as one might pat the head of a large dog that comes and thrusts its muzzle between one’s knees. She felt, even as she made it, how meaningless and unintimate the gesture was. If she had liked him, she would have run her fingers through his hair; but somehow his hair rather disgusted her. ‘It’s all right, all right.’ But, of course, it wasn’t all right; and she was comforting him under false pretences and he was kneeling at the feet of somebody who simply wasn’t there – so utterly detached, so far away she was from all this scene and all his misery.

‘You’re the only person,’ he said at last, ‘who cares or understands.’

Mrs Viveash could almost have laughed.

He began once more to kiss her hand.

‘Beautiful and enchanting Myra – you were always that. But now you’re good and dear as well, now I know you’re kind.’

‘Poor Casimir!’ she said. Why was it that people always got involved in one’s life? If only one could manage things on the principle of the railways! Parallel tracks – that was the thing. For a few miles you’d be running at the same speed. There’d be delightful conversation out of the windows; you’d exchange the omelette in your restaurant car for the vol-au-vent in theirs. And when you’d said all there was to say, you’d put on a little more steam, wave your hand, blow a kiss and away you’d go, forging ahead along the smooth, polished rails. But instead of that, there were these dreadful accidents; the points were wrongly set, the trains came crashing together; or people jumped on you as you were passing through the stations and made a nuisance of themselves and wouldn’t allow themselves to be turned off. Poor Casimir! But he irritated her, he was a horrible bore. She ought to have stopped seeing him.

‘You can’t wholly dislike me, then?’

‘But of course not, my poor Casimir!’

‘If you knew how horribly I loved you!’ He looked up at her despairingly.

‘But what’s the good?’ said Mrs Viveash.

‘Have you ever known what it’s like to love some one so much that you feel you could die of it? So that it hurts all the time. As though there were a wound. Have you ever known that?’

Mrs Viveash smiled her agonizing smile, nodded slowly and said, ‘Perhaps. And one doesn’t die, you know. One doesn’t die.’

Lypiatt was leaning back, staring fixedly up at her. The tears were dry on his face, his cheeks were flushed. ‘Do you know what it is,’ he asked, ‘to love so much that you begin to long for the anodyne of physical pain to quench the pain in the soul? You don’t know that.’ And suddenly, with his clenched fist, he began to bang the wooden dais on which he was kneeling, blow after blow, with all his strength.

Mrs Viveash leant forward and tried to arrest his hand. ‘You’re mad, Casimir,’ she said. ‘You’re mad. Don’t do that.’ She spoke with anger.

Lypiatt laughed till his face was all broken up with the grimace, and proffered for her inspection his bleeding knuckles. The skin hung in little white tags and tatters, and from below the blood was slowly oozing up to the surface. ‘Look,’ he said, and laughed again. Then suddenly, with an extraordinary agility, he jumped to his feet, bounded from the dais and began once more to stride up and down the fairway between his easel and the door.

‘By God,’ he kept repeating, ‘by God, by God. I feel it in me. I can face the whole lot of you; the whole damned lot. Yes, and I shall get the better of you yet. An Artist’ – he called up that traditional ghost and it comforted him; he wrapped himself with a protective gesture within the ample folds of its bright mantle – ‘an Artist doesn’t fail under unhappiness. He gets new strength from it. The torture makes him sweat new masterpieces . . .’

He began to talk about his books, his poems and pictures; all the great things in his head, the things he had already done. He talked about his exhibition – ah, by God, that would astonish them, that would bowl them over, this time. The blood mounted to his face; there was a flush over the high projecting cheekbones. He could feel the warm blood behind his eyes. He laughed aloud; he was a laughing lion. He stretched out his arms; he was enormous, his arms reached out like the branches of a cedar. The Artist walked across the world and the mangy dogs ran yelping and snapping behind him. The great wind blew and blew, driving him on; it lifted him and he began to fly.

Mrs Viveash listened. It didn’t look as though he would get much further with the portrait.

CHAPTER VII

IT WAS PRESS Day. The critics had begun to arrive; Mr Albemarle circulated among them with a ducal amiability. The young assistant hovered vaguely about, straining to hear what the great men had to say and trying to pretend that he wasn’t eavesdropping. Lypiatt’s pictures hung on the walls, and Lypiatt’s catalogue, thick with its preface and its explanatory notes, was in all hands.

‘Very strong,’ Mr Albemarle kept repeating, ‘very strong indeed!’ It was his password for the day.

Little Mr Clew, who represented the Daily Post, was inclined to be enthusiastic. ‘How well he writes!’ he said to Mr Albemarle, looking up from the catalogue. ‘And how well he paints! What impasto!’

Impasto, impasto – the young assistant sidled off unobtrusively to the desk and made a note of it. He would look the word up in Grubb’s Dictionary of Art and Artists later on. He made his way back, circuitously, and as though by accident, into Mr Clew’s neighbourhood.

Mr Clew was one of those rare people who have a real passion for art. He loved painting, all painting, indiscriminately. In a picture-gallery he was like a Turk in a harem; he adored them all. He loved Memling as much as Raphael, he loved Grünewald and Michelangelo, Holman Hunt and Manet, Romney and Tintoretto; how happy he could be with all of them! Sometimes, it is true, he hated; but that was only when familiarity had not yet bred love. At the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, for example, in 1911, he had taken a very firm stand. ‘This is an obscene farce,’ he had written then. Now, however, there was no more passionate admirer of Matisse’s genius. As a connoisseur and kunstforscher, Mr Clew was much esteemed. People would bring him dirty old pictures to look at, and he would exclaim at once: Why, it’s an El Greco, a Piazzetta, or some other suitable name. Asked how he knew, he would shrug his shoulders and say: But it’s signed all over. His certainty and his enthusiasm were infectious. Since the coming of El Greco into fashion, he had discovered dozens of early works by that great artist. For Lord Petersfield’s collection alone he had found four early El Grecos, all by pupils of Bassano. Lord Petersfield’s confidence in Mr Clew was unbounded; not even that affair of the Primitives had shaken it. It was a sad affair: Lord Petersfield’s Duccio had shown signs of cracking; the estate carpenter was sent for to take a look at the panel; he had looked. ‘A worse-seasoned piece of Illinois hickory,’ he said, ‘I’ve never seen.’ After that he looked at the Simone Martini; for that, on the contrary, he was full of praise. Smooth-grained, well-seasoned – it wouldn’t crack, no, not in a hundred years. ‘A nicer slice of board never came out of America.’ He had a hyperbolical way of speaking. Lord Petersfield was extremely angry; he dismissed the estate carpenter on the spot. After that he told Mr Clew that he wanted a Giorgione, and Mr Clew went out and found him one which was signed all over.

‘I like this very much,’ said Mr Clew, pointing to one of the thoughts with which Lypiatt had prefaced his catalogue. ‘“Genius,”’ he adjusted his spectacles and began to read aloud, ‘“is life. Genius is a force of nature. In art, nothing else counts. The modern impotents, who are afraid of genius and who are envious of it, have invented in self-defence the notion of the Artist. The Artist with his sense of form, his style, his devotion to pure beauty, et cetera, et cetera. But Genius includes the Artist; every Genius has, among very many others, the qualities attributed by the impotents to the Artist. The Artist without genius is a carver of fountains through which no water flows.” Very true,’ said Mr Clew, ‘very true indeed.’ He marked the passage with his pencil.

Mr Albemarle produced the password. ‘Very strongly put,’ he said.

‘I have always felt that myself,’ said Mr Clew. ‘El Greco, for example . . .’

‘Good morning. What about El Greco?’ said a voice, all in one breath. The thin, long, skin-covered skeleton of Mr Mallard hung over them like a guilty conscience. Mr Mallard wrote every week in the Hebdomadal Digest. He had an immense knowledge of art, and a sincere dislike of all that was beautiful. The only modern painter whom he really admired was Hodler. All others were treated by him with a merciless savagery; he tore them to pieces in his weekly articles with all the holy gusto of a Calvinist iconoclast smashing images of the Virgin.

‘What about El Greco?’ he repeated. He had a peculiarly passionate loathing of El Greco.

Mr Clew smiled up at him propitiatingly; he was afraid of Mr Mallard. His enthusiasms were no match for Mr Mallard’s erudite and logical disgusts. ‘I was merely quoting him as an example,’ he said.

‘An example, I hope, of incompetent drawing, baroque composition, disgusting forms, garish colouring and hysterical subject-matter.’ Mr Mallard showed his old ivory teeth in a menacing smile. ‘Those are the only things which El Greco’s work exemplifies.’

Mr Clew gave a nervous little laugh. ‘What do you think of these?’ he asked, pointing to Lypiatt’s canvases.

‘They look to me very ordinarily bad,’ answered Mr Mallard.

The young assistant listened appalled. In a business like this, how was it possible to make good?

‘All the same,’ said Mr Clew courageously, ‘I like that bowl of roses in the window with the landscape behind. Number twenty-nine.’ He looked in the catalogue. ‘And there’s a really charming little verse about it:

“O beauty of the rose,

Goodness as well as perfume exhaling!

Who gazes on these flowers,

On this blue hill and ripening field – he knows

Where duty leads and that the nameless Powers

In a rose can speak their will.”

Really charming!’ Mr Clew made another mark with his pencil.

‘But commonplace, commonplace.’ Mr Mallard shook his head. ‘And in any case a verse can’t justify a bad picture. What an unsubtle harmony of colour! And how uninteresting the composition is! That receding diagonal – it’s been worked to death.’ He too made a mark in his catalogue – a cross and a little circle, arranged like the skull and cross-bones on a pirate’s flag. Mr Mallard’s catalogues were always covered with these little marks: they were his symbols of condemnation.

Mr Albemarle, meanwhile, had moved away to greet the new arrivals. To the critic of the Daily Cinema he had to explain that there were no portraits of celebrities. The reporter from the Evening Planet had to be told which were the best pictures.

‘Mr Lypiatt,’ he dictated, ‘is a poet and philosopher as well as a painter. His catalogue is a – h’m – declaration of faith.’

The reporter took it down in shorthand. ‘And very nice too,’ he said. ‘I’m most grateful to you, sir, most grateful.’ And he hurried away, to get to the Cattle Show before the King should arrive. Mr Albemarle affably addressed himself to the critic of the Morning Globe.

‘I always regard this gallery,’ said a loud and cheerful voice, full of bulls and canaries in chorus, ‘as positively a mauvais lieu. Such exhibitions!’ And Mr Mercaptan shrugged his shoulders expressively. He halted to wait for his companion.

Mrs Viveash had lagged behind, reading the catalogue as she slowly walked along. ‘It’s a complete book,’ she said, ‘full of poems and essays and short stories even, so far as I can see.’

‘Oh, the usual cracker mottoes.’ Mr Mercaptan laughed. ‘I know the sort of thing. “Look after the past and the future will look after itself.” “God squared minus Man squared equals Art-plus-life times Art-minus-life.” “The Higher the Art the fewer the morals” – only that’s too nearly good sense to have been invented by Lypiatt. But I know the sort of thing. I could go on like that for ever.’ Mr Mercaptan was delighted with himself.

‘I’ll read you one of them,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘“A picture is a chemical combination of plastic form and spiritual significance.”’

‘Crikey!’ said Mr Mercaptan.

‘“Those who think that a picture is a matter of nothing but plastic form are like those who imagine that water is made of nothing but hydrogen.”’

Mr Mercaptan made a grimace. ‘What writing!’ he exclaimed; ‘le style c’est l’homme. Lypiatt hasn’t got a style. Argal – inexorable conclusion – Lypiatt doesn’t exist. My word, though. Look at those horrible great nudes there. Like Caraccis with cubical muscles.’

‘Samson and Delilah,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘Would you like me to read about them?’

‘Certainly not.’

Mrs Viveash did not press the matter. Casimir, she thought, must have been thinking about her when he wrote this little poem about Poets and Women, crossed genius, torments, the sweating of masterpieces. She sighed. ‘Those leopards are rather nice,’ she said, and looked at the catalogue again. ‘“An animal is a symbol and its form is significant. In the long process of adaptation, evolution has refined and simplified and shaped, till every part of the animal expresses one desire, a single idea. Man, who has become what he is, not by specialization, but by generalization, symbolizes with his body no one thing. He is a symbol of everything from the most hideous and ferocious bestiality to godhead.”’

‘Dear me,’ said Mr Mercaptan.

A canvas of mountains and enormous clouds like nascent sculptures presented itself.

‘“Aerial Alps”’ Mrs Viveash began to read.

‘“Aerial Alps of amber and of snow,

Junonian flesh, and bosomy alabaster

Carved by the wind’s uncertain hands . . .”’

Mr Mercaptan stopped his ears. ‘Please, please,’ he begged.

‘Number seventeen,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘is called “Woman on a Cosmic Background.”’ A female figure stood leaning against a pillar on a hilltop, and beyond was a blue night with stars. ‘Underneath is written: “For one at least, she is more than the starry universe.”’ Mrs Viveash remembered that Lypiatt had once said very much that sort of thing to her. ‘So many of Casimir’s things remind me,’ she said, ‘of those Italian vermouth advertisements. You know – Cinzano, Bonomelli and all those. I wish they didn’t. This woman in white with her head in the Great Bear . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Poor Casimir.’

Mr Mercaptan roared and squealed with laughter. ‘Bonomelli,’ he said; ‘that’s precisely it. What a critic, Myra! I take off my hat.’ They moved on. ‘And what’s this grand transformation scene?’ he asked.

Mrs Viveash looked at the catalogue. ‘It’s called “The Sermon on the Mount”,’ she said. ‘And really, do you know, I rather like it. All that crowd of figures slanting up the hill and the single figure on the top – it seems to me very dramatic.’

‘My dear,’ protested Mr Mercaptan.

‘And in spite of everything,’ said Mrs Viveash, feeling suddenly and uncomfortably that she had somehow been betraying the man, ‘he’s really very nice, you know. Very nice indeed.’ Her expiring voice sounded very decidedly.

‘Ah, ces femmes,’ exclaimed Mr Mercaptan, ‘ces femmes! They’re all Pasiphaes and Ledas. They all in their hearts prefer beasts to men, savages to civilized beings. Even you, Myra, I really believe.’ He shook his head.

Mrs Viveash ignored the outburst. ‘Very nice,’ she repeated thoughtfully. ‘Only rather a bore . . .’ Her voice expired altogether.

They continued their round of the gallery.

CHAPTER VIII

CRITICALLY, IN THE glasses of Mr Bojanus’s fitting-room, Gumbril examined his profile, his back view. Inflated, the Patent Small-Clothes bulged, bulged decidedly, though with a certain gracious opulence that might, in a person of the other sex, have seemed only deliciously natural. In him, however, Gumbril had to admit, the opulence seemed a little misplaced and paradoxical. Still, if one has to suffer in order to be beautiful, one must also expect to be ugly in order not to suffer. Practically, the trousers were a tremendous success. He sat down heavily on the hard wooden bench of the fitting-room and was received as though on a lap of bounding resiliency; the Patent Small-Clothes, there was no doubt, would be proof even against marble. And the coat, he comforted himself, would mask with its skirts the too decided bulge. Or if it didn’t, well, there was no help for it. One must resign oneself to bulging, that was all.

‘Very nice,’ he declared at last.

Mr Bojanus, who had been watching his client in silence and with a polite but also, Gumbril could not help feeling, a somewhat ironical smile, coughed. ‘It depends,’ he said, ‘precisely what you mean by “nice”.’ He cocked his head on one side, and the fine waxed end of his moustache was like a pointer aimed up at some remote star.

Gumbril said nothing, but catching sight once more of his own side view, nodded a dubious agreement.

‘If by nice,’ continued Mr Bojanus, ‘you mean comfortable, well and good. If, however, you mean elegant, then, Mr Gumbril, I fear I must disagree.’

‘But elegance,’ said Gumbril, feebly playing the philosopher, ‘is only relative, Mr Bojanus. There are certain African negroes among whom it is considered elegant to pierce the lips and distend them with wooden plates, until the mouth looks like a pelican’s beak.’

Mr Bojanus placed his hand in his bosom and slightly bowed. ‘Very possibly, Mr Gumbril,’ he replied. ‘But if you’ll pardon my saying so, we are not African negroes.’

Gumbril was crushed, deservedly. He looked at himself again in the mirrors. ‘Do you object,’ he asked after a pause, ‘to all eccentricities in dress, Mr Bojanus? Would you put us all into your elegant uniform?’

‘Certainly not,’ replied Mr Bojanus. ‘There are certain walks of life in which eccentricity in appearance is positively a sine qua non, Mr Gumbril, and I might almost say de rigueur.’

‘And which walks of life, Mr Bojanus, may I ask? You refer, perhaps, to the artistic walks? Sombreros and Byronic collars and possibly velveteen trousers? Though all that sort of thing is surely a little out of date, nowadays.’

Enigmatically Mr Bojanus smiled, a playful Sphinx. He thrust his right hand deeper into his bosom and with his left twisted to a finer needle the point of his moustache. ‘Not artists, Mr Gumbril.’ He shook his head. ‘In practice they may show themselves a little eccentric and negleejay. But they have no need to look unusual on principle. It’s only the politicians who need to do it on principle. It’s only de rigueur, as one might say, in the political walks, Mr Gumbril.’

‘You surprise me,’ said Gumbril. ‘I should have thought that it was to the politician’s interest to look respectable and normal.’

‘But it is still more to his interest as a leader of men to look distinguished,’ Mr Bojanus replied. ‘Well, not precisely distinguished,’ he corrected himself, ‘because that implies that politicians look distangay, which I regret to say, Mr Gumbril, they very often don’t. Distinguishable, is more what I mean.’

‘Eccentricity is their badge of office?’ suggested Gumbril. He sat down luxuriously on the Patent Small-Clothes.

‘That’s more like it,’ said Mr Bojanus, tilting his moustaches. ‘The leader has got to look different from the other ones. In the good old days they always wore their official badges. The leader ’ad his livery, like every one else, to show who he was. That was sensible, Mr Gumbril. Nowadays he has no badge – at least not for ordinary occasions – for I don’t count Privy Councillors’ uniforms and all that sort of once-a-year fancy dress. ‘E’s reduced to dressing in some eccentric way or making the most of the peculiarities of ’is personal appearance. A very ’apazard method of doing things, Mr Gumbril, very ’apazard.’

Gumbril agreed.

Mr Bojanus went on, making small, neat gestures as he spoke. ‘Some of them,’ he said, ‘wear ’uge collars, like Mr Gladstone. Some wear orchids and eyeglasses, like Joe Chamberlain. Some let their ‘air grow, like Lloyd George. Some wear curious ’ats, like Winston Churchill. Some put on black shirts, like this Mussolini, and some put on red ones, like Garibaldi. Some turn up their moustaches, like the German Emperor. Some turn them down, like Clemenceau. Some grow whiskers, like Tirpitz. I don’t speak of all the uniforms, orders, ornaments, ’ead-dresses, feathers, crowns, buttons, tattooings, ear-rings, sashes, swords, trains, tiaras, urims, thummims and what not, Mr Gumbril, that ’ave been used in the past and in other parts of the world to distinguish the leader. We, ’oo knows our ’istory, Mr Gumbril, we know all about that.’

Gumbril made a deprecating gesture. ‘You speak for yourself, Mr Bojanus,’ he said.

Mr Bojanus bowed.

‘Pray continue,’ said Gumbril.

Mr Bojanus bowed again. ‘Well, Mr Gumbril,’ he said, ‘the point of all these things, as I’ve already remarked, is to make the leader look different, so that ’e can be recognized at the first coop d’oil, as you might say, by the ’erd ’e ’appens to be leading. For the ‘uman ’erd, Mr Gumbril, is an ’erd which can’t do without a leader. Sheep, for example: I never noticed that they ’ad a leader; nor rooks. Bees, on the other ‘and, I take it, ’ave. At least when they’re swarming. Correct me, Mr Gumbril, if I’m wrong. Natural ’istory was never, as you might say, my forty.’

‘Nor mine,’ protested Gumbril.

‘As for elephants and wolves, Mr Gumbril, I can’t pretend to speak of them with first-’and knowledge. Nor llamas, nor locusts, nor squab pigeons, nor lemmings. But ‘uman beings, Mr Gumbril, those I can claim to talk of with authority, if I may say so in all modesty, and not as the scribes. I ’ave made a special study of them, Mr Gumbril. And my profession ‘as brought me into contact with very numerous specimens.’

Gumbril could not help wondering where precisely in Mr Bojanus’s museum he himself had his place.

‘The ‘uman ’erd,’ Mr Bojanus went on, ‘must have a leader. And a leader must have something to distinguish him from the ’erd. It’s important for ‘is interests that he should be recognized easily. See a baby reaching out of a bath and you immediately think of Pears’ Soap; see the white ‘air waving out behind, and you think of Lloyd George. That’s the secret. But in my opinion, Mr Gumbril, the old system was much more sensible, give them regular uniforms and badges, I say; make Cabinet Ministers wear feathers in their ‘air. Then the people will be looking to a real fixed symbol of leadership, not to the peculiarities of the mere individuals. Beards and ‘air and funny collars change; but a good uniform is always the same. Give them feathers, that’s what I say, Mr Gumbril. Feathers will increase the dignity of the State and lessen the importance of the individual. And that,’ concluded Mr Bojanus with emphasis, ‘that, Mr Gumbril, will be all to the good.’

‘But you don’t mean to tell me,’ said Gumbril, ‘that if I chose to show myself to the multitude in my inflated trousers, I could become a leader – do you?’

‘Ah, no,’ said Mr Bojanus. ‘You’d ’ave to ’ave the talent for talking and ordering people about, to begin with. Feathers wouldn’t give the genius, but they’d magnify the effect of what there was.’

Gumbril got up and began to divest himself of the Small-Clothes. He unscrewed the valve and the air whistled out, dyingly. He too sighed. ‘Curious,’ he said pensively, ‘that I’ve never felt the need for a leader. I’ve never met any one I felt I could whole-heartedly admire or believe in, never any one I wanted to follow. It must be pleasant, I should think, to hand oneself over to somebody else. It must give you a warm, splendid, comfortable feeling.’

Mr Bojanus smiled and shook his head. ‘You and I, Mr Gumbril,’ he said, ‘we’re not the sort of people to be impressed with feathers or even by talking and ordering about. We may not be leaders ourselves. But at any rate we aren’t the ’erd.’

‘Not the main herd, perhaps.’

‘Not any ’erd,’ Mr Bojanus insisted proudly.

Gumbril shook his head dubiously and buttoned up his trousers. He was not sure, now he came to think of it, that he didn’t belong to all the herds – by a sort of honorary membership and temporarily, as occasion offered, as one belongs to the Union at the sister university or to the Naval and Military Club while one’s own is having its annual clean-out. Shearwater’s herd, Lypiatt’s herd, Mr Mercaptan’s herd, Mrs Viveash’s herd, the architectural herd of his father, the educational herd (but that, thank God! was now bleating on distant pastures), the herd of Mr Bojanus – he belonged to them all a little, to none of them completely. Nobody belonged to his herd. How could they? No chameleon can live with comfort on a tartan. He put on his coat.

‘I’ll send the garments this evening,’ said Mr Bojanus.

Gumbril left the shop. At the theatrical wig-maker’s in Leicester Square he ordered a blond fan-shaped beard to match his own hair and moustache. He would, at any rate, be his own leader; he would wear a badge, a symbol of authority. And Coleman had said that there were dangerous relations to be entered into by the symbol’s aid.

Ah, now he was provisionally a member of Coleman’s herd. It was all very depressing.

CHAPTER IX

FAN-SHAPED, BLOND, MOUNTED on gauze and guaranteed undetectable, it arrived from the wig-maker, preciously packed in a stout cardboard box six times too large for it and accompanied by a quarter of a pint of the choicest spirit gum. In the privacy of his bedroom Gumbril uncoffined it, held it out for his own admiration, caressed its silkiness, and finally tried it on, holding it provisionally to his chin, in front of the looking-glass. The effect, he decided immediately, was stunning, was grandiose. From melancholy and all too mild he saw himself transformed on the instant into a sort of jovial Henry the Eighth, into a massive Rabelaisian man, broad and powerful and exuberant with vitality and hair.

The proportions of his face were startlingly altered. The podium, below the mouth, had been insufficiently massive to carry the stately order of the nose; and the ratiocinative attic of the forehead, noble enough, no doubt, in itself, had been disproportionately high. The beard now supplied the deficiencies in the stylobate, and planted now on a firm basement of will, the order of the senses, the aerial attic of ideas, reared themselves with a more classical harmoniousness of proportion. It only remained for him to order from Mr Bojanus an American coat, padded out at the shoulders as squarely and heroically as a doublet of the Cinquecento, and he would look the complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. Fitted out with coat and beard, he could qualify for the next vacancy among the coenobites of Thelema.

He removed his beard – ‘put his beaver up,’ as they used to say in the fine old days of chivalry; he would have to remember that little joke for Coleman’s benefit. He put his beaver up – ha, ha! – and stared ruefully at the far from Rabelaisian figure which now confronted him. The moustache – that was genuine enough – which had looked, in conjunction with the splendid work of art below, so fierce and manly, served by itself, he now perceived, only droopily to emphasize his native mildness and melancholy.

It was a dismal affair, which might have belonged to Maurice Barrès in youth; a slanting, flagging, sagging thing, such as could only grow on the lip of an assiduous Cultivator of the Me, and would become, as one grew older, ludicrously out of place on the visage of a roaring Nationalist. If it weren’t that it fitted in so splendidly with the beard, if it weren’t that it became so marvellously different in the new context he had now discovered for it, he would have shaved it off then and there.

Mournful appendage. But now he would transform it, he would add to it its better half. Zadig’s quatrain to his mistress, when the tablet on which it was written was broken in two, became a treasonable libel on the king. So this moustache, thought Gumbril, as gingerly as he applied the spirit gum to his cheeks and chin, this moustache which by itself serves only to betray me, becomes, as soon as it is joined to its missing context, an amorous arm for the conquest of the fair sex.

A little far-fetched, he decided; a little ponderous. And besides, as so few people had read Zadig, not much use in conversation. Cautiously and with neat, meticulous fingertips he adjusted the transformation to his gummed face, pressed it firmly, held it while it stuck fast. The portals of Thelema opened before him; he was free of those rich orchards, those halls and courts, those broad staircases winding in noble spirals within the flanks of each of the fair round towers. And it was Coleman who had pointed out the way; he felt duly grateful. One last look at the Complete Man, one final and definitive constatation that the Mild and Melancholy one was, for the time at least, no more; and he was ready in all confidence to set out. He selected a loose, light great-coat – not that he needed a coat at all, for the day was bright and warm; but until Mr Bojanus had done his labour of padding he would have to broaden himself out in this way, even if it did mean that he might be uncomfortably hot. To fall short of Complete Manhood for fear of a little inconvenience would be absurd. He slipped, therefore, into his light coat – a toga, Mr Bojanus called it, a very neat toga in real West Country whipcord. He put on his broadest and blackest felt hat, for breadth above everything was what he needed to give him completeness – breadth of stature, breadth of mind, breadth of human sympathy, breadth of smile, breadth of humour, breadth of everything. The final touch was a massive and antique Malacca cane belonging to his father. If he had possessed a bulldog, he would have taken it out on a leash. But he did not. He issued into the sunshine, unaccompanied.

But unaccompanied he did not mean to remain for long. These warm, bright May days were wonderful days for being in love on. And to be alone on such days was like a malady. It was a malady from which the Mild and Melancholy Man suffered all too frequently. And yet there were millions of superfluous women in the country; millions of them. Every day, in the streets, one saw thousands of them passing; and some were exquisite, were ravishing, the only possible soulmates. Thousands of unique soulmates every day. The Mild and Melancholy one allowed them to pass – for ever. But to-day – to-day he was the complete and Rabelaisian man; he was bearded to the teeth; the imbecile game was at its height; there would be opportunities, and the Complete Man could know how to take them. No, he would not be unaccompanied for long.

Outside in the square the fourteen plane-trees glowed in their young, unsullied green. At the end of every street the golden muslin of the haze hung in an unwrinkled curtain that thinned away above the sky’s gauzy horizon to transparent nothing against the intenser blue. The dim, conch-like murmur that in a city is silence seemed hazily to identify itself with the golden mistiness of summer, and against this dim, wide background the yells of the playing children detached themselves, distinct and piercing. ‘Beaver,’ they shouted, ‘beaver!’ and, ‘Is it cold up there?’ Full of playful menace, the Complete Man shook at them his borrowed Malacca. He accepted their prompt hail as the most favourable of omens.

At the first tobacconist’s Gumbril bought the longest cigar he could find, and trailing behind him expiring blue wreaths of Cuban smoke, he made his way slowly and with an ample swagger towards the park. It was there, under the elms, on the shores of the ornamental waters, that he expected to find his opportunity, that he intended – how confidently behind his Gargantuan mask! – to take it.

The opportunity offered itself sooner than he expected.

He had just turned into the Queen’s Road and was sauntering past Whiteley’s with the air of one who knows that he has a right to a good place, to two or three good places even, in the sun, when he noticed just in front of him, peering intently at the New Season’s Models, a young woman whom in his mild and melancholy days he would have only hopelessly admired, but who now, to the Complete Man, seemed a destined and accessible prey. She was fairly tall, but seemed taller than she actually was, by reason of her remarkable slenderness. Not that she looked disagreeably thin, far from it. It was a rounded slenderness. The Complete Man decided to consider her as tubular – flexible and tubular, like a section of boa constrictor, should one say? She was dressed in clothes that emphasized this serpentine slimness: in a close-fitting grey jacket that buttoned up to the neck and a long, narrow grey skirt that came down to her ankles. On her head was a small, sleek black hat, that looked almost as though it were made of metal. It was trimmed on one side with a bunch of dull golden foliage.

Those golden leaves were the only touch of ornament in all the severe smoothness and unbroken tubularity of her person. As for her face, that was neither strictly beautiful nor strictly ugly, but combined elements of both beauty and ugliness into a whole that was unexpected, that was oddly and somehow unnaturally attractive.

Pretending, he too, to take an interest in the New Season’s Models, Gumbril made, squinting sideways over the burning tip of his cigar, an inventory of her features. The forehead, that was mostly hidden by her hat; it might be pensively and serenely high, it might be of that degree of lowness which in men is villainous, but in women is only another – a rather rustic one perhaps, rather canaille even, but definitely another – attraction. There was no telling. As for her eyes, they were green, and limpid; set wide apart in her head, they looked out from under heavy lids and through openings that slanted up towards the outer corners. Her nose was slightly aquiline. Her mouth was full-lipped, but straight and unexpectedly wide. Her chin was small, round and firm. She had a pale skin, a little flushed over the cheek-bones, which were prominent.

On the left cheek, close under the corner of the slanting eye, she had a brown mole. Such hair as Gumbril could see beneath her hat was pale and inconspicuously blond. When she had finished looking at the New Season’s Models she moved slowly on, halting for a moment before the travelling-trunks and the fitted picnic-baskets; dwelling for a full minute over the corsets, passing the hats, for some reason, rather contemptuously, but pausing, which seemed strange, for a long pensive look at the cigars and wine. As for the tennis rackets and cricket bats, the school outfits and the gentleman’s hosiery – she hadn’t so much as a look for one of them. But how lovingly she lingered before the boots and shoes! Her own feet, the Complete Man noticed with satisfaction, had an elegance of florid curves. And while other folk walked on neat’s leather she was content to be shod with nothing coarser than mottled serpent’s skin.

Slowly they drifted up Queen’s Road, lingering before every jeweller’s, every antiquarian’s, every milliner’s on the way. The stranger gave him no opportunity, and indeed, Gumbril reflected, how should she? For the imbecile game on which he was relying is a travelling piquet for two players, not a game of patience. No sane human being could play it in solitude. He would have to make the opportunity himself.

All that was mild in him, all that was melancholy, shrank with a sickened reluctance from the task of breaking – with what consequences delicious and perilous in the future or, in the case of the deserved snub, immediately humiliating? – a silence which, by the tenth or twelfth shop window, had become quite unbearably significant. The Mild and Melancholy one would have drifted to the top of the road, sharing, with that community of tastes which is the basis of every happy union, her enthusiasm for brass candlesticks and toasting-forks, imitation Chippendale furniture, gold watch-bracelets and low-waisted summer frocks; would have drifted to the top of the road and watched her, dumbly, disappearing for ever into the green park or along the blank pavements of the Bayswater Road; would have watched her for ever disappear and then, if the pubs had happened to be open, would have gone and ordered a glass of port, and sitting at the bar would have savoured, still dumbly, among the other drinkers, the muddy grapes of the Douro, and his own unique loneliness.

That was what the Mild and Melancholy one would have done. But the sight, as he gazed earnestly into an antiquary’s window, of his own powerful bearded face reflected in a sham Hepplewhite mirror, reminded him that the Mild and Melancholy one was temporarily extinct, and that it was the Complete Man who now dawdled, smoking his long cigar, up the Queen’s Road towards the Abbey of Thelema.

He squared his shoulders; in that loose toga of Mr Bojanus’s he looked as copious as François Premier. The time, he decided, had come.

It was at this moment that the reflection of the stranger’s face joined itself in the little mirror, as she made a little movement away from the Old Welsh dresser in the corner, to that of his own. She looked at the spurious Hepplewhite. Their eyes met in the hospitable glass. Gumbril smiled. The corners of the stranger’s wide mouth seemed faintly to move; like petals of the magnolia, her eyelids came slowly down over her slanting eyes. Gumbril turned from the reflection to the reality.

‘If you want to say Beaver,’ he said, ‘you may.’

The Complete Man had made his first speech.

‘I want to say nothing,’ said the stranger. She spoke with a charming precision and distinctness, lingering with a pretty emphasis on the n of nothing. ‘N-n-nothing’ – it sounded rather final. She turned away, she moved on.

But the Complete Man was not one to be put off by a mere ultimatum. ‘There,’ he said, falling into step with her, ‘now I’ve had it – the deserved snub. Honour is saved, prestige duly upheld. Now we can get on with our conversation.’

The Mild and Melancholy one stood by, gasping with astonished admiration.

‘You are v-very impertinent,’ said the stranger, smiling and looking up from under the magnolia petals.

‘It is in my character,’ said the Complete Man. ‘You mustn’t blame me. One cannot escape from one’s heredity; that’s one’s share of original sin.’

‘There is always grace,’ said the stranger.

Gumbril caressed his beard. ‘True,’ he replied.

‘I advise you to pr-ray for it.’

His prayer, the Mild and Melancholy one reflected, had already been answered. The original sin in him had been self-corrected.

‘Here is another antique shop,’ said Gumbril. ‘Shall we stop and have a look at it?’

The stranger glanced at him doubtfully. But he looked quite serious. They stopped.

‘How revolting this sham cottage furniture is,’ Gumbril remarked. The shop, he noticed, was called ‘Ye Olde Farme House’.

The stranger, who had been on the point of saying how much she liked those lovely Old Welsh dressers, gave him her heartiest agreement. ‘So v-vulgar.’

‘So horribly refined. So refined and artistic.’

She laughed on a descending chromatic scale. This was excitingly new. Poor Aunt Aggie with her Arts and Crafts, and her old English furniture. And to think she had taken them so seriously! She saw in a flash the fastidious lady that she now was – with Louis whatever-it-was furniture at home, and jewels, and young poets to tea, and real artists. In the past, when she had imagined herself entertaining real artists, it had always been among really artistic furniture. Aunt Aggie’s furniture. But now – no, oh no. This man was probably an artist. His beard; and that big black hat. But not poor; very well dressed.

‘Yes, it’s funny to think that there are people who call that sort of thing artistic. One’s quite s-sorry for them,’ she added, with a little hiss.

‘You have a kind heart,’ said Gumbril. ‘I’m glad to see that.’

‘Not v-very kind, I’m af-fraid.’ She looked at him sideways, and significantly as the fastidious lady would have looked at one of the poets.

‘Well, kind enough, I hope,’ said the Complete Man. He was delighted with his new acquaintance.

Together they disembogued into the Bayswater Road. It was here, Gumbril reflected, that the Mild and Melancholy one would dumbly have slunk away to his glass of port and his loneliness among the alien topers at the bar. But the Complete Man took his new friend by the elbow, and steered her into the traffic. Together they crossed the road, together entered the park.

‘I still think you are v-very impertinent,’ said the lady. ‘What induced you to follow me?’

With a single comprehensive gesture, Gumbril indicated the sun, the sky, the green trees airily glittering, the grass, the emerald lights and violet shadows of the rustic distance. ‘On a day like this,’ he said, ‘how could I help it?’

‘Original sin?’

‘Oh,’ the Complete Man modestly shook his head, ‘I lay no claim to originality in this.’

The stranger laughed. This was nearly as good as a young poet at the tea-table. She was very glad that she’d decided, after all, to put on her best suit this afternoon, even if it was a little stuffy for the warmth of the day. He, too, she noticed, was wearing a great-coat; which seemed rather odd.

‘Is it original,’ he went on, ‘to go and tumble stupidly like an elephant into a pitfall, head over ears, at first sight . . .?’

She looked at him sideways, then closed down the magnolia petals, and smiled. This was going to be the real thing – one of those long, those interminable, or, at any rate, indefinitely renewable conversations about love; witty, subtle, penetrating and bold, like the conversations in books, like the conversations across the tea-table between brilliant young poets and ladies of quality, grown fastidious through an excessive experience, fastidious and a little weary, but still, in their subtle way, insatiably curious.

‘Suppose we sit down,’ suggested Gumbril, and he pointed to a couple of green iron chairs, standing isolated in the middle of the grass close together and with their fronts slanting inwards a little towards one another in a position that suggested a confidential intimacy. At the prospect of the conversation that, inevitably, was about to unroll itself, he felt decidedly less elated than did his new friend. If there was anything he disliked it was conversation about love. It bored him, oh, it bored him most horribly, this minute analysis of the passion that young women always seemed to expect one, at some point or other in one’s relation with them, to make. How love alters the character for both good and bad; how physical passion need not be incompatible with the spiritual; how a hateful and tyrannous possessiveness can be allied in love with the most unselfish solicitude for the other party – oh, he knew all this and much more, so well, so well. And whether one can be in love with more than one person at a time, whether love can exist without jealousy, whether pity, affection, desire can in any way replace the full and genuine passion – how often he had had to thrash out these dreary questions!

And all the philosophic speculations were equally familiar, all the physiological and anthropological and psychological facts. In the theory of the subject he had ceased to take any interest. Unhappily, a discussion of the theory always seemed to be an essential preliminary to the practice of it. He sighed a little wearily as he took his seat on the green iron chair. But then, recollecting that he was now the Complete Man, and that the Complete Man must do everything with a flourish and a high hand, he leaned forward and, smiling with a charming insolence through his beard, began:

‘Tiresias, you may remember, was granted the singular privilege of living both as a man and a woman.’

Ah, this was the genuine young poet. Supporting an elbow on the back of her chair and leaning her cheek against her hand, she disposed herself to listen and, where necessary, brilliantly to interpellate; it was through half-closed eyes that she looked at him, and she smiled faintly in a manner which she knew, from experience, to be enigmatic, and though a shade haughty, though a tiny bit mocking and ironical, exceedingly attractive.

An hour and a half later they were driving towards an address in Bloxam Gardens, Maida Vale. The name seemed vaguely familiar to Gumbril. Bloxam Gardens – perhaps one of his aunts had lived there once?

‘It’s a dr-dreadful little maisonette,’ she explained. ‘Full of awful things. We had to take it furnished. It’s so impossible to find anything now.’

Gumbril leaned back in his corner, wondering, as he studied that averted profile, who or what this young woman could be. She seemed to be in the obvious movement, to like the sort of things one would expect people to like; she seemed to be as highly civilized, in Mr Mercaptan’s rather technical sense of the term, as free of all prejudices as the great exponent of civilization himself.

She seemed, from her coolly dropped hints, to possess all the dangerous experience, all the assurance and easy ruthlessness of a great lady whose whole life is occupied in the interminable affairs of the heart, the senses and the head. But, by a strange contradiction, she seemed to find her life narrow and uninteresting. She had complained in so many words that her husband misunderstood and neglected her, had complained, by implication, that she knew very few interesting people.

The maisonette in Bloxam Gardens was certainly not very splendid – six rooms on the second and third floors of a peeling stucco house. And the furniture – decidedly Hire Purchase. And the curtains and cretonnes – brightly ‘modern’, positively ‘futurist’.

‘What one has to put up with in furnished flats!’ The lady made a grimace as she ushered him into the sitting-room. And while she spoke the words, she really managed to persuade herself that the furniture wasn’t theirs, that they had found all this sordid stuff cluttering up the rooms, not chose it, oh and with pains! themselves, not doggedly paid for it, month by month.

‘Our own things,’ she murmured vaguely, ‘are stored. In the Riviera.’ It was there, under the palms, among the gaudy melon flowers and the croupiers that the fastidious lady had last held her salon of young poets. In the Riviera – that would explain, now she came to think of it, a lot of things, if explanation ever became necessary.

The Complete Man nodded sympathetically. ‘Other people’s tastes,’ he held up his hands, they both laughed. ‘But why do we think of other people?’ he added. And coming forward with a conquering impulsiveness, he took both her long, fine hands in his and raised them to his bearded mouth.

She looked at him for a second, then dropped her eyelids, took back her hands. ‘I must go and make the tea,’ she said. ‘The servants’ – the plural was a pardonable exaggeration – ‘are out.’

Gallantly, the Complete Man offered to come and help her. These scenes of intimate life had a charm all their own. But she would not allow it. ‘No, no,’ she was very firm, ‘I simply forbid you. You must stay here. I won’t be a moment,’ and she was gone, closing the door carefully behind her.

Left to himself, Gumbril sat down and filed his nails.

As for the young lady, she hurried along to her dingy little kitchen, lit the gas, put the kettle on, set out the teapot and the cups on a tray, and from the biscuit-box, where it was stored, took out the remains of a chocolate cake, which had already seen service at the day-before-yesterday’s tea-party. When all was ready here, she tip-toed across to her bedroom and sitting down at her dressing-table, began with hands that trembled a little with excitement to powder her nose and heighten the colour of her cheeks. Even after the last touch had been given, she still sat there, looking at her image in the glass.

The lady and the poet, she was thinking, the grande dame and the brilliant young man of genius. She liked young men with beards. But he was not an artist, in spite of the beard, in spite of the hat. He was a writer of sorts. So she gathered; but he was reticent, he was delightfully mysterious. She too, for that matter. The great lady slips out, masked, into the street; touches the young man’s sleeve: Come with me. She chooses, does not let herself passively be chosen. The young poet falls at her feet; she lifts him up. One is accustomed to this sort of thing.

She opened her jewel-box, took out all her rings – there were not many of them, alas! – and put them on. Two or three of them, on second thoughts, she took off again; they were a little, she suspected with a sudden qualm, in other people’s taste.

He was very clever, very artistic – only that seemed to be the wrong word to use; he seemed to know all the new things, all the interesting people. Perhaps he would introduce her to some of them. And he was so much at ease behind his knowledge, so well assured. But for her part, she felt pretty certain, she had made no stupid mistakes. She too had been, had looked at any rate – which was the important thing – very much at ease.

She liked young men with beards. They looked so Russian. Catherine of Russia had been one of the great ladies with caprices. Masked in the streets. Young poet, come with me. Or even, Young butcher’s boy. But that, no, that was going too far, too low. Still, life, life – it was there to be lived – life – to be enjoyed. And now, and now? She was still wondering what would happen next, when the kettle, which was one of those funny ones which whistle when they come to the boil, began, fitfully at first, then, under full steam, unflaggingly, to sound its mournful, otherworldly note. She sighed and bestirred herself to attend to it.

‘Let me help you.’ Gumbril jumped up as she came into the room. ‘What can I do?’ He hovered rather ineptly round her.

The lady put down her tray on the little table. ‘N-nothing,’ she said.

‘N-nothing?’ he imitated her with a playful mockery. ‘Am I good for n-nothing at all?’ He took one of her hands and kissed it.

‘Nothing that’s of the 1-least importance.’ She sat down and began to pour out the tea.

The Complete Man also sat down. ‘So to adore at first sight,’ he asked, ‘is not of the 1-least importance?’

She shook her head, smiled, raised and lowered her eyelids. One was so well accustomed to this sort of thing; it had no importance. ‘Sugar?’ she asked. The young poet was safely there, sparkling across the tea-table. He offered love and she, with the easy heartlessness of one who is so well accustomed to this sort of thing, offered him sugar.

He nodded. ‘Please. But if it’s of no importance to you,’ he went on, ‘then I’ll go away at once.’

The lady laughed her section of a descending chromatic scale. ‘Oh no, you won’t,’ she said. ‘You can’t.’ And she felt that the grande dame had made a very fine stroke.

‘Quite right,’ the Complete Man replied; ‘I couldn’t.’ He stirred his tea. ‘But who are you,’ he looked up at her suddenly, ‘you devilish female?’ He was genuinely anxious to know; and besides, he was paying her a very pretty compliment. ‘What do you do with your dangerous existence?’

‘I enjoy life,’ she said. ‘I think one ought to enjoy life. Don’t you? I think it’s one’s first duty.’ She became quite grave. ‘One ought to enjoy every moment of it,’ she said. ‘Oh, passionately, adventurously, newly, excitingly, uniquely.’

The Complete Man laughed. ‘A conscientious hedonist. I see.’

She felt uncomfortably that the fastidious lady had not quite lived up to her character. She had spoken more like a young woman who finds life too dull and daily, and would like to get on to the cinema. ‘I am very conscientious,’ she said, making significant play with the magnolia petals and smiling her riddling smile. She must retrieve the Great Catherine’s reputation.

‘I could see that from the first,’ mocked the Complete Man with a triumphant insolence. ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all.’

The fastidious lady only contemptuously smiled. ‘Have a little chocolate cake,’ she suggested. Her heart was beating. She wondered, she wondered.

There was a long silence. Gumbril finished his chocolate cake, gloomily drank his tea and did not speak. He found, all at once, that he had nothing to say. His jovial confidence seemed, for the moment, to have deserted him. He was only the Mild and Melancholy one foolishly disguised as a Complete Man; a sheep in beaver’s clothing. He entrenched himself behind his formidable silence and waited; waited, at first, sitting in his chair, then, when this total inactivity became unbearable, striding about the room.

She looked at him, for all her air of serene composure, with a certain disquiet. What on earth was he up to now? What could he be thinking about? Frowning like that, he looked like a young Jupiter, bearded and burly (though not, she noticed, quite so burly as he had appeared in his overcoat), making ready to throw a thunderbolt. Perhaps he was thinking of her – suspecting her, seeing through the fastidious lady and feeling angry at her attempted deception. Or perhaps he was bored with her, perhaps he was wanting to go away. Well, let him go; she didn’t mind. Or perhaps he was just made like that – a moody young poet; that seemed, on the whole, the most likely explanation; it was also the most pleasing and romantic. She waited. They both waited.

Gumbril looked at her and was put to shame by the spectacle of her quiet serenity. He must do something, he told himself; he must recover the Complete Man’s lost morale. Desperately he came to a halt in front of the one decent picture hanging on the walls. It was an eighteenth-century engraving of Raphael’s ‘Transfiguration’ – better, he always thought, in black and white than in its bleakly-coloured original.

‘That’s a nice engraving,’ he said. ‘Very nice.’ The mere fact of having uttered at all was a great comfort to him, a real relief.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That belongs to me. I found it in a secondhand shop, not far from here.’

‘Photography,’ he pronounced, with that temporary earnestness which made him seem an enthusiast about everything, ‘is a mixed blessing. It has made it possible to reproduce pictures so easily and cheaply, that all the bad artists who were well occupied in the past, making engravings of good men’s paintings, are now free to do bad original work of their own.’ All this was terribly impersonal, he told himself, terribly off the point. He was losing ground. He must do something drastic to win it back. But what?

She came to his rescue. ‘I bought another at the same time,’ she said. ‘“The Last Communion of St Jerome”, by – who is it? I forget.’

‘Ah, you mean Domenichino’s “St Jerome”?’ The Complete Man was afloat again. ‘Poussin’s favourite picture. Mine too, very nearly. I’d like to see that.’

‘It’s in my room, I’m afraid. But if you don’t mind.’

He bowed. ‘If you don’t.’

She smiled graciously to him and got up. ‘This way,’ she said, and opened the door.

‘It’s a lovely picture,’ Gumbril went on, loquaciously now, behind her, as they walked down the dark corridor. ‘And besides, I have a sentimental attachment to it. There used to be a copy of an engraving of it at home, when I was a child. And I remember wondering and wondering – oh, it went on for years – every time I saw the picture; wondering why on earth that old bishop (for I did know it was a bishop) should be handing the naked old man a five-shilling piece.’

She opened a door; they were in her very pink room. Grave in its solemn and subtly harmonious beauty, the picture hung over the mantelpiece, hung there, among the photographs of the little friends of her own age, like some strange object from another world. From within that chipped gilt frame all the beauty, all the grandeur of religion looked darkly out upon the pink room. The little friends of her own age, all deliciously nubile, sweetly smiled, turned up their eyes, clasped Persian cats or stood jauntily, feet apart, hand in the breeches pocket of the land-girl’s uniform; the pink roses on the wallpaper, the pink and white curtains, the pink bed, the strawberry-coloured carpet, filled all the air with the rosy reflections of nakedness and life.

And utterly remote, absorbed in their grave, solemn ecstasy, the robed and mitred priest held out, the dying saint yearningly received, the body of the Son of God. The ministrants looked gravely on, the little angels looped in the air above a gravely triumphant festoon, the lion slept at the saint’s feet, and through the arch beyond, the eye travelled out over a quiet country of dark trees and hills.

‘There it is,’ she waved towards the mantelpiece.

But Gumbril had taken it all in long ago. ‘You see what I mean by the five-shilling piece.’ And stepping up to the picture, he pointed to the round bright wafer which the priest holds in his hand and whose averted disk is like the essential sun at the centre of the picture’s harmonious universe. ‘Those were the days of five-shilling pieces,’ he went on. ‘You’re probably too young to remember those large, lovely things. They came my way occasionally, and consecrated wafers didn’t. So you can understand how much the picture puzzled me. A bishop giving a naked old man five shillings in a church, with angels fluttering overhead, and a lion sleeping in the foreground. It was obscure, it was horribly obscure.’ He turned away from the picture and confronted his hostess, who was standing a little way behind him smiling enigmatically and invitingly.

‘Obscure,’ he repeated. ‘But so is everything. So is life in general. And you,’ he stepped towards her, ‘you in particular.’

‘Am I?’ she lifted her limpid eyes at him. Oh, how her heart was beating, how hard it was to be the fastidious lady, calmly satisfying her caprice. How difficult it was to be accustomed to this sort of thing. What was going to happen next?

What happened next was that the Complete Man came still closer, put his arms round her, as though he were inviting her to the fox-trot, and began kissing her with a startling violence. His beard tickled her neck; shivering a little, she brought down the magnolia petals across her eyes. The Complete Man lifted her up, walked across the room carrying the fastidious lady in his arms and deposited her on the rosy catafalque of the bed. Lying there with her eyes shut, she did her best to pretend she was dead.

Gumbril had looked at his wrist watch and found that it was six o’clock. Already? He prepared himself to take his departure. Wrapped in a pink kimono, she came out into the hall to wish him farewell.

‘When shall I see you again, Rosie?’ He had learnt that her name was Rosie.

She had recovered her great lady’s equanimity and detachment, and was able to shrug her shoulders and smile. ‘How should I know?’ she asked, implying that she could not foresee what her caprice might be an hour hence.

‘May I write, then, and ask one of these days if you do know?’

She put her head on one side and raised her eyebrows, doubtfully. At last nodded. ‘Yes, you can write,’ she permitted.

‘Good,’ said the Complete Man, and picked up his wide hat. She held out her hand to him with stateliness, and with a formal gallantry he kissed it. He was just closing the front door behind him, when he remembered something. He turned round. ‘I say,’ he called after the retreating pink kimono. ‘It’s rather absurd. But how can I write? I don’t know your name. I can’t just address it “Rosie”.’

The great lady laughed delightedly. This had the real capriccio flavour. ‘Wait,’ she said, and she ran into the sitting-room. She was back again in a moment with an oblong of pasteboard. ‘There,’ she said, and dropped it into his great-coat pocket. Then blowing a kiss she was gone.

The Complete Man closed the door and descended the stairs. Well, well, he said to himself; well, well. He put his hand in his coat pocket and took out the card. In the dim light of the staircase he read the name on it with some difficulty. Mrs James – but no, but no. He read again, straining his eyes; there was no question of it. Mrs James Shearwater.

Mrs James Shearwater.

That was why he had vaguely known the name of Bloxam Gardens.

Mrs James Shear–. Step after step he descended, ponderously. ‘Good Lord,’ he said out loud. ‘Good Lord.’

But why had he never seen her? Why did Shearwater never produce her? Now he came to think of it, he hardly ever spoke of her.

Why had she said the flat wasn’t theirs? It was; he had heard Shearwater talk about it.

Did she make a habit of this sort of thing?

Could Shearwater be wholly unaware of what she was really like? But, for that matter, what was she really like?

He was half-way down the last flight, when with a rattle and a squeak of hinges the door of the house, which was only separated by a short lobby from the foot of the stairs, opened, revealing, on the doorstep, Shearwater and a friend, eagerly talking.

‘. . . I take my rabbit,’ the friend was saying – he was a young man with dark, protruding eyes, and staring, doggy nostrils; very eager, lively and loud. ‘I take my rabbit and I inject into it the solution of eyes, pulped eyes of another dead rabbit. You see?’

Gumbril’s first instinct was to rush up the stairs and hide in the first likely-looking corner. But he pulled himself together at once. He was a Complete Man, and Complete Men do not hide; moreover, he was sufficiently disguised to be quite unrecognisable. He stood where he was, and listened to the conversation.

‘The rabbit,’ continued the young man, and with his bright eyes and staring, sniffing nose, he looked like a poacher’s terrier ready to go barking after the first white tail that passed his way; ‘the rabbit naturally develops the appropriate resistance, develops a specific anti-eye to protect itself. I then take some of its anti-eye serum and inject it into my female rabbit; I then immediately breed from her.’ He paused.

‘Well?’ asked Shearwater, in his slow, ponderous way. He lifted his great round head inquiringly and looked at the doggy young man from under his bushy eyebrows.

The doggy young man smiled triumphantly. ‘The young ones,’ he said, emphasizing his words by striking his right fist against the extended palm of his left hand, ‘the young ones are born with defective sight.’

Thoughtfully Shearwater pulled at his formidable moustache. ‘H’m,’ he said slowly. ‘Very remarkable.’

‘You realize the full significance of it?’ asked the young man. ‘We seem to be affecting the germ-plasm directly. We have found a way of making acquired characteristics . . .’

‘Pardon me,’ said Gumbril. He had decided that it was time to be gone. He ran down the stairs and across the tiled hall, he pushed his way firmly but politely between the talkers.

‘. . . heritable,’ continued the young man, imperturbably eager, speaking through and over and round the obstacle.

‘Damn!’ said Shearwater. The Complete Man had trodden on his toe. ‘Sorry,’ he added, absent-mindedly apologizing for the injury he had received.

Gumbril hurried off along the street. ‘If we really have found out a technique for influencing the germ-plasm directly . . .’ he heard the doggy young man saying; but he was already too far away to catch the rest of the sentence. There are many ways, he reflected, of spending an afternoon.

The doggy young man refused to come in, he had to get in his game of tennis before dinner. Shearwater climbed the stairs alone. He was taking off his hat in the little hall of his own apartment, when Rosie came out of the sitting-room with a trayful of tea-things.

‘Well?’ he asked, kissing her affectionately on the forehead. ‘Well? People to tea?’

‘Only one,’ Rosie replied. ‘I’ll go and make you a fresh cup.’

She glided off, rustling in her pink kimono towards the kitchen.

Shearwater sat down in the sitting-room. He had brought home with him from the library the fifteenth volume of the Journal of Biochemistry. There was something in it he wanted to look up. He turned over the pages. Ah, here it was. He began reading. Rosie came back again.

‘Here’s your tea,’ she said.

He thanked her without looking up. The tea grew cold on the little table at his side.

Lying on the sofa, Rosie pondered and remembered. Had the events of the afternoon, she asked herself, really happened? They seemed very improbable and remote, now, in this studious silence. She couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. Was it only this? So simple and obvious? She tried to work herself up into a more exalted mood. She even tried to feel guilty; but there she failed completely. She tried to feel rapturous; but without much more success. Still, he certainly had been a most extraordinary man. Such impudence, and at the same time such delicacy and tact.

It was a pity she couldn’t afford to change the furniture. She saw now that it wouldn’t do at all. She would go and tell Aunt Aggie about the dreadful middle-classness of her Art and Craftiness.

She ought to have an Empire chaise longue. Like Madame Récamier. She could see herself lying there, dispensing tea. ‘Like a delicious pink snake.’ He had called her that.

Well, really, now she came to think of it all again, it had been too queer, too queer.

‘What’s a hedonist?’ she suddenly asked.

Shearwater looked up from the Journal of Biochemistry. ‘What?’ he said.

‘A hedonist.’

‘A man who holds that the end of life is pleasure.’

A ‘conscientious hedonist’ – ah, that was good.

‘This tea is cold,’ Shearwater remarked.

‘You should have drunk it before,’ she said. The silence renewed and prolonged itself.

Rosie was getting much better, Shearwater reflected, as he washed his hands before supper, about not interrupting him when he was busy. This evening she had really not disturbed him at all, or at most only once, and that not seriously. There had been times in the past when the child had really made life almost impossible. There were those months at the beginning of their married life, when she had thought she would like to study physiology herself and be a help to him. He remembered the hours he had spent trying to teach her elementary facts about the chromosomes. It had been a great relief when she abandoned the attempt. He had suggested she should go in for stencilling patterns on Government linen. Such pretty curtains and things one could make like that. But she hadn’t taken very kindly to the idea. There had followed a long period when she seemed to have nothing to do but prevent him from doing anything. Ringing him up at the laboratory, invading his study, sitting on his knee, or throwing her arms round his neck, or pulling his hair, or asking ridiculous questions when he was trying to work.

Shearwater flattered himself that he had been extremely patient. He had never got cross. He had just gone on as though she weren’t there. As though she weren’t there.

‘Hurry up,’ he heard her calling. ‘The soup’s getting cold.’

‘Coming,’ he shouted back, and began to dry his large, blunt hands.

She seemed to have been improving lately. And to-night, to-night she had been a model of non-existence.

He came striding heavily into the dining-room. Rosie was sitting at the head of the table, ladling out the soup. With her left hand she held back the flowing pink sleeve of her kimono so that it should not trail in the plates or the tureen. Her bare arms showed white and pearly through the steam of lentils.

How pretty she was! He could not resist the temptation, but coming up behind her bent down and kissed her, rather clumsily, on the back of her neck.

Rosie drew away from him. ‘Really, Jim,’ she said, disapprovingly. ‘At meal-times!’ The fastidious lady had to draw the line at these ill-timed, tumbling familiarities.

‘And what about work-times?’ Shearwater asked laughing. ‘Still, you were wonderful this evening, Rosie, quite wonderful.’ He sat down and began eating his soup. ‘Not a sound all the time I was reading; or, at any rate, only one sound, so far as I remember.’

The great lady said nothing, but only smiled – a little contemptuously and with a touch of pity. She pushed away the plate of soup unfinished and planted her elbows on the table. Slipping her hands under the sleeves of her kimono, she began, lightly, delicately, with the tips of her fingers, to caress her own arms.

How smooth they were, how soft and warm and how secret under the sleeves. And all her body was as smooth and warm, was as soft and secret, still more secret beneath the pink folds. Like a warm serpent hidden away, secretly, secretly.

CHAPTER X

MR BOLDERO LIKED the idea of the Patent Small-Clothes. He liked it immensely, he said, immensely.

‘There’s money in it,’ he said.

Mr Boldero was a small dark man of about forty-five, active as a bird and with a bird’s brown, beady eyes, a bird’s sharp nose. He was always busy, always had twenty different irons in the fire at once, was always fresh, clear-headed, never tired. He was also always unpunctual, always untidy. He had no sense of time or of order. But he got away with it, as he liked to say. He delivered the goods – or rather the good, in the convenient form of cash, delivered themselves, almost miraculously it always seemed, to him.

He was like a bird in appearance. But in mind, Gumbril found, after having seen him once or twice, he was like a caterpillar: he ate all that was put before him, he consumed a hundred times his own mental weight every day. Other people’s ideas, other people’s knowledge – they were his food. He devoured them and they were at once his own. All that belonged to other people he annexed without a scruple or a second thought, quite naturally, as though it were already his own. And he absorbed it so rapidly and completely, he laid public claim to it so promptly that he sometimes deceived people into believing that he had really anticipated them in their ideas, that he had known for years and years the things they had just been telling him, and which he would at once airily repeat to them with the perfect assurance of one who knows – knows by instinct, as it were, by inheritance.

At their first luncheon he had asked Gumbril to tell him all about modern painting. Gumbril had given him a brief lecture; before the savoury had appeared on the table, Mr Boldero was talking with perfect familiarity of Picasso and Derain. He almost made it understood that he had a fine collection of their works in his drawing-room at home. Being a trifle deaf, however, he was not very good at names, and Gumbril’s all-too-tactful corrections were lost on him. He could not be induced to abandon his Bacosso in favour of any other version of the Spaniard’s name. Bacosso – why, he had known all about Bacosso since he was a schoolboy! Bacosso was an old master, already.

Mr Boldero was very severe with the waiters and knew so well how things ought to be done at a good restaurant, that Gumbril felt sure he must recently have lunched with some meticulous gormandizer of the old school. And when the waiter made as though to serve them with brandy in small glasses, Mr Boldero was so passionately indignant that he sent for the manager.

‘Do you mean to tell me,’ he shouted in a perfect frenzy of righteous anger, ‘that you don’t yet know how brandy ought to be drunk?’

Perhaps it was only last week that he himself, Gumbril reflected, had learned to aerate his cognac in Gargantuan beakers.

Meanwhile, of course, the Patent Small-Clothes were not neglected. As soon as he had been told about the things, Mr Boldero began speaking of them with a perfect and practised familiarity. They were already his, mentally his. And it was only Mr Boldero’s generosity that prevented him from making the Small-Clothes more effectively his own.

‘If it weren’t for the friendship and respect which I feel for your father, Mr Gumbril,’ he said, twinkling genially over the brandy, ‘I’d just annex your Small-Clothes. Bag and baggage. Just annex them.’

‘Ah, but they’re my patent,’ said Gumbril. ‘Or at least they’re in process of being patented. The agents are at work.’

Mr Boldero laughed. ‘Do you suppose that would trouble me if I wanted to be unscrupulous? I’d just take the idea and manufacture the article. You’d bring an action. I’d have it defended with all the professional erudition that could be brought. You’d find yourself let in for a case that might cost thousands. And how would you pay for it? You’d be forced to come to an agreement out of court, Mr Gumbril. That’s what you’d have to do. And a damned bad agreement it would be for you. I can tell you.’ Mr Boldero laughed very cheerfully at the thought of the badness of this agreement. ‘But don’t be alarmed,’ he said. ‘I shan’t do it, you know.’

Gumbril was not wholly impressed. Tactfully, he tried to find out what terms Mr Boldero was prepared to offer. Mr Boldero was nebulously vague.

They met again in Gumbril’s rooms. The contemporary drawings on the walls reminded Mr Boldero that he was now an art expert. He told Gumbril all about it – in Gumbril’s words. Every now and then, it was true, Mr Boldero made a little slip. Bacosso, for example, remained unshakably Bacosso. But on the whole the performance was most impressive. It made Gumbril feel very uncomfortable, however, while it lasted. For he recognized in this characteristic of Mr Boldero a horrible caricature of himself. He too was an assimilator; more discriminating, no doubt, more tactful, knowing better than Mr Boldero how to turn the assimilated experience into something new and truly his own; but still a caterpillar, definitely a caterpillar. He began studying Mr Boldero with a close and disgustful attention, as one might pore over some repulsive memento mori.

It was a relief when Mr Boldero stopped talking art and consented to get down to business. Gumbril was wearing for the occasion the sample pair of Small-Clothes which Mr Bojanus had made for him. For Mr Boldero’s benefit he put them, so to speak, through their paces. He allowed himself to drop with a bump on to the floor – arriving therefore bruiseless and unjarred. He sat in complete comfort for minutes at a stretch on the edge of the ornamental iron fender. In the intervals he paraded up and down before Mr Boldero like a mannequin. ‘A trifle bulgy,’ said Mr Boldero. ‘But still . . .’ He was, taking it all round, favourably impressed. It was time, he said, to begin thinking of details. They would have to begin by making experiments with the bladders to discover a model combining, as Mr Boldero put it, ‘maximum efficiency with minimum bulge’. When they had found the right thing, they would have it made in suitable quantities by any good rubber firm. As for the trousers themselves, they could rely for those on sweated female labour in the East End. ‘Cheap and good,’ said Mr Boldero.

‘It sounds ideal,’ said Gumbril.

‘And then,’ said Mr Boldero, ‘there’s our advertising campaign. On that I may say,’ he went on with a certain solemnity, ‘will depend the failure or success of our enterprise. I consider it of the first importance.’

‘Quite,’ said Gumbril, nodding impatiently and with intelligence.

‘We must set to work,’ said Mr Boldero, ‘sci – en – tifically.’

Gumbril nodded again.

‘We have to appeal,’ Mr Boldero went on so glibly that Gumbril felt sure he must be quoting somebody else’s words, ‘to the great instincts and feelings of humanity . . . They are the sources of action. They spend the money, if I may put it like that.’

‘That’s all very well,’ said Gumbril. ‘But how do you propose to appeal to the most important of the instincts? I refer, as you may well imagine, to sex.’

‘I was just going to come to that,’ said Mr Boldero, raising his hand as though to ask for a patient hearing. ‘Alas! we can’t. I don’t see any way of hanging our Small-Clothes on the sexual peg.’

‘Then we are undone,’ said Gumbril, too dramatically.

‘No, no.’ Mr Boldero was reassuring. ‘You make the error of the Viennese. You exaggerate the importance of sex. After all, my dear Mr Gumbril, there is also the instinct of self-preservation; there is also,’ he leaned forward, wagging his finger, ‘the social instinct, the instinct of the herd.’

‘True.’

‘Both of them as powerful as sex. What are the Professor’s famous Censors but forbidding suggestions from the herd without, made powerful and entrenched by the social instinct within?’

Gumbril had no answer; Mr Boldero continued, smiling:

‘So that we shall be all right if we stick to self-preservation and the herd. Rub in the comfort and the utility, the hygienic virtues of our Small-Clothes; that will catch their self-preservatory feelings. Aim at their dread of public opinion, at their ambition to be one better than their fellows and their terror of being different – at all the ludicrous weaknesses a well-developed social instinct exposes them to. We shall get them, if we set to work scientifically.’ Mr Boldero’s bird-like eyes twinkled very brightly. ‘We shall get them,’ he repeated, and he laughed a happy little laugh, full of such a childlike diabolism, such an innocent gay malignity, that it seemed as though a little leprechaun had suddenly taken the financier’s place in Gumbril’s best arm-chair.

Gumbril laughed too; for this leprechaunish mirth was infectious. ‘We shall get them,’ he echoed. ‘Oh, I’m sure we shall, if you set about it, Mr Boldero.’

Mr Boldero acknowledged the compliment with a smile that expressed no false humility. It was his due, and he knew it.

‘I’ll give you some of my ideas about the advertising campaign,’ he said. ‘Just to give you a notion. You can think them over, quietly, and make suggestions.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Gumbril, nodding.

Mr Boldero cleared his throat. ‘We shall begin,’ he said, ‘by making the most simple elementary appeal to their instinct of self-preservation: we shall point out that the Patent Small-Clothes are comfortable; that to wear them is to avoid pain. A few striking slogans about comfort – that’s all we want. Very simple indeed. It doesn’t take much to persuade a man that it’s pleasanter to sit on air than on wood. But while we’re on the subject of hard seats we shall have to glide off subtly at a tangent to make a flank attack on the social instincts.’ And joining the tip of his forefinger to the tip of his thumb, Mr Boldero moved his hand delicately sideways, as though he were sliding it along a smooth brass rail. ‘We shall have to speak about the glories and the trials of sedentary labour. We must exalt its spiritual dignity and at the same time condemn its physical discomforts. “The seat of honour”, don’t you know. We could talk about that. “The Seats of the Mighty.” “The seat that rules the office rocks the world.” All those lines might be made something of. And then we could have little historical chats about thrones; how dignified, but how uncomfortable they’ve been. We must make the bank clerk and the civil servant feel proud of being what they are and at the same time feel ashamed that, being such splendid people, they should have to submit to the indignity of having blistered hind-quarters. In modern advertising you must flatter your public – not in the oily, abject, tradesman-like style of the old advertisers, crawling before clients who were their social superiors; that’s all over now. It’s we who are the social superiors – because we’ve got more money than the bank clerks and the civil servants. Our modern flattery must be manly, straightforward, sincere, the admiration of equal for equal – all the more flattering as we aren’t equals.’ Mr Boldero laid a finger to his nose. ‘They’re dirt and we’re capitalists . . .’ He laughed.

Gumbril laughed too. It was the first time that he had ever thought of himself as a capitalist, and the thought was exhilarating.

‘We flatter them,’ went on Mr Boldero. ‘We say that honest work is glorious and ennobling – which it isn’t; it’s merely dull and cretinizing. And then we go on to suggest that it would be finer still, more ennobling, because less uncomfortable, if they wore Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes. You see the line?’

Gumbril saw the line.

‘After that,’ said Mr Boldero, ‘we get on to the medical side of the matter. The medical side, Mr Gumbril – that’s most important. Nobody feels really well nowadays – at any rate, nobody who lives in a big town and does the kind of loathsome work that the people we’re catering for does. Keeping this fact before our eyes, we have to make it clear that only those can expect to be healthy who wear pneumatic trousers.’

‘That will be a little difficult won’t it?’ questioned Gumbril.

‘Not a bit of it!’ Mr Boldero laughed with an infectious confidence. ‘All we have to do is to talk about the great nerve-centre of the spine: the shocks they get when they sit down too hard; the wearing exhaustion to which long-protracted sitting on unpadded seats subjects them. We’ll have to talk very scientifically about the great lumbar ganglia – if there are such things, which I really don’t pretend to know. We’ll even talk amost mystically about the ganglia. You know that sort of ganglion philosophy?’

Mr Boldero went on parenthetically. ‘Very interesting it is, sometimes, I think. We could put in a lot about the dark, powerful sense-life, sex-life, instinct-life which is controlled by the lumbar ganglion. How important it is that that shouldn’t be damaged. That already our modern conditions of civilization tend unduly to develop the intellect and the thoracic ganglia controlling the higher emotions. That we’re wearing out, growing feeble, losing our balance in consequence. And that the only cure – if we are to continue our present mode of civilized life – is to be found in Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.’ Mr Boldero brought his hand with an emphatic smack on to the table as he spoke, as he fairly shouted these last words.

‘Magnificent,’ said Gumbril, with genuine admiration.

‘This sort of medical and philosophical dope,’ Mr Boldero went on, ‘is always very effective, if it’s properly used. The public to whom we are making our appeal is, of course, almost absolutely ignorant on these, or, indeed, on almost all other subjects. It is therefore very much impressed by the unfamiliar words; particularly if they have such a good juicy sound as the word “ganglia”.’

‘There was a young man of East Anglia, whose loins were a tangle of ganglia,’ murmured Gumbril, improvvisatore.

‘Precisely,’ said Mr Boldero. ‘Precisely. You see how juicy it is? Well, as I say, they’re impressed. And they’re also grateful. They’re grateful to us for having given them a piece of abstruse, unlikely information which they can pass on to their wives, or to such friends as they know don’t read the paper in which our advertisement appears – can pass on airily, don’t you know, with easy erudition, as though they’d known all about ganglia from their childhood. And they’ll feel such a flow of superiority as they hand on the metaphysics and the pathology, that they’ll always think of us with affection. They’ll buy our breeks and they’ll get other people to buy. That’s why,’ Mr Boldero went off again on an instructive tangent, ‘that’s why the day of secret patent medicines is really over. It’s no good saying you have rediscovered some secret known only, in the past, to the Egyptians. People don’t know anything about Egyptology; but they have an inkling that such a science exists. And that if it does exist, it’s unlikely that patent-medicine makers should have found out facts unknown to the professors at the universities. And it’s much the same even with secrets that don’t come from Egypt. People know there’s such a thing as medical science and they again feel it’s improbable that manufacturers should know things ignored by the doctors. The modern democratic advertiser is entirely above-board. He tells you all about it. He explains that the digestive juices acting on bismuth give rise to a disinfectant acid. He points out that lactic ferment gets destroyed before it reaches the large intestine, so that Metchnikoff’s cure generally won’t work. And he goes on to explain that the only way of getting the ferment there is to mix it with starch and paraffin: starch to feed the ferment on, paraffin to prevent the starch being digested before it gets to the intestine. And, in consequence, he convinces you that a mixture of starch, paraffin and ferment is the only thing that’s any good at all. Consequently you buy it; which you would never have done without the explanation. In the same way, Mr Gumbril, we mustn’t ask people to take our trousers on trust. We must explain scientifically why these trousers will be good for their health. And by means of the ganglia, as I’ve pointed out, we can even show that the trousers will be good for their souls and the whole human race at large. And as you probably know, Mr Gumbril, there’s nothing like a spiritual message to make things go. Combine spirituality with practicality and you’ve fairly got them. Got them, I may say, on toast. And that’s what we can do with our trousers; we can put a message into them, a big, spiritual message. Decidedly,’ he concluded, ‘we shall have to work those ganglia all we can.’

‘I’ll undertake to do that,’ said Gumbril, who felt buoyant and self-assured. Mr Boldero’s hydrogenous conversation had blown him up like a balloon.

‘And I’m sure you’ll do it well,’ said Mr Boldero encouragingly. ‘There is no better training for modern commerce than a literary education. As a practical business man, I always uphold the ancient universities, especially in their teaching of the Humanities.’

Gumbril was much flattered. At the moment, it seemed supremely satisfying to be told that he was likely to make a good business man. The business man took on a radiance, began to glow, as it were, with a phosphorescent splendour.

‘Then it’s very important,’ continued Mr Boldero, ‘to play on their snobbism; to exploit that painful sense of inferiority which the ignorant and ingenuous always feel in the presence of the knowing. We’ve got to make our trousers the Thing – socially right as well as merely personally comfortable. We’ve got to imply somehow that it’s bad form not to wear them. We’ve got to make those who don’t wear them feel rather uncomfortable. Like that film of Charlie Chaplin’s, where he’s the absent-minded young man about town who dresses for dinner immaculately, from the waist up – white waistcoat, tail coat, stiff shirt, top-hat – and only discovered, when he gets down into the hall of the hotel, that he’s forgotten to put on his trousers. We’ve got to make them feel like that. That’s always very successful. You know those excellent American advertisements about young ladies whose engagements are broken off because they perspire too freely or have an unpleasant breath? How horribly uncomfortable those make you feel! We’ve got to do something of the same sort for our trousers. Or more immediately applicable would be those tailor’s advertisements about correct clothes. “Good clothes make you feel good.” You know the sort of line. And then those grave warning sentences in which you’re told that a correctly cut suit may make the difference between an appointment gained and an appointment lost, an interview granted and an interview refused. But the most masterly examples I can think of,’ Mr Boldero went on with growing enthusiasm, ‘are those American advertisements of spectacles, in which the manufacturers first assume the existence of a social law about goggles, and then proceed to invoke all the sanctions which fall on the head of the committer of a solecism upon those who break it. It’s masterly. For sport or relaxation, they tell you, as though it was a social axiom, you must wear spectacles of pure tortoiseshell. For business, tortoiseshell rims and nickel earpieces lend incisive poise – incisive poise, we must remember that for our ads, Mr Gumbril. “Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes lend incisive poise to business men.” For semi-evening dress, shell rims with gold ear-pieces and gold nose-bridges. And for full dress, gold-mounted rimless pince-nez are refinement itself, and absolutely correct. Thus we see, a social law has been created, according to which every self-respectiving myope or astigmat must have four distinct pairs of glasses. Think if he should wear the all-shell sports model with full dress! Revolting solecism! The people who read advertisements like that begin to feel uncomfortable; they have only one pair of glasses, they are afraid of being laughed at, thought low-class and ignorant and suburban. And since there are few who would not rather be taken in adultery than in provincialism, they rush out to buy four new pairs of spectacles. And the manufacturer gets rich, Mr Gumbril. Now, we must do something of the kind with our trousers. Imply somehow that they’re correct, that you’re undressed without, that your fiancée would break off the engagement if she saw you sitting down to dinner on anything but air.’ Mr Boldero shrugged his shoulders, vaguely waved his hand.

‘It may be rather difficult,’ said Gumbril, shaking his head.

‘It may be,’ Mr Boldero agreed. ‘But difficulties are made to be overcome. We must pull the string of snobbery and shame; it’s essential. We must find our methods for bringing the weight of public opinion to bear mockingly on those who do not wear our trousers. It is difficult at the moment to see how it can be done. But it will have to be done, it will have to be done,’ Mr Boldero repeated emphatically. ‘We might even find a way of invoking patriotism to our aid. “English trousers filled with English air for Englishmen.” A little far-fetched, perhaps. But there might be something in it.’

Gumbril shook his head doubtfully.

‘Well, it’s one of the things we’ve got to think about in any case,’ said Mr Boldero. ‘We can’t afford to neglect such powerful social emotions as these. Sex, as we’ve seen, is almost entirely out of the question. We must run the rest, therefore, as hard as we can. For instance, there’s the novelty business. People feel superior if they possess something new which their neighbours haven’t got. The mere fact of newness is an intoxication. We must encourage that sense of superiority, brew up that intoxication. The most absurd and futile objects can be sold because they’re new. Not long ago I sold four million patent soap-dishes of a new and peculiar kind. The point was that you didn’t screw the fixture into the bathroom wall: you made a hole in the wall and built the soap-dish into a niche, like a holy water stoup. My soap-dishes possessed no advantages over other kinds of soap-dishes, and they cost a fantastic amount to install. But I managed to put them across, simply because they were new. Four million of them.’ Mr Boldero smiled with satisfaction at the recollection. ‘We shall do the same, I hope, with our trousers. People may be shy of being the first to appear in them; but the shyness will be compensated for by the sense of superiority and elation produced by the consciousness of the newness of the things.’

‘Quite so,’ said Gumbril.

‘And then, of course, there’s the economy slogan. “One pair of Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes will outlast six pairs of ordinary trousers.” That’s easy enough. So easy that it’s really uninteresting.’ Mr Boldero waved it away.

‘We shall have to have pictures,’ said Gumbril, parenthetically. He had an idea.

‘Oh, of course.’

‘I believe I know of the very man to do them,’ Gumbril went on. ‘His name’s Lypiatt. A painter. You’ve probably heard of him.’

‘Heard of him!’ exclaimed Mr Boldero. He laughed. ‘But who hasn’t heard of Lydgate.’

‘Lypiatt.’

‘Lypgate, I mean, of course.’

‘I think he’d be the very man,’ said Gumbril.

‘I’m certain he would,’ said Mr Boldero, not a whit behindhand.

Gumbril was pleased with himself. He felt he had done some one a good turn. Poor old Lypiatt; be glad of the money. Gumbril remembered also his own fiver. And remembering his own fiver, he also remembered that Mr Boldero had as yet made no concrete suggestion about terms. He nerved himself at last to suggest to Mr Boldero that it was time to think of this little matter. Ah, how he hated talking about money! He found it so hard to be firm in asserting his rights. He was ashamed of showing himself grasping. He always thought with consideration of the other person’s point of view – poor devil, could he afford to pay? And he was always swindled and always conscious of the fact. Lord, how he hated life on these occasions! Mr Boldero was still evasive.

‘I’ll write you a letter about it,’ he said at last.

Gumbril was delighted. ‘Yes, do,’ he said enthusiastically, ‘do.’ He knew how to cope with letters all right. He was a devil with the fountain-pen. It was these personal, hand-to-hand combats that he couldn’t manage. He could have been, he always felt, such a ruthless critic and satirist, such a violent, unscrupulous polemical writer. And if ever he committed his autobiography to paper, how breath-takingly intimate, how naked – naked without so much as a healthy sunburn to colour the whiteness – how quiveringly a sensitive jelly it would be! All the things he had never told any one would be in it. Confession at long range – if anything it would be rather agreeable.

‘Yes, do write me a letter,’ he repeated. ‘Do.’

Mr Boldero’s letter came at last, and the proposals it contained were derisory. A hundred pounds down and five pounds a week when the business should be started. Five pounds a week – and for that he was to act as a managing director, writer of advertisements and promoter of foreign sales. Gumbril felt thankful that Mr Boldero had put the terms in a letter. If they had been offered point-blank across the luncheon table, he would probably have accepted them without a murmur. He wrote a few neat, sharp phrases saying that he could not consider less than five hundred pounds down and a thousand a year. Mr Boldero’s reply was amiable; would Mr Gumbril come and see him?

See him? Well, of course, it was inevitable. He would have to see him again some time. But he would send the Complete Man to deal with the fellow. A Complete Man matched with a leprechaun – there could be no doubt as to the issue.

‘DEAR MR BOLDERO,’ he wrote back, ‘I should have come to talk over matters before this. But I have been engaged during the last few days in growing a beard and until this has come to maturity, I cannot, as you will easily be able to understand, leave the house. By the day after to-morrow, however, I hope to be completely presentable and shall come to see you at your office at about three o’clock, if that is convenient to you. I hope we shall be able to arrange matters satisfactorily. – Believe me, dear Mr Boldero, yours very truly, THEODORE GUMBRIL, JR.’

The day after to-morrow became in due course to-day; splendidly bearded and Rabelaisianly broad in his whip-cord toga, Gumbril presented himself at Mr Boldero’s office in Queen Victoria Street.

‘I should hardly have recognized you,’ exclaimed Mr Boldero as he shook hands. ‘How it does alter you, to be sure!’

‘Does it?’ The Complete Man laughed with a significant joviality.

‘Won’t you take off your coat?’

‘No, thanks,’ said Gumbril. ‘I’ll keep it on.’

‘Well,’ said the leprechaun, leaning back in his chair and twinkling, bird-like, across the table.

‘Well,’ repeated Gumbril on a different tone from behind the stooks of his corn-like beard. He smiled, feeling serenely strong and safe.

‘I’m sorry we should have disagreed,’ said Mr Boldero.

‘So am I,’ the Complete Man replied. ‘But we shan’t disagree for long,’ he added, with significance; and as he spoke the words he brought down his fist with such a bang, that the inkpots on Mr Boldero’s very solid mahogany writing-table trembled and the pens danced, while Mr Boldero himself started with a genuine alarm. He had not expected them. And now he came to look at him more closely, this young Gumbril was a great, hulking, dangerous-looking fellow. He had thought he would be easy to manage. How could he have made such a mistake?

Gumbril left the office with Mr Boldero’s cheque for three hundred and fifty pounds in his pocket and an annual income of eight hundred. His bruised right hand was extremely tender to the touch. He was thankful that a single blow had been enough.

CHAPTER XI

GUMBRIL HAD SPENT the afternoon at Bloxam Gardens. His chin was still sore from the spirit gum with which he had attached to it the symbol of the Complete Man; he was feeling also a little fatigued. Rosie had been delighted to see him; St Jerome had gone on solemnly communicating all the time.

His father had gone out to dine, and Gumbril had eaten his rump steak and drunk his bottle of stout alone. He was sitting now in front of the open french windows which led from his father’s workroom on to the balcony, with a block on his knee and a fountain-pen in his hand, composing advertisements for the Patent Small-Clothes. Outside, in the plane-trees of the square, the birds had gone through their nightly performance. But Gumbril had paid no attention to them. He sat there, smoking, sometimes writing a word or two – sunk in the quagmire of his own drowsy and comfortable body. The flawless weather of the day had darkened into a blue May evening. It was agreeable merely to be alive.

He sketched out two or three advertisements in the grand idealistic transatlantic style. He imagined one in particular with a picture of Nelson at the head of the page and ‘England expects . . .’ printed large beneath it. ‘England . . . Duty . . . these are solemn words.’ That was how it would begin. ‘These are solemn words, and we use them solemnly as men who realize what Duty is, and who do all that in them lies to perform it as Englishmen should. The Manufacturer’s is a sacred trust. The guide and ruler of the modern world, he has, like the Monarch of other days, responsibilities towards his people; he has a Duty to fulfil. He rules, but he must also serve. We realize our responsibilities, we take them seriously. Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes have been brought into the world that they may serve. Our Duty towards you is a Duty of Service. Our proud boast is that we perform it. But besides his Duty towards Others, every man has a duty towards Himself. What is that Duty? It is to keep himself in the highest possible state of physical and spiritual fitness. Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes protect the lumbar ganglia . . .’ After that it would be plain medical and mystical sailing.

As soon as he got to the ganglia, Gumbril stopped writing. He put down the block, sheathed his pen, and abandoned himself to the pleasures of pure idleness. He sat, he smoked his cigar. In the basement, two floors down, the cook and the house parlourmaid were reading – one the Daily Mirror, the other the Daily Sketch. For them, Her Majesty the Queen spoke kindly words to crippled female orphans; the jockeys tumbled at the jumps; Cupid was busy in Society, and the murderers who had disembowelled their mistresses were at large. Above him was the city of models, was a bedroom, a servant’s bedroom, an attic of tanks and ancient dirt, the roof and, after that, two or three hundred light-years away, a star of the fourth magnitude. On the other side of the party-wall on his right, a teeming family of Jews led their dark, compact, Jewish lives with a prodigious intensity. At this moment they were all passionately quarrelling. Beyond the wall on the left lived the young journalist and his wife. To-night it was he who had cooked the supper. The young wife lay on the sofa, feeling horribly sick; she was going to have a baby, there could be no doubt about it now. They had meant not to have one; it was horrible. And, outside, the birds were sleeping in the trees, the invading children from the slum tumbled and squealed. Ships meanwhile were walloping across the Atlantic freighted with more cigars. Rosie at this moment was probably mending Shearwater’s socks. Gumbril sat and smoked, and the universe arranged itself in a pattern about him, like iron filings round a magnet.

The door opened, and the house-parlourmaid intruded Shearwater upon his lazy felicity, abruptly, in her unceremonious old way, and hurried back to the Daily Sketch.

‘Shearwater! This is very agreeable,’ said Gumbril. ‘Come and sit down!’ He pointed to a chair.

Clumsily, filling the space that two ordinary men would occupy, Shearwater came zigzagging and lurching across the room, bumped against the work-table and the sofa as he passed, and finally sat down in the indicated chair.

It suddenly occurred to Gumbril that this was Rosie’s husband: he had not thought of that before. Could it be in the marital capacity that he presented himself so unexpectedly now? After this afternoon . . . He had come home; Rosie had confessed all . . . Ah! but then she didn’t know who he was. He smiled to himself at the thought. What a joke! Perhaps Shearwater had come to complain to him of the unknown Complete Man – to him! It was delightful. Anon – the author of all those ballads in the Oxford Book of English Verse: the famous Italian painter – Ignoto. Gumbril was quite disappointed when his visitor began to talk of other themes than Rosie. Sunk in the quagmire of his own comfortable guts, he felt good-humouredly obscene. The dramatic scabrousness of the situation would have charmed him in his present mood. Good old Shearwater – but what an ox of a man! If he, Gumbril, took the trouble to marry a wife, he would at least take some interest in her.

Shearwater had begun to talk in general terms about life. What would he be getting at, Gumbril wondered? What particulars were ambushed behind these generalizations? There were silences. Shearwater looked, he thought, very gloomy. Under his thick moustache the small, pouting babyish mouth did not smile. The candid eyes had a puzzled, tired expression in them.

‘People are queer,’ he said after one of his silences. ‘Very queer. One has no idea how queer they are.’

Gumbril laughed. ‘But I have a very clear idea of their queerness,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s queer, and the ordinary, respectable, bourgeois people are the queerest of the lot. How do they manage to live like that? It’s astonishing. When I think of all my aunts and uncles . . .’ He shook his head.

‘Perhaps it’s because I’m rather incurious,’ said Shearwater. ‘One ought to be curious, I think. I’ve come to feel lately that I’ve not been curious enough about people.’ The particulars began to peep, alive and individual, out of the vagueness, like rabbits; Gumbril saw them in his fancy, at the fringe of a wood.

‘Quite,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Quite.’

‘I think too much of my work,’ Shearwater went on, frowning. ‘Too much physiology. There’s also psychology. People’s minds as well as their bodies . . . One shouldn’t be limited. Not too much, at any rate. People’s minds . . .’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I can imagine,’ he went on at last, as in the tone of one who puts a very hypothetical case, ‘I can imagine one’s getting so much absorbed in somebody else’s psychology that one could really think of nothing else.’ The rabbits seemed ready to come out into the open.

‘That’s a process,’ said Gumbril, with middle-aged jocularity, speaking out of his private warm morass, ‘that’s commonly called falling in love.’

There was another silence. Shearwater broke it to begin talking about Mrs Viveash. He had lunched with her three or four days running. He wanted Gumbril to tell him what she was really like. ‘She seems to be a very extraordinary woman,’ he said.

‘Like everybody else,’ said Gumbril irritatingly. It amused him to see the rabbits scampering about at last.

‘I’ve never known a woman like that before.’

Gumbril laughed. ‘You’d say that of any woman you happen to be interested in,’ he said. ‘You’ve never known any women at all.’ He knew much more about Rosie, already, than Shearwater did, or probably ever would.

Shearwater meditated. He thought of Mrs Viveash, her cool, pale, critical eyes; her laughter, faint and mocking; her words that pierced into the mind, goading it into thinking unprecedented thoughts.

‘She interests me,’ he repeated. ‘I want you to tell me what she’s really like.’ He emphasized the word really, as though there must, in the nature of things, be a vast difference between the apparent and the real Mrs Viveash.

Most lovers, Gumbril reflected, picture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else – their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘How should I know? You must find out for yourself.’

‘But you know her, you know her well,’ said Shearwater, almost with anxiety in his voice.

‘Not so well as all that.’

Shearwater sighed profoundly, like a whale in the night. He felt restless, incapable of concentrating. His mind was full of a horrible confusion. A violent eruptive bubbling up from below had shaken its calm clarity to pieces. All this absurd business of passion – he had always thought it nonsense, unnecessary. With a little strength of will one could shut it out. Women – only for half an hour out of the twenty-four. But she had laughed, and his quiet, his security had vanished. ‘I can imagine,’ he had said to her yesterday, ‘I can imagine myself giving up everything, work and all, to go running round after you.’ ‘And do you suppose I should enjoy that?’ Mrs Viveash had asked. ‘It would be ridiculous,’ he said, ‘it would be almost shameful.’ And she had thanked him for the compliment. ‘And at the same time,’ he went on, ‘I feel that it might be worth it. It might be the only thing.’ His mind was confused, full of new thoughts. ‘It’s difficult,’ he said after a pause, ‘arranging things. Very difficult. I thought I had arranged them so well . . .’

‘I never arrange anything,’ said Gumbril, very much the practical philosopher. ‘I take things as they come.’ And as he spoke the words, suddenly he became rather disgusted with himself. He shook himself; he climbed up out of his own morass. ‘It would be better, perhaps, if I arranged things more,’ he added.

‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,’ said Shearwater, as though to himself; ‘and to God, and to sex, and to work . . . There must be a working arrangement.’ He sighed again. ‘Everything in proportion. In proportion,’ he repeated, as though the word were magical and had power. ‘In proportion.’

‘Who’s talking about proportion?’ They turned round. In the doorway Gumbril Senior was standing, smoothing his ruffled hair and tugging at his beard. His eyes twinkled cheerfully behind his spectacles. ‘Poaching on my architectural ground?’ he said.

‘This is Shearwater,’ Gumbril Junior put in, and explained who he was.

The old gentleman sat down. ‘Proportion,’ he said – ‘I was just thinking about it, now, as I was walking back. You can’t help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn’t exist. You can’t help pining for it. There are some streets . . . oh, my God!’ And Gumbril Senior threw up his hands in horror. ‘It’s like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way. And the one street that was really like a symphony by Mozart – how busily and gleefully they’re pulling it down now! Another year and there’ll be nothing left of Regent Street. There’ll only be a jumble of huge, hideous buildings at three-quarters of a million apiece. A concert of Brobdingnagian cats. Order has been turned into a disgusting chaos. We need no barbarians from outside; they’re on the premises, all the time.’

The old man paused and pulled his beard meditatively. Gumbril Junior sat in silence, smoking; and in silence Shearwater revolved within the walls of his great round head his agonizing thoughts of Mrs Viveash.

‘It has always struck me as very curious,’ Gumbril Senior went on, ‘that people are so little affected by the vile and discordant architecture around them. Suppose, now, that all these brass bands of unemployed ex-soldiers that blow so mournfully at all the street corners were suddenly to play nothing but a series of senseless and devilish discords – why, the first policeman would move them on, and the second would put them under arrest, and the passers-by would try to lynch them on their way to the police station. There would be a real spontaneous outcry of indignation. But when at these same street corners the contractors run up enormous palaces of steel and stone that are every bit as stupid and ignoble and inharmonious as ten brass bandsmen each playing a different tune in a different key, there is no outcry. The police don’t arrest the architect; the passing pedestrians don’t throw stones at the workmen. They don’t notice that anything’s wrong. It’s odd,’ said Gumbril Senior. ‘It’s very odd.’

‘Very odd,’ Gumbril Junior echoed.

‘The fact is, I suppose,’ Gumbril Senior went on, smiling with a certain air of personal triumph, ‘the fact is that architecture is a more difficult and intellectual art than music. Music – that’s just a faculty you’re born with, as you might be born with a snub nose. But the sense of plastic beauty – though that’s, of course, also an inborn faculty – is something that has to be developed and intellectually ripened. It’s an affair of the mind; experiences and thought have to draw it out. There are infant prodigies in music; but there are no infant prodigies in architecture.’ Gumbril Senior chuckled with a real satisfaction. ‘A man can be an excellent musician and a perfect imbecile. But a good architect must also be a man of sense, a man who knows how to think and to profit by experience. Now, as almost none of the people who pass along the streets in London, or any other city of the world, do know how to think or to profit by experience, it follows that they cannot appreciate architecture. The innate faculty is strong enough in them to make them dislike discord in music; but they haven’t the wit to develop that other innate faculty – the sense of plastic beauty – which would enable them to see and disapprove of the same barbarism in architecture. Come with me,’ Gumbril Senior added, getting up from his chair, ‘and I’ll show you something that will illustrate what I’ve been saying. Something you’ll enjoy, too. Nobody’s seen it yet,’ he said mysteriously as he led the way upstairs. ‘It’s only just finished – after months and years. It’ll cause a stir when they see it – when I let them see it, if ever I do, that is. The dirty devils!’ Gumbril Senior added good-humouredly.

On the landing of the next floor he paused, felt in his pocket, took out a key and unlocked the door of what should have been the second best bedroom. Gumbril Junior wondered, without very much curiosity, what the new toy would turn out to be. Shearwater wondered only how he could possess Mrs Viveash.

‘Come on,’ called Gumbril Senior from inside the room. He turned on the light. They entered.

It was a big room; but almost the whole of the floor was covered by an enormous model, twenty feet long by ten or twelve wide, of a complete city traversed from end to end by a winding river and dominated at its central point by a great dome. Gumbril Junior looked at it with surprise and pleasure. Even Shearwater was roused from his bitter ruminations of desire to look at the charming city spread out at his feet.

‘It’s exquisite,’ said Gumbril Junior. ‘What is it? The capital of Utopia, or what?’

Delighted, Gumbril Senior laughed. ‘Don’t you see something rather familiar in the dome?’ he asked.

‘Well, I had thought . . .’ Gumbril Junior hesitated, afraid that he might be going to say something stupid. He bent down to look more closely at the dome. ‘I had thought it looked rather like St Paul’s – and now I see that it is St Paul’s.’

‘Quite right,’ said his father. ‘And this is London.’

‘I wish it were,’ Gumbril Junior laughed.

‘It’s London as it might have been if they’d allowed Wren to carry out his plans of rebuilding after the Great Fire.’

‘And why didn’t they allow him to?’ Shearwater asked.

‘Chiefly,’ said Gumbril Senior, ‘because, as I’ve said before, they didn’t know how to think or profit by experience. Wren offered them open spaces and broad streets; he offered them sunlight and air and cleanliness; he offered them beauty, order and grandeur. He offered to build for the imagination and the ambitious spirit of man, so that even the most bestial, vaguely and remotely, as they walked those streets, might feel that they were of the same race – or very nearly – as Michelangelo; that they too might feel themselves, in spirit at least, magnificent, strong and free. He offered them all these things; he drew a plan for them, walking in peril among the still smouldering ruins. But they preferred to re-erect the old intricate squalor; they preferred the mediaeval darkness and crookedness and beastly irregular quaintness; they preferred holes and crannies and winding tunnels; they preferred foul smells, sunless, stagnant air, phthisis and rickets; they preferred ugliness and pettiness and dirt; they preferred the wretched human scale, the scale of the sickly body, not of the mind. Miserable fools! But I suppose,’ the old man continued, shaking his head, ‘we can’t blame them.’ His hair had blown loose from its insecure anchorage; with a gesture of resignation he brushed it back into place. ‘We can’t blame them. We should have done the same in the circumstances – undoubtedly. People offer us reason and beauty; but we will have none of them, because they don’t happen to square with the notions that were grafted into our souls in youth, that have grown there and become a part of us. Experientia docet – nothing falser, so far as most of us are concerned, was ever said. You, no doubt, my dear Theodore, have often in the past made a fool of yourself with women . . .’

Gumbril Junior made an embarrassed gesture that half denied, half admitted the soft impeachment. Shearwater turned away, painfully reminded of what, for a moment, he had half forgotten. Gumbril Senior went on.

‘Will that prevent you from making as great a fool of yourself again to-morrow? It will not. It will most assuredly not.’ Gumbril Senior shook his head. ‘The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn’t. And that is why we must not be too hard on these honest citizens of London who, fully appreciating the inconveniences of darkness, disorder and dirt, manfully resisted any attempt to alter conditions which they had been taught from childhood onwards to consider as necessary, right and belonging inevitably to the order of things. We must not be too hard. We are doing something even worse ourselves. Knowing by a century of experience how beautiful, how graceful, how soothing to the mind is an ordered piece of town-planning, we pull down almost the only specimen of it we possess and put up in its place a chaos of Portland stone that is an offence against civilization. But let us forget about these old citizens and the labyrinth of ugliness and inconvenience which we have inherited from them, and which is called London. Let us forget the contemporaries who are making it still worse than it was. Come for a walk with me through this ideal city. Look.’

And Gumbril Senior began expounding it to them.

In the middle, there, of that great elliptical Piazza at the eastern end of the new City, stands, four-square, the Royal Exchange. Pierced only with small dark windows, and built of rough ashlars of the silvery Portland stone, the ground floor serves as a massy foundation for the huge pilasters that slide up, between base and capital, past three tiers of pedimented windows. Upon them rest the cornice, the attic and the balustrade, and on every pier of the balustrade a statue holds up its symbol against the sky. Four great portals, rich with allegory, admit to the courtyard with its double tier of coupled columns, its cloister and its gallery. The statue of Charles the Martyr rides triumphantly in the midst, and within the windows one guesses the great rooms, rich with heavy garlands of plaster, panelled with carved wood.

Ten streets give on to the Piazza, and at either end of its ellipse the water of sumptuous fountains ceaselessly blows aloft and falls. Commerce, in that to the north of the Exchange, holds up her cornucopia, and from the midst of its grapes and apples the master jet leaps up; from the teats of all the ten Useful Arts, grouped with their symbols about the central figure, there spouts a score of fine subsidiary streams. The dolphins, the sea-horses and the Tritons sport in the basin below. To the south, the ten principal cities of the Kingdom stand in a family round the Mother London, who pours from her urn an inexhaustible Thames.

Ranged round the Piazza are the Goldsmiths’ Hall, the Office of Excise, the Mint, the Post Office. Their flanks are curved to the curve of the ellipse. Between pilasters, their windows look out on to the Exchange, and the sister statues on the balustrades beckon to one another across the intervening space.

Two master roads of ninety feet from wall to wall run westwards from the Exchange. New Gate ends the more northern vista with an Arch of Triumph, whose three openings are deep, shadowy and solemn as the entries of caverns. The Guildhall and the halls of the twelve City Companies in their livery of rose-red brick, with their lacings of white stone at the coigns and round the windows, lend to the street an air of domestic and comfortable splendour. And every two or three hundred paces the line of the house is broken, and in the indentation of a square recess there rises, conspicuous and insular, the fantastic tower of a parish church. Spire out of dome; octagon on octagon diminishing upwards; cylinder on cylinder; round lanterns, lanterns of many sides; towers with airy pinnacles; clusters of pillars linked by incurving cornices, and above them, four more clusters and above once more; square towers pierced with pointed windows; spires uplifted on flying buttresses; spires bulbous at the base – the multitude of them beckons, familiar and friendly, on the sky. From the other shore, or sliding along the quiet river, you see them all, you tell over their names; and the great dome swells up in the midst overtopping them all.

The dome of St Paul’s.

The other master street that goes westward from the Piazza of the Exchange slants down towards it. The houses are of brick, plain-faced and square, arcaded at the base, so that the shops stand back from the street and the pedestrian walks dry-shod under the harmonious succession of the vaultings. And there at the end of the street, at the base of a triangular space formed by the coming together of this with another master street that runs eastwards to Tower Hill, there stands the Cathedral. To the north of it is the Deanery and under the arcades are the booksellers’ shops.

From St Paul’s the main road slopes down under the swaggering Italianate arches of Ludgate, past the wide lime-planted boulevards that run north and south within and without the city wall, to the edge of the Fleet Ditch – widened now into a noble canal, on whose paved banks the barges unload their freights of country stuff – leaps it on a single flying arch to climb again to a round circus, a little to the east of Temple Bar, from which, in a pair of diagonally superimposed crosses, eight roads radiate: three northwards towards Holborn, three from the opposite arc towards the river, one eastward to the City, and one past Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the west. The piazza is all of brick and the houses that compose it are continuous above the ground-floor level; for the roads lead out under archways, to one who stands in the centre at the foot of the obelisk that commemorates the victory over the Dutch, it seems a smooth well of brickwork pierced by eight arched conduits at the base and diversified above by the three tiers of plain, unornamented windows.

Who shall describe all the fountains in the open places, all the statues and monuments? In the circus north of London Bridge, where the four roads come together, stands a pyramid of nymphs and Tritons – river goddesses of Polyolbion, sea-gods of the island beaches – bathing in a ceaseless tumble of white water. And here the city griffon spouts from its beak, the royal lion from between its jaws. St George at the foot of the Cathedral rides down a dragon whose nostrils spout, not fire, but the clear water of the New River. In front of the India House, four elephants of black marble, endorsed with towers of white, blow through their upturned trunks the copious symbol of Eastern wealth. In the gardens of the Tower sits Charles the Second, enthroned among a troop of Muses, Cardinal Virtues, Graces and Hours. The tower of the Customs-House is a pharos. A great water-gate, the symbol of naval triumph, spans the Fleet at its junction with the Thames. The river is embanked from Blackfriars to the Tower, and at every twenty paces a grave stone angel looks out from the piers of the balustrade across the water . . .

Gumbril Senior expounded his city with passion. He pointed to the model on the ground, he lifted his arms and turned up his eyes to suggest the size and splendour of his edifices. His hair blew wispily loose and fell into his eyes, and had to be brushed impatiently back again. He pulled at his beard; his spectacles flashed, as though they were living eyes. Looking at him, Gumbril Junior could imagine that he saw before him the passionate and gesticulating silhouette of one of those old shepherds who stand at the base of Piranesi’s ruins demonstrating obscurely the prodigious grandeur and the abjection of the human race.

CHAPTER XII

‘YOU? IS IT you?’ She seemed doubtful.

Gumbril nodded. ‘It’s me,’ he reassured her. ‘I’ve shaved; that’s all.’ He had left his beard in the top right-hand drawer of the chest of drawers, among the ties and the collars.

Emily looked at him judicially. ‘I like you better without it,’ she decided at last. ‘You look nicer. Oh no, I don’t mean to say you weren’t nice before,’ she hastened to add. ‘But – you know – gentler –’ She hesitated. ‘It’s a silly word,’ she said, ‘but there it is: sweeter.’

That was the unkindest cut of all. ‘Milder and more melancholy?’ he suggested.

‘Well, if you like to put it like that,’ Emily agreed.

He took her hand and raised it to his lips. ‘I forgive you,’ he said.

He could forgive her anything for the sake of those candid eyes, anything for the grave, serious mouth, anything for the short brown hair that curled – oh, but never seriously, never gravely – with such a hilarious extravagance round her head. He had met her, or rather the Complete Man, flushed with his commercial triumphs as he returned from his victory over Mr Boldero, had met her at the National Gallery. ‘Old Masters, young mistresses’; Coleman had recommended the National Gallery. He was walking up the Venetian Room, feeling as full of swaggering vitality as the largest composition of Veronese, when he heard, gigglingly whispered just behind him, his Open Sesame to new adventure, ‘Beaver’. He spun round on his tracks and found himself face to face with two rather startled young women. He frowned ferociously: he demanded satisfaction for the impertinence. They were both, he noticed, of gratifyingly pleasing appearance and both extremely young. One of them, the elder it seemed, and the more charming, as he had decided from the first, of the two, was dreadfully taken aback; blushed to the eyes, stammered apologetically. But the other, who had obviously pronounced the word, only laughed. It was she who made easy the forming of an acquaintance which ripened, half an hour later, over the tea-cups and to the strains of the most classy music on the fifth floor of Lyons’ Strand Corner House.

Their names were Emily and Molly. Emily, it seemed, was married. It was Molly who let that out, and the other had been angry with her for what was evidently an indiscretion. The bald fact that Emily was married had at once been veiled with mysteries, surrounded and protected by silences; whenever the Complete Man asked a question about it, Emily did not answer and Molly only giggled. But if Emily was married and the elder of the two, Molly was decidedly the more knowledgeable about life; Mr Mercaptan would certainly have set her down as the more civilized. Emily didn’t live in London; she didn’t seem to live anywhere in particular. At the moment she was staying with Molly’s family at Kew.

He had seen them the next day, and the day after, and the day after that; once at lunch, to desert them precipitately for his afternoon with Rosie; once at tea in Kew Gardens; once at dinner, with a theatre to follow and an extravagant taxi back to Kew at midnight. The tame decoy allays the fears of the shy wild birds; Molly, who was tame, who was frankly a flirting little wanton, had served the Complete Man as a decoy for the ensnaring of Emily. When Molly went away to stay with friends in the country, Emily was already inured and accustomed to the hunter’s presence; she accepted the playful attitude of gallantry, which the Complete Man, at the invitation of Molly’s rolling eyes and provocative giggle, had adopted from the first, as natural and belonging to the established order of things. With giggling Molly to give her a lead, she had gone in three days much further along the path of intimacy than, by herself, she would have advanced in ten times the number of meetings.

‘It seems funny,’ she had said the first time they met after Molly’s departure, ‘it seems funny to be seeing you without Molly.’

‘It seemed funnier with Molly,’ said the Complete Man. ‘It wasn’t Molly I wanted to see.’

‘Molly’s a very nice, dear girl,’ she declared loyally. ‘Besides, she’s amusing and can talk. And I can’t; I’m not a bit amusing.’

It wasn’t difficult to retort to that sort of thing; but Emily didn’t believe in compliments; oh, quite genuinely not.

He set out to make the exploration of her; and now that she was inured to him, no longer too frightened to let him approach, now, moreover, that he had abandoned the jocular insolences of the Complete Man in favour of a more native mildness, which he felt instinctively was more suitable in this particular case, she laid no difficulties in his way. She was lonely, and he seemed to understand everything so well; in the unknown country of her spirit and her history she was soon going eagerly before him as his guide.

She was an orphan. Her mother she hardly remembered. Her father had died of influenza when she was fifteen. One of his business friends used to come and see her at school, take her out for treats and give her chocolates. She used to call him Uncle Stanley. He was a leather merchant, fat and jolly with a rather red face, very white teeth and a bald head that was beautifully shiny. When she was seventeen and a half he asked her to marry him, and she had said yes.

‘But why?’ Gumbril asked. ‘Why on earth?’ he repeated.

‘He said he’d take me round the world; it was just when the war had come to an end. Round the world, you know; and I didn’t like school. I didn’t know anything about it and he was very nice to me; he was very pressing. I didn’t know what marriage meant.’

‘Didn’t know?’

She shook her head; it was quite true. ‘But not in the least.’

And she had been born within the twentieth century. It seemed a case for the text-books of sexual psychology. ‘Mrs Emily X, born in 1901, was found to be in a state of perfect innocence and ignorance at the time of the Armistice, 11th November 1918,’ etc.

‘And so you married him?’

She had nodded.

‘And then?’

She had covered her face with her hands, she had shuddered. The amateur uncle, now professionally a husband, had come to claim his rights – drunk. She had fought him, she had eluded him, had run away and locked herself into another room. On the second night of her honeymoon he gave her a bruise on the forehead and a bite on the left breast which had gone on septically festering for weeks. On the fourth, more determined than ever, he seized her so violently by the throat, that a blood-vessel broke and she began coughing bright blood over the bedclothes. The amateur uncle had been reduced to send for a doctor and Emily had spent the next few weeks in a nursing home. That was four years ago; her husband had tried to induce her to come back, but Emily had refused. She had a little money of her own; she was able to refuse. The amateur uncle had consoled himself with other and more docile nieces.

‘And has nobody tried to make love to you since then?’ he asked.

‘Oh, lots of them have tried.’

‘And not succeeded?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t like men,’ she said. ‘They’re hateful, most of them. They’re brutes.’

‘Anch’io?’

‘What?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘Am I a brute too?’ And behind his beard, suddenly, he felt rather a brute.

‘No,’ said Emily, after a little hesitation, ‘you’re different. At least I think you are; though sometimes,’ she added candidly, ‘sometimes you do and say things which make me wonder if you really are different.’

The Complete Man laughed.

‘Don’t laugh like that,’ she said. ‘It’s rather stupid.’

‘You’re perfectly right,’ said Gumbril. ‘It is.’

And how did she spend her time? He continued the exploration.

Well, she read a lot of books; but most of the novels she got from Boots’ seemed to her rather silly.

‘Too much about the same thing. Always love.’

The Complete Man gave a shrug. ‘Such is life.’

‘Well, it oughtn’t to be,’ said Emily.

And then, when she was in the country – and she was often in the country, taking lodgings here and there in little villages, weeks and months at a time – she went for long walks. Molly couldn’t understand why she liked the country; but she did. She was very fond of flowers. She liked them more than people, she thought.

‘I wish I could paint,’ she said. ‘If I could, I’d be happy for ever, just painting flowers. But I can’t paint.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve tried so often. Such dirty, ugly smudges come out on the paper; and it’s all so lovely in my head, so lovely out in the fields.’

Gumbril began talking with erudition about the flora of West Surrey: where you could find butterfly orchis and green man and the bee, the wood where there was actually wild columbine growing, the best localities for butcher’s broom, the outcrops of clay where you get wild daffodils. All this odd knowledge came spouting up into his mind from some underground source of memory. Flowers – he never thought about flowers nowadays from one year’s end to the other. But his mother had liked flowers. Every spring and summer they used to go down to stay at their cottage in the country. All their walks, all their drives in the governess cart had been haunts after flowers. And naturally the child had hunted with all his mother’s ardour. He had kept books of pressed flowers, he had mummified them in hot sand, he had drawn maps of the country and coloured them elaborately with different coloured inks to show where the different flowers grew. How long ago all that was! Horribly long ago! Many seeds had fallen in the stony places of his spirit, to spring luxuriantly up into stalky plants and wither again because they had no deepness of earth; many had been sown there and had died, since his mother scattered the seeds of the wild flowers.

‘And if you want sundew,’ he wound up, ‘you’ll find it in the Punch Bowl, under Hindhead. Or round about Frensham. The Little Pond, you know, not the Big.’

‘But you know all about them,’ Emily exclaimed in delight. ‘I’m ashamed of my poor little knowledge. And you must really love them as much as I do.’

Gumbril did not deny it; they were linked henceforth by a chain of flowers.

But what else did she do?

Oh, of course she played the piano a great deal. Very badly; but at any rate it gave her pleasure. Beethoven: she liked Beethoven best. More or less, she knew all the sonatas, though she could never keep up anything like the right speed in the difficult parts.

Gumbril had again shown himself wonderfully at home. ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘I bet you can’t shake that low B in the last variation but one of Op. io6 so that it doesn’t sound ridiculous.’

And of course she couldn’t, and of course she was glad that he knew all about it and how impossible it was.

In the cab, as they drove back to Kew that evening, the Complete Man had decided it was time to do something decisive. The parting kiss – more of a playful sonorous buss than a serious embracement – that was already in the protocol, as signed and sealed before her departure by giggling Molly. It was time, the Complete Man considered, that this salute should take on a character less formal and less playful. One, two, three and, decisively, as they passed through Hammersmith Broadway, he risked the gesture. Emily burst into tears. He was not prepared for that, though perhaps he should have been. It was only by imploring, only by almost weeping himself, that Gumbril persuaded her to revoke her decision never, never to see him again.

‘I had thought you were different,’ she sobbed. ‘And now, now –’

‘Please, please,’ he entreated. He was on the point of tearing off his beard and confessing everything there and then. But that, on second thoughts, would probably only make things worse.

‘Please, I promise.’

In the end, she had consented to see him once again, provisionally, in Kew Gardens, on the following day. They were to meet at the little temple that stands on the hillock above the valley of the heathers.

And now, duly, they had met. The Complete Man had been left at home in the top right-hand drawer, along with the ties and collars. She would prefer, he guessed, the Mild and Melancholy one; he was quite right. She had thought him ‘sweeter’ at a first glimpse.

‘I forgive you,’ he said, and kissed her hand. ‘I forgive you.’

Hand in hand they walked down towards the valley of the heaths.

‘I don’t know why you should be forgiving me,’ she said, laughing. ‘It seems to me that I ought to be doing the forgiving. After yesterday.’ She shook her head at him. ‘You made me so wretched.’

‘Ah, but you’ve already done your forgiving.’

‘You seem to take it very much for granted,’ said Emily. ‘Don’t be too sure.’

‘But I am sure,’ said Gumbril. ‘I can see –’

Emily laughed again. ‘I feel happy,’ she declared.

‘So do I.’

‘How green the grass is!’

Green, green – after these long damp months it glowed in the sunlight, as though it were lighted from inside.

‘And the trees!’

The pale, high, clot-polled trees of the English spring; the dark, symmetrical pine trees, islanded here and there on the lawns, each with its own separate profile against the sky and its own shadow, impenetrably dark or freckled with moving lights, on the grass at its feet.

They walked on in silence. Gumbril took off his hat, breathed the soft air that smelt of the greenness of the garden.

‘There are quiet places also in the mind,’ he said meditatively. ‘But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately – to put a stop to the quietness. We don’t like the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head – round and round, continually.’ He made a circular motion with his hand. ‘And the jazz bands, the music-hall songs, the boys shouting the news. What’s it for? what’s it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost it isn’t there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night, sometimes – not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep – the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits, all the fragments of it we’ve been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like this outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows – a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying, yes, terrifying as well as beautiful. For one’s alone in the crystal and there’s no support from outside, there’s nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or to stand on, superiorly, contemptuously, so that one can look down. There’s nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiastic about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressibly lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressibly terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize and engulf you, you’d die; all the regular, habitual, daily part of you would die. There would be an end of bandstands and whizzing factories, and one would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard-of-manner. Nearer, nearer come the steps; but one can’t face the advancing thing. One daren’t. It’s too terrifying, it’s too painful to die. Quickly, before it is too late, start the factory wheels, bang the drum, blow up the saxophone. Think of the women you’d like to sleep with, the schemes for making money, the gossip about your friends, the last outrage of the politicians. Anything for a diversion. Break the silence, smash the crystal to pieces. There, it lies in bits; it is easily broken, hard to build up and easy to break. And the steps? Ah, those have taken themselves off, double quick. Double quick, they were gone at the first flawing of the crystal. And by this time the lovely and terrifying thing is three infinities away, at least. And you lie tranquilly on your bed, thinking of what you’d do if you had ten thousand pounds, and of all the fornications you’ll never commit.’ He thought of Rosie’s pink underclothes.

‘You make things very complicated,’ she said, after a silence.

Gumbril spread out his great-coat on a green bank and they sat down. Leaning back, his hands under his head, he watched her sitting there beside him. She had taken off her hat; there was a stir of wind in those childish curls, and at the nape, at the temples, where the hair had sleaved out thin and fine, the sunlight made little misty haloes of gold. Her hands clasped round her knees, she sat quite still, looking out across the green expanses, at the trees, at the white clouds on the horizon. There was quiet in her mind, he thought. She was native to that crystal world; for her, the steps came comfortingly through the silence and the lovely thing brought with it no terrors. It was all so easy for her and simple.

Ah, so simple, so simple; like the Hire Purchase System on which Rosie had bought her pink bed. And how simple it was, too, to puddle clear waters and unpetal every flower! – every wild flower, by God! one ever passed in a governess cart at the heels of a barrel-bellied pony. How simple to spit on the floors of churches! Si prega di non sputare. Simple to kick one’s legs and enjoy oneself – dutifully – in pink underclothing. Perfectly simple.

‘It’s like the Arietta, don’t you think?’ said Emily suddenly, ‘the Arietta of Op. III.’ And she hummed the first bars of the air. ‘Don’t you feel it’s like that?’

‘What’s like that?’

‘Everything,’ said Emily. ‘To-day, I mean. You and me. These gardens –’ And she went on humming.

Gumbril shook his head. ‘Too simple for me,’ he said.

Emily laughed. ‘Ah, but then think how impossible it gets a little farther on.’ She agitated her fingers wildly, as though she were trying to play the impossible passages. ‘It begins easily for the sake of poor imbeciles like me; but it goes on, it goes on, more and more fully and subtly and abstrusely and embracingly. But it’s still the same movement.’

The shadows stretched farther and farther across the lawns, and as the sun declined the level light picked out among the grasses innumerable stipplings of shadow; and in the paths, that had seemed under the more perpendicular rays as level as a table, a thousand little shadowy depressions and sun-touched mountains were now apparent. Gumbril looked at his watch.

‘Good Lord!’ he said, ‘we must fly.’ He jumped up. ‘Quick, quick!’

‘But why?’

‘We shall be late.’ He wouldn’t tell her for what. ‘Wait and see’ was all that Emily could get out of him by her questioning. They hurried out of the gardens, and in spite of her protests he insisted on taking a taxi into town. ‘I have such a lot of unearned increment to get rid of,’ he explained. The Patent Small-Clothes seemed at the moment remoter than the farthest stars.

CHAPTER XIII

IN SPITE OF the taxi, in spite of the gobbled dinner, they were late. The concert had begun.

‘Never mind,’ said Gumbril. ‘We shall get in in time for the minuetto. It’s then that the fun really begins.’

‘Sour grapes,’ said Emily, putting her ear to the door. ‘It sounds to me simply too lovely.’

They stood outside, like beggars waiting abjectly at the doors of a banqueting-hall – stood and listened to the snatches of music that came out tantalizingly from within. A rattle of clapping announced at last that the first movement was over; the doors were thrown open. Hungrily they rushed in. The Sclopis Quartet and a subsidiary viola were bowing from the platform. There was a chirrup of tuning, then preliminary silence. Sclopis nodded and moved his bow. The minuetto of Mozart’s G minor Quintet broke out, phrase after phrase, short and decisive, with every now and then a violent sforzando chord, startling in its harsh and sudden emphasis.

Minuetto – all civilization, Mr Mercaptan would have said, was implied in the delicious word, the delicate, pretty thing. Ladies and precious gentlemen, fresh from the wit and gallantry of Crebillon-haunted sofas, stepping gracefully to a pattern of airy notes. To this passion of one who cries out, to this obscure and angry argument with fate how would they, Gumbril wondered, how would they have tripped it?

How pure the passion, how unaffected, clear and without clot or pretension the unhappiness of that slow movement which followed! Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Pure and unsullied; pure and unmixed, unadulterated. ‘Not passionate, thank God; only sensual and sentimental.’ In the name of earwig. Amen. Pure, pure. Worshippers have tried to rape the statues of the gods; the statuaries who made the images were generally to blame. And how deliciously, too, an artist can suffer! and, in the face of the whole Albert Hall, with what an effective gesture and grimace! But blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The instruments come together and part again. Long silver threads hang aerially over a murmur of waters; in the midst of muffled sobbing a cry. The fountains blow their architecture of slender pillars, and from basin to basin the waters fall; from basin to basin, and every fall makes somehow possible a higher leaping of the jet, and at the last fall the mounting column springs up into the sunlight, and from water the music has modulated up into a rainbow. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God; they shall make God visible too, to other eyes.

Blood beats in the ears. Beat, beat, beat. A slow drum in the darkness, beating in the ears of one who lies wakeful with fever, with the sickness of too much misery. It beats unceasingly, in the ears, in the mind itself. Body and mind are indivisible, and in the spirit blood painfully throbs. Sad thoughts drop through the mind. A small, pure light comes swaying down through the darkness, comes to rest, resigning itself to the obscurity of its misfortune. There is resignation, but blood still beats in the ears. Blood still painfully beats, though the mind has acquiesced. And then, suddenly, the mind exerts itself, throws off the fever of too much suffering and laughing, commands the body to dance. The introduction to the last movement comes to its suspended, throbbing close. There is an instant of expectation, and then, with a series of mounting trochees and a downward hurrying, step after tiny step, in triple time, the dance begins. Irrelevant, irreverent, out of key with all that has gone before. But man’s greatest strength lies in his capacity for irrelevance. In the midst of pestilences, wars and famines, he builds cathedrals; and a slave, he can think the irrelevant and unsuitable thoughts of a free man. The spirit is slave to fever and beating blood, at the mercy of an obscure and tyrannous misfortune. But irrelevantly, it elects to dance in triple measure – a mounting skip, a patter of descending feet.

The G minor Quintet is at an end; the applause rattles out loudly. Enthusiasts stand up and cry bravo. And the five men on the platform rise and bow their acknowledgments. Great Sclopis himself receives his share of the plaudits with a weary condescension; weary are his poached eyes, weary his disillusioned smile. It is only his due, he knows; but he has had so much clapping, so many lovely women. He has a Roman nose, a colossal brow and, though the tawny musical mane does much to conceal the fact, no back to his head. Garofalo, the second fiddle, is black, beady-eyed and pot-bellied. The convex reflections of the electroliers slide back and forth over his polished bald head, as he bends, again, again, in little military salutes. Peperkoek, two metres high, bows with a sinuous politeness. His face, his hair are all the same greyish buff colour; he does not smile, his appearance is monolithic and grim. Not so exuberant Knoedler, who sweats and smiles and embraces his ‘cello and lays his hand to his heart and bows almost to the ground as though all this hullaboo were directed only at him. As for poor little Mr Jenkins, the subsidiary viola, he has slid away into the background, and feeling that this is really the Sclopis’s show and that he, a mere intruder, has no right to any of these demonstrations, he hardly bows at all, but only smiles, vaguely and nervously, and from time to time makes a little spasmodic twitch to show that he isn’t really ungrateful or haughty, as you might think, but that he feels in the circumstances – the position is a little embarrassing – it is hard to explain . . .

‘Strange,’ said Gumbril, ‘to think that those ridiculous creatures could have produced what we’ve just been hearing.’

The poached eye of Sclopis lighted on Emily, flushed and ardently applauding. He gave her, all to herself, a weary smile. He would have a letter, he guessed, to-morrow morning signed ‘Your little Admirer in the Third Row’. She looked a choice little piece. He smiled again to encourage her. Emily, alas! had not even noticed. She was applauding the music.

‘Did you enjoy it?’ he asked, as they stepped out into a deserted Bond Street.

‘Did I . . .?’ Emily laughed expressively. ‘No, I didn’t enjoy,’ she said. ‘Enjoy isn’t the word. You enjoy eating ices. It made me happy. It’s unhappy music, but it made me happy.’

Gumbril hailed a cab and gave the address of his rooms in Great Russell Street. ‘Happy,’ he repeated, as they sat there side by side in the darkness. He, too, was happy.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘To my rooms,’ said Gumbril, ‘we shall be quiet there.’ He was afraid she might object to going there – after yesterday. But she made no comment.

‘Some people think that it’s only possible to be happy if one makes a noise,’ she said, after a pause. ‘I find it’s too delicate and melancholy for noise. Being happy is rather melancholy – like the most beautiful landscape, like those trees and the grass and the clouds and the sunshine to-day.’

‘From the outside,’ said Gumbril, ‘it even looks rather dull.’ They stumbled up the dark staircase to his rooms. Gumbril lit a pair of candles and put the kettle on the gas ring. They sat together on the divan sipping tea. In the rich, soft light of the candles she looked different, more beautiful. The silk of her dress seemed wonderfully rich and glossy, like the petals of a tulip, and on her face, on her bare arms and neck the light seemed to spread an impalpable bright bloom. On the wall behind them, their shadows ran up towards the ceiling, enormous and profoundly black.

‘How unreal it is,’ Gumbril whispered. ‘Not true. This remote secret room. These lights and shadows out of another time. And you out of nowhere and I, out of a past utterly remote from yours, sitting together here, together – and being happy. That’s the strangest thing of all. Being quite senselessly happy. It’s unreal, unreal.’

‘But why,’ said Emily, ‘why? It’s here and happening now. It is real.’

‘It all might vanish, at any moment,’ he said.

Emily smiled rather sadly. ‘It’ll vanish in due time,’ she said. ‘Quite naturally, not by magic; it’ll vanish the way everything else vanishes and changes. But it’s here now.’

They gave themselves up to the enchantment. The candles burned, two shining eyes of flame, without a wink, minute after minute. But for them there were no longer any minutes. Emily leaned against him, her body held in the crook of his arm, her head resting on his shoulder. He caressed his cheek against her hair; sometimes, very gently, he kissed her forehead or her closed eyes.

‘If I had known you years ago . . .’ she sighed. ‘But I was a silly little idiot then. I shouldn’t have noticed any difference between you and anybody else.’

‘I shall be very jealous,’ Emily spoke again after another timeless silence. ‘There must never be anybody else, never the shadow of anybody else.’

‘There never will be anybody else,’ said Gumbril.

Emily smiled and opened her eyes, looked up at him. ‘Ah, not here,’ she said, ‘not in this real unreal room. Not during this eternity. But there will be other rooms just as real as this.’

‘Not so real, not so real.’ He bent his face towards hers. She closed her eyes again, and the lids fluttered with a sudden tremulous movement at the touch of his light kiss.

For them there were no more minutes. But time passed, time passed flowing in a dark stream, stanchlessly, as though from some profound mysterious wound in the world’s side, bleeding, bleeding for ever. One of the candles had burned down to the socket and the long, smoky flame wavered unsteadily. The flickering light troubled their eyes; the shadows twitched and stirred uneasily. Emily looked up at him.

‘What’s the time?’ she said.

Gumbril looked at his watch. It was nearly one o’clock. ‘Too late for you to get back,’ he said.

‘Too late?’ Emily sat up. Ah, the enchantment was breaking, was giving way, like a film of ice beneath a weight, like a web before a thrust of wind. They looked at one another. ‘What shall I do?’ she asked.

‘You could sleep here,’ Gumbril answered in a voice that came from a long way away.

She sat for a long time in silence, looking through half-closed eyes at the expiring candle flame. Gumbril watched her in an agony of suspense. Was the ice to be broken, the webwork finally and for ever torn? The enchantment could still be prolonged, the eternity renewed. He felt his heart beating in his breast; he held his breath. It would be terrible if she were to go now, it would be a kind of death. The flame of the candle flickered more violently, leaping up in a thin, long, smoky flare, sinking again almost to darkness. Emily got up and blew out the candle. The other still burned calmly and steadily.

‘May I stay?’ she asked. ‘Will you allow me?’

He understood the meaning of her question, and nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Of course? Is it as much of course as all that?’

‘When I say so.’ He smiled at her. The eternity had been renewed, the enchantment prolonged. There was no need to think of anything but now the moment. The past was forgotten, the future abolished. There was only this secret room and the candlelight and the unreal, impossible happiness of being two. Now that this peril of a disenchantment had been averted, it would last for ever. He got up from the couch, crossed the room, he took her hands and kissed them.

‘Shall we sleep now?’ she asked.

Gumbril nodded.

‘Do you mind if I blow out the light?’ And without waiting for his answer, Emily turned, gave a puff, and the room was in darkness. He heard the rustling of her undressing. Hastily he stripped off his own clothes, pulled back the coverlet from the divan. The bed was made and ready; he opened it and slipped between the sheets. A dim greenish light from the gas lamp in the street below came up between the parted curtains illuminating faintly the farther end of the room. Against this tempered darkness he could see her, silhouetted, standing quite still, as if hesitating on some invisible brink.

‘Emily,’ he whispered.

‘I’m coming,’ Emily answered. She stood there, unmoving, a few seconds longer, then overstepped the brink. She came across the room, and sat down on the edge of the low couch. Gumbril lay perfectly still, without speaking, waiting in the enchanted timeless darkness. Emily lifted her knees, slid her feet in under the sheet, then stretched herself out beside him, her body, in the narrow bed, touching his. Gumbril felt that she was trembling; trembling, a sharp involuntary start, a little shudder, another start.

‘You’re cold,’ he said, and slipping one arm beneath her shoulders he drew her, limp and unresisting, towards him. She lay there, pressed against him. Gradually the trembling ceased. Quite still, quite still in the calm of the enchantment. The past is forgotten, the future abolished; there is only this dark and everlasting moment. A drugged and intoxicated stupor possessed his spirit; a numbness, warm and delicious, lay upon him. And yet through the stupor he knew with a dreadful anxious certainty that the end would soon be there. Like a man on the night before his execution, he looked forward through the endless present; he foresaw the end of his eternity. And after? Everything was uncertain and unsafe.

Very gently, he began caressing her shoulder, her long slender arm, drawing his finger-tips lightly and slowly over her smooth skin; slowly from her neck, over her shoulder, lingeringly round the elbow to her hand. Again, again: he was learning her arm. The form of it was part of the knowledge, now, of his fingertips; his fingers knew it as they knew a piece of music, as they knew Mozart’s Twelfth Sonata, for example. And the themes that crowd so quickly one after another at the beginning of the first movement played themselves aerially, glitteringly in his mind; they became a part of the enchantment.

Through the silk of her shift he learned her curving side, her smooth straight back and the ridge of her spine. He stretched down, touched her feet, her knees. Under the smock he learned her warm body, lightly, slowly caressing. He knew her, his fingers, he felt, could build her up, a warm and curving statue in the darkness. He did not desire her; to desire would have been to break the enchantment. He let himself sink deeper and deeper into his dark stupor of happiness. She was asleep in his arms; and soon he too was asleep.

CHAPTER XIV

MRS VIVEASH DESCENDED the steps into King Street, and standing there on the pavement looked dubiously first to the right and then to the left. Little and loud, the taxis rolled by on their white wheels, the long-snouted limousines passed with a sigh. The air smelt of watered dust, tempered in Mrs Viveash’s immediate neighbourhood by those memories of Italian jasmines which were her perfume. On the opposite pavement, in the shade, two young men, looking very conscious of their grey top-hats, marched gravely along.

Life, Mrs Viveash thought, looked a little dim this morning in spite of the fine weather. She glanced at her watch; it was one o’clock. Soon one would have to eat some lunch. But where, and with whom? Mrs Viveash had no engagements. All the world was before her, she was absolutely free, all day long. Yesterday, when she declined all those pressing invitations, the prospect had seemed delightful. Liberty, no complications, no contacts; a pre-Adamite empty world to do what she liked in.

But to-day, when it came to the point, she hated her liberty. To come out like this at one o’clock into a vacuum – it was absurd, it was appalling. The prospect of immeasurable boredom opened before her. Steppes after steppes of ennui, horizon beyond horizon, for ever the same. She looked again to the right and again to the left. Finally she decided to go to the left. Slowly, walking along her private knife-edge between her personal abysses, she walked towards the left. She remembered suddenly one shining day like this in the summer of 1917, when she had walked along this same street, slowly, like this, on the sunny side, with Tony Lamb. All that day, that night, it had been one long good-bye. He was going back the next morning. Less than a week later he was dead. Never again, never again: there had been a time when she could make herself cry, simply by saying those two words once or twice, under her breath. Never again, never again. She repeated them softly now. But she felt no tears behind her eyes. Grief doesn’t kill, love doesn’t kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkles and softens the body while it still lives, rots it like a medlar, kills it too at last. Never again, never again. Instead of crying, she laughed, laughed aloud. The pigeon-breasted old gentleman who had just passed her, twirling between his finger and thumb the ends of a white military moustache, turned round startled. Could she be laughing at him?

‘Never again,’ murmured Mrs Viveash.

‘I beg your pardon?’ queried the martial gentleman, in a rich, port-winey, cigary voice.

Mrs Viveash looked at him with such wide-eyed astonishment that the old gentleman was quite taken aback. ‘A thousand apologies, dear lady. Thought you were addressing . . . H’m, ah’m.’ He replaced his hat, squared his shoulders and went off smartly, left, right, bearing preciously before him his pigeon breast. Poor thing, he thought, poor young thing. Talking to herself. Must be cracked, must be off her head. Or perhaps she took drugs. That was more likely: that was much more likely. Most of them did nowadays. Vicious young women. Lesbians, drug-fiends, nymphomaniacs, dipsos – thoroughly vicious, nowadays, thoroughly vicious. He arrived at his club in an excellent temper.

Never again, never, never again. Mrs Viveash would have liked to be able to cry.

St James’s Square opened before her. Romantically under its trees the statue pranced. The trees gave her an idea: she might go down into the country for the afternoon, take a cab and drive out, out, goodness only knew where! To the top of a hill somewhere. Box Hill, Leith Hill, Holmbury Hill, Ivinghoe Beacon – any hill where one could sit and look out over plains. One might do worse than that with one’s liberty.

But not much worse, she reflected.

Mrs Viveash had turned up towards the northern side of the square and was almost at its north-western corner when, with a thrill of genuine delight, with a sense of the most profound relief she saw a familiar figure, running down the steps of the London Library.

‘Theodore!’ she hallooed faintly but penetratingly, from her inward death-bed. ‘Gumbril!’ She waved her parasol.

Gumbril halted, looked around, came smiling to meet her. ‘How delightful,’ he said, ‘but how unfortunate.’

‘Why unfortunate?’ asked Mrs Viveash. ‘Am I of evil omen?’

‘Unfortunate,’ Gumbril explained, ‘because I’ve got to catch a train and can’t profit by this meeting.’

‘Ah no, Theodore,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘you’re not going to catch a train. You’re going to come and lunch with me. Providence has decreed it. You can’t say no to Providence.’

‘I must,’ Gumbril shook his head. ‘I’ve said yes to somebody else.’

‘To whom?’

‘Ah!’ said Gumbril, with a coy and saucy mysteriousness.

‘And where are you going in your famous train?’

‘Ah again,’ Gumbril answered.

‘How intolerably tiresome and silly you are!’ Mrs Viveash declared. ‘One would think you were a sixteen-year-old schoolboy going out for his first assignment with a shop girl. At your age, Gumbril!’ She shook her head, smiled agonizingly and with contempt. ‘Who is she? What sordid pick-up?’

‘Not sordid in the least,’ protested Gumbril.

‘But decidedly a pick-up. Eh?’ A banana-skin was lying, like a bedraggled starfish, in the gutter, just in front of where they were standing. Mrs Viveash stepped forward and with the point of her parasol lifted it carefully up and offered it to her companion.

‘Merci,’ Gumbril bowed.

She tossed the skin back again into the gutter. ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘the young lady can wait while we have luncheon.’

Gumbril shook his head. ‘I’ve made the arrangement,’ he said. Emily’s letter was in his pocket. She had taken the loveliest cottage just out of Robertsbridge, in Sussex. Ah, but the loveliest imaginable. For the whole summer. He could come and see her there. He had telegraphed that he would come to-day, this afternoon, by the two o’clock from Charing Cross.

Mrs Viveash took him by the elbow. ‘Come along,’ she said. ‘There’s a post office in that passage going from Jermyn Street to Piccadilly. You can wire from there your infinite regrets. These things always improve with a little keeping. There will be raptures when you do go to-morrow.’

Gumbril allowed himself to be led along. ‘What an insufferable woman you are,’ he said, laughing.

‘Instead of being grateful to me for asking you to luncheon!’

‘Oh, I am grateful,’ said Gumbril. ‘And astonished.’

He looked at her. Mrs Viveash smiled and fixed him for a moment with her pale, untroubled eyes . . . She said nothing.

‘Still,’ Gumbril went on, ‘I must be at Charing Cross by two, you know.’

‘But we’re lunching at Verrey’s.’

Gumbril shook his head.

They were at the corner of Jermyn Street. Mrs Viveash halted and delivered her ultimatum, the more impressive for being spoken in that expiring voice of one who says in articulo the final and supremely important things. ‘We lunch at Verrey’s, Theodore, or I shall never, never speak to you again.’

‘But be reasonable, Myra,’ he implored. If only he’d told her that he had a business appointment . . . Imbecile, to have dropped those stupid hints . . . in that tone!

‘I prefer not to be,’ said Mrs Viveash.

Gumbril made a gesture of despair and was silent. He thought of Emily in her native quiet among the flowers; in a cottage altogether too cottagey, with honeysuckles and red ramblers and hollyhocks – though, on second thoughts, none of them would be blooming yet, would they? – happily, in white muslin, extracting from the cottage piano the easier sections of the Arietta. A little absurd, perhaps, when you considered her like that; but exquisite, but adorable, but pure of heart and flawless in her bright pellucid integrity, complete as a crystal in its faceted perfection. She would be waiting for him, expecting him; and they would walk through the twiddly lanes – or perhaps there would be a governess cart for hire, with a fat pony like a tub on legs to pull it – they would look for flowers in the woods and perhaps he would still remember what sort of noise a whitethroat makes; or even if he didn’t remember, he could always magisterially say he did. ‘That’s a whitethroat, Emily. Do you hear? The one that goes “Tweedly, weedly, weedledy dee”.’

‘I’m waiting,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘Patiently, however.’

Gumbril looked at her and found her smiling like a tragic mask. After all, he reflected, Emily would still be there if he went down to-morrow. It would be stupid to quarrel with Myra about something that was really, when he came to think of it, not of enormous importance. It was stupid to quarrel with any one about anything; and with Myra and about this, particularly so. In this white dress patterned with flowing arabesques of black she looked, he thought, more than ever enchanting. There had been times in the past . . . The past leads on the present . . . No; but in any case she was excellent company.

‘Well,’ he said, sighing decisively, ‘let’s go and send my wire.’

Mrs Viveash made no comment, and traversing Jermyn Street they walked up the narrow passage under the lee of Wren’s bald barn of St James’s, to the post office.

‘I shall pretext a catastrophe,’ said Gumbril, as they entered; and going to the telegraph desk he wrote: ‘Slight accident on the way to station not serious at all but a little indisposed come same train to-morrow.’ He addressed the form and handed it in.

‘A little what?’ asked the young lady behind the bars, as she read it through, prodding each successive word with the tip of her blunt pencil.

‘A little indisposed,’ said Gumbril, and he felt suddenly very much ashamed of himself. ‘A little indisposed,’ – no, really, that was too much. He’d withdraw the telegram, he’d go after all.

‘Ready?’ asked Mrs Viveash, coming up from the other end of the counter where she had been buying stamps.

Gumbril pushed a florin under the bars.

‘A little indisposed,’ he said, hooting with laughter, and he walked towards the door leaning heavily on his stick and limping. ‘Slight accident,’ he explained.

‘What is the meaning of this clownery?’ Mrs Viveash inquired.

‘What indeed?’ Gumbril had limped up to the door and stood there, holding it open for her. He was taking no responsibility for himself. It was the clown’s doing, and the clown, poor creature, was non compos, not entirely there, and couldn’t be called to account for his actions. He limped after her towards Piccadilly.

‘Giudicato guarabile in cinque giorni,’ Mrs Viveash laughed. ‘How charming that always is in the Italian papers. The fickle lady, the jealous lover, the stab, the colpo di rivoltella, the mere Anglo-Saxon black eye – all judged by the house surgeon at the Misericordia curable in five days. And you, my poor Gumbril, are you curable in five days?’

‘That depends,’ said Gumbril. ‘There may be complications.’

Mrs Viveash waved her parasol; a taxi came swerving to the pavement’s edge in front of them. ‘Meanwhile,’ she said, ‘you can’t be expected to walk.’

At Verrey’s they lunched off lobsters and white wine. ‘Fish suppers,’ Gumbril quoted jovially from the Restoration, ‘fish suppers will make a man hop like a flea.’ Through the whole meal he clowned away in the most inimitable style. The ghost of a governess cart rolled along the tweddly lanes of Robertsbridge. But one can refuse to accept responsibility; a clown cannot be held accountable. And besides, when the future and the past are abolished, when it is only the present instant, whether enchanted or unenchanted, that counts, when there are no causes or motives, no future consequences to be considered, how can there be responsibility, even for those who are not clowns? He drank a great deal of hock, and when the clock struck two and the train had begun to snort out of Charing Cross, he could not refrain from proposing the health of Viscount Lascelles. After that he began telling Mrs Viveash about his adventure as a Complete Man.

‘You should have seen me,’ he said, describing his beard.

‘I should have been bowled over.’

‘You shall see me, then,’ said Gumbril. ‘Ah, what a Don Giovanni. La ci darem la mano, La mi dirai di si, Vieni, non e lontano, Partiam, ben mio, da qui. And they came they came. Without hesitation. No “vorrei e non vorrei”, no “mi trema un poco il cor.” Straight away.’

‘Felice, io so, sarei,’ Mrs Viveash sang very faintly under her breath, from a remote bed of agony.

Ah, happiness, happiness; a little dull, some one had wisely said, when you looked at it from outside. An affair of duets at the cottage piano, of collecting specimens, hand in hand, for the hortus siccus. A matter of integrity and quietness.

‘Ah, but the history of the young woman who was married four years ago,’ exclaimed Gumbril with clownish rapture, ‘and remains to this day a virgin – what an episode in my memoirs!’ In the enchanted darkness he had learned her young body. He looked at his fingers; her beauty was a part of their knowledge. On the tablecloth he drummed out the first bars of the Twelfth Sonata of Mozart. ‘And even after singing her duet with the Don,’ he continued, ‘she is still virgin. There are chaste pleasures, sublimated sensualities. More thrillingly voluptuous,’ with the gesture of a restaurant-keeper who praises the speciality of the house, he blew a treacly kiss, ‘than any of the grosser deliriums.’

‘What is all this about?’ asked Mrs Viveash.

Gumbril finished off his glass. ‘I am talking esoterically,’ he said, ‘for my own pleasure, not yours.’

‘But tell me more about the beard,’ Mrs Viveash insisted. ‘I liked the beard so much.’

‘All right,’ said Gumbril, ‘let us try to be unworthy with coherence.’

They sat for a long time over their cigarettes; it was half past three before Mrs Viveash suggested they should go.

‘Almost time,’ she said, looking at her watch, ‘to have tea. One damned meal after another. And never anything new to eat. And every year one gets bored with another of the old things. Lobster, for instance, how I used to adore lobster once! But to-day – well, really, it was only your conversation, Theodore, that made it tolerable.’

Gumbril put his hand to his heart and bowed. He felt suddenly extremely depressed.

‘And wine: I used to think Orvieto so heavenly. But this spring, when I went to Italy, it was just a bad muddy sort of Vouvray. And those soft caramels they call Fiats; I used to eat those till I was sick. I was at the sick stage before I’d finished one of them, this time in Rome.’ Mrs Viveash shook her head. ‘Disillusion after disillusion.’

They walked down the dark passage into the street.

‘We’ll go home,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘I really haven’t got the spirit to do anything else this afternoon.’ To the commissionaire who opened the door of the cab she gave the address of her house in St James’s.

‘Will one ever recapture the old thrills?’ she asked rather fatiguedly as they drove slowly through the traffic of Regent Street.

‘Not by chasing after them,’ said Gumbril, in whom the clown had quite evaporated. ‘If one sat still enough they might perhaps come back of their own accord . . .’ There would be the faint sound as it were of feet approaching through the quiet.

‘It isn’t only food,’ said Mrs Viveash, who had closed her eyes and was leaning back in her corner.

‘So I can well believe.’

‘It’s everything. Nothing’s the same now. I feel it never will be.’

‘Never more,’ croaked Gumbril.

‘Never again,’ Mrs Viveash echoed. ‘Never again.’ There were still no tears behind her eyes. ‘Did you ever know Tony Lamb?’ she asked.

‘No,’ Gumbril answered from his corner. ‘What about him?’

Mrs Viveash did not answer. What, indeed, about him? She thought of his very clear blue eyes and the fair, bright hair that had been lighter than his brown face. Brown face and neck, red-brown hands; and all the rest of his skin was as white as milk. ‘I was very fond of him,’ she said at last. ‘That’s all. He was killed in 1917, just about this time of the year. It seems a very long time ago, don’t you think?’

‘Does it?’ Gumbril shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. The past is abolished. Vivamus, mea Lesbia. If I weren’t so horribly depressed, I’d embrace you. That would be some slight compensation for my’ – he tapped his foot with the end of his walking-stick – ‘my accident.’

‘You’re depressed too?’

‘One should never drink at luncheon,’ said Gumbril. ‘It wrecks the afternoon. One should also never think of the past and never for one moment consider the future. These are treasures of ancient wisdom. But perhaps after a little tea –’ He leaned forward to look at the figures on the taxi-meter, for the cab had come to a standstill – ‘after a nip of the tannin stimulant’ – he threw open the door – ‘we may feel rather better.’

Mrs Viveash smiled excruciatingly. ‘For me,’ she said, as she stepped out on to the pavement, ‘even tannin has lost its virtues now.’

Mrs Viveash’s drawing-room was tastefully in the movement. The furniture was upholstered in fabrics designed by Dufy – racehorses and roses, little tennis players clustering in the midst of enormous flowers, printed in grey and ochre on a white ground. There were a couple of lamp-shades by Balla. On the pale rose-stippled walls hung three portraits of herself by three different and entirely incongruous painters, a selection of the usual oranges and lemons, and a rather forbidding contemporary nude painted in two tones of green.

‘And how bored I am with this room and all these beastly pictures!’ exclaimed Mrs Viveash as she entered. She took off her hat and, standing in front of the mirror above the mantelpiece, smoothed her coppery hair.

‘You should take a cottage in the country,’ said Gumbril, ‘buy a pony and a governess cart and drive along the twiddly lanes looking for flowers. After tea you open the cottage piano,’ and suiting his action to the words, Gumbril sat down at the long-tailed Blüthner, ‘and you play, you play.’ Very slowly and with parodied expressiveness he played the opening theme of the Arietta. ‘You wouldn’t be bored then,’ he said, turning round to her, when he had finished.

‘Ah, wouldn’t I!’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘And with whom do you propose that I should share my cottage?’

‘Any one you like,’ said Gumbril. His fingers hung, as though meditating over the keys.

‘But I don’t like any one,’ cried Mrs Viveash with a terrible vehemence from her death-bed . . . Ah, now it had been said, the truth. It sounded like a joke. Tony had been dead five years now. Those bright blue eyes – ah, never again. All rotted away to nothing.

‘Then you should try,’ said Gumbril, whose hands had begun to creep softly forward into the Twelfth Sonata. ‘You should try.’

‘But I do try,’ said Mrs Viveash. Her elbows propped on the mantelpiece, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she was looking fixedly at her own image in the glass. Pale eyes looked unwaveringly into pale eyes. The red mouth and its reflection exchanged their smiles of pain. She had tried; it revolted her now to think how often she had tried; she had tried to like someone, any one, as much as Tony. She had tried to recapture, to re-evoke, to revivify. And there had never been anything, really, but a disgust. ‘I haven’t succeeded,’ she added, after a pause.

The music had shifted from F major to D minor; it mounted in leaping anapaests to a suspended chord, ran down again, mounted once more, modulating to C minor, then, through a passage of trembling notes to A flat major, to the dominant of D flat, to the dominant of C, to C minor, and at last, to a new clear theme in the major.

‘Then I’m sorry for you,’ said Gumbril, allowing his fingers to play on by themselves. He felt sorry, too, for the subjects of Mrs Viveash’s desperate experiments. She mightn’t have succeeded in liking them – for their part, poor devils, they in general only too agonizingly liked her . . . Only too . . . He remembered the cold, damp spots on his pillow, in the darkness. Those hopeless, angry tears. ‘You nearly killed me once,’ he said.

‘Only time kills,’ said Mrs Viveash, still looking into her own pale eyes. ‘I have never made any one happy,’ she added, after a pause. ‘Never any one,’ she thought, except Tony, and Tony they had killed, shot him through the head. Even the bright eyes had rotted, like any other carrion. She too had been happy then. Never again.

A maid came in with the tea-things.

‘Ah, the tannin!’ exclaimed Gumbril with enthusiasm, and broke off his playing. ‘The one hope of salvation.’ He poured out two cups, and picking up one of them he came over to the fireplace and stood behind her, sipping slowly at the pale brewage and looking over her shoulder at their two reflections in the mirror.

‘La ci darem,’ he hummed. ‘If only I had my beard!’ He stroked his chin and with the tip of his forefinger brushed up the drooping ends of his moustache. ‘You’d come trembling like Zerlina, in under its golden shadow.’

Mrs Viveash smiled. ‘I don’t ask for anything better,’ she said. ‘What more delightful part! Felice, io so, sarei: Batti, batti, o bel Mazetto. Enviable Zerlina!’

The servant made another silent entry.

‘A gentleman,’ she said, ‘called Mr Shearwater would like –’

‘Tell him I’m not at home,’ said Mrs Viveash, without looking round.

There was a silence. With raised eyebrows Gumbril looked over Mrs Viveash’s shoulder at her reflection. Her eyes were calm and without expression, she did not smile or frown. Gumbril still questioningly looked. In the end he began to laugh.

CHAPTER XV

THEY WERE PLAYING that latest novelty from across the water ‘What’s he to Hecuba?’ Sweet, sweet and piercing, the saxophone pierced into the very bowels of compassion and tenderness, pierced like a revelation from heaven, pierced like the angel’s treacly dart into the holy Teresa’s quivering and ecstasiated flank. More ripely and roundly, with a kindly and less agonizing voluptuousness, the ‘cello meditated those Mohammedian ecstasies that last, under the green palms of Paradise, six hundred inenarrable years apiece. Into this charged atmosphere the violin admitted refreshing draughts of fresh air, cool and thin like the breath from a still damp squirt. And the piano hammered and rattled away unmindful of the sensibilities of the other instruments, banged away all the time, reminding every one concerned, in a thoroughly business-like way, that this was a cabaret where people came to dance the fox-trot; not a baroque church for female saints to go into ecstasies in, not a mild, happy valley of tumbling houris.

At each recurrence of the refrain the four negroes of the orchestra, or at least the three of them who played with their hands alone – for the saxophonist always blew at this point with a redoubled sweetness, enriching the passage with a warbling contrapuntal soliloquy that fairly wrung the entrails and transported the pierced heart – broke into melancholy and drawling song:

‘What’s he to Hecuba?

Nothing at all.

That’s why there’ll be no wedding on Wednesday week.

Way down in old Bengal.’

‘What unspeakable sadness,’ said Gumbril, as he stepped, stepped through the intricacies of the trot. ‘Eternal passion, eternal pain. Les chants désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux, Et j’en sais d’immortels qui sont de purs sanglots. Rum tiddle-um-tum, pom-pom. Amen. What’s he to Hecuba? Nothing at all. Nothing, mark you. Nothing, nothing.’

‘Nothing,’ repeated Mrs Viveash. ‘I know all about that.’ She sighed.

‘I am nothing to you,’ said Gumbril, gliding with skill between the wall and the Charybdis of a couple dangerously experimenting with a new step. ‘You are nothing to me. Thank God. And yet here we are, two bodies with but a single thought, a beast with two backs, a perfectly united centaur trotting, trotting.’ They trotted.

‘What’s he to Hecuba?’ The grinning blackamoors repeated the question, reiterated the answer on a tone of frightful unhappiness. The saxophone warbled on the verge of anguish. The couples revolved, marked time, stepped and stepped with an habitual precision, as though performing some ancient and profoundly significant rite. Some were in fancy dress, for this was a gala night at the cabaret. Young women disguised as callipygous Florentine pages, blue-breeched Gondoliers, black-breeched Toreadors circulated, moon-like, round the hall, clasped sometimes in the arms of Arabs, or white clowns, or more often of untravestied partners. The faces reflected in the mirrors were the sort of faces one feels one ought to know by sight; the cabaret was ‘Artistic’.

‘What’s he to Hecuba?’

Mrs Viveash murmured the response, almost piously, as though she were worshipping almighty and omnipresent Nil. ‘I adore this tune,’ she said, ‘this divine tune.’ It filled up a space, it moved, it jigged, it set things twitching in you, it occupied time, it gave you a sense of being alive. ‘Divine tune, divine tune,’ she repeated with emphasis, and she shut her eyes, trying to abandon herself, trying to float, trying to give Nil the slip.

‘Ravishing little Toreador, that,’ said Gumbril, who had been following the black-breeched travesty with affectionate interest.

Mrs Viveash opened her eyes. Nil was unescapable. ‘With Piers Cotton, you mean? Your tastes are a little common, my Theodore.’

‘Green-eyed monster!’

Mrs Viveash laughed. ‘When I was being “finished” in Paris,’ she said, ‘Mademoiselle always used to urge me to take fencing lessons. C’est un exercise très gracieux. Et puis,’ Mrs Viveash mimicked a passionate earnestness, ‘et puis, ça develope le bassin. Your Toreador, Gumbril, looks as though she must be a champion with the foils. Quel bassin!’

‘Hush,’ said Gumbril. They were abreast of the Toreador and her partner. Piers Cotton turned his long greyhound’s nose in their direction.

‘How are you?’ he asked across the music.

They nodded. ‘And you?’

‘Ah, writing such a book,’ cried Piers Cotton, ‘such a brilliant, brilliant, flashing book.’ The dance was carrying them apart. ‘Like a smile of false teeth,’ he shouted across the widening gulf, and disappeared in the crowd.

‘What’s he to Hecuba?’ Lachrymosely, the hilarious blackamoors chanted their question, mournfully pregnant with its foreknown reply.

Nil, omnipresent nil, world-soul, spiritual informer of all matter. Nil in the shape of a black-breeched moon-basined Toreador. Nil, the man with the greyhound’s nose. Nil, as four blackamoors. Nil in the form of a divine tune. Nil, the faces, the faces one ought to know by sight, reflected in the mirrors of the hall. Nil this Gumbril whose arm is round one’s waist, whose feet step in and out among one’s own. Nothing at all.

That’s why there’ll be no wedding. No wedding at St George’s, Hanover Square, – oh, desperate experiment! – with Nil Viveash, that charming boy, that charming nothing at all, engaged at the moment in hunting elephants, hunting fever and carnivores among the Tikki-tikki pygmies. That’s why there’ll be no wedding on Wednesday week. For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime. For the light strawy hair (not a lock left), the brown face, the red-brown hands and the smooth boy’s body, milk-white, milk-warm, are nothing at all, nothing, now, at all – nil these five years – and the shining blue eyes as much nil as the rest.

‘Always the same people,’ complained Mrs Viveash, looking round the room. ‘The old familiar faces. Never any one new. Where’s the younger generation, Gumbril? We’re old, Theodore. There are millions younger than we are. Where are they?’

‘I’m not responsible for them,’ said Gumbril. ‘I’m not even responsible for myself.’ He imagined a cottagey room, under a roof, with a window near the floor and a sloping ceiling where you were always bumping your head; and in the candle-light Emily’s candid eyes, her grave and happy mouth; in the darkness, the curve, under his fingers, of her firm body.

‘Why don’t they come and sing for their supper?’ Mrs Viveash went on petulantly. ‘It’s their business to amuse us.’

‘They’re probably thinking of amusing themselves,’ Gumbril suggested.

‘Well, then, they should do it where we can see them.’

‘What’s he to Hecuba?’

‘Nothing at all,’ Gumbril clownishly sang. The room, in the cottage, had nothing to do with him. He breathed Mrs Viveash’s memories of Italian jasmines, laid his cheek for a moment against her smooth hair. ‘Nothing at all.’ Happy Clown!

Way down in old Bengal, under the green Paradisiac palms, among the ecstatic mystagogues and the saints who scream beneath the divine caresses, the music came to an end. The four negroes wiped their glistening faces. The couples fell apart. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash sat down and smoked a cigarette.

CHAPTER XVI

THE BLACKAMOORS HAD left the platform at the end of the hall. The curtains looped up at either side had slid down, cutting it off from the rest of the room – ‘making two worlds,’ Gumbril elegantly and allusively put it, ‘where only one grew before – and one of them a better world,’ he added too philosophically, ‘because unreal.’ There was the theatrical silence, the suspense. The curtains parted again.

On a narrow bed – on a pier perhaps – the corpse of a woman. The husband kneels beside it. At the foot stands the doctor, putting away his instruments. In a beribboned pink cradle reposes a monstrous baby.

THE HUSBAND: Margaret! Margaret!

THE DOCTOR: She is dead.

THE HUSBAND: Margaret!

THE DOCTOR: Of septicaemia, I tell you.

THE HUSBAND: I wish that I too were dead!

THE DOCTOR: But you won’t to-morrow.

THE HUSBAND: To-morrow! But I don’t want to live to see tomorrow.

THE DOCTOR: You will to-morrow.

THE HUSBAND: Margaret! Margaret! Wait for me there; I shall not fail to meet you in that hollow vale.

THE DOCTOR: You will not be slow to survive her.

THE HUSBAND: Christ have mercy upon us!

THE DOCTOR: You would do better to think of the child.

THE HUSBAND [rising and standing menacingly over the cradle]: Is that the monster?

THE DOCTOR: No worse than others.

THE HUSBAND: Begotten in a night of immaculate pleasure, monster, may you live loveless, in dirt and impurity!

THE DOCTOR: Conceived in lust and darkness, may your own impurity always seem heavenly, monster, in your own eyes!

THE HUSBAND: Murderer, slowly die all your life long!

THE DOCTOR: The child must be fed.

THE HUSBAND: Fed? With what?

THE DOCTOR: With milk.

THE HUSBAND: Her milk is cold in her breasts.

THE DOCTOR: There are still cows.

THE HUSBAND: Tubercular shorthorns. [Calling.] Let Short-i’-the-horn be brought!

VOICES [off]: Short-i’-the-horn! Short-i’-the-horn! [Fadingly.] Short-i’-the . . .

THE DOCTOR: In nineteen hundred and twenty-one, twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and thirteen women died in childbirth.

THE HUSBAND: But none of them belonged to my harem.

THE DOCTOR: Each of them was somebody’s wife.

THE HUSBAND: Doubtless. But the people we don’t know are only characters in the human comedy. We are the tragedians.

THE DOCTOR: Not in the spectator’s eyes.

THE HUSBAND: Do I think of the spectators? Ah, Margaret! Margaret! . . .

THE DOCTOR: The twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and fourteenth.

THE HUSBAND: The only one!

THE DOCTOR: But here comes the cow.

[SHORT-I’-THE-HORN is led in by a YOKEL.]

THE HUSBAND: Ah, good Short-i’-the-horn! [He pats the animal.] She was tested last week, was she not?

THE YOKEL: Ay, sir.

THE HUSBAND: And found tubercular. No?

THE YOKEL: Even in the udders, may it please you.

THE HUSBAND: Excellent! Milk me the cow, sir, into this dirty wash-pot.

THE YOKEL: I will, sir. [He milks the cow.]

THE HUSBAND: Her milk – her milk is cold already. All the woman in her chilled and curdled within her breasts. Ah, Jesus! what miraculous galactagogue will make it flow again?

THE YOKEL: The wash-pot is full, sir.

THE HUSBAND: Then take the cow away.

THE YOKEL: Come, Short-i’-the-horn; come up, Short-i’-the-horn. [He goes out with the cow.]

THE HUSBAND [pouring the milk into a long-tubed feeding-bottle]: Here’s for you, monster, to drink your own health in. [He gives the bottle to the child.]

[CURTAIN.]

‘A little ponderous, perhaps,’ said Gumbril, as the curtain came down.

‘But I liked the cow,’ Mrs Viveash opened her cigarette-case and found it empty. Gumbril offered her one of his. She shook her head. ‘I don’t want it in the least,’ she said.

‘Yes, the cow was in the best pantomime tradition,’ Gumbril agreed. Ah! but it was a long time since he had been to a Christmas pantomime. Not since Dan Leno’s days. All the little cousins, the uncles and aunts on both sides of the family, dozens and dozens of them – every year they filled thebest part of a row in the dress circle at Drury Lane. And buns were stickily passed from hand to hand, chocolates circulated; the grown-ups drank tea. And the pantomime went on and on, glory after glory, under the shining arch of the stage. Hours and hours; and the grown-ups always wanted to go away before the harlequinade. And the children felt sick from eating too much chocolate, or wanted with such extreme urgency to go to the w.c. that they had to be led out, trampling and stumbling over everybody else’s feet – and every stumble making the need more agonizingly great – in the middle of the transformation scene. And there was Dan Leno, inimitable Dan Leno, dead now as poor Yorick, no more than a mere skull like anybody else’s skull. And his mother, he remembered, used to laugh at him sometimes till the tears ran down her cheeks. She used to enjoy things thoroughly, with a whole heart.

‘I wish they’d hurry up with the second scene,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘If there’s anything that bores me, it’s entr’actes.’

‘Most of one’s life is an entr’acte,’ said Gumbril, whose present mood of hilarious depression seemed favourable to the enunciation of apophthegms.

‘None of your cracker mottoes, please,’ protested Mrs Viveash. All the same, she reflected, what was she doing now but waiting for the curtain to go up again, waiting, with what unspeakable weariness of spirit, for the curtain that had rung down, ten centuries ago, on those blue eyes, that bright strawy hair and the weathered face?

‘Thank God,’ she said with an expiring earnestness, ‘here’s the second scene!’

The curtain went up. In a bald room stood the Monster, grown now from an infant into a frail and bent young man with bandy legs. At the back of the stage a large window giving on to a street along which people pass.

THE MONSTER [solus]: The young girls of Sparta, they say, used to wrestle naked with naked Spartan boys. The sun caressed their skins till they were brown and transparent like amber or a flask of olive oil. Their breasts were hard, their bellies flat. They were pure with the chastity of beautiful animals. Their thoughts were clear, their minds cool and untroubled. I spit blood into my handkerchief and sometimes I feel in my mouth something slimy, soft and disgusting, like a slug – and I have coughed up a shred of my lung. The rickets from which I suffered in childhood have bent my bones and made them old and brittle. All my life I have lived in this huge town, whose domes and spires are wrapped in a cloud of stink that hides the sun. The slug-dank tatters of lung that I spit out are black with the soot I have been breathing all these years. I am now come of age. Long-expected one-and-twenty has made me a fully privileged citizen of this great realm of which the owners of the Daily Mirror, the News of the World and the Daily Express are noble peers. Somewhere, I must logically infer, there must be other cities, built by men for men to live in. Somewhere, in the past, in the future, a very long way off . . . But perhaps the only street improvement schemes that ever really improve the streets are schemes in the minds of those who live in them: schemes of love mostly. Ah! here she comes.

 [The YOUNG LADY enters. She stands outside the window, in the street, paying no attention to the MONSTER; she seems to be waiting for somebody.]

She is like a pear tree in flower. When she smiles, it is as though there were stars. Her hair is like the harvest in an eclogue, her cheeks are all the fruits of summer. Her arms and thighs are as beautiful as the soul of St Catherine of Siena. And her eyes, her eyes are plumbless with thought and limpidly pure like the water of the mountains.

THE YOUNG LADY: If I wait till the summer sale, the crêpe de Chine will be reduced by at least two shillings a yard, and on six camisoles that will mean a lot of money. But the question is: can I go from May till the end of July with the under-clothing I have now?

THE MONSTER: If I knew her, I should know the universe!

THE YOUNG LADY: My present ones are so dreadfully middleclass. And if Roger should . . . by any chance . . .

THE MONSTER: Or, rather, I should be able to ignore it, having a private universe of my own.

THE YOUNG LADY: If – if he did – well, it might be rather humiliating with these I have . . . like a servant’s almost . . .

THE MONSTER: Love makes you accept the world; it puts an end to criticism.

THE YOUNG LADY: His hand already . . .

THE MONSTER: Dare I, dare I tell her how beautiful she is?

THE YOUNG LADY: On the whole, I think I’d better get it now, though it will cost more.

THE MONSTER [desperately advancing to the window as though to assault a battery]: Beautiful! beautiful!

THE YOUNG LADY [looking at him]: Ha, ha, ha!

THE MONSTER: But I love you, flowering pear tree; I love you, golden harvest; I love you, fruitage of summer; I love you, body and limbs, with the shape of a saint’s thought.

THE YOUNG LADY [redoubles her laughter]: Ha, ha, ha!

THE MONSTER [taking her hand]: You cannot be cruel! [He is seized with a violent paroxysm of coughing which doubles him up, which shakes and torments him. The handkerchief he holds to his mouth is spotted with blood.]

THE YOUNG LADY: You disgust me! [She draws away her skirts so that they shall not come in contact with him.]

THE MONSTER: But I swear to you, I love – I – [He is once more interrupted by his cough.]

THE YOUNG LADY: Please go away. [In a different voice.] Ah, Roger! [She advances to meet a snub-nosed lubber with curly hair and a face like a groom’s, who passes along the street at this moment.]

ROGER: I’ve got the motor-bike waiting at the corner.

THE YOUNG LADY: Let’s go, then.

ROGER [pointing to the MONSTER]: What’s that?

THE YOUNG LADY: Oh, it’s nothing in particular.

[Both roar with laughter. ROGER escorts her out, patting her familiarly on the back as they walk along.]

THE MONSTER [looking after her]: There is a wound under my left pap. She has deflowered all women. I cannot . . .

‘Lord!’ whispered Mrs Viveash, ‘how this young man bores me!’

‘I confess,’ replied Gumbril, ‘I have rather a taste for moralities. There is a pleasant uplifting vagueness about these symbolical generalized figures which pleases me.’

‘You were always charmingly simple-minded,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘But who’s this? As long as the young man isn’t left alone on the stage, I don’t mind.’

Another female figure has appeared in the street beyond the window. It is the Prostitute. Her face, painted in two tones of red, white, green, blue and black, is the most tasteful of nature-mortes.

THE PROSTITUTE: Hullo, duckie!

THE MONSTER: Hullo!

THE PROSTITUTE: Are you lonely?

THE MONSTER: Yes.

THE PROSTITUTE: Would you like me to come in to see you?

THE MONSTER: Very well.

THE PROSTITUTE: Shall we say thirty bob?

THE MONSTER: As you like.

THE PROSTITUTE: Come along then.

[She climbs through the window and they go off together through the door on the left of the stage. The curtains descend for a moment, then rise again. The MONSTER and the PROSTITUTE are seen issuing from the door at which they went out.]

THE MONSTER [taking out a cheque-book and a fountain-pen]: Thirty shillings . . .

THE PROSTITUTE: Thank you. Not a cheque. I don’t want any cheques. How do I know it isn’t a dud one that they’ll refuse payment for at the bank? Ready money for me, thanks.

THE MONSTER: But I haven’t got any cash on me at the moment.

THE PROSTITUTE: Well, I won’t take a cheque. Once bitten, twice shy, I can tell you.

THE MONSTER: But I tell you I haven’t got any cash.

THE PROSTITUTE: Well, all I can say is, here I stay till I get it. And, what’s more, if I don’t get it quick, I’ll make a row.

THE MONSTER: But this is absurd. I offer you a perfectly good cheque . . .

THE PROSTITUTE: And I won’t take it. So there!

THE MONSTER: Well then, take my watch. It’s worth more than thirty bob. [He pulls out his gold half-hunter.]

THE PROSTITUTE: Thank you, and get myself arrested as soon I take it to the pop-shop! No, I want cash, I tell you.

THE MONSTER: But where the devil do you expect me to get it at this time of night?

THE PROSTITUTE: I don’t know. But you’ve got to get it pretty quick.

THE MONSTER: You’re unreasonable.

THE PROSTITUTE: Aren’t there any servants in this house?

THE MONSTER: Yes.

THE PROSTITUTE: Well, go and borrow it from one of them.

THE MONSTER: But really, that would be too low, too humiliating.

THE PROSTITUTE: All right, I’ll begin kicking up a noise. I’ll go to the window and yell till all the neighbours are woken up and the police come to see what’s up. You can borrow it from the copper then.

THE MONSTER: You really won’t take my cheque? I swear to you it’s perfectly all right. There’s plenty of money to meet it.

THE PROSTITUTE: Oh, shut up! No more dilly-dallying. Get me my money at once, or I’ll start the row. One, two, three . . . [She opens her mouth wide as if to yell.]

THE MONSTER: All right. [He goes out.]

THE PROSTITUTE: Nice state of things we’re coming to, when young rips try and swindle us poor girls out of our money! Mean, stinking skunks! I’d like to slit the throats of some of them.

THE MONSTER [coming back again]: Here you are. [He hands her money.]

THE PROSTITUTE [examining it]: Thank you, dearie. Any other time you’re lonely . . .

THE MONSTER: No, no!

THE PROSTITUTE: Where did you get it finally?

THE MONSTER: I woke the cook.

THE PROSTITUTE [goes off into a peal of laughter]: Well, so long, duckie. [She goes out.]

THE MONSTER [solus]: Somewhere there must be love like music. Love harmonious and ordered: two spirits, two bodies moving contrapuntally together. Somewhere, the stupid brutish act must be made to make sense, must be enriched, must be made significant. Lust, like Diabelli’s waltz, a stupid air, turned by a genius into three-and-thirty fabulous variations. Somewhere . . .

‘Oh dear!’ sighed Mrs Viveash.

‘Charming!’ Gumbril protested.

. . . love like sheets of silky flame; like landscapes brilliant in the sunlight against a background of purple thunder; like the solution of a cosmic problem; like faith . . .

‘Crikey!’ said Mrs Viveash.

. . . Somewhere, somewhere. But in my veins creep the maggots of the pox . . .

‘Really, really!’ Mrs Viveash shook her head. ‘Too medical!’

. . . crawling towards the brain, crawling into the mouth, burrowing into the bones. Insatiably.

The Monster threw himself to the ground, and the curtain came down.

‘And about time too!’ declared Mrs Viveash.

‘Charming!’ Gumbril stuck to his guns. ‘Charming! charming!’

There was a disturbance near the door. Mrs Viveash looked round to see what was happening. ‘And now on top of it all,’ she said, ‘here comes Coleman, raving, with an unknown drunk.’

‘Have we missed it?’ Coleman was shouting. ‘Have we missed all the lovely bloody farce?’

‘Lovely bloody!’ his companion repeated with drunken raptures, and he went into fits of uncontrollable laughter. He was a very young boy with straight dark hair and a face of Hellenic beauty, now distorted with tipsiness.

Coleman greeted his acquaintances in the hall, shouting a jovial obscenity to each. ‘And Bumbril-Gumbril,’ he exclaimed, catching sight of him at last in the front row. ‘And Hetaira-Myra!’ He pushed his way through the crowd, followed unsteadily by his young disciple. ‘So you’re here,’ he said, standing over them and looking down with an enigmatic malice in his bright blue eyes. ‘Where’s the physiologue?’

‘Am I the physiologue’s keeper?’ asked Gumbril. ‘He’s with his glands and his hormones, I suppose. Not to mention his wife.’ He smiled to himself.

‘Where the hormones, there moan I,’ said Coleman, skidding off sideways along the slippery word. ‘I hear, by the way, that there’s a lovely prostitute in this play.’

‘You’ve missed her,’ said Mrs Viveash.

‘What a misfortune,’ said Coleman. ‘We’ve missed the delicious trull,’ he said, turning to the young man.

The young man only laughed.

‘Let me introduce, by the way,’ said Coleman. ‘This is Dante,’ he pointed to the dark-haired boy; ‘and I am Virgil. We’re making a round tour – or, rather, a descending spiral tour of hell. But we’re only at the first circle so far. These, Alighieri, are two damned souls, though not, as you might suppose, Paolo and Francesca.’

The boy continued to laugh, happily and uncomprehendingly.

‘Another of these interminable entr’actes,’ complained Mrs Viveash. ‘I was just saying to Theodore here that if there’s one thing I dislike more than another, it’s a long entr’acte.’ Would hers ever come to an end?

‘And if there’s one thing I dislike more than another,’ said the boy, breaking silence for the first time, with an air of the greatest earnestness, ‘it’s . . . it’s one thing more than another.’

‘And you’re perfectly right in doing so,’ said Coleman. ‘Perfectly right.’

‘I know,’ the boy replied modestly.

When the curtain rose again it was on an aged Monster, with a black patch over the left side of his nose, no hair, no teeth, and sitting harmlessly behind the bars of an asylum.

THE MONSTER: Asses, apes and dogs! Milton called them that; he should have known. Somewhere there must be men, however. The variations on Diabelli prove it. Brunelleschi’s dome is more than the magnification of Cléo de Mérode’s breast. Somewhere there are men with power, living reasonably. Like our mythical Greeks and Romans. Living cleanly. The images of the gods are their portraits. They walk under their own protection. [The MONSTER climbs on to a chair and stands in the posture of a statue.] Jupiter, father of gods, a man, I bless myself, I throw bolts at my own disobedience, I answer my own prayers, I pronounce oracles to satisfy the questions I myself propound. I abolish all tetters, poxes, blood-spitting, rotting of bones. With love I recreate the world from within. Europa puts an end to squalor, Leda does away with tyranny, Danae tempers stupidity. After establishing these reforms in the social sewer, I climb, I climb, up through the manhole, out of the manhole, beyond humanity. For the manhole, even the manhole, is dark; though not so dingy as the doghole it was before I altered it. Up through the manhole, towards the air. Up, up! [And the MONSTER, suiting the action to his words, climbs up the runged back of his chair and stands, by a miraculous feat of acrobacy, on the topmost bar.] I begin to see the stars through other eyes than my own. More than dog already, I become more than man. I begin to have inklings of the shape and sense of things. Upwards, upwards I strain, I peer, I reach aloft. [The balanced MONSTER reaches, strains and peers.] And I seize, I seize! [As he shouts these words, the MONSTER falls heavily, head foremost, to the floor. He lies there quite still. After a little time the door opens and the DOCTOR of the first scene enters with a WARDER.]

THE WARDER: I heard a crash.

THE DOCTOR [who has by this time become immensely old and has a beard like Father Thames]: It looks as though you were right. [He examines the MONSTER.]

THE WARDER: He was for ever climbing on to his chair.

THE DOCTOR: Well, he won’t any more. His neck’s broken.

THE WARDER: You don’t say so?

THE DOCTOR: I do.

THE WARDER: Well, I never!

THE DOCTOR: Have it carried down to the dissecting-room.

THE WARDER: I’ll send for the porters at once.

[Exeunt severally, and CURTAIN.]

‘Well,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘I’m glad that’s over.’

The music struck up again, saxophone and ‘cello, with the thin draught of the violin to cool their ecstasies and the thumping piano to remind them of business. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash slid out into the dancing crowd, revolving as though by force of habit.

‘These substitutes for the genuine copulative article,’ said Coleman to his disciple, ‘are beneath the dignity of hellhounds like you and me.’

Charmed, the young man laughed; he was attentive as though at the feet of Socrates. Coleman had found him in a night club, where he had gone in search of Zoe, found him very drunk in the company of two formidable women fifteen or twenty years his senior, who were looking after him, half maternally out of pure kindness of heart, half professionally; for he seemed to be carrying a good deal of money. He was incapable of looking after himself. Coleman had pounced on him at once, claimed an old friendship which the youth was too tipsy to be able to deny, and carried him off. There was something, he always thought, peculiarly interesting about the spectacle of children tobogganing down into the cesspools.

‘I like this place,’ said the young man.

‘Tastes differ!’ Coleman shrugged his shoulders. ‘The German professors have catalogued thousands of people whose whole pleasure consists of eating dung.’

The young man smiled and nodded, rather vaguely. ‘Is there anything to drink here?’ he asked.

‘Too respectable,’ Coleman answered, shaking his head.

‘I think this is a bloody place,’ said the young man.

‘Ah! but some people like blood. And some like boots. And some like long gloves and corsets. And some like birch-rods. And some like sliding down slopes and can’t look at Michelangelo’s “Night” on the Medici Tombs without dying the little death, because the statue seems to be sliding. And some . . .’

‘But I want something to drink,’ insisted the young man.

Coleman stamped his feet, waved his arms. ‘À boire! à boire!’ he shouted, like the newborn Gargantua. Nobody paid any attention.

The music came to an end. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash reappeared.

‘Dante,’ said Coleman, ‘calls for drink. We must leave the building.’

‘Yes. Anything to get out of this,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘What’s the time?’

Gumbril looked at his watch. ‘Half-past one.’

Mrs Viveash sighed. ‘Can’t possibly go to bed,’ she said, ‘for another hour at least.’

They walked out into the street. The stars were large and brilliant overhead. There was a little wind that almost seemed to come from the country. Gumbril thought so, at any rate; he thought of the country.

‘The question is, where?’ said Coleman. ‘You can come to my bordello, if you like; but it’s a long way off and Zoe hates us all so much, she’ll probably set on us with the meat-chopper. If she’s back again, that is. Though she may be out all night. Zoe mou, sas agapo. Shall we risk it?’

‘To me it’s quite indifferent,’ said Mrs Viveash faintly, as though wholly preoccupied with expiring.

‘Or there’s my place,’ Gumbril said abruptly, as though shaking himself awake out of some dream.

‘But you live still farther, don’t you?’ said Coleman. ‘With venerable parents, and so forth. One foot in the grave and all that. Shall we mingle hornpipes with funerals?’ He began to hum Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ at three times its proper speed, and seizing the young stranger in his arms, two-stepped two or three turns on the pavement, then released his hold and let him go reeling against the area railings.

‘No, I don’t mean the family mansion,’ said Gumbril. ‘I mean my own rooms. They’re quite near. In Great Russell Street.’

‘I never knew you had any rooms, Theodore,’ said Mrs Viveash.

‘Nobody did.’ Why should they know now? Because the wind seemed almost a country wind? ‘There’s drink there,’ he said.

‘Splendid!’ cried the young man. They were all splendid people.

‘There’s some gin,’ said Gumbril.

‘Capital aphrodisiac!’ Coleman commented.

‘Some light white wine.’

‘Diuretic.’

‘And some whisky.’

‘The great emetic,’ said Coleman. ‘Come on.’ And he struck up the March of the Fascisti. ‘Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di bellezza . . .’ The noise went fading down the dark, empty streets.

The gin, the white wine, and even, for the sake of the stranger, who wanted to sample everything, the emetic whisky, were produced.

‘I like your rooms,’ said Mrs Viveash, looking round her. ‘And I resent your secrecy about them, Theodore.’

‘Drink, puppy!’ Coleman refilled the boy’s glass.

‘Here’s to secrecy,’ Gumbril proposed. Shut it tightly, keep it dark, cover it up. Be silent, prevaricate, lie outright. He laughed and drank. ‘Do you remember,’ he went on, ‘those instructive advertisements of Eno’s Fruit Salts they used to have when we were young? There was one little anecdote about a doctor who advised the hypochondriacal patient who had come to consult him, to go and see Grimaldi, the clown; and the patient answered, “I am Grimaldi.” Do you remember?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘And why do you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Or rather, I do know,’ Gumbril corrected himself, and laughed again.

The young man suddenly began to boast. ‘I lost two hundred pounds yesterday playing chemin de fer,’ he said, and looked round for applause.

Coleman patted his curly head. ‘Delicious child!’ he said. ‘You’re positively Hogarthian.’

Angrily, the boy pushed him away. ‘What are you doing?’ he shouted; then turned and addressed himself once more to the others. ‘I couldn’t afford it, you know – not a bloody penny of it. Not my money, either.’ He seemed to find it exquisitely humorous. ‘And that two hundred wasn’t all,’ he added, almost expiring with mirth.

‘Tell Coleman how you borrowed his beard, Theodore.’

Gumbril was looking intently into his glass, as though he hoped to see in its pale mixture of gin and Sauterne visions, as in a crystal, of the future. Mrs Viveash touched him on the arm and repeated her injunction.

‘Oh, that!’ said Gumbril rather irritably. ‘No. It isn’t an interesting story.’

‘Oh yes, it is! I insist,’ said Mrs Viveash, commanding peremptorily from her death-bed.

Gumbril drank his gin and Sauterne. ‘Very well then,’ he said reluctantly, and began.

‘I don’t know what my governor will say,’ the young man put in once or twice. But nobody paid any attention to him. He relapsed into a sulky and, it seemed to him, very dignified silence. Under the warm, jolly tipsiness he felt a chill of foreboding. He poured out some more whisky.

Gumbril warmed to his anecdote. Expiringly Mrs Viveash laughed from time to time, or smiled her agonizing smile. Coleman whooped like a Redskin.

‘And after the concert to these rooms,’ said Gumbril.

Well, let everything go. Into the mud. Leave it there, and let the dogs lift their hind legs over it as they pass.

‘Ah! the genuine platonic fumblers,’ commented Coleman.

‘I am Grimaldi,’ Gumbril laughed. Further than this it was difficult to see where the joke could go. There, on the divan, where Mrs Viveash and Coleman were now sitting, she had lain sleeping in his arms.

‘Towsing, in Elizabethan,’ said Coleman.

Unreal, eternal in the secret darkness. A night that was an eternal parenthesis among the other nights and days.

‘I feel I’m going to be sick,’ said the young man suddenly. He had wanted to go on silently and haughtily sulking; but his stomach declined to take part in the dignified game.

‘Good Lord!’ said Gumbril, and jumped up. But before he could do anything effective, the young man had fulfilled his own prophecy.

‘The real charm about debauchery,’ said Coleman philosophically, ‘is its total pointlessness, futility, and above all its incredible tediousness. If it really were all roses and exhilaration as these poor children seem to imagine, it would be no better than going to church or studying the higher mathematics. I should never touch a drop of wine or another harlot again. It would be against my principles. I told you it was emetic,’ he called to the young man.

‘And what are your principles?’ asked Mrs Viveash.

‘Oh, strictly ethical,’ said Coleman.

‘You’re responsible for this creature,’ said Gumbril, pointing to the young man, who was sitting on the floor near the fireplace, cooling his forehead against the marble of the mantelpiece. ‘You must take him away. Really, what a bore!’ His nose and mouth were all wrinkled up with disgust.

‘I’m sorry,’ the young man whispered. He kept his eyes shut and his face was exceedingly pale.

‘But with pleasure,’ said Coleman. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked the young man, ‘and where do you live?’

‘My name is Porteous,’ murmured the young man.

‘Good Lord!’ cried Gumbril, letting himself fall on to the divan beside Mrs Viveash. ‘That’s the last straw!’

CHAPTER XVII

THE TWO O’CLOCK snorted out of Charing Cross, but no healths were drunk, this time, to Viscount Lascelles. A desiccating sobriety made arid the corner of the third-class carriage in which Gumbril was sitting. His thoughts were an interminable desert of sand, with not a palm in sight, not so much as a comforting mirage. Once again he fumbled in his breast-pocket, brought out and unfolded the flimsy paper. Once more he read. How many times had he read it before?

‘Your telegram made me very unhappy. Not merely because of the accident – though it made me shudder to think that something terrible might have happened, poor darling – but also, selfishly, my own disappointment. I had looked forward so much. I had made a picture of it all so clearly. I should have met you at the station with the horse and trap from the Chequers, and we’d have driven back to the cottage – and you’d have loved the cottage. We’d have had tea and I’d have made you eat an egg with it after your journey. Then we’d have gone for a walk; through the most heavenly wood I found yesterday to a place where there’s a wonderful view – miles and miles of it. And we’d have wandered on and on, and sat down under the trees, and the sun would have set, and the twilight would slowly have come to an end, and we’d have gone home again and found the lamps lighted and supper ready – not very grand, I’m afraid, for Mrs Vole isn’t the best of cooks. And then the piano; for there is a piano, and I had the tuner come specially from Hastings yesterday, so that it isn’t so bad now. And you’d have played; and perhaps I would have made my noises on it. And at last it would have been time for candles and bed. When I heard you were coming, Theodore, I told Mrs Vole a lie about you. I said you were my husband, because she’s fearfully respectable, of course; and it would dreadfully disturb her if you weren’t. But I told myself that, too. I meant that you should be. You see, I tell you everything. I’m not ashamed. I wanted to give you everything I could, and then we should always be together, loving one another. And I should have been your slave, I should have been your property and lived inside your life. But you would always have had to love me.

‘And then, just as I was getting ready to go and call at the Chequers for the horse and trap, your telegram came. I saw the word “accident”, and I imagined you all bleeding and smashed – oh, dreadful, dreadful. But then, when you seemed to make rather a joke of it – why did you say “a little indisposed”? that seemed, somehow, so stupid, I thought – and said you were coming to-morrow, it wasn’t that which upset me; it was the dreadful, dreadful disappointment. It was like a stab, that disappointment; it hurt so terribly, so unreasonably much. It made me cry and cry, so that I thought I should never be able to stop. And then, gradually, I began to see that the pain of the disappointment wasn’t unreasonably great. It wasn’t merely a question of your coming being put off for a day; it was a question of its being put off for ever, of my never seeing you again. I saw that that accident had been something really arranged by Providence. It was meant to warn me and show me what I ought to do. I saw how hopelessly impracticable the happiness I had been imagining really was. I saw that you didn’t, you couldn’t love me in anything like the same way as I loved you. I was only a curious adventure, a new experience, a means to some other end. Mind, I’m not blaming you in the least. I’m only telling you what it true, what I gradually came to realize as true. If you’d come – what then? I’d have given you everything, my body, my mind, my soul, my whole life. I’d have twisted myself into the threads of your life. And then, when in due course you wanted to make an end to this curious little adventure, you would have had to cut the tangle and it would have killed me; it would also have hurt you. At least I think it would. In the end, I thanked God for the accident which had prevented you coming. In this way, Providence lets us off very lightly – you with a bruise or two (for I do hope it really is nothing, my precious darling), and me with a bruise inside, round the heart. But both will get well quite soon. And all our lives, we shall have an afternoon under the trees, an evening of music and in the darkness, a night, an eternity of happiness, to look back on. I shall go away from Robertsbridge at once. Good-bye, Theodore. What a long letter! The last you’ll ever get from me. The last – what a dreadful hurting word that is. I shall take it to post at once, for fear, if I leave it, I may be weak enough to change my mind and let you come to-morrow. I shall take it at once, then I shall come home again and pack up and tell some new fib to Mrs Vole. And after that, perhaps I shall allow myself to cry again. Good-bye.’

Aridly, the desert of sand stretched out with not a tree and not even a mirage, except perhaps the vague and desperate hope that he might get there before she started, that she might conceivably have changed her mind. Ah, if only he’d read the letter a little earlier! But he hadn’t woken up before eleven, he hadn’t been down before half-past. Sitting at the breakfast-table, he had read the letter through.

The eggs and bacon had grown still colder, if that was possible, than they were. He had read it through, he had rushed to the A.B.C. There was no practicable train before the two o’clock.

If he had taken the seven-twenty-seven he would certainly have got there before she started. Ah, if only he had woken up a little earlier! But then he would have had to go to bed a little earlier. And in order to go to bed earlier, he would have had to abandon Mrs Viveash before she had bored herself to that ultimate point of fatigue at which she did at last feel ready for repose. And to abandon Mrs Viveash – ah, that was really impossible, she wouldn’t allow herself to be left alone. If only he hadn’t gone to the London Library yesterday! A wanton, unnecessary visit it had been. For after all, the journey was short; he didn’t need a book for the train. And the Life of Beckford, for which he had asked proved, of course, to be out – and he had been utterly incapable of thinking of any other book, among the two or three hundred thousand on the shelves, that he wanted to read. And, in any case, what the devil did he want with a Life of Beckford? Hadn’t he his own life, the life of Gumbril, to attend to? Wasn’t one life enough, without making superfluous visits to the London Library in search of other lives? And then what a stroke of bad luck to have run into Mrs Viveash at that very moment! What an abject weakness to have let himself be bullied into sending that telegram. ‘A little indisposed . . .’ Oh, my God! Gumbril shut his eyes and ground his teeth together; he felt himself blushing with a retrospective shame.

And of course it was quite useless taking the train, like this, to Robertsbridge. She’d be gone, of course. Still, there was always the desperate hope. There was the mirage across the desiccated plains, the mirage one knew to be deceptive and which, on a second glance, proved not even to be a mirage, but merely a few livery spots behind the eyes. Still, it was amply worth doing – as a penance, and to satisfy the conscience and to deceive oneself with an illusion of action. And then the fact that he was to have spent the afternoon with Rosie and had put her off – that too was highly satisfying. And not merely put her off, but – ultimate clownery in the worst of deliriously bad taste – played a joke on her. ‘Impossible to come to you, meet me 213 Sloane Street, second floor, a little indisposed.’ He wondered how she’d get on with Mr Mercaptan; for it was to his rococo boudoir and Crébillon-souled sofa that he had on the spur of the clownish moment, as he dashed into the post office on the way to the station, sent her.

Aridly, the desiccated waste extended. Had she been right in her letter? Would it really have lasted no more than a little while and ended as she prophesied, with an agonizing cutting of the tangle? Or could it be that she had held out the one hope of happiness? Wasn’t she perhaps the one unique being with whom he might have learned to await in quietness the final coming of that lovely terrible thing, from before the sound of whose secret footsteps more than once and oh! ignobly he had fled? He could not decide, it was impossible to decide until he had seen her again, till he had possessed her, mingled his life with hers. And now she had eluded him; for he knew very well that he would not find her. He sighed and looked out of the window.

The train pulled up at a small suburban station. Suburban, for though London was already some way behind, the little sham half-timbered houses near the station, the newer tile and rough-cast dwellings farther out on the slope of the hill proclaimed with emphasis the presence of the business man, the holder of the season ticket. Gumbril looked at them with a pensive disgust which must have expressed itself on his features; for the gentleman sitting in the corner of the carriage facing his, suddenly leaned forward, tapped him on the knee, and said, ‘I see you agree with me, sir, that there are too many people in the world.’

Gumbril, who up till now had merely been aware that somebody was sitting opposite him, now looked with more attention at the stranger. He was a large, square old gentleman of robust and flourishing appearance, with a face of wrinkled brown parchment and a white moustache that merged, in a handsome curve, with a pair of side whiskers, in a manner which reminded one of the photographs of the Emperor Francis Joseph.

‘I perfectly agree with you, sir,’ Gumbril answered. If he had been wearing his beard, he would have gone on to suggest that loquacious old gentlemen in trains are among the supernumeraries of the planet. As it was, however, he spoke with courtesy, and smiled in his most engaging fashion.

‘When I look at all these revolting houses,’ the old gentleman continued, shaking his fist at the snuggeries of the season-ticket holders, ‘I am filled with indignation. I feel my spleen ready to burst, sir, ready to burst.’

‘I can sympathize with you,’ said Gumbril. ‘The architecture is certainly not very soothing.’

‘It’s not the architecture I mind so much,’ retorted the old gentleman, ‘that’s merely a question of art, and all nonsense so far as I’m concerned. What disgusts me is the people inside the architecture, the number of them, sir. And the way they breed. Like maggots, sir, like maggots. Millions of them, creeping about the face of the country, spreading blight and dirt wherever they go; ruining everything. It’s the people I object to.’

‘Ah well,’ said Gumbril, ‘if you will have sanitary conditions that don’t allow plagues to flourish properly; if you will tell mothers how to bring up their children, instead of allowing nature to kill them off in her natural way; if you will import unlimited supplies of corn and meat: what can you expect? Of course the numbers go up.’

The old gentleman waved all this away. ‘I don’t care what the causes are,’ he said. ‘That’s all one to me. What I do object to, sir, is the effects. Why sir, I am old enough to remember walking through the delicious meadows beyond Swiss Cottage, I remember seeing the cows milked in West Hampstead, sir. And now, what do I see now, when I go there? Hideous red cities pullulating with Jews, sir. Pullulating with prosperous Jews. Am I right in being indignant, sir? Do I do well, like the prophet Jonah, to be angry?’

‘You do, sir,’ said Gumbril, with growing enthusiasm, ‘and the more so since this frightful increase in population is the world’s most formidable danger at the present time. With populations that in Europe alone expand by millions every year, no political foresight is possible. A few years of this mere bestial propagation will suffice to make nonsense of the wisest schemes of to-day – or would suffice,’ he hastened to correct himself, ‘if any wise schemes were being matured at the present.’

‘Very possibly, sir,’ said the old gentleman, ‘but what I object to is seeing good cornland being turned into streets, and meadows, where cows used to graze, covered with houses full of useless and disgusting human beings. I resent seeing the country parcelled out into back gardens.’

‘And is there any prospect,’ Gumbril earnestly asked, ‘of our ever being able in the future to support the whole of our population? Will unemployment ever decrease?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ the old gentleman replied. ‘But the families of the unemployed will certainly increase.’

‘You are right, sir,’ said Gumbril, ‘they will. And the families of the employed and the prosperous will as steadily grow smaller. It is regrettable that birth control should have begun at the wrong end of the scale. There seems to be a level of poverty below which it doesn’t seem worth while practising birth control, and a level of education below which birth control is regarded as morally wrong. Strange, how long it has taken for the ideas of love and procreation to dissociate themselves in the human mind. In the majority of minds they are still, even in this so-called twentieth century, indivisibly wedded. Still,’ he continued hopefully, ‘progress is being made, progress is certainly, though slowly, being made. It is gratifying to find, for example, in the latest statistics, that the clergy, as a class, are now remarkable for the smallness of their families. The old jest is out of date. Is it too much to hope that these gentlemen may bring themselves in time to preach what they already practise?’

‘It is too much to hope, sir,’ the old gentleman answered with decision.

‘You are probably right,’ said Gumbril.

‘If we were all to preach all the things we all practise,’ continued the old gentleman, ‘the world would soon be a pretty sort of bear-garden, I can tell you. Yes, and a monkey-house. And a wart-hoggery. As it is, sir, it is merely a place where there are too many human beings. Vice must pay its tribute to virtue, or else we are all undone.’

‘I admire your wisdom, sir,’ said Gumbril.

The old gentleman was delighted. ‘And I have been much impressed by your philosophical reflections,’ he said. ‘Tell me, are you at all interested in old brandy?’

‘Well, not philosophically,’ said Gumbril. ‘As a mere empiric only.’

‘As a mere empiric!’ The old gentleman laughed. ‘Then let me beg you to accept a case. I have a cellar which I shall never drink dry, alas! before I die. My only wish is that what remains of it shall be distributed among those who can really appreciate it. In you, sir, I see a fitting recipient of a case of brandy.’

‘You overwhelm me,’ said Gumbril. ‘You are too kind, and, I may add, too flattering.’ The train, which was a mortally slow one, came grinding for what seemed the hundredth time to a halt.

‘Not at all,’ said the old gentleman. ‘If you have a card, sir.’

Gumbril searched his pockets. ‘I have come without one.’

‘Never mind,’ said the old gentleman. ‘I think I have a pencil. If you will give me your name and address, I will have the case sent to you at once.’

Leisurely, he hunted for the pencil, he took out a notebook. The train gave a jerk forward.

‘Now, sir,’ he said.

Gumbril began dictating. ‘Theodore,’ he said slowly.

‘The – o – dore,’ the old gentleman repeated, syllable by syllable.

The train crept on, with slowly gathering momentum, through the station. Happening to look out of the window at this moment, Gumbril saw the name of the place painted across a lamp. It was Robertsbridge. He made a loud, inarticulate noise, flung open the door of the compartment, stepped out on to the footboard and jumped. He landed safely on the platform, staggered forward a few paces with his acquired momentum and came at last to a halt. A hand reached out and closed the swinging door of his compartment and, an instant afterwards, through the window, a face that, at a distance, looked more than ever like the face of the Emperor Francis Joseph, looked back towards the receding platform. The mouth opened and shut; no words were audible. Standing on the platform, Gumbril made a complicated pantomime, signifying his regret by shrugging his shoulders and placing his hand on his heart; urging in excuse for his abrupt departure the necessity under which he laboured of alighting at this particular station – which he did by pointing at the name on the boards and lamps, then at himself, then at the village across the fields. The old gentleman waved his hand, which still held, Gumbril noticed, the notebook in which he had been writing. Then the train carried him out of sight. There went the only case of old brandy he was ever likely to possess, thought Gumbril sadly, as he turned away. Suddenly, he remembered Emily again; for a long time he had quite forgotten her.

The cottage, when at last he found it, proved to be fully as picturesque as he had imagined. And Emily, of course, had gone, leaving, as might have been expected, no address. He took the evening train back to London. The aridity was now complete, and even the hope of a mirage had vanished. There was no old gentleman to make a diversion. The size of clergymen’s families, even the fate of Europe, seemed unimportant now, were indeed perfectly indifferent to him.

CHAPTER XVIII

TWO HUNDRED AND thirteen Sloane Street. The address, Rosie reflected, as she vaporized synthetic lilies of the valley over all her sinuous person, was decidedly a good one. It argued a reasonable prosperity, attested a certain distinction. The knowledge of his address confirmed her already high opinion of the bearded stranger who had so surprisingly entered her life, as though in fulfilment of all the fortune-tellers’ prophecies that ever were made; had entered, yes, and intimately made himself at home. She had been delighted, when the telegram came that morning, to think that at last she was going to find out something more about this man of mystery. For dark and mysterious he had remained, remote even in the midst of the most intimate contacts. Why, she didn’t even know his name. ‘Call me Toto,’ he had suggested, when she asked him what it was. And Toto she had had to call him, for lack of anything more definite or committal. But to-day he was letting her further into his secret. Rosie was delighted. Her pink underclothing, she decided, as she looked in the long glass, was really ravishing. She examined herself, turning first one way, then the other, looking over her shoulder to see the effect from behind. She pointed a toe, bent and straightened a knee, applauding the length of her legs (‘Most women,’ Toto had said, ‘are like dachshunds’), their slenderness and plump suavity of form. In their white stockings of Milanese silk they looked delicious; and how marvellously, by the way, those Selfridge people had mended those stockings by their new patent process! Absolutely like new, and only charged four shillings. Well, it was time to dress. Good-bye, then, to the pink underclothing and the long white legs. She opened the wardrobe door. The moving glass reflected, as it swung through its half-circle, pink bed, rose-wreathed walls, little friends of her own age, and the dying saint at his last communion. Rosie selected the frock she had bought the other day at one of those little shops in Soho, where they sell such smart things so cheaply to a clientage of minor actresses and cocottes. Toto hadn’t seen it yet. She looked extremely distinguished in it. The little hat, with its inch of veil hanging like a mask, unconcealing and inviting, from the brim, suited her to perfection. One last dab of powder, one last squirt of synthetic lilies of the valley, and she was ready. She closed the door behind her. St Jerome was left to communicate in the untenanted pinkness.

Mr Mercaptan sat at his writing-table – an exquisitely amusing affair in papier mâché, inlaid with floral decorations in mother-of-pearl and painted with views of Windsor Castle and Tintern in the romantic manner of Prince Albert’s later days – polishing to its final and gem-like perfection one of his middle articles. It was on a splendid subject – the ‘Jus Primae Noctis, or Droit du Seigneur’ – ‘that delicious droit,’ wrote Mr Mercaptan, ‘on which, one likes to think, the Sovereigns of England insist so firmly in their motto, Dieu et mon Droit – de Seigneur.’ That was charming, Mr Mercaptan thought, as he read it through. And he liked that bit which began elegiacally: ‘But, alas! the Right of the First Night belongs to a Middle Age as mythical, albeit happily different, as those dismal epochs invented by Morris or by Chesterton. The Lord’s right, as we prettily imagine it, is a figment of the baroque imagination of the seventeenth century. It never existed. Or at least it did exist, but as something deplorably different from what we love to picture it.’ And he went on, eruditely, to refer to that Council of Carthage which, in 398, demanded of the faithful that they should be continent on their wedding-night. It was the Lord’s right – the droit of a heavenly Seigneur. On this text of fact, Mr Mercaptan went on to preach a brilliant sermon on that melancholy sexual perversion known as continence. How much happier we all should be if the real historical droit du Seigneur had in fact been the mythical right of our ‘pretty prurient imaginations’! He looked forward to a golden age when all should be seigneurs possessing rights that should have broadened down into universal liberty. And so on. Mr Mercaptan read through his creation with a smile of satisfaction on his face. Every here and there he made a careful correction in red ink. Over ‘pretty prurient imaginations’ his pen hung for a full minute in conscientious hesitation. Wasn’t it perhaps a little too strongly alliterative, a shade, perhaps, cheap? Perhaps ‘pretty lascivious’ or ‘delicate prurient’ would be better. He repeated the alternatives several times, rolling the sound of them round his tongue, judicially, like a tea-taster. In the end, he decided that ‘pretty prurient’ was right. ‘Pretty prurient’ – they were the mots justes, decidedly, without a question.

Mr Mercaptan had just come to this decision and his poised pen was moving farther down the page, when he was disturbed by the sound of arguing voices in the corridor, outside his room.

‘What is it, Mrs Goldie?’ he called irritably, for it was not difficult to distinguish his housekeeper’s loud and querulous tones. He had given orders that he was not to be disturbed. In these critical moments of correction one needed such absolute tranquillity.

But Mr Mercaptan was to have no tranquillity this afternoon. The door of his sacred boudoir was thrown rudely open, and there strode in, like a Goth into the elegant marble vomitorium of Petronius Arbiter, a haggard and dishevelled person whom Mr Mercaptan recognized, with a certain sense of discomfort, as Casimir Lypiatt.

‘To what do I owe the pleasure of this unexpected . . .?’ Mr Mercaptan began with an essay in offensive courtesy.

But Lypiatt, who had no feeling for the finer shades, coarsely interrupted him. ‘Look here, Mercaptan,’ he said. ‘I want to have a talk with you.’

‘Delighted, I’m sure,’ Mr Mercaptan replied. ‘And what, may I ask, about?’ He knew, of course, perfectly well; and the prospect of the talk disturbed him.

‘About this,’ said Lypiatt; and he held out what looked like a roll of paper.

Mr Mercaptan took the roll and opened it out. It was a copy of the Weekly World. ‘Ah!’ said Mr Mercaptan, in a tone of delighted surprise, ‘The World. You have read my little article?’

‘That was what I wanted to talk to you about,’ said Lypiatt.

Mr Mercaptan modestly laughed. ‘It hardly deserves it,’ he said.

Preserving a calm of expression which was quite unnatural to him, and speaking in a studiedly quiet voice, Lypiatt pronounced with careful deliberation: ‘It is a disgusting, malicious, ignoble attack on me,’ he said.

‘Come, come!’ protested Mr Mercaptan. ‘A critic must be allowed to criticize.’

‘But there are limits,’ said Lypiatt.

‘Oh, I quite agree,’ Mr Mercaptan eagerly conceded. ‘But, after all, Lypiatt, you can’t pretend that I have come anywhere near those limits. If I had called you a murderer, or even an adulterer – then, I admit, you would have some cause to complain. But I haven’t. There’s nothing like a personality in the whole thing.’

Lypiatt laughed derisively, and his face went all to pieces, like a pool of water into which a stone is suddenly dropped.

‘You’ve merely said I was insincere, an actor, a mountebank, a quack, raving fustian, spouting mock heroics. That’s all.’

Mr Mercaptan put on the expression of one who feels himself injured and misunderstood. He shut his eyes, he flapped deprecatingly with his hand. ‘I merely suggested,’ he said, ‘that you protest too much. You defeat your own ends; you lose emphasis by trying to be over-emphatic. All this folie de grandeur, all this hankering after terribiltà –’ sagely Mr Mercaptan shook his head, ‘it’s led so many people astray. And, in any case, you can’t really expect me to find it very sympathetic.’ Mr Mercaptan uttered a little laugh and looked affectionately round his boudoir, his retired and perfumed poutery within whose walls so much civilization had finely flowered. He looked at his magnificent sofa, gilded and carved, upholstered in white satin, and so deep – for it was a great square piece of furniture, almost as broad as it was long – that when you sat right back, you had of necessity to lift your feet from the floor and recline at length. It was under the white satin that Crébillon’s spirit found, in these late degenerate days, a sympathetic home. He looked at his exquisite Condor fans over the mantelpiece; his lovely Marie Laurencin of two young girls, pale-skinned and berry-eyed, walking embraced in a shallow myopic landscape amid a troop of bounding heraldic dogs. He looked at his cabinet of bibelots in the corner where the nigger mask and the superb Chinese phallus in sculptured rock crystal contrasted so amusingly with the Chelsea china, the little ivory Madonna, which might be a fake, but in any case was quite as good as any mediaeval French original, and the Italian medals. He looked at his comical writing-desk in shining black papier mâché and mother-of-pearl; he looked at his article on the ‘Jus Primae Noctis’, black and neat on the page, with the red corrections attesting his tireless search for, and his, he flattered himself, almost invariable discovery of, the inevitable word. No, really, one couldn’t expect him to find Lypiatt’s notions very sympathetic.

‘But I don’t expect you to,’ said Lypiatt, ‘and, good God! I don’t want you to. But you call me insincere. That’s what I can’t and won’t stand. How dare you do that?’ His voice was growing louder.

Once more Mr Mercaptan deprecatingly flapped. ‘At the most,’ he corrected, ‘I said that there was a certain look of insincerity about some of the pictures. Hardly avoidable, indeed, in work of this kind.’

Quite suddenly, Lypiatt lost his self-control. All the accumulated anger and bitterness of the last days burst out. His show had been a hopeless failure. Not a picture sold, a press that was mostly bad, or, when good, that had praised for the wrong, the insulting reasons. ‘Bright and effective work.’ ‘Mr Lypiatt would make an excellent stage designer.’ Damn them! damn them! And then, when the dailies had all had their yelp, here was Mercaptan in the Weekly World taking him as a text for what was practically an essay on insincerity in art. ‘How dare you?’ he furiously shouted. ‘You – how dare you talk about sincerity? What can you know about sincerity, you disgusting little bug!’ And avenging himself on the person of Mr Mercaptan against the world that had neglected him, against the fate that had denied him his rightful share of talent, Lypiatt sprang up and, seizing the author of the ‘Jus Primae Noctis’ by the shoulders, he shook him, he bumped him up and down in his chair, he cuffed him over the head. ‘How can you have the impudence,’ he asked, letting go of his victim, but still standing menacingly over him, ‘to touch anything that even attempts to be decent and big?’ All these years, these wretched years of poverty and struggle and courageous hope and failure and repeated disappointment; and now this last failure, more complete than all. He was trembling with anger; at least one forgot unhappiness while one was angry.

Mr Mercaptan had recovered from his first terrified surprise. ‘Really, really,’ he repeated, ‘too barbarous. Scuffling like hobbledehoys.’

‘If you knew,’ Lypiatt began; but he checked himself. If you knew, he was going to say, what those things had cost me, what they meant, what thought, what passion – But how could Mercaptan understand? And it would sound as though he were appealing to this creature’s sympathy. ‘Bug!’ he shouted instead, ‘bug!’ And he struck out again with the flat of his hand. Mr Mercaptan put up his hands and ducked away from the slaps, blinking.

‘Really,’ he protested, ‘really . . .’

Insincere? Perhaps it was half true. Lypiatt seized his man more furiously than before and shook him, shook him. ‘And then that vile insult about the vermouth advertisement,’ he cried out. That had rankled. Those flaring, vulgar posters! ‘You thought you could mock me and spit at me with impunity, did you? I’ve stood it so long, you thought I’d always stand it? Was that it? But you’re mistaken.’ He lifted his fist. Mr Mercaptan cowered away, raising his arm to protect his head. ‘Vile bug of a coward,’ said Lypiatt, ‘why don’t you defend yourself like a man? You can only be dangerous with words. Very witty and spiteful and cutting about those vermouth posters, wasn’t it? But you wouldn’t dare to fight me if I challenged you.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Mr Mercaptan, peering up from under his defences, ‘I didn’t invent that particular piece of criticism. I borrowed the apéritif.’ He laughed feebly, more canary than bull.

‘You borrowed it, did you?’ Lypiatt contemptuously repeated. ‘And who from may I ask?’ Not that it interested him in the least to know.

‘Well, if you really want to know,’ said Mr Mercaptan, ‘it was from our friend Myra Viveash.’

Lypiatt stood for a moment without speaking, then putting his menacing hand in his pocket, he turned away. ‘Oh!’ he said non-committally, and was silent again.

Relieved, Mr Mercaptan sat up in his chair; with the palm of his right hand he smoothed his dishevelled head.

Airily, outside in the sunshine, Rosie walked down Sloane Street, looking at the numbers on the doors of the houses. A hundred and ninety-nine, two hundred, two hundred and one – she was getting near now. Perhaps all the people who passed, strolling so easily and elegantly and disengagedly along, perhaps they all of them carried behind their eyes a secret, as delightful and amusing as hers. Rosie liked to think so; it made life more exciting. How nonchalantly distinguished, Rosie reflected, she herself must look. Would any one who saw her now, sauntering along like this, would any one guess that, ten houses farther down the street, a young poet, or at least very nearly a young poet, was waiting, on the second floor, eagerly for her arrival? Of course they wouldn’t and couldn’t guess! That was the fun and the enormous excitement of the whole thing. Formidable in her light-hearted detachment, formidable in the passion which at will she could give rein to and check again, the great lady swam beautifully along through the sunlight to satisfy her caprice. Like Diana, she stooped over the shepherd boy. Eagerly the starving young poet waited, waited in his garret. Two hundred and twelve, two hundred and thirteen. Rosie looked at the entrance and was reminded that the garret couldn’t after all be very sordid, nor the young poet absolutely starving. She stepped in and, standing in the hall, looked at the board with the names. Ground floor: Mrs Budge. First floor: F. de M. Rowbotham. Second floor: P. Mercaptan.

P. Mercaptan . . . But it was a charming name, a romantic name, a real young poet’s name! Mercaptan – she felt more than ever pleased with her selection. The fastidious lady could not have had a happier caprice. Mercaptan . . . Mercaptan . . . She wondered what the P. stood for. Peter, Philip, Patrick, Pendennis even? She could hardly have guessed that Mr Mercaptan’s father, the eminent bacteriologist, had insisted, thirty-four years ago, on calling his first-born ‘Pasteur’.

A little tremulous, under her outward elegant calm, Rosie mounted the stairs. Twenty-five steps to the first floor – one flight of thirteen, which was rather disagreeably ominous, and one of twelve. Then two flights of eleven, and she was on the second landing, facing a front door, a bell-push like a round eye, a brass name-plate. For a great lady thoroughly accustomed to this sort of thing, she felt her heart beating rather unpleasantly fast. It was those stairs, no doubt. She halted a moment, took two deep breaths, then pushed the bell.

The door was opened by an aged servant of the most forbiddingly respectable appearance.

‘Mr Mercaptan at home?’

The person at the door burst at once into a long, rambling, angry complaint, but precisely about what Rosie could not for certain make out. Mr Mercaptan had left orders, she gathered, that he wasn’t to be disturbed. But some one had come and disturbed him, ‘fairly shoved his way in, so rude and inconsiderate,’ all the same. And now he’d been once disturbed, she didn’t see why he shouldn’t be disturbed again. But she didn’t know what things were coming to if people fairly shoved their way in like that. Bolshevism, she called it.

Rosie murmured her sympathies, and was admitted into a dark hall. Still querulously denouncing the Bolsheviks who came shoving in, the person led the way down a corridor and throwing open a door, announced, in a tone of grievance: ‘A lady to see you, Master Paster’ – for Mrs Goldie was an old family retainer, and one of the few who knew the secret of Mr Mercaptan’s Christian name, one of the fewer still who were privileged to employ it. Then, as soon as Rosie had stepped across the threshold, she cut off her retreat with a bang and went off, muttering all the time, towards her kitchen.

It certainly wasn’t a garret. Half a glance, the first whiff of potpourri, the feel of the carpet beneath her feet, had been enough to prove that. But it was not the room which occupied Rosie’s attention, it was its occupants. One of them, thin, sharp-featured and, in Rosie’s very young eyes, quite old, was standing with an elbow on the mantelpiece. The other, sleeker and more genial in appearance, was sitting in front of a writing-desk near the window. And neither of them – Rosie glanced desperately from one to the other, hoping vainly that she might have overlooked a blond beard – neither of them was Toto.

The sleek man at the writing-desk got up, advanced to meet her.

‘An unexpected pleasure,’ he said, in a voice that alternately boomed and fluted. ‘Too delightful! But to what do I owe –? Who, may I ask –?’

He had held out his hand; automatically Rosie proffered hers. The sleek man shook it with cordiality, almost with tenderness.

‘I . . . I think I must have made a mistake,’ she said. ‘Mr Mercaptan . . .?’

The sleek man smiled. ‘I am Mr Mercaptan.’

‘You live on the second floor?’

‘I never laid claims to being a mathematician,’ said the sleek man, smiling as though to applaud himself, ‘but I have always calculated that . . .’ he hesitated . . . ‘enfin, que ma demeure se trouve, en effet, on the second floor. Lypiatt will bear me out, I’m sure.’ He turned to the thin man, who had not moved from the fireplace, but had stood all the time motionlessly, his elbow on the mantelpiece, looking gloomily at the ground.

Lypiatt looked up. ‘I must be going,’ he said abruptly. And he walked towards the door. Like vermouth posters, like vermouth posters! – so that was Myra’s piece of mockery! All his anger had sunk like a quenched flame. He was altogether quenched, put out with unhappiness.

Politely Mr Mercaptan hurried across the room and opened the door for him. ‘Good-bye, then,’ he said airily.

Lypiatt did not speak, but walked out into the hall. The front door banged behind him.

‘Well, well,’ said Mr Mercaptan, coming back across the room to where Rosie was still irresolutely standing. ‘Talk about the furor poeticus! But do sit down, I beg you. On Crébillon.’ He indicated the vast white satin sofa. ‘I call it Crébillon,’ he explained, ‘because the soul of that great writer undoubtedly tenants it, undoubtedly. You know his book, of course? You know Le Sopha?’

Sinking into Crébillon’s soft lap, Rosie had to admit that she didn’t know Le Sopha. She had begun to recover her self-possession. If this wasn’t the young poet, it was certainly a young poet. And a very peculiar one, too. As a great lady she laughingly accepted the odd situation.

‘Not know Le Sopha?’ exclaimed Mr Mercaptan. ‘Oh! but, my dear and mysterious young lady, let me lend you a copy of it at once. No education can be called complete without a knowledge of that divine book.’ He darted to the bookshelf and came back with a small volume bound in white vellum. ‘The hero’s soul,’ he explained, handing her the volume, ‘passes, by the laws of metempsychosis, into a sofa. He is doomed to remain a sofa until such time as two persons consummate upon his bosom their reciprocal and equal loves. The book is the record of the poor sofa’s hopes and disappointments.’

‘Dear me!’ said Rosie, looking at the title-page.

‘But now,’ said Mr Mercaptan, sitting down beside her on the edge of Crébillon, ‘won’t you please explain? To what happy quiproquo do I owe this sudden and altogether delightful invasion of my privacy?’

‘Well,’ said Rosie, and hesitated. It was really rather difficult to explain. ‘I was to meet a friend of mine.’

‘Quite so,’ said Mr Mercaptan encouragingly.

‘Who sent me a telegram,’ Rosie went on.

‘He sent you a telegram!’ Mr Mercaptan echoed.

‘Changing the – the place we had fixed and telling me to meet him at this address.’

‘Here?’

Rose nodded. ‘On the s-second floor,’ she made it more precise.

‘But I live on the second floor,’ said Mr Mercaptan. ‘You don’t mean to say your friend is also called Mercaptan and lives here too?’

Rosie smiled. ‘I don’t know what he’s called,’ she said with a cool ironical carelessness that was genuinely grande dame.

‘You don’t know his name?’ Mr Mercaptan gave a roar and a squeal of delighted laughter. ‘But that’s too good,’ he said.

‘S-second floor, he wrote in the telegram.’ Rosie was now perfectly at her ease. ‘When I saw your name, I thought it was his name. I must say,’ she added, looking sideways at Mr Mercaptan and at once dropping the magnolia petals of her eyelids, ‘it seemed to me a very charming name.’

‘You overwhelm me,’ said Mr Mercaptan, smiling all over his cheerful, snouty face. ‘As for your name – I am too discreet a galantuomo to ask. And, in any case, what does it matter? A rose by any other name . . .’

‘But, as a matter of fact,’ she said, raising and lowering once again her smooth, white lids, ‘my name does happen to be Rose; or, at any rate, Rosie.’

‘So you are sweet by right!’ exclaimed Mr Mercaptan, with a pretty gallantry which he was the first to appreciate. ‘Let’s order tea on the strength of it.’ He jumped up and rang the bell. ‘How I congratulate myself on this astonishing piece of good fortune!’

Rosie said nothing. This Mr Mercaptan, she thought, seemed to be even more a man of the great artistic world than Toto.

‘What puzzles me,’ he went on, ‘is why your anonymous friend should have chosen my address out of all the millions of others. He must know me, or, at any rate, know about me.’

‘I should imagine,’ said Rosie, ‘that you have a lot of friends.’

Mr Mercaptan laughed – the whole orchestra, from bassoon to piccolo. ‘Des amis, des amies – with and without the mute “e”,’ he declared.

The aged and forbidding servant appeared at the door.

‘Tea for two, Mrs Goldie.’

Mrs Goldie looked round the room suspiciously. ‘The other gentleman’s gone, has he?’ she asked. And having assured herself of his absence, she renewed her complaint. ‘Shoving in like that,’ she said. ‘Bolshevism, that’s what I –’

‘All right, all right, Mrs Goldie. Let’s have our tea as quickly as possible.’ Mr Mercaptan held up his hand, authoritatively, with the gesture of a policeman controlling the traffic.

‘Very well, Master Paster.’ Mrs Goldie spoke with resignation and departed.

‘But tell me,’ Mr Mercaptan went on, ‘if it isn’t indiscreet – what does your friend look like?’

‘W-well,’ Rosie answered, ‘he’s fair, and though he’s quite young he wears a beard.’ With her two hands she indicated on her own unemphatic bosom the contours of Toto’s broad blond fan.

‘A beard! But, good heavens,’ Mr Mercaptan slapped his thigh, ‘it’s Coleman, it’s obviously and undoubtedly Coleman!’

‘Well, whoever it was,’ said Rosie severely, ‘he played a very stupid sort of joke.’

‘For which I thank him. De tout mon coeur.’

Rosie smiled and looked sideways. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘I shall give him a piece of my mind.’

Poor Aunt Aggie! Oh, poor Aunt Aggie, indeed! In the light of Mr Mercaptan’s boudoir her hammered copper and her leadless gaze certainly did look a bit comical.

After tea Mr Mercaptan played cicerone in a tour of inspection round the room. They visited the papier mâché writing-desk, the Condor fans, the Marie Laurencin, the 1914 edition of Du Côté de chez Swann, the Madonna that probably was a fake, the nigger mask, the Chelsea figures, the Chinese object of art in sculptured crystal, the scale model of Queen Victoria in wax under a glass bell. Toto, it became clear, had been no more than a forerunner; the definitive revelation was Mr Mercaptan’s. Yes, poor Aunt Aggie! And indeed, when Mr Mercaptan began to read her his little middle on the ‘Droit du Seigneur’, it was poor everybody. Poor mother, with her absurd, old-fashioned, prudish views; poor, earnest father, with his Unitarianism, his Hibbert Journal, his letters to the papers about the necessity for a spiritual regeneration.

‘Bravo!’ she cried from the depths of Crébillon. She was leaning back in one corner, languid, serpentine, and at ease, her feet in their mottled snake’s leather tucked up under her. ‘Bravo!’ she cried as Mr Mercaptan finished his reading, and looked up for his applause.

Mr Mercaptan bowed.

‘You express so exquisitely what we –’ and waving her hand in a comprehensive gesture, she pictured to herself all the other fastidious ladies, all the marchionesses of fable, reclining, as she herself at this moment reclined, on upholstery of white satin, ‘what we all only feel and aren’t clever enough to say.’

Mr Mercaptan was charmed. He got up from before his writing-desk, crossed the room and sat down beside her on Crébillon. ‘Feeling,’ he said, ‘is the important thing.’

Rosie remembered that her father had once remarked in blank verse: ‘The things that matter happen in the heart.’

‘I quite agree,’ she said.

Like movable raisins in the suet of his snouty face, Mr Mercaptan’s brown little eyes rolled amorous avowals. He took Rosie’s hand and kissed it. Crébillon creaked discreetly as he moved a little nearer.

It was on the evening of the same day. Rosie lay on her sofa – a poor, hire-purchase thing indeed, compared with Mr Mercaptan’s grand affair in white satin and carved and gilded wood, but still a sofa – lay with her feet on the arm of it and her long suave legs exposed, by the slipping of the kimono, to the top of her stretched stockings. She was reading the little vellum-jacketed volume of Crébillon, which Mr Mercaptan had given her when he said ‘good-bye’ (or rather, ‘À bientôt, mon amie’); given, not lent, as he had less generously offered at the beginning of their afternoon; given with the most graceful of allusive dedications inscribed on the fly-leaf:

TO

BY-NO-OTHER-NAME-AS-SWEET,

WITH GRATITUDE,

FROM

CRÉBILLON DELIVERED.

À bientôt – she had promised to come again very soon. She thought of the essay on the ‘Jus primae Noctis’ – ah! what we’ve all been feeling and none of us clever enough to say. We on the sofas, ruthless, lovely and fastidious . . .

‘I am proud to constitute myself’ – Mr Mercaptan had said of it – ‘l’esprit d’escalier des dames galantes.’

Rosie was not quite sure what he meant; but it certainly sounded very witty indeed.

She read the book slowly. Her French, indeed, wasn’t good enough to permit her to read it anyhow else. She wished it were better. Perhaps if it were better she wouldn’t be yawning like this. It was disgraceful: she pulled herself together. Mr Mercaptan had said that it was a masterpiece.

In his study, Shearwater was trying to write his paper on the regulative functions of the kidneys. He was not succeeding.

Why wouldn’t she see me yesterday? he kept wondering. With anguish he suspected other lovers; desired her, in consequence, the more. Gumbril had said something, he remembered, that night they had met her by the coffee-stall. What was it? He wished now that he had listened more attentively.

She’s bored with me. Already. It was obvious.

Perhaps he was too rustic for her. Shearwater looked at his hands. Yes, the nails were dirty. He took an orange stick out of his waistcoat pocket and began to clean them. He had bought a whole packet of orange sticks that morning.

Determinedly he took up his pen. ‘The hydrogen ion concentration in the blood . . .’ he began a new paragraph. But he got no further than the first seven words.

If, he began thinking with a frightful confusion, if – if – if – Past conditionals, hopelessly past. He might have been brought up more elegantly; his father, for example, might have been a barrister instead of a barrister’s clerk. He mightn’t have had to work so hard when he was young; might have been about more, danced more, seen more young women. If he had met her years ago – during the war, should one say, dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant in the Guards . . .

He had pretended that he wasn’t interested in women; that they had no effect on him; that, in fact, he was above that sort of thing. Imbecile! He might as well have said that he was above having a pair of kidneys. He had only consented to admit, graciously, that they were a physiological necessity.

O God, what a fool he had been!

And then, what about Rosie? What sort of a life had she been having while he was being above that sort of thing? Now he came to think of it, he really knew nothing about her, except that she had been quite incapable of learning correctly, even by heart, the simplest facts about the physiology of frogs. Having found that out, he had really given up exploring further. How could he have been so stupid?

Rosie had been in love with him, he supposed. Had he been in love with her? No. He had taken care not to be. On principle. He had married her as a measure of intimate hygiene; out of protective affection, too, certainly out of affection; and a little for amusement, as one might buy a puppy.

Mrs Viveash had opened his eyes; seeing her, he had also begun to notice Rosie. It seemed to him that he had been a loutish cad as well as an imbecile.

What should he do about it? He sat for a long time wondering.

In the end he decided that the best thing would be to go and tell Rosie all about it, all about everything.

About Mrs Viveash too? Yes, about Mrs Viveash too. He would get over Mrs Viveash more easily and more rapidly if he did. And he would begin to try and find out about Rosie. He would explore her. He would discover all the other things besides an incapacity to learn physiology that were in her. He would discover her, he would quicken his affection for her into something livelier and more urgent. And they would begin again; more satisfactorily this time; with knowledge and understanding; wise from their experience.

Shearwater got up from his chair before the writing-table, lurched pensively towards the door, bumping into the revolving bookcase and the arm-chair as he went, and walked down the passage to the drawing-room. Rosie did not turn her head as he came in, but went on reading without changing her position, her slippered feet still higher than her head, her legs still charmingly avowing themselves.

Shearwater came to a halt in front of the empty fireplace. He stood there with his back to it, as though warming himself before an imaginary flame. It was, he felt, the safest, the most strategic point from which to talk.

‘What are you reading?’ he asked.

‘Le Sopha,’ said Rosie.

‘What’s that?’

‘What’s that?’ Rosie scornfully echoed. ‘Why, it’s one of the great French classics.’

‘Who by?’

‘Crébillon the younger.’

‘Never heard of him,’ said Shearwater.

There was a silence. Rosie went on reading.

‘It just occurred to me,’ Shearwater began again in his rather ponderous, infelicitous way, ‘that you mightn’t be very happy Rosie.’

Rosie looked up at him and laughed. ‘What put that into your head?’ she asked. ‘I’m perfectly happy.’

Shearwater was left a little at a loss. ‘Well, I’m very glad to hear it,’ he said. ‘I only thought . . . that perhaps you might think . . . that I rather neglected you.’

Rosie laughed again. ‘What is all this about?’ she said.

‘I have it rather on my conscience,’ said Shearwater. ‘I begin to see . . . something has made me see . . . that I’ve not . . . I don’t treat you very well . . .’

‘But I don’t n-notice it, I assure you,’ put in Rosie, still smiling.

‘I leave you out too much,’ Shearwater went on with a kind of desperation, running his fingers through his thick black hair. ‘We don’t share enough together. You’re too much outside my life.’

‘But after all,’ said Rosie, ‘we are a civ-vilized couple. We don’t want to live in one another’s pockets, do we?’

‘No, but we’re really no more than strangers,’ said Shearwater. ‘That isn’t right. And it’s my fault. I’ve never tried to get into touch with your life. But you did your best to understand mine . . . at the beginning of our marriage.’

‘Oh, then-n!’ said Rosie, laughing. ‘You found out what a little idiot I was.’

‘Don’t make a joke of it,’ said Shearwater. ‘It isn’t a joke. It’s very serious. I tell you, I’ve come to see how stupid and inconsiderate and un-understanding I’ve been with you. I’ve come to see quite suddenly. The fact is,’ he went on with a rush, like an uncorked fountain, ‘I’ve been seeing a woman recently whom I like very much, and who doesn’t like me.’ Speaking of Mrs Viveash, unconsciously he spoke her language. For Mrs Viveash people always euphemistically ‘liked’ one another rather a lot, even when it was a case of the most frightful and excruciating passion, the most complete abandonments. ‘And somehow that’s made me see a lot of things which I’d been blind to before – blind deliberately, I suppose. It’s made me see, among other things, that I’ve really been to blame towards you, Rosie.’

Rosie listened with an astonishment which she perfectly disguised. So James was embarking on his little affairs, was he? It seemed incredible, and also, as she looked at her husband’s face – the face, behind its bristling manly mask, of a harassed baby – also rather pathetically absurd. She wondered who it could be. But she displayed no curiosity. She would find out soon enough.

‘I’m sorry you should have been unhappy about it,’ she said.

‘It’s finished now.’ Shearwater made a decided little gesture.

‘Ah, no!’ said Rosie. ‘You should persevere.’ She looked at him, smiling.

Shearwater was taken aback by this display of easy detachment. He had imagined the conversation so very differently, as something so serious, so painful and, at the same time, so healing and soothing, that he did not know how to go on. ‘But I thought,’ he said hesitatingly, ‘that you . . . that we . . . after this experience . . . I would try to get closer to you . . .’ (Oh, it sounded ridiculous!) . . . ‘We might start again, from a different place, so to speak.’

‘But, cher ami,’ protested Rosie, with the inflection and in the preferred tongue of Mr Mercaptan, ‘you can’t seriously expect us to do the Darby and Joan business, can you? You’re distressing yourself quite unnecessarily on my account. I don’t find you neglect me or anything like it. You have your life – naturally. And I have mine. We don’t get in one another’s way.’

‘But do you think that’s the ideal sort of married life?’ asked Shearwater.

‘It’s obviously the most civ-vilized,’ Rosie answered, laughing.

Confronted by Rosie’s civilization, Shearwater felt helpless.

‘Well, if you don’t want,’ he said. ‘I’d hoped . . . I’d thought . . .’

He went back to his study to think things over. The more he thought them over, the more he blamed himself. And incessantly the memory of Mrs Viveash tormented him.

CHAPTER XIX

AFTER LEAVING MR MERCAPTAN, Lypiatt had gone straight home. The bright day seemed to deride him. With its shining red omnibuses, its parasols, its muslin girls, its young-leaved trees, its bands at the street corners, it was too much of a garden party to be tolerable. He wanted to be alone. He took a cab back to the studio. He couldn’t afford it, of course; but what did that matter, what did that matter now?

The cab drove slowly and as though with reluctance down the dirty mews. He paid it off, opened his little door between the wide stable doors, climbed the steep ladder of his stairs and was at home. He sat down and tried to think.

‘Death, death, death, death,’ he kept repeating to himself, moving his lips as though he were praying. If he said the word often enough, if he accustomed himself completely to the idea, death would come almost by itself; he would know it already, while he was still alive, he would pass almost without noticing out of life into death. Into death, he thought, into death. Death like a well. The stone falls, falls, second after second; and at last there is a sound, a far-off, horrible sound of death and then nothing more. The well at Carisbrooke, with a donkey to wind the wheel that pulls up the bucket of water, of icy water . . . He thought for a long time of the well of death.

Outside in the mews a barrel-organ struck up the tune of ‘Where do flies go in the winter-time?’ Lypiatt lifted his head to listen. He smiled to himself. ‘Where do flies go?’ The question asked itself with a dramatic, a tragical appositeness. At the end of everything – the last ludicrous touch. He saw it all from outside. He pictured himself sitting there alone, broken. He looked at his hand lying limp on the table in front of him. It needed only the stigma of the nail to make it the hand of a dead Christ.

There, he was making literature of it again. Even now. He buried his face in his hands. His mind was full of twisted darkness, of an unspeakable, painful confusion. It was too difficult, too difficult.

The inkpot, he found when he wanted to begin writing, contained nothing but a parched black sediment. He had been meaning for days past to get some more ink; and he had always forgotten. He would have to write in pencil.

‘Do you remember,’ he wrote, ‘do you remember, Myra, that time we went down into the country – you remember – under the Hog’s Back at that little inn they were trying to make pretentious? “Hotel Bull” – do you remember? How we laughed over the Hotel Bull! And how we liked the country outside its doors! All the world in a few square miles. Chalk-pits and blue butterflies on the Hog’s Back. And at the foot of the hill, suddenly, the sand; the hard, yellow sand with those queer caves, dug when and by what remote villains at the edge of the Pilgrims’ Way? the fine grey sand on which the heather of Puttenham Common grows. And the flagstaff and the inscription marking the place where Queen Victoria stood to look at the view. And the enormous sloping meadows round Compton and the thick, dark woods. And the lakes, the heaths, the Scotch firs at Cutt Mill. The forests of Shackleford. There was everything. Do you remember how we enjoyed it all? I did, in any case. I was happy during those three days. And I loved you, Myra. And I thought you might, you might perhaps, some day, love me. You didn’t. And my love has only brought me unhappiness. Perhaps it has been my fault. Perhaps I ought to have known how to make you give me happiness. You remember that wonderful sonnet of Michelangelo’s, where he says that the loved woman is like a block of marble from which the artist knows how to cut the perfect statue of his dreams. If the statue turns out a bad one, if it’s death instead of love that the lover gets – why, the fault lies in the artist and in the lover, not in the marble, not in the beloved.

Amor dunque non ha, nè tua beltate,

O fortuna, o durezza, o gran disdegno,

Del mio mal colpa, o mio destino, o sorte,

Se dentro del tuo cor morte è pietate

Porti in un tempo, e ch’l mio basso ingegno

Non sappia ardendo trarne altro che morte.

Yes, it was my basso ingegno: my low genius which did not know how to draw love from you, nor beauty from the materials of which art is made. Ah, now you’ll smile to yourself and say: Poor Casimir, he has come to admit that at last? Yes, yes, I have come to admit everything. That I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t write, I couldn’t make music. That I was a charlatan and a quack. That I was a ridiculous actor of heroic parts who deserved to be laughed at – and was laughed at. But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind. You could turn Hamlet into an epigrammatic farce with an inimitable scene when he takes his adored mother in adultery. You could make the wittiest Guy de Maupassant short story out of the life of Christ, by contrasting the mad rabbi’s pretensions with his abject fate. It’s a question of the point of view. Every one’s a walking farce and a walking tragedy at the same time. The man who slips on a banana-skin and fractures his skull describes against the sky, as he falls, the most richly comical arabesque. And you, Myra – what do you suppose the unsympathetic gossips say of you? What sort of a farce of the Boulevards is your life in their eyes? For me, Myra, you seem to move all the time through some nameless and incomprehensible tragedy. For them you are what? Merely any sort of wanton, with amusing adventures. And what am I? A charlatan, a quack, a pretentious, boasting, rhodomontading imbecile, incapable of painting anything but vermouth posters. (Why did that hurt so terribly? I don’t know. There was no reason why you shouldn’t think so if you wanted to.) I was all that – and grotesquely laughable. And very likely your laughter was justified, your judgment was true. I don’t know. I can’t tell. Perhaps I am a charlatan. Perhaps I’m insincere; boasting to others, deceiving myself. I don’t know, I tell you. Everything is confusion in my mind now. The whole fabric seems to have tumbled to pieces; it lies in a horrible chaos. I can make no order within myself. Have I lied to myself? have I acted and postured the Great Man to persuade myself that I am one? have I something in me, or nothing? have I ever achieved anything of worth, anything that rhymed with my conceptions, my dreams (for those were fine; of that, I am certain)? I look into the chaos that is my soul and, I tell you, I don’t know, I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’ve spent nearly twenty years now playing the charlatan at whom you all laugh. That I’ve suffered, in mind and in body too – almost from hunger, sometimes – in order to play it. That I’ve struggled, that I’ve exultantly climbed to the attack, that I’ve been thrown down – ah, many times! – that I’ve picked myself up and started again. Well, I suppose all that’s ludicrous, if you like to think of it that way. It is ludicrous that a man should put himself to prolonged inconvenience for the sake of something which doesn’t really exist at all. It’s exquisitely comic, I can see. I can see it in the abstract, so to speak. But in this particular case, you must remember I’m not a dispassionate observer. And if I am overcome now, it is not with laughter. It is with an indescribable unhappiness, with the bitterness of death itself. Death, death, death. I repeat the word to myself, again and again. I think of death, I try to imagine it, I hang over it, looking down, where the stones fall and fall and there is one horrible noise, and then silence again; looking down into the well of death. It is so deep that there is no glittering eye of water to be seen at the bottom. I have no candle to send down. It is horrible, but I do not want to go on living. Living would be worse than . . .’

Lypiatt was reaching out for another sheet of paper when he was startled to hear the sound of feet on the stairs. He turned towards the door. His heart beat with violence. He was filled with a stranger sense of apprehension. In terror he awaited the approach of some unknown and terrible being. The feet of the angel of death were on the stairs. Up, up, up. Lypiatt felt himself trembling as the sound came nearer. He knew for certain that in a few seconds he was going to die. The hangmen had already pinioned him; the soldiers of the firing squad had already raised their rifles. One, two, . . . he thought of Mrs Viveash standing, bare-headed, the wind blowing in her hair, at the foot of the flagstaff from the site of which Queen Victoria had admired the distant view of Selborne; he thought of her dolorously smiling; he remembered that once she had taken his head between her two hands and kissed him: ‘Because you’re such a golden ass’, she had said, laughing. Three . . . There was a little tap at the door. Lypiatt pressed his hand over his heart. The door opened.

A small, bird-like man with a long, sharp nose and eyes as round and black and shining as buttons stepped into the room.

‘Mr Lydgate, I presume?’ he began. Then looked at a card on which a name and address were evidently written. ‘Lypiatt, I mean. A thousand pardons. Mr Lypiatt, I presume?’

Lypiatt leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. His face was as white as paper. He breathed hard and his temples were wet with sweat, as though he had been running.

‘I found the door down below open, so I came straight up. I hope you’ll excuse . . .’ The stranger smiled apologetically.

‘Who are you?’ Lypiatt asked, reopening his eyes. His heart was still beating hard; after the storm it calmed itself slowly. He drew back from the brink of the fearful well; the time had not yet come to plunge.

‘My name,’ said the stranger, ‘is Boldero, Herbert Boldero. Our mutual friend Mr Gumbril, Mr Theodore Gumbril, junior,’ he made it more precise, ‘suggested that I might come and see you about a little matter in which he and I are interested and in which perhaps you, too, might be interested.’

Lypiatt nodded, without saying anything.

Mr Boldero, meanwhile, was turning his bright, bird-like eyes about the studio. Mrs Viveash’s portrait, all but finished now, was clamped to the easel. He approached it, a connoisseur.

‘It reminds me very much,’ he said, ‘of Bacosso. Very much indeed, if I may say so. Also a little of . . .’ he hesitated, trying to think of the name of that other fellow Gumbril had talked about. But being unable to remember the unimpressive syllables of Derain he played for safety and said – ‘of Orpen.’ Mr Boldero looked inquiringly at Lypiatt to see if that was right.

Lypiatt still spoke no word and seemed, indeed, not to have heard what had been said.

Mr Boldero saw that it wasn’t much good talking about modern art. This chap, he thought, looked as though something were wrong with him. He hoped he hadn’t got influenza. There was a lot of the disease about. ‘This little affair I was speaking of,’ he pursued, in another tone, ‘is a little business proposition that Mr Gumbril and I have gone into together. A matter of pneumatic trousers,’ he waved his hand airily.

Lypiatt suddenly burst out laughing, an embittered Titan. Where do flies go? Where do souls go? The barrel-organ, and now pneumatic trousers! Then, as suddenly, he was silent again. More literature? Another piece of acting? ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Mr Boldero indulgently. ‘I know the idea does seem a little humorous, if I may say so, at first. But I assure you, there’s money in it, Mr Lydgate – Mr Lypiatt. Money!’ Mr Boldero paused a moment dramatically. ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘our idea was to launch the new product with a good swingeing publicity campaign. Spend a few thousands in the papers and then get it good and strong into the Underground and on the hoardings, along with Owbridge’s and John Bull and the Golden Ballot. Now, for that, Mr Lypiatt, we shall need, as you can well imagine, a few good striking pictures. Mr Gumbril mentioned your name and suggested I should come and see you to find out if you would perhaps be agreeable to lending us your talent for this work. And I may add, Mr Lypiatt,’ he spoke with real warmth, ‘that having seen this example of your work’ – he pointed to the portrait of Mrs Viveash – ‘I feel that you would be eminently capable of . . .’

He did not finish the sentence; for at this moment Lypiatt leapt up from his chair and, making a shrill, inarticulate, animal noise, rushed on the financier, seized him with both hands by the throat, shook him, threw him to the floor, then picked him up again by the coat collar and pushed him towards the door, kicking him as he went. A final kick sent Mr Boldero tobogganing down the steep stairs. Lypiatt ran down after him; but Mr Boldero had picked himself up, had opened the front door, slipped out, slammed it behind him, and was running up the mews before Lypiatt could get to the bottom of the stairs.

Lypiatt opened the door and looked out. Mr Boldero was already far away, almost at the Piranesian arch. He watched him till he was out of sight, then went upstairs again and threw himself face downwards on his bed.

CHAPTER XX

ZOE ENDED THE discussion by driving half an inch of penknife into Coleman’s left arm and running out of the flat, slamming the door behind her. Coleman was used to this sort of thing; this sort of thing, indeed, was what he was there for. Carefully he pulled out the penknife which had remained sticking in his arm. He looked at the blade and was relieved to see that it wasn’t so dirty as might have been expected. He found some cotton wool, mopped up the blood as it oozed out, and dabbed the wound with iodine. Then he set himself to bandage it up. But to tie a bandage round one’s own left arm is not easy. Coleman found it impossible to keep the lint in place, impossible to get the bandage tight enough. At the end of a quarter of an hour he had only succeeded in smearing himself very copiously with blood, and the wound was still unbound. He gave up the attempt and contented himself with swabbing up the blood as it came out.

‘And forthwith came there out blood and water,’ he said aloud, and looked at the red stain on the cotton wool. He repeated the words again and again, and at the fiftieth repetition burst out laughing.

The bell in the kitchen suddenly buzzed. Who could it be? He went to the front door and opened it. On the landing outside stood a tall slender young woman with slanting Chinese eyes and a wide mouth, elegantly dressed in a black frock piped with white. Keeping the cotton wool still pressed to his bleeding arm, Coleman bowed as gracefully as he could.

‘Do come in,’ he said. ‘You are just in the nick of time. I am on the point of bleeding to death. And forthwith came there out blood and water. Enter, enter,’ he added, seeing the young woman still standing irresolutely on the threshold.

‘But I wanted to see Mr Coleman,’ she said, stammering a little and showing her embarrassment by blushing.

‘I am Mr Coleman.’ He took the cotton wool for a moment from his arm and looked with the air of a connoisseur at the blood on it. ‘But I shall very soon cease to be that individual unless you come and tie up my wounds.’

‘But you’re not the Mr Coleman I thought you were,’ said the young lady, still more embarrassed. ‘You have a beard, it is true; but . . .’

‘Then I must resign myself to quit this life, must I?’ He made a gesture of despair, throwing out both hands. ‘Out, out, brief Coleman. Out, damned spot,’ and he made as though to close the door.

The young lady checked him. ‘If you really need tying up,’ she said, ‘I’ll do it, of course. I passed my First-Aid Exam in the war.’

Coleman reopened the door. ‘Saved!’ he said. ‘Come in.’

It had been Rosie’s original intention yesterday to go straight on from Mr Mercaptan’s to Toto’s. She would see him at once, she would ask him what he meant by playing that stupid trick on her. She would give him a good talking to. She would even tell him that she would never see him again. But, of course, if he showed himself sufficiently contrite and reasonably explanatory, she would consent – oh, very reluctantly – to take him back into favour. In the free, unprejudiced circles in which she now moved, this sort of joke, she imagined, was a mere trifle. It would be absurd to quarrel seriously about it. But still, she was determined to give Toto a lesson.

When, however, she did finally leave Mr Mercaptan’s delicious boudoir, it was too late to think of going all the way to Pimlico, to the address which Mr Mercaptan had given her. She decided to put it off till the next day.

And so the next day, duly, she had set out for Pimlico – to Pimlico, and to see a man called Coleman! It seemed rather dull and second-rate after Sloane Street and Mr Mercaptan. Poor Toto! – the sparkle of Mr Mercaptan had made him look rather tarnished. That essay on the ‘Jus Primae Noctis’ – ah! Walking through the unsavoury mazes of Pimlico, she thought of it, and, thinking of it, smiled. Poor Toto! And also, she mustn’t forget, stupid, malicious, idiotic Toto! She had made up her mind exactly what she should say to him; she had even made up her mind what Toto would say to her. And when the scene was over they would go and dine at the Café Royal – upstairs, where she had never been. And she would make him rather jealous by telling him how much she had liked Mr Mercaptan; but not too jealous. Silence is golden, as her father used to say when she used to fly into tempers and wanted to say nasty things to everybody within range. Silence, about some things, is certainly golden.

In the rather gloomy little turning off Lupus Street to which she had been directed, Rosie found the number, found, in the row of bells and cards, the name. Quickly and decidedly she mounted the stairs.

‘Well,’ she was going to say as soon as she saw him, ‘I thought you were a civilized being.’ Mr Mercaptan had dropped a hint that Coleman wasn’t really civilized; a hint was enough for Rosie. ‘But I see,’ she would go on, ‘that I was mistaken. I don’t like to associate with boors.’ The fastidious lady had selected him as a young poet, not as a ploughboy.

Well rehearsed, Rosie rang the bell. And then the door opened on this huge bearded Cossack of a man, who smiled, who looked at her with bright, dangerous eyes, who quoted the Bible and who was bleeding like a pig. There was blood on his shirt, blood on his trousers, blood on his hands, bloody fingermarks on his face; even the blond fringe of his beard, she noticed, was dabbled here and there with blood. It was too much, at first, even for her aristocratic equanimity.

In the end, however, she followed him across a little vestibule into a bright, whitewashed room empty of all furniture but a table, a few chairs and a large box-spring and mattress, which stood like an island in the middle of the floor and served as bed or sofa as occasion required. Over the mantelpiece was pinned a large photographic reproduction of Leonardo’s study of the anatomy of love. There were no other pictures on the walls.

‘All the apparatus is here,’ said Coleman, and he pointed to the table. ‘Lint, bandages, cotton wool, iodine, gauze, oiled silk. I have them all ready in preparation for these little accidents.’

‘But do you often manage to cut yourself in the arm?’ asked Rosie. She took off her gloves and began to undo a fresh packet of lint.

‘One gets cut,’ Coleman explained. ‘Little differences of opinion, you know. If your eye offend you, pluck it out; love your neighbour as yourself. Argal: if his eye offend you – you see? We live on Christian principles here.’

‘But who are “we”?’ asked Rosie, giving the cut a last dressing of iodine and laying a big square of lint over it.

‘Merely myself and – how shall I put it? – my helpmate,’ Coleman answered. ‘Ah! you’re wonderfully skilful at this business,’ he went on. ‘You’re the real hospital-nurse type; all maternal instincts. When pain and anguish wring the brow, an interesting mangle thou, as we used to say in the good old days when the pun and the Spoonerismus were in fashion.’

Rosie laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t spend all my time tying up wounds,’ she said, and turned her eyes for an instant from the bandage. After the first surprise she was feeling her cool self again.

‘Brava!’ cried Coleman. ‘You make them too, do you? Make them first and cure them afterwards in the grand old homoeopathic way. Delightful! You see what Leonardo has to say about it.’ With his free hand he pointed to the photograph over the mantelpiece.

Rosie, who had noticed the picture when she came into the room, preferred not to look at it too closely a second time. ‘I think it’s rather revolting,’ she said, and was very busy with the bandage.

‘Ah! but that’s the point, that’s the whole point,’ said Coleman, and his clear blue eyes were alive with dancing lights. ‘That’s the beauty of the grand passion. It is revolting. You read what the Fathers of the Church have to say about love. They’re the men. It was Odo of Cluny, wasn’t it, who called a woman a saccus stercoris, a bag of muck. Si quis enim considerat quae intra nares et quae intra fauces et quae intra ventrem lateant, sordes ubique reperiet.’ The Latin rumbled like eloquent thunder in Coleman’s mouth. ‘Et si nec extremis digitis flegma vel stercus tangere patimur, quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desideramus.’ He smacked his lips. ‘Magnificent!’ he said.

‘I don’t understand Latin,’ said Rosie, ‘and I’m glad of it. And your bandage is finished. Look.’

‘Interesting mangle!’ Coleman smiled his thanks. ‘But Bishop Odo, I fear, wouldn’t even have spared you; not even for your good works. Still less for your good looks, which would only have provoked him to dwell with the more insistency on the visceral secrets which they conceal.’

‘Really,’ Rosie protested. She would have liked to get up and go away, but the Cossack’s blue eyes glittered at her with such a strange expression and he smiled so enigmatically, that she found herself still sitting where she was, listening with a disgusted pleasure to his quick talk, his screams of deliberate and appalling laughter.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, throwing up his hands, ‘what sensualists these old fellows were! What a real voluptuous feeling they had for dirt and gloom and sordidness and boredom, and all the horrors of vice. They pretended they were trying to dissuade people from vice by enumerating its horrors. But they were really only making it more spicy by telling the truth about it. O esca vermium, O massa pulveris! What nauseating embracements! To conjugate the copulative verb, boringly, with a sack of tripes – what could be more exquisitely and piercingly and deliriously vile?’ And he threw back his head and laughed; the blood-dabbled tips of his blond beard shook. Rosie looked at them, fascinated with disgust.

‘There’s blood on your beard,’ she felt compelled to say.

‘What of it? Why shouldn’t there be?’ Coleman asked.

Confused, Rosie felt herself blushing. ‘Only because it’s rather unpl-leasant. I don’t know why. But it is.’

‘What a reason for immediately falling into my arms!’ said Coleman. ‘To be kissed by a beard is bad enough at any time. But by a bloody beard – imagine!’

Rosie shuddered.

‘After all,’ he said, ‘what interest or amusement is there in doing the ordinary things in the obvious way? Life au naturel.’ He shook his head. ‘You must have garlic and saffron. Do you believe in God?’

‘Not m-much,’ said Rosie, smiling.

‘I pity you. You must find existence dreadfully dull. As soon as you do, everything becomes a thousand times life-size. Phallic symbols five hundred feet high,’ he lifted his hand. ‘A row of grinning teeth you could run the hundred yards on.’ He grinned at her through his beard. ‘Wounds big enough to let a coach-and-six drive into their purulent recesses. Every slightest act eternally significant. It’s only when you believe in God, and especially in hell, that you can really begin enjoying life. For instance, when in a few moments you surrender yourself to the importunities of my bloody beard, how prodigiously much more you’d enjoy it if you could believe you were committing the sin against the Holy Ghost – if you kept thinking calmly and dispassionately all the time the affair was going on: All this is not only a horrible sin, it is also ugly, grotesque, a mere defecation, a –’

Rosie held up her hand. ‘You’re really horrible,’ she said. Coleman smiled at her. Still, she did not go.

‘He who is not with me is against me,’ said Coleman. ‘If you can’t make up your mind to be with, it’s surely better to be positively against than merely negatively indifferent.’

‘Nonsense!’ exclaimed Rosie feebly.

‘When I call my lover a nymphomaniacal dog, she runs the penknife into my arm.’

‘Well, do you enjoy it?’ asked Rosie.

‘Piercingly,’ he answered. ‘It is at once sordid to the last and lowest degree and infinitely and eternally significant.’

Coleman was silent and Rosie too said nothing. Futilely she wished it had been Toto instead of this horrible, dangerous Cossack. Mr Mercaptan ought to have warned her. But then, of course, he supposed that she already knew the creature. She looked up at him and found his bright eyes fixed upon her; he was silently laughing.

‘Don’t you want to know who I am?’ she asked. ‘And how I got here?’

Coleman blandly shook his head. ‘Not in the very least,’ he said.

Rosie felt more helpless, somehow, than ever. ‘Why not?’ she asked as bravely and impertinently as she could.

Coleman answered with another question. ‘Why should I?’

‘It would be natural curiosity.’

‘But I know all I want to know,’ he said. ‘You are a woman, or, at any rate, you have all the female stigmata. Not too sumptuously well-developed, let me add. You have no wooden legs. You have eyelids that flutter up and down over your eyes like a moving shutter in front of a signalling lamp, spelling out in a familiar code the letters: A.M.O.R., and not, unless I am very much mistaken, those others: C.A.S.T.I.T.A.S. You have a mouth that looks as though it knew how to taste and how to bite. You . . .’

Rosie jumped up. ‘I’m going away,’ she said.

Coleman leaned back in his chair and hallooed with laughter. ‘Bite, bite, bite,’ he said. ‘Thirty-two times.’ And he opened and shut his mouth as fast as he could, so that his teeth clicked against one another with a little dry, bony noise. ‘Every mouthful thirty-two times. That’s what Mr Gladstone said. And surely Mr Gladstone’ – he rattled his sharp, white teeth again – ‘surely Mr Gladstone should know.’

‘Good-bye,’ said Rosie from the door.

‘Good-bye,’ Coleman called back; and immediately afterwards jumped to his feet and made a dash across the room towards her.

Rosie uttered a cry, slipped through the door and, slamming it behind her, ran across the vestibule and began fumbling with the latches of the outer door. It wouldn’t open, it wouldn’t open. She was trembling; fear made her feel sick. There was a rattling at the door behind her. There was a whoop of laughter, and then the Cossack’s hands were on her arms, his face came peering over her shoulder, and the blond beard dabbled with blood prickled against her neck and face.

‘Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t!’ she implored, turning away her head. Then all at once she began violently crying.

‘Tears!’ exclaimed Coleman in rapture, ‘genuine tears!’ He bent eagerly forward to kiss them away, to drink them as they fell. ‘What an intoxication,’ he said, looking up to the ceiling like a chicken that has taken a sip of water; he smacked his lips.

Sobbing uncontrollably, Rosie had never in all her life felt less like a great, fastidious lady.

CHAPTER XXI

‘WELL,’ SAID GUMBRIL, ‘here I am again.’

‘Already?’ Mrs Viveash had been reduced, by the violence of her headache, to coming home after her luncheon with Piers Cotton for a rest. She had fed her hungry pain on Pyramidon and now she was lying down on the Dufy-upholstered sofa at the foot of her full-length portrait by Jacques-Emile Blanche. Her head was not much better, but she was bored. When the maid had announced Gumbril, she had given word that he was to be let in. ‘I’m very ill,’ she went on expiringly. ‘Look at me,’ she pointed to herself, ‘and me again.’ She waved her hand towards the sizzling brilliance of the portrait. ‘Before and after. Like the advertisements, you know. Every picture tells a story.’ She laughed faintly, then made a little grimace and, sucking in the breath between her lips, she put her hand to her forehead.

‘My poor Myra.’ Gumbril pulled up a chair to the sofa and sat there like a doctor at his patient’s bedside. ‘But before and after what?’ he asked, almost professionally.

Mrs Viveash gave an all but imperceptible shrug. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘Not influenza, I hope?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Not love, by any chance?’

Mrs Viveash did not venture another laugh; she contented herself with smiling agonizingly.

‘That would have been a just retribution,’ Gumbril went on, ‘after what you’ve done to me.’

‘What have I done to you?’ Mrs Viveash asked, opening wide her pale-blue eyes.

‘Merely wrecked my existence.’

‘But you’re being childish, Theodore. Say what you mean without these grand, silly phrases.’ The dying voice spoke with impatience.

‘Well, what I mean,’ said Gumbril, ‘is merely this. You prevented me from going to see the only person I ever really wanted to see in my life. And yesterday, when I tried to see her, she was gone. Vanished. And here am I left in the vacuum.’

Mrs Viveash shut her eyes. ‘We’re all in the vacuum,’ she said. ‘You’ll still have plenty of company, you know.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘Still, I’m sorry,’ she added. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? And why didn’t you just pay no attention to me and go all the same?’

‘I didn’t tell you,’ Gumbril answered, ‘because, then, I didn’t know. And I didn’t go because I didn’t want to quarrel with you.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Viveash, and patted his hand. ‘But what are you going to do about it now? Not quarrelling with me is only a rather negative satisfaction, I’m afraid.’

‘I propose to leave the country to-morrow morning,’ said Gumbril.

‘Ah, the classical remedy . . . But not to shoot big game, I hope?’ She thought of Viveash among the Tikki-tikkis and the tsetses. He was a charming creature; charming, but . . . but what?

‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Gumbril. ‘What do you take me for? Big game!’ He leaned back in his chair and began to laugh, heartily, for the first time since he had returned from Robertsbridge, yesterday evening. He had felt then as though he would never laugh again. ‘Do you see me in a pith helmet, with an elephant gun?’

Mrs Viveash put her hand to her forehead. ‘I see you, Theodore,’ she said, ‘but I try to think you would look quite normal; because of my head.’

‘I go to Paris first,’ said Gumbril. ‘After that, I don’t know. I shall go wherever I think people will buy pneumatic trousers. I’m travelling on business.’

This time, in spite of her head, Mrs Viveash laughed.

‘I thought of giving myself a farewell banquet,’ Gumbril went on. ‘We’ll go round before dinner, if you’re feeling well enough, that is, and collect a few friends. Then, in a profoundest gloom, we’ll eat and drink. And in the morning, unshaved, exhausted and filled with disgust, I shall take the train from Victoria, feeling thankful to get out of England.’

‘We’ll do it,’ said Mrs Viveash faintly and indomitably from the sofa that was almost genuinely a death-bed. ‘And, meanwhile, we’ll have a second brew of tea and you shall talk to me.’

The tannin was brought in. Gumbril settled down to talk and Mrs Viveash to listen – to listen and from time to time to dab her brows with eau-de-Cologne, to take a sniff of hartshorn.

Gumbril talked. He talked of the marriage ceremonies of octopuses, of the rites intricately consummated in the submarine green grottos of the Indian Ocean. Given a total of sixteen arms, how many permutations and combinations of caresses? And in the middle of each bunch of arms a mouth like the beak of a macaw.

On the backside of the moon, his friend Umbilikoff, the mystic, used to assure him, the souls of the dead in the form of little bladders – like so much swelled sago – are piled up and piled up till they squash and squeeze one another with an excruciating and ever-growing pressure. In the exoteric world this squeezing on the moon’s backside is known, erroneously, as hell. And as for the constellation, Scorpio – he was the first of all constellations to have a proper sort of backbone. For by an effort of the will he ingurgitated his external armour, he compressed and rebuilt it within his body and so became the first vertebrate. This, you may well believe, was a notable day in cosmic history.

The rents in these new buildings in Regent Street and Piccadilly run to as much as three or four pounds a square foot. Meanwhile, all the beauty imagined by Nash has departed, and chaos and barbarism once more reign supreme, even in Regent Street. The ghost of Gumbril Senior stalked across the room.

Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast-beef, water and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time. ‘I can tell you all about heroin,’ said Mrs Viveash.

Lady Capricorn, he understood, was still keeping open bed. How Rubens would have admired those silk cushions, those gigantic cabbage roses, those round pink pearls of hers, vaster than those that Captain Nemo discovered in the immemorial oyster! And the warm dry rustle of flesh over flesh as she walks, moving first one leg, then advancing the other.

Talking of octopuses, the swim-bladders of deep-sea fishes are filled with almost absolutely pure oxygen. C’est la vie – Gumbril shrugged his shoulders.

In Alpine pastures the grasshoppers start their flight, whizzing like clockwork grasshoppers. And these brown invisible ones reveal themselves suddenly as they skim above the flowers – a streak of blue lightning, a trailing curve of scarlet. Then the overwing shuts down over the coloured wing below and they are more invisible fiddlers rubbing their thighs, like Lady Capricorn, at the foot of the towering flowers.

Forgers give patina to their mediaeval ivories by lending them to stout young Jewesses to wear for a few months hanging, like an amulet, between their breasts.

In Italian cemeteries the family vaults are made of glass and iron, like greenhouses.

Sir Henry Griddle has finally married the hog-faced gentlewoman.

Piero della Francesca’s fresco of the Resurrection at San Sepolcro is the most beautiful picture in the world, and the hotel there is far from bad. Scriabine = le Tschaikovsky de nos jours. The dullest landscape painter is Marchand. The best poet . . .

‘You bore me,’ said Mrs Viveash.

‘Must I talk of love, then?’ asked Gumbril.

‘It looks like it,’ Mrs Viveash answered, and closed her eyes.

Gumbril told the anecdote about Jo Peters, Connie Asticot and Jim Baum. The anecdote of Lola Knopf and the Baroness Gnomon. Of Margherita Radicofani, himself, and the Pastor Meyer. Of Lord Cavey and little Toby Nobes. When he had finished these, he saw that Mrs Viveash had gone to sleep.

He was not flattered. But a little sleep would do her headache, he reflected, a world of good. And knowing that if he ceased to speak, she would probably be woken by the sudden blankness of the silence, he went on quietly talking to himself.

‘When I’m abroad this time,’ he soliloquized, ‘I shall really begin writing my autobiography. There’s nothing like a hotel bedroom to work in.’ He scratched his head thoughtfully and even picked his nose, which was one of his bad habits, when he was alone. ‘People who know me,’ he went on, ‘will think that what I write about the governess cart and my mother and the flowers and so on is written merely because I know in here,’ he scratched his head a little harder to show himself that he referred to his brain, ‘that that’s the sort of thing one ought to write about. They’ll think I’m a sort of dingy Romain Rolland, hopelessly trying to pretend that I feel the emotions and have the great spiritual experiences, which the really important people do feel and have. And perhaps they’ll be right. Perhaps the Life of Gumbril will be as manifestly an ersatz as the Life of Beethoven. On the other hand, they may be astonished to find that it’s the genuine article. We shall see.’ Gumbril nodded his head slowly, while he transferred two pennies from his right-hand trouser pocket to his left-hand trouser pocket. He was somewhat distressed to find that these coppers had been trespassing among the silver. Silver was for the right-hand, copper for the left. It was one of the laws which it was extremely unlucky to infringe. ‘I have a premonition,’ he went on, ‘that one of these days I may become a saint. An unsuccessful flickering sort of saint, like a candle beginning to go out. As for love – m’yes, m’yes. And as for the people I have met – I shall point out that I have known most of the eminent men in Europe, and that I have said of all of them what I said after my first love affair: Is that all?’

‘Did you really say that about your first love affair?’ asked Mrs Viveash, who had woken up again.

‘Didn’t you?’

‘No. I said: This is all – everything, the universe. In love, it’s either all or nothing at all.’ She shut her eyes and almost immediately went to sleep again.

Gumbril continued his lullaby-soliloquy.

‘“This charming little book.” . . . The Scotsman. “This farrago of obscenity, slander and false psychology.” . . . Darlington Echo. “Mr Gumbril’s first cousin is St Francis Xavier, his second cousin is the Earl of Rochester, his third cousin is the Man of Feeling, his fourth cousin is David Hume.” . . . Court Journal.’ Gumbril was already tired of this joke. ‘When I consider how my light is spent,’ he went on, ‘when I consider! . . . Herr Jesu, as Fraulein Nimmernein used to exclaim at the critical moment. Consider, dear cow, consider. This is not the time of year for grass to grow. Consider, dear cow, consider, consider.’ He got up from his chair and tiptoed across the room to the writing-table. An Indian dagger lay next to the blotting-pad; Mrs Viveash used it as a paper-knife. Gumbril picked it up, executed several passes with it. ‘Thumb on the blade,’ he said, ‘and strike upwards. On guard. Lunge. To the hilt it penetrates. Poniard at the tip’ – he ran the blade between his fingers – ‘caress by the time it reaches the hilt. Z-zip.’ He put down the knife and stopping for a moment to make a grimace at himself in the mirror over the mantelpiece, he went back to his chair.

At seven o’clock Mrs Viveash woke up. She shook her head to feel if the pain were still rolling about loose inside her skull.

‘I really believe I’m all right,’ she said. She jumped up. ‘Come on,’ she cried. ‘I feel ready for anything.’

‘And I feel like so much food for worms,’ said Gumbril. ‘Still, Versiam’ a tazza piena il generoso umor.’ He hummed the Drinking Song out of Robert the Devil, and to that ingenuously jolly melody they left the house.

Their taxi that evening cost them several pounds. They made the man drive back and forth, like a shuttle, from one end of London to the other. Every time they passed through Piccadilly Circus Mrs Viveash leant out of the window to look at the sky signs dancing their unceasing St Vitus’s dance above the monument to the Earl of Shaftesbury.

‘How I adore them!’ she said the first time they passed them. ‘Those wheels that whiz round till the sparks fly out from under them: that rushing motor, and that lovely bottle of port filling the glass and then disappearing and reappearing and filling it again. Too lovely.’

‘Too revolting,’ Gumbril corrected her. ‘These things are the epileptic symbol of all that’s most bestial and idiotic in contemporary life. Look at those beastly things and then look at that.’ He pointed to the County Fire Office on the northern side of the Circus. ‘There stands decency, dignity, beauty, repose. And there flickers, there gibbers and twitches – what? Restlessness, distraction, refusal to think, anything for an unquiet life . . .’

‘What a delicious pedant you are!’ She turned away from the window, put her hands on his shoulders and looked at him. ‘Too exquisitely ridiculous!’ And she kissed him.

‘You won’t force me to change my opinion.’ Gumbril smiled at her. ‘Eppur’ si muove – I stick to my guns like Galileo. They move and they’re horrible.’

‘They’re me,’ said Mrs Viveash emphatically. ‘Those things are me.’

They drove first to Lypiatt’s mews. Under the Piranesian arch. The clothes-line looped from window to window across the street might have been those ropes which form so essential and so mysterious a part of the furniture of the Prisons. The place smelt, the children were shouting; the hyena-like laughter of the flappers reverberated between the close-set walls. All Gumbril’s sense of social responsibility was aroused in a moment.

Shut up in his room all day, Lypiatt had been writing – writing his whole life, all his ideas and ideals, all for Myra. The pile of scribbled sheets grew higher and higher. Towards evening he made an end; he had written all that he wanted to write. He ate the remains of yesterday’s loaf of bread and drank some water; for he realized suddenly that he had been fasting the whole day. Then he composed himself to think; he stretched himself out on the brink of the well and looked down into the eyeless darkness.

He still had his Service revolver. Taking it out of the drawer in which it was kept, he loaded it, he laid it on the packing-case which served him as a table at his bed’s head, and stretched himself out on the bed. He lay quite still, his muscles all relaxed, hardly breathing. He imagined himself dead. Derision! there was still the plunge into the well.

He picked up the pistol, looked down the barrel. Black and deep as the well. The muzzle against his forehead was a cold mouth.

There was nothing new to be thought about death. There was not even the possibility of a new thought. Only the old thoughts, the horrible old questions returned.

The cold mouth to his forehead, his finger pressing on the trigger. Already he would be falling, falling. And the annihilating crash would be the same as the far-away sound of death at the bottom of the well. And after that, in the silence? The old question was still the same.

After that, he would lie bleeding. The flies would drink his blood as though it were red honey. In the end the people would come and fetch him away, and the coroner’s jury would look at him in the mortuary and pronounce him temporarily insane. Then he would be buried in a black hole, would be buried and decay.

And meanwhile, would there be anything else? There was nothing new to be thought or asked. And there was still no answer.

In the room it began to grow dark; colours vanished, forms ran together. The easel and Myra’s portrait were now a single black silhouette against the window. Near and far were fused, become one and continuous in the darkness, became a part of the darkness. Outside the window the pale twilight grew more sombre. The children shouted shrilly, playing their games under the green gas lamps. The mirthless, ferocious laughter of young girls mocked and invited. Lypiatt stretched out his hand and fingered the pistol.

Down below, at his door, he heard a sharp knocking. He lifted his head and listened, caught the sound of two voices, a man’s and a woman’s. Myra’s voice he recognized at once; the other, he supposed, was Gumbril’s.

‘Hideous to think that people actually live in places like this,’ Gumbril was saying. ‘Look at those children. It ought to be punishable by law to produce children in this street.’

‘They always take me for the Pied Piper,’ said Mrs Viveash. Lypiatt got up and crept to the window. He could hear all they said.

‘I wonder if Lypiatt’s in. I don’t see any sign of a light.’

‘But he has heavy curtains,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘and I know for a fact that he always composes his poetry in the dark. He may be composing poetry.’

Gumbril laughed.

‘Knock again,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘Poets are always absorbed, you know. And Casimir’s always the poet.’

‘Il Poeta – capital P. Like d’Annunzio in the Italian papers,’ said Gumbril. ‘Did you know that d’Annunzio has books printed on mackintosh for his bath?’ He rapped again at the door. ‘I saw it in the Corriere della Sera the other day at the club. He reads the Little Flowers of St Francis by preference in his bath. And he has a fountain-pen with waterproof ink in the soap-dish, so that he can add a few Fioretti of his own whenever he feels like it. We might suggest that to Casimir.’

Lypiatt stood with folded arms by the window, listening. How lightly they threw his life, his heart, from hand to hand, as though it were a ball and they were playing a game! He thought suddenly of all the times he had spoken lightly and maliciously of other people. His own person had always seemed, on those occasions, sacred. One knew in theory very well that others spoke of one contemptuously – as one spoke of them. In practice – it was hard to believe.

‘Poor Casimir!’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘I’m afraid his show was a failure.’

‘I know it was,’ said Gumbril. ‘Complete and absolute. I told my tame capitalist that he ought to employ Lypiatt for our advertisements. He’d be excellent for those. And it would mean some genuine money in his pocket.’

‘But the worst of it is,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘that he’ll only feel insulted by the suggestion.’ She looked up at the window.

‘I don’t know why,’ she went on, ‘this house looks most horribly dead. I hope nothing’s happened to poor Casimir. I have a most disagreeable feeling that it may have.’

‘Ah, this famous feminine intuition,’ laughed Gumbril. He knocked again.

‘I can’t help feeling that he may be lying there dead, or delirious, or something.’

‘And I can’t help feeling that he must have gone out to dinner. We shall have to give him up, I’m afraid. It’s a pity. He’s so good with Mercaptan. Like bear and mastiff. Or rather, like bear and poodle, bear and King Charles’s spaniel – or whatever those little dogs are that you see ladies in eighteenth-century French engravings taking to bed with them. Let’s go.’

‘Just knock once again,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘He might really be preoccupied, or asleep, or ill.’ Gumbril knocked. ‘Now listen. Hush.’

They were silent; the children still went on hallooing in the distance. There was a great clop-clopping of horse’s feet as a van backed into a stable door near by. Lypiatt stood motionless, his arms crossed, his chin on his breast. The seconds passed.

‘Not a sound,’ said Gumbril. ‘He must have gone out.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Mrs Viveash.

‘Come on, then. We’ll go and look for Mercaptan.’

He heard their steps in the street below, heard the slamming of the taxi door. The engine was started up. Loud on the first gear, less loud on the second, whisperingly on the third, it moved away, gathering speed. The noise of it was merged with the general noise of the town. They were gone.

Lypiatt walked slowly back to his bed. He wished suddenly that he had gone down to answer the last knock. These voices – at the well’s edge he had turned to listen to them; at the well’s extreme verge. He lay quite still in the darkness; and it seemed to him at last that he had floated away from the earth, that he was alone, no longer in a narrow dark room, but in an illimitable darkness outside and beyond. His mind grew calmer; he began to think of himself, of all that he had known, remotely, as though from a great way off.

‘Adorable lights!’ said Mrs Viveash, as they drove once more through Piccadilly Circus.

Gumbril said nothing. He had said all that he had to say last time.

‘And there’s another,’ exclaimed Mrs Viveash, as they passed, near Burlington House, a fountain of Sandeman’s port. ‘If only they had an automatic jazz band attached to the same mechanism!’ she said regretfully.

The Green Park remained solitary and remote under the moon. ‘Wasted on us,’ said Gumbril, as they passed. ‘One should be happily in love to enjoy a summer night under the trees.’ He wondered where Emily could be now. They sat in silence; the cab drove on.

Mr Mercaptan, it seemed, had left London. His housekeeper had a long story to tell. A regular Bolshevik had come yesterday, pushing in. And she had heard him shouting at Mr Mercaptan in his own room. And then, luckily, a lady had come and the Bolshevik had gone away again. And this morning Mr Mercaptan had decided, quite sudden like, to go away for two or three days. And it wouldn’t surprise her at all if it had something to do with that horrible Bolshevik fellow. Though of course Master Paster hadn’t said anything about it. Still, as she’d known him when he was so high and seen him grow up like, she thought she could say she knew him well enough to guess why he did things. It was only brutally that they contrived to tear themselves away.

Secure, meanwhile, behind a whole troop of butlers and footmen, Mr Mercaptan was dining comfortably at Oxhanger with the most faithful of his friends and admirers, Mrs Speegle. It was to Mrs Speegle that he had dedicated his coruscating little ‘Loves of the Pachyderms’; for Mrs Speegle it was who had suggested, casually one day at luncheon, that the human race ought to be classified in two main species – the pachyderms, and those whose skin, like her own, like Mr Mercaptan’s and a few others, was fine and ‘responsive,’ as Mr Mercaptan himself put it, ‘to all caresses, including those of pure reason.’ Mr Mercaptan had taken the casual hint and had developed it, richly. The barbarous pachyderms he divided up into a number of subspecies: steatocephali, acephali, theolaters, industrious Judaeorhynci – busy, compact and hard as dung-beetles – Peabodies, Russians and so on. It was all very witty and delicately savage. Mr Mercaptan had a standing invitation at Oxhanger. With dangerous pachyderms like Lypiatt ranging loose about the town, he thought it best to avail himself of it. Mrs Speegle, he knew, would be delighted to see him. And indeed she was. He arrived just at lunch-time. Mrs Speegle and Maisie Furlonger were already at the fish.

‘Mercaptan!’ Mrs Speegle’s soul seemed to be in the name. ‘Sit down,’ she went on, cooing as she talked, like a ring-dove. There seemed to be singing in every word she spoke. She pointed to a chair next to hers. ‘N’you’re n’just in time to tell us all about n’your Lesbian experiences.’

And Mercaptan, giving vent to his fully orchestrated laugh – squeal and roar together – had sat down and, speaking in French partly, he nodded towards the butler and the footman, ‘à cause des valets,’ and partly because the language lent itself more deliciously to this kind of confidences, he had begun there and then, interrupted and spurred on by the cooing of Mrs Speegle and the happy shrieks of Maisie Furlonger, to recount at length and with all the wit in the world his experience among the Isles of Greece. How delicious it was, he said to himself, to be with really civilized people! In this happy house it seemed scarcely possible to believe that such a thing as a pachyderm existed.

But Lypiatt still lay, face upwards, on his bed, floating, it seemed to himself, far out into the dark emptiness between the stars. From those distant abstract spaces he seemed to be looking impersonally down upon his own body stretched out by the brink of the hideous well; to be looking back over his own history. Everything, even his own unhappiness, seemed very small and beautiful; every frightful convulsion had become no more than a ripple, and only the fine musical ghost of sound came up to him from all the shouting.

‘We have no luck,’ said Gumbril, as they climbed once more into the cab.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘that we haven’t really had a great deal. Did you genuinely want very much to see Mercaptan?’

‘Not in the least,’ said Gumbril. ‘But do you genuinely want to see me?’

Mrs Viveash drew the corners of her mouth down into a painful smile and did not answer. ‘Aren’t we going to pass through Piccadilly Circus again?’ she asked. ‘I should like to see the lights again. They give one temporarily the illusion of being cheerful.’

‘No, no,’ said Gumbril, ‘we are going straight to Victoria.’

‘We couldn’t tell the driver to . . .?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘Perhaps one’s better without stimulants. I remember when I was very young, when I first began to go about at all, how proud I was of having discovered champagne. It seemed to me wonderful to get rather tipsy. Something to be exceedingly proud of. And, at the same time, how much I really disliked wine! Loathed the taste of it. Sometimes, when Calliope and I used to dine quietly together, tête-à-tête, with no awful men about, and no appearances to keep up, we used to treat ourselves to the luxury of a large lemon-squash, or even raspberry syrup and soda. Ah, I wish I could recapture the deliciousness of raspberry syrup.’

Coleman was at home. After a brief delay he appeared himself at the door. He was wearing pyjamas, and his face covered with red-brown smears, the tips of his beard were clotted with the same dried pigment.

‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ asked Mrs Viveash.

‘Merely washing in the blood of the Lamb,’ Coleman answered, smiling, and his eyes sparkling blue fire, like an electric machine.

The door on the opposite side of the little vestibule was open. Looking over Coleman’s shoulder, Gumbril could see through the opening a brightly lighted room and, in the middle of it, like a large rectangular island, a wide divan. Reclining on the divan an odalisque by Ingres – but slimmer, more serpentine, more like a lithe pink length of boa – presented her back. That big, brown mole on the right shoulder was surely familiar. But when, startled by the loudness of the voices behind her, the odalisque turned round – to see in a horribly embarrassing instant that the Cossack had left the door open and that people could look in, were looking in, indeed – the slanting eyes beneath their heavy white lids, the fine aquiline nose, the wide, full-lipped mouth, though they presented themselves for only the fraction of a second, were still more recognizable and familiar. For only the fraction of a second did the odalisque reveal herself definitely as Rosie. Then a hand pulled feverishly at the counterpane, the section of buff-coloured boa wriggled and rolled; and, in a moment, where an odalisque had been, lay only a long packet under a white sheet, like a jockey with a fractured skull when they carry him from the course.

Well, really . . . Gumbril felt positively indignant, not jealous, but astonished and righteously indignant.

‘Well, when you’ve finished bathing,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘I hope you’ll come and have dinner with us. Coleman was standing between her and the farther door; Mrs Viveash had seen nothing in the room beyond the vestibule.

‘I’m busy,’ said Coleman.

‘So I see.’ Gumbril spoke as sarcastically as he could.

‘Do you see?’ asked Coleman, and looked round. ‘So you do!’ He stepped back and closed the door.

‘It’s Theodore’s last dinner,’ pleaded Mrs Viveash.

‘Not even if it were his last supper,’ said Coleman, enchanted to have been given the opportunity to blaspheme a little. ‘Is he going to be crucified? Or what?’

‘Merely going abroad,’ said Gumbril.

‘He has a broken heart,’ Mrs Viveash explained.

‘Ah, the genuine platonic towsers?’ Coleman uttered his artificial demon’s laugh.

‘That’s just about it,’ said Gumbril, grimly.

Relieved by the shutting of the door from her immediate embarrassment, Rosie threw back a corner of the counterpane and extruded her head, one arm and the shoulder with the mole on it. She looked about her, opening her slanting eyes as wide as she could. She listened with parted lips to the voices that came, muffled now, through the door. It seemed to her as though she were waking up; as though now, for the first time, she were hearing that shattering laugh, were looking now for the first time on these blank, white walls and the one lovely and horrifying picture. Where was she? What did it all mean? Rosie put her hand to her forehead, tried to think. Her thinking was always a series of pictures; one after another the pictures swam up before her eyes, melted again in an instant.

Her mother taking off her pince-nez to wipe them – and at once her eyes were tremulous and vague and helpless. ‘You should always let the gentleman get over the stile first,’ she said, and put on her glasses again. Behind the glasses her eyes immediately became clear, piercing, steady and efficient. Rather formidable eyes. They had seen Rosie getting over the stile in front of Willie Hoskyns, and there was too much leg.

James was reading at his desk; his heavy, round head propped on his hand. She came up behind him and threw her arms round his neck. Very gently, and without turning his eyes from the page, he undid her embrace and, with a little push that was no more than a hint, an implication, signified that he didn’t want her. She had gone to her pink room, and cried.

Another time James shook his head and smiled patiently under his moustache. ‘You’ll never learn,’ he said. She had gone to her room and cried that time too.

Another time they were lying in bed together, in the pink bed; only you couldn’t see it was pink because there was no light. They were lying very quietly. Warm and happy and remote she felt. Sometimes as it were the physical memory of pleasure plucked at her nerves, making her start, making her suddenly shiver. James was breathing as though he were asleep. All at once he stirred. He patted her shoulder two or three times in a kindly and business-like way. ‘I know what that means,’ she said, ‘when you pat me like that.’ And she patted him – pat-pat-pat, very quickly. ‘It means you’re going to bed.’ ‘How do you know?’ he asked. ‘Do you think I don’t know you after all this time? I know that pat by heart.’ And suddenly all her warm, quiet happiness evaporated; it was all gone. ‘I’m only a machine for going to bed with,’ she said. ‘That’s all I am for you.’ She felt she would like to cry. But James only laughed and said, ‘Nonsense!’ and pulled his arm clumsily from underneath her. ‘You go to sleep,’ he said, and kissed her on the forehead. Then he got out of bed, and she heard him bumping clumsily about in the darkness. ‘Damn!’ he said once. Then he found the door, opened, and was gone.

She thought of those long stories she used to make up when she went shopping. The fastidious lady; the poets; all the adventures.

Toto’s hands were wonderful.

She saw, she heard Mr Mercaptan reading his essay. Poor father, reading aloud from the Hibbert Journal!

And now the Cossack, covered with blood. He, too, might read aloud from the Hibbert Journal – only backwards, so to speak. She had a bruise on her arm. ‘You think there’s nothing inherently wrong and disgusting in it?’ he had asked. ‘There is, I tell you.’ He had laughed and kissed her and stripped off her clothes and caressed her. And she had cried, she had struggled, she had tried to turn away; and in the end she had been overcome by a pleasure more piercing and agonizing than anything she had ever felt before. And all the time Coleman had hung over her, with his blood-stained beard, smiling into her face, and whispering, ‘Horrible, horrible, infamous and shameful.’ She lay in a kind of stupor. Then, suddenly there had been that ringing. The Cossack had left her. And now she was awake again, and it was horrible, it was shameful. She shuddered; she jumped out of bed and began as quickly as she could to put on her clothes.

‘Really, really, won’t you come?’ Mrs Viveash was insisting. She was not used to people saying no when she asked, when she insisted. She didn’t like it.

‘No.’ Coleman shook his head. ‘You may be having the last supper. But I have a date here with the Magdalen.’

‘Oh, a woman,’ said Viveash. ‘But why didn’t you say so before?’

‘Well, as I’d left the door open,’ said Coleman, ‘I thought it was unnecessary.’

‘Fie,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘I find this very repulsive. Let’s go away.’ She plucked Gumbril by the sleeve.

‘Good-bye,’ said Coleman, politely. He shut the door after them and turned back across the little hall.

‘What! Not thinking of going?’ he exclaimed, as he came in. Rosie was sitting down on the edge of the bed pulling on her shoes.

‘Go away,’ she said. ‘You disgust me.’

‘But that’s splendid,’ Coleman declared. ‘That’s all as it should be, all as I intended.’ He sat down beside her on the divan. ‘Really,’ he said, admiringly, ‘what exquisite legs!’

Rosie would have given anything in the world to be back again in Bloxam Gardens. Even if James did live in his books all the time . . . Anything in the world.

‘This time,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘we simply must go through Piccadilly Circus.’

‘It’ll only be about two miles farther.’

‘Well, that isn’t much.’

Gumbril leaned out and gave the word to the driver.

‘And besides, I like driving about like this,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘I like driving for driving’s sake. It’s like the Last Ride Together. Dear Theodore!’ She laid her hands on his.

‘Thank you,’ said Gumbril, and kissed it.

The little cab buzzed along down the empty Mall. They were silent. Through the thick air one could see the brightest of the stars. It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous. It was one of those evenings when love is once more invented for the first time. That, too, seems a little ridiculous, sometimes, in the morning.

‘Here are the lights again,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘Hop, twitch, flick – yes, genuinely an illusion of jollity, Theodore. Genuinely.’

Gumbril stopped the cab. ‘It’s after half-past eight,’ he said. ‘At this rate we shall never get anything to eat. Wait a minute.’

He ran into Appenrodt’s, and came back in a moment with a packet of smoked salmon sandwiches, a bottle of white wine and a glass.

‘We have a long way to go,’ he explained, as he got into the taxi.

They ate their sandwiches, they drank their wine. The taxi drove on and on.

‘This is positively exhilarating,’ said Mrs Viveash, as they turned into the Edgware Road.

Polished by the wheels and shining like an old and precious bronze, the road stretched before them, reflecting the lamps. It had the inviting air of a road which goes on for ever.

‘They used to have such good peep-shows in this street,’ Gumbril tenderly remembered: ‘Little back shops where you paid twopence to see the genuine mermaid, which turned out to be a stuffed walrus, and the tattooed lady, and the dwarf, and the living statuary, which one always hoped, as a boy, was really going to be rather naked and thrilling, but which was always the most pathetic of unemployed barmaids, dressed in the thickest of pink Jaeger.’

‘Do you think there’d be any of those now?’ asked Mrs Viveash.

Gumbril shook his head. ‘They’ve moved on with the march of civilization. But where?’ He spread out his hands interrogatively. ‘I don’t know which direction civilization marches – whether north towards Kilburn and Golders Green, or over the river to the Elephant, to Clapham and Sydenham and all those other mysterious places. But, in any case, high rents have marched up here; there are no more genuine mermaids in the Edgware Road. What stories we shall be able to tell our children!’

‘Do you think we shall ever have any?’ Mrs Viveash asked.

‘One can never tell.’

‘I should have thought one could,’ said Mrs Viveash. Children – that would be the most desperate experiment of all. The most desperate, and perhaps the only one having any chance of being successful. History recorded cases . . . On the other hand, it recorded other cases that proved the opposite. She had often thought of this experiment. There were so many obvious reasons for not making it. But some day, perhaps – she always put it off, like that.

The cab had turned off the main road into quieter and darker streets.

‘Where are we now?’ asked Mrs Viveash.

‘Penetrating into Maida Vale. We shall soon be there. Poor old Shearwater!’ He laughed. Other people in love were always absurd.

‘Shall we find him in, I wonder?’ It would be fun to see Shearwater again. She liked to hear him talking, learnedly, and like a child. But when the child is six feet high and three feet wide and two feet thick, when it tries to plunge head first into your life – then, really, no . . . ‘But what did you want with me?’ he had asked. ‘Just to look at you,’ she answered. Just to look; that was all. Music hall, not boudoir.

‘Here we are.’ Gumbril got out and rang the second floor bell.

The door was opened by a impertinent-looking little maid.

‘Mr Shearwater’s at the lavatory,’ she said, in answer to Gumbril’s question.

‘Laboratory?’ he suggested.

‘At the ’ospital.’ That made it clear.

‘And is Mrs Shearwater at home?’ he asked maliciously.

The little maid shook her head. ‘I expected ’er, but she didn’t come back to dinner.’

‘Would you mind giving her a message when she does come in,’ said Gumbril. ‘Tell her that Mr Toto was very sorry he hadn’t time to speak to her when he saw her this evening in Pimlico.’

‘Mr who?’

‘Mr Toto.’

‘Mr Toto is sorry ’e ’adn’t the time to speak to Mrs Shearwater when ’e saw ’er in Pimlico this evening. Very well, sir.’

‘You won’t forget?’ said Gumbril.

‘No, I won’t forget.’

He went back to the cab and explained that they had drawn blank once more.

‘I’m rather glad,’ said Mrs Viveash. ‘If we ever did find anybody, it would mean the end of this Last-Ride-Together feeling. And that would be sad. And it’s a lovely night. And really, for the moment, I feel I can do without my lights. Suppose we just drove for a bit now.’

But Gumbril would not allow that. ‘We haven’t had enough to eat yet,’ he said, and he gave the cabman Gumbril Senior’s address.

Gumbril Senior was sitting on his little iron balcony among the dried-out pots that had once held geraniums, smoking his pipe and looking earnestly out into the darkness in front of him. Clustered in the fourteen plane-trees of the square, the starlings were already asleep. There was no sound but the rustling of the leaves. But sometimes, every hour or so, the birds would wake up. Something – perhaps it might be a stronger gust of wind, perhaps some happy dream of worms, some nightmare of cats simultaneously dreamed by all the flock together – would suddenly rouse them. And then they would all start to talk at once, at the tops of their shrill voices – for perhaps half a minute. Then in an instant they all went to sleep again and there was once more no sound but the rustling of the shaken leaves. At these moments Mr Gumbril would lean forward, would strain his eyes and his ears in the hope of seeing, of hearing something – something significant, explanatory, satisfying. He never did, of course; but that in no way diminished his happiness.

Mr Gumbril received them on his balcony with courtesy.

‘I was just thinking of going in to work,’ he said. ‘And now you come and give me a good excuse for sitting out here a little longer. I’m delighted.’

Gumbril Junior went downstairs to see what he could find in the way of food. While he was gone, his father explained to Mrs Viveash the secrets of the birds. Enthusiastically, his light floss of grey hair floating up and falling again about his head as he pointed and gesticulated, he told her; the great flocks assembled – goodness only knew where! – they flew across the golden sky, detaching here a little troop, there a whole legion, they flew until at last all had found their appointed resting-places and there were no more to fly. He made this nightly flight sound epical, as though it were a migration of peoples, a passage of armies.

‘And it’s my firm belief,’ said Gumbril Senior, adding notes to his epic, ‘that they make use of some sort of telepathy, some kind of direct mind-to-mind communication between themselves. You can’t watch them without coming to that conclusion.’

‘A charming conclusion,’ said Mrs Viveash.

‘It’s a faculty,’ Gumbril Senior went on, ‘we all possess, I believe. All we animals.’ He made a gesture which included himself, Mrs Viveash and the invisible birds among the plane-trees. ‘Why don’t we use it more? You may well ask. For the simple reason, my dear young lady, that half our existence is spent in dealing with things that have no mind – things with which it is impossible to hold telepathic communication. Hence the development of the five sense. I have eyes that preserve me from running into the lamp-post, ears that warn me I’m in the neighbourhood of Niagara. And having made these instruments very efficient, I use them in holding converse with other beings having a mind. I let my telepathic faculty lie idle, preferring to employ an elaborate and cumbrous arrangement of symbols in order to make my thought known to you through your senses. In certain individuals, however, the faculty is naturally so well-developed – like the musical, or the mathematical, or the chess-playing faculties in other people – that they cannot help entering into direct communication with other minds, whether they want to or not. If we knew a good method of educating and drawing out the latent faculty, most of us could make ourselves moderately efficient telepaths; just as most of us can make ourselves into moderate musicians, chess players and mathematicians. There would also be a few, no doubt, who could never communicate directly. Just as there are a few who cannot recognize “Rule Britannia” or Bach’s Concerto in D minor for two violins, and a few who cannot comprehend the nature of an algebraical symbol. Look at the general development of the mathematical and musical faculties only within the last two hundred years. By the twenty-first century, I believe, we shall all be telepaths. Meanwhile, these delightful birds have forestalled us. Not having the wit to invent a language or an expressive pantomime, they contrive to communicate such simple thoughts as they have, directly and instantaneously. They all go to sleep at once, wake at once, say the same thing at once; they turn all at once when they’re flying. Without a leader, without a word of command, they do everything together, in complete unison. Sitting here in the evenings, I sometimes fancy I can feel their thoughts striking against my own. It has happened to me once or twice: that I have known a second before it actually happened, that the birds were going to wake up and begin their half-minute of chatter in the dark. Wait! Hush.’ Gumbril Senior threw back his head, pressed his hand over his mouth, as though by commanding silence on himself he could command it on the whole world. ‘I believe they’re going to wake now. I feel it.’

He was silent. Mrs Viveash looked towards the dark trees and listened. A full minute passed. Then the old gentleman burst out happily laughing.

‘Completely wrong!’ he said. ‘They’ve never been more soundly asleep.’ Mrs Viveash laughed too. ‘Perhaps they all changed their minds, just as they were waking up,’ she suggested.

Gumbril Junior reappeared; glasses clinked as he walked, and there was a little rattle of crockery. He was carrying a tray.

‘Cold beef,’ he said, ‘and salad and a bit of cold apple-pie. It might be worse.’

They drew up chairs to Gumbril Senior’s work-table, and there, among the letters and the unpaid bills and the sketchy elevations of archiducal palaces, they ate the beef and the apple-pie, and drank the one-and-ninepenny vin ordinaire of the house. Gumbril Senior, who had already supped, looked on at them from the balcony.

‘Did I tell you,’ said Gumbril Junior, ‘that we saw Mr Porteous’s son the other evening – very drunk?’

Gumbril Senior threw up his hands. ‘If you knew the calamities that young imbecile has been the cause of!’

‘What’s he done?’

‘Gambled away I don’t know how much borrowed money. And poor Porteous can’t afford anything – even now.’ Mr Gumbril shook his head and clutched and combed his beard. ‘It’s a fearful blow, but of course, Porteous is very steadfast and serene and . . . There!’ Gumbril Senior interrupted himself, holding up his hand. ‘Listen!’

In the fourteen plane-trees the starlings had suddenly woken up.

There was a wild outburst, like a stormy sitting in the Italian Parliament. Then all was silent. Gumbril Senior listened, enchanted. His face, as he turned back towards the light, revealed itself all smiles. His hair seemed to have blown loose of its own accord, from within, so to speak; he pushed it into place.

‘You heard them?’ he asked Mrs Viveash. ‘What can they have to say to one another, I wonder, at this time of night?’

‘And did you feel they were going to wake up?’ Mrs Viveash inquired.

‘No,’ said Gumbril Senior with candour.

‘When we’ve finished,’ Gumbril Junior spoke with his mouth full, ‘you must show Myra your model of London. She’d adore it – except that it has no electric sky-signs.’

His father looked all of a sudden very much embarrassed. ‘I don’t think it would interest Mrs Viveash much,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes it would. Really,’ she declared.

‘Well, as a matter of fact it isn’t here.’ Gumbril Senior pulled with fury at his beard.

‘Not here? But what’s happened to it?’

Gumbril Senior wouldn’t explain. He just ignored his son’s question and began to talk once more about the starlings. Later on, however, when Gumbril and Mrs Viveash were preparing to go, the old man drew him apart into a corner and began to whisper the explanation.

‘I didn’t want to blare it about in front of strangers,’ he said, as though it were a question of the housemaid’s illegitimate baby or a repair to the water-closet. ‘But the fact is, I’ve sold it. The Victoria and Albert had wind that I was making it; they’ve been wanting it all the time. And I’ve let them have it.’

‘But why?’ Gumbril Junior asked in a tone of astonishment. He knew with what a paternal affection – no, more than paternal; for he was sure that his father was more whole-heartedly attached to his models than his son – with what pride he regarded these children of his spirit.

Gumbril Senior sighed. ‘It’s all that young imbecile,’ he said.

‘What young imbecile?’

‘Porteous’s son, of course. You see, poor Porteous has had to sell his library, among other things. You don’t know what that means to him. All these precious books. And collected at the price of such hardships. I thought I’d like to buy a few of the best ones back for him. They gave me quite a good price at the Museum.’ He came out of his corner and hurried across the room to help Mrs Viveash with her cloak. ‘Allow me, allow me,’ he said.

Slowly and pensively Gumbril Junior followed him. Beyond good and evil? Below good and evil? The name of earwig . . . The tubby pony trotted. The wild columbines suspended, among the shadows of the hazel copse, hooked spurs, helmets of aerial purple. The Twelfth Sonata of Mozart was insecticide; no earwigs could crawl through that music. Emily’s breasts were firm and pointed and she had slept at last without a tremor. In the starlight, good, true and beautiful became one. Write the discovery in books – in books quos, in the morning, legimus cacantes. They descended the stairs. The cab was waiting outside.

‘The Last Ride again,’ said Mrs Viveash.

‘Golgotha Hospital, Southwark,’ said Gumbril to the driver and followed her into the cab.

‘Drive, drive, drive,’ repeated Mrs Viveash. ‘I like your father, Theodore. One of these days he’ll fly away with the birds. And how nice it is of those starlings to wake themselves up like that in the middle of the night, merely to amuse him. Considering how unpleasant it is to be woken in the night. Where are we going?’

‘We’re going to look at Shearwater in his laboratory.’

‘Is that a long way away?’

‘Immensely,’ said Gumbril.

‘Thank God for that,’ Mrs Viveash piously and expiringly breathed.

CHAPTER XXII

SHEARWATER SAT ON his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a man in a nightmare. The pedals were geared to a little wheel under the saddle and the rim of the wheel rubbed, as it revolved, against a brake, carefully adjusted to make the work of the pedaller hard, but not impossibly hard. From a pipe which came up through the floor issued a little jet of water which played on the brake and kept it cool. But no jet of water played on Shearwater. It was his business to get hot. He did get hot.

From time to time his dog-faced young friend, Lancing, came and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber to see how he was getting on. Inside that little wooden house, which might have reminded Lancing, if he had had a literary turn of mind, of the Box in which Gulliver left Brobdingnag, the scenes of intimate life were the same every time he looked in. Shearwater was always at his post on the saddle of the nightmare bicycle, pedalling, pedalling. The water trickled over the brake. And Shearwater sweated. Great drops of sweat came oozing out from under his hair, ran down over his forehead, hung beaded on his eyebrows, ran into his eyes, down his nose, along his cheeks, fell like raindrops. His thick bull-neck was wet; his whole naked body, his arms and legs streamed and shone. The sweat poured off him and was caught as it rained down in a waterproof sheet, to trickle down its sloping folds into a large glass receptacle which stood under a hole in the centre of the sheet at the focal point where all its slopes converged. The automatically controlled heating apparatus in the basement kept the temperature in the box high and steady. Peering through the damp-dimmed panes of the window, Lancing noticed with satisfaction that the mercury stood unchangingly at twenty-seven point five Centigrade. The ventilators at the side and top of the box were open; Shearwater had air enough. Another time, Lancing reflected, they’d make the box air-tight and see the effect of a little carbon dioxide poisoning on top of excessive sweating. It might be very interesting, but to-day they were concerned with sweating only. After seeing that the thermometer was steady, that the ventilators were properly open, the water was still trickling over the brake, Lancing would tap at the window. And Shearwater, who kept his eyes fixed straight before him, as he pedalled slowly and unremittingly along his nightmare road, would turn his head at the sound.

‘All right?’ Lancing’s lips moved and his eyebrows went up inquiringly.

Shearwater would nod his big, round head, and the sweat-drops, suspended on his eyebrows and his moustache, would fall like little liquid fruits shaken suddenly by the wind.

‘Good,’ and Lancing would go back to his thick German book under the reading-lamp at the other end of the laboratory.

Constant as the thermometer Shearwater pedalled steadily and slowly on. With a few brief halts for food and rest, he had been pedalling ever since lunch-time. At eleven he would go to bed on a shake-down in the laboratory and at nine to-morrow morning he would re-enter the box and start pedalling again. He would go on all to-morrow and the day after; and after that, as long as he could stand it. One, two, three, four. Pedal, pedal, pedal . . . He must have travelled the equivalent of sixty or seventy miles this afternoon. He would be getting on for Swindon. He would be nearly at Portsmouth. He would be past Cambridge, past Oxford. He would be nearly at Harwich, pedalling through the green and golden valleys where Constable used to paint. He would be at Winchester by the bright stream. He would have ridden through the beech woods of Arundel out into the sea . . .

In any case he was far away, he was escaping. And Mrs Viveash followed, walking swayingly along on feet that seemed to tread between two abysses, at her leisure. Pedal, pedal. The hydrogen ion concentration in the blood . . . Formidably, calmly, her eyes regarded. The lids cut off an arc of those pale circles. When she smiled, it was a crucifixion. The coils of her hair were copper serpents. Her small gestures loosened enormous fragments of the universe and at the faint dying sound of her voice they had fallen in ruins about him. His world was no longer safe, it had ceased to stand on its foundations. Mrs Viveash walked among his ruins and did not even notice them. He must build up again. Pedal, pedal. He was not merely escaping; he was working a building machine. It must be built with proportion; with proportion, the old man had said. The old man appeared in the middle of the nightmare road in front of him, clutching his beard. Proportion, proportion. There were first a lot of dirty rocks lying about; then there was St Paul’s. These bits of his life had to be built up proportionably.

There was work. And there was talk about work and ideas. And there were men who could talk about work and ideas. But so far as he had been concerned that was about all they could do. He would have to find out what else they did; it was interesting. And he would have to find out what other men did; men who couldn’t talk about work and not much about ideas. They had as good kidneys as any one else.

And then there were women.

On the nightmare road he remained stationary. The pedals went round and round under his driving feet; the sweat ran off him. He was escaping, and yet he was also drawing nearer. He would have to draw nearer. ‘Woman, what have I to do with you? Not enough; too much.

Not enough – he was building her in, a great pillar next to the pillar of work.

Too much – he was escaping. If he had not caged himself here in this hot box, he would have run out after her, to throw himself – all in fragments, all dissipated and useless – in front of her. And she wanted none of him. But perhaps it would be worse, perhaps it would be far, far worse if she did.

The old man stood in the road before him, clutching his beard, crying out, ‘Proportion, proportion.’ He trod and trod at his building machine, working up the pieces of his life, steadily, unremittingly working them into a proportionable whole, into a dome that should hang, light, spacious and high, as though by a miracle, on the empty air. He trod and trod, escaping, mile after mile into fatigue, into wisdom. He was at Dover now, pedalling across the Channel. He was crossing a dividing gulf and there would be safety on the other side; the cliffs of Dover were already behind him. He turned his head as though to look back at them; the drops of sweat were shaken from his eyebrows, from the shaggy fringes of his moustache. He turned his head from the blank wooden wall in front of him over his left shoulder. A face was looking through the observation window behind him – a woman’s face.

It was the face of Mrs Viveash.

Shearwater uttered a cry and at once turned back again. He redoubled his pedalling. One, two, three, four – furiously he rushed along the nightmare road. She was haunting him now in hallucinations. She was pursuing and she was gaining on him. Will, wisdom, resolution and understanding were of no avail, then? But there was always fatigue. The sweat poured down his face, streamed down the indented runnel of his spine, along the seam at the meeting-place of the ribs. His loin-cloth was wringing wet. The drops pattered continuously on the waterproof sheet. His calves and the muscles of his thighs ached with pedalling. One, two, three, four – he trod round a hundred times with either foot. After that he ventured to turn his head once more. He was relieved, and at the same time he was disappointed, to see that there was now no face at the window. He had exorcised the hallucination. He settled down to a more leisurely pedalling.

In the annexe of the laboratory the animals devoted to the service of physiology were woken by the sudden opening of the door, the sudden irruption of light. The albino guinea-pigs peered through the meshes of their hutch and their red eyes were like the rear-lights of bicycles. The pregnant she-rabbits lolloped out and shook their ears and pointed their tremulous noses towards the door. The cock into which Shearwater had engrafted an ovary came out, not knowing whether to crow or cluck.

‘When he’s with hens,’ Lancing explained to his visitors, ‘he thinks he’s a cock. When he’s with a cock, he’s convinced he’s a pullet.’

The rats who were being fed on milk from a London dairy came tumbling from their nest with an anxious hungry squeaking. They were getting thinner and thinner every day; in a few days they would be dead. But the old rat, whose diet was Grade A milk from the country, hardly took the trouble to move. He was as fat and sleek as a brown furry fruit, ripe to bursting. No skim and chalky water, no dried dung and tubercle bacilli for him. He was in clover. Next week, however, the fates were plotting to give him diabetes artificially.

In their glass pagoda the little black axolotls crawled, the heraldry of Mexico, among a scanty herbage. The beetles, who had had their heads cut off and replaced by the heads of other beetles, darted uncertainly about, some obeying their heads, some their genital organs. A fifteen-year-old monkey, rejuvenated by the Steinach process, was discovered by the light of Lancing’s electric torch, shaking the bars that separated him from the green-furred, bald-rumped, bearded young beauty in the next cage. He was gnashing his teeth with thwarted passion.

Lancing expounded to the visitors all the secrets. The vast, unbelievable, fantastic world opened out as he spoke. There were topics, there were cold seas busy with living beings, there were forests full of horrible trees, silence and darkness. There were ferments and infinitesimal poisons floating in the air. There were leviathans suckling their young, there were flies and worms, there were men, living in cities, thinking, knowing good and evil. And all were changing continuously, moment by moment, and each remained all the time itself by virtue of some unimaginable enchantment. They were all alive. And on the other side of the courtyard beyond the shed in which the animals slept or uneasily stirred, in the huge hospital that went up sheer like a windowed cliff into the air, men and women were ceasing to be themselves, or were struggling to remain themselves. They were dying, they were struggling to live. The other windows looked on to the river. The lights of London Bridge were on the right, of Blackfriars to the left. On the opposite shore, St Paul’s floated up as though self-supported in the moonlight. Like time the river flowed, silent and black. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash leaned their elbows on the sill and looked out. Like time the river flowed, stanchlessly, as though from a wound in the world’s side. For a long time they were silent. They looked out, without speaking, across the flow of time, at the stars, as the human symbol hanging miraculously in the moonlight. Lancing had gone back to his German book; he had no time to waste looking out of windows.

‘To-morrow,’ said Gumbril at last, meditatively.

‘To-morrow,’ Mrs Viveash interrupted him, ‘will be as awful as to-day.’ She breathed it like a truth from beyond the grave prematurely revealed, expiringly from her death-bed within.

‘Come, come,’ protested Gumbril.

In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled. He was across the Channel now; he felt himself safe. Still he trod on; he would be at Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate. He was escaping, he had escaped. He was building up his strong light dome of life. Proportion, cried the old man, proportion! And it hung there, proportioned and beautiful in the dark, confused horror of his desires, solid and strong and durable among his broken thoughts. Time flowed darkly past.

‘And now,’ said Mrs Viveash, straightening herself up, and giving herself a little shake, ‘now we’ll drive to Hampstead and have a look at Piers Cotton.’

The End

Point Counter Point

First Published 1928

CHAPTER I

‘You won’t be late?’ There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling’s voice, there was something like entreaty.

‘No, I won’t be late,’ said Walter, unhappily and guiltily certain that he would be. Her voice annoyed him. It drawled a little, it was too refined-even in misery.

‘Not later than midnight.’ She might have reminded him of the time when he never went out in the evenings without her. She might have done so; but she wouldn’t; it was against her principles; she didn’t want to force his love in any way.

‘Well, call it one. You know what these parties are.’ But as a matter of fact, she didn’t know, for the good reason that, not being his wife, she wasn’t invited to them. She had left her husband to live with Walter Bidlake; and Carling, who had Christian scruples, was feebly a sadist and wanted to take his revenge, refused to divorce her. It was two years now since they had begun to live together. Only two years; and now, already, he had ceased to love her, he had begun to love someone else. The sin was losing its only excuse, the social discomfort its sole palliation. And she was with child.

‘Halfpast twelve,’ she implored, though she knew that her importunity would only annoy him, only make him love her the less. But she could not prevent herself from speaking; she loved him too much, she was too agonizingly jealous. The words broke out in spite of her principles. It would have been better for her, and perhaps for Walter too, if she had had fewer principles and given her feelings the violent expression they demanded. But she had been well brought up in habits of the strictest self-control. Only the uneducated, she knew, made ‘scenes.’ An imploring ‘Halfpast twelve, Walter’ was all that managed to break through her principles. Too weak to move him, the feeble outburst would only annoy. She knew it, and yet she could not hold her tongue.

‘If I can possibly manage it.’ (There; she had done it. There was exasperation in his tone.) “But I can’t guarantee it; don’t expect me too certainly.” For of course, he was thinking (with Lucy Tantamount’s image unexorcizably haunting him), it certainly wouldn’t be halfpast twelve.

He gave the final touches to his white tie. From the mirror her face looked out at him, close beside his own. It was a pale face and so thin that the down-thrown light of the electric lamp hanging above them made a shadow in the hollows below the cheek-bones. Her eyes were darkly ringed. Rather too long at the best of times, her straight nose protruded bleakly from the unfleshed face. She looked ugly, tired and ill. Six months from now her baby would be born. Something that had been a single cell, a cluster of cells, a little sac of tissue, a kind of worm, a potential fish with gills, stirred in her womb and would one day become a man-a grown man, suffering and enjoying, loving and hating, thinking, remembering, imagining. And what had been a blob of jelly within her body would invent a god and worship; what had been a kind of fish would create and, having created, would become the battle-ground of disputing good and evil; what had blindly lived in her as a parasitic worm would look at the stars, would listen to music, would read poetry. A thing would grow into a person, a tiny lump of stuff would become a human body, a human mind. The astounding process of creation was going on within her; but Marjorie was conscious only of sickness and lassitude; the mystery for her meant nothing but fatigue and ugliness and a chronic anxiety about the future, pain of the mind as well as discomfort of the body. She had been glad, or at least she had tried to be glad, in spite of her haunting fears of physical and social consequences, when she first recognized the symptoms Df her pregnancy. The child, she believed, would bring Walter closer; (he had begun to fade away from her even then). It would arouse in him new feelings which would make up for whatever element it was that seemed to be lacking in his love for her. She dreaded the pain, she dreaded the inevitable difficulties and embarrassments. But the pains, ‘the difficulties would have been worth while if they purchased a renewal, a strengthening of Walter’s attachment. In spite of everything, she was glad. And at first her previsions had seemed to be justified. The news that she was going to have a child had quickened his tenderness. For two or three weeks she was happy, she was reconciled to the pains and discomforts. Then, from one day to another, everything was changed; Walter had met that woman. He still did his best, in the intervals of running after Lucy, to keep up a show of solicitude. But she could feel that the solicitude was resentful, that he was tender and attentive out of a sense of duty, that he hated the child for compelling him to be so considerate to its mother. And because he hated it, she too began to hate it. No longer overlaid by happiness, her fears came to the surface, filled her mind. Pain and discomfort-that was all the future held. And meanwhile ugliness, sickness, fatigue. How could she fight her battle when she was in this state?

‘Do you love me, Walter?’ she suddenly asked.

Walter turned his brown eyes for a moment from the reflected tie and looked into the image of her sad, intently gazing grey ones. He smiled. But if only, he was thinking, she would leave me in peace! He pursed his lips and parted them again in the suggestion of a kiss. But Marjorie did not return his smile. Her face remained unmovingly sad, fixed in an intent anxiety. Her eyes took on a tremulous brightness, and suddenly there were tears on her lashes.

‘Couldn’t you stay here with me this evening?’ she begged, in the teeth of all her heroic resolutions not to apply any sort of exasperating compulsion to his love, to leave him free to do what he wanted.

At the sight of those tears, at the sound of that tremulous and reproachful voice, Walter was filled with an emotion that was at once remorse and resentment; anger, pity, and shame.

‘But can’t you understand,’ that was what he would have liked to say, what he would have said if he had had the courage, ‘can’t you understand that it isn’t the same as it was, that it can’t be the same? And perhaps, if the truth be told, it never was what you believed it was our love, I mean—it never was what I tried to pretend it was. Let’s be friends, let’s be companions. I like you, I’m very fond of you. But for goodness sake don’t envelop me in love, like this; don’t force love on me. If you knew how dreadful love seems to somebody who doesn’t love, what a violation, what an outrage…’

But she was crying. Through her closed eyelids the tears were welling out, drop after drop. Her face was trembling into the grimace of agony. And he was the tormentor. He hated himself. ‘But why should I let myself be blackmailed by her tears?’ he asked, and, asking, he hated her also. A drop ran down her long nose

‘She has no right to do this sort of thing, no right to be so unreasonable. Why can’t she be reasonable?’

‘Because she loves me.’

‘But I don’t want her love, I don’t want it.’ He felt the anger mounting up within him. She had no business to love him like that; not now, at any rate. ‘It’s a blackmail,’ he repeated inwardly, ‘a blackmail. Why must I be blackmailed by her love and the fact that once I loved too-or did I ever love her, really?’

Marjorie took out a handkerchief and began to wipe her eyes. He felt ashamed of his odious thoughts. But she was the cause of his shame; it was her fault. She ought to have stuck to her husband. They could have had an affair. Afternoons in a studio. It would have been romantic.

‘But after all, it was I who insisted on her coming away with me.’

‘But she ought to have had the sense to refuse. She ought to have known that it couldn’t last for ever.’ But she had done what he had asked her; she had given up everything, accepted social discomfort for his sake. Another piece of blackmail. She blackmailed him with sacrifice. He resented the appeal which her sacrifices made to his sense of decency and honour

‘But if she had some decency and honour,’ he thought, ‘she wouldn’t exploit mine.’

But there was the baby

‘Why on earth did she ever allow it to come into existence?’

He hated it. It increased his responsibility towards its mother, increased his guiltiness in making her suffer. He looked at her wiping her tear-wet face. Being with child had made her so ugly, so old. How could a woman expect…? But no, no, no! Walter shut his eyes, gave an almost imperceptible shuddering shake of the head. The ignoble thought must be shut out, repudiated.

‘How can I think such things?’ he asked himself.

‘Don’t go,’ he heard her repeating. How that refined and drawling shrillness got on his nerves! ‘Please don’t go, Walter.’

There was a sob in her voice. More blackmail. Ah, how could he be so base? And yet, in spite of his shame and, in a sense, because of it, he continued to feel the shameful emotions with an intensity that seemed to increase rather than diminish. His dislike of her grew because he was ashamed of it; the painful feelings of shame and self-hatred, which she caused him to feel, constituted for him yet another ground of dislike. Resentment bred shame, and shame in its turn bred more resentment.

‘Oh, why can’t she leave me in peace? He wished it furiously, intensely, with an exasperation that was all the more’ savage for being suppressed. (For he lacked the brutal courage to give it utterance; he was sorry for her, he was fond of her in spite of everything; he was incapable of being openly and frankly cruel-he was cruel only out of weakness, against his will.)

‘Why can’t she leave me in peace?’ He would like her so much more if only she left him in peace; and she herself would be so much happier. Ever so much happier. It would be for her own good…. But suddenly he saw through his own hypocrisy. ‘But all the same, why the devil can’t she let me do what I want?’

What he wanted? But what he wanted was Lucy Tantamount. And he wanted her against reason, against all his ideals and principles, madly, against his own wishes, even against his own feelings—for he didn’t like Lucy; he really hated her. A noble end may justify shameful means. But when the end is shameful, what then? It was for Lucy that he was making Marjorie suffer—Marjorie, who loved him, who had made sacrifices for him, who was unhappy. But her unhappiness was blackmailing him.

‘Stay with me this evening,’ she implored once more.

There was a part of his mind that joined in her entreaties, that wanted him to give up the party and stay at home. But the other part was stronger. He answered her with lies—half lies, that were worse, for the hypocritically justifying element of truth in them, than frank whole lies.

He put his arm round her. The gesture was in itself a falsehood.

‘But my darling,’ he protested in the cajoling tone of one who implores a child to behave reasonably, ‘I really must go. You see, my father’s going to be there.’ That was true. Old Bidlake was always at the Tantamounts’ parties. ‘And I must have a talk with him. About business,’ he added vaguely and importantly, releasing with the magical word a kind of smoke-screen of masculine interests between himself and Marjorie. But the lie, he reflected, must be transparently visible through the smoke.

‘Couldn’t you see him some other time? ‘

‘It’s important,’ he answered, shaking his head. ‘And besides,’ he added, forgetting that several excuses are always less convincing than one, ‘Lady Edward’s inviting an American editor specially for my sake. He might be useful; you know how enormously they pay.’ Lady Edward had told him that she would invite the man if he hadn’t started back to America-she was afraid he had. ‘Quite preposterously much,’ he went on, thickening his screen with impersonal irrelevancies. ‘It’s the only place in the world where it’s possible for a writer to be overpaid.’ He made an attempt at laughter. ‘And I really need a bit of overpaying to make up for all this two-guineas-a-thousand business.’ He tightened his embrace, he bent down to kiss her. But Marjorie averted her face. ‘Marjorie,’ he implored. ‘don’t cry. Please.’ He felt guilty and unhappy. But oh! why couldn’t she leave him in peace, in peace?

‘I’m not crying,’ she answered. But her cheek was wet and cold to his lips.

‘Marjorie, I won’t go, if you don’t want me to.’

‘But I do want you to,’ she answered, still keeping her face averted.

‘You don’t. I’ll stay.’

‘You mustn’t.’ Marjorie looked at him and made an effort to smile. ‘It’s only my silliness. It would be stupid to miss your father and that American man.’ Returned to him like this, his excuses sounded peculiarly vain and improbable. He winced with a kind of disgust.

‘They can wait,’ he answered, and there was a note of anger in his voice. He was angry with himself for having made such lying excuses (why couldn’t he have told her the crude and brutal truth straight out? she knew it, after all); and he was angry with her for reminding him of them. He would have liked them to fall directly into the pit of oblivion, to be as though they had never been uttered.

‘No, no; I insist. I was only being silly. I’m sorry.’

He resisted her at first, refused to go, demanded to stay. Now that there was no danger of his having to stay, he could afford to insist. For Marjorie, it was clear, was serious in her determination that he should go. It was an opportunity for him to be noble and selfsacrificing at a cheap rate, gratis even. What an odious comedy! But he played it. In the end he consented to go, as though he were doing her a special favour by not staying. Marjorie tied his scarf for him, brought him his silk hat and his gloves, kissed him goodbye lightly, with a brave show of gaiety. She had her pride and her code of amorous honour; and in spite of unhappiness, in spite of jealousy, she stuck to her principles—he ought to be free; she had no right to interfere with him. And besides it was the best policy not to interfere. At least, she hoped it was the best policy.

Walter shut the door behind him and stepped out into the cool of the night. A criminal escaping from the scene of his crime, escaping from the spectacle of the victim, escaping from compassion and remorse, could not have felt more profoundly relieved. In the street he drew a deep breath. He was free. Free from recollection and anticipation. Free, for an hour or two, to refuse to admit the existence of past or future. Free to live only now and here, in the place where his body happened at each instant to be. Free-but the boast was idle; he went on remembering. Escape was not so easy a matter. Her voice pursued him. ‘I insist on your going.’ His crime had been a fraud as well as a murder. ‘I insist.’ How nobly he had protested! How magnanimously given in at last! It was cardsharping on top of cruelty.

‘God!’ he said almost aloud. ‘How could I?’ He was astonished at himself as well as disgusted. ‘But if only she’d leave me in peace! ‘ he went on. ‘Why can’t she be reasonable?’ The weak and futile anger exploded again within him.

He thought of the time when his wishes had been different. Not to be left in peace by her had once been his whole ambition. He had encouraged her devotion. He remembered the cottage they had lived in, alone with one another, month after month, among the bare downs. What a view over Berkshire! But it was a mile and a half to the nearest village. Oh, the weight of that knapsack full of provisions! The mud when it rained! And that bucket you had to wind up from the well. The well was more than a hundred feet deep. But even when he wasn’t doing something tiresome, like winding up the bucket, had it really been very satisfactory? Had he ever really been happy with Marjorie —as happy, at any rate, as he had imagined he was going to be, as he ought to have been in the circumstances? It should have been like Epipsychidion; but it wasn’t—perhaps because he had too consciously wanted it to be, because he had deliberately tried to model his feelings and their life together on Shelley’s poetry.

‘One shouldn’t take art too literally.’ He remembered what his brother-in-law, Philip Quarles, had said one evening, when they were talking about poetry. ‘Particularly where love is concerned.’

‘Not even if it’s true?’ Walter had asked.

‘It’s apt to be too true. Unadulterated, like distilled water. When truth is nothing but the truth, it’s unnatural, it’s an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth. That’s why art moves you-precisely because it’s unadulterated with all the irrelevancies of real life. Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there’s no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure—chemically pure, I mean,’ he had added with a laugh, ‘not morally.’

‘But Epipsychidion isn’t pornography,’ Walter had objected.

‘No, but it’s equally pure from the chemist’s point of view. How does that sonnet of Shakespeare’s go?

‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

And so on. He’d taken the poets too literally and was reacting. Let him be a warning to you.’

Philip had been right, of course. Those months in the cottage hadn’t been at all like Epipsychidion or La Maison du Berger. What with the well and the walk to the village…. But even if there hadn’t been the well and the walk, even if he had had Marjorie unadulterated, would it have been any better? It might even have been worse. Marjorie unadulterated might have been worse than Marjorie tempered by irrelevancies.

That refinement of hers, for example, that rather cold virtuousness, so bloodless and spiritual—from a distance and theoretically he admired. But in practice and close at hand? It was with that virtue, that refined, cultured, bloodless spirituality that he had fallen in love—with that and with her unhappiness; for Carling was unspeakable. Pity made him a knight errant. Love, he had then believed (for he was only twenty-two at the time, ardently pure, with the adolescent purity of sexual desires turned inside out, just down from Oxford and stuffed with poetry and the lucubrations of philosophers and mystics), love was talk, love was spiritual communion and companionship. That was real love. The sexual business was only an irrelevancy, unavoidable, because unfortunately human beings had bodies, but to be kept as far as possible in the background. Afdently pure with the ardour of young desires taught artificially to burn on the side of the angels, he had admired that refined and quiet purity which, in Marjorie, was the product of a natural coldness, a congenitally low vitality.

‘You’re so good,’ he had said. ‘It seems to come to you so easily. I wish I could be good, like you.’

It was the equivalent, but he did not realize it, of wishing himself half dead. Under the shy, diffident, sensitive skin of him, he was ardently alive. It was indeed hard for him to be good, as Marjorie was good. But he tried. And meanwhile, he admired her goodness and purity. And he was touched-at least until it bored and exasperated him-by her devotion to him, he was flattered by her admiration.

Walking now towards Chalk Farm station he suddenly remembered that story his father used to tell about an Italian chauffeur he had once talked to about love. (The old man had a genius for getting people to talk; all sorts of people, even servants, even workmen. Walter envied him the talent.) Some women, according to the chauffeur, are like wardrobes. Sono come cassettoni. How richly old Bidlake used to tell the anecdote! They may be as lovely as you like; but what’s the point of a lovely wardrobe in your arms? What on earth’s the point? (And Marjorie, Walter reflected, wasn’t even really good looking.) ‘Give me,’ said the chauffeur, ‘the other kind, even if they’re ugly. My girl,’ he had confided, ‘is the other kind. Č un frullino, proprio un frullino—a regular egg-whisk.’ And the old man would twinkle like a jovial, wicked old satyr behind his monocle. Stiff wardrobes or lively egg-whisks? Walter had to admit that his preferences were the same as the chauffeur’s. At any rate, he knew by personal experience that (whenever ‘real’ love was being tempered by the sexual irrelevancies) he didn’t much like the wardrobe kind of woman. At a distance, theoretically, purity and goodness and refined spirituality were admirable. But in practice and close to they were less appealing. And from someone who does not appeal to one, even devotion, even the flattery of admiration are unbearable. Confusedly and simultaneously he hated Marjorie for her patient, martyred coldness; he accused himself of swinish sensuality. His love for Lucy was mad and shameful, but Marjorie was bloodless and half dead. He was at once justified and without excuse. But more without excuse, all the same; more without excuse. They were low, those sensual feelings; they were ignoble. Eggwhisk and chest of drawers—could anything be more base and ignoble than such a classification? In imagination he heard his father’s rich and fleshy laugh. Horrible! Walter’s whole conscious life had been orientated in opposition to his father, in opposition to the old man’s jolly, careless sensuality. Consciously he had always been on the side of his mother, on the side of purity, refinement, the spirit. But his blood was at least half his father’s. And now two years of Marjorie had made him consciously dislike cold virtue. He consciously disliked it, even though at the same time he was still ashamed of his dislike, ashamed of what he regarded as his beastly sensual desires, ashamed of his love for Lucy. But oh, if only Marjorie would leave him in peace! If only she’d refrain from clamouring for a return to the unwelcome love she persisted in forcing on him! If only she’d stop being so dreadfully devoted! He could give her friendship-for he liked her, genuinely; she was so good and kind, so loyal and devoted. He’d be glad of her friendship in return. But love-that was suffocating. And when, imagining she was fighting the other woman with her own weapons, she did violence to her own virtuous coldness and tried to win him back by the ardour of her caresses-oh, it was terrible, really terrible.

And then, he went on to reflect, she was really rather a bore with her heavy, insensitive earnestness. Really rather stupid in spite of her culture-because of it perhaps. The culture was genuine all right; she had read the books, she remembered them. But did she understand them? Could she understand them? The remarks with which she broke her long, long silences, the cultured, earnest remarks-how heavy they were, how humourless and without understanding! She was wise to be so silent; silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture. The silent bear no witness against themselves. Marjorie knew how to listen well and sympathetically. And when she did break silence, half her utterances were quotations. For Marjorie had a retentive memory and had formed the habit of learning the great thoughts and the purple passages by heart. It had taken Walter some time to discover the heavy, pathetically uncomprehending stupidity that underlay the silence and the quotations. And when he discovered, it was too late.

He thought of Carling. A drunkard and religious. Always chattering away about chasubles and saints and the Immaculate Conception, and at the same time a nasty drunken pervert. If the man hadn’t been quite so detestably disgusting, if he hadn’t made Marjorie quite so wretched-what then? Walter imagined his freedom. He wouldn’t have pitied, he wouldn’t have loved. He remembered Marjorie’s red and swollen eyes after one of those disgusting scenes with Carling. The dirty brute!

‘And what about me?’ he suddenly thought.

He knew that the moment the door had shut behind him, Marorie had started to cry. Carling at least had the excuse of whiskey. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. He himself was never anything but sober. At this moment, he knew, she was crying.

‘I ought to go back,’ he said to himself. But instead, he quickened his pace till he was almost running down the street. It was a flight from his conscience and at the same time a hastening towards his desire.

‘I ought to go back, I ought.’

He hurried on, hating her because he had made her so unhappy.

A man looking into a tobacconist’s window suddenly stepped backwards as he was passing. Walter violently collided with him.

‘Sorry,’ he said automatically, and hurried on without looking round.

‘Where yer going?’ the man shouted after him angrily. ‘Wotcher think you’re doing? Being a bloody Derby winner?’

Two loitering street boys whooped with ferociously derisive mirth.

‘You in yer top ‘at,’ the man pursued contemptuously, hating the uniformed gentleman.

The right thing would have been to turn round and give the fellow back better than he gave. His father would have punctured him with a word. But for Walter there was only flight. He dreaded these encounters, he was frightened of the lower classes. The noise of the man’s abuse faded in his ears.

Odious! He shuddered. His thoughts returned to Marorie.

‘Why can’t she be reasonable? ‘ he said to himself. ‘Just reasonable. If only at least she had something to do, something to keep her occupied.’

She had too much time to think, that was the trouble with Marjorie. Too much time to think about him. Though after all it was his fault; it was he who had robbed her of her occupation and made her focus her mind exclusively on himself. She had taken a partnership in a decorator’s shop when he first knew her; one of those lady-like, artistic, amateurish decorating establishments in Kensington. Lampshades and the companionship of the young women who painted them and above all devotion to Mrs. Cole, the senior partner, were Marjorie’s compensations for a wretched marriage. She had created a little world of her own, apart from Carling; a feminine world, with something of the girl’s school about it, where she could talk about clothes and shops, and listen to gossip, and indulge in what schoolgirls call a ‘ pash’ for an elder woman, and imagine in the intervals that she was doing part of the world’s work and helping on the cause of Art.

Walter had persuaded her to give it all up. Not without difficulty, however. For her happiness in being devoted to Mrs. Cole, in having a sentimental ‘pash’ for her, was almost a compensation for her misery with Carling. But Carling turned out to be more than Mrs. Cole could compensate for. Walter offered what the lady perhaps could not, and certainly did not wish to, provide—a place of refuge, protection, financial support. Besides, Walter was a man, and a man ought, by tradition, to be loved, even when, as Walter had finally concluded about Marjorie, one doesn’t really like men and is only naturally attuned to the company of women. (The effect of literature again! He remembered Philip Quarles’s comments on the disastrous influence which art can exercise on life.) Yes, he was a man; but ‘different,’ as she had never tired of telling him, from ordinary men. He had accepted his ‘ difference’ as a flattering distinction, then. But was it? He wondered. Anyhow, ‘different’ she had then found him and so was able to get the best of both worlds—a man who yet wasn’t a man. Charmed by Walter’s persuasions, driven by Carling’s brutalities, she had consented to abandon the shop and with it Mrs. Cole, whom Walter detested as a bullying, slave-driving, blood-sucking embodiment of female will.

‘You’re too good to be an amateur upholsterer,’ he had flattered her out of the depths of a then genuine belief in her intellectual capacities.

She should help him in some unspecified way with his literary work, she should write herself. Under his influence she had taken to writing essays and short stories. But they were obviously no good. From having been encouraging, he became reticent; he said no more about her efforts. In a little while Marjorie abandoned the unnatural and futile occupation. She had nothing after that but Walter. He became the reason of her existence, the foundation on which her whole life was established. The foundation was moving away from under her.

‘If only,’ thought Walter, ‘she’d leave me in peace!’

He turned into the Underground station. At the entrance a man was selling the evening papers. SOCIALIST ROBBERY SCHEME. FIRST READING. The words glared out from the placard. Glad of an excuse to distract his mind Walter bought a paper. The LiberalLabour Government’s Bill for the nationalization of the mines had passed its first reading by the usual majority. Walter read the news with pleasure. His political opinions were advanced. Not so the opinions of the proprietor of the evening paper. The language of the leading article was savagely violent.

‘The ruffians,’ thought Walter as he read it. The article evoked in him a stimulating enthusiasm for all that it assailed, a delightful hatred for Capitalists and Reactionaries. The barriers of his individuality were momentarily thrown down, the personal complexities were abolished. Possessed by the joy of political battle, he overflowed his boundaries, he became, so to speak, larger than himself-larger and simpler.

‘The ruffians,’ he repeated, thinking of the oppressors, the monopolizers.

At Camden Town station a wizened little man with a red handkerchief round his neck took the seat next to his. The stink of the old man’s pipe was so suffocating, that Walter looked up the car to see if there were not another vacant seat. There was, as it happened; but on second thoughts, he decided not to move. To retire from the stink would seem too offensively pointed, might occasion comment from the stinker. The acrid smoke rasped his throat; he coughed.

‘One should be loyal to one’s tastes and instincts,’ Philip Quarles used to say. ‘What’s the good of a philosophy with a major premise that isn’t the rationalization of your feelings? If you’ve never had a religious experience, it’s folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can’t eat them without being sick.’

A whiff of stale sweat came up with the nicotine fumes to Walter’s nostrils. ‘The Socialists call it Nationalization,’ he read in his paper; ‘but the rest of us have a shorter and homelier name for what they propose to do. That name is Theft.’ But at least it was theft from thieves and for the benefit of their victims. The little old man leaned forward and spat, cautiously and perpendicularly, between his feet. With the heel of his boot he spread the gob over the floor. Walter looked away; he wished that he could personally like the oppressed and personally hate the rich oppressors. One should be loyal to one’s tastes and instincts. But one’s tastes and instincts were accidents. There were eternal principles. But if the axiomatic principles didn’t happen to be your personal major premiss…?

And suddenly he was nine years old and walking with his mother in the fields near Gattenden. Each of them carried a bunch of cowslips. They must have been up to Batt’s Corner; it was the only place where cowslips grew in the neighbourhood.

‘We’ll stop for a minute and see poor Wetherington,’ his mother said. ‘He’s very ill.’ She knocked at a cottage door.

Wetherington had been the under-gardener at the Hall; but for the past month he had not been working. Walter remembered him as a pale, thin man with a cough, not at all communicative. He was not much interested in Wetherington. A woman opened the door. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs. Wetherington.’ They were shown in.

Wetherington was lying in bed propped up with pillows. His face was terrible. A pair of enormous, large-pupilled eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. Stretched over the starting bones, the skin was white and clammy with sweat. But almost more appalling even than the face was the neck, the unbelievably thin neck. And from the sleeves of his nightshirt projected two knobbed sticks, his arms, with a pair of immense skeleton hands fastened to the end of them, like rakes at the end of their slender hafts. And then the smell in that sickroom! The windows were tightly shut, a fire burned in the little grate. The air was hot and heavy with a horrible odour of stale sick breath and the exhalations of a sick body—an old inveterate smell that seemed to have grown sickeningly sweetish with long ripening in the pent-up heat. A new, fresh smell, however pungently disgusting, would have been less horrible. It was the inveterateness, the sweet decaying over-ripeness of this sickroom smell that made it so peculiarly unbearable. Walter shuddered even now to think of it. He lit a cigarette to disinfect his memory. He had been brought up on baths and open windows. The first time that, as a child, he was taken to church, the stuffiness, the odour of humanity made him sick; he had to be hurried out. His mother did not take him to church again. Perhaps we’re brought up too wholesomely and aseptically, he thought. An education -that results in one’s feeling sick in the company of one’s fellow-men, one’s brothers-can it be good? He would have liked to love them. But love does not flourish in an atmosphere that nauseates the lover with an uncontrollable disgust.

In Wetherington’s sickroom even pity found it hard to flourish. He sat there, while his mother talked to the dying man and his wife, gazing, reluctant but compelled by the fascination of horror, at the ghastly skeleton in the bed and breathing through his bunch of cowslips the warm and sickening air. Even through the fresh delicious scent of the cowslips he could smell the inveterate odours of the sickroom. He felt almost no pity, only horror, fear and disgust. And even when Mrs. Wetherington began to cry, turning her face away so that the sick man should not see her tears, he felt not pitiful so much as uncomfortable, embarrassed. The spectacle of her grief only made him more urgently long to escape, to get out of that horrible room into the pure enormous air and the sunshine.

He felt ashamed of these emotions as he remembered them. But that was how he had felt, how he still felt. ‘One should be loyal to one’s instincts.’ No, not to all, not to the bad ones; one should resist these. But they were not so easily overcome. The old man in the next seat relit his pipe. He remembered that he had held every breath for as long as he possibly could, so as not to have to draw in and smell the tainted air too often. A deep breath through the cowslips; then he counted forty before he let it out again and inhaled another. The old man once more leaned forward and spat. ‘The idea that nationalization will increase the prosperity of the workers is entirely fallacious. During the past years the tax-payer has learned to his cost the meaning of bureaucratic control. If the workers imagine…’ He shut his eyes and saw the sickroom. When the time came to say goodbye, he had shaken the skeleton hand. It lay there, unmoving, on the bedclothes; he slipped his fingers underneath those dead and bony ones, lifted the hand a moment and let it fall again.

It was cold and wettish to the touch. Turning away, he surreptitiously wiped his palm on his coat. He let out his long-contained breath with an explosive sigh and inhaled another lungfull of the sickening air. It was the last he had to take; his mother was already moving towards the door. Her little Pekingese frisked round her, barking.

‘Be quiet, T’ang!’ she said in her clear, beautiful voice. She was perhaps the only person in England, he now reflected, who regularly pronounced the apostrophe in T’ang.

They walked home by the footpath across the fields. Fantastic and improbable as a little Chinese dragon, T’ang ran on ahead of them bounding lightly over what were to him enormous obstacles. His feathery tail fluttered in the wind. Sometimes, when the grass was very long he sat up on his little flat rump as though he were begging for sugar, and looked out with his round bulgy eyes over the tussocks, taking his bearings.

Under the bright dappled sky Walter had felt like a reprieved prisoner. He ran, he shouted. His mother walked slowly, without speaking. Every now and then she halted for a moment and shut her eyes. It was a habit she had, when she felt pensive or perplexed. She was often perplexed, Walter reflected, smiling tenderly to himself. Poor Wetherington must have perplexed her a great deal. He remembered how often she had halted on their way home.

‘Do hurry up, mother,’ he had shouted impatiently. ‘We shall be late for tea.’

Cook had baked scones for tea and there was yesterday’s plum cake and a newly opened pot of Tiptree’s cherry jam.

‘One should be loyal to one’s tastes and instincts.’ But an accident of birth had determined them for him. Justice was eternal; charity and brotherly love were beautiful in spite of the old man’s pipe and Wetherington’s sickroom. Beautiful precisely because of such things. The train slowed down. Leicester Square. He stepped out on to the platform and made his way towards the lifts. But the personal major premiss, he was thinking, is hard to deny; and the major premiss that isn’t personal is hard, however excellent, to believe in. Honour, fidelity-these were good things. But the personal major premiss of his present philosophy was that Lucy Tantamount was the most beautiful, the most desirable…

‘All tickets, please!’

The debate threatened to start again. Deliberately he stifled it, the liftman slammed the gates. The lift ascended. In the street he hailed a taxi.

‘Tantamount House, Pall Mall.’

CHAPTER II

Three Italian ghosts unobtrusively haunt the eastern end of Pall Mall. The wealth of newly industrialized England and the enthusiasm, the architectural genius, of Charles Barry called them up out of the past and their native sunshine. Under the encrusting grime of the Reform Club the eye of faith recognizes something agreeably reminiscent of the Farnese Palace. A few yards further down the street, Sir Charles’s recollections of the house that Raphael designed for the Pandolfini loom up through the filmy London air-the Travellers’ Club. And between them, austerely classical, grim like a prison and black with soot, rises a smaller (but still enormous) version of the Cancelleria. It is Tantamount House.

Barry designed it in I839. A hundred workmen laboured for a year or two. And the third marquess paid the bills. They were heavy; but the suburbs of Leeds and Sheffield had begun to spread over the land which his ancestors had stolen from the monasteries three hundred years before. ‘The Catholic Church, instructed by the Holy Spirit, has from the sacred writings and the ancient traditions of the Fathers, taught that there is a Purgatory and that the souls there detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, but principally by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar’ Rich men with uneasy consciences had left their land to the monks that their souls might be helped through Purgatory by a perpetual performance of the acceptable sacrifice of the altar. But Henry vyi. had lusted after a young woman and desired a son; and because Pope Clement vu. was in the power of Henry’s first wife’s daughter’s cousin, he would not grant him a divorce. The monasteries were in consequence suppressed. An army of beggars, of paupers, of the infirm died miserably of hunger. But the Tantamounts acquired some scores of square miles of ploughland, forest and pasture. A few years later, under Edward VI., they stole the property of two disestablished grammar schools; children remained uneducated that the Tantamounts might be rich. They farmed their land scientifically with a view to the highest profit. Their contemporaries regarded them as ‘ men that live as though there were no God at all, men that would have all in their own hands, men that would leave nothing to others, men that be never satisfied.’ From the pulpit of St. Paul’s, Lever accused them of having ‘ offended God, and brought a common wealth into a common ruin.’ The Tantamounts were unperturbed. The land was theirs, the money came in regularly.

The corn was sown, grew and was harvested, again and again. The beasts were born, fattened and went to the slaughter. The ploughmen, the shepherds, the cow-herds laboured from before dawn till sunset, year after year, until they died. Their children took their places. Tantamount succeeded Tantamount. Elizabeth made them barons; they became viscounts under Charles n., earls under William and Mary, marquesses under George n. They married heiress after heiressten square miles of Nottinghamshire, fifty thousand pounds, two streets in Bloomsbury, half a brewery, a bank, a plantation and six hundred slaves in Jamaica. Meanwhile, obscure men were devising machines which made things more rapidly than they could be made by hand. Villages were transformed into towns, towns into great cities. On what had been the Tantamounts’ pasture and ploughland, houses and factories were built. Under the grass of their meadows half-naked men hewed at the black and shining coal face. The laden trucks were hauled by little boys and women. From Peru the droppings of ten thousand generations of sea-gulls were brought in ships to enrich their fields. The corn grew thicker; the new mouths were fed. And year by year the Tantamounts grew richer and richer and the souls of the Black Prince’s pious contemporaries continued, no doubt, to writhe, unaided as they were by any acceptable sacrifice of the altar, in the unquenchable fires of Purgatory. The money that might, if suitably applied, have shortened their term among the flames served, among other things, to call into existence a model of the Papal Chancellery in Pall Mall.

The interior of Tantamount House is as nobly Roman as its facade. Round a central quadrangle run two tiers of open arcades with an attic, lit by small square windows, above. But instead of being left open to the sky, the quadrangle is covered by a glass roof, which converts it into an immense hall rising the whole height of the building. With its arcades and gallery it makes a very noble room-but too large, too public, too much like a swimming bath or a roller-skating rink to be much lived in. To-night, however, it was justifying its existence. Lady Edward Tantamount was giving one of her musical parties. The floor was crowded with seated guests and in the hollow architectural space above them the music intricately pulsed.

‘What a pantomime! ‘ said old John Bidlake to his hostess. ‘My dear Hilda, you really must look.’

‘Sh-sh!’ Lady Edward protested behind her feather fan. ‘You mustn’t interrupt the music. Besides I am looking.’

Her whisper was colonial and the r’s of ‘interrupt’ were rolled far back in the throat; for Lady Edward came from Montreal and her mother had been a Frenchwoman. In I897 the British Association met in Canada. Lord Edward Tantamount read a much-admired paper to the Biological Section. ‘One of the coming men,’ the professors had called him., But for those who weren’t professors, a Tantamount and a millionaire might be regarded as already having arrived. Hilda Sutton was most decidedly of that opinion. Lord Edward was the guest, during his stay in Montreal, of Hilda’s father. She took her opportunity. The British Association went home; but Lord Edward remained in Canada.

‘Believe me,’ Hilda had once confided to a friend, ‘ I never took so much interest in osmosis before or since.’

The interest in osmosis roused Lord Edward’s attention. He became aware of a fact which he had not previously noticed; that Hilda was exceedingly pretty. Hilda also knew her woman’s business. Her task was not difficult. At forty Lord Edward was in all but intellect a kind of child. In the laboratory, at his desk, he was as old as science itself. But his feelings, his intuitions, his instincts were those of a little boy. Unexercised, the greater part of his spiritual being had never developed. He was a kind of child, but with his childish habits ingrained by forty years of living. Hilda helped him over his paralysing twelve-year-old shynesses, and whenever terror prevented him from making the necessary advances, came half or even all the way to meet him. His ardours were boyish-at once violent and timid, desperate and dumb. Hilda talked for two and was discreetly bold. Discreetly-for Lord Edward’s notions of how young girls should behave were mainly derived from the Pickwick Papers. Boldness undisguised would have alarmed him, would have driven him away. Hilda kept up all the appearance of Dickensian younggirlishness, but contrived at the same time to make all the advances, create all the opportunities and lead the conversation into all the properly amorous channels. She had her reward. In the spring of i898 she was Lady Edward Tantamount.

‘But I assure you,’ she had once said to John Bidlake, quite angrily-for he had been making fun of poor Edward, ‘I’m genuinely fond of him, genuinely.’

‘In your own way, no doubt,’ mocked Bidlake. ‘In your own way. But you must admit it’s a good thing it isn’t everybody’s way. Just look at yourself in that mirror.’

She looked and saw the reflection of her naked body lying, half sunk in deep cushions, on a divan.

‘Beast!’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t make any difference to my being fond of him.’

‘Oh, not to your particular way of being fond, I’m sure.’ He laughed. ‘But I repeat that it’s perhaps a good thing that—’

She put her hand over his mouth. That was a quarter of a century ago. Hilda had been married five years and was thirty. Lucy was a child of four. John Bidlake was forty-seven, at the height of his powers and reputation as a painter; handsome, huge, exuberant, careless; a great laugher, a great worker, a great eater, drinker and taker of virginities.

‘Painting’s a branch of sensuality,’ he’ retorted to those who reproved him for his way of life. ‘Nobody can paint a nude who hasn’t learnt the human body by heart with his hands and his lips and his own body. I take my art seriously. I’m unremitting in my preliminary studies.’ And the skin would tighten in laughing wrinkles round his monocle, his eyes would twinkle like a genial satyr’s.

To Hilda, John Bidlake brought the revelation of her own body, her physical potentialities. Lord Edward was only a kind of child, a fossil boy preserved in the frame of a very large middleaged man. Intellectually, in the laboratory, he understood the phenomena of sex But in practice and emotionally he was a child, a fossil mid-Victorian child, preserved intact, with all the natural childish timidities and all the taboos acquired from the two beloved and very virtuous maiden aunts, who had taken the place of his dead mother, all the amazing principles and prejudices sucked in with the humours of Mr. Pickwick and Micawber He loved his young wife, but loved her as a fossil child of the’sixties might love-timidly and very apologetically; apologizing for his ardours, apologizing for his body, apologizing for hers. Not in so many words, of course; for the fossil child was dumb with shyness; but by a silent ignoring, a silent pretending that the bodies weren’t really involved in the ardours, which anyhow didn’t really exist. His love was one long tacit apology for itself; and being nothing more than an apology was therefore quite inexcusable. Love must justify itself by its results in intimacy of mind and body, in warmth, in tender contact, in pleasure. If it has to be justified from outside, it is thereby proved a thing without justification. John Bidlake made no apologies for the kind of love he had to offer. So far as it went, it entirely justified itself. A healthy sensualist, he made his love straightforwardly, naturally, with the good animal gusto of a child of nature.

‘Don’t expect me to talk about the stars and madonna lilies and the cosmos,’ he said. ‘They’re not my line. I don’t believe in them. I believe in—’ And his language became what a mysterious convention has decreed to be unprintable.

It was a love without pretensions, but warm, natural, and, being natural, good so far as it went—a decent, good-humoured, happy sensuality. To Hilda, who had never known anything but a fossil child’s reticent apology for love, it was a revelation. Things which had been dead in her came alive. She discovered herself, rapturously. But not too rapturously. She never lost her head. If she had lost her head, she might have lost Tantamount House and the Tantamount millions and the Tantamount title as well. She had no intention of losing these things. So she kept her head, coolly and deliberately; kept it high and secure above the tumultuous raptures, like a rock above the waves. She enjoyed herself, but never to the detriment of her social position. She could look on at her own enjoyment; her cool head, her will to retain her social position remained apart from and above the turmoil. John Bidlake approved the way she made the best of both worlds.

‘Thank God, Hilda,’ he had often said, ‘you’re a sensible woman.’

Women who believed the world well lost for love were apt to be a terrible nuisance, as he knew only too well by personal experience. He liked women; love was an indispensable enjoyment. But nobody was worth involving oneself in tiresome complications for, nothing was worth messing up one’s life for. With the women who hadn’t been sensible and had taken love too seriously, John Bidlake had been ruthlessly cruel. It was the battle of ‘all for love’ against ‘anything for a quiet life.’ John Bidlake always won. Fighting for his quiet life, he drew the line at no sort of frightfulness.

Hilda Tantamount was as much attached to the quiet life as John himself. Their affair had lasted, pleasantly enough, for a space of years and slowly faded out of existence. They had been good lovers, they remained good friends—conspirators, even, people called them, mischievous conspirators leagued together to amuse themselves at the world’s expense. They were laughing now. Or rather old John, who hated music, was laughing alone. Lady Edward was trying to preserve the decorums.

‘You simply must be quiet,’ she whispered

‘But you’re not realizing how incredibly comic it is,’ Bidlake insisted.

‘Sh-sh.’

‘But I’m whispering.’ This continual shushing annoyed him. ‘Like a lion.’

‘I can’t help that,’ he answered crossly. When he took the trouble to whisper, he assumed that his voice was inaudible to all but the person to whom his remarks were addressed. He did not like to be told that what he chose to assume as true was not true.

‘Lion, indeed!’ he muttered indignantly. But his face suddenly brightened again. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘Here’s another late arrival. What’s the betting she’ll do the same as all the others?’

‘Sh-sh,’ Lady Edward repeated.

But John Bidlake paid no attention to her. He was looking in the direction of the door, where the latest of the late-comers was still standing, torn between the desire to disappear unobtrusively into the silent crowd and the social duty of making her arrival known to her hostess. She looked about her in embarrassment. Lady Edward hailed her over the heads of the intervening crowd with a wave of her long feather and a smile. The late arrival smiled back, blew a kiss, laid a finger to her lips, pointed to an empty chair at the other side of the room, threw out both hands in a little gesture that was meant to express apologies for being late and despairing regret at being unable in the circumstances to come and speak to Lady Edward, then shrugging up her shoulders and shrinking into herself so as to occupy the smallest possible amount of space, tiptoed with extraordinary precautions down the gangway towards the vacant seat.

Bidlake was in ecstasies of merriment. He had echoed the poor lady’s every gesture as she made it. Her blown kiss he had returned with extravagant interest, and when she laid a finger to her lips, he had covered his mouth with a whole hand. He had repeated her gesture of regret, grotesquely magnifying it until it expressed a ludicrous despair. And when she tiptoed away, he began to count on his fingers, to make the gestures that, in Naples, avert the evil eye, and to tap his forehead. He turned to Lady Edward in triumph.

‘I told you so,’ he whispered, and his whole face was wrinkled with suppressed laughter. ‘It’s like being in a deaf and dumb asylum. Or talking to pygmies in Central Africa.’ He opened his mouth and pointed into it with a stretched forefinger; he went through the motions of drinking from a glass. ‘Me hungly,’ he said, ‘me velly velly thirsty.’

Lady Edward flapped her ostrich at him.

Meanwhile the music played on—Bach’s Suite in B minor, for flute and strings. Young Tolley conducted with his usual inimitable grace, bending in swan-like undulations from the loins, and tracing luscious arabesques on the air with his waving arms, as though he were dancing to the music. A dozen anonymous fiddlers and ‘cellists scraped at his bidding. And the great Pongileoni glueily kissed his flute. He blew across the mouth hole and a cylindrical air column vibrated; Bach’s meditations filled the Roman quadrangle. In the opening largo John Sebastian had, with the help of Pongileoni’s snout and the air column, made a statement: There are grand things in the world, noble things; there are men born kingly; there are real conquerors, intrinsic lords of the earth. But of an earth that is, oh! complex and multitudinous, he had gone on to reflect in the fugal allegro. You seem to have found the truth; clear, definite, unmistakable, it is announced by the violins; you have it, you triumphantly hold it. But it slips out of your grasp to present itself in a new aspect among the ‘cellos and yet again in terms of Pongileoni’s vibrating air column. The parts live their separate lives; they touch, their paths cross, they combine for a moment to create a seemingly final and perfected harmony, only to break apart again. Each is always alone and separate and individual. ‘I am I,’ asserts the violin; ‘the world revolves round me.’ ‘Round me,’ calls the ‘cello. ‘Round me,’ the flute insists. And all are equally right and equally wrong; and none of them will listen to the others.

In the human fugue there are eighteen hundred million parts. The resultant noise means something perhaps to the statistician, nothing to the artist. It is only by considering one or two parts at a time that the artist can understand anything. Here, for example, is one particular part; and John Sebastian puts the case. The Rondeau begins, exquisitely and simply melodious, almost a folk-song. It is a young girl singing to herself of love, in solitude, tenderly mournful. A young girl singing among the hills, with the clouds drifting overhead. But solitary as one of the floating clouds, a poet had been listening to her song. The thoughts that it provoked in him are the Sarabande that follows the Rondeau. His is a slow and lovely meditation on the beauty (in spite of squalor and stupidity), the profound goodness (in spite of all the evil), the oneness (in spite of such bewildering diversity) of the world. It is a beauty, a goodness, a unity that no intellectual research can discover, that analysis dispels, but of whose reality the spirit is from time to time suddenly and overwhelmingly convinced. A girl singing to herself under the clouds suffices to create the certitude. Even a fine morning is enough. Is it illusion or the revelation of profoundest truth? Who knows? Pongileoni blew, the fiddlers drew their rosined horse-hair across the stretched intestines of lambs; through the long Sarabande the poet slowly meditated his lovely and consoling certitude.

‘This music is beginning to get rather tedious,’ John Bidlake whispered to his hostess. ‘Is it going to last much longer?’

Old Bidlake had no taste or talent for music, and he had the frankness to say so. He could afford to be frank. When one can paint as well as John Bidlake, why should one pretend to like music, when in fact one doesn’t? He looked over the seated audience and smiled.

‘They look as though they were in church,’ he said.

Lady Edward raised her fan protestingly.

‘Who’s that little woman in black,’ he went on, ‘rolling her eyes and swaying her body like St. Teresa in an ecstasy? ‘

‘Fanny Logan,’ Lady Edward whispered back. ‘But do keep quiet.’

‘People talk of the tribute vice pays to virtue,’ John Bidlake went on, incorrigibly. ‘But everything’s permitted nowadays-there’s no more need of moral hypocrisy. There’s only intellectual hypocrisy now. The tribute philistinism pays to art, what? Just look at them all paying it-in pious grimaces and religious silence!’

‘You can be thankful they payyou in guineas,’ said Lady Edward. ‘And now I absolutely insist that you should hold your tongue.’

Bidlake made a gesture of mock terror and put his hand over his mouth. Tolley voluptuously waved his arms; Pongileoni blew, the fiddlers scraped. And Bach, the poet, meditated of truth and beauty.

Fanny Logan felt the tears coming into her eyes. She was easily moved, especially by music; and when she felt an emotion, she did not try to repress it, but abandoned herself whole-heartedly to it. How beautiful this music was, how sad, and yet how comforting! She felt it within her, as a current of exquisite feeling, running smoothly but irresistibly through all the labyrinthine intricacies of her being. Even her body shook and swayed in time with the pulse and undulation of the melody. She thought of her husband; the memory of him came to her on the current of the music, of darling, darling Eric, dead now almost two years; dead, and still so young. The tears came faster. She wiped them away. The music was infinitely sad; and yet it consoled. It admitted everything, so to speak-poor Eric’s dying before his time, the pain of his illness, his reluctance to go-it admitted everything. It expressed the whole sadness of the world, and from the depths of that sadness it was able to affirm-deliberately, quietly, without protesting too much-that everything was in some way right, acceptable. It included the sadness within some vaster, more comprehensive happiness. The tears kept welling up into Mrs. Logan’s eyes; but they were somehow happy tears, in spite of her sadness. She would have liked to tell Polly, her daughter, what she was feeling. But Polly was sitting in another row. Mrs. Logan could see the back of her head, two rows further forward, and her slim little neck with the pearls that darling Eric had given her on her eighteenth birthday, only a few months before he died. And suddenly, as though she had felt that her mother was looking at her, as though she understood what she was feeling, Polly turned round and gave her a quick smile. Mrs. Logan’s sad and musical happiness was complete. Her mother’s were not the only eyes that looked in Polly’s direction. Advantageously placed behind and to one side of her, Hugo Brockle admiringly studied her profile. How lovely she was! He was wondering whether he would have the courage to tell her that they had played together in Kensington Gardens when they were children. He would come up to her when the music was over and boldly say: ‘We were introduced in our perambulators, you know.’ Or, if he wanted to be more unconventionally witty, ‘You’re the person who hit me on the head with a battledore.’

Looking restlessly round the room, John Bidlake had suddenly caught sight of Mary Betterton. Yes, Mary Betterton-that monster! He put his hand under his chair, he touched wood. Whenever John Bidlake saw something unpleasant, he always felt safer if he could touch wood. He didn’t believe in God, of course; he liked to tell disobliging stories about the clergy. But wood, wood-there was something about wood…. And to think that he had been in love with her, wildly, twenty, twenty-two, he dared not think how many years ago. How fat, how old and hideous! His hand crept down again to the chair leg. He averted his eyes and tried to think of something that wasn’t Mary Betterton. But the memories of the time when Mary had been young imposed themselves upon him. He still used to ride then. The image of himself on a black horse, of Mary on a bay, rose up before him. They had often gone riding in those days. It was the time he was painting the third and best of his groups of ‘ Bathers.’ What a picture, by God! Mary was already a little too plump for some tastes, even then. Not for his; he had never objected to plumpness. These women nowadays, wanting to look like drain-pipes…. He looked at her again for a moment and shuddered. He hated her for being so repulsive, for having once been so charming. And he was the best part of twenty years her senior.

CHAPTER III

Two flights up, between the piano nobile and the servants’ quarters under the roof, Lord Edward Tantamount was busy in his laboratory.

The younger Tantamounts were generally military. But the heir being a cripple, Lord Edward’s father had destined him for the political career, which the eldest sons had always traditionally begun in the Commons and continued majestically in the Lords. Hardly had Lord Edward come of age, when he was given a constituency to nurse. He nursed it dutifully. But oh, how he hated public speaking! And when one met a potential voter, what on earth was one to say? And he couldn’t even remember the main items in the Conservative party programme, much less feel enthusiastic about them. Decidedly, politics were not his line.

‘But what are you interested in? ‘ his father had asked. And the trouble was that Lord Edward didn’t know. Going to concerts was about the only thing he thoroughly enjoyed. But obviously, one couldn’t spend one’s life going to concerts. The fourth marquess could not conceal his anger and disappointment. ‘The boy’s an imbecile,’ he said, and Lord Edward himself was inclined to agree. He was good for nothing, a failure; the world had no place for him. There were times when he thought of suicide.

‘If only he’d sow a few wild oats!’ his father had complained. But the young man was, if possible, even less interested in debauchery than in politics. ‘And he’s not even a sportsman,’ the accusation continued. It was true. The massacre of birds, even in the company of the Prince of Wales, left Lord Edward quite unmoved, except perhaps by a faint disgust. He preferred to sit at home and read, vaguely, desultorily, a little of everything. But even reading seemed to him unsatisfactory. The best that could be said of it was that it kept his mind from brooding and killed time. But what was the good of that? Killing time with a book was not intrinsically much better than killing pheasants and time with a gun. He might go on reading like this for the rest of his days; but it would never help him to achieve anything.

On the afternoon of April 18th, 1887, he was sitting in the library at Tantamount House, wondering whether life was worth living and whether drowning were preferable, as a mode of dying, to shooting. It was the day that the Times had published the forged letter, supposed to be Parnell’s, condoning the Phoenix Park murders. The fourth marquess had been in a state of apoplectic agitation ever since breakfast. At the clubs men talked of nothing else. ‘I suppose it’s very important,’ Lord Edward kept saying to himself. But he found it impossible to take much interest either in Parnellism or in crime. After listening for a little to what people were saying at the club, he went home in despair. The library door was open; he entered and dropped into a chair, feeling utterly exhausted as though he had come in from a thirty-mile walk. ‘I must be an idiot,’ he assured himself, when he thought of other people’s political enthusiasms and his own indifference. He was too modest to attribute the idiocy to the other people. ‘I’m hopeless, hopeless.’ He groaned aloud, and in the learned silence of the vast library the sound was appalling. Death; the end of everything; the river; the revolver…. Time passed. Even about death, Lord Edward found, he could not think consecutively and attentively. Even death was a bore. The current Quarterl1y lay on the table beside him. Perhaps it would bore him less than death was doing. He picked it up, opened it casually and found himself reading a paragraph in the middle of an article about someone called Claude Bernard. He had never previously heard of Claude Bernard. A Frenchman, he supposed. And what, he wondered, was the glycogenic function of the liver? Some scientific business, evidently. His eyes skimmed over the page There were inverted commas; it was a quotation from Claude Bernard’s own writings.

‘The living being does not form an exception to the great natural harmony which makes things adapt themselves to one another; it breaks no concord; it is neither in contradiction to, nor struggling against, general cosmic forces. Far from that, it is a member of the universal concert of things, and the life of the animal, for example, is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.’

He read the words, idly first, then more carefully, then several times with a strained attention. ‘The life of the animal is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.’ Then what about suicide? A fragment of the universe would be destroying itself? No, not destroying; it couldn’t destroy itself even if it tried. It would be changing its mode of existence. Changing…. Bits of animals and plants became human beings. What was one day a sheep’s hind leg and leaves of spinach was the next part of the hand that wrote, the brain that conceived the slow movement of the Jupiter Symphony. And another day had come when thirty-six years of pleasures, pains, hungers, loves, thoughts, music, together with infinite unrealized potentialities of melody and harmony had manured an unknown corner of a Viennese cemetery, to be transformed into grass and dandelions, which in their turn had been transformed into sheep, whose hind legs had in their turn been transformed into other musicians, whose bodies in their turn … It was all obvious, but to Lord Edward an apocalypse. Suddenly and for the first time he realized his solidarity with the world. The realization was extraordinarily exciting; he rose from his chair and began to walk agitatedly up and down the room. His thoughts were confused, but the muddle was bright and violent, not dim, not foggily languid as at ordinary times. ‘Perhaps when I was at Vienna last year, I actually consumed a piece of Mozart’s substance. It might have been in a Wiener Schnitzel, or a sausage, or even a glass of beer. Communion, physical communion. And that wonderful performance of The Magic Flute—another sort of communion, or perhaps the same, really. Transubstantiation, cannibalism, chemistry. It comes down to chemistry in the end, of course. Legs of mutton and spinach … all chemistry. Hydrogen, oxygen … What are the other things? God, how infuriating, how infuriating not to know! All those years at Eton. Latin verses. What the devil was the good? En! distenta ferunt perpingues ubera vaccae. Why didn’t they teach me anything sensible? “A member of the universal concert of things.” It’s all like music; harmonies and counterpoint and modulations. But you’ve got to be trained to listen. Chinese music… we can’t make head or tail of it. The universal concert—that’s Chinese music for me, thanks to Eton. Glycogenic function of the liver… it might be in Bantu, so far as I’m concerned. What a humiliation! But I can learn, I will learn, I will…’

Lord Edward was filled with an extraordinary exultation; he had never felt so happy in his life before.

That evening he told his father that he was not going to stand for Parliament. Still agitated by the morning’s revelations of Parnellism, the old gentleman was furious. Lord Edward was entirely unmoved; his mind was made up. The next day he advertised for a tutor. In the spring of the following year he was in Berlin working under Du Bois Reymond.

Forty years had passed since then. The studies of osmosis, which had indirectly given him a wife, had also given him a reputation. His work on assimilation and growth was celebrated. But what he regarded as the real task of his life—the great theoretical treatise on physical biology—was still unfinished. ‘The life of the animal is only a fragment of the total life of the universe.’ Claude Bernard’s words had been his lifelong theme as well as his original inspiration. The book on which he had been working all these years was but an elaboration, a quantitative and mathematical illustration of them.

Upstairs in the laboratory the day’s work had just begun. Lord Edward preferred to work at night. He found the daylight hours disagreeably noisy. Breakfasting at halfpast one, he would walk for an hour or two in the afternoon and return to read or write till lunch-time at eight. At nine or halfpast he would do some practical work with his assistant, and when that was over they would sit down to work on the great book or to discussion of its problems. At one, Lord Edward had his supper, and at about four or five he would go to bed.

Diminished and in fragments the B minor Suite came floating up from the great hall to the ears of the two men in the laboratory. They were too busy to realize that they were hearing it.

‘Forceps,’ said Lord Edward to his assistant. He had a very deep voice, indistinct and without, so to speak, a clearly defined contour. ‘A furry voice,’ his daughter Lucy had called it, when she was a child.

Illidge handed him the fine bright instrument. Lord Edward made a deep noise that signified thanks and turned back with the forceps to the anaesthetized newt that lay stretched out on the diminutive operating table. Illidge watched him critically, and approved. The Old Man was doing the job extraordinarily well. Illidge was always astonished by Lord Edward’s skill. You would never have expected a huge, lumbering creature like the Old Man to be so exquisitely nleat. His big hands could do the finest work; it was a pleasure to watch them.

‘There! ‘ said Lord Edward at last and straightened himself up as far as his rheumatically bent back would allow him. ‘I think that’s all right, don’t you? ‘

Illidge nodded. ‘Perfectly all right,’ he said in an accent that had certainly not been formed in any of the ancient and expensive seats of learning. It hinted of Lancashire origins. He was a small man, with a boyishlooking freckled face and red hair.

The newt began to wake up. Mlidge put it away in a place of safety. The animal had no tail; it had lost that eight days ago, and to-night the little bud of regenerated tissue which would normally have grown into a new tail had been removed and grafted on to the stump of its amputated right foreleg. Transplanted to its new position, would the bud turn into a foreleg, or continue incongruously to grow as a tail? Their first experiment had been with a tail-bud only just formed; it had duly turned into a leg. In the next, they had given the bud time to grow to a considerable size before they transplanted it; it had proved too far committed to tailhood to be able to adapt itself to the new conditions; they had manufactured a monster with a tail where an arm should have been. To-night they were experimenting on a bud of intermediate age.

Lord Edward took a pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it, looking meditatively meanwhile at the newt. ‘Interesting to see what happens this time,’ he said in his profound indistinct voice. ‘I should think we must be just about on the border line between…’ He left the sentence unfinished: it was always difficult for him to find the words to express his meaning. ‘The bud will have a difficult choice.’

‘To be or not to be,’ said Illidge facetiously, and started to laugh; but seeing that Lord Edward showed no signs of having been amused, he checked himself. Almost put his foot in it again. He felt annoyed with himself and also, unreasonably, with the Old Man.

Lord Edward filled his pipe. ‘Tail becomes leg,’ he said meditatively. ‘What’s the mechanism? Chemical peculiarities in the neighbouring…? It can’t obviously be the blood. Or do you suppose it has something to do with the electric tension? It does vary, of course, in different parts of the body. Though why we don’t all just vaguely proliferate like cancers… Growing in a definite shape is very unlikely, when you come to think of it. Very mysterious and…’ His voice trailed off into a deep and husky murmur.

Illidge listened disapprovingly. When the Old Man started off like this about the major and fundamental problems of biology, you never knew where he’d be getting to. Why, as likely as not he’d begin talking about God. It really made one blush. He was determined to prevent anything so discreditable happening this time. ‘The next step with these newts,’ he said in his most briskly practical tone, ‘is to tinker with the nervous system and see whether that has any influence on the grafts. Suppose, for example, we excised a piece of the spine…’

But Lord Edward was not listening to his assistant. He had taken his pipe out of his mouth, he had lifted his head and at the same time slightly cocked it on one side. He was frowning, as though making an effort to seize and remember something. He raised his hand in a gesture that commanded silence; Illidge interrupted himself in the middle of his sentence and also listened. A pattern of melody faintly traced itself upon the silence.

‘Bach?’ said Lord Edward in a whisper.

Pongileoni’s blowing and the scraping of the anonymous fiddlers had shaken the air in the great hall, had set the glass of the windows looking on to it vibrating; and this in turn had shaken the air in Lord Edward’s apartment on the further side. The shaking air rattled Lord Edward’s membrana tympani; the interlocked malleus, incus and stirrup bones were set in motion so as to agitate the membrane of the oval window and raise an infinitesimal storm in the fluid of the labyrinth. The hairy endings of the auditory nerve shuddered like weeds in a rough sea; a vast number of obscure miracles were performed in the brain, and Lord Edward ecstatically whispered ‘Bach! ‘ He smiled with pleasure, his eyes lit up. The young girl was singing to herself in solitude under the floating clouds. And then the cloud-solitary philosopher began poetically to meditate. ‘We must really go downstairs and listen,’ said Lord Edward. He got up. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Work can wait. One doesn’t hear this sort of thing every night.’

‘But what about clothes,’ said Illidge doubtfully. ‘I can’t come down like this.’ He looked down at himself. It had been a cheap suit at the best of times. Age had not improved it.

‘Oh, that doesn’t matter.’ A dog with the smell of rabbits in his nostrils could hardly have shown a more indecent eagerness than Lord Edward at the sound of Pongileoni’s flute. He took his assistant’s arm and hurried him out of the door, and along the corridor towards the stairs. ‘It’s just a little party,’ he went on. ‘I seem to remember my wife having said… Quite informal. And besides,’ he added, inventing new excuses to justify the violence of his musical appetite, ‘we can just slip in without… Nobody will notice.’

Illidge had his doubts. ‘I’m afraid it’s not a very small party,’ he began; he had seen the motors arriving.

‘Never mind, never mind,’ interrupted Lord Edward, lusting irrepressibly for Bach.

Illidge abandoned himself. He would look like a horrible fool, he reflected, in his shiny blue serge suit. But perhaps, on second thoughts, it was better to appear in shiny blue—straight from the laboratory, after all, and under the protection of the master of the house (himself in a tweed jacket), than in that old and, as he had perceived during previous excursions into Lady Edward’s luscious world, deplorably shoddy and illmade evening suit of his. It was better to be totally different from the rich and smart-a visitor from another intellectual planet—than a fourth-rate and snobbish imitator. Dressed in blue, one might be stared at as an oddity; in badly cut black (like a waiter) one was contemptuously ignored, one was despised for trying without success to be what one obviously wasn’t.

Illidge braced himself to play the part of the Martian visitor with firmness, even assertively.

Their entrance was even more embarrassingly conspicuous than Illidge had anticipated. The great staircase at Tantamount House comes down from the first floor in two branches which join, like a pair of equal rivers, to precipitate themselves in a single architectural cataract of Verona marble into the hall. It debouches under the arcades, in the centre of one of the sides of the covered quadrangle, opposite the vestibule and the front door. Coming in from the street, one looks across the hall and sees through the central arch of the opposite arcade the wide stairs and shining balustrades climbing up to a landing on which a Venus by Canova, the pride of the third marquess’s collection, stands pedestalled in an alcove, screening with a modest but coquettish gesture of her two hands, or rather failing to screen, her marble charms. It was at the foot of this triumphal slope of marble that Lady Edward had posted the orchestra; her guests were seated in serried rows confronting it. When Illidge and Lord Edward turned the corner in front of Canova’s Venus, tiptoeing, as they approached the music and the listening crowd, with steps ever more laboriously conspiratorial, they found themselves suddenly at the focus of a hundred pairs of eyes. A gust of curiosity stirred the assembled guests. The apparition from a world so different from theirs of this huge bent old man, pipe-smoking and tweed-jacketed, seemed strangely portentous. He had a certain air of the skeleton in the cupboard—broken loose; or of one of those monsters which haunt the palaces of only the best and most aristocratic families. The Beastie of Glamis, the Minotaur itself could hardly have aroused more interest than did Lord Edward. Lorgnons were raised, there was a general craning to left and right, as people tried to look round the well-fed obstacles in front of them. Becoming suddenly aware of so many inquisitive glances, Lord Edward took fright. A consciousness of social sin possessed him; he took his pipe out of his mouth and put it away, still smoking, into the pocket of his jacket. He halted irresolutely. Flight or advance? He turned this way and that, pivoting his whole bent body from the hips with a curious swinging motion, like the slow ponderous balancing of a camel’s neck. For a moment he wanted to retreat. But love of Bach was stronger than his terrors. He was the bear whom the smell of molasses constrains in spite of all his fears to visit the hunters’ camp; the lover who is ready to face an armed and outraged husband and the divorce court for the sake of an hour in his mistress’s arms. He went forward, tiptoeing down the stairs more conspiratorially than ever—Guy Fawkes discovered, but yet irrationally hoping that he might escape notice by acting as though the Gunpowder Plot were still unrolling itself according to plan. Illidge followed him. His face had gone very red with the embarrassment of the first moment; but in spite of this embarrassment, or rather because of it, he came downstairs after Lord Edward with a kind of swagger, one hand in his pocket, a smile on his lips. He turned his eyes coolly this way and that over the crowd. The expression on his face was one of contemptuous amusement. Too busy being the Martian to look where he was going, Illidge suddenly missed his footing on this unfamiliarly regal staircase with its inordinate treads and dwarfishly low risers. His foot slipped, he staggered wildly on the brink of a fall, waving his arms, to come to rest, however, still miraculously on his feet, some two or three steps lower down. He resumed his descent with such dignity as he could muster up. He felt exceedingly angry, he hated Lady Edward’s guests one and all, without exception.

CHAPTER IV

Pongileoni surpassed himself in the final Badinerie. Euclidean axioms made holiday with the formulae of elementary statics. Arithmetic held a wild saturnalian kermesse; algebra cut capers. The music came to an end in an orgy of mathematical merry-making. There was applause. Tolley bowed, with all his usual grace; Pongileoni bowed, even the anonymous fiddlers bowed. The audience pushed back its chairs and got up. Torrents of pent-up chatter broke loose.

‘Wasn’t the Old Man too marvellously funny?’ Polly Logan had found a friend.

‘And the little carroty man with him.’

‘Like Mutt and Jeff.’

‘I thought I should die of laughing,’ said Norah.

‘Such an old magician!’ Polly spoke in a thrilling whisper, leaning forward and opening her eyes very wide, as though to express in dramatic pantomime as well as words the mysteriousness of the magical old man. ‘A wizard.’

‘But what does he do up there?’

‘Cuts up toads and salamanders and all that,’ Polly answered.

‘Eye of newt and toe of frog,

Wool of bat and tongue of dog…’

She recited with gusto, intoxicated by the words. ‘And he takes guinea-pigs and makes them breed with serpents. Can you imagine it—a cross between a cobra and a guinea-pig?’

‘Ugh!’ the other shuddered. ‘But why did he ever marry her, if that’s the only sort of thing he’s interested in? That’s what I always wonder.’

‘Why did she marry him?’ Polly’s voice dropped again to a stage whisper. She liked to make everything sound exciting-as exciting as she still felt everything to be. She was only twenty. ‘There were very good reasons for that.’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘And she was a Canadian, remember, which made the reasons even more cogent.’

‘One wonders how Lucy ever…’

‘Sh-sh.’

The other looked round. ‘Wasn’t Pongileoni splendid,’ she exclaimed very loudly, and with altogether too much presence of mind.

‘Too wonderful!’ Polly bawled back, as though she were on the stage at Drury Lane. ‘Ah, there’s Lady Edward.’ They were both enormously surprised and delighted. ‘We were just saying how marvellous Pongileoni’s playing was.’

‘Were you?’ said Lady Edward smiling and looking from one to the other. She had a deep rich voice and spoke slowly, as though everything she said were very serious and important. ‘That was very nice of you.’ The ‘r’ was most emphatically rolled. ‘He’s an Italian,’ she added, and her face was now quite grave and unsmiling. ‘Which makes it even more wonderful.’ And she passed on, leaving the two young girls haggardly looking into one another’s blushing face.

Lady Edward was a small, thin woman, with an elegance of figure that, in a low-cut dress, was visibly beginning to run to bones and angles, as were also the aquiline good looks of a rather long and narrow face. A French mother and perhaps, in these later days, the hairdresser’s art accounted for the jetty blackness of her hair. Her skin was whitely opaque. Under arched black eyebrows her eyes had that boldness and insistence of regard which is the characteristic of all very dark eyes set in a pale face. To this generic boldness Lady Edward added a certain candid impertinence of fixed gaze and bright ingenuous expression that was entirely her own. They were the eyes of a child, ‘mais d’un enfant terrible,’ as John Bidlake had warned a French colleague whom he had taken to see her. The French colleague had occasion to make the discovery on his own account. At the luncheon table he found himself sitting next to the critic who had written of his pictures that they were the work either of an imbecile or of a practical joker. Wide-eyed and innocent, Lady Edward had started a discussion on art…. John Bidlake was furious. He drew her aside when the meal was over and gave her a piece of his mind.

‘Damn it all,’ he said, ‘the man’s my friend. I bring him to see you. And this is how you treat him. It’s a bit thick.’

Lady Edward’s bright black eyes had never been more candid, nor her voice more disarmingly French-Canadian (for she could modify her accent at will, making it more or less colonial according as it suited her to be the simple-hearted child of the North American steppe or the English aristocrat). ‘But what’s too thick?’ she asked. ‘What have I done this time?’

‘None of your comedy with me,’ said Bidlake.

‘But it isn’t a comedy. I’ve no idea what’s thick. No idea.’

Bidlake explained about the critic. ‘You knew as well as I do,’ he said.’ And now I come to think of it, we were talking about his article only last week.’

Lady Edward frowned, as though trying to recapture a vanished memory. ‘so we were!’ she cried at last, and looked at him with an expression of horror and repentance. ‘Too awful! But you know what a hopeless memory I have.’

‘You have the best memory of any person I know,’ said Bidlake.

‘But I always forget,’ she protested.

‘Only what you know you ought to remember. It’s a damned sight too regular to be accidental. You deliberately remember to forget.’

‘What nonsense!’ cried Lady Edward.

‘If you had a bad memory,’ Bidlake went on, ‘you might occasionally forget that husbands oughtn’t to be asked to meet the notorious lovers of their wives; you might sometimes forget that anarchists and leader writers in the Morning Post aren’t likely to be the best friends, and that pious Catholics don’t much enjoy listening to blasphemy from professional atheists. You might occasionally forget, if your memory were bad. But, I assure you, it needs a first-class memory to forget every time. A first-class memory and a first-class love of mischief.’

For the first time since the conversation had begun Lady Edward relaxed her ingenuous seriousness. She laughed. ‘You’re too absurd, my dear John.’

Talking, Bidlake had recovered his good humour; he echoed her laughter. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I don’t in the least object to your playing practical jokes on other people. I enjoy it. But I do draw the line at having them played on me.’

‘I’ll do my best to remember next time,’ she said meekly and looked at him with an ingenuousness that was so impertinent, that he had to laugh.

That had been many years before; she had kept her word and played no more tricks on him. But with other people, she was just as embarrassingly innocent and forgetful as ever. Throughout the world in which she moved her exploits were proverbial. People laughed. But there were too many victims; she was feared, she was not liked. But her parties were always thronged; her cook, her wine merchant and caterer were of the first class. Much was forgiven her for her husband’s wealth. Besides, the company at Tantamount House was always variously and often eccentrically distinguished. People accepted her invitations and took their revenge by speaking ill of her behind her back. They called her, among other things, a snob and a lion hunter. But a snob, they had to admit to her defenders, who laughed at the pomps and grandeurs for which she lived. A hunter who collected lions in order that she might bait them. Where a middle-class Englishwoman would have been serious and abject, Lady Edward was mockingly irreverent. She hailed from the New World; for her the traditional hierarchies were a joke—but a picturesque joke and one worth living for.

‘She might have been the heroine of that anecdote,’ old Bidlake had once remarked of her, ‘that anecdote about the American and the two English peers. You remember? He got into conversation with two Englishmen in the train, liked them very much, wanted to renew the acquaintance later and asked their names. “My name,” says one of them, “is the Duke of Hampshire and this is my friend the Master of Ballantrae.” “Glad to meet you,” says the American. “Allow me to present my son Jesus Christ.” That’s Hilda all over. And yet her whole life consists precisely in asking and being asked out by the people whose titles seem to her so comic. Queer.’ He shook his head.’very queer indeed.’

Turning way from the two discomfited young girls, Lady Edward was almost run down by a very tall and burly man, who was hurrying with dangerous speed across the crowded room.

‘Sorry,’ he said without looking down to see who it was he had almost knocked over. His eyes were following the movements of somebody at the other end of the room; he was only aware of a smallish obstacle, presumably human, since all the obstacles in the neighbourhood were human. He checked himself in mid career and took a step to the side, so as to get round the obstacle. But the obstacle was not of the kind one circumvents as easily as that.

Lady Edward reached out and caught him by the sleeve. ‘Webley!’ Pretending not to have felt the hand on his sleeve, not to have heard the calling of his name, Everard Webley still moved on; he had no wish and no leisure to talk to Lady Edward. But Lady Edward would not be shaken off; she suffered herself to be dragged along, still tugging, at his side.

‘Webley!’ she repeated.’Stop! Woa!’ And her imitation of a country carter was so loud and so realistically rustic that Webley was compelled to listen, for fear of attracting the laughing attention of his fellow guests.

He looked down at her. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said gruffly. ‘Sorry I hadn’t noticed.’ The annoyance, expressed in his frown and his ill-mannered words, was partly genuine, partly assumed. Many people, he had found, are frightened of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity. It kept people at a distance, saved him from being bothered.

‘Goodness!’ exclaimed Lady Edward with an expression of terror that was frankly a caricature.

‘Did you want anything?’ he demanded in the tone in which he might have addressed an importunate beggar in the street.

‘You do look cross.’

‘If that was all you wanted to say to me, I think I might as well…’

‘Lady Edward, meanwhile, had been examining him critically out of her candidly impertinent eyes.

‘You know,’ she said, interrupting him in the middle of his sentence, as though unable to delay for a moment longer the announcement of her great and sudden discovery,’ you ought to play the part of Captain Hook in Peter Pan. Yes, really. You have the ideal face for a pirate king. Hasn’t he, Mr. Babbage?’ She caught at Illidge as he was passing, disconsolately alien, through the crowd of strangers.

‘Good evening,’ he said. The cordiality of Lady Edward’s smile did not entirely make up for the insult of his unremembered name.

‘Webley, this is Mr. Babbage, who helps my husband with his work.’ Webley nodded a distant acknowledgment of Illidge’s existence. ‘But don’t you think he’s like a pirate king, Mr. Babbage? ‘ Lady Edward went on. ‘Look at him now.’

Illidge uncomfortably laughed. ‘Not that I’ve seen many pirate kings,’ he said.

‘But of course,’ Lady Edward cried out, ‘I’d forgotten; he is a pirate king. In real life. Aren’t you, Webley?’

Everard Webley laughed.’Oh, certainly, certainly.’

‘Because, you see,’ Lady Edward explained, turning confidentially to Illidge, ‘this is Mr. Everard Webley. The head of the British Freemen. You know those men in the green uniform? Like the male chorus at a musical comedy.’

Illidge smiled maliciously and nodded. So this, he was thinking, was Everard Webley. The founder and the head of the Brotherhood of British Freemen—the B.B.F.’s, the ‘B—y, b—ing, f—s,’ as their enemies called them. Inevitably; for, as the extremely well-informed correspondent of the Figaro once remarked in an article devoted to the Freemen, ‘les initiales B.B.F. ont, pour le public anglais, une signification plutot pejorative.’ Webley had not thought of that, when he gave his Freemen their name. It pleased Illidge to reflect that he must be made to think of it very often now.

‘If you’ve finished being funny,’ said Everard, ‘I’ll take my leave.’

Tinpot Mussolini, Illidge was thinking. Looks his part, too. (He had a special personal hatred of anyone who was tall and handsome, or who looked in any way distinguished. He himself was small and had the appearance of a very intelligent street Arab, grown up.) Great lout!’

‘But you’re not offended by anything I said, are you?’ Lady Edward asked with a great show of anxiety and contrition.

Illidge remembered a cartoon in the Daily Herald. ‘The British Freemen,’ Webley had had the insolence to say, ‘exist to keep the world safe for intelligence.’ The cartoon showed Webley and half a dozen of his uniformed bandits kicking and bludgeoning a workman to death. Behind them a top-hatted company-director looked on approvingly. Across his monstrous belly sprawled the word: INTELLIGENCE.

‘Not offended, Webley?’ Lady Edward repeated.

‘Not in the least. I’m only rather busy. You see,’ he explained in his silkiest voice, ‘ I have things to do. I work, if you know what that means.’

Illidge wished that the hit had been scored by someone else. The dirty ruffian! He himself was a communist. Webley left them. Lady Edward watched him ploughing his way through the crowd. ‘Like a steam engine, she said. ‘What energy! But so touchy. These politicians—worse than actresses. Such vanity! And dear Webley hasn’t got much sense of humour. He wants to be treated as though he were his own colossal statue, erected by an admiring and grateful nation.’ (The r’s roared like lions.) ‘Posthumously, if you see what I mean. As a great historical character. I can never remember, when I see him, that he’s really Alexander the Great. I always make the mistake of thinking it’s just Webley.’

Illidge laughed. He found himself positively liking Lady Edward. She had the right feelings about things. She seemed even to be on the right side, politically.

‘Not but what his Freemen aren’t a very good thing,’ Lady Edward went on. Illidge’s sympathy began to wane as suddenly as it had shot up.’don’t you think so, Mr. Babbage?’

He made a little grimace. ‘Well…’ he began.

‘By the way,’ said Lady Edward, cutting short what would have been an admirably sarcastic comment of Webley’s Freemen, ‘you must really be careful coming down those stairs. They’re terribly slippery.’

Illidge blushed. ‘Not at all,’ he muttered and blushed still more deeply—a beetroot to the roots of his carrot-coloured hair—as he realized the imbecility of what he had said. His sympathy declined still further.

‘Well, rather slippery all the same,’ Lady Edward politely insisted, with an emphatic rolling in the throat. ‘What were you working at with Edward this evening? ‘ she went on. ‘It always interests me so much.’

Illidge smiled. ‘Well, if you really want to know,’ he said, ‘we were working at the regeneration of lost parts in newts.’ Among the newts he felt more at ease; a little of his liking for Lady Edward returned.

‘Newts? Those things that swim?’ Illidge nodded. ‘But how do they lose their parts? ‘

‘Well, in the laboratory,’ he explained, ‘they lose them because we cut them off.’

‘And they grow again?’

‘They grow again.’

‘Dear me,’ said Lady Edward. ‘I never knew that. How fascinating these things are. Do tell me some more.’

She wasn’t so bad after all. He began to explain. Warming to his subject, he warmed also to Lady Edward. He had just reached the crucial, the important and significant point in the proceedings—the conversion of the transplanted tail-bud into a leg—when Lady Edward, whose eyes had been wandering, laid her hand on his arm.

‘Come with me,’ she said, ‘and I’ll introduce you to General Knoyle. Such an amusing old man—if only unintentionally sometimes.’

Illidge’s exposition froze suddenly in his throat. He realized that she had not taken the slightest interest in what he had been saying, had not even troubled to pay the least attention. Detesting her, he followed in resentful silence.

General Knoyle was talking with another military-looking gentleman. His voice was martial and asthmatic. ‘“My dear fellow,” I said to him’ (they heard him as they approached), ‘“my dear fellow, don’t enter the horse now. It would be a crime,” I said. “It would be sheer madness. Scratch him,” I said, “scratch him.” And he scratched him.’

Lady Edward made her presence known. The two military gentlemen were overwhelmingly polite; they had enjoyed their evening immensely.

‘I chose the Bach specially for you, General Knoyle,’ said Lady Edward with something of the charming confusion of a young girl confessing an amorous foible.

‘Well—er—really, that was very kind of you.’ General Knoyle’s confusion was genuine; he did not know what to do with the musical present she had made him.

‘I hesitated,’ Lady Edward went on in the same significantly intimate tone, ‘between Handel’s Water Music and the B minor Suite with Pongileoni. Then I remembered you and decided on the Bach.’ Her eyes took in the signs of embarrassment on the General’s ruddy face.

‘That was very kind of you,’ he protested. ‘Not that I can pretend to understand much about music. But I know what I like, I know what I like.’ The phrase seemed to give him confidence. He cleared his throat and started again. ‘What I always say is…’

‘And now,’ Lady Edward concluded triumphantly, ‘I want to introduce Mr. Babbage, who helps Edward with his work and who is a real expert on newts. Mr. Babbage, this is General Knoyle and this is Colonel Pilchard.’ She gave a last smile and was gone.

‘Well, I’m damned!’ exclaimed the General, and the Colonel said she was a holy terror.

‘One of the holiest,’ Illidge feelingly agreed.

The two military gentlemen looked at him for a moment and decided that from one so obviously beyond the pale the comment was an impertinence. Good Catholics may have their little jokes about the saints and the habits of the clergy; but they are outraged by the same little jokes on the lips of infidels. The General made no verbal comment and the Colonel contented himself with looking his disapproval. But the way in which they turned to one another and continued their interrupted discussion of race-horses, as though they were alone, was so intentionally offensive, that Illidge wanted to kick them.

****

‘Lucy, my child!’

‘Uncle John!’ Lucy Tantamount turned round and smiled at her adopted uncle. She was of middle height and slim, like her mother, with short dark hair, oiled to complete blackness and brushed back from her forehead. Naturally pale, she wore no rouge. Only her thin lips were painted and there was a little blue round the eyes. A black dress emphasized the whiteness of her arms and shoulders. It was more than two years now since Henry Tantamount had died—for Lucy had married her second cousin. But she still mourned in her dress, at any rate by artificial light. Black suited her so well. ‘How are you?’ she added, thinking as she spoke the words that he was beginning to look very old.

‘Perishing,’ said John Bidlake. He took her arm familiarly, grasping it just above the elbow with a big, blue-veined hand. ‘Give me an excuse for going to have supper. I’m ravenously hungry.’

‘But I’m not.’

‘No matter,’ said old Bidlake. ‘My need is greater than thine, as Sir Philip Sidney so justly remarked.’

‘But I don’t want to eat.’ She objected to being domineered, to following instead of leading. But Uncle John was too much for her.

‘I’ll do all the eating,’ he declared. ‘Enough for two.’ And jovially laughing, he continued to lead her along towards the dining-room.

Lucy abandoned the struggle. They edged their way through the crowd. Greenish-yellow and freckled, the orchid in John Bidlake’s button-hole resembled the face of a yawning serpent. His monocle glittered in his eye.

‘Who’s that old man with Lucy?’ Polly Logan enquired as they passed.

‘That’s old Bidlake.’

‘Bidlake? The man who…who painted the pictures?’ Polly spoke hesitatingly, in the tone of one who is conscious of a hole in her education and is afraid of making a ridiculous mistake.’do you mean that Bidlake?’ Her companion nodded. She felt enormously relieved. ‘Well I never,’ she went on, raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes very wide. ‘I always thought he was an Old Master. But he must be about a hundred by this time, isn’t he?’

‘I should think he must be.’ Norah was also under twenty.

‘I must say,’ Polly handsomely admitted, ‘he doesn’t look it. He’s still quite a beau, or a buck, or a Champagne Charlie, or whatever people were in his young days.’

‘He’s had about fifteen wives,’ said Norah.

It was at this moment that Hugo Brockle found the courage to present himself. ‘You don’t remember me. We were introduced in our perambulators.’ How idiotic it sounded! He felt himself blushing all over.

The third and finest ofJohn Bidlake’s ‘Bathers’ hung over the mantelpiece in the dining-room of Tantamount House. It was a gay and joyous picture, very light in tone, the colouring very pure and brilliant. Eight plump and pearly bathers grouped themselves in the water and on the banks of a stream so as to form with their moving bodies and limbs a kind of garland (completed above by the foliage of a tree) round the central point of the canvas. Through this wreath of nacreous flesh (and even their faces were just smiling flesh, not a trace of spirit to distract you from the contemplation of the lovely forms and their relations) the eye travelled on towards a pale bright landscape of softly swelling downland and clouds.

Plate in hand and munching caviar sandwiches, old Bidlake stood with his companion, contemplating his own work. An emotion of mingled elation and sadness possessed him.

‘It’s good,’ he said, ‘it’s enormously good. Look at the way it’s composed. Perfect balance, and yet there’s no suggestion of repetition or artificial arrangement.’ The other thoughts and feelings which the picture had evoked in his mind he left unexpressed. They were too many and too confused to be easily put into words. Too melancholy above all; he did not care to dwell on them. He stretched out a finger and touched the sideboard; it was mahogany, genuine wood. ‘Look at the figure on the right with the arms up.’ He went on with his technical exposition in order that he might keep down, might drive away the uninvited thoughts.’see how it compensates for the big stooping one there on the left. Like a long lever lifting a heavy weight.’ But the figure with the arms up was Jenny Smith, the loveliest model he had ever had. Incarnation of beauty, incarnation of stupidity and vulgarity. A goddess as long as she was naked, kept her mouth shut, or had it kept shut for her with kisses; but oh, when she opened it, when she put on her clothes, her frightful hats! He remembered the time he had taken her to Paris with him. He had to send her back after a week. ‘You ought to be muzzled, Jenny,’ he told her, and Jenny cried. ‘It was a mistake going to Paris,’ he went on. ‘Too much sun in Paris, too many artificial lights. Next time, we’ll go to Spitzbergen. In winter. The nights are six months long up there.’ That had made her cry still more loudly. The girl had treasures of sensuality as well as of beauty. Afterwards she took to drink and decayed, came round begging and drank up the charity. And finally what was left of her died. But the real Jenny remained here in the picture with her arms up and the pectoral muscles lifting her little breasts. What remained of John Bidlake, the John Bidlake of five and twenty years ago, was there in the picture too. Another John Bidlake still existed to contemplate his own ghost. Soon even he would have disappeared. And in any case, was he the real Bidlake, any more than the sodden and bloated woman who died had been the real Jenny? Real Jenny lived among the pearly bathers. And real Bidlake, their creator, existed by implication in his creatures.

‘It’s good,’ he said again, when he had finished his exposition, and his tons was mournful; his face as he looked at his picture was sad. ‘But after all,’ he added, after a little pause and with a sudden explosion of voluntary laughter,’ after all, everything I do is good; damn good even.’ It was a bidding of defiance to the stupid critics who had seen a falling off in his later paintings; it was a challenge to his own past, to time and old age, to the real John Bidlake who had painted real Jenny and kissed her into silence.

‘Of course it’s good,’ said Lucy, and wondered why the old man’s painting had fallen off so much of late. This last exhibition—it was deplorable. He himself, after all, had remained so young, comparatively speaking. Though of course, she reflected, as she looked at him, he had certainly aged a good deal during the last few months.

‘Of course,’ he repeated. ‘That’s the right spirit.’

‘Though I must confess,’ Lucy added, to change the subject, ‘I always find your bathers rather an insult.’

‘An insult?’

‘Speaking as a woman, I mean. Do you really find us so profoundly silly as you paint us?’

‘Yes, do you?’ another voice enquired. ‘Do you really?’ It was an intense, emphatic voice, and the words came out in gushes, explosively, as though they were being forced through a narrow aperture under emotional pressure.

Lucy and John Bidlake turned and saw Mrs. Betterton, massive in dove grey, with arms, old Bidlake reflected, like thighs, and hair that was, in relation to the fleshy cheeks and chins, ridiculously short, curly and auburn. Her nose, which had tilted up so charmingly in the days when he had ridden the black horse and she the bay, was now preposterous, an absurd irrelevance in the middleaged face. Real Bidlake had ridden with her, just before he had painted these bathers. She had talked about art with a naive, schoolgirlish earnestness which he had found laughable and charming. He had cured her, he remembered, of a passion for Burne-Jones, but never, alas, of her prejudice in favour of virtue. It was with all the old earnestness and a certain significant sentimentality as of one who remembers old times and would like to exchange reminiscences as well as general ideas, that she now addressed him. Bidlake had to pretend that he was pleased to see her after all these years. It was extraordinary, he reflected as he took her hand, how completely he had succeeded in avoiding her; he could not remember having spoken to her more than three or four times in all the quarter of a century which had turned Mary Betterton into a memento mori.

‘Dear Mrs. Betterton!’ he exclaimed. ‘This is delightful.’ But he disguised his repugnance very badly. And when she addressed him by his Christian name— ‘Now, John,’ she said, ‘you must give us an answer to our question,’ and she laid her hand on Lucy’s arm, so as to associate her in the demand—old Bidlake was positively indignant. Familiarity from a memento mori—it was intolerable. He’d give her a lesson. The question, it happened, was well chosen for his purposes; it fairly invited the retort discourteous. Mary Betterton had intellectual pretensions, was tremendously keen on the soul. Remembering this, old Bidlake asserted that he had never known a woman who had anything worth having beyond a pair of legs and a figure. Some of them, he added, significantly, lacked even those indispensables. True, many of them had interesting faces; but that meant nothing. Bloodhounds, he pointed out, have the air of learned judges, oxen when they chew the cud seem to meditate the problems of metaphysics, the mantis looks as though it were praying; but these appearances are entirely deceptive. It was the same with women. He had preferred to paint his bathers unmasked as well as naked, to give them faces that were merely extensions of their charming bodies and not deceptive symbols of a non-existent spirituality. It seemed to him more realistic, truer to the fundamental facts. He felt his good humour returning as he talked, and, as it came back, his dislike for Mary Betterton seemed to wane. When one is in high spirits, memento mori’s cease to remind.

‘John, you’re incorrigible,’ said Mrs. Betterton, indulgently. She turned to Lucy, smiling. ‘But he doesn’t mean a word he says.’

‘I should have thought, on the contrary, that he meant it all,’ objected Lucy. ‘I’ve noticed that men who like women very much are the ones who express the greatest contempt for them.’

Old Bidlake laughed.

‘Because they’re the ones who know women most intimately.’

‘Or perhaps because they resent our power over them.’

‘But I assure you,’ Mrs. Betterton insisted, ‘he doesn’t mean it. I knew him before you were born, my dear.’

The gaiety went out of John Bidlake’s face. The memento mori grinned for him again behind Mary Betterton’s flabby mask.

‘Perhaps he was different then,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s been infected by the cynicism of the younger generation, I suppose. We’re dangerous company, Uncle John. You ought to be careful.’

She had started one of Mrs. Betterton’s favourite hares. That lady dashed off in serious pursuit. ‘It’s the upbringing,’ she explained. ‘Children are brought up so stupidly nowadays. No wonder they’re cynical.’ She proceeded eloquently. Children were given too much, too early. They were satiated with amusements, inured to all the pleasures from the cradle. ‘I never saw the inside of a theatre till I was eighteen’ she declared, with pride.

‘My poor dear lady!’

‘I began going when I was six,’ said Lucy.

‘And dances,’ Mrs. Betterton continued. ‘The hunt ball—what an excitement! Because it only happened once a year.’ She quoted Shakespeare.

‘Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,

Since seldom coming, in the long year set,

Like stones of worth they thinly placed….

‘They’re a row of pearls nowadays.’

‘And false ones at that,’ said Lucy.

Mrs. Betterton was triumphant. ‘False ones-you see? But for us they were genuine, because they were rare. We didn’t “blunt the fine point of seldom pleasure” by daily wear. Nowadays young people are bored and world-weary before they come of age. A pleasure too often repeated produces numbness; it’s no more felt as a pleasure.’

‘And what’s your remedy? ‘ enquired John Bidlake. ‘If a member of the congregation may be permitted to ask questions,’ he added ironically.

‘Naughty!’ cried Mrs. Betterton with an appalling playfulness. Then, becoming serious, ‘The remedy,’ she went on, ‘is fewer diversions.’

‘But I don’t want them fewer,’ objected John Bidlake. ‘In that case,’ said Lucy, ‘they must be strongerprogressively.’

‘Progressively?’ Mrs. Betterton repeated. ‘But where would that sort of progress end?’

‘In bull fighting?’ suggested John Bidlake. ‘Or gladiatorial shows? Or public executions, perhaps? Or the amusements of the Marquis de Sade? Where?’

Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘Who knows?’

****

Hugo Brockle and Polly were already quarrelling.

‘I think it’s detestable,’ Polly was saying—and her face was flushed with anger, ‘to make war on the poor.’

‘But the Freemen don’t make war on the poor.’

‘They do.’

‘They don’t,’ said Hugo. ‘Read Webley’s speeches.’

‘I only read about his actions.’

‘But they’re in accordance with his words.’

‘They are not.’

‘They are. All he’s opposed to is dictatorship of a class.’

‘Of the poor class.’

‘Of any class,’ Hugo earnestly insisted. ‘That’s his whole point. The classes must be equally strong. A strong working class clamouring for high wages keeps the professional middle class active.’

‘Like fleas on a dog,’ suggested Polly and laughed with a return towards good humour. When a ludicrous thought occurred to her she could never prevent herself from giving utterance to it, even when she was supposed to be serious, or, as in this case, in a rage.

‘They’ve jolly well got to be inventive and progressive,’ Hugo continued, struggling with the difficulties of lucid exposition. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to pay the workers what they demand and make a profit for themselves. And at the same time a strong and intelligent middle class is good for the workers, because they get good leadership and good organization. Which means better wages and peace and happiness.’

‘Amen,’ said Polly.

‘So the dictatorship of one class is nonsense,’ continued Hugo. ‘Webley wants to keep all the classes and strengthen them. He wants them to live in a condition of tension, so that the state is balanced by each pulling as hard as it can its own way. Scientists say that the different organs of the body are like that. They live in a state—’ he hesitated, he blushed—’of hostile symbiosis.’

‘Golly!’

‘I’m sorry,’ Hugo apologized.

‘All the same,’ said Polly, ‘he doesn’t want to allow men to strike.’

‘Because strikes are stupid.’

‘He’s against democracy.’

‘Because it allows such awful people to get power. He wants the best to rule.’

‘Himself, for example,’ said Polly sarcastically.

‘Well, why not? If you knew what a wonderful chap he was.’ Hugo became enthusiastic. He had been acting as one of Webley’s aides-de-camp for the last three months. ‘I never met anyone like him,’ he said.

Polly listened to his outpourings with a smile. She felt old and superior. At school she herself had felt and talked like that about the domestic economy mistress. All the same, she liked him for being so loyal.

CHAPTER V

A jungle of innumerable trees and dangling creepers—it was in this form that parties always presented themselves to Walter Bidlake’s imagination. A jungle of noise; and he was lost in the jungle, he was trying to clear a path for himself through its tangled luxuriance. The people were the roots of the trees and their voices were the stems and waving branches and festooned lianas—yes, and the parrots and the chattering monkeys as well.

The trees reached up to the ceiling and from the ceiling they were bent back again, like mangroves, towards the floor. But in this particular room, Walter reflected, in this queer combination of a Roman courtyard and the Palm House at Kew, the growths of sound shooting up, uninterrupted, through the height of three floors, would have gathered enough momentum to break clean through the flimsy glass roof that separated them from the outer night. He pictured them going up and up, like the magic beanstalk of the Giant Killer, into the sky. Up and up, loaded with orchids and bright cockatoos, up through the perennial mist of London, into the clear moonlight beyond the smoke. He fancied them waving up there in the moonlight, the last thin aerial twigs of noise. That loud laugh, for example, that exploding guffaw from the fat man on the left-it would mount and mount, diminishing as it rose, till it no more than delicately tinkled up there under the moon. And all these voices (what were they saying? ‘… made an excellent speech…’; ‘… no idea how comfortable those rubber reducing belts are till you’ve tried them…’; ‘… such a bore…’; ‘… eloped with the chauffeur…’), all these voices—how exquisite and tiny they’d be up there! But meanwhile down here, in the jungle… Oh, loud, stupid, vulgar, fatuous.

Looking over the heads of the people who surrounded him, he saw Frank Illidge, alone, leaning against a pillar. His attitude, his smile were Byronic, at once world-weary and contemptuous; he glanced about him with a languid amusement, as though he were watching the drolleries of a group of monkeys. Unfortunately, Walter reflected, as he made his way through the crowd towards him, poor Illidge hadn’t the right physique for being Byronically superior. Satirical romantics should be long, slow-moving, graceful and handsome. Illidge was small, alert and jerky. And what a comic face! Like a street Arab’s, with its upturned nose and wide slit of a mouth; a very intelligent, sharp-witted street Arab’s face, but not exactly one to be languidly contemptuous with. Besides, who can be superior with freckles? Illidge’s complexion was sandy with them. Protectively coloured, the sandy-brown eyes, the sandyorange eyebrows and lashes disappeared, at a little distance, into the skin, as a lion dissolves into the desert. From across a room his face seemed featureless and unregarding, like the face of a statue carved out of a block of sandstone. Poor Illidge! The Byronic part made him look rather ridiculous.

‘Hullo,’ said Walter, as he got within speaking distance. The two young men shook hands. ‘How’s science?’ What a silly question! thought Walter as he pronounced the words.

Illidge shrugged his shoulders. ‘Less fashionable than the arts, to judge by this party.’ He looked round him. ‘I’ve seen half the writing and painting section of Who’s Who this evening. The place fairly stinks of art.’

‘Isn’t that rather a comfort for science?’ said Walter. ‘The arts don’t enjoy being fashionable.’

‘Oh, don’t they! Why are you here, then?’

‘Why indeed?’ Walter parried the question with a laugh. He looked round, wondering where Lucy could have gone. He had not caught sight of her since the music stopped.

‘You’ve come to do your tricks and have your head patted,’ said Illidge, trying to get a little of his own back; the memory of that slip on the stairs, of Lady Edward’s lack of interest in newts, of the military gentlemen’s insolence, still rankled. ‘Just look at that girl there with the frizzy dark hair, in cloth of silver. The one like a little white negress. What about her, for example? It’d be pleasant to have one’s head patted by that sort of thing—eh?’

‘Well, would it?’

Illidge laughed. ‘You take the high philosophical line, do you? But, my dear chap, admit it’s all humbug I take it myself, so I ought to know. To tell you the honest truth, I envy you art-mongers your success. It makes me really furious when I see some silly, halfwitted little writer…’

‘Like me, for example.’

‘No, you’re a cut above most of them,’ conceded Illidge. ‘But when I see some wretched little scribbler with a tenth of my intelligence, making money and being cooed over, while I’m disregarded, I do get furious sometimes.’

‘You ought to regard it as a compliment. If they coo over us, it’s because they can understand, more or less, what we’re after. They can’t understand you; you’re above them. Their neglect is a compliment to your mind.’

‘Perhaps; but it’s a damned insult to my body.’ Illidge was painfully conscious of his appearance. He knew that he was ugly and looked undistinguished. And knowing, he liked to remind himself of the unpleasant fact, like a man with an aching tooth, who is for ever fingering the source of his pain, just to make sure it is still painful. ‘If I looked like that enormous lout, Webley, they wouldn’t neglect me, even if my mind were like Newton’s. The fact is,’ he said, giving the aching tooth a good tug this time, ‘ I look like an anarchist. You’re lucky, you know. You look like a gentleman, or at least like an artist. You’ve no idea what a nuisance it is to look like an intellectual of the lower classes.’ The tooth was responding excruciatingly; he pulled at it the harder. ‘It’s not merely that the women neglect you—these women, at any rate. That’s bad enough. But the police refuse to neglect you; they take a horrid inquisitive interest. Would you believe it, I’ve been twice arrested, simply because I look like the sort of man who makes infernal machines.’

‘It’s a good story,’ said Walter sceptically.

‘But true, I swear. Once it was in this country. Near Chesterfield. They were having a coal strike. I happened to be looking on at a fight between strikers and blacklegs. The police didn’t like my face and grabbed me. It took me hours to get out of their clutches. The other time was in Italy. Somebody had just been trying to blow up Mussolini, I believe. Anyhow, a gang of black-shirted bravoes made me get out of the train at Genoa and searched me from top to toe. Intolerable! Simply because of my subversive face.’

‘Which corresponds, after all, to your ideas.’

‘Yes, but a face isn’t evidence, a face isn’t a crime. Well yes,’ he added parenthetically,’ perhaps some faces are crimes. Do you know General Knoyle? ‘ Walter nodded. ‘His is a capital offence. Nothing short of hanging would do for a man like that. God! how I’d like to kill them all!’ Had he not slipped on the stairs and been snubbed by a stupid man-butcher?’How I loathe the rich! Loathe them! Don’t you think they’re horrible?’

‘More horrible than the poor?’ The recollection of Wetherington’s sickroom made him almost at once feel rather ashamed of the question.

 ‘Yes, yes. There’s something peculiarly base and ignoble and diseased about the rich. Money breeds a kind of gangrened insensitiveness. It’s inevitable. Jesus understood. That bit about the camel and the needle’s eye is a mere statement of fact. And remember that other bit about loving your neighbours. You’ll be thinking I’m a Christian at this rate,’ he added with parenthetic apology. ‘But honour where honour is due. The man had sense; he saw what was what. Neighbourliness is the touchstone that shows up the rich. The rich haven’t got any neighbours.’

‘But, damn it, they’re not anchorites.’

‘But they have no neighbours in the sense that the poor have neighbours. When my mother had to go out, Mrs. Cradock from next door on the right kept an eye on us children. And my mother did the same for Mrs. Cradock when it was her turn to go out. And when somebody had broken a leg, or lost his job, people helped with money and food. And how well I remember, as a little boy, being sent running round the village after the nurse, because young Mrs. Foster from next door on the left had suddenly been taken with birth pains before she expected! When you live on less than four pounds a week, you’ve damned well got to behave like a Christian and love your neighbour. To begin with, you can’t get away from him; he’s practically in your back-yard. There can be no refined and philosophical ignoring of his existence. You must either hate or love; and on the whole you’d better make a shift to love, because you may need his help in emergencies and he may need yours—so urgently, very often, that there can be no question of refusing to give it. And since you must give, since, if you’re a human being, you can’t help giving, it’s better to make an effort to like the person you’ve anyhow got to give to.’

 Walter nodded. ‘Obviously.’

‘But you rich,’ the other went on, ‘you have no real neighbours. You never perform a neighbourly action or expect your neighbours to do you a kindness in return. It’s unnecessary. You can pay people to look after you. You can hire servants to simulate kindness for three pounds a month and board. Mrs. Cradock from next door doesn’t have to keep an eye on your babies when you go out. You have nurses and governesses doing it for money. No, you’re generally not even aware of your neighbours. You live at a distance from them. Each of you is boxed up in his own secret house. There may be tragedies going on behind the shutters; but the people next door don’t know anything about it.’

‘Thank God!’ ejaculated Walter.

‘Thank him by all means. Privacy’s a great luxury. Very pleasant, I agree. But you pay for luxuries. People aren’t moved by misfortunes they don’t know about. Ignorance is insensitive bliss. In a poor street misfortune can’t be hidden. Life’s too public. People have their neighbourly feeling kept in constant training. But the rich never have a chance of being neighbourly to their equals. The best they can do is to feel mawkish about the sufferings of their inferiors, which they can never begin to understand, and to be patronizingly kind. Horrible! And that’s when they’re doing their best. When they’re at their worst, they’re like this.’ He indicated the crowded room. ‘They’re Lady Edward —the lowest hell! They’re that daughter of hers….’ He made a grimace, he shrugged his shoulders.

Walter listened with a strained and agonized attention.

‘Damned, destroyed, irrevocably corrupted,’ Illidge went on like a denouncing prophet. He had only once spoken to Lucy Tantamount, casually, for a moment. She had seemed hardly to notice that he was there.

It was true, Walter was thinking. She was all that people enviously or disapprovingly called her, and yet the most exquisite and marvellous of beings. Knowing all, he could listen to anything that might be said about her. And the more atrocious the words the more desperately he loved her. Credo quia absurdum. Amo quia turpe, quia indignum….

‘What a putrefaction!’ Illidge continued grandiloquently. ‘The consummate flower of this charming civilization of ours—that’s what she is. A refined and perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal. The logical conclusion, so far as most people are concerned, of having money and leisure.’

Walter listened, his eyes shut, thinking of Lucy. ‘A perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal.’ The words were true and an excruciation; but he loved her all the more because of the torment and because of the odious truth.

‘Well,’ said Illidge in a changed voice, ‘I must go and see if the Old Man wants to go on working to-night. We don’t generally knock off before halfpast one or two. It’s rather pleasant living upside down like this. Sleeping till lunch-time, starting work after tea. Very pleasant, really.’ He held out his hand.’So long.’

‘We must dine together one evening,’ said Walter without much conviction. Illidge nodded.

‘Let’s fix it up one of these days,’ he said and was gone.

Walter edged his way through the crowd, searching.

****

Everard Webley had got Lord Edward into a corner and was trying to persuade him to support the British Freemen.

‘But I’m not interested in politics,’ the Old Man huskily protested. ‘I’m not interested in politics….’ Obstinately, mulishly, he repeated the phrase, whatever Webley might say.

Webley was eloquent. Men of good will, men with a stake in the country ought to combine to resist the forces of destruction. It was not only property that was menaced, not only the material interests of a class; it was the English tradition, it was personal initiative, it was intelligence, it was all natural distinction of any kind. The Freemen were banded to resist the dictatorship of the stupid; they were armed to protect individuality from the mass man, the mob; they were fighting for the recognition of natural superiority in every sphere. The enemies were many and busy.

But forewarned was forearmed; when you saw the bandits approaching, you formed up in battle order and drew your swords. (Webley had a weakness for swords; he wore one when the Freemen paraded, his speeches were full of them, his house bristled with panoplies.) Organization, discipline, force were necessary. The battle could no longer be fought constitutionally. Parliamentary methods were quite adequate when the two parties agreed about fundamentals and disagreed only about trifling details. But where fundamental principles were at stake, you couldn’t allow politics to go on being treated as a Parliamentary game. You had to resort to direct action or the threat of it.

‘I was five years in Parliament,’ said Webley. ‘Long enough to convince myself that there’s nothing to be done in these days by Parliamentarism. You might as well try to talk a fire out. England can only be saved by direct action. When it’s saved we can begin to think about Parliament again. (Something very unlike the present ridiculous collection of mob-elected rich men it’ll have to be.) Meanwhile, there’s nothing for it but to prepare for fighting. And preparing for fighting, we may conquer peacefully. It’s the only hope. Believe me, Lord Edward, it’s the only hope.’

Harassed, like a bear in a pit set upon by dogs, Lord Edward turned uneasily this way and that, pivoting his bent body from the loins. ‘But I’m not interested in pol…’ He was too agitated to be able to finish the word.

‘But even if you’re not interested in politics,’ Webley persuasively continued, ‘you must be interested in your fortune, your position, the future of your family. Remember, all those things will go down in the general destruction.’

‘Yes, but… No….’ Lord Edward was growing desperate

‘I… I’m not interested in money.’

Once, years before, the head of the firm of solicitors to whom he left the entire management of his affairs, had called, in spite of Lord Edward’s express injunction that he was never to be troubled with matters of business, to consult his client about a matter of investments. There were some eighty thousand pounds to be disposed of. Lord Edward was dragged from the fundamental equations of the statics of living systems. When he learned the frivolous cause of the interruption, the ordinarily mild Old Man became unrecognizably angry. Mr. Figgis, whose voice was loud and whose manner confident, had been used, in previous interviews, to having things all his own way. Lord Edward’s fury astonished and appalled him. It was as though, in his rage, the Old Man had suddenly thrown back atavistically to the feudal past, had remembered that he was a Tantamount, talking to a hired servant. He had given orders; they had been disobeyed and his privacy unjustifiably disturbed. It was insufferable. If this sort of thing should ever happen again, he would transfer his affairs to another solicitor. And with that he wished Mr. Figgis a very good afternoon.

‘I’m not interested in money,’ he now repeated.

Illidge, who had approached and was hovering in the neighbourhood, waiting for an opportunity to address the Old Man, overheard the remark and exploded with inward laughter. ‘These rich! ‘ he thought. ‘These bloody rich!’ They were all the same.

‘But if not for your own sake,’ Webley insisted, attacking from another quarter, ‘for the sake of civilization, of progress.’

Lord Edward started at the word. It touched a trigger, it released a flood of energy. ‘Progress! he echoed, and the tone of misery and embarrassment was exchanged for one of confidence. ‘Progress! You politicians are always talking about it. As though it were going to last. Indefinitely. More motors, more babies, more food, more advertising, more money, more everything, for ever. You ought to take a few lessons in my subject. Physical biology. Progress, indeed! What do you propose to do about phosphorus, for example? ‘ His question was a personal accusation.

‘But all this is entirely beside the point,’ said Webley impatiently.

‘On the contrary,’ retorted Lord Edward, ‘ it’s the only point.’ His voice had become loud and severe. He spoke with a much more than ordinary degree of coherence. Phosphorus had made a new man of him; he felt very strongly about phosphorus and, feeling strongly, he was strong. The worried bear had become the worrier. ‘With your intensive agriculture,’ he went on, ‘you’re simply draining the soil of phosphorus. More than half of one per cent. a year. Going clean out of circulation. And then the way you throw away hundreds of thousands of tons of phosphorus pentoxide in your sewage! Pouring it into the sea. And you call that progress. Your modern sewage systems!’ His tone was witheringly scornful. ‘You ought to be putting it back where it came from. On the land.’ Lord Edward shook an admonitory finger and frowned. ‘On the land, I tell you.’

‘But all this has nothing to do with me,’ protested Webley.

‘Then it ought to,’ Lord Edward answered sternly. ‘That’s the trouble with you politicians. You don’t even think of the important things. Talking about progress and votes and Bolshevism and every year allowing a million tons of phosphorus pentoxide to run away into the sea. It’s idiotic, it’s criminal, it’s… it’s fiddling while Rome is burning.’ He saw Webley opening his mouth to speak and made haste to anticipate what he imagined was going to be his objection. ‘No doubt,’ he said, ‘you think you can make good the loss with phosphate rocks. But what’ll you do when the deposits are exhausted? ‘ He poked Everard in the shirt front. ‘What then? Only two hundred years and they’ll be finished. You think we’re being progressive because we’re living on our capital Phosphates, coal, petroleum, nitre—squander them all. That’s your policy. And meanwhile you go round trying to make our flesh creep with talk about revolutions.’

‘But damn it all,’ said Webley, half angry, half amused, ‘your phosphorus can wait. This other danger’s imminent. Do you want a political and social revolution?’

‘Will it reduce the population and check production?’ asked Lord Edward.

‘Of course.’

‘Then certainly I want a revolution.’ The Old Man thought in terms of geology and was not afraid of logical conclusions. ‘Certainly.’ Illidge could hardly contain his laughter.

‘Well, if that’s your view…’ began Webley; but Lord Edward interrupted him.

‘The only result of your progress,’ he said, ‘ will be that in a few generations there ‘II be a real revolutiona natural, cosmic revolution. You’re upsetting the equilibrium. And in the end, nature will restore it. And the process will be very uncomfortable for you. Your decline will be as quick as your rise. Quicker, because you’ll be bankrupt, you’ll have squandered your capital. It takes a rich man a little time to realize all his resources. But when they’ve all been realized, it takes him almost no time to starve.’

Webley shrugged his shoulders. ‘Dotty old lunatic!’ he said to himself, and aloud, ‘Parallel straight lines never meet, Lord Edward. So I’ll bid you goodnight.’ He took his leave.

A minute later the Old Man and his assistant were making their way up the triumphal staircase to their world apart.

‘What a relief!’ said Lord Edward, as he opened the door of his laboratory. Voluptuously, he sniffed the faint smell of the absolute alcohol in which the specimens were pickled. ‘These parties! One’s thankful to get back to science. Still, the music was really…’ His admiration was inarticulate.

Illidge shrugged his shoulders. ‘Parties, music, science—alternative entertainments for the leisured. You pays your money and you takes your choice. The essential is to have the money to pay.’ He laughed disagreeably.

Illidge resented the virtues of the rich much more than their vices. Gluttony, sloth, sensuality and all the less comely products of leisure and an independent income could be forgiven, precisely because they were discreditable. But disinterestedness, spirituality, incorruptibility, refinement of feeling and exquisiteness of taste—these were commonly regarded as qualities to be admired; that was why he so specially disliked them. For these virtues, according to Illidge, were as fatally the product of wealth as were chronic guzzling and breakfast at eleven.

‘These bourgeois,’ he complained, ‘they go about handing one another bouquets for being so disinterested—that is to say, for having enough to live on without being compelled to work or be preoccupied about money. Then there’s another bouquet for being able to afford to refuse a tip And another for having enough money to buy the apparatus of cultured refinement. And yet another for having the time to spare for art and reading and elaborate longdrawn love-making. Why can’t they be frank and say outright what they’re all the time implying-that the root of all their virtue is a five per cent. gilt-edged security?’

The amused affection which he felt for Lord Edward was tempered by a chronic annoyance at the thought that all the Old Man’s intellectual and moral virtues, all his endearing eccentricities and absurdities were only made possible by the really scandalous state of his bank balance. And this latent disapproval became acute whenever he heard Lord Edward being praised, admired or even laughed at by others. Laughter, liking and admiration were permitted to him, because he understood and could forgive. Other people did not even realize that there was anything to forgive. Illidge was always quick to inform them.

‘If the Old Man wasn’t the descendant of monastery-robbers,’ he would say to the praisers or admirers, ‘he’d be in the workhouse or the loony asylum.’

And yet he was genuinely fond of the Old Man, he genuinely admired his talents and his character. The world, however, might be excused for not realizing the fact. ‘Unpleasant’ was the ordinary comment on Lord Edward’s assistant.

But being unpleasant to and about the rich, besides a pleasure, was also, in Illidge’s eyes, a sacred duty. He owed it to his class, to society at large, to the future, to the cause of justice. Even the Old Man himself was not spared. He had only to breathe a word in favour of the soul (for Lord Edward had what his assistant could only regard as a shameful and adulterous passion for idealistic metaphysics); Illidge would at once leap out at him with a sneer about capitalist philosophy and bourgeois religion. An expression of distaste for hardheaded business men, of indifference to material interests, of sympathy for the poor, would bring an immediate reference, more or less veiled, but always sarcastic, to the Tantamount millions. There were days (and owing to the slip on the stairs and that snub from the General, this day was one of them) when even a reference to pure science elicited its ironic comment. Illidge was an enthusiastic biologist; but as a class-conscious citizen he had to admit that pure science, like good taste and boredom, perversity and platonic love, is a product of wealth and leisure. He was not afraid of being logical and deriding even his own idol.

‘Money to pay,’ he repeated. ‘That’s the essential.

The Old Man looked rather guiltily at his assistant.

These implied reproofs made him feel uncomfortable. He tried to change the subject. ‘What about our tadpoles? ‘ he asked

‘The asymmetrical ones.’ They had a brood of tadpoles hatched from eggs that had been kept abnormally warm on one side and abnormally cold on the other. He moved towards the glass tank in which they were kept. Illidge followed. ‘Asymmetrical tadpoles!’ he repeated.

‘Asymmetrical tadpoles! What a refinement! Almost as good as playing Bach on the flute or having a palate for wine.’ He thought of his brother Tom, who had weak lungs and worked a broaching machine in a motor factory at Manchester. He remembered washing days and the pink crinkled skin of his mother’s watersodden hands. ‘Asymmetrical tadpoles!’ he said once more and laughed.

****

‘Strange,’ said Mrs. Betterton, ‘strange that a great artist should be such a cynic.’ In Burlap’s company she preferred to believe that John Bidlake had meant what he said. Burlap on cynicism was uplifting and Mrs. Betterton liked to be uplifted. Uplifting too on greatness, not to mention art. ‘For you must admit,’ she added, ‘he is a great artist.’

Burlap nodded slowly. He did not look directly at Mrs. Betterton, but kept his eyes averted and downcast as though he were addressing some little personage invisible to everyone but himself, standing to one side of her—his private daemon, perhaps; an emanation from himself, a little doppelganger. He was a man of middle height with a stoop and a rather slouching gait. His hair was dark, thick and curly, with a natural tonsure as big as a medal showing pink on the crown of his head. His grey eyes were very deeply set, his nose and chin pronounced but well shaped. his mouth full-lipped and rather wide. A mixture, according to old Bidlake, who was a caricaturist in words as well as with the pencil, of a movie villain and St. Anthony of Padua by a painter of the baroque, of a cardsharping Lothario and a rapturous devotee.

‘Yes, a great artist,’ he agreed, ‘but not one of the greatest.’ He spoke slowly, ruminatively, as though he were talking to himself. All his conversation was a dialogue with himself or that little doppelgdnger which stood invisibly to one side of the people he was supposed to be talking to; Burlap was unceasingly and exclusively selfconscious. ‘Not one of the greatest,’ he repeated slowly. As it happened, he had just been writing an article about the subject-matter of art for next week’s number of the Literary World. ‘Precisely because of that cynicism.’ Should he quote himself? he wondered.

‘How true that is!’ Mrs. Betterton’s applause exploded perhaps a little prematurely; her enthusiasm was always on the boil. She clasped her hands together. ‘How true!’ She looked at Burlap’s averted face and thought it so spiritual, so beautiful in its way.

‘How can a cynic be a great artist?’ Burlap went on, having decided that he’d spout his own article at her and take the risk of her recognizing it in print next Thursday. And even if she did recognize it, that wouldn’t efface the personal impression he’d made by spouting it. ‘Though why you want to make an impression,’ a mocking devil had put in, ‘unless it’s because she’s rich and useful, goodness knows!’ The devil was pitchforked back to where he came from. ‘One has responsibilities,’ an angel hastily explained. ‘The lamp mustn’t be hidden under a bushel. One must let it shine, especially on people of good will.’ Mrs. Betterton was on the side of the angels; her loyalty should be confirmed. ‘A great artist,’ he went on aloud, ‘is a man who synthesizes all experience. The cynic sets out by denying half the facts—the fact of the soul, the fact of ideals, the fact of God. And yet we’re aware of spiritual facts just as directly and indubitably as we’re aware of physical facts.’

‘Of course, of course!’ exclaimed Mrs. Bidlake

‘It’s absurd to deny either class of facts.’ ‘Absurd to deny me,’ said the demon, poking out his head into Burlap’s consciousness.

‘Absurd!’

‘The cynic confines himself to only half the world of possible experience. Less than half. For there are more spiritual than bodily experiences.’

‘Infinitely more!’

‘He may handle his limited subject-matter very well. Bidlake, I grant you, does. Extraordinarily well. He has all the sheer ability of the most consummate artists. Or had, at any rate.’

‘Had,’ Mrs. Betterton sighed. ‘When I first knew him.’ The implication was that it was her influence that had made him paint so well.

‘But he’s always applied his powers to something small. What he synthesizes in his art was limited, comparatively unimportant.’

‘That’s what I always told him,’ said Mrs. Betterton, reinterpreting those youthful arguments about Pre-Raphaelitism in a new and, for her own reputation, favourable light. ‘Consider Burne-Jones, I used to say.’ The memory of John Bidlake’s huge and Rabelaisian laughter reverberated in her ears

‘Not that Burne-Jones was a particularly good painter,’ she hastened to add. (‘He painted,’ John Bidlake had said—and how shocked she had been, how deeply offended!—’as though he had never seen a pair of buttocks in the whole of his life.’) ‘But his subjects were noble. If you had his dreams, I used to tell John Bidlake, if you had his ideals, you’d be a really great artist.’

Burlap nodded, smiling his agreement. Yes, she’s On the side of the angels, he was thinking; she needs encouraging. One has a responsibility. The demon winked. There was something in his smile, Mrs. Betterton reflected, that reminded one of a Leonardo or a Sodoma—something mysterious, subtle, inward.

‘Though, mind you,’ he said regurgitating his article slowly, phrase by phrase, ‘the subject doesn’t make the work of art. Whittier and Longfellow were fairly stuffed with Great Thoughts. But what they wrote was very small poetry.’

‘How true!’

‘The only generalization one can risk is that the greatest works of art have had great subjects; and that works with small subjects, however accomplished, are never so good as…’

‘There’s Walter,’ said Mrs. Betterton, interrupting him. ‘Wandering like an unlaid ghost. Walter!’

At the sound of his name, Walter turned. The Betterton—good Lord! And Burlap! He assumed a smile. But Mrs. Be and his colleague on the Literary World were among the last people he wanted at this moment to see.

‘We were just discussing greatness in art,’ Mrs. Betterton explained. ‘Mr. Burlap was saying such profound things.’

She began to reproduce the profundities for Walter’s benefit.

He meanwhile was wondering why Burlap’s manner towards him had been so cold, so distant, shut, even hostile. That was the trouble with Burlap. You never knew where you stood with him. Either he loved you, or he hated. Life with him was a series of scenes—scenes of hostility or, even more trying in Walter’s estimation, scenes of affection. One way or the other, the emotion was always flowing. There were hardly any intervals of comfortably slack water. The tide was always running. Why was it running now towards hostility?

Mrs. Betterton went on with her exposition of the profundities. To Walter they sounded curiously like certain paragraphs in that article of Burlap’s, the proof of which he had only that morning been correcting for the printers. Reproduced—explosion after enthusiastic explosion—from Burlap’s spoken reproduction, the article did sound rather ridiculous. A light dawned. Could that be the reason? He looked at Burlap. His face was stony.

‘I’m afraid I must go,’ said Burlap abruptly, when Mrs. Betterton paused.

‘But no,’ she protested. ‘But why?’

He made an effort and smiled his Sodoma smile. ‘The world is too much with us,’ he quoted mysteriously. He liked saying mysterious things, dropping them surprisingly into the middle of the conversation.

‘But you’re not enough with us,’ flattered Mrs. Betterton.

‘It’s the crowd,’ he explained. ‘After a time, I get into a panic. I feel they’re crushing my soul to death. I should begin to scream if I stayed.’ He took his leave.

‘Such a wonderful man!’ Mrs. Betterton exclaimed before he was well out of earshot. ‘It must be wonderful for you to work with him.’

‘He’s a very good editor,’ said Walter.

‘But I was thinking of his personality. How shall I say? The spiritual quality of the man.’

Walter nodded and said, ‘Yes,’ rather vaguely. The spiritual quality of Burlap was just the thing he wasn’t very enthusiastic about.

‘In an age like ours,’ Mrs. Betterton continued, ‘he’s an oasis in the desert of stupid frivolity and cynicism.’

‘Some of his ideas are first rate,’ Walter cautiously agreed.

He wondered how soon he could decently make his escape.

****

‘There’s Walter,’ said Lady Edward.

‘Walter who?’ asked Bidlake. Borne by the social currents, they had drifted together again.

‘Your Walter.’

‘Oh, mine.’ He was not much interested, but he followed the direction of her glance. ‘What a weed!’ he said. He disliked his children for growing up; growing, they pushed him backwards, year after year, backwards towards the gulf and the darkness. There was Walter; it was only yesterday he was born. And yet the fellow must be five-and-twenty, if he was a day.

‘Poor Walter; he doesn’t look at all well.’

‘Looks as though he had worms,’ said Bidlake ferociously.

‘How’s that deplorable affair of his going?’ she asked.

Bidlake shrugged his shoulders. ‘As usual, I suppose.’

‘I never met the woman.’

‘I did. She’s awful.’

‘What, vulgar? ‘

‘No, no. I wish she were,’ protested Bidlake. ‘She’s refined, terribly refined. And she speaks like this.’ He spoke into a drawling falsetto that was meant to be an imitation of Marjorie’s voice. ‘Like a sweet little innocent girlie. And so serious, such a highbrow. He interrupted the imitation with his own deep laugh,’Do you know what she said to me once? I may mention that she always talks to me about Art. Art with a capital A. She said’: (his voice went up again to the babyish falsetto) ‘“I think there’s a place for Fra Angelico and Rubens.”’ He laughed again, homerically. ‘What an imbecile! And she has a nose that’s at least three inches too long.’

****

Marjorie had opened the box in which she kept her private papers. All Walter’s letters. She untied the ribbon and looked them over one by one. ‘Dear Mrs. Carling, I enclose under separate cover that volume of Keats’s Letters I mentioned to-day. Please do not trouble to return it. I have another copy, which I shall re-read for the pleasure of accompanying you, even at a distance, through the same spiritual adventure.’

That was the first of them. She read it through and recaptured in memory something of the pleased surprise which that passage about the spiritual adventure had originally evoked in her. In conversation he had always seemed to shrink from the direct and personal approach, he was painfully shy. She hadn’t expected him to write like that. Later, when he had written to her often, she became accustomed to his peculiarities. She took it for granted that he should be bolder with the pen than face to face. All his love—all of it, at any rate, that was articulate and all of it that, in the days of his courtship, was in the least ardent—was in his letters. The arrangement suited Marorie perfectly. She would have liked to go on indefinitely making cultured and verbally burning love by post. She liked the idea of love; what she did not like was lovers, except at a distance and in imagination. A correspondence course of passion was, for her, the perfect and ideal relationship with a man. Better still were personal relationships with women; for women had all the good qualities of men at a distance, with the added advantage of being actually there. They could be in the room with you and yet demand no more than a man at the other end of a system of post-offices. With his face-to-face shyness and his postal freedom and ardour, Walter had seemed in Marjorie’s eyes to combine the best points of both sexes. And then he was so deeply, so flatteringly interested in everything she did and thought and felt. Poor Marjorie was not much used to having people interested in her.

‘Sphinx,’ she read in the third of his letters. (He had called her that because of her enigmatic silences. Carling, for the same reason, had called her Turnip or Dumb-Bell.) ‘Shinx, why do you hide yourself inside such a shell of silence? One would think you were ashamed of your goodness and sweetness and intelligence. But they pop their heads out all the same and in spite of you.’

The tears came into her eyes. He had been so kind to her, so tender and gentle. And now…

‘Love,’ she read dimly, through the tears, in the next letter, ‘love can transform physical into spiritual desire; it has the magic power to turn the body into pure soul….’

Yes, he had had those desires too. Even he. All men had, she supposed. Rather dreadful. She shuddered, remembering Carling, remembering even Walter with something of the same horror. Yes, even Walter, though he had been so gentle and considerate. Walter had understood what she felt. That made it all the more extraordinary that he should be behaving as he was behaving now. It was as though he had suddenly become somebody else, become a kind of wild animal, with the animal’s cruelty as well as the animal’s lusts.

‘How can he be so cruel? ‘ she wondered.

‘How can he, deliberately? Walter?’ Her Walter, the real Walter, was so gentle and understanding and considerate, so wonderfully unselfish and good. It was for that goodness and gentleness that she had loved him, in spite of his being a man and having ‘those’ desires; her devotion was to that tender, unselfish, considerate Walter, whom she had got to know and appreciate after they had begun to live together. She had loved even the weak and unadmirable manifestations of his considerateness; had loved him even when he let himself be overcharged by cabmen and porters, when he gave handfuls of silver to tramps with obviously untrue stories about jobs at the other end of the country and no money to pay the fare. He was too sensitively quick to see the other person’s point of view. In his anxiety to be just to others he was often prepared to be unjust to himself. He was always ready to sacrifice his own rights rather than run any risk of infringing the rights of others. It was a considerateness, Marjorie realized, that had become a weakness, that was on the point of turning into a vice; a considerateness, moreover, that was due to his timidity, his squeamish and fastidious shrinking from every conflict, even every disagreeable contact. All the same, she loved him for it, loved him even when it led him to treat her with something less than justice. For having come to regard her as a being on the hither side of the boundary between himself and the rest of the world, he had sometimes in his excessive considerateness for the rights of others, sacrificed not only his own rights, but also hers. How often, for example, she had told him that he was being underpaid for his work on the Literary World! She thought of the latest of their conversations on what was to him the most odious of topics.

‘Burlap’s sweating you, Walter,’ she had said.

‘The paper’s very hard up.’ He always had excuses for the shortcomings of other people towards himself.

‘But why should you let yourself be swindled?’

‘I’m not being swindled.’ There was a note of exasperation in his voice, the exasperation of a man who knows he is in the wrong. ‘And even if I were, I prefer being swindled to haggling for my pound of flesh. After all, it’s my business.’

‘And mine!’ She held up the account book on which she had been busy when the conversation began. ‘If you knew the price of vegetables!’

He had flushed up and left the room without answering. The conversation, the case were typical of many others. Walter had never been deliberately unkind to her, only by mistake, out of excessive consideration for other people and while he was being unkind to himself. She had never resented these injustices. They proved how closely he associated her with himself. But now, now there was nothing accidental about his unkindness. The gentle considerate Walter had disappeared and somebody else—somebody ruthless and full of hate—was deliberately making her suffer.

****

Lady Edward laughed. ‘One wonders what he saw in her, if she’s so deplorable as you make out.’

‘What does one ever see in anyone?’ John Bidlake spoke in a melancholy tone. Quite suddenly he had begun to feel rather ill. An oppression in the stomach, a feeling of sickness, a tendency to hiccough. It often happened now. Just after eating. Bicarbonate didn’t seem to do much good. ‘In these matters,’ he added, ‘we’re all equally insane.’

‘Thanks!’ said Lady Edward, laughing.

Making an essay to be gallant, ‘Present company excepted,’ he said with a smile and a little bow. He stifled another hiccough. How miserable he was feeling! ‘ Do you mind if I sit down? ‘ he asked. ‘All this standing about…’ He dropped heavily into a chair.

Lady Edward looked at him with a certain solicitude, but said nothing. She knew how much he hated all references to age, or illness, or physical weakness.

‘It must have been that caviar,’ he was thinking. ‘That beastly caviar.’ He violently hated caviar. Every sturgeon in the Black Sea was his personal enemy.

‘Poor Walter!’ said Lady Edward, taking up the conversation where it had been dropped. ‘And he has such a talent.’

John Bidlake snorted contemptuously. Lady Edward perceived that she had said the wrong thing—by mistake, genuinely by mistake, this time. She changed the subject.

‘And Elinor?’ she asked. ‘When’s your Elinor coming home? Elinor and Quarles?’

‘Leaving Bombay to-morrow,’ John Bidlake answered telegraphically. He was too busy thinking of the caviar and his visceral sensations to be more responsive.

CHAPTER VI

The Indians drank deir liberalism at your fountains,’ said Mr. Sita Ram, quoting from one of his own speeches in the Legislative Assembly. He pointed an accusing finger at Philip Quarles. The drops of sweat pursued one another down his brown and pouchy cheeks; he seemed to be weeping for Mother India. One drop had been hanging, an iridescent jewel in the lamplight, at the end of his nose. It flashed and trembled while he spoke, as if responsive to patriotic sentiments. There came a moment when the sentiments were too much for it. At the word ‘fountain,’ it gave a last violent shudder and fell among the broken morsels of fish on Mr. Sita Ram’s plate.

‘Burke and Bacon,’ Mr. Sita Ram went on sonorously, ‘Milton and Macaulay…’

‘Oh, look!’ Elinor Quarles’s voice was shrill with alarm. She got up so suddenly that her chair fell over backwards. Mr. Sita Ram turned towards her.

‘What’s de matter?’ he asked in a tone of annoyance. It is vexatious to be interrupted in the middle of a peroration.

Elinor pointed. A very large grey toad was laboriously hopping across the veranda. In the silence its movements were audible—a soft thudding, as though a damp sponge were being repeatedly dropped.

‘De toad can do no harm,’ said Mr. Sita Ram, who was accustomed to the tropical fauna.

Elinor looked beseechingly at her husband. The glance that he returned was one of disapproval.

‘Really, my darling,’ he protested. He himself had a strong dislike for squashy animals. But he knew how to conceal his disgust, stoically. It was the same with the food. There had been (the right, the fully expressive word now occurred to him) a certain toad-like quality about the fish. But he had managed, none the less, to eat it. Elinor had left hers, after the first mouthful, untouched.

‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind driving it away,’ she whispered. Her face expressed her inward agony. ‘You know how much I detest them.’

Her husband laughed and, apologizing to Mr. Sita Ram, got up, very tall and slim, and limped across the veranda. With the toe of his clumsy surgical boot he manoeuvred the animal to the edge of the platform. It flopped down heavily into the garden below. Looking out, he caught a glimpse of the sea shining between the palm stems. The moon was up and the tufted foliage stood out black against the sky. Not a leaf stirred. It was enormously hot and seemed to be growing hotter as the night advanced. Heat under the sun was not so bad; one expected it. But this stifling darkness…Philip mopped his face and went back to his seat at the table.

‘You were saying, Mr. Sita Ram?’

But Mr. Sita Ram’s first fine careless rapture had evaporated. ‘I was re-reading some of de works of Morley to-day,’ he announced

‘Golly! ‘ said Philip Quarles, who liked on occasion, very deliberately, to bring out a piece of schoolboy slang. It made such an effect in the middle of a serious conversation.

But Mr. Sita Ram could hardly be expected to catch the full significance of that ‘ Golly.’ ‘What a tinker!’ he pursued. ‘What a great tinker! And de style is so chaste.’

‘I suppose it is.’

‘Dere are some good phrases,’ Mr. Sita Ram went on ‘I wrote dem down.’ He searched his pockets, but failed to discover his notebook. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘But dey were good phrases. Sometimes one reads a whole book widout finding a single phrase one can remember or quote. What’s de good of such a book, I ask you?’

‘What indeed?’

Four or five untidy servants came out of the house and changed the plates. A dish of dubious rissoles made its appearance. Elinor glanced despairingly at her husband, then turned to Mr. Sita Ram to assure him that she never ate meat. Himself stoically eating, Philip approved her wisdom. They drank sweet champagne that was nearly as warm as tea. The rissoles were succeeded by sweetmeats—large, pale balls (much fingered, one felt sure, long and lovingly rolled between the palms) of some equivocal substance, at once slimy and gritty, and tasting hauntingly through their sweetness of mutton fat.

Under the influence of the champagne, Mr. Sita Ram recovered his eloquence. His latest oration re-uttered itself.

‘Dere is one law for de English,’ he said, ‘and anoder for de Indians, one for de oppressors and anoder for de oppressed. De word justice has eider disappeared from your vocab’lary, or else it has changed its meaning.’

‘I’m inclined to think that it has changed its meaning,’ said Philip.

Mr. Sita Ram paid no attention. He was filled with a sacred indignation, the more violent for being so hopelessly impotent. ‘Consider de case,’ he went on (and his voice trembled out of his control), ‘of de unfortunate station-master of Bhowanipore.’

But Philip refused to consider it. He was thinking of the way in which the word justice changes its meaning. Justice for India had meant one thing before he visited the country. It meant something very different now, when he was on the point of leaving it.

The station-master of Bhowanipore, it appeared, had had a spotless record and nine children.

‘But why don’t you teach them birth control, Mr. Sita Ram? ‘ Elinor had asked. These descriptions of enormous families always made her wince. She remembered what she had suffered when little Phil was born. And after all, she had had chloroform and two nurses and Sir Claude Aglet. Whereas the wife of the station-master of Bhowanipore… She had heard accounts of Indian midwives. She shuddered. ‘Isn’t it the only hope for India?’

Mr. Sita Ram, however, thought that the only hope was universal suffrage and self-government. He went on with the station-master’s history. The man had passed all his examinations with credit; his qualifications were the highest possible. And yet he had been passed over for promotion no less than four times. Four times, and always in favour of Europeans or Eurasians. Mr. Sita Ram’s blood boiled when he thought of the five thousand years of Indian civilization, Indian spirituality, Indian moral superiority, cynically trampled, in the person of the station-master of Bhowanipore, under English feet…

‘Is dat justice, I ask? ‘ He banged the table.

Who knows? Philip wondered. Perhaps it is.

Realizing that he was expected to make some response, Philip shook his head and said, ‘No.’

Elinor was still thinking of the nine children. To obtain a quick delivery, the midwives, she had heard, stamp on their patients. And, instead of ergot, they use a paste made of cow-dung and powdered glass

‘Do you call dat justice? ‘ Mr. Sita Ram repeated. Realizing that he was expected to make some response, Philip shook his head and said, ‘No.’

‘You ought to write about it,’ said Mr. Sita Ram, ‘you ought to show de scandal up.’

Philip excused himself; he was only a writer of novels, not a politician, not a journalist.’do you know old Daulat Singh?’ he added with apparent irrelevance. ‘The one who lives at Ajmere?’

‘I have met de man,’ said Mr. Sita Ram, in a tone that made it quite clear that he didn’t like Daulat Singh, or perhaps (more probably, thought Philip) hadn’t been liked or approved by him.

‘A fine man, I thought,’ said Philip. For men like Daulat Singh justice would have to mean something very different from what it meant for Mr. Sita Ram or the station-master of Bhowanipore. He remembered the noble old face, the bright eyes, the restrained passion of his words. If only he could have refrained from chewing pan….

The time came for them to go. At last. They said goodbye with an almost excessive cordiality, climbed into the waiting car and were driven away. The ground beneath the palm trees of Joohoo was littered with a mintage of shining silver, splashed with puddles of mercury. They rolled through a continuous flickering of light and dark—the cinema film of twenty years ago—until, emerging from under the palm trees, they found themselves in the full glare of the enormous moon.

‘Three-formed Hecate,’ he thought, blinking at the round brilliance. ‘But what about Sita Ram and Daulat Singh and the station-master, what about old appalling India, what about justice and liberty, what about progress and the future? The fact is, I don’t care. Not a pin. It’s disgraceful. But I don’t. And the forms of Hecate aren’t three. They’re a thousand, they’re millions. The tides. The Nemorensian goddess, the Tifatinian. Varying directly as the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distances. A florin at arm’s length, but as big as the Russian Empire. Bigger than India. What a comfort it will be to be back in Europe again! And to think there was a time when I read books about yoga and did breathing exercises and tried to persuade myself that I didn’t really exist! What a fool! It was the result of talking with that idiot Burlap. But luckily people don’t leave much trace on me. They make an impression easily, like a ship in water. But the water closes up again. I wonder what this Italian ship will be like to-morrow? The Lloyd Triestino boats are always supposed to be good. “Luckily,” I said; but oughtn’t one to be ashamed of one’s indifference? That parable of the sower. The seed that fell in shallow ground. And yet, obviously, it’s no use pretending to be what one isn’t. One sees the results of that in Burlap. What a comedian! But he takes in a lot of people. Including himself, I suppose. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a conscious hypocrite, except for special occasions. You can’t keep it up all the time. All the same, it would be good to know what it’s like to believe in something to the point of being prepared to kill people or get yourself killed. It would be an experience….’

Elinor had lifted her face towards the same bright disc. Moon, full moon…. And instantly she had changed her position in space and time. She dropped her eyes and turned towards her husband; she took his hand and leaned tenderly against him.

‘Do you remember those evenings?’ she asked. ‘In the garden, at Gattenden. Do you remember, Phil?’

Elinor’s words came to his ears from a great distance and from a world in which, for the moment, he felt no interest. He roused himself with reluctance. ‘Which evenings? ‘ he asked, speaking across gulfs, and in the rather flat and colourless voice of one who answers an importunate telephone.

At the sound of that telephone voice Elinor quickly drew away from him. To press yourself against someone who turns out simply not to be there is not only disappointing; it is also rather humiliating. Which evenings, indeed!

‘Why don’t you love me any more?’ she asked despairingly. As if she could have been talking about any other evenings than those of that wonderful summer they had spent, just after their marriage, at her mother’s house. ‘You don’t even take any interest in me now—less than you would in a piece of furniture, much less than in a book.’

‘But, Elinor, what are you talking about?’ Philip put more astonishment into his voice than he really felt. After the first moment, when he had had time to come to the surface, so to speak, from the depths of his reverie, he had understood what she meant, he had connected this Indian moon with that which had shone, eight years ago, on the Hertfordshire garden. He might have said so, of course. It would have made things easier. But he was annoyed at having been interrupted, he didn’t like to be reproached, and the temptation to score a debater’s point against his wife was strong. ‘I ask a simple question,’ he went on, ‘merely wanting to know what you mean. And you retort by complaining that I don’t love you. I fail to see the logical connection.’

‘But you know quite well what I was talking about,’ said Elinor. ‘And besides, it is true—you don’t love me any more.’

‘I do, as it happens,’ said Philip and, still skirmishing (albeit, vainly as he knew) in the realm of dialectic, went on like a little Socrates with his cross-examination. ‘But what I really want to know is how we ever got to this point from the place where we started. We began with evenings and now…’

But Elinor was more interested in love than in logic. ‘Oh, I know you don’t want to say you don’t love me,’ she interrupted. ‘Not in so many words. You don’t want to hurt my feelings. But it would really hurt them less if you did so straight out, instead of just avoiding the whole question, as you do now. Because this avoiding is really just as much of an admission as a bald statement. And it hurts more because it lasts longer, because there’s suspense and uncertainty and repetition of pain. So long as the words haven’t been definitely spoken, there’s always just a chance that they mayn’t have been tacitly implied. Always a chance, even when one knows that they have been implied. There’s still room for hope. And where there’s hope there’s disappointment. It isn’t really kinder to evade the question, Phil; it’s crueller.’

‘But I don’t evade the question,’ he retorted. ‘Why should I, seeing that I do love you?’

‘Yes, but how? How do you love me? Not in the way you used to, at the beginning. Or perhaps you’ve forgotten. You didn’t even remember the time when we were first married.’

‘But, my dear child,’ Philip protested,’do be accurate. You just said “those evenings” and expected me to guess which.’

‘Of course I expected,’ said Elinor. ‘You ought to have known. You would have known, if you took any interest. That’s what I complain of. You care so little now that the time when you did care means nothing to you. Do you think I can forget those evenings?’

She remembered the garden with its invisible and perfumed flowers, the huge black Wellingtonia on the lawn, the rising moon, and the two stone griffins at either end of the low terrace wall, where they had sat together. She remembered what he had said and his kisses, the touch of his hands. She remembered everything—remembered with the minute precision of one who loves to explore and reconstruct the past, of one who is for ever turning over and affectionately verifying each precious detail of recollected happiness.

‘It’s all simply faded out of your mind,’ she added, mournfully reproachful. For her, those evenings were still more real, more actual than much of her contemporary living.

‘But of course I remember,’ said Philip impatiently. ‘Only one can’t readjust one’s mind instantaneously. At the moment, when you spoke, I happened to be thinking of something else; that was all.’

Elinor sighed. ‘I wish I had something else to think about,’ she said. ‘That’s the trouble; I haven’t. Why should I love you so much? Why? It isn’t fair. You’re protected by an intellect and a talent. You have your work to retire into, your ideas to shield you. But I have nothing—no defence against my feelings, no alternative to you. And it’s I who need the defence and the alternative. For I’m the one who really cares. You’ve got nothing to be protected from. You don’t care. No, it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair.’

And after all, she was thinking, it had always been like this. He hadn’t ever really loved her, even at the beginning. Not profoundly and entirely, not with abandonment. For even at the beginning he had evaded her demands, he had refused to give himself completely to her. On her side she had offered everything, everything. And he had taken, but without return. His soul, the intimacies of his being, he had always withheld. Always, even from the first, even when he had loved her most. She had been happy then—but only because she had not known better than to be happy, because she had not realized, in her inexperience, that love could be different and better. She took a perverse pleasure in the retrospective disparagement of her felicity, in laying waste her memories. The moon, the dark and perfumed garden, the huge black tree and its velvet shadow on the lawn…. She denied them, she rejected the happiness which they symbolized in her memory.

Philip Quarles, meanwhile, said nothing. There was nothing, really, to say. He put his arm round her and drew her towards him; he kissed her forehead and her fluttering eyelids; they were wet with tears.

The sordid suburbs of Bombay slid past them—factories and little huts and huge tenements, ghastly and bone-white under the moon. Brown, thin-legged pedestrians appeared for a moment in the glare of the headlights, like truths apprehended intuitively and with immediate certainty, only to disappear again almost instantly into the void of outer darkness. Here and there, by the roadside, the light of a fire mysteriously hinted at dark limbs and faces. The inhabitants of a world of thought starrily remote from theirs peered at them, as the car flashed past, from creaking bullock carts.

‘My darling,’ he kept repeating, ‘my darling…’

Elinor permitted herself to be comforted. ‘You love me a little?’

‘So much.’

She actually laughed, rather sobbingly, it is true; but still, it was a laugh. ‘You do your best to be nice to me.’ And after all, she thought, those days at Gattenden had really been blissful. They were hers, she had had them; they couldn’t be denied. ‘You make such efforts. It’s sweet of you.’

‘It’s silly to talk like that,’ he protested. ‘You know I love you.’

‘Yes, I know you do.’ She smiled and stroked his cheek. ‘When you have time and then by wireless across the Atlantic.’

‘No, that isn’t true.’ But secretly he knew that it was. All his life long he had walked in a solitude, in a private void, into which nobody, not his mother, not his friends, not his lovers had ever been permitted to enter. Even when he held her thus, pressed close to him, it was by wireless, as she had said, and across an Atlantic that he communicated with her.

‘It isn’t true,’ she echoed, tenderly mocking. ‘But, my poor old Phil, you couldn’t even take in a child. You don’t know how to lie convincingly. You’re too honest. That’s one of the reasons why I love you. If you knew how transparent you were!’

Philip was silent. These discussions of personal relations always made him uncomfortable. They threatened his solitude—that solitude which, with a part of his mind, he deplored (for he felt himself cut off from much he would have liked to experience), but in which alone, nevertheless, his spirit could live in comfort, in which alone he felt himself free. At ordinary times he took this inward solitude for granted, as one accepts the atmosphere in which one lives. But when it was menaced, he became only too painfully aware of its importance to him; he fought for it, as a choking man fights for air. But it was a fight without violence, a negative battle of retirement and defence. He entrenched himself now in silence, in that calm, remote, frigid silence, which he was sure that Elinor would not attempt, knowing the hopelessness of the venture, to break through. He was right; Elinor glanced at him for an instant, and then, turning away, looked out at the moonlit landscape. Their parallel silences flowed on through time, unmeeting.

They were driven on through the Indian darkness. Almost cool against their faces, the moving air smelt now of tropical flowers, now of sewage, or curry, or burning cow-dung.

‘And yet,’ said Elinor suddenly, unable any longer to contain her resentful thoughts, ‘you couldn’t do without me. Where would you be, if I left you, if I went to somebody who was prepared to give me something in return for what I give? Where would you be?’

The question dropped into the silence. Philip made no answer. But where would he be? He too wondered. For in the ordinary daily world of human contacts he was curiously like a foreigner, uneasily not at home among his fellows, finding it difficult or impossible to enter into communication with any but those who could speak his native intellectual language of ideas. Emotionally, he was a foreigner. Elinor was his interpreter, his dragoman. Like her father, Elinor Bidlake had been born with a gift of intuitive understanding and social ease. She was quickly at home with anybody. She knew, instinctively, as well as old John himself, just what to say to every type of person—to every type except, perhaps, her husband’s. It is difficult to know what to say to someone who does not say anything in return, who answers the personal word with the impersonal, the particular and feeling word with an intellectual generalization. Still, being in love with him, she persisted in her efforts to lure him into direct contact; and though the process was rather discouraging—like singing to deaf-mutes or declaiming poetry to an empty hall—she went on giving him her intimacies of thought and feeling. There were occasions, when, making a great effort, he did his best, in exchange, to admit her into his own personal privacies. But whether it was that the habit of secrecy had made it impossible for him to give utterance to his inward feelings, or whether the very capacity to feel had actually been atrophied by consistent silence and repression, Elinor found these rare intimacies disappointing. The holy of holies into which he so painfully ushered her was almost as naked and empty as that which astonished the Roman invaders, when they violated the temple ofJerusalem. Still, she was grateful to Philip for his good intentions in at least wanting to admit her to his emotional intimacy, even though there mightn’t be much of an emotional life to be intimate with. A kind of Pyrrhonian indifference, tempered by a consistent gentleness and kindness, as well as by the more violent intermittences of physical passion—this was the state of being which nature and second nature had made normal for him. Elinor’s reason told her that this was so; but her feelings would not accept in practice what she was sure of in theory. What was living and sensitive and irrational in her was hurt by his indifference, as though it were a personal coldness directed only against herself. And yet, whatever she might feel, Elinor knew all the time that his indifference wasn’t personal, that he was like that with everybody, that he loved her as much as it was possible for him to love, that his love for her hadn’t diminished, because it had never really been greater—more passionate once perhaps, but never more emotionally rich in intimacies and self-giving, even at its most passionate, than it was now. But all the same her feelings were outraged; he oughtn’t to be like this. He oughtn’t to be; but there, he was. After an outburst, she would settle down and try to love him as reasonably as she could, making the best of his kindness, his rather detached and separate passion, his occasional and laborious essays at emotional intimacy, and finally his intelligence—that quick, comprehensive, ubiquitous intelligence that could understand everything, including the emotions it could not feel and the instincts it took care not to be moved by.

Once, when he had been telling her about Koehler’s book on the apes, ‘You’re like a monkey on the superman side of humanity,’ she said. ‘Almost human, like those poor chimpanzees. The only difference is that they’re trying to think up with their feelings and instincts, and you’re trying to feel down with your intellect. Almost human. Trembling on the verge, my poor Phil.’

He understood everything so perfectly. That was why it was such fun being his dragoman and interpreting other people for him. (It was less amusing when one had to interpret oneself.) All that the intelligence could seize upon he seized. She reported her intercourse with the natives of the realm of emotion and he understood at once, he generalized her experience for her, he related it with other experiences, classified it, found analogies and parallels. From single and individual it became in his hands part of a system. She was astonished to find that she and her friends had been, all unconsciously, substantiating a theory, or exemplifying some interesting generalization. Her functions as dragoman were not confined to mere scouting and reporting. She acted also directly as personal interpreter between Philip and any third party he might wish to get into touch with, creating the atmosphere in which alone the exchange of personalities is possible, preserving the conversation from intellectual desiccation. Left to himself Philip would never have been able to establish personal contact or preserve it when once established. But when Elinor was there to make and keep the contact for him, he could understand, he could sympathize, with his intelligence, in a way which Elinor assured him was all but human. In his subsequent generalizations from the experience she had made possible for him he became once more undisguisedly the overman.

Yes, it was fun to serve as dragoman to such an exceptionally intelligent tourist in the realm of feeling. But it was more than fun; it was also, in Elinor’s eyes, a duty. There was his writing to consider.

‘Ah, if you were a little less of an overman, Phil,’ she used to say, ‘what good novels you’d write!’

Rather ruefully he agreed with her. He was intelligent enough to know his own defects. Elinor did her best to supply them—gave him first-hand information about the habits of the natives, acted as go-between when he wanted to come into personal contact with one of them. Not only for her own sake, but for the sake of the novelist he might be, she wished he could break his habit of impersonality and learn to live with the intuitions and feelings and instincts as well as with the intellect. Heroically, she had even encouraged him in his velleities of passion for other women. It might do him good to have a few affairs. So anxious was she to do him good as a novelist, that on more than one occasion, seeing him look admiringly at some young woman or other, she had gone out of her way to establish for him the personal contact which he would never have been able to establish for himself. It was risky, of course. He might really fall in love; he might forget to be intellectual and become a reformed character, but for some other woman’s benefit. Elinor took the risk, partly because she thought that his writing ought to come before everything else, even her own happiness, and partly because she was secretly convinced that there was in reality no risk at all, that he would never lose his head so wholly as to want to run off with another woman. The cure by affairs, if it worked at all, would be gentle in its action; and if it did work, she was sure she would know how to profit by its good effects on him. Anyhow, it hadn’t worked so far. Philip’s infidelities amounted to very little and had had no appreciable effect on him. He remained depressingly, even maddeningly the same—intelligent to the point of being almost human, remotely kind, separately passionate and sensual, impersonally sweet. Maddening. Why did she go on loving him? She wondered. One might almost as well go on loving a bookcase. One day she would really leave him. There was such a thing as being too unselfish and devoted. One should think of one’s own happiness sometimes. To be loved for a change, instead of having to do all the loving oneself; to receive instead of perpetually giving…. Yes, one day she really would leave him. She had herself to think about. Besides, it would be a punishment for Phil. A punishment—for she was sure that, if she left him, he would be genuinely unhappy, in his way, as much as it lay in him to be unhappy. And perhaps the unhappiness might achieve the miracle she had been longing and working for all these years; perhaps it would sensitize him, personalize him. Perhaps it might be the making of him as a writer. Perhaps it was even her duty to make him unhappy, the most sacred of her duties….

The sight of a dog running across the road just in front of the car aroused her from her reverie. How suddenly, how startlingly it had dashed into the narrow universe of the headlamps! It existed for a fraction of a second, desperately running, and was gone again into the darkness on the other side of the luminous world. Another dog was suddenly in its place, pursuing.

‘Oh!’ cried Elinor. ‘It ‘1I be…’ The headlights swerved and swung straight again, there was a padded jolt, as though one of the wheels had passed over a stone; but the stone yelped. ‘…run over,’ she concluded.

‘It has been run over.’

The Indian chauffeur looked round at them, grinning. They could see the flash of his teeth. ‘Dog!’ he said. He was proud of his English.

‘Poor beast!’ Elinor shuddered.

‘It was his fault,’ said Philip. ‘He wasn’t looking. That’s what comes of running after the females of one’s species.’

There was a silence. It was Philip who broke it.

‘Morality’d be very queer,’ he reflected aloud, ‘if we loved seasonally, not all the year round. Moral and immoral would change from one month to another. Primitive societies are apt to be more seasonal than cultivated ones. Even in Sicily there are twice as many births in January as in August. Which proves conclusively that in the spring the young man’s fancy… But nowhere only in the spring. There’s nothing human quite analogous to heat in mares or she-dogs. Except,’ he added, ‘except perhaps in the moral sphere. A bad reputation in a woman allures like the signs of heat in a bitch. Ill-fame announces accessibility. Absence of heat is the animal’s equivalent of the chaste woman’s habits and principles….’

Elinor listened with interest and at the same time a kind of horror. Even the squashing of a wretched animal was enough to set that quick untiring intelligence to work. A poor starved pariah dog had its back broken under the wheels and the incident evoked from Philip a selection from the vital statistics of Sicily, a speculation about the relativity of morals, a brilliant psychological generalization. It was amusing, it was unexpected, it was wonderfully interesting; but oh! she almost wanted to scream.

CHAPTER VII

Mrs. Betterton had been shaken off, his father and Lady Edward distantly waved to and avoided; Walter was free to continue his search. And at last he found what he was looking for. Lucy Tantamount had just emerged from the dining-room and was standing under the arcades, glancing in indecision this way and that. Against the mourning of her dress the skin was luminously white. A bunch of gardenias was pinned to her bodice. She raised a hand to touch her smooth black hair, and the emerald of her ring shot a green signal to him across the room. Critically, with a kind of cold intellectual hatred, Walter looked at her and wondered why he loved. Why? There was no reason, no justification. All the reasons were against his loving her.

Suddenly she moved, she walked out of sight. Walter followed. Passing the entrance to the dining-room, he noticed Burlap, no longer the anchorite, drinking champagne and being talked to by the Comtesse d’Exergillod. Gosh! thought Walter, remembering his own experiences with Molly d’Exergillod. ‘But Burlap probably adores her. He would…He…’ But there she was again, talking—damnation!—with General Knoyle. Walter hung about at a little distance, waiting impatiently for an opportunity to address her.

‘Caught at last,’ said the General patting her hand. ‘Been looking for you the whole evening.’

Half satyr, half uncle, he had an old man’s weakness for Lucy. ‘Charming little girl!’ he would assure all those who wanted to hear. ‘Charming little figure! Such eyes!’ For the most part he preferred them rather younger. ‘Nothing like youth!’ he was fond of saying. His lifelong prejudice against America and Americans had been transformed into enthusiastic admiration ever since, at the age of sixty-five, he had visited California and seen the flappers of Hollywood and the bathing beauties on the Pacific beaches. Lucy was nearly thirty; but the General had known her for years; he continued to regard her as hardly more than the young girl of his first memories. For him, she was still about seventeen. He patted her hand again. ‘We’ll have a good talk,’ he said.

‘That will be fun,’ said Lucy with sarcastic politeness.

From his post of observation Walter looked on. The General had been handsome once. Corseted, his tall figure still preserved its military bearing. The gallant and the guardsman, he smiled; he fingered his white moustache. The next moment he was the playful, protective and confidential old uncle. Faintly smiling, Lucy looked at him out of her pale grey eyes with a detached and unmerciful amusement. Walter studied her. She was not even particularly good looking. So why, why? He wanted reasons, he wanted justification. Why? The question persistently reverberated. There was no answer. He had just fallen in love with her—that was all; insanely, the first time he set eyes on her.

Turning her head, Lucy caught sight of him. She beckoned and called his name. He pretended to be surprised and delightfully astonished.

‘I hope you’ve not forgotten our appointment,’ he said.

‘Do I ever forget? Except occasionally on purpose,’ she qualified with a little laugh. She turned to the General. ‘Walter and I are going to see your stepson this evening,’ she announced in the tone and with the smile which one employs when one talks to people about those who are dear to them. But between Spandrell and his stepfather the quarrel, she knew very well, was mortal. Lucy had inherited all her mother’s fondness for the deliberate social blunder and with it a touch of her father’s detached scientific curiosity. She enjoyed experimenting, not with frogs and guinea-pigs, but with human beings. You did unexpected things to people, you put them in curious situations and waited to see what would happen. It was the method of Darwin and Pasteur.

What happened in this case was that General Knoyle’s face became extremely red. ‘I haven’t seen him for some time,’ he said stiffly.

‘Good, she said to herself. ‘He’s reacting.’

‘But he’s such good company,’ she said aloud.

The General grew redder and frowned. What he hadn’t done for that boy! And how ungratefully the boy had responded, how abominably he had behaved! Getting himself kicked out of every job the General had wangled him into. A waster, an idler; drinking and drabbing; making his mother miserable, sponging on her, disgracing the family name. Anid the insolence of the fellow, the things he had ventured to say the last time they had met and, as usual, had a scene together! The Genleral was never likely to forget being called ‘an impotent old fumbler.’

‘And so intelligent,’ Lucy was saying. With an inward smile she remembered Spandrell’s summary of his stepfather’s career. ‘Superannuated from Harrow,’ it began, ‘passed out from Sandhurst at the bottom of the list, he had a most distinguished career in the Army, rising durng the War to a high post in the Military Intelligence Department.’ The way he rolled out this anticipated obituary was really magnificent. He was thne Times made audible. And then his remarks on Military Intelligence in general! ‘If you look up “Intelligence” in the new volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica,’ he had said, ‘you’ll find it classified under the following three heads: Intelligence, Human; Intelligence, Animal; Intelligence, Military. My stepfather’s a perfect specimen of Intelligence, Military.’

‘So intelligent,’ Lucy repeated

‘Some people think so, I know,’ said General Knoyle very stiffly. ‘But personally…’ He cleared his throat with violence. That was his personal opinion.

A moment later, still rigid, still angrily dignified, he took his leave. He felt that Lucy had offended him. Even her youth and her bare shoulders did not compensate him for those laudatory references to Maurice Spandrell. Insolent, bad-blooded young cub! His existence was the General’s standing grievance against his wife. A woman had no right to have a son like that, no right. Poor Mrs. Knoyle had often atoned to her second husband for the offences of her son. She was there, she could be punished, she was too weak to resist. The exasperated General visited the sins of the child on his parent.

Lucy glanced after the retreating figure, then turned to Walter. ‘I can’t risk that sort of thing happening again,’ she said. ‘It would be bad enough even if he didn’t smell so unpleasant. Shall we go away?’

Walter desired nothing better. ‘But what about your mother and the social duties?’ he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘After all, mother can look after her own bear garden.’

‘Bear garden’s the word,’ said Walter, feeling suddenly hopeful ‘Let’s sneak away to some place where it’s quiet.’

‘My poor Walter! Her eyes were derisive. ‘I never knew anybody with such a mania for quietness as you. But I don’t want to be quiet.’

His hope evaporated, leaving a feeble little bitterness, an ineffective anger. ‘Why not stay here then?’ he asked with an attempt at sarcasm. ‘Isn’t it noisy enough?’

‘Ah, but noisy with the wrong sort of noise,’ she explained. ‘There’s nothing I hate more than the noise of cultured, respectable, eminent people, like these creatures.’ She waved her hand comprehensively. The words evoked, for Walter, the memory of hideous evenings passed with Lucy in the company of the disreputable and uncultured—tipsy at that. Lady Edward’s guests were bad enough. But the others were surely worse. How could she tolerate them?

Lucy seemed to divine his thoughts. Smiling, she laid a hand reassuringly on his arm. ‘Cheer up!’ she said. ‘I’m not taking you into low company this time. There’s Spandrell…’

‘Spandrell,’ he repeated and made a grimace.

‘And if Spandrell isn’t classy enough for you, we shall probably find Mark Rampion and his wife, if we don’t arrive too late.’

At the name of the painter and writer, Walter nodded approvingly.

‘No, I don’t mind listening to Rampion’s noise,’ he said. And then, making an effort to overcome the timidity which always silenced him when the moment came to give words to his feelings, ‘but I’d much rather,’ he added, jocularly, so as to temper the boldness of his words, ‘I’d much rather listen to your noise, in private.’

Lucy smiled, but said nothing. He flinched away in a kind of terror from her eyes. They looked at him calmly, coldly, as though they had seen everything before and were not much interested—only faintly amused, very faintly and coolly amused.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’ His tone was resigned and wretched.

‘We must do a creep,’ she said. ‘Furtive’s the word. No good being caught and headed back.’

But they did not escape entirely unobserved. They were approaching the door, when there was a rustle and a sound of hurrying steps behind them. A voice called Lucy’s name. They turned round and saw Mrs. Knoyle, the General’s wife. She laid a hand on Lucy’s arm.

‘I’ve just heard that you’re going to see Maurice this evening,’ she said, but did not explain that the General had told her so only because he wanted to relieve his feelings by saying something disagreeable to somebody who couldn’t resent the rudeness. ‘Give him a message from me, will you?’ She leaned forward appealingly. ‘Will you?’ There was something pathetically young and helpless about her manner, something very young and soft even about her middleaged looks. To Lucy, who might have been her daughter, she appealed as though to someone older and stronger than herself. ‘Please.’

‘But of course,’ said Lucy.

Mrs. Knoyle smiled gratefully. ‘Tell him I ‘1 come to see him to-morrow afternoon,’ she said.

‘Tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Between four and halfpast. And don’t mention it to anyone else,’ she added after a moment of embarrassed hesitation.

‘Of course I won’t.’

‘I’m so grateful to you,’ said Mrs. Knoyle, and with a sudden shy impulsiveness she leaned forward and kissed her. ‘Good night, my dear.’ She slipped away into the crowd.

‘One would think,’ said Lucy, as they crossed the vestibule, ‘that it was an appointment with her lover she was making, not her son.’

Two footmen let them out, obsequiously automatic. Closing the door, one winked to the other significantly. For an instant, the machines revealed themselves disquietingly as human beings.

Walter gave the address of Sbisa’s restaurant to the taxi driver and stepped into the enclosed darkness of the cab. Lucy had already settled into her corner.

Meanwhile, in the dining-room, Molly d’Exergillod was still talking. She prided herself on her conversation. Conversation was in the family. Her mother had been one of the celebrated Miss Geoghegans of Dublin. Her father was that Mr. Justice Brabant, so well known for his table talk and his witticisms from the bench. Moreover she had married into conversation. D’Exergillod had been a disciple of Robert de Montesquiou and had won the distinction of being mentioned in Sodome et Gomorrhe by Marcel Proust. Molly would have had to be a talker by marriage, if she had not already been one by birth. Nature and environment had conspired to make her a professional athlete of the tongue. Like all conscientious professionals, she was not content to be merely talented. She was industrious, she worked hard to develop her native powers. Malicious friends said that she could be heard practising her paradoxes in bed, before she got up in the morning. She herself admitted that she kept diaries in which she recorded, as well as the complicated history of her own feelings and sensations, every trope and anecdote and witticism that caught her fancy. Did she refresh her memory with a glance at these chronicles each time she dressed to go out to dinner? The same friends who had heard her practising in bed had also found her, like an examinee the night before his ordeal, laboriously mugging up Jean Cocteau’s epigrams about art and Mr. Birrell’s after-dinner stories and W. B. Yeats’s anecdotes about George Moore and what Charlie Chaplin had said to and of her last time she was in Hollywood. Like all professional talkers Molly was very economical with her wit and wisdom. There are not enough bons mots in existence to provide any industrious conversationalist with a new stock for every social occasion. Though extensive, Molly’s repertory was, like that of other more celebrated talkers, limited. A good housewife, she knew how to hash up the conversational remains of last night’s dinner to furnish out this morning’s lunch. Monday’s funeral baked meats did service for Tuesday’s wedding.

To Denis Burlap she was at this moment serving up the talk that had already been listened to with such appreciation by Lady Benger’s lunch party, by the week-enders at Gobley, by Tommy Fitton, who was one of her young men, and Vladimir Pavloff, who was another, by the American Ambassador and Baron Benito Cohen. The talk turned on Molly’s favourite topic.

‘Do you know what Jean said about me?’ she was saying (Jean was her husband). ‘Do you?’ she repeated insistently, for she had a curious habit of demanding answers to merely rhetorical questions. She leaned towards Burlap, offering dark eyes, teeth, a decollete.

Burlap duly replied that he didn’t know.

‘He said that I wasn’t quite human. More like an elemental than a woman. A sort of fairy. Do you think it’s a compliment or an insult?’

‘That depends on one’s tastes,’ said Burlap, making his face look arch and subtle as though he had said something rather daring, witty and at the same time profound.

‘But I don’t feel that it’s even true,’ Molly went on. I don’t strike myself as at all elemental or fairy-like. I’ve always considered myself a perfectly simple, straightforward child of nature. A sort of peasant, really.’ At this point in Molly’s performance all her other auditors had burst into laughing protestation. Baron Benito Cohen had vehemently declared that she was ‘ one of Nature’th Roman Empreththeth.’

 Burlap’s reaction was unexpectedly different from that of the others. He wagged his head, he smiled with a far-away, whimsical sort of expression. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think that’s true. A child of nature, malgre tout. You wear disguises, but the simple genuine person shows through.’

Molly was delighted by what she felt was the highest compliment Burlap could pay her. She had been equally delighted by the others’ denials of her peasanthood. Denial had been their highest compliment. The flattering intention, the interest in her personality were the things that mattered. About the actual opinions of her admirers she cared little.

Burlap, meanwhile, was developing Rousseau’s antithesis between the Man and the Citizen. She cut him short and brought the conversation back to the original theme.

‘Human beings and fairies—I think it’s a very good classification, don’t you?’ She leaned forward with offered face and bosom, intimately. ‘Don’t you?’ she repeated the rhetorical question.

‘Perhaps.’ Burlap was annoyed at having been interrupted.

‘The ordinary human—yes, let’s admit it—all too ‘human being on the one hand. And the elemental on the other. The one so attached and involved and sentimental—I’m terribly sentimental, I may say.’ (‘About ath the ntimental ath the Thirenth in the Odyththey,’ had been Baron Benito’s classical comment.) ‘The other, the elemental, quite free and apart from things, like a cat; coming and going—and going just as lightheartedly as it came; charming, but never charmed; making other people feel, but never really feeling itself. Oh, I envy them their free airiness.’

‘You might as well envy a balloon,’ said Burlap, gravely. He was always on the side of the heart.

‘But they have such fun.’

‘They haven’t got enough feelings to have fun with. That’s what I should have thought.’

‘Enough to have fun,’ she qualified; ‘but perhaps not enough to be happy. Certainly not enough to be unhappy. That’s where they’re so enviable. Particularly if they’re intelligent. Take Philip Quarles, for example. There’s a fairy if ever there was one.’ She launched into her regular description of Philip. ‘Zoologist of fiction,’, ‘learnedly elfish,’ ‘a scientific Puck’ were a few of her phrases. But the best of them had slipped her memory. Desperately she hunted it, but it eluded her. Her Theophrastian portrait had to go out into the world robbed this time of its most brilliantly effective passage, and a little marred as a whole by Molly’s consciousness of the loss and her desperate efforts, as she poured forth, to make it good. ‘Whereas his wife,’ she concluded, rather painfully aware that Burlap had not smiled as frequently as he should have done, ‘is quite the opposite of a fairy. Neither elfish, nor learned, nor particularly intelligent.’ Molly smiled rather patronizingly. ‘A man like Philip must find her a little inadequate sometimes, to say the least.’ The smile persisted, a smile now of selfsatisfaction. Philip had had a faible for her, still had. He wrote such amusing letters, almost as amusing as her own. (‘Quand je veux briller dans le monde,’ Molly was fond of quoting her husband’s compliments, ‘je cite des phrases de tes lettres.’) Poor Elinor! ‘A little bit of a bore sometimes,’ Molly went on. ‘But mind you, a most charming creature. I’ve known her since we were children together. Charming, but not exactly a Hypatia.’ Too much of a fool even to realize that Philip was bound to be attracted by a woman of his own mental stature, a woman he could talk to on equal terms. Too much of a fool to notice, when she had brought them together, how thrilled he had been. Too much of a fool to be jealous. Molly had felt the absence of jealousy as a bit of an insult. Not that she ever gave real cause for jealousy. She didn’t sleep with husbands; she only talked to them. Still, they did do a lot of talking; there was no doubt of that. And wives had been jealous. Elinor’s ingenuous confidingness had piqued her into being more than ordinarily gracious to Philip. But he had started to go round the world before much conversation had taken place. The talk, she ‘anticipated, would be agreeably renewed on his return. Poor Elinor, she thought pityingly. Her feelings might have been a little less Christian, if she had realized that poor Elinor had noticed the admiring look in Philip’s eye even before Molly had noticed it herself, and, noticing, had conscientiously proceeded to act the part of dragoman and go-between. Not that she had much hope or fear that Molly would achieve the transforming miracle. One does not fall very desperately in love with a loud speaker, however pretty, however firmly plump (for Philip’s tastes were rather old-fashioned), however attractively callipygous. Her only hope was that the passions aroused by the plumpness and prettiness would be so very inadequately satisfied by the talking (for talk was all, according to report, that Molly ever conceded) that poor Philip would be reduced to a state of rage and misery most conducive to good writing.

‘But of course,’ Molly went on, ‘intelligence ought never to marry intelligence. That’s why Jean is always threatening to divorce me. He says I’m too stimulating. “Tu ne m’ennuies pas assez,” he says; and that what he needs is une femme sedative. And I believe he’s really right. Philip Quarles has been wise. Imagine an intelligent fairy of a man like Philip married to an equally fairyish intelligent woman—Lucy Tantamount, for example. It would be a disaster, don’t you think? ‘

‘Lucy’d be rather a disaster for any man, wouldn’t she, fairy or no fairy? ‘

‘No, I must say, I like Lucy.’ Molly turned to her inner store-house of Theophrastian phrases

‘I like the way she floats through life instead of trudging. I like the way she flits from flower to flower—which is perhaps a rather too botanical and poetical description of Bentley and Jim Conklin and poor Reggie Tantamount and Maurice Spandrell and Tom Trivet and Poniatovsky and that young Frenchman who writes plays, what is his name? and the various others one has forgotten or never heard about.’ Burlap smiled; they all smiled at this passage. ‘Anyhow, she flits. Doing a good deal of damage to the flowers, I must admit.’ Burlap smiled again. ‘But getting nothing but fun out of it herself. I must say, I rather envy her. I wish I were a fairy and could float.’

‘She has much more reason to envy you,’ said Burlap, looking deep, subtle and Christian once more, and wagging his head.

‘Envy me for being unhappy? ‘

‘Who’s unhappy? ‘ asked Lady Edward breaking in on them at this moment. ‘Good evening, Mr. Burlap,’ she went on without waiting for an answer. Burlap told her how much he had enjoyed the music.

‘We were just talking about Lucy,’ said Molly d’Exergillod, interrupting him. ‘Agreeing that she was like a fairy. So light and detached.’

‘Fairy!’ repeated Lady Edward, emphatically rolling the ‘r’ far back in her throat.’she’s like a leprechaun. You’ve no idea, Mr. Burlap, how hard it is to bring up a leprechaun.’ Lady Edward shook her head.’she used really to frighten me sometimes.’

‘Did she?’ said Molly. ‘But I should have thought you were a bit of a fairy yourself, Lady Edward.’

‘A bit,’ Lady Edward admitted. ‘But never to the point of being a leprechaun.’

****

‘Well?’ said Lucy, as Walter sat down beside her in the cab. She seemed to be uttering a kind of challenge. ‘Well?’

The cab started. He lifted her hand and kissed it. It was his answer to her challenge. ‘I love you. That’s all.’

‘Do you, Walter?’ She turned towards him and, taking his face between her two hands, looked at him intently in the half-darkness

‘Do you? ‘ she repeated; and as she spoke, she shook her head slowly and smiled. Then, leaning forward, she kissed him on the mouth. Walter put his arms round her; but she disengaged herself from the embrace. ‘No, no,’ she protested and dropped back into her corner. ‘No.’

He obeyed her and drew away. There was a silence. Her perfume was of gardenias; sweet and tropical, the perfumed symbol of her being enveloped him. ‘I ought to have insisted,’ he was thinking. ‘Brutally. Kissed her again and again. Compelled her to love me. Why didn’t I? Why?’ He didn’t know. Nor why she had kissed him, unless it was just provocatively, to make him desire her more violently, to make him more hopelessly her slave. Nor why, knowing this, he still loved her. Why, why? he kept repeating to himself. And echoing his thoughts out loud her voice suddenly spoke.

‘Why do you love me?’ she asked from her corner.

He opened his eyes. They were passing a street lamp. Through the window of the moving cab the light of it fell on her face. It stood out for a moment palely against the darkness, then dropped back into invisibility—a pale mask that had seen everything before and whose expression was one of amused detachment and a hard, rather weary languor. ‘I was just wondering,’ Walter answered. ‘And wishing I didn’t.’

‘I might say the same, you know. You’re not particularly amusing when you’re like this.’

How tiresome, she reflected, these men who imagined that nobody had ever been in love before! All the same, she liked him. He was attractive. No, ‘attractive’ wasn’t the word. Attractive, as a possible lover, was just what he wasn’t. ‘Appealing’ was more like it. An appealing lover? It wasn’t exactly her style. But she liked him. There was something very nice about him. Besides, he was clever, he could be a pleasant companion. And tiresome as it was, his love-sickness did at least make him very faithful. That, for Lucy, was important. She was afraid of loneliness and needed her cavalier servants in constant attendance. Walter attended with a dog-like fidelity. But why did he look so like a whipped dog sometimes? So abject. What a fool! She felt suddenly annoyed by his abjection.

‘Well, Walter,’ she said mockingly, laying her hand on his, ‘why don’t you talk to me?’

He did not reply.

‘Or is mum the word?’ Her fingers brushed electrically along the back of his hand and closed round his wrist. ‘Where’s your pulse?’ she asked after a moment. ‘I can’t feel it anywhere. ‘She groped over the soft skin for the throbbing of the artery. He felt the touch of her finger tips, light and thrilling and rather cold against his wrist. ‘I don’t believe you’ve got a pulse,’ she said. ‘I believe your blood stagnates. ‘The tone of her voice was contemptuous. What a fool! she was thinking. What an abject fool! ‘Just stagnates,’ she repeated and suddenly, with sudden malice, she drove her sharp file-pointed nails into his flesh. Walter cried out in surprise and pain. ‘You deserved it,’ she said and laughed in his face.

He seized her by the shoulders and began to kiss her, savagely. Anger had quickened his desire; his kisses were a vengeance. Lucy shut her eyes and abandoned herself unresistingly, limply. Little premonitions of pleasure shot with a kind of panic flutter, like fluttering moths, through her skin. And suddenly sharp fingers seemed to pluck, pizzicato, at the fiddle-strings of her nerves; Walter could feel her whole body starting involuntarily within his arms, starting as though it had been suddenly hurt. Kissing her, he found himself wondering if she had expected him to react in this way to her provocation, if she had hoped he would. He took her slender neck in his two hands. His thumbs were on her wind-pipe. He pressed gently. ‘One day,’ he said between his clenched teeth, ‘ I shall strangle you.

‘Lucy only laughed. He bent forward and kissed her laughing mouth. The touch of his lips against her own sent a thin, sharp sensation that was almost pain running unbearably through her. The panic moth-wings fluttered over her body. She hadn’t expected such fierce and savage ardours from Walter. She was agreeably surprised.

The taxi turned into Soho Square, slowed down, came to a halt. They had arrived. Walter let fall his hands and drew away from her.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘Well?’ she asked challengingly, for the second time that evening. There was a moment’s silence.

‘Lucy,’ he said, ‘let’s go somewhere else. Not here; not this horrible place. Somewhere where we can be alone. ‘His voice trembled, his eyes were imploring. The fierceness had gone out of his desire; it had become abject again, dog-like. ‘Let’s tell the man to drive on,’ he begged.

She smiled and shook her head. Why did he implore, like that? Why was he so abject? The fool, the whipped dog!

‘Please, please!’ he begged. But he should have commanded. He should simply have ordered the man to drive on, and taken her in his arms again.

‘Impossible,’ said Lucy and stepped out of the cab. If he behaved like a whipped dog, he could be treated like one.

Walter followed her, abject and miserable.

Sbisa himself received them on the threshold. He bowed, he waved his fat white hands, and his expanding smile raised a succession of waves in the flesh of his enormous cheeks. When Lucy arrived, the consumption of champagne tended to rise. She was an honoured guest.

‘Mr. Spandrell here!’ she asked. ‘And Mr. and Mrs. Rampion?’

‘Oo yez, oo yez,’ old Sbisa repeated with Neapolitan, almost oriental emphasis. The implication was that they were not only there, but that if it had been in his power, he would have provided two of each of them for her benefit. ‘And you? Quaite well, quaite well, I hope? Sooch lobster we have to-night, sooch lobster…’ Still talking, he ushered them into the restaurant.

CHAPTER VIII

‘What I complain of,’ said Mark Rampion, ‘is the horrible unwholesome tameness of our world.’

Mary Rampion laughed whole-heartedly from the depths of her lungs. It was a laugh one could not hear without wishing to laugh oneself. ‘You wouldn’t say that,’ she said, ‘if you’d been your wife instead of you. Tame? I could tell you something about tameness.’

There was certainly nothing very tame about Mark Rampion’s appearance. His profile was steep, with a hooked fierce nose like a cutting instrument and a pointed chin. The eyes were blue and piercing, and the very fine hair, a little on the reddish side of golden, fluttered up at every movement, every breath of wind, like wisps of blown flame.

‘Well, you’re not exactly a sheep either,’ said Rampion. ‘But two people aren’t the world. I was talking about the world, not us. It’s tame, I say. Like one of those horrible big gelded cats.’

‘Did you find the War so tame?’ asked Spandrell, speaking from the half-darkness outside the little world of pink-tinged lamplight in which their table stood. He sat leaning backwards, his chair tilted on its hind legs against the wall.

‘Even the War,’ said Rampion. ‘It was a domesticated outrage. People didn’t go and fight because their blood was up. They went because they were told to; they went because they were good citizens. ” Man is a fighting animal,” as your stepfather is so fond of saying in his speeches. But what I complain of is that he’s a domestic animal.’

‘And getting more domestic every day,’ said Mary Rampion, who shared her husband’s opinions-or perhaps it would be truer to say, shared most of his feelings and, consciously or unconsciously, borrowed his opinions when she wanted to express them. ‘It’s factories, it’s Christianity, it’s science, it’s respectability, it’s our education,’ she explained. ‘They weigh on the modern soul. They suck the life out of it. They…’

‘Oh, for God’s sake shut up!’ said Rampion.

‘But isn’t that what you say?’

‘What I say is what I say. It becomes quite different when you say it.’

The expression of irritation which had appeared on Mary Rampion’s face cleared away. She laughed.

Ah, well,’ she said good-humouredly, ‘ratiocination was never my strongest point. But you might be a little more polite about it in public.’

‘I don’t suffer fools gladly.’

‘You’ll suffer one very painfully, if you’re not careful,’ she menaced laughingly.

‘If you’d like to throw a plate at him,’ said Spandrell, pushing one over to her as he spoke,’ don’t mind me.’

Mary thanked him. ‘It would do him good,’ she said. ‘He gets so bumptious.’

‘And it would do you no harm,’ retorted Rampion, ‘if I gave you a black eye in return.’

‘You just try. I’ll take you on with one hand tied behind my back.’

They all burst out laughing.

‘I put my money on Mary,’ said Spandrell, tilting back his chair. Smiling with a pleasure which he would have found it hard to explain, he looked from one to the other—from the thin, fierce, indomitable little man to the big golden woman. Each separately was good; but together, as a couple, they were better still. Without realizing it, he had quite suddenly begun to feel happy.

‘We’ll have it out one of these days,’ said Rampion and laid his hand for a moment on hers. It was a delicate hand, sensitive and expressive. An aristocrat’s hand if ever there was one, thought Spandrell. And hers, so blunt and strong and honest, was a peasant’s. And yet by birth it was Rampion who was the peasant and she the aristocrat. Which only showed what nonsense the genealogists talked.

‘Ten rounds,’ Rampion went on. ‘No gloves.’ He turned to Spandrell.

‘You ought to get married, you know,’ he said.

 Spandrell’s happiness suddenly collapsed. It was as though he had come with a jolt to his senses. He felt almost angry with himself. What business had he to go and sentimentalize over a happy couple?’

 I can’t box,’ he answered; and Rampion detected a bitterness in his jocularity, an inward hardening.

‘No, seriously,’ he said, trying to make out the expression on the other’s face. But Spandrell’s head was in the shadow, and the light of the interposed lamp on the table between them dazzled him.

‘Yes, seriously,’ echoed Mary. ‘You ought. You’d be a changed man.’

Spandrell uttered a brief and snorting laugh, and letting his chair fall back on to its four legs, leaned forward across the table. Pushing aside his coffee cup and his half-emptied liqueur glass, he planted his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands. His face came into the light of the rosy lamp. Like a gargoyle, Mary thought, a gargoyle in a pink boudoir. There was one on Notre Dame in just that attitude, leaning forward with his demon’s face between his claws. Only the gargoyle was a comic devil, so extravagantly diabolical that you couldn’t take his devilishness very seriously. Spandrell was a real person, not a caricature; that was why his face was so much more sinister and tragical. It was a gaunt face. Cheekbone and jaw showed in hard outline through the tight skin. The grey eyes were deeply set. In the cadaverous mask only the mouth was fleshy—a wide mouth, with lips that stood out from the skin like two thick weals.

‘When he smiles,’ Lucy Tantamount had once said of him, ‘it’s like an appendicitis operation with ironical corners.’ The red scar was sensual, but firm at the same time and determined, as was the round chin below. There were lines round the eyes and at the corners of his lips. The thick brown hair had begun to retreat from the forehead.

‘He might be fifty, to look at him,’ Mary Rampion was thinking. ‘And yet, what is his age?’ She made calculations and decided that he couldn’t be more than thirty-two or thirty-three. Just the right age for settling down.

‘A changed man,’ she repeated.

‘But I don’t particularly want to be changed.’

Mark Rampion nodded. ‘Yes, that’s the trouble with you, Spandrell. You like stewing in your disgusting suppurating juice. You don’t want to be made healthy. You enjoy your unwholesomeness. You’re rather proud of it, even.’

‘Marriage would be the cure,’ persisted Mary, indefatigably enthusiastic in the cause of the sacrament to which she herself owed all her life and happiness.

‘Unless, of course, it merely destroyed the wife,’ said Rampion. ‘He might infect her with his own gangrene.’

Spandrell threw back his head and laughed profoundly, butt, as was his custom, almost inaudibly, a muted explosion. ‘Admirable!’ he said. ‘Admirable! The first really good argument in favour of matrimony I ever heard. Almost thou persuadest me, Rampion. I’ve never actually carried it as far as marriage.’

‘Carried what?’ asked Rampion, frowning a little. He disliked the other’s rather melodramatically cynical way of talking. So damned pleased with his naughtinesses! Like a stupid child, really.

‘The process of infection. I’d always stopped this side of the registry office. But I’ll cross the threshold next time.’ He drank some more brandy. ‘I’m like Socrates,’ he went on. ‘I’m divinely appointed to corrupt the youth, the female youth more particularly. I have a mission to educate them in the way they shouldn’t go.’ He threw back his head to emit that voiceless laugh of his. Rampion looked at him distastefully. So theatrical. It was as though the man were overacting in order to convince himself he was there at all.

 ‘But if you only knew what marriage could mean,’ Mary earnestly put in. ‘If you only knew…’

‘But, my dear woman, of course he knows,’ Rampion interrupted with impatience.

‘We’ve been married more than fifteen years now,’ she went on, the missionary spirit strong within her. ‘And I assure you…’

‘I wouldn’t waste my breath, if I were you.’

Mary glanced enquiringly at her husband. Wherever human relationships were concerned, she had an absolute trust in Rampion’s judgment. Through those labyrinths he threaded his way with a sure tact which she could only envy, not imitate. ‘He can smell people’s souls,’ she used to say of him. She herself had but an indifferent nose for souls. Wisely then, she allowed herself to be guided by him. She glanced at him. Rampion was staring into his coffee cup. His forehead was puckered into a frown; he had evidently spoken in earnest. ‘Oh, very well,’ she said and lit another cigarette.

Spandrell looked from one to the other almost triumphantly. ‘I have a regular technique with the young ones,’ he went on in the same too cynical manner. Mary shut her eyes and thought of the time when she and Rampion had been young.

CHAPTER IX

‘What a blotch!’ said the young Mary, as they topped the crest of the hill and looked down into the valley. Stanton-in-Teesdale lay below them, black with its slate roofs and its sooty chimneys and its smoke. The moors rose up and rolled away beyond it, bare as far as the eye could reach. The sun shone, the clouds trailed enormous shadows. ‘Our poor view! It oughtn’t to be allowed. It really oughtn’t.’

‘Every prospect pleases and only man is vile,’ quoted her brother George.

The other young man was more practically minded. ‘If one could plant a battery here,’ he suggested, ‘and drop a few hundred rounds onto the place…’

‘It would be a good thing,’ said Mary emphatically. ‘A really good thing.’

Her approval filled the military young man with happiness. He was desperately in love. ‘Heavy, howitzers,’ he added, trying to improve on his suggestion. But George interrupted him.

‘Who the devil is that?’ he asked.

The others looked round in the direction he was pointing. A stranger was walking up the hill towards them.

‘No idea,’ said Mary, looking at him.

The stranger approached. He was a young man in the early twenties, hook-nosed, with blue eyes and silky pale hair that blew about in the wind—for he wore no hat. He had on a Norfolk jacket, ill cut and of cheap material, and a pair of baggy grey flannel trousers. His tie was red; he walked without a stick.

‘Looks as if he wanted to talk to us,’ said George.

And indeed, the young man was coming straight towards them. He walked rapidly and with an air of determination, as though he were on some very important business.

‘What an extraordinary face!’ thought Mary, as he approached. ‘But how ill he looks! So thin, so pale.’ But his eyes forbade her to feel pity. They were bright with power.

He came to a halt in front of them drawing up his thin body very rigidly, as though he were on parade. There was defiance in the attitude, an earnest defiance in the expression of his face. He looked at them fixedly with his bright eyes, turning from one to the other.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said. It was costing him an enormous effort to speak. But speak he must, just because of that insolent unawareness in their blank rich faces.

Mary answered for the others. ‘Good afternoon.’

‘I’m trespassing here,’ said the stranger. ‘Do you mind?’ The seriousness of his defiance deepened. He looked at them sombrely. The young men were examining him from the other side of the bars, from a long way off, from the vantage ground of another class. They had noticed his clothes. There was hostility and contempt in their eyes. There was also a kind of fear. ‘I’m a trespasser,’ he repeated. His voice was rather shrill, but musical. His accent was of the country.

‘One of the local cads,’ George had been thinking.

‘A trespasser.’ It would have been much easier, much pleasanter to sneak out unobserved. That was why he had to affront them.

There was a silence. The military man turned away. He dissociated himself from the whole unpleasant business. It had nothing to do with him, after all. The park belonged to Mary’s father. He was only a guest. ‘I’ve gotta motta: Always merry and bright,’ he hummed to himself, as he looked out over the black town in the valley.

It was George who broke the silence.’Do we mind?’ he said, repeating the stranger’s words. His face had gone very red.

‘How absurd he looks!’ thought Mary, as she glanced at him. ‘Like a bull calf. A blushing bull calf.’

‘Do we mind?’ Damned insolent little bounder! George was working up a righteous indignation. ‘I should just think we do mind. And I’ll trouble you to…’

Mary broke out into laughter. ‘We don’t mind at all,’ she said. ‘Not in the least.’

Her brother’s face became even redder. ‘What do you mean, Mary?’ he asked furiously. (‘Always merry and bright,’ hummed the military man, more starrily detached than ever.) ‘The place is private.’

‘But we don’t mind a bit,’ she said, not looking at her brother, but at the stranger. ‘Not a bit, when people come and are frank about it, like you.’ She smiled at him; but the young man’s face remained as proudly serious as ever. Looking into those serious bright eyes, she too suddenly became serious. It was no joke, she saw all at once, no joke. Grave issues were involved, important issues. But why grave and in what way important she did not know. She was only obscurely and profoundly aware that it was no joke. ‘Goodbye,’ she said in an altered voice, and held out her hand.

The stranger hesitated for a second, then took it. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘I’ll get out of the park as quick as I can.’ And turning round, he walked rapidly away.

‘What the devil!’ George began, turning angrily on his sister.

‘Oh, hold your tongue!’ she answered impatiently.

‘Shaking hands with the fellow,’ he went on protesting.

 ‘A bit of a pleb, wasn’t he?’ put in the military friend.

 She looked from one to the other without speaking and walked away. What louts they were! The two young men followed.

‘I wish to God Mary would learn how to behave herself properly,’ said George, still fuming.

The military young man made deprecating noises. He was in love with her; but he had to admit that she was rather embarrassingly unconventional sometimes. It was her only defect.

‘Shaking that bounder’s hand!’ George went on grumbling.

That was their first meeting. Mary then was twenty-two and Mark Rampion a year younger. He had finished his second year at Sheffield University and was back at Stanton for the summer vacation. His mother lived in one of a row of cottages near the station. She had a little pension—her husband had been a postman—and made a few extra shillings by sewing. Mark was a scholarship boy. His younger and less talented brothers were already at work.

‘A very remarkable young man,’ the Rector insisted more than once in the course of his sketch of Mark Rampion’s career, some few days later.

The occasion was a church bazaar and charitable garden party at the Rectory. Some of the Sunday School children had acted a little play in the open air The dramatist was Mark Rampion.

‘Quite unassisted,’ the Rector assured the assembled gentry.’ And what’s more, the lad can draw. They’re a little eccentric perhaps, his pictures, a little…ah..’ he hesitated.

‘Weird,’ suggested his daughter, with an upper middle-class smile, proud of her incomprehension.

‘But full of talent,’ the Rector continued. ‘The boy’s a real cygnet of Tees,’ he added with a selfconscious, almost guilty laugh. He had a weakness for literary allusions. The gentry smiled perfunctorily.

The prodigy was introduced. Mary recognized the trespasser.

‘I’ve met you before,’ she said.

‘Poaching your view.’

‘You’re welcome to it.’ The words made him smile, a little ironically it seemed to her. She blushed, fearful lest she had said something that might have sounded rather patronizing. ‘But I suppose you’d go on poaching whether you were welcome or not,’ she added with a nervous little laugh.

He said nothing, but nodded, still smiling.

Mary’s father stepped in with congratulations. His praises went trampling over the delicate little play like a herd of elephants. Mary writhed. It was all wrong, hopelessly wrong. She could feel that. But the trouble, as she realized, was that she couldn’t have said anything better herself. The ironic smile still lingered about his lips. ‘What fools he must think us all!’ she said to herself.

And now it was her mother’s turn. ‘Jolly good’ was replaced by ‘too charming.’ Which was just as bad, just as hopelessly beside the point.

When Mrs. Felpham asked him to tea, Rampion wanted to refuse the invitation—but to refuse it without being boorish or offensive. After all, she meant well enough, poor woman. She was only rather ludicrous. The village Maecenas, in petticoats, patronizing art to the extent of two cups of tea and a slice of plum cake. The role was a comic one. While he was hesitating, Mary joined in the invitation.

‘Do come,’ she insisted. And her eyes, her smile expressed a kind of rueful amusement and an apology. She saw the absurdity of the situation. ‘But I can’t do anything about it,’ she seemed to say. ‘Nothing at all. Except apologize.’

‘I should like to come very much,’ he said, turning back to Mrs. Felpham.

The appointed day came. His tie as red as ever, Rampion presented himself. The men were out fishing; he was received by Mary and her mother. Mrs. Felpham tried to rise to the occasion. The village Shakespeare, it was obvious, must be interested in the drama.

‘Don’t you love Barrie’s plays?’ she asked. ‘I’m so fond of them.’ She talked on; Rampion made no comment. It was only later, when Mrs. Felpham had given him up as a bad job and had commissioned Mary to show him round the garden, that he opened his lips.

‘I’m afraid your mother thought me very rude,’ he said, as they walked along the smooth flagged paths between the roses

‘Of course not,’ Mary protested with an excessive heartiness.

Rampion laughed. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But of course she did. Because I was rude. I was rude in order that I shouldn’t be ruder. Better say nothing than say what I thought about Barrie.’

‘Don’t you like his plays?’

‘Do I like them? I?’ He stopped and looked at her. The blood rushed up into her cheeks; what had she said? ‘You can ask that here.’ He waved his hand at the flowers, the little pool with the fountain, the high terrace, with the stonecrops and the aubretias growing from between the stones, the grey, severe Georgian house beyond. ‘But come down with me into Stanton and ask me there. We’re sitting on the hard reality down there, not with an air cushion between us and the facts. You must have an assured five pounds a week at least, before you can begin to enjoy Barrie. If you’re sitting on the bare facts, he’s an insult.’

There was a silence. They walked up and down among the roses—those roses which Mary was feeling that she ought to disclaim, to apologize for. But a disclaimer, an apology would be an offence. A big retriever puppy came frisking clumsily along the path towards them. She called its name; the beast stood up on its hind legs and pawed at her.

‘I think I like animals better than people,’ she said, as she protected herself from its ponderous playfulness.

‘Well, at least they’re genuine, they don’t live on air cushions like the sort of people you have to do with,’ said Rampion, bringing out the obscure relevance of her remark to what had been said before. Mary was amazed and delighted by the way he understood.

‘I’d like to know more of your sort of people,’ she said; ‘genuine people, people without air cushions.’

‘Well, don’t imagine I’m going to do the Cook’s guide for you,’ he answered ironically. ‘We’re not a Zoo, you know; we’re not natives in quaint costume, or anything of that sort. If you want to go slumming, apply to the Rector.’

She flushed very red. ‘You know I wasn’t meaning that,’ she protested.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked her. ‘When one’s rich, it’s difficult not to mean that. A person like you simply can’t imagine what it is not to be rich. Like a fish. How can a fish imagine what life out of the water is like?’

‘But can’t one discover, if one tries?’

‘There’s a great gulf,’ he answered.

‘It can be crossed.’

‘Yes, I suppose it can be crossed.’ But his tone was dubious.

They walked and talked among the roses for a few minutes longer; then Rampion looked at his watch and said he must be going.

‘But you’ll come again?’

‘Would there be much point in my coming again?’ he asked. ‘It’s rather like interplanetary visiting, isn’t it?

‘I hadn’t felt it like that,’ she answered, and added, after a little pause, ‘I suppose you find us all very stupid, don’t you?’ She looked at him. He had raised his eyebrows, he was about to protest. She wouldn’t allow him to be merely polite. ‘Because, you know, we are stupid. Terribly stupid.’ She laughed, rather ruefully. With people of her own kind stupidity was rather a virtue than a defect. To be too intelligent was to risk not being a gentleman. Intelligence wasn’t altogether safe. Rampion had made her wonder whether there weren’t better things than gentlemanly safety. In his presence she didn’t feel at all proud of being stupid.

Rampion smiled at her. He liked her frankness. There was something genuine about her. She hadn’t been spoilt—not yet, at any rate.

‘I believe you’re an agent provocateur,’ he bantered, ‘trying to tempt me to say rude and subversive things about my betters. But as a matter of fact, my opinions aren’t a bit rude. You people aren’t stupider than anyone else. Not naturally stupider. You’re victims of your way of living. It’s put a shell round you and blinkers over your eyes. By nature a tortoise may be no stupider than a bird. But you must admit that its way of living doesn’t exactly encourage intelligence.’

They met again several times in the course of that summer. Most often they walked together over the moors. ‘Like a force of nature,’ he thought as he watched her with bent head tunnelling her way through the damp wind. A great physical force. Such energy, such strength and health—it was magnificent. Rampion himself had been a delicate child, constantly ailing. He admired the physical qualities he did not himself possess. Mary was a sort of berserker Diana of the moors. He told her, as much one day. She liked the compliment.

‘Wass fur ein Atavismus! That was what my old German governess always used to say about me. She was right, I think. I am a bit of an Atavismus.’

Rampion laughed. ‘It sounds ridiculous in German. But it isn’t at all absurd in itself. An atavismus—that’s what we all ought to be. Atavismuses with all modern conveniences. Intelligent primitives. Big game with a soul.’

It was a wet cold summer. On the morning of the day fixed for their next meeting, Mary received a letter from him. ‘Dear Miss Felpham,’ she read, and this first sight of his handwriting gave her a strange pleasure. ‘I’ve idiotically gone and caught a chill. Will you be more forgiving than I am—for I can’t tell you how inexpressibly disgusted and angry I am with myself—and excuse me for putting you off till to-day week?’

He looked pale and thin, when she next saw him, and was still troubled by a cough. When she enquired about his health, he cut her short almost with anger. ‘I’m quite all right,’ he said sharply, and changed the subject.

‘I’ve been re-reading Blake,’ he said. And he began to speak about the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

‘Blake was civilized,’ he insisted, ‘civilized. Civilization is harmony and completeness. Reason, feeling, instinct, the life of the body—Blake managed to include and harmonize everything. Barbarism is being lopsided. You can be a barbarian of the intellect as well as of the body. A barbarian of the soul and the feelings as well as of sensuality. Christianity made us barbarians of the soul, and now science is making us barbarians of the intellect. Blake was the last civilized man.’

He spoke of the Greeks and those naked sunburnt Etruscans in the sepulchral wall paintings. ‘You’ve seen the originals?’ he said. ‘My word, I envy you.’

Mary felt terribly ashamed. She had seen the painted tombs at Tarquinia; but how little she remembered of them! They had just been curious old works of art like all those other innumerable old works of art she had dutifully seen in company with her mother on their Italian journey the year before. They had really been wasted on her. Whereas if he could have afforded to go to Italy…

‘They were civilized,’ he was saying, ‘they knew how to live harmoniously and completely, with their whole being.’ He spoke with a kind of passion, as though he were angry—with the world, with himself, perhaps. ‘We’re all barbarians,’ he began; but was interrupted by a violent fit of coughing. Mary waited for the paroxysm to subside. She felt anxious and at the same time embarrassed and ashamed, as one feels when one has come upon a man off his guard and displaying a weakness which at ordinary times he is at pains to conceal. She wondered whether she ought to say something sympathetic about the cough, or pretend that she hadn’t noticed it. He solved her problem by referring to it himself.

‘Talk of barbarism,’ he said, when the fit was over. He spoke in a tone of disgust, his smile was wry and angry. ‘Have you ever heard anything more barbarous than that cough? A cough like that wouldn’t be allowed in a civilized society.’

Mary proffered solicitude and advice. He laughed impatiently.

‘My mother’s very words,’ he said. ‘Word for word. You women are all the same. Clucking like hens after their chickens.’

‘But think how miserable you’d be if we didn’t cluck!’

A few days later—with some misgivings—he took her to see his mother. The misgivings were groundless; Mary and Mrs. Rampion seemed to find no difficulties in making spiritual contact. Mrs. Rampion was a woman of about fifty, still handsome and with an expression on her face of calm dignity and resignation. Her speech was slow and quiet. Only once did Mary see her manner change and that was when, Mark being out of the room preparing the tea, she began to talk about her son.

‘What do you think of him?’ she asked, leaning forward towards her guest with a sudden brightening of the eyes.

‘What do I think?’ Mary laughed. ‘I’m not impertinent enough to set up as a judge of my betters. But he’s obviously somebody, somebody that matters.’

Mrs. Rampion nodded, smiling with pleasure. ‘He’s somebody,’ she repeated. ‘That’s what I’ve always said.’ Her face became grave. ‘If only he were stronger! If I could only have afforded to bring him up better. He was always delicate. He ought to have been brought up more carefully than I could do. No, not more carefully. I was as careful as I could be. More comfortably, more healthily. But there, I couldn’t afford it.’ She shook her head.’ ‘There you are.’ She gave a little sigh and, leaning back in her chair, sat there in silence, with folded arms, looking at the floor.

Mary made no comment; she did not know what to say. Once more she felt ashamed, miserable and ashamed.

‘What did you think of my mother? ‘ Rampion asked later, when he was escorting her home.

‘I liked her,’ Mary answered.’very much indeed. Even though she did make me feel so small and petty and bad. Which is another way of saying that I admired her, and liked her because of my admiration.’

 Rampion nodded. ‘She is admirable,’ he said. ‘She’s courageous and strong and enduring. But she’s too resigned.’

‘But I thought that was one of the wonderful things about her.’

‘She has no right to be resigned,’ he answered, frowning. ‘No right. When you’ve had a life like hers, you oughtn’t to be resigned. You ought to be rebellious. It’s this damned religion. Did I tell you she was religious?’

‘No; but I guessed it, when I saw her,’ Mary answered.

‘She’s a barbarian of the soul,’ he went on. ‘All soul and future. No present, no past, no body, no intellect. Only the soul and the future and in the meantime resignation. Could anything be more barbarous? She ought to rebel.’

‘I should leave her as she is,’ said Mary. ‘She’ll be happier. And you can rebel enough for two.’

Rampion laughed. ‘I’ll rebel enough for millions,’ he said.

At the end of the summer Rampion returned to Sheffield, and a little later the Felphams moved southwards to their London house. It was Mary who wrote the first letter. She had expected to hear from him; but he did not write. Not that there was any good reason why he should. But somehow she had expected that he would write; she was disappointed when he did not. The weeks passed. In the end she wrote to ask him the name of a book about which he had spoken in one of their conversations. The pretext was flimsy; but it served. He answered; she thanked him; the correspondence became an established fact.

At Christmas Rampion came up to London; he had had some things accepted by the newspapers and was unprecedentedly rich—he had ten pounds to do what he liked with. He did not let Mary know of his proximity till the day before his departure.

‘But why didn’t you tell me before?’ she asked reproachfully, when she heard how many days he had already been in London.

‘I didn’t want to inflict myself on you,’ he answered.

‘But you knew I should have been delighted.’

‘You have your own friends.’ Rich friends, the ironical smile implied.

‘But aren’t you one of my friends?’ she asked, ignoring the implication.

‘Thank you for saying so.’

‘Thank you for being so,’ she answered without affectation or coquetry.

He was moved by the frankness of her avowal, the genuineness and simplicity of her sentiment. He knew, of course, that she liked and admired him; but to know and to be told are different things.

‘I’m sorry, then, I didn’t write to you before,’ he said, and then regretted his words. For they were hypocritical. The real reason why he had kept away from her was not a fear of being badly received; it was pride. He could not afford to take her out; he did not want to accept anything.

They spent the afternoon together and were unreasonably, disproportionately happy.

‘If only you’d told me before,’ she repeated when it was time for her to go. ‘I wouldn’t have made this tiresome engagement for the evening.’

‘You’ll enjoy it,’ he assured her with a return of that ironical tone in which all his references to her life as a member of the monied class were made. The expression of happiness faded from his face. He felt suddenly rather resentful at having been so happy in her company It was stupid to feel like that. What, was the point of being happy on opposite sides of a gulf? ‘You’ll enjoy it,’ he repeated, more bitterly. ‘Good food and wine, distinguished people, witty conversation, the theatre afterwards. Isn’t it the ideal evening?’ His tone was savagely contemptuous.

She looked at him with sad, pained eyes, wondering why he should suddenly have started thus to lay waste retrospectively to their afternoon. ‘I don’t know why you talk like that,’ she said. ‘Do you know yourself?’

The question reverberated in his mind long after they had parted. ‘Do you know yourself?’ Of course he knew. But he also knew that there was a gulf.

They met again at Stanton in Easter week. In the interval they had exchanged many letters, and Mary had received a proposal of marriage from the military friend who had wanted to obliterate Stanton with howitzers. To the surprise and somewhat to the distress of her relations, she refused him.

‘He’s such a nice boy,’ her mother had insisted.

‘I know. But one simply can’t take him seriously, can one? ‘

‘Why not?’

‘And then,’ Mary continued, ‘he doesn’t really exist. He isn’t completely there. Just a lump; nothing more. One can t marry someone who isn’t there.’ She thought of Rampion’s violently living face; it seemed to burn, it seemed to be sharp and glowing. ‘One can’t marry a ghost, even when it’s tangible and lumpy—particularly when it’s lumpy.’ She burst out laughing.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Mrs. Felpham with dignity.

‘But I do,’ Mary answered. ‘I do. And after all, that’s what chiefly matters in the circumstances.’

Walking with Rampion on the moors, she told him of the laying of this too, too solid military phantom. He made no comment. There was a long silence. Mary felt disappointed and at the same time ashamed of her disappointment. ‘I believe,’ she said to herself, ‘I believe I was trying to get him to propose to me.’

The days passed; Rampion was silent and gloomy. When she asked him the reason, he talked unhappily about his future prospects. At the end of the summer, he would have finished his university course; it would be time to think of a career. The only career that seemed to be immediately open—for he could not afford to wait—was teaching.

‘Teaching,’ he repeated with emphatic horror, ‘teaching! Does it surprise you that I should feel depressed?’ But his misery had other causes besides the prospect of having to teach. ‘Would she laugh at me, if I asked her? ‘ he was wondering. He didn’t think she would. But if she wasn’t going to refuse, was it fair on his part to ask? Was it fair to let her in for the kind of life she would have to lead with him? Or perhaps she had money of her own; and in that case his own honour would be involved.

‘Do you see me as a pedagogue?’ he asked aloud. The pedagogue was his scapegoat.

‘But why should you be a pedagogue, when you can write and draw? You can live on your wits.’

‘But can I? At least pedagogy’s safe.’

‘What do you want to be safe for?’ she asked, almost contemptuously.

Rampion laughed. ‘You wouldn’t ask if you’d had to live on a weekly wage, subject to a week’s notice. Nothing like money for promoting courage and selfconfidence.’

‘Well then, to that extent money’s a good thing. Courage and selfconfidence are virtues.’

They walked on for a long time in silence. ‘Well, well,’ said Rampion at last, looking up at her, ‘you’ve brought it on yourself.’ He made an attempt at laughter. ‘Courage and selfconfidence are virtues; you said so yourself. I’m only trying to live up to your moral standards. Courage and selfconfidence! I’m going to tell you that I love you.’ There was another long silence. He waited; his heart was beating as though with fear.

‘Well?’ he questioned at last. Mary turned towards him and, taking his hand, lifted it to her lips.

Before and after their marriage Rampion had many occasions of admiring those wealth-fostered virtues. It was she who made him give up all thought of teaching and trust exclusively to his wits for a career. She had confidence for both.

‘I’m not going to marry a schoolmaster,’ she insisted. And she didn’t; she married a dramatist who had never had a play performed, except at the Stanton-in-Teesdale church bazaar, a painter who had never sold a picture.

‘We shall starve,’ he prophesied. The spectre of hunger haunted him; he had seen it too often to be able to ignore its existence.

‘Nonsense,’ said Mary, strong in the knowledge that people didn’t starve. Nobody that she knew had ever been hungry. ‘Nonsense.’ She had her way in the end.

What made Rampion the more reluctant to take the unsafe course was the fact that it could only be taken at Mary’s expense.

‘I can’t live on you,’ he said. ‘I can’t take your money.’

‘But you’re not taking my money,’ she insisted, ‘you’re simply an investment. I’m putting up capital in the hope of getting a good return. You shall live on me for a year or two, so that I may live on you for the rest of my life. It’s business; it’s positively sharp practice.

He had to laugh.

‘And in any case,’ she continued, ‘you won’t live very long on me. Eight hundred pounds won’t last for ever.’

He agreed at last to borrow her eight hundred pounds at the current rate of interest. He did it reluctantly, feeling that he was somehow betraying his own people. To start life with eight hundred pounds—it was too easy, it was a shirking of difficulties, a taking of unfair advantages. If it had not been for that sense of responsibility which he felt towards his own talents, he would have refused the money and either desperately risked the career of literature without a penny, or gone the safe and pedagogical way. When at last he consented to take the money, he made it a condition that she should never accept anything from her relations. Mary agreed.

‘Not that they’ll be very anxious to give me anything,’ she added with a laugh.

She was right. Her father’s horror at the misalliance was as profound as she had expected. Mary was in no danger, so far as he was concerned, of becoming rich.

They were married in August and immediately went abroad. They took the train as far as Dijon and from there began to walk south-east, towards Italy. Rampion had never been out of England before. The strangeness of France was symbolical to him of the new life he had just begun, the new liberty he had acquired. And Mary herself was no less symbolically novel than the country through which they travelled. She had not only selfconfidence, but a recklessness which was altogether strange and extraordinary in his eyes. Little incidents impressed him. There was that occasion, for example, when she left her spare pair of shoes behind in the farm where they had spent the night. It was only late in the afternoon that she discovered her loss. Rampion suggested that they should walk back and reclaim them. She would not hear of it.

‘They’re gone,’ she said. ‘It’s no use bothering. Let the boots bury their boots.’ He got quite angry with her. ‘Remember you’re not rich any more,’ he insisted. ‘You can’t afford to throw away a good pair of shoes. We shan’t be able to buy a new pair till we get home.’ They had taken a small sum with them for their journey and had vowed that in no circumstances would they spend more. ‘Not till we get home,’ he repeated.

‘I know, I know,’ she answered impatiently. ‘I shall learn to walk barefoot.’

And she did.

‘I was born to be a tramp,’ she declared one evening when they were lying on hay in a barn. ‘I can’t tell you how I enjoy not being respectable. It’s the Atavismus coming out. You bother too much, Mark. Consider the lilies of the field.’

‘And yet,’ Rampion meditated, ‘Jesus was a poor man. Tomorrow’s bread and boots must have mattered a great deal in his family. How was it that he could talk about the future like a millionaire?’

‘Because he was one of nature’s dukes,’ she answered. ‘That’s why. He was born with the title; he felt he had a divine right, like a king. Millionaires who make their money are always thinking about money; they’re terribly preoccupied about to-morrow. Jesus had the real ducal feeling that he could never be let down. None of your titled financiers or soap boilers. A genuine aristocrat. And besides, he was an artist, he was a genius. He had more important things to think about than bread and boots and to-morrow.’ She was silent for a little and then added, as an afterthought: ‘And what’s more, he wasn’t respectable. He didn’t care about appearances. They have their reward. But I don’t mind if we do look like scarecrows.’

‘You’ve paid yourself a nice lot of compliments, said Rampion. But he meditated her words and her spontaneous, natural, untroubled way of living. He envied her her Atavismus.

It was not merely tramping that Mary liked. She got almost as much enjoyment out of the more prosaic settled life they led, when they returned to England. ‘Marie-Antoinette at the Trianon,’ was what Rampion called her, when he saw her cooking the dinner; she did it with such childlike enthusiasm.

‘Think carefully,’ he had warned her before they married

‘You’re going to be poor. Really poor; not poor on a thousand a year like your impecunious friends. There’ll be no servants. You’ll have to cook and mend and do housework. You won’t find it pleasant.’

Mary only laughed. ‘You’ll be the one who won’t find it pleasant,’ she answered, ‘at any rate until I’ve learnt to cook.’

She had never so much as fried an egg when she married him.

Strangely enough that childlike, Marie-Antoinette-ish enthusiasm for doing things—for cooking on a real range, using a real carpet sweeper, a real sewing machine—survived the first novel and exciting months. She went on enjoying herself.

‘I could never go back to being a perfect lady,’ she used to say. ‘It would bore me to death. Goodness knows, housework and managing and looking after the children can be boring and exasperating enough. But being quite out of touch with all the ordinary facts of existence, living in a different planet from the world of daily, physical reality—that’s much worse.’

Rampion was of the same opinion. He refused to make art and thought excuses for living a life of abstraction. In the intervals of painting and writing he helped Mary with the housework.

‘You don’t expect flowers to grow in nice clean vacuums.’ That was his argument. ‘They need mould and clay and dung. So does art.’

For Rampion, there was also a kind of moral compulsion to live the life of the poor. Even when he was making quite a reasonable income, they kept only one maid and continued to do a great part of the housework themselves. It was a case, with him, of noblesse obligeor rather roture oblige. To live like the rich, in a comfortable abstraction from material cares would be, he felt, a kind of betrayal of his class, his own people. If he sat still and paid servants to work for him, he would somehow be insulting his mother’s memory, he would be posthumously telling her that he was too good to lead the life she had led.

There were occasions when he hated this moral compulsion, because he felt that it was compelling him to do foolish and ridiculous things; and hating, he would try to rebel against it. How absurdly shocked he had been, for example, by Mary’s habit of lying in bed of a morning. When she felt lazy, she didn’t get up; and there was an end of it. The first time it happened, Rampion was really distressed.

‘But you can’t stay in bed all the morning,’ he protested.

‘Why not?’

‘Why not? But because you can’t.’

‘But I can,’ said Mary calmly. ‘And I do.’

It shocked him. Unreasonably, as he perceived when he tried to analyse his feelings. But all the same, he was shocked. He was shocked because he had always got up early himself, because all his people had had to get up early. It shocked him that one should lie in bed while other people were up and working. To get up late was somehow to add insult to injury. And yet, obviously, getting up early oneself, unnecessarily, did nothing to help those who had to get up early. Getting up, when one wasn’t compelled to get up, was just a tribute of respect, like taking off one’s hat in a church. And at the same time it was an act of propitiation, a sacrificial appeasement of the conscience

‘One oughtn’t to feel like that,’ he reflected. ‘Imagine a Greek feeling like that!’

It was unimaginable. And yet the fact remained that, however much he might disapprove of the feeling, he did in fact feel like that.

‘Mary’s healthier than I am,’ he thought; and he remembered those lines of Walt Whitman about the animals. ‘They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.’ Mary was like that and it was good. To be a perfect animal and a perfect human—that was the ideal. All the same, he was shocked when she didn’t get up in the morning. He tried not to be; but he was shocked. Rebelling, he would sometimes lie in bed himself till noon, on principle. It was a duty not to be a barbarian of the conscience. But it was a very long time before he could genuinely enjoy his laziness.

Slug-abed habits were not the only things in Mary that distressed him. During those first months of their marriage he was often, secretly and against his own principles, shocked by her. Mary soon learnt to recognize the signs of his unexpressed disapproval and made a point, when she saw that she had shocked him, of shocking him yet more profoundly. The operation, she thought, did him nothing but good.

‘You’re such an absurd old puritan,’ she told him.

The taunt annoyed him, because he knew it was well founded. By birth, to some extent, and yet more by training, he was half a puritan. His father had died when he was only a child and he had been brought up exclusively by a virtuous and religious mother who had done her best to abolish, to make him deny the existence of all the instinctive and physical components of his being. Growing up, he had revolted against her teaching, but with the mind only, not in practice. The conception of life against which he had rebelled was a part of him; he was at war against himself. Theoretically, he approved of Mary’s easy aristocratic tolerance of behaviour which his mother had taught him was horribly sinful; he admired her unaffected enjoyment of food and wine and kisses, of dancing and singing, fairs and theatres and every kind of jollification. And yet, whenever, in those early days, she began to talk in her calm matter-of-fact way of what he had only heard of, portentously, as fornication and adultery, he felt a shock, not in his reason (for that, after a moment’s reflection, approved), but in some deeper layer of his being. And the same part of him obscurely suffered from her great and whole-heartedly expressed capacity for pleasure and amusement, from her easy laughter, her excellent appetite, her unaffected sensuality. It took him a long time to unlearn the puritanism of his childhood. There were moments when his love for his mother turned almost to hatred.

‘She had no right to bring me up like that,’ he said. ‘Like a Japanese gardener deliberately stunting a tree. No right.’

And yet he was glad that he had not been born a noble savage, like Mary. He was glad that circumstances had compelled him laboriously to learn his noble savagery. Later, when they had been married several years and had achieved an intimacy impossible in those first months of novelties, shocks and surprises, he was able to talk to her about these matters.

‘Living comes to you too easily,’ he tried to explain. ‘You live by instinct. You know what to do quite naturally, like an insect when it comes out of the pupa. It’s too simple, too simple.’ He shook his head. ‘You haven’t earned your knowledge; you’ve never realized the alternatives.’

‘In other words,’ said Mary, ‘I’m a fool.’

‘No, a woman.’

‘Which is your polite way of saying the same thing. But I’d like to know,’ she went on with an irrelevance that was only apparent, ‘where you’d be without me. I’d like to know what you’d be doing if you’d never met me.’ She moved from stage to stage of an emotionally coherent argument.

‘I’d be where I am and be doing exactly what I’m doing now.’ He didn’t mean it, of course; for he knew, better than anyone, how much he owed to her, how much he had learnt from her example and precept. But it amused him to annoy her.

‘You know that’s not true,’ Mary was indignant.

‘It is true.’

‘It’s a lie. And to prove it,’ she added, ‘I’ve a very good mind to go away with the children and leave you for a few months to stew in your own juice. I’d like to see how you get on without me.’

‘I should get on perfectly well,’ he assured her with exasperating calmness.

Mary flushed; she was beginning to be genuinely annoyed.’very well then,’ she answered, ‘ I’ll really go. This time I really will.’ She had made the threat before; they quarrelled a good deal, for both were quick-tempered.

‘Do,’ said Rampion. ‘But remember that two can play at that going-away game. When you go away from me, I go away from you.’

‘We’ll see how you get on without me,’ she continued menacingly.

‘And you?’ he asked.

‘What about me?’

‘Do you imagine you can get on any better without me than I can get on without you?’

They looked at one another for a little time in silence and then, simultaneously, burst out laughing.

CHAPTER X

A regular technique,’ Spandrell repeated. ‘One chooses them unhappy, or dissatisfied, or wanting to go on the stage, or trying to write for the magazines and being rejected and consequently thinking they’re dmes incomprises.’ He was boastfully generalizing from the case of poor little Harriet Watkins. If he had just baldly recounted his affair with Harriet, it wouldn’t have sounded such a very grand exploit. Harriet was such a pathetic, helpless little creature; anybody could have done her down. But generalized like this, as though her case was only one of hundreds, told in a language of the cookery book (‘one chooses them unhappy’—it was one of Mrs. Beeton’s recipes), the history sounded, he thought, most cynically impressive. ‘And one starts by being very, very kind, and so wise, and perfectly pure, an elder brother, in fact. And they think one’s really wonderful, because, of course, they’ve never met anybody who wasn’t just a city man, with city ideas and city ambitions. Simply wonderful, because one knows all about art and has met all the celebrities and doesn’t think exclusively about money and in terms of the morning paper. And they’re a little in awe of one too,’ he added remembering little Harriet’s expression of scared admiration; ‘one’s so unrespectable and yet so high-class, so at ease and at home among the great works and the great men, so wicked but so extraordinarily good, so learned, so well travelled, so brilliantly cosmopolitan and West-End (have you ever heard a suburban talking of the West-End?), like that gentleman with the order of the Golden Fleece in the advertisements for De Reszke cigarettes. Yes, they’re in awe of one; but at the same time they adore. One’s so understanding, one knows so much about life in general and their souls in particular, and one isn’t a bit flirtatious or saucy like ordinary men, not a bit. They feel they could trust one absolutely; and so they can, for the first weeks. One has to get them used to the trap; quite tame and trusting, trained not to shy at an occasional brotherly pat on the back or an occasional chaste uncle-ish kiss on the forehead. And meanwhile one coaxes out their little confidences, one makes them talk about love, one talks about it oneself in a man-to-man sort of way, as though they were one’s own age and as sadly disillusioned and bitterly knowing as oneself—which they find terribly shocking (though of course they don’t say so), but oh, so thrilling, so enormously flattering. They simply love you for that. Well then, finally, when the moment seems ripe and they’re thoroughly domesticated and no more frightened, one stages the denouement. Tea in one’s rooms—one’s got them thoroughly used to coming with absolute impunity to one’s rooms—and they’re going to go out to dinner with one, so that there’s no hurry. The twilight deepens, one talks disillusionedly and yet feelingly about the amorous mysteries, one produces cocktailsvery strong—and goes on talking so that they ingurgitate them absentmindedly without reflection. And sitting on the floor at their feet, one begins very gently stroking their ankles in an entirely platonic way, still talking about amorous philosophy, as though one were quite unconscious of what one’s hand were doing. If that’s not resented and the cocktails have done their work, the rest shouldn’t be difficult. So at least I’ve always found.’ Spandrell helped himself to more brandy and drank. ‘But it’s then, when they’ve become one’s mistress that the fun really begins. It’s then one deploys all one’s Socratic talents. One develops their little temperaments, one domesticates them—still so wisely and sweetly and patiently—to every outrage of sensuality. It can be done, you know; the more easily, the more innocent they are. They can be brought in perfect ingenuousness to the most astonishing pitch of depravity.’

‘I’ve no doubt they can,’ said Mary indignantly. ‘But what’s the point of doing it?’

‘It’s an amusement,’ said Spandrell with theatrical cynicism. ‘It passes the time and relieves the tedium.’

‘And above all,’ Mark Rampion went on, without looking up from his coffee cup, ‘ above all it’s a vengeance. It’s a way of getting one’s own back on women, it’s a way of punishing them for being women and so attractive, it’s a way of expressing one’s hatred of them and of what they represent, it’s a way of i expressing one’s hatred of oneself. The trouble with I you, Spandrell,’ he went on, suddenly and accusingly raising his bright pale eyes to the other’s face, ‘is that you really hate yourself. You hate the very source of your life, its ultimate basis—for there’s no denying it,’sex is fundamental. And you hate it, hate it.’

‘Me?’ It was a novel accusation. Spandrell was accustomed to hearing himself blamed for his excessive love of women and the sensual pleasures.

‘Not only you. All these people.’ With a jerk of his head he indicated the other diners. ‘And all the respectable ones too. Practically everyone. It’s the disease of modern man. I call it Jesus’s disease on the analogy of Bright’s disease. Or rather Jesus’s and Newton’s disease; for the scientists are as much responsible as the Christians. So are the big business men, for that matter. It’s Jesus’s and Newton’s and Henry Ford’s disease. Between them, the three have pretty well killed us. Ripped the life out of our bodies and stuffed us with hatred.’

Rampion was full of his subject. He had been busy all day on a drawing that symbolically illustrated it. Jesus, in the loin-cloth of the execution morning, and an overalled surgeon were represented, scalpel in hand, one on either side of an operating table, on which, foreshortened, the soles of his feet presented to the spectator, lay crucified a half-dissected man. From the horrible wound in his belly escaped a coil of entrails which, falling to the earth, mingled with those of the gashed and bleeding woman lying in the foreground, to be transformed by an allegorical metamorphosis into a whole people of living snakes. In the background receded a landscape of hills, dotted with black collieries and chimneys. On one side of the picture, behind the figure of Jesus, two angels—the spiritual product of the vivisectors’ mutilations—were trying to rise on their outspread wings. Vainly, for their feet were entangled in the coils of the serpents. For all their efforts, they could not leave the earth.

‘Jesus and the scientists are vivisecting us,’ he went on, thinking of his picture. ‘Hacking our bodies to bits.’

‘But after all, why not?’ objected Spandrell. ‘Perhaps they’re meant to be vivisected. The fact of shame is significant. We feel spontaneously ashamed of the body and its activities. That’s a sign of the body’s absolute and natural inferiority.’

‘Absolute and natural rubbish!’ said Rampion indignantly.’shame isn’t spontaneous, to begin with. It’s artificial, it’s acquired. You can make people ashamed of anything. Agonizingly ashamed of wearing brown boots with a black coat, or speaking with the wrong sort of accent, or having a drop at the end of their noses. Of absolutely anything, including the body and its functions. But that particular shame’s just as artificial as any other. The Christians invented it, just as the tailors in Savile Row invented the shame of wearing brown boots with a black coat. There was precious little of it before Christian times. Look at the Greeks, the Etruscans.’

The antique names transported Mary back to the moors above Stanton. He was just the same. Stronger now, that was all. How ill he had looked that day! She had felt ashamed of being healthy and rich. Had she loved him then as much as she loved him now?

Spandrell had lifted a long and bony hand. ‘I know, I know. Noble and nude and antique. But I believe they’re entirely a modem invention, those Swedishdrill pagans of ours. We trot them out whenever we want to bait the Christians. But did they ever exist? I have my doubts.’

‘But look at their art,’ put in Mary, thinking of the paintings at Tarquinia. She had seen them a second time with Mark—really seen them on that occasion.

‘Yes, and look at ours,’ retorted Spandrell. ‘When the Royal Academy sculpture room is dug up three thousand years hence, they’ll say that twentieth-century Londoners wore fig-leaves, suckled their babies in public and embraced one another in the parks, stark naked.’

‘I only wish they did,’ said Rampion.

‘But they don’t. And then—leaving this question of shame on one side for the momen—what about asceticism as the preliminary condition of the mystical experience?’

Rampion brought his hands together with a clap and, leaning back in his chair, turned up his eyes. ‘Oh, my sacred aunt!’ he said. ‘So it’s come to that, has it? Mystical experience and asceticism. The fornicator’s hatred of life in a new form.’

‘But seriously…’ the other began.

‘No, seriously, have you read Anatole France’s Thais?’

 Spandrell shook his head.

 ‘Read it,’ said Rampion. ‘Read it. It’s elementary, of course. A boy’s book. But one mustn’t grow up without having read all the boys’ books. Read it and then come and talk to me again about asceticism and mystical experiences.’

‘I‘1I read it,’ said Spandrell. ‘Meanwhile, all I wanted to say is that there are certain states of consciousness known to ascetics that are unknown to people who aren’t ascetics.’

‘No doubt. And if you treat your body in the way nature meant you to, as an equal, you attain to states of consciousness unknown to the vivisecting ascetics.’

‘But the states of the vivisectors are better than the states of the indulgers.’

‘In other words, lunatics are better than sane men. Which I deny. The sane, harmonious, Greek man gets as much as he can of both sets of states. He’s not such a fool as to want to kill part of himself. He strikes a balance. It isn’t easy of course; it’s even damnably difficult. The forces to be reconciled are intrinsically hostile. The conscious soul resents the activities of the unconscious, physical, instinctive part of the total being The life of the one is the other’s death and vice versa. But the sane man at least tries to strike a balance. The Christians, who weren’t sane, told people that they’d got to throw half of themselves in the waste-paper basket. And now the scientists and business men come and tell us that we must throw away half of what the Christians left us. But I don’t want to be three-quarters dead. I prefer to be alive, entirely alive. It’s time there was a revolt in favour of life and wholeness.’

‘But from your point of view,’ said Spandrell, ‘I should have thought this epoch needed no reforming. It’s the golden age of guzzling, sport and promiscuous love-making.’

‘But if you knew what a puritan Mark really was!’ Mary Rampion laughed. ‘What a regular old puritan!’

‘Not a puritan,’ said her husband. ‘Merely sane. You’re like everyone else,’ he went on, addressing himself to Spandrell. ‘You seem to imagine that the cold, modern, civilized lasciviousness is the same as the healthy—what shall I call it?—phallism (that gives the religious quality of the old way of life; you’ve read the Acharnians?) phallism, then, of the ancients.’

Spandrell groaned and shook his head.’spare us the Swedish exercisers.’

‘But it isn’t the same,’ the other went on. ‘It’s just Christianity turned inside out. The ascetic contempt for the body expressed in a different way. Contempt and hatred. That was what I was saying just now. You hate yourselves, you hate life. Your only alternatives are promiscuity or asceticism. Two forms of death. Why, the Christians themselves understood phallism a great deal better than this godless generation. What’s that phrase in the marriage service? ” With my body I thee worship.” Worshipping with the body—that’s the genuine phallism. And if you imagine it has anything to do with the unimpassioned civilized promiscuity of our advanced young people, you’re very much mistaken indeed.’

‘Oh, I’m quite ready to admit the deathliness of our civilized entertainments,’ Spandrell answered. ‘There’s a certain smell,’ he went on speaking in snatches between sucks at the half-smoked cigar he was trying to relight, ‘of cheap scent…and stale unwashedness…I often think…the atmosphere of hell…must be composed of it.’ He threw the match away.’ But the other alternative—there’s surely no death about that. No death in Jesus or St. Francis, for example.’

‘In spots,’ said Rampion. ‘They were dead in spots. Very much alive in others, I quite agree. But they simply left half of existence out of account. No, no, they won’t do. It’s time people stopped talking about them. I’m tired of Jesus and Francis, terribly tired of them.’

‘Well then, the poets,’ said Spandrell. ‘You can’t say that Shelley’s a corpse.’

‘Shelley?’ exclaimed Rampion. ‘Don’t talk to me of Shelley.’ He shook his head emphatically. ‘No, no. There’s something very dreadful about Shelley. Not human, not a man. A mixture between a fairy and a white slug.’

‘Come, come,’ Spandrell protested.

‘Oh, exquisite and all that. But what a bloodless kind of slime inside! No blood, no real bones and bowels. Only pulp and a white juice. And oh, that dreadful lie in the soul! The way he was always pretending for the benefit of himself and everybody else that the world wasn’t really the world, but either heaven or hell. And that going to bed with women wasn’t really going to bed with them, but just two angels holding hands. Ugh! Think of his treatment of women—shocking, really shocking. The women loved it of course—for a little. It made them feel so spiritual—that is, until it made them feel like committing suicide. So spiritual. And all the time he was just a young schoolboy with a sensual itch like anybody else’s, but persuading himself and other people that he was Dante and Beatrice rolled into one, only much more so. Dreadful, dreadful! The only excuse is that, I suppose, he couldn’t help it. He wasn’t born a man; he was only a kind of fairy slug with the sexual appetites of a schoolboy. And then, think of that awful incapacity to call a spade a spade. He always had to pretend it was an angel’s harp or a platonic imagination. Do you remember the Ode to the Skylark?” Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert!”’ Rampion recited with a ludicrous parody of an elocutionist’s ‘expression.’ ‘Just pretending, just lying to himself, as usual. The lark couldn’t be allowed to be a mere bird, with blood and feathers and a nest and an appetite for caterpillars. Oh no! That wasn’t nearly poetical enough, that was much too coarse. It had to be a disembodied spirit. Bloodless, boneless. A kind of ethereal flying slug. It was only to be expected. Shelley was a kind of flying slug himself; and, after all, nobody can really write about anything except himself. If you’re a slug, you must write about slugs, even though your subject is supposed to be a skylark. But I wish to God,’ Ramplon added, with a sudden burst of comically extravagant fury, ‘I wish to God the bird had had as much sense as those sparrows in the book of Tobit and dropped a good large mess in his eye. It would have served him damned well right for saying it wasn’t a bird. Blithe spirit, indeed! Blithe spirit!’

CHAPTER XI

In Lucy’s neighbourhood life always tended to become exceedingly public. The more the merrier was her principle; or if ‘merrier’ were too strong a word, at least the noisier, the more tumultuously distracting. Within five minutes of her arrival, the corner in which Spandrell and the Rampions had been sitting all evening in the privacy of quiet conversation was invaded and in a twinkling overrun by a loud and alcoholic party from the inner room. Cuthbert Arkwright was the noisiest and the most drunken—on principle and for the love of art as well as for that of alcohol. He had an idea that by bawling and behaving offensively, he was defending art against the Philistines. Tipsy, he felt himself arrayed on the side of the angels, of Baudelaire, of Edgar Allan Poe, of De Quincey, against the dull unspiritual mob. And if he boasted of his fornications, it was because respectable people had thought Blake a madman, because Bowdler had edited Shakespeare, and the author of Madame Bovary had been prosecuted, because when one asked for the Earl of Rochester’s Sodom at the Bodleian, the librarians wouldn’t give it unless one had a certificate that one was engaged on bona fide literary research. He made his living, and in the process convinced himself that he was serving the arts, by printing limited and expensive editions of the more scabrous specimens of the native and foreign literatures. Blond, beef-red, with green and bulging eyes, his large face shining, he approached vociferating greetings. Willie Weaver jauntily followed, a little man perpetually smiling, spectacles astride his long nose, bubbling with good humour and an inexhaustible verbiage. Behind him, his twin in height and also spectacled, but grey, dim, shrunken and silent, came Peter Slipe.

‘They look like the advertisement of a patent medicine,’ said Spandrell as they approached. Slipe’s the patient before, Weaver’s the same after one bottle, and Cuthbert Arkwright illustrates the appalling results of taking the complete cure.’

Lucy was still laughing at the joke when Cuthbert took her hand. ‘Lucy! ‘ he shouted. ‘My angel! But why in heaven’s name do you always write in pencil? I simply cannot read what you write. It’s a mere chance that I’m here to-night.’

So she’d written to tell him to meet her here, thought Walter. That vulgar, stupid lout.

Willie Weaver was shaking hands with Mary Rampion and Mark. ‘I had no idea I was to meet the great,’ he said. ‘Not to mention the fair.’ He bowed towards Mary, who broke into loud and masculine laughter. Willie Weaver was rather pleased than offended. ‘Positively the Mermaid Tavern!’ he went on.

‘Still busy with the bric-a-brac?’ asked Spandrell, leaning across the table to address Peter Slipe, who had taken the seat next to Walter’s. Peter was an Assyriologist employed at the British Museum.

‘But why in pencil, why in pencil?’ Cuthbert was roaring.

‘I get my fingers so dirty when I use a pen.’

‘I’ll kiss the ink away,’ protested Cuthbert, and bending over the hand he was still holding, he began to kiss the thin fingers.

Lucy laughed. ‘I think I’d rather buy a stylo,’ she said.

Walter looked on in misery. Was it possible? A gross and odious clown like that?’

Ungrateful!’ said Cuthbert. ‘But I simply must talk to Rampion.’

And turning away, he gave Rampion a clap on the shoulder and simultaneously waved his other hand at Mary.

‘What an agape!’ Willie Weaver simmered on, like a tea kettle. The spout was now turned towards Lucy, ‘what a symposium! What a—’ he hesitated for a moment in search of the right, the truly staggering phrase—’what Athenian enlargements! What a more than Platonic orgy!’

‘What is an Athenian enlargement?’ asked Lucy. Willie sat down and began to explain. ‘Enlargements, I mean, by contrast with our bourgeois and Pecksniffian smuggeries…’

‘Why don’t you give me something of yours to print?’ Cuthbert was persuasively enquiring.

Rampion looked at him with distaste. ‘Do you think I’m ambitious of having my books sold in the rubber shops?’

‘They’d be in good company,’ said Spandrell. ‘The Works of Aristotle…’ Cuthbert roared in protest.

‘Compare an eminent Victorian with an eminent Periclean,’ said Willie Weaver. He smiled, he was happy and eloquent.

On Peter Slipe the burgundy had acted as a depressant, not a stimulant. The wine had only enhanced his native dimness and melancholy.

‘What about Beatrice?’ he said to Walter, ‘Beatrice Gilray?’ he hiccoughed and tried to pretend that he had coughed. ‘I suppose you see her often, now that she works on the Literary World.’

Walter saw her three times a week and always found her well.

‘Give her my love, when you see her next,’ said Slipe.

‘The stertorous borborygms of the dyspeptic Carlyle!’ declaimed Willie Weaver, and beamed through his spectacles. The mot, he flattered himself, could hardly have been more exquisitely juste. He gave the little cough which was his invariable comment on the best of his phrases. ‘I would laugh, I would applaud,’ the little cough might be interpreted; ‘but modesty forbids.’

‘Stertorous what?’ asked Lucy. ‘Do remember that I’ve never been educated.’

‘Warbling your native woodnotes wild!’ said Willie. ‘May I help myself to some of that noble brandy? The blushful Hippocrene.’

‘She treated me badly, extremely badly.’ Peter Slipe was plaintive. ‘But I don’t want her to think that I bear her any grudge.’

Willie Weaver smacked his lips over the brandy. ‘Solid joys and liquid pleasures none but Zion’s children know,’ he misquoted and repeated his little cough of selfsatisfaction.

‘The trouble with Cuthbert,’ Spandrell was saying, ‘is that he’s never quite learnt to distinguish art from pornography.’

‘Of course,’ continued Peter Slipe, ‘she had a perfect right to do what she liked with her own house. But to turn me out at such short notice.’

At another time Walter would have been delighted to listen to poor little Slipe’s version of that curious story. But with Lucy on his other hand, he found it difficult to take much interest.

‘But I sometimes wonder if the Victorians didn’t have more fun than we did,’ she was saying. ‘The more prohibitions, the greater the fun. If you want to see people drinking with real enjoyment, you must go to America. Victorian England was dry in every department. For example, there was a nineteenth amendment about love. They must have made it as enthusiastically as the Americans drink whiskey. I don’t know that I really believe in Athenian enlargements—that is, if we’re one of them.’

‘You prefer Pecksniff to Alcibiades,’ Willie Weaver concluded.

Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’ve had no experience of Pecksniff.’

‘I don’t know,’ Peter Slipe was saying, ‘whether you’ve ever been pecked by a goose.’

‘Been what?’ asked Walter, recalling his attention. ‘Been pecked by a goose.’

‘Never, that I can remember.’

‘It’s a hard, dry sensation.’ ‘Slipe jabbed the air with a tobacco-stained forefinger. ‘Beatrice is like that. She pecks; she enjoys pecking. But she can be very kind at the same time. She insists on being kind in her way, and she pecks if you don’t like it. Pecking’s part of the kindness; so I always found. I never objected. But why should she have turned me out of the house as though I were a criminal? And rooms are so difficult to find now. I had to stay in a boarding house for three weeks. The food…’ He shuddered.

Walter could not help smiling.

‘She must have been in a great hurry to instal Burlap in your place.’

‘But why in such a hurry as all that?’

‘When it’s a case of off with the old love and on with the new…’

‘But what has love to do with it?’ asked Slipe. ‘In Beatrice’s case.’

‘A great deal,’ Willie Weaver broke in. ‘Everything. These superannuated virgins—always the most passionate.’

‘But she’s never had a love affair in her life.’

‘Hence the violence,’ concluded Willie triumphantly. ‘Beatrice has a nigger sitting on the safety valve. And my wife assures me that her underclothes are positively Phrynean. That’s most sinister.’

‘Perhaps she likes being well dressed,’ suggested Lucy.

Willie Weaver shook his head. The hypothesis was too simple.

‘That woman’s unconscious as a black hole.’ Willie hesitated a moment. ‘Full of batrachian grapplings in the dark,’ he concluded and modestly coughed to commemorate his achievement.

****

Beatrice Gilray was mending a pink silk camisole. She was thirtyfive, but seemed younger, or rather seemed ageless. Her skin was clear and fresh. From shallow and unwrinkled orbits the eyes looked out, shining. In a sharp, determined way her face was not unhandsome, but with something intrinsically rather comic about the shape and tilt of the nose, something slightly absurd about the bright beadiness of the eyes, the pouting mouth and round defiant chin. But one laughed with as well as at her; for the set of her lips was humorous and the expression of her round astonished eyes was mocking and mischievously inquisitive.

She stitched away. The clock ticked. The moving instant which, according to Sir Isaac Newton, separates the infinite past from the infinite future advanced inexorably through the dimension of time. Or, if Aristotle was right, a little more of the possible was every instant made real; the present stood still and drew into itself the future, as a man might suck for ever at an unending piece of macaroni. Every now and then Beatrice actualized a potential yawn. In a basket by the fireplace a black she-cat lay on her side purring and suckling four blind and parti-coloured kittens. The walls of the room were primrose yellow. On the top shelf of the bookcase the dust was thickening on the text-books of Assyriology which she had bought when Peter Slipe was the tenant of her upper floor. A volume of Pascal’s Thoughts, with pencil annotations by Burlap, lay open on the table. The clock continued to tick.

Suddenly the front door banged. Beatrice put down her pink silk camisole and sprang to her feet.

‘Don’t forget that you must drink your hot milk, Denis,’ she said, looking out into the hall. Her voice was clear, sharp and commanding.

Burlap hung up his coat and came to the door. ‘You oughtn’t to have sat up for me,’ he said, with tender reproachfulness, giving her one of his grave and subtle Sodoma smiles.

‘I had some work I simply had to get finished,’ Beatrice lied.

‘Well, it was most awfully sweet of you.’ These pretty colloquialisms, with which Burlap liked to pepper his conversation, had for sensitive ears a most curious ring. ‘He talks slang,’ Mark Rampion once said, ‘as though he were a foreigner with a perfect command of English—but a foreigner’s command. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard an Indian calling anyone a “jolly good sport.” Burlap’s slang reminds me of that.’

For Beatrice, however, that ‘awfully sweet’ sounded entirely natural and un-alien. She flushed with a younggirlishly timid pleasure. But, ‘Come in and shut the door,’ she rapped out commandingly. Over that soft young timidity the outer shell was horny; there was a part of her being that pecked and was efficient. ‘Sit down there,’ she ordered; and while she was briskly busy over the milk-jug, the saucepan, the gas-ring, she asked him if he had enjoyed the party.

Burlap shook his head. ‘Fascinatio nugacitatis,’ he said. ‘Fascinatio nugacitatis.’ He had been ruminating the fascination of nugacity all the way from Piccadilly Circus.

Beatrice did not understand Latin; but she could see from his face that the words connoted disapproval. ‘Parties are rather a waste of time, aren’t they?’ she said.

Burlap nodded. ‘A waste of time,’ he echoed in his slow ruminant’s voice, keeping his blank preoccupied eyes fixed on the invisible daemon standing a little to Beatrice’s left. ‘One’s forty, one has lived more than half one’s life, the world is marvellous and mysterious. And yet one spends four hours chattering about nothing at Tantamount House. Why should triviality be so fascinating? Or is there something else besides the triviality that draws one? Is it some vague fantastic hope that one may meet the messianic person one’s always been looking for, or hear the revealing word?’ Burlap wagged his head as he spoke with a curious loose motion, as though the muscles of his neck were going limp. Beatrice was so familiar with the motion that she saw nothing strange in it any more. Waiting for the milk to boil, she listened admiringly, she watched him with a serious church-going face. A man whose excursions into the drawing-rooms of the rich were episodes in a lifelong spiritual quest might justifiably be regarded as the equivalent of Sunday morning church.

‘All the same,’ Burlap added, glancing up at her with a sudden mischievous, gutter-snipish grin, most startlingly unlike the Sodoma smile of a moment before, ‘the champagne and the caviar were really marvellous.’ It was the demon that had suddenly interrupted the angel at his philosophic ruminations. Burlap had allowed him to speak out loud. Why not? It amused him to be baffling. He looked at Beatrice.

Beatrice was duly baffled. ‘I’m sure they were,’ she said, readjusting her church-going face to make it harmonize with the grin. She laughed rather nervously and turned away to pour out the milk into a cup. ‘Here’s your milk,’ she rapped out, taking refuge from her bafflement in officious command. ‘Mind you drink it while it’s hot.’

There was a long silence. Burlap sipped slowly at his steaming milk and, seated on a pouf in front of the empty fireplace, Beatrice waited, rather breathlessly, she hardly knew for what.

‘You look like little Miss Muffett sitting on her tuffet,’ said Burlap at last.

Beatrice smiled. ‘Luckily there’s no big spider.’

‘Thanks for the compliment, if it is one.’

‘Yes it is,’ said Beatrice. That was the really delightful thing about Denis, she reflected; he was so trustworthy. Other men were liable to pounce on you and try to paw you about and kiss you. Dreadful that was, quite dreadful. Beatrice had never really got over the shock she received as a young girl, when her Aunt Maggie’s brother-in-law, whom she had always looked up to as an uncle, had started pawing her about in a hansom. The incident so scared and disgusted her that when Tom Field, whom she really did like, asked her to marry him, she refused, just because he was a man, like that horrible Uncle Ben, and because she was so terrified of being made love to, she had such a panic fear of being touched. She was over thirty now and had never allowed anyone to touch her. The soft quivering little girl underneath the business-like shell of her had often fallen in love. But the terror of being pawed about, of being even touched, had always been stronger than the love. At the first sign of danger, she had desperately pecked, she had hardened her shell, she had fled. Arrived in safety, the terrified little girl had drawn a long breath. Thank Heaven! But a little sigh of disappointment was always included in the big sigh of relief. She wished she hadn’t been frightened, she wished that the happy relationship that had existed before the pawing could have gone on for ever, indefinitely. Sometimes she was angry with herself; more often she thought there was something fundamentally wrong with love, something fundamentally dreadful about men. That was the wonderful thing about Denis Burlap; he was so reassuringly not a pouncer or a pawer. Beatrice could adore him without a qualm.

‘Susan used to sit on poufs, like little Miss Muffett,’ Burlap resumed after a pause. His voice was melancholy. He had spent the last minutes in ruminating the theme of his dead wife. It was nearly two years now since Susan had been carried off in the influenza epidemic. Nearly two years; but the pain, he assured himself, had not diminished, the sense of loss had remained as overwhelming as ever. Susan, Susan, Susan—he had repeated the name to himself over and over again. He would never see her any more, even if he lived for a million years. A million years, a million years. Gulfs opened all round the words. ‘Or on the floor,’ he went on, reconstructing her image as vividly as he could. ‘I think she liked sitting on the floor best. Like a child.’ A child, a child, he repeated to himself. So young.

Beatrice sat in silence, looking into the empty grate. To have looked at Burlap, she felt, would have been indiscreet, indecent almost. Poor fellow! When she turned towards him at last, she saw that there were tears on his cheeks. The sight filled her with a sudden passion of maternal pity. ‘Like a child,’ he had said. But he was like a child himself. Like a poor unhappy child. Leaning forward she drew her fingers caressingly along the back of his limply hanging hand.

****

‘Batrachian grapplings!’ Lucy repeated and laughed. ‘That was a stroke of genius, Willie.’

‘All my strokes are strokes of genius,’ said Willie modestly. He acted himself; he was Willie Weaver in the celebrated role of Willie Weaver. He exploited artistically that love of eloquence, that passion for the rotund and reverberating phrase with which, more than three centuries too late, he had been born. In Shakespeare’s youth he would have been a literary celebrity. Among his contemporaries, Willie’s euphuisms only raised a laugh. But he enjoyed applause, even when it was derisive. Moreover, the laughter was never malicious; for Willie Weaver was so good-natured and obliging that everybody liked him. It was to a hilariously approving audience that he played his part; and, feeling the approval through the hilarity, he played it for all it was worth. ‘All my strokes are strokes of genius.’ The remark was admirably in character. And perhaps true? Willie jested, but with a secret belief. ‘And mark my words,’ he added, ‘one of these days the batrachians will erump, they’ll break out.’

‘But why batrachians?’ asked Slipe. ‘Anything less like a batrachian than Beatrice…’

‘And why should they break out?’ put in Spandrell.

‘Frogs don’t peck.’ But Slipe’s thin voice was drowned by Mary Rampion’s.

‘Because things do break out,’ she cried. ‘They do.’

‘Moral,’ Cuthbert concluded:’don’t shut anything up. I never do.’

‘But perhaps the fun consists in breaking out,’ Lucy speculated.

‘Perverse and paradoxical prohibitionist!’

‘But obviously,’ Rampion was saying, ‘you get revolutions occurring inside as well as outside. It’s poor against rich in the state. In the individual, it’s the oppressed body and instincts against the intellect. The intellect’s been exalted as the spiritual upper classes; the spiritual lower classes rebel.’

‘Hear, hear!’ shouted Cuthbert, and banged the table.

Rampion frowned. He felt Cuthbert’s approbation as a personal insult.

‘I’m a counter-revolutionary,’ said Spandrell. ‘Put the spiritual lower classes in their place.’

‘Except in your own case, eh?’ said Cuthbert grinning.

‘Mayn’t one theorize?’

‘People have been forcibly putting them in their place for centuries,’ said Rampion; ‘and look at the result. You, among other things.’ He looked at Spandrell, who threw back his head and noiselessly laughed. ‘Look at the result,’ he repeated. ‘Inward personal revolution and consequent outward and social revolution.’

‘Come, come,’ said Willie Weaver. ‘You talk as though the thermidorian tumbrils were already rumbling. England still stands very much where it did.’

‘But what do you know of England and Englishmen?’ Rampion retorted. ‘You’ve never been out of London or your class. Go to the North.’

‘God forbid!’ Willie piously interjected.

‘Go to the coal and iron country. Talk a little with the steel workers. It isn’t revolution for a cause, It’s revolution as an end in itself. Smashing for smashing’s sake.’

‘Rather sympathetic it sounds,’ said Lucy.

‘It’s terrifying. It simply isn’t human. Their humanity has all been squeezed out of them by civilized living, squeezed out by the weight of coal and iron. It won’t be a rebellion of men. It’ll be a revolution of elementals, monsters, pre-human monsters. And you just shut your eyes and pretend everything’s too perfect.

****

‘Think of the disproportion,’ Lord Edward was saying, as he smoked his pipe. ‘It’s positively…’ His voice failed. ‘Take coal, for example. Man’s using a hundred and ten times as much as he used in i8oo. But population’s only two and a half times what it was. With other animals…Surely quite different. Consumption’s proportionate to numbers.’

Illidge objected. ‘But if animals can get more than they actually require to subsist, they take it, don’t they? If there’s been a battle or a plague, the hyenas and vultures take advantage of the abundance to overeat. Isn’t it the same with us? Forests died in great quantities some millions of years ago. Man has unearthed their corpses, finds he can use them and is giving himself the luxury of a real good guzzle while the carrion lasts. When the supplies are exhausted, he’ll go back to short rations, as the hyenas do in the intervals between wars and epidemics.’ Illidge spoke with gusto. Talking about human beings as though they were indistinguishable from maggots filled him with a peculiar satisfaction. ‘A coal-field’s discovered; oil’s struck. Towns spring up, railways are built, ships come and go. To a long-lived observer on the moon, the swarming and crawling must look like the pullulation of ants and flies round a dead dog. Chilean nitre, Mexican oil, Tunisian phosphates—at every discovery another scurrying of insects. One can imagine the comments of the lunar astronomers. “These creatures have a remarkable and perhaps unique tropism towards fossilized carrion.”’

****

‘Like ostriches,’ said Mary Rampion. ‘You live like ostriches.’

‘And not about revolutions only,’ said Spandrell, while Willie Weaver was heard to put in something about ‘strouthocamelian philosophies.’ ‘About all the important things that happen to be disagreeable. There was a time when people didn’t go about pretending that death and sin didn’t exist. “Au ditour d’un sentier une charogne infame,”’ he quoted. ‘Baudelaire was the last poet of the Middle Ages as well as the first modern. “Et pourtant,”’ he went on, looking with a smile to Lucy and raising his glass.

‘“Et pourtant vous serez semblable a cette ordure,

A cette horrible infection,

Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature,

Vous, mon ange et ma passion!

Alors, o ma beaute, dites a la vermine

Qui vous mangera de baisers…”’

‘My dear Spandrell!’ Lucy held up her hand protestingly.

‘Really too necrophilous!’ said Willie Weaver.

‘Always the same hatred of life,’ Rampion was thinking. ‘Different kinds of death—the only alternatives.’ He looked observantly into Spandrell’s face.

****

‘And when you come to think of it,’ Illidge was saying, ‘the time it took to form the coal measures divided by the length of a human life isn’t so hugely different from the life of a sequoia divided by a generation of decay bacteria.’

****

Cuthbert looked at his watch. ‘But good God!’ he shouted. ‘It’s twentyfive to one.’ He jumped up. ‘And I promised we’d put in an appearance at Widdicombe’s party. Peter, Willie! Quick march.’

‘But you can’t go,’ protested Lucy. ‘Not so absurdly early.’

‘The call of duty,’ Willie Weaver explained. ‘Stern Daughter of the Voice of God.’ He uttered his little cough of self-approbation.

‘But it’s ridiculous, it’s not permissible.’ She looked from one to another with a kind of angry anxiety. The dread of solitude was chronic with her. And it was always possible, if one sat up another five minutes, that something really amusing might happen. Besides, it was insufferable that people should do things she didn’t want them to do.

‘And we too, I’m afraid,’ said Mary Rampion rising.

Thank heaven, thought Walter. He hoped that Spandrell would follow the general example.

‘But this is impossible!’ cried Lucy. ‘Rampion, I simply cannot allow it.’

Mark Rampion only laughed. These professional sirens! he thought. She left him entirely cold, she repelled him. In desperation Lucy even appealed to the woman of the party.

‘Mrs. Rampion, you must stay. Five minutes more. Only five minutes,’ she coaxed.

In vain. The waiter opened the side door. Furtively they slipped out into the darkness.

‘Why will they insist on going?’ asked Lucy, plaintively.

‘Why will we insist on staying?’ echoed Spandrell. Walter’s heart sank; that meant the man didn’t intend to go. ‘Surely, that’s much more incomprehensible.’

Utterly incomprehensible! On Walter the heat and alcohol were having their usual effects. He was feeling ill as well as miserable. What was the point of sitting on, hopelessly, in this poisonous air? Why not go home at once. Marjorie would be pleased.

‘You, at least, are faithful, Walter.’ Lucy gave him a smile. He decided to postpone his departure. There was a silence.

****

Cuthbert and his companions had taken a cab. Refusing all invitations, the Rampions had preferred to walk.

‘Thank heaven!’ said Mary as the taxi drove away. ‘That dreadful Arkwright!’

‘Ah, but that woman’s worse,’ said Rampion.’she gives me the creeps. That poor silly little Bidlake boy. Like a rabbit in front of a weasel.’

‘That’s male trade unionism. I rather like her for making you men squirm a bit. Serves you right.’

‘You might as well like cobras.’ Rampion’s zoology was wholly symbolical.

‘But if it’s a matter of creeps, what about Spandrell? He’s like a gargoyle, a demon.’

‘He’s like a silly schoolboy,’ said Rampion emphatically. ‘He’s never grown up. Can’t you see that? He’s a permanent adolescent. Bothering his head about all the things that preoccupy adolescents. Not being able to live, because he’s too busy thinking about death and God and truth and mysticism and all the rest of it; too busy thinking about sins and trying to commit them and being disappointed because he’s not succeeding. It’s deplorable. The man’s a sort of Peter Pan—much worse even than Barrie’s disgusting little abortion, because he’s got stuck at a sillier age. He’s Peter Pan a la Dostoevsky-cum-de Musset-cum-the-Nineties-cum-Bunyan-cum-Byron and the Marquis de Sade. Really deplorable. The more so as he’s potentially a very decent human being.’

Mary laughed. ‘I suppose I shall have to take your word for it.’

****

‘By the way,’ said Lucy, turning to Spandrell. ‘I had a message from your mother.’ She gave it. Spandrell nodded, but made no comment.

‘And the General?’ he enquired as soon as she had finished speaking. He wanted no more said about his mother.

‘Oh, the General!’ Lucy made a grimace. ‘I had at least half an hour of Military Intelligence this evening. Really, he oughtn’t to be allowed. What about a Society for the Prevention of Generals?’

‘I’m an honorary and original member.’

‘Or why not for the Prevention of the Old, while one was about it?’ Lucy went on. ‘The old really aren’t possible. Except your father, Walter. He’s perfect. Really perfect. The only possible old man.’

‘One of the few completely impossible, if you only knew.’ Among the Bidlakes of Walter’s generation the impossibility of old John was almost axiomatic. ‘You wouldn’t find him quite so perfect if you’d been his wife or his daughter.’ As he uttered the words, Walter suddenly remembered Marjorie. The blood rushed to his cheeks.

‘Oh, of course, if you will go and choose him as a husband or a father,’ said Lucy, ‘ what can you expect? He’s a possible old man just because he’s been such an impossible husband and father. Most old people have had the life crushed out of them by their responsibilities. Your father never allowed himself to be squashed. He’s had wives and children and all the rest. But he’s always lived as though he were a boy on the spree. Not very pleasant for the wives and children, I grant. But how delightful for the rest of us!’

‘I suppose so,’ said Walter. He had always thought of himself as so utterly unlike his father. But he was acting just as his father had acted.

‘Think of him unfilially.’

‘I’ll try.’ How should he think of himself?’

Do, and you’ll see that I’m right. One of the few possible old men. Compare him with the others.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s no good; you can’t have any dealings with them.’

Spandrell laughed. ‘You speak of the old as though they were Kaffirs or Eskimos.’

‘Well, isn’t that just about what they are? Hearts of gold, and all that. And wonderfully intelligent—in their way, and all things considered. But they don’t happen to belong to our civilization. They’re aliens. I shall always remember the time I went to tea with some Arab ladies in Tunis. So kind they were, so hospitable. But they would make me eat such uneatable cakes, and they talked French so badly, and there was nothing whatever to say to them, and they were so horrified by my short skirts and my lack of children. Old people always remind me of an Arab tea party. Do you suppose we shall be an Arab tea party when we’re old?’

‘Yes, and probably a death’s head into the bargain,’ said Spandrell. ‘It’s a question of thickening arteries.’

‘But what makes the old such an Arab tea party is their ideas. I simply cannot believe that thick arteries will ever make me believe in God and morals and all the rest of it. I came out of the chrysalis during the War, when the bottom had been knocked out of everything. I don’t see how our grandchildren could possibly knock it out any more thoroughly than it was knocked then. So where would the misunderstanding come in?’

‘They might have put the bottom in again,’ suggested Spandrell.

She was silent for a moment. ‘I never thought of that.’

‘Or else you might have put it in yourself. Putting the bottom in again is one of the traditional occupations of the aged.’

****

The clock struck one and, like the cuckoo released by the bell, Simmons popped into the library, carrying a tray. Simmons was middleaged and had that statesman-like dignity of demeanour which the necessity of holding the tongue and keeping the temper, of never speaking one’s real mind and preserving appearances tends always to produce in diplomats, royal personages, high government officials and butlers. Noiselessly, he laid the table for two, and, announcing that his lordship’s supper was served, retired. The day had been Wednesday; two grilled mutton chops were revealed when Lord Edward lifted the silver cover. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays were chop days. On Tuesdays and Thursdays there was steak with chips. On Saturdays, as a treat, Simmons prepared a mixed grill. On Sundays he went out; Lord Edward had to be content with cold ham and tongue, and a salad.

‘Curious,’ said Lord Edward, as he handed Illidge his chop, ‘curious that the sheep population doesn’t rise. Not at the same rate as the human population.

One would have expected…seeing that the symbiosis is such a close…’ He chewed in silence.

‘Mutton must be going out of fashion,’ said Illidge. ‘Like God,’ he added provocatively, ‘ and the immortal soul.’ Lord Edward was not to be baited. ‘Not to mention the Victorian novelists,’ Illidge went on. He had slipped on the stairs; and the only literature Lord Edward ever read was Dickens and Thackeray. But the Old Man calmly masticated. ‘And innocent young girls.’ Lord Edward took a scientific interest in the sexual activities of axolotls and chickens, guinea-pigs and frogs; but any reference to the corresponding activities of humans made him painfully uncomfortable. ‘And purity,’ Illidge continued, looking sharply into the Old Man’s face,’ and virginities, and…’ He was interrupted and Lord Edward saved from further persecution by the ringing of the telephone bell.

‘I’ll deal with it,’ said Illidge jumping up from his place.

He put the receiver to his ear. ‘Hullo!’

‘Edward, is that you?’ said a deep voice, not unlike Lord Edward’s own. ‘This is me. Edward, I’ve just this moment discovered a most extraordinary mathematical proof of the existence of God, or rather of…’

‘But this isn’t Lord Edward,’ shouted Illidge. ‘Wait. I’ll ask him to come.’ He turned back to the Old Man. ‘It’s Lord Gattenden,’ he said. ‘He’s just discovered a new proof of the existence of God.’ He did not smile, his tone was grave. Gravity in the circumstances was the wildest derision. The statement made fun of itself. Laughing comment made it less, not more, ridiculous. Marvellous old imbecile! Illidge felt himself revenged for all the evening’s humiliations. ‘A mathematical proof,’ he added, more seriously than ever.

‘Oh dear!’ exclaimed Lord Edward, as though something deplorable had happened. Telephoning always made him nervous. He hurried to the instrument. ‘Charles, is that…’

‘Ah, Edward,’ cried the disembodied voice of the head of the family from forty miles away at Gattenden. ‘Such a really remarkable discovery. I wanted your opinion on it. About God. You know the formula, m over nought equals infinity, m being any positive number? Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought? In which case you have m equals infinity times nought. That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity. Doesn’t that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite power out of nothing? Doesn’t it?’ The diaphragm of the telephone receiver was infected by Lord Gattenden’s excitement, forty miles away. It talked with breathless speed; its questions were earnest and insistent. ‘Doesn’t it, Edward?’ All his life the fifth marquess had been looking for the absolute. It was the only sort of hunting possible to a cripple. For fifty years he had trundled in his wheeled chair at the heels of the elusive quarry. Could it be that he had now caught it, so easily, and in such an unlikely place as an elementary school-book on the theory of limits? It was something that justified excitement. ‘What’s your opinion, Edward?’

‘Well,’ began Lord Edward, and at the other end of the electrified wire, forty miles away, his brother knew, from the tone in which that single word was spoken, that it was no good. The Absolute’s tail was still unsalted.

****

‘Talking about elders,’ said Lucy,’did I ever tell either of you that really marvellous story about my father?’

‘Which story? ‘

‘The one about the conservatories.’ The mere thought of the story made her smile.

‘No, I never remember hearing about the conservatories,’ said Spandrell, and Walter also shook his head.

‘It was during the War,’ Lucy began. ‘I was getting on for eighteen, I suppose. Just launched. And by the way, somebody did almost literally break a bottle of champagne over me. Parties were rather feverish in those days, if you remember.’

Spandrell nodded and, though as a matter of fact he had been at school during the War, Walter also nodded, knowingly.

‘One day,’ Lucy continued, ‘I got a message: Would I go upstairs and see his Lordship? It was unprecedented. I was rather alarmed. You know how the old imagine one lives. And how upset they are when they discover they’ve been wrong. The usual Arab tea party.’ She laughed and, for Walter, her laughter laid waste to all the years before he had known her. To elaborate the history of their young and innocent loves had been one of his standing consolations. She had laughed; and now not even fancy could take pleasure in that comforting romance.

Spandrell nodded. ‘So you went upstairs, feeling as though you were climbing a scaffold…’

‘And found my father in his library, pretending to read. My arrival really terrified him. Poor man! I never saw anyone so horribly embarrassed and distressed You can imagine how his terrors increased mine. Such strong feelings must surely have an adequate cause What could it be? Meanwhile, he suffered agonies. If his sense of duty hadn’t been so strong, I believe he would have told me to go away again at once. You should have seen his face!’ The comic memories were too much for her. She laughed.

His elbow on the table, his head in his hand, Walter stared into his wine-glass. The bright little bubbles came rushing to the surface one by one, purposively, as though determined at all costs to be free and happy. He did not dare to raise his eyes. The sight of Lucy’s laughter-distorted face, he was afraid, might make him do something stupid—cry aloud, or burst into tears.

‘Poor man!’ repeated Lucy, and the words came out on a puff of explosive mirth. ‘He could hardly speak for terror.’ Suddenly changing her tone, she mimicked Lord Edward’s deep blurred voice bidding her sit down, telling her (stammeringly and with painful hesitations) that he had something to talk to her about. The mimicry was admirable. Lord Edward’s embarrassed phantom was sitting at their table.

‘Admirable!’ Spandrell applauded. And even Walter had to laugh; but the depths of his unhappiness remained undisturbed.

‘It must have taken him a good five minutes,’ Lucy went on, ‘to screw himself up to the talking point. I was in an agony, as you can imagine. But guess what it was he wanted to say.

‘What?’

‘Guess.’ And all at once Lucy began to laugh again, uncontrollably. She covered her face with her hands, her whole body shook, as though she were passionately weeping. ‘It’s too good,’ she gasped, dropping her hands and leaning back in her chair. Her face still worked with laughter; there were tears on her cheeks. ‘Too good.’ She opened the little beaded bag that lay on the table in front of her and taking out a handkerchief, began to wipe her eyes. A gust of perfume came out with the handkerchief, reinforcing those faint memories of gardenias that surrounded her, that moved with her wherever she went like a second ghostly personality. Walter looked up; the strong gardenia perfume was in his nostrils; he was breathing what was for him the very essence of her being, the symbol of her power, of his own insane desires. He looked at her with a kind of terror.

‘He told me,’ Lucy went on, still laughing spasmodically, still dabbing at her eyes,’ he told me that he had heard that I sometimes allowed young men to kiss me at dances, in conservatories. Conservatories!’ she repeated. ‘What a wonderful touch! So marvellously in period. The ‘eighties. The old Prince of Wales. Zola’s novels. Conservatories! Poor dear man! He said he hoped I wouldn’t let it happen again. My mother’d be so dreadfully distressed if she knew. Oh dear, oh dear!’ She drew a deep breath. The laughter finally died down.

Walter looked at her and breathed her perfume, breathed his own desires and the terrible power of her attraction. And it seemed to him that he was seeing her for the first time. Now for the first time—with the half-emptied glass in front of her, the bottle, the dirty ash-tray; now, as she leaned back in her chair, exhausted with laughter, and wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes.

‘Conservatories,’ Spandrell was repeating. ‘Conservatories. Yes, that’s very good. That’s very good indeed.’

‘Marvellous,’ said Lucy. ‘The old are really marvellous. But hardly possible, you must admit. Except, of course, Walter’s father.’

****

John Bidlake climbed slowly up the stairs. He was very tired. ‘These awful parties,’ he was thinking. He turned on the light in his bedroom. Over the mantelpiece one of Degas’s realistically unlovely women sat in her round tin bath trying to scrub her back. On the opposite wall a little girl by Renoir played the piano between a landscape of his own and one of Walter Sickert’s visions of Dieppe. Above the bed hung two caricatures of himself by Max Beerbohm and another by Rouveyre. There was a decanter of brandy on the table, with a siphon and glass. Two letters were propped conspicuously against the edge of the tray. He opened them. The first contained press cuttings about his latest show. The Daily Mail called him ‘the veteran of British Art ‘ and assured its readers that’ his hand has lost nothing of its cunning.’ He crumpled up the cutting and threw it angrily into the fireplace. The next was from one of the superior weeklies. The tone was almost contemptuous. He was judged by his own earlier performance and condemned. ‘It is difficult to believe that works so cheap and flashy—ineffectively flashy, at that—as those collected in the present exhibition should have been produced by the painter of the Tate Gallery ‘Haymakers’ and the still more magnificent ‘Bathers,’ now at Tantamount House. In these empty and trivial pictures we look in vain for those qualities of harmonious balance, of rhythmic calligraphy, of three-dimensional plasticity which…’ What a rigmarole! What tripe! He threw the whole bunch of cuttings after the first. But his contempt for the critics could not completely neutralize the effects of their criticism. ‘Veteran of British art’—it was the equivalent of ‘poor old Bidlake.’ And when they complimented him on his hand having lost none of its cunning, they were patronizingly assuring him that he still painted wonderfully well for an old dotard in his second childhood. The only difference between the hostile and the favourable critic was that one said brutally in so many words what the other implied in his patronizing compliment. He almost wished that he had never painted those Bathers.

He opened the other envelope. It contained a letter from his daughter Elinor. It was dated from Lahore:

‘The bazaars are the genuine article—maggoty. What with the pullulations and the smells, it is like burrowing through a cheese. From the artist’s point of view, the distressing thing about all this oriental business is that it’s exactly like that painting of Eastern scenes they did in France in the middle of last century. You know the stuff, smooth and shiny, like those pictures that used to be printed on tea canisters. When you’re here, you see that the style is necessary. The brown skin makes the faces uniform and the sweat puts a polish on the skin. One would have to paint with a surface at least as slick as an Ingres.’

He read on with pleasure. The girl always had something amusing to say in her letters. She saw things with the right sort of eye. But suddenly he frowned.

‘Yesterday, who should come to see us but John Bidlake Junior. We had imagined him in Waziristan; but he was down here on leave. I hadn’t seen him since I was a little girl. You can imagine my surprise when an enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache stalked in and called me by my Christian name. He had never seen Phil, of course. We killed such fatted calves as this hotel can offer in honour of the prodigal brother.’

John Bidlake leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The enormous military man with the grey moustache was his son. Young John was fifty. Fifty. There had been a time when fifty seemed a Methusalem age. ‘If Manet hadn’t died prematurely…’ He remembered the words of his old teacher at the art school in Paris. ‘But did Manet die so young?’ The old man had shaken his head. (Old? John Bidlake reflected. He had seemed very old then. But probably he wasn’t more than sixty.) ‘Manet was only fifty-one,’ the teacher had answered. He had found it difficult to restrain his laughter. And now his own son was the age of Manet when Manet died. An enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache. And his brother was dead and buried at the other side of the world, in California. Cancer of the intestine. Elinor had met his son at Santa Barbara—a young man with a rich young wife, evading the Prohibition laws to the tune of a bottle of gin a day between them.

John Bidlake thought of his first wife, the mother of the military gentleman and the Californian who had died of cancer of the intestine. He was only twenty-two when he married for the first time. Rose was not yet twenty. They loved one another frantically, with a tigerish passion. They quarrelled too, quarrelled rather enjoyably at first, when the quarrels could be made up in effusions of sensuality as violent as the furies they assuaged. But the charm began to wear off when the children arrived, two of them within twentyfive months. There was not enough money to keep the brats at a distance, to hire professionals to do the tiresome and dirty work. John Bidlake’s paternity was no sinecure. His studio became a nursery. Very soon, the results of passion—the yelling and the wetted diapers, the broken sleep, the smells—disgusted him of passion. Moreover, the object of his passion was no longer the same. After the babies were born, Rose began to put on fat. Her face became heavy; her body swelled and sagged. The quarrels, now, were not so easily made up. At the same time, they were more frequent; paternity got on John Bidlake’s nerves. His art provided him with a pretext for going to Paris. He went for a fortnight and stayed away four months. The quarrels began again on his return. Rose now frankly disgusted him. His models offered him facile consolations; he had a more serious love affair with a married woman who had come to him to have her portrait painted. Life at home was a dreariness tempered by scenes. After a particularly violent scene Rose packed up and went to live with her parents. She took the children with her; John Bidlake was only too delighted to be rid of them. The elder of the squalling diaper-wetters was now an enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache. And the other was dead of cancer of the intestine. He had not seen either of them since they were boys of five-and-twenty. The sons had stuck to their mother. She too was dead, had been in the grave these fifteen years.

Once bitten, twice shy. After his divorce John Bidlake had promised himself that he would never marry again. But when one falls desperately in love with a virtuous young woman of good family, what can one do? He had married, and those two brief years with Isabel had been the most extraordinary, the most beautiful, the happiest of all his life. And then she had died in childbirth, pointlessly. He did his best never to think of her. The recollection was too painful. Between her remembered image and the moment of remembering, the abysses of time and separation were vaster than any other gulf between the present and the past. And by comparison with the past which he had shared with Isabel every present seemed dim; and her death was a horrible reminder of the future. He never spoke of her, and all that might remind him of her—her letters, her books, the furniture of her room—he destroyed or sold. He wished to ignore all but here and now, to be as though he had only just entered the world and were destined to be eternal. But his memory survived, even though he never deliberately made use of it; and though the things which had been Isabel’s were destroyed, he could not guard against chance reminders. Chance had found many gaps in his defences this evening. The widest breach was opened by this letter of Elinor’s. Sunk in his armchair, John Bidlake sat for a long time, unmoving.

****

Polly Logan sat in front of the looking-glass. As she drew the comb through her hair there was a fine small crackling of electric sparks.

‘Little sparks, like a tiny battle, tiny, tiny ghosts shooting. Tiny battle, tiny ghost of a battle-rattle.’

Polly pronounced the words in a sonorous monotone, as though she were reciting to an audience. She lingered lovingly over them, rolling the r’s, hissing on the s’s, humming like a bee on the m’s, drawing out the long vowels and making them round and pure. ‘Ghost rattle of ghost rifles, in-fin-itesimal ghost cannonade.’ Lovely words! It gave her a peculiar satisfaction to be able to roll them out, to listen with an appreciative, a positively gluttonous ear, to the rumble of the syllables as they were absorbed into the silence. Polly had always liked talking to herself. It was a childish habit which she would not give up. ‘But if it amuses me,’ she protested, when people laughed at her for it, ‘why shouldn’t I? It does nobody any harm.’

She refused to let herself be laughed out of the habit.

‘Electric, electric,’ she went on, dropping her voice, and speaking in a dramatic whisper. ‘Electrical musketry, metrical biscuitry. Ow! ‘ The comb had caught in a tangle. She leaned forward to see more clearly in the glass what she was doing. The reflected face approached. ‘Ma chere,’ exclaimed Polly in another tone, ‘tu as l’air fatigue. Tu es vieille. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. At your age. Tz, tz!’ She clicked her tongue disapprovingly against her teeth and shook her head. ‘This won’t do, this won’t do. Still, you looked all right to-night. “My dear, how sweet you look in white!”’ She imitated Mrs. Betterton’s emphatic voice. ‘Same to you and many of them. Do you think I shall look like an elephant when I’m sixty? Still, I suppose one ought to be grateful even for an elephant’s compliments. “Count your blessings, count them one by one,”’ she chanted softly, ‘“And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.” Oh, heavens, heavens!’ She put down her comb, she violently shuddered and covered her face with her hands. ‘Heavens!’ She felt the blood rushing up into her cheeks. ‘The gaffe! The enormous and ghastly floater!’ She had thought suddenly of Lady Edward. Of course she had overheard. ‘How could I have risked saying that about her being a Canadian?’ Polly moaned, overwhelmed with retrospective shame and embarrassment. ‘That’s what comes of wanting to say something clever at any cost. And then think of wasting attempted cleverness on Norah! Norah! Oh Lord, oh Lord!’ She jumped up and pulling her dressing-gown round her as she went, hurried down the corridor to her mother’s room. Mrs. Logan was already in bed and had turned out the light. Polly opened the door and stepped into darkness.

‘Mother,’ she called, ‘mother!’ Her tone was urgent and agonized.

‘What is it?’ Mrs. Logan answered anxiously out of the dark. She sat up and fumbled for the, electric switch by the bed. ‘What is it?’ The light went on with a click. ‘What is it, my darling?’

Polly threw herself down on the bed and hid her face against her mother’s knees. ‘Oh, mother, if you knew what a terrible floater I made with Lady Edward! If you knew! I forgot to tell you.’

Mrs. Logan was almost angry that her anxiety had been for nothing. When one has put forth all one’s strength to raise what seems an enormous weight, it is annoying to find that the dumb-bell is made of cardboard and could have been lifted between two fingers. ‘Was it necessary to come and wake me up out of my first sleep to tell me?’ she asked crossly.

Polly looked up at her mother ‘I’m sorry, mother,’ she said repentantly. ‘But if you knew what an awful floater it was!’

Mrs. Logan could not help laughing.

‘I couldn’t have gone to sleep if I hadn’t told you,’ Polly went on.

‘And I mayn’t go to sleep until you have.’ Mrs. Logan tried to be severe and sarcastic. But her eyes, her smile betrayed her.

Polly took her mother’s hand and kissed it. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind,’ she said.

‘I do mind. Very much.’

‘It’s no good trying to bluff me,’ said Polly. ‘But now I must tell you about the floater.’

Mrs. Logan heaved the parody of a sigh of resignation and, pretending to be overwhelmed with sleepiness, closed her eyes. Polly talked. It was after halfpast two before she went back to her room. They had discussed, not only the floater and Lady Edward, but the whole party, and everyone who was there. Or rather Polly had discussed and Mrs. Logan had listened, had laughed and laughingly protested when her daughter’s comments became too exuberantly highspirited.

‘But Polly, Polly,’ she had said, ‘you really mustn’t say that people look like elephants.’

‘But Mrs. Betterton does look like an elephant,’ Polly had replied. ‘It’s the truth.’ And in her dramatic stage whisper she had added, rising from fancy to still more preposterous fancy: ‘Even her nose is like a trunk.’

‘But she’s got a short nose.’

Polly’s whisper had become more gruesome. ‘An amputated trunk. They bit it off when she was a baby. Like puppies’ tails.’

CHAPTER XII

For valued clients, Sbisa never closed his restaurant. They could sit there, in spite of the law, and consume intoxicating poisons as far into the small hours as they liked. An extra waiter came on at midnight to attend to the valued clients who wished to break the law. Old Sbisa saw to it that their value, to him, was very high. Alcohol was cheaper at the Ritz than at Sbisa’s.

It was about halfpast one—’only halfpast one,’ Lucy complained—when she and Walter and Spandrell left the restaurant.

‘Still young,’ was Spandrell’s comment on the night. ‘Young and rather insipid. Nights are like human beings—never interesting till they’re grown up. Round about midnight they reach puberty. At a little after one they come of age. Their prime is from two to halfpast. An hour later they’re growing rather desperate, like those man-eating women and waning middleaged men who hop around twice as violently as they ever did in the hope of persuading themselves that they’re not old. After four they’re in full decay. And their death is horrible. Really horrible at sunrise, when the bottles are empty and people look like corpses and desire’s exhausted itself into disgust. I have rather a weakness for the death-bed scenes, I must confess,’ Spandrell added.

‘I’m sure you have,’ said Lucy.

‘And it’s only in the light of ends that you can judge beginnings and middles. The night has just come of age. It remains to be seen how it will die. Till then, we can’t judge it.’

Walter knew how it would die for him—in the midst of Marjorie’s tears and his own complicated misery and exasperation, in an explosion of self-hatred and hatred for the woman to whom he had been cruel. He knew, but would not admit his knowledge; nor that it was already halfpast one and that Marjorie would be awake and anxiously wondering why he hadn’t returned.

At five to one Walter had looked at his watch and declared that he must go. What was the good of staying? Spandrell was immovable. There was no prospect of his having a moment alone with Lucy. He lacked even that justification for making Marjorie suffer. He was torturing her, not that he might be happy, but that he might feel bored, ill, exasperated, impatiently wretched.

‘I must really go,’ he had said, standing up.

But Lucy had protested, cajoled, commanded. In the end he sat down again. That had been more than half an hour ago and now they were out in Soho Square, and the evening, according to Lucy and Spandrell, had hardly begun.

‘I think it’s time,’ Spandrell had said to Lucy, ‘that you saw what a revolutionary communist looked like.’

Lucy demanded nothing better.

‘I belong to a sort of club,’ Spandrell explained. He offered to take them in with him.

‘There’ll still be a few enemies of society on view, I expect,’ he went on, as they stepped out into the refreshing darkness. ‘Good fellows mostly. But absurdly childish. Some of them seem genuinely to believe that a revolution would make people happier. It’s charming, it’s positively touching.’ He uttered his noiseless laugh. ‘But I’m an aesthete in these matters. Dynamite for dynamite’s sake.’

‘But what’s the point of dynamite, if you don’t believe in Utopia?’ asked Lucy.

‘The point? But haven’t you eyes?’

Lucy looked round her. ‘I see nothing particularly frightful.’

‘They have eyes and see not.’ He halted, took her arm with one hand and with the other pointed round the square. ‘The deserted pickle factory, transformed into a dance hall; the lying-in hospital; Sbisa’s; the publishers of Who’s Who. And once,’ he added, ‘the Duke of Monmouth’s palace. You can imagine the ghosts:

‘Whether inspired by some diviner lust,

His father got him with a keener gust…’

And so forth. You know the portrait of him after the execution, lying on a bed, with the sheet up to his chin, so that you can’t see the place where the neck was cut through? By Kneller. Or was it Lely? Monmouth and pickles, lying-in and Who’s Who, and dancing and Sbisa’s champagne—think of them a little, think of them.’

‘I’m thinking of them,’ said Lucy. ‘Hard.’

‘And do you still ask what the point of dynamite is?’ They walked on. At the door of a little house in St. Giles’s Spandrell called a halt. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said, beckoning the others back into the darkness. He rang. The door opened at once. There was a brief parleying in the shadows; then Spandrell turned and called to his companions. They followed him into a dark hall, up a flight of stairs and into a brightly-lighted room on the first floor. Two men were standing near the fire place, a turbaned Indian and a little man with red hair. At the sound of footsteps they turned round. The red-haired man was Illidge.

‘Spandrell? Bidlake?’ he raised his invisibly sandy eyebrows in astonishment. And what’s that woman doing here? he wondered.

Lucy came forward with outstretched hand. ‘We’re old acquaintances,’ she said with a smile of friendly recognition. Illidge, who was preparing to make his face look coldly hostile, found himself smiling back at her.

****

A taxi turned into the street, suddenly and startlingly breaking the silence. Marjorie sat up in bed, listening. The hum of the engine grew louder and louder. It was Walter’s taxi; this time she felt sure of it, she knew. Nearer it came and nearer. At the bottom of the little hill on the right of the house, the driver changed down to a lower gear; the engine hummed more shrilly, like an angry wasp. Nearer and nearer. She was possessed by an anxiety that was of the body as well as of the mind. She felt breathless, her heart beat strongly and irregularly—beat, beat, beat and then it seemed to fail; the expected beat did not make itself felt; it was as though a trap-door had been opened beneath her into the void; she knew the terror of emptiness, of falling, falling—and the next retarded beat was the impact of her body against solid earth. Nearer, nearer. She almost dreaded, though she had so unhappily longed for, his return. She dreaded the emotions she would feel at the sight of him; the tears she would shed, the reproaches she would find herself uttering, in spite of herself. And what would he say and do, what would be his thoughts? She was afraid of imagining. Nearer; the sound was just below her windows; it retreated, it diminished. And she had been so certain that it was Walter’s taxi. She lay down again. If only she could have slept. But that physical anxiety of her body would not allow her. The blood thumped in her ears. Her skin was hot and dry. Her eyes ached. She lay quite still, on her back, her arms crossed on her breast, like a dead woman laid out for burial. Sleep, sleep, she whispered to herself; she imagined herself relaxed, smoothed out, asleep. But suddenly, a malicious hand seemed to pluck at her taut nerves. A violent tic contracted the muscles of her limbs; she started as though with terror. And the physical reaction of fear evoked an emotion of terror in her mind, quickening and intensifying the anxiety of unhappiness which, all the time, had underlain her conscious efforts to achieve tranquillity. ‘Sleep, sleep, relax’—it was useless to go on trying to be calm, to forget, to sleep. She allowed her misery to come to the surface of her mind. ‘Why should he want to make me so unhappy?’ She turned her head. The luminous hands of the clock on the little table beside her bed marked a quarter to three. A quarter to three—and he knew she could never go to sleep before he came in. ‘He knows I’m ill,’ she said aloud.’doesn’t he care?’

A new thought suddenly occurred to her. ‘Perhaps he wants me to die.’ To die, not to be, not to see his face any more, to leave him with that other woman. The tears came into her eyes. Perhaps he was deliberately trying to kill her. It was not in spite of her being ill that he treated her like this; it was because she suffered so much, it was precisely because she was ill. He was cruel with a purpose. He hoped, he intended that she should die; die and leave him in peace with that other woman. She pressed her face against the pillow and sobbed. Never see him again, never any more. Darkness, loneliness, death, for ever. For ever and ever. And on top of everything, it was all so unfair. Was it her fault that she couldn’t afford to dress well?

‘If I could afford to buy the clothes she buys.’ Chanel, Lanvin,—the pages of Vogue floated before her eyes—Molyneux, Groult….At one of those cheap-smart shops where cocottes buy their clothes, off Shaftesbury Avenue, there was a model for sixteen guineas. ‘He likes her because she’s attractive. But if I had the money…’ It wasn’t fair. He was making her pay for not being well off. She had to suffer because he didn’t earn enough to buy her good clothes.

And then there was the baby. He was making her pay for that. His child. He was bored with her, because she was always tired and ill; he didn’t like her any more. That was the greatest injustice of all.

A cell had multiplied itself and become a worm, the worm had become a fish, the fish was turning into the foetus of a mammal. Marjorie felt sick and tired. Fifteen years hence a boy would be confirmed. Enormous in his robes, like a full-rigged ship, the Bishop would say: ‘Do ye here in the presence of God, and of this congregation, renew the solemn promise and vow that was made in your name at your Baptism?’ And the ex-fish would answer with passionate conviction: ‘I do.’

For the thousandth time she wished she were not pregnant. Walter might not succeed in killing her now. But perhaps it would happen in any case, when the child was born. The doctor had said it would be difficult for her to have a baby. The pelvis was narrow. Death reappeared before her, a great pit at her feet.

A sound made her start violently. The outside door of the flat was being furtively opened. The hinges squeaked. There were muffled footsteps. Another squeak, the hardly perceptible click of the spring latch being carefully let back into place, then more footsteps. Another click and simultaneously the light showed yellow under the door that separated her room from his. Did he mean to go to bed without coming to bid her goodnight? She lay quite still, quiveringly awake, her eyes wide open, listening to the noises that came from the other room and to the quick terrified beating of her own heart.

Walter sat on the bed unlacing his shoes. He was wondering why he had not come home three hours before, why he had ever gone out at all. He hated a crowd; alcohol disagreed with him and the twice-breathed air, the smell, the smoke of restaurants acted on him like a depressing poison. He had suffered to no purpose; except for those painful exasperating moments in the taxi, he had not been alone with Lucy the whole evening. The hours he had spent with her had been hours of boredom and impatience—endlessly long, minute after minute of torture. And the torture of desire and jealousy had been reinforced by the torture of selfconscious guilt. Every minute they lingered at Sbisa’s, every minute among the revolutionaries, was a minute that retarded the consummation of his desire and that, increasing Marjorie’s unhappiness, increased at the same time his own remorse and shame. It was after three when finally they left the club. Would she dismiss Spandrell and let him drive her home? He looked at her; his eyes were eloquent. He willed, he commanded.

‘There’ll be sandwiches and drinks at my house,’ said Lucy, when they were in the street.

‘That’s very welcome news,’ said Spandrell.

‘Come along, Walter darling.’ She took his hand, she pressed it affectionately.

Walter shook his head. ‘I must go home.’ If misery could kill, he would have died there in the street.

‘But you can’t desert us now,’ she protested. ‘Now that you’ve got thus far, you really must see it through. Come along.’ She tugged at his hand.

‘No, no.’ But what she said was true. He could hardly make Marjorie any more wretched than he had certainly done already. If she weren’t there, he thought, if she were to die—a miscarriage, bloodpoisoning…

Spandrell looked at his watch. ‘Halfpast three. The death rattle has almost started.’ Walter listened in horror; was the man reading his thoughts? ‘Munie des conforts de notre sainte religion. Your place is at the bedside, Walter. You can’t go and leave the night to die like a dog in a ditch.’

Like a dog in a ditch. The words were terrible, they condemned him. ‘I must go.’ He was firm, three hours too late. He walked away. In Oxford Street he found a taxi. Hoping, he knew vainly, to come home unobserved, he paid off the cab at Chalk Farm station and walked the last furlong to the door of the house in which he and Marjorie occupied the two upper floors. He had crept upstairs, he had opened the door with the precautions of a murderer. No sound from Marjorie’s room. He undressed, he washed as though he were performing a dangerous operation. He turned out the light and got into bed. The darkness was utterly silent. He was safe.

‘Walter!’

It was with the feelings of a condemned criminal when the warders come to wake him on the morning of his execution that he answered, putting an imitation of astonishment into his voice: ‘Are you awake, Marjorie?’ He got up and walked, as though from the condemned cell to the scaffold, into her room.

‘Do you want to make me die, Walter?’

Like a dog in a ditch, alone. He made as if to take her in his arms. Marjorie pushed him away. Her misery had momentarily turned to anger, her love to a kind of hatred and resentment. ‘Don’t be a hypocrite on top of everything else,’ she said. ‘Why can’t you tell me frankly that you hate me, that you’d like to get rid of me, that you’d be glad if I died? Why can’t you be honest and tell me?’

‘But why should I tell you what isn’t true?’ he protested.

‘Are you going to tell me that you love me, then?’ she asked sarcastically.

He almost believed it while he said so; and besides it was true, in a way.

‘But I do, I do. This other thing’s a kind of madness. I don’t want to. I can’t help it. If you knew how wretched I felt, what an unspeakable brute.’ All that he had ever suffered from thwarted desire, from remorse and shame and self-hatred seemed to be crystallized by his words into a single agony. He suffered and he pitied his own sufferings. ‘If you knew, Marjorie.’ And suddenly something in his body seemed to break. An invisible hand took him by the throat, his eyes were blinded with tears and a power within him that was not himself shook his whole frame and wrenched from him, against his will, a muffled and hardly human cry.

At the sound of this dreadful sobbing in the darkness beside her, Marjorie’s anger suddenly fell. She only knew that he was unhappy, that she loved him. She even felt remorse for her anger, for the bitter words she had spoken.

‘Walter. My darling.’ She stretched out her hands, she drew him down towards her. He lay there like a child in the consolation of her embrace.

****

‘Do you enjoy tormenting him?’ Spandrell enquired, as they walked towards the Charing Cross Road.

‘Tormenting whom? ‘ said Lucy. ‘Walter? But I don’t.’

‘But you don’t let him sleep with you?’ said Spandrell. Lucy shook her head. ‘And then you say you don’t torment him! Poor wretch!’

‘But why should I have him, if I don’t want to?’

‘Why indeed? Meanwhile, however, keeping him dangling’s mere torture.’

‘But I like him,’ said Lucy. ‘He’s such good company. Too young, of course; but really rather perfect. And I assure you, I don’t torment him. He torments himself.’

Spandrell delayed his laughter long enough to whistle for the taxi he had seen at the end of the street. The cab wheeled round and came to a halt in front of them. He was still silently laughing when they climbed in. ‘Still, he only gets what’s due to him,’ Spandrell went on from his dark corner. ‘He’s the real type of murderee.’

‘Murderee?’

‘It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cutthroats are born to be hanged. You can see it in their faces. There’s a victim type as well as a criminal type. Walter’s the obvious victim; he fairly invites maltreatment.’

‘Poor Walter!’

‘And it’s one’s duty,’ Spandrell went on, ‘to see that he gets it.’

‘Why not to see that he doesn’t get it, poor lamb?’

‘One should always be on the side of destiny. Walter’s manifestly born to catch it. It’s one’s duty to give his fate a helping hand. Which I’m glad to see you’re already doing.’

‘But I tell you, I’m not. Have you a light?’ Spandrell struck a match. The cigarette between her thin lips, she leaned forward to drink the flame. He had seen her leaning like this, with the same swift, graceful and ravenous movement, leaning towards him to drink his kisses. And the face that approached him now was focussed and intent on the flame, as he had seen it focussed and intent upon the inner illumination of approaching pleasure. There are many thoughts and feelings, but only a few gestures; and the mask has only half a dozen grimaces to express a thousand meanings. She drew back; Spandrell threw the match out of the window. The red cigarette end brightened and faded in the darkness.

‘Do you remember that curious time of ours in Paris?’ he asked, still thinking of her intent and eager face. Once, three years before, he had been her lover for perhaps a month.

Lucy nodded. ‘I remember it as rather perfect, while it lasted. But you were horribly fickle.’

‘In other words I didn’t make as much of an outcry as you hoped I would, when you went off with Tom Trivet.’

‘That’s a lie!’ Lucy was indignant. ‘You’d begun to fade away long before I even dreamt of Tom.’

‘Well, have it your own way. As a matter of fact you weren’t enough of a murderee for my taste.’ There was nothing of the victim about Lucy; not much even, he had often reflected, of the ordinary woman. She could pursue her pleasure as a man pursues his, remorselessly, single-mindedly, without allowing her thoughts and feelings to be in the least involved. Spandrell didn’t like to be used and exploited for someone else’s entertainment. He wanted to be the user. But with Lucy there was no possibility of slave-holding. ‘I’m like you,’ he added. ‘I need victims.’

‘The implication being that I’m one of the criminals?’

‘I thought we’d agreed to that long ago, my dear Lucy.’

‘I’ve never agreed to anything in my life,’ she protested,’ and never will. Not for more than half an hour at a time, at any rate.’

‘It was in Paris, do you remember? At the Chaumiere. There was a young man painting his lips at the next table.’

‘Wearing a platinum and diamond bracelet.’ She nodded, smiling. ‘And you called me an angel, or something.’

‘A bad angel,’ he qualified, ‘a born bad angel.’

‘For an intelligent man, Maurice, you talk a lot of drivel. Do you genuinely believe that some things are right and some wrong?’

Spandrell took her hand and kissed it. ‘Dear Lucy,’ he said, ‘you’re magnificent. And you must never bury your talents. Well done, thou good and faithful succubus!’ He kissed her hand again. ‘Go on doing your duty as you’ve already done it. That’s all heaven asks of you.’

‘I merely try to amuse myself.’ The cab drew up in front of her little house in Bruton Street. ‘God knows,’ she added as she stepped out, ‘without much success. Here, I’ve got money.’ She handed the driver a ten-shilling note. Lucy insisted, when she was with men, on doing as much of the paying as possible. Paying, she was independent, she could call her own tune. ‘And nobody gives me much help,’ she went on, as she fumbled with her latchkey. ‘You’re all so astonishingly dull.’

In the dining-room a rich still-life of bottles, fruits and sandwiches was awaiting them. Round the polished flanks of the vacuum flask their reflections walked fantastically in a non-Euclidean universe. Professor Dewar had liquefied hydrogen in order that Lucy’s soup might be kept hot for her into the small hours. Over the sideboard hung one of John Bidlake’s paintings of the theatre. A curve of the gallery, a slope of faces, a corner of the bright proscenium.

‘How good that is!’ said Spandrell shading his eyes to see it more clearly.

Lucy made no comment. She was looking at herself in an old grey-glassed mirror.

‘What shall I do when I’m old?’ she suddenly asked.

‘Why not die?’ suggested Spandrell with his mouth full of bread and Strasbourg goose liver.

‘I think I’ll take to science, like the Old Man. Isn’t there such a thing as human zoology? I’d get a bit tired of frogs. Talking of frogs,’ she added, ‘I rather liked that little carroty man—what’s his name?—Illidge. How he does hate us for being rich!’

‘Don’t lump me in with the rich. If you knew…’ Spandrell shook his head. ‘Let’s hope she’ll bring some cash when she comes to-morrow,’ he was thinking, remembering the message Lucy had brought from his mother. He had written that the case was urgent.

‘I like people who can hate,’ Lucy went on.

‘Illidge knows how to. He’s fairly stuffed with theories and bile and envy. He longs to blow you all up.’

‘Then why doesn’t he? Why don’t you? Isn’t that what your club’s there for?’

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘There’s a slight difference between theory and practice, you know. And when one’s a militant communist and a scientific materialist and an admirer of the Russian Revolution, the theory’s uncommonly queer. You should hear our young friend talking about murder! Political murder is what especially interests him, of course; but he doesn’t make much distinction between the different branches of the profession. One kind, according to him, is as harmless and morally indifferent as another. Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species. And so on and so forth. Queer,’ Spandrell commented parenthetically, ‘how old-fashioned and even primitive the latest manifestations of art and politics generally are! Young Illidge talks like a mixture of Lord Tennyson in In Memoriam and a Mexican Indian, or a Malay trying to make up his mind to run amok. Justifying the most primitive, savage, animal indifference to life and individuality by means of obsolete scientific arguments. Very queer indeed.’

‘But why should the science be obsolete?’ asked Lucy

‘Seeing that he’s a scientist himself…’

‘But also a communist. Which means he’s committed to nineteenth-century materialism. You can’t be a true communist without being a mechanist. You’ve got to believe that the only fundamental realities are space, time and mass, and that all the rest is nonsense, mere illusion and mostly bourgeois illusion at that. Poor Illidge! He’s sadly worried by Einstein and Edington. And how he hates Henri Poincare! How furious he gets with old Mach! They’re undermining his simple faith. They’re telling him that the laws of nature are useful conventions of strictly human manufacture and that space and time and mass themselves, the whole universe of Newton and his successors, are simply our own invention. The idea’s as inexpressibly shocking and painful to him as the idea of the non-existence of Jesus would be to a Christian. He’s a scientist, but his principles make him fight against any scientific theory that’s less than fifty years old. It’s exquisitely comic.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Lucy, yawning. ‘That is, if you happen to be interested in theories, which I’m not.’

‘But I am,’ retorted Spandrell; ‘so I don’t apologize. But if you prefer it, I can give you examples of his practical inconsistencies. I discovered not long ago, quite accidentally, that Illidge has the most touching sense of family loyalty. He keeps his mother, he pays for his younger brother’s education, he gave his sister fifty pounds when she married.’

‘What’s wrong in that?’

‘Wrong? But it’s disgustingly bourgeois! Theoretically he sees no distinction between his mother and any other aged female. He knows that, in a properly organized society, she’d be put into the lethal chamber, because of her arthritis. In spite of which he sends her I don’t know how much a week to enable her to drag on a useless existence. I twitted him about it the other day. He blushed and was terribly upset, as though he’d been caught cheating at cards. So, to restore his prestige, he had to change the subject and begin talking about political murder and its advantages with the most wonderfully calm, detached, scientific ferocity. I only laughed at him. “One of these days,” I threatened, “I’ll take you at your word and invite you to a man-shooting party.” And what’s more, I will.’

‘Unless you just go on chattering, like everybody else.’

‘Unless,’ Spandrell agreed, ‘ I just go on chattering.’

‘Let me know if you ever stop chattering and do something. It might be lively.’

‘Deathly, if anything.’

‘But the deathly sort of liveliness is the most lively, really.’ Lucy frowned. ‘I’m so sick of the ordinary conventional kinds of liveliness. Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm. You know. It’s silly, it’s monotonous. Energy seems to have so few ways of manifesting itself nowadays. It was different in the past, I believe.’

‘There was violence as well as love-making. Is that what you mean?’

‘That’s it.’ She nodded. ‘The liveliness wasn’t so exclusively…so exclusively bitchy, to put it bluntly.’

‘They broke the sixth commandment too. There are too many policemen nowadays.’

‘Many too many. They don’t allow you to stir an eyelid. One ought to have had all the experiences.’

‘But if none of them are either right or wrong—which is what you seem to feel—what’s the point?’

‘The point? But they might be amusing, they might be exciting.’

‘They could never be very exciting if you didn’t feel they were wrong.’ Time and habit had taken the wrongness out of almost all the acts he had once thought sinful. He performed them as unenthusiastically as he would have performed the act of catching the morning train to the city. ‘Some people,’ he went on meditatively, trying to formulate the vague obscurities of his own feelings,’some people can only realize goodness by offending against it.’ But when the old offences have ceased to be felt as offences, what then? The argument pursued itself internally. The only solution seemed to be to commit new and progressively more serious offences, to have all the experiences, as Lucy would say in her jargon. ‘One way of knowing God,’ he concluded slowly, ‘is to deny Him.’

‘My good Maurice!’ Lucy protested.

‘I ‘1 stop.’ He laughed. ‘But really, if it’s a case of “my good Maurice”’ (he imitated her tone), ‘if you’re equally unaware of goodness and offence against goodness, what is the point of having the sort of experiences the police interfere with?’

Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘Curiosity. One’s bored.’

‘Alas, one is.’ He laughed again. ‘All the same, I do think the cobbler should stick to his last.’

‘But what is my last?’

Spandrell grinned. ‘Modesty,’ he began, ‘forbids…’

CHAPTER XIII

Walter travelled down to Fleet Street feeling not exactly happy, but at least calm—calm with the knowledge that everything was now settled. Yes, everything had been settled; everything—for in the course of last night’s emotional upheaval, everything had come to the surface. To begin with, he was never going to see Lucy again; that was definitely decided and promised, for his own good as well as for Marjorie’s. Next he was going to spend all his evenings with Marorie. And finally he was going to ask Burlap for more money. Everything was settled. The very weather seemed to know it. It was a day of white insistent mist, so intrinsically calm that all the noises of London seemed an irrelevance. The traffic roared and hurried, but somehow without touching the essential stillness and silence of the day. Everything was settled; the world was starting afresh—not very exultantly, perhaps, not at all brilliantly, but with resignation, with a determined calm that nothing could disturb.

Remembering the incident of the previous evening, Walter had expected to be coldly received at the office. But on the contrary, Burlap was in one of his most genial moods. He too remembered last night and was anxious that Walter should forget it. He called Walter ‘old man’ and squeezed his arm affectionately, looking up at him from his chair with those eyes that expressed nothing, but were just holes into the darkness inside his skull. His mouth, meanwhile, charmingly and subtly smiled. Walter returned the ‘old man’ and the smile, but with a painful consciousness of insincerity. Burlap always had that effect on him; in his presence, Walter never felt quite honest or genuine. It was a most uncomfortable sensation. With Burlap he was always, in some obscure fashion, a liar and a comedian. And at the same time all that he said, even when he was speaking his innermost convictions, became a sort of falsehood.

‘I liked your article on Rimbaud,’ Burlap declared, still pressing Walter’s arm, still smiling up at him from his tilted swivel chair.

‘I’m glad,’ said Walter, feeling uncomfortably that the remark wasn’t really addressed to him, but to some part of Burlap’s own mind which had whispered, ‘You ought to say something nice about his article,’ and was having its demands duly satisfied by another part of Burlap’s mind.

‘What a man!’ exclaimed Burlap. ‘That was someone who believed in Life, if you like!’

Ever since Burlap had taken over the editorship, the leaders of the Literary World had almost weekly proclaimed the necessity of believing in Life. Burlap’s belief in Life was one of the things Walter found most disturbing. What did the words mean? Even now he hadn’t the faintest idea. Burlap had never explained. You had to understand intuitively; if you didn’t, you were as good as damned. Walter supposed that he was among the damned. He was never likely to forget his first interview with his future chief. ‘I hear you’re in want of an assistant editor,’ he had shyly begun. Burlap nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’ And after an enormous and horrible silence, he suddenly looked up with his blank eyes and asked: ‘Do you believe in Life?’ Walter blushed to the roots of his hair and said, Yes. It was the only possible answer. There was another desert of speechlessness and then Burlap looked up again. ‘Are you a virgin?’ he enquired. Walter blushed yet more violently, hesitated and at last shook his head. It was only later that he discovered, from one of Burlap’s own articles, that the man had been modelling his behaviour on that of Tolstoy—’ going straight to the great simple fundamental things,’ as Burlap himself described the old Salvationist’s soulful impertinences.

‘Yes, Rimbaud certainly believed in Life,’ Walter acquiesced feebly, feeling while he spoke the words as he felt when he had to write a formal letter of condolence. Talking about believing in Life was as bad as talking about grieving with you in your great bereavement.

‘He believed in it so much,’ Burlap went on, dropping his eyes (to Walter’s great relief) and nodding as he ruminatively pronounced the words,’so profoundly that he was prepared to give it up. That’s how I interpret his abandonment of literature—as a deliberate sacrifice.’ (He uses the big words too easily, thought Walter.) ‘He that would save his life must lose it.’ (Oh, oh!) ‘To be the finest poet of your generation and, knowing it, to give up poetry—that’s losing your life to save it. That’s really believing in life. His faith was so strong, that he was prepared to lose his life, in the certainty of gaining a new and better one.’ (Much too easily! Walter was filled with embarrassment.) ‘A life of mystical contemplation and intuition. Ah, if only one knew what he did and thought in Africa, if only one knew!’

‘He smuggled guns for the Emperor Menelik,’ Walter had the courage to reply. ‘And to judge from his letters, he seems to have thought chiefly about making enough money to settle down. He carried forty thousand francs in his belt. A stone and a half of gold round his loins.’ Talking of gold, he was thinking, I really ought to speak to him about my screw.

But at the mention of Menelik’s rifles and the forty thousand francs, Burlap smiled with an expression of Christian forgiveness. ‘But do you really imagine,’ he asked, ‘that gun-running and money were what occupied his mind in the desert? The author of Les Illuminations?’

Walter blushed, as though he had been guilty of some nasty solecism. ‘Those are the only facts we know,’ he said self-excusingly.

‘But there is an insight that sees deeper than the mere facts.’ ‘Deeper insight’ was Burlap’s pet name for his own opinion. ‘He was realizing the new life, he was gaining the Kingdom of Heaven.’

‘It’s a hypothesis,’ said Walter, wishing uncomfortably that Burlap had never read the New Testament.

‘For me,’ retorted Burlap, ‘it’s a certainty. An absolute certainty.’ He spoke very emphatically, he wagged his head with violence. ‘A complete and absolute certainty,’ he repeated, hypnotizing himself by the reiteration of the phrase into a fictitious passion of conviction. ‘Complete and absolute.’ He was silent; but within, he continued to lash himself into mystical fury. He thought of Rimbaud until he himself was Rimbaud. And then suddenly his devil popped out its grinning face and whispered, ‘A stone and a half of gold round his loins.’ Burlap exorcised the creature by changing the subject. ‘Have you seen the new books for review?’ he said, pointing to a double pile of volumes on the corner of the table. ‘Yards of contemporary literature.’ He became humorously exasperated. ‘Why can’t authors stop? It’s a disease. It’s a bloody flux, like what the poor lady suffered from in the Bible, if you remember.’

What Walter chiefly remembered was the fact that the joke was Philip Quarles’s.

Burlap got up and began to look through the books. ‘Pity the poor reviewer!’ he said with a sigh.

The poor reviewer—wasn’t that the cue for his little speech about salary? Walter nerved himself, focussed his will. ‘I was wondering,’ he began.

But Burlap had almost simultaneously begun on his own account. ‘I’ll get Beatrice to come in,’ he said and pressed the bell-push three times. ‘Sorry. What were you saying?’

‘Nothing.’ The demand would have to be postponed. It couldn’t be made in public, particularly when the public was Beatrice. Damn Beatrice! he thought unjustly. What business had she to do subediting and Shorter Notices for nothing? Just because she had a private income and adored Burlap.

Walter had once complained to her, jokingly, of his miserable six pounds a week.

‘But the World’s worth making sacrifices for,’ she rapped out. ‘After all, one has a responsibility towards people; one ought to do something for them.’ Echoed in her clear rapping voice, Burlap’s Christian sentiments sounded, Walter thought, particularly odd. ‘The World does do something; one ought to help.’

The obvious retort was that his own private income was very small and that he wasn’t in love with Burlap. He didn’t make it, however, but suffered himself to be pecked. Damn her, all the same!

Beatrice entered, a neat, plumply well-made little figure, very erect and business-like. ‘Morning, Walter,’ she said, and every word she uttered was like a sharp little rap with an ivory mallet over the knuckles. She examined him with her bright, rather protuberant brown eyes. ‘You look tired,’ she went on. ‘Worn out, as though you’d been on the tiles last night.’ Peck after peck. ‘Were you?’

Walter blushed. ‘I slept badly,’ he mumbled and engrossed himself in a book.

They sorted out the volumes for the various reviewers. A little heap for the scientific expert, another for the accredited metaphysician, a whole mass for the fiction specialist. The largest pile was of Tripe. Tripe wasn’t reviewed, or only got a Shorter Notice.

‘Here’s a book about Polynesia for you, Walter,’ said Burlap generously. ‘And a new anthology of French verse. No, on second thoughts, I think I’ll do that.’ On second thoughts he generally did keep the most interesting books for himself.

‘The Life of St. Francis re-toldfor the Children by Bella Jukes. Theology or tripe?’ asked Beatrice.

‘Tripe,’ said Walter looking over her shoulder.

‘But I’d rather like an excuse to do a little article on St. Francis,’ said Burlap. In the intervals of editing, he was engaged on a full-length study of the Saint. ‘St. Francis and the Modern Psyche,’ it was to be called. He took the little book from Beatrice and let the pages flick past under his thumb. ‘Tripe-ish,’ he admitted. ‘But what an extraordinary man! Extraordinary!’ He began to hypnotize himself, to lash himself up into the Franciscan mood.

‘Extraordinary!’ Beatrice rapped out, her eyes fixed on Burlap.

Walter looked at her curiously. Her ideas and her pecking goose-billed manner seemed to belong to two different people, between whom the only perceptible link was Purlap. Was there any inward, organic connection?

‘What a devastating integrity!’ Burlap went on, selfintoxicated. He shook his head and, sighing, sobered himself sufficiently to proceed with the morning’s business.

When the opportunity came for Walter to talk (with what diffidence, what a squeamish reluctance!) about his salary, Burlap was wonderfully sympathetic.

‘I know, old man,’ he said, laying his hand on the other’s shoulder with a gesture that disturbingly reminded Walter of the time when, as a schoolboy, he had played Antonio in The Merchant of Venice and the detestable Porter Major, disguised as Bassanio, had been coached to register friendship. ‘I know what being hard up is.’ His little laugh gave it to be understood that he was a Franciscan specialist in poverty, but was too modest to insist upon the fact. ‘I know, old man.’ And he really almost believed that he wasn’t half owner and salaried editor of the World, that he hadn’t a penny invested, that he had been living on two pounds a week for years. ‘I wish we could afford to pay you three times as much as we do. You’re worth it, old man.’ He gave Walter’s shoulder a little pat.

Walter made a vague mumbling sound of deprecation. That little pat, he was thinking, was the signal for him to begin:

‘I am a tainted wether of the flock,

Meetest for slaughter.’

‘I wish for your sake,’ Burlap continued, ‘for mine too,’ he added, putting himself with a rueful little laugh in the same financial boat as Walter, ‘that the paper did make more money. If you wrote worse, it might.’ The compliment was graceful. Burlap emphasized it with another friendly pat and a smile. But the eyes expressed nothing. Meeting them for an instant, Walter had the strange impression that they were not looking at him at all, that they were not looking at anything. ‘The paper’s too good. It’s largely your fault. One cannot serve God and mammon.’

‘Of course not,’ Walter agreed; but he felt again that the big words had come too easily.

‘I wish one could.’ Burlap spoke like a jocular St. Francis pretending to make fun of his own principles.

Walter joined mirthlessly in the laughter. He was wishing that he had never mentioned the word ‘salary.’

‘I’ll go and talk to Mr. Chivers,’ said Burlap. Mr. Chivers was the business manager. Burlap made use of him, as the Roman statesman made use of oracles and augurs, to promote his own policy. His unpopular decisions could always be attributed to Mr. Chivers; and when he made a popular one, it was invariably made in the teeth of the business manager’s soulless tyranny. Mr. Chivers was a most convenient fiction. ‘I’ll go this morning.’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Walter.

‘If it’s humanly possible to scrape up anything more for you…’

‘No, please.’ Walter was positively begging not to be given more. ‘I know thd difficulties. Don’t think I want…’

‘But we’re sweating you, Walter, positively sweating you.’ The more Walter protested, the more generous Burlap became.’don’t think I’m not aware of it. I’ve been worrying about it for a long time.’

His magnanimity was infectious. Walter was determined not to take any more money, quite determined, even though he was sure the paper could afford to give it. ‘Really, Burlap,’ he almost begged, ‘I’d much rather you left things as they are.’ And then suddenly he thought of Marjorie. How unfairly he was treating her! Sacrificing her comfort to his. Because he found haggling distasteful, because he hated fighting on the one hand and accepting favours on the other, poor Marjorie would have to go without new clothes and a second maid.

But Burlap waved his objections aside. He insisted on being generous. ‘I’ll go and talk to Chivers at once. I think I can persuade him to let you have another twentyfive a year.’

Twentyfive. That was ten shillings a week. Nothing. Marjorie had said that he ought to stand out for at least another hundred. ‘Thank you,’ he said and despised himself for saying it.

‘It’s ridiculously little, I’m afraid. Quite ridiculously.’

That’s what I ought to have said, thought Walter.

‘One feels quite ashamed of offering it. But what can one do?’ ‘One’ could obviously do nothing, for the good reason that ‘one’ was impersonal and didn’t exist.

Walter mumbled something about being grateful. He felt humiliated and blamed Marjorie for it.

When Walter worked at the office, which was only three days a week, he sat with Beatrice. Burlap, in editorial isolation, sat alone. It was the day of Shorter Notices. Between them, on the table, stood the stacks of Tripe. They helped themselves. It was a Literary Feast—a feast of offal. Bad novels and worthless verses, imbecile systems of philosophy and platitudinous moralizings, insignificant biographies and boring books of travel, pietism so nauseating and children’s books so vulgar and so silly that to read them was to feel ashamed for the whole human race—the pile was high, and every week it grew higher. The ant-like industry of Beatrice, Walter’s quick discernment and facility were utterly inadequate to stem the rising flood. They settled down to their work ‘like vultures,’ said Walter, ‘in the Towers of Silence.’ What he wrote this morning was peculiarly pungent.

On paper Walter was all he failed to be in life. His reviews were epigrammatically ruthless. Poor earnest spinsters, when they read what he had written of their heartfelt poems about God and Passion and the Beauties of Nature, were cut to the quick by his brutal contempt. The big-game shooters who had so much enjoyed their African trip would wonder how the account of anything so interesting could be called tedious. The young novelists who had modelled their styles and their epical conceptions on those of the best authors, who had daringly uncovered the secrets of their most intimate and sexual life, were hurt, were amazed, were indignant to learn that their writing was stilted, their construction non-existent, their psychology unreal, their drama stagey and melodramatic. A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul. But the bad author’s soul being, artistically at any rate, of inferior quality, its sincerities will be, if not always intrinsically uninteresting, at any rate uninterestingly expressed, and the labour expended on the expression will be wasted. Nature is monstrously unjust. There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail. Immersed in his Tripe, Walter ferociously commented on lack of talent. Conscious of their industry, sincerity and good artistic intentions, the authors of the Tripe felt themselves outrageously and unfairly treated.

Beatrice’s methods of criticism were simple; she tried in every case to say what she imagined Burlap would say. In practice what happened was that she praised all books in which Life and its problems were taken, as she thought, seriously, and condemned all those in which they were not. She would have ranked Bailey’s Festus higher than Candide, unless of course Burlap or some other authoritative person had previously told her that it was her duty to prefer Candide. As she was never permitted to criticize anything but Tripe, her lack of all critical insight was of little importance.

They worked, they went out to lunch, they returned and set to work again. Eleven new books had arrived in the interval.

‘I feel,’ said Walter, ‘as the Bombay vultures must feel when there’s been an epidemic among the Parsees.’ Bombay and the Parsees reminded him of his sister Elinor. She and Philip would be sailing to-day. He was glad they were coming home. They were almost the only people he could talk to intimately about his affairs. He would be able to discuss his problems with them. It would be a comfort, an alleviation of his responsibility. And then suddenly he remembered that everything was settled, that there were no more problems. No more. And then the telephone bell rang. He lifted the receiver, he hallooed into the mouthpiece

‘Is that you, Walter darling?’ The voice was Lucy’s.

His heart sank; he knew what was going to happen.

‘I’ve just woken up,’ she explained. ‘I’m all alone.’

She wanted him to come to tea. He refused. After tea, then.

‘I can’t,’ he persisted.

‘Nonsense! Of course you can.’

‘Impossible.’

‘But why? ‘

‘Work.’

‘But not after six. I insist.’

After all, he thought, perhaps it would be better to see her and explain what he had decided.

‘I’ll never forgive you if you don’t come.’

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll make an effort. I’ll come if I possibly can.’

‘What a flirt you are!’ Beatrice mocked, as he hung up the receiver. ‘Saying no for the fun of being persuaded!’

And when, at a few minutes after five, he left the office on the pretext that he must get to the London Library before closing time, she sent ironical good wishes after him. ‘Bon amusement!’ were her last words.

****

In the editorial room. Burlap was dictating letters to his secretary. ‘Yours etcetera,’ he concluded and picked up another batch of papers. ‘Dear Miss Saville,’ he began, after glancing at them for a moment. ‘No,’ he corrected himself.’dear Miss Romola Saville. Thank you for your note and for the enclosed manuscripts.’ He paused and, leaning back in his chair, closed his eyes in brief reflection. ‘It is not my custom,’ he went on at last in a soft remote voice, ‘it is not my custom to write personal letters to unknown contributors.’ He reopened his eyes, to meet the dark bright glance of his secretary from across the table. The expression in Miss Cobbett’s eyes was sarcastic; the faintest little smile almost imperceptibly twitched the corners of her mouth. Burlap was annoyed; but he concealed his feelings and continued to stare straight in front of him as though Miss Cobbett were not there at all and he were looking absentmindedly at a piece of furniture. Miss Cobbett looked back at her notebook.

‘How contemptible!’ she said to herself. ‘How unspeakably vulgar!’

Miss Cobbett was a small woman, black-haired, darkly downy at the corners of her upper lip, with brown eyes disproportionately large for her thin, rather sickly little face. Sombre and passionate eyes in which there was, almost permanently, an expression of reproach that could flash up into sudden anger or, as at this moment, derision. She had a right to look reproachfully on the world. Fate had treated her badly. Very badly indeed. Born and brought up in the midst of a reasonable prosperity, her father’s death had left her, from one day to another, desperately poor. She got engaged to Harry Markham. Life promised to begin again. Then came the War. Harry joined up and was killed. His death condemned her to shorthand and typing for the rest of her natural existence. Harry was the only man who had ever loved her, who had been prepared to take the risk of loving her. Other men found her too disquietingly violent and impassioned and serious. She took things terribly seriously. Young men felt uncomfortable and silly in her company. They revenged themselves by laughing at her for having no’sense of humour,’ for being a pedant and, as time went on, for being an old maid who was longing for a man. They said she looked like a witch. She had often been in love, passionately, with a hopeless violence. The men had either not noticed; or, if they noticed, had fled precipitately, or had mocked, or, what was almost worse, had been patronizingly kind as though to a poor misguided creature who might be a nuisance but who ought, none the less, to be treated with charity. Ethel Cobbett had every right to look reproachful.

She had met Burlap because, as a girl, in the prosperous days, she had been at school with Susan Paley, who had afterwards become Burlap’s wife. When Susan died and Burlap exploited the grief he felt, or at any rate loudly said he felt, in a more than usually painful series of these always painfully personal articles which were the secret of his success as a journalist (for the great public has a chronic and cannibalistic appetite for personalities), Ethel wrote him a letter of condolence, accompanying it with a long account of Susan as a girl. A moved and moving answer came back by return of post. ‘Thank you, thank you for your memories of what I have always felt to be the realest Susan, the little girl who survived so beautifully and purely in the woman, to the very end; the lovely child that in spite of chronology she always was, underneath and parallel with the physical Susan living in time. In her heart of hearts, I am sure, she never quite believed in her chronological adult self; she could never quite get it out of her head that she was a little girl playing at being grown up.’ And so it went on—pages of a rather hysterical lyricism about the dead child-woman. He incorporated a good deal of the substance of the letter in his next week’s article. ‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’ was its title. A day or two later he travelled down to Birmingham to have a personal interview with this woman who had known the realest Susan when she was chronologically as well as spiritually a child. The impression each made upon the other was favourable. For Ethel, living bitterly and reproachfully between her dismal lodgings and the hateful insurance office where she was a clerk, the arrival first of his letter and now of Burlap himself had been great and wonderful events. A real writer, a man with a mind and a soul. In the state into which he had then worked himself Burlap would have liked any woman who could talk to him about Susan’s childhood and into whose warm maternal compassion, a child himself, he could luxuriously sink as into a feather bed. Ethel Cobbett was not only sympathetic and a friend of Susan’s; she had intelligence, was earnestly cultured and an admirer. The first impressions were good.

Burlap wept and was abject. He agonized himself with the thought that he could never, never ask Susan’s forgiveness for all the unkindness he had ever done her, for all the cruel words he had spoken. He confessed in an agony of contrition that he had once been unfaithful to her. He recounted their quarrels. And now she was dead; he would never be able to ask her pardon. Never, never. Ethel was moved. Nobody, she reflected, would care like that when she was dead. But being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive. These agonies which Burlap, by a process of intense concentration on the idea of his loss and grief, had succeeded in churning up within himself were in no way proportionate or even related to his feelings for the living Susan. For every Jesuit novice Loyola prescribed a course of solitary meditation on the passion of Christ; a few days of this exercise, accompanied by fasting, were generally enough to produce in the novice’s mind a vivid, mystical and personal realization of the Saviour’s real existence and sufferings. Burlap employed the same process; but instead of thinking about Jesus, or even about Susan, he thought of himself, his own agonies, his own loneliness, his own remorses. And duly, at the end of some few days of incessant spiritual masturbation, he had been rewarded by a mystical realization of his own unique and incomparable piteousness. He saw himself in an apocalyptic vision as a man of sorrows. (The language of the New Testament was constantly on Burlap’s lips and under his pen. ‘To each of us,’ he wrote, ‘is given a Calvary proportionate to his or her powers of endurance and capabilities of self-perfection.’ He spoke familiarly of agonies in the garden and cups.) The vision rent his heart; he was overwhelmed with self-pity. But with the sorrows of this Christ-like Burlap poor Susan had really very little to do. His love for the living Susan had been as much self-induced and self-intensified as his grief at her death. He had loved, not Susan, but the mental image of Susan and the idea of love, fixedly concentrated on, in the best Jesuitical manner, until they became hallucinatingly real. His ardours for this phantom, and the love of love, the passion for passion which he had managed to squeeze out of his inner consciousness, conquered Susan, who imagined that they had some connection with herself. What pleased her most about his feelings was their ‘pure’ unmasculine quality. His ardours were those of a child for its mother (a rather incestuous child, it is true; but how tactfully and delicately the little (Edipus!); his love was at once babyish and maternal; his passion was a kind of passive snuggling. Frail, squeamish, less than fully alive and therefore less than adult, permanently under-aged, she adored him as a superior and almost holy lover. Burlap in return adored his private phantom, adored his beautifully Christian conception of matrimony, adored his own adorable husbandliness. His periodical articles in praise of marriage were lyrical. He was, however, frequently unfaithful; but he had such a pure, childlike and platonic way of going to bed with women, that neither they nor he ever considered that the process really counted as going to bed. His life with Susan was a succession of scenes in every variety of emotional key. He would chew and chew on some grievance until he had poisoned himself into a passion of anger or jealousy. Or else he would pore over his own shortcomings and grow abjectly repentant, or roll at her feet in an ecstasy of incestuous adoration for the imaginary mother-baby of a wife with whom he had chosen to identify the corporeal Susan. And then sometimes, very disquietingly for poor Susan, he would suddenly interrupt his emotions with an oddly cynical little laugh and would become for a while somebody entirely different, somebody like the Jolly Miller in the song. ‘I care for nobody, no, not I, and nobody cares for me.’ ‘One’s devil’ was how he described those moods, when he had worked himself back again into emotional spirituality; and he would quote the Ancient Mariner’s words about the wicked whisper that had turned his heart as dry as dust. ‘One’s devil’—or was it, perhaps the genuine, fundamental Burlap, grown tired of trying to be somebody else and of churning up emotions he did not spontaneously feel, taking a brief holiday?

Susan died; but the prolonged and passionate grief which he felt on that occasion could have been worked up, if Burlap had chosen to imagine her dead and himself desolate and lonely, almost equally well during her lifetime. Ethel was touched by the intensity of his feelings, or rather by the loudness and insistence of their expression. Burlap seemed to be quite broken down, physically and spiritually, by his grief. Her heart bled for him. Encouraged by her sympathy, he plunged into an orgy of regrets, whose vanity made them exasperatingly poignant, of repentances, excruciating for being too late, of unnecessary confessions and self-abasements. Feelings are not separate entities that can be stimulated in isolation from the rest of the mind. When a man is emotionally exalted in one direction, he is liable to become emotionally exalted in others. Burlap’s grief made him noble and generous; his self-pity made it easy to feel Christian about other people. ‘You’re unhappy, too,’ he said to Ethel. ‘I can see it.’ She admitted it; told him how much she hated her work, hated the place, hated the people; told him her wretched history. Burlap churned up his sympathy. ‘But what do my little miseries matter in comparison with yours,’ she protested, remembering the violence of his outcry. Burlap talked about the freemasonry of suffering and then, dazzled by the vision of his own generous self, proceeded to offer Miss Cobbett a secretarial job on the staff of the Literary World. Infinitely preferable as London and the Liteary World seemed to the Insurance office and Birmingham, Ethel hesitated. The insurance job was dull, but it was safe, permanent, pensioned. In another and yet more explosive burst of generous feeling Burlap guaranteed her all the permanence she wanted. He felt warm with goodness.

Miss Cobbett allowed herself to be persuaded. She came. If Burlap had hoped to slide by gradual stages and almost imperceptibly into Ethel’s bed, he was disappointed. A broken-hearted child in need of consolation, he would have liked to lure his consoler, ever so spiritually and platonically, into a gentle and delicious incest. But to Ethel Cobbett the idea was unthinkable; it never entered her head. She was a woman of principles, as passionate and violent in her moral loyalties as in her love. She had taken Burlap’s grief seriously and literally. When they had agreed, with tears, to found a kind of private, cult for poor Susan, to raise and keep perpetually illumined and adorned an inward altar to her memory, Ethel had imagined that they were meaning what they were saying. She meant it in any case. It never occurred to her that Burlap did not. His subsequent behaviour had astonished and shocked her. Was this the man, she asked herself as she watched him living his life of disguised and platonic and slimily spiritual promiscuities, was this the man who had vowed to keep the candles for ever burning in front of poor little Susan’s altar? She looked, she spoke her disapproval. Burlap cursed himself for his foolishness in having lured her away from the insurance office, his double-dyed idiocy in promising her permanence of tenure. If only she’d go of her own accord! He tried to make her life a misery for her by treating her with a cold, superior impersonality, as though she were just a machine for taking down letters and copying articles. But Ethel Cobbett grimly stuck to her job, had stuck to it for eighteen months now and showed no signs of giving notice. It was intolerable; it couldn’t go on. But how should he put an end to it? Of course, he wasn’t legally bound to keep her for ever. He had never put down anything in black and white. If the worst came to the worst…

Stonily ignoring the look in Ethel Cobbett’s eyes, the almost imperceptible smile of irony, Burlap went on with his dictation. One doesn’t deign to notice machines; one uses them. But still, this sort of thing simply could not go on.

‘It is not my custom to write personal letters to unknown contributors,’ he repeated in a firm, determined tone. ‘But I cannot refrain from telling you—no, no—from thanking you for the great pleasure your poems have given me. The lyrical freshness of your work, its passionate sincerity, its untamed and almost savage brilliance have come as a surprise and a refreshment to me. An editor must read through such quantities of bad literature, that he is almost pathetically grateful to those who—no; say: to the rare and precious spirits who offer him gold instead of the customary dross. Thank you for the gift of…’ he looked again at the papers, ‘of “Love in the Greenwood” and “Passion Flowers.” Thank you for their bright and turbulent verbal surface. Thank you also for the sensitiveness…no, the quivering sensibility, the experience of suffering, the ardent spirituality which a deeper insight detects beneath that surface. I am having both poems set up at once and hope to print them early next month.

‘Meanwhile, if you ever happen to be passing in the neighbourhood of Fleet Street, I should esteem it a great honour to hear from you personally some account of your poetical projects. The literary aspirant, even of talent, is often balked by material difficulties which the professional man of letters knows how to circumvent. I have always regarded it as one of my greatest privileges and duties as a critic and editor to make smooth the way for literary talent. This must be my excuse for writing to you at such length. Believe me, yours very truly.’

He looked again at the typewritten poems and read a line or two. ‘Real talent,’ he said to himself several times, ‘real talent.’ But ‘one’s devil’ was thinking that the girl was remarkably outspoken, must have a temperament, seemed to know a thing or two. He dropped the papers into the basket on his right hand and picked up another letter from the basket on his left.

‘To the Reverend James Hitchcock,’ he dictated. ‘The Vicarage, Tuttleford, Wilts. Dear Sir, I regret very much that I am unable to use your long and very interesting article on the relation between agglutinative languages and agglutinative chimera-forms in symbolic art. Exigencies of space…

****

Pink in her dressing-gown like the tulips in the vases, Lucy lay propped on her elbow, reading. The couch was grey, the walls were hung with grey silk, the carpet was rose-coloured. In its gilded cage even the parrot was pink and grey. The door opened.

‘Walter, darling! At last!’ She threw down her book.

‘Already. If you knew all the things I ought to be doing instead of being here.’ (‘Do you promise?’ Marjorie had asked. And he had answered, ‘ I promise.’ But this last visit of explanation didn’t count.)

The divan was wide. Lucy moved her feet towards the wall, making place for him to sit down. One of her red Turkish slippers fell.

‘That tiresome manicure woman,’ she said, raising the bare foot a few inches so that it came into her line of sight. ‘she will put that horrible red stuff on my toe nails. They look like wounds.’

Walter did not speak. His heart was violently beating. Like the warmth of a body transposed into another sensuous key, the scent of her gardenias enveloped him. There are hot perfumes and cold, stifling and fresh. Lucy’s gardenias seemed to fill his throat and lungs with a tropical and sultry sweetness. On the grey silk of the couch, her foot was flower-like and pale, like the pale fleshy buds of lotus flowers. The feet of Indian goddesses walking among their lotuses are themselves flowers. Time flowed in silence, but not to waste, as at ordinary moments. It was as though it flowed, pumped beat after beat by Walter’s anxious heart, into some enclosed reservoir of experience to mount and mount behind the dam until at last, suddenly…Walter suddenly reached out and took her bare foot in his hand. Under the pressure of those silently accumulated seconds, the dam had broken. It was a long foot, long and narrow. His fingers closed round it. He bent down and kissed the instep.

‘But, my dear Walter!’ She laughed. ‘You’re becoming quite oriental.’

Walter said nothing, but kneeling on the ground beside the couch, he leaned over her. The face that bent to kiss her was set in a kind of desperate madness. The hands that touched her trembled. She shook her head, she shielded her face with her hand.

‘No, no.’

‘But why not?’

‘It wouldn’t do,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘It would complicate things too much for you, to begin with.’

‘No, it wouldn’t,’ said Walter. There were no complications. Marjorie had ceased to exist.

‘Besides,’ Lucy went on, ‘you seem to forget me. I don’t want to.’

But his lips were soft, his hands touched lightly. The moth-winged premonitions of pleasure came flutteringly to life under his kisses and caresses. She shut her eyes. His caresses were like a drug, at once intoxicant and opiate. She had only to relax her will; the drug would possess her utterly. She would cease to be herself. She would become nothing but a skin of fluttering pleasure enclosing a void, a warm abysmal darkness.

‘Lucy!’ Her eyelids fluttered and shuddered under his lips. His hand was on her breast. ‘My sweetheart.’ She lay quite still, her eyes still closed.

A sudden and piercing shriek made both of them start, broad awake, out of their timelessness. It was as though a murder had been committed within a few feet of them, but on someone who found the process of being slaughtered rather a joke, as well as painful.

Lucy burst out laughing. ‘It’s Polly.’

Both turned towards the cage. His head cocked a little on one side, the bird was examining them out of one black and circular eye. And while they looked, a shutter of parchment skin passed like a temporary cataract across the bright expressionless regard and was withdrawn. The jocular martyr’s dying shriek was once again repeated.

‘You’ll have to cover his cage with the cloth,’ said Lucy.

Walter turned back towards her and angrily began to kiss her. The parrot yelled again. Lucy’s laughter redoubled.

‘It’s no good,’ she gasped. ‘He won’t stop till you cover him.’

The bird confirmed what she had said with another scream of mirthful agony. Feeling furious, outraged and a fool, Walter got up from his knees and crossed the room. At his approach the bird began to dance excitedly on its perch; its crest rose, the feathers of its head and neck stood apart from one another like the scales of a ripened fir-cone. ‘Good-morning,’ it said in a guttural ventriloquial voice, ‘good-morning, Auntie, good-morning, Auntie, good-morning, Auntie….’ Walter unfolded the pink brocade that lay on the table near the cage and extinguished the creature. A last ‘Good-morning, Auntie’ came out from under the cloth. Then there was silence.

‘He likes his little joke,’ said Lucy, as the parrot disappeared. She had lighted a cigarette.

Walter strode back across the room and without saying anything took the cigarette from between her fingers and threw it into the fireplace. Lucy raised her eyebrows, but he gave her no time to speak. Kneeling down again beside her, he began to kiss her, angrily.

‘Walter,’ she protested. ‘No! What’s come over you?’ She tried to disengage herself, but he was surprisingly strong. ‘You’re like a wild beast.’ His desire was dumb and savage. ‘Walter! I insist.’ Struck by an absurd idea, she suddenly laughed. ‘If you knew how like the movies you were! A great huge grinning close-up.’

But ridicule was as unavailing as protest. And did she really desire it to be anything but unavailing? Why shouldn’t she abandon herself? It was only rather humiliating to be carried away, to be compelled instead of to choose. Her pride, her will resisted him, resisted her own desire. But after all, why not? The drug was potent and delicious. Why not? She shut her eyes. But as she was hesitating, circumstances suddenly decided for her. There was a knock at the door. Lucy opened her eyes again. ‘I’m going to say come in,’ she whispered.

He scrambled to his feet and, as he did so, heard the knock repeated.

‘Come in!’

The door opened. ‘Mr. Illidge to see you, madam,’ said the maid.

Walter was standing by the window, as though profoundly interested in the delivery van drawn up in front of the opposite house.

‘Show him up,’ said Lucy.

He turned round as the door closed behind the maid. His face was very pale, his lips were trembling.

‘I quite forgot,’ she explained ‘I asked him last night; this morning rather.’

He averted his face and without saying a word crossed the room, opened the door and was gone.

‘Walter!’ she called after him, ‘Walter!’ But he did not return.

On the stairs he met Illidge ascending behind the maid.

Walter responded to his greetings with a vague salute and hurried past. He could not trust himself to speak.

‘Our friend Bidlake seemed to be in a great hurry,’ said Illidge, when the preliminary greetings were over. He felt exultantly certain that he had driven the other fellow away.

She observed the triumph on his face. Like a little ginger cock, she was thinking. ‘He’d forgotten something,’ she vaguely explained.

‘Not himself, I hope,’ he questioned waggishly. And when she laughed, more at the fatuous masculinity of his expression than at his joke, he swelled with selfconfidence and satisfaction. This social business was as easy as playing skittles. Feeling entirely at his ease, he stretched his legs, he looked round the room. Its richly sober elegance impressed him at once as the right thing. He sniffed the perfumed air appreciatively.

‘What’s under that mysterious red cloth there?’ he asked, pointing at the mobled cage.

‘That’s a cockatoo,’ Lucy answered. ‘A cock-adoodle-doo,’ she emended, breaking out into a sudden disquieting and inexplicable laughter.

There are confessable agonies, sufferings of which one can positively be proud. Of bereavement, of parting, of the sense of sin and the fear of death the poets have eloquently spoken. They command the world’s sympathy. But there are also discreditable anguishes, no less excruciating than the others, but of which the sufferer dare not, cannot speak. The anguish of thwarted desire, for example. That was the anguish which Walter carried with him into the street. It was pain, anger, disappointment, shame, misery all in one. He felt as though his soul were dying in torture. And yet the cause was unavowable, low, even ludicrous. Suppose a friend were now to meet him and to ask why he looked so unhappy.

‘I was making love to a woman when I was interrupted, first by the screaming of a cockatoo, then by the arrival of a visitor.’

The comment would be enormous and derisive laughter. His confession would have been a smokingroom joke. And yet he could not be suffering more if he had lost his mother.

He wandered for an hour through the streets, in Regent’s Park. The light gradually faded out of the white and misty afternoon; he became calmer. It was a lesson, he thought, a punishment; he had broken his promise. For his own good as well as for Marjorie’s, never again. He looked at his watch and seeing that it was after seven, turned homewards. He arrived at the house tired and determinedly repentant. Marjorie was sewing; the lamplight was bright on her thin fatigued face. She too was wearing a dressing-gown. It was mauve and hideous; he had always thought her taste bad. The flat was pervaded with a smell of cooking. He hated kitchen smells, but that was yet another reason why he should be faithful. It was a question of honour and duty. It was not because he preferred gardenia to cabbage that he had a right to make Marjorie suffer.

‘You’re late,’ she said.

‘There was a lot to do,’ Walter explained. ‘And I walked home.’ That at least was true. ‘How are you feeling?’ He laid his hand on her shoulder and bent down. Dropping her sewing, Marjorie threw her hands round his neck. What a happiness, she was thinking, to have him again! Hers once more. What a comfort! But even as she pressed herself against him, she realized that she was once more betrayed. She broke away from him.

‘Walter, how could you?’

The blood rushed to his face; but he tried to keep up the pretence. ‘How could I what? ‘ he asked.

‘You’ve been to see that woman again.’

‘But what are you talking about?’ He knew it was useless; but he went on pretending all the same.

‘It’s no use lying.’ She got up so suddenly that her work basket overturned and scattered its contents on the floor. Unheeding, she walked across the room. ‘Go away!’ she cried, when he tried to follow her. Walter shrugged his shoulders and obeyed. ‘How could you?’ she went on. ‘Coming home reeking of her perfume.’ So it was the gardenias. What a fool he was not to have foreseen….’After all you said last night. How could you?’

‘But if you’d let me explain,’ he protested in the tone of a victim—an exasperated victim.

‘Explain why you lied,’ she said bitterly. ‘Explain why you broke your promise.’

Her contemptuous anger evoked an answering anger in Walter. ‘Merely explain,’ he said with hard and dangerous politeness. What a bore she was with her scenes and jealousies! What an intolerable, infuriating bore!

‘Merely go on lying,’ she mocked.

Again he shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you like to put it like that,’ he said politely.

‘Just a despicable liar—that’s what you are.’ And turning away from him, she covered her face with her hands and began to cry.

Walter was not touched. The sight of her heaving shoulders just exasperated and bored him. He looked at her with a cold and weary anger.

‘Go away,’ she cried through her tears, ‘go away.’ She did not want him to be there, triumphing over her, while she cried. ‘Go away.’

‘Do you really want me to go?’ he asked with the same cool, aggravating politeness.

‘Yes, go, go.’

‘Very well,’ he said and opening the door, he went.

At Camden Town he took a cab and was at Bruton Street just in time to find Lucy on the point of going out to dinner.

‘You’re coming out with me,’ he announced very calmly.

‘Alas!’

‘Yes, you are.’

She looked at him curiously and he looked back at her, with steady eyes, smiling, with a queer look of amused triumph and invincible obstinate power, which she had never seen on his face before. ‘All right,’ she said at last and, ringing for the maid, ‘Telephone to Lady Sturlett, will you,’ she ordered, ‘and say I’m sorry, but I’ve got a very bad headache and can’t come to-night.’ The maid retired. ‘Well, are you grateful now?’

‘I’m beginning to be,’ he answered.

‘Beginning?’ She assumed indignation. ‘I like your damned impertinence.’

‘I know you do,’ said Walter, laughing. And she did. That night Lucy became his mistress.

****

It was between three and four in the afternoon. Spandrell had only just got out of bed. He was still unshaved; over his pyjamas he wore a dressing-gown of rough brown cloth, like a monk’s cassock. (The monastic note was studied; he liked to remind himself of the ascetics. He liked, rather childishly, to play the part of the anchorite of diabolism.) He had filled the kettle and was waiting for it to boil on the gas ring. It seemed to be taking an unconscionably long time about it. His mouth was dry and haunted by a taste like the fumes of heated brass. The brandy was having its usual effects.

‘Like as the hart desireth the water brooks,’ he said to himself,’so longeth my soul…With a morningafter thirst. If only Grace could be bottled like Perrier water.’

He walked to the window. Outside a radius of fifty yards everything in the universe had been abolished by the white mist. But how insistently that lamp-post thrust itself up in front of the next house on the right, how significantly! The world had been destroyed and only the lamp-post, like Noah, preserved from the universal cataclysm. And he had never even noticed there was a lamp-post there; it simply hadn’t existed until this moment. And now it was the only thing that existed. Spandrell looked at it with a fixed and breathless attention. This lamp-post alone in the mist—hadn’t he seen something like it before? This queer sensation of being with the sole survivor of the Deluge was somehow familiar. Staring at the lamp-post, he tried to remember. Or rather he breathlessly didn’t try; he held back his will and his conscious thoughts, as a policeman might hold back the crowd round a woman who had fainted in the street; he held back his consciousness to give the stunned memory a place to stretch itself, to breathe, to come to life. Staring at the lamp-post, Spandrell waited, agonized and patient, like a man who feels he is just going to sneeze, tremulously awaiting the anticipated paroxysm; waited for the long-dead memory to revive. And suddenly it sprang up, broad awake, out of its catalepsy and, with a sense of enormous relief, Spandrell saw himself walking up the steep hard-trodden snow of the road leading from Cortina towards the pass of Falzarego. A cold white cloud had descended on to the valley. There were no more mountains. The fantastic coral pinnacles of the Dolomites had been abolished. There were no more heights and depths. The world was only fifty paces wide, white snow on the ground, white cloud around and above. And every now and then, against the whiteness appeared some dark shape of house or telegraph pole, of tree or man or sledge, portentous in its isolation and uniqueness, each one a solitary survivor from the general wreck. It was uncanny, but how thrillingly new and how beautiful in a strange way! The walk was an adventure; he felt excited and a kind of anxiety intensified his happiness till he could hardly bear it.

‘But look at that little chalet on the left,’ he cried to his mother. ‘That wasn’t here when I came up last. I swear it wasn’t here.’

He knew the road perfectly, he had been up and down it a hundred times and never seen that little chalet. And now it loomed up almost appallingly, the only dark and definite thing in a vague world of whiteness.

‘Yes, I’ve never noticed it, either,’ said his mother. ‘Which only shows,’ she added with that note of tenderness which always came into her voice when she mentioned her dead husband, ‘ how right your father was. Mistrust all evidence, he used to say, even your own.’

He took her hand and they walked on together in silence, pulling their sledges after them.

Spandrell turned away from the window. The kettle was boiling. He filled the tea-pot, poured himself out a cup and drank. Symbolically enough, his thirst remained unassuaged. He went on sipping, meditatively, remembering and analysing those quite incredible felicities of his boyhood. Winters among the Dolomites. Springs in Tuscany or Provence or Bavaria, summers by the Mediterranean or in Savoy. After his father’s death and before he went to school, they lived almost continuously abroad—it was cheaper. And almost all his holidays from school were spent out of England. From seven to fifteen, he had moved from one European beauty spot to another, appreciating their beauty, what was more—genuinely, a precocious Childe Harold. England seemed a little tame afterwards. He thought of another day in winter. Not misty, this time, but brilliant; the sun hot in a cloudless sky; the coral precipices of the Dolomites shining pink and orange and white above the woods and the snow slopes. They were sliding down on skis through the bare larchwoods. Streaked with tree-shadows, the snow was like an immense white and blue tiger-skin beneath their feet. The sunlight was orange among the leafless twigs, sea-green in the hanging beards of moss. The powdery snow sizzled under their skis, the air was at once warm and eager. And when he emerged from the woods the great rolling slopes lay before him like the contours of a wonderful body, and the virgin snow was a smooth skin, delicately grained in the low afternoon sunlight, and twinkling with diamonds and spangles. He had gone ahead. At the outskirts of the wood he halted to wait for his mother. Looking back he watched her coming through the trees. A strong tall figure, still young and agile, the young face puckered into a smile. Down she came towards him, and she was the most beautiful and at the same time the most homely and comforting and familiar of beings. ‘Well!’ she said, laughing, as she drew up beside him

‘Well!’ He looked at her and then at the snow and the tree-shadows and the great bare rocks and the blue sky, then back again at his mother. And all at once he was filled with an intense, inexplicable happiness.

‘I shall never be so happy as this again,’ he said to himself, when they set off once more. ‘Never again, even though I live to be a hundred.’ He was only fifteen at the time, but that was how he felt and thought.

And his words had been prophetic. That was the last of his happinesses. Afterwards…No, no. He preferred not to think of afterwards. Not at the moment. He poured himself out another cup of tea.

A bell rang startlingly. He went to the door of the flat and opened it. It was his mother.

‘You?’ Then he suddenly remembered that Lucy had said something.

‘Didn’t you get my message?’ Mrs. Knoyle asked anxiously.

‘Yes. But I’d clean forgotten.’

‘But I thought you needed…’ she began. She was afraid she might have intruded; his face was so unwelcoming.

The corners of his mouth ironically twitched. ‘I do need,’ he said. He was chronically penniless.

They passed into the other room. The windows, Mrs. Knoyle observed at a glance, were foggy with grime. On shelf and mantel the dust lay thick. Sooty cobwebs dangled from the ceiling. She had tried to get Maurice’s permission to send a woman to clean up two or three times a week. But, ‘None of your slumming,’ he had said. ‘I prefer to wallow. Filth’s my natural element. Besides, I haven’t a distinguished military position to keep up.’ He laughed, noiselessly, showing his big strong teeth. That was for her. She never dared to repeat her offer. But the room really did need cleaning.

‘Would you like some tea? ‘ he asked. ‘It’s ready. I’m just having breakfast,’ he added, purposely drawing attention to the irregularity of his way of life.

She refused, without venturing any comment on the unusual breakfast hour. Spandrell was rather disappointed that he had not succeeded in drawing her. There was a long silence.

From time to time Mrs. Knoyle glanced almost surreptitiously at her son. He was staring fixedly into the empty fireplace. He looked old, she thought, and rather ill and dreadfully uncared for. She tried to recognize the child, the big schoolboy he had been in those far-off times when they were happy, just the two of them together. She remembered how distressed he used to be when she didn’t wear what he thought were the right clothes, when she wasn’t smart or failed to look her best. He was as jealously proud of her as she was of him. But the responsibility of his upbringing weighed on her heavily. The future had always frightened her; she had always been afraid of taking decisions; she had no trust in her own powers. Besides, after her husband’s death, there wasn’t much money; and she had no head for affairs, no talent for management. How to afford to send him to the university, how to get him started in life? The questions tormented her. She lay awake at night, wondering what she 6ught to do. Life terrified her. She had a child’s capacity for happiness, but also a child’s fears, a child’s inefficiency. When existence was a holiday, none could be more rapturously happy; but when there was business to be done, plans to be made, decisions taken, she was simply lost and terrified. And to make matters worse, after Maurice went to school she was very lonely. He was with her only in the holidays. For nine months out of the twelve she was alone, with nobody to love but her old dachshund. And at last even he failed her-fell ill, poor old beast, and had to be put out of his misery. It was shortly after poor old Fritz’s death that she first met Major Knoyle, as he then was.

‘You say you brought that money?’ Spandrell asked, breaking the long silence.

Mrs. Knoyle flushed. ‘Yes, it’s here,’ she said and opened her bag. The moment to speak had come. It was her duty to admonish, and the wad of bank notes gave her the right, the power. But the duty was odious and she had no wish to use her power. She raised her eyes and looked at him imploringly. ‘Maurice,’ she begged, ‘why can’t you be reasonable? It’s such a madness, such a folly.’

Spandrell raised his eyebrows. ‘What’s a madness?’ he asked, pretending not to know what she was talking about.

Embarrassed at being thus compelled to specify her vague reproaches, Mrs. Knoyle blushed. ‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘This way of living. It’s bad and stupid. And such a waste, such a suicide. Besides, you’re not happy; I can see that.’

‘Mayn’t I even be unhappy, if I want to?’ he asked ironically.

‘But do you want to make me unhappy too? ‘ she asked. ‘Because if you do, you succeed, Maurice; you succeed. You make me terribly unhappy.’ The tears came into her eyes. She felt in her bag for a handkerchief.

Spandrell got up from his chair and began to walk up and down the room. ‘You didn’t think much of my happiness in the past,’ he said.

His mother did not answer, but went on noiselessly crying.

‘When you married that man,’ he went on, ‘did you think of my happiness?’

‘You know I thought it would be for the best,’ she answered brokenly. She had explained it so often; she couldn’t begin again. ‘You know it,’ she repeated.

‘I only know what I felt and said at the time,’ he answered. ‘You didn’t listen to me, and now you tell me you wanted to make me happy.’

‘But you were so unreasonable,’ she protested. ‘If you had given me any reasons…’

‘Reasons,’ he repeated slowly. ‘Did you honestly expect a boy of fifteen to tell his mother the reasons why he didn’t want her to share her bed with a stranger?’

He was thinking of that book which had circulated surreptitiously among the boys of his house at school. Disgusted and ashamed, but irresistibly fascinated, he had read it at night, by the light of an electric torch, under the bedclothes. A Girls’ School in Paris it was called, innocuously enough; but the contents were pure pornography. The sexual exploits of the military were pindarically exalted. A little later his mother wrote to him that she was going to marry Major Knoyle. ‘It’s no good, mother, he said aloud. ‘Hadn’t we better talk about something else?’

Mrs. Knoyle drew her breath sharply and with determination, gave her eyes a final wipe and put away the handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was stupid of me. Perhaps I’d better go.’

Secretly she hoped that he would protest, would beg her to stay. But he said nothing.

‘Here’s the money,’ she added.

He took the folded bank-notes and stuffed them into the pocket of his dressing-gown. ‘I’m sorry I had to ask you for it,’ he said. ‘I was in a hole. I’ll try not to get into it again.’

He looked at her for a moment, smiling, and suddenly, through the worn mask, she seemed to see him as he was in boyhood. Tenderness like a soft warmth expanded within her, soft but irresistible. It would not be contained. She laid her hands on his shoulders.

‘Goodbye, my darling boy,’ she said, and Spandrell recognized in her voice that note which used to come into it when she talked to him of his dead father. She leaned forward to kiss him. Averting his face, he passively suffered her lips to touch his cheek.

CHAPTER XIV

Miss Fulkes rotated the terrestrial globe until the crimson triangle of India was opposite their eyes. ‘That’s Bombay,’ she said, pointing with her pencil. ‘That’s where Daddy and Mummy took the ship. Bombay is a big town in India,’ she went on instructively. ‘All this is India.’

‘Why is India red?’ asked little Phil.

‘I told you before. Try to remember.’

‘Because it’s English?’ Phil remembered, of course; but the explanation had seemed inadequate. He had hoped for a better one this time.

‘There, you see, you can remember if you try,’ said Miss Fulkes, scoring a small triumph.’

‘But why should English things be red?’

‘Because red is England’s colour. Look, here’s little England.’ She spun the globe. ‘Red too.’

‘We live in England, don’t we?’ Phil looked out of the window. The lawn with its Wellingtonia, the clotpolled elms looked back at him.

‘Yes, we live just about here,’ and Miss Fulkes poked the red island in the stomach.

‘But it’s green, where we live,’ said Phil. ‘Not red.’

Miss Fulkes tried to explain, as she had done so many times before, just precisely what a map was.

In the garden Mrs. Bidlake walked among her flowers, weeding and meditating. Her walking-stick had a little pronged spud at the end of it; she could weed without bending. The weeds in the flower-beds were young and fragile; they yielded without a struggle to the spud. But the dandelions and plantains on the lawn were more formidable enemies. The dandelions’ roots were like long tapering white serpents. The plantains, when she tried to pull them up, desperately clawed the earth.

It was the season of tulips. Duc van Thol and Keizers Kroon, Proserpine and Thomas Moore stood at attention in all the beds, glossy in the light. Atoms in the sun vibrated and their trembling filled all space. Eyes felt the pulses as light; the tulip atoms absorbed or reverberated the accorded movements, creating colours for whose sake the burgesses of seventeenth-century Haarlem were prepared to part with hoarded guilders. Red tulips and yellow, white and parti-coloured, smooth or feathery—Mrs. Bidlake looked at them, happily. They were like those gay and brilliant young men, she reflected, in Pinturicchio’s frescoes at Siena. She halted so as to be able to shut her eyes and think more thoroughly of Pinturicchio. Mrs. Bidlake could only think really well when she had her eyes shut. Her face tilted a little upwards towards the sky, her heavy, wax-white eyelids closed against the light, she stood remembering, confusedly thinking. Pinturicchio, Siena, the solemn huge cathedral—the Tuscan Middle Ages marched past her in a rich and confused pageant….She had been brought up on Ruskin. Watts had painted her portrait as a child. Rebelling against the Pre-Raphaelites, she had thrilled with an admiration that was quickened, at first, by a sense of sacrilege, over the Impressionists. It was because she loved art that she had married John Bidlake. Liking his pictures, she had imagined, when the painter of ‘The Haymakers’ had paid his court to her, that she adored the man. He was twenty years her senior; his reputation as a husband was bad; her family objected strenuously. She did not care. John Bidlake was embodied Art. His was a sacred function and through his function he appealed to all her vague, but ardent, idealism.

John Bidlake’s reasons for desiring to marry yet again were unromantic. Travelling in Provence he had caught typhoid. (‘That’s what comes of drinking water,’ he used to say afterwards. ‘If only I’d stuck to Burgundy and cognac!’) After a month in hospital at Avignon he returned to England, a thin and tottering convalescent. Three weeks later influenza, followed by pneumonia, brought him again to death’s door. He recovered slowly. The doctor congratulated him on having recovered at all.’do you call this recovering? ‘ grumbled John Bidlake. ‘I feel as though about three-quarters of me were dead and buried.’ Accustomed to being well, he was terrified of illness. He saw himself living miserably, a lonely invalid. Marriage would be an alleviation. He decided to marry. The girl must be good-looking—that went without saying. But serious, not flighty; devoted, a stay-at-home.

In Janet Paston he found all that he had been looking for. She had a face like a saint’s; she was serious almost to excess; her adoration for himself was flattering.

They were married, and ifJohn Bidlake had remained the invalid he had imagined himself doomed to be, the marriage might have been a success. Her devotion would have made up for her incompetence as a nurse; his helplessness would have rendered her indispensable to his happiness. But health returned. Six months after his marriage John Bidlake was entirely his old self. The old self began to behave in the old way. Mrs. Bidlake took refuge from unhappiness in an endless imaginative meditation, which even her two children were hardly able to interrupt.

It had lasted now for a quarter of a century. A tall imposing lady of fifty all in white, with a white veil hanging from her hat, she stood among the tulips, her eyes shut, thinking of Pinturicchio and the Middle Ages, and time flowing and flowing, and God immobile on the eternal bank.

A shrill barking precipitated her out of her high eternity. She opened her eyes, reluctantly, and looked round. The small and silky parody of an extreme-oriental monster, her little Pekingese was barking at the kitchen cat. Frisking this way and that round the circumference of a circle whose radius was proportionate to his terror of the arched and spitting tabby, he yapped hysterically. His tail waved like a plume in the wind, his eyes goggled out of his black face.

‘T’ang!’ Mrs. Bidlake called. ‘T’ang!’ All her Pekingese for the last thirty years had had dynastic names. T’ang the First had flourished before her children were born. It was with T’ang the Second that she and Walter had visited the dying Wetherington. The kitchen cat was now spitting at T’ang the Third. In the intervals, little Mings and Sungs had lived, grown decrepit and, in the lethal chamber, gone the way of all pets. ‘T’ang, come here.’ Even in this emergency Mrs. Bidlake was careful to pronounce the apostrophe. Or rather she was not careful to pronounce it; she pronounced it by cultured instinct, because, being what nature and education had made her, she simply could not pronounce the word without the apostrophe even when the fur was threatening to fly.

The little dog obeyed at last. The cat ceased to spit, its fur lay down on its back, it walked away majestically. Mrs. Bidlake went on with her weeding and her vague, unending meditation among the flowers. God, Pinturicchio, dandelions, eternity, the sky, the clouds, the early Venetians, dandelions….

Upstairs in the schoolroom lessons were over. At least they were over as far as little Phil was concerned; for he was doing what he liked best in the world, drawing. Miss Fulkes, it is true, called the process ‘Art’ and ‘Imagination Training,’ and allotted half an hour to it every morning, from twelve to halfpast. But for little Phil it was just fun. He sat bent over his paper, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, his face intent and serious, drawing, drawing with a kind of inspired violence. Wielding a pencil that seemed disproportionately large, his little brown hand indefatigably laboured. At once rigid and wavering, the lines of the childish composition traced themselves out on the paper.

Miss Fulkes sat by the window, looking out at the sunny garden, but not consciously seeing it. What she saw was behind the eyes, in a fanciful universe. She saw herself—herself in that lovely Lanvin frock that had been illustrated last month in Vogue, with pearls, dancing at Ciro’s, which looked (for she had never been at Ciro’s) curiously like the Hammersmith Palais de Danse, where she had been. ‘How lovely she looks!’ all the people were saying. She walked swayingly, like that actress she had seen at the London Pavilion—what was her name? She held out her white hand; it was young Lord Wonersh who kissed it, Lord Wonersh, who looked like Shelley and lived like Byron and owned half Oxford Street and had come to the house last February with old Mr. Bidlake and had perhaps spoken to her twice. And then, all at once, she saw herself riding in the Park. And a couple of seconds later she was on a yacht in the Mediterranean. And then in a motor car. Lord Wonersh had just taken his seat beside her, when the noise of T’ang’s shrill barking startlingly roused her to consciousness of the lawn, the gay tulips, the Wellingtonia and, on the other side, the schoolroom. Miss Fulkes felt guilty, she had been neglecting her charge.

‘Well, Phil,’ she asked, turning round briskly to her pupil, ‘what are you drawing?’

‘Mr. Stokes and Albert pulling the mow-lawner,’ Phil answered, without looking up from his paper.

‘Lawn-mower,’ Miss Fulkes corrected.

‘Lawn-mower,’ Phil dutifully repeated.

‘You never get your compound words right,’ Miss Fulkes continued. ‘Mow-lawner, hopgrasser, crack-nutter—it’s a sort of mental defect, like mirror-writing, I suppose.’ Miss Fulkes had taken a course in educational psychology. ‘You must’really try to correct it, Phil,’ she added, earnestly. After so long and flagrant a dereliction of duty (at Ciro’s, on horseback, in the limousine with Lord Wonersh) Miss Fulkes felt it incumbent upon her to be particularly solicitous, scientifically so: she was a very conscientious young woman. ‘Will you try?’ she insisted.

‘Yes, Miss Fulkes,’ the child answered. He had no idea what she wanted him to try to do. But it would keep her quiet if he said yes. He was busy on a particularly difficult bit of his drawing.

Miss Fulkes sighed and looked out of the window again. This time she consciously perceived what her eyes saw. Mrs. Bidlake wandered among the tulips, dressed flowingly in white, with a white veil hanging from her hat, a sort of Pre-Raphaelitic ghost. Every now and then she paused and looked at the sky. Old Mr. Stokes the gardener, passed carrying a rake; the tips of his white beard fluttered gently in the breeze. The village clock struck the half-hour. The garden, the trees, the fields, the wooded hills in the distance were always the same. Miss Fulkes felt all at once so hopelessly sad that she could have cried.

‘Do mow-lawners, I mean lawn-mowers, have wheels?’ asked little Phil, looking up with a frown of effort and perplexity wrinkling his forehead. ‘I can’t remember.’

‘Yes. Or let me think…’ Miss Fulkes also frowned; ‘no. They have rollers.’

‘Rollers! ‘ cried Phil. ‘That’s it.’ He attacked his drawing again with fury.

Always the same. There seemed to be no escape, no prospect of freedom. ‘If I had a thousand pounds,’ thought Miss Eulkes, ‘a thousand pounds. A thousand pounds.’ The words were magical. ‘A thousand pounds.’

‘There!’ cried Phil. ‘Come and look.’ He held up his paper. Miss Fulkes got up and crossed to the table. ‘What a lovely drawing!’ she said.

‘That’s all the little bits of grass flying up,’ said Phil, pointing to a cloud of dots and dashes in the middle of his picture. He was particularly proud of the grass.

‘I see,’ said Miss Fulkes.

‘And look how hard Albert is pulling!’ It was true; Albert was pulling like mad. And old Mr. Stokes, recognizable by the four parallel pencil strokes issuing from his chin, pushed as energetically at the other end of the machine.

For a child of his age, little Phil had an observant eye, and a strange talent for rendering on paper what he had seen—not realistically, of course, but in terms of expressive symbols. Albert and Mr. Stokes were, for all their scratchy uncertainty of outline, violently alive.

‘Albert’s left leg is rather funny, isn’t it?’ said Miss Fulkes. ‘Rather long and thin and…’ She checked herself, remembering what old Mr. Bidlake had said. ‘On no account is the child to be taught how to draw, in the art-school sense of the word. On no account. I don’t want him to be ruined.’

Phil snatched the paper from her. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said angrily. His pride was hurt, he hated criticism, refused ever to be in the wrong.

‘Perhaps it isn’t really,’ Miss Fulkes made haste to be soothing. ‘Perhaps I made a mistake.’ Phil smiled again. ‘Though why a child,’ Miss Fulkes was thinking,’shouldn’t be told when he’s drawn a leg that’s impossibly long and thin and waggly, I really don’t understand.’ Still, old Mr. Bidlake ought to know. A man in his position, with his reputation, a great painter—she had often heard him called a great painter, read it in newspaper articles, even in books. Miss Fulkes had a profound respect for the Great. Shakespeare, Milton, Michelangelo…Yes, Mr. Bidlake, the Great John Bidlake, ought to know best. She had been wrong in mentioning that left leg.

‘It’s after halfpast twelve,’ she went on in a brisk efficient voice. ‘Time for you to lie down.’ Little Phil always lay down for half an hour before lunch.

‘No!’ Phil tossed his head, scowled ferociously and made a furious gesture with his clenched fists.

‘Yes,’ said Miss Fulkes calmly. ‘And don’t make those silly faces.’ She knew, by experience, that the child was not really angry; he was just making a demonstration, in order to assert himself and in the vague hope, perhaps, that he might frighten his adversary into yielding—as Chinese soldiers are said to put on devils’ masks and to utter fearful yells when they approach the enemy, in the hope of inspiring terror.

‘Why should I?’ Phil’s tone was already much calmer.

‘Because you must.’

The child got up obediently. When the mask and the yelling fail to take effect, the Chinese soldier, being a man of sense and not at all anxious to get hurt, surrenders.

‘I’ll come and draw the curtains for you,’ said Miss Fulkes.

Together, they walked down the passage to Phil’s bedroom. The child took off his shoes and lay down. Miss Fulkes drew the folds of orange cretonne across the windows.

‘Not too dark,’ said Phil, watching her movements through the richly coloured twilight.

‘You rest better when it’s dark.’

‘But I’m frightened,’ protested Phil.

‘You’re not frightened in the least. Besides, it isn’t really dark at all.’ Miss Fulkes moved towards the door.

‘Miss Fulkes!’ She paid no attention. ‘Miss Fulkes!’

On the threshold Miss Fulkes turned round. ‘If you go on shouting,’ she said severely, ‘I shall be very angry. Do you understand?’ She turned and went out, shutting the door behind her.

‘Miss Fulkes!’ he continued to call, but in a whisper, under his breath. ‘Miss Fulkes! Miss Fulkes!’ She mustn’t hear him, of course; for then she would really be cross. At the same time he wasn’t going to obey tamely and without a protest. Whispering her name he rebelled, he asserted his personality, but in complete safety.

Sitting in her own room, Miss Fulkes was reading—to improve her mind. The book was The Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith, she knew, was Great. His book was one of those that one ought to have read. The best that has been thought or said. Her family was poor, but cultured. We needs must love the highest when we see it. But when the highest takes the form of a chapter beginning, ‘As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent of that power, or in other words, by the extent of the market,’ then, really, it is difficult to love it as ardently as one ought to do. ‘When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment, for want of the opportunity to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men’s labour as he has occasion for.’

Miss Fulkes read the sentence through; but before she had come to the end of it, she had forgotten what the beginning was about. She began again;…’for want of the opportunity to exchange all that surplus…(I could take the sleeves out of my brown dress, she was thinking; because it’s only under the arms that it’s begun to go, and wear it for the skirt only with a jumper over it)…over and above his own consumption for such parts…(an orange jumper perhaps).’ She tried a third time, reading the words out aloud. ‘When the market is very small…’ A vision of the cattle market at Oxford floated before her inward eye; it was quite a large market. ‘No person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself…’ What was it all about? Miss Fulkes suddenly rebelled against her own conscientiousness. She hated the highest when she saw it. Getting up, she put The Wealth of Nations back on the shelf. It was a row of very high books—’my treasures,’ she called them. Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Tennyson bound in squashy leather and looking, with their rounded corners and Gothic titles, like so many Bibles. Sartor Resartus, also Emerson’s Essays. Marcus Aurelius in one of those limp leathery artistic little editions that one gives, at Christmas, and in sheer despair, to those to whom one can think of nothing more suitable to give. Macaulay’s History. Thomas a Kempis, Mrs. Browning. Miss Fulkes did not select any of them. She put her hand behind the best that has beenr thought or said and withdrew from its secret place a copy of The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds. A ribbon marked her place. She opened and began to read. ‘Lady Kitty turned on the lights and walked in. A cry of horror broke from her lips, a sudden faintness almost overcame her. In the middle of the room lay the body of a man in faultless evening dress. The face was almost unrecognizably mangled; there was a red gash in the white shirt front. The rich Turkey carpet was darkly soaked with blood…’ Miss Fulkes read on, avidly. The thunder of the gong brought her back with a start from the world of emeralds and murder. She sprang up. ‘I ought to have kept an eye on the time,’ she thought, feeling guilty. ‘We shall be late.’ Pushing The Mystery of the Castlemaine Emeralds back into its place behind the best that has been thought or said, she hurried along to the night nursery. Little Phil had to be washed and brushed.

****

There was no breeze except the wind of the ship’s own speed; and that was like a blast from the engine-room. Stretched in their chairs Philip and Elinor watched the gradual diminution against the sty of a jagged island of bare red rock. From the deck above came the sound of people playing shuffle-board. Walking on principle or for an appetite their fellow passengers passed and re-passed with the predictable regularity of comets.

‘The way people take exercise,’ said Elinor in a tone positively of resentment; it made her hot to look at them. ‘Even in the Red Sea.’

‘It explains the British Empire,’ he said.

There was a silence. Burnt brown, burnt scarlet, the young men on leave passed laughing, four to a girl. Sun-dried and curry-pickled veterans of the East strolled by with acrimonious words; about the Reforms and the cost of Indian living, upon their lips. Two female missionaries padded past in a rarely broken silence. The French globe-trotters reacted to the oppressively imperial atmosphere by talking very loud. The Indian students slapped one another on the back like stage subalterns in the days of ‘Charley’s Aunt’; and the slang they talked would have seemed old-fashioned in a preparatory school.

Time flowed. The island vanished; the air was if possible hotter.

‘I’m worried about Walter,’ said Elinor, who had been ruminating the contents of that last batch of letters she had received just before leaving Bombay.

‘He’s a fool,’ Philip answered. ‘After committing one stupidity with that Carling female, he ought to have had the sense not to start again with Lucy.’

‘Of course he ought,’ said Elinor irritably. ‘But the point is that he hasn’t had the sense. It’s a question of thinking of a remedy.’

‘Well, it’s no good thinking about it five thousand miles away.’

‘I’m afraid he may suddenly rush off and leave poor Marorie in the lurch. With a baby on the way, too. She’s a dreary woman. But he mustn’t be allowed to treat her like that.’

‘No,’ Philip agreed. There was a pause. The sparse procession of exercise lovers marched past. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he went on reflectively, ‘that it would make an excellent subject.’

‘What?’

‘This business of Walter’s.’

‘You don’t propose to exploit poor Walter as copy?’ Elinor was indignant. ‘No really, I won’t have it. Botanizing on his grave—or at any rate his heart.’

‘But of course not!’ Philip protested.

‘Mais je vous assure,’ one of the Frenchwomen was shouting so loud that he had to abandon the attempt to continue, ‘ aux Galeries Lafayette les camisoles en flanelle pour enfant ne coutent que…’

‘Camisoles enflanelle,’ repeated Philip. ‘Phew!’

‘But seriously, Phil…’

‘But, my dear, I never intended to use more than the situation. The young man who tries to make his life rhyme with his idealizing books and imagines he’s having a great spiritual love, only to discover that he’s got hold of a bore whom he really doesn’t like at all.’

‘Poor Marjorie! But why can’t she keep her face better powdered? And those artistic beads and earrings she always wears…’

‘And who then goes down like a ninepin,’ Philip continued, ‘at the mere sight of a Siren. It’s the situation that appealed to me. Not the individuals. After all, there are plenty of other nice young men besides Walter. And Marjorie isn’t the only bore. Nor Lucy the only man-eater.’

‘Well, if it’s only the situation,’ Elinor grudgingly allowed.

‘And besides,’ he went on, ‘it isn’t written and probably never will be. So there’s nothing to get upset about, I assure you.’

‘All right. I won’t say anything more till I see the book.’

There was another pause.

‘.. such a wonderful time at Gulmerg last summer,’ the young lady was saying to her four attentive cavaliers. ‘There was golf, and dancing every evening, and…’

‘And in any case,’ Philip began again in a meditative tone, ‘ the situation would only be a kind of…’

‘Mais je lui ai dit, les hommes sont comme ca. Une jeune fille bien elevee doit…’

‘…a kind of excuse,’ bawled Philip. ‘It’s like trying to talk in the parrot-house at the Zoo,’ he added with parenthetic irritation. ‘A kind of excuse, as I was saying, for a new way of looking at things that I want to experiment with.’

‘I wish you’d begin by looking at me in a new way,’ said Elinor with a little laugh. ‘A more human way.’

‘But seriously, Elinor…’

‘Seriously,’ she mocked. ‘Being human isn’t serious. Only being clever.’

‘Oh, well,’ he shrugged his shoulders, ‘if you don’t want to listen, I’ll shut up.’

‘No, no, Phil. Please.’ She laid her hand on his. ‘Please.’

‘I don’t want to bore you.’ He was huffy and dignified.

‘I’m sorry, Phil. But you do look so comic when you’re more in sorrow than in anger. Do you remember those camels at Bikaner—what an extraordinarily superior expression? But do go on!’

‘This year,’ one female missionary was saying to the other, as they passed by, ‘ the Bishop of Kuala Lumpur ordained six Chinese deacons and two Malays. And the Bishop of British North Borneo…’ The quiet voices faded into inaudibility.

Philip forgot his dignity and burst out laughing. ‘Perhaps he ordained some Orang-utans.’

‘But do you remember the wife of the Bishop of Thursday Island?’ asked Elinor. ‘The woman we met on that awful Australian ship with the cockroaches.’

‘The one who would eat pickles at breakfast?’

‘Pickled onions at that,’ she qualified with a shudder. ‘But what about your new way of looking at things? We seem to have wandered rather a long way from that.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Philip, ‘we haven’t. All these camisoles en flanelle and pickled onions and bishops of cannibal islands are really quite to the point. Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,’ he nodded after the retreating group, ‘ thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once. With religious eyes, scientific eyes, economic eyes, homme moyen sensuel eyes…’

‘Loving eyes too.’

He smiled at her and stroked her hand. ‘The result…’ he hesitated.

‘Yes, what would the result be?’ she asked.

‘Queer,’ he answered. ‘A very queer picture indeed.’

‘Rather too queer, I should have thought.’

‘But it can’t be too queer,’ said Philip. ‘However queer the picture is, it can never be half so odd as the original reality. We take it all for granted; but the moment you start thinking, it becomes queer. And the more you think, the queerer it grows. That’s what I want to get in this book—the astonishingness of the most obvious things. Really any plot or situation would do. Because everything’s implicit in anything. The whole book could be written about a walk from Piccadilly Circus to Charing Cross. Or you and I sitting here on an enormous ship in the Red Sea. Really, nothing could be queerer than that. When you reflect on the evolutionary processes, the human patience and genius, the social organisation, that have made it possible for us to be here, with stokers having heat apoplexy for our benefit and steam turbines doing five thousand revolutions a minute, and the sea being blue, and the rays of light not flowing round obstacles, so that there’s a shadow, and the sun all the time providing us with energy to live and think—when you think of all this and a million other things, you must see that nothing could well be queerer and that no picture can be queer enough to do justice to the facts.’

‘All the same,’ said Elinor, after a long silence, ‘I wish one day you’d write a simple straightforward story about a young man and a young woman who fall in love and get married and have difficulties, but get over them, and finally settle down.’

‘Or why not a detective novel?’ He laughed. But if, he reflected, he didn’t write that kind of story, perhaps it was because he couldn’t. In art there are simplicities more difficult than the most serried complications. He could manage the complications as well as anyone. But when it came to the simplicities, he lacked the talent—that talent which is of the heart, no less than of the head, of the feelings, the sympathies, the intuitions, no less than of the analytical understanding. The heart, the heart, he said to himself. ‘Perceive ye not, neither understand? have ye your heart yet hardened?’ No heart, no understanding.

‘…a terrible flirt!’ cried one of the four cavaliers, as the party rounded the corner into hearing.

‘I am not!’ the young lady indignantly retorted.

‘You are!’ they all shouted together. It was courtship in chorus and by teasing.

‘It’s a lie!’ But, one could hear, the ticklish impeachment really delighted her.

Like dogs, he thought. But the heart, the heart The heart was Burlap’s speciality. ‘You’ll never write a good book,’ he had said oracularly, ‘unless you write from the heart.’ It was true; Philip knew it. But was Burlap the man to say so, Burlap whose books were so heartfelt that they looked as though they had come from the stomach, after an emetic? If he went in for the grand simplicities, the results would be no less repulsive. Better to cultivate his own particular garden for all it was worth. Better to remain rigidly and loyally oneself. Oneself? But this question of identity was precisely one of Philip’s chronic problems. It was so easy for him to be almost anybody, theoretically and with his intelligence. He had such a power of assimilation, that he was often in danger of being unable to distinguish the assimilator from the assimilated, of not knowing among the multiplicity of his roles who was the actor. The amoeba, when it finds a prey, flows round it, incorporates it and oozes on. There was something amoeboid about Philip Quarles’s mind. It was like a sea of spiritual protoplasm, capable of flowing in all directions, of engulfing every object in its path, of trickling into every crevice, of filling every mould and, having engulfed, having filled, of flowing on towards other obstacles, other receptacles, leaving the first empty and dry. At different times in his life and even at the same moment he had filled the most various moulds. He had been a cynic and also a mystic, a humanitarian and also a contemptuous misanthrope; he had tried to live the life of detached and stoical reason and another time he had aspired to the unreasonableness of natural and uncivilized existence. The choice of moulds depended at any given moment on the books he was reading, the people he was associating with. Burlap, for example, had redirected the flow of his mind into those mystical channels which it had not filled since he discovered Boehme in his undergraduate days. Then he had seen through Burlap and flowed out again, ready however at any I time to let himself trickle back once more, whenever the circumstances seemed to require it. He was trickling back at this moment, the mould was heart-shaped. Where was the self to which he could be loyal?

The female missionaries passed in silence. Looking over Elinor’s shoulder he saw that she was reading the Arabian Nights in Mardrus’s translation. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science lay on his knees; he picked it up and began looking for his place. Or wasn’t there a self at all? he was wondering. No, no, that was untenable, that contradicted immediate experience. He looked over the top of his book at the enormous blue glare of the sea. The essential character of the self consisted precisely in that liquid and undeformable ubiquity; in that capacity to espouse all contours and yet remain unfixed in any form, to take, and with an equal facility efface, impressions. To such moulds as his spirit might from time to time occupy, to such hard and burning obstacles as it might flow round, submerge, and, itself cold, penetrate to the fiery heart of, no permanent loyalty was owing. The moulds were emptied as easily as they had been filled, the obstacles were passed by. But the essential liquidness that flowed where it would, the cool indifferent flux of intellectual curiosity—that persisted and to that his loyalty was due. If there was any single way of life he could lastingly believe in, it was that mixture of pyrrhonism and stoicism which had struck him, an enquiring schoolboy among the philosophers, as the height of human wisdom and into whose mould of sceptical indifference he had poured his unimpassioned adolescence. Against the pyrrhonian suspense of judgment and the stoical imperturbability he had often rebelled. But had the rebellion ever been really serious? Pascal had made him a Catholic—but only so long as the volume of Pensees was open before him. There were moments when, in the company of Carlyle or Whitman or bouncing Browning, he had believed in strenuousness for strenuousness’ sake. And then there was Mark Rampion. After a few hours in Mark Rampion’s company he really believed in noble savagery; he felt convinced that the proudly conscious intellect ought to humble itself a little and admit the claims of the heart, aye and the bowels, the loins, the bones and skin and muscles, to a fair share of life. The heart again! Burlap had been right, even though he was a charlatan, a sort of swindling thimble-rigger of the emotions. The heart! But always, whatever he might do, he knew quite well in the secret depths of his being that he wasn’t a Catholic, or a strenuous liver, or a mystic, or a noble savage. And though he sometimes nostalgically wished he were one or other of these beings, or all of them at once, he was always secretly glad to be none of them and at liberty, even though his liberty was in a strange paradoxical way a handicap and a confinement to his spirit.

‘That simple story of yours,’ he said aloud; ‘it wouldn’t do.’

Elinor looked up from the Arabian Nights. ‘Which simple story?’

‘That one you wanted me to write.’

‘Oh, that!’ She laughed. ‘You’ve been brooding over it a long time.’

‘It wouldn’t give me my opportunity,’ he explained.

‘It would have to be solid and deep. Whereas I’m wide; wide and liquid. It wouldn’t be in my line.’

‘I could have told you that the first day I met you,’ said Elinor, and returned to Scheherazade.

‘All the same,’ Philip was thinking, ‘Mark Rampion’s right. In practice, too; which makes it so much more impressive. In his art and his living, as well as in his theories. Not like Burlap.’ He thought with disgust of Burlap’s emetic leaders in the World. Like a spiritual channel crossing. And such a nasty, slimy sort of life. But Rampion was the proof of his own theories. ‘If I could capture something of his secret!’ Philip sighed to himself. ‘I’ll go and see him the moment I get home.’

CHAPTER XV

During the weeks which followed their final scene, Walter and Marjorie lived in relations of a peculiar and unpleasant falsity. They were very considerate to one Another, very courteous, and whenever they were left together alone they made a great deal of polite unintimate conversation. The name of Lucy Tantamount was never mentioned and no reference whatsoever was made to Walter’s almost nightly absences. There was a tacit agreement to pretend that nothing had happened and that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

In the first outburst of anger Marjorie had actually begun to pack her clothes. She would leave at once, that very night, before he came back. She would show him that there was a limit to the outrages and insults she would put up with. Coming home reeking of that woman’s scent! It was disgusting. He seemed to imagine that she was so abjectly devoted to him and materially so dependent on him, that he could go on insulting her without any fear of provoking her to open revolt. She had made a mistake not to put her foot down before. She oughtn’t to have allowed herself to be touched by his misery the previous night. But better late than never. This time it was final. She had her self-respect to consider. She pulled out her trunks from the box-room and began to pack.

But where was she going? What was she going to do? What should she live on? The questions asked themselves more and more insistently with every minute. The only relation she had was a married sister, who was poor and had a disapproving husband. Mrs. Cole had quarrelled with her. There were no other friends who could or would support her. She had been trained to no profession, she had no particular gifts. Besides, she was going to have a baby; she would never find a job. And after all and in spite of everything she was very fond of Walter, she loved him, she didn’t know how she would be able to do without him. And he had loved her, did still love her a little, she was sure. And perhaps this madness would die down of its own accord; or perhaps she would be able to bring him round again gradually. And in any case it was better not to act precipitately. In the end she unpacked her clothes again and dragged the trunks back to the box room. Next day she started to play her comedy of pretence and deliberately feigned ignorance.

On his side Walter was only too happy to play the part assigned to him in the comedy. To say nothing, to act as though nothing particular had happened, suited him perfectly. The evaporation of his anger, the slaking of his desire had reduced him from momentary strength and ruthlessness to his normal condition of gentle, conscience-stricken timidity. Upon the fibres of the spirit bodily fatigue has a softening effect. He came back from Lucy feeling guiltily that he had done Marjorie a great wrong and looking forward with dread to the outcry she was sure to raise. But she was asleep when he crept to his room. Or at any rate she pretended to be, she didn’t call him. And next day it was only the more than ordinarily courteous and formal manner of her greeting that so much as hinted at any untowardness. Enormously relieved, Walter requited portentous silence with silence and politely trivial courtesy with a courtesy that, in his case, was more than merely formal, that came from the heart, that was a genuine attempt (so uneasy was his conscience) to be of service, to make solicitous and affectionate amends for past offences, to beg forgiveness in advance for the offences he had no intention of not committing in the future.

That there had been no outcry, no reproaches, only a polite ignoring silence, was a great relief. But as the days passed, Walter began to find the falsity of their relationship more and more distressing. The comedy got on his nerves, the silence was accusatory. He became more and more polite, solicitous, affectionate; but though he genuinely did like her, though he genuinely desired to make her happy, his nightly visits to Lucy made even his genuine affection for Marjorie seem a lie and his real solicitude had the air of an hypocrisy, even to himself, so long as he persisted in doing, in the intervals of his kindness, precisely those things which he knew must make her unhappy. ‘But if only,’ he said to himself, with impotent complaining anger, ‘if only she’d be content with what I can give her and stop distressing herself about what I can’t.” (For it was obvious, in spite of the comedy of silence and courtesy, that she was distressing herself. Her thin, haggard face was alone sufficient to belie the studied indifference of her manner.) ‘What I can give her is so much. What I can’t give is so unimportant. At any rate for her,’ he added; for he had no intention of cancelling his unimportant engagement with Lucy that evening.

‘Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;

Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

Past reason hated.’

Literature, as usual, had been misleading. So far from making him hate and despise, having and enjoying had only made him long for more having and enjoying. True, he was still rather ashamed of his longing. He wanted it to be justified by something higher—by love. (‘After all,’ he argued, ‘there’s nothing impossible or unnatural in being in love with two women at the same time. Genuinely in love.’) He accompanied his ardours with all the delicate and charming tenderness of his rather weak and still adolescent nature. He treated Lucy, not as the hard, ruthless amusementhunter he had so clearly recognized her as being before he became her lover, but as an ideally gracious and sensitive being, to be adored as well as desired, a sort of combined child, mother and mistress, whom one should maternally protect and be maternally protected by, as well as virilely and yes! faunishly make love to. Sensuality and sentiment, desire and tenderness are as often friends as they are enemies. There are some people who no sooner enjoy, but they despise what they have enjoyed. But there are others in whom the enjoyment is associated with kindliness and affection. Walter’s desire to justify his longings by love was only, on final analysis, the articulately moral expression of his natural tendency to associate the act of sexual enjoyment with a feeling of tenderness, at once chivalrously protective and childishly self-abased. In him sensuality produced tenderness; and conversely, where there was no sensuality, tenderness remained undeveloped. His relations with Marjorie were too sexless and platonic to be fully tender. JIt was as a hard, angrily cynical sensualist that Walter had conquered Lucy. But put into action, his sensuality sentimentalized him. The Walter who had held Lucy naked in his arms was different from the Walter who had only desired to do so; and this new Walter required, in sheer self-preservation, to believe that Lucy felt no less tenderly under the influence of his caresses than he did himself. Tenderness can only live in an atmosphere of tenderness. To have gone on believing, as the old Walter had believed, that she was hard, selfish, incapable of warm feeling would have killed the soft tenderness of the new Walter. It was essential for him to believe her tender. He did his best to deceive himself. Every movement of languor and abandonment was eagerly interpreted by him as a symptom of inner softening, of trustfulness and surrender. Every loving word—and Lucy was fashionably free with her’darlings’ and ‘angels’ and ‘beloveds,’ her rapturous or complimentary phrases—was treasured as a word come straight from the depths of the heart. To these marks of an imaginary softness and warmth of feeling he responded with a grateful redoubling of his own tenderness; and this redoubled tenderness was doubly anxious to find an answering tenderness in Lucy. Love produced a desire to be loved. Desire to be loved begot a strained precarious belief that he was loved. The belief that he was loved strengthened his love. And so, self-intensified, the circular process began again.

Lucy was touched by his adoring tenderness, touched and surprised. She had had him because she was bored, because his lips were soft and his hands knew how to caress and because, at the last moment, she had been amused and delighted by his sudden conversion from abjectness to conquering impertinence. What a queer evening it had been! Walter sitting opposite to her at dinner with that hard look on his face, as though he were terribly angry and wanted to grind his teeth; but being very amusing, telling the most malicious stories about everybody, producing the most fantastic and grotesque pieces of historical information, the most astonishing quotations from old books. When dinner was over, ‘We’ll go back to your house,’ he said. But Lucy wanted to go and see Nellie Wallace’s turn at the Victoria Palace and then drop in at the Embassy for some food and a little dancing, and then perhaps drive round to Cuthbert Arkwright’s on the chance that…Not that she had any real and active desire to go to the music hall, or dance, or listen to Cuthbert’s conversation. She only wanted to assert her will against Walter’s. She only wanted to dominate, to be the leader and make him do what she wanted, not what he wanted. But Walter was not to be shaken. He said nothing, merely smiled. And when the taxi came to the restaurant door, he gave the address in Bruton Street.

‘But this is a rape,’ she protested.

Walter laughed. ‘Not yet,’ he answered. ‘But it’s going to be.’

And in the grey and rose-coloured sittingroom it almost was. Lucy provoked and submitted to all the violences of sensuality. But what she had not expected to provoke was the adoring and passionate tenderness which succeeded those first violences. The hard look of anger faded from his face and it was as though a protection had been stripped from him and he were left bare, in the quivering, vulnerable nakedness of adoring love. His caresses were like the soothing of pain or terror, like the appeasements of anger, like delicate propitiations. His words were sometimes like whispered and fragmentary prayers to a god, sometimes words of whispered comfort to a sick child. Lucy was surprised, touched, almost put to shame by this passion of tenderness.

‘No, I’m not like that, not like that,’ she protested in answer to his whispered adorations. She could not accept such love on false pretences. But his soft lips, brushing her skin, his lightly drawn finger tips were soothing and caressing her into tenderness, were magically transforming her into the gentle, loving, warmhearted object of his adoration, were electrically charging her with all those qualities his whispers had attributed to her and the possession of which she had denied.

She drew his head on to her breast, she ran her fingers through his hair. ‘Darling Walter,’ she whispered,’darling Walter.’ There was a long silence, a warm still happiness. And then suddenly, just because this silent happiness was so deep and perfect and therefore, in her eyes, intrinsically rather absurd and even rather dangerous in its flawless impersonality, rather menacing to her conscious will, ‘Have you gone to sleep, Walter?’ she asked and tweaked his ear.

In the days that followed Walter desperately did his best to credit her with the emotions he himself experienced. But Lucy did not make it easy for him. She did not want to feel that deep tenderness which is a surrender of the will, a breaking down of personal separateness. She wanted to be herself, Lucy Tantamount, in full command of the situation, enjoying herself consciously to the last limit, ruthlessly having her fun; free, not only financially and legally, but emotionally too—emotionally free to have him or not to have him. To drop him as she had taken him, at any moment, whenever she liked. She had no wish to surrender herself. And that tenderness of his—why, it was touching, no doubt, and flattering and rather charming in itself, but a little absurd and, in its anxious demand for a response from her side, really rather tiresome. She would let herself go a little way towards surrender, would suffer herself to be charged by his caresses with some of his tenderness; only to suddenly draw herself back from him into a teasing, provocative detachment. And Walter would be woken from his dream of love into a reality of what Lucy called ‘fun,’ into the cold daylight of sharply conscious, laughingly deliberate sensuality. She left him unjustified, his guiltiness unpalliated.

‘Do you love me? ‘ he asked her one night. He knew she didn’t. But perversely he wanted to have his knowledge confirmed, made explicit.

‘I think you’re a darling,’ said Lucy. She smiled up at him. But Walter’s eyes remained unansweringly sombre and despairing.

‘But do you love me?’ he insisted. Propped on his elbow, he hung over her almost menacingly. Lucy was lying on her back, her hands clasped under her head, her flat breasts lifted by the pull of the stretched muscles. He looked down at her; under his fingers was the curved elastic warmth of the body he had so completely and utterly possessed. But the owner of the body smiled up at him through half-closed eyelids, remote and unattained. ‘Do you love me?’

‘You’re enchanting.’ Something like mockery shone between the dark lashes.

‘But that isn’t an answer to my question. Do you love me?’

Lucy shrugged up her shoulders and made a little grimace

‘Love?’ she repeated. ‘It’s rather a big word, isn’t it?’ Disengaging one of her hands from under her head she raised it to give a little tug to the lock of brown hair that had fallen across Walter’s forehead. ‘Your hair’s too long,’ she said.

‘Then why did you have me?’ Walter insisted.

‘If you knew how absurd you looked with your solemn face and your hair in your eyes!’ She laughed. ‘Like a constipated sheep dog.’

Walter brushed back the drooping lock. ‘I want to be answered,’ he went on obstinately. ‘Why did you have me?’

‘Why? Because it amused me. Because I wanted to. Isn’t that fairly obvious?’

‘Without loving?’

‘Why must you always bring in love?’ she asked impatiently.

‘Why?’ he repeated. ‘But how can you leave it out?’

‘But if I can have what I want without it, why should I put it in? And besides, one doesn’t put it in. It happens to one. How rarely! Or perhaps it never happens; I don’t know. Anyhow, what’s one to do in the intervals?’ She took him again by the forelock and pulled his face down towards her own. ‘In the intervals, Walter darling, there’s you.’

His mouth was within an inch or two of hers. He stiffened his neck and would not let himself be pulled down any further. ‘Not to mention all the others,’ he said.

Lucy tugged harder at his hair. ‘Idiot!’ she said, frowning. ‘Instead of being grateful for what you’ve got.’

‘But what have I got?’ Her body curved away, silky and warm, under his hand; but he was looking into her mocking eyes

‘What have I got?’ Her body curved away, silky and warm, under his hand; but he was looking into her mocking eyes. ‘What have I got?’

Lucy still frowned. ‘Why don’t you kiss me?’ she demanded, as though she were delivering an ultimatum. Walter did not answer, did not stir. ‘Oh, very well.’ She pushed him away. ‘Two can play at that game.’

Repelled, Walter anxiously bent down to kiss her. Her voice had been hard with menace; he was terrified of losing her. ‘I’m a fool,’ he said.

‘You are.’ Lucy averted her face.

‘I’m sorry.’

But she would not make peace. ‘No, no,’ she said, and when, with a hand under her cheek, he tried to turn her face back towards his kisses, she made a quick fierce movement and bit him in the ball of the thumb. Full of hatred and desire, he took her by force.

‘Still bothering about love?’ she asked at last, breaking the silence of that languid convalescence which succeeds the fever of accomplished desires.

Reluctantly, almost with pain, Walter roused himself to answer. Her question in that deep silence was like the spurt of a match in the darkness of the night. The night is limitless, enormous, pricked with stars. The match is struck and all the stars are instantly abolished; there are no more distances and profundities. The universe is reduced to a little luminous cave scooped out of the solid blackness, crowded with brightly lit faces, with hands and bodies and the near familiar objects of common life. In that deep night of silence Walter had been happy. Convalescent after the fever, he held her in his arms, hating no more, but filled with a drowsy tenderness. His spirit seemed to float in the warm serenity between being and annihilation. She stirred within his arms, she spoke, and that marvellous unearthly serenity wavered and broke like a smooth reflecting surface of water suddenly disturbed.

‘I wasn’t bothering about anything.’ He opened his eyes to find her looking at him, amused and curious. Walter frowned. ‘Why do you stare at me? ‘ he asked.

‘I didn’t know it was prohibited.’

‘Have you been looking at me like that all this time?’ The idea was strangely unpleasant to him.

‘For hours,’ Lucy answered. ‘But admiringly, I assure you. I thought you looked really charming. Quite a sleeping beauty.’ She was smiling, mockingly; but she spoke the truth. Aesthetically, with a connoisseur’s appreciation, she had really been admiring him as he lay there, pale, with closed eyes and as though dead, at her side.

Walter was not mollified by the flattery. ‘I don’t like you to exult over me,’ he said, still frowning.

‘Exult?’

‘As though you’d killed me.’

‘What an incorrigible romantic!’ She laughed. But it was true, all the same. He had looked dead; and death, in these circumstances, had something slightly ridiculous and humiliating about it. Herself alive, wakefully and consciously alive, she had studied his beautiful deadness. Admiringly, but with amused detachment, she had looked at this pale exquisite creature which she had used for her delight and which was now dead. ‘What a fool!’ she had thought. And ‘why do people make themselves miserable, instead of taking the fun that comes to them? ‘ She had expressed her thoughts in the mocking question which recalled Walter from his eternity. Bothering about love—what a fool!

‘All the same,’ insisted Walter, ‘you were exulting.’

‘Romantic, romantic!’ she jeered. ‘You think in such an absurdly unmodern way about everything. Killing and exulting over corpses and love and all the rest of it. It’s absurd. You might as well walk about in a stock and a swallow-tail coat. Try to be a little more up to date.’

‘I prefer to be human.’

‘Living modernly’s living quickly,’ she went on. ‘You can’t cart a waggon-load of ideals and romanticisms about with you these days. When you travel by aeroplane, you must leave your heavy baggage behind. The good old-fashioned soul was all right when people lived slowly. But it’s too ponderous nowadays. There’s no room for it in the aeroplane.’

‘Not even for a heart?’ asked Walter. ‘I don’t so much care about the soul.’ He had cared a great deal about the soul once. But now that his life no more consisted in reading the philosophers, he was somehow less interested in it. ‘But the heart,’ he added, the heart…’

Lucy shook her head. ‘Perhaps it’s a pity,’ she admitted. ‘But you can’t get something for nothing. If you like speed, if you want to cover the ground, you can’t have luggage. The thing is to know what you want and to be ready to pay for it. I know exactly what I want; so I sacrifice the luggage. If you choose to travel in a furniture van, you may. But don’t expect me to come along with you, my sweet Walter. And don’t expect me to take your grand piano in my two-seater monoplane.’

There was a long silence. Walter shut his eyes. He wished he were dead. The touch of Lucy’s hand on his face made him start. He felt her taking his lower lip between her thumb and forefinger. She pinched it gently. ‘You have the most delicious mouth,’ she said.

CHAPTER XVI

The Rampions lived in Chelsea. Their house consisted of one large studio with three or four little rooms tacked on to it. A very nice little place, in its rather ramshackle way, Burlap reflected, as he rang the bell that Saturday afternoon. And Rampion had bought it for nothing, literally for nothing, just before the War. No post-War rents for him. A sheer gift of a hundred and fifty a year. Lucky devil, thought Burlap, forgetting for the moment that he himself was living rent-free at Beatrice’s, and only remembering that he had just spent twentyfour and ninepence on a luncheon for himself and Molly d’Exergillod.

Mary Rampion opened the door. ‘Mark’s expecting you in the studio,’ she said when salutations had been exchanged. Though why on earth, she was inwardly wondering, why on earth he goes on being friendly with this creature passes all comprehension. She herself detested Burlap. ‘He’s a sort of vulture,’ she had said to her husband after the journalist’s previous visit. ‘No, not a vulture, because vultures only eat carrion. He’s a parasite that feeds on living hosts, and always the choicest he can find He has a nose for the choicest; I’ll grant him that. A spiritual leech, that’s what he is. Why do you let him suck your blood?’

‘Why shouldn’t he suck?’ retorted Mark. ‘He doesn’t do me any harm, and he amuses me.’

‘I believe he tickles your vanity,’ said Mary. ‘It’s flattering to have parasites. It’s a compliment to the quality of your blood.’

‘And besides,’ Rampion went on, he has something in him.’

‘Of course he has something in him,’ Mary answered. ‘He has your blood in him, among other things. And the blood of all the other people he feeds on.’

‘Now, don’t exaggerate, don’t be romantic.’ Rampion objected to all hyperboles that weren’t his own.

‘Well, all I can say is that I don’t like parasites.’ Mary spoke with finality. ‘And next time he comes I shall try sprinkling a little Keating’s powder on him, just to see what happens. So there.’

However, the next time had arrived, and here she was opening the door for him and telling him to find his own way to the studio, as if he were a welcome guest. Even in atavistic Mary the force of polite habit was stronger than her desire to sprinkle Keating’s.

Burlap’s thoughts, as he found his own way to the studio, were still of financial matters. The memory of what he had paid for lunch continued to rankle.

‘Not only does Rampion pay no rent,’ he was thinking; ‘he has hardly any expenses. Living as they do with only one servant, doing most of the housework themselves, having no car, they really must spend ridiculously little. True, they have two children to educate.’ But Burlap managed by a kind of mental conjuring trick, at which he was extremely adept, to make the two children disappear out of his field of consciousness. ‘And yet Rampion must make quite a lot. He sells his pictures and drawings very decently. And he has a regular market for anything he chooses to write. What does he do with all his money? ‘ Burlap wondered rather resentfully, as he knocked at the studio door. ‘Does he hoard it up? Or what?’

‘Come in,’ called Rampion’s voice from the other side of the door.

Burlap adjusted his face to a smile and opened.

‘Ah, it’s you,’ said Rampion. ‘Can’t shake hands at the moment, I’m afraid.’ He was cleaning his brushes. ‘How are you?’

Burlap shook his head and said that he needed a holiday but couldn’t afford to take it. He walked round the studio looking reverentially at the paintings. St. Francis would hardly have approved of most of them. But what life, what energy, what imagination! Life, after all, was the’important thing. ‘I believe in life.’ That was the first article of one’s creed.

‘What’s the title of this?’ he asked, coming to a halt in front of the canvas on the easel.

Wiping his hands as he came, Rampion crossed the room and stood beside him. ‘That?’ he said. ‘Well, “Love,” I suppose, is what you‘d call it.’ He laughed; he had worked well that afternoon and was in the best of humours. ‘But less refined and soulful people might prefer something less printable.’ Grinning, he suggested a few of the less printable alternatives. Burlap’s smile was rather sickly. ‘I don’t know if you can think of any others,’ Rampion concluded maliciously. When Burlap was in the neighbourhood it amused him, and at the same time he felt it positively a duty, to be shocking.

It was a smallish painting, in oils. Low down in the left-hand corner of the canvas, set in a kind of recess between a foreground of dark rocks and tree trunks and a background of precipitous crags, and arched over by a mass of foliage, two figures, a man and a woman, lay embraced. Two naked bodies, the woman’s white, the man’s a red brown. These two bodies were the source of the whole illumination of the picture. The rocks and tree trunks in the foreground were silhouetted against the light that issued from them. The precipice behind them was golden with the same light. It touched the lower surface of the leaves above, throwing shadows up into a thickening darkness of greenery. It streamed out of the recess in which they lay, diagonally into and across the picture, illuminating and, one felt, creating by its radiance an astounding flora of gigantic roses and zinnias and tulips, with horses and leopards and little antelopes coming and going between the huge flowers, and beyond, a green landscape deepening, plane after plane, into blue, with a glimpse of the sea between the hills and over it the shapes of huge, heroic clouds in the blue sky.

‘It’s fine,’ said Burlap slowly, wagging his head over the picture.

‘But I can see you hate it.’ Mark Rampion grinned with a kind of triumph.

‘But why do you say that?’ the other protested with a martyred and gentle sadness.

‘Because it happens to be true. The thing’s not gentle-Jesusish enough for you. Love, physical love, as the source of light and life and beauty—Oh, no, no, no! That’s much too coarse and carnal; it’s quite deplorably straightforward.’

‘But do you take me for Mrs. Grundy?’

‘Not Mrs. Grundy, no.’ Rampion’s high spirits bubbled over in mockery. ‘Say St. Francis. By the way, how’s your Life of him progressing? I hope you’ve got a good juicy description of his licking the lepers.’ Burlap made a gesture of protest. Rampion grinned. ‘As a matter of fact even St. Francis is a little too grown up for you. Children don’t lick lepers. Only sexually perverted adolescents do that. St. Hugh of Lincoln, that’s who you are, Burlap. He was a child, you know, a pure sweet chee-yild. Such a dear snuggly-wuggly, lovey-dovey little chap. So wide-eyed and reverent towards the women, as though they were all madonnas. Coming to be petted and have his pains kissed away and be told about poor Jesus—even to have a swig of milk if there happened to be any going.’

‘Really! ‘ Burlap protested.

‘Yes, really,’ Rampion mimicked. He liked baiting the fellow, making him look like a forgiving Christian martyr. Serve him right for coming in that beloveddisciple attitude and being so disgustingly reverential and admiring.

‘Toddling wide-eyed little St. Hugh. Toddling up to the women so reverently, as though they were all madonnas. But putting his dear little hand under their skirts all the same. Coming to pray, but staying to share madonnina’s bed.’ Rampion knew a good deal about Burlap’s amorous affairs and had guessed more. ‘Dear little St. Hugh! How prettily he toddles to the bedroom, and what a darling babyish way he has of snuggling down between the sheets! This sort of thing is much too gross and unspiritual for our little Hughie.’ He threw back his head and laughed.

‘Go on, go on,’ said Burlap. ‘Don’t mind me.’ And at the sight of his martyred, spiritual smile, Rampion laughed yet louder.

‘Oh dear, oh dear!’ he gasped. ‘Next time you come, I’ll have a copy of Ary Scheffer’s “St. Monica and St. Augustine” for you. That ought to make you really happy. Would you like to see some of my drawings?’ he asked in another tone. Burlap nodded. ‘They’re grotesques mostly. Caricatures. Rather ribald, I warn you. But if you will come to look at my work, you must expect what you get.’

He opened a portfolio that was lying on the table.

‘Why do you imagine I don’t like your work?’ asked Burlap. ‘After all, you’re a believer in life and so am I. We have our differences; but on most matters our point of view’s the same.’

Rampion looked up at him. ‘Oh, I’m sure it is, I know it is,’ he said, and grinned.

‘Well, if you know it’s the same,’ said Burlap, whose averted eyes had not seen the grin on the other’s face, ‘why do you imagine I’ll disapprove of your drawings?’

‘Why indeed? ‘ the other mocked.

‘Seeing that the point of view’s the same…’

‘It’s obvious that the people looking at the view from the same point must be identical.’ Rampion grinned again. ‘Q. E. D.’ He turned away again to take out one of the drawings. ‘This is what I call “Fossils of the Past and Fossils of the Future.”’ He handed Burlap the drawing. It was in ink touched with coloured washes, extraordinarily brilliant and lively. Curving in a magnificently sweeping S, a grotesque procession of monsters marched diagonally down and across the paper. Dinosaurs, pterodactyls, titanotheriums, diplodocuses, ichthyosauruses walked, swam or flew at the tail of the procession; the van was composed of human monsters, huge-headed creatures, without limbs or bodies, creeping slug-like on vaguely slimy extensions of chin and neck. The faces were mostly those of eminent contemporaries. Among the crowd Burlap recognized J. J. Thomson and Lord Edward Tantamount, Bernard Shaw, attended by eunuchs and spinsters, and Sir Oliver Lodge, attended by a sheeted and turnipheaded ghost and a walking cathode tube, Sir, Alfred Mond and the head of John D. Rockefeller carried on a charger by a Baptist clergyman, Dr. Frank Crane and Mrs. Eddy wearing haloes, and many others.

‘The lizards died of having too much body and too little head,’ said Rampion in explanation.’so at least the scientists are never tired of telling us. Physical size is a handicap after a certain point. But what about mental size? These fools seem to forget that they’re just as top-heavy and clumsy and disproportioned as any diplodocus. Sacrificing physical life and affective life to mental life. What do they imagine’s going to happen?’

Burlap nodded his agreement. ‘That’s what I’ve always asked. Man can’t live without a heart.’

‘Not to mention bowels and skin and bones and flesh,’ said Rampion. ‘They’re just marching towards extinction. And a damned good thing too. Only the trouble is that they’re marching the rest of the world along with them. Blast their eyes! I must say, I resent being condemned to extinction because these imbeciles of scientists and moralists and spiritualists and technicians and literary and political uplifters and all the rest of them haven’t the sense to see that man must live as a man, not as a monster of conscious braininess and soulfulness. Grr! I’d like to kill the lot of them.’ He put the drawing back into the portfolio and extracted another. ‘Here are two Outlines of History, the one on the left according to H. G. Wells, the one on the right according to me….’

Burlap looked, smiled, laughed outright. ‘Excellent!’ he said. The drawing on the left was composed on the lines of a simple crescendo. A very small monkey was succeeded by a very slightly larger pithecanthropus, which was succeeded in its turn by a slightly larger Neanderthal man. Paleolithic man, neolithic man, bronze-age Egyptian and Babylonian man, iron-age Greek and Roman man—the figures slowly increased in size. By the time Galileo and Newton had appeared on the scene, humanity had grown to quite respectable dimensions. The crescendo continued’ uninterrupted through Watt and Stephenson, Faraday and Darwin, Bessemer and Edison, Rockefeller and Wanamaker, to come to a contemporary consummation in the figures of Mr. H. G. Wells himself and Sir Alfred Mond. Nor was the future neglected. Through the radiant mist of prophecy the forms of Wells and Mond, growing larger and larger at every repetition, wound away in a triumphant spiral clean off the paper, towards Utopian infinity The drawing on the right had a less optimistic composition of peaks and declines. The small monkey very soon blossomed into a good-sized bronze-age man, who gave place to a very large Greek and a scarcely smaller Etruscan. The Romans grew smaller again. The monks of the Thebaid were hardly distinguishable from the primeval little monkeys. There followed a number of good-sized Florentines, English, French. They were succeeded by revolting monsters labelled Calvin and Knox, Baxter and Wesley. The stature of the representative men declined. The Victorians had begun to be dwarfish and misshapen. Their twentieth-century successors were abortions. Through the mists of the future one could see a diminishing company of little gargoyles and foetuses with heads too large for their squelchy bodies, the tails of apes and the faces of our most eminent contemporaries, all biting and scratching and disembowelling one another with that methodical and systematic energy which belongs only to the very highly civilized.

‘I’d like to have one or two of these for the World,’ said Burlap, when they had looked through the contents of the portfolio. ‘We don’t generally reproduce drawings. We’re frankly missionaries, not an art for art concern. But these things of yours are parables as well as pictures. I must say,’ he added, ‘I envy you your power of saying things so immediately and economically. It would take me hundreds and thousands of words to say the same things less vividly in an essay.’

Rampion nodded. ‘That’s why I’ve almost given up writing for the moment. Writing’s not much good for saying what I find I want to say now. And what a comfort to escape from words! Words, words, words, they shut one off from the universe. Three-quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them. And often not even with those—only with some poet’s damned metaphorical rigmarole about a thing. “Nor what soft incense hangs upon the bough,” for example. Or “every fall soothing the raven wing of darkness till it smiled.” Or even” then will I visit with a roving kiss the vale of lilies and the bower of bliss.”’ He looked at Burlap with a grin. ‘Even the bower of bliss is turned into a metaphorical abstraction. Vale of lilies, indeed! Oh, these words! I’m thankful to have escaped from them. It’s like getting out of a prison—oh, a very elegant fantastic sort of prison, full of frescoes and tapestries and what not. But one prefers the genuine country outside. Painting, I find, puts you in real touch with it. I can say what I want to say.’

‘Well, all I can do,’ said Burlap, ‘is to provide an audience to listen to what you’ve got to say.’

‘Poor devils!’ laughed Rampion. ‘But I think they ought to listen. One has a responsibility. That’s why I’d like to publish some of your drawings in the World. I feel it’s really a duty.’

‘Oh, if it’s a question of the categorical imperative,’ Rampion laughed again, ‘why then of course you must. Take what you like. The more shocking the drawings you publish, the better I shall be pleased.’

Burlap shook his head. ‘We must begin mildly,’ he said. He didn’t believe in Life to the point of taking any risks with the circulation.

‘Mildly, mildly,’ the other mockingly repeated. ‘You’re all the same, all you newspaper men. No jolts. Safety first. Painless literature. No prejudices extracted or ideas hammered in except under ail anaesthetic. Readers kept permanently in a state of twilight sleep. You’re hopeless, all of you.’

‘Hopeless,’ repeated Burlap penitently, ‘I know. But, alas, one simply must compromise a little with the world, the flesh and the devil.’

‘I don’t mind your doing that,’ Rampion answered. ‘What I resent is the disgusting way you compromise with heaven, respectability and Jehovah. Still, I suppose in the circumstances you can’t help it. Take what you want.’

Burlap made his selection. ‘I’ll take these,’ he said at last, holding up three of the least polemical and scandalous of the drawings. ‘Is that all right?’

Rampion glanced at them. ‘If you’d waited another week,’ he grumbled, ‘I’d have had that copy of Ary Scheffer ready for you.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said Burlap with that wistfully spiritual expression which always came over his face when he began to speak about money, ‘I’m afraid I shan’t be able to pay much for them.’

‘Ah, well. I’m used to it,’ Rampion shrugged his shoulders. Burlap was glad he took it like that. And after all, he reflected, it was true. Rampion wasn’t used to being paid much. And with his way of living he did not need much. No car, no servants…

‘One wishes one could,’ he said aloud, drifting away into impersonality. ‘But the paper…’ He shook his head. ‘Trying to persuade people to love the highest when they see it doesn’t pay. One might manage four guineas a drawing.’

 Rampion laughed. ‘Not exactly princely. But take them. Take them for nothing if you like.’

‘No, no,’ protested Burlap. ‘I wouldn’t do that. The World doesn’t live on charity. It pays for what it uses—not much, alas, but something, it pays something. I make a point of that,’ he went on, wagging his head, ‘even if I have to pay out of my own pocket. It’s a question of principle. Absolutely of principle,’ he insisted, contemplating with a thrill of justifiable satisfaction the upright and selfsacrificing Denis Burlap who paid contributors out of his own pocket and in whose existence he was beginning, as he talked, almost genuinely to believe. He talked on, and with every word the outlines of this beautifully poor but honest Burlap became clearer before his inward eyes; and at the same time the World crept closer and closer to the brink of insolvency, while the bill for lunch grew momently larger and larger, and his income correspondingly decreased. Rampion eyed him curiously. What the devil is he lashing himself up into a fury about this time? he wondered. A possible explanation suddenly occurred to him. When Burlap next paused for breath, he nodded sympathetically.

‘What you need is a capitalist,’ he said. ‘If I had a few hundreds or thousands to spare, I’d put them into the World. But alas, I haven’t. Not sixpence,’ he concluded, almost triumphantly, and the sympathetic expression turned suddenly into a grin.

****

That evening Burlap addressed himself to the question of Franciscan poverty. ‘Barefooted through the Umbrian hills she goes, the Lady Poverty.’ It was thus that he began his chapter. His prose, in moments of exaltation, was apt to turn into blank verse…. ‘Her feet are set on the white dusty roads that seem, to one who gazes from the walls of the little cities, taut stretched white ribbons in the plain below…’

There followed references to the gnarled olive trees, the vineyards, the terraced fields,’ the great white oxen with their curving horns,’ the little asses patiently carrying their burdens up the stony paths, the blue mountains, the hill towns in the distance, each like a little New Jerusalem in a picture book, the classical waters of Clitumnus and the yet more classical waters of Trasimene. ‘That was a land,’ continued Burlap, ‘and that a time when poverty was a practical, workable ideal. The land supplied all the needs of those who lived on it; there was little functional specialization; every peasant was, to a great extent, his own manufacturer as well as his own butcher, baker, green-grocer and vintner. It was a society in which money was still comparatively unimportant. The majority lived in an almost moneyless condition. They dealt directly in things—household stuff of their own making and the kindly fruits of the earth—and so had no need of the precious metals which buy things. St. Francis’s ideal of poverty was practicable then, because it held up for admiration a way of life not so enormously unlike the actual way of his humbler contemporaries. He was inviting the leisured and the functionally specialized members of society—those who were living mainly in terms of money—to live as their inferiors were living, in terms of things. How different is the state of things to-day!’ Burlap relapsed once more into blank verse, moved this time by indignation, not by lyrical tenderness. ‘We are all specialists, living in terms only of money, not of real things, inhabiting remote abstractions, not the actual world of growth and making.’ He rumbled on a little about ‘the great machines that having been man’s slaves are now his masters,’ about standardization, about industrial and commercial life and its withering effect on the human soul (for which last he borrowed a few of Rampion’s favourite phrases). Money, he concluded, was the root of the whole evil: the fatal necessity under which man now labours of living in terms of money, not of real things. ‘To modern eyes St. Francis’s ideal appears fantastic, utterly insane. The Lady Poverty has been degraded by modern circumstances into the semblance of a sackaproned, leaky-booted charwoman…No one in his senses would dream of following her. To idealize so repulsive a Dulcinea one would have to be madder than Don Quixote himself. Within our modern society the Franciscanideal is unworkable. We have made poverty detestable. But this does not mean that we can just neglect St. Francis as a dreamer of mad dreams. No, on the contrary, the insanity is ours, not his. He is the doctor in the asylum. To the lunatics the doctor seems the only madman. When we recover our senses, we shall see that the doctor has been all the time the only healthy man. As things are at present the Franciscan ideal is unworkable. The moral of that is that things must be altered, radically. Our aim must be to create a new society in which Lady Poverty shall be, not a draggled charwoman, but a lovely form of light and graciousness and beauty. Oh Poverty, Poverty, beautiful Lady Poverty!…’

Beatrice came in to say that supper was on the table.

‘Two eggs,’ she commanded, rapping out her solicitude. ‘Two, I insist. They were made especially for you.’

‘You treat me like the prodigal son,’ said Burlap. ‘Or the fatted calf while it was being fattened.’ He wagged his head, he smiled a Sodoma smile and helped himself to the second egg.

‘I want to ask your advice about some gramophone shares I’ve got,’ said Beatrice. ‘They’ve been rising so violently.’

‘Gramophones!’ said Burlap. ‘Ah…’ He advised.

CHAPTER XVII

It had been raining for days. To Spandrell it seemed as though the fungi and the mildew were sprouting even in his soul. He lay in bed, or sat in his dismal room, or leaned against the counter in a public house, feeling the slimy growth within him, watching it with his inward eyes.

‘But if only you’d do something,’ his mother had so often implored. ‘Anything.’

And all his friends had said the same thing, had gone on saying it for years.

But he was damned if he’d do anything. Work, the gospel of work, the sanctity of work, laborare est orare—all that tripe and nonsense. ‘Work!’ he once broke out contemptuously against the reasonable expostulations of Philip Quarles, ‘work’s no more respectable than alcohol, and it serves exactly the same purpose: it just distracts the mind, makes a man forget himself. Work’s simply a drug, that’s all. It’s humiliating that men shouldn’t be able to live without drugs, soberly; it’s humiliating that they shouldn’t have the courage to see the world and themselves as they really are. They must intoxicate themselves with work. It’s stupid. The gospel of work’s just a gospel of stupidity and funk. Work may be prayer; but it’s also hiding one’s head in the sand, it’s also making such a din and a dust that a man can’t hear himself speak or see his own hand before his face. It’s hiding yourself from yourself. No wonder the Samuel Smileses and the big business men are such enthusiasts for work. Work gives them the comforting illusion of existing, even of being important. If they stopped working, they’d realize that they simply weren’t there at all, most of them. Just holes in the air, that’s all. Holes with perhaps a rather nasty smell in them. Most Smilesian souls must smell rather nasty, I should think. No wonder they daren’t stop working. They might find out what they really are, or rather aren’t. It’s a risk they haven’t the courage to take.’

‘And what has your courage permitted you to find out about yourself? ‘ asked Philip Quarles.

Spandrell grinned rather melodramatically. ‘It needed some courage,’ he said, ‘to go on looking at what I discovered. If I hadn’t been such a brave man, I’d have taken to work or morphia long ago.’

Spandrell dramatized himself a little, made his conduct appear rather more rational and romantic than it really was. If he did nothing, it was out of habitual laziness as well as on perverse and topsy-turvy moral principle. The sloth, indeed, had preceded the principle and was its root. Spandrell would never have discovered that work was a pernicious opiate, if he had not had an invincible sloth to find a reason and a justification for. But that it did require some courage on his part to do nothing was true; for he was idle in spite of the ravages of a chronic boredom that could become, at moments like the present, almost unbearably acute. But the habit of idleness was so deeply ingrained that to break it would have demanded more courage than to bear the agonies of boredom to which it gave rise. Pride had reinforced his native laziness—the pride of an able man who is not quite able enough, of an admirer of great achievements who realizes that he lacks the talent to do original work and who will not humiliate himself by what he knows will be an unsuccessful attempt to create, or by stooping, however successfully, to some easier task.

‘It’s all very well you talking about work,’ he had said to Philip. ‘But you can do something, I can’t. What do you want me to do? Bank clerking? Commercial travelling?’

‘There are other professions,’ said Philip. ‘And since you’ve got some money, there’s all scholarship, all natural history…

‘Oh, you want me to be an ant collector, do you? Or a writer of theses on the use of soap among the Angevins. A dear old Uncle Toby with a hobby to ride. But I tell you, I don’t want to be an Uncle Toby. If I’m no real good, I prefer to be just frankly no good. I don’t want to disguise myself as a man of learning. I don’t want to be the representative of a hobby. I want to be what nature made me—no good.’

Ever since his mother’s second marriage Spandrell had always perversely made the worst of things, chosen the worst course, deliberately encouraged his own worst tendencies. It was with debauchery that he distracted his endless leisures. He was taking his revenge on her, on himself also for having been so foolishly happy and good. He was spiting her, spiting himself, spiting God. He hoped there was a hell for him to go to and regretted his inability to believe in its existence. Still, hell or no hell, it was satisfactory, it was even exciting in those early days to know that one was doing something bad and wrong. But there is in debauchery something so intrinsically dull, something so absolutely and hopelessly dismal, that it is only the rarest beings, gifted with much less than the usual amount of intelligence and much more than the usual intensity of appetite, who can go on actively enjoying a regular course of vice or continue actively to believe in its wickedness. Most habitual debauchees are debauchees not because they enjoy debauchery, but because they are uncomfortable when deprived of it. Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities. The man who has formed a habit of women or gin, of opium-smoking or flagellation, finds it as difficult to live without his vice as to live without bread and water, even though the actual practice of the vice may have become in itself as unexciting as eating a crust or drinking a glass from the kitchen tap. Habit is as fatal to a sense of wrongdoing as to active enjoyment. After a few years the converted or sceptical Jew, the Westernized Hindu, can eat their pork and beef with an equanimity which to their still believing brothers seems brutally cynical. It is the same with the habitual debauchee. Actions which at first seemed thrilling in their intrinsic wickedness become after a certain number of repetitions morally neutral. A little disgusting, perhaps; for the practice of most vices is followed by depressing physiological reactions; but no longer wicked, because so ordinary. It is difficult for a routine to seem wicked.

Robbed gradually by habit both of his active enjoyment and of his active sense of wrongdoing (which had always been a part of his pleasure), Spandrell had turned with a kind of desperation to the refinements of vice. But the refinements of vice do not produce corresponding refinements of feeling. The contrary is in fact true; the more refined in its far-fetched extravagance, the more uncommon and abnormal the vice, the more dully and hopelessly unemotional does the practice of it become. Imagination may exert itself in devising the most improbable variations on the normal sexual theme; but the emotional product of all the varieties of orgy is always the same—a dull sense of humiliation and abasement. There are many people, it is true, (and they are generally the most intellectually civilized, refined and sophisticated), who have a hankering after lowness and eagerly pursue their own abasement in the midst of multiple orgies, masochistic prostitutions, casual and almost bestial couplings with strangers, sexual association with gross and uneducated individuals of a lower class. Excessive intellectual and aesthetic refinement is liable to be bought rather dearly at the expense of some strange emotional degeneration, and the perfectly civilized Chinaman with his love of art and his love of cruelty is suffering from another form of the same disease which gives the perfectly civilized modern aesthete his taste for guardsmen and apaches, for humiliating promiscuities and violences. ‘High brows, low loins,’ was how Rampion had once summed up in Spandrell’s hearing. ‘The higher the one, the lower the other.’ Spandrell, for his part, did not enjoy humiliation. The emotional results of all the possible refinements of vice seemed to him dully uniform. Divorced from all significant emotion, whether approving or remorseful, the mere sensations of physical excitement and pleasure were insipid. The corruption of youth was the only form of debauchery that now gave him any active emotion. Inspired, as Rampion had divined, by that curious vengeful hatred of sex, which had resulted from the shock of his mother’s second marriage supervening, in an uneasy moment of adolescence, on the normal upper middle-class training in refinement and gentlemanly repression, he could still feel a peculiar satisfaction in inflicting what he regarded as the humiliation of sensual pleasure on the innocent sisters of those too much loved and therefore detested women who had been for him the personification of the detested instinct. Mediaevally hating, he took his revenge, not (like the ascetics and puritans) by mortifying the hated flesh of women, but by teaching it an indulgence which he himself regarded as evil, by luring and caressing it on to more and more complete and triumphant rebellion against the conscious soul. And the final stage of his revenge consisted in the gradual insinuation into the mind of his victim of the fundamental wrongness and baseness of the raptures he himself had taught her to feel. Poor little Harriet was the only innocent on whom, so far, he had been able to carry out the whole of his programme. With her predecessors he had never gone so far and she had had no successors. Seduced in the manner he had described to the Rampions, Harriet had adored him and imagined herself adored. And she was almost right; for Spandrell did genuinely care for her, even while he was deliberately making her his victim. The violation of his own feelings as well as of hers gave an added spice of perversity to the proceedings. Patiently, with the tact and gentleness and understanding of the most delicate, most exquisitely sympathetic lover, he allayed her virgin fears and gradually melted the coldness of her youth, thawed down the barriers raised by her education—only, however, to impose on her inexperience the ingenuous acceptance of the most fantastic lubricities. To see her accepting these as ordinary marks of affection was already, for the reversed ascetic in Spandrell, an admirable revenge on her for being a woman. But it was not enough; he began to simulate scruples, to shrink with an air of distress from her ardours or, if he accepted them, to accept them passively as though he were being outraged and violated. Harriet became suddenly anxious and distressed, felt ashamed, as a sensitive person always feels whose ardours meet with no response; and suddenly, at the same time, she found herself a little grotesque, like an actor who has been performing with a group of companions and who, deserted, suddenly realises he is alone on the stage—grotesque and even a little disgusting. Didn’t he love her any more? But so much, he answered. Then why? Precisely because of the depth of his love; and he began to talk about the soul. The body was like a wild beast that devoured the soul, annihilated the consciousness, abolished the real you and me. And as though by accident, somebody, that very evening, had sent him a mysterious parcel, which when he opened, as he now did, turned out to contain a portfolio full of pornographic French etchings, in which poor Harriet saw with a growing sense of horror and disgust all the actions she had so innocently and warmheartedly accepted as love, represented in cold and lucid outlines and made to look so hideous, so low, so bottomlessly vulgar that but to glance was to hate and despise the whole human race. For some days Spandrell skilfully rubbed the horror in; and then, when she was thoroughly penetrated with the sense of guilt and creeping with self-disgust, cynically and violently renewed his now obscene love-making. In the end she had left him, hating him, hating herself. That was three months ago. Spandrell had made no attempt to have her back or to renew the experiment on another victim. It wasn’t worth the effort; nothing was worth the effort. He contented himself with talking about the excitements of diabolism, while in practice he remained sunk apathetically in the dismal routine of brandy and hired love. The talk momentarily excited him; but when it was over he fell back again yet deeper into boredom and despondency. There were times when he felt as though he were becoming inwardly paralysed, with a gradual numbing of the very soul. It was a paralysis which it was within his power, by making an effort of the will, to cure. But he could not, even would not, make the effort.

‘But if you’re bored by it, if you hate it,’ Philip Quarles had interrogated, focussing on Spandrell his bright intelligent curiosity, ‘why the devil do you go on with the life?’ It was nearly a year since the question had been asked; the paralysis had not then crept so deep into Spandrell’s soul. But even in those days Philip had found his case very puzzling. And since the man was prepared to talk about himself without demanding any personalities in return, since he didn’t seem to mind being an object of scientific curiosity and was boastful rather than reticent about his weaknesses, Philip had taken the opportunity of cross-examining him. ‘I can’t see why,’ he insisted.

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Because I’m committed to it. Because in some way it’s my destiny. Because that’s what life finally is—hateful and boring; that’s what human beings are, when they’re left to themselves—hateful and boring again. Because, once one’s damned, one ought to damn oneself doubly. Because…yes, because I really like hating and being bored.’

He liked it. The rain fell and fell; the mushrooms sprouted in his very heart and he deliberately cultivated them. He could have gone to see his friends; but he preferred to be bored and alone. The concert season was in full swing, there was opera at Covent Garden, all the theatres were open; but Spandrell only read the advertisements—the Eroica at the Queen’s Hall, Schnabel playing Op. 106 at the Wigmore, Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, Little Tich at the Alhambra, Othello at the Old Vic, Charlie Chaplin at Marble Arch—read them very carefully and stayed at home. There was a pile of music on the piano, his shelves were full of books, all the London Library was at his disposal; Spandrell read nothing but magazines and the illustrated weeklies and the morning and evening papers. The rain went sliding incessantly down the dirty glass of the windows; Spandrell turned the enormous crackling pages of the Times. ‘The Duke of York,’ he read, having eaten his way, like a dung beetle’s maggot in its native element, through Births, Deaths and the Agony Column, through Servants and Real Estate, through Legal Reports, through Imperial and Foreign News, through Parliament, through the morning’s history, through the five leading articles, through Letters to the Editor, as far as Court and Personal and the little clerical essay on The Bible in Bad Weather,’ the Duke of York will be presented with the Honorary Freedom of the Gold and Silver Wire Drawers Company on Monday next. His Royal Highness will take luncheon with the Master and Wardens of the Company after the presentation.’ Pascal and Blake were within reach, on the bookshelf. But ‘Lady Augusta Crippen has left England on the Berengaria. She will travel across America to visit her brother-in-law and sister, the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.’ Spandrell laughed, and the laughter was a liberation, was a source of energy. He got up; he put on his mackintosh and went out. ‘The Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter.’ Still smiling, he turned into the public-house round the comer. It was early; there was only one other drinker in the bar.

‘But why should two people stay together and be unhappy?’ the barmaid was saying. ‘Why? When they can get a divorce and be happy?’

‘Because marriage is a sacrament,’ replied the stranger.

‘Sacrament yourself!’ the barmaid retorted contemptuously. Catching sight of Spandrell, she nodded and smiled. He was a regular customer.

‘Double brandy,’ he ordered, and leaning against the bar examined the stranger. He had a face like a choirboy’s—but a choirboy suddenly overwhelmed by middle age; chubby, prettily doll-like, but withered. The mouth was horribly small, a little slit in a rosebud. The cherub’s cheeks had begun to sag and were grey, like the chin, with a day’s beard.

‘Because,’ the stranger went on—and Spandrell noticed that he was never still, but must always be smiling, frowning, lifting eyebrows, cocking his head on one side or another, writhing his body in a perpetual ecstasy of selfconsciousness, ‘because a man shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh. One flesh,’ he repeated and accompanied the wdrds by a more than ordinary writhe of the body and a titter. He caught Spandrell’s eye, blushed, and to keep himself in countenance, hastily emptied his glass.

‘What do you think, Mr. Spandrell?’ asked the barmaid as she turned to reach for the brandy bottle.

‘Of what? Of being one flesh?’ The barmaid nodded. ‘H’m. As a matter of fact, I was just envying the Governor-General of South Melanesia and Lady Ethelberta Todhunter for being so unequivocally two fleshes. If you were called the Governor-General of South Melanesia,’ he went on, addressing himself to the withered choirboy,’ and your wife was Lady Ethelberta Todhunter, do you imagine you’d be one flesh? ‘ The stranger wriggled like a worm on a hook. ‘Obviously not. It would be shocking if you were.’

The stranger ordered another whiskey. ‘But joking apart,’ he said, ‘the sacrament of marriage…’

‘But why should two people be unhappy? ‘ persisted the barmaid. ‘When it isn’t necessary?’

‘Why shouldn’t they be unhappy?’ Spandrell enquired. ‘Perhaps it’s what they’re here for. How do you know that the earth isn’t some other planet’s hell?’

A positivist, the barmaid laughed. ‘What rot!’

‘But the Anglicans don’t regard it as a sacrament,’ Spandrell continued.

The choirboy writhed indignantly. ‘Do you take me for an Anglican?’

The working day was over; the bar began to fill up with men in quest of spiritual relaxation. Beer flowed, spirits were measured out in little noggins, preciously. In stout, in bitter, in whiskey they bought the equivalents of foreign travel and mystical ecstasy, of poetry and a week-end with Cleopatra, of big-game hunting and music. The choirboy ordered another drink.

‘What an age we live in!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Barbarous. Such abysmal ignorance of the most rudimentary religious truths.’

‘Not to mention hygienic truths,’ said Spandrell. ‘These damp clothes! And not a window.’ He pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his nose.

The choirboy shuddered and held up his hands. ‘But what a handkerchief!’ he exclaimed, ‘what a horror!’

Spandrell held it out for inspection. ‘It seems to me a very nice handkerchief,’ he said. It was a silk bandana, red with bold patterns in black and pink. ‘Extremely expensive, I may add.’

‘But the colour, my dear sir. The colour!’

‘I like it.’

‘But not at this. season of the year. Not between Easter and Whitsun. Impossible! The liturgical colour is white.’ He pulled out his own handkerchief. It was snowy. ‘And my socks.’ He lifted a foot.

‘I wondered why you looked as though you were going to play tennis.’

‘White, white,’ said the choirboy. ‘It’s prescribed. Between Easter and Pentecost the chasuble must be predominantly white. Not to mention the fact that to-day’s the feast of St. Natalia the Virgin. And white’s the colour for all virgins who aren’t also martyrs.’

‘I should have thought they were all martyrs,’ said Spandrell. ‘That is, if they’ve been virgins long enough.’

The swing-door opened and shut, opened and shut. Outside was loneliness and the damp twilight; within, the happiness of being many, of being close and in contact. The choirboy began to talk of little St. Hugh of Lincoln and St. Piran of Perranzabuloe, the patron saint of Cornish tin-miners. He drank another whiskey and confided to Spandrell that he was writing the lives of the English saints, in verse.

‘Another wet Derby,’ prophesied a group of pessimists at the bar, and were happy because they could prophesy in company and with fine weather in their bellies and beery sunshine in their souls. The wet clothes steamed more suffocatingly than ever,—a steam of felicity; the sound of talk and laughter was deafening. Into Spandrell’s face the withered choirboy breathed alcohol and poetry.

‘To and fro, to and fro,

Piran of Perranzabuloe,’

he intoned. Four whiskeys had almost cured him of writhing and grimacing. He had lost his selfconsciousness. The onlooker who was conscious of the self had gone to sleep. A few more whiskeys and there would be no more self to be conscious of.

‘Walked weightless,’

he continued,

‘Walked weightless on the heaving seas

Among the Cassiterides.’

‘That was Piran’s chief miracle,’ he explained; ‘walking from Land’s End to the Scilly Islands.’

‘Pretty nearly the world’s record, I should think,’ said Spandrell.

The other shook his head. ‘There was an Irish saint who walked to Wales. But I can’t remember his name. Miss!’ he called. ‘Here! Another whiskey, please.’

‘I must say,’ said Spandrell, ‘you seem to make the best of both worlds. Six whiskeys…

‘Only five,’ the choirboy protested. ‘This is only the fifth.’

‘Five whiskeys, then, and the liturgical colours. Not to mention St. Piran of Perranzabuloe. Do you really believe in that walk to the Scillies?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And here’s for young Sacramento,’ said the barmaid, pushing his glass across the counter.

The choirboy shook his head as he paid. ‘Blasphemies all round,’ he said. ‘Every word another wound in the Sacred Heart.’ He drank. ‘Another bleeding, agonizing wound.’

‘What fun you have with your Sacred Heart!’

‘Fun?’ said the choirboy indignantly.

‘Staggering from the bar to the altar rails. And from the confessional to the bawdy house. It’s the ideal life. Never a dull moment. I envy you.’

‘Mock on, mock on!’ He spoke like a dying martyr. ‘And if you knew what a tragedy my life has been, you wouldn’t say you envied me.’

The swing-door opened and shut, opened and shut. God-thirsty from the spiritual deserts of the workshop and the office, men came, as to a temple. Bottled and barrelled by Clyde and Liffey, by Thames, Douro and Trent, the mysterious divinity revealed itself to them.

For the Brahmins who pressed and drank the soma, its name was Indra; for the hemp-eating yogis, Siva. The gods of Mexico inhabited the peyotl. The Persian Sufis discovered Allah in the wine of Shiraz, the shamans of the Samoyedes ate toadstools and were filled with the spirit of Num.

‘Another whiskey, Miss,’ said the choirboy, and turning back to Spandrell almost wept over his misfortunes. He had loved, he had married—sacramentally; he insisted on that. He had been happy. They had both been happy.

Spandrell raised his eyebrows.’did she like the smell of whiskey?’

The other shook his head sadly. ‘I had my faults,’ he admitted. ‘I was weak. This accursed drink! Accursed!’ And in a sudden enthusiasm for temperance he poured his whiskey on the floor. ‘There!’ he said triumphantly.

‘Very noble!’ said Spandrell. He beckoned to the barmaid

‘Another whiskey for this gentleman.’

The choirboy protested, but without much warmth. He sighed. ‘It was always my besetting sin,’ he said. ‘But I was always sorry afterwards. Genuinely repentant.’

‘I’m sure you were. Never a dull moment.’

‘If she’d stood by me, I might have cured myself.’

‘A pure woman’s help, what?’ said Spandrell.

‘Exactly,’ the other nodded. ‘That’s exactly it. But she left me. Ran off. Or rather, not ran. She was lured. She wouldn’t have done it on her own. It was that horrible little snake in the grass. That little…’ He ran through the sergeant-major’s brief vocabulary. ‘I’d wring his neck if he were here,’ the choirboy went on. The Lord of Battles had been in his fifth whiskey. ‘Dirty little swine!’ He banged the counter. ‘You know the man who painted those pictures in the Tate; Bidlake? Well, it was that chap’s son. Walter Bidlake.’

Spandrell raised his eyebrows, but made no comment. The choirboy talked on.

At Sbisa’s, Walter was dining with Lucy Tantamount.

‘Why don’t you come to Paris too? ‘ Lucy was saying.

 Walter shook his head. ‘I’ve got to work.’

‘I find it’s really impossible to stay in one place more than a couple of months at a time. One gets so stale and wilted, so unutterably bored. The moment I step into the aeroplane at Croydon I feel as though I had been born again—like the Salvation Army.’

‘And how long does the new life last?’

Lucy shrugged her shoulders. ‘As long as the old one. But fortunately there’s an almost unlimited supply of aeroplanes. I’m all for Progress.’

The swing-doors of the temple of the unknown god closed behind them. Spandrell and his companion stepped out into the cold and rainy darkness.

‘Oof!’ said the choirboy, shivering, and turned up the collar of his raincoat. ‘It’s like jumping into a swimming-bath.’

‘It’s like reading Haeckel after Fenelon. You Christians live in such a jolly little public-house of a universe.’

They walked a few yards down the street.

‘Look here,’ said Spandrell,’do you think you can get home on foot? Because you don’t look as though you could.’

Leaning against a lamp-post the choirboy shook his head.

‘We’ll wait for a cab.’

They waited. The rain fell. Spandrell looked at the other man with a cold distaste. The creature had amused him, while they had been in the pub, had served as a distraction. Now, suddenly, he was merely repulsive.

‘Aren’t you afraid of going to hell?’ he asked. ‘They’ll make you drink burning whiskey there. A perpetual Christmas pudding in your belly. If you could see yourself! The revolting spectacle…’

The choirboy’s sixth whiskey had been full of contrition. ‘I know, I know,’ he groaned. ‘I’m disgusting. I’m contemptible. But if you knew how I’d struggled and striven and…’

‘There’s a cab.’ Spandrell gave a shout.

‘How I’d prayed,’ the choirboy continued.

‘Where do you live?’

‘Forty-one Ossian Gardens. I’ve wrestled…’

The cab drew up in front of them. Spandrell opened the door.

‘Get in, you sot,’ he said, and gave the other a push. ‘Forty-one Ossian Gardens,’ he said to the driver. The choirboy, meanwhile, had crawled into his seat. Spandrell followed. ‘Disgusting slug!’

‘Go on, go on. I deserve it. You have every right to despise me.’

‘I know,’ said Spandrell. ‘But if you think I’m going to do you the pleasure of telling you so any more, you’re much mistaken.’ He leaned back in his corner and shut his eyes. All his appalling weariness and disgust had suddenly returned. ‘God,’ he said to himself. ‘God, God, God.’ And like a grotesque derisive echo of his thoughts, the choirboy prayed aloud. ‘God have mercy upon me,’ the maudlin voice repeated. Spandrell burst out laughing.

Leaving the drunkard on his front door step, Spandrell went back to the cab. He remembered suddenly that he had not dined.’sbisa’s Restaurant,’ he told the driver. ‘God, God,’ he repeated in the darkness. But the night was a vacuum.

‘There’s Spandrell,’ cried Lucy, interrupting her companion in the middle of a sentence. She raised her arm and waved.

‘Lucy!’ Spandrell took her hand and kissed it. He sat down at their table. ‘It’ll interest you to hear, Walter, that I’ve just been doing a good Samaritan to your victim.’

‘My victim?’

‘Your cuckold. Carling; isn’t that his name?’ Walter blushed in an agony. ‘He wears his horns without any difference. Quite traditionally.’ He looked at Walter and was glad to see the signs of distress on his face. ‘I found him drowning his sorrows,’ he went on maliciously. ‘In whiskey. The grand romantic remedy.’ It was a relief to be able to take some revenge for his miseries.

CHAPTER XVIII

At Port Said they went ashore. The flank of the ship was an iron precipice. At its foot the launch heaved on a dirty and slowly wallowing sea; between its gunwale and the end of the ship’s ladder a little chasm alternately shrank and expanded. For a sound pair of legs the leap would have been nothing. But Philip hesitated. To jump with his game leg foremost might mean to collapse under the impact of arrival; and if he trusted to the game leg to propel him, he had a good chance of falling ignominiously short. He was delivered from his predicament by the military gentleman who had preceded him in the leap.

‘Here, take my hand,’ he called, noticing Philip’s hesitation and its cause.

‘Thanks so much,’ said Philip when he waa safely in the launch.

‘Awkward, this sort of thing,’ said the other. ‘Particularly if one’s short of a leg, what?’

‘Very.’

‘Damaged in the War?’

Philip shook his head. ‘Accident when I was a boy,’ he explained telegraphically, and the blood mounted to his cheeks. ‘There’s my wife,’ he mumbled, glad of an excuse to get away. Elinor jumped, steadied herself against him; they picked their way to seats at the other end of the launch.

‘Why didn’t you let me go first and help you over?’ she asked.

‘I was all right,’ he answered curtly and in a tone that decided her to say no snore. She wondered what was the matter. Something to do with his lameness? Why was he so queer about it?

Philip himself would have found it hard to explain what there was in the military gentleman’s question to distress him. After all there was nothing in the least discreditable in having been run over by a cart. And to have been rejected as totally unfit for military service was not in the least unpatriotic. And yet, quite unreasonably, the question had disturbed him, as all such questions, as any too overt reference to his lameness, unless deliberately prepared for by himself, invariably did.

Discussing him with Elinor, ‘Philip was the last person,’ his mother had once said, ‘the very last person such an accident ought to have happened to. He was born far away, if you know what I mean. It was always too easy for him to dispense with people. He was too fond of shutting himself up inside his own private silence. But he might have learned to come out more, if that horrible accident hadn’t happened. It raised an artificial barrier between him and the rest of the world. It meant no games, to begin with; and no games meant fewer contacts with other boys, more solitude, more leisure for books. And then (poor Phil!) it meant fresh causes for shyness. A sense of inferiority. Children can be so horribly ruthless; they used to laugh at him sometimes at school. And later, when girls began to matter, how I wish he’d been able to go to dances and tennis parties! But he couldn’t waltz or play. And of course he didn’t want to go as an onlooker and an outsider. His poor smashed leg began by keeping him at a physical distance from girls of his own age. And it kept him at a psychological distance, too. For I believe he was always afraid (secretly, of course, and without admitting it) that they might laugh at him, as some of the boys did; and he didn’t want to run the risk of being rejected in favour of someone who wasn’t handicapped as he was. Not that he’d ever have taken very much interest in girls,’ Mrs. Quarles had added.

And Elinor had laughed. ‘I shouldn’t imagine so.’

‘But he wouldn’t have got into such a habit of deliberately avoiding them. He wouldn’t have so systematically retired from all personal contacts—and not with girls only; with men, too. Intellectual contacts—those are the only ones he admits.’

‘It’s as though he only felt safe among ideas,’ Elinor had said.

‘Because he can hold his own there; because he can be certain of superiority. He’s got into the habit of feeling afraid and suspicious outside that intellectual world. He needn’t have. And I’ve always tried to reassure him and tempt him out; but he won’t let himself be tempted, he creeps back into his shell.’ And after a silence, ‘it’s had only one good result,’ she had added, ‘the accident, I mean. It saved him from going to the War, from being killed, probably. Like his brother.’

The launch began to move towards the shore. From being an impending wall of black iron, the liner, as they receded, became a great ship, seen in its entirety. Fixed motionless between the sea and the blue glare of the sky, it looked like the advertisement of tropical cruises in the window of a Cockspur Street shipping office.

‘It was an impertinence to ask,’ Philip was thinking. ‘What business was it of his whether I’d been damaged in the War? How they go on gloating over their War, those professional soldiers! Well, I can be thankful I kept out of the bloody business. Poor Geoffrey!’ He thought of his dead brother.

‘And yet,’ Mrs. Quarles had concluded after a pause, ‘in a certain sense I wish he had gone to the War. Oh, not for fire-eating patriotic reasons. But because, if one could have guaranteed that he wouldn’t have been killed or mangled, it would have been so good for him—violently good, perhaps; painfully good; but still good. It might have smashed his shell for him and set him free from his own prison. Emotionally free; for his intellect’s free enough already. Too free, perhaps, for my old-fashioned taste.’ And she had smiled rather sadly. ‘Free to come and go in the human world, instead of being boxed up in that indifference of his.’

‘But isn’t the indifference natural to him?’ Elinor had objected.

‘Partly. But in part it’s a habit. If he could break the habit, he’d be so much happier. And I think he knows it, but can’t break it himself. If it could be broken for him… But the War was the last chance. And circumstances didn’t allow it to be taken.’

‘Thank heaven!’

‘Well, perhaps you’re right.’

The launch had arrived; they stepped ashore. The heat was terrific, the pavements glared, the air was full of dust. With much display of teeth, much flashing of black and liquid eyes, much choreographic gesticulation, an olive-coloured gentleman in a tarboosh tried to sell them carpets. Elinor was for driving him away. But,’don’t waste energy,’ said Philip. ‘Too hot. Passive resistance, and pretend not to understand.’

They walked on like martyrs across an arena; and like a hungry lion, the gentleman in the tarboosh frisked round them. If not carpets, then artificial pearls. No pearls? Then genuine Havana cigars at three-halfpence each. Or a celluloid comb. Or imitation amber. Or almost genuine gold bangles. Philip continued to shake his head.

‘Nice corals. Nice scarabs—real old.’ That winning smile was beginning to look like a snarl.

Elinor had seen the drapery shop she was looking for; they crossed the street and entered.

‘Saved!’ she said. ‘He daren’t follow. I had such a horrible fear that he might suddenly begin to bite. Poor wretch, though. I think we ought to buy something.’ She turned and addressed herself to the assistant behind the counter.

‘Meanwhile,’ said Philip, foreseeing that Elinor’s shopping would be interminably tedious, ‘I’ll go and get a few cigarettes.’

He stepped out into the glare. The man in the tarboosh was waiting. He pounced, he caught Philip by the sleeve. Desperately, he played his last trump.

‘Nice postcards,’ he whispered confidentially and produced an envelope from his breast-pocket. ‘Hot stuff. Only ten shillings.’

Philip stared uncomprehending. ‘No English,’ he said and limped away along the street. The man in the tarboosh hurried at his side.

‘Tres curieuses,’ he said. ‘Tres amusantes. Moeurs arabes. Pour passer le temps a bord. Soixante francs seulement.’ He saw no answering light of comprehension. ‘Molto artistiche,’ he suggested in Italian. ‘Proprio curiose. Cinquanta franchi.’ He peered in desperation into Philip’s face; it was a blank. ‘Huebsch,’ he went on,’sehr geschlechtlich. Zehn mark.’ Not a muscle moved. ‘Muy hermosas, muy agraciadas, mucho indecorosas.’ He tried again. ‘Skon bref kort. Liderlig fotografi bild. Nakna jungfrun. Verklig smutsig.’ Philip was evidently no Scandinavian. Was he a Slav? ‘Sprosny obraz,’ the man wheedled. It was no good. Perhaps Portuguese would do it. ‘Photographia deshonesta,’ he began.

Philip burst out laughing. ‘Here,’ he said, and gave him half a crown. ‘You deserve it.’

‘Did you discover what you wanted?’ asked Elinor when he returned.

He nodded. ‘And I also discovered the only possible basis for the League of Nations. The one common interest. Our toothy friend offered me indecent postcards in seventeen languages. He’s wasting himself at Port Said. He ought to be at Geneva.’

****

‘Two ladies to see you, sir,’ said the office boy.

‘Two?’ Burlap raised his dark eyebrows. ‘Two?’ The office boy insisted. ‘Well, show them up.’ The boy retired. Burlap was annoyed. He was expecting Romola Saville, the Romola Saville who had written,

‘Already old in passion, I have known

All the world’s lovers since the world began;

Have held in Leda’s arms the immortal Swan;

And felt fair Paris take me as his own.’

And she was coming with a duenna. It wasn’t like her. Two ladies…

The two doors of his sanctum opened simultaneously. Ethel Cobbett appeared at one holding a bunch of galley proofs. By the other entered the two ladies. Standing on the threshold Ethel looked at them. One of them was tall and remarkably thin. Almost equally tall, the other was portly. Neither of them was any longer young. The thin lady seemed a withered and virgin forty three or four. The portly one was perhaps a little older, but had preserved a full-blown and widowed freshness. The thin one was sallow, with sharp bony features, nondescript brown hair and grey eyes, and was dressed rather fashionably, not in the style of Paris, but in the more youthful and jaunty mode of Hollywood, in pale grey and pink. The other lady was very blonde, with blue eyes, and long dangling earrings and lapis lazuli beads to match. Her style of dressing was more matronly and European than the other’s, and numbers of not very precious ornaments were suspended here and there all over her person and tinkled a little as she walked.

The two ladies advanced across the room. Burlap pretended to be so deeply immersed in composition that he had not heard the opening of the door. It was only when the ladies had come to within a few feet of his table that he looked up from the paper on which he had been furiously scribbling—with what a start of amazement, what an expression of apologetic embarrassment! He sprang to his feet.

‘I’m so sorry. Forgive…I hadn’t noticed. One gets so deeply absorbed.’ The n’s and m’s had turned to d’s and b’s. He had a cold.’so idvolved id ode’s work.’

He came round the table to meet them, smiling his subtlest and most spiritual Sodoma smile. But, ‘Oh God!’ he was inwardly exclaiming. ‘What appalling females!’

‘And which,’ he went on aloud, smiling from one to the other,’ which, may I venture to ask, is Miss Saville?’

‘Neither of us,’ said the portly lady in a rather deep voice, but playfully and with a smile.

‘Or both, if you like,’ said the other. Her voice was high and metallic and she spoke sharply, in little spurts, and with an extraordinary and vertiginous rapidity. ‘Both and neither.’

And the two ladies burst into simultaneous laughter. Burlap looked and listened with a sinking heart. What had he let himself in for? They were formidable. He blew his nose; he coughed. They were making his cold worse.

‘The fact is,’ said the portly lady, cocking her head rather archly on one side and affecting the slightest lisp, ‘the fact ith…’

But the thin one interrupted her. ‘The fact is,’ she said pouring out her words so fast that it was extraordinary that she should have been able to articulate them at all, ‘that we’re a partnership, a combination, almost a conspiracy.’ She uttered her sharp shrill laugh.

‘Yeth, a conthpirathy,’ said the portly one lisping from sheer playfulness.

‘We’re the two parts of Romola Saville’s dual personality.’

‘I being the Dr. Jekyll,’ put in the portly one, and both laughed yet once more.

‘A conspiracy,’ thought Burlap with a growing sense of horror. ‘I should think it was!’

‘Dr. Jekyll, alias Ruth Goffer. May I introduce you to Mrs. Goffer?’

‘While I do the same for Mr. Hyde, alias Miss Hignett?’

‘While together we introduce ourselves as the Romola Saville whose poor poems you said such very kind things about.’

Burlap shook hands with the two ladies and said something about his pleasure at beefing the authors of work he had so much adbired. ‘But how shall I ever get rid of them?’ he wondered. So much energy, such an exuberance of force and will! Getting rid of them would be no joke. He shuddered inwardly. ‘They’re like steam engines,’ he decided. And they’d pester him to go on printing their beastly verses. Their obscene verses—for that’s what they were, in the light of these women’s age and energy and personal appearance—just obscene. ‘The bitches!’ he said to himself, feeling resentfully that they’d got something out of him on false pretences, that they’d taken advantage of his innocence and swindled him. It was at this moment that he caught sight of Miss Cobbett. She held up her bundle of proofs enquiringly. He shook his head. ‘Later,’ he said to her, with a dignified and editorial expression. Miss Cobbett turned away, but not before he had remarked the look of derisive triumph on her face. Damn the woman! It was intolerable.

‘We were so thrilled and delighted by your kind letter,’ said the stouter of the ladies.

Burlap smiled Franciscanly. ‘One’s glad to be able to do something for literature.’

‘So few take any interest.’

‘Yes, so few,’ echoed Miss Hignett. And speaking with the rapidity of one who tries to say ‘ Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper ‘ in the shortest possible time and with the fewest possible mistakes, she poured out their history and their grievances. It appeared that they had been living together at Wimbledon and conspiring to be Romola Saville for upwards of six years now, and that only on nine occasions in all that time had any of their works been printed. But they hadn’t lost courage. Their day, they knew, would come. They had gone on writing. They had written a great deal. Perhaps Mr. Burlap would be interested to see the plays they had written? And Miss Hignett opened a despatch case and laid four thick wads of typescript on the table. Historical plays they were, in blank verse. And the titles were ‘Fredegond,’ ‘The Bastard of Normandy,’ ‘Semiramis’ and ‘Gilles de Retz.’

They went at last, taking with them Burlap’s promise to read their plays, to print a sonnet sequence, to come to lunch at Wimbledon. Burlap sighed; then recomposing his face to stoniness and superiority, rang for Miss Cobbett.

‘You’ve got the proofs?’ he asked distantly and without looking at her.

She handed them to him. ‘I’ve telephoned to say they must hurry up with the rest.’

‘Good.’

There was a silence. It was Miss Cobbett who broke it, and though he did not deign to look up at her, Burlap could tell from the tone of her voice that she was smiling.

‘Your Romola Saville,’ she said; ‘that was a bit of a shock, wasn’t it?’

Miss Cobbett’s loyalty to Susan’s memory was the intenser for being forced and deliberate. She had been in love with Burlap herself. Her loyalty to Susan and to that platonic spirituality which was Burlap’s amorous speciality (she believed, at first, that he meant what he so constantly and beautifully said) was exercised by a continual struggle against love, and grew strong in the process. Burlap, who was experienced in these matters, had soon realized, from the quality of her response to his first platonic advances, that there was, in the vulgar language which even his devil hardly ever used,’ nothing doing.’ Persisting, he would only damage his own high spiritual reputation. In spite of the fact that the gitl was in love with him, or even in a certain sense because of it (for, loving, she realized how dangerously easy it would be to betray the cause of Susan and pure spirit and, realizing the danger, braced herself against it), she would never, he saw, permit his passage, however gradual, from spirituality to a carnality however refined. And since he himself was not in love with her, since she had aroused in him only the vague adolescent itch of desire which almost any personable woman could satisfy, it cost him little to be wise and retire. Retirement, he calculated, would enhance her admiration for his spirituality, would quicken her love. It is always useful, as Burlap had found in the past, to have employees who are in love with one. They work much harder and ask much less than those who are not in love. For a little everything went according to plan. Miss Cobbett did the work of three secretaries and an office boy, and at the same time worshipped. But there were incidents. Burlap was too much interested in female contributors. Some women he had actually been to bed with came and confided in Miss Cobbett. Her faith was shaken. Her righteous indignation at what she regarded as Burlap’s treachery to Susan and his ideals, his deliberate hypocrisy, was inflamed by personal feelings. He had betrayed her too. She was angry and resentful. Anger and resentment intensified her ideal loyalty. It was only in terms of loyalty to Susan and the spirit that she could express her jealousy.

The last straw was Beatrice Gilray. The cup of Miss Cobbett’s bitterness overflowed when Beatrice was installed at the office—in the editorial department, what was more, actually doing some of the writing for the paper. Miss Cobbett comforted herself a little by the thought that the writing was only Shorter Notices, which Were quite unimportant. But still, she was bitterly resentful. She was much better educated than that fool of a Beatrice, much more intelligent too. It was just because Beatrice had money that she was allowed to write. Beatrice had put a thousand pounds into the paper. She worked for nothing—and worked, what was more, like mad; just as Miss Cobbett herself had worked, at the beginning. Now, Miss Cobbett did as little as she could. She stood on her rights, never arrived a minute early, never stayed a minute past her allotted time. She did no more than she was paid to do. Burlap was annoyed, resentful, distressed; he would either have to do more work himself or employ another secretary. And then, providentially, Beatrice turned up. She took over all the subediting which Miss Cobbett now had no time to do. To compensate her for the subediting and the thousand pounds he allowed her to do a little writing. She didn’t know how to write, of course; but that didn’t matter. Nobody ever read the Shorter Notices.

When Burlap went to live in Beatrice Gilray’s house, Miss Cobbett’s cup overflowed again. In the first moment of anger she was rash enough to give Beatrice a solemn warning against her tenant. But her disinterested solicitude for Beatrice’s reputation and virginity was too manifestly and uncontrollably tinged with spite against Burlap. The only effect of her admonition was to exasperate Beatrice into sharp retort.

‘She’s really insufferable,’ Beatrice complained to Burlap afterwards, without, however, detailing all the reasons she had for finding the woman insufferable.

Burlap looked Christ-like. ‘She’s difficult,’ he admitted. ‘But one’s sorry for her. She’s had a hard life.’

‘I don’t see that a hard life excuses anybody from behaving properly,’ she rapped out.

‘But one has to make allowances,’ said Burlap, wagging his head.

‘If I were you,’ said Beatrice, ‘I wouldn’t have her in the place; I’d send her away.’

‘No, I couldn’t do that,’ Burlap answered, speaking slowly and ruminatively, as though the whole discussion were taking place inside himself. ‘Not in the circumstances.’ He smiled a Sodoma smile, subtle, spiritual and sweet; once more he wagged his dark, romantic head. ‘The circumstances are rather peculiar.’ He went on vaguely, never quite definitely explaining what the rather peculiar circumstances were, and with a kind of diffidence, as though he were reluctant to sing his own praises. Beatrice was left to gather that he had taken and was keeping Miss Cobbett out of charity. She was filled with a mixed feeling of admiration and pity—admiration for his goodness and pity for his helplessness in an ungrateful world.

‘All the same,’ she said, and she looked fierce, her words were like sharp little mallet taps, ‘I don’t see why you should let yourself be bullied. I wouldn’t let myself be treated like that.’

From that time forward she took every opportunity of snubbing Miss Cobbett and being rude. Miss Cobbett snapped, snubbed and was sarcastic in return. In the offices of the Literary World the war was open. Remotely, but not quite impartially, like a god with a prejudice in favour of virtue—virtue being represented in the present case by Beatrice—Burlap hovered mediatingly above the battle.

The episode of Romola Saville gave Miss Cobbett an opportunity for being malicious.

‘Did you see those two terrifying poetesses?’ she enquired of Beatrice, with a deceptive air of friendliness, the next morning.

Beatrice glanced at her sharply. What was the woman up to? ‘Which poetesses?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘Those two formidable middleaged ladies the editor asked to come and see him under the impression that they were one young one.’ She laughed. ‘Romola Saville. That’s how the poems were signed. It sounded so romantic. And the poems were quite romantic too. But the two authoresses! Oh, my goodness. When I saw the editor in their clutches I really felt quite sorry for him. But after all, he did bring it on himself. If he will write to his lady contributors…

That evening Beatrice renewed her complaints about Miss Cobbett. The woman was not only tiresome and impertinent; one could put up with that if she did her job properly; she was lazy. Running a paper was a business like any other. One couldn’t afford to do business on a basis of sentimentality. Vaguely, diffidently, Burlap talked again about the peculiar circumstances of the case. Beatrice retorted. There was an argument.

‘There’s such a thing as being too kind,’ Beatrice sharply concluded.

‘Is there?’ said Burlap; and his smile was so beautifully and wistfully Franciscan, that Beatrice felt herself inwardly melting into tenderness.

‘Yes, there is,’ she rapped out, feeling more hard and hostile towards Miss Cobbett as she felt more softly and maternally protective towards Burlap. Her tenderness was lined, so to speak, with indignation. When she didn’t want to show her softness, she turned her feelings inside out and was angry. ‘Poor Denis,’ she thought, underneath her indignation

‘He really needs somebody to look after him. He’s too good.’ She spoke aloud

‘And you’ve got a shocking cough,’ she said reproachfully with an irrelevance that was only apparent. Being too good, having nobody to look after one and having a cough—the ideas were logically connected. ‘What you need,’ she went on in the same sharp commanding tones, ‘is a good rubbing with camphorated oil and a wad of Thermogene.’ She spoke the words almost menacingly, as though she were threatening him with a good beating and a month on bread and water. Her solicitude expressed itself that way; but how tremulously soft it was underneath the surface!

Burlap was only too happy to let her carry out her tender threat. At halfpast ten he was lying in bed with an extra hot-water bottle. He had drunk a glass of hot milk and honey and was now sucking a soothing lozenge. It was a pity, he was thinking, that she wasn’t younger. Still, she was really amazingly youthful for her age. Her face, her figure—more like twentyfive than thirtyfive. He wondered how she’d behave when finally she’d been coaxed past her terrors. There was something very strange about these childish terrors in a grown woman. Half of her was arrested at the age at which Uncle Ben had made his premature experiment. Burlap’s devil grinned at the recollection of her account of the incident.

There was a tap at the door and Beatrice entered carrying the camphorated oil and the Thermogene.

‘Here’s the executioner,’ said Burlap laughing. ‘Let me die like a man.’ He undid his pyjama jacket. His chest was white and well-covered; the contour of the ribs only faintly showed through the flesh. Between the paps a streak of dark curly hair followed the line of the breastbone.’do your worst,’ he bantered on. ‘I’m ready.’ His smile was playfully tender.

Beatrice uncorked the bottle and poured a little of the aromatic oil into the palm of her right hand. ‘Take the bottle,’ she commanded,’ and put it down.’ He did as he was told. ‘Now,’ she said, when he was stretched out again unmoving; and she began to rub.

Her hand slid back and forth over his chest, back and forth, vigorously, efficiently. And when the right was tired, she began again with the left, back and forth, back and forth.

‘You’re like a little steam engine,’ said Burlap with his playfully tender smile.

‘I feel like one,’ she answered. But it wasn’t true. She felt like almost anything but a steam engine, She had had to overcome a kind of horror before she could touch that white, full-fleshed chest of his. Not that it was ugly or repulsive. On the contrary, it was rather beautiful in its smooth whiteness and fleshy strength. Fine, like the torso of a statue. Yes, a statue. Only the statue had dark little curls along the breastbone and a little brown mole that fluttered up and down with the pulsing skin over the heart. The statue lived; that was the disquieting thing. The white naked breast was beautiful; but it was almost repulsively alive. To touch it…She shuddered inwardly with a little spasm of horror, and was angry with herself for having felt so stupidly. Quickly she had stretched out her hand and begun to rub. Her palm slid easily over the lubricated skin. The warmth of his body was against her hand. Through the skin she could feel the hardness of the bones. There was a bristle of roughness against her fingers as they touched the hairs along the breastbone, and the little paps were firm and elastic. She shuddered again, but there was something agreeable in the feeling of horror and the overcoming of it; there was a strange pleasure in the creeping of alarm and repulsion that travelled through her body. She went on rubbing, a steam engine only in the vigour and regularity of her movements, but, within, how quiveringly and self-dividedly alive!

Burlap lay with his eyes shut, faintly smiling with the pleasure of abandonment and self-surrender. He was feeling, luxuriously, like a child, helpless; he was in her hands, like a child who is its mother’s property and plaything, no longer his own master. Her hands were cold on his chest; his flesh was passive and abandoned, like so much clay, under those strong cold hands.

‘Tired?’ he asked, when she paused to change hands for the third time. He opened his eyes to look at her.

She shook her head. ‘I’m as much bother as a sick child.’

‘No bother at all.’

But Burlap insisted on being sorry for her and apologetic for himself. ‘Poor Beatrice!’ he said. ‘All you have to do for me! I’m quite ashamed.’

Beatrice only smiled. Her first shudderings of unreasonable repulsion had passed off. She felt extraordinarily happy.

‘There!’ she said at last. ‘Now for the Thermogene.’ She opened the cardboard box and unfolded the orange wool. ‘The problem is how to stick it on to your chest. I’d thought of keeping it in place with a bandage. Two or three turns right round the body. What do you think?’

‘I don’t think anything,’ said Burlap who was still enjoying the luxury of infantility. ‘I’m utterly in your hands.’

‘Well, then, sit up,’ she commanded. He sat up. ‘Hold the wool on to your chest while I pass the bandage round.’ To bring the bandage round his body she had to lean very close to him, almost embracing him; her hands met for a moment behind his back, as she unwound the bandage. Burlap dropped his head forward and his forehead rested against her breast. The forehead of a tired child on the soft breast of its mother.

‘Hold the end a moment while I get a safety-pin.’

Burlap lifted his forehead and drew back. Rather flushed, but still very business-like and efficient, Beatrice was detaching one from a little card of assorted safety pins.

‘Now comes the really difficult moment,’ she said, laughing. ‘You won’t mind if I run the pin into your flesh.’

‘No, I won’t mind,’ said Burlap and it was true; he wouldn’t have minded. He’d have been rather pleased, if she had hurt him. But she didn’t. The bandage was pinned into position with quite professional neatness.

‘There!’

‘What do you want me to do now?’ asked Burlap, greedy to obey.

‘Lie down.’

He lay down. She did up the buttons of his pyjama jacket. ‘Now you must go to sleep as quickly as you can.’ She pulled the bedclothes up to his chin and tucked them in. Then she laughed. ‘You look like a little boy.’

‘Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?’

The colour came into Beatrice’s cheeks. She bent down and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Goodnight,’ she said. And suddenly she wanted to take him in her arms, to press his head against her breast and stroke his hair. But she only laid her hand for a moment against his cheek, then hurried out of the room.

CHAPTER XIX

Little Phil was lying on his bed. The room was in an orange twilight. A thin needle of sunshine came probing in between the drawn curtains. Phil was more than usually restless.

‘What’s the time?’ he shouted at last, though he had shouted before and been told to keep quiet.

‘Not time for you to get up,’ Miss Fulkes called back from across the passage. Her voice came muffled, for she was half-way into her blue frock, her head involved in silken darkness, her arms struggling blindly to find the entrance to their respective sleeves. Phil’s parents were arriving to-day; they would be at Gattenden for lunch. Miss Fulkes’s blue best was imperatively called for.

‘But what’s the time?’ the child shouted back angrily. ‘On your watch, I mean.’

Miss Fulkes’s head came through into the light. ‘Twenty to one,’ she called back. ‘You must be quiet.’

‘Why isn’t it one?’

‘Because it isn’t. Now I shan’t answer you any more. And if you shout again I shall tell your mother how naughty you’ve been.’

‘Naughty!’ Phil retorted, putting a tearful fury into his voice—but so softly, that Miss Fulkes hardly heard him. ‘I hate you!’ He didn’t of course. But he had made his protest; honour was saved.

Miss Fulkes went on with her toilet. She felt agitated, afraid, painfully excited. What would they think of Phil— her Phil, the Phil she had made? ‘I hope he’ll be good,’ she thought. ‘I hope he’ll be good.’ He could be an angel, so enchanting when he chose. And when he wasn’t an angel, there was always a reason; but one had to know him, one had to understand him in order to see the reason. Probably they wouldn’t be able to see the reason. They had been away so long; they might have forgotten what he was like. And in any case they couldn’t know what he was like now, what he had grown into during these last months. She alone knew that Phil. Knew him and loved him—so much, so much. She alone. And one day she would have to leave him. She had no rights over him, no claim to him; she only loved him. They could take him away from her whenever they wanted. The image of herself in the glass wavered and was lost in a rainbow fog and suddenly the tears overflowed on to her cheeks.

The train was punctual, the car in attendance. Philip and Elinor climbed in.

‘Isn’t it wonderful to be here?’ Elinor took her husband’s hand. Her eyes shone. ‘But, good Lord,’ she added, in a tone of horror and without waiting for his answer,’ they’ re building a lot of new houses on the hill there. How dare they?’

Philip looked. ‘Rather garden city, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s a pity the English love the country so much,’ he added. ‘They’re killing it with kindness.’

‘But how lovely it still is, all the same. Aren’t you tremendously excited?’

‘Excited?’ he questioned, cautiously. ‘Well…

‘Aren’t you even pleased that you’re going to see your son again?’

‘Of course.’

‘Of course!’ Elinor repeated the words derisively. ‘And in that tone of voice. I never thought there was any “of course” about it; but now the time has come, I’ve never been so excited in my life.’

There was a silence; the car drove on windingly, down the lanes. The road mounted; they climbed through beechwoods to a wooded plateau. At the end of a long green vista the most colossal monument of Tantamount grandeur, the palace of the Marquess of Gattenden, basked far off in the sun. The flag flew; his lordship was in residence. ‘We must go and call on the old madman one day,’ said Philip. The fallow deer browsed in the park.

‘Why does one ever travel?’ said Elinor, as she looked at them.

Miss Fulkes and little Phil were waiting on the steps. ‘I believe I hear the car,’ said Miss Fulkes. Her rather lumpy face was very pale; her heart was beating with more than ordinary force. ‘No,’ she added, after a moment of intent listening. What she had heard was only the sound of her own anxiety.

Little Phil moved about uncomfortably, conscious only of a violent desire to ‘go somewhere.’ Anticipation had lodged a hedgehog in his entrails.

‘Aren’t you happy?’ asked Miss Fulkes, with assumed enthusiasm, selfsacrificingly determined that the child should show himself wild with joy to see his parents again. ‘Aren’t you tremendously excited?’ But they could take him away from her if they wanted to, take him away and never let her see him again.

‘Yes,’ little Phil replied rather vaguely. He was preoccupied exclusively with the approach of visceral events.

Miss Fulkes was disappointed by the flatness of his tone. She looked at him enquiringly. ‘Phil?’ She had noticed his uneasy Charleston. The child nodded. She took his hand and hurried him into the house.

A minute later Philip and Elinor drove up to a deserted porch. Elinor couldn’t help feeling disappointed. She had so clearly visualized the scene—Phil on the steps frantically waving—she had so plainly, in anticipation, heard his shouting. And the steps were a blank.

‘Nobody to meet us,’ she said, and her tone was mournful.

‘You could hardly expect them to hang about, waiting,’ Philip replied. He hated anything in the nature of a fuss. For him, the perfect homecoming would have been in a cloak of invisibility. This was a good second best.

They got out of the car. The front door was open. They entered. In the silent, empty hall three and a half centuries of life had gone to sleep. The sunlight stared through flat-arched windows. The panelling had been painted pale green in the eighteenth century. All ancient oak and high-lights, the staircase climbed up, out of sight, towards the higher floors. A smell of potpourri faintly haunted the air; it was as though one apprehended the serene old silence through another sense.

Elinor looked round her, she took a deep breath, she drew her finger-tips along the polished walnut wood of a table, with the knuckle of a bent forefinger she rapped the round Venetian bowl that stood on it; the glassy bell-note lingered sweetly on the perfumed silence.

‘Like the Sleeping Beauty,’ she said. But even as she spoke the words, the spell was broken. Suddenly, as though the ringing glass had called the house back to life, there was sound and movement. Somewhere upstairs a door opened, through the sanitary noise of rushing water came the sound of Phil’s piercing young voice; small feet thudded along the carpet of the corridor, clattered like little hoofs on the naked oak of the stairs. At the same moment a door on the ground floor flew open and the enormous form of Dobbs, the parlourmaid, hastened into the hall.

‘Why, Miss Elinor, I never heard you…’

Little Phil rounded the last turn of the staircase. At the sight of his parents he gave a shout, he quickened his pace; he almost slid from step to step.

‘Not so fast, not so fast!’ his mother called anxiously and ran towards him.

‘Not so fast!’ echoed Miss Fulkes hurrying down the stairs behind. And suddenly, from the morningroom, which had a door leading out into the garden, Mrs. Bidlake appeared, white and silent and with floating veils, like an imposing phantom. In a little basket she carried a bunch of cut tulips; her gardening scissors dangled at the end of a yellow ribbon. T’ang the Third followed her, barking. There was a confusion of embracing and handshaking. Mrs. Bidlake’s greetings had the majesty of ritual, the solemn grace of an ancient and sacred dance. Miss Fulkes writhed with shyness and excitement, stood first on one leg and then on the other, went into the attitudes of fashion-plates and mannequins and from time to time piercingly laughed. When she shook hands with Philip, she writhed so violently that she almost lost her balance.

‘Poor creature!’ Elinor had time to think between the answering and asking of questions. ‘How urgently she needs marrying! Much worse than when we left.’

‘But how he’s grown!’ she said aloud. ‘And how he’s ‘changed!’ She held the child at arm’s length with the gesture of a connoisseur who stands back to examine a picture. ‘He used to be the image of Phil. But now…’ She shook her head. Now the broad face had lengthened, the short straight nose (the comical ‘cat’s nose’ which in Philip’s face she had always laughed at and so much loved) had grown finer and faintly aquiline, the hair had darkened. ‘Now he’s exactly like Walter. Don’t you think so?’ Mrs. Bidlake remotely nodded. ‘Except when he laughs,’ she added. ‘His laugh’s pure Phil.’

‘What have you brought me?’ asked little Phil almost anxiously. When people went away and came back again, they always brought him something. ‘Where’s my present?’

‘What a question!’ Miss Fulkes protested, blushing with vicarious shame, and writhing.

But Elinor and Philip only laughed.

‘He’s Walter when he’s serious,’ said Elinor.

‘Or you.’ Philip looked from one to the other.

‘The first minute your father and mother arrive!’ Miss Fulkes continued her reproaches.

‘Naughty!’ the child retorted and threw back his head with a little movement of anger and pride.

Elinor, who had been looking at him, almost laughed aloud. That sudden lifting of the chin—why it was the parody of old Mr. Quarles’s gesture of superiority. For a moment the child was her father-in-law, her absurd deplorable father-in-law, caricatured and in miniature. It was comic, but at the same time it was somehow no joke. She wanted to laugh, but she was oppressed by a sudden realization of the mysteries and complexities of life, the terrible inscrutabilities of the future. Here was her child—but he was also Philip, he was also herself, he was also Walter, her father, her mother; and now, with that upward tilting of the chin, he had suddenly revealed himself as the deplorable Mr. Quarles. And he might be hundreds of other people too. Might be? He certainly was. He was aunts and cousins she hardly ever saw; grandfathers and great-uncles she had only known as a child and utterly forgotten; ancestors who had died long ago, back to the beginning of things. A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts and would go on dictating and controlling. Phil, little Phil—the name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like ‘France’ or ‘England,’ to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals, who were born, lived and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong. She looked at the child with a kind of terror. What a responsibility!

‘I call that cupboard love,’ Miss Fulkes was still going on. ‘And you mustn’t say “naughty” to me like that.’

Elinor gave a little sigh, shook herself out of her reverie and, picking up the child in her arms, pressed him against her. ‘Never mind,’ she said, half to the reproving Miss Fulkes, half to her own apprehensive self. ‘Never mind.’ She kissed him.

Philip was looking at his watch. ‘Perhaps we ought to go and wash and brush up a bit before lunch,’ he said. He had the sentiment of punctuality.

‘But first,’ said Elinor, to whom it seemed that meals were made for man, not man for meals,’ first we simply must run into the kitchen and say how-do-you-do to Mrs. Inman. It would be unforgivable if we didn’t. Come.’ Still carrying the child, she led the way through the dining-room. The smell of roast duck grew stronger and stronger as they advanced.

Fretted a little by his consciousness of unpunctuality, and a little uneasy at having to risk himself, even with Elinor for dragoman, in the kitchen among the servants, Philip reluctantly followed her.

At luncheon, little Phil celebrated the occasion by behaving atrociously.

‘The excitement has been too much for him,’ poor Miss Fulkes kept repeating, trying to excuse the child and indirectly to justify herself. She would have liked to cry. ‘You’ll see when he’s got used to your being here, Mrs. Quarles,’ she said, turning to Elinor, ‘you’ll see; he can be such an angel. It’s the excitement.’

She had come to love the child so much that his triumphs and humiliations, his virtues and his crimes made her exult or mourn, feel selfsatisfaction or shame, as if they had been her own. Besides there was her professional pride. She had been alone responsible for him all these months, teaching him the social virtues and why the triangle of India is painted crimson on the map; she had made him, had moulded him. And now, when this object of tenderest love, this product of her skill and patience, screamed at table, spat out mouthfuls of half-masticated food and spilt the water, Miss Fulkes not only blushed with agonizing shame, as though it were she who had screamed, had spat, had spilled, but experienced at the same time all the humiliation of the conjurer whose long-prepared trick fails to come off in public, the inventor of the ideal flying machine which simply refuses to leave the ground.

After all,’ said Elinor, consolingly, ‘it’s only to be expected.’ She felt genuinely sorry for the poor girl. She looked at the child. He was crying—and she had expected (how unreasonably!) that it would be quite different now, that she would find him entirely rational and grown up. Her heart sank. She loved him, but children were terrible, terrible. And he was still a child. ‘Now, Phil,’ she said severely, ‘you must eat. No more nonsense.’

The child howled louder. He would have liked to behave well, but he did not know how to stop behaving badly. He had voluntarily worked up this mood of rebellious misery within himself; but now the emotion was his master and stronger than his will. It was impossible for him, even though he desired it, to return by the way he had come. Besides he had always rather disliked roast duck; and having now, for five minutes, thought of roast duck with concentrated disgust and horror, he loathed it. The sight, the smell, the taste of it really and genuinely made him sick.

Mrs. Bidlake meanwhile preserved her metaphysical calm. Her soul swam on steadily, like a great ship through a choppy sea; or perhaps it was more like a balloon, drifting high above the waters in the serene and windless world of fancy. She had been talking to Philip about Buddhism (Mrs. Bidlake had a special weakness for Buddhism). At the first screams, she had not even turned round to see what was the matter., contenting herself with raising her voice so as to make it audible above the tumult. The yelling was renewed, was continued. Mrs. Bidlake was silent and shut her eyes. A cross-legged Buddha, serene and golden, appeared against the red background oi her closed lids; she saw the yellow-robed priests around him, each in the attitude of the god and plunged in ecstasic meditation.

‘Maya,’ she said with a sigh, as though to herself, ‘maya—the eternal illusion.’ She opened her eyes again. ‘It is rather tough,’ she added, addressing herself to Elinor and Miss Fulkes who were desperately trying to make the child eat.

Little Phil seized the excuse which she had thus gratuitously given him. ‘It’s tough,’ he shouted tearfully, pushing away the fork on which Miss Fulkes, her hand trembling with the excess of painful emotions, was offering him a shred of roast duck and half a new potato.

Mrs. Bidlake shut her eyes again for a moment; then turned to Philip and went on discussing the EightFold Way.

****

That evening Philip wrote at some length in the notebook, in which he recorded, pell mell, thoughts and events, conversations, things heard and seen. ‘The kitchen in the old house,’ was how he headed the page. ‘You can render it easily enough. The Tudor casements reflected in the bottoms of the copper pots. The huge black range with its polished steel trimmings and the fire peeping out through the half-opened porthole in the top. The mignonette in the window boxes. The cat, an enormous ginger eunuch, dozing in its basket by the dresser. The kitchen table so worn with time and constant scrubbing that the graining stands out above the softer wood—as though an engraver had prepared a wood-block of some gigantic finger-print. The beams in the low ceiling. The brown beechwood chairs. The raw pastry in process of rolling. The smell of cookery. The leaning column of yellow sunlight full of motes. And finally old Mrs. Inman, the cook, small, frail, indomitable, the authoress of how many thousand meals! Work that up a little, and you’d have your picture. But I want something more. A sketch of the kitchen in time as well as space, a hint of its significance in the general human cosmos. I write one sentence.’summer after summer, from the time when Shakespeare was a boy till now, ten generations of cooks have employed infrared radiations to break up the protein molecules of spitted ducklings; (“thou wast not born for death, immortal bird,” etc.).’ One sentence, and I am already involved in history, art and all the sciences. The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart’s music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object. But in all cases, the things seen at the end of the vista must be strange enough to make the familiar seem fantastically mysterious. Question; can this be achieved without pedantry, and without spinning out the work interminably? It needs a great deal of thinking about.

Meanwhile, how charming the kitchen is! How sympathetic its inhabitants. Mrs. Inman has been in the house as long as Elinor. A miracle of aged beauty. And how serene, how aristocratically commanding! When one has been monarch of all one surveys for thirty years, one looks the royal part, even when all one surveys is only the kitchen. And then there is Dobbs, the parlourmaid. Dobbs has only been in the house since a little before the War. An invention of Rabelais. Six feet high and proportionately thick. And the enormous body houses Gargantua’s spirit. What broad humours, what a relish for life, what anecdotes, what facile and enormous laughter! Dobbs’s laughter is almost terrifying. And on a shelf of the pantry dresser I noticed, when we went to pay our respects, a green bottle, half full of pills—but pills like good-sized marbles, such as one blows down the throats of horses from a rubber hose. What Homeric indigestions they imply!

The kitchen is good; but so is the drawing-room. We came in from our afternoon walk to find the vicar and his wife talking Art over the tea-cups. Yes, Art. For it was their first call since their visit to the Academy.

It is an annual affair. Every year on the day following Ascension Day they take the 8.52 to town and pay the tribute that even Religion owes to Art—Established Religion and Established Art. They scour every corner of Burlington House annotating the catalogue as they go round, humorously, wherever humour is admissible—for Mr. Truby (who looks rather like Noah in a child’s ark) is one of those facetious churchmen who crack jokes in order to show that, in spite of the black coat and the reversed collar, they are ‘human,’ ‘good chaps,’ etc.

Plumply pretty Mrs. Truby is less uproariously waggish than her husband, but is none the less what upper middle-class readers of Punch would call a ‘thoroughly cheery soul,’ up to any amount of innocent fun and full of quaint remarks. I looked on and listened, fascinated, while Elinor drew them out about the parish and the Academy, feeling like Fabre among the coleoptera. Every now and then some word of the conversation would cross the spiritual abysses separating Elinor’s mother from her surroundings, would penetrate her reverie and set up a curious reaction. Oracularly, disconcertingly, with a seriousness that was almost appalling in the midst of the Truby waggeries, she would speak out of another world. And outside, meanwhile, the garden is green and flowery. Old Stokes the gardener has a beard and looks like Father Time. The sky is pale blue. There is a noise of birds. The place is good. How good, one must have circumnavigated the globe to discover. Why not stay? Take root? But roots are chains. I have a terror of losing my freedom. Free, without ties, unpossessed by any possessions, free to do as one will, to go at a moment’s notice wherever the fancy may suggest—it is good. But so is this place. Might it not be better? To gain freedom one sacrifices something—the house, Mrs. Inman, Dobbs, facetious Truby from the parsonage, the tulips in the garden, and all that these things and people signify. One sacrifices something-for a greater gain in knowledge, in understanding, in intensified living? I sometimes wonder?

****

Lord Edward and his brother were taking the air in Gattenden Park. Lord Edward took it walking. The fifth Marquess took it in a bath chair drawn by a large grey donkey. He was a cripple. ‘Which luckily doesn’t prevent the mind from running,’ he was fond of saying. It had been running, mazily, hither and thither all his life. Meanwhile, the grey ass only walked, very slowly. Before the two brothers and behind stretched Gattenden Broad Walk. A mile in front of them at the end of the straight vista stood a model of Trajan’s column in Portland stone with a bronze statue of the first Marquess, on the top and an inscription in large letters round the pedestal setting forth his claims to fame. He had been, among other things, Viceroy of Ireland and the Father of Scientific Agriculture. At the other end of the Broad Walk, a mile behind the brothers, rose the fantastic towers and pinnacles of Gattenden Castle, built for the second Marquess by James Wyatt in the most extravagant style of Strawberry Hill Gothic, and looking more mediaeval than anything that the real chronological Middle Ages had ever dreamt of. The Marquess lived permanently at Gattenden. Not that he particularly liked the house or the surrounding scenery. He was hardly aware of them. When he wasn’t reading, he was thinking about what he had read; the world of appearances, as he liked, platonically, to call visible and tangible reality, did not interest him. This lack of interest was his revenge on the universe for having made him a cripple. He inhabited Gattenden, because it was only at Gattenden that he could safely go for drives in his bath chair. Pall Mall is no place for grey donkeys and paralytic old gentlemen who read and meditate as they drive. He had made over Tantamount House to his brother and continued to drive his ass through the beechwoods of Gattenden Park.

The ass had halted to browse at the wayside. The fifth Marquess and his brother were having an argument about God. Time passed. They were still talking about God when, half an hour later, Philip and Elinor, who had been taking their afternoon walk in the Park, emerged from the beechwood and unexpectedly came upon the Marquess’s bath chair.

‘Poor old creatures!’ was Philip’s comment when they were once more out of earshot. ‘What else have they got to talk about? Too old to want to talk about love—too old and much too good. Too rich to talk about money. Too highbrow to talk about people and too hermit-like to know any people to talk about. Too shy to talk about themselves, too blankly inexperienced to talk about life or even literature. What is there left for the poor old wretches to talk about? Nothing—only God.’

‘And at the present rate of progress,’ said Elinor, ‘you’ll be exactly like them ten years from now.’

CHAPTER XX

Of Philip Quarles’s father old John Bidlake used to say that he was like one of those baroque Italian churches with sham facades. High, impressive, bristling with classical orders, broken pedimenta and statuary, the faCade seems to belong to a great cathedral. But look more closely and you discover that it is only a screen. Behind the enormous and elaborate front there crouches a wretched little temple of brick and rubble and scabby plaster. And warming to his simile, John Bidlake would describe the unshaven priest gabbling the office, the snotty little acolyte in his unwashed surplice, the congregation of goitrous peasant women and their brats, the cretin begging at the door, the tin crowns on the images, the dirt on the floor, the stale smell of generations of pious humanity.

‘Why is it,’ he concluded, forgetting that he was making an uncomplimentary comment on his own successes, ‘that women always needs must love the lowest when they see it—or rather him? Curious. Particularly in this case. One would have given Rachel Quarles too much sense to be taken in by such a vacuum.’

Other people had thought so too, had also wondered why. Rachel Quarles seemed so incomparably too good for her husband. But one does not marry a set of virtues and talents; one marries an individual human being. The Sidney Quarles who had proposed to Rachel was a young man whom anyone might have fallen in love with and even believed in—anyone; and Rachel was only eighteen and particularly inexperienced. He too was young (youth is in itself a virtue), young and good-looking. Broad-shouldered and proportionately tall, portly now to the verge of stoutness, Sidney Quarles was still an imposing figure. At twenty-three the big body had been athletic, the greyish hair which now surrounded a pink and polished tonsure had then been golden-brown and had covered the whole of his scalp with a waving luxuriance. The large, highcoloured, fleshy face had been fresher, firmer, less moon-like. The forehead, even before baldness had set in, had seemed intellectual in its smooth height. Nor did Sidney Quarles’s conversation belie the circumstantial evidence offered by his brow. He talked well, albeit perhaps with a little too much arrogance and selfsatisfaction for every taste. Moreover, he had at that time a reputation; he had just come down from the university in something that was almost a blaze of academic and debating-society glory. On the virgin expanses of his future sanguine friends painted the brightest visions. At the time when Rachel first knew him, these prophecies had a positively reasonable air. And in any case, reasonably or unreasonably she loved him. They were married when she was only nineteen.

From his father Sidney had inherited a handsome fortune The business (old Mr. Quarles was in sugar) was a going concern. The estate in Essex paid its way. The town house was in Portman Square, the country house at Chamford was commodious and Georgian. Sidney’s ambitions were political. After an apprenticeship in local government, he would go into Parliament. Hard work, speeches at once sound and brilliant would mark him out as the coming man. He would be offered an assistant under-secretaryship, there would be rapid promotions. He might expect (so at least it had seemed five-and-thirty years ago) to realize the most extravagant ambitions.

But Sidney, as old Bidlake had said, was only a faĂ§ade, an impressive appearance, a voice, a superficial cleverness and nothing more. Behind the handsome front lived the genuine Sidney, feeble, lacking all tenacity of purpose in important matters, though obstinate where trifles were concerned, easily fired with enthusiasm and still more easily bored. Even the cleverness turned out to be no more than the kind of cleverness which enables brilliant schoolboys to write Ovidian Latin verses or humorous parodies of Herodotus. Brought to the test, this sixth-form ability proved to be as impotent in the purely intellectual as in the practical sphere. For when, by a course of neglect tempered by feverish speculation and mismanagement, he had half ruined his father’s business (Rachel made him sell out completely before it was too late), when his political prospects had been completely ruined by years of alternating indolence and undisciplined activity, he decided that his real vocation was to be a publicist. In the first flush of this new conviction, he actually contrived to finish a book about the principles of government. Shallow and vague, commonplace with an ordinariness made emphatic by the pretensions of an ornate style that coruscated with verbal epigrams, the book met with a deserved neglect, which Sidney Quarles attributed to the machinations of political enemies. He trusted to posterity for his due.

Ever since the publication of that first book, Mr. Quarles had been writing, or at least had been supposed to be writing, another, much larger and more important, about democracy. The largeness and the importance justified an almost indefinite delay in its completion. He had already been at work on it for more than seven years and as yet, he would say to anyone who asked him about the progress of the book (shaking his head as he spoke with the expression of a man who bears an almost intolerable burden), as yet he had not even finished collecting the materials.

‘It’s a labour of Hercules,’ he would say with an air at once martyred and fatuously arrogant. He had a way when he spoke to you of tilting his face upwards and shooting his words into the air, as though he were a howitzer, looking at you meanwhile, if he condescended to look at you at all, along his nose and from under half-shut eyelids. His voice was resonant and full of those baaings with which the very Oxonian are accustomed to enrich the English language. ‘Really’ in Sidney’s mouth was always ‘ryahly,’ ‘mere’ was ‘myah.’ It was as though a flock of sheep had broken loose in his vocabulary. ‘A labour of Hercules.’ The words were accompanied by a sigh. ‘Ryahly fyahful.’

If the questioner were sufficiently sympathetic, he would take him into his study and show him (or preferably her) the enormous apparatus of card indices and steel filing-cabinets which he had accumulated round his very professional-looking roll-top desk. As time passed and the book showed no signs of getting itself written, Mr. Quarles had collected more and more of these impressive objects. They were the visible proofs of his labour, they symbolized the terrific difficulty of his task. He possessed no less than three typewriters. The portable Corona accompanied him wherever he went, in case he should at any time feel inspired when on his travels. Occasionally, when he felt the need of being particularly impressive, he took the Hammond, a rather larger machine, on which the letters were carried, not on separate arms, but on a detachable band of metal clipped to a revolving drum, so that it was possible to change the type at will and write in Greek or Arabic, mathematical symbols or Russian, according to the needs of the moment; Mr. Quarles had a large collection of these alternative types which, of course, he never used, but of which he felt very proud, as though each of them represented a separate talent or accomplishment of his own. Finally there was the third and latest of the typewriters, a very large and very expensive office instrument, which was not only a typewriter, but also a calculating machine. So useful, Mr. Quarles would explain, for compiling statistics for his great book and for doing the accounts of the estate. And he would point with special pride to the little electric motor attached to the machine; ydu made a connection with the wall plug and the motor did everything for you—everything, that is to say, except actually compose your book. You had only to touch the keys, so (and Mr. Quarles would give a demonstration); the electricity provided the force to bring the type into contact with the paper. All muscular effort was eliminated. You could go on typing for eighteen hours at a stretch-and Mr. Quarles gave it to be understood that it was a common thing for him to spend eighteen hours at his desk (like Balzac, or Sir Isaac Newton)—you could go on, indeed, almost indefinitely without experiencing the slightest fatigue, at any rate in the fingers. An American invention. Very ingenious.

Mr. Quarles had bought his calculating typewriter at the moment when, for all practical purposes, he had ceased to have anything to do with the management of the estate. For Rachel had left him the estate. Not that he ran it any better than the business which she had persuaded him, only just in time, to abandon. But the absence of profit did not matter, the loss, when there actually was a loss, was inconsiderable. The estate, Rachel Quarles had hoped, would keep her husband healthily occupied. For that it was worth paying something. But the price that had to be paid in these post-War years of depression was very high; and as Sidney occupied himself less and less with the routine of management, the price rose alarmingly, while the object for which it was being paid—healthy occupation for Sidney—was not achieved. Occasionally, it is true, Sidney would get an idea into his head and suddenly plunge into an orgy of what he called ‘estate improvements.’ On one occasion after reading a book about American efficiency, he bought a large outfit of costly machinery, only to discover that the estate was not large enough to justify the expenditure; he could not give his machines enough to do. Later, he built a jam factory; it had never paid. Their lack of success made him rapidly lose interest in his ‘improvements.’ Hard work and constant attention might conceivably have made them profitable in time; meanwhile, however, owing to Sidney’s neglect, the improvement had resulted in a dead loss. Decidedly, the price was too high, and it was being paid for nothing. Mrs. Quarles decided that it was time to get the estate out of Sidney’s hands. With her usual tact—for after more than thirty years of marriage she knew her husband only too well—she persuaded him that he would have more time for his great work if he left the tiresome business of estate management to others. She and the bailiff were good enough for that. There was no sense in wasting talents that might be better, more suitably employed, on such mechanical labour. Sidney was easily persuaded. The estate bored him; it had hurt his vanity by being so malevolently unsuccessful in spite of his improvements. At the same time, he realized that to give up all connection with it would be an acknowledgment of failure and a tribute—yet another—to his wife’s inherent superiority. He agreed to devote less time to the details of management, but promised, or threatened, in a god-like way, that he would continue to keep an eye on it, would supervise it distantly, but none the less effectively, in the intervals of his literary labours. It was now that, to justify himself, to magnify his importance, he bought the calculating typewriter. It symbolized the enormous complexity of the literary work to which he was now mainly to devote himself; and it proved at the same time that he had not completely abandoned all interest in practical affairs. For the calculating machine was to deal not only with statistics (in what way Mr. Quarles was wise enough never precisely to specify), but also with the accounts under which, it was implied, poor Rachel and the bailiff would infallibly succumb without his higher aid.

Sidney did not, of course, acknowledge his wife’s superiority. But the obscure realization and resentment of it, the desire to prove that, in spite of everything, he was really just as good as she, or indeed much better, conditioned his whole life. It was this resentment, this desire to assert his domestic superiority that had made him cling so long to his unsuccessful political career. Left to himself, he would probably have abandoned political life at the first discovery of its difficulties and tediousness; his indolence was stronger than his ambition. But a reluctance to admit failure and the personal inferiority which failure would have implied, kept him (for ever desperately sanguine of his prospects) from resigning his parliamentary seat. With the exasperating spectacle of Rachel’s quiet efficiency perpetually before his eyes, he could not admit himself defeated. What Rachel did, she did well; people loved and admired her. It was to rival and outdo her, in the eyes of the world and in his own, that he clung to politics, that he plunged into the erratic activities which had distinguished his parliamentary career. Disdaining to be the mere slave of his party and desirous of personal distinction, he had championed with enthusiasm, only to desert again with disgust, a succession of Causes. The abolition of capital punishment, antivivisection, prison reform, the amelioration of labour conditions in West Africa had called forth, each in its turn, his fieriest eloquence and a brief outburst of energy. He had visions of himself as a conquering reformer bringing victory by his mere presence to whatever cause he chose to take up. But the walls of Jericho never collapsed at the sound of his trumpet, and he was not the man to undertake laborious sieges. Hangings, operations on dogs and frogs, solitary convicts and maltreated negroes—one after another, all lost their charm for him. And Rachel continued to be efficient, continued to be loved and admired.

Meanwhile, her direct encouragement had always supplemented that indirect stimulus to ambition which she had provided, all unintentionally, by the mere fact of being herself and Sidney’s wife. At first she genuinely believed in him; she encouraged her hero. A few years sufficed to change faith in his ultimate success into a pious hope. When the hope was gone she encouraged him for diplomatic reasons—because failure in politics cost less than failure in the City. For Sidney’s mismanagement of the business was threatening to be ruinous. She dared not tell him so, dared not advise him to sell out; to have done so would have been to provoke him to cling more tenaciously than ever to the business. By throwing doubts on his capacity she would only have spurred him on to new and more dangerous speculations. To hostile criticism Sidney reacted with a violent and obstinate contrariness. Made wise by experience Rachel Quarles averted the danger by redoubling her encouragement of his political ambitions. She magnified the importance of his parliamentary activities. What good, what noble work he was doing! And what a pity that the care of the business should take up so much of the time and energies that might be better employed! Sidney responded at once and with a secret and unrealized gratitude. The routine of business bored him; he was becoming alarmed by his speculative failures. He welcomed the excuse for divesting himself of his responsibilities, which Rachel had so diplomatically offered. He sold out before it was too late and reinvested the money in securities which might be trusted to look after themselves. His income was in this way reduced by about a third; but in any case it was now secure—that was what Rachel chiefly cared about. Sidney went about hinting at the great financial sacrifices he had made in order that he might devote all his time to the poor convicts. (Later it was the poor negroes; but the sacrifices remained the same.)

When finally, tired of being a political nonentity and outraged by what he regarded as the injustice of his party chiefs, Sidney resigned his seat, Mrs. Quarles made no objection. There was no business now for her husband to ruin, and the estate in those times of agricultural prosperity that immediately followed the Armistice was still profitable. Sidney explained that he was too good for practical politics; they degraded a man of worth, their dirt came off. He had decided (for his consciousness of Rachel’s superiority would not let him rest) to devote himself to something more important than ‘myah’ politics, something worthier of his powers. To be the philosopher of politics was better than to be a politician He actually finished and published a first instalment of his political philosophy. The prolonged effort of writing blunted his enthusiasm for philosophical authorship; the poor success of the book disgusted him completely. But Rachel was still efficient and beloved. In self-defence he announced his intention of producing the largest and most comprehensive work on democracy that had ever been written. Rachel might be very active on committees, do good works, be loved by the villagers, have friends and correspondents galore; but, after all, what was that compared with writing the largest book on democracy? The only trouble was that the book did not get written. When Rachel showed herself too efficient, when people liked her too much, Mr. Quarles bought another cardindex, or a new and more ingenious kind of loose-leaf notebook, or a fountain-pen with a particularly large ink capacity—a fountain-pen, he explained, that could write six thousand words without requiring to be refilled. The retort was perhaps inadequate. But it seemed to Sidney Quarles good enough.

Philip and Elinor spent a couple of days with Mrs. Bidlake at Gattenden. Then it was the turn of Philip’s parents. They arrived at Chamford to find that Mr. Quarles had just bought a dictaphone. Sidney did not allow his son to remain for long in ignorance of his triumph. The dictaphone was his greatest achievement since the calculating typewriter.

‘I’ve just made an acquisition,’ he said in his rich voice, shooting the words up over Philip’s head. ‘Something that will interest you, as a writer.’ He led the way to his study.

Philip followed him. He had expected to be overwhelmed with questions about the East and the tropics. Instead of which his father had only perfunctorily enquired if the voyage had been good, and had gone on, almost before Philip could answer, to speak about his own affairs. For the first moment Philip had been surprised and even a little nettled. But the moon, he reflected, seems larger than Sirius, because it is nearer. The voyage, his voyage, was to him a moon, to his father the smallest of little stars.

‘Here,’ said Mr. Quarles and raised the cover. The dictaphone was revealed. ‘Wonderful invention!’ He spoke with profound selfsatisfaction. It was the sudden rising, in all its refulgence, of his moon. He explained the workings of the machine. Then, tilting up his face, ‘It’s so useful,’ he said, ‘when an idyah occurs to you. You put it into wahds at once. Talk to yourself; the machine remembahs. I have it brought up to my bedroom every night. Such valuable idyahs come to one when one’s in bed, don’t you find? Without a dictaphone they would get lost.’

‘And what do you do when you’ve got to the end of one of these phonograph records?’ Philip enquired.

‘Send it to my secretarah to be typed.’

Philip raised his eyebrows. ‘You’ve got a secretary now?’

Mr. Quarles nodded importantly. ‘Only a half-time one, so far,’ he said, addressing the cornice of the opposite wall. ‘You’ve no idyah what a lot I have to do. What with the book, and the estate, and letters, and accounts and…and…things,’ he concluded rather lamely. He sighed, he shook the martyr’s head. ‘You’re lucky, my dyah boy,’ he went on. ‘You have no distractions. You can give your whole time to writing. I wish I could give all mine. But I have the estate and all the rest. Trivial—but the business must be done.’ He sighed again. ‘I envy you your freedom.’

Philip laughed. ‘I almost envy myself sometimes. But the dictaphone will be a great help.’

‘Oh, it will,’ said Mr. Quarles

‘Undoubtedlah.’

‘How’s the book going?’

‘Slowly,’ his father replied, ‘but surely. I think I have most of my materials now.’

‘Well, that’s something.’

‘You novelists,’ said Mr. Quarles patronizingly, ‘you’re fortunate. You can just sit down and write. No preliminarah labour necessarah. Nothing like this.’ He pointed to the filing cabinets and the cardindex boxes. They were the proofs of his superiority, as well as of the enormous difficulties against which he had to struggle. Philip’s books might be successful. But after all, what was a novel? An hour’s entertainment, that was all; to be picked up and thrown aside again, carelessly. Whereas the largest book on democracy…And anyone could write a novel. It was just a question of living and then proceeding to record the fact. To compose the largest book on democracy one had to take notes, collect materials from innumerable sources, buy filing cabinets and typewriters, portable, polyglottic, calculating; one needed a cardindex and loose-leaf notebooks and a fountain-pen that could write six thousand words without having to be refilled; one required a dictaphone and a half-time secretary who would shortly have to become a whole-time one. ‘Nothing like this,’ he insisted.

‘Oh, no,’ said Philip, who had been wandering round the room examining the literary apparatus. ‘Nothing like this.’ He picked up some newspaper clippings that were lying under a paper weight on the lid of the unopened Corona. ‘Puzzles?’ he asked, holding up the irregularly chequered diagrams. ‘I didn’t know you’d become a crossword fiend.’

Mr. Quarles took the clippings from his son and put them away in a drawer. He was annoyed that Philip should have seen them. The crosswords spoiled the effect of the dictaphone. ‘Childish things,’ he said with a little laugh. ‘But they’re a distraction when the mind is tired. I like to amuse myself with them occasionalah.’ In reality Mr. Quarles spent almost the whole of his mornings on crosswords. They exactly suited his type of intelligence. He was one of the most expert puzzle-solvers of his epoch.

In the drawing-room, meanwhile, Mrs. Quarles was talking with her daughter-in-law. She was a small and active woman, grey-haired but preserving unblurred and hardly distorted the pure outlines of regular and well-moulded features. The expression of the face was at once vivacious and sensitive. It was a delicate energy, a strong but quiveringly responsive life, that shone in incessant variations of brilliance and shade of colour from her expressive grey-blue eyes. Her lips responded hardly less closely and constantly to her thoughts and feelings than did her eyes, and were grave or firm, smiled or were melancholy through an almost infinitesimally chromatic scale of emotional expression.

‘And little Phil?’ she said, enquiring after her grandchild.

‘Radiant.’

‘Darling little man!’ The warmth of Mrs. Quarles’s affection enriched her voice and was visible as a light in her eyes. ‘You must have felt miserable, leaving him for such a long time.’

Elinor gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. ‘Well, I knew that Miss Fulkes and mother between them would look after him much better than I could do.’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘I don’t believe nature ever meant me to have children. Either I’m impatient with them, or else I spoil them. Little Phil’s a pet, of course; but I know that a family would have driven me crazy.’

Mrs. Quarles’s expression changed. ‘But wasn’t it wonderful to see him again after all those months? ‘ The tone of the question was almost anxious. She hoped that Elinor would answer it with the enthusiastic affirmative which would have been natural in the circumstances to herself. But at the same time she was haunted by a fear lest the strange girl might answer (with the frankness which was so admirable a quality in her, but which was also so disquieting, in its revelation of unfamiliar and to Rachel incomprehensible states of soul) that she hadn’t been in the least pleased to see her child again. Elinor’s first words came to her as a relief.

‘Yes, it was wonderful,’ she said, but robbed the phrase of its full effect by adding. ‘I didn’t imagine I could be so glad to see him again. But it was really a wild excitement.’

There was a silence. ‘A queer girl,’ Mrs. Quarles was thinking; and her face reflected something of that bewilderment which she always felt in Elinor’s presence. She did her best to love her daughter-in-law; and up to a point she succeeded. Elinor had many excellent qualities. But something seemed to be lacking in her, something without which no human being could be entirely sympathetic to Rachel Quarles. It was as though she had been born without certain natural instincts. Not to have expected to feel happy when she saw her baby again—that was strange enough. But what Rachel found almost stranger was Elinor’s calm and casual admission of the fact. She herself would have blushed to make such an admission, even if it had been the truth. It would have seemed to her something shameful—a kind of blasphemy, a denial of what was holy. To Rachel the reverence for holy things came naturally. It was Elinor’s lack of this reverence, her inability even to realize that holy things were holy, which made it impossible for Mrs. Quarles to love her daughter-in-law as much as she would have liked.

On her side Elinor admired, respected and genuinely liked her husband’s mother. For her, the chronic difficulty was to establish effectual contact with a person whose ruling ideas and motives seemed to her so oddly incomprehensible and even so absurd. Mrs. Quarles was unobtrusively but ardently religious and lived to the best of her ability in accordance with her beliefs. Elinor admired, but felt that it was all rather absurd and superfluous. Her education had been orthodox. But she never remembered a time, even in her childhood, when she seriously believed what people told her about the other world and its inhabitants. The other world bored her; she was interested only in this. Confirmation had evoked in her no more enthusiasm than a visit to the theatre, indeed considerably less. Her adolescence had passed without the trace of a religious crisis.

‘It all seems to me just nonsense,’ she would say when the matter was discussed in her presence. And there was no affectation in her words, they were not uttered provocatively. She simply stated a fact of her personal history. Religion and, along with religion, all transcendental morality, all metaphysical speculation seemed to her nonsensical in precisely the same way as the smell of Gorgonzola seemed to her disgusting. There was no getting behind the immediate experience. Often, on occasions like this, she wished there were. She would have liked to cross the abyss which separated her from Mrs. Quarles. As it was, she felt a certain uneasiness when she was with her mother-in-law; she hesitated in her presence to express her feelings or to say what she thought. For she had found, only too often, that the frank utterance of what seemed to her perfectly natural sentiments and reasonable opinions, was apt to distress her mother-in-law, to strike her as strange and shocking. It had happened again now, as she could see from the expression which showed itself for an instant on Mrs. Quarles’s mobile and sensitive face. What had it been this time? Conscious of no offence, Elinor could only wonder. In future, she decided, she would volunteer nothing of her own; she would just agree with what was said.

As it happened, however, the next topic of conversation to be broached was one in which Elinor was too deeply interested to be able to keep her new-made resolution. Moreover it was one on which, as she knew by experience, she could speak freely without risk of unintentional offence. For where Philip was concerned, Elinor’s feelings and opinions seemed to Mrs. Quarles entirely appropriate.

‘And big Philip?’ she now asked.

‘You see how well he looks,’ Elinor answered for his health, though she knew that the question had not concerned his bodily wellbeing. It was with a certain dread that she looked forward to the conversation that impended. At the same time, however, she was glad to have an opportunity of discussing that which so constantly and distressingly occupied her thoughts.

‘Yes, yes, I can see that,’ said Mrs. Quarles. ‘But what I really meant was: how is he in himself? How is he with you?’

There was a silence. Elinor frowned slightly and looked at the floor. ‘Remote,’ she said at last.

Mrs. Quarles sighed. ‘He was always that,’ she said. ‘Always remote.’

He too, it seemed to her, was lacking in something—in the desire and the capacity to give himself, to go out and meet his fellows, even those who loved him, even those he loved. Geoffrey had been so different. At the memory of her dead son Mrs. Quarles felt her whole being invaded by a poignant sadness. If anyone had suggested that she had loved him more than she loved Philip, she would have protested. Her own feelings, she felt sure, had been initially the same. But Geoffrey had permitted himself to be loved more fully, more intimately than his brother. If only Philip had allowed her to love him more! But there had always been barriers between them, barriers of his erecting. Geoffrey had come out to meet her, had given that he might receive. But Philip had always been reluctant and parsimonious. He had always shut doors when she approached, always locked up his mind lest she should catch a glimpse of his secrets. She had never known what he really felt and thought. ‘Even as a little boy,’ she said aloud.

‘And now he has his work,’ said Elinor after a pause. ‘Which makes it worse. It’s like a castle on the top of a mountain, his work. He shuts himself up in it and he’s impregnable.’

Mrs. Quarles smiled sadly. ‘Impregnable.’ It was the right word. Even as a little boy he had been impregnable. ‘Perhaps in the end he’ll surrender of his own accord.’

‘To me?’ said Elinor. ‘Or to someone else? It wouldn’t be much satisfaction if it was to somebody else, would it? Though when I’m feeling unselfish,’ she added, ‘I wish he’d surrender to anyone—anyone, for his own good.’

Elinor’s words set Mrs. Quarles thinking of her husband—not resentfully, though he had done wrong, though he had hurt her, but pityingly, rather, and solicitously. For she could never feel that it was entirely his fault. It was his misfortune.

Elinor sighed. ‘I can’t really expect to receive his surrender,’ she said. ‘When one has become a habit, one can’t very well suddenly turn into an overwhelming revelation.’

Mrs. Quarles shook her head. In recent years Sidney’s overwhelming revelations had come from such unexpectedly humble sources. The little kitchenmaid, the gamekeeper’s daughter. How could he, she wondered for the thousandth time, how could he? It was incomprehensible.

‘If at least,’ she said almost in a whisper, ‘you had God as a companion.’ God had always been her comfort, God and the doing of God’s will. She could never understand how people could get through life without Him. ‘If only you could find God.’

Elinor’s smile was sarcastic. Remarks of this sort annoyed her by being so ridiculously beside the point. ‘It might be simpler,’ she began, but checked herself after the first words. She had meant to say that it might be simpler perhaps to find a man. But she remembered her resolution and was silent.

‘What were you saying?’

Elinor shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

****

Fortunately for Mr. Quarles the British Museum had no Essex branch. It was only in London that he could make researches and collect the documents necessary for his book. The house in Portman Square was let (Mr. Quarles blamed the income tax, but his own speculations in sugar were mainly responsible); and it was in a modest little flat in Bloomsbury (‘convenientlah nyah the Museum’) that he now camped whenever the claims of scholarship brought him to town.

During the last few weeks the claims had been more than usually peremptory. His visits to London had been frequent and prolonged. After the second of these visits Mrs. Quarles had wondered, sadly, whether Sidney had found another woman. And when, on his return from a third journey and, a few days later, on the eve of a fourth, he began to groan ostentatiously over the vast complexity of the history of democracy among the Ancient Indians, Rachel felt convinced that the woman had been found. She knew Sidney well enough to be certain that, if he had really been reading about the Ancient Indians, he would never have troubled to talk about them over the dinner-table—not at such length, in any case, nor so insistently. Sidney talked for the same reason as the hunted sepia squirts ink, to conceal his movements. Behind the inkcloud of the Ancient Indians he hoped to go jaunting up to town unobserved. Poor Sidney! He thought himself so Machiavellian. But his ink was transparent, his cunning like a child’s.

‘Couldn’t you get the books sent down from the London Library?’ Mrs. Quarles rather pointedly asked.

Sidney shook his head. ‘They’re the sort of books,’ he said importantly, ‘that are only in the Museum.’

Rachel sighed and could only hope that the woman could be trusted to look after herself well enough to keep out of serious trouble and not so well as to want to make mischief.

‘I think I shall run up to town with you to-morrow,’ he announced on the morning before Philip and Elinor took their leave.

‘Again?’ asked Mrs. Quarles.

‘There’s a point about those wretched Indians,’ he explained, ‘that I ryahly must clear up. I think I may find it in Pramathanatha Banerea’s book…Or it may be dealt with by Radakhumud Mookerji.’ He rolled out the names impressively, professionally. ‘It’s about local government in Maurya times. So democratic, you know, in spite of the central despotism. For example…’

Through the inkcloud Mrs. Quarles caught glimpses of a female figure.

Breakfast over, Sidney retired to his study and addressed himself to the morning’s crossword. A kind of onion, six letters Anticipations of the morrow distracted him; he could not fix his attention. Her breasts, he was thinking, her smooth white back…What about ‘chive’? No good; only five letters. Walking over to the bookshelf he took out his Bible; its thin pages rustled under his fingers. ‘Thy navel is like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor, thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like young roes that are twins.’ Solomon spoke for him, with what rich thunders! ‘The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.’ He read the words out loud. Gladys had a perfect figure. ‘Like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor.’ These orientals knew what passion was. Miscalling libidinousness ‘passion,’ Mr. Quarles regarded himself as a very passionate man. ‘Thy belly is like an heap of wheat.’ Passion is respectable, is actually respected by the law in some countries. For the poets it is even sacred. He agreed with the poets. But ‘like young roes’ was an odd, inadequate simile. Gladys was plump without being fat, firmly resilient. Roes, on the contrary…As a man of great passions, Sidney could regard himself as positively a noble and heroic figure. ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits; camphire with spikenard; spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh…’ But, of course, the word was ‘garlic’! Six letters. A kind of onion. ‘Myrrh and aloes, with all the chief spices.’

Their train next morning was nearly twenty minutes late. ‘Scandalous,’ Mr. Quarles kept repeating, as he looked at his watch, ‘disgraceful.’

‘You’re in a great hurry to be at your Indians,’ said Philip, smiling from his corner.

His father frowned and talked about something else. At Liverpool Street they parted, Sidney in one taxi, Philip and Elinor in a second. Sidney reached his flat only just in time. He was still engaged in washing the grime of the journey from his large, flesh-padded hands, when the bell rang. He made haste to rinse and dry himself, then, adjusting his face, he stepped into the hall and opened. It was Gladys. He received her with a kind of condescending regality, his chin tilted, his chest thrown back, his waistcoat projecting, but smiling down at her (Gladys called herself ‘petite’) and graciously twinkling through half-shut eyelids. It was an impudent, vulgar, snubby little face that smiled back at him. But it was not her face that had brought Mr. Quarles to London, it was not the individual Gladys Helmsley; it was the merely generic aspect of the woman, her ‘figah,’ as Sidney would have euphemistically put it.

‘You’re very punctual, my dyah,’ he said, holding out his hand.

Gladys was rather taken aback by the coolness of his greeting. After what had happened last time, she had expected something tenderer.

‘Am I!’ she said, for lack of anything better to say; and since human beings have only a limited number of noises and grimaces with which to express the multiplicity of their emotions, she laughed as though she had been amused by something, when in fact she was only surprised and disquieted. It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him, provocative-petulantly, why he didn’t kiss her, whether he was tired of her—already. But she decided to wait.

‘Almost too punctual,’ Sidney went on. ‘My train was scandalouslah late. Scandalouslah!’ He radiated indignation.

‘Fancy! ‘ said Gladys. The refinement that hung around her speech, like a too genteel disguise, dropped away from time to time, leaving individual words and phrases nakedly cockney.

‘Ryahly disgraceful!’ said Sidney. ‘Trains have no business to be late. I shall write to the Traffic Superintendent at Liverpool Street. I’m not sure,’ he added, still more importantly, ‘that I shan’t write to the Times as well.’

Gladys was impressed. Mr. Quarles had intended that she should be. Apart from all merely sensual satsfactions, the greatest charm of his sexual holidays resided in the fact that they were shared with impressible companions. Sidney liked them, not only young, but of a lower class, and poor. To feel himself unequivocally superior and genuinely admired was for Sidney a luxury almost as great as an embracement. His escapades were holidays not only from chastity, but also from that sense of inferiority which, at home, in parliament, at the office, had always inveterately haunted him. In relation to young women of the lower classes he was a great man, as well as a ‘passionate’ one.

Gladys, on her side, was impressed by his thunderings. But she was also amused. Impressed, because she belonged to the world of poor and patient wage-slaves, who accept the unpleasantnesses of social life as so many natural phenomena, uncontrollable by human agency and recalcitrant to human desires. But Sidney was one of the Olympian rich; the rich refuse to accept unpleasantness; they write letters to the Times about it, they pull wires, use influence, lodge formal complaints with an always friendly and obsequious police. To Gladys it was wonderful—wonderful, but also very funny. There was such a lot of loud haw-haw and lahdy-da about the whole performance. It was so like the parody of itself on the music-hall stage. She admired, she realized very accurately the economic and social causes of Sidney’s behaviour (it was that realization which had made her so promptly his mistress). But she also laughed. She lacked reverence.

Mr. Quarles opened the sittingroom door to let her pass.

‘Ta,’ said Gladys and walked in.

He followed. On the nape of her neck, her dark cropped hair ended in a little triangle that pointed downwards along the spine. She was wearing a thin green dress. Through the fine stuff he could see, just below her shoulders, the line where the underclothes gave place to bare skin. A belt of black shiny leather was fastened in a slant very low on her hips. At every stride it rose and fell on her left hip with a rhythmical regularity. Her stockings were the colour of sunburnt flesh. Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on. wheels, Mr. Quarles was peculiarly susceptible to calves, found modem fashions a treat and could never quite get over the belief that the young women who adopted them had deliberately made themselves indecent for his benefit and because they wanted him to become their lover. His eyes followed the curves of the lustrous sunburn. But what fascinated him most to-day was the black leather belt flicking up and down over the left haunch, with the regularity of a piece of machinery, every time she moved her leg. In that rise and fall the whole unindividualized species, the entire sex semaphored their appeal.

Gladys halted and turned towards him with a smile, expectantly coquettish. But Mr. Quarles made no responding gesture.

‘I’ve got the Corona hyah,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we had better begin at once.’

For the second time Gladys was surprised, thought of making a comment, and again said nothing, but sat down in silence before the typewriter.

Mr. Quarles put on his tortoiseshell-rimmed pince-nez and opened his despatch case. He had found a mistress, but he did not see why that should entail the loss of a typist, for whose services, after all, he paid.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, looking up at her over the top of his pince-nez, ‘we’d better begin with those letters to the Traffic Superintendent and the Times.’ Gladys adjusted the paper, typed the date. Mr. Quarles cleared his throat and dictated. There were some good phrases, he flattered himself, in the letters. ‘Inexcusable slackness entailing the waste of time otherwise valuable than that of drowsy railway bureaucrats’—that, for example, was excellent. And so (for the benefit of the Times) was ‘the pampered social parasites of a protected industry.’

‘That’ll teach the dogs,’ he said with satisfaction, as he read the letters through. ‘That’ll make them squirm.’ He looked to Gladys for applause, and was not entirely satisfied with the smile on that impertinent face. ‘Pity old Lord Hagworm’s not alive,’ he added, calling up strong allies

‘I’d have written to him. He was a director of the company.’ But the last of the Hagworms had died in 1912. And Gladys continued to be more amused than admiring.

Mr. Quarles dictated a dozen more letters, the answers to a correspondence which he had allowed to accumulate for several days before coming to London, so that the total might seem more important and also that he might get his full money’s worth out of Gladys’s secretaryship

‘Thank goodness,’ he said, when the last of the letters was answered. ‘You’ve no idyah,’ he went on (and the great thinker had come to reinforce the landed gentleman), ‘you’ve no idyah how exasperating these trivial little things can be, when you’ve got something more syahrious and important to think about.’

‘I suppose they must be,’ said Gladys, thinking how funny he was.

‘Take down,’ commanded Mr. Quarles, to whom a pensee had suddenly occurred. He leaned back in his chair and, closing his eyes, pursued the elusive phrase.

Gladys waited, her fingers poised above the keyboard. She looked at the watch on her wrist. Ten past twelve. It would be lunch-time soon. A new watch—that would be the first thing she’d make him give her. The one she had was such a cheap, nasty-looking watch; and it kept such bad time.

‘Note for the volume of Reflections,’ said Mr. Quarles, without opening his eyes. The keys briefly rattled. ‘The ivory pinnacles of thought’—he repeated the words inwardly. They made a satisfying reverberation along the corridors of his mind. The phrase was caught. He sat up briskly and opened his eyes—to become aware that the lisle-thread top of one of Gladys’s sunburnt stockings was visible, from where he was sitting, to a considerable distance above the knee.

‘All my life,’ he dictated, his eyes fixed on the lisle thread, ‘I have suffered from the irrelevant—no, say “importunate”—interruptions of the wahld’s trivialitah, full stop. Some thinkers comma I know comma are able to ignore these interruptions comma to give them a fleeting but sufficient attention and return with a serene mind to higher things full stop.’

There was silence. Above the lisle thread, Mr. Quarles was thinking, was the skin,—soft, curving tightly over the firm curved flesh. To caress and, caressing, to feel the finger-tips silkily caressed; to squeeze a handful of elastic flesh. Even to bite. Like a round goblet, like a heap of wheat.

Suddenly conscious of the direction of his glances, Gladys pulled down her skirt.

‘Where was I?’ asked Mr. Quarles.

‘Higher things with a serene mind,’ Gladys g answered, reading from the page in front of her.

‘H’m.’ He rubbed his nose. ‘For me comma alas comma this serenitah has always been impossible semi-colon; my nahvous sensibilitah is too great full stop. Dragged down from the ivorah pinnacles of thought’ (he rolled out the phrase with relish) ‘into the common dust comma, I am exasperated comma, I lose my peace of mind and am unable to climb again into my tower.’

He rose and began to walk restlessly about the room.

‘That’s always been my trouble,’ he said. ‘Too much sensibilitah. A syahrious thinker ought to have no temperament, no nerves. He has no business to be passionate.’

The skin, he was thinking, the firm elastic flesh. He halted behind her chair. The little triangle of cropped hair pointed down along her spine. He put his hands on her shoulders and bent over her.

Gladys looked up, smiling impertinently, with triumph. ‘Well?’ she asked.

Mr. Quarles bent lower and kissed her neck. She giggled.

‘How you tickle!’

His hands explored her, sliding along her arms, pressing her body—the body of the species, of the entire sex. The individual Gladys continued to giggle.

‘Naughty!’ she said, and made a pretence of pushing his hands away. ‘Naughty!’

CHAPTER XXI

‘A month ago,’ said Elinor, as their taxi drove out of Liverpool Street Station, ‘we were in Udaipur.’

‘It certainly seems improbable,’ said Philip, agreeing with the implications of her remark.

‘These ten months of travel have been like an hour in a cinema. There’s the Bank. I begin to doubt whether I’ve ever been away.’ She sighed. ‘It’s rather a dreadful feeling.’

‘Is it?’ said Philip. ‘I suppose I’m used to it. I never do feel that anything has really happened before this morning.’ He craned his neck out of the window. ‘Why people should bother about the Taj Mahal when there’s St. Paul’s to look at, I can’t imagine. What a marvel!’

‘That wonderful black and white of the stone.’

‘As though it were an engraving. Doubly a work of art. Not merely architecture, but an etching of architecture.’ He leaned back. ‘I often doubt whether I ever had a childhood,’ he went on, returning to the previous conversation.

‘That’s because you never think of it. Lots of my childhood is more real to me than Ludgate Hill here. But then I constantly think of it.’

‘That’s true,’ said Philip. ‘I don’t often try to remember. Hardly ever, in fact. I always seem to have too much to do and think about.’

‘You have no natural piety,’ said Elinor. ‘I wish you had.’

They drove along the Strand. The two little churches protested against Australia House, in vain. In the courtyard of King’s College a group of young men and women sat in the sun waiting for the Professor of Pastoral Theology. At the pit door of the Gaiety there was already a queue; the placards advertised the four hundredth performance of’ The Girl from Biarritz.’ Next door to the Savoy, Philip noticed, you could still buy a pair of boots for twelve-and-six. In Trafalgar Square the fountains were playing, Sir Edwin Landseer’s lions mildly glared, the lover of Lady Hamilton stood perched among the clouds, like St. Simeon the Stylite. And behind the grim colonnade of the National Gallery Uccello’s horsemen timelessly fought and Rubens raped his Sabines, Venus looked into her mirror and in the midst of Piero’s choiring angels Jesus was born into a magically lovely world.

The cab turned down Whitehall.

‘I like to think of all the bureaucrats.’

‘I don’t,’ said Elinor.

‘Scribbling away,’ he went on,’scribbling from morning till night in order that we may live in freedom and comfort. Scribble, scribble—the result is the British Empire. What a comfort,’ he added, ‘to live in a world where one can delegate everything tiresome, from governing to making sausages, to somebody else.’

At the Gate of the Horse Guards the mounted sentries looked as though they were stuffed. Near the Cenotaph a middleaged lady was standing with raised eyes, murmuring a prayer over the Kodak with which she proposed to take a snapshot of the souls of the nine hundred thousand dead. A Sikh with a black beard and a pale mauve turban emerged from Grindley’s as they passed. The time, according to Big Ben, was twenty-seven minutes past eleven. In the library of the House of Lords was there a dozing marquess? A charabanc disgorged Americans at the door of Westminster Abbey. Looking back through the little porthole in the hood they were able to see that the hospital was still urgently in need of funds.

John Bidlake’s house was in Grosvenor Road, overlooking the river.

‘Pimlico,’ said Philip meditatively, as they approached the house. He laughed. ‘Do you remember that absurd song your father used always to quote?’

‘“To Pimlico Then let us go,”’ Elinor chanted.

‘“One verse omitted here.” You mustn’t forget that.’ They both laughed, remembering John Bidlake’s comments.

‘“One verse omitted here.” It’s omitted in all the anthologies. I’ve never been able to discover what happened when they’d got to Pimlico. It’s kept me wondering for years, feverishly. Nothing like Bowdlerism for heating the imagination.’

‘Pimlico,’ Philip repeated. Old Bidlake, he was thinking, had made of Pimlico a sort of Rabelaisian Olympus. He liked the phrase. But ‘Gargantuan’ would be better for public use than ‘Rabelaisian.’ For those who had never read him, Rabelais connoted nothing but smut. Gargantuan Olympus, then. They had at least heard rumours that Gargantua was large.

But the John Bidlake they found sitting by the stove in his studio was not at all Olympian, seemed less instead of more than life size. He suffered himself to be kissed by his daughter, limply shook hands with Philip.

‘Good to see you again,’ he said. But there was no resonance in his voice; the undertone ofjovial thunders and jovial laughters was absent. He spoke without gusto. His eyes were without lustre, and bloodshot. He looked thin and grey.

‘How are you, father?’ Elinor was surprised and distressed. She had never seen her father like this before.

‘Not well,’ he answered, shaking his head, ‘not well. Something wrong with my insides.’ The old lion suddenly and recognizably roared. ‘Making us go through life with a barrow-full of tripes! I’ve always resented God’s practical jokes.’ The roar became plaintive. ‘I don’t know what’s happening to mine now. Something very unpleasant.’ It degenerated almost into a whine. ‘I feel wretched.’ Lengthily, the old man described his symptoms.

‘Have you seen a doctor?’ Elinor asked, when he had finished.

He shook his head. ‘Don’t believe in them. They never do one any good.’ The truth was that he had a superstitious terror of doctors. Birds of evil omen—he hated to see them in the house.

‘But you really ought.’ She tried to persuade him.

‘All right,’ he at last consented grumblingly.

‘Let the quacks come.’ But secretly he was rather relieved. He had been wanting to see the doctor for some time now; but his superstition had been stronger hitherto than his desire. The ill-omened medicine man was now to come, but not on his invitation; on Elinor’s. The responsibility was not his; not on him, therefore, would fall the bad luck. Old Bidlake’s private religion was obscurely complicated.

They began to talk of other things. Now that he knew he could consult a doctor in safety, John Bidlake felt better and more cheerful.

I’m worried about him,’ said Elinor, as they drove away.

Philip nodded. ‘Being seventy-three’s no joke. He’s begun to look his age.’

What a head! he was thinking. He wished he could paint. Literature couldn’t render it. One could describe it, of course, down to the last wrinkle. But where would one be then? Nowhere. Descriptions are slow. A face is instantaneously perceived. A word, a single phrase â€”that was what one needed. ‘The glory that was Greece, grown old.’ That, for example, would give you something of the man. Only of course it wouldn’t do. Quotations have something facetiously pedantic about them. ‘A statue in parchment’ would be better. ‘The parchment statue of what had once been Achilles was sitting, crumpled, near the stove.’ That was getting nearer the mark. No longwinded description. But for anyone who had ever seen a cast of the Discobolos, handled a vellum-bound book, heard of Achilles, John Bidlake was in that sentence visible. And for those who had never seen a Greek statue or read about Achilles in a book with a crinkly sheep-skin cover? Well, presumably they could go to the devil.

‘All the same,’ he thought, ‘it’s too literary. Too much culture.’

Elinor broke the silence. ‘I wonder how I shall find Everard, now that he’s become such a great man.’ With her mind’s eye she saw the keen face, the huge but agile body. Swiftness and violence. And he was in love with her. Did she like the man? Or did she detest him?

‘I wonder if he’s started pinching people’s ears, like Napoleon?’ Philip laughed. ‘Anyhow, it’s only a matter of time.’

‘All the same,’ said Elinor, ‘I like him.’ Philip’s mockery had answered her question for her.

‘So do I. But mayn’t I laugh at what I like?’

‘You certainly laugh at me. Is that because you like me?’

He took her hand and kissed it. ‘I adore you, and I never laugh at you. I take you perfectly seriously.’

Elinor looked at him, unsmiling. ‘You make me desperate sometimes. What would you do, if I went off with another man? Would you care two pins?’

‘I should be perfectly wretched.’

‘Would you?’ She looked at him. Philip was smiling; he was a thousand miles away. ‘I’ve a good mind to make the experiment,’ she added, frowning. ‘But would you be wretched? I’d like to be certain before I began.’

‘And who’d be your fellow experimenter?’

‘Ah, that’s the trouble. Most other men are so impossible.’

‘What a compliment!’

‘But you’re impossible too, Phil. The most impossible of them all, really. And the worst of it is I love you, in spite of it. And you know it. Yes, and exploit it too.’ The cab drew up at the curb. She reached for her umbrella. ‘But you be careful,’ she went on, as she rose to her feet. ‘I’m not indefinitely exploitable. I won’t go on giving something for nothing for ever. One of these days I shall start looking for somebody else.’ She stepped out on to the pavement.

‘Why not try Everard,’ he chaffed, looking out at her through the window of the cab.

‘Perhaps I shall,’ she answered. ‘I know Everard would ask nothing better.’

Philip laughed and blew her a kiss. ‘Tell the man to drive to the Club,’ he said.

Everard kept her waiting nearly ten minutes. When she had finished re-powdering her face, Elinor wandered inquisitively about the room. The flowers were abominably arranged. And that cabinet full of old swords and daggers and inlaid pistols was hideous, like a thing in a museum; a monstrosity, but at the same time rather touchingly absurd. Everard had such a schoolboyish ambition to ride about on a horse and chop people’s heads off; the cabinet gave him away. So did that glass-topped table with the tray-full of coins and medals under the crystal lid. How proudly he had shown her his treasures! There was the Macedonian tetradrachm, with the head of Alexander the Great in the guise of Hercules; the sestertius of 44 B.C. with the formidable profile of Caesar, and next to it Edward iI.’s rose noble stamped with the ship that symbolized the beginning of England’s power at sea. And there, on Pisanello’s medal, was Sigismondo Malatesta, most beautiful of ruffians; and there was Queen Elizabeth in her ruff and Napoleon with laurels in his hair, and the Duke of Wellington. She smiled at them affectionately; they were old friends. The satisfactory thing about Everard, she reflected, was that you always knew where you were with him. He was always so definitely himself; he lived up to character. She opened the piano and played a couple of chords; out of tune, as usual. On the little table near the fireplace was a volume of Everard’s latest Speeches and Addresses. She picked it up, she turned over the pages. ‘The policy of the British Freemen,’ she read, ‘may be summarized as Socialism without Political Democracy, combined with Nationalism without insularity.’ That sounded excellent. But if he had written ‘ political democracy without socialism combined with insularity without nationalism’she would probably have admired just as sincerely. These abstractions! she shook her head and sighed. ‘I must be a fool,’ she thought. But really they meant nothing to her. They were quite empty. Words, nothing more. She turned a page. ‘The party system works well enough in cases where the parties are merely two groups of rival oligarchs, belonging to the same class and having fundamentally the same interests and ideals, competing with one another for power. But when parties become identified with classes and develop strict party principles, the system becomes an insanity. Because I sit on one side of the house and you sit on the other, I am compelled to believe in individualism to the exclusion of all state interference, you are compelled to believe in state interference to the exclusion of all individualism; I am compelled to believe in nationalism, even in economic nationalism (which is an imbecility), and you are compelled to believe in internationalism, even political internationalism (which is no less of an imbecility); I am compelled to believe in the dictatorship of the rich (to the exclusion of the intelligent), you are compelled to believe in the dictatorship of the poor (also to the exclusion of the intelligent). All this for the simple and politically irrelevant reason that I am on the Right and you are on the Left. In our parliaments the claims of topography are stronger than those of sense. Such are the blessings of the modern party system. It is the aim of the British Freemen to abolish that system, along with the corrupt and inefficient parliamentarism which is its corollary.’ That sounded all right, she thought; but she wondered, nevertheless, why people should bother about this sort of thing. Instead of just living. But apparently, if one were a man, one found just living dull. She reopened the book in the middle. ‘Every English liberty has been paid for by a new slavery. The destruction of feudalism strengthened the Crown. At the Reformation, we disposed of Papal infallibility, but we saddled ourselves with the divine right of kings. Cromwell smashed the divine right of kings, but imposed the tyranny of the landowners and the middle classes. The tyranny of the landowners and the middle classes is rapidly being destroyed, in order that we may have the dictatorship of the proletariat. A new infallibility, not of the Pope, but of the majority, has been propounded—an infallibility which we are compelled by law to believe in. The British Freemen are pledged to a new reformation and a new political revolution. We shall dispose of the dictatorship of the proletariat as our fathers disposed of the divine right of kings. We shall deny majority infallibility as they denied papal infallibility. The British Freemen stand for…’ Elinor had some difficulty in turning the page. Stand for what? she wondered. For the dictatorship of Everard and the infallibility of Webley? She blew at the recalcitrant pages; they fluttered apart. ‘…for justice and liberty. Their policy is that the best men shall rule, whatever their origin. Careers, in a word, must be fully open to talents. That is justice. They demand that every problem shall be dealt with on its own merits, intelligently, without reference to traditional party prejudices or the worthless opinion of stupid majorities. That is liberty. Those who imagine that liberty is synonymous with universal suffrage…’ A door banged; a loud voice resounded in the hall. There was a rush of feet on the stairs; the house shook. The door of the drawing-room burst open, as though a bomb had exploded on the outside. Everard Webley came in on a burst of loud apology and welcome.

‘How can I excuse myself?’ he cried, as he took her hands. ‘But if you knew what a whirl I live in! How marvellous it is to see you again! Not changed at all. As lovely as ever.’ He looked intently into her face. The same serene pale eyes, the same full and melancholy lips. ‘And looking so wonderfully well!’

She smiled back at him. His eyes were a very dark brown; from a little distance they seemed all pupil. Fine eyes, but rather disquieting, she found, in their intent, bright, watchful fixity. She looked into them a moment, then turned away. ‘You too,’ she said, ‘just the same. But then I don’t know why we should be different.’ She glanced back into his face and found him still intently looking at her. ‘Ten months and travelling in the tropics don’t turn one into somebody else.’

Everard laughed. ‘Thank heaven for that!’ he said. ‘Let’s come down to lunch.’

‘And Philip?’ he asked, when the fish had been served

‘Is he also the same as ever?’

‘A little more so, if possible.’

Everard nodded. ‘A little more so. Quite. One would expect it. Seeing blackamoors walking about without trousers must have made him still more sceptical about the eternal verities than he was.’

Elinor smiled, but at the same time was a little offended by his mockery. ‘And what’s been the effect on you of seeing so many Englishmen walking about in pea-green uniforms?’ she retorted.

Everard laughed.’strengthened my belief in the eternal verities, of course.’

‘Of which you’re one?’

He nodded. ‘Of which, naturally, I’m one.’ They looked at one another, smiling. It was Elinor again who first averted her eyes.

‘Thanks for telling me.’ She kept up the note of irony. ‘I mightn’t have guessed by myself.’ There was a little silence.

‘Don’t imagine,’ he said at last in a tone that was no more bantering, but serious, ‘that you can make me lose my temper by telling me that I’ve got a swelled head.’ He spoke softly; but you were conscious of huge reserves of power. ‘Other people might succeed perhaps. But then one doesn’t like to be bothered by the lower animals. One squashes them. But with fellow humans one discusses things rationally.’

‘I’m most relieved to hear it,’ laughed Elinor.

‘You think I’ve got a swelled head,’ he went on. ‘And I suppose it’s true in a way. But the trouble is, I know it’s justified—experimentally. Modesty’s harmful if it’s false. Milton said that “nothing profits more than self-esteem founded on just and right.” I know that mine is founded on just and right. I know, I’m absolutely convinced that I can do what I want to do. What’s the good of denying the knowledge? I’m going to be master, I’m going to impose my will. I have the determination and the courage. Very soon I shall have the organized strength. And then I shall take control. I know it; why should I pretend that I don’t?’ He leaned back in his chair and there was a long silence.

‘It’s absurd,’ Elinor was thinking, ‘it’s ridiculous to talk like that.’ It was the protest of her critical intellect against her feelings. For her feelings had been strangely moved. His words, the tone of his voice—so soft, yet with such vibrating latencies of power and passion divinable beneath its softness—had carried her away. When he had said, ‘I’m going to be master,’ it was as though she had taken a gulp of mulled wine—such a warmth had suddenly tingled through her whole body. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she inwardly repeated, trying to avenge herself on him for his easy conquest, trying to punish the traitors within her own soul who had so easily surrendered. But what had been done could not wholly be undone. The words might be ridiculous; but the fact remained that, while he was uttering them, she had thrilled with sudden admiration, with excitement, with a strange desire to exult and laugh aloud.

The servant changed the plates. They talked of indifferent matters—of her travels, of doings in London while she had been away, of common friends. The coffee was brought, they lit their cigarettes; there was a silence. How would it be broken? Elinor wondered apprehensively. Or rather did not wonder; for she knew and it was this prophetic knowledge that made her apprehensive. Perhaps she could forestall him by breaking the silence herself. Perhaps, if she rattled on, she could keep the conversation insignificant till it was time for her to go. But there seemed suddenly to be nothing to say. She felt as though paralysed by the approach of the inevitable event. She could only sit and wait. And at last the inevitable duly happened.

‘Do you remember,’ he said slowly, without looking up, ‘what I told you before you went away?’

‘I thought we’d agreed not to talk about it again.’

He threw back his head with a little laugh. ‘Well, you thought wrong.’ He looked at her and saw in her eyes an expression of distress and anxiety, an appeal for mercy. But Everard was merciless. He planted his elbows on the table and leaned towards her. She dropped her eyes.

‘You said I hadn’t changed to look at,’ he said in his soft voice with its latencies of violence. ‘Well, my mind hasn’t changed either. It’s still the same, Elinor, still the same as it was when you went away. I love you just as much, Elinor. No, I love you more.’ Her hand lay limp on the table in front of her. He stretched out one of his and took it. ‘Elinor,’ he whispered.

She shook her head, without looking at him.

Softly and passionately he talked on. ‘You don’t know what love can be,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what I can give you. Love that’s desperate and mad, like a forlorn hope. And at the same time tender, like a mother’s love for a sick child. Love that’s violent and gentle, violent like a crime and as gentle as sleep.’

‘Words,’ Elinor was thinking, ‘absurd melodramatic words.’ But they moved her, as his boasting had moved her

‘Please, Everard,’ she said aloud,’ no more.’ She didn’t want to be moved. With an effort she held her glance steady while she looked into his face, into those bright and searching eyes. She essayed a laugh, she shook her head. ‘Because it’s impossible, and you know it.’

‘All I know,’ he said slowly, ‘is that you’re afraid. Afraid of coming to life. Because you’ve been half dead all these years. You haven’t had a chance to come fully alive. And you know I can give it you. And you’re afraid, you’re afraid.’

‘What nonsense!’ she said. It was just ranting and melodrama.

‘And perhaps you’re right, in a way,’ he went on. ‘Being alive, really alive, isn’t entirely a joke. It’s dangerous. But by God,’ he added, and the latent violence in his soft voice suddenly broke out into ringing actuality, ‘it’s exciting.’

‘If you knew what a fright you gave me!’ she said.’shouting like that!’ But it was not only a fright she had had. Her nerves and her very flesh still crept and quivered with the obscure and violent exultations which his voice had evoked in her. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she assured herself. But it was as though she had heard the voice directly with her body. The echoes of it seemed to vibrate at her very midriff. ‘Ridiculous,’ she repeated. And then what was this love he talked about so thrillingly? Just an occasional brief violence in the intervals of business. He despised women, resented them because they wasted a man’s time and energy. She had often heard him say that he had no time for love-making. His advances were almost an insult—the propositions one makes to a woman of the streets.

‘Do be reasonable, Everard,’ she said.

Everard withdrew his hand from hers and, with a laugh, leaned back in his chair. ‘Very well,’ he answered. ‘For to-day.’

‘For every day.’ She felt profoundly relieved. ‘Besides,’ she added, quoting a phrase of his, with a little ironical smile, ‘you’re not a member of the leisured class. You’ve got more important things to do than make love.’

Everard looked at her for a little in silence and his face was grave with a kind of lowering thoughtfulness. More important things to do? It was true, of course. He was angry with himself for wanting so much to have her. Angry with Elinor for keeping him unsatisfied.’shall we talk about Shakespeare?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘Or the musical glasses?’

****

The fare was three-and-six. Philip gave the driver two half-crowns and climbed the steps of the club’s pillared portico pursued by the sound of thanks. He made a habit of overtipping. It was not out of ostentation or because he had asked, or meant to ask, special services. (Indeed, few men could have demanded less of their servants than did Philip, could have been more patient to put up with bad service, and more willing to excuse remissness.) His overtipping was the practical expression of a kind of remorseful and apologetic contempt. ‘My poor devil!’ the superfluous gratuity seemed to imply, ‘I’m sorry to be your superior.’ And perhaps also there was a shilling’s worth of apology for his very considerateness as an employer. For if he was unexacting in his demands, that was due as much to a dread and dislike of unnecessary human contacts as to consideration and kindness. From those who served him Philip demanded little, for the good reason that he wanted to have as little as possible to do with them. Their presence disturbed him. He did not like to have his privacy intruded upon by alien personalities. To be compelled to speak with them, to have to establish a direct contact—not of intelligences, but of wills, feelings, intuitions—with these intruders was always disagreeable to him. He avoided it as much as he could; and when contact was necessary, he did his best to dehumanize the relation. Philip’s generosity was in part a compensation for his inhuman kindness towards its recipients. It was conscience money.

The doors stood open; he entered. The hall was vast, dim, pillared and cool. Sir Francis Chantrey’s allegorical marble group of Science and Virtue subduing the Passions writhed with classical decorum in a niche on the stairs. He hung up his hat and went to the smokingroom to look at the papers and await the arrival of his guests. Spandrell was the first to arrive.

‘Tell me,’ said Philip, as soon as the greetings were over and the vermouth ordered, ‘tell me quickly, before he comes, what about my absurd young brother-in-law. What’s happening with him and Lucy Tantamount?’

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘What does usually happen on these occasions? And in any case, is this the place and time to go into details?’ He indicated the other occupants of the smokingroom. A cabinet minister, two judges and a bishop were within earshot.

Philip laughed. ‘But I only wanted to know how serious the affair really was, how long it’s likely to last…’

‘Very serious as far as Walter’s concerned. As for duration—who knows? But Lucy’s going abroad very soon.’

‘Thank heaven for small mercies! Ah, here you are!’ It was Walter. ‘And there’s Illidge.’ He waved his hand. The newcomers refused an aperitive. ‘Let’s come and eat at once, then,’ said Philip.

The dining-room at Philip’s club was enormous. A double row of stucco Corinthian pillars supported a gilded ceiling. From the pale chocolate-brown walls, the portraits of distinguished members, now deceased, glared down. Curtains of claretcoloured velvet were looped up at either side of the six windows, a claretcoloured carpet muffled the floor and in their claretcoloured liveries the waiters darted about almost invisibly, like leaf-insects in a forest.

‘I always like this room,’ said Spandrell as they entered. ‘It’s like a scene for Belshazzar’s feast.’

‘But a very Anglican Belshazzar,’ Walter qualified.

‘Gosh!’ exclaimed Illidge, who had been looking round

‘This is the sort of thing that really does make me feel pleb-ish.’

Philip laughed, rather uncomfortably. Changing the subject, he pointed out the protectively coloured waiters. They proved the Darwinian hypothesis. ‘Survival of the fittest,’ he said as they sat down at their appointed table. ‘The men in other colours must have been killed off by infuriated members.’ One of the claretcoloured survivors brought the fish. They began to eat.

‘It’s curious,’ said Illidge, pursuing the train of thought suggested by his first impressions of the room, ‘it’s really extraordinary that I should be here at all. Sitting with you, at any rate, as a guest. For there wouldn’t have been anything so very surprising about my being here in one of these wine-coloured coats. That at least would have been in harmony with what the parsons would call “my station in life.”’ He uttered a brief resentful laugh. ‘But to be sitting with you—that’s really almost incredible. And it’s all due to the fact that a Manchester shopkeeper had a son with tendencies to scrofula. If Reggie Wright had been normally healthy, I’d probably be cobbling shoes in Lancashire. But luckily Reggie had tubercle bacilli in his lymph-system. The doctors prescribed a country life. His father took a cottage in our village for his wife and child, and Reggie went to the village school. But his father was ambitious for Reggie. (What a disgusting little rat he was!) ‘ Illidge remarked parenthetically. ‘Wanted him to go to Manchester Grammar School, later on. With a scholarship. Paid our schoolmaster to give him special coaching. I was a bright boy; the master liked me. While he was coaching Reggie, he thought he might as well coach me. Gratis, what’s more. Wouldn’t let my mother pay a penny. Not that she could have done so very easily, poor woman. The time came, and it was I who got the scholarship. Reggie failed.’ Illidge laughed. ‘Miserable scrofulous little squit! But I’m eternally grateful to him and the busy bacilli in his glands. But for them I’d be carrying on my uncle’s cobbling business in a Lancashire village. And that’s the sort of thing one’s life hinges on—some absolutely absurd, million-to-one chance. An irrelevance, and youi life’s altered.’

‘Not an irrelevance,’ objected Spandrell. ‘Your scholarship wasn’t irrelevant; it was very much to the point, it was in harmony with you. Otherwise you wouldn’t have won it, you wouldn’t be here. I doubt if anything is really irrelevant. Everything that happens Jis intrinsically like the man it happens to.’

‘That’s a bit oracular, isn’t it?’ Philip objected. ‘Perceiving events, men distort them—put it like that—so that what happens seems to be like themselves.’

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘There may be that sort of distortion. But I believe that events come ready-made to fit the people they happen to.’

‘What rot!’ said Illidge, disgustedly.

Philip dissented more politely. ‘But many people can be influenced by the same event in entirely different and characteristic ways.’

‘I know,’ Spandrell answered. ‘But in some indescribable way the event’s modified, qualitatively modified, so as to suit the character of each person involved in it. It’s a great mystery and a paradox.’

‘Not to say an absurdity and impossible,’ put in Illidge.

‘Absurd, then, and impossible,’ Spandrell agreed. ‘But all the same, I believe that’s how it happens. Why should things be logically explainable?’

‘Yes, why indeed? ‘ Walter echoed.

‘Still,’ said Philip, ‘your providence that makes the same event qualitatively different for different peopleisn’t that a bit thick?’

‘No thicker than our being here at all. No thicker than all this.’ With a wave of his hand he indicated the Belshazzaresque dining-room, the eaters, the plumcoloured waiters and the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy, who happened at that moment to be entering the room with the Professor of Poetry at the University of Cambridge.

But Philip was argumentatively persistent. ‘But assuming, as the scientists do, that the simplest hypothesis is the best—though I could never for the life of me see what justification, beyond human ineptitude, they had for doing so…’

‘Hear, hear.’

‘What justification?’ repeated Illidge. ‘Only the justification of observed fact, that’s all. It happens to be found experimentally that nature does do things in the simplest way.’

‘Or else,’ said Spandrell, ‘that human beings understand only the simplest explanations. In practice, you couldn’t distinguish between those alternatives.’

‘But if a thing has a simple, natural explanation, it can’t at the same time have a complicated supernatural one.’

‘Why not?’ asked Spandrell. ‘You mayn’t be able to understand or measure the supernatural forces behind the superficially natural ones (whatever the difference between natural and supernatural may be). But that doesn’t prove they’re not there. You’re simply raising your stupidity to the rank of a general law.’

Philip took the opportunity to continue his argument. ‘But assuming, all the same,’ he broke in before Illidge could speak again, ‘that the simpler explanation is likely to be the truer—aren’t the facts more simply explained by saying it’s the individual, with his history and character, who distorts the event into his own likeness? We can see individuals, but we can’t see providence; we have to postulate it. Isn’t it best, if we can do without it, to omit the superfluous postulate?’

‘But is it superfluous?’ said Spandrell. ‘Can you cover the facts without it? I have my doubts. What about the malleable sort of people—and we’re all more or less malleable, we’re all more or less made as well as born? What about the people whose characters aren’t given but are formed, inexorably, by a series of events all of one type? A run of luck, if you like to call it that, or a run of bad luck; a run of purity or a run of impurity; a run of fine heroic chances or a run of ignoble drab ones. After the run has gone on long enough (and it’s astounding the way such runs persist), the character will be formed; and then, if you like to explain it that way, you can say that it’s the individual who distorts all that happens to him into his own likeness. But before he had a definite character to distort events into the likeness of—what then? Who decided the sort of things that should happen to him then?’

‘Who decides whether a penny shall come down heads or tails?’ asked Illidge contemptuously.

‘But why bring in pennies?’ Spandrell retorted. ‘Why bring in pennies, when we’re talking about human beings? Consider yourself. Do you feel like a penny when things happen to you?’

‘It doesn’t matter how I feel. Feelings have nothing to do with objective facts.’

‘But sensations have. Science is the rationalization of sense-perceptions. Why should one class of psychological intuitions be credited with scientific value and all others denied it? A direct intuition of providential action is just as likely to be a bit of information about objective facts as a direct intuition of blueness and hardness. And when things happen to one, one doesn’t feel like a penny. One feels that events are significant; that they’ve been arranged. Particularly when they occur in series. Tails a hundred times in succession, shall we say?’

‘Give us the credit of coming down heads,’ said Philip laughing. ‘We’re the intelligentsia, remember.’ Spandrell frowned; he felt the frivolity, as an irrelevance. The subject for him was a serious one. ‘When I think of myself,’ he said, ‘I feel sure that everything that has happened to me was somehow engineered in advance. As a young boy I had a foretaste of what I might have grown up to be, but for events. Something entirely different from this actual Me.’

‘A little angel, what?’ said Illidge.

Spandrell ignored the interruption. ‘But from the time that I was fifteen onwards, things began happening to me which were prophetically like what I am now.’ He was silent.

‘And so you grew a tail and hoofs instead of a halo and a pair of wings. A sad story. Has it ever struck you,’ Illidge went on, turning towards Walter, ‘you who are an expert on art, or at least ought to be—has it ever struck you that the paintings of angels are entirely incorrect and unscientific?’ Walter shook his head. ‘A seventy-kilogram man, if he developed wings, would have to develop colossal muscles to work them. And big flying muscles would mean a correspondingly large sternum, like a bird’s. A ten-stone angel, if he wanted to fly as well as a duck, would have to have a breastbone projecting at least four or five feet. Tell your father that, next time he wants to paint a picture of the Annunciation. All the existing Gabriels are really shockingly improbable.’

Spandrell, meanwhile, was thinking of those raptures among the mountains, those delicacies of feeling, those scruples and sensitivenesses and remorses of his boyhood; and how they were all—the repentance for a bad action no less than the piercing delight at the spectacle of a flower or a landscape—in some way bound up with his sentiment for his mother, somehow rooted and implied in it. He remembered that Girls’ School in Paris, those erotic readings by flashlight under the sheets. The book had been written in the age when long black stockings and long black gloves had been the height of pornographic fashion, when ‘kissing a man without a moustache was like eating an egg without salt.’ The seductive and priapic major’s moustaches had been long, curly and waxed. What shame he had felt and what remorse! Struggled how hard, and prayed how earnestly for strength! And the god to whom he had prayed wore the likeness of his mother. To resist temptation was to be worthy of her. Succumbing, he betrayed her, he denied God. He had begun to triumph. And then, one morning, out of the blue, came the news that she was going to marry Major Knoyle. Major Knoyle’s moustaches were also curly.

‘Augustine and the Calvinists were right,’ he said aloud, breaking in on the discussion of Seraphim’s breastbones.

‘Still harping?’ said Illidge.

‘God means to save some people and damn others.’

‘Or rather he might do so if (a) he existed, (b) there were such a thing as salvation, and (c)…’

‘When I think of the War,’ Spandrell went on, interrupting him, ‘what it might have been for me and what in fact it was…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes, Augustine was right.’

‘Well, I must say,’ said Philip, ‘I’ve always been very grateful to Augustine, or whoever else it may have been, for giving me a game leg. It prevented me from being a hero; but it also preserved me from becoming a corpse.’

Spandrell looked at him; the corers of his wide mouth ironically twitched. ‘Your accident guaranteed you a quiet detached life. In other words, the event was like you. Just as the War, so far as I was concerned, was exactly like me. I’d been up at Oxford a year, when it began,’ he went on.

‘The dear old College, what?’ said Illidge, who could never hear the name of one of the more ancient and expensive seats of learning mentioned without making some derisive comment.

‘Three lively terms and two still more lively vacs—discovering alcohol and poker and the difference between women in the flesh and women in the pubescent imagination. Such an apocalypse, the first real woman!’ he added parenthetically. ‘And at the same time, such a revolting disappointment! So flat, in a way, after the superheated fancy and the pornographic book.’

‘Which is a tribute to art,’ said Philip. ‘As I’ve so often pointed out.’ He smiled at Walter, who blushed, remembering what his brother-in-law had said about the dangers of trying to make love after high poetic models. ‘We’re brought up topsy-turvy,’ Philip went on. ‘Art before life; Romeo and Juliet and filthy stories before marriage or its equivalents. Hence all young modern literature is disillusioned. Inevitably. In the good old days poets began by losing their virginity; and then, with a complete knowledge of the real thing and just where and how it was unpoetical, deliberately set to work to idealize and beautify it. We start with the poetical and proceed to the unpoetical. If boys and girls lost their virginities as early as they did in Shakespeare’s day, there’d be a revival of the Elizabethan love lyric.’

‘You may be right,’ said Spandrell. ‘All I know is that, when I discovered the reality, I found it disappointing—but attractive, all the same. Perhaps so attractive just because it was so disappointing. The heart’s a curious sort of manure—heap; dung calls to dung, and the great charm of vice consists in its stupidity and sordidness. It attracts because it’s so repellent. But repellent it always remains. And I remember when the War came, how exultantly glad I was to have a chance of getting out of the muck and doing something decent, for a change.’

‘For King and Country!’ mocked Illidge.

‘Poor Rupert Brooke! One smiles now at that thing of his about honour having come back into the world again. Events have made it seem a bit comical.’

‘It was a bad joke even when it was written,’ said Illidge.

‘No, no. At the time it was exactly what I felt myself.’

‘Of course you did. Because you were what Brooke was—a spoilt and blase member of the leisured class. You needed a new thrill, that was all. The War and that famous “honour” of yours provided it.’

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Explain it like that if you want. All I say is that in August 1914 I wanted to do something noble. I’d even have been quite pleased to get killed.’

‘“Rather death than dishonour,” what?’

‘Yes, quite literally,’ said Spandrell. ‘For I can assure you that all the melodramas are perfectly realistic. There are certain occasions when people do say that sort of thing. The only defect of melodrama is that it leads you to believe that they say it all the time. They don’t, unfortunately. But “rather death than dishonour” was exactly what I was thinking in August 1914. If the alternative to death was the stupid kind of life I’d been leading. I wanted to get killed.’

‘There speaks the gentleman of leisure again,’ said Illidge.

‘And then, just because I’d been brought up a good deal abroad and knew three foreign languages, because I had a mother who was too fond of me and a stepfather with military influence, I was transferred willynilly into the Intelligence. God was really bent on damning me.’

‘He was very kindly trying to save your life,’ said Philip.

‘But I didn’t want it saved. Not unless I could do something decent with it, something heroic for preference, or at least difficult and risky. Instead of which they put me on to liaison work and then to hunting spies. Of all the sordid and ignoble businesses…’

‘But after all the trenches weren’t so very romantic.’

‘No, but they were dangerous. Sitting in a trench, you needed courage and endurance. A spy catcher was perfectly safe and didn’t have to display any of the nobler virtues; while as to his opportunities for vice… Those towns behind the lines, and Paris, and the ports-whores and alcohol were their chief products.’

‘But after all,’ said Philip, ‘those are avoidable evils.’ Naturally cold, he found it easy to be reasonable.

‘Not avoidable by me,’ Spandrell answered. ‘Particularly in those circumstances. I’d wanted to do something decent, and I’d been prevented. So it became a kind of point of honour to do the opposite of what I’d desired. A point of honour—can you understand that?’

Philip shook his head. ‘A little too subtle for me.’

‘But just imagine yourself in the presence of a man you respect and like and admire more than you’ve ever admired and liked anyone before.’

Philip nodded. But in point of fact, he reflected, he had never deeply and whole-heartedly admired anyone. Theoretically, yes; but never in practice, never to the point of wanting to make himself a disciple, a follower. He had adopted other people’s opinions, even their modes of life—but always with the underlying conviction that they weren’t really his, that he could and certainly would abandon them as easily as he had taken them up. And whenever there had seemed any risk of his being carried away, he had deliberately resisted, had fought or fled for his liberty.

‘You’re overcome with your feeling for him,’ Spandrell continued. ‘And you go towards him with outstretched hands, offering your friendship and devotion. His only response is to put his hands in his pockets and turn away. What would you do then? ‘ Philip laughed. ‘I should have to consult Vogue’s Book of Etiquette.’

‘You’d knock him down. At least that’s what I would do. It would be a point of honour. And the more you’d admired, the more violent the knock and the longer the subsequent dance on his carcase. That’s why the whores and the alcohol weren’t avoidable. On the contrary, it became a point of honour never to avoid them. That life in France was like the life I’d been leading before the War—only much nastier and stupider, and utterly unrelieved by any redeeming feature. And after a year of it, I was desperately wangling to cling to my dishonour and avoid death. Augustine was right, I tell you,; we’re damned or saved in advance. The things that happen are a providential conspiracy.’

‘Providential balderdash!’ said Illidge; but in the silence that followed he thought again how extraordinary it was, how almost infinitely improbable that he should be sitting there, drinking claret, with the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy two tables away and the second oldest Judge of the High Court just behind him. Twenty years before the odds against, his being there under the gilded ceiling had been at the rate of several hundreds or thousands of millions to one. But there, all the same, he was. He took another draught of claret.

And Philip, meanwhile, was remembering that immense black horse, kicking, plunging, teeth bared and cars laid back; and how it suddenly started forward, dragging the carter along with it; and the rumble of the wheels; and, ‘Aie!’ his own scream; and how he shrank back against the steep bank, how he tried to climb, slipped, fell; and the appalling rush and trampling of the giant; and ‘Aie, aie!’ the huge shape between him and the sun, the great hoofs and suddenly an annihilating pain.

And through the same silence Walter was thinking of that afternoon when, for the first time, he entered Lucy Tantamount’s drawing-room. ‘Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man it happens to.’

****

‘But what’s her secret?’ Marjorie asked. ‘Why should he have gone mad about her? Because he has gone mad. Literally.’

‘Isn’t it rather an obvious secret?’ said Elinor. What she found queer was not that Walter should have lost his head about Lucy, but that he should ever have seen anything attractive in poor Marjorie. ‘After all,’ she continued, ‘Lucy’s very amusing and alive. And besides,’ she added, remembering Philip’s exasperating comments on the dog they had run over at Bombay, ‘she has a bad reputation.’

‘But is that attractive? A bad reputation?’ The tea-pot hung suspended over the cup as she asked.

‘Of course. It means that the woman who enjoys it is accessible. No sugar, thanks.’

‘But surely,’ said Marjorie, handing her the cup, men don’t want to share their mistress with other lovers.’

‘Perhaps not. But the fact that a woman has had other lovers gives a man hope. “Where others have succeeded, I can succeed.” That’s the man’s argument. And at the same time a bad reputation makes him immediately think of the woman in terms of love-making. It gives a twist to his imaginations about her. When you met Lola Montes, her reputation made you automatically think of bedrooms. You didn’t think of bedrooms when you met Florence Nightingale. Only sickrooms. Which are rather different,’ Elinor concluded.

There was a silence. It was horrid of her, Elinor was thinking, not to feel more sympathetic. But there it was; she didn’t. She reminded herself of the abominable life the poor woman had had—first with her husband, and now with Walter. Really abominable. But those dreadful, dangling, sham jade earrings! And the voice, the earnest manner…

Marjorie looked up. ‘But is it possible that men can be so easily taken in? By such a cheap bait? Men like Walter. Like Walter,’ she insisted. ‘Can men like that be such…such…’

‘Pigs?’ suggested Elinor. ‘Apparently they can. It seems odd, certainly.’ Perhaps it would be better, she reflected, if Philip were rather more of a pig and less of a hermit crab. Pigs are human—all too much so, perhaps; but still human. Whereas hermit crabs are doing their best to be molluscs.

Marjorie shook her head and sighed. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ she said with a conviction that struck Elinor as rather ludicrous. ‘What sort of an opinion can she have of herself?’ she wondered. But Marjorie’s good opinion was not for herself so much as for virtue. She had been brought up to believe in the ugliness of vice and the animal part of human nature, the beauty of virtue and the spirit. And cold by nature, she had the cold woman’s utter incomprehension of sensuality. That Walter should suddenly cease to be the Walter she had known and behave ‘like a pig,’ as Elinor rather crudely put it, was to her really extraordinary, quite apart from any personal considerations of her own attractiveness.

‘And then you must remember,’ Elinor said aloud, ‘Lucy has another advantage where men like Walter are concerned. She’s one of those women who have the temperament of a man. Men can get pleasure out of casual encounters. Most women can’t; they’ve got to be in love, more or less. They’ve got to be emotionally involved. All but a few of them. Lucy’s one of the few. She has the masculine detachment. She can separate her appetite from the rest of her soul.’

‘What a horror!’ Marjorie shuddered.

Elinor observed the shudder and was annoyed by it into contradiction.

‘Do you think so? It seems to me sometimes rather an enviable talent.’ She laughed and Marjorie was duly shocked by her cynicism. ‘For a boy with Walter’s shyness and timidity,’ she went on, ‘there’s something very exciting about that kind of bold temperament. It’s the opposite of his. Reckless, without scruple, wilful, unconscientious. I can so well understand its going to his head.’ She thought of Everard Webley. ‘Force is always attractive,’ she added. ‘Particularly if one lacks it oneself, as Walter does. Lucy’s obviously a force. You may not like that kind of force.’ She herself didn’t much like Webley’s energetic ambition. ‘But you can’t help admiring the force in itself. It’s like Niagara. Fine, even though you mayn’t want to be standing underneath. May I take another piece of bread and butter?’ She helped herself. Out of politeness Marjorie also took another slice. ‘Delicious brown bread,’ Elinor commented and wondered how Walter could have lived with anyone who crooked the little finger of the hand that held the tea-cup and who took such horribly small bites from a slice of bread and then chewed only with the front teeth, like a guinea-pig—as though the process of eating were an indelicate and rather disgusting affair.

‘But what do you think I ought to do?’ Marjorie brought herself finally to ask.

Elinor shrugged her shoulders. ‘What can you do, but hope he’ll get what he wants and soon be sick of it.’

It was obvious; but Marjorie thought her rather unfeeling, hard and cruel to have said it.

****

In London the Quarleses sketchily inhabited what had once been the last of a row of stables in a Belgravian mews. You passed under an archway. A cliff of cream-coloured stucco rose sheer on your left—windowless, for the Belgravians had declined to be aware of the squalid domesticity of their dependants. On the right stretched the low line of stables with the single storey of living rooms above, tenanted now by enormous Daimlers and the families of their chauffeurs. The mews ended in a wall, over the top of which you could see the waving planetrees of Belgravian gardens. The Quarleses doorstep lay in the shadow of this wall. Set between the gardens and the sparsely inhabited mews, the little house was very quiet. The coming and going of limousines and the occasional yelling of a child were the only disturbances.

‘But fortunately,’ Philip had remarked, ‘the rich can afford to buy silent cars. And there’s something about internal combustion engines that makes for birth control. Who ever heard of a chauffeur with eight children?’ Coach-house and horse-boxes had been knocked together in the reconstruction of the stable, into a single spacious living-room. Two screens hinted at a division. Behind the screen on the right, as you entered, was the drawing-room end of the apartment—chairs and a sofa grouped around the fireplace. The screen on the left concealed the dining-table and the entrance to a tiny kitchen. A little staircase slanted up across one of the walls, leading to the bedrooms. Yellow cretonnes mimicked the sunshine that never shone through the northward-looking windows. There were many books. Old Bidlake’s portrait of Elinor as a young girl hung over the mantelpiece.

Philip was lying on the sofa, book in hand. ‘Very remarkable,’ he read, ‘is Mr. Tate Regan’s account of pigmy parasitic males in three species of Cerativid Anglerfishes. In the Arctic Ceratias holbolli a female about eight inches in length carried on her ventral surface two males of about two-and-a-half inches. The snout and chin region of the dwarf malewas permanently attached to a papilla of the female’s skin, and the bloodvessels of the two were confluent. The male is without teeth; the mouth is useless; the alimentary canal is degenerate. In photocarynus spiniceps the female, about two-and-a-half inches in length bore a male under half an inch long on the top of her head in front of her right eye. In Edriolychnus schmidti the dimensions were about the same as in the last case, and the female carried the pigmy male upside down on the inner surface of her gill-cover.’

Philip put down the book and feeling in his breast pocket pulled out his pocket diary and his fountain-pen. ‘Female Anglerfishes,’ he wrote, ‘carry dwarf parasitic males attached to their bodies. Draw the obvious comparison, when my Walter rushes after his Lucy. What about a scene at an aquarium? They go in with a scientific friend who shows them the female Anglers and their husbands. The twilight, the fishes—perfect background.’ He was just putting his diary away, when another thought occurred to him. He reopened it. ‘Make it the aquarium at Monaco and describe Monte Carlo and the whole Riviera in terms of deep-sea monstrosity.’ He lit a cigarette and went on with his book.

There was a rap at the door. He got up and opened; it was Elinor.

‘What an afternoon!’ She dropped into a chair.

‘Well, what news of Marjorie?’ he asked.

‘No news,’ she sighed, as she took off her hat. ‘The poor creature’s as dreary as ever. But I’m very sorry for her.’

‘What did you advise her to do?’

‘Nothing. What else could she do? And Walter?’ she asked in her turn. ‘Did you get a chance to be the heavy father?’

‘The middle-weight father, shall we say. I persuaded him to come down to Chamford with Marjorie.’

‘Did you? That was a real triumph.’

‘Not quite such a triumph as you think. I had no enemy to fight with. Lucy’s going to Paris next Saturday.’

‘Let’s hope she’ll stay there. Poor Walter!’

‘Yes, poor Walter. But I must tell you about Anglerfishes.’ He told her. ‘One of these days,’ he concluded,’ I shall really have to write a modem Bestiary. Such moral lessons! But tell me, how was Everard? I quite forgot you’d seen him.’

‘You would have forgotten,’ she answered scornfully.

‘Would I? I don’t know why.’

‘No, you wouldn’t.’

‘I’m crushed,’ said Philip with a mock humility. There was a silence.

‘Everard’s in love with me,’ said Elinor at last without looking at her husband and in the flattest, most matter-of-fact of voices.

‘Is that news?’ asked Philip. ‘I thought he was an old admirer.’

‘But it’s serious,’ Elinor went on.’very serious.’ She waited anxiously for his comment. It came, after a little pause.

‘That must be less amusing.’

Less amusing! Couldn’t he understand? After all, he wasn’t a fool. Or perhaps he did understand and was only pretending not to; perhaps he was secretly glad about Everard. Or was it just indifference that made him blind? Nobody understands what he does not feel. Philip couldn’t understand her because he didn’t feel as she felt. He was confident in the belief that other people were as reasonably lukewarm as he was himself. ‘But I like him,’ she said aloud in a last desperate attempt to provoke him into at least a semblance of caring. If only he’d show himself jealous, or sad, or angry, how happy she’d be, how grateful! ‘Very much,’ she went on. ‘There’s something very attractive about him. That passionateness of his, that violence….’

Philip laughed. ‘Quite the irresistible cave-man, in fact.’

Elinor rose with a little sigh, picked up her hat and bag, and bending over her husband’s chair, kissed him on the forehead, as though she were saying goodbye; then turned away and still without a word went upstairs to her bedroom.

Philip picked up his abandoned book. ‘Bonellia viridis,’ he read, ‘is a green worm, not uncommon in the Mediterranean. The female has a body about the size of a prune, bearing a string-like, terminally bifid, very contractile proboscis, which may be two feet long. But the male is microscopic and lives in what may be called the reproductive duct (modified nephridium) of the female. It has no mouth and depends on what it absorbs parasitically through its ciliated surfaces….’

Philip once more put down the book. He was wondering whether he oughtn’t to go upstairs and say something to Elinor. He was sure she’d never really care for Everard. But perhaps he oughtn’t to take it so much for granted. She had seemed rather upset. Perhaps she had expected him to say something—how much he cared for her, how wretched he’d be, how angry, if she were to stop caring for him. But these precisely were the almost unsayable things. In the end he decided not to go upstairs. He’d wait and see, he’d put it off to another time. He went on reading about Bonellia viridis.

CHAPTER XXII

From Philip Quarles’s Notebook

To-day, at Lucy Tantamount’s, I was the victim of a very odd association of ideas. Lucy, as usual, was the French tricolor; blue round the eyes, a scarlet mouth and the rest dead white against a background of shiny metal-black hair. I made some sort of a joke. She laughed, opening her mouth—and her tongue and gums were so much paler than the paint on her lips that they seemed (it gave me a queer creepy shock of astonished horror) quite bloodless and white by contrast. And then, without transition, I was standing in front of those sacred crocodiles in the palace gardens at Jaipur, and the Indian guide was throwing them bits of meat, and the inside of the animals’ mouths was almost white, as though the mouths were lined with a slightly glace cream-coloured kid. And that’s how one’s mind naturally works. And one has intellectual pretensions! Well, well. But what a windfall for my novel! I shall begin the book with it. My Walterish hero makes his Lucyish siren laugh and immediately (to his horror; but he goes on longing for her, with an added touch of perversity, all the same and perhaps all the more) sees those disgusting crocodiles he had been looking at in India a month before. In this way I strike the note of strangeness and fantasticality at once. Everything’s incredible, if you can skin off the crust of obviousness our habits put on it. Every object and event contains within itself an infinity of depths within depths. Nothing’s in the least like what it seems—or rather it’s like several million other things at the same time. All India rushes like a cinema film through his head while she’s laughing and showing—she the beloved, longedfor, lusted-after, beautiful one—those gruesomely bloodless crocodile’s gums and palate.

The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound. (Pleuvent les bleus baisers des astres taciturnes. Mere glossolalia). But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. (Majesty alternating with a joke, for example, in the first movement of the B flat major quartet. Comedy suddenly hinting at prodigious and tragic solemnities in the scherzo of the C sharp minor quartet.) More interesting still the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further. Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example. The whole range of thought and feeling, yet all in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune. Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways—dissimilars solving the same problem. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: The novelist can assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story in their various aspects—emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical, etc. He will modulate from one to the other—as from the aesthetic to the physico-chemical aspect of things, from the religious to the physiological or financial. But perhaps this is a too tyrannical imposition of the author’s will. Some people would think so. But need the author be so retiring? I think we’re a bit too squeamish about these personal appearances nowadays.

Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting—at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make a variation on the theme. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second? And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there’s a quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc., etc. Alt about the tenth remove you might have a novelist telling your story in algebraic symbols or in terms of variations in blood-pressure, pulse, secretion of ductless glands and reaction times.

Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions of soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express—which excludes all but about .01 per cent. of the human race. Hence the real, the congenital novelists don’t write such books. But then I never pretended to be a congenital novelist.

The great defect of the novel of ideas is that it’s a made-up affair. Necessarily; for people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real; they’re slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run.

The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours. Such amazing meannesses as one’s always coming across, particularly among the rich! Such fantastic extravagances too. Both qualities, often, in the same person. And then the hoarders, the grubbers, the people who are entirely and almost unceasingly preoccupied with money. Nobody’s unceasingly preoccupied with sex in the same way—I suppose because there’s a physiological satisfaction possible in sexual matters, while there’s none where money’s concerned. When the body’s satiated, the mind stops thinking about food or women. But the hunger for money and possessions is an almost purely mental thing. There’s no physical satisfaction possible. That would account for the excesses and perversities of acquisitiveness. Our bodies almost compel the sexual instinct to behave in a normal fashion. Perversions must be violent before they overrule the normal physiological tendencies. But where acquisitiveness is concerned, there’s no regulating body, no lump of too too solid flesh to be pushed out of the grooves of physiological habit. The slightest tendency to perversion is at once made manifest. But perhaps the word ‘perversion’ is meaningless in this context. For perversion implies the existence of a norm from which it departs. What is the norm of acquisitiveness? One guesses vaguely at some golden mean; but is it in fact the true statistical norm? I should imagine myself rather ‘under-acquisitivized’; less interested in money and possessions in general than the average. Illidge would say it’s entirely due to having been brought up in an atmosphere of easy money. It may be partly true. But not entirely, I think. Consider the many people born rich who are preoccupied with nothing but money making. No, my under-acquisitiveness is hereditary as well as acquired. In any case I find myself uninterested in possessions and rather unsympathetic with, and without understanding of, those who are. No predominantly acquisitive character has appeared in any of my stories. It is a defect; for acquisitives are obviously very common in real life. But I doubt if I could make such a character interesting—not being interested myself in the acquisitive passion. Balzac could; circumstances and heredity had made him passionately interested in money. But when one finds a thing boring, one’s apt to be boring about it.

CHAPTER XXIII

The writing table was under the window. Dimmed by the smoky air of Sheffield, a shaft of yellow, viscous-looking sunlight lit up a corner of the table and a patch of red and flowered carpet. Everard Webley was writing a letter. His pen rushed over the paper. Whatever he did was done with rapidity and decision.

‘Dearest Elinor,’ he wrote. ‘De profundis clamavi, from the depths of this repulsive hotel bedroom and the even lower depths of this political tour of the North, I call to you.’ (He wrote his I’s as though they were pillars—a strong straight shaft and two little transverse strokes at top and bottom for capital and base. The crosses on his t’s were firm and uncompromising.) ‘But I don’t suppose you listen. I’ve always felt such sympathy for the savages who give their gods a good beating when they don’t answer prayers or respond to sacrifices. England expects that every god this day will do his duty. And if he doesn’t—well, so much the worse for him; he’ll get a taste of the cat-o’-nine-tails. The modern worship of a remote Ineffable, whose acts one doesn’t criticize, seems to me very unsatisfactory. What’s the good of making a contract with somebody who can break it at will and against whom one has no redress? Women have gone the same way as the gods. They mayn’t be questioned. You’re not allowed to compel them to do their duty by their worshippers or fulfil their part in the natural contract between the sexes. I write, I implore. But, like the newfangled god of modern philosophies and broad theologies, you don’t listen. And one’s not allowed to take reprisals; it’s bad form to beat the defaulting god. It isn’t done. All the same, I warn you: one of these days I’ll try the good old methods. I’ll do a slight Rape of the Sabines and then where will your ineffable remote superiority be? How I hate you really for compelling me to love you so much! It’s such a damnable injustice—getting so much passion and longing out of me and giving nothing in return. And you not here to receive the punishment you deserve! I have to take a vicarious revenge on the ruffians who disturb my meetings. I had a terrific battle last night. Howls, booing, organized singing of the International. But I fought them down. Literally at one moment. I had to give one of the ringleaders a black eye. Poor devil! He was only paying for your misdeeds. He was your scapegoat. For it was really you I was fighting. If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have been half so savage. I probably wouldn’t have won. So indirectly I owe you my victory. For which I’m duly grateful. But another time there won’t be any Communists to vent my rage on. The next fight will be against the real enemy—against you. So be careful, my dear. I’ll try to stop short of black eyes; but in the heat of the moment one never knows. But seriously, Elinor, seriously. Why are you so cold and aloof and dead? Why do you shut yourself off from me? I think of you so incessantly, so insistently. The thought of you is always there. It lies hidden, a latency, in the most unlikely things and places, ready at the command of some chance association to jump out at me from its ambush. Haunting, like a guilty conscience. If I…’

There was a knock at the door. It was Hugo Brockle who came in. Everard looked at his watch, then at Hugo. The expression on his face was menacing. ‘Why are you so late?’ he asked in a terrifyingly quiet voice.

Hugo blushed. ‘I hadn’t realized the time.’ It was only too true. He had been lunching with the Upwiches, twenty miles away across the moors. Polly Logan was staying with them. After lunch old Upwich and the others had gone to play a round of golf on the private links in the park. Polly, providentially, didn’t play. He had taken her for a walk through the woods along the river. How should he have realized the time? ‘I’m sorry,’ he added.

‘I should hope you were,’ said Everard and the latent violence broke out from under his quietness. ‘I tell you to be back at five and it’s now a quarter past six. When you’re with me on British Freeman business you’re under military discipline. My orders are to be obeyed, do you understand? Do you understand?’ he insisted.

Sheepishly Hugo nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘And now go away and see that all the arrangements for this evening’s meeting have been properly made. And mind, this sort of thing mustn’t happen again. You won’t get off so lightly next time.’

Hugo shut the door after him. All the anger instantly vanished from Everard’s face. He believed in frightening his subordinates from time to time. Anger, he always found, was an excellent weapon, so long as you didn’t let yourself be mastered by it. He never did. Poor Hugo! he smiled to himself and went on with his letter. Ten minutes later Hugo came in to say that dinner was ready. The meeting was at eight; they had to eat very early.

****

‘But it’s so silly, all this political squabbling,’ said Rampion, his voice shrill with exasperation,’so utterly silly. Bolsheviks and Fascists, Radicals and Conservatives, Communists and British Freemen—what the devil are they all fighting about? I’ll tell you. They’re fighting to decide whether we shall go to hell by communist express train or capitalist racing motor car, by individualist ‘bus or collectivist tram running on the rails of state control. The destination’s the same in every case. They’re all of them bound for hell, all headed for the same psychological impasse and the social collapse that results from psychological collapse. The only point of difference between them is: How shall we get there? It’s simply impossible for a man of sense to be interested in such disputes. For the man of sense the important thing is hell, not the means of transport to be employed in getting there. The question for the man of sense is: Do we or do we not want to go to hell? And his answer is: No, we don’t. And if that’s his answer, then he won’t have anything to do with any of the politicans. Because they all want to land us in hell. All, without exception. Lenin and Mussolini, MacDonald and Baldwin. All equally anxious to take us to hell and only squabbling about the means of taking us.’

‘Some of them may take us a little more slowly than others,’ suggested Philip.

Rampion shrugged his shoulders. ‘But so very little more slowly that it wouldn’t make any appreciable difference. They all believe in industrialism in one form or another, they all believe in Americanization. Think of the Bolshevist ideal. America but much more so. America with government departments taking the place of trusts and state officials instead of rich men. And then the ideal of the rest of Europe. The same thing, only with the rich men preserved. Machinery and government officials there. Machinery and Alfred Mond or Henry Ford here. The machinery to take us to hell; the rich or the officials to drive it. You think one set may drive more cautiously than the other? Perhaps you’re right. But I can’t see that there’s anything to choose between them. They’re all equally in a hurry. In the name of science, progress and human happiness! Amen and step on the gas.’

Philip nodded. ‘They do step on it all right,’ he said. ‘They get a move on. Progress. But as you say, it’s probably in the direction of the bottomless pit.’

‘And the only thing the reformers can find to talk about is the shape, colour and steering arrangements of the vehicle. Can’t the imbeciles see that it’s the direction that matters, that we’re entirely on the wrong road and ought to go back—preferably on foot, without the stinking machine?’

‘You may be right,’ said Philip. ‘But the trouble is that, given our existing world, you can’t go back, you can’t scrap the machine. That is, you can’t do it unless you’re prepared to kill off about half the human race. Industrialism made possible the doubling of the world’s population in a hundred years. If you want to get rid of industrialism, you’ve got to get back to where you started. That’s to say, you’ve got to slaughter half the existing number of men and women. Which might, sub specie aeternitatis or merely historiac, be an excellent thing. But hardly a matter of practical politics.’

‘Not at the moment,’ Rampion agreed. ‘But the next war and the next revolution will make it only too practical.’

‘Possibly. But one shouldn’t count on wars and revolutions. Because, if you count on them happening, they certainly will happen.’

‘They’ll happen,’ said Rampion, ‘whether you count on them or not. Industrial progress means over-production, means the need for getting new markets, means international rivalry, means war. And mechanical progress means more specialization and standardization of work, means more ready-made and unindividual amusements, means diminution of initiative and creativeness, means more intellectualism and the progressive atrophy of all the vital and fundamental things in human nature, means increased boredom and restlessness, means finally a kind of individual madness that can only result in social revolution. Count on them or not, wars and revolutions are inevitable, if things are allowed to go on as they are at present.’

‘So the problem will solve itself,’ said Philip.

‘Only by destroying itself. When humanity’s destroyed, obviously there’ll be no more problem. But it seems a poor sort of solution. I believe there may be another, even within the framework of the present system. A temporary one while the system’s being modified in the direction of a permanent solution. The root of the evil’s in the individual psychology; so it’s there, in the individual psychology, that you’d have to begin. The first step would be to make people live dualistically, in two compartments. In one compartment as industrialized workers, in the other as human beings. As idiots and machines for eight hours out of every twentyfour and real human beings for the rest.’

‘Don’t they do that already?’

‘Of course they don’t. They live as idiots and machines all the time, at work and in their leisure. Like idiots and machines, but imagining they ‘reliving like civilized humans, even like gods. The first thing to do is to make them admit that they are idiots and machines during working hours. “Our civilization being what it is,” this is what you’ll have to say to them,” you’ve got to spend eight hours out of every twentyfour as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It’s very disagreeable, I know. It’s humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You’ve got to do it; otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we’ll all starve. Do the job, then, idiotically and mechanically; and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman, as the case may be. Don’t mix the two lives together; keep the bulkheads watertight between them. The genuine human life in your leisure hours is the real thing. The other’s just a dirty job that’s got to be done. And never forget that it is dirty and, except in so far as it keeps you fed and society intact, utterly unimportant, utterly irrelevant to the real human life. Don’t be deceived by the canting rogues who talk of the sanctity of labour and the Christian Service that business men do their fellows. It’s all lies. Your work’s just a nasty, dirty job, made unfortunately necessary by the folly of your ancestors. They piled up a mountain of garbage and you’ve got to go on digging it away, for fear it might stink you to death, dig for dear life, while cursing the memory of the maniacs who made all the dirty work for you to do. But don’t try to cheer yourself up by pretending the nasty mechanical job is a noble one. It isn’t; and the only result of saying and believing that it is, will be to lower your humanity to the level of the dirty work. If you believe in business as Service and the sanctity of labour, you’ll merely turn yourself into a mechanical idiot for twentyfour hours out of the twentyfour. Admit it’s dirty, hold your nose and do it for eight hours and then concentrate on being a real human being in your leisure. A real complete human being. Not a newspaper reader, not a jazzer, not a radio fan. The industrialists who 1purvey standardized ready-made amusements to the masses are doing their best to make you as much of a mechanical imbecile in your leisure as in your hours of work. But don’t let them. Make the effort of being human.” That’s what you’ve got to say to people; that’s the lesson you’ve got to teach the young. You’ve got to persuade everybody that all this grand industrial civilization is just a bad smell and that the real, significant life can only be lived apart from it. It’ll be a very long time before decent living and industrial smell can be reconciled. Perhaps, indeed, they’re irreconcilable. It remains to be seen. In the meantime, at any rate, we must shovel the garbage and bear the smell stoically, and in the intervals try to lead the real human life.’

‘It’s a good programme,’ said Philip. ‘But I don’t see you winning many votes on it at the next election.’

‘That’s the trouble.’ Rampion frowned. ‘One would have them all against one. For the only thing they’re all agreed on—Tories, Liberals, Socialists, Bolsheviks—is the intrinsic excellence of the industrial stink and the necessity of standardizing and specializing every trace of genuine manhood or womanhood out of the human race. And we’re expected to take an interest in politics. Well, well.’ He shook his head. ‘Let’s think about something pleasanter. Look, I want to show you this picture.’ He crossed the studio and pulled out one from a stack of canvases leaning against the wall. ‘There,’ he said when he had set it up on an easel. Seated on the crest of a grassy bank, where she formed the apex of the pyramidal composition, a naked woman was suckling a child. Below and in front of her to the left crouched a man, his bare back turned to the spectator, and in the corresponding position on the right stood a little boy. The crouching man was playing with a couple of tiny leopard cubs that occupied the centre of the picture, a little below the seated mother’s feet; the little boy looked on. Close behind the woman and filling almost the whole of the upper part of the picture, stood a cow, its head slightly averted, ruminating. The woman’s head and shoulders stood out pale against its dun flank.

‘It’s a picture I like particularly,’ said Rampion after a little silence. ‘The flesh is good. Don’t you think. Has a bloom to it, a living quality. By God, how marvellously your father-in-law could paint flesh in the open air! Amazing! Nobody’s done it better. Not even Renoir. I wish I had his gifts. But this is all right, you know,’ he went on, turning back to the picture. ‘Quite good, really. And there are other qualities. I feel I’ve managed to get the living relationship of the figures to each other and the rest of the world. The cow, for example. It’s turned away, it’s unaware of the human scene. But somehow you feel it’s happily in touch with the humans in some milky, cud-chewing, bovine way. And the humans are in touch with it. And also in touch with the leopards, but in a quite different way-a way corresponding to the quick leopardy way the cubs are in touch with them. Yes, I like it.’

‘So do I,’ said Philip. ‘It’s something to put over against the industrial stink.’ He laughed. ‘You ought to paint a companion picture of life in the civilized world. The woman in a mackintosh, leaning against a giant Bovril bottle and feeding her baby with Glaxo. The bank covered with asphalt. The man dressed in a five-guinea suit for fifty shillings, squatting down to play with a wireless set. And the little boy, pimpled and with rickets, looking interestedly on.’

‘And the whole thing painted in the cubist manner,’ said Rampion; ‘so as to make quite sure that there should be no life in it whatever. Nothing like modern art for sterilizing the life out of things. Carbolic acid isn’t in it.’

CHAPTER XXIV

Local government among the Indians under the Maurya emperors continued, week after week, to necessitate Mr. Quarles’s attendance at the British Museum for at least two full days in every seven.

‘I had no idyah,’ he explained, ‘that there was so much available matyahrial.’

Gladys, meanwhile, was discovering that she had made a mistake. The good time which she had looked forward to enjoying under Mr. Quarles’s protection was no better than the good time she might have enjoyed with ‘boys’ hardly richer than herself. Mr. Quarles, it seemed, was not prepared to pay for the luxury of feeling superior. He wanted to be a great man, but for very little money. His excuse for the cheap restaurant and the cheap seats at the theatre was always the necessity of secrecy. It would never do for him to be seen by an acquaintance in Gladys’s company; and since his acquaintances belonged to the world which is carried, replete, from the Berkeley to the stalls of the Gaiety, Mr. Quarles and Gladys ate at a Corer House and looked at the play remotely from the Upper Circle. Such was the official explanation of the very unprincely quality of Sidney’s treats. The real explanation was not the need for secrecy, but Sidney’s native reluctance to part with hard cash. For though large sums meant little to him, small ones meant a great deal. When it was a matter of’ improving the estate,’ he would lightheartedly sign away hundreds, even thousands of pounds. But when it was a question of parting with two or three half-crowns to give his mistress a better seat at the play or a more palatable meal, a bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates, he became at once the most economical of men. His avarice was at the root of a certain curious puritanism, which tinged his opinions about almost all pleasures and amusements other than the strictly sexual. Dining with a seduced work-girl in the cheap obscurity of a Soho eating-hell, he would (with all the passion of a Milton reproving the sons of Belial, all the earnestness of a Wordsworth advocating low living and high thinking) denounce the hoggish guzzlers at the Carlton, the gluttons at the Ritz, who in the midst of London’s serried miseries would carelessly spend a farm labourer’s monthly wage on a tete-a-tete dinner. Thus his inexpensive preferences in the matter of restaurants and theatre seats were made to assume a high moral as well as a merely diplomatic character. Seduced by an ageing libertine, Mr. Quarles’s mistresses were surprised to find themselves dining with a Hebrew prophet, and taking their amusements with a disciple of Cato or of Calvin.

‘One would think you were a blessed saint to hear you talk,’ said Gladys sarcastically, when he had paused for breath in the midst of one of his Corner House denunciations of the extravagant and greedy. ‘You!’ Her laughter was mockingly savage.

Mr. Quarles was disconcerted. He was used to being listened to respectfully, as an Olympian. Gladys’s tone was ribald and rebellious; he didn’t like it; it even alarmed him.

He raised his chin with dignity and fired a dropping shot of rebuke upon her head. ‘It isn’t a question of myah personalities,’ he pronounced. ‘It’s a question of general principles.’

‘I can’t see any difference,’ retorted Gladys, abolishing at one stroke all the solemn pretensions of all the philosophers and moralists, all the religious leaders and reformers and Utopia-makers from the beginning of human time.

What exasperated Gladys most was the fact that even in the world of the Maison Lyons and cheap seats, Mr. Quarles did not abandon his Olympian pretensions and his Olympian manners. His indignation, when one evening there was a crowd on the stairs leading to the Upper Circle was loud and righteous. ‘A ryahl scandal!’ he called it.

‘One would think you’d taken the royal box,’ said Gladys sarcastically.

And when, at a tea-shop, he complained that the one-and-fourpenny slice of salmon tasted as though it had come from British Columbia rather than from Scotland, she advised him to write to the Times about it. The discovery tickled her fancy and, after that, she was always ironically telling him to write to the Times. Did he complain, a noble and disillusioned philosopher, of the shallowness of politicians and the sordid triviality of political life, Gladys bade him write to the Times. He was eloquent about iniquitous Mrs. Grundy and English illiberality; let him write to the Times. It was a ryahl scandal that neither Sir Edward Grey nor Lloyd George should have been able to speak French; the Times again was indicated. Mr. Quarles was hurt and outraged. Nothing like this had ever happened before. In the company of his other mistresses the consciousness of his superiority had been a serene happiness. They had worshipped and admired; he had felt himself a god. And during the first days Gladys too had seemed a worshipper. But coming to pray, she had stayed to mock. His spiritual happiness was ruined. If it had not been for the bodily solace which the species in her provided, Mr. Quarles would have quickly exhausted the subject of local self-government under the Mauryas and stayed at home. But there was in Gladys a more than usually large admixture of undifferentiated species. It was too much for Mr. Quarles. The derisive individual in her pained and repelled him; but the attraction of what was generic, of the whole feminine species, the entire sex, was stronger than that individual repulsion. In spite of her mockery, Mr. Quarles returned. The claims of the Indians became increasingly peremptory.

Realizing her power, Gladys began to withhold what he desired. Perhaps he could be blackmailed into the generosity which it was not in his nature to display spontaneously. Returning from a very inexpensive evening at Lyons’ and the pictures, she pushed him angrily away when, in the taxi, he attempted the usual endearments.

‘Can’t you leave me in peace?’ she snapped. And a moment later, ‘Tell the driver to go to my place first and drop me.’

‘But, my dyah child! Mr. Quarles protested. Hadn’t she promised to come back with him?

‘I’ve changed my mind. Tell the driver.’

The thought that, after three days of fervid anticipation, he would have to pass the evening in solitude was agonizing. ‘But, Gladys, my darling…’

‘Tell the driver.’

‘But it’s ryahly too cruel; you’re too unkind.’

‘Better write to the Times about it,’ was all her answer. ‘I’ll tell the driver myself.’

After a night of insomnia and suffering Mr. Quarles went out as soon as the shops were open and bought a fourteen-guinea wrist watch.

****

The advertisement was for a dentifrice. But as the picture represented two fox-trotting young people showing their teeth at one another in an amorous and pearly smile and as the word began with a D, little Phil unhesitatingly read ‘dancing.’

His father laughed. ‘You old humbug!’ he said. ‘I thought you said you could read.’

‘But they are dancing,’ the child protested.

‘Yes, but that isn’t what the word says. Try again.’ He pointed.

Little Phil glanced again at the impossible word and took a long look at the picture. But the fox-trotting couple gave him no help. ‘Dynamo,’ he said at last in desperation. It was the only other word beginning with a D that he could think of at the moment.

‘Or why not dinosaurus, while you’re about it?’ mocked his father. ‘Or dolicocephalous? Or dicotyledon?’ Little Phil was deeply offended; he could not bear to be laughed at. ‘Try again. Try to read it this time. Don’t guess.’

Little Phil turned his head away. ‘It bores me,’ he said. His vanity made him reluctant to attempt what he could not achieve successfully. Miss Fulkes, who believed in teaching by rational persuasion and with the reasoned consent of the taught (she was still very young), had lectured him on his own psychology, in the hope that, once he had realized his defects, he would mend them. ‘You’ve got the wrong sort of pride,’ she had told him. ‘You’re not ashamed of being a dunce and not knowing things. But you are ashamed of making mistakes. You’d rather not do a thing at all than do it badly. That’s quite wrong.’ Little Phil would nod his head and say ‘Yes, Miss Fulkes’ in the most rational and understanding way imaginable. But he continued to prefer doing things not at all to doing them with difficulty and badly. ‘It bores me,’ he repeated. ‘But would you like me to make you a drawing?’ he suggested, turning back to his father with a captivating smile. He was always ready to draw; he drew well.

‘No thanks. I’d like you to read,’ said Philip.

‘But it bores me.’

‘Never mind. You must try.’

‘But I don’t want to try.’

‘But I want you to. Try.’

Little Phil burst into tears. Tears, he knew, were an irresistible weapon. And, sure enough, they proved their value yet once more.

Elinor looked up from where she was sitting, dissociated, book in hand, at the other end of the room. ‘Don’t make him cry,’ she called. ‘It’s so bad for him.’

Philip shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you imagine that’s the way to educate a child…’ he said with a bitterness that the occasion did not justify, a bitterness gradually accumulated during the past weeks of silence and distant hostility, of self-questioning and ineffective self-reproach, and finding now an almost irrelevant expression.

‘I don’t imagine anything,’ said Elinor in a cold hard voice. ‘I only know that I don’t want him to cry.’ Little Phil redoubled his noise. She called him to her and took him on to her knee.

‘But seeing that he has the misfortune to be an only child, one really ought to make the effort not to spoil him.’

Elinor pressed her cheek against the boy’s hair.’seeing that he is an only child,’ she said, ‘ I don’t see why he shouldn’t be treated as one.’

‘You’re hopeless,’ said Philip. ‘It’s high time we settled down, so that the boy can have a chance of being brought up rationally.’

‘And who’s going to do the rational upbringing?’ asked Elinor. ‘You?’ She laughed sarcastically. ‘At the end of a week you’d be so bored that you’d either commit suicide or take the first aeroplane to Paris and not come back for six months.’

‘Naughty father!’ put in the child.

Philip was offended, the more so as he was secretly aware that what she said was true. The ideal of a rustic domesticity, filled with small duties and casual human contacts, was one that, for him, precariously verged on absurdity. And though the idea of supervising little Phil’s upbringing was interesting, he knew that the practice would be intolerably tedious. He remembered his own father’s spasmodic essays at education. He’d be just the same. Which was precisely why Elinor had no business to say so.

‘I’m not quite so childishly frivolous as you seem to imagine,’ he said with dignity and bottled anger.

‘On the contrary,’ she answered, ‘you’re too adultly serious. You couldn’t manage a child because you’re not enough of a child yourself. You’re like one of those dreadfully grown-up creatures in Shaw’s Methuselah.’

‘Naughty father!’ repeated little Phil exasperatingly, like a parrot with only one phrase.

Philip’s first impulse was to seize the child out of his mother’s arms, smack him for his impertinence, drive him from the room and then turn on Elinor and violently ‘have things out’ with her. But a habit of gentlemanly self-control and a dread of scenes made him keep his temper. Instead of healthily breaking out he made an effort of will and more than ever tightly shut himself in. Preserving his dignity and his unexpressed grievance, he got up and walked through the French window into the garden. Elinor watched his departure. Her impulse was to run after him, take him by the hand and make peace. But she too checked herself. Philip limped away out of sight. The child continued to whimper. Elinor gave him a little shake.

‘Stop, Phil,’ she said almost angrily. ‘That’s enough now. Stop at once.’

****

The two doctors were examining what to an untrained eye might have seemed the photograph of a typhoon in the Gulf of Siam, of an explosion of black smoke in the midst of clouds, or merely of an ink stain.

‘Particularly clear,’ said the young radiographer. ‘Look.’ He pointed at the smoke cloud. ‘There’s a most obvious new growth there, at the pylorus.’ He glanced with a certain enquiring deference at his distinguished colleague.

Sir Herbert nodded. ‘Obvious,’ he repeated. He had an oracular manner; what he said, you felt, was always and necessarily true.

‘It couldn’t very well be large. Not with the symptoms so far recorded. There’s been no vomiting yet.’

‘No vomiting?’ exclaimed the radiographer with an almost excessive display of interest and astonishment. ‘That would explain the smallness.’

‘The obstruction’s only slight.’

‘It would certainly be worth opening up the abdomen for exploration purposes.’

Sir Herbert made a little pouting grimace and dubiously shook his head. ‘One has to think of the patient’s age.’

‘Quite,’ the radiographer made haste to agree.

‘He’s older than he seems.’

‘Yes, yes. He certainly doesn’t look his age.’

‘Well, I must be going,’ said Sir Herbert.

The young radiographer darted to the door, handed him his hat and gloves, personally escorted him to the attendant Daimler. Returning to his desk he glanced again at the black-blotched, grey-cloudy photograph.

‘A really remarkably successful exposure,’ he said to himself with satisfaction and, turning the picture over, he wrote a few words in pencil on the back.

‘J. Bidlake, Esq. Stomach after barium meal. New growth at pylorus, small but v. clear. Photographed….’ He looked up at his calendar for the date, recorded it and put the photograph away in his file for future reference.

****

The old manservant announced the visitor and retired, closing the door of the studio behind him.

‘Well, John,’ said Lady Edward, advancing across the room. ‘How are you? I heard you’d been seedy. Nothing serious, I hope.’

John Bidlake did not even get up to receive her. From the depth of the armchair in which he had spent the day meditating in terror the themes of disease and death, he held out a hand.

‘But, my poor John!’ exclaimed Lady Edward sitting down beside him. ‘You look very low and wretched. What is it?’

John Bidlake shook his head. ‘God knows,’ he said. He had guessed, of course, from Sir Herbert’s vaguely professional words about ‘slight obstructions in the neighbourhood of the pylorus,’ he knew what was the matter. Hadn’t his son Maurice died of the same thing five years ago, in California? He knew; but he would not speak his knowledge. Uttered, the worst was more frightful, more irrevocable. Besides, one should never formulate one’s knowledge of coming evil; for then fate would have, so to speak, a model on which to shape events. There was always a kind of impossible chance that, if one didn’t put one’s foreboding of evil into words, the evil wouldn’t happen. The mysteries of John Bidlake’s personal religion were quite as obscure and paradoxical as any of those in the ‘theolatrous’ orthodoxies which he liked to deride.

‘But haven’t you seen a doctor?’ Lady Edward’s tone was accusatory; she knew her friend’s strange prejudice against doctors.

‘Of course I have,’ he answered irritably, knowing that she knew. ‘Do you take me for a fool? But they’re all charlatans. I went to one with a knighthood. But do you suppose he knew anything more than the others? He just told me in quack jargon what I’d told him in plain words; that I’d got something wrong with my innards. Stupid rogue!’ His hatred of Sir Herbert and all doctors had momentarily revived him.

‘But he must have told you something,’ Lady Edward insisted.

The words brought him back to the thought of that’slight obstruction in the neighbourhood of the pylorus,’ of disease and pain and the creeping approach of death. He relapsed into his old misery and terror. ‘Nothing of significance,’ he muttered, averting his face.

‘Then perhaps it’s nothing really serious,’ Lady Edward comfortingly suggested.

‘No, no!’ To the old man her lighthearted hopefulness seemed an outrage. He would not put himself into the power of fate by formulating the horrible truth. But at the same time he wanted to be treated as though the truth had been formulated. Treated with a grave commiseration. ‘It’s bad. It’s very bad,’ he insisted.

He was thinking of death; death in the form of a new life growing and growing in his belly, like an embryo in a womb. The one thing fresh and active in his old body, the one thing exuberantly and increasingly alive was death.

All round, on the walls of the studio, hung fragmentary records of John Bidlake’s life. Two little landscapes painted in the Pincian Gardens in the days when Rome had only just ceased to be the Pope’s—a view of belfries and cupolas seen through a gap in the ilex trees, a pair of statues silhouetted against the sky. Next to them a satyr’s face, snubby and bearded—the portrait of Verlaine. A London street scene, full of hansoms and top hats and lifted skirts. Three sketches of the plump, bright-coloured Mary Betterton of thirty years ago. And Jenny, loveliest of models, lying naked on a long chair, with a window behind her, white clouds beyond, a bowl of roses on the window-sill and a great blue Persian cat stretched like a couchant lion, on Jenny’s white belly, dozing, its paws between her round and shallow breasts.

Lady Edward brightly changed the subject. ‘Lucy’s just flown off to Paris again,’ she began.

CHAPTER XXV

QUAI VOLTAIRE.

The air was rough, I forgot the Quies for my ears and was in a Hell of Noise for 2 1/2 hours. Feeling very tired and consequently, sweet Walter, rather sentimental and sola sola. Why aren’t you here to console me for the unbearable sadness of this lovely evening outside my window? The Louvre, the river, the green glass sky, the sunlight and those velvet shadows—they make me feel like bursting into tears. And not the scenery only. My arms in the sleeves of my dressing-gown, my hand writing, even my bare toes, now that I’ve dropped my slippers—terible, terrible. And as for my face in the glass, and my shoulders, and the orange roses and the Chinese goldfish to match, and the Dufy curtains and all the rest—yes, all, because everything’s equally beautiful and extraordinary, even the things that are dull and ugly—they’re too much to be borne. Too much. I can’t stand it and what’s more, I won’t. Interval of 5 minutes. That’s why I’ve telephoned to Rene Tallemant to come and have a cocktail and take me out somewhere amusing, malgre my headache. I simply won’t let myself be bullied by the universe. Do you know Rene? Rather a divine little man. But I wish it were you, all the same. Must go and put on a few clothes. A toi. LUCY.

QUAI VOLTAIRE.

Your letter was tiresome. Such yammering. And it isn’t flattering to be called a poison in the blood. It’s the equivalent of being called a stomach-ache. If you can’t write more sensibly, don’t write at all. Quant a moi, je m’amuse. Pas follement. But sufficiently, sufficiently. Theatres; mostly bad; but I like them; I’m still childish enough to feel involved in the imbecile plots. And buying clothes; such ravishments! I simply adored myself in Lanvin’s looking-glasses. Looking at pictures, on the other hand, is an overrated sport. Not dancing, though. There’d be some point, if life were always like dancing with a professional. But it ain’t. And if it were, I dare say one would long to walk. In the evenings a little pub-crawling in Mont Parnasse through hordes of Americans, Poles, Esthonians, Rumanians, Finns, Letts, Lapps, Wends, etcetera, and all of them (God help us!) artists. Shall we found a league for the suppression of art? Paris makes me long to. Also I wish one met a few more heterosexuals for a change. I don’t really like ni les tapettes ni les gousses. And since Proust and Gide made them fashionable one sees nothing else in this tiresome town. All my English respectability breaks out! Yours, L.

QUAI VOLTAIRE.

This time your letter was much better. (My only poem, and an accident at that. Rather good, all the same.) If only everybody would realize that being miserable or jolly about love is chiefly a matter of fashion. Being poetically miserable is an old fashion, and besides, the rhymes don’t justify it in English. Cuoredolore-amore; you can’t escape it in Italian. Nor in German; herz must feel schmerz and liebe is inevitably full of triebe. But in English, no. There’s no pain connected with English loves; only gloves and turtle doves. And the only things that, by the laws of poetry, can go straight to Englishmen’s hearts are tarts and amorous arts. And I assure you, a man’s much better occupied when he’s thinking about those subjects than when he’s telling himself how wretched he is, how jealous, how cruelly wronged and all the nonsensical rest of it. I wish that idiot Rene would understand this. But unfortunately cceur rhymes with douleur, and he’s French. He’s becoming almost as much of a bore as you were, my poor Walter. But I hope you’re now a reformed character. I like you. L.

QUAI VOLTAIRE.

Suffering from a cold and intense boredom, only momentarily relieved by your letter. Paris is really terribly dreary. I have a good mind to fly away somewhere else, only I don’t know where. Eileen came to see me to-day. She wants to leave Tim, because he will insist on her lying naked in bed while he sets fire to newspapers over her and lets the hot ashes fall on her body. Poor Tim! It seems unkind to deprive him of his simple pleasures. But Eileen’s so nervous of being grilled. She was furious with me for laughing and not being more sympathetic. I took it all as a joke. Which it is. A very mild one, however. For really, like the Queen, we are not amused. How I hate you for not being here to entertain me! One can forgive anything except absence. Unpardonably absent Walter, goodbye. I have an envie for you to-night, for your hands and your mouth. And you? Do you remember? L.

QUAI VOLTARAIRE.

So Philip Quarles is going to settle in the country and be a mixture of Mrs. Gaskell and Knud Hamsun. Well, well…. But it’s good that somebody should have illusions. At any rate he can’t be more bored in his village than I am here. What straits one’s reduced to! Last night I went with Tim and Eileen, who seems to be reconciled to the firework displays, to one of those places where you pay a hundred francs for the privilege of looking on at orgies (in masks—the one amusing feature) and if you want to, participating in them. Dim religious lights, little cubicles, divans, a great deal of what the French call amour promiscuously going on. Odd and grotesque, but terribly dreary and all so very medical. A sort of cross between very stupid clowns and an operating theatre. Tim and Eileen wanted me to stay. I told them I’d rather pay-a visit to the Morgue, and left them there. I hope they amused themselves. But what a bore, what a hopeless unmitigated bore! I always thought Heliogabalus was such a very sophisticated young person. But now I’ve seen what amused him, I realize that he must have had a mind like a baby’s, really infantile. I have the misfortune to be rather grown up about some things. I’ve a notion of going to Madrid next week. It’ll be terrifically hot, of course. gut I love the heat. I blossom in ovens. (Rather a significant intimation of my particular immortality, perhaps?) Why don’t you come with me? Seriously, I mean. You could surely get away. Murder Burlap and come and be a tripper a la Maurice Barre’s. Du sang, de la volupte et de la mort. I feel rather bloodthirsty at the moment. Spain would suit me. Meanwhile, I’ll make enquiries about the bull-fighting season. The ring makes you sick; even my bloodthirstiness won’t run to disembowelled cab-horses. But the spectators are marvellous. Twenty thousand simultaneous sadistic frissons. Really remarkable. You simply must come. my sweet Walter. Say yes. I insist. LUCY.

QUAI VOLTAIRE.

It was too sweet of you, Walter darling, to do the impossible to come to Spain. I wish, for once, you hadn’t taken my momentary envie quite so seriously. Madrid’s off-for the present, at any rate. If it should come on again, I’ll let you know at once. Meanwhile. Paris. Hastily. L.

CHAPTER XXVI

From Philip Quarles’s Notebook

Found Rampion gloomy and exasperated, I don’t know what about, and consequently pessimistic—lyrically and violently so. ‘I give the present dispensation ten years,’ he said, after cataloguing the horrors of the modern world. ‘After that the most appalling and sanguinary bust up that’s ever been.’ And he prophesied class wars, wars between the continents, the final catastrophic crumbling of our already dreadfully unsteady society. ‘Not a pleasant look-out for our children,’ I said. ‘We’ve at least had our thirty years or so. They’ll only grow up to see the Last Judgment.’ ‘We oughtn’t to have brought them into the world,’ he answered. I mentioned those Melanesians that Rivers wrote about, who simply refused to breed any more after the white people had robbed them of their religion and their traditional civilization. ‘The same thing’s been happening in the West,’ I said, ‘but more slowly. No sudden race suicide, but gradual diminution of births. Gradual, because with us the poison of modem civilization has infected men so slowly. The thing has been going on for a long time; but we’re only just beginning to realize that we’re being poisoned. That’s why we’ve only just begun to stop begetting children. The Melanesians had their souls suddenly murdered, so they couldn’t help realizing what was being done to them. That’s why they decided, almost from one day to another, that they wouldn’t bother to keep the race alive any longer.’ ‘The poison isn’t slow any more. It works faster and faster.’ ‘Like arsenic—the effects are cumulative. After a certain moment you begin to gallop towards death.’ ‘Breeding would have slowed down much more completely if people had realized. Well, well; our brats will have to look out for themselves now they’re here.’ ‘And meanwhile,’ I said, ‘one’s got to go on behaving as if our world were going on for ever—teaching them good manners and Latin grammar and all the rest. What do you do about yours?’ ‘If I could have my way, I wouldn’t teach them anything. Just turn them loose in the country, on a farm, and tell them to amuse themselves. And if they couldn’t amuse themselves, I’d give them rat poison.’ ‘Rather Utopian as an educational programme, isn’t it?’ ‘I know. They’ve got to be scholars and gentlemen, damn them! Twenty years ago, I’d have objected to the gentility. I’d have brought them up as peasants. But the working classes are just as bad as the others nowadays. Just rather bad imitations of the bourgeoisie, a little worse than the original in some ways. So it’s as gentlemen my boys are being brought up after all. And scholars. What an imbecility!’ He complained to me that both his children have a passion for machinery—motor cars, trains, aeroplanes, radios. ‘It’s an infection, like smallpox. The love of death’s in the air. They breathe it and get infected. I try to persuade them to like something else. But they won’t have it. Machinery’s the only thing for them. They’re infected with the love of death. It’s as though the young were absolutely determined to bring the world to an end—mechanize it first into madness, then into sheer murder. Well, let them if they want to, the stupid little devils! But it’s humiliating, it’s horribly humiliating that human beings should have made such a devilish mess of things. Life could have been so beautiful, if they’d cared to make it so. Yes, and it was beautiful once, I believe. Now it’sjust an insanity; it’s just death violently galvanized, twitching about and making a hellish hullabaloo to persuade itself that it isn’t really death, but the most exuberant sort of life. Think of New York, for example; think of Berlin! God! Well, let them go to hell if they want to. I don’t care.’ But the trouble is that he does care.

Since reading Alverdes and Wheeler I have quite decided that my novelist must be an amateur zoologist. Or, better still, a professional zoologist who is writing a novel in his spare time. His approach will be strictly biological. He will be constantly passing from the termitary to the drawing-room and the factory, and back again. He will illustrate human vices by those of the ants, which neglect their young for the sake of the intoxicating liquor exuded by the parasites that invade their nests. His hero and heroine will spend their honeymoon by a lake, where the grebes and ducks illustrate all the aspects of courtship and matrimony. Observing the habitual and almost sacred ‘pecking order’ which prevails among the hens in his poultry yard—hen A pecking hen B, but not being pecked by it, hen B pecking hen C and so forth—the politician will meditate on the Catholic hierarchy and Fascism. The mass of intricately copulating snakes will remind the libertine of his orgies. (I can visualize quite a good scene with a kind of Spandrell drawing the moral, to an innocent and idealistic young woman, of a serpents’ petting party.) Nationalism and the middle classes’ religious love of property will be illustrated by the male warbler’s passionate and ferocious defence of his chosen territory. And so on. Something queer and quite amusing could be made out of this.

One of the hardest things to remember is that a man’s merit in one sphere is no guarantee of his merit in another. Newton’s mathematics don’t prove his theology. Faraday was right about electricity, but not about Sandemanism. Plato wrote marvellously well, and that’s why people still go on believing in his pernicious philosophy. Tolstoy was an excellent novelist; but that’s no reason for regarding his ideas about morality as anything but detestable, or for feeling anything but contempt for his aesthetics, his sociology and his religion. In the case of scientists and philosophers this ineptitude outside their own line of business isn’t surprising. Indeed, it’s almost inevitable. For it’s obvious that excessive development of the purely mental functions leads to atrophy of all the rest. Hence the notorious infantility of professors and the ludicrous simplicity of the solutions they offer for the problems of life. The same is true of the specialists in spirituality. The profound silliness of saintly people; their childishness. But in an artist there’s less specialization, less one-sided development; consequently the artist ought to be sounder right through than the lopsided man of science; he oughtn’t to have the blind spots and the imbecilities of the philosophers and saints. That’s why a man like Tolstoy is so specially unforgivable. Instinctively you trust him more than you would trust an intellectual or a spiritual specialist. And there he goes perverting all his deepest instincts and being just as idiotic and pernicious as St. Francis of Assisi, or as Kant the moralist (oh, those categorical imperatives! and then the fact that the only thing the old gentleman felt at all deeply about was crystallized fruit!), or Newton the theologian. It puts one on one’s guard, even against those one thinks are probably in the right. Such as Rampion, for example. An extraordinary artist. But right in his views about the world? Alas, it doesn’t follow from the excellence of his painting and writing. But two things give me confidence in his opinions about the problems of living. The first is that he himself lives in a more satisfactory way than anyone I know. He lives more satisfactorily, because he lives more realistically than other people. Rampion, it seems to me, takes into account all the facts (whereas other people hide from them, or try to pretend that the ones they find unpleasant don’t or shouldn’t exist), and then proceeds to make his way of living fit the facts, and doesn’t try to compel the facts to fit in with a preconceived idea of the right way of living (like these imbecile Christians and intellectuals and moralists and efficient business men). The second thing which gives me confidence in his judgment is that so many of his opinions agree with mine, which, apart from all questions of vanity, is a good sign, because we start from such distant points, from opposite poles in fact. Opinions on which two opponents agree (for that’s what essentially, and to start with, we are: opponents) have a fair chance of being right. The chief difference between us, alas, is that his opinions are lived and mine, in the main, only thought. Like him, I mistrust intellectualism, but intellectually I disbelieve in the adequacy of any scientific or philosophical theory, any abstract moral principle, but on scientific, philosophical and abstract-moral grounds. The problem for me is to transform a detached intellectual scepticism into a way of harmonious all-round living.

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the nonintellectuals have never stirred. The theme was developed by Burlap in one of those squelchy emetic articles of his. And there’s a good deal of truth in it, in spite of Burlap. (Here we are, back again among the personalities. The thoroughly contemptible man may have valuable opinions, just as the in some ways admirable man can have detestable opinions. And I suppose, parenthetically, that I belong to the first class—though not so completely, I hope, as Burlap and in a different way.) Many intellectuals, of course, don’t get far enough to reach the obvious again. They remain stuck in a pathetic belief in rationalism and the absolute supremacy of mental values and the entirely conscious will. You’ve got to go further than the nineteenth-century fellows, for example; as far at least as Protagoras and Pyrrho, before you get back to the obvious in which the nonintellectuals have always remained. And one must hasten to make it clear that these nonintellectuals aren’t the modern canaille who read the picture papers and listenin and jazz and are preoccupied with making money and having the awful modem ‘good time.’ No, no; one isn’t paying a compliment to the hardheaded business man or the low-brow. For, in spite of their stupidity and tastelessness and vulgarity and infantility (or rather because of all these defects), they aren’t the nonintellectuals I’m talking about. They take the main intellectualist axiom for granted—that there’s an intrinsic superiority in mental, conscious, voluntary life over physical, intuitive, instinctive, emotional life. The whole of modern civilization is based on the idea that the specialized function which gives a man his place in society is more important than the whole man, or rather is the whole man, all the rest being irrelevant or even (since the physical, intuitive, instinctive and emotional part of man doesn’t contribute appreciably to making money or getting on in an industrialized world) positively harmful and detestable. The low-brow of our modern industrialized society has all the defects of the intellectual and none of his redeeming qualities. The nonintellectuals I’m thinking of are very different beings. One might still find a few of them in Italy (though Fascism has probably turned them all into bad imitations of Americans and Prussians by this time); a few perhaps in Spain, in Greece, in Provence. Not elsewhere in modern Europe. There were probably quite a lot of them three thousand years ago. But the combined efforts of Plato and Artistotle, Jesus, Newton and big business have turned their descendants into the modern bourgeoisie and proletariat. The obvious that the intellectual gets back to, if he goes far enough, isn’t of course the same as the obvious of the nonintellectuals. For their obvious is life itself and his recovered obvious is only the idea of that life. Not many can put flesh and blood on the idea and turn it into reality. The intellectuals who, like Rampion, don’t have to return to the obvious, but have always believed in it and lived it, while at the same time leading the life of the spirit, are rarer still.

Being with Rampion rather depresses me; for he makes me see what a great gulf separates the knowledge of the obvious from the actual living of it. And oh, the difficulties of crossing that gulf! I perceive now that the real charm of the intellectual life—the life devoted to erudition, to scientific research, to philosophy, to aesthetics, to criticism—is its easiness. It’s the substitution of simple intellectual schemata for the complexities of reality; of still and formal death for the bewildering movements of life. It’s incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology, than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one’s fellows and to have satisfactory relations with one’s friends and lovers, one’s wife and children. Living’s much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics. The intellectual life is child’s play; which is why intellectuals tend to become children—and then imbeciles and finally, as the political and industrial history of the last few centuries clearly demonstrates, homicidal lunatics and wild beasts. The repressed functions don’t die; they deteriorate, they fester, they revert to primitiveness. But meanwhile it’s much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man. That’s why (among other reasons) there’s such a demand for higher education. The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public-house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life. Some drown their sorrows in alcohol, but still more drown them in books and artistic dilettantism; some try to forget themselves in fornication, dancing, movies, listening-in, others in lectures and scientific hobbies. The books and lectures are better sorrow-drowners than drink and fornication; they leave no headache, none of that despairing post coitum triste feeling. Till quite recently, I must confess, I took learning and philosophy and science—all the activities that are magniloquently lumped under the title of ‘The Search for Truth’—very seriously. I regarded the Search for Truth as the highest of human tasks and the Searchers as the noblest of men. But in the last year or so I have begun to see that this famous Search for Truth is just an amusement, a distraction like any other, a rather refined and elaborate substitute for genuine living; and that Truth-Searchers become just as silly, infantile and corrupt in their way as the boozers, the pure aesthetes, the business men, the Good-Timers in theirs. I also perceived that the pursuit of Truth is just a polite name for the intellectual’s favourite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality. But seeking Truth is much easier than learning the art of integral living (in which, of course, Truth-Seeking will take its due and proportionate place along with the other amusements, like skittles and mountain-climbing). Which explains, though it doesn’t justify, my continued and excessive indulgence in the vices of informative reading and abstract generalization. Shall I ever have the strength of mind to break myself of these indolent habits of intellectualism and devote my energies to the more serious and difficult task of living integrally? And even if I did try to break these habits, shouldn’t I find that heredity was at the bottom of them and that I was congenitally incapable of living wholly and harmoniously?

CHAPTER XXVII

John Bidlake and his third wife had never definitely or officially parted company. They simply didn’t see one another very often, that was all. The arrangement suited John very well. He hated everything in the nature of a fuss, and he was the enemy of every definite and irrevocable contract. Any arrangement that bound him down, that imposed responsibilities and kept him in mind of duties, was intolerable to him. ‘God knows what I should have done,’ he used to say,’ if I’d had to go to an office every day, or get work done by a certain date. I think I should have run amok after a few months of it.’ Of marriage he had always consistently disapproved. Unfortunately, however, he could not have all the women he wanted without marriage. He had had to enter into no less than three of what he called, in Ciceronian language, ‘those inopportune and obscene compacts.’ The idea of divorce or an official separation was hardly less disagreeable to him than that of marriage; it was too definite, it committed you. Why not leave things to settle themselves, instead of trying to give an arbitrary shape to them? The ideal was to live, emotionally and socially speaking, from hand to mouth—without plans, without a status, in good company of one’s own daily choosing, not the choosing of others or of some dead self. ‘Sleeping around’—that was how he had heard a young American girl describe the amorous side of the ideal life, as lived in Hollywood. Its other aspects might be lumped under the head of ‘waking around.’ The unideal life, the life which John Bidlake had always refused to lead, was that which consisted of waking and sleeping not ‘around,’ but definitely here or there, day after day, according to a fixed foreseeable schedule that only death, or at the least the act of God or the king’s enemies, could alter.

With his third wife John Bidlake’s relations were, and had been for years, most satisfyingly indefinite. They did not live together, but they were not separated. They rarely communicated, but they had never quarrelled. John had been sleeping and waking ‘around’ for upwards of twenty years, and yet they met, whenever they did meet, on friendly terms; and if ever he desired to refresh his memories of the landscape of the northern Chilterns, his arrival at Gattenden was accepted without comment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. The arrangement entirely suited John Bidlake; and, to do him justice, he was grateful to his wife for making it possible. He refrained, however, from expressing his gratitude; for to have done so would have been to comment on the arrangement; and a comment would have brought a touch of destructive definition into a situation whose fragile excellence consisted precisely in its virgin and beautifully unsullied vagueness. Few women, as her husband gratefully recognized, would have been willing or even able to preserve the indefiniteness of the situation so chronically inviolate as Janet Bidlake. Another wife would have demanded explanations, would have wanted to know where she stood, would have offered the irrevocable choice of peace or war, life in common or separation. But Mrs. Bidlake had permitted her husband to fade out of their married life without a quarrel, with hardly a word. And his brief spasmodic re-entries were accepted by her with as little comment. She had been from childhood more at home in the fictitious world of her invention than in the real. As a little girl she had had an imaginary sister who lived in the signal-box by the level crossing. Between the ages of ten and thirteen, her inability to distinguish between the testimony of her senses and that of her fancy had often resulted in her being punished for lying. Pictures and books gave a new turn to her imagining, which became less personal and more classically artistic, literary and speculative. From sixteen onwards she was an inhabitant of the country of art and letters and was little more than a reluctant stranger in mere England. It was because she had imagined John Bidlake a spiritual compatriot that she had fallen in love with him—artistically, poetically in love—and consented to become his wife. Her parents, who considered him only as a fellow-subject of the Queen and attached more importance, in the circumstances, to his career as a husband than as an artist, did their best to dissuade her. But Janet was of age and had the obstinacy of those who can simply retire from the plane on which the argument is taking place, leaving the opponent to waste his energy on a mere untenanted body. She ended by doing what she wanted. When she discovered, as she discovered only too soon, that there was very little connection between the admirable artist she had loved and the husband she had married, Janet Bidlake was restrained by a very natural pride from complaining. She had no wish to give her relations the pleasure of saying, ‘I told you so.’ John slept and woke ‘around,’ faded more and more completely out of conjugality. She held her peace and herself retired for consolation into those regions of artistic and literary fancy, where she was native and felt most at home. A private income, supplemented by the irregular and fluctuating contributions which John Bidlake made whenever he remembered or felt he could afford to support a wife and family, allowed her to make a habit of this foreign travel of the imagination. Elinor was born a year after their marriage. Four years later an ulcerated stomach brought John Bidlake home, a temporarily reformed character, to be nursed. Walter was the result of his still domestic convalescence. The ulcers healed, John Bidlake faded away again. Nurses and governesses looked after the children. Mrs. Bidlake superintended their upbringing dimly and as though from a distance. From time to time she swooped across the border dividing her private country from the world of common fact; and her interferences with the quotidian order of things had always a certain disconcerting and almost supernatural quality. Incalculable things were liable to happen whenever she descended, a being from another plane’ and judging events by other standards than those of the common world, into the midst of the children’s educational routine. Once, for example, she dismissed a governess because she had heard her playing Dan Leno’s song about the Wasp and the Hard-boiled Egg on the schoolroom piano. She was a good girl, taught well and supported a paralytic father. But great artistic principles were at stake. Elinor’s musical taste might be irretrievably ruined (incidentally Elinor resembled her father in detesting music); and the fact that she was very fond of Miss Dempster made the danger of contamination even greater. Mrs. Bidlake was firm. ‘The Wasp and the Hard-boiled Egg’ could not be permitted. Miss Dempster was sent away. When he heard the news, her old father had another stroke and was picked up blind in one eye and unable to speak. But Mrs. Bidlake’s returns from imaginative travel were generally less serious in their results. When she interfered with the practical business of her children’s upbringing, it was usually only to insist that they should read classical authors usually considered incomprehensible or unsuitable for the very young. Children, it was her theory, should be brought up only with the very best in the way of philosophy and the arts. Elinor had had Hamlet read to her when she was three, her picture-books were reproductions of Giotto and Rubens. She had been taught French out of Candide, had been given Tristram Shandy and Bishop Berkeley’s Theory of Vision when she was seven, Spinoza’s Ethics, Goya’s etchings and, as a German text-book, Also sprach Zarathustra when she was nine. The result of this premature introduction to the best philosophy was to produce in Elinor that slightly amused contempt for the grand abstractions and highfaluting idealisms, which had come to be so characteristic of her. Brought up at the same time on the unexpurgated classics, she had acquired in childhood a complete theoretical knowledge of all those matters which it is thought least suitable for the young to know. This knowledge had reinforced rather than tempered the coldness and practical incuriosity about all amorous matters which were natural to her; and she had grown up in a state of well-informed and superficially cynical innocence, like one of those Shakespearean heroines, whose scientific and Rabelaisian speech accompanies actions of the most delicately virtuous refinement. Mrs. Bidlake was a little distressed by Elinor’s irreverent attitude towards her cherished fancies; but, wise in her way, she did not comment, did not try to reform, only ignored and retired, as she had ignored her husband’s shortcomings, had retired from the realization of them into the happier realms of art and imagination. There can be no cancellation of accomplished facts; but for practical purposes a conspiracy of silence is almost as effective as cancellation. Unmentioned, what is can become as though it were not. When John Bidlake arrived at Gattenden, a sick man made sicker by dejection, terror and an all-absorbing self-pity, Mrs. Bidlake passed over in silence the fact, upon which she might so easily have commented: that he only came to her when he needed a nurse. His room was made ready, he settled in. It was as though he had never been away. In the privacy of the kitchen the housemaids grumbled a little at the extra work, while Mrs. Inman sighed and Dobbs was massively and Anglicanly indignant over old Mr. Bidlake’s treatment of his wife. At the same time all felt a kind of gloating pity for the old man. His disease and its symptoms were talked of in lowered voices, religiously. Aloud, the servants might grumble and disapprove. But secretly they were all rather pleased. John Bidlake’s arrival broke the daily monotony, and the fact that he was going to die made them all feel somehow more important. To the domesticities of Gattenden his approaching death gave a new significance. That future event was the sun round which the souls of the household now meaningfully and almost stealthily revolved. They might grumble and disapprove, but they looked after him solicitously. In an obscure way they were grateful to him. Dying, he was quickening their life.

CHAPTER XXVIII

With Molly d’Exergillod everything had to be articulate, formulated, expressed. The whole of experience was, for her, only the raw material out of which an active mind could manufacture words. Ironstone was of no use to man until he learnt to smelt it and hammer out the pure metal into tools and swords. For Molly, the raw facts of living, the sensations, the feelings, the thoughts and recollections, were as uninteresting in themselves as so many lumps of rock. They were of value only when they had been transformed by conversational art and industry into elegant words and well-shaped phrases. She loved a sunset because she could say of it: ‘It’s like a mixture of Bengal lights, Mendelssohn, soot and strawberries and cream’; or of spring flowers: ‘They make you feel as you feel when you’re convalescent after influenza. Don’t you think so?’ And leaning intimately she would press the rhetorical question. ‘Don’t you think so?’ What she liked about a view of distant mountains in a thunderstorm was that it was so like El Greco’s landscapes of Toledo. As for love, why, the whole charm of love, in Molly’s eyes, was its almost infinite capacity for being turned into phrases. You could talk about it for ever. She was talking about it now to Philip Quarles-had been talking about it for the last hour; analysing herself, recounting her experiences, questioning him about his past and his feelings. Reluctantly and with difficulty (for he hated talking about himself and did it very badly) he answered her.

‘Don’t you think,’ she was saying, ‘that the most exciting thing about being in love is the discoveries it enables you to make about yourself?’

Philip duly thought so.

‘I’d no idea how motherly I really was, before I married Jean. I’m so preoccupied now when he gets his feet wet.’

‘I’d be very worried if you got your feet wet,’ said Philip essaying a gallantry. Too stupid! he thought. He was not very good at gallantries. He wished he wasn’t so much attracted by Molly’s rather creamy and florid beauty. He wouldn’t be here making a fool of himself if she were ugly.

‘Too sweet of you,’ said Molly. ‘Tell me,’ she added, leaning towards him with offered face and bosom, ‘why do you like me.’

‘Isn’t it fairly obvious why?’ he answered.

Molly smiled. ‘Do you know why Jean says I’m the only woman he could ever fall in love with?’

‘No,’ said Philip, thinking that she was really superb in her Junonian way.

‘Because,’ Molly went on, ‘according to him, I’m the only woman who isn’t what Baudelaire calls le contraire du dandy. You remember that fragment in Mon Coeur Mis a Nu? “La femme a faim et elle veut manger; soif, et elle veut boire. La femme est naturelle, c’est-a-dire abominable. Aussi est-elle…”’

Philip interrupted her. ‘You’ve left out a sentence,’ he said, laughing. ‘Soif, et elle veut boire. And then: Elle est en rut, et elle veut etre…They don’t print the word in Crepet’s edition; but I’ll supply it if you like.’

‘No, thanks,’ said Molly, rather put out by the interruption. It had spoilt the easy unfolding of a welltried conversational gambit. She wasn’t accustomed to people being so well up in French literature as Philip. ‘The word’s irrelevant.’

‘Is it?’ Philip raised his eyebrows. ‘I wonder.’

‘Aussi est-elle toujours vulgaire,’ Molly went on, hurrying back to the point at which she had been interrupted, ‘c’est-a-dire le contraire du dandy. Jean says I’m the only female dandy. What do you think?’

‘I’m afraid he’s right.’

‘Why “afraid”?’

‘I don’t know that I like dandies much. Particularly female ones.’ A woman who uses the shapeliness of her breasts to compel you to admire her mind—a good character, he reflected, for his novel. But trying in private life, very trying indeed. ‘I prefer them natural,’ he added.

‘But what’s the point of being natural unless you have enough art to do it well and enough consciousness to know how natural you’re being?’ Molly was pleased with her question. A little polishing and it would be epigrammatically perfect. ‘There’s no point in being in love with a person unless you know exactly what you feel and can express it.’

‘I can see a great deal of point,’ said Philip. ‘One doesn’t have to be a botanist or a still-life painter to enjoy flowers. And equally, my dear Molly, one doesn’t have to be Sigmund Freud or Shakespeare to enjoy you.’ And sliding suddenly nearer to her along the sofa, he took her in his arms and kissed her.

‘But what are you thinking about?’ she cried in pained astonishment.

‘I’m not thinking about anything,’ he answered rather angrily from the other end of the arm with which she had pushed him away from her. ‘Not thinking; only wanting.’ He felt humiliated, made a fool of. ‘But I’d forgotten you were a nun.’

‘I’m nothing of the kind,’ she protested. ‘I’m merely civilized. All this pouncing and clawing—it’s really too savage.’ She readjusted a water-waved lock of hair, and began to talk about platonic relationships as aids to spiritual growth. The more platonic the relations between an amorous man and woman, the more intense in them the life of the conscious mind.

‘What the body loses, the soul gains. Wasn’t it Paul Bourget who pointed that out in his Psychologie Contemporaine? A bad novelist,’ she added, finding it necessary to apologize for quoting from so very old-fashioned and disreputed an author; ‘but good as an essayist, I always find. Wasn’t it Paul Bourget?’ she repeated.

‘I should think it must have been Paul Bourget,’ said Philip wearily.

‘The energy which wanted to expend itself in physical passion is diverted and turns the mills of the soul.’ (‘Turn the mills of the soul’ was perhaps a shade too romantic, Victorian, Meredithian, she felt as she pronounced the words.)’ The body’s dammed and canalized,’ she emended, ‘and made to drive the spiritual dynamos. The thwarted unconscious finds vent in making consciousness more intense.’

‘But does one want one’s consciousness intensified?’ asked Philip, looking angrily at the rather luscious figure at the other end of the sofa. ‘I’m getting a bit tired of consciousness, to tell you the truth.’ He admired her body, but the only contact she would permit was with her much less interesting and beautiful mind. He wanted kisses, but all he got was analytical anecdotes and philosophic epigrams. ‘Thoroughly tired,’ he repeated. It was no wonder.

Molly only laughed. ‘Don’t start pretending you’re a paleolithic cave-man,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t suit you. Tired of consciousness, indeed! You! Why, if you’re tired of consciousness, you must be tired of yourself.’

‘Which is exactly what I am,’ said Philip. ‘You’ve made me tired of myself. Sick to death.’ Still irritated, he rose to take his leave.

‘Is that an insult?’ she asked, looking up at him. ‘Why have I made you tired of yourself?’

Philip shook his head. ‘I can’t explain. I’ve given up explaining.’ He held out his hand. Still looking enquiringly into his face, Molly took it. ‘If you weren’t one of the vestal virgins of civilization,’ he went on, ‘you’d understand without any explaining. Or rather, there wouldn’t be any explaining to do. Because you wouldn’t have made me feel tired of myself. And let me add, Molly, that if you were really and consistently civilized, you’d take steps to make yourself less desirable. Desirability’s barbarous. It’s as savage as pouncing and clawing. You ought to look like George Eliot. Goodbye.’ And giving her hand a final shake, he limped out of the room. In the street he gradually recovered his temper. He even began to smile to himself. For it was a joke. The spectacle of a biter being bitten is always funny, even when the bitten biter happens to be oneself. Conscious and civilized, he had been defeated by someone even more civilized than himself. The justice was poetic. But what a warning! Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms. In Molly he perceived a kind of Max Beerbohm version of himself. The spectacle was alarming. Having smiled, he became pensive.

‘I must be pretty awful,’ he thought.

Sitting on a chair in the Park, he considered his shortcomings. He had considered them before, often. But he had never done anything about them. He knew in advance that he wouldn’t do anything about them this time. Poor Elinor! That rigmarole of Molly’s about platonic relations and Paul Bourget gave him a notion of what she had to put up with. He decided to tell her of his adventure with Molly—comically, for it was always easier to talk unseriously—and then go on to talk about themselves. Yes, that was what he’d do. He ought to have spoken before. Elinor had been so strangely and unnaturally silent of late, so far away. He had been anxious, had wanted to speak, had felt he ought to have spoken. But about what? The ridiculous episode with Molly provided him with an opening gambit.

‘I saw Molly d’Exergillod this afternoon,’ he began, when he saw Elinor. But the tone of her ‘Did you?’ was so coldly uninterested, that he went no further. There was a silence. Elinor went on with her reading. He glanced at her surreptitiously over the top of his book. Her pale face wore an expression of calm remoteness. He felt a renewal of that uneasy anxiety which had come upon him so often during the last few weeks.

‘Why don’t you ever talk now?’ he screwed up the courage to ask her that evening after dinner.

Elinor looked up at him from her book. ‘Don’t I ever talk?’ she said, ironically smiling. ‘Well, I suppose there’s nothing of any particular interest to say.’

Philip recognized one of the answers he was in the habit of making to her reproaches, and was abashed into silence. And yet it was unfair of her to retort it upon him. For in his case it was true: there really wasn’t anything of interest to say. By dint of being secretive about them, he had almost abolished his intimate feelings. Very little seemed to go on in the unintellectual part of his mind—very little, at any rate, that wasn’t either trivial or rather discreditable. Whereas Elinor always had a mass of things to say. Things that said themselves, that came out of their own accord from the depths of her being. Philip would have liked to explain this to her; but somehow it was difficult, he couldn’t.

‘All the same,’ he brought himself to say, after a pause, ‘you used to talk much more. It’s only in these last days…’

‘I suppose I’m rather tired of talking, that’s all.’

‘But why should you be tired?’

‘Mayn’t one be tired sometimes?’ She uttered a rather resentful little laugh. ‘You seem to be permanently tired.’

Philip looked at her with a kind of anxiety. His eyes seemed to implore. But she wouldn’t allow herself to be touched. She had allowed herself to be touched too often. He had exploited her love, systematically underpaid her and, whenever she threatened rebellion, had turned suddenly rather pathetic and helpless, appealing to her better feelings. This time she was going to be hard. He might look as imploring and anxious as he liked, but she wouldn’t take any notice. It only served him right. All the same she felt rather guilty. And yet it was his own fault. Why couldn’t he love her actively, articulately, outright? When she gave him her love, he took it for granted, he accepted it passively as his right. And when she stopped giving it, he looked dumbly anxious and imploring. But as for saying anything, as for doing anything…

The seconds passed. Elinor waited, pretending to read. If only he’d speak or move! She longed for an excuse to love him again. As for Everard—why, Everard simply didn’t count. To the deep instinctive core of her being he really didn’t matter and if Philip would only take the trouble to love her a little, he wouldn’t matter any more even to the conscious part of her that was trying to love him—to love him on principle, so to speak, to love him deliberately, of set purpose. But the seconds passed in silence. And at last, with a little sigh (for he too would have liked to say something, to do something; only it was impossible, because the something said or done would have to be personal), Philip picked up his book and, in the interests of the zoological novelist in his novel, went on reading about the possessive instinct in birds. Reading again. He wasn’t going to say anything after all. Oh, very well; if he wanted her to become Everard’s mistress, then he’d have only himself to blame. She tried to shrug her shoulders and feel truculently. But the threat, she inwardly felt, was directed against herself rather than against Philip. It was she, not he, who was being condemned. Condemned to be Everard’s mistress.

Taking a lover had seemed to Elinor, thoeretically and in advance, a matter of no great difficulty. Morally wrong she did not think it. All the fuss that Christians and the heroines of novels managed to make about it! It was incomprehensible. ‘If people want to go to bed with one another,’ she would say, ‘why can’t they do it quite simply and straightforwardly, without tormenting themselves and everyone else within range?’ Nor had she any fear of the social consequences of taking a lover. The people who, if they knew, would object, were precisely the people she herself had always objected to. By refusing to meet her, they would be doing her a favour. As for Phil, he would have deserved it. He had had it in his power to prevent any such thing happening. Why couldn’t he have come nearer, given a little more of himself? She had begged for love; but what he had given her was a remote impersonal benevolence. Mere warmth, that was all she wanted; mere humanity. It was not much to ask. And she had warned him so often of what would happen if he didn’t give it.

Didn’t he understand? Or was it that he simply didn’t care? Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt him at all; the punishment wouldn’t punish. That would be humiliating. But after all, she would go on to remind herself, whenever she had arrived (yet once more) at this point in her inward argument, after all it wasn’t only or mainly to punish Philip, it wasn’t primarily to teach him humanity by pain and jealousy, that she was going to take a lover. It was in the interest of her own happiness. (She would try to forget how very wretched the pursuit of her own happiness made her.) Her own independent happiness. She had grown accustomed to think and act too exclusively in relation to Philip. Even when she planned to take a lover, it was still of him that she thought. Which was absurd, absurd.

But these self-reminders of her right, her intention to be independently happy, had to be constantly repeated. Her natural and habitual mode of thinking even about a possible lover was still in terms of her husband—of his conversion, or his punishment. It was only by an effort, deliberately, that she could remember to forget him.

But anyhow, for whatever reasons she might do it, to take a lover had seemed, in advance, a matter of no great psychological difficulty. Particularly if the lover were to be Everard Webley. For she liked Everard, very much; she admired him; she felt herself strangely moved and thrilled by the power that seemed to radiate out of him. And yet, when it came to the point of physical contact with the man, what extraordinary difficulties at once arose! She liked to be with him, she liked his letters, she could imagine, when he did not touch her, that she was in love with him. But when, at their second meeting after her return, Everard took her in his arms and kissed her, she was seized with a kind of horror, she felt herself turning colk and stony in his embrace. It was the same horror, Ehe same coldness as she had felt, nearly a year before, when he had first tried to kiss her. The same, in spite of the fact she had prepared herself in the interval to feel differently, had accustomed her conscious mind to the idea of taking him as a lover. That horror, that wincing coldness were the spontaneous reactions of the instinctive and habitual part of her being. It was only her mind that had decided to accept. Her feelings, her body, all the habits of her instinctive self were in rebellion. What her intellect found harmless, her stiffened and shrinking body passionately disapproved. The spirit was a libertine, but the flesh and its affections were chaste.

‘Please, Everard,’ she begged, ‘please.’

He let her go. ‘Why do you hate me?’

‘But I don’t, Everard.’

‘I only give you the creeps, that’s all!’ he said with a savage derision. Hurt, he took a pleasure in opening his own wound. ‘I merely disgust you.’

‘But how can you say such a thing?’ She felt wretched and ashamed of her shrinking; but the sense of repulsion still persisted.

‘Because it happens to be true.’

‘No, it isn’t.’ At the words Everard stretched out his hands again. She shook her head. ‘But you mustn’t touch me,’ she begged. ‘Not now. It would spoil everything. I can’t explain why. I don’t know why. But not now. Not yet,’ she added, implicitly promising but meanwhile avoiding.

The implication of a promise revived his importunity. Elinor was half sorry that she had pronounced the words, half glad that she had, to this extent, committed herself. She was relieved to have escaped from the immediate menace of his bodily contact, and at the same time angry with herself for having shrunk from him. Her body and her instincts had rebelled against her will. Her implied promise was the will’s reprisal against the traitors within her. It made the amends which, she felt, she owed to Everard. ‘Not yet.’ But when? When? Any time, her will replied, any time you like. It was easy to promise, but oh, how hard to fulfil! Elinor sighed. If only Philip would let her love him! But he did not speak, he did not act, he just went on reading. Silently he condemned her to unfaithfulness.

CHAPTER XXIX

The scene was Hyde Park; the day, a Saturday in June.

Dressed in green and wearing a sword, Everard Webley was addressing a thousand British Freemen from the back of his white horse, Bucephalus. With a military precision which would have done credit to the Guards, the Freemen had formed up on the Embankment at Blackfriars, had marched with music and symbolic standards to Charing Cross, up Northumberland Avenue, through Trafalgar Square and Cambridge Circus to the Tottenham Court Road and thence along the whole length of Oxford Street to the Marble Arch. At the entrance to the Park they had met an AntiVivisection procession and there had been some slight confusion—a mingling of ranks, a musical discord, as the bands collided, of ‘The British Grenadiers’ and ‘My Faith looks up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary,’ an entangling of banners, ‘Protect our Doggies’ with ‘Britons never shall be slaves,’ ‘Socialism is Tyranny’ with ‘Doctors or Devils?’ But the admirable discipline of the Freemen had prevented the confusion from becoming serious, and after a short delay the thousand had entered the Park, marched past their leader and finally formed themselves into three sides of a hollow square, with Everard and his staff at the centre of the fourth side. The trumpets had sounded a fanfare and the thousand had sung the four verses of Everard’s rather Kiplingesque ‘Song of the Freemen.’ When the singing was done Everard began his speech.

‘British Freemen!’ he said, ‘comrades!’ and at the sound of that strong effortless voice there was a silence even among the spectators who had idly collected to watch the proceedings. Carrying a power not intrinsically theirs, a power that belonged to the speaker, not to what he spoke, his words fell one by one, thrillingly audible, into the attentive hush they had created. He began by praising the Freemen’s discipline. ‘Discipline,’ he said, ‘voluntarily accepted discipline is the first condition of freedom, the first virtue of Freemen. Free and disciplined Spartans held the Persian hordes at bay. Free and disciplined Macedonians conquered half the world. It is for us free and disciplined Englishmen to deliver our country from the slaves who have enslaved it. Three hundred fought at Thermopylae against tens of thousands. The odds we face are not so desperate. Your battalion is only one of more than sixty, a single thousand among the sixty thousand Freemen of England. The numbers daily increase. Twenty, fifty, sometimes a hundred recruits join us every day. The army grows, the green army of Freemen.

‘The British Freemen are uniformed in green. Theirs is the livery of Robin Hood and Little John, the livery of outlaws. For outlaws they are in this stupid democratic world. Outlaws proud of their outlawry. The law of the democratic world is quantity. We outlaws believe in quality. For the democratic politicians, the voice of the greatest number is the voice of God; their law is the law that pleases the mob. Outside the pale of mob-made law, we desire the rule of the best, not the most numerous. Stupider than their liberal grandfathers, the democrats of to-day would discourage individual enterprise and, by nationalizing industry and land, invest the state with tyrannical powers such as it has never possessed, except perhaps in India in the time of the Moguls. We outlaws are freemen. We believe in the value of individual liberty. We would encourage individual enterprise; for we believe that, co-ordinated and controlled in the interests of society as a whole, individual enterprise produces the best economic and moral results. The law of the democratic world is human standardization, is the reduction of all humanity to the lowest common measure. Its religion is the worship of the average man. We outlaws believe in diversity, in aristocracy, in the natural hierarchy. We would remove every removable handicap and give every man his chance, in order that the best may rise to the position for which nature has qualified them. In a word, we believe in justice. And we revere, not the ordinary, but the extraordinary man. I could go on almost indefinitely with this list of the points on which we British Freemen are in radical disagreement with the democratic governors of what once was free and merry England. But I have said enough to show that there can be no peace between them and us. Their white is our black, their political good is our evil, their earthly paradise is our hell. Voluntary outlaws, we repudiate their rule, we wear the green livery of the forest. And we bide our time, we bide our time. For our time is coming and we do not propose to remain outlaws for ever. The time is coming when the laws will be of our making and the forest will be the place for those who now hold power. Two years ago our band was insignificant. To-day it is an army. An army of outlaws. Yet a little while, my comrades, and it will be the army of those who make the laws, not of those who break them. Yes, of those who break them. For, before we can become the makers of good laws, we must be the breakers of bad laws. We must have the courage of our outlawry. British Freemen, fellow outlaws, when the time comes, will you have that courage?’

From the green-coated ranks rose an enormous shout.

‘When I give the word, will you follow.’

‘We will, we will,’ the green thousand repeated.

‘Even if laws must be broken?’

There was another burst of affirmative cheering. When it died down and as Everard Webley was opening his mouth to continue, a voice shouted,’down with Webley! Down with the rich man’s militia! Down with the Bloody B…’ But before the voice could enunciate the whole hated parody of their name, half a dozen of the nearest British Freemen had thrown themselves upon its owner.

Everard Webley rose in his stirrups. ‘Keep your ranks,’ he called peremptorily. ‘How dare you leave the ranks?’

There was a scurrying of officers to the scene of confusion, an angry shouting of orders. The over-zealous Freemen slunk back to their places. Holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose and escorted by two policemen, their enemy marched away. He had lost his hat. The dishevelled hair blazed red in the sunlight. It was Illidge.

Everard Webley turned to the officer commanding the company whose men had broken their ranks. ‘Insubordination,’ he began; and his voice was cold and hard, not loud, but dangerously penetrating, ‘insubordination is the worst…’

Illidge removed his handkerchief from his nose and shouted in a shrill falsetto, ‘Oh, you naughty boys!’

There was a guffaw from the spectators. Everard ignored the interruption and having concluded his rebuke, went on with his speech. Commanding and yet persuasive, passionate, but controlled and musical, his voice thrilled out; and in a moment the shattered silence was reconstructed round his words, the dissipated attention was once more focussed and concentrated. There had been a rebellion; he had made another conquest.

****

Spandrell waited without impatience. Illidge’s tardiness gave him the opportunity to drink an extra cocktail or two. He was at his third and feeling already much better and more cheerful, when the restaurant door swung open and in walked Illidge, very militant and defiant, with an air of truculently parading his blackened eye.

‘Drunk and disorderly?’ questioned Spandrell at the sight of the bruise. ‘Or did you meet an outraged husband? Or have words with a lady?’

Illidge sat down and recounted his adventure, boastfully and with embellishments. He had been, according to his own account, a mixture of Horatius defending the bridge and St. Stephen under the shower of stones.

‘The ruffians!’ said Spandrell sympathetically. But his eyes shone with malicious laughter. The misfortunes of his friends were an unfailing source of amusement to him, and this of Illidge’s was a particularly entertaining disaster.

‘But at least I spoilt the best effect in Webley’s disgusting oration,’ Illidge went on in the same selfcongratulating tone.

‘It might have been slightly more satisfactory if you’d spoilt his face for him.’

Illidge was stung by the note of mockery in Spandrell’s words. ‘Spoiling his face wouldn’t be enough,’ he said with ferocity, scowling as he spoke. ‘The man ought to be exterminated. He’s a public danger, he and his gang of bravoes.’ He broke into profanity.

Spandrell only laughed. ‘It’s easy to yammer,’ he said. ‘Why not do something for a change? A little direct action in Webley’s own style.’

The other shrugged his shoulders apologetically. ‘We’re not well enough organized.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought it needed much organization to knock a man on the head. No, the real trouble is that you’re not courageous enough.’

Illidge blushed. ‘That’s a lie!’

‘Not well enough organized!’ Spandrell went on contemptuously ‘At least you’re modern in your excuses. The great god organization. Even art and love will soon be bowing down like everything else. Why are your verses so bad? Because the poetry industry isn’t well enough organized. And the impotent lover will excuse himself in the same way and assure the indignant lady that, next time, she’ll find his organization perfect. No, no, my dear Illidge, it won’t do, you know; it won’t do.’

‘You’re being very funny, no doubt,’ said Illidge, still pink with anger. ‘But you’re talking rot. You can’t compare poetry and politics. A political party’s a lot of men who’ve got to be disciplined and held together. A poet’s one man.’

‘But so’s a murderer, isn’t he?’ Spandrell’s tone, his smile were still sarcastic. Illidge felt the blood running up again into his face like the warmth of a suddenly flaring inward fire. He hated Spandrell for his power of humiliating him, for making him feel small, a fool and ashamed. He had come in feeling important and heroic, flushed with satisfaction. And now, with a few slow sneering words, Spandrell had turned his selfsatisfaction to an angry shame. There was a silence; they ate their soup without speaking. When his plate was empty, ‘One man,’ said Spandrell meditatively, leaning back in his chair. ‘With all one man’s responsibility. A thousand men have no.) responsibility. That’s why organization’s such a wonderful comfort. A member of a political party feels himself as safe as the member of a church. The party may order civil war, rape, massacre; he does what he’s told cheerfully, because the responsibility isn’t his. It’s the leader’s. And the leader is the rare man, like Webley. The man with courage.’

‘Or cowardice, in his case,’ said Illidge. ‘Webley’s the bourgeois rabbit terrified into ferocity.’

‘Is he?’ asked Spandrell raising his eyebrows derisively. ‘Well, you may be right. But anyhow, he’s rather different from the ordinary rabbit. The ordinary rabbit isn’t scared into ferocity. He’s scared into abject inactivity or abject activity in obedience to somebody else’s orders. Never into activity on his own account, for which he has to take the responsibility. When it’s a question of murder, for example, you don’t find the ordinary rabbits exactly eager, do you? They wait to be organized. The responsibility’s too great for the little individual. He’s scared.’

‘Well, obviously nobody wants to be hanged.’

‘He’d be scared even if there wasn’t any hanging.’

‘You’re not going to trot out the categorical imperative again, are you.?’ It was Illidge’s turn to be sarcastic.

‘It trots itself out. Even in your case. When it came to the point, you’d never dare do anything about Webley, unless you had an organization to relieve you of all responsibility. You simply wouldn’t dare,’ he repeated, with a kind of mocking challenge. He looked at Illidge intently between half-closed eyelids, and through the whole of Illidge’s rather rhetorical speech about the scotching of snakes, the shooting of tigers, the squashing of bugs, he studied his victim’s flushed and angry face. How comic the man was when he tried to be heroic! Illidge stormed on, uncomfortably conscious that his phrases were too big and sounded hollow. But emphasis and still more emphasis, as the smile grew more contemptuous, seemed to be the only possible retort to Spandrell’s maddeningly quiet derision—more and still more, however false the rhetoric might sound. Like a man who stops shouting because he is afraid his voice may break, he was suddenly silent. Spandrell slowly nodded.

‘All right,’ he said mysteriously. ‘All right.’

****

‘It’s absurd,’ Elinor kept assuring herself. ‘It’s childish. Childish and absurd.’

It was an irrelevance. Everard was no different because he had sat on a white horse, because he had commanded and been acclaimed by a cheering crowd. He was no better because she had seen him at the head of one of his battalions. It was absurd, it was childish to have been so moved. But moved she had been; the fact remained. What an excitement when he had appeared, riding, at the head of his men! A quickening of the heart and a swelling. And what an anxiety in the seconds of silence before he began to speak! A real terror. He might stammer and hesitate; he might say something stupid or vulgar; he might be longwinded and a bore; he might be a mountebank. And then, when the voice spoke, unstrained, but vibrant and penetrating, when the speech began to unroll itself in words that were passionate and stirring, but never theatrical, in phrases rich, but brief and incisive—then what an exultation, what pride! But when that man made his interruption, she had felt, together with a passion of indignation against the interrupter, a renewal of her anxiety, her terror lest he might fail, might be publicly humiliated and put to shame. But he had sat unmoved, he had uttered his stern rebuke, he had made a pregnant and breathless silence and then, at last, continued his speech, as though nothing had happened. Elinor’s anxiety had given place to an extraordinary happiness. The speech came to an end; there was a burst of cheering and Elinor had felt enormously proud and elated and at the same time embarrassed, as though the cheering had been in part directed towards herself; and she had laughed aloud, she did not know why, and the blood had rushed up into her cheeks and she had turned away in confusion, not daring to look at him; and then, for no reason, she had begun to cry.

Absurd and childish, she now assured herself. But there, the absurd and childish thing had happened; there was no undoing it.

****

From Philip Quarles’s Notebook

In the Sunday Pictorial, a snapshot of Everard Webley with his mouth open—a black hole in the middle of a straining face—bawling. ‘Mr. E. W., the founder and chief of the B. B. F., addressed a battalion of British Freemen in Hyde Park on Saturday.’ And that was all that remained of the event, that gargoylish symbol of demagogy. A mouth opened to bray. What a horror!

And yet the event was genuinely impressive. And E.’s bawling sounded quite nobly, at the time. And he looked monumental on his white horse. Selecting a separate instant out of what had been a continuity, the camera turned him into a cautionary scarecrow. Unfair? Or was the camera’s vision the true one and mine the false? For after all, the impressive continuity must have been made up of such appalling instants as the camera recorded. Can the whole be something quite different from its parts? In the physical world, yes. Taken as a whole a body and brain are radically different from their component electrons. But what about the moral world? Can a collection of low values make up a single high value? Everard’s photo poses a genuine problem. Millions of monstrous instants making up a splendid half-hour.

Not that I was without my doubts of the splendidness at the time. E. talked a lot about Thermopylae and the Spartans. But my resistance was even more heroic. Leonidas had three hundred companions. I defended my spiritual Thermopylae single-handed against E. and his Freemen. They impressed me; but I resisted. The drill, to begin with, was superb. I watched, enchanted. As usual. How does one explain the fascination of the military spectacle? Explain it away, by preference. I wondered all the time I was watching.

A squad is merely ten men and emotionally neutral. The heart only begins to beat at the sight of a company. The evolutions of a battalion are intoxicating. And a brigade is already an army with banners—which is the equivalent, as we know from the Song of Songs, of being in love. The thrill is proportional to the numbers. Given the fact that one is only two yards high, two feet wide and solitary, a cathedral is necessarily more impressive than a cottage and a mile of marching men is grander than a dozen loafers at a street corner. But that’s not all. A regiment’s more impressive than a crowd. The army with banners is equivalent to love only when it’s perfectly drilled. Stones in the form of a building are finer than stones in a heap. Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army’s beautiful. But that’s not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master. So I thought, as I admired the evolutions of Everard’s Freemen. And by taking the admiration to bits, I preserved myself from being overwhelmed by it. Divide and rule. I did the same with the music and afterwards with Everard’s speech.

What a great stage manager was lost in Everard! Nothing could have been more impressive than (breaking the studiously prolonged silence) that fanfare of trumpets and then, solemnly, the massive harmonies of a thousand voices singing ‘The Song of the Freemen.’ The trumpets were prodigious—like the overture to the Last Judgment. (Why should upper partials be so soul-shaking?) And when the trumpet overture was done, the thousand voices burst out with that almost supernatural sound which choral singing always has. Enormous, like the voice of Jehovah. Reinhardt himself couldn’t have done the trick more effectually. IV felt as though there were a hole where my diaphragm should be; a kind of anxious tingling ran over my skin, the tears were very nearly at the surface of my eyes. I did the Leonidas turn again and reflected how bad the music was, what ridiculous rant the words.

The Last Trump, the voice of God—and then it was Everard’s turn to speak. And one wasn’t let down. How well he did it! His voice took you in the solar plexus, like those upper partials on the trumpets. Moving and convincing, even though you knew that what he said was vague and more or less meaningless. I analysed the tricks. They were the usual ones. The most effective was the employment of inspiring words with two or more meanings. ‘Liberty,’ for example. The liberty in the title and programme of the British Freemen is the liberty to buy and sell and own property with a minimum of government interference. (A pretty large minimum, parenthetically; but let that pass.) Everard bawls out the word in his solar-plexus-punching voice: ‘we are fighting for liberty; we are going to free the country,’ etcetera. The hearer immediately visualizes himself sitting in shirt-sleeves with a bottle and a complaisant wench and no laws, no code of good manners, no wife, no policeman, no parson to forbid. Liberty! Naturally it arouses his enthusiasm. It’s only when the British Freemen come to power that he’ll realize that the word was really used in an entirely different sense. Divide and conquer. I conquered. P. S.—Or rather one part of me conquered. I’ve got into the habit of associating myself with that part and applauding when it triumphs. But, after all, is it the best part? In these particular circumstances, perhaps yes. It’s probably better to be dispassionately analytical than to be overwhelmed by Everard’s stage-managing and eloquence into becoming a British Freeman. But in other circumstances? Rampion’s probably right. But having made a habit of dividing and conquering in the name of the intellect, it’s hard to stop. And perhaps it isn’t entirely a matter of second nature; perhaps first nature comes in too. It’s easy to believe one ought to change one’s mode of living. The difficulty is to act on the belief. This settlement in the country, for example; this being rustic and paternal and a good neighbour; this living vegetably and intuitively—is it really going to be possible? I imagine it; but in fact, in fact…? Meanwhile, it might be rather interesting to concoct a character on these lines. A man who has always taken pains to encourage his own intellectualist tendencies at the expense of all the others. He avoids personal relationships as much as he can, he observes without participating, doesn’t like to give himself away, is always a spectator rather than an actor. Again, he has always been careful not to distinguish one day, one place from another; not to review the past and anticipate the future at the New Year, not to celebrate Christmas or birthdays, not to revisit the scenes of his childhood, not to make pilgrimages to the birthplaces of great men, battlefields, ruins and the like. By this suppression of emotional relationships and natural piety he seems to himself to be achieving freedom—freedom from sentimentality, from the irrational, from passion, from impulse and emotionalism. But in reality, as he gradually discovers, he has only narrowed and desiccated his life; and what’s more, has cramped his intellect by the very process he thought would emancipate it. His reason’s free, but only to deal with a small fraction of experience. He realizes his psychological defects, and desires, in theory, to change. But it’s difficult to break lifelong habits; and perhaps the habits are only the expression of an inborn indifference and coldness, which it might be almost impossible to overcome. And for him at any rate, the merely intellectual life is easier; it’s the line of least resistance, because it’s the line that avoids other human beings. Among them his wife. For he’d have a wife and there would be the elements of drama in the relations between the woman, living mainly with her emotions and intuitions, and the man whose existence is mainly on the abstracted intellectual plane. He loves her in his way and she loves him in hers. Which means that he’s contented and she’s dissatisfied; for love in his way entails the minimum of those warm, confiding human relationships which constitute the essence of love in her way. She complains; he would like to give more, but finds it hard to change himself. She even threatens to leave him for a more human lover; but she is too much in love with him to put the threat into effect.

****

 That Sunday afternoon Elinor and Everard Webley drove down into the country.

‘Forty-three miles in an hour and seven minutes,’ said Everard looking at his watch as he stepped out of the car. ‘Not bad considering that includes getting out of London and being held up by that filthy charabanc in Guildford. Not at all bad.’

‘And what’s more,’ said Elinor, ‘we’re still alive. If you knew the number of times I just shut my eyes and only expected to open them again on the Day of Judgment….’

He laughed, rather glad that she should have been so frightened by the furiousness of his driving. Her terrors gave him a pleasing sense of power and superiority. He took her arm protectively and they walked away down the green path into the wood. Everard drew a deep breath.

‘This is better than making political speeches,’ he said, pressing her arm.

‘Still,’ said Elinor, ‘it must be rather wonderful to sit on a horse and make a thousand people do whatever you want.’

Everard laughed. ‘Unfortunately there’s a bit more in politics than that.’ He glanced at her. ‘You enjoyed the meeting?’

‘I was thrilled.’ She saw him again on his white horse, heard his strong vibrating voice, remembered her exultation and those sudden tears. Magnificent, she said to herself, magnificent! But there was no recapturing the exultation. His hand was on her arm, his huge presence loomed almost threateningly over her. ‘Is he going to kiss me?’ she nervously wondered. She tried to drive out the questioning dread and fill its place with yesterday’s exultation. Magnificent! But the dread would not be exorcised. ‘I thought your speech was splendid,’ she said aloud and wondered parenthetically as she spoke what it had been about She remembered the sound and timbre of the words, but not their significance. Hopeless! ‘Oh, what lovely honeysuckle!’

Everard reached up, enormous, and picked a couple of blossoms. ‘Such beauty, such loveliness!’ He quoted Keats, fumbled in his memory for a line in the Midsummer Night’s Dream. He wondered lyrically why one lived in towns, why one wasted one’s time in the pursuit of money and power, when there was all this beauty waiting to be known and loved.

Elinor listened rather uncomfortably. He seemed to turn it on, this love of beauty, like an electric light—turn out the love of power, turn out efficiency and political preoccupations and turn on the love of beauty. But why shouldn’t he, after all? There was nothing wrong in liking beautiful things. Nothing, except that in some obscure indescribable way Everard’s love of beauty wasn’t quite right. Too deliberate was it? Too occasional? Too much for holidays only? Too conventional, too heavy, too humourlessly reverent? She preferred him as a lover of power. As a power-lover he was somehow of better quality than as a beauty-lover. A poor beauty-lover, perhaps, because he was such a good power-lover. By compensation. Everything has to be paid for.

They walked on. In an open glade between the trees the foxgloves were coming into flower.

‘Like torches burning upwards from the bottom,’ said Everard poetically.

Elinor halted in front of one tall plant whose first flower-bells were on a level with her eyes. The red flesh of the petals was cool and resilient between her fingers. She peeped into the open bell-mouth.

‘Think of the discomfort of having freckles in one’s throat,’ she said. ‘Not to mention little beetles.’

They moved away in silence through the trees. It was Everard who first spoke.

‘Will you ever love me?’ he asked suddenly.

‘You know how fond I am of you, Everard.’ Her heart sank; the moment had come, he would want to kiss her. But he made no gesture, only laughed, rather mournfully.

‘Very fond of me,’ he repeated. ‘Ah, if only you could be a little less reasonable, a little more insane If only you knew what loving was!’

‘Isn’t it a good thing somebody should be sane? ‘ said Elinor. ‘Sane beforehand, I mean. For everybody can be sane afterwards. Much too sane, when the fit’s over and the lovers begin to wonder whether, after all, the world was well lost. Think, Everard, think first. Do you want to lose the world?’

‘I shouldn’t lose it,’ Everard answered, and his voice had that strange thrilling vibration which she seemed to hear, not with her ears, but with her body, in the very midriff. ‘They couldn’t take it away from me. Times have changed since Parnell’s day. Besides I’m not Parnell. Let them try to take it away!’ He laughed. ‘Love and the world—I’m going to have both, Elinor. Both.’ He smiled down at her, the power-lover triumphant.

‘You’re asking too much,’ she answered laughing, ‘you’re greedy.’ The exultation tingled again through her, was like the breath-taking warmth of hot wine.

He bent down and kissed her. Elinor did not shrink.

Another car had pulled up at the roadside, another couple strolled along the green path into the wood. Through the glaring pink and white of her cosmetics the woman’s face was old; the weary flesh had sagged out of its once charming shape.

‘Oh, isn’t it lovely!’ she kept exclaiming as she walked along, carrying her heavy body rather unsteadily on very high-heeled shoes over the uneven ground. ‘Isn’t it lovely!’

Spandrell—for it was he—did not answer.

‘Pick me some of that honeysuckle there!’ she begged.

He pulled down a flowered spray with the crook of his stick. Through the reek of chemical perfumery and not very clean underlinen the scent of the flowers came cool and delicious to his nostrils.

‘Don’t they smell simply divine!’ she exclaimed, rapturously sniffing. ‘Too divine!’

The corners of Spandrell’s mouth twitched into a smile. It amused him to hear the cast-off locutions of duchesses in the mouth of this ageing prostitute. He looked at her. Poor Connie! She was a skeleton at the feast—more gruesomely deathly for being covered with so much loose and sagging flesh. Really gruesome. There was no other word. Here, in the sun, she was like a piece of stage scenery seen by daylight and from close at hand. That was why he had gone to the expense of hiring the Daimler and taking her out—just because the poor superannuated punk was so gruesome. He nodded. ‘Quite nice,’ he said. ‘But I prefer your scent.’

They walked on. A little uncertain already of the distinction between a second and a minor third, a cuckoo was calling. In the slanting corridors of sunlight tunnelled through the green and purple of the forest shadows the little flies jerkily danced and zigzagged. There was no wind, the leaves hung down heavy with greenness. The trees were as though gorged with sap and sunshine.

‘Lovely, lovely,’ was Connie’s refrain. The place, the day reminded her, she said, of her childhood in the country. She sighed.

‘And you wish you’d been a good girl,’ said Spandrell sarcastically. ‘“The roses round the door make me love mother more.” I know, I know.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘What I hate about trees in the summer,’ he went on, ‘is their beastly fat complacency. Bulging—that’s what they are; like bloated great profiteers. Bulging with insolence, passive insolence.’

‘Oh, the foxgloves!’ cried Connie, who hadn’t even been listening. She ran towards them, grotesquely unsteady on her high heels. Spandrell followed her.

‘Pleasingly phallic,’ he said, fingering one of the spikes of unopened buds. And he went on to develop the conceit, profusely.

‘Oh, be quiet, be quiet,’ cried Connie. ‘How can you say such things?’ She was outraged, wounded. ‘How can you—here?’

‘In God’s country,’ he mocked. ‘How can I?’ And raising his stick he suddenly began to lay about him right and left, slash, slash, breaking one of the tall proud plants at every stroke. The ground was strewn with murdered flowers.

‘Stop, stop!’ She caught at his arm. Silently laughing, Spandrell wrenched himself away from her and went on beating down the plants. ‘Stop! Please! Oh, don’t, don’t.’ She made another dash at him. Still laughing, still laying about him with his stick, Spandrell dodged away from her.

‘Down with them,’ he shouted, ‘down with them.’ Flower after flower fell under his strokes. ‘There!’ he said at last, breathless with laughter and running and slashing. ‘There!’ Connie was in tears.

‘How could you?’ she said ‘How could you do it?’

He laughed again, silently, throwing back his head. ‘Serve them right,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m going to sit still and let myself be insulted? The insolence of the brutes! Ah, there’s another!’ He stepped across the glade to where one last tall foxglove stood as though hiding among the hazel saplings. One stroke was enough. The broken plant fell almost noiselessly.

‘Damn their insolence! It serves them right. Let’s come back to the car.’

CHAPTER XXX

Rachel Quarles had no sympathy with those sentiA mental philanthropists who blur the distinction between right and wrong, between wrong-doers and the righteous. Criminals, in her eyes, and not the society in which they lived, were responsible for their crimes. Sinners committed their own sins; their environment did not do it for them. There were excuses, of course, palliations, extenuating circumstances. But good was always good, bad remained bad. There were circumstances in which the choice of good was very difficult; but it was always the individual who made the choice and who, having made, must answer for it. Mrs. Quarles, in a word, was a Christian and not a humanitarian. As a Christian she thought that Marjorie had done wrong to leave her husband—even such a husband as Carling—for another man. She disapproved the act, but did not presume to judge the person, the more so since, in spite of what she had done, Marjorie’s heart and head were still, from Mrs. Quarles’s Christian point of view, ‘in the right place.’ Rachel found it easier to like a person who had acted wrongly, while continuing to think rightly, than one who, like her daughter-in-law, Elinor, thought wrongly, while acting, so far as she knew, in a manner entirely blameless. There were circumstances, too, in which wrong action seemed to her almost less reprehensible than wrong thought. It was not that she had any sympathy for hypocrisy. The person who thought and spoke well while consistently and consciously acting ill was detestable to her. Such people, however, are rare. Most of those who do wrong, in spite of their sound beliefs, do so in a moment of weakness and afterwards regret their wrongdoing. But the person who thinks wrongly does not admit the wrongness of bad actions. He sees no reason why he should not commit them or why, having committed them, he should repent and mend his ways. And even if he in fact behaves virtuously, he may be the means, by his wrong thinking, of leading others into wrong action.

‘An admirable woman,’ had been John Bidlake’s verdict; ‘but rather too fond of fig-leaves—especially over the mouth.’

Herself, Rachel Quarles was only conscious of being a Christian. She could never imagine how people contrived to live without being Christians. But a great many, she sadly had to admit, did so contrive. Almost all the young people of her acquaintance. ‘It’s as though one’s children talked a different languages’ she had once complained to an old friend.

In Marjorie Carling she discovered someone who spoke and understood her own spiritual idiom.

‘You’ll find her, I’m afraid, a bit of a bore,’ Philip had warned her, when he announced his intention of lending his little house at Chamford to Walter and Marjorie. ‘But be nice to her, all the same. She deserves it, poor woman. She’s had a very thin time of it.’ And he detailed a story that made his mother sigh to listen to.

‘I shouldn’t have expected Walter Bidlake to be like that,’ she said.

‘But in these matters one doesn’t expect anything of anybody. Things happen to them, that’s all. They don’t do them.’

Mrs. Quarles did not answer. She was thinking of the time when she had first discovered one of Sidney’s infidelities. The astonishment, the pain, the humiliation…. ‘But still,’ she said aloud, ‘one wouldn’t have thought he’d knowingly have made somebody unhappy.’

‘Still less that he’d knowingly have made himself unhappy. And yet I think he’s really made himself quite as wretched as Marjorie. Perhaps that’s his chief justification.’

His mother sighed. ‘It all seems so extraordinarily unnecessary.’

Mrs. Quarles called on Marjorie almost as soon as she had settled in.

‘Come and see me often,’ she said, as she took her leave. ‘Because I like you,’ she added, with a sudden smile, for which poor Marjorie was quite pathetically grateful. It wasn’t often that people liked her. That she had fallen so deeply in love with Walter was due, above everything, to his having been one of the few people who had ever shown any interest in her. ‘And I hope you like me,’ Mrs. Quarles added.

Marjorie could only blush and stammer. But she already adored.

Rachel Quarles had spoken in all sincerity. She did like Marjorie—liked her, even, for the very defects which made other people find her such a bore; for her stupidity—it was so good and well-meaning; for her lack of humour—it was the mark of such earnestness. Even those intellectual pretensions, those deep or informative remarks dropped portentously out of a meditative silence, did not displease her. Mrs. Quarles recognized in them the rather absurd symptoms of a genuine love of the good, the true and the beautiful, of a genuine desire for self-improvement.

At their third meeting Marjorie confided all her story. Mrs. Quarles’s comments were sensible and Christian. ‘There’s no miraculous cure for these things,’ she said; ‘no patent medicine for unhappiness. Only the old dull virtues, patience, resignation and the rest; and the old consolation, the old source of strength—old, but not dull. There’s nothing less dull than God. But most young people won’t believe me when I tell them so, even though they’re bored to death with jazz bands and dancing.’

Marjorie’s first adoration was confirmed and increased—increased so much, indeed, that Mrs. Quarles felt quite ashamed, as though she had extorted something on false pretences, as though she had fraudulently acted a part.

‘You’re such a wonderful help and comfort,’ Marjorie declared.

‘No, I’m not,’ she answered almost angrily. ‘The truth is that you were lonely and unhappy and I was conveniently there at the right moment.’

Marjorie protested; but the older woman would not permit herself to be praised or thanked.

They talked a good deal about religion. Carling had given Marjorie a horror for all that was picturesque or formal in Christianity. Piran of Peranzabuloe, vestments, ceremonials—everything remotely connected with a saint, a rite, a tradition was hateful to her. But she preserved a vague inchoate faith in what she regarded as the essentials; she had retained from girlhood a certain habit of Christian feeling and thought. Under the influence of Rachel Quarles the faith became more definite, the habitual emotions were reinforced.

‘I feel so enormously much happier since I’ve been here, with you,’ she announced hardly more than a week after her arrival.

‘It’s because you’re not trying to be happy or wondering why you should have been made unhappy, because you’ve stopped thinking in terms of happiness or unhappiness. That’s the enormous stupidity of the young people of this generation,’ Mrs. Quarles went on; ‘they never think of life except in terms of happiness. How shall I have a good time? That’s the question they ask. Or they complain. Why am I not having a better time? But this is a world where good times, in their sense of the word, perhaps in any sense, simply cannot be had continuously, and by everybody. And even when they get their good times, it’s inevitably a disappointment—for imagination is always brighter than reality. And after it’s been had for a little, it becomes a bore. Everybody strains after happiness, and the result is that nobody’s happy. It’s because they’re on the wrong road. The question they ought to be asking themselves isn’t: Why aren’t we happy, and how shall we have a good time? It’s: How can we please God, and why aren’t we better? If people asked themselves those questions and answered them to the best of their ability in practice, they’d achieve happiness without ever thinking about it. For it’s not by pursuing happiness that you find it; it’s by pursuing salvation. And when people were wise, instead of merely clever, they thought of life in terms of salvation and damnation, not of good times and bad times. If you’re feeling happy now, Marjorie, that’s because you’ve stopped wishing you were happy and started trying to be better. Happiness is like coke—something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.’

****

At Gattenden, meanwhile, the days passed gloomily.

‘Why don’t you do a little painting?’ Mrs. Bidlake suggested to her husband on the morning that followed his arrival.

Old John shook his head.

‘You’d enjoy it so much once you started,’ coaxed Elinor.

But her father would not allow himself to be persuaded. He didn’twant to paint, precisely because painting would have been so enjoyable. His very dread of pain, sickness and death made him perversely refuse to let his mind be distracted from their abhorred contemplation. It was as though some part of him obscurely desired to accept defeat and misery, were anxious to make abjection yet more abject. His courage, his Gargantuan power, his careless high spirits had been the fruits of a deliberate and lifelong ignorance. But now that to ignore was no longer possible, now that the enemy was installed in his very vitals, the virtue had gone out of him. He was afraid and could not conceal his terrors. He no longer even desired to conceal them. He somehow wanted to be abject. And abject he was. Mrs. Bidlake and Elinor did their best to rouse him from the apathetic misery in which he spent the greater part of his days at Gattenden. But he would not be roused except to complain and occasionally fly into a querulous rage.

‘Deplorable,’ wrote Philip in his notebook, ‘to see an Olympian reduced by a little tumour in his stomach to a state of subhumanness. But perhaps,’ he added a few days later as an afterthought, ‘he was always subhuman, even when he seemed most Olympian; perhaps being Olympian was just a symptom of subhumanity.’

It was only with little Phil that John Bidlake would occasionally rouse himself from his abjection. Playing with the child, he would sometimes forget for a little to be wretched.

‘Draw something for me,’ he would say.

And with his tongue between his teeth little Phil would draw a train, or a ship, or the stags in Gattenden Park fighting, or the old marquess in his donkey-drawn chair.

‘Now you draw me something, grandfather,’ he would say, when he was tired.

And the old man would take the pencil and make half a dozen marvellous little sketches of T’ang, the Pekingese dog, or Tompy, the kitchen cat. Or sometimes, in a fit of naughtiness, he would scribble a caricature of poor Miss Fulkes writhing. And sometimes, forgetting all about the child, he would draw for his own amusement—a group of bathers, two men wrestling, a dancer.

‘But why have they got no clothes on?’ the child would ask.

‘Because they’re nicer without.’

‘I don’t think so.’ And losing interest in drawings that had so little in the way of a story to tell him, he would ask for the pencil back again.

But it was not always that John Bidlake responded so happily to his grandson. Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly wretched, he felt the child’s mere presence as an outrage, a kind of taunting. He would fly into a rage, would shout at the boy for making a noise and disturbing him.

‘Can’t I ever be left in peace?’ he would shout, and then would go on to complain with curses of the general inefficiency of everybody. The house was full of women, all supposed to be looking after that damned brat. But there he always was, rampaging round, kicking up hell’s own din, getting in the way. It was intolerable. Particularly when one wasn’t well. Absolutely intolerable. People were without any consideration. Flushed and writhing, poor Miss Fulkes would lead her howling charge back to the nursery.

The most trying scenes were at meal-times. For it was at meals (now reduced, so far as he was concerned, to broth and milk and Benger’s food) that John Bidlake was most disagreeably reminded of the state of his health. ‘Disgusting slops!’ he grumbled. But if he ate anything solid, the results were deplorable. Meal-times were the stormiest and most savage moments of John Bidlake’s day. He vented his anger on the child. Always a reluctant eater, little Phil was peculiarly difficult about his food all that spring and early summer. There were tears at almost every meal.

‘It’s because he isn’t really very well,’ Miss Fulkes explained apologetically. And it was true. The boy looked sallow and peaked, slept uneasily, was nervous and quickly tired, suffered from headaches, had ceased to put on weight. Dr. Crowther had ordered malt and codliver oil and a tonic. ‘Not well,’ insisted Miss Fulkes.

But John Bidlake would not hear of it. ‘He’s simply naughty, that’s all. He just won’t eat.’ And turning to the boy, ‘Swallow, child, swallow!’ he shouted. ‘Have you forgotten how to swallow?’ The spectacle of little Phil chewing and chewing interminably on a mouthful of something he did not like exasperated him. ‘Swallow, boy! Don’t go on ruminating like that. You’re not a cow. Swallow!’ And, very red in the face, with tears welling up into his eyes, little Phil would make a terrible effort to swallow the abhorred cud of five minutes’ queasy mastication. The muscles of his throat would heave and ripple, an expression of invincible disgust would distort his small face, there would be an ominous sound of retching. ‘But it’s simply revolting!’ stormed the old man. ‘Swallow!’ His shouting was an almost infallible recipe for making the child sick.

****

Burdens fell, darkness gave place to light, Marjorie apocalyptically understood all the symbols of religious literature. For she herself had struggled in the Slough of Despond and had emerged; she too had climbed laboriously and without hope and had suddenly been consoled by a sight of the promised land.

‘All these phrases used to sound so conventional and meaninglessly pious,’ she said to Mrs. Quarles. ‘But now I see they’re just descriptions of facts.’

Mrs. Quarles nodded. ‘Bad descriptions, because the facts are indescribable. But if you’ve had personal experience of them, you can see what the symbols are driving at.’

‘Do you know the Black Country?’ said Marjorie. ‘I feel as though I’d come out of one of those mining towns on to the moors. Out into the great open spaces,’ she added in her earnest, rather drawlingly childish voice. (The voice, Mrs. Quarles couldn’t help thinking, and repented immediately of the thought—for after all the poor girl couldn’t help her voice—made the great open spaces seem curiously stuffy.) ‘And when I look back, the black town seems so small and insignificant compared with the space and the enormous sky. As though one were looking at it through the wrong end of a pair of field-glasses.’

Mrs. Quarles frowned slightly. ‘Not so insignificant as all that,’ she said. ‘For after all, there are people living in the town, however black it may be. And the wrong end of the field-glasses is the wrong end. One isn’t meant to look at things so that they appear small and insignificant. That’s one of the dangers of getting out under the sky; one’s too apt to think of the towns and the people in them as small and remote and unimportant. But they aren’t, Marjorie. And it’s the business of the lucky ones who have got out into the open to help the others to come too.’ She frowned again, at herself this time; she hated anything like preaching. But Marjorie mustn’t imagine herself superior, promoted out of the world. ‘How’s Walter?’ she asked with an irrelevance that was no irrelevance. ‘How are you getting on together now?’

‘The same as ever,’ said Marjorie. The admission, a few weeks ago, would have made her utterly wretched. But now even Walter had begun to seem small and rather remote. She loved him still, of course; but somehow through the wrong end of the field-glasses. Through the right end she saw only God and Jesus; they loomed overwhelmingly large.

Mrs. Quarles looked at her, and an expression of sadness passed quickly over her sensitive face. ‘Poor Walter!’ she said.

‘Yes, I’m sorry for him too,’ said Marjorie. There was silence.

Old Dr. Fisher had told her to come and report progress every few weeks, and Marjorie took advantage of that Wednesday’s cheap excursion tickets to run up to town, do some necessary shopping and tell the doctor how well she felt.

‘You look it too,’ said Dr. Fisher, peering at her first through his spectacles, then over the top of them. ‘Extraordinarily much better than when you were here last. It often happens in the fourth month,’ he went on to explain. Dr. Fisher liked to make his patients take an intelligent interest in their own physiology. ‘Health improves. So do spirits. It’s the body settling down to the new state of affairs. The changes in the circulation no doubt have something to do with it. The foetal heart begins to beat about this time. I’ve known cases of neurasthenic women who wanted to have one baby after another, as quick as ever it could be managed. Pregnancy was the only thing that could cure them of their melancholy and obsessions. How little as yet we understand about the relations between body and mind!’

Marjorie smiled and said nothing. Dr. Fisher was an angel, one of the best and kindest men in the whole world. But there were things he understood even less of than the relations between body and mind. What did he understand about God, for example? What did he understand about the soul and its mystical communion with spiritual powers? Poor Dr. Fisher! All that he could talk about was the fourth month of pregnancy and the foetal heart. She smiled inwardly, feeling a kind of pity for the old man.

Burlap that morning was affectionate. ‘Old man,’ he said, laying a hand on Walter’s shoulder,’shouldn’t we go out and eat a chop together somewhere?’ He gave Walter’s shoulder a little squeeze and smiled down at him with the wistful enigmatic tenderness of one of Sodoma’s saints.

‘Alas,’ said Walter, trying to simulate an answering affection,’ I’m lunching with a man at the other end of London.’ It was a lie; but he couldn’t face the prospect of an hour with Burlap in a Fleet Street chophouse. Besides, he wanted to see if there was a letter from Lucy waiting for him at the club. He looked at his watch. ‘Lord!’ he added, not wishing to prolong the conversation with Burlap, ‘I must be off.’

Outside it was raining. The umbrellas were like black mushrooms that had suddenly sprouted from the mud. Gloomy, gloomy. In Madrid the sunshine would be ferocious. ‘But I love the heat,’ she had said. ‘I blossom in ovens.’ He had imagined Spanish nights, dark and hot, and her body pale in the starlight, a ghost, but tangible and warm; and love as patient and relentless as hatred, and possessions like slow murder. His imaginations had justified every conceivable lie and outrage. It mattered not what might be done or left undone, provided the imaginations were realized. He had prepared the ground, he had invented a series of elaborate lies, one set for Burlap, another for Marjorie; he had made enquiries about the price of tickets, he had arranged for an overdraft at the bank. And then came Lucy’s letter with the news that she had changed her mind. She was going to stay in Paris. Why? There was only one possible reason. His jealousy, his disappointment; his humiliation had overflowed into six pages of reproach and fury.

‘Any letters?’ he asked offhandedly of the porter as he entered the club. His tone was meant to imply that he expected nothing more interesting than a publisher’s circular or a philanthropic offer to lend five thousand pounds without security. The porter handed him the familiar yellow envelope. He tore it open and unfolded three sheets of pencilled scribble. ‘Quai Voltaire. Monday.’ He pored over the writing. It was almost as difficult to read as an ancient manuscript. ‘Why do you always write to me in pencil?’ He remembered Cuthbert Arkwright’s question and her answer. ‘I’ll kiss the ink away,’ he had replied. The lout! Walter entered the dining-room and ordered his lunch. Between the mouthfuls he deciphered Lucy’s letter. ‘Quai Voltaire. Insufferable, your letter. Once and for all, I refuse to be cursed at or whined at; I simply won’t be reproached, or condemned. I do what I like and I don’t admit anybody’s right to call my doings into question. Last week I thought it would be amusing to go to Madrid with you; this week I don’t. If my changing my mind has put you to any inconvenience, I’m sorry. But I’m not in the least apologetic for having changed my mind, and if you think your howlings and jealousies make me feel sorry for you, you’re much mistaken. They’re intolerable, they’re inexcusable. Do you really want to know why I’m not leaving Paris? Very well. “I suppose you’ve found some man you like more than me.” Marvellous, my dear Holmes! And guess where I found him? In the street. Strolling along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, looking at the bookshops. I noticed I was being followed from window to window by a young man. I liked his looks. Very black, with an olive skin, rather Roman, no taller than I. At the fourth window he began to talk to me in extraordinary French, with accents on all the mute E’s. “Ma Lei e italiano.” He was; huge delight. “Parla italiano?” And he began pouring out his admiration in the choicest Tuscan. I looked at him. After all, why not? Someone one has never seen before and knows nothing about—it’s an exciting idea. Absolute strangers at one moment and as intimate at the next as two human beings can be. Besides, he was a beautiful creature. ” Vorrei e non vorrei,” I said. But he’d never heard of Mozart—only Puccini, so I cut the cackle. ” All right.” We hailed a taxi and drove to a little hotel near the Jardin des Plantes. Rooms by the hour. A bed, a chair, a cupboard, a washstand with a tin basin and jug, a towel-horse, a bidet. Sordid, but that was part of the fun. “Dunque,” I said. I hadn’t let him touch me in the cab. He came at me as though he were going to kill me, with clenched teeth. I shut my eyes, like a Christian martyr in front of a lion. Martyrdom’s exciting. Letting oneself be hurt, humiliated, used like a doormat—queer. I like it. Besides, the doormat uses the user. It’s complicated. He’d just come back from a seaside holiday by the Mediterranean and his body was all brown and polished by the sun. Beautifully savage he looked, a Red Indian. And as savage as his looks. The marks are still there where he bit me on the neck. I shall have to wear a scarf for days. Where did I see that statue of Marsyas being skinned? His face was like that. I dug my nails into his arm so that the blood came. Afterwards I asked him what he was called. His name’s Francesco Allegri and he’s an aeronautical engineer, and comes from Siena, where his father’s a professor of medicine at the university. How curiously irrelevant that a brown savage should design aircraft engines and have a father who’s a professor! I’m going to see him again to-morrow. So now you know, Walter, why I’ve changed my mind about going to Madrid. Don’t ever send me another letter like the last. L.’

****

Marjorie caught the three-twelve back to Chamford. The rain had stopped when she arrived. The hills on the other side of the valley were touched with sunlight and seemed to shine with their own radiance against the smoke and indigo of the clouds. Drops still hung from the twigs and every cup of leaves and petals was full. The wetted earth gave out a cool delicious fragrance; there was a noise of birds. As she passed under the overhanging branches of the great oak tree half-way up the hill, a puff of wind shook down a cold and sudden shower on her face. Marjorie laughed with pleasure.

She found the cottage untenanted. The maid was out and wouldn’t be back till a little before bedtime. The silence in the empty rooms had a quality of crystalline and musical transparency; the solitude seemed friendly and kind. When she moved about the house, she walked on tiptoe, as though she were afraid of waking a sleeping child.

Marjorie made herself a cup of tea, sipped, ate a biscuit, lighted a cigarette. The flavour of the food and drink, the aroma of the tobacco seemed peculiarly delicious and somehow novel. It was as if she had discovered them for the first time.

She turned the armchair so that it faced the window and sat there looking out, over the valley towards the bright hills with their background of storm. She remembered a day like this when they were living in their cottage in Berkshire. Sunshine the brighter for being so precarious in the midst of darkness; a shining and transfigured earth. Walter and she had sat together at the open window. He had loved her then. And yet she was happier now, much happier. She regretted nothing of what had happened in the interval. The suffering had been necessary. It was the cloud that enhanced the shining of her present felicity. A dark cloud, but how remote now, how curiously irrelevant! And that other happy brightness before the coming of the cloud—that too was tiny and far away, like an image in a curved mirror. Poor Walter! she thought, and remotely she was sorry for him. Pursuing happiness, he had made himself miserable. Happiness is a by-product, Mrs. Quarles had said. It was true. ‘Happiness, happiness.’ Marjorie repeated the word to herself. Against the black vapours the hills were like emerald and green gold. Happiness and beauty and goodness. ‘The peace of God,’ she whispered, ‘ the peace of God that passeth all understanding. Peace, peace, peace…’ She felt as though she were melting into that green and golden tranquillity, sinking and being absorbed into it, dissolving out of separateness into union. Stillness flowed into stillness, the silence without became one with the silence within her. The shaken and turbid liquor of existence grew gradually calm, and all that had made it opaque—all the noise and uproar of the world, all the personal anxieties and desires and feelings—began to settle like a sediment, fell slowly, slowly and noiselessly, out of sight. The turbid liquor became clearer and clearer, more and more translucent. Behind that gradually vanishing mist was reality, was God. It was a slow, progressive revelation. ‘Peace, peace,’ she whispered to herself; and the last faint ripples died away from the surface of life, the opacities churned up by the agitation of living dropped away through the utter calm. ‘Peace, peace.’ She had no desires, no more preoccupations. The liquor which had been turbid was now quite clear, clearer than crystal, more diaphanous than air; the mist had vanished and the unveiled reality was a wonderful emptiness, was nothing. Nothing—the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing. The gradual revelation was now complete.

Marjorie was roused by the click of the front-door latch and the sound of footsteps in the passage. Reluctantly and with a kind of pain she rose from the depths of divine vacancy; her soul swam up again to the surface of consciousness. The sunlight on the hills had deepened its colour, the clouds had lifted and the sky was a pale greenish blue, like water. It was almost evening. Her limbs felt stiff. She must have been sitting there for hours.

‘Walter?’ she called questioningly to the source of the noises in the passage.

The voice in which he answered was dead and flat. ‘Why is he so unhappy?’ she wondered at the sound of it, but wondered from a great distance and with a kind of far-away resentment. She resented his disturbing and interrupting presence, his very existence. He entered the room and she saw that his face was pale, his eyes darkly ringed.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, almost against her will. The nearer she came to Walter, the further she moved from the marvellous nothingness of God. ‘You don’t look at all well.’

‘It’s nothing,’ he answered. ‘Rather tired, that’s all.’ Coming down in the train he had read and re-read Lucy’s letter, till he almost knew it by heart. His imagination had supplemented the words. He knew that sordid little room in the hotel meuble; he had seen the Italian’s brown body and her whiteness, and the man’s clenched teeth and his face like the face of a tortured Marsyas, and Lucy’s own face with that expression he knew, that look of grave and attentive suffering, as though the agonizing pleasure were a profound and difficult truth only to be grasped by intense concentration.

Ah well, Marjorie was thinking; he had said it was nothing; that was all right; she needn’t worry any further. ‘Poor Walter!’ she said aloud and smiled at him with a pitying tenderness. He wasn’t going to make any demands on her attention or her feelings; she resented him no longer. ‘Poor Walter!’

Walter looked at her for a moment, then turned away. He didn’t want pity. Not that sort of superior angel’s pity, at any rate, and not from Marjorie. He had accepted pity from her once. The memory of the occasion made his whole flesh creep with shame. Never again. He walked away.

Marjorie heard his feet on the stairs and the banging of a door.

‘All the same,’ she thought, reluctantly solicitous, ‘there is something wrong. Something has made him specially miserable. Perhaps I ought to go up and see what he’s doing.’

But she didn’t go. She sat where she was, quite still, deliberately forgetting him. The little sediment that Walter’s coming had stirred up in her quickly settled again. Through the vacant lifelessness of trance her spirit sank slowly down once more into God, into the perfected absolute, into limitless and everlasting nothing. Time passed; the late afternoon turned into summer twilight; the twilight thickened slowly into darkness.

Daisy, the maid, came back at ten.

‘Sittin’ in the dark, mum?’ she asked, looking into the sittingroom. She turned on the light. Marjorie winced. The glare brought back to her dazzled eyes all the close immediate details of the material world. God had vanished like a pricked bubble. Daisy caught sight of the unlaid table. ‘What, ‘aven’t you ‘ad no supper?’ she exclaimed in horror.

‘Why, no,’ said Marjorie. ‘I quite forgot about supper.’

‘Not Mr. Bidlake neither?’ Daisy went on reproachfully. ‘Why, pore man, ‘e must be perished.’

She hurried away towards the kitchen in search of cold beef and pickles.

Upstairs in his room Walter was lying on the bed, his face buried in the pillows.

CHAPTER XXXI

A crossword problem had brought Mr. Quarles to the seventeenth volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Idle curiosity detained him. The Lord Chamberlain, he learned, carries a white staff and wears a golden or jewelled key. The word lottery has no very definite signification; but Nero gave such prizes as a house or a slave, while Heliogabalus introduced an element of absurdity—one ticket for a golden vase, another for six flies. Pinckney B. S. Pinchback was the acting Republican governor of Louisiana in 1873. To define the lyre, it is necessary clearly to separate it from the allied harp and guitar. In one of the northern ravines of Madeira some masses of a coarsely crystalline Essexite are exposed to view. But there is also a negative side to magic. And terrestrial magnetism has a long history. He had just started to read about Sir John Blundell Maple, Bart. (1845-1903), whose father, John Maple (d. 1900) had a small furniture shop in the Tottenham Court Road, when the parlourmaid appeared at the door and announced that there was a young lady to see him.

‘A young ladah?’ he repeated with some surprise, taking off his pince-nez.

‘Yes, it’s me,’ said a familiar voice and Gladys pushed past the maid and advanced into the middle of the room.

At the sight of her, Mr. Quarles felt a sudden spasm of apprehension. He got up. ‘You can go,’ he said with dignity to the maid. She went. ‘My dyah child!’ He took Gladys’s hand; she disengaged it. ‘But what a surprise!’

‘Ow, a pleasant surprise!’ she answered sarcastically. Emotion always resuscitated the cockney in her. She sat down, planting herself with force and determination in the chair. ‘Here I am,’ that determined down-sitting seemed to imply, ‘and here I stay’—perhaps even, ‘here I bloody well stay.’

‘Pleasant indeed,’ said Mr. Quarles mellifluously, for the sake of saying something. This was terrible, he was thinking. What could she want? And how should he get her out of the house again? But if necessary, he could say he’d sent for her to do some specially urgent typing for him. ‘But very unexpected,’ he added.

‘Very.’ She shut her mouth firmly and looked at him—with eyes that Mr. Quarles didn’t at all like the expression of—as if in expectation. Of what?

‘I’m delighted to see you, of course,’ he went on.

‘Ow, are you?’ She laughed dangerously.

Mr. Quarles looked at her and was afraid. He really hated the girl. He began to wonder why he had ever desired her. ‘Very glad,’ he repeated, with dignified emphasis. The great thing was to remain dignified, firmly superior. ‘But…’

‘But,’ she echoed.

‘Well, ryahlly, I think it was rather rash to come here.’

‘He thinks it rather rash,’ said Gladys, as though passing on the information to an invisible third party.

‘Not to say unnecessarah.’

‘Well, I’m the judge of that.’

‘After all, you know quite well that if you’d wanted to see me, you’d only got to write and I’d have come at once. So why run the risk of coming hyah?’ He waited. But Gladys did not answer, only looked at him with those hard green eyes of hers and that close-lipped smile that seemed to shut in enigmatically heaven only knew what dangerous thoughts and feelings. ‘I’m ryahlly annoyed with you.’ The manner of Mr. Quarles’s rebuke was dignified and impressive, but kind—always kind. ‘Yes, ryahily annoyed.’

Gladys threw back her head and uttered a shrill, short, hyena-like laugh.

Mr. Quarles was disconcerted. But he preserved his dignity. ‘You may laugh,’ he said. ‘But I speak syahriously. You had no right to come. You knew quite well how important it is that nothing should be suspected. Especially hyah—hyah, in my own house. You knew it.’

‘Yes, I knew it,’ Gladys repeated, nodding her head truculently. ‘And that’s exactly why I came.’ She was silent for a moment. But the pressure of her feelings made silence no longer bearable. ‘Because I knew you were frightened,’ she went on, ‘frightened that people might find out what you were reelly like. You dirty old swine!’ And suddenly losing all control of her fury, she sprang to her feet and advanced on Mr. Quarles so menacingly, that he recoiled a step. But her attack was only verbal. ‘Giving yourself such airs, as though you was the Prince of Wales. And then taking a girl to dinner at the Corner House. And blaming everybody else, worse than a parson, when you’re no better than a dirty old pig yourself. Yes, a dirty old pig, that’s what you are. Saying you loved me, indeed! I know what that sort of love is. Why, a girl isn’t safe with you in a taxi. No, she isn’t. You filthy old beast! And then…’

‘Ryahlly, ryahily!’ Mr. Quarles had sufficiently recovered from his first shock of horrified surprise to be able to protest. This was terrible, unheard of. He felt himself being devastated, laid waste to, ravaged.

‘“Ryahlly, ryably,”’ she mimicked derisively. ‘And then not even taking a girl to a decent seat at the theatre. But w hen it was a question of your having a bit of fun in your way—oh, lord! Nasty fat old swine! And carrying on all the time like Rudolph Valentino, with your chatter about all the women that had been in love with you. With you! You just look at yourself in the glass. Like a red egg, that’s what you are.’

‘Too unseemlah!’

‘Talking about love with a face like that!’ she went on, more shrilly than ever. ‘An old swine like you! And then you only give a girl a rotten old watch and a pair of earrings, and the stones in them aren’t even good ones, because I asked a jeweller and he said they weren’t. And now, on top of everything I’m going to have a baby.’

‘A babah?’ repeated Mr. Quarles incredulously, but with a deeper and more dreadful sinking of apprehension. ‘Surely not a babah.’

‘Yes, a baby!’ Gladys shouted, stamping her foot. ‘Can’t you hear what I say, you old idiot? A baby. That’s what I’ve come here about. And I won’t go away till…’

It was at this moment that Mrs. Quarles walked in through the French window from the garden. She had been having a talk with Marjorie at the cottage and had come to tell Sidney that she had asked the two young people to dinner that evening.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, halting on the threshold.

There was a moment’s silence. Then, addressing herself this time to Mrs. Quarles, Gladys began again with uncontrollable fury. Five minutes later she was no less uncontrollably sobbing and Mrs. Quarles was trying to console her. Sidney took the opportunity to sneak out of the room. When the gong sounded for lunch, he sent down word to say that he was feeling very ill and would they please send up two lightly boiled eggs, some toast and butter, and a little stewed fruit.

Meanwhile in the study Mrs. Quarles had hung solicitously over Gladys’s chair. ‘It’s all right,’ she kept repeating, patting the girl’s shoulder, ‘It’s all right. You mustn’t cry.’ Poor girl! she was thinking. And what a dreadful scent! And how could Sidney? And again, poor girl, poor girl! ‘Don’t cry. Try to be brave. It’ll be all right.’

Gladys’s sobbing gradually subsided. Mrs. Quarles’s calm voice talked on consolingly. The girl listened. Then suddenly she jumped up. The face that confronted Mrs. Quarles was savagely derisive through the tear stains.

‘Ow, shut it!’ she said sarcastically, ‘shut it! What do you take me for? A baby? Talking like that! You think you can talk me quiet, do you? Talk me out of my rights. Talky talky; baby’s going to be good, isn’t she? But you’re mistaken, I tell you. You’re damned well mistaken. And you’ll know it soon enough, I can tell you.’

And with that she bounced out of the room into the garden and was gone.

CHAPTER XXXII

In the little house at the end of the mews Elinor was alone. Faint rumblings of far-away traffic caressed the warm silence. A bowl of her mother’s potpourri peopled the air for her with countless potential memories of childhood. She was arranging roses in a vase; huge white roses with petals of malleable porcelain, orange roses like whorls of congealed and perfumed flame. The chiming clock on the mantelpiece made a sudden and startling comment of eight notes and left the accorded vibrations to tingle mournfully away into nothingness, like music on a departing ship. Halfpast three. And at six she was expecting Everard. Expecting Everard for a cocktail, she was at pains to explain to herself, before he took her out to dinner and the play. Just an evening’s entertainment, like any other evening’s entertainment. She kept telling herself so, because she knew, underneath, she was prophetically certain, that the evening wouldn’t be in the least like other evenings, but cardinal, decisive. She would have to make up her mind, she would have to choose. But she didn’t want to choose; that was why she tried to make herself believe that the evening was to be merely trivial and amusing. It was like covering a corpse with flowers. Mountains of flowers. But the corpse was always there, in spite of the concealing lilies. And a choice would have to be made, in spite of dinner at Kettner’s and the theatre. Sighing, she picked up the heavy vase in both hands and was just lifting it on to the mantelpiece, when there was a loud knock at the door. Elinor started so violently, that she almost dropped her burden. And the terror persisted, even when she had recovered from the first shock of surprise. A knock at the door, when she was alone in the lonely house, always set her heart uncomfortably beating. The idea that there was somebody there, waiting, listening, a stranger, an enemy perhaps (for Elinor’s fancy was pregnant with horrible hairy faces peering round corners, with menacing hands, with knives and clubs and pistols) or perhaps a madman, listening intently for any sound of life within the house, waiting, waiting like a spider for her to open—this was a nightmare to her, a terror. The knock was repeated. Setting down the vase, she tiptoed with infinite precautions to the window and peeped between the curtains. On days when she was feeling particularly nervous she lacked the courage even to do this, but sat motionless, hoping that the noise of her heart might not be audible in the street, until the knocker at last wore out his patience and walked away. Next day the man from Selfridge’s would heap coals of fire upon her by apologizing for the retarded delivery. ‘Called yesterday evening, madam, but there was nobody at home.’ And Elinor would feel ashamed of herself and a fool. But the next time she was alone and nervous, she would do exactly the same thing.

This afternoon she had courage; she ventured to look at the enemy—at as much of him, that is to say, as she could see, peeping sideways through the glass towards the door. A grey trouser-leg and an elbow were all that entered her field of vision. There was yet another knock. Then the trouser-leg moved back, the whole coat came into view, the black hat and, with a turn of the head, Spandrell’s face. She ran to the door and opened.

‘Sspandrell!’ she called, for he had already turned to go. He came back, lifting his hat. They shook hands. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she explained. ‘I was alone. I thought it was at least a murderer. Then I peeped through the window and saw it was you.’

Spandrell gave vent to brief and noiseless laughter. ‘But it might still be a murderer, even though it is me.’ And he shook his knobbed stick at her with a playfulness which was, however, so dramatically like her imaginings of the genuinely homicidal article, that Elinor was made to feel quite uncomfortable.

She covered her emotion with a laugh, but decided not to ask him into the house. Standing on the doorstep she felt safer. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘it would be better to be murdered by somebody one knows than by a stranger.’

‘Would it?’ He looked at her; the corners of his wide weal-like mouth twitched into a curious smile. ‘It needs a woman to think of those refinements. But if you should ever feel like having your throat cut in a thoroughly friendly fashion…’

‘My dear Spandrell!’ she protested, and felt gladder than ever that she was still on the doorstep and not inside the house.

‘… Don’t hesitate to send for me. No matter what the inconvenience,’ he laid his hand on his heart, ‘ I’d fly to your side. Or rather to your neck.’ He clicked his heels and bowed. ‘But tell me,’ he went on in another tone, ‘is Philip anywhere about? I wanted him to come and dine to-night. At Sbisa’s. I’d ask you too. Only it’s a purely masculine affair.’

She thanked him. ‘But I couldn’t come in any case, And Philip’s gone down into the country to see his mother. And will only be back just in time for Tolley’s concert at the Queen’s Hall. But I know he said he was going round to Sbisa’s afterwards, on the chance of meeting someone. You’ll see him then. Late.’

‘Well, better late than never. Or at least,’ he uttered another of his soundless laughs, ‘so one piously hopes, where one’s friends are concerned. Pious hopes! But to tell you the truth, the proverb needs changing. Better never than early.’

‘Then why go to the trouble of asking people to dine?’

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Force of habit,’ he said. ‘And besides, I generally make them pay, when I ask them out.’

They were both laughing, when a loud ringing made them turn. A telegraph boy on a red bicycle was shooting down the mews towards them.

‘Quarles?’ he asked, as he jumped off.

Elinor took the telegram and opened it. The laughter went out of her face as she read. ‘No answer.’ The boy remounted and rode away. Elinor stood staring at the telegram as though its words were written in an unfamiliar language difficult to interpret. She looked at the watch on her wrist, then back at the flimsy paper.

‘Will you do something for me?’ she said at last, turning to Spandrell.

‘But of course.’

‘My baby’s ill,’ she explained. ‘They want me to come. If I hurry ‘ (she looked again at her watch): ‘I can just catch the four-seventeen at Euston. But there’ll be no time for anything else. Will you ring up Everard Webley for me and explain why I can’t dine with him this evening?’ It was a warning, she thought; a prohibition. ‘Before six. At his office.’

‘Before six,’ he repeated slowly. ‘At his office. Very well.’

‘I must rush,’ she said, holding out her hand.

‘But I’ll go and get you a cab, while you put on your hat.’

She thanked him. Spandrell hurried away along the mews. A prohibition, Elinor repeated to herself, as she adjusted her hat in front of the Venetian mirror in the living-room. The choice had been made for her. It was at once a relief and a disappointment. But made, she went on to reflect, at poor little Phil’s expense. She wondered what was the matter with him. Her mother’s telegram—such a characteristic one, that she could not help smiling now that she thought of it again—said nothing. ‘PHILIP RATHER SOUFFRANT AND THOUGH UNALARMINGLY SHOULD ADVISE PROMPT HOMECOMING MOTHER.’ She remembered how nervous and difficult the child had been of late, how easily fatigued. She reproached herself for not having realized that he was working up for an illness. Now it had come. A touch of influenza, perhaps. ‘I ought to have taken more care,’ she kept repeating. She scribbled a note for her husband. ‘The accompanying telegram explains my sudden departure. Join me at Gattenden to-morrow morning.’ Where should she put it so that Philip should be sure to see it when he came in? Leaning against the clock on the mantelpiece? But would he necessarily want to know the time? Or on the table? No; pin it to the screen; that was the thing! He couldn’t miss it. She ran upstairs in search of a pin. On Philip’s dressing-table she saw a bunch of keys. She picked them up and looked at them, frowning. ‘The idiot’s forgotten his latchkey. How will he get in to-night?’ The noise of a taxi under the window suggested a solution. She hurried down, pinned the note and the telegram conspicuously to the screen that shut off the drawing-room part of the living-room from the door and let herself out into the mews. Spandrell was standing at the door of the cab.

‘That is kind of you,’ she said. ‘But I haven’t finished exploiting you even now.’ She held up the keys. ‘When you see Philip this evening, give him these and tell him with my love that he’s an imbecile. He wouldn’t have been able to get in without them.’ Spandrell took the keys in silence. ‘And tell him why I’ve gone and that I’m expecting him to-morrow.’ She got into the cab. ‘And don’t forget to ring up Webley. Before six. Because he was supposed to be meeting me here at six.’

‘Here?’ he asked with an expression of sudden interest and curiosity which Elinor found rather offensive and embarrassing. Was he imagining something, was he daring to suppose…?

‘Yes, here,’ she nodded curtly.

‘I won’t forget,’ he assured her emphatically, and there was still something about his expression which made her suspect a private significance behind the obvious words.

‘Thank you,’ said Elinor, without cordiality. ‘And now I must fly.’ She gave the word to the driver. The taxi backed up the mews, under the archway, turned and was gone.

Spandrell walked slowly up to Hyde Park Corner. From the public call-box in the station he telephoned to Illidge.

****

Everard Webley was striding about the room, dictating. Sedentary composition he found impossible. ‘How do people write when they’re grafted to chairs all day long, year in year out?’ He found it incomprehensible. ‘When I’m sitting in a chair, or lying on a bed, I become like the furniture I’ve combined myself with—mere wood and stuffing. My mind doesn’t move unless my muscles move.’ On days when his correspondence was large, when there were articles to dictate, speeches to compose, Everard’s working day was an eight-hour walking tour. ‘Doing the lion,’ was how his secretaries described his methods of dictation. He was doing the lion now—the restless lion, a little before feeding time—pacing from wall to wall of his big bare office.

‘Remember,’ he was saying, frowning, as he spoke, at the grey carpet; under his secretary’s pencil the shorthand scurried across the page, ‘remember that the final authority is in all cases mine and that, so long as I remain at the head of the B. B. F., every attempt at insubordination will be promptly and ruthlessly suppressed. Yours etcetera.’ He was silent and, walking back to his desk from the spot where the conclusion of his thoughtful and leonine pacing had left him, he turned over the scattered papers. ‘That seems to be all,’ he said and looked at his watch. It was just after a quarter to six. ‘Have these last letters ready for me in the morning,’ he went on. ‘I’ll sign them then.’ He took his hat from the peg. ‘Good evening.’ And slamming the door, he descended the stairs two at a time. Outside the house he found his chauffeur waiting with the car. It was a powerful machine (for Everard was a lover of furious driving) and, since he also enjoyed the sensation of battling with the weather and the wind of his own speed, open. A tightly-stretched waterproof sheet covered the whole of the back part of the touring body like a deck, leaving only the two front seats available for passengers. ‘I shan’t need you anv more this evening,’ he said to the chauffeur, as he settled into the driver’s seat. ‘You can go.’

He touched the self-starter, threw the car into gear and shot off with a violent impetuosity. Several dozens of horses were bottled in the three litres of Everard’s cylinders; he liked to make them work their hardest. Full speed ahead and then, a yard from the impending accident, jam on the brakes, that was his method. Driving with Everard in town was almost too exciting. Elinor had protested the last time he took her out. ‘I don’t so much mind dying,’ she had said. ‘But I really should object to passing the rest of my life with two wooden legs and a broken nose.’ He had laughed. ‘You’re quite safe with me. I don’t have accidents.’

‘You’re above such things are you?’ she had mocked. ‘Well, if you like to put it like that’ The brakes were applied with such violence that Elinor had had to clutch at the arms of her seat to prevent herself from being thrown against the wind-screen. ‘Imbecile,’ he had shouted at the bewildered old gentleman whose hen-like indecisions in the roadway had so nearly landed him under Everard’s Dunlops. ‘If you like to put it like that—’ and the car had shot forward again with a jerk that flattened Elinor against the back of her seat—’ you may. I don’t have accidents. I manufacture my own luck.’

Remembering the incident, Everard smiled to himself as he drove along Oxford Street. A railway delivery van held up his progress. Horses oughtn’t to be allowed in the streets. ‘Either you take me,’ he would say to her, ‘and in the end that means you’ll have to make the thing public—leave Philip and come to me’—(for he intended to be entirely honest with her; there were to be no false pretences of any kind); ‘either that, or else…’ There was an opportunity to pass the delivery van; he pressed the accelerator and darted forward with a swerve to the right and another, past the nose of the old and patiently trotting horse, to the left again. ‘Or else we don’t see one another again.’ It was to be an ultimatum. Brutal. But Everard hated situations that were neither one thing nor the other. He preferred definite knowledge, however unpleasant, to even the most hopefully blissful of uncertainties. And in this case the uncertainty wasn’t at all blissful. At the entry to Oxford Circus a policeman lifted his hand. It was seven minutes to six. She was too squeamish, he thought, looking round, too sensitive about these new buildings. Everard found nothing displeasing in the massively florid baroque of modern commerce. It was vigorous and dramatic; it was large, it was expensive, it symbolized progress. ‘But it’s so revoltingly vulgar!’ she had protested. ‘But it’s difficult,’ he had answered, ‘not to be vulgar, when one isn’t dead. You object to these people doing things. And I agree: doing things is rather vulgar.’ She had the typical consumer’s point of view, not the producer’s. The policeman dropped his hand. Slowly at first, but with gathering impetus, the pent-up flood of traffic rumbled forward. A luxury mind—that was what she had; not a necessity mind. A mind that thought of the world only in terms of beauty and enjoyment, not of use; a mind preoccupied with sensations and shades of feeling, and preoccupied with them for their own sake, not because sharp eyes and intuition are necessary in the struggle for life. Indeed, she hardly knew that there was a struggle. He ought to have disapproved of her; and he would have disapproved (Everard smiled to himself as he made the reflection) if he hadn’t been in love with her. He would have…Flop! from the roof of a passing ‘bus a banana skin fell like a draggled star-fish on to the bonnet in front of him. A whoop of laughter sounded through the roaring. Lifting his eyes he saw two young girls looking down at him over the rail, open-mouthed, like a pair of pretty little gargoyles, and laughing, laughing as though there had never been a joke in the world before that moment. Everard shook his fist at them and laughed too. How much Elinor would have enjoyed that! he thought. She who so loved the streets and their comedies. What an eye she had for the odd, the amusing, the significant! Where he perceived only a mass of undifferentiated humanity, she distinguished individuals. And her talent for inventing life histories for her onceglimpsed oddities was no less remarkable than her detecting eye. She would have known all about those young girls—their class, the sort of homes they came from, where they bought their clothes and how much they paid for them, whether they were still virtuous, what books they read, and which were their favourite cinema actors. Imagining to himself what Elinor would have said, remembering her laughter and the look in her eyes and her tricks of speech, he was suddenly filled with so much tenderness, such a violent yet delicately affectionate longing to be with her, that he could hardly bear to be separated from her for even a moment longer. He hooted at the taxi in front of him, he tried to thrust past on the right. An obstructing street island compelled him to fall back, but not before the taxi-driver had had time to throw doubts on his legitimacy, his heterosexuality and his prospects of happiness in another world. With as much gusto and incomparably more originality, Everard swore back. He felt himself overflowing with life, extraordinarily vigorous and strong, inexplicably and (but for the fact that it would be at least five minutes before he saw Elinor) perfectly happy. Yes, perfectly happy; for he knew (with what calm conviction!) that she would say yes, that she loved him. And his happiness became more intense, more poignant and at the same time more serene, as he swung round past the Marble Arch into the Park. His prophetic conviction deepened into something like remembered certainty, as though the future were already history. The sun was low and wherever its rosily golden light touched earth, it was as if a premature and more luminous autumn had fired the leaves and grass. Great shafts of powdery radiance leaned down from the west between the trees and in the shadows the twilight was a mist of lavender, a mist of blue and darkening indigo, plane after plane into the hazy London distance. And the couples strolling across the grass, the children playing were alternately eclipsed and transfigured as they passed from shade to sunlight, were alternately insignificant and brilliantly miraculous. It was as though a capricious god, now bored and now enchanted by his creatures, had turned upon them at one moment an eye of withering indifference and at the next, with his love, had bestowed upon them some of his own divinity. The road stretched clear and polished before him; but Everard hardly exceeded the speed limit—in spite of his longing; in a sense because he loved her so much. For it was all so beautiful; and where beauty was, there too, for Everard, by some private logic, some personal necessity, was Elinor. She was with him now, because she would have enjoyed this loveliness so much. And because she would have wanted to prolong the pleasure, he crept along. The engine was turning at a bare fifteen hundred revolutions a minute; the dynamo was hardly charging. A Baby Austin passed him as though he were standing still. Let them pass! Everard was thinking of the phrases in which he would describe to her this marvel. Through the railings, the ‘buses in Park Lane blazed scarlet and glittered like triumphal cars in a pageant. Faintly, through the noise of the traffic, a clock struck six; and before it had finished, another chimed in, melodious, sweet and with a touch of melancholy—the very voice of the bright evening and of his happiness. And now, for all his creeping, the marble gateways of Hyde Park Corner were before him. Offered, in spite of the nakedness and the more than Swedish development of his abdominal muscles, by the Ladies of England to the Victor of Waterloo, the bronze Achilles, whose flesh had once been Napoleon’s cannons, stood with shield raised, sword brandished, menacing and defending himself against the pale and empty sky. It was almost regretfully, though he longed to be at his journey’s end, that Everard left the Park. Once more the towering ‘buses roared before him and behind. Rounding the archipelago of islands he vowed that to-morrow, if Elinor said Yes, he would send five pounds to St. George’s Hospital. He knew she would. The money was as good as given already. He turned out of Grosvenor Place; the roaring faded behind him. Belgrave Square was an oasis of trees; the starlings chattered in a rural silence. Everard turned once, twice and yet again. On the left, between the houses was an archway. He passed it by a yard or two, stopped and, pulling the wheel over, backed under it into the mews, back, back to the very end of the blind alley. He stopped the car and got out. How charming the yellow curtains looked! His heart was beating very fast. He felt as he had felt when he made his first speech, halffrightened, half-exultant. Mounting the doorstep, he knocked and waited twenty heart-beats; the house gave forth no answering sound. He knocked again and, remembering what Elinor had told him of her terrors, accompanied the rap with a whistle and, as though in answer to the unspoken challenge of her fears, a call of ‘Friend!’ And then, suddenly, he noticed that the door was not latched, but only ajar. He pushed; it swung open. Everard stepped over the threshold.

‘Elinor!’ he called, thinking that she must be upstairs. ‘Elinor!’

There was still no answer. Or was she playing a joke? Would she suddenly pounce out at him from behind one of the screens. He smiled to himself at the thought and was advancing to explore the silent room, when his eye was caught by the papers pinned so conspicuously to a panel of the screen on the right. He approached and had just begun to read, ‘The accompanying telegram will explain…’ when a sound behind him made him turn his head. A man was standing within four feet of him, his hands raised; the club which they grasped had already begun to swing sideways and forward from over the right shoulder. Everard threw up his arm, too late. The blow caught him on the left temple. It was as though a light had suddenly been turned out. He was not even conscious of falling.

****

Mrs. Quarles kissed her son. ‘Dear Phil,’ she said. ‘It’s good of you to have come so quickly.’

‘You’re not looking very well, mother.’

‘A little tired, that’s all. And worried,’ she added after a moment’s pause and with a sigh.

‘Worried?’

‘About your father. He’s not well,’ she went on, speaking slowly and as if with reluctance. ‘He wanted very specially to see you. That was why I wired.’

‘He isn’t dangerously ill?’

‘Not physically,’ Mrs. Quarles replied. ‘But his nerves…. It’s a kind of breakdown. He’s very excited. Very unstable.’

‘But what’s the cause?’

Mrs. Quarles was silent. And when at last she spoke it was with an obvious effort, as though each word had to force its way past some inward barrier. Her sensitive face was fixed and strained. ‘Something has happened to upset him,’ she said. ‘He’s had a great shock.’ And slowly, word by word, the story came out.

Bent forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, Philip listened. After a first glance at his mother’s face, he kept his eyes fixed on the ground. He felt that to look at her, to meet her eyes would be the infliction of an unnecessary embarrassment. Speaking was already a pain to her and a humiliation; let her at least speak unseen, as though there were nobody there to witness her distress. His averted eyes left her a kind of spiritual privacy. Word after word, in a colourless soft voice, Mrs. Quarles talked on. Incident succeeded sordid incident. When she began to tell the story of Gladys’s visit of two days before, Philip could not bear to listen any longer. It was too humiliating for her; he could not permit her to go on.

‘Yes, yes, I can imagine,’ he said, interrupting her. And jumping up, he limped with quick nervous steps to the window.’don’t go on.’ He stood there for a minute, looking out at the lawn and the thick yew-tree walls and the harvest-coloured hills beyond, on the further side of the valley. The scene was almost exasperatingly placid. Philip turned, limped back across the room and standing for a moment behind his mother’s chair laid a hand on her shoulder; then walked away again.

‘Don’t think about it any more,’ he said. ‘I’ll do whatever has to be done.’ He looked forward with an enormous distaste to loud and undignified scenes, to disputes and vulgar hagglings. ‘Perhaps I’d better go and see father,’ he suggested.

Mrs. Quarles nodded. ‘He was very anxious to see you.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t quite know. But he’s been insisting.’

‘Does he talk about…well, this business?’

‘No. Never mentions it. I have the impression that he forgets about it deliberately.’

‘Then I’d better not speak about it.’

‘Not unless he begins,’ Mrs. Quarles advised. ‘Mostly he talks about himself. About the past, about his health—pessimistically. You must try to cheer him.’ Philip nodded. ‘And humour him,’ his mother went on;’don’t contradict. He easily flares up. It isn’t good for him to get excited.’

Philip listened. As though he were a dangerous animal, he was thinking; or a naughty child. The misery of it, the anxiety, the humiliation for his mother!

‘And don’t stay too long,’ she added.

Philip left her. The fool, he said to himself as he crossed the hall, the damned fool! The sudden anger and contempt with which he thought of his father were tempered by no previous affection. Neither, for that matter, were they exacerbated by any previous hatred. Up to this time Philip had neither loved nor disliked his father. Unreflectingly tolerant or, at the worst, with a touch of amused resignation, he had just accepted his existence. There was nothing in his memories of childhood to justify more positive emotions. As a father, Mr. Quarles had shown himself no less erratic and no less ineffectual than as a politician or as a man of business. Brief periods of enthusiastic interest in his children had alternated with long periods, during which he almost ignored their existence. Philip and his brother had preferred him during the seasons of neglect; for he had ignored them benevolently. They liked him less when he was interested in their wellbeing. For the interest was generally not so much in the children as in a theory of education or hygiene. After meeting an eminent doctor, after reading the latest book on pedagogical methods, Mr. Quarles would wake up to the discovery that, unless something were drastically done, his sons were likely to grow up into idiots and cripples, weak-minded and with bodies poisoned by the wrong food and distorted by improper exercise. And then, for a few weeks, the two boys would be stuffed with raw carrots or overdone beef (it depended on the doctor Mr. Quarles happened to have met); would be drilled, or taught folk-dancing and eurhythmics; would be made to learn poetry by rote (if it happened to be the memory that was important at the moment) or else (if it happened to be the ratiocinative faculties) would be turned out into the garden, told to plant sticks in the lawn and, by measuring the shadow at different hours of the day, discover for themselves the principles of trigonometry. While the fit lasted, life for the two boys was almost intolerable. And if Mrs. Quarles protested, Sidney flew into a rage and told her that she was a selfishly doting mother, to whom the true welfare of her children meant nothing. Mrs. Quarles did not insist too strongly; for she knew that, thwarted, Sidney would probably become more obstinate; humoured, he would forget his enthusiasm. And in fact, after a few weeks, Sidney would duly tire of labours which produced no quick and obvious results. His hygiene had not made the boys perceptibly larger or stronger; they had not grown appreciably more intelligent for his pedagogy. All that they quite indubitably were was a daily and hourly bore. ‘Affairs of greater moment’ would occupy more and more of his attention, until gradually, like the Cheshire cat, he had faded altogether out of the world of the schoolroom and the nursery into higher and more comfortable spheres. The boys settled down again to happiness.

Arrested at the door of his father’s room by the sounds from within, Philip listened. His face took on an expression of anxiety, even of alarm. That voice? And his father, he had been told, was alone. Talking to himself? Was he as bad as all that? Bracing himself, Philip opened the door and was immediately reassured to find that what he had taken for insanity was only dictation to the dictaphone. Propped up on pillows, Mr. Quarles was half-sitting, half-lying in his bed. His face, his very scalp were flushed and shining, and his pink silk pyjamas were like an intensified continuation of the same fever. The dictaphone stood on the table by his bed; Mr. Quarles was talking into the mouthpiece of its flexible speaking-tube. ‘True greatness,’ he was saying sonorously, ‘is inversely proportional to myahr immediate success. Ah, hyah you are! he cried, looking round as the door opened. He stopped the clockwork of the machine, hung up the speaking-tube and stretched out a welcoming hand. Simple gestures. But there was something, it seemed to Philip, extravagant about all his movements. It was as though he were on the stage. The eyes which he turned on Philip were unnaturally bright. ‘I’m so glad you’ve come. So glad, dyah boy.’ He patted Philip’s hand; the loud voice suddenly trembled.

Unused to such demonstrations, Philip was embarrassed. ‘Well, how are you feeling?’ he asked with an assumption of cheeriness.

Mr. Quarles shook his head and pressed his son’s hand without speaking. Philip was more than ever embarrassed at seeing that the tears had come into his eyes. How could one go on hating and being angry?

‘But you’ll be all right,’ he said, trying to be reassuring. ‘It’s just a question of resting for a bit.’ Mr. Quarles tightened the clasp of his hand. ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he said. ‘But I feel that the end’s nyah.’

‘But that’s nonsense, father. You mustn’t talk like that.’

‘Nyah,’ Mr. Quarles repeated, obstinately nodding, ‘very nyah. That’s why I’m so glad you’re hyah. I should have been unhappah to die when you were at the other end of the wahld. But with you hyah, I feel I can go’—his voice trembled again—’quite contentedlah.’ Once more he squeezed Philip’s hand. He was convinced that he had always been a devoted father, living for nothing but his children. And so he had been, every now and then. ‘Yes, quite contentedlah.’ He pulled out his handkerchief, blew his nose, and while he was doing so surreptitiously wiped his eyes.

‘But you’re not going to die.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Mr. Quarles insisted. ‘I can feel it.’ He genuinely did feel it; he believed he was going to die, because there was at least a part of his mind that desired to die. These complications of the last weeks had been too much for him; and the future promised to be worse, if that were possible. To fade out, painlessly—that would be the best solution of all his problems. He wished, he believed; and, believing in his approaching death, he pitied himself as a victim and at the same time admired himself for the resigned nobility with which he supported his fate.

‘But you’re not going to die,’ Philip dully insisted, not knowing what consolation, beyond mere denial, to offer. He had no gift for dealing extempore with the emotional situations of practical life. ‘There’s nothing…’ He was going to say, ‘There’s nothing the matter with you’; but checked himself, reflecting, before it was too late, that his father might be offended.

‘Let’s say no more about it.’ Mr. Quarles spoke tartly; there was a look of annoyance in his eye. Philip remembered what his mother had said about humouring him. He kept silence. ‘One can’t quarrel with Destinah,’ Mr. Quarles went on in another tone. ‘Destinah,’ he repeated with a sigh. ‘You’ve been fortunate, dyah boy; you discovered your vocation from the farst. Fate has treated you well.’

Philip nodded. He had often thought so himself, with a certain apprehension even. He had an obscure belief in nemesis.

‘Whereas in my case…’ Mr. Quarles did not finish the sentence, but raised his hand and let it fall again, hopelessly, on to the coverlet. ‘I wasted yahs of my life on false scents. Yahs and yahs before I discovered my ryahl bent. A philosopher’s wasted on practical affairs. He’s even absard. Like what’s-his-name’s albatross. You know.’

Philip was puzzled. ‘Do you mean the one in The Ancient Mariner?’

‘No, no,’ said Mr. Quarles impatiently. ‘That Frenchman.’

‘Oh, of course.’ Philip had caught the reference. ‘Le Poete est semblable au prince des nuees. Baudelaire, you mean.’

‘Baudelaire, of course.’

‘Exile sur le sol au milieu des huees,

Ses ailes de geant l’empechent de marcher,’

Philip quoted, glad to be able to divert the conversation if only for a moment from personalities to literature.

His father was delighted. ‘Exactlah!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘It’s the same with philosophers. Their wings prevent them from walking. For tharty yahs I tried to be a walker—in politics, in business. I didn’t ryahlize that my place was in the air, not on the ground. In the air!’ he repeated, raising his arm. ‘I had wings.’ He agitated his hand in a rapid tremolo. ‘Wings, and didn’t know it.’ His voice had grown louder, his eyes brighter, his face pinker and more shiny. His whole person expressed such an excitement, such restlessness and exaltation, that Philip was seriously disquieted.

‘Hadn’t you better rest a little?’ he anxiously suggested.

Mr. Quarles disregarded the interruption. ‘Wings, wings,’ he cried. ‘I had wings and if I’d ryahlized it as a young man, what heights I might have flown to! But I tried to walk. In the mud. For tharty yahs. Only after tharty yahs did I discover that I was meant to be flying. And now I must give up almost before I’ve begun.’ He sighed and, leaning back against his pillows, he shot the words almost perpendicularly up into the air. ‘My work unfinished. My dreams unryahlized. Fate’s been hard.’

‘But you’ll have all the time you need to finish your work.’

‘No, no,’ Mr. Quarles insisted, shaking his head. He wanted to be one of fate’s martyrs, to be able to point to himself and say: There, but for the malignity of providence, goes Aristotle. Destiny’s unkindness justified everything—his failure in sugar, in politics, in farming, the coldness with which his first book had been received, the indefinite delay in the appearance of the second; it even justified in some not easily explicable fashion his having put Gladys in a family way. To be a seducer of servants, secretaries, peasant girls was part of his unhappy destiny. And now that, to crown the edifice of his misfortune, he was about to die (prematurely but stoically, like the noblest Roman of them all), how trivial, how wretchedly insignificant was this matter of lost virginities and impending babies! And how unseemly, at the philosophic death-bed, was all the outcry! But he could only ignore it on condition that this was. genuinely his death-bed and that destiny was universally admitted to have been cruel. A martyred philosopher on the point of death was justified in refusing to be bothered with Gladys and her baby. That was why (though the reason was felt and not formulated) Mr. Quarles repudiated, so vigorously and even with annoyance, his son’s consoling assurances of long life; that was why he arraigned malignant providence and magnified with even more than his ordinary self-complaisance the talents which providence had prevented him from using.

‘No, no, dyah boy,’ he repeated. ‘I shall never finish. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to have a talk with you.’

Philip looked at him with a certain apprehension. What was coming next? he wondered. There was a little silence.

‘One doesn’t want to shuffle off entirely unrecorded,’ said Mr. Quarles in a voice made husky by a recrudescence of self-pity

‘Shyahr extinction—it’s difficult to face.’ Before his mind’s eye the void expanded, lampless and abysmal. Death. It might be the end of his troubles; but it was none the less appalling. ‘You understand the feeling?’ he asked.

‘Perfectly,’ said Philip, ‘perfectly. But in your case, father…’ Mr. Quarles who had been blowing his nose again raised a protesting hand. ‘No, no.’ He had made up his mind that he was going to die; it was useless for anyone to attempt to dissuade him. ‘But if you understand my feeling, that’s all that matters. I can depart in peace with the knowledge that you won’t allow all memory of me to disappyah completely. Dyah boy, you shall be my literary executor. There are some fragments of my writing….’

‘The book on democracy?’ asked Philip, who saw himself being called upon to complete the largest work on the subject yet projected. His father’s answer took a load off his mind.

‘No, not that,’ Mr. Quarles hastily replied. ‘Only the bare matyahrials of that book exist. And to a great extent not on paper. Only in my mind. In fact,’ he went on, ‘I was just going to tell you that I wanted all my notes for the big book destroyed. Without being looked at. They’re myah jottings. Meaningless except to me.’ Mr. Quarles was not anxious that the emptiness of his files and the prevailing blankness of the cards in his cardindex should be posthumously discovered and commented on. ‘They must all be destroyed, do you understand?’

Philip made no protest.

‘What I wanted to entrust to you dyah boy,’ Mr. Quarles went on, ‘was a collection of more intimate fragments. Reflections on life, records of pahsonal expyahriences. Things like that.’

Philip nodded. ‘I see.’

‘I’ve been jotting them down for a long time past,’ said Mr. Quarles. ‘Memories and Reflections of Fifty Yahs—that might be a good title. There’s a lot in my notebooks. And these last days I’ve been recording on this.’ He tapped the dictaphone. ‘When one’s ill, you know, one thinks a lot.’ He sighed. ‘Syahriously.’

‘Of course,’ Philip agreed.

‘If you’d care to listen…’ he indicated the dictaphone.

Philip nodded. Mr. Quarles prepared the machine. ‘It’ll give you an idyah of the kind of thing. Thoughts and memories. Hyah.’ He pushed the machine across the table and, pushing, sent a piece of paper fluttering to the ground. It lay there on the carpet, chequered, a puzzle. ‘This is where you listen.’

Philip listened. After a moment of scratchy roaring, the Punch and Judy parody of his father’s voice said, ‘The key to the problem of sex:—passion is sacred, a manifestation of the divinitah.’ And then, without stop or transition, but in a slightly different tone: ‘The wahrst thing about politics is the frivolitah of politicians. Meeting Asquith one evening at dinner, I forget now where, I took the opportunitah of ahrging on him the necessitah of abolishing capital punishment. One of the most syahrious questions of modern life. But he myahrly suggested that we should go and play bridge. Unit of measure seven letters long: Verchok. Fastidious men do not live in pigsties, nor can they long remain in politics or business. There are nature’s Greeks and nature’s Mrs. Grundies. I never shared the mob’s high opinion of Lloyd George. Every man is born with a natural right to be happy; but what ferocious repression when anybody tried to claim his right! Brazilian stork, six letters: jabiru. True greatness is invarsely proportional to myahr immediate success. Ah, hyah you…!’ The scratchy roar supervened.

‘Yes, I see the style of the thing,’ said Philip, looking up. ‘How does one stop this affair? Ah, that’s it.’ He stopped it.

‘So many thoughts occur to me as I lie hyah,’ said Mr. Quarles, aimed upwards, as though speaking against aircraft. ‘Such a wealth! I could never record them all but for the machine. It’s wonderful. Ryahly wonderful! ‘

CHAPTER XXXIII

Elinor had had time to telegraph from Euston. On her arrival, she found the car waiting for her at the station. ‘How is he?’ she asked the chauffeur. But Paxton was vague, didn’t rightly know. Privately, he thought it was one of these ridiculous fusses about nothing, such as the rich are always making, particularly where their children are concerned. They drove up to Gattenden and the landscape of the Chilterns in the ripe evening light was so serenely beautiful, that Elinor began to feel less anxious and even half wished that she had stayed till the last train. She would have been able in that case to see Webley. But hadn’t she decided that she was really almost glad not to be seeing him? One can be glad and sorry at the same time. Passing the north entrance to the Park, she had a glimpse through the bars of Lord Gattenden’s bath-chair standing just inside the gate. The ass had stopped and was eating grass at the side of the road, the reins hung loose and the marquess was too deeply absorbed in a thick red morocco quarto to be able to think of driving. The car hurried on; but that second’s glimpse of the old man sitting with his book behind the grey donkey, as she had so often seen him sitting and reading; that brief revelation of life living itself regularly, unvaryingly in the same old familiar way, was as reassuring as the calm loveliness of beech-trees and bracken, of greengolden foreground and violet distances.

And there at last was the Hall! The old house seemed to doze in the westering sun like a basking animal; you could almost fancy that it purred. And the lawn was like the most expensive green velvet; and in the windless air the huge Wellingtonia had all the dignified gravity of an old gentleman who sits down to meditate after an enormous meal. There could be nothing much wrong here. She jumped out of the car and ran straight upstairs to the nursery. Phil was lying in bed, quite still and with closed eyes. Miss Fulkes, who was sitting beside him, turned as she entered, rose and came to meet her. One glance at her face was enough to convince Elinor that the blue and golden tranquillity of the landscape, the dozing house, the marquess and his ass had been lying comforters. ‘All’s well,’ they had seemed to say. ‘Everything’s going on as usual.’ But Miss Fulkes looked pale and frightened, as though she had seen a ghost.

‘What’s the matter?’ Elinor whispered with a sudden return of all her anxiety, and before Miss Fulkes had time to answer, ‘Is he asleep?’ she added. If he were asleep, she was thinking, it was a good sign; he looked as though he were asleep.

But Miss Fulkes shook her head. The gesture was superfluous. For the question was hardly out of Elinor’s mouth, when the child made a sudden spasmodic movement under the sheets. His face contracted with pain. He uttered a little whimpering moan.

‘His head hurts him so much,’ said Miss Fulkes. There was a look of terror and misery in her eyes.

‘Go and have a rest,’ said Elinor.

Miss Fulkes hesitated, shook her head. ‘I’d like to be useful…’

Elinor insisted. ‘You’ll be more useful when you’ve rested….’ She saw Miss Fulkes’s lips trembling, her eyes growing suddenly bright with tears.

‘Go along,’ she said and pressed her arm consolingly.

 Miss Fulkes obeyed with a sudden alacrity. She was afraid that she might start crying before she got to her room.

Elinor sat down by the bed. She took the little hand that lay on the turned-back sheet, she passed her fingers through the child’s pale hair caressingly, soothingly. ‘Sleep,’ she whispered, as her fingers caressed him, ‘sleep, sleep.’ But the child still stirred uneasily; and every now and then his face was distorted with sudden pain; he shook his head, as though trying to shake off the thing that was hurting him, he uttered his little whimpering moan. And bending over him, Elinor felt as though her heart were being crushed within her breast, as though a hand were at her throat, choking her.

‘My darling,’ she said beseechingly, imploring him not to suffer, ‘my darling.’

And she pressed the small hand more tightly, she let her palm rest more heavily on his hot forehead, as if to stifle the pain or at least to steady the shuddering little body against its attacks. And all her will commanded the pain to cease under her fingers, to come out of him—out of him, through her fingers, into her own body. But still he fidgeted restlessly in his bed, turning his head from one side to the other, now drawing up his legs, now straightening them out with a sharp spasmodic kick under the sheets. And still the pain returned, stabbing; and the face made its grimace of agony, the parted lips gave utterance to the little whimpering cry, again and again. She stroked his lorehead, she whispered tender words. And that was all she could do. The sense of her helplessness suffocated her. At her throat and heart the invisible hands tightened their grip.

‘How do you find him?’ asked Mrs. Bidlake, when her daughter came down.

Elinor did not answer, but turned away her face. The question had brought the tears rushing into her eyes. Mrs. Bidlake put her arms round her and kissed her. Elinor hid her face against her mother’s shoulder. ‘You must be strong,’ she kept saying to herself. ‘You mustn’t cry, mustn’t break down. Be strong. To help him.’ Her mother held her more closely. The physical contact comforted her, gave her the strength for which she was praying. She made an effort of will and with a deep intaken breath swallowed down the sobs in her throat. She looked up at her mother and gratefully smiled. Her lips still trembled a little; but the will had conquered.

‘I’m stupid,’ she said apologetically. ‘I couldn’t help it. It’s so horrible to see him suffer. Helplessly. It’s dreadful. Even if one knows that it’ll be all right in the end.’

Mrs. Bidlake sighed. ‘Dreadful,’ she echoed,’dreadful,’ and closed her eyes in a meditative perplexity. There was a silence. ‘By the way,’ she went on, opening them again to look at her daughter, ‘I think you ought to keep an eye on Miss Fulkes. I don’t know whether her influence is always entirely good.’

‘Miss Fulkes’s influence?’ said Elinor, opening her eyes in astonishment. ‘But she’s the nicest, the most conscientious…’

‘Oh, not that, not that!’ said Mrs. Bidlake hastily. ‘Her artistic influence, I mean. When I went up to see Phil the day before yesterday I found her showing him such dreadfully vulgar pictures of a dog.’

‘Bonzo?’ suggested Elinor.

Her mother nodded. ‘Yes, Bonzo.’ She pronounced the word with a certain distaste. ‘If he wants pictures of animals, there are such excellent reproductions of Persian miniatures at the British Museum. It’s so easy to spoil a child’s taste…. But Elinor! My dear!’

Suddenly and uncontrollably, Elinor had begun to laugh. To laugh and to cry, uncontrollably. Grief alone she had been able to master. But grief allied with Bonzo was irresistible. Something broke inside her and she found herself sobbing with a violent, painful and hysterical laughter.

Mrs. Bidlake helplessly patted her shoulder. ‘My dear,’ she kept repeating. ‘Elinor!’

Roused from uneasy and nightmarish dozing, John Bidlake shouted furiously from the library. ‘Stop that cackling,’ commanded the angry-plaintive voice. ‘For God’s sake.’

But Elinor could not stop.

‘Screaming like parrots,’ John Bidlake went on muttering to himself.

‘Some idiotic joke. When one isn’t well…’

****

‘Now, for God’s sake,’ said Spandrell roughly, ‘pull yourself together.’

Illidge pressed his handkerchief to his mouth; he was afraid of being sick. ‘I think I’ll lie down for a moment,’ he whispered. But when he tried to walk, it was as though his legs were dead under him. It might have been a paralytic who dragged himself to the sofa.

‘What you need is a mouthful of spirits,’ said Spandrell. He crossed the room. A bottle of brandy stood on the sideboard, and from the kitchen he returned with glasses. He poured out two fingers of the spirit. ‘Here. Drink this.’ Illidge took and sipped. ‘One would think we were crossing the Channel,’ Spandrell went on with ferocious mockery, as he helped himself to brandy. ‘Study in green and ginger—that’s how Whistler would have described you now. Apple-green. Moss-green.’

Illidge looked at him for a moment, then turned away, unable to face the steady glance of those contemptuous grey eyes. He had never felt such hatred as he now felt for Spandrell.

‘Not to say frog-green, slime-green, scum-green,’ the other went on.

‘Oh shut up!’ cried Illidge in a voice that had recovered some of its resonance and hardly wavered. Spandrell’s mockery had steadied his nerves. Hate, like brandy, is a stimulant. He took another burning gulp. There was a silence.

‘When you feel like it,’ said Spandrell, putting down his emptied glass, ‘you can come and help me clear up.’ He rose and walked round the screen, out of sight.

Everard Webley’s body was lying where it had fallen, on its side, with the arms reaching out across the floor. The chloroform-soaked handkerchief still covered the face. Spandrell bent down and twitched it away. The temple which had been struck was against the floor; seen from above the face seemed unwounded.

His hands in his pockets, Spandrell stood looking down at the body.

‘Five minutes ago,’ he said to himself, formulating his thoughts in words, that his realization of their significance might be the more complete, ‘five minutes ago, it was alive, it had a soul. Alive,’ he repeated and balancing himself unsteadily on one leg, with the other foot he touched the dead cheek, he pushed forward the ear and let it flick back again. ‘A soul.’ And for a moment he allowed some of his weight to rest on what had been Everard Webley’s face. ‘He withdrew his foot; the print of it remained, dust-grey, on the white skin. ‘Trampling on a dead face,’ he said to himself. Why had he done it? ‘Trampling.’ He raised his foot again and pressed his heel into the socket of the eye, gently, tentatively, as though experimenting with outrage. ‘Like grapes,’ he thought. ‘Trampling wine out of the grapes.’ It was in his power to trample this thing into a pulp., But he had done enough. Symbolically, he had trodden out the essential horror from his murder; it flowed from under his trampling feet. The essential horror? But it was more stupid and disgusting, than horrible. Pushing the toe of his boot under the chin, he rolled the head over until the face was looking up, open-mouthed and with half-shut eyes, at the ceiling. Above and behind the left eye was a huge red contusion. There were trickles of blood on the left cheek, already dry, and where the forehead had rested on the floor, a little pool—hardly even a pool—a smear.

‘Incredibly little blood,’ said Spandrell aloud.

At the sound of his calm voice Illidge violently started.

Spandrell withdrew his supporting foot. The dead face fell back with a little thump on to its side.

‘It’s a complete justification for Bishop Odo’s mace,’ he went on dispassionately. That he should find himself recalling, at this of all moments, the comical prancings of that conscientious churchman in the Bayeux tapestry—that too was part of the essential horror. The frivolousness of the human mind! The wandering irrelevance! Evil might have a certain dignity. But silliness…

Illidge heard him walk into the kitchen. There was the gradually sharpening note of water running into a pail. The tap was turned off; there were foot-falls; the bucket was set down with a metallic clink.

‘Luckily,’ Spandrell went on, in comment on his last remark. ‘Or else I don’t know what we should have done about the mess.’

Illidge listened with a strained and horrified attention to the sounds that came to him from the other side of the screen. A limp and meaty thud; was that an arm lifted and dropped? The sibilant sliding of a soft and heavy object across the floor. Then the splash of water, the homely noise of scrubbing. And at these sounds, so incomparably more horrible, more profoundly significant than any words, however brutal, however calmly cynical, that Spandrell could say, he felt a recrudesence of that sinking, that heart-fluttering faintness of the first minutes, when the dead man was lying there, still twitching, at his feet. He remembered, he lived over again those moments of breathless and sick anticipation before the horrible event. The noise of the car backing down the street; the gritty scrape of feet on the doorstep, and then the knock, and then a long, long silence of heart-beats and visceral creepings and imaginative forebodings, of justifying thoughts of revolution and the future, justifying hatred of oppression and the vileness of wealth. And at the same time ridiculous, incongruous recollections, as he crouched behind the screen, of those childish games of hide-and-seek on school-treat days, among the gorse and juniper bushes of the common. ‘One, two, three…’; the seekers covered their faces and began to count their hundred, aloud; the hiders scattered. You thrust yourself into a prickly bush, you lay in the bracken. Then came the shout of ‘ninety-nine, a hundred, Cooee!’; and the seekers were off, were after you. And the excitement was so painfully intense, as you crouched or squatted in your lair, peeping, listening for a chance to make a bolt for Home, that you felt an almost irrepressible desire to’do something,’ though something had been done, behind the junipers, only five minutes before. Absurd memories! And because absurd, dreadful! For the hundredth time he felt in his pocket to make sure that the bottle of chloroform was still there and safely corked. The second knock startlingly resounded and, with it, the whistle and that humorous call (you could hear, from the tone of his voice, that he was smiling) of ‘Friend!’ Behind his screen Midge had shuddered. ‘Friend!’ And remembering now, he shuddered again, more violently, with all the shame and horror and humiliation which he had had no time then to feel. No time; for before his mind could realize all the implications upon implications of that laughing call, the door had creaked on its hinges, there was the noise of feet on the boards, and Webley was shouting Elinor’s name. (Illidge suddenly found himself wondering if he had been in love with her.) ‘Elinor!’ There followed a silence; Webley had seen the note. Illidge had heard his breathing, only a foot or two away, on the other side of the screen. And then there was the rustle of a quick movement, the beginning of an exclamation and that sudden dry concussion, like the noise of a slap, but duller, deader and at the same time much louder. There followed a fraction of a second’s silence, then the noise of falling—not a single sound, but a series of noises spread over an appreciable period of time; the bony collapse of the knees, the scrape of shoes sliding away across the polished floor, the muffled thud of the body and arms, and the sharp hard rap of the head against the boards. ‘Quick!’ had come the sound of Spandrell’s voice, and he had darted out of his hidingplace. ‘Chloroform.’ Obediently, he had soaked the handkerchief, he had spread it over the twitching face….He shuddered again, he took another sip of brandy.

The sound of scrubbing was succeeded by the squelch of a wetted cloth.

‘There,’ said Spandrell, appearing round the screen. He was drying his hands on a duster. ‘And how’s the invalid?’ he added in the parody of a bedside manner, smiling ironically.

Illidge averted his face. The hatred flared up in him, expelling for the moment every other emotion. ‘I’m all right,’ he said curtly.

‘Just taking it easy while I do the dirty work. Is that it?’ Spandrell threw the duster on to a chair and began to turn down his shirt cuffs.

In two hours the muscles of the heart contract and relax, contract again and relax only eight thousand times. The earth travels less than an eighth of a million miles along its orbit. And the prickly pear has had time to invade only another hundred acres of Australian territory. Two hours are as nothing. The time to listen to the Ninth Symphony and a couple of the posthumous quartets, to fly from London to Paris, to transfer a luncheon from the stomach to the small intestine, to read Macbeth, to die of snake bite or earn one-and-eightpence as a charwoman. No more. But to Illidge, as he sat waiting, with the dead body lying there behind the screen, waiting for the darkness, they seemed unending.

‘Are you an idiot? asked Spandrell, when he had suggested that they should go away at once and leave the thing lying there. ‘Or are you particularly anxious to die of hanging?’ The sneer, the cool ironic amusement were maddening to Illidge. ‘It would be found to-night when Philip came home.’

‘But Quarles hasn’t got a key,’ said Illidge.

‘Then to-morrow, as soon as he’d got hold of a locksmith. And three hours later, when Elinor had explained what she had done with the key, the police would be knocking at my door. And I promise you, they’d knock at yours very soon afterwards.’ He smiled at Illidge, who averted his eyes. ‘No,’ Spandrell went on, ‘Webley’s got to be taken away. And with his car standing outside, it’s child’s play, if we wait till after dark.’

‘But it won’t be dark for another two hours.’ Illidge’s voice was shrill with anger and complaint.

‘Well, what of it?’

‘Why…’ Illidge began and checked himself; he realized that if he was going to answer truthfully, he would have to say that he didn’t want to stay those two hours because he was frightened. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s stay.’ Spandrell picked up the silver cigarette box, opened and sniffed. ‘They smell very nice,’ he said. ‘Have one.’ He pushed the box across the table. ‘And there are lots of books. And the Times And the New Statesman. And the latest number of Vogue. It’s positively a dentist’s waiting-room. And we might even make ourselves a cup of tea.’ The time of waiting began. Heart-beat followed heart-beat. Each second the earth travelled twenty miles and the prickly pears covered another five rods of Australian ground. Behind the screen lay the body. Thousands upon thousands of millions of minute and diverse individuals had come together and the product of their mutual dependence, their mutual hostility had been a human life. Their total colony, their living hive had been a man. The hive was dead. But in the lingering warmth many of the component individuals still faintly lived; soon they also would have perished. And meanwhile, from the air, the invisible hosts of saprophytics had already begun their unresisted invasion. They would live among the dead cells, they would grow, and prodigiously multiply and in their growing and procreation all the chemical building of the body would be undone, all the intricacies and complications of its matter would be resolved, till by the time their work was finished a few pounds of carbon, a few quarts of water, some lime, a little phosphorus and sulphur, a pinch of iron and silicon, a handful of mixed salts—all scattered and recombined with the surrounding world—would be all that remained of Everard Webley’s ambition to rule and his love for Elinor, of his thoughts about politics and his recollections of childhood, of his fencing and good horsemanship, of that soft strong voice and that suddenly illuminating smile, of his admiration for Mantegna, his dislike of whiskey, his deliberately terrifying rages, his habit of stroking his chin, his belief in God, his incapacity to whistle a tune correctly, his unshakeable determinations and his knowledge of Russian.

Illidge turned over the advertisement pages of Vogue. A young lady in a fur coat priced at two hundred guineas was stepping into a motor car; on the opposite page another young lady in nothing but a towel was stepping out of a bath impregnated with Dr. Verbruggen’s Reducing Salts. There followed a still-life of scent bottles containing Songe Negre and the maker’s latest creation, Relent d’Amour. The names of Worth, Lanvin, Patou sprawled across three more pages. Then there was a picture of a young lady in a rubber reducing belt, looking at herself in the glass. A group of young ladies admired one another’s slumber wear from Crabb and Lushington’s lingerie department. Opposite them another young lady reclined on a couch at Madame Adrena’s Beauty Laboratory, while the hands of a masseuse stroked the menace of a double chin. Then followed a still-life of rolling pins and rubber strigils for rolling and rubbing away young ladies’ superfluous fat, and another still-life of jars and gallipots containing skin foods to protect their faces from the ravages of time and the weather.

‘Revolting!’ Illidge said to himself as he turned the pages. ‘Criminal!’ And he cherished his indignation, he cultivated it. To be angry was a distraction, and at the same time a justification. Raging at plutocratic callousness and frivolity, he could half forget and half excuse to himself the horrible thing that had happened. Webley’s body was lying on the other side of the screen. But there were women who paid two hundred guineas for a fur coat. Two hundred guineas! His Uncle Joseph would have thought himself happy if he could have made as much in eighteen months of cobbling. And they bought scent at twentyfive shillings the quarter-pint. He remembered the time when his little brother Tom had had pneumonia after influenza. Ghastly! And when he was convalescent, the doctor had said he ought to go away to the sea for a few weeks. They hadn’t been able to afford it. Tom’s lungs had never been too strong after that. He worked in a motor factory now (making machines for those bitches in twohundred-guinea coats to sit in); Illidge had paid for him to go to a technical school—paid, he reflected, beating up his anger, that the boy might have the privilege of standing eight hours a day in front of a milling machine. The air of Manchester wasn’t doing Tom any good. There was no superfluous fat to be rolled off him, poor devil. Swinish guzzling! Why couldn’t they do a little useful work instead of squeegeeing their hams and bellies? That would take the fat off all right. If they worked as his mother had done…. She had no fat to rub off with rolling-pins, or sweat off under a rubber belt, or stew off in hot baths and brine. He thought indignantly of that endless dreary labour of housework. Day after day, year after year. Making beds, that they might be unmade. Cooking to fill bellies eternally empty. Washing up what the next meal was to make dirty again. Scrubbing the floor for muddy boots to defile. Darning and patching that yet more holes might be made. It was like the labouring of Sisyphus and the Danaids, hopeless and interminable—or would have been interminable (except by his mother’s death), if he hadn’t been able to send her those two pounds a week out of his salary. She could get a girl in now to help with the hardest work. But she still did more than enough to make rubber belts unnecessary. What a life! And in the world of fur coats and Songe Negre they complained of boredom and fatigue, they had to retire into nursing homes for rest cures. If they could lead her life for a bit! And perhaps they’d be made to, one of these days (he hoped so), even in England. Illidge thought with satisfaction of those ex-officers of the Tsar driving taxis and working in factories, those ex-countesses with their restaurants and cabarets and hat-shops; of all the ex-rich of Russia, all over the world, from Harbin and Shanghai to Rome and London and Berlin, bankrupt, humiliated, reduced to the slavish estate of the common people on whom they had once parasitically lived. That was good, that served them right. And perhaps it might happen here too. But they were strong here, the fat-reducers and the fur-coated; they were numerous, they were an organized army. But the army had lost its chief. He had got his packet. Embodied beastliness and plutocracy, he lay there behind the screen. But his mouth had been open and the muscles of his face, before the reeking handkerchief had covered it, had twitched grotesquely. Illidge shuddered. He looked again for indignant distraction and justification at the picture of the young lady in the twohundred-guinea fur, of the young lady stepping, naked but coyly towelled, out of her reducing bath. Strumpets and gluttons! They belonged to the class that Webley had fought to perpetuate. The champion of all that was vile and low. He had got what he deserved, he had…

‘Good Lord!’ exclaimed Spandrell suddenly, looking up from his book. The sound of his voice in the silence made Illidge start with an uncontrollable terror. ‘I’d absolutely forgotten. They get stiff, don’t they?’ He looked at Illidge. ‘Corpses, I mean.’

Illidge nodded: He drew a deep breath and steadied himself with an effort of will.

‘What about getting him into the car, then?’ He sprang up and walked quickly round the screen, out of sight. Illidge heard the latch of the house door rattling. He was seized with a sudden horrible terror: Spandrell was going to make off, leaving him locked in with the body.

‘Where are you going?’ he shouted and darted off in panic pursuit. ‘Where are you going?’ The door was open, Spandrell was not to be seen, and the thing lay on the floor, its face uncovered, open-mouthed and staring secretly, significantly, as though through spyholes, between half-closed eyelids. ‘Where are you going?’ Illidge’s voice had risen almost to a scream.

‘What is the excitement about?’ asked Spandrell as the other appeared, pale and with desperation in his looks, on the doorstep. Standing by Webley’s car, he was engaged in undoing the tightly stretched waterproof which decked in all that part of the open body lying aft of the front seats. ‘These thingumbobs are horribly hard to unfasten.’

Illidge put his hands in his pockets and pretended that it was merely an idle curiosity that had brought him out with such precipitation.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked offhandedly.

Spandrell gave a final tug; the cover came loose along the whole length of one side of the car. He turned it back and looked in. ‘Empty, thank goodness,’ he said and, stretching his hand, he played imaginary octaves, span after span, over the coach-work. ‘Say four feet wide,’ he concluded, ‘by about the same in length. Of which half is taken up by the seat. With two foot six of space under the cover. Plenty of room to curl up in and be very comfortable. But if one were stiff?’ He looked enquiringly at Illidge. ‘A man could be got in, but not a statue.’

Illidge nodded. Spandrell’s last words had made him suddenly remember Lady Edward’s mocking commentary on Webley. ‘He wants to be treated like his own colossal statue—posthumously, if you see what I mean.’

‘We must do something quickly,’ Spandrell went on. ‘Before the stiffness sets in.’ He pulled back the cover and laying a hand on Illidge’s shoulder, propelled him gently into the house. The door slammed behind them. They stood looking down at the body.

‘We shall have to pull the knees up and the arms down,’ said Spandrell.

He bent down and moved one of the arms towards the side. It returned, when he let go, half-way to its former position. Like a puppet, Spandrell reflected, with elastic joints. Grotesque rather than terrible; not tragical, but only rather tiresome and even absurd. That was the essential horror—that it was all (even this) a kind of bad and tedious jape. ‘We shall have to find some string,’ he said. ‘Something to tie the limbs into place.’ It was like amateur plumbing, or mending the summerhouse oneself; just rather unpleasant and ludicrous.

‘They ransacked the house. There was no string to be found. They had to be content with three bandages, which Spandrell found among the aspirin and iodine, the boracic powder and vegetable laxatives of the little medicine cupboard in the bathroom.

‘Hold the arms in place while I tie,’ commanded Spandrell.

Illidge did as he was told. But the coldness of those dead wrists against his fingers was horrible; he felt sick again, he began to tremble.

‘There!’ said Spandrell, straightening himself up. ‘Now the legs. Thank goodness we didn’t leave it much longer.’

‘Treated like his own statue.’ The words reverberated in Illidge’s memory. ‘Posthumously, if you see what I mean.’ Posthumously… Spandrell bent one of the legs till the knee almost touched the chin.

‘Hold it.’

Illidge grasped the ankle; the socks were grey and clocked with white. Spandrell let go, and Illidge felt a sudden and startlingly powerful thrust against his retaining hand. The dead man was trying to kick. Black voids began to expand in front of his eyes, eating out holes in the solid world before him. And the solid world itself swayed and swam round the edges of those interstellar vacancies. His gorge turned, he felt horribly giddy.

‘Look here,’ he began, turning to Spandrell, who had squatted down on his heels and was tearing the wrapping off another bandage. Then shutting his eyes, he relinquished his grasp.

The leg straightened itself out like a bent spring, and the foot, as it shot forward, caught Spandrell on the shoulder and sent him, unsteadily balanced as he was, sprawling backwards on to the floor.

He picked himself up. ‘You bloody fool!’ But the anger aroused by that first shock of surprise died down. He uttered a little laugh. ‘We might be at the circus,’ he said. It was not only not tragic; it was a clownery.

By the time the body was finally trussed, Illidge knew that Tom’s weak lungs and twohundred-guinea coats, that superfluous fat and his mother’s lifelong slaving, that rich and poor, oppression and revolution, justice, punishment, indignation—all, as far as he was concerned, were utterly irrelevant to the fact of these stiffening limbs, this mouth that gaped, these half-shut, glazed and secretly staring eyes. Irrelevant, and beside the point.

****

Philip was dining alone. In front of his plate half a bottle of claret and the water-jug propped up an open volume. He read between the mouthfuls, as he masticated. The book was Bastian’s On the Brain. Not very up to date, perhaps, but the best he could find in his father’s library to keep him amused in the train. Halfway through the fish, he came upon the case of the Irish gentleman who had suffered from paraphasia, and was so much struck by it that he pushed aside his plate and, taking out his pocket-book, made a note of it at once. The physician had asked the patient to read aloud a paragraph from the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin. ‘It shall be in the power of the College to examine or not examine every Licentiate previous to his admission to a fellowship, as they shall think fit.’ What the patient actually read was: ‘An the bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo, to majoram or that emidrate, eni eni krastrei, mestreit to ketra totombreidei, to ra from treido as that kekritest.’ Marvellous! Philip said to himself as he copied down the last word. What style! what majestic beauty! The richness and sonority of the opening phrase! ‘An the bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo.’ He repeated it to himself. ‘I shall print it on the title-page of my next novel,’ he wrote in his notebook. ‘The epigraph the text of the whole sermon.’ Shakespeare only talked about tales told by an idiot. But here was the idiot actually speaking Shakespeareanly, what was more. ‘The final word about life,’ he added in pencil.

At the Queen’s Hall Tolley began with Erik Satie’s Borborygmes Symphoniques. Philip found the joke only moderately good. A section of the audience improved it, however, by hissing and booing. Ironically polite, Tolley bowed with more than his usual grace. When the hubbub subsided, he addressed himself to the second item on the programme. It was the Coriolan overture. Tolley prided himself on a catholic taste and omnicompetence. But, oh dear! thought Philip as he listened, how abominably he conducted real music! As though he were rather ashamed of Beethoven’s emotions and were trying to apologize for them. But fortunately Coriolanus was practically Tolley-proof. The music was heroically beautiful, it was tragic and immense in spite of him. The last of the expiring throbs of sound died away, a demonstration of man’s indomitable greatness and the necessity, the significance of suffering.

In the interval Philip limped out for a smoke in the bar. A hand plucked at his sleeve.

‘The melomaniac discovered!’ said a familiar voice. He turned and saw Willie Weaver twinkling all over with good-humour, kindliness and absurdity. ‘What did you think of our modemrn Orpheus?’

‘If you’re referring to Tolley, I don’t think he can conduct Beethoven.’

‘A shade too light and fantastic for old man Ludwig’s portentosities?’ suggested Willie.

‘That’s about it,’ said Philip smiling. ‘Not up to him.’

‘Or too far up. Portentosity belongs to the prepositivistic epoch. It’s bourgeois as Comrade Lenin would say. Tolley’s nothing if not contemporaneous. Didn’t you like him in the Satie? Or did you,’ he went on, in response to Philip’s contemptuous shrug, ‘did you wish he’d committed it?’ He coughed his own appreciation of the pun.

‘He’s almost as modern as the Irish genius whose works I discovered this evening.’ Philip took out his pocket-book and, after a word of explanation, read aloud. ‘An the bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo…’ At the foot of the page were his own comments of an hour before. ‘The text of the whole sermon. The final word about life.’ He did not read them out. He happened to be thinking quite differently now. ‘The difference between portentosity and Satiecum-Tolleyism,’ he said, ‘ is the same as the difference between the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin, and this bee-what in the teemother of the trothodoodoo.’

He was blankly contradicting himself. But, after all, why not?

****

Illidge wanted to go home and to bed; but Spandrell had insisted that he should spend at least an hour or two at Tantamount House.

‘You must get yourself seen,’ he said. ‘For the sake of the alibi. I’m going on to Sbisa’s. There’ll be a dozen people to vouch for me.’

Illidge agreed only under the threat of violence. He dreaded the ordeal of talking with anyone—even with someone so incurious, preoccupied and absent as Lord Edward. ‘I shan’t be able to stand it,’ he kept repeating, almost in tears. They had had to carry the body, trussed into the posture of a child in the womb—carry it amorously pressed in a close and staggering embrace—out of the door, down the steps into the roadway. A single greenish gas-lamp under the archway threw but a feeble light up the mews; enough, however, to have betrayed them, if anyone had happened to be passing the entrance as they carried their burden out and lifted it into the car. They had begun by dumping the thing on its back on the floor; but the up-drawn knees projected above the level of the carriage-work. Spandrell had to climb into the car and push and lug the heavy body on to its side, so that the knees rested on the edge of the back seat. They’ shut the doors, pulled the cover over and fastened it tautly into place. ‘Perfect,’ said Spandrell. He took his companion by the elbow. ‘You need a little more brandy,’ he added. But in spite of the brandy Illidge was still faint and tremulous when they drove away. Nor was Spandrell’s bungling with the mechanism of the unfamiliar car at all calculated to soothe his nerves. They had begun by backing violently into the wall at the end of the mews; and before he discovered the secret of the gears, Spandrell twice inadvertently stopped the engine. He relieved his irritation by a few curses and laughed. But to Illidge these little mishaps, entailing as they did a minute’s delay in escaping from that horrible and accursed place, were catastrophes. His terror, his anxious impatience became almost hysterical.

‘No, I can’t, I really can’t,’ he protested when Spandrell had told him that he must spend the evening at Tantamount House.

‘All the same,’ said the other, ‘you’re damned well going to,’ and he headed the car into the Mall. ‘I ‘1 drop you at the door.’

‘No, really!’

‘And if necessary kick you in.’

‘But I couldn’t stand being there, I couldn’t stand it.’

‘This is an extremely nice car,’ said Spandrell pointedly changing the subject.’delightful to drive.’

‘I couldn’t stand it,’ Illidge whimperingly repeated.

‘I believe the makers guarantee a hundred miles an hour on the track.’

They turned up past St. James’s Palace into Pall Mall.

‘Here you are,’ said Spandrell, drawing up at the kerb. Obediently, Illidge got out, crossed the pavement, climbed the steps and rang the bell. Spandrell waited till the door had closed behind him, then drove on into St. James’s Square. Twenty or thirty cars were parked round the central gardens. He backed in among them, stopped the engine, got out and walked up to Piccadilly Circus. A penny’bus-ride took him to the top of the Charing Cross Road. The trees of Soho Square shone green in the lamplight at the end of the narrow lane between the factory buildings. Two minutes later he was at Sbisa’s, apologizing to Burlap and Rampion for being so late.

****

‘Ah, here you are,’ said Lord Edward.’so glad you’ve come.’

Illidge mumbled vague apologies for not having come sooner. An appointment with a man. About business. But suppose, he wondered in terror while he spoke, suppose Lord Edward should ask what man, what business? He wouldn’t know what to answer; he would utterly break down. But the Old Man seemed not even to have heard his excuses.

‘Afraid I must ask you to do a little arithmetic for me,’ he said in his deep blurred voice. Lord Edward had made himself a tolerably good mathematician; but ‘sums’ had always been beyond his powers. He had never been able to multiply correctly. And as for long division—it was fifty years since he had even attempted it. ‘I’ve got the figures here.’ He tapped the notebook that lay open in front of him on the desk. ‘It’s for the chapter on phosphorus. Human interference with the cycle. How much P2 05 did we find out was dispersed into the sea in sewage?’ He turned a page. ‘Four hundred thousand tons. That was it. Practically irrecoverable. Just thrown away. Then there’s the stupid way we deal with cadavers. Three-quarters of a kilo of phosphorus pentoxide in every body. Restored to the earth, you may say.’ Lord Edward was ready to admit every excuse, to anticipate, that he might rebut, every shift of advocacy. ‘But how inadequately!’ he swept the excuses away, he blew the special pleaders to bits. ‘Huddling bodies together in cemeteries! How can you expect the phosphorus to get distributed? It finds its way back to the life cycle in time, no doubt. But for our purposes it’s lost. Taken out of currency. Now, given three-quarters of a kilo of P2 05. for every cadaver and a world population of eighteen hundred millions and an average deathrate of twenty per thousand, what’s the total quantity restored every year to the earth? You can do sums, my dear Illidge. I leave it to you.’ Illidge sat in silence, shielding his face with his hand. ‘But then one has to remember,’ the Old Man continued, ‘ that there are a lot of people who dispose of the dead more sensibly than we do. It’s really only among the white races that the phosphorus is taken out of circulation. Other people don’t have necropolises and watertight coffins and brick vaults. The only people more wasteful than we are the Indians. Burning bodies and throwing the ashes into rivers! But the Indians are stupid about everything. The way they burn all the cow-dung instead of putting it back on the land. And then they’re surprised that half the population hasn’t enough to eat. We shall have to make a separate calculation about the Indians. I haven’t got the figures, though. But meanwhile will you work out the grand total for the world? And another, if you don’t mind, for the white races. I’ve got a list of the populations here somewhere. And, of course, the deathrate will be lower than the average for the whole world, at any rate in Western Europe and America. Would you like to sit here? There’s room at this end of the table.’ He cleared a space. ‘And here’s paper. And this is quite a decent pen.’

‘Do you mind,’ said Illidge faintly, ‘if I lie down for a minute. I’m not feeling well.’

CHAPTER XXXIV

It was nearly eleven before Philip Quarles appeared at Sbisa’s. Spandrell saw him as he was entering and beckoned him to the table where he was sitting with Burlap and Rampion. Philip came limping across the room and sat down beside him.

‘I’ve got messages for you,’ said Spandrell, ‘and, what’s more important,’ he felt in his pocket, ‘ the key of your house.’ He handed it over, explaining how he had come into possession of it. If the man knew what had happened in his house that evening… ‘And Elinor’s gone down to Gattenden,’ he went on. ‘She had a telegram. The child doesn’t seem to be well. And she expects you to-morrow.’

‘The devil she does!’ said Philip. ‘But I have at least fifteen engagements. What’s wrong with the boy?’

‘Unspecified.’

Philip shrugged his shoulders. ‘If it had been serious, my mother-in-law wouldn’t have telegraphed,’ he said, yielding to the temptation to say something amusing. ‘She’s like that. She’ll. take a case of double pneumonia with perfect calm and then get terribly excited about a headache or a pain in the belly.’ He interrupted himself to order an omelette and half a bottle of Moselle. Still, Philip reflected, the boy hadn’t been very flourishing these last weeks. He rather wished he hadn’t yielded to the temptation. And what he had said hadn’t really been in the least amusing. Wanting to be amusing—that was his chief literary defect. His books would be much better if he would allow them to be much duller. He sank into a rather gloomy silence.

‘These children!’ said Spandrell. ‘If you will go in for them….’

‘still, it must be wonderful to have a child,’ said Burlap with proper wistfulness. ‘I often wish…’

Rampion interrupted him. ‘It must be still more wonderful to be one. When one’s grown up, I mean.’ He grinned.

‘What do you do about your children?’ asked Spandrell.

‘As little as I can. Unfortunately they have to go to school. I only hope they won’t learn too much. It’d be really awful if they emerged as little professors stuffed with knowledge, trotting out their smart little abstract generalizations. They probably will. Just to spite me. Children generally do spite their parents. Not on purpose, of course, but unconsciously, because they can’t help it, because the parents have probably gone too far in one direction and nature’s reacting, trying to get back to the state of equilibrium. Yes, yes, I can feel it in my bones. They’ll be professors, the little devils. They’ll be horrid little scientists. Like your friend Illidge,’ he said, turning to Spandrell, who started uncomfortably at the name and was annoyed that he should have started. ‘Horrid little brains that do their best to suppress the accompanying hearts and bowels.’

Spandrell smiled his significant, rather melodramatically-ironic smile. ‘Young Illidge hasn’t succeeded in suppressing his heart and bowels,’ he said. ‘Not by a long chalk.’

‘Of course not. Nobody can suppress them. All that happens in the process is that they’re transformed from living organs into offal. And why are they transformed? In the interests of what? Of a lot of silly knowledge and irrelevant abstractions.’

‘Which are after all quite amusing in themselves,’ said Philip, breaking his silence to come to the rescue of the intellect. ‘Making generalizations and pursuing knowledge are amusements. Among the most entertaining, to my mind.’ Philip went on to develop his hedonistic justification of the mental life. ‘So why be so hard on our little diversions?’ he concluded. ‘You don’t denounce golf; so why should you denounce the sports of the highbrows?’

‘That’s fairly rudimentary, isn’t it?’ said Rampion. ‘The tree shall be known by its fruits. The fruits of golf are either non-existent, harmless or positively beneficial. A healthy liver, for example—that’s a very fine fruit. Whereas the fruits of intellectualism—my God!’ He made a grimace. ‘Look at them. The whole of our industrial civilization—that’s their fruit. The morning paper, the radio, the cinema, all fruits. Tanks and trinitrotoluol; Rockefeller and Mond—fruits again. They’re all the result of the systematically organized, professional intellectualism of the last two hundred years. And you expect me to approve of your amusements? But, I tell you, I prefer bull-fighting. What’s the torture of a few animals and the brutalizing of a few hundred spectators compared to the ruining and befouling and degrading of a whole world? Which is what you highbrows have done since you professionalized and organized your amusements.’

‘Come, come,’ said Philip. ‘The picture’s a little lurid. And anyhow, even if it were accurate, the highbrows can’t be held responsible for the applications other people have made of their results.’

‘They are responsible. Because they brought the other people up in their own damned intellectualist tradition. After all, the other people are only highbrows on another plane. A business man is just a man of science who happens to be rather stupider than the real man of science. He’s living just as one-sidedly and intellectually, as far as his intellect goes, as the other one, And the fruit of that is inner psychological degeneration. For of course,’ he added parenthetically, ‘the fruits of your amusements aren’t merely the external apparatus of modern industrial life. They’re an inward decay; they’re infantilism and degeneracy and all sorts of madness and primitive reversion. No, no, I have no patience with your precious amusements of the mind. You’d be doing far less harm if you were playing golf.’

‘But truth?’ queried Burlap, who had been listening to the discussion without speaking. ‘What about truth?

Spandrell nodded approval. ‘Isn’t that worth looking for?’

‘Certainly,’ said Rampion. ‘But not where Philip and his scientific and scholarly friends are looking for it. After all, the only truth that can be of any interest to us, or that we can know, is a human truth. And to discover that, you must look for it with the whole being, not with a specialized part of it. What the scientists are trying to get at is nonhuman truth. Not that they can ever completely succeed; for not even a scientist can completely cease to be human. But they can go some way towards abstracting themselves from the human world of reality. By torturing their brains they can get a faint notion of the universe as it would seem if looked at through nonhuman eyes. What with their quantum theory, wave mechanics, relativity and all the rest of it, they do really seem to have got a little way outside humanity. Well, what the devil’s the good of that?’

‘Apart from the fun of the thing,’ said Philip, ‘the good may be some astonishing practical discovery, like the secret of disintegrating the atom and the liberation of endless supplies of energy.’

‘And the consequent reduction of human beings to absolute imbecility and absolute subservience to their machines,’ jeered Rampion. ‘I know your paradises. But the point for the moment is truth. This nonhuman truth that the scientists are trying to get at with their intellects—it’s utterly irrelevant to ordinary human living. Our truth, the relevant human truth is something you discover by living—living completely, with the whole man. The results of your amusements, Philip, all these famous theories about the cosmos and their practical applications—they’ve got nothing whatever to do with the only truth that matters. And the nonhuman truth isn’t merely irrelevant; it’s dangerous. It distracts people’s attention from the important human truth. It makes them falsify their experience in order that lived reality may fit in with abstract theory. For example, it’s an established nonhuman truth—or at least it was established in my young days—that secondary qualities have no real existence. The man who takes that seriously denies himself, destroys the whole fabric of his life as a human being. For human beings happen to be so arranged that secondary qualities are, for them, the only real ones. Deny them and you commit suicide.’

‘But in practice,’ said Philip, ‘nobody does deny them.’

‘Not completely,’ Rampion agreed. ‘Because it can’t be done. A man can’t abolish his sensations and feelings completely without physically killing himself. But he can disparage them after the event. And, in fact, that’s what a great number of intelligent and welleducated people do—disparage the human in the interests of the nonhuman. Their motive’s different from that of the Christians; but the result’s the same. A sort of self-destruction. Always the same,’ he went on with a sudden outburst of anger in his voice. ‘Every attempt at being something better than a man—the result’s always the same. Death, some sort of death. You try to be more than you are by nature and you kill something in yourself and become much less. I’m so tired of all this rubbish about the higher life and moral and intellectual progress and living for ideals and all the rest of it. It all leads to death. Just as surely as living for money. Christians and moralists and cultured aesthetes, and bright young scientists and Smilesian business men—all the poor little human frogs trying to blow themselves up into bulls of pure spirituality, pure idealism, pure efficiency, pure conscious intelligence, and just going pop, ceasing to be anything but the fragments of a little frog—decaying fragments at that. The whole thing’s a huge stupidity, a huge disgusting lie. Your little stink-pot of a St. Francis, for example.’ He turned to Burlap, who protested. ‘Just a little stink-pot,’ Rampion insisted. ‘A silly vain little man trying to blow himself up into a Jesus and only succeeding in killing whatever sense or decency there was in him, only succeeding in turning himself into the nasty smelly fragments of a real human being. Going about getting thrills of excitement out of licking lepers! Ugh! The disgusting little pervert! He thinks himself too good to kiss a woman; he wants to be above anything so vulgar as natural healthy pleasure, and the only result is that he kills whatever core of human decency he ever had in him and becomes a smelly little pervert who can only get a thrill out of licking lepers’ ulcers. Not curing the lepers, mind you. Just licking them. For his own amusement. Not theirs. It’s revolting!’

Philip leaned back in his chair and laughed. But Rampion turned on him in a fury.

‘You may laugh,’ he said.

‘But don’t imagine you’re any better, really. You and your intellectual, scientific friends. You’ve killed just as much of yourselves as the Christian maniacs. Shall I read you your programme?’ He picked up the book that was lying beside him on the table and began to turn the pages. ‘I came upon it just now, as I was coming here in the ‘bus. Here we are.’ He began to read, pronouncing the French words carefully and clearly. ‘Plus un obstacle materiel toutes les rapidites gagnees par la science et la richesse. Pas une tare a l’independance. Voir un crime de lese-moi dans toute frequentation, homme ou pays, qui ne serait pas expressement voulu. L’energie, le recueillement, la tension de la solitude, les transporter dans ses rapports avec de vrais semblables. Pas d’amour peut-etre, mais des amities rares, difficiles, exaltees, nerveuses; vivre comme on revivrait en esprit de detachement, d’inquietude et de revanche.’ Rampion closed the book and looked up. ‘That’s your programme,’ he said to Philip. ‘Formulated by Marie Leneru in 1901. Very brief and neat and complete. And, my God, what a horror! No body, no contact with the material world, no contact with human beings except through the intellect, no love…’

‘We’ve changed that a little since 1901,’ said Philip, smiling.

‘Not really. You’ve admitted promiscuous fornication, that’s all. But not love, not the natural contact and flow, not* the renunciation of mental selfconsciousness, not the abandonment to instinct. No, no. You stick to your conscious will. Everything must be expressement voulu, all the time. And the connections must be purely mental. And life must be lived, not as though it were life in a world of living people, but as though it were solitary recollection and fancy and meditation. An endless masturbation, like Proust’s horrible great book. That’s the higher life. Which is the euphemistic name of incipient death. It’s significant, it’s symbolic that that Leneru woman was deaf and purblind. The outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual truth. Poor creature! She had some excuse for spirituality. But the other HigherLifers, the ones who haven’t any physical defect—they’re not so forgivable. They’ve maimed themselves deliberately, for fun. It’s a pity they don’t develop visible hunch-backs or wall-eyes. One would know better who one was dealing with.’

‘Quite,’ said Philip, nodding, and laughed with an affectation of amusement that was meant to cover the embarrassment he felt at Rampion’s references to physical disability. ‘Quite.’ Nobody should think that, because he had a game leg, he didn’t entirely appreciate the justice of Rampion’s remarks about deformity.

The irrelevant loudness of his laugh made Rampion glance questioningly at him. What was up? He couldn’t be bothered to discover.

‘It’s all a damned lie,’ he went on, ‘and an idiotic lie at that—all this pretending to be more than human. Idiotic because it never comes off. You try to be more than human, but you only succeed in making yourself less than human. Always…’

‘Hear, hear!’ said Philip. ‘“We walk on earth and have no need of wings.”’ And suddenly he heard his father’s loud voice saying, ‘I had wings. I had wings’; he saw his flushed face and feverishly pink pyjamas. Ludicrous and deplorable. ‘Do you know who that’s by?’ he went on. ‘That’s the last line of the poem I wrote for the Newdigate prize at Oxford, when I was twenty-one. The subject was “King Arthur,” if I remember rightly. Needless to say I didn’t get the prize. But it’s a good line.’

‘A pity you didn’t live up to it,’ said Rampion, ‘instead of whoring after abstractions. But of course, there’s nobody like the lover of abstraction for denouncing abstractions. He knows by experience how lifedestroying they are. The ordinary man can afford to take them in his stride. He can afford to have wings too, so long as he also remembers that he’s got feet. It’s when people strain themselves to fly all the time that they go wrong. They’re ambitious of being angels; but all they succeed in being is either cuckoos and geese on the one hand or else disgusting vultures and carrion crows on the other.’

‘But all this,’ said Spandrell, breaking a long silence, ‘is just the gospel of animalism. You’re just advising us to behave like beasts.’

‘I’m advising you to behave like human beings,’ said Rampion. ‘Which is slightly different. And anyhow,’ he added, ‘it’s a damned sight better to behave like a beast—a real genuine undomesticated animal, I mean—than to invent a devil and then behave like one’s invention.’

There was a brief silence.’suppose I were to tell them,’ Spandrell was thinking,’suppose I were to tell them that I’d just jumped out on a man from behind a screen and hit him on the side of the head with an Indian club.’ He took another sip of brandy. ‘No,’ he said aloud, ‘I’m not so sure of what you say. Behaving like an animal is behaving like a creature that’s below good and evil. You must know what good is before you can start behaving like the devil.’ And yet it had all been just stupid and sordid and disgusting. Yes, and profoundly silly, an enormous stupidity. At the core of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil he had found, not fire and poison, but only a brown disgusting putrefaction and a few small maggots. ‘Things exist only in terms of their opposites,’ he went on, frowning at his own thoughts. ‘The devil implies God.’

‘No doubt,’ said Rampion impatiently. ‘A devil of absolute evil implies a God of absolute good. Well, what of it? What’s that got to do with you or me?’

‘A good deal, I should have thought.’

‘It’s got about as much to do with us as the fact of this table being made of electrons, or an infinite series of waves undulating in an unknown medium, or a large number of point-events in a four-dimensional continuum, or whatever else Philip’s scientific friends assure us it is made of. As much as that. That is to say, practically nothing. Your absolute God and absolute devil belong to the class of irrelevant nonhuman facts. The only things that concern us are the little relative gods and devils of history and geography, the little relative goods and evils of individual casuistry. Everything else is nonhuman and beside the point; and if you allow yourself to be influenced by nonhuman, absolute considerations, then you inevitably make either a fool of yourself, or a villain, or perhaps both.’

‘But that’s better than making an animal of oneself,’ insisted Spandrell. ‘I’d rather be a fool or a villain than a bull or a dog.’

‘But nobody’s asking you to be a bull or a dog,’ said Rampion impatiently. ‘Nobody’s asking you to be anything but a man. A man, mind you. Not an angel or a devil. A man’s a creature on a tight-rope, walking delicately, equilibrated, with mind and consciousness and spirit at one end of his balancing pole and body and instinct and all that’s unconscious and earthy and mysterious at the other. Balanced. Which is damnably difficult. And the only absolute he can ever really know is the absolute of perfect balance. The absoluteness of perfect relativity. Which is a paradox and nonsense intellectually. But so is all real, genuine, living truth—just nonsense according to logic. And logic is just nonsense in the light of living truth. You can choose which you like, logic or life. It’s a matter of taste. Some people prefer being dead.’

‘Prefer being dead.’ The words went echoing through Spandrell’s mind. Everard Webley lying on the floor, trussed up like a chicken. Did he prefer being dead? ‘All the same,’ he said slowly,’some things must always remain absolutely and radically wrong. Killing, for example.’ He wanted to believe that it was more than merely low and sordid and disgusting. He wanted to believe that it was also terrible and tragic. ‘That’s an absolute wrong.’

‘But why more absolute than anything else?’ said Rampion. ‘There are circumstances when killing’s obviously necessary and right and commendable. The only absolutely evil act, so far as I can see, that a man can perform, is an act against life, against his own integrity. He does wrong if he perverts himself, if he falsifies his instincts.’

Spandrell was sarcastic. ‘We’re getting back to the’ beasts again,’ he said. ‘Go ravening round fulfilling all your appetites as you feel them. Is that the last word in human wisdom?’

‘Well, it isn’t really so stupid as you try to make out,’ said Rampion. ‘If men went about satisfying their instinctive desires only when they genuinely felt them, like the animals you’re so contemptuous of, they’d behave a damned sight better than the majority of civilized human beings behave to-day. It isn’t natural appetite and spontaneous instinctive desire that make men so beastly—no, “beastly” is the wrong word; it implies an insult to the animals—so all-too-humanly bad and vicious, then. It’s the imagination, it’s the intellect, its principles, its tradition and education. Leave the instincts to themselves and they’ll do very little mischief. If men made love only when they were carried away by passion, if they fought only when they were angry or terrified, if they grabbed at property only when they had need or were swept off their feet by an uncontrollable desire for possession—why, I assure you, this world would be a great deal more like the Kingdom of Heaven than it is under our present Christian-intellectual-scientific dispensation. It’s not instinct that makes Casanovas and Byrons and Lady Castlemaines; it’s a prurient imagination artificially tickling up the appetite, tickling up desires that have no natural existence. If Don Juans and Don Juanesses only obeyed their desires, they’d have very few affairs. They have to tickle themselves up imaginatively before they can start being casually promiscuous. And it’s the same with the other instincts. It’s not the possessive instinct that’s made modem civilization insane about money. The possessive instinct has to be kept artificially tickled by education and tradition and moral principles. The money-grubbers have to be told that money-grubbing’s natural and noble, that thrift and industry are virtues, that persuading people to buy things they don’t want is Christian Service. Their possessive instinct would never be strong enough to keep them grubbing away from morning till night all through a lifetime. It has to be kept chronically gingered up by the imagination and the intellect. And then, think of civilized war. It’s got nothing to do with spontaneous combativeness. Men have to be compelled by law and then tickled up by propaganda before they’ll fight. You’d do more for peace by telling men to obey the spontaneous dictates of their fighting instincts than by founding any number of Leagues of Nations.’

‘You’d do still more,’ said Burlap, ‘by telling them to obey Jesus.’

‘No, you wouldn’t. Telling them to obey Jesus is telling them to be more than human. And, in practice, trying to be more than human always means succeeding in being less than human. Telling men to obey Jesus literally is telling them, indirectly, to behave like idiots and finally like devils. Just consider the examples. Old Tolstoy—a great man who deliberately turned himself into an idiot by trying to be more than a great man. Your horrid little St. Francis.’ He turned to Burlap.

‘Another idiot. But already on the verge of diabolism. With the monks of Thebaid you see the process carried a step further. They went over the verge. They got to the stage of being devils. Self-torture, destruction of everything decent and beautiful and living. That was their programme. They tried to obey Jesus and be more than men; and all they succeeded in doing was to become the incarnation of pure diabolic destructiveness. They could have been perfectly decent human beings if they’d just gone about behaving naturally, in accordance with their instincts. But no, they wanted to be more than human. So they just became devils. Idiots first and then devils, imbecile devils. Ugh! ‘ Rampion made a grimace and shook his head with disgust. ‘And to think,’ he went on indignantly, ‘that the world’s full of these creatures! Not quite so far gone as St. Anthony and his demons or St. Francis and his halfwits. But of the same kind. Different only in degree. And all perverted in the same wayby trying to be nonhuman. Nonhumanly religious, nonhumanly moral, nonhumanly intellectual and scientific, nonhumanly specialized and efficient, nonhumanly the business man, nonhumanly avaricious and property-loving, nonhumanly lascivious and Don Juanesque, nonhumanly the conscious individual even in love. All perverts. Perverted towards goodness or badness, towards spirit or flesh; but always away from the central norm, always away from humanity. The world’s an asylum of perverts. There are four of them at this table now.’ He looked round with a grin. ‘A pure little Jesus pervert.’ Burlap forgivingly smiled. ‘An intellectual-aesthetic pervert.’ ‘Thanks for the compliment,’ said Philip.

‘A morality-philosophy pervert.’ He turned to Spandrell. ‘Quite the little Stavrogin. Pardon my saying so, Spandrell; but you really are the most colossal fool.’ He looked intently into his face.

‘Smiling like all the tragic characters of fiction rolled into one! But it won’t do. It doesn’t conceal the simple-minded zany underneath.’ Spandrell threw back his head and noiselessly laughed. If he knew, he was thinking, if he knew… But if he knew, would he think him any less of a fool?

‘Laugh away, old Dostoievsky! But let ife tell you, it’s Stavrogin who ought to have been called the Idiot, not Mishkin. He was incomparably the bigger fool, the completer pervert.’

‘And what sort of a fool and pervert is the fourth person at this table?’ asked Philip.

‘What indeed!’ Rampion shook his head. His fine hair floated up silkily. He smiled. ‘A pedagogue pervert. A Jeremiah pervert. A worry-about-the-bloodyold-world pervert. Above all a gibber pervert.’ He got up. ‘That’s why I’m going home,’ he said. ‘The way I’ve been talking—it’s really nonhuman. Really scandalous. I’m ashamed. But that’s the trouble: when you’re up against nonhuman things and people, you inevitably become nonhuman yourself. It’s all your fault.’ He gave a final grin, waved goodnight and was gone.

****

Burlap came home to find Beatrice, as usual, waiting up for him. Sitting—for such was the engagingly childlike habit he had formed during the last few weeks—on the floor at her feet, his head, with the little pink tonsure in the middle of the dark curls, against her knee, he sipped his hot milk and talked of Rampion. An extraordinary man, a great man, even. Great? queried Beatrice, disapprovingly. She didn’t like to hear greatness attributed to any living man (the dead were a different matter; they were dead), unless it was to Denis himself. Hardly great, she insisted jealously. Well, perhaps not quite. But very nearly. If he hadn’t that strange insensitiveness to spiritual values, that prejudice, that blind spot. The attitude was comprehensible. Rampion was reacting against something which had gone too far in one direction; but in the process of reacting he had gone too far in the other. His incapacity to understand St. Francis, for example. The grotesque and really hideous things he could say about the saint. That was extraordinary and deplorable.

‘What does he say?’ asked Beatrice severely. Since knowing Burlap, she had taken St. Francis under her protection.

Burlap gave her an account, a little expurgated, of what Rampion had said. Beatrice was indignant. How could he say such things? How did he dare? It was an outrage. Yes, it was a defect in him, Burlap admitted, a real defect. But so few people, he added in charitable palliation, were born with a real feeling for spiritual beauty. Rampion was an extraordinary man in many ways, but it was as though he lacked that extra sense-organ which enables men like St. Francis to see the beauty that is beyond earthly beauty. In a rudimentary form he himself, he thought, had the power. How rarely he met anyone who seemed to be like him! Almost everybody was in this respect a stranger. It was like seeing normally in a country where most people were colour blind. Didn’t Beatrice feel that too? For of course she was one of the rare clear-seeing ones. He had felt it at once, the first time he met her. Beatrice nodded gravely. Yes, she too felt like that. Burlap smiled up at her; he knew it. She felt proud and important. Rampion’s idea of love, for example; Burlap shook his head. So extraordinarily gross and animal and corporeal.

‘Dreadful,’ said Beatrice feelingly. Denis, she was thinking, was so different. Tenderly she looked down at the head that reposed, so trustingly, against her knee. She adored the way his hair curled, and his very small, beautiful ears, and even the pink bare spot on the top of his crown. That little pink tonsure was somehow rather engagingly pathetic. There was a long silence.

Burlap at last profoundly sighed. ‘How tired I am!’ he said.

‘You ought to go to bed.’

‘Too tired even to move.’ He pressed his cheek more heavily against her knee and shut his eyes.

Beatrice raised her hand, hesitated a moment, dropped it again, then raised it once more and began to run her fingers soothingly through his dark curls. There was another long silence.

‘Ah, don’t stop,’ he said, when at last she withdrew her hand. ‘It’s so comforting. Such a virtue seems to go out from you. You’d almost cured my headache.’

‘You’ve got a headache?’ asked Beatrice, her solicitude running as usual to a kind of anger. ‘Then you simply must go to bed,’ she commanded.

‘But I’m so happy here.’

‘No, I insist.’ Her protective motherliness was thoroughly aroused. It was a bullying tenderness.

‘How cruel you are!’ Burlap complained, rising reluctantly to his feet. Beatrice was touched with compunction. ‘I’ll stroke your head when you’re in bed,’ she promised. She too now regretted that soft warm silence, that speechless intimacy, which her outburst of domineering solicitude had too abruptly shattered. She justified herself by an explanation. The headache would return if he didn’t go to sleep the moment it was cured. And so on.

Burlap had been in bed nearly ten minutes when she came to keep her promise. She was dressed in a green dressing-gown and her yellow hair was plaited into a long thick pigtail that swung heavily as she moved, like the heavy plaited tail of a cart-horse at a show.

‘You look about twelve with that pigtail hanging down your back,’ said Burlap, enchanted.

Beatrice laughed, rather nervously, and sat down on the edge of the bed. He raised his hand and took hold of the thick plait. ‘Too charming,’ he said. ‘It simply invites pulling.’ He gave a little tug at it, playfully.

‘Look out,’ she warned. ‘I’ll pull back, in spite of your headache.’ She took hold of one of his dark curls.

‘Pax, pax!’ he begged, reverting to the vocabulary of the preparatory school. ‘I’ll let go. The real reason,’ he added, ‘why little boys don’t like fighting with little girls is simply that little girls are so much more ruthless and ferocious.’

Beatrice laughed again. There was a silence. She felt a little breathless and fluttering, as one feels when one is anxiously expecting something to happen. ‘Head bad?’

she asked

‘Rather bad.’ She stretched out a hand and touched his forehead.

‘Your hand’s magical,’ he said. With a quick unexpected movement he wriggled round sideways under the sheets and laid his head on her lap. ‘There,’ he whispered and, with a sigh of contentment, closed his eyes.

For a moment Beatrice was taken aback, almost frightened. That dark head lying hard and heavy on her thighs—it seemed strange, terrifying. She had to suppress a little shudder before she could feel glad at the confiding childishness of his movement. She began stroking his forehead, stroking his scalp through the thick dark curls. Time passed. The soft warm silence enveloped them once more, the dumb intimacy of contact was reestablished. She was no longer domineering in her protective solicitude, only tender. The armour of her hardness was as though melted away from her, melted away in this warm intimacy along with the terrors which made it necessary.

Burlap sighed again. He was in a kind of blissful doze of sensual passivity.

‘Better?’ she asked in a soft whisper.

‘Still rather bad on the side,’ he whispered back. ‘Just over the ear.’ And he rolled his head over so that she could more easily reach the painful spot, rolled it over so that his face was pressed against her belly, her soft belly that stirred so livingly with her breathing, that was so warm and yielding against his face.

At the touch of his face against her body Beatrice felt a sudden renewal of those spasmodic creepings of apprehension. Her flesh was terrified by the nearness of that physical intimacy. But as Burlap did not stir, as he made no dangerous gesture, no movement towards a closer contact, the terrors died gradually down and their flutterings served only to enhance and intensify that wonderful warm emotion of tenderness which succeeded them. She ran her fingers through his hair, again and again. The warmth of his breathing was against her belly. She shivered a little; her happiness fluttered with apprehensions and anticipations. Her flesh trembled, but was somehow joyful; was afraid and yet curious; shrank, but took warmth at the contact and even, through its terrors, timidly desired.

‘Better?’ she whispered again.

He made a little movement with his head and pressed his face closer to her soft flesh.

‘Shall I stop now?’ she went on, ‘shall I go away?’

Burlap raised his head and looked at her. ‘No, no,’ he implored. ‘Don’t go. Not yet. Don’t break the magic. Stay here for a moment longer. Lie down here for a moment under the quilt. For a moment.’

Without speaking she stretched herself out beside him and he drew the quilt over her, he turned out the light.

The fingers that caressed her arm under its wide sleeve touched delicately, touched spiritually and as it were disembodiedly, like the fingers of those inflated rubber gloves that brush so thrillingly against one’s face in the darkness of seances, bringing comfort from the Great Beyond and a message of affection from the loved ones who have passed over. To caress and yet be a spiritualized rubber glove at a seance, to make love but as though from the Great Beyond—that was Burlap’s talent. Softly, patiently, with an infinite disembodied gentleness he went on caressing. Beatrice’s armour was melted quite away. It was the soft younggirlish, tremulous core of her that Burlap caressed with that delicate touch of spirit fingers from the Great Beyond. Her armour was gone; but she felt so wonderfully safe with Denis. She felt no fears, or at least only such faint breathless flutterings of her still almost childish flesh as served to quicken her happiness. She felt so wonderfully safe even when—after what had seemed a delicious eternity of patiently repeated caresses from wrist to shoulder and back again—the spirit hand reached out of the Beyond and touched her breast. Delicately, almost disembodiedly it touched, like a skin of rubber stuffed with air; spiritually it slid over the rounded flesh, and its angelic fingers lingered along the skin. At the first touch the round breast shuddered; it had its private terrors within Beatrice’s general happiness and sense of security. But patiently, gently, unalarmingly, the spirit hand repeated its caress again, again, till the reassured and at last eager breast longed for its return and her whole body was alive with the tingling ramifications of the breast’s desires. In the darkness the eternities prolonged themselves.

CHAPTER XXXV

Next day, instead of whimpering with every return of pain, the child began to scream—cry after shrill cry, repeated with an almost clockwork regularity of recurrence for what seemed to Elinor an eternity of hours. Like the scream of a rabbit in a trap. But a thousand times worse; for it was a child that screamed, not an animal; her child, trapped and in agony. She felt as though she too were trapped. Trapped by her own utter helplessness to alleviate his pain. Trapped by that obscure sense of guilt, that irrational belief (but haunting in spite of its irrationality), that ever more closely pressing and suffocating conviction that it was all, in some inscrutable fashion, her fault, a punishment, malevolently vicarious, for her offence. Caged within her own snare, but outside his, she sat there holding the small hand as it were between invisible bars, unable to come to his aid, waiting through the child’s quickbreathed and feverish silence for the recurrence of that dreadful cry, for yet another sight of that suddenly distorted face, that shuddering little body racked by a pain which was somehow of her own inflicting.

The doctor came at last with his opiates.

Philip arrived by the twelve-twenty. He had been in no hurry to get up and come by an earlier train. It annoyed him to have to leave town. His late arrival was in the nature of a protest. Elinor must really learn not to make such a fuss every time the child had a stomach-ache. It was absurd. S

he met him at the door as he stepped out of the car, so white and haggard, and with such darkcircled and desperate eyes, that he was shocked to see her.

‘But you’re the one who’s ill,’ he said anxiously ‘What is it?’

She did not answer for a moment, but stood holding him, her face hidden on his shoulder, pressing herself against him. ‘Dr. Crowther says it’s meningitis,’ she whispered at last.

At halfpast five arrived the nurse for whom Mrs. Bidlake had telegraphed in the morning. The evening papers came by the same train; the chauffeur returned with a selection of them. On the front page was the announcement of the discovery, in -his own motor car, of Everard Webley’s body. It was to old John Bidlake, dozing listlessly in the library, that the papers were first brought. He read and was so excited by the news of another’s death that he entirely forgot all his preoccupations with his own. Rejuvenated, he sprang to his feet and ran, waving the paper, into the hall. ‘Philip!’ he shouted in the strong resonant voice that had not been his for weeks past. ‘Philip! Come here at once!’

Philip, who had just come out of the sickroom and was standing in the corridor, talking to Mrs. Bidlake, hurried down to see what was the matter. John Bidlake held out the paper with an expression almost of triumph on his face. ‘Read that,’ he commanded importantly.

When Elinor was told the news, she almost fainted.

****

‘I believe he’s better this morning, Dr. Crowther.’

Dr. Crowther fingered his tie to feel if it were straight. He was a small man, brisk and almost too neatly dressed. ‘Quieter, eh? Sleeps?’ he enquired telegraphically. His conversation had been reduced to bed-rock efficiency. It was just comprehensible and nothing more. No energy was wasted on the uttering of unnecessary words. Dr. Crowther spoke as Ford cars are made. Elinor disliked him intensely, but believed in him for just those qualities of perky efficiency and selfconfidence which she detested.

‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said. ‘He’s sleeping.’

‘He would be,’ said Dr. Crowther, nodding, as though he had known everything in advance-which indeed he had; for the disease was running its invariable course.

Elinor accompanied him up the stairs. ‘Is it a good sign?’ she asked in a voice that implored a favourable answer.

Dr. Crowther pushed out his lips, cocked his head a little on one side, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well…’ he said non-committally and was silent. He had saved at least five foot-pounds of energy by not explaining that, in meningitis, a phase of depression follows the initial phase of excitement.

The child now dozed away his days in a kind of stupor, suffering no pain (Elinor was thankful for that), but disquietingly unresponsive to what was going on about him, as though he were not fully alive. When he opened his eyes she saw that the pupils were so enormously dilated that there was hardly any iris left. Little Phil’s blue and mischievous regard had turned to expressionless blackness. The light which had caused him such an agony during the first days of his illness no longer troubled him. No longer did he start and tremble at every sound. Indeed, the child did not seem to hear when he was spoken to. Two days passed and then, quite suddenly and with a horrible sinking sense of apprehension, Elinor realized that he was almost completely deaf.

‘Deaf?’ echoed Dr. Crowther, when she told him of her dreadful discovery. ‘Common symptom.’

‘But isn’t there anything to be done about it?’ she asked. The trap was closing on her again, the trap from which she had imagined herself free when that terrible screaming had quieted into silence.

Dr. Crowther shook his head, briskly, but only once each way. He did not speak. A foot-pound saved is a foot-pound gained.

‘But we can’t let him be deaf,’ she said, when the doctor was gone, appealing with a kind of incredulous despair to her husband. ‘We can’t let him be deaf.’ She knew he could do nothing; and yet she hoped. She realized the horror; but she refused to believe in it.

‘But if the doctor says there isn’t anything to be done…’

‘But deaf?’ she kept repeating, questioningly.’deaf, Phil? Deaf?’

‘Perhaps it’ll pass off by itself,’ he suggested consolingly and wondered, as he spoke the words, whether she still imagined that the child would recover.

Early next morning when, in her dressing-gown, she tiptoed upstairs for nurse’s report on the night, she found the child already awake. One eyelid was wide open and the eye, all pupil, was looking straight up at the ceiling; the other was half shut in a permanent wink that imparted to the thin and shrunken little face an expression of ghastly facetiousness.

‘He can’t open it,’ the nurse explained. ‘It’s paralysed.’

Between those long and curly lashes, which she had so often envied him, Elinor could see that the eyeball had rolled away to the exterior corner of the eye and was staring out sideways in a fixed unseeing squint.

****

‘Why the devil,’ said Cuthbert Arkwright, in the tone of one who has a personal grievance, ‘why the devil doesn’t Quarles come back to London?’ He hoped to extort from him a preface to his new illustrated edition of the Mimes of Herondas.

The rustication, Willie Weaver explained polysyllabically, was not voluntary. ‘His child’s ill,’ he added, uttering his little cough of self-applause; ‘it seems very reluctant, as they would say in Denmark, to absent itself from felicity much longer.’

‘Well, I wish it would hurry up about it,’ grumbled Arkwright. He frowned. ‘Perhaps I’d better try to get hold of someone else for my preface.’

At Gattenden the days had been like the successive stages of an impossibly horrible dream. When he had been deaf for a couple of days, little Phil ceased also to see. The squinting eyes were quite blind. And after nearly a week’s respite there was a sudden recurrence of the pain of the first days; he began to scream. Later he was seized several times with violent attacks of convulsions; it was as though a devil had entered into him and were torturing him from within. Then, one side of his face and half his body became paralysed and the flesh began to waste almost visibly from off his bones, like wax melting away in the heat of some inward and invisible fire. Trapped by her helplessness and by that horrible sense of guilt, which the news of Everard’s murder had enormously intensified, Elinor sat by her child’s bed and watched the phases of the malady succeeding one another—each one worse, it seemed to her, than the last, each more atrociously impossible. Yes, impossible. For such things could not, did not happen. Not to oneself at any rate. One’s own child was not gratuitously tortured and deformed before one’s eyes. The man who loved one and whom one had (oh wrongly, guiltily and as it had turned out, fatally!) almost made up one’s mind to love in return, was not suddenly and mysteriously murdered. Events like that simply did not occur. They were an impossibility. And yet, in spite of this impossibility, Everard was dead and for little Phil each day reserved a new and more excruciating torment. As in a nightmare, the impossible was being actualized.

Outwardly Elinor was very calm, silent and efficient. When Nurse Butler complained that the meals brought up to the sickroom got very cold on the way (and might she have Indian tea, as China didn’t agree with her digestion?), she ordered Lipton and arranged, in spite of Dobbs’s passionate objections, that lunch and dinner should be brought up in the water-heated breakfast dishes. All that Dr. Crowther telegraphically ordered her to do, she did, punctually, except to take more rest. Even Nurse Butler had grudgingly to admit that she was thorough and methodical. But she backed up the doctor, partly because she wanted to rule alone and undisputed in the sickroom and partly disinterestedly, for Elinor’s own sake. That calmness, she could see, was the result of effort; it was the rigidity of extreme tension. Philip and Mrs. Bidlake were no less insistent that she should rest; but Elinor would not listen to them.

‘But I’m perfectly all right,’ she protested, denying the evidence of her pallor and of those dark circles round her eyes.

She would have liked, if it had been humanly possible, never to eat or sleep at all. With Everard dead and the child in torture before her eyes, eating and sleeping seemed almost cynical. But the very possession of a body is a cynical comment on the soul and all its ways. It is a piece of cynicism, however, which the soul must accept, whether it likes it or no. Elinor duly went to bed at eleven and came down to meals—if only that she might have strength to endure yet more unhappiness. To suffer was the only thing she could do; she wanted to suffer as much and intensely as she could.

‘Well, how’s the boy?’ her father would ask perfunctorily, over his chicken-broth, when they met at lunch. And when she had given some vague reply, he would hastily pass on to another topic.

John Bidlake had steadily refused, throughout his grandchild’s illness, to come near the sickroom. He had always hated the spectacle of suffering and disease, of anything that might remind him of the pain and death he so agonizingly dreaded for himself. And in this case he had a special reason for terror. For, with that talent for inventing private superstitions which had always distinguished him, he had secretly decided that his own fate was bound up with the child’s. If the child recovered, so would he. If not… Once formulated, the superstition could not be disregarded. ‘It’s absurd,’ he tried to assure himself. ‘It’s utterly senseless and idiotic.’ But every unfavourable bulletin from the nursery made him shudder. To have entered the room might have been to discover, quite gratuitously, the most horrible confirmation of his forebodings. And perhaps (who knows?) the child’s sufferings might in some mysterious way infect himself. He did not even wish to hear of the boy. Except for that single brief enquiry at lunch-time, he never alluded to him and whenever someone else spoke of him, he either changed the subject of conversation (surreptitiously touching wood as he did so) or else withdrew out of earshot. After a few days the others learned to understand and respect his weakness. Moved by that sentiment which decrees that condemned criminals shall be treated with a special kindness, they were careful, in his presence, to avoid any allusion to what was happening upstairs.

Philip, meanwhile, hovered uneasily about the house. From time to time he went up to the nursery; but after having made an always vain attempt to persuade Elinor to come away, he would go down again in a few minutes.

He could not have borne to sit there for long at a time. The futility of Elinor’s helpless vigil appalled him; he had at all times a dread of doing nothing and in circumstances like these a long spell of mental disoccupation would have been a torture. In the intervals between his visits to the sickroom, he read, he tried to write. And then there was that affair of Gladys Helmsley to be attended to. The child’s illness had made a journey to London impossible and so absolved him from the necessity of personally interviewing Gladys. It was to Willie Weaver—Willie, who was a solicitor as well as the most reliable of friends—that he delegated the business. With what immense relief! He had really dreaded the encounter with Gladys. Willie, on the contrary, seemed to enjoy the business. ‘My dear Philip,’ he wrote, ‘I have been doing my best for your Aged Parent; but even my best promises to be somewhat expensive. The lady has all the endearing young charms (only professional etiquette prevented me from attempting a little playful superfoetation on my own account); but she is also a business woman. Moreover, her feelings about the Aged P. are ferocious. Rather justifiably so, I must confess to thinking, after what I heard from her. Do you know where he feeds his paramours? Chez Lyons. The man must be a barmecidal maniac, as I said to the young lady when she told me. (Needless to say, she didn’t understand the witticism; so I offer it to you, on the basis of a five per cent. commission on all royalties accruing from the sales of any work or works into which you may introduce it.) Tell the Aged P. that, next time, he must really spend a little more on his amusements; it’ll probably be cheaper in the long run. Advise him to indulge his gulosity as well as his lubricity; bid him control his thrift and temperance. I return to the attack to-morrow, when I hope to get the terms of the peace treaty set down in black and white. So sorry to hear your offspring’s not well. Yours, W. W.’

Philip smiled as he read the letter, and ‘Thank goodness,’ he thought, ‘that’s settled.’ But the last phrase made him feel ashamed of his amusement and his sense of relief. ‘What bottomless selfishness’ he reproached himself. And as though to make some amends, he limped upstairs to the nursery to sit for a while with Elinor. Little Phil lay in a stupor. His face was almost unrecognizably fleshless and shrunken, and the paralysed side of it was twisted into a kind of crooked grin. His little hands plucked unceasingly at the bedclothes. He breathed now very quickly, now so slowly that one began to wonder whether he was breathing at all.

Nurse Butler had gone to take a nap; for her nights were half sleepless. They sat together in silence. Philip took his wife’s hand and held it. Measured by that light irregular breathing from the bed, time slowly passed.

In the garden John Bidlake was painting—his wife had finally induced him to make the experiment—for the first time since his arrival at Gattenden. And for the first time, forgetting himself and his illness, he was happy. What an enchantment! he was thinking. The landscape was all curves and bulges and round recessions, like a body. Orbism, by God, orbism! The clouds were cherubic backsides; and that sleek down was a Nereid’s glaucous belly; and Gattenden Punch Bowl was an enormous navel; and each of those elms in the middle distance was a paunchy great Silenus straight out of Jordaens; and these absurd round bushes of evergreen in the foreground were the multitudinous breasts of a green Diana of the Ephesians. Whole chunks of anatomy in leaves and vapour and swelling earth. Marvellous! And by God, what one could make of it! Those seraphic buttocks should be the heavenly reflection of Diana’s breasts; one orbic theme, with variations; the buttocks slanting outwards and across the canvas towards the surface of the picture; the breasts slanting inwards, towards the interior. And the sleek belly should be a transverse and horizontal reconciliation of the two diagonal movements, with the great Sileni, zigzagging a little, disposed in front of it. And in the foreground on the left there’d be the silhouetted edge of the Wellingtonia, imaginatively transplanted there to stop the movements from running right out of the picture; and the stone griffon would come in very nicely on the right—for this was to be a closed composition, a little universe with boundaries beyond which the imagination was not to be allowed to stray. And the eye was to gaze as through an imaginary tunnel, unable to stray from the focal point in the middle of the great navel of Gattenden Punch Bowl, round which all the other fragments of divine anatomy would be harmoniously grouped. ‘By God,’ John Bidlake said to himself, swearing aloud in pure satisfaction of spirit, ‘by God! And he began to paint with a kind of fury.

Wandering through the garden in her endless crusade against weeds, Mrs. Bidlake halted for a moment behind him and looked over his shoulder.

‘Admirable,’ she said, as much in comment on her husband’s activity as on its pictorial results.

She moved away and, having uprooted a dandelion, paused and, with eyes shut, began to repeat her own name, ‘Janet Bidlake, Janet Bidlake, Janet Bidlake,’ again and again, until the syllables had lost all significance for her and had become as mysterious, meaningless and arbitrary as the words of a necromancer’s spell. Abracadabra, Janet Bidlake—was she really herself? did she even exist? and the trees? and people? this moment and the past? everything….?

Meanwhile, in the nursery, an extraordinary thing had happened. Suddenly and without warning, little Phil had opened his eyes and looked about him. They met his mother’s. As well as his twisted face would permit him, he smiled.

‘But he can see!’ cried Elinor. And kneeling down by the bed, she put her arms round the child and began to kiss him with a love that was quickened by an outburst of passionate gratitude. After all these days of squinting blindness, she was thankful to him, she was profoundly grateful for that look of answering intelligence in his eyes, that poor twisted essay at a smile. ‘My darling,’ she repeated and, for the first time for days, she began to cry. She averted her face, so that the child should not see her tears, got up and walked away from the bed. ‘Too stupid,’ she said apologetically to her husband, as she wiped her eyes. ‘But I can’t help it.’

‘I’m hungry,’ said little Phil suddenly.

Elinor was down on her knees again beside the bed. ‘What would you like to eat, my darling?’ But the child did not hear her question.

‘I’m hungry,’ he repeated.

‘He’s still deaf,’ said Philip.

‘But he can see again, he can speak.’ Elinor’s face was transfigured. She had known all the time, in spite of everything, that it was impossible he shouldn’t get well. Quite impossible. And now she was being proved right. ‘Stay here,’ she went on. ‘I’ll run and get some milk.’ She hurried out of the room.

Philip remained at the bedside. He stroked the child’s hand and smiled. Little. Phil smiled back. He too began to believe that there really might have been a miracle.

‘Draw me something,’ the child commanded.

Philip pulled out his fountain pen and, on the back of an old letter, scribbled one of those landscapes full of elephants and airships, trains and flying pigs and steamers, for which his son had’such a special partiality. An elephant came into collision with a train. Feebly, but with a manifest enjoyment, little Phil began to laugh. There could be no doubt of it; the miracle had really happened.

Elinor returned with some milk and a plate of jelly. There was colour in her cheeks, her eyes were bright and the face which, all these days, had been drawn and rigidly set had in a moment recovered all its mobility of expression. It was as though she had suddenly come to life again.

‘Come and look at the elephants,’ said little Phil. ‘So funny!’ And between each sip of milk, each spoonful of jelly, Philip had to show him the latest additions to his crowded landscape—whales in the sea, and divers being pinched by lobsters, two submarines fighting and a hippopotamus in a balloon; a volcano in eruption, cannons, a lighthouse, a whole army of pigs.

‘Why don’t you ever say anything?’ the child suddenly asked.

They looked at one another. ‘He can’t hear us,’ said Philip.

Elinor’s expression of happiness was momentarily clouded. ‘Perhaps to-morrow,’ she said. ‘If the blindness has gone to-day why shouldn’t he hear to-morrow?’

‘Why do you whisper?’ said the child. The only answer she could make was to kiss him and stroke his forehead.

‘We mustn’t tire him,’ said Elinor at last. ‘I think he ought to go to sleep.’ She shook up his pillow, she smoothed the sheets, she bent over him. ‘Goodbye, my little darling.’ He could answer at least to her smile.

Elinor drew the curtains and they tiptoed out. In the passage she turned and waited for her husband to come up to her. Philip put his arm round her and she pressed herself against him with a great sigh.

‘I was beginning to be afraid,’ she said, ‘that the nightmare was going on for ever. To the end.’

Luncheon that day was like a festival of resurrection, an Easter sacrament. Elinor was unfrozen, a woman of flesh again, not of stone. And poor Miss Fulkes, in whom the symptoms of misery had been identical with those of a very bad cold in the head accompanied by pimples, reassumed an almost human appearance and was moved to all but hysterical laughter by the jokes and anecdotes of the resuscitated John Bidlake. The old man had come in, rubbing his hands.

‘What a landscape!’ he exclaimed as he took his seat.’so juicy, so succulent, if you know what I mean, so fleshy—there’s no other word. It makes one’s mouth water to look at it. Perhaps that’s why I’m so ravenously hungry.’

‘Here’s your broth,’ said Mrs. Bidlake.

‘But you can’t expect me to do a morning’s painting on slops!’ And in spite of protests, he insisted on eating a cutlet.

The news that little Phil was better increased his satisfaction. (He touched wood three times with both hands at once.) Besides, he was really very fond of his grandchild. He began to talk, and it was the old Gargantuan Bidlake who spoke. Miss Fulkes laughed so violently at one of his anecdotes about Whistler that she choked and had to hide her face in her napkin. In the vague benevolence even of Mrs. Bidlake’s smile there was a hint of something like hilarity.

At about three o’clock John Bidlake began to feel a familiar discomfort, growing momently more acute, in the region of his midriff. He was shaken by spasmodic hiccoughs. He tried to go on painting; but all his pleasure in the work had evaporated. Diana’s breasts and the angel’s hind-quarters had lost all their charm for him. ‘A slight obstruction at the pylorus.’ Sir Herbert’s medical phrases re-echoed in his memory. ‘The contents of the stomach…a certain difficulty in passing into the duodenum.’ After a particularly violent hiccough, he put down his brushes and walked into the house to lie down.

‘Where’s father?’ Elinor enquired, when she came down to tea.

Mrs. Bidlake shook her head. ‘He’s not feeling very well again.’

‘Oh, dear.’

There was a silence, and it was as though death were suddenly in the room with them. But, after all, he was old, Elinor reflected; the thing was inevitable. He might be worse, but little Phil was better; and that was all that really mattered. She began to talk to her mother about the garden. Philip lighted a cigarette.

There was a knock at the door. It was the housemaid with a message from Nurse Butler: would they please come up at once.

The convulsions had been very violent; the wasted body was without strength. By the time they reached the nursery, little Phil was dead.

CHAPTER XXXVI

The Webley Mystery, as the papers lost no time in calling it, was complete. There was no clue. At the offices of the British Freemen nobody knew anything. Webley had left at the usual hour and by his usual mode of conveyance. He was not in the habit of talking to his subordinates about his private affairs; nobody had been told where he was going. And outside the office nobody had observed the car from the time Webley had told his chauffeur he could go and the time when the policeman in St. James’s Square began to wonder, at about midnight, how much longer it was going to be left there unattended. Nobody had noticed the car being parked, nobody had remarked the driver as he left it. The only finger-prints on the paintwork and the steering wheel were those of the dead man. The person who drove the car after the murder had evidently worn gloves. No, there was no clue. Direct evidence was absolutely lacking. The police did what they could with the indirect. The fact that the body had not been robbed seemed obviously to point to a political motive for the crime. At the offices of the British Freemen reposed a whole collection of threatening letters. Webley received two or three of them every week. ‘They’re my favourite reading,’ he was fond of saying. A search was made for the writers. Two Russian Jews from Houndsditch, a Nottingham typist and an ardent young undergraduate of Balliol, were identified as the authors of the most menacing and arrested, only to be released again almost immediately. The days passed. The murderers remained at large. Public interest in the crime was not allowed to abate. In part of the conservative press it was openly affirmed that the LiberalLabour Government had given orders to the police that the affair was not to be too closely looked into. ‘Screening the Murderers.’ ‘Socialists fear the Light.’ ‘Politics before the Ten Commandments.’ The headlines were lively. The crime was a godsend to the opposition. The Daily Mail offered ten thousand pounds reward to any person who would give information leading to the arrest of Webley’s murderers. Meanwhile, the British Freemen had almost doubled their numbers in a week. ‘Are you on the side of Murder? If not, join the British Freemen.’ The posters glared from every hoarding. Troops of Freemen in uniform and plain clothes scoured London canvassing for recruits, making patriotic demonstrations, doing amateur detective work. They also took the opportunity to beat a number of people with whose opinions they disagreed. In Tottenham and East Ham they fought pitched battles with hostile crowds and damaged numerous policemen. At Everard’s funeral a green procession more than three miles long followed the coffin to the grave.

Spandrell read all the papers every morning. They amused him. What a farce! What knockabout! What an incomparable idiocy! To Illidge, who had gone down to Lancashire to stay with his mother, he sent a picture postcard of Everard in uniform on his white horse—the shops were full of them now; hawkers peddled them in the streets. ‘The dead lion seems likely to do much more damage than the live dog,’ he wrote on the back. ‘God was always a joker.’

God’s best joke, so far as he himself was concerned, was not being there. Simply not there. Neither God nor the devil. For if the devil had been there, God would have been there too. All that was there was the memory of a sordid disgusting stupidity and now an enormous knockabout. First an affair of dust-bins and then a farce. But perhaps that was what the devil really was: the spirit of dust-bins. And God? God in that case would be simply the absence of dust-bins.

‘God’s not apart, not above, not outside.’ He remembered what Rampion had once said. ‘At any rate, no relevant, humanly important aspect of God’s above and outside. Neither is God inside, in the sense that the Protestants use the phrase—safely stowed away in the imagination, in the feelings and intellect, in the soul. He’s there, of course among other places. But he’s also inside in the sense that a lump of bread’s inside when you’ve eaten it. He’s in the very body, in the blood and bowels, in the heart and skin and loins. God’s the total result, spiritual and physical, of any thought or action that makes for life, of any vital relation with the world. God’s a quality of actions and relations—a felt, experienced quality. At any rate, he’s that for our purposes, for purposes of living. Because, of course for purposes of knowing and speculating he may be dozens of other things as well. He may be a Rock of Ages; he may be the Jehovah of the Old Testament; he may be anything you like. But what’s that got to do with us as living corporeal beings? Nothing, nothing but harm, at any rate. The moment you allow speculative truth to take the place of felt instinctive truth as a guide to living, you ruin everything.’

Spandrell had protested. Men must have absolutes, must steer by fixed external marks. ‘Music exists,’ he concluded, ‘even though you personally happen to be unmusical. You must admit its existence, absolutely, apart from your own capacity for listening and enjoying.

‘Speculatively, theoretically, yes. Admit it as much as you like. But don’t allow your theoretical knowledge to influence your practical life. In the abstract you know that music exists and is beautiful. But don’t therefore pretend, when you hear Mozart, to go into raptures which you don’t feel. If you do, you become one of those idiotic musicsnobs one meets at Lady Edward Tantamount’s. Unable to distinguish Bach from Wagner, but mooing with ecstasy as soon as the fiddles strike up. It’s exactly the same with God. The world’s full of ridiculous God-snobs. People who aren’t really alive, who’ve never done any vital act, who aren’t in any living relation with anything; people who haven’t the slightest personal or practical knowledge of what God is. But they moo away in churches, they coo over their prayers, they pervert and destroy their whole dismal existences by acting in accordance with the will of an arbitrarily imagined abstraction which they choose to call God. Just a pack of God-snobs. They’re as grotesque and contemptible as the musicsnobs at Lady Edward’s. But nobody has the sense to say so. The God-snobs are admired for being so good and pious and Christian. When they’re merely dead and ought to be having their bottoms kicked and their noses tweaked to make them sit up and come to life.’

Spandrell thought of the conversation now, as he addressed his postcard to Illidge. God was not there, the devil was not there; only the memory of a piece of squalid knockabout among the dust-bins, a piece of dirty dung-beetle’s scavengering. A God-snob—that’s what Rampion would call him. Dung-beetling in search of a non-existent God. But no, but no, God was there, outside, absolute. Else how account for the efficacy of prayer—for it was efficacious; how explain providence and destiny? God was there, but hiding. Deliberately hiding. It was a question of forcing him to come out of his lair, his abstract absolute lair, and compelling him to incarnate himself as a felt experienced quality of personal actions. It was a matter of violently dragging him from outsideness and aboveness to insideness. But God was a joker. Spandrell had conjured him with violence to appear; and out of the bloody steam of the magically compelling sacrifice had emerged only a dust-bin. But the very failure of the incantation had been a proof that God was there, outside. Nothing happens to a man except that which is like himself. Dust-bin to dust-bin, dung to dung. He had not succeeded in compelling God to pass from outsideness to insideness But the appearance of the dust-bin confirmed the reality of God as a providence, God as a destiny, God as the giver or withholder of grace, God as the predestinating saviour or destroyer. Dust-bins had been his predestined lot. In giving him dust-bins yet again, the providential joker was merely being consistent.

One day, in the London Library, he met Philip Quarles.

‘I was very sorry to hear about your little boy,’ he said.

Philip mumbled something and looked rather uncomfortable, like a man who finds himself involved in an embarrassing situation. He could not bear to let anyone come near his misery. It was private, secret, sacred. It hurt him to expose it, it made him feel ashamed.

‘It was a peculiarly gratuitous horror,’ he said, to bring the conversation away from the particular and personal to the general.

‘All horrors are gratuitous,’ said Spandrell. ‘How’s Elinor standing it?’

The question was direct, had to be answered. ‘Badly.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s quite broken her down.’ Why did his voice, he wondered, sound so strangely unreal and, as it were, empty?

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘We shall go abroad in a few days, if Elinor feels up to the journey. To Siena, I’d thought. And then perhaps to the seaside somewhere in the Maremma.’ It was a comfort to be able to go into these geographical details.

‘No more English domesticity then,’ said Spandrell after a little pause.

‘The reason of it has been taken away.’

Spandrell nodded slowly. ‘Do you remember that conversation we had at the Club, with Illidge and Walter Bidlake? Nothing ever happens to a man except what’s like him. Settling down in the country in England wasn’t at all like you. It didn’t happen. It’s been prevented. Ruthlessly, by God! But providence uses foul means as well as fair. Travelling about, being unfixed, being a spectator—that was like you. You’re being compelled to do what’s like you.’ There was a silence. ‘And living in a kind of dustheap,’ Spandrell added, ‘that’s like me. Whatever I do, however hard I try to escape, I remain on the dustheap. I suppose I always shall.’ Yes always, he went on thinking. He had played the last card and lost. No, not the last card; for there was one other. The last but one. Would he also lose with the last?

CHAPTER XXXVII

Spandrell was very insistent that they should come without delay. The heilige Dankgesang eines genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart simply must be heard.

‘You can’t understand anything until you have heard it,’ he declared. ‘It proves all kinds of things—God, the soul, goodness—unescapably. It’s the only real proof that exists; the only one, because Beethoven was the only man who could get his knowledge over into expression. You must come.’

‘Most willingly,’ said Rampion, ‘But…’

Spandrell interrupted him. ‘I heard quite by accident yesterday that the A minor quartet had been recorded for the gramophone. I rushed out and bought a machine and the records specially for you.’

‘For me? But why this generosity?’

‘No generosity,’ Spandrell answered laughing. ‘Pure selfishness. I want you to hear and confirm my opinion.’

‘But why?’

‘Because I believe in you and, if you confirm, I shall believe in myself.’

‘What a man!’ mocked Rampion. ‘Ought to join the Church of Rome and have a confessor.’

‘But you must come.’ He spoke earnestly.

‘But not now,’ said Mary.

‘Not to-day,’ her husband echoed, wondering as he spoke why the man was so strangely insistent. What was the matter with him? The way he moved and spoke, the look in his eyes…. So excited. ‘I have innumerable things to do this afternoon.’

‘Then to-morrow.’

As though he were drunk, Rampion was reflecting. ‘Why not the day after?’ he said aloud. ‘It would be much easier for me. And the machine won’t fly away in the interval.’

Spandrell uttered his noiseless laugh. ‘No, but I may,’ he said. ‘I shall probably be gone by the day after to-morrow.’

‘You hadn’t told us you were going away,’ said Mary. ‘Where?’

‘Who knows?’ Spandrell answered, laughing once more. ‘All I know is that I shan’t be here any more.’

‘All right,’ said Rampion, who had been watching him curiously, ‘ I’ll make it to-morrow.’ Why is he so melodramatic? he wondered.

Spandrell took his leave.

‘What was wrong with him?’ said Rampion, when he was gone.

‘I didn’t notice anything particularly wrong with him,’ Mary answered.

Rampion made a gesture of impatience. ‘You wouldn’t notice the Last Judgment,’ he said.’didn’t you see that he was holding down his excitement. Like the lid of a saucepan on the boil—holding it down. And that melodramatic way of laughing. Like the conscious villain in the play….’

‘But was he acting?’ said Mary, ‘was he playing the fool for our benefit?’

‘No, no. He was genuine all right. But when you’re genuinely in the position of the conscious villain in the melodrama, you inevitably begin to behave like the conscious villain. You act in spite of yourself.’

‘But what’s he being a conscious villain about?’

‘How on earth should I know?’ said Rampion impatiently. Mary always expected him, by some mysterious and magical intuition, to know everything. Her faith sometimes amused and sometimes pleased, but sometimes also annoyed him.’do you take me for Spandrell’s father confessor.’

‘There’s nothing to fly in a rage about.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Rampion, ‘there’s practically nothing not to fly in a rage about. If one keeps one’s temper, it’s because one lives most of the time with one’s eyes shut, half asleep. If one were always awake, my God! There wouldn’t be much crockery unsmashed.’ He stalked off to his studio.

Spandrell walked slowly eastwards from Chelsea along the river whistling to himself over and over again the opening phrases of the Lydian melody from the heilige Dankgesang. Over and over again. The river stretched away into the hot haze. The music was like water in a parched land. After so many years of drought, a spring, a fountain. A watering-cart rumbled past trailing its artificial shower. The wetted dust was fragrant. That music was a proof, as he had said to Rampion. In the gutter a little torrent was hurrying a crumpled cigarette packet and a piece of orange peel towards the drain. He stopped whistling. The essential horror. Like carting garbage; that was what it had been. Just nasty and unpleasant, like cleaning a latrine. Not terrible so much as stupid, indescribably stupid. The music was a proof; God existed. But only so long as the violins were playing. When the bows were lifted from the strings, what then? Garbage and stupidity, the pitiless drought.

In the Vauxhall Bridge Road he bought a shilling packet of writing-paper and envelopes. For the price of a cup of coffee and a bun he hired a table in a tea-shop. With a stump of pencil he wrote. ‘To the Secretary General, Brotherhood of British Freemen. Sir, Tomorrow, Wednesday, at five p.m., the murderer of Everard Webley will be at 37 Catskill Street, S.W .7. The flat is on the second floor. The man will probably answer.the bell in person. He is armed and desperate.’

He read it through and was reminded of those communications (written in red ink, to imitate blood, and under the influence of the serial stories in Chums and the B.O.P.) with which he and Pokinghorne Minor had hoped, at nine years old, to startle and terrify Miss Veal, the matron of their preparatory school. They had been discovered and reported to the head master. Old Nosey had given them three cuts apiece over the buttocks. ‘He is armed and desperate.’ That was pure Pokinghorne. But if he didn’t say it, they wouldn’t carry revolvers. And then, why, then it wouldn’t happen. Nothing would happen. Let it go. He folded the paper and put it into the envelope. There was an essential silliness, as well as an essential nastiness and stupidity. He scribbled the address.

‘Well, here we are,’ said Rampion, when Spandrell opened his door to them the next afternoon. ‘Where’s Beethoven? Where’s the famous proof of God’s existence and the superiority of Jesus’s morality?’

‘In here.’ Spandrell led the way into his sittingroom. The gramophone stood on the table. Four or five records lay scattered near it. ‘Here’s the beginning of the slow movement,’ Spandrell went on, picking up one of them. ‘I won’t bother you with the rest of the quartet. It’s lovely. But the heilige Dankgesang is the crucial part.’ He wound up the clockwork; the disc revolved; he lowered the needle of the sound-box on to its grooved surface. A single violin gave out a long note, then another a sixth above, dropped to the fifth (while the second violin began where the first had started), then leapt to the octave, and hung there suspended through two long beats. More than a hundred years before, Beethoven, stone deaf, had heard the imaginary music of stringed instruments expressing his inmost thoughts and feelings. He had made signs with ink on ruled paper. A century later, four Hungarians had reproduced from the printed reproduction of Beethoven’s scribbles that music which Beethoven had never heard except in his imagination. Spiral grooves on a surface of shellac remembered their playing. The artificial memory revolved, a needle travelled in its grooves and through a faint scratching and roaring that mimicked the noises of Beethoven’s own deafness, the audible symbols of Beethoven’s convictions and emotions quivered out into the air. Slowly, slowly, the melody unfolded itself. The archaic Lydian harmonies hung on the air. It was an unimpassioned music, transparent, pure and crystalline, like a tropical sea, an Alpine lake. Water on water, calm sliding over calm; the according of level horizons and waveless expanses, a counterpoint of serenities. And everything clear and bright; no mists, no vague twilights. It was the calm of still and rapturous contemplation, not of drowsiness or sleep. It was the serenity of the convalescent who wakes from fever and finds himself born again into a realm of beauty. But the fever was ‘the fever called living’ and the rebirth was not into this world; the beauty was unearthly, the convalescent serenity was the peace of God. The interweaving of Lydian melodies was heaven.

Thirty slow bars had built up heaven, when the character of the music suddenly changed. From being remotely archaic, it became modern. The Lydian harmonies were replaced by those of the corresponding major key. The time quickened. A new melody leapt and bounded, but over earthly mountains, not among those of paradise.

‘Neue Kraft fuehlend,’ Spandrell quoted in a whisper from the score. ‘He’s feeling stronger; but it’s not so heavenly.’

The new melody bounded on for another fifty bars and expired in scratchings. Spandrell lifted the needle and stopped the revolving of the disc.

‘The Lydian part begins again on the other side,’ he explained, as he wound up the machine. ‘Then there’s more of this lively stuff in A major. Then it’s Lydian to the end, getting better and better all the time. Don’t you think it’s marvellous?’ He turned to Rampion. ‘Isn’t it a proof?’

The other nodded. ‘Marvellous. But the only thing it proves, so far as I can hear, is that sick men are apt to be very weak. It’s the art of a man who’s lost his body.’

‘But discovered his soul.’

‘Oh, I grant you,’ said Rampion, ‘sick men are very spiritual. But that’s because they’re not quite men. Eunuchs are very spiritual lovers for the same reason.’

‘But Beethoven wasn’t a eunuch.’

‘I know. But why did he try to be one? Why did he make castration and bodilessness his ideal? What’s this music? Just a hymn in praise of eunuchism. Very beautiful, I admit. But couldn’t he have chosen something more human than castration to sing about?’

Spandrell sighed. ‘To me it’s the beatific vision, it’s heaven.’

‘Not earth. That’s just what I’ve been complaining of.’

‘But mayn’t a man imagine heaven if he wants to?’ asked Mary.

‘Certainly, so long as he doesn’t pretend that his imagination is the last word in truth, beauty, wisdom, virtue and all the rest. Spandrell wants us to accept this disembodied eunuchism as the last word. I won’t. I simply won’t.’

‘Listen to the whole movement, before you judge.’ Spandrell reversed the disc and lowered the needle. The bright heaven of Lydian music vibrated on the air.

‘Lovely, lovely,’ said Rampion, when the record was finished. ‘You’re quite right. It is heaven, it is the life of the soul. It’s the most perfect spiritual abstraction from reality I’ve ever known. But why should he have wanted to make that abstraction? Why couldn’t he be content to be a man and not an abstract soul? Why, why? ‘ He began walking up and down the room. ‘This damned soul,’ he went on, ‘this damned abstract soul—it’s like a kind of cancer, eating up the real, human, natural reality, spreading and spreading at its expense. Why can’t he be content with reality, your stupid old Beethoven? Why should he find it necessary to replace the real, warm, natural thing by this abstract cancer of a soul? The cancer may have a beautiful shape; but, damn it all, the body’s more beautiful. I don’t want your spiritual cancer.’

‘I won’t argue with you,’ said Spandrell He felt all at once extraordinarily tired and depressed. It had been a failure. Rampion had refused to be convinced. Was the proof, after all, no proof? Did the music refer to nothing outside itself and the idiosyncrasies of its inventor? He looked at his watch; it was almost five. ‘Hear the end of the movement at any rate,’ he said. ‘It’s the best part.’ He wound up the gramophone. Even if it’s meaningless, he thought, it’s beautiful, so long as it lasts. And perhaps it isn’t meaningless. After all, Rampion isn’t infallible. ‘Listen.’

The music began again. But something new and marvellous had happened in its Lydian heaven. The speed of the slow melody was doubled; its outlines became clearer and more definite; an inner part began to harp insistently on a throbbing phrase. It was as though heaven had suddenly and impossibly become more heavenly, had passed from achieved perfection into perfection yet more deeper and more absolute. The ineffable peace persisted; but it was no longer the peace of convalescence and passivity. It quivered, it was alive, it seemed to grow and intensify itself, it became an active calm, an almost passionate serenity. The miraculous paradox of eternal life and eternal repose was musically realized.

They listened, almost holding their breaths. Spandrell looked exultantly at his guest. His own doubts had vanished. How could one fail to believe in something which was there, which manifestly existed? Mark Rampion nodded. ‘Almost thou persuadest me,’ he whispered. ‘But it’s too good.’

‘How can anything be too good?’

‘Not human. If it lasted, you’d cease to be a man. You’d die.’

They were silent again. The music played on, leading from heaven to heaven, from bliss to deeper bliss. Spandrell sighed and shut his eyes. His face was grave and serene, as though it had been smoothed by sleep or death. Yes, dead, thought Rampion as he looked at him. ‘He refuses to be a man. Not a man—either a demon or a dead angel. Now he’s dead.’ A touch of discord in the Lydian harmonies gave an almost unbearable poignancy to the beatitude. Spandrell sighed again. There was a knocking at the door. He looked up. The lines of mockery came back into his face, the corners of the mouth became once more ironic.

‘There, he’s the demon again,’ thought Rampion. ‘He’s come to life and he’s the demon.’

‘There they are,’ Spandrell was saying and without answering Mary’s question, ‘Who?’ he walked out of the room.

Rampion and Mary remained by the gramophone, listening to the revelation of heaven. A deafening explosion, a shout, another explosion and another, suddenly shattered the paradise of sound.

They jumped up and ran to the door. In the passage three men in the green uniform of British Freemen were looking down at Spandrell’s body. They held pistols in their hands. Another revolver lay on the floor beside the dying man. There was a hole in the side of his head and a patch of blood on his shirt. His hands opened and shut, opened again and shut, scratching the boards.

‘What has…?’ began Rampion.

‘He fired first,’ one of the men interrupted.

There was a little silence. Through the open door came the sound of music. The passion had begun to fade from the celestial melody. Heaven, in those longdrawn notes, became once more the place of absolute rest, of still and blissful convalescence. Long notes, a chord repeated, protracted, bright and pure, hanging, floating, effortlessly soaring on and on. And then suddenly there was no more music; only the scratching of the needle on the revolving disc.

****

The afternoon was fine. Burlap walked home. He was feeling pleased with himself and the world at large. ‘I accept the Universe,’ was how, only an hour before, he had concluded his next week’s leader. ‘I accept the Universe.’ He had every reason for accepting it. Mrs. Betterton had given him an excellent lunch and much flattery. The Broad Christian’s Monthly of Chicago had offered him three thousand dollars for the serial rights of his St. Francis and the Modern Psyche. He had cabled back demanding three thousand five hundred. The Broad Christian’s answer had arrived that afternoon; his terms were accepted. Then there were the Affiliated Ethical Societies of the North of England. They had invited him to deliver four lectures each in Manchester, Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield. The fee would be fifteen guineas per lecture. Which for England, wasn’t at all bad. And there’d be very little work to do. It would just be a matter of re-hashing a few of his leaders in the World. Two hundred and forty guineas plus three thousand five hundred dollars. The best part of a thousand pounds. He would go and have a talk with his broker about the position and prospects of rubber. Or what about one of these Investment Trusts? They gave you a very safe six or seven per cent. Burlap whistled softly as he walked. The tune was Mendelssohn’s ‘On Wings of Song.’ The Broad Christian and the Affiliated Ethicals had made him spiritually musical. He whistled with no less satisfaction when he thought of the day’s other triumph. He had definitely got rid of Ethel Cobbett. The moment had been auspicious. Miss Cobbett had gone away for her holiday. These things are easier to do by post than face to face. Mr. Chivers, the business manager, had written a business-like letter. For financial reasons a reduction of the staff of the Literary World was urgently necessary. He regretted, but… One month’s notice would have been legally sufficient. But as a token of the directors’ appreciation of her services he was enclosing a cheque for three months’ salary. Any references she might require would always be forthcoming and he was hers faithfully. Burlap had tempered Mr. Chivers’s business-likeness with a letter of his own, full of regrets, and friendship, and jeremiads against a public that wouldn’t buy the Literary World, and lamentations over the defeat of God, incarnated in literature and himself, by Mammon in the person of Mr. Chivers and all business men. He had spoken of her to his friend Judd of the Wednesday Review, as well as to several other people in the journalistic world and would, of course, do everything in his power to etcetera.

Thank goodness, he reflected, as he walked along whistling ‘On Wings of Song’ with rich expression, that was the end of Ethel Cobbett so far as he was concerned. It was the end of her also as far as everybody was concerned. For some few days later, having written him a twelve-page letter, which he put in the fire after reading the first scarifying sentence, she lay down with her head in an oven and turned on the gas. But that was something which Burlap could not foresee. His mood as he walked whistling homewards was one of unmixed contentment. That night he and Beatrice pretended to be two little children and had their bath together. Two little children sitting at opposite ends of the big old-fashioned bath. And what a romp they had! The bathroom was drenched with their splashings. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.

The End

Brave New World

First Published 1932

1

A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables.

“And this,” said the Director opening the door, “is the Fertilizing Room.”

Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director’s heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse’s mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D.H.C. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments.

“Just to give you a general idea,” he would explain to them. For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently—though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.

“To-morrow,” he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality, “you’ll be settling down to serious work. You won’t have time for generalities. Meanwhile …”

Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse’s mouth into the notebook. The boys scribbled like mad.

Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. He had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say. And anyhow the question didn’t arise; in this year of stability, A.F. 632, it didn’t occur to you to ask it.

“I shall begin at the beginning,” said the D.H.C. and the more zealous students recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin at the beginning. “These,” he waved his hand, “are the incubators.” And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. “The week’s supply of ova. Kept,” he explained, “at blood heat; whereas the male gametes,” and here he opened another door, “they have to be kept at thirty-five instead of thirty-seven. Full blood heat sterilizes.” Rams wrapped in theremogene beget no lambs.

Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduction—“the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to six months’ salary”; continued with some account of the technique for preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing; passed on to a consideration of optimum temperature, salinity, viscosity; referred to the liquor in which the detached and ripened eggs were kept; and, leading his charges to the work tables, actually showed them how this liquor was drawn off from the test-tubes; how it was let out drop by drop onto the specially warmed slides of the microscopes; how the eggs which it contained were inspected for abnormalities, counted and transferred to a porous receptacle; how (and he now took them to watch the operation) this receptacle was immersed in a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa—at a minimum concentration of one hundred thousand per cubic centimetre, he insisted; and how, after ten minutes, the container was lifted out of the liquor and its contents reexamined; how, if any of the eggs remained unfertilized, it was again immersed, and, if necessary, yet again; how the fertilized ova went back to the incubators; where the Alphas and Betas remained until definitely bottled; while the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons were brought out again, after only thirty-six hours, to undergo Bokanovsky’s Process.

“Bokanovsky’s Process,” repeated the Director, and the students underlined the words in their little notebooks.

One egg, one embryo, one adult—normality. But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult. Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before. Progress.

“Essentially,” the D.H.C. concluded, “bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development. We check the normal growth and, paradoxically enough, the egg responds by budding.”

Responds by budding. The pencils were busy.

He pointed. On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was entering a large metal box, another rack-full was emerging. Machinery faintly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he told them. Eight minutes of hard X-rays being about as much as an egg can stand. A few died; of the rest, the least susceptible divided into two; most put out four buds; some eight; all were returned to the incubators, where the buds began to develop; then, after two days, were suddenly chilled, chilled and checked. Two, four, eight, the buds in their turn budded; and having budded were dosed almost to death with alcohol; consequently burgeoned again and having budded—bud out of bud out of bud—were thereafter—further arrest being generally fatal—left to develop in peace. By which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos—a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature. Identical twins—but not in piddling twos and threes as in the old viviparous days, when an egg would sometimes accidentally divide; actually by dozens, by scores at a time.

“Scores,” the Director repeated and flung out his arms, as though he were distributing largesse. “Scores.”

But one of the students was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay.

“My good boy!” The Director wheeled sharply round on him. “Can’t you see? Can’t you see?” He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. “Bokanovsky’s Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!”

Major instruments of social stability.

Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.

“Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!” The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. “You really know where you are. For the first time in history.” He quoted the planetary motto. “Community, Identity, Stability.” Grand words. “If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.”

Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.

“But, alas,” the Director shook his head, “we can’t bokanovskify indefinitely.”

Ninety-six seemed to be the limit; seventy-two a good average. From the same ovary and with gametes of the same male to manufacture as many batches of identical twins as possible—that was the best (sadly a second best) that they could do. And even that was difficult.

“For in nature it takes thirty years for two hundred eggs to reach maturity. But our business is to stabilize the population at this moment, here and now. Dribbling out twins over a quarter of a century—what would be the use of that?”

Obviously, no use at all. But Podsnap’s Technique had immensely accelerated the process of ripening. They could make sure of at least a hundred and fifty mature eggs within two years. Fertilize and bokanovskify—in other words, multiply by seventy-two—and you get an average of nearly eleven thousand brothers and sisters in a hundred and fifty batches of identical twins, all within two years of the same age.

“And in exceptional cases we can make one ovary yield us over fifteen thousand adult individuals.”

Beckoning to a fair-haired, ruddy young man who happened to be passing at the moment. “Mr. Foster,” he called. The ruddy young man approached. “Can you tell us the record for a single ovary, Mr. Foster?”

“Sixteen thousand and twelve in this Centre,” Mr. Foster replied without hesitation. He spoke very quickly, had a vivacious blue eye, and took an evident pleasure in quoting figures. “Sixteen thousand and twelve; in one hundred and eighty-nine batches of identicals. But of course they’ve done much better,” he rattled on, “in some of the tropical Centres. Singapore has often produced over sixteen thousand five hundred; and Mombasa has actually touched the seventeen thousand mark. But then they have unfair advantages. You should see the way a negro ovary responds to pituitary! It’s quite astonishing, when you’re used to working with European material. Still,” he added, with a laugh (but the light of combat was in his eyes and the lift of his chin was challenging), “still, we mean to beat them if we can. I’m working on a wonderful Delta-Minus ovary at this moment. Only just eighteen months old. Over twelve thousand seven hundred children already, either decanted or in embryo. And still going strong. We’ll beat them yet.”

“That’s the spirit I like!” cried the Director, and clapped Mr. Foster on the shoulder. “Come along with us, and give these boys the benefit of your expert knowledge.”

Mr. Foster smiled modestly. “With pleasure.” They went.

In the Bottling Room all was harmonious bustle and ordered activity. Flaps of fresh sow’s peritoneum ready cut to the proper size came shooting up in little lifts from the Organ Store in the sub-basement. Whizz and then, click! the lift-hatches flew open; the bottle-liner had only to reach out a hand, take the flap, insert, smooth-down, and before the lined bottle had had time to travel out of reach along the endless band, whizz, click! another flap of peritoneum had shot up from the depths, ready to be slipped into yet another bottle, the next of that slow interminable procession on the band.

Next to the Liners stood the Matriculators. The procession advanced; one by one the eggs were transferred from their test-tubes to the larger containers; deftly the peritoneal lining was slit, the morula dropped into place, the saline solution poured in … and already the bottle had passed, and it was the turn of the labellers. Heredity, date of fertilization, membership of Bokanovsky Group—details were transferred from test-tube to bottle. No longer anonymous, but named, identified, the procession marched slowly on; on through an opening in the wall, slowly on into the Social Predestination Room.

“Eighty-eight cubic metres of card-index,” said Mr. Foster with relish, as they entered.

“Containing all the relevant information,” added the Director.

“Brought up to date every morning.”

“And co-ordinated every afternoon.”

“On the basis of which they make their calculations.”

“So many individuals, of such and such quality,” said Mr. Foster.

“Distributed in such and such quantities.”

“The optimum Decanting Rate at any given moment.”

“Unforeseen wastages promptly made good.”

“Promptly,” repeated Mr. Foster. “If you knew the amount of overtime I had to put in after the last Japanese earthquake!” He laughed goodhumouredly and shook his head.

“The Predestinators send in their figures to the Fertilizers.”

“Who give them the embryos they ask for.”

“And the bottles come in here to be predestined in detail.”

“After which they are sent down to the Embryo Store.”

“Where we now proceed ourselves.”

And opening a door Mr. Foster led the way down a staircase into the basement.

The temperature was still tropical. They descended into a thickening twilight. Two doors and a passage with a double turn insured the cellar against any possible infiltration of the day.

“Embryos are like photograph film,” said Mr. Foster waggishly, as he pushed open the second door. “They can only stand red light.”

And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon. The bulging flanks of row on receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with innumerable rubies, and among the rubies moved the dim red spectres of men and women with purple eyes and all the symptoms of lupus. The hum and rattle of machinery faintly stirred the air.

“Give them a few figures, Mr. Foster,” said the Director, who was tired of talking.

Mr. Foster was only too happy to give them a few figures.

Two hundred and twenty metres long, two hundred wide, ten high. He pointed upwards. Like chickens drinking, the students lifted their eyes towards the distant ceiling.

Three tiers of racks: ground floor level, first gallery, second gallery.

The spidery steel-work of gallery above gallery faded away in all directions into the dark. Near them three red ghosts were busily unloading demijohns from a moving staircase.

The escalator from the Social Predestination Room.

Each bottle could be placed on one of fifteen racks, each rack, though you couldn’t see it, was a conveyor traveling at the rate of thirty-three and a third centimetres an hour. Two hundred and sixty-seven days at eight metres a day. Two thousand one hundred and thirty-six metres in all. One circuit of the cellar at ground level, one on the first gallery, half on the second, and on the two hundred and sixty-seventh morning, daylight in the Decanting Room. Independent existence—so called.

“But in the interval,” Mr. Foster concluded, “we’ve managed to do a lot to them. Oh, a very great deal.” His laugh was knowing and triumphant.

“That’s the spirit I like,” said the Director once more. “Let’s walk around. You tell them everything, Mr. Foster.”

Mr. Foster duly told them.

Told them of the growing embryo on its bed of peritoneum. Made them taste the rich blood surrogate on which it fed. Explained why it had to be stimulated with placentin and thyroxin. Told them of the corpus luteum extract. Showed them the jets through which at every twelfth metre from zero to 2040 it was automatically injected. Spoke of those gradually increasing doses of pituitary administered during the final ninety-six metres of their course. Described the artificial maternal circulation installed in every bottle at Metre 112; showed them the reservoir of blood-surrogate, the centrifugal pump that kept the liquid moving over the placenta and drove it through the synthetic lung and waste product filter. Referred to the embryo’s troublesome tendency to anæmia, to the massive doses of hog’s stomach extract and foetal foal’s liver with which, in consequence, it had to be supplied.

Showed them the simple mechanism by means of which, during the last two metres out of every eight, all the embryos were simultaneously shaken into familiarity with movement. Hinted at the gravity of the so-called “trauma of decanting,” and enumerated the precautions taken to minimize, by a suitable training of the bottled embryo, that dangerous shock. Told them of the test for sex carried out in the neighborhood of Metre 200. Explained the system of labelling—a T for the males, a circle for the females and for those who were destined to become freemartins a question mark, black on a white ground.

“For of course,” said Mr. Foster, “in the vast majority of cases, fertility is merely a nuisance. One fertile ovary in twelve hundred—that would really be quite sufficient for our purposes. But we want to have a good choice. And of course one must always have an enormous margin of safety. So we allow as many as thirty per cent of the female embryos to develop normally. The others get a dose of male sex-hormone every twenty-four metres for the rest of the course. Result: they’re decanted as freemartins—structurally quite normal (except,” he had to admit, “that they do have the slightest tendency to grow beards), but sterile. Guaranteed sterile. Which brings us at last,” continued Mr. Foster, “out of the realm of mere slavish imitation of nature into the much more interesting world of human invention.”

He rubbed his hands. For of course, they didn’t content themselves with merely hatching out embryos: any cow could do that.

“We also predestine and condition. We decant our babies as socialized human beings, as Alphas or Epsilons, as future sewage workers or future …” He was going to say “future World controllers,” but correcting himself, said “future Directors of Hatcheries,” instead.

The D.H.C. acknowledged the compliment with a smile.

They were passing Metre 320 on Rack 11. A young Beta-Minus mechanic was busy with screwdriver and spanner on the blood-surrogate pump of a passing bottle. The hum of the electric motor deepened by fractions of a tone as he turned the nuts. Down, down … A final twist, a glance at the revolution counter, and he was done. He moved two paces down the line and began the same process on the next pump.

“Reducing the number of revolutions per minute,” Mr. Foster explained. “The surrogate goes round slower; therefore passes through the lung at longer intervals; therefore gives the embryo less oxygen. Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par.” Again he rubbed his hands.

“But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?” asked an ingenuous student.

“Ass!” said the Director, breaking a long silence. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?”

It evidently hadn’t occurred to him. He was covered with confusion.

“The lower the caste,” said Mr. Foster, “the shorter the oxygen.” The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters.

“Who are no use at all,” concluded Mr. Foster.

Whereas (his voice became confidential and eager), if they could discover a technique for shortening the period of maturation what a triumph, what a benefaction to Society!

“Consider the horse.”

They considered it.

Mature at six; the elephant at ten. While at thirteen a man is not yet sexually mature; and is only full-grown at twenty. Hence, of course, that fruit of delayed development, the human intelligence.

“But in Epsilons,” said Mr. Foster very justly, “we don’t need human intelligence.”

Didn’t need and didn’t get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow’s, what an enormous saving to the Community!

“Enormous!” murmured the students. Mr. Foster’s enthusiasm was infectious.

He became rather technical; spoke of the abnormal endocrine co-ordination which made men grow so slowly; postulated a germinal mutation to account for it. Could the effects of this germinal mutation be undone? Could the individual Epsilon embryo be made a revert, by a suitable technique, to the normality of dogs and cows? That was the problem. And it was all but solved.

Pilkington, at Mombasa, had produced individuals who were sexually mature at four and full-grown at six and a half. A scientific triumph. But socially useless. Six-year-old men and women were too stupid to do even Epsilon work. And the process was an all-or-nothing one; either you failed to modify at all, or else you modified the whole way. They were still trying to find the ideal compromise between adults of twenty and adults of six. So far without success. Mr. Foster sighed and shook his head.

Their wanderings through the crimson twilight had brought them to the neighborhood of Metre 170 on Rack 9. From this point onwards Rack 9 was enclosed and the bottles performed the remainder of their journey in a kind of tunnel, interrupted here and there by openings two or three metres wide.

“Heat conditioning,” said Mr. Foster.

Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. “We condition them to thrive on heat,” concluded Mr. Foster. “Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it.”

“And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue—liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.”

In a gap between two tunnels, a nurse was delicately probing with a long fine syringe into the gelatinous contents of a passing bottle. The students and their guides stood watching her for a few moments in silence.

“Well, Lenina,” said Mr. Foster, when at last she withdrew the syringe and straightened herself up.

The girl turned with a start. One could see that, for all the lupus and the purple eyes, she was uncommonly pretty.

“Henry!” Her smile flashed redly at him—a row of coral teeth.

“Charming, charming,” murmured the Director and, giving her two or three little pats, received in exchange a rather deferential smile for himself.

“What are you giving them?” asked Mr. Foster, making his tone very professional.

“Oh, the usual typhoid and sleeping sickness.”

“Tropical workers start being inoculated at Metre 150,” Mr. Foster explained to the students. “The embryos still have gills. We immunize the fish against the future man’s diseases.” Then, turning back to Lenina, “Ten to five on the roof this afternoon,” he said, “as usual.”

“Charming,” said the Director once more, and, with a final pat, moved away after the others.

On Rack 10 rows of next generation’s chemical workers were being trained in the toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar, chlorine. The first of a batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundred metre mark on Rack 3. A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation. “To improve their sense of balance,” Mr. Foster explained. “Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job. We slacken off the circulation when they’re right way up, so that they’re half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they’re upside down. They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they’re only truly happy when they’re standing on their heads.

“And now,” Mr. Foster went on, “I’d like to show you some very interesting conditioning for Alpha Plus Intellectuals. We have a big batch of them on Rack 5. First Gallery level,” he called to two boys who had started to go down to the ground floor.

“They’re round about Metre 900,” he explained. “You can’t really do any useful intellectual conditioning till the foetuses have lost their tails. Follow me.”

But the Director had looked at his watch. “Ten to three,” he said. “No time for the intellectual embryos, I’m afraid. We must go up to the Nurseries before the children have finished their afternoon sleep.”

Mr. Foster was disappointed. “At least one glance at the Decanting Room,” he pleaded.

“Very well then.” The Director smiled indulgently. “Just one glance.”

2

Mr. Foster was left in the Decanting Room. The D.H.C. and his students stepped into the nearest lift and were carried up to the fifth floor.

INFANT NURSERIES. NEO-PAVLOVIAN CONDITIONING ROOMS, announced the notice board.

The Director opened a door. They were in a large bare room, very bright and sunny; for the whole of the southern wall was a single window. Half a dozen nurses, trousered and jacketed in the regulation white viscose-linen uniform, their hair aseptically hidden under white caps, were engaged in setting out bowls of roses in a long row across the floor. Big bowls, packed tight with blossom. Thousands of petals, ripe-blown and silkily smooth, like the cheeks of innumerable little cherubs, but of cherubs, in that bright light, not exclusively pink and Aryan, but also luminously Chinese, also Mexican, also apoplectic with too much blowing of celestial trumpets, also pale as death, pale with the posthumous whiteness of marble.

The nurses stiffened to attention as the D.H.C. came in.

“Set out the books,” he said curtly.

In silence the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out—a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.

“Now bring in the children.”

They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumb-waiter laden, on all its four wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike (a Bokanovsky Group, it was evident) and all (since their caste was Delta) dressed in khaki.

“Put them down on the floor.”

The infants were unloaded.

“Now turn them so that they can see the flowers and books.”

Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on the white pages. As they approached, the sun came out of a momentary eclipse behind a cloud. The roses flamed up as though with a sudden passion from within; a new and profound significance seemed to suffuse the shining pages of the books. From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure.

The Director rubbed his hands. “Excellent!” he said. “It might almost have been done on purpose.”

The swiftest crawlers were already at their goal. Small hands reached out uncertainly, touched, grasped, unpetaling the transfigured roses, crumpling the illuminated pages of the books. The Director waited until all were happily busy. Then, “Watch care-fully,” he said. And, lifting his hand, he gave the signal

The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever.

There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.

The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.

“And now,” the Director shouted (for the noise was deafening), “now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock.”

He waved his hand again, and the Head Nurse pressed a second lever. The screaming of the babies suddenly changed its tone. There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wires.

“We can electrify that whole strip of floor,” bawled the Director in explanation. “But that’s enough,” he signalled to the nurse.

The explosions ceased, the bells stopped ringing, the shriek of the siren died down from tone to tone into silence. The stiffly twitching bodies relaxed, and what had become the sob and yelp of infant maniacs broadened out once more into a normal howl of ordinary terror.

“Offer them the flowers and the books again.”

The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of the roses, at the mere sight of those gaily-coloured images of pussy and cock-a-doodle-doo and baa-baa black sheep, the infants shrank away in horror; the volume of their howling suddenly increased.

“Observe,” said the Director triumphantly, “observe.”

Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks— already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.

“They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an ‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives.” The Director turned to his nurses. “Take them away again.”

Still yelling, the khaki babies were loaded on to their dumb-waiters and wheeled out, leaving behind them the smell of sour milk and a most welcome silence.

One of the students held up his hand; and though he could see quite well why you couldn’t have lower-caste people wasting the Community’s time over books, and that there was always the risk of their reading something which might undesirably decondition one of their reflexes, yet … well, he couldn’t understand about the flowers. Why go to the trouble of making it psychologically impossible for Deltas to like flowers?

Patiently the D.H.C. explained. If the children were made to scream at the sight of a rose, that was on grounds of high economic policy. Not so very long ago (a century or thereabouts), Gammas, Deltas, even Epsilons, had been conditioned to like flowers—flowers in particular and wild nature in general. The idea was to make them want to be going out into the country at every available opportunity, and so compel them to consume transport.

“And didn’t they consume transport?” asked the student.

“Quite a lot,” the D.H.C. replied. “But nothing else.”

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport. For of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it. The problem was to find an economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes. It was duly found.

“We condition the masses to hate the country,” concluded the Director. “But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport. Hence those electric shocks.”

“I see,” said the student, and was silent, lost in admiration.

There was a silence; then, clearing his throat, “Once upon a time,” the Director began, “while our Ford was still on earth, there was a little boy called Reuben Rabinovitch. Reuben was the child of Polish-speaking parents.” The Director interrupted himself. “You know what Polish is, I suppose?”

“A dead language.”

“Like French and German,” added another student, officiously showing off his learning.

“And ‘parent’?” questioned the D.H.C.

There was an uneasy silence. Several of the boys blushed. They had not yet learned to draw the significant but often very fine distinction between smut and pure science. One, at last, had the courage to raise a hand.

“Human beings used to be …” he hesitated; the blood rushed to his cheeks. “Well they used to be viviparous.”

“Quite right.” The Director nodded approvingly.

“And when the babies were decanted …”

“‘Born,’” came the correction.

“Well, then they were the parents—I mean, not the babies, of course; the other ones.” The poor boy was overwhelmed with confusion.

“In brief,” the Director summed up, “the parents were the father and the mother.” The smut that was really science fell with a crash into the boys’ eye-avoiding silence. “Mother,” he repeated loudly rubbing in the science; and, leaning back in his chair, “These,” he said gravely, “are unpleasant facts; I know it. But then most historical facts are unpleasant.”

He returned to Little Reuben—to Little Reuben, in whose room, one evening, by an oversight, his father and mother (crash, crash!) happened to leave the radio turned on.

(“For you must remember that in those days of gross viviparous reproduction, children were always brought up by their parents and not in State Conditioning Centres.”)

While the child was asleep, a broadcast programme from London suddenly started to come through; and the next morning, to the astonishment of his crash and crash (the more daring of the boys ventured to grin at one another), Little Reuben woke up repeating word for word a long lecture by that curious old writer (“one of the very few whose works have been permitted to come down to us”), George Bernard Shaw, who was speaking, according to a well-authenticated tradition, about his own genius. To Little Reuben’s wink and snigger, this lecture was, of course, perfectly incomprehensible and, imagining that their child had suddenly gone mad, they sent for a doctor. He, fortunately, understood English, recognized the discourse as that which Shaw had broadcasted the previous evening, realized the significance of what had happened, and sent a letter to the medical press about it.

“The principle of sleep-teaching, or hypnopædia, had been discovered.” The D.H.C. made an impressive pause.

The principle had been discovered; but many, many years were to elapse before that principle was usefully applied.

“The case of Little Reuben occurred only twenty-three years after Our Ford’s first T-Model was put on the market.” (Here the Director made a sign of the T on his stomach and all the students reverently followed suit.) “And yet …”

Furiously the students scribbled. “Hypnopædia, first used officially in A.F. 214. Why not before? Two reasons. (a) …”

“These early experimenters,” the D.H.C. was saying, “were on the wrong track. They thought that hypnopædia could be made an instrument of intellectual education …”

(A small boy asleep on his right side, the right arm stuck out, the right hand hanging limp over the edge of the bed. Through a round grating in the side of a box a voice speaks softly.

“The Nile is the longest river in Africa, and the second in length of all the rivers of the globe. Although falling short of the length of the Mississippi-Missouri, the Nile is at the head of all rivers as regards the length of its basin, which extends through 35 degrees of latitude …”

At breakfast the next morning, “Tommy,” some one says, “do you know which is the longest river in Africa?” A shaking of the head. “But don’t you remember something that begins: The Nile is the …”

“The - Nile - is - the - longest - river in - Africa - and -the - second in length - of - all - the - rivers - of - the - globe …” The words come rushing out. “Although - falling - short - of …”

“Well now, which is the longest river in Africa?”

The eyes are blank. “I don’t know.”

“But the Nile, Tommy.”

“The - Nile - is - the - longest - river - in - Africa - and - second …”

“Then which river is the longest, Tommy?”

Tommy burst into tears. “I don’t know,” he howls.)

That howl, the Director made it plain, discouraged the earliest investigators. The experiments were abandoned. No further attempt was made to teach children the length of the Nile in their sleep. Quite rightly. You can’t learn a science unless you know what it’s all about.

“Whereas, if they’d only started on moral education,” said the Director, leading the way towards the door. The students followed him, desperately scribbling as they walked and all the way up in the lift. “Moral education, which ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational.”

“Silence, silence,” whispered a loud speaker as they stepped out at the fourteenth floor, and “Silence, silence,” the trumpet mouths indefatigably repeated at intervals down every corridor. The students and even the Director himself rose automatically to the tips of their toes. They were Alphas, of course; but even Alphas have been well conditioned. “Silence, silence.” All the air of the fourteenth floor was sibilant with the categorical imperative.

Fifty yards of tiptoeing brought them to a door which the Director cautiously opened. They stepped over the threshold into the twilight of a shuttered dormitory. Eighty cots stood in a row against the wall. There was a sound of light regular breathing and a continuous murmur, as of very faint voices remotely whispering.

A nurse rose as they entered and came to attention before the Director.

“What’s the lesson this afternoon?” he asked,

“We had Elementary Sex for the first forty minutes,” she answered. “But now it’s switched over to Elementary Class Consciousness.”

The Director walked slowly down the long line of cots. Rosy and relaxed with sleep, eighty little boys and girls lay softly breathing. There was a whisper under every pillow. The D.H.C. halted and, bending over one of the little beds, listened attentively.

“Elementary Class Consciousness, did you say? Let’s have it repeated a little louder by the trumpet.”

At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.

“… all wear green,” said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, “and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I’m so glad I’m a Beta.”

There was a pause; then the voice began again.

“Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able …”

The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.

“They’ll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson.”

Roses and electric shocks, the khaki of Deltas and a whiff of asafœtida—wedded indissolubly before the child can speak. But wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behaviour. For that there must be words, but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia.

“The greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time.”

The students took it down in their little books. Straight from the horse’s mouth.

Once more the Director touched the switch.

“… so frightfully clever,” the soft, insinuating, indefatigable voice was saying, “I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because …”

Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.

“Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!” The Director almost shouted in his triumph. “Suggestions from the State.” He banged the nearest table. “It therefore follows …”

A noise made him turn round.

“Oh, Ford!” he said in another tone, “I’ve gone and woken the children.”

3

Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos and threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.

“Strange,” mused the Director, as they turned away, “strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.” He interrupted himself.

“That’s a charming little group,” he said, pointing.

In a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing, very gravely and with all the focussed attention of scientists intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game.

“Charming, charming!” the D.H.C. repeated sentimentally.

“Charming,” the boys politely agreed. But their smile was rather patronizing. They had put aside similar childish amusements too recently to be able to watch them now without a touch of contempt. Charming? but it was just a pair of kids fooling about; that was all. Just kids.,

“I always think,” the Director was continuing in the same rather maudlin tone, when he was interrupted by a loud boo-hooing.

From a neighbouring shrubbery emerged a nurse, leading by the hand a small boy, who howled as he went. An anxious-looking little girl trotted at her heels.

“What’s the matter?” asked the Director.

The nurse shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing much,” she answered. “It’s just that this little boy seems rather reluctant to join in the ordinary erotic play. I’d noticed it once or twice before. And now again to-day. He started yelling just now …”

“Honestly,” put in the anxious-looking little girl, “I didn’t mean to hurt him or anything. Honestly.”

“Of course you didn’t, dear,” said the nurse reassuringly. “And so,” she went on, turning back to the Director, “I’m taking him in to see the Assistant Superintendent of Psychology. Just to see if anything’s at all abnormal.”

“Quite right,” said the Director. “Take him in. You stay here, little girl,” he added, as the nurse moved away with her still howling charge. “What’s your name?”

“Polly Trotsky.”

“And a very good name too,” said the Director. “Run away now and see if you can find some other little boy to play with.”

The child scampered off into the bushes and was lost to sight.

“Exquisite little creature!” said the Director, looking after her. Then, turning to his students, “What I’m going to tell you now,” he said, “may sound incredible. But then, when you’re not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible.”

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.

A look of astonished incredulity appeared on the faces of his listeners. Poor little kids not allowed to amuse themselves? They could not believe it.

“Even adolescents,” the D.H.C. was saying, “even adolescents like yourselves …”

“Not possible!”

“Barring a little surreptitious auto-erotism and homosexuality—absolutely nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“In most cases, till they were over twenty years old.”

“Twenty years old?” echoed the students in a chorus of loud disbelief.

“Twenty,” the Director repeated. “I told you that you’d find it incredible.”

“But what happened?” they asked. “What were the results?”

“The results were terrible.” A deep resonant voice broke startlingly into the dialogue.

They looked around. On the fringe of the little group stood a stranger—a man of middle height, black-haired, with a hooked nose, full red lips, eyes very piercing and dark. “Terrible,” he repeated.

The D.H.C. had at that moment sat down on one of the steel and rubber benches conveniently scattered through the gardens; but at the sight of the stranger, he sprang to his feet and darted forward, his hand outstretched, smiling with all his teeth, effusive.

“Controller! What an unexpected pleasure! Boys, what are you thinking of? This is the Controller; this is his ford-ship, Mustapha Mond.”

In the four thousand rooms of the Centre the four thousand electric clocks simultaneously struck four. Discarnate voices called from the trumpet mouths.

“Main Day-shift off duty. Second Day-shift take over. Main Day-shift off…”

In the lift, on their way up to the changing rooms, Henry Foster and the Assistant Director of Predestination rather pointedly turned their backs on Bernard Marx from the Psychology Bureau: averted themselves from that unsavoury reputation.

The faint hum and rattle of machinery still stirred the crimson air in the Embryo Store. Shifts might come and go, one lupus-coloured face give place to another; majestically and for ever the conveyors crept forward with their load of future men and women.

Lenina Crowne walked briskly towards the door.

His fordship Mustapha Mond! The eyes of the saluting students almost popped out of their heads. Mustapha Mond! The Resident Controller for Western Europe! One of the Ten World Controllers. One of the Ten … and he sat down on the bench with the D.H.C., he was going to stay, to stay, yes, and actually talk to them … straight from the horse’s mouth. Straight from the mouth of Ford himself.

Two shrimp-brown children emerged from a neighbouring shrubbery, stared at them for a moment with large, astonished eyes, then returned to their amusements among the leaves.

“You all remember,” said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, “you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford’s: History is bunk. History,” he repeated slowly, “is bunk.”

He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather wisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk—and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk—and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom—all were gone. Whisk—the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk …

“Going to the Feelies this evening, Henry?” enquired the Assistant Predestinator. “I hear the new one at the Alhambra is first-rate. There’s a love scene on a bearskin rug; they say it’s marvellous. Every hair of the bear reproduced. The most amazing tactual effects.”

“That’s why you’re taught no history,” the Controller was saying. “But now the time has come …”

The D.H.C. looked at him nervously. There were those strange rumours of old forbidden books hidden in a safe in the Controller’s study. Bibles, poetry—Ford knew what.

Mustapha Mond intercepted his anxious glance and the corners of his red lips twitched ironically.

“It’s all right, Director,” he said in a tone of faint derision, “I won’t corrupt them.”

The D.H.C. was overwhelmed with confusion.

Those who feel themselves despised do well to look despising. The smile on Bernard Marx’s face was contemptuous. Every hair on the bear indeed!

“I shall make a point of going,” said Henry Foster.

Mustapha Mond leaned forward, shook a finger at them. “Just try to realize it,” he said, and his voice sent a strange thrill quivering along their diaphragms. “Try to realize what it was like to have a viviparous mother.”

That smutty word again. But none of them dreamed, this time, of smiling.

“Try to imagine what ‘living with one’s family’ meant.”

They tried; but obviously without the smallest success.

“And do you know what a ‘home’ was?”

They shook their heads.

From her dim crimson cellar Lenina Crowne shot up seventeen stories, turned to the right as she stepped out of the lift, walked down a long corridor and, opening the door marked GIRLS’ DRESSING-ROOM, plunged into a deafening chaos of arms and bosoms and underclothing. Torrents of hot water were splashing into or gurgling out of a hundred baths. Rumbling and hissing, eighty vibro-vacuum massage machines were simultaneously kneading and sucking the firm and sunburnt flesh of eighty superb female specimens. Every one was talking at the top of her voice. A Synthetic Music machine was warbling out a super-cornet solo.

“Hullo, Fanny,” said Lenina to the young woman who had the pegs and locker next to hers.

Fanny worked in the Bottling Room, and her surname was also Crowne. But as the two thousand million inhabitants of the planet had only ten thousand names between them, the coincidence was not particularly surprising.

Lenina pulled at her zippers—downwards on the jacket, downwards with a double-handed gesture at the two that held trousers, downwards again to loosen her undergarment. Still wearing her shoes and stockings, she walked off towards the bathrooms.

Home, home—a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.

(The Controller’s evocation was so vivid that one of the boys, more sensitive than the rest, turned pale at the mere description and was on the point of being sick.)

Lenina got out of the bath, toweled herself dry, took hold of a long flexible tube plugged into the wall, presented the nozzle to her breast, as though she meant to commit suicide, pressed down the trigger. A blast of warmed air dusted her with the finest talcum powder. Eight different scents and eau-de-Cologne were laid on in little taps over the wash-basin. She turned on the third from the left, dabbed herself with chypre and, carrying her shoes and stockings in her hand, went out to see if one of the vibro-vacuum machines were free.

And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children) … brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, “My baby, my baby,” over and over again. “My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable agonizing pleasure! Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps …”

“Yes,” said Mustapha Mond, nodding his head, “you may well shudder.”

“Who are you going out with to-night?” Lenina asked, returning from the vibro-vac like a pearl illuminated from within, pinkly glowing.

“Nobody.”

Lenina raised her eyebrows in astonishment.

“I’ve been feeling rather out of sorts lately,” Fanny explained. “Dr. Wells advised me to have a Pregnancy Substitute.”

“But, my dear, you’re only nineteen. The first Pregnancy Substitute isn’t compulsory till twenty-one.”

“I know, dear. But some people are better if they begin earlier. Dr. Wells told me that brunettes with wide pelvises, like me, ought to have their first Pregnancy Substitute at seventeen. So I’m really two years late, not two years early.” She opened the door of her locker and pointed to the row of boxes and labelled phials on the upper shelf.

“SYRUP OF CORPUS LUTEUM,” Lenina read the names aloud. “OVARIN, GUARANTEED FRESH: NOT TO BE USED AFTER AUGUST 1ST, A.F. 632. MAMMARY GLAND EXTRACT; TO BE TAKEN THREE TIMES DAILY, BEFORE MEALS, WITH A LITTLE WATER. PLACENTIN: 5CC TO BE INJECTED INTRAVENALLY EVERY THIRD DAY … Ugh!” Lenina shuddered. “How I loathe intravenals, don’t you?”

“Yes. But when they do one good …” Fanny was a particularly sensible girl.

Our Ford—or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters—Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers—was therefore full of misery; full of mothers—therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts—full of madness and suicide.

“And yet, among the savages of Samoa, in certain islands off the coast of New Guinea …”

The tropical sunshine lay like warm honey on the naked bodies of children tumbling promiscuously among the hibiscus blossoms. Home was in any one of twenty palm-thatched houses. In the Trobriands conception was the work of ancestral ghosts; nobody had ever heard of a father.

“Extremes,” said the Controller, “meet. For the good reason that they were made to meet.”

“Dr. Wells says that a three months’ Pregnancy Substitute now will make all the difference to my health for the next three or four years.”

“Well, I hope he’s right,” said Lenina. “But, Fanny, do you really mean to say that for the next three months you’re not supposed to …”

“Oh no, dear. Only for a week or two, that’s all. I shall spend the evening at the Club playing Musical Bridge. I suppose you’re going out?”

Lenina nodded.

“Who with?”

“Henry Foster.”

“Again?” Fanny’s kind, rather moon-like face took on an incongruous expression of pained and disapproving astonishment. “Do you mean to tell me you’re still going out with Henry Foster?”

Mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. But there were also husbands, wives, lovers. There were also monogamy and romance.

“Though you probably don’t know what those are,” said Mustapha Mond.

They shook their heads.

Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.

“But every one belongs to every one else,” he concluded, citing the hypnopædic proverb.

The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.

“But after all,” Lenina was protesting, “it’s only about four months now since I’ve been having Henry.”

“Only four months! I like that. And what’s more,” Fanny went on, pointing an accusing finger, “there’s been nobody else except Henry all that time. Has there?”

Lenina blushed scarlet; but her eyes, the tone of her voice remained defiant. “No, there hasn’t been any one else,” she answered almost truculently. “And I jolly well don’t see why there should have been.”

“Oh, she jolly well doesn’t see why there should have been,” Fanny repeated, as though to an invisible listener behind Lenina’s left shoulder. Then, with a sudden change of tone, “But seriously,” she said, “I really do think you ought to be careful. It’s such horribly bad form to go on and on like this with one man. At forty, or thirty-five, it wouldn’t be so bad. But at your age, Lenina! No, it really won’t do. And you know how strongly the D.H.C. objects to anything intense or long-drawn. Four months of Henry Foster, without having another man—why, he’d be furious if he knew …”

“Think of water under pressure in a pipe.” They thought of it. “I pierce it once,” said the Controller. “What a jet!”

He pierced it twenty times. There were twenty piddling little fountains.

“My baby. My baby …!”

“Mother!” The madness is infectious.

“My love, my one and only, precious, precious …”

Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby. No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn’t allow them to take things easily, didn’t allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases and the endless isolating pain, what with the uncertainties and the poverty—they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation), how could they be stable?

“Of course there’s no need to give him up. Have somebody else from time to time, that’s all. He has other girls, doesn’t he?”

Lenina admitted it.

“Of course he does. Trust Henry Foster to be the perfect gentleman—always correct. And then there’s the Director to think of. You know what a stickler …”

Nodding, “He patted me on the behind this afternoon,” said Lenina.

“There, you see!” Fanny was triumphant. “That shows what he stands for. The strictest conventionality.”

“Stability,” said the Controller, “stability. No civilization without social stability. No social stability without individual stability.” His voice was a trumpet. Listening they felt larger, warmer.

The machine turns, turns and must keep on turning—for ever. It is death if it stands still. A thousand millions scrabbled the crust of the earth. The wheels began to turn. In a hundred and fifty years there were two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death.

Wheels must turn steadily, but cannot turn untended. There must be men to tend them, men as steady as the wheels upon their axles, sane men, obedient men, stable in contentment.

Crying: My baby, my mother, my only, only love; groaning: My sin, my terrible God; screaming with pain, muttering with fever, bemoaning old age and poverty—how can they tend the wheels? And if they cannot tend the wheels … The corpses of a thousand thousand thousand men and women would be hard to bury or burn.

“And after all,” Fanny’s tone was coaxing, “it’s not as though there were anything painful or disagreeable about having one or two men besides Henry. And seeing that you ought to be a little more promiscuous …”

“Stability,” insisted the Controller, “stability. The primal and the ultimate need. Stability. Hence all this.”

With a wave of his hand he indicated the gardens, the huge building of the Conditioning Centre, the naked children furtive in the undergrowth or running across the lawns.

Lenina shook her head. “Somehow,” she mused, “I hadn’t been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately. There are times when one doesn’t. Haven’t you found that too, Fanny?”

Fanny nodded her sympathy and understanding. “But one’s got to make the effort,” she said, sententiously, “one’s got to play the game. After all, every one belongs to every one else.”

“Yes, every one belongs to every one else,” Lenina repeated slowly and, sighing, was silent for a moment; then, taking Fanny’s hand, gave it a little squeeze. “You’re quite right, Fanny. As usual. I’ll make the effort.”

Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.

“Fortunate boys!” said the Controller. “No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy—to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all.”

“Ford’s in his flivver,” murmured the D.H.C. “All’s well with the world.”

“Lenina Crowne?” said Henry Foster, echoing the Assistant Predestinator’s question as he zipped up his trousers. “Oh, she’s a splendid girl. Wonderfully pneumatic. I’m surprised you haven’t had her.”

“I can’t think how it is I haven’t,” said the Assistant Predestinator. “I certainly will. At the first opportunity.”

From his place on the opposite side of the changing-room aisle, Bernard Marx overheard what they were saying and turned pale.

“And to tell the truth,” said Lenina, “I’m beginning to get just a tiny bit bored with nothing but Henry every day.” She pulled on her left stocking. “Do you know Bernard Marx?” she asked in a tone whose excessive casualness was evidently forced.

Fanny looked startled. “You don’t mean to say … ?”

“Why not? Bernard’s an Alpha Plus. Besides, he asked me to go to one of the Savage Reservations with him. I’ve always wanted to see a Savage Reservation.”

“But his reputation?”

“What do I care about his reputation?”

“They say he doesn’t like Obstacle Golf.”

“They say, they say,” mocked Lenina.

“And then he spends most of his time by himself—alone” There was horror in Fanny’s voice.

“Well, he won’t be alone when he’s with me. And anyhow, why are people so beastly to him? I think he’s rather sweet.” She smiled to herself; how absurdly shy he had been! Frightened almost—as though she were a World Controller and he a Gamma-Minus machine minder.

“Consider your own lives,” said Mustapha Mond. “Has any of you ever encountered an insurmountable obstacle?”

The question was answered by a negative silence.

“Has any of you been compelled to live through a long time-interval between the consciousness of a desire and its fulfilment?”

“Well,” began one of the boys, and hesitated.

“Speak up,” said the D.H.C. “Don’t keep his fordship waiting.”

“I once had to wait nearly four weeks before a girl I wanted would let me have her.”

“And you felt a strong emotion in consequence?”

“Horrible!”

“Horrible; precisely,” said the Controller. “Our ancestors were so stupid and short-sighted that when the first reformers came along and offered to deliver them from those horrible emotions, they wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”

“Talking about her as though she were a bit of meat.” Bernard ground his teeth. “Have her here, have her there. Like mutton. Degrading her to so much mutton. She said she’d think it over, she said she’d give me an answer this week. Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford.” He would have liked to go up to them and hit them in the face—hard, again and again.

“Yes, I really do advise you to try her,” Henry Foster was saying.

“Take Ectogenesis. Pfitzner and Kawaguchi had got the whole technique worked out. But would the Governments look at it? No. There was something called Christianity. Women were forced to go on being viviparous.”

“He’s so ugly!” said Fanny.

“But I rather like his looks.”

“And then so small.” Fanny made a grimace; smallness was so horribly and typically low-caste.

“I think that’s rather sweet,” said Lenina. “One feels one would like to pet him. You know. Like a cat.”

Fanny was shocked. “They say somebody made a mistake when he was still in the bottle—thought he was a Gamma and put alcohol into his blood-surrogate. That’s why he’s so stunted.”

“What nonsense!” Lenina was indignant.

“Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.”

“But, my dear chap, you’re welcome, I assure you. You’re welcome.” Henry Foster patted the Assistant Predestinator on the shoulder. “Every one belongs to every one else, after all.”

One hundred repetitions three nights a week for four years, thought Bernard Marx, who was a specialist on hypnopædia. Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

“Or the Caste System. Constantly proposed, constantly rejected. There was something called democracy. As though men were more than physico-chemically equal.”

“Well, all I can say is that I’m going to accept his invitation.”

Bernard hated them, hated them. But they were two, they were large, they were strong.

“Then the Nine Years’ War began in A.F. 141.”

“Not even if it were true about the alcohol in his blood-surrogate.”

“Phosgene, chloropicrin, ethyl iodoacetate, diphenylcyanarsine, trichlormethyl, chloroformate, dichlorethyl sulphide. Not to mention hydrocyanic acid.”

“Which I simply don’t believe,” Lenina concluded.

“The noise of fourteen thousand aeroplanes advancing in open order. But in the Kurfurstendamm and the Eighth

Arrondissement, the explosion of the anthrax bombs is hardly louder than the popping of a paper bag.”

“Because I do want to see a Savage Reservation.”

Ch₈C₆H₂(NO₂)8 + Hg(CNO)₂ = well, what? An enormous hole in the ground, a pile of masonry, some bits of flesh and mucus, a foot, with the boot still on it, flying through the air and landing, flop, in the middle of the geraniums—the scarlet ones; such a splendid show that summer!

“You’re hopeless, Lenina, I give you up.”

“The Russian technique for infecting water supplies was particularly ingenious.”

Back turned to back, Fanny and Lenina continued their changing in silence.

“The Nine Years’ War, the great Economic Collapse. There was a choice between World Control and destruction. Between stability and …”

“Fanny Crowne’s a nice girl too,” said the Assistant Predestinator.

In the nurseries, the Elementary Class Consciousness lesson was over, the voices were adapting future demand to future industrial supply. “I do love flying,” they whispered, “I do love flying, I do love having new clothes, I do love …”

“Liberalism, of course, was dead of anthrax, but all the same you couldn’t do things by force.”

“Not nearly so pneumatic as Lenina. Oh, not nearly.”

“But old clothes are beastly,” continued the untiring whisper. “We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better …”

“Government’s an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks, never with the fists. For example, there was the conscription of consumption.”

“There, I’m ready,” said Lenina, but Fanny remained speechless and averted. “Let’s make peace, Fanny darling.”

“Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the interests of industry. The sole result …”

“Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more stitches …”

“One of these days,” said Fanny, with dismal emphasis, “you’ll get into trouble.”

“Conscientious objection on an enormous scale. Anything not to consume. Back to nature.”

“I do love flying. I do love flying.”

“Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

“Do I look all right?” Lenina asked. Her jacket was made of bottle green acetate cloth with green viscose fur at the cuffs and collar.

“Eight hundred Simple Lifers were mowed down by machine guns at Golders Green.”

“Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending.”

Green corduroy shorts and white viscose-woollen stockings turned down below the knee.

“Then came the famous British Museum Massacre. Two thousand culture fans gassed with dichlorethyl sulphide.”

A green-and-white jockey cap shaded Lenina’s eyes; her shoes were bright green and highly polished.

“In the end,” said Mustapha Mond, “the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopædia …”

And round her waist she wore a silver-mounted green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt, bulging (for Lenina was not a freemartin) with the regulation supply of contraceptives.

“The discoveries of Pfitzner and Kawaguchi were at last made use of. An intensive propaganda against viviparous reproduction …”

“Perfect!” cried Fanny enthusiastically. She could never resist Lenina’s charm for long. “And what a perfectly sweet Malthusian belt!”

“Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years’ War); by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 150.”

“I simply must get one like it,” said Fanny.

“There were some things called the pyramids, for example.”

“My old black-patent bandolier …”

“And a man called Shakespeare. You’ve never heard of them of course.”

“It’s an absolute disgrace—that bandolier of mine.”

“Such are the advantages of a really scientific education.”

“The more stitches the less riches; the more stitches the less …”

“The introduction of Our Ford’s first T-Model …”

“I’ve had it nearly three months.”

“Chosen as the opening date of the new era.”

“Ending is better than mending; ending is better …”

“There was a thing, as I’ve said before, called Christianity.”

“Ending is better than mending.”

“The ethics and philosophy of under-consumption …”

“I love new clothes, I love new clothes, I love …”

“So essential when there was under-production; but in an age of machines and the fixation of nitrogen—positively a crime against society.”

“Henry Foster gave it me.”

“All crosses had their tops cut and became T’s. There was also a thing called God.”

“It’s real morocco-surrogate.”

“We have the World State now. And Ford’s Day celebrations, and Community Sings, and Solidarity Services.”

“Ford, how I hate them!” Bernard Marx was thinking.

“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.”

“Like meat, like so much meat.”

“There was a thing called the soul and a thing called immortality.”

“Do ask Henry where he got it.”

“But they used to take morphia and cocaine.”

“And what makes it worse, she thinks of herself as meat.”

“Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized in A.F. 178.”

“He does look glum,” said the Assistant Predestinator, pointing at Bernard Marx.

“Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug.”

“Let’s bait him.”

“Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant.”

“Glum, Marx, glum,” The clap on the shoulder made him start, look up. It was that brute Henry Foster. “What you need is a gramme of soma.”

“All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects.”

“Ford, I should like to kill him!” But all he did was to say, “No, thank you,” and fend off the proffered tube of tablets.

“Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology.”

“Take it,” insisted Henry Foster, “take it.”

“Stability was practically assured.”

“One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments,” said the Assistant Predestinator citing a piece of homely hypnopædic wisdom.

“It only remained to conquer old age.”

“Damn you, damn you!” shouted Bernard Marx.

“Hoity-toity.”

“Gonadal hormones, transfusion of young blood, magnesium salts …”

“And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn.” They went out, laughing.

“All the physiological stigmata of old age have been abolished. And along with them, of course …”

“Don’t forget to ask him about that Malthusian belt,” said Fanny.

“Along with them all the old man’s mental peculiarities. Characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime.”

“… two rounds of Obstacle Golf to get through before dark. I must fly.”

“Work, play—at sixty our powers and tastes are what they were at seventeen. Old men in the bad old days used to renounce, retire, take to religion, spend their time reading, thinking—thinking!”

“Idiots, swine!” Bernard Marx was saying to himself, as he walked down the corridor to the lift.

“Now—such is progress—the old men work, the old men copulate, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think—or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of their distractions, there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction, scampering from feely to feely, from girl to pneumatic girl, from Electromagnetic Golf course to …”

“Go away, little girl,” shouted the D.H.C. angrily “Go away, little boy! Can’t you see that his fordship’s busy? Go and do your erotic play somewhere else.”

“Suffer little children,” said the Controller.

Slowly, majestically, with a faint humming of machinery, the Conveyors moved forward, thirty-three centimetres an hour. In the red darkness glinted innumerable rubies.

4

Part 1

The lift was crowded with men from the Alpha Changing Rooms, and Lenina’s entry was greeted by many friendly nods and smiles. She was a popular girl and, at one time or another, had spent a night with almost all of them.

They were dear boys, she thought, as she returned their salutations. Charming boys! Still, she did wish that George Edzel’s ears weren’t quite so big (perhaps he’d been given just a spot too much parathyroid at Metre, 328?). And looking at Benito Hoover, she couldn’t help remembering that he was really too hairy when he took his clothes off.

Turning, with eyes a little saddened by the recollection of Benito’s curly blackness, she saw in a corner the small thin body, the melancholy face of Bernard Marx.

“Bernard!” she stepped up to him. “I was looking for you.” Her voice rang clear above the hum of the mounting lift. The others looked round curiously. “I wanted to talk to you about our New Mexico plan.” Out of the tail of her eye she could see Benito Hoover gaping with astonishment. The gape annoyed her. “Surprised I shouldn’t be begging to go with him again!” she said to herself. Then aloud, and more warmly than ever, “I’d simply love to come with you for a week in July,” she went on. (Anyhow, she was publicly proving her unfaithfulness to Henry. Fanny ought to be pleased, even though it was Bernard.) “That is,” Lenina gave him her most deliciously significant smile, “if you still want to have me.”

Bernard’s pale face flushed. “What on earth for?” she wondered, astonished, but at the same time touched by this strange tribute to her power.

“Hadn’t we better talk about it somewhere else?” he stammered, looking horribly uncomfortable.

“As though I’d been saying something shocking,” thought Lenina. “He couldn’t look more upset if I’d made a dirty joke—asked him who his mother was, or something like that.”

“I mean, with all these people about …” He was choked with confusion.

Lenina’s laugh was frank and wholly unmalicious. “How funny you are!” she said; and she quite genuinely did think him funny. “You’ll give me at least a week’s warning, won’t you,” she went on in another tone. “I suppose we take the Blue Pacific Rocket? Does it start from the Charing-T Tower? Or is it from Hampstead?”

Before Bernard could answer, the lift came to a standstill.

“Roof!” called a creaking voice.

The liftman was a small simian creature, dressed in the black tunic of an Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.

“Roof.”

He flung open the gates. The warm glory of afternoon sunlight made him start and blink his eyes. “Oh, roof!” he repeated in a voice of rapture. He was as though suddenly and joyfully awakened from a dark annihilating stupor. “Roof.”

He smiled up with a kind of doggily expectant adoration into the faces of his passengers. Talking and laughing together, they stepped out into the light. The liftman looked after them.

“Roof?” he said once more, questioningly.

Then a bell rang, and from the ceiling of the lift a loud speaker began, very softly and yet very imperiously, to issue its commands.

“Go down,” it said, “go down. Floor Eighteen. Go down, go down. Floor Eighteen. Go down, go …”

The liftman slammed the gates, touched a button and instantly dropped back into the droning twilight of the well, the twilight of his own habitual stupor.

It was warm and bright on the roof. The summer afternoon was drowsy with the hum of passing helicopters; and the deeper drone of the rocket-planes hastening, invisible, through the bright sky five or six miles overhead was like a caress on the soft air. Bernard Marx drew a deep breath. He looked up into the sky and round the blue horizon and finally down into Lenina’s face.

“Isn’t it beautiful!” His voice trembled a little.

She smiled at him with an expression of the most sympathetic understanding. “Simply perfect for Obstacle Golf,” she answered rapturously. “And now I must fly, Bernard. Henry gets cross if I keep him waiting. Let me know in good time about the date.” And waving her hand, she ran away across the wide flat roof towards the hangars. Bernard stood watching the retreating twinkle of the white stockings, the sunburnt knees vivaciously bending and unbending again, again, and the softer rolling of those well-fitted corduroy shorts beneath the bottle green jacket. His face wore an expression of pain.

“I should say she was pretty,” said a loud and cheery voice just behind him.

Bernard started and looked around. The chubby red face of Benito Hoover was beaming down at him—beaming with manifest cordiality. Benito was notoriously good-natured. People said of him that he could have got through life without ever touching soma. The malice and bad tempers from which other people had to take holidays never afflicted him. Reality for Benito was always sunny.

“Pneumatic too. And how!” Then, in another tone: “But, I say,” he went on, “you look glum! What you need is a gramme of soma.” Diving into his right-hand trouser-pocket, Benito produced a phial. “One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy … But, I say!”

Bernard had suddenly turned and rushed away.

Benito stared after him. “What can be the matter with the fellow?” he wondered, and, shaking his head, decided that the story about the alcohol having been put into the poor chap’s blood-surrogate must be true. “Touched his brain, I suppose.”

He put away the soma bottle, and taking out a packet of sex-hormone chewing-gum, stuffed a plug into his cheek and walked slowly away towards the hangars, ruminating.

Henry Foster had had his machine wheeled out of its lockup and, when Lenina arrived, was already seated in the cockpit, waiting.

“Four minutes late,” was all his comment, as she climbed in beside him. He started the engines and threw the helicopter screws into gear. The machine shot vertically into the air. Henry accelerated; the humming of the propeller shrilled from hornet to wasp, from wasp to mosquito; the speedometer showed that they were rising at the best part of two kilo-metres a minute. London diminished beneath them. The huge table-topped buildings were no more, in a few seconds, than a bed of geometrical mushrooms sprouting from the green of park and garden. In the midst of them, thin-stalked, a taller, slenderer fungus, the Charing-T Tower lifted towards the sky a disk of shining concrete.

Like the vague torsos of fabulous athletes, huge fleshy clouds lolled on the blue air above their heads. Out of one of them suddenly dropped a small scarlet insect, buzzing as it fell.

“There’s the Red Rocket,” said Henry, “just come in from New York.” Looking at his watch. “Seven minutes behind time,” he added, and shook his head. “These Atlantic services—they’re really scandalously unpunctual.”

He took his foot off the accelerator. The humming of the screws overhead dropped an octave and a half, back through wasp and hornet to bumble bee, to cockchafer, to stag-beetle. The upward rush of the machine slackened off; a moment later they were hanging motionless in the air. Henry pushed at a lever; there was a click. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, till it was a circular mist before their eyes, the propeller in front of them began to revolve. The wind of a horizontal speed whistled ever more shrilly in the stays. Henry kept his eye on the revolution-counter; when the needle touched the twelve hundred mark, he threw the helicopter screws out of gear. The machine had enough forward momentum to be able to fly on its planes.

Lenina looked down through the window in the floor between her feet. They were flying over the six kilometre zone of park-land that separated Central London from its first ring of satellite suburbs. The green was maggoty with fore-shortened life. Forests of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy towers gleamed between the trees. Near Shepherd’s Bush two thousand Beta-Minus mixed doubles were playing Riemann-surface tennis. A double row of Escalator Fives Courts lined the main road from Notting Hill to Willesden. In the Ealing stadium a Delta gymnastic display and community sing was in progress.

“What a hideous colour khaki is,” remarked Lenina, voicing the hypnopædic prejudices of her caste.

The buildings of the Hounslow Feely Studio covered seven and a half hectares. Near them a black and khaki army of labourers was busy revitrifying the surface of the Great West Road. One of the huge travelling crucibles was being tapped as they flew over. The molten stone poured out in a stream of dazzling incandescence across the road; the asbestos rollers came and went; at the tail of an insulated watering cart the steam rose in white clouds.

At Brentford the Television Corporation’s factory was like a small town.

“They must be changing the shift,” said Lenina.

Like aphides and ants, the leaf-green Gamma girls, the black Semi-Morons swarmed round the entrances, or stood in queues to take their places in the monorail tram-cars. Mulberry-coloured Beta-Minuses came and went among the crowd. The roof of the main building was alive with the alighting and departure of helicopters.

“My word,” said Lenina, “I’m glad I’m not a Gamma.”

Ten minutes later they were at Stoke Poges and had started their first round of Obstacle Golf.

Part 2

With eyes for the most part downcast and, if ever they lighted on a fellow creature, at once and furtively averted, Bernard hastened across the roof. He was like a man pursued, but pursued by enemies he does not wish to see, lest they should seem more hostile even than he had supposed, and he himself be made to feel guiltier and even more helplessly alone.

“That horrible Benito Hoover!” And yet the man had meant well enough. Which only made it, in a way, much worse. Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly. Even Lenina was making him suffer. He remembered those weeks of timid indecision, during which he had looked and longed and despaired of ever having the courage to ask her. Dared he face the risk of being humiliated by a contemptuous refusal? But if she were to say yes, what rapture! Well, now she had said it and he was still wretched—wretched that she should have thought it such a perfect afternoon for Obstacle Golf, that she should have trotted away to join Henry Foster, that she should have found him funny for not wanting to talk of their most private affairs in public. Wretched, in a word, because she had behaved as any healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave and not in some other, abnormal, extraordinary way.

He opened the door of his lock-up and called to a lounging couple of Delta-Minus attendants to come and push his machine out on to the roof. The hangars were staffed by a single Bokanovsky Group, and the men were twins, identically small, black and hideous. Bernard gave his orders in the sharp, rather arrogant and even offensive tone of one who does not feel himself too secure in his superiority. To have dealings with members of the lower castes was always, for Bernard, a most distressing experience. For whatever the cause (and the current gossip about the alcohol in his blood-surrogate may very likely—for accidents will happen—have been true) Bernard’s physique was hardly better than that of the average Gamma. He stood eight centimetres short of the standard Alpha height and was slender in proportion. Contact with members of the lower castes always reminded him painfully of this physical inadequacy. “I am I, and wish I wasn’t”; his self-consciousness was acute and distressing. Each time he found himself looking on the level, instead of downward, into a Delta’s face, he felt humiliated. Would the creature treat him with the respect due to his caste? The question haunted him. Not without reason. For Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons had been to some extent conditioned to associate corporeal mass with social superiority. Indeed, a faint hypnopædic prejudice in favour of size was universal. Hence the laughter of the women to whom he made proposals, the practical joking of his equals among the men. The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity. How bitterly he envied men like Henry Foster and Benito Hoover! Men who never had to shout at an Epsilon to get an order obeyed; men who took their position for granted; men who moved through the caste system as a fish through water—so utterly at home as to be unaware either of themselves or of the beneficent and comfortable element in which they had their being.

Slackly, it seemed to him, and with reluctance, the twin attendants wheeled his plane out on the roof.

“Hurry up!” said Bernard irritably. One of them glanced at him. Was that a kind of bestial derision that he detected in those blank grey eyes? “Hurry up!” he shouted more loudly, and there was an ugly rasp in his voice.

He climbed into the plane and, a minute later, was flying southwards, towards the river.

The various Bureaux of Propaganda and the College of Emotional Engineering were housed in a single sixty-story building in Fleet Street. In the basement and on the lower floors were the presses and offices of the three great London newspapers—The Hourly Radio, an upper-caste sheet, in pale green Gamma Gazette, and, on khaki paper and in words exclusively of one syllable, The Delta Mirror. Then came the Bureaux of Propaganda by Television, by Feeling Picture, and by Synthetic Voice and Music respectively—twenty-two floors of them. Above were the research laboratories and the padded rooms in which the Sound-Track Writers and Synthetic Composers did their delicate work. The top eighteen floors were occupied by the College of Emotional Engineering.

Bernard landed on the roof of Propaganda House and stepped out.

“Ring down to Mr. Helmholtz Watson,” he ordered the Gamma-Plus porter, “and tell him that Mr. Bernard Marx is waiting for him on the roof.”

He sat down and lit a cigarette.

Helmholtz Watson was writing when the message came down.

“Tell him I’m coming at once,” he said and hung up the receiver. Then, turning to his secretary; “I’ll leave you to put my things away,” he went on in the same official and impersonal tone; and, ignoring her lustrous smile, got up and walked briskly to the door.

He was a powerfully built man, deep-chested, broad-shouldered, massive, and yet quick in his movements, springly and agile. The round strong pillar of his neck supported a beautifully shaped head. His hair was dark and curly, his features strongly marked. In a forcible emphatic way, he was handsome and looked, as his secretary was never tired of repeating, every centimetre an Alpha-Plus. By profession he was a lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department of Writing) and in the intervals of his educational activities, a working Emotional Engineer. He wrote regularly for The Hourly Radio, composed feely scenarios, and had the happiest knack for slogans and hypnopædic rhymes.

“Able,” was the verdict of his superiors. “Perhaps,” (and they would shake their heads, would significantly lower their voices) “a little too able.”

Yes, a little too able; they were right. A mental excess had produced in Helmholtz Watson effects very similar to those which, in Bernard Marx, were the result of a physical defect. Too little bone and brawn had isolated Bernard from his fellow men, and the sense of this apartness, being, by all the current standards, a mental excess, became in its turn a cause of wider separation. That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability. What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals. But whereas the physically defective Bernard had suffered all his life from the consciousness of being separate, it was only quite recently that, grown aware of his mental excess, Helmholtz Watson had also become aware of his difference from the people who surrounded him. This Escalator-Squash champion, this indefatigable lover (it was said that he had had six hundred and forty different girls in under four years), this admirable committee man and best mixer had realized quite suddenly that sport, women, communal activities were only, so far as he was concerned, second bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in something else. But in what? In what? That was the problem which Bernard had come to discuss with him—or rather, since it was always Helmholtz who did all the talking, to listen to his friend discussing, yet once more.

Three charming girls from the Bureaux of Propaganda by Synthetic Voice waylaid him as he stepped out of the lift.

“Oh, Helmholtz, darling, do come and have a picnic supper with us on Exmoor.” They clung round him imploringly.

He shook his head, he pushed his way through them. “No, no.”

“We’re not inviting any other man.”

But Helmholtz remained unshaken even by this delightful promise. “No,” he repeated, “I’m busy.” And he held resolutely on his course. The girls trailed after him. It was not till he had actually climbed into Bernard’s plane and slammed the door that they gave up pursuit. Not without reproaches.

“These women!” he said, as the machine rose into the air. “These women!” And he shook his head, he frowned. “Too awful,” Bernard hypocritically agreed, wishing, as he spoke the words, that he could have as many girls as Helmholtz did, and with as little trouble. He was seized with a sudden urgent need to boast. “I’m taking Lenina Crowne to New Mexico with me,” he said in a tone as casual as he could make it.

“Are you?” said Helmholtz, with a total absense of interest. Then after a little pause, “This last week or two,” he went on, “I’ve been cutting all my committees and all my girls. You can’t imagine what a hullabaloo they’ve been making about it at the College. Still, it’s been worth it, I think. The effects …” He hesitated. “Well, they’re odd, they’re very odd.”

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

The rest of the short flight was accomplished in silence. When they had arrived and were comfortably stretched out on the pneumatic sofas in Bernard’s room, Helmholtz began again.

Speaking very slowly, “Did you ever feel,” he asked, “as though you had something inside you that was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using—you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines?” He looked at Bernard questioningly.

“You mean all the emotions one might be feeling if things were different?”

Helmholtz shook his head. “Not quite. I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it—only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power. If there was some different way of writing … Or else something else to write about …” He was silent; then, “You see,” he went on at last, “I’m pretty good at inventing phrases—you know, the sort of words that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you’d sat on a pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they’re about something hypnopædically obvious. But that doesn’t seem enough. It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.”

“But your things are good, Helmholtz.”

“Oh, as far as they go.” Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. “But they go such a little way. They aren’t important enough, somehow. I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one’s expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced. That’s one of the things I try to teach my students—how to write piercingly. But what on earth’s the good of being pierced by an article about a Community Sing, or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing—you know, like the very hardest X-rays—when you’re writing about that sort of thing? Can you say something about nothing? That’s what it finally boils down to. I try and I try …”

“Hush!” said Bernard suddenly, and lifted a warning finger; they listened. “I believe there’s somebody at the door,” he whispered.

Helmholtz got up, tiptoed across the room, and with a sharp quick movement flung the door wide open. There was, of course, nobody there.

“I’m sorry,” said Bernard, feeling and looking uncomfortably foolish. “I suppose I’ve got things on my nerves a bit. When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.”

He passed his hand across his eyes, he sighed, his voice became plaintive. He was justifying himself. “If you knew what I’d had to put up with recently,” he said almost tearfully—and the uprush of his self-pity was like a fountain suddenly released. “If you only knew!”

Helmholtz Watson listened with a certain sense of discomfort. “Poor little Bernard!” he said to himself. But at the same time he felt rather ashamed for his friend. He wished Bernard would show a little more pride.

5

Part 1

By eight o’clock the light was failing. The loud speakers in the tower of the Stoke Poges Club House began, in a more than human tenor, to announce the closing of the courses. Lenina and Henry abandoned their game and walked back towards the Club. From the grounds of the Internal and External Secretion Trust came the lowing of those thousands of cattle which provided, with their hormones and their milk, the raw materials for the great factory at Farnham Royal.

An incessant buzzing of helicopters filled the twilight. Every two and a half minutes a bell and the screech of whistles announced the departure of one of the light monorail trains which carried the lower caste golfers back from their separate course to the metropolis.

Lenina and Henry climbed into their machine and started off. At eight hundred feet Henry slowed down the helicopter screws, and they hung for a minute or two poised above the fading landscape. The forest of Burnham Beeches stretched like a great pool of darkness towards the bright shore of the western sky. Crimson at the horizon, the last of the sunset faded, through orange, upwards into yellow and a pale watery green. Northwards, beyond and above the trees, the Internal and External Secretions factory glared with a fierce electric brilliance from every window of its twenty stories. Beneath them lay the buildings of the Golf Club—the huge Lower Caste barracks and, on the other side of a dividing wall, the smaller houses reserved for Alpha and Beta members. The approaches to the monorail station were black with the ant-like pullulation of lower-caste activity. From under the glass vault a lighted train shot out into the open. Following its south-easterly course across the dark plain their eyes were drawn to the majestic buildings of the Slough Crematorium. For the safety of night-flying planes, its four tall chimneys were flood-lighted and tipped with crimson danger signals. It was a landmark.

“Why do the smoke-stacks have those things like balconies around them?” enquired Lenina.

“Phosphorous recovery,” explained Henry telegraphically. “On their way up the chimney the gases go through four separate treatments. P₂O₅ used to go right out of circulation every time they cremated some one. Now they recover over ninety-eight per cent of it. More than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. Which makes the best part of four hundred tons of phosphorous every year from England alone.” Henry spoke with a happy pride, rejoicing wholeheartedly in the achievement, as though it had been his own. “Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we’re dead. Making plants grow.”

Lenina, meanwhile, had turned her eyes away and was looking perpendicularly downwards at the monorail station. “Fine,” she agreed. “But queer that Alphas and Betas won’t make any more plants grow than those nasty little Gammas and Deltas and Epsilons down there.”

“All men are physico-chemically equal,” said Henry sententiously. “Besides, even Epsilons perform indispensable services.”

“Even an Epsilon …” Lenina suddenly remembered an occasion when, as a little girl at school, she had woken up in the middle of the night and become aware, for the first time, of the whispering that had haunted all her sleeps. She saw again the beam of moonlight, the row of small white beds; heard once more the soft, soft voice that said (the words were there, unforgotten, unforgettable after so many night-long repetitions): “Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons are useful. We couldn’t do without Epsilons. Every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one …” Lenina remembered her first shock of fear and surprise; her speculations through half a wakeful hour; and then, under the influence of those endless repetitions, the gradual soothing of her mind, the soothing, the smoothing, the stealthy creeping of sleep.…

“I suppose Epsilons don’t really mind being Epsilons,” she said aloud.

“Of course they don’t. How can they? They don’t know what it’s like being anything else. We’d mind, of course. But then we’ve been differently conditioned. Besides, we start with a different heredity.”

“I’m glad I’m not an Epsilon,” said Lenina, with conviction.

“And if you were an Epsilon,” said Henry, “your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren’t a Beta or an Alpha.” He put his forward propeller into gear and headed the machine towards London. Behind them, in the west, the crimson and orange were almost faded; a dark bank of cloud had crept into the zenith. As they flew over the Crematorium, the plane shot upwards on the column of hot air rising from the chimneys, only to fall as suddenly when it passed into the descending chill beyond.

“What a marvellous switchback!” Lenina laughed delightedly.

But Henry’s tone was almost, for a moment, melancholy. “Do you know what that switchback was?” he said. “It was some human being finally and definitely disappearing. Going up in a squirt of hot gas. It would be curious to know who it was—a man or a woman, an Alpha or an Epsilon.…” He sighed. Then, in a resolutely cheerful voice, “Anyhow,” he concluded, “there’s one thing we can be certain of; whoever he may have been, he was happy when he was alive. Everybody’s happy now.”

“Yes, everybody’s happy now,” echoed Lenina. They had heard the words repeated a hundred and fifty times every night for twelve years.

Landing on the roof of Henry’s forty-story apartment house in Westminster, they went straight down to the dining-hall. There, in a loud and cheerful company, they ate an excellent meal. Soma was served with the coffee. Lenina took two half-gramme tablets and Henry three. At twenty past nine they walked across the street to the newly opened Westminster Abbey Cabaret. It was a night almost without clouds, moonless and starry; but of this on the whole depressing fact Lenina and Henry were fortunately unaware. The electric sky-signs effectively shut off the outer darkness. “CALVIN STOPES AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS.” From the façade of the new Abbey the giant letters invitingly glared. “LONDON’S FINEST SCENT AND COLOUR ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC.”

They entered. The air seemed hot and somehow breathless with the scent of ambergris and sandalwood. On the domed ceiling of the hall, the colour organ had momentarily painted a tropical sunset. The Sixteen Sexophonists were playing an old favourite: “There ain’t no Bottle in all the world like that dear little Bottle of mine.” Four hundred couples were five-stepping round the polished floor. Lenina and Henry were soon the four hundred and first. The sexophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them. Rich with a wealth of harmonics, their tremulous chorus mounted towards a climax, louder and ever louder—until at last, with a wave of his hand, the conductor let loose the final shattering note of ether-music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence. Thunder in A flat major. And then, in all but silence, in all but darkness, there followed a gradual deturgescence, a diminuendo sliding gradually, through quarter tones, down, down to a faintly whispered dominant chord that lingered on (while the five-four rhythms still pulsed below) charging the darkened seconds with an intense expectancy. And at last expectancy was fulfilled. There was a sudden explosive sunrise, and simultaneously, the Sixteen burst into song:

“Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted!

Bottle of mine, why was I ever decanted?

Skies are blue inside of you,

The weather’s always fine;

For

There ain’t no Bottle in all the world

Like that dear little Bottle of mine.”

Five-stepping with the other four hundred round and round Westminster Abbey, Lenina and Henry were yet dancing in another world—the warm, the richly coloured, the infinitely friendly world of soma-holiday. How kind, how good-looking, how delightfully amusing every one was! “Bottle of mine, it’s you I’ve always wanted …” But Lenina and Henry had what they wanted … They were inside, here and now—safely inside with the fine weather, the perennially blue sky. And when, exhausted, the Sixteen had laid by their sexophones and the Synthetic Music apparatus was producing the very latest in slow Malthusian Blues, they might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate.

“Good-night, dear friends. Good-night, dear friends.” The loud speakers veiled their commands in a genial and musical politeness. “Good-night, dear friends …”

Obediently, with all the others, Lenina and Henry left the building. The depressing stars had travelled quite some way across the heavens. But though the separating screen of the sky-signs had now to a great extent dissolved, the two young people still retained their happy ignorance of the night.

Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds. Bottled, they crossed the street; bottled, they took the lift up to Henry’s room on the twenty-eighth floor. And yet, bottled as she was, and in spite of that second gramme of soma, Lenina did not forget to take all the contraceptive precautions prescribed by the regulations. Years of intensive hypnopædia and, from twelve to seventeen, Malthusian drill three times a week had made the taking of these precautions almost as automatic and inevitable as blinking.

“Oh, and that reminds me,” she said, as she came back from the bathroom, “Fanny Crowne wants to know where you found that lovely green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt you gave me.”

Part 2

Alternate Thursdays were Bernard’s Solidarity Service days. After an early dinner at the Aphroditæum (to which Helmholtz had recently been elected under Rule Two) he took leave of his friend and, hailing a taxi on the roof, told the man to fly to the Fordson Community Singery. The machine rose a couple of hundred metres, then headed eastwards, and as it turned, there before Bernard’s eyes, gigantically beautiful, was the Singery. Flood-lighted, its three hundred and twenty metres of white Carrara-surrogate gleamed with a snowy incandescence over Ludgate Hill; at each of the four corners of its helicopter platform an immense T shone crimson against the night, and from the mouths of twenty-four vast golden trumpets rumbled a solemn synthetic music.

“Damn, I’m late,” Bernard said to himself as he first caught sight of Big Henry, the Singery clock. And sure enough, as he was paying off his cab, Big Henry sounded the hour. “Ford,” sang out an immense bass voice from all the golden trumpets. “Ford, Ford, Ford …” Nine times. Bernard ran for the lift.

The great auditorium for Ford’s Day celebrations and other massed Community Sings was at the bottom of the building. Above it, a hundred to each floor, were the seven thousand rooms used by Solidarity Groups for their fortnight services. Bernard dropped down to floor thirty-three, hurried along the corridor, stood hesitating for a moment outside Room 3210, then, having wound himself up, opened the door and walked in.

Thank Ford! he was not the last. Three chairs of the twelve arranged round the circular table were still unoccupied. He slipped into the nearest of them as inconspicuously as he could and prepared to frown at the yet later comers whenever they should arrive.

Turning towards him, “What were you playing this afternoon?” the girl on his left enquired. “Obstacle, or Electromagnetic?”

Bernard looked at her (Ford! it was Morgana Rothschild) and blushingly had to admit that he had been playing neither. Morgana stared at him with astonishment. There was an awkward silence.

Then pointedly she turned away and addressed herself to the more sporting man on her left.

“A good beginning for a Solidarity Service,” thought Bernard miserably, and foresaw for himself yet another failure to achieve atonement. If only he had given himself time to look around instead of scuttling for the nearest chair! He could have sat between Fifi Bradlaugh and Joanna Diesel. Instead of which he had gone and blindly planted himself next to Morgana. Morgana! Ford! Those black eyebrows of hers—that eyebrow, rather—for they met above the nose. Ford! And on his right was Clara Deterding. True, Clara’s eyebrows didn’t meet. But she was really too pneumatic. Whereas Fifi and Joanna were absolutely right. Plump, blonde, not too large … And it was that great lout, Tom Kawaguchi, who now took the seat between them.

The last arrival was Sarojini Engels.

“You’re late,” said the President of the Group severely. “Don’t let it happen again.”

Sarojini apologized and slid into her place between Jim Bokanovsky and Herbert Bakunin. The group was now complete, the solidarity circle perfect and without flaw. Man, woman, man, in a ring of endless alternation round the table. Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being.

The President stood up, made the sign of the T and, switching on the synthetic music, let loose the soft indefatigable beating of drums and a choir of instruments—near-wind and super-string—that plangently repeated and repeated the brief and unescapably haunting melody of the first Solidarity Hymn. Again, again—and it was not the ear that heard the pulsing rhythm, it was the midriff; the wail and clang of those recurring harmonies haunted, not the mind, but the yearning bowels of compassion.

The President made another sign of the T and sat down. The service had begun. The dedicated soma tablets were placed in the centre of the table. The loving cup of strawberry ice-cream soma was passed from hand to hand and, with the formula, “I drink to my annihilation,” twelve times quaffed. Then to the accompaniment of the synthetic orchestra the First Solidarity Hymn was sung.

“Ford, we are twelve; oh, make us one,
Like drops within the Social River;
Oh, make us now together run
As swiftly as thy shining Flivver.”

Twelve yearning stanzas. And then the loving cup was passed a second time. “I drink to the Greater Being” was now the formula. All drank. Tirelessly the music played. The drums beat. The crying and clashing of the harmonies were an obsession in the melted bowels. The Second Solidarity Hymn was sung.

“Come, Greater Being, Social Friend,
Annihilating Twelve-in-One!
We long to die, for when we end,
Our larger life has but begun.”

Again twelve stanzas. By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles. Even Bernard felt himself a little melted. When Morgana Rothschild turned and beamed at him, he did his best to beam back. But the eyebrow, that black two-in-one—alas, it was still there; he couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t, however hard he tried. The melting hadn’t gone far enough. Perhaps if he had been sitting between Fifi and Joanna … For the third time the loving cup went round. “I drink to the imminence of His Coming,” said Morgana Rothschild, whose turn it happened to be to initiate the circular rite. Her tone was loud, exultant. She drank and passed the cup to Bernard. “I drink to the imminence of His Coming,” he repeated, with a sincere attempt to feel that the coming was imminent; but the eyebrow continued to haunt him, and the Coming, so far as he was concerned, was horribly remote. He drank and handed the cup to Clara Deterding. “It’ll be a failure again,” he said to himself. “I know it will.” But he went on doing his best to beam.

The loving cup had made its circuit. Lifting his hand, the President gave a signal; the chorus broke out into the third Solidarity Hymn.

“Feel how the Greater Being comes!
Rejoice and, in rejoicings, die!
Melt in the music of the drums!
For I am you and you are I.”

As verse succeeded verse the voices thrilled with an ever intenser excitement. The sense of the Coming’s imminence was like an electric tension in the air. The President switched off the music and, with the final note of the final stanza, there was absolute silence—the silence of stretched expectancy, quivering and creeping with a galvanic life. The President reached out his hand; and suddenly a Voice, a deep strong Voice, more musical than any merely human voice, richer, warmer, more vibrant with love and yearning and compassion, a wonderful, mysterious, supernatural Voice spoke from above their heads. Very slowly, “Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford,” it said diminishingly and on a descending scale. A sensation of warmth radiated thrillingly out from the solar plexus to every extremity of the bodies of those who listened; tears came into their eyes; their hearts, their bowels seemed to move within them, as though with an independent life. “Ford!” they were melting, “Ford!” dissolved, dissolved. Then, in another tone, suddenly, startlingly. “Listen!” trumpeted the voice. “Listen!” They listened. After a pause, sunk to a whisper, but a whisper, somehow, more penetrating than the loudest cry. “The feet of the Greater Being,” it went on, and repeated the words: “The feet of the Greater Being.” The whisper almost expired. “The feet of the Greater Being are on the stairs.” And once more there was silence; and the expectancy, momentarily relaxed, was stretched again, tauter, tauter, almost to the tearing point. The feet of the Greater Being—oh, they heard them, they heard them, coming softly down the stairs, coming nearer and nearer down the invisible stairs. The feet of the Greater Being. And suddenly the tearing point was reached. Her eyes staring, her lips parted. Morgana Rothschild sprang to her feet.

“I hear him,” she cried. “I hear him.”

“He’s coming,” shouted Sarojini Engels.

“Yes, he’s coming, I hear him.” Fifi Bradlaugh and Tom Kawaguchi rose simultaneously to their feet.

“Oh, oh, oh!” Joanna inarticulately testified.

“He’s coming!” yelled Jim Bokanovsky.

The President leaned foward and, with a touch, released a delirium of cymbals and blown brass, a fever of tom-tomming.

“Oh, he’s coming!” screamed Clara Deterding. “Aie!” and it was as though she were having her throat cut.

Feeling that it was time for him to do something, Bernard also jumped up and shouted: “I hear him; He’s coming.” But it wasn’t true. He heard nothing and, for him, nobody was coming. Nobody—in spite of the music, in spite of the mounting excitement. But he waved his arms, he shouted with the best of them; and when the others began to jig and stamp and shuffle, he also jigged and shuffled.

Round they went, a circular procession of dancers, each with hands on the hips of the dancer preceding, round and round, shouting in unison, stamping to the rhythm of the music with their feet, beating it, beating it out with hands on the buttocks in front; twelve pairs of hands beating as one; as one, twelve buttocks slabbily resounding. Twelve as one, twelve as one. “I hear Him, I hear Him coming.” The music quickened; faster beat the feet, faster, faster fell the rhythmic hands. And all at once a great synthetic bass boomed out the words which announced the approaching atonement and final con-summation of solidarity, the coming of the Twelve-in-One, the incarnation of the Greater Being. “Orgy-porgy,” it sang, while the tom-toms continued to beat their feverish tattoo:

“Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,

Kiss the girls and make them One.

Boys at one with girls at peace;

Orgy-porgy gives release.”

“Orgy-porgy,” the dancers caught up the liturgical refrain, “Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, kiss the girls …” And as they sang, the lights began slowly to fade—to fade and at the same time to grow warmer, richer, redder, until at last they were dancing in the crimson twilight of an Embryo Store. “Orgy-porgy …” In their blood-coloured and foetal darkness the dancers continued for a while to circulate, to beat and beat out the indefatigable rhythm. “Orgy-porgy …” Then the circle wavered, broke, fell in partial disintegration on the ring of couches which surrounded—circle enclosing circle—the table and its planetary chairs. “Orgy-porgy …” Tenderly the deep Voice crooned and cooed; in the red twilight it was as though some enormous negro dove were hovering benevolently over the now prone or supine dancers.

They were standing on the roof; Big Henry had just sung eleven. The night was calm and warm.

“Wasn’t it wonderful?” said Fifi Bradlaugh. “Wasn’t it simply wonderful?” She looked at Bernard with an expression of rapture, but of rapture in which there was no trace of agitation or excitement—for to be excited is still to be unsatisfied. Hers was the calm ecstasy of achieved consummation, the peace, not of mere vacant satiety and nothingness, but of balanced life, of energies at rest and in equilibrium. A rich and living peace. For the Solidarity Service had given as well as taken, drawn off only to replenish. She was full, she was made perfect, she was still more than merely herself. “Didn’t you think it was wonderful?” she insisted, looking into Bernard’s face with those supernaturally shining eyes.

“Yes, I thought it was wonderful,” he lied and looked away; the sight of her transfigured face was at once an accusation and an ironical reminder of his own separateness. He was as miserably isolated now as he had been when the service began—more isolated by reason of his unreplenished emptiness, his dead satiety. Separate and unatoned, while the others were being fused into the Greater Being; alone even in Morgana’s embrace—much more alone, indeed, more hopelessly himself than he had ever been in his life before. He had emerged from that crimson twilight into the common electric glare with a self-consciousness intensified to the pitch of agony. He was utterly miserable, and perhaps (her shining eyes accused him), perhaps it was his own fault. “Quite wonderful,” he repeated; but the only thing he could think of was Morgana’s eyebrow.

6

Part 1

Odd, odd, odd, was Lenina’s verdict on Bernard Marx. So odd, indeed, that in the course of the succeeding weeks she had wondered more than once whether she shouldn’t change her mind about the New Mexico holiday, and go instead to the North Pole with Benito Hoover. The trouble was that she knew the North Pole, had been there with George Edzel only last summer, and what was more, found it pretty grim. Nothing to do, and the hotel too hopelessly old-fashioned—no television laid on in the bedrooms, no scent organ, only the most putrid synthetic music, and not more than twenty-five Escalator-Squash Courts for over two hundred guests. No, decidedly she couldn’t face the North Pole again. Added to which, she had only been to America once before. And even then, how inadequately! A cheap week-end in New York—had it been with Jean-Jacques Habibullah or Bokanovsky Jones? She couldn’t remember. Anyhow, it was of absolutely no importance. The prospect of flying West again, and for a whole week, was very inviting. Moreover, for at least three days of that week they would be in the Savage Reservation. Not more than half a dozen people in the whole Centre had ever been inside a Savage Reservation. As an Alpha-Plus psychologist, Bernard was one of the few men she knew entitled to a permit. For Lenina, the opportunity was unique. And yet, so unique also was Bernard’s oddness that she had hesitated to take it, had actually thought of risking the Pole again with funny old Benito. At least Benito was normal. Whereas Bernard …

“Alcohol in his blood-surrogate,” was Fanny’s explanation of every eccentricity. But Henry, with whom, one evening when they were in bed together, Lenina had rather anxiously discussed her new lover, Henry had compared poor Bernard to a rhinoceros.

“You can’t teach a rhinoceros tricks,” he had explained in his brief and vigorous style. “Some men are almost rhinoceroses; they don’t respond properly to conditioning. Poor Devils! Bernard’s one of them. Luckily for him, he’s pretty good at his job. Otherwise the Director would never have kept him. However,” he added consolingly, “I think he’s pretty harmless.”

Pretty harmless, perhaps; but also pretty disquieting. That mania, to start with, for doing things in private. Which meant, in practice, not doing anything at all. For what was there that one could do in private. (Apart, of course, from going to bed: but one couldn’t do that all the time.) Yes, what was there? Precious little. The first afternoon they went out together was particularly fine. Lenina had suggested a swim at Toquay Country Club followed by dinner at the Oxford Union. But Bernard thought there would be too much of a crowd. Then what about a round of Electromagnetic Golf at St. Andrew’s? But again, no: Bernard considered that Electro-magnetic Golf was a waste of time.

“Then what’s time for?” asked Lenina in some astonishment.

Apparently, for going on walks in the Lake District; for that was what he now proposed. Land on the top of Skiddaw and walk for a couple of hours in the heather. “Alone with you, Lenina.”

“But, Bernard, we shall be alone all night.”

Bernard blushed and looked away. “I meant, alone for talking,” he mumbled.

“Talking? But what about?” Walking and talking—that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon.

In the end she persuaded him, much against his will, to fly over to Amsterdam to see the Semi-Demi-Finals of the Women’s Heavyweight Wrestling Championship.

“In a crowd,” he grumbled. “As usual.” He remained obstinately gloomy the whole afternoon; wouldn’t talk to Lenina’s friends (of whom they met dozens in the ice-cream soma bar between the wrestling bouts); and in spite of his misery absolutely refused to take the half-gramme raspberry sundae which she pressed upon him. “I’d rather be myself,” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”

“A gramme in time saves nine,” said Lenina, producing a bright treasure of sleep-taught wisdom.

Bernard pushed away the proffered glass impatiently.

“Now, don’t lose your temper,” she said. “Remember one cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments.”

“Oh, for Ford’s sake, be quiet!” he shouted.

Lenina shrugged her shoulders. “A gramme is always better than a damn,” she concluded with dignity, and drank the sundae herself.

On their way back across the Channel, Bernard insisted on stopping his propeller and hovering on his helicopter screws within a hundred feet of the waves. The weather had taken a change for the worse; a south-westerly wind had sprung up, the sky was cloudy.

“Look,” he commanded.

“But it’s horrible,” said Lenina, shrinking back from the window. She was appalled by the rushing emptiness of the night, by the black foam-flecked water heaving beneath them, by the pale face of the moon, so haggard and distracted among the hastening clouds. “Let’s turn on the radio. Quick!” She reached for the dialling knob on the dashboard and turned it at random.

“… skies are blue inside of you,” sang sixteen tremoloing falsettos, “the weather’s always …”

Then a hiccough and silence. Bernard had switched off the current.

“I want to look at the sea in peace,” he said. “One can’t even look with that beastly noise going on.”

“But it’s lovely. And I don’t want to look.”

“But I do,” he insisted. “It makes me feel as though …” he hesitated, searching for words with which to express himself, “as though I were more me, if you see what I mean. More on my own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body. Doesn’t it make you feel like that, Lenina?”

But Lenina was crying. “It’s horrible, it’s horrible,” she kept repeating. “And how can you talk like that about not wanting to be a part of the social body? After all, every one works for every one else. We can’t do without any one. Even Epsilons …”

“Yes, I know,” said Bernard derisively. “‘Even Epsilons are useful’! So am I. And I damned well wish I weren’t!”

Lenina was shocked by his blasphemy. “Bernard!” She protested in a voice of amazed distress. “How can you?”

In a different key, “How can I?” he repeated meditatively. “No, the real problem is: How is it that I can’t, or rather—because, after all, I know quite well why I can’t—what would it be like if I could, if I were free—not enslaved by my conditioning.”

“But, Bernard, you’re saying the most awful things.”

“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?”

“I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated. Then, turning to him, “Oh, do let’s go back, Bernard,” she besought; “I do so hate it here.”

“Don’t you like being with me?”

“But of course, Bernard. It’s this horrible place.”

“I thought we’d be more … more together here—with nothing but the sea and moon. More together than in that crowd, or even in my rooms. Don’t you understand that?”

“I don’t understand anything,” she said with decision, determined to preserve her incomprehension intact. “Nothing. Least of all,” she continued in another tone, “why you don’t take soma when you have these dreadful ideas of yours. You’d forget all about them. And instead of feeling miserable, you’d be jolly. So jolly,” she repeated and smiled, for all the puzzled anxiety in her eyes, with what was meant to be an inviting and voluptuous cajolery.

He looked at her in silence, his face unresponsive and very grave—looked at her intently. After a few seconds Lenina’s eyes flinched away; she uttered a nervous little laugh, tried to think of something to say and couldn’t. The silence prolonged itself.

When Bernard spoke at last, it was in a small tired voice. “All right then,” he said, “we’ll go back.” And stepping hard on the accelerator, he sent the machine rocketing up into the sky. At four thousand he started his propeller. They flew in silence for a minute or two. Then, suddenly, Bernard began to laugh. Rather oddly, Lenina thought; but still, it was laughter.

“Feeling better?” she ventured to ask.

For answer, he lifted one hand from the controls and, slipping his arm around her, began to fondle her breasts.

“Thank Ford,” she said to herself, “he’s all right again.”

Half an hour later they were back in his rooms. Bernard swallowed four tablets of soma at a gulp, turned on the radio and television and began to undress.

“Well,” Lenina enquired, with significant archness when they met next afternoon on the roof, “did you think it was fun yesterday?”

Bernard nodded. They climbed into the plane. A little jolt, and they were off.

“Every one says I’m awfully pneumatic,” said Lenina reflectively, patting her own legs.

“Awfully.” But there was an expression of pain in Bernard’s eyes. “Like meat,” he was thinking.

She looked up with a certain anxiety. “But you don’t think I’m too plump, do you?”

He shook his head. Like so much meat.

“You think I’m all right.” Another nod. “In every way?”

“Perfect,” he said aloud. And inwardly. “She thinks of herself that way. She doesn’t mind being meat.”

Lenina smiled triumphantly. But her satisfaction was premature.

“All the same,” he went on, after a little pause, “I still rather wish it had all ended differently.”

“Differently?” Were there other endings?

“I didn’t want it to end with our going to bed,” he specified.

Lenina was astonished.

“Not at once, not the first day.”

“But then what … ?”

He began to talk a lot of incomprehensible and dangerous nonsense. Lenina did her best to stop the ears of her mind; but every now and then a phrase would insist on becoming audible. “… to try the effect of arresting my impulses,” she heard him say. The words seemed to touch a spring in her mind.

“Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have today,” she said gravely.

“Two hundred repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a half,” was all his comment. The mad bad talk rambled on. “I want to know what passion is,” she heard him saying. “I want to feel something strongly.”

“When the individual feels, the community reels,” Lenina pronounced.

“Well, why shouldn’t it reel a bit?”

“Bernard!”

But Bernard remained unabashed.

“Adults intellectually and during working hours,” he went on. “Infants where feeling and desire are concerned.”

“Our Ford loved infants.”

Ignoring the interruption. “It suddenly struck me the other day,” continued Bernard, “that it might be possible to be an adult all the time.”

“I don’t understand.” Lenina’s tone was firm.

“I know you don’t. And that’s why we went to bed together yesterday—like infants—instead of being adults and waiting.”

“But it was fun,” Lenina insisted. “Wasn’t it?”

“Oh, the greatest fun,” he answered, but in a voice so mournful, with an expression so profoundly miserable, that Lenina felt all her triumph suddenly evaporate. Perhaps he had found her too plump, after all.

“I told you so,” was all that Fanny said, when Lenina came and made her confidences. “It’s the alcohol they put in his surrogate.”

“All the same,” Lenina insisted. “I do like him. He has such awfully nice hands. And the way he moves his shoulders—that’s very attractive.” She sighed. “But I wish he weren’t so odd.”

Part 2

Halting for a moment outside the door of the Director’s room, Bernard drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders, bracing himself to meet the dislike and disapproval which he was certain of finding within. He knocked and entered.

“A permit for you to initial, Director,” he said as airily as possible, and laid the paper on the writing-table.

The Director glanced at him sourly. But the stamp of the World Controller’s Office was at the head of the paper and the signature of Mustapha Mond, bold and black, across the bottom. Everything was perfectly in order. The Director had no choice. He pencilled his initials—two small pale letters abject at the feet of Mustapha Mond—and was about to return the paper without a word of comment or genial Ford-speed, when his eye was caught by something written in the body of the permit.

“For the New Mexican Reservation?” he said, and his tone, the face he lifted to Bernard, expressed a kind of agitated astonishment.

Surprised by his surprise, Bernard nodded. There was a silence.

The Director leaned back in his chair, frowning. “How long ago was it?” he said, speaking more to himself than to Bernard. “Twenty years, I suppose. Nearer twenty-five. I must have been your age …” He sighed and shook his head.

Bernard felt extremely uncomfortable. A man so conventional, so scrupulously correct as the Director—and to commit so gross a solecism! It made him want to hide his face, to run out of the room. Not that he himself saw anything intrinsically objectionable in people talking about the remote past; that was one of those hypnopædic prejudices he had (so he imagined) completely got rid of. What made him feel shy was the knowledge that the Director disapproved—disapproved and yet had been betrayed into doing the forbidden thing. Under what inward compulsion? Through his discomfort Bernard eagerly listened.

“I had the same idea as you,” the Director was saying. “Wanted to have a look at the savages. Got a permit for New Mexico and went there for my summer holiday. With the girl I was having at the moment. She was a Beta-Minus, and I think” (he shut his eyes), “I think she had yellow hair. Anyhow she was pneumatic, particularly pneumatic; I remember that. Well, we went there, and we looked at the savages, and we rode about on horses and all that. And then—it was almost the last day of my leave—then … well, she got lost. We’d gone riding up one of those revolting mountains, and it was horribly hot and oppressive, and after lunch we went to sleep. Or at least I did. She must have gone for a walk, alone. At any rate, when I woke up, she wasn’t there. And the most frightful thunderstorm I’ve ever seen was just bursting on us. And it poured and roared and flashed; and the horses broke loose and ran away; and I fell down, trying to catch them, and hurt my knee, so that I could hardly walk. Still, I searched and I shouted and I searched. But there was no sign of her. Then I thought she must have gone back to the rest-house by herself. So I crawled down into the valley by the way we had come. My knee was agonizingly painful, and I’d lost my soma. It took me hours. I didn’t get back to the rest-house till after midnight. And she wasn’t there; she wasn’t there,” the Director repeated. There was a silence. “Well,” he resumed at last, “the next day there was a search. But we couldn’t find her. She must have fallen into a gully somewhere; or been eaten by a mountain lion. Ford knows. Anyhow it was horrible. It upset me very much at the time. More than it ought to have done, I dare say. Because, after all, it’s the sort of accident that might have happened to any one; and, of course, the social body persists although the component cells may change.” But this sleep-taught consolation did not seem to be very effective. Shaking his head, “I actually dream about it sometimes,” the Director went on in a low voice. “Dream of being woken up by that peal of thunder and finding her gone; dream of searching and searching for her under the trees.” He lapsed into the silence of reminiscence.

“You must have had a terrible shock,” said Bernard, almost enviously.

At the sound of his voice the Director started into a guilty realization of where he was; shot a glance at Bernard, and averting his eyes, blushed darkly; looked at him again with sudden suspicion and, angrily on his dignity, “Don’t imagine,” he said, “that I’d had any indecorous relation with the girl. Nothing emotional, nothing longdrawn. It was all perfectly healthy and normal.” He handed Bernard the permit. “I really don’t know why I bored you with this trivial anecdote.” Furious with himself for having given away a discreditable secret, he vented his rage on Bernard. The look in his eyes was now frankly malignant. “And I should like to take this opportunity, Mr. Marx,” he went on, “of saying that I’m not at all pleased with the reports I receive of your behaviour outside working hours. You may say that this is not my business. But it is. I have the good name of the Centre to think of. My workers must be above suspicion, particularly those of the highest castes. Alphas are so conditioned that they do not have to be infantile in their emotional behaviour. But that is all the more reason for their making a special effort to conform. It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination. And so, Mr. Marx, I give you fair warning.” The Director’s voice vibrated with an indignation that had now become wholly righteous and impersonal—was the expression of the disapproval of Society itself. “If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a Sub-Centre—preferably to Iceland. Good morning.” And swivelling round in his chair, he picked up his pen and began to write.

“That’ll teach him,” he said to himself. But he was mistaken. For Bernard left the room with a swagger, exulting, as he banged the door behind him, in the thought that he stood alone, embattled against the order of things; elated by the intoxicating consciousness of his individual significance and importance. Even the thought of persecution left him undismayed, was rather tonic than depressing. He felt strong enough to meet and overcome affliction, strong enough to face even Iceland. And this confidence was the greater for his not for a moment really believing that he would be called upon to face anything at all. People simply weren’t transferred for things like that. Iceland was just a threat. A most stimulating and life-giving threat. Walking along the corridor, he actually whistled.

Heroic was the account he gave that evening of his interview with the D.H.C. “Whereupon,” it concluded, “I simply told him to go to the Bottomless Past and marched out of the room. And that was that.” He looked at Helmholtz Watson expectantly, awaiting his due reward of sympathy, encouragement, admiration. But no word came. Helmholtz sat silent, staring at the floor.

He liked Bernard; he was grateful to him for being the only man of his acquaintance with whom he could talk about the subjects he felt to be important. Nevertheless, there were things in Bernard which he hated. This boasting, for example. And the outbursts of an abject self-pity with which it alternated. And his deplorable habit of being bold after the event, and full, in absence, of the most extraordinary presence of mind. He hated these things—just because he liked Bernard. The seconds passed. Helmholtz continued to stare at the floor. And suddenly Bernard blushed and turned away.

Part 3

The journey was quite uneventful. The Blue Pacific Rocket was two and a half minutes early at New Orleans, lost four minutes in a tornado over Texas, but flew into a favourable air current at Longitude 95 West, and was able to land at Santa Fé less than forty seconds behind schedule time.

“Forty seconds on a six and a half hour flight. Not so bad,” Lenina conceded.

They slept that night at Santa Fé. The hotel was excellent—incomparably better, for example, than that horrible Aurora Bora Palace in which Lenina had suffered so much the previous summer. Liquid air, television, vibro-vacuum massage, radio, boiling caffeine solution, hot contraceptives, and eight different kinds of scent were laid on in every bedroom. The synthetic music plant was working as they entered the hall and left nothing to be desired. A notice in the lift announced that there were sixty Escalator-Squash Racket Courts in the hotel, and that Obstacle and Electro-magnetic Golf could both be played in the park.

“But it sounds simply too lovely,” cried Lenina. “I almost wish we could stay here. Sixty Escalator-Squash Courts …”

“There won’t be any in the Reservation,” Bernard warned her. “And no scent, no television, no hot water even. If you feel you can’t stand it, stay here till I come back.”

Lenina was quite offended. “Of course I can stand it. I only said it was lovely here because … well, because progress is lovely, isn’t it?”

“Five hundred repetitions once a week from thirteen to seventeen,” said Bernard wearily, as though to himself.

“What did you say?”

“I said that progress was lovely. That’s why you mustn’t come to the Reservation unless you really want to.”

“But I do want to.”

“Very well, then,” said Bernard; and it was almost a threat.

Their permit required the signature of the Warden of the Reservation, at whose office next morning they duly presented themselves. An Epsilon-Plus negro porter took in Bernard’s card, and they were admitted almost immediately.

The Warden was a blond and brachycephalic Alpha-Minus, short, red, moon-faced, and broad-shouldered, with a loud booming voice, very well adapted to the utterance of hypnopædic wisdom. He was a mine of irrelevant information and unasked-for good advice. Once started, he went on and on—boomingly.

“… five hundred and sixty thousand square Kilometers, divided into four distinct Sub-Reservations, each surrounded by a high-tension wire fence.”

At this moment, and for no apparent reason, Bernard suddenly remembered that he had left the Eau de Cologne tap in his bathroom wide open and running.

“… supplied with current from the Grand Canyon hydroelectric station.”

“Cost me a fortune by the time I get back.” With his mind’s eye, Bernard saw the needle on the scent meter creeping round and round, antlike, indefatigable. “Quickly telephone to Helmholtz Watson.”

“… upwards of five thousand kilometres of fencing at sixty thousand volts.”

“You don’t say so,” said Lenina politely, not knowing in the least what the Warden had said, but taking her cue from his dramatic pause. When the Warden started booming, she had inconspicuously swallowed half a gramme of soma, with the result that she could now sit, serenely not listening, thinking of nothing at all, but with her large blue eyes fixed on the Warden’s face in an expression of rapt attention.

“To touch the fence is instant death,” pronounced the Warden solemnly. “There is no escape from a Savage Reservation.”

The word “escape” was suggestive. “Perhaps,” said Bernard, half rising, “we ought to think of going.” The little black needle was scurrying, an insect, nibbling through time, eating into his money.

“No escape,” repeated the Warden, waving him back into his chair; and as the permit was not yet countersigned, Bernard had no choice but to obey. “Those who are born in the Reservation—and remember, my dear young lady,” he added, leering obscenely at Lenina, and speaking in an improper whisper, “remember that, in the Reservation, children still are born, yes, actually born, revolting as that may seem …” (He hoped that this reference to a shameful subject would make Lenina blush; but she only smiled with simulated intelligence and said, “You don’t say so!” Disappointed, the Warden began again.) “Those, I repeat, who are born in the Reservation are destined to die there.”

Destined to die … A decilitre of Eau de Cologne every minute. Six litres an hour. “Perhaps,” Bernard tried again, “we ought …”

Leaning forward, the Warden tapped the table with his forefinger. “You ask me how many people live in the Reservation. And I reply”—triumphantly—“I reply that we do not know. We can only guess.”

“You don’t say so.”

“My dear young lady, I do say so.”

Six times twenty-four—no, it would be nearer six times thirty-six. Bernard was pale and trembling with impatience. But inexorably the booming continued.

“… about sixty thousand Indians and half-breeds … absolute savages … our inspectors occasionally visit … otherwise, no communication whatever with the civilized world … still preserve their repulsive habits and customs … marriage, if you know what that is, my dear young lady; families … no conditioning … monstrous superstitions … Christianity and totemism and ancestor worship … extinct languages, such as Zuñi and Spanish and Athapascan … pumas, porcupines and other ferocious animals … infectious diseases … priests … venomous lizards …”

“You don’t say so?”

They got away at last. Bernard dashed to the telephone. Quick, quick; but it took him nearly three minutes to get on to Helmholtz Watson. “We might be among the savages already,” he complained. “Damned incompetence!”

“Have a gramme,” suggested Lenina.

He refused, preferring his anger. And at last, thank Ford, he was through and, yes, it was Helmholtz; Helmholtz, to whom he explained what had happened, and who promised to go round at once, at once, and turn off the tap, yes, at once, but took this opportunity to tell him what the D.H.C. had said, in public, yesterday evening .…

“What? He’s looking out for some one to take my place?” Bernard’s voice was agonized. “So it’s actually decided? Did he mention Iceland? You say he did? Ford! Iceland …” He hung up the receiver and turned back to Lenina. His face was pale, his expression utterly dejected.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“The matter?” He dropped heavily into a chair. “I’m going to be sent to Iceland.”

Often in the past he had wondered what it would be like to be subjected (soma-less and with nothing but his own inward resources to rely on) to some great trial, some pain, some persecution; he had even longed for affliction. As recently as a week ago, in the Director’s office, he had imagined himself courageously resisting, stoically accepting suffering without a word. The Director’s threats had actually elated him, made him feel larger than life. But that, as he now realized, was because he had not taken the threats quite seriously; he had not believed that, when it came to the point, the D.H.C. would ever do anything. Now that it looked as though the threats were really to be fulfilled, Bernard was appalled. Of that imagined stoicism, that theoretical courage, not a trace was left.

He raged against himself—what a fool!—against the Director—how unfair not to give him that other chance, that other chance which, he now had no doubt at all, he had always intended to take. And Iceland, Iceland …

Lenina shook her head. “Was and will make me ill,” she quoted, “I take a gramme and only am.”

In the end she persuaded him to swallow four tablets of soma. Five minutes later roots and fruits were abolished; the flower of the present rosily blossomed. A message from the porter announced that, at the Warden’s orders, a Reservation Guard had come round with a plane and was waiting on the roof of the hotel. They went up at once. An octoroon in Gamma-green uniform saluted and proceeded to recite the morning’s programme.

A bird’s-eye view of ten or a dozen of the principal pueblos, then a landing for lunch in the valley of Malpais. The rest-house was comfortable there, and up at the pueblo the savages would probably be celebrating their summer festival. It would be the best place to spend the night.

They took their seats in the plane and set off. Ten minutes later they were crossing the frontier that separated civilization from savagery. Uphill and down, across the deserts of salt or sand, through forests, into the violet depth of canyons, over crag and peak and table-topped mesa, the fence marched on and on, irresistibly the straight line, the geometrical symbol of triumphant human purpose. And at its foot, here and there, a mosaic of white bones, a still unrotted carcase dark on the tawny ground marked the place where deer or steer, puma or porcupine or coyote, or the greedy turkey buzzards drawn down by the whiff of carrion and fulminated as though by a poetic justice, had come too close to the destroying wires.

“They never learn,” said the green-uniformed pilot, pointing down at the skeletons on the ground below them. “And they never will learn,” he added and laughed, as though he had somehow scored a personal triumph over the electrocuted animals.

Bernard also laughed; after two grammes of soma the joke seemed, for some reason, good. Laughed and then, almost immediately, dropped off to sleep, and sleeping was carried over Taos and Tesuque; over Nambe and Picuris and Pojoaque, over Sia and Cochiti, over Laguna and Acoma and the Enchanted Mesa, over Zuñi and Cibola and Ojo Caliente, and woke at last to find the machine standing on the ground, Lenina carrying the suit-cases into a small square house, and the Gamma-green octoroon talking incomprehensibly with a young Indian.

“Malpais,” explained the pilot, as Bernard stepped out. “This is the rest-house. And there’s a dance this afternoon at the pueblo. He’ll take you there.” He pointed to the sullen young savage. “Funny, I expect.” He grinned. “Everything they do is funny.” And with that he climbed into the plane and started up the engines. “Back to-morrow. And remember,” he added reassuringly to Lenina, “they’re perfectly tame; savages won’t do you any harm. They’ve got enough experience of gas bombs to know that they mustn’t play any tricks.” Still laughing, he threw the helicopter screws into gear, accelerated, and was gone.

7

The mesa was like a ship becalmed in a strait of lion-coloured dust. The channel wound between precipitous banks, and slanting from one wall to the other across the valley ran a streak of green—the river and its fields. On the prow of that stone ship in the centre of the strait, and seemingly a part of it, a shaped and geometrical outcrop of the naked rock, stood the pueblo of Malpais. Block above block, each story smaller than the one below, the tall houses rose like stepped and amputated pyramids into the blue sky. At their feet lay a straggle of low buildings, a criss-cross of walls; and on three sides the precipices fell sheer into the plain. A few columns of smoke mounted perpendicularly into the windless air and were lost.

“Queer,” said Lenina. “Very queer.” It was her ordinary word of condemnation. “I don’t like it. And I don’t like that man.” She pointed to the Indian guide who had been appointed to take them up to the pueblo. Her feeling was evidently reciprocated; the very back of the man, as he walked along before them, was hostile, sullenly contemptuous.

“Besides,” she lowered her voice, “he smells.”

Bernard did not attempt to deny it. They walked on.

Suddenly it was as though the whole air had come alive and were pulsing, pulsing with the indefatigable movement of blood. Up there, in Malpais, the drums were being beaten. Their feet fell in with the rhythm of that mysterious heart; they quickened their pace. Their path led them to the foot of the precipice. The sides of the great mesa ship towered over them, three hundred feet to the gunwale.

“I wish we could have brought the plane,” said Lenina, looking up resentfully at the blank impending rock-face. “I hate walking. And you feel so small when you’re on the ground at the bottom of a hill.”

They walked along for some way in the shadow of the mesa, rounded a projection, and there, in a water-worn ravine, was the way up the companion ladder. They climbed. It was a very steep path that zigzagged from side to side of the gully. Sometimes the pulsing of the drums was all but inaudible, at others they seemed to be beating only just round the corner.

When they were half-way up, an eagle flew past so close to them that the wind of his wings blew chill on their faces. In a crevice of the rock lay a pile of bones. It was all oppressively queer, and the Indian smelt stronger and stronger. They emerged at last from the ravine into the full sunlight. The top of the mesa was a flat deck of stone.

“Like the Charing-T Tower,” was Lenina’s comment. But she was not allowed to enjoy her discovery of this reassuring resemblance for long. A padding of soft feet made them turn round. Naked from throat to navel, their dark brown bodies painted with white lines (“like asphalt tennis courts,” Lenina was later to explain), their faces inhuman with daubings of scarlet, black and ochre, two Indians came running along the path. Their black hair was braided with fox fur and red flannel. Cloaks of turkey feathers fluttered from their shoulders; huge feather diadems exploded gaudily round their heads. With every step they took came the clink and rattle of their silver bracelets, their heavy necklaces of bone and turquoise beads. They came on without a word, running quietly in their deerskin moccasins. One of them was holding a feather brush; the other carried, in either hand, what looked at a distance like three or four pieces of thick rope. One of the ropes writhed uneasily, and suddenly Lenina saw that they were snakes.

The men came nearer and nearer; their dark eyes looked at her, but without giving any sign of recognition, any smallest sign that they had seen her or were aware of her existence. The writhing snake hung limp again with the rest. The men passed.

“I don’t like it,” said Lenina. “I don’t like it.”

She liked even less what awaited her at the entrance to the pueblo, where their guide had left them while he went inside for instructions. The dirt, to start with, the piles of rubbish, the dust, the dogs, the flies. Her face wrinkled up into a grimace of disgust. She held her handkerchief to her nose.

“But how can they live like this?” she broke out in a voice of indignant incredulity. (It wasn’t possible.)

Bernard shrugged his shoulders philosophically. “Anyhow,” he said, “they’ve been doing it for the last five or six thousand years. So I suppose they must be used to it by now.”

“But cleanliness is next to fordliness,” she insisted.

“Yes, and civilization is sterilization,” Bernard went on, concluding on a tone of irony the second hypnopædic lesson in elementary hygiene. “But these people have never heard of Our Ford, and they aren’t civilized. So there’s no point in …”

“Oh!” She gripped his arm. “Look.”

An almost naked Indian was very slowly climbing down the ladder from the first-floor terrace of a neighboring house—rung after rung, with the tremulous caution of extreme old age. His face was profoundly wrinkled and black, like a mask of obsidian. The toothless mouth had fallen in. At the corners of the lips, and on each side of the chin, a few long bristles gleamed almost white against the dark skin. The long unbraided hair hung down in grey wisps round his face. His body was bent and emaciated to the bone, almost flesh-less. Very slowly he came down, pausing at each rung before he ventured another step.

“What’s the matter with him?” whispered Lenina. Her eyes were wide with horror and amazement.

“He’s old, that’s all,” Bernard answered as carelessly as he could. He too was startled; but he made an effort to seem unmoved.

“Old?” she repeated. “But the Director’s old; lots of people are old; they’re not like that.”

“That’s because we don’t allow them to be like that. We preserve them from diseases. We keep their internal secretions artificially balanced at a youthful equilibrium. We don’t permit their magnesium-calcium ratio to fall below what it was at thirty. We give them transfusion of young blood. We keep their metabolism permanently stimulated. So, of course, they don’t look like that. Partly,” he added, “because most of them die long before they reach this old creature’s age. Youth almost unimpaired till sixty, and then, crack! the end.”

But Lenina was not listening. She was watching the old man. Slowly, slowly he came down. His feet touched the ground. He turned. In their deep-sunken orbits his eyes were still extraordinarily bright. They looked at her for a long moment expressionlessly, without surprise, as though she had not been there at all. Then slowly, with bent back, the old man hobbled past them and was gone.

“But it’s terrible,” Lenina whispered. “It’s awful. We ought not to have come here.” She felt in her pocket for her soma—only to discover that, by some unprecedented oversight, she had left the bottle down at the rest-house. Bernard’s pockets were also empty.

Lenina was left to face the horrors of Malpais unaided. They came crowding in on her thick and fast. The spectacle of two young women giving breast to their babies made her blush and turn away her face. She had never seen anything so indecent in her life. And what made it worse was that, instead of tactfully ignoring it, Bernard proceeded to make open comments on this revoltingly viviparous scene. Ashamed, now that the effects of the soma had worn off, of the weakness he had displayed that morning in the hotel, he went out of his way to show himself strong and unorthodox.

“What a wonderfully intimate relationship,” he said, deliberately outrageous. “And what an intensity of feeling it must generate! I often think one may have missed something in not having had a mother. And perhaps you’ve missed something in not being a mother, Lenina. Imagine yourself sitting there with a little baby of your own.…”

“Bernard! How can you?” the passage of an old woman with ophthalmia and a disease of the skin distracted her from her indignation.

“Let’s go away,” she begged. “I don’t like it.”

But at this moment their guide came back and, beckoning them to follow, led the way down the narrow street between the houses. They rounded a corner. A dead dog was lying on a rubbish heap; a woman with a goitre was looking for lice in the hair of a small girl. Their guide halted at the foot of a ladder, raised his hand perpendicularly, then darted it horizontally forward. They did what he mutely commanded—climbed the ladder and walked through the doorway, to which it gave access, into a long narrow room, rather dark and smelling of smoke and cooked grease and long-worn, long-unwashed clothes. At the further end of the room was another doorway, through which came a shaft of sunlight and the noise, very loud and close, of the drums.

They stepped across the threshold and found themselves on a wide terrace. Below them, shut in by the tall houses, was the village square, crowded with Indians. Bright blankets, and feathers in black hair, and the glint of turquoise, and dark skins shining with heat. Lenina put her handkerchief to her nose again. In the open space at the centre of the square were two circular platforms of masonry and trampled clay—the roofs, it was evident, of underground chambers; for in the centre of each platform was an open hatchway, with a ladder emerging from the lower darkness. A sound of subterranean flute playing came up and was almost lost in the steady remorseless persistence of the drums.

Lenina liked the drums. Shutting her eyes she abandoned herself to their soft repeated thunder, allowed it to invade her consciousness more and more completely, till at last there was nothing left in the world but that one deep pulse of sound. It reminded her reassuringly of the synthetic noises made at Solidarity Services and Ford’s Day celebrations. “Orgyporgy,” she whispered to herself. These drums beat out just the same rhythms.

There was a sudden startling burst of singing—hundreds of male voices crying out fiercely in harsh metallic unison. A few long notes and silence, the thunderous silence of the drums; then shrill, in a neighing treble, the women’s answer. Then again the drums; and once more the men’s deep savage affirmation of their manhood.

Queer—yes. The place was queer, so was the music, so were the clothes and the goitres and the skin diseases and the old people. But the performance itself—there seemed to be nothing specially queer about that.

“It reminds me of a lower-caste Community Sing,” she told Bernard.

But a little later it was reminding her a good deal less of that innocuous function. For suddenly there had swarmed up from those round chambers underground a ghastly troop of monsters. Hideously masked or painted out of all semblance of humanity, they had tramped out a strange limping dance round the square; round and again round, singing as they went, round and round—each time a little faster; and the drums had changed and quickened their rhythm, so that it became like the pulsing of fever in the ears; and the crowd had begun to sing with the dancers, louder and louder; and first one woman had shrieked, and then another and another, as though they were being killed; and then suddenly the leader of the dancers broke out of the line, ran to a big wooden chest which was standing at one end of the square, raised the lid and pulled out a pair of black snakes. A great yell went up from the crowd, and all the other dancers ran towards him with out-stretched hands. He tossed the snakes to the first-comers, then dipped back into the chest for more. More and more, black snakes and brown and mottled—he flung them out. And then the dance began again on a different rhythm. Round and round they went with their snakes, snakily, with a soft undulating movement at the knees and hips. Round and round. Then the leader gave a signal, and one after another, all the snakes were flung down in the middle of the square; an old man came up from underground and sprinkled them with corn meal, and from the other hatchway came a woman and sprinkled them with water from a black jar. Then the old man lifted his hand and, startlingly, terrifyingly, there was absolute silence. The drums stopped beating, life seemed to have come to an end. The old man pointed towards the two hatchways that gave entrance to the lower world. And slowly, raised by invisible hands from below, there emerged from the one a painted image of an eagle, from the other that of a man, naked, and nailed to a cross. They hung there, seemingly self-sustained, as though watching. The old man clapped his hands. Naked but for a white cotton breech-cloth, a boy of about eighteen stepped out of the crowd and stood before him, his hands crossed over his chest, his head bowed. The old man made the sign of the cross over him and turned away. Slowly, the boy began to walk round the writhing heap of snakes. He had completed the first circuit and was half-way through the second when, from among the dancers, a tall man wearing the mask of a coyote and holding in his hand a whip of plaited leather, advanced towards him. The boy moved on as though unaware of the other’s existence. The coyote-man raised his whip; there was a long moment of expectancy, then a swift movement, the whistle of the lash and its loud flat-sounding impact on the flesh. The boy’s body quivered; but he made no sound, he walked on at the same slow, steady pace. The coyote struck again, again; and at every blow at first a gasp, and then a deep groan went up from the crowd. The boy walked. Twice, thrice, four times round he went. The blood was streaming. Five times round, six times round. Suddenly Lenina covered her face with her hands and began to sob. “Oh, stop them, stop them!” she implored. But the whip fell and fell inexorably. Seven times round. Then all at once the boy staggered and, still without a sound, pitched forward on to his face. Bending over him, the old man touched his back with a long white feather, held it up for a moment, crimson, for the people to see, then shook it thrice over the snakes. A few drops fell, and suddenly the drums broke out again into a panic of hurrying notes; there was a great shout. The dancers rushed forward, picked up the snakes and ran out of the square. Men, women, children, all the crowd ran after them. A minute later the square was empty, only the boy remained, prone where he had fallen, quite still. Three old women came out of one of the houses, and with some difficulty lifted him and carried him in. The eagle and the man on the cross kept guard for a little while over the empty pueblo; then, as though they had seen enough, sank slowly down through their hatchways, out of sight, into the nether world.

Lenina was still sobbing. “Too awful,” she kept repeating, and all Bernard’s consolations were in vain. “Too awful! That blood!” She shuddered. “Oh, I wish I had my soma.”

There was the sound of feet in the inner room.

Lenina did not move, but sat with her face in her hands, unseeing, apart. Only Bernard turned round.

The dress of the young man who now stepped out on to the terrace was Indian; but his plaited hair was straw-coloured, his eyes a pale blue, and his skin a white skin, bronzed.

“Hullo. Good-morrow,” said the stranger, in faultless but peculiar English. “You’re civilized, aren’t you? You come from the Other Place, outside the Reservation?”

“Who on earth … ?” Bernard begat\'7d in astonishment.

The young man sighed and shook his head. “A most unhappy gentleman.” And, pointing to the bloodstains in the centre of the square, “Do you see that damned spot?” he asked in a voice that trembled with emotion.

“A gramme is better than a damn,” said Lenina mechanically from behind her hands. “I wish I had my soma!”

“I ought to have been there,” the young man went on. “Why wouldn’t they let me be the sacrifice? I’d have gone round ten times—twelve, fifteen. Palowhtiwa only got as far as seven. They could have had twice as much blood from me. The multitudinous seas incarnadine.” He flung out his arms in a lavish gesture; then, despairingly, let them fall again. “But they wouldn’t let me. They disliked me for my complexion. It’s always been like that. Always.” Tears stood in the young man’s eyes; he was ashamed and turned away.

Astonishment made Lenina forget the deprivation of soma. She uncoverd her face and, for the first time, looked at the stranger. “Do you mean to say that you wanted to be hit with that whip?”

Still averted from her, the young man made a sign of affirmation. “For the sake of the pueblo—to make the rain come and the corn grow. And to please Pookong and Jesus. And then to show that I can bear pain without crying out. Yes,” and his voice suddenly took on a new resonance, he turned with a proud squaring of the shoulders, a proud, defiant lifting of the chin “to show that I’m a man … Oh!” He gave a gasp and was silent, gaping. He had seen, for the first time in his life, the face of a girl whose cheeks were not the colour of chocolate or dogskin, whose hair was auburn and permanently waved, and whose expression (amazing novelty!) was one of benevolent interest. Lenina was smiling at him; such a nice-looking boy, she was thinking, and a really beautiful body. The blood rushed up into the young man’s face; he dropped his eyes, raised them again for a moment only to find her still smiling at him, and was so much overcome that he had to turn away and pretend to be looking very hard at something on the other side of the square.

Bernard’s questions made a diversion. Who? How? When? From where? Keeping his eyes fixed on Bernard’s face (for so passionately did he long to see Lenina smiling that he simply dared not look at her), the young man tried to explain himself. Linda and he—Linda was his mother (the word made Lenina look uncomfortable)—were strangers in the Reservation. Linda had come from the Other Place long ago, before he was born, with a man who was his father. (Bernard pricked up his ears.) She had gone walking alone in those mountains over there to the North, had fallen down a steep place and hurt her head. (“Go on, go on,” said Bernard excitedly.) Some hunters from Malpais had found her and brought her to the pueblo. As for the man who was his father, Linda had never seen him again. His name was Tomakin. (Yes, “Thomas” was the D.H.C.’s first name.) He must have flown away, back to the Other Place, away without her—a bad, unkind, unnatural man.

“And so I was born in Malpais,” he concluded. “In Malpais.” And he shook his head.

The squalor of that little house on the outskirts of the pueblo!

A space of dust and rubbish separated it from the village. Two famine-stricken dogs were nosing obscenely in the garbage at its door. Inside, when they entered, the twilight stank and was loud with flies.

“Linda!” the young man called.

From the inner room a rather hoarse female voice said, “Coming.”

They waited. In bowls on the floor were the remains of a meal, perhaps of several meals.

The door opened. A very stout blonde squaw stepped across the threshold and stood looking at the strangers, staring incredulously, her mouth open. Lenina noticed with disgust that two of the front teeth were missing. And the colour of the ones that remained … She shuddered. It was worse than the old man. So fat. And all the lines in her face, the flabbiness, the wrinkles. And the sagging cheeks, with those purplish blotches. And the red veins on her nose, the bloodshot eyes. And that neck—that neck; and the blanket she wore over her head—ragged and filthy. And under the brown sack-shaped tunic those enormous breasts, the bulge of the stomach, the hips. Oh, much worse than the old man, much worse! And suddenly the creature burst out in a torrent of speech, rushed at her with outstretched arms and—Ford! Ford! it was too revolting, in another moment she’d be sick—pressed her against the bulge, the bosom, and began to kiss her. Ford! to kiss, slobberingly, and smelt too horrible, obviously never had a bath, and simply reeked of that beastly stuff that was put into Delta and Epsilon bottles (no, it wasn’t true about Bernard), positively stank of alcohol. She broke away as quickly as she could.

A blubbered and distorted face confronted her; the creature was crying.

“Oh, my dear, my dear.” The torrent of words flowed sobbingly. “If you knew how glad—after all these years! A civilized face. Yes, and civilized clothes. Because I thought I should never see a piece of real acetate silk again.” She fingered the sleeve of Lenina’s shirt. The nails were black. “And those adorable viscose velveteen shorts! Do you know, dear, I’ve still got my old clothes, the ones I came in, put away in a box. I’ll show them to you afterwards. Though, of course, the acetate has all gone into holes. But such a lovely white bandolier—though I must say your green morocco is even lovelier. Not that it did me much good, that bandolier.” Her tears began to flow again. “I suppose John told you. What I had to suffer—and not a gramme of soma to be had. Only a drink of mescal every now and then, when Popé used to bring it. Popé is a boy I used to know. But it makes you feel so bad afterwards, the mescal does, and you’re sick with the peyotl; besides it always made that awful feeling of being ashamed much worse the next day. And I was so ashamed. Just think of it: me, a Beta—having a baby: put yourself in my place.” (The mere suggestion made Lenina shudder.) “Though it wasn’t my fault, I swear; because I still don’t know how it happened, seeing that I did all the Malthusian Drill—you know, by numbers, One, two, three, four, always, I swear it; but all the same it happened; and of course there wasn’t anything like an Abortion Centre here. Is it still down in Chelsea, by the way?” she asked. Lenina nodded. “And still floodlighted on Tuesdays and Fridays?” Lenina nodded again. “That lovely pink glass tower!” Poor Linda lifted her face and with closed eyes ecstatically contemplated the bright remembered image. “And the river at night,” she whispered. Great tears oozed slowly out from behind her tight-shut eyelids. “And flying back in the evening from Stoke Poges. And then a hot bath and vibro-vacuum massage … But there.” She drew a deep breath, shook her head, opened her eyes again, sniffed once or twice, then blew her nose on her fingers and wiped them on the skirt of her tunic. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said in response to Lenina’s involuntary grimace of disgust. “I oughtn’t to have done that. I’m sorry. But what are you to do when there aren’t any handkerchiefs? I remember how it used to upset me, all that dirt, and nothing being aseptic. I had an awful cut on my head when they first brought me here. You can’t imagine what they used to put on it. Filth, just filth. ‘Civilization is Sterilization,’ I used to say to them. And ‘Streptocock-Gee to Banbury-T, to see a fine bathroom and W.C.’ as though they were children. But of course they didn’t understand. How should they? And in the end I suppose I got used to it. And anyhow, how can you keep things clean when there isn’t hot water laid on? And look at these clothes. This beastly wool isn’t like acetate. It lasts and lasts. And you’re supposed to mend it if it gets torn. But I’m a Beta; I worked in the Fertilizing Room; nobody ever taught me to do anything like that. It wasn’t my business. Besides, it never used to be right to mend clothes. Throw them away when they’ve got holes in them and buy new. ‘The more stitches, the less riches.’ Isn’t that right? Mending’s anti-social. But it’s all different here. It’s like living with lunatics. Everything they do is mad.” She looked round; saw John and Bernard had left them and were walking up and down in the dust and garbage outside the house; but, none the less confidentially lowering her voice, and leaning, while Lenina stiffened and shrank, so close that the blown reek of embryo-poison stirred the hair on her cheek. “For instance,” she hoarsely whispered, “take the way they have one another here. Mad, I tell you, absolutely mad. Everybody belongs to every one else—don’t they? don’t they?” she insisted, tugging at Lenina’s sleeve. Lenina nodded her averted head, let out the breath she had been holding and managed to draw another one, relatively untainted. “Well, here,” the other went on, “nobody’s supposed to belong to more than one person. And if you have people in the ordinary way, the others think you’re wicked and anti-social. They hate and despise you. Once a lot of women came and made a scene because their men came to see me. Well, why not? And then they rushed at me … No, it was too awful. I can’t tell you about it.” Linda covered her face with her hands and shuddered. “They’re so hateful, the women here. Mad, mad and cruel. And of course they don’t know anything about Malthusian Drill, or bottles, or decanting, or anything of that sort. So they’re having children all the time—like dogs. It’s too revolting. And to think that I … Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford! And yet John was a great comfort to me. I don’t know what I should have done without him. Even though he did get so upset whenever a man … Quite as a tiny boy, even. Once (but that was when he was bigger) he tried to kill poor Waihusiwa—or was it Popé?—just because I used to have them sometimes. Because I never could make him understand that that was what civilized people ought to do. Being mad’s infectious, I believe. Anyhow, John seems to have caught it from the Indians. Because, of course, he was with them a lot. Even though they always were so beastly to him and wouldn’t let him do all the things the other boys did. Which was a good thing in a way, because it made it easier for me to condition him a little. Though you’ve no idea how difficult that is. There’s so much one doesn’t know; it wasn’t my business to know. I mean, when a child asks you how a helicopter works or who made the world—well, what are you to answer if you’re a Beta and have always worked in the Fertilizing Room? What are you to answer?”

8

Outside, in the dust and among the garbage (there were four dogs now), Bernard and John were walking slowly up and down.

“So hard for me to realize,” Bernard was saying, “to reconstruct. As though we were living on different planets, in different centuries. A mother, and all this dirt, and gods, and old age, and disease …” He shook his head. “It’s almost inconceivable. I shall never understand, unless you explain.”

“Explain what?”

“This.” He indicated the pueblo. “That.” And it was the little house outside the village. “Everything. All your life.”

“But what is there to say?”

“From the beginning. As far back as you can remember.”

“As far back as I can remember.” John frowned. There was a long silence.

It was very hot. They had eaten a lot of tortillas and sweet corn. Linda said, “Come and lie down, Baby.” They lay down together in the big bed. “Sing,” and Linda sang. Sang “Strep-tocock-Gee to Banbury-T” and “Bye Baby Banting, soon you’ll need decanting.” Her voice got fainter and fainter …

There was a loud noise, and he woke with a start. A man was saying something to Linda, and Linda was laughing. She had pulled the blanket up to her chin, but the man pulled it down again. His hair was like two black ropes, and round his arm was a lovely silver bracelet with blue stones in it. He liked the bracelet; but all the same, he was frightened; he hid his face against Linda’s body. Linda put her hand on him and he felt safer. In those other words he did not understand so well, she said to the man, “Not with John here.” The man looked at him, then again at Linda, and said a few words in a soft voice. Linda said, “No.” But the man bent over the bed towards him and his face was huge, terrible; the black ropes of hair touched the blanket. “No,” Linda said again, and he felt her hand squeezing him more tightly. “No, no!” But the man took hold of one of his arms, and it hurt. He screamed. The man put up his other hand and lifted him up. Linda was still holding him, still saying, “No, no.” The man said something short and angry, and suddenly her hands were gone. “Linda, Linda.” He kicked and wriggled; but the man carried him across to the door, opened it, put him down on the floor in the middle of the other room, and went away, shutting the door behind him. He got up, he ran to the door. Standing on tiptoe he could just reach the big wooden latch. He lifted it and pushed; but the door wouldn’t open. “Linda,” he shouted. She didn’t answer.

He remembered a huge room, rather dark; and there were big wooden things with strings fastened to them, and lots of women standing round them—making blankets, Linda said. Linda told him to sit in the corner with the other children, while she went and helped the women. He played with the little boys for a long time. Suddenly people started talking very loud, and there were the women pushing Linda away, and Linda was crying. She went to the door and he ran after her. He asked her why they were angry. “Because I broke something,” she said. And then she got angry too. “How should I know how to do their beastly weaving?” she said. “Beastly savages.” He asked her what savages were. When they got back to their house, Popé was waiting at the door, and he came in with them. He had a big gourd full of stuff that looked like water; only it wasn’t water, but something with a bad smell that burnt your mouth and made you cough. Linda drank some and Popé drank some, and then Linda laughed a lot and talked very loud; and then she and Popé went into the other room. When Popé went away, he went into the room. Linda was in bed and so fast asleep that he couldn’t wake her.

Popé used to come often. He said the stuff in the gourd was called mescal; but Linda said it ought to be called soma; only it made you feel ill afterwards. He hated Popé. He hated them all—all the men who came to see Linda. One afternoon, when he had been playing with the other children—it was cold, he remembered, and there was snow on the mountains—he came back to the house and heard angry voices in the bedroom. They were women’s voices, and they said words he didn’t understand; but he knew they were dreadful words. Then suddenly, crash! something was upset; he heard people moving about quickly, and there was another crash and then a noise like hitting a mule, only not so bony; then Linda screamed. “Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t!” she said. He ran in. There were three women in dark blankets. Linda was on the bed. One of the women was holding her wrists. Another was lying across her legs, so that she couldn’t kick. The third was hitting her with a whip. Once, twice, three times; and each time Linda screamed. Crying, he tugged at the fringe of the woman’s blanket. “Please, please.” With her free hand she held him away. The whip came down again, and again Linda screamed. He caught hold of the woman’s enormous brown hand between his own and bit it with all his might. She cried out, wrenched her hand free, and gave him such a push that he fell down. While he was lying on the ground she hit him three times with the whip. It hurt more than anything he had ever felt—like fire. The whip whistled again, fell. But this time it was Linda who screamed.

“But why did they want to hurt you, Linda?” he asked that night. He was crying, because the red marks of the whip on his back still hurt so terribly. But he was also crying because people were so beastly and unfair, and because he was only a little boy and couldn’t do anything against them. Linda was crying too. She was grown up, but she wasn’t big enough to fight against three of them. It wasn’t fair for her either. “Why did they want to hurt you, Linda?”

“I don’t know. How should I know?” It was difficult to hear what she said, because she was lying on her stomach and her face was in the pillow. “They say those men are their men,” she went on; and she did not seem to be talking to him at all; she seemed to be talking with some one inside herself. A long talk which she didn’t understand; and in the end she started crying louder than ever.

“Oh, don’t cry, Linda. Don’t cry.”

He pressed himself against her. He put his arm round her neck. Linda cried out. “Oh, be careful. My shoulder! Oh!” and she pushed him away, hard. His head banged against the wall. “Little idiot!” she shouted; and then, suddenly, she began to slap him. Slap, slap …

“Linda,” he cried out. “Oh, mother, don’t!”

“I’m not your mother. I won’t be your mother.”

“But, Linda … Oh!” She slapped him on the cheek.

“Turned into a savage,” she shouted. “Having young ones like an animal … If it hadn’t been for you, I might have gone to the Inspector, I might have got away. But not with a baby. That would have been too shameful.”

He saw that she was going to hit him again, and lifted his arm to guard his face. “Oh, don’t, Linda, please don’t.”

“Little beast!” She pulled down his arm; his face was uncovered.

“Don’t, Linda.” He shut his eyes, expecting the blow.

But she didn’t hit him. After a little time, he opened his eyes again and saw that she was looking at him. He tried to smile at her. Suddenly she put her arms round him and kissed him again and again.

Sometimes, for several days, Linda didn’t get up at all. She lay in bed and was sad. Or else she drank the stuff that Popé brought and laughed a great deal and went to sleep. Sometimes she was sick. Often she forgot to wash him, and there was nothing to eat except cold tortillas. He remembered the first time she found those little animals in his hair, how she screamed and screamed.

The happiest times were when she told him about the Other Place. “And you really can go flying, whenever you like?”

“Whenever you like.” And she would tell him about the lovely music that came out of a box, and all the nice games you could play, and the delicious things to eat and drink, and the light that came when you pressed a little thing in the wall, and the pictures that you could hear and feel and smell, as well as see, and another box for making nice smells, and the pink and green and blue and silver houses as high as mountains, and everybody happy and no one ever sad or angry, and every one belonging to every one else, and the boxes where you could see and hear what was happening at the other side of the world, and babies in lovely clean bottles—everything so clean, and no nasty smells, no dirt at all—and people never lonely, but living together and being so jolly and happy, like the summer dances here in Malpais, but much happier, and the happiness being there every day, every day.… He listened by the hour. And sometimes, when he and the other children were tired with too much playing, one of the old men of the pueblo would talk to them, in those other words, of the great Transformer of the World, and of the long fight between Right Hand and Left Hand, between Wet and Dry; of Awonawilona, who made a great fog by thinking in the night, and then made the whole world out of the fog; of Earth Mother and Sky Father; of Ahaiyuta and Marsailema, the twins of War and Chance; of Jesus and Pookong; of Mary and Etsanatlehi, the woman who makes herself young again; of the Black Stone at Laguna and the Great Eagle and Our Lady of Acoma. Strange stories, all the more wonderful to him for being told in the other words and so not fully understood. Lying in bed, he would think of Heaven and London and Our Lady of Acoma and the rows and rows of babies in clean bottles and Jesus flying up and Linda flying up and the great Director of World hatcheries and Awonawilona.

Lots of men came to see Linda. The boys began to point their fingers at him. In the strange other words they said that Linda was bad; they called her names he did not understand, but that he knew were bad names. One day they sang a song about her, again and again. He threw stones at them. They threw back; a sharp stone cut his cheek. The blood wouldn’t stop; he was covered with blood.

Linda taught him to read. With a piece of charcoal she drew pictures on the wall—an animal sitting down, a baby inside a bottle; then she wrote letters. THE CAT IS ON THE MAT. THE TOT IS IN THE POT. He learned quickly and easily. When he knew how to read all the words she wrote on the wall, Linda opened her big wooden box and pulled out from under those funny little red trousers she never wore a thin little book. He had often seen it before. “When you’re bigger,” she had said, “you can read it.” Well, now he was big enough. He was proud. “I’m afraid you won’t find it very exciting,” she said. “But it’s the only thing I have.” She sighed. “If only you could see the lovely reading machines we used to have in London!” He began reading. The Chemical and Bacteriological Conditioning of the Embryo. Practical Instructions for Beta Embryo-Store Workers. It took him a quarter of an hour to read the title alone. He threw the book on the floor. “Beastly, beastly book!” he said, and began to cry.

The boys still sang their horrible song about Linda. Sometimes, too, they laughed at him for being so ragged. When he tore his clothes, Linda did not know how to mend them. In the Other Place, she told him, people threw away clothes with holes in them and got new ones. “Rags, rags!” the boys used to shout at him. “But I can read,” he said to himself, “and they can’t. They don’t even know what reading is.” It was fairly easy, if he thought hard enough about the reading, to pretend that he didn’t mind when they made fun of him. He asked Linda to give him the book again.

The more the boys pointed and sang, the harder he read. Soon he could read all the words quite well. Even the longest. But what did they mean? He asked Linda; but even when she could answer it didn’t seem to make it very clear. And generally she couldn’t answer at all.

“What are chemicals?” he would ask.

“Oh, stuff like magnesium salts, and alcohol for keeping the Deltas and Epsilons small and backward, and calcium carbonate for bones, and all that sort of thing.”

“But how do you make chemicals, Linda? Where do they come from?”

“Well, I don’t know. You get them out of bottles. And when the bottles are empty, you send up to the Chemical Store for more. It’s the Chemical Store people who make them, I suppose. Or else they send to the factory for them. I don’t know. I never did any chemistry. My job was always with the embryos.”

It was the same with everything else he asked about. Linda never seemed to know. The old men of the pueblo had much more definite answers.

“The seed of men and all creatures, the seed of the sun and the seed of earth and the seed of the sky—Awonawilona made them all out of the Fog of Increase. Now the world has four wombs; and he laid the seeds in the lowest of the four wombs. And gradually the seeds began to grow …”

One day (John calculated later that it must have been soon after his twelfth birthday) he came home and found a book that he had never seen before lying on the floor in the bedroom. It was a thick book and looked very old. The binding had been eaten by mice; some of its pages were loose and crumpled. He picked it up, looked at the tide-page: the book was called The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Linda was lying on the bed, sipping that horrible stinking mescal out of a cup. “Popé brought it,” she said. Her voice was thick and hoarse like somebody else’s voice. “It was lying in one of the chests of the Antelope Kiva. It’s supposed to have been there for hundreds of years. I expect it’s true, because I looked at it, and it seemed to be full of nonsense. Uncivilized. Still, it’ll be good enough for you to practise your reading on.” She took a last sip, set the cup down on the floor beside the bed, turned over on her side, hiccoughed once or twice and went to sleep.

He opened the book at random.

Nay, but to live

In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,

Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love

Over the nasty sty …

The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried; like old Mitsima saying magic over his feathers and his carved sticks and his bits of bone and stone—kiathla tsilu silokwe silokwe silokwe. Kiai silu silu, tsithl—but better than Mitsima’s magic, because it meant more, because it talked to him; talked wonderfully and only half-under-standably, a terrible beautiful magic, about Linda; about Linda lying there snoring, with the empty cup on the floor beside the bed; about Linda and Popé, Linda and Popé.

He hated Popé more and more. A man can smile and smile and be a villain. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, landless villain. What did the words exactly mean? He only half knew. But their magic was strong and went on rumbling in his head, and somehow it was as though he had never really hated Popé before; never really hated him because he had never been able to say how much he hated him. But now he had these words, these words like drums and singing and magic. These words and the strange, strange story out of which they were taken (he couldn’t make head or tail of it, but it was wonderful, wonderful all the same)—they gave him a reason for hating Popé; and they made his hatred more real; they even made Popé himself more real.

One day, when he came in from playing, the door of the inner room was open, and he saw them lying together on the bed, asleep—white Linda and Popé almost black beside her, with one arm under her shoulders and the other dark hand on her breast, and one of the plaits of his long hair lying across her throat, like a black snake trying to strangle her. Popé’s gourd and a cup were standing on the floor near the bed. Linda was snoring.

His heart seemed to have disappeared and left a hole. He was empty. Empty, and cold, and rather sick, and giddy. He leaned against the wall to steady himself. Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous … Like drums, like the men singing for the corn, like magic, the words repeated and repeated themselves in his head. From being cold he was suddenly hot. His cheeks burnt with the rush of blood, the room swam and darkened before his eyes. He ground his teeth. “I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him,” he kept saying. And suddenly there were more words.

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage

Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed …

The magic was on his side, the magic explained and gave orders. He stepped back in the outer room. “When he is drunk asleep …” The knife for the meat was lying on the floor near the fireplace. He picked it up and tiptoed to the door again. “When he is drunk asleep, drunk asleep …” He ran across the room and stabbed—oh, the blood!—stabbed again, as Popé heaved out of his sleep, lifted his hand to stab once more, but found his wrist caught, held and—oh, oh!—twisted. He couldn’t move, he was trapped, and there were Popé’s small black eyes, very close, staring into his own. He looked away. There were two cuts on Popé’s left shoulder. “Oh, look at the blood!” Linda was crying. “Look at the blood!” She had never been able to bear the sight of blood. Popé lifted his other hand—to strike him, he thought. He stiffened to receive the blow. But the hand only took him under the chin and turned his face, so that he had to look again into Popé’s eyes. For a long time, for hours and hours. And suddenly—he couldn’t help it—he began to cry. Popé burst out laughing. “Go,” he said, in the other Indian words. “Go, my brave Ahaiyuta.” He ran out into the other room to hide his tears.

“You are fifteen,” said old Mitsima, in the Indian words. “Now I may teach you to work the clay.”

Squatting by the river, they worked together.

“First of all,” said Mitsima, taking a lump of the wetted clay between his hands, “we make a little moon.” The old man squeezed the lump into a disk, then bent up the edges; the moon became a shallow cup.

Slowly and unskilfully he imitated the old man’s delicate gestures.

“A moon, a cup, and now a snake.” Mitsima rolled out another piece of clay into a long flexible cylinder, hooped it into a circle and pressed it on to the rim of the cup. “Then another snake. And another. And another.” Round by round, Mitsima built up the sides of the pot; it was narrow, it bulged, it narrowed again towards the neck. Mitsima squeezed and patted, stroked and scraped; and there at last it stood, in shape the familiar water pot of Malpais, but creamy white instead of black, and still soft to the touch. The crooked parody of Mitsima’s, his own stood beside it. Looking at the two pots, he had to laugh.

“But the next one will be better,” he said, and began to moisten another piece of clay.

To fashion, to give form, to feel his fingers gaining in skill and power—this gave him an extraordinary pleasure. “A, B, C, Vitamin D,” he sang to himself as he worked. “The fat’s in the liver, the cod’s in the sea.” And Mitsima also sang—a song about killing a bear. They worked all day, and all day he was filled with an intense, absorbing happiness.

“Next winter,” said old Mitsima, “I will teach you to make the bow.”

He stood for a long time outside the house, and at last the ceremonies within were finished. The door opened; they came out. Kothlu came first, his right hand outstretched and tightly closed, as though over some precious jewel. Her clenched hand similarly outstretched, Kiakimé followed. They walked in silence, and in silence, behind them, came the brothers and sisters and cousins and all the troop of old people.

They walked out of the pueblo, across the mesa. At the edge of the cliff they halted, facing the early morning sun. Kothlu opened his hand. A pinch of corn meal lay white on the palm; he breathed on it, murmured a few words, then threw it, a handful of white dust, towards the sun. Kiakimé did the same. Then Kiakimé’s father stepped forward, and holding up a feathered prayer stick, made a long prayer, then threw the stick after the corn meal.

“It is finished,” said old Mitsima in a loud voice. “They are married.”

“Well,” said Linda, as they turned away, “all I can say is, it does seem a lot of fuss to make about so little. In civilized countries, when a boy wants to have a girl, he just … But where are you going, John?”

He paid no attention to her calling, but ran on, away, away, anywhere to be by himself.

It is finished. Old Mitsima’s words repeated themselves in his mind. Finished, finished … In silence and from a long way off, but violently, desperately, hopelessly, he had loved Kiakimé. And now it was finished. He was sixteen.

At the full moon, in the Antelope Kiva, secrets would be told, secrets would be done and borne. They would go down, boys, into the kiva and come out again, men. The boys were all afraid and at the same time impatient. And at last it was the day. The sun went down, the moon rose. He went with the others. Men were standing, dark, at the entrance to the kiva; the ladder went down into the red lighted depths. Already the leading boys had begun to climb down. Suddenly, one of the men stepped forward, caught him by the arm, and pulled him out of the ranks. He broke free and dodged back into his place among the others. This time the man struck him, pulled his hair. “Not for you, white-hair!” “Not for the son of the she-dog,” said one of the other men. The boys laughed. “Go!” And as he still hovered on the fringes of the group, “Go!” the men shouted again. One of them bent down, took a stone, threw it. “Go, go, go!” There was a shower of stones. Bleeding, he ran away into the darkness. From the red-lit kiva came the noise of singing. The last of the boys had climbed down the ladder. He was all alone.

All alone, outside the pueblo, on the bare plain of the mesa. The rock was like bleached bones in the moonlight. Down in the valley, the coyotes were howling at the moon. The bruises hurt him, the cuts were still bleeding; but it was not for pain that he sobbed; it was because he was all alone, because he had been driven out, alone, into this skeleton world of rocks and moonlight. At the edge of the precipice he sat down. The moon was behind him; he looked down into the black shadow of the mesa, into the black shadow of death. He had only to take one step, one little jump.… He held out his right hand in the moonlight. From the cut on his wrist the blood was still oozing. Every few seconds a drop fell, dark, almost colourless in the dead light. Drop, drop, drop. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow …

He had discovered Time and Death and God.

“Alone, always alone,” the young man was saying.

The words awoke a plaintive echo in Bernard’s mind. Alone, alone … “So am I,” he said, on a gush of confiding-ness. “Terribly alone.”

“Are you?” John looked surprised. “I thought that in the Other Place … I mean, Linda always said that nobody was ever alone there.”

Bernard blushed uncomfortably. “You see,” he said, mumbling and with averted eyes, “I’m rather different from most people, I suppose. If one happens to be decanted different …”

“Yes, that’s just it.” The young man nodded. “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely. They’re beastly to one. Do you know, they shut me out of absolutely everything? When the other boys were sent out to spend the night on the mountains—you know, when you have to dream which your sacred animal is—they wouldn’t let me go with the others; they wouldn’t tell me any of the secrets. I did it by myself, though,” he added. “Didn’t eat anything for five days and then went out one night alone into those mountains there.” He pointed.

Patronizingly, Bernard smiled. “And did you dream of anything?” he asked.

The other nodded. “But I mustn’t tell you what.” He was silent for a little; then, in a low voice, “Once,” he went on, “I did something that none of the others did: I stood against a rock in the middle of the day, in summer, with my arms out, like Jesus on the Cross.”

“What on earth for?”

“I wanted to know what it was like being crucified. Hanging there in the sun …”

“But why?”

“Why? Well …” He hesitated. “Because I felt I ought to. If Jesus could stand it. And then, if one has done something wrong … Besides, I was unhappy; that was another reason.”

“It seems a funny way of curing your unhappiness,” said Bernard. But on second thoughts he decided that there was, after all, some sense in it. Better than taking soma …

“I fainted after a time,” said the young man. “Fell down on my face. Do you see the mark where I cut myself?” He lifted the thick yellow hair from his forehead. The scar showed, pale and puckered, on his right temple.

Bernard looked, and then quickly, with a little shudder, averted his eyes. His conditioning had made him not so much pitiful as profoundly squeamish. The mere suggestion of illness or wounds was to him not only horrifying, but even repulsive and rather disgusting. Like dirt, or deformity, or old age. Hastily he changed the subject.

“I wonder if you’d like to come back to London with us?” he asked, making the first move in a campaign whose strategy he had been secretly elaborating ever since, in the little house, he had realized who the “father” of this young savage must be. “Would you like that?”

The young man’s face lit up. “Do you really mean it?”

“Of course; if I can get permission, that is.”

“Linda too?”

“Well …” He hesitated doubtfully. That revolting creature! No, it was impossible. Unless, unless … It suddenly occurred to Bernard that her very revoltingness might prove an enormous asset. “But of course!” he cried, making up for his first hesitations with an excess of noisy cordiality.

The young man drew a deep breath. “To think it should be coming true—what I’ve dreamt of all my life. Do you remember what Miranda says?”

“Who’s Miranda?”

But the young man had evidently not heard the question. “O wonder!” he was saying; and his eyes shone, his face was brightly flushed. “How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!” The flush suddenly deepened; he was thinking of Lenina, of an angel in bottle-green viscose, lustrous with youth and skin food, plump, benevolently smiling. His voice faltered. “O brave new world,” he began, then suddenly interrupted himself; the blood had left his cheeks; he was as pale as paper. “Are you married to her?” he asked.

“Am I what?”

“Married. You know—for ever. They say ‘for ever’ in the Indian words; it can’t be broken.”

“Ford, no!” Bernard couldn’t help laughing.

John also laughed, but for another reason—laughed for pure joy.

“O brave new world,” he repeated. “O brave new world that has such people in it. Let’s start at once.”

“You have a most peculiar way of talking sometimes,” said Bernard, staring at the young man in perplexed astonishment. “And, anyhow, hadn’t you better wait till you actually see the new world?”

9

Lenina felt herself entitled, after this day of queerness and hor-ror, to a complete and absolute holiday. As soon as they got back to the rest-house, she swallowed six half-gramme tablets of soma, lay down on her bed, and within ten minutes had embarked for lunar eternity. It would be eighteen hours at the least before she was in time again.

Bernard meanwhile lay pensive and wide-eyed in the dark. It was long after midnight before he fell asleep. Long after midnight; but his insomnia had not been fruitless; he had a plan.

Punctually, on the following morning, at ten o’clock, the green-uniformed octoroon stepped out of his helicopter. Bernard was waiting for him among the agaves.

“Miss Crowne’s gone on soma-holiday,” he explained. “Can hardly be back before five. Which leaves us seven hours.”

He could fly to Santa Fé, do all the business he had to do, and be in Malpais again long before she woke up.

“She’ll be quite safe here by herself?”

“Safe as helicopters,” the octoroon assured him.

They climbed into the machine and started off at once. At ten thirty-four they landed on the roof of the Santa Fé Post Office; at ten thirty-seven Bernard had got through to the World Controller’s Office in Whitehall; at ten thirty-nine he was speaking to his fordship’s fourth personal secretary; at ten forty-four he was repeating his story to the first secretary, and at ten forty-seven and a half it was the deep, resonant voice of Mustapha Mond himself that sounded in his ears.

“I ventured to think,” stammered Bernard, “that your fordship might find the matter of sufficient scientific interest …”

“Yes, I do find it of sufficient scientific interest,” said the deep voice. “Bring these two individuals back to London with you.”

“Your fordship is aware that I shall need a special permit …”

“The necessary orders,” said Mustapha Mond, “are being sent to the Warden of the Reservation at this moment. You will proceed at once to the Warden’s Office. Good-morning, Mr. Marx.”

There was silence. Bernard hung up the receiver and hurried up to the roof.

“Warden’s Office,” he said to the Gamma-green octoroon.

At ten fifty-four Bernard was shaking hands with the Warden.

“Delighted, Mr. Marx, delighted.” His boom was deferential. “We have just received special orders …”

“I know,” said Bernard, interrupting him. “I was talking to his fordship on the phone a moment ago.” His bored tone implied that he was in the habit of talking to his fordship every day of the week. He dropped into a chair. “If you’ll kindly take all the necessary steps as soon as possible. As soon as possible,” he emphatically repeated. He was thoroughly enjoying himself.

At eleven three he had all the necessary papers in his pocket.

“So long,” he said patronizingly to the Warden, who had accompanied him as far as the lift gates. “So long.”

He walked across to the hotel, had a bath, a vibro-vac massage, and an electrolytic shave, listened in to the morning’s news, looked in for half an hour on the televisor, ate a leisured luncheon, and at half-past two flew back with the octoroon to Malpais.

The young man stood outside the rest-house.

“Bernard,” he called. “Bernard!” There was no answer.

Noiseless on his deerskin moccasins, he ran up the steps and tried the door. The door was locked.

They were gone! Gone! It was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to him. She had asked him to come and see them, and now they were gone. He sat down on the steps and cried.

Half an hour later it occurred to him to look through the window. The first thing he saw was a green suit-case, with the initials L.C. painted on the lid. Joy flared up like fire within him. He picked up a stone. The smashed glass tinkled on the floor. A moment later he was inside the room. He opened the green suit-case; and all at once he was breathing Lenina’s perfume, filling his lungs with her essential being. His heart beat wildly; for a moment he was almost faint. Then, bending over the precious box, he touched, he lifted into the light, he examined. The zippers on Lenina’s spare pair of viscose velveteen shorts were at first a puzzle, then solved, a delight. Zip, and then zip; zip, and then zip; he was enchanted. Her green slippers were the most beautiful things he had ever seen. He unfolded a pair of zippicamiknicks, blushed, put them hastily away again; but kissed a perfumed acetate handkerchief and wound a scarf round his neck. Opening a box, he spilt a cloud of scented powder. His hands were floury with the stuff. He wiped them on his chest, on his shoulders, on his bare arms. Delicious perfume! He shut his eyes; he rubbed his cheek against his own powdered arm. Touch of smooth skin against his face, scent in his nostrils of musky dust—her real presence. “Lenina,” he whispered. “Lenina!”

A noise made him start, made him guiltily turn. He crammed up his thieveries into the suit-case and shut the lid; then listened again, looked. Not a sign of life, not a sound. And yet he had certainly heard something—something like a sigh, something like the creak of a board. He tiptoed to the door and, cautiously opening it, found himself looking on to a broad landing. On the opposite side of the landing was another door, ajar. He stepped out, pushed, peeped.

There, on a low bed, the sheet flung back, dressed in a pair of pink one-piece zippyjamas, lay Lenina, fast asleep and so beautiful in the midst of her curls, so touchingly childish with her pink toes and her grave sleeping face, so trustful in the helplessness of her limp hands and melted limbs, that the tears came to his eyes.

With an infinity of quite unnecessary precautions—for nothing short of a pistol shot could have called Lenina back from her soma -holiday before the appointed time—he entered the room, he knelt on the floor beside the bed. He gazed, he clasped his hands, his lips moved. “Her eyes,” he murmured,

“Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice;

Handiest in thy discourse O! that her hand,

In whose comparison all whites are ink

Writing their own reproach; to whose soft seizure

The cygnet’s down is harsh …”

A fly buzzed round her; he waved it away. “Flies,” he remembered,

“On the white wonder of dear Juliet’s hand, may seize

And steal immortal blessing from her lips,

Who, even in pure and vestal modesty,

Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin.”

Very slowly, with the hesitating gesture of one who reaches forward to stroke a shy and possibly rather dangerous bird, he put out his hand. It hung there trembling, within an inch of those limp fingers, on the verge of contact. Did he dare? Dare to profane with his unworthiest hand that … No, he didn’t. The bird was too dangerous. His hand dropped back. How beautiful she was! How beautiful!

Then suddenly he found himself reflecting that he had only to take hold of the zipper at her neck and give one long, strong pull … He shut his eyes, he shook his head with the gesture of a dog shaking its ears as it emerges from the water. Detestable thought! He was ashamed of himself. Pure and vestal modesty …

There was a humming in the air. Another fly trying to steal immortal blessings? A wasp? He looked, saw nothing. The humming grew louder and louder, localized itself as being outside the shuttered windows. The plane! In a panic, he scrambled to his feet and ran into the other room, vaulted through the open window, and hurrying along the path between the tall agaves was in time to receive Bernard Marx as he climbed out of the helicopter.

10

The hands of all the four thousand electric clocks in all the Bloomsbury Centre’s four thousand rooms marked twenty-seven minutes past two. “This hive of industry,” as the Director was fond of calling it, was in the full buzz of work. Every one was busy, everything in ordered motion. Under the microscopes, their long tails furiously lashing, spermatozoa were burrowing head first into eggs; and, fertilized, the eggs were expanding, dividing, or if bokanovskified, budding and breaking up into whole populations of separate embryos. From the Social Predestination Room the escalators went rumbling down into the basement, and there, in the crimson darkness, stewing warm on their cushion of peritoneum and gorged with blood-surrogate and hormones, the foetuses grew and grew or, poisoned, languished into a stunted Epsilonhood. With a faint hum and rattle the moving racks crawled imperceptibly through the weeks and the recapitulated aeons to where, in the Decanting Room, the newly-unbottled babes uttered their first yell of horror and amazement.

The dynamos purred in the sub-basement, the lifts rushed up and down. On all the eleven floors of Nurseries it was feeding time. From eighteen hundred bottles eighteen hundred carefully labelled infants were simultaneously sucking down their pint of pasteurized external secretion.

Above them, in ten successive layers of dormitory, the little boys and girls who were still young enough to need an afternoon sleep were as busy as every one else, though they did not know it, listening unconsciously to hypnopædic lessons in hygiene and sociability, in class-consciousness and the toddler’s love-life. Above these again were the playrooms where, the weather having turned to rain, nine hundred older children were amusing themselves with bricks and clay modelling, hunt-the-zipper, and erotic play.

Buzz, buzz! the hive was humming, busily, joyfully. Blithe was the singing of the young girls over their test-tubes, the Predestinators whistled as they worked, and in the Decanting Room what glorious jokes were cracked above the empty bottles! But the Director’s face, as he entered the Fertilizing Room with Henry Foster, was grave, wooden with severity.

“A public example,” he was saying. “In this room, because it contains more high-caste workers than any other in the Centre. I have told him to meet me here at half-past two.”

“He does his work very well,” put in Henry, with hypocritical generosity.

“I know. But that’s all the more reason for severity. His intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted. Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual—and, after all, what is an individual?” With a sweeping gesture he indicated the rows of microscopes, the test-tubes, the incubators. “We can make a new one with the greatest ease—as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself. Yes, at Society itself,” he repeated. “Ah, but here he comes.”

Bernard had entered the room and was advancing between the rows of fertilizers toward them. A veneer of jaunty self-confidence thinly concealed his nervousness. The voice in which he said, “Good-morning, Director,” was absurdly too loud; that in which, correcting his mistake, he said, “You asked me to come and speak to you here,” ridiculously soft, a squeak.

“Yes, Mr. Marx,” said the Director portentously. “I did ask you to come to me here. You returned from your holiday last night, I understand.”

“Yes,” Bernard answered.

“Yes-s,” repeated the Director, lingering, a serpent, on the “s.” Then, suddenly raising his voice, “Ladies and gentlemen,” he trumpeted, “ladies and gentlemen.”

The singing of the girls over their test-tubes, the preoccupied whistling of the Microscopists, suddenly ceased. There was a profound silence; every one looked round.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Director repeated once more, “excuse me for thus interrupting your labours. A painful duty constrains me. The security and stability of Society are in danger. Yes, in danger, ladies and gentlemen. This man,” he pointed accusingly at Bernard, “this man who stands before you here, this Alpha-Plus to whom so much has been given, and from whom, in consequence, so much must be expected, this colleague of yours—or should I anticipate and say this ex-colleague?—has grossly betrayed the trust imposed in him. By his heretical views on sport and soma, by the scandalous unorthodoxy of his sexlife, by his refusal to obey the teachings of Our Ford and behave out of office hours, ‘even as a little infant,’” (here the Director made the sign of the T), “he has proved himself an enemy of Society, a subverter, ladies and gentlemen, of all Order and Stability, a conspirator against Civilization itself. For this reason I propose to dismiss him, to dismiss him with ignominy from the post he has held in this Centre; I propose forthwith to apply for his transference to a Sub-Centre of the lowest order and, that his punishment may serve the best interest of Society, as far as possible removed from any important Centre of population. In Iceland he will have small opportunity to lead others astray by his unfordly example.” The Director paused; then, folding his arms, he turned impressively to Bernard. “Marx,” he said, “can you show any reason why I should not now execute the judgment passed upon you?”

“Yes, I can,” Bernard answered in a very loud voice.

Somewhat taken aback, but still majestically, “Then show it,” said the Director.

“Certainly. But it’s in the passage. One moment.” Bernard hurried to the door and threw it open. “Come in,” he commanded, and the reason came in and showed itself.

There was a gasp, a murmur of astonishment and horror; a young girl screamed; standing on a chair to get a better view some one upset two test-tubes full of spermatozoa. Bloated, sagging, and among those firm youthful bodies, those undistorted faces, a strange and terrifying monster of middle-agedness, Linda advanced into the room, coquettishly smiling her broken and discoloured smile, and rolling as she walked, with what was meant to be a voluptuous undulation, her enormous haunches. Bernard walked beside her.

“There he is,” he said, pointing at the Director.

“Did you think I didn’t recognize him?” Linda asked indignantly; then, turning to the Director, “Of course I knew you; Tomakin, I should have known you anywhere, among a thousand. But perhaps you’ve forgotten me. Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember, Tomakin? Your Linda.” She stood looking at him, her head on one side, still smiling, but with a smile that became progressively, in face of the Director’s expression of petrified disgust, less and less self-confident, that wavered and finally went out. “Don’t you remember, Tomakin?” she repeated in a voice that trembled. Her eyes were anxious, agonized. The blotched and sagging face twisted grotesquely into the grimace of extreme grief. “Tomakin!” She held out her arms. Some one began to titter.

“What’s the meaning,” began the Director, “of this monstrous …”

“Tomakin!” She ran forward, her blanket trailing behind her, threw her arms round his neck, hid her face on his chest.

A howl of laughter went up irrepressibly.

“… this monstrous practical joke,” the Director shouted. Red in the face, he tried to disengage himself from her embrace. Desperately she clung. “But I’m Linda, I’m Linda.” The laughter drowned her voice. “You made me have a baby,” she screamed above the uproar. There was a sudden and appalling hush; eyes floated uncomfortably, not knowing where to look. The Director went suddenly pale, stopped struggling and stood, his hands on her wrists, staring down at her, horrified. “Yes, a baby—and I was its mother.” She flung the obscenity like a challenge into the outraged silence; then, suddenly breaking away from him, ashamed, ashamed, covered her face with her hands, sobbing. “It wasn’t my fault, Tomakin. Because I always did my drill, didn’t I? Didn’t I? Always … I don’t know how … If you knew how awful, Tomakin … But he was a comfort to me, all the same.” Turning towards the door, “John!” she called. “John!”

He came in at once, paused for a moment just inside the door, looked round, then soft on his moccasined feet strode quickly across the room, fell on his knees in front of the Director, and said in a clear voice: “My father!”

The word (for “father” was not so much obscene as—with its connotation of something at one remove from the loathsomeness and moral obliquity of child-bearing—merely gross, a scatological rather than a pornographic impropriety); the comically smutty word relieved what had become a quite intolerable tension. Laughter broke out, enormous, almost hysterical, peal after peal, as though it would never stop. My father—and it was the Director! My father! Oh Ford, oh Ford! That was really too good. The whooping and the roaring renewed themselves, faces seemed on the point of disintegration, tears were streaming. Six more test-tubes of spermatozoa were upset. My father!

Pale, wild-eyed, the Director glared about him in an agony of bewildered humiliation.

My father! The laughter, which had shown signs of dying away, broke out again more loudly than ever. He put his hands over his ears and rushed out of the room.

11

After the scene in the Fertilizing Room, all uppercaste London was wild to see this delicious creature who had fallen on his knees before the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning—or rather the ex-Director, for the poor man had resigned immediately afterwards and never set foot inside the Centre again—had flopped down and called him (the joke was almost too good to be true!) “my father.” Linda, on the contrary, cut no ice; nobody had the smallest desire to see Linda. To say one was a mother—that was past a joke: it was an obscenity. Moreover, she wasn’t a real savage, had been hatched out of a bottle and conditioned like any one else: so couldn’t have really quaint ideas. Finally—and this was by far the strongest reason for people’s not wanting to see poor Linda—there was her appearance. Fat; having lost her youth; with bad teeth, and a blotched complexion, and that figure (Ford!)—you simply couldn’t look at her without feeling sick, yes, positively sick. So the best people were quite determined not to see Linda. And Linda, for her part, had no desire to see them. The return to civilization was for her the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you’d done something so shamefully anti-social that you could never hold up your head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks. The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous. Greedily she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses. Dr. Shaw at first demurred; then let her have what she wanted. She took as much as twenty grammes a day.

“Which will finish her off in a month or two,” the doctor confided to Bernard. “One day the respiratory centre will be paralyzed. No more breathing. Finished. And a good thing too. If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be different. But we can’t.”

Surprisingly, as every one thought (for on soma-holiday Linda was most conveniently out of the way), John raised objections.

“But aren’t you shortening her life by giving her so much?”

“In one sense, yes,” Dr. Shaw admitted. “But in another we’re actually lengthening it.” The young man stared, uncomprehending. “Soma may make you lose a few years in time,” the doctor went on. “But think of the enormous, immeasurable durations it can give you out of time. Every soma-holiday is a bit of what our ancestors used to call eternity.”

John began to understand. “Eternity was in our lips and eyes,” he murmured.

“Eh?”

“Nothing.”

“Of course,” Dr. Shaw went on, “you can’t allow people to go popping off into eternity if they’ve got any serious work to do. But as she hasn’t got any serious work …”

“All the same,” John persisted, “I don’t believe it’s right.”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Well, of course, if you prefer to have her screaming mad all the time …”

In the end John was forced to give in. Linda got her soma. Thenceforward she remained in her little room on the thirty-seventh floor of Bernard’s apartment house, in bed, with the radio and television always on, and the patchouli tap just dripping, and the soma tablets within reach of her hand—there she remained; and yet wasn’t there at all, was all the time away, infinitely far away, on holiday; on holiday in some other world, where the music of the radio was a labyrinth of sonorous colours, a sliding, palpitating labyrinth, that led (by what beautifully inevitable windings) to a bright centre of absolute conviction; where the dancing images of the television box were the performers in some indescribably delicious all-singing feely; where the dripping patchouli was more than scent—was the sun, was a million sexophones, was Popé making love, only much more so, incomparably more, and without end.

“No, we can’t rejuvenate. But I’m very glad,” Dr. Shaw had concluded, “to have had this opportunity to see an example of senility in a human being. Thank you so much for calling me in.” He shook Bernard warmly by the hand.

It was John, then, they were all after. And as it was only through Bernard, his accredited guardian, that John could be seen, Bernard now found himself, for the first time in his life, treated not merely normally, but as a person of outstanding importance. There was no more talk of the alcohol in his blood-surrogate, no gibes at his personal appearance. Henry Foster went out of his way to be friendly; Benito Hoover made him a present of six packets of sex-hormone chewing-gum; the Assistant Predestinator came out and cadged almost abjectly for an invitation to one of Bernard’s evening parties. As for the women, Bernard had only to hint at the possibility of an invitation, and he could have whichever of them he liked.

“Bernard’s asked me to meet the Savage next Wednesday,” Fanny announced triumphantly.

“I’m so glad,” said Lenina. “And now you must admit that you were wrong about Bernard. Don’t you think he’s really rather sweet?”

Fanny nodded. “And I must say,” she said, “I was quite agreeably surprised.”

The Chief Bottler, the Director of Predestination, three Deputy Assistant Fertilizer-Generals, the Professor of Feelies in the College of Emotional Engineering, the Dean of the Westminster Community Singery, the Supervisor of Bokanovskification—the list of Bernard’s notabilities was interminable.

“And I had six girls last week,” he confided to Helm-holtz Watson. “One on Monday, two on Tuesday, two more on Friday, and one on Saturday. And if I’d had the time or the inclination, there were at least a dozen more who were only too anxious …”

Helmholtz listened to his boastings in a silence so gloomily disapproving that Bernard was offended.

“You’re envious,” he said.

Helmholtz shook his head. “I’m rather sad, that’s all,” he answered.

Bernard went off in a huff. Never, he told himself, never would he speak to Helmholtz again.

The days passed. Success went fizzily to Bernard’s head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory. In so far as it recognized him as important, the order of things was good. But, reconciled by his success, he yet refused to forego the privilege of criticizing this order. For the act of criticizing heightened his sense of importance, made him feel larger. Moreover, he did genuinely believe that there were things to criticize. (At the same time, he genuinely liked being a success and having all the girls he wanted.) Before those who now, for the sake of the Savage, paid their court to him, Bernard would parade a carping unorthodoxy. He was politely listened to. But behind his back people shook their heads. “That young man will come to a bad end,” they said, prophesying the more confidently in that they themselves would in due course personally see to it that the end was bad. “He won’t find another Savage to help him out a second time,” they said. Meanwhile, however, there was the first Savage; they were polite. And because they were polite, Bernard felt positively gigantic—gigantic and at the same time light with elation, lighter than air.

“Lighter than air,” said Bernard, pointing upwards.

Like a pearl in the sky, high, high above them, the Weather Department’s captive balloon shone rosily in the sunshine.

“… the said Savage,” so ran Bernard’s instructions, “to be shown civilized life in all its aspects.…”

He was being shown a bird’s-eye view of it at present, a bird’s-eye view from the platform of the Charing-T Tower. The Station Master and the Resident Meteorologist were acting as guides. But it was Bernard who did most of the talking. Intoxicated, he was behaving as though, at the very least, he were a visiting World Controller. Lighter than air.

The Bombay Green Rocket dropped out of the sky. The passengers alighted. Eight identical Dravidian twins in khaki looked out of the eight portholes of the cabin—the stewards.

“Twelve hundred and fifty kilometres an hour,” said the Station Master impressively. “What do you think of that, Mr. Savage?”

John thought it very nice. “Still,” he said, “Ariel could put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.”

“The Savage,” wrote Bernard in his report to Mustapha Mond, “shows surprisingly little astonishment at, or awe of, civilized inventions. This is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that he has heard them talked about by the woman Linda, his m—.”

(Mustapha Mond frowned. “Does the fool think I’m too squeamish to see the word written out at full length?”)

“Partly on his interest being focussed on what he calls ‘the soul,’ which he persists in regarding as an entity independent of the physical environment, whereas, as I tried to point out to him …”

The Controller skipped the next sentences and was just about to turn the page in search of something more interestingly concrete, when his eye was caught by a series of quite extraordinary phrases. “… though I must admit,” he read, “that I agree with the Savage in finding civilized infantility too easy or, as he put it, not expensive enough; and I would like to take this opportunity of drawing your fordship’s attention to …”

Mustapha Mond’s anger gave place almost at once to mirth. The idea of this creature solemnly lecturing him—him—about the social order was really too grotesque. The man must have gone mad. “I ought to give him a lesson,” he said to himself; then threw back his head and laughed aloud. For the moment, at any rate, the lesson would not be given.

It was a small factory of lighting-sets for helicopters, a branch of the Electrical Equipment Corporation. They were met on the roof itself (for that circular letter of recommendation from the Controller was magical in its effects) by the Chief Technician and the Human Element Manager. They walked downstairs into the factory.

“Each process,” explained the Human Element Manager, “is carried out, so far as possible, by a single Bokanovsky Group.”

And, in effect, eighty-three almost noseless black brachy-cephalic Deltas were cold-pressing. The fifty-six four-spindle chucking and turning machines were being manipulated by fifty-six aquiline and ginger Gammas. One hundred and seven heat-conditioned Epsilon Senegalese were working in the foundry. Thirty-three Delta females, long-headed, sandy, with narrow pelvises, and all within 20 millimetres of 1 metre 69 centimetres tall, were cutting screws. In the assembling room, the dynamos were being put together by two sets of Gamma-Plus dwarfs. The two low work-tables faced one another; between them crawled the conveyor with its load of separate parts; forty-seven blonde heads were confronted by forty-seven brown ones. Forty-seven snubs by forty-seven hooks; forty-seven receding by forty-seven prognathous chins. The completed mechanisms were inspected by eighteen identical curly auburn girls in Gamma green, packed in crates by thirty-four short-legged, left-handed male Delta-Minuses, and loaded into the waiting trucks and lorries by sixty-three blue-eyed, flaxen and freckled Epsilon Semi-Morons.

“O brave new world …” By some malice of his memory the Savage found himself repeating Miranda’s words. “O brave new world that has such people in it.”

“And I assure you,” the Human Element Manager concluded, as they left the factory, “we hardly ever have any trouble with our workers. We always find …”

But the Savage had suddenly broken away from his companions and was violently retching, behind a clump of laurels, as though the solid earth had been a helicopter in an air pocket.

“The Savage,” wrote Bernard, “refuses to take soma, and seems much distressed because the woman Linda, his m—–, remains permanently on holiday. It is worthy of note that, in spite of his m—–’s senility and the extreme repulsiveness of her appearance, the Savage frequently goes to see her and appears to be much attracted to her—an interesting example of the way in which early conditioning can be made to modify and even run counter to natural impulses (in this case, the impulse to recoil from an unpleasant object).”

At Eton they alighted on the roof of Upper School. On the opposite side of School Yard, the fifty-two stories of Lupton’s Tower gleamed white in the sunshine. College on their left and, on their right, the School Community Singery reared their venerable piles of ferro-concrete and vita-glass. In the centre of the quadrangle stood the quaint old chrome-steel statue of Our Ford.

Dr. Gaffney, the Provost, and Miss Keate, the Head Mistress, received them as they stepped out of the plane.

“Do you have many twins here?” the Savage asked rather apprehensively, as they set out on their tour of inspection.

“Oh, no,” the Provost answered. “Eton is reserved exclusively for upper-caste boys and girls. One egg, one adult. It makes education more difficult of course. But as they’ll be called upon to take responsibilities and deal with unexpected emergencies, it can’t be helped.” He sighed.

Bernard, meanwhile, had taken a strong fancy to Miss Keate. “If you’re free any Monday, Wednesday, or Friday evening,” he was saying. Jerking his thumb towards the Savage, “He’s curious, you know,” Bernard added. “Quaint.”

Miss Keate smiled (and her smile was really charming, he thought); said Thank you; would be delighted to come to one of his parties. The Provost opened a door.

Five minutes in that Alpha Double Plus classroom left John a trifle bewildered.

“What is elementary relativity?” he whispered to Bernard. Bernard tried to explain, then thought better of it and suggested that they should go to some other classroom.

From behind a door in the corridor leading to the Beta-Minus geography room, a ringing soprano voice called, “One, two, three, four,” and then, with a weary impatience, “As you were.”

“Malthusian Drill,” explained the Head Mistress. “Most of our girls are freemartins, of course. I’m a freemartin myself.” She smiled at Bernard. “But we have about eight hundred unsterilized ones who need constant drilling.”

In the Beta-Minus geography room John learnt that “a savage reservation is a place which, owing to unfavourable climatic or geological conditions, or poverty of natural resources, has not been worth the expense of civilizing.” A click; the room was darkened; and suddenly, on the screen above the Master’s head, there were the Penitentes of Acoma prostrating themselves before Our Lady, and wailing as John had heard them wail, confessing their sins before Jesus on the Cross, before the eagle image of Pookong. The young Etonians fairly shouted with laughter. Still wailing, the Penitentes rose to their feet, stripped off their upper garments and, with knotted whips, began to beat themselves, blow after blow. Redoubled, the laughter drowned even the amplified record of their groans.

“But why do they laugh?” asked the Savage in a pained bewilderment.

“Why?” The Provost turned towards him a still broadly grinning face. “ Why? But because it’s so extraordinarily funny.”

In the cinematographic twilight, Bernard risked a gesture which, in the past, even total darkness would hardly have emboldened him to make. Strong in his new importance, he put his arm around the Head Mistress’s waist. It yielded, willowily. He was just about to snatch a kiss or two and perhaps a gentle pinch, when the shutters clicked open again.

“Perhaps we had better go on,” said Miss Keate, and moved towards the door.

“And this,” said the Provost a moment later, “is Hypnopædic Control Room.”

Hundreds of synthetic music boxes, one for each dormitory, stood ranged in shelves round three sides of the room; pigeon-holed on the fourth were the paper soundtrack rolls on which the various hypnopædic lessons were printed.

“You slip the roll in here,” explained Bernard, interrupting Dr. Gaffney, “press down this switch …”

“No, that one,” corrected the Provost, annoyed.

“That one, then. The roll unwinds. The selenium cells transform the light impulses into sound waves, and …”

“And there you are,” Dr. Gaffney concluded.

“Do they read Shakespeare?” asked the Savage as they walked, on their way to the Bio-chemical Laboratories, past the School Library.

“Certainly not,” said the Head Mistress, blushing.

“Our library,” said Dr. Gaffney, “contains only books of reference. If our young people need distraction, they can get it at the feelies. We don’t encourage them to indulge in any solitary amusements.”

Five bus-loads of boys and girls, singing or in a silent embracement, rolled past them over the vitrified highway.

“Just returned,” explained Dr. Gaffney, while Bernard, whispering, made an appointment with the Head Mistress for that very evening, “from the Slough Crematorium. Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course.”

“Like any other physiological process,” put in the Head Mistress professionally.

Eight o’clock at the Savoy. It was all arranged.

On their way back to London they stopped at the Television Corporation’s factory at Brentford.

“Do you mind waiting here a moment while I go and telephone?” asked Bernard.

The Savage waited and watched. The Main Day-Shift was just going off duty. Crowds of lower-caste workers were queued up in front of the monorail station—seven or eight hundred Gamma, Delta and Epsilon men and women, with not more than a dozen faces and statures between them. To each of them, with his or her ticket, the booking clerk pushed over a little cardboard pillbox. The long caterpillar of men and women moved slowly forward.

“What’s in those” (remembering The Merchant of Venice) “those caskets?” the Savage enquired when Bernard had rejoined him.

“The day’s soma ration,” Bernard answered rather indistinctly; for he was masticating a piece of Benito Hoover’s chewing-gum. “They get it after their work’s over. Four half-gramme tablets. Six on Saturdays.”

He took John’s arm affectionately and they walked back towards the helicopter.

Lenina came singing into the Changing Room.

“You seem very pleased with yourself,” said Fanny.

“I am pleased,” she answered. Zip! “Bernard rang up half an hour ago.” Zip, zip! She stepped out of her shorts. “He has an unexpected engagement.” Zip! “Asked me if I’d take the Savage to the feelies this evening. I must fly.” She hurried away towards the bathroom.

“She’s a lucky girl,” Fanny said to herself as she watched Lenina go.

There was no envy in the comment; good-natured Fanny was merely stating a fact. Lenina was lucky; lucky in having shared with Bernard a generous portion of the Savage’s immense celebrity, lucky in reflecting from her insignificant person the moment’s supremely fashionable glory. Had not the Secretary of the Young Women’s Fordian Association asked her to give a lecture about her experiences? Had she not been invited to the Annual Dinner of the Aphroditeum Club? Had she not already appeared in the Feelytone News—visibly, audibly and tactually appeared to countless millions all over the planet?

Hardly less flattering had been the attentions paid her by conspicuous individuals. The Resident World Controller’s Second Secretary had asked her to dinner and breakfast. She had spent one week-end with the Ford Chief-Justice, and another with the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury. The President of the Internal and External Secretions Corporation was perpetually on the phone, and she had been to Deauville with the Deputy-Governor of the Bank of Europe.

“It’s wonderful, of course. And yet in a way,” she had confessed to Fanny, “I feel as though I were getting something on false pretences. Because, of course, the first thing they all want to know is what it’s like to make love to a Savage. And I have to say I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Most of the men don’t believe me, of course. But it’s true. I wish it weren’t,” she added sadly and sighed. “He’s terribly good-looking; don’t you think so?”

“But doesn’t he like you?” asked Fanny.

“Sometimes I think he does and sometimes I think he doesn’t. He always does his best to avoid me; goes out of the room when I come in; won’t touch me; won’t even look at me. But sometimes if I turn round suddenly, I catch him staring; and then—well, you know how men look when they like you.”

Yes, Fanny knew.

“I can’t make it out,” said Lenina.

She couldn’t make it out; and not only was bewildered; was also rather upset.

“Because, you see, Fanny, I like him.”

Liked him more and more. Well, now there’d be a real chance, she thought, as she scented herself after her bath. Dab, dab, dab—a real chance. Her high spirits overflowed in song.

“Hug me till you drug me, honey;

Kiss me till I’m in a coma:

Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;

Love’s as good as soma.”

The secret organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio—rippling arpeggios of thyme and lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of daring modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and new-mown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord—a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig’s dung) back to the simple aromatics with which the piece began. The final blast of thyme died away; there was a round of applause; the lights went up. In the synthetic music machine the soundtrack roll began to unwind. It was a trio for hyper-violin, super-cello and oboe-surrogate that now filled the air with its agreeable languor. Thirty or forty bars—and then, against this instrumental background, a much more than human voice began to warble; now throaty, now from the head, now hollow as a flute, now charged with yearning harmonics, it effortlessly passed from Gaspard’s Forster’s low record on the very frontiers of musical tone to a trilled bat-note high above the highest C to which (in 1770, at the ducal opera of Parma, and to the astonishment of Mozart) Lucrezia Ajugari, alone of all the singers in history, once piercingly gave utterance.

Sunk in their pneumatic stalls, Lenina and the Savage sniffed and listened. It was now the turn also for eyes and skin.

The house lights went down; fiery letters stood out solid and as though self-supported in the darkness. THREE WEEKS IN A HELICOPTER. AN ALL-SUPER-SINGING, SYNTHETIC-TALKING, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY. WITH SYNCHRONIZED SCENT-ORGAN ACCOMPANIMENT.

“Take hold of those metal knobs on the arms of your chair,” whispered Lenina. “Otherwise you won’t get any of the feely effects.”

The Savage did as he was told.

Those fiery letters, meanwhile, had disappeared; there were ten seconds of complete darkness; then suddenly, dazzling and incomparably more solid-looking than they would have seemed in actual flesh and blood, far more real than reality, there stood the stereoscopic images, locked in one another’s arms, of a gigantic negro and a golden-haired young brachycephalic Beta-Plus female.

The Savage started. That sensation on his lips! He lifted a hand to his mouth; the titillation ceased; let his hand fall back on the metal knob; it began again. The scent organ, meanwhile, breathed pure musk. Expiringly, a sound-track super-dove cooed “Oo-ooh”; and vibrating only thirty-two times a second, a deeper than African bass made answer: “Aa-aah.” “Ooh-ah! Ooh-ah!” the stereoscopic lips came together again, and once more the facial erogenous zones of the six thousand spectators in the Alhambra tingled with almost intolerable galvanic pleasure. “Ooh …”

The plot of the film was extremely simple. A few minutes after the first Oohs and Aahs (a duet having been sung and a little love made on that famous bearskin, every hair of which—the Assistant Predestinator was perfectly right—could be separately and distinctly felt), the negro had a helicopter accident, fell on his head. Thump! what a twinge through the forehead! A chorus of ow’s and aie’s went up from the audience.

The concussion knocked all the negro’s conditioning into a cocked hat. He developed for the Beta blonde an exclusive and maniacal passion. She protested. He persisted. There were struggles, pursuits, an assault on a rival, finally a sensational kidnapping. The Beta blonde was ravished away into the sky and kept there, hovering, for three weeks in a wildly anti-social têta-à-tête with the black madman. Finally, after a whole series of adventures and much aerial acrobacy three handsome young Alphas succeeded in rescuing her. The negro was packed off to an Adult Re-conditioning Centre and the film ended happily and decorously, with the Beta blonde becoming the mistress of all her three rescuers. They interrupted themselves for a moment to sing a synthetic quartet, with full super-orchestral accompaniment and gardenias on the scent organ. Then the bearskin made a final appearance and, amid a blare of sexophones, the last stereoscopic kiss faded into darkness, the last electric titillation died on the lips like a dying moth that quivers, quivers, ever more feebly, ever more faintly, and at last is quite, quite still.

But for Lenina the moth did not completely die. Even after the lights had gone up, while they were shuffling slowly along with the crowd towards the lifts, its ghost still fluttered against her lips, still traced fine shuddering roads of anxiety and pleasure across her skin. Her cheeks were flushed. She caught hold of the Savage’s arm and pressed it, limp, against her side. He looked down at her for a moment, pale, pained, desiring, and ashamed of his desire. He was not worthy, not … Their eyes for a moment met. What treasures hers promised! A queen’s ransom of temperament. Hastily he looked away, disengaged his imprisoned arm. He was obscurely terrified lest she should cease to be something he could feel himself unworthy of.

“I don’t think you ought to see things like that,” he said, making haste to transfer from Lenina herself to the surrounding circumstances the blame for any past or possible future lapse from perfection.

“Things like what, John?”

“Like this horrible film.”

“Horrible?” Lenina was genuinely astonished. “But I thought it was lovely.”

“It was base,” he said indignantly, “it was ignoble.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean.” Why was he so queer? Why did he go out of his way to spoil things?

In the taxicopter he hardly even looked at her. Bound by strong vows that had never been pronounced, obedient to laws that had long since ceased to run, he sat averted and in silence. Sometimes, as though a finger had plucked at some taut, almost breaking string, his whole body would shake with a sudden nervous start.

The taxicopter landed on the roof of Lenina’s apartment house. “At last,” she thought exultantly as she stepped out of the cab. At last—even though he had been so queer just now. Standing under a lamp, she peered into her hand mirror. At last. Yes, her nose was a bit shiny. She shook the loose powder from her puff. While he was paying off the taxi—there would just be time. She rubbed at the shininess, thinking: “He’s terribly good-looking. No need for him to be shy like Bernard. And yet … Any other man would have done it long ago. Well, now at last.” That fragment of a face in the little round mirror suddenly smiled at her.

“Good-night,” said a strangled voice behind her. Lenina wheeled round. He was standing in the doorway of the cab, his eyes fixed, staring; had evidently been staring all this time while she was powdering her nose, waiting—but what for? or hesitating, trying to make up his mind, and all the time thinking, thinking—she could not imagine what extraordinary thoughts. “Good-night, Lenina,” he repeated, and made a strange grimacing attempt to smile.

“But, John … I thought you were … I mean, aren’t you? …”

He shut the door and bent forward to say something to the driver. The cab shot up into the air.

Looking down through the window in the floor, the Savage could see Lenina’s upturned face, pale in the bluish light of the lamps. The mouth was open, she was calling. Her foreshortened figure rushed away from him; the diminishing square of the roof seemed to be falling through the darkness.

Five minutes later he was back in his room. From its hiding-place he took out his mouse-nibbled volume, turned with religious care its stained and crumbled pages, and began to read Othello. Othello, he remembered, was like the hero of Three Weeks in a Helicopter—a black man.

Drying her eyes, Lenina walked across the roof to the lift. On her way down to the twenty-seventh floor she pulled out her soma bottle. One gramme, she decided, would not be enough; hers had been more than a one-gramme affliction. But if she took two grammes, she ran the risk of not waking up in time to-morrow morning. She compromised and, into her cupped left palm, shook out three half-gramme tablets.

12

Bernard had to shout through the locked door; the Savage would not open.

“But everybody’s there, waiting for you.”

“Let them wait,” came back the muffled voice through the door.

“But you know quite well, John” (how difficult it is to sound persuasive at the top of one’s voice!) “I asked them on purpose to meet you.”

“You ought to have asked me first whether I wanted to meet them.”

“But you always came before, John.”

“That’s precisely why I don’t want to come again.”

“Just to please me,” Bernard bellowingly wheedled. “Won’t you come to please me?”

“No.”

“Do you seriously mean it?”

“Yes.”

Despairingly, “But what shall I do?” Bernard wailed.

“Go to hell!” bawled the exasperated voice from within.

“But the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury is there to-night.” Bernard was almost in tears.

“Ai yaa tákwa!” It was only in Zuni that the Savage could adequately express what he felt about the Arch-Community-Songster. “Háni!” he added as an afterthought; and then (with what derisive ferocity!): “Sons éso tse-ná.” And he spat on the ground, as Popé might have done.

In the end Bernard had to slink back, diminished, to his rooms and inform the impatient assembly that the Savage would not be appearing that evening. The news was received with indignation. The men were furious at having been tricked into behaving politely to this insignificant fellow with the unsavoury reputation and the heretical opinions. The higher their position in the hierarchy, the deeper their resentment.

“To play such a joke on me,” the Arch-Songster kept repeating, “on me!”

As for the women, they indignantly felt that they had been had on false pretences—had by a wretched little man who had had alcohol poured into his bottle by mistake—by a creature with a Gamma-Minus physique. It was an outrage, and they said so, more and more loudly. The Head Mistress of Eton was particularly scathing.

Lenina alone said nothing. Pale, her blue eyes clouded with an unwonted melancholy, she sat in a corner, cut off from those who surrounded her by an emotion which they did not share. She had come to the party filled with a strange feeling of anxious exultation. “In a few minutes,” she had said to herself, as she entered the room, “I shall be seeing him, talking to him, telling him” (for she had come with her mind made up) “that I like him—more than anybody I’ve ever known. And then perhaps he’ll say …”

What would he say? The blood had rushed to her cheeks.

“Why was he so strange the other night, after the feelies? So queer. And yet I’m absolutely sure he really does rather like me. I’m sure …”

It was at this moment that Bernard had made his announcement; the Savage wasn’t coming to the party.

Lenina suddenly felt all the sensations normally experienced at the beginning of a Violent Passion Surrogate treatment—a sense of dreadful emptiness, a breathless apprehension, a nausea. Her heart seemed to stop beating.

“Perhaps it’s because he doesn’t like me,” she said to herself. And at once this possibility became an established certainty: John had refused to come because he didn’t like her. He didn’t like her.…

“It really is a bit too thick,” the Head Mistress of Eton was saying to the Director of Crematoria and Phosphorus Reclamation. “When I think that I actually.…”

“Yes,” came the voice of Fanny Crowne, “it’s absolutely true about the alcohol. Some one I know knew some one who was working in the Embryo Store at the time. She said to my friend, and my friend said to me …”

“Too bad, too bad,” said Henry Foster, sympathizing with the Arch-Community-Songster. “It may interest you to know that our ex-Director was on the point of transferring him to Iceland.”

Pierced by every word that was spoken, the tight balloon of Bernard’s happy self-confidence was leaking from a thousand wounds. Pale, distraught, abject and agitated, he moved among his guests stammering incoherent apologies, assuring them that next time the Savage would certainly be there, begging them to sit down and take a carotene sandwich, a slice of vitamin A pâté, a glass of champagne-surrogate. They duly ate, but ignored him; drank and were either rude to his face or talked to one another about him, loudly and offensively, as though he had not been there.

“And now, my friends,” said the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury, in that beautiful ringing voice with which he led the proceedings at Ford’s Day Celebrations, “Now, my friends, I think perhaps the time has come …” He rose, put down his glass, brushed from his purple viscose waistcoat the crumbs of a considerable collation, and walked towards the door.

Bernard darted forward to intercept him.

“Must you really, Arch-Songster? … It’s very early still. I’d hoped you would …”

Yes, what hadn’t he hoped, when Lenina confidentially told him that the Arch-Community-Songster would accept an invitation if it were sent. “He’s really rather sweet, you know.” And she had shown Bernard the little golden zipper-fastening in the form of a T which the Arch-Songster had given her as a memento of the week-end she had spent at Lambeth. To meet the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury and Mr. Savage. Bernard had proclaimed his triumph on every invitation card. But the Savage had chosen this evening of all evenings to lock himself up in his room, to shout “Háni!” and even (it was lucky that Bernard didn’t understand Zuñi) “Sons éso tse-ná!” What should have been the crowning moment of Bernard’s whole career had turned out to be the moment of his greatest humiliation.

“I’d so much hoped …” he stammeringly repeated, looking up at the great dignitary with pleading and distracted eyes.

“My young friend,” said the Arch-Community-Songster in a tone of loud and solemn severity; there was a general silence. “Let me give you a word of advice.” He wagged his finger at Bernard. “Before it’s too late. A word of good advice.” (His voice became sepulchral.) “Mend your ways, my young friend, mend your ways.” He made the sign of the T over him and turned away. “Lenina, my dear,” he called in another tone. “Come with me.”

Obediently, but unsmiling and (wholly insensible of the honour done to her) without elation, Lenina walked after him, out of the room. The other guests followed at a respectful interval. The last of them slammed the door. Bernard was all alone.

Punctured, utterly deflated, he dropped into a chair and, covering his face with his hands, began to weep. A few minutes later, however, he thought better’ of it and took four tablets of soma.

Upstairs in his room the Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet.

Lenina and the Arch-Community-Songster stepped out on to the roof of Lambeth Palace. “Hurry up, my young friend—I mean, Lenina,” called the Arch-Songster impatiently from the lift gates. Lenina, who had lingered for a moment to look at the moon, dropped her eyes and came hurrying across the roof to rejoin him.

“A New Theory of Biology,” was the tide of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the tide-page: “The author’s mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published.” He underlined the words. “The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary.” A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose—well, you didn’t know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible. He picked up his pen again, and under the words “Not to be published” drew a second line, thicker and blacker than the first; then sighed, “What fun it would be,” he thought, “if one didn’t have to think about happiness!”

With closed eyes, his face shining with rapture, John was softly declaiming to vacancy:

“Oh! she doth teach the torches to burn bright.

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night,

Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear;

Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear …”

The golden T lay shining on Lenina’s bosom. Sportively, the Arch-Community-Songster caught hold of it, sportively he pulled, pulled. “I think,” said Lenina suddenly, breaking a long silence, “I’d better take a couple of grammes of soma.”

Bernard, by this time, was fast asleep and smiling at the private paradise of his dreams. Smiling, smiling. But inexorably, every thirty seconds, the minute hand of the electric clock above his bed jumped forward with an almost imperceptible click. Click, click, click, click … And it was morning. Bernard was back among the miseries of space and time. It was in the lowest spirits that he taxied across to his work at the Conditioning Centre. The intoxication of success had evaporated; he was soberly his old self; and by contrast with the temporary balloon of these last weeks, the old self seemed unprecedentedly heavier than the surrounding atmosphere.

To this deflated Bernard the Savage showed himself unexpectedly sympathetic.

“You’re more like what you were at Malpais,” he said, when Bernard had told him his plaintive story. “Do you remember when we first talked together? Outside the little house. You’re like what you were then.”

“Because I’m unhappy again; that’s why.”

“Well, I’d rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here.”

“I like that,” said Bernard bitterly. “When it’s you who were the cause of it all. Refusing to come to my party and so turning them all against me!” He knew that what he was saying was absurd in its injustice; he admitted inwardly, and at last even aloud, the truth of all that the Savage now said about the worthlessness of friends who could be turned upon so slight a provocation into persecuting enemies. But in spite of this knowledge and these admissions, in spite of the fact that his friend’s support and sympathy were now his only comfort, Bernard continued perversely to nourish, along with his quite genuine affection, a secret grievance against the Savage, to meditate a campaign of small revenges to be wreaked upon him. Nourishing a grievance against the Arch-Community-Songster was useless; there was no possibility of being revenged on the Chief Bottler or the Assistant Predestinator. As a victim, the Savage possessed, for Bernard, this enormous superiority over the others: that he was accessible. One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.

Bernard’s other victim-friend was Helmholtz. When, discomfited, he came and asked once more for the friendship which, in his prosperity, he had not thought it worth his while to preserve. Helmholtz gave it; and gave it without a reproach, without a comment, as though he had forgotten that there had ever been a quarrel. Touched, Bernard felt himself at the same time humiliated by this magnanimity—a magnanimity the more extraordinary and therefore the more humiliating in that it owed nothing to soma and everything to Helmholtz’s character. It was the Helmholtz of daily life who forgot and forgave, not the Helmholtz of a half-gramme holiday. Bernard was duly grateful (it was an enormous comfort to have his friend again) and also duly resentful (it would be pleasure to take some revenge on Helmholtz for his generosity).

At their first meeting after the estrangement, Bernard poured out the tale of his miseries and accepted consolation. It was not till some days later that he learned, to his surprise and with a twinge of shame, that he was not the only one who had been in trouble. Helmholtz had also come into conflict with Authority.

“It was over some rhymes,” he explained. “I was giving my usual course of Advanced Emotional Engineering for Third Year Students. Twelve lectures, of which the seventh is about rhymes. ‘On the Use of Rhymes in Moral Propaganda and Advertisement,’ to be precise. I always illustrate my lecture with a lot of technical examples. This time I thought I’d give them one I’d just written myself. Pure madness, of course; but I couldn’t resist it.” He laughed. “I was curious to see what their reactions would be. Besides,” he added more gravely, “I wanted to do a bit of propaganda; I was trying to engineer them into feeling as I’d felt when I wrote the rhymes. Ford!” He laughed again. “What an outcry there was! The Principal had me up and threatened to hand me the immediate sack. I’m a marked man.”

“But what were your rhymes?” Bernard asked.

“They were about being alone.”

Bernard’s eyebrows went up.

“I’ll recite them to you, if you like.” And Helmholtz began:

“Yesterday’s committee,

Sticks, but a broken drum,

Midnight in the City,

Flutes in a vacuum,

Shut lips, sleeping faces,

Every stopped machine,

The dumb and littered places

Where crowds have been: …

All silences rejoice,

Weep (loudly or low),

Speak—but with the voice

Of whom, I do not know.

Absence, say, of Susan’s,

Absence of Egeria’s

Arms and respective bosoms,

Lips and, ah, posteriors,

Slowly form a presence;

Whose? and, I ask, of what

So absurd an essence,

That something, which is not,

Nevertheless should populate

Empty night more solidly

Than that with which we copulate,

Why should it seem so squalidly”?

Well, I gave them that as an example, and they reported me to the Principal.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Bernard. “It’s flatly against all their sleep-teaching. Remember, they’ve had at least a quarter of a million warnings against solitude.”

“I know. But I thought I’d like to see what the effect would be.”

“Well, you’ve seen now.”

Helmholtz only laughed. “I feel,” he said, after a silence, “as though I were just beginning to have something to write about. As though I were beginning to be able to use that power I feel I’ve got inside me—that extra, latent power. Something seems to be coming to me.” In spite of all his troubles, he seemed, Bernard thought, profoundly happy.

Helmholtz and the Savage took to one another at once. So cordially indeed that Bernard felt a sharp pang of jealousy. In all these weeks he had never come to so close an intimacy with the Savage as Helmholtz immediately achieved. Watching them, listening to their talk, he found himself sometimes resentfully wishing that he had never brought them together. He was ashamed of his jealousy and alternately made efforts of will and took soma to keep himself from feeling it. But the efforts were not very successful; and between the soma-holidays there were, of necessity, intervals. The odious sentiment kept on returning.

At his third meeting with the Savage, Helmholtz recited his rhymes on Solitude.

“What do you think of them?” he asked when he had done.

The Savage shook his head. “Listen to this,” was his answer; and unlocking the drawer in which he kept his mouse-eaten book, he opened and read:

“Let the bird of loudest lay

On the sole Arabian tree,

Herald sad and trumpet be …”

Helmholtz listened with a growing excitement. At “sole Arabian tree” he started; at “thou shrieking harbinger” he smiled with sudden pleasure; at “every fowl of tyrant wing” the blood rushed up into his cheeks; but at “defunctive music” he turned pale and trembled with an unprecedented emotion. The Savage read on:

“Property was thus appall’d,

That the self was not the same;

Single nature’s double name

Neither two nor one was call’d

Reason in itself confounded

Saw division grow together …”

“Orgy-porgy!” said Bernard, interrupting the reading with a loud, unpleasant laugh. “It’s just a Solidarity Service hymn.” He was revenging himself on his two friends for liking one another more than they liked him.

In the course of their next two or three meetings he frequently repeated this little act of vengeance. It was simple and, since both Helmholtz and the Savage were dreadfully pained by the shattering and defilement of a favourite poetic crystal, extremely effective. In the end, Helmholtz threatened to kick him out of the room if he dared to interrupt again. And yet, strangely enough, the next interruption, the most disgraceful of all, came from Helmholtz himself.

The Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud—reading (for all the time he was seeing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet) with an intense and quivering passion. Helmholtz had listened to the scene of the lovers’ first meeting with a puzzled interest. The scene in the orchard had delighted him with its poetry; but the sentiments expressed had made him smile. Getting into such a state about having a girl—it seemed rather ridiculous. But, taken detail by verbal detail, what a superb piece of emotional engineering! “That old fellow,” he said, “he makes our best propaganda technicians look absolutely silly.” The Savage smiled triumphantly and resumed his reading. All went tolerably well until, in the last scene of the third act, Capulet and Lady Capulet began to bully Juliet to marry Paris. Helmholtz had been restless throughout the entire scene; but when, pathetically mimed by the Savage, Juliet cried out:

“Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,

That sees into the bottom of my grief?

O sweet my mother, cast me not away:

Delay this marriage for a month, a week;

Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed

In that dim monument where Tybalt lies …”

when Juliet said this, Helmholtz broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing.

The mother and father (grotesque obscenity) forcing the daughter to have some one she didn’t want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having some one else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly comical. He had managed, with a heroic effort, to hold down the mounting pressure of his hilarity; but “sweet mother” (in the Savage’s tremulous tone of anguish) and the reference to Tybalt lying dead, but evidently uncremated and wasting his phosphorus on a dim monument, were too much for him. He laughed and laughed till the tears streamed down his face—quenchlessly laughed while, pale with a sense of outrage, the Savage looked at him over the top of his book and then, as the laughter still continued, closed it indignantly, got up and, with the gesture of one who removes his pearl from before swine, locked it away in its drawer.

“And yet,” said Helmholtz when, having recovered breath enough to apologize, he had mollified the Savage into listening to his explanations, “I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can’t write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvellous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You’ve got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can’t think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases. But fathers and mothers!” He shook his head. “You can’t expect me to keep a straight face about fathers and mothers. And who’s going to get excited about a boy having a girl or not having her?” (The Savage winced; but Helmholtz, who was staring pensively at the floor, saw nothing.) “No,” he concluded, with a sigh, “it won’t do. We need some other kind of madness and violence. But what? What? Where can one find it?” He was silent; then, shaking his head, “I don’t know,” he said at last, “I don’t know.”

13

Henry Foster loomed up through the twilight of the Embryo Store.

“Like to come to a feely this evening?”

Lenina shook her head without speaking.

“Going out with some one else?” It interested him to know which of his friends was being had by which other. “Is it Benito?” he questioned.

She shook her head again.

Henry detected the weariness in those purple eyes, the pallor beneath that glaze of lupus, the sadness at the corners of the unsmiling crimson mouth. “You’re not feeling ill, are you?” he asked, a trifle anxiously, afraid that she might be suffering from one of the few remaining infectious diseases.

Yet once more Lenina shook her head.

“Anyhow, you ought to go and see the doctor,” said Henry. “A doctor a day keeps the jim-jams away,” he added heartily, driving home his hypnopædic adage with a clap on the shoulder. “Perhaps you need a Pregnancy Substitute,” he suggested. “Or else an extra-strong V.P.S. treatment. Sometimes, you know, the standard passion surrogate isn’t quite …”

“Oh, for Ford’s sake,” said Lenina, breaking her stubborn silence, “shut up!” And she turned back to her neglected embryos.

A V.P.S. treatment indeed! She would have laughed, if she hadn’t been on the point of crying. As though she hadn’t got enough V.P. of her own! She sighed profoundly as she refilled her syringe. “John,” she murmured to herself, “John …” Then “My Ford,” she wondered, “have I given this one its sleeping sickness injection, or haven’t I?” She simply couldn’t remember. In the end, she decided not to run the risk of letting it have a second dose, and moved down the line to the next bottle.

Twenty-two years, eight months, and four days from that moment, a promising young Alpha-Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of trypanosomiasis—the first case for over half a century. Sighing, Lenina went on with her work.

An hour later, in the Changing Room, Fanny was energetically protesting. “But it’s absurd to let yourself get into a state like this. Simply absurd,” she repeated “And what about? A man—one man.”

“But he’s the one I want.”

“As though there weren’t millions of other men in the world.”

“But I don’t want them.”

“How can you know till you’ve tried?”

“I have tried.”

“But how many?” asked Fanny, shrugging her shoulders contemptuously. “One, two?”

“Dozens. But,” shaking her head, “it wasn’t any good,” she added.

“Well, you must persevere,” said Fanny sententiously. But it was obvious that her confidence in her own prescriptions had been shaken. “Nothing can be achieved without perseverance.”

“But meanwhile …”

“Don’t think of him.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Take soma, then.”

“I do.”

“Well, go on.”

“But in the intervals I still like him. I shall always like him.”

“Well, if that’s the case,” said Fanny, with decision, “why don’t you just go and take him. Whether he wants it or no.”

“But if you knew how terribly queer he was!”

“All the more reason for taking a firm line.”

“It’s all very well to say that.”

“Don’t stand any nonsense. Act.” Fanny’s voice was a trumpet; she might have been a Y.W.F.A. lecturer giving an evening talk to adolescent Beta-Minuses. “Yes, act—at once. Do it now.”

“I’d be scared,” said Lenina.

“Well, you’ve only got to take half a gramme of soma first. And now I’m going to have my bath.” She marched off, trailing her towel.

The bell rang, and the Savage, who was impatiently hoping that Helmholtz would come that afternoon (for having at last made up his mind to talk to Helmholtz about Lenina, he could not bear to postpone his confidences a moment longer), jumped up and ran to the door.

“I had a premonition it was you, Helmholtz,” he shouted as he opened.

On the threshold, in a white acetate-satin sailor suit, and with a round white cap rakishly tilted over her left ear, stood Lenina.

“Oh!” said the Savage, as though some one had struck him a heavy blow.

Half a gramme had been enough to make Lenina forget her fears and her embarrassments. “Hullo, John,” she said, smiling, and walked past him into the room. Automatically he closed the door and followed her. Lenina sat down. There was a long silence.

“You don’t seem very glad to see me, John,” she said at last.

“Not glad?” The Savage looked at her reproachfully; then suddenly fell on his knees before her and, taking Lenina’s hand, reverently kissed it. “Not glad? Oh, if you only knew,” he whispered and, venturing to raise his eyes to her face, “Admired Lenina,” he went on, “indeed the top of admiration, worth what’s dearest in the world.” She smiled at him with a luscious tenderness. “Oh, you so perfect” (she was leaning towards him with parted lips), “so perfect and so peerless are created” (nearer and nearer) “of every creature’s best.” Still nearer. The Savage suddenly scrambled to his feet. “That’s why,” he said speaking with averted face, “I wanted to do something first … I mean, to show I was worthy of you. Not that I could ever really be that. But at any rate to show I wasn’t absolutely un-worthy. I wanted to do something.”

“Why should you think it necessary …” Lenina began, but left the sentence unfinished. There was a note of irritation in her voice. When one has leant forward, nearer and nearer, with parted lips—only to find oneself, quite suddenly, as a clumsy oaf scrambles to his feet, leaning towards nothing at all—well, there is a reason, even with half a gramme of soma circulating in one’s blood-stream, a genuine reason for annoyance.

“At Malpais,” the Savage was incoherently mumbling, “you had to bring her the skin of a mountain lion—I mean, when you wanted to marry some one. Or else a wolf.”

“There aren’t any lions in England,” Lenina almost snapped.

“And even if there were,” the Savage added, with sudden contemptuous resentment, “people would kill them out of helicopters, I suppose, with poison gas or something. I wouldn’t do that, Lenina.” He squared his shoulders, he ventured to look at her and was met with a stare of annoyed incomprehension. Confused, “I’ll do anything,” he went on, more and more incoherently. “Anything you tell me. There be some sports are painful—you know. But their labour delight in them sets off. That’s what I feel. I mean I’d sweep the floor if you wanted.”

“But we’ve got vacuum cleaners here,” said Lenina in bewilderment. “It isn’t necessary.”

“No, of course it isn’t necessary. But some kinds of baseness are nobly undergone. I’d like to undergo something nobly. Don’t you see?”

“But if there are vacuum cleaners …”

“That’s not the point.”

“And Epsilon Semi-Morons to work them,” she went on, “well, really, why?”

“Why? But for you, for you. Just to show that I …”

“And what on earth vacuum cleaners have got to do with lions …”

“To show how much …”

“Or lions with being glad to see me …” She was getting more and more exasperated.

“How much I love you, Lenina,” he brought out almost desperately.

An emblem of the inner tide of startled elation, the blood rushed up into Lenina’s cheeks. “Do you mean it, John?”

“But I hadn’t meant to say so,” cried the Savage, clasping his hands in a kind of agony. “Not until … Listen, Lenina; in Malpais people get married.”

“Get what?” The irritation had begun to creep back into her voice. What was he talking about now?

“For always. They make a promise to live together for always.”

“What a horrible idea!” Lenina was genuinely shocked.

“Outliving beauty’s outward with a mind that doth renew swifter than blood decays.”

“What?”

“It’s like that in Shakespeare too. ‘If thou dost break her virgin knot before all sanctimonious ceremonies may with full and holy rite …’”

“For Ford’s sake, John, talk sense. I can’t understand a word you say. First it’s vacuum cleaners; then it’s knots. You’re driving me crazy.” She jumped up and, as though afraid that he might run away from her physically, as well as with his mind, caught him by the wrist. “Answer me this question: do you really like me, or don’t you?”

There was a moment’s silence; then, in a very low voice, “I love you more than anything in the world,” he said.

“Then why on earth didn’t you say so?” she cried, and so intense was her exasperation that she drove her sharp nails into the skin of his wrist. “Instead of drivelling away about knots and vacuum cleaners and lions, and making me miserable for weeks and weeks.”

She released his hand and flung it angrily away from her.

“If I didn’t like you so much,” she said, “I’d be furious with you.”

And suddenly her arms were round his neck; he felt her lips soft against his own. So deliciously soft, so warm and electric that inevitably he found himself thinking of the embraces in Three Weeks in a Helicopter. Ooh! ooh! the stereoscopic blonde and aah! the more than real blackamoor. Horror, horror, horror … he tried to disengage himself; but Lenina tightened her embrace.

“Why didn’t you say so?” she whispered, drawing back her face to look at him. Her eyes were tenderly reproachful.

“The murkiest den, the most opportune place” (the voice of conscience thundered poetically), “the strongest suggestion our worser genius can, shall never melt mine honour into lust. Never, never!” he resolved.

“You silly boy!” she was saying. “I wanted you so much. And if you wanted me too, why didn’t you? …”

“But, Lenina …” he began protesting; and as she immediately untwined her arms, as she stepped away from him, he thought, for a moment, that she had taken his unspoken hint. But when she unbuckled her white patent cartridge belt and hung it carefully over the back of a chair, he began to suspect that he had been mistaken.

“Lenina!” he repeated apprehensively.

She put her hand to her neck and gave a long vertical pull; her white sailor’s blouse was ripped to the hem; suspicion condensed into a too, too solid certainty. “Lenina, what arc you doing?”

Zip, zip! Her answer was wordless. She stepped out of her bell-bottomed trousers. Her zippicamiknicks were a pale shell pink. The Arch-Community-Songster’s golden T dangled at her breast.

“For those milk paps that through the window bars bore at men’s eyes.…” The singing, thundering, magical words made her seem doubly dangerous, doubly alluring. Soft, soft, but how piercing! boring and drilling into reason, tunnelling through resolution. “The strongest oaths are straw to the fire i’ the blood. Be more abstemious, or else …”

Zip! The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left: the zippicamiknicks were lying lifeless and as though deflated on the floor.

Still wearing her shoes and socks, and her rakishly tilted round white cap, she advanced towards him. “Darling. Darling! If only you’d said so before!” She held out her arms.

But instead of also saying “Darling!” and holding out his arms, the Savage retreated in terror, flapping his hands at her as though he were trying to scare away some intruding and dangerous animal. Four backwards steps, and he was brought to bay against the wall.

“Sweet!” said Lenina and, laying her hands on his shoulders, pressed herself against him. “Put your arms round me,” she commanded. “Hug me till you drug me, honey.” She too had poetry at her command, knew words that sang and were spells and beat drums. “Kiss me”; she closed her eyes, she let her voice sink to a sleepy murmur, “kiss me till I’m in a coma. Hug me, honey, snuggly …”

The Savage caught her by the wrists, tore her hands from his shoulders, thrust her roughly away at arm’s length.

“Ow, you’re hurting me, you’re … oh!” She was suddenly silent. Terror had made her forget the pain. Opening her eyes, she had seen his face—no, not his face, a ferocious stranger’s, pale, distorted, twitching with some insane, inexplicable fury. Aghast, “But what is it, John?” she whispered. He did not answer, but only stared into her face with those mad eyes. The hands that held her wrists were trembling. He breathed deeply and irregularly. Faint almost to imperceptibility, but appalling, she suddenly heard the grinding of his teeth. “What is it?” she almost screamed.

And as though awakened by her cry he caught her by the shoulders and shook her. “Whore!” he shouted. “Whore! Impudent strumpet!”

“Oh, don’t, do-on’t,” she protested in a voice made grotesquely tremulous by his shaking.

“Whore!”

“Pie-ease.”

“Damned whore!”

“A gra-amme is be-etter …” she began.

The Savage pushed her away with such force that she staggered and fell. “Go,” he shouted, standing over her menacingly, “get out of my sight or I’ll kill you.” He clenched his fists.

Lenina raised her arm to cover her face. “No, please don’t, John …”

“Hurry up. Quick!”

One arm still raised, and following his every movement with a terrified eye, she scrambled to her feet and still crouching, still covering her head, made a dash for the bathroom.

The noise of that prodigious slap by which her departure was accelerated was like a pistol shot.

“Ow!” Lenina bounded forward.

Safely locked into the bathroom, she had leisure to take stock of her injuries. Standing with her back to the mirror, she twisted her head. Looking over her left shoulder she could see the imprint of an open hand standing out distinct and crimson on the pearly flesh. Gingerly she rubbed the wounded spot.

Outside, in the other room, the Savage was striding up and down, marching, marching to the drums and music of magical words. “The wren goes to’t and the small gilded fly does lecher in my sight.” Maddeningly they rumbled in his ears. “The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t with a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are Centaurs, though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit. Beneath is all the fiend’s. There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie, pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.”

“John!” ventured a small ingratiating voice from the bathroom. “John!”

“O thou weed, who are so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet that the sense aches at thee. Was this most goodly book made to write ‘whore’ upon? Heaven stops the nose at it …”

But her perfume still hung about him, his jacket was white with the powder that had scented her velvety body. “Impudent strumpet, impudent strumpet, impudent strumpet.” The inexorable rhythm beat itself out. “Impudent …”

“John, do you think I might have my clothes?”

He picked up the bell-bottomed trousers, the blouse, the zippicamiknicks.

“Open!” he ordered, kicking the door.

“No, I won’t.” The voice was frightened and defiant.

“Well, how do you expect me to give them to you?”

“Push them through the ventilator over the door.”

He did what she suggested and returned to his uneasy pacing of the room. “Impudent strumpet, impudent strumpet. The devil Luxury with his fat rump and potato finger …”

“John.”

He would not answer. “Fat rump and potato finger.”

“John.”

“What is it?” he asked gruffly.

“I wonder if you’d mind giving me my Malthusian belt.”

Lenina sat, listening to the footsteps in the other room, wondering, as she listened, how long he was likely to go tramping up and down like that; whether she would have to wait until he left the flat; or if it would be safe, after allowing his madness a reasonable time to subside, to open the bathroom door and make a dash for it.

She was interrupted in the midst of these uneasy speculations by the sound of the telephone bell ringing in the other room. Abruptly the tramping ceased. She heard the voice of the Savage parleying with silence.

“Hullo.”

.…

“Yes.”

.…

“If I do not usurp myself, I am.”

.…

“Yes, didn’t you hear me say so? Mr. Savage speaking.”

.…

“What? Who’s ill? Of course it interests me.”

.…

“But is it serious? Is she really bad? I’ll go at once …”

.…

“Not in her rooms any more? Where has she been taken?”

.…

“Oh, my God! What’s the address?”

.…

“Three Park Lane—is that it? Three? Thanks.” Lenina heard the click of the replaced receiver, then hurrying steps. A door slammed. There was silence. Was he really gone?

With an infinity of precautions she opened the door a quarter of an inch; peeped through the crack; was encouraged by the view of emptiness; opened a little further; and put her whole head out; finally tiptoed into the room; stood for a few seconds with strongly beating heart, listening, listening; then darted to the front door, opened, slipped through, slammed, ran. It was not till she was in the lift and actually dropping down the well that she began to feel herself secure.

14

The Park Lane Hospital for the Dying was a sixty-story tower of primrose tiles. As the Savage stepped out of his taxicopter a convoy of gaily-coloured aerial hearses rose whirring from the roof and darted away across the Park, westwards, bound for the Slough Crematorium. At the lift gates the presiding porter gave him the information he required, and he dropped down to Ward 81 (a Galloping Senility ward, the porter explained) on the seventeenth floor.

It was a large room bright with sunshine and yellow paint, and containing twenty beds, all occupied. Linda was dying in company—in company and with all the modern conveniences. The air was continuously alive with gay synthetic melodies. At the foot of every bed, confronting its moribund occupant, was a television box. Television was left on, a running tap, from morning till night. Every quarter of an hour the prevailing perfume of the room was automatically changed. “We try,” explained the nurse, who had taken charge of the Savage at the door, “we try to create a thoroughly pleasant atmosphere here, something between a first-class hotel and a feely-palace, if you take my meaning.”

“Where is she?” asked the Savage, ignoring these polite explanations.

The nurse was offended. “You are in a hurry,” she said.

“Is there any hope?” he asked.

“You mean, of her not dying?” (He nodded.) “No, of course there isn’t. When somebody’s sent here, there’s no …” Startled by the expression of distress on his pale face, she suddenly broke off. “Why, whatever is the matter?” she asked. She was not accustomed to this kind of thing in visitors. (Not that there were many visitors anyhow: or any reason why there should be many visitors.) “You’re not feeling ill, are you?”

He shook his head. “She’s my mother,” he said in a scarcely audible voice.

The nurse glanced at him with startled, horrified eyes; then quickly looked away. From throat to temple she was all one hot blush.

“Take me to her,” said the Savage, making an effort to speak in an ordinary tone.

Still blushing, she led the way down the ward. Faces still fresh and unwithered (for senility galloped so hard that it had no time to age the cheeks, only the heart and brain) turned as they passed. Their progress was followed by the blank, incurious eyes of second infancy. The Savage shuddered as he looked.

Linda was lying in the last of the long row of beds, next to the wall. Propped up on pillows, she was watching the Semi-finals of the South American Riemann-Surface Tennis Championship, which were being played in silent and diminished reproduction on the screen of the television box at the foot of the bed. Hither and thither across their square of illuminated glass the little figures noiselessly darted, like fish in an aquarium—the silent but agitated inhabitants of another world.

Linda looked on, vaguely and uncomprehendingly smiling. Her pale, bloated face wore an expression of imbecile happiness. Every now and then her eyelids closed, and for a few seconds she seemed to be dozing. Then with a little start she would wake up again—wake up to the aquarium antics of the Tennis Champions, to the Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana rendering of “Hug me till you drug me, honey,” to the warm draught of verbena that came blowing through the ventilator above her head—would wake to these things, or rather to a dream of which these things, transformed and embellished by the soma in her blood, were the marvellous constituents, and smile once more her broken and discoloured smile of infantile contentment.

“Well, I must go,” said the nurse. “I’ve got my batch of children coming. Besides, there’s Number 3.” She pointed up the ward. “Might go off any minute now. Well, make yourself comfortable.” She walked briskly away.

The Savage sat down beside the bed.

“Linda,” he whispered, taking her hand.

At the sound of her name, she turned. Her vague eyes brightened with recognition. She squeezed his hand, she smiled, her lips moved, then quite suddenly her head fell forward. She was asleep. He sat watching her—seeking through the tired flesh, seeking and finding that young, bright face which had stooped over his childhood in Malpais, remembering (and he closed his eyes) her voice, her movements, all the events of their life together. “Streptocock-Gee to Banbury T …” How beautiful her singing had been! And those childish rhymes, how magically strange and mysterious!

A, B, C, vitamin D:

The fat’s in the liver, the cod’s in the sea.

He felt the hot tears welling up behind his eyelids as he recalled the words and Linda’s voice as she repeated them. And then the reading lessons: The tot is in the pot, the cat is on the mat; and the Elementary Instructions for Beta Workers in the Embryo Store. And long evenings by the fire or, in summertime, on the roof of the little house, when she told him those stories about the Other Place, outside the Reservation: that beautiful, beautiful Other Place, whose memory, as of a heaven, a paradise of goodness and loveliness, he still kept whole and intact, undefiled by contact with the reality of this real London, these actual civilized men and women.

A sudden noise of shrill voices made him open his eyes and, after hastily brushing away the tears, look round. What seemed an interminable stream of identical eight-year-old male twins was pouring into the room. Twin after twin, twin after twin, they came—a nightmare. Their faces, their repeated face—for there was only one between the lot of them—puggishly stared, all nostrils and pale goggling eyes. Their uniform was khaki. All their mouths hung open. Squealing and chattering they entered. In a moment, it seemed, the ward was maggoty with them. They swarmed between the beds, clambered over, crawled under, peeped into the television boxes, made faces at the patients.

Linda astonished and rather alarmed them. A group stood clustered at the foot of her bed, staring with the frightened and stupid curiosity of animals suddenly confronted by the unknown.

“Oh, look, look!” They spoke in low, scared voices. “Whatever is the matter with her? Why is she so fat?”

They had never seen a face like hers before—had never seen a face that was not youthful and taut-skinned, a body that had ceased to be slim and upright. All these moribund sexagenarians had the appearance of childish girls. At forty-four, Linda seemed, by contrast, a monster of flaccid and distorted senility.

“Isn’t she awful?” came the whispered comments. “Look at her teeth!”

Suddenly from under the bed a pug-faced twin popped up between John’s chair and the wall, and began peering into Linda’s sleeping face.

“I say …” he began; but the sentence ended prematurely in a squeal. The Savage had seized him by the collar, lifted him clear over the chair and, with a smart box on the ears, sent him howling away.

His yells brought the Head Nurse hurrying to the rescue.

“What have you been doing to him?” she demanded fiercely. “I won’t have you striking the children.”

“Well then, keep them away from this bed.” The Savage’s voice was trembling with indignation. “What are these filthy little brats doing here at all? It’s disgraceful!”

“Disgraceful? But what do you mean? They’re being death-conditioned. And I tell you,” she warned him truculently, “if I have any more of your interference with their conditioning, I’ll send for the porters and have you thrown out.”

The Savage rose to his feet and took a couple of steps towards her. His movements and the expression on his face were so menacing that the nurse fell back in terror. With a great effort he checked himself and, without speaking, turned away and sat down again by the bed.

Reassured, but with a dignity that was a trifle shrill and uncertain, “I’ve warned you,” said the nurse, “so mind.” Still, she led the too inquisitive twins away and made them join in the game of hunt-the-zipper, which had been organized by one of her colleagues at the other end of the room.

“Run along now and have your cup of caffeine solution, dear,” she said to the other nurse. The exercise of authority restored her confidence, made her feel better. “Now children!” she called.

Linda had stirred uneasily, had opened her eyes for a moment, looked vaguely around, and then once more dropped off to sleep. Sitting beside her, the Savage tried hard to recapture his mood of a few minutes before. “A, B, C, vitamin D,” he repeated to himself, as though the words were a spell that would restore the dead past to life. But the spell was ineffective. Obstinately the beautiful memories refused to rise; there was only a hateful resurrection of jealousies and uglinesses and miseries. Popé with the blood trickling down from his cut shoulder; and Linda hideously asleep, and the flies buzzing round the spilt mescal on the floor beside the bed; and the boys calling those names as she passed.… Ah, no, no! He shut his eyes, he shook his head in strenuous denial of these memories. “A, B, C, vitamin D …” He tried to think of those times when he sat on her knees and she put her arms about him and sang, over and over again, rocking him, rocking him to sleep. “A, B, C, vitamin D, vitamin D, vitamin D …”

The Super-Vox-Wurlitzeriana had risen to a sobbing crescendo; and suddenly the verbena gave place, in the scent-circulating system, to an intense patchouli. Linda stirred, woke up, stared for a few seconds bewilderedly at the Semi-finalists, then, lifting her face, sniffed once or twice at the newly perfumed air and suddenly smiled—a smile of childish ecstasy.

“Popé!” she murmured, and closed her eyes. “Oh, I do so like it, I do …” She sighed and let herself sink back into the pillows.

“But, Linda!” The Savage spoke imploringly, “Don’t you know me?” He had tried so hard, had done his very best; why wouldn’t she allow him to forget? He squeezed her limp hand almost with violence, as though he would force her to come back from this dream of ignoble pleasures, from these base and hateful memories—back into the present, back into reality; the appalling present, the awful reality—but sublime, but significant, but desperately important precisely because of the imminence of that which made them so fearful. “Don’t you know me, Linda?”

He felt the faint answering pressure of her hand. The tears started into his eyes. He bent over her and kissed her.

Her lips moved. “Popé!” she whispered again, and it was as though he had had a pailful of ordure thrown in his face.

Anger suddenly boiled up in him. Balked for the second time, the passion of his grief had found another outlet, was transformed into a passion of agonized rage.

“But I’m John!” he shouted. “I’m John!” And in his furious misery he actually caught her by the shoulder and shook her.

Linda’s eyes fluttered open; she saw him, knew him—“John!”—but situated the real face, the real and violent hands, in an imaginary world—among the inward and private equivalents of patchouli and the Super-Wurlitzer, among the transfigured memories and the strangely transposed sensations that constituted the universe of her dream. She knew him for John, her son, but fancied him an intruder into that paradisal Malpais where she had been spending her soma-holiday with Popé. He was angry because she liked Popé, he was shaking her because Popé was there in the bed—as though there were something wrong, as though all civilized people didn’t do the same. “Every one belongs to every …” Her voice suddenly died into an almost inaudible breathless croaking. Her mouth fell open: she made a desperate effort to fill her lungs with air. But it was as though she had forgotten how to breathe. She tried to cry out—but no sound came; only the terror of her staring eyes revealed what she was suffering. Her hands went to her throat, then clawed at the air—the air she could no longer breathe, the air that, for her, had ceased to exist.

The Savage was on his feet, bent over her. “What is it, Linda? What is it?” His voice was imploring; it was as though he were begging to be reassured.

The look she gave him was charged with an unspeakable terror—with terror and, it seemed to him, reproach. She tried to raise herself in bed, but fell back on to the pillows. Her face was horribly distorted, her lips blue.

The Savage turned and ran up the ward.

“Quick, quick!” he shouted. “Quick!”

Standing in the center of a ring of zipper-hunting twins, the Head Nurse looked round. The first moment’s astonishment gave place almost instantly to disapproval. “Don’t shout! Think of the little ones,” she said, frowning. “You might decondition … But what are you doing?” He had broken through the ring. “Be careful!” A child was yelling.

“Quick, quick!” He caught her by the sleeve, dragged her after him. “Quick! Something’s happened. I’ve killed her.”

By the time they were back at the end of the ward Linda was dead.

The Savage stood for a moment in frozen silence, then fell on his knees beside the bed and, covering his face with his hands, sobbed uncontrollably.

The nurse stood irresolute, looking now at the kneeling figure by the bed (the scandalous exhibition!) and now (poor children!) at the twins who had stopped their hunting of the zipper and were staring from the other end of the ward, staring with all their eyes and nostrils at the shocking scene that was being enacted round Bed 20. Should she speak to him? try to bring him back to a sense of decency? remind him of where he was? of what fatal mischief he might do to these poor innocents? Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry—as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that! It might give them the most disastrous ideas about the subject, might upset them into reacting in the entirely wrong, the utterly antisocial way.

She stepped forward, she touched him on the shoulder. “Can’t you behave?” she said in a low, angry voice. But, looking around, she saw that half a dozen twins were already on their feet and advancing down the ward. The circle was disintegrating. In another moment … No, the risk was too great; the whole Group might be put back six or seven months in its conditioning. She hurried back towards her menaced charges.

“Now, who wants a chocolate éclair?” she asked in a loud, cheerful tone.

“Me!” yelled the entire Bokanovsky Group in chorus. Bed 20 was completely forgotten.

“Oh, God, God, God …” the Savage kept repeating to himself. In the chaos of grief and remorse that filled his mind it was the one articulate word. “God!” he whispered it aloud. “God …”

“Whatever is he saying?” said a voice, very near, distinct and shrill through the warblings of the Super-Wurlitzer.

The Savage violently started and, uncovering his face, looked round. Five khaki twins, each with the stump of a long éclair in his right hand, and their identical faces variously smeared with liquid chocolate, were standing in a row, puggily goggling at him.

They met his eyes and simultaneously grinned. One of them pointed with his éclair butt.

“Is she dead?” he asked.

The Savage stared at them for a moment in silence. Then in silence he rose to his feet, in silence slowly walked towards the door.

“Is she dead?” repeated the inquisitive twin trotting at his side.

The Savage looked down at him and still without speaking pushed him away. The twin fell on the floor and at once began to howl. The Savage did not even look round.

15

The menial stuff of the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying con-sisted of one hundred and sixty-two Deltas divided into two Bokanovsky Groups of eighty-four red-headed female and seventy-eight dark dolychocephalic male twins, respectively. At six, when their working day was over, the two Groups assembled in the vestibule of the Hospital and were served by the Deputy Sub-Bursar with their soma ration.

From the lift the Savage stepped out into the midst of them. But his mind was elsewhere—with death, with his grief, and his remorse; mechanically, without consciousness of what he was doing, he began to shoulder his way through the crowd.

“Who are you pushing? Where do you think you’re going?”

High, low, from a multitude of separate throats, only two voices squeaked or growled. Repeated indefinitely, as though by a train of mirrors, two faces, one a hairless and freckled moon haloed in orange, the other a thin, beaked bird-mask, stubbly with two days’ beard, turned angrily towards him. Their words and, in his ribs, the sharp nudging of elbows, broke through his unawareness. He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw—knew it, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent delirium of his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness. Twins, twins.… Like maggots they had swarmed defilingly over the mystery of Linda’s death. Maggots again, but larger, full grown, they now crawled across his grief and his repentance. He halted and, with bewildered and horrified eyes, stared round him at the khaki mob, in the midst of which, overtopping it by a full head, he stood. “How many goodly creatures are there here!” The singing words mocked him derisively. “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world …”

“Soma distribution!” shouted a loud voice. “In good order, please. Hurry up there.”

A door had been opened, a table and chair carried into the vestibule. The voice was that of a jaunty young Alpha, who had entered carrying a black iron cash-box. A murmur of satisfaction went up from the expectant twins. They forgot all about the Savage. Their attention was now focused on the black cash-box, which the young man had placed on the table, and was now in process of unlocking. The lid was lifted.

“Oo-oh!” said all the hundred and sixty-two simultaneously, as though they were looking at fireworks.

The young man took out a handful of tiny pill-boxes. “Now,” he said peremptorily, “step forward, please. One at a time, and no shoving.”

One at a time, with no shoving, the twins stepped forward. First two males, then a female, then another male, then three females, then …

The Savage stood looking on. “O brave new world, O brave new world …” In his mind the singing words seemed to change their tone. They had mocked him through his misery and remorse, mocked him with how hideous a note of cynical derision! Fiendishly laughing, they had insisted on the low squalor, the nauseous ugliness of the nightmare. Now, suddenly, they trumpeted a call to arms. “O brave new world!” Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble. “O brave new world!” It was a challenge, a command.

“No shoving there now!” shouted the Deputy Sub-Bursar in a fury. He slammed down the lid of his cash-box. “I shall stop the distribution unless I have good behaviour.”

The Deltas muttered, jostled one another a little, and then were still. The threat had been effective. Deprivation of soma—appalling thought!

“That’s better,” said the young man, and reopened his cash-box.

Linda had been a slave, Linda had died; others should live in freedom, and the world be made beautiful. A reparation, a duty. And suddenly it was luminously clear to the Savage what he must do; it was as though a shutter had been opened, a curtain drawn back.

“Now,” said the Deputy Sub-Bursar.

Another khaki female stepped forward.

“Stop!” called the Savage in a loud and ringing voice. “Stop!”

He pushed his way to the table; the Deltas stared at him with astonishment.

“Ford!” said the Deputy Sub-Bursar, below his breath. “It’s the Savage.” He felt scared.

“Listen, I beg of you,” cried the Savage earnestly. “Lend me your ears …” He had never spoken in public before, and found it very difficult to express what he wanted to say. “Don’t take that horrible stuff. It’s poison, it’s poison.”

“I say, Mr. Savage,” said the Deputy Sub-Bursar, smiling propitiatingly. “Would you mind letting me …”

“Poison to soul as well as body.”

“Yes, but let me get on with my distribution, won’t you? There’s a good fellow.” With the cautious tenderness of one who strokes a notoriously vicious animal, he patted the Savage’s arm. “Just let me …”

“Never!” cried the Savage.

“But look here, old man …”

“Throw it all away, that horrible poison.”

The words “Throw it all away” pierced through the enfolding layers of incomprehension to the quick of the Delta’s consciousness. An angry murmur went up from the crowd.

“I come to bring you freedom,” said the Savage, turning back towards the twins. “I come …”

The Deputy Sub-Bursar heard no more; he had slipped out of the vestibule and was looking up a number in the telephone book.

“Not in his own rooms,” Bernard summed up. “Not in mine, not in yours. Not at the Aphroditæum; not at the Centre or the College. Where can he have got to?”

Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. They had come back from their work expecting to find the Savage waiting for them at one or other of the usual meeting-places, and there was no sign of the fellow. Which was annoying, as they had meant to nip across to Biarritz in Helmholtz’s four-seater sporticopter. They’d be late for dinner if he didn’t come soon.

“We’ll give him five more minutes,” said Helmholtz. “If he doesn’t turn up by then we’ll …”

The ringing of the telephone bell interrupted him. He picked up the receiver. “Hullo. Speaking.” Then, after a long interval of listening, “Ford in Flivver!” he swore. “I’ll come at once.”

“What is it?” Bernard asked.

“A fellow I know at the Park Lane Hospital,” said Helmholtz. “The Savage is there. Seems to have gone mad. Anyhow, it’s urgent. Will you come with me?”

Together they hurried along the corridor to the lifts.

“But do you like being slaves?” the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with ardour and indignation. “Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking,” he added, exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had come to save. The insults bounced off their carapace of thick stupidity; they stared at him with a blank expression of dull and sullen resentment in their eyes. “Yes, puking!” he fairly shouted. Grief and remorse, compassion and duty—all were forgotten now and, as it were, absorbed into an intense overpowering hatred of these less than human monsters. “Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?” Rage was making him fluent; the words came easily, in a rush. “Don’t you?” he repeated, but got no answer to his question. “Very well then,” he went on grimly. “I’ll teach you; I’ll make you be free whether you want to or not.” And pushing open a window that looked on to the inner court of the Hospital, he began to throw the little pill-boxes of soma tablets in hand-fills out into the area.

For a moment the khaki mob was silent, petrified, at the spectacle of this wanton sacrilege, with amazement and horror.

“He’s mad,” whispered Bernard, staring with wide open eyes. “They’ll kill him. They’ll …” A great shout suddenly went up from the mob; a wave of movement drove it menacingly towards the Savage. “Ford help him!” said Bernard, and averted his eyes.

“Ford helps those who help themselves.” And with a laugh, actually a laugh of exultation, Helmholtz Watson pushed his way through the crowd.

“Free, free!” the Savage shouted, and with one hand continued to throw the soma into the area while, with the other, he punched the indistinguishable faces of his assailants. “Free!” And suddenly there was Helmholtz at his side—“Good old Helmholtz!”—also punching—“Men at last!”—and in the interval also throwing the poison out by handfuls through the open window. “Yes, men! men!” and there was no more poison left. He picked up the cash-box and showed them its black emptiness. “You’re free!”

Howling, the Deltas charged with a redoubled fury.

Hesitant on the fringes of the battle. “They’re done for,” said Bernard and, urged by a sudden impulse, ran forward to help them; then thought better of it and halted; then, ashamed, stepped forward again; then again thought better of it, and was standing in an agony of humiliated indecision—thinking that they might be killed if he didn’t help them, and that he might be killed if he did—when (Ford be praised!), goggle-eyed and swine-snouted in their gas-masks, in ran the police.

Bernard dashed to meet them. He waved his arms; and it was action, he was doing something. He shouted “Help!” several times, more and more loudly so as to give himself the illusion of helping. “Help! Help! HELP!”

The policemen pushed him out of the way and got on with their work. Three men with spraying machines buckled to their shoulders pumped thick clouds of soma vapour into the air. Two more were busy round the portable Synthetic Music Box. Carrying water pistols charged with a powerful anæsthetic, four others had pushed their way into the crowd and were methodically laying out, squirt by squirt, the more ferocious of the fighters.

“Quick, quick!” yelled Bernard. “They’ll be killed if you don’t hurry. They’ll … Oh!” Annoyed by his chatter, one of the policemen had given him a shot from his water pistol. Bernard stood for a second or two wambling unsteadily on legs that seemed to have lost their bones, their tendons, their muscles, to have become mere sticks of jelly, and at last not even jelly—water: he tumbled in a heap on the floor.

Suddenly, from out of the Synthetic Music Box a Voice began to speak. The Voice of Reason, the Voice of Good Feeling. The sound-track roll was unwinding itself in Synthetic Anti-Riot Speech Number Two (Medium Strength). Straight from the depths of a non-existent heart, “My friends, my friends!” said the Voice so pathetically, with a note of such infinitely tender reproach that, behind their gas masks, even the policemen’s eyes were momentarily dimmed with tears, “what is the meaning of this? Why aren’t you all being happy and good together? Happy and good,” the Voice repeated. “At peace, at peace.” It trembled, sank into a whisper and momentarily expired. “Oh, I do want you to be happy,” it began, with a yearning earnestness. “I do so want you to be good! Please, please be good and …”

Two minutes later the Voice and the soma vapour had produced their effect. In tears, the Deltas were kissing and hugging one another—half a dozen twins at a time in a comprehensive embrace. Even Helmholtz and the Savage were almost crying. A fresh supply of pill-boxes was brought in from the Bursary; a new distribution was hastily made and, to the sound of the Voice’s richly affectionate, baritone valedictions, the twins dispersed, blubbering as though their hearts would break. “Good-bye, my dearest, dearest friends, Ford keep you! Good-bye, my dearest, dearest friends, Ford keep you. Good-bye my dearest, dearest …”

When the last of the Deltas had gone the policeman switched off the current. The angelic Voice fell silent.

“Will you come quietly?” asked the Sergeant, “or must we anæsthetize?” He pointed his water pistol menacingly.

“Oh, we’ll come quietly,” the Savage answered, dabbing alternately a cut lip, a scratched neck, and a bitten left hand.

Still keeping his handkerchief to his bleeding nose Helmholtz nodded in confirmation.

Awake and having recovered the use of his legs, Bernard had chosen this moment to move as inconspicuously as he could towards the door.

“Hi, you there,” called the Sergeant, and a swine-masked policeman hurried across the room and laid a hand on the young man’s shoulder.

Bernard turned with an expression of indignant innocence. Escaping? He hadn’t dreamed of such a thing. “Though what on earth you want me for,” he said to the Sergeant, “I really can’t imagine.”

“You’re a friend of the prisoner’s, aren’t you?”

“Well …” said Bernard, and hesitated. No, he really couldn’t deny it. “Why shouldn’t I be?” he asked.

“Come on then,” said the Sergeant, and led the way towards the door and the waiting police car.

16

The room into which the three were ushered was the Controller’s study.

“His fordship will be down in a moment.” The Gamma butler left them to themselves.

Helmholtz laughed aloud.

“It’s more like a caffeine-solution party than a trial,” he said, and let himself fall into the most luxurious of the pneumatic arm-chairs. “Cheer up, Bernard,” he added, catching sight of his friend’s green unhappy face. But Bernard would not be cheered; without answering, without even looking at Helmholtz, he went and sat down on the most uncomfortable chair in the room, carefully chosen in the obscure hope of somehow deprecating the wrath of the higher powers.

The Savage meanwhile wandered restlessly round the room, peering with a vague superficial inquisitiveness at the books in the shelves, at the sound-track rolls and reading machine bobbins in their numbered pigeon-holes. On the table under the window lay a massive volume bound in limp black leather-surrogate, and stamped with large golden T’s. He picked it up and opened it. MY LIFE AND WORK, BY OUR FORD. The book had been published at Detroit by the Society for the Propagation of Fordian Knowledge. Idly he turned the pages, read a sentence here, a paragraph there, and had just come to the conclusion that the book didn’t interest him, when the door opened, and the Resident World Controller for Western Europe walked briskly into the room.

Mustapha Mond shook hands with all three of them; but it was to the Savage that he addressed himself. “So you don’t much like civilization, Mr. Savage,” he said.

The Savage looked at him. He had been prepared to lie, to bluster, to remain sullenly unresponsive; but, reassured by the good-humoured intelligence of the Controller’s face, he decided to tell the truth, straightforwardly. “No.” He shook his head.

Bernard started and looked horrified. What would the Controller think? To be labelled as the friend of a man who said that he didn’t like civilization—said it openly and, of all people, to the Controller—it was terrible. “But, John,” he began. A look from Mustapha Mond reduced him to an abject silence.

“Of course,” the Savage went on to admit, “there are some very nice things. All that music in the air, for instance …”

“Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears and sometimes voices.”

The Savage’s face lit up with a sudden pleasure. “Have you read it too?” he asked. “I thought nobody knew about that book here, in England.”

“Almost nobody. I’m one of the very few. It’s prohibited, you see. But as I make the laws here, I can also break them. With impunity, Mr. Marx,” he added, turning to Bernard. “Which I’m afraid you can’t do”

Bernard sank into a yet more hopeless misery.

“But why is it prohibited?” asked the Savage. In the excitement of meeting a man who had read Shakespeare he had momentarily forgotten everything else.

The Controller shrugged his shoulders. “Because it’s old; that’s the chief reason. We haven’t any use for old things here.”

“Even when they’re beautiful?”

“Particularly when they’re beautiful. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.”

“But the new ones are so stupid and horrible. Those plays, where there’s nothing but helicopters flying about and you feel the people kissing.” He made a grimace. “Goats and monkeys!” Only in Othello’s words could he find an adequate vehicle for his contempt and hatred.

“Nice tame animals, anyhow,” the Controller murmured parenthetically.

“Why don’t you let them see Othello instead?”

“I’ve told you; it’s old. Besides, they couldn’t understand it.”

Yes, that was true. He remembered how Helmholtz had laughed at Romeo and Juliet. “Well then,” he said, after a pause, “something new that’s like Othello, and that they could understand.”

“That’s what we’ve all been wanting to write,” said Helmholtz, breaking a long silence.

“And it’s what you never will write,” said the Controller. “Because, if it were really like Othello nobody could understand it, however new it might be. And if it were new, it couldn’t possibly be like Othello.”

“Why not?”

“Yes, why not?” Helmholtz repeated. He too was forgetting the unpleasant realities of the situation. Green with anxiety and apprehension, only Bernard remembered them; the others ignored him. “Why not?”

“Because our world is not the same as Othello’s world. You can’t make flivvers without steel—and you can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma. Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty, Mr. Savage. Liberty!” He laughed. “Expecting Deltas to know what liberty is! And now expecting them to understand Othello! My good boy!”

The Savage was silent for a little. “All the same,” he insisted obstinately, “Othello’s good, Othello’s better than those feelies.”

“Of course it is,” the Controller agreed. “But that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.”

“But they don’t mean anything.”

“They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience.”

“But they’re … they’re told by an idiot.”

The Controller laughed. “You’re not being very polite to your friend, Mr. Watson. One of our most distinguished Emotional Engineers …”

“But he’s right,” said Helmholtz gloomily. “Because it is idiotic. Writing when there’s nothing to say …”

“Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You’re making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel—works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation.”

The Savage shook his head. “It all seems to me quite horrible.”

“Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

“I suppose not,” said the Savage after a silence. “But need it be quite so bad as those twins?” He passed his hand over his eyes as though he were trying to wipe away the remembered image of those long rows of identical midgets at the assembling tables, those queued-up twin-herds at the entrance to the Brentford monorail station, those human maggots swarming round Linda’s bed of death, the endlessly repeated face of his assailants. He looked at his bandaged left hand and shuddered. “Horrible!”

“But how useful! I see you don’t like our Bokanovsky Groups; but, I assure you, they’re the foundation on which everything else is built. They’re the gyroscope that stabilizes the rocket plane of state on its unswerving course.” The deep voice thrillingly vibrated; the gesticulating hand implied all space and the onrush of the irresistible machine. Mustapha Mond’s oratory was almost up to synthetic standards.

“I was wondering,” said the Savage, “why you had them at all—seeing that you can get whatever you want out of those bottles. Why don’t you make everybody an Alpha Double Plus while you’re about it?”

Mustapha Mond laughed. “Because we have no wish to have our throats cut,” he answered. “We believe in happiness and stability. A society of Alphas couldn’t fail to be unstable and miserable. Imagine a factory staffed by Alphas—that is to say by separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities. Imagine it!” he repeated.

The Savage tried to imagine it, not very successfully.

“It’s an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work—go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized—but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren’t sacrifices; they’re the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he’s got to run. He can’t help himself; he’s foredoomed. Even after decanting, he’s still inside a bottle—an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course,” the Controller meditatively continued, “goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles. It’s obvious theoretically. But it has also been proved in actual practice. The result of the Cyprus experiment was convincing.”

“What was that?” asked the Savage.

Mustapha Mond smiled. “Well, you can call it an experiment in rebottling if you like. It began in A.F. 473. The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn’t properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen.”

The Savage sighed, profoundly.

“The optimum population,” said Mustapha Mond, “is modelled on the iceberg—eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.”

“And they’re happy below the water line?”

“Happier than above it. Happier than your friend here, for example.” He pointed.

“In spite of that awful work?”

“Awful? They don’t find it so. On the contrary, they like it. It’s light, it’s childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True,” he added, “they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn’t. The experiment was tried, more than a century and a half ago. The whole of Ireland was put on to the four-hour day. What was the result? Unrest and a large increase in the consumption of soma; that was all. Those three and a half hours of extra leisure were so far from being a source of happiness, that people felt constrained to take a holiday from them. The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes: Thousands of them.” Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. “And why don’t we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure. It’s the same with agriculture. We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don’t. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes—because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That’s another reason why we’re so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science.”

Science? The Savage frowned. He knew the word. But what it exactly signified he could not say. Shakespeare and the old men of the pueblo had never mentioned science, and from Linda he had only gathered the vaguest hints: science was something you made helicopters with, something that caused you to laugh at the Corn Dances, something that prevented you from being wrinkled and losing your teeth. He made a desperate effort to take the Controller’s meaning.

“Yes,” Mustapha Mond was saying, “that’s another item in the cost of stability. It isn’t only art that’s incompatible with happiness; it’s also science. Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”

“What?” said Helmholtz, in astonishment. “But we’re always saying that science is everything. It’s a hypnopædic platitude.”

“Three times a week between thirteen and seventeen,” put in Bernard.

“And all the science propaganda we do at the College …”

“Yes; but what sort of science?” asked Mustapha Mond sarcastically. “You’ve had no scientific training, so you can’t judge. I was a pretty good physicist in my time. Too good—good enough to realize that all our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn’t be added to except by special permission from the head cook. I’m the head cook now. But I was an inquisitive young scullion once. I started doing a bit of cooking on my own. Unorthodox cooking, illicit cooking. A bit of real science, in fact.” He was silent.

“What happened?” asked Helmholtz Watson.

The Controller sighed. “Very nearly what’s going to happen to you young men. I was on the point of being sent to an island.”

The words galvanized Bernard into violent and unseemly activity. “Send me to an island?” He jumped up, ran across the room, and stood gesticulating in front of the Controller. “You can’t send me. I haven’t done anything. It was the others. I swear it was the others.” He pointed accusingly to Helmholtz and the Savage. “Oh, please don’t send me to Iceland. I promise I’ll do what I ought to do. Give me another chance. Please give me another chance.” The tears began to flow. “I tell you, it’s their fault,” he sobbed. “And not to Iceland. Oh please, your fordship, please …” And in a paroxysm of abjection he threw himself on his knees before the Controller. Mustapha Mond tried to make him get up; but Bernard persisted in his grovelling; the stream of words poured out inexhaustibly. In the end the Controller had to ring for his fourth secretary.

“Bring three men,” he ordered, “and take Mr. Marx into a bedroom. Give him a good soma vaporization and then put him to bed and leave him.”

The fourth secretary went out and returned with three green-uniformed twin footmen. Still shouting and sobbing, Bernard was carried out.

“One would think he was going to have his throat cut,” said the Controller, as the door closed. “Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he’d understand that his punishment is really a reward. He’s being sent to an island. That’s to say, he’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who’s any one. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson.”

Helmholtz laughed. “Then why aren’t you on an island yourself?”

“Because, finally, I preferred this,” the Controller answered. “I was given the choice; to be sent to an island, where I could have got on with my pure science, or to be taken on to the Controllers’ Council with the prospect of succeeding in due course to an actual Controllership. I chose this and let the science go.” After a little silence, “Sometimes,” he added, “I rather regret the science. Happiness is a hard master—particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.” He sighed, fell silent again, then continued in a brisker tone, “Well, duty’s duty. One can’t consult one’s own preference. I’m interested in truth, I like science. But truth’s a menace, science is a public danger. As dangerous as it’s been beneficent. It has given us the stablest equilibrium in history. China’s was hopelessly insecure by comparison; even the primitive matriarchies weren’t steadier than we are. Thanks, I repeat, to science. But we can’t allow science to undo its own good work. That’s why we so carefully limit the scope of its researches—that’s why I almost got sent to an island. We don’t allow it to deal with any but the most immediate problems of the moment. All other enquiries are most sedulously discouraged. It’s curious,” he went on after a little pause, “to read what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value; all the rest was secondary and subordinate. True, ideas were beginning to change even then. Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t. And, of course, whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered. Still, in spite of everything, unrestricted scientific research was still permitted. People still went on talking about truth and beauty as though they were the sovereign goods. Right up to the time of the Nine Years’ War. That made them change their tune all right. What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you? That was when science first began to be controlled—after the Nine Years’ War. People were ready to have even their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life. We’ve gone on controlling ever since. It hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. But it’s been very good for happiness. One can’t have something for nothing. Happiness has got to be paid for. You’re paying for it, Mr. Watson—paying because you happen to be too much interested in beauty. I was too much interested in truth; I paid too.” “But you didn’t go to an island,” said the Savage, breaking a long silence.

The Controller smiled. “That’s how I paid. By choosing to serve happiness. Other people’s—not mine. It’s lucky,” he added, after a pause, “that there are such a lot of islands in the world. I don’t know what we should do without them. Put you all in the lethal chamber, I suppose. By the way, Mr. Watson, would you like a tropical climate? The Marquesas, for example; or Samoa? Or something rather more bracing?”

Helmholtz rose from his pneumatic chair. “I should like a thoroughly bad climate,” he answered. “I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms, for example …”

The Controller nodded his approbation. “I like your spirit, Mr. Watson. I like it very much indeed. As much as I officially disapprove of it.” He smiled. “What about the Falkland Islands?”

“Yes, I think that will do,” Helmholtz answered. “And now, if you don’t mind, I’ll go and see how poor Bernard’s getting on.”

17

“Art, science—you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness,” said the Savage, when they were alone. “Anything else?”

“Well, religion, of course,” replied the Controller. “There used to be something called God—before the Nine Years’ War. But I was forgetting; you know all about God, I suppose.”

“Well …” The Savage hesitated. He would have liked to say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy darkness, about death. He would have liked to speak; but there were no words. Not even in Shakespeare.

The Controller, meanwhile, had crossed to the other side of the room and was unlocking a large safe set into the wall between the bookshelves. The heavy door swung open. Rummaging in the darkness within, “It’s a subject,” he said, “that has always had a great interest for me.” He pulled out a thick black volume. “You’ve never read this, for example.”

The Savage took it. “ The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments,” he read aloud from the tide-page.

“Nor this.” It was a small book and had lost its cover.

“The Imitation of Christ.”

“Nor this.” He handed out another volume.

“The Varieties of Religious Experience. By William James.”

“And I’ve got plenty more,” Mustapha Mond continued, resuming his seat. “A whole collection of pornographic old books. God in the safe and Ford on the shelves.” He pointed with a laugh to his avowed library—to the shelves of books, the rack full of reading-machine bobbins and sound-track rolls.

“But if you know about God, why don’t you tell them?” asked the Savage indignantly. “Why don’t you give them these books about God?”

“For the same reason as we don’t give them Othello: they’re old; they’re about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now.”

“But God doesn’t change.”

“Men do, though.”

“What difference does that make?”

“All the difference in the world,” said Mustapha Mond. He got up again and walked to the safe. “There was a man called Cardinal Newman,” he said. “A cardinal,” he exclaimed parenthetically, “was a kind of Arch-Community-Songster.”

“‘I Pandulph, of fair Milan, cardinal.’ I’ve read about them in Shakespeare.”

“Of course you have. Well, as I was saying, there was a man called Cardinal Newman. Ah, here’s the book.” He pulled it out. “And while I’m about it I’ll take this one too. It’s by a man called Maine de Biran. He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.”

“A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,” said the Savage promptly.

“Quite so. I’ll read you one of the things he did dream of in a moment. Meanwhile, listen to what this old Arch-Community-Songster said.” He opened the book at the place marked by a slip of paper and began to read. “‘We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God’s property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way—to depend on no one—to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man—that it is an unnatural state—will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end …’” Mustapha Mond paused, put down the first book and, picking up the other, turned over the pages. “Take this, for example,” he said, and in his deep voice once more began to read: “‘A man grows old; he feels in himself that radical sense of weakness, of listlessness, of discomfort, which accompanies the advance of age; and, feeling thus, imagines himself merely sick, lulling his fears with the notion that this distressing condition is due to some particular cause, from which, as from an illness, he hopes to recover. Vain imaginings! That sickness is old age; and a horrible disease it is. They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excited and less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges as from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms has begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false—a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.’” Mustapha Mond shut the book and leaned back in his chair. “One of the numerous things in heaven and earth that these philosophers didn’t dream about was this” (he waved his hand), “us, the modern world. ‘You can only be independent of God while you’ve got youth and prosperity; independence won’t take you safely to the end.’ Well, we’ve now got youth and prosperity right up to the end. What follows? Evidently, that we can be independent of God. ‘The religious sentiment will compensate us for all our losses.’ But there aren’t any losses for us to compensate; religious sentiment is superfluous. And why should we go hunting for a substitute for youthful desires, when youthful desires never fail? A substitute for distractions, when we go on enjoying all the old fooleries to the very last? What need have we of repose when our minds and bodies continue to delight in activity? of consolation, when we have soma? of something immovable, when there is the social order?”

“Then you think there is no God?”

“No, I think there quite probably is one.”

“Then why? …”

Mustapha Mond checked him. “But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that’s described in these books. Now …”

“How does he manifest himself now?” asked the Savage.

“Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren’t there at all.”

“That’s your fault.”

“Call it the fault of civilization. God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. That’s why I have to keep these books locked up in the safe. They’re smut. People would be shocked if …”

The Savage interrupted him. “But isn’t it natural to feel there’s a God?”

“You might as well ask if it’s natural to do up one’s trousers with zippers,” said the Controller sarcastically. “You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons—that’s philosophy. People believe in God because they’ve been conditioned to believe in God.”

“But all the same,” insisted the Savage, “it is natural to believe in God when you’re alone—quite alone, in the night, thinking about death …”

“But people never are alone now,” said Mustapha Mond. “We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it.”

The Savage nodded gloomily. At Malpais he had suffered because they had shut him out from the communal activities of the pueblo, in civilized London he was suffering because he could never escape from those communal activities, never be quietly alone.

“Do you remember that bit in King Lear?” said the Savage at last. “‘The gods are just and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us; the dark and vicious place where thee he got cost him his eyes,’ and Edmund answers—you remember, he’s wounded, he’s dying—’Thou hast spoken right; ’tis true. The wheel has come full circle; I am here.’ What about that now? Doesn’t there seem to be a God managing things, punishing, rewarding?”

“Well, does there?” questioned the Controller in his turn. “You can indulge in any number of pleasant vices with a freemartin and run no risks of having your eyes put out by your son’s mistress. ‘The wheel has come full circle; I am here.’ But where would Edmund be nowadays? Sitting in a pneumatic chair, with his arm round a girl’s waist, sucking away at his sex-hormone chewing-gum and looking at the feelies. The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.”

“Are you sure?” asked the Savage. “Are you quite sure that the Edmund in that pneumatic chair hasn’t been just as heavily punished as the Edmund who’s wounded and bleeding to death? The gods are just. Haven’t they used his pleasant vices as an instrument to degrade him?”

“Degrade him from what position? As a happy, hardworking, goods-consuming citizen he’s perfect. Of course, if you choose some other standard than ours, then perhaps you might say he was degraded. But you’ve got to stick to one set of postulates. You can’t play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.”

“But value dwells not in particular will,” said the Savage. “It holds his estimate and dignity as well wherein ’tis precious of itself as in the prizer.”

“Come, come,” protested Mustapha Mond, “that’s going rather far, isn’t it?”

“If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn’t allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices. You’d have a reason for bearing things patiently, for doing things with courage. I’ve seen it with the Indians.”

“I’m sure you have,” said Mustapha Mond. “But then we aren’t Indians. There isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant. And as for doing things—Ford forbid that he should get the idea into his head. It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own.”

“What about self-denial, then? If you had a God, you’d have a reason for self-denial.”

“But industrial civilization is only possible when there’s no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.”

“You’d have a reason for chastity!” said the Savage, blushing a little as he spoke the words.

“But chastity means passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the end of civilization. You can’t have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.”

“But God’s the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic. If you had a God …”

“My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond, “civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars, where there are divided allegiances, where there are temptations to be resisted, objects of love to be fought for or defended—there, obviously, nobility and heroism have some sense. But there aren’t any wars nowadays. The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving any one too much. There’s no such thing as a divided allegiance; you’re so conditioned that you can’t help doing what you ought to do. And what you ought to do is on the whole so pleasant, so many of the natural impulses are allowed free play, that there really aren’t any temptations to resist. And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.”

“But the tears are necessary. Don’t you remember what Othello said? ‘If after every tempest came such calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death.’ There’s a story one of the old Indians used to tell us, about the Girl of Mátaski. The young men who wanted to marry her had to do a morning’s hoeing in her garden. It seemed easy; but there were flies and mosquitoes, magic ones. Most of the young men simply couldn’t stand the biting and stinging. But the one that could—he got the girl.”

“Charming! But in civilized countries,” said the Controller, “you can have girls without hoeing for them; and there aren’t any flies or mosquitoes to sting you. We got rid of them all centuries ago.”

The Savage nodded, frowning. “You got rid of them. Yes, that’s just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether ’tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them … But you don’t do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It’s too easy.”

He was suddenly silent, thinking of his mother. In her room on the thirty-seventh floor, Linda had floated in a sea of singing lights and perfumed caresses—floated away, out of space, out of time, out of the prison of her memories, her habits, her aged and bloated body. And Tomakin, ex-Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, Tomakin was still on holiday—on holiday from humiliation and pain, in a world where he could not hear those words, that derisive laughter, could not see that hideous face, feel those moist and flabby arms round his neck, in a beautiful world …

“What you need,” the Savage went on, “is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.”

(“Twelve and a half million dollars,” Henry Foster had protested when the Savage told him that. “Twelve and a half million—that’s what the new Conditioning Centre cost. Not a cent less.”)

“Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare, even for an eggshell. Isn’t there something in that?” he asked, looking up at Mustapha Mond. “Quite apart from God—though of course God would be a reason for it. Isn’t there something in living dangerously?”

“There’s a great deal in it,” the Controller replied. “Men and women must have their adrenals stimulated from time to time.”

“What?” questioned the Savage, uncomprehending.

“It’s one of the conditions of perfect health. That’s why we’ve made the V.P.S. treatments compulsory.”

“V.P.S.?”

“Violent Passion Surrogate. Regularly once a month. We flood the whole system with adrenin. It’s the complete physiological equivalent of fear and rage. All the tonic effects of murdering Desdemona and being murdered by Othello, without any of the inconveniences.”

“But I like the inconveniences.”

“We don’t,” said the Controller. “We prefer to do things comfortably.”

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.

“I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. “You’re welcome,” he said.

18

The door was ajar; they entered.

“John!”

From the bathroom came an unpleasant and characteristic sound.

“Is there anything the matter?” Helmholtz called.

There was no answer. The unpleasant sound was repeated, twice; there was silence. Then, with a click the bathroom door opened and, very pale, the Savage emerged.

“I say,” Helmholtz exclaimed solicitously, “you do look ill, John!”

“Did you eat something that didn’t agree with you?” asked Bernard.

The Savage nodded. “I ate civilization.”

“What?”

“It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then,” he added, in a lower tone, “I ate my own wickedness.”

“Yes, but what exactly? … I mean, just now you were …”

“Now I am purified,” said the Savage. “I drank some mustard and warm water.”

The others stared at him in astonishment. “Do you mean to say that you were doing it on purpose?” asked Bernard.

“That’s how the Indians always purify themselves.” He sat down and, sighing, passed his hand across his forehead. “I shall rest for a few minutes,” he said. “I’m rather tired.”

“Well, I’m not surprised,” said Helmholtz. After a silence, “We’ve come to say good-bye,” he went on in another tone. “We’re off to-morrow morning.”

“Yes, we’re off to-morrow,” said Bernard on whose face the Savage remarked a new expression of determined resignation. “And by the way, John,” he continued, leaning forward in his chair and laying a hand on the Savage’s knee, “I want to say how sorry I am about everything that happened yesterday.” He blushed. “How ashamed,” he went on, in spite of the unsteadiness of his voice, “how really …”

The Savage cut him short and, taking his hand, affectionately pressed it.

“Helmholtz was wonderful to me,” Bernard resumed, after a little pause. “If it hadn’t been for him, I should …”

“Now, now,” Helmholtz protested.

There was a silence. In spite of their sadness—because of it, even; for their sadness was the symptom of their love for one another—the three young men were happy.

“I went to see the Controller this morning,” said the Savage at last.

“What for?”

“To ask if I mightn’t go to the islands with you.”

“And what did he say?” asked Helmholtz eagerly.

The Savage shook his head. “He wouldn’t let me.”

“Why not?”

“He said he wanted to go on with the experiment. But I’m damned,” the Savage added, with sudden fury, “I’m damned if I’ll go on being experimented with. Not for all the Controllers in the world, I shall go away to-morrow too.”

“But where?” the others asked in unison.

The Savage shrugged his shoulders. “Anywhere. I don’t care. So long as I can be alone.”

From Guildford the down-line followed the Wey valley to Godalming, then, over Milford and Witley, proceeded to Haslemere and on through Petersfield towards Portsmouth. Roughly parallel to it, the upline passed over Worplesden, Tongham, Puttenham, Elstead and Grayshott. Between the Hog’s Back and Hindhead there were points where the two lines were not more than six or seven kilometres apart. The distance was too small for careless flyers—particularly at night and when they had taken half a gramme too much. There had been accidents. Serious ones. It had been decided to deflect the upline a few kilometres to the west. Between Grayshott and Tongham four abandoned air-lighthouses marked the course of the old Portsmouth-to-London road. The skies above them were silent and deserted. It was over Selborne, Bordon and Farnham that the helicopters now ceaselessly hummed and roared.

The Savage had chosen as his hermitage the old lighthouse which stood on the crest of the hill between Puttenham and Elstead. The building was of ferro-concrete and in excellent condition—almost too comfortable the Savage had thought when he first explored the place, almost too civilizedly luxurious. He pacified his conscience by promising himself a com-pensatingly harder self-discipline, purifications the more complete and thorough. His first night in the hermitage was, deliberately, a sleepless one. He spent the hours on his knees praying, now to that Heaven from which the guilty Claudius had begged forgiveness, now in Zuñi to Awonawilona, now to Jesus and Pookong, now to his own guardian animal, the eagle. From time to time he stretched out his arms as though he were on the Cross, and held them thus through long minutes of an ache that gradually increased till it became a tremulous and excruciating agony; held them, in voluntary crucifixion, while he repeated, through clenched teeth (the sweat, meanwhile, pouring down his face), “Oh, forgive me! Oh, make me pure! Oh, help me to be good!” again and again, till he was on the point of fainting from the pain.

When morning came, he felt he had earned the right to inhabit the lighthouse; yet, even though there still was glass in most of the windows, even though the view from the platform was so fine. For the very reason why he had chosen the lighthouse had become almost instantly a reason for going somewhere else. He had decided to live there because the view was so beautiful, because, from his vantage point, he seemed to be looking out on to the incarnation of a divine being. But who was he to be pampered with the daily and hourly sight of loveliness? Who was he to be living in the visible presence of God? All he deserved to live in was some filthy sty, some blind hole in the ground. Stiff and still aching after his long night of pain, but for that very reason inwardly reassured, he climbed up to the platform of his tower, he looked out over the bright sunrise world which he had regained the right to inhabit. On the north the view was bounded by the long chalk ridge of the Hog’s Back, from behind whose eastern extremity rose the towers of the seven skyscrapers which constituted Guildford. Seeing them, the Savage made a grimace; but he was to become reconciled to them in course of time; for at night they twinkled gaily with geometrical constellations, or else, flood-lighted, pointed their luminous fingers (with a gesture whose significance nobody in England but the Savage now understood) solemnly towards the plumbless mysteries of heaven.

In the valley which separated the Hog’s Back from the sandy hill on which the lighthouse stood, Puttenham was a modest little village nine stories high, with silos, a poultry farm, and a small vitamin-D factory. On the other side of the lighthouse, towards the South, the ground fell away in long slopes of heather to a chain of ponds.

Beyond them, above the intervening woods, rose the fourteen-story tower of Elstead. Dim in the hazy English air, Hindhead and Selborne invited the eye into a blue romantic distance. But it was not alone the distance that had attracted the Savage to his lighthouse; the near was as seductive as the far. The woods, the open stretches of heather and yellow gorse, the clumps of Scotch firs, the shining ponds with their overhanging birch trees, their water lilies, their beds of rushes—these were beautiful and, to an eye accustomed to the aridities of the American desert, astonishing. And then the solitude! Whole days passed during which he never saw a human being. The lighthouse was only a quarter of an hour’s flight from the Charing-T Tower; but the hills of Malpais were hardly more deserted than this Surrey heath. The crowds that daily left London, left it only to play Electromagnetic Golf or Tennis. Puttenham possessed no links; the nearest Riemann-surfaces were at Guildford. Flowers and a landscape were the only attractions here. And so, as there was no good reason for coming, nobody came. During the first days the Savage lived alone and undisturbed.

Of the money which, on his first arrival, John had received for his personal expenses, most had been spent on his equipment. Before leaving London he had bought four viscose-woollen blankets, rope and string, nails, glue, a few tools, matches (though he intended in due course to make a fire drill), some pots and pans, two dozen packets of seeds, and ten kilogrammes of wheat flour. “No, not synthetic starch and cotton-waste flour-substitute,” he had insisted. “Even though it is more nourishing.” But when it came to pan-glandular biscuits and vitaminized beef-surrogate, he had not been able to resist the shopman’s persuasion. Looking at the tins now, he bitterly reproached himself for his weakness. Loathsome civilized stuff! He had made up his mind that he would never eat it, even if he were starving. “That’ll teach them,” he thought vindictively. It would also teach him.

He counted his money. The little that remained would be enough, he hoped, to tide him over the winter. By next spring, his garden would be producing enough to make him independent of the outside world. Meanwhile, there would always be game. He had seen plenty of rabbits, and there were waterfowl on the ponds. He set to work at once to make a bow and arrows.

There were ash trees near the lighthouse and, for arrow shafts, a whole copse full of beautifully straight hazel saplings. He began by felling a young ash, cut out six feet of unbranched stem, stripped off the bark and, paring by paring, shaved away the white wood, as old Mitsima had taught him, until he had a stave of his own height, stiff at the thickened centre, lively and quick at the slender tips. The work gave him an intense pleasure. After those weeks of idleness in London, with nothing to do, whenever he wanted anything, but to press a switch or turn a handle, it was pure delight to be doing something that demanded skill and patience.

He had almost finished whittling the stave into shape, when he realized with a start that he was singing—singing! It was as though, stumbling upon himself from the outside, he had suddenly caught himself out, taken himself flagrantly at fault. Guiltily he blushed. After all, it was not to sing and enjoy himself that he had come here. It was to escape further contamination by the filth of civilized life; it was to be purified and made good; it was actively to make amends. He realized to his dismay that, absorbed in the whittling of his bow, he had forgotten what he had sworn to, himself he would constantly remember—poor Linda, and his own murderous unkindness to her, and those loathsome twins, swarming like lice across the mystery of her death, insulting, with their presence, not merely his own grief and repentance, but the very gods themselves. He had sworn to remember, he had sworn unceasingly to make amends. And there was he, sitting happily over his bow-stave, singing, actually singing.…

He went indoors, opened the box of mustard, and put some water to boil on the fire.

Half an hour later, three Delta-Minus land-workers from one of the Puttenham Bokanovsky Groups happened to be driving to Elstead and, at the top of the hill, were astonished to see a young man standing outside the abandoned lighthouse stripped to the waist and hitting himself with a whip of knotted cords. His back was horizontally streaked with crimson, and from weal to weal ran thin trickles of blood. The driver of the lorry pulled up at the side of the road and, with his two companions, stared open-mouthed at the extraordinary spectacle. One, two three—they counted the strokes. After the eighth, the young man interrupted his self-punishment to run to the wood’s edge and there be violently sick. When he had finished, he picked up the whip and began hitting himself again. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve …

“Ford!” whispered the driver. And his twins were of the same opinion.

“Fordey!” they said.

Three days later, like turkey buzzards settling on a corpse, the reporters came.

Dried and hardened over a slow fire of green wood, the bow was ready. The Savage was busy on his arrows. Thirty hazel sticks had been whittled and dried, tipped with sharp nails, carefully nocked. He had made a raid one night on the Puttenham poultry farm, and now had feathers enough to equip a whole armoury. It was at work upon the feathering of his shafts that the first of the reporters found him. Noiseless on his pneumatic shoes, the man came up behind him.

“Good-morning, Mr. Savage,” he said. “I am the representative of The Hourly Radio.”

Startled as though by the bite of a snake, the Savage sprang to his feet, scattering arrows, feathers, glue-pot and brush in all directions.

“I beg your pardon,” said the reporter, with genuine compunction. “I had no intention …” He touched his hat—the aluminum stove-pipe hat in which he carried his wireless receiver and transmitter. “Excuse my not taking it off,” he said. “It’s a bit heavy. Well, as I was saying, I am the representative of The Hourly …”

“What do you want?” asked the Savage, scowling. The reporter returned his most ingratiating smile.

“Well, of course, our readers would be profoundly interested …” He put his head on one side, his smile became almost coquettish. “Just a few words from you, Mr. Savage.” And rapidly, with a series of ritual gestures, he uncoiled two wires connected to the portable battery buckled round his waist; plugged them simultaneously into the sides of his aluminum hat; touched a spring on the crown—and antennae shot up into the air; touched another spring on the peak of the brim—and, like a jack-in-the-box, out jumped a microphone and hung there, quivering, six inches in front of his nose; pulled down a pair of receivers over his ears; pressed a switch on the left side of the hat—and from within came a faint waspy buzzing; turned a knob on the right—and the buzzing was interrupted by a stethoscopic wheeze and cackle, by hiccoughs and sudden squeaks. “Hullo,” he said to the microphone, “hullo, hullo …” A bell suddenly rang inside his hat. “Is that you, Edzel? Primo Mellon speaking. Yes, I’ve got hold of him. Mr. Savage will now take the microphone and say a few words. Won’t you, Mr. Savage?” He looked up at the Savage with another of those winning smiles of his. “Just tell our readers why you came here. What made you leave London (hold on, Edzel!) so very suddenly. And, of course, that whip.” (The Savage started. How did they know about the whip?) “We’re all crazy to know about the whip. And then something about Civilization. You know the sort of stuff. ‘What I think of the Civilized Girl.’ Just a few words, a very few …”

The Savage obeyed with a disconcerting literalness. Five words he uttered and no more—five words, the same as those he had said to Bernard about the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury. “Háni! Sons éso tse-ná!” And seizing the reporter by the shoulder, he spun him round (the young man revealed himself invitingly well-covered), aimed and, with all the force and accuracy of a champion foot-and-mouth-baller, delivered a most prodigious kick.

Eight minutes later, a new edition of The Hourly Radio was on sale in the streets of London. “HOURLY RADIO REPORTER HAS COCCYX KICKED BY MYSTERY SAVAGE,” ran the headlines on the front page. “SENSATION IN SURREY.”

“Sensation even in London,” thought the reporter when, on his return, he read the words. And a very painful sensation, what was more. He sat down gingerly to his luncheon.

Undeterred by that cautionary bruise on their colleague’s coccyx, four other reporters, representing the New York Times, the Frankfurt Four-Dimensional Continuum, The Fordian Science Monitor, and The Delta Mirror, called that afternoon at the lighthouse and met with receptions of progressively increasing violence.

From a safe distance and still rubbing his buttocks, “Benighted fool!” shouted the man from The Fordian Science Monitor, “why don’t you take soma?”

“Get away!” The Savage shook his fist.

The other retreated a few steps then turned round again. “Evil’s an unreality if you take a couple of grammes.”

“Kohakwa iyathtokyai!” The tone was menacingly derisive.

“Pain’s a delusion.”

“Oh, is it?” said the Savage and, picking up a thick hazel switch, strode forward.

The man from The Fordian Science Monitor made a dash for his helicopter.

After that the Savage was left for a time in peace. A few helicopters came and hovered inquisitively round the tower. He shot an arrow into the importunately nearest of them. It pierced the aluminum floor of the cabin; there was a shrill yell, and the machine went rocketing up into the air with all the acceleration that its super-charger could give it. The others, in future, kept their distance respectfully. Ignoring their tiresome humming (he likened himself in his imagination to one of the suitors of the Maiden of Mátsaki, unmoved and persistent among the winged vermin), the Savage dug at what was to be his garden. After a time the vermin evidently became bored and flew away; for hours at a stretch the sky above his head was empty and, but for the larks, silent.

The weather was breathlessly hot, there was thunder in the air. He had dug all the morning and was resting, stretched out along the floor. And suddenly the thought of Lenina was a real presence, naked and tangible, saying “Sweet!” and “Put your arms round me!”—in shoes and socks, perfumed. Impudent strumpet! But oh, oh, her arms round his neck, the lifting of her breasts, her mouth! Eternity was in our lips and eyes. Lenina… No, no, no, no! He sprang to his feet and, half naked as he was, ran out of the house. At the edge of the heath stood a clump of hoary juniper bushes. He flung himself against them, he embraced, not the smooth body of his desires, but an armful of green spikes. Sharp, with a thousand points, they pricked him. He tried to think of poor Linda, breathless and dumb, with her clutching hands and the unutterable terror in her eyes. Poor Linda whom he had sworn to remember. But it was still the presence of Lenina that haunted him. Lenina whom he had promised to forget. Even through the stab and sting of the juniper needles, his wincing flesh was aware of her, unescapably real. “Sweet, sweet … And if you wanted me too, why didn’t you …”

The whip was hanging on a nail by the door, ready to hand against the arrival of reporters. In a frenzy the Savage ran back to the house, seized it, whirled it. The knotted cords bit into his flesh.

“Strumpet! Strumpet!” he shouted at every blow as though it were Lenina (and how frantically, without knowing it, he wished it were), white, warm, scented, infamous Lenina that he was flogging thus. “Strumpet!” And then, in a voice of despair, “Oh, Linda, forgive me. Forgive me, God. I’m bad. I’m wicked. I’m … No, no, you strumpet, you strumpet!”

From his carefully constructed hide in the wood three hundred metres away, Darwin Bonaparte, the Feely Corporation’s most expert big game photographer had watched the whole proceedings. Patience and skill had been rewarded. He had spent three days sitting inside the bole of an artificial oak tree, three nights crawling on his belly through the heather, hiding microphones in gorse bushes, burying wires in the soft grey sand. Seventy-two hours of profound discomfort. But now the great moment had come—the greatest, Darwin Bonaparte had time to reflect, as he moved among his instruments, the greatest since his taking of the famous all-howling stereoscopic feely of the gorillas’ wedding. “Splendid,” he said to himself as the Savage started his astonishing performance. “Splendid!” He kept his telescopic cameras carefully aimed—glued to their moving objective; clapped on a higher power to get a close-up of the frantic and distorted face (admirable!); switched over, for half a minute, to slow motion (an exquisitely comical effect, he promised himself); listened in, meanwhile, to the blows, the groans, the wild and raving words that were being recorded on the sound-track at the edge of his film, tried the effect of a little amplification (yes, that was decidedly better); was delighted to hear, in a momentary lull, the shrill singing of a lark; wished the Savage would turn round so that he could get a good close-up of the blood on his back—and almost instantly (what astonishing luck!) the accommodating fellow did turn round, and he was able to take a perfect close-up.

“Well, that was grand!” he said to himself when it was all over. “Really grand!” He mopped his face. When they had put in the feely effects at the studio, it would be a wonderful film. Almost as good, thought Darwin Bonaparte, as the Sperm Whale’s Love-Life—and that, by Ford, was saying a good deal!

Twelve days later The Savage of Surrey had been released and could be seen, heard and felt in every first-class feely-palace in Western Europe.

The effect of Darwin Bonaparte’s film was immediate and enormous. On the afternoon which followed the evening of its release John’s rustic solitude was suddenly broken by the arrival overhead of a great swarm of helicopters.

He was digging in his garden—digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death—and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last … He shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true—truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods. Besides, thy best of rest is sleep and that thou oft provok’st; yet grossly fear’st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams? …

A humming overhead had become a roar; and suddenly he was in shadow, there was something between the sun and him. He looked up, startled, from his digging, from his thoughts; looked up in a dazzled bewilderment, his mind still wandering in that other world of truer-than-truth, still focused on the immensities of death and deity; looked up and saw, close above him, the swarm of hovering machines. Like locusts they came, hung poised, descended all around him on the heather. And from out of the bellies of these giant grasshoppers stepped men in white viscose-flannels, women (for the weather was hot) in acetate-shantung pyjamas or velveteen shorts and sleeveless, half-unzippered singlets—one couple from each. In a few minutes there were dozens of them, standing in a wide circle round the lighthouse, staring, laughing, clicking their cameras, throwing (as to an ape) peanuts, packets of sex-hormone chewing-gum, panglandular petits beurres. And every moment—for across the Hog’s Back the stream of traffic now flowed unceasingly—their numbers increased. As in a nightmare, the dozens became scores, the scores hundreds.

The Savage had retreated towards cover, and now, in the posture of an animal at bay, stood with his back to the wall of the lighthouse, staring from face to face in speechless horror, like a man out of his senses.

From this stupor he was aroused to a more immediate sense of reality by the impact on his cheek of a well-aimed packet of chewing-gum. A shock of startling pain—and he was broad awake, awake and fiercely angry.

“Go away!” he shouted.

The ape had spoken; there was a burst of laughter and hand-clapping. “Good old Savage! Hurrah, hurrah!” And through the babel he heard cries of: “Whip, whip, the whip!”

Acting on the word’s suggestion, he seized the bunch of knotted cords from its nail behind the door and shook it at his tormentors.

There was a yell of ironical applause.

Menacingly he advanced towards them. A woman cried out in fear. The line wavered at its most immediately threatened point, then stiffened again, stood firm. The consciousness of being in overwhelming force had given these sightseers a courage which the Savage had not expected of them. Taken aback, he halted and looked round.

“Why don’t you leave me alone?” There was an almost plaintive note in his anger.

“Have a few magnesium-salted almonds!” said the man who, if the Savage were to advance, would be the first to be attacked. He held out a packet. “They’re really very good, you know,” he added, with a rather nervous smile of propitiation. “And the magnesium salts will help to keep you young.”

The Savage ignored his offer. “What do you want with me?” he asked, turning from one grinning face to another. “What do you want with me?”

“The whip,” answered a hundred voices confusedly. “Do the whipping stunt. Let’s see the whipping stunt.”

Then, in unison, and on a slow, heavy rhythm, “We—want—the whip,” shouted a group at the end of the line. “We—want—the whip.”

Others at once took up the cry, and the phrase was repeated, parrot-fashion, again and again, with an ever-growing volume of sound, until, by the seventh or eighth reiteration, no other word was being spoken. “We—want—the whip.”

They were all crying together; and, intoxicated by the noise, the unanimity, the sense of rhythmical atonement, they might, it seemed, have gone on for hours—almost indefinitely. But at about the twenty-fifth repetition the proceedings were startlingly interrupted. Yet another helicopter had arrived from across the Hog’s Back, hung poised above the crowd, then dropped within a few yards of where the Savage was standing, in the open space between the line of sightseers and the lighthouse. The roar of the air screws momentarily drowned the shouting; then, as the machine touched the ground and the engines were turned off: “We—want—the whip; we—want—the whip,” broke out again in the same loud, insistent monotone.

The door of the helicopter opened, and out stepped, first a fair and ruddy-faced young man, then, in green velveteen shorts, white shirt, and jockey cap, a young woman.

At the sight of the young woman, the Savage started, recoiled, turned pale.

The young woman stood, smiling at him—an uncertain, imploring, almost abject smile. The seconds passed. Her lips moved, she was saying something; but the sound of her voice was covered by the loud reiterated refrain of the sightseers.

“We—want—the whip! We—want—the whip!”

The young woman pressed both hands to her left side, and on that peach-bright, doll-beautiful face of hers appeared a strangely incongruous expression of yearning distress. Her blue eyes seemed to grow larger, brighter; and suddenly two tears rolled down her cheeks. Inaudibly, she spoke again; then, with a quick, impassioned gesture stretched out her arms towards the Savage, stepped forward.

“We—want—the whip! We—want …”

And all of a sudden they had what they wanted.

“Strumpet!” The Savage had rushed at her like a madman. “Fitchew!” Like a madman, he was slashing at her with his whip of small cords.

Terrified, she had turned to flee, had tripped and fallen in the heather. “Henry, Henry!” she shouted. But her ruddy-faced companion had bolted out of harm’s way behind the helicopter.

With a whoop of delighted excitement the line broke; there was a convergent stampede towards that magnetic centre of attraction. Pain was a fascinating horror.

“Fry, lechery, fry!” Frenzied, the Savage slashed again.

Hungrily they gathered round, pushing and scrambling like swine about the trough.

“Oh, the flesh!” The Savage ground his teeth. This time it was on his shoulders that the whip descended. “Kill it, kill it!”

Drawn by the fascination of the horror of pain and, from within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that desire for unanimity and atonement, which their conditioning had so ineradicably implanted in them, they began to mime the frenzy of his gestures, striking at one another as the Savage struck at his own rebellious flesh, or at that plump incarnation of turpitude writhing in the heather at his feet.

“Kill it, kill it, kill it …” The Savage went on shouting.

Then suddenly somebody started singing “Orgy-porgy” and, in a moment, they had all caught up the refrain and, singing, had begun to dance. Orgy-porgy, round and round and round, beating one another in six-eight time. Orgy-porgy …

It was after midnight when the last of the helicopters took its flight. Stupefied by soma, and exhausted by a long-drawn frenzy of sensuality, the Savage lay sleeping in the heather. The sun was already high when he awoke. He lay for a moment, blinking in owlish incomprehension at the light; then suddenly remembered—everything.

“Oh, my God, my God!” He covered his eyes with his hand.

That evening the swarm of helicopters that came buzzing across the Hog’s Back was a dark cloud ten kilometres long. The description of last night’s orgy of atonement had been in all the papers.

“Savage!” called the first arrivals, as they alighted from their machine. “Mr. Savage!”

There was no answer.

The door of the lighthouse was ajar. They pushed it open and walked into a shuttered twilight. Through an archway on the further side of the room they could see the bottom of the staircase that led up to the higher floors. Just under the crown of the arch dangled a pair of feet.

“Mr. Savage!”

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east.…

The End

Eyeless in Gaza

First Published 1936

CHAPTER I

August 30th 1933

THE SNAPSHOTS HAD become almost as dim as memories. This young woman who had stood in a garden at the turn of the century was like a ghost at cock-crow. His mother, Anthony Beavis recognized. A year or two, perhaps only a month or two, before she died. But fashion, as he peered at the brown phantom, fashion is a topiary art. Those swan-like loins! That long slanting cascade of bosom – without any apparent relation to the naked body beneath! And all that hair, like an ornamental deformity on the skull! Oddly hideous and repellent it seemed in 1933. And yet, if he shut his eyes (as he could not resist doing), he could see his mother languidly beautiful on her chaise-longue; or, agile, playing tennis; or swooping like a bird across the ice of a far-off winter.

It was the same with these snapshots of Mary Amberley, taken ten years later. The skirt was as long as ever, and within her narrower bell of drapery woman still glided footless, as though on castors. The breasts, it was true, had been pushed up a bit, the redundant posterior pulled in. But the general shape of the clothed body was still strangely improbable. A crab shelled in whalebone. And this huge plumed hat of 1911 was simply a French funeral of the first class. How could any man in his senses have been attracted by so profoundly anti-aphrodisiac an appearance? And yet, in spite of the snapshots, he could remember her as the very embodiment of desirability. At the sight of that feathered crab on wheels his heart had beaten faster, his breathing had become oppressed.

Twenty years, thirty years after the event, the snapshots revealed only things remote and unfamiliar. But the unfamiliar (dismal automatism!) is always the absurd. What he remembered, on the contrary, was the emotion felt when the unfamiliar was still the familiar, when the absurd, being taken for granted, had nothing absurd about it. The dramas of memory are always Hamlet in modern dress.

How beautiful his mother had been – beautiful under the convoluted wens of hair and in spite of the jutting posterior, the long slant of bosom. And Mary, how maddeningly desirable even in a carapace, even beneath funereal plumes! And in his little fawn-coloured covert coat and scarlet tam-o’-shanter; as Bubbles, in grass-green velveteen and ruffles; at school in his Norfolk suit with the knickerbockers that ended below the knees in two tight tubes of box-cloth; in his starched collar and his bowler, if it were Sunday, his red-and-black school-cap on other days – he too, in his own memory, was always in modern dress, never the absurd little figure of fun these snapshots revealed. No worse off, so far as inner feeling was concerned, than the little boys of thirty years later in their jerseys and shorts. A proof, Anthony found himself reflecting impersonally, as he examined the top-hatted and tail-coated image of himself at Eton, a proof that progress can only be recorded, never experienced. He reached out for his note-book, opened it and wrote: ‘Progress may, perhaps, be perceived by historians; it can never be felt by those actually involved in the supposed advance. The young are born into the advancing circumstances, the old take them for granted within a few months or years, advances aren’t felt as advances. There is no gratitude – only irritation if, for any reason, the newly invented conveniences break down. Men don’t spend their time thanking God for cars; they only curse when the carburettor is choked.’

He closed the book and returned to the top-hat of 1907.

There was a sound of footsteps and, looking up, he saw Helen Ledwidge approaching with those long springing strides of hers across the terrace. Under the wide hat her face was bright with the reflection from her flame-coloured beach pyjamas. As though she were in hell. And in fact, he went on to think, she was there. The mind is its own place; she carried her hell about with her. The hell of her grotesque marriage; other hells too, perhaps. But he had always refrained from enquiring too closely into their nature, had always pretended not to notice when she herself offered to be his guide through their intricacies. Enquiry and exploration would land him in heaven knew what quagmire of emotion, what sense of responsibility. And he had no time, no energy for emotions and responsibilities. His work came first. Suppressing his curiosity, he went on stubbornly playing the part he had long since assigned himself – the part of the detached philosopher, of the preoccupied man of science who doesn’t see the things that to everyone else are obvious. He acted as if he could detect in her face nothing but its external beauties of form and texture. Whereas, of course, flesh is never wholly opaque; the soul shows through the walls of its receptacle. Those clear grey eyes of hers, that mouth with its delicately lifted upper lip, were hard and almost ugly with a resentful sadness.

The hell-flush was quenched as she stepped out of the sunlight into the shadow of the house; but the sudden pallor of her face served only to intensify the embittered melancholy of its expression. Anthony looked at her, but did not rise, did not call a greeting. There was a convention between them that there should never be any fuss; not even the fuss of saying good-morning. No fuss at all. As Helen stepped through the open glass doors into the room, he turned back to the study of his photographs.

‘Well, here I am,’ she said without smiling. She pulled off her hat and with a beautiful impatient movement of the head shook back the ruddy-brown curls of her hair. ‘Hideously hot!’ She threw the hat on to the sofa and crossed the room to where Anthony was sitting at his writing table. ‘Not working?’ she asked in surprise. It was so rare to find him otherwise than immersed in books and papers.

He shook his head. ‘No sociology today.’

‘What are you looking at?’ Standing by his chair, she bent over the scattered snapshots.

‘At my old corpses.’ He handed her the ghost of the dead Etonian.

After studying it for a moment in silence, ‘You looked nice then,’ she commented.

‘Merci mon vieux!’ He gave her an ironically affectionate pat on the back of the thigh. ‘At my private school they used to call me Benger.’ Between his finger-tips and the rounded resilience of her flesh the silk interposed a dry sliding smoothness, strangely disagreeable to the touch. ‘Short for Benger’s Food. Because I looked so babyish.’

‘Sweet,’ she went on, ignoring his interruption, ‘you looked really sweet then. Touching.’

‘But I still am,’ Anthony protested, smiling up at her.

She looked at him for a moment in silence. Under the thick dark hair the forehead was beautifully smooth and serene, like the forehead of a meditative child. Childish too, in a more comical way, was the short, slightly tilted nose. Between their narrowed lids the eyes were alive with inner laughter, and there was a smile also about the corners of the lips – a faint ironic smile that in some sort contradicted what the lips seemed in their form to express. They were full lips, finely cut; voluptuous and at the same time grave, sad, almost tremulously sensitive. Lips as though naked in their brooding sensuality; without defence of their own and abandoned to their helplessness by the small, unaggressive chin beneath.

‘The worst of it is,’ Helen said at last, ‘that you’re right. You are sweet, you are touching. God knows why. Because you oughtn’t to be. It’s all a swindle really, a trick for getting people to like you on false pretences.’

‘Come!’ he protested.

‘You make them give you something for nothing.’

‘But at least I’m always perfectly frank about its being nothing. I never pretend it’s a Grand Passion.’ He rolled the r and opened the as grotesquely. ‘Not even a Wahlverwandschaft,’ he added, dropping into German, so as to make all this romantic business of affinities and violent emotions sound particularly ridiculous. ‘Just a bit of fun.’

‘Just a bit of fun,’ Helen echoed ironically, thinking, as she spoke, of that period at the beginning of the affair, when she had stood, so to speak, on the threshold of being in love with him – on the threshold, waiting to be called in. But how firmly (for all his silence and studied gentleness), how definitely and decidedly he had shut the door against her! He didn’t want to be loved. For a moment she had been on the verge of rebellion; then, in that spirit of embittered and sarcastic resignation with which she had learned to face the world, she accepted his conditions. They were the more acceptable since there was no better alternative in sight; since, after all, he was a remarkable man and, after all, she was very fond of him; since, also, he knew how to give her at least a physical satisfaction. ‘Just a bit of fun,’ she repeated, and gave a little snort of laughter.

Anthony shot a glance at her, wondering uncomfortably whether she meant to break the tacitly accepted agreement between them and refer to some forbidden topic. But his fears were unjustified.

‘Yes, I admit it,’ she went on after a little silence. ‘You’re honest all right. But that doesn’t alter the fact that you’re always getting something for nothing. Call it an unintentional swindle. Your face is your fortune, I suppose. Handsome is as handsome doesn’t, in your case.’ She bent down once more over the photographs. ‘Who’s that?’

He hesitated a moment before replying; then, with a smile, but feeling at the same time rather uncomfortable, ‘One of the not-grand passions,’ he answered. ‘Her name was Gladys.’

‘It would have been!’ Helen wrinkled up her nose contemptuously. ‘Why did you throw her over?’

‘I didn’t. She preferred someone else. Not that I very much minded,’ he was adding, when she interrupted him.

‘Perhaps the other man sometimes talked to her when they were in bed.’

Anthony flushed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Some women, oddly enough, like being talked to in bed. And seeing that you didn’t . . . You never do, after all.’ She threw Gladys aside and picked up the woman in the clothes of 1900. ‘Is that your mother?’

Anthony nodded. ‘And that’s yours,’ he said, pushing across the picture of Mary Amberley in her funereal plumes. Then, in a tone of disgust, ‘All this burden of past experience one trails about with one!’ he added. ‘There ought to be some way of getting rid of one’s superfluous memories. How I hate old Proust! Really detest him.’ And with a richly comic eloquence he proceeded to evoke the vision of that asthmatic seeker of lost time squatting, horribly white and flabby, with breasts almost female but fledged with long black hairs, for ever squatting in the tepid bath of his remembered past. And all the stale soapsuds of countless previous washings floated around him, all the accumulated dirt of years lay crusty on the sides of the tub or hung in dark suspension in the water. And there he sat, a pale repellent invalid, taking up spongefuls of his own thick soup and squeezing it over his face, scooping up cupfuls of it and appreciatively rolling the grey and gritty liquor round his mouth, gargling, rinsing his nostrils with it, like a pious Hindu in the Ganges . . .

‘You talk about him,’ said Helen, ‘as if he were a personal enemy.’

Anthony only laughed.

In the silence that followed, Helen picked up the faded snapshot of her mother and began to pore over it intently, as though it were some mysterious hieroglyph which, if interpreted, might provide a clue, unriddle an enigma.

Anthony watched her for a little; then, rousing himself to activity, dipped into the heap of photographs and brought out his Uncle James in the tennis clothes of 1906. Dead now – of cancer, poor old wretch, and with all the consolations of the Catholic religion. He dropped that snapshot and picked up another. It showed a group in front of dim Swiss mountains – his father, his stepmother, his two half-sisters. ‘Grindelwald, 1912’ was written on the back in Mr Beavis’s neat hand. All four of them, he noticed, were carrying alpenstocks.

‘And I would wish,’ he said aloud, as he put the picture down, ‘I would wish my days to be separated each from each by unnatural impiety.’

Helen looked up from her undecipherable hieroglyph. ‘Then why do you spend your time looking at old photographs?’

‘I was tidying my cupboard,’ he explained. ‘They came to light. Like Tutankhamen. I couldn’t resist the temptation to look at them. Besides, it’s my birthday,’ he added.

‘Your birthday?’

‘Forty-two today.’ Anthony shook his head. ‘Too depressing! And since one always likes to deepen the gloom . . .’ He picked up a handful of the snapshots and let them fall again. ‘The corpses turned up very opportunely. One detects the finger of Providence. The hoof of chance, if you prefer it.’

‘You liked her a lot, didn’t you?’ Helen asked after another silence, holding out the ghostly image of her mother for him to see.

He nodded and, to divert the conversation, ‘She civilized me,’ he explained. ‘I was half a savage when she took me in hand.’ He didn’t want to discuss his feelings for Mary Amberley – particularly (though this, no doubt, was a stupid relic of barbarism) with Helen. ‘The white woman’s burden,’ he added with a laugh. Then, picking up the alpenstock group once again, ‘And this is one of the things she delivered me from,’ he said. ‘Darkest Switzerland. I can never be sufficiently grateful.’

‘It’s a pity she couldn’t deliver herself,’ said Helen, when she had looked at the alpenstocks.

‘How is she, by the way?’

Helen shrugged her shoulders. ‘She was better when she came out of the nursing home this spring. But she’s begun again, of course. The same old business. Morphia; and drink in the intervals. I saw her in Paris on the way here. It was awful!’ She shuddered.

Ironically affectionate, the hand that still pressed her thigh seemed all of a sudden extremely out of place. He let it fall.

‘I don’t know which is worse,’ Helen went on after a pause. ‘The dirt – you’ve no idea of the state she lives in! – or that malice, that awful lying.’ She sighed profoundly.

With a gesture that had nothing ironical about it, Anthony took her hand and pressed it. ‘Poor Helen!’

She stood for a few seconds, motionless and without speech, averted; then suddenly shook herself as though out of sleep. He felt her limp hand tighten on his; and when she turned round on him, her face was alive with a reckless and deliberate gaiety. ‘Poor Anthony, on the contrary!’ she said, and from deep in her throat produced a queer unexpected little sound of swallowed laughter. ‘Talk of false pretences!’

He was protesting that, in her case, they were true, when she bent down and, with a kind of angry violence, set her mouth against his.

CHAPTER II

April 4th 1934

From A.B.’s diary.

Five words sum up every biography. Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor. Like all other human beings, I know what I ought to do, but continue to do what I know I oughtn’t to do. This afternoon, for example, I went to see poor Beppo, miserably convalescent from ’flu. I knew I ought to have sat with him and let him pour out his complaints about youth’s ingratitude and cruelty, his terror of advancing old age and loneliness, his awful suspicions that people are beginning to find him a bore, no longer à la page. The Bolinskys had given a party without inviting him, Hagworm hadn’t asked him to a week-end since November . . . I knew I ought to have listened sympathetically, and proffered good advice, implored him not to make himself miserable over inevitabilities and trifles. The advice, no doubt, wouldn’t have been accepted – as usual; but still, one never knows, therefore ought never to fail to give it. Instead of which I squared conscience in advance by buying him a pound of expensive grapes and told a lie about some committee I had to run off to, almost immediately. The truth being that I simply couldn’t face a repetition of poor B’s self-commiserations. I justified my behaviour, as well as my five bob’s worth of fruit, by righteous thoughts: at fifty, the man ought to know better than continue to attach importance to love affairs and invitations to dinner and meeting the right people. He oughtn’t to be such an ass; therefore (impeccable logic) it wasn’t incumbent upon me to do what I knew I should do. And so I hurried off after only a quarter of an hour with him – leaving the poor wretch to solitude and his festering self-pity. Shall go to him tomorrow for at least two hours.

‘Besetting sin’ – can one still use the term? No. It has too many unsatisfactory overtones and implications – blood of lamb, terrible thing to fall into hands of living God, hell fire, obsession with sex, offences, chastity instead of charity. (Note that poor old Beppo, turned inside out = Comstock or St Paul.) Also ‘besetting sin’ has generally implied that incessant, egotistic brooding on self which mars so much piety. See in this context the diary of Prince, that zealous evangelical who subsequently founded the Abode of Love – under Guidance, as the Buchmanites would say; for his long-repressed wish for promiscuous copulation at last emerged into consciousness as a command from the Holy Ghost (with whom in the end he came to identify himself) to ‘reconcile flesh with God.’ And he proceeded to reconcile it – in public, apparently, and on the drawing-room sofa.

No, one can’t use the phrase, nor think in the terms it implies. But that doesn’t mean, of course, that persistent tendencies to behave badly don’t exist, or that it isn’t one’s business to examine them, objectively, and try to do something about them. That remark of old Miller’s, as we were riding to see one of his Indian patients in the mountains: ‘Really and by nature every man’s a unity; but you’ve artificially transformed the unity into a trinity. One clever man and two idiots – that’s what you’ve made yourself. An admirable manipulator of ideas, linked with a person who, so far as self-knowledge and feeling are concerned, is just a moron; and the pair of you associated with a half-witted body. A body that’s hopelessly unaware of all it does and feels, that has no accomplishments, that doesn’t know how to use itself or anything else. Two imbeciles and one intellectual. But man is a democracy, where the majority rules. You’ve got to do something about that majority.’ This journal is a first step. Self-knowledge an essential preliminary to self-change. (Pure science and then applied.) That which besets me is indifference. I can’t be bothered about people. Or rather, won’t. For I avoid, carefully, all occasions for being bothered. A necessary part of the treatment is to embrace all the bothersome occasions one can, to go out of one’s way to create them. Indifference is a form of sloth. For one can work hard, as I’ve always done, and yet wallow in sloth, be industrious about one’s job, but scandalously lazy about all that isn’t the job. Because, of course, the job is fun. Whereas the non-job – personal relations, in my case – is disagreeable and laborious. More and more disagreeable as the habit of avoiding personal relations ingrains itself with the passage of time. Indifference is a form of sloth, and sloth in its turn is one of the symptoms of lovelessness. One isn’t lazy about what one loves. The problem is: how to love? Once more the word is suspect – greasy from being fingered by generations of Stigginses. There ought to be some way of dry-cleaning and disinfecting words. Love, purity, goodness, spirit – a pile of dirty linen waiting for the laundress. How, then, to – not ‘love,’ since it’s an unwashed handkerchief – feel, say, persistent affectionate interest in people? How make the anthropological approach to them, as old Miller would say? Not easy to answer.

April 5th.

Worked all morning. For it would be silly not to put my materials into shape. Into a new shape, of course. My original conception was of a vast Bouvard et Pécuchet, constructed of historical facts. A picture of futility, apparently objective, scientific, but composed, I realize, in order to justify my own way of life. If men had always behaved either like half-wits or baboons, if they couldn’t behave otherwise, then I was justified in sitting comfortably in the stalls with my opera-glasses. Whereas if there were something to be done, if the behaviour could be modified . . . Meanwhile a description of the behaviour and an account of the ways of modifying it will be valuable. Though not so valuable as to justify complete abstention from all other forms of activity.

In the afternoon to Miller’s, where I found a parson, who takes Christianity seriously and has started an organization of pacifists. Purchas by name. Middle-aged. Slightly the muscular-jocular Christian manner. (How hard to admit that a man can use clichés and yet be intelligent!) But a very decent sort of man. More than decent, indeed. Rather impressive.

The aim is to use and extend Purchas’s organization. The unit a small group, like the Early Christian agape, or the communist cell. (Note that all successful movements have been built up in rowing eights or football elevens.) Purchas’s groups preface meetings with Christian devotions. Empirically, it is found that a devotional atmosphere increases efficiency, intensifies spirit of co-operation and self-sacrifice. But devotion in Christian terms will be largely unacceptable. Miller believes possible a non-theological praxis of meditation. Which he would like, of course, to couple with training, along F. M. Alexander’s lines, in use of the self, beginning with physical control and achieving through it (since mind and body are one) control of impulses and feelings. But this is impracticable. The necessary teachers don’t exist. ‘We must be content to do what we can from the mental side. The physical will let us down, of course. The flesh is weak in so many more ways than we suppose.’

I agreed to contribute money, prepare some literature and go round speaking to groups. The last is the most difficult, as I have always refused to utter in public. When Purchas had gone, asked Miller if I should take lessons in speaking.

Answer. ‘If you take lessons before you’re well and physically co-ordinated, you’ll merely be learning yet another way of using yourself badly. Get well, achieve co-ordination, use yourself properly; you’ll be able to speak in any way you please. The difficulties, from stage fright to voice production, will no longer exist.’

Miller then gave me a lesson in use of the self. Learning to sit in a chair, to get out of it, to lean back and forward. He warned me it might seem a bit pointless at first. But that interest and understanding would grow with achievement. And that I should find it the solution of the video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor problem: a technique for translating good intentions into acts, for being sure of doing what one knows one ought to do.

Spent the evening with Beppo. After listening to catalogues of miseries, suggested that there was no cure, only prevention. Avoid the cause. His reaction was passionate anger: I was robbing life of its point, condemning him to suicide. In answer I hinted that there was more than one point. He said he would rather die than give up his point; then changed his mood and wished to God he could give it up. But for what? I suggested pacifism. But he was a pacifist already, always been. Yes, I knew that; but a passive pacifist, a negative one. There was such a thing as active and positive pacifism. He listened, said he’d think about it, thought perhaps it might be a way out.

CHAPTER III

August 30th 1933

FROM THE FLAT roof of the house the eye was drawn first towards the west, where the pines slanted down to the sea – a blue Mediterranean bay fringed with pale bone-like rocks and cupped between high hills, green on their lower slopes with vines, grey with olive trees, then pine-dark, earth-red, rock-white or rosy-brown with parched heath. Through a gap between the nearer hills, the long straight ridge of the Sainte-Baume stood out metallically clear, but blue with distance. To north and south, the garden was hemmed in by pines; but eastwards, the vineyards and the olive orchards mounted in terraces of red earth to a crest; and the last trees stood, sometimes dark and brooding, sometimes alive with tremulous silver, against the sky.

There were mattresses on the roof for sun-bathing; and on one of these they were lying, their heads in the narrow shade of the southern parapet. It was almost noon; the sunlight fell steep out of the flawless sky; but a faint breeze stirred and died and swelled again into motion. Lapped in that fitfully tempered heat, skin seemed to acquire a livelier sensibility, almost an independent consciousness. As though it were drinking a new life from the sun. And that strange, violent, flamy life from outer space seemed to strike through the skin, to permeate and transmute the flesh beneath, till the whole body was a thing of alien sun-stuff and the very soul felt itself melting out of its proper identity and becoming something else, something of a different, an other-than-human kind.

There are so few possible grimaces, such a paucity, in comparison with all the thoughts and feelings of sensations, such a humiliating poverty of reflexes, even of consciously expressive gestures! Still lucid in his self-estrangement, Anthony observed the symptoms of that death-bed in which he also had his part as assassin and fellow-victim. Restlessly she turned her head on the cushions, this way, that way, as though seeking, but always vainly, some relief, however slight, some respite, if only for a moment, from her intolerable suffering. Sometimes, with the gesture of one who prays despairingly that a cup may be removed, she clasped her hands, and raising them to her mouth gnawed at the clenched knuckles or pressed a wrist between her parted teeth as if to stifle her own crying. Distorted, the face was a mask of extremest grief. It was the face, he suddenly perceived, as he bent down towards those tormented lips, of one of Van der Weyden’s holy women at the foot of the Cross.

And then, from one moment to the next, there was a stillness. The victim no longer rolled her tortured head on the pillow. The imploring hands fell limp. The agonized expression of pain gave place to a superhuman and rapturous serenity. The mouth became grave like that of a saint. Behind the closed eyelids what beatific vision had presented itself?

They lay for a long time in a golden stupor of sunlight and fulfilled desire. It was Anthony who first stirred. Moved by the dumb unthinking gratitude and tenderness of his satisfied body he reached out a caressing hand. Her skin was hot to touch as fruit in the sun. He propped himself up on his elbow and opened his eyes.

‘You look like a Gauguin,’ he said after a moment. Brown like a Gauguin and, curiously, it struck him, flat like a Gauguin too; for the sunburn suppressed those nacreous gleams of carmine and blue and green that give the untanned white body its peculiar sumptuousness of relief.

The sound of his voice broke startlingly into Helen’s warm delicious trance of unconsciousness. She winced almost with pain. Why couldn’t he leave her in peace? She had been so happy in that other world of her transfigured body; and now he was calling her back – back to this world, back to her ordinary hell of emptiness and drought and discontent. She left his words unanswered and, shutting her eyes yet tighter against the menace of reality, tried to force her way back to the paradise from which she had been dragged.

Brown like a Gauguin, and flat . . . But the first Gauguin he ever saw (and had pretended, he remembered, to like a great deal more than he actually did) had been with Mary Amberley that time in Paris – that exciting and, for the boy of twenty that he then was, extraordinary and apocalyptic time.

He frowned to himself; this past of his was becoming importunate! But when, in order to escape from it, he bent down to kiss Helen’s shoulder, he found the sun-warmed skin impregnated with a faint, yet penetrating smell, at once salty and smoky, a smell that transported him instantaneously to a great chalk pit in the flank of the Chilterns, where, in Brian Foxe’s company, he had spent an inexplicably pleasurable hour striking two flints together and sniffing, voluptuously, at the place where the spark had left its characteristic tang of marine combustion.

‘L-like sm-smoke under the s-sea,’ had been Brian’s stammered comment when he was given the flints to smell.

Even the seemingly most solid fragments of present reality are riddled with pitfalls. What could be more uncompromisingly there, in the present, than a woman’s body in the sunshine? And yet it had betrayed him. The firm ground of its sensual immediacy and of his own physical tenderness had opened beneath his feet and precipitated him into another time and place. Nothing was safe. Even this skin had the scent of smoke under the sea. This living skin, this present skin; but it was nearly twenty years since Brian’s death.

A chalk pit, a picture gallery, a brown figure in the sun, a skin, here, redolent of salt and smoke, and here (like Mary’s, he remembered) savagely musky. Somewhere in the mind a lunatic shuffled a pack of snapshots and dealt them out at random, shuffled once more and dealt them out in different order, again and again, indefinitely. There was no chronology. The idiot remembered no distinction between before and after. The pit was as real and vivid as the gallery. That ten years separated flints from Gauguins was a fact, not given, but discoverable only on second thoughts by the calculating intellect. The thirty-five years of his conscious life made themselves immediately known to him as a chaos – a pack of snapshots in the hands of a lunatic. And who decided which snapshots were to be kept, which thrown away? A frightened or libidinous animal, according to the Freudians. But the Freudians were victims of the pathetic fallacy, incorrigible rationalizers always in search of sufficient reasons, of comprehensible motives. Fear and lust are the most easily comprehensible motives of all. Therefore . . . But psychology had no more right to be anthropomorphic, or even exclusively zoomorphic, than any other science. Besides a reason and an animal, man was also a collection of particles subject to the laws of chance. Some things were remembered for their utility or their appeal to the high faculties of the mind; some, by the presiding animal, remembered (or else deliberately forgotten) for their emotional content. But what of the innumerable remembered things without any particular emotional content, without utility, or beauty, or rational significance? Memory in these cases seemed to be merely a matter of luck. At the time of the event certain particles happened to be in a favourable position. Click! the event found itself caught, indelibly recorded. For no reason whatever. Unless, it now rather disquietingly occurred to him, unless of course the reason were not before the event, but after it, in what had been the future. What if that picture gallery had been recorded and stored away in the cellars of his mind for the sole and express purpose of being brought up into consciousness at this present moment? Brought up, today, when he was forty-two and secure, forty-two and fixed, unchangeably himself, brought up along with those critical years of his adolescence, along with the woman who had been his teacher, his first mistress, and was now a hardly human creature festering to death, alone, in a dirty burrow? And what if that absurd childish game with the flints had had a point, a profound purpose, which was simply to be recollected here on this blazing roof, now as his lips made contact with Helen’s sun-warmed flesh? In order that he might be forced, in the midst of this act of detached and irresponsible sensuality, to think of Brian and of the things that Brian had lived for; yes, and had died for – died for, another image suddenly reminded him, at the foot of just such a cliff as that beneath which they had played as children in the chalk pit. Yes, even Brian’s suicide, he now realized with horror, even the poor huddled body on the rocks, was mysteriously implicit in this hot skin.

One, two, three, four – counting each movement of his hand, he began to caress her. The gesture was magical, would transport him, if repeated sufficiently often, beyond the past and the future, beyond right and wrong, into the discrete, the self-sufficient, the atomic present. Particles of thought, desire and feeling moving at random among particles of time, coming into casual contact and as casually parting. A casino, an asylum, a zoo; but also, in a corner, a library and someone thinking. Someone largely at the mercy of the croupiers, at the mercy of the idiots and the animals; but still irrepressible and indefatigable. Another two or three years and the Elements of Sociology would be finished. In spite of everything; yes, in spite of everything, he thought with a kind of defiant elation, and counted thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five . . .

CHAPTER IV

November 6th 1902

HORNS WITH A frizzle of orange hair between; the pink muzzle lowered enquiringly towards a tiny cup and saucer; eyes expressive of a more than human astonishment. ‘THE OX,’ it was proclaimed in six-inch lettering, ‘THE OX IN THE TEA-CUP.’ The thing was supposed to be a reason for buying beef extract – was a reason.

Ox in Cup. The words, the basely comic image, spotted the home counties that summer and autumn like a skin disease. One of a score of nasty and discreditable infections. The train which carried Anthony Beavis into Surrey rolled through mile-long eczemas of vulgarity. Pills, soaps, cough drops and – more glaringly inflamed and scabby than all the rest – beef essence, the cupped ox.

‘Thirty-one . . . thirty-two,’ the boy said to himself, and wished he had begun his counting when the train started. Between Waterloo and Clapham Junction there must have been hundreds of oxen. Millions.

Opposite, leaning back in his corner, sat Anthony’s father. With his left hand he shaded his eyes. Under the drooping brown moustache his lips moved.

‘Stay for me there,’ John Beavis was saying to the person who, behind his closed lids, was sometimes still alive, sometimes the cold, immobile thing of his most recent memories:

‘Stay for me there; I shall not fail

To meet thee in that hollow vale.’

There was no immortality, of course. After Darwin, after the Fox Sisters, after John Beavis’s own father, the surgeon, how could there be? Beyond that hollow vale there was nothing. But all the same, oh, all the same, stay for me, stay for me, stay, stay!

‘Thirty-three.’

Anthony turned away from the hurrying landscape and was confronted by the spectacle of that hand across the eyes, those moving lips. That he had ever thought of counting the oxen seemed all at once shameful, a betrayal. And Uncle James, at the other end of the seat, with his Times – and his face, as he read, twitching every few seconds in sudden spasms of nervousness. He might at least have had the decency not to read it now – now, while they were on their way to . . . Anthony refused to say the words; words would make it all so clear, and he didn’t want to know too clearly. Reading The Times might be shameful; but the other thing was terrible, too terrible to bear thinking about, and yet so terrible that you couldn’t help thinking about it.

Anthony looked out of the window again, through tears. The green and golden brightness of St Martin’s summer swam in an obscuring iridescence. And suddenly the wheels of the train began to chant articulately. ‘Dead-a-dead-a-dead,’ they shouted, ‘dead-a-dead-a-dead . . .’ For ever. The tears overflowed, were warm for an instant on his cheeks, then icy cold. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away, wiped the fog out of his eyes. Luminous under the sun, the world before him was like one vast and intricate jewel. The elms had withered to a pale gold. Huge above the fields, and motionless, they seemed to be meditating in the crystal light of the morning, seemed to be remembering, seemed, for the very brink of dissolution, to be looking back and in a last ecstasy of recollection living over again, concentrated in this shining moment of autumnal time, all the long-drawn triumph of spring and summer.

‘DEAD-A-DEAD,’ in a sudden frenzy yelled the wheels, as the train crossed a bridge, ‘A-DEAD-A-DEAD!’

Anthony tried not to listen – vainly; then tried to make the wheels say something else. Why shouldn’t they say, To stop the train pull down the chain? That was what they usually said. With a great effort of concentration he forced them to change their refrain.

‘To stop the train pull down the chain, to stop the train pull down a-dead-a-dead-a-dead . . .’ It was no good.

Mr Beavis uncovered his eyes for a moment and looked out of the window. How bright, the autumnal trees! Cruelly bright they would have seemed, insultingly, except for something desperate in their stillness, a certain glassy fragility that, oh! invited disaster, that prophetically announced the coming darkness and the black branches moving in torture among stars, the sleet like arrows along the screaming wind.

Uncle James turned the page of his Times. The Ritualists and the Kensitites were at it again, he saw; and was delighted. Let dog eat dog. ‘MR CHAMBERLAIN AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE SCHOOL.’ What was the old devil up to now? Unveiling a tablet to the Old Boys who had been killed in the war. ‘Over one hundred young men went to the front, and twelve of them laid down their lives for the country in South Africa (cheers).’ Deluded idiots, thought Uncle James, who had always been passionately a pro-Boer.

Painted, among the real cows in their pasture, the enormous horns, the triangular auburn frizz, the enquiring nostrils, the tea-cup. Anthony shut his eyes against the vision.

‘No, I won’t,’ he said with all the determination he had previously used against the wheels. He refused to know the horror; he refused to know the ox. But what was the good of refusing? The wheels were still shouting away. And how could he suppress the fact that this ox was the thirty-fourth, on the right, from Clapham Junction? A number is always a number, even on the way to . . . But counting was shameful, counting was like Uncle James’s Times. Counting was shirking, was betraying. And yet the other thing, the thing they ought to be thinking about, was really too terrible. Too unnatural, somehow.

‘Whatever we may have thought, or still think, as to the causes, the necessity, the justice of the war which is now happily at an end, I think that we must all have a feeling of profound satisfaction that when the country called its children to arms, the manhood of the nation leaped to it in response . . .’ His face twitching with exasperation, Uncle James put down The Times and looked at his watch.

‘Two and a half minutes late,’ he said angrily.

‘If only it were a hundred years late,’ thought his brother. ‘Or ten years early – no, twelve, thirteen. The first year of our marriage.’

James Beavis looked out of the window. ‘And we’re still at least a mile from Lollingdon,’ he went on.

As though to a sore, to an aching tooth, his fingers travelled again to the chronometer in his waistcoat pocket. Time for its own sake. Always imperiously time, categorically time – time to look at one’s watch and see the time . . .

The wheels spoke more and more slowly, became at last inarticulate. The brakes screamed.

‘Lollingdon, Lollingdon,’ the porter called.

But Uncle James was already on the platform. ‘Quick!’ he shouted, striding, long-legged, beside the still moving train. His hand went once more to that mystical ulcer for ever gnawing at his consciousness. ‘Quick!’

A sudden resentment stirred in his brother’s mind. ‘What does he want me to be quick for?’ As if they were in danger of missing something – some pleasure, some precariously brief entertainment.

Anthony climbed down after his father. They walked towards the gate, along a wall of words and pictures. A GUINEA A BOX AND A BLESSING TO MEN THE PICKWICK THE OWL AND KILLS MOTHS BUGS BEETLES A SPADE A SPADE AND BRANSON’S CAMP COFFEE THE OX IN . . . And suddenly here were the horns, the expressive eyes, the cup – the thirty-fifth cup – ‘No, I won’t, I won’t’ – but all the same, the thirty-fifth, the thirty-fifth from Clapham Junction on the right-hand side.

The cab smelt of straw and leather. Of straw and leather and of the year eighty-eight, was it? yes, eighty-eight; that Christmas when they had driven to the Champernownes’ dance – he and she and her mother – in the cold, with the sheepskin rug across their knees. And as though by accident (for he had not yet dared to make the gesture deliberately) the back of his hand had brushed against hers; had brushed, as though by accident, had casually rested. Her mother was talking about the difficulty of getting servants – and when you did get them, they didn’t know anything, they were lazy. She hadn’t moved her hand! Did that mean she didn’t mind? He took the risk; his fingers closed over hers. They were disrespectful, her mother went on, they were . . . He felt an answering pressure and, looking up, divined in the darkness that she was smiling at him.

‘Really,’ her mother was saying, ‘I don’t know what things are coming to nowadays.’ And he had seen, by way of silent comment, the mischievous flash of Maisie’s teeth; and that little squeeze of the hand had been deliciously conspiratorial, secret and illicit.

Slowly, hoof after hoof, the old horse drew them; slowly along lanes, into the heart of the great autumnal jewel of gold and crystal; and stopped at last at the very core of it. In the sunshine, the church tower was like grey amber. The clock, James Beavis noticed with annoyance, was slow. They passed under the lych-gate. Startlingly and hideously black, four people were walking up the path in front of them. Two huge women (to Anthony they all seemed giantesses) rose in great inky cones of drapery from the flagstones. With them, still further magnified by their top-hats, went a pair of enormous men.

‘The Champernownes,’ said James Beavis; and the syllables of the familiar name were like a sword, yet another sword, in the very quick of his brother’s being. ‘The Champernownes and – let’s see – what’s the name of that young fellow their daughter married? Anstey? Annerley?’ He glanced enquiringly at John; but John was staring fixedly in front of him and did not answer.

‘Amersham? Atherton?’ James Beavis frowned with irritation. Meticulous, he attached an enormous importance to names and dates and figures; he prided himself on his power to reproduce them correctly. A lapse of memory drove him to fury. ‘Atherton? Anderson?’ And what made it more maddening was the fact that the young man was so goodlooking, carried himself so well – not in that stupid, stiff, military way, like his father-in-law, the General, but gracefully, easily . . . ‘I shan’t know what to call him,’ he said to himself; and his right cheek began to twitch, as though some living creature had been confined beneath the skin and were violently struggling to escape.

They walked on. It seemed to Anthony that he had swallowed his heart – swallowed it whole, without chewing. He felt rather sick, as though he were expecting to be caned.

The black giants halted, turned, and came back to meet them. Hats were raised, hands shaken.

‘And dear little Anthony!’ said Lady Champernowne, when at last it was his turn. Impulsively, she bent down and kissed him.

She was fat. Her lips left a disgusting wet place on his cheek. Anthony hated her.

‘Perhaps I ought to kiss him too,’ thought Mary Amberley, as she watched her mother. One was expected to do such odd things when one was married. Six months ago, when she was still Mary Champernowne and fresh from school, it would have been unthinkable. But now . . . one never knew. In the end, however, she decided that she wouldn’t kiss the boy, it would really be too ridiculous. She pressed his hand without speaking, smiling only from the remote security of her secret happiness. She was nearly five months gone with child, and had lived for these last two or three weeks in a kind of trance of drowsy bliss, inexpressibly delicious. Bliss in a world that had become beautiful and rich and benevolent out of all recognition. The country, as they drove that morning in the gently swaying landau, had been like paradise; and this little plot of green between the golden trees and the tower was Eden itself. Poor Mrs Beavis had died, it was true; so pretty still, so young. How sad that was! But the sadness, somehow, did not touch this secret bliss of hers, remained profoundly irrelevant to it, as though it were the sadness of somebody in another planet.

Anthony looked up for a moment into the smiling face, so bright in its black setting, so luminous with inner peace and happiness, then was overcome with shyness and dropped his eyes.

Fascinated, meanwhile, Roger Amberley observed his father-in-law and wondered how it was possible for anyone to live so unfailingly in character; how one could contrive to be a real general and at the same time to look and sound so exactly like a general on the musical comedy stage. Even at a funeral, even while he was saying a few well-chosen words to the bereaved husband – pure Grossmith! Under his fine brown moustache his lips twitched irrepressibly.

‘Looks badly cut up,’ the General was thinking, as he talked to John Beavis; and felt sorry for the poor fellow, even while he still disliked him. For of course the man was an affected bore and a prig, too clever, but at the same time a fool. Worst of all, not a man’s man. Always surrounded by petticoats. Mothers’ petticoats, aunts’ petticoats, wives’ petticoats. A few years in the army would have done him all the good in the world. Still, he did look most horribly cut up. And Maisie had been a sweet little thing. Too good for him, of course . . .

They stood for a moment, then all together slowly moved towards the church. Anthony was in the midst of them, a dwarf among the giants. Their blackness hemmed him in, obscured the sky, eclipsed the amber tower and the trees. He walked as though at the bottom of a moving well. Its black walls rustled all around him. He began to cry.

He had not wanted to know – had done his best not to know, except superficially, as one knows, for example, that thirty-five comes after thirty-four. But this black well was dark with the concentrated horror of death. There was no escape. His sobs broke out uncontrollably.

Mary Amberley, who had been lost in the rapturous contemplation of golden leaves patterned against the pale sky, looked down for a moment at this small creature weeping on another planet, then turned away again.

‘Poor child!’ his father said to himself; and then, overbidding as it were, ‘Poor motherless child!’ he added deliberately, and was glad (for he wanted to suffer) that the words should cost him so much pain to pronounce. He looked down at his son, saw the grief-twisted face, the full and sensitive lips so agonizingly hurt, and above this tear-stained distortion the broad high forehead, seemingly unmoved in its smooth purity; saw, and felt his heart wrung with an additional pain.

‘Dear boy!’ he said aloud, thinking, as he spoke, how this grief would surely bring them nearer together. It was so difficult somehow with a child – so hard to be natural, to establish a contact. But surely, surely this sadness, and their common memories . . . He squeezed the small hand within his own.

They were at the church door. The well disintegrated.

‘One might be in Tibet,’ thought Uncle James as he took off his hat. ‘Why not one’s boots as well?’

Inside the church was an ancient darkness, smelly with centuries of rustic piety. Anthony took two breaths of that sweet-stale air, and felt his midriff heave with a qualm of disgust. Fear and misery had already made him swallow his heart; and now this smell, this beastly smell that meant that the place was full of germs. . . . ‘Reeking with germs!’ He heard her voice – her voice that always changed when she talked about germs, became different, as though somebody else was speaking. At ordinary times, when she wasn’t angry, it sounded so soft and somehow lazy – laughingly lazy, or else tiredly lazy. Germs made it suddenly almost fierce, and at the same time frightened. ‘Always spit when there’s a bad smell about,’ she had told him. ‘There might be typhoid germs in the air.’ His mouth, as he recalled her words, began to water. But how could he spit here, in church? There was nothing to do but swallow his spittle. He shuddered as he did so, with fear and a sickening disgust. And suppose he really should be sick in this stinking place? The apprehension made him feel still sicker. And what did one have to do during the service? He had never been to a funeral before.

James Beavis looked at his watch. In three minutes the hocus-pocus was timed to begin. Why hadn’t John insisted on a plain-clothes funeral? It wasn’t as if poor Maisie had ever set much store by this kind of thing. A silly little woman; but never religiously silly. Hers had been the plain secular silliness of mere female frivolity. The silliness of reading novels on sofas, alternating with the silliness of tea-parties and picnics and dances. Incredible that John had managed to put up with that kind of foolery – had even seemed to like it! Women crackling like hens round the tea-table. James Beavis frowned with angry contempt. He hated women – was disgusted by them. All those soft bulges of their bodies. Horrible. And the stupidity, the brainlessness. But anyhow, poor Maisie had never been one of the curate-fanciers. It was those awful relations of hers. There were deans in the family – deans and deanesses. John hadn’t wanted to offend them. Weak-minded of him. One ought to be offensive on a matter of principle.

The organ played. A little procession of surplices entered through the open door. Some men carried in what seemed a great pile of flowers. There was singing. Then silence. And then, in an extraordinary voice, ‘Now is Christ risen from the dead,’ began the clergyman; and went on and on, all about God, and death, and beasts at Ephesus, and the natural body. But Anthony hardly heard, because he could think of nothing except those germs that were still there in spite of the smell of the flowers, and of the spittle that kept flowing into his mouth and that he had to swallow in spite of the typhoid and influenza, and of that horrible sick feeling in his stomach. How long would it last?

‘Like a goat,’ James Beavis said to himself as he listened to the intoning from the lectern. He looked again at that young son-in-law of the Champernownes. Anderton, Abdy . . .? What a fine, classical profile!

His brother sat with bent head and a hand across his eyes, thinking of the ashes in the casket there beneath the flowers – the ashes that had been her body.

The service was over at last. ‘Thank goodness!’ thought Anthony, as he spat surreptitiously into his handkerchief and folded away the germs into his pocket, ‘Thank goodness!’ He hadn’t been sick. He followed his father to the door and, rapturously, as he stepped out of the twilight, breathed the pure air. The sun was still shining. He looked around and up into the pale sky. Overhead, in the church tower, a sudden outcry of jackdaws was like the noise of a stone flung glancingly on to a frozen pond and skidding away with a reiteration of glassy chinking across the ice.

‘But, Anthony, you mustn’t throw stones on the ice,’ his mother had called to him. ‘They get frozen in, and then the skaters . . .’

He remembered how she had come swerving round towards him, on one foot – swooping, he had thought, like a sea-gull; all in white: beautiful. And now . . . The tears came into his eyes again. But, oh, why had she insisted on his trying to skate?

‘I don’t want to,’ he had said; and when she asked why, it had been impossible to explain. He was afraid of being laughed at, of course. People made such fools of themselves. But how could he have told her that? In the end he had cried – in front of everyone. It couldn’t have been worse. He had almost hated her that morning. And now she was dead, and up there in the tower the jackdaws were throwing stones on last winter’s ice.

They were at the grave-side now. Once more Mr Beavis pressed his son’s hand. He was trying to forestall the effect upon the child’s mind of these last, most painful moments.

‘Be brave,’ he whispered. The advice was tendered as much to himself as to the boy.

Leaning forward, Anthony looked into the hole. It seemed extraordinarily deep. He shuddered, closed his eyes; and immediately there she was, swooping towards him, white, like a sea-gull, and white again in the satin evening-dress when she came to say good-night before she went out to dinner, with that scent on her as she bent over him in bed, and the coolness of her bare arms. ‘You’re like a cat,’ she used to say when he rubbed his cheek against her arms. ‘Why don’t you purr while you’re about it?’

‘Anyhow,’ thought Uncle James with satisfaction, ‘he was firm about the cremation.’ The Christians had been scored off there. Resurrection of the body, indeed! In AD 1902!

When his time came, John Beavis was thinking, this was where he would be buried. In this very grave. His ashes next to hers.

The clergyman was talking again in that extraordinary voice. ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secret of our hearts . . .’ Anthony opened his eyes. Two men were lowering into the hole a small terra-cotta box, hardly larger than a biscuit tin. The box touched the bottom; the ropes were hauled up.

‘Earth to earth,’ bleated the goat-like voice, ‘ashes to ashes.’

‘My ashes to her ashes,’ thought John Beavis. ‘Mingled.’

And suddenly he remembered that time in Rome, a year after they were married; those June nights and the fire-flies, under the trees, in the Doria Gardens, like stars gone crazy.

‘Who shall change our vile body that it may be like unto his glorious body . . .’

‘Vile, vile?’ His very soul protested.

Earth fell, one spadeful, then another. The box was almost covered. It was so small, so dreadfully and unexpectedly tiny . . . the image of that enormous ox, that minute tea-cup, rose to Anthony’s imagination. Rose up obscenely and would not be exorcized. The jackdaws cried again in the tower. Like a sea-gull she had swooped towards him, beautiful. But the ox was still there, still in its tea-cup, still base and detestable; and he himself yet baser, yet more hateful.

John Beavis released the hand he had been holding and, laying his arm round the boy’s shoulders, pressed the thin little body against his own – close, close, till he felt in his own flesh the sobs by which it was shaken.

‘Poor child! Poor motherless child!’

CHAPTER V

December 8th 1926

‘YOU WOULDN’T DARE,’ Joyce said.

‘I would.’

‘No, you wouldn’t.’

‘I tell you I would,’ Helen Amberley insisted more emphatically.

Maddeningly sensible. ‘You’d be sent to prison if you were caught,’ the elder sister went on. ‘No, not to prison,’ she corrected herself. ‘You’re too young. You’d be sent to a reformatory.’

The blood rushed up to Helen’s face. ‘You and your reformatories!’ she said in a tone that was meant to be contemptuous, but that trembled with irrepressible anger. That reformatory was a personal affront. Prison was terrible; so terrible that there was something fine about it. (She had visited Chillon, had crossed the Bridge of Sighs.) But a reformatory – no! that was utterly ignoble. A reformatory was on the same level as a public lavatory or a station on the District Railway. ‘Reformatories!’ she repeated. It was typical of Joyce to think of reformatories. She always dragged anything amusing and adventurous down into the mud. And what made it so much worse, she was generally quite right in doing so: the mud was facts, the mud was common sense. ‘You think I wouldn’t dare to do it, because you wouldn’t dare,’ Helen went on. ‘Well, I shall do it. Just to show you. I shall steal something from every shop we go to. Every one. So there.’

Joyce began to feel seriously alarmed. She glanced questioningly at her sister. A profile, pale now and rigid, the chin defiantly lifted, was all that Helen would let her see. ‘Now, look here,’ she began severely.

‘I’m not listening,’ said Helen, speaking straight ahead into impersonal space.

‘Don’t be a little fool!’

There was no answer. The profile might have been that of a young queen on a coin. They turned into the Gloucester Road and walked towards the shops.

But suppose the wretched girl really meant what she said? Joyce changed her strategy. ‘Of course I know you dare,’ she said conciliatorily. There was no answer. ‘I’m not doubting it for a moment.’ She turned again towards Helen; but the profile continued to stare ahead with eyes unwaveringly averted. The grocer’s was at the next corner, not twenty yards away. There was no time to lose. Joyce swallowed what remained of her pride. ‘Now, look here, Helen,’ she said, and her tone was appealing, she was throwing herself on her sister’s generosity. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t.’ In her fancy she saw the whole deplorable scene. Helen caught red-handed; the indignant shopkeeper, talking louder and louder; her own attempts at explanation and excuse made unavailing by the other’s intolerable behaviour. For, of course, Helen would just stand there, in silence, not uttering a word of self-justification or regret, calm and contemptuously smiling, as though she were a superior being and everybody else just dirt. Which would enrage the shopkeeper still more. Until at last he’d send for a policeman. And then . . . But what would Colin think when he heard of it? His future sister-in-law arrested for stealing! He might break off the engagement. ‘Oh, please, don’t do it,’ she begged; ‘please!’ But she might as well have begged the image of King George on a half-crown to turn round and wink at her. Pale, determined, a young queen minted in silver, Helen kept on. ‘Please!’ Joyce repeated, almost tearfully. The thought that she might lose Colin was a torture. ‘Please!’ But the smell of groceries was already in her nostrils; they were on the very threshold. She caught her sister by the sleeve; but Helen shook her off and marched straight in. With a sinking of the heart, Joyce followed as though to her execution. The young man at the cheese and bacon counter smiled welcomingly as they came in. In her effort to avert suspicion, to propitiate in advance his inevitable indignation, Joyce smiled back with an effusive friendliness. No, that was overdoing it. She readjusted her face. Calm; easy; perfectly the lady, but at the same time affable; affable and (what was that word?), oh yes, gracious – like Queen Alexandra. Graciously she followed Helen across the shop. But why, she was thinking, why had she ever broached the subject of crime? Why, knowing Helen, had she been mad enough to argue that, if one were properly brought up, one simply couldn’t be a criminal? It was obvious what Helen’s response would be to that. She had simply asked for it.

It was to the younger sister that their mother had given the shopping list. ‘Because she’s almost as much of a scatterbrain as I am,’ Mrs Amberley had explained, with that touch of complacency that always annoyed Joyce so much. People had no right to boast about their faults. ‘It’ll teach her to be a good housekeeper – God help her!’ she added with a little snort of laughter.

Standing at the counter, Helen unfolded the paper, read, and then, very haughtily and without a smile, as though she were giving orders to a slave, ‘Coffee first of all,’ she said to the assistant. ‘Two pounds – the two-and-fourpenny mixture.’

The girl, it was evident, was offended by Helen’s tone and feudal manner. Joyce felt it her duty to beam at her with a double, compensatory graciousness.

‘Do try to behave a little more civilly,’ she whispered when the girl had gone for the coffee.

Helen preserved her silence, but with an effort. Civil, indeed! To this horrible little creature who squinted and didn’t wash enough under the arms? Oh, how she loathed all ugliness and deformity and uncleanliness! Loathed and detested . . .

‘And for heaven’s sake,’ Joyce went on, ‘don’t do anything idiotic. I absolutely forbid . . .’

But even as she spoke the words, Helen stretched out a hand and without any attempt at concealment took the topmost of an elaborate structure of chocolate tablets that stood, like the section of a spiral pillar, on the counter – took it and then, with the same slow deliberation of movement, put it carefully away in her basket.

But before the crime was fully accomplished Joyce had turned and walked away.

‘I might say I’d never seen her before,’ she was thinking. But of course that wouldn’t do. Everybody knew they were sisters. ‘Oh, Colin,’ she cried inwardly, ‘Colin!’

A pyramid of tinned lobster loomed up before her. She halted. ‘Calm,’ she said to herself. ‘I must be calm.’ Her heart was thumping with terror, and the dark magenta lobsters on the labels of the tins wavered dizzily before her eyes. She was afraid to look round; but through the noise of her heart-beats she listened anxiously for the inevitable outcry.

‘I don’t know if you’re interested in lobster, Miss,’ a confidential voice almost whispered into her left ear.

Joyce started violently; then managed, with an effort, to smile and shake her head.

‘This is a line we can heartily recommend, Miss. I’m sure if you were to try a tin . . .’

‘And now,’ Helen was saying, very calmly and in the same maddeningly feudal tone, ‘I need ten pounds of sugar. But that you must send.’

They walked out of the shop. The young man at the cheese and bacon counter smiled his farewell; they were nice-looking girls and regular customers. With a great effort, Joyce contrived to be gracious yet once more. But they were hardly through the door when her face disintegrated, as it were, into a chaos of violent emotion.

‘Helen!’ she said furiously. ‘Helen!’

But Helen was still the young queen on her silver florin, a speechless profile.

‘Helen!’ Between the glove and the sleeve, Joyce found an inch of her sister’s bare skin and pinched, hard.

Helen jerked her arm away, and without looking round, a profile still, ‘If you bother me any more,’ she said in a low voice, ‘I shall push you into the gutter.’

Joyce opened her mouth to speak, then changed her mind and, absurdly, shut it again. She knew that if she did say anything more, Helen unquestionably would push her into the gutter. She had to be content with shrugging her shoulders and looking dignified.

The greengrocer’s was crowded. Waiting for her turn to be served, Helen had no difficulty in bagging a couple of oranges.

‘Have one?’ she proposed insultingly to Joyce as they walked out of the shop.

It was Joyce’s turn to be a profile on a coin.

At the stationer’s there were, unfortunately, no other clients to distract the attention of the people behind the counter. But Helen was equal to the situation. A handful of small change suddenly went rolling across the floor; and while the assistants were hunting for the scattered pennies, she helped herself to a rubber and three very good pencils.

It was at the butcher’s that the trouble began. Ordinarily Helen refused to go into the shop at all; the sight, the sickening smell of those pale corpses disgusted her. But this morning she walked straight in. In spite of the disgust. It was a point of honour. She had said every shop, and she wasn’t going to give Joyce an excuse for saying she had cheated. For the first half-minute, while her lungs were still full of the untainted air she had inhaled outside in the street, it was all right. But, oh God, when at last she had to breathe . . . God! She put her handkerchief to her nose. But the sharp rasping smell of the carcases leaked through the barrier of perfume, superimposing itself upon the sweetness, so that a respiration that began with Quelques Fleurs would hideously end with dead sheep or, opening in stale blood, modulated insensibly into the key of jasmine and ambergris.

A customer went out; the butcher turned to her. He was an oldish man, very large, with a square massive face that beamed down at her with a paternal benevolence.

‘Like Mr Baldwin,’ she said to herself, and then, aloud but indistinctly through her handkerchief, ‘A pound and a half of rump-steak, please.’

The butcher returned in a moment with a mass of gory flesh. ‘There’s a beautiful piece of meat, Miss!’ He fingered the dank, red lump with an artist’s loving enthusiasm. ‘A really beautiful piece.’ It was Mr Baldwin’s fingering his Virgil, thumbing his dog’s-eared Webb.

‘I shall never eat meat again,’ she said to herself, as Mr Baldwin turned away and began to cut up the meat. ‘But what shall I take?’ She looked around. ‘What on earth . . .? Ah!’ A marble shelf ran, table-high, along one of the walls of the shop. On it, in trays, pink or purply brown, lay a selection of revolting viscera. And among the viscera a hook – a big steel S, still stained, at one of its curving tips, with the blood of whatever drawn and decapitated corpse had hung from it. She glanced round. It seemed a good moment – the butcher was weighing her steak, his assistant was talking to that disgusting old woman like a bulldog, the girl at the cash desk was deep in her accounts. Aloof and dissociated in the doorway, Joyce was elaborately overacting the part of one who interrogates the sky and wonders if this drizzle is going to turn into something serious. Helen took three quick steps, picked up the hook, and was just lowering it into her basket when, full of solicitude, ‘Look out, Miss,’ came the butcher’s voice, ‘you’ll get yourself dirty if you touch those hooks.’

That start of surprise was like the steepest descent of the Scenic Railway – sickening! Hot in her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead, came a rush of guilty blood! She tried to laugh.

‘I was just looking.’ The hook clanked back on to the marble.

‘I wouldn’t like you to spoil your clothes, Miss.’ His smile was fatherly. More than ever like Mr Baldwin.

Nervously, for lack of anything better to do or say, Helen laughed again, and, in the process, drew another deep breath of corpse. Ugh! She fortified her nose once more with Quelque Fleurs.

‘One pound and eleven ounces, Miss.’

She nodded her assent. But what could she take? And how was she to find the opportunity?

‘Anything more this morning?’

Yes, that was the only thing to do – to order something more. That would give her time to think, a chance to act. ‘Have you any . . .’ she hesitated ‘. . . any sweetbreads?’

Yes, Mr Baldwin did have some sweetbreads, and they were on the shelf with the other viscera. Near the hook. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, when he asked her how much she needed. ‘Just the ordinary amount, you know.’

She looked about her while he was busy with the sweetbreads, despairingly. There was nothing in this beastly shop, nothing except the hook, that she could take. And now that he had seen her with it in her hands, the hook was out of the question. Nothing whatever. Unless . . . That was it! A shudder ran through her. But she frowned, she set her teeth. She was determined to go through with it.

‘And now,’ when he had packed up the sweetbreads, ‘now,’ she said, ‘I must have some of those!’ She indicated the packets of pale sausages piled on a shelf at the other end of the shop.

‘I’ll do it while his back is turned,’ she thought. But the girl at the cash desk had emerged from her accounts and was looking round the shop. ‘Oh, damn her, damn her!’ Helen fairly screamed in her imagination, and then, ‘Thank goodness!’ the girl had turned away. A hand shot out; but the averted glance returned, ‘Damn her!’ The hand dropped back. And now it was too late. Mr Baldwin had got the sausages, had turned, was coming back towards her.

‘Will that be all, Miss?’

‘Well, I wonder?’ Helen frowned uncertainly, playing for time. ‘I can’t help thinking there was something else . . . something else . . .’ The seconds passed; it was terrible; she was making a fool of herself, an absolute idiot. But she refused to give up. She refused to acknowledge defeat.

‘We’ve some beautiful Welsh mutton in this morning,’ said the butcher in that artist’s voice of his, as though he were talking of the Georgics.

Helen shook her head: she really couldn’t start buying mutton now.

Suddenly the girl at the cash desk began to write again. The moment had come. ‘No,’ she said with decision, ‘I’ll take another pound of those sausages.’

‘Another?’ Mr Baldwin looked surprised.

No wonder! she thought. They’d be surprised at home too.

‘Yes, just one more,’ she said, and smiled ingratiatingly, as though she were asking a favour. He walked back towards the shelf. The girl at the cash desk was still writing, the old woman who looked like a bulldog had never stopped talking to the assistant. Quickly – there was not a second to lose – Helen turned towards the marble shelf beside her. It was for one of those kidneys that she had decided. The thing slithered obscenely between her gloved fingers – a slug, a squid. In the end she had to grab it with her whole hand. Thank heaven, she thought, for gloves! As she dropped it into the basket, the idea came to her that for some reason she might have to take the horrible thing in her mouth, raw as it was and oozy with some unspeakable slime, take it in her mouth, bite, taste, swallow. Another shudder of disgust ran through her, so violent this time that it seemed to tear something at the centre of her body.

Tired of acting the meteorologist, Joyce was standing under her umbrella looking at the chrysanthemums in the florist’s window next door. She had prepared something particularly offensive to say to Helen when she came out. But at the sight of her sister’s white unhappy face she forgot even her legitimate grievances.

‘Why, Helen, what is the matter?’

For all answer Helen suddenly began to cry.

‘What is it?’

She shook her head and, turning away, raised her hand to her face to brush away the tears.

‘Tell me . . .’

‘Oh!’ Helen started and cried out as though she had been stung by a wasp. An expression of agonized repugnance wrinkled up her face. ‘Oh, too filthy, too filthy,’ she repeated, looking at her fingers. And setting her basket down on the pavement, she unbuttoned the glove, stripped it off her hand, and, with a violent gesture, flung it away from her into the gutter.

CHAPTER VI

November 6th 1902

THE GUARD WHISTLED, and obediently the train began to move – past Keating, at a crawl; past Branson; past Pickwick, Owl and Waverley; past Beecham, Owbridge, Carter, Pears, in accelerated succession; past Humphrey’s Iron Buildings, past Lollingdon for Choate; past Eno’s at twenty miles an hour; past Pears, Pears, Pears, Pears, Pears – and suddenly the platform and its palings dipped and were lost, swallowed in the green country. Anthony leaned back in his corner and sighed thankfully. It was escape at last; he had climbed out of that black well into which they had pushed him, and was free again. The wheels sang cheerfully in his ears. ‘To stop the train pull down the chain penálty for impróper use five póunds five póunds FIVE POUNDS FIVE POUNDS . . .’ But how perfectly awful luncheon at Granny’s had been!

‘Work,’ James Beavis was saying. ‘It’s the only thing at a time like this.’

His brother nodded. ‘The only thing,’ he agreed. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘One’s had a pretty bad knock,’ he added self-consciously, in that queer jargon which he imagined to be colloquial English. John Beavis’s colloquialisms mostly came out of books. That ‘bad knock’ was a metaphor drawn from the boxing contests he had never witnessed. ‘Luckily,’ he went on, ‘one’s got a great deal of work on hand at the moment.’ He thought of his lectures. He thought of his contributions to the Oxford Dictionary. The mountains of books, the slips, his huge card index, the letters from fellow philologists. And the exhaustive essay on Jacobean slang. ‘Not that one wants to “shirk” anything,’ he added, putting the colloquial word between the audible equivalents of inverted commas. James mustn’t think that he was going to drown his grief in work. He groped for a phrase. ‘It’s . . . it’s a sacred music that one’s facing!’ he brought out at last.

James kept nodding with quick little jerks of the head, as though he knew in advance everything his brother would or possibly could say. His face twitched with sudden involuntary tics. He was wasted by nervous impatience as though by a consumption, eaten away by it to the very bone. ‘Quite,’ he said, ‘quite.’ And gave one last nod. There was a long silence.

‘Tomorrow,’ Anthony was thinking, ‘there’ll be algebra with old Jimbug.’ The prospect was disagreeable; he wasn’t good at maths, and, even at the best of times, even when he was only joking, Mr Jameson was a formidable teacher. ‘If Jimbug gets baity with me, like that time last week . . .’ Remembering the scene, Anthony frowned; the blood came up into his cheeks. Jimbug made sarcastic remarks at him and pulled his hair. He had begun to blub. (Who wouldn’t have blubbed?) A tear had fallen on to the equation he was trying to work out and made a huge round blot. That beast Staithes had ragged him about it afterwards. Luckily Foxe had come to his rescue. One laughed at Foxe because he stammered; but he was really extraordinarily decent.

At Waterloo, Anthony and his father took a hansom. Uncle James preferred to walk. ‘I can get to the Club in eleven minutes,’ he told them. His hand went to his waistcoat pocket. He looked at his watch; then turned and without saying another word went striding away down the hill.

‘Euston!’ John Beavis called up to the cabman.

Stepping cautiously on the smooth slope, the horse moved forward; the cab heaved like a ship. Inaudibly, Anthony hummed the ‘Washington Post.’ Riding in a hansom always made him feel extraordinarily happy. At the bottom of the hill, the cabby whipped his horse into a trot. They passed a smell of beer, a smell of fried fish; drove through ‘Good-bye, Dolly Gray’ on a cornet and swung into the Waterloo Bridge Road. The traffic roared and rattled all about them. If his father had not been there, Anthony would have sung out aloud.

The end of the afternoon was still smokily bright above the house tops. And, all at once, here was the river, shining, with the black barges, and a tug, and St Paul’s like a balloon in the sky, and the mysterious Shot Tower.

On the bridge, a man was throwing bread to the seagulls. Dim, almost invisible, they came sliding through the air; turned, with a tilt of grey wings, leaning against their speed, and suddenly flashed into brilliance, like snow against the dark fringes of the sky; then wheeled away again out of the light, towards invisibility. Anthony looked and stopped humming. Swerving towards you on the ice, a skater will lean like that.

And suddenly, as though, disquietingly, he too had understood the inner significance of those swooping birds, ‘Dear boy,’ Mr Beavis began, breaking a long silence. He pressed Anthony’s arm. ‘Dear boy!’

With a sinking of the heart Anthony waited for what he would say next.

‘We must stand together now,’ said Mr Beavis.

The boy made a vague noise of acquiescence.

‘Close together. Because we both . . .’ he hesitated, ‘we both loved her.’

There was another silence. ‘Oh, if only he’d stop!’ Anthony prayed. Vainly. His father went on.

‘We’ll always be true to her,’ he said. ‘Never . . . never let her down? – will we?’

Anthony nodded.

‘Never!’ John Beavis repeated emphatically. ‘Never!’ And to himself he recited yet once more those lines that had haunted him all these days:

‘Till age, or grief, or sickness must

Marry my body to that dust

It so much loves; and fills the room

My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.

Stay for me there!’

Then aloud and in a tone almost of defiance, ‘She’ll never be dead for us,’ he said. ‘We’ll keep her living in our hearts – won’t we?’

‘Living for us,’ his father continued, ‘so that we can live for her – live finely, nobly, as she would want us to live.’ He paused on the brink of a colloquialism – the sort of colloquialism, he intended it to be, that a schoolboy would understand and appreciate. ‘Live . . . well, like a pair of regular “bricks,”’ he brought out unnaturally. ‘And bricks,’ he continued, extemporizing an improvement on the original locution, ‘bricks that are also “pals.” Real “chums.” We’re going to be “chums” now, Anthony, aren’t we?’

Anthony nodded again. He was in an agony of shame and embarrassment. ‘Chums.’ It was a school-story word. The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s. You laughed when you read it, you howled derisively. Chums! And with his father! He felt himself blushing. Looking out of the side window, to hide his discomfort, he saw one of the grey birds come swooping down, out of the sky, towards the bridge; nearer, nearer; then it leaned, it swerved away to the left, gleamed for a moment, transfigured, and was gone.

At school everyone was frightfully decent. Too decent, indeed. The boys were so tactfully anxious not to intrude on his emotional privacy, not to insult him with the display of their own high spirits, that, after having made a few constrained and unnatural demonstrations of friendliness, they left him alone. It was almost, Anthony found, like being sent to Coventry. They could hardly have made it worse for him if he had been caught stealing or sneaking. Never, since the first days of his first term, had he felt so hopelessly out of it all as he felt that evening.

‘Pity you missed the match this afternoon,’ said Thompson as they sat down to supper; he spoke in the tone he would have used to a visiting uncle.

‘Was it a good game?’ Anthony asked with the same unnatural politeness.

‘Oh, jolly good. They won, though. Three-two.’ The conversation languished. Uncomfortably, Thompson wondered what he should say next. That limerick of Butterworth’s, about the young lady of Ealing? No, he couldn’t possibly repeat that; not today, when Beavis’s mother . . . Then what? A loud diversion at the other end of the table providentially solved his problem. He had an excuse to turn away. ‘What’s that?’ he shouted with unnecessary eagerness. ‘What’s that?’ Soon they were all talking and laughing together. From beyond an invisible gulf Anthony listened and looked on.

‘Agnes!’ someone called to the maid. ‘Agnes!’

‘Aganeezer Lemon-squeezer,’ said Mark Staithes – but in a low voice, so that she shouldn’t hear; rudeness to the servants was a criminal offence at Bulstrode, and for that reason all the more appreciated, even sotto voce. That lemon-squeezer produced an explosion of laughter. Staithes himself, however, preserved his gravity. To sit unsmiling in the midst of the laughter he himself had provoked gave him an extraordinary sense of power and superiority. Besides, it was in the family tradition. No Staithes ever smiled at his own joke or epigram or repartee.

Looking round the table, Mark Staithes saw that the wretched, baby-face Benger Beavis wasn’t laughing with the rest, and for a second was filled with a passionate resentment against this person who had dared not to be amused by his joke. What made the insult more intolerable was the fact that Benger was so utterly insignificant. Bad at football, not much use at cricket. The only thing he was good at was work. Work! And did such a creature dare to sit unsmiling when he . . . Then, all of a sudden, he remembered that the poor chap had lost his mother, and, relaxing the hardness of his face, he gave him, across the intervening space, a little smile of recognition and sympathy. Anthony smiled back, then looked away, blushing with an obscure discomfort as though he had been caught doing something wrong. The consciousness of his own magnanimity and the spectacle of Benger’s embarrassment restored Staithes to his good humour.

‘Agnes!’ he shouted. ‘Agnes!’

Large, chronically angry, Agnes came at last.

‘More jam, please, Agnes.’

‘Jore mam,’ cried Thompson. Everybody laughed again, not because the joke was anything but putrid, but simply because everybody wanted to laugh.

‘And breadney.’

‘Yes, more breaf.’

‘More breaf, please, Agnes.’

‘Breaf, indeed!’ said Agnes indignantly, as she picked up the empty bread-and-butter plate. ‘Why can’t you say what you mean?’

There was a redoubling of the laughter. They couldn’t say what they meant – absolutely couldn’t, because to say ‘breaf’ or ‘breadney’ instead of bread was a Bulstrodian tradition and the symbol of their togetherness, the seal of their superiority to all the rest of the uninitiated world.

‘More Pepin le Bref!’ shouted Staithes.

‘Pepin le Breadney, le Breadney!’

The laughter became almost hysterical. They all remembered the occasion last term, when they had come to Pepin le Bref in their European History. Pepin le Bref – le Bref! First Butterworth had broken down, then Pembroke-Jones, then Thompson – and finally the whole of Division II, Staithes with the rest of them, uncontrollably. Old Jimbug had got into the most appalling bait. Which made it, now, even funnier.

‘Just a lot of silly babies!’ said Agnes; and, finding them still laughing when, a moment later, she came back with more bread. ‘Just babies!’ she repeated in a determined effort to be insulting. But her stroke did not touch them. They were beyond her, rapt away in the ecstasy of causeless laughter.

Anthony would have liked to laugh with them, but somehow did not dare to do more than smile, distantly and politely, like someone in a foreign country, who does not understand the joke, but wants to show he has no objection to other people having a big of fun. And a moment later, feeling hungry, he found himself unexpectedly struck dumb above his empty plate. For to have asked for more breaf, or another chunk of breadney, would have been, for the sacred pariah he had now become, at once an indecency and an intrusion – an indecency, because a person who has been sanctified by his mother’s death should obviously not talk slang, and an intrusion, because an outsider has no right to use the special language reserved to the elect. Uncertainly, he hesitated. Then at last, ‘Pass me the bread, please,’ he murmured; and blushed (the words sounded so horribly stupid and unnatural) to the roots of his hair.

Leaning towards his neighbour on the other side, Thompson went on with his whispered recitation of the limerick. ‘. . . all over the ceiling,’ he concluded; and they shrieked with laughter.

Thank goodness, Thompson hadn’t heard. Anthony felt profoundly relieved. In spite of his hunger, he did not ask again.

There was a stir at the high table; old Jimbug rose to his feet. A hideous noise of chair-legs scraping across boards filled the hall, solidly, it seemed; then evaporated into the emptiness of complete silence. ‘For all that we have received . . .’ The talk broke out again, the boys stampeded towards the door.

In the corridor, Anthony felt a hand on his arm. ‘Hullo, B-benger.’

‘Hullo, Foxe.’ He did not say, ‘Hullo, Horse-Face,’ because of what had happened this morning. Horse-Face would be as inappropriate to the present circumstances as Breaf.

‘I’ve got s-something to sh-show you,’ said Brian Foxe, and his melancholy, rather ugly face seemed suddenly to shine, as he smiled at Anthony. People laughed at Foxe because he stammered and looked like a horse. But almost everybody liked him. Even though he was a bit of a swot and not much good at games. He was rather pi, too, about smut; and he never seemed to get into trouble with the masters. But in spite of it all, you had to like him, because he was so awfully decent. Too decent, even; for it really wasn’t right to treat New Bugs the way he did – as though they were equals. Beastly little ticks of nine the equals of boys of eleven and twelve; imagine! No, Foxe was wrong about the New Bugs; of that there could be no doubt. All the same, people liked old Horse-Face.

‘What have you got?’ asked Anthony; and he felt so grateful to Horse-Face for behaving towards him in a normal, natural way, that he spoke quite gruffly, for fear the other might notice what he was feeling.

‘Come and see,’ Brian meant to say; but he got no further than ‘C-c-c-c . . .’ The long agony of clicks prolonged itself. At another time, Anthony might have laughed, might have shouted, ‘Listen to old Horse-Face trying to be sea-sick!’ But today he said nothing; only thought what awful bad luck it was on the poor chap. In the end, Brian Foxe gave up the attempt to say, ‘Come and see,’ and, instead, brought out, ‘It’s in my p-play-box.’

They ran down the stairs to the dark lobby where the play-boxes were kept.

‘Th-there!’ said Brian, lifting the lid of his box.

Anthony looked, and at the sight of that elegant little ship, three-masted, square-rigged with paper sails, ‘I say,’ he exclaimed, ‘that’s a beauty! Did you make her yourself?’

Brian nodded. He had had the carpenter’s shop to himself that afternoon – all the tools he needed. That was why she was so professional-looking. He would have liked to explain it all, to share his pleasure in the achievement with Anthony; but he knew his stammer too well. The pleasure would evaporate while he was laboriously trying to express it. Besides, ‘carpenter’ was a terrible word. ‘We’ll t-try her to-n-night,’ he had to be content with saying. But the smile which accompanied the words seemed at once to apologize for their inadequacy and to make up for it. Anthony smiled back. They understood one another.

Carefully, tenderly, Brian unstepped the three matchstick masts and slipped them, sails and all, into the inner pocket of his jacket; the hull went into his breeches. A bell rang. It was bed-time. Obediently, Brian shut his play-box. They started to climb the stairs once more.

‘I w-won f-five more g-games today with my old c-c-c . . . my ch-cheeser,’ he emended, finding ‘conker’ too difficult.

‘Five!’ cried Anthony. ‘Good for the old Horse-Face!’

Forgetting that he was an outcast, a sacred pariah, he laughed aloud. He felt warm and at home. It was only when he was undressing in his cubicle that he remembered – because of the tooth powder.

‘Twice a day,’ he heard her saying, as he dipped his wet brush into the pink carbolic-smelling dust. ‘And if you possibly can, after lunch as well. Because of the germs.’

‘But Mother, you can’t expect me to go up and clean them after lunch!’

The wound to his vanity (did she think his teeth were so dirty?) had made him rude. He found a retrospective excuse in the reflection that it was against the school rules to go up into the dorms during the day.

On the other side of the wooden partition that separated his cubicle from Anthony’s, Brian Foxe was stepping into his pyjamas. First the left leg, then the right. But just as he was starting to pull them up, there came to him, suddenly, a thought so terrible that he almost cried aloud. ‘Suppose my mother were to die!’ And she might die. If Beavis’s mother had died, of course she might. And at once he saw her, lying in her bed at home. Terribly pale. And the death-rattle, that deathrattle one always read about in books – he heard it plainly; and it was like the noise of one of those big wooden rattles that you scare birds with. Loud and incessant, as though it were made by a machine. A human being couldn’t possibly make such a noise. But all the same, it came out of her mouth. It was the death-rattle. She was dying.

His trousers still only half-way up his thighs, Brian stood there, quite still, staring at the brown varnished partition in front of him with eyes that had filled with tears. It was too terrible. The coffin; and then the empty house; and, when he went to bed, nobody to come and say good-night.

Suddenly shaking himself out of immobility, he pulled up his trousers and tied the string with a kind of violence.

‘But she isn’t dead!’ he said to himself. ‘She isn’t!’

Two cubicles away, Thompson gave vent to one of those loud and extraordinarily long-drawn farts for which, at Bulstrode, he had such a reputation. There were shouts, a chorus of laughter. Even Brian laughed – Brian who generally refused to see that there was anything funny about that sort of noise. But he was filled at this moment with such a sense of glad relief, that any excuse for laughter was good enough. She was still alive! And though she wouldn’t have liked him to laugh at anything so vulgar, he simply had to allow his thankfulness to explode. Uproariously he guffawed; then, all at once, broke off. He had thought of Beavis. His mother was really dead. What must he be thinking? Brian felt ashamed of having laughed, and for such a reason.

Later, when the lights had been put out, he climbed on to the rail at the head of his bed and, looking over the partition into Anthony’s cubicle, ‘I s-say,’ he whispered, ‘sh-shall we see how the new b-b-b . . . the new sh-ship goes?’

Anthony jumped out of bed and, the night being cold, put on his dressing-gown and slippers; then, noiselessly, stepped on to his chair and from the chair (pushing aside the long baize curtain) to the window-ledge. The curtain swung back behind him, shutting him into the embrasure.

It was a high narrow window, divided by a wooden transom into two parts. The lower and larger part consisted of a pair of sashes; the small upper pane was hinged at the top and opened outwards. When the sashes were closed, the lower of them formed a narrow ledge, half-way up the window. Standing on this ledge, a boy could conveniently get his head and shoulders through the small square opening above. Each window – each pair of windows, rather – was set in a gable, so that when you leaned out, you found the slope of the tiles coming steeply down on either side, and immediately in front of you, on a level with the transom, the long gutter which carried away the water from the roof.

The gutter! It was Brian who had recognized its potentialities. A sod of turf carried surreptitiously up to bed in a bulging pocket, a few stones – and there was your dam. When it was built, you collected all the water-jugs in the dormitory, hoisted them one by one and poured their contents into the gutter. There would be no washing the next morning; but what of that? A long narrow sea stretched away into the night. A whittled ship would float, and those fifty feet of watery boundlessness invited the imagination. The danger was always rain. If it rained hard, somebody had somehow to sneak up, at whatever risk, and break the dam. Otherwise the gutter would overflow, and an overflow meant awkward investigations and unpleasant punishments.

Perched high between the cold glass and the rough hairy baize of the curtains, Brian and Anthony leaned out of their twin windows into the darkness. A brick mullion was all that separated them; they could speak in whispers.

‘Now then, Horse-Face,’ commanded Anthony. ‘Blow!’

And like the allegorical Zephyr in a picture, Horse-Face blew. Under its press of paper sail, the boat went gliding along the narrow water-way.

‘Lovely!’ said Anthony ecstatically; and bending down till his cheek was almost touching the water, he looked with one half-shut and deliberately unfocused eye until, miraculously, the approaching toy was transformed into a huge three-master, seen phantom-like in the distance and bearing down on him, silently, through the darkness. A great ship – a ship of the line – one hundred and ten guns – under a cloud of canvas – the North-East Trades blowing steadily – bowling along at ten knots – eight bells just sounding from . . . He stared violently as the foremast came into contact with his nose. Reality flicked back into place again.

‘It looks just like a real ship,’ he said to Brian as he turned the little boat round in the gutter. ‘Put your head down and have a squint. I’ll blow.’

Slowly the majestic three-master travelled back again.

‘It’s like the Fighting T-t-t- . . . You know that p-picture.’

Anthony nodded; he never liked to admit ignorance.

‘T-temeraire,’ the other brought out at last.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Anthony, rather impatiently, as though he had known it all the time. Bending down again, he tried to recapture that vision of the huge hundred-and-ten-gunner bowling before the North-East Trades; but without success; the little boat refused to be transfigured. Still, she was a lovely ship. ‘A beauty,’ he said out loud.

‘Only she’s a b-bit l-lopsided,’ said Brian, in modest depreciation of his handiwork.

‘But I rather like that,’ Anthony assured him. ‘It makes her look as though she were heeling over with the wind.’ Heeling over: – it gave him a peculiar pleasure to pronounce the phrase. He had never uttered it before – only read it in books. Lovely words! And making an excuse to repeat them, ‘Just look!’ he said, ‘how she heels over when it blows really hard.’

He blew, and the little ship almost capsized. The hurricane, he said to himself . . . struck her full on the starboard beam . . . carried away the fore top-gallant sails and the spinnakers . . . stove in our only boat . . . heeled till the gunwale touched the water . . . But it was tiring to go on blowing as hard as that. He looked up from the gutter; his eyes travelled over the sky; he listened intently to the silence. The air was extraordinarily still; the night, almost cloudless. And what stars! There was Orion, with his feet tangled in the branches of the oak tree. And Sirius. And all the others whose names he didn’t know. Thousands and millions of them.

‘Gosh!’ he whispered at last.

‘W-what on earth do you s-suppose they’re f-for?’ said Brian, after a long silence.

‘What – the stars?’

Brian nodded.

Remembering things his Uncle James had said, ‘They’re not for anything,’ Anthony answered.

‘But they m-must be,’ Brian objected.

‘Why?’

‘Because e-everything is for s-something.’

‘I don’t believe that.’

‘W-well, th-think of b-b-bees,’ said Brian with some difficulty.

Anthony was shaken; they had been having some lessons in botany from old Bumface – making drawings of pistils and things. Bees – yes; they were obviously for something. He wished he could remember exactly what Uncle James had said. The iron somethings of nature. But iron whats?

‘And m-mountains,’ Brian was laboriously continuing. ‘It w-wouldn’t r-rain properly if there w-weren’t any m-mountains.’

‘Well, what do you think they’re for?’ Anthony asked, indicating the stars with an upward movement of the chin.

‘Perhaps there are p-people.’

‘Only on Mars.’ Anthony’s certainty was dogmatic.

There was a silence. Then, with decision, as though he had at last made up his mind to have it out, at any cost, ‘S-sometimes,’ said Brian, ‘I w-wonder wh-whether they aren’t really al-live.’ He looked anxiously at his companion: was Benger going to laugh? But Anthony, who was looking up at the stars, made no sound or movement of derision; only nodded gravely. Brian’s shy defenceless little secret was safe, had received no wound. He felt profoundly grateful; and suddenly it was as though a great wave were mounting, mounting through his body. He was almost suffocated by that violent uprush of love and (‘Oh, suppose it had been my mother!’) of excruciating sympathy for poor Benger. His throat contracted; the tears came into his eyes. He would have liked to reach out and touch Benger’s hand; only, of course, that sort of thing wasn’t done.

Anthony meanwhile was still looking at Sirius. ‘Alive,’ he repeated to himself. ‘Alive.’ It was like a heart in the sky, pulsing with light. All at once he remembered that young bird he had found last Easter holidays. It was on the ground and couldn’t fly. His mother had made fun of him because he didn’t want to pick it up. Big animals he liked, but for some reason it gave him the horrors to touch anything small and alive. In the end, making an effort with himself, he had caught the bird. And in his hand the little creature had seemed just a feathered heart, pulsing against his palm and fingers, a fistful of hot and palpitating blood. Up there, above the fringes of the trees, Sirius was just such another heart. Alive. But of course Uncle James would just laugh.

Stung by this imaginary mockery and ashamed of having been betrayed into such childishness, ‘But how can they be alive?’ he asked resentfully, turning away from the stars.

Brian winced. ‘Why is he angry?’ he wondered. Then, aloud, ‘Well,’ he started, ‘if G-god’s alive . . .’

‘But my pater doesn’t go to church,’ Anthony objected.

‘N-no, b-b-but . . .’ How little he wanted to argue now!

Anthony couldn’t wait. ‘He doesn’t believe in that sort of thing.’

‘But it’s G-god that c-counts; n-not ch-church.’ Oh, if only he hadn’t got this horrible stammer! He could explain it all so well; he could say all those things his mother had said. But somehow, at the moment, even the things that she had said were beside the point. The point wasn’t saying; the point was caring for people, caring until it hurt.

‘My uncle,’ said Anthony, ‘he doesn’t even believe in God. I don’t either,’ he added provocatively.

But Brian did not take up the challenge. ‘I s-say,’ he broke out impulsively, ‘I s-say, B-b-b- . . .’ The very intensity of his eagerness made him stammer all the worse. ‘B-benger,’ he brought out at last. It was an agony to feel the current of his love thus checked and diverted. Held up behind the grotesquely irrelevant impediment to its progress, the stream mounted, seemed to gather force and was at last so strong within him that, forgetting altogether that it wasn’t done, Brian suddenly laid his hand on Anthony’s arm. The fingers travelled down the sleeve, then closed round the bare wrist; and thereafter, every time his stammer interposed itself between his feeling and its object, his grasp tightened in a spasm almost of desperation.

‘I’m so t-terribly s-sorry about your m-mother,’ he went on. ‘I d-didn’t w-want to s-say it be-before. N-not in f-front of the o-others. You know, I was th-th-th- . . .’ He gripped on Anthony’s wrist more tightly; it was as though he were trying to supplement his strangled words by the direct eloquence of touch, were trying to persuade the other of the continued existence of the stream within him, of its force, unabated in spite of the temporary checking of the current. He began the sentence again and acquired sufficient momentum to take him past the barrier. ‘I was th-thinking just n-now,’ he said, ‘it m-might have been my mother. Oh, B-b-beavis, it m-must be too awful!’

Anthony had looked at him, in the first moment of surprise, with an expression of suspicion, almost of fear on his face. But as the other stammered on, this first hardening of resistance melted away, and now, without feeling ashamed of what he was doing, he began to cry.

Balanced precariously in the tall embrasure of the windows, the two children stood there for a long time in silence. The cheeks of both of them were cold with tears; but on Anthony’s wrist the grip of that consoling hand was obstinately violent, like a drowning man’s.

Suddenly, with a thin rattling of withered leaves, a gust of wind came swelling up out of the darkness. The little three-master started, as though it had been woken out of sleep, and noiselessly, with an air of purposeful haste, began to glide, stern-foremost, along the gutter.

The servants had gone to bed; all the house was still. Slowly, in the dark, John Beavis left his study and climbed past the mezzanine landing, past the drawing-room, stair after stair, towards the second floor. Outside, in the empty street, the sound of hoofs approached and again receded. The silence closed in once more – the silence of his solitude, the silence (he shuddered) of her grave.

He stood still, listening for long seconds to the beating of his heart; then, with decision, mounted the last two stairs, crossed the dark landing and, opened the door, turned on the light. His image confronted him, staring palely from the dressing-table mirror. The silver brushes were in their usual place, the little trays and pincushions, the row of cut-glass bottles. He looked away. One corner of the broad pink quilt was turned back; he saw the two pillows lying cheek by cheek, and above them, on the wall, that photogravure of the Sistine Madonna they had bought together, in the shop near the British Museum. Turning, he saw himself again, at full length, funereally black, in the glass of the wardrobe. The wardrobe . . . He stepped across the room and turned the key in the lock. The heavy glass door swung open of its own accord, and suddenly he was breathing the very air of her presence, that faint scent of orris-root, quickened secretly, as it were, by some sharper, warmer perfume. Grey, white, green, shell-pink, black – dress after dress. It was as though she had died ten times and ten times been hung there, limp, gruesomely headless, but haloed still, ironically, with the sweet, breathing symbol of her life. He stretched out his hand and touched the smooth silk, the cloth, the muslin, the velvet; all those various textures. Stirred, the hanging folds gave out their perfume more strongly; he shut his eyes and inhaled her real presence. But what was left of her had been burnt, and the ashes were at the bottom of that pit in Lollingdon churchyard.

‘Stay for me there,’ John Beavis whispered articulately in the silence.

His throat contracted painfully; the tears welled out between his closed eyelids. Shutting the wardrobe door, he turned away and began to undress.

He was conscious, suddenly, of an overwhelming fatigue. It cost him an immense effort to wash. When he got into bed, he fell asleep almost at once.

Towards the morning, when the light of the new day and the noises from the street had begun to break through the enveloping layers of his inner darkness, John Beavis dreamed that he was walking along the corridor that led to his lecture-room at King’s College. No, not walking: running. For the corridor had become immensely long and there was some terribly urgent reason for getting to the end of it quickly, for being there in time. In time for what? He did not know; but as he ran, he felt a sickening apprehension mounting, as it were, and expanding and growing every moment more intense within him. And when at last he opened the door of the lecture-room, it wasn’t the lecture-room at all, but their bedroom at home, with Maisie lying there, panting for breath, her face flushed with fever, dark with the horrible approach of asphyxiation, and across it, like two weals, bluish and livid, the parted lips. The sight was so dreadful that he started broad awake. Daylight shone pale between the curtains; the quilt showed pink; there was a gleam in the wardrobe mirror; outside, the milkman was calling, ‘Mu-ilk, Mui-uilk!’ as he went his rounds. Everything was reassuringly familiar, in its right place. It had been no more than a bad dream. Then, turning his head, John Beavis saw that the other half of the broad bed was empty.

The bell came nearer and nearer, ploughing through the deep warm drifts of sleep, until at last it hammered remorselessly on his naked and quivering consciousness. Anthony opened his eyes. What a filthy row it made! But he needn’t think of getting up for at least another five minutes. The warmth under the sheets was heavenly. Then – and it spoilt everything – he remembered that early school was algebra with Jimbug. His heart came into his throat. Those awful quadratics! Jimbug would start yelling at him again. It wasn’t fair. And he’d blub. But then it occurred to him that Jimbug probably wouldn’t yell at him today – because of what, he suddenly remembered, had happened yesterday. Horse-Face had been most awfully decent last night, he went on to think.

But it was time to get up. One, two, three and, ugh, how filthily cold it was! He was just diving upwards into his shirt when somebody tapped very softly at the door of his cubicle. One last wriggle brought his head through into daylight. He went and opened. Staithes was standing in the passage. Staithes – grinning, it was true, in apparent friendliness; but still . . . Anthony was disturbed. Mistrustfully, but with a hypothetical smile of welcome, ‘What’s up?’ he began; but the other put a finger to his lips.

‘Come and look,’ he whispered. ‘It’s marvellous!’

Anthony was flattered by this invitation from one who, as captain of the football eleven, had a right to be, and generally was, thoroughly offensive to him. He was afraid of Staithes and disliked him – and for that very reason felt particularly pleased that Staithes should have taken the trouble to come to him like this, of his own accord . . .

Staithes’s cubicle was already crowded. The conspiratorial silence seethed and bubbled with a suppressed excitement. Thompson had had to stuff his handkerchief into his mouth to keep himself from laughing, and Pembroke-Jones was doubling up in paroxysms of noiseless mirth. Wedged in the narrow space between the foot of the bed and the wash-stand, Partridge was standing with one cheek pressed against the partition. Staithes touched him on the shoulder. Partridge turned round and came out into the centre of the cubicle; his freckled face was distorted with glee and he twitched and fidgeted as though his bladder were bursting. Staithes pointed to the place he had vacated and Anthony squeezed in. A knot in the wood of the partition had been prized out, and through the hole you could see all that was going on in the next cubicle. On the bed, wearing only a woollen undervest and his rupture appliance, lay Goggler Ledwidge. His eyes behind the thick glass of his spectacles were shut; his lips were parted. He looked tranquilly happy and serene, as though he were in church.

‘Is he still there?’ whispered Staithes.

Anthony turned a grinning face and nodded; then pressed his eyes more closely to the spy-hole. What made it so specially funny was the fact that it should be Goggler – Goggler, the school buffoon, the general victim, predestined by weakness and timidity to inevitable persecution. This would be something new to bait him with.

‘Let’s give him a fright,’ suggested Staithes, and climbed up on to the rail at the head of the bed.

Partridge, who played centre forward for the first eleven, made a movement to follow him. But it was to Anthony that Staithes unexpectedly turned. ‘Come on, Beavis,’ he whispered. ‘Come up here with me.’ He wanted to be specially decent to the poor chap – because of his mater. Besides, it pleased him to be able to snub that lout, Partridge.

Anthony accepted the flattering invitation with an almost abject alacrity and got up beside him. The others perched unsteadily at the foot of the bed. At a signal from Staithes all straightened themselves up and, showing their heads above the partition, hooted their derision.

Recalled thus brutally from his squalidly tender little Eden of enemas and spankings (it had, as yet, no female inhabitants), Goggler gave vent to a startled cry; his eyes opened, frantic with terror; he went very white for a moment, then blushed. With his two hands he pulled down his vest; but it was too short to cover his nakedness or even his truss. Absurdly short, like a baby’s vest. (‘We’ll try to make them last this one more term,’ his mother had said. ‘These woollen things are so frightfully expensive.’ She had made great sacrifices to send him to Bulstrode.)

‘Pull, pull!’ Staithes shouted in sarcastic encouragement of his efforts.

‘Why wouldn’t Henry VIII allow Anne Boleyn to go into his henhouse?’ said Thompson. Everyone knew the answer, of course. There was a burst of laughter.

Staithes lifted one foot from its perch, pulled off the leathersoled slipper, took aim and threw. It hit Goggler on the side of his face. He gave a cry of pain, jumped out of bed and stood with hunched shoulders and one skinny little arm raised to cover his head, looking up at the jeering faces through eyes that had begun to overflow with tears.

‘Buzz yours too!’ shouted Staithes to the others. Then, seeing the new arrival standing in the open doorway of his cubicle, ‘Hullo, Horse-Face,’ he said, as he took off the other slipper; ‘come and have a shot.’ He raised his arm; but before he could throw, Horse-Face had jumped on to the bed and caught him by the wrist.

‘No, s-stop!’ he said. ‘Stop.’ And he caught also at Thompson’s arm. Leaning over Staithes’s shoulder, Anthony threw – as hard as he could. Goggler ducked. The slipper thumped against the wooden partition behind him.

‘B-beavis!’ cried Horse-Face – so reproachfully, that Anthony felt a sudden twinge of shame.

‘It didn’t hit him,’ he said, by way of excuse; and for some queer reason found himself thinking of that horrible deep hole in Lollingdon churchyard.

Staithes had found his tongue again. ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Horse-Face,’ he said angrily, and jerked the slipper out of Brian’s hand. ‘Why can’t you mind your own business?’

‘It isn’t f-fair,’ Brian answered.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘F-five against one.’

‘But you don’t know what he was doing.’

‘I d-don’t c-c-c . . . don’t m-mind.’

‘You would care, if you knew,’ said Staithes; and proceeded to tell him what Goggler had been doing – as dirtily as he knew how.

Brian dropped his eyes and his cheeks went suddenly very red. To have to listen to smut always made him feel miserable – miserable and at the same time ashamed of himself.

‘Look at old Horse-Face blushing!’ called Partridge; and they all laughed – none more derisively than Anthony. For Anthony had had time to feel ashamed of his shame; time to refuse to think about that hole in Lollingdon churchyard; time, too, to find himself all of a sudden almost hating old Horse-Face. ‘For being so disgustingly pi,’ he would have said, if somebody had asked him to explain his hatred. But the real reason was deeper, obscurer. If he hated Horse-Face, it was because Horse-Face had the courage of convictions which Anthony felt should also be his convictions – which, indeed, would be his convictions if only he could bring himself to have the courage of them. It was just because he liked Horse-Face so much, that he now hated him. Or, rather, because there were so many reasons why he should like him – so few reasons, on the contrary, why Horse-Face should return the liking. Horse-Face was rich with all sorts of fine qualities that he himself either lacked completely, or else, which was worse, possessed, but somehow was incapable of manifesting. That sudden derisive burst of laughter was the expression of a kind of envious resentment against a superiority which he loved and admired. Indeed, the love and the admiration in some sort produced the resentment and the envy – produced, but ordinarily kept them below the surface in an unconscious abeyance, from which, however, some crisis like the present would suddenly call them.

‘You should have seen him,’ concluded Staithes. Now that he felt in a better humour he laughed – he could afford to laugh.

‘In his truss,’ Anthony added, in a tone of sickened contempt. Goggler’s rupture was an aggravation of the offence.

‘Yes, in his beastly old truss!’ Staithes confirmed approvingly. There was no doubt about it; combined as it was with the spectacles and the timidity, that truss made the throwing of slippers not only inevitable, but right, a moral duty.

‘He’s disgusting,’ Anthony went on, warming pleasantly to his righteous indignation.

For the first time since Staithes had started on his description of Goggler’s activities Brian looked up. ‘B-but w-why is he more disg-gusting than anyone else?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘A-after all,’ he went on, and the blood came rushing back into his cheeks as he spoke, ‘he i-isn’t the . . . the o-only one.’

There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence. Of course he wasn’t the only one. But he was the only one, they were all thinking, who had a truss, and goggles, and a vest that was too short for him; the only one who did it in broad daylight and let himself be caught at it. There was a difference.

Staithes counter-attacked on another front. ‘Sermon by the Reverend Horse-Face!’ he said jeeringly, and at once recovered the initiative, the position of superiority. ‘Gosh!’ he added in another tone, ‘it’s late. We must buck up.’

CHAPTER VII

April 8th 1934

From A. B.’s diary.

CONDITIONED REFLEX. What a lot of satisfaction I got out of old Pavlov when first I read him. The ultimate de-bunking of all human pretensions. We were all dogs and bitches together. Bow-wow, sniff the lamp-post, lift the leg, bury the bone. No nonsense about free will, goodness, truth and all the rest. Each age has its psychological revolutionaries. La Mettrie, Hume, Condillac, and finally the Marquis de Sade, latest and most sweeping of the eighteenth-century de-bunkers. Perhaps, indeed, the ultimate and absolute revolutionary. But few have the courage to follow the revolutionary argument to Sade’s conclusions. Meanwhile, science did not stand still. Dix-huitième de-bunking, apart from Sade, proved inadequate. The nineteenth century had to begin again. Marx and the Darwinians. Who are still with us – Marx obsessively so. Meanwhile the twentieth century has produced yet another lot of de-bunkers – Freud and, when he began to flag, Pavlov and the Behaviourists. Conditioned reflex: – it seemed, I remember, to put the lid on everything. Whereas actually, of course, it merely restated the doctrine of free will. For if reflexes can be conditioned, then, obviously, they can be reconditioned. Learning to use the self properly, when one has been using it badly – what is it but re-conditioning one’s reflexes?

Lunched with my father. More cheerful than I’ve seen him recently, but old and, oddly, rather enjoying it. Making much of getting out of his chair with difficulty, of climbing very slowly up the stairs. A way, I suppose, of increasing his sense of importance. Perhaps also a way of commanding sympathy whenever he happens to want it. Baby cries so that mother shall come and make a fuss of him. It goes on from the cradle to the grave. Miller says of old age that it’s largely a bad habit. Use conditions function. Walk about as if you were a martyr to rheumatism and you’ll impose such violent muscular strains upon yourself that a martyr to rheumatism you’ll really be. Behave like an old man and your body will function like an old man’s, you’ll think and feel as an old man. The lean and slippered pantaloon – literally a part that one plays. If you refuse to play it and learn how to act on your refusal, you won’t become a pantaloon. I suspect this is largely true. Anyhow, my father is playing his present part with gusto. One of the great advantages of being old, provided that one’s economic position is reasonably secure and one’s health not too bad, is that one can afford to be serene. The grave is near, one has made a habit of not feeling anything very strongly; it’s easy, therefore, to take the God’s-eye view of things. My father took it about peace, for example. Yes, men were made, he agreed; there would be another war quite soon – about 1940, he thought. (A date, significantly, when he was practically certain to be dead!) Much worse than the last war, yes; and would probably destroy the civilization of Western Europe. But did it really matter so much? Civilization would go on in other continents, would built itself up anew in the devastated areas. Our time scale was all wrong. We should think of ourselves, not as living in the thirties of the twentieth century, but as at a point between two ice ages. And he ended up by quoting Goethe – alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss. All which is doubtless quite true, but not the whole truth. Query: how to combine belief that the world is to a great extent illusory with belief that it is none the less essential to improve the illusion? How to be simultaneously dispassionate and not indifferent, serene like an old man and active like a young one?

CHAPTER VIII

August 30th 1933

‘THESE VILE HORSE-FLIES!’ Helen rubbed the reddening spot on her arm. Anthony made no comment. She looked at him for a little in silence. ‘What a lot of ribs you’ve got!’ she said at last.

‘Schizothyme physique,’ he answered from behind the arm with which he was shielding his face from the light. ‘That’s why I’m here. Predestined by the angle of my ribs.’

‘Predestined to what?’

‘To sociology; and in the intervals to this.’ He raised his hand, made a little circular gesture and let it fall again on the mattress.

‘But what’s “this?”’ she insisted.

‘This?’ Anthony repeated. ‘Well . . .’ He hesitated. But it would take too long to talk about that temperamental divorce between the passions and the intellect, those detached sensualities, those sterilized ideas. ‘Well, you,’ he brought out at last.

‘Me?’

‘Oh, I admit it might have been someone else,’ he said, and laughed, genuinely amused by his own cynicism.

Helen also laughed, but with a surprising bitterness. ‘I am somebody else.’

‘Meaning what?’ he asked, uncovering his face to look at her.

‘Meaning what I say. Do you think I should be here – the real I?’

‘Real I!’ he mocked. ‘You’re talking like a theosophist.’

‘And you’re talking like a fool,’ she said. ‘On purpose. Because, of course, you aren’t one.’ There was a long silence. I, real I? But where, but how, but at what price? Yes, above all, at what price? Those Cavells and Florence Nightingales. But it was impossible, that sort of thing; it was, above all, ridiculous. She frowned to herself, she shook her head; then, opening her eyes, which had been shut, looked for something in the external world to distract her from these useless and importunate thoughts within. The foreground was all Anthony. She looked at him for a moment; then reaching out with a kind of fascinated reluctance, as though towards some irresistibly strange but distasteful animal, she touched the pink crumpled skin of the great scar that ran diagonally across his thigh, an inch or two above the knee. ‘Does it still hurt?’ she asked.

‘When I’m run down. And sometimes in wet weather.’ He raised his head a little from the mattress and, at the same time bending his right knee, examined the scar. ‘A touch of the Renaissance,’ he said reflectively. ‘Slashed trunks.’

Helen shuddered. ‘It must have been awful!’ Then, with a sudden vehemence, ‘How I hate pain!’ she cried, and her tone was one of passionate, deeply personal resentment. ‘Hate it,’ she repeated for all the Cavells and Nightingales to hear.

She had pushed him back into the past again. That autumn day at Tidworth eighteen years before. Bombing instruction. An imbecile recruit had thrown short. The shouts, his panic start, the blow. Oddly remote it all seemed now, and irrelevant, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. And even the pain, all the months of pain, had shrunk almost to non-existence. Physically, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him – and the lunatic in charge of his memory had practically forgotten it.

‘One can’t remember pain,’ he said aloud.

‘I can.’

‘No, you can’t. You can only remember its occasion, its accompaniments.’

Its occasion at the midwife’s in the rue de la Tombe-Issoire, its accompaniments of squalor and humiliation. Her face hardened as she listened to his words.

‘You can never remember its actual quality,’ he went on. ‘No more than you can remember the quality of a physical pleasure. Today, for example, half an hour ago – you can’t remember. There’s nothing like a re-creation of the event. Which is lucky.’ He was smiling now. ‘Think, if one could fully remember perfumes or kisses! How wearisome the reality of them would be! And what woman with a memory would ever have more than one baby?’

Helen stirred uneasily. ‘I can’t imagine how any woman ever does,’ she said in a low voice.

‘As it is,’ he went on, ‘the pains and pleasures are new each time they’re experienced. Brand new. Every gardenia is the first gardenia you ever smelt. And every confinement . . .’

‘You’re talking like a fool again,’ she interrupted angrily. ‘Confusing the issue.’

‘I thought I was clarifying it,’ he protested. ‘And anyhow, what is the issue?’

‘The issue’s me, you, real life, happiness. And you go chattering away about things in the air. Like a fool!’

‘And what about you?’ he asked. ‘Are you such a clever one at real life? Such an expert in happiness?’

In the mind of each of them his words evoked the image of a timorous figure, ambushed behind spectacles.

That marriage! What on earth could have induced her? Old Hugh, of course, had been sentimentally in love. But was that a sufficient reason? And, afterwards, what sort of disillusions? Physiological, he supposed, for the most part. Comic, when you thought of them in relation to old Hugh. The corners of Anthony’s mouth fairly twitched. But for Helen, of course, the joke could only have been disastrous. He would have liked to know the details – but at second hand, on condition of not having to ask for or be offered her confidences. Confidences were dangerous, confidences were entangling – like fly-paper; yes, like fly-paper . . .

Helen sighed; then, squaring her shoulders and in a tone of resolution, ‘Two blacks don’t make a white,’ she said. ‘Besides, I’m my own affair.’

Which was all for the best, he thought. There was a silence.

‘How long were you in hospital with that wound?’ she asked in another tone.

‘Nearly ten months. It was disgustingly infected. They had to operate six times altogether.’

‘How horrible!’

Anthony shrugged his shoulders. At least it had preserved him from those trenches. But for the grace of God . . . ‘Queer,’ he added, ‘what unlikely forms the grace of God assumes sometimes! A half-witted bumpkin with a hand-grenade. But for him I should have been shipped out to France and slaughtered – almost to a certainty. He saved my life.’ Then, after a pause, ‘My freedom too,’ he added. ‘I’d let myself be fuddled by those beginning-of-war intoxications. “Honour has come back, as a king, to earth.” But I suppose you’re too young ever to have heard of poor Rupert. It seemed to make sense then, in 1914. “Honour has come back . . .” But he failed to mention that stupidity had come back too. In hospital, I had all the leisure to think of that other royal progress through the earth. Stupidity has come back, as a king – no; as an emperor, as a divine Führer of all the Aryans. It was a sobering reflection. Sobering and profoundly liberating. And I owed it to the bumpkin. He was one of the great Führer’s most faithful subjects.’ There was a silence. ‘Sometimes I feel a bit nervous – like Polycrates – because I’ve had so much luck in my life. All occasions always seem to have conspired for me. Even this occasion.’ He touched the scar. ‘Perhaps I ought to do something to allay the envy of the gods – throw a ring into the sea next time I go bathing.’ He uttered a little laugh. ‘The trouble is, I don’t possess a ring.’

CHAPTER IX

April 2nd 1903

AT PADDINGTON, Mr Beavis and Anthony got into an empty third-class compartment and waited for the train to start. For Anthony a railway journey was still profoundly important, still a kind of sacrament. The male soul, in immaturity, is naturaliter ferrovialis. This huge and god-like green monster, for example, that now came snorting into the station and drew up at Platform 1 – but for Watt and Stephenson it would never have rolled thus majestically into its metropolitan cathedral of sooty glass. But the intensity of delight which Anthony felt as he watched the divine creature approach, as he breathed its stink of coal smoke and hot oil, as he heard and almost unconsciously imitated the ch-ff, ch-ff, ch-ff of its steamy panting, was a sufficient proof that the boyish heart must have been, in some mysterious way, prepared for the advent of Puffing Billy and the Rocket, that the actual locomotive, when it appeared, must have corresponded (how satisfyingly!) with some dim prophetic image of a locomotive, pre-existing in the mind of children from the beginning of Palaeolithic time. Ch-ff, ch-ff; then silence; then the terrible, the soul-annihilating roar of escaping steam. Wonderful! Lovely!

Bonneted, in black, like a pair of Queen Victorias, two fat and tiny old ladies passed slowly, looking for a compartment where they would not have their throats cut or be compelled to listen to bad language. Mr Beavis looked very respectable indeed. They paused, held a consultation; but, leaning out of the window, Anthony made such a face at them that they moved away again. He smiled triumphantly. Keeping the compartment to oneself was one of the objects of the sacred game of travelling – was the equivalent, more or less, of a Royal Marriage at bezique; you scored forty, so to speak, each time you left a station without a stranger in your carriage. Having lunch in the dining-car counted as much as a Sequence – two hundred and fifty. And Double Bezique – but this, as yet, Anthony had never scored – was being in a slip carriage.

The guard whistled, the train began to move.

‘Hurrah!’ Anthony shouted.

The game had begun well: a Royal Marriage in the very first round. But a few minutes later he was regretting those two old ladies. For, rousing himself suddenly from his abstracted silence, John Beavis leaned forward and, touching his son’s knee, ‘Do you remember what day of the month it is?’ he asked in a low and, to Anthony, inexplicably significant tone.

Anthony looked at him doubtfully; then started to overact the part of the Calculator, frowning over a difficult problem. There was something about his father that seemed to make such overacting inevitable.

‘Let me see,’ he said unnaturally, ‘we broke up on the thirty-first – or was it the thirtieth? That was Saturday, and today’s Monday . . .’

‘Today’s the second,’ said his father in the same slow voice.

Anthony felt apprehensive. If his father knew the date, why had he asked?

‘It’s exactly five months today,’ Mr Beavis went on.

Five months? And then, with a sudden sickening drop of the heart, Anthony realized what his father was talking about. The Second of November, the Second of April. It was five months since she had died.

‘Each second of the month – one tried to keep the day sacred.’

Anthony nodded and turned his eyes away with a sense of guilty discomfort.

‘Bound each to each by natural piety,’ said Mr Beavis.

What on earth was he talking about now? And, oh, why, why did he have to say these things? So awful; so indecent – yes, indecent; one didn’t know where to look. Like the times when Granny’s stomach made those awful bubbling noises after meals . . .

Looking into his son’s averted face, Mr Beavis perceived signs of resistance and was hurt, was saddened, and felt the sadness turn into an obscure resentment that Anthony should not suffer as acutely as he did. Of course the child was still very young, not yet able to realize the full extent of his loss; but all the same, all the same . . .

To Anthony’s unspeakable relief the train slowed down for its first stop. The suburbs of Slough passed slowly and even slowlier before his eyes. Against all the rules of the sacred game, he prayed that somebody might get into their compartment. And, thank heaven, somebody did get in – a gross, purple-faced man whom on any other occasion Anthony would have hated. Today he loved him.

Shielding his eyes with his hand, Mr Beavis retired again into a private world of silence.

In the carriage, on the way from Twyford station, his father added insult to injury.

‘You must always be on your very best behaviour,’ he recommended.

‘Of course,’ said Anthony curtly.

‘And always be punctual,’ Mr Beavis continued. ‘And don’t be greedy at meal-times.’ He hesitated, smiled in anticipation of what he was about to say, then launched his colloquialism: ‘however excellent the “grub” may be.’ There was a little silence. ‘And be polite to the Abigails,’ he added.

They turned off the road into a drive that wound between tall shrubberies of rhododendrons. Then, across an expanse of tree-islanded grass, appeared a façade of Georgian stucco. The house was not large, but solid, comfortable and at the same time elegant. Built, you divined, by someone who could quote Horace, aptly, on every occasion. Rachel Foxe’s father, Mr Beavis reflected, as he looked at it, must have left quite a lot of money. Naval architecture – and didn’t the old boy invent something that the Admiralty took up? Foxe, too, had been well off: something to do with coal. (How charming those daffodils looked in the grass there, under the tree!) But a dour, silent, humourless man who had not, Mr Beavis remembered, understood his little philological joke about the word ‘pencil.’ Though if he’d known at the time that the poor fellow had a duodenal ulcer, he certainly wouldn’t have risked it.

Mrs Foxe and Brian came to meet them as the carriage drew up. The boys went off together. Mr Beavis followed his hostess into the drawing-room. She was a tall woman, slender and very upright, with something so majestic in her carriage, so nobly austere in the lines and expression of her face, that Mr Beavis always felt himself slightly intimidated and ill at ease in her presence.

‘It was so very good of you to ask us,’ he said. ‘And I can’t tell you how much it will mean for . . .’ he hesitated for an instant; then (since it was the second of the month), with a little shake of the head and in a lower tone, ‘for this poor motherless little fellow of mine,’ he went on, ‘to spend his holidays here with you.’

Her clear brown eyes had darkened, as he spoke, with a sympathetic distress. Always firm, always serious, the coming together of her full, almost floridly sculptured lips expressed more than ordinary gravity. ‘But I’m so delighted to have him,’ she said in a voice that was warm and musically vibrant with feeling. ‘Selfishly glad – for Brian’s sake.’ She smiled, and he noticed that even when she smiled her mouth seemed somehow to preserve, through all its sensibility, its profound capacity for suffering and enjoyment, that seriousness, that determined purity which characterized it in repose. ‘Yes, selfishly,’ she repeated. ‘Because, when he’s happy, I am.’

Mr Beavis nodded; then, sighing, ‘One’s thankful,’ he said, ‘to have as much left to one as that – the reflection of someone’s else’s happiness.’ Magnanimously, he was giving Anthony the right not to suffer – though of course when the boy was a little older, when he could realize more fully . . .

Mrs Foxe did not continue the conversation. There was something rather distasteful to her in his words and manner, something that jarred upon her sensibilities. But she hastened to banish the disagreeable impression from her mind. After all, the important, the essential fact was that the poor man had suffered, was still suffering. The false note, if falsity there were, was after the fact – in the mere expression of the suffering.

She proposed a stroll before tea, and they walked through the garden and out into the domesticated wilderness of grass and trees beyond. In a glade of the little copse that bounded the property to the north, three crippled children were picking primroses. With a gruesome agility they swung themselves on their crutches from clump to clump of the pale golden flowers, yelling as they went in shrill discordant rapture.

They were staying, Mrs Foxe explained, in one of her cottages. ‘Three of my cripples,’ she called them.

At the sound of her voice the children looked up, and at once came hopping across the open space towards her.

‘Look, Miss, look what I found!’

‘Look here, Miss!’

‘What’s this called, Miss?’

She answered their questions, asked others in return, promised to come that evening to see them.

Feeling that he too ought to do something for the cripples, Mr Beavis began to tell them about the etymology of the word ‘primrose.’ ‘Primerole in Middle English,’ he explained. ‘The “rose” crept in by mistake.’ They stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘A mere popular blunder,’ he went on; then, twinkling, ‘a “howler,”’ he added. ‘Like our old friend,’ he smiled at them knowingly, ‘our friend “causeway.”’

There was a silence. Mrs Foxe changed the subject.

‘Poor little mites!’ she said, when at last they let her go. ‘They’re so happy, they make one want to cry. And then, after a week, one has to pack them off again. Back to their slum. It seems too cruel. But what can one do? There are so many of them. One can’t keep one lot at the expense of the others.’

They walked on for a time in silence, and Mrs Foxe found herself suddenly thinking that there were also cripples of the spirit. People with emotions so lame and rickety that they didn’t know how to feel properly; people with some kind of hunch or deformity in their power of expression. John Beavis perhaps was one of them. But how unfair she was being! How presumptuous too! Judge not that ye be not judged. And anyhow, if it were true, that would only be another reason for feeling sorry for him.

‘I think it must be tea-time,’ she said aloud; and, to prevent herself from passing any more judgments, she started to talk to him about those Cripple Schools she had been helping to organize in Notting Dale and St Pancras. She described the cripple’s life at home – the parents out at work; not a glimpse of a human face from morning till night; no proper food; no toys, no books, nothing to do but to lie still and wait – for what? Then she told him about the ambulance that now went round to fetch the children to school, about the special desks, the lessons, the arrangements for supplying a decent dinner.

‘And our reward,’ she said, as she opened the door into the house, ‘is that same heart-breaking happiness I was speaking of just now. I can’t help feeling it as a kind of reproach, an accusation. Each time I see that happiness, I ask myself what right I have to be in a position to give so easily, just by spending a little money and taking a tiny bit of pleasant trouble. Yes, what right?’ Her warm clear voice trembled a little as she uttered the question. She raised her hands in an interrogative gesture, then let them fall again and walked quickly into the drawing-room.

Mr Beavis followed her in silence. A kind of tingling warmth had expanded within him as he listened to her last words. It was like the sensation he had when he read the last scene of Measure for Measure, or listened to Joachim in the Beethoven Concerto.

Mr Beavis could only stay two nights. There was an important meeting of the Philological Society. And then, of course, his work on the Dictionary. ‘The old familiar grind,’ he explained to Mrs Foxe in a tone of affected self-pity and with a sigh that was hardly even meant to carry conviction. The truth was that he enjoyed his work, would have felt lost without it. ‘And you’re really sure,’ he added, ‘that Anthony won’t be too much of a burden to you?’

‘Burden? But look!’ And she pointed through the window to where the two boys were playing bicycle polo on the lawn. ‘And it’s not only that,’ she went on. ‘I’ve really come to be very much attached to Anthony in these two days. There’s something so deeply touching about him. He seems so vulnerable somehow. In spite of all that cleverness and good sense and determination of his. There’s part of him that seems terribly at the mercy of the world.’ Yes, at its mercy, she repeated to herself, thinking, as she did so, of that broad and candid forehead, of those almost tremulously sensitive lips, of that slight, unforceful chin. He could be easily hurt, easily led astray. Each time he looked at her, he made her feel almost guiltily responsible for him.

‘And yet,’ said Mr Beavis, ‘there are times when he seems strangely indifferent.’ The memory of that episode in the train had not ceased to rankle. For though, of course, he wanted the child to be happy, though he had decided that the only happiness he himself could know henceforward would come from the contemplation of the child’s happiness, the old resentment still obscurely persisted: he felt aggrieved because Anthony had not suffered more, because he seemed to resist and reject suffering when it was brought to him. ‘Strangely indifferent,’ he repeated.

Mrs Foxe nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he wears a kind of armour. Covers up his vulnerability in the most exposed place and at the same time uncovers it elsewhere, so that the slighter wounds shall act as a kind of distraction, a kind of counterirritant. It’s self-protection. And yet’ (her voice deepened, thrilling), ‘and yet I believe that in the long run he’d be better and spiritually healthier, yes, and happier too, if he could bring himself to do just the opposite – if he’d armour himself against the little distracting wounds, the little wounds of pleasure as well as the little wounds of pain, and expose his vulnerableness only to the great and piercing blows.’

‘How true that is!’ said Mr Beavis, who found that her words applied exactly to himself.

There was a silence. Then, harking back to his original question, ‘No, no,’ said Mrs Foxe with decision, ‘so far from feeling him as a burden, I’m really enchanted to have him here. Not only for what he is in himself, but also for what he is to Brian – and incidentally for what Brian is to him. It’s delightful to see them. I should like them to be together every holidays.’ Mrs Foxe paused for a moment; then, ‘Seriously,’ she went on, ‘if you’ve made no plans for the summer, why don’t you think of this? We’ve taken a little house at Tenby for August. Why shouldn’t you and Anthony find a place there too?’

Mr Beavis thought the idea an excellent one; and the boys, when it was broached to them, were delighted.

‘So it’s only good-bye till August,’ said Mrs Foxe as she saw him off. ‘Though of course,’ she added, with a warmth that was all the greater for being the result of a deliberate effort of cordiality, ‘of course we shall meet before then.’

The carriage rattled away down the drive; and for a hundred yards or more Anthony ran beside it, shouting ‘Good-bye’ and waving his handkerchief with a vehemence that Mr Beavis took as the sign of a corresponding intense regret to see him go. In fact, however, it was just a manifestation of overflowing energy and high spirits. Circumstances had filled him, body and mind, with the deep joy of being happily alive. This joy required physical expression, and his father’s departure gave him an excuse for running and waving his arms. Mr Beavis was extremely touched. But if only, he went on sadly to think, if only there were some way of canalizing this love, and his own for the boy, so that it might irrigate the aridities of their daily intercourse! Women understood these things so much better. It had been touching to see how the poor child had responded to Mrs Foxe’s affection. And perhaps, he went on to speculate, perhaps it was just because there had been no woman to direct his feelings that Anthony had seemed to be so uncaring. Perhaps a child could never adequately mourn his mother for the very reason that he was motherless. It was a vicious circle. Mrs Foxe’s influence would be good, not only in this matter, but in a thousand other ways as well. Mr Beavis sighed. If only it were possible for a man and a woman to associate; not in marriage, but for a common purpose, for the sake of motherless, of fatherless, children! A good woman – admirable, extraordinary even. But in spite of that (almost because of that), it could only be an association for a common purpose. Never a marriage. And anyhow there was Maisie – waiting for him there; he would not fail . . . But an association for the sake of the children – that would be no betrayal.

Anthony walked back to the house whistling ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee.’ He was fond of his father – fond, it is true, by force of habit, as one is fond of one’s native place, or its traditional cooking – but still, genuinely fond of him. Which did nothing, however, to diminish the discomfort he always felt in Mr Beavis’s presence.

‘Brian!’ he shouted, as he approached the house – shouted a bit self-consciously; for it seemed queer to be calling him Brian instead of Foxe or Horse-Face. Rather unmanly, even a shade discreditable.

Brian’s answering whistle came from the school-room.

‘I vote we take the bikes,’ Anthony called.

At school, people used to mock at old Horse-Face for his bird mania. ‘I say, you fellows,’ Staithes would say, taking Horse-Face by the arm, ‘guess what I saw today! Two spewtits and a piddle-warbler.’ And a great howl of laughter would go up – a howl in which Anthony always joined. But here, where there was nobody to shame him out of being interested in spring migrants and next-boxes and heronries, he took to bird-watching with enthusiasm. Coming in, wet and muddy from the afternoon’s walk, ‘Do you know what we heard, Mrs Foxe?’ he would ask triumphantly, before poor Brian had had time to get out a stammered word. ‘The first white-throat!’ or ‘The first willow wren!’ and Rachel Foxe would say, ‘How splendid!’ in such a way that he was filled with pride and happiness. It was as though those piddle-warblers had never existed.

After tea, when the curtains had been drawn and the lamps brought in, Mrs Foxe would read to them. Anthony, who had always been bored to death by Scott, found himself following the ‘Fortunes of Nigel’ with the most passionate attention.

Easter approached, and, for the time being, ‘Nigel’ was put away. Mrs Foxe gave them readings, instead, from the New Testament. ‘And he saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch. And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.’ The lamplight was a round island in the darkness of the room, and towards it, from the fire, projected a vague promontory of luminous redness. Anthony was lying on the floor, and from the high Italian chair beside the lamp the words came down to him, transfigured, as it were, by that warm, musical voice, charged with significances he had never heard or seen in them before. ‘And it was the third hour, and they crucified him.’ In the ten heart-beats of silence that followed he seemed to hear the blows of the hammer on the nails. Thud, thud, thud . . . He passed the fingers of one hand across the smooth palm of the other; his body went rigid with horror, and through the stiffened muscles passed a violent spasm of shuddering.

‘And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.’ Mrs Foxe lowered her book. ‘That’s one of those additions I was telling you about,’ she said, ‘one of those embroideries on the story. One must think of the age in which the writers of the gospels lived. They believed these things could happen; and, what’s more, they thought they ought to happen on important occasions. They wanted to do honour to Jesus; they wanted to make his story seem more wonderful. But to us, nowadays, these things make it seem less wonderful; and we don’t feel that they do him honour. The wonderful thing for us,’ she went on, and her voice thrilled with a deep note of fervour, ‘is that Jesus was a man, no more able to do miracles and no more likely to have them done for him than the rest of us. Just a man – and yet he could do what he did, he could be what he was. That’s the wonder.’

There was a long silence; only the clock ticked and the flame rustled silkily in the grate. Anthony lay on his back and stared at the ceiling. Everything was suddenly clear. Uncle James was right; but the other people were right too. She had shown how it was possible for both of them to be right. Just a man – and yet . . . Oh, he too, he too would do and be!

Mrs Foxe picked up the book once more. The thin pages crackled as she turned them.

‘Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came upon the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.’

The stone . . . But at Lollingdon there was earth; and only ashes in that little box – that little box no bigger than a biscuit tin. Anthony shut his eyes in the hope of excluding the odious vision; but against the crimson darkness the horns, the triangular frizz of auburn curls stood out with an intenser vividness. He lifted his hand to his mouth, and, to punish himself, began to bite the forefinger, harder, harder, until the pain was almost intolerable.

That evening, when she came to say good-night to him, Mrs Foxe sat down on the edge of Anthony’s bed and took his hand. ‘You know, Anthony,’ she said after a moment of silence, ‘you mustn’t be afraid of thinking about her.’

‘Afraid?’ he mumbled, as though he hadn’t understood. But he had understood – understood, perhaps, more than she had meant. The blood rushed guiltily into his cheeks. He felt frightened, as though somehow she had trapped him, found him out – frightened and therefore resentful.

‘You mustn’t be afraid of suffering,’ she went on. ‘Thinking about her will make you sad: that’s inevitable. And it’s right. Sadness is necessary sometimes – like an operation; you can’t be well without it. If you think about her, Anthony, it’ll hurt you. But if you don’t think about her, you condemn her to a second death. The spirit of the dead lives on in God. But it also lives on in the minds of the living – helping them, making them better and stronger. The dead can only have this kind of immortality if the living are prepared to give it them. Will you give it her, Anthony?’

Mutely, and in tears, he nodded his answer. It was not so much the words that had reassured him as the fact that the words were hers and had been uttered in that compelling voice. His fears were allayed, his suspicious resentment died down. He felt safe with her. Safe to abandon himself to the sobs that now mounted irresistibly in his throat.

‘Poor little Anthony!’ She stroked his hair. ‘Poor little Anthony! There’s no help for it; it’ll always hurt – always. You’ll never be able to think of her without some pain. Even time can’t take away all the suffering, Anthony.’

She paused, and for a long minute sat there in silence, thinking of her father, thinking of her husband. The old man, so massive, so majestic, like a prophet – then in his wheeled chair, paralysed and strangely shrunken, his head on one side, dribbling over his white beard, hardly able to speak . . . And the man she had married, out of admiration for his strength, out of respect for his uprightness; had married, and then discovered that she did not, could not love. For the strength, she had found, was cold and without magnanimity; the uprightness, harsh and cruel uprightness. And the pain of the long last illness had hardened and embittered him. He had died implacable, resisting her tenderness to the last.

‘Yes, there’ll always be pain and sadness,’ she went on at last. ‘And after all,’ a warm note of pride, almost of defiance, came into her voice, ‘can one wish that it should be otherwise? You wouldn’t want to forget your mother, would you, Anthony? Or not to care any more? Just in order to escape a little suffering. You wouldn’t want that?’

Sobbing, he shook his head. And it was quite true. At this moment he didn’t want to escape. It was in some obscure way a relief to be suffering this extremity of sorrow. And he loved her because she had known how to make him suffer.

Mrs Foxe bent down and kissed him. ‘Poor little Anthony!’ she kept repeating. ‘Poor little Anthony!’

It rained on Good Friday; but on Saturday the weather changed, and Easter Day was symbolically golden, as though on purpose, as though in a parable. Christ’s resurrection and the re-birth of Nature – two aspects of an identical mystery. The sunshine, the clouds, like fragments of marbly sculpture in the pale blue sky, seemed, in some profound and inexpressible way, to corroborate all that Mrs Foxe had said.

They did not go to church; but, sitting on the lawn, she read aloud, first a bit of the service for Easter Day, then some extracts from Renan’s Life of Jesus. The tears came into Anthony’s eyes as he listened, and he felt an unspeakable longing to be good, to do something fine and noble.

On the Monday, a party of slum children were brought down to spend the day in the garden and the copse. At Bulstrode one would have called them scadgers and offensively ignored their existence. Beastly little scadgers; and when they were older, they would grow into louts and cads. Here, however, it different. Mrs Foxe transformed the scadgers into unfortunate children who would probably never get a second glimpse of the country in all the year.

‘Poor kids!’ Anthony said to her when they arrived. But in spite of the compassion he was doing his level best to feel, in spite of his determined goodwill, he was secretly afraid of these stunted yet horribly mature little boys with whom he had offered to play, he feared and therefore disliked them. They seemed immeasurably foreign. Their patched, stained clothes, their shapeless boots, were like a differently coloured skin; their cockney might have been Chinese. The mere appearance of them made him feel guiltily self-conscious. And then there was the way they looked at him; with a derisive hatred of his new suit and his alien manners; there was the way the bolder of them whispered together and laughed. When they laughed at Brian for his stammer, he laughed with them; and in a little while they laughed no more or laughed only in a friendly and almost sympathetic way. Anthony, on the contrary, pretended not to notice their mockery. A gentleman, he had always been taught explicitly as well as by constant implication and the example of his elders, a gentleman doesn’t pay any attention to that kind of thing. It is beneath his dignity. He behaved as though their laughter were non-existent. They went on laughing.

He hated that morning of rounders and hide-and-seek. But worse was to follow at lunch-time. He had offered to help in the serving of the table. The work in itself was unobjectionable enough. But the smell of poverty when the twenty children were assembled in the dining-room was so insidiously disgusting – like Lollingdon church, only much worse – that he had to slip out two or three times in the course of the meal to spit in the lavatory basin. ‘Reeking with germs!’ he heard his mother’s angrily frightened voice repeating. ‘Reeking with germs!’ And when Mrs Foxe asked him a question, he could only nod and make an inarticulate noise with his mouth shut; if he spoke, he would have to swallow. Swallow what? It was revolting only to think of it.

‘Poor kids!’ he said once more, as he stood with Mrs Foxe and Brian watching their departure. ‘Poor kids!’ and felt all the more ashamed of his hypocrisy when Mrs Foxe thanked him for having worked so hard to entertain them.

And when Anthony had gone up to the school-room, ‘Thank you too, my darling,’ she said, turning to Brian. ‘You were really splendid.’

Flushing with pleasure, Brian shook his head. ‘It was all y-you,’ he said; and suddenly, because he loved her so much, because she was so good, so wonderful, he found his eyes full of tears.

Together they walked out into the garden. Her hand was on his shoulder. She smelt faintly of eau-de-Cologne, and all at once (and this also, it seemed, was part of her wonderfulness) the sun came out from behind a cloud.

‘Look at those heavenly daffodils!’ she cried, in that voice that made everything she said seem, to Brian, truer, in some strange way, than the truth itself. ‘“And now my heart with pleasure fills . . .” Do you remember, Brian?’

Flushed and with bright eyes, he nodded. ‘“And d-dances . . .”’

‘“Dances with the daffodils.”’ She pressed him closer to her. He was filled with an unspeakable happiness. They walked on in silence. Her skirts rustled at every step – like the sea, Brian thought; the sea at Ventnor, that time last year, when he couldn’t sleep at night because of the waves on the beach. Lying there in the darkness, listening to the distant breathing of the sea, he had felt afraid, and above all sad, terribly sad. But, associated with his mother, the memories of that fear, that profound and causeless sadness, became beautiful; and at the same time, in some obscure way, they seemed to reflect their new beauty back on to her, making her seem yet more wonderful in his eyes. Rustling back and forth across the sunny lawn, she took on some of the mysterious significance of the windy darkness, the tirelessly returning waves.

‘Poor little Anthony!’ said Mrs Foxe, breaking the long silence. ‘It’s hard, it’s terribly hard.’ Hard also for poor Maisie, she was thinking. That graceful creature, with her languors, her silences, her dreamy abstractions, and then her sudden bursts of laughing activity – what had such a one to do with death? Or with birth, for that matter? Maisie with a child to bring up – it hardly made more sense than Maisie dead.

‘It must be t-t-t . . .’ but ‘terrible’ wouldn’t come, ‘it must be d-dreadful,’ said Brian, laboriously circumventing the obstacle, while his emotion ran on ahead in an imaginary outburst of unuttered and unutterable words, ‘n-not to have a m-mother.’

Mrs Foxe smiled tenderly, and, bending down, laid her cheek for a moment against his hair. ‘Dreadful also not to have a son,’ she said, and realized, as she did so, that the words were even truer than she had intended them to be – that they were true on a plane of deeper, more essential existence than that on which she was now moving. She had spoken for the present; but if it would be terrible not to have him now, how incomparably more terrible it would have been then, after her father had had his stroke and during the years of her husband’s illness! In that time of pain and utter spiritual deprivation her love for Brian had been her only remaining possession. Ah, terrible, terrible indeed, then, to have no son!

CHAPTER X

June 16th 1912

BOOKS. THE TABLE in Anthony’s room was covered with them. The five folio volumes of Bayle, in the English edition of 1738. Rickaby’s translation of the Summa contra Gentiles. De Gourmont’s Problème du Style. The Way of Perfection. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. Three volumes of Byron’s Letters. The works of St John of the Cross in Spanish. The plays of Wycherley. Lee’s History of the Sacerdotal Celibacy.

If only, Anthony thought as he came in from his walk, if only one had two sets of eyes! Janus would be able to read Candide and the Imitation simultaneously. Life was so short, and books so countlessly many. He pored voluptuously over the table, opening at random now one volume, now another. ‘He would not lie down,’ he read; ‘then his neck was too large for the aperture, and the priest was obliged to drown his exclamations by still louder exhortations. The head was off before the eye could trace the blow; but from an attempt to draw back the head, notwithstanding it was held forward by the hair, the first head was cut off close to the ears; the other two were taken off more cleanly. The first turned me quite hot and thirsty and made me shake so that I could hardly hold the opera glass . . .’ ‘Happiness being the peculiar good of an intelligent nature, must attach to the intelligent nature on the side of something that is peculiar to it. But appetite is not peculiar to intelligent nature, but is found in all things, though diversely in diverse beings. The will, as being an appetite, is not a peculiar appurtenance of an intelligent nature, except so far as it is dependent on the intelligence; but intelligence in itself is peculiar to an intelligent nature. Happiness therefore consists in an act of the intellect substantially and principally rather than in an act of the will . . .’ ‘Even in my most secret soul I have never been able to think of love as anything but a struggle, which begins with hatred and ends with moral subjection . . .’ ‘“I will not be a cuckold, I say; there will be a danger in making me a cuckold.” “Why, wert thou well cured of thy last clap?” . . .’ ‘La primera noche o purgación es amarga y terrible para el sentido, como ahora diremos. La segunda no tiene comparación, porque es horrenda y espantable para el espíritu . . .’ ‘I think I have read somewhere that the preciseness has been carried so far that ladies would not say, J’ai mangé des confitures, but des fitures. At this rate, above one half of the words of the Dictionary of the French Academy should be struck out . . .’

In the end, Anthony settled down to The Way of Perfection of St Teresa When Brian came in, an hour later, he had got as far as the Prayer of Quiet.

‘B-busy?’ Brian asked.

Anthony shook his head.

The other sat down. ‘I c-came to s-see if there was anything more to s-settle about to-m-morrow.’ Mrs Foxe and Joan Thursley, Mr and Mrs Beavis were coming down to Oxford for the day. Brian and Anthony had agreed to entertain them together.

Hock or Sauterne cup? Lobster mayonnaise or cold salmon? And if it rained, what would be the best thing to do in the afternoon?

‘Are you c-coming to the F-fabians this evening?’ Brian asked, when the discussion of the next day’s plans was at an end.

‘Of course,’ said Anthony. There was to be voting, that evening, for next term’s president. ‘It’ll be a close fight between you and Mark Staithes. You’ll need all the votes you can . . .’

Interrupting him, ‘I’ve st-stood down,’ said Brian.

‘Stood down? But why?’

‘V-various reasons.’

Anthony looked at him and shook his head. ‘Not that I’d have ever dreamt of putting up,’ he said. ‘Can’t imagine anything more boring than to preside over any kind of organization.’ Even belonging to an organization was bad enough. Why should one be bullied into making choices when one didn’t want to choose; into binding oneself to a set of principles when it was so essential to be free; into committing oneself to associate with other people when as likely as not one would want to be alone; into promising in advance to be at given places at given times? It was with the greatest difficulty that Brian had persuaded him to join the Fabians; for the rest he was unattached. ‘Inconceivably boring,’ he insisted. ‘But still, once in the running, why stand down?’

‘Mark’ll be a b-better president than I.’

‘He’ll be ruder, if that’s what you mean.’

‘B-besides, he was so a-awfully k-keen on g-getting elected,’ Brian began; then broke off, suddenly conscience-stricken. Anthony might think he was implying a criticism of Mark Staithes, was assuming the right to patronize him. ‘I mean, he kn-knows he’ll do the j-job so well,’ he went on quickly. ‘W-whereas I . . . So I r-really didn’t see why . . .’

‘In fact you thought you might as well humour him.’

‘No, n-no!’ cried Brian in a tone of distress. ‘Not th-that.’

‘Cock of the dunghill,’ Anthony continued, ignoring the other’s protest. ‘He’s got to be cock – even if it’s only of the tiniest little Fabian dunghill.’ He laughed. ‘Poor old Mark! What an agony when he can’t get to the top of his dunghill! One’s lucky to prefer books.’ He patted St Teresa affectionately. ‘Still, I wish you hadn’t stood down. It would have made me laugh to see Mark trying to pretend he didn’t mind when you’d beaten him. You’re reading a paper, aren’t you,’ he went on, ‘after the voting?’

Relieved by the change of subject, Brian nodded. ‘On Syn . . .’ he began.

‘On sin?’

‘Synd-dicalism.’

They both laughed.

‘Odd, when you come to think of it,’ said Anthony when their laughter subsided, ‘that the mere notion of talking to socialists about sin should seem so . . . well, so outrageous, really. Sin . . . socialism.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s like mating a duck with a zebra.’

‘You could t-talk about sin if you st-started from the other end.’

‘Which end?’

‘The s-social end. O-organizing a s-society so well that the i-individual simply c-couldn’t commit any sins.’

‘But do you honestly think such a society could exist?’

‘P-perhaps,’ said Brian doubtfully, but reflected that social change could hardly abolish those ignoble desires of his, couldn’t even legitimate those desires, except within certain conventional limits. He shook his head. ‘N-no, I don’t kn-know,’ he concluded.

‘I can’t see that you could do more than just transfer people’s sins from one plane to another. But we’ve done that already. Take envy and ambition, for example. They used to express themselves on the plane of physical violence. Now, we’ve reorganized society in such a way that they have to express themselves for the most part in terms of economic competition.’

‘Which we’re g-going to ab-abolish.’

‘And so bring physical violence back into fashion, eh?’

‘Th-that’s what you h-hope, d-don’t you?’ said Brian; and laughing, ‘You’re awful!’ he added.

There was a silence. Absently, Brian picked up The Way of Perfection, and, turning over the pages, read a line here, a paragraph there. Then with a sigh he shut the book, put it back in its place and, shaking his head, ‘I c-can’t understand,’ he said, ‘why you read this sort of st-stuff. S-seeing that you d-don’t b-believe in it.’

‘But I do believe,’ Anthony insisted. ‘Not in the orthodox explanations, of course. Those are obviously idiotic. But in the facts. And in the fundamental metaphysical theory of mysticism.’

‘You m-mean that you can g-get at t-truth by some s-sort of d-direct union with it?’

Anthony nodded. ‘And the most valuable and important sort of truth only in that way.’

Brian sat for a time in silence, his elbows on his knees, his long face between his hands, staring at the floor. Then, without looking up, ‘It s-seems to me,’ he said at last, ‘that you’re r-running with the h-hare and h-h-h . . . and h-h . . .’

‘Hunting with the hounds,’ Anthony supplied.

The other nodded. ‘Using sc-scepticism against r-religion – ag-against any s-sort of i-idealism, really,’ he added, thinking of the barbed mockery with which Anthony loved to puncture any enthusiasm that seemed to him excessive. ‘And using th-this st-stuff’ – he pointed to The Way of Perfection – ‘a-against s-scientific argument, when it s-suits your b-b-b . . .’ ‘book’ refused to come: ‘when it s-suits your bee-double-o-kay.’

Anthony relit his pipe before answering. ‘Well, why shouldn’t one make the best of both worlds?’ he asked, as he threw the spent match into the grate. ‘Of all the worlds. Why not?’

‘W-well, c-consistency, s-single-mindedness . . .’

‘But I don’t value single-mindedness. I value completeness. I think it’s one’s duty to develop all one’s potentialities – all of them. Not stupidly stick to only one. Single-mindedness!’ he repeated. ‘But oysters are single-minded. Ants are single-minded.’

‘S-so are s-saints.’

‘Well, that only confirms my determination not to be a saint.’

‘B-but h-how can you d-do anything if you’re not s-single-minded? It’s the f-first cond-dition of any ach-achievement.’

‘Who tells you I want to achieve anything?’ asked Anthony. ‘I don’t. I want to be, completely. And I want to know. And so far as getting to know is doing, I accept the conditions of it, single-mindedly.’ With the stem of his pipe he indicated the books on the table.

‘You d-don’t accept the c-conditions of th-that kind of kn-knowing,’ Brian retorted, pointing once more at The Way of Perfection ‘P-praying and f-fasting and all th-that.’

‘Because it isn’t knowing; it’s a special kind of experience. There’s all the difference in the world between knowing and experiencing. Between learning algebra, for example, and going to bed with a woman.’

Brian did not smile. Still staring at the floor, ‘B-but you th-think,’ he said, ‘that m-mystical experiences b-brings one into c-contact with t-truth?’

‘And so does going to bed.’

‘D-does it?’ Brian forced himself to ask. He disliked this sort of conversation, disliked it more than ever now that he was in love with Joan – in love, and yet (he hated himself for it) desiring her basely, wrongly . . .

‘If it’s the right woman,’ the other answered with an airy knowingness, as though he had experimented with every kind of female. In fact, though he would have been ashamed to admit it, he was a virgin.

‘S-so you needn’t b-bother about the f-fasting,’ said Brian, suddenly ironical.

Anthony grinned. ‘I’m quite content with only knowing about the way of perfection,’ he said.

‘I think I should w-want to experience it too,’ said Brian, after a pause.

Anthony shook his head. ‘Not worth the price,’ he said. ‘That’s the trouble of all single-minded activity; it costs you your liberty. You find yourself driven into a corner. You’re a prisoner.’

‘But if you w-want to be f-free, you’ve g-got to be a p-prisoner. It’s the c-condition of freedom – t-true freedom.’

‘True freedom!’ Anthony repeated in the parody of a clerical voice. ‘I always love that kind of argument. The contrary of a thing isn’t the contrary; oh, dear me, no! It’s the thing itself, but as it truly is. Ask a diehard what conservatism is; he’ll tell you it’s true socialism. And the brewers’ trade papers; they’re full of articles about the beauty of True Temperance. Ordinary temperance is just gross refusal to drink; but true temperance, true temperance is something much more refined. True temperance is a bottle of claret with each meal and three double whiskies after dinner. Personally, I’m all for true temperance, because I hate temperance. But I like being free. So I won’t have anything to do with true freedom.’

‘Which doesn’t p-prevent it from being t-true freedom,’ the other obstinately insisted.

‘What’s in a name?’ Anthony went on. ‘The answer is, Practically everything, if the name’s a good one. Freedom’s a marvellous name. That’s why you’re so anxious to make use of it. You think that, if you call imprisonment true freedom, people will be attracted to the prison. And the worst of it is you’re quite right. The name counts more with most people than the thing. They’ll follow the man who repeats it most often and in the loudest voice. And of course “True Freedom” is actually a better name than freedom tout court. Truth – it’s one of the magical words. Combine it with the magic of “freedom” and the effect’s terrific.’ After a moment’s silence, ‘Curious,’ he went on, digressively and in another tone, ‘that people don’t talk about true truth. I suppose it sounds too queer. True truth; true truth,’ he repeated experimentally. ‘No, it obviously won’t do. It’s like beri-beri, or Wagga-Wagga. Nigger talk. You couldn’t take it seriously. If you want to make the contrary of truth acceptable, you’ve got to call it spiritual truth, or inner truth, or higher truth, or even . . .’

‘But a m-moment ago you were s-saying that there w-was a k-kind of higher truth. S-something you could only g-get at m-mystically. You’re c-contradicting yourself.’

Anthony laughed. ‘That’s one of the privileges of freedom. Besides,’ he added, more seriously, ‘there’s that distinction between knowing and experiencing. Known truth isn’t the same as experienced truth. There ought to be two distinct words.’

‘You m-manage to wr-wriggle out of e-everything.’

‘Not out of everything,’ Anthony insisted. ‘There’ll always be those.’ He pointed again to the books. ‘Always knowledge. The prison of knowledge – because of course knowledge is also a prison. But I shall always be ready to stay in that prison.’

‘A-always?’ Brian questioned.

‘Why not?’

‘Too m-much of a l-luxury.’

‘On the contrary. It’s a case of scorning delights and living laborious days.’

‘Which are thems-selves del-lightful.’

‘Of course. But mayn’t one take pleasure in one’s work?’

Brian nodded. ‘It’s not exactly th-that,’ he said. ‘One doesn’t w-want to exp-ploit one’s p-privileges.’

‘Mine’s only a little one,’ said Anthony. ‘About six pounds a week,’ he added, specifying the income that had come to him from his mother.

‘P-plus all the r-rest.’

‘Which rest?’

‘The l-luck that you happen to l-like this sort of thing.’ He reached out and touched the folio Bayles. ‘And all your g-gifts.’

‘But I can’t artificially make myself stupid,’ Anthony objected. ‘Nor can you.’

‘N-no, but we can use what we’ve g-got for s-something else.’

‘Something we’re not suited for,’ the other suggested sarcastically.

Ignoring the mockery, ‘As a k-kind of th-thank-offering,’ Brian went on with a still intenser passion of earnestness.

‘For what?’

‘For all that we’ve been g-given. M-money, to start with. And then kn-knowledge, t-taste, the power to c-c . . .’ He wanted to say ‘create,’ but had to be content with ‘to do things.’ ‘B-being a scholar or an artist – it’s I-like purs-suing your p-personal salvation. But there’s also the k-kingdom of G-god. W-waiting to be realized.’

‘By the Fabians?’ asked Anthony in a tone of pretended ingenuousness.

‘Am-among others.’ There was a long half-minute of silence. ‘Shall I say it?’ Brian was wondering. ‘Shall I tell him?’ And suddenly, as though a dam had burst, his irresolution was swept away. ‘I’ve decided,’ he said aloud, and the feeling with which he spoke the words was so strong that it lifted him, almost without his knowledge, to his feet and sent him striding restlessly about the room, ‘I’ve decided that I shall g-go on with ph-philosophy and l-literature and h-history till I’m thirty. Then it’ll be t-time to do something else. S-something more dir-rect.’

‘Direct?’ Anthony repeated. ‘In what way?’

‘In getting at p-people. In r-realizing the k-kingdom of G-god . . .’ The very intensity of his desire to communicate what he was feeling reduced him to dumbness.

Listening to Brian’s words, looking up into the serious and ardent face, Anthony felt himself touched, profoundly, to the quick of his being . . . felt himself touched, and, for that very reason, came at once under a kind of compulsion, as though in self-defence, to react to his own emotion, and his friend’s, with a piece of derision. ‘Washing the feet of the poor, for example,’ he suggested. ‘And drying them on your hair. It’ll be awkward if you go prematurely bald.’

Afterwards, when Brian had gone, he felt ashamed of his ignoble ribaldry – humiliated, at the same time, by the unreflecting automatism with which he had brought it out. Like those pithed frogs that twitch when you apply a drop of acid to their skin. A brainless response.

‘Damn!’ he said aloud, then picked up his book.

He was deep once more in The Way of Perfection, when there was a thump at the door and a voice, deliberately harshened so as to be like the voice of a drill-sergeant on parade, shouted his name.

‘These bloody stairs of yours!’ said Gerry Watchett as he came in. ‘Why the devil do you live in such a filthy hole?’

Gerry Watchett was fair-skinned, with small, unemphatic features and wavy golden-brown hair. A good-looking young man, but good-looking, in spite of his height and powerful build, almost to girlish prettiness. For the casual observer, there was an air about him of Arcadian freshness and innocence, strangely belied, however, upon a closer examination, by the hard insolence in his blue eyes, by the faint smile of derision and contempt that kept returning to his face, by the startling coarseness of those thick-fingered, short-nailed hands.

Anthony pointed to a chair. But the other shook his head. ‘No, I’m in a hurry. Just rushed in to say you’ve got to come to dinner tonight.’

‘But I can’t.’

Gerry frowned. ‘Why not?’

‘I’ve got a meeting of the Fabians.’

‘And you call that a reason for not coming to dine with me?’

‘Seeing I’ve promised to . . .’

‘Then I can expect you at eight?’

‘But really . . .’

‘Don’t be a fool! What does it matter? A mothers’ meeting?’

‘But what excuse shall I give?’

‘Any bloody thing you like. Tell them you’ve just had twins.’

‘All right, then,’ Anthony agreed at last. ‘I’ll come.’

‘Thank you very kindly,’ said Gerry, with mock politeness. ‘I’d have broken your neck if you hadn’t. Well, so long.’ At the door he halted. ‘I’m having Bimbo Abinger, and Ted, and Willie Monmouth, and Scroope. I wanted to get old Gorchakov too: but the fool’s gone and got ill at the last moment. That’s why I had to ask you,’ he added with a quiet matter-of-factness that was far more offensive than any emphasis could have been; then turned, and was gone.

‘Do you I-like him?’ Brian had asked one day when Gerry’s name came up between them. And because the question evoked an uneasy echo in his own consciousness, Anthony had answered, with a quite unnecessary sharpness, that of course he liked Gerry. ‘Why else do you suppose I go about with him?’ he had concluded, looking at Brian with irritable suspicion. Brian made no reply; and the question had returned like a boomerang upon the asker. Yes, why did he go about with Gerry? For of course he didn’t like the man; Gerry had hurt and humiliated him again on the slightest provocation. Or rather without any provocation at all – just for fun, because it amused him to humiliate people, because he had a natural talent for inflicting pain. So why, why?

Mere snobbery, as Anthony was forced to admit to himself, was part of the discreditable secret. It was absurd and ridiculous; but the fact remained, nevertheless, that it pleased him to associate with Gerry and his friends. To be the intimate of these young aristocrats and plutocrats, and at the same time to know himself their superior in intelligence, taste, judgment, in all the things that really mattered, was satisfying to his vanity.

Admitting his intellectual superiority, the young barbarians expected him to pay for their admiration by amusing them. He was their intimate, yes; but as Voltaire was the intimate of Frederick the Great, as Diderot of the Empress Catherine. The resident philosopher is not easily distinguishable from the court fool.

With genuine appreciation, but at the same time patronizingly, offensively, ‘Good for the Professor!’ Gerry would say after one of his sallies. Or, ‘Another drink for the old Professor’ as though he were an Italian organ-grinder, playing for pennies.

The prick of remembered humiliation was sharp like an insect’s sting. With sudden violence Anthony heaved himself out of his chair and began to walk, frowning, up and down the room.

A middle-class snob tolerated because of his capacities as an entertainer. The thought was hateful, wounding. ‘Why do I stand it?’ he wondered. ‘Why am I such a damned fool? I shall write Gerry a note to say I can’t come.’ But time passed; the note remained unwritten. For, after all, he was thinking, there were also advantages, there were also satisfactions. An evening spent with Gerry and his friends was exhilarating, was educative. Exhilarating and educative, not because of anything they said or thought – for they were all stupid, all bottomlessly ignorant; but because of what they were, of what their circumstances had made them. For, thanks to their money and their position, they were able actually to live in such freedom as Anthony had only imagined or read about. For them, the greater number of the restrictions which had always hedged him in did not even exist. They permitted themselves as a matter of course licences which he took only in theory, and which he felt constrained even then to justify with all the resources of a carefully perverted metaphysic, an ingeniously adulterated mystical theology. By the mere force of social and economic circumstances, these ignorant barbarians found themselves quite naturally behaving as he did not dare to behave even after reading all Nietzsche had said about the Superman, or Casanova about women. Nor did they have to study Patanjali or Jacob Boehme in order to find excuses for the intoxications of wine and sensuality: they just got drunk and had their girls, like that, as though they were in the Garden of Eden. They faced life, not diffidently and apologetically, as Anthony faced it, not wistfully, from behind invisible bars, but with the serenely insolent assurance of those who know that God intended them to enjoy themselves and had decreed the unfailing acquiescence of their fellows in all their desires.

True, they also had their confining prejudices; they too on occasion were as ready as poor old Brian to lock themselves up in the prison of a code. But code and prejudices were of their own particular caste; therefore, so far as Anthony was concerned, without binding force. Their example delivered him from the chains that his upbringing had fastened upon him, but was powerless to bind him with those other chains in which they themselves walked through life. In their company the compulsions of respectability, the paralysing fear of public opinion, the inhibitory maxims of middle-class prudence fell away from him; but when Bimbo Abinger indignantly refused even to listen to the suggestion that he should sell the monstrous old house that was eating up three-quarters of his income, when Scroope complained that he would have to go into Parliament, because in his family the eldest sons had always sat in the House of Commons before coming into the title, Anthony could only feel the amused astonishment of an explorer watching the religious antics of a tribe of blackamoors. A rational being does not allow himself to be converted to the cult of Mumbo Jumbo; but he will have no objection to occasionally going a bit native. The worship of Mumbo Jumbo means the acceptance of taboos; going native means freedom. ‘True Freedom!’ Anthony grinned to himself; his good humour and equanimity had returned. A snob, a middle-class snob. No doubt. But there was a reason for his snobbery, a justification. And if the lordly young barbarians tended to regard him as a sort of high-class buffoon – well, that was the price he had to pay for their gift of freedom. There was no price to be paid for associating with the Fabians; but then, how little they had to give him! Socialist doctrines might to some extent theoretically liberate the intellect; but the example of the young barbarians was a liberation in the sphere of practice.

‘So frightfully sorry,’ he scribbled in his note to Brian. ‘Suddenly remembered I’d booked myself for dinner tonight.’ (‘Booked’ was one of his father’s words – a word he ordinarily detested for its affectation. Writing a lie, he had found it coming spontaneously to his pen.) ‘Alas’ (that was also a favourite locution of his father’s), ‘shan’t be able to listen to you on sin! Wish I could get out of this, but don’t see how. Yours, A.’

By the time the fruit was on the table they were all pretty drunk. Gerry Watchett was telling Scroope about that German baroness he had had on the boat, on the way to Egypt. Abinger had no audience, but was reciting limericks: the Young Lady of Wick, the Old Man of Devizes, the Young Man called Maclean – a whole dictionary of national biography. Ted and Willie were having a violent quarrel about the best way of shooting grouse. Alone of the party, Anthony was silent. Speech would have compromised the delicate happiness he was then enjoying. That last glass of champagne had made him the inhabitant of a new world, extraordinarily beautiful and precious and significant. The apples and oranges in the silver bowl were like enormous gems. Each glass, under the candles, contained not wine, but a great yellow beryl, solid and translucent. The roses had the glossy texture of satin and the shining hardness and distinctness of form belonging to metal or glass. Even sound was frozen and crystalline. The Young Lady of Kew was the equivalent, in his ears, of a piece of sculptured jade, and that violently futile discussion about grouse seemed like a waterfall in winter. Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui, he thought with heightened pleasure. Everything was supernaturally brilliant and distinct, but at the same time how remote, how strangely irrelevant! Bright against the outer twilight of the room, the faces grouped about the table might have been things seen on the other side of a sheet of plate-glass, in an illuminated aquarium. And the aquarium was not only without, it was also, mysteriously, within him. Looking through the glass at those sea flowers and submarine gems, he was himself a fish – but a fish of genius, a fish that was also a god. ICHTHUS – Iesos Christos theou huios soter. His divine fish-soul hung there, poised in its alien element, gazing, gazing through huge eyes that perceived everything, understood everything, but having no part in what it saw. Even his own hands lying there on the table in front of him had ceased, in any real sense, to be his. From his aquarium fastness he viewed them with the same detached and happy admiration as he felt for the fruits and flowers, or those other transfigured bits of still life, the faces of his friends. Beautiful hands! contrived – how marvellously! – to perform their innumerable functions – the pointing of double-barrelled guns at flying birds, the caressing of the thighs of German baronesses in liners, the playing of imaginary scales upon the table-cloth, so. Enchanted, he watched the movements of his fingers, the smooth sliding of the tendons under the skin. Exquisite hands! But no more truly a part of himself, of the essential fish-soul in its timeless aquarium, than the hands of Abinger peeling that banana, the hands of Scroope carrying a match to his cigar. I am not my body, I am not my sensations, I am not even my mind; I am that I am. I om that I om. The sacred word OM represents Him. God is not limited by time. For the One is not absent from anything, and yet is separated from all things . . .

‘Hi, Professor!’ A piece of orange-peel struck him on the cheek. He started and turned round. ‘What the hell are you thinking about?’ Gerry Watchett was asking in that purposely harsh voice which it amused him to put on like a hideous mask.

The momentarily troubled waters of the aquarium had already returned to rest. A fish once more, a divine and remotely happy Fish, Anthony smiled at him with serene indulgence.

‘I was thinking about Plotinus,’ he said.

‘Why Plotinus?’

‘Why Plotinus? But, my dear sir, isn’t it obvious? Science is reason, and reason is multitudinous.’ The fish had found a tongue; eloquence flowed from the aquarium in an effortless stream. ‘But if one happens to be feeling particularly unmultitudinous – well, what else is there to think about except Plotinus? Unless, of course, you prefer the pseudo-Dionysius, or Eckhart, or St Teresa. The flight of the alone to the Alone. Even St Thomas is forced to admit that no mind can see the divine substance unless it is divorced from bodily senses, either by death or by some rapture. Some rapture, mark you! But a rapture is always a rapture, whatever it’s due to. Whether it’s champagne, or saying OM, or squinting at your nose, or looking at a crucifix, or making love – preferably in a boat, Gerry; I’m the first to admit it; preferably in a boat. What are the wild waves saying? Rapture! Ecstasy! Fairly yelling it. Until, mark you, until, the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul, while with an eye made quiet . . .’

‘There was a Young Fellow of Burma,’ Abinger suddenly declaimed.

‘Made quiet,’ Anthony repeated more loudly, ‘by the power of harmony . . .’

‘Whose betrothed had good reasons to murmur.’

‘And the deep power of joy,’ shouted Anthony, ‘we see . . .’

‘But now that they’re married he’s

‘Been taking cantharides . . .’

‘We see into the life of things. The life of things, I tell you. The life of things. And damn all Fabians!’ he added.

Anthony got back to his lodgings at about a quarter to midnight, and was unpleasantly startled, as he entered the sitting-room, to see someone rising with the violent impatience of a Jack-in-the-box from an armchair.

‘God, what a fright . . .!’

‘At last!’ said Mark Staithes. His emphatically featured face wore an expression of angry impatience. ‘I’ve been waiting nearly an hour.’ Then, with contempt, ‘You’re drunk,’ he added.

‘As though you’d never been drunk!’ Anthony retorted. ‘I remember . . .’

‘So do I,’ said Mark Staithes, interrupting him. ‘But that was in my first year.’ In his first year, when he had felt it necessary to prove that he was manly – manlier than the toughest of them, noisier, harder-drinking. ‘I’ve got something better to do now.’

‘So you imagine,’ said Anthony.

The other looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got about seven minutes,’ he said. ‘Are you sober enough to listen?’

Anthony sat down with dignity and in silence.

Short, but square-shouldered and powerful, Mark stood over him, almost menacingly. ‘It’s about Brian,’ he said.

‘About Brian?’ Then with a knowing smile, ‘That reminds me,’ Anthony added, ‘I ought to have congratulated you on being our future president.’

‘Fool!’ said Mark angrily. ‘Do you think I go about accepting charity? When he withdrew, I withdrew too.’

‘And let that dreary little Mumby walk into the job?’

‘What the devil do I care about Mumby?’

‘What do any of us care about anybody?’ said Anthony sententiously. ‘Nothing, thank God. Absolutely noth . . .’

‘What does he mean by insulting me like that?’

‘Who? Little Mumby?’

‘No; Brian, of course.’

‘He thinks he’s being nice to you.’

‘I don’t want his damned niceness,’ said Mark. ‘Why can’t he behave properly?’

‘Because it amuses him to behave like a Christian.’

‘Well, then, tell him for God’s sake to try it on someone else in future. I don’t like having Christian tricks played on me.’

‘You want a cock to fight with, in fact.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Otherwise it’s no fun being on top of the dunghill. Whereas Brian would like us all to be jolly little capons together. Well, so far as dunghills are concerned, I’m all for Brian. It’s when we come to the question of the hens that I begin to hesitate.’

Mark looked at his watch again. ‘I must go.’ At the door he turned back. ‘Don’t forget to tell him what I’ve told you. I like Brian, and I don’t want to quarrel with him. But if he tries being charitable and Christian again . . .’

‘The poor boy will forfeit your esteem for ever,’ concluded Anthony.

‘Buffoon!’ said Staithes, and, slamming the door behind him, hurried downstairs.

Left alone, Anthony took the fifth volume of the Historical Dictionary and began to read what Bayle had to say about Spinoza.

CHAPTER XI

December 8th 1926

‘Condar intra MEUM latus! It is the only place of refuge left to us.’ Anthony rolled the sheet off his typewriter, added it to the other sheets lying before him on the table, clipped them together and started to read through what he had written. Chapter XI of his Elements of Sociology was to deal with the Individual and his conceptions of Personality. He had spent the day jotting down unmethodically a few preliminary reflections.

‘Cogito ergo sum,’ he read. ‘But why not caco ergo sum? Eructo ergo sum? Or, escaping solipsism, why not futuo ergo sumus? Ribald questions. But what is “personality”?

‘MacTaggart knows his personality by direct acquaintance; others by description. Hume and Bradley don’t know theirs at all, and don’t believe it really exists. Mere splitting, all this, of a bald man’s imaginary hairs. What matters is that “Personality” happens to be a common word with a generally accepted meaning.

‘People discuss my “personality.” What are they talking about? Not homo cacans, nor homo eructans, not even, except very superficially, homo futuens. No, they are talking about homo sentiens (impossible Latin) and homo cogitans. And when, in public, I talk about “myself,” I talk about the same two homines. My “personality,” in the present conventional sense of the word, is what I think and feel – or, rather, what I confess to thinking and feeling. Caco, eructo, futuo – I never admit that the first person singular of such verbs is really me. Only when, for any reason, they palpably affect my feeling and thinking do the processes they stand for come within the bounds of my “personality.” (This censorship makes ultimate nonsense of all literature. Plays and novels just aren’t true.)

‘Thus, the “personal” is the creditable, or rather the potentially creditable. Not the morally undifferentiated.

‘It is also the enduring. Very short experiences are even less personal than discreditable or merely vegetative experiences. They become personal only when accompanied by feeling and thought, or when reverberated by memory.

‘Matter, analysed, consists of empty space and electric charges. Take a woman and a washstand. Different in kind. But their component electric charges are similar in kind. Odder still, each of these component electric charges is different in kind from the whole woman or washstand. Changes in quantity, when sufficiently great, produce changes in quality. Now, human experience is analogous to matter. Analyse it – and you find yourself in the presence of psychological atoms. A lot of these atoms constitute normal experience, and a selection from normal experience constitutes “personality.” Each individual atom is unlike normal experience and still more unlike personality. Conversely, each atom in one experience resembles the corresponding atom in another. Viewed microscopically, a woman’s body is just like a washstand, and Napoleon’s experience is just like Wellington’s. Why do we imagine that solid matter exists? Because of the grossness of our sense organs. And why do we imagine that we have coherent experiences and personality? Because our minds work slowly and have very feeble powers of analysis. Our world and we who live in it are the creations of stupidity and bad sight.

‘Recently, however, thinking and seeing have been improved. We have instructions that will resolve matter into very small parts and a mathematical technique that allows us to think about still smaller parts.

‘Psychologists have no new instruments, only new techniques of thought. All their inventions are purely mental – techniques of analysis and observation, working hypotheses. Thanks to the novelists and professional psychologists, we can think of our experience in terms of atoms and instants as well as in terms of lumps and hours. To be a tolerably good psychologist was possible, in the past, only for men of genius. Compare Chaucer’s psychology with Gower’s, even Boccaccio’s. Compare Shakespeare’s with Ben Jonson’s. The difference is one not only of quality, but also of quantity. The men of genius knew more than their merely intelligent contemporaries.

‘Today, there is a corpus of knowledge, a technique, a working hypothesis. The amount a merely intelligent man can know is enormous – more than an unlearned man of genius relying solely on intuition.

‘Were the Gowers and Jonsons hampered by their ignorance? Not at all. Their ignorance was the standard knowledge of their times. A few monsters of intuition might know more than they; but the majority knew even less.

‘And here a digression – sociologically speaking, more important than the theme digressed from. There are fashions in personality. Fashions that vary in time – like crinolines and hobble skirts – and fashions that vary in space – like Gold Coast loin-cloths and Lombard Street tail-coats. In primitive societies everyone wears, and longs to wear, the same personality. But each society has a different psychological costume. Among the Red Indians of the North-West Pacific Coast the ideal personality was that of a mildly crazy egotist competing with his rivals on the plane of wealth and conspicuous consumption. Among the Plains Indians, it was that of an egotist competing with others in the sphere of warlike exploits. Among the Pueblo Indians, the ideal personality was neither that of an egotist, nor of a conspicuous consumer, nor of a fighter, but of the perfectly gregarious man who makes great efforts never to distinguish himself, who knows the traditional rites and gestures and tries to be exactly like everyone else.

‘European societies are large and racially, economically, professionally heterogeneous; therefore orthodoxy is hard to impose, and there are several contemporaneous ideals of personality. (Note that Fascists and Communists are trying to create one single “right” ideal – in other words, are trying to make industrialized Europeans behave as though they were Dyaks or Eskimos. The attempt, in the long run, is doomed to failure; but in the meantime, what fun they will get from bullying the heretics!)

‘In our world, what are the ruling fashions? There are, of course, the ordinary clerical and commercial modes – turned out by the little dressmakers round the corner. And then la haute couture. Ravissante personalité d’intérieur de chez Proust. Maison Nietzsche et Kipling: personalité de sport. Personalité de nuit, création de Lawrence. Personalité de bain, par Joyce. Note the interesting fact that, of these, the personalité de sport is the only one that can really count as a personality in the accepted sense of the word. The others are to a greater or less extent impersonal, because to a greater or less extent atomic. And this brings us back to Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. A pragmatist would have to say that Jonson’s psychology was “truer” than Shakespeare’s. Most of his contemporaries did in fact perceive themselves and were perceived as Humours. It took Shakespeare to see what a lot there was outside the boundaries of the Humour, behind the conventional mask. But Shakespeare was in a minority of one – or, if you set Montaigne beside him, of two. Humours “worked”; the complex, partially atomized personalities of Shakespeare didn’t.

‘In the story of the emperor’s new clothes the child perceives that the great man is naked. Shakespeare reversed the process. His contemporaries thought they were just naked Humours; he saw that they were covered with a whole wardrobe of psychological fancy dress.

‘Take Hamlet. Hamlet inhabited a world whose best psychologist was Polonius. If he had known as little as Polonius, he would have been happy. But he knew too much; and in this consists tragedy. Read his parable of the musical instruments. Polonius and the others assumed as axiomatic that man was a penny whistle with only half a dozen stops. Hamlet knew that, potentially at least, he was a whole symphony orchestra.

‘Mad, Ophelia lets the cat out of the bag. ‘We know what we are, but know not what we may be.’ Polonius knows very clearly what he and other people are, within the ruling conventions. Hamlet knows this, but also what they may be – outside the local system of masks and humours.

‘To be the only man of one’s age to know what people may be as well as what they conventionally are! Shakespeare must have gone through some rather disquieting quarters of an hour.

‘It was left to Blake to rationalize psychological atomism into a philosophical system. Man, according to Blake (and, after him, according to Proust, according to Lawrence), is simply a succession of states. Good and evil can be predicated only of states, not of individuals, who in fact don’t exist, except as the places where the states occur. It is the end of personality in the old sense of the word. (Parenthetically – for this is quite outside the domain of sociology – is it the beginning of a new kind of personality? That of the total man, unbowdlerized, unselected, uncanalized, to change the metaphor, down any one particular drainpipe of Weltanschauung – of the man, in a word, who actually is what he may be. Such a man is the antithesis of any of the variants on the fundamental Christian man of our history. And yet in a certain sense he is also the realization of that ideal personality conceived by the Jesus of the Gospel. Like Jesus’s ideal personality, the total, unexpurgated, non-canalized man is (1) not pharisaic, that is to say, not interested in convention and social position, not puffed up with the pride of being better than other men; (2) humble, in his acceptance of himself, in his refusal to exalt himself above his human station; (3) poor in spirit, inasmuch as “he” – his ego – lays no lasting claims on anything, is content with what, for a personality of the old type, would seem psychological and philosophical destitution; (4) like a little child, in his acceptance of the immediate datum of experience for its own sake, in his refusal to take thought for the morrow, in his readiness to let the dead bury their dead; (5) not a hypocrite or a liar, since there is no fixed model which individuals must pretend to be like.)

‘A question: did the old personality ever exist? In the year m men feel x in content z. In the year n they feel the same x in quite a different context p. But x is a major emotion – vitally significant for personality. And yet x is felt in contexts that change with the changing conventions of fashion. “Rather death than dishonour.” But honour is like women’s skirts. Worn short, worn long, worn full, worn narrow, worn with petticoats, worn minus drawers. Up to 1750 you were expected to feel, you did feel, mortally dishonoured if you saw a man pinching your sister’s bottom. So intense was your indignation, that you had to try to kill him. Today, our honours have migrated from the fleshy parts of our female relations’ anatomy, and have their seats elsewhere. And so on, indefinitely.

‘So what is personality? And what is it not?

‘It is not our total experience. It is not the psychological atom or instant. It is not sense impressions as such, nor vegetative life as such.

‘It is experience in the lump and by the hour. It is feeling and thought.

‘And who makes this selection from total experience, and on what principle? Sometimes we make it – whoever we are. But as often it is made for us – by the collective unwisdom of a class, a whole society. To a great extent, “personality” is not even our personal property.

‘Vaguely, but ever more widely, this fact is now coming to be realized. At the same time, ever-increasing numbers of people are making use of the modern techniques to see themselves and others microscopically and instantaneously, as well as in the lump and by the hour. Moreover, having a working hypothesis of the unconscious, increasing numbers are becoming aware of their secret motives, and so are perceiving the large part played in their lives by the discreditable and vegetative elements of experience. With what results? That the old conception of personality has begun to break down. And not only the conception, also the fact. “Strong personalities,” even “definite personalities,” are becoming less common. Fascists have to go out of their way to manufacture them, deliberately, by a suitable process of education. An education that is simplification, Eskimization; that entails the suppression of psychological knowledge and the inculcation of respect for psychological ignorance. Odious policy – but, I suspect, inevitable and, sociologically speaking, right. For our psychological acumen is probably harmful to society. Society has need of simple Jonsonian Humours, not of formless collections of self-conscious states. Yet another example of the banefulness of too much knowledge and too much scientific technique.

‘Once more, Hamlet casts a light. Polonius is much more obviously and definitely a person than the prince. Indeed, Hamlet’s personality is so indefinite that critics have devoted thousands of pages to the discussion of what it really was. In fact, of course, Hamlet didn’t have a personality – knew altogether too much to have one. He was conscious of his total experience, atom by atom and instant by instant, and accepted no guiding principle which would make him choose one set of patterned atoms to represent his personality rather than another. To himself and to others he was just a succession of more or less incongruous states. Hence that perplexity at Elsinore and among the Shakespearean critics ever since. Honour, Religion, Prejudice, Love – all the conventional props that shore up the ordinary personality have been, in this case, gnawed through. Hamlet is his own termite, and from a tower has eaten himself down to a heap of sawdust. Only one thing prevents Polonius and the rest from immediately perceiving the fact: whatever the state of his mind, Hamlet’s body is still intact, unatomized, macroscopically present to the senses. And perhaps, after all, this is the real reason for our belief in personality: – the existence and persistence of bodies. And perhaps whatever reality there is in the notion of coherent individual continuity is just a function of this physical persistence. “Such hair, such a wonderful figure! I think Mrs Jones has a lovely poys-sonality.” When I heard that, in the bus going up Fifth Avenue, it made me laugh. Whereas I probably ought to have listened as though to Spinoza. For what is the most personal thing about a human being? Not his mind – his body. A Hearst, a Rothermere, can mould my feelings, coerce my thinking. But no amount of propaganda can make my digestion or metabolism become identical to theirs. Cogito, ergo Rothermere est. But caco, ergo sum.

‘And here, I suspect, lies the reason for that insistence, during recent years, on the rights of the body. From the Boy Scouts to the fashionable sodomites, and from Elizabeth Arden to D. H. Lawrence (one of the most powerful personality-smashers, incidentally: there are no “characters” in his books). Always and everywhere the body. Now the body possesses one enormous merit; it is indubitably there. Whereas the personality, as a mental structure, may be all in bits – gnawed down to Hamlet’s heap of sawdust. Only the rather stupid and insentient, nowadays, have strong and sharply defined personalities. Only the barbarians among us “know what they are.” The civilized are conscious of “what they may be,” and so are incapable of knowing what, for practical, social purposes, they actually are – have forgotten how to select a personality out of their total atomic experience. In the swamp and welter of this uncertainty the body stands firm like a Rock of Ages.

Jesu, pro me perforatus,

Condar intra tuum latus.

Even faith hankers for warm caverns of perforated flesh. How much more wildly urgent must be the demands of a scepticism that has ceased to believe even in its own personality! Condar intra MEUM latus! It is the only place of refuge left to us.’

Anthony laid the typescript down, and, tilting backwards, rocked himself precariously on the hind legs of his chair. Not so bad, he was thinking. But there were obviously omissions, there were obviously unjustifiable generalizations. He had written of the world in general as though the world in general were like himself – from the desire, of course, that it should be. For how simple it would be if it were! How agreeable! Each man a succession of states enclosed in the flesh of his own side. And if any other principle of coherence were needed, there was always some absorbing and delightful intellectual interest, like sociology, for example, to supplement the persisting body. Condar intra meum laborem. Instead of which . . . He sighed. In spite of Hamlet, in spite of The Prophetic Books, in spite of Du côté de chez Swann and Women in Love, the world was still full of Jonsonian Humours. Full of the villains of melodrama, the equally deplorable heroes of films, full of Poincarés, of Mussolinis, of Northcliffes, full of ambitious and avaricious mischief-makers of every size and shape.

An idea occurred to him. He let his tilted chair fall forward and picked up his fountain-pen.

‘Last infirmity of noble mind, the primary, perhaps only, source of sin,’ he scribbled. ‘Noble mind = evil mind. Tree known by fruits. What are fruits of fame-seeking, ambition, desire to excel? Among others, war, nationalism, economic competition, snobbery, class hatred, colour prejudice. Comus quite right to preach sensuality; and how foolish of Satan to tempt a, by definition, ahimsa-practising Messiah with fame, dominion, ambition – things whose inevitable fruits are violence and coercion! Compared with fame-seeking, pure sensuality all but harmless. Were Freud right and sex supreme, we should live almost in Eden. Alas, only half right. Adler also half right. Hinc illae lac.’

He looked at his watch. Twenty past seven – and he had to be in Kensington by eight! In his bath, he wondered what the evening would be like. It was twelve years now since he had quarrelled with Mary Amberley. Twelve years, during which he had seen her only at a distance – in picture galleries, once or twice; and across the drawing-room of a common friend. ‘I don’t ever want to speak to you again,’ he had written in that last letter to her. And yet, a few days since, when her reconciliatory invitation had unexpectedly appeared with the other letters on his breakfast table, he had accepted immediately; accepted in the same tone as that in which the invitation itself was couched – casually, matter-of-factly, with no more explicit reference to the past than a ‘Yes, it’s a long time since I last dined at Number 17.’ And after all, why not? What was the point of doing things finally and irrevocably? What right had the man of 1914 to commit the man of 1926? The 1914 man had been an embodied state of anger, shame, distress, perplexity. His state today was one of cheerful serenity, mingled, so far as Mary Amberley was concerned, with considerable curiosity. What would she be like now – at forty-three, was it? And was she really as amusing as he remembered her? Or had his admiration been only one of the fruits – the absurd, delicious fruits – of youthful inexperience? Would his swan turn out a goose? Or still a swan – but moulted, but (poor Mary!) middle-aged? Still wondering, he hurried downstairs and into the street.

CHAPTER XII

August 30th 1933

A FAINT RUSTLING caressed the half-conscious fringes of their torpor, swelled gradually, as though a shell were being brought closer and closer to the ear, and became at last a clattering roar that brutally insisted on attention. Anthony opened his eyes for just long enough to see that the aeroplane was almost immediately above them, then shut them again, dazzled by the intense blue of the sky.

‘These damned machines!’ he said. Then, with a little laugh, ‘They’ll have a nice God’s-eye view of us here,’ he added.

Helen did not answer; but behind her closed eyelids she smiled. Pop-eyed and with an obscene and gloating disapproval! The vision of that heavenly visitant was irresistibly comic.

‘David and Bathsheba,’ he went on. ‘Unfortunately at a hundred miles an hour . . .’

A strange yelping sound punctuated the din of the machine. Anthony opened his eyes again, and was in time to see a dark shape rushing down towards him. He uttered a cry, made a quick and automatic movement to shield his face. With a violent but dull and muddy impact the thing struck the flat roof a yard or two from where they were lying. The drops of a sharply spurted liquid were warm for an instant on their skin, and then, as the breeze swelled up out of the west, startlingly cold. There was a long second of silence. ‘Christ!’ Anthony whispered at last. From head to foot both of them were splashed with blood. In a red pool at their feet lay the almost shapeless carcase of a fox-terrier. The roar of the receding aeroplane had diminished to a raucous hum, and suddenly the ear found itself conscious once again of the shrill rasping of the cicadas.

Anthony drew a deep breath; then, with an effort and still rather unsteadily, contrived to laugh. ‘Yet another reason for disliking dogs,’ he said, and, scrambling to his feet, looked down, his face puckered with disgust, at his blood-bedabbled body. ‘What about a bath?’ he asked, turning to Helen.

She was sitting quite still, staring with wide-open eyes at the horribly shattered carcase. Her face was very pale, and a glancing spurt of blood had left a long red streak that ran diagonally from the right side of the chin, across the mouth, to the corner of the left eye.

‘You look like Lady Macbeth,’ he said, with another effort at jocularity. ‘Allons.’ He touched her shoulder. ‘Out, vile spot. This beastly stuff’s drying on me. Like seccotine.’

For all answer, Helen covered her face with her hands and began to sob.

For a moment Anthony stood quite still, looking at her crouched there, in the hopeless abjection of her bloodstained nakedness, listening to the painful sound of her weeping. ‘Like seccotine’: his own words re-echoed disgracefully in his ears. Pity stirred within him, and then an almost violent movement of love for this hurt and suffering woman, this person, yes, this person whom he had ignored, deliberately, as though she had no existence except in the context of pleasure. Now, as she knelt there sobbing, all the tenderness he had ever felt for her body, all the affection implicit in their sensualities and never expressed, seemed suddenly to discharge themselves, in a kind of lightning flash of accumulated feeling, upon this person, this embodied spirit, weeping in solitude behind concealing hands.

He knelt down beside her on the mattress, and, with a gesture that was meant to express all that he now felt, put an arm round her shoulder.

But at his touch she winced away as if from a defilement. With a violent, shuddering movement she shook her head.

‘But, Helen . . .’ he protested, in the stupid conviction that there must be some mistake, that it was impossible that she shouldn’t be feeling what he was feeling. It was only a question of making her understand what had happened to him. He laid his hand once more on her shoulder. ‘But I care, I’m so fond . . .’ Even now he refused to commit himself to the word ‘love.’

‘Don’t touch me,’ she cried almost inarticulately, leaning away from him.

He withdrew his hand, but remained there, kneeling beside her, in perplexed and miserable silence. He remembered the time when she had wanted to be allowed to love, and how he had evaded her, had refused to take more of the person that she was, or to give more of himself, than the occasional and discontinuous amorousness of their bodies. She had ended by accepting his terms – accepting them so completely that now . . .

‘Helen,’ he ventured once again. She must be made to understand.

Helen shook her head again. ‘Leave me alone,’ she said; then, as he did not move, she uncovered a face now grotesquely smudged with blood and looked at him. ‘Why can’t you go away?’ she asked, making an effort to express a cold dispassionate resentment of his intrusion upon her. Then, suddenly, her tears began to flow again. ‘Oh, please go away!’ she implored. Her voice broke, and turning aside, she once more buried her face in her hands.

Anthony hesitated for a moment; then, realizing that he would only make things worse if he stayed on, rose to his feet and left her. ‘Give her time,’ he said to himself, ‘give her time.’

He took a bath, dressed and went down to the sitting-room. The snapshots were lying as they had left them, scattered over the table. He sat down and methodically began to sort them out, subject by subject, into little heaps. Mary in plumes; Mary veiled, clambering into a pre-war Renault; Mary bathing at Dieppe in a half-sleeved bodice and bloomers that were covered to the knee by a little skirt. His mother in a garden; feeding the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco; and then her grave at Lollingdon churchyard. His father with an alpenstock; roped to a guide on a snow slope; with Pauline and the two children. Uncle James on his bicycle; Uncle James wearing a speckled straw hat; rowing on the Serpentine; talking, ten years later, with convalescent soldiers in a hospital garden. Then Brian; Brian with Anthony’s own former self at Bulstrode; Brian in a punt with Joan and Mrs Foxe; Brian climbing in the Lakes. That girl he had had an affair with in New York, in 1927, was it? His grandmother. His aunts. Half a dozen snaps of Gladys . . .

Half an hour later he heard Helen’s steps, cautious at first and slow on the precipitous stairs leading down from the roof, then swift along the passage. Water splashed in the bath.

Time, she must have time. He decided to behave towards her as though nothing had happened. It was almost cheerfully, therefore, that he greeted her as she entered the room.

‘Well?’ he questioned brightly, looking up from his photographs. But the sight of that pale and stonily collected face filled him with misgiving.

‘I’m going,’ she said.

‘Now? Before lunch?’

She nodded.

‘But why?’

‘I prefer it,’ was all she answered.

Anthony was silent for a moment, wondering whether he ought to protest, to insist, to tell her the things he had tried to tell her on the roof. But the stoniness of her composure proclaimed in advance that the attempt would be useless. Later, when she had got over the first shock, when she had been given time . . . ‘All right, then,’ he said aloud. ‘I’ll drive you back to the hotel.’

Helen shook her head. ‘No, I shall walk.’

‘Not in this heat!’

‘I shall walk,’ she repeated in a tone of finality.

‘Well, if you also prefer to swelter . . .’ He tried to smile, without much success.

She passed through the glass doors on to the terrace, and suddenly that pale stony face was as though fire-flushed by the reflection from her pyjamas. In hell again, he said to himself, as he followed her.

‘Why do you come out?’ she asked.

‘I’ll take you as far as the gate.’

‘There’s no need.’

‘I prefer it.’

She did not return his smile, but walked on without speaking.

Two tall bushy plants of buddleia grew on either side of the steps that led down from the terrace. On the hot air the scent of the flowers (itself, so it seemed, intrinsically hot) was of an intense and violent sweetness.

‘Delicious,’ Anthony said aloud as they stepped into the perfumed aura of the blossoms. ‘Almost too delicious. But look!’ he called in another voice, and caught her sleeve. ‘Do look!’

New from they chrysalis, bright and still untattered, a swallowtail had settled on one of the clusters of mauve flowers. The pale yellow wings, with their black markings, their eyes of blue and crimson, were fully outstretched in the sunlight. Their forward edges had the curve of a sabre, and from the tips the line slanted elegantly backwards towards the two projecting tails of the lower wings. The whole butterfly seemed the symbol, the hieroglyph of gay and airy speed. The spread wings were tremulous as though from an uncontrollable excess of life, of passionate energy. Rapidly, ravenously, but with an extraordinary precision of purposeful movement, the creature plunged its uncoiled proboscis into the tiny trumpet-shaped flowers that composed the cluster. A quick motion of the head and thorax, and the probe had been thrust home, to be withdrawn a moment later and plunged as swiftly and unerringly between the lips of another and yet another flower, until all the blooms within striking distance had been explored and it was necessary to hasten on towards a yet unrifled part of the cluster. Again, again, to the very quick of the expectant flowers, deep to the sheathed and hidden sources of that hot intoxicating sweetness! Again, again, with what a tireless concupiscence, what an intense passion of aimed and accurate greed!

For a long minute they watched in silence. Then, suddenly, Helen stretched out her hand and flicked the cluster on which the butterfly was settled. But before her finger had even touched the flowers, the light, bright creature was gone. A quick flap of the wings, then a long soaring swoop; another spurt of fluttering movement, another long catenary of downward and upward slanting flight, and it was out of sight behind the house.

‘Why did you do that?’ he asked.

Pretending not to have heard his question, Helen ran down the steps and along the gravelled path. At the gate of the garden she halted and turned back.

‘Good-bye, Anthony.’

‘When are you coming again?’ he asked.

Helen looked at him for a few seconds without speaking, then shook her head. ‘I’m not coming again,’ she said at last.

‘Not coming again?’ he repeated. ‘What do you mean?’

But she had already slammed the gate behind her and with long springing stride was hurrying along the dusty road under the pine trees.

Anthony watched her go, and knew that, for the moment at least, it was no good even trying to do anything. It would only make things worse if he followed her. Later on, perhaps; this evening, when she had had time . . . But walking back along the garden path, through the now unheeded perfume of the buddleias, he wondered uneasily whether it would be much good, even later on. He knew Helen’s obstinacy. And then what right had he now, after all these months of disclaiming, of actively refusing any rights whatever?

‘But I’m a fool,’ he said aloud as he opened the kitchen door, ‘I’m mad.’ And he made an effort to recover his sanity by disparaging and belittling the whole incident. Unpleasant, admittedly. But not unpleasant enough to justify Helen in behaving as though she were acting Ibsen. Doing a slight Doll’s House, he said to himself – trying to reduce it all to a conveniently ridiculous phrase – when there was no doll and no house; for she really couldn’t complain that old Hugh had ever shut her up, or that he himself had cherished any designs on her liberty. On the contrary, he had insisted on her being free. Her liberty was also his; if she had become his slave, he would necessarily have become hers.

As for his own emotions, up there on the roof – that uprush of tenderness, that longing to know and love the suffering person within that all at once irrelevantly desirable body – these had been genuine, of course; were facts of direct experience. But after all, they could be explained, explained away, as the mere exaggerations, in a disturbing moment, of his very natural sympathy with her distress. The essential thing was time. Given a little time, she would listen once more to what he wanted to say, and he would no longer want to say any of the things she had just now refused to listen to.

He opened the refrigerator and found that Mme Cayol had prepared some cold veal and a cucumber and tomato salad. Mme Cayol had a vicarious passion for cold veal, was constantly giving it him. Anthony, as it happened, didn’t much like it, but he preferred eating it to discussing the bill of fare with Mme Cayol. Whole weeks would sometimes pass without the necessity arising for him to say more than Bonjour and A demain, Mme Cayol, and II fait beau aujourd’hui, or Quel vent!, whichever the case might be. She came for two hours each morning, tidied up, prepared some food, laid the table and went away again. He was served, but almost without being aware of the servant. The arrangement, he considered, was as nearly perfect as any earthly arrangement could be. Cold veal was a small price to pay for such service.

At the table in the shade of the great fig tree on the terrace, Anthony settled down with determination to his food, and as he ate, turned over the pages of his latest notebook. There was nothing, he assured himself, like work – nothing, to make oneself forget a particular and personal feeling, so effective as a good generalization. The word ‘freedom’ caught his eye, and remembering the satisfaction he had felt, a couple of months before, when he had got those ideas safely on to paper, he began to read.

‘Acton wanted to write the History of Man in terms of a History of the Idea of Freedom. But you cannot write a History of the Idea of Freedom without at the same time writing of the Fact of Slavery.

‘The Fact of Slavery. Or rather of Slaveries. For, in his successive attempts to realize the Idea of Freedom, man is constantly changing one form of slavery for another.

‘The primal slavery is the slavery to the empty belly and the unpropitious season. Slavery to nature, in a word. The escape from nature is through social organization and technical invention. In a modern city it is possible to forget that such a thing as nature exists – particularly nature in its more inhuman and hostile aspects. Half the population of Europe lives in a universe that’s entirely home-made.

‘Abolish slavery to nature. Another form of slavery instantly arises. Slavery to institutions: religious institutions, legal institutions, military institutions, economic institutions, educational, artistic and scientific institutions.

‘All modern history is a History of the Idea of Freedom from Institutions. It is also the History of the Fact of Slavery to Institutions.

‘Nature is senseless. Institutions, being the work of men, have meaning and purpose. Circumstances change quicker than institutions. What once was sense is sense no longer. An outworn institution is like a person who applies logical reasoning to the non-existent situation created by an idée fixe or hallucination. A similar state of things comes about when institutions apply the letter of the law to individual cases. The institution would be acting rationally if the circumstances envisaged by it really existed. But in fact they don’t exist. Slavery to an institution is like slavery to a paranoiac, who suffers from delusions but is still in possession of all his intellectual faculties. Slavery to nature is like slavery to an idiot who hasn’t even enough mind to be able to suffer from delusions.

‘Revolt against institutions leads temporarily to anarchy. But anarchy is slavery to nature, and to a civilized man slavery to nature is even less tolerable than slavery to institutions. The escape from anarchy is through the creation of new institutions. Sometimes there is no period of anarchy – no temporary enslavement to nature; men pass directly from one set of institutions to another.

‘Institutions are changed in an attempt to realize the Idea of Freedom. To appreciate the fact of the new slavery takes a certain time. So it comes about that in all revolts against institutions there is a kind of joyful honeymoon, when people believe that freedom has at last been attained. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” And not only in the dawn of the French Revolution. What undiluted happiness, for example, in the dawn of the Franciscan movement, in the dawn of the Reformation, in the dawn of Christianity and Islam! Even in the dawn of the Great War. The honeymoon may last for as much as twenty or thirty years. Then the fact of the new slavery imposes itself on men’s consciousness. It is perceived that the idea of freedom was not realized by the last change, that the new institutions are just as enslaving as the old. What is to be done? Change the new institutions for yet newer ones. And when that honeymoon is over? Change the yet newer for newer still. And so on – indefinitely, no doubt.

‘In any given society the fact of freedom exists only for a very small number of individuals. Propitious economic circumstances are the condition of at least a partial freedom. But if the freedom is to be more nearly complete, there must also be propitious intellectual, psychological, biographical circumstances. Individuals for whom all these circumstances are favourable are not the slaves of institutions. For them, institutions exist as a kind of solid framework on which they can perform whatever gymnastics they please. The rigidity of society as a whole makes it possible for these privileged few to wander out of intellectual and customary moral bounds without risk either for themselves or for the community at large. All particular freedoms – and there is no freedom that is not particular – is enjoyed on the condition of some form of general slavery.’

Anthony shut his book, feeling that he couldn’t read even one line more. Not that his words seemed any less true now than they had done when he wrote them. In their own way and on their particular level they were true. Why then did it all seem utterly false and wrong? Not wishing to discuss this question with himself, he went into the house and sat down to Usher’s History of Mechanical Inventions.

At half-past four he suddenly remembered that dead dog. A few hours more, and in this heat . . . He hurried out to the tool-house. The ground in the untended garden was sunbaked almost to the consistency of brick; by the time he had dug the hole he was dripping with sweat. Then, spade in hand, he went up to the roof. There lay the dog. The bloodstains on its fur, on the parapet, on the mattresses had turned the colour of rust. After several ineffectual attempts, he succeeded in scooping up the carcase with his spade and throwing it, flies and all – for the flies refused to be disturbed – over the parapet. He went downstairs and out into the garden; there, as though he were obstinately competing in some hideous egg-and-spoon race, he scooped the thing up once more and carried it, horribly dangling across the iron of his spade, to the grave. When he came back to the house, he felt so sick that he had to drink some brandy. After that he went down to the sea and took a long swim.

At six, when he was dressed again, he took his car and drove down to the hotel to have a talk with Helen. By this time, he calculated, she would have got over her first shock, she would be ready to listen to him. Forgetting all about the Doll’s House and the sanity of it had been intended to preserve, he was filled, as he drove, with an extraordinary elation. In a few minutes he would be seeing her again. Would be telling her of the discoveries he had suddenly made that morning: the discovery that he cared for her, the discovery that he had been a fool and worse, unspeakably worse than a fool . . . It would be difficult, it would be all but impossible to say these things about himself; but for that very reason the thought that he was going to say them filled him with profound happiness.

He drew up at the door of the hotel and hurried into the hall.

‘Madame Ledwidge est-elle dans sa chambre, mademoiselle?’

‘Mais non, monsieur, Madame vient de partir.’

‘Elle vient de partir?’

‘Madame est allée prendre le rapide à Toulon.’

Anthony looked at his watch. The train had already started. In a wretched little car like his there was no hope of getting to Marseilles before it left again for Paris.

‘Merci, mademoiselle, merci,’ he said, lapsing by force of habit into that excessive politeness by means of which he protected himself from the disquieting world of the lower classes.

‘Mais de rien, monsieur.’

He drove home again, wondering miserably whether he oughtn’t to be thankful for the deliverance. The postman had called in his absence. There was a letter from his broker, advising him to sell at least a part of that block of gold-mining shares he had inherited from Uncle James. There seemed to be no likelihood of their appreciating any further; in view of which, the wisest course would be to take advantage of the present prices and re-invest in sound English industrials such as . . . He threw the letter aside. Occasions, as usual, had been conspiring for him – thrusting good fortune upon him, malignantly. Now, in the depression, he was better off than ever before. Better off when other people were worse off. Freer while they were more hopelessly enslaved. The ring of Polycrates . . . It looked as though the gods had already begun their vengeance.

He went to bed early, and at two was woken by that horribly familiar dream that had haunted his boyhood and plagued him from time to time even as a grown man. In substance it was always the same. Nothing much was ever visible; but there was generally a knowledge that he was in company, surrounded by dim presences. He took a mouthful of some indeterminate food, and instantly it expanded between his teeth, became progressively more rubbery and at the same time stickier, till it was like a gag smeared with a kind of gum that dried in a thick film on the teeth, tongue, palate. Unspeakably disgusting, this process of asphyxiating expansion, of gluey thickening and clogging, went on and on. He tried to swallow, tried, in spite of the obscure but embarrassing presence of strangers, to disgorge. Without effect. In the end, he was reduced to hooking the stuff out with his finger – lump after ropy lump of it. But always in vain. For the gag continued to expand, the film to thicken and harden. Until at last he was delivered by starting out of sleep. This night, the expanding mouthful had some kind of vague but horrible connection with the dog. He woke up shuddering. Once awake, he was unable to go to sleep again. A huge accumulation of neglected memories broke through, as it were, into his awareness. Those snapshots. His mother and Mary Amberley. Brian in the chalkpit, evoked by that salty smell of sun-warmed flesh, and again dead at the cliff’s foot, among the flies – like that dog . . .

CHAPTER XIII

May 20th 1934

MADE MY SECOND speech yesterday night. Without serious nervousness. It’s easy enough, once you’ve made up your mind that it doesn’t matter if you make a fool of yourself. But it’s depressing. There’s a sense in which five hundred people in a hall aren’t concrete. One’s talking to a collective noun, an abstraction, not to a set of individuals. Only those already partially or completely convinced of what you’re saying even want to understand you. The rest are invincibly ignorant. In private conversation, you could be certain of getting your man to make at least a grudging effort to understand you. The fact that there’s an audience confirms the not-understander in his incomprehension. Particularly if he can ask questions after the address. Some of the reasons for this are obvious. Just getting up and being looked at is a pleasure – in many cases, piercing to the point of pain. Excruciating orgasms of self-assertion. Pleasure is heightened if the question is hostile. Hostility is a declaration of personal independence. Makes it clear at the same time that it’s only an accident that the questioner isn’t on the platform himself – accident or else, of course, deliberate plot on the part of ruffians who want to keep him down. Interruptions and questions are generally of course quite irrelevant. Hecklers (like the rest of us) live in their own private world, make no effort to enter other people’s words. Most arguments in public are at cross-purposes and in different languages – without interpreters.

Mark was at the meeting, and afterwards, in my rooms, took pleasure in intensifying my depression.

‘Might as well go and talk to cows in a field.’ The temptation to agree with him was strong. All my old habits of thinking, living, feeling impel me towards agreement. A senseless world, where nothing whatever can be done – how satisfactory! One can go off and (seeing that there’s nothing else to do) compile one’s treatise on sociology – the science of human senselessness. With Mark last night I caught myself taking intense pleasure in commenting on the imbecility of my audience and human beings at large. Caught and checked myself. Reflecting that seeds had been sown, that if only one were to germinate, it would have been worth while to hold the meeting. Worth while even if none were to germinate – for my own sake, as an exercise, a training for doing better next time.

I didn’t say all this. Merely stopped talking and, I suppose, changed my expression. Mark, who notices everything, began to laugh. Foresaw the time when I’d preface every mention of a person or group with the adjective ‘dear.’ ‘The dear Communists,’ ‘the dear armament makers,’ ‘dear General Goering.’

I laughed – for he was comic in his best savage manner. But, after all, if you had enough love and goodness, you could be sure of evoking some measure of answering love and goodness from almost everyone you came in contact with – whoever he or she might be. And in that case almost everyone would really be ‘dear.’ At present, most people seem more or less imbecile or odious; the fault is at least as much in oneself as in them.

May 24th 1934.

PUT IN FOUR hours this morning at working up my notes. Extraordinary pleasure! How easily one could slip back into uninterrupted scholarship and idea-mongering! Into that ‘Higher Life’ – which is simply death without tears. Peace, irresponsibility – all the delights of death here and now. In the past, you had to go into a monastery to find them. You paid for the pleasures of death with obedience, poverty, chastity. Now you can have them gratis and in the ordinary world. Death completely without tears. Death with smiles, death with the pleasures of bed and bottle, death in private with nobody to bully you. Scholars, philosophers, men of science – conventionally supposed to be unpractical. But what other class of men has succeeded in getting the world to accept it and (more astonishing) go on accepting it at its own valuation? Kings have lost their divine right, plutocrats look as though they were going to lose theirs. But Higher Lifers continue to be labelled as superior. It’s the fruit of persistence. Persistently paying compliments to themselves, persistently disparaging other people. Year in, year out, for the last sixty centuries. We’re High, you’re Low; we’re of the Spirit, you’re of the World. Again and again, like Pears Soap. It’s been accepted, now, as an axiom. But, in fact, the Higher Life is merely the better death-substitute. A more complete escape from the responsibilities of living with alcohol or morphia or addiction to sex or property. Booze and dope destroy health. Sooner or later sex addicts get involved in responsibilities. Property addicts can never get all the stamps, Chinese vases, houses, varieties of lilies or whatever it may be, that they want. Their escape is a torment of Tantalus. Whereas the Higher Lifer escapes into a world where there’s no risk to health and the minimum of responsibilities and tortures. A world, what’s more, that tradition regards as actually superior to the world of responsible living – higher. The Higher Shirker can fairly wallow in his good conscience. For how easy to find in the life of scholarship and research equivalents for all the moral virtues! Some, of course, are not equivalent, but identical: perseverance, patience, self-forgetfulness and the like. Good means to ends that may be bad. You can work hard and whole-heartedly at anything – from atomic physics to forgery and white-slaving. The rest are ethical virtues transposed into the mental key. Chastity of artistic and mathematical form. Purity of scientific research. Courageousness of thought. Bold hypotheses. Logical integrity. Temperance of views. Intellectual humility before the facts. All the cardinal virtues in fancy dress. The Higher Lifers come to think of themselves as saints – saints of art and science and scholarship. A purely figurative and metaphorical sanctity taken au pied de la lettre.

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ The Higher Lifer even has equivalents for spiritual poverty. As a man of science, he tries to keep himself unbiased by his interests and prejudices. But that’s not all. Ethical poverty of spirit entails taking no thought for the morrow, letting the dead bury their dead, losing one’s life to gain it. The Higher Life can make parodies of these renunciations. I know; for I made them and actually took credit to myself for having made them. You live continuously and responsibly only in the other, Higher world. In this, you detach yourself from your past; you refuse to commit yourself in the future; you have no convictions, but live moment by moment; you renounce your own identity, except as a Higher Lifer, and become just the succession of your states. A more than Franciscan destitution. Which can be combined, however, with more than Napoleonic exultations in imperialism. I used to think I had no will to power. Now I perceive that I vented it on thoughts, rather than people. Conquering an unknown province of knowledge. Getting the better of a problem. Forcing ideas to associate or come apart. Bullying recalcitrant words to assume a certain pattern. All the fun of being a dictator without any risks and responsibilities.

CHAPTER XIV

December 8th 1926

BY DINNER-TIME it was already a Story – the latest addition to Mary Amberley’s repertory. The latest, and as good, it seemed to Anthony’s critically attentive ear, as the finest classics of the collection. Ever since he received her invitation, he now realized, his curiosity had been tinged with a certain vindictive hope that she would have altered for the worse, either relatively in his own knowledgeable eyes, or else absolutely by reason of the passage of these twelve long years; would have degenerated from what she was, or what he had imagined her to be, at the time when he had loved her. Discreditably enough, as he now admitted to himself, it was with a touch of disappointment that he had found her hardly changed from the Mary Amberley of his memories. She was forty-three. But her body was almost as slim as ever, and she moved with all the old swift agility. With something more than the old agility, indeed; for he had noticed that she was now agile on purpose, that she acted the part of one who is carried away by a youthful impulse to break into quick and violent motion – acted it, moreover, in circumstances where the impulse could not, if natural, possibly have been felt. Before dinner, she took him upstairs to her bedroom to see those nudes of Pascin that she had just bought. The first half of the flight she negotiated at a normal pace, talking as she went; then, as though she had suddenly remembered that slowness on stairs is a sign of middle-age, she suddenly started running – no, scampering, Anthony corrected himself as he remembered the incident: scampering was the word. And when they returned to the drawing-room, no tomboy of sixteen could have thrown herself more recklessly into the sofa or tucked her legs with a more kittenish movement. The Mary of 1914 had never behaved so youthfully as that. Couldn’t have even if she had wanted to, he reflected, in all those skirts and petticoats. Whereas now, in kilts . . . It was absurd, of course; but not yet, he judicially decided, painfully absurd. For Mary could still claim to look the youthful part. Only a little worn, her face still seemed to sparkle, through the faint stigmata of fatigue, with the old laughing vitality. And as for her accomplishments – why, this improvisation (and an improvisation it must be, seeing that the event had occurred only this morning), this improvisation on the theme of Helen’s stolen kidney was a little masterpiece.

‘I shall have the object embalmed,’ she was concluding in a mock-serious tone, pregnant with subdued laughter. ‘Embalmed and . . .’

But like a suddenly opened ginger-beer bottle, bubblingly, ‘I’ll give you an address for the embalming,’ put in Beppo Bowles. He smiled, he blinked his eyes, he wriggled. His whole plump and florid person seemed to participate in what he said; he talked with every organ of his body. ‘From the Mortician’s Journal.’ He waved a hand and declaimed, ‘Embalmers! do your results have that unpleasant putty look? If so . . .’

Mrs Amberley had laughed – a little perfunctorily, perhaps; for she did not like to be interrupted in the middle of a story. Beppo was a darling, of course. So boyish, in spite of his tummy and the bald patch on the top of his head. (So girlish, even, on occasion.) But still . . . She cut him short with a ‘Too perfect.’ Then, turning back to the rest of the table, ‘Well, as I was saying,’ she continued, ‘I shall have it embalmed and put under one of those glass domes . . .’

‘Like life,’ Beppo could not refrain from ginger-beerily interjecting. But nobody caught the reference to Adonais, and he giggled alone.

‘Those domes,’ repeated Mrs Amberley without looking at the interrupter, ‘one finds in lodging-houses. With birds under them. Stuffed birds.’ She lingered over the monosyllable, as though she were a German prolonging a modified o; and the birds, the Teutonic bö-öds, became, for some obscure reason, extraordinarily funny.

The voice, Anthony decided, was better than ever. There was a faint hoarseness now, like the bloom on a fruit, like the haze through which, on a summer’s day, one sees St Paul’s from Waterloo Bridge. The interposition of that curtain of husky gauze seemed to deepen, as it were, and enrich the beauties of the vocal landscape lying behind it. Listening more attentively than ever, he tried to fix the cadences of her speech upon his memory, to analyse them into their component sounds. In his projected Elements of Sociology there was to be a chapter on Mass Suggestion and Propaganda. One of the sections would be devoted to the subject of Fascinating Noises. The fascinatingly excitingly exciting noise, for example, of Savonarola, or Lloyd George. The fascinatingly sedative noise of intoning priests; the fascinatingly aphrodisiac noise of certain actors and actresses, certain singers, certain sirens and Don Juans of private life. Mary’s gift, he decided, was for making a noise that was simultaneously aphrodisiac and comic. She could emit sounds that touched the springs of laughter and desire, but never those of sorrow, of pity, of indignation. In moments of emotional stress (and he recalled those horrible scenes she used to make) her voice passed out of control into a chaos of raucous shrillness. The sound of her words of complaint, reproach or grief evoked in the hearer only a certain physical discomfort. Whereas with Mrs Foxe, he now went on to think, the noise alone of what she said had been enough to compel your acquiescence and sympathy. Hers was the mysterious gift that hoisted Robespierre into power, that enabled Whitefield, by the mere repetition, two or three times, of some pious exclamation, to reduce the most hardened sceptic to tears. There are fascinating noises capable of convincing a listener of the existence of God.

Those bö-öds! They all laughed, all simply had to laugh, at them. Even Colin Egerton, even Hugh Ledwidge. And yet ever since that man Beavis had come into the drawing-room, Hugh had been in a prickle of uneasiness. Beavis whom he always did his best to avoid . . . Why hadn’t Mary told him? For a moment he imagined it was a plot. Mary had invited Beavis on purpose to put him to shame – because she knew that the man had been a witness of his humiliations at Bulstrode. There were to be two of them: Staithes (for Staithes, he knew, was expected after dinner) and Beavis. Hugh had grown accustomed to meeting Staithes in this house, didn’t mind meeting him. Staithes, there could be no doubt, had forgotten. But Beavis – whenever he met Beavis, it always seemed to Hugh that the man looked at him in a queer way. And now Mary had invited him, on purpose, so that he could remind Staithes; and then the two of them would bait him with their reminiscences – their reminiscences of how he had funked at football; of how he had cried when it was his turn at fire-drill to slide down the rope; of how he had sneaked to Jimbug and had then been made to run the gauntlet between two lines of them, armed with wet towels rolled up into truncheons; of how they had looked over the partition . . . He shuddered. But of course, on second, saner thoughts, it couldn’t possibly be a plot. Not conceivably. All the same, he was glad when they went down to dinner and he found himself separated from Beavis. Across Helen, conversation would be difficult. And after dinner he would do his best to keep at a distance . . .

As for Colin, he had sat all through the meal in a bewilderment that, as it grew, as he felt himself more and more hopelessly out of it all, was mingled to an ever-increasing extent with exasperation and disapproval, until at last he was saying to himself (what he intended to say aloud to Joyce at the first opportunity), was saying: ‘I may be stupid and all that’ – and this confession was uttered by his inward voice of strength, not weakness – ‘I may be stupid and all that, but at least – well, at least I do know what’s within the pale and what’s without.’ He would say all that to Joyce, and much more; and Joyce (he had glanced at her in the middle of one of Beppo’s outrageous stories and caught an eye that was humble, anxious, pleading apologetic), Joyce would agree with every word he said. For the poor child was like a kind of changeling – a County changeling left by some inexplicable mistake in the arms of a mad, impossible mother who forced her, against her real nature, to associate with these . . . these . . . (He couldn’t find the mentionable word for Beppo.) And he, Colin Egerton, he was the St George who would rescue her. The fact that – like some pure young girl fallen among white-slavers – she needed rescuing was one of the reasons why he felt so strongly attracted to her. He loved her, among other reasons, because he so violently loathed that ghastly degenerate (that was the word), Beppo Bowles; and his approval of all that Joyce was and did was proportionate to his disapproval (a disapproval strengthened by a certain terror) of Joyce’s mother. And yet, now, in spite of the disapproval, in spite of his fear of that sharp tongue of hers, those piercingly ironic glances, he could not help laughing with the rest. Those long-drawn bö-öds under their glass domes were irresistible.

For Mrs Amberley the laughter was like champagne – warming, stimulating. ‘And I shall have an inscription carved on the base,’ she went on, raising her voice against the din: ‘“This kidney was stolen by Helen Amberley, at the risk of her life and . . .”’

‘Oh, do shut up, Mummy!’ Helen was blushing with a mixture of pleasure and annoyance. ‘Please!’ It was certainly nice to be the heroine of a story that everybody was listening to – but then the heroine was also a bit of an ass. She felt angry with her mother for exploiting the assishness.

‘. . . and in spite of a lifelong and conscientious objection to butchery,’ Mrs Amberley went on. Then ‘Poor darling,’ she added in another tone. ‘Smells always were her weak point. Butchers, fishmongers, – and shall I ever forget the one and only time I took her to church!’

(‘One and only time,’ thought Colin. ‘No wonder she goes and does things like this!’)

‘Oh, I do admit,’ cried Mrs Amberley, ‘that a village congregation on a wet Sunday morning – well, frankly, it stinks. Deafeningly! But still . . .’

‘It’s the odour of sanctity,’ put in Anthony Beavis: and turning to Helen, ‘I’ve suffered from it myself. And did your mother make you spit when there were bad smells about? Mine did. It made things very difficult in church.’

‘She didn’t spit,’ Mrs Amberley answered for her daughter. ‘She was sick. All over Lady Worplesdon’s astrakhan coat. I was never able to show my face in respectable society again. Thank God!’ she added.

Beppo sizzled a protest against her implied imputations. Switched off kidneys, the conversation rolled away along another line.

Helen sat unnoticed, in silence. Her face had suddenly lost all its light; ‘I’ll never touch meat again,’ she had said. And here she was, with a morsel of that gruesome red lump of cow impaled on her fork. ‘I’m awful,’ she thought. Pas sérieuse, old Mme Delécluze had pronounced. And though as a professional girl-finisher the old beast could hardly be expected to say anything else, yet it was true; at bottom it was quite true. ‘I’m not serious. I’m not . . .’ But suddenly she was aware that the voice which had been sounding, inarticulately and as though from an immense distance, in her right ear was addressing itself to her.

‘Proust,’ she heard it saying, and realized that it had pronounced the same syllable at least twice before. She looked round, guiltily, and saw, red with embarrassment, the face of Hugh Ledwidge turned, waveringly and uncertainly, towards her. He smiled foolishly; his spectacles flashed; he turned away. She felt doubly confused and ashamed.

‘I’m afraid I didn’t quite catch . . .’ she contrived to mumble.

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ he mumbled back. ‘It’s really of no importance.’ Of no importance; but it had taken him the best part of five minutes to think of that gambit about Proust. ‘I must say something to her,’ he had decided, when he saw Beavis safely involved in intimate talk with Mary Amberley and Beppo. ‘Must say something.’ But what? What did one say to young girls of eighteen? He would have liked to say something personal, something even a bit gallant. About her frock, for example. ‘How nice!’ No, that was a bit vague and unspecific. ‘How it suits your complexion, your eyes!’ (What colour were they, by the way?) Or he might ask her about parties. Did she go to many? With (very archly) boy friends? But that, he knew, was too difficult for him. Besides, he didn’t much like to think of her with boy friends – preferred her virginal: du bist wie eine Blume . . . Or else, seriously but with a smile, ‘Tell me,’ he might say, ‘tell me, Helen, what are young people really like nowadays? What do they think and feel about things?’ And Helen would plant her elbows on the table and turn sideways and tell him, exactly, all he wanted to know about that mysterious world, the world where people danced and went to parties and were always having personal relations with one another; would tell him everything, everything – or else, more likely, nothing, and he would just be made to feel an impertinent fool. No, no; this wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do at all. This was just fancy, this was just wish-fulfilment. It was then that the question about Proust had occurred to him. What did she think of Proust? It was a comfortingly impersonal question – one that he could ask without feeling awkward and unnatural. But its impersonality could easily be made to lead to a long discussion – always in the abstract, always, so to speak, in a test-tube – of the most intimately emotional, even (no, no; but still, one never knew; it was revolting; and yet . . .) even physiological matters. Talking of Proust, it would be possible to say everything – everything, but always in terms of a strictly literary criticism. Perfect! He had turned towards Helen.

‘I suppose you’re as keen on Proust as everybody else.’ No answer. From the end of the table came wafts of Mrs Amberley’s conversation with Anthony and Beppo: they were discussing the habits of their friends. Colin Egerton was in the middle of a tiger hunt in the Central Provinces. He coughed, then, ‘You’re a Proustian, I take it? Like the rest of us,’ he repeated. But the lowered and melancholy profile gave no sign of life. Feeling most uncomfortably a fool, Hugh Ledwidge tried once more.

‘I wish you’d tell me,’ he said in a louder voice, that sounded, he thought, peculiarly unnatural, ‘what you think about Proust.’

Helen continued to stare at some invisible object on the table, just in front of her place. Pas sérieuse. She was thinking of all the unserious things she had ever done in her life, all the silly, the mean, the awful things. A kind of panic embarrassment overwhelmed Hugh Ledwidge. He felt as he might feel as if his trousers were to start coming down in Piccadilly – lost. Anybody else, of course, would just touch her arm and say, ‘A penny for your thoughts, Helen!’ How simple this would be, how sensible! The whole incident would at once be turned into a joke – a joke, moreover, at her expense. He would establish once and for all a position of teasing superiority. ‘Day-dreaming in the middle of a dinner! About what? About whom?’ Very knowing and arch. And she would blush, would giggle – at his behest, in response to his command. Like a skilled matador, he would wave his little red flag, and she would go plunging here, go charging there, making an absurd and ravishing exhibition of herself, until at last, raising his sword . . . But simple and sensible and strategically advantageous as all this would be, Hugh Ledwidge found it quite impossible to make the first move. There was her bare arm, thin like a little girl’s; but somehow he could not bring himself to put out his hand and touch it. And the jocular offer of that penny – it couldn’t be made; his vocal cords would not do it. Thirty seconds passed – seconds of increasing embarrassment and uncertainty. Then suddenly, as though waking from sleep, she had looked round at him. What had he said? But it was impossible to repeat that question again.

‘It’s of no importance. No importance.’ He turned away. But why, oh why was he such a fool, so ridiculously incompetent? At thirty-five. Nel mezzo del cammin. Imagine Dante in the circumstances! Dante, with his steel profile, ploughing forward, like a spiritual battleship. And meanwhile, what on earth should he say to her in place of that now impossible remark about Proust? What in the name of heaven . . .?

It was she finally who touched his arm. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said with a real contrition. She was trying to make up for her awfulness, for having so frivolously eaten Mr Baldwin’s well-thumbed cow. Besides, she liked old Hugh. He was nice. He had taken the trouble to show her the Mexican things at the Museum. ‘I have an appointment with Mr Ledwidge,’ she had said. And the attendants had all been delightfully deferential. She had been led to his private room – the private room of the Assistant Director of the Department – as though she were some distinguished personage. One eminent archaeologist visiting another. It had really been extraordinarily interesting. Only, of course – and this was another symptom of her awful unseriousness – she had forgotten most of the things he had told her. ‘So awfully sorry,’ she repeated; and it was genuinely true. She knew what he must be feeling. ‘You see,’ she explained, ‘Granny’s deaf. I know how awful it is when I have to repeat something. It sounds so idiotic. Like Mr Shandy and the clock, somehow, if you see what I mean. Do forgive me.’ She pressed his arm appealingly, then, planting her elbows on the table and turning sideways towards him in just the confidential attitude he had visualized, ‘Listen, Hugh,’ she said, ‘you’re serious, aren’t you? You know, sérieux.’

‘Well, I suppose so,’ he stammered. He had just seen, rather belatedly, what she meant by that reference to Mr Shandy, and the realization had come as something of a shock.

‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘you could hardly be at the Museum if you weren’t serious.’

‘No,’ he admitted, ‘I probably couldn’t.’ But after all, he was thinking, still preoccupied by Mr Shandy, there’s such a thing as theoretical knowledge. (And didn’t he know it? Only too well.) Theoretical knowledge corresponding to no genuine experience, unrealized, not lived through. ‘Oh God!’ he inwardly groaned.

‘Well, I’m not serious,’ Helen was saying. She felt a great need to unburden herself, to ask for help. There were moments – and they recurred whenever, for one reason or another, she felt doubtful of herself – moments when everything round her seemed terribly vague and unreliable. Everything – but in practice, of course, it all boiled down to the reliability of her mother. Helen was very fond of her mother, but at the same time she had to admit to herself that she was no use. ‘Mummy’s like a very bad practical joke,’ she had once said to Joyce. ‘You think you’re going to sit on it; but the chair’s whisked away and you come down with a horrible bump on your bottom.’ But all that Joyce had said was: ‘Helen, you simply mustn’t use those words.’ Ass of a girl! Though, of course, it had to be admitted, Joyce was a chair that could be sat on. But an inadequate chair, a chair only for unimportant occasions – and what was the good of that? Joyce was too young; and even if she’d been much older, she wouldn’t really have understood anything properly. And now that she was engaged to Colin, she seemed to understand things less and less. God, what a fool that man was! But all the same, there, if you liked, was a chair. A chair like the rock of ages. But so shaped, unfortunately, that it forced you to sit in the most grotesquely uncomfortable position. However, as Joyce didn’t seem to mind the discomfort, that was all right. Chairless in an exhausting world, Helen almost envied her. Meanwhile there was old Hugh. She sat down, heavily.

‘What’s wrong with me,’ she went on, ‘is that I’m so hopelessly frivolous.’

‘I can’t really believe that,’ he said; though why he said it he couldn’t imagine. For, obviously, he ought to be encouraging her to make confession, not assuring her that she had no sins to confess. It was as though he were secretly afraid of the very thing he had wished for.

‘I don’t think you’re . . .’

But fortunately nothing he said could put her off. She insisted on using him as a chair.

‘No, no, it’s quite true,’ she said. ‘You can’t imagine how frivolous I am. I’ll tell you . . .’

Half an hour later, in the back drawing-room, he was writing out for her a list of the books she ought to read. Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophers; Phaedrus, Timaeus, The Apology, and The Symposium in Jowett’s translation; the Nicomachean Ethics; Cornford’s little anthology of the Greek moralists; Marcus Aurelius; Lucretius in any good translation; Inge’s Plotinus. His manner, as he spoke, was easy, confident, positively masterful. He was like a creature suddenly restored to its proper element.

‘Those will give you some idea of the way the ancients thought about things.’

She nodded. Her face as she looked at the pencilled list was grave and determined. She had decided that she would wear spectacles, and have a table brought up to her bedroom, so that she could sit undisturbed, with her books piled up and her writing materials in front of her. Note-books – or, better, a card index. It would be a new life – a life with some meaning in it, some purpose. In the drawing-room somebody started up the gramophone. As though on its own initiative, her foot began to beat out the rhythm. One two three, one two three – it was a waltz. But what was she thinking of? She frowned and held her foot still.

‘As for modern thought,’ Hugh was saying, ‘well, the two indispensable books, from which every modern culture must start, are’ – his pencil hurried across the paper – ‘Montaigne’s Essays and the Pensées of Pascal. Indispensable, these.’ He underlined the names. ‘Then you’d better glance at the Discourse on Method.’

‘Which method?’ asked Helen.

But Hugh did not hear the question. ‘And take a look at Hobbes, if you have the time,’ he went on with ever-increasing power and confidence. ‘And then Newton. That’s absolutely essential. Because if you don’t know the philosophy of Newton, you don’t know why science has developed as it has done. You’ll find all you need in Burt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.’ There was a little silence while he wrote. Tom had arrived, and Eileen and Sybil. Helen could hear them talking in the other room. ‘Then there’s Hume,’ he continued. ‘You’d better begin with the Essays. They’re superb. Such sense, such an immense sagacity!’

‘Sagacity,’ Helen repeated, and smiled to herself with pleasure. Yes, that was exactly the word she’d been looking for – exactly what she herself would like to be: sagacious, like an elephant, like an old sheep-dog, like Hume, if you preferred it. But at the same time, of course, herself. Sagacious, but young; sagacious, but lively and attractive; sagacious, but impetuous and . . .

‘I won’t inflict Kant on you,’ said Hugh indulgently. ‘But I think’ (he brought the pencil into play again), ‘I think you’ll have to read one or two of the modern Kantians. Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As If, for example, and von Uexküll’s Theoretical Biology. You see, Kant’s behind all our twentieth-century science. Just as Newton was behind all the science of the eighteenth and nineteenth . . .’

‘Well, Helen!’

They started and looked up – looked up into the smiling, insolently handsome face of Gerry Watchett. Brilliantly blue against the sunburnt skin, the eyes glanced from one to the other with a kind of mockery. Coming a step nearer, he laid his hand familiarly on Helen’s shoulder. ‘What’s the fun? Crossword puzzles?’ He gave the shoulder two or three little pats.

‘As though she were his horse,’ Hugh said to himself indignantly. And, in effect, that was what the man looked like – a groom. That crisply waving, golden-brownish hair, that blunt-featured face, at once boyish and tough – they were straight from the table, straight from Epsom downs.

Helen smiled a smile that was intended to be contemptuously superior – an intellectual’s smile. ‘You would think it was crosswords!’ she said. Then, ‘By the way,’ she added in another tone, ‘you know each other, don’t you?’ she looked enquiringly from Gerry to Hugh.

‘We do,’ Gerry answered: and still keeping his right hand on Helen’s shoulder, he raised his left in the derisive caricature of a military salute. ‘Good evening, Colonel.’

Sheepishly, Hugh returned the salute. All his power and confidence had vanished with his forced return from the world of books to that of personal life; he felt like an albatross on dry land – helplessly awkward, futile, ugly. And yet how easy it should have been to put on a knowing smile, and say significantly, ‘Yes, I know Mr Watchett very well’ – know him, the tone would imply, for what he is: the gentleman share-pusher, the professional gambler and the professional lover. Mary Amberley’s lover at the moment, so it was supposed. ‘Know him very well indeed!’ That was what it would have been so easy to say. But he didn’t say it: he only smiled and rather foolishly raised his hand to his forehead.

Gerry, meanwhile, had sat down on the arm of the sofa, and through the smoke of his cigarette was staring at Helen with a calm and easy insolence, appraising her, so it seemed, point by point – hocks, withers, quarters, barrel. ‘Do you know, Helen,’ he said at last, ‘you’re getting prettier and prettier every day.’

Blushing, Helen threw back her head and laughed; then suddenly stiffened her face into an unnatural rigidity. She was angry – angry with Gerry for his damned impertinence, angry above all with herself for having been pleased by the damned impertinence, for having reacted with such a humiliatingly automatic punctuality to that offensive flattery. Going red in the face and giggling like a schoolgirl! And that Philosophy of As If, those horn-rimmed spectacles, and the new life, and the card index . . .? A man said, ‘You’re pretty,’ and it was as though they had never been so much as thought of. She turned towards Hugh; turned for protection, for support. But her eyes no sooner met his than he looked away. His face took on an expression of meditative absence; he seemed to be thinking of something else. Was he angry with her, she wondered? Had he been offended because she had been pleased by Gerry’s compliment? But it had been like blinking at the noise of a gun – something you couldn’t help doing. He ought to understand, ought to realize that she wanted to lead that new life, was simply longing to be sagacious. Instead of which, he just faded out and refused to have anything to do with her. Oh, it wasn’t fair!

Behind that cold detached mask of his, Hugh was feeling more than ever like Baudelaire’s albatross.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!

Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!

Ah, those strong and majestic swoopings in the neo-Kantian azure!

From the next room the gramophone was trumpeting, ‘Yes, sir, she’s my baby.’ Gerry whistled a couple of bars; then ‘What about a spot of fox-trotting, Helen?’ he suggested. ‘Unless, of course, you haven’t finished with the Colonel.’ He glanced mockingly at Hugh’s averted face. ‘I don’t want to interrupt . . .’

It was Helen’s turn to look at Hugh. ‘Well . . .’ she began doubtfully.

But without looking up, ‘Oh, not at all, not at all,’ Hugh made haste to say; and wondered, even as he did so, what on earth had induced him to proclaim his own defeat before even there had been a battle. Leaving her to that groom! Fool, coward! Still, he told himself cynically, she probably preferred the groom. He got up, mumbled something about having to talk to someone about some point that had turned up, and moved away towards the door that gave on to the landing and the stairs.

‘Well, if he doesn’t want me to stay,’ Helen thought resentfully, ‘if he doesn’t think it’s worth his while to keep me.’ She was hurt.

‘Exit the Colonel,’ said Gerry. Then, ‘What about that spot of dancing?’ He rose, came towards her and held out his hand. Helen took it and pulled herself up from the low chair. ‘No, sir, don’t say maybe,’ he sang as he put his arm about her. They stepped out into the undulating stream of the music. Zigzagging between chairs and tables, he steered towards the door that led into the other room.

CHAPTER XV

June 1903–January 1904

IT HAD BECOME a rite, a sacrament (that was how John Beavis described it to himself): a sacrament of communion. First, the opening of the wardrobe door, the handling of her dresses. Closing his eyes, he breathed the perfume they exhaled, the faint sweet essence of her body from across the widening abyss of time. Then there were the drawers. These three, on the left, contained her linen. The lavender bags were tied with pale blue ribbon. This lace on the night-gown he now unfolded had touched . . . Even in thought, John Beavis avoided the pronunciation of the words ‘her breasts,’ but only imagined the rounded flesh softly swelling and sinking under the intricacies of the patterned thread; then recalled those Roman nights; and finally thought of Lollingdon and the hollow vale, the earth, the terrible dark silence. The night-gown refolded and once more shut away, it was the turn of the two small drawers on the right – of the gloves that had encased her hands, the belts that had girdled her body and that now he wound round his wrist or tightened like a phylactery about his temples. And the rite concluded with the reading of her letters – those touchingly childish letters she had written during their engagement. That consummated the agony for him; the rite was over and he could go to bed with yet another sword in his heart.

But recently, it seemed, the sword had grown blunter. It was as though her death, till now so poignantly alive, had itself begun to die. The rite seemed to be losing its magic: consummation became increasingly difficult of achievement, and, when achieved, was less painful and, for that reason, less satisfying. For the thing which had made life worth living all these months was precisely the pain of his bereavement. Desire and tenderness had suddenly been deprived of their object. It was an amputation – agonizing. And now this pain – and it was all of her that was left him – this precious anguish was slipping away from him, was dying, even as Maisie herself had died.

Tonight it seemed to have vanished altogether. He buried his face in the scented folds of her dresses, he spread out the lace and lawn she had worn next her skin, he blew into one of her gloves and watched the gradual deflation of this image of her hand – dying, dying, till the skin hung limp again and empty of even the pretence of life. But the rites were without effect; John Beavis remained unmoved. He knew that she was dead and that his bereavement was terrible. But he felt nothing of this bereavement – nothing except a kind of dusty emptiness of spirit.

He went to bed unfulfilled, somehow humiliated. Magic rites justify themselves by success; when they fail to produce their proper emotional results, the performer feels that he has been betrayed into making a fool of himself.

Dry, like a mummy, in the dusty emptiness of his own sepulchre, John Beavis lay for a long time, unable to sleep. Twelve; one; two; and then, when he had utterly despaired of it, sleep came, and he was dreaming that she was there beside him; and it was Maisie as she had been in the first year of their marriage, the round flesh swelling and subsiding beneath the lace, the lips parted and, oh, innocently consenting. He took her in his arms.

It was the first time since her death that he had dreamed of her except as dying.

John Beavis woke to a sense of shame; and when, later in the day, he saw Miss Gannett evidently waiting for him, as usual, in the corridor outside his lecture-room, he pretended not to have noticed her, but hurried past with downcast eyes, frowning, as though preoccupied by some abstruse, insoluble problem in the higher philology.

But the next afternoon found him at his old Aunt Edith’s weekly At Home. And of course – though he expressed a perhaps excessive surprise at seeing her – of course Miss Gannett was there, as he knew she would be; for she never missed one of Aunt Edith’s Thursdays.

‘You were in a terrible hurry yesterday,’ she said, when his surprise had had time to die down.

‘Me? When?’ He pretended not to know what she meant.

‘At the College, after your lecture.’

‘But were you there? I didn’t see you.’

‘Now he thinks I shirked his lecture,’ she wailed to some non-existent third party. Ever since, two months before, she had first met him in Aunt Edith’s drawing-room, Miss Gannett had faithfully attended every one of his public lectures. ‘To improve my mind,’ she used to explain. ‘Because,’ with a jocularity that was at the same time rather wistful, ‘it does so need improving!’

Mr Beavis protested. ‘But I didn’t say anything of the kind.’

‘I’ll show you the notes I took.’

‘No, please don’t do that!’ It was his turn to be playful. ‘If you knew how my own lectures bored me!’

‘Well, you nearly ran me over in the corridor, after the lecture.’

‘Oh, then!’

‘I never saw anyone walk so fast.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, I was in a hurry; it’s quite true. I had a Committee. Rather a special one,’ he added impressively.

She opened her eyes at him very wide, and, from playful, her tone and expression became very serious. ‘It must be rather a bore sometimes,’ she said, ‘to be such a very important person – isn’t it?’

Mr Beavis smiled down at the grave and awestruck child before him – at the innocent child who was also a rather plump and snubbily pretty young woman of seven and twenty – smiled with pleasure and stroked his moustache. ‘Oh, not quite so important as all that,’ he protested. ‘Not quite such . . .’ he hesitated for a moment; his mouth twitched, his eyes twinkled; then the colloquialism came out: ‘not quite such a “howling toff” as you seem to imagine.’

There was only one letter that morning. From Anthony, Mr Beavis saw as he tore open the envelope.

‘BULSTRODE, June 26th.

‘DEAREST FATHER, – Thank you for your letter. I thought we were going to Tenby for the holidays. Did you not arrange it with Mrs Foxe? Foxe says she expects us, so perhaps we ought not to go to Switzerland instead as you say we are doing. We had two matches yesterday, first eleven v. Sunny Bank, second v. Mumbridge, we won both which was rather ripping. I was playing in the second eleven and made six not out. We have begun a book called Lettres de mon Moulin in French, I think it is rotten. There is no more news, so with much love. – Your loving son,

‘ANTHONY.

‘P.S. – Don’t forget to write to Mrs Foxe, because Foxe says he knows she thinks we are going To Tenby.’

Mr Beavis frowned as he read the letter, and when breakfast was over, sat down at once to write an answer.

‘EARL’S COURT SQUARE,

27.vi.03.

‘DEAREST ANTHONY, – I am disappointed that you should have received what I had hoped was a piece of very exciting news with so little enthusiasm. At your age I should certainly have welcomed the prospect of “going abroad,” especially to Switzerland, with unbounded delight. The arrangements with Mrs Foxe were always of the most indeterminate nature. Needless to say, however, I wrote to her as soon as the golden opportunity for exploring the Bernese Oberland in congenial company turned up, as it did only a few days since, and made me decide to postpone the realization of our vague Tenby plans. If you want to see exactly where we are going, take your map of Switzerland, find Interlaken and the Lake of Brienz, move eastward from the end of the lake to Meiringen and thence in a southerly direction towards Grindelwald. We shall be staying at the foot of the Scheideck Pass, at Rosenlaui, almost in the shadow of such giants as the Jungfrau, Weisshorn and Co. I do not know the spot, but gather from all accounts that it is entirely “spiffing” and paradisal.

‘I am delighted to hear you did so creditably in your match. You must go on, dear boy, from strength to strength. Next year I shall hope to see you sporting the glories of the First Eleven colours.

‘I cannot agree with you in finding Daudet “rotten.” I suspect that his rottenness mainly consists in the difficulties he presents to a tyro. When you have acquired a complete mastery of the language, you will come to appreciate the tender charm of his style and the sharpness of his wit.

‘I hope you are working your hardest to make good your sad weakness in “maths.” I confess that I never shone in the mathematical line myself, so am able to sympathize with your difficulties. But hard work will do wonders, and I am sure that if you really “put your back into” algebra and geometry, you can easily get up to scholarship standards by this time next year. – Ever your most affectionate father,

J.B.’

‘It’s too sickening!’ said Anthony, when he had finished reading his father’s letter. The tears came into his eyes; he was filled with a sense of intolerable grievance.

‘W-what does he s-say?’ Brian asked.

‘It’s all settled. He’s written to your Mater that we’re going to some stinking hole in Switzerland instead of Tenby. Oh, I really am too sick about it!’ He crumpled up the letter and threw it angrily on the ground, then turned away and tried to relieve his feelings by kicking his play-box. ‘Too sick, too sick!’ he kept repeating.

Brian was sick too. They were going to have had such a splendid time at Tenby; it had all been imaginatively foreseen, preconstructed in the most luxuriant detail; and now, crash! the future good time was in bits.

‘S-still,’ he said at last, after a long silence, ‘I exp-pect you’ll enj-joy yourself in S-switzerland.’ And, moved by a sudden impulse, for which he would have found it difficult to offer an explanation, he picked up Mr Beavis’s letter, smoothed out the crumpled pages and handed it back to Anthony. ‘Here’s your l-letter,’ he said.

Anthony looked at it for a moment, opened his mouth as though to speak, then shut it again, and taking the letter, put it away in his pocket.

The congenial company in which they were to explore the Bernese Oberland turned out, when they reached Rosenlaui, to consist of Miss Gannett and her old school-friend Miss Louie Piper. Mr Beavis always spoke of them as ‘the girls,’ or else, with a touch of that mock-heroic philological jocularity to which he was so partial, ‘the damsels’ – dominicellae, double diminutive of domina. The teeny weeny ladies! He smiled to himself each time he pronounced the word. To Anthony the damsels seemed a pair of tiresome and already elderly females. Piper, the thin one, was like a governess. He preferred fat old Gannett, in spite of that awful mooey, squealing laugh of hers, in spite of the way she puffed and sweated up the hills. Gannett at least was well-meaning. Luckily, there were two other English boys in the hotel. True, they came from Manchester and spoke rather funnily, but they were decent chaps, and they knew an extraordinary number of dirty stories. Moreover, in the woods behind the hotel they had discovered a cave, where they kept cigarettes. Proudly, when he got back to Bulstrode, Anthony announced that he had smoked every day of the hols.

One Saturday in November Mr Beavis came down to Bulstrode for the afternoon. They watched the football for a bit, then went for a depressing walk that ended, however, at the King’s Arms. Mr Beavis ordered crumpets ‘and buttered eggs for this young stalwart’ (with a conspiratorial twinkle at the waitress, as though she also knew that the word meant ‘foundation-worthy’), ‘and cherry jam to follow – isn’t cherry the favourite?’

Anthony nodded. Cherry was the favourite. But so much solicitude made him feel rather suspicious. What could it all be for? Was he going to say something about his work? About going in for the scholarship next summer? About . . . ? He blushed. But after all, his father couldn’t possibly know anything about that. Not possibly. In the end he gave it up; he couldn’t imagine what it was.

But when, after an unusually long silence, his father leaned forward and said, ‘I’ve got an interesting piece of news for you, dear boy,’ Anthony knew, in a sudden flash of illumination, exactly what was coming.

‘He’s going to marry the Gannett female,’ he said to himself.

And so he was. In the middle of December.

‘A companion for you,’ Mr Beavis was saying. That youthfulness, those fresh and girlish high spirits! ‘A companion as well as a second mother.’

Anthony nodded. But ‘companion’ – what did he mean? He thought of the fat old Gannett, toiling up the slopes behind Rosenlaui, red-faced, smelling of sweat, reeking . . . And suddenly his mother’s voice was sounding in his ears.

‘Pauline wants you to call her by her Christian name,’ Mr Beavis went on. ‘It’ll be . . . well, jollier, don’t you think?’

Anthony said ‘Yes,’ because there was obviously nothing else for him to say, and helped himself to more cherry jam.

‘Third person singular aorist of τἰθημι?’ questioned Anthony.

Horse-Face got it wrong. It was Staithes who answered correctly.

‘Second plural pluperfect of έρχομαι?’

Brian’s hesitation was due to something graver than his stammer.

‘You’re putrid tonight, Horse-Face,’ said Anthony and pointed his finger at Staithes, who gave him the right answer again. ‘Good for you, Staithes.’ And repeating Jimbug’s stalest joke, ‘The sediment sinks to the bottom, Horse-Face,’ he rumbled in a parody of Jimbug’s deep voice.

‘Poor old Horse-Face!’ said Staithes, slapping the other on the back. Now that Horse-Face had given him the pleasure of knowing less Greek grammar than he did, Staithes almost loved him.

It was nearly eleven, long after lights-out, and the three of them were crowded into the W.C., Anthony in his capacity of examiner sitting majestically on the seat, and the other two squatting on their heels below him, on the floor. The May night was still and warm; in less than six weeks they would be sitting for their scholarship examinations, Brian and Anthony at Eton, Mark Staithes at Rugby. It was after the previous Christmas holidays that Staithes had come back to Bulstrode with the announcement that he was going in for a scholarship. Astonishing news and, for his courtiers and followers, appalling! That work was idiotic, and that those who worked were contemptible, had been axiomatic among them. And now here was Staithes going in for a schol with the other swots – with Benger Beavis, with old Horse-Face, with that horrible little tick, Goggler Ledwidge. It had seemed a betrayal of all that was most sacred.

By his words first of all, and afterwards, more effectively, by his actions, Staithes had reassured them. The scholarship idea was his Pater’s. Not because of the money, he had hastened to add. His Pater didn’t care a damn about the money. But for the honour and glory, because it was a tradition in the Family. His Pater himself and his Uncles, his Fraters – they had all got schols. It wouldn’t do to let the Family down. Which didn’t change the fact that swotting was a stinking bore and that all swotters who swotted because they liked it, as Horse-Face and Beavis seemed to do, or for the sake of the money, like the miserable Goggler, were absolute worms. And to prove it he had ragged old Horse-Face about his stammer and his piddle-warblers, he had organized a campaign against Goggler for funking at football, he had stuck nibs into Beavis’s bottom during prep; and, though working very hard himself, he had made up for it by playing harder than ever and by missing no opportunity of telling everyone how beastly swotting was, how he had absolutely no chance whatever of getting a schol.

When face had been sufficiently saved, he had changed his tactics towards Beavis and Horse-Face, and after showing himself for some time progressively more friendly towards them, had ended by proposing the creation of a society of mutual assistance in schol swotting. It was he who, at the beginning of the summer term, had suggested the nightly sessions in the W.C. Brian had wanted to include Goggler in these reading-parties; but the other two had protested; and anyhow, the W.C. was demonstrably too small to contain a fourth. He had to be content with helping Goggler in occasional half-hours during the day. Night and the lavatory were reserved for the triumvirate.

To explain this evening’s failure with Greek verbs, ‘I’m rather t-t-t . . .’ Brian began; then, forced into apparent affectation, ‘rather weary to-n-night,’ he concluded.

His pallor and the blue transparency under his eyes testified to the truth of his words; but for Mark Staithes they were obviously an excuse by means of which Horse-Face hoped to diminish a little the sting of his defeat at the hands of one who had been swotting, not for years, as his rivals had, but only a few months. It was an implied confession of inferiority. Triumphing, Staithes felt that he could be magnanimous. ‘Hard luck!’ he said solicitously. ‘Let’s have a bit of a rest.’

From the pocket of his dressing-gown Anthony produced three ginger-nuts, rather soft, it was true, with age, but none the less welcome.

For the thousandth time since it had been decided that he should go in for a scholarship, ‘I wish I had the ghost of a chance,’ said Staithes.

‘You’ve g-got a very g-good one.’

‘No, I haven’t. It’s just a crazy idea of my Pater’s. Crazy!’ he repeated, shaking his head. But in fact it was with a tingling, warm sensation of pride, of exultation, that he remembered his father’s words. ‘We Staitheses . . . When one’s a Staithes . . . You’ve got as good brains as the rest of us, and as much determination . . .’ He forced a sigh, and, aloud, ‘Not a ghost of a chance,’ he insisted.

‘Yes, you h-have, honestly.’

‘Rot!’ He refused to admit even the possibility of the thing. Then, if he failed, he could laughingly say, ‘I told you so’; and if he succeeded, as he privately believed he would, the glory would be all the greater. Besides, the more persistently he denied his chances, the oftener they would repeat their delicious assurances of his possible, his probable, success. Success, what was more, in their own line; success, in spite of his consistent refusal, till the beginning of last term, ever to take this ridiculous swotting seriously.

It was Benger who brought the next tribute. ‘Jimbug thinks you’ve got a chance,’ he said. ‘I heard him talking to old Jacko about it yesterday.’

‘What does that old fool Jimbug know about it?’ Staithes made a disparaging grimace; but through the mask of contempt his brown eyes shone with pleasure. ‘And as for Jacko . . .’

A sudden rattling of the door-handle made them all start. ‘I say, you chaps,’ came an imploring whisper through the keyhole, ‘do buck up! I’ve got the most frightful belly-ache.’

Brian rose hastily from the floor. ‘We must I-let him in,’ he began.

But Staithes pulled him down again. ‘Don’t be a fool!’ he said; then, turning towards the door, ‘Go to one of the rears downstairs,’ he said, ‘we’re busy.’

‘But I’m in a most frightful hurry.’

‘Then the quicker you go, the better.’

‘You are swine!’ protested the whisper. Then ‘Christ!’ it added, and they heard the sound of slippered feet receding in a panic rush down the stairs.

Staithes grinned. ‘That’ll teach him,’ he said. ‘What about another go at the Greek grammar?’

Outraged in advance, James Beavis had felt his indignation growing with every minute he spent under his brother’s roof. The house positively reeked of matrimony. It was asphyxiating! And there sat John, fairly basking in those invisible radiations of dark female warmth, inhaling the stuffiness with a quivering nostril, deeply contented, revoltingly happy! Like a marmot, it suddenly occurred to James Beavis, a marmot with its female, crowded fur to fur in their subterranean burrow. Yes, the house was just a burrow – a burrow, with John like a thin marmot at one end of the table and that soft, bulging marmot-woman at the other, and between them, one on either side, himself, outraged and nauseated, and that unhappy little Anthony, like a changeling from the world of fresh air, caught and dragged down and imprisoned in the marmot-warren. Indignation begot equally violent pity and affection for this unhappy child, begot at the same time a retrospective feeling of sympathy for poor Maisie. In her lifetime he had always regarded Maisie as just a fool – hopelessly silly and frivolous. Now, John’s marriage and the oppressive connubiality which enveloped the all too happy couple made him forget his judgments on the living Maisie and think of her as a most superior woman (at least, she had had the grace to be slim), posthumously martyred by her husband for the sake of this repulsively fleshy female marmot. Horrible! He did well to be angry.

Pauline meanwhile had refused a second helping of the chocolate soufflé.

‘But my dear, you must,’ John Beavis insisted.

Pauline heaved the conscious imitation of a sigh of repletion. ‘I couldn’t.’

‘Not even the favourite chocolatl?’ Mr Beavis always spoke of chocolate in the original Aztec.

Playfully, Pauline eyed the dish askance. ‘I shouldn’t,’ she said, implicitly admitting that the repletion was not complete.

‘Yes, you should,’ he wheedled.

‘Now he’s trying to make me fat!’ she wailed with mock reproach. ‘He’s leading me into temptation!’

‘Well, be led.’

This time, Pauline’s sigh was a martyr’s. ‘All right, then,’ she said submissively. The maid, who had been waiting impassively for the outcome of the controversy, presented the dish once again. Pauline helped herself.

‘There’s a good child,’ said Mr Beavis, in a tone and with a twinkle that expressed a sportive mock-fatherliness. ‘And now, James, I hope you’ll follow the good example.’

James’s disgust and anger were so intense that he could not trust himself to speak, for fear of saying something outrageous. He contented himself with curtly shaking his head.

‘No chocolatl for you?’ Mr Beavis turned to Anthony. ‘But I’m sure you’ll take pity on the pudding!’ And when Anthony did, ‘Ah, that’s good!’ he said. ‘That’s the way . . .’ – he hesitated for a fraction of a second – ‘. . . the way to tuck in!’

CHAPTER XVI

June 17th 1912

ANTHONY’S FLUENCY, as they walked to the station, was a symptom of his inward sense of guilt. By the profusion of his talk, by the brightness of his attention, he was making up to Brian for what he had done the previous evening. It was not as though Brian had uttered any reproaches; he seemed, on the contrary, to be taking special pains not to hint at yesterday’s offence. His silence served Anthony as an excuse for postponing all mention of the disagreeable subject of Mark Staithes. Some time, of course, he would have to talk about the whole wretched affair (what a bore people were, with their complicated squabbles!); but, for the moment, he assured himself, it would be best to wait . . . to wait until Brian himself referred to it. Meanwhile, his uneasy conscience constrained him to display towards Brian a more than ordinary friendliness, to make a special effort to be interesting and to show himself being interested. Interested in the poetry of Edward Thomas as they walked down Beaumont Street, in Bergson opposite Worcester; crossing Hythe Bridge, in the nationalization of coal mines; and finally, under the viaduct and up the long approach to the station, in Joan Thursley.

‘It’s ext-traordinary,’ said Brian, breaking, with what was manifestly an effort, a rather long preparatory silence, ‘that you sh-shouldn’t ever have met her.’

‘Dis aliter visum,’ Anthony answered in his father’s best classical style. Though, of course, if he had accepted Mrs Foxe’s invitations to stay at Twyford, the gods, he reflected, would have changed their minds.

‘I w-want you to l-like one another,’ Brian was saying.

‘I’m sure we shall.’

‘She’s not frightfully c-c-c . . .’ Patiently he began again: ‘frightfully c-clever. N-not on the s-surface. You’d th-think she was o-only interested in c-c-c . . .’ But ‘country life’ wouldn’t allow itself to be uttered; Brian was forced in seemingly affected circumlocution: ‘in rural m-matters,’ he brought out at last. ‘D-dogs and b-birds and all that.’

Anthony nodded and, suddenly remembering those spewtits and piddle-warblers of the Bulstrode days, imperceptibly smiled.

‘But w-when you g-get to kn-know her better,’ Brian went on laboriously, ‘you f-find there’s a lot m-more in her than you th-thought. She’s g-got ext-traordinary feeling for p-p-p . . . for v-verse. W-wordsworth and M-meridith, for example. I’m always ast-astonished how g-good her j-judgments are.’

Anthony smiled to himself sarcastically. Yes, it would be Meredith!

The other was silent, wondering how he should explain, whether he should even try to explain. Everything was against him – his own physical disability, the difficulty of putting what he had to say into words, the possibility that Anthony wouldn’t even want to understand what he said, that he would produce his alibi of cynicism and just pretend not to be there at all.

Brian thought of their first meeting. The embarrassing discovery of two strangers in the drawing-room when he came in, flushed and his hair still wet with the rain, to tea. His mother pronounced a name: ‘Mrs Thursley.’ The new vicar’s wife, he realized, as he shook hands with the thin dowdy woman. Her manners were so ingratiating that she lisped as she spoke; her smile was deliberately bright.

‘And this is Joan.’

The girl held out her hand, and as he took it, her slender body swayed away from his alien presence in a movement of shyness that was yet adorably graceful, like the yielding of a young tree before the wind. That movement was the most beautiful and at the same time the most touching thing he had ever seen.

‘We’ve been hearing you’re keen on birds,’ said Mrs Thursley, with an oppressive politeness and intensifying that all too bright, professionally Christian smile of hers. ‘So’s Joan. A regular ornithologist.’

Blushing, the girl muttered a protest.

‘She will be pleased to have someone to talk to about her precious birds. Won’t you, Joanie?’

Joan’s embarrassment was so great that she simply couldn’t speak.

Looking at her flushed, averted face, Brian was filled with compassionate tenderness. His heart began to beat very hard. With a mixture of fear and exultation he realized that something extraordinary, something irrevocable had happened.

And then, he went on to think, there was that time, some four or five months later, when they were staying together at her uncle’s house in East Sussex. Away from her parents, she was as though transformed – not into another person; into her own fundamental self, into the happy, expansive girl that it was impossible for her to be at home. For at home she lived under constraint. Her father’s chronic grumblings and occasional outbursts of bad temper oppressed her with fear. And though she loved her, she felt herself the prisoner of her mother’s affection, was dimly conscious of being somehow exploited by means of it. And finally there was the cold numbing atmosphere of the genteel poverty in which they lived, the unremitting tension of the struggle to keep up appearances, to preserve social superiority. At home, it was impossible for Joan to be fully herself; but there, in that spacious house at Iden, among its quiet, easy-going inhabitants, she was liberated into a transfiguring happiness. Dazzled, Brian fell in love with her all over again.

He thought of the day when they had gone walking in Winchelsea marshes. The hawthorn was in bloom; dotted here and there on the wide, flat expanse of grass, the sheep and their lambs were like white constellations; overhead, the sky was alive with white clouds gliding in the wind. Unspeakably beautiful! And suddenly it seemed to him that they were walking through the image of their love. The world was their love, and their love the world; and the world was significant, charged with depth beyond depth of mysterious meaning. The proof of God’s goodness floated in those clouds, crept in those grazing sheep, shone from every burning bush of incandescent blossom – and, in himself and Joan, walked hand in hand across the grass and was manifest in their happiness. His love, it seemed to him, in that apocalyptic moment, was more than merely his; it was in some mysterious way the equivalent of this wind and sunshine, these white gleams against the green and blue of spring. His feeling for Joan was somehow implicit in the world, had a divine and universal significance. He loved her infinitely, and for that reason was able to love everything in the world as much as he loved her.

The memory of that experience was precious to him, all the more so now, since the quality of his feelings had undergone a change. Transparent and seemingly pure as spring water, that infinite love of his had crystallized out, with the passage of time, into specific desires.

Et son bras et sa jambe, et sa cuisse et ses reins,

Polis comme de I’huile, onduleux comme un cygne,

Passaient devant mes yeux clairvoyants et sereins,

Et son ventre et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne.

Ever since Anthony had first made him read the poem, those lines had haunted his imagination; impersonally, at first; but later, they had come to associate themselves, definitely, with the image of Joan. Polis comme de I’huile, onduleux comme un cygne. There was no forgetting. The words had remained with him, indelibly, like a remorse, like the memory of a crime.

They entered the station and found that there were nearly five minutes to wait. The two young men walked slowly up and down the platform.

In an effort to lay the shameful phantom of those breasts, that oil-smooth belly, ‘My m-mother likes her a l-lot,’ Brian went on at last.

‘That’s very satisfactory,’ said Anthony; but felt, even as he uttered the words, that he was rather overdoing the approval. If he fell in love, he most certainly wouldn’t take the girl to be inspected by his father and Pauline. On approval! But it wasn’t their business to approve – or disapprove, for that matter. Mrs Foxe was different, of course; one could take her more seriously than Pauline or his father. But, all the same, one wouldn’t want even Mrs Foxe to interfere – indeed, he went on to reflect, would probably dislike the interference even more intensely than other people’s, just because of that superiority. For the superiority constituted a kind of claim on one, gave her certain rights. One wouldn’t be able so easily to ignore her opinion as one could ignore Pauline’s, for example. He was very fond of Mrs Foxe, he respected and admired her; but for that very reason he felt her as potentially a menace to his freedom. For she might – indeed, if she knew it, she certainly would – object to his way of looking at things. And though her criticisms would be based on the principles of that liberal Christianity of hers, and though, of course, such modernism was just as preposterous and, in spite of its pretensions to being ‘scientific,’ just as hopelessly beyond the pale of rationality as the most extravagant fetishism – nevertheless, her words, being hers, would carry weight, would have to be considered. Which was why he did his best not to place himself in the position of having to listen to them. It was more than a year now since he had accepted one of her invitations to come and stay with them in the country. Dis aliter visum. But he looked forward rather nervously to his impending encounter with her.

The train came roaring in; and there, a minute later, they all were, at the other end of the platform – Mr Beavis in a grey suit, and Pauline beside him, very large in mauve, her face apoplectically flushed by the shadow of her mauve parasol, and behind them Mrs Foxe, straight and queenly, and a tall girl in a big flopping hat and a flowered dress.

Mr Beavis adopted for his greetings a humorously mock-heroic manner that Anthony found particularly irritating. ‘Six precious souls,’ he quoted, as he patted his son’s shoulder, ‘or rather only four precious souls, but all agog to dash through thick and thin. And what a hot dash – what a dashed hot dash!’ he emended, twinklingly.

‘Well, Anthony.’ Mrs Foxe’s voice was musically rich with affection. ‘It’s an age since I saw you.’

‘Yes, an age.’ He laughed rather uncomfortably, trying, as he did so, to remember those elaborate reasons he had given for not accepting her invitations. At all costs he mustn’t contradict himself. Was it at Easter or at Christmas that the necessity of working at the British Museum had kept him in London? He felt a touch on his arm, and thankful for any excuse to break off the embarrassing conversation, turned quickly away.

‘J-joan,’ Brian was saying to the girl in the flowered dress, ‘h-here’s A-anthony.’

‘Awfully glad,’ he mumbled. ‘Heard such a lot about you from . . .’ Nice hair, he thought; and the hazel eyes were beautifully bright and eager. But the profile was too emphatic; and though the lips were well cut, the mouth was too wide. A bit dairymaidish, was his conclusion; and her clothes were really too home-made. He himself preferred something rather more urban.

‘Well, lead on, Macduff,’ said Mr Beavis.

They left the station, and slowly, on the shady side of the street, walked towards the centre of the town. Still merrily Gilpinesque, as though (and this particularly irritated Anthony) today’s expedition were his first holiday jaunt for twenty years, Mr Beavis expatiated in waggish colloquialisms on the Oxford of his own undergraduate days. Mrs Foxe listened, smiled at the appropriate moments, asked pertinent questions. Pauline complained from time to time of the heat. Her face shone; and, walking in gloomy silence beside her, Anthony remarked with distaste the rather rank intensification of her natural odour. From behind him, he cold hear snatches of the conversation between Brian and Joan. ‘. . . a great big hawk,’ she was saying. Her speech was eager and rapid. ‘It must have been a harrier.’ ‘D-did it have b-bars on its t-t-t . . . on its tail?’ ‘That’s it. Dark bars on a light grey ground.’ ‘Th-then it was a f-female,’ said Brian. ‘F-females have b-bars on their t-tails.’ Anthony smiled to himself sarcastically.

They were passing the Ashmolean, when a woman who was coming very slowly and as though disconsolately out of the museum suddenly waved her hand at them and, calling out first Mr Beavis’s name and then, as they all turned round to look at her, Mrs Foxe’s, came running down the steps towards them.

‘Why, it’s Mary Champernowne,’ said Mrs Foxe. ‘Mary Amberley, I should say.’ Or perhaps, she reflected, should not say, now that the Amberleys were divorced.

The name, the familiar face, evoked in Mr Beavis’s mind only a pleasant sensation of surprised recognition. Raising his hat with a self-consciously comic parody of an old-world flourish, ‘Welcome,’ he said to the new arrival. ‘Welcome, dear lady.’

Mary Amberley took Mrs Foxe’s hand. ‘Such luck,’ she exclaimed breathlessly. Mrs Foxe was surprised by so much cordiality. Mary’s mother was her friend; but Mary had always held aloof. And anyhow, since her marriage she had moved in a world that Mrs Foxe did not know, and of which, on principle, she disapproved. ‘Such marvellous luck!’ the other repeated as she turned to Mr Beavis.

‘The luck is ours,’ he said gallantly. ‘You know my wife, don’t you? And the young stalwart?’ His eyes twinkled; the corners of his mouth, under the moustache, humorously twitched. He laid a hand on Anthony’s arm. ‘The young foundation-worthy?’

She smiled at Anthony. A strange smile, he noticed; a crooked smile of unparted lips that seemed as though secretly significant. ‘I haven’t seen you for years,’ she said. ‘Not since . . .’ Not since the first Mrs Beavis’s funeral, as a matter of fact. But one could hardly say so. ‘Not since you were so high!’ And lifting a gloved hand to the level of her eye, she measured, between the thumb and forefinger, a space of about an inch.

Anthony laughed nervously, intimidated, even while he admired, by so much prettiness and ease and smartness.

Mrs Amberley shook hands with Joan and Brian; then, turning back to Mrs Foxe, ‘I was feeling like Robinson Crusoe,’ she said, explaining that abnormal cordiality. ‘Marooned.’ She lingered with a comical insistence over the long syllable. ‘Absolutely marooooned. Monarch of all I surveyed.’ And while they slowly walked on across St Giles’s, she launched out into a complicated story about a stay in the Cotswolds; about an appointment to meet some friends on the way home, at Oxford, on the eighteenth; about her journey from Chipping Campden; about her punctual arrival at the meeting-place, her waiting, her growing impatience, her rage, and finally her discovery that she had come a day too early: it was the seventeenth. ‘Too typical of me.’

Everybody laughed a great deal. For the story was full of unexpected fantasies and extravagances; and it was told in a voice that modulated itself with an extraordinary subtlety to fit the words – a voice that knew when to hurry breathlessly and when to drawl, when to fade out into an inaudibility rich with unspoken implications.

Even Mrs Foxe, who didn’t particularly want to be amused – because of that divorce – found herself unable to resist the story.

For Mary Amberley, their laughter was like champagne; it warmed her, it sent a tingling exhilaration through her body. They were bores, of course; they were philistines. But the applause even of bores and philistines is still applause and intoxicating. Her eyes shone, her cheeks flushed. ‘Too hopelessly typical of me!’ she wailed, when their laughter had subsided; but the gesture of despairing self-disparagement was a caricature; she was really proud of her incompetence, regarded it as part of her feminine charm. ‘Well, anyhow,’ she concluded, ‘there I was – shipwrecked. All alone on a desert island.’

They walked for a moment in silence. The thought that she would have to be asked to lunch was in all their minds – a thought tinged in Mrs Foxe’s case with vexation, in Anthony’s with embarrassed desire. The lunch was being given in his rooms; as the host, he ought to ask her. And he wanted to ask her – violently wanted it. But what would the others say? Oughtn’t he somehow to consult them first? Mr Beavis solved the problem for him by making the suggestion on his own account.

‘I think’ – he hesitated; then, twinkling, ‘I think our festal “spread,”’ he went on, ‘will run to another guest, won’t it, Anthony?’

‘But I can’t impose myself,’ she protested, turning from the father to the son. He seemed a nice boy, she thought, sensitive and intelligent. Pleasant-looking too.

‘But I assure you . . .’ Anthony was earnestly and incoherently repeating, ‘I assure you . . .’

‘Well, if it’s really all right . . .’ She thanked him with a smile of sudden intimacy, almost of complicity – as though there were some bond between them, as though, of all the party, they two were the only ones who understood what was what.

After lunch, Joan had to be shown the sights of Oxford; and Mr Beavis had an appointment with a philological colleague in the Woodstock Road; and Pauline thought she would like to take things quietly till tea-time. Anthony was left to entertain Mary Amberley. The responsibility was deliciously alarming.

In the hansom that was taking them to Magdalen Bridge Mrs Amberley turned to him a face that was bright with sudden mischief.

‘Free at last,’ she said.

Anthony nodded at her and smiled back, understandingly, conspiratorially. ‘They were rather heavy,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I ought to apologize.’

‘I’ve often thought of founding a league for the abolition of families,’ she went on. ‘Parents ought never to be allowed to come near their children.’

‘Plato thought so too,’ he said, rather pedantically.

‘Yes, but he wanted children to be bullied by the state instead of by their fathers and mothers. I don’t want them to be bullied by anyone.’

He ventured a personal question. ‘Were you bullied?’ he asked.

Mary Amberley nodded. ‘Horribly. Few children have been more loved than I was. They fairly bludgeoned me with affection. Made me a mental cripple. It took me years to get over the deformity.’ There was a silence. Then, looking at him with an embarrassingly appraising glance, as though he were for sale, ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘the last time I saw you was at your mother’s funeral.’

The subterranean association between this remark and what had gone before made him blush guiltily, as though at an impropriety in mixed company. ‘Yes, I remember,’ he mumbled, and was annoyed with himself for feeling so uncomfortably embarrassed, was at the same time rather ashamed that he had allowed even this remotely implied comment upon his mother to pass without some kind of protest, that he had felt so little desire to make a protest.

‘You were a horrible, squalid little boy then,’ she went on, still looking at him judicially. ‘How awful little boys always are! It seems incredible that they should ever turn into presentable human beings. And of course,’ she added, ‘a great many of them don’t. Dismal, don’t you find? – the way most people are so hideous and stupid, so utterly and abysmally boring!’

Making a violent effort of will, Anthony emerged from his embarrassment with a creditable dash. ‘I hope I’m not one of the majority?’ he said, lifting his eyes to hers.

Mrs Amberley shook her head, and with a serious matter-of-factness, ‘No,’ she answered. ‘I was thinking how successfully you’d escaped from the horrors of boyhood.’

He blushed again, this time with pleasure.

‘Let’s see, how old are you now?’ she asked.

‘Twenty – nearly twenty-one.’

‘And I shall be thirty this winter. Queer,’ she added, ‘how these things change their significance. When I saw you last, those nine years were a great gulf between us. Uncrossable, it seemed then. We belonged to different species. And yet here we are, sitting on the same side of the gulf as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Which indeed it is, now.’ She turned and smiled at him that secret and significant smile of unparted lips. Her dark eyes were full of dancing brightness. ‘Ah, there’s Magdalen,’ she went on, leaving him (to his great relief; for in his excited embarrassment he would not have known what to say) no time to comment on her words. ‘How dreary that late Gothic can be! So mean! No wonder Gibbon didn’t think much of the Middle Ages!’ She was suddenly silent, remembering the occasion when her husband had made that remark about Gibbon. Only a month or two after their marriage. She had been shocked and astonished by his airy criticisms of things she had been brought up to regard as sacredly beyond judgment – shocked, but also thrilled, also delighted. For what fun to see the sacred things knocked about! And in those days Roger was still adorable. She sighed; then, with a touch of irritation, shook off the sentimental mood and went on talking about that odious architecture.

The cab drew up at the bridge; they dismounted and walked down to the boat-house. Lying back on the cushions of the punt, Mary Amberley was silent. Very slowly, Anthony poled his way upstream. The green world slid past her half-shut eyes. Green darkness of trees overarching the olive shadows and tawny-glaucous lights of water; and between the twilight stretches of green vaulting, the wide gold-green meadows, islanded with elms. And always the faint weedy smell of the river; and the air so soft and warm against the face that one was hardly aware any longer of the frontiers between self and not-self, but lay there, separated by no dividing surfaces, melting, drowsily melting into the circumambient summer.

Standing at the stern, Anthony could look down on her, as from a post of vantage. She lay there at his feet, limp and abandoned. Handling his long pole with an easy mastery of which he was proud, he felt, as he watched her, exultantly strong and superior. There was no gulf between them now. She was a woman, he a man. He lifted his trailing punt pole and swung it forward with a movement of easy grace, of unhurried and accomplished power. Thrust it down into the mud, tightened his muscles against its resistance; the punt shot forward, the end of the pole lifted from the river-bed, trailed for a moment, then gracefully, once more, easily, masterfully was swung forward. Suddenly she lifted her eyelids and looked at him, with that detached appraising look that had embarrassed him so much in the cab. His manly confidence evaporated at once.

‘My poor Anthony,’ she said at last, and her face came closer, as it were, in a sudden smile. ‘It makes me hot even to look at you.’

When the punt had been secured, he came forward and sat down in the place she made, drawing her skirts away, on the cushion beside her.

‘I don’t suppose your father bullies you much,’ she said, returning to the theme of their conversation in the cab.

He shook his head.

‘Nor blackmails you with too much affection, I imagine.’

Anthony found himself feeling unexpectedly loyal to his father. ‘I think he was always very fond of me.’

‘Oh, of course,’ said Mrs Amberley impatiently. ‘I didn’t imagine he knocked you about.’

Anthony could not help laughing. The vision of his father running after him with a club was irresistibly comic. Then, more seriously, ‘He never got near enough to knock me about,’ he said. ‘There was always a great gulf fixed.’

‘Yes, one feels he has a talent for fixing gulfs. And yet your step-mother seems to get on with him all right. So did your mother, I believe.’ She shook her head. ‘But, then, marriage is so odd and unaccountable. The most obviously incompatible couples stick together, and the most obviously compatible fly apart. Boring, tiresome people are adored, and charming ones are hated. Why? God knows. But I suppose it’s generally a matter of what Milton calls the Genial Bed.’ She lingered, ludicrously, over the first syllable of ‘genial’; but Anthony was so anxious not to seem startled by the casual mention of what he had always regarded as, in a lady’s presence, the unmentionable, that he did not laugh – for a laugh might have been interpreted as a schoolboy’s automatic reaction to smut – did not even smile; but gravely, as though he were admitting the truth of a proposition in geometry, nodded his head and in a very serious and judicial tone said, ‘Yes, I suppose it generally is.’

‘Poor Mrs Foxe,’ Mary Amberley went on. ‘I imagine there was a minimum of geniality there.’

‘Did you know her husband?’ he asked.

‘Only as a child. One grown-up seems as boring as another then. But my mother’s often talked to me about him. Thoroughly beastly. And thoroughly virtuous. God preserve me from a virtuous beast! The vicious ones are bad enough; but at least they’re never beastly on principle. They’re inconsistent; so they’re sometimes nice by mistake. Whereas the virtuous ones – they never forget; they’re beastly all the time. Poor woman! She had a dog’s life, I’m afraid. But she seems to be getting it back on her son all right.’

‘But she adores Brian,’ he protested. ‘And Brian adores her.’

‘That’s exactly what I was saying. All the love she never got from her husband, all the love she never gave him – it’s being poured out on that miserable boy.’

‘He isn’t miserable.’

‘He may not know it, perhaps. Not yet. But you wait!’

Then, after a little pause, ‘You’re lucky,’ Mrs Amberley went on. ‘A great deal luckier than you know.’

CHAPTER XVII

May 26th 1934

LITERATURE FOR PEACE – of what kind? One can concentrate on economics: trade barriers, disorganized currency, impediments in the way of migration, private interests bent on making profits at all costs. And so on. One can concentrate on politics: danger of the concept of the sovereign state, as a wholly immortal being having interests irreconcilable with those of other sovereign states. One can propose political and economic remedies – trade agreements, international arbitration, collective security. Sensible prescriptions following sound diagnosis. But has the diagnosis gone far enough, and will the patient follow the treatment prescribed?

This question came up in the course of today’s discussion with Miller. Answer in the negative. The patient can’t follow the treatment prescribed, for a good reason: there is no patient. States and Nations don’t exist as such. There are only people. Sets of people living in certain areas, having certain allegiances. Nations won’t change their national policies unless and until people change their private policies. All governments, even Hitler’s, even Stalin’s, even Mussolini’s, are representative. Today’s national behaviour – a large-scale projection of today’s individual behaviour. Or rather, to be more accurate, a large-scale projection of the individual’s secret wishes and intentions. For we should all like to behave a good deal worse than our conscience and respect for public opinion allow. One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfils our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we’re profoundly virtuous. Sweet and decorous to murder, lie, torture for the sake of the fatherland. Good international policies are projections of individual good intentions and benevolent wishes, and must be of the same kind as good inter-personal policies. Pacifist propaganda must be aimed at people as well as their governments; must start simultaneously at the periphery and the centre.

Empirical facts:

One: We are all capable of love for other human beings.

Two. We impose limitations on that love.

Three. We can transcend all these limitations – if we choose to. (It is a matter of observation that anyone who so desires can overcome personal dislike, class feeling, national hatred, colour prejudice. Not easy; but it can be done, if we have the will and know how to carry out our good intentions.)

Four. Love expressing itself in good treatment breeds love. Hate expression itself in bad treatment breeds hate.

In the light of these facts, it’s obvious what inter-personal, inter-class and international policies should be. But, again, knowledge cuts little ice. We all know; we almost all fail to do. It is a question, as usual, of the best methods of implementing intentions. Among other things, peace propaganda must be a set of instructions in the art of modifying character.

I see

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be,

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.

On the way home from Miller’s, dived into the public lavatory at Marble Arch, and there ran into Beppo Bowles deep in conversation with one of those flannel-trousered, hatless young men who look like undergraduates and are, I suppose, very junior clerks or shop assistants. On B.’s face, what a mingling of elation and anxiety. Happy, drunk with thrilling anticipation, and at the same time horribly anxious and afraid. He might be turned down – unspeakable humiliation! He might not be turned down – appalling dangers! Frustration of desire, if there was failure, cruel blow to pride, wound to the very root of personality. And, if success, fear (through all the triumph) of blackmail and police court. Poor wretch! He was horribly embarrassed at the sight of me. I just nodded and hurried past. B.’s hell – an underground lavatory with rows of urinals stretching to infinity in all directions and a boy at each. Beppo walking up and down the rows, for ever – his sweating self, but worse.

CHAPTER XVIII

December 8th 1926

MORE GUESTS KEPT arriving – young people mostly, friends of Joyce and Helen. Dutifully, they crossed the drawing-room to the far corner where Mrs Amberley was sitting between Beppo Bowles and Anthony, said good-evening, then hurried off to dance.

‘They put one in one’s middle-aged place all right,’ said Anthony; but either Mrs Amberley preferred not to hear the remark, or else she was genuinely absorbed in what Beppo was saying with such loud fizzling enthusiasm about Berlin – the most amusing place in Europe nowadays! Where else would you find, for example, those special tarts for masochists? In top-boots; yes, genuine top-boots! And the Museum of Sexology: such photographs and wax models – almost too trompe-l’œil – such astounding objects in horn from Japan, such strange and ingenious tailoring for exhibitionists! And all those delicious little Lesbian bars, all those cabarets where the boys were dressed up as women . . .

‘There’s Mark Staithes,’ said Mrs Amberley, interrupting him, and waved to a shortish, broad-shouldered man who had just entered the drawing-room. ‘I forget,’ she said, turning to Anthony, ‘whether you know him.’

‘Only for the last thirty years,’ he answered, finding once again a certain malicious pleasure in insisting, to the point of exaggeration, on his vanished youth. If he were no longer young, then Mary had ceased to be young nine years ago.

‘But with long gaps,’ he qualified. ‘During the war and then afterwards, for all that time he was in Mexico. And I’ve hardly had more than a glimpse of him since he came back. I’m delighted to have this chance . . .’

‘He’s a queer fish,’ said Mary Amberley, thinking of the time, just after his return from Mexico, some eighteen months before, when he had first come to her house. His appearance, his manner, as of some savage and fanatical hermit, had violently attracted her. She had tried all her seductions upon him – without the smallest effect. He had ignored them – but so completely and absolutely that she felt no ill-will towards him for the rebuff, convinced, as she was, that in fact there hadn’t been any rebuff, merely a display of symptoms, either, she diagnosed judicially, of impotence, or else, less probably (though of course one never knew, one never knew), of homosexuality. ‘A queer fish,’ she repeated, and decided that she’d take the next opportunity of asking Beppo about the homosexuality. He would be sure to know. They always did know about one another. Then, waving again, ‘Come and sit with us, Mark,’ she called through the noise of the gramophone.

Staithes crossed the room, drew up a chair and sat down. His hair had retreated from his forehead, and above the ears was already grey. The brown face – that fanatical hermit’s face which Mary Amberley had found so strangely attractive – was deeply lined. No smooth obliterating layer of fat obscured its inner structure. Under the skin each strip of muscle in the cheek and jaw seemed to stand out distinct and separate like the muscles in those lime-wood statues of flayed human beings that were made for Renaissance anatomy rooms. When he smiled – and each time that happened it was as though the flayed statue had come to life and were expressing its agony – one could follow the whole mechanism of the excruciating grimace; the upward and outward pull of the zygomaticus major, the sideways tug of the risorius, the contraction of the great sphincters round the eyelids.

‘Am I interrupting?’ he asked, looking with sharp, inquisitorial movements from one to the other.

‘Beppo was telling us about Berlin,’ said Mrs Amberley.

‘I popped over to get away from the General Strike,’ Beppo explained.

‘Naturally,’ said Staithes, and his face twitched in the anguish of amused contempt.

‘Such a heavenly place!’ Beppo exploded irrepressibly.

‘You feel like Lord Haldane about it? Your spiritual home?’

‘Carnal,’ Anthony emended.

Only too happy to plead guilty, Beppo giggled. ‘Yes, those transvestitists!’ he had to admit rapturously.

‘I was over there this winter,’ said Staithes. ‘On business. But of course one has to pay one’s tribute to pleasure too. That night life . . .’

‘Didn’t you find it amusing?’

‘Oh, passionately.’

‘You see!’ Beppo was triumphant.

‘One of the creatures came and sat at my table,’ Staithes went on. ‘I danced with it. It looked like a woman.’

‘You simply can’t tell them apart,’ Beppo cried excitedly, as though he were taking personal credit for the fact.

‘When we’d finished dancing, it painted its face a bit and we drank a little beer. Then it showed me some indecent photographs. That rather surgical, anti-aphrodisiac kind – you know. Damping. Perhaps that was why the conversation flagged. Anyhow, there were uncomfortable silences. Neither it nor I seemed to know what to say next. We were becalmed.’ He threw out his two thin and knotted hands horizontally, as though sliding them across an absolutely flat surface. ‘Utterly becalmed. Until, suddenly, the creature did a most remarkable thing. One of its regular gambits, no doubt; but never having had it played on me before, I was impressed. “Would you like to see something?” it said. I said yes, and immediately it began to poke and pull at something under its blouse. “Now, look!” it said at last. I looked. It smiled triumphantly, like a man playing the ace of trumps – or rather playing two aces of trumps; for what it plunked down on the table was a pair. A pair of superb artificial breasts, made of pink rubber sponge.’

‘But how revolting!’ cried Mrs Amberley, while Anthony laughed and Beppo’s round face took on an expression of pained distress. ‘How revolting!’ she repeated.

‘Yes, but how satisfactory!’ Staithes insisted, making that crooked and agonized grimace that passed with him for a smile. ‘It’s so good when things happen as they ought to happen – artistically, symbolically. Two rubber breasts between the beer mugs – that’s what vice ought to be. And when that was what it actually was – well, it felt as though something had clicked into place. Inevitably, beautifully. Yes, beautifully,’ he repeated. ‘Beautifully revolting.’

‘All the same,’ Beppo insisted, ‘you must admit there’s a lot to be said for a town where that sort of thing can happen. In public,’ he added earnestly, ‘in public, mind you. It’s the most tolerant in the world, the German Government. You’ve got to admit that.’

‘Oh, I do,’ said Staithes. ‘It tolerates everybody. Not only girls in boiled shirts and boys with rubber breasts, but also monarchists, fascists, Junkers, Krupps, Communists too, I’m thankful to say. All its enemies of every colour.’

‘I think that’s rather fine,’ said Mrs Amberley.

‘Very fine indeed, until its enemies rise up and destroy it. I only hope the communists will get in first.’

‘But seeing that they’re tolerated, why should its enemies want to destroy it?’

‘Why not? They don’t believe in tolerance. Quite rightly,’ he added.

‘You’re barbarous,’ Beppo protested.

‘As one should be if one lives in the Dark Ages. You people – you’re survivors from the Age of Antonines.’ He looked from one to the other, smiling his flayed smile, and shook his head. ‘Imagining you’re still in the first volume of Gibbon. Whereas we’re well on in the third.’

‘Do you mean to say . . .? But, good heavens,’ Mrs Amberley interrupted herself, ‘there’s Gerry!’

At her words, at the sight of Gerry Watchett himself, foxtrotting in from the back drawing-room with Helen, Anthony took out his pocket-book and quickly examined its contents. ‘Thank God!’ he said. ‘Only two pounds.’ Gerry had caught him with ten the previous month and, on the strength of a most improbably distressing story, borrowed them all. He ought to have disbelieved the story, of course, ought to have withheld the loan. Ten pounds were more than he could afford. He had said so, but had lacked the firmness to persist in his refusal. It had taken more than a fortnight of strict economy to make up that lost money. Economizing was an unpleasant process; but to say no and to go on saying it in the teeth of Gerry’s importunities and reproaches would have been still more unpleasant. He was always ready to sacrifice his rights to his conveniences. People thought him disinterested, and he would have liked, he did his best, to accept their diagnosis of his character. But awareness of the real state of affairs kept breaking through. When it did, he accepted self-knowledge with a laugh. He was laughing now. ‘Only two,’ he repeated. ‘Luckily I can afford . . .’

He broke off. Behind Mary’s back, Beppo had tapped him on the shoulder, was making significant grimaces. Anthony turned and saw that she was still staring intently and with knitted brows at the new arrivals.

‘He told me he wasn’t coming this evening,’ she said, almost as though she were speaking to herself. Then, through the music, ‘Gerry!’ she called sharply in a voice that had suddenly lost all its charm – a voice that reminded Anthony only too painfully of those distasteful scenes in which, long since, he had played his part. So that was it, he said to himself, and felt sorry for poor Mary.

Gerry Watchett turned, and with the expression of one who refers to some excellent shared joke gave her a quick smile and even a hint of a wink, then looked down again to go on talking to his partner.

Mrs Amberley flushed with sudden anger. Grinning at her like that! It was intolerable. Intolerable too – but how typical! – to appear like this, unannounced, out of the blue – casually dancing with another woman, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. This time, it was true, the other woman was only Helen; but that was merely because he hadn’t found anyone else to dance with, anyone worse. ‘The beast!’ she thought, as she followed him round the room with her eyes. Then, making an effort, she looked away, she forced herself to pay attention to what was going on around her.

‘. . . a country like this,’ Mark Staithes was saying, ‘a country where a quarter of the population’s genuinely bourgeois and another quarter passionately longs to be.’

‘You’re exaggerating,’ Anthony protested.

‘Not a bit. What does the Labour Party poll at an election? A third of the votes. I’m generously assuming it might some day poll half of them. The rest’s bourgeois. Either naturally bourgeois by interest and fear, or else artificially, by snobbery and imagination. It’s childish to think you can get what you want by constitutional methods.’

‘And what about unconstitutional ones?’

‘There’s a chance.’

‘Not much of a chance,’ said Anthony. ‘Not against the new weapons.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Mark Staithes, ‘I know. If they use their strength, the middle classes can obviously win. They could win, most likely, even without tanks and planes – just because they’re potentially better soldiers than the proletariat.’

‘Better soldiers?’ Beppo protested, thinking of those guardsmen friends of his.

‘Because of their education. A bourgeois gets anything from ten to sixteen years of training – most of it, what’s more, in a boarding school; that’s to say, in barracks. Whereas a workman’s child lives at home and doesn’t get more than six or seven years at his day school. Sixteen years of obedience and esprit de corps. No wonder that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. If they’ll use only half their resources – use them ruthlessly – the game’s theirs.’

‘You think they won’t use their resources?’

Mark shrugged his shoulders. ‘Certainly the German republicans don’t seem ready to use theirs. And think of what happened here, during the Strike? Even the majority of industrialists were ready to compromise.’

‘For the simple reason,’ Anthony put in, ‘that you can’t be a successful industrialist unless you have the compromising habit. A business isn’t run by faith; it’s run by haggling.’

‘Anyhow,’ Mark went on, ‘the fact remains that the available resources weren’t used. That’s what allows one to hope that a revolution might succeed. Provided it were carried out very quickly. For, of course, once they realized they were seriously in danger, they’d forget their scruples. But they might hesitate long enough, I think, to make a revolution possible. Even a few hours of compunction would be sufficient. Yes, in spite of tanks, there’s still a chance of success. But you must be prepared to take a chance. Not like the imbeciles of the T.U.C. Or the rank and file of the Unions, for that matter. As full of scruples as the bourgeoisie. It’s the hang-over of evangelical Christianity. You’ve no idea what a lot of preaching and hymn-singing there was during the General Strike. I was flabbergasted. But it’s good to know the worst. Perhaps the younger generation . . .’ He shook his head. ‘But I don’t feel certain even of them. Methodism may be decaying. But look at those spiritualist chapels that are sprouting up all over the industrial areas! Like toadstools.’

The next time he passed, Gerry called her name; but Mary Amberley refused to acknowledge his greeting. Turning coldly away she pretended to be interested only in what Anthony was saying.

‘Ass of a woman!’ thought Gerry, as he looked at her averted face. Then, aloud, ‘What do you say to putting on this record another time?’ he asked his partner.

Helen nodded ecstatically.

The music of the spheres, the beatific vision . . . But why should heaven be a monopoly of ear or eye? The muscles as they move, they too have their paradise. Heaven is not only an illumination and a harmony; it is also a dance.

‘Half a tick,’ said Gerry, when they were opposite the gramophone.

Helen stood there as he wound up the machine, quite still, her arms hanging limp at her sides. Her eyes were closed; she was shutting the world away from her, shutting herself out of existence. In this still vacancy between two heavens of motion, existence was without a point.

The music stopped for a moment; then began again in the middle of a bar. Behind her closed eyelids, she was aware that Gerry had moved, was standing over her, very near; then his arm encircled her body.

‘Onward, Christian soldiers!’ he said; and they stepped out once more into the music, into the heaven of harmoniously moving muscles.

There had been a silence. Determined not to pay any attention to that beast, Mrs Amberley turned to Staithes. ‘And those scents of yours?’ she asked with an assumption of bright, amused interest.

‘Flourishing,’ he answered. ‘I’ve had to order three new stills and take on more labour.’

Mrs Amberley smiled at him and shook her head. ‘You of all people!’ she said. ‘It seems peculiarly ridiculous that you should be a scent-manufacturer.’

‘Why?’

‘The most unfrivolous of men,’ she went on, ‘the least gallant, the most implacable misogynist!’ (Either impotent or homosexual – there couldn’t be a doubt; and, after his story about Berlin, almost certainly impotent, she thought.)

With a smile of excruciated mockery, ‘But hasn’t it occurred to you,’ Staithes asked, ‘that those might be reasons for being a scent-maker?’

‘Reasons?’

‘A way of expressing one’s lack of gallantry.’ In point of fact, it was entirely by chance that he had gone into the scent business. His eye had been caught by an advertisement in The Times, a small factory for sale very cheap . . . Just luck. But now, after the event, it heightened his self-esteem to say that he had chosen the profession deliberately, in order to express his contempt for the women for whom he catered. The lie, which he had willed and by this time half believed to be the truth, placed him in a position of superiority to all women in general and, at this moment, to Mary Amberley in particular. Leaning forward, he took Mary’s hand, raised it as though he were about to kiss it, but, instead, only sniffed at the skin – then let it fall again. ‘For example,’ he said, ‘there’s civet in the stuff you’ve scented yourself with.’

‘Well, why not?’

‘Oh, no reason at all,’ said Staithes, ‘no reason at all, if you happen to have a taste for the excrement of polecats.

Mrs Amberley made a grimace of disgust.

‘In Abyssinia,’ he went on, ‘they have civet farms. Twice a week, you take a stick and go and poke the cats until they’re thoroughly angry and frightened. That’s when they secrete their stuff. Like children wetting their knickers when they’re afraid. Then you catch them with a pair of tongs, so that they can’t bite, and scrape out the contents of the little pouch attached to their genital organs. You do it with an egg-spoon and the stuff’s a kind of yellow grease, rather like ear-wax. Stinks like hell when it’s undiluted. We get it in London packed in buffalo horns. Huge cornucopias full of dark brown stinking ear-wax. At a hundred and seventeen shillings the ounce, what’s more. That’s one of the reasons why your scent costs you so much. The poor can’t afford to smear themselves with cat’s mess. They have to be content with plain iso-eugenol and phenyl acetic aldehyde.’

Colin and Joyce had stopped dancing and were sitting on the landing outside the drawing-room door. Alone. It was Colin’s opportunity for releasing some of the righteous indignation that had been accumulating within him, ever since dinner-time.

‘I must say, Joyce,’ he began, ‘some of your mother’s guests . . .’

Joyce looked at him with eyes in which there was anxiety as well as adoration. ‘Yes, I know,’ she apologized. ‘I know,’ and was abjectly in a hurry to agree with him about Beppo’s degeneracy and Anthony Beavis’s cynicism. Then, seeing that he was enjoying his indignation and that she herself rather profited than suffered by it, she even volunteered the information that that man who had come in last and was sitting with her mother was a Bolshevik. Yes, Mark Staithes was a Bolshevik.

The phrase that Colin had been meditating all the evening found utterance. ‘I may be stupid and all that,’ he said with an assumption of humility that cloaked an overweening self-satisfaction in what he regarded as the quite extraordinary quality of his ordinariness; ‘I may be ignorant and badly educated; but at least’ (his tone changed, he was proudly giving expression to his consciousness of being uniquely average), ‘at least I know – well, I do know what’s done. I mean, if one’s a gentleman.’ He underlined the words to make them sound slightly comic and so prove that he had a sense of humour. To speak seriously of what one took seriously – this, precisely, was one of the things that wasn’t done. That touch of humour proved more cogently than any emphasis could do, any emotional trembling of the voice, that he did take these things seriously – as a uniquely average gentleman must take them. And of course Joyce understood that he did. She glanced at him worshippingly and pressed his hand.

Dancing, dancing . . . Oh, if only, thought Helen, one could go on dancing for ever! If only one didn’t have to spend all that time doing other things! Wrong things, mostly, stupid things, things one was sorry for after they were done. Dancing, she lost her life in order to save it; lost her identity and became something greater than herself; lost her perplexities and self-hatreds in a bright harmonious certitude; lost her bad character and was made perfect; lost the regretted past, the apprehended future, and gained a timeless present of consummate happiness. She who could not paint, could not write, could not even sing in tune, became while she danced an artist; no, more than an artist; became a god, the creator of a new heaven and a new earth, a creator rejoicing in his creation and finding it good.

‘“Yes, sir, she’s my baby. No, sir . . .”’ Gerry broke off his humming. ‘I won sixty pounds at poker last night,’ he said. ‘Pretty good, eh?’

She smiled up at him and nodded in rapturous silence. Good, good – everything was wonderfully good.

‘And I can’t tell you,’ Staithes was saying, ‘how intensely I enjoy writing those advertisements.’ The muscles in his face were working as though for an anatomical demonstration. ‘The ones about bad breath and body odours.’

‘Hideous!’ Mrs Amberley shuddered. ‘Hideous! There’s only one Victorian convention I appreciate, and that’s the convention of not speaking about those things.’

‘Which is precisely why it’s such fun to speak about them,’ said Staithes, beaming at her between contracted sphincters. ‘Forcing humans to be fully, verbally conscious of their own and other people’s disgustingness. That’s the beauty of this kind of advertising. It shakes them into awareness.’

‘And into buying,’ put in Anthony. ‘You’re forgetting the profits.’

Staithes shrugged his shoulders. ‘They’re incidental,’ he said; and it was obvious, Anthony reflected, as he watched him, it was obvious that the man was telling the truth. For him, the profits were incidental. ‘Breaking down your protective convention,’ he went on, turning again to Mary, ‘that’s the real fun. Leaving you defenceless against the full consciousness of the fact that you can’t do without your fellow humans, and that, when you’re with them, they make you sick.’

CHAPTER XIX

July 7th 1912

MRS FOXE WAS looking through her engagement book. The succession of committee meetings, of district visitings, of afternoons at the cripples’ playroom, darkened the pages. And in between whiles there would be calls, and tea at the vicarage and luncheon-parties in London. And yet (she knew it in advance) the total effect of the coming summer would be one of emptiness. However tightly crammed with activity, time always seemed strangely empty when Brian was away. In other years there had been a wedge of well-filled time each summer. But this July, after only a week or two at home, Brian was going to Germany. To learn the language. It was essential. She knew that he had to go; she earnestly wanted him to go. All the same, when the moment actually came for his departure, it was painful. She wished she could be frankly selfish and keep him at home.

‘This time tomorrow,’ she said, when Brian came into the room, ‘you’ll be driving across London to Liverpool Street.’

He nodded without speaking and, laying a hand on her shoulder, bent down and kissed her.

Mrs Foxe looked up at him and smiled. Then, forgetting for a moment that she had vowed not to say anything to him about her feelings, ‘It’ll be a sadly empty summer, I’m afraid,’ she said; and immediately reproached herself for having brought that expression of distress to his face; reproached herself even while, with a part of her being, she rejoiced to find him so responsively loving, so sensitively concerned with her feelings. ‘Unless you fill it with your letters,’ she added by way of qualification. ‘You will write, won’t you?’

‘Of c-c-c . . . N-naturally, I’ll wr-write.’

Mrs Foxe proposed a walk; or what about a little drive in the dogcart? Embarrassed, Brian looked at his watch.

‘But I’m l-lunching with the Th-Thursleys,’ he answered uncomfortably. ‘There w-wouldn’t be much t-t-t . . . much leisure’ (how he hated these ridiculous circumlocutions!) ‘for a drive.’

‘But how silly of me!’ cried Mrs Foxe. ‘I’d quite forgotten your lunch.’ It was true that she had forgotten; and this sudden, fresh realization that for long hours, on this last day, she would have to do without him was like a wound. She made an effort to prevent any sign of the pain she felt from appearing on her face or sounding in her voice. ‘But there’ll be time at least for a stroll in the garden, won’t there?’

They walked out through the French window and down the long green alley between the herbaceous borders. It was a sunless day, but warm, almost sultry. Under the grey sky the flowers took on a brilliance that seemed somehow almost unnatural. Still silent, they turned at the end of the alley and walked back again.

‘I’m glad it’s Joan,’ said Mrs Foxe at last; ‘and I’m glad you care so much. Though in a way it’s a pity you met her when you did. Because, I’m afraid, it’ll be such a weary long time before you’ll be able to get married.’

Brian nodded without speaking.

‘It’ll be a testing time,’ she went on. ‘Difficult; not altogether happy perhaps. All the same’ (and her voice vibrated movingly), ‘I’m glad it happened, I’m glad,’ she repeated. ‘Because I believe in love.’ She believed in it, as the poor believe in a heaven of posthumous comfort and glory, because she had never known it. She had respected her husband, admired him for his achievements, had liked him for what was likeable in him, and, maternally, had pitied him for his weaknesses. But there had been no transfiguring passion, and his carnal approach had always remained for her an outrage, hardly supportable. She had never loved him. That was why her belief in love’s reality was so strong. Love had to exist in order that the unfavourable balance of her own personal experience might be at least vicariously redressed. Besides, there were the attestations of the poets; it did exist and was wonderful, holy, a revelation. ‘It’s a kind of special grace,’ she went on, ‘sent by God to help us, to make us stronger and better, to deliver us from evil. Saying no to the worst is easy when one has said yes to the best.’

Easy, Brian was thinking in the ensuing silence, even when one hasn’t said yes to the best. The woman who had come and sat at their table in the Café-Concert, when Anthony and he were learning French at Grenoble, two years before – it hadn’t been difficult to resist that temptation.

‘Tu as l’air bien vicieux,’ she had said to him in the first entr’acte; and to Anthony, ‘Il droit être terrible avec les femmes, hein?’ Then she had suggested that they should come home with her. ‘Tous les deux, j’ai une petite amie. Nous nous amuserons bien gentiment. On vous fera voir des choses drôles. Toi qui es si vicieux – ça t’amusera.’

No, that certainly hadn’t been difficult to resist, even though he had never set eyes on Joan at the time. The real temptations were not the worst, but the best. At Grenoble, it had been the best in literature. Et son ventre, et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne . . . Elle se coula á mon côté, m’appela des noms les plus tendres et des noms les plus effroyablement grossiers, qui glissaient sur ses lèvres en suaves murmures. Puis elle se tût et commença à me donner ces baisers qu’elle savait . . . The creations of the best stylists had proved to be far more dangerously attractive, far less easily resistible than the sordid realities of the Café-Concert. And now that he had said yes to the best possible reality, the appeal of the worst was even less effective, had ceased altogether to be anything remotely resembling a temptation. Such temptation as there was came once more from the best. It had been impossible to desire the low, vulgar, half-animal creature of the Café-Concert. But Joan was beautiful, Joan was refined, Joan shared his interests – and precisely for those reasons was desirable. Just because she was the best (and this for him was the paradox that it was so painful and bewildering to live through), he desired her in the wrong way, physically . . .

‘Do you remember those lines of Meredith’s?’ said Mrs Foxe, breaking the silence. Meredith was one of her favourite authors. ‘From the Woods,’ she specified, affectionately abbreviating the title of the poem almost to a nickname. And she quoted:

‘“Love, the great volcano, flings

Fires of lower earth to sky.”

Love’s a kind of philosopher’s stone,’ she went on. ‘Not only does it deliver us; it also transforms. Dross into gold. Earth into heaven.’

Brian nodded affirmatively. And yet, he was thinking, those voluptuous and faceless bodies created by the stylists had actually come to assume Joan’s features. In spite of love, or just because of it, the succubi now had a name, a personality.

The stable clock struck twelve; and at the first stroke there was a noiseless explosion of doves, like snowflakes whirling up against the clotted darkness of the elms beyond.

‘The beauty of it!’ said Mrs Foxe with a kind of muted intensity.

But suppose, it suddenly occurred to Brian, suppose she were suddenly left with no money at all? And if Joan were as poor as that wretched woman at Grenoble, as hopelessly without an alternative resource?

Slowly the last bell note expired, and one by one the whirling doves dropped back on to their turreted cote above the clock.

‘Perhaps,’ said Mrs Foxe, ‘you ought to be starting if you’re going to get there punctually.’

Brian knew how reluctant his mother was to let him go; and this display of generosity produced in him a sense of guilt and, along with it (since he did not want to feel guilty), a certain resentment. ‘B-but I d-don’t need an hour,’ he said almost angrily, ‘to c-cycle three m-miles.’

A moment later he was feeling ashamed of himself for the note of irritation in his voice, and for the rest of the time he was with her he showed himself more than ordinarily affectionate.

At half-past twelve he took his bicycle and rode over to the Thursleys’. The maid opened the nineteenth-century Gothic front door and he stepped into a faint smell of steamed pudding flavoured with cabbage. As usual. The vicarage always smelt of steamed pudding and cabbage. It was a symptom, he had discovered, of poverty and, as such, gave him a feeling of moral discomfort, as though he had done something wrong and were suffering from an uneasy conscience.

He was ushered into the drawing-room. Behaving as if he were some very distinguished old lady, Mrs Thursley rose from her writing-table and advanced to meet him. ‘Ah, dear Brian!’ she cried. Her professionally Christian smile was pearly with the flash of false teeth. ‘So nice to see you!’ She took and held his hand. ‘And your dear mother – how’s she? Sad because you’re going to Germany, I’m sure. We’re all sad, if it comes to that. You’ve got such a gift for making people miss you,’ she continued in the same complimentary strain, while Brian blushed and fidgeted in an agony of discomfort. Saying nice things to people’s faces, particularly to the faces of the rich, the influential, the potentially useful, was a habit with Mrs Thursley. A Christian habit she would have called it, if she had been pressed for an explanation. Loving one’s neighbour; seeing the good in everybody; creating an atmosphere of sympathy and trust. But below the level of the avowal, almost below the level of consciousness, she knew that most people were greedy for flattery, however outrageous, and were prepared, in one way or another, to pay for it.

‘Ah, but here’s Joan,’ she cried, interrupting her praise of him, and added, in a tone that was charged with sprightly meaning, ‘You won’t want to go on talking with her tiresome old mother – will he, Joanie?’

The two young people looked at one another in a speechless embarrassment.

The door suddenly flew open and Mr Thursley hurried into the room. ‘Look at this!’ he cried in a voice that trembled with rage, and held out a glass ink-pot. ‘How do you expect me to do my work with an eighth of an inch of sediment? Dipping, dipping, dipping the whole morning. Never able to write more than two words at a time . . .’

‘Here’s Brian, Daddy,’ said Joan in the hope, which she knew in advance was vain, that the stranger’s presence might shame him into silence.

His pointed nose still white with rage, Mr Thursley glared at Brian, shook hands and, turning away, at once went on with his angry complaint. ‘It’s always like that in this house. How can one be expected to do serious work?’

‘Oh, God,’ Joan inwardly prayed, ‘make him stop, make him shut up.’

‘As if he couldn’t fill the pot himself!’ Brian was thinking. ‘Why doesn’t she tell him so?’

But it was impossible for Mrs Thursley to say or even think anything of the kind. He had his sermons, his articles in the Guardian, his studies in Neo-Platonism. How could he be expected to fill his own ink-pot? For her as well as for him it was obvious, it had become, after these five and twenty years of abjectly given and unreflectingly accepted slavery, completely axiomatic that he couldn’t do such a thing. Besides, if she were to suggest in any way that he wasn’t perfectly right, his anger would become still more violent. Goodness only knew what he mightn’t do or say – in front of Brian! It would be awful. She began to make excuses for the empty ink-pot. Abject excuses on her own behalf, on Joan’s, on her servants’. Her tone was at once deprecatory and soothing; she spoke as though she were dealing with a mixture between Jehovah and a very savage dog that might bite at any moment.

The gong – the Thursleys had a gong that would have been audible from end to end of a ducal mansion – rumbled up to a thunderous fortissimo that reduced even the vicar to silence. But as the sound ebbed, he began again.

‘It’s not as though I asked for very much,’ he said.

‘He’ll be quieter when he’s had something to eat,’ Mrs Thursley thought, and led the way into the dining-room, followed by Joan. Brian wanted the vicar to precede him; but even in his righteous anger Mr Thursley remembered his good manners. Laying his hand on Brian’s shoulder, he propelled him towards the door, keeping up all the time a long-range bombardment of his wife.

‘Only a little quiet, only the simplest material conditions for doing my work. The barest minimum. But I don’t get it. The house is as noisy as a railway station, and my ink-pot’s neglected till I have nothing but a little black mud to write with.’

Under the bombardment, Mrs Thursley walked as though shrunken and with bowed head. But Joan, Brian noticed, had gone stiff; her body was rigid and ungraceful with excess of tension.

In the dining-room they found the two boys, Joan’s younger brothers, already standing behind their chairs. At the sight of them, Mr Thursley reverted from his ink-pot to the noise in the house. ‘Like a railway station,’ he repeated, and the righteous indignation flared up in him with renewed intensity. ‘George and Arthur have been rushing up and down the stairs and round the garden the whole morning. Why can’t you keep them in order?’

They were all at their places now; Mrs Thursley at one end of the table, her husband at the other; the two boys on her left; Joan and Brian on her right. They stood there, waiting for the vicar to say grace.

‘Like hooligans,’ said Mr Thursley; the flames of wrath ran through him; he was filled with a tingling warmth, horribly delicious. ‘Like savages.’

Making an effort, he dropped his long cleft chin on his chest and was silent. His nose was still deathly pale with anger: like marine animals in an aquarium, the nostrils contracted and expanded in a pulse of regular but fluttering movement. In his right hand he still held the ink-pot.

‘Benedictus benedicat, per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum,’ he said at last in his praying voice, which was deep, with the suspicion of a tremolo, and charged with transcendental significance.

With the noise of pent-up movement suddenly released they all sat down.

‘Screaming and howling,’ said Mr Thursley, reverting from the tone of piety to his original harshness. ‘How am I expected to do my work?’ With an indignant bang, he put the ink-pot down on the table in front of him, then unfolded his napkin.

At the other end of the table Mrs Thursley was cutting up the mock duck with an extraordinary rapidity.

‘Pass that to your father,’ she said to the nearest boy. It was essential to get him eating as soon as possible.

A second or two later the parlour-maid was offering Mr Thursley the vegetable. Her apron and cap were stiff with starch and she was as well drilled as a guardsman. The vegetable dishes were hideous, but had been expensive; the spoons were of heavy Victorian silver. With them, the vicar helped himself first to boiled potatoes, then to cabbage, mashed and moulded into damp green bricks.

Still indulging himself in the luxury of anger, ‘Women simply don’t understand what serious work is,’ Mr Thursley went on; then started eating.

When she had helped the others to their mock duck, Mrs Thursley ventured a remark. ‘Brian’s just off to Germany,’ she said.

Mr Thursley looked up, chewing his food very rapidly with his front teeth, like a rabbit. ‘What part of Germany?’ he asked, darting a sharp inquisitorial look at Brian. His nose had flushed again to its normal colour.

‘M-marburg.’

‘Where there’s the university?’

Brian nodded.

Startlingly, with a noise like coke being poured down a chute, Mr Thursley burst out laughing. ‘Don’t take to beerdrinking with the students,’ he said.

The storm was over. In part out of the thankfulness of her heart, in part to make her husband feel that she had found his joke irresistible, Mrs Thursley also laughed. ‘Oh, no,’ she cried, ‘don’t take to that!’

Brian smiled and shook his head.

‘Water or soda-water?’ the parlour-maid asked confidentially, creaking with starch and whalebone as she bent over him.

‘W-water, please.’

After lunch, when the vicar had returned to his study, Mrs Thursley suggested, in her bright, embarrassingly significant way, that the two young people should go for a walk. The ogival front door slammed behind them. Like a prisoner at last restored to liberty, Joan drew a deep breath.

The sky was still overcast, and beneath the low ceiling of grey cloud the air was soft and as though limp with fatigue, as though weary with the burden of too much summer. In the woods, into which they turned from the high-road, the stillness was oppressive, like the intentional silence of sentient beings, pregnant with unavowed thoughts and hidden feelings. An invisible tree-creeper started to sing; but it was as if the clear bright sound were coming from some other time and place. They walked on hand in hand; and between them was the silence of the wood and at the same time the deeper, denser, more secret silence of their own unexpressed emotions. The silence of the complaints she was too loyal to utter and the pity that, unless she complained, it would, he felt, be insulting for him to put into words; her longing for the comfort of his arms and those desires he did not wish to feel.

Their path led them between great coverts of rhododendrons, and suddenly they were in a narrow cleft, hemmed in by high walls of the impenetrable, black-green foliage. It was a solitude within a solitude, the image of their own private silence visibly hollowed out of the greater stillness of the wood.

‘Almost f-frightening,’ he whispered, as they stood there listening – listening (for there was nothing else for them to hear) to their own heart-beats and each other’s breathing and all the words that hung unspoken between them.

All at once, she could bear it no longer, ‘When I think of what it’ll be like at home . . .’ The complaint had uttered itself, against her will. ‘Oh, I wish you weren’t going, Brian!’

Brian looked at her and, at the sight of those trembling lips, those eyes bright with tears, he felt himself as it were disintegrated by tenderness and pity. Stammering her name, he put his arm about her. Joan stood for a little while quite still, her head bent, her forehead resting on his shoulder. The touch of her hair was electric against his lips, he breathed its perfume. All at once, as though waking from sleep, she stirred into motion and, drawing a little away from him, looked up into his face. Her regard had a desperate, almost inhuman fixity.

‘Darling,’ he whispered.

Joan’s only answer was to shake her head.

But why? What was she denying, what implication of his endearment was she saying no to? ‘But J-joan . . .?’ There was a note of anxiety in his voice.

Still she did not answer; only looked at him and once more slowly shook her head. How many negations were expressed in that single movement! The refusal to complain; the denial for herself of the possibility of happiness; the sad insistence that all her love and all his availed nothing against the pain of absence; the resolution not to exploit his pity, not to elicit, however much she longed for it, another, a more passionate avowal . . .

Suddenly, he took her face between his hands and, stooping, kissed her on the mouth.

But this was what she had resolved not to extort from him, this was the gesture that could avail nothing against her inevitable unhappiness! For a second or two she stiffened her body in resistance, tried to shake her head again, tried to draw back. Then, vanquished by a longing stronger than herself, she was limp in his arms; the shut, resisting lips parted and were soft under his kisses; her eyelids closed, and there was nothing left in the world but his mouth and the thin hard body pressed against her own.

Fingers stirred the hair above the nape of her neck, slid round to the throat and dropped to her breast. The strength went out of her, she felt herself sinking deeper and deeper into that mysterious other world, behind her eyelids, into the sightless universe of touch.

Then, without warning, as though in precipitate obedience to some inaudible word of command, he broke away from her. For an instant she thought she was going to fall; but the strength came back to her knees, just in time. She swayed unsteadily, then recovered her balance, and with it the consciousness of the outrage he had inflicted upon her. She had leaned upon him with her whole being, soul as well as body, and he had allowed her to fall, had withdrawn his lips and chest and left her suddenly cold and horribly exposed, defenceless and as if naked. She opened hurt, reproachful eyes and saw him standing there pale and strangely furtive; he met her glance for a moment, then averted his face.

Her resentful sense of outrage gave place to anxiety. ‘What is it, Brian?’

He looked at her for a moment, then turned away again. ‘Perhaps we’d better go home,’ he said in a low voice.

It was a day late in September. Under a pale blue sky the distances were mournful, were exquisitely tender with faint mist. The world seemed remote and unactual, like a memory or an ideal.

The train came to a standstill. Brian waved to the solitary porter, but he himself, nevertheless, got out with the heaviest of the suitcases. By straining his muscles he found that he was able to relieve his conscience of some of the burden that the ability to buy a poor man’s services tended, increasingly as he grew older, to impose upon it.

The porter came running up and almost snatched the bag out of Brian’s hand. He too had his conscience. ‘You leave that to me, sir,’ he said, almost indignantly.

‘T-two more in the c-c-c . . . inside,’ he emended, long after the porter had stepped into the unpronounceable compartment to collect the remaining pieces. ‘Sh-shall I give a hand?’ he offered. The man was old – forty years older than himself, Brian calculated; white-haired and wrinkled, but called him ‘sir,’ but carried his bags and would be grateful for a shilling. ‘Sh-shall I . . .?’

The old porter did not even answer, but swung the suitcases down from the rack, taking evident pride in his well-directed strength.

A touch on his shoulder made Brian turn sharply round. The person who had touched him was Joan.

‘In the King’s name!’ she said; but the laughter behind her words was forced, and there was an expression in her eyes of anxiety – the accumulated anxiety of weeks of bewildered speculation. All those queer, unhappy letters he had written from Germany – they had left her painfully uncertain what to think, how to feel, what to expect of him when he came back. In his letters, it was true, he had reproached only himself – with a violence for whose intensity she was unable to account. But to the extent that she was responsible for what had happened in the wood (and of course she was partly responsible; why not? what was so wrong with just a kiss?), she felt that the reproaches were also addressed to her. And if he reproached her, could he still love her? What did he really feel about her, about himself, about their relations to one another? It was because she simply couldn’t wait an unnecessary minute for the answer that she had come, surreptitiously, to meet him at the station.

Brian stood there speechless; he had not expected to see her so soon, and was almost dismayed at thus finding himself, without preparation, in her presence. Automatically, he held out his hand. Joan took it and pressed it in her own, hard, hard, as if hoping to force the reality of her love upon him; but even while doing so, she swayed away from him in her apprehension, her embarrassed uncertainty of what he might have become, swayed away as she would have done from a stranger.

The grace of that shy, uneasy movement touched him as poignantly as it had touched him at their first meeting. It was the grace, in spite of the embarrassment that the movement expressed, of a young tree in the wind. That was how he had thought of it then. And now it had happened again; and the beauty of the gesture was again a revelation, but more poignant than it had been the first time, because of its implication that he was once again an alien; but an alien, against whose renewed strangeness the pressure on his hand protested, almost violently.

Her face, as she looked up into his, seemed to waver; and suddenly that artificial brightness was quenched in profound apprehension.

‘Aren’t you glad to see me, Brian?’ she asked.

Her words broke a spell; he was able to smile again, able to speak. ‘G-glad?’ he repeated; and, for answer, kissed her hand. ‘But I didn’t th-think you’d be here. It almost g-gave me a fright.’

His expression reassured her. During those first seconds of silence, his still, petrified face had seemed the face of an enemy. Now, by that smile, he was transfigured, was once more the old Brian she had loved; so sensitive, so kind and good; and so beautiful in his goodness, beautiful in spite of that long, queer face, that lanky body, those loose, untidily moving limbs.

Noisily, the train started, gathered speed and was gone. The old porter walked away to fetch a barrow. They were alone at the end of the long platform.

‘I thought you didn’t love me,’ she said after a long silence.

‘But, J-joan!’ he protested. They smiled at one another; then, after a moment, he looked away. Not love her? he was thinking. But the trouble was that he loved her too much, loved her in a bad way, even though she was the best.

‘I thought you were angry with me.’

‘But why sh-should I be?’ His face was still averted.

‘You know why.’

‘I wasn’t a-angry with you.’

‘But it was my fault.’

Brian shook his head. ‘It w-wasn’t.’

‘It was,’ she insisted.

At the thought of what his sensations had been as he held her there, in the dark cleft between the rhododendron coverts, he shook his head a second time, more emphatically.

The old porter was there again with his barrow and his comments on the weather, his scraps of news and gossip. They followed him, playing for his benefit their parts as supernumerary characters in the local drama.

When they were almost at the gate, Joan laid a hand on Brian’s arm. ‘It’s all right, isn’t it?’ Their eyes met. ‘I’m allowed to be happy?’

He smiled without speaking and nodded.

In the dogcart on the way to the house he kept remembering the sudden brightening of her face in response to that voiceless gesture of his. And all he could do to repay her for so much love was to . . . He thought of the rhododendron coverts again and was overcome with shame.

When she learned from Brian that Joan had been at the station, Mrs Foxe felt a sharp pang of resentment. By what right? Before his own mother . . . And besides, what bad faith! For Joan had accepted her invitation to come to lunch the day after Brian’s return. Which meant that she had tacitly admitted Mrs Foxe’s exclusive right to him on the day itself. But here she was, stealing surreptitiously to the station to catch him as he stepped out of the train. It was almost dishonest.

Mrs Foxe’s passion of indignant jealousy lasted only a few seconds; its very intensity accelerated her recognition of its wrongness, its unworthiness. No sign of what she felt had appeared on her face, and it was with a smile of amused indulgence that she listened to Brian’s vaguely stammered account of the meeting. Then, with a strong effort of the will, she not only shut off the expression of her emotion, but even excluded the emotion itself from her consciousness. All that, as it seemed, an impersonal regard for right conduct justified her in still feeling was a certain regretful disapproval of Joan’s – how should she put it? – disingenuousness. For the girl to have stolen that march upon her was not quite right.

Not quite right; but still very understandable, she now went on to reflect, very excusable. When one’s in love . . . And Joan’s was an impulsive, emotional character. Which had its fortunate side, Mrs Foxe reflected. The impulses were as strong towards right as towards wrong. If one could canalize that deep and powerful stream of life within her, if one could make the right appeal to what was best in her, if one could confirm her in those fine and generous aspirations of hers – why, she would be a splendid person. Splendid, Mrs Foxe insisted to herself.

‘Well,’ she said next day, when Joan came over to lunch, ‘I hear you caught our migrant on the wing before he’d even had time to settle.’ The tone was playful, there was a charming smile on Mrs Foxe’s face. But Joan blushed guiltily.

‘You didn’t mind, did you?’ she asked.

‘Mind?’ Mrs Foxe repeated. ‘But, my dear, why should I? I only thought we’d agreed on today. But, of course, if you felt you absolutely couldn’t wait . . .’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Joan. But something that was almost hatred mounted hot within her.

Mrs Foxe laid her hand affectionately on the girl’s shoulder. ‘Let’s stroll out into the garden,’ she suggested, ‘and see if Brian’s anywhere about.’

CHAPTER XX

December 8th 1926

TIPTOEING OUT OF the back drawing-room, Hugh Ledwidge had hoped to find the refreshment of a little solitude; but on the landing he was caught by Joyce and Colin. And Colin, it appeared, was tremendously keen on natives, had always been anxious to talk to a professional ethnologist about his experiences on shikar. For nearly half an hour he had to listen, while the young man poured out his illiterate nonsense about India and Uganda. An immense fatigue overwhelmed him. His one desire was to escape, to get away from this parrot house of stupid chatter, back to delicious silence and a book.

They left him, thank God, at last, and drawing a deep breath, he braced himself for the final ordeal of leave-taking. That saying good-bye at the end of an evening was one of the things Hugh most intensely disliked. To have to expose yourself yet once more to personal contact, to be compelled, weary as you were and thirsty for solitude, to grin again and gibber and make yet another effort of hypocrisy – how odious that could be! Particularly with Mary Amberley. There were evenings when the woman simply wouldn’t allow you to say good-bye, but clung to you desperately, as though she were drowning. Questions, confidences, scabrous discussions of people’s love-affairs – anything to keep you a few minutes longer. She seemed to regard each successive departure of a guest as the death of a fragment of her own being. His heart sank as he made his way across the room towards her. ‘Damned woman!’ he thought, and positively hated her; hated her, as well as for all the other reasons, because Helen was still dancing with that groom; and now with a fresh access of malevolence, because, as he suddenly perceived through the mists of his dim sight, Staithes and that man Beavis were sitting with her. All his insane thoughts about the plot came rushing back into his mind. They had been talking about him, him and the fire-escape, him on the football field, him when they threw the slippers over the partition of his cubicle. For a moment, he thought of turning back and slipping out of the house without a word. But they had seen him coming, they would suspect the reason of his flight, they would laugh all the louder. His common sense returned to him, it was all nonsense, there was no plot. How could there be a plot? And even if Beavis did remember, what reason had he to talk? But all the same, all the same . . . Squaring his narrow shoulders, Hugh Ledwidge marched resolutely towards the anticipated ambush.

To his immense relief, Mary Amberley let him go almost without a protest. ‘Must you be off, Hugh? So soon?’ That was all. She seemed to be absent, thinking of something else.

Beppo fizzled amiably; Staithes merely nodded; and now it was Beavis’s turn. Was that smile of his what it seemed to be – just vaguely and conventionally friendly? Or did it carry hidden significances, did it secretly imply derisive reminders of those past shames? Hugh turned and hurried away. Why on earth, he wondered, did one ever go to these idiotic parties? Kept on going, what was more, again and again, when one knew it was all utterly pointless and boring . . .

Mark Staithes turned to Anthony. ‘You realize who that is?’ he asked.

‘Who? Ledwidge? Is he anyone special?’

Staithes explained.

‘Goggler!’ Anthony laughed. ‘Why, of course. Poor Goggler! How fiendish we were to him!’

‘That’s why I’ve always pretended I didn’t know who he was,’ said Staithes, and smiled an anatomical smile of pity and contempt. ‘I think it would be charitable,’ he added, ‘if you did the same.’ Protecting Hugh Ledwidge gave him genuine pleasure.

Utterly pointless and boring – yes, and humiliating, Hugh was thinking, humiliating as well. For there was always some humiliation. A Beavis smiling; a Gerry Watchett, like an insolent groom . . .

There was a hurrying of feet on the stairs behind him. ‘Hugh! Hugh!’ He started almost guiltily and turned round. ‘Why were you slinking away without saying good-night to me?’

Essaying a joke, ‘You seemed so busy,’ he began, twinkling up at Helen through his spectacles; then fell silent in sudden astonishment, almost in awe.

She was standing there, three steps above him, one hand on the banister, the fingers of the other splayed out against the opposite wall, leaning forward as though on the brink of flight. But what had happened to her, what miracle? The flushed face that hung over him seemed to shine with an inward illumination. This was not Helen, but some supernatural creature. In the presence of such unearthly beauty, he blushed for the ignoble irrelevance of his waggery, his knowing look.

‘Busy?’ she echoed. ‘But I was only dancing.’ And it was as though some ingenuous and unconscious Moses had said to his bedazzled Israelites: ‘I was only talking to Jehovah.’ ‘You had no excuse,’ she went on. Then quickly, as though a new and curious idea had suddenly occurred to her, ‘Or were you cross with me for some reason?’ she added in another tone.

He began by shaking his head; but felt impelled, on second thoughts, to try to explain a little. ‘Not cross,’ he distinguished, ‘just . . . just a bit unsociable.’

The light behind her face seemed to leap up in a quivering rush of intenser flame. Unsociable! That was really too exquisitely funny! The dancing had made her perfect, had transformed earth into heaven. At the idea that one could be (preposterous word!) unsociable, that one could feel anything but an overflowing love for everyone and everything, she could only laugh.

‘You are funny, Hugh!’

‘I’m glad you think so.’ His tone was offended. He had turned away his head.

The silk of her dress rustled sharply; a little gust of perfume was cool on his cheek – and she was standing only one step above him, very close. ‘You’re not hurt because I said you were funny?’ she asked.

He lifted his eyes again and found her face on a level with his own. Mollified by that expression of genuine solicitude he shook his head.

‘I didn’t mean funny in the horrid way,’ she explained. ‘I meant . . . well, you know: nicely funny. Funny, but a darling.’

In threateningly personal circumstances, a well-timed foolery is a sure defence. Smiling, Hugh raised his right hand to his heart. ‘Je suis pénétré de reconnaissance,’ was what he was going to say by way of acknowledgment for that ‘darling.’ The courtly jape, the mock-heroic gesture were his immediate and automatic reaction to her words. ‘Je suis pénétré . . .’

But Helen gave him no time to take cover behind his dixhuitième waggery. For she followed up her words by laying her two hands on his shoulders and kissing him on the mouth.

For a moment he was almost annihilated with surprise and confusion and a kind of suffocating, chaotic joy.

Helen drew back a little and looked at him. He had gone very pale – looked as though he had seen a ghost. She smiled – for he was funnier than ever – then bent forward and kissed him again.

The first time she had kissed him, it had been out of the fullness of the life that was in her, because she was made perfect in a perfect world. But his scared face was so absurdly comic that the sight of it somehow transformed this fullness of perfect life into a kind of mischievous wantonness. The second time she kissed him, it was for fun; for fun and, at the same time, out of curiosity. It was an experiment, made in a spirit of hilarious scientific enquiry. She was a vivisector – licensed by perfection, justified by happiness. Besides, Hugh had an extraordinarily nice mouth. She had never kissed such full soft lips before; the experience had been startlingly pleasurable. It was not only that she wanted to see, scientifically, what the absurd creature would do next; she also wanted to feel once more that cool resilience against her mouth, to experience that strange creeping of pleasure that tingled out from her lips and ran, quick and almost unbearable, like moths, along the surface of her body.

‘You were so sweet to take all that trouble,’ she said by way of justification for the second kiss. The moths had crept again, deliciously, had settled with an electric tremor of vibrating wings on her breasts. ‘All that trouble about my education.’

But ‘Helen!’ was all that he could whisper; and, before he had time to think, he had put his arms about her and kissed her.

His mouth, for the third time; and those hurrying moths along the skin . . . But, oh, how quickly he drew away!

‘Helen!’ he repeated.

They looked at one another; and now that he had had the time to think, Hugh found himself all of a sudden horribly embarrassed. His hands dropped furtively from her body. He didn’t know what to say to her – or, rather, knew, but couldn’t bring himself to say it. His heart was beating with a painful violence. ‘I love you, I want you,’ he was crying, he was positively shouting, from behind his embarrassed silence. But no word was uttered. He smiled at her rather foolishly, and dropped his eyes – the eyes, he now reflected, that must look so hideous, like a fish’s eyes, through the thick lenses of his spectacles.

‘How funny he is,’ Helen thought. But her scientific laughter had died down. His shyness was infectious. To put an end to the uncomfortable situation, ‘I shall read all those books,’ she said. ‘And that reminds me, you must give me the list.’

Grateful to her for supplying him with a subject about which it was possible to talk, he looked up at her again – for a moment only, because of those fish-eyes, goggling. ‘I’ll fill in the gaps and send it you,’ he said. Then, after a second or two, he realized that in his improvidence he had exhausted the preciously impersonal topic of the books in a single sentence. The silence persisted, distressingly; and at last, in despair, because there was nothing else to say, he decided to say goodnight. Trying to charge his voice with an infinity of loving significance, ‘Good-night, Helen,’ he said. The words were intended to be as eloquent as a whole speech. But would she hear the eloquence, would she understand the depths of his implied meaning? He bent forward and kissed her again, quickly, very lightly, a kiss of tenderly respectful devotion.

But he had not reckoned with Helen. The embarrassment that had momentarily clouded her wanton perfection had evaporated at the touch of his lips; she was once more the laughing vivisector.

‘Kiss me again, Hugh,’ she said. And when he obeyed, she would not let him go; but kept his mouth pressed to hers, second after second . . .

The noises of voices and music became suddenly louder; somebody had opened the drawing-room door.

‘Good-night, Hugh,’ she whispered against his lips; then loosed her hold and ran up the stairs two at a time.

Looking after her, as she ran out of the room to say good-night to old Ledwidge, Gerry had smiled to himself complacently. Pink in the face; with shining eyes. As though she’d drunk a bottle of champagne. Absolutely buffy with the dancing. It was fun when they lost their heads like that; lost them so enthusiastically, so ungrudgingly, so completely. Not keeping anything back, but chucking it all out of the window, so to speak. Most girls were so damned avaricious and calculating. They’d only lose half their heads and carefully keep the other half to play the outraged virgin with. Mean little bitches! But with Helen you felt that the engine was all out. She stepped on the gas and didn’t care what was in the way. He liked that sort of thing, and liked it not only because he hoped to profit by the lost head, but also disinterestedly, because he couldn’t help admiring people who let themselves go and didn’t care two hoots about the consequences. There was something fine and generous and spirited about such people. He was like that himself, when he could afford it. Guts: that was what she’d got. And the makings of a temperament, he was thinking with an inward satisfaction, when a touch on his arm from behind him made him suddenly start. His surprise turned almost instantaneously to anger. There was nothing he hated more than to be taken unawares, off his guard. He turned sharply round and, seeing that the person who had touched him was Mary Amberley, tried to readjust his face. Vainly; the hard resentful eyes belied his smile.

But Mary was herself too angry to notice the signs of his annoyance. ‘I want to talk to you, Gerry,’ she said in a low voice that she tried to keep level and unemotional, but that trembled in spite of all her efforts.

‘Christ!’ he thought; ‘a scene,’ and felt angrier than ever with the tiresome woman. ‘Talk away,’ he said aloud; and, with an offensive air of detachment, he took out his cigarette-case, opened and proffered it.

‘Not here,’ she said.

Gerry pretended not to understand her. ‘Sorry. I thought you didn’t mind people smoking here.’

‘Fool!’ Her anger broke out with sudden violence. Then, catching him by the sleeve, ‘Come!’ she commanded, and almost dragged him to the door.

Running upstairs, Helen was in time to see her mother and Gerry mounting from the drawing-room landing towards the higher floors of the tall house. ‘I shall have to find somebody else to dance with,’ was all she thought; and a moment later she had found little Peter Quinn and was gliding away once more into paradise.

‘Talk of floaters!’ said Anthony as their hostess left the room with Gerry Watchett. ‘I didn’t realize that Gerry was the present incumbent . . .’

Beppo nodded. ‘Poor Mary!’ he sighed.

‘On the contrary,’ said Staithes, ‘rich Mary! She’ll be poor later.’

‘And nothing can be done about it?’ asked Anthony.

‘She’d hate you if you tried.’

Anthony shook his head. ‘These dismal compulsions! Like cuckoos in August. Like stags in October.’

‘She showed symptoms of having a compulsion about me,’ said Staithes. ‘Just after I first met her, it was. But I soon cured her of that. And then that ruffian Watchett turned up.’

‘Fascinating, the way these aristocrats can behave!’ Anthony’s tone was one of scientific enthusiasm.

Staithes’s flayed face twisted itself into a grimace of contempt. ‘Just a coarse, vulgar gangster,’ he said. ‘How on earth you ever put up with him at Oxford, I simply cannot imagine.’ In fact, of course, he was busily imagining that Anthony had done it out of mere ignoble toadyism.

‘Just snobbery,’ said Anthony, depriving the other of half his pleasure by the easy confession. ‘But, then, I insist, people like Gerry are an essential part of any liberal education. There was something really rather magnificent about him when he was rich. A certain detached and disinterested recklessness. Now . . .’ He raised his hand and let it fall again. ‘Just a gangster – you’re quite right. But that’s the fascinating thing – the ease with which aristocrats turn into gangsters. Very comprehensible, when you come to think of it. Here’s a man brought up to believe that he had a divine right to the best of everything. And so long as he gets his rights it’s all noblesse oblige and honour and all the rest of it. Inextricably mixed up with insolence, of course; but genuinely there. Now, take away his income; the oddest things are liable to happen. Providence intended you to have the best of everything; therefore intended you to have the means for procuring the best of everything; therefore, when the means don’t come to you legitimately, justifies you in getting them illegitimately. In the past, our Gerry could have gone in for banditry or simony. He’d have made an admirable condottiere, an almost perfect cardinal. But nowadays the Church and the army are too respectable, too professional. They’ve no place for amateurs. The impoverished nobleman finds himself driven into business. Selling cars. Touting stocks and shares. Promoting dubious companies. To the accompaniment, of course, if he’s presentable, of a judicious prostitution of his body. If he has the luck to be born with a gift of the gab, he can make a good living out of the politer forms of blackmail and sycophancy – as a gossip writer. Noblesse oblige; but so does poverty. And when they both oblige simultaneously – well, we of the middle classes had better start counting the silver. Instead of which . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Poor Mary!’

Upstairs, in the bedroom, the torrent of Mary’s reproaches and abuse streamed on, unceasingly. Gerry did not even look at her. Averted, he seemed absorbed in the contemplation of the Pascin hanging over the mantelpiece. The painting showed two women lying foreshortened on a bed, naked.

‘I like this picture,’ he said with deliberate irrelevance, when Mrs Amberley had paused for breath. ‘You can see that the man who painted it had just finished making love to those girls. Both of them. At the same time,’ he added.

Mary Amberley went very pale; her lips trembled, her nostrils fluttered as though with a separate and uncontrollable life of their own.

‘You haven’t even been listening to me,’ she cried. ‘Oh, you’re awful, you’re horrible!’ The torrent began to flow again, more vehemently than ever.

Still turning his back to her, Gerry went on looking at the Pascin nudes; then at last, blowing out a final cloud of tobacco-smoke, he threw the stump of his cigarette into the fireplace and turned round.

‘When you’ve quite done,’ he said in a tired voice, ‘we may as well go to bed.’ And after a little pause, while, unable to speak, she glared furiously in his face, ‘Seeing that that’s what you really want,’ he added, and, smiling ironically, advanced across the room towards her. When he was quite near her, he halted and held out his hands invitingly. They were large hands, immaculately kept, but coarse, insensitive, brutal. ‘Hideous hands,’ Mary thought as she looked at them, ‘odious hands!’ All the more odious now, because it was by their very ugliness and brutality that she had first been attracted, was even at this very moment being attracted, shamefully, in spite of all the reasons she had for hating him. ‘Well, aren’t you coming?’ he asked in the same bored, derisive tone.

For answer, she hit out at his face. But he was too quick for her, caught the flying hand in mid-air and, when she tried to bring the other into play, caught that too. She was helpless in his grasp.

Still smiling down at her, and without a word, he pushed her backwards, step by step, towards the bed.

‘Beast!’ she kept repeating, ‘beast!’ and struggled, vainly, and found obscure pleasure in her helplessness. He pushed her against the end of the low divan, further and further, inexorably, and at last she lost her balance and fell back across the counterpane – (fell back, while, with one knee on the edge of the bed, he bent over her, still smiling the same derisive smile). ‘Beast, beast!’ But in fact, as she secretly admitted to herself – and the consciousness was intoxicating in its shamefulness – in fact, she really wanted to be treated as he was treating her – like a prostitute, like an animal; and in her own house, what was more, with her guests all waiting for her, and the door unlocked, and her daughters wondering where she was, perhaps at this very moment coming up the stairs to look for her. Yes, she really wanted it. Still struggling, she gave herself up to the knowledge, to the direct physical intuition that this intolerable degradation was the accomplishment of an old desire, was a revelation marvellous as well as horrible, was the Apocalypse, the whole Apocalypse at once, angel and beast, plague, lamb and whore in a single divine, revolting, overwhelming experience . . .

‘Civilization and sexuality,’ Anthony was saying: ‘there’s a definite correlation. The higher the one, the intenser the other.’

‘My word,’ said Beppo, fizzling with pleasure, ‘we must be civilized!’

‘Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit. And this in a safe urban world, where there are no risks, no physical fatigues. In a town like this, for example, one can live for years at a time without being made aware that there’s such a thing as nature. Everything’s man-made and punctual and convenient. But people can have too much of convenience; they want excitement, they want risks and surprises. Where are they going to find them under our dispensation? In money-making, in politics, in occasional war, in sport, and finally in sex. But most people can’t be speculators or active politicians; and war’s getting to be too much of a good thing; and the more elaborate and dangerous sports are only for the rich. So that sex is all that’s left. As material civilization rises, the intensity and importance of sexuality also rises. Must rise, inevitably. And since at the same time food and literature have increased the amount of available appetite . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, you see!’

Beppo was charmed. ‘You explain it all,’ he cried. ‘Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.’ He felt, delightedly, that Anthony’s argument gave, not only absolution, but also a plenary indulgence – to everyone (for Beppo unselfishly wanted everyone to be as happy as he was) and for everything, everything, from the ravishing barmen at Toulon to those top-booted tarts (so definitely not for him) on the Kurfürstendamm.

Staithes said nothing. If social progress, he was thinking, just meant greater piggishness for more people, why then – then, what?

‘Do you remember that remark of Dr Johnson’s?’ Anthony began again with a note of elation in his voice. It had suddenly come to him, an unexpected gift from his memory to his discursive reason – come to enrich the pattern of his thinking, to fill out his argument and extend its scope. His voice reflected the sudden triumphant pleasure that he felt. ‘How does it go? “A man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is making money.” Something like that. Admirable!’ He laughed aloud. ‘The innocence of those who grind the faces of the poor, but refrain from pinching the bottoms of their neighbours’ wives! The innocence of Ford, the innocence of Rockefeller! The nineteenth century was the Age of Innocence – that sort of innocence. With the result that we’re now almost ready to say that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making love.’

There was a silence. Staithes looked at his watch. ‘Time one was getting out of here,’ he said. ‘But the problem,’ he added, turning round in his chair to scan the room, ‘the problem is one’s hostess.’

They got up, and while Beppo hurried off to greet a couple of young acquaintances on the other side of the room, Staithes and Anthony made their way to the door.

‘The problem,’ Staithes kept repeating, ‘the problem . . .’

On the landing, however, they met Mrs Amberley and Gerry coming down the stairs.

‘We were looking for you,’ said Anthony. ‘To say good-night.’

‘So soon?’ cried Mary with a sudden access of anxiety.

But they were firm. A couple of minutes later the three of them, Staithes, Gerry Watchett and Anthony, were walking up the street together.

It was Gerry who broke the silence. ‘These old hags,’ he said in a tone of meditative rancour, and shook his head. Then more cheerfully, ‘What about a game of poker?’ he suggested. But Anthony didn’t know how, and Mark Staithes didn’t desire, to play poker; he had to go off alone in search of more congenial company.

‘Good riddance,’ said Mark. ‘And now what about coming to my rooms for an hour?’

It was the most important thing, Hugh Ledwidge felt as he walked home, the most important and also the most extraordinary, most incredible thing that had ever happened to him. So beautiful, so young. ‘Fashioned so slenderly.’ (If only she had thrown herself into the Thames and he had rescued her! ‘Helen! My poor child!’ And, ‘Hugh!’ she would have murmured gratefully. ‘Hugh . . .’) But even without the suicide it had been astonishing enough. Her mouth against his. Oh, why hadn’t he shown more courage, more presence of mind? All the things he might have said to her, the gestures he ought to have made! And yet, in a certain sense, it was better that he should have behaved as he did – stupidly, timidly, ineptly. Better, because it proved more conclusively that she cared for him; because it gave a higher value to her action, so young, so pure – and yet spontaneously, under no compulsion of his, in the teeth, indeed, of what had almost been his resistance, she had stepped down, had laid her hands on his shoulders, had kissed him. Kissed him in spite of everything, he repeated to himself with a kind of astonished triumph that mingled strangely with his sense of shame, his conviction of weakness and futility; in spite of everything. Non più andrai, he hummed to himself as he walked along; then, as though the dank London night were a morning on the downs in spring, broke out into unequivocal singing.

Delle belle turbando il riposo,

Narcissetto, Adoncino d’ amor . . .

At home, he sat down at once to his desk and began to write to her.

‘Helen, Helen . . . If I repeat the syllables too often, they lose their sense, become just a noise in my silent room – terrifying in their meaninglessness. But if I say the name just two or three times, very softly, how rich it becomes, how full! Charged with echoes and reminders. Not so much, for me, of the original Greek Helen. I can’t feel that she was ever anything but a mature woman – never anything but married to Menelaus and eloping with Paris. Never really young, as you are – exquisitely, exquisitely, like a flower. No, it’s more Poe’s Helen I catch sight of through the name. The beauty that carries the traveller back to his own native shore – takes him home. Not to the obvious, worldly home of the passions. No; to that further, rarer, lovelier home, beyond and above them. Beyond and above; and yet implying, yet including, even while transcending, the passions . . .’

It was a long letter; but he was in time, running out, to catch the midnight post. The sense of triumph with which he returned this second time was almost unalloyed. Momentarily, he had forgotten his shyness, his humiliating cowardice; he remembered only that consciousness of soaring power that had filled him while he wrote his letter. Exalted above his ordinary self, he forgot, when undressing, to put his truss away in the chest of drawers, so that Mrs Brinton shouldn’t see it when she came in with his early tea in the morning. In bed, he lay for a long time thinking tenderly, paternally, poetically, thinking at the same time with desire, but a desire so lingeringly gentle that lasciviousness assumed the quality of prayer, thinking of Helen’s exquisite youthfulness, fashioned so slenderly, and her innocence, her slender innocence, and those unexpected, those extraordinary kisses.

CHAPTER XXI

August 31st 1933

HELEN RANG THE bell, then listened. In the silence behind the closed door, nothing stirred. She had come straight from the station after a night in the train; it was not yet ten; her mother would still be asleep. She rang again; then, after a pause, once more. Heavily asleep – unless, of course, she had stayed out all night. Where? And with whom? Remembering that horrible Russian she had met at her mother’s flat the last time she was in Paris, Helen frowned. She rang a fourth time, a fifth. From within the apartment there was suddenly an answering sound of movement. Helen sighed, partly with relief that her mother had only been asleep, partly in apprehension of what the coming minutes or hours held in store. The door opened at last, opened on a twilight that smelt of cats and ether and stale food; and there, in dirty pink pyjamas, her dyed orange hair dishevelled, and still blinking, still strangely swollen with sleep, stood her mother. For a second the face was a mask, bloated and middle-aged, of stupefied incomprehension; then, in a flash, it came back to life, almost back to youth, with a sudden smile of genuine delight.

‘But what fun!’ cried Mrs Amberley. ‘Darling, I’m so glad.’

If she hadn’t known – by how bitter an experience! – that this mood of gaiety and affectionateness would inevitably be followed by, at the best, a spiteful despondency, at the worst, by a fit of insanely violent anger, Helen would have been touched by the warmth of her mother’s greeting. As it was, she merely suffered herself to be kissed and, her face still set and stony, stepped across the threshold into the horribly familiar nightmare of her mother’s life.

This time, she found, the nightmare had a comic element.

‘It’s all because of that beastly old femme de ménage,’ Mrs Amberley explained as they stood there in the smelly little lobby. ‘She was stealing my stockings. So I had to lock the bedroom door when I went out. And then somehow I lost the key. You know what I am,’ she added complacently, boasting by force of habit of that absent-mindedness of which she had always been so proud. ‘Hopeless, I’m afraid.’ She shook her head and smiled that crooked little smile of hers, conspiratorially. ‘When I got home, I had to smash that panel.’ She pointed to the oblong aperture in the lower half of the door. ‘You should have seen me, banging away with the flat-iron!’ Her voice was richly vibrant with laughter. ‘Luckily it was like matchwood. Cheap and nasty to a degree. Like everything in this beastly place.’

‘And you crawled through?’ Helen asked.

‘Like this,’ And going down on her hands and knees, Mrs Amberley pushed her head through the hole, turned sideways so as to admit an arm and shoulder, then, with surprising agility, pulled and pushed with a hand beyond and feet on the hither side of the door, till only her legs remained in the lobby. First one, then the other, the legs were withdrawn, and an instant later, as though from a dog-kennel, Mrs Amberley’s face emerged, a little flushed, through the aperture.

‘You see,’ she said. ‘It’s as easy as winking. And the beauty of it is that old Madame Roget’s much too fat. No possible chance of her getting through. I don’t have to worry about my stockings any more.’

‘Do you mean to say she never goes into your bedroom?’

Mrs Amberley shook her head. ‘Not since I lost the key; and that was three weeks ago, at least.’ Her tone was one of triumph.

‘But who makes the bed and does the cleaning?’

‘Well . . .’ There was a moment’s hesitation. ‘Why, I do, of course,’ the other replied a little irritably.

‘You?’

‘Why not?’ From her kennel door, Mrs Amberley looked up almost defiantly into her daughter’s face. There was a long silence; then, simultaneously, both of them burst out laughing.

Still smiling, ‘Let’s have a look,’ said Helen, and went down on all fours. The stony face had softened into life; she felt an inward warmth. Her mother had been so absurd, peering up like that out of her kennel, so childishly ridiculous, that suddenly she was able to love her again. To love her while she laughed at her, just because she could laugh at her.

Mrs Amberley withdrew her head. ‘Of course it is a bit untidy,’ she admitted rather anxiously, as Helen wriggled through the hole in the door. Still kneeling, she pushed some dirty linen and the remains of yesterday’s lunch under the bed.

On her feet again, inside the bedroom, Helen looked round. It was filthier even than she had expected – much filthier. She made an effort to go on smiling; but the muscles of her face refused to obey her.

Three days later Helen was on her way back to London. Opening the English newspaper she had bought at the Gare du Nord, she read, with an equal absence of interest, about the depression, the test match, the Nazis, the New Deal. Sighing, she turned the page. Printed very large, the words, ‘An Exquisite First Novel,’ caught her eye. And below, in small letters, ‘The Invisible Lover. By Hugh Ledwidge. Reviewed by Catesby Rudge.’ Helen folded back the page to make it more manageable and read with an intense and fixed attention.

‘Just another book, I thought, like all the rest. And I was on the point of throwing it aside, unread. But luckily something – some mystic intuition, I suppose – made me change my mind. I opened the book. I turned over the pages, glancing at a sentence here and there. And the sentences I found, were gems – jewels of wrought crystal. I decided to read the book. That was at nine in the evening. And at midnight I was still reading, spellbound. It was nearly two before I got to bed – my mind in a whirl of enthusiasm for this masterpiece I had just read.

‘How shall I describe the book to you? I might call it a fantasy. And as far as it goes, that description holds good. The Invisible Lover is a fantasy. But a fantasy that is poignant as well as airy; profound as well as intriguing and light; fraught with tears as well as with smiles at once subtly humorous and of a high, Galahad-like spirituality. It is full of broken-hearted fun, and its laughter is dewy with tears. And throughout runs a vein of naïve and child-like purity, infinitely refreshing in a world full of Freudians and sex-novelists and all their wearisome ilk. This fantasy of the invisible but ever present, ever watchful, ever adoring lover and his child-beloved has an almost celestial innocence. If I wanted to describe the book in a single phrase, I should say that it was the story of Dante and Beatrice told by Hans Andersen . . .’

Falling into her memories of Hugh’s few ignominious attempts to make love to her, the words produced in Helen’s mind a kind of violent chemical reaction. She burst out laughing; and since the ridiculous phrase went echoing on, since the grotesque memories kept renewing themselves with ever heightened intensity and in ever fuller, more painfully squalid detail, the laughter continued, irrepressibly. The story of Dante and Beatrice told by Hans Andersen! Tears of hysterical merriment ran down her cheeks; she was breathless, and the muscles of her throat were contracted in a kind of agonizing cramp. But still she went on laughing – was utterly unable to stop; it was as though she were possessed by a demon. Luckily, she was alone in the compartment. People would have taken her for a madwoman.

In the cab, on the way to Hugh’s flat – her flat too, in spite of Dante and Beatrice and Hans Andersen – she wondered whether he’d have gone to bed already, and just how upset he’d be to see her. She hadn’t warned him of her arrival; he would be unprepared to receive her, unbraced against the shock of her grossly physical presence. Poor old Hugh! she thought with a derisive pity. Enjoying his private and invisible fun, like Dante with his phantom, and then having to suffer the trampling intrusion of Signora Alighieri! But tonight, she realized, as she stood at last before the door of the flat, looking in her bag for the latch-key, that invisible solitude of his had already been invaded. Somebody was playing the piano; there was a sound of laughter and voices. Hugh must be having a party. And all at once Helen saw herself making a dramatic entrance, like Banquo’s ghost, and was delighted by the vision. The reading of that article had momentarily transposed her entire being into the key of laughter. Everything was a vast, extravagant, savage joke – or if it wasn’t already, should be made so. It was with a tingling sense of excited anticipation that she opened the door and silently slipped into the hall. An assortment of strange hats hung on the pegs, lay on the chairs – a couple of rich hats, she noticed, very new and shapely, and the rest deformed, and ancient; hats, one could see, of the intellectual poor. There were some letters on the marble-topped table; she bent down by mere force of habit to look at them, and found that one was addressed to her – from Anthony, she recognized; and that too was a joke. Did he seriously imagine that she would read his letters? Enormous ass! She popped the envelope unopened into her bag, then tiptoed along the passage to her room. How tidy it was! How dead! Like a family vault under dust-sheets. She took off her coat and hat, washed, combed her hair, made up her face, then, as silently as she had come, crept back to the hall and stood at the door of the sitting-room, trying to guess by the sound of their voices who were the guests. Beppo Bowles, for one; that giggle, those squeaks and fizzlings were unmistakable. And Mark Staithes. And then a voice she wasn’t sure of, and another, very soft and confidential, that must be old Croyland’s. And who was that ridiculous foreigner who spoke so slowly and ponderously, all on one note? She stood there at the door for a long minute, then very gently turned the handle, drew the door gradually open, and without a sound edged into the room. Nobody had noticed her. Mark Staithes was seated at the piano, with Beppo, a Beppo fatter than ever, she noticed, and balder and more nervously agitated, and – yes, beard and all! – old Croyland, standing one on either side of him, leaning on the instrument and looking down at him while he spoke. Hugh was on the sofa near the fireplace, with the owner of the voice she hadn’t recognized, but who turned out to be Caldwell, the publisher – the publisher, of course, of The Invisible Lover, she reflected, and had a difficulty in checking another uprush of mirth. With them was a young man she had never seen before – a young man with very pale flaxen hair and a ruddy open face that wore at the moment an expression of almost child-like seriousness. His, it was evident, had been the foreign accent – German, she supposed.

But now the moment had come.

‘Good-evening,’ she called, and stepped forward.

They were all startled; but as for poor Hugh – he jumped as though someone had fired a cannon in his ear. And after the first fright, what an expression of appalled dismay! Irresistibly comic!

‘Well, Hugh,’ she said.

He looked up into her laughing face, unable to speak. Ever since the first laudatory notices of his book had begun to come in, he had been feeling so strong, so blissfully secure. And now here was Helen – come to humiliate him, come to bear shameful witness against him.

‘I didn’t expect,’ he managed to mumble incoherently. ‘I mean, why did you . . .?’

But Caldwell, who had a reputation for after-dinner speaking to keep up, interrupted him. Raising the glass he was holding, ‘To the Muse,’ he called out. ‘The Muse and also – I don’t think it’s an indiscretion if I say so – also the heroine of our masterpiece.’ Charmed by the felicity of his own phrasing, he beamed at Helen; then, turning to Hugh with a gesture of affectionate proprietorship, he patted him on the shoulder. ‘You must drink too, old man. It’s not a compliment to you – not this time.’ And he uttered a rich chuckle.

Hugh did as he was told and, averting his eyes, took a gulp of whisky-and-soda.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ cried Helen. The laughter was seething within her, like water in a kettle. She gave one hand to Caldwell and the other to Hugh. ‘I can’t tell you how thrilled I was,’ she went on. ‘Dante and Beatrice by Hans Andersen – it sounds too delicious.’

Blushing, Hugh tried to protest. ‘That frightful article . . .’

Cutting him short, ‘But why did you keep it up your sleeve?’ she asked.

Yes why, why? Hugh was thinking; and that he had been mad to publish the book without first showing it to Helen. He had always wanted to show it to her – and always, at the last moment, found the task too difficult, too embarrassing. But the desire to publish had remained with him, had grown stronger, until at last, senselessly, he had taken the manuscript to Caldwell and, after its acceptance, arranged with him that it should appear while Helen was out of the country. As though that would prevent her knowing anything about it! Madness, madness! And the proof that he had been mad was her presence here tonight, with that strange wild smile on her face, that brightness in the eyes. An uncalculating recklessness was one of the child-beloved’s most characteristic and engaging traits; she was a celestial enfant terrible. But in the real Helen this recklessness seemed almost fiendish. She was capable of doing anything, absolutely anything.

‘Why did you?’ she insisted.

He made a vague apologetic noise.

‘You ought to have told me you were Dante Andersen. I’d have tried to live up to you. Beatrice and the Little Match Girl rolled into one. Good-evening, Beppo! And Mark!’ They had come over from the piano to greet her. ‘And, Mr Croyland, how are you?’

Mr Croyland gave a perfect performance of an old gentleman greeting a lovely young woman – benevolently, yet with a touch of playfulness, an attenuated echo of gallantry.

‘Such an unexpected enchantment,’ he breathed in the soft, deliberately ecstatic voice he ordinarily reserved for describing quattrocento paintings or for addressing the celebrated or the very rich. Then, with a gesture that beautifully expressed an impulsive outburst of affection, Mr Croyland sandwiched her hand between both of his. They were very pale, soft hands, almost gruesomely small and dainty. By comparison, it seemed to Helen that her own brown hand was like a peasant’s. Mr Croyland’s silvery and prophetic beard parted in a smile that ought to have been the gracious confirmation of his words and gestures, but which, with its incongruous width and the sudden ferocity of all its large and yellowing teeth, seemed instead to deny all reality to the old gentleman’s exquisite refinement of manner. That smile belonged to the Mr Croyland who had traded so profitably in the Old Masters; the little white hands and their affectionate gestures, the soft, ecstatic voice and its heartfelt words, were the property of that other, that ethereal Croyland who only cared about Art.

Helen disengaged her hand. ‘Did you ever see those china mugs, Mr Croyland?’ she asked, ‘you who know Italy so well? The ones they sell at Montecatini for drinking the purgative waters out of? White, with an inscription in golden letters: Io son Beatrice che ti faccio andare.’

‘But what an outrage!’ Mr Croyland exclaimed, and lifted his small hands in horror.

‘But it’s the sort of joke I really enjoy. Particularly now that Beatrice is really me . . .’ Becoming aware that the flaxen-haired young man was standing at attention about a yard to the west of her, evidently trying to attract her notice, Helen interrupted herself and turned towards him, holding out her hand.

The young man took it, bowed stiffly from the waist and, saying, ‘Giesebrecht,’ firmly squeezed it.

Laughing (it was another joke), Helen answered, ‘Ledwidge’; then, as an afterthought, ‘geboren Amberley.’

Nonplussed by this unexpected gambit, the young man bowed again in silence.

Staithes intervened to explain that Ekki Giesebrecht was his discovery. A refugee from Germany. Not because of his nose, he added as (taking pity on poor old Hugh) he drew her confidentially out of the group assembled round the sofa; not because of his nose – because of his politics. Aryan, but communist – ardently and all along the line.

‘He believes that as soon as all incomes are equalized, men will stop being cruel. Also that all power will automatically find itself in the hands of the best people. And he’s absolutely convinced that nobody who obtains power will be capable of even wishing to abuse it.’ Staithes shook his head. ‘One doesn’t know whether to admire and envy, or to thank God for not having made one such an ass. And to complicate matters, he’s such a thoroughly good ass. An ass with the moral qualities of a saint. Which is why he’s such an admirable propagandist. Saintliness is almost as good as sex-appeal.’ He pulled up a chair for Helen, and himself sat down again at the piano and began to play the first few bars of Beethoven’s Für Elise; then broke off and, turning back to her, ‘The trouble’, he resumed, ‘is that nothing works. Not faith, not intelligence, not saintliness, not even villainy – nothing. Faith’s just organized and directed stupidity. It may remove a mountain or two by dint of mere obstinate butting; but it’s blinkered, it can’t see that if you move mountains, you don’t destroy them, you merely shove them from one place to another. You need intelligence to see that; but intelligence isn’t much good because people can’t feel enthusiastic about it; it’s at the mercy of the first Hitler or Mussolini that comes along – of anyone who can rouse enthusiasm for any cause however idiotic and criminal.’

Helen was looking across the room. ‘I suppose his hair’s naturally that colour?’ she said, more to herself than to her companion. Then, turning back to Staithes, ‘And what about saintliness?’ she asked.

‘Well, look at history,’ he answered.

‘I don’t know any.’

‘Of course not. But I take it that you’ve heard of someone called Jesus? And occasionally, no doubt, you read the papers? Well, put two and two together, the morning’s news and the saint, and draw your own conclusions.’

Helen nodded. ‘I’ve drawn them.’

‘If saintliness were enough to save the world,’ he went on, ‘then obviously the world would have been saved long ago. Dozens of times. But saintliness can exist without the intelligence. And though it’s attractive, it isn’t more attractive than lots of other things – good food, for example, comfort, going to bed with people, bullying, feeling superior.’

Laughing (for this also was laughable), ‘It looks,’ said Helen, ‘as if there were nothing to do but throw up everything and become an invisible lover.’ She helped herself to a sandwich and a tumbler of white wine from the tray.

The group at the other end of the room had disintegrated, and Beppo and Mr Croyland were drifting back towards the piano. Staithes smiled at them and, picking up the thread of the argument that Helen’s arrival had interrupted, ‘Alternatively,’ he said, ‘one might become an aesthete.’

‘You use the word as though it were an insult,’ Beppo protested with the emphatic peevishness that had grown upon him with age. Life was treating him badly – making him balder, making him stouter, making young men more and more reluctant to treat him as their contemporary, making sexual successes increasingly difficult of achievement, making that young German of Staithes’s behave almost rudely to him. ‘Why should one be ashamed of living for beauty?’

The thought of Beppo living for beauty – living for it with his bulging waistcoat and the tight seat of his check trousers and his bald crown and Florentine page’s curls – almost made Helen choke over her wine.

From the depths of his armchair, ‘“Glory be to God for dappled things,”’ murmured Mr Croyland. ‘I’ve been re-reading Father Hopkins lately. So poignant! Like a dagger. “What lovely behaviour of silk-sack clouds!”’ He sighed, he pensively shook his head. ‘They’re among the things that wound one with their loveliness. Wound and yet sustain, make life liveable.’

There was cathedral silence.

Then, making an effort to keep the laughter out of her voice, ‘Be an angel, Beppo,’ said Helen, ‘and give me some more of that hock.’

Mr Croyland sat remote, behind half-closed eyelids, the inhabitant of a higher universe.

When the clinking of the glasses had subsided, ‘“Ripeness is all,”’ he quoted. ‘“That sober certainty of waking bliss.” Waking,’ he insisted. ‘Piercingly conscious. And then, of course, there are pictures – the Watteaus at Dresden, and Bellini’s Transfiguration, and those Raphael portraits at the Pitti. Buttresses to shore up the soul. And certain philosophies, too. Zarathustra, the Symposium.’ He waved his little hand. ‘One would be lost without them – lost!’

‘And, with them, I take it, you’re saved?’ said Mark from his seat at the piano; and, without waiting for an answer, ‘I wish I were,’ he went on. ‘But there seems to be so little substance in it all. Even in the little that’s intrinsically substantial. For of course most thinking has never been anything but silly. And as for art, as for literature – well, look at the museums and the libraries. Look at them! Ninety-nine per cent, of nonsense and mere rubbish.’

‘But the Greeks,’ Mr Croyland protested, ‘the Florentines, the Chinese . . .’ He sketched in the air an exquisitely graceful gesture, as though he were running his fingers over the flanks of a Sung jar, round the cup-shaped navel of a High Renaissance water-nymph. Subtly, with what was meant to be the expression of a Luini Madonna, he smiled; but always, through the opening fur, his large yellow teeth showed ferociously, rapaciously – even when he talked about the Schifanoia frescoes, even when he whispered, as though it were an Orphic secret, the name of Vermeer of Delft.

But nonsense, Staithes insisted, almost invariably nonsense and rubbish. And most of what wasn’t nonsense or rubbish was only just ordinarily good. ‘Like what you or I could do with a little practice,’ he explained. ‘And if one knows oneself – the miserable inept little self that can yet accomplish such feats – well, really, one can’t be bothered to take the feats very seriously.’

Mr Croyland, it was evident from his frown, didn’t think of his own self in quite this spirit.

‘Not but what one can enjoy the stuff for all kinds of irrelevant reasons,’ Staithes admitted. ‘For its ingenuity, for example, if one’s in any way a technician or an interpreter. Steady progressions in the bass, for example, while the right hand is modulating apparently at random. Invariably delightful! But then, so’s carpentry. No; ultimately it isn’t interesting, that ordinarily good stuff. However great the accomplishment or the talent. Ultimately it’s without value; it differs from the bad only in degree. Composing like Brahms, for example – what is it, after all, but a vastly more elaborate and intellectual way of composing like Meyerbeer? Whereas the best Beethoven is as far beyond the best Brahms as it’s beyond the worst Meyerbeer. There’s a difference in kind. One’s in another world.’

‘Another world,’ echoed Mr Croyland in a religious whisper. ‘But that’s just what I’ve been trying to get you to admit. With the highest art one enters another world.’

Beppo fizzled with emphatic agreement.

‘A world,’ Mr Croyland insisted, ‘of gods and angels.’

‘Don’t forget the invisible lovers,’ said Helen, who was finding, as she drank her white wine, that everything was becoming more and more uproariously amusing.

Mr Croyland ignored the interruption. ‘A next world,’ he went on. ‘The great artists carry you up to heaven.’

‘But they never allow you to stay there,’ Mark Staithes objected. ‘They give you just a taste of the next world, then let you fall back, flop, into the mud. Marvellous while it lasts. But the time’s so short. And even while they’ve actually got me in heaven, I catch myself asking: Is that all? Isn’t there anything more, anything further? The other world isn’t other enough. Even Macbeth, even the Mass in D, even the El Greco Assumption.’ He shook his head. ‘They used to satisfy me. They used to be an escape and a support. But now . . . now I find myself wanting something more, something heavenlier, something less human. Yes, less human,’ he repeated. Then the flayed face twisted itself up into an agonized smile. ‘I feel rather like Nurse Cavell about it,’ he added. ‘Painting, music, literature, thought – they’re not enough.’

‘What is enough, then?’ asked Beppo. ‘Politics? Science? Money-making?’ Staithes shook his head after every suggestion.

‘But what else is there?’ asked Beppo.

Still anatomically smiling, Mark looked at him for a moment in silence, then said, ‘Nothing – absolutely nothing.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said Mr Croyland. ‘They’re enough for me.’ He dropped his eyelids once more and retired into spiritual fastnesses.

Looking at him, Staithes was moved by a sudden angry desire to puncture the old gentleman’s balloon-like complacency – to rip a hole in that great bag of cultural gas, by means of which Mr Croyland contrived to hoist his squalid traffickings sky-high into the rarefied air of pure aesthetics. ‘And what about death? You find them adequate against death?’ he insisted in a tone that had suddenly become brutally inquisitorial. He paused, and for a moment the old man was enveloped in a horribly significant silence – the silence of those who in the presence of a victim or an incurable tactfully ignore the impending doom. ‘Adequate against life, for that matter,’ Mark Staithes went on, relenting; ‘against life in any of its more unpleasant or dangerous aspects.’

‘Such as dogs falling on one out of aeroplanes!’ Helen burst out laughing.

‘But what are you talking about?’ cried Beppo.

‘Father Hopkins won’t keep dogs off,’ she went on breathlessly. ‘I agree with you, Mark. A good umbrella, any day . . .’

Mr Croyland rose to his feet. ‘I must go to bed,’ he said. ‘And so should you, my dear.’ The little white hand upon her shoulder was benevolent, almost apostolic. ‘You’re tired after your journey.’

‘You mean, you think I’m drunk,’ Helen answered, wiping her eyes. ‘Well, perhaps you’re right. Gosh,’ she added, ‘how nice it is to laugh for a change!’

When Mr Croyland was gone, and Beppo with him, Staithes turned towards her. ‘You’re in a queer state, Helen.’

‘I’m amused,’ she explained.

‘What by?’

‘By everything. But it began with Dante; Dante and Hans Andersen. If you’d been married to Hugh, you’d know why that was so extraordinarily funny. Imagine Europa if the bull had turned out after all to be Narcissus!’

‘I don’t think you’d better talk so loud,’ said Staithes, looking across the room to where, with an expression on his face of hopeless misery, Hugh was pretending to listen to an animated discussion between Caldwell and the young German.

Helen also looked round for a moment; then turned back with a careless shrug of the shoulders. ‘If he says he’s invisible, why shouldn’t I say I’m inaudible?’ Her eyes brightened again with laughter. ‘I shall write a book called The Inaudible Mistress. A woman who says exactly what she thinks about her lovers while they’re making love to her. But they can’t hear her. Not a word.’ She emptied her glass and refilled it.

‘And what does she say about them?’

‘The truth, of course. Nothing but the truth. That the romantic Don Juan is just a crook. Only I’m afraid that in reality she wouldn’t find that out till afterwards. Still, one might be allowed a bit of poetic licence – make the esprit d’escalier happen at the same time as the romantic affair. The moonlight, and “My darling,” and “I adore you,” and those extraordinary sensations – and at the same moment “You’re nothing but a sneak-thief, nothing but a low blackguardly swindler.” And then there’d be the spiritual lover – Hans Dante, in fact.’ She shook her head. ‘Talk of Kraft Ebbing!’

‘But what does she say to him?’

‘What indeed!’ Helen took a gulp of wine. ‘Luckily she’s inaudible. We’d better skip that chapter and come straight to the epicurean sage. With the sage, she doesn’t have to be quite so obscure. “You think you’re a man, because you happen not to be impotent.” That’s what she says to him. “But in fact you’re not a man. You’re sub-human. In spite of your sageness – because of it even. Worse than the crook in some ways.” And then, bang, like a sign from heaven, down comes the dog!’

‘But what dog?’

‘Why, the dog Father Hopkins can’t protect you from. The sort of dog that bursts like a bomb when you drop it out of an aeroplane. Bang!’ The laughing excitement seethed and bubbled within her, seeking expression, seeking an outlet; and the only possible assuagement was through some kind of outrage, some violence publicly done to her own and other people’s feelings. ‘It almost fell on Anthony and me,’ she went on, finding a strange relief in speaking thus openly and hilariously about the unmentionable event. ‘On the roof of his house it was. And we had no clothes on. Like the Garden of Eden. And then, out of the blue, down came that dog – and exploded, I tell you, literally exploded.’ She threw out her hands in a violent gesture. ‘Dog’s blood from head to foot. We were drenched – but drenched! In spite of which this imbecile goes and writes me a letter.’ She opened her bag and produced it. ‘Imagining I’d read it, I suppose. As though nothing had happened, as though we were still in the Garden of Eden. I always told him he was a fool. There!’ She handed the letter to Staithes. ‘You open it and see what the idiot has to say. Something witty, no doubt; something airy and casual; humorously wondering why I took it into my funny little head to go away.’ Then, noticing that Mark was still holding the letter unopened, ‘But why don’t you read it?’ she asked.

‘Do you really want me to?’

‘Of course. Read it aloud. Read it with expression.’ She rolled the r derisively.

‘Very well, then.’ He tore open the envelope and unfolded the thin sheets. ‘“I went to look for you at the hotel,”’ he read out slowly, frowning over the small and hurried script. ‘“You were gone – and it was like a kind of death.”’

‘Ass!’ commented Helen.

‘“It’s probably too late, probably useless; but I feel I must try to tell you in this letter some of the things I meant to say to you, yesterday evening, in words. In one way it’s easier – for I’m inept when it comes to establishing a purely personal contact with another human being. But in another way, it’s much more difficult; for these written words will just be words and no more, will come to you, floating in a void, unsupported, without the life of my physical presence.”’

Helen gave a snort of contemptuous laughter. ‘As though that would have been a recommendation!’ She drank some more wine.

‘“Well, what I wanted to tell you,”’ Staithes read on, ‘“was this: that suddenly (it was like a conversion, like an inspiration) while you were kneeling there yesterday on the roof, after that horrible thing had happened . . .”’

‘He means the dog,’ said Helen. ‘Why can’t he say so?’

‘“. . . suddenly I realized . . .”’ Mark Staithes broke off. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I really can’t go on.’

‘Why not? I insist on your going on,’ she cried excitedly.

He shook his head. ‘I’ve got no right!’

‘But I’ve given you the right.’

‘Yes, I know. But he hasn’t.’

‘What has he got to do with it? Now that I’ve received the letter . . .’

‘But it’s a love-letter.’

‘A love-letter?’ Helen repeated incredulously, then burst out laughing. ‘That’s too good!’ she cried. ‘That’s really sublime! Here, give it to me.’ She snatched the letter out of his hand. ‘Where are we? Ah, here! “. . . kneeling on the roof after that horrible thing had happened, suddenly I realized that I’d been living a kind of outrageous lie towards you!”’ She declaimed the words rhetorically and to the accompaniment of florid gesticulations. ‘“I realized that in spite of all the elaborate pretence that it was just a kind of detached irresponsible amusement, I really loved you.” He really lo-o-oved me,’ she repeated, drawing the word into a grotesque caricature of itself. ‘Isn’t that wonderful? He really lo-o-oved me.’ Then, turning round in her chair, ‘Hugh!’ she called across the room.

‘Helen, be quiet!’

But the desire, the need to consummate the outrage was urgent within her.

She shook off the restraining hand that Staithes had laid on her arm, shouted Hugh’s name again and, when they all turned towards her, ‘I just wanted to tell you he really lo-o-oved me,’ she said, waving the letter.

‘Oh, for God’s sake shut up!’

‘I most certainly won’t shut up,’ she retorted, turning back to Mark. ‘Why shouldn’t I tell Hugh the good news? He’ll be delighted, seeing how much he lo-o-oves me himself. Don’t you, Hughie?’ She swung back again, and her face was flushed and brilliant with excitement. ‘Don’t you?’ Hugh made no answer, but sat there pale and speechless, looking at the floor.

‘Of course you do,’ she answered for him. ‘In spite of all appearances to the contrary. Or rather,’ she emended, uttering a little laugh, ‘in spite of all disappearances – seeing that it was always invisible, that love of yours. Oh yes, Hughie darling, definitely invisible. But still . . . still, in spite of all disappearances to the contrary, you do lo-o-ove me, don’t you? Don’t you?’ she insisted, trying to force him to answer her, ‘don’t you?’

Hugh rose to his feet and, without speaking a word, almost ran out of the room.

‘Hugh!’ Caldwell shouted after him, ‘Hugh!’ There was no answer. Caldwell looked round at the others. ‘I think perhaps one ought to see that he’s all right,’ he said, with the maternal solicitude of a publisher who sees a first-rate literary property rushing perhaps towards suicide. ‘One never knows.’ And jumping up he hurried after Hugh. The door slammed.

There was a moment’s silence. Then, startlingly, Helen broke into laughter. ‘Don’t be alarmed, Herr Giesebrecht,’ she said turning to the young German. ‘It’s just a little bit of English family life. Die Familie im Wohnzimmer, as we used to learn at school. Was tut die Mutter? Die Mutter spielt Klavier. Und was tut der Vater? Der Vater sitzt in einem Lehnstuhl und raucht seine Pfeife. Just that, Herr Giesebrecht, no more. Just a typical bourgeois family.’

‘Bourgeois,’ the young man repeated, and nodded gravely. ‘You say better than you know.’

‘Do I?’

‘You are a wictim,’ he went on, very slowly, and separating word from word, ‘a wictim of capitalist society. It is full of wices . . .’

Helen threw back her head and laughed again more loudly than before; then, controlling herself with an effort, ‘You mustn’t think I’m laughing at you,’ she gasped. ‘I think you’re being sweet to me – extraordinarily decent. And probably you’re quite right about capitalist society. Only somehow at this particular moment – I don’t know why – it seemed rather . . . rather . . .’ The laughter broke out once more. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘We must be going,’ said Mark, and rose from his chair. The young German also got up and came across the room towards them. ‘Good-night, Helen.’

‘Good-night, Mark. Good-night, Mr Giesebrecht. Come and see me again, will you? I’ll behave better next time.’

He returned her smile and bowed. ‘I will come whenever you wish,’ he said.

CHAPTER XXII

December 8th 1926

MARK LIVED IN a dingy house off the Fulham Road. Dark, brown brick with terra-cotta trimmings; and, within, patterned linoleum; bits of red Axminster carpet; wallpapers of ochre sprinkled with bunches of cornflowers, of green, with crimson roses; fumed oak chairs and tables; rep curtains; bamboo stands supporting glazed blue pots. The hideousness, Anthony reflected, was so complete, so absolutely unrelieved, that it could only have been intentional. Mark must deliberately have chosen the ugliest surroundings he could find. To punish himself, no doubt – but why, for what offence?

‘Some beer?’

Anthony nodded.

The other opened a bottle, filled a single glass; but himself did not drink.

‘You still play, I see,’ said Anthony, pointing in the direction of the upright piano.

‘A little,’ Mark had to admit. ‘It’s a consolation.’

The fact that the Matthew Passion, for example, the Hammerklavier Sonata, had had human authors was a source of hope. It was just conceivable that humanity might some day and somehow be made a little more John-Sebastian-like. If there were no Well-Tempered Clavichord, why should one bother even to wish for revolutionary change?

‘Turning one kind of common humanity into common humanity of a slightly different kind – well, if that’s all that revolution can do, the game isn’t worth the candle.’

Anthony protested. For a sociologist it was the most fascinating of all games.

‘To watch or to play?’

‘To watch, of course.’

A spectacle bottomlessly comic in its grotesqueness, endlessly varied. But looking closely, one could detect the uniformities under the diversity, the fixed rules of the endlessly shifting game.

‘A revolution to transform common humanity into common humanity of another variety. You find it horrifying. But that’s just what I’d like to live long enough to see. Theory being put to the test of practice. To detect, after your catastrophic reform of everything, the same old uniformities working themselves out in a slightly different way – I can’t imagine anything more satisfying. Like logically inferring the existence of a new planet and then discovering it with the telescope. As for producing more John Sebastians . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You might as well imagine that revolution will increase the number of Siamese twins.’

That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to common-place people is high; in reality, very low.

‘Books are opium,’ said Mark.

‘Precisely. That’s why it’s doubtful if there’ll ever be such a thing as proletarian literature. Even proletarian books will deal with exceptional proletarians. And exceptional proletarians are no more proletarian than exceptional bourgeois are bourgeois. Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth. Hence those geniuses of fiction, those leaders and dukes and millionaires. People who are completely conditioned by circumstances – one can be desperately sorry for them; but one can’t find their lives very dramatic. Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.’

‘But do you really think that people with money or power are free?’

‘Freer than the poor, at any rate. Less completely conditioned by matter and other people’s wills.’

Mark shook his head. ‘You don’t know my father,’ he said, ‘Or my disgusting brothers.’

At Bulstrode, Anthony remembered, it was always, ‘My pater says . . .’ or ‘My frater at Cambridge . . .’

‘The whole vile brood of Staitheses,’ Mark went on.

He described the Staithes who was now a Knight Commander of St Michael and St George and a Permanent Under-Secretary. Pleased as Punch with it all, and serenely conscious of his own extraordinary merits, adoring himself for being such a great man.

‘As though there were any real difficulty in getting where he’s got! Anything in the least creditable about that kind of piddling little conquest!’ Mark made a flayed grimace of contemptuous disgust. ‘He thinks he’s a marvel.’

And the other Staitheses, the Staitheses of the younger generation – they also thought that they were marvels. There was one of them at Delhi, heroically occupied in bullying Indians who couldn’t stand up for themselves. And the other was on the Stock Exchange and highly successful. Successful as what? As a cunning exploiter of ignorance and greed and the insanity of gamblers and misers. And on top of everything the man prided himself on being an amorist, a professional Don Juan.

(Why the poor devil shouldn’t be allowed to have a bit of fun, Anthony was unable, as he sipped his beer, to imagine.)

One of the boys! One of the dogs! A dog among bitches – what a triumph!

‘And you call them free,’ Mark concluded. ‘But how can a climber be free? He’s tied to his ladder.’

‘But social ladders,’ Anthony objected, ‘become broader as they rise. At the bottom, you can only just get your foot on to them. At the top the rungs are twenty yards across.’

‘Well, perhaps it’s a wider perch than the bank clerk’s,’ Mark admitted. ‘But not wide enough for me. And not high enough; above all, not clean enough.’

The rage they had been in when he enlisted during the war as a private! Feeling that he’d let the family down. The creatures were incapable of seeing that, if you had the choice, it was more decent to elect to be a private than a staff lieutenant.

‘Turds to the core,’ he said. ‘So they can’t think anything but turdish thoughts. And above all, they can’t conceive of anyone else thinking differently. Turd calls to turd; and, when it’s answered by non-turd, it’s utterly at a loss.’

And when the war was over, there was that job his father had taken such pains to find for him in the City – with Lazarus and Coit, no less! – just waiting for him to step into the moment he was demobilized. A job with almost unlimited prospects for a young man with brains and energy – for a Staithes, in a word. ‘A five-figure income by the time you’re fifty,’ his father had insisted almost lyrically, and had been really hurt and grieved, as well as mortally offended, furiously angry, when Mark replied that he had no intention of taking it.

‘“But why not?” the poor old turd kept asking. “Why not?” And simply couldn’t see that it was just because it was so good that I couldn’t take his job. So unfairly good! So ignobly good! He just couldn’t see it. According to his ideas, I ought to have rushed at it, headlong, like all the Gadarene swine rolled into one. Instead of which I returned him his cow-pat and went to Mexico – to look after a coffee finca.’

‘But did you know anything about coffee?’

‘Of course not. That was one of the attractions of the job.’ He smiled. ‘When I did know something about it, I came back to see if there was anything doing here.’

‘And is there anything doing?’

The other shrugged his shoulders. God only knew. One joined the Party, one distributed literature, one financed pressure-groups out of the profits on synthetic carnations, one addressed meetings and wrote articles. And perhaps it was all quite useless. Perhaps, on the contrary, the auspicious moment might some day present itself . . .

‘And then what?’ asked Anthony.

‘Ah, that’s the question. It’ll be all right at the beginning. Revolution’s delightful in the preliminary stages. So long as it’s a question of getting rid of the people at the top. But afterwards, if the thing’s a success – what then? More wireless sets, more chocolates, more beauty parlours, more girls with better contraceptives.’ He shook his head. ‘The moment you give people the chance to be piggish, they take it – thankfully. That freedom you were talking about just now, the freedom at the top of the social ladder – it’s just the licence to be a pig; or alternatively a prig, a self-satisfied pharisee like my father. Or else both at once, like my precious brother. Pig and prig simultaneously. In Russia they haven’t yet had the chance to be pigs. Circumstances have forced them to be ascetics. But suppose their economic experiment succeeds; suppose a time comes when they’re all prosperous – what’s to prevent them turning into Babbitts? Millions and millions of soft, piggish Babbitts, ruled by a small minority of ambitious Staitheses.’

Anthony smiled. ‘A new phase of the game played according to the old unchanging rules.’

‘I’m horribly afraid you’re right,’ said the other. ‘It’s orthodox Marxism, of course. Behaviour and modes of thought are the outcome of economic circumstances. Reproduce Babbitt’s circumstances and you can’t help reproducing his manners and customs. Christ!’ He rose, walked to the piano and, drawing up a chair, sat down in front of it, ‘Let’s try to get that taste out of our mouths.’ He held his large bony hands poised for a moment above the keyboard; then began to play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D. They were in another universe, a world where Babbitts and Staitheses didn’t exist, were inconceivable.

Mark had played for only a minute or two when the door opened and an elderly woman, thin and horse-faced, in a brown silk dress and wearing round her neck an old diseased brown fur, entered the room. She walked on tiptoe, acting in elaborate pantomime the very personification of silence, but in the process produced an extraordinary volume and variety of disturbing noises – creaking of shoes, rustling of silk, glassy clinkings of bead necklaces, jingling of the silver objects suspended by little chains from the waist. Mark went on playing without turning his head. Embarrassed, Anthony rose and bowed. The horse-faced creature waved him back to his place, and cautiously, in a final prolonged explosion of noise, sat down on the sofa.

‘Exquisite!’ she cried when the final chord had been struck. ‘Play us something more, Mark.’

But Mark got up, shaking his head. ‘I want to introduce you to Miss Pendle,’ he said to Anthony; and to the old woman, ‘Anthony Beavis was at Bulstrode with me,’ he explained.

Anthony took her hand. She gave him a smile. The teeth, which were false ones and badly fitting, were improbably too white and bright. ‘So you were at Bulstrode with Mark!’ she cried. ‘Isn’t that extraordinary!’

‘Extraordinary that we should still be on speaking terms?’ said Mark.

‘No, no,’ said Miss Pendle, and with a playfulness that Anthony found positively ghoulish, gave him a little slap on the arm. ‘You know exactly what I mean. He always was like that, Mr Beavis, even when he was a boy – do you remember?’

Anthony duly nodded assent.

‘So sharp and sarcastic! Even before you knew him at Bulstrode. Shocking!’ She flashed her false teeth at Mark in a sparkle of loving mock-reprobation. ‘He was my first pupil, you know,’ she went on confidentially. ‘And I was his first teacher.’

Anthony rose gallantly to the occasion. ‘Let me congratulate Mark,’ he said, ‘and condole with you.’

Miss Pendle looked at Mark. ‘Do you think I need his condolences?’ she asked, almost archly, like a young girl, coquettishly fishing for compliments.

Mark did not answer, only smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’ll go and make some tea,’ he said. ‘You’d like tea, wouldn’t you, Penny?’ Miss Pendle nodded, and he rose and left the room.

Anthony was wondering rather uncomfortably what he should say to this disquietingly human old nag, when Miss Pendle turned towards him. ‘He’s wonderful, Mark is; really wonderful.’ The false teeth flashed, the words came gushingly with an incongruously un-equine vehemence. Anthony felt himself writhing with an embarrassed distaste. ‘Nobody knows how kind he is,’ she went on. ‘He doesn’t like it told; but I don’t mind – I want people to know.’ She nodded so emphatically that the beads of her necklace rattled. ‘I was ill last year,’ she went on. Her savings had gone, she couldn’t get another job. In despair, she had written to some of her old employers, Sir Michael Staithes among them. ‘Sir Michael sent me five pounds,’ she said. ‘That kept me going for a bit. Then I had to write again. He said he couldn’t do anything more. But he mentioned the matter to Mark. And what do you think Mark did?’ She looked at Anthony in silence, a horse transfigured, with an expression at once of tenderness and triumph and her red-lidded brown eyes full of tears.

‘What did he do?’ asked Anthony.

‘He came to me where I was staying – I had a room in Camberwell then – he came and took me away with him. Straight away, the moment I could get my things packed up, and brought me here. I’ve kept house for him ever since. What do you think of that, Mr Beavis?’ she asked. Her voice trembled and she had to wipe her eyes; but she was still triumphant. ‘What do you think of that?’

Anthony really didn’t know what to think of it; but said, meanwhile, that it was wonderful.

‘Wonderful,’ the horse repeated, approvingly. ‘That’s exactly what it is. But you mustn’t tell him I told you. He’d be furious with me. He’s like that text in the Gospel about not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing. That’s what he’s like.’ She gave her eyes a final wipe and blew her nose. ‘There, I hear him coming,’ she said, and, before Anthony could intervene, had jumped up, darted across the room in a storm of rustlings and rattlings, and opened the door. Mark entered, carrying a tray with the tea-things and a plate of mixed biscuits.

Miss Pendle poured out, said she oughtn’t to eat anything at this time of night, but, all the same, took a round biscuit with pink sugar icing on it.

‘Now, tell me what sort of a boy young Master Mark was at Bulstrode,’ she said in that playful way of hers. ‘Up to all kind of mischief, I’ll be bound!’ She took another bite at her biscuit.

‘He bullied me a good deal,’ said Anthony.

Miss Pendle interrupted her quick nibbling to laugh aloud. ‘You naughty boy!’ she said to Mark; then the jaws started to work again.

‘Being so good at football, he had a right to bully me.’

‘Yes, you were captain of the eleven, weren’t you?’

‘I forget,’ said Mark.

‘He forgets!’ Miss Pendle repeated, looking triumphantly at Anthony. ‘That’s typical of him. He forgets!’ She helped herself to a second biscuit, pushing aside the plain ones to select another with icing on it, and began to nibble once more with the intense and concentrated passion of those whose only sensual pleasures have been the pleasures of the palate.

When she had gone to bed, the two men sat down again by the fire. There was a long silence.

‘She’s rather touching,’ said Anthony at last.

For some time Mark made no comment. Then, ‘A bit too touching,’ he brought out.

Anthony looked into his face and saw there a demonstration of the anatomy of sardonic irony. There was another silence. The clock, which was supported by two draped nymphs in gilded bronze, ticked from its place among the imitation Dresden figures that thronged the shelves of the elaborate overmantel. Hideous on purpose, Anthony said to himself, as his eye took in the details of each separate outrage on good taste. And the poor old horse – was she merely the largest, the most monstrous of the knick-knacks? ‘I’m surprised,’ he said aloud, ‘that you don’t wear a hairshirt. Or perhaps you do?’ he added.

CHAPTER XXIII

June 1st 1934

TONIGHT, AT DINNER with Mark, saw Helen, for the first time since my return from America.

Consider the meaning of a face. A face can be a symbol, signifying matter which would require volumes for its exposition in successive detail. A vast sum, for the person on whom it acts as a symbol, of feelings and thoughts, of remembered sensations, impressions, judgments, experiences – all rendered synthetically and simultaneously, at a single glance. As she came into the restaurant, it was like the drowning man’s instantaneous vision of life. A futile, bad, unsatisfactory life; and a vision, charged with regret. All those wrong choices, those opportunities irrevocably missed! And that sad face was not only a symbol, indirectly expressive of my history; it was also a directly expressive emblem of hers. A history for whose saddening and embittering quality I was at least in part responsible. If I had accepted the love she wanted to give me, if I had consented to love (for I could have loved) in return . . . But I preferred to be free, for the sake of my work – in other words, to remain enslaved in a world where there could be no question of freedom, for the sake of my amusements. I insisted on irresponsible sensuality, rather than love. Insisted, in other words, on her becoming a means to the end of my detached, physical satisfaction and, conversely, of course, on my becoming a means to hers.

Curious how irrelevant appears the fact of having been, technically, ‘lovers’! It doesn’t qualify her indifference or my feeling. There’s a maxim of La Rochefoucauld’s about women forgetting the favours they have accorded to past lovers. I used to like it for being cynical; but really it’s just a bald statement of the fact that something that’s meant to be irrelevant, i.e. sensuality, is irrelevant. Into my present complex of thoughts, feelings and memories, physical desire, I find, enters hardly at all. In spite of the fact that my memories are of intense and complete satisfactions. Surprising, the extent to which eroticism is a matter of choice and focus. I don’t think much in erotic terms now; but very easily could, if I wished to. Choose to consider individuals in their capacity as potential givers and receivers of pleasure, focus attention on sensual satisfactions: eroticism will become immensely important and great quantities of energy will be directed along erotic channels. Choose a different conception of the individual, another focal range: energy will flow elsewhere and eroticism seem relatively unimportant.

Spent a good part of the evening arguing about peace and social justice. Mark, as sarcastically disagreeable as he knew how to be about Miller and what he called my neo-Jesus avatar. ‘If the swine want to rip one another’s guts out, let them; anyhow, you can’t prevent them. Swine will be swine.’ But may become human, I insisted. Homo non nascitur, fit. Or rather makes himself out of the ready-made elements and potentialities of man with which he’s born.

Helen’s was the usual communist argument – no peace or social justice without a preliminary ‘liquidation’ of capitalists, liberals and so forth. As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice! Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed. Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve. Violence and war will produce a peace and a social organization having the potentialities of more violence and war. The war to end war resulted, as usual, in a peace essentially like war; the revolution to achieve communism, in a hierarchical state where a minority rules by police methods á la Metternich-Hitler-Mussolini, and where the power to oppress in virtue of being rich is replaced by the power to oppress in virtue of being a member of the oligarchy. Peace and social justice, only obtainable by means that are just and pacific. And people will behave justly and pacifically only if they have trained themselves as individuals to do so, even in circumstances where it would be easier to behave violently and unjustly. And the training must be simultaneously physical and mental. Knowledge of how to use the self and of what the self should be used for. Neo-Ignatius and neo-Sandow was Mark’s verdict.

Put Mark into a cab and walked, as the night was beautiful, all the way from Soho to Chelsea. Theatres were closing. Helen brightened suddenly to a mood of malevolent high spirits. Commenting in a ringing voice on passers-by. As though we were at the Zoo. Embarrassing, but funny and acute, as when she pointed to the rich young men in top-hats trying to look like the De Reszke Aristocrat, or opening and shutting cigarette-cases in the style of Gerald du Maurier; to the women trying to look like Vogue, or expensive advertisements (for winter cruises or fur coats), head in air, eyelids dropped superciliously – or slouching like screen vamps, with their stomachs stuck out, as though expecting twins. The pitiable models on which people form themselves! Once it was the Imitation of Christ – now of Hollywood.

Were silent when we had left the crowds. Then Helen asked if I were happy. I said, yes – though didn’t know if happiness was the right word. More substantial, more complete, more interested, more aware. If not happy exactly, at any rate having greater potentialities for happiness. Another silence. Then, ‘I thought I could never see you again, because of that dog. Then Ekki came, and the dog was quite irrelevant. And now he’s gone, it’s still irrelevant. For another reason. Everything’s irrelevant, for that matter. Except Communism.’ But that was an afterthought – an expression of piety, uttered by force of habit. I said our ends were the same, the means adopted, different. For her, end justified means; for me, means the end. Perhaps, I said, one day she would see the importance of the means.

June 3rd 1934.

AT TODAY’S LESSON with Miller found myself suddenly step forward in my grasp of the theory and practice of the technique. To learn proper use one must first inhibit all improper uses of the self. Refuse to be hurried into gaining ends by the equivalent (in personal, psycho-physiological terms) of violent revolution; inhibit this tendency, concentrate on the means whereby the end is to be achieved; then act. This process entails knowing good and bad use – knowing them apart. By the ‘feel’. Increased awareness and increased power of control result. Awareness and control: trivialities take on new significance. Indeed, nothing is trivial any more or negligible. Cleaning teeth, putting on shoes – such processes are reduced by habits of bad use to a kind of tiresome nonexistence. Become conscious, inhibit, cease to be a greedy endgainer, concentrate on means: tiresome non-existence turns into absorbingly interesting reality. In Evans-Wentz’s last book on Tibet I find among ‘The Precepts of the Gurus’ the injunction: ‘Constantly retain alertness of consciousness in walking, in sitting, in eating, in sleeping.’ An injunction, like most injunctions, unaccompanied by instructions as to the right way of carrying it out. Here, practical instructions accompany injunctions; one is taught how to become aware. And not only that. Also how to perform rightly, instead of wrongly, the activities of which there is awareness. Nor is this all. Awareness and power of control are transferable. Skill acquired in getting to know the muscular aspect of mind-body can be carried over into the exploration of other aspects. There is increasing ability to detect one’s motives for any given piece of behaviour, to assess correctly the quality of a feeling, the real significance of a thought. Also, one becomes more clearly and consistently conscious of what’s going on in the outside world, and the judgment associated with that heightened consciousness is improved. Control also is transferred. Acquire the art of inhibiting muscular bad use and you acquire thereby the art of inhibiting more complicated trains of behaviour. Not only this: there is prevention as well as cure. Given proper correlation, many occasions for behaving undesirably just don’t arise. There is an end, for example, of neurotic anxieties and depressions – whatever the previous history. For note: most infantile and adolescent histories are disastrous: yet only some individuals develop serious neurosis. Those, precisely, in whom use of the self is particularly bad. They succumb because resistance is poor. In practice, neurosis is always associated with some kind of wrong use. (Note the typically bad physical posture of neurotics and lunatics. The stooping back, the muscular tension, the sunken head.) Reeducate. Give back correct physical use. You remove a keystone of the arch constituting the neurotic personality. The neurotic personality collapses. And in its place is built up a personality in which all the habits of physical use are correct. But correct physical use entails – since body-mind is indivisible except in thought – correct mental use. Most of us are slightly neurotic. Even slight neurosis provides endless occasions for bad behaviour. Teaching of right use gets rid of neurosis – therefore of many occasions for bad behaviour. Hitherto preventive ethics had been thought of as external to individuals. Social and economic reforms carried out with a view to eliminating occasions for bad behaviour. This is important. But not nearly enough. Belief that it is enough makes the social-reform conception of progress nonsensical. The knowledge that it is nonsensical had always given me pleasure. Sticking pins in large, highly inflated balloons – one of the most delightful of amusements. But a bit childish; and after a time it palls. So how satisfactory to find that there seems to be a way of making sense of the nonsense. A method of achieving progress from within as well as from without. Progress, not only as a citizen, a machine-minder and machine-user, but also as a human being.

Prevention is good; but can’t eliminate the necessity for cure. The power to cure bad behaviour seems essentially similar to the power to cure bad co-ordination. One learns this last when learning the proper use of self. There is a transference. The power to inhibit and control. It becomes easier to inhibit undesirable impulses. Easier to follow as well as see and approve the better. Easier to put good intentions into practice and be patient, good-tempered, kind, unrapacious, chaste.

CHAPTER XXIV

June 23rd and July 5th 1927

SHE COULDN’T AFFORD it; but that didn’t matter. Mrs Amberley was used to doing things she couldn’t afford. It was really so simple; you just sold a little War Loan, and there you were. There you were with your motor tour in Italy, your nudes by Pascin, your account at Fortnum and Mason. And there, finally, you were in Berkshire, in the most adorable little old house, smelling of pot-pourri, with towering lime trees on the lawn and the downs at your back door, stretching away mile after mile in smooth green nakedness under the sky. She couldn’t afford it; but it was so beautiful, so perfect. And after all, what were a hundred and fifty pounds of War Loan? How much did they bring in? About five pounds a year, when the taxes had been paid. And what were five pounds a year? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And besides Gerry was going to re-invest her money for her. Her capital might have shrunk; but her income would soon start growing. Next year she would be able to afford it; and so, in anticipation of that happy time, here she was, sitting under the lime trees on the lawn with her guests around her.

Propped up on one elbow, Helen was lying on a rug behind her mother’s chair. She was paying no attention to what was being said. The country was so exquisitely beautiful that one really couldn’t listen to old Anthony holding forth about the place of machines in history; no, the only thing one could do in such heavenly circumstances was to play with the kitten. You pushed a twig under the corner of the rug, very slowly, till the end reappeared again on the other side, like the head of an animal cautiously peering out from its burrow. A little way, very suspiciously; and then with a jerk you withdrew it. The animal had taken fright and scuttled back to cover. Then, plucking up its courage, out it came once more, went nosing to right and left between the grass stems, then retired to finish its meal safely under the rug. Long seconds passed; and suddenly out it popped like a jack-in-the-box, as though it were trying to catch any impending danger unaware, and was back again in a flash. Then once more, very doubtfully and reluctantly – impelled only by brute necessity and against its better judgment – it emerged into the open, conscious, you felt, of being the predestined victim, foreknowing its dreadful fate. And all this time the tabby kitten was following its comings and goings with a bright expressionless ferocity. Each time the twig retired under the rug, he came creeping, with an infinity of precautions, a few inches nearer. Nearer, nearer, and now the moment had come for him to crouch for the final, decisive spring. The green eyes stared with an absurd balefulness; the tiny body was so heavily overcharged with a tigerish intensity of purpose that, not the tail only, but the whole hind-quarters shook under the emotional pressure. Overhead, meanwhile, the lime trees rustled in a faint wind, the round dapplings of golden light moved noiselessly back and forth across the grass. On the other side of the lawn the herbaceous borders blazed in the sunshine as though they were on fire, and beyond them lay the downs like huge animals, fast asleep, with the indigo shadows of clouds creeping across their flanks. It was all so beautiful, so heavenly, that every now and then Helen simply couldn’t stand it any longer, but had to drop the twig and catch up the kitten, and rub her cheek against the silky fur, and whisper meaningless words to him in baby language, and hold him up with ridiculously dangling paws in front of her face, so that their noses almost touched, and stare into those blankly bright green eyes, till at last the helpless little beast began to mew so pathetically that she had to let him go again. ‘Poor darling!’ she murmured repentantly. ‘Did I torture him?’ But the torturing had served its purpose; the painful excess of her happiness had overflowed, as it were, and left her at ease, the heavenly beauty was once more supportable. She picked up the twig. Forgivingly, for he had already forgotten everything, the kitten started the game all over again.

The ringing of a bicycle bell made her look up. It was the postman riding up the drive with the afternoon delivery. Helen scrambled to her feet and, taking the kitten with her, walked quickly but, she hoped, inconspicuously towards the house. At the door she met the parlour-maid coming out with the letters. There were two for her. The first she opened was from Joyce, from Aldershot. (She had to smile as she read the address at the head of the paper. ‘Joyce is now living at A-aldershot,’ her mother would say, lingering over the first syllable of the name with a kind of hollow emphasis and a tone of slightly shocked incredulity, as though it were really inconceivable that any daughter of hers should find herself at such a place. ‘At A-aldershot, my dear.’ And she managed to endow that military suburb with the fabulous strangeness of Tibet, the horror and remoteness of darkest Liberia. ‘Living at A-a-aldershot – as a mem-sahib.’)

‘Just a line,’ Helen read, still smiling, ‘to thank you for your sweet letter. I am rather worried by what you say about Mother’s taking so many sleeping draughts. They can’t be good for her. Colin thinks she ought to take more healthy exercise. Perhaps you might suggest riding. I have been having riding lessons lately, and it is really lovely once you are used to it. We are now quite settled in, and you have no idea how adorable our little house looks now. Colin and I worked like niggers to get things straight, and I must say the results are worth all the trouble. I had to pay a lot of nerve-racking calls; but everybody has been very nice to me and I feel quite at home now. Colin sends his love. – Yours,

JOYCE.’

The other letter – and that was why she had gone to meet the postman – was from Hugh Ledwidge. If the letters had been brought to Mrs Amberley on the lawn; if she had sorted them out, in public . . . Helen flushed with imagined shame and anger at the thought of what her mother might have said about that letter from Hugh. In spite of all the people sitting round; or rather because of them. When they were alone, Helen generally got off with a teasing word. But when other people were there, Mrs Amberley would feel inspired by her audience to launch out into elaborate descriptions and commentaries. ‘Hugh and Helen,’ she would explain, ‘they’re a mixture between Socrates and Alcibiades and Don Quixote and Dulcinea.’ There were moments when she hated her mother. ‘It’s a case,’ said the remembered voice, ‘a case of: I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not ethnology more.’ Helen had had to suffer a great deal on account of those letters.

She tore open the envelope.

‘22.vi.27.

‘Midsummer Day, Helen. But you’re too young, I expect, to think much about the significance of special days. You’ve only been in the world for about seven thousand days altogether; and one has got to have lived through at least ten thousand before one begins to realize that there aren’t an indefinite number of them and that you can’t do exactly what you want with them. I’ve been here more than thirteen thousand days, and the end’s visible, the boundless possibilities have narrowed down. One must cut according to one’s cloth; and one’s cloth is not only exiguous; it’s also of one special kind – and generally of poor quality at that. When one’s young, one thinks one can tailor one’s time into all sorts of splendid and fantastic garments – shakoes and chasubles and Ph.D gowns; Nijinsky’s tights and Rimbaud’s slate-blue trousers and Garibaldi’s red shirt. But by the time you’ve lived ten thousand days, you begin to realize that you’ll be lucky if you succeed in cutting one decent workaday suit out of the time at your disposal. It’s a depressing realization; and Midsummer is one of the days that brings it home. The longest day. One of the sixty or seventy longest days of one’s five and twenty thousand. And what have I done with this longest day – longest of so few, of so uniform, of so shoddy? The catalogue of my occupations would be humiliatingly absurd and pointless. The only creditable and, in any profound sense of the word, reasonable thing I’ve done is to think a little about you, Helen, and write this letter . . .’

‘Any interesting letters?’ asked Mrs Amberley when her daughter came out again from the house.

‘Only a note from Joyce.’

‘From our mem-sahib?’

Helen nodded.

‘She’s living at A-aldershot, you know,’ said Mary Amberley to the assembled company. ‘At A-a-aldershot,’ she insisted, dragging out the first syllable, till the place became ludicrously unreal and the fact that Joyce lived there, a fantastic and slightly indecent myth.

‘You can thank your lucky stars that you aren’t living at Aldershot,’ said Anthony. ‘After all, you ought to be. A general’s daughter.’

For the first moment Mary was put out by his interruption; she had looked forward to developing her fantastic variations on the theme of Aldershot. But her good humour returned as she perceived the richer opportunity with which he had provided her. ‘Yes, I know,’ she cried eagerly. ‘A general’s daughter. And do you realize that, but for the grace of God, I might at this moment be a colonel’s wife? I was within an ace of marrying a soldier. Within an ace, I tell you. The most ravishingly beautiful creature. But ivory,’ she rapped her forehead, ‘solid ivory. It was lucky he was such a crashing bore. If he’d been the tiniest bit brighter, I’d have gone out to India with him. And then what? It’s unimaginable.’

‘Unimaginable!’ Beppo repeated, with a little squirt of laughter.

‘On the contrary,’ said Anthony, ‘perfectly imaginable. The club every evening between six and eight; parties at government house; adultery in the hot weather, polo in the cold; incessant bother with the Indian servants; permanent money difficulties and domestic scenes; occasional touches of malaria and dysentery; the monthly parcel of second-hand novels from the Times Book Club; and all the time the inexorable advance of age – twice as fast as in England. If you’ve ever been to India, nothing’s more easy to imagine.’

‘And you think all that would have happened to me?’ asked Mary.

‘What else could have happened? You don’t imagine you’d have gone about buying Pascins in Quetta?’

Mary laughed.

‘Or reading Max Jacob in Rawalpindi? You’d have been a mem-sahib like all the other mem-sahibs. A bit more bored and discontented than most of them, perhaps. But still a memsahib.’

‘I suppose so,’ she agreed. ‘But is one so hopelessly at the mercy of circumstances?’

He nodded.

‘You don’t think I’d have escaped.’

‘I can’t see why.’

‘But that means there isn’t really any such thing as me. Me,’ she repeated, laying a hand on her breast. ‘I don’t really exist.’

‘No, of course you don’t. Not in that absolute sense. You’re a chemical compound, not an element.’

‘But if one doesn’t really exist, one wonders why . . .’ she hesitated.

‘Why one makes such a fuss about things,’ Anthony suggested. ‘All that howling and hurrahing and gnashing of teeth. About the adventures of a self that isn’t really a self – just the result of a lot of accidents. And of course,’ he went on, ‘once you start wondering, you see at once that there is no reason for making such a fuss. And then you don’t make a fuss – that is, if you’re sensible. Like me,’ he added, smiling.

There was a silence. ‘You don’t make a fuss,’ Mrs Amberley repeated to herself, and thought of Gerry Watchett. ‘You don’t make a fuss.’ But how was it possible not to make a fuss, when he was so stupid, so selfish, so brutal, and at the same time so excruciatingly desirable – like water in the desert, like sleep after insomnia? She hated him; but the thought that in a few days he would be there, staying in the house, sent a prickling sensation of warmth through her body. She shut her eyes and drew a deep breath.

Still carrying the kitten, like a furry baby, in her arms, Helen had walked away across the lawn. She wanted to be alone, out of earshot of that laughter, those jarringly irrelevant voices. ‘Seven thousand days,’ she repeated again and again. And it was not only the declining sun that made everything seem so solemnly and richly beautiful; it was also the thought of the passing days, of human limitations, of the final unescapable dissolution. ‘Seven thousand days,’ she said aloud, ‘seven thousand days.’ The tears came into her eyes; she pressed the sleeping kitten closely to her breast.

Savernake, the White Horse, Oxford; and in between whiles the roar and screech of Gerry’s Bugatti, the rush of the wind, the swerves and bumps, the sickening but at the same time delicious terrors of excessive speed. And now they were back again. After an age, it seemed; and at the same time it was as though they had never been away. The car came to a halt; but Helen made no move to alight.

‘What’s the matter?’ Gerry asked. ‘Why don’t you get out?’

‘It seems so terribly final,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Like breaking a spell. Like stepping out of the magic circle.’

‘Magic?’ he repeated questioningly. ‘What kind? White or black?’

Helen laughed. ‘Piebald. Absolutely heavenly and absolutely awful. You know, Gerry, you ought to be put in gaol, the way you drive. Or in a lunatic asylum. Crazy and criminal. But I adored it,’ she added, as she opened the door and stepped out.

‘Good!’ was all he answered, while he gave her a smile that was as studiedly unamorous as he could make it. He threw the car into gear and, in a stink of burnt castor oil, shot off round the house, towards the garage.

Charming! he was thinking. And how wise he had been to take that jolly, honest-to-God, big-brother line with her! Ground bait. Getting the game accustomed to you. She’d soon be eating out of his hand. The real trouble, of course, was Mary. Tiresome bitch! he thought, with a sudden passion of loathing. Jealous, suspicious, interfering. Behaving as though he were her private property. And greedy, insatiable. Perpetually thrusting herself upon him – thrusting that ageing body of hers. His face, as he manoeuvred the car into the garage, was puckering into folds of distaste. But thank God, he went on to reflect, she’d got this chill on the liver, or whatever it was. That ought to keep her quiet for a bit, keep her out of the way.

Without troubling to take off her coat, and completely forgetting her mother’s illness and for the moment her very existence, Helen crossed the hall and, almost running, burst into the kitchen.

‘Where’s Tompy, Mrs Weeks?’ she demanded of the cook. The effect of the sunshine and the country and Gerry’s Bugatti had been such that it was now absolutely essential to her that she should take the kitten in her arms. Immediately. ‘I must have Tompy,’ she insisted. And by the way of excuse and explanation, ‘I didn’t have time to see him this morning,’ she added; ‘we started in such a hurry.’

‘Tompy doesn’t seem to be well, Miss Helen.’ Mrs Weeks put away her sewing.

‘Not well?’

‘I put him in here,’ Mrs Weeks went on, getting up from her Windsor chair and leading the way to the scullery. ‘It’s cooler. He seemed to feel the heat so. As though he was feverish like. I’m sure I don’t know what’s the matter with him,’ she concluded in a tone half of complaint, half of sympathy. She was sorry for Tompy. But she was also sorry for herself because Tompy had given her all this trouble.

The kitten was lying in the shadow, under the sink. Crouching down beside the basket, Helen stretched out her hand to take him; then, with a little exclamation of horror, withdrew it, as though from the contact of something repellent.

‘But what has happened to him?’ she cried.

The little cat’s tabby coat had lost all its smoothness, all its silky lustre, and was matted into damp uneven tufts. The eyes were shut and gummy with a yellow discharge. A running at the nose had slimed the beautifully patterned fur of the face. The absurd lovely little Tompy she had played with only yesterday, the comic and exquisite Tompy she had held up, pathetically helpless, in one hand, had rubbed her face against, had stared into the eyes of, was gone, and in his place lay a limp unclean little rag of living refuse. Like those kidneys, it suddenly occurred to her with a qualm of disgust; and at once she felt ashamed of herself for having had the thought, for having, in that first gesture of recoil, automatically acted upon the thought even before she had consciously had it.

‘How beastly I am!’ she thought. ‘Absolutely beastly!’

Tompy was sick, miserable, dying perhaps. And she had been too squeamish even to touch him. Making an effort to overcome her distaste, she reached out once more, picked up the little cat, and with the fingers of her free hand caressed (with what a sickening reluctance!) the dank bedraggled fur. The tears came into her eyes, overflowed, ran down her cheeks.

‘It’s too awful, it’s too awful,’ she repeated in a breaking voice. Poor little Tompy! Beautiful, adorable, funny little Tompy! Murdered – no; worse than murdered: reduced to a squalid little lump of dirt; for no reason, just senselessly; and on this day of all days, this heavenly day with the clouds over the White Horse, the sunshine between the leaves in Savernake forest. And now, to make it worse, she was disgusted by the poor little beast, couldn’t bear to touch him, as though he were one of those filthy kidneys – she, who had pretended to love him, who did love him, she insisted to herself. But it was no good her holding him like this and stroking him; it made no difference to what she was really feeling. She might perform the gesture of overcoming her disgust; but the disgust was still there. In spite of the love.

She lifted a streaming face to Mrs Weeks. ‘What shall we do?’

Mrs Weeks shook her head. ‘I never found there was much you could do,’ she said. ‘Not with cats.’

‘But there must be something.’

‘Nothing except leave them alone,’ insisted Mrs Weeks, with a pessimism evidently reinforced by her determination not to be bothered. Then, touched by the spectacle of Helen’s misery, ‘He’ll be all right, dear,’ she added consolingly. ‘There’s no need to cry. Just let him sleep it off.’

Footsteps sounded on the flagstones of the stable yard, and through the open window came the notes of ‘Yes, sir, she’s my baby,’ whistled slightly out of tune. Helen straightened herself up from her crouching position and, leaning out, ‘Gerry!’ she called; then added, in response to his expression of surprised commiseration, ‘Something awful has happened.’

In his large powerful hands Tompy seemed more miserably tiny than ever. But how gentle he was, and how efficient! Watching him, as he swabbed the little cat’s eyes, as he wiped away the slime from the nostrils, Helen was amazed by the delicate precision of his movements. She herself, she reflected with a heightened sense of her own shameful ineptitude, had been incapable of doing anything except stroke Tompy’s fur and feel disgusted. Hopeless, quite hopeless! And when he asked for her help in getting Tompy to swallow half an aspirin tablet crushed in milk, she bungled everything and spilt the medicine.

‘Perhaps I can do it better by myself,’ he said, and took the spoon from her. The cup of her humiliation was full . . .

Mary Amberley was indignant. Here she was, feverish and in pain, worrying herself, what was more, into higher fever, worse pain, with the thought of Gerry’s dangerous driving. And here was Helen, casually strolling into her room after having been in the house for more than two hours – more than two hours without having had the common decency to come and see how she was, more than two hours while her mother – her mother, mind you! – had lain there, in an agony of distress, thinking that they must have had an accident.

‘But Tompy was dying,’ Helen explained. ‘He’s dead now.’ Her face was very pale, her eyes red with tears.

‘Well, if you prefer a wretched cat to your mother . . .’

‘Besides, you were asleep. If you hadn’t been asleep, you’d have heard the car coming back.’

‘Now you’re grudging me my sleep,’ said Mrs Amberley bitterly. ‘Aren’t I to be allowed a moment’s respite from pain? Besides,’ she added, ‘I wasn’t asleep. I was delirious. I’ve been delirious several times today. Of course I didn’t hear the car.’ Her eyes fell on the bottle of Somnifaine standing on the table by her bed, and the suspicion that Helen might also have noticed it made her still more angry. ‘I always knew you were selfish,’ she went on. ‘But I must say I didn’t think you’d be quite as bad as this.’

At another time Helen would have flared up in angry self-defence, or else, convicted of guilt, would have burst out crying. But today she was feeling too miserable to be able to shed any more tears, too much subdued by shame and unhappiness to resent even the most flagrant injustice. Her silence exasperated Mrs Amberley still further.

‘I always used to think,’ she resumed, ‘that you were only selfish from thoughtlessness. But now I see that it’s heartlessness. Plain heartlessness. Here am I – having sacrificed the best years of my life to you; and what do I get in return?’ Her voice trembled as she asked the question. She was convinced of the reality of that sacrifice, profoundly moved by the thought of its extent, its martyr-like enormity. ‘The most cynical indifference. I might die in a ditch; but you wouldn’t care. You’d be much more upset about your cat. And now go away,’ she almost shouted, ‘go away! I know my temperature’s gone up. Go away.’

After a lonely dinner – for Helen was keeping to her room on the plea of a headache – Gerry was up to sit with Mrs Amberley. He was particularly charming that evening, and so affectionately solicitous that Mary forgot all her accumulated grounds of complaint and fell in love with him all over again, and for another set of reasons – not because he was so handsome, so easily and insolently dominating, such a ruthless and accomplished lover, but because he was kind, thoughtful and affectionate, was everything, in a word, she had previously known he wasn’t.

Half-past ten struck. He rose from his chair. ‘Time for your spot of shut-eye.’

Mary protested; he was firm – for her own good.

Thirty drops were the normal dose of Somnifaine; but he measured out forty-five, so as to make quite sure of her sleeping, made her drink, then tucked her up (‘like an old Nanny,’ she cried, laughing with pleasure, as he busied himself round the bed) and, after kissing her good-night with an almost maternal tenderness, turned out the light and left her.

The clock of the village church sounded eleven – how sadly, Helen thought as she listened to the strokes of the distant bell, how lonelily! It was as though she were listening to the voice of her own spirit, reverberated in some mysterious way from the walls of the enclosing night. One, two, three, four . . . Each sweet, cracked note seemed more hopelessly mournful, seemed to rise from the depths of a more extreme solitude, than the last. Tompy had died, and she hadn’t even been capable of giving him a spoonful of milk and crushed aspirin, hadn’t had the strength to overcome her disgust.

Selfish and heartless: her mother was quite right. But lonely as well as selfish, all alone among the senseless malignities that had murdered poor little Tompy; and her heartlessness spoke with the despairing voice of that bell; night was empty and enormous all around.

‘Helen!’

She started and turned her head. The room was impenetrably black.

‘It’s me,’ Gerry’s voice continued. ‘I was so worried about you. Are you feeling better?’

Her first surprise and alarm had given place to a feeling of resentment that he should intrude upon the privacy of her unhappiness. ‘You needn’t have bothered,’ she said coldly. ‘I’m quite all right.’

Enclosed in his faint aura of Turkish tobacco, of peppermintflavoured tooth-paste and bay rum, he approached invisibly. Through the blanket, a groping hand touched her shin: then the springs creaked and tilted under his weight as he sat down on the edge of the bed.

‘Felt a bit responsible,’ he went on. ‘All that looping the loop!’ The tone of his voice implied the unseen smile, suggested a whimsical and affectionate twinkling of hidden eyes.

She made no comment; there was a long silence. A bad start, Gerry thought, and frowned to himself in the darkness; then began again on another tack.

‘I can’t help thinking of that miserable little Tompy,’ he said in a different voice. ‘Extraordinary how upsetting it is when an animal gets ill like that. It seems so frightfully unfair.’

In a few minutes she was crying, and he had an excuse to console her.

Gently, as he had handled Tompy, and with all the tenderness that had so much touched Mrs Amberley, he stroked her hair, and later, when her sobs began to subside, drew the fingers of his other hand along her bare arm. Again and again, with the patient regularity of a nurse lulling her charge to sleep; again and again . . . Three hundred times at least, he was thinking, before he risked any gesture that could possibly be interpreted as amorous. Three hundred times; and even then the caresses would have to deviate by insensible degrees, as though by a series of accidents, till gradually, unintentionally, the hand that was now on her arm would come at last to be brushing, with the same maternal persistence, against her breasts, while the fingers that came and went methodically among the curls would have strayed to the ear, and from the ear across the cheek to the lips, and would linger there lightly, chastely, but charged with the stuff of kisses, proxies and forerunners of the mouth that would ultimately come down on hers, through the darkness, for the reward of its long patience.

CHAPTER XXV

May 20th 1931

IT WAS ANOTHER ‘knock.’ Fitzsimmons, Jeffries, Jack Johnson, Carpentier, Dempsey, Gene Tunney – the champions came and went; but the metaphor in which Mr Beavis described his successive bereavements remained unaltered.

Yes, a hard knock. And yet, it seemed to Anthony, there was a note almost of triumph in his father’s reminiscences, over the luncheon table, of Uncle James as a schoolboy.

‘Poor James . . . such curly hair he had then . . . nos et mutamur.’ The commiseration and regret were mingled with a certain satisfaction – the satisfaction of an old man who finds himself still alive, still able to attend the funerals of his contemporaries, his juniors.

‘Two years,’ he insisted. ‘There was the best part of two years between James and me. I was Beavis major at school.’

He shook his head mournfully; but the old, tired eyes had brightened with an irrepressible light. ‘Poor James!’ He sighed. ‘We hadn’t seen one another much these last years. Not since his conversion. How did he do it? It beats me. A Catholic – he of all people . . .’

Anthony said nothing. But after all, he was thinking, it wasn’t so surprising. The poor old thing had grown up as a Bradlaugh atheist. Ought to have been blissfully happy, parading his cosmic defiance, his unyielding despair. But had had the bad luck to be a homosexual at a time when one couldn’t avow it even to oneself. Ingrowing pederasty – it had poisoned his whole life. Had turned that metaphysical and delightfully Pickwickian despair into real, common or garden misery. Misery and neurasthenia; the old man had been half mad, really. (Which hadn’t prevented him from being a first-rate actuary.) Then, during the war, the clouds had lifted. One could be kind to wounded soldiers – be kind pro patria and with a blameless conscience. Anthony remembered Uncle James’s visits to him in hospital. He had come almost every day. Loaded with gifts for a dozen adopted nephews as well as for the real one. On his thin, melancholy face there had been, in those days, a perpetual smile. But happiness never lasts. The armistice had come; and, after those four years in paradise, hell had seemed blacker than ever. In 1923 he had turned papist. It was only to be expected.

But Mr Beavis simply couldn’t understand. The idea of James surrounded by Jesuits, James bobbing up and down at Mass, James going to Lourdes with his inoperable tumour, James dying with all the consolations of religion – it filled him with horrified amazement.

‘And yet,’ said Anthony, ‘I admire the way they usher you out of life. Dying – it’s apt to be an animal process. More exclusively animal even than sea-sickness.’ He was silent for a moment, thinking of poor Uncle James’s last and most physiological hour. The heavy, snoring breath, the mouth cavernously gaping, the scrabbling of the hands.

‘How wise the Church has been to turn it into a ceremonial!’

‘Charades,’ said Mr Beavis contemptuously.

‘But good charades,’ Anthony insisted. ‘A work of art. In itself, the event’s like a rough channel crossing – only rather worse. But they manage to turn it into something rather fine and significant. Chiefly for the spectator, of course. But perhaps also significant for the actor.’

There was a silence. The maid changed the plates and brought in the sweet. ‘Some apple tart?’ Pauline questioned, as she cut the crust.

‘Apple pie, my dear.’ Mr Beavis’s tone was severe. ‘When will you learn that a tart’s uncovered? A thing with a roof is a pie.’

They helped themselves to cream and sugar.

‘By the way,’ said Pauline suddenly, ‘had you heard about Mrs Foxe?’ Anthony and Mr Beavis shook their heads. ‘Maggie Clark told me yesterday. She’s had a stroke.’

‘Dear, dear,’ said Mr Beavis. Then, reflectively, ‘Curious the way people pass out of one’s life,’ he added. ‘After being very much in it. I don’t believe I’ve seen Mrs Foxe half a dozen times in the last twenty years. And yet before that . . .’

‘She had no sense of humour,’ said Pauline, by way of explanation.

Mr Beavis turned to Anthony. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve . . . well, “kept up” with her very closely, not since that poor boy of hers died.’

Anthony shook his head, without speaking. It was not agreeable to be reminded of all that he had done to avoid keeping up with Mrs Foxe. Those long affectionate letters she had written to him during the first year of the war – letters which he had answered more and more briefly, perfunctorily, conventionally; and at last hadn’t answered at all; hadn’t even read. Hadn’t even read, and yet – moved by some superstitious compunction – had never thrown away. At least a dozen of the blue envelopes, addressed in the large, clear, flowing writing, were still lying unopened in one of the drawers of his desk. Their presence there was, in some obscure, inexplicable way, a salve to his conscience. Not an entirely effective salve. His father’s question had made him feel uncomfortable; he hastened to change the subject.

‘And what have you been delving into recently?’ he asked, in the sort of playfully archaic language that his father might have used.

Mr Beavis chuckled and began to describe his researches into modern American slang. Such savoury locutions! Such an Elizabethan wealth of new coinages and original metaphors! Horse feathers, dish the dope, button up your face – delicious! ‘And how would you like to be called a fever frau?’ he asked his younger daughter, Diana, who had sat in silence, severely aloof, throughout the meal. ‘Or worse, a cinch pushover, my dear? Or I might say that you had a dame complex, Anthony. Or refer regretfully to your habit of smooching the sex jobs.’ He twinkled with pleasure.

‘It’s like so much Chinese,’ said Pauline from the other end of the table. Across her round placid face mirth radiated out in concentric waves of soft pink flesh; the succession of her chins shook like jelly. ‘He thinks he’s the cat’s pyjamas, your father does.’ She reached out, helped herself to a couple of chocolate creams from the silver bowl on the table in front of her and popped one of them into her mouth. ‘The cat’s pyjamas,’ she repeated indistinctly and heaved with renewed laughter.

Mr Beavis, who had been working himself up to the necessary pitch of naughtiness, leaned forward and asked Anthony, in a confidential whisper, ‘What would you do if the fever frau had the misfortune to be storked?’

They were darlings, Diana was thinking; that went without saying. But how silly they could be, how inexpressibly silly! All the same, Anthony had no right to criticize them; and under that excessive politeness of his he obviously was criticizing them, the wretch! She felt quite indignant. Nobody had a right to criticize them except herself and possibly her sister. She tried to think of something unpleasant to say to Anthony; but he had given her no opening and she had no gift for epigram. She had to be content with silently frowning. And anyhow it was time to go back to the lab.

Getting up, ‘I must go,’ she said in her curt, abrupt way. ‘I absolutely forbid you to eat all those sweets,’ she added, as she bent down to kiss her mother. ‘Doctor’s orders.’

‘You’re not a doctor yet, darling.’

‘No, but I shall be next year.’

Tranquilly Pauline poked the second chocolate cream into her mouth. ‘And next year, perhaps, I’ll stop eating sweets,’ she said.

Anthony left a few minutes later. Walking through South Kensington, he found his thoughts harking back to Mrs Foxe. Had the stroke, he wondered, been a bad one? Was she paralysed? He had been so anxious to prevent his father from talking about her, that there had been no time for Pauline to say. He pictured her lying helpless, half dead, and was horrified to find himself feeling, along with sympathy, a certain satisfaction, a certain sense of relief. For, after all, she was the chief witness for the prosecution, the person who could testify most damningly against him. Dead, or only half dead, she was out of court; and, in her absence, there was no longer any case against him. With part of his being he was glad of Pauline’s news. Shamefully glad. He tried to think of something else, and, meanwhile, boarded a bus so as to reach more quickly the haven of the London Library.

He spent nearly three hours there, looking up references to the history of the Anabaptists, then walked home to his rooms in Bloomsbury. He was expecting Gladys that evening before dinner. The girl had been a bit tiresome recently; but still . . . He smiled to himself with anticipatory pleasure.

She was due at six; but at a quarter-past she had not yet come. Nor yet at half-past. Nor yet at seven. Nor yet at half-past seven. At eight, he was looking at those blue envelopes, postmarked in 1914 and 1915 and addressed in Mrs Foxe’s writing – looking at them and wondering, in the self-questioning despondency that had succeeded his first impatience and rage, whether he should open them. He was still wondering, when the telephone bell rang, and there was Mark Staithes asking him if by any chance he was free for dinner. A little party had formed itself at the last moment. Pitchley would be there, and his wife, the psychologist, and that Indian politician, Sen, and Helen Ledwidge . . . Anthony put the letters back in their drawer and hurried out of the house.

CHAPTER XXVI

September 5th 1933

IT WAS AFTER two o’clock. Anthony lay on his back staring up into the darkness. Sleep, it seemed, deliberately refused to come, was being withheld by someone else, some malignant alien inhabiting his own body. Outside, in the pine trees the cicadas harped incessantly on the theme of their existence; and at long intervals a sound of cock-crowing would swell up out of the darkness, louder and nearer, until all the birds in the surrounding gardens were shouting defiance back and forth, peal answering peal. And then for no reason, first one, then another fell silent and the outburst died away fainter and fainter into increasing distance – right across France, he fancied as he strained his ears after the receding sound, in a hurrying wave of ragged crowing. Hundreds of miles, perhaps. And then somewhere, the wave would turn and roll back again as swiftly as it had come. Back from the North Sea, perhaps; over the battlefields; round the fringes of Paris and from bird to distant bird through the forests; then across the plains of Beauce; up and down the hills of Burgundy and, like another aerial river of sound, headlong down the valley of the Rhône; past Valence, past Orange and Avignon, past Arles and Aix and across the bare hills of Provence; until here it was again, an hour after its previous passage, flowing tumultuously shrill across the cicadas’ loud, unremitting equivalent of silence.

He was reminded suddenly of a passage in Lawrence’s The Man who Died, and, thankful for an excuse to interrupt for a little his vain pursuit of sleep, he turned on the light and went downstairs to look for the book. Yes, here it was. ‘As he came out, the young cock crowed. It was a diminished, pinched cry, but there was that in the voice of the bird stronger than chagrin. It was the necessity to live and even to cry out the triumph of life. The man who had died stood and watched the cock who had escaped and been caught, ruffling himself up, rising forward on his toes, throwing up his head, and parting his beak in another challenge from life to death. The brave sounds rang out, and though they were diminished by the cord round the bird’s leg, they were not cut off. The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave crests, foam-tips emerging out of the blue invisible, a black orange cock or the green flame-tongues out of the extremes of the fig tree. They came forth, these things and creatures of spring, glowing with desire and assertion. They came like crests of foam, out of the blue flood of the invisible desire, out of the vast invisible sea of strength, and they came coloured and tangible, evanescent, yet deathless in their coming. The man who had died looked on the great swing into existence of things that had not died, but he saw no longer their tremulous desire to exist and to be. He heard instead their ringing, ringing, defiant challenge to all other things existing . . .’

Anthony read on till he had finished the story of the man who had died and come to life again, the man who was himself the escaped cock; then put away the book and went back to bed. The foam on the waves of that invisible sea of desire and strength. But life, life as such, he protested inwardly – it was not enough. How could one be content with the namelessness of mere energy, with the less than individuality of a power, that for all its mysterious divineness, was yet unconscious, beneath good and evil? The cicadas sounded incessantly, and again, at about four, the tide of cock-crowing came sweeping across the land and passed on out of hearing, towards Italy.

Life irrepressibly living itself out. But there were emblems, he reflected, more vividly impressive than the crowing cock or the young leaves breaking out from the winter fig tree’s bone-white skeleton. He remembered that film he had seen of the fertilization of a rabbit’s ovum. Spermatozoa, a span long on the screen, ferociously struggling towards their goal – the moon-like sphere of the egg. Countless, aimed from every side, their flagella in frantic vibration. And now the foremost had reached their objective, were burrowing into it, thrusting through the outer wall of living matter, tearing away in their violent haste whole cells that floated off and were lost. And at last one of the invaders had penetrated to the quick of the nucleus, the act of fertilization was consummated; and suddenly the hitherto passive sphere stirred into movement. There was a violent spasm of contraction; its smooth rounded surface became corrugated and in some way resistant to the other sperms that vainly threw themselves upon it. And then the egg began to divide, bending in its walls upon itself till they met in the centre, and there were two cells instead of one; then, as the two cells repeated the process, four cells; then eight, then sixteen. And within the cells the granules of protoplasm were in continuous motion, like peas in a boiling pot, but self-activated, moving by their own energy.

In comparison with these minute fragments of living matter, the crowing cock, the cicadas endlessly repeating the proclamation of their existence, were only feebly alive. Life under the microscope seemed far more vehement and irrepressible than in the larger world. Consolingly and at the same time appallingly irrepressible. For, yes, it was also appalling, the awful unconsciousness of that unconquerable, crawling desire! And, oh, the horror of that display of submental passion, of violent and impersonal egotism! Intolerable, unless one could think of it only as raw material and available energy.

Yes, raw material and a stream of energy. Impressive for their quantity, their duration. But qualitatively they were only potentially valuable: would become valuable only when made up into something else, only when used to serve an ulterior purpose. For Lawrence, the animal purpose had seemed sufficient and satisfactory. The cock, crowing, fighting, mating – anonymously; and man anonymous like the cock. Better such mindless anonymity, he had insisted, than the squalid relationships of human beings advanced half-way to consciousness, still only partially civilized.

But Lawrence had never looked through a microscope, never seen biological energy in its basic undifferentiated state. He hadn’t wanted to look, had disapproved on principle of microscopes, fearing what they might reveal; and had been right to fear. Those depths beneath depths of namelessness, crawling irrepressibly – they would have horrified him. He had insisted that the raw material should be worked up – but worked only to a certain pitch and no further; that the primal crawling energy should be used for the relatively higher purposes of animal existence, but for no existence beyond the animal. Arbitrarily, illogically. For the other, ulterior purposes and organizations existed and were not to be ignored. Moving through space and time, the human animal discovered them on his path, unequivocally present and real.

Thinking and the pursuit of knowledge – these were purposes for which he himself had used the energy that crawled under the microscope, that crowed defiantly in the darkness. Thought as an end, knowledge as an end. And now it had become suddenly manifest that they were only means – as definitely raw material as life itself. Raw material – and he divined, he knew, what the finished product would have to be; and with part of his being he revolted against the knowledge. What, set about trying to turn his raw material of life, thought, knowledge into that – at his time of life, and he a civilized human being! The mere idea was ridiculous. One of those absurd hang-overs from Christianity – like his father’s terror of the more disreputable realities of existence, like the hymn-singing of workmen during the General Strike. The headaches, the hiccoughs of yesterday’s religion. But with another part of his mind he was miserably thinking that he would never succeed in bringing about the transformation of his raw material into the finished product; that he didn’t know how or where to begin; that he was afraid of making a fool of himself; that he lacked the necessary courage, patience, strength of mind.

At about seven, when behind the shutters the sun was already high above the horizon, he dropped off into a heavy sleep, and woke with a start three hours later to see Mark Staithes beside his bed and peering at him, smiling, an amused and inquisitive gargoyle, through the mosquito net.

‘Mark?’ he questioned in astonishment. ‘What on earth . . .?’

‘Bridal!’ said Mark, poking the muslin net. ‘Positively première communion! I’ve been watching you sleeping.’

‘For long?’

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ he said, replying not to the spoken, but to the unspoken question implied by Anthony’s tone of annoyance. ‘You don’t give yourself away in your sleep. On the contrary, you take other people in. I’ve never seen anyone look so innocent as you did under that veil. Like the infant Samuel. Too sweet!’

Reminded of Helen’s use of the same word on the morning of the catastrophe, Anthony frowned. Then, after a silence, ‘What have you come for?’ he asked.

‘To stay with you.’

‘You weren’t asked.’

‘That remains to be seen,’ said Mark.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you may discover it after the event.’

‘Discover what?’

‘That you wanted to ask me. Without knowing that you wanted it.’

‘What makes you think that?’

Mark drew up a chair and sat down before answering. ‘I saw Helen the night she got back to London.’

‘Did you?’ Anthony’s tone was as blankly inexpressive as he could make it. ‘Where?’ he added.

‘At Hugh’s. Hugh was giving a party. There were some uncomfortable moments.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, because she wanted them to be uncomfortable. She was in a queer state, you know.’

‘Did she tell you why?’

Mark nodded. ‘She even made me read your letter. The beginning of it, at least. I wouldn’t go on.’

‘Helen made you read my letter?’

‘Aloud. She insisted. But, as I say, she was in a very queer state.’ There was a long silence. ‘That’s why I came here,’ he added at last.

‘Thinking that I’d be glad to see you?’ the other asked in an ironical tone.

‘Thinking that you’d be glad to see me,’ Mark answered gravely.

After another silence, ‘Well, perhaps you’re not altogether wrong,’ said Anthony. ‘In a way, of course, I simply hate the sight of you.’ He smiled at Mark. ‘Nothing personal intended, mind you. I should hate the sight of anyone just as much. But in another way I’m glad you’ve come. And this is personal. Because I think you’re likely – well, likely to have some notion of what’s what,’ he concluded with a non-committal vagueness. ‘If there’s anybody who can . . .’ He was going to say ‘help’: but the idea of being helped was so repugnant to him, seemed so grotesquely associated with the parson’s wellchosen words after a death in the family, with the house-master’s frank, friendly talk about sexual temptations, that he broke off uncomfortably. ‘If anybody can make a sensible remark about it all,’ he began again, on a different level of expression, ‘I think it’s you.’

The other nodded without speaking, and thought how typical it was of the man to go on talking about sensible remarks – even now!

‘I have a feeling,’ Anthony went on slowly, overcoming inward resistances in order to speak, ‘a feeling that I’d like to get it over, get things settled. On another basis,’ he brought out as though under torture. ‘The present one . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I’m a bit bored with it.’ Then, perceiving with a sense of shame the ludicrous inappropriateness and the worse than ludicrous falsity of the under-statement, ‘It won’t do,’ he added resolutely. ‘It’s a basis that can’t carry more than the weight of a ghost. And in order to use it, I’ve turned myself into a ghost.’ After a pause, ‘These last few days,’ he went on slowly, ‘I’ve had a queer feeling that I’m not really there, that I haven’t been there for years past. Ever since . . . well, I don’t exactly know when. Since before the war, I suppose.’ He could not bring himself to speak of Brian. ‘Not there,’ he repeated.

‘A great many people aren’t there,’ said Mark. ‘Not as people, at any rate. Only as animals and incarnate functions.’

‘Animals and incarnate functions,’ the other repeated. ‘You’ve said it exactly. But in most cases they have no choice; nonentity is forced on them by circumstance. Whereas I was free to choose – at any rate, so far as anybody is free to choose. If I wasn’t there, it was on purpose.’

‘And do you mean to say that you’ve only just discovered the fact that you’ve never been there?’

Anthony shook his head. ‘No, no, I’ve known it, of course. All the time. But theoretically. In the same way as one knows . . . well, for example, that there are birds that live symbiotically with wasps. A curious and interesting fact, but no more. I didn’t let it be more. And then I had my justifications. Work: too much personal life would interfere with my work. And the need for freedom: freedom to think, freedom to indulge my passion for knowing about the world. And freedom for its own sake. I wanted to be free, because it was intolerable not to be free.’

‘I can understand that,’ said Mark, ‘provided that there’s someone there who can enjoy the freedom. And provided,’ he added, ‘that that someone makes himself conscious of being free by overcoming the obstacles that stand in the way of freedom. But how can you be free, if there’s no “you”?’

‘I’ve always put it the other way round,’ said Anthony. ‘How can you be free – or rather (for one must think of it impersonally) how can there be freedom – so long as the “you” persists? A “you” has got to be consistent and responsible, has got to make choices and commit itself. But if one gets rid of the “you,” one gets rid of responsibility and the need for consistency. One’s free as a succession of unconditioned, uncommitted states without past or future, except in so far as one can’t voluntarily get rid of one’s memories and anticipations.’ After a silence, ‘The staggering imbecility of old Socrates!’ he went on. ‘Imagining that one had only to know the correct line of conduct in order to follow it. One practically always knows it – and more often than not one doesn’t follow it. Or perhaps you’re not like that,’ he added in another tone, looking at Mark through the mosquito net. ‘One’s inclined to attribute one’s own defects to everyone else. Weakness, in my case. Not to mention timidity,’ he added with a laugh, that uttered itself automatically, so deeply ingrained was the habit of half withdrawing, as soon as it was spoken, anything in the nature of a personal confident, of evoking in the listener’s mind a doubt as to the seriousness of his intention in speaking; ‘timidity, and downright cowardice, and indolence in regard to anything that isn’t my work.’ He laughed again as though it were all absurd, not worth mentioning. ‘One forgets that other people may be difference. Tough-minded, firm of purpose. I dare say you always do what you know is right.’

‘I always do it,’ Mark answered. ‘Whether it’s right or wrong.’ He demonstrated the anatomy of a smile.

Anthony lay back on his pillows, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes half shut. Then, after a long silence, he turned to Staithes and said abruptly: ‘Don’t you ever feel that you simply can’t be bothered to do what you’ve decided on? Just now, for example, I found myself wondering all of a sudden why on earth I’d been talking to you like this – why I’d been thinking these things before you came – why I’d been trying to make up my mind to do something. Wondering and feeling that I simply couldn’t be bothered. Thinking it would be better just to evade it all and go back to the familiar routine. The quiet life. Even though the quiet life would be fatal. Fatal, mortal, but all the same anything for it.’ He shook his head. ‘Probably if you hadn’t come to shame me into some sort of resolution, that’s what I would have done – escaped from it all and gone back to the quiet life.’ He laughed. ‘And perhaps,’ he added, ‘I shall do it even now. In spite of you.’ He sat up, lifted the mosquito net and stepped out of bed. ‘I’m going to have my bath.’

CHAPTER XXVII

May 27th 1914

ANTHONY CAME DOWN to breakfast to find his father explaining to the two children the etymology of what they were eating. ‘. . . merely another form of “pottage”. You say ”porridge” just as you say – or rather’ (he twinkled at them) ‘I hope you don’t say – “shurrup” for “shut up”.’

The two little girls went on stolidly eating.

‘Ah, Anthony!’ Mr Beavis went on. ‘Better late than never. What, no pottage this morning? But you’ll have an Aberdeen cutlet, I hope.’

Anthony helped himself to the haddock and sat down in his place.

‘Here’s a letter for you,’ said Mr Beavis, and handed it over. ‘Don’t I recognize Brian’s writing?’ Anthony nodded. ‘Does he still enjoy his work at Manchester?’

‘I think so,’ Anthony answered. ‘Except, of course, that he does too much. He’s at the newspaper till one or two in the morning. And then from lunch to dinner he works at his thesis.’

‘Well, it’s good to see a young man who has the energy of his ambitions,’ said Mr Beavis. ‘Because, of course, he needn’t work so hard. It’s not as if his mother hadn’t got the wherewithal.’

The wherewithal so exasperated Anthony that, though he found Brian’s action absurd, it was with a cutting severity that he answered his father. ‘He won’t accept his mother’s money,’ he said very coldly. ‘It’s a matter of principle.’

There was a diversion while the children put away their porridge plates and were helped to Aberdeen cutlets. Anthony took the opportunity to start reading his letter.

‘No news of you for a long time. Here all goes on as usual, or would do, if I were feeling a bit sprightlier. But sleep has been none too good and internal workings not all they might be. Am slowing down, in consequence, on the thesis, as I can’t slow down on the paper. All this makes me look forward longingly to our projected fortnight in Langdale. Don’t let me down, for heaven’s sake. What a bore one’s carcase is when it goes in the least wrong! Even when it goes right, for that matter. Such a lot of unmodern inconveniences. I sometimes bitterly resent this physical predestination to scatology and obscenity.

‘Write soon and let me know how you are, what you’ve been reading, whether you’ve met anybody of interest. And will you do me a kindness? Joan’s in town now, staying with her aunt and working for the Charity Organization people. Her father didn’t want her to go, of course – preferred to have her at home, so that he could tyrannize her. There was a long battle, which he finally lost; she has been in town nearly a month now. For which I’m exceedingly thankful – but at the same time, for various reasons, feel a bit worried. If I could get away for the week-ends, I’d come myself; but I can’t. And perhaps, in a certain sense, it’s all for the best. In my present mouldy condition I should be rather a skeleton at the feast; and besides, there are certain complications. I can’t explain them in a letter; but when you come north in July I’ll try. I ought to have asked your advice before this. You’re harder in the head than I am. Which is ultimately the reason why I didn’t talk to you about the matter – for fear of being thought a fool by you! Such is one’s imbecility. But, there, we’ll discuss it all later. Meanwhile, will you get in touch with her, take her out to a meal, get her to talk, then write and tell me how you think she’s reacting to London, what she feels about life in general, and so forth. It’s been a violent transition – from remote country to London, from cramping poverty to a rich house, from subjection to her father’s bad-tempered tyranny to independence. A violent transition; and, though I’m glad of it, I’m a bit nervous as to its effects. But you’ll see. – Yours,

B.’

Anthony did see that same day. The old shyness, he noticed, as they shook hands in the lobby of the restaurant, was still there – the same embarrassed smile, the same swaying movement of recoil. In face and body she was more of a woman than when he had seen her last, a year before, seemed prettier too – chiefly, no doubt, because she was better dressed.

They passed into the restaurant and sat down. Anthony ordered the food and a bottle of Vouvray, then began to explore the ground.

London – how did she like London?

Adored it.

Even the work?

Not the office part, perhaps. But three times a week she helped at a crèche. ‘I love babies.’

‘Even those horrible little smelly ones?’

Joan was indignant. ‘They’re adorable. I love the work with them. Besides, it allows me to enjoy all the rest of London with a clear conscience. I feel I’ve paid for my theatres and dances.’

Shyness broke up her talk, plunged it, as it were, into alternate light and shade. At one moment she would be speaking with difficulty, hardly opening her lips, her voice low and indistinct, her face averted; the next, her timidity was swept aside by an uprush of strong feeling – delight, or some distress, or irrepressible mirth, and she was looking at him with eyes grown suddenly and surprisingly bold; from almost inaudible, her voice had become clear; the strong white teeth flashed between lips parted in a frank expression of feeling. Then suddenly she was as though appalled by her own daring; she became conscious of him as a possible critic. What was he thinking? Had she made a fool of herself? Her voice faltered, the blood rose to her cheeks, she looked down at her plate; and for the next few minutes he would get nothing but short mumbled answers to his questions, nothing but the most perfunctory of nervous laughs in response to his best efforts to amuse her. The food, however, and the wine did their work, and as the meal advanced, she found herself more at ease with him. They began to talk about Brian.

‘You ought to prevent him from working so hard,’ he said.

‘Do you think I don’t try?’ Then, with something almost like anger in her voice, ‘It’s his nature,’ she went on. ‘He’s so terribly conscientious.’

‘It’s your business to make him unconscientious.’ He smiled at her, expecting a return in kind. But, instead of that, she frowned; her face took on an expression of resentful misery. ‘It’s easy for you to talk,’ she muttered. There was a silence, while she sat with downcast eyes, sipping her wine.

They could have married, it occurred to him for the first time, if Brian had consented to live on his mother. Why on earth, then, seeing how much he was in love with the girl . . .?

With the peach-melba it all came out. ‘It’s difficult to talk about,’ she said. ‘I’ve hardly mentioned it to anyone. But with you it’s different. You’ve known Brian such a long time; you’re his oldest friend. You’ll understand. I feel I can tell you about it.’

Curious, but at the same time a little disquieted, he murmured something vaguely polite.

She failed to notice the signs of his embarrassment; for her, at the moment, Anthony was only the heaven-sent opportunity for at last releasing in speech a flood of distressing feelings too long debarred from expression.

‘It’s that conscientiousness of his. If you only knew . . .! Why has he got the idea that there’s something wrong about love? The ordinary, happy kind of love, I mean. He thinks it isn’t right; he thinks he oughtn’t to have those feelings.’

She pushed away her plate, and, leaning forward, her elbows on the table, began to speak in a lower, more intimate tone of the kisses that Brian had given and been ashamed of, and those other kisses that, by way of atonement, he had refused to give.

Anthony listened in astonishment. ‘Certain complications’ was what Brian had written in his letter; it was putting it mildly. This was just craziness. Tragic – but also grotesque, absurd. It occurred to him that Mary would find the story particularly ludicrous.

‘He said he wanted to be worthy of me,’ she went on. ‘Worthy of love. But all that happened was that it made me feel unworthy. Unworthy of everything, in every way. Guilty – feeling I’d done something wrong. And dirty too, if you understand what I mean, as though I’d fallen into the mud. But, Anthony, it isn’t wrong, is it?’ she questioned. ‘I mean, we’d never done anything that wasn’t . . . well, you know: quite innocent. Why does he say he’s unworthy, and make me feel unworthy at the same time? Why does he?’ she insisted. There were tears in her eyes.

‘He was always rather like that,’ said Anthony. ‘Perhaps his upbringing . . . His mother’s a wonderful person,’ he added, dropping, as he suddenly realized, while the words were being spoken, into Mrs Foxe’s own idiom. ‘But perhaps a bit oppressive, just for that reason.’

Joan nodded emphatically, but did not speak.

‘It may be she’s made him aim a bit too high,’ he went on. ‘Too high all along the line, if you see what I mean – even when he’s not directly following her example. That business of not wanting to take her money, for instance . . .’

Joan caught up the subject with passionate eagerness. ‘Yes, why does he want to be different from everyone else? After all, there are other good people in the world and they don’t feel it necessary to do it. Mind you,’ she added, looking up sharply into Anthony’s face, as if trying to catch and quell any expression of disapproval there, or worse, of patronizing amusement, ‘mind you, I think it’s wonderful of him to do it. Wonderful!’ she repeated with a kind of defiance. Then, resuming the critical tone which she would not allow Anthony to use, but to which it seemed to her that her own feelings for Brian gave her a right, ‘All the same,’ she went on, ‘I can’t see how it would hurt him to take that money. I believe it was mostly his mother’s doing.’

Surprised, ‘But he told me that Mrs Foxe had tried to insist on his taking it.’

‘Oh, she made it seem as though she wanted him to take it. We were there for a week-end in May to talk it over. She kept telling him that it wasn’t wrong to take the money, and that he ought to think about me and getting married. But then, when Brian and I told her that I’d agreed to his not taking it, she . . .’

Anthony interrupted her. ‘But had you agreed?’

Joan dropped her eyes. ‘In a way,’ she said sullenly. Then looking up again with sudden anger, ‘How could I help agreeing with him? Seeing that that was what he wanted to do, and would have done, what’s more, even if I hadn’t agreed. And besides, I’ve told you, there was something rather splendid and wonderful about it. Of course, I had agreed. But agreeing didn’t mean that I really wanted him to refuse the money. And that’s where her falseness came in – pretending to think that I wanted him to refuse it, and congratulating me and him on what we’d done. Saying we were heroic and all that. And so encouraging him to go on with the idea. It is her doing, I tell you. Much more than you think.’

She was silent, and Anthony thought it best to allow the subject to drop. Heaven only knew what she’d say if he allowed her to go on talking about Mrs Foxe. ‘Poor Brian,’ he said aloud, and added, taking refuge in platitude, ‘The best is the enemy of the good.’

‘Yes, that’s just it!’ she cried. ‘The enemy of the good. He wants to be perfect – but look at the result! He tortures himself and hurts me. Why should I be made to feel dirty and criminal? Because that’s what he’s doing. When I’ve done nothing wrong. Nor has he, for that matter. And yet he wants me to feel the same about him. Dirty and criminal. Why does he make it so difficult for me? As difficult as he possibly can.’ Her voice trembled, the tears overflowed. She pulled out her handkerchief and quickly wiped her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m making a fool of myself. But if you knew how hard it’s been for me! I’ve loved him so much, I want to go on loving him. But he doesn’t seem to want to allow me to. It ought to be so beautiful; but he does his best to make it all seem ugly and horrible.’ Then, after a pause, and in a voice that had sunk almost to a whisper, ‘I sometimes wonder if I can go on much longer.’

Did it mean, he wondered, that she had already decided to break it off – had already met someone else who was prepared to love her and be loved less tragically, more normally than Brian? No; probably not, he decided. But there was every likelihood that she soon would. In her way (it didn’t happen to be exactly the way he liked) she was attractive. There would be no shortage of candidates; and if a satisfactory candidate presented himself, would she be able – whatever she might consciously wish – to refuse?

Joan broke the silence. ‘I dream so often of the house we’re going to live in,’ she said. ‘Going from room to room; and it all looks so nice. Such pretty curtains and chair covers. And vases full of flowers.’ She sighed; then, after a pause, ‘Do you understand his not wanting to take his mother’s money?’

Anthony hesitated a moment; then replied noncommittally: ‘I understand it; but I don’t think I should do it myself.’

She sighed once more. ‘That’s how I feel too.’ She looked at her watch; then gathered up her gloves. ‘I shall have to go.’ With this return from intimacy to the prosaic world of time and people and appointments, she suddenly woke up again to painful self-consciousness. Had it bored him? Did he think her a fool? She looked into his face, trying to divine his thoughts; then dropped her eyes. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been talking a lot about myself,’ she mumbled. ‘I don’t know why I should burden you . . .’

He protested. ‘I only wish I could be of some help.’

Joan raised her face again and gave him a quick smile of gratitude. ‘You’ve done a lot by just listening.’

They left the restaurant and, when he had seen her to her bus, he set off on foot towards the British Museum, wondering, as he went, what sort of letter he ought to write to Brian. Should he wash his hands of the whole business and merely scribble a note to the effect that Joan seemed well and happy? Or should he let out that she had told him everything, and then proceed to expostulate, warn, advise? He passed between the huge columns of the portico into the dim coolness within. A regular sermon, he thought with distaste. If only one could approach the problem as it ought to be approached – as a Rabelaisian joke. But then poor Brian could hardly be expected to see it in that light. Even though it would do him a world of good to think for a change in Rabelaisian terms. Anthony showed his card to the attendant and walked down the corridor to the Reading Room. That was always the trouble, he reflected; you could never influence anybody to be anything except himself, nor influence him by any means that he didn’t already accept the validity of. He pushed open the door and was under the dome, breathing the faint, acrid smell of books. Millions of books. And all those hundreds of thousands of authors, century after century – each convinced he was right, convinced that he knew the essential secret, convinced that he could convince the rest of the world by putting it down in black and white. When in fact, of course, the only people anyone ever convinced were the ones that nature and circumstances had actually or potentially convinced already. And even those weren’t wholly to be relied on. Circumstances changed. What convinced in January wouldn’t necessarily convince in August. The attendant handed him the books that had been reserved for him, and he walked off to his seat. Mountains of the spirits in interminable birth-pangs; and the result was – what? Well, si ridiculum murem requires, circumspice. Pleased with his invention, he looked about him at his fellow readers – the men like walruses, the dim females, the Indians, emaciated or overblown, the whiskered patriarchs, the youths in spectacles. Heirs to all the ages. Depressing, if you took it seriously; but also irresistibly comic. He sat down and opened his book – De Lancre’s Tableau de l’Inconstance des Mauvais Anges – at the place where he had stopped reading the day before. ‘Le Diable estoit en forme de bouc, ayant une queue et au dessoubs un visage d’homme noir, où elle fut contrainte le baiser . . .’ He laughed noiselessly to himself. Another one for Mary, he thought.

At five he rose, left his books at the desk and, from Holborn, took the tube to Gloucester Road. A few minutes later he was at Mary Amberley’s front door. The maid opened; he smiled at her familiarly and, assuming the privilege of an intimate of the house, ran upstairs to the drawing-room, unannounced.

‘I have a story for you,’ he proclaimed, as he crossed the room.

‘A coarse story, I hope,’ said Mary Amberley from the sofa.

Anthony kissed her hand in that affected style he had recently adopted, and sat down. ‘To the coarse,’ he said, ‘all things are coarse.’

‘Yes, how lucky that is!’ And with that crooked little smile of hers, that dark glitter between narrowed lids, ‘A filthy mind,’ she added, ‘is a perpetual feast.’ The joke was old and not her own; but Anthony’s laughter pleased her none the less for that. It was wholehearted laughter, loud and prolonged – louder and longer than the joke itself warranted. But then it wasn’t at the joke that he was really laughing. The joke was hardly more than an excuse; that laughter was his response, not to a single stimulus, but to the whole extraordinary and exciting situation. To be able to talk freely about anything (anything, mind you) with a woman, a lady, a genuine ‘loaf-kneader’, as Mr Beavis, in his moments of etymological waggery, had been known to say, a true-blue English loaf-kneader who was also one’s mistress, had also read Mallarmé, was also a friend of Guillaume Apollinaire; and to listen to the loaf-kneader preaching what she practised and casually mentioning beds, water-closets, the physiology of what (for the Saxon words still remained unpronounceable) they were constrained to call l’amour – for Anthony, the experience was still, after two years and in spite of Mary’s occasional infidelities, an intoxicating mixture of liberation and forbidden fruit, of relief and titillation. In his father’s universe, in the world of Pauline and the Aunts, such things were simply not there – but not there with a painfully, glaringly conspicuous absence. Like the hypnotized patient who has been commanded to see the five of clubs as a piece of virgin pasteboard, they deliberately failed to perceive the undesirable things, they were conspiratorially silent about all they had been blind to. The natural functions even of the lower animals had to be ignored; there were silences even about quadrupeds. That goat incident, for example – it was the theme, now, of one of Anthony’s choicest anecdotes. Exquisitely comic – but how much more comic now than at the time, nearly two years before he first met Mary, when it had actually happened! Picnicking on that horrible Scheideck Pass, with the Weisshorn hanging over them like an obsession and a clump of gentians, carefully sought out by Mr Beavis, in the grass at their feet, the family had been visited by a half-grown kid, greedy for the salt of their hard-boiled eggs. Shrinking and a little disgusted under their delight, his two small half-sisters had held out their hands to be licked, while Pauline took a snapshot, and Mr Beavis, whose interest in goats was mainly philological, quoted Theocritus. Pastoral scene! But suddenly the little creature had straddled its legs and, still expression-lessly gazing at the Beavis family through the oblong pupils of its large yellow eyes, had proceeded to make water on the gentians.

‘They’re not very generous with their butter,’ and, ‘How jolly the dear old Weisshorn is looking today,’ Pauline and Mr Beavis brought out almost simultaneously – the one, as she peered into her sandwich, in a tone of complaint, the other, gazing away far-focused, with a note in his voice of a rapture none the less genuinely Wordsworthian for being expressed in terms of a gentlemanly and thoroughly English facetiousness.

In haste and guiltily, the two children swallowed their incipient shriek of startled mirth and averted frozen faces from one another and the outrageous goat. Momentarily compromised, the world of Mr Beavis and Pauline and the Aunts had settled down again to respectability.

‘And what about your story?’ Mrs Amberley enquired, as his laughter subsided.

‘You shall hear,’ said Anthony, and was silent for a little, lighting a cigarette, while he thought of what he was about to say and the way he meant to say it. He was ambitious about his story, wanted to make it a good one, at once amusing and psychologically profound; a smoking-room story that should also be a library story, a laboratory story. Mary must be made to pay a double tribute of laughter and admiration.

‘You know Brian Foxe?’ he began.

‘Of course.’

‘Poor old Brian!’ By his tone, by the use of the patronizing adjective, Anthony established his position of superiority, asserted his right, the right of the enlightened and scientific vivisector, to anatomize and examine. Yes, poor old Brian! That maniacal preoccupation of his with chastity! Chastity – the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont. Mary’s appreciative smile acted on him like a spur to fresh efforts. Fresh efforts, of course, at Brian’s expense. But at the moment, that didn’t occur to him.

‘But what can you expect,’ Mrs Amberley put in, ‘with a mother like that? One of those spiritual vampires. A regular St Monica.’

‘St Monica by Ary Scheffer,’ he found himself overbidding. Not that there was a trace in Mrs Foxe of that sickly insincerity of Scheffer’s saint. But the end of his story-telling, which was to provoke Mary’s laughter and admiration, was sufficient justification for any means whatever. Scheffer was an excellent joke, too good a joke to be neglected, even if he were beside the point. And when Mary brought out what was at the moment her favourite phrase and talked of Mrs Foxe’s ‘uterine reactions,’ he eagerly seized upon the words and began applying them, not merely to Mrs Foxe, but also to Joan and even (making another joke out of the physical absurdity of the thing) to Brian. Brian’s uterine reactions towards chastity in conflict with his own and Joan’s uterine reactions towards the common desires – it was a drama. A drama, he explained, whose existence hitherto he had only suspected and inferred. Now there was no more need to guess; he knew. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Or rather, straight from the mare’s. Poor Joan! The vivisector laid out another specimen on the operating table.

‘Like early Christians,’ was Mrs Amberley’s comment, when he had finished.

The virulent contempt in her voice made him suddenly remember, for the first time since he had begun this story, that Brian was his friend, that Joan had been genuinely unhappy. Too late, he wanted to explain that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, there was nobody he liked and admired and respected more than Brian. ‘You mustn’t misunderstand me,’ he said to Mary retrospectively and in imagination. ‘I’m absolutely devoted to him.’ Inside his head, he became eloquent on the subject. But no amount of this interior eloquence could alter the fact that he had betrayed confidences and been malicious without apology or qualifying explanation. At the time, of course, this malice had seemed to him the manifestation of his own psychological acuteness; these betrayed confidences, the indispensable facts without which the acuteness could not have exercised. But now . . .

He found himself all at once confused and tongue-tied with self-reproach.

‘I felt awfully sorry for Joan,’ he stammered, trying to make amends. ‘Promised I’d do all I could to help the poor girl. But what? That’s the question. What?’ He exaggerated the note of perplexity. Perplexed, he was justified in betraying Joan’s confidences; he had told the story (he now began to assure himself) solely for the sake of asking Mary’s advice – the advice of an experienced woman of the world.

But the experienced woman of the world was looking at him in the most disquieting way. Mrs Amberley’s eyelids had narrowed over a mocking brilliance; the left-hand corner of her mouth was drawn up ironically. ‘The nicest thing about you,’ she said judicially, ‘is your innocence.’

Her words were so wounding that he forgot in an instance Joan, Brian, his own discreditable behaviour, and could think only of his punctured vanity.

‘Thank you,’ he said, trying to give her a smile of frank amusement. Innocent – she thought him innocent? After their time in Paris. After those jokes about uterine reactions?

‘So deliciously youthful, so touching.’

‘I’m glad you think so.’ The smile had gone all awry; he felt the blood mounting to his cheeks.

‘A girl comes to you,’ Mrs Amberley went on, ‘and complains because she hasn’t been kissed enough. And here you are, solemnly asking what you ought to do to help her! And now you’re blushing like a beetroot. Darling, I absolutely adore you!’ Laying her hand on his arm, ‘Kneel down on the floor here,’ she commanded. Rather sheepishly, he obeyed. Mary Amberley looked at him for a little in silence, with the same bright mocking expression in her eyes. Then, softly, ‘Shall I show you what you can do to help her?’ she asked. ‘Shall I show you?’

He nodded without speaking; but still, at arm’s length, she smiled enquiringly into his face.

‘Or am I a fool to show you?’ she asked. ‘Won’t you learn the lesson too well? Perhaps I shall be jealous?’ She shook her head and smiled – a gay and ‘civilized’ smile. ‘No, I don’t believe in being jealous.’ She took his face between her two hands and, whispering, ‘This is how you can help her,’ drew him towards her.

Anthony had felt humiliated by her almost contemptuous assumption of the dominant rôle; but no shame, no resentment could annul his body’s consciousness of the familiar creepings of pleasure and desire. He abandoned himself to her kisses.

A clock struck, and immediately, from an upper floor, came the approaching sound of shrill childish voices. Mrs Amberley drew back and, laying a hand over his mouth, pushed him away from her. ‘You’ve got to be domestic,’ she said, laughing. ‘It’s six. I do the fond mother at six.’

Anthony scrambled to his feet and, with the idea of fabricating a little favourable evidence, walked over to the fire and stood there with his elbows on the mantelpiece, looking at a Conder water-colour.

The door burst open, and with a yell like the whistle of an express train a small round child of about five came rushing into the room and fairly hurled herself upon her mother. Another little girl, three or four years older than the first, came hurrying after.

‘Helen!’ she kept calling, and her face, with its expression of anxious disapproval, was the absurd parody of a governess’s face. ‘Helen! You mustn’t. Tell her she mustn’t shout like that, Mummy,’ she appealed to Mrs Amberley.

But Mrs Amberley only laughed and ran her fingers through the little one’s thick yellow hair. ‘Joyce believes in the Ten Commandments,’ she said, turning to Anthony. ‘Was born believing in them. Weren’t you, darling?’ She put an arm round Joyce’s shoulder and kissed her. ‘Whereas Helen and I . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears.’

‘Nanny says it’s the draught that gives her a stiff neck,’ Joyce volunteered, and was indignant when her mother and Anthony, and even, by uncomprehending contagion, little Helen, burst out laughing. ‘But it’s true!’ she cried; and tears of outraged virtue were in her eyes. ‘Nanny says so.’

CHAPTER XXVIII

June 25th 1934

THE FACILITY WITH which one could become a Stiggins in modern dress! A much subtler, and therefore more detestable, more dangerous Stiggins. For of course Stiggins himself was too stupid to be either intrinsically very bad or capable of doing much harm to other people. Whereas if I set my mind to it, heaven knows what I mightn’t achieve in the way of lies in the soul. Even with not setting my mind to it, I could go far – as I perceived, to my horror, today, when I found myself talking to Purchas and three or four of his young people. Talking about Miller’s ‘anthropological approach’; talking about peace as a way of life as well as an international policy – the way of life being the condition of any policy that had the least hope of being permanently successful. Talking so clearly, so profoundly, so convincingly. (The poor devils were listening with their tongues hanging out.) Much more convincingly than Purchas himself could have done; that muscular-jocular-Christian style starts by being effective, but soon makes hearers feel that they’re being talked down to. What they like is that the speaker should be thoroughly serious, but comprehensible. Which is a trick I happen to possess. There I was, discoursing in a really masterly way about the spiritual life, and taking intense pleasure in that mastery, secretly congratulating myself on being not only so clever, but also so good – when all at once I realized who I was: Stiggins. Talking about the theory of courage, self-sacrifice, patience, without any knowledge of the practice. Talking, moreover, in the presence of people who had practised what I was preaching – preaching so effectively that the proper rôles were reversed: they were listening to me, not I to them. The discovery of what I was doing came suddenly. I was overcome with shame. And yet – more shameful – went on talking. Not for long, however. A minute or two, and I simply had to stop, apologize, insist that it wasn’t my business to talk.

This shows how easy it is to be Stiggins by mistake and unconsciously. But also that unconsciousness is no excuse, and that one’s responsible for the mistake, which arises, of course, from the pleasure one takes in being more talented than other people and in dominating them by means of those talents. Why is one unconscious? Because one hasn’t ever taken the trouble to examine one’s motives; and one doesn’t examine one’s motives, because one’s motives are mostly discreditable. Alternatively, of course, one examines one’s motives, but tells oneself lies about them till one comes to believe that they’re good. Which is the conviction of the self-conscious Stiggins. I’ve always condemned showing off and the desire to dominate as vulgar, and imagined myself pretty free of these vulgarities. But in so far as free at all, free, I now perceive, only thanks to the indifference which has kept me away from other people, thanks to the external-economic and internal-intellectual circumstances which made me a sociologist rather than a banker, administrator, engineer, working in direct contact with my fellows. Not to make contacts, I have realized, is wrong; but the moment I make them, I catch myself showing off and trying to dominate. Showing off, to make it worse, as Stiggins would have done, trying to dominate by a purely verbal display of virtues which I don’t put into practice. Humiliating to find that one’s supposed good qualities are mainly due to circumstances and the bad habit of indifference, which made me shirk occasions for behaving badly – or well, for that matter, seeing that it’s very difficult to behave either well or badly except towards other people. More humiliating still to find that when, with an effort of goodwill, one creates the necessary opportunities, one immediately responds to them by behaving badly. Note: meditate on the virtues that are the contraries of vanity, lust for power, hypocrisy.

CHAPTER XXIX

May 24th 1931

THE BLINDS WERE up; the sunlight lay bright across the dressing-table. Helen, as usual, was still in bed. The days were so long. Lying in the soft, stupefying warmth of her own body under the quilt, she shortened them with sleep, with vague inconsequential thoughts, with drowsy reading. The book, this morning, was Shelley’s poems. ‘Warm fragrance,’ she read, articulating the words in an audible whisper, ‘seemed to fall from her light dress . . .’ (She saw a long-legged figure in white muslin, with sloping shoulders and breasts high set.)

. . . from her light dress

And her loose hair; and where some heavy tress

The air of her own speed has disentwined . . .

(The figure was running now, in square-toed pumps cross-gartered with black ribbon over the white cotton stockings.)

The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind;

And in the soul a wild odour is felt

Beyond the sense, like fiery dews that melt

Into the bosom of a frozen bud . . .

The half-opened rose gave place to Mark Staithes’s strangely twisted face. Those things he had told her the other night about perfumes. Musk, ambergris . . . And Henri Quatre with his bromidrosis of the feet. Bien vous en prend d’être roi; sans cela on ne vous pourrait souffrir. Vous puez comme charogne. She made a grimace. Hugh’s smell was like sour milk.

A clock struck. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Twelve! She felt guilty; then defiantly decided that she would stay in bed for lunch. A remembered voice – it was Cynthia’s – sounded reproachfully in her memory. ‘You ought to go out more, see more people.’ But people, Cynthia’s people, were such bores. Behind closed eyelids, she saw her mother rapping the top of her skull: ‘Solid ivory, my dear!’ Hopelessly stupid, ignorant, tasteless, slow. ‘I was brought up above my mental station,’ was what she had said to Anthony the other night. ‘So that now, if ever I have to be with people as silly and uneducated as myself, it’s torture, absolute torture!’

Cynthia was sweet, of course; always had been, ever since they were at school together. But Cynthia’s husband – that retriever! And her young men, and the young men’s young women! ‘My boy friend. My girl friend.’ How she loathed the words and, still more, the awful way they spoke them! So coy, such saucy implications of sleeping together! When, in fact, most of them were utterly respectable. In the few cases where they weren’t respectable, it seemed even worse – a double hypocrisy. Really sleeping together, and pretending to be only archly pretending to do it. The dreary, upper-class Englishness of it all! And then they were always playing games. ‘Ga-ames,’ Mrs Amberley drawled out of a pre-morphia past. ‘A Dear Old School in every home.’ See more of those people, do more of the things they did . . . She shook her head.

Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate

Whose course has been so starless . . .

Was it all nonsense? Or did it mean something – something marvellous she had never experienced? But, yes, she had experienced it.

For in the fields of Immortality

My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,

A divine presence in a place divine . . .

It was humiliating, now, to admit it; but the fact remained that, with Gerry, she had known exactly what those lines signified. A divine presence in a place divine. And it had been the presence in bed of a swindler who was also a virtuoso in the art of love-making. She found a perverse pleasure in insisting, as brutally as she could, upon the grotesque disparity between the facts and what had then been her feelings.

I love thee; yes, I feel

That on the fountain of my heart a seal

Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright

For thee . . .

Noiselessly, Helen laughed. The sound of the clock chiming the quarter made her think again of Cynthia’s advice. There were also the other people – the people they met when Hugh and she dined with the Museum or the University. ‘Those god-fearing people’ (her mother spoke again), ‘who still go on fearing God even though they’ve pitched him overboard.’ Fearing God on committees. Fearing him in W.E.A. lecture-rooms. Fearing him through interminable discussions of the Planned Society. But Gerry’s good looks, Gerry’s technique as a lover – how could those be planned out of existence? Or the foetus irrepressibly growing and growing in the womb? ‘A coordinated housing scheme for the whole country.’ She remembered Frank Ditchling’s eager, persuasive voice. He had a turned-up nose, and the large nostrils stared at one like a second pair of eyes, insistently. ‘Redistribution of the population . . . Satellite towns . . . Green belts . . . Lifts even in working-class flats . . .’ She had listened, she had succumbed to the spell of his hypnotic nostrils, and at the time it had seemed splendid, worth dying for. But afterwards . . . Well, lifts were very convenient – she wished there were one to her own flat. Parks were nice to walk in. But how would Frank Ditchling’s crusade affect any of the serious issues? Coordinated housing wouldn’t make her mother any less dirty, any less hopelessly at the mercy of an intoxicated body. And Hugh – would Hugh be any different in a satellite town and with a lift from what he was now, when he walked up four flights of stairs in London? Hugh! She thought, derisively, of his letters – all the delicate, beautiful things he had written – and then of the man as he had been in everyday reality, as a husband. ‘Show me how I can help you, Hugh.’ Arranging his papers, typing his notes, looking up references for him in the library. But always, his eyes glassy behind glass, he had shaken his head: either he didn’t need help, or else she wasn’t capable of giving it. ‘I want to be a good wife, Hugh.’ With her mother’s laughter loud in her imagination, it had been difficult to pronounce those words. But she had meant them; she did want to be a good wife. Darning socks, making hot milk for him before he went to bed, reading up his subject, being sérieuse, in a word, for the first time and profoundly. But Hugh didn’t want her to be a good wife, didn’t want her, so far as she could see, to be anything. A divine presence in a place divine. But the place was his letters; she was present, so far as he was concerned, only at the other end of the postal system. He didn’t even want her in bed – or at any rate not much, not in any ordinary way. Green belts, indeed!

It was all beside the point. For the point was those silences in which Hugh enclosed himself at meals. The point was that martyred expression he put on if ever she came into his study while he was working. The point was the furtive squalor of those approaches in the darkness, the revolting detachment and gentleness of a sensuality, in which the part assigned to her was purely ideal. The point was that expression of dismay, almost of horror and disgust, which she had detected that time, within the first few weeks of their marriage, when she was laid up with the flu. He had shown himself solicitous; and at first she had been touched, had felt grateful. But when she discovered how heroic an effort it had cost him to attend upon her sick body, the gratitude had evaporated. In itself, no doubt, the effort was admirable. What she resented, what she couldn’t forgive was the fact that an effort had had to be made. She wanted to be accepted as she was, even in fever, even vomiting bile. In that book on mysticism she had read, there was an account of Mme Guyon picking up from the floor a horrible gob of phlegm and spittle and putting it in her mouth – as a test of will. Sick, she had been Hugh’s test of will; and, since then, each month had renewed his secret horror of her body. It was an intolerable insult – and would be no less intolerable in one of Ditchling’s satellite towns, in the planned world those god-fearing atheists were always talking about.

But there was also Fanny Carling. ‘The mouse’ was Helen’s name for her – she was so small, so grey, so silently quick. But a mystical mouse. A mouse with enormous blue eyes that seemed perpetually astonished by what they saw behind the appearances of things. Astonished, but bright at the same time with an inexplicable happiness – a happiness that to Helen seemed almost indecent, but which she envied. ‘How does one believe in things that are obviously false?’ she had asked, half in malice, half genuinely desirous of learning a valuable secret. ‘By living,’ the mouse answered. ‘If you live in the right way, all these things turn out to be obviously true.’ And she went on to talk incomprehensible stuff about the love of God and the love of things and people for the sake of God. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ ‘Only because you don’t want to, Helen.’ Stupid, maddening answer! ‘How do you know what I want?’

Sighing, Helen returned to her book.

I never was attached to that great sect,

Whose doctrine is, that each one should select

Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,

(‘One of my boy friends . . .’)

And all the rest, though fair and wise commend

To cold oblivion, though it is the code

Of modern morals, and the beaten road

Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,

Who travel to their home among the dead

By the broad highway of the world, and so

With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,

The dreariest and the longest journey go.

The dreariest and the longest, she repeated to herself. But it could be as long, she thought, and as dreary with several as with only one – with Bob and Cecil and Quentin as with Hugh.

True Love in this differs from gold and clay,

That to divide is not to take away.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said aloud; and anyhow there hadn’t been much love to divide. For poor little Cecil she had never pretended to be more than sorry. And with Quentin it was just – well, just hygiene. As for Bob, he had genuinely cared for her and she, on her side, had done her best to care for him. But under those charming manners of his, under those heroic good looks there was really nothing. And as a lover, how hopelessly clumsy he had been, how barbarous and uncomprehending! She had broken with him after only a few weeks. And perhaps, she went on to think, that was her fate – to lose her heart only to men like Gerry, to be loved only by men like Hugh, and Bob and Cecil. To worship cruelty and meanness, be adored by deficiency.

The telephone bell rang; Helen picked up the receiver.

‘Hullo.’

It was the voice of Anthony Beavis that answered. He wanted her to dine with him tomorrow.

‘I’d love to,’ she said, though she had promised the evening to Quentin.

There was a smile on her face, as she leaned back again on the pillows. An intelligent man, she was thinking. Worth fifty of these wretched little Cecils and Quentins. And amusing, charming, even rather good-looking. How nice he had been to her the other night at Mark’s dinner! Had gone out of his way to be nice. Whereas that pretentious ass Pitchley had gone out of his way to be rude and snubbing. She had wondered at the time whether Anthony wasn’t rather attracted by her. Had wondered and rather hoped so. Now, this invitation gave her reasons, not only for hoping, but for thinking so as well. She hummed to herself; then, suddenly energetic, threw back the bed-clothes. She had decided that she would get up for lunch.

CHAPTER XXX

July 2nd 1914

SO FAR AS Mary Amberley was concerned, that spring and early summer had been extremely dull. Anthony was a charming boy, no doubt. But two years were a long time; he had lost his novelty. And then he was really too much in love. It was pleasant having people in love with you, of course, but not too violently, not if it went on too long. They became a nuisance in that case; they began to imagine that they had rights and that you had duties. Which was intolerable. All the fuss that Anthony had made last winter about that art critic in Paris! Flattering, in a certain sense. Mary had rarely seen anyone so desperately upset. And seeing that the art critic had turned out, on a nearer acquaintance, to be a bit of a bore, she had quite enjoyed the process of letting herself be blackmailed by Anthony’s dumb miseries and tears. But the principle was wrong. She didn’t want to be loved in that blackmailing way. Particularly if it was a long-drawn blackmail. She liked things to be short and sharp and exciting. Another time, and with anyone who wasn’t the art critic, she wouldn’t allow Anthony to blackmail her. But the trouble was that, except for Sidney Gattick – and she wasn’t really sure if she could tolerate Sidney’s voice and manner – there was nobody else in sight. The world was a place where all amusing and exciting things seemed, all of a sudden, to have stopped happening. There was nothing for it but to make them happen. That was why she went on at Anthony about what she called ‘Joan’s treatment,’ went on and on with a persistence quite out of proportion with any interest she felt in Joan, or in Brian Foxe, or even in Anthony – went on simply in the hope of creating a little fun out of the boring nothingness of the time.

‘How’s the treatment advancing?’ she asked yet again that afternoon in July.

Anthony replied with a long story, elaborately rehearsed, about his position as Heavy Uncle; and how he was gradually establishing himself, on a more intimate footing, as Big Brother; how from Big Brother, he proposed to develop, almost imperceptibly, into Sentimental Cousin; and from Sentimental Cousin into . . .

‘The truth being,’ said Mrs Amberley, interrupting him, ‘that you’re doing nothing at all.’

Anthony protested. ‘I’m going slow. Using strategy.’

‘Strategy!’ she echoed contemptuously. ‘It’s just funk.’

He denied it, but with an irrepressible blush. For of course she was half right. The funk was there. In spite of the two years he had spent as Mary’s lover, he still suffered from shyness, still lacked self-confidence in the presence of women. But his timidity was not the only inhibiting force at work. There was also compunction, also affection and loyalty. But of these it would be all but impossible to talk to Mary. She would say that he was only disguising his fear in a variety of creditable fancy dresses, would simply refuse to believe in the genuineness of these other feelings of his. And the trouble was that she would have some justification for the refusal. For, after all, there hadn’t been much sign of that compunction, that affection and loyalty, when he originally told her the story. How often since then, in futile outbursts of retrospective anger, he had cursed himself for having done it! And, trying to persuade himself that the responsibility was not exclusively his, had also cursed Mary. Blaming her for not having told him that he was betraying confidences out of mere wantonness and vanity; for not having refused to listen to him.

‘The fact of the matter,’ Mary now went on, implacably, ‘is that you haven’t got the guts to kiss a woman. You can only put on one of those irresistibly tender and melancholy faces of yours and silently beg to be seduced.’

‘What nonsense!’ But he was blushing more hotly than ever.

Ignoring the interruption, ‘She won’t seduce you, of course,’ Mary continued. ‘She’s too young. Not too young to be tempted, perhaps. Because the thing you go for is the mother instinct, and even a child of three has got that. Even a child of three would feel her little heart wrung for you. Absolutely wr-wrung.’ She rolled the r derisively. ‘But seduction . . .’ Mrs Amberley shook her head. ‘You can’t expect that till a good deal later. Certainly not from a girl of twenty.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Anthony, trying to divert her from this painful dissection of his character, ‘I’ve never found Joan particularly attractive. A bit too rustic.’ He emphasized the word in Mary’s own style. ‘Besides, she’s really rather childish,’ he added, and was instantly made to regret his words; for Mary was down on him again, like a hawk.

‘Childish!’ she repeated. ‘I like that. And what about you? Talk about pots and kettles! The feeding-bottle calling the diaper childish. Though of course,’ she went on, returning to the attack at the point where she had broken through before, ‘it’s only natural that you should complain of her. She is too childish for you. Too childish to do the pouncing. Childish enough to expect to be pounced on. Poor girl! she’s come to the wrong address. She’ll get no more kisses out of you than she gets out of that benighted early Christianof hers. Even though you do profess to be civilized . . .’

She was interrupted by the opening of the door.

‘Mr Gattick,’ the maid announced.

Large, florid, almost visibly luminous with the inner glow of his self-satisfaction and confidence, Sidney Gattick came striding in. His voice boomed resonantly as he spoke his greetings, enquired after her health. A deep voice, virile as only the voice of an actor-manager playing the part of a strong man can be virile. And his profile, Anthony suddenly perceived – that too was an actor’s: too noble to be quite true. And after all, he went on to think, with a contempt born of jealousy and a certain envy of the other’s worldly success, what were these barristers but actors? Clever actors, but clever with the cleverness of examination-passers; capable of mugging up a case and forgetting it again the moment it was finished, as one mugged up formal logic or The Acts of the Apostles for Pass Mods or Divvers. No real intelligence, no coherent thinking. Just the examinee’s mind lodged in the actor’s body and expressing itself in the actor’s booming voice. And, for this, society paid the creature five or six thousand pounds a year. And the creature regarded itself as important, wise, a man of note; the creature felt itself in a position to be patronizing. Not that it mattered, Anthony assured himself, being patronized by this hollow, booming mountebank. One could laugh – it was so absurd! But in spite of the absurdity, and even while one laughed, the patronage seemed painfully humiliating. The way, for example, he now acted the distinguished old military man, the bluff country squire, and, patting him on the shoulder, said, ‘Well, Anthony my lad!’ – it was absolutely intolerable. On this occasion, however, the intolerableness, it seemed to Anthony, was worth putting up with. The man might be a tiresome and pretentious fool; but at least his coming had delivered him from the assaults of Mary. In Gattick’s presence she couldn’t go on at him about Joan.

But he had reckoned without Mary and her boredom, her urgent need to make something amusing and exciting happen. Few things are more exciting than deliberate bad taste, more amusing than the spectacle of someone else’s embarrassment. Before Gattick had had time to finish his preliminary boomings, she was back again on the old, painful subject.

‘When you were Anthony’s age,’ she began, ‘did you always wait for the woman to seduce you?’

‘Me?’

She nodded.

Recovering from his surprise, Gattick smiled the knowing smile of an experienced Don Juan and, in his most virile jeune premier’s voice, said, ‘Of course not.’ He laughed complacently. ‘On the contrary, I’m afraid I used to rush in where angels fear to tread. Got my face slapped sometimes. But more often, not.’ He twinkled scabrously.

‘Anthony prefers to sit still,’ said Mrs Amberley; ‘to sit still and wait for the woman to make the advances.’

‘Oh, that’s bad, Anthony, that’s very bad,’ said Gattick; and his voice once more implied the military moustaches, the country gentleman’s Harris tweeds.

‘Here’s a poor girl who wants to be kissed,’ Mrs Amberley went on, ‘and he simply hasn’t got the courage to put an arm round her waist and do it.’

‘Nothing to say in your own defence, Anthony?’ Gattick asked.

Trying, rather unsuccessfully, to pretend that he didn’t care, Anthony shrugged his shoulders. ‘Only that it isn’t true.’

‘What isn’t true?’ asked Mary.

‘That I haven’t the courage.’

‘But it is true that you haven’t done the kissing. Isn’t it?’ she insisted. ‘Isn’t it?’ And when he had to admit that it was true, ‘I’m only drawing the obvious inference from the facts,’ she said. ‘You’re a lawyer, Sidney. Tell me if it’s a justifiable inference.

‘Absolutely justifiable,’ said Gattick, and the Lord Chancellor himself could not have spoken more weightily. An aura of robes and full-bottomed wigs hung round him. He was justice incarnate.

Anthony opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. In front of Gattick, and with Mary obstinately determined to be only ‘civilized,’ how could he say what he really felt? And if that were what he really felt, why (the question propounded itself once more), why had he told her the story? And told it in that particular style – as though he were a vivisecting comedian? Vanity, wantonness; and then, of course, the fact that he was in love with her and anxious to please, at any cost, even at the cost of what he really felt. (And at the moment of telling, he was forced to admit, he hadn’t really felt anything but the desire to be amusing.) But, again, that couldn’t be put into words. Gattick didn’t know about their affair, mustn’t know. And even if Gattick hadn’t been there, it would have been difficult, almost impossible, to explain it to Mary. She would laugh at him for being romantic – romantic about Brian, about Joan, even about herself; would think him absurd and ridiculous for making tragic mountains out of a simple amorous mole-hill.

‘People will insist,’ she used to say, ‘on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!’

When at last he spoke, ‘I don’t do it,’ he confined himself to saying, ‘because I don’t want to do it.’

‘Because you don’t dare,’ cried Mary.

‘I do.’

‘You don’t!’ Her dark eyes shone. She was thoroughly enjoying herself.

Booming, but with a hint of laughter in his ponderousness, the Lord Chancellor let fly once more. ‘It’s an overwhelming case against you,’ he said.

‘I’m ready to bet on it,’ said Mary. ‘Five to one. If you do it within a month, I’ll give you five pounds.’

‘But I tell you I don’t want to,’ he persisted.

‘No, you can’t get out of it like that. A bet’s a bet. Five pounds to you if you bring it off within a month from today. And if you don’t, you pay me a pound.’

‘You’re too generous,’ said Gattick.

‘Only a pound,’ she repeated. ‘But I shall never speak to you again.’

For a few seconds they looked at one another in silence. Anthony had gone very pale. Close-lipped and crookedly, Mary was smiling; between the half-closed lids, her eyes were bright with malicious laughter.

Why did she have to be so horrible to him, he wondered, so absolutely beastly? He hated her, hated her all the more because of his desire for her, because of the memory and the anticipation of those pleasures, because of her liberating wit and knowledge, because of everything, in a word, that made it inevitable for him to do exactly what she wanted. Even though he knew it was stupid and wrong.

Watching him, Mary saw the rebellious hatred in his eyes, and when at last he dropped them, the sign of her own triumph.

‘Never again,’ she repeated. ‘I mean it.’

At home, as Anthony was hanging up his hat in the hall, his father called to him.

‘Come and look here, dear boy.’

‘Damn!’ Anthony said to himself resentfully; it was with an aggrieved expression, which Mr Beavis was much too busy to notice, that he entered his father’s study.

‘Just having a little fun with the map,’ said Mr Beavis, who was sitting at his desk with a sheet of the Swiss ordnance survey spread out before him. He had a passion for maps, a passion due in part to his love of walking, in part to his professional interest in place names. ‘Comballas,’ he murmured to himself, without looking up from the map. ‘Chamossaire. Charming, charming!’ Then, turning to Anthony, ‘It’s a thousand pities,’ he said, ‘that your conscience won’t allow you to take a holiday and come along with us.’

Anthony, who had made his work for the research fellowship an excuse for staying in England with Mary, gravely nodded. ‘One really can’t do any serious reading at high altitudes,’ he said.

‘So far as I can see,’ said Mr Beavis, who had turned back to his map, ‘we ought to have the jolliest walks and scrambles all round les Diablerets. And what a delicious name that is!’ he added parenthetically. ‘Up the Col du Pillon, for example.’ He ran his finger sinuously along the windings of a road. ‘Can you see, by the way?’ Perfunctorily, Anthony bent a little closer. ‘No, you can’t,’ Mr Beavis went on. ‘I cover it all up with my hand.’ He straightened himself up and dipped first into one pocket, then into another. ‘Where on earth,’ he said, frowning; then suddenly, as his most daring philological joke came to his mind, he changed the frown into a sly smile. ‘Where on earth is my teeny weeny penis. Or, to be accurate, my teeny weeny weeny . . .’

Anthony was so much taken aback that he could only return a blank embarrassed stare to the knowing twinkle his father gaily shot at him.

‘My pencil,’ Mr Beavis was forced to explain. ‘Penecillus: diminutive of peniculus: double diminutive of penis; which as you know,’ he went on, at last producing the teeny weeny weeny from his inside left-breast pocket, ‘originally meant a tail. And now let’s attack the Pillon again.’ Lowering the point of the pencil to the map, he traced out the zigzags. ‘And when we’re at the top of the Col,’ he continued, ‘we bear north-north-west round the flank of Mont Fornettaz until . . .’

It was the first time, Anthony was thinking, that his father had ever, in his presence, made any allusion to the physiology of sex.

CHAPTER XXXI

September 6th 1933

‘DEATH,’ SAID Mark Staithes. ‘It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing. Not from any lack of the desire to do so, of course. We’re like dogs on an acropolis. Trotting round with inexhaustible bladders and only too anxious to lift a leg against every statue. And mostly we succeed. Art, religion, heroism, love – we’ve left our visiting-card on all of them. But death – death remains out of reach. We haven’t been able to defile that statue. Not yet, at any rate. But progress is still progressing.’ He demonstrated the anatomy of a smile. ‘The larger hopes, the proliferating futures . . .’ The bony hands went out in a lavish gesture. ‘One day, no doubt, some genius of the kennel will manage to climb up and deposit a well-aimed tribute bang in the middle of the statue’s face. But luckily progress hasn’t yet got so far. Death still remains.’

‘It remains,’ Anthony repeated. ‘But the smoke-screen is pretty thick. We manage to forget it most of the time.’

‘But not all the time. It remains, unexorcizably. Intact. Indeed,’ Mark qualified, ‘more than intact. We have bigger and better smoke-screens than our fathers had. But behind the smoke the enemy is more formidable. Death’s grown, I should say, now that the consolations and hopes have been taken away. Grown to be almost as large as it was when people seriously believed in hell. Because, if you’re a busy film-going, newspaper-reading, football-watching, chocolate-eating modern, then death is hell. Every time the smoke-screen thins out a bit, people catch a glimpse and are terrified. I find that a very consoling thought.’ He smiled again. ‘It makes up for a great deal. Even for those busy little dogs on the acropolis.’ There was a silence. Then, in another tone, ‘It’s a comfort,’ he resumed, ‘to think that death remains faithful. Everything else may have gone; but death remains faithful,’ he repeated. ‘If we choose to risk our lives, we can risk them as completely as ever we did.’ He rose, took a turn or two about the room; then, coming to a halt in front of Anthony’s chair, ‘That’s what I really came to see you about,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘About this business of risking one’s life. I’ve been feeling as though I were stuck. Bogged to the neck in civilized humanity.’ He made the grimace of one who encounters a foul smell. ‘There seemed to be only one way out. Taking risks again. It would be like a whiff of fresh air. I thought perhaps that you too . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished.

‘I’ve never taken a risk,’ said Anthony, after a pause. ‘Only had one taken for me once,’ he added, remembering the bumpkin with the hand-grenade.

‘Isn’t that a reason for beginning?’

‘The trouble,’ said Anthony, frowning to himself, ‘the trouble is that I’ve always been a coward. A moral one, certainly. Perhaps also a physical one – I don’t know. I’ve never really had an opportunity of finding out.’

‘I should have thought that that was a still more cogent reason.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘If it’s a case of changing the basis of one’s life, wouldn’t it be best to change it with a bang?’

‘Bang into a corpse?’

‘No, no. Just a risk; not suicide. It’s merely dangerous, the business I’m thinking of. No more.’ He sat down again. ‘I had a letter the other day,’ he began. ‘From an old friend of mine in Mexico. A man I worked with on the coffee finca. Jorge Fuentes, by name. A remarkable creature, in his way.’

He outlined Don Jorge’s history. Besieged by the revolutionaries on his estate in the valley of Oaxaca. Most of the other landowners had fled. He was one of the only men who put up a resistance. At first he had had his two brothers to help him. But they were killed, one at long range, the other by machetes in an ambush among the cactuses. He had carried on the fight single-handed. Then, one day when he was out riding round the fields, a dozen of them managed to break into the house. He had come home to find the bodies of his wife and their two little boys lying mangled in the courtyard. After that, the place seemed no longer worth defending. He stayed long enough to shoot three of the murderers, then abandoned his patrimony and went to work for other men. It was during this period that Mark had known him. Now he possessed his own house again and some land; acted as agent for most of the planters on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca state; recruited their labour for them in the mountain villages, and was the only man the Indians trusted, the only one who didn’t try to swindle them. Recently, however, there had been trouble. Don Jorge had gone into politics, become the leader of a party, made enemies and hardly less dangerous friends. He was in opposition now; the state governor was persecuting him and his allies. A bad man, according to Don Jorge; corrupt, unjust – unpopular too. It shouldn’t be difficult to get rid of him. Some of the troops would certainly come over. But before he started, Don Jorge wanted to know if there was any prospect of Mark’s being in the neighbourhood of Oaxaca in the immediate future.

‘Poor old Jorge! He has a most touching belief in the soundness of my judgment.’ Mark laughed. Thus to understate Don Jorge’s faith in him, thus to withhold the reasons of that faith, sent a glow of satisfaction running through his body. He might have told Anthony of that occasion when the old ass had gone and let himself be caught by bandits, and of the way he had been rescued. A good story, and creditable to himself. But not to tell it gave him more pleasure than telling it would have done. ‘True, it’s better than his judgment,’ Mark went on. ‘But that isn’t saying much. Don Jorge’s brave – brave as a lion; but foolhardy. No sense of reality. He’ll make a mess of his coup d’état.’

‘Unless you are there to help him, I take it. And do you propose to be there?

Mark nodded. ‘I’ve written him that I’ll start as soon as I can settle my affairs in England. It occurred to me that you . . .’ Again he left the sentence unfinished and looked enquiringly at Anthony.

‘Do you think it’s a good cause?’ Anthony asked at last.

The other laughed. ‘As good as any other Mexican politician’s cause,’ he answered.

‘Is that good enough?’

‘For my purpose. And anyhow, what is a good cause? Tyranny under commissars, tyranny under Gauleiters – it doesn’t seem to make much difference. A drill-sergeant is always a drill-sergeant, whatever the colour of his shirt.’

‘Revolution for revolution’s sake, then?’

‘No, for mine. For the sake of every man who takes part in the thing. For every man can get as much fun out of it as I can.’

‘I expect it would be good for me,’ Anthony brought out after a pause.

‘I’m sure it would be.’

‘Though I’m devilishly frightened – even at this distance.’

‘That’ll make it all the more interesting.’

Anthony drew a deep breath. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll come with you.’ Then vehemently, ‘It’s the most stupid, senseless idea I’ve ever heard of,’ he concluded. ‘So, as I’ve always been so clever and sensible . . .’ He broke off and, laughing, reached for his pipe and the tin of tobacco.

CHAPTER XXXII

July 29th 1934

WITH HELEN TODAY to hear Miller speaking at Tower Hill, during the dinner hour. A big crowd. He spoke well – the right mixture of arguments, jokes, emotional appeal. The theme, peace. Peace everywhere or no peace at all. International peace not achievable unless a translation into policy of inter-individual relations. Militarists at home, in factory, and office, towards inferiors and rivals, cannot logically expect governments which represent them to behave as pacifists. Hypocrisy and stupidity of those who advocate peace between states, while conducting private wars in business or the family. Meanwhile, there was much heckling by communists in the crowd. How can anything be achieved without revolution? With liquidating the individuals and classes standing in the way of social progress? And so on. Answer (always with extraordinary good humour and wit): means determine ends. Violence and coercion produce a post-revolutionary society, not communistic but (like the Russian) hierarchical, ruled by an oligarchy using secret police methods. And all the rest.

After about a quarter of an hour, an angry young heckler climbed on to the little wall, where Miller was standing, and threatened to knock him off if he didn’t stop. ‘Come on then, Archibald.’ The crowd laughed; the young man grew still angrier, advanced, clenched, squared up. ‘Get down, you old bastard, or else . . .’ Miller stood quite still, smiling, hands by side, saying, All right; he had no objection to being knocked off. The attacker made sparring movements, brought a fist to within an inch of Miller’s nose. The old man didn’t budge, showed no sign of fear or anger. The other drew back the hand, but instead of bringing it into Miller’s face, hit him on the chest. Pretty hard. Miller staggered, lost his balance and fell off the wall into the crowd. Apologized to the people he’d fallen on, laughed, got up again on to the wall. Repetition of the performance. Again the young man threatened the face, but again, when Miller didn’t lift his hands, or show either fear or anger, hit him on the chest. Miller went down and again climbed up. Got another blow. Came up once more. This time the man screwed himself up to hitting the face, but only with the flat of his hand. Miller straightened his head and went on smiling. ‘Three shots a penny, Archibald.’ The man let out at the body and knocked him off the wall. Up again. Miller looked at his watch. ‘Another ten minutes before you need to go back to work, Archibald. Come on.’ But this time the man could only bring himself to shake his fist and call Miller a bloodsucking old reactionary. Then turned and walked off along the wall, pursued by derisive laughter, jokes and whistlings from the crowd. Miller went on with his speech.

Helen’s reaction was curious. Distress at the spectacle of the young man’s brutality towards the old. But at the same time anger with Miller for allowing himself to be knocked about without resistance. The reason for this anger? Obscure; but I think she resented Miller’s success. Resented the fact that the young man had been reduced, psychologically, to importence. Resented the demonstration that there was an alternative to terrorism and a non-violent means of combating it. ‘It’s only a trick,’ she said. Not a very easy trick, I insisted; and that I certainly couldn’t perform it. ‘Anyone could learn it, if he tried.’ ‘Possibly; wouldn’t it be a good thing if we all tried?’ ‘No, I think it’s stupid.’ Why? She found it hard to answer. ‘Because it’s unnatural,’ was the reason she managed to formulate at last – and proceeded to develop it in terms of a kind of egalitarian philosophy. ‘I want to be like other people. To have the same feelings and interests. I don’t want to make myself different. Just an ordinary person; not somebody who’s proud of having learnt a difficult trick. Like that old Miller of yours.’ I pointed out that we’d all learned such difficult tricks as driving cars, working in offices, reading and writing, crossing the street. Why shouldn’t we all learn this other difficult trick? A trick, potentially, so much more useful. If all were to learn it, then one could afford to be like other people, one could share all their feelings in safety, with the certainty that one would be sharing something good, not bad. But Helen wasn’t to be persuaded. And when I suggested that we should join the old man for a late lunch, she refused. Said she didn’t want to know him. That the young man had been quite right; Miller was a reactionary. Disguising himself in a shroud of talk about economic justice; but underneath just a tory agent. His insistence that changes in social organization weren’t enough, but that they must be accompanied by, must spring from a change in personal relations – what was that but a plea for conservatism? ‘I think he’s pernicious,’ she said. ‘And I think you’re pernicious.’ But she consented to have lunch with me. Which showed how little stock she set on my powers to shake her convictions! Arguments – I might have lots of good arguments; to those she was impervious. But Miller’s action had got between the joints of her armour. He acted his doctrine, didn’t rest content with talking it. Her confidence that I couldn’t get between the joints, as he had done, was extremely insulting. The more so as I knew it was justified.

Perseverance, courage, endurance. All, fruits of love. Love goodness enough, and indifference and slackness are inconceivable. Courage comes as to the mother defending her child; and at the same time there is no fear of the opponent, who is loved, whatever he may do, because of the potentialities for goodness in him. As for pain, fatigue, disapproval – they are borne cheerfully, because they seem of no consequence by comparison with the goodness loved and pursued. Enormous gulf separating me from this state! The fact that Helen was not afraid of my perniciousness (as being only theoretical), while dreading Miller’s (because his life was the same as his argument), was a painful reminder of the existence of this gulf.

CHAPTER XXXIII

July 18th 1914

THE CURTAIN ROSE, and before them was Venice, green in the moonlight, with Iago and Roderigo talking together in the deserted street.

‘Light, I say! Light!’ Brabantio called from his window. And in an instant the street was thronged, there was a clanking of weapons and armour, torches and lanterns burned yellow in the green darkness . . .

‘Horribly vulgar scenery, I’m afraid,’ said Anthony as the curtain fell after the first scene.

Joan looked at him in surprise. ‘Was it?’ Then: ‘Yes, I suppose it was,’ she added, hypocritically paying the tribute of philistinism to taste. In reality, she had thought it too lovely. ‘You know,’ she confessed, ‘this is only the fifth time I’ve ever been in a theatre.’

‘Only the fifth time?’ he repeated incredulously.

But here was another street and more armed men and Iago again, bluff and hearty, and Othello himself, dignified like a king, commanding in every word and gesture; and when Brabantio came in with all his men, and the torchlight glittering on the spears and halberds, how heroically serene! ‘Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.’ A kind of anguish ran up and down her spine as she listened, as she saw the dark hand lifted, as the sword-points dropped, under his irresistible compulsion, towards the ground.

‘He speaks the lines all right,’ Anthony admitted.

The council chamber was rich with tapestry; the red-robed senators came and went. And here was Othello again. Still kingly, but with a kingliness that expressed itself, not in commands, this time, not in the lifting of a hand, but on a higher plane than that of the real world – in the calm, majestic music of the record of his wooing.

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,

It was my hint to speak . . .

Her lips moved as she repeated the familiar words after him – familiar but transfigured by the voice, the bearing of the speaker, the setting, so that, though she knew them by heart, they seemed completely new. And here was Desdemona, so young, so beautiful, with her neck and her bare shoulders rising frail and slender out of the heavy magnificence of her dress. Sumptuous brocade, and beneath it, the lovely irrelevance of a girl’s body; beneath the splendid words, a girl’s voice.

You are the lord of duty,

I am hitherto your daughter; but here’s my husband.

She felt again that creeping anguish along her spine. And now they were all gone, Othello, Desdemona, senators, soldiers, all the beauty, all the nobleness – leaving only Iago and Roderigo whispering together in the empty room. ‘When she is sated of his body, she will find the error of her choice.’ And then that fearful soliloquy. Evil, deliberate and conscious of itself . . .

The applause, the lights of the entr’-acte were a sacrilegious irrelevance; and when Anthony offered to buy her a box of chocolates she refused almost indignantly.

‘Do you think there really are people like Iago?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Men don’t tell themselves that the wrong they’re doing is wrong. Either they do it without thinking. Or else they invent reasons for believing it’s right. Iago’s a bad man who passes other people’s judgments of him upon himself.’

The lights went down again. They were in Cyprus. Under a blazing sun, Desdemona’s arrival; then Othello’s – and, oh, the protective tenderness of his love!

The sun had set. In cavernous twilight, between stone walls, the drinking, the quarrel, the rasping of sword on sword, and Othello again, kingly and commanding, imposing silence, calling them all to obedience. Kingly and commanding for the last time. For in the scenes that followed, how terrible it was to watch the great soldier, the holder of high office, the civilized Venetian, breaking down, under Iago’s disintegrating touches, breaking down into the Africa, into the savage, into the uncontrolled and primordial beast! ‘Handkerchief – confessions – handkerchief! . . . Noses, ears, and lips! Is it possible?’ And then the determination to kill. ‘Do it not with poison, strangle her in bed, even the bed she hath contaminated.’ And afterwards the horrible outburst of his anger against Desdemona, the blow delivered in public; and in the humiliating privacy of the locked room, that colloquy between the kneeling girl and an Othello, momentarily sane again, but sane with the base, ignoble sanity of Iago, cynically knowing only the worst, believing in the possibility only of what was basest.

I cry you mercy then;

I took you for that cunning whore of Venice

That married with Othello.

There was a hideous note of derision in his voice, an undertone of horrible obscene laughter. Irrepressibly, she began to tremble.

‘I can’t bear it,’ she whispered to Anthony between the scenes. ‘Knowing what’s going to happen. ‘It’s too awful. I simply can’t bear it.’

Her face was pale, she spoke with a violent intensity of feeling.

‘Well, let’s go,’ he suggested. ‘At once.’

She shook her head. ‘No, no. I must see it to the end. Must.’

‘But if you can’t bear it . . . ?’

‘You mustn’t ask me to explain. Not now.’

The curtain rose again.

My mother had a maid call’d Barbara;

She was in love, and he she lov’d prov’d mad

And did forsake her; she had a song of ‘willow’.

Her heart was beating heavily; she felt sick with anticipation. In an almost childish voice, sweet, but thin and untrained, Desdemona began to sing.

The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,

Sing all a green willow

The vision wavered before Joan’s eyes, became indistinct; the tears rolled down her cheeks.

It was over at last; they were out in the street again.

Joan drew a deep breath. ‘I feel I’d like to go for a long walk,’ she said. ‘Miles and miles without stopping.’

‘Well, you can’t,’ he said shortly. ‘Not in those clothes.’

Joan looked at him with an expression of pained astonishment. ‘You’re angry with me,’ she said.

Blushing, he did his best to smile it off. ‘Angry? Why on earth should I be angry?’ But she was right, of course. He was angry – angry with everyone and everything that entered into the present insufferable situation: with Mary for having pushed him into it; with himself for having allowed her to push him in; with Joan for being the subject of that monstrous bet; with Brian because he was ultimately responsible for the whole thing; with Shakespeare, even, and the actors and this jostling crowd . . .

‘Don’t be cross,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s been such a lovely evening. If you knew how marvellous it’s made me feel! But I have to be so careful with the marvellousness. Like carrying a cup that’s full to the brim. The slightest jolt – and down it goes. Let me carry it safely home.’

Her words made him feel embarrassed, almost guilty. He laughed nervously. ‘Do you think you can carry it home safely in a hansom?’ he asked.

Her face lit up with pleasure at the suggestion. He waved his hand; the cab drew up in front of them. They climbed in and closed the doors upon themselves. The driver jerked his reins. The old horse walked a few steps, then, at the crack of the whip, broke reluctantly into a very slow trot. Along Coventry Street, through the glare of the Circus, into Piccadilly. Above the spire of St James’s the dilute blackness of the sky was flushed with a coppery glow. Reflected in the polished darkness of the roadway, the long recession of the lamps seemed inexpressibly mournful, like a reminder of death. Bu there were the trees of the Green Park – bright wherever the lamplight struck upwards into the leaves with an unearthly, a more than spring-like freshness. There was life as well as death.

Joan sat in silence, holding firm within herself the fragile cup of that strange happiness that was also and at the same time intensest sadness. Desdemona was dead, Othello was dead, and the lamps retreating for ever down their narrowing vistas were symbols of the same destiny. And yet the melancholy of these converging parallels and the pain of the tragedy were as essential constituents of her present joy as her delight in the splendour of the poetry, as her pleasure in the significant and almost allegorical beauty of those illumined leaves. For this joy of hers was not one particular emotion exclusive of all others; it was all emotions – a state, so to speak, of general and undifferentiated movedness. The overtones and aftertones of horror, of delight, of pity and laughter – all lingered harmoniously in her mind. She sat there, behind the slowly trotting horse, serene, but with a serenity that contained the potentiality of every passion. Sadness, delight, fear, mirth – they were all there at once, impossibly conjoined within her mind. She cherished the precarious miracle.

A hansom, he was thinking – it was the classical opportunity. They were already at Hyde Park Corner; by this time he ought at least to have been holding her hand. But she sat there like a statue, staring at nothing, in another world. She would feel outraged if he were to call her roughly back to reality.

‘I shall have to invent a story for Mary,’ he decided. But it wouldn’t be easy; Mary had an extraordinary talent for detecting lies.

Reined in, the old horse gingerly checked itself, came to a halt. They had arrived. Oh, too soon, Joan thought, too soon. She would have liked to drive on like this for ever, nursing in silence her incommunicable joy. It was with a sigh that she stepped on to the pavement.

‘Aunt Fanny said you were to come and say good-night to her if she was still up.’

That meant that the last chance of doing it had gone, he reflected, as he followed her up the steps and into the dimply lighted hall.

‘Aunt Fanny,’ Joan called softly as she opened the drawing-room door. But there was no answer; the room was dark.

‘Gone to bed?’

She turned back towards him and nodded affirmatively. They stood there for a moment in silence.

‘I shall have to go,’ he said at last.

‘It was a wonderful evening, Anthony. Simply wonderful.’

‘I’m glad you enjoyed it.’ Behind his smile, he was thinking with apprehension that that last chance had not yet disappeared.

‘It was more than enjoying,’ she said. ‘It was . . . I don’t know how to say what it was.’ She smiled at him, added, ‘Good-night,’ and held out her hand.

Anthony took it, said good-night in his turn; then, suddenly deciding that it was now or never, stepped closer, laid an arm round her shoulder and kissed her.

The suddenness of his decision and his embarrassment imparted to his movements a clumsy abruptness indistinguishable from that which would have been the result of a violent impulse irrepressibly breaking through restraints. His lips touched her cheek first of all, then found her mouth. She made as if to withdraw, to avert her face; but the movement was checked almost before it was begun. Her mouth came back to his, drawn irresistibly. All the diffuse and indefinite emotion that had accumulated within her during the evening suddenly crystallized, as it were, round her surprise and the evidence of his desire and this almost excruciating pleasure that, from her lips, invaded her whole body and took possession of her mind. The astonishment and anger of the first second were swallowed up in an apocalypse of new sensations. It was as though a quiet darkness were violently illuminated, as though the relaxed dumb strings of an instrument had been wound up and were vibrating ever more shrilly and piercingly, until at last the brightness and the tension annihilated themselves in their own excess. She felt herself becoming empty; enormous spaces opened up within her, gulfs of darkness.

Anthony felt her body droop limp and heavy in his arms. So heavy indeed, and with so unexpected a weight, that he almost lost his balance. He staggered, then braced himself and held her up more closely.

‘What is it, Joan?’

She did not answer, but leaned her forehead against his shoulder. He could feel that if he were now to let her go, she would fall. Perhaps she was ill. He would have to call for help – wake up the aunt – explain what had happened . . . Wondering desperately what to do, he looked about him. The lamp in the hall projected through the open door of the drawing-room a strip of light that revealed the end of a sofa covered with yellow chintz. Still holding her up with one arm about her shoulders, he bent down and slid the other behind her knees; then, with an effort (for she was heavier than he had imagined), lifted her off her feet, carried her along the narrow path of illumination that led into the darkness, and lowered her as gently as her weight would allow him on to the sofa.

Kneeling on the floor beside her, ‘Are you feeling better now?’ he asked.

Joan drew a deep breath, passed a hand across her forehead, then opened her eyes and looked at him, but only for a moment; overcome by an access of timidity and shame, she covered her face with her hands. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what happened. I felt so faint all of a sudden.’ She was silent for a little; the lamps were alight again, the stretched wires were vibrating – but tolerably, not to excess. She parted her hands once more and turned towards him, shyly smiling.

With eyes that had grown accustomed to the faint light, he looked anxiously into her face. Thank God, she seemed to be all right. He wouldn’t have to call the aunt. His feeling of relief was so profound that he took her hand and pressed it tenderly.

‘You’re not cross with me, Anthony?’

‘Why should I be?’

‘Well, you have every right. Fainting like that . . .’ Her face felt naked and exposed; withdrawing her hand from his grasp, she once more hid her shame. Fainting like that . . . The recollection humiliated her. Thinking of that sudden, silent, violent gesture of his, ‘He loves me,’ she said to herself. And Brian? But Brian’s absence seemed to have been raised to a higher power. He was not there with an unprecedented intensity, not there to the point of never having been there. All that was really there was this living presence beside her – the presence of desire, the presence of hands and mouth, the presence, potential but waiting, waiting to actualize itself again, of those kisses. She felt her breast lift, though she was unaware of having taken a deep breath; it was as though someone else had drawn it. ‘He loves me,’ she repeated; it was a justification. She dropped her hands from her face, looked at him for a moment, then reached out and, whispering his name, drew his head down towards her.

‘Well, what’s the result?’ Mary called from the sofa as he entered. By the gloomy expression on Anthony’s face she judged that it was she who had won the bet; and this annoyed her. She felt suddenly very angry with him – doubly and trebly angry; because he was so spiritless; because he hadn’t cared enough for her to win his bet in spite of the spiritlessness; because he was forcing upon her a gesture which she didn’t in the least want to make. After a day’s motoring with him in the country she had come to the conclusion that Sidney Gattick was absolutely insufferable. By contrast, Anthony seemed the most charming of men. She didn’t want to banish him, even temporarily. But her threat had been solemn and explicit; if she didn’t carry it out, at least in part, all her authority was gone. And now the wretch was forcing her to keep her word. In a tone of angry reproach, ‘You’ve been a coward and lost,’ she said. ‘I can see it.’

He shook his head. ‘No, I’ve won.’

Mary regarded him doubtfully. ‘I believe you’re lying.’

‘I’m not.’ He sat down beside her on the sofa.

‘Well, then, why do you look so glum? It’s not very flattering to me.’

‘Why on earth did you make me do it?’ he burst out. ‘It was idiotic.’ It had also been wrong; but Mary would only laugh if he said that. ‘I always knew it was idiotic. But you insisted.’ His voice was shrill with a complaining resentment. ‘And now God knows where I’ve landed myself.’ Where he’d landed Joan and Brian, for that matter. ‘God knows.’

‘But explain,’ cried Mary Amberley, ‘explain! Don’t talk like a minor prophet.’ Her eyes were bright with laughing curiosity. She divined some delightfully involved and fantastic situation. ‘Explain,’ she repeated.

‘Well, I did what you told me,’ he answered sullenly.

‘Hero!’

‘There’s nothing funny about it.’

‘What! did you get your face slapped?’

Anthony frowned angrily and shook his head.

‘Then how did she take it?’

‘That’s just the trouble: she took it seriously.’

‘Seriously?’ Mary questioned. ‘You mean, she threatened to tell papa?’

‘I mean, she thought I was in love with her. She wants to break it off with Brian.’

Mrs Amberley threw back her head and gave utterance to a peal of her clear, richly vibrant laughter.

Anthony felt outraged. ‘It’s not a joke.’

‘That’s where you make your mistake.’ Mary wiped her eyes and took a deep breath. ‘It’s one of the best jokes I ever heard. But what do you propose to do?’

‘I shall have to tell her it’s all a mistake.’

‘That’ll be an admirable scene!’

He shook his head. ‘I shall write a letter.’

‘Courageous, as usual!’ She patted his knee. ‘But now I want to hear the details. How was it that you let her go as far as she did? To the point of thinking you were in love with her. To the point of wanting to break it off with Brian. Couldn’t you nip it in the bud?’

‘It was difficult,’ he muttered, avoiding her inquisitive eye. ‘The situation . . . well, it got a bit out of control.’

‘You mean, you lost your head?’

‘If you like to put it that way,’ he admitted reluctantly, thinking what a fool he had been, what an utter fool. He ought, of course, to have retreated when she turned towards him in the darkness; he ought to have refused her kisses, to have made it quite clear that his own had been light-hearted and without significance. But instead of that he had accepted them: out of laziness and cowardice, because it had been too much of an effort to make the necessary and necessarily difficult explanation; out of a certain weak and misplaced kindness of heart, because it would have hurt and humiliated her if he had said no – and to inflict a suffering he could actually witness was profoundly distasteful to him. And having accepted, he had enjoyed her kisses, had returned them with a fervour which he knew to be the result only of a detached, a momentary sensuality, but which Joan, it was obvious now (and he had known it even at the time), would inevitably regard as being roused specifically by herself, as having her for its special and irreplaceable object. An impartial observer would say that he had done his best, had gone out of his way, to create the greatest possible amount of misunderstanding in the shortest possible time.

‘How do you propose to get out of it?’ Mary asked.

He hated her for putting the question that was tormenting him. ‘I shall write her a letter,’ he said. As though that were an answer!

‘And what will Brian say about it?’

‘I’m going to stay with him tomorrow,’ he replied irrelevantly. ‘In the Lakes.’

‘Like Wö-ödsworth,’ said Mary. ‘What fun that’ll be! And what exactly do you propose to tell him about Joan?’ she went on inexorably.

‘Oh, I shall explain.’

‘But suppose Joan explains first – in a different way?’

He shook his head. ‘I told her I didn’t want her to write to Brian before I’d talked to him.’

‘And you think she’ll do what you ask?’

‘Why shouldn’t she?’

Mary shrugged her shoulders and looked at him, smiling crookedly, her eyes bright between narrowed eyelids. ‘Why should she, if it comes to that?’

CHAPTER XXXIV

March 3rd 1928

‘REORGANIZATION . . .’ ‘Readjustment . . .’ ‘Writing down of capital values in the light of existing trade conditions . . .’ Anthony lifted his eyes from the printed page. Propped up on her pillows, Mary Amberley was staring at him, he found, with an embarrassing intentness.

‘Well?’ she asked, leaning forward. Hennaed to an impossible orange, a lock of tousled hair fell drunkenly across her forehead. Her bed-jacket opened as she moved; under soiled lace, the breasts swung heavily towards him. ‘What does it mean?’

‘It means that they’re going bankrupt on you.’

‘Going bankrupt?’

‘Paying you six and eightpence in the pound.’

‘But Gerry told me they were doing so well,’ she protested in a tone of angry complaint.

‘Gerry doesn’t know everything,’ he charitably explained.

But, of course, the ruffian had known only too well; had known, had acted on his knowledge, had been duly paid by the people who wanted to unload their shares before the crash came. ‘Why don’t you ask him about it?’ he said aloud, and in a tone that implied some of the resentment he felt at having been dragged, this very evening of his return from New York, into the entanglements of Mary’s squalid tragedy. Everyone else, he supposed, had fled from her since she’d started taking that morphia; alone of all her friends, having been out of England for half a year, he had had as yet no opportunity and been given no reason to flee. Absence had preserved their friendship, as though in cold storage, in the state it was in before he left. When she had asked him urgently to come and see her, he had no excuse to refuse. Besides, people exaggerated; she couldn’t be as bad as they made out.

‘Why don’t you ask him?’ he repeated irritably.

‘He’s gone to Canada.’

‘Oh, he’s gone to Canada.’

There was a silence. He laid the paper down on the coverlet. Mrs Amberley picked it up and re-read it – for the hundredth time, in the absurd and desperate hope that there might, this hundredth time, be something new in it, something different.

Anthony looked at her. The lamp on the bed-table lit up the profile she presented to him with a ruthlessly revealing brilliance. How hollow the cheeks were! And those lines round the mouth, those discoloured pouches of skin beneath the eyes! Remembering how she looked when he had seen her last, that time in Berkshire, only the previous summer, Anthony was appalled. The drug had aged her twenty years in half as many months. And it was not only her body that had been ravaged; the morphia had also changed her character, transformed her into someone else, someone (there had been no exaggeration at all) much worse. That engaging absence of mind, for example, that vagueness, of which, as of yet another feminine allurement, she always used to be so irritatingly vain, had now degenerated into almost an idiot’s indifference. She forgot, she wasn’t aware; above all, she didn’t care, she couldn’t any longer be bothered. Grotesquely dyed (in the hope, he supposed, of regaining some of the attractiveness which she could not help noticing that she had lost), the hair was greasy and uncombed. A smear of red paint, clumsily laid on, enlarged her lower lip into an asymmetrical shapelessness. A cigarette-end had burned a round hole in the eiderdown, and the feathers fluttered up like snow-flakes each time she moved. The pillows were smudged with rouge and yolk of egg. There was a brown stain of coffee on the turned-back sheet. Between her body and the wall, the tray on which her dinner had been brought up stood precariously tilted. Still stained with gravy, a knife had slipped on to the counterpane.

With a sudden movement, Mrs Amberley crumpled up the paper and threw it from her. ‘That beast! He absolutely forced me to put my money into this. And now look what’s happened!’ The tears overflowed, carrying the black of her painted eyelashes in long sooty trickles down her cheeks.

‘He did it on purpose,’ she went on through her angry sobbing. ‘Just in order to harm me. He’s a sadist, really. He likes hurting people. He does it for pleasure.’

‘For profit,’ Anthony almost said; but checked himself. She seemed to derive some consolation from the thought that she had been swindled, not from vulgarly commercial motives, but gratuitously, because of a fiendishness allied to and springing from the passion of love. It would be unkind to deprive her of that illusion. Let the poor woman think the thoughts she found least painfully humiliating. Besides, the less she was contradicted and diverted, the sooner, it might be hoped, would she stop. Prudently as well as considerately, he contented himself with a non-committal nod.

‘When I think of all I did for that man!’ Mrs Amberley burst out. But while she recited her incoherent catalogue of generosities and kindnesses, Anthony could not help thinking of what the man had done for her; above all, of the terms in which Gerry was accustomed to describe what he had done. Gross, extravagantly cynical terms. Terms of an incredible blackguardism. One was startled, one was set free into sudden laughter; and one was ashamed that such inadmissible brutalities should contain any element of liberating truth. And yet they were true.

‘All the most intelligent people in London,’ Mrs Amberley was sobbing. ‘He met them all at my house.’

‘These old hags!’ Gerry Watchett’s voice sounded clearly in Anthony’s memory. ‘They’ll do anything to get it, absolutely anything.’

‘Not that he ever appreciated them,’ she went on. ‘He was too stupid for that, too barbarous.’

‘Not a bad old bitch really, if she gets enough of it to keep her quiet. The problem is to give her enough. It’s uphill work, I can tell you.’

The tone changed from anger to self-pity. ‘But what shall I do?’ she wailed. ‘What can I do? Without a penny. Living on charity.’

He tried to reassure her. There was still something. Quite a decent little sum, really. She would never starve. If she lived carefully, if she economized . . .

‘But I shall have to give up this house,’ she interrupted, and, when he agreed that of course she would have to give it up, broke out into new and louder lamentations. Giving up the house was worse than being penniless and living on charity – worse, because more conceivable, a contingency nearer to the realities of her actual life. Without her pictures, without her furniture, how could she live? She was made physically ill by ugliness. And then small rooms – she developed claustrophobia in small rooms. And how could she possibly manage without her books? How did he expect her to work, when she was poor? For of course she was going to work; had already planned to write a critical study of the modern French novel. Yes, how did he expect her to do that, if he deprived her of her books?

Anthony stirred impatiently in his chair. ‘I don’t expect you to do anything,’ he said. ‘I’m simply telling you what you’ll find you’ve got to do.’

There was a long silence. Then, with a little smile that she tried to make ingratiating and appealing, ‘Now you’re angry with me,’ she said.

‘Not in the least. I’m merely asking you to face the facts.’ He rose, and feeling himself in danger of being inextricably entangled in Mary’s misfortune, symbolically asserted his right to be free by walking restlessly up and down the room. ‘I ought to talk to her about the morphia,’ he was thinking; ‘try to persuade her to go into a home and get cured. For her own sake. For the sake of poor Helen.’ But he knew Mary. She’d start to protest, she’d scream, she’d fly into a rage. It would be like a public-house brawl. Or worse, much worse, he thought with a shudder, she’d repent, she’d make promises, she’d melt into tears. He would find himself her only friend, her moral support for life. In the end, he said nothing. ‘It wouldn’t do any good,’ he assured himself. ‘It never does do any good with these morphia cases.’ ‘One’s got to come to terms with reality,’ he said aloud. Meaningless platitude – but what else was there to say?

Unexpectedly, with a submissive alacrity that he found positively disquieting, she agreed with him. Oh, absolutely agreed! It was no use crying over spilt milk. No use building castles in the air. What was needed was a plan – lots of plans – serious, practical, sensible plans for the new life. She smiled at him with an air of connivance, as though they were a pair of conspirators.

Reluctantly, and with mistrust, he accepted her invitation to sit on the edge of the bed. The plans unfolded themselves – serious to a degree. A little flat in Hampstead. Or else a tiny house in one of those slummy streets off the King’s Road, Chelsea. She could still give an occasional party, very cheaply. The real friends would come, in spite of the cheapness – wouldn’t they? she insisted with a rather pathetic anxiety to be reassured.

‘Of course,’ he had to say; though it wasn’t the cheapness that would put them off; it was the dirt, the squalor, the morphia, this sickening smell of ether on the breath.

‘One can have bottle parties,’ she was saying. ‘It’ll be fun!’ Her face brightened. ‘What sort of bottle will you bring, Anthony?’ And before he could answer, ‘We shall get infinitely tight with all those mixed drinks,’ she went on. ‘Infinitely . . .’ A moment later she had begun to tell him about the advances that George Wyvern had taken it into his head to make to her these days. Rather embarrassing, in the circumstances – seeing that Sally Wyvern was also . . . well! She smiled that enigmatic smile of hers, close-lipped and between half-shut eyelids. And what was really too extraordinary, even old Hugh Ledwidge had recently shown signs . . .

Anthony listened in astonishment. Those pathetically few real friends had been transformed, as though by magic, into positively a host of eager lovers. Did she seriously believe in her own inventions? But anyhow, he went on to think, it didn’t seem to matter whether she believed in them or not. Even unbelieved, these fictions evidently had power to raise her spirits, to restore her, at least for the moment, to a state of cheerful self-confidence.

‘That time in Paris,’ she was saying intimately. ‘Do you remember?’

But this was awful!

‘The Hôtel des Saints-Pères.’ Her voice deepened and vibrated with a subterranean laughter.

Anthony nodded without raising his head. She had obviously wanted him to echo her hint of significant mirth, to take up the scabrous reference to that old joke of theirs about the Holy Fathers and their own amusements under that highecclesiastical patronage. In their private language, ‘doing a slight Holy Father,’ or, yet more idiomatically, ‘doing Holiers,’ had signified ‘making love.’ He frowned, feeling suddenly very angry. How did she dare . . .?

The seconds passed. Making a desperate effort to fill the icy gulf of his silence, ‘We had a lot of fun,’ said Mary in a tone of sentimental reminiscence.

‘A lot,’ he repeated, as unemphatically as possible.

Suddenly she took his hand. ‘Dear Anthony!’

‘Oh, God!’ he thought, and tried, as politely as might be, to withdraw. But the clasp of those hot dry fingers never relaxed.

‘We were fools to quarrel,’ she went on. ‘Or rather, I was a fool.’

‘Not at all,’ he said politely.

‘That stupid bet,’ she shook her head. ‘And Sidney . . .’

‘You did what you wanted to do.’

‘I did what I didn’t want to do,’ she answered quickly. ‘One’s always doing things one doesn’t want – stupidly, out of sheer perversity. One chooses the worse just because it is the worse. Hyperion to a satyr – and therefore the satyr.’

‘But for certain purposes,’ he couldn’t resist saying, ‘the satyr may be more satisfactory.’

Ignoring his words, Mary sighed and shut her eyes.

‘Doing what one doesn’t want,’ she repeated, as though to herself. ‘Always doing what one doesn’t want.’ She released his hand, and, clasping her own behind her head, leaned back against the pillows in the attitude, the known and familiar attitude, that in the Hôtel des Saints-Pères had been so delicious in its graceful indolence, so wildly exciting because of that white round throat stretched back like a victim’s, those proffered breasts, lifted and taut beneath the lace. But today the lace was soiled and torn, the breasts hung tired under their own weight, the victim throat was no more a smooth column of white flesh, but withered, wrinkled, hollow between starting tendons.

She opened her eyes, and, with a start, he recognized the look she gave him as the same, identically the same look, at once swooning and cynical, humorous and languidly abandoned, as had invited him, irresistibly then, in Paris, fifteen years ago. It was the look of 1913 in the face of 1928 – painfully out of its context. He stared at her for a second or two, appalled; then managed to break the silence.

‘I shall have to go.’

But before he could rise, Mrs Amberley had quickly leaned forward and laid her hands on his shoulders.

‘No, don’t go. You mustn’t go.’ She tried to repeat that laughingly voluptuous invitation, but could not prevent a profound anxiety from showing in her eyes.

Anthony shook his head and, in spite of that sickening smell of ether, did his best to smile as he lied about the supper-party he had promised to join at eleven. Gently, but with a firm and decided movement, he lifted her confining hands and stood up by the side of the bed.

‘Good-night, dear Mary!’ The tone of his voice was warm; he could afford to be affectionate, now. ‘Bon courage!’ he squeezed her hands; then, bending down, kissed first one, then the other. Now that he was on his feet, and with the road to freedom clear before him, he felt at liberty to plunge into almost any emotional extravagance. But, instead of taking the cue, Mary Amberley returned him a look that had now become fixed and as though stony with unwavering misery. The mask he had adjusted to be so radiant with whimsical affectionateness seemed all of a sudden horribly out of keeping with the real situation. He could feel its irrelevance, physically, in the muscles of his face. Fool, hypocrite, coward! But it was almost at a run that he made towards the door and hurried down the stairs.

‘If a woman,’ Helen was reading in the Encyclopaedia, ‘administers to herself any poison or other noxious thing, or unlawfully uses any instrument or other means to procure her own miscarriage, she is guilty of . . .’ The sound of Anthony’s feet on the stairs caught her ear. She rose, and quickly walked to the door and out on to the landing.

‘Well?’ She smiled no greeting in answer to his, simulated no pleasure at seeing him. The face she lifted was as tragically naked of all the conventional grimaces as her mother’s had been.

‘But what’s the matter, Helen?’ he was startled into exclaiming. She looked at him for a few seconds in silence, then shook her head and began to ask him about those shares, the whole financial position.

Obviously, he was thinking as he answered her questions, one would expect her to find it all very upsetting. But upsetting to this point – he looked at her again: no – one wouldn’t have expected that. It wasn’t as if the girl had ever had a wild devotion for her mother. In the teeth of Mary’s ferocious egotism, how could she? And after all, it was nearly a year since the wretched woman had started on her morphia. One would think that by this time the horror would have lost some of its intensity. And yet he had never seen an unhappier face. Such youth, such freshness – it wasn’t right that they should be associated with an expression of so intense a despair. The sight of her made him feel somehow guilty – guiltily responsible. But when he made another gesture of enquiring sympathy, she only shook her head again and turned away.

‘You’d better go,’ she said.

Anthony hesitated a moment, then went. After all, she wanted him to go. Still feeling guilty, but with a sense of profound relief, he closed the front door behind him, and, drawing a deep breath, set off towards the Underground station.

Helen went back to her volume of the Encyclopaedia ‘. . . to procure her own miscarriage, she is guilty of felony. The punishment for this offence is penal servitude for life, or not less than three years, or imprisonment for not more than two years. If the child is born alive . . .’ But they didn’t say which the proper poisons were, nor what sort of instruments you had to use, and how. Only this stupid nonsense about penal servitude. Yet another loophole of escape had closed against her. It was as though the whole world had conspired to shut her in with her own impossibly appalling secret.

Melodiously, the clock in the back drawing-room struck eleven. Helen rose, put the heavy volume back in its place, and went upstairs to her mother’s room.

With an unwontedly careful precision of movement, Mrs Amberley was engaged, when her daughter entered, in filling a hypodermic syringe from a little glass ampoule. She started as the door opened, looked up, made a movement as if to hide syringe and ampoule under the bedclothes, then, fearful of spilling any of the precious liquor, checked herself in the midst of her gesture.

‘Go away!’ she called angrily. ‘Why do you come in without knocking? I won’t have you coming into my room without knocking,’ she repeated more shrilly, glad of the excuse she had discovered for her fury.

Helen stood for a second or two in the doorway, quite still, as if incredulous of the evidence of her own eyes; then hurried across the room.

‘Give those things to me,’ she said, holding out her hand.

Mrs Amberley shrank back towards the wall. ‘Go away!’ she shouted.

‘But you promised . . .’

‘I didn’t.’

‘You did, Mummy.’

‘I did not. And, anyhow, I shall do what I like.’

Without speaking, Helen reached out and caught her mother by the wrist. Mrs Amberley screamed so loudly that, fearful lest the servants should come down to see what was the matter, Helen relaxed her grip.

Mrs Amberley stopped screaming; but the look she turned on Helen was terrifying in its malevolence. ‘If you make me spill any of this,’ she said in a voice that trembled with rage, ‘I shall kill you. Kill you,’ she repeated.

They looked at one another for a moment without speaking. It was Helen who broke the silence. ‘You’d like to kill me,’ she said slowly, ‘because I don’t let you kill yourself.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, I suppose if you really want to kill yourself . . .’ She left the sentence unfinished.

Mrs Amberley stared at her in silence. ‘If you really want . . .’ She remembered the words she had spoken to Anthony only a few minutes since, and suddenly the tears ran down her cheeks. She was overwhelmed with self-pity. ‘Do you think I want to do this?’ she said brokenly. ‘I hate it, I absolutely hate it. But I can’t help it.’

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, Helen put her arm round her mother’s shoulders. ‘Mummy darling!’ she implored. ‘Don’t cry. It’ll be all right.’ She was profoundly moved.

‘It’s all Gerry’s fault,’ Mrs Amberley cried; and without noticing the little shuddering start Helen gave, ‘everything’s his fault,’ she went on. ‘Everything. I always knew he was a beast. Even when I cared for him most.’

As though her mother had suddenly become a stranger whom it was not right to be touching so intimately, Helen withdrew her encircling arm. ‘You cared for him?’ she whispered incredulously. ‘In that way?’

Answering quite a different question, parrying a reproach that had never been made, ‘I couldn’t help it,’ Mrs Amberley replied. ‘It was like this.’ She made a little movement with the hand that held the hypodermic syringe.

‘You mean,’ said Helen, speaking very slowly, and as though overcoming an almost invincible reluctance, ‘you mean he was . . . he was your lover?’

The strangeness of the tone aroused Mrs Amberley, for the first time since their conversation had begun, to something like a consciousness of her daughter’s real, personal existence. Turning, she looked at Helen with an expression of astonishment. ‘You didn’t know?’ Confronted by that extraordinary pallor, those uncontrollably trembling lips, the older woman was seized with a sudden compunction. ‘But, darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t imagine . . . You’re still so young; you don’t understand. You can’t . . . But where are you going? Come back! Helen!’

The door slammed. Mrs Amberley made a move to follow her daughter, then thought better of it, and, instead, resumed the interrupted task of filling her hypodermic syringe.

CHAPTER XXXV

August 4th 1934

RETURNED DEPRESSED from an evening with Helen and half a dozen of her young political friends. Such a passion for ‘liquidating’ the people who don’t agree with them! And such a sincere conviction that liquidation is necessary!

Revolting – but only to be expected. Regard the problem of reform exclusively as a matter of politics and economics, and you must approve and practise liquidation.

Consider recent history. Industrialism has grown pari passu with population. Now, where markets are expanding, the two besetting problems of all industrial societies solve themselves. New inventions may create technological unemployment; but expanding markets cure it as it’s made. Each individual may possess inadequate purchasing power; but the total number of individuals is steadily rising. Many small purchasing powers do as much as fewer big ones.

Our population is now stationary, will soon decline. Shrinkage instead of expansion of markets. Therefore, no more automatic solution of economic problems. Birth control necessitates the use of co-ordinating political intelligence. There must be a large-scale plan. Otherwise the machine won’t work. In other words, politicians will have to be about twenty times as intelligent as heretofore. Will the supply of intelligence be equal to the demand?

And of course intelligence, as Miller’s always insisting, isn’t isolated. The act of intelligently planning modifies the emotions of the planners. Consider English politics. We’ve made plenty of reforms – without ever accepting the principles underlying them. (Compare the King’s titles with his present position. Compare our protestations that we’ll never have anything to do with socialism with the realities of state control.) There are no large-scale plans in English politics, and hardly any thinking in terms of first principles. With what results? Among others, that English politics have been on the whole very good-natured. The reason is simple. Deal with practical problems as they arise and without reference to first principles; politics are a matter of higgling. Now higglers lose tempers, but don’t normally regard one another as fiends in human form. But this is precisely what men of principle and systematic planners can’t help doing. A principle is, by definition, right; a plan, for the good of the people. Axioms from which it logically follows that those who disagree with you and won’t help to realize your plan are enemies of goodness and humanity. No longer men and women, but personifications of evil, fiends incarnate. Killing men and women is wrong; but killing fiends is a duty. Hence the Holy Office, hence Robespierre and the Ogpu. Men with strong religious and revolutionary faith, men with well-thought-out plans for improving the lot of their fellows, whether in this world or the next, have been more systematically and coldbloodedly cruel than any others. Thinking in terms of first principles entails acting with machine-guns. A government with a comprehensive plan for the betterment of society is a government that uses torture. Per contra, if you never consider principles and have no plan, but deal with situations as they arise, piecemeal, you can afford to have unarmed policemen, liberty of speech and habeas corpus. Admirable. But what happens when an industrial society learns (a) how to make technological advances at a constantly accelerating speed, and (b) to prevent conception? Answer: it must either plan itself in accordance with general political and economic principles, or else break down. But governments with principles and plans have generally been tyrannies making use of police spies and terrorism. Must we resign ourselves to slavery and torture for the sake of co-ordination?

Breakdown on the other hand, Inquisition and Ogpu rule on the other. A real dilemma, if the plan is mainly economic and political. But think in terms of individual men, women, and children, not of States, Religions, Economic Systems and such-like abstractions: there is then a hope of passing between the horns. For if you begin by considering concrete people, you see at once that freedom from coercion is a necessary condition of their developing into full-grown human beings; that the form of economic prosperity which consists in possessing unnecessary objects doesn’t make for individual well-being; that a leisure filled with passive amusements is not a blessing; that the conveniences of urban life are bought at a high physiological and mental price; that an education which allows you to use yourself wrongly is almost valueless; that a social organization resulting in individuals being forced, every few years, to go out and murder one another must be wrong. And so on. Whereas if you start from the State, the Faith, the Economic System, there is a complete transvaluation of values. Individuals must murder one another, because the interests of the Nation demand it; must be educated to think of ends and disregard means, because the schoolmasters are there and don’t know of any other method; must live in towns, must have leisure to read the newspapers and go to the movies, must be encouraged to buy things they don’t need, because the industrial system exists and has to be kept going; must be coerced and enslaved, because otherwise they might think for themselves and give trouble to their rulers.

The sabbath was made for man. But man now behaves like the Pharisees and insists that he is made for all the things – science, industry, nation, money, religion, schools – which were really made for him. Why? Because he is so little aware of his own interests as a human being that he feels irresistibly tempted to sacrifice himself to these idols. There is no remedy except to become aware of one’s interests as a human being, and, having become aware, to learn to act on that awareness. Which means learning to use the self and learning to direct the mind. It’s almost wearisome, the way one always comes back to the same point. Wouldn’t it be nice, for a change, if there were another way out of our difficulties! A short cut. A method requiring no greater personal effort than recording a vote or ordering some ‘enemy of society’ to be shot. A salvation from outside, like a dose of calomel.

CHAPTER XXXVI

July 19th 1914

IN THE TRAIN going north, Anthony thought of what was in store for him. Within the next two days, or at the outside three, Brian would have to be told about what had happened, and a letter would have to be written to Joan. In what words? And what excuses should he make for himself? Should he tell the whole truth about his bet with Mary? For himself, the truth had certain advantages; if he told it, he could throw most of the blame for what had happened on Mary – but at the risk, he went on to think, of seeming miserably feeble. And that was not the only disadvantage; for Joan, the truth would be intolerably humiliating. However much blame he threw on Mary, the insult to Joan would remain. If only he could tell the truth to Brian and something else to Joan!

But that wasn’t possible. They would have to be told the same story, and, for Joan’s sake, a story that wasn’t true. But what story? Which explanation of the facts would throw least discredit upon himself and inflict the least humiliation on Joan? On the whole, he decided, the best thing to say would be that he had lost his head – been carried away by a sudden impulse, an impulse that he had subsequently seen the madness of and regretted. It was somebody else who had kissed her: that was what he would write to Joan. Somebody else – but not too else. She wouldn’t like it if she were made to feel that it was a mere momentary baboon who had behaved like that in the unlighted drawing-room. The person who had kissed her would have to be partially himself. Enough himself to have been all the time very fond of her, profoundly sorry for her; but someone else to the extent of allowing the circumstances of the evening to transform the affection and sympathy into – what? Love? Desire? No, he would have to avoid saying anything so specific; would have to talk about confusions, temporary insanities spoiling a relationship which had been so fine, and so forth. Meanwhile he could only say that he was sorry and ashamed; that he felt, more strongly than ever now, that Brian was the only man who was worthy of her, that the difficulties that had arisen between herself and Brian were only temporary and would soon . . . And all the rest.

Yes, the letter ought to be fairly easy. The trouble was that he would be expected to follow it up by interviews and explanations; that he would have to bear reproaches, listen to confidences, perhaps defend himself against declarations of passion. And in the interval there would be Brian to talk to – and with Brian the thing would begin with the interviews; and the more he thought about those interviews, the harder did he find it to foresee the part that Brian would play in them. Anthony imagined himself trying to make it clear that he wasn’t in love, that Joan had only momentarily lost her head as he had lost his, that nothing had changed, and that all Brian had to do was to go and kiss her himself. But would he succeed in making Brian believe him? The man being what he was, it seemed to him probable – seemed more probable the more he thought about it – that he would fail. Brian was the sort of man who would imagine that one couldn’t kiss a woman under any compulsion less urgent than the deepest, most heart-felt love. He would be told that Joan had been kissed and had returned the kisses; and no amount of talk about lost heads would persuade him that it wasn’t a serious matter of love at its intensest pitch. And then, Anthony speculated, what would the man do then? He’d be hurt, of course, he’d feel betrayed: but the chances were that there’d be no recriminations. No, something much worse might happen. Brian would probably take all the blame on himself; would renounce all his rights, would refuse to believe it when Anthony swore that he wasn’t in love and that it had all been a kind of bad joke; would insist, just because it would be so agonizing a sacrifice, that Joan should go to the man she really loved and who really loved her. And then, suppose that, on her side, Joan agreed! And it was probable, Anthony thought with dismay as he remembered her response to his kisses, it was almost certain even, that she would do so. Appalling prospect! He couldn’t face it. And why should he face it, after all? He could borrow on his securities – enough to get out of the country and stay away; for six months, for a year if necessary. And while the midlands streamed past the window, he leaned back with closed eyes, picturing himself in Italy or, if Italy wasn’t far enough from England, in Greece, in Egypt, even in India, Malaya, Java. With Mary; for of course Mary would have to come too, at least for part of the time. She could dump the children with some relation; and Egypt, he reflected, practical in his daydreaming, Egypt in the off-season was quite cheap, and this war scare of course was nothing. Was Luxor as impressive as it looked in the photographs? And the Parthenon? And Paestum? And what of the tropics? In imagination he sailed from island to island in the Aegean; smoked hashish in the slums of Cairo, ate bhang in Benares; did a slight Joseph Conrad in the East Indies, a slight Loti even, in spite of the chromolithograph style, among the copper-coloured girls and the gardenias, and, though he still found it impossible to like the man as much as Mary did, a slight Gauguin in the South Seas. These future and hypothetical escapes were escapes also here and now, so that for a long time in his corner of the compartment he quite forgot the reason for his projected flight into the exotic. The memory of what had happened, the apprehensive anticipation of what was going to happen, returned only with the realization that the train was crossing Shap Fell, and that in less than an hour he would be talking to Brian on the platform at Ambleside. All the old questions propounded themselves with a more desperate urgency. What should he say? How? On what occasion? And what would be Brian’s response? What Joan’s, when she got his letter? Horrible questions! But why had he put himself in the position of having to provide or receive the answers to them? What a fool he had been not to take flight at once! By this time he could have been at Venice, in Calabria, on a ship in the Mediterranean. Beyond the reach of letters. Secure and happy in complete ignorance of the results of his actions. And free. Instead of which he had stupidly stayed where he was and consented to be made the slave of the circumstances his folly had created. But even now, at the eleventh hour, it wasn’t too late. He could get out at the next station, make his way back to London, raise a little money and be off within twenty-four hours. But when the train stopped at Kendal, he made no move. The taking of so sudden and momentous a decision was something from which he shrank. He hated suffering, and looked forward with dread to what the next few days and weeks held in store for him. But his fear of suffering was less than his fear of action. He found it easier to accept passively what came than to make a decisive choice and act upon it.

As the train rolled on again, he thought of all the reasons why it had been right for him not to take that decision. Brian was counting on him, would be so disturbed by his non-arrival that he might easily rush down to London to find out what had happened, see Joan and learn everything, at once. And how should he explain things to his father? Besides, there was no reason to think that Mary would come with him; she had made her arrangements for the summer and wouldn’t, perhaps couldn’t, alter them. And while he was away, heaven only knew what rivals would present themselves. Besides, flight would be cowardly, he went on to assure himself, and immediately afterwards was reflecting that he could probably escape from his difficulties just as effectively if he stayed in England. A little tact, a bit of passive resistance . . .

Brian was waiting on the platform when the train drew in, and at the sight of him Anthony felt a sudden pang of pitying distress. For between the man and his clothes there was a startling and painful incongruousness. The rough homespun jacket and breeches, the stockings, the nailed boots, the bulging rucksack were emblems of energy and rustic good health. But the Brian who wore these emblems was the living denial of their significance. The long face was emaciated and sallow. The nose seemed larger than in the past, the eye-sockets deeper, the cheek-bones more prominent. And when he spoke, he stammered more uncontrollably than ever.

‘But what is the matter with you?’ cried Anthony, laying a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘You look wretched.’

Half touched by this display of a genuine solicitude (it was extraordinary, he reflected, how charming Anthony could unexpectedly be), half annoyed by having been, as he felt, found out, Brian shook his head and mumbled something about being a bit tired and in need of a rest.

But his idea of a rest, it turned out, was to walk twenty miles a day up and down the steepest hills he could find.

Anthony looked at him disapprovingly. ‘You ought to be lying out in a deck-chair,’ he said, but could see, as he spoke, that his advice was unwelcome. With Brian it was a kind of dogma that taking violent exercise in mountain scenery was intrinsically good. Good, because of Wordsworth; because, in his mother’s version of Christianity, landscape took the place of revelation.

‘I l-like w-walking,’ Brian insisted. ‘S-saw a d-dipper yesterday. The p-place is f-full of nice b-birds.’

In his distress at finding his friend so ill, Anthony had forgotten all about Joan and the events of the last days; but those birds (those bö-öds, this piddle-warblers) reminded him violently of what had happened. Feeling suddenly ashamed, as though he had been caught in some unworthy display of hypocrisy, Anthony withdrew his hand from Brian’s shoulder. They made their way in silence along the platform and out into the street. There they halted for a discussion. Brian wanted to send the luggage by the carrier and walk to their cottage in Langdale. Anthony proposed that they should take a car.

‘You’ve no business to walk a step further today,’ he said; then, when the other protested that he hadn’t yet taken enough exercise, changed ground and insisted that it was he who was tired after the journey, and that anyhow he couldn’t walk because he was wearing unsuitable clothes and shoes. After a final plea to be allowed to walk back to Langdale by himself, Brian was overruled and submitted to the car. They drove away.

Breaking a long silence, ‘Have you seen J-joan lately?’ Brian asked.

The other nodded without speaking.

‘How w-was she?’

‘Quite well,’ Anthony found himself replying in the brightly vague tone in which one answers questions about the health of those in whom one takes no particular interest. The lie – for it was a lie by omission – had come to him of its own accord. By means of it, his mind had defended itself against Brian’s question as automatically and promptly as his body, by blinking, by lifting an arm, by starting back, would have defended itself against an advancing fist. But the words were no sooner spoken than he regretted their brevity and the casualness with which they had been uttered, than he felt that he ought at once to qualify them with additional information, in another and more serious tone. He ought to rush in immediately, and without further delay make a clean breast of everything. But time passed; he could not bring himself to speak; and within a few seconds he had already begun to dignify his cowardice with the name of consideration, he was already assuring himself that it would be wrong, Brian’s health being what it was, to speak out at once, that the truly friendly thing was to wait and choose an occasion, tomorrow perhaps or the day after, when Brian was in a better state to receive the news.

‘You d-don’t think she was w-worrying?’ Brian went on. ‘I m-mean ab-bout all this d-delay in our g-getting married?’

‘Well, of course,’ Anthony admitted, ‘she’s not altogether happy about it.’

Brian shook his head. ‘N-nor am I. But I th-think it’s r-right; and I th-think in the l-long r-run she’ll see it was r-right.’ Then, after a silence, ‘If only one were a-absolutely certain,’ he said. ‘S-sometimes I w-wonder if it isn’t a k-kind of s-selfishness.’

‘What is?’

‘St-sticking to p-principles, reg-gardless of p-people. P-people – o-other p-people, I mean – p-perhaps they’re m-more imp-portant e-even than what one kn-knows is a r-right p-principle. But if you d-don’t st-tick to your p-principles . . .’ he hesitated, turned a puzzled and unhappy face towards Anthony, then looked away again: ‘well, where are you?’ he concluded despairingly.

‘The sabbath is made for man,’ said Anthony; and thought resentfully what a fool Brian had been not to take whatever money he could get and marry out of hand. If Joan had been safely married, there would have been no confidences, no bet, no kiss and none of the appalling consequences of kissing. And then, of course, there was poor Joan. He went on to feel what was almost righteous indignation against Brian for not having grasped the fundamental Christian principle that the sabbath is made for man, not man for the sabbath. But was it made for man, an intrusive voice suddenly began asking, to the extent of man’s having the right, for a bet, to disturb the equilibrium of another person’s feelings, to break up a long-established relationship, to betray a friend?

Brian meanwhile was thinking of the occasion, a couple of months before, when he and Joan had talked over the matter with his mother.

‘You still think,’ she had asked, ‘that you oughtn’t to take the money?’ and went on, when he told her that his opinions hadn’t changed, to set forth all the reasons why it wouldn’t be wrong for him to take it. The system might be unjust, and it might be one’s duty to alter it; but meanwhile one could use one’s financial advantages to help the individual victims of the system, to forward the cause of desirable reform.

‘That’s what I’ve always felt about it,’ his mother concluded.

And had been right, he insisted; and that he didn’t dream of criticizing what she had done, of even thinking it criticizable. But that was because her circumstances had been so different from his. A man, he had opportunities to make his own living such as she had never had. Besides, she had been left with responsibilities; whereas he . . .

‘But what about Joan?’ she interrupted, laying her hand affectionately, as she spoke, on Joan’s arm. ‘Isn’t she a responsibility?’

He dropped his eyes and, feeling that it was not for him to answer the question, said nothing.

There were long seconds of an uncomfortably expectant silence, while he wondered whether Joan would speak and what, if she didn’t, he should say and do.

Then, to his relief, ‘After all,’ Joan brought out at last in a curiously flat and muffled voice, ‘Brian was a child then. But I’m grown up, I’m responsible for myself. And I’m able to understand his reasons.’

He raised his head and looked at her with a smile of gratitude. But her face was cold and as though remote; she met his eyes for only a moment, then looked away.

‘You understand his reasons?’ his mother questioned.

Joan nodded.

‘And you approve them?’

She hesitated for a moment, then nodded again. ‘If Brian thinks it’s right,’ she began, and broke off.

His mother looked from one to the other. ‘I think you’re a pair of rather heroic young people,’ she said, and the tone of her voice, so beautiful, so richly vibrant with emotion, imparted to the words a heightened significance. He felt that he had been confirmed in his judgment.

But later, he remembered with a pained perplexity, later, when Joan and he were alone together and he tried to thank her for what she had done, she turned on him with a bitterly resentful anger.

‘You love your own ideas more than you love me. Much more.’

Brian sighed and, shaking himself out of his long distraction, looked at the trees by the side of the road, at the mountains so sumptuously shadowed and illumined by the late afternoon sunlight, at the marbly islands of cloud in the sky – looked at them, saw that they were beautiful, and found their beauty hopelessly irrelevant.

‘I wish to G-god,’ he said, ‘I knew what to d-do.’

So did Anthony, though he did not say so.

CHAPTER XXXVII

Autumn 1933

IT TOOK LONGER than Mark expected to dispose of his business, and at moments, during the long weeks that preceded their departure, the temptation to throw up the whole ridiculous enterprise and scuttle back into the delicious other-world of Mediterranean sunshine and abstract ideas became, for Anthony, almost irresistible.

‘What are you really going for?’ he asked resentfully.

‘Fun,’ was all the answer that Mark condescended to give.

‘And your Don Jorge,’ Anthony insisted. ‘What does he hope to achieve by this little revolution of his?’

‘His own greater glory.’

‘But the peasants, the Indians?’

‘They’ll be exactly where they were before, where they always will be: underneath.’

‘And yet you think it’s worth while to go and help this Jorge of yours?’

‘Worth while for me.’ Mark smiled anatomically. ‘And worth while for you. Very much worth while for you,’ he insisted.

‘But not for the peons, I gather.’

‘It never is. What did the French peons get out of their revolution? Or our friends, the Russians, for that matter? A few years of pleasant intoxication. Then the same old treadmill. Gilded, perhaps; repainted. But in essentials the old machine.’

‘And you expect me to come along with you for fun?’ The thought of the Mediterranean and his books heightened Anthony’s indignation. ‘It’s crazy, it’s abominable.’

‘In other words,’ said Mark, ‘you’re afraid. Well, why not? But if you are, for God’s sake say so. Have the courage of your cowardice.’

How he had hated Mark for telling him the home truths he knew so well! If it hadn’t been for Mr Beavis, and that interview with Helen, and finally Beppo Bowles, perhaps he would have had the courage of his cowardice. But they made it impossible for him to withdraw. There was his father, first of all, still deep in the connubial burrow, among the petticoats and the etymologies and the smell of red-haired women – but agitated, as Anthony had never seen him agitated before, hurt, indignant, bitterly resentful. The presidency of the Philological Society, which ought, without any question, to have come to him, had gone instead to Jenkins. Jenkins, if you please! A mere ignorant popularizer, the very antithesis of a real scholar. A charlatan, a philological confidence trickster, positively (to use an American colloquialism) a ‘crook.’

Jenkins’s election had taken Mr Beavis long strides towards death. From being a man much younger than his years, he had suddenly come to look his age. An old man; and tired into the bargain, eroded from within.

‘I’m worried,’ Pauline had confided to Anthony. ‘He’s making himself ill. And for something so childish, really. I can’t make him see that it doesn’t matter. Or rather I can’t make him feel it. Because he sees it all right, but goes on worrying all the same.’

Even in the deepest sensual burrow, Anthony reflected as he walked back to his rooms, even in the snuggest of intellectual other-worlds, fate could find one out. And suddenly he perceived that, having spent all his life trying to react away from the standards of his father’s universe, he had succeeded only in becoming precisely what his father was – a man in a burrow. With this small difference, that in his case the burrow happened to be intermittently adulterous instead of connubial all the time; and that the ideas were about societies and not words. For the moment, he was out of his burrow – had been chased out, as though by ferrets. But it would be easy and was already a temptation to return. To return and be snug, be safe. No, not safe; that was the point. At any moment a Jenkins might be elected to some presidency or other, and then, defenceless in one’s burrow of thought and sensuality, one would be at the mercy of any childish passion that might arise. Outside, perhaps, one might learn to defend oneself against such contingencies. He decided to go with Mark.

But in the succeeding days the temptation kept coming back. In spite of the spectacle of Mr Beavis’s self-destroying childishness, the quiet life seemed immensely attractive. ‘Mark’s mad,’ he kept assuring himself. ‘We’re doing something stupid and wrong. And after all, my sociology is important. It’ll help people to think clearly.’ Wasn’t it (ridiculous word!) a ‘duty’ to go on with it? But then, more than six weeks after his return to London, he saw Helen and Beppo Bowles – saw them both in the course of a single afternoon. The meeting with Helen was a chance one. It was in the French Room at the National Gallery. Anthony was stooping to look closely into Cezanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire, when he became aware that two other visitors had halted just behind them. He shifted a little to one side, so as to let them see the picture, and continued his meticulous examination of the brushwork.

A few seconds passed; then, very slowly and with a foreign accent, a man’s voice said: ‘See now here how the nineteenth-century petit bourgeois tried to escape from industrialism. Why must he paint such landscapes, so romantic? Because he will forget the new methods of production. Because he will not think of the proletariat. That is why.’

‘Yes, I suppose that is the reason,’ said another voice.

With a start, Anthony recognized it as Helen’s. ‘What shall I do?’ he was wondering, when the voice spoke again.

‘Why, it’s Anthony!’ A hand touched his arm.

He straightened himself up and turned towards her, making the gestures and noises appropriate to delighted astonishment. That face, which he had last seen alternately stony and bright with mockery, then in the rapt agony of pleasure, then dabbled with blood and pitiably disintegrated by a grief extreme beyond expression, finally hard as it had been at first, harder, more rigidly a stone – that face was now beautifully alive, and tender, illuminated from within by a kind of secure joy. She looked at him without the least trace of embarrassment. It was as though the past had been completely abolished, as though, for her, only the present existed and were real.

‘This is Ekki Giesebrecht,’ she said.

The fair-haired young man beside her bent stiffly forwards as they shook hands.

‘He had to escape from Germany,’ she was explaining. ‘They would have killed him for his politics.’

It was not jealousy that he felt as he looked from one glad face to the other – not jealousy, but an unhappiness so acute that it was like a physical pain. A pain that endured and that was not in the least diminished by the solemn absurdity of the little lecture which Helen now delivered on art as a manifestation of class interests. Listening, he could laugh to himself, he could reflect with amusement on love’s fantastic by-products in matters of taste, political opinions, religious beliefs. But behind the laughter, beneath the ironical reflections, that pain of unhappiness persisted.

He refused her invitation to have tea with them.

‘I’ve promised to go and see Beppo,’ he explained.

‘Give him my love,’ she said, and went on to ask if, since his return, he had met Hugh.

Anthony shook his head.

‘We’re parting company, you know.’

Making an effort to smile, ‘All good wishes for the divorce,’ he said, and hurried away.

Walking through the smoky dimness of the afternoon, he thought of that softly radiant face of hers, and felt, along with the pain of unhappiness, a renewal of that other, profounder pain of dissatisfaction with himself. Since his arrival in London he had led his ordinary London life – the lunches with men of learning and affairs, the dinners where women kept the conversation more gossipy and amusing – and the easy, meaningless successes, which his talents and a certain natural charm always allowed him to score at such gatherings, had made him all but completely forget his dissatisfaction, had masked the pain of it, as a drug will mask neuralgia or toothache. This meeting with Helen had instantaneously neutralized the soothing drug and left him defenceless against a pain no whit diminished by the temporary anodyne – rather, indeed, intensified by it. For the realization that he had permitted himself to be soothed by an opiate of such poor quality was a new cause for dissatisfaction added to the old. And then to think that he had been seriously considering the idea of returning to the old quiet life! So quietly squalid, so quietly inhuman and, for all the expense of thought it entailed, so quietly mad. Mark’s enterprise might be stupid and even disgraceful; but, however bad, it was still preferable to that quietude of work and occasional detached sensuality beside the Mediterranean.

Standing at the door of Beppo’s flat, he heard the sound of voices – Beppo’s and another man’s. He rang the bell. Time passed. The door remained unopened. The voices talked on, inarticulately, but with shrill squeaks on Beppo’s side and, on that of the stranger, a crescendo of gruff barks which proclaimed that they were quarrelling. He rang again. There were a few more squeaks and shouts; then the sound of hurrying feet. The door was flung open, and there stood Beppo. The face was flushed, the bald crown shiny with perspiration. Behind him, very upright and soldierly in his carriage, appeared a rather coarsely handsome young man, with a small moustache and carefully oiled wavy brown hair, dressed in a blue serge suit of extreme and somehow improbable smartness.

‘Come in,’ said Beppo rather breathlessly.

‘Am I disturbing?’

‘No, no. My friend was just going – this is Mr Simpson, by the way – just going.’

‘Was he?’ asked the young man in a significant voice and with a Nottinghamshire accent. ‘I hadn’t known he was.’

‘Perhaps I’d better go,’ Anthony suggested.

‘No, please don’t, please don’t.’ There was a note in Beppo’s voice of almost desperate appeal.

The young man laughed. ‘He wants protection – that’s what it is. Thinks he’s going to be blackmailed. And so I could if I wanted to.’ He looked at Anthony with knowing, insolent eyes. ‘But I don’t want to.’ He assumed an expression that was meant to be one of lofty moral indignation. ‘I wouldn’t do it for a thousand pounds. It’s a skunk’s game too.’ He pointed an accusing finger. ‘A mean, dirty swine. That’s what you are. I’ve said it before, and I say it again. And I don’t care who hears me. Because I can prove it. Yes, and you know I can. A mean, dirty swine.’

‘All right, all right,’ Beppo cried, in the tone of one who makes unconditional surrender. Catching Anthony by the arm, ‘Go into the sitting-room, will you,’ he begged.

Anthony did as he was told. Outside in the hall, a few almost whispered sentences were exchanged. Then, after a silence, the front door slammed, and Beppo, pale and distracted, entered the room. With one hand he was wiping his forehead; but it was only after he had sat down that he noticed what he was holding in the other. The fat white fingers were closed round his wallet. Embarrassed, he put the compromising object away in his breast pocket. Then, fizzling explosively in misery as he fizzled in mirth, ‘It’s only money that they’re after,’ he burst out like an opened ginger-beer bottle. ‘You’ve seen it. Why should I try to hide it? Only money.’ And he rambled on, popping, squeaking, fizzling in almost incoherent denunciation of ‘them,’ and commiseration for himself. Yes, he was doubly to be pitied – pitied for what he had to suffer because of ‘their’ mercenary attitude, when the thing he was looking for was love for love’s and adventure for adventure’s sake; pitied also for that growing incapacity to find the least satisfaction in any amorous experience that was not wholly new. Increasingly, repetition was becoming the enemy. Repetition killed what he called the frisson. Unspeakable tragedy. He, who so longed for tenderness, for understanding, for companionship, was debarred from ever getting what he wanted. To have an affair with somebody of one’s own class, somebody one could talk to, had come to be out of the question. But how could there be real tenderness without the sensual relationship? With ‘them,’ the relationship was possible, was wildly desirable. But tenderness could no more flourish without communication than it could flourish without sensuality. And sensuality entirely divorced from communication and tenderness seemed now to be possible only under the stimulus of a constant change of object. There had to be another of ‘them’ each time. For that he was to be pitied; but the situation had its romantic side. Or at any rate might have it – used to have it. Nowadays, Beppo complained, ‘they’ had changed, were becoming mercenary, frankly rapacious, mere prostitutes.

‘You saw just now,’ he said, ‘the sordidness of it, the lowness!’ His misery bubbled over as though under an inner pressure of carbonic acid gas. In his agitation he heaved himself out of his chair and began to walk up and down the room, exposing to Anthony’s eyes, now the bulging waistcoat, the lavish tie from Sulka’s, the face with its pendant of chins, the bald and shining crown, now the broad seat of pale check trousers, the black jacket rising pear-like to narrow shoulders, and below the central baldness that fuzz of pale brown hair, like a Florentine page’s, above the collar. ‘And I’m not mean. God knows, I’ve got plenty of other faults, but not that. Why can’t they understand that it isn’t meanness, that it’s a wish to . . . to . . .’ he hesitated, ‘well, to keep the thing on a human basis? A basis at least of romance, of adventure. Instead of that, they make these awful, humiliating scenes. Refusing to understand, absolutely refusing.’

He continued to walk up and down the room in silence. Anthony made no comment, but wondered inwardly how far poor old Beppo knew the truth or whether he too refused to understand – refused to understand that, to ‘them,’ his ageing and unpalatable person could hardly be expected to seem romantic, that the only charm which remained to him, outside a certain good taste, and a facile intelligence which ‘they’ were not in a position to appreciate, was his money. Did he know all this? Yes, of course he did; it was unavoidable. He knew it quite well and refused to understand. ‘Like me,’ Anthony said to himself.

That evening he telephoned to Mark to tell him definitely that he could book their passages.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

August 10th 1934

TODAY HELEN TALKED again with Miller. Talked with a kind of resentful vehemence. (Certain memories, certain trains of thought are like the aching tooth one must always be touching just to make sure it still hurts.) Non-violence: this time, it was not only a mere trick, insignificant; it was also wrong. If you’re convinced people are wicked, you’ve no right not to try to make them behave decently. Agreed: but how are you most likely to succeed? By violence? But violence may make people assume the forms of good behaviour for the moment; it won’t produce the reality of genuine and permanent good behaviour. She accused me of shirking real issues, taking refuge in vague idealism. It all boiled down at last to her vengeful hatred for the Nazis. Peace all round, except for Nazis and, by contagion, Fascists. These should be punished, painfully exterminated – like rats. (Note that we’re all ninety-nine per cent. pacifists. Sermon on Mount, provided we’re allowed to play Tamburlane or Napoleon in our particular one per cent. of selected cases. Peace, perfect peace, so long as we can have the war that suits us. Result: everyone is the predestined victim of somebody else’s exceptionally permissible war. Ninety-nine per cent. pacifism is merely another name for militarism. If there’s to be peace, there must be hundred per cent. pacifism.)

We exchanged a lot of arguments; then, for some time, said nothing. Finally, she began to talk about Giesebrecht. Executed after God only knew what tortures, ‘Can you be surprised if I feel like this about the Nazis?’ Not surprised at all – any more than by the Nazis themselves. Surprising would have been tolerance on their part, forgiveness on hers. ‘But the person who might have forgiven vanished when Ekki vanished. I was good while he was with me. Now I’m bad. If he were still here I might be able to forgive them for taking him away. But that’s an impossible condition. I can’t ever forgive.’ (There were answers to that, of course. But it didn’t seem to me that I had any right, being what I am, acting as I still do, to make them.) She went on to describe what he had been to her. Someone she didn’t have to be ashamed of loving, as she had had to be ashamed of loving Gerry. Someone she had been able to love with her whole being – ‘not just occasionally and with part of me, on a roof; or just for fun, in a studio, before dinner.’ And she came back to the same point – that Ekki had made her kind, truthful, unselfish, as well as happy. ‘I was somebody else while I was with him. Or perhaps I was myself – for the first time.’ Then, ‘Do you remember how you laughed at me that time on the roof, when I talked about my real self?’ Did I not remember! I hadn’t even been real enough, at that moment, to perceive my own remoteness from reality. Afterwards, when I saw her crying, when I knew that I’d been deliberately refusing to love her, I did perceive it.

After a silence, ‘At the beginning I believe I could have loved you almost as much as I loved Ekki.’

And I’d done my best, of course, to prevent her.

Her face brightened with sudden malicious derision. Like her mother’s. ‘Extraordinary how funny a tragedy is, when you look at it from the wrong side!’ Then, still smiling, ‘Do you imagine you care for me now? Lo-ove me, in a word?’

Not only imagined; did really.

She held up a hand, like a policeman. ‘No film stuff here. I’d have to throw you out if you began that game. Which I don’t want to do. Because, oddly enough, I really like you. In spite of everything. I never thought I should. Not after that dog. But I do.’ That painful brightness came back into the face. ‘All the things I thought I should never do again! Such as eating a square meal; but I was doing it after three days. And wanting to make love. That seemed inconceivably sacrilegious. And yet within three or four months it was occurring to me, I was having dreams about it. And one of these days, I suppose, I shall actually be doing it. Doing it “without any obligation,” as they say when they send you the vacuum-cleaner on approval. Exactly as I did before.’ She laughed again. ‘Most probably with you, Anthony. Till the next dog comes down. Would you be ready to begin again?’

Not on the old basis. I’d want to give more, receive more.

‘It takes two to give and receive.’ Then she switched the conversation on to another line; who was I having an affair with at the moment? and when I answered: with nobody, asked whether it wasn’t difficult and disagreeable to be continent, and why I should want to imitate Mark Staithes. Tried to explain that I wasn’t imitating Mark, that Mark’s asceticism was undertaken for its own sake and above all for his, that he might feel himself more separate, more intensely himself, in a better position to look down on other people. Whereas what I was trying to do was to avoid occasions for emphasizing individual separateness through sensuality. Hate, anger, ambition explicitly deny human unity; lust and greed do the same indirectly and by implication – by insisting exclusively on particular individual experiences and, in the case of lust, using other people merely as a means for obtaining such experiences. Less dangerously so than malevolence and the passions for superiority, prestige, social position, lust is still incompatible with pacifism; can be made compatible only when it ceases to be an end in itself and becomes a means towards the unification through love of two separate individuals. Such particular union, a paradigm of union in general.

CHAPTER XXXIX

March 25th 1928

WHEN HELEN KEPT her eyes closed, the red darkness behind the lids came wildly and chaotically to life. Like a railway station, it seemed, full of hurrying people, loud with voices; and the colours glowed, the forms stood sharply out, jewelled, with the more than real definition of forms and colours under limelight. It was as though the fever had assembled a crowd inside her head, had lighted lamps and turned on the gramophone. On the unnaturally brilliant stage the images came and went on their own initiative and in ferocious disregard of Helen’s own wishes. Came and went, talked, gesticulated, acted out their elaborate, insane dramas, unceasingly, without mercy on her fatigue, without consideration for her longing to be at rest and alone. Sometimes, in the hope that the outer world would eclipse this scurrying lunacy within, she opened her eyes. But the light hurt her; and in spite of those bunched roses on the wallpaper, in spite of the white counterpane and the knobs at the end of the bedstead, in spite of the looking-glass, the hair brushes, the bottle of eau-de-Cologne, those images on the other side of her eyes went on living that private life of theirs, undisturbed. A vehement and crazy life – now utterly irrelevant, like a story invented by somebody else, then all at once agonizingly to the point, agonizingly hers.

This morning, for example, this afternoon (which was it? time was at once endless and non-existent: but at any rate it was just after Mme Bonifay had been in to see her – stinking, stinking of garlic and dirty linen), there had been a huge hall, with statues. Gilded statues. She recognized Voltaire, fifty feet high, and there was one of those Chinese camels, but enormous. People were standing in groups, beautifully placed, like people on the stage. Indeed, they were on the stage. Acting a play of intrigue, a play with love-scenes and revolvers. How bright the spotlights were! how clearly and emphatically they spoke the lines! Each word a bell, each figure a shining lamp.

‘Hands up . . . I love you . . . If she falls into the traps . . .’ And yet who were they, what were they saying? And now for some extraordinary reason they were talking about arithmetic. Sixty-six yards of linoleum at three and eleven a yard. And the woman with the revolver was suddenly Miss Cosmas. There was no Voltaire, no gilded camel. Only the blackboard. Miss Cosmas had always hated her because she was so bad at maths, had always been odious and unfair. ‘At three and eleven,’ Miss Cosmas shouted, ‘at three and eleven.’ But Mme Bonifay’s number was eleven, and Helen was walking once again along the rue de la Tombe-Issoire, feeling more and more sick with apprehension at every step. Walking slowlier and slowlier in the hope of never getting there. But the houses came rushing down towards her, like the walls of the moving staircases in the Underground. Came rushing towards her, and then, when number eleven drew level, stopped dead, noiselessly. ‘Mme Bonifay. Sage Femme de Ière Classe.’ She stood looking at the words, just as she had stood in reality, two days before; then walked on, just as she had walked on then. Only one more minute, she pleaded with herself, till she got over her nervousness, till she felt less sick. Walked up the street again, and was in a garden with her grandmother and Hugh Ledwidge. It was a walled garden with a pine wood at one end of it. And a man came running out of the wood, a man with some awful kind of skin disease on his face. Red blotches and scabs and scurf. Horrible! But all her grandmother said was, ‘God has spat in his face,’ and everyone laughed. But in the middle of the wood, when she went on, stood a bed, and immediately, somehow, she was lying on it, looking at a lot of people in another play, in the same play, perhaps. Bright under the spotlights, with voices like bells in her ears; but incomprehensible, unrecognizable. And Gerry was there, sitting on the edge of her bed, kissing her, stroking her shoulders, her breasts. ‘But, Gerry, you mustn’t! All those people – they can see us. Gerry, don’t!’ But when she tried to push him away, he was like a block of granite, immovable; and all the time his hands, his lips were releasing soft moths of quick and fluttering pleasure under her skin; and the shame, the dismay at being seen by all those people, let loose at the same time a special physical anguish of its own – a finger-footed, wildlier-fluttering sensation that was no longer a moth, but some huge beetle, revolting to the touch, and yet revoltingly delicious. ‘Don’t, Gerry, don’t!’ And suddenly she remembered everything – that night after the kitten had died, and all the other nights, and then the first signs, the growing anxiety, and the day she had telephoned to him and been told that he’d gone to Canada, and finally the money, and that evening when her mother . . . ‘I hate you!’ she cried; but as she managed with a last violent effort to push him away, she felt a stab of pain so excruciating that for a moment she forgot her delirium and was wholly at the mercy of immediate, physical reality. Slowly the pain died down; the other-world of fever closed in on her again. And it wasn’t Gerry any more, it was Mme Bonifay. Mme Bonifay with that thing in her hand. Je vous ferai un peu mal. And it wasn’t the bed or the pine wood but the couch in Mme Bonifay’s sitting-room. She clenched her teeth, just as she had clenched them then. Only this time it was worse, because she knew what was going to happen. And under the limelight the people were still there, acting their play. And lying there on the couch she herself was part of the play, outside, and at last was no longer herself, but someone else, someone in a bathing-dress, with enormous breasts, like Lady Knipe’s. And what was there to prevent her breasts from getting to be like that? Bell-clear, but incomprehensible, the actors discussed the nightmarish possibility. The possibility of Helen with enormous breasts, of Helen with thick rolls of fat round her hips, of Helen with creases in her thighs, of Helen with rows and rows of children – howling all the time; and that disgusting smell of curdled milk; and their diapers. And here, all of a sudden, was Joyce wheeling the pram along the streets of Aldershot. Taking the baby out. Feeding him. Half horrified, half fascinated, she watched him clinging, sucking. Flattened against the breast, the little frog face wore an expression of determined greed that gradually relaxed, as the stomach filled, to one of sleepy, imbecile ecstasy. But the hands – those were fully human, those were little miracles of the most delicate elegance. Lovely, exquisite little hands! Irresistible little hands! She took the baby from Joyce, she pressed him close against her body, she bent her head so as to be able to kiss those adorable little fingers. But the thing she held in her arms was the dying kitten, was those kidneys at the butcher’s, was that horrible thing which she had opened her eyes to see Mme Bonifay nonchalantly picking up and carrying away in a tin basin to the kitchen.

The surgeon had been called in time, and Helen now was out of all danger. Reassured, Mme Bonifay had resumed the motherly and Rabelaisian good humour that was natural to her.

It was almost with a wink that she now talked of the operation that had saved Helen’s life. ‘Ton petit curetage,’ she would say with a kind of jovial archness, as though she were talking of some illicit pleasure. For Helen, every tone of that fat, jolly voice was yet another insult, yet a further humiliation. The fever had left her; her present weakness was lucid; she inhabited the real world once more. Turning her head, she could see herself reflected in the wardrobe mirror. It gave her a certain satisfaction to see how thin she was, how pale, what blue transparent shadows there were under the eyes, and the eyes themselves, how lifelessly without lustre. She could have powdered herself now, painted her lips a little, and rouged her cheeks, brushed back the gloss into her dull untidy hair; but, perversely, she preferred her sick pallor and dishevelment. ‘Like the kitten,’ she kept thinking. Reduced to a dirty little rag of limp flesh, transformed from a bright living creature into something repellent, into the likeness of kidneys, of that unspeakable thing that Mme Bonifay . . . She shuddered. And now ton petit curetage – in the same tone as ton petit amoureux. It was horrible, the final humiliation. She loathed the beastly woman, but at the same time was glad that she was so awful. That cheerful gross vulgarity was somehow appropriate – in keeping with all the rest. But when Mme Bonifay had left the room she would start crying, silently, in an agony of self-pity.

Returning unexpectedly, Mme Bonifay found her, that second morning after the petit curetage, with the tears streaming down her face. Genuinely distressed, she offered comfort. But the comfort smelt, as usual, of onions. Physically disgusted as well as resentful of the intrusion upon the privacy of her unhappiness, Helen turned aside, and when Mme Bonifay tried to force consolation upon her, she shook her head and told her to go away. Mme Bonifay hesitated for a moment, then obeyed, but with a Parthian insult in the form of a tenderly suggestive remark about the letter she had brought and which she now laid on Helen’s pillow. From him, without a doubt. A good heart, in spite of everything . . .

The letter, it turned out, was from Hugh. ‘A holiday in Paris!’ he wrote. ‘From my dingy little kennel among the bric-à-brac, how I envy you, Helen! Paris in high summer. Gaily beautiful, as this place of hazy distances can never be. London’s always mournful, even in the sunshine. One pines for the clear, unequivocal brilliance of the Paris summer. How I wish I were there! Selfishly, first of all, for the pleasure of being with you and out of London and the Museum. And then unselfishly, for your sake – because it worries me, the thought of your being all alone in Paris. Theoretically, with my head, I know that nothing’s likely to happen to you. But all the same, all the same – I’d like to be there, protective, but invisible, so that you wouldn’t be aware of me, never feel my devotion as an importunity, but so that you should always have the confidence that comes from being two instead of one. Not, alas, that I should be a very good second in a tight corner. (How I hate myself sometimes for my shameful inadequacy!) But better, perhaps, than nobody. And I’d never encroach, never trespass or interfere. I’d be non-existent; except when you needed me. My reward would be just being in your neighbourhood, just seeing and hearing you – the reward of someone who comes out of a dusty place into a garden, and looks at the flowering trees, and listens to the fountains.

‘I’ve never told you before (was afraid you’d laugh – and you may laugh; I don’t mind: for after all it’s your laughter), but the truth is that I sit sometimes, spinning stories to myself – stories in which I’m always with you, as I’ve told you I’d like to be with you now in Paris. Watching over you, keeping you from harm, and in return being refreshed by your loveliness, and warmed by your fire, and dazzled by your bright purity . . .’

Angrily, as though the irony in it had been intentional, Helen threw the letter aside. But an hour later she had picked it up again and was re-reading it from the beginning. After all, it was comforting to know that there was somebody who cared.

CHAPTER XL

September 11th 1934

WITH MILLER TO see a show of scientific films. Development of the sea urchin. Fertilization, cell division, growth. A renewal of last year’s almost nightmarish vision of a more-than-Bergsonian life force, of an ultimate Dark God, much darker, stranger and more violent than any that Lawrence imagined. Raw material that, on its own inhuman plane, is already a perfectly finished product. A picture of earthworms followed. Week-long hermaphroditic love-making, worm to worm, within a tube of slime. Then an incredibly beautiful film showing the life-history of the blow-fly. The eggs. The grubs on their piece of decaying meat. Snow-white, like a flock of sheep on a meadow. Hurrying away from light. Then, after five days of growth, descending to the earth, burrowing, making a cocoon. In twelve more days, the fly emerges. Fantastic process of resurrection! An organ in the head is inflated like a balloon. Blown up so large, that the walls of the cocoon are split. The fly wriggles out. Positively now, instead of negatively photo-tropic, as it was as a grub. (Minor and incidental miracle!) Burrowing upwards, towards the light. At the surface, you see it literally pumping up its soft, wet body with air, smoothing out its crumpled wings by forcing blood into the veins. Astonishing and moving spectacle.

I put the question to Miller: what will be the influence of the spread of knowledge such as this? Knowledge of a world incomparably more improbable and more beautiful than the imaginings of any myth-maker. A world, only a few years ago, completely unknown to all but a handful of people. What the effects of its general discovery by all? Miller laughed. ‘It will have exactly as much or as little effect as people want it to have. Those who prefer to think about sex and money will go on thinking about sex and money. However loudly the movies proclaim the glory of God.’ Persistence of the ingenuous notion that the response to favourable circumstances is inevitably and automatically good. Raw material, once again, to be worked up. One goes on believing in automatic progress, because one wants to cherish this stupidity: it’s so consoling. Consoling, because it puts the whole responsibility for everything you do or fail to do on somebody or something other than yourself.

CHAPTER XLI

December 1933

AT COLON THEY drove in a cab, at evening, along an esplanade. Whitish, like a vast fish’s eye, the sea lay as though dead. Against a picture postcard of sunset the immoderately tall thin palms were the emblems of a resigned hopelessness, and in the nostrils the hot air was like a vapour of wool. They swam for a little in the warm fish-eye, then returned through the deepening night to the town.

For the rich there were, after dinner, cabaret shows with expensive drinks and genuinely white prostitutes at ten dollars. For the poor, in the back streets, the mulatto women sat at doors that opened directly on to lighted bedrooms.

‘If one were really conscientious,’ said Anthony, as they walked back late that night to the hotel, ‘I suppose one would have to go and infect oneself with syphilis.’

The smell of sweat, the smell of alcohol, the smells of sewage and decay and cheap perfumes; then, next morning, the Canal, the great locks, the ship climbing up from one ocean and down again to the other. A more than human achievement that made it possible, Mark explained, smiling anatomically, to transport whores and whisky by water instead of overland from Colon to Panama.

Their ship headed northwards. Once every couple of days they would call at a little port to pick up cargo. From among the bananas, at San José, a spider, large as a fist and woolly, made its way into their cabin. Off Champerico, where the lighters came out loaded with bags of coffee, an Indian fell into the sea and was drowned.

At night, it was not the ship that seemed to move, but the stars. They mounted slowly, slantwise, hung at the top of their trajectory, then swooped downwards, travelled tentatively to the right and back to the left, then, beginning all over again, mounted once more towards the zenith.

‘Rather sickening,’ was Anthony’s verdict, ‘but beautiful.’

An improvement on the ordinary celestial mechanics. One could lie there and look at them indefinitely.

There was a note of grim satisfaction in Staithes’s voice as he replied that in two days’ time they would be at Puerto San Felipe.

Puerto San Felipe was a village of huts, with some wooden sheds, near the water, for storing coffee. Don Jorge’s agent at the port helped them through the customs. A pure Spaniard, half dead with tropical diseases, but still elaborately courteous. ‘My house is yours,’ he assured them, as they climbed the steep path towards his bungalow, ‘my house is yours.’

Orchids hung from the veranda, and, among them, cages full of incessantly screaming green parakeets.

An emaciated woman, prematurely old and tired, hopelessly tired, beyond the limit of her strength, came shuffling out of the house to welcome them, to apologize in advance for her hospitality. Puerto San Felipe was a small place, lacked commodities; and besides, she explained, the child was not well, not at all well. Mark asked her what was the matter. She looked at him with eyes expressionless with fatigue, and answered vaguely that it was fever; fever and a pain in the head.

They went with her into the house, and were shown a little girl lying on a camp-bed, restlessly turning her head from side to side, as if seeking, but always vainly, some cool place on which to rest her cheek, some position in which she might find relief from pain. The room was full of flies, and a smell of fried fish came from the kitchen. Looking at the child, Anthony suddenly found himself remembering Helen, that day on the roof – turning and turning her head in the torture of pleasure.

‘I suppose it must be mastoid,’ Mark was saying. ‘Or meningitis, perhaps.’

As he spoke, the child lifted thin arms from under the sheet and, clasping her head between her hands, began to roll still more violently from side to side, and at last broke out into a paroxysm of screaming.

In immediate response, the noise of the parakeets on the veranda swelled up, shriek after shriek, to a deafening maximum of intensity.

‘Quiet, quiet,’ the mother kept repeating, wheedlingly at first, then with a growing insistence, begging, exhorting, commanding the child to stop crying, to feel less pain. The screaming continued, the head went on rolling from side to side.

Tortured by pleasure, tortured by pain. At the mercy of one’s skin and mucus, at the mercy of those thin threads of nerve.

‘Quiet, quiet,’ the woman repeated almost angrily. She bent over the bed and, by main force, dragged down the child’s lifted arms; then, holding the two thin wrists in one hand, laid the other on the head in an effort to hold it unmoving on the pillows. Still screaming, the little girl struggled under the constraint. The woman’s bony hand tightened round the wrists, rested more heavily on the forehead. If she could forcefully restrain the manifestations of pain, perhaps the pain itself would cease, perhaps the child would stop that screaming, would sit up perhaps, smiling, and be well again.

‘Quiet, quiet,’ she commanded between clenched teeth.

With a violent effort the child released her arms from the grasp of those claw-like fingers; the hands flew once more to the head. Before the woman could snatch them away again, Mark touched her on the arm. She looked round at him.

‘Better to leave her,’ he was saying.

Obediently she straightened herself up and walked away towards the door that gave on to the veranda. They followed her. There was nothing whatever that they could do.

‘Mi casa es suya.’

Thank God, it wasn’t. The child’s screams had subsided; but the frying fish, the parakeets among the orchids . . . Politely, Mark refused the invitation to an early luncheon. They walked out again into the oppressive sunshine. The mozos had loaded their baggage on to the pack-mules, and the riding animals stood in the shade of a tree, ready saddled. They buckled on enormous spurs and mounted.

The track wound up and up from the coast, through a jungle silvery and brownish pink with drought. Sitting bolt upright on his high-backed saddle, Mark read Timon of Athens from his pocket edition of the Tragedies. Each time he turned a page, he gave his mule the spur; and for a few yards she would climb a little more quickly, then revert to the old, slow pace.

In the hotel at Tapatlan, where they spent the night, Anthony was bitten for the first time in his life by bed bugs, and the next evening it was an attack of dysentery . . . On the fourth day he was well enough to go out and see the sights. The last earthquake had almost wrecked the church. A dense black fruitage of bats hung, like ripe plums, from the rafters; an Indian boy, ragged and bare-footed, was sweeping up the droppings; from the altars the baroque saints flapped and gesticulated in a frozen paroxysm of devotion. They walked out again into the market-place, where, secret and as though ambushed within their dark shawls, the brown Indian women squatted in the dust before their little piles of fruit and withering vegetables. The meat on the butcher’s stall was covered with a crust of flies. Rhythmically shaking their long ears the donkeys passed, on small quick hoofs, noiseless in the dust. The women came and went in silence, carrying kerosene tins of water on their heads. From under hat-brims, dark eyes regarded the strangers with an inscrutably reptilian glitter that seemed devoid of all curiosity, all interest, any awareness even of their presence.

‘I’m tired,’ Anthony announced. They had not walked very far; but at Tapatlan, it was an immense fatigue even to be living and conscious. ‘When I die,’ he went on after a silence, ‘this is the part of hell I shall be sent to. I recognize it instantly.’

The bar of the hotel was in a dim crypt-like room with a vaulted ceiling supported at the centre by a pier of masonry, inordinately thick for its height, to resist the earthquake shocks. ‘The Saxon ossuary,’ Mark called it; and here, while he went to their room to fetch a handkerchief, he left Anthony installed in a cane chair.

Propped against the bar, a smartly dressed young Mexican in riding-breeches and an enormous felt hat was boasting to the proprietress about the alligators he had shot in the swamps at the mouth of the Coppalita, of his firmness in dealing with the Indians who had come to pick the coffee on his estate, of the money he expected to make when he sold his crop.

‘A bit tight,’ Anthony reflected, listening and looking on from his chair; and was enjoying the performance, when the young man turned, and, bowing with the grave formality of one who is so drunk that he must do everything with a conscious deliberation, asked if the foreign cavalier would take a glass of tequila with him.

Fatigue had made Anthony’s Spanish more halting than usual. His efforts to explain that he had not been well, that it would not be good for him to drink alcohol, landed him very soon in incoherence. The young man listened, fixing him all the time with dark eyes, bright like the Indians’, but, unlike theirs, comprehensibly expressive – European eyes, in which it was possible to read an intense and passionate interest, a focused awareness. Anthony mumbled on, and all at once those eyes took on a new and dangerous glitter; an expression of anger distorted the handsome face, the knuckles of the strong rapacious hands went white under a sudden pressure. The young man stepped forward menacingly.

‘Usted me disprecia,’ he shouted.

His movement, the violence of his tone, startled Anthony into a kind of panic alarm. He scrambled to his feet and, edging behind his chair, began to explain in a voice that he had meant to be calmly conciliatory, but which, in spite of all his efforts to keep it grave and steady, trembled into a breathless shrillness, that he hadn’t dreamed of despising anyone, that it was merely a question of – he fumbled for the medical explanation and could find nothing better than a pain in the stomach – merely a question of un dolor en mi estómago.

For some reason the word estómago seemed to the young man the final, most outrageous insult. He bellowed something incomprehensible, but evidently abusive; his hand went back to his hip-pocket and, as the proprietress screamed for help, came forward again, holding a revolver.

‘Don’t, don’t!’ Anthony cried out, without knowing what he was saying; then, with extraordinary agility, darted out of his corner to take shelter behind the massive pillar at the centre of the room.

For a second the young man was out of sight. But suppose he were to creep up on tiptoe. Anthony imagined the revolver suddenly coming round the pillar into his face; or else from behind – he would feel the muzzle pressed against his back, would hear the ghastly explosion, and then . . . A fear so intense that it was like the most excruciating physical pain possessed him entirely; his heart beat more violently than ever, he felt as though he were going to be sick. Overcoming terror by a greater terror, he stuck out his head to the left. The young man was standing only two yards away, staring with a ferocious fixity at the pillar. Anthony saw him jerk into movement, and with a despairing shout for help jumped to the right, looked out again and jumped back to the left; then once more to the right.

‘It can’t go on,’ he was thinking. ‘I can’t do it much longer.’ The thought of that pistol coming unexpectedly round the pillar forced him to look out yet again.

The young man moved, and he darted precipitately to the left.

The noise of the revolver going off – that was what he dreaded most. The horrible noise, sudden and annihilating like the noise of that other explosion years before. His eyelids had stiffened and were irrepressibly trembling, ready to blink, in anticipation of the horrifying event. The lashes flickered before his eyes, and it was through a kind of mist that, peeping out, he saw the door open and Mark moving swiftly across the room, Mark catching the young man by the wrist . . . The pistol went off; reverberated from walls and ceiling, the report was catastrophically loud. Anthony uttered a great cry, as though he had been wounded, and, shutting his eyes, flattened himself against the pillar. Conscious only of nausea and that pain in the genitals, those gripings of the bowels, he waited, reduced to a mere quivering embodiment of fearful anticipation, for the next explosion. Waited for what seemed hours. Dim voices parleyed incomprehensibly. Then a touch on his shoulder made him start. He shouted, ‘No, don’t,’ and lifting eyelids that still twitched with the desire to blink, saw Mark Staithes, demonstrating muscle by muscle a smile of friendly amusement.

‘All clear,’ he said, ‘you can come out.’

Feeling profoundly ashamed and humiliated, Anthony followed him into the open. The young Mexican was at the bar again and already drinking. As they approached, he turned and with outstretched arms came to meet them. ‘Hombre,’ he said to Anthony, as he shook him affectionately by the hand, ‘hombre!’

Anthony felt more abjectly humiliated than ever.

CHAPTER XLII

September 15th 1934

HAVE BUILT UP during the last few days a meditation on a phrase of William Penn’s. ‘Force may subdue, but Love gains; and he who forgives first wins the laurel.’

‘Force may subdue.’ I visualize men using force. First, hand to hand. With fists, knives, truncheons, whips. Weals, red or livid, across flesh. Lacerations, bruises, the broken bone sticking in jags through the skin, faces horribly swollen and bleeding. Then try to imagine, in my own body; the pain of a crushed finger, of blows with a stick of lash across the face, the searing touch of red-hot iron. All the short-range brutalities and tortures. Then, force from a distance. Machine-gun bullets, high explosive, gases, choking or blistering, fire.

Force, finally, in the shape of economic coercion. Starved children, pot-bellied and with arms and legs like sticks. Women old at thirty. And those living corpses, standing in silence at the street corners in Durham or South Wales, shuffling in silence through the mud.

Yes, force may subdue. Subdue in death, subdue by wounds, subdue through starvation and terror. Vision of frightened faces, of abject gestures of servility. The manager at his desk, hectoring. The clerk cringing under the threat of dismissal. Force – the act of violently denying man’s ultimate unity with man.

‘Force may subdue, but Love gains.’ I rehearse the history of Penn himself among the Redskins. Remember how Miller used to allay the suspicious hostility of the Indians in the mountain villages. Think of Pennell on the North-West Frontier; of the Quakers during the Russian famine; of Elizabeth Fry and Damien.

Next I consider the translations of love into terms of politics. Campbell-Bannerman’s insistence that reparation should be made in South Africa – in the teeth of the protests, the Cassandra-like prophesyings of such ‘sane and practical men’ as Arthur Balfour. Love gains even in the clumsy, distorted form of a good political constitution. ‘He who forgives first wins the laurel.’ In South Africa, the English forgave those whom they had wronged – which is only less difficult than forgiving those by whom one has been wronged – and so secured a prize which they couldn’t have won by continued coercion. No prize has been won since the last war, because no combatant has yet forgiven those by whom he has been wronged or those he has wronged.

Consistently applied to any situation, love always gains. It is an empirically determined fact. Love is the best policy. The best not only in regard to those loved, but also in regard to the one who loves. For love is self-energizing. Produces the means whereby its policy can be carried out. In order to go on loving, one needs patience, courage, endurance. But the process of loving generates these means to its own continuance. Love gains because, for the sake of that which is loved, the lover is patient and brave.

And what is loved? Goodness and the potentialities for goodness in all human beings – even those most busily engaged in refusing to actualize those potentialities for goodness in relation to the lover himself. If sufficiently great, love can cast out the fear even of malevolently active enemies.

I end by holding the thought of goodness, still, as it were, before the eyes of my mind. Goodness, immanent in its potentialities, transcendent as a realized ideal; conceivable in its perfection, but also susceptible of being realized in practice, of being embodied at least partially in any situation in which we may find ourselves. ‘The thought of goodness’ – it is the wrong phrase. For in reality it is a whole system of thoughts and sentiments. It is this whole system that I hold, quite still, perceived simultaneously in its entirety – hold it without words, without images, undiscursively, as a single, simple entity. Hold it – then at last must retreat again, back into words, back at last (but refreshed, but made more conscious, but replenished, as it were) into ordinary life.

September 17th 1934.

WAS CALLED IN by Helen to help entertain her sister and brother-in-law, back on leave from India. Had to put on evening clothes – the first time this year – because Colin could not allow himself to be seen in a theatre or at the Savoy Grill in anything but a white tie. A depressing evening. Joyce sickly and gaunt before her time. Colin furtively interested in plumper, fresher bodies. She, jealous and nagging; he, resentful at being tied to her and the children, blaming her for the strictness of his own code, which doesn’t allow him to be the libertine he would like to be. Each chronically impatient with the other. Every now and then an outburst of bad temper, an exchange of angry or spiteful words. Colin had other grievances as well. England, it seemed, didn’t show sufficient respect to the officer and gent. Cabmen were impertinent, the lower classes jostled him in the streets. ‘They call this a white man’s country.’ (This, after the second ‘quick one’ in the bar of the theatre, between the acts.) ‘It isn’t. Give me Poona every time.’

Reflect that we all have our Poonas, bolt-holes from unpleasant reality. The danger, as Miller is always insisting, of meditation becoming such a bolt-hole. Quietism can be mere self-indulgence. Charismata like masturbations. Masturbations, however, that are dignified, by the amateur mystics who practise them, with all the most sacred names of religion and philosophy. ‘The contemplative life.’ It can be made a kind of high-brow substitute for Marlene Dietrich: a subject for erotic musings in the twilight. Meditation – valuable, not as a pleasurable end; only as a means for effecting desirable changes in the personality and mode of existence. To live contemplatively is not to live in some deliciously voluptuous or flattering Poona; it is to live in London, but to live there in a non-cockney style.

CHAPTER XLIII

July 20th and 21st 1914

THE RIGHT, THE auspicious moment for telling Brian the truth – or at any rate as much of the truth as it was expedient for him to know – never seemed to present itself. That first evening had been ruled out in advance – because Anthony felt that he must treat himself to a respite, because poor Brian was looking so ill and tired. At supper, and after it, Anthony kept the conversation as entertainingly impersonal as he could make it. He talked about Sorel’s Réflexions sur la Violence – uncomfortable reading for Fabians! And had Brian seen how effectively his beloved Bergson had been punctured by Julien Benda? And what about Lascelles Abercrombie’s blank verse? And the latest Gilbert Cannan? Next morning they set out for a walk on the Langdale Pikes. Both were out of training; but in spite of shortened breath and bumping heart, Brian pressed on with a kind of Spartan determination that to Anthony seemed at first absurd, then exasperating. When they got home, late in the afternoon, they were both thoroughly tired; but Anthony was also resentful. Rest and a meal did something to change his mood; but he still found it impossible to behave towards Brian except as a man, forgiving indeed, but still on his dignity; and dignity was obviously quite incompatible with the telling of this particular truth. They spent a silent evening – Anthony reading, the other restlessly prowling about the room, as though on the watch for an occasion to speak – an occasion which Anthony’s air of intense preoccupation was deliberately intended not to give him.

In bed the next morning Anthony found himself startled broad awake by the uncomfortable thought that time was passing, and passing not only for himself but also for Joan and Brian. Joan’s impatience might get the better of her promise not to write to Brian; besides, the longer he postponed the inevitable explanation with Brian, the worse Brian would think of him.

Inventing a blistered heel for the occasion, he let Brian go out by himself, and having watched him indomitably striding away up the steep slope behind the cottage, sat down to write his letter to Joan. To try to write it, rather; for every one of the drafts he produced displayed one or other of two faults, and each of the two faults exposed him, he realized, to a particular danger: the danger that, if he insisted too much on the esteem and affection which had prepared him to lose his head on that accursed evening, she would reply that so much esteem and affection accompanied by head-losing amounted to love, and were his justification (since love was supposed to justify everything) for betraying Brian; and the other danger that, if he insisted too exclusively on the head-losing and temporary insanity, she would feel insulted and complain to Brian, to Mrs Foxe, to her relations, raise a regular hue and cry against him as a cad, a seducer, and heaven only knew what else. After the expense of three hours and a dozen sheets of paper, the best of his efforts seemed to him too unsatisfactory to send off. He put it angrily aside, and, in his mood of exasperation, dashed off a violent letter of abuse to Mary. Damned woman! She was responsible for everything. ‘Deliberate malice . . .’ ‘Shameless exploitation of my love for you . . .’ ‘Treating me as though I were some sort of animal you could torment for your private amusement . . .’ The phrases flowed from his pen. ‘This is good-bye,’ he concluded, and, with half his mind, believed in what he was dramatically writing. ‘I never want to see you again. Never.’ But a quarrel, the other half of his mind was reflecting, can always be made up: he would give her this lesson: then, perhaps, if she behaved well, if he felt he simply couldn’t do without her . . . He sealed up the letter, and at once walked briskly to the village to post it. This act of decision did something to restore his self-esteem. On his way home he made up his mind, quite definitely this time, that he would have his talk with Brian that evening, and then, in the light of his knowledge of Brian’s attitude, re-write the letter to Joan the following morning.

Brian was back at six, triumphing in the fact that he had walked further and climbed to the tops of more mountains than on any previous occasion in his life, but looking, in spite of his exultations, completely exhausted. At the sight of that face he had known so long, that face now so tragically worn and emaciated beneath the transfigurement of the smile, Anthony felt an intenser renewal of the first evening’s emotions – of anxious solicitude for an old friend, of distressed sympathy with a human being’s suffering – and along with these an excruciating sense of guilt towards the friend, of responsibility for the human being. Instant confession might have relieved his pain, might have allowed him at the same time to express his feelings; but he hesitated; he was silent; and in a few seconds, by an almost instantaneous process of psychological chemistry, the sympathy and the solicitude had combined with the sense of guilt to form a kind of anger. Yes, he was positively angry with Brian for looking so tired, for being already so miserable, for going to be so much more miserable the moment he was told the truth.

‘You’re mad to overtire yourself like this,’ he said gruffly, and drove him into the house to take a rest before supper.

After the meal they went out on to the strip of terraced lawn in front of the cottage and, spreading out a rug, lay down and looked up into a sky green at their arrival with the last trace of summer twilight, then gradually and ever more deeply blue.

The time, thought Anthony, with a certain sinking of the heart, had come, irrevocably; and through a long silence he prepared himself to begin, trying out in his mind one opening gambit after another; hesitating between the abrupt and precipitate clean-breast-of-it-all and a more devious strategy that would prepare the victim gradually for the final shock.

But before he had decided which was the best approach to his confession, the other broke out all at once into stammering speech. He too, it was evident, had been waiting for an opportunity to ease his mind, and instead of acting the penitent, as he had intended, Anthony found himself (to the relief of a part of his mind, to the dismay and embarrassment of the inhabitant of a deeper layer of consciousness) suddenly called upon to play the part of confessor and director of conscience; called upon to listen all over again to the story that Joan had already told him – the story that, adorned with St Monicas and uterine reactions, he had so joyfully passed on to Mary Amberley. He had to hear how humiliating, how painful his friend found it to be unable to gain the mastery of his body, to banish all the low desires unworthy of the love he felt for Joan. Or perhaps, Brian had qualified, citing Meredith’s great volcano flinging fires of earth to sky, perhaps not unworthy when circumstances should have allowed them to take their place in the complex whole of a perfect marriage; but unworthy at that moment when it was not yet possible for them to find their legitimate expression, unworthy in so far as they were able to defy the authority of the conscious mind.

‘I’ve had to r-run away,’ he explained, ‘h-had to remove my b-body to a safe d-distance. B-because I wasn’t able to c-c-c . . .’; ‘control’ would not come; he had to be satisfied with another less expressive word; ‘to m-manage myself with my w-will. One’s ash-shamed of being so weak,’ Brian continued.

Anthony nodded. Weak in making up one’s mind to kiss, and no less weak when it came to interrupting a momentarily agreeable experience – though there had been something more than weakness there, something positive, a perverse revelling in an action known to be stupid, dangerous, wrong.

‘But if one kn-knows one c-can’t overc-come it,’ Brian was saying, ‘I s-suppose it’s b-best to r-run away. B-better than l-letting it g-get one into av-voidable trouble.’

‘Yes, I agree,’ said Anthony, wondering why he hadn’t followed his impulse and turned back at Kendal.

‘And not only ones-self, but o-other people. G-getting th-them into trouble t-too.’ There was a long silence; then, slowly and laboriously, he set out to explain that the lovely, the splendid thing about Joan was her naturalness. She had the strength of natural things and their spontaneity; she was warm, like nature, and generous and profoundly innocent. She had the qualities of a summer landscape, of a flowering tree, of a water-bird darting bright-eyed and glossy between the rushes. This naturalness was what he had chiefly loved in her, because it was the complementary opposite of his own scrupulousness and intellectualism. But it was this same naturalness that had made it all but impossible for Joan to understand why he had found her presence so dangerous, why he had felt it necessary to keep away from her. She had been hurt by his withholding of himself, had thought it was because he didn’t love her; whereas the truth was . . .

The truth was, Anthony said to himself, finding a kind of consolation, a renewal of his sense of superiority, in the derisive cynicism of his thoughts, the truth was that she was thirsty for kisses, that at his first caress her whole body revealed itself a shuddering and palpitating protest against the continence that had been imposed on it.

‘The t-truth,’ Brian was laboriously saying, ‘is that I l-love her m-more than I e-ever did. Unspeakably much.’ He was silent once more for a little; then, looking up at Anthony, ‘What shall I d-do?’ he asked.

Still in his cynical mood, Anthony scored, with the grossness of his unspoken answer, another private triumph – as short-lived, however, as it was easy; for his first thought was succeeded almost instantaneously by the disquieting realization that he was being faced by a choice: either to tell Brian what had happened between himself and Joan; or else to make some anodyne and non-committal reply to his question, and postpone the telling of the truth till later on. By omission, the anodyne reply would be a monstrous falsehood; and when at last he came to tell the truth, this lie and all the other lies implied in more than two days of silence or irrelevant chatter would inevitably be remembered against him. But to tell the truth at once, in this particular context, would be specially painful – and painful, he went on to think, not only to himself but also, and above all, to Brian. After what Brian had been saying this evening, to blurt out a plain account of what had happened would be sheer cruelty and deliberate insult.

‘What o-ought I to d-do?’ Brian was insisting.

‘I think,’ Anthony answered softly, ‘I think you ought to come to terms with reality.’

He had made his decision – or rather, as he preferred to put it when, later on, in the privacy of his bedroom, he thought of the events of the evening, the decision had made itself. Looking back, he felt that he had had nothing to do with the matter.

CHAPTER XLIV

September 21st 1934

REMARKS BY St Teresa. ‘Let us look at our own faults, and not at other people’s. We ought not to insist on everyone following our footsteps, nor to take upon ourselves to give instructions in spirituality when, perhaps, we do not even know what it is. Zeal for the good of souls, though given us by God, may often lead us astray.’ To which add this. ‘It is a great grace of God to practise self-examination, but too much is as bad as too little, as they say; believe me, by God’s help, we shall accomplish more by contemplating the divinity than by keeping our eyes fixed on ourselves.’ God may or may not exist. But there is the empirical fact that contemplation of the divinity – of goodness in its most unqualified form – is a method of realizing that goodness to some slight degree in one’s life, and results, often, in an experience as if of help towards that realization of goodness, help from some being other than one’s ordinary self and immensely superior to it. Christian God and the Buddhist’s primal Mind – interpretations of concrete experiences, the Buddhist being the rationalization of a state further removed from the normal than the Christian. Christians, of course, have often experienced that state and found great difficulties in explaining it in orthodox terms. Both conceptions legitimate – just as both macroscopical and microscopical views of matter are legitimate. We look at the universe with a certain kind of physico-mental apparatus. That apparatus can respond only to certain stimuli. Within relatively narrow limits, it is adjustable. The nature of the facts which each of us perceives as primary and given depends on the nature of the individual instrument and on the adjustment we have been brought up, or deliberately chosen, to give it. From these data one can draw inferences. Which may be logically sound or unsound. Any philosophy is intellectually legitimate if, one, it starts from facts which, for the philosopher, are data and if, two, the logical construction based on these facts is sound. But an intellectually is not the same as a morally legitimate philosophy. We can adjust our instrument deliberately, by an act of the will. This means that we can will modifications in the personal experiences which underlie our philosophy, the data from which we argue. Problem: to build really solid logical bridges between given facts and philosophical inferences. All but insoluble. No bullet-proof arguments for any of the main cosmological theories. What, then, shall we do? Stick, so far as possible, to the empirical facts – always remembering that these are modifiable by anyone who chooses to modify the perceiving mechanism. So that one can see, for example, either irremediable senselessness and turpitude, or else actualizable potentialities for good – whichever one likes; it is a question of choice.

CHAPTER XLV

April 14th 1928

HAPPINESS INEXPRESSIBLE – that was what her letter should have brought him. Hugh’s face, as he walked – walked instead of having his lunch – up and down the long gallery of the Ethnographical Collection, was a mask of perplexity and distress. The words of Helen’s letter repeated themselves in his memory. ‘Nobody cares a pin whether I’m alive or dead.’

From the Mexican case the symbol of death in crystal and that other skull inlaid with turquoise stared out at him as he passed. ‘Nobody cares . . .’ It should have been his opportunity. He had dreamt of her unhappiness – in an agony of commiseration, but also with hope. Unhappy, she would turn to him. ‘Nobody cares . . .’

‘Nobody except you.’ His exultant pride and pleasure in those words had been tempered, as he read on, by the realization that she didn’t really understand how he cared, didn’t appreciate the exact quality of his feeling. ‘My mother?’ she had written. ‘But, after all, ever since she started taking that horrible stuff, she’s somebody else – always was somebody else really, even when she was well (though of course not so else). Just as I was always somebody else, if it comes to that. She expected a daughter; but I was always selfish and irresponsible. Just as she was. Somebody else. How could she care? You’re not selfish, Hugh. You’re . . .’ But it wasn’t a question merely of selfishness or unselfishness, he began to protest, with all the painted faces of the Peruvian vases staring down from the right with an unwinking intensity of frozen life. It was a question of something different, something deeper and more spiritual. On his left the trophies of the Papuan head-hunters hung shrivelled, but fantastically painted, like the heads of decapitated clowns. The skulls from the Torres Straits had been given round shining eyes of mother-of-pearl. Yes, more spiritual, Hugh insisted, thinking of what he had written about her – lyrically, lyrically! – and of that subtle analysis of his own emotions. The unselfishness was there, but melted down, as it were, in contemplation, refined into something aesthetic. Unselfishness in a picture. Unselfishness by Watteau, by Cima da Conegliano. And she herself, the object of his contemplative and aesthetic unselfishness – she too, in his imaginings, in the accumulating pages of his manuscript, had possessed the quality of a picture or a piece of music; something that it would be sufficient happiness merely to look at for ever, to listen to; perhaps, occasionally, to touch, as though she were a statue, to caress with an almost imperceptible tenderness. And sometimes in those imaginings she was cold, was unhappy – nobody cared a pin – and she asked to be comforted and made warm, she crept into his arms; into those unselfish, contemplative, impalpable arms of his, and lay there safely, but naked, lay there a picture, virginal, ideal, but melting, melting . . . Feathered like an ambassador in full dress uniform, with the beak of a bird, the teeth of a shark, this wooden mask had once made its wearer feel, as he danced, that he was more than human, akin to the gods. ‘You’ve said you’d like to be always with me. Well, I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, and I believe that that’s what I’d like too. Dear Hugh, I’m not in love with you; but I like you more than anyone else. I think you’re nicer, kinder, gentler, less selfish. And surely that’s a good enough foundation to build on.’ The words, when he read them first, had filled him with a kind of panic; and it was with the same protesting agitation that he now walked between New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands. In the belly of a wooden bonito fish the Melanesian widow opened a little door, and there, like a chamber-pot, was her husband’s skull. But it was always spiritually and aesthetically that he had wanted to be with her. Hadn’t she been able to understand that? Surely he had made it clear enough? ‘If you still want it, there I am – I want it too.’ It was terrible, he was thinking, terrible! She was forcing a decision on him, making it impossible for him to say no by assuming that he had already said yes. He felt himself hemmed in, driven into a corner. Marriage? But he would have to change his whole way of life. The flat wouldn’t be large enough. She’d want to eat meat at night. Mrs Barton would give notice. Of the spears on his left some were tipped with obsidian, some with the spines of sting-rays, some with human bone. ‘You probably think I’m a fool, and flighty and irresponsible; and it’s true, I have been up till now. I’m hopeless. But I wasn’t born hopeless – I was made it, because of the kind of life I’ve lived. Now I want to be something else, and I know I can be something else. Sérieuse. A good wife and all that, ridiculous and embarrassing as it sounds when one puts it down on paper. But I refuse to be ashamed of goodness any longer. I absolutely refuse.’ That irresponsibility, he was thinking, was one of the loveliest and most moving things about her. It separated her from the common world, it promoted her out of vulgar humanity. He didn’t want her to be responsible and a good wife. He wanted her to be like Ariel, like the delicate creature in his own manuscript, a being of another order, beyond good and evil. Meanwhile he had walked into Africa. The image of a Negress holding her long pointed breasts in her two hands glistened darkly from behind the confining glass. Her belly was tattooed, her navel projected in a little cone. The spears in the next case were headed with iron. Like Ariel, he repeated to himself, like those Watteaus at Dresden, like Debussy. For resonator, this xylophone had, not the usual gourd, but a human skull, and there were skulls festooned along the ivory fetish horns, thigh-bones around the sacrificial drum from Ashanti. She was spoiling everything, he said to himself resentfully. And suddenly, lifting his eyes, he saw that she was there, hurrying along the narrow passage between the cases to meet him.

‘You?’ he managed to whisper.

But Helen was too much perturbed to see the look of dismay, the pallor, and then the guilty blush, too intensely preoccupied with her own thoughts to hear the note of startled apprehension in his voice.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said breathlessly, as she took his hand. ‘I didn’t mean to come and pester you here. But you don’t know what it’s been like this morning at home.’ She shook her head; her lips trembled. ‘Mother’s been like a madwoman. I can’t tell you . . . You’re the only person, Hugh . . .’

Clumsily, he tried to console her. But the reality was profoundly different from his imagination of her unhappiness. The imagination had always been his delicious opportunity; the reality was the menace of an unavoidable doom. Desperately, he tried the effect of changing the subject. These things from Benin were rather interesting. The ivory leopard, spotted with disks of copper inlay. The Negro warriors, in bronze, with their leaf-shaped spears and swords, and the heads of their enemies hanging from their belts. The Europeans, bearded and aquiline, in their high sixteenth-century morions and baggy hose, their matchlocks in their hands, and the cross hanging round their necks. Comic, he remarked, parenthetically, that the only thing these blackamoors ever got out of Christianity should have been the art of crucifying people. The punitive expedition in 1897 found the place full of crosses. And this beautiful head of the young girl with her tapering Phrygian cap of coral beads . . .

‘Look at this,’ Helen suddenly interrupted; and, pulling up her sleeve, she showed him two red semi-circular marks on the skin of her forearm a few inches above the wrist. ‘That’s where she bit me, when I tried to make her go back to bed.’

Hugh was startled into pitying indignation. ‘But it’s awful!’ he cried. ‘It’s too awful.’ He took her hand. ‘My poor child!’ They stood for a moment in silence. Then, suddenly, his pity was shot through by the realization that the thing had happened. There could be no escape now. He found himself thinking again of Mrs Barton. If she were to give notice, what would he do?

CHAPTER XLVI

October 30th 1934

MARK, AT DINNER, said he’d been re-reading Anna Karenina. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses – catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eye-strain. The chronic physical disabilities – ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood.

Lying by omission turns inevitably into positive lying. The implications of literature are that human beings are controlled, if not by reason, at least by comprehensible, well-organized, avowable sentiments. Whereas the facts are quite different. Sometimes the sentiments come in, sometimes they don’t. All for love, or the world well lost; but love may be the title of nobility given to an inordinate liking for a particular person’s smell or texture, a lunatic desire for the repetition of a sensation produced by some particular dexterity. Or consider those cases (seldom published, but how numerous, as anyone in a position to know can tell!), those cases of the eminent statesmen, churchmen, lawyers, captains of industry – seemingly so sane, demonstrably so intelligent, publicly so high-principled; but, in private, under irresistible compulsion towards brandy, towards young men, towards little girls in trains, towards exhibitionism, towards gambling or hoarding, towards bullying, towards being whipped, towards all the innumerable, crazy perversions of the lusts for money and power and position on the one hand, for sexual pleasure on the other. Mere tics and tropisms, lunatic and unavowable cravings – these play as much part in human life as the organized and recognized sentiments. And imaginative literature suppresses the fact. Propagates an enormous lie about the nature of men and women.

‘Rightly, no doubt. Because, if human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves. But meanwhile, I really can’t be bothered to read any more imaginative literature. Lies don’t interest me. However poetically they may be expressed. They’re just a bore.’

Agreed with Mark that imaginative literature wasn’t doing its duty. That it was essential to know everything – and to know it, not merely through scientific textbooks, but also in a form that would have power to bring the facts home to the whole mind, not merely to the intellect. A complete expression (in terms of imaginative literature) leading to complete knowledge (with the whole mind) of the complete truth: indispensable preliminary condition of any remedial action, any serious attempt at the construction of a genuinely human being. Construction from within, by training in proper use of the self – training, simultaneously physical and mental. Construction, at the same time, from without, by means of social and economic arrangements devised in the light of a complete knowledge of the individual, and of the way in which the individual can modify himself.

Mark only laughed, and said I reminded him of the men who go round from house to house selling electric washing-machines.

November 4th 1934.

VERY GOOD MEETING in Newcastle with Miller and Purchas. Large and enthusiastic crowds – predominantly of the dispossessed. Note the significant fact that pacifism is in inverse ratio, generally, to prosperity. The greater the poverty, the longer the unemployment, the more wholehearted the determination not to fight again, and the more complete the scepticism about the conventional idols, Empire, National Honour and the like. A negative attitude closely correlated with bad economic conditions. Therefore not to be relied on. Such pacifism is without autonomous life. At the mercy, first of all, of anyone who comes along with money – and threats of war would lead to a vast increase of employment. At the mercy, in the second place, of anyone who comes along with an alluring positive doctrine – however crazy and criminal its positiveness may be. The mind abhors a vacuum. Negative pacifism and scepticism about existing institutions are just holes in the mind, emptiness waiting to be filled. Fascism or communism have sufficient positive content to act as fillers. Someone with the talents of Hitler may suddenly appear. The negative void will be pumped full in a twinkling. These disillusioned pacifist sceptics will be transformed overnight into drilled fanatics of nationalism, class war or whatever it may be. Question: have we time to fill the vacuum with positive pacifism? Or, having the time, have we the ability?

CHAPTER XLVII

January 10th and 11th 1934

OSTENSIBLY, DON Jorge’s telegram was an order for the immediate sale of six hundred bags of coffee. In fact, it announced that the moment had come, and that he was urgently expecting them.

Mark looked at his companion with an expression that was frankly hostile. ‘Those blasted guts of yours!’ he said.

Anthony protested that he was all right again.

‘You’re not fit to do the journey.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘You’re not,’ Mark repeated with a solicitude that was at the same time a passionate resentment. ‘Three days on a mule across these damned mountains. It’s too much for anyone in your condition.’

Piqued by the other’s words, and afraid, if he agreed with Mark, of seeming unwilling to face the difficulties and dangers that lay in front of them, Anthony insisted obstinately that he was fit for anything. Wishing to believe it, Mark soon allowed himself to be persuaded. An answer was despatched to Don Jorge – the six hundred bags were being sold immediately; he might expect to hear further details on Friday – and, after lunch, in the blazing heat of the early afternoon, they set out for the finca, lying high in the mountains above Tapatlan, where one of Don Jorge’s friends would put them up for the night. Mark produced his pocket Shakespeare once again, and, for four hours, they spurred their reluctant beasts, up and up, between dusty maize stubbles, and, above the fields, through a dry leafless scrub that gave place at last to the green darkness and golden lights of coffee plantations under their towering shade trees. Up and up, while Mark read the whole of Hamlet and two acts of Troilus and Cressida, and Anthony sat wondering, in a mist of fatigue, how much longer he could stand it. But at last, as night was falling, they reached their destination.

At four the next morning they were in the saddle again. Under the trees there was a double night of starless shadow; but the mules picked their way along the windings of the track with a reassuring certainty. From time to time they rode under invisible lemon trees, and in the darkness the scent of the flowers was like the brief and inenarrable revelation of something more than earthly – a moment’s ecstasy, and then, as the mules advanced, hoof after hoof, up the stony path, the fading of the supernatural presence, the return to a common life symbolically represented by the smell of leather and sweat.

The sun rose, and a little later they emerged from the cultivated forest of the coffee plantations into an upland country of bare rocks and pine woods. Almost level, the track went winding in and out along the buttressed and indented flank of a mountain. To the left, the ground fell steeply away into valleys still dark with shadow. Far off, through air made hazy by the dry season’s dust and the smoke of forest fires, a dim whiteness high up in the sky was the Pacific.

Mark went on reading Troilus and Cressida.

A descent so steep that they had to dismount and lead their animals brought them in another hour to the banks of a river. They forded it, and, in the blistering sunshine, began to climb the slope beyond. There was no shade, and the vast bald hills were the colour of dust and burnt grass. Nothing stirred, not even a lizard among the stones. There was no sight or sound of life. Hopelessly empty, the chaos of tumbled mountains seemed to stretch away interminably. It was as though they had ridden across the frontier of the world out into nothingness, into an infinite expanse of hot and dusty negation.

At eleven they halted for a meal, and an hour later, with the sun almost perpendicularly above them, were off once more. The path climbed, dropped fifteen hundred feet into a ravine and climbed again. By three o’clock Anthony was so tired that he could scarcely think or even see. The landscape seemed to advance and retreat before his eyes, turned black sometimes, and faded away altogether. He heard voices, and, in his mind, his thoughts began to lead a life of their own – a life that was autonomous in its mad and maddening irrelevance. Image succeeded image in a phantasmagoria that it was beyond his power to exorcize. It was as though he were possessed, as though he were being forced to lead someone else’s life and think with another person’s mind. But the sweat that poured like water off his face and soaked through his shirt and cotton riding-breeches, the intolerable aching of loins and thighs – these were his own. His own and excruciating, intolerable. He was tempted to groan, even to burst into tears. But through the other person’s delirium he remembered his assurances to Mark, his confident promise that he wouldn’t be tired. He shook his head and rode on – rode on through the illusory world of alien fancy and half-seen, vanishing landscape, rode on through the hideous reality of his pain and fatigue.

Mark’s voice startled him out of his stupor.

‘Are you all right?’

Looking up, and, with an effort, focusing his eyes, he saw that Mark had halted and was waiting at the turn of the track just above him. Fifty yards further up the slope the mozo was riding behind the baggage-mule.

‘Mula-a-a!’ came the long-drawn shout, and along with it the dull thump of a stick on mule-skin.

‘Sorry,’ Anthony mumbled, ‘I must have dropped behind.’

‘You’re sure you’re all right?’

He nodded.

‘There’s less than an hour to go,’ said Mark. ‘Stick it out if you can.’ In the shadow of the enormous straw hat, his worn face twisted itself into a smile of encouragement.

Touched, Anthony smiled back and, to reassure him, tried to make a joke about the hardness of the wooden saddles on which they were riding.

Mark laughed. ‘If we get through intact,’ he said, ‘we’ll dedicate a pair of silver buttocks to St James of Compostella.’

He jerked the reins and gave his mule the spur. The animal started up the slope; then, in a slither of rolling stones, stumbled and fell forward on its knees.

Anthony had shut his eyes to rest them a moment from the glare. At the noise he opened them again and saw Mark lying face downwards on the ground and the mule heaving itself, in a series of violent spasms of movement, to its feet. The landscape snapped back into solidity, the moving images fell still. Forgetting the pain in his back and legs, Anthony swung himself down from the saddle and ran up the path. As he approached, Mark rolled over and raised himself to a sitting position.

‘Hurt?’ Anthony said.

The other shook his head, but did not speak.

‘You’re bleeding.’

The breeches were torn at the left knee, and a red stain was creeping down the leg. Anthony shouted to the mozo to come back with the baggage-mule; then, kneeling down, opened his penknife, slid the blade into the rent and sawed a long jagged split in the tough material.

‘You’re spoiling my bags,’ Mark said, speaking for the first time.

Anthony did not answer, only tore away a wide panel of the stuff.

The whole knee-cap and the upper part of the shin were skinless red flesh, grey, where the blood was not oozing, with dust and grit. On the inner side of the knee was a deep cut that bled profusely.

Anthony frowned, and, as though the pain were his own, caught his lower lip between his teeth. A pang of physical disgust mingled with his horrified sympathy. He shuddered.

Mark had leaned forward to look at the damaged knee. ‘Messy,’ was his comment.

Anthony nodded without speaking, unscrewed the stopper of his water-bottle, and, wetting his handkerchief, began to wash the dirt out of the wounds. His emotion disappeared; he was wholly absorbed in his immediate task. Nothing was important any more except to wash this grit away without hurting Mark in the process.

By this time, the mozo had come back with the baggage-mule and was standing beside them in silence, looking down with expressionless black eyes on what was happening.

‘I expect he thinks we’re making an unnecessary fuss,’ said Mark, and made an attempt to smile.

Anthony rose to his feet, ordered the mozo to untie the mule’s load, and, from one of the canvas bundles, pulled out the medicine-chest.

Under the sting of the disinfectant Mark gave vent to an explosive burst of laughter. ‘No humanitarian nonsense about iodine,’ he said. ‘The good old-fashioned idea of hurting you for your own good. Like Jehovah. Christ!’ He laughed again as Anthony swabbed another patch of raw flesh. Then, when the knee was bandaged, ‘Give me a hand,’ he went on. Anthony helped him to his feet, and he took a few steps up the path and back again. ‘Seems all right.’ He bent down to look at the fore-legs of his mule. They were hardly scratched. ‘Nothing to prevent us pushing on at once,’ he concluded.

They helped him to mount, and, spurring with his uninjured leg, he set off at a brisk pace up the hill. For the rest of the way he was, for Anthony, mostly a straight and rigid back, but sometimes also, at the zigzags of the path, a profile, marbly in its fixed pallor – the statue of a stoic, flayed, but still alive and silently supporting his agony.

In less than the appointed hour – for Mark had chosen to keep up a pace that set the mules blowing and sweating in the afternoon heat – they rode into San Cristobal el Alto. The thirty or forty Indian ranchos of which the village consisted were built on a narrow ridge between plunging gulfs, beyond which, on either side, the mountains stretched away chaotically, range after range, into the haze.

Seeing distinguished travellers, the village shopkeeper hurried out on to the plaza to offer them accommodation for the night. Mark listened to him, nodded and made a movement to dismount; then, wincing, let himself fall back into his saddle.

Without turning his head, ‘You’ll have to get me off this blasted mule,’ he called in a loud, angry voice.

Anthony and the mozo helped him down; but, once on the ground, he refused any further assistance.

‘I can walk by myself,’ he said curtly, frowning while he spoke, as though, in offering an arm, Anthony had meant to insult him.

Their quarters for the night turned out to be a wooden shed, half full of coffee bags and hides. After inspecting the place, Mark limped out again to look at the thatched lean-to, where the mules were to be stabled; then suggested a walk round the village, ‘to see the sights,’ he explained.

Walking, it was evident, hurt him so much that he could not trust himself to speak. It was in silence that they crossed the little plaza, in silence that they visited the church, the school, the cabildo, the village prison. In silence, and one behind the other. For if they walked abreast, Anthony had reflected, he would be able to see Mark’s face, and Mark would feel that he was being spied upon. Whereas if he walked in front, it would be an insult, a challenge to Mark to quicken his pace. Deliberately, Anthony lagged behind, silent, like an Indian wife trailing through the dust after her husband.

It was nearly half an hour before Mark felt that he had tortured himself sufficiently.

‘So much for the sights,’ he said grimly. ‘Let’s go and have something to eat.’

The night was piercingly cold, the bed merely a board of wood. It was from a restless and unrefreshing sleep that Anthony was roused next morning.

‘Wake!’ Mark was shouting to him. ‘Wake!’

Anthony sat up, startled, and saw Mark, in the other wooden bed, propped on his elbow and looking across at him with angry eyes.

‘Time to get away,’ the harsh voice continued. ‘It’s after six.’

Suddenly remembering yesterday’s accident, ‘How’s the knee?’ Anthony asked.

‘Just the same.’

‘Did you sleep?’

‘No, of course not,’ Mark answered irritably. Then, looking away, ‘I can’t manage to get out of bed,’ he added. ‘The thing’s gone stiff on me.’

Anthony pulled on his boots and, having opened the door of the shed to admit the light, came and sat down on the edge of Mark’s bed.

‘We’d better put on a clean dressing,’ he said, and began to untie the bandage.

The lint had stuck to the raw flesh. Anthony pulled at it cautiously, then let go. ‘I’ll see if they can give me some warm water at the shop,’ he said.

Mark uttered a snort of laughter, and taking a corner of the lint between his thumb and forefinger, gave a violent jerk. The square of pink fabric came away in his hand.

‘Don’t!’ Anthony had cried out, wincing as though the pain were his. The other only smiled at him contemptuously. ‘You’ve made it bleed again,’ he added, in another tone, finding a medical justification for his outburst. But in point of fact, that trickle of fresh blood was not the thing that disturbed him most when he bent down to look at what Mark had uncovered. The whole knee was horribly swollen and almost black with bruises, and round the edges of the newly opened wound the flesh was yellow with pus.

‘You can’t possibly go with your knee in this state,’ he said.

‘That’s for me to decide,’ Mark answered, and added, after a moment, ‘After all, you did it the day before yesterday.’

The words implied a contemptuous disparagement. ‘If a poor creature like you can overcome pain, then surely I . . .’ That was what they meant to say. But the insult, Anthony realized, was unintended. It sprang from the depths of an arrogance that was almost child-like in its single-minded intensity. There was something touching and absurd about such ingenuousness. Besides, there was the poor fellow’s knee. This was not the time to resent insults.

‘I was practically well,’ he argued in a conciliatory tone. ‘You’ve got a leg that’s ready to go septic at any moment.’

Mark frowned. ‘Once I’m on my mule I shall be all right,’ he insisted. ‘It’s just a bit stiff and bruised; that’s all. Besides,’ he added, in a contradiction of what he had said before, ‘there’ll be a doctor at Miajutla. The quicker I get this thing into his hands, the better.’

‘You’ll make it ten times worse on the way. If you waited here a day or two . . .’

‘Don Jorge would think I was leaving him in the lurch.’

‘Damn Don Jorge! Send him a telegram.’

‘The line doesn’t go through this place. I asked.’

‘Send the mozo then.’

Mark shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t trust him.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’ll get drunk at the first opportunity.’

‘In other words, you don’t want to send him.’

‘Besides, it would be too late,’ Mark went on. ‘Don Jorge will be moving in a day or two.’

‘And do you imagine you’ll be able to move with him?’

‘I mean to be there,’ said Mark.

‘You can’t.’

‘I tell you, I mean to be there. I’m not going to let him down.’ His voice was cold and harsh with restrained anger. ‘And now help me up,’ he commanded.

‘I won’t.’

The two men looked at one another in silence. Then, making an effort to control himself, Mark shrugged his shoulders.

‘All right, then,’ he said, ‘I’ll call the mozo. And if you’re afraid of going on to Miajutla,’ he continued in a tone of savage contempt, ‘you can ride back to Tapatlan. I’ll go on by myself.’ Then, turning towards the open door, ‘Juan,’ he shouted. ‘Juan!’

Anthony surrendered. ‘Have it your own way. If you really want to be mad . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished. ‘But I take no responsibility.’

‘You weren’t asked to,’ Mark answered. Anthony got up and went to fetch the medicine-chest. He swabbed the wounds and applied the new dressing in silence; then, while he was trying to bandage, ‘Suppose we stopped quarrelling,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t that make things easier?’

For a few seconds Mark remained hostile and averted; then looked up and twisted his face into a reconciliatory smile of friendliness. ‘Peace,’ he said, nodding affirmatively. ‘We’ll make peace.’

But he had reckoned without the pain. It began, agonizingly, when he addressed himself to the task of getting out of bed. For it turned out to be impossible for him, even with Anthony’s assistance, to get out of bed without bending his wounded knee; and to bend it was torture. When at last he was on his feet beside the bed, he was pale and the expression on his face had hardened to a kind of ferocity.

‘All right?’ Anthony questioned.

Mark nodded, and, as though the other had become his worst enemy, limped out of the shed without giving him a glance.

The torture began again when the time came for mounting, and was renewed with every step the mule advanced. As on the previous day, Mark took the lead. At the head of the cavalcade, he proved his superiority and at the same time put himself out of range of inquisitive eyes. The air was still cold; but from time to time, Anthony noticed, he took out his handkerchief and wiped his face, as if he were sweating. Each time he put the handkerchief away again, he would give the mule a particularly savage dig with his one available spur.

The track descended, climbed again, descended through pine woods, descended, descended. An hour passed, two hours, three; the sun was high in the sky, it was oppressively hot. Three hours, three and a half; and now there were clearings in the woods, steep fields, the stubble of Indian corn, a group of huts, and an old woman carrying water, brown children silently playing in the dust. They were on the outskirts of another village.

‘What about stopping here for some food?’ Anthony called, and spurred his animal to a trot. ‘We might get some fresh eggs,’ he continued as he drew up with the other mule.

The face Mark turned towards him was as white as paper, and, as he parted his clenched teeth to speak, the lower jaw trembled uncontrollably. ‘I think we’d better push on,’ he began in an almost inaudible voice. ‘We’ve still got a long way . . .’ Then the lids fluttered over his eyes, his head dropped, his body seemed to collapse upon itself; he fell forward on to the neck of his mule, slid to one side, and would have pitched to the ground if Anthony had not caught him by the arm and held him up.

CHAPTER XLVIII

July 23rd 1914

ANTHONY HAD DOZED off again after being called, and was late for breakfast. As he entered the little living-room, Brian looked up with startled eyes and, as though guiltily, folded away the letter he had been reading into his pocket, but not before Anthony had recognized from across the room the unmistakable characteristics of Joan’s rather heavy and elaborately looped writing. Putting a specially casual note of cheeriness into his good-morning, he sat down and proceeded to busy himself elaborately, as though it were a complicated scientific process requiring the whole of his attention, with pouring out his coffee.

‘Should I tell him?’ he was wondering. ‘Yes, I ought to tell him. It ought to come from me, even though he does know it already. Bloody girl! Why couldn’t she keep her promise?’ He felt righteously indignant with Joan. Breaking her word! And what the devil had she told Brian? What would happen if his own story was different from hers? And anyhow, what a fool he would look, confessing now, when it was too late. She had robbed him of the opportunity, the very possibility, of telling Brian what had happened. The woman had queered his pitch; and as his anger modulated into self-pity, he perceived himself as a man full of good intentions, maliciously prevented, at the eleventh hour, from putting them into practice. She had stopped his mouth just as he was about to speak the words that would have explained and made amends for everything; and by doing so, she had made his situation absolutely intolerable. How the devil did she expect him to behave towards Brian, now that Brian knew? He answered the question, so far, at any rate, as the next few minutes were concerned, by retiring behind the Manchester Guardian. Hidden, he pretended, while he ate his scrambled eggs, to be taking a passionate interest in all this stuff about Russia and Austria and Germany. But the silence, as it lengthened out, became at last intolerable.

‘This war business looks rather bad,’ he said at last, without lowering his barricade.

From the other end of the table Brian made a faint murmur of assent. Seconds passed. Then there was the noise of a chair being pushed back. Anthony sat there, a man so deeply preoccupied with the Russian mobilization that he wasn’t aware of what was going on in his immediate neighbourhood. It was only when Brian had actually opened the door that he started ostentatiously into consciousness.

‘Off already?’ he questioned, half turning, but not so far that he could see the other’s face.

‘I d-don’t think I shall g-go out this m-morning.’

Anthony nodded approvingly, like a family doctor. ‘That’s good,’ he said, and added that he himself proposed to hire a bicycle in the village and nip down to Ambleside. There were some things he had to buy. ‘See you at lunch-time,’ he concluded.

Brian said nothing. The door closed behind him.

By a quarter to one Anthony had returned his borrowed bicycle and was walking up the hill to the cottage. This time it was settled, definitely, once and for all. He would tell Brian everything – almost everything, the very moment he came in.

‘Brian!’ he called from the doorstep.

There was no answer.

‘Brian!’

The kitchen door opened, and old Mrs Benson, who did their cooking and cleaning, stepped out into the narrow hall. Mr Foxe, she explained, had started for a walk about half an hour before; wouldn’t be back for lunch, he had said, but had wanted (would you believe it?) to set off without anything to eat; she had made him take some sandwiches and a hard-boiled egg.

It was with a sense of inner discomfort that Anthony sat down to his solitary lunch. Brian had deliberately avoided him; therefore must be angry – or worse, it occurred to him, was hurt – too deeply to be able to bear his presence. The thought made him wince; to hurt people was so horrible, so hurting even to the hurter. And if Brian came back from his walk magnanimously forgiving – and knowing him, Anthony felt convinced that he would – what then? It was also painful to be forgiven; particularly painful in the case of an offence one had not oneself confessed. ‘If only I could have told him,’ he kept repeating to himself, ‘if only I could have told him’; and almost contrived to persuade himself that he had been prevented.

After lunch he walked up into the wild country behind the cottage, hoping (for it was now so urgently necessary to speak), and at the same time (since the speaking would be such an agonizing process) profoundly fearing, to meet Brian. But he met nobody. Resting on the crest of the hill, he managed for a little while to forget his troubles in sarcasms at the expense of the view. So typically and discreditably English, he reflected, wishing that Mary were there to listen to his comments. Mountain, valleys, lakes, but on the pettiest scale. Miserably small and hole-and-cornery, like English cottage architecture – all ingle-nooks and charming features; nothing fine or grandiose. No hint of thirteen-century megalomania or baroque gesticulation. A snug, smug little sublimity. It was almost in high spirits that he started his descent.

No, said old Mrs Benson, Mr Foxe hadn’t yet come back.

He had his tea alone, then sat on a deck-chair on the lawn and read de Gourmont on style. At six, Mrs Benson came out, and after elaborately explaining that she had laid the table and that the cold mutton was in the larder, wished him good-evening and walked away down the road towards her own cottage.

Soon afterwards the midges began to bite and he went indoors. The little bird in the Swiss clock opened its door, cuckooed seven times and retired again into silence. Anthony continued to read about style. Half an hour later the bird popped out for a single cry. It was supper-time. Anthony rose and walked to the back door. Behind the cottage the hill was bright with an almost supernatural radiance. There was no sign of Brian. He returned to the sitting-room, and for a change read some Santayana. The cuckoo uttered eight shrill hiccoughs. Above the orange stain of sunset the evening planet was already visible. He lit the lamp and drew the curtains. Then, sitting down again, he tried to go on reading Santayana; but those carefully smoothed pebbles of wisdom rolled over the surface of his mind without making the smallest impression. He shut the book at last. The cuckoo announced that it was half-past eight.

An accident, he was wondering, could the fellow have had an accident? But, after all, people don’t have accidents – not when they’re out for a quiet walk. A new thought suddenly came to him, and at once the very possibility of twisted ankles or broken legs disappeared. That walk – he felt completely certain of it now – had been to the station. Brian was in the train, on his way to London, on his way to Joan. It was obvious, when one came to think of it; it simply couldn’t be otherwise.

‘Christ!’ Anthony said aloud in the solitude of the little room. Then, made cynical and indifferent by the very hopelessness of the situation, he shrugged his shoulders and, lighting a candle, went out to the larder to fetch the cold mutton.

This time, he decided, as he ate his meal, he really would escape. Just bolt into hiding till things looked better. He felt no compunction. Brian’s journey to London had relieved him, in his own estimation, of any further responsibility in the matter; he felt that he was now free to do whatever suited him best.

In preparation for his flight, he went upstairs after supper and began to pack his bag. The recollection that he had lent Brian The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman to red in bed sent him, candle in hand, across the landing. On the chest of drawers in Brian’s room three envelopes stood conspicuously propped against the wall. Two, he could see from the doorway, were stamped, the other was unstamped. He crossed the room to look at them more closely. The unstamped envelope was addressed to himself, the others to Mrs Foxe and Joan respectively. He set down the candle, took the envelope addressed to himself, and tore it open. A vague but intense apprehension had filled his mind, a fear of something unknown, something he dared not know. He stood there for a long time holding the open envelope in his hand and listening to the heavy pulse of his own blood. Then, coming at last to a decision, he extracted the folded sheets. There were two of them, one in Brian’s writing, the other in Joan’s. Across the top of Joan’s letter Brian had written: ‘Read this for yourself.’ He read.

‘DEAREST BRIAN, – By this time Anthony will have told you what has happened. And, you know, it did just happen – from outside, if you see what I mean, like an accident, like being run into by a train. I certainly hadn’t thought about it before, and I don’t think Anthony had – not really; the discovery that we loved one another just ran into us, ran over us. There wasn’t any question of us doing it on purpose. That’s why I don’t feel guilty. Sorry, yes – more than words can say – for the pain I know I shall give you. Ready to do all I can to make it less. Asking forgiveness for hurting you. But not feeling guilty, not feeling I’ve treated you dishonourably. I should only feel that if I had done it deliberately; but I didn’t. I tell you, it just happened to me – to us both. Brian dear, I’m unspeakably sorry to be hurting you. You of all people. If it were a matter of doing it with intention, I couldn’t do it. No more than you could have hurt me intentionally. But this thing has just happened, in the same way as it just happened that you hurt me because of that fear that you’ve always had of love. You didn’t want to hurt me, but you did; you couldn’t help it. The impulse that made you hurt me ran into you, ran over you, like this impulse of love that has run into me and Anthony. I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault, Brian. We had bad luck. Everything ought to have been so good and beautiful. And then things happened to us – to you first, so that you had to hurt me; then to me. Later on, perhaps, we can still be friends. I hope so. That’s why I’m not saying good-bye to you, Brian dear. Whatever happens, I am always your loving friend,

JOAN.’

In the effort to keep up his self-esteem and allay his profound disquietude, Anthony forced himself to think with distaste of the really sickening style in which this kind of letter was generally written. A branch of pulpit oratory, he concluded, and tried to smile to himself. But it was no good. His face refused to do what he asked of it. He dropped Joan’s letter and reluctantly picked up the other sheet in Brian’s handwriting.

‘DEAR A., – I enclose the letter I received this morning from Joan. Read it; it will save me explaining. How could he have done it? That’s the question I’ve been asking myself all the morning; and now I put it to you. How could you? Circumstances may have run over her – like a train, as she says. And that, I know, was my fault. But they couldn’t have run over you. You’ve told me quite enough about yourself and Mary Amberley to make it quite clear that there could be no question in your case of poor Joan’s train. Why did you do it? And why did you come here and behave as though nothing had happened? How could you sit there and let me talk about my difficulties with Joan and pretend to be sympathetic, when a couple of evenings before you had been giving her the kisses I wasn’t able to give? God knows, I’ve done all manner of bad and stupid things in the course of my life, told all manner of lies; but I honestly don’t think I could have done what you have done. I didn’t think anybody could have done it. I suppose I’ve been living in a sort of fool’s paradise all these years, thinking the world was a place where this sort of thing simply couldn’t happen. A year ago I might have known how to deal with the discovery that it can happen. Not now. I know that, if I tried, I should just break down into some kind of madness. This last year has strained me more than I knew. I realize now that I’m all broken to pieces inside, and that I’ve been holding myself together by a continuous effort of will. It’s as if a broken statue somehow contrived to hold itself together. And now this has finished it. I can’t hold any more. I know if I were to see you now – and it’s not because I feel that you’ve done something you shouldn’t have done; it would be the same with anyone, even my mother – yes, if I were to see anyone who had ever meant anything to me, I should just break down and fall to bits. A statue at one moment, and the next a heap of dust and shapeless fragments. I can’t face it. Perhaps I ought to; but I simply can’t. I was angry with you when I began to write this letter, I hated you; but now I find I don’t hate you any longer. God bless you,

Anthony put the two letters and the torn envelope in his pocket, and, picking up the two stamped envelopes and the candle, made his way downstairs to the sitting-room. Half an hour later, he went to the kitchen, and in the range, which was still smouldering, set fire one by one to all the papers that Brian had left behind him. The two unopened envelopes with their closely folded contents burnt slowly, had to be constantly relighted; but at last it was done. With the poker he broke the charred paper into dust, stirred up the fire to a last flame and drew the round cover back into place. Then he walked out into the garden and down the steps to the road. On the way to the village it suddenly struck him that he would never be able to see Mary again. She would question him, she would worm the truth out of him, and having wormed it out, would proclaim it to the world. Besides, would he even want to see her again now that Brian had . . . He could not bring himself to say the words even to himself. ‘Christ!’ he said aloud. At the entrance to the village he halted for a few moments to think what he should say when he knocked up the policeman. ‘My friend’s lost . . . My friend has been out all day and . . . I’m worried about my friend . . .’ Anything would do; he hurried on, only anxious to get it over.

CHAPTER XLIX

January 12th and 14th 1934

IT WAS DARK in the little rancho, and from noon till sunset stiflingly hot; then cold all through the night. A partition divided the hut into two compartments; in the middle of the first compartment was a hearth of rough stones, and when the fire was lighted for cooking, the smoke filtered slowly away through the chinks in the windowless wooden walls. The furniture consisted of a stool, two kerosene tins for water, some earthenware cooking-pots, and a stone mortar for grinding maize. On the further side of the partition were a couple of plank beds on trestles. It was on one of these that they laid Mark.

By the following morning he was delirious with fever, and, from the knee, the infection had crept downwards, until the leg was swollen almost to the ankle.

For Anthony, as he sat there in the hot twilight, listening to the mutterings and sudden outcries of this stranger on the bed, there was, for the moment, only one thing to decide. Should he send the mozo to fetch a doctor and the necessary drugs from Miajutla? Or should he go himself?

It was a choice of evils. He thought of poor Mark, abandoned, alone in the hands of these inept and not too well-intentioned savages. But even if he himself were there, what could he do with the resources at his disposal? And suppose the mozo were sent and failed to persuade the doctor to come at once, failed to bring the necessary supplies, failed perhaps to return at all. Miajutla, as Mark had said, was in the pulque country; there would be oceans of cheap alcohol. Riding hard, he himself could be back again at Mark’s bedside in less than thirty hours. A white man with money in his pocket, he would be able to bully and bribe the doctor to bestir himself. Hardly less important, he would know what stores to bring back with him. His mind was made up. He rose, and, going to the door, called to the mozo to saddle his mule.

He had ridden for less than two hours when the miracle happened. Coming round a bend in the track he saw advancing towards him, not fifty yards away, a white man, followed by two Indians, one mounted and one on foot, with a couple of laden baggage-mules. As they drew together, the white man courteously raised his hat. The hair beneath it was light brown, grizzled above the ears, and in the deeply bronzed face the blue eyes were startlingly pale.

‘Buenas dias, caballero,’ he said.

There was no mistaking the accent. ‘Good-morning,’ Anthony replied.

They reined up their beasts alongside one another and began to talk.

‘This is the first word of English I’ve heard for seven and a half months,’ said the stranger. He was an elderly little man, short and spare, but with fine upright carriage that lent him a certain dignity. The face was curiously proportioned, with a short nose and an upper lip unusually long above a wide, tightly shut mouth. A mouth like an inquisitor’s. But the inquisitor had forgotten himself and learned to smile; there were the potentialities of laughter in the deep folds of skin which separated the quiveringly sensitive corners of the mouth from the cheeks. And round the bright enquiring eyes those intricate lines seemed the traces and hieroglyphic symbols of a constantly repeated movement of humorous kindliness. A queer face, Anthony decided, but charming.

‘My name is James Miller,’ said the stranger. ‘What’s yours?’ And when he had been told, ‘Are you travelling alone, Anthony Beavis?’ he questioned, addressing the other, Quaker fashion, by both his names.

Anthony told him where he was bound and on what errand. ‘I suppose you don’t know anything about doctors in Miajutla,’ he concluded.

With a sudden deepening of the hieroglyphs about the eyes, a sudden realization of those potentialities of laughter round the mouth, the little man smiled. ‘I know about doctors here,’ he said, and tapped himself on the chest. ‘M.D., Edinburgh. And a good supply of materia medica on those mules, what’s more.’ Then, in another tone, ‘Come on,’ he said briskly. ‘Let’s get back to that poor friend of yours as quick as we can.’

Anthony wheeled his animal round, and side by side the two men set off up the track.

‘Well, Anthony Beavis,’ said the doctor, ‘you came to the right address.’

Anthony nodded. ‘Fortunately,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t been praying, otherwise I’d have had to believe in special providence and miraculous interventions.’

‘And that would never do,’ the doctor agreed. ‘Not that anything ever happens by chance, of course. One takes the card the conjuror forces on one – the card which one has oneself made it inevitable that he should force on one. It’s a matter of cause and effect.’ Then, without a pause, ‘What’s your profession?’ he asked.

‘I suppose you’d say I was a sociologist. Was one, at any rate.’

‘Indeed! Is that so?’ The doctor seemed surprised and pleased. ‘Mine’s anthropology,’ he went on. ‘Been living with the Lacandones in Chiapas these last months. Nice people when you get to know them. And I’ve collected a lot of material. Are you married, by the way?’

‘No.’

‘Never been married?’

‘No.’

Dr Miller shook his head. ‘That’s bad, Anthony Beavis,’ he said. ‘You ought to have been.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I can see it in your face. Here, and there.’ He touched his lips, his forehead. ‘I was married. For fourteen years. Then my wife died. Blackwater fever it was. We were working in West Africa then. She was qualified too. Knew her job better, in some ways, than I did.’ He sighed. ‘You’d have made a good husband, you know. Perhaps you will do, even now. How old are you?’

‘Forty-three.’

‘And look younger. Though I don’t like that sallow skin of yours,’ he protested with sudden vehemence. ‘Do you suffer much from constipation?’

‘Well, no,’ Anthony answered, smiling, and wondered whether it would be agreeable if everybody were to talk to one in this sort of way. A bit tiring, perhaps, to have to treat all the people you met as human beings, every one of them with a right to know all about you; but more interesting than treating them as objects, as mere lumps of meat dumped down beside you in the bus, jostling you on the pavements. ‘Not much,’ he qualified.

‘You mean, not manifestly,’ said the doctor. ‘Any eczema?’

‘Occasional touches.’

‘And the hair tends to be scurfy.’ Dr Miller nodded his own confirmation to this statement. ‘And you get headaches, don’t you?’

Anthony had to admit that he sometimes did.

‘And, of course, stiff necks and attacks of lumbago. I know. I know. A few years more and it’ll be settled in as sciatica or arthritis.’ The doctor was silent for a moment while he looked enquiringly into Anthony’s face. ‘Yes, that sallow skin,’ he repeated, and shook his head. ‘And the irony, the scepticism, the what’s-the-good-of-it-all attitude! Negative really. Everything you think is negative.’

Anthony laughed; but laughed to hide a certain disquiet. This being on human terms with everyone you met could be a bit embarrassing.

‘Oh, don’t imagine I’m criticizing!’ cried the doctor, and there was a note of genuine compunction in his voice.

Anthony went on laughing, unconvincingly.

‘Don’t get it into your head that I’m blaming you in any way.’

Stretching out a hand, he patted Anthony affectionately on the shoulder. ‘We’re all of us what we are; and when it comes to turning ourselves into what we ought to be – well, it isn’t easy. No, it isn’t easy, Anthony Beavis. How can you expect to think in anything but a negative way, when you’ve got chronic intestinal poisoning? Had it from birth, I guess. Inherited it. And at the same time stooping, as you do. Slumped down on your mule like that – it’s awful. Pressing down on the vertebrae like a ton of bricks. One can almost hear the poor things grinding together. And when the spine’s in that state, what happens to the rest of the machine? It’s frightful to think of.’

‘And yet,’ said Anthony, feeling a little piqued by this remorseless enumeration of his physical defects, ‘I’m still alive. I’m here to tell the tale.’

‘Somebody’s here to tell the tale,’ the doctor answered. ‘But is he the one you’d like him to be?’

Anthony did not answer, only smiled uncomfortably.

‘And even that somebody won’t be telling the tale much longer, if you’re not careful. I’m serious,’ he insisted. ‘Perfectly serious. You’ve got to change if you want to go on existing. And if it’s a matter of changing – why, you need all the help you can get, from God’s to the doctor’s. I tell you this because I like you,’ he explained. ‘I think you’re worth changing.’

‘Thank you,’ said Anthony, smiling this time with pleasure.

‘Speaking as a doctor, I’d suggest a course of colonic irrigation to start with.’

‘And speaking for God,’ said Anthony, allowing his pleasure to overflow in good-humoured mockery, ‘a course of prayer and fasting.’

‘No, not fasting,’ the doctor protested very seriously, ‘not fasting. Only a proper diet. No butcher’s meat; it’s poison, so far as you’re concerned. And no milk; it’ll only blow you up with wind. Take it in the form of cheese and butter; never liquid. And a minimum of eggs. And, of course, only one heavy meal a day. You don’t need half the stuff you’re eating. As for prayer . . .’ He sighed and wrinkled his forehead into a pensive frown. ‘I’ve never really liked it, you know. Not what’s ordinarily meant by prayer, at any rate. All that asking for special favours and guidances and forgivenesses – I’ve always found that it tends to make one egotistical, preoccupied with one’s own ridiculous self-important little personality. When you pray in the ordinary way, you’re merely rubbing yourself into yourself. You return to your own vomit, if you see what I mean. Whereas what we’re all looking for is some way of getting beyond our own vomit.’

Some way, Anthony was thinking, of getting beyond the books, beyond the perfumed and resilient flesh of women, beyond fear and sloth, beyond the painful but secretly flattering vision of the world as menagerie and asylum.

‘Beyond this piddling, twopenny-halfpenny personality,’ said the doctor, ‘with all its wretched little virtues and vices, all its silly cravings and silly pretensions. But, if you’re not careful, prayer just confirms you in the bad habit of being personal. I tell you, I’ve observed it clinically, and it seems to have much the same effect on people as butcher’s meat. Prayer makes you more yourself, more separate. Just as a rump-steak does. Look at the correlation between religion and diet. Christians eat meat, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco; and Christianity exalts personality, insists on the value of petitionary prayer, teaches that God feels anger and approves the persecution of heretics. It’s the same with the Jews and the Moslems. Kosher and an indignant Jehovah. Mutton and beef – and personal survival among the houris, avenging Allah and holy wars. Now look at the Buddhists. Vegetables and water. And what’s their philosophy? They don’t exalt personality; they try to transcend it. They don’t imagine that God can be angry; when they’re unenlightened, they think he’s compassionate, and when they’re enlightened, they think he doesn’t exist, except as an impersonal mind of the universe. Hence they don’t offer petitionary prayer; they meditate – or, in other words, try to merge their own minds in the universal mind. Finally, they don’t believe in special providences for individuals; they believe in a moral order, where every event has its cause and produces its effect – where the card’s forced upon you by the conjuror, but only because your previous actions have forced the conjuror to force it upon you. What worlds away from Jehovah and God the Father and ever-lasting, individual souls! The fact is, of course, that we think as we eat. I eat like a Buddhist, because I find it keeps me well and happy; and the result is that I think like a Buddhist – and, thinking like a Buddhist, I’m confirmed in my determination to eat like one.’

‘And now you’re recommending me to eat like one.’

‘More or less.’

‘And do you also want me to think like one?’

‘In the long run you won’t be able to avoid it. But, of course, it’s better to do it consciously.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ said Anthony, ‘I do think like a Buddhist already. Not in all ways perhaps, but certainly in many ways. In spite of roast beef.’

‘You think you think like a Buddhist,’ said the doctor. ‘But you don’t. Thinking negatively isn’t thinking like a Buddhist; it’s thinking like a Christian who’s eating more butcher’s meat than his intenstine can deal with.’

Anthony laughed.

‘Oh, I know it sounds funny,’ said the doctor. ‘But that’s only because you’re a dualist.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Not in theory perhaps. But in practice – how can you be anything but a dualist? What are you, Anthony Beavis? A clever man – that’s obvious. But it’s equally obvious that you’ve got an unconscious body. An efficient thinking apparatus and a hopelessly stupid set of muscles and bones and viscera. Of course you’re a dualist. You live your dualism. And one of the reasons you live it is because you poison yourself with too much animal protein. Like millions of other people, of course! What’s the greatest enemy of Christianity today? Frozen meat. In the past only members of the upper classes were thoroughly sceptical, despairing, negative. Why? Among other reasons, because they were the only people who could afford to eat too much meat. Now there’s cheap Canterbury Lamb and Argentine chilled beef. Even the poor can afford to poison themselves into complete scepticism and despair. And only the most violent stimuli will rouse them to purposive activity, and, what’s worse, the only activity they’ll undertake is diabolic. They can only be stimulated by hysterical appeals to persecute Jews, or murder socialists, or go to war. You personally happen to be too intelligent to be a fascist or a nationalistic; but again, it’s a matter of theory, not of life. Believe me, Anthony Beavis, your intestines are ripe for fascism and nationalism. They’re making you long to be shaken out of the horrible negativity to which they’ve condemned you – to be shaken by violence into violence.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Anthony, ‘that’s one of the reasons why I’m here.’ He waved his hand towards the tumbled chaos of the mountains. ‘Simply to be shaken out of negativity. We were on our way to a revolution when poor Staithes got hurt.’

The doctor nodded. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘you see! And do you suppose you’d be here if you had a healthy intestine?’

‘Well, I don’t really know,’ Anthony answered, laughing.

‘You know quite well that you wouldn’t,’ said the doctor almost severely. ‘Not on that kind of lunatic’s errand, at any rate. For, of course, you might be here as an anthropologist, say, or a teacher, a healer, whatever you like, so long as it meant understanding people and helping them.’

Anthony nodded his head slowly, but did not speak; and for a long way they rode along in silence.

There was light out of doors, and it was cleaner under the sky than in the little rancho. Dr Miller had chosen as his operating theatre a little clearing in the woods, outside the village.

‘Beyond the range of the flies, let’s hope,’ he said, but without seeming too confident of it.

A hearth had been built by his two mozos, and on the fire stood a cauldron of boiling water. They had borrowed a table from the schoolmaster and some stools, with bowls for the disinfectant, and a cotton sheet to cover the bedstead.

Dr Miller had given him a dose of Nembutal, and when the time came, Mark was carried out unconscious to the clearing among the pine trees. All the boys in the village escorted the stretcher and stood round in attentive silence while the patient was lifted on to the bed. Trousered, and in their wide hats, with their little blankets folded over their shoulders, they seemed, not children, but the absurd and derisive parodies of grown men.

Anthony, who had been holding the gangrened leg, straightened himself up, and, looking round, saw the ring of brown faces and the glitter of all those black, blank eyes. At the sight he found his growing apprehension abruptly transformed into uncontrollable anger.

‘Go away!’ he shouted in English, and advanced towards them, waving his arms. ‘Away, you little beasts, away!’

The children retreated, but slowly, reluctantly, with the manifest intention of returning the moment he should turn his back.

Anthony made a quick dart and caught one small boy by the arm.

‘Little beast!’

He shook the child violently, then, carried away by an irresistible impulse to inflict pain, gave him a cuff over the head that sent the big hat flying between the trees.

Uttering no cry, the child ran away after its companions. Anthony made a last menacing gesture in their direction, then turned and walked back towards the centre of the clearing. He had not taken more than a few steps when a stone, well aimed, caught him full between the shoulders. He swung round furiously, exploding into such obscenities as he had not uttered since he was at school.

Dr Miller, who was washing his hands at the table, looked up. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

‘The little devils are throwing stones.’

‘Serve you right,’ said the doctor unsympathetically. ‘Leave them alone, and come and do your duty.’

The unfamiliarly clerical and military word startled him into the uncomfortable realization that he had been behaving like a fool. Worse than a fool. With the realization of his discreditable folly came the impulse to justify it. It was in a tone of pained indignation that he spoke. ‘You’re not going to let them look on, are you?’

‘How am I to prevent them looking on, if they want to?’ asked the doctor, drying his hands as he spoke. ‘And now, Anthony Beavis,’ he went on sternly, ‘pull yourself together. This is going to be difficult enough anyhow, without your being hysterical.’

Silenced and, because he was ashamed of himself, angry with Miller, Anthony washed his hands and put on the clean shirt which had to do duty as overall.

‘Now,’ said the doctor, and stepped forward. ‘We must begin by draining the leg of blood.’

‘The’ leg, not ‘his’ leg, Anthony was thinking, as he stood beside the doctor, looking down on the man sleeping on the bed. Something impersonal, belonging to nobody in particular. The leg. But Mark’s face, Mark’s sleeping face, now so incredibly calm, so smooth, in spite of the emaciation, as though this death-like stupor had drawn a new skin across the flayed and twisted muscles – this could never be merely ‘the’ face. It was ‘his’, his for all its unlikeness to that contemptuous, suffering mask through which at ordinary times Mark looked out at the world. All the more genuinely his, perhaps, just because of that unlikeness. He remembered suddenly what Mark had said to him, beside the Mediterranean, only four months before, when he had woken to see those eyes, now shut, but then wide open and bright with derision, sardonically examining him through the mosquito net. Perhaps one really is what one seems to be in sleep. Innocence and peace – the mind’s essence, and all the rest mere accident.

‘Take his foot,’ Dr Miller ordered, ‘and lift the leg as nearly vertical as you can.’

Anthony did as he was told. Raised in this grotesque way, the horribly swollen and discoloured leg seemed more impersonal, more a mere thing than ever. The stink of mortified flesh was in his nostrils. From behind them, among the trees, a voice said something incomprehensible; there was a snicker of laughter.

‘Now leave the foot to the mozo and stand by here.’ Anthony obeyed, and smelt again the resin of the forest. ‘Hold that bottle for me.’

There was an astonished murmur of ‘Amarillo!’ as the doctor painted the thigh with flavine. Anthony looked again at his friend’s face; it remained undisturbed in its serenity. Essentially still and pure. The leg with its black dead flesh; the saw there in the bowl of permanganate solution, the knives and forceps; the fascinated children peering out of the forest – all were somehow irrelevant to the essential Mark.

‘Now the chloroform,’ said Dr Miller. ‘And the cotton wool. I’ll show you how to use it. Then you’ll have to go on by yourself.’

He opened the bottle, and the smell of pine trees in the sunshine was overlaid by a rasping and nauseating sweetness.

‘There, do you see the trick?’ asked the doctor. ‘Like that. Go on with that. I’ll tell you when to stop. I’ve got to put on the tourniquet.’

There were no birds in the trees, hardly, even, any insects. The wood was deathly still. This sunny clearing was a little island of speech and movement in an ocean of silence. And at the centre of that island lay another silence, intenser, more complete than the silence of the forest.

The tourniquet was in place. Dr Miller ordered the mozo to lower the grotesquely hoisted leg. He pulled up a stool to the bedside, sat down, then rose again and, as he washed his hands for the last time, explained to Anthony that he would have to operate sitting down. The bed was too low for him to be able to stand. Taking his seat once more, he dipped into the bowl of permanganate for a scalpel.

At the sight of those broad flaps of skin turned back, like the peel of a huge banana, but from a red and bleeding fruit, Anthony was seized with a horrible sensation of nausea. The saliva came pouring into his mouth and he had to keep swallowing and swallowing to get rid of it. Involuntarily, he gave vent to a retching cough.

‘Steady now,’ said the doctor without looking up. With an artery forceps, he secured the end of an oozing vessel.

‘Think of it scientifically.’ He made another sweeping cut through the red flesh. ‘And if you must be sick,’ he went on with sudden asperity, ‘for God’s sake go and do it quickly!’ Then, in another tone – the tone of the professor who demonstrates an interesting point to his students, ‘One has to cut back the nerves a long way,’ he said. ‘There’s a tremendous retraction as the tissues heal up. Anyhow,’ he added, ‘he’ll probably have to have a re-amputation at home. It won’t be a beautiful stump, I’m afraid.’

Calm and at peace, innocent of all craving, all malice, all ambition – it was the face of one who has made himself free, one for whom there are no more bars or chains, no more sepulchres under a stone, and on whom the birdlime no longer sticks. The face of one who has made himself free . . . But in fact, Anthony reflected, in fact he had had his freedom forced upon him by this evil-smelling vapour. Was it possible to be one’s own liberator? There were snares; but also there was a way of walking out of them. Prisons; but they could be opened. And if the torture-chambers could never be abolished, perhaps the tortures could be made to seem irrelevant. As completely irrelevant as now to Mark this sound of sawing, as this revolting rasp and squeak of the steel teeth biting into the bone, of the steel blade rubbing back and forth in the deepening groove. Mark lay there serene, almost smiling.

CHAPTER L

Christmas Day 1934

GOD – A PERSON or not a person? Quien sabe? Only revelation can decide such metaphysical questions. And revelation isn’t playing the game – is equivalent to pulling three aces of trumps from up your sleeve.

Of more significance is the practical question. Which gives a man more power to realize goodness – belief in a personal or an impersonal God? Answer: it depends. Some minds work one way, some another. Mine, as it happens, finds no need, indeed, finds it impossible to think of the world in terms of personality. Patanjali says you may believe in a personal God, or not, according to taste. The psychological results will be the same in either case.

For those whose nature demands personality as a source of energy, but who find it impossible to believe that the universe is run by a person in any sense of the word that we can possibly understand – what’s the right policy? In most cases, they reject any practice which might be called religious. But this is throwing away the baby with the bath water. The desired relationship with a personality can be historical, not ontological. A contact, not with somebody existing at present as manager of the universe, but with somebody known to have existed at some time in the past. The Imitation of Christ (or of any other historical character) is just as effective if the model be regarded as having existed there, then, as it is if the model be conceived as existing here, now. And meditation on goodness, communication with goodness, contemplation of goodness are demonstrably effective means of realizing goodness in life, even when that which is meditated on, communicated with and contemplated, is not a person, but a general mind, or even an ideal supposed to exist only in human minds. The fundamental problem is practical – to work out systems of psychological exercises for all types of men and women. Catholicism has many systems of mental prayer – Ignatian, Franciscan, Liguorian, Carmelite and so on. Hinduism, Northern, Southern and Zen Buddhism also have a variety of practices. There is a great work to be done here. Collecting and collating information from all these sources. Consulting books and, more important, people who have actually practised what is in the books, have had experience of teaching novices. In time, it might be possible to establish a complete and definitive Ars Contemplativa. A series of techniques, adapted to every type of mind. Techniques for meditating on, communicating with and contemplating goodness. Ends in themselves and at the same time means for realizing some of that goodness in practice.

January 1st 1935.

MACHINERY AND GOOD organization – modern inventions; and, like all blessings, have to be paid for. In many ways. One item is the general belief, encouraged by mechanical and social efficiency, that progress is automatic and can be imposed from outside. We, as individuals, need do nothing about it. Liquidate undesirables, distribute enough money and goods – all will be well. It is a reversion to magic, a pandering to man’s natural sloth. Note the striking way in which this tendency runs through the whole of modern life, cropping up at every point. There seems no obvious connection between the Webbs and the Soviets on the one hand and Modern Catholicism on the other. But what profound subterranean resemblances! The recent Catholic revival essentially a revival of sacraments. From a Catholic point of view, this is a ‘sacramental age’. Magic power of sacraments regarded as sufficient for salvation. Mental prayer conspicuously absent. Exact analogy to the Webbs-Soviet idea of progress from without, through machinery and efficient organization. For English Catholics, sacraments are the psychological equivalents of tractors in Russia.

CHAPTER LI

February 7th 1934

DR MILLER DISMOUNTED at the open hut, left his beast with the mozo, and stepped into the hut.

Propped up on his bed, Mark watched him enter – a small, erect figure, walking briskly, his blue eyes bright with enquiring kindness, the corners of his mouth alive with the potentialities of laughter.

‘And how are all the little patients this evening?’ Mark twisted up his pale and still emaciated face into a ferociously sardonic smile.

From the stool on which he was sitting beside the bed, Anthony shot a glance at him, and remembered the serenity of that face three weeks before, in the early morning sunshine among the pine trees. Serene and at peace. But now that life had come back to him, now that he was safely convalescent, the peace had departed, leaving him the embittered enemy of the whole world. There had been hatred in his eyes even before he was strong enough to speak. Hatred for everyone who came near him – above all for old Miller.

‘I can’t bear his perpetual twinkle,’ was what he had said to Anthony later on. ‘Nobody has a right to go about looking like the advertisement of a constipation cure.’

But the real reason for Mark’s dislike was different. He hated old Miller because of his dependence upon him, because of the unflaggingly watchful efficiency of the man’s care. Poor Mark! How acutely he suffered from having to accept a service and, still more, from being compelled by his own physical weakness to ask for it! How bitterly he resented even affection, if it were given by somebody to whom it was impossible for him to feel superior! His dislike for the doctor had been present from the first moment of his return to consciousness, had increased with every day that the old man delayed his departure in order to look after him.

‘But why don’t you get on with your journey?’ he had asked; and when the doctor answered that he was in no hurry and intended to see him safely down to the coast and even, since he himself was leaving, home through the Canal to England, had protested vehemently that his leg was practically healed, that there would be no difficulty in getting back to Puerto San Felipe, that he himself would probably be taking the north-bound boat to Los Angeles.

But the doctor had remained, attending to Mark and in the intervals riding out to the neighbouring villages to treat the sick. To the convalescent this was an additional source of irritation – though why it should have annoyed him Anthony could not rightly understand. Perhaps he resented the fact that the benefactor of the Indians was not himself. Anyhow, there it was; he was never tired of baiting old Miller with those ‘little patients’ of his.

Then, a fortnight after the operation, had come the news of the ignominious failure of Don Jorge’s attempt at insurrection. He had been surprised with an insufficient guard, taken alive, summarily tried and shot with his chief lieutenant. The report added that the two men had cracked jokes together as they walked between the soldiers towards the cemetery, where their graves were already dug.

‘And he died,’ had been Mark’s comment, ‘believing that I’d taken fright at the last moment and let him down.’

The thought was like another wound to him.

‘If I hadn’t had this blasted accident . . .’ he kept repeating. ‘If I’d been there to advise him . . . That crazy rashness of his! This was why he’d asked me to come. He mistrusted his own judgment. And here was I lying in this stinking pigsty, while the poor devil marches off to the cemetery . . .’ Cracking jokes, as he sniffed the cold morning air. ‘Huele al cimintero, Don Jaime.’ He too would have cracked his joke. Instead of which . . . It was just bad luck, of course, just a typical piece of providential idiocy; but providence was not there for him to vent his grievance on. Only Anthony and the doctor were there. His behaviour towards them, after the news of Don Jorge’s death, had become increasingly bitter and resentful. It was as though he regarded them as personally responsible for what had happened. Both of them, especially the doctor.

‘How’s the delicious bedside manner?’ Mark now went on, in the same derisive tone in which he had asked after the little patients.

‘Wasted, I’m afraid,’ Dr Miller answered good-humouredly as he took off his hat and sat down. ‘Either they haven’t got any beds for me to be at the side of – only a blanket on the floor. Or else they don’t speak any Spanish, and I don’t speak their brand of Indian dialect. And how’s yourself?’ he asked.

‘Myself,’ said Mark, returning the doctor his expression in a tone of emphatically contemptuous disgust, as though it were some kind of verbal ordure, ‘is very well, thanks.’

‘But doing a slight Bishop Berkeley,’ Anthony interposed. ‘Feeling pains in the knee he hasn’t got.’

Mark looked at him for a moment with an expression of stony dislike; then turning away and fixing his eyes on the bright evening landscape, visible through the open door of the hut, ‘Not pains,’ he said coldly, though it was as pains that he had described them to Anthony only half an hour before. ‘Just the sensation that the knee’s still there.’

‘Can’t avoid that, I’m afraid.’ The doctor shook his head.

‘I didn’t suppose one could,’ Mark said, as though he were replying with dignity to an aspersion on his honour.

Dr Miller broke the uncomfortable silence by remarking that there was a good deal of goitre in the higher valleys.

‘It has its charm,’ said Mark, stroking an imaginary bulge at his throat. ‘How I regret those cretins one used to see in Switzerland when I was a child! They’ve iodined them out of existence now, I’m afraid. The world’s too damned sanitary these days.’ He shook his head and smiled anatomically. ‘What do they do up there in the high valleys?’ he asked.

‘Grow maize,’ said the doctor. ‘And kill one another in the intervals. There’s a huge network of vendettas spread across these mountains. Everybody’s involved. I’ve been talking to the responsible men, trying to persuade them to liquidate all the old accounts and start afresh.’

‘They’ll die of boredom.’

‘No, I’m teaching them football instead. Matches between the villages.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve had a lot of experience with vendettas,’ he added. ‘All over the world. They all detest them, really. Are only too thankful for football when they’re used to it.’

‘Christ!’

‘Why “Christ”?’

‘Those games! Can’t we ever escape from them?’

‘But they’re the greatest English contribution to civilization,’ said the doctor. ‘Much more important than parliamentary government, or steam engines, or Newton’s Principia. More important even than English poetry. Poetry can never be a substitute for war and murder. Whereas games can be. A complete and genuine substitute.’

‘Substitutes!’ Mark echoed contemptuously. ‘You’re all content with substitutes. Anthony finds his in bed or in the British Museum Reading Room. You look for yours on the football field. God help you! Why are you so frightened of the genuine article?’

For a little while no one spoke. Dr Miller looked at Anthony, and, seeing that he did not propose to answer, turned back to the other. ‘It isn’t a question of being frightened, Mark Staithes,’ he said very mildly. ‘It’s a question of choosing something right instead of something wrong . . .’

‘I’m suspicious of right choices that happen to need less courage than wrong ones.’

‘Is danger your measure of goodness?’

Mark shrugged his shoulders. ‘What is goodness? Hard to know, in most cases. But at least one can be sure that it’s good to face danger courageously.’

‘And for that you’re justified in deliberately creating dangerous situations – at other people’s expense?’ Dr Miller shook his head. ‘That won’t do, Mark Staithes. If you want to use courage, why not use it in a good cause.’

‘Such as teaching blackamoors to play football,’ Mark sneered.

‘Which isn’t so easy, very often, as it sounds.’

‘They can’t grasp the offside rule, I suppose.’

‘They don’t want to grasp any rule at all, except the rule of killing the people from the next village. And when you’re between two elevens armed to the teeth and breathing slaughter at one another . . .’ He paused; his wide mouth twitched into a smile; the almost invisible hieroglyphs round his eyes deepened, as he narrowed the lids, into the manifest symbols of an inner amusement. ‘Well, as I say, it isn’t quite so easy as it sounds. Have you ever found yourself faced by a lot of angry men who wanted to kill you?’

Mark nodded, and an expression of rather malevolent satisfaction appeared on his face. ‘Several times,’ he answered. ‘When I was running a coffee finca a bit further down the coast, in Chiapas.’

‘And you faced them without arms?’

‘Without arms,’ Mark repeated, and, by way of explanation, ‘The politicians,’ he added, ‘were still talking about revolution in those days. The land for the people – and all the rest. One fine morning the villagers came to seize the estate.’

‘Which, on your principles,’ said Anthony, ‘you ought to have approved of.’

‘And did approve, of course. But I could hardly admit it – not in those circumstances.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, surely that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?? There they were, marching against me. Was I to tell them I sympathized with their politics and then hand over the estate? No, really, that would have been a bit too simple!’

‘What did you do, then?’

‘There were about a hundred of them the first time,’ Mark explained. ‘Festooned with guns and cartridge-belts like Christmas trees, and all with their machetes. But polite, soft spoken. They had no particular quarrel with me, and the revolutionary idea was strange; they didn’t feel too certain of themselves. Not that they ever make much noise,’ he added. ‘I’ve seen them killing in silence. Like fish. It’s an aquarium, this country.’

‘Seems an aquarium,’ Dr Miller emended. ‘But when one has learnt how the fishes think . . .’

‘I’ve always found it more important to learn how they drink,’ said Mark. ‘Tequila’s the real enemy. Luckily, mine were sober. Otherwise . . . Well, who knows what would have happened?’ After a pause, ‘They were standing on the cement drying floor,’ he went on, ‘and I was sitting at the door of the office, up a few steps, above them. Superior, as though I were holding a durbar of my loyal subjects.’ He laughed; the colour had come to his cheeks, and he spoke with a kind of gusto, as though the words had a pleasant taste in his mouth. ‘A hundred villainous, coffee-coloured peons, staring up at one with those beady tortoise eyes of theirs – it wasn’t reassuring. But I managed to keep my face and voice from giving anything away. It helped a lot, I found, to think of the creatures as some kind of rather squalid insects. Cockroaches, dung beetles. Just a hundred big, staring bugs. It helped, I say. But still my heart did beat a bit. On its own – you know the sensation, don’t you? It’s as though you had a live bird under your ribs. A bird with its own bird-like consciousness. Suffering from its own private fears. An odd sensation, but exhilarating. I don’t think I was ever happier in my life than I was that day. The fact of being one against a hundred. A hundred armed to the teeth. But bugs, only bugs. Whereas the one was a man. It was a wonderful feeling.’ He was silent for a little, smiling to himself.

‘And what happened then?’ Anthony asked.

‘Nothing. I just gave them a little speech from the throne. Told them the finca wasn’t mine to give away. That, meanwhile, I was responsible for the place. And if I caught anybody trespassing on the land, or doing any mischief – well, I should know what to do. Firm, dignified, the real durbar touch. After which I got up, told them they could go, and walked up the path towards the house. I suppose I was within sight of them for about a minute. A full minute with my back turned to them. And there were at least a hundred of the creatures; nobody could ever have discovered who fired the shot. That bird under the ribs!’ Lifting a hand, he fluttered the fingers in the air. ‘And there was a new sensation – ants running up and down the spine. Terrors – but of the body only; autonomous, if you see what I mean. In my mind I knew that they wouldn’t shoot, couldn’t shoot. A hundred miserable bugs – it was morally impossible for them to do it. Bird under the ribs, ants up and down the spine; but inside the skull there was a man; and he was confident, in spite of the body’s doubts, he knew that the game had been won. It was a long minute, but a good one. A very good one. And there were other minutes like it afterwards. The only times they ever shot at me were at evening, from out of the bushes. I was within their range, but they were out of mine. Out of the range of my consciousness and will. That was why they had the courage to shoot. When the man’s away, the bugs will play. Luckily, no amount of courage has ever taught an Indian to shoot straight. In time, of course, they might have got me by a fluke; but meanwhile revolution went out of fashion. It never cut very much ice on the Pacific coast.’ He lit a cigarette. There was a long silence.

‘Well,’ said Dr Miller at last, ‘that’s one way of dealing with a hostile crowd. And seeing that you’re here to tell us, it’s evidently a way that sometimes succeeds. But it’s not my way. I’m an anthropologist, you see.’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘Quite a big one.’ Dr Miller replied. ‘An anthropologist is a person who studies men. But you prefer to deal with bugs. I’d call you an entomologist, Mark Staithes.’ His smile evoked no answering sign of friendliness. Mark’s face was stony as he met the doctor’s eyes and looked away again.

‘Entomologist!’ he repeated scornfully. ‘That’s just stupid. Why do you play with words?’

‘Because words express thoughts, Mark Staithes; and thoughts determine actions. If you call a man a bug, it means that you propose to treat him as a bug. Whereas if you call him a man, it means that you propose to treat him as a man. My profession is to study men. Which means that I must always call men by their name; always think of them as men; yes, and always treat them as men. Because if you don’t treat men as men, they don’t behave as men. But I’m an anthropologist, I repeat. I want human material. Not insect material.’

Mark uttered an explosive little laugh. ‘One may want human material,’ he said. ‘But that doesn’t mean one’s going to get it. What one actually gets . . .’ He laughed again. ‘Well, it’s mostly plain, undiluted bug.’

‘There,’ said Dr Miller, ‘you’re wrong. If one looks for men, one finds them. Very decent ones, in a majority of cases. For example, go among a suspicious, badly treated, savage people; go unarmed, with your hands open.’ He held out his large square hands in a gesture of offering. ‘Go with the persistent and obstinate intention of doing them some good – curing their sick, for example. I don’t care how bitter their grievance against white men may be; in the end, if you’re given time enough to make your intentions clear, they’ll accept you as a friend, they’ll be human beings treating you as a human being. Of course,’ he added, and the symbols of inner laughter revealed themselves once more about his eyes, ‘it sometimes happens that they don’t leave you the necessary time. They spear you before you’re well under way. But it doesn’t often happen – it has never happened to me, as you see – and when it does happen, well, there’s always the hope that the next man who comes will be more successful. Anthropologists may get killed; but anthropology goes on; and in the long run it can’t fail to succeed. Whereas your entomological approach . . .’ He shook his head. ‘It may succeed at the beginning; you can generally frighten and overawe people into submission. That’s to say that, by treating them as bugs, you can generally make them behave like bugs – crawl and scuttle to cover. But the moment they have the opportunity, they’ll turn on you. The anthropologist may get killed while establishing his first contacts; but after that, he’s safe; he’s a man among men. The entomologist may start by being safe; but he’s a bug-hunter among bugs – among bugs, what’s more, who resent being treated as bugs, who know they aren’t bugs. His bad quarter of an hour comes later on. It’s the old story: you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them.’

‘You don’t have to sit on them,’ said Mark. ‘It’s the other people’s bottoms that get punctured, not yours. If you wielded the bayonets with a certain amount of intelligence, I don’t see why you shouldn’t go on ruling indefinitely. The real trouble is, of course, that there isn’t the necessary intelligence. Most bug-hunters are indistinguishable from the bugs.’

‘Exactly,’ Dr Miller agreed. ‘And the only remedy is for the bug-hunter to throw his bayonets away and treat the bugs as though they were human beings.’

‘But we’re talking about intelligence,’ said Mark. The tone of contemptuous tolerance implied that he was doing his best not to get angry with the old fool for his incapacity to think. ‘Being sentimental has nothing to do with being intelligent.’

‘On the contrary,’ the doctor insisted, ‘it has everything to do with it. You can’t be intelligent about human beings unless you’re first sentimental about them. Sentimental in the good sense, of course. In the sense of caring for them. It’s the first indispensable condition of understanding them. If you don’t care for them, you can’t possibly understand them; all your acuteness will just be another form of stupidity.’

‘And if you do care for them,’ said Mark, ‘you’ll be carried away by your maudlin emotions and become incapable of seeing them for what they are. Look at the grotesque, humiliating things that happen when people care too much. The young men who fall in love and imagine that hideous, imbecile girls are paragons of beauty and intellect. The devoted women who persist in thinking that their squalid little hubbies are all that’s most charming, noble, wise, profound.’

‘They’re probably quite right,’ said Dr Miller. ‘It’s indifference and hatred that are blind, not love.’

‘Not lo-ove!’ Mark repeated derisively. ‘Perhaps we might now sing a hymn.’

‘With pleasure.’ Dr Miller smiled. ‘A Christian hymn, or a Buddhist hymn, or a Confucian – whichever you like. I’m an anthropologist; and after all, what’s anthropology? Merely applied scientific religion.’

Anthony broke a long silence. ‘Why do you only apply it to blackamoors?’ he asked. ‘What about beginning at home, like charity?’

‘You’re right,’ said the doctor, ‘it ought to have begun at home. If, in fact, it began abroad, that’s merely a historical accident. It began there because we were imperialists and so came into contact with people whose habits were different from ours and therefore seemed stranger than ours. An accident, I repeat. But in some ways a rather fortunate accident. For thanks to it we’ve learnt a lot of facts and a valuable technique, which we probably shouldn’t have learnt at home. For two reasons. Because it’s hard to think dispassionately about oneself, and still harder to think correctly about something that’s very complicated. Home’s both those things – an elaborate civilization that happens to be our own. Savage societies are simply civilized societies on a small scale and with the lid off. We can learn to understand them fairly easily. And when we’ve learnt to understand savages, we’ve learnt, as we discover, to understand the civilized. And that’s not all. Savages are usually hostile and suspicious. The anthropologist has got to learn to overcome that hostility and suspicion. And when he’s learnt that, he’s learnt the whole secret of politics.’

‘Which is . . .?’

‘That if you treat other people well, they’ll treat you well.’

‘You’re a bit optimistic, aren’t you?’

‘No. In the long run they’ll always treat you well.’

‘In the long run,’ said Mark impatiently, ‘we shall all be dead. What about the short run?’

‘You’ve got to take a risk.’

‘But Europeans aren’t like your Sunday-school savages. It’ll be an enormous risk.’

‘Possibly. But always smaller than the risk you run by treating people badly and goading them into a war. Besides, they’re not worse than savages. They’ve just been badly handled – need a bit of anthropology, that’s all.’

‘And who’s going to give them the anthropology?’

‘Well, among others,’ Dr Miller answered, ‘I am. And I hope you are, Mark Staithes.’

Mark made a flayed grimace and shook his head. ‘Let them slit one another’s throats,’ he said. ‘They’ll do it anyhow, whatever you tell them. So leave them to make their idiotic wars in peace. Besides,’ he pointed to the basket-work cage that kept the bed-clothes out of contact with his wound, ‘what can I do now? Look on, that’s all. We’d much better all look on. It won’t be for long, anyhow. Just a few years; and then . . .’ He paused, looked down and frowned. ‘What are those verses of Rochester’s? Yes.’ He raised his head again and recited:

‘Then old age and experience; hand in hand,

Lead him to death, and make him understand,

After a search so painful and so long,

That all his life he had been in the wrong.

Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies,

Who was so proud, so witty and so wise.

‘Huddled in dirt,’ he repeated. ‘That’s really admirable. Huddled in dirt. And one doesn’t have to wait till one’s dead to be that. We’ll find a snug little patch of dirt and huddle together, shall we?’ He turned to Anthony. ‘Huddle together among the cow-pats and watch the doctor trying his best anthropological bedside manner on General Goering. There’ll be some hearty laughs.’

‘In spite of which,’ said Anthony, ‘I think I shall go and make myself ridiculous with Miller.’

CHAPTER LII

July 24th 1914

THERE WERE FOUR of them in the search-party: Anthony, the policeman, an old shepherd, with the grey whiskers and the majestic profile of a Victorian statesman, and a fair, red-faced boy of seventeen, the baker’s son. The boy was made to carry the canvas part of the stretcher, while the shepherd and the policeman used the long poles as staves.

They set out from behind the cottage, walking in a line – like beaters, Anthony found himself reflecting – up the slope of the hill. It was a brilliant day, cloudless and windless. The distant hills showed as though through veils, dim with much sunlight and almost without colour. Under their feet the grass and heather were dusty with long drought. Anthony took off his jacket, and then, on second thoughts, his hat. A touch of sunstroke might simplify things; there would be no need to give explanations or answer questions. Even as it was, he felt rather sick and there was a griping in his bowels. But that was hardly enough. How many difficulties would be removed if he could be really ill! Every now and then, as they climbed slowly on, he put his hand to his head, and each time the hair felt hot to the touch, like the fur of a cat that has been sitting in front of the fire. It was a pity, he thought, that his hair was so thick.

Three hours later they had found what they were looking for. Brian’s body was lying, face downwards, in a kind of rocky bay, at the foot of a cliff above the tarn. Bracken was growing between the rocks, and in the hot air its sweetish, oppressive scent was almost suffocatingly strong. The place was loud with flies. When the policeman turned the body over, the mangled face was almost unrecognizable. Anthony looked for a moment, then turned away. His whole body had begun to tremble uncontrollably; he had to lean against a rock to prevent himself from falling.

‘Come, lad.’ The old shepherd took him by the arm, and leading him away, made him sit down on the grass, out of sight of the body. Anthony waited. A buzzard turned slowly in the sky, tracing out the passage of time on an invisible clock-face. Then at last they came out from behind the buttress of rock into his view. The shepherd and the boy walked in front, each holding one pole of the stretcher, while the policeman, behind, had to support the weight on both the poles. Brian’s torn jacket had been taken off and spread over his face. One stiffened arm stuck out irrepressibly and, at every step the bearers took, swung and trembled in the air. There were bloodstains on the shirt. Anthony got up, and, in spite of their protestations, insisted on taking half the policeman’s burden. Very slowly, they made their way down towards the valley. It was after three o’clock when at last they reached the cottage.

Later, the policeman went through the pockets of coat and trousers. A tobacco pouch, a pipe, Mrs Benson’s packet of sandwiches, six or seven shillings in money, and a notebook half full of jottings about the economic history of the Roman Empire. Not the smallest hint that what had happened had been anything but an accident.

Mrs Foxe arrived the following evening. Rigid at first with self-control, she listened in silence, stonily, to Anthony’s story; then, all at once, broke down, fell to pieces as it were, in a passion of tears. Anthony stood by her for a moment, uncertainly; then crept out of the room.

Next morning, when he saw her again, Mrs Foxe had recovered her calm – but a different kind of calm. The calm of a living, sentient being, not the mechanical and frozen stillness of a statue. There were dark lines under her eyes, and the face was that of an old and suffering woman; but there was a sweetness and serenity in the suffering, an expression of dignity, almost of majesty. Looking at her, Anthony felt himself abashed, as though he were in the presence of something that he was not worthy, that he had no right, to approach. Abashed and guilty, more guilty even than he had felt the night before, when her grief had passed beyond her control.

He would have liked to escape once more; but she kept him with her all the morning, sometimes sitting in silence, sometimes speaking in that slow, beautifully modulated voice of hers. To Anthony silence and speech were equally a torture. It was an agony to sit there, saying nothing, listening to the clock ticking, and wondering, worrying about the future – how to get away from Joan, what to tell her about that accursed letter of hers; and every now and then stealing a glance at Mrs Foxe and asking himself what was going on in her mind and whether she had any knowledge, any suspicion even, of what had really happened. Yes, her silences were painful; but equally painful was her speech.

‘I realize,’ she began, slowly and pensively, ‘I realize now that I loved him in the wrong way – too possessively.’

What was he to say? That it was true? Of course it was true. She had been like a vampire, fastened on poor Brian’s spirit. Sucking his life’s blood. (St Monica, he remembered, by Ary Scheffer.) Yes, a vampire. If anyone was responsible for Brian’s death, it was she. But his self-justificatory indignation against her evaporated as she spoke again.

‘Perhaps that was one of the reasons why it happened, in order that I might learn that love mustn’t be like that.’ Then, after a pause, ‘I suppose,’ she went on, ‘Brian had learnt enough. He hadn’t very much to learn, really. He knew so much to start with. Like Mozart – only his genius wasn’t for music; it was for love. Perhaps that was why he could go so soon. Whereas I . . .’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve had to have this lesson. After all these long years of learning, still so wilfully stupid and ignorant!’ She sighed and was silent once more.

A vampire – but she knew it; she admitted her share of responsibility. There remained his share – still unconfessed. ‘I ought to tell her,’ he said to himself, and thought of all that had resulted from his failure to tell the truth to Brian. But while he was hesitating, Mrs Foxe began again.

‘One ought to love everyone like an only son,’ she went on. ‘And one’s own only son as one amongst them. A son one can’t help loving more than the rest, because one has more opportunities for loving him. But the love would be different only in quantity, not in kind. One ought to love him as one loves all the other only sons – for God’s sake, not for one’s own.’

The richly vibrant voice spoke on, and, with every word it uttered, Anthony felt more guilty – more guilty, and at the same time more completely and hopelessly committed to his guilt. The longer he delayed and the more she said in this strain of resignation, the harder it was going to be to undeceive her with the truth.

‘Listen, Anthony,’ she resumed, after another long pause. ‘You know how fond of you I’ve always been. Ever since that time just after your mother’s death – do you remember? – when you first came to stay with us. You were such a defenceless little boy. And that’s how I’ve always seen you, ever since. Defenceless under your armour. For, of course, you’ve had an armour. You still have. To protect yourself against me, among other dangers.’ She smiled at him. Anthony dropped his eyes, blushed and mumbled some incoherent phrase. ‘Never mind why you’ve wanted to protect yourself,’ she went on. ‘I don’t want to know, unless you want to tell me. And perhaps you’ll feel you want to protect yourself still more now. Because I’m going to say that I’d like you to take Brian’s place. The place,’ she qualified, ‘that Brian ought to have had if I’d loved him in the right way. Among all the other only sons, the one whom there’s more opportunity of loving than the rest. That’s what I’d like you to be, Anthony. But, of course, I won’t force myself on you. It’s for you to decide.’

He sat in silence, his face averted from her, his head bent. ‘Blurt it out,’ a voice was crying within him. ‘Anyhow, at any price!’ But if it had been difficult before, now it was impossible. Saying she wanted him to take Brian’s place! It was she who had made it impossible. He was shaken by a gust of futile anger. If only she’d leave him in peace, let him go away and be alone! Suddenly his throat contracted, the tears came into his eyes, the muscles of his chest tightened in spasm after violent spasm; he was sobbing. Mrs Foxe crossed the room, and bending over him, laid a hand on his shoulder.

‘Poor Anthony,’ she whispered.

He was pinned irrevocably to his lie.

That evening he wrote to Joan. This horrible accident. So unnecessary. So stupid in its tragedy. It had happened, as a matter of fact, before he had had an opportunity for telling Brian about those events in London. And, by the way, had she written to Brian? An envelope addressed in her handwriting had been delivered at mid-day, when the poor fellow had already started out. He was keeping it for her and would return it personally, when he saw her next. Meanwhile, Mrs Foxe was bearing it wonderfully; and they must all be brave; and he was always hers affectionately.

CHAPTER LIII

February 23rd 1934

HELEN CAME INTO the sitting-room, holding a frying-pan in which the bacon was still spluttering from the fire.

‘Breakfast!’ she called.

‘Komme gleich’ came back from the bedroom, and a moment later Ekki showed himself at the open door in shirtsleeves, razor in hand, his fair ruddy face covered with soapsuds.

‘Almost finished,’ he said in English, and disappeared again.

Helen smiled to herself as she sat down. Loving him as she did, she found an extraordinary pleasure in this close and incessant physical intimacy with him – the intimacy that their poverty had perforce imposed on them. Why do people want large houses, separate rooms, all the private hiding-places that the rich find indispensable? She couldn’t imagine, now. Humming to herself, out of tune, Helen poured out the tea, helped herself to bacon, then began to sort the morning’s letters. Helen Amberley. No Mrs. Communist frankness and informality. She opened the envelope. The letter was from Newcastle. Would it be possible for her or Giesebrecht to speak to a group of young comrades on conditions in Germany some time in March? Well, one would have to see. Mr E. Giesebrecht. From Switzerland; and surely that thin spiky writing was Holtzmann’s. Ekki would be pleased.

‘Something from Holtzmann,’ she said as he came in. ‘I wonder what news he’ll have this time?’

Ekki took the letter, and, with that methodical deliberation that characterized all his actions, opened it; then, laid it down beside his plate and cut off a piece of bacon. He poked the bacon into his mouth, picked up the letter again, and, slowly chewing, began to read. An expression of intent and focused gravity came into his face; he could never do anything except thoroughly and wholeheartedly. When he had finished, he turned back to the first page and started reading all over again.

Helen’s impatience got the better of her at last. ‘Anything interesting?’ she asked. Holtzmann was the best informed of the exiled journalists; he always had something to communicate. ‘Tell me what he says.’

Ekki did not answer at once, but read on in silence for a few seconds, then folded up the letter and put it away in his pocket. ‘Mach is in Basel,’ he answered at last, looking up at her.

‘Mach?’ she repeated. ‘Do you mean Ludwig Mach?’

In the course of these last months, the name of this most resourceful and courageous of all the German comrades engaged in the dissemination of communist propaganda and censored news had become, for Helen, at once familiar and fabulous, like the name of a personage in literature or mythology. That Ludwig Mach should be at Basel seemed almost as improbable as that Odysseus should be there, or Odin, or the Scarlet Pimpernel. ‘Ludwig Mach from Stuttgart?’ she insisted incredulously.

Ekki nodded. ‘I shall have to go and see him. Tomorrow.’

Spoken in that slow, emphatic, foreign way of his, the words had a strange quality of absolute irrevocableness. Even his most casual statements always sounded, when uttered in English, as though he had made an oath.

‘I shall have to go,’ he repeated.

Carefully, conscientiously pronounced, each syllable had the same value. Two heavy spondees and the first half of a third. Whereas an Englishman, however irrevocably he had made up his mind, would have spoken the phrase as a kind of gobbled anapaest – I-shall-have-to-go. In another man, this way of speaking – so ponderous, so Jehovah-like, as she herself had teasingly called it – would have seemed to Helen intolerably grotesque. But, in Ekki, it was an added attraction. It seemed somehow right and fitting that this man, whom (quite apart from loving) she admired and respected beyond anyone she had ever known, should be thus touchingly absurd.

‘If I couldn’t laugh at him sometimes,’ she explained to herself, ‘it might all go putrid. A pool of stagnant adoration. Like religion. Like one of Landseer’s dogs. The laughter keeps it aired and moving.’

Listening, looking into his face (at once so absurdly ingenuous in its fresh and candid gravity and so heroically determined) Helen felt, as she had so often felt before, that she would like to burst out laughing and then go down on her knees and kiss his hands.

‘I shall have to go too,’ she said aloud, parodying his way of speaking. He thought at first that she was joking; then, when he realized that she was in earnest, grew serious and began to raise objections. The fatigue – for they would be travelling third-class. The expense. But Helen was suddenly like her mother – a spoilt woman whose caprices had to be satisfied.

‘It’ll be such fun,’ she cried excitedly. ‘Such an adventure!’ And when he persisted in being negatively reasonable, she grew angry. ‘But I will come with you,’ she repeated obstinately. ‘I will.’

Holtzmann met them at the station, and, instead of being the tall, stiff, distinguished personage of Helen’s anticipatory fancy, turned out to be short and squat, with a roll of fat at the back of his neck, and, between little pig’s eyes, a soft shapeless nose like a potato. His hand, when she shook it, was so coldly sweaty that she felt her own defiled; surreptitiously, when he wasn’t looking, she wiped it on her skirt. But worse than even his appearance and his sweaty hands was the man’s behaviour. Her presence, she could see, had taken him aback.

‘I had not expected . . .’ he stammered, when Ekki presented her; and his face, for a moment, seemed to disintegrate in agitation. Then, recovering himself, he became effusively polite and cordial. It was gnädige Frau, lieber Ekki, unbeschreiblich froh all the way down the platform. As though he were meeting them on the stage, Helen thought. And acting badly, what was more, like someone in a third-rate touring company. And how detestable that nervousness was! A man had no business to giggle like that and gesticulate and make grimaces. Mopping and mowing, she said under her breath. Walking beside him, she felt herself surrounded by a bristling aura of dislike. This horrible creature had suddenly spoilt all the fun of the journey. She found herself almost wishing that she hadn’t come.

‘What a loathsome man!’ she managed to whisper to Ekki, while Holtzmann was engaged in extravagantly overacting the part of one who tells the porter to be careful with the typewriter.

‘You find him so?’ Ekki asked with genuine surprise. ‘I had not thought . . .’ He left the sentence unfinished and shook his head. A little frown of perplexity wrinkled his smooth forehead. But a moment later, interrupting Holtzmann’s renewed protestations of affection and delight, he was asking what Mach thought of the present situation in Germany; and when Holtzmann replied, he listened, absorbed.

Half angry with him for his insensitive obtuseness, half admiring him for his power to ignore everything that, to him, was irrelevant, Helen walked in silence at his side.

‘Men are extraordinary,’ she was thinking. ‘All the same, I ought to be like that.’

Instead of which she allowed herself to be distracted by faces, by gigglings and gestures; she wasted her feelings on pigs’ eyes and rolls of fat. And all the time millions of men and women and children were going cold and hungry, were being exploited, were being overworked, were being treated as though they were less than human, mere beasts of burden, mere cogs and levers; millions were being forced to live in chronic fear and misery and despair, were being dragooned and beaten, were being maddened with lies and cowed with threats and blows, were being herded this way and that like senseless animals on the road to market, to an ultimate slaughter-house. And here was she, detesting Holtzmann, because he had sweaty hands – instead of respecting him, as she should have done, for what he had dared, what he had suffered for the sake of those unhappy millions. His hands might be sweaty; but he lived precariously in exile, had been persecuted for his principles, was a champion of justice and truth. She felt ashamed of herself, but at the same time couldn’t help thinking that life, if you were like Ekki, must be strangely narrow and limited, unimaginably without colour. A life in black and white, she reflected, hard and clear and definite, like a Dürer engraving. Whereas hers – hers was a vague bright Turner, a Monet, a savage Gauguin. But ‘you look like a Gauguin,’ Anthony had said, that morning on the blazing roof, and here in the chilly twilight of Basel station she suddenly winced, as though with physical pain.

‘Oh, how awful,’ she said to herself, ‘how awful!’

‘And the labour camps,’ Ekki was asking, intently, ‘what does Mach say about the feeling in the labour camps?’

Outside the station they halted.

‘Shall we begin by taking our things to a hotel?’ Ekki suggested.

But Holtzmann would not hear of it. ‘No, no, you must come at once,’ he insisted with a breathless emphasis. ‘To my house at once. Mach is waiting there. Mach wouldn’t understand it if there was any delay.’ But when Ekki agreed, he still stood irresolute and nervous at the pavement’s edge, like a swimmer afraid to plunge.

‘What’s the matter with the man?’ Helen wondered impatiently; then aloud, ‘Well, why don’t we take a taxi?’ she asked, forgetting for the moment that the time of taxis had long since come to an end. One took trams now, one took buses. But Gauguin had precipitated her into the past; it seemed natural to think of taxis.

Holtzmann did not answer her; but suddenly, with the quick, agitated movements of one who has been forced by circumstances to take a disagreeable decision, caught Ekki by the arm, and, drawing him aside, began to speak to him in a hurried whisper. Helen saw a look of surprise and annoyance come over Ekki’s face as he listened. His lips moved, he was evidently making an objection. The other replied in smiling deprecation and began to stroke his sleeve, as though in the hope of caressing him into acquiescence.

In the end Ekki nodded, and, turning back to Helen, ‘Holtzmann wants you to join us only at lunch,’ he said in his abrupt, heavy way. ‘He says that Mach wouldn’t like it if there is anyone besides me.’

‘Does he think I’ll give him away to the Nazis?’ Helen asked indignantly.

‘It isn’t you,’ Ekki explained. ‘He doesn’t know you. If he did, it would be different. But he is afraid. Afraid of everyone he does not know. And he is quite right to be afraid,’ he added, in that tone of dogmatic finality which meant that the argument was closed.

Making a great effort to swallow her annoyance and chagrin, Helen nodded her head. ‘All right then, I’ll meet you at lunch-time. Though what the point was of my coming here at all,’ she couldn’t help adding, ‘I really can’t imagine.’

‘Dear Miss Amberley, chère consœur, gnädige Frau, comrade . . .’ Holtzmann overflowed with bourgeois and communist courtesies in all the languages at his disposal. ‘Es tut mir so leid. So very sorry.’ But here was the address of his house. At half-past twelve. And if he might advise her on the best way of spending a morning in Basel . . .

She slipped the card into her bag, and without waiting to listen to his suggestions, turned her back on the two men and walked quickly away.

‘Helen!’ Ekki called after her. But she paid no attention. He did not call again.

It was cold; but the sky was a clear pale blue, the sun was shining. And suddenly, emerging from behind high houses, she found herself beside the Rhine. Leaning over the parapet, she watched the green water hurrying past, silent, but swift and purposive, like a living thing, like life itself, like the power behind the world, eternally, irresistibly flowing; watching it, until at last it was as though she herself were flowing along with the great river, were one with it, a partaker of its power. ‘And shall Trelawney die?’ she found herself singing. ‘And shall Trelawney die? There’s twenty thousand Cornish men shall know the rea-ea-eason why.’ And suddenly it seemed certain that they would win, that the revolution was only just round the corner – there, after that first bend in the river. Irresistibly the flood drove on towards it. And meanwhile what a fool she had been to be cross with Ekki, what an absolute beast! Remorse gave place, after a little, to the ecstatically tender anticipation of their reconcilement. ‘Darling,’ she would say to him, ‘darling, you must forgive me. I was really too stupid and odious.’ And he would put one arm round her, and with the other hand would push back the hair from her forehead and then bend down and kiss her . . .

When she walked on, the Rhine was still rushing within her, and, unburdened of her offence towards Ekki, she felt immaterially light, felt almost as though she were floating – floating in a thin intoxicating air of happiness. The starving millions receded once more into remote abstraction. How good everything was, how beautiful, how exactly as it ought to be! Even the fat old women were perfect, even the nineteenth-century Gothic houses. And that cup of hot chocolate in the café – how indescribably delicious! And the old waiter, so friendly and paternal. Friendly and paternal, what was more, in an astonishing Swiss-German that made one want to roar with laughter, as though everything he said – from his commentaries on the weather to his complaints about the times – were one huge, continuous joke. Such gutturals, such neighings! Like the language of the Houyhnhnms, she thought, and led him on, with an unwearying delight in the performance, to hoick and whinny yet again.

From the café she went on at last to the picture gallery; and the picture gallery turned out to be as exquisitely comic in its own way as the waiter’s German. Those Boecklins! All the extraordinary pictures one had only seen on postcards or hanging, in coloured reproduction, on the walls of pensions in Dresden. Mermaids and tritons caught as though by a camera; centaurs in the stiff ungainly positions of race-horses in a pressman’s photograph. Painted with a good faith and a laborious lack of talent that were positively touching. And here – unspeakable joy! – was the Toteninsel. The funereal cypresses, the white tomb-like temples, the long-robed figures, the solitary boat on its way across the wine-dark sea . . . The joke was perfect. Helen laughed aloud. In spite of everything, she was still her mother’s daughter.

In the room of the primitives she paused for a moment, on her way out, before a picture of the martyrdom of St Erasmus. An executioner in fifteenth-century costume, with a pale shell-pink cod-piece, was methodically turning the handle of a winch – like Mr Mantalini at the mangle – winding the saint’s intestines, yard after yard, out of a gash in the emaciated belly, while the victim lay back, as if on a sofa, making himself thoroughly comfortable and looking up into the sky with an expression of unruffled equanimity. The joke here was less subtle than in Toteninsel, more frankly a knockabout; but excellent, none the less, in its own simple way. She was still smiling as she walked out into the street.

Holtzmann, it turned out, lived only a few hundred yards from the gallery, in a pretty little early nineteenth-century house (much too good for a man with sweaty hands!) set back from the road behind a little square of gravel. A large car was standing at the door. Holtzmann’s? she wondered. He must be rich, the old pig! It had taken her so little time to come from the gallery that it was hardly a quarter-past twelve as she mounted the steps. ‘Never mind,’ she said to herself. ‘They’ll have to put up with me. I refuse to wait one second longer.’ The thought that, in a moment, she would see Ekki again made her heart beat quickly. ‘What a fool I am! What an absolute fool.’ But how marvellous to be able to be a fool! She rang the bell.

It was Holtzmann himself who opened – dressed in an overcoat, she was surprised to see, as though he were just going out. The expression with which he had greeted her at the station reappeared on his face as he saw her.

‘You are so soon,’ he said, trying to smile; but his nervousness and embarrassment amounted almost to terror. ‘We had not awaited you until half-one.’

Helen laughed. ‘I hadn’t awaited myself,’ she explained. ‘But I got here quicker than I thought.’

She made a movement to step across the threshold; but Holtzmann held out his arm. ‘We are not yet ready,’ he said. His face was flushed and sweating with embarrassment. ‘If you will return in a quarter hour,’ he almost implored. ‘Only a quarter hour.’

‘Nur ein Viertel Stündchen.’ Helen laughed, thinking of those embroidered cushions on the sofas where the Geheimrats slept off the effects of noonday eating. ‘But why shouldn’t I wait indoors?’ She pushed past him into a dark little hall that smelt of cooking and stale air. ‘Where’s Ekki?’ she asked, suddenly overcome by the desire to see him, to see him at once, without another second’s delay, so that she could tell him what a beast she had been, but how loving all the same, how adoring in spite of the beastliness, and how happy, how eager to share her happiness with him! At the other end of the vestibule a door stood ajar. Calling his name, Helen ran towards it.

‘Stop!’ Holtzmann shouted behind her.

But she was already across the threshold.

The room in which she found herself was a bedroom. On the narrow iron bed Ekki was lying with all his clothes on, his head on one side, his mouth open. His breath came slowly in long snores; he was asleep – but asleep as she had never seen him sleeping.

‘Ekki!’ she had time to cry, while a door slammed, another voice joined itself to Holtzmann’s, and the vestibule was loud with violent movement. ‘My darling . . .’

Then suddenly a hand closed on her shoulder from behind. She turned, saw the face of a strange man within a few inches of her own, heard somewhere from the background Holtzmann’s ‘Schnell, Willi, schnell!’ and the stranger almost whispering, between clenched teeth, Schmutziges Frauenzimmer’; then, as she opened her mouth to scream, received a terrible blow on the chin that brought the teeth violently together again, and felt herself dropping into blackness.

When she came to herself, she was in bed in a hospital ward. Some peasants had found her lying unconscious in a little wood five or six miles from the town. An ambulance had brought her back to Basel. It was only on the following morning that the effects of the barbitone wore off and she remembered what had happened. But by that time Ekki had been over the frontier, in Germany, for nearly twenty hours.

CHAPTER LIV

February 23rd 1935

ANTHONY HAD SPENT the morning at the offices of the organization, dictating letters. For the most part, it was a matter of dealing with the intellectual difficulties of would-be pacifists. ‘What would you do if you saw a foreign soldier attacking your sister?’ Well, whatever else one did, one certainly wouldn’t send one’s son to murder his second cousin. Wearisome work! But it had to be done. He dictated twenty-seven letters; then it was time to go to lunch with Helen.

‘There’s practically nothing to eat,’ she said, when he came in. ‘I simply couldn’t be bothered to cook anything. The unspeakable boredom of making meals!’ Her voice took on a note of almost malevolent resentment.

They addressed themselves to tinned salmon and lettuce. Anthony tried to talk; but his words seemed to bounce off the impenetrable surface of her sullen and melancholy silence. In the end, he too sat speechless.

‘It’s just a year ago today,’ she brought out at last.

‘What is?’

‘Just a year since those devils at Basel . . .’ She shook her head and was silent again.

Anthony said nothing. Anything he could say would be an irrelevance, he felt, almost an insult.

‘I often wish they’d killed me too,’ she went on slowly. ‘Instead of leaving me here, rotting away, like a piece of dirt on a rubbish heap. Like a dead kitten,’ she added, as an afterthought. ‘So much carrion.’ The words were spoken with a vehement disgust.

‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.

‘Because it’s true. I am carrion.’

‘There’s no need for you to be.’

‘I can’t help it. I’m carrion by nature.’

‘No, you’re not,’ he insisted. ‘You’ve said it yourself. When Ekki was there . . .’

‘No, I wasn’t carrion then.’

‘What you’ve been once, you can be again.’

‘Not without him.’

He nodded. ‘Yes, if you want to be, you can. It’s a matter of choosing. Choosing and then setting to work in the right way.’

Helen shook her head. ‘They ought to have killed me. If you only knew how I disgust myself!’ She screwed up her face into a grimace. ‘I’m no good. Worse than no good. Just a lump of dirt.’ After a pause, ‘I’m not even interested in Ekki’s work,’ she went on. ‘I don’t like his friends. Communists. But they’re just beastly little people, like anyone else. Stupid, vulgar, envious, pushing. One might as well have the fun of wearing a chinchilla coat and lunching at Claridge’s. I shall probably end by selling myself to a rich man. That is, if I can find one.’ She laughed again. Then, in a tone of more bitter self-contempt, ‘Only a year today,’ she resumed, ‘and already I’m sick of it all. Utterly sick of it and pining to get out of it. I’m disgusting.’

‘But are you entirely to blame?’

‘Of course I am.’

Anthony shook his head. ‘Perhaps it’s also the fault of the work.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Organized hatred – it’s not exactly attractive. Not what most people feel they really want to live for.’

‘Ekki lived for it. Lots of people live for it.’

‘But what sort of people?’ he asked. ‘They’re of three kinds. Idealists with an exceptional gift for self-deception. Either they don’t know that it’s organized hatred, or else they genuinely believe that the end justifies the means, genuinely imagine that the means don’t condition the end. Ekki was one of those. They form the majority. And then there are two minorities. A minority of people who know that the thing’s organized hatred and rejoice in the fact. And a minority that’s ambitious, that merely uses the movement as a convenient machine for realizing its ambition. You, Helen – you’re neither ambitious nor self-deceiving. And, in spite of what happened this day last year, don’t really want to liquidate people – not even Nazis. And that’s why the chinchillas and the orchids seem so attractive. Not because you actively long for them. Only because this particular alternative is so unsatisfactory.’

There was a silence. Helen got up, changed the plates and set a bowl of fruit on the table. ‘What is the satisfactory alternative?’ she asked, as she helped herself to an apple.

‘It begins,’ he answered, ‘with trying to cultivate the difficult art of loving people.’

‘But most people are detestable.’

‘They’re detestable, because we detest them. If we liked them, they’d be likeable.’

‘Do you think that’s true?’

‘I’m sure it’s true.’

‘And what do you do after that?’

‘There’s no “after,”’ he replied. ‘Because, of course, it’s a lifetime’s job. Any process of change is a lifetime’s job. Every time you get to the top of a peak, you see another peak in front of you – a peak that you couldn’t see from lower down. Take the mind-body mechanism, for example. You begin to learn how to use it better; you make an advance; from the position you’ve advanced to, you discover how you can use it better still. And so on, indefinitely. The ideal ends recede as you approach them; they’re seen to be other and more remarkable than they seemed before the advance was begun. It’s the same when one tries to change one’s relations with other people. Every step forward reveals the necessity of making new steps forward – unanticipated steps, towards a destination one hadn’t seen when one set out. Yes, it lasts a lifetime,’ he repeated. ‘There can’t be any “after.” There can only be an attempt, as one goes along, to project what one had discovered on the personal level on to the level of politics and economics. One of the first discoveries,’ he added, ‘one of the very first one makes, is that organized hatred and violence aren’t the best means for securing justice and peace. All men are capable of love for all other men. But we’ve artificially restricted our love. By means of conventions of hatred and violence. Restricted it within families and clans, within classes and nations. Your friends want to remove those restrictions by using more hatred and violence – that’s to say, by using exactly the same means as were the original causes of the restrictions.’ He smiled. ‘Can you be surprised if you find the work a bit unsatisfying?’

Helen looked at him for a little in silence, then shook her head. ‘I prefer my chinchillas.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Yes, I do. I’d rather be a lump of dirt. It’s easier.’ She got up. ‘What about some coffee?’ In the little kitchen, as they were waiting for the water to boil, she suddenly started to tell him about that young man in advertising. She had met him a couple of weeks before. Such an amusing and intelligent creature! And he had fallen violently in love with her. Her face brightened with a kind of reckless, laughing malice. ‘Blue eyes,’ she said, cataloguing the young man’s merits, as though she were an auctioneer, ‘curly hair, tremendous shoulders, narrow hips, first-rate amateur boxer – which is more than you ever were, my poor Anthony,’ she added parenthetically and in a tone of contemptuous commiseration. ‘In fact, thoroughly bedworthy. Or at least he looks it. Because one never really knows till one’s tried, does one?’ She laughed. ‘I’ve a good mind to try tonight,’ she went on. ‘To commemorate this anniversary. Don’t you think it would be a good idea, Anthony?’ And when he didn’t answer, ‘Don’t you think so?’ she insisted. ‘Don’t you think so?’ She looked into his face, trying to detect in it the signs of anger, or jealousy, or disgust.

Anthony smiled back at her. ‘It isn’t so easy, being a lump of dirt,’ he said. ‘In fact, I should say it was very hard work indeed.’

The brightness faded out of her face. ‘Hard work,’ she repeated. ‘Perhaps that’s one of the reasons for going on trying.’ After a pause, while she poured the water into the percolator, ‘Did you say you were having a meeting tonight?’

‘In Battersea.’

‘Perhaps I shall come and listen to you. Unless,’ she added, making an effort to laugh, ‘unless, of course, I’ve decided to celebrate the anniversary in the other way.’

When they had drunk their coffee, Anthony walked back to his rooms, to put in a few hours’ work at the new pamphlet he had promised to write for Purchas. Two letters had come by the mid-day delivery. One was from Miller, describing the excellent meetings he had been having in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The other, without an address, was typewritten.

‘SIR,’ it began, ‘we have been keeping an eye on you for some time past, and have decided that you cannot be allowed to go on in your present disloyal and treacherous way. We give you fair warning. If you make any more of your dirty pacifist speeches, we shall deal with you as you deserve. Appealing to the police will not do any good. We shall get you sooner or later, and it will not be pleasant for you. It is announced that you are speaking tonight in Battersea. We shall be there. So we advise you, if you value your yellow skin, to keep away. You do not deserve this warning, but we want to behave sportingly even towards a skunk like you. – Yours faithfully,

A GROUP OF PATRIOTIC ENGLISHMEN.’

A joke, Anthony wondered? No, probably serious. He smiled. ‘How virtuous they must be feeling!’ he said to himself. ‘And how heroic! Striking their blow for England.’

But the blow, he went on to reflect, as he sat down in front of the fire, the blow would fall upon himself – if he spoke, that was to say, if they weren’t prevented from attacking him. And, of course, there could be no question of not speaking. No question of calling on the police for protection. Nothing to do but practise what he had been preaching.

But would he have the strength of mind to see it through? Suppose they set on him, suppose they started to knock him about? Would he know how to stand it?

He tried to work on the pamphlet; but the personal questions insistently recurred, thrusting aside those remoter and impersonal problems of colonies and prestige, markets, investment, migration. He visualized the horrible expression of anger on the men’s distorted faces, heard in his fancy their violent insulting words, saw hands, lifted, falling. Would he be able to prevent himself from flinching? And the pain of blows – sharp, excruciating, on the face, heavy and sickening on the body – how much would he be able to bear, for how long? If only Miller were here to give advice and encouragement! But Miller was in Glasgow.

Doubt of himself grew upon him. To stand there, letting himself be struck, without hitting back, without giving ground – he would never be able to do that.

‘I shan’t have the guts,’ he kept repeating, and was obsessed by the fear of being afraid. Remembering the way he had behaved at Tapatlan, he blushed with shame. And, this time, the disgrace would be public. They would all know – Helen with the rest.

And this time, he went on to think, this time there wouldn’t be the excuse of surprise. They had given him warning – ‘even to a skunk like you.’ And besides, he had been training himself for months past to cope with just such a contingency as this. The scene had been rehearsed. He knew by heart every cue and gesture. But when the time actually came, when the pain was no longer imaginary but real, would he remember his part? What guarantee was there that he wouldn’t hopelessly break down? In front of Helen – when Helen was standing hesitant on the threshold of her own life, perhaps also of his. Besides, if he broke down, he would be discrediting more than himself. To break down would be to deny his convictions, to invalidate his philosophy, to betray his friends. ‘But why are you such a fool?’ a small voice began to question; ‘why do you go and saddle yourself with convictions and philosophies? And why put yourself in the position of being able to betray anyone? Why not go back to doing what nature meant you to do – to looking on from your private box and making comments? What does it all matter, after all? And even if it matters, what can you do? Why not quietly resign yourself to the inevitable, and in the interval get on with the job you can do best?’

The voice spoke out of a cloud of fatigue. For a minute he was nothing but a dead, dry husk enclosing black weariness and negation. ‘Ring them up,’ the voice went on. ‘Tell them you’ve got flu. Stay in bed a few days. Then have yourself ordered to the south of France by the doctor . . .’

Suddenly he laughed aloud. From sinister, from insidiously persuasive, that small voice had become absurd. Carried to such a pitch, expressed so ingenuously, baseness was almost comic.

‘Unity,’ he said in an articulate whisper.

He was committed to them, as a hand is committed to the arm. Committed to his friends, committed even to those who had declared themselves his enemies. There was nothing he could do but would affect them all, enemies and friends alike – for good, if what he did were good, for evil if it were wrong. Unity, he repeated. Unity.

Unity of mankind, unity of all life, all being even.

Physical unity, first of all. Unity even in diversity, even in separation. Separate patterns, but everywhere alike. Everywhere the same constellations of the ultimate units of energy. The same on the surface of the sun as in the living flesh warmed by the sun’s radiance; in the scented cluster of buddleia flowers as in the blue sea and the clouds on the horizon; in the drunken Mexican’s pistol as in the dark dried blood on that mangled face among the rocks, the fresh blood spattered scarlet over Helen’s naked body, the drops oozing from the raw contusion on Mark’s knee.

Identical patterns, and identical patternings of patterns. He held the thought of them in his mind, and, along with it, the thought of life incessantly moving among the patterns, selecting and rejecting for its own purposes. Life building up simpler into more complex patterns – identically complex through vast ranges of animate being.

The sperm enters the egg, the cell divides and divides, to become at last this man, that rat or horse. A cow’s pituitary will make frogs breed out of season. Urine of a pregnant woman brings the mouse on heat. Sheep’s thyroid transforms the axolotl from a gilled larva into an air-breathing salamander, the cretinous dwarf into a well-grown and intelligent human being. Between one form of animal life and another, patterns are interchangeable. Interchangeable also between animal and plant, plant and the inanimate world. Patterns in seed and leaf and root, patterns built up from simpler patterns existent in the air and soil – these can be assimilated and transformed by insect, reptile, mammal, fish.

The unity of life. Unity demonstrated even in the destruction of one life by another. Life and all being are one. Otherwise no living thing could ever derive sustenance from another or from the unloving substances around it. One even in destruction, one in spite of separation. Each organism is unique. Unique and yet united with all other organisms in the sameness of its ultimate parts; unique above a substratum of physical identity.

And minds – minds are also unique, but unique above a substratum of mental identity. Identity and interchange-ableness of love, trust, courage. Fearless affection restores the lunatic to sanity, transforms the hostile savage into a friend, tames the wild animal. The mental pattern of love can be transferred from one mind to another and still retain its virtue, just as the physical pattern of a hormone can be transferred, with all its effectiveness, from one body to another.

And not only love, but hate as well; not only trust, but suspicion; not only kindness, generosity, courage, but also malevolence and greed and fear.

Divisive emotions; but the fact that they can be interchanged, can be transferred from mind to mind and retain all their original passion, is a demonstration of the fundamental unity of minds.

Reality of unity, but equal reality of division – greater reality, indeed, of division. No need to meditate the fact of division. One is constantly aware of it. Constantly aware of being unique and separate; only sometimes, and then most often only intellectually, only as the result of a process of discursive thought, aware of being one with other minds, other lives and all being. Occasionally an intuition of unity, an intuition coming at random, or sought for, step by step, in meditation.

One, one, one, he repeated; but one in division; united and yet separate.

Evil is the accentuation of division; good, whatever makes for unity with other lives and other beings. Pride, hatred, anger – the essentially evil sentiments; and essentially evil because they are all intensifications of the given reality of separateness, because they insist upon division and uniqueness, because they reject and deny other lives and beings. Lust and greed are also insistences upon uniqueness, but insistences which do not entail any negative awareness of the others from whom the unique being is divided. Lust only says, ‘I must have pleasure,’ not ‘You must have pain.’ Green in its pure state is merely a demand for my satisfaction, not for your exclusion from satisfaction. They are wrong in emphasizing the separate self; but less wrong than pride or hatred or anger, because their self-emphasis is not accompanied by denial of others.

But why division at all? Why, unavoidably, even in the completest love, and, at the other end of the scale of being, even in that which is or seems to be below right and wrong, why must the evil of separation persist? Separation even of saint from saint, and separation even of mere physical pattern from mere physical pattern. One man cannot eat for another. The best must think, must enjoy and suffer, must touch, see, smell, hear, taste in isolation. The good man is merely a less completely closed universe than the bad; but still closed, even as the atom is closed.

And, of course, if there is to be existence – existence as we know it – being must be organized in closed universes. Minds like ours can only perceive undifferentiated unity as nothing. Unescapable paradox that we should desire that n should be equal to one, but that, in fact, we should always find that one is equal to nought.

Separation, diversity – conditions of our existence. Conditions upon which we possess life and consciousness, know right and wrong and have the power to choose between them, recognize truth, have experience of beauty. But separation is evil. Evil, then, is the condition of life, the condition of being aware, of knowing what is good and beautiful.

That which is demanded, that which men come finally to demand of themselves, is the realization of union between beings who would be nothing if they were not separate; is the actualization of goodness by creatures who, if they were not evil, would not exist. Impossibility – but none the less demanded.

‘Born under one law, to another bound.’

He himself, Anthony went on to think, he himself had chosen to regard the whole process as either pointless or a practical joke. Yes, chosen. For it had been an act of the will. If it were all nonsense or a joke, then he was at liberty to read his books and exercise his talents for sarcastic comment; there was no reason why he shouldn’t sleep with any presentable woman who was ready to sleep with him. If it weren’t nonsense, if there were some significance, then he could no longer live irresponsibly. There were duties towards himself and others and the nature of things. Duties with whose fulfilment the sleeping and the indiscriminate reading and the habit of detached irony would interfere. He had chosen to think it nonsense, and nonsense for more than twenty years the thing had seemed to be – nonsense, in spite of occasional uncomfortable intimations that there might be a point, and that the point was precisely in what he had chosen to regard as the pointlessness, the practical joke. And now at last it was clear, now by some kind of immediate experience he knew that the point was in the paradox, in the fact that unity was the beginning and unity the end, and that in the meantime the condition of life and all existence was separation, which was equivalent to evil. Yes, the point, he insisted, is that one demands of oneself the achievement of the impossible. The point is that, even with the best will in the world, the separate, evil universe of a person or a physical pattern can never unite itself completely with other lives and beings, or the totality of life and being. Even for the highest goodness the struggle is without end; for never in the nature of present things can the shut become the wholly open; goodness can never free itself completely from evil. It is a test, an education – searching, difficult, drawn out through a lifetime, perhaps through long series of lifetimes. Lifetimes passed in the attempt to open up further and a little further the closed universe that perpetually tends to spring shut the moment that effort is relaxed. Passed in overcoming the separating passions of hate and malice and price. Passed in making still the self-emphasizing cravings. Passed in constant efforts to realize unity with other lives and other modes of being. To experience it in the act of love and compassion. To experience it on another plane through meditation, in the insight of direct intuition. Unity beyond the turmoil of separations and divisions. Goodness beyond the possibility of evil. But always the fact of separation persists, always evil remains the very condition of life and being. There must be no relaxation of the opening pressure. But even for the best of us, the consummation is still immeasurably remote.

Meanwhile there are love and compassion. Constantly obstructed. But, oh, let them be made indefatigable, implacable to surmount all obstacles, the inner sloth, the distaste, the intellectual scorn; and, from without, the other’s aversions and suspicions. Affection, compassion – and also, meanwhile, this contemplative approach, this effort to realize the unity of lives and being with the intellect, and at last, perhaps, intuitively in an act of complete understanding. From one argument to another, step by step, towards a consummation where there is no more discourse, only experience, only unmediated knowledge, as of a colour, a perfume, a musical sound. Step by step towards the experience of being no longer wholly separate, but united at the depths with other lives, with the rest of being. United in peace. In peace, he repeated, in peace, in peace. In the depth of every mind, peace. The same peace for all, continuous between mind and mind. At the surface, the separate waves, the whirlpools, the spray; but below them the continuous and undifferentiated expanse of sea, becoming calmer as it deepens, till at last there is an absolute stillness. Dark peace in the depths. A dark peace that is the same for all who can descend to it. Peace that by a strange paradox is the substance and source of the storm at the surface. Born of peace, the waves yet destroy peace; destroy it, but are necessary; for without the storm on the surface there would be no existence, no knowledge of goodness, no effort to allay the leaping frenzy of evil, no rediscovery of the underlying calm, no realization that the substance of the frenzy is the same as the substance of peace.

Frenzy of evil and separation. In peace there is unity. Unity with other lives. Unity with all being. For beneath all being, beneath the countless identical but separate patterns, beneath the attractions and repulsions, lies peace. The same peace as underlies the frenzy of the mind. Dark peace, immeasurably deep. Peace from pride and hatred and anger, peace from cravings and aversions, peace from all the separating frenzies. Peace through liberation, for peace is achieved freedom. Freedom and at the same time truth. The truth of unity actually experienced. Peace in the depths, under the storm, far down below the leaping of the waves, the frantically flying spray. Peace in this profound subaqueous night, peace in this silence, this still emptiness where there is no more time, where there are no more images, no more words. Nothing but the experience of peace; peace as a dark void beyond all personal life, and yet itself a form of life more intense, for all its diffuseness, for all the absence of aim or desire, richer and of finer quality than ordinary life. Peace beyond peace, focused at first, brought together, then opening out in a kind of boundless space. Peace at the tip, as it were, of a narrowing cone of concentration and elimination, a cone with its base in the distractions of the heaving surface of life and its point in the underlying darkness. And in the darkness the tip of one cone meets the tip of another; and, from a single, focal point, peace expands and expands towards a base immeasurably distant and so wide that its circle is the ground and source of all light, all being. Cone reversed from the broken and shifting light of the surface; cone reversed and descending to a point of concentrated darkness; thence, in another cone, expanding and expanding through the darkness towards, yes! some other light, steady, untroubled, as utterly calm as the darkness out of which it emerges. Cone reversed into cone upright. Passage from wide stormy light to the still focus of darkness; and thence, beyond the focus, through widening darkness into another light. From storm to calm and on through yet profounder and intenser peace to the final consummation, the ultimate light that is the source and substance of all things; source of the darkness, the void, the submarine night of living calm; source finally of the waves and the frenzy of the spray – forgotten now. For now there is only the darkness expanding and deepening, deepening into light; there is only this final peace, this consciousness of being no more separate, this illumination . . .

The clock struck seven. Slowly and cautiously he allowed himself to lapse out of the light, back through the darkness into the broken gleams and shadows of everyday existence. He rose at last and went to the kitchen to prepare himself some food. There was not much time; the meeting was at eight, and it would take him a good half-hour to reach the hall. He put a couple of eggs to boil, and sat down meanwhile to bread and cheese. Dispassionately, and with a serene lucidity, he thought of what was in store for him. Whatever it might be, he knew now that all would be well.

The End

After Many a Summer

First Published 1939

PART I

Chapter I

IT HAD all been arranged by telegram; Jeremy Pordage was to look out for a coloured chauffeur in a grey uniform with a carnation in his button-hole; and the coloured chauffeur was to look out for a middle-aged Englishman carrying the Poetical Works of Wordsworth. In spite of the crowds at the station, they found one another without difficulty.

“Mr. Stoyte’s chauffeur?”

“Mr. Pordage, sah?”

Jeremy nodded and, his Wordsworth in one hand, his umbrella in the other, half extended his arms in the gesture of a self-deprecatory mannequin exhibiting, with a full and humorous consciousness of their defects, a deplorable figure accentuated by the most ridiculous clothes. “A poor thing,” he seemed to be implying, “but myself.” A defensive and, so to say, prophylactic disparagement had become a habit with him. He resorted to it on every sort of occasion. Suddenly a new idea came into his head. Anxiously, he began to wonder whether, in this democratic Far West of theirs, one shook hands with the chauffeur—particularly if he happened to be a blackamoor, just to demonstrate that one wasn’t a pukka sahib even if one’s country did happen to be bearing the White Man’s burden. In the end he decided to do nothing. Or, to be more accurate, the decision was forced upon him—as usual, he said to himself, deriving a curious wry pleasure from the recognition of his own shortcomings. While he was hesitating what to do, the chauffeur took off his cap and, slightly over-acting the part of an old-world Negro retainer, bowed, smiled toothily and said:

“Welcome to Los Angeles, Mr. Pordage, sah!” Then, changing the tone of his chanting drawl from the dramatic to the confidential, “I should have knowed you by your voice, Mr. Pordage,” he went on, “even without the book.”

Jeremy laughed a little uncomfortably. A week in America had made him self-conscious about that voice of his. A product of Trinity College Cambridge, ten years before the War, it was a small, fluty voice, suggestive of evensong in an English cathedral. At home, when he used it, nobody paid any particular attention. He had never had to make jokes about it, as he had done, in self-protection, about his appearance, for example, or his age. Here, in America, things were different. He had only to order a cup of coffee or ask the way to the lavatory (which, anyhow, wasn’t called the lavatory in this disconcerting country) for people to stare at him with an amused and attentive curiosity, as though he were a freak on show in an amusement park. It had not been at all agreeable.

“Where’s my porter?” he said fussily in order to change the subject.

A few minutes later they were on their way. Cradled in the back seat of the car, out of range, he hoped, of the chauffeur’s conversation, Jeremy Pordage abandoned himself to the pleasure of merely looking. Southern California rolled past the windows; all he had to do was to keep his eyes open.

The first thing to present itself was a slum of Africans and Filipinos, Japanese and Mexicans. And what permutations and combinations of black, yellow and brown! What complex bastardies! And the girls—how beautiful in their artificial silk! “And Negro ladies in white muslin gowns.” His favourite line in The Prelude. He smiled to himself. And meanwhile the slum had given place to the tall buildings of a business district. The population took on a more Caucasian tinge. At every corner there was a drug-store. The newspaper boys were selling headlines about Franco’s drive on Barcelona. Most of the girls, as they walked along, seemed to be absorbed in silent prayer; but he supposed, on second thought, it was only gum that they were thus incessantly ruminating. Gum, not God. Then suddenly the car plunged into a tunnel and emerged into another world, a vast, untidy, suburban world of filling stations and billboards, of low houses in gardens, of vacant lots and waste paper, of occasional shops and office buildings and churches—primitive Methodist churches built, surprisingly enough, in the style of the Cartuja at Granada, Catholic churches like Canterbury Cathedral, synagogues disguised as Hagia Sophia, Christian Science churches with pillars and pediments, like banks. It was a winter day and early in the morning; but the sun shone brilliantly, the sky was without a cloud. The car was travelling westwards and the sunshine, slanting from behind them as they advanced, lit up each building, each sky sign and billboard as though with a spot-light, as though on purpose to show the new arrival all the sights.

EATS. COCKTAILS. OPEN NITES.

JUMBO MALTS.

DO THINGS, GO PLACES WITH CONSOL SUPER-GAS!

AT BEVERLY PANTHEON FINE FUNERALS ARE NOT EXPENSIVE.

The car sped onwards, and here in the middle of a vacant lot was a restaurant in the form of a seated bulldog, the entrance between the front paws, the eyes illuminated.

“Zoomorph,” Jeremy Pordage murmured to himself, and again, “zoomorph.” He had the scholar’s taste for words. The bulldog shot back into the past.

ASTROLOGY, NUMEROLOGY, PSYCHIC READINGS.

DRIVE IN FOR NUTBURGERS—whatever they were. He resolved at the earliest opportunity to have one. A nut-burger and a jumbo malt.

STOP HERE FOR CONSOL SUPER-GAS.

Surprisingly, the chauffeur stopped. “Ten gallons of Super-Super,” he ordered; then, turning back to Jeremy, “This is our company,” he added. “Mr. Stoyte, he’s the president.” He pointed to a billboard across the street. CASH LOANS IN FIFTEEN MINUTES, Jeremy read; CONSULT COMMUNITY SERVICE FINANCE CORPORATION. “That’s another of ours,” said the chauffeur proudly.

They drove on. The face of a beautiful young woman, distorted, like a Magdalene’s, with grief, stared out of a giant billboard, BROKEN ROMANCE, proclaimed the caption. SCIENCE PROVES THAT 73 PER CENT OF ALL ADULTS HAVE HALITOSIS.

IN TIME OF SORROW LET BEVERLY PANTHEON BE YOUR FRIEND.

FACIALS, PERMANENTS, MANICURES.

BETTY’S BEAUTY SHOPPE.

Next door to the beauty shoppe was a Western Union office. That cable to his mother . . . Heavens, he had almost forgotten! Jeremy leaned forward and, in the apologetic tone he always used when speaking to servants, asked the chauffeur to stop for a moment. The car came to a halt. With a preoccupied expression on his mild, rabbit-like face, Jeremy got out and hurried across the pavement, into the office.

“Mrs. Pordage, The Araucarias, Woking, England,” he wrote, smiling a little as he did so. The exquisite absurdity of that address was a standing source of amusement. “The Araucarias, Woking.” His mother, when she bought the house, had wanted to change the name, as being too ingenuously middle-class, too much like a joke by Hilaire Belloc “But that’s the beauty of it,” he had protested. “That’s the charm.” And he had tried to make her see how utterly right it would be for them to live at such an address. The deliciously comic incongruity between the name of the house and the nature of its occupants! And what a beautiful, topsyturvy appositeness in the fact that Oscar Wilde’s old friend, the witty and cultured Mrs. Pordage, should write her sparkling letters from The Araucarias, and that from these same Araucarias, these Araucarias, mark you, at Woking, should come the works of mingled scholarship and curiously rarefied wit for which her son had gained his reputation. Mrs. Pordage had almost instantly seen what he was driving at. No need, thank goodness, to labour your points where she was concerned. You could talk entirely in hints and anacoluthons; she could be relied on to understand. The Araucarias had remained The Araucarias.

Having written the address, Jeremy paused, pensively frowned and initiated the familiar gesture of biting his pencil—only to find, disconcertingly, that this particular pencil was tipped with brass and fastened to a chain. “Mrs. Pordage, The Araucarias, Woking, England,” he read out loud, in the hope that the words would inspire him to compose the right, the perfect message—the message his mother expected of him, at once tender and witty, charged with a genuine devotion ironically worded, acknowledging her maternal domination, but at the same time making fun of it, so that the old lady could salve her conscience by pretending that her son was entirely free, and herself, the least tyrannical of mothers. It wasn’t easy—particularly with this pencil on a chain. After several abortive essays, he decided, though it was definitely unsatisfactory, on: “Climate being subtropical shall break vow re underclothes. Stop. Wish you were here my sake not yours as you would scarcely appreciate this unfinished Bournemouth indefinitely magnified. Stop.”

“Unfinished what?” questioned the young woman on the further side of the counter.

“B-o-u-r-n-e-m-o-u-t-h,” Jeremy spelled out. He smiled; behind the bifocal lenses of his spectacles his blue eyes twinkled, and, with a gesture of which he was quite unconscious, but which he always automatically made when he was about to utter one of his little jokes, he stroked the smooth bald spot on the top of his head. “You know,” he said, in a particularly fluty tone, “the bourne to which no traveller goes, if he can possibly help it.”

The girl looked at him blankly then, inferring from his expression that something funny had been said and remembering that Courteous Service was Western Union’s slogan, gave the bright smile for which the poor old chump was evidently asking, and went on reading: “Hope you have fun at Grasse. Stop. Tendresses. Jeremy.”

It was an expensive message; but luckily, he reflected, as he took out his pocketbook, luckily Mr. Stoyte was grossly over-paying him. Three months’ work, six thousand dollars. So damn the expense.

He returned to the car and they drove on. Mile after mile they went, and the suburban houses, the gas stations, the vacant lots, the churches, the shops went along with them, interminably. To right and left, between palms, or pepper trees, or acacias, the streets of enormous residential quarters receded to the vanishing point.

CLASSY EATS. MILE HIGH CONES.

JESUS SAVES.

HAMBURGERS.

Yet once more, the traffic lights turned red. A paper boy came to the window. “Franco claims gains in Catalonia,” Jeremy read, and turned away. The frightfulness of the world had reached a point at which it had become for him merely boring. From the halted car in front of them, two elderly ladies, both with permanently waved white hair and both wearing crimson trousers, descended, each carrying a Yorkshire terrier. The dogs were set down at the foot of the traffic signal. Before the animals could make up their minds to use the convenience, the lights had changed. The Negro shifted into first, and the car swerved forward, into the future. Jeremy was thinking of his mother. Disquietingly enough, she too had a Yorkshire terrier.

FINE LIQUORS.

TURKEY SANDWICHES.

GO TO CHURCH AND FEEL BETTER ALL THE WEEK.

WHAT IS GOOD FOR BUSINESS IS GOOD FOR YOU.

Another zoomorph presented itself, this time a real estate agent’s office in the form of an Egyptian sphinx.

JESUS IS COMING SOON.

YOU TOO CAN HAVE ABIDING YOUTH WITH THRILL-PHORM BRASSIERES.

BEVERLY PANTHEON, THE CEMETERY THAT IS DIFFERENT.

With the triumphant expression of Puss in Boots enumerating the possessions of the Marquis of Carabas, the Negro shot a glance over his shoulder at Jeremy, waved his hand towards the billboard and said, “That’s ours, too.”

“You mean, the Beverly Pantheon?”

The man nodded. “Finest cemetery in the world, I guess,” he said; and added, after a moment’s pause, “Maybe you’s like to see it. It wouldn’t hardly be out of our way.”

“That would be very nice,” said Jeremy with upper-class English graciousness. Then, feeling that he ought to express his acceptance rather more warmly and democratically, he cleared his throat and, with a conscious effort to reproduce the local vernacular, added that it would be swell. Pronounced in his Trinity College Cambridge voice, the word sounded so unnatural that he began to blush with embarrassment. Fortunately, the chauffeur was too busy with the traffic to notice.

They turned to the right, sped past a Rosicrucian Temple, past two cat-and-dog hospitals, past a School for Drum-Majorettes and two more advertisements of the Beverly Pantheon. As they turned to the left on Sunset Boulevard, Jeremy had a glimpse of a young woman who was doing her shopping in a hydrangea-blue strapless bathing suit, platinum curls and a black fur jacket. Then she too was whirled back into the past.

The present was a road at the foot of a line of steep hills, a road flanked by small, expensive-looking shops, by restaurants, by night-clubs shuttered against the sunlight, by offices and apartment houses. Then they too had taken their places in the irrevocable. A sign proclaimed that they were crossing the city limits of Beverly Hills. The surroundings changed. The road was flanked by the gardens of a rich residential quarter. Through trees, Jeremy saw the facades of houses, all new, almost all in good taste—elegant and witty pastiches of Lutyens manor houses, of Little Trianons, of Monticellos; light-hearted parodies of Le Corbusier’s solemn machines-for-living-in; fantastic adaptations of Mexican haciendas and New England farms.

They turned to the right. Enormous palm trees lined the road. In the sunlight, masses of mesembryanthemums blazed with an intense magenta glare. The houses succeeded one another, like the pavilions at some endless international exhibition. Gloucestershire followed Andalusia and gave place in turn to Touraine and Oaxaca, Düsseldorff and Massachusetts.

“That’s Harold Lloyd’s place,” said the chauffeur, indicating a kind of Boboli. “And that’s Charlie Chaplin’s. And that’s Pickfair.”

The road began to mount, vertiginously. The chauffeur pointed across an intervening gulf of shadow at what seemed a Tibetan lamasery on the opposite hill. “That’s where Ginger Rogers lives. Yes, sir,” he nodded triumphantly, as he twirled the steering wheel.

Five or six more turns brought the car to the top of the hill. Below and behind lay the plain, with the city like a map extending indefinitely into a pink haze.

Before and to either hand were mountains—ridge after ridge as far as the eye could reach, a desiccated Scotland, empty under the blue desert sky.

The car turned a shoulder of orange rock, and there all at once, on a summit hitherto concealed from view, was a huge sky sign, with the words BEVERLY PANTHEON, THE PERSONALITY CEMETERY, in six-foot neon tubes and, above it, on the very crest, a full-scale reproduction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa—only this one didn’t lean.

“See that?” said the Negro impressively. “That’s the Tower of Resurrection. Two hundred thousand dollars, that’s what it cost. Yes, sir.” He spoke with an emphatic solemnity. One was made to feel that the money had all come out of his own pocket.

Chapter II

AN HOUR later, they were on their way again, having seen everything. Everything. The sloping lawns, like a green oasis in the mountain desolation. The groups of trees. The tombstones in the grass. The Pets’ Cemetery, with its marble group after Landseer’s Dignity and Impudence. The Tiny Church of the Poet—a miniature reproduction of Holy Trinity at Stratford-on-Avon, complete with Shakespeare’s tomb and a twenty-four-hour service of organ music played automatically by the Perpetual Wurlitzer and broadcast by concealed loud speakers all over the cemetery.

Then, leading out of the vestry, the Bride’s Apartment (for one was married at the Tiny Church as well as buried from it)—the Bride’s Apartment that had just been redecorated, said the chauffeur, in the style of Norma Shearer’s boudoir in Marie Antoinette. And, next to the Bride’s Apartment, the exquisite black marble Vestibule of Ashes, leading to the Crematorium, where three super-modern oil-burning mortuary furnaces were always under heat and ready for any emergency.

Accompanied wherever they went by the tremolos of the Perpetual Wurlitzer, they had driven next to look at the Tower of Resurrection—from the outside only; for it housed the executive offices of the West Coast Cemeteries Corporation. Then the Children’s Corner with its statues of Peter Pan and the Infant Jesus, its groups of alabaster babies playing with bronze rabbits, its lily pool and an apparatus labelled The Fountain of Rainbow Music, from which there spouted simultaneously water, coloured lights and the inescapable strains of the Perpetual Wurlitzer. Then, in rapid succession, the Garden of Quiet, the Tiny Taj Mahal, the Old World Mortuary. And, reserved by the chauffeur to the last, as the final and crowning proof of his employer’s glory, the Pantheon itself.

Was it possible, Jeremy asked himself, that such an object existed? It was certainly not probable. The Beverly Pantheon lacked all verisimilitude, was something entirely beyond his powers to invent. The fact that the idea of it was now in his mind proved, therefore, that he must really have seen it. He shut his eyes against the landscape and recalled to his memory the details of that incredible reality. The external architecture, modelled on that of Boecklin’s Toteninsel. The circular vestibule. The replica of Rodin’s Le Baiser, illuminated by concealed pink floodlights. The flights of black marble stairs. The seven-storey columbarium, with its endless galleries, its tiers on tiers of slab-sealed tombs. The bronze and silver urns of the cremated, like athletic trophies. The stained glass windows after Burne-Jones. The texts inscribed on marble scrolls. The Perpetual Wurlitzer crooning on every floor. The sculpture . . .

That was the hardest to believe, Jeremy reflected, behind closed eyelids. Sculpture almost as ubiquitous as the Wurlitzer. Statues wherever you turned your eyes. Hundreds of them, bought wholesale, one would guess, from some monumental masonry concern at Carrara or Pietrasanta. All nudes, all female, all exuberantly nubile. The sort of statues one would expect to see in the reception room of a high-class brothel in Rio de Janeiro. “Oh Death,” demanded a marble scroll at the entrance to every gallery, “where is thy sting?” Mutely, but eloquently, the statues gave their reassuring reply. Statues of young ladies in nothing but a very tight belt imbedded, with Bernini-like realism, in the Parian flesh. Statues of young ladies crouching; young ladies using both hands to be modest; young ladies stretching, writhing, callipygously stooping to tie their sandals, reclining. Young ladies with doves, with panthers, with other young ladies, with upturned eyes expressive of the soul’s awakening. “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” proclaimed the scrolls. “The Lord is my shepherd; therefore shall I want nothing.” Nothing, not even Wurlitzer, not even girls in tightly buckled belts. “Death is swallowed up in victory”—the victory no longer of the spirit but of the body—the well-fed body, for ever youthful, immortally athletic, indefatigably sexy. The Moslem paradise had had copulations six centuries long. In this new Christian heaven, progress, no doubt, would have stepped up the period to a millennium and added the joys of everlasting tennis, eternal golf and swimming.

All at once the car began to descend. Jeremy opened his eyes again, and saw that they had reached the further edge of the range of hills, among which the Pantheon was built.

Below lay a great tawny plain, chequered with patches of green and dotted with white houses. On its further side, fifteen or twenty miles away, ranges of pinkish mountains fretted the horizon.

“What’s this?” Jeremy asked.

“The San Fernando Valley,” said the chauffeur. He pointed into the middle distance. “That’s where Groucho Marx has his place,” he said. “Yes, sir.”

At the bottom of the hill the car turned to the left along a wide road that ran, a ribbon of concrete and suburban buildings, through the plain. The chauffeur put on speed; sign succeeded sign with bewildering rapidity. MALTS CABINS DINE AND DANCE AT THE CHATEAU HONOLULU SPIRITUAL HEALING AND COLONIC IRRIGATION BLOCK-LONG HOT DOGS BUY YOUR DREAM HOME NOW. And behind the signs the mathematically planted rows of apricot and walnut trees flicked past—a succession of glimpsed perspectives preceded and followed every time by fan-like approaches and retirements.

Dark-green and gold, enormous orange orchards manœuvred, each one a mile-square regiment glittering in the sunlight. Far off, the mountains traced their un-interpretable graph of boom and slump.

“Tarzana,” said the chauffeur startlingly; and there, sure enough, was the name suspended, in white letters, across the road. “There’s Tarzana College,” the man went on, pointing to a group of Spanish-Colonial palaces clustering round a Romanesque basilica. “Mr. Stoyte, he’s just given them an auditorium.”

They turned to the right along a less important road. The orange groves gave place for a few miles to huge fields of alfalfa and dusty grass, then returned again more luxuriant than ever. Meanwhile the mountains on the northern edge of the valley were approaching and, slanting in from the west, another range was looming up to the left. They drove on. The road took a sudden turn, aiming, it seemed, at the point where the two ranges must come together. All at once, through a gap between two orchards, Jeremy Pordage saw a most surprising sight. About half a mile from the foot of the mountains, like an island off a cliff-bound coast, a rocky hill rose abruptly, in places almost precipitously, from the plain. On the summit of the bluff and as though growing out of it in a kind of stony efflorescence, stood a castle. But what a castle! The donjon was like a skyscraper, the bastions plunged headlong with the effortless swoop of concrete dams. The thing was Gothic, mediaeval, baronial—doubly baronial, Gothic with a Gothicity raised, so to speak, to a higher power, more mediaeval than any building of the thirteenth century. For this . . . this object, as Jeremy was reduced to calling it, was mediaeval, not out of vulgar historical necessity, like Coucy, say, or Alnwick, but out of pure fun and wantonness, platonically, one might say. It was mediaeval as only a witty and irresponsible modern architect would wish to be mediaeval, as only the most competent modern engineers are technically equipped to be.

Jeremy was startled into speech. “What on earth is that?” he asked, pointing at the nightmare on the hilltop.

“Why, that’s Mr. Stoyte’s place,” said the retainer; and smiling yet once more with the pride of vicarious ownership, he added: “It’s a pretty fine home, I guess.”

The orange groves closed in again; leaning back in his seat, Jeremy Pordage began to wonder, rather apprehensively, what he had let himself in for when he accepted Mr. Stoyte’s offer. The pay was princely; the work, which was to catalogue the almost legendary Hauberk Papers, would be delightful. But that cemetery, this Object—Jeremy shook his head. He had known, of course, that Mr. Stoyte was rich, collected pictures, owned a show place in California. But no one had ever led him to expect this. The humorous puritanism of his good taste was shocked; he was appalled at the prospect of meeting the person capable of committing such an enormity. Between that person and oneself, what contact, what community of thought or feeling could possibly exist? Why had he sent for one? For it was obvious that he couldn’t conceivably like one’s books. But had he even read one’s books? Did he have the faintest idea of what one was like? Would he be capable, for example, of understanding why one had insisted on the name of The Araucarias remaining unchanged? Would he appreciate one’s point of view about . . .

These anxious questionings were interrupted by the noise of the horn, which the chauffeur was sounding with a loud and offensive insistence. Jeremy looked up. Fifty yards ahead, an ancient Ford was creeping tremulously along the road. It carried, lashed insecurely to roof and running boards and luggage rack, a squalid cargo of household goods—rolls of bedding, an old iron stove, a crate of pots and pans, a folded tent, a tin bath. As they flashed past, Jeremy had a glimpse of three dull-eyed, anaemic children, of a woman with a piece of sacking wrapped around her shoulders, of a haggard, unshaved man.

“Transients,” the chauffeur explained in a tone of contempt.

“What’s that?” Jeremy asked.

“Why, transients” the Negro repeated, as though the emphasis were an explanation, “Guess that lot’s from the dust bowl. Kansas licence plate. Come to pick our navels.”

“Come to pick your navels?” Jeremy echoed incredulously.

“Navel oranges,” said the chauffeur. “It’s the season. Pretty good year for navels, I guess.”

They emerged once more into the open and there once more was the Object, larger than ever. Jeremy had time to study the details of its construction. A wall with towers encircled the base of the hill, and there was a second line of defence, in the most approved post-Crusades manner, half way up. On the summit stood the square keep, surrounded by subsidiary buildings.

From the donjon, Jeremy’s eyes travelled down to a group of buildings in the plain, not far from the foot of the hill. Across the façade of the largest of them the words “Stoyte Home for Sick Children” were written in gilded letters. Two flags, one the stars and stripes, the other a white banner with the letter S in scarlet, fluttered in the breeze. Then a grove of leafless walnut trees shut out the view once again. Almost at the same moment the chauffeur threw his engine out of gear and put on the brakes. The car came gently to a halt beside a man who was walking at a brisk pace along the grassy verge of the road.

“Want a ride, Mr. Propter?” the Negro called.

The stranger turned his head, gave the man a smile of recognition and came to the window of the car. He was a large man, broad shouldered, but rather stooping, with brown hair turning grey and a face, Jeremy thought, like the face of one of those statues which Gothic sculptors carve for a place high up on a West front—a face of sudden prominences and deeply shadowed folds and hollows, emphatically rough-hewn so as to be expressive even at a distance. But this particular face, he went on to notice, was not merely emphatic, not only for the distance; it was a face also for the near point, also for intimacy, a subtle face, in which there were the signs of sensibility and intelligence as well as of power, of a gentle and humorous serenity no less than of energy and strength.

“Hullo, George,” the stranger said, addressing the chauffeur; “nice of you to stop for me.”

“Well, I’m sure glad to see you, Mr. Propter,” said the Negro cordially. Then, he half turned in his seat, waved a hand towards Jeremy and with a florid formality of tone and manner, said, “I’d like to have you meet Mr. Pordage of England. Mr. Pordage, this is Mr. Propter.”

The two men shook hands, and, after an exchange of courtesies, Mr. Propter got into the car.

“You’re visiting with Mr. Stoyte?” he asked, as the chauffeur drove on.

Jeremy shook his head. He was here on business; had come to look at some manuscripts—the Hauberk Papers, to be precise.

Mr. Propter listened attentively, nodded from time to time, and, when Jeremy had finished, sat for a moment in silence.

“Take a decayed Christian,” he said at last in a meditative tone, “and the remains of a Stoic; mix thoroughly with good manners, a bit of money and an old-fashioned education; simmer for several years in a university. Result: a scholar and a gentleman. Well, there were worse types of human being.” He uttered a little laugh. “I might almost claim to have been one myself, once, long ago.”

Jeremy looked at him inquiringly. “You’re not William Propter, are you?” he asked. “Not ‘Short Studies in the Counter Reformation,’ by any chance?”

The other inclined his head.

Jeremy looked at him in amazement and delight. Was it possible? he asked himself. Those “Short Studies” had been one of his favourite books—a model, he had always thought, of their kind.

“Well, I’m jiggered,” he said aloud, using the school boyish locution deliberately and as though between inverted commas. He had found that, both in writing and in conversation, there were exquisite effects to be obtained by the judicious employment, in a solemn or cultural context, of a phrase of slang, a piece of childish profanity or obscenity. “I’ll be damned,” he exploded again, and his consciousness of the intentional silliness of the words made him stroke his bald head and cough.

There was another moment of silence. Then, instead of talking, as Jeremy had expected, about the “Short Studies,” Mr. Propter merely shook his head and said, “We mostly are.”

“Mostly are what?” asked Jeremy.

“Jiggered,” Mr. Propter answered. “Damned. In the psychological sense of the word,” he added.

The walnut trees came to an end and there once more, on the starboard bow, was the Object. Mr. Propter pointed in its direction. “Poor Jo Stoyte!” he said. “Think of having that millstone round one’s neck. Not to mention, of course, all the other millstones that go with it. What luck we’ve had, don’t you think?—we who’ve never been given the opportunity of being anything much worse than scholars and gentlemen!” After another little silence, “Poor Jo,” he went on with a smile, “he isn’t either of them. You’ll find him a bit trying. Because of course he’ll want to bully you, just because tradition says that your type is superior to his type. Not to mention the fact,” he added, looking into Jeremy’s face with an expression of mingled amusement and sympathy, “that you’re probably the sort of person that invites persecution. A bit of a murderee, I’m afraid, as well as a scholar and gentleman.”

Feeling simultaneously annoyed by the man’s indiscretion and touched by his friendliness, Jeremy smiled rather nervously and nodded his head.

“Maybe,” Mr. Propter went on, “maybe it would help you to be less of a murderee towards Jo Stoyte, if you knew what gave him the original impulsion to get damned in just that way”—and he pointed again towards the Object. “We were at school together, Jo and I; only nobody called him Jo in those days. We called him Slob, or Jelly-Belly. Because, you see, poor Jo was the local fat boy, the only fat boy in the school during those years.” He paused for a moment; then went on in another tone, “I’ve often wondered why people have always made fun of fatness. Perhaps there’s something intrinsically wrong with fat. For example, there isn’t a single fat saint—except, of course, old Thomas Aquinas; and I cannot see any reason to suppose that he was a real saint, a saint in the popular sense of the word, which happens to be the true sense. If Thomas is a saint, then Vincent de Paul isn’t. And if Vincent’s a saint, which he obviously is, then Thomas isn’t. And perhaps that enormous belly of his had something to do with it. Who knows? But anyhow, that’s by the way. We’re talking about Jo Stoyte. And poor Jo, as I say, was a fat boy and, being fat, was fair game for the rest of us. God, how we punished him for his glandular deficiencies! And how disastrously he reacted to that punishment! Overcompensation . . . But here I am at home,” he added, looking out of the window as the car slackened speed and came to a halt in front of a small white bungalow set in the midst of a clump of eucalyptus trees. “We’ll go on with this another time. But remember, if poor Jo gets too offensive, think of what he was at school and be sorry for him—and don’t be sorry for yourself.” He got out of the car, closed the door behind him and, waving a hand to the chauffeur, walked quickly up the path and entered the little house.

The car rolled on again. At once bewildered and reassured by his encounter with the author of the “Short Studies,” Jeremy sat, inertly looking out of the window. They were very near the Object now; and suddenly he noticed, for the first time, that the castle hill was surrounded by a moat. Some few hundred yards from the water’s edge, the car passed between two pillars, topped by heraldic lions. Its passage, it was evident, interrupted a beam of invisible light directed on a photoelectric cell; for no sooner were they past the lions than a draw-bridge began to descend. Five seconds before they reached the moat, it was in place; the car rolled smoothly across and came to a halt in front of the main gateway of the castle’s outer walls. The chauffeur got out and, speaking into a telephone receiver concealed in a convenient loophole, announced his presence. The chromium-plated portcullis rose noiselessly, the double doors of stainless steel swung back. They drove in. The car began to climb. The second line of walls was pierced by another gate, which opened automatically as they approached. Between the inner side of this second wall and the slope of the hill a ferro-concrete bridge had been constructed, large enough to accommodate a tennis court. In the shadowy space beneath, Jeremy caught sight of something familiar. An instant later he had recognized it as a replica of the grotto of Lourdes.

“Miss Maunciple, she’s a Catholic,” remarked the chauffeur, jerking his thumb in the direction of the grotto. “That’s why he had it made for her. We’s Presbyterians in our family,” he added.

“And who is Miss Maunciple?”

The chauffeur hesitated for a moment. “Well, she’s a young lady Mr. Stoyte’s kind of friendly with,” he explained at last; then changed the subject.

The car climbed on. Beyond the grotto all the hillside was a cactus garden. Then the road swung round to the northern slope of the bluff, and the cactuses gave place to grass and shrubs. On a little terrace, over-elegant like a fashion-plate from some mythological Vogue for goddesses, a bronze nymph by Giambologna spouted two streams of water from her deliciously polished breasts. A little further on, behind wire netting, a group of baboons squatted among the rocks or paraded the obscenity of their hairless rumps.

Still climbing, the car turned again and finally drew up on a circular concrete platform, carried out on cantilevers over a precipice. Once more the old-fashioned retainer, the chauffeur, taking off his cap, did a final impersonation of himself welcoming the young master home to the plantation, then set to work to unload the luggage.

Jeremy Pordage Walked to the balustrade and looked over. The ground fell almost sheer for about a hundred feet, then sloped steeply to the inner circle of walls and, below them, to the outer fortifications. Beyond lay the moat and, on the further side of the moat, stretched the orange orchards. “In dunkeln Laub die Gold-Orangen glühn,” he murmured to himself; and then: “He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night.” Marvell’s rendering, he decided, was better than Goethe’s. And, meanwhile, the oranges seemed to have become brighter and more significant. For Jeremy, direct, unmediated experience was always hard to take in, always more or less disquieting. Life became safe, things assumed meaning, only when they had been translated into words and confined between the covers of a book. The oranges were beautifully pigeon-holed; but what about the castle? He turned round and, leaning back against the parapet, looked up. The Object impended, insolently enormous. Nobody had dealt poetically with that. Not Childe Roland, not the King of Thule, not Marmion, not the Lady of Shalott, not Sir Leoline. Sir Leoline, he repeated to himself with a connoisseur’s appreciation of romantic absurdity, Sir Leoline, the baron rich, had—what? A toothless mastiff bitch. But Mr. Stoyte had baboons and a sacred grotto, Mr. Stoyte had a chromium portcullis and the Hauberk Papers, Mr. Stoyte had a cemetery like an amusement park and a donjon like . . .

There was a sudden rumbling sound; the great nail-studded doors of the Early English entrance porch rolled back and from between them, as though propelled by a hurricane, a small, thick-set man, with a red face and a mass of snow white hair, darted out on to the terrace and bore down upon Jeremy, His expression, as he advanced, did not change. The face wore that shut, unsmiling mask which American workmen tend to put on in their dealings with strangers—in order to prove, by not making the ingratiating grimaces of courtesy, that theirs is a free country and you’re not going to come it over them.

Not having been brought up in a free country, Jeremy had automatically begun to smile as this person, whom he guessed to be his host and employer, came hurrying towards him. Confronted by the unwavering grimness of the other’s face, he suddenly became conscious of this smile—conscious that it was out of place, that it must be making him look a fool. Profoundly embarrassed, he tried to readjust his face.

“Mr. Pordage?” said the stranger in a harsh, barking voice. “Pleased to meet you. My name’s Stoyte.” As they shook hands, he peered, still unsmiling, into Jeremy’s face. “You’re older than I thought,” he added.

For the second time that morning, Jeremy made his mannequin’s gesture of apologetic self-exhibition.

“The sere and withered leaf,” he said. “One’s sinking into senility. One’s . . .”

Mr. Stoyte cut him short. “What’s your age?” he asked in a loud peremptory tone, like that of a police sergeant interrogating a captured thief.

“Fifty-four.”

“Only fifty-four?” Mr. Stoyte shook his head. “Ought to be full of pep at fifty-four. How’s your sex life?” he added disconcertingly.

Jeremy tried to laugh off his embarrassment. He twinkled; he patted his bald head. “Mon beau printemps et mon iti ont fait le saut par la fenitre” he quoted.

“What’s that?” said Mr. Stoyte frowning. “No use talking foreign languages to me. I never had any education.” He broke into a sudden braying of laughter. “I’m head of an oil company here,” he said. “Got two thousand filling stations in California alone. And not one man in any of those filling stations that isn’t a college graduate!” He brayed again, triumphantly. “Go and talk foreign languages to them” He was silent for a moment; then, pursuing an unexplicit association of ideas, “My agent in London,” he went on, “the man who picks up things for me there—he gave me your name. Told me you were the right man for those—what do you call them? You know, those papers I bought this summer. Roebuck? Hobuck?”

“Hauberk,” said Jeremy, and with a gloomy satisfaction noted that he had been quite right. The man had never read one’s books, never even heard of one’s existence. Still, one had to remember that he had been called Jelly-Belly when he was young.

“Hauberk,” Mr. Stoyte repeated with a contemptuous impatience. “Anyhow, he said you were the man.” Then, without pause or transition, “What was it you were saying, about your sex life, when you started that foreign stuff on me?”

Jeremy laughed uncomfortably. “One was implying that it was normal for one’s age.”

“What do you know about what’s normal at your age?” said Mr. Stoyte. “Go and talk to Dr. Obispo about it. It won’t cost you anything. Obispo’s on salary. He’s the house physician.” Abruptly changing the subject, “Would you like to see the castle?” he asked. “I’ll take you round.”

“Oh, that’s very kind of you,” said Jeremy effusively. And for the sake of making a little polite conversation, he added: “I’ve already seen your burial ground.”

“Seen my burial ground?” Mr. Stoyte repeated in a tone of suspicion: suspicion turned suddenly to anger. “What the hell do you mean?” he shouted.

Quailing before his fury, Jeremy stammered something about the Beverly Pantheon and that he had understood from the chauffeur that Mr. Stoyte had a financial interest in the company.

“I see,” said the other, somewhat mollified, but still frowning. “I thought you meant . . .” Mr. Stoyte broke off in the middle of the sentence, leaving the bewildered Jeremy to guess what he had thought. “Come on,” he barked; and, bursting into movement, he hurried towards the entrance to the house.

Chapter III

THERE was silence in Ward Sixteen of the Stoyte Home for Sick Children; silence and the luminous twilight of drawn Venetian blinds. It was the mid-morning rest period. Three of the five small convalescents were asleep. A fourth lay staring at the ceiling, pensively picking his nose. The fifth, a little girl, was whispering to a doll as curly and Aryan as herself. Seated by one of the windows, a young nurse was absorbed in the latest issue of True Confessions.

“His heart gave a lurch,” she read. “With a strangled cry he pressed me closer. For months we’d been fighting against just this; but the magnet of our passion was too strong for us. The clamorous pressure of his lips had struck an answering spark within my melting body.

‘Germaine,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t make me wait. Won’t you be good to me now, darling?’

He was so gentle, but so ruthless too—as a girl in love wants a man to be ruthless. I felt myself swept away by the rising tide of . . .”

There was a noise outside in the corridor. The door of the ward flew open, as though before the blast of a hurricane, and someone came rushing into the room.

The nurse looked up with a start of surprise which the completeness of her absorption in “The Price of a Thrill” rendered positively agonizing. Her almost immediate reaction to the shock was one of anger.

“What’s the idea?” she began indignantly; then she recognized the intruder and her expression changed. “Why, Mr. Stoyte!”

Disturbed by the noise, the young nose-picker dropped his eyes from the ceiling, the little girl turned away from her doll.

“Uncle Jo!” they shouted simultaneously. “Uncle Jo!”

Starting out of sleep, the others took up the cry.

“Uncle Jo! Uncle Jo!”

Mr. Stoyte was touched by the warmth of his reception. The face which Jeremy had found so disquietingly grim relaxed into a smile. In mock protest, he covered his ears with his hands. “You’ll make me deaf,” he cried. Then, in an aside to the nurse, “Poor kids,” he murmured. “Makes me feel I’d kind of like to cry,” His voice became husky with sentiment. “And when one thinks how sick they’ve been . . .” He shook his head, leaving the sentence unfinished; then, in another tone, “By the way,” he added, waving a large square hand in the direction of Jeremy Pordage, who had followed him into the ward and was standing near the door, wearing an expression of bewildered embarrassment, “This is Mr. . . . Mr. . . . Hell! I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Pordage,” said Jeremy, and reminded himself that Mr. Stoyte’s name had once been Slob.

“Pordage, that’s it. Ask him about history and literature,” he added derisively to the nurse. “He knows it all.”

Jeremy was modestly protesting that his period was only from the invention of Ossian to the death of Keats, when Mr. Stoyte turned back to the children and in a voice that drowned the other’s faintly fluted disclaimers, shouted: “Guess what Uncle Jo’s brought you!”

They guessed. Candies, bubble gum, balloons, guinea pigs. Mr. Stoyte continued triumphantly to shake his head. Finally, when the children had exhausted their powers of imagination, he dipped into the pocket of his old tweed jacket and produced, first, a whistle, then a mouth organ, then a small musical box, then a trumpet, then a wooden rattle, then an automatic pistol. This, however, he hastily put back.

“Now play,” he said, when he had distributed the instruments. “All together. One, two, three.” And, beating time with both arms, he began to sing “Way down upon the Swanee River.”

At this latest in a long series of shocks and surprises, Jeremy’s mild face took on an expression of more intense bewilderment.

What a morning! The arrival at dawn. The Negro retainer. The interminable suburb. The Beverly Pantheon. The Object among the orange trees and his meeting with William Propter and this really dreadful Stoyte. Then, inside the castle, the Rubens and the great El Greco in the hall, the Vermeer in the elevator, the Rembrandt etchings along the corridors, the Winter-halter in the butler’s pantry.

Then Miss Maunciple’s Louis XV boudoir, with the Watteau and the two Lancrets and the fully equipped soda fountain in a rococo embrasure, and Miss Maunciple herself, in an orange kimono, drinking a raspberry and peppermint ice cream soda at her own counter. He had been introduced, had refused the offer of a sundae and been hurried on again, always at top speed, always as though on the wings of a tornado, to see the other sights of the castle. The Rumpus Room, for example, with frescoes of elephants by Sert. The library with its woodwork by Grinling Gibbons, but with no books, because Mr. Stoyte had not yet brought himself to buy any. The small dining-room, with its Fra Angelico and its furniture from Brighton Pavilion. The large dining-room, modelled on the interior of the mosque at Fatehpur Sikri. The ballroom with its mirrors and coffered ceiling. The thirteenth-century stained glass in the eleventh-floor W.C. The morning room, with Boucher’s picture of La Petite Morphil bottom upwards on a pink satin sofa. The chapel, imported in fragments from Goa, with the walnut confessional used by St. Francois de Sales at Annecy. The functional billiard room. The indoor swimming pool. The Second Empire bar, with its nudes by Ingres. The two gymnasiums. The Christian Science Reading Room, dedicated to the memory of the late Mrs. Stoyte. The dentist’s office. The Turkish bath. Then down, with Vermeer, into the bowels of the hill, to look at the cellar in which the Hauberk Papers had been stored. Down again yet deeper to the safe deposit vaults, the power house, the air-conditioning plant, the well and pumping station. Then up once more to ground level and the kitchens, where the Chinese chef had shown Mr. Stoyte the newly arrived consignment of turtles from the Caribbean. Up again to the bedroom which Jeremy was to occupy during his stay. Then up another six storeys to the business office, where Mr. Stoyte gave orders to his secretary, dictated a couple of letters and had a long telephone conversation with his brokers in Amsterdam. And when that was finished, it had been time to go to the hospital.

Meanwhile, in Ward Sixteen, a group of nurses had collected and were watching Uncle Jo, his white hair flying like Stokowski’s, frantically spurring his orchestra to yet louder crescendos of cacophony.

“He’s like a great big kid himself,” said one of them, in a tone of almost tender amusement.

Another, evidently with literary leanings, declared that it was like something in Dickens. “Don’t you think so?” she insisted to Jeremy.

He smiled nervously and nodded a vague and noncommittal assent.

More practical, a third wished she had her Kodak with her. “Candid Camera portrait of the President of Consol Oil, California Land and Minerals Corporation, Bank of the Pacific, West Coast Cemeteries, etc., etc. . . .” She reeled off the names of Mr. Stoyte’s chief companies, mock-heroically, indeed, but with admiring gusto, as a convinced legitimist with a sense of humour might enumerate the titles of a grandee of Spain. “The papers would pay you good money for a snap like that,” she insisted. And to prove that what she was saying was true, she went on to explain that she had a boy friend who worked with an advertising firm, so that he ought to know, and only the week before he had told her that . . .

Mr. Stoyte’s knobbed face, as he left the hospital, was still illuminated with benevolence and happiness.

“Makes you feel kind of good, playing with those poor kids,” he kept repeating to Jeremy.

A wide flight of steps led down from the hospital entrance to the roadway. At the foot of these steps Mr. Stoyte’s blue Cadillac was waiting. Behind it stood another smaller car, which had not been there when they arrived. A look of suspicion clouded Mr. Stoyte’s beaming face as he caught sight of it. Kidnappers, blackmailers—one never knew. His hand went to the pocket of his coat. “Who’s there?” he shouted in a tone of such loud fury that Jeremy thought for a moment that the man must have suddenly gone mad.

Moon-like, a large, snub-featured face appeared at the car window, smiling round the chewed butt of a cigar.

“Oh, it’s you, Clancy,” said Mr. Stoyte. “Why didn’t they tell me you were here?” he went on. His face had flushed darkly; he was frowning and a muscle in his cheek had begun to twitch. “I don’t like having strange cars around. Do you hear, Peters?” he almost screamed at his chauffeur—not because it was the man’s business, of course; simply because he happened to be there, available. “Do you hear, I say?” Then, suddenly, he remembered what Dr. Obispo had said to him that time he had lost his temper with the fellow. “Do you really want to shorten your life, Mr. Stoyte?” The doctor’s tone had been one of cool amusement; he had smiled with an expression of politely sarcastic indulgence. “Are you absolutely bent on having a stroke? A second stroke, remember; and you won’t get off so lightly next time. Well, if so, then go on behaving as you’re doing now. Go on.” With an enormous effort of will, Mr. Stoyte swallowed his anger. “God is love,” he said to himself. “There is no death.” The late Prudence McGladdery Stoyte had been a Christian Scientist. “God is love,” he said again, and reflected that, if people would only stop being so exasperating, he would never have to lose his temper. “God is love.” It was all their fault.

Clancy, meanwhile, had left his car and, grotesquely pot-bellied over spindly legs, was coming up the steps, mysteriously smiling and winking, as he approached.

“What is it?” Mr. Stoyte inquired, and wished to God the man wouldn’t make those faces. “Oh, by the way,” he added, “this is Mr. . . . Mr. . . .”

“Pordage,” said Jeremy.

Clancy was pleased to meet him. The hand he gave to Jeremy was disagreeably sweaty.

“I got some news for you,” said Clancy in a hoarse conspiratorial whisper; and, speaking behind his hand, so that his words and the smell of cigar should be for Mr. Stoyte alone, “You remember Tittelbaum?” he added.

“That chap in the City Engineer’s Department?”

Clancy nodded. “One of the boys,” he affirmed enigmatically, and again winked.

“Well, what about him?” asked Mr. Stoyte; and in spite of God’s being love, there was a note in his voice of renascent exasperation.

Clancy shot a glance at Jeremy Pordage; then, with the elaborate by-play of Guy Fawkes talking to Catesby on the stage of a provincial theatre, he took Mr. Stoyte by the arm and led him a few feet away, up the steps. “Do you know what Tittelbaum told me today?” he asked rhetorically.

“How the devil should I know?” (But no, no. God is love. There is no death.)

Undeterred by the signs of Mr. Stoyte’s irritation, Clancy went on with his performance. “He told me what they’ve decided about . . .” he lowered his voice still further, “about the San Felipe Valley.”

“Well, what have they decided?” Once more Mr. Stoyte was at the limits of his patience.

Before answering, Clancy removed the cigar butt from his mouth, threw it away, produced another cigar out of his waistcoat pocket, tore off the cellophane wrapping and stuck it, unlighted, in the place occupied by the old one.

“They’ve decided,” he said very slowly, so as to give each word its full dramatic effect, “they’ve decided to pipe the water into it.”

Mr. Stoyte’s expression of exasperation gave place at last to one of interest. “Enough to irrigate the whole valley?” he asked.

“Enough to irrigate the whole valley,” Clancy repeated with solemnity.

Mr. Stoyte was silent for a moment. “How much time have we got?” he asked at last.

“Tittelbaum thought the news wouldn’t break for another six weeks.”

“Six weeks?” Mr. Stoyte hesitated for a moment; then made his decision. “All right. Get busy at once,” he said with the peremptory manners of one accustomed to command. “Go down yourself and take a few of the other boys along with you. Independent purchasers—interested in cattle raising; want to start a Dude Ranch. Buy all you can. What’s the price, by the way?”

“Averages twelve dollars an acre.”

“Twelve,” Mr. Stoyte repeated, and reflected that it would go to a hundred as soon as they started laying the pipe. “How many acres do you figure you can get?” he asked.

“Maybe thirty thousand.”

Mr. Stoyte’s face beamed with satisfaction. “Good,” he said briskly. “Very good. No mention of my name, of course,” he added, and then, without pause or transition: “What’s Tittelbaum going to cost?”

Clancy smiled contemptuously. “Oh, I’ll give him four or five hundred bucks.”

“That all?”

The other nodded. “Tittelbaum’s in the bargain basement,” he said. “Can’t afford to ask any fancy prices. He needs the money—needs it awful bad,”

“What for?” asked Mr. Stoyte, who had a professional interest in human nature. “Gambling? Women?”

Clancy shook his head. “Doctors” he explained. “He’s got a kid that’s paralysed.”

“Paralysed?” Mr. Stoyte echoed in a tone of genuine sympathy. “That’s too bad.” He hesitated for a moment; then, in a sudden burst of generosity, “Tell him to send the kid here,” he went on, making a large gesture towards the hospital. “Best place in the State for infantile paralysis, and it won’t cost him anything. Not a red cent.”

“Hell, that’s kind of you, Mr. Stoyte,” said Clancy admiringly. “That’s real kind.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said Mr. Stoyte, as he moved towards his car. “I’m glad to be able to do it. Remember what it says in the Bible about children. You know,” he added, “I get a real kick out of being with those poor kids in there. Makes you feel kind of warm inside.” He patted the barrel of his chest. “Tell Tittelbaum to send in an application for the kid. Send it to me personally. I’ll see that it goes through at once.” He climbed into the car and shut the door after him; then, catching sight of Jeremy, opened it again without a word. Mumbling apologetically, Jeremy scrambled in. Mr. Stoyte slammed the door once more, lowered the glass and looked out.

“So long,” he said. “And don’t lose any time about that San Felipe business. Make a good job of it, Clancy, and I’ll let you have ten per cent of all the acreage over twenty thousand.” He raised the window and signalled to the chauffeur to start. The car swung out of the drive and headed towards the castle. Leaning back in his seat, Mr. Stoyte thought of those poor kids and the money he would make out of the San Felipe business. “God is love,” he said yet once more, with momentary conviction and again, in a whisper that was audible to his companion. “God is love.” Jeremy felt more uncomfortable than ever.

The drawbridge came down as the blue Cadillac approached, the chromium portcullis went up, the gates of the inner rampart rolled back to let it pass. On the concrete tennis court, the seven children of the Chinese cook were roller-skating. Below, in the sacred grotto, a group of masons were at work. At the sight of them, Mr. Stoyte shouted to the chauffeur to stop.

“They’re putting up a tomb for some nuns,” he said to Jeremy as they got out of the car.

“Some nuns?” Jeremy echoed in surprise.

Mr. Stoyte nodded and explained that his Spanish agents had bought some sculpture and iron work from the chapel of a convent that had been wrecked by the anarchists at the beginning of the civil war. “They sent some nuns along too,” he added. “Embalmed, I guess. Or maybe just sun-dried. I don’t know. Anyhow, there they are. Luckily I happened to have something nice to put them in.” He pointed to the monument which the masons were in process of fixing to the south wall of the grotto. On a marble shelf above a large Roman sarcophagus were the statues by some nameless Jacobean stonemason of a gentleman and lady, both in ruffs, kneeling, and behind them in three rows of three, nine daughters diminishing from adolescence to infancy. “Hie jacet Carolus Franciscus Beals, Armiger . . .” Jeremy began to read.

“Bought it in England, two years ago,” said Mr. Stoyte, interrupting him. Then, turning to the workmen, “When will you boys be through?” he asked.

“Tomorrow noon. Maybe tonight.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” said Mr. Stoyte, and turned away. “I must have those nuns taken out of storage,” he said, as they walked back to the car.

They drove on. Poised on the almost invisible vibration of its wings, a humming bird was drinking at the jet that spouted from the left nipple of Giambologna’s nymph. From the enclosure of the baboons came the shrill noise of battle and copulation. Mr. Stoyte shut his eyes. “God is love,” he repeated, trying deliberately to prolong the delightful condition of euphoria into which those poor kids and Clancy’s good news had plunged him. “God is love. There is no death.” He waited to feel that sense of inward warmth, like the after-effect of whisky, which had followed his previous utterance of the words. Instead, as though some immanent fiend were playing a practical joke on him, he found himself thinking of the shrunken leathery corpses of those nuns, and of his own corpse, and of judgment and the flames. Prudence McGladdery Stoyte had been a Christian Scientist; but Joseph Budge Stoyte, his father, had been a Sandemanian; and Letitia Morgan, his maternal grandmother, had lived and died a Plymouth Sister. Over his cot in the attic room of the little frame house in Nashville, Tennessee, had hung the text, in vivid orange on a black background: “IT IS A TERRIBLE THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD.” “God is love,” Mr.Stoyte desperately reaffirmed. “There is no death.” But for sinners, such as himself, it was only the worm that never died.

“If you’re always scared of dying,” Obispo had said, “you’ll surely die. Fear’s a poison; and not such a slow poison either.”

Making another enormous effort, Mr. Stoyte suddenly began to whistle. The tune was “I’m making hay in the moonlight in my baby’s arms,” but the face which Jeremy Pordage saw and, as though from some horrible and indecent secret, immediately averted his eyes from, was the face of a man in the condemned cell.

“Old sour-puss,” the chauffeur muttered to himself, as he watched his employer get out of the car and walk away.

Followed by Jeremy, Mr. Stoyte hurried in silence through the Gothic portal, crossed a pillared Romanesque lobby like the Lady Chapel at Durham and, his hat still pulled down over his eyes, stepped into the cathedral twilight of the great hall.

A hundred feet overhead, the sound of the two men’s footsteps echoed in the vaulting. Like iron ghosts, the suits of armour stood immobile round the walls. Above them, sumptuously dim, the fifteenth-century tapestries opened windows upon a leafy world of phantasy. At one end of the cavernous room, lit by a hidden searchlight, El Greco’s Crucifixion of St. Peter blazed out in the darkness like the beautiful revelation of something incomprehensible and profoundly sinister. At the other, no less brilliantly illuminated, hung a full-length portrait of Hélène Fourment, dressed only in a bearskin cape. Jeremy looked from one to the other—from the ectoplasm of the inverted saint to the unequivocal skin and fat and muscle which Rubens had so loved to see and touch; from unearthly flesh tints of green-white ochre and carmine, shadowed with transparent black, to the creams and warm pinks, the nacreous blues and greens of Flemish nudity. Two shining symbols, incomparably powerful and expressive—but of what, of what? That, of course, was the question.

Mr. Stoyte paid attention to none of his treasures, but strode across the hall, inwardly cursing his buried wife for having made him think about death by insisting that there wasn’t any.

The door of the elevator was in an embrasure between pillars. Mr. Stoyte opened it, and the light came on revealing a Dutch lady in blue satin sitting at a harpsichord—sitting, Jeremy reflected, at the very heart of an equation, in a world where beauty and logic, painting and analytical geometry, had become one. With what intention? To express, symbolically, what truths about the nature of things? Again, that was the question. Where art was concerned, Jeremy said to himself, that was always the question.

“Shut the door,” Mr. Stoyte ordered; then when it was done, “We’ll have a swim before lunch,” he added, and pressed the topmost of a long row of buttons.

Chapter IV

MORE than a dozen families of transients were already at work in the orange grove, as the man from Kansas, with his wife and his three children and his yellow dog, hurried down the line towards the trees which the overseer had assigned to him. They walked in silence, for they had nothing to say to one another and no energy to waste on words.

Only half a day, the man was thinking; only four hours till work would be stopped. They’d be lucky if they made as much as seventy-five cents. Seventy-five cents. Seventy-five cents; and that right front tire wasn’t going to last much longer. If they meant to get up to Fresno and then Salinas, they’d just have to get a better one. But even the rottenest old second-hand tire cost money. And money was food. And did they eat! he thought with sudden resentment. If he were alone, if he didn’t have to drag the kids and Minnie around, then he could rent a little place somewhere. Near the highway, so that he could make a bit extra by selling eggs and fruit and things to the people that rode past in their automobiles, sell a lot cheaper than the markets and still make good money. And then, maybe, he’d be able to buy a cow and a couple of hogs; and then he’d find a girl—one of those fat ones; he liked them rather fat; fat and young, with . . .

His wife started coughing again; the dream was shattered. Did they eat! More than they were worth. Three kids with no strength in them. And Minnie going sick on you half the time so that you had to do her work as well as yours I

The dog had paused to sniff at a post. With sudden and surprising agility, the man from Kansas took two quick steps forward and kicked the animal squarely in the ribs. “You goddam dog!” he shouted. “Get out of the way!” It ran off, yelping. The man from Kansas turned his head in the hope of catching in his children’s faces an expression of disapproval or commiseration. But the children had learnt better than to give him an excuse for going on from the dog to themselves. Under the tousled hair, the three pale, small faces were entirely blank and vacant. Disappointed, the man turned away grumbling indistinctly that he’d belt the hell out of them if they weren’t careful. The mother did not even turn her head. She was feeling too sick and tired to do anything but walk straight on. Silence settled down again over the party.

Then, suddenly, the youngest of the three children let out a shrill cry. “Look there!” she pointed. In front of them was the castle. From the summit of its highest tower rose a spidery metal structure, carrying a succession of platforms to a height of twenty or thirty feet above the parapet. On the highest of these platforms, black against the shining sky, stood a tiny human figure. As they looked, the figure spread its arms and plunged head foremost out of sight behind the battlements. The children’s shrill outcry of astonishment gave the man from Kansas the pretext which, a moment before, they had denied him. He turned on them furiously. “Stop that yellin’,” he yelled; then rushed at them, hitting out—a slap on the side of the head for each of them. With an enormous effort, the woman lifted herself from the abyss of fatigue into which she had fallen; she halted, she turned, she cried out protestingly, she caught her husband’s arm. He pushed her away, so violently that she almost fell.

“You’re as bad as the kids,” he shouted at her. “Just layin’ around and eatin’. Not worth a damn. I tell you, I’m just sick and tired of the whole lot of you. Sick and tired,” he repeated. “So you keep your mouth shut, see!” He turned away and, feeling a good deal better for his outburst, walked briskly on, at a rate which he knew his wife would find exhausting, between the rows of loaded orange trees.

From that swimming pool at the top of the donjon the view was prodigious. Floating on the translucent water, one had only to turn one’s head to see, between the battlement, successive vistas of plain and mountain, of green and tawny and violet and faint blue. One floated, one looked and one thought, that is, if one were Jeremy Pordage, of that tower in Epipsychidion, that tower with its chambers

Looking towards the golden Eastern air
 And level with the living winds.

Not so, however, if one were Miss Virginia Maunciple. Virginia neither floated, nor looked, nor thought of Epipsychidion, but took another sip of whisky and soda, climbed to the highest platform of the diving tower, spread her arms, plunged, glided under water and, coming up immediately beneath the unsuspecting Pordage, caught him by the belt of his bathing pants and pulled him under.

“You asked for it,” she said, as he came up again, gasping and spluttering, to the surface. “Lying there without moving, like a silly old Buddha.” She smiled at him with an entirely good-natured contempt.

These people that Uncle Jo kept bringing to the castle! An Englishman with a monocle to look at the armour; a man with a stammer to clean the pictures; a man who couldn’t speak anything but German to look at some silly old pots and plates; and today this other ridiculous Englishman with a face like a rabbit’s and a voice like Songs without Words on the saxophone.

Jeremy Pordage blinked the water out of his eyes and, dimly, since he was presbyopic and without his spectacles, saw the young laughing face very close to his own, the body foreshortened and wavering uncertainly through the water. It was not often that he found himself in such proximity to such a being. He swallowed his annoyance and smiled at her.

Miss Maunciple stretched out a hand and patted the bald patch at the top of Jeremy’s head. “Boy,” she said, “does it shine! Talk of billiard balls. I know what I shall call you: Ivory. Good-bye, Ivory.” She turned, swam to the ladder, climbed out, walked to the table on which the bottles and glasses were standing, drank the rest of her whisky and soda, then went and sat down on the edge of the couch on which, in black spectacles and bathing drawers, Mr. Stoyte was taking his sun bath.

“Well, Uncle Jo,” she said in a tone of affectionate playfulness, “feeling kind of good?”

“Feeling fine, baby,” he answered. It was true; the sun had melted away his dismal forebodings; he was living again in the present, that delightful present in which one brought happiness to sick children; in which there were Tittelbaums prepared, for five hundred bucks, to give one information worth at the very least a million; in which the sky was blue and the sunshine a caressing warmth upon the stomach; in which finally, one stirred out of a delicious somnolence to see little Virginia smiling down at one as though she really cared for her old Uncle Jo, and cared for him, what was more, not merely as an old uncle—no, sir; because when all’s said and done, a man is only as old as he feels and acts; and where his baby was concerned did he feel young? did he act young? Yes, sir. Mr. Stoyte smiled to himself, a smile of triumphant self-satisfaction.

“Well, baby,” he said aloud, and laid a square, thick-fingered hand on the young woman’s bare knee.

Through half-closed eyelids, Miss Maunciple gave him a secret and somehow indecent look of understanding and complicity; then uttered a little laugh and stretched her arms. “Doesn’t the sun feel good!” she said; and, closing her lids completely, she lowered her raised arms, clasped her hands behind her neck and threw back her shoulders. It was a pose that lifted the breasts, that emphasized the inward curve of the loins and the contrary swell of the buttocks—the sort of pose that a new arrival in the seraglio would be taught by the eunuchs to assume at her first interview with the sultan; the very pose, Jeremy recognized, as he had chanced to look her way, of that quite particularly unsuitable statue on the third floor of the Beverly Pantheon.

Through his dark glasses, Mr. Stoyte looked up at her with an expression of possessiveness at once gluttonous and paternal. Virginia was his baby, not only figuratively and colloquially, but also in the literal sense of the word. His sentiments were simultaneously those of the purest father-love and the most violent eroticism.

He looked up at her. By contrast with the shiny white satin of her breech clout and brassière the sunburnt skin seemed more richly brown. The planes of the young body flowed in smooth continuous curves, effortlessly solid, three-dimensional without accent or abrupt transition. Mr. Stoyte’s regard travelled up to the auburn hair and came down by way of the rounded forehead, of the wide-set eyes, and small, straight, impudent nose to the mouth. That mouth—it was her most striking feature. For it was to the mouth’s short upper lip that Virginia’s face owed its characteristic expression of child-like innocence—an expression that persisted through all her moods, that was noticeable whatever she might be doing, whether it was telling smutty stories or making conversation with the Bishop, taking tea in Pasadena or getting tight with the boys, enjoying what she called “a bit of yum-yum” or attending Mass. Chronologically, Miss Maunciple was a young woman of twenty-two; but that abbreviated upper lip gave her, in all circumstances, an air of being hardly adolescent, of not having reached the age of consent. For Mr. Stoyte, at sixty, the curiously perverse contrast between childishness and maturity, between the appearance of innocence and the fact of experience, was intoxicatingly attractive. It was not only so far as he was concerned that Virginia was both kinds of baby; she was also both kinds of baby objectively, in herself.

Delicious creature! The hand that had lain inert, hitherto, upon her knee slowly contracted. Between the broad spatulate thumb and the strong fingers, what smoothness, what a sumptuous and substantial resilience!

“Jinny,” he said. “My baby!”

The baby opened her large blue eyes and dropped her arms to her sides. The tense back relaxed, the lifted breasts moved downwards and forwards like soft living creatures sinking to repose. She smiled at him.

“What are you pinching me for, Uncle Jo?”

“I’d like to eat you,” her Uncle Jo replied in a tone of cannibalistic sentimentality.

“I’m tough.”

Mr. Stoyte uttered a maudlin chuckle. “Little tough kid!” he said.

The tough kid stooped down and kissed him.

Jeremy Pordage who had been quietly looking at the panorama and continuing his silent recitation of Epipsychidion, happened at this moment to turn once more in the direction of the couch and was so much embarrassed by what he saw that he began to sink and had to strike out violently with arms and legs to prevent himself from going under. Turning round in the water, he swam to the ladder, climbed out and, without waiting to dry himself, hurried to the elevator.

“Really,” he said to himself as he looked at the Vermeer. “Really!”

“I did some business this morning,” said Mr. Stoyte when the baby had straightened herself up again.

“What sort of business?”

“Good business,” he answered. “Might make a lot of money. Real money,” he insisted.

“How much?”

“Maybe half a million,” he said cautiously understating his hopes; “maybe a million; maybe even more.”

“Uncle Jo,” she said, “I think you’re wonderful.” Her voice had the ring of complete sincerity. She genuinely did think him wonderful. In the world in which she had lived it was axiomatic that a man who could make a million dollars must be wonderful. Parents, friends, teachers, newspapers, radio, advertisements—explicitly or by implication, all were unanimous in proclaiming his wonderfulness. And besides, Virginia was very fond of her Uncle Jo. He had given her a wonderful time, and she was grateful. Besides, she liked to like people if she possibly could; she liked to please them. Pleasing them made her feel good—even when they were elderly, like Uncle Jo, and when some of the ways in which she was called upon to please them didn’t happen to be very appetizing. “I think you’re wonderful,” she repeated.

Her admiration gave him an intense satisfaction. “Oh, it’s quite easy,” he said with hypocritical modesty, angling for more.

Virginia gave it him. “Easy, nothing!” she said firmly. “I say you are wonderful. So just keep your mouth shut.”

Enchanted, Mr. Stoyte took another handful of firm flesh and squeezed it affectionately. “I’ll give you a present, if the deal goes through,” he said. “What would you like, baby?”

“What would I like?” she repeated. “But I don’t want anything.”

Her disinterestedness was not assumed. For it was true; she never did want things this way, in cold blood. At the moment a want occurred, for an ice cream soda, for example, for a bit of yum-yum, for a mink coat seen in a shop window—at such moments, she did want things, and wanted them badly, couldn’t wait to have them. But as for long-range wants, wants that had to be thought about in advance—no, she never had wanted like that. The best part of Virginia’s life was spent in enjoying the successive instants of present contentment of which it was composed; and if ever circumstances forced her out of this mindless eternity into the world of time, it was a narrow little universe in which she found herself, a world whose farthest boundaries were never more than a week or two away in the future. Even as a show-girl, at eighteen dollars a week, she had found it difficult to bother much about money and security and what would happen if you had an accident and couldn’t show your legs any more. Then Uncle Jo had come along, and everything was there, as though it grew on trees—a swimming-pool tree, a cocktail tree, a Schia-parelli tree. You just had to reach out your hand and there it was, like an apple in the orchard, back home in Oregon. So where did presents come in? Why should she want anything? Besides, it was obvious that Uncle Jo got a tremendous kick out of her not wanting things; and to be able to give Uncle Jo a kick always made her feel good. “I tell you, Uncle Jo, I don’t want anything”

“Don’t you?” said a strange voice, startlingly close behind them. “Well, I do.”

Dark-haired and dapper, glossily Levantine, Dr. Sig-mund Obispo stepped briskly up to the side of the couch.

“To be precise,” he went on, “I want to inject one-point-five cubic centimetres of testosterone into the great man’s gluteus medius. So off you go, my angel,” he said to Virginia in a tone of derision, but with a smile of unabashed desire. “Hop!” He gave her a familiar little pat on the shoulder and another, when she got up to make room for him, on the white satin posterior.

Virginia turned round sharply, with the intention of telling him not to be so fresh; then, as her glance travelled from that barrel of hairy flesh which was Mr. Stoyte to the other’s handsome face, so insultingly sarcastic and at the same time so flatteringly concupiscent, she changed her mind and, instead of telling him, loudly, just where he got off, she made a grimace and stuck out her tongue at him. What was begun as a rebuke had ended, before she knew it, as the acquiescence in an impertinence, as an act of complicity with the offender and of disloyalty to Uncle Jo. Poor Uncle Jo! she thought, with a rush of affectionate pity for the old gentleman. For a moment she felt quite ashamed of herself. The trouble, of course, was that Dr. Obispo was so handsome; that he made her laugh; that she liked his admiration; that it was fun to lead him on and see how he’d act. She even enjoyed getting mad at him, when he was rude, which he constantly was.

“I suppose you think you’re Douglas Fairbanks, Junior,” she said, making an attempt to be scathing; then walked away with as much dignity as her two little strips of white satin would permit her to assume and, leaning against a battlement, looked down at the plain below. Ant-like figures moved among the orange trees. She wondered idly what they were doing; then her mind wandered to other, more interesting and personal matters. To Sig and the fact that she couldn’t help feeling rather thrilled when he was around, even when he acted the way he had done just now. Some day, maybe—some day, just to see what it was like and if things got a bit dull out here at the castle . . . Poor Uncle Jo! she reflected. But then what could he expect—at his age and at hers? The unexpected thing was that, in all these months, she hadn’t yet given him any reason for being jealous—unless, of course, you counted Enid and Mary Lou; which she didn’t; because she really wasn’t that way at all; and when it did happen, it was nothing more than a kind of little accident; nice, but not a bit important. Whereas with Sig, if it ever happened, the thing would be different; even though it wasn’t very serious; which it wouldn’t be—not like with Walt, for example, or even with little Buster back in Portland. It would be different from the accidents with Enid and Mary Lou, because, with a man, those things generally did matter a good deal, even when you didn’t mean them to matter. Which was the only reason for not doing them, outside of their being sins, of course; but somehow that never seemed to count very much when the boy was a real good looker (which one had to admit Sig was, even though it was rather in the style of Adolphe Menjou; but, come to think of it, it was those dark ones with oil on their hair that had always given her the biggest kick). And when you’d had a couple of drinks, maybe, and you felt you’d like some thrills, why then it never even occurred to you that it was a sin; and then one thing led to another and before you knew what had happened—well, it had happened; and really she just couldn’t believe it was as bad as Father O’Reilly said it was; and anyhow Our Lady would be a lot more understanding and forgiving than he was; and what about the way Father O’Reilly ate his food, whenever he came to dinner? like a hog, there wasn’t any other word for it; and wasn’t gluttony just as bad as the other thing? So who was he to talk like that?

“Well, and how’s the patient?” Dr. Obispo inquired in the parody of a bedside manner, as he took Virginia’s place on the couch. He was in the highest of spirits. His work in the laboratory was coming along unexpectedly well; that new preparation of bile salts had done wonders for his liver; the rearmament boom had sent his aircraft shares up another three points; and it was obvious that Virginia wasn’t going to hold out much longer. “How’s the little invalid this morning?” he went on, enriching his parody with the caricature of an English accent; for he had done a year of postgraduate work at Oxford.

Mr. Stoyte growled inarticulately. There was something about Dr. Obispo’s facetiousness that always enraged him. In some not easily definable way it had the quality of a deliberate insult. Mr. Stoyte was always made to feel that Obispo’s apparently good-natured banter was in reality the expression of a calculated and malignant contempt. The thought of it made Mr. Stoyte’s blood boil. But when his blood boiled, his blood pressure, he knew, went up, his life was shortened. He could not afford to be as angry with Obispo as he would have liked. And what was more, he couldn’t afford to get rid of the man. Obispo was an indispensable evil. “God is love; there is no death.” But Mr. Stoyte remembered with terror that he had had a stroke, that he was growing old. Obispo had put him on his feet again when he was almost dying, had promised him ten more years of life even if those researches didn’t work out as well as he hoped; and if they did work out—then more, much more. Twenty years, thirty, forty. Or it might even be that the loathsome little brute would find some way of proving that Mrs. Eddy was right, after all. Perhaps there really and truly wouldn’t be any death—not for Uncle Jo, at any rate. Glorious prospect! Meanwhile . . . Mr. Stoyte sighed, resignedly, profoundly. “We all have our cross to bear,” he said to himself, echoing, across the intervening years, the words his grandmother used to repeat when she made him take castor oil.

Dr. Obispo, meanwhile, had sterilized his needle, filed the top off a glass ampoule, filled his syringe. His movements, as he worked, were characterized by a certain studied exquisiteness, by a florid and self-conscious precision. It was as though the man were simultaneously his own ballet and his own audience—a sophisticated and highly critical audience, it was true; but then, what a ballet! Nijinsky, Karsavina, Pavlova, Massine—all on a single stage. However terrific the applause, it was always merited.

“Ready,” he called at last.

Obediently and in silence, like a trained elephant, Mr. Stoyte rolled over on to his stomach.

Chapter V

JEREMY had dressed again and was sitting in the subterranean store-room that was to serve as his study. The dry acrid dust of old documents had gone to his head, like a kind of intoxicating snuff. His face was flushed as he prepared his files and sharpened his pencils; his bald head shone with perspiration; behind their bifocal lenses, his eyes were bright with excitement.

There! Everything was ready. He turned round in his swivel chair and sat for a little while quite still, voluptuously savouring his anticipations. Tied up in innumerable brown paper parcels, the Hauberk Papers awaited their first reader. Twenty-seven crates of still unravished brides of quietness. He smiled to himself at the thought that he was to be their Bluebeard. Thousands of brides of quietness accumulated through centuries by successive generations of indefatigable Hauberks. Hauberk after Hauberk; barony after knighthood; earldom after barony; and then Earl of Gonister after Earl of Gonister down to the last, the eighth. And, after the eighth, nothing but death duties and an old house and two old spinster ladies, sinking ever deeper into solitude and eccentricity, into poverty and family pride, but finally, poor pets! more deeply into poverty than pride. They had sworn they would never sell; but in the end they had accepted Mr. Stoyte’s offer. The papers had been shipped to California. They would be able, now, to buy themselves a couple of really sumptuous funerals. And that would be the end of the Hauberks. Delicious fragments of English history! Cautionary perhaps, or perhaps, and more probably, merely senseless, merely a tale told by an idiot. A tale of cutthroats and conspirators, of patrons of learning and shady speculators, of bishops and kings’ catamites and minor poets, of admirals and pimps, of saints and heroines and nymphomaniacs, of imbeciles and prime ministers, of art collectors and sadists. And here was all that remained of them, in twenty-seven crates, higgledy-piggledy, never catalogued, never even looked at, utterly virgin. Gloating over his treasure, Jeremy forgot the fatigues of the journey, forgot Los Angeles and the chauffeur, forgot the cemetery and the castle, forgot even Mr. Stoyte. He had the Hauberk Papers, had them all to himself. Like a child dipping blindly into a bran pie for a present which he knows will be exciting, Jeremy picked up one of the brown paper parcels with which the first crate was filled and cut the string. What rich confusion awaited him within! A book of household accounts for the year 1576 and 1577; a narrative by some Hauberk cadet of Sir Kenelm Digby’s expedition to Scanderoon; eleven letters in Spanish from Miguel de Molinos to that Lady Hauberk who had scandalized her family by turning papist; a collection, in early eighteenth-century handwriting, of sickroom recipes; a copy of Drelincourt’s “On Death”; and an odd volume of Andréa de Nerciat’s “Felicia, ou Mes Fredaines.” He had just cut the string of the second bundle and was wondering whose was the lock of pale brown hair preserved between the pages of the Third Earl’s holograph, “Reflections of the Late Popish Plot,” when there was a knock at the door. He looked up and saw a small, dark man in a white overall advancing towards him. The stranger smiled, said, “Don’t let me disturb you,” but nevertheless disturbed him. “My name’s Obispo,” he went on, “Dr. Sigmund Obispo. Physician in ordinary to His Majesty King Stoyte the First—and let’s hope also the last.”

Evidently delighted by his own joke, he broke into a peal of startlingly loud, metallic laughter. Then, with the elegantly fastidious gesture of an aristocrat in a dust heap, he picked up one of Molinos’s letters and started, slowly, and out loud, to decipher the first line of the flowing seventeenth-century calligraphy that met his eyes. “ ‘Ame a Dios como es en si y no como se lo dice y forma su imaginacion.’ ” He looked up at Jeremy with an amused smile. “Easier said than done, I should think. Why, you can’t even love a woman as she is in herself; and after all, there is some sort of objective physical basis for the phenomenon we call a female. A pretty nice basis in some cases. Whereas poor old Dios is only a spirit—in other words, pure imagination. And here’s this idiot, whoever he is, telling some other idiot that people mustn’t love God as He is in their imagination.” Once again self-consciously the aristocrat, he threw down the letter with a contemptuous flick of the wrist. “What drivel it all is!” he went on. “A string of words called religion. Another string of words called philosophy. Half a dozen other strings called political ideals. And all the words either ambiguous or meaningless. And people getting so excited about them they’ll murder their neighbours for using a word they don’t happen to like. A word that probably doesn’t mean as much as a good belch. Just a noise without even the excuse of gas on the stomach. ‘Ame a Dios como es en si,’ ” he repeated derisively. “It’s about as sensible as saying ‘hiccough a hiccough como es en hiccough.’ I don’t know how you litterae humaniores boys manage to stand it. Don’t you pine for some sense once in a while?”

Jeremy smiled with an expression of nervous apology. “One doesn’t bother too much about the meanings,” he said. Then, anticipating further criticism by disparaging himself and the things he loved most dearly, “One gets a lot of fun, you know,” he went on; “just scrabbling about in the dust heaps.” Dr. Obispo laughed and patted Jeremy encouragingly on the shoulder. “Good for you!” he said. “You’re frank. I like that. Most of the Ph.D. boys one meets are such damned Pecksniffs. Trying to pull that high-moral culture stuff on you! You know: wisdom rather than knowledge; Sophocles instead of science. ‘Funny,’ I always say to them when they try that on me, ‘funny that the thing you get your income from should happen to be the thing that’s going to save humanity.’ Whereas you don’t try to glorify your little racket. You’re honest. You admit you’re in the thing merely for the fun of it. Well, that’s why I’m in my little racket. For the fun. Though of course if you’d given me any of that Sophocles stuff, I’d just have let you have my piece about science and progress, science and happiness, even science and ultimate truth, if you’d been obstinate.” He showed his white teeth in a happy derision of everybody.

His amusement was infectious. Jeremy also smiled. “I’m glad I wasn’t obstinate,” he said in a tone whose fluty demureness implied how much he objected to disquisitions on ultimate truth.

“Mind you,” Dr. Obispo went on, “I’m not entirely blind to the charms of your racket. I’d draw the line at Sophocles, of course. And I’d be deadly bored with this sort of stuff.” He nodded towards the twenty-seven crates. “But I must admit,” he concluded handsomely, “I’ve had a lot of fun out of old books in my time. Really, a lot of fun.”

Jeremy coughed and caressed his scalp; his eyes twinkled in anticipation of the deliciously dry little jokes he was just about to make. But unfortunately Dr. Obispo gave him no time. Serenely unaware of Jeremy’s preparations he looked at his watch; then rose to his feet. “I’d like to show you my laboratory,” he said. “There’s plenty of time before lunch.”

“Instead of asking if I’d like to see his bloody laboratory,” Jeremy protested inwardly, as he swallowed his joke; and it had been such a good onel He would have liked, of course, to go on unpacking the Hauberk Papers; but, lacking the courage to say so, he rose obediently and followed Dr. Obispo towards the door.

Longevity, the doctor explained, as they left the room. That was his subject. Had been ever since he left medi cal school. But of course, so long as he was in practice, he hadn’t been able to do any serious work on it. Practice was fatal to serious work, he added parenthetically. How could you do anything sensible when you had to spend all your time looking after patients? Patients belonged to three classes: those that imagined they were sick, but weren’t; those that were sick, but would get well anyhow; those that were sick and would be much better dead. For anybody capable of serious work to waste his time with patients was simply idiotic. And, of course, nothing but economic pressure would ever have driven him to do it. And he might have gone on in that groove for ever. Wasting himself on morons. But then, quite suddenly, his luck had turned. Jo Stoyte had come to consult him. It had been positively providential.

“Most awfully a godsend,” Jeremy murmured, quoting his favourite phrase of Coleridge.

Jo Stoyte, Dr. Obispo repeated, Jo Stoyte on the verge of breaking up completely. Forty pounds overweight and having had a stroke. Not a bad one, luckily; but enough to put the old bastard into a sweat. Talk of being scared of death! (Dr. Obispo’s white teeth flashed again in wolfish good humour.) In Jo’s case it had been a panic. Out of that panic had come Dr. Obispo’s liberation from his patients; had come his income, his laboratory for work on the problems of longevity, his excellent assistant; had come, too, the financing of that pharmaceutical work at Berkeley, of those experiments with monkeys in Brazil, of that expedition to study the tortoises on the Galapagos Islands. Everything a research worker could ask for, with old Jo himself thrown in as the perfect guinea-pig—ready to submit to practically anything short of vivisection without anaesthetics, provided it offered some hope of keeping him above ground a few years longer.

Not that he was doing anything spectacular with the old buzzard at the moment. Just keeping his weight down; and taking care of his kidneys; and pepping him up with periodical shots of synthetic sex hormone; and watching out for those arteries. The ordinary, common-sense treatment for a man of Jo Stoyte’s age and medical history. Meanwhile, however, he was on the track of something new, something that promised to be important. In a few months, perhaps in a few weeks, he’d be in a position to make a definite pronouncement.

“That’s very interesting,” said Jeremy with hypocritical politeness.

They were walking along a narrow corridor, whitewashed and bleakly illuminated by a series of electric bulbs. Through open doors, Jeremy had occasional glimpses of vast cellars crammed with totem poles and armour, with stuffed orang-utans and marble groups by Thorwaldsen, with gilded Bodhisattvas and early steam engines, with lingams and stage coaches and Peruvian pottery, with crucifixes and mineralogical specimens.

Dr. Obispo, meanwhile, had begun to talk again about longevity. The subject, he insisted, was still in the pre-scientific stage. A lot of observations without any explanatory hypothesis. A mere chaos of facts. And what odd, what essentially eccentric facts! What was it, for example, that made a cicada live as long as a bull? Or a canary outlast three generations of sheep? Why should dogs be senile at fourteen and parrots sprightly at a hundred? Why should female humans become sterile in the forties, while female crocodiles continued to lay eggs into their third century? Why in heaven’s name should a pike live to two hundred without showing any signs of senility? Whereas poor old Jo Stoyte . . .

From a side passage two men suddenly emerged carrying between them on a stretcher a couple of mummified nuns. There was a collision.

“Damned fools!” Dr. Obispo shouted angrily.

“Damned fool yourself!”

“Can’t you look where you’re going?”

“Keep your face shut!”

Dr. Obispo turned contemptuously away and walked on.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” they called after him.

Jeremy meanwhile had been looking with lively curiosity at the mummies. “Discalced Carmelites,” he said to nobody in particular; and enjoying the flavour of that curious combination of syllables, he repeated them with a certain emphatic relish. “Discalced Carmelites.”

“Discalce your ass,” said the foremost of the two men, turning fiercely upon this new antagonist.

Jeremy gave one glance at that red and angry face, then, with ignominious haste, hurried after his guide.

Dr. Obispo halted at last. “Here we are,” he said, opening a door. A smell of mice and absolute alcohol floated out into the corridor. “Come on in,” he said cordially.

Jeremy entered. There were the mice all right—cage upon cage of them, in tiers along the wall directly in front of him. To the left, three windows, hewn in the rock, gave on to the tennis court and a distant panorama of orange trees and mountains. Seated at a table in front of one of these windows, a man was looking through a microscope. He raised his fair, tousled head as they approached and turned towards them a face of almost child-like candour and openness. “Hullo, doc,” he said with a charming smile.

“My assistant,” Dr. Obispo explained, “Peter Boone. Pete, this is Mr. Pordage.” Pete rose and revealed himself an athletic young giant.

“Call me Pete,” he said, when Jeremy had called him Mr. Boone. “Everyone calls me Pete.”

Jeremy wondered whether he ought to invite the young man to call him Jeremy—but wondered, as usual, so long that the appropriate moment for doing so passed, irrevocably.

“Pete’s a bright boy,” Dr. Obispo began again in a tone that was affectionate in intention, but a little patronizing in fact. “Knows his physiology. Good with his hands, too. Best mouse surgeon I ever saw.” He patted the young man on the shoulder.

Pete smiled—a little uncomfortably, it seemed to Jeremy, as though he found it rather difficult to make the right response to the other’s cordiality.

“Takes his politics a bit too seriously,” Dr. Obispo went on. “That’s his only defect. I’m trying to cure him of that. Not very successfully so far, I’m afraid. Eh, Pete?”

The young man smiled again, more confidently; this time he knew exactly where he stood and what to do.

“Not very successfully,” he echoed. Then, turning to Jeremy, “Did you see the Spanish news this morning?” he asked. The expression on his large, fair, open face changed to one of concern.

Jeremy shook his head.

“It’s something awful,” said Pete gloomily. “When I think of those poor devils without planes or artillery or . . .”

“Well, don’t think of them,” Dr. Obispo cheerfully advised. “You’ll feel better.”

The young man looked at him, then looked away again without saying anything. After a moment of silence he pulled out his watch. “I think I’ll go and have a swim before lunch,” he said and walked towards the door.

Dr. Obispo picked up a cage of mice and held it within a few inches of Jeremy’s nose. “These are the sex-hormone boys,” he said with a jocularity that the other found curiously offensive. The animals squeaked as he shook the cage. “Lively enough while the effect lasts. The trouble is that the effects are only temporary.”

Not that temporary effects were to be despised, he added, as he replaced the cage. It was always better to feel temporarily good than temporarily bad. That was why he was giving old Jo a course of that testosterone stuff. Not that the old bastard had any great need of it with that Maunciple girl around . . .

Dr. Obispo suddenly put his hand over his mouth and looked round towards the window. “Thank God,” he said, “he’s out of the room. Poor old Pete!” A derisive smile appeared on his face. “Is he in love?” He tapped his forehead. “Thinks she’s like something in the works of Tennyson. You know, chemically pure. Last month he nearly killed a man for suggesting that she and the old boy . . . Well, you know. God knows what he figures the girl is doing here. Telling Uncle Jo about the spiral nebulae, I suppose. Well, if it makes him happy to think that way, I’m not the one that’s going to spoil his fun.” Dr. Obispo laughed indulgently. “But to come back to what I was saying about Uncle Jo . . .”

Just having that girl around the house was the equivalent of a hormone treatment. But it wouldn’t last. It never did. Brown-Sequard and Voronoff and all the rest of them—they’d been on the wrong track. They’d thought that the decay of sexual power was the cause of senility. Whereas it was only one of the symptoms. Senescence started somewhere else and involved the sex mechanism along with the rest of the body. Hormone treatments were just palliatives and pick-me-ups. Helped you for a time, but didn’t prevent your growing old.

Jeremy stifled a yawn.

For example, Dr. Obispo went on, why should some animals live much longer than human beings and yet show no signs of old age? Somehow, somewhere we had made a biological mistake. Crocodiles had avoided that mistake; so had tortoises. The same was true of certain species of fish.

“Look at this,” he said; and, crossing the room, he drew back a rubber curtain, revealing as he did so the glass front of a large aquarium recessed into the wall. Jeremy approached and looked in.

In the green and shadowy translucence, two huge fish hung suspended, their snouts almost touching, motionless except for the occasional ripple of a fin and the rhythmic panting of their gills. A few inches from their staring eyes, a rosary of bubbles streamed ceaselessly up towards the light and all around them the water was spasmodically silver with the dartings of smaller fish. Sunk in their mindless ecstasy, the monsters paid no attention.

Carp, Dr. Obispo explained; carp from the fishponds of a castle in Franconia—he had forgotten the name; but it was somewhere near Bamberg. The family was impoverished; but the fish were heirlooms, unpurchasable. Jo Stoyte had had to spend a lot of money to have these two stolen and smuggled out of the country in a specially constructed automobile with a tank under the back seats. Sixty pounders they were; over four feet long; and those rings in their tails were dated 1761.

“The beginning of my period,” Jeremy murmured in a sudden access of interest. 1761 was the year of “Fingal.” He smiled to himself; the juxtaposition of carp and Ossian, carp and Napoleon’s favourite poet, carp and the first premonitions of the Celtic Twilight, gave him a peculiar pleasure. What a delightful subject for one of his little essays! Twenty pages of erudition and absurdity—of sacrilege in lavender—of a scholar’s delicately canaille irreverence for the illustrious or unillustrious dead.

But Dr. Obispo would not allow him to think his thoughts in peace. Indefatigably riding his own hobby, he began again. There they were, he said, pointing at the huge fish; nearly two hundred years old; perfectly healthy; no symptoms of senility; no apparent reason why they shouldn’t go on for another three or four centuries. There they were; and here were you. He turned back accusingly towards Jeremy. Here were you! no more than middle-aged, but already bald, already longsighted and short-winded; already more or less edentate; incapable of prolonged physical exertion; chronically constipated (could you deny it?); your memory already not so good as it was; your digestion capricious; your potency falling off, if it hadn’t, indeed, already disappeared for good.

Jeremy forced himself to smile and, at every fresh item, nodded his head in what was meant to look like an amused assent. Inwardly, he was writhing with a mixture of distress at this all too truthful diagnosis and anger against the diagnostician for the ruthlessness of his scientific detachment. Talking with a humorous self-deprecation about one’s own advancing senility was very different from being bluntly told about it by someone who took no interest in you except as an animal that happened to be unlike a fish. Nevertheless, he continued to nod and smile.

Here you were, Dr. Obispo repeated at the end of his diagnosis, and there were the carp. How was it that you didn’t manage your physiological affairs as well as they did? Just where and how and why did you make the mistake that had already robbed you of your teeth and hair and would bring you in a very few years to the grave?

Old Metchnikoff had asked those questions and made a bold attempt to answer. Everything he said happened to be wrong; phagocytosis didn’t occur; intestinal autointoxication wasn’t the sole cause of senility; neurono-phages were mythological monsters; drinking sour milk didn’t materially prolong life; whereas the removal of the large gut did materially shorten it. Chuckling, he recalled those operations that were so fashionable just before the War—old ladies and gentlemen with their colons cut out, and in consequence being forced to evacuate every few minutes, like canaries! All to no purpose, needless to say; because of course the operation that was meant to make them live to a hundred killed them all off within a year or two. Dr. Obispo threw back his glossy head and uttered one of those peals of brazen laughter which were his regular response to any tale of human stupidity resulting in misfortune. Poor old Metchnikoff, he went on, wiping the tears of merriment from his eyes. Consistently wrong. And yet almost certainly not nearly so wrong as people had thought. Wrong, yes, in supposing that it was all a matter of intestinal stasis and auto-intoxication. But probably right, in thinking that the secret was somewhere down there, in the gut. Somewhere in the gut, Dr. Obispo repeated; and, what was more, he believed that he was on its track.

He paused and stood for a moment in silence, drumming with his fingers on the glass of the aquarium. Poised between mud and air, the two obese and aged carps hung in their greenish twilight, serenely unaware of him. Dr. Obispo shook his head at them. The worst experimental animals in the world, he said in a tone of resentment mingled with a certain gloomy pride. Nobody had a right to talk about technical difficulties who hadn’t tried to work with fish. Take the simplest operation; it was a nightmare. Had you ever tried to keep its gills properly wet while it was anaesthetized on the operating table? Or, alternatively, to do your surgery under water? Had you ever set out to determine a fish’s basal metabolism, or take an electro-cardiograph of its heart action, or measure its blood pressure? Had you ever wanted to analyse its excreta? And, if so, did you know how hard it was even to collect them? Had you ever attempted to study the chemistry of a fish’s digestion and assimilation? To determine its blood picture under different conditions? To measure the speed of its nervous reactions?

No, you had not, said Dr. Obispo contemptuously. And until you had, you had no right to complain about anything.

He drew the curtain on his fish, took Jeremy by the arm and led him back to the mice.

“Look at those,” he said, pointing to a batch of cages on an upper shelf.

Jeremy looked. The mice in question were exactly like all other mice. “What’s wrong with them?” he asked.

Dr. Obispo laughed. “If those animals were human beings,” he said dramatically, “they’d all be over a hundred years old.”

And he began to talk, very rapidly and excitedly, about fatty alcohols and the intestinal flora of carp. For the secret was there, the key to the whole problem of senility and longevity. There, between the sterols and the peculiar flora of the carp’s intestine.

Those sterols! (Dr. Obispo frowned and shook his head over them.) Always linked up with senility. The most obvious case, of course, was cholesterol. A senile animal might be defined as one with an accumulation of cholesterol in the walls of its arteries. Potassium thiocyanate seemed to dissolve those accumulations. Senile rabbits would show signs of rejuvenation under a treatment with potassium thiocyanate. So would senile humans. But, again, not for very long. Cholesterol in the arteries was evidently only one of the troubles. But then cholesterol was only one of the sterols. They were a closely related group, those fatty alcohols. It didn’t take much to transform one into another. But if you’d read old Schneeglock’s work and the stuff they’d been publishing at Upsala, you’d know that some of the sterols were definitely poisonous—much more than cholesterol, even in large accumulations. Longbotham had even sug gested a connexion between fatty alcohols and neoplasms. In other words, cancer might be regarded, in a final analysis, as a symptom of sterol-poisoning. He himself would go even further and say that such sterol-poisoning was responsible for the entire degenerative process of senescence in man and the other mammals. What nobody had done hitherto was to look into the part played by fatty alcohols in the life of such animals as carp. That was the work he had been doing for the last year. His researches had convinced him of three things: first, that the fatty alcohols in carp did not accumulate in excessive quantity; second, that they did not undergo transformation into the more poisonous sterols; and third, that both of these immunities were due to the peculiar nature of the carp’s intestinal flora. What a flora! Dr. Obispo cried enthusiastically. So rich, so wonderfully varied! He had not yet succeeded in isolating the organism responsible for the carp’s immunity to old age, nor did he fully understand the nature of the chemical mechanisms involved. Nevertheless, the main fact was certain. In one way or another, in combination or in isolation, these organisms contrived to keep the fish’s sterols from turning into poisons. That was why a carp could live a couple of hundred years and show no signs of senility.

Could the intestinal flora of a carp be transferred to the gut of a mammal? And, if transferable, would it achieve the same chemical and biological results? That was what he had been trying, for the past few months, to discover. With no success, to begin with. Recently, however, they had experimented with a new technique—a technique that protected the flora from the processes of digestion, gave it time to adapt itself to the unfamiliar conditions. It had taken root. The effect on the mice had been immediate and significant. Senescence had been halted, even reversed. Physiologically, the animals were younger than they had been for at least eighteen months—younger at the equivalent of a hundred than they had been at the equivalent of sixty.

Outside in the corridor an electric bell began to ring. It was lunch time. The two men left the room and walked towards the elevator. Dr. Obispo went on talking. Mice, he said, were apt to be a bit deceptive. He had now begun to try the thing out on larger animals. If it worked all right on dogs and baboons, it ought to work on Uncle Jo.

Chapter VI

IN THE small dining-room, most of the furnishings came from the Pavilion at Brighton. Four gilded dragons supported the red lacquered table and two more served as caryatids on either side of a chimney piece in the same material. It was the Regency’s dream of the Gorgeous East. The kind of thing, Jeremy reflected, as he sat down on his scarlet and gold chair, the kind of thing that the word “Cathay” would have conjured up in Keats’s mind, for example, or Shelley’s, or Lord Byron’s—just as that charming Leda by Etty, over there, next to the Fra Angelico Annunciation, was an accurate embodiment of their fancies on the subject of pagan mythology; was an authentic illustration (he chuckled inwardly at the thought) to the Odes to Psyche and the Grecian Urn, to “Endymion” and “Prometheus Unbound.” An age’s habits of thought and feeling and imagination are shared by all who live and work within that age—by all, from the journeyman up to the genius. Regency is always Regency, whether you take your sample from the top of the basket or from the bottom. In 1820, the man who shut his eyes and tried to visualize magic casements opening on the foam of faery seas would see—what? The turrets of Brighton Pavilion. At the thought, Jeremy smiled to himself with pleasure. Etty and Keats, Brighton and Percy Bysshe Shelley—what a delightful subject! Much better than carp and Ossian; better inasmuch as Nash and the Prince Regent were funnier than even the most aged fish. But for conversational purposes and at the luncheon table, even the best of subjects is worthless if there is nobody to discuss it with. And who was there, Jeremy asked himself, who was there in this room desirous or capable of talking with him on such a theme? Not Mr. Stoyte; not, certainly, Miss Maunciple, nor the two young women who had come over from Hollywood to have lunch with her; not Dr. Obispo, who cared more for mice than books; nor Peter Boone who probably didn’t even know that there were any books to care for. The only person who might conceivably be expected to take an interest in the manifestations of the later-Georgian time spirit was the individual who had been introduced to him as Dr. Herbert Mulge, Ph.D., D.D., Principal of Tarzana College. But at the moment Dr. Mulge was talking in a rich vein of something that sounded almost like pulpit eloquence about the new Auditorium which Mr. Stoyte had just presented to the College and which was shortly to be given its formal opening. Dr. Mulge was a large and handsome man with a voice to match—a voice at once sonorous and suave, unctuous and ringing. The flow of his language was slow, but steady and apparently stanchless. In phrases full of the audible equivalents of Capital Letters, he now went on to assure Mr. Stoyte and any one else who cared to listen that it would be a Real Inspiration for the boys and girls of Tarzana to come together in the beautiful new building for their Com munity Activities. For Non-Denominational Worship, for example; for the Enjoyment of the Best in Drama and Music. Yes, what an inspiration! The name of Stoyte would be remembered with love and reverence by successive generations of the College’s Alumni and Alumnae—would be remembered, he might say, for ever; for the Auditorium was a monumentum aere perennius, a Footprint on the Sand of Time—definitely a Footprint. And now, Dr. Mulge continued, between the mouthfuls of creamed chicken, now Tarzana’s Crying Need was for a new art school. Because, after all, Art, as we were now discovering, was one of the most potent of educational forces. Art was the aspect under which, in this twentieth century of ours, the Religious Spirit most clearly manifested itself. Art was the means by which Personalities could best achieve Creative Self-Expression and . . .

“Cripes!” Jeremy said to himself; and then: “Golly!” He smiled ruefully at the thought that he hoped to talk to this imbecile about the relation between Keats and Brighton Pavilion.

Peter Boone found himself separated from Virginia by the blonder of her two young friends from Hollywood, so that he could only look at her past a foreground of rouge and eyelashes, of golden curls and a thick, almost visible perfume of gardenias. To any one else, this foreground might have seemed a bit distracting; but for Pete it was of no more significance than the equivalent amount of mud. He was interested only in what was beyond the foreground—in that exquisitely abbreviated upper lip, in the little nose that made you want to cry when you looked at it, it was so elegant and impertinent, so ridiculous and angelic; in that long Florentine bob of lustrous auburn hair; in those wide-set, widely opened eyes with their twinkling surface of humour and their dark blue depths of what he was sure was an infinite tenderness, a plumbless feminine wisdom. He loved her so much that, where his heart should have been, he could feel only an aching breathlessness, a cavity which she alone could fill.

Meanwhile, she was talking to the blonde Foreground about that new job which the Foreground had landed with Cosmopolis-Perimutter Studios. The picture was called Say It with Stockings and the Foreground was to play the part of a rich debutante who runs away from home to make a career of her own, becomes a strip-tease dancer in a Western mining camp and finally marries a cowpuncher, who turns out to be the son of a millionaire.

“Sounds like a swell story,” said Virginia. “Don’t you think so, Pete?”

Pete thought so; he was ready to think almost anything if she wanted him to.

“That reminds me of Spain,” Virginia announced. And while Jeremy, who had been eavesdropping on the conversation, frantically tried to imagine what train of associations had taken her from Say It with Stockings to the Civil War—whether it had been Cosmopolis-Perimutter, Anti-Semitism, Nazis, Franco—or débutante, class war, Moscow, Negrin; or strip-tease, mo dernity, radicalism, Republicans—while he was vainly speculating thus, Virginia went on to ask the young man to tell them about what he had done in Spain; and when he demurred, insisted—because it was so thrilling, because the Foreground had never heard about it, because, finally, she wanted him to.

Pete obeyed. Only half articulately, in a vocabulary composed of slang and cliches, and adorned by expletives and grunts—the vocabulary, Jeremy reflected as he listened surreptitiously through the booming of Dr. Mulge’s eloquence, the characteristically squalid and poverty-stricken vocabulary to which the fear of being thought unsocially different or undemocratically superior, or unsportingly highbrow, condemns most young Englishmen and Americans—he began to describe his experiences as a volunteer in the International Brigade during the heroic days of 1937. It was a touching narrative. Through the hopelessly inadequate language, Jeremy could divine the young man’s enthusiasm for liberty and justice; his courage; his love for his comrades; his nostalgia, even in the neighbourhood of that short upper lip, even in the midst of an absorbing piece of scientific research, for the life of men united in devotion to a cause, made one in the face of hardship and shared danger and impending death.

“Gee,” he kept repeating, “they were swell guys.”

They were all swell—Knud, who had saved his life one day, up there in Aragon; Anton and Chuck and poor little Dino, who had been killed. André, who had lost a leg; Jan, who had a wife and two children; Fritz, who’d had six months in a Nazi concentration camp; and all the others—the finest bunch of boys in the world. And what did he do but go and get rheumatic fever on them, and then myocarditis—which meant no more active service; no more anything except sitting around. That was why he was here, he explained apologetically. But, gee, it had been good while it lasted! That time, for example, when he and Knud had gone out at night and climbed a precipice in the dark and taken a whole platoon of Moors by surprise and killed half a dozen of them and come back with a machine gun and three prisoners . . .

“And what is your opinion of Creative Work, Mr, Pordage?”

Surprised in flagrant inattention, Jeremy started guiltily. “Creative work?” he mumbled, trying to gain a little time. “Creative work? Well, of course one’s all for it. Definitely,” he insisted.

“I’m glad to hear you say so,” said Dr. Mulge. “Because that’s what I want at Tarzana. Creative Work—ever more and more Creative. Shall I tell you what is my highest ambition?” Neither Mr. Stoyte nor Jeremy made any reply. But Dr. Mulge proceeded, nevertheless, to tell them. “It is to make of Tarzana the living Centre of the New Civilization that is coming to blossom here in the West.” He raised a large fleshy hand in solemn asseveration. “The Athens of the twentieth century is on the point of emerging here, in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. I want Tarzana to be its Parthenon and its Academe, its Stoa and its Temple of the Muses. Religion, Art, Philosophy, Science—I want them all to find their home in Tarzana, to radiate their influence from our campus, to . . .”

In the middle of his story about the Moors and the precipice, Pete became aware that only the Foreground was listening to him. Virginia’s attention had wandered, surreptitiously at first, then frankly and avowedly—had wandered to where, on her left, the less blonde of her two friends was having something almost whispered to her by Dr. Obispo.

“What’s that?” Virginia asked.

Dr. Obispo leaned towards her and began again. The three heads, the oil-smooth black, the elaborately curly brown, the lustrous auburn, were almost touching. By the expression on their faces Pete could see that the doctor was telling one of his dirty stories. Alleviated for a moment by the smile she had given him when she asked him to tell them about Spain, the anguish in that panting void where his heart ought to have been came back with redoubled intensity. It was a complicated pain, made up of jealousy and a despairing sense of loss and personal unworthiness, of a fear that his angel was being corrupted and another, deeper fear, which his conscious mind refused to formulate, a fear that there wasn’t much further corruption to be done, that the angel was not as angelic as his love had made him assume. The flow of his narrative suddenly dried up. He was silent.

“Well, what happened then?” the Foreground inquired with an eagerness and an expression of hero worshipping admiration that any other young man would have found delightfully flattering.

He shook his head. “Oh, nothing much.”

“But those Moors . . .”

“Hell,” he said impatiently, “what does it matter, anyhow?”

His words were drowned by a violent explosion of laughter that sent the three conspiratorial heads, the black, the brown, the lovely auburn, flying apart from one another. He looked up at Virginia and saw a face distorted with mirth. At what? he asked himself in agony, trying to measure the extent of her corruption; and a kind of telescoped and synthetic memory of all the schoolboy stories, all the jokes and Limericks he had ever heard rushed in upon him. Was it at that one that she was laughing? Or at that? Or, God, perhaps at that? He hoped and prayed it wasn’t at that; and the more he hoped and prayed, the more insanely sure he became that that was the one it had been.

“. . . above all,” Dr. Mulge was saying, “Creative Work in the Arts. Hence the crying need for a new Art School, an Art School worthy of Tarzana, worthy of the highest traditions of . . .”

The girls’ shrill laughter exploded with a force of hilarity proportionate to the strength of the surrounding social taboos. Mr. Stoyte turned sharply in the direction from which the noise had come.

“What’s the joke?” he asked suspiciously. He wasn’t going to have his Baby listen to smut. He disapproved of smut in mixed company almost as whole-heartedly as his grandmother, the Plymouth Sister, had done. “What’s all that noise about?”

It was Dr. Obispo who answered. He’d been telling them a funny story he’d heard over the radio, he explained with that suave politeness that was like a sarcasm. Something delightfully amusing. Perhaps Mr. Stoyte would like to have him repeat it.

Mr. Stoyte grunted ferociously and turned away.

A glance at his host’s scowling face convinced Dr. Mulge that it would be better to postpone discussion of the Art School to another, more propitious occasion. It was disappointing; for it seemed to him that he had been making good progress. But, therel Such things would happen. Dr. Mulge was a college president chronically in quest of endowments; he knew all about the rich. Knew, for example, that they were like gorillas, creatures not easily domesticated, deeply suspicious, alternately bored and bad tempered. You had to approach them with caution, to handle them gently and with a boundless cunning. And even then they might suddenly turn savage on you and show their teeth. Half a life-time of experience with bankers and steel magnates and retired meat packers had taught Dr. Mulge to take such little set-backs as today’s with a truly philosophic patience. Brightly, with a smile on his large, imperial-Roman face, he turned to Jeremy. “And what do you think of our California weather, Mr. Pordage?” he asked.

Meanwhile, Virginia had noticed the expression on Pete’s face and immediately divined the causes of his misery. Poor Pete! I But really if he thought she had nothing better to do than always be listening to his talk about that silly old war in Spain—or if it wasn’t Spain, it was the laboratory; and they did vivisection there, which was just awful; because, after all, when you were hunting, the animals had a chance of getting away, particularly if you were a bad shot, like she was; besides, hunting was full of thrills and you got such a kick from being up there in the mountains in the good air; whereas Pete cut them up underground in that cellar place. . . . No, if he thought she had nothing better to do than that, he made a big mistake. All the same he was a nice boy; and talk about being in love! It was nice having people around who felt that way about you; made you feel kind of good. Though it could be rather a nuisance sometimes. Because they got to feel they had some claim on you; they figured they had a right to tell you things and interfere. Pete didn’t do that in so many words; but he had a way of looking at you—like a dog would do if it suddenly started criticizing you for taking another cocktail. Saying it with eyes, like Hedy Lamarr—only it wasn’t the same thing as Hedy was saying with her eyes; in fact, just the opposite. It was just the opposite now—and what had she done? Got bored with that silly old war and listened in to what Sig was saying to Mary Lou. Well, all she could say was that she wasn’t going to have any one interfering with the way she chose to live her own life. That was her business. Why, he was almost as bad, the way he looked at her, as Uncle Jo, or her mother, or Father O’Reilly. Only, of course, they didn’t just look; they said things. Not that he meant badly, of course, poor Pete; he was just a kid, just unsophisticated and, on top of everything, in love the way a kid is—like the high-school boy in Deanna Durbin’s last picture. Poor Pete, she thought again. It was tough luck on him; but the fact was she never had been attracted by that big, fair, Cary Grant sort of boy. They just didn’t appeal to her; that was all there was to it. She liked him; and she enjoyed his being in love with her. But that was all.

Across the corner of the table she caught his eye, gave him a dazzling smile and invited him, if he had half an hour to spare after lunch, to come and teach her and the girls how to pitch horseshoes.

Chapter VII

THE meal was over at last; the party broke up. Dr. Mulge had an appointment in Pasadena to see a rubber goods manufacturer’s widow, who might perhaps give fifty thousand dollars for a new girls’ dormitory. Mr. Stoyte drove into Los Angeles for his regular Friday afternoon board meetings and business consultations. Dr. Obispo was going to operate on some rabbits and went down to the laboratory to prepare his instruments. Pete had a batch of scientific journals to look at, but gave himself, meanwhile, a few minutes of happiness in Virginia’s company. And for Jeremy, of course, there were the Hauberk Papers. It was with a sense of almost physical relief, a feeling that he was going home to where he belonged, that he returned to his cellar. The afternoon slipped past—how delightfully, how profitably! Within three hours, another batch of letters from Molinos had turned up among the account books and the business correspondence. So had the third and fourth volumes of “Félicia.” So had an illustrated edition of “Le Portier des Carmes”; and, bound like a prayer book, so had a copy of that rarest of all works of the Divine Marquis, “Les Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome.” What a treasure! What unexpected fortune! Or perhaps, Jeremy reflected, not so unexpected if one remembered the history of the Hauberk family. For the date of the books made it likely that they had been the property of the Fifth Earl—the one who had held the title for more than half a century and died at more than ninety, under William IV, completely unregenerate. Given the character of that old gentleman, one had no reason to feel surprised at the finding of a store of pornography—one had every reason, indeed, to hope for more.

Jeremy’s spirits mounted with each new discovery. Always, with him, a sure sign of happiness, he began to hum the tunes that had been popular during his childhood. Molinos evoked “Tara-rara Boom-de-ay!” “Félicia” and the “Portier des Carmes” shared the romantic lilt of “The Honeysuckle and the Bee.” As for the “Cent-Vingt Jours,” which he had never previously read or even seen a copy of—the finding of that delighted him so much that when, as a matter of bibliographical routine, he raised the ecclesiastical cover and, expecting the Anglican ritual, found instead the coldly elegant prose of the Marquis de Sade, he broke out into that rhyme from “The Rose and the Ring,” the rhyme his mother had taught him to repeat when he was only three years old and which had remained with him as the symbol of child-like wonder and delight, as the only completely adequate reaction to any sudden blessing, any providentially happy surprise:

Oh, what fun to have a plum bun!
 How I wish it never was done!

And fortunately it wasn’t done, wasn’t even begun; the book was still unread, the hours of entertainment and instruction still lay before him. Remembering that pang of jealousy he had felt up there, in the swimming pool, he smiled indulgently. Let Mr. Stoyte have all the girls he wanted; a well-written piece of eighteenth-century pornography was better than any Maunciple. He closed the volume he was holding. The tooled morocco was austerely elegant; on the back, the words “The Book of Common Prayer” were stamped in a gold which the years had hardly tarnished. He put it down with the other curiosa on a corner of the table. When he had finished for the afternoon, he would take the whole collection up to his bedroom.

“Oh, what fun to have a plum bun,” he chanted to himself, as he opened another bundle of papers, and then, “On a summer’s afternoon, where the honeysuckles bloom and all Nature seems at rest.” That Wordsworthian touch about Nature always gave him a special pleasure. The new batch of papers turned out to be a correspondence between the Fifth Earl and a number of prominent Whigs regarding the enclosure, for his benefit, of three thousand acres of common land in Nottinghamshire. Jeremy slipped them into a file, wrote a brief preliminary description of the contents on a card, put the file in a cupboard and the card in its cabinet, and, dipping again into the bran pie, reached down for another bundle. He cut the string. “You are my honey, honey, honeysuckle, I am the bee.” What would Dr. Freud have thought of that, he wondered? Anonymous pamphlets against deism were a bore; he threw them aside. But here was a copy of Law’s “Serious Call” with manuscript notes by Edward Gibbon; and here were some accounts rendered to the Fifth Earl by Mr. Rogers of Liverpool; accounts of the expenses and profits of three slave trading expeditions which the earl had helped to finance. The second voyage, it appeared, had been particularly auspicious; less than a fifth of the cargo had perished on the way, and the prices realized at Savannah were gratifyingly high. Mr. Rogers begged to enclose his draft for seventeen thousand two hundred and twenty-four pounds, eleven shillings and fourpence. Written from Venice, in Italian, another letter announced to the same Fifth Earl the appearance upon the market of a half length Mary Magdalen by Titian, at a price which his correspondent described as derisory. Other offers had already been made; but out of respect for the not less learned than illustrious English cognoscente, the vendor would wait until a reply had been received from his lordship. In spite of which, his lordship would be well advised not to delay too long; for otherwise . . .

It was five o’clock; the sun was low in the sky. Dressed in white shoes and socks, white shorts, a yachting cap and a pink silk sweater, Virginia had come to see the feeding of the baboons.

Its engine turned off, her rose-coloured motor scooter stood parked at the side of the road thirty or forty feet above the cage. In company with Dr. Obispo and Pete, she had gone down to have a closer look at the animals.

Just opposite the point at which they were standing, on a shelf of artificial rock, sat a baboon mother, holding in her arms the withered and disintegrating corpse of the baby she would not abandon even though it had been dead for a fortnight. Every now and then, with an intense, automatic affection, she would lick the little cadaver. Tufts of greenish fur and even pieces of skin detached themselves under the vigorous action of her tongue. Delicately, with black fingers, she would pick the hairs out of her mouth, then begin again. Above her, at the mouth of a little cave, two young males suddenly got into a fight. The air was filled with screams and barks and the gnashing of teeth. Then one of the two combatants ran away and, in a moment, the other had forgotten all about the fight and was searching for pieces of dandruff on his chest. To the right, on another shelf of rock a formidable old male, leather-snouted, with the grey bobbed hair of a seventeenth-century Anglican divine, stood guard over his submissive female. It was a vigilant watch; for if she ventured to move without his leave, he turned and bit her; and meanwhile the small black eyes, the staring nostrils at the end of the truncated snout, kept glancing this way and that with an unsleeping suspicion. From the basket he was carrying, Pete threw a potato in his direction, then a carrot and another potato. With a vivid flash of magenta buttocks the old baboon darted down from his perch on the artificial mountain, seized the carrot and, while he was eating it, stuffed one potato into his left cheek, the other into the right; then, still biting at the carrot, advanced towards the wire and looked up for more. The coast was clear. The young male, who had been looking for dandruff suddenly saw his opportunity. Chattering with excitement, he bounded down to the shelf on which, too frightened to follow her master, the little female was still squatting. Within ten seconds they had begun to copulate.

Virginia clapped her hands with pleasure. “Aren’t they cute!” she cried. “Aren’t they human!

Another burst of screaming and barking almost drowned her words.

Pete interrupted his distribution of food to say that it was a long while since he had seen Mr. Propter. Why shouldn’t they all go down the hill and pay a call on him.

“From the monkey cage to the Propter paddock,” said Dr. Obispo, “and from the Propter paddock back to the Stoyte house and the Maunciple kennel. What do you say, angel?”

Virginia was throwing potatoes to the old male—throwing them in such a way as to induce him to turn, to retrace his steps towards the shelf on which he had left his female. Her hope was that, if she got him to go back far enough, he’d see how the girl friend passed the time when he was away. “Yes, let’s go and see old Proppy,” she said, without turning round. She tossed another potato into the enclosure. With a flutter of grey bobbed hair the baboon pounced on it; but instead of looking up and catching Mrs. B. having her romance with the ice-man, the exasperating animal immediately turned round towards the wire, asking for more. “Stupid old fool!” Virginia shouted and this time threw the potato straight at him; it caught him on the nose. She laughed and turned towards the others. “I like old Proppy,” she said. “He scares me a bit; but I like him.”

“All right then,” said Dr. Obispo, “let’s go and rout out Mr. Pordage, while we’re about it.”

“Yes, let’s go and fetch old Ivory,” Virginia agreed, patting her own auburn curls in reference to Jeremy’s baldness. “He’s kind of cute, don’t you think?”

Leaving Pete to go on with the feeding of the baboons, they climbed back to the road and up a flight of steps on the further side, leading directly to the rock-cut windows of Jeremy’s room. Virginia pushed open the glass door.

“Ivory,” she called, “we’ve come to disturb you.”

Jeremy began to murmur something humorously gallant; then broke off in the middle of a sentence. He had suddenly remembered that pile of curious literature on the corner of the table. To get up and put the books into a cupboard would be to invite attention to them; he had no newspaper with which to cover them, no other books to mix them up with. There was nothing to be done. Nothing, except to hope for the best. Fervently he hoped for it; and almost immediately the worst happened. Idly, out of the need to perform some muscular action, however pointless, Virginia picked up a volume of Nerciat, opened it on one of its conscientiously detailed engravings, looked, then with wider eyes looked again and let out a whoop of startled excitement. Dr. Obispo glanced and yelled in turn; then both broke out into enormous laughter.

Jeremy sat in a misery of embarrassment, sicklily smiling, while they asked him if that was how he spent his time, if this was the sort of thing he was studying. If only people weren’t so wearisome, he was thinking, so deplorably unsubtle!

Virginia turned over the pages until she found another illustration. Once more, there was an outcry of delight, astonishment and, this time, incredulity. Was it possible? Could it really be done? She spelled out the caption under the engraving: “La volupté frappait à toutes les portes”; then petulantly shook her head. It was no good; she couldn’t understand it. Those French lessons at high school—just lousy; that was all you could say about them. They hadn’t taught her anything except a lot of nonsense about le crayon de mon oncle and savez-vous planter le chou. She’d always said that studying was mostly a waste of time; this proved it. And why did they have to print this stuff in French anyhow? At the thought that the deficiencies in the educational system of the State of Oregon might for ever prevent her from reading Andréa de Nerciat, the tears came into Virginia’s eyes. It was really too bad!

A brilliant idea occurred to Jeremy. Why shouldn’t he offer to translate the book for her—viva voce and sentence by sentence, like an interpreter at a Council Meeting of the League of Nations? Yes, why not? The more he thought of it, the better the idea seemed to him to be. His decision was made and he had begun to consider how most felicitously to phrase his offer, when Dr. Obispo quietly took the volume Virginia was hold ing, picked up the three companion volumes from the table, along with “Le Portier des Carmes” and the “Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome” and slipped the entire collection into the side pocket of his jacket.

“Don’t worry,” he said to Virginia. “I’ll translate them for you. And now let’s go back to the baboons. Pete’ll be wondering what’s happened to us. Come on, Mr. Pordage.”

In silence, but boiling inwardly with self-reproach for his own inefficiency and indignation at the doctor’s impudence, Jeremy followed them out of the French window and down the steps.

Pete had emptied his basket and was leaning against the wire, intently following with his eyes the movements of the animals within. At their approach he turned towards them. His pleasant young face was bright with excitement.

“Do you know, doc,” he said, “I believe it’s working.”

“What’s working?” asked Virginia.

Pete’s answering smile was beautiful with happiness. For, oh, how happy he was! Doubly and trebly happy. By the sweetness of her subsequent behaviour, Virginia had more than made up for the pain she had inflicted by turning away to listen to that smutty story. And after all it probably wasn’t a smutty story; he had been maligning her, thinking gratuitous evil of her. No, it certainly hadn’t been a smutty story—not smutty because, when she turned back to him, her face had looked like the face of that child in the illustrated Bible at home, that child who was gazing so innocently and cutely while Jesus said, “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” And that was not the only reason for his happiness. He was happy, too, because it looked as though those cultures of the carp’s intestinal flora were really having an effect on the baboons they had tried them on.

“I believe they’re livelier,” he explained. “And their fur—it’s kind of glossier.”

The fact gave him almost as great a satisfaction as did Virginia’s presence here in the transfiguring richness of the evening sunlight, as did the memory of her sweetness, the uplifting conviction of her essential innocence. Indeed, in some obscure way, the rejuvenation of the baboons and Virginia’s adorableness seemed to him to have a profound connexion—a connexion not only with one another, but also and at the same time with Loyalist Spain and Anti-Fascism. Three separate things, and yet one thing. There was a bit of poetry he had been made to learn at school—how did it go?

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not something or other (he could not at the moment remember what) more.

He did not love anything more than Virginia. But the fact that he cared so enormously much for science and justice, for this research and the boys back in Spain, did something to make his love for her more profound and, though it seemed a paradox, more whole-hearted.

“Well, what about moving on?” he suggested at last.

Dr. Obispo looked at his wrist watch. “I’d forgotten,” he said, “I’ve got some letters I ought to write before dinner. Guess I’ll have to see Mr. Propter some other time.”

“That’s too bad!” Pete did his best to impart to his tone and expression the cordiality of regret he did not feel. In fact, he was delighted. He admired Dr. Obispo, thought him a remarkable research worker—but not the sort of person a young innocent girl like Virginia ought to associate with. He dreaded for her the influence of so much cynicism and hard-boiledness. Besides, so far as his own relations to Virginia were concerned, Dr. Obispo was always in the way. “That’s too bad,” he repeated, and the intensity of his pleasure was such that he fairly ran up the steps leading from the baboon-enclosure to the drive—ran so fast that his heart began palpitating and missing beats. Damn that rheumatic fever!

Dr. Obispo stepped back to allow Virginia to pass and, as he did so, gave a little tap to the pocket containing “Les Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome” and tipped her a wink. Virginia winked back and followed Pete up the steps.

A few moments later Dr. Obispo was walking up the drive, the others down. Or to be more exact, Pete-and Jeremy were walking, while Virginia, to whom the idea of using one’s legs to get from anywhere to anywhere else was practically unthinkable, sat on her strawberry-and-cream-coloured scooter and, with one hand affectionately laid on Pete’s shoulder, allowed herself to be carried down by the force of gravity.

The noise of the baboons faded behind them, and at the next turn of the road there was Giambologna’s nymph, still indefatigably spouting from her polished breasts. Virginia suddenly interrupted a conversation about Clark Gable to say, in the righteously indignant tone of a vice crusader: “I just can’t figure why Uncle Jo allows that thing to stand there. It’s disgusting!”

“Disgusting?” Jeremy echoed in astonishment.

“Disgusting!” she repeated emphatically.

“Do you object to her not having any clothes on?” he asked, remembering, as he did so, those two little satin asymptotes to nudity which she herself had worn up there, in the swimming pool.

She shook her head impatiently. “It’s the way the water comes out.” She made the grimace of one who had tasted something revolting. “I think it’s horrible.”

“But why?” Jeremy insisted.

“Because it’s horrible,” was all the explanation she could give. A child of her age, which was the age, in this context, of bottle-feeding and contraception, she felt herself outraged by this monstrous piece of indelicacy from an earlier time. It was just horrible; that was all that could be said about it. Turning back to Pete, she went on talking about Clark Gable.

Opposite the entrance to the Grotto, Virginia parked her scooter. The masons had finished their work on the tomb and were gone; the place was empty. Virginia straightened her rakishly tilted yachting cap as a sign of respect; then ran up the steps, paused on the threshold to cross herself, and, entering, knelt for a few moments before the image. The others waited silently, in the roadway.

“Our Lady was so wonderful to me when I had sinus trouble last summer,” Virginia explained to Jeremy when she emerged again. “That’s why I got Uncle Jo to make this Grotto for Her. Wasn’t it gorgeous when the Archbishop came for the consecration!” she added, turning to Pete.

Pete nodded affirmatively.

“I haven’t even had a cold since She’s been here,” Virginia went on, as she took her seat on the scooter. Her face fairly shone with triumph; every victory for the Queen of Heaven was also a personal success for Virginia Maunciple. Then abruptly and without warning, as though she were doing a screen test and had received the order to register fatigue and self-pity, she passed a hand across her forehead, sighed profoundly and, in a tone of utter dejection and discouragement, said, “All the same, I’m feeling pretty tired this evening. Guess I was in the sun too much right after lunch. Maybe I’d better go and lie down a bit,” And affectionately but very firmly rejecting Pete’s offer to go back with her to the castle, she wheeled her scooter round, so that it faced uphill, gave the young man a last, particularly charming, almost amorous smile and look, said, “Good-bye, Pete darling,” and, opening the throttle of the engine, shot off with gathering momentum and an accelerating roll of explosions up the steep curving road, out of sight. Five minutes later she was in her boudoir, fixing a chocolate and banana split at the soda fountain. Seated in a gilded armchair upholstered in satin couleur fesse de nymphe, Dr. Obispo was reading aloud and translating as he went along from the first volume of “Les Cent-Vingt Jours.”

Chapter VIII

MR. PROPTER was sitting on a bench under the largest of his eucalyptus trees. To the west the mountains were already a flat silhouette against the evening sky, but in front of him, to the north the upper slopes were still alive with light and shadow, with rosy gold and depths of indigo. In the foreground, the castle had put on a garment of utterly improbable splendour and romance. Mr. Propter looked at it and at the hills and up through the motionless leaves of the eucalyptus at the pale sky; then closed his eyes and noiselessly repeated Cardinal Bérulle’s answer to the question: What is man? It was more than thirty years before, when he was writing his study of the Cardinal, that he had first read those words. They had impressed him even then by the splendour and precision of their eloquence. With the lapse of time and the growth of his experience they had come to seem more than eloquent, had come to take on ever richer connotations, ever profounder significances. “What is man?” he whispered to himself. “Cest un niant environné de Dieu, indigent de Dieu, capable de Dieu, et rempli de Dieu, s’il veut.” A nothingness surrounded by God; indigent and capable of God, filled with God if he so desires. And what is this God of which men are capable? Mr. Propter answered with the definition given by John Tauler in the first paragraph of his “Following of Christ”: “God is a being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working.” Man, then, is as nothingness surrounded by, and indigent of, a being withdrawn from creatures, a nothingness capable of free power, filled with a pure working if he so desires. If he so desires, Mr. Propter was distracted into reflecting, with a sudden but rather bitter sadness. But how few men ever do desire or, desiring, ever know what to wish for or how to get it! Right knowledge is hardly less rare than the sustained good will to act on it. Of those few who look for God, most find, through ignorance, only such reflections of their own self-will as the God of battles, the God of the chosen people, the Prayer-Answerer, the Saviour.

Having deviated thus far into negativity, Mr. Propter was led on, through a continuing failure of vigilance, into an even less profitable preoccupation with the concrete and particular miseries of the day. He remembered his interview that morning, with Hansen, who was the agent for Jo Stoyte’s estates in the valley. Hansen’s treatment of the migrants who came to pick the fruit was worse even than the average. He had taken advantage of their number and their desperate need to force down wages. In the groves he managed, young children were being made to work all day in the sun at the rate of two or three cents an hour. And when the day’s work was finished, the homes to which they returned were a row of verminous sties in the waste land beside the bed of the river. For these sties, Hansen was charging a rent of ten dollars a month. Ten dollars a month for the privilege of freezing or suffocating; of sleeping in a filthy promiscuity; of being eaten up by bed bugs and lice; of picking up ophthalmia and perhaps hookworm and amoebic dysentery. And yet Hansen was a very decent, kindly man. One who would be shocked and indignant if he saw you hurting a dog; one who would fly to the protection of a maltreated woman or a crying child. When Mr. Propter drew this fact to his attention, Hansen had flushed darkly with anger.

“That’s different,” he had said.

Mr. Propter had tried to find out why it was different.

It was his duty, Hansen had said.

But how could it be his duty to treat children worse than slaves and inoculate them with hookworm?

It was his duty to the estates. He wasn’t doing anything for himself.

But why should doing wrong for someone else be different from doing wrong on your own behalf? The results were exactly the same in either case. The victims didn’t suffer any less when you were doing what you called your duty than when you were acting in what you imagined might be your own interest.

This time the anger had exploded in violent abuse. It was the anger, Mr. Propter had perceived, of the well-meaning but stupid man who is compelled against his will to ask himself indiscreet questions about what he has been doing as a matter of course. He doesn’t want to ask these questions because he knows that if he does he will be forced either to go on with what he is doing, but with the cynic’s awareness that he is doing wrong, or else, if he doesn’t want to be a cynic, to change the entire pattern of his life so as to bring his desire to do right into harmony with the real facts as revealed in the course of self-interrogation. To most people radical change is even more odious than cynicism. The only way between the horns of the dilemma is to persist at all costs in the ignorance which permits one to go on doing wrong in the comforting belief that by doing so one is accomplishing one’s duty—one’s duty to the company, to the shareholders, to the family, the city, the state, the fatherland, the Church. For, of course, poor Hansen’s case wasn’t in any way unique; on a smaller scale and therefore with less power to do evil, he was acting like all those civil servants and statesmen and prelates, who go through life, spreading misery and destruction, in the name of their ideals and under orders from their categorical imperatives.

Well, he hadn’t got very far with Hansen, Mr. Propter sadly concluded. He’d have to try again with Jo Stoyte. In the past, Jo had always refused to listen, on the ground that the estates were Hansen’s business. The alibi was so convenient that it would be hard, he foresaw, to break it down.

From Hansen and Jo Stoyte his thoughts wandered to that newly arrived family of transients from Kansas, to whom he had given one of his cabins. The three undernourished children, with the teeth already rotting in their mouths; the woman, emaciated by God knew what complication of diseases, deep-sunken already in apathy and weakness; the husband alternately resentful and self-pitying, violent and morose.

He had gone with the man to get some vegetables from the garden plots and a rabbit for the family supper. Sitting there, skinning the rabbit, he had had to listen to outbursts of incoherent complaint and indignation. Complaint and indignation against the wheat market, which had broken each time he had begun to do well. Against the banks he had borrowed money from and been unable to repay. Against the droughts and winds that had reduced his farm to a hundred and sixty acres of dust and wilderness. Against the luck that had always been against him. Against the folks who had treated him so meanly, everywhere, all his life.

Dismally familiar story! With inconsiderable variations, he had heard it a thousand times before. Sometimes they were sharecroppers from further south, dispossessed by the owners in a desperate effort to make the farming pay. Sometimes, like this man, they had owned their own place and been dispossessed, not by financiers, but by the forces of nature—forces of nature which they themselves had made destructive by tearing up the grass and planting nothing but wheat. Sometimes they had been hired men, displaced by the tractors. All of them had come to California as to a promised land; and California had already reduced them to a condition of wandering peonage and was fast transforming them into Untouchables. Only a saint, Mr. Propter reflected, only a saint could be a peon and a pariah with impunity, because only a saint would accept the position gladly and as though he had chosen it of his own free will. Poverty and suffering ennoble only when they are voluntary. By involuntary poverty and suffering men are made worse. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an involuntarily poor man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Here, for example, was this poor devil from Kansas. How had he reacted to involuntary poverty and suffering? So far as Mr. Propter could judge, he was compensating himself for his misfortunes by brutality to those weaker than himself. The way he yelled at the children ... It was an all too familiar symptom.

When the rabbit was skinned and gutted, Mr. Propter had interrupted his companion’s monologue.

“Do you know which is the stupidest text in the Bible?” he had suddenly asked.

Startled and evidently a bit shocked, the man from Kansas had shaken his head.

“It’s this,” Mr, Propter had said, as he got up and handed him the carcass of the rabbit. “ ‘They hated me without a cause.’ ”

Under the eucalyptus tree, Mr. Propter wearily sighed. Pointing out to unfortunate people that, in part at any rate, they were pretty certainly responsible for their own misfortunes; explaining to them that ignorance and stupidity are no less severely punished by the nature of things than deliberate malice—these were never agreeable tasks. Never agreeable, but, so far as he could see, always necessary. For what hope, he asked himself, what faintest glimmer of hope is there for a man who really believes that “they hated me without a cause” and that he had no part in his own disasters? Obviously, no hope whatever. We see, as a matter of brute fact, that disasters and hatreds are never without causes; we also see that some at least of those causes are generally under the control of the people who suffer the disasters or are the object of the hatred. In some measure they are directly or indirectly responsible. Directly, by the commission of stupid or malicious acts. Indirectly, by the omission to be as intelligent and compassionate as they might be. And if they make this omission, it is generally because they choose to conform unthinkingly to local standards, and the current way of living. Mr. Propter’s thoughts returned to the poor fellow from Kansas. Self-righteous, no doubt disagreeable to the neighbours, an incompetent farmer; but that wasn’t the whole story. His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right. Like all the others he had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learnt to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity, with money to spend in a shop. Like all the others, he had abandoned any idea of subsistence farming to think exclusively in terms of a cash crop; and he had gone on thinking in those terms, even when the crop no longer gave him any cash. Then, like all the others, he had got into debt with the banks. And finally, like all the others, he had learnt that what the experts had been saying for a generation was perfectly true: in a semi-arid country, it is grass that holds down the soil; tear up the grass, the soil will go. In due course, it had gone.

The man from Kansas was now a peon and a pariah; and the experience was making a worse man of him.

St. Peter Claver was another of the historical personages to whom Mr. Propter had devoted a study. When the slave ships came into the harbour of Cartagena, Peter Claver was the only white man to venture down into the holds. There, in the unspeakable stench and heat, in the vapours of pus and excrement, he tended the sick, he dressed the ulcers of those whom their manacles had wounded, he held in his arms the men who had given way to despair and spoke to them words of comfort and affection—and in the intervals talked to them about their sins. Their sins! The modern humanitarian would laugh, if he were not shocked. And yet—such was the conclusion to which Mr. Propter had gradually and reluctantly come—and yet St. Peter Claver was probably right. Not completely right, of course; for acting on wrong knowledge, no man, however well intentioned, can be more than partially right. But as nearly right, at any rate, as a good man with a counter-reformation Catholic philosophy could expect to be. Right in insisting that, whatever the circumstances in which he finds himself, a human being always has omissions to make good, commissions whose effects must if possible be neutralized. Right in believing that it is well even for the most brutally sinned against to be reminded of their own shortcomings.

Peter Claver’s conception of the world had the defect of being erroneous, but the merit of being simple and dramatic. Given a personal God, dispenser of forgiveness; given heaven and hell and the absolute reality of human personalities; given the meritoriousness of mere good intentions and of unquestioning faith in a set of incorrect opinions; given the one true Church, the efficacy of priestly mediation, the magic of sacraments—given all these, it was really quite easy to convince even a newly imported slave of his sinfulness and to explain exactly what he ought to do about it. But if there is no single inspired book, no uniquely holy Church, no mediating priesthood nor sacramental magic; if there is no personal God to be placated into forgiving offences; if there are, even in the moral world, only causes and effects and the enormous complexity of interrelationships—then clearly, the task of telling people what to do about their shortcomings is much more difficult. For every individual is called on to display not only unsleeping good will but also unsleeping intelligence. And this is not all. For, if individuality is not absolute, if personalities are illusory figments of a self-will disastrously blind to the reality of a more-than-personal consciousness, of which it is the limitation and denial, then all of every human being’s efforts must be directed, in the last resort, to the actualization of that more-than-personal consciousness. So that even intelligence is not sufficient as an adjunct to good will; there must also be the recollection which seeks to transform and transcend intelligence. Many are called, but few are chosen—because few even know in what salvation consists. Con sider again this man from Kansas . . . Mr. Propter sadly shook his head. Everything was against the poor fellow—his fundamentalist orthodoxy, his wounded and inflamed egotism, his nervous irritability, his low intelligence. The first three disadvantages might perhaps be removed. But could anything be done about the fourth? The nature of things is implacable towards weakness. “From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” And what were those words of Spinoza’s? “A man may be excusable and nevertheless be tormented in many ways. A horse is excusable for not being a man; but nevertheless he must needs be a horse, and not a man.” All the same, there must surely be something to be done for people like the man from Kansas—something that didn’t entail telling harmful untruths about the nature of things. The untruth, for example, that there is a person up aloft or the other more modern untruth to the effect that human values are absolute and that God is the nation or the party or the human race as a whole. Surely, Mr. Propter insisteo surely, there was something to be done for such people The man from Kansas had begun by resenting what ht had said about the chain of cause and effect, the network of relationships—resenting it as a personal insult. But afterwards, when he saw that he was not being blamed, that no attempt was being made to come it over him, he had begun to take an interest, to see that after all there was something in it. Little by little it might be possible to make him think a bit more realistically at least about the world of everyday life, the outside world of appearances. And when he had done that, then it mightn’t be so overwhelmingly difficult for him to think a bit more realistically about himself—to conceive of that all-important ego of his as a fiction, a kind of nightmare, a frantically agitated nothingness capable, when once its frenzy had been quieted, of being filled with God, with a God conceived and experienced as a more than personal consciousness, as a free power, a pure working, a being withdrawn. . . . Suddenly, as he thus returned to his starting point, Mr. Propter became aware of the long, circuitous, unprofitable way he had travelled in order to reach it. He had come to this bench under the eucalyptus tree in order to recollect himself, in order to realize for a moment the existence of that other consciousness behind his private thoughts and feelings, that free, pure power greater than his own. He had come for this; but memories had slipped in while he was off his guard; speculations had started up, cloud upon cloud, like sea-birds rising from their nesting place to darken and eclipse the sun. Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance; and he had failed to be vigilant. It wasn’t a case, he reflected ruefully, of the spirit being willing and the flesh weak. That was altogether the wrong antithesis. The spirit is always willing; but the person, who is a mind as well as a body, is always unwilling—and the person, incidentally, is not weak but extremely strong.

He looked again at the mountains, at the pale sky between the leaves, at the soft russet pinks and purples and greys of the eucalyptus trunks; then shut his eyes once more.

“A nothingness surrounded by God, indigent of God, capable of God and filled with God if man so desires.” And what is God? A being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working. His vigilance gradually ceased to be an act of the will, a deliberate thrusting back of irrelevant personal thoughts and wishes and feelings. For little by little these thoughts and wishes and feelings had settled like a muddy sediment in a jar of water, and as they settled, his vigilance was free to transform itself into a kind of effortless unattached awareness, at once intense and still, alert and passive—an awareness whose object was the words he had spoken and at the same time that which surrounded the words. But that which surrounded the words was the awareness itself; for this vigilance which was now an effortless awareness—what was it but an aspect, a partial expression, of that impersonal and untroubled consciousness into which the words had been dropped and through which they were slowly sinking? And as they sank they took a new significance for the awareness that was following them down into the depths of itself—a significance new not in respect to the entities connoted by the words, but rather in the mode of their comprehension, which, from being intellectual in character, had become intuitive and direct, so that the nature of man in his potentiality and of God in actuality was realized by an analogue of sensuous experience, by a kind of unmediated participation. The busy nothingness of his being experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsions and desires, for the blissful freedom from personality. . . .

The sound of approaching footsteps made him open his eyes. Peter Boone and that Englishman he had sat with in the car were advancing up the path towards his seat under the eucalyptus trees. Mr. Propter raised his hand in welcome and smiled. He was fond of young Pete. There was native intelligence there and native kindliness; there was sensitiveness, generosity, a spontaneous decency of impulse and reaction. Charming and beautiful qualities! The pity was that by themselves and undirected as they were by a right knowledge of the nature of things, they should be so impotent for good, so inadequate to anything a reasonable man could call salvation. Fine gold, but still in the ore, unsmelted, unworked. Some day, perhaps, the boy would learn to use his gold. He would have to wish to learn first—and wish also to unlearn a lot of things he now regarded as self-evident and right. It would be hard for him, as hard, but for other reasons, as it would be for that poor fellow from Kansas.

“Well, Pete,” he called, “come and sit with me here. And you’ve brought Mr. Pordage; that’s good.” He moved to the middle of the bench so that they could sit, one on either side of him. “And did you meet the Ogre?” he said to Jeremy, pointing in the direction of the castle.

Jeremy made a grimace and nodded. “I remembered the name you used to call him at school,” he said. “That made it a little easier.”

“Poor Jo,” said Mr. Propter. “Fat people are always supposed to be so happy. But who ever enjoyed being laughed at? That jolly manner they sometimes have, and the jokes they make at their own expense—it’s just a case of alibis and prophylactics. They vaccinate themselves with their own ridicule so that they shan’t react too violently to other people’s.”

Jeremy smiled. He knew all about that. “It’s a good way out of an unpleasant predicament,” he said.

Mr. Propter nodded. “But unfortunately,” he said, “it didn’t happen to be Jo’s way. Jo was the kind of fat boy who bluffs it out. The kind that fights. The kind that bullies or patronizes. The kind that boasts and shows off. The kind that buys popularity by treating the girls to ice-creams, even if he has to steal a dime from his grandmother’s purse to do it. The kind that goes on stealing, even if he’s found out and gets beaten and believes it when they tell him he’ll go to hell. Poor Jo, he’s been that sort of fat boy all his life.” He pointed once again in the direction of the castle. “That’s his monument to a faulty pituitary. And talking of pituitaries,” he went on, turning to Pete, “how’s the work been going?”

Pete had been thinking gloomily of Virginia—wondering for the hundredth time why she had left them, whether he had done anything to offend her, whether she was really tired or if there might be some other reason. At Mr. Propter’s mention of work, he looked up, and his face brightened. “It’s going just fine,” he answered and, in quick eager phrases, strangely compounded of slang and technical terms, he told Mr. Propter about the results they had already got with their mice and were beginning to get, so it seemed, with the baboons and the dogs.

“And if you succeed,” Mr. Propter asked, “what happens to your dogs?”

“Why, their life’s prolonged,” Pete answered triumphantly.

“Yes, yes, I know that,” said the older man. “What I meant to ask was something different. A dog’s a wolf that hasn’t fully developed. It’s more like the foetus of a wolf than an adult wolf; isn’t that so?”

Pete nodded.

“In other words,” Mr. Propter went on, “it’s a mild, tractable animal because it has never grown up into savagery. Isn’t that supposed to be one of the mechanisms of evolutionary development?”

Pete nodded again. “There’s a kind of glandular equilibrium,” he explained. “Then a mutation comes along and knocks it sideways. You get a new equilibrium that happens to retard the development rate. You grow up; but you do it so slowly that you’re dead before you’ve stopped being like your great-great-grandfather’s foetus.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Propter. “So what happens if you prolong the life of an animal that has evolved that way?”

Pete laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “Guess we’ll have to wait and see,” he said.

“It would be a bit disquieting,” said Mr. Propter, “if your dogs grew back in the process of growing up.”

Pete laughed again delightedly. “Think of the dowagers being chased by their own Pekinese,” he said.

Mr. Propter looked at him curiously and was silent for a moment, as though waiting to see whether Pete would make any further comment. The comment did not come. “I’m glad you feel so happy about it,” he said. Then, turning to Jeremy, “It is not, if I remember rightly, Mr. Pordage,” he went on, “it is not growing like a tree in bulk doth make men better be.”

“Or standing long an oak, three hundred years,” said Jeremy, smiling with the pleasure which an apt quotation always gave him.

“What shall we all be doing at three hundred?” Mr. Propter speculated. “Do you suppose you’d still be a scholar and a gentleman?”

Jeremy coughed and patted his bald head. “One will certainly have stopped being a gentleman,” he answered. “One’s begun to stop even now, thank heaven.”

“But the scholar will stay the course?”

“There’s a lot of books in the British Museum.”

“And you, Pete?” said Mr. Propter. “Do you suppose you’ll still be doing scientific research?”

“Why not? What’s to prevent you from going on with it for ever?” the young man answered emphatically.

“For ever?” Mr. Propter repeated. “You don’t think you’d get a bit bored? One experiment after another. Or one book after another,” he added in an aside to Jeremy. “In general, one damned thing after another. You don’t think that would prey on your mind a bit?”

“I don’t see why,” said Pete.

“Time doesn’t bother you, then?”

Pete shook his head. “Why should it?”

“Why shouldn’t it?” said Mr. Propter, smiling at him with an amused affection. “Time’s a pretty bothersome thing, you know.”

“Not if you aren’t scared of dying or growing old.”

“Yes, it is,” Mr. Propter insisted; “even if you’re not scared. It’s nightmarish in itself—intrinsically nightmarish, if you see what I mean.”

“Intrinsically?” Pete looked at him perplexed. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Intrinsically nightmarish . . . ?”

“Nightmarish in the present tense, of course,” Jeremy put in. “But if one takes it in the fossil state—in the form of the Hauberk Papers, for example . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.

“Oh, pleasant enough,” said Mr. Propter, agreeing with his implied conclusion. “But after all, history isn’t the real thing. Past time is only evil at a distance; and, of course, the study of past time is itself a process in time. Cataloguing bits of fossil evil can never be more than an ersatz for the experience of eternity.” He glanced curiously at Pete, wondering how the boy would respond to what he was saying. Plunging like this into the heart of the matter, beginning at the very core and centre of the mystery—it was risky; there was a danger of evoking nothing but bewilderment, or alternatively nothing but angry derision. Pete’s, he could see, was more nearly the first reaction; but it was a bewilderment that seemed to be tempered by interest; he looked as though he wanted to find out what it was all about.

Meanwhile, Jeremy had begun to feel that this conversation was taking a most undesirable turn. “What precisely are we supposed to be talking about?” he asked acidulously. “The New Jerusalem?”

Mr. Propter smiled at him good-humouredly. “It’s all right,” he said. “I won’t say a word about harps or wings.”

“Well, that’s something,” said Jeremy.

“I never could get much satisfaction out of meaningless discourse,” Mr. Propter continued. “I like the words I use to bear some relation to facts. That’s why I’m interested in eternity—psychological eternity. Because it’s a fact.”

“For you, perhaps,” said Jeremy in a tone which implied that more civilized people didn’t suffer from these hallucinations.

“For any one who chooses to fulfil the conditions under which it can be experienced.”

“And why should any one choose to fulfil them?”

“Why should any one choose to go to Athens to see the Parthenon? Because it’s worth the bother. And the same is true of eternity. The experience of timeless good is worth all the trouble it involves.”

“Timeless good,” Jeremy repeated with distaste. “I don’t know what the words mean.”

“Why should you?” said Mr. Propter. “One doesn’t know the full meaning of the word ‘Parthenon’ until one has actually seen the thing.”

“Yes, but at least I’ve seen photographs of the Parthenon; I’ve read descriptions.”

“You’ve read descriptions of timeless good,” Mr. Propter answered. “Dozens of them. In all the literatures of philosophy and religion. You’ve read them; but you’ve never bought your ticket for Athens.”

In a resentful silence, Jeremy had to admit to himself that this was true. The fact that it was true made him disapprove of the conversation even more profoundly than he had done before.

“As for time,” Mr. Propter was saying to Pete, “what is it, in this particular context, but the medium in which evil propagates itself, the element in which evil lives and outside of which it dies? Indeed, it’s more than the element of evil, more than merely its medium. If you carry your analysis far enough, you’ll find that time is evil. One of the aspects of its essential substance.”

Jeremy listened with growing discomfort and a mounting irritation. His fears had been justified; the old boy was launching out into the worst kind of theology. Eternity, timeless experience of good, time as the substance of evil—it was bad enough, God knew, in books; but, fired at you like this, point blank by somebody who really took it seriously, why, it was really frightful. Why on earth couldn’t people live their lives in a rational, civilized way? Why couldn’t they take things as they came? Breakfast at nine, lunch at one-thirty, tea at five. And conversation. And the daily walk with Mr. Gladstone, the Yorkshire terrier. And the library; the Works of Voltaire in eighty-three volumes; the inexhaustible treasure of Horace Walpole; and for a change the “Divine Comedy”; and then in case you might be tempted to take the Middle Ages too seriously, Salimbene’s autobiography and the “Miller’s Tale.” And sometimes calls in the afternoon—the Rector, Lady Fredegond with her ear trumpet, Mr. Veal. And political discussions—except that in these last months, since the Anschluss and Munich one had found that political discussion was one of the unpleasant things it was wise to avoid. And the weekly journey to London, with lunch at the Reform, and always dinner with old Thripp of the British Museum; and a chat with one’s poor brother Tom at the Foreign Office (only that too was rapidly becoming one of the things to be avoided). And then, of course, the London Library, and Vespers at Westminster Cathedral, if they happened to be singing Palestrina, and every alternate week, between five and six-thirty, an hour and a half with Mae or Doris in their flat in Maida Vale. Infinite squalor in a little room, as he liked to call it; abysmally delightful. Those were the things that came; why couldn’t they take them, quietly and sensibly? But no, they had to gibber about eternity and all the rest. That sort of stuff always made Jeremy want to be blasphemous—to ask whether God had a boyau rectum, to protest, like the Japanese in the anecdote, that he was altogether flummoxed and perplexed by position of Honourable Bird. But unfortunately, the present was one of those peculiarly exasperating cases where such reactions were out of place. For, after all, old Propter had written “Short Studies”; what he said couldn’t just be dismissed as the vapourings of a deficient mind. Besides, he hadn’t talked Christianity, so that jokes about anthropomorphism were beside the point. It was really too exasperating! He assumed an expression of haughty detachment and even started to hum “The Honeysuckle and the Bee.” The impression he wanted to give was that of a superior being who really couldn’t be expected to waste his time listening to stuff like this.

A comic spectacle, Mr. Propter reflected as he looked at him; except, of course, that it was so extremely depressing.

Chapter IX

“TIME and craving,” said Mr. Propter, “craving and time—two aspects of the same thing; and that thing is the raw material of evil. So you see, Pete,” he added in another tone, “you see what a queer sort of present you’ll be making us, if you’re successful in your work. Another century or so of time and craving. A couple of extra life-times of potential evil.”

“And potential good,” the young man insisted with a note of protest in his voice.

“And potential good,” Mr. Propter agreed. “But only at a far remove from that extra time you’re giving us.”

“Why do you say that?” Pete asked.

“Because potential evil is in time; potential good isn’t. The longer you live, the more evil you automatically come into contact with. Nobody comes automatically into contact with good. Men don’t find more good by merely existing longer. It’s curious,” he went on reflectively, “that people should always have concentrated on the problem of evil. Exclusively. As though the nature of good were something self-evident. But it isn’t self-evident. There’s a problem of good at least as difficult as the problem of evil.”

“And what’s the solution?” Pete asked.

“The solution is very simple and profoundly unacceptable. Actual good is outside time.”

“Outside time? But then how . . . ?”

“I told you it was unacceptable,” said Mr. Propter.

“But if it’s outside time, then . . .”

“. . . then nothing within time can be actual good. Time is potential evil, and craving converts the potentiality into actual evil. Whereas a temporal act can never be more than potentially good, with a potentiality, what’s more, that can’t be actualized except out of time.”

“But inside time, here—you know, just doing the ordinary things—hell! we do sometimes do right. What acts are good?”

“Strictly speaking, none,” Mr. Propter answered. “But in practice, I think one’s justified in applying the word to certain acts. Any act that contributes towards the liberation of those concerned in it—I’d call it a good act.”

“Liberation?” the young man repeated dubiously. The words, in his mind, carried only economic and revolutionary connotations. But it was evident that Mr. Propter wasn’t talking about the necessity for getting rid of capitalism. “Liberation from what?”

Mr. Propter hesitated before replying. Should he go on with this? he wondered. The Englishman was hostile; the time short; the boy himself entirely ignorant. But it was an ignorance evidently mitigated by good will and a touching nostalgia for perfection. He decided to take a chance and go on.

“Liberation from time,” he said. “Liberation from craving and revulsion. Liberation from personality.”

“But, heck,” said Pete, “you’re always talking about democracy. Doesn’t that mean respecting personality?”

“Of course,” Mr. Propter agreed. “Respecting it in order that it may be able to transcend itself. Slavery and fanaticism intensify the obsession with time and evil and the self. Hence the value of democratic institutions and a sceptical attitude of mind. The more you respect a personality, the better its chance of discovering that all personality is a prison. Potential good is anything that helps you to get out of prison. Actualized good lies outside the prison, in timelessness, in the state of pure, disinterested consciousness.”

“I’m not much good at abstractions,” said the young man. “Let’s take some concrete examples. What about science, for instance? Is that good?”

“Good, bad and indifferent, according to how it’s pursued and what it’s used for. Good, bad and indifferent, first of all, for the scientists themselves—just as art and scholarship may be good, bad or indifferent for artists and scholars. Good if it facilitates liberation; indifferent if it neither helps nor hinders; bad if it makes liberation more difficult by intensifying the obsession with personality. And, remember, the apparent selflessness of the scientist, or the artist, is not necessarily a genuine freedom from the bondage of personality. Scientists and artists are men devoted to what we vaguely call an ideal. But what is an ideal? An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.”

“Say that again,” Pete requested, while even Jeremy so far forgot his pose of superior detachment to lend his most careful attention.

Mr. Propter said it again. “And that’s true,” he went on, “of every ideal except the highest, which is the ideal of liberation—liberation from personality, liberation from time and craving, liberation into union with God, if you don’t object to the word, Mr. Pordage. Many people do,” he added. “It’s one of the words that the Mrs. Grundys of the intellect find peculiarly shocking. I always try to spare their sensibilities, if I can. Well, to return to our idealist,” he continued, glad to see that Jeremy had been constrained, in spite of himself, to smile. “If he serves any ideal except the highest—whether it’s the artist’s ideal of beauty, or the scientist’s ideal of truth, or the humanitarian’s ideal of what currently passes for goodness—he’s not serving God; he’s serving a magnified aspect of himself. He may be completely devoted; but, in the last analysis, his devotion turns out to be directed towards an aspect of his own personality. His apparent selflessness is really not a liberation from his ego, but merely another form of bondage. This means that science may be bad for scientists even when it appears to be a deliverer. And the same holds good of art, of scholarship, of humanitarianism.”

Jeremy thought nostalgically of his library at The Araucarias. Why couldn’t this old madman be content to take things as they came?

“And what about other people?” Pete was saying. “People who aren’t scientists. Hasn’t it helped to set them free?”

Mr. Propter nodded. “And it has also helped to tie them more closely to themselves. And what’s more, I should guess that it has increased bondage more than it has diminished it—and will tend to go on increasing it, progressively.”

“How do you figure that out?”

“Through its applications,” Mr. Propter answered. “Applications to warfare, first of all. Better planes, better explosives, better guns and gases—every improvement increases the sum of fear and hatred, widens the incidence of nationalistic hysteria. In other words, every improvement in armaments makes it more difficult for people to escape from their egos, more difficult to forget those horrible projections of themselves they call their ideals of patriotism, heroism, glory and all the rest. And even the less destructive applications of science aren’t really much more satisfactory. For what do such applications result in? The multiplication of possessable objects; the invention of new instruments of stimulation; the disseminations of new wants through propaganda aimed at equating possession with well-being and incessant stimulation with happiness. But incessant stimulation from without is a source of bondage; and so the preoccupation with possessions. And now you’re threatening to prolong our lives, so that we can go on being stimulated, go on desiring possessions, go on waving flags and hating our enemies and being afraid of air attack—go on and on, generation after generation, sinking deeper and deeper into the stinking slough of our personality.” He shook his head. “No, I can’t quite share your optimism about science.”

There was a silence while Pete debated with himself whether to ask Mr. Propter about love. In the end he decided he wouldn’t. Virginia was too sacred. (But why, why had she turned back at the Grotto? What could he have said or done to offend her?) As much to prevent himself from brooding over these problems as because he wanted to know the old man’s opinions on the last of the three things that seemed to him supremely valuable, he looked up at Mr. Propter and asked, “What about social justice? I mean, take the French Revolution. Or Russia. And what about this Spanish business—fighting for liberty and democracy against Fascist aggression?” He had tried to remain perfectly calm and scientific about the whole thing; but his voice trembled a little as he spoke the last words. In spite of their familiarity (perhaps because of their familiarity), phrases like “Fascist aggression” still had power to move him to the depths.

“Napoleon came out of the French Revolution,” said Mr. Propter after a moment’s silence. “German nationalism came out of Napoleon. The war of 1870 came out of German nationalism. The war of 1914 came out of the war of 1870. Hitler came out of the war of 1914. Those are the bad results of the French Revolution. The good results were the enfranchisement of the French peasants and the spread of political democracy. Put the good results in one scale of your balance and the bad ones in the other, and try which set is the heavier. Then perform the same operation with Russia. Put the abolition of Czardom and capitalism in one scale; and in the other put Stalin, put the secret police, put the famines, put twenty years of hardship for a hundred and fifty million people, put the liquidation of intellectuals and Kulaks and old Bolsheviks, put the hordes of slaves in prison camps; put the military conscription of everybody, male and female, from childhood to old age, put the revolutionary propaganda which spurred the bourgeoisie to invent Fascism.” Mr. Propter shook his head. “Or take the fight for democracy in Spain,” he went on. “There was a fight for democracy all over Europe not so long ago. Rational prognosis can only be based on past experience. Look at the results of 1914 and then ask yourself what chance the Loyalists ever had of establishing a liberal regime at the end of a long war. The others are winning; so we shall never have the opportunity of seeing what circumstances and their own passions would have driven those well-intentioned liberals to become.”

“But, hell!” Pete broke out, “what do you expect people to do when they’re attacked by the Fascists? Sit down and let their throats be cut?”

“Of course not,” said Mr. Propter. “I expect them to fight. And the expectation is based on my previous knowledge of human behaviour. But the fact that people generally do react to that kind of situation in that kind of way doesn’t prove that it’s the best way of reacting. Experience makes me expect that they’ll behave like that. But experience also makes me expect that, if they do behave like that, the results will be disastrous.”

“Well, how do you want us to act? Do you want us to sit still and do nothing?”

“Not nothing,” said Mr. Propter. “Merely something appropriate.”

“But what is appropriate?”

“Not war, anyhow. Nor violent revolution. Nor yet politics, to any considerable extent, I should guess.” “Then what?”

“That’s what we’ve got to discover. The main lines are clear enough. But there’s still a lot of work to be done on the practical details.”

Pete was not listening. His mind had gone back to that time in Aragon, when life had seemed supremely significant. “But those boys, back there in Spain,” he burst out. “You didn’t know them, Mr. Propter. They were wonderful, really they were. Never mean to you, and brave, and loyal and . . . and everything.” He wrestled with the inadequacies of his vocabulary, with the fear of making an exhibition of himself by talking big, like a highbrow. “They weren’t living for themselves, I can tell you that, Mr. Propter.” He looked into the old man’s face almost supplicatingly, as though imploring him to believe. “They were living for something much bigger than themselves—like what you were talking about just now; you know, something more than just personal.”

“And what about Hitler’s boys?” Mr. Propter asked. “What about Mussolini’s boys? What about Stalin’s boys? Do you suppose they’re not just as brave, just as kind to one another, just as loyal to their cause and just as firmly convinced that it’s the cause of justice, truth, freedom, right and honour?” He looked at Pete inquiringly; but Pete said nothing. “The fact that people have a lot of virtues,” Mr. Propter went on, “doesn’t prove anything about the goodness of their actions. You can have all the virtues—that’s to say, all except the two that really matter, understanding and compassion—you can have all the others, I say, and be a thoroughly bad man. Indeed, you can’t be really bad unless you do have most of the virtues. Look at Milton’s Satan for example. Brave, strong, generous, loyal, prudent, temperate, self-sacrificing. And let’s give the dictators the credit that’s due to them; some of them are nearly as virtuous as Satan. Not quite, I admit, but nearly. That’s why they can achieve so much evil.”

His elbows on his knees, Pete sat in silence, frowning. “But that feeling,” he said at last, “that feeling there was between us. You know—the friendship; only it was more than just ordinary friendship. And the feeling of being there all together—fighting for the same thing—and the thing being worth while—and then the danger, and the rain, and that awful cold at nights, and the heat in summer, and being thirsty, and even those lice and the dirt—share and share alike in everything, bad or good—and knowing that tomorrow it might be your turn, or one of the other boys’—your turn for the field hospital (and the chances were they wouldn’t have enough anaesthetics, except maybe for an amputation or something like that) or your turn for the burial party. All those feelings, Mr. Propter—I just can’t believe they didn’t mean something.”

“They meant themselves,” said Mr. Propter.

Jeremy saw the opportunity for a counter-attack and, with a promptitude unusual in him, immediately took it. “Doesn’t the same thing apply to your feelings about eternity, or whatever it is?” he asked.

“Of course it does,” said Mr. Propter.

“Well, in that case, how can you claim any validity for it? The feeling means itself, and that’s all there is to it.”

“It means itself,” Mr. Propter agreed. “But what precisely is this ‘itself? In other words, what is the nature of the feeling?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Jeremy with a shake of the head and a comically puzzled lift of the eyebrows. “I really don’t know.”

Mr. Propter smiled. “I know you don’t want to know,” he said. “And I won’t ask you. I’ll just state the facts. The feeling in question is a non-personal experience of timeless peace. Accordingly, non-personality, timelessness and peace are what it means. Now let’s consider the feeling that Pete has been talking about. These are all personal feelings, evoked by temporal situations, and characterized by a sense of excitement. Intensification of the ego within the world of time and craving—that’s what these feelings meant.”

“But you can’t call self-sacrifice an intensification of the ego,” said Pete.

“I can and I do,” Mr. Propter insisted. “For the good reason that it generally is. Self-sacrifice to any but the highest cause is sacrifice to an ideal, which is simply a projection of the ego. What is commonly called self-sacrifice is the sacrifice of one part of the ego to another part, one set of personal feelings and passions for another set—as when the feelings connected with money or sex are sacrificed in order that the ego may have the feelings of superiority, solidarity and hatred which are associated with patriotism, or any kind of political or religious fanaticism.”

Pete shook his head. “Sometimes,” he said, with a smile of rueful perplexity, “sometimes you almost talk like Dr. Obispo. You know—cynically.”

Mr. Propter laughed. “It’s good to be cynical,” he said. “That is, if you know when to stop. Most of the things that we’re all taught to respect and reverence—they don’t deserve anything but cynicism. Take your own case. You’ve been taught to worship ideals like patriotism, social justice, science, romantic love. You’ve been told that such virtues as loyalty, temperance, courage and prudence are good in themselves, in any circumstances. You’ve been assured that self-sacrifice is always splendid and fine feelings invariably good. And it’s all nonsense, all a pack of lies that people have made up in order to justify themselves in continuing to deny God and wallow in their own egotism. Unless you’re steadily and unflaggingly cynical about the solemn twaddle that’s talked by bishops and bankers and professors and politicians and all the rest of them, you’re lost. Utterly lost. Doomed to perpetual imprisonment in your ego—doomed to be a personality in a world of personalities; and a world of personalities is this world, the world of greed and fear and hatred, of war and capitalism and dictatorship and slavery. Yes, you’ve got to be cynical, Pete. Specially cynical about all the actions and feelings you’ve been taught to suppose were good. Most of them are not good. They’re merely evils which happen to be regarded as creditable. But unfortunately, creditable evil is just as bad as discreditable evil. Scribes and Pharisees aren’t any better, in the last analysis, than publicans and sinners. Indeed, they’re often much worse. For several reasons. Being well thought of by others, they think well of themselves; and nothing so confirms an egotism as thinking well of oneself. In the next place, publicans and sinners are generally just human animals, without enough energy or self-control to do much harm. Whereas the scribes and Pharisees have all the virtues, except the only two which count, and enough intelligence to understand everything except the real nature of the world. Publicans and sinners merely fornicate and over-eat, and get drunk. The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word—these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.”

“So what it all boils down to,” Pete concluded in a tone of angry despair, “is that there just isn’t anything you can do. Is that it?”

“Yes and no,” said Mr. Propter, in his quiet judicial way. “On a strictly human level, the level of time and craving, I should say that it’s quite true: in the last resort, there isn’t anything you can do.”

“But that’s just defeatism!” Pete protested.

“Why is it defeatism to be realistic?”

“There must be something to do!”

“I see no ‘must’ about it.”

“Then what about the reformers and all those people? If you’re right, they’re just wasting their time.”

“It depends on what they think they’re doing,” said Mr. Propter. “If they think they’re just temporarily palliating particular distresses, if they see themselves as people engaged in laboriously deflecting evil from old channels into new and slightly different channels, then they can justifiably claim to be successful. But if they think they’re making good appear where evil was before, why then all history clearly shows that they are wasting their time.”

“But why can’t they make good appear where evil was before?”

“Why do we fall when we jump out of a tenth-storey window? Because the nature of things happens to be such that we do fall. And the nature of things is such that, on the strictly human level of time and craving, you can’t achieve anything but evil. If you choose to work exclusively on that level and exclusively for the ideals and causes that are characteristic of it, then you’re insane if you expect to transform evil into good. You’re insane, because experience should have shown you that, on that level, there doesn’t happen to be any good. There are only different degrees and different kinds of evil.”

“Then what do you want people to do?”

“Don’t talk as though it were all my fault,” said Mr. Propter. “I didn’t invent the universe.”

“What ought they to do, then?”

“Well, if they want fresh varieties of evil, let them go on with what they’re doing now. But if they want good, they’ll have to change their tactics. And the encouraging thing,” Mr. Propter added in another tone, “the encouraging thing is that there are tactics which will produce good. We’ve seen that there’s nothing to be done on the strictly human level—or rather there are millions of things to be done, only none of them will achieve any good. But there is something effective to be done on the levels where good actually exists. So you see, Pete, I’m not a defeatist. I’m a strategist. I believe that if a battle is to be fought, it had better be fought under conditions in which there’s at least some chance of winning. I believe that, if you want the golden fleece, it’s more sensible to go to the place where it exists than to rush round performing prodigies of valour in a country where all the fleeces happen to be coal-black.”

“Then where ought we to fight for good?”

“Where good is.”

“But where is it?”

“On the level below the human and on the level above. On the animal level and on the level . . . well, you can take your choice of names: the level of eternity; the level, if you don’t object, of God; the level of the spirit—only that happens to be about the most ambiguous word in the language. On the lower level, good exists as the proper functioning of the organism in accordance with the laws of its own being. On the higher level, it exists in the form of a knowledge of the world without desire or aversion; it exists as the experience of eternity, as the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego. Strictly human activities are activities that prevent the manifestation of good on the other two levels. For, insofar as we’re human, we’re obsessed with time, we’re passionately concerned with our personalities and with those magnified projections of our personalities which we call our policies, our ideals, our religions. And what are the results? Being obsessed with time and our egos, we are for ever craving and worrying. But nothing impairs the normal functioning of the organism like craving and revulsion, like greed and fear and worry. Directly or indirectly, most of our physical ailments and disabilities are due to worry and craving. We worry and crave ourselves into high blood pressure, heart disease, tuberculosis, peptic ulcer, low resistance to infection, neurasthenia, sexual aberrations, insanity, suicide. Not to mention all the rest.” Mr. Propter waved his hand comprehensively. “Craving even prevents us from seeing properly,” he went on. “The harder we try to see, the graver our error of accommodation. And it’s the same with bodily posture: the more we worry about doing the thing immediately ahead of us in time, the more we interfere with our correct body posture and the worse, in consequence, becomes the functioning of the entire organism. In a word, insofar as we’re human beings, we prevent ourselves from realizing the physiological and instinctive good that we’re capable of as animals. And, mutatis mutandis, the same thing is true in regard to the sphere above. Insofar as we’re human beings, we prevent ourselves from realizing the spiritual and timeless good that we’re capable of as potential inhabitants of eternity, as potential enjoyers of the beatific vision. We worry and crave ourselves out of the very possibility of transcending personality and knowing, intellectually at first and then by direct experience, the true nature of the world.”

Mr. Propter was silent for a moment; then, with a sudden smile, “Luckily,” he went on, “most of us don’t manage to behave like human beings all the time. We forget our wretched little egos and those horrible great projections of our egos in the ideal world—forget them and relapse for a while into harmless animality. The organism gets a chance to function according to its own laws; in other words, it gets a chance to realize such good as it’s capable of. That’s why we’re as healthy and sane as we are. Even in great cities, as many as four persons out of five manage to go through life without having to be treated in a lunatic asylum. If we were consistently human, the percentage of mental cases would rise from twenty to a hundred. But fortunately most of us are incapable of consistency. The animal is always trying to resume its rights. And to some people fairly frequently, perhaps occasionally to all, there come little flashes of illumination—momentary glimpses into the nature of the world as it is for a consciousness liberated from appetite and time, of the world as it might be if we didn’t choose to deny God by being our personal selves. Those flashes come to us when we’re off our guard; then craving and worry come rushing back and the light is eclipsed once more by our personality and its lunatic ideals, its criminal policies and plans.”

There was silence. The sun had gone. Behind the mountains to the west, a pale yellow light faded through green into a blue that deepened as it climbed. At the zenith, it was all night. Pete sat quite still, staring into the dark but still transparent sky above the northern peaks. That voice, so calm at first and then at the end so powerfully resonant, those words, now mercilessly critical of all the things to which he had given his allegiance, now charged with the half comprehended promise of things incommensurably worthier of loyalty, had left him profoundly moved and at the same time perplexed and at a loss. Everything, he saw, would have to be thought out again, from the beginning—science, politics, perhaps even love, even Virginia. He was appalled by the prospect and yet, in another part of his being, attracted; he felt resentful at the thought of Mr. Propter, but at the same time loved the disquieting old man; loved him for what he did and, above all, for what he so admirably and, in Pete’s own experience, uniquely was—disinterestedly friendly, at once serene and powerful, gentle and strong, self-effacing and yet intensely there, more present, so to speak, radiating more life than any one else.

Jeremy Pordage had also found himself taking an interest in what the old man said, had even, like Pete, experienced the stirrings of a certain disquiet—a disquiet none the less disquieting for having stirred in him before. The substance of what Mr. Propter had said was familiar to him. For, of course, he had read all the significant books on the subject—would have thought himself barbarously uneducated if he hadn’t—had read Sankara and Eckhart, the Pali texts and John of the Cross, Charles de Condran and the Bardo and Patan-jali and the Pseudo-Dionysius. He had read them and been moved by them into wondering whether he oughtn’t to do something about them; and, because he had been moved in this way, he had taken the most elaborate pains to make fun of them, not only to other people, but also and above all to himself. “You’ve never bought your ticket to Athens,” the man had said—damn his eyes! Why did he want to go putting these things over on one? All one asked was to be left in peace, to take things as they came. Things as they came—one’s books, one’s little articles, and Lady Fredegond’s ear trumpet, and Palestrina, and steak and kidney pudding at the Reform, and Mae and Doris. Which reminded him that today was Friday; if he were in England it would be his afternoon at the flat in Maida Vale. Deliberately he turned his attention away from Mr. Propter and thought instead of those alternate Friday afternoons; of the pink lampshades; the smell of talcum powder and perspiration; the Trojan women, as he called them because they worked so hard, in their kimonos from Marks and Spencer’s; the framed reproductions of pictures by Poynter and Alma Tadema (delicious irony that works which the Victorians had regarded as art should have come to serve, a generation later, as pornography in a trollop’s bedroom!); and, finally, the erotic routine, so matter-of-factly sordid, so conscientiously and professionally low, with a lowness and a sordidness that constituted, for Jeremy, their greatest charm, that he prized more highly than any amount of moonlight and romance, any number of lyrics and Lie-bestods. Infinite squalor in a little room! It was the apotheosis of refinement, the logical conclusion of good taste.

Chapter X

THIS Friday, Mr. Stoyte’s afternoon in town had been exceptionally uneventful. Nothing untoward had occurred during the preceding week. In the course of his various meetings and interviews nobody had said or done anything to make him lose his temper. The reports on business conditions had been very satisfactory. The Japs had bought another hundred thousand barrels of oil. Copper was up two cents. The demand for bentonite was definitely increasing. True, applications for bank credit had been rather disappointing; but the influenza epidemic had raised the weekly turnover of the Pantheon to a figure well above the average.

Things went so smoothly that Mr. Stoyte was through with all his business more than an hour before he had expected. Finding himself with time to spare, he stopped, on the way home, at his agent’s to find out what was happening on the estate. The interview lasted only a few minutes—long enough, however, to put Mr. Stoyte in a fury that sent him rushing out to the car.

“Drive to Mr. Propter’s,” he ordered with a peremptory ferocity as he slammed the door.

What the hell did Bill Propter think he was doing? he kept indignantly asking himself. Shoving his nose into other people’s business. And all on account of those lousy bums who had come to pick the oranges! All for those tramps, those stinking, filthy hoboes! Mr. Stoyte had a peculiar hatred for the ragged hordes of transients on whom he depended for the harvesting of his crops, a hatred that was more than the rich man’s ordinary dislike of the poor. Not that he didn’t experience that complex mixture of fear and physical disgust, of stifled compassion and shame transformed by repression into chronic exasperation. He did. But over and above this common and generic dislike for poor people, he was moved by other hatreds of his own. Mr. Stoyte was a rich man who had been poor. In the six years between the time when he ran away from his father and grandmother in Nashville and the time when he had been adopted by the black sheep of the family, his Uncle Tom, in California, Jo Stoyte had learnt, as he imagined, everything there was to be known about being poor. Those years had left him with an ineradicable hatred for the circumstances of poverty and at the same time an ineradicable contempt for all those who had been too stupid, or too weak, or too unlucky to climb out of the hell into which they had fallen or been born. The poor were odious to him, not only because they were potentially a menace to his position in society, not only because their misfortunes demanded a sympathy he did not wish to give, but also because they reminded him of what he himself had suffered in the past and at the same time because the fact that they were still poor was a sufficient proof of their contemptibleness and his own superiority. And since he had suffered what they were now suffering, it was only right that they should go on suffering what he had suffered. Also, since their continued poverty proved them contemptible, it was proper that he, who was now rich, should treat them in every way as the contemptible creatures they had shown themselves to be. Such was the logic of Mr. Stoyte’s emotions. And here was Bill Propter, running counter to this logic by telling the agent that they oughtn’t to take advantage of the glut of transient labour to force down wages; that they ought, on the contrary, to raise them—raise them, if you please, at a time when these bums were swarming over the state like a plague of Mormon crickets! And not only that; they ought to build accommodations for them—cabins, like the ones that crazy fool Bill had built for them himself; two-roomed cabins at six or seven hundred dollars apiece—for bums like that, and their women, and those disgusting children who were so filthy dirty, he wouldn’t have them in his hospital; not unless they were really dying of appendicitis or something—you couldn’t refuse them then, of course. But meanwhile, what the hell did Bill Propter think he was doing? And it wasn’t the first time either that he’d tried to interfere. Gliding through the twilight of the orange groves, Mr. Stoyte kept striking the palm of his left hand with his clenched right fist.

“I’ll let him have it,” he whispered to himself. “I’ll let him have it.”

Fifty years before, Bill Propter had been the only boy in the school who, even though he was the older and stronger, didn’t make fun of him for being fat. They had met again when Bill was teaching at Berkeley and he himself had made good in the real estate game and had just gone into oil. Partly in gratitude for the way Bill Propter had acted when they were boys, partly also in order to display his power, to redress the balance of superiority in his own favour, Jo Stoyte had wanted to do something handsome for the young Assistant Professor. But in spite of his modest salary and the two or three miserable thousand dollars a year his father had left him, Bill Propter hadn’t wanted anything done for him. He had seemed genuinely grateful, he had been perfectly courteous and friendly; but he just didn’t want to come in on the ground floor of Consol Oil—didn’t want to because, as he kept explaining, he had all he needed and preferred not to have anything more. Jo’s effort to redress the balance of superiority had failed. Failed disastrously, because by refusing his offer, Bill had done something which, though he called him a fool for doing it, compelled Jo Stoyte secretly to admire him more than ever. Extorted against his will, this admiration bred a corresponding resentment towards its object. Jo Stoyte felt aggrieved that Bill had given him so many reasons for liking him. He would have preferred to like him without a reason, in spite of his shortcomings. But Bill had few shortcomings and many merits, merits which Jo himself did not have and whose presence in Bill he therefore regarded as an affront. Thus it was that all the reasons for liking Bill Propter were also, in Jo’s eyes, equally valid reasons for disliking him. He continued to call Bill a fool; but he felt him as a standing reproach. And yet the nature of this standing reproach was such that he liked to be in Bill’s company. It was because Bill had settled down on a ten-acre patch of land in this part of the valley that Mr. Stoyte had decided to build his castle on the site where it now stood. He wanted to be near Bill Propter, even though, in practice, there was almost nothing that Bill could do or say that didn’t annoy him. Today, this chronic exasperation had been fanned by Mr. Stoyte’s hatred of the transients into a passion of fury.

“I’ll let him have it,” he repeated again and again.

The car came to a halt and, before the chauffeur could open the door for him, Mr. Stoyte had darted out and was hurrying in his determined way, looking neither to right nor left, up the path that led from the road to his old friend’s bungalow.

“Hullo, Jo,” a familiar voice called from the shadow under the eucalyptus trees.

Mr. Stoyte turned, peered through the twilight, then, without a word, hurried towards the bench on which the three men were sitting. There was a chorus of “Good evenings,” and, as he approached, Pete rose politely and offered him his place. Ignoring his gesture and his very presence, Mr. Stoyte addressed himself immediately to Bill Propter.

“Why the hell can’t you leave my man alone?” he almost shouted.

Mr. Propter looked at him with only a moderate astonishment. He was used to these outbursts from poor Jo; le had long since divined their fundamental cause and knew by experience how to deal with them.

“Which man, Jo?” he asked.

“Bob Hansen, of course. What do you mean by going to him behind my back?”

“When I went to you,” said Mr. Propter, “you told me it was Hansen’s business. So I went to Hansen.”

This was so infuriatingly true that Mr. Stoyte could only resort to roaring. He roared. “Interfering with him in his work! What’s the idea?”

“Pete’s offering you a seat,” Mr. Propter put in. “Or if you prefer it, there’s an iron chair behind you. You’d better sit down, Jo.”

“I’m not going to sit down,” Mr. Stoyte bellowed. “And I want an answer. What’s the idea?”

“The idea?” Mr. Propter repeated in his slow quiet way. “Well, it’s quite an old one, you know, I didn’t invent it.”

“Can’t you answer me?”

“It’s the idea that men and women are human beings. Not vermin.”

“Those bums of yours!”

Mr. Propter turned to Pete. “You may as well sit down again,” he said.

“Those lousy bums! I tell you I won’t stand it,”

“Besides,” Mr. Propter went on, “I’m a practical man. You’re not.”

“Me not practical?” Mr. Stoyte echoed with indignant amazement. “Not practical? Well, look at the place I live in and then look at this dump of yours.”

“Exactly. That proves the point. You’re hopelessly romantic, Jo; so romantic, you think people can work when they haven’t had enough to eat.”

“You’re trying to make Communists of them.” The word Communist renewed Mr. Stoyte’s passion and at the same time justified it; his indignation ceased to be merely personal and became righteous. “You’re nothing but a Communist agitator.” His voice trembled, Mr. Propter sadly noticed, just as Pete’s had trembled half an hour before, at the words “Fascist aggression.” He wondered if the boy had noticed or, having noticed, would take the hint. “Nothing but a Communist agitator,” Mr, Stoyte repeated with a crusader’s zeal.

“I thought we were talking about eating,” said Mr. Propter.

“You’re stalling!”

“Eating and working—wasn’t that it?”

“I’ve put up with you all these years,” Mr. Stoyte went on, “for old times’ sake. But now I’m through. I’m sick of you. Talking Communism to those bums! Making the place dangerous for decent people to live in.

“Decent?” Mr. Propter echoed, and was tempted to laugh, but immediately checked the impulse. Being laughed at in the presence of Pete and Mr. Pordage might goad the poor fellow into doing something irreparably stupid.

“I’ll have you run out of the valley,” Mr. Stoyte was roaring. “I’ll see that you’re . . .” He broke off in the middle of the sentence and stood there for a few seconds in silence, his mouth still open and working, his eyes staring. That drumming in the ears, that tingling heat in the face—they had suddenly reminded him of his blood pressure, of Dr. Obispo, of death. Death and that flame-coloured text in his bedroom at home. Terrible to fall into the hands of the living God—not Prudence’s God, of course; the other one, the real one, the God of his father and his grandmother.

Mr. Stoyte drew a deep breath, pulled out his handkerchief, wiped his face and neck, then, without uttering another word, turned and began to walk away.

Mr. Propter got up, hurried after him and, in spite of the other’s angry motion of recoil, took Mr. Stoyte’s arm and walked along beside him.

“I want to show you something, Jo,” he said. “Something that’ll interest you, I think.”

“I don’t want to see it,” said Mr. Stoyte between his false teeth.

Mr. Propter paid no attention, but continued to lead him towards the back of the house. “It’s a gadget that Abbot of the Smithsonian has been working on for some time,” he continued. “A thing for making use of solar energy.” He interrupted himself for a moment to call back to the others to follow him; then turned again to Mr. Stoyte and resumed the conversation. “Much more compact than anything of the kind that’s ever been made before,” he said. “Much more efficient, too.” And he went on to describe the system of trough-shaped reflectors, the tubes of oil heated to a temperature of four or five hundred degrees Fahrenheit; the boiler for raising steam, if you wanted to run a low-pressure engine; the cooking range and water heater, if you were using it only for domestic purposes. “Pity the sun’s down,” he said, as they stood in front of the machine. “I’d have liked to show you the way it works the engine. I’ve had two horse-power, eight hours a day, ever since I got the thing working last week. Not bad considering we’re still in January. We’ll have her working overtime all summer.”

Mr. Stoyte had intended to persist in his silence—just to show Bill that he was still angry, that he hadn’t forgiven him; but his interest in the machine and, above all, his exasperated concern with Bill’s idiotic, crackpot notions were too much for him. “What the hell do you want with two horse-power, eight hours a day?” he asked.

“To run my electric generator.”

“But what do you want with an electric generator? Haven’t you got your current wired in from the city?”

“Of course. And I’m trying to see how far I can be independent of the city.”

“But what for?”

Mr. Propter uttered a little laugh. “Because I believe in Jeffersonian democracy.”

“What the hell has Jeffersonian democracy got to do with it?” said Mr. Stoyte with mounting irritation. “Can’t you believe in Jefferson and have your current wired in from the city?”

“That’s exactly it,” said Mr. Propter; “you almost certainly can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I say,” Mr. Propter answered mildly.

“I believe in democracy too,” Mr. Stoyte announced with a look of defiance.

“I know you do. And you also believe in being the undisputed boss in all your businesses.”

“I should hope so!”

“There’s another name for an undisputed boss,” said Mr. Propter. “ ‘Dictator.’ “

“What are you trying to get at?”

“Merely at the facts. You believe in democracy; but you’re at the head of businesses which have to be run dictatorially. And your subordinates have to accept your dictatorship because they’re dependent on you for their living. In Russia they’d depend on government officials for their living. Perhaps you think that’s an improvement,” he added, turning to Pete.

Pete nodded. “I’m all for the public ownership of the means of production,” he said. It was the first time he had openly confessed his faith in the presence of his employer; he felt happy at having dared to be a Daniel.

“Public ownership of the means of production,” Mr. Propter repeated. “But unfortunately governments have a way of regarding the individual producers as being parts of the means. Frankly, I’d rather have Jo Stoyte as my boss than Jo Stalin. This Jo” (he laid his hand on Mr. Stoyte’s shoulder) “this Jo can’t have you executed; he can’t send you to the Arctic; he can’t prevent you from getting a job under another boss. Whereas the other Jo . . .” he shook his head. “Not that,” he added, “I’m exactly longing to have even this Jo as my boss.”

“You’d be fired pretty quick,” growled Mr. Stoyte.

“I don’t want any boss,” Mr. Propter went on. “The more bosses, the less democracy. But unless people can support themselves, they’ve got to have a boss who’ll undertake to do it for them. So the less self-support, the less democracy. In Jefferson’s day, a great many Americans did support themselves. They were economically independent. Independent of government and independent of big business. Hence the Constitution.”

“We’ve still got the Constitution,” said Mr. Stoyte.

“No doubt,” Mr. Propter agreed. “But if we had to make a new Constitution today, what would it be like? A Constitution to fit the facts of New York and Chicago and Detroit; of United States Steel and the Public Utilities and General Motors and the CLO. and the government departments. What on earth would it be like?” he repeated. “We respect our old Constitution, but in fact we live under a new one. And if we want to live under the first, we’ve got to recreate something like the conditions under which the first was made. That’s why I’m interested in this gadget.” He patted the frame of the machine. “Because it may help to give independence to any one who desires independence. Not that many do desire it,” he added parenthetically. “The propaganda in favour of dependence is too strong. They’ve come to believe that you can’t be happy unless you’re entirely dependent on government or centralized business. But for the few who do care about democracy, who really want to be free in the Jeffersonian sense, this thing may be a help. If it makes them independent of fuel and power, that’s already a great deal.”

Mr. Stoyte looked anxious. “Do you really think it’ll do that?”

“Why not?” said Mr. Propter. “There’s a lot of sunshine running to waste in this part of the country.”

Mr. Stoyte thought of his presidency of the Consol Oil Company. “It won’t be good for the oil business,” he said.

“I should hate it to be good for the oil business,” Mr. Propter answered cheerfully.

“And what about coal?” He had an interest in a group of West Virginia mines. “And the railroads?” There was that big block of Union Pacific shares that had belonged to Prudence. “The railroads can’t get on without long hauls. And steel,” he added disinterestedly; for his holdings in Bethlehem Steel were almost negligible. “What happens to steel if you hurt the railroads and cut down trucking? You’re going against progress,” he burst out in another access of righteous indignation. “You’re turning back the clock,”

“Don’t worry, Jo,” said Mr. Propter. “It won’t affect your dividends for quite a long while. There’ll be plenty of time to adjust to the new conditions.”

With an admirable effort, Mr. Stoyte controlled his temper. “You seem to figure I can’t think of anything but money,” he said with dignity. “Well, it may interest you to know that I’ve decided to give Dr. Mulge another thirty thousand dollars for his Art School.” (The decision had been made there and then, for the sole purpose of serving as a weapon in the perennial battle with Bill Propter.) “And if you think,” he added as an afterthought, “if you think I’m only concerned with my own interests, read the special World’s Fair number of the New York Times. Read that,” he insisted with the solemnity of a fundamentalist recommending the Book of Revelation. “You’ll see that the most forward-looking men in the country think as I do.” He spoke with unaccustomed and incongruous unction, in the phraseology of after-dinner eloquence. “The way of progress is the way of better organization, more service from business, more goods for the consumer!” Then, incoherently, “Look at the way a housewife goes to her grocer,” he added, “and buys a package of some nationally advertised cereal or something. That’s progress. Not your crackpot idea of doing everything at home with this idiotic contraption.” Mr. Stoyte had reverted completely to his ordinary style. “You always were a fool, Bill, and I guess you always will be. And remember what I told you about interfering with Bob Hansen. I won’t stand for it.” In dramatic silence he walked away; but after taking a few steps, he halted and called back over his shoulder. “Come up to dinner, if you feel like it.”

“Thanks,” said Mr. Propter. “I will.”

Mr. Stoyte walked briskly towards his car. He had forgotten about high blood pressure and the living God and felt all of a sudden unaccountably and unreasonably happy. It was not that he had scored any notable success in his battle with Bill Propter. He hadn’t; and, what was more, in the process of not scoring a success he had made, and was even half aware that he had made, a bit of a fool of himself. The source of his happiness was elsewhere. He was happy, though he would never have admitted the fact, because, in spite of everything, Bill seemed to like him.

In the car, as he drove back to the castle, he whistled to himself.

Entering with his hat on, as usual (for even after all these years he still derived a childish pleasure from the contrast between the palace in which he lived and the proletarian manners he affected), Mr. Stoyte crossed the great hall, stepped into the elevator and, from the elevator, walked directly into Virginia’s boudoir.

When he opened the door, the two were sitting at least fifteen feet apart. Virginia was at the soda counter, pensively eating a chocolate and banana split; seated in an elegant pose on one of the pink satin arm-chairs, Dr. Obispo was in the process of lighting a cigarette.

On Mr. Stoyte the impact of suspicion and jealousy was like the blow of a fist directed (for the shock was physical and localized in the midriff) straight to the solar plexus. His face contracted as though with pain. And yet he had seen nothing; there was no apparent cause for jealousy, no visible reason, in their attitudes, their actions, their expressions, for suspicion. Dr. Obispo’s manner was perfectly easy and natural; and the Baby’s smile of startled and delighted welcome was angelic in its candour. “Uncle Jo!” She ran to meet him and threw her arms round his neck. “Uncle Jo!”

The warmth of her tone, the softness of her lips had a magical effect on Mr. Stoyte. Moved to a point at which he was using the word to the limit of its double connotation, he murmured, “My Babyl” with a lingering emphasis. The fact that he should have felt suspicious, even for a moment, of this pure and adorable, this deliciously warm, resilient and perfumed child, filled him with shame. And even Dr. Obispo now heaped coals of fire on his head.

“I was a bit worried,” he said, as he got up from his chair, “by the way you coughed after lunch. That’s why I came up here, to make sure of catching you the moment you got in.” He put a hand in his pocket and, after half drawing out and immediately replacing a little leather-bound volume, like a prayer book, extracted a stethoscope. “Prevention’s better than cure,” he went on. “I’m not going to let you get influenza, if I can help it.”

Remembering what a good week they had had at the Beverly Pantheon on account of the epidemic, Mr. Stoyte felt alarmed. “I don’t feel bad,” he said. “I guess that cough wasn’t anything. Only my old—you know: the chronic bronchitis.”

“Maybe it was only that. But all the same, I’d like to listen in.” Briskly professional, Dr. Obispo hung the stethoscope round his neck.

“He’s right, Uncle Jo,” said the Baby.

Touched by so much solicitude and at the same time rather disturbed by the thought that it might perhaps be influenza, Mr. Stoyte took off his coat and waistcoat and began to undo his tie. A moment later he was stand ing stripped to the waist under the crystals of the chandelier. Modestly, Virginia retired again to her soda fountain. Dr. Obispo slipped the ends of the curved nickel tubes of the stethoscope into his ears. “Take a deep breath,” he said as he pressed the muzzle against Mr. Stoyte’s chest. “Again,” he ordered. “Now cough.” Looking past that thick barrel of hairy flesh, he could see, on the wall behind, the inhabitants of Watteau’s mournful paradise as they prepared to set sail for some other paradise, doubtless yet more heartbreaking.

“Say ninety-nine,” Dr. Obispo commanded, returning from the embarcation for Cythera to a near view of Mr. Stoyte’s thorax and abdomen.

“Ninety-nine,” said Mr. Stoyte. “Ninety-nine. Ninety-nine.”

With professional thoroughness, Dr. Obispo shifted the muzzle of his stethoscope from point to point on the curving barrel of flesh before him. There was nothing wrong, of course, with the old buzzard. Just the familiar set of râles and wheezes he always had. Perhaps it would make things a bit more realistic if he were to take the creature down to his office and stick him up in front of the fluoroscope. But, no; he really couldn’t be bothered. And, besides, this farce would be quite enough.

“Cough again,” he said, planting his instrument among the grey hairs on Mr. Stoyte’s left pap. And among other things, he went on to reflect, while Mr. Stoyte forced out a succession of artificial coughs, among other things, these old sacks of guts didn’t smell too good. How any young girl could stand it, even for money, he really couldn’t imagine. And yet the fact remained that there were thousands of them who not only stood it, but actually enjoyed it. Or, perhaps, “enjoy” was the wrong word. Because in most cases there probably wasn’t any question of enjoyment in the proper, physiological sense of the word. It all happened in the mind, not in the body. They loved their old gut-sacks with their heads; loved them because they admired them, because they were impressed by the gut-sack’s position in the world, or his knowledge, or his celebrity. What they slept with wasn’t the man; it was a reputation, it was the embodiment of a function. And then, of course, some of the girls were future models for Mother’s Day advertisements; some were little Florence Nightingales, on the lookout for a Crimean War. In those cases, the very infirmities of their gut-sacks were added attractions. They had the satisfaction of sleeping not only with a reputation or a stock of wisdom, not only with a federal judgeship, for example, or the presidency of a chamber of commerce, but also and simultaneously with a wounded soldier, with an imbecile child, with a lovely stinking little baby who still made messes in its bed. Even this cutie (Dr. Obispo shot a sideways glance in the direction of the soda fountain), even this one had something of the Florence Nightingale in her, something of the Gold Star Mother. (And that in spite of the fact that, with her conscious mind, she felt a kind of physical horror of maternity.) Jo Stoyte was a little bit her baby and her patient; and at the same time, of course, he was a great deal her own private Abraham

Lincoln. Incidentally, he also happened to be the man with the cheque book. Which was a consideration, of course. But if he were only that, Virginia wouldn’t have been so nearly happy as she obviously was. The cheque book was made more attractive by being in the hands of a demigod who had to have a nanny to change his diapers.

“Turn round, please.”

Mr. Stoyte obeyed. The back, Dr. Obispo reflected, was perceptibly less revolting than the front. Perhaps because it was less personal.

“Take a deep breath,” he said; for he was going to play the farce all over again on this new stage. “Another.”

Mr. Stoyte breathed enormously, like a cetacean.

“And again,” said Dr. Obispo, reflecting as the old man snorted, that his own chief asset was a refreshing unlikeness to this smelly old gut-sack. She would take him, and take him, what was more, on his own terms. No Romeo-and-Juliet acts, no nonsense about Love with a large L, none of that popular-song claptrap with its skies of blue, dreams come true, heaven with you. Just sensuality for its own sake. The real, essential, concrete thing; no less, it went without saying, but also (and this most certainly didn’t go without saying for the bitches were always trying to get you to stick them on pedestals, or be their soul-mates), also no more. No more, to begin with, out of respect for scientific truth. He believed in scientific truth. Facts were facts; accept them as such. It was a fact, for example, that young girls in the pay of rich old men could be seduced without much difficulty. It was also a fact that rich old men, however successful at business, were generally so frightened, ignorant and stupid that they could be bamboozled by any intelligent person who chose to try.

“Say ninety-nine again,” he said aloud.

“Ninety-nine. Ninety-nine.”

Ninety-nine chances out of a hundred that they would never find out anything. That was the fact about old men. The fact about love was that it consisted essentially of tumescence and detumescence. So why embroider the fact with unnecessary fictions? Why not be realistic? Why not treat the whole business scientifically?

“Ninety-nine,” Mr. Stoyte went on repeating. “Ninety-nine.”

And then, Dr. Obispo went on to reflect, as he listened without interest to the whisperings and crepitations inside the warm, smelly barrel before him, then there were the more personal reasons for preferring to take love unadorned, in the chemically pure condition. Personal reasons that were, also, of course, a fact that had to be accepted. For it was a fact that he personally found an added pleasure in the imposition of his will upon the partner he had chosen. To be pleasurable, this imposition of will must never be too easy, too much a matter of course. Which ruled out all professionals. The partner had to be an amateur and, like all amateurs, committed to the thesis that tumescence and detumescence should always be associated with LOVE, PASSION, SOUL-MATING—all in upper-case letters. In imposing his will, he imposed the contradictory doctrine, the doctrine of tumescence and detumescence for tumescence^ and detumescence’s sake. All he asked was that a partner should give the thesis a practical tryout—however reluctantly, however experimentally, for just once only; he didn’t care. Just a single tryout. After that it was up to him. If he couldn’t make a permanent and enthusiastic convert of her, at any rate so far as he was concerned, then the fault was his.

“Ninety-nine, ninety-nine,” said Mr. Stoyte with exemplary patience.

“You can stop now,” Dr. Obispo told him graciously.

Just one tryout; he could practically guarantee himself success. It was a branch of applied physiology; he was an expert, a specialist. The Claude Bernard of the subject. And talk of imposing one’s will! You began by forcing the girl to accept a thesis that was in flat contradiction to all the ideas she had been brought up with, all the dreams-come-true rigmarole of popular ideology. Quite a pleasant little victory, to be sure. But it was only when you got down to the applied physiology that the series of really satisfying triumphs began. You took an ordinarily rational human being, a good hundred-percent American with a background, a position in society, a set of conventions, a code of ethics, a religion (Catholic in the present instance, Dr. Obispo remembered parenthetically); you took this good citizen, with rights fully and formally guaranteed by the Constitution, you took her (and perhaps she had come to the place of assignation in her husband’s Packard limousine and direct from a banquet, with speeches in honor, say, of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler or the retiring Archbishop of Indianapolis), you took her and you proceeded, systematically and scientifically, to reduce this unique personality to a mere epileptic body, moaning and gibbering under the excruciations of a pleasure for which you, the Claude Bernard of the subject, were responsible and of which you remained the enjoying, but always detached, always ironically amused, spectator.

“Just a few more deep breaths, if you don’t mind.”

Wheezily Mr. Stoyte inhaled, then with a snorting sigh emptied his lungs.

Chapter XI

THERE was silence after Mr. Stoyte’s departure. A long silence, while each of the three men thought his own private thoughts. It was Pete who spoke first.

“Things like that,” he said gloomily, “they get me kind of wondering if I ought to go on taking his money. What would you do, Mr. Propter, if you were me?”

“What would I do?” Mr. Propter reflected for a moment. “I’d go on working in Jo’s laboratory,” he said. “But only so long as I felt fairly certain that what I was doing wouldn’t cause more harm than good. One has to be a utilitarian in these matters. A utilitarian with a difference,” he qualified. “Bentham crossed with Eckhart, say, or Nagarjuna.”

“Poor Bentham!” said Jeremy, horrified by the thought of what was being done to his namesake.

Mr. Propter smiled. “Poor Bentham, indeed! Such a good, sweet, absurd, intelligent man! So nearly right; but so enormously wrong! Deluding himself with the notion that the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be achieved on the strictly human level—the level of time and evil, the level of the absence of God. Poor Bentham!” he repeated. “What a great man he would have been if only he could have grasped that good can’t be had except where it exists!”

“That sort of utilitarian you’re talking about,” said Pete, “what would he feel about the job I’m doing now?”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Propter answered. “I haven’t thought about it enough to guess what he’d say. And anyhow we haven’t yet got the empirical material on which a reasonable judgment could be based. All I know is that if I were in on this I’d be cautious. Infinitely cautious,” he insisted.

“And what about the money?” Pete went on. “Seeing where it comes from and who it belongs to, do you think I ought to take it?”

“All money’s pretty dirty,” said Mr. Propter. “I don’t know that poor Jo’s is appreciably dirtier than any one else’s. You may think it is; but that’s only because, for the first time, you’re seeing money at its source—its personal, human source. You’re like one of those city children who have been used to getting their milk in sterilized bottles from a shiny white delivery wagon. When they go into the country and see it being pumped out of a big, fat, smelly old animal, they’re horrified, they’re disgusted. It’s the same with money. You’ve been used to getting it from behind a bronze grating in a magnificent marble bank. Now, you’ve come out into the country and are living in the cow shed with the animal that actually secretes the stuff. And the process doesn’t strike you as very savoury or hygienic. But the same process was going on, even when you didn’t know about it. And if you weren’t working for Jo Stoyte, you’d probably be working for some college or university. But where do colleges and universities get their money from? From rich men. In other words, from people like Jo Stoyte. Again, it’s dirt served out in sterile containers—by a gentleman in a cap and gown, this time.”

“So you figure it’s all right for me to go on like I am now?” said Pete.

“All right,” Mr. Propter answered, “in the sense that it’s not conspicuously worse than anything else.” Suddenly smiling, “I was glad to hear that Dr. Mulge had got his art school,” he said in another, lighter tone. “Immediately after the Auditorium, too. It’s a lot of money. But I suppose the prestige of being a patron of learning is worth it. And, of course, there’s an enormous social pressure on the rich to make them become patrons of learning. They’re being pushed by shame as well as pulled by the longing to believe they’re the benefactors of humanity. And happily with Dr. Mulge a rich man can have his kudos with safety. No amount of art schools at Tarzana will ever disturb the status quo. Whereas if I were to ask Jo for fifty thousand dollars to finance research into the technique of democracy, he’d turn me down flat. Why? Because he knows that sort of thing is dangerous. He likes speeches about democracy. (Incidentally, Dr. Mulge is really terrific on the subject.) But he doesn’t approve of the coarse materialists who try to find out how to put those ideals into practice. You saw how angry he got about my poor little sun machine. Because, in its tiny way, it’s a menace to the sort of big business he makes his money from. And it’s the same with these other little gadgets that I’ve talked to him about from time to time. Come and look, if it doesn’t bore you.”

He took them into the house. Here was the little electric mill, hardly larger than a coffee machine, in which he ground his own flour, as he needed it. Here was the loom at which he had learnt and was now teaching others to weave. Next he took them out to the shed in which, with a few hundred dollars’ worth of electrically operated tools, he was equipped to do any kind of carpentry and even some light metal work. Beyond the shed were the still unfinished greenhouses; for the vegetable plots weren’t adequate to supply the demands of his transients. There they were, he added, pointing through the increasing darkness to the lights of a row of cabins. He could put up only a few of them; the rest had to live in a sort of garbage heap down in the dry bed of the river—paying rent to Jo Stoyte for the privilege. Not the best material to work with, of course. But such misery as theirs left one no choice. They simply had to be attended to. A few had come through undemoralized; and, of these, a few could see what had to be done, what you had to aim at. Two or three were working with him here; and he had been able to raise money to settle two or three more on some land near Santa Suzanna. Mere beginnings—unsatisfactory, at that. Because, obviously, you could not even start experimenting properly until you had a full-fledged community working under the new conditions. But to set a community on its feet would require money. A lot of money. But rich men wouldn’t touch the work; they preferred art schools at Tarzana. The people who were interested had no money; that was one of the reasons why they were interested. Borrowing at the current commercial rates was dangerous. Except in very favourable circumstances, the chances were that you’d merely be selling yourself into slavery to a bank.

“It isn’t easy,” said Mr. Propter, as they walked back to the house. “But the great point is that, easy or not easy, it’s there, waiting to be done. Because, after all, Pete, there is something to do.”

Mr. Propter went into the bungalow for a moment to turn out the lights, then emerged again on to the porch. Together, the three men walked down the path to the road. Before them the castle was a vast black silhouette punctured by occasional lights.

“There is something you can do,” Mr. Propter resumed; “but only on condition that you know what the nature of the world happens to be. If you know that the strictly human level is the level of evil, you won’t waste your time trying to produce good on that level. Good manifests itself only on the animal level and on the level of eternity. Knowing that, you’ll realize that the best you can do on the human level is preventive. You can see that purely human activities don’t interfere too much with the manifestation of good on the other levels. That’s all. But politicians don’t know the nature of reality. If they did, they wouldn’t be politicians. Reactionary or revolutionary, they’re all humanists, all romantics. They live in a world of illusion, a world that’s a mere projection of their own human personalities. They act in ways which would be appropriate if such a world as they think they live in really existed. But unfortunately it doesn’t exist except in their imaginations. Hence nothing that they do is appropriate to the real world. All their actions are the actions of lunatics, and all, as history is there to demonstrate, are more or less completely disastrous. So much for the romantics. The realists who have studied the nature of the world know that an exclusively humanistic attitude towards life is always fatal, and that all strictly human activities must therefore be made instrumental to animal and spiritual good. They know, in other words, that men’s business is to make the human world safe for animals and spirits. Or perhaps,” he added turning to Jeremy, “perhaps, as an Englishman you prefer Lloyd George’s phrase to Wilson’s: A home fit for heroes to live in—wasn’t that it? A home fit for animals and spirits, for physiology and disinterested consciousness. At present, I’m afraid, it’s profoundly unfit. The world we’ve made for ourselves is a world of sick bodies and insane or criminal personalities. How shall we make this world safe for ourselves as animals and as spirits? If we can answer that question, we’ve discovered what to do.”

Mr. Propter halted at what appeared to be a wayside shrine, opened a small steel door with a key he carried in his pocket, and, lifting the receiver of the telephone within, announced their presence to an invisible porter, somewhere on the other side of the moat. They walked on.

“What are the things that make the world unsafe for animals and spirits?” Mr. Propter continued. “Obviously, greed and fear, lust for power, hatred, anger . . .”

At this moment, a dazzling light struck them full in the face and was almost immediately turned out.

“What in heaven’s name . . . ?” Jeremy began.

“Don’t worry,” said Peter. “They only want to make sure it’s us, not a set of gangsters. It’s just the searchlight.”

“Just our old friend Jo expressing his personality,” said Mr. Propter, taking Jeremy’s arm. “In other words, proclaiming to the world that he’s afraid because he’s been greedy and domineering. And he’s been greedy and domineering, among other reasons, because the present system puts a premium on those qualities. Our problem is to find a system that will give the fewest possible opportunities for unfortunate people, like Jo Stoyte, to realize their potentialities.”

The bridge had swung down as they approached the moat, and now the boards rang hollow under their feet.

“You’d like Socialism, Pete,” Mr. Propter continued. “But Socialism seems to be fatally committed to centralization and standardized urban mass production all round. Besides, I see too many occasions for bullying there—too many opportunities for bossy people to display their bossiness, for sluggish people to sit back and be slaves.”

The portcullis rose, the gates slid back to receive them.

“If you want to make the world safe for animals and spirits, you must have a system that reduces the amount of fear and greed and hatred and domineering to their minimum, which means that you must have enough economic security to get rid at least of that source of worry. Enough personal responsibility to prevent people from wallowing in sloth. Enough property to protect them from being bullied by the rich, but not enough to permit them to bully. And the same thing with political rights and authority—enough of the first for the protection of the many, too little of the second for domination by the few.”

“Sounds like peasants to me,” said Pete dubiously.

“Peasants plus small machines and power. Which means that they’re no longer peasants, except insofar as they’re largely self-sufficient.”

“And who makes the machines? More peasants?”

“No; the same sort of people as make them now. What can’t be made satisfactorily except by mass production methods, obviously has to go on being made that way. About a third of all production—that’s what it seems to amount to. The other two-thirds are more economically produced at home or in a small workshop. The immediate, practical problem is to work out the technique of that small-scale production. At present, all the research is going to the discovery of new fields for mass production.”

In the Grotto a row of twenty-five-watt electric candles burned in perpetual devotion before the Virgin. Above, on the tennis court, the second butler, two maids and the head electrician were playing mixed doubles by the light of arc lamps.

“And do you figure people will want to leave the cities and live the way you’re telling us, on little farms?”

“Ah, now you’re talking, Pete!” said Mr. Propter approvingly. “Frankly, then, I don’t expect them to leave the cities, any more than I expect them to stop having wars and revolutions. All I expect is that if I do my work and it’s reasonably good, there’ll be a few people who will want to collaborate with me. That’s all.”

“But if you’re not going to get more than just a few, what’s the point? Why not try to do something with the cities and the factories, seeing that that’s where most people are going to stay? Wouldn’t that be more practical?”

“It depends how one defines the word,” said Mr. Propter. “For example, you seem to think that it’s practical to help a great many people to pursue a policy which is known to be fatal; but that it isn’t practical to help a very few people to pursue a policy which there is every reason to regard as sound. I don’t agree with you.”

“But the many are there. You’ve got to do something about them.”

“You’ve got to do something about them,” Mr. Propter agreed. “But at the same time, there are circumstances in which you can’t do anything. You can’t do anything effective about any one if he doesn’t choose or isn’t able to collaborate with you in doing the right thing. For example, you’ve got to help people who are being killed off by malaria. But in practice you can’t help them if they refuse to screen their windows and insist on taking walks near stagnant water in the twilight. It’s exactly the same with the diseases of the body politic. You’ve got to help people if they’re faced by war or ruin or enslavement, if they’re under the menace of sudden revolution or slow degeneration. You’ve got to help. But the fact remains, nevertheless, that you can’t help if they persist in the course of behaviour which originally got them into their trouble. For example, you can’t preserve people from the horrors of war if they won’t give up the pleasures of nationalism. You can’t save them from slumps and depressions so long as they go on thinking exclusively in terms of money and regarding money as the supreme good. You can’t avert revolution and enslavement if they will identify progress with the increase of centralization and prosperity with the intensifying of mass production. You can’t preserve them from collective madness and suicide if they persist in paying divine honours to ideals which are merely projections of their own personalities—in other words, if they persist in worshipping themselves rather than God. So much for conditional clauses. Now let’s consider the actual facts of the present situation. For our purposes, the most significant facts are these: the inhabitants of every civilized country are menaced; all desire passionately to be saved from impending disaster; the overwhelming majority refuse to change the habits of thought, feeling and action which are directly responsible for their present plight. In other words, they can’t be helped, because they are not prepared to collaborate with any helper who proposes a rational and realistic course of action. In these circumstances, what ought the would-be helper do?”

“He’s got to do something” said Pete.

“Even if he thereby accelerates the process of destruction?” Mr. Propter smiled sadly. “Doing for doing’s sake,” he went on. “I prefer Oscar Wilde. Bad art can’t do so much harm as ill-considered political action. Doing good on any but the tiniest scale requires more intelligence than most people possess. They ought to be content with keeping out of mischief; it’s easier and it doesn’t have such frightful results as trying to do good in the wrong way. Twiddling the thumbs and having good manners are much more helpful, in most cases, than rushing about with good intentions, doing things.”

Floodlighted, Giambologna’s nymph was still inde-fatigably spouting away against the velvet background of the darkness. Electricity and sculpture, Jeremy was thinking as he looked at her—predestined partners. The things that old Bernini could have done with a battery of projectors! The startling lights, the rich fantastic shadows! The female mystics in orgasm, the conglobulated angels, the skeletons whizzing up out of papal tombs like sky-rockets, the saints in their private hurricane of flapping draperies and wind-blown marble curls! What fun! What splendour! What self-parodying emphasis! What staggering beauty! What enormous bad taste! And what a shame that the man should have had to be content with mere daylight and tallow candles!

“No,” Mr. Propter was saying in answer to a protesting question from the young man, “no, I certainly wouldn’t advise their abandonment. I’d advise the constant reiteration of the truths they’ve been told again and again during the past three thousand years. And, in the intervals, I’d do active work on the techniques of a better system, and, I’d collaborate with the few who understand what the system is and are ready to pay the price demanded for its realization. Incidentally, the price, measured in human terms, is enormously high. Though, of course, much lower than the price demanded by the nature of things from those who persist in behaving in the standard human way. Much lower than the price of war, for example—particularly war with contemporary weapons. Much lower than the price of economic depression and political enslavement.”

“And what happens,” Jeremy asked in a fluting voice, “what happens when you’ve had your war? Will the few be any better off than the many?”

“Oddly enough,” Mr. Propter answered, “there’s just a chance they may be. For this reason. If they’ve learnt the technique of self-sufficiency they’ll find it easier to survive a time of anarchy than the people who depend for their livelihood on a highly centralized and specialized organization. You can’t work for the good without incidentally preparing yourself for the worst.”

He stopped speaking, and they walked on through a silence broken only by the sound, from somewhere high overhead in the castle, of two radios tuned to different stations. The baboons, on the contrary, were already asleep.

Chapter XII

IN THE columned Lady Chapel, with its hat racks and its Magnascos, its Brancusi and its Etruscan sarcophagus used as an umbrella stand, Jeremy Pordage began, all of a sudden, to feel himself more cheerful and at home.

“It’s as though one were walking into the mind of a lunatic,” he said smiling happily, as he hung up his hat and followed the others into the great hall. “Or, rather, an idiot,” he qualified. “Because I suppose a lunatic’s a person with a one-track mind. Whereas this . . .” he made a circular gesture . . . “this is a no-track mind. No-track because infinity-track. It’s the mind of an idiot of genius. Positively stuffed with the best that has been thought and said.” He pronounced the phrase with a kind of old-maidish precision that made it sound entirely ludicrous. “Greece, Mexico, backsides, crucifixions, machinery, George IV, Amida Buddha, science, Christian science, Turkish baths—anything you like to mention. And every item is perfectly irrelevant to every other item.” He rubbed his hands together, he twinkled delightedly through his bifocals. “Disquieting at first. But do you know? I’m beginning to enjoy it. I find I really rather like living inside an idiot.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Mr. Propter, matter-of-factly. “It’s a common taste.”

Jeremy was offended. “One wouldn’t have thought this sort of thing was very common,” he said, nodding in the direction of the Greco.

“It isn’t,” Mr. Propter agreed. “But you can live in an idiot-universe without going to the expense of actually constructing it out of ferro-concrete and filling it with works of art.”

There was a pause while they entered the lift.

“You can live inside a cultural idiot,” Mr. Propter went on. “Inside a patchwork of mutually irrelevant words and bits of information. Or, if you’re a lowbrow, you can live in the idiot world of the homme moyen sensuel—the world where the irrelevances consist of newspapers and baseball, of sex and worry, of advertising and money and halitosis and keeping up with the Joneses. There’s a hierarchy of idiocies. Naturally, you and I prefer the classiest variety.”

The elevator came to a halt. Pete opened the gate, and they stepped out into the white-washed corridor of the sub-sub-basement.

“Nothing like an idiot-universe if you want a quiet irresponsible life. That is, provided you can stand the idiocy,” Mr. Propter added. “A lot of people can’t. After a time, they get tired of their no-track world. They feel the need of being concentrated and directed. They want their lives to have some sense. That’s when they go Communist, or join the Church of Rome, or take up with the Oxford Group. Anything provided it will make them one-trackers. And, of course, in the overwhelming majority of cases they choose the wrong track. Inevitably. Because there are a million wrong tracks and only one right—a million ideals, a million projections of personality, and only one God and one beatific vision. From no-track idiocy most of them pass on to some one-track lunacy, generally criminal. It makes them feel better, of course; but, pragmatically, the last state is always worse than the first. If you don’t want the only thing worth having, my advice is: Stick to idiocy. Is this where you work?” he went on in another tone, as Jeremy opened the door of his vaulted study. “And those are the Hauberk Papers, I take it. Plenty of them. The title’s extinct, isn’t it?”

Jeremy nodded. “And so’s the family—or very nearly. Nothing left but two old maids in a haunted house without any money.” He twinkled, uttered his little preparatory cough and, patting his bald crown, said with an exaggerated precision: “Decayed gentlewomen.” Exquisite locution! It was one of his favourites. “And the decay must have gone pretty far,” he added. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have sold the papers. They’ve refused all previous offers.”

“How fortunate one is not to belong to an ancient family!” said Mr. Propter. “All those inherited loyalties to bricks and mortar, all those obligations to tombstones and bits of paper and painted canvases!” He shook his head. “What a dismal form of compulsory idolatry.”

Jeremy, meanwhile, had crossed the room, opened a drawer and returned with a file of papers which he handed to Mr. Propter. “Look at these.”

Mr. Propter looked. “From Molinos!” he said in surprise.

“I thought that would be your cup of tea,” said Jeremy, deriving a sly pleasure from talking about mysticism in the most absurdly inappropriate language.

Mr. Propter smiled. “My cup of tea,” he repeated. “But not my favourite blend. There was something not quite right about poor Molinos. A strain of—how shall I put it?—of negative sensuality. He enjoyed suffering. Mental suffering, the dark night of the soul—he really wallowed in it. No doubt, poor fellow, he sincerely believed he was destroying self-will; but without his being aware of it, he was always turning the process of destruction into another affirmation of self-will. Which was a pity,” Mr. Propter added, taking the letters to the light, to look at them more closely, “because he certainly did have some first-hand experience of reality. Which only shows that you’re never certain of getting there, even when you’ve come near enough to see what sort of thing you’re going to. Here’s a fine sentence,” he put in parenthetically. “ ‘Ame a Dios,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘como es en si y no como se lo dice y forma su imagination.’ ”

Jeremy almost laughed. The coincidence that Mr. Propter should have picked on the same passage as had caught Dr. Obispo’s eye that morning gave him a peculiar satisfaction. “Pity he couldn’t have read a little Kant,” he said. “Dios en si seems to be much the same as Ding an sich. Unknowable by the human mind.”

“Unknowable by the personal human mind,” Mr. Propter agreed, “because personality is self-will, and self-will is the negation of reality, the denial of God. So far as the ordinary human personality is concerned, Kant is perfectly right in saying that the thing in itself is unknowable. Dios en si can’t be comprehended by a consciousness dominated by an ego. But now suppose there were some way of eliminating the ego from consciousness. If you could do this, you’d get close to reality, you’d be in a position to comprehend Dios en si. Now, the interesting thing is that, as a matter of brute fact, this can be done, has been done again and again. Kant’s blind alley is for people who choose to remain on the human level. If you choose to climb on to the level of eternity, the impasse no longer exists.”

There was a silence. Mr. Propter turned over the sheets, pausing every now and then to decipher a line or two of the fine caligraphy. “ ‘Tres maneras hay de silencio,’ ” he read aloud after a moment. “ ‘El primero es de palabras, el segundo de deseos y el tercero de pensamientos.’ He writes nicely, don’t you think? Probably that had a lot to do with his extraordinary success. How disastrous when a man knows how to say the wrong things in the right way! Incidentally,” he added, looking up with a smile into Jeremy’s face, “how few great stylists have ever said any of the right things. That’s one of the troubles about education in the humanities. The best that has been thought and said. Very nice. But best in which way? Alas, only in form. The content is generally deplorable.” He turned back to the letters. After a moment, another passage caught his attention. “ ‘Oirá y leerd el hombre racional estas espirituales materias, pero no llegerá, dice San Pablo, a comprenderlas: Animalis homo non percipit ea quae sunt spiritus.’ And not merely animalis homo,” Mr. Propter commented. “Also humanus homo. Indeed, above all humanus homo. And you might even add that humanus homo non percipit ea quae sunt animalis. Insofar as we think as strictly human beings, we fail to understand what is below us no less than what is above. And then there’s a further trouble. Suppose we stop thinking in a strictly human fashion; suppose we make it possible for ourselves to have direct intuitions of the non-human realities in which, so to speak, we’re imbedded. Well and good. But what happens when we try to pass on the knowledge so acquired? We’re floored. The only vocabulary at our disposal is a vocabulary primarily intended for thinking strictly human thoughts about strictly human concerns. But the things we want to talk about are non-human realities and non-human ways of thinking. Hence the radical inadequacy of all statements about our animal nature and, even more, of all statements about God or spirit, or eternity.”

Jeremy uttered a little cough. “I can think of some pretty adequate statements about . . .” he paused, beamed, caressed his polished scalp; . . . “well, about the more intime aspects of our animal nature,” he concluded demurely. His face suddenly clouded; he had remembered his treasure trove and Dr. Obispo’s impudent theft.

“But what does their adequacy depend on?” Mr. Propter asked. “Not so much on the writer’s skill as the reader’s response. The direct, animal intuitions aren’t rendered by words; the words merely remind you of your memories of similar experiences. Notus color is what Virgil says when he’s talking about the sensations experienced by Vulcan in the embraces of Venus. Familiar heat. No attempt at description or analysis; no effort to get any kind of verbal equivalence to the facts. Just a reminder. But that reminder is enough to make the passage one of the most voluptuous affairs in Latin poetry. Virgil left the work to his readers. And, by and large, that’s what most erotic writers are content to do. The few who try to do the work themselves have to flounder about with metaphors and similes and analogies. You know the sort of stuff: fire, whirlwinds, heaven, darts.”

“ ‘The vale of lilies,’ ” Jeremy quoted, “ ‘And the bower of bliss.’ ”

“Not to mention the expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” said Mr. Propter; “and all the other figures of speech. An endless variety, with only one feature in common—they’re all composed of words which don’t connote any aspect of the subject they’re supposed to describe.”

“Saying one thing in order to mean another,” Jeremy put in. “Isn’t that one of the possible definitions of imaginative literature?”

“Maybe,” Mr. Propter answered. “But what chiefly interests me at the moment is the fact that our immediate animal intuitions have never been given any but the most summary and inadequate labels. We say ‘red,’ for example, or ‘pleasant,’ and just leave it at that without trying to find verbal equivalents for the various aspects of perceiving redness or experiencing pleasure.”

“Well, isn’t that because you can’t go beyond ‘red’ or ‘pleasant’?” said Pete. “They’re just facts, ultimate facts.”

“Like giraffes,” Jeremy added. “ ‘There ain’t no such animal,’ is what the rationalist says, when he’s shown its portrait. And then in it walks, neck and all!”

“You’re right,” said Mr. Propter. “A giraffe is an ultimate fact. You’ve got to accept it, whether you like it or not. But accepting the giraffe doesn’t prevent you from studying and describing it. And the same applies to redness or pleasure or notus calor. They can be analysed, and the results of the analysis can be described by means of suitable words. But as a matter of historical fact, this hasn’t been done.”

Pete nodded slowly. “Why do you figure that should be?” he asked.

“Well,” said Mr. Propter, “I should say it’s because men have always been more interested in doing and feeling than in understanding. Always too busy making good and having thrills and doing what’s ‘done’ and worshipping the local idols—too busy with all this even to feel any desire to have an adequate verbal instrument for elucidating their experiences. Look at the languages we’ve inherited—incomparably effective in rousing violent and exciting emotions; an ever-present help for those who want to get on in the world; worse than useless for any one who aspires to disinterested understanding. Hence, even on the strictly human level, the need for special impersonal languages like mathematics and technical vocabularies of the various sciences. Wherever men have felt the wish to understand, they’ve given up the traditional language and substituted for it another special language, more precise and, above all, less contaminated with self-interest.

“Now, here’s a very significant fact. Imaginative literature deals mainly with the everyday life of men and women; and the everyday life of men and women consists, to a large extent, of immediate animal experiences. But the makers of imaginative literature have never forged an impersonal, uncontaminated language for the elucidation of immediate experiences. They’re content to use the bare, unanalysed names of experiences as mere aids to their own and their reader’s memory. Every direct intuition is notus calor, with the connotation of the words left open, so to speak, for each individual reader to supply according to the nature of his or her particular experiences in the past. Simple, but not exactly scientific. But then people don’t read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.”

Mr. Propter looked down again at the close-set lines of Molinos’ epistle. “ ‘Oirá y leerá el hombre racional estas espirituales materias,’ ” he read out once more. “ ‘Pero non llegerá a comprenderlas’ He’ll hear and read these things, but he won’t succeed in understanding them. And he won’t succeed,” said Mr. Propter, closing the file and handing it back to Jeremy, “he won’t succeed for one of two excellent reasons. Either he has never seen the giraffes in question, and so, being an hombre racional, knows quite well that there ain’t no such animal. Or else he has had glimpses of the creatures, or has some other reason for believing in their existence, but can’t understand what the experts say about them; can’t understand because of the inadequacy of the language in which the fauna of the spiritual world are ordinarily described. In other words, he either hasn’t had the immediate experience of eternity and so has no reason to believe that eternity exists; or else he does believe that eternity exists, but can’t make head or tail of the language in which it’s talked about by those who have had experience of it. Furthermore, when he wants to talk about eternity himself—and he may wish to do so either in order to communicate his own experiences to others or to understand them better, from the human point of view, himself—he finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. For either he recognizes that the existing language is unsuitable—in which case he has only two rational choices: to say nothing at all, or to invent a new and better technical language of his own, a calculus of eternity, so to speak, a special algebra of spiritual experience (and if he does invent it, nobody who hasn’t learnt it will know what he’s talking about). So much for the first horn of the dilemma. The second horn is reserved for those who don’t recognize the inadequacy of the existing language; or else who do recognize it, but are irrationally hopeful enough to take a chance with an instrument which they know to be worthless. These people will write in the existing language, and their writing will be, in consequence, more or less completely misunderstood by most of their readers. Inevitably, because the words they use don’t correspond to the things they’re talking about. Most of them are words taken from the language of everyday life. But the language of everyday life refers almost exclusively to strictly human affairs. What happens when you apply words derived from that language to experiences on the plane of the spirit, the plane of timeless experience? Obviously, you create a misunderstanding; you say what you didn’t mean to say.”

Pete interrupted him. “I’d like an example, Mr. Propter,” he said.

“All right,” the other answered. “Let’s take the commonest word in all religious literature: love. On the human level the word means—what? Practically everything from Mother to the Marquis de Sade.”

The name reminded Jeremy yet again of what had happened to the “Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome.” Really it was too insufferable! The impudence of it ... !

“We don’t even make the simple Greek distinction between erao and philo, eros and agape. With us, everything is just love, whether it’s self-sacrificing or possessive, whether it’s friendship or lust or homicidal lunacy. It’s all just love,” he repeated. “Idiotic word! Even on the human level it’s hopelessly ambiguous. And when you begin using it in relation to experiences on the level of eternity—well, it’s simply disastrous. ‘The love of God.’ ‘God’s love for us.’ ‘The saint’s love for his fellows.’ What does the word stand for in such phrases? And in what way is this related to what it stands for when it’s applied to a young mother suckling her baby? Or to Romeo climbing into Juliet’s bedroom? Or to Othello as he strangles Desdemona? Or to the research worker who loves his science? Or to the patriot who’s ready to die for his country—to die, and, in the meantime, to kill, steal, lie, swindle and torture for it? Is there really anything in common between what the word stands for in these contexts and what it stands for when one talks, let us say, of the Buddha’s love for all sentient beings? Obviously, the answer is: No, there isn’t. On the human level, the word stands for a great many different states of mind and ways of behaving. Dissimilar in many respects, but alike at least in this: they’re all accompanied by emotional excitement and they all contain an element of craving. Whereas the most characteristic features of the enlightened person’s experience are serenity and disinterestedness. In other words, the absence of excitement and the absence of craving.”

“The absence of excitement and the absence of craving,” Pete said to himself, while the image of Virginia in her yachting cap, riding her pink scooter, kneeling in her shorts under the arch of the Grotto, swam before his inward eye.

“Distinctions in fact ought to be represented by distinctions in language,” Mr. Propter was saying. “If they’re not, you can’t expect to talk sense. In spite of which, we insist on using one word to connote entirely different things. ‘God is love,’ we say. The word’s the same as the one we use when we talk about ‘being in love,’ or ‘loving one’s children’ or ‘being inspired by love of country.’ Consequently we tend to think that the thing we’re talking about must be more or less the same. We imagine in a vague, reverential way, that God is composed of a kind of immensely magnified yearning.” Mr. Propter shook his head. “Creating God in our own image. It flatters our vanity, and of course we prefer vanity to understanding. Hence those confusions of language. If we wanted to understand the world, if we wanted to think about it realistically, we should say that we were in love, but that God was x-love. In this way people who had never had any first-hand experience on the level of eternity would at least be given a chance of knowing intellectually that what happens on that level is not the same as what happens on the strictly human level. They’d know, because they’d seen it in print, that there was some kind of difference between love and x-love. Consequently, they’d have less excuse than people have today for imagining that God was like themselves, only a bit more so on the side of respectability and a bit less so, of course, on the other side.

“And naturally what applies to the word ‘love’ applies to all the other words taken over from the language of everyday life and used to describe spiritual experience. Words like ‘knowledge,’ ‘wisdom,’ ‘power,’ ‘mind,’ ‘peace,’ ‘joy,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘good.’ They stand for certain things on the human level. But the things that writers force them to stand for when they describe events on the level of eternity are quite different. Hence the use of them merely confuses the issue. They just make it all but impossible for any one to know what’s being talked about. And, meanwhile, you must remember that these words from the language of everyday life aren’t the only trouble-makers. People who write about experiences on the level of eternity also make use of technical phrases borrowed from various systems of philosophy.”

“Isn’t that your algebra of spiritual experience?” said Pete. “Isn’t that the special, scientific language you’ve been talking about?”

“It’s an attempt at such an algebra,” Mr. Propter answered. “But unfortunately a very unsuccessful attempt. Unsuccessful because this particular algebra is derived from the language of metaphysics—bad metaphysics, incidentally. The people who use it are committing themselves, whether they like it or not, to an explanation of the facts as well as a description. An explanation of actual experiences in terms of metaphysical entities, whose existence is purely hypothetical and can’t be demonstrated. In other words, they’re describing the facts in terms of figments of the imagination; they’re explaining the known in terms of the unknown. Take a few examples. Here’s one: ‘ecstasy.’ It’s a technical term that refers to the soul’s ability to stand outside the body—and of course it carries the further implication that we know what the soul is and how it’s related to the body and the rest of the universe. Or take another instance, a technical term that is essential to the Catholic theory of mysticism, ‘infused contemplation’ Here the implication is that there’s somebody outside us who pours a certain kind of psychological experience into our minds. The further implication is that we know who that somebody is. Or consider even ‘union with God.’ ,What it means depends on the upbringing of the speaker. It may mean ‘union with the Jehovah of the Old Testament’ Or it may mean ‘union with the personal deity of orthodox Christianity’ It may mean what it probably would have meant, say, to Eckhart, ‘union with the impersonal Godhead of which the God of orthodoxy is an aspect and a particular limitation’ Similarly, if you were an Indian, it may mean ‘union with Isvara’ or ‘union with Brahman’ In every case, the term implies a previous knowledge about the nature of things which are either completely unknowable, or at best only to be inferred from the nature of the experiences which the term is supposed to describe. So there,” Mr. Propter concluded, “you have the second horn of the dilemma—the horn on which all those who use the current religious vocabulary to describe their experiences on the level of eternity inevitably impale themselves.”

“And the way between the horns?” Jeremy questioned. “Isn’t it the way of the professional psychologists who have written about mysticism? They’ve evolved a pretty sensible language. You haven’t mentioned them.”

“I haven’t mentioned them,” said Mr. Propter, “for the same reason as in talking about beauty I shouldn’t mention professional aestheticians who had never been inside a picture gallery.”

“You mean, they don’t know what they’re talking about?”

Mr. Propter smiled. “I’d put it another way,” he said. “They talk about what they know. But what they know isn’t worth talking about. For what they know is only the literature of mysticism—not the experience.”

“Then there’s no way between the horns,” Jeremy concluded. His eyes twinkled behind his spectacles; he smiled like a child, taking a sly triumph in some small consummation of naughtiness. “What fun it is when there isn’t a way between!” he went on. “It makes the world seem so deliciously cosy, when all the issues are barred and there’s nowhere to go to with all your brass bands and shining armour. Onward, Christian soldiers! Forward, the Light Brigade! Excelsior! And all the time you’re just going round and round—head to tail, follow-my Fuehrer—like Fabre’s caterpillars. That really gives me a great deal of pleasure!”

This time Mr. Propter laughed outright. “I’m sorry to have to disappoint you,” he said. “But unfortunately there is a way between the horns. The practical way. You can go and find out what it means for yourself, by first-hand experience. Just as you can find out what El Greco’s Crucifixion of St. Peter looks like by taking the elevator and going up to the hall. Only in this case, I’m afraid, there isn’t any elevator. You have to go up on your own legs. And make no mistake,” he added, turning to Pete, “there’s an awful lot of stairs.”

Dr. Obispo straightened himself up, took the tubes of the stethoscope out of his ears and stowed the instrument away in his pocket along with the “Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome.”

“Anything bad?” Mr. Stoyte asked anxiously.

Dr. Obispo shook his head and gave him a smile of reassurance. “No influenza anyhow,” he said. “Just a slight intensification of the bronchial condition. I’ll give you something for it tonight before you go to bed.”

Mr. Stoyte’s face relaxed into cheerfulness. “Glad it was only a false alarm,” he said and turned away to get his clothes, which were lying in a heap on the sofa, under the Watteau.

From her seat at the soda counter, Virginia let out a whoop of triumph. “Isn’t that just swell!” she cried. Then in another, graver tone, “You know, Uncle Jo,” she added, “he’s got me panicked about that cough of yours. Panicked,” she repeated.

Uncle Jo grinned triumphantly and slapped his chest so hard that its hairy, almost female accumulations of flesh shivered like jellies under the blow. “Nothing wrong with me” he boasted.

Virginia watched him over the top of her glass, as he got into his shirt and knotted his tie. The expression on her innocent young face was one of perfect serenity. But behind those limpid blue eyes her mind was simmering with activity. “Was that a close call?” she kept saying to herself. “Gee, was it close!” At the recollection of that sudden violent start at the sound of the elevator gate being opened, of that wild scramble as the footsteps approached along the corridor, she felt herself tingling with a delicious mixture of fear and amusement, of apprehension and triumph. It was the sensation she used to have as a child, playing hide and seek in the dark. A close call! And hadn’t Sig been wonderful! What presence of mind! And that stethoscope thing he pulled out of his pocket—what a brain wave! It had saved the situation! Because, without the stethoscope, Uncle Jo would have put on one of his jealousy acts. Though what right he had to be jealous, Virginia went on to reflect, with a strong sense of injury, she really didn’t know. Seeing that nothing had happened except just a little reading aloud. And anyhow why shouldn’t a girl be allowed to read that sort of thing if she wanted to? Especially as it was in French. And, besides, who was Uncle Jo to be prudish, she’d like to know? Getting mad with people only for telling you a funny story, when just look what he himself was doing all the time—and then expecting you to talk like Louisa M. Alcott, and thinking you ought to be protected from hearing so much as a dirty word! And the way he simply wouldn’t allow her to tell the truth about herself, even if she had wanted to. Making a build-up of her as somebody quite different from what she really was. Acting almost as though she were Daisy Mae in the comic strip and he a sort of Little Abner rescuing her in the nick of time. Though, of course, he had to admit that it had happened at least once before he came along, because if it hadn’t, there’d have been no excuse for him. It had happened, but quite unwillingly—you know, practically a rape—or else some fellow taking advantage of her being so dumb and innocent—at the Congo Club with nothing on but a G-string and some talcum powder! And naturally she was always supposed to have hated it; crying her eyes out all the time until Uncle Jo came along; and then everything was different. But in that case, it now suddenly occurred to Virginia, if that was the way he thought about her, what the hell did he mean by coming home like this at seven-fifteen, when he’d told her he wouldn’t be back till eight? The old double-crosser! Was he trying to spy on her? Because, if so, she wasn’t going to stand for it; if so, then it just served him right that that was what Sig had been reading to her. He was just getting what he deserved for snooping around, trying to catch her doing something that wasn’t right. Well, if that was how he was going to act, she’d tell Sig to come every day and read another chapter. Though how on earth the man who wrote the book was going to keep it up for a hundred and twenty days, she really couldn’t imagine. Considering what had happened already in the first week—and here was she, figuring that there wasn’t anything she didn’t know! Well, one lived and learnt. Though there was some of it she really hadn’t in the least wanted to learn. Things that made you feel sick to your stomach. Horrible! As bad as having babies! (She shuddered.) Not that there weren’t a lot of funny things in the book too. The piece she had made Sig read over again—that was grand, that had given her a real kick. And that other bit where the girl . . .

“Well, Baby,” said Mr. Stoyte, as he did up the last button of his waistcoat. “You’re not saying much, are you? A penny for your thoughts.”

Virginia raised that childishly short upper lip in a smile that made his heart melt with tenderness and desire. “I was thinking about you, Uncle Jo,” she said.

Chapter XIII

“AND very nice too,” Jeremy said aloud. Transparent was the word, he reflected. The meaning was there like a fly in amber. Or, rather, there was no fly; there was only the amber; and the amber was the meaning. He looked at his watch. Three minutes to midnight. He closed his Wordsworth—and to think, he went on bitterly to remind himself, to think that he might have been refreshing his memory of “Félicia”!—laid the volume down on the table beside his bed and took off his glasses. Deprived of their six and a half diopters of correction, his eyes were instantly reduced to a state of physiological despair. Curved crystal had become their element; unspectacled, they were like a pair of jellied sea creatures, suddenly taken out of water. Then the light went out; and it was as though the poor things had been mercifully dropped, for safe keeping, into an aquarium.

Jeremy stretched under the bed-clothes and yawned. What a day! But now, thank God, the paradise of bed. The Blessed Damozel leaned out from the gold bed of heaven. But these sheets were cotton ones, not linen; which was really a bit discreditable in a house like this! A house full of Rubenses and Grecos—and your sheets were cotton! But that Crucifixion of St. Peter—what a really staggering machine! At least as good as the Assumption at Toledo. Which had probably been blown up by this time, incidentally. Just to demonstrate what happened when people took things too seriously. Not but that, he went on to reflect, there wasn’t something rather impressive about that old Propter-Object. (For that was what he had decided to call the man in his own mind and when he wrote to his mother; the Propter-Object.) A bit of an Ancient Mariner, perhaps. The wedding guest, he beat his breast on occasions; ought perhaps to have beaten it more often than he had done, seeing what a frightful subversion of all the common decencies and, a fortiori, the common indecencies (such as Félicia, such as every other Friday afternoon in Maida Vale), the creature was inculcating. Not without a considerable persuasiveness, damn his glittering eyes! For this particular Mariner not only held you with that eye of his; he was also and simultaneously the loud bassoon you wanted to hear. One listened without reluctance—though of course one had no intention of permitting one’s own particular little structure of decencies and indecencies to be subverted. One was not going to allow religion (of all things!) to invade the sanctities of private life. An Englishman’s home is his castle; and curiously enough, an American’s castle, as he had discovered after the first shock began to wear off, was turning out to be this particular Englishman’s home. His spiritual home. Because it was the embodiment of an imbecile’s no-track mind. Because there were no issues and nothing led anywhere and the dilemmas had an infinity of horns and you went round and round, like Fabre’s caterpillars, in a closed universe of utter cosiness—round and round among the Hauberk Papers, from St. Peter to La Petite Morphil to Giambologna to the gilded Bodhisattvas in the cellar to the baboons to the Marquis de Sade to St. François de Sales to Felicia and round again in due course to St. Peter. Round and round, like caterpillars inside the mind of an imbecile; round and round in an infinite cosiness of issueless thoughts and feelings and actions, of hermetically bottled art and learning, of culture for its own sake, of self-sufficient little decencies and indecencies, of impassable dilemmas and moral questions sufficiently answered by the circumambient idiocy.

Round and round, round and round, from Peter’s feet to Morphil’s little buttocks to the baboons’, from the beautiful Chinese spiral of the folds in the Buddha’s robe to the humming-bird drinking in mid-air to Peter’s feet again with the nails in them . . . His drowsiness darkened into sleep.

In another room on the same floor of the donjon Pete Boone was not even trying to get to sleep; he was trying, on the contrary, to figure things out. To figure out science and Mr. Propter, social justice and eternity and Virginia and Anti-Fascism. It wasn’t easy. Because if Mr. Propter was right, then you’d have to start thinking quite differently about almost everything. “Disinterested quest for truth”—that was what you said (if you were ever forced to say anything so embarrassing) about why you were a biologist. And in the case of Socialism it was “humanity,” it was “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” it was “progress”—and, of course, that linked up with biology again: happiness and progress through science as well as Socialism. And while happiness and progress were on the way there was loyalty to the cause. He remembered a piece about loyalty by Josiah Royce, a piece he had had to read in his sophomore year at college. Something about all loyal people grasping in their own way some form of religious truth—winning some kind of genuine religious insight. It had made a big impression on him at the time. He had just lost his faith in that old Blood-of-the-Lamb business he’d been brought up in, and this had come as a kind of reassurance, had made him feel that after all he was religious even if he didn’t go to church any more—religious because he was loyal. Loyal to causes, loyal to friends. He had been religious, it had always seemed to him, over there in Spain. Religious, again, when he felt that way about Virginia. And yet, if Mr. Propter was right, old Royce’s ideas about loyalty were all wrong. Being loyal didn’t of itself give you religious insight. On the contrary, it might prevent you from having insight—indeed, was absolutely certain to prevent you, if you gave your loyalty to anything less than the highest cause of all and the highest cause of all (if Mr. Propter was right) was almost terrible in its farness and strangeness. Almost terrible; and yet the more he thought about it, the more dubious he felt about everything else. Perhaps it really was the highest. But if it was, then Socialism wasn’t enough. And it wasn’t enough, because humanity wasn’t enough. Because the greatest happiness didn’t happen to be in the place where people had thought it was, because you couldn’t make it come by doing things in the sort of fields you worked in if you were a social reformer. The best you could do in those fields was to make it easier for people to go on to where the greatest happiness could be had. And, of course, what applied to Socialism would apply to biology or any other science, if you thought of it as a means to progress. Because, if Mr. Propter was right, then what people called progress wasn’t progress. That is, it wouldn’t be progress, unless it had made it easier for people to go on to where the greatest happiness actually was. Easier, in other words, to be loyal to the highest cause of all. And, obviously, if that was your standard, you had to think twice about using progress as a justification for science. And then there was that disinterested quest for truth. But again, if Mr. Propter was right, biology and the rest were the disinterested quest for only one aspect of truth. But a half-truth was a falsehood, and it remained a falsehood even when you’d told it in the belief that it was the whole truth. So it looked as though that justification wouldn’t do either—or at any rate as though it wouldn’t do unless you were at the same time disinterestedly trying to discover the other aspect of truth, the aspect you were looking for when you gave your loyalty to the highest cause of all. And meanwhile what about Virginia, he asked himself in mounting anguish, what about Virginia? For, if Mr. Propter was right, then even Virginia wasn’t enough, even Virginia might actually be an obstacle to prevent him from giving his loyalty to the highest cause of all. Even those eyes and her innocence and that utterly adorable mouth; even what he felt about her; even love itself, even the best kind of love (for he could honestly say that he hated the other kind—that dreadful brothel in Barcelona, for example, and here, at home, those huggings after the third or fourth cocktail, those gropings by the roadside in a parked car)—yes, even the best kind of love might be inadequate, might actually be worse than inadequate. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not something or other more.” Hitherto, something or other had been his biology, his socialism. But now these had turned out to be inadequate, or even, taken as ends in themselves, worse than inadequate. No loyalty was good in itself, or brought religious insight, except loyalty to the highest cause of all. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not the highest cause of all more.” But the question, the agonizing question, was this: Could you love the highest cause of all and go on feeling as you did about Virginia? The worst love was obviously incompatible with loyalty to the highest cause of all. Obviously so; because the worst love was just being loyal to your own physiology, whereas, if Mr. Propter was right, you couldn’t be loyal to the highest cause of all without denying such loyalties to yourself. But was the best love so fundamentally different, after all, from the worst? The worst was being loyal to your physiology. It was hateful to admit it; but so too was the best: being loyal to your physiology and at the same time (which was its distinguishing mark) loyal also to your higher feelings—to that empty ache of longing, to that infinity of tenderness, to that adoration, that happiness, those pains, that sense of solitude, that longing for identity. You were loyal to these, and being loyal to these was the definition of the best kind of love, of what people called romance and praised as the most wonderful thing in life. But being loyal to these was being loyal to yourself; and you couldn’t be loyal to yourself and loyal at the same time to the highest cause of all.

The practical conclusion was obvious. But Pete refused to draw it. Those eyes were blue and limpid, that mouth, adorable in its innocence. And, then, how sweet she was, how beautifully thoughtful! He remembered the conversation they had had on the way into dinner. He had asked her how her headache was. “Don’t talk about it,” she had whispered; “it might upset Uncle Jo. Doc’s been going over him with his stethoscope; doesn’t think he’s so good this evening. I don’t want to have him worrying about me. And anyhow, what is a headache?” Not only beautiful, not only innocent and sweet, but brave, too, and unselfish. And how adorable she had been to him all the evening, asking him about his work, telling him about her home in Oregon, making him talk about his home down in El Paso. In the end Mr. Stoyte had come and sat down beside them—in silence, and his face black as thunder. Pete had glanced inquiringly at Virginia, and she had given him a look that said, “Please, go,” and another when he rose to say good-night, so pleadingly apologetic, so full of gratitude, so understanding, so sweet and affectionate, that the recollection of it was enough to bring the tears into his eyes. Lying there in the darkness, he cried with happiness.

That niche in the wall between the windows in Virginia’s bedroom had been intended, no doubt, for a bookshelf. But Virginia was not very keen on books; the recess had been fitted up instead as a little shrine. You drew back a pair of short white velvet curtains (everything in the room was white) and there, in a bower of artificial flowers, dressed in real silk clothes, with the cutest little gold crown on her head and six strings of seed pearls round her neck, stood Our Lady brilliantly illuminated by an ingenious system of concealed electric bulbs. Barefooted and in white satin pyjamas, Virginia was kneeling before this sacred doll’s house, saying her evening prayers. Our Lady, it seemed to her, was looking particularly sweet and kind tonight. Tomorrow, she decided, while her lips pronounced the formulas of praise and supplication, tomorrow morning, first thing, she’d go right down to the sewing-room and get one of the girls to help her make a new mantle for Our Lady out of that lovely piece of blue brocade she had bought last week at the junk shop in Glendale. A blue brocade mantle, fastened in front with a gold button—or, better still, with a little gold cord that you could tie in a bow, with the ends hanging down, almost to Our Lady’s feet. Oh, that would be just gorgeous! She wished it were morning so that she could start right away.

The last prayer had been said; Virginia crossed herself and rose from her knees. Happening to look down as she did so, she saw to her horror that some of the cyclamen-coloured varnish had scaled off the nails of the second and third toes of her left foot. A minute later she was squatting on the floor beside the bed, the right leg outstretched, the other foot drawn across it, making ready to repair the damage. An open bottle stood beside her; she held a small paint brush in her hand, and a horribly industrial aura of acetone had enveloped the Schiaparelli “Shocking” with which her body was impregnated. She started to work and as she bent forward, two strands of auburn hair broke loose from their curly pattern and fell across her forehead. Under frowning brows, the large blue eyes intently stared. To aid concentration, the tip of a pink tongue was held between the teeth. “Helll” she suddenly said aloud, as the little brush made a false stroke. Then, immediately, the teeth clamped down again.

Interrupting her work to allow the first coat of varnish to dry, she shifted her scrutiny from the toes to the calf and shin of her left leg. The hairs were beginning to grow again, she noticed with annoyance; it would soon be time for another of those wax treatments. Still pensively caressing the leg, she let her mind travel back over the events of the day. The memory of that close call with Uncle Jo still gave her shivers of apprehensive excitement. Then she thought of Sig with his stethoscope, and the upper lip lifted ravishingly in a smile of amusement. And then there was that book, which it served Uncle Jo right that she should have had Sig read to her. And Sig getting fresh with her between the chapters and making passes; that also served Uncle Jo right for trying to spy on her. She remembered how mad she got at Sig. Not so much for what he actually did; for besides serving Uncle Jo right (of course it was only afterwards that she discovered quite how right it served him), what he actually did had been rather thrilling than otherwise; because after all Sig was terribly attractive and in those ways Uncle Jo didn’t hardly count; in fact you might almost say that he counted the other way; in the red, so to speak; counted less than nobody, so that anybody else who was attractive seemed still more attractive when Uncle Jo had been around. No, it wasn’t what he actually did that had made her mad at him. It was the way he did it. Laughing at her, like that. She didn’t mind a bit of kidding at ordinary times. But kidding while he was actually making passes—that was treating her like she was a tart on Main Street. No romance, or anything; just that sniggering sort of laugh and a lot of dirty cracks. Maybe it was sophisticated; but she didn’t like it. And didn’t he see that it was just plain dumb to act that way? Because, after all, when you’d been reading that book with someone so attractive as Sig—well, you felt you’d like a bit of romance. Real romance, like in the pictures, with moonlight, and swing music, or perhaps a torch singer (because it was nice to feel sad when you were happy), and a boy saying lovely things to you, and a lot of kissing, and at the end of it, almost without your knowing it, almost as if it weren’t happening to you, so that you never felt there was anything wrong, anything that Our Lady would really mind . . . Virginia sighed deeply and shut her eyes; her face took on an expression of seraphic tranquillity. Then she sighed again, shook her head and frowned. Instead of that, she was thinking angrily, instead of that, Sig had to go and spoil it all by acting hard-boiled and sophisticated. It just shot all the romance to pieces and made you feel mad at him. And what was the sense in that? Virginia concluded resentfully. What was the sense in that, either from his point of view or from hers?

The first coat of varnish seemed to be dry. Bending over her foot, she blew on her toes for a little, then started to apply the second coat. Behind her, all of a sudden, the door of the bedroom was opened and as gently closed again.

“Uncle Jo,” she said inquiringly and with a note of surprise in her voice, but without looking up from her enamelling.

There was no answer, only the sound of an approach across the room.

“Uncle Jo?” she repeated and, this time, interrupted the painting of her toes to turn round.

Dr. Obispo was standing over her. “Sig!” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “What are you doing?”

Dr. Obispo smiled his smile of ironic admiration, of intense and at the same time amused and mocking concupiscence. “I thought we might go on with our French lesson,” he said.

“You’re crazy!” She looked apprehensively towards the door. “He’s just across the hall. He might come in . . .”

Dr. Obispo’s smile broadened to a grin. “Don’t worry about Uncle Jo,” he said.

“He’d kill you, if he found you here.”

“He won’t find me here,” Dr. Obispo answered. “I gave him a capsule of Nembutal before he went to bed. He’ll sleep through the Last Trump.”

“I think you’re awful!” said Virginia emphatically; but she couldn’t help laughing, partly out of relief and partly because it really was rather funny to think of Uncle Jo snoring away next door, while Sig read her that stuff.

Dr. Obispo pulled the Book of Common Prayer out of his pocket. “Don’t let me interrupt your labours,” he said with the parody of chivalrous politeness. “‘A woman’s work is never done.’ Just go right on as though I weren’t there. I’ll find the place and start reading.” Smiling at her with imperturbable impudence, he sat down on the edge of the rococo bed and turned over the pages of the book.

Virginia opened her mouth to speak; then, catching hold of her left foot, closed it again under the compulsion of a need even more urgent than that of telling him exactly where he got off. The varnish was drying in lumps; her toes would look just awful if she didn’t go on with them at once. Hastily dipping her little brush in the bottle of acetone enamel, she started painting again with the focussed intensity of a Van Eyck at work on the microscopic details of the Adoration of the Lamb.

Dr. Obispo looked up from the book. “I admired the way you acted with Pete this evening/’ he said. “Flirting with him all through dinner, so that you got the old man hopping jealous of him. That was masterly. Or should one say mistressly?”

Virginia released her tongue to say emphatically: “Pete’s a nice boy.”

“But dumb,” Dr. Obispo qualified, as he sprawled with conscious elegance and a maddeningly insolent assumption of being at home, across the bed. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be in love with you the way he is.” He uttered a snort of laughter. “The poor chump thinks you’re an angel, a heavenly little angel, complete with wings, harp and genuine eighteen-carat, fully jewelled, Swiss-made virginity. Well, if that isn’t being dumb . . .”

“You just wait till I get time for you,” said Virginia menacingly, but without looking up; for she had reached a critical phase in the execution of her work of art.

Dr. Obispo ignored the remark. “I used to underestimate the value of an education in the humanities,” he said after a little silence. “Now, I make that mistake no longer.” In a tone of deep solemnity, a tone, one might imagine, like Whittier’s in a reading from his own works, “The lessons of great literature!” he went on. “The deep truths! The gems of wisdom!”

“Oh, shut up!” said Virginia.

“When I think what I owe Dante and Goethe,” said Dr. Obispo in the same prophetic style. “Take the case of Paolo reading aloud to Francesca. With the most fruitful results, if you remember. ‘Un giorno leggevamo per diletto di Lancilotto, come amor lo strinse. Soli eravamo e senz’alcun sospetto. Senz’alcun sospetto,’ ” Dr. Obispo repeated with emphasis, looking, as he did so, at one of the engravings in the “Cent-Vingt Jours.” “Not the smallest suspicion, mark you, of what was going to happen.”

“Helll” said Virginia, who had made another slip.

“No, not even a suspicion of hell,” Dr. Obispo insisted. “Though, of course, they ought to have been on the lookout for it. They ought to have had the elementary prudence to guard against being sent there by the accident of sudden death. A few simple precautions, and they could have made the best of both worlds. Could have had their fun while the brother was out of the way and, when the time for having fun was over, could have repented and died in the odour of sanctity. But then it must be admitted that they hadn’t the advantage of reading Goethe’s ‘Faust.’ They hadn’t learnt that inconvenient relatives could be given sleeping draughts. And even if they had learnt, they wouldn’t have been able to go to the drug-store and buy a bottle of Nembutal. Which shows that education in the humanities isn’t enough; there must also be education in science. Dante and Goethe to teach you what to do. And the professor of pharmacology to show you how to put the old buzzard into a coma with a pinch of barbiturate.”

The toes were finished. Still holding her left foot, so as to keep it from any damaging contact until the varnish should be entirely dry, Virginia turned on her visitor. “I won’t have you calling him an old buzzard,” she said hotly.

“Well, shall we say ‘bastard’?” Dr. Obispo suggested.

“He’s a better man than you’ll ever be!” Virginia cried; and her voice had the ring of sincerity. “I think he’s wonderful.”

“You think he’s wonderful,” Dr. Obispo repeated. “But all the same in about fifteen minutes you’ll be sleeping with me.” He laughed as he spoke and, leaning forwards from his place on the bed, caught her two arms from behind, a little below the shoulders. “Look out for your toes,” he said, as Virginia cried out and tried to wrench herself away from him.

The fear of ruining her masterpiece made her check the movement before it was more than barely initiated. Dr. Obispo took advantage of her hesitation to stoop down, through the aura of acetone towards the nape of that delicious neck, towards the perfume of ‘Shocking/ towards a firm warmth against the mouth, a touch of hair like silk upon the cheeks. Swearing, Virginia furiously jerked her head away. But a fine tingling of agreeable sensation was running parallel, so to speak, with her indignation, was incorporating itself in it.

This time, Dr. Obispo kissed her behind the ear. “Shall I tell you,” he whispered, “what I’m going to do to you?” She answered by calling him a lousy ape man. But he told her all the same, in considerable detail.

Less than the fifteen minutes had elapsed when Virginia opened her eyes and, across the now darkened room, caught sight of Our Lady smiling benignantly from among the flowers of her illuminated doll’s house. With a cry of dismay she jumped up and, without waiting to put on any clothes, ran to the shrine and drew the curtains. The lights went out automatically. Stretching out her hands in the thick darkness, she groped her way cautiously back to bed.

PART II

Chapter I

“AGAIN, no dearth of news,” Jeremy wrote to his mother three weeks later. “News of every kind and from all the centuries. Here’s a bit of news, to begin with, about the Second Earl. In the intervals of losing battles for Charles I, the Second Earl was a poet. A bad poet, of course (for the chances are always several thousands to one against any given poet being good), but with occasional involuntary deviations into charm. What about this, for example, which I found in manuscript only yesterday?

One taper burns, but ‘tis too much;

Our loves demand complete eclipse.

Let sight give place to amorous touch,

And candle-light to limbs and lips!

Rather pretty, don’t you think? But alas, almost the only nugget so far unearthed from the alluvium. If only the rest were silence! But that’s the trouble with poets, good no less than bad. They will not keep their traps shut, as we say in the Western hemisphere. What joy if the rest of Wordsworth had been silence, the rest of Coleridge, the rest of Shelley!

“Meanwhile the Fifth Earl sprang a surprise on me yesterday in the form of a note-book full of miscellaneous jottings. I have only just started on them (for I mustn’t spend all my time on any one item till I have the whole collection unpacked and roughly catalogued); but the fragments I’ve read are decidedly appetizing. I found this on the first page: ‘Lord Chesterfield writes to his Son that a Gentleman never speaks to his footman, nor even the beggar in the street, d’un ton brusque, but “corrects the one coolly and refuses the other with humanity.” His lordship should have added that there is an Art by which such coolness may be rendered no less formidable than Anger and such humanity more wounding than Insult.

“ ‘Furthermore, footmen and beggars are not the only objects on whom this Art may be exercised. His lordship has been ungallant enough in this instance to forget the Sex, for there is also an Art of coolly outraging a devoted female, and of abusing her Person, with all the bienstance befitting the most accomplished Gentleman.’

“Not a bad beginning! I will keep you posted of any subsequent discoveries in this field.

“Meanwhile contemporary news is odd, confused and a bit disagreeable. To begin with, Uncle Jo is chronically glum and ill-tempered these days. I suspect the green-eyed monster; for the blue-eyed monster (in other words Miss Maunciple, the Baby) has been rolling them, for some time now, in the direction of young Pete. Whether she rolls more than the eyes, I don’t know; but suspect the fact; for she has that inward, dreamy look, that far-away sleep-walker’s expression, which one often remarks on the faces of young ladies who have been doing a lot of strenuous love-making. You know the expression I mean: exquisitely spiritual and pre-Raphaelitish. One has only to look at such a face to know that God Exists. The one incongruous feature in the present instance is the costume. A pre-Raphaelite expression demands pre-Raphaelite clothes: long sleeves, square yokes, yards and yards of Liberty velveteen. When you see it, as I did today, in combination with white shorts, a bandana and a cowboy hat, you’re disturbed, you’re all put out. Meanwhile, in defence of Baby’s Honour, I must insist that all this is mere hypothesis and guess-work. It may be, of course, that this new, spiritual expression of hers is not the result of amorous fatigue. For all I know to the contrary, Baby may have been converted by the teachings of the Propter-Object and is now walking about in a state of perpetual samadhi. On the other hand, I do see her giving the glad eye to Pete. What’s more, Uncle Jo exhibits all the symptoms of being suspicious of them and extremely cross with everybody else. With me among others, of course. Perhaps even more with me than with others, because I happen to have read more books than the rest and am therefore more of a symbol of Culture. And Culture, of course, is a thing for which he has positively a Tartar’s hatred. Only, unlike the Tartars, he doesn’t want to burn the monuments of Culture, he wants to buy them up. He expresses his superiority to talent and education by means of possession rather than destruction; by hiring and then insulting the talented and educated rather than by killing them. (Though perhaps he would kill them, if he had the Tartar’s opportunities and power.) All this means that, when I am not in bed or safely underground with the Hauberks, I spend most of my time grinning and bearing, thinking of Jellybelly and my nice salary, in order not to think too much of Uncle Jo’s bad manners. It’s all very unpleasant; but fortunately not unbearable—and the Hauberks are an immense consolation and compensation.

“So much for the erotic and cultural fronts. On the scientific front, the news is that we’re all perceptibly nearer to living as long as crocodiles. At the time of writing, I haven’t decided whether I really want to live as long as a crocodile. (With the penning of the second ‘crocodile,’ Jeremy was seized by a sudden qualm. His mother would be seventy-seven in August. Under that urbanity of hers, under the crackled glaze of the admirable conversation, there was a passionate greed for life. She would talk matter-of-factly enough about her own approaching extinction; she would make little jokes about her death and funeral. But behind the talk and the little jokes there lurked, as Jeremy knew, a fierce determination to hold on to what was left, to go on doing what she had always done, in the teeth of death, in defiance of old age. This talk of crocodiles might give pain; this expression of doubt as to the desirability of prolonging life might be interpreted as an unfavourable criticism. Jeremy took a new sheet of paper and started the paragraph afresh.)

“So much for the erotic and cultural fronts,” he wrote. “On the scientific front, rien de nouveau, except that the Obispo is being more bumptious than ever; which isn’t news, because he’s always more bumptious than ever. Not one of my favourite characters, I’m afraid. Though not unamusing when one feels inclined for a few moments of ribaldry. Longevity, it appears, is making headway. Old Parr and the Countess of Desmond are on the march.

“And what of the religious front? Well, our Propter-Object has given up his attempts at edification, at any rate so far as I’m concerned. Thank heaven 1 for when he dismounts from his hobby horse, what excellent company he isl A mind full of all kinds of oddments; and the oddments are pigeon-holed in apple-pie order. One rather envies him his intellectual coherence; but consoles oneself by thinking that, if one had them, they’d spoil one’s own particular little trick. When one has a gift for standing gracefully on one’s head, one is foolish and ungrateful to envy the Marathon-runner. A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.

“My final item is from the home front and refers to your last letter from Grasse. What a feast! Your account of Mme. de Villemomble was really Proustian. And as for the description of your drive to Cap d’Ail and your day with what remains of the Princess and ce pauvre Hunyadi—well, all I can say is that it was worthy of Murasaki: the essence of all tragedy refined to a couple of tablespoonfuls of amber-coloured tea in a porcelain cup no bigger than a magnolia flower. What an admirable lesson in the art of literary chastity! My own tendencies—only in the world of letters, I am thankful to say—are towards a certain exhibitionism. This vestal prose of yours puts me to shame.

“Well, there is nothing more to say, as I used to write when I was at school—very large, do you remember? in an effort to make the words fill up half a page of note-paper. There is nothing more to say, except, of course, the unsayable, which I leave unsaid because you know it already.”

Jeremy sealed up his letter, addressed it—to The Araucarias, for his mother would be back from Grasse by the time it had crossed the Atlantic—and slipped the envelope into his pocket. All around him, the Hauberk Papers clamoured for his attention; but for some time he remained idle. His elbow on the desk, in an attitude of prayer, he meditatively scratched his head; scratched it with both hands where two little spots had formed dry scabs at the roots of the hair that still remained to him, scabs which it was an exquisite pleasure to prize up with the finger-nails and carefully detach. He was thinking of his mother and how curious it was, after all, that one should have read all the Freudian literature about the Oedipus business, all the novels, from “Sons and Lovers” downwards, about the dangers of too much filial devotion, the menace of excessive maternal love—that one should have read them all and still, with one’s eyes open, go on being what one was: the victim of a greedy possessive mother. And perhaps even odder was the fact that this possessive mother had also read all the relevant literature and was also perfectly aware of what she was and what she had done to her son. And yet she too went on being and doing what she had always been and done, just as he did, and with eyes no less open than his own. (There! the scab under the right hand had come loose. He pulled it out through the thick tufted hair above his ears and, as he looked at the tiny desiccated shred of tissue, was suddenly reminded of the baboons. But, after all, why not? The most certain and abiding pleasures are the tiniest, the simplest, the rudimentarily animal—the pleasure of lying in a hot bath, for example, or under the bed-clothes, between waking and sleeping, in the morning; the pleasure of answering the calls of nature, the pleasure of being rubbed by a good masseur, the pleasure finally of scratching when one itched. Why be ashamed? He dropped the scab into the waste paper basket and continued to scratch with the left hand.)

Nothing like self-knowledge, he reflected. To know why you do a thing that is wrong or stupid is to have an excuse for going on doing it. Justification by psychoanalysis—the modern substitute for justification by faith. You know the distant causes which made you a sadist or a money-grubber, a mother-worshipper or a son-cannibal; therefore you are completely justified in continuing to be a son-cannibal, mother-worshipper, money-grubber or sadist. No wonder if whole generations had risen up to bless the name of Freud! Well, that was how he and his mother managed things. “We bloodsucking matriarchs!” Mrs. Pordage used to say of herself—in the presence of the Rector, what was more. Or else it was into Lady Fredegond’s ear trumpet that she proclaimed her innocence. “Old Jocasta’s like me, with a middle-aged son in the house,” she would shout. And Jeremy would play up to her by coming across the room and bellowing into that tomb of intelligent conversation some feeble waggery about his being an old maid, for example, or about erudition as a substitute for embroidery; any rot would do. And the old harridan would utter that deep gangster’s laugh of hers and wag her head till the stuffed sea-gulls, or the artificial petunias, or whatever it was that she happened to be wearing in her always extraordinary hat, nodded like the plumes of a horse in a French pompe funèbre of the first class. Yes how curious it was, he said to himself again; but how sensible considering that they both, his mother and he, desired nothing better than to go on being just what they were. Her reasons for wanting to go on being a matriarch were obvious enough; it’s fun to be a queen, it’s delightful to receive homage and have a faithful subject. Less obvious, perhaps, at any rate to an outsider, were his own reasons for preferring the status quo. But looked into, they turned out to be cogent enough. There was affection, to begin with; for under a certain superficial irony and airiness, he was deeply attached to his mother. Then there was habit—habit so long-standing that his mother had come to be for him almost like an organ of his own body, hardly less dispensable than his pancreas or his liver. There was even a feeling of gratitude towards her for having done to him the things which, at the time she did them, had seemed the most cruelly unjustifiable. He had fallen in love, when he was thirty; he had wanted to marry. Without making a single scene, without being anything but sympathetically loving towards himself and charming in all her dealings with dear little Eileen, Mrs. Pordage had set to work to undermine the relationship between the two young people; and had succeeded so well that, in the end, the relationship just fell in on itself, like a house sapped from beneath. He had been very unhappy at the time, and with a part of himself he had hated his mother for what she had done. But as the years passed, he had felt less and less bitterly about the whole business, until now he was positively grateful to her for having delivered him from the horrors of responsibility, of a family, of regular and remunerative labour, of a wife who would probably have turned out to be a worse tyrant than his mother—indeed, who would certainly have turned out to be a worse tyrant; for the bulging, bustling matron into whom Eileen had by degrees transformed herself was one of the most disastrous females of his acquaintance; a creature passionately conventional, proud of her obtuseness, ant-like in her efficiency, tyrannically benevolent. In short, a monster. But for his mother’s strategy he would now be the unfortunate Mr. Welkin who was Eileen’s husband and the father of no less than four little Welkins as dreadful even in childhood and adolescence as Eileen had become in her middle age. His mother was doubtless speaking the truth when she jokingly called herself an old Jocasta, a blood-sucking matriarch; and doubtless, too, his brother Tom was right when he called him, Jeremy, a Peter Pan, and talked contemptuously of apron strings. But the fact remained that he had had the opportunity to read what he liked and write his little articles; and that his mother saw to all the practical aspects of life, demanded in return an amount of devotion which it really wasn’t very difficult to give and left him free, on alternate Friday afternoons, to savour the refined pleasures of an infinite squalor, in Maida Vale. Meanwhile, look what had happened to poor Tom! Second Secretary at Tokyo; First Secretary at Oslo; Counsellor at La Paz; and now back, more or less for good, in the Foreign Office, climbing slowly up the hierarchy, towards posts of greater responsibility and tasks of increasing turpitude. And as the salary rose and the morality of what he was called upon to do correspondingly sank, the poor fellow’s uneasiness had increased, until at last, with the row over Abyssinia, he just hadn’t been able to stand it any longer. On the brink of resignation or a nervous breakdown, he had managed, in the nick of time, to get himself converted to Catholicism. Thenceforward, he had been able to pack up the moral responsibility for his share in the general iniquity, take it to Farm Street and leave it there, in camphor, so to speak, with the Jesuit Fathers. Admirable arrangement! It had made a new man of him. After fourteen years of childlessness, his wife had suddenly had a baby—conceived, Jeremy had calculated, on the very night that the Spanish Civil War began. Then, two days after the sack of Nanking, Tom had published a volume of comic verses. (Curious how many English Catholics take to comic versifying.) Meanwhile, he was steadily gaining weight; between the Anschluss and Munich he had put on eleven pounds. Another year or two of Farm Street and power politics, and Tom would turn the scale at fourteen stone and have written the libretto of a musical comedy. No! Jeremy said to himself with decision. No! it simply wasn’t admissible. Better Peter Pan and apron strings and infinite squalor in a little room. Better a thousand times. Better to begin with, aesthetically; for this getting fat on realpolitik, this scribbling of comic verses on the margins of an engraving of the Crucifixion—really, it was too inelegant. And that wasn’t all; it was better even ethically; for of course the old Propter-Object was right: if you can’t be sure of doing positive good, at least keep out of mischief. And there was poor old Tom, as busy as a beaver and, now that he was a Papist, as happy as a lark, working away at the precise spot where he could do the maximum amount of harm to the greatest possible number of people.

(The other scab came loose. Jeremy sighed and leaned back in his chair.)

One scratched like a baboon, he concluded; one lived, at fifty-four, in the security of one’s mother’s shadow; one’s sexual life was simultaneously infantile and corrupt; by no stretch of the imagination could one’s work be described as useful or important. But when one compared oneself with other people, with Tom, for example, or even with the eminent and august, with cabinet ministers and steel magnates and bishops and celebrated novelists—well, really, one didn’t come out so badly after all. Judged by the negative criterion of harmless-ness, one even came out extremely well. So that, taking all things into consideration, there was really no reason why one should do anything much about anything. Having decided which, it was time to get back to the Hauberks.

Chapter II

VIRGINIA did not wake up that morning till nearly ten; and even after having had her bath and eaten her breakfast she remained in bed for another hour or more, her eyes closed, leaning back motionless against the heaped-up pillows, like a beautiful young convalescent newly emerged from the valley of the shadow.

The valley of the shadow of death; of the greater deaths and all the little deaths. Through deaths come transfigurations. He who would save his life must lose it. Men and women are continually trying to lose their lives, the stale, unprofitable, senseless lives of their ordinary personalities. For ever trying to get rid of them, and in a thousand different ways. In the frenzies of gambling and revivalism; in the monomanias of avarice and perversion, of research and sectarianism and ambition; in the compensatory lunacies of alcohol, of reading, of day-dreaming, of morphia; in the hallucinations of opium and the cinema and ritual; in the wild epilepsies of political enthusiasm and erotic pleasure; in the stupors of veronal and exhaustion. To escape; to forget one’s own, old, wearisome identity; to become someone else or, better, some other thing—a mere body, strangely numbed or more than ordinarily sentient; or else just a state of impersonal mind, a mode of unindividualized consciousness. What happiness, what a blissful alleviation! Even for such as were not previously aware that there was anything in their condition that needed to be alleviated. Virginia had been one of those—happy in limitation, not sufficiently conscious of her personal self to realize its ugliness and inadequacy, or the fundamental wretchedness of the human state. And yet, when Dr. Obispo had scientifically engineered her escape into an erotic epilepsy more excruciatingly intense than anything she had known before or even imagined possible, Virginia had realized that after all there was something in her existence that required alleviating and that this headlong plunge through an intenser, utterly alien consciousness into the darkness of a total oblivion was precisely the alleviation it required.

But like all the other addictions, whether to drugs or books, to power or applause, the addiction to pleasure tends to aggravate the condition it temporarily alleviates. The addict goes down into the valley of the shadow of his own particular little death—down indefatigably, desperately down in search of something else, something not himself, something other and better than the life he miserably lives as a human person in the hideous world of human persons. He goes down and, either violently or in delicious inertia, he dies and is transfigured; but dies only for a little while, is transfigured only momentarily. After the little death is a little resurrection, a resurrection out of unconsciousness, out of self-annihilating excitement, back into the misery of knowing oneself alone and weak and worthless, back into a completer separateness, an acuter sense of personality. And the acuter the sense of separate personality, the more urgent the demand for yet another experience of assuaging death and transfiguration. The addiction alleviates, but in doing so increases the pains demanding alleviation.

Lying there, propped up against her pillows, Virginia was suffering her daily resurrection from the valley of the shadow of her nocturnal deaths. From having been epileptically something else, she was becoming her own self again—a self, it was true, still somewhat numbed and bewildered by fatigue, still haunted by the memory of strange scenes and overpowering sensations, but none the less recognizably the old Virginia; the Virginia who admired Uncle Jo for his success and was grateful to him for having given her such a wonderful time, the Virginia who had always laughed and thought life grand and never bothered about things, the Virginia who had made Uncle Jo build the Grotto and had loved Our Lady ever since she was a kid. And now this Virginia was double-crossing her poor old admired Uncle Jo—not just telling a few little fibs, which might happen to any one, but deliberately and systematically double-crossing him. And not only him; she was also double-crossing poor Pete. Talking to him all the time; giving him the glad eye (as glad an eye, at any rate, as she was capable of giving in the circumstances); practically making love to him in public, so that Uncle Jo wouldn’t suspect Sig. Not that she wouldn’t be glad in some ways if Uncle Jo did suspect him. She’d love to see him getting a punch on the jaw and being thrown out. Just love it! But meanwhile she was doing everything she could to cover him up; and in the process making that poor, idiot boy imagine she was stuck on him. A double-crosser—that was all she was. A double-crosser. The knowledge of this worried her, it made her feel unhappy and ashamed; it prevented her laughing at things the way she used to; it kept her thinking, and feeling bad about what she was doing, and resolving not to do it again; resolving, but not being able to prevent herself doing it again, even though she really hated herself for doing it and hated Sig for making her and, above all, for telling her, in that horrible, hard-boiled, cynical way, just how he made her and why she couldn’t resist it. And one of the reasons why she had to do it again was that it stopped her feeling bad about having done it before. But then, afterwards, she felt bad again. Felt so bad, indeed, that she had been ashamed to look Our Lady in the face. For more than a week now the white velvet curtains across the front of the sacred doll’s house had remained drawn. She simply didn’t dare to open them, because she knew that if she did and if she made a promise there, on her knees, to Our Lady, it just wouldn’t be any good. When that awful Sig came along again, she’d just go all funny inside, like her bones had all turned into rubber, and the strength would go out of her and, before she knew where she was, it would all be happening again. And that would be much worse than the other times, because she’d made a promise about it to Our Lady. So that it was better not to make any promise at all—not now, at any rate; not until there seemed to be some chance of keeping it. Because it just couldn’t last this way for ever; she simply refused to believe she’d always have that awful rubber feeling in her bones. Some day she’d feel strong enough to tell Sig to go to hell. And when she did she’d make that promise. Till then, better not.

Virginia opened her eyes, and looked with a nostalgic expression at the niche between the windows and the drawn white curtains that concealed the treasure within—the cunning little crown, the seed pearls, the mantle of blue silk, the benignant face, the adorable little hands. Virginia sighed profoundly and, closing her eyes again, tried, by a simulation of sleep, to recapture the happy oblivion from which the light of morning had forced her unwillingly to emerge.

Chapter III

MR. STOYTE had spent his morning at the Beverly Pantheon. Very reluctantly; for he had a horror of cemeteries, even his own. But the claims of money-making were sacred; business was a duty to which all merely personal considerations had to be sacrificed. And talk of business! the Beverly Pantheon was the finest real estate proposition in the country. The land had been bought during the War at five hundred dollars an acre, improved (with roads, Tiny Tajes, Columbariums and statuary) to the tune of about ten thousand an acre, and was now selling, in grave sites, at the rate of a hundred and sixty thousand an acre—selling so fast that the entire capital outlay had already been amortized, so that everything from now on would be pure jam. And, of course, as the population of Los Angeles increased, the jam would become correspondingly more copious. And the population was increasing, at the rate of nearly ten per cent per annum—and, what was more the main accessions consisted of elderly retired people from other states of the Union; the very people who would bring the greatest immediate profit to the Pantheon. And so, when Charlie Habakkuk sent that urgent call for him to come over and discuss the latest plans of improvements and extensions, Mr. Stoyte had found it morally impossible to refuse. Repressing his antipathies, he had done his duty. All that morning the two men had sat with their cigars in Charlie’s office at the top of the Tower of Resurrection; and Charlie had waved those hands of his, and spouted cigar smoke from his nostrils, and talked—God, how he had talked! As though he were one of those men in a red fez trying to make you buy an Oriental carpet—and incidentally, Mr. Stoyte reflected morosely, that was what Charlie looked like; only he was better fed than most of those carpet boys, and therefore greasier.

“Cut the sales talk,” he growled out loud. “You seem to forget I own the place.”

Charlie looked at him with an expression of pained surprise. Sales talk? But this wasn’t sales talk. This was real, this was earnest. The Pantheon was his baby; for all practical purposes, he had invented the place. It was he who had thought up the Tiny Taj and the Church of the Bard; he who, on his own initiative, had bought that bargain lot of statues at Genoa; he who had first clearly formulated the policy of injecting sex appeal into death; he who had resolutely resisted every attempt to introduce into the cemetery any representation of grief or age, any symbol of mortality, any image of the sufferings of Jesus. He had had to fight for his ideas, he had had to listen to a lot of criticism; but the results had proved him right. Any one who complained that there was no Crucifixion in the place could be referred to the published accounts. And here was Mr. Stoyte talking sarcastically about sales talk. Sales talk, indeed, when the demand for space in the Pantheon was so great that existing accommodation would soon be inadequate. There would have to be enlargements. More space, more buildings, more amenities. Bigger and better; progress; service.

At the top of the Tower of Resurrection, Charlie Habakkuk unfolded his plans. The new extension was to have a Poet’s Corner, open to any bona fide writer—though he was afraid they’d have to draw the line at the authors of advertising copy, which was a pity, because a lot of them made good money and might be persuaded to pay extra for the prestige of being buried with the moving picture people. But that cut both ways—because the scenario writers wouldn’t feel that the Poet’s Corner was exclusive enough if you let in the advertising boys. And seeing that the moving picture fellows made so much more than the others . . . well, it stood to reason, Charlie had concluded, it stood to reason. And, of course, they’d have to have a replica of Westminster Abbey in the Poet’s Corner. Wee Westminster—it would sound kind of cute. And as they needed a couple of extra mortuary furnaces anyhow, they’d have them installed there in Dean’s Yard. And they’d put a new automatic record player in the crypt, so that there’d be more variety in the music. Not that people didn’t appreciate the Perpetual Wurlitzer; they did. But all the same it got a bit monotonous. So he’d thought they might have some recordings of a choir singing hymns and things, and perhaps, every now and then, just for a change, some preacher giving an inspirational message, so that you’d be able to sit in the Garden of Contemplation, for example, and listen to the Wurlitzer for a few minutes and then the choir singing “Abide with Me” and then a nice sort of Barrymore voice saying some piece, like the Gettysburg Address or “Laugh and the World Laughs with You,” or maybe some nice juicy bit by Mrs. Eddy or Ralph Waldo Trine—anything would do so long as it was inspirational enough. And then there was his idea of the Catacombs. And, boy, it was the best idea he’d ever had. Leading Mr. Stoyte to the south-eastern window, he had pointed across an intervening valley of tombs and cypresses and the miniature monuments of bogus antiquity, to where the land sloped up again to a serrated ridge on the further side. There, he had shouted excitedly, there, in that hump in the middle; they’d tunnel down into that. Hundreds of yards of Catacombs. Lined with reinforced concrete to make them earthquake proof. The only class-A Catacombs in the world. And little chapels, like the ones in Rome. And a lot of phony-looking murals, looking like they were real old. You could get them done cheap by one of those W.P.A. art projects. Not that those guys knew how to paint, of course; but that was quite O.K., seeing that the murals had to look phony anyhow. And they wouldn’t have anything but candles and little lamps for people to carry around—no electric light at all, except right at the very end of all those winding passages and stairs, where there’d be a great big sort of underground church, with one of those big nude statues that were going up at the San Francisco Fair and that they’d be glad to sell for a thousand bucks or even less when the show was over—one of those modernistic broads with muscles on them—and they’d have her standing right in the middle, there with maybe some fountains spouting all around her and concealed pink lighting in the water so she’d look kind of real. Why, the tourists would come a thousand miles to see it. Because there was nothing people liked so much as caves. Look at those Carlsbad Caverns, for example; and all those caves in Virginia. And those were just common-or-garden natural caves, without murals or anything. Whereas these would be Catacombs. Yes, sir; real Catacombs, like the things the Christian Martyrs lived in—and, by gum, that was another idea! Martyrs! Why couldn’t they have a Chapel of the Martyrs with a nice plaster group of some girls with no clothes on, just going to be eaten by a lion? People wouldn’t stand for the Crucifixion; but they’d get a real thrill out of that.

Mr. Stoyte had listened wearily and with repugnance. He loathed his Pantheon and everything to do with it. Loathed it, because in spite of statues and Wurlitzer, it spoke to him of nothing but disease and death and corruption and final judgment; because it was here, in the Pantheon, that they would bury him—at the foot of the pedestal of Rodin’s Baiser. (An assistant manager had once inadvisedly pointed out the spot to him and been immediately fired; but there was no dismissing the memory of his offence.) Charlie’s enthusiasm for Catacombs and Wee Westminsters elicited no answering warmth; only occasional grunts and a final sullen O.K. for everything except the Chapel of the Martyrs. Not that the Chapel of the Martyrs seemed to Mr. Stoyte a bad idea; on the contrary, he was convinced that the public would go crazy over it. If he rejected it, it was merely on principle—because it would never do to allow Charlie Habakkuk to think he was always right.

“Get plans and estimates for everything else,” he ordered in a tone so gruff that he might have been delivering a reprimand. “But no martyrs. I won’t have any martyrs.”

Almost in tears, Charlie pleaded for just one lion, just one early Christian Virgin with her hands tied behind her back—because people got such a kick out of anything to do with ropes or handcuffs. Two or three Virgins would have been much better, of course; but he’d be content with one. “Just one, Mr. Stoyte,” he implored, clasping his eloquent hands. “Only one.”

Obstinately deaf to all his entreaties, Mr. Stoyte shook his head. “No martyrs here,” he said. “That’s final.” And to show that it was final, he threw away the butt of his cigar and got up to go.

Five minutes later, Charlie Habakkuk was letting off steam to his secretary. The ingratitude of people! The stupidity. He’d a good mind to resign, just to show the old buzzard that they couldn’t get on without him. Not for five minutes. Who was it that had made the place what it was: the uniquest cemetery in the world? Absolutely the uniquest. Who? (Charlie slapped himself on the chest.) And who made all the money? Jo Stoyte. And what had he done to make the place a success? Absolutely nothing at all. It was enough to make you want to be a Communist. And the old devil wasn’t grateful or even decently polite. Pushing you around as though you were a bum off the streets! Well, there was one comfort: Old Jo hadn’t been looking any too good this morning. One of these days, maybe, they’d have the pleasure of burying him. Down there in the vestibule of the Columbarium, eight foot underground. And serve him right!

It was not only that he didn’t look too good; leaning back in the car which was taking him down to Beverly Hills on his way to see Clancy, Mr. Stoyte was thinking, as he had thought so often during these last two or three weeks, that he didn’t feel too good. He’d wake up in the morning feeling kind of sluggish and heavy; and his mind didn’t seem to be as clear as it was. Obispo called it suppressed influenza and made him take those pills every night; but they didn’t seem to do him any good. He went on feeling that way just the same. And, on top of everything else, he was worrying himself sick about Virginia. The Baby was acting strange, like someone that wasn’t really there; so quiet, and not noticing anything, and starting when you spoke to her and asking what you said. Acting for all the world like one of those advertisements for Sal Hepatica or California Syrup of Figs; and that was what he’d have thought it was, if it hadn’t been for the way she went on with that Peter Boone fellow. Always talking to him at meals—and asking him to come and have a swim; and wanting to take a squint down his microscope—and what sort of a damn did she give for microscopes, he’d like to know? Throwing herself at him—that was what it had looked like on the surface. And that kind of syrup-of-figs way of acting (like people at those Quaker Meetings that Prudence used to make him go to before she took up with Christian Science)—that all fitted in. You’d say she was kind of stuck on the fellow. But then why should it have happened so suddenly? Because she’d never shown any signs of being stuck on him before. Always treated him like you’d treat a great big dog—friendly and all that, but not taking him too seriously; just a pat on the head and then, when he’d wagged his tail, thinking of something else. No, he couldn’t understand it; he just couldn’t figure it out. It looked like she was stuck on him; but then, at the same time, it looked like she just didn’t notice if he was a boy or a dog. Because that was how she was acting even now. She paid a lot of attention to him—only the way you’d pay attention to a nice big retriever. And that was what had thrown him out. If she’d been stuck on Pete in the ordinary way, then he’d have got mad, and raised hell, and thrown the boy out of the house. But how could you raise hell over a dog? How could you get mad with a girl for telling a retriever she’d like to have a squint down his microscope? You couldn’t even if you tried; because getting mad didn’t make any sense. All he’d been able to do was just worry, trying to figure things out and not being able to. There was only one thing that was clear, and that was that the Baby meant more to him than he had thought, more than he had ever believed it possible that any one should mean to him. It had begun by his just wanting her—wanting her to touch, to hold, to handle, to eat; wanting her because she was warm and smelt good; wanting her because she was young and he was old, because she was so innocent and he too tired for anything not innocence to excite. That was how it had begun; but almost immediately something else had happened. That youth of hers, that innocence and sweetness—they were more than just exciting. She was so cute and lovely and childish, he almost felt like crying over her, even while he wanted to hold and handle and devour. She did the strangest things to him—made him feel good, like you felt when you’d tanked up a bit on Scotch, and at the same time made him feel good, like you felt when you were at church, or listening to William Jennings Bryan, or making some poor kid happy by giving him a doll or something. And Virginia wasn’t just anybody’s kid, like the ones at the hospital; she was his kid, his very own. Prudence wasn’t able to have children; and at the time he’d been sore about it. But now he was glad. Because if he’d had a row of kids, they’d be standing in the way of the Baby. And Virginia meant more to him than any daughter could mean. Because even if she were only a daughter, which she wasn’t, she was probably a lot nicer than his own flesh-and-blood daughter would have been—seeing that, after all, the Stoytes were all a pretty sour-faced lot and Prudence had been kind of dumb even if she was a good woman, which she certainly was—maybe a bit too good. Whereas with the Baby everything was just right, just perfect. He had been happier since he’d known her than he’d ever been in years, With her around, things had seemed worth doing again. You didn’t have to go through life asking “why?” The reason for everything was there in front of you, wearing that cunning little yachting cap, maybe, or all dressed up with her emeralds and everything for some party with the moving picture crowd.

And now something had happened. The reason for carrying on was being taken away from him. The Baby had changed; she was fading away from him; she had gone somewhere else. Where had she gone? And why? Why did she want to leave him? To leave him all alone. Absolutely alone, and he was an old man, and the white slab was there in the vestibule of the Columbarium, waiting for him.

“What’s the matter, Baby?” he had asked. Time and again he had asked with anguish in his heart, too miserable to be angry, too much afraid of being left alone to care about his dignity, or his rights, about anything except keeping her, at whatever cost. “What’s the matter, Baby?”

And all she ever did was to look at him as though she were looking at him from some place a million miles away—to look at him like that and say: Nothing; she was feeling fine; she hadn’t got anything on her mind; and, no, there wasn’t anything he could do for her, because he’d given her everything already, and she was perfectly happy.

And if he mentioned Pete (kind of casually, so she shouldn’t think he suspected anything) she wouldn’t even bat an eyelid; just say, Yes, she liked Pete; he was a nice boy, but unsophisticated—and that made her laugh; and she liked laughing.

“But, Baby, you’re different,” he would say; and it was difficult for him to keep his voice from breaking, he was so unhappy. “You don’t act like you used to, Baby.”

And all she’d answer was that that was funny because she felt just the same.

“You don’t feel the same about me,” he would say.

And she’d say she did. And he’d say no. And she’d say it wasn’t true. Because what reasons did he have for saying she felt different about him? And of course she was quite right; there weren’t any reasons you could lay your finger on. He couldn’t honestly say she acted less affectionate, or didn’t want to let him kiss her, or anything like that. She was different because of something you couldn’t put a name to. Something in the way she looked and moved and sat around. He couldn’t describe it except by saying it was like she wasn’t really there where you thought you were looking at her, but some place else; some place where you couldn’t touch her, or talk to her, or even really see her. That was how it was. But whenever he had tried to explain it to her, she had just laughed at him and said he must be having some of those feminine intuitions you read about in stories—only his feminine intuitions were all wrong.

And so there he’d be, back where he started from, trying to figure it out and not being able to, and worrying himself sick. Yes, worrying himself sick. Because when he’d got over feeling sluggish and heavy, like he always did in the mornings now, he felt so worried about the Baby that he’d start bawling out the servants and being rude to that god-damned Englishman and getting mad with Obispo. And the next thing that happened was that he couldn’t digest his meals. He was getting heartburn and sour stomach; and one day he had such a pain that he’d thought it was appendicitis. But Obispo had said it was just gas; because of his suppressed influenza. And then he’d got mad and told the fellow he must be a lousy doctor if he couldn’t cure a little thing like that. Which must have put the fear of God into Obispo, because he’d said, “Just give me two or three days more. That’s all I need to complete the treatment.” And he’d said that suppressed influenza was a funny thing; didn’t seem to be anything, but poisoned the whole system, so you couldn’t think straight any more; and you’d get to imagining things that weren’t really there, and worrying about them.

Which might be true in a general way; but in this case he just knew it wasn’t all imagination. The Baby was different; he had a reason for being worried.

Sunk in his mood of perplexed and agitated gloom, Mr. Stoyte was carried down the windings of the mountain road, through the bowery oasis of Beverly Hills and eastward (for Clancy lived in Hollywood) along Santa Monica Boulevard. Over the telephone, that morning, Clancy had put on one of his melodramatic conspirator acts. From the rigmarole of hints and dark allusions and altered names, Mr. Stoyte had gathered that the news was good. Clancy and his boys had evidently succeeded in buying up most of the best land in the San Felipe Valley. At another time, Mr. Stoyte would have exulted in his triumph; today, even the prospect of making a million or two of easy money gave him no sort of pleasure. In the world he had been reduced to inhabiting, millions were irrelevant. For what could millions do to allay his miseries? The miseries of an old, tired, empty man; of a man who had no end in life but himself, no philosophy, no knowledge but of his own interests, no appreciations, not even any friends—only a daughter-mistress, a concubine-child, frantically desired, cherished to the point of idolatry. And now this being, on whom he had relied to give significance to his life, had begun to fail him. He had come to doubt her fidelity—but to doubt without tangible reasons, to doubt in such a way that none of the ordinary satisfying reactions, of rage, of violence, of recrimination, was appropriate. The sense was going out of his life and he could do nothing; for he was in a situation with which he did not know how to deal, hopelessly bewildered. And always, in the background of his mind, there floated an image of that circular marble room, with Rodin’s image of desire at the centre, and that white slab in the pavement at its base—the slab that would someday have his name engraved upon it: Joseph Panton Stoyte, and the dates of his birth and death. And along with that inscription went another, in orange letters on a coal black ground: It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. And meanwhile here was Clancy, conspiratorially announcing victory. Good news, good news!! A year or two from now he would be richer by another million. But the millions were in one world and the old, unhappy, frightened man was in another, and there was no communication between the two.

Chapter IV

JEREMY worked for a couple of hours, unpacking, examining, provisionally cataloguing, filing. There were no interesting finds this morning—merely accounts and legal documents and business letters. Stuff for Coulton and Tawney and the Hammonds; not at all his cup of tea.

By half past twelve the weight of boredom had become too much for him. He broke off and, in search of a little spiritual refreshment turned to the Fifth Earl’s vellum-bound note-book.

“July, 1780,” he read. “Sensuality is close allied with Sorrow, and it sometimes happens that, on account of the very sincerity of her Grief, the weeping Widow is betrayed by her own Feelings and finds herself unable to resist the importunities of the funeral Guest, who knows the Art of passing imperceptibly from Condolence to Familiarity. I myself have posthumously cuckolded a Duke and two Viscounts (one of them no later than last night) upon the very Beds from which but a few hours before, they had been borne in Pomp to the ancestral Sepulchre.”

That was something for his mother, Jeremy reflected. The sort of thing she really adored! He had a good mind, if it wasn’t too horribly expensive, to cable it to her in a night letter.

He returned to the note-book.

“One of the Livings in my Gift having unexpected fallen vacant, my Sister sent to me today a young Divine whom she commends, and I believe her, for his singular Virtue. I will have no Parsons around me but such as drink deep, ride to Hounds and caress the Wives and daughters of their Parishioners. A Virtuous Parson does nothing to test or exercise the Faith of his Flock; but as I have written to my Sister, it is by Faith that we come to Salvation.”

The next entry was dated March, 1784:

“In old Tombs newly opened a kind of ropy Slime depends from the roof and coats the walls. It is the condensation of decay.”

“January, 1786. Half a dozen pensées in as many years. If I am to fill a volume at this rate, I must outlast the patriarchs. I regret my sloth, but console myself with the thought that my fellow men are too contemptible for me to waste my time instructing or entertaining them.”

Jeremy hurried over three pages of reflections on politics and economics. Under the date of March 12, 1787, he found a more interesting entry:

“Dying is almost the least spiritual of our acts, more strictly carnal even than the act of love. There are Death Agonies that are like the strainings of the Costive at stool. Today I saw M. B. die.”

“January 11th, 1788. This day fifty years ago I was born. From solitude in the Womb, we emerge into solitude among our Fellows, and return again to solitude within the Grave. We pass our lives in the attempt to mitigate that solitude. But Propinquity is never fusion. The most populous City is but an agglomeration of wildernesses. We exchange Words, but exchange them from prison to prison, and without hope that they will signify to others what they mean to ourselves. We marry, and there are two solitudes in the house instead of one; we beget children, and there are many solitudes. We reiterate the act of love; but again propinquity is never fusion. The most intimate contact is only of Surfaces and we couple, as I have seen the condemned Prisoners at Newgate coupling with their Trulls, between the bars of our cages. Pleasure cannot be shared; like Pain, it can only be experienced or inflicted, and when we give Pleasure to our Lovers or bestow Charity upon the Needy, we do so, not to gratify the object of our Benevolence, but only ourselves. For the Truth is that we are kind for the same reason as we are cruel, in order that we may enhance the sense of our own Power; and this we are for ever trying to do, despite the fact that by doing it we cause ourselves to feel more solitary than ever. The reality of Solitude is the same in all men, there being no mitigation of it, except in Forgetfulness, Stupidity or Illusion; but a man’s sense of Solitude is proportionate to the sense and fact of his Power. In any set of circumstances, the more Power we have, the more intensely do we feel our solitude. I have enjoyed much Power in my life.”

“June, 1788. Captain Pavey came to pay his respects today, a round, jovial, low man, whom even his awe of me could not entirely prevent from breaking out into the vulgar Mirth which is native to him. I questioned him concerning his last Voyage, and he very minutely described for me the mode of packing the Slaves in the holds; the chains used to secure them; the feeding of them and, in calm weather, the exercising on deck, though always with Nets about the bulwarks, to prevent the more desperate from casting themselves into the sea; the Punishments for the refractory; the schools of hungry sharks accompanying the vessel; the scurvy and other diseases, the wearing away of the negroes’ Skin by the hardness of the planks on which they lie and the continual Motion of the waves; the Stench so horrible that even the hardiest seaman will turn pale and swoon away, if he ventures into the hold; the frequent Deaths and almost incredibly rapid Putrefaction, especially in damp Weather near the Line. When he took his leave, I made him a present of a gold snuff box. Anticipating no such favour, he was so coarsely loud in his expression of thanks and future devotion to my Interests, that I was forced to cut him short. The snuff box cost me sixty guineas; Captain Pavey’s last three Voyages have brought me upwards of forty thousand. Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man’s distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived. For every risk taken by the General Officer, the private soldier takes a hundred; and for every guinea earned by the latter the General earns a hundred. So with myself and Pavey and the Slaves. The Slaves labour in the Plantation for nothing but blows and their diet; Captain Pavey undergoes the hardships and dangers of the Sea and lives not so well as a Haberdasher or Vintner; I put my hand to nothing more material than a Banker’s draft, and a shower of gold descends upon me for my pains. In a world such as ours, a man is given but three choices. In the first place, he may do as the multitude have always done and, too stupid to be wholly a knave, mitigate his native baseness with a no less native folly. Second, he may imitate those more consummate fools who painfully deny their native Baseness in order to practise Virtue. Third, he may choose to be a man of sense—one who, knowing his native Baseness, thereby learns to make use of it and, by the act of knowledge, rises superior to it and to his more foolish Fellows. For myself, I have chosen to be a man of sense.”

“March, 1789. Reason promises Happiness; Feeling protests that it is Happiness; Sense alone gives Happiness. And Happiness itself is like dust in the mouth.”

“July, 1789. If Men and Women took their Pleasures as noisily as the Cats, what Londoner could ever hope to sleep of nights?”

“July, 1789. The Bastille is fallen. Long live the Bastille!”

The next few pages were devoted to the Revolution. Jeremy skipped them. In 1794 the Fifth Earl’s interest in the Revolution gave place to interest in his own health.

“To those who visit me,” he had written, “I say that I have been sick and am now well again. The words are quite untrue; for it was not I who lay at Death’s door, nor is it I whom am recovered. The first was a special creation of Fever, an embodiment of Pain and Lassitude; the second is not I, but an old man, weak, shrunken and without desires. My name and some memories are all that remain to me of the Being I once was. It is as if a Man had died and willed to some surviving Friend a handful of worthless trinkets to remember him by.”

“1794. A sick, rich Man is like one who lies wounded and alone in the deserts of Egypt; the Vultures hover lower and lower above his head and the Jackals and Hyenas prowl in ever narrowing circles about the place where he lies. Not even a rich Man’s Heirs could be more unsleepingly attentive. When I look into my Nephew’s face and read there, behind the mask of Solicitude, his impatient longing for my Death and his disappointment that I am not already gone, I feel an influx of new Life and Strength. If for no other reason, I will live on to rob him of the Happiness which he still believes (for he is confident of my Relapse) to be within his Grasp.”

“1794. The World is a Mirror, reflecting his image to the Beholder.”

“January, 1795. I have tried King David’s remedy against old age and found it wanting. Warmth cannot be imparted, but only evoked; and where no lingering spark persists, even tinder will not raise a flame. It may be as the Parsons say, that we are saved by another’s vicarious suffering; but I can vouch for the fact that vicarious pleasure is without efficacity, except only to enhance the sentiments of Superiority and Power in him who inflicts it.”

“1795. As the Satisfactions of Sense decay, we compensate ourselves for their loss by cultivating the sentiments of Pride and Vanity. The love of Domination is independent of the bodily faculties and therefore, when the body loses its powers, may easily take the place of vanished Pleasure. For myself, I was never without the love of Dominion even when in the Throes of Pleasure. Since my late Death, the Phantom that remains of me is forced to content itself with the first, less substantial and, above all, less harmless of these two Satisfactions.”

“July, 1796. The fish-ponds at Gonister were dug in the Ages of Superstition by the monks of the Abbey upon whose foundations the present House is built. Under King Charles I, my great-great-grandfather caused a number of leaden Disks engraved with his cypher and the date, to be attached by silver rings to the tails of fifty well-grown carp. Not less than twenty of these fish are alive today, as one may count whenever the bell is rung that call the Creatures to be fed. With them come others even larger than they—survivors, it may be, from the monkish times before King Henry’s Dissolution of the Religious Houses. Watching them through the pellucid Water, I marvel at the strength and unimpaired agility of these great Fishes, of which the oldest were perhaps alive when the Utopia was written, while the youngest are co-eval with the author of Paradise Lost. The latter attempted to justify God’s ways to Man. He would have done a more useful Work in undertaking to explain the ways of God to Fish. Philosophers have wasted their own and their readers’ time in speculations upon the Immortality of the Soul; the Alchemists have pored for centuries over their crucibles in the vain hope of discovering the Elixir or the Stone. Meanwhile, in every pond and river, one may find Carps that have outlived three Platos and half a dozen Para-celsuses. The Secret of eternal Life is not to be found in old Books, nor in liquid Gold, nor even in Heaven; it is to be found in the Mud and only awaits a skilful Angler.”

Outside, in the corridor, the bell rang for lunch. Jeremy rose, put the Fifth Earl’s note-book away and walked towards the lift, smiling to himself at the thought of the pleasure he would derive from telling that bumptious ass, Obispo, that all his best ideas about longevity had been anticipated in the eighteenth century.

Chapter V

LUNCHEON, in the absence of Mr. Stoyte, was a very cheerful meal. The servants went about their business unreprimanded. Jeremy could talk without the risk of being snubbed or insulted. Dr. Obispo was able to tell the story about the chimney sweep who applied for life insurance after going on his honeymoon, and, from the far-away depths of that almost trance-like state of fatigue—that state which she deliberately fostered, so as not to have to think too much and feel too badly about what was happening—Virginia was at liberty to laugh at it as loudly as she liked. And though with one part of herself she would have liked not to laugh at all, because she didn’t want to make Sig think she was encouraging him in any way, with another part she wanted to laugh, indeed couldn’t help laughing, because, after all, the story was really very funny. Besides, it was such a relief not to have to put on that act with Pete for the benefit of Uncle Jo. No double-crossing. For once, she could be herself. The only fly in the ointment was that this self she was being was such a miserable specimen; a self with bones that would go like rubber whenever that horrible Sig chose to come along; a self without the strength to keep a promise even to Our Lady. Her laughter abruptly ceased.

Only Pete was consistently unhappy—about the chimney sweep, of course, and Virginia’s burst of merriment; but also because Barcelona had fallen and, with it, all his hopes of a speedy victory over Fascism, all prospect of ever seeing any of his old comrades again. And that wasn’t all. Laughing at the story of the chimney sweep was only a single painful incident among many. Virginia had allowed the first two courses of the meal to come and go without once paying any attention to him. But why? Why? His distress was aggravated by bitter bewilderment. Why? In the light of what had been happening during the past three weeks it was inexplicable. Ever since the evening of the day she had turned back at the Grotto, Virginia had been simply wonderful to him—going out of her way to talk to him, inviting him to tell her things about Spain and even about biology. Why, she had actually asked to look at something under the microscope. Trembling with happiness, so that he could hardly adjust the slide, he had focussed the instrument on a preparation of the carp’s intestinal flora. Then she had sat down in his place and, as she bent over the eyepiece, her auburn curls had swung down on either side of the microscope and, above the edge of her pink sweater, the nape of her neck had been uncovered, so white, so tangibly inviting that the enormous effort he had had to make to prevent himself from kissing it had left him feeling almost faint.

There had been times, during the ensuing days, when he wished that he hadn’t made that effort. But then his better self would reassert its rule and he was glad again that he had. Because, of course, it wouldn’t have been right. For though he had long since given up the family belief in that Blood-of-the-Lamb business, he still remembered what his pious and conventional mother had said about kissing any one you weren’t engaged to; he was still at heart the earnest adolescent whom Reverend Schlitz’s eloquence had fired during the perplexities of puberty, with a passionate determination to be continent, a conviction of the Sacredness of Love, an enthusiasm for something wonderful called Christian marriage. But at the moment, unfortunately, he wasn’t earning enough to feel justified in asking Virginia to accept his sacred love and enter into Christian marriage with him. And there was the added complication that on his side the marriage wouldn’t be Christian, whereas Virginia was attached to the institution which Reverend Schlitz sometimes called the Whore of Babylon and the Marxists regarded as pre-eminently detestable. An institution, moreover, that would think as poorly of him as he thought of it—though he thought rather less poorly of it now that Hitler was persecuting it in Germany and since he had been looked after by those Sisters of Mercy in Spain. And even if those religious and financial difficulties could somehow be miraculously smoothed away, there remained the dreadful fact of Mr. Stoyte. He knew, of course, that Mr. Stoyte was nothing more than a father to Virginia, or at most an uncle—but knew it with that excessive certainty which is born of desire; knew it in the same way as Don Quixote knew that the pasteboard vizor of his helmet was as strong as steel. It was the kind of knowledge about which it is prudent to make no inquiries; and of course, if he asked Virginia to marry him, such inquiries, or the information such inquiries might be expected to elicit, would almost inevitably be forced upon him.

Yet another complicating factor in the situation was Mr. Propter. For if Mr. Propter was right, as Pete was coming to feel more and more certain that he was, then it was obviously unwise to do something that would make more difficult the passage from the human level to the level of eternity. And though he loved Virginia, he found it difficult to believe that marriage to her would be anything but an obstacle to the enlightenment of everybody concerned.

Or rather, he had thought this; but in the course of the last week or two his opinion had changed. Or to be more exact, he no longer had an opinion; he was just uncertain and bewildered. For Virginia’s character seemed almost suddenly to have changed. From being child-like, loud and extraverted, her innocence had become quiet and inscrutable. In the past, she had treated him with the jocular and casual friendliness of mere good fellowship; but recently there had been a strange alteration. The jokes had stopped and a kind of earnest solicitude had taken their place. She had been simply wonderful to him—but not in the way a girl is wonderful to a man she wants to fall in love with her. No, Virginia had been wonderful like a sister—and not an ordinary sister, either: almost a Sister of Mercy. Not just any Sister of Mercy; that particular Sister who had nursed him when he was in hospital at Gerona; the young Sister with the big eyes and the pale oval face, like the face of the Virgin Mary in a picture; the one who always seemed to be secretly happy, not because of anything that was going on around her, but because of something inside, something extraordinary and beautiful behind her eyes that she could look in at; and when she’d looked at it, there was no reason any more why she should feel scared by an air raid, for example, or upset by an amputation. She evidently saw things from what Mr. Propter called the level of eternity; they didn’t affect her in the way they’d affect a person living on the human level. On the human level you were scared and angry; or, if you were calm, you made yourself calm by an effort of will. But the Sister was calm without making an effort of will. At the time, he had admired without comprehension. Now, thanks to Mr. Propter, he could begin to understand as well as admire.

Well, that was the face that Virginia’s had reminded him of during the past weeks. There had been a kind of sudden conversion from the outward-looking life to the inward, from open responsiveness to secret and mysterious abstraction. The cause of this conversion was beyond his comprehension; but the fact was manifest, and he had respected it. Respected it by not kissing her neck as she bent over the microscope; by never even touching her arm or taking her hand; by not saying to her one word of all he felt about her. In the strange inexplicable circumstances of her transformation, such actions, he had felt, would have been inappropriate to the point positively of sacrilege. It was as a sister that she had chosen to be wonderful to him; it was therefore as a brother that he had responded. And now, for no known reason, she seemed suddenly to have become unaware of his existence. The sister had forgotten her brother; and the Sister of Mercy had forgotten herself—forgotten herself so far as to listen to Dr. Obispo’s ignoble anecdote about the chimney sweep, even to laugh at it. And yet, Pete noticed in bewilderment, the moment she stopped laughing, her face resumed its expression of inwardness and secrecy and detachment. The Sister of Mercy remembered herself as promptly as she had forgotten. It was beyond him; he simply couldn’t figure it out.

With the arrival of the coffee, Dr. Obispo announced that he proposed to take the afternoon off and, as there was nothing that urgently needed doing in the laboratory, he advised Pete to do the same. Pete thanked him and, pretending to be in a hurry (for he didn’t want to go through the humiliation of being ignored when Virginia discussed her plans for the afternoon), swallowed his coffee and, mumbling excuses, left the room. A little later he was out in the sunshine, walking down towards the plain.

As he went, he thought of some of the things Mr. Propter had said to him in the course of his recent visits.

Of what he had said about the silliest text in the Bible and the most sensible. “They hated me without a cause” and “God is not mocked; as a man sows, so shall he reap.”

Of what he had said about nobody ever getting some thing for nothing—so that a man would pay for too much money, for example, or too much power or too much sex, by being shut up more tightly inside his own ego.

The baboons were gibbering as he passed. Pete recalled some of Mr. Propter’s remarks about literature. About the wearisomeness, to an adult mind, of all those merely descriptive plays and novels, which critics expected one to admire. All the innumerable, interminable anecdotes and romances and character-studies but no general theory of anecdotes, no explanatory hypothesis of romance or character. Just a huge collection of facts about lust and greed, fear and ambition, duty and affection; just facts, and imaginary facts at that, with no co-ordinating philosophy superior to common sense and the local system of conventions, no principle of arrangement more rational than simple aesthetic expediency. And then the astonishing nonsense talked by those who undertake to elucidate and explain this hodge-podge of prettily patterned facts and fancies! All that solemn tosh, for example, about Regional Literature—as though there were some special and outstanding merit in recording unco-ordinated facts about the lusts, greeds and duties of people who happen to live in the country and speak in dialect! Or else the facts were about the urban poor and there was an effort to co-ordinate them in terms of some post-Marxian theory that might be partly true, but was always inadequate. And in that case it was the great Proletarian Novel. Or else somebody wrote yet another book proclaiming that Life is Holy; by which he always meant that anything people do in the way of fornicating, or getting drunk, or losing their tempers, or feeling maudlin is entirely O.K. with God and should therefore be regarded as permissible and even virtuous. In which case it was up to the critics to talk about the author’s ripe humanity, his deep and tender wisdom, his affinities with the great Goethe, and his obligations to William Blake.

Pete smiled as he remembered, but with a certain ruefulness as well as amusement; for he too had taken this sort of thing with the seriousness its verbiage seemed to demand.

Misplaced seriousness—the source of some of our most fatal errors. One should be serious, Mr. Propter had said, only about what deserves to be taken seriously. And, on the strictly human level, there was nothing that deserved to be taken seriously except the sufferings men inflicted upon themselves by their crimes and follies. But, in the last analysis, most of these crimes and follies arose from taking too seriously things which did not deserve it. And that, Mr. Propter had continued, was another of the enormous defects of so-called good literature; it accepted the conventional scale of values; it respected power and position; it admired success; it treated as though they were reasonable the mainly lunatic preoccupations of statesmen, lovers, business men, social climbers, parents. In a word, it took seriously the causes of suffering as well as the suffering. It helped to perpetuate misery by explicitly or implicitly approving the thoughts and feelings and practices which could not fail to result in misery. And this approval was bestowed in the most magnificent and persuasive language. So that even when a tragedy ended badly, the reader was hypnotized by the eloquence of the piece into imagining that it was all somehow noble and worth while. Which, of course, it wasn’t. Because, if you considered them dispassionately, nothing could be more silly and squalid than the themes of “Phèdre,” or “Othello,” or “Wuthering Heights,” or the “Agamemnon.” But the treatment of these themes had been in the highest degree sublime and thrilling, so that the reader or the spectator was left with the conviction that, in spite of the catastrophe, all was really well with the world, the all too human world, which had produced it. No, a good satire was much more deeply truthful and, of course, much more profitable than a good tragedy. The trouble was that so few good satires existed, because so few satirists were prepared to carry their criticism of human values far enough. “Candide,” for example, was admirable as far as it went; but it went no farther than debunking the principal human activities in the name of the ideal of harmlessness. Now, it was perfectly true that harmlessness was the highest ideal most people could aspire to; for, though few had the power to do much positive good, there was nobody who could not refrain, if he so desired, from evil. Nevertheless mere harmlessness, however excellent, most certainly didn’t represent the highest possible ideal. II faut cultiver notre jardin was not the last word in human wisdom; at the best it was only the last but one.

The sun was in such a position that, as he walked down the hill, Pete saw two little rainbows spouting from the nipples of Giambologna’s nymph. Thoughts of Noah immediately arose in conjunction with thoughts of Virginia in her white satin bathing costume. He tried to repress the latter as incompatible with the new thoughts he was trying to cultivate about the Sister of Mercy; and since Noah was not a subject that would bear much thinking about, he proceeded instead to concentrate on that talk he had had with Mr. Propter about sex. It had begun with his own puzzled questionings as to what sort of sexual behaviour was normal—not statistically normal, of course, but normal in that absolute sense in which perfect vision or unimpaired digestion may be called normal. What sort of sexual behaviour was normal in that sense of the word? And Mr. Propter had answered: None. But there must be, he had protested. If good could be manifested on the animal level, then there must be some kind of sexual behaviour that was absolutely normal and natural, just as there was an absolutely normal and natural sort of digestive activity. But man’s sexual behaviour, Mr. Propter had answered, wasn’t on the same level as digestion. A rat’s love making—yes, that was on the same level as digestion; for the entire process was instinctive; in other words, was controlled by the physiological intelligence of the body—the same physiological intelligence as correlated the actions of heart and lungs and kidneys, as regulated temperature, as nourished the muscles and made them do the work demanded of them by the central nervous system. Men’s bodily activities were controlled by the same physiological intelligence; and it was that intelligence which, on the animal level, manifested good. In human beings, sexual behaviour was almost completely outside the jurisdiction of this physiological intelligence. It controlled only the cellular activities which made sexual behaviour possible. All the rest was non-instinctive and took place on the strictly human level of self-consciousness. Even when men thought that they were being most exclusively animal in their sexuality, they were still on the human level. Which meant that they were still self-conscious, still dominated by words—and where there were words, there, of necessity, were memories and wishes, judgment and imagination. There, inevitably, were the past and the future, the actual and the fantastic; regret and anticipation; good and evil; the creditable and the discreditable; the beautiful and the ugly. Among men and women, even the most apparently bestial acts of eroticism were associated with some or all of these non-animal factors—factors which were injected into every human situation by the existence of language. This meant that there was no one type of human sexuality that could be called “normal” in the sense in which one could say that there was a normality of vision or digestion. In that sense, all kinds of human sexuality were strictly abnormal. The different kinds of sexual behaviour could not be judged by referring them to an absolute, natural norm. They could only be judged in reference to ultimate aims of each individual and the results observed in each case. Thus, if an individual wanted to be well thought of in any given society, he or she could safely regard as “normal” the type of sexual behaviour currently tolerated by that local religion and approved by the “best people.” But there were some individuals who cared little for the judgment of an angry God or even of the best people. Their principal desire was for intense and reiterated stimulation of their senses and feelings. For these, it was obvious, “normality” in sexual behaviour would be quite different from what it was for the more social-minded. Then there would be all the kinds of sexuality “normal” to those desirous of making the best of both worlds—the personal world of sensations and emotions, and the social world of moral and religious conventions. The “normalities” of Tartufe and Pecksniff; of the clergymen who can’t keep away from schoolgirls, the cabinet ministers with a secret mania for handsome youths. And finally there were those who were concerned neither to get on in society, nor to placate the local deity, nor to enjoy repeated emotional and sensuous stimulations, but whose chief preoccupation was with enlightenment and liberation, with the problem of transcending personality, of passing from the human level to the level of eternity. Their conceptions of “normality” in sexual behaviour would not resemble those of the men and women in any of the other categories.

From the concrete tennis court the children of the Chinese cook were flying kites in the shape of birds and equipped with little whistles, so that they warbled plaintively in the wind. The cheerful quacking sound of Cantonese drifted down to Pete’s ears. Across the Pacific, he reflected, millions upon millions of such children had died already or were dying. Below them, in the Sacred Grotto, stood the plaster figure of Our Lady. Pete thought of Virginia kneeling in white shorts and a yachting cap, of the abusive eloquence of Reverend Schlitz, of Dr. Obispo’s jokes, of Alexis Carrel on the subject of Lourdes, of Lee’s “History of the Inquisition,” of Tawney in the relationship between Protestantism and Capitalism, of Niemoller and John Knox and Torque-mada and that Sister of Mercy and again of Virginia and finally of Mr. Propter as the only person he knew who could make some sense out of the absurd, insane, diabolical confusion of it all.

Chapter VI

SOMEWHAT to Jeremy’s disappointment, Dr. Obispo was not at all mortified by the information that his ideas had been anticipated in the eighteenth century.

“I’d like to hear some more about your Fifth Earl,” he had said, as they glided down into the cellars with the Vermeer. “You say he lived to ninety?”

“More than ninety,” Jeremy answered. “Ninety-six or seven, I forget which. And died in the middle of a scandal, what’s more.”

“What sort of a scandal?”

Jeremy coughed and patted the top of his head. “The usual sort,” he fluted.

“You mean, the old bozo was still at it?” Dr. Obispo asked incredulously.

“Still at it,” Jeremy repeated. “There’s a passage about the affair in the unpublished papers of Greville. He died just in time. They were actually on the point of arresting him.”

“What for?”

Jeremy twinkled again and coughed. “Well,” he said slowly and in his most Cranford-like manner, “it seems that he had a tendency to take his pleasures rather homicidally.”

“You mean, he’d killed someone.”

“Not actually killed,” Jeremy answered: “just damaged.”

Dr. Obispo was rather disappointed, but consoled himself almost immediately by the reflection that, at ninety-six, even damage was pretty creditable. “I’d like to look into this a little further,” he added.

“Well, the note-book’s at your disposal,” said Jeremy politely.

Dr. Obispo thanked him. Together, they walked towards Jeremy’s work room.

“The handwriting’s rather difficult,” said Jeremy as they entered. “I think it might be easier if I read it aloud to you.”

Dr. Obispo protested that he didn’t want to waste Jeremy’s time; but as the other was anxious to find an excuse for putting off to another occasion the wearisome task of sorting papers that didn’t interest him, the protest was out-protested. Jeremy insisted on being altruistic. Dr. Obispo thanked him and settled down to listen. Jeremy took his eyes out of their native element for long enough to polish his spectacles, then began to re-read aloud the passage he had been reading that morning, when the bell rang for lunch.

“ ‘It is to be found in the Mud,’ ” he concluded, “ ‘and only awaits a skilful Angler.’ ”

Dr. Obispo chuckled. “You might almost use it as a definition of science,” he said. “What is science? Science is angling in the mud—angling for immortality and for anything else that may happen to turn up.” He laughed again and added that he liked the old bastard.

Jeremy went on reading.

“ ‘August, 1796. Today my gabbling niece, Caroline, reproached me with what she called the Inconsistency of my Conduct. A man who is humane with the Horses in his stables, the Deer in his park and the Carp in his fishponds should show his Consistency by being more sociable than I am, more tolerant of the company of Fools, more charitable towards the poor and humble. To which I answered by remarking that the word, Man, is the general Name applied to successions of inconsistent Conduct, having their source within a two-legged and feath-erless Body, and that such words as Caroline, John and the like are the proper names applied to particular successions of inconsistent Conduct within particular Bodies. The only Consistency exhibited by the mass of Mankind is a Consistency of Inconsistency. In other words, the nature of any particular succession of inconsistent Conduct depends upon the history of the individual and his ancestors. Each succession of Inconsistencies is determined and obeys the Laws imposed upon it by its own antecedent Circumstances. A Character may be said to be consistent in the sense that its Inconsistencies are predestined and cannot pass beyond the boundaries ordained for it. The Consistency demanded by such Fools as Caroline is of quite another kind. These reproach us because our successive Acts are not consistent with some arbitrarily selected set of Prejudices, or ridiculous code of rules, such as the Hebrew, the stoic, the Iroquois, the Christian. Such Consistency is not to be achieved, and the attempt to achieve it results only in Imbecility or Hypocrisy. Consider, I said to Caroline, your own Conduct. What Consistency, pray, do you find between your conversations with the Dean upon Redemption and your Draconian birchings of the younger Maids? between your conspicuous charities and the setting of man-traps on your estates? between your appearances at Court and your chaise percée? or between divine service on Sunday morning and the pleasures enjoyed on Saturday night with your husband and on Friday or Thursday, as all the world suspects, with a certain Baronet who shall be nameless? But before I had concluded my final question, Caroline had left the room.’ ”

“Poor Caroline,” said Dr. Obispo, with a laugh. “Still, she got what she asked for.”

Jeremy read out the next entry.

“ ‘December, 1796. After this second attack of pulmonary congestion, Convalescence has come more slowly than before and advanced less far. I hang here suspended above the pit as though by a single thread, and the substance of that thread is Misery.’ ”

With an elegantly bent little finger, Dr. Obispo flicked the ash of his cigarette on to the floor.

“One of those pharmaceutical tragedies,” he commented. “With a course of thiamine chloride and some testosterone, I could have made him as happy as a sand-boy. Has it ever struck you,” he added, “what a lot of the finest romantic literature is the result of bad doctoring?”

I could lie down like a tired child

And weep away this life of care.

“Lovely! But if they’d known how to clear up poor Shelley’s chronic tuberculous pleurisy it would never have been written. Lying down like a tired child and weeping life away happens to be one of the most characteristic symptoms of chronic tuberculous pleurisy. And most of the other Weltschmerz boys were either sick men or alcoholics or dope addicts. I could have prevented every one of them from writing as he did.” Dr. Obispo looked at Jeremy with a wolfish smile that was almost child-like in the candour of its triumphant cynicism. “Well, let’s hear how the Old Boy gets over his troubles.”

“ ‘December, 1796,’ ” Jeremy read out. “ ‘The prowlings of my attendant hyaenas became so intolerable to me that yesterday I resolved to put an end to them. When I asked them to leave me alone in the future, Caroline and John protested their more than filial Affection. In the end I was forced to say that, unless they were gone by noon today, I would order my Steward to bring a score of men and eject them from my House. This morning, from my window, I watched them take their departure.’ ”

The next note was dated January 11, 1797: “This year the anniversary of my birth calls up Thoughts more gloomy than ever before. I am too weary to record them. The day being fine and remarkably warm for the Season, I had myself carried in my chair to the fishponds. The bell was rung, and the Carp at once came hurrying to be fed. The spectacle of the brute Creation provides me with almost my sole remaining pleasures. The stupidity of the Brutes is without pretensions and their malignity depends on Appetite and is therefore only intermittent. Men are systematically and continuously cruel, while their Follies are justified in the names of Religion and Politics, and their Ignorance is muffled up in the pompous garments of Philosophy.

“Meanwhile, as I watched the fishes pushing and jostling for their dinner, like a crowd of Divines in search of Preferment, my Thoughts returned to the perplexing Question upon which I have so often speculated in the past. Why should a man die at three score years and ten, when a Fish can retain its Youth for two or three centuries? I have debated with myself a number of possible answers. There was a time, for example, when I thought that the longer life of Carp and Pike might be due to the superiority of their Watery Element over our Air. But the lives of some subaqueous Creatures are short, while those of certain Birds exceed the human span.

“Again, I have asked myself if the Fish’s longer years might not be due to its peculiar mode of begetting and bearing its young. But again I am met by fatal Objections. The Males of Parrots and Ravens do not onanize, but copulate; the females of Elephants do not lay eggs but bear their young, if we are to believe M. de Buffon, for a period of not less than four and twenty months. But Parrots, Ravens and Elephants are long-lived Creatures; from which we must conclude that the Brevity of human Life is due to other Causes than the manner in which Men beget and Females reproduce their Kind.

“The only Hypotheses to which I can see no manifest Objections are these: the Diet of such fish as Carp and Pike contains some substance which preserves their Bodies from the Decay which overtakes the greater number of Creatures even while they are alive; alternatively the substance which prevents Decay is to be found within the Body of the Fish, especially, it would be reasonable to guess, in the Stomach, Liver, Bowels and other Organs of Concoction and Assimilation. In the short-lived animals, such as Man, the Substances preventive of Decay must be presumed to be lacking. The question then arises whether these Substances can be introduced into the human Body from that of the Fish. History does not record any remarkable instances of longevity among the Ichthyophagi, nor have I ever observed that the Inhabitants of sea ports and other places where there is an abundance of Fish were specially long-lived. But we need not conclude from this that the Substance preventive of Decay can never be conveyed from Fish to Man. For Man cooks his Food before eating it, and we know by a thousand instances that the application of Heat profoundly modifies the nature of many Substances; moreover, he throws away, as unfit for his Consumption, precisely those Organs of the Fish in which it is most reasonable to assume that the Substance preventive of Decay is continued.”

“Christ!” said Dr. Obispo, unable to contain himself any longer. “Don’t tell me that the old buzzard is going to eat raw fish guts!”

Bright behind their bifocals, Jeremy’s eyes had darted down to the bottom of the page and were already at the top of the next. “That’s exactly what he is doing,” he cried delightedly. “Listen to this. ‘My first three attempts provoked an uncontrollable retching; at the fourth I contrived to swallow what I had placed in my mouth, but within two or three minutes my triumph was cut short by an access of vomiting. It was only after the ninth or tenth essay that I was able to swallow and retain even a few spoonfuls of the nauseating mince meat.’ ”

“Talk of courage!” said Dr. Obispo. “I’d rather go through an air raid than that.”

Jeremy, meanwhile, had not so much as raised his eyes from the book.

“ ‘It is now a month,’ ” he said, “ ‘since I began to test the truth of my Hypothesis, and I am now ingesting each day not less than six ounces of the raw, triturated Viscera of freshly opened Carp.’ ”

“And the fish,” said Dr. Obispo, slowly shaking his head, “has a greater variety of parasitic worms than any other animal. It makes my blood run cold even to hear about it.”

“You needn’t worry,” said Jeremy, who had gone on reading. “His Lordship does nothing but get better and better. Here’s a ‘singular accession of Strength and Vigour during the month of March.’ Not to mention ‘Revival of appetite and Improved memory and powers of ratiocination.’ I like that ratiocination,” Jeremy put in appreciatively. “Such a nice period piece, don’t you think? A real Chippendale word!” He went on reading to himself, and, after a little silence, announced triumphantly: “By April he’s riding again ‘an hour on the bay gelding every afternoon.’ And the dose of what he calls his ‘visceral and stercoraceous pap’ has been raised to ten ounces a day.”

Dr. Obispo jumped up from his chair and began to walk excitedly up and down the room. “Damn it all!” he shouted. “This is more than a joke. This is serious. Raw fish guts; intestinal flora; prevention of sterol poisoning; and rejuvenation. Rejuvenation!” he repeated.

“The Earl’s more cautious than you are,” said Jeremy. “Listen to this. ‘Whether I owe my recovery to the Carp, to the Return of Spring, or to the Vis medicatrix Naturae, I am not yet able to determine.’ ”

Dr. Obispo nodded approvingly. “That’s the right spirit,” he said.

“ ‘Time,’ ” Jeremy continued, “ ‘will show; that is, if I can force it to show, which I intend to do by persisting in my present Regimen. For I take it that my Hypothesis will be substantiated if, after persisting in it for some time longer, I shall have recovered not only my former state of Health, but a measure of Vigour not enjoyed since the passing of Youth.’ ”

“Good for him!” Dr. Obispo exclaimed. “I only wish old Uncle Jo could look at things in that scientific way. Or, maybe,” he added, suddenly remembering the Nembutal and Mr. Stoyte’s child-like faith in his medical omniscience, “maybe I don’t wish it. It might have its inconveniences.” He chuckled to himself over his private joke. “Well, let’s go on with our case history,” he added.

“In September he can ride for three hours at a stretch without fatigue,” said Jeremy. “And he’s renewing his acquaintance with Greek literature, and thinks very poorly of Plato, I notice. After which we have no entry till 1799.”

“No entry till 1799!” Dr. Obispo repeated indignantly. “The old bastard! Just when his case is getting really interesting, he goes and leaves us in the dark.”

Jeremy looked up from the note-book smiling. “Not entirely in the dark,” he said. “I’ll read you his first entry after the two years of silence and you can draw your own conclusions about the state of his intestinal flora.” He uttered a little cough and began to read in his Mrs. Gaskell manner. “ ‘May, 1799. The most promiscuously abandoned Females, especially among Women of Quality, are often those to whom an unkind Nature has denied the ordinary Reason and Excuse for Gallantry. Cut off by a constitutional Frigidity from the enjoyments of Pleasure, they are in everlasting rebellion against their Fate. The power which drives them on to multiply the number of their Gallantries is not Sensuality, but Hope; not the wish to reiterate the experience of a familiar Bliss, but rather the aspiration towards a common and much vaunted Felicity which they themselves have had the misfortune never to know. To the Voluptuary, the woman of easy Virtue is often no less obnoxious, though for other reasons, than she seems to the severe Moralist. God preserve me in Future from any such Conquests as that which I made this Spring at Bath!’ ” Jeremy put down the book. “Do you still feel that you’ve been left in the dark?” he asked.

Chapter VII

WITH a deafening shriek the electric smoothing tool whirled its band of sandpaper against the rough surface of the wood. Bent over the carpenter’s bench, Mr. Propter did not hear the sound of Pete’s entrance and approach. For a long half minute the young man stood in silence, watching him while he moved the smoothing tool back and forth over the board before him. There was sawdust, Pete noticed, in the shaggy eyebrows, and on the sunburnt forehead a black smear where he had touched his face with oily fingers.

Pete felt a sudden twinge of compunction. It wasn’t right to spy on a man if he didn’t know you were there. It was underhand; you might be seeing something he didn’t want you to see. He called Mr. Propter’s name.

The old man looked up, smiled and stopped the motor of his little machine.

“Well, Pete,” he said. “You’re just the man I want. That is, if you’ll do some work for me. Will you? But I’d forgotten,” he added, interrupting Pete’s affirmative answer, “I’d forgotten about that heart of yours. These miserable rheumatic fevers! Do you think you ought to?”

Pete blushed a little; for he had not yet had time to live down a certain sense of shame in regard to his disability. “You’re not going to make me run the quarter mile, are you?”

Mr. Propter ignored the jocular question. “You’re sure it’s all right?” he insisted, looking with an affectionate earnestness into the young man’s face.

“Quite sure, if it’s only this sort of thing.” Pete waved his hand in the direction of the carpenter’s bench.

“Honest?”

Pete was touched and warmed by the other’s solicitude. “Honest!” he affirmed.

“Very well then,” said Mr. Propter, reassured. “You’re hired. Or rather you’re not hired, because you’ll be lucky if you get as much as a Coca-Cola for your work. You’re conscribed.”

All the other people round the place, he went on to explain, were busy. He had been left to run the entire furniture factory single-handed. And the trouble was that it had to be run under pressure; three of the migrant families down at the cabins were still without any chairs or tables.

“Here are the measurements,” he said, pointing to a typewritten sheet of paper pinned to the wall. “And there’s the lumber. Now, I’ll tell you what I’d like you to do first,” he added, as he picked up a board and laid it on the bench.

The two men worked for some time without trying to speak against the noise of their electric tools. Then there was an interim of less noisy activity. Too shy to embark directly upon the subject of his own perplexities, Pete started to talk about Professor Pearl’s new book on population. Forty inhabitants to the square mile for the entire land area of the planet. Sixteen acres per head. Take away at least half for unproductive land, and you were left with eight acres. And with average agricultural methods a human being could be supported on the produce of two and a half acres. With five and a half acres to spare for every person, why should a third of the world be hungry?

“I should have thought you’d have discovered the answer in Spain,” said Mr. Propter. “They’re hungry because man cannot live by bread alone.”

“What has that got to do with it?”

“Everything,” Mr. Propter answered. “Men can’t live by bread alone, because they need to feel that their life has a point. That’s why they take to idealism. But it’s a matter of experience and observation that most idealism leads to war, persecution and mass insanity. Man cannot live by bread alone; but if he chooses to nourish his mind on the wrong kind of spiritual food, he won’t even get bread. He won’t even get bread, because he’ll be so busy killing or preparing to kill his neighbours in the name of God, or Country, or Social Justice that he won’t be able to cultivate his fields. Nothing could be simpler or more obvious. But at the same time,” Mr. Propter concluded, “nothing is unfortunately more certain than that most people will go on choosing the wrong spiritual food and thereby indirectly choosing their own destruction.”

He turned on the current and once more the smoothing tool set up its rasping shriek. There was another cessation of talk.

“In a climate like this,” said Mr. Propter, in the next interval of silence, “and with all the water that’ll be available when the Colorado River aqueduct starts running next year, you could do practically anything you liked.” He unplugged the smoothing tool and went to fetch a drill. “Take a township of a thousand inhabitants; give it three or four thousand acres of land and a good system of producers’ and consumers’ co-operatives—it could feed itself completely; it could supply about two-thirds of its other needs on the spot; and it could produce a surplus to exchange for such things as it couldn’t produce itself. You could cover the state with such townships. That is,” he added, smiling rather mournfully, “that is, if you could get the permission from the banks and a supply of people intelligent and virtuous enough to run a genuine democracy.”

“You certainly wouldn’t get the banks to agree,” said Pete.

“And you probably couldn’t find more than quite a few of the right people,” Mr. Propter added. “And of course nothing’s more disastrous than starting a social experiment with the wrong people. Look at all the efforts to start communities in this country. Robert Owen, for example, and the Fourierists and the rest of them. Dozens of social experiments and they all failed. Why? Because the men in charge didn’t choose their people. There was no entrance examination and no novitiate. They accepted any one who came along. That’s what comes of being unduly optimistic about human beings.”

He started the drill and Pete took his turn with the smoothing tool.

“Do you think one oughtn’t to be optimistic?” the young man asked.

Mr. Propter smiled. “What a curious question!” he answered. “What would you say about a man who installed a vacuum pump in a fifty-foot well? Would you call him an optimist?”

“I’d call him a fool.”

“So would I,” said Mr. Propter. “And that’s the answer to your question; a man’s a fool if he’s optimistic about any situation in which experience has shown that there’s no justification for optimism. When Robert Owen took in a crowd of defectives and incompetents and habitual crooks, and expected them to organize themselves into a new and better sort of human society, he was just a damned fool.”

There was silence for a time while Pete did some sawing.

“I suppose I’ve been too optimistic,” the young man said reflectively, when it was over.

Mr. Propter nodded. “Too optimistic in certain directions,” he agreed. “And at the same time too pessimistic in others.”

“For instance?” Pete questioned.

“Well, to begin with,” said Mr. Propter, “too optimistic about social reforms. Imagining that good can be fabricated by mass production methods. But, unfortunately, good doesn’t happen to be that sort of commodity. Good is a matter of moral craftsmanship. It can’t be produced except by individuals. And, of course, if individuals don’t know what good consists in, or don’t wish to work for it, then it won’t be manifested, however perfect the social machinery. There!” he added, in another tone and blew the sawdust out of the hole he had been drilling. “Now for these chair legs and battens.” He crossed the room and began to adjust the lathe.

“And what do you think I’ve been too pessimistic about?” Pete asked.

Mr. Propter answered, without looking up from his work, “About human nature.”

Pete was surprised. “I’d have expected you to say I was too optimistic about human nature,” he said.

“Well, of course, in certain respects that’s true,” Mr. Propter agreed. “Like most people nowadays you’re insanely optimistic about people as they are, people living exclusively on the human level. You seem to imagine that people can remain as they are and yet be the inhabitants of a world conspicuously better than the world we live in. But the world we live in is a consequence of what men have been and a projection of what they are now. If men continue to be like what they are now and have been in the past, it’s obvious that the world they live in can’t become better. If you imagine it can, you’re wildly optimistic about human nature. But on the other hand you’re wildly pessimistic if you imagine that men and women are condemned by their nature to pass their whole lives on the strictly human level. Thank God,” he said emphatically, “they’re not. They have it in their power to climb out and up, on to the level of eternity. No human society can become conspicuously better than it is now, unless it contains a fair proportion of individuals who know that their humanity isn’t the last word and who consciously attempt to transcend it. That’s why one should be profoundly pessimistic about the things most people are optimistic about—such as applied science, and social reform, and human nature as it is in the average man or woman. And that’s also why one should be profoundly optimistic about the thing they’re so pessimistic about that they don’t even know it exists—I mean, the possibility of transforming and transcending human nature. Not by evolutionary growth, not in some remote future, but at any time—here and now, if you like—by the use of properly directed intelligence and good will.”

Tentatively he started the lathe, then stopped it again for further adjustments.

“It’s the kind of pessimism and the kind of optimism you find in all the great religions,” he added. “Pessimism about the world at large and human nature as it displays itself in the majority of men and women. Optimism about the things that can be achieved by any one who wants to and knows how.” He started the lathe again and, this time, kept it going.

“You know the pessimism of the New Testament,” he went on through the noise of the machine. “Pessimism about the mass of mankind: many are called, few chosen. Pessimism about weakness and ignorance: from those that have not shall be taken away even that which they have. Pessimism about life as lived on the ordinary human level: for that life must be lost if the other eternal life is to be gained. Pessimism about even the highest forms of worldly morality: there’s no access to the kingdom of heaven for any one whose righteousness fails to exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees. But who are the Scribes and Pharisees? Simply the best citizens; the pillars of society; all right-thinking men. In spite of which, or rather because of which, Jesus calls them a generation of vipers. Poor dear Dr. Mulge,” he added parenthetically, “how pained he’d be if he ever had the misfortune to meet his Saviour!” Mr. Propter smiled to himself over his work. “Well, that’s the pessimistic side of the Gospel teaching,” he went on. “And, more systematically and philosophically, you’ll find the same things set forth in the Buddhist and Hindu scriptures. The world as it is and people on the strictly human level—they’re beyond hope: that’s the universal verdict. Hope begins only when human beings start to realize that the kingdom of heaven, or whatever other name you care to give it, is within and can be experienced by anybody who’s prepared to take the necessary trouble. That’s the optimistic side of Christianity and the other world religions.”

Mr. Propter stopped the lathe, took out the chair leg he had been turning and put another in its place.

“It isn’t the sort of optimism they teach you in the liberal churches,” said Pete, thinking of his transition period between Reverend Schlitz and militant Anti-Fascism.

“No, it isn’t,” Mr. Propter agreed. “What they teach you in liberal churches hasn’t got anything to do with Christianity or any other realistic religion. It’s mainly drivel.”

“Drivel?”

“Drivel,” Mr. Propter repeated. “Early twentieth century humanism seasoned with nineteenth-century evangelicalism. What a combination! Humanism affirms that good can be achieved on a level where it doesn’t exist and denies the fact of eternity. Evangelicalism denies the relationship between causes and effects by affirming the existence of a personal deity who forgives offences. They’re like Jack Spratt and his wife: between the two of them, they lick the platter clean of all sense whatsoever. No, I’m wrong,” Mr. Propter added, through the buzz of the machine, “not all sense. The humanists don’t talk of more than one race, and the evangelicals only worship one God. It’s left to the patriots to polish off that last shred of sense. The patriots and the political sectarians. A hundred mutually exclusive idolatries. ‘There are many gods and the local bosses are their respective prophets.’ The amiable silliness of the liberal churches is good enough for quiet times; but note that it’s always supplemented by the ferocious lunacies of nationalism, for use in times of crisis. And those are the philosophies young people are brought up on. The philosophies your optimistic elders expect you to reform the world with.” Mr. Propter paused for a moment, then added, “As a man sows, so shall he reap. God is not mocked. Not mocked,” he repeated. “But people simply refuse to believe it. They go on thinking they can cock a snook at the nature of things and get away with it. I’ve sometimes thought of writing a little treatise, like a cook-book. ‘One Hundred Ways of Mocking God,’ I’d call it. And I’d take a hundred examples from history and contemporary life, illustrating what happens when people undertake to do things without paying regard to the nature of reality. And the book would be divided into sections, such as ‘Mocking God in Agriculture,’ ‘Mocking God in Politics,’ ‘Mocking God in Education,’ ‘Mocking God in Philosophy,’ ‘Mocking God in Economics.’ It would be an instructive little book. But a bit depressing,” Mr. Propter added.

Chapter VIII

THE news that the Fifth Earl had had three illegitimate children at the age of eighty-one was announced in the note-book with a truly aristocratic understatement. No boasting, no self-congratulation. Just a brief, quiet statement, sandwiched between the record of a conversation with the Duke of Wellington and a note on the music of Mozart. One hundred twenty years after the event, Dr. Obispo, who was not an English gentleman, exulted noisily, as though the achievement had been his own.

“Three of them,” he shouted in his proletarian enthusiasm. “Three! What do you think of that?”

Brought up in the same tradition as the Fifth Earl, Jeremy thought that it wasn’t bad, and went on reading.

In 1820 the Earl had been ill again; but not severely; and a three months’ course of raw carp’s entrails had restored him to his normal health, “the health,” as he put it, “of a man in the flower of his age.”

A year later, for the first time in a quarter of a century, he visited his nephew and niece, and was delighted to find that Caroline had become a shrew, that John was already bald and asthmatic, and that their eldest daughter was so monstrously fat that nobody would marry her.

On the news of the death of Bonaparte he had written philosophically that a man must be a great fool if he could not satisfy his desire for glory, power and excitement except by undergoing the hardships of war and the tedium of civil government. “The language of polite conversation,” he concluded, “reveals with a sufficient clarity that such exploits as those of Alexander and Bonaparte have their peaceful and domestic equivalents. We speak of amorous Adventures, of the Conquest of a desired Female and the Possession of her Person. For the Man of sense, such tropes are eloquent indeed. Considering their significance he perceives that War and the pursuit of Empire are wrong because foolish, foolish because unnecessary and unnecessary because the satisfactions derivable from Victory and Dominion may be obtained with vastly less trouble, pain and ennui behind the silken curtains of the Duchess’s Alcove or on the straw Pallet of the Dairy Maid. And if at any time such simple Pleasures should prove insipid, if, like the antique Hero, he should find himself crying for new Worlds to conquer, then by the offer of a supplementary guinea, or in very many instances, as I have found, gratuitously, by the mere elicitation of a latent Desire for Humiliation and even Pain, a man may enjoy the privilege of using the Birch, the Manacles, the Cage and any such other Emblems of absolute Power as the Fancy of the Conqueror may suggest and the hired Patience of the Conquered will tolerate or her consenting Taste approve. I recall a remark by Dr. Johnson to the effect that a man is seldom more innocently employed than when making Money. Making Love is an even more innocent employment than making Money. If Bonaparte had had the Wisdom to vent his Desire for Domination in the Saloons, and Bed Chambers of his native Corsica, he would have expired in Freedom among his own people, and many hundreds of thousands of men now dead or maimed or blind would be alive and enjoying the use of their faculties. True, they would doubtless be employing their Eyes, Limbs and Lives as foolishly and malignantly as those whom Bonaparte did not murder are employing them today. But though a Superior Being might applaud the one-time Emperor for having removed so great a quantity of Vermin from the Earth, the Vermin themselves will always be of another Opinion. As a mere Man of Sense, and not a Superior Being, I am on the side of the Vermin.”

“Have you ever noticed,” said Dr. Obispo, reflectively, “the way even the most hard-boiled people always try to make out they’re really good? Even this old buzzard—you’d think he wouldn’t care how he rated, so long as he got his fun. But no; he has to write a long screed proving what a much better man he is than Napoleon. Which, of course, he is by any reasonable standard. But you wouldn’t expect him to go out of his way to say so.”

“Well, nobody else was likely to say so,” Jeremy put in.

“So he had to do it himself,” Dr. Obispo concluded. “Which just proves my point. Iagos don’t exist. People will do everything Iago did; but they’ll never say they’re villains. They’ll construct a beautiful verbal world in which all their villainies are right and reasonable. I’d hoped that old carp-guts would be an exception. But he isn’t. It’s really rather a disappointment.”

Jeremy giggled with a certain patronizing disdain. “You’d have liked him to do the Don-Juan-in-hell act. The calme héros courbé sur sa rapière. You’re more romantic than I thought.” He turned back to the notebook and, after a pause, announced that in 1823, the Fifth Earl had spent some hours with Coleridge and found his conversation deep, but singularly muddy—“characteristics,” he had added, “which are admirable in Fish Ponds, but deplorable in rational Discourse, which should be pellucid and always shallow enough for a man to wade through without risk of drowning himself in an abyss of nonsense.” Jeremy beamed with pleasure. Coleridge was not a favourite of his. “When I think of the rot people are still talking about the rubbish that old dope-addict wrote . . .”

Dr. Obispo cut him short. “Let’s hear some more about the Earl,” he said.

Jeremy returned to the note-book.

In 1824 the old gentleman was lamenting the passage of the Bill which assimilated the transportation of slaves to piracy and so made the trade a capital offence. Henceforward, he would be a matter of eight or nine thousand a year the poorer. But he consoled himself by thinking of Horace living in philosophic tranquillity on his Sabine farm.

In 1826 he was deriving his keenest pleasure from a re-persual of Theocritus and the company of a young female, called Kate, whom he had made his housekeeper. In the same year, despite the curtailment of his income, he had been unable to resist the temptation of purchasing an exquisite Assumption of the Virgin by Murillo.

1827 had been a year of financial reverses; reverses that were connected, apparently, with the death, following an abortion, of a very young maid employed by the housekeeper as her personal attendant. The entry in the note-book was brief and obscure; but it seemed to imply that the girl’s parents had had to be paid a very substantial sum. A little later, he was unwell again and wrote a long and minute description of the successive stages of decay in the human corpse, with special reference to the eyes and lips. A short course of triturated carp restored him to a more cheerful frame of mind, and, in 1828, he made a voyage to Athens, Constantinople and Egypt.

In 1831 he was in negotiations for the purchase of a house near Farnham.

“That must be Selford,” Jeremy put in. “The house where these things came from.” He indicated the twenty-seven packing cases. “Where the two old ladies are living.” He continued his reading. “ ‘The house is old, dark and inconvenient, but stands in sufficiently extensive Grounds upon an Eminence above the River Wey, whose southern bank at this point rises almost perpendicularly in a Cliff of yellow sandstone, to the height of perhaps one hundred and twenty feet. The Stone is soft and easily worked, a Circumstance which accounts for the existence beneath the house of very extensive Cellars which were dug, it would seem, about a Century ago, when the Vaults were used for the storage of smuggled Spirits and other goods on their way from the coasts of Hampshire and Sussex to the Metropolis. To allay the fears of his Wife, who dreads to lose a child in their subterranean meanders, the Farmer who now owns the House has walled off the greater part of his Cellarage; but even that which remains presents the appearance of a veritable Catacomb. In Vaults such as these a man could be assured of all the Privacy required for the satisfaction of even the most eccentric Tastes.’ ” Jeremy looked up over the top of his book. “That sounds a bit sinister, don’t you think?”

Dr. Obispo shrugged his shoulders. “Nobody can have enough privacy,” he said emphatically. “When I think of all the trouble I’ve had for want of some nice cellars like the ones you’ve been reading about . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, and a shadow crossed his face: he was thinking that he couldn’t go on giving Jo Stoyte those Nembutal capsules indefinitely, damn him!

“Well, he buys the house,” said Jeremy, who had been reading to himself. “And he has repairs and additions made in the Gothic manner. And an apartment is fitted up in the cellars, forty-five feet underground and at the end of a long passage. And to his delight he finds that there’s a subterranean well, and another shaft that goes down to a great depth and can be used as a privy. And the place is perfectly dry and has an ample supply of air, and . . .”

“But what does he do down there?” Dr. Obispo asked impatiently.

“How should I know?” Jeremy answered. He ran his eyes down the page. “At the moment,” he went on, “the old boy’s making a speech to the House of Lords in favour of the Reform Bill.”

“In favour of it?” said Obispo in surprise.

“ ‘In the first days of the French Revolution,’ ” Jeremy read out, “ ‘I infuriated the adherents of every political Party by saying: The Bastille is fallen; long live the Bastille. Forty-three years have elapsed since the occurrence of that singularly futile Event, and the correctness of my Prognostications has been demonstrated by the rise of new Tyrannies and the restoration of old ones. It is therefore with perfect Confidence that I now say: Privilege is dead; long live Privilege. The masses of mankind are incapable of Emancipation and too inept to direct their own Destinies. Government must always be by Tyrants or Oligarchs. My opinion of the Peerage and the landed Gentry is exceedingly low; but their own opinion of themselves must be even lower than mine. They believe that the Ballot will rob them of their Power and Privileges, whereas I am sure that, by the exercise of even such little Prudence and Cunning as parsimonious Nature has endowed them with, they can with ease maintain themselves in their present pre-eminence. This being so, let the Rabble amuse itself by voting. An Election is no more than a gratuitous Punch and Judy Show, offered by the Rulers in order to distract the attention of the Ruled.’ ”

“How he’d have enjoyed a modern Communist or Fascist election!” said Dr. Obispo. “By the way, how old was he when he made this speech?”

“Let me see.” Jeremy paused for a moment to make the calculation, then answered: “Ninety-four.”

“Ninety-four!” Dr. Obispo repeated. “Well, if it wasn’t those fish guts, I don’t know what it was.”

Jeremy turned back to the note-book. “At the beginning of 1833 he sees his nephew and niece again, on the occasion of Caroline’s sixty-fifth birthday. Caroline now wears a red wig, her eldest daughter is dead of cancer, the younger is unhappy with her husband and is addicted to piety, the son, who is now a Colonel, has gambling debts which he expects his parents to pay. Altogether, as the Earl remarks, ‘a most enjoyable evening.’ ”

“Nothing about those cellars,” Dr. Obispo complained.

“No; but his housekeeper, Kate, has been ill and he’s giving her the carp diet.”

Dr. Obispo showed a renewal of interest. “And what happens?” he asked.

Jeremy shook his head. “The next entry’s about Milton,” he said.

“Milton?” exclaimed Dr. Obispo in a tone of indignant disgust.

“He says that Milton’s writings prove that religion depends for its existence upon the picturesque use of intemperate language.”

“He may be right,” said Dr. Obispo irritably. “But what I want to know is what happened to that housekeeper.”

“She’s evidently alive,” said Jeremy. “Because here’s a little note in which he complains about the tediousness of too much female devotion.”

“Tedious!” Dr. Obispo repeated. “That’s putting it mildly. I’ve known women who were like fly paper.”

“She doesn’t seem to have objected to an occasional infidelity. There’s a reference here to a young mulatto girl.” He paused; then, smiling, “ ‘Delicious creature,’ ” he said. “ ‘She combines the brutish imbecility of the Hottentot with the malice and cupidity of the European.’ After which the old gentleman goes out to dinner at Farnham Castle with the Bishop of Winchester and finds his claret poor, his port execrable and his intellectual powers beneath contempt.”

“Nothing about Kate’s health?” Dr. Obispo persisted.

“Why should he talk about it? He takes it for granted.”

“I’d hoped he was a man of science,” said Dr. Obispo almost plaintively.

Jeremy laughed. “You must have very odd ideas about Fifth Earls and Eleventh Barons. Why on earth should they be men of science?” Dr. Obispo was unable to answer. There was a silence, while Jeremy started a new page. “Well, I’m damned,” he broke out. “He’s been reading James Mill’s ‘Analysis of the Human Mind.’ At ninety-five. I think that’s even more remarkable than having a rejuvenated housekeeper and a mulatto. ‘The Common Fool is merely stupid and ignorant. To be a Great Fool a man must have much learning and high abilities. To the everlasting credit of Mr. Bentham and his Lieutenants it must be said that their Folly has always been upon the grandest scale. Mr. Mill’s Analysis is a veritable Coliseum of silliness.’ And the next note is about the Marquis de Sade. By the way,” Jeremy interpolated, looking up at Dr. Obispo, “when are you going to return me my books?”

Dr. Obispo shrugged his shoulders. “Whenever you like,” he answered. “I’m through with them.”

Jeremy tried not to show his delight and, with a cough, returned to the note-book. “ ‘The Marquis de Sade,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘was a man of powerful genius, unhappily deranged. In my opinion, an Author would achieve Perfection if he combined the qualities of the Marquis with those of Bishop Butler and Sterne.’ ” Jeremy paused. “The Marquis, Bishop Butler and Sterne,” he repeated slowly. “My word, you’d have a pretty remarkable book!” He went on reading. “ ‘October, 1833. To degrade oneself is pleasurable in proportion to the height of the worldly and intellectual Eminence from which one descends and to which one returns when the act of Degradation is concluded.’ That’s pretty good,” he commented, thinking of the Trojan Women and alternate Friday afternoons in Maida Vale. “Yes, that’s pretty good. Let me see, where are we? Oh, yes. ‘The Christians talk much of Pain, but nothing of what they say is to the point. For the most remarkable Characteristics of Pain are these: the Disproportion between the enormity of physical suffering and its often trifling causes; and the manner in which, by annihilating every faculty and reducing the body to helplessness, it defeats the Object for which it was apparently devised by Nature: viz.: to warn the sufferer of the approach of Danger, whether from within or without. In relation to Pain, that empty word, Infinity, comes near to having a meaning. This is not the case with Pleasure; for Pleasure is strictly finite and any attempt to extend its boundaries results in its transformation into Pain. For this reason, the infliction of Pleasure can never be so delightful to the aspiring Mind as the infliction of Pain. To give a finite quantity of Pleasure is a merely human act; the infliction of the Infinity we call Pain is truly god-like and divine.’ ”

“The old bastard’s going mystical in his old age,” Dr. Obispo complained. “Almost reminds me of Mr. Propter.” He lit a cigarette. There was a silence.

“Listen to this,” Jeremy suddenly cried in a tone of excitement. “ ‘March, 1834. By the criminal negligence of Kate, Priscilla has been allowed to escape from the subterranean place of confinement. Bearing as she does upon her Person the evidence that she has been for some weeks past the subject of my Investigations, she holds in her hands my Reputation and perhaps even my Liberty and Life.’ ”

“I suppose this is what you were talking about before we started reading,” said Dr. Obispo. “The final scandal. What happened?”

“Well, I suppose the girl must have told her story,” Jeremy answered without looking up from the page be fore him. “Otherwise how do you account for the presence of this ‘hostile Rabble’ he’s suddenly started talking about? ‘The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.’ ”

Dr. Obispo threw back his head and uttered a peal of his surprisingly loud, metallic laughter. “That’s exquisite!” he said. “Exquisite! You couldn’t have a better example of typically human behaviour. Homo conducting himself like sub-homo and then being sapiens in order to prove that he’s really super-homo.” He rubbed his hands together. “This is really heavenly!” he said; then added, “Let’s hear what happens now.”

“Well, as far as I can make out,” said Jeremy, “they have to send a company of militia from Guildford to protect the house from the rabble. And a magistrate has issued a warrant for his arrest; but they’re not doing anything for the time being, on account of his age and position and the scandal of a public trial. Oh, and now they’ve sent for John and Caroline. Which makes the old gentleman wildly angry. But he’s helpless. So they arrive at Selford; ‘Caroline in her orange wig and John, at seventy-two, looking at least twenty years older than I, who was already twenty-four when my Brother, then scarcely of age, had the imprudence to marry an Attorney’s Daughter and the richly merited misfortune to beget this Attorney’s Grandson whom I have always treated with the Contempt which his low Origin and feeble Intellect deserve, but to whom the negligence of a Strumpet has now given the Power to impose his Will upon me.’ ”

“One of those delightful family reunions,” said Dr. Obispo. “But I suppose he doesn’t give us any of the details?”

Jeremy shook his head. “No details,” he said. “Just an outline of the negotiations. On March the seventeenth, they tell him that he can avoid prosecution if he makes over his unentailed property by deed of gift, assigns them the revenues of the entailed estates, and consents to enter a private asylum.”

“Pretty stiff conditions!”

“Which he refuses,” Jeremy continued, “on the morning of the eighteenth.”

“Good for him!”

“ ‘Private madhouses,’ ” Jeremy read out, “ ‘are private prisons in which, uncontrolled by Parliament or Judiciary, subject to no inspection by the Police and closed even to the humanitarian visitations of Philanthropists, hired Torturers and Gaolers execute the dark designs of family Vengeance and personal Spite.’ ”

Dr. Obispo clapped his hands with delight. “There’s another beautiful human touch!” he cried. “Those humanitarian visitations of philanthropists!” he laughed aloud. “And hired torturers! It’s like a speech by one of the Foundling Fathers. Magnificent! And then one thinks of those slave ships and little Miss Priscilla. It’s almost as good as Field-Marshal Goering, denouncing un-kindness to animals. Hired torturers and gaolers,” he repeated with relish, as though the phrase were a delicious sweetmeat, slowly melting upon the palate. “What’s the next move?” he asked.

“They tell him he’ll be tried, condemned and transported. To which he answers that he prefers transportation to a private asylum. ‘At this it was evident that my precious nephew and niece were nonplussed. They swore that my treatment in the Madhouse should be humane. I answered that I would not accept their word. John talked of his honour. I said, An Attorney’s honour, no doubt, and spoke of the manner in which a lawyer sells his convictions for a Fee. They then implored me for the good name of the Family to accept their offers. I answered that the good name of the Family was indifferent to me, but that I had no desire to undergo the Humiliations of a Public Trial or the pains and discomforts of Transportation. I was ready, I said, to accept any reasonable Alternative to Trial and Transportation; but I would regard no Alternative as reasonable which did not in some sort guarantee my proper treatment at their hands. Their word of honour I did not regard as such a Guarantee; nor could I accept to be placed in an Institution where I should be entrusted to the care of Doctors and Keepers in the pay of those whose Interest it was that I should perish with all possible Celerity. I therefore refused to subscribe to any Arrangement which left me at their Mercy without placing them to a corresponding extent at mine.’ ”

“The principles of diplomacy in a nutshell!” said Dr. Obispo. “If only Chamberlain had understood them a little better before he went to Munich! Not that it would have made much difference in the long run,” he added. “Because, after all, it doesn’t really matter what the politicians do: nationalism will always produce at least one war each generation. It has done in the past and I suppose we can rely on it to do the same in the future. But how does the old gentleman propose to put his principles into practice? He’s at their mercy all right. How’s he going to put them at his?”

“I don’t know yet,” Jeremy answered from the depths of the recorded past. “He’s gone off on one of his philosophizing jaunts again.”

“Now?” said Dr. Obispo in astonishment. “When he’s got a warrant out against him?”

“ ‘There was a time,’ “ Jeremy read, “ ‘when I believed that all the Efforts of Humanity were directed towards a Point located approximately at the Centre of the female Person. Today I am inclined to think that Vanity and Avarice play a more considerable part even than Lust in shaping the course of men’s Actions and determining the nature of their Thoughts.’ And so on. Where the devil does he get back to the point again? Perhaps he never does; it would be just like him. No, here’s something. ‘March 20th. Today, Robert Parsons, my Factor, returned from London bringing with him in the Coach, three strong boxes containing Gold coin and Bank Notes to the value of two hundred and eighteen thousand pounds, the product of the sale of my Securities and such Jewels, Plate and works of Art as it was possible to dispose of at such short notice and for cash. With more time I could have realized at least three hundred and fifty thousand pounds. This loss I can bear philosophically; for the sum I have in hand is amply sufficient for my purposes.’ ”

“What purpose?” asked Dr. Obispo.

Jeremy did not answer for a little while. Then he shook his head in bewilderment. “What on earth is happening now?” he said. “Listen to this. ‘My funeral will be conducted with all the Pomp befitting my exalted Rank and the eminence of my Virtues. John and Caroline were miserly and ungrateful enough to object to the expense; but I have insisted that my Obsequies shall cost not a penny less than Four Thousand Pounds. My only Regret is that I shall be unable to leave my subterranean Retreat to see the Pageantry of Woe and to study the expression of grief upon the withered faces of the new Earl and his Countess. Tonight I shall go down with Kate to our Quarters in the Cellarage; and tomorrow morning the World will hear the news of my death. The body of an aged Pauper has already been conveyed hither in Secret from Haslemere, and will take my place in the Coffin. After the Interment the New Earl and Countess will proceed at once to Gonister, where they will take up their Residence, leaving this house untenanted except for Parsons, who will serve as Caretaker and provide for our material wants. The Gold and Bank Notes brought by Parsons from London are already bestowed in a subterranean hiding place known only to myself, and it has been arranged that, every First of June, so long as I live, five thousand pounds in cash shall be handed over by myself to John, or to Caroline, or, in the event of their predeceasing me, to their Heir, or to some duly authorized Representative of the Family. By this arrangement, I flatter myself, I have placed them hardly less in my power than I have been placed in theirs. The betrayal of my secret would cost them the Title and Estates, and would expose them, moreover, to a prosecution for Perjury. Nor is this all. My Life is worth to them five thousand pounds a year in Cash, and they know that, at the first suspicion of foul play, I should at once destroy the sources of their supply. I rely upon Cupidity and Fear to fortify their Honour and to fill the Place left vacant by the Affection they most certainly do not feel.’ And that’s all,” said Jeremy, looking up. “There’s nothing else. Just two more blank pages, and that’s the end of the book. Not another word of writing.”

There was a long silence. Once more, Dr. Obispo got up and began to walk about the room.

“And nobody knows how long the old buzzard lived on?” he said at last.

Jeremy shook his head. “Not outside the family. Perhaps those two old ladies . . .”

Dr. Obispo halted in front of him, and banged the table with his fist. “I’m taking the next boat to England,” he announced dramatically.

Chapter IX

TODAY, even the Children’s Hospital brought Mr. Stoyte no consolations. The nurses had welcomed him with their friendliest smiles. The young House Physician encountered in the corridor was flatteringly deferential. The convalescents shouted “Uncle Jo!” with all their customary enthusiasm, and, as he paused beside their beds, the faces of the sick were momentarily illuminated with pleasure. His gifts of toys were received as usual, sometimes with noisy rapture, sometimes (more touchingly) in the silence of a happiness speechless with amazement and incredulity. On his round of the various wards, he saw, as on other days, the pitiful succession of small bodies distorted by scrofula and paralysis, of small emaciated faces resigned to suffering, of little angels dying, and martyred innocents, and snub-faced imps of mischief tortured into a reluctant stillness.

Ordinarily it all made him feel good—like he wanted to cry, but at the same time like he wanted to shout and be proud: proud of just being human, because these kids were human and you’d never seen anything so brave as they were; and proud that he had done this thing for them, given them the finest hospital in the state, and all the best that money could buy. But today his visit brought none of the customary reactions. He had no impulsion either to cry or to shout. He felt neither pride, nor the anguish of sympathy, nor the exquisite happiness that resulted from their combination. He felt nothing—nothing except the dull, gnawing misery which had been with him all that day, at the Pantheon, with Clancy, in his down-town office. Driving out from the city, he had looked forward to his visit to the hospital as an asthma patient might look forward to a dose of adrenalin or an opium smoker to a long-postponed pipe. But the looked-for relief had not come. The kids had let him down.

Taking his cue from what had happened at the end of previous visits, the porter smiled at Mr. Stoyte as he left the hospital and said something about it being the finest bunch of great little kids he ever knew. Mr. Stoyte looked at him blankly, nodded without speaking and passed on.

The porter watched him go. “Jeepers Creepers!” he said to himself, remembering the expression on Mr. Stoyte’s face.

Mr. Stoyte drove back to the castle, feeling as unhappy as he had felt when he left it in the morning. He went up with the Vermeer to the fourteenth floor; Virginia was not in her boudoir. He went down to the tenth; but she was not in the billiard room. He dropped to the second; but she was being neither manicured nor massaged. In a sudden access of suspicion, he descended to the sub-sub-basement and almost ran to see if she were in the laboratory with Pete; the laboratory was empty. A mouse squeaked in its cage and behind the glass of the aquarium one of the aged carp glided slowly from shadow into light and from light once more into green shadow. Mr. Stoyte hurried back to the elevator, shut himself in with the Dutchman’s dream of everyday life mysteriously raised to the pitch of mathematical perfection, and pressed the topmost of the twenty-three buttons.

Arrived at his destination, Mr. Stoyte slid back the gate of the elevator and looked out through the glass panel in the second door.

The water of the swimming pool was perfectly still. Between the battlements, the mountains had taken on their evening richness of golden light and indigo shadow. The sky was cloudless and transparently blue. A tray with bottles and glasses had been set on the iron table at the further side of the pool, and behind the table stood one of the low couches on which Mr. Stoyte was accustomed to take his sun baths. Virginia was lying on this couch, as though anaesthetized, her lips parted, her eyes closed, one arm dropped limply and its palm lying upwards on the floor, like a flower carelessly thrown aside and forgotten. Half concealed by the table, Dr. Obispo, the Claude Bernard of his subject, was looking down into her face with an expression of slightly amused scientific curiosity.

In its first irrepressible uprush, Mr. Stoyte’s fury came near to defeating its own homicidal object. With a great effort, he checked the impulse to shout, to charge headlong out of the elevator, waving his fists and foaming at the mouth. Trembling under the internal pressure of pent-up rage and hatred, he groped in the pocket of his jacket. Except for a child’s rattle and two packets of chewing gum left over from his distribution of gifts at the hospital, it was empty. For the first time in months, he had forgotten his automatic.

For a few seconds, Mr. Stoyte stood hesitating, undecided what to do. Should he rush out, as he had first been moved to do, and kill the man with his bare hands? Or should he go down and fetch his gun? In the end, he decided to get the gun. He pressed the button, and the lift dropped silently down its shaft. Unseeing, Mr. Stoyte glared at the Vermeer; and from her universe of perfected geometrical beauty, the young lady in blue satin turned her head from the open harpsichord and looked out, past the draped curtain, over the black and white tessellated floor—out through the window of the picture frame into that other universe in which Mr. Stoyte and his fellow creatures had their ugly and untidy being.

Mr. Stoyte ran to his bedroom, opened the drawer in which his handkerchiefs were kept, rummaged furiously among the silks and cambrics, and found nothing. Then he remembered. Yesterday morning he had worn no jacket. The gun had been in his hip pocket. Then Pedersen had come to give him his Swedish exercises. But a gun in the hip pocket was uncomfortable, if you did things on your back, on the floor. He had taken it out and put it away in the writing desk in his study.

Mr. Stoyte ran back to the elevator, went down four floors and ran to the study. The gun was in the top left-hand drawer of the writing table; he remembered exactly.

The top left-hand drawer of the writing table was locked. So were all the other drawers.

“God damn that old bitch!” Mr. Stoyte shouted, as he tugged at the handles.

Thoughtful and conscientious in every detail, Miss Grogram, his secretary, always locked up everything before she went home.

Still cursing Miss Grogram, whom he hated at the moment almost as bitterly as he hated that swine there on the roof, Mr. Stoyte hurried back to the elevator. The gate was locked. During his absence in the study, somebody must have pressed the recall button on some other floor. Through the closed door he could hear the faint hum of the machinery. The elevator was in use. God only knew how long he would have to wait.

Mr. Stoyte let out an inarticulate bellow, rushed along the corridor, turned to the right, opened a swing door, turned to the right again and was at the gate of the service lift. He seized the handle and pulled. It was locked. He pressed the recall button. Nothing happened. The service elevator was also in use.

Mr. Stoyte ran back along the corridor, through the swing door, then through another swing door. Spiralled round a central well that went down two hundred feet into the depths of the cellars, the staircase mounted and descended. Mr. Stoyte started to climb. Breathless after only two floors, he ran back to the elevators. The service elevator was still in use; but the other responded to the call of the button. Dropping from somewhere overhead, it came to a halt in front of him. The locked door un locked itself. He pulled it open and stepped in. The young lady in satin still occupied her position of equilibrium in a perfectly calculated universe. The distance of her left eye from the left side of the picture was to its distance from the right side as one is to the square root of two minus one; and the distance of the same eye from the bottom of the picture was equal to its distance from the left side. As for the knot of ribbons on her right shoulder—that was precisely at the corner of an imaginary square with the sides equal to the longer of the two golden sections into which the base of the picture was divisible. A deep fold in the satin skirt indicated the position of the right side of this square and the lid of the harpsichord marked the top. The tapestry in the upper right-hand corner stretched exactly one-third of the way across the picture and had its lower edge at a height equal to the base. Pushed forward by the browns and dusky ochres of the background, the blue satin encountered the black and white marble slabs of the floor and was pushed back, to be held suspended in mid picture-space, like a piece of steel between two magnets of opposite sign. Within the frame nothing could have been different; the stillness of that world was not the mere immobility of old paint and canvas; it was also the spirited repose of consummated perfection.

“The old bitch,” Mr. Stoyte kept growling to himself and then, turning in memory from his secretary to Dr. Obispo, “The swine!”

The elevator came to a stop. Mr. Stoyte darted out and hurried along the corridor to Miss Grogram’s empty office. He thought he knew where she kept the keys; but it turned out that he was wrong. They were somewhere else. But where? where? where? Frustration churned up his rage into a foam of frenzy. He opened drawers and flung their contents on the floor, he scattered the neatly filed papers about the room, he overturned the dictaphone, he even went to the trouble of emptying the bookshelves and upsetting the potted cyclamen and the bowl of Japanese goldfish which Miss Grogram kept on the window sill. Red scales flashed among the broken glass and the reference books. One gauzy tail was black with spilled ink. Mr. Stoyte picked up a bottle of glue and, with all his might, threw it down among the dying fish.

“Bitch!” he shouted. “Bitch!”

Then suddenly he saw the keys, hanging in a neat little bunch on a hook near the mantelpiece, where, he suddenly remembered, he had seen them a thousand times before.

“Bitch!” he shouted with redoubled fury, as he seized them. He hurried towards the door, pausing only to push the typewriter off its table. It fell with a crash into the chaos of torn paper and glue and goldfish. That would serve the old bitch right, Mr. Stoyte reflected with a kind of maniacal glee as he ran towards the elevator.

Chapter X

BARCELONA had fallen.

But even if it had not fallen, even if it had never been besieged, what then?

Like every other community, Barcelona was part machine, part sub-human organism, part nightmare-huge projection and embodiment of men’s passions and insanities—their avarice, their pride, their lust for power, their obsession with meaningless words, their worship of lunatic ideals.

Captured or uncaptured, every city and nation has its being on the plane of the absence of God. Has its being on the plane of the absence of God, and is therefore foredoomed to perpetual self-stultification, to endlessly reiterated attempts at self-destruction.

Barcelona had fallen. But even the prosperity of human societies is a continual process of gradual or catastrophic falling. Those who build up the structures of civilization are the same as those who undermine the structures of civilization. Men are their own termites, and must remain their own termites for just so long as they persist in being only men.

The towers rise, the palaces, the temples, the dwellings, the workshops; but the heart of every beam is gnawed to dust even as it is laid, the joists are riddled, the floors eaten away under the feet.

What poetry, what statues—but on the brink of the Peloponnesian War! And now the Vatican is painted—just in time for the sack of Rome. And the Eroica is composed—but for a hero who turns out to be just another bandit. And the nature of the atom is elucidated—by the same physicists as volunteer in war-time to improve the arts of murder.

On the plane of the absence of God, men can do nothing else except destroy what they have built—destroy even while they build—build with the elements of destruction. Madness consists in not recognizing the facts; in making wishes the fathers of thoughts; in conceiving things to be other than they really are; in trying to realize desired ends by means which countless previous experiments have shown to be inappropriate.

Madness consists, for example, in thinking of oneself as a soul, a coherent and enduring human entity. But, between the animal below and the spirit above, there is nothing on the human level except a swarm of constellated impulses and sentiments and notions; a swarm brought together by the accidents of heredity and language; a swarm of incongruous and often contradictory thoughts and desires. Memory and the slowly changing body constitute a kind of spatio-temporal cage, within which the swarm is enclosed. To talk of it as though it were a coherent and enduring “soul” is madness. On the strictly human level there is no such thing as a soul.

Though constellations, feeling-arrangements, desire-patterns. Each of these is strictly conditioned by the nature of its fortuitous origin. Our “souls” are so little “us” that we cannot even form the remotest conception how “we” should react to the universe, if we were ignorant of language in general, or even of our own particular language. The nature of our “souls” and of the world they inhabit would be entirely different from what it is, if we had never learnt to talk, or if we had learnt to talk Eskimo instead of English. Madness consists, among other things, in imagining that our “soul” exists apart from the language our nurses happen to have taught us.

Every psychological pattern is determined; and, within the cage of flesh and memory, the total swarm of such patterns is no more free than any of its members. To talk of freedom in connexion with acts which in reality are determined is madness. On the strictly human level no acts are free. By their insane refusal to recognize facts as they are, men and women condemn themselves to have their desires stultified and their lives distorted or extinguished. No less than the cities and nations of which they are members, men and women are for ever falling, for ever destroying what they have built and are building. But whereas cities and nations obey the laws that come into play whenever large numbers are involved, individuals do not. Or rather need not; for though in actual fact most individuals allow themselves to be subjected to these laws, they are under no necessity to do so. For they are under no necessity to remain exclusively on the human level of existence. It is in their power to pass from the level of the absence of God to that of God’s presence. Each member of the psychological swarm is determined; and so is the conduct of the total swarm. But beyond the swarm, and yet containing and interpenetrating it, lies eternity, ready and waiting to experience itself. But if eternity is to experience itself within the temporal and spatial cage of any individual human being, the swarm we call the “sour” must voluntarily renounce the frenzy of its activity, must make room, as it were, for the other timeless consciousness, must be silent to render possible the emergence of pro-founder silence. God is completely present only in the complete absence of what we call our humanity. No iron necessity condems the individual to the futile torment of being merely human. Even the swarm we call the soul has it in its power temporarily to inhibit its insane activity, to absent itself, if only for a moment, in order that, if only for a moment, God may be present. But let eternity experience itself, let God be sufficiently often present in the absence of human desires and feelings and preoccupations: the result will be a transformation of that life which must be lived, in the intervals, upon the human level. Even the swarm of our passions and opinions is susceptible to the beauty of eternity; and being susceptible becomes dissatisfied with its own ugliness; and being dissatisfied undertakes to change itself. Chaos gives place to order—not the arbitrary, purely human order that comes from the subordination of the swarm to some lunatic “ideal,” but an order that reflects the real order of the world. Bondage gives place to liberty—for choices are no longer dictated by the chance occurrences of earlier history, but are made teleologically and in the light of a direct insight into the nature of things. Violence and mere inertia give place to peace—for violence is the manic, and inertia the depressive, phase of that cyclic insanity, which consists in regarding the ego or its social projections as real entities. Peace is the serene activity which springs from the knowledge that our ‘‘souls” are illusory and their creations insane, that all beings are potentially united in eternity. Compassion is an aspect of peace and a result of the same act of knowledge.

Walking at sunset up the castle hill, Pete kept thinking with a kind of tranquil exultation of all the things Mr. Propter had said to him. Barcelona had fallen. Spain, England, France, Germany, America—all were falling; falling even at such times as they seemed to be rising; destroying what they built in the very act of building. But any individual has it in his power to refrain from falling, to stop destroying himself. The solidarity with evil is optional, not compulsory.

On their way out of the carpenter’s shop Pete had brought himself to ask Mr. Propter if he would tell him what he ought to do.

Mr. Propter had looked at him intently. “If you want it,” he had said, “I mean, if you really want it . . .”

Pete had nodded without speaking.

The sun had set; and now the twilight was like the embodiment of peace—the peace of God, Pete said to himself, as he looked across the plain to the distant mountains, the peace that passes all understanding. To part with such loveliness was unbearable. Entering the castle, he went straight to the elevator, recalled the cage from somewhere up aloft, shut himself up with the Vermeer and pressed the highest of the buttons. Up there, at the top of the keep, he would be at the very heart of this celestial peace.

The elevator came to a halt. He opened the gates and stepped out. The swimming pool reflected a luminous tranquillity. He turped his eyes from the water to the sky and from the sky to the mountains; then walked round the pool in order to look down over the battlements on the further side.

“Go away!” a muffled voice suddenly said.

Pete started violently, turned and saw Virginia lying in the shadow almost at his feet.

“Go away,” the voice repeated. “I hate you.”

“I’m sorry,” he stammered, “I didn’t know . . .”

“Oh, it’s you.” She opened her eyes, and in the dim light he was able to see that she had been crying. “I thought it was Sig. He went to get a comb for my hair.” She was silent for a little; then suddenly she burst out, “I’m so unhappy, Pete.”

“Unhappy?” The word and her tone had utterly shattered the peace of God. In an anguish of love and anxiety he sat down beside her on the couch. (Under her bath robe, he couldn’t help noticing, she didn’t seem to be wearing anything at all.) “Unhappy?”

Virginia covered her face with her hands and began to sob. “Not even Our Lady,” she gasped in an inco-herency of grief. “I can’t even tell her. I feel so mean. . .”

“Darling.” he said in a voice of entreaty, as though imploring her to be happy. He began to stroke her hair. “My darling.”

Suddenly there was a violent commotion on the further side of the pool. A crash as the elevator gates were flung back; a rush of feet; an inarticulate yell of rage. Pete turned his head and was in time to see Mr. Stoyte rushing towards them, holding something in his hand, something that might almost have been an automatic pistol.

He had half risen to his feet, when Mr. Stoyte fired.

Arriving two or three minutes later with the comb for Virginia’s hair, Dr. Obispo found the old man on his knees, trying, with a pocket handkerchief, to staunch the blood that was still pouring out of the two wounds, one clean and small, the other cavernous, which the bullet had made as it passed through Pete’s head.

Crouching in the shadow of the battlements, the Baby was praying. “Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinners-now-and-in-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen,” she repeated, again and again, as fast as her sobs would permit her. Every now and then she would be seized and shaken by an access of nausea, and the praying would be interrupted for a moment. Then it began again where she had left off: “. . . us-sinners-now-and-in-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen-Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God . . .”

Dr. Obispo opened his mouth to make an exclamation, then closed it again, whispered, “Christ!” and walked quickly and silently round the pool. Before making his presence known, he took the precaution of picking up the pistol and slipping it into his pocket. One never knew. Then he called Mr. Stoyte’s name. The old man started and a hideous expression of terror appeared on his face. Fear gave place to relief as he turned round and saw who it was that had spoken to him.

“Thank God, it’s you,” he said; then suddenly remembered that this was the man he had meant to kill. But all that had been a million years ago, a million miles away. The near, immediate, urgent fact was not the Baby, not love or anger; it was fear and this thing that lay here on the ground.

“You got to save him,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “We can say it was an accident. I’ll pay him anything he likes. Anything in reason,” an old reflex impelled him to add. “But you got to save him.” Laboriously, he heaved himself to his feet and motioned Dr. Obispo to his vacated place.

The only movement Dr. Obispo made was one of withdrawal. The old man was covered with blood, and he had no wish to spoil a ninety-five dollar suit. “Save him?” he repeated. “You’re mad. Look at all the brain lying there on the floor.”

From the shadows behind him, Virginia interrupted the sobbing mutter of her prayers to scream. “On the floor,” she kept wailing. “On the floor.”

Dr. Obispo turned on her savagely. “Shut up, do you hear?”

The screams abruptly ceased; but a few seconds later there was a sound of violent retching; then “Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinners-now-and-in-the-hour of-our-death-Amen-Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinners . . .”

“If we’re going to try and save anybody” Dr. Obispo went on, “it had better be you. And believe me,” he added emphatically, throwing all his weight on his left leg and using the toe of his right shoe to point at the body, “you need some saving. It’s either the gas chamber or San Quentin for life.”

“But it was an accident,” Mr, Stoyte began to protest with a breathless eagerness. “I mean, it was all a mistake. I never wanted to shoot him. I meant to . . .” He broke off and stood in silence, his mouth working, as though he were trying to swallow some unspoken word.

“You meant to kill me,” said Dr. Obispo completing the sentence for him and smiling, as he did so, with the expression of wolfish good humour which was characteristic of him in any situation where the joke was at all embarrassing or painful. Secure in the knowledge that the old buzzard was much too scared to be angry and that anyhow the gun was in his own pocket, he prolonged the joke by saying, “Well,” sententiously, “that’s what comes of snooping.”

“. . . now-and-in-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen,” Virginia gabbled in the ensuing silence. “Holy-Mary-Mother . . .”

“I never meant it,” Mr. Stoyte reiterated. “I just got mad. Guess I didn’t really figure out what I was doing . . .”

“Tell that to the jury,” said Dr. Obispo sarcastically.

“But I swear it: I didn’t really know,” Mr. Stoyte pro tested. His harsh voice broke grotesquely into a squeak. His face was white with fear.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe,” he said. “But not knowing doesn’t make any difference to that.” He stood on one leg again to point an elegantly shod foot in the direction of the body.

“But what shall I do?” Mr. Stoyte almost screamed in the anguish of his terror.

“Don’t ask me.”

Mr. Stoyte initiated the gesture of laying his hand imploringly on the other’s sleeve; but Dr. Obispo quickly drew back; “No, don’t touch me,” he said, “Just look at your hands.”

Mr. Stoyte looked. The thick, carrot-like fingers were red; under the horny nails the blood was already caked and dry, like clay. “God!” he whispered. “Oh, my God!”

“. . . and-at-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen-Holy-Mary . . .”

At the word “death,” the old man started as though he had been struck with a whip. “Obispo,” he began again, breathless with apprehension, “Obispo! Listen here—you got to help me out of this. You got to help me,” he entreated.

“After you did your best to do that to me?” The white-and-tan shoe shot out again.

“You wouldn’t let them get me?” Mr. Stoyte wheedled, abject in his terror.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“But you can’t,” he almost shouted. “You can’t.”

Dr. Obispo bent down to make quite sure, in the fading light, that there was no blood on the couch; then, pulling up his fawn-coloured trousers, sat down. “One gets tired of standing,” he said in a pleasant conversational tone.

Mr. Stoyte went on pleading. “I’ll make it worth your while,” he said. “You can have anything you care to ask for. Anything,” he repeated without any qualifying reference, this time, to reason.

“Ah,” said Dr. Obispo, “now you’re talking turkey.”

“. . . Mother-of-God,” muttered the Baby, “pray-for-us-sinners-now-and-in-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen-Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinners-now . . .”

“You’re talking turkey,” Dr. Obispo repeated.

PART III

Chapter I

THERE was a tap at the door of Jeremy’s work room; it was Mr. Propter who entered. He was wearing, Jeremy noticed, the same dark grey suit and black tie as he had worn at Pete’s funeral. The urban costume diminished him; he seemed smaller than in his working clothes and at the same time less himself. That weather-beaten, emphatically featured face of his—that face of a statue high up on the west front of a cathedral—looked curiously incongruous above a starched collar.

“You’ve not forgotten?” he said, when they had shaken hands.

For all reply, Jeremy pointed to his own black jacket and sponge-bag trousers. They were expected at Tarzana for the ceremonial opening of the new Stoyte Auditorium.

Mr. Propter looked at his watch. “We’ve got another few minutes before we need think of starting.” He sat down. “What’s the news?”

“Couldn’t be better,” Jeremy answered.

Mr. Propter nodded. “Now that poor Jo and the others have gone, it must be quite agreeable here.”

“All alone with twelve million dollars worth of bric-a-brac,” said Jeremy. “I have the most enormous fun.”

“How little fun you’d be having,” said Mr. Propter meditatively, “if you’d been left in company with the people who actually made the bric-a-brac. With Greco, and Rubens, and Turner, and Fra Angelico.”

“God preserve us!” said Jeremy, throwing up his hands.

“That’s the charm of art,” Mr. Propter went on. “It represents only the most amiable aspects of the most talented human beings. That’s why I’ve never been able to believe that the art of any period threw much light on the life of that period. Take a Martian; show him a representative collection of Botticellis, Peruginos and Raphaels. Could he infer from them the conditions described by Machiavelli?”

“No, he couldn’t,” Jeremy agreed. “But meanwhile, here’s another question. The conditions described by Machiavelli—were they the real conditions? Not that Machiavelli didn’t tell the truth. The things he described really happened. But did contemporaries think them as awful as they seem to us when we read about them now? We think they ought to have been miserable about what was happening. But were they?”

“Were they?” Mr. Propter repeated. “We ask the historians; and of course they can’t answer—because obviously there’s no way of compiling statistics about the sum of happiness, nor any way of comparing the feelings of people living under one set of conditions with the feelings of people living under another and quite different set. The real conditions at any given moment are the subjective conditions of the people then alive. And the historian has no way of finding out what those conditions were.”

“No way except through looking at works of art,” said Jeremy. “I’d say they do throw light on the subjective conditions. Take one of your examples. Perugino’s a contemporary of Machiavelli. That means that at least one person contrived to be cheerful all through an unpleasant period. And if one could be, why not many?” He cleared the way for a quotation with a little cough. “ ‘The state of the country never put a man off his dinner.’ ”

“Massive wisdom!” said Mr. Propter. “But remember that the state of Dr. Johnson’s England was excellent, even at its worst. What about the state of a country like China, say, or Spain—a country where a man can’t be put off his dinner, for the simple reason that there isn’t any dinner? And conversely, what about all the losses of appetite at times when everything’s going well?” He paused, smiled inquiringly at Jeremy, then shook his head. “Sometimes there’s a lot of cheerfulness as well as a lot of misery; sometimes there seems to be almost nothing but misery. That’s all the historian can say insofar as he’s a historian. Insofar as he’s a theologian, of course, or a metaphysician, he can maunder on indefinitely, like Marx or St. Augustine or Spengler.” Mr. Propter made a little grimace of distaste. “God, what a lot of bosh we’ve managed to talk in the last few thousand years!” he said.

“But it has its charm,” Jeremy insisted. “Really good bosh . . .”

“I’m barbarous enough to prefer sense,” said Mr. Propter. “That’s why, if I want a philosophy of history, I go to the psychologist.”

“ ‘Totem and Tabu?” Jeremy questioned in some astonishment.

“No, no,” said Mr. Propter with a certain impatience. “Not that kind of psychologist. I mean the religious psychologist; the one who knows by direct experience that men are capable of liberation and enlightenment. He’s the only philosopher of history whose hypothesis has been experimentally verified; therefore the only one who can make a generalization that covers the facts.”

“And what are his generalizations?” said Jeremy. “Just the usual thing?”

Mr. Propter laughed. “Just the usual thing,” he answered. “The old, boring, inescapable truths. On the human level, men live in ignorance, craving and fear. Ignorance, craving and fear result in some temporary pleasures, in many lasting miseries, in final frustration. The nature of the cure is obvious; the difficulties in the way of achieving it, almost insuperable. We have to choose between almost insuperable difficulties on the one hand and absolutely certain misery and frustration on the other. Meanwhile, the general hypothesis remains as the intellectual key to history. Only the religious psychologist can make any sense of Perugino and Machia-velli, for example; or of all this.” He pointed towards the Hauberk Papers.

Jeremy twinkled behind his glasses and patted his bald patch. “Your true scholar,” he fluted, “doesn’t even want to make sense of it.”

“Yes, I always tend to forget that,” said Mr. Propter rather sadly.

Jeremy coughed. “ ‘Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,’ ” he quoted from the “Grammarian’s Funeral.”

“Gave it for his own sake,” said Mr. Propter, getting out of his chair. “Gave it regardless of the fact that the grammar he was studying was hopelessly unscientific, riddled with concealed metaphysics, utterly provincial and antiquated. Well,” he added, “that’s what one would expect, I suppose.” He took Jeremy’s arm, and they walked together towards the elevator. “What a curious figure old Browning is!” he continued, his mind harking back to the Grammarian. “Such a first-rate intelligence, and at the same time such a fool. All that preposterous stuff about romantic love! Bringing God into it, putting it into heaven, talking as though marriage and the higher forms of adultery were identical with the beatific vision. The silliness of it! But, again, that’s what one has to expect.” He sighed. “I don’t know why,” he added after a pause, “I often find myself remembering that rhyme of his—I can’t even recall which poem it comes from—the one that goes: ‘One night he kissed My soul out in a burning mist.’ My soul out in a burning mist, indeed!” he repeated. “Really, how much I prefer Chaucer on the subject. Do you remember? ‘Thus swivfèd is this carpenterès wife.’ So beautifully objective and unemphatic and free of verbiage! Browning was always rambling on about God; but I suspect he was much further away from reality than Chaucer was, even though Chaucer never thought about God, if he could possibly help it. Chaucer had nothing between himself and eternity but his appetites. Browning had his appetites, plus a great barrage of nonsense—nonsense, what’s more, with a purpose. For, of course, that bogus mysticism wasn’t merely gratuitous bosh. It had an object. It existed in order that Browning might be able to persuade himself that his appetites were identical with God. ‘Thus swivèd is this carpenterès wife,’ ” he repeated, as they entered the elevator and went up with Vermeer to the great hall. “ ‘My soul out in a burning mist.’ It’s extraordinary the way the whole quality of our existence can be changed by altering the words in which we think and talk about it. We float in language like icebergs—four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.”

They crossed the hall. Mr. Propter’s car was standing outside the front door. He took the wheel; Jeremy got in beside him. They drove off, down the curving road, past the baboons, past Giambologna’s nymph, past the Grotto, under the portcullis and across the drawbridge.

“I so often think of that poor boy,” said Mr. Propter, breaking a long silence. “Dying so suddenly.”

“I’d no idea his heart was as bad as that,” said Jeremy.

“In a certain sense,” Mr. Propter went on, “I feel responsible for what happened. I asked him to help me in the carpenter’s shop. Made him work too hard, I guess—though he insisted it was all right for him. I ought to have realized that he had his pride—that he was young enough to feel ashamed of admitting he couldn’t take it. One’s punished for being insensitive and unaware. And so are the people one’s insensitive about.”

They drove past the hospital and through the orange groves in silence. “There’s a kind of pointlessness about sudden and premature death,” said Jeremy at last. “A kind of specially acute irrelevance . . .”

“Specially acute?” Mr. Propter questioned. “No, I shouldn’t say so. It’s no more irrelevant than any other human event. If it seems more irrelevant, that’s only because, of all possible events, premature death is the most glaringly out of harmony with what we imagine ourselves to be.”

“What do you mean?” Jeremy asked.

Mr. Propter smiled. “I mean what I presume you mean,” he answered. “If a thing seems irrelevant, there must be something it’s irrelevant to. In this case, that something is our conception of what we are. We think of ourselves as free, purposive beings. But every now and then, things happen to us that are incompatible with this conception. We speak of them as accidents; we call them pointless and irrelevant. But what’s the criterion by which we judge? The criterion is the picture we paint of ourselves in our own fancy—the highly flattering portrait of the free soul making creative choices and being the master of its fate. Unfortunately, the picture bears no resemblance to ordinary human reality. It’s the picture of what we’d like to be, of what, indeed, we might become if we took the trouble. To a being who is in fact the slave of circumstance there’s nothing specially irrelevant about premature death. It’s the sort of event that’s characteristic of the universe in which he actually lives—though not, of course, of the universe he foolishly imagines he lives in. An accident is the collision of a train of events on the level of determinism with another train of events on the level of freedom. We imagine that our life is full of accidents, because we imagine that our human existence is passed on the level of freedom. In fact, it isn’t. Most of us live on the mechanical level, where events happen in accordance with the laws of large numbers. The things we call accidental and irrelevant belong to the very essence of the world in which we elect to live,”

Annoyed at having, by an inconsidered word, landed himself in a position which Mr, Propter could show to be unwarrantably “idealistic,” Jeremy was silent. They drove on for a time without speaking.

“That funeral!” Jeremy said at last; for his chronically anecdotal mind had wandered back to what was concrete, particular and odd in the situation under discussion. “Like something out of Ronald Firbank!” He giggled. “I told Mr. Habakkuk he ought to put steam heat into the statues. They’re dreadfully unlifelike to the touch.” He moved his cupped hand over an imaginary marble protuberance.

Mr. Propter, who had been thinking about liberation, nodded and politely smiled.

“And Dr. Mulge’s reading of the service!” Jeremy went on. “Talk of unction! It couldn’t have been oilier even in an English cathedral. Like vaseline with a flavour of port wine. And the way he said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’—as though he really meant it, as though he, Mulge, could personally guarantee it, in writing, on a money-back basis: the entire cost of the funeral refunded if the next world fails to give complete satisfaction.”

“He probably even believes it,” said Mr. Propter meditatively. “In some curious Pickwickian way, of course. You know: it’s true, but you consistently act as though it weren’t; it’s the most important fact in the universe, but you never think about it if you can possibly avoid it.”

“And how do you believe in it?” Jeremy asked. “Pick-wickianly or un-Pickwickianly?” And when Mr. Propter answered that he didn’t believe in that sort of resurrection and life, “Oho!” he went on in the tone of an indulgent father who has caught his son kissing the housemaid. “Oho! So there’s also a Pickwickian resurrection?”

Mr. Propter laughed. “I think there may be,” he said.

“In which case what has become of poor Pete?”

“Well, to start with,” said Mr. Propter slowly, “I should say that Pete, qua Pete, doesn’t exist any longer.”

“Super-Pickwickian!” Jeremy interjected.

“But Pete’s ignorance,” Mr. Propter went on, “Pete’s fears and cravings—well, I think it’s quite possible that they’re still somehow making trouble in the world. Making trouble for everything and everyone, especially for themselves. Themselves in whatever form they happen to be taking.”

“And if by any chance Pete hadn’t been ignorant and concupiscent, what then?”

“Well, obviously,” said Mr. Propter, “there wouldn’t be anything to make further trouble.” After a moment’s silence, he quoted Tauler’s definition of God. “ ‘God is a being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working.’ ”

He turned the car off the main road, into the avenue of pepper trees that wound across the green lawns of the Tarzana campus. The new Auditorium loomed up, austerely romanesque. Mr. Propter parked his old Ford among the lustrous Cadillacs and Chryslers and Packards already lined up in front of it, and they entered. The press photographers at the entrance looked them over, saw at a glance that they were neither bankers, nor movie stars, nor corporation lawyers, nor dignitaries of any church, nor Senators, and turned away contemptuously.

The students were already in their places. Under their stares, Jeremy and Mr. Propter were ushered down the aisle to the rows of seats reserved for distinguished guests. And what distinction! There, in the front row, was Sol R. Katzenblum, the President of Abraham Lincoln Pictures; there, beside him, was the Bishop of Santa Monica; there too was Mr. Pescecagniolo, of the Bank of the Far West. The Grand Duchess Eulalie was sitting next to Senator Bardolph; and in the next row were two of the Engels Brothers and Gloria Bossom, who was chatting with Rear-Admiral Shotover. The orange robe and permanently waved beard belonged to Swami Yogalinga, founder of the School of Personality. Beside him sat the Vice-President of Consol Oil and Mrs. Wagner. . . .

Suddenly the organ burst out, full blast, into the Tarzana Anthem. The academic procession filed in. Two by two, in their gowns and hoods and tasselled mortar boards, the Doctors of Divinity, of Philosophy, of Science, of Law, of Letters, of Music, shuffled down the aisle and up the steps on to the platform, where their seats had been prepared for them in a wide arc close to the back drop. At the centre of the stage stood a reading desk and at the reading desk stood Dr. Mulge. Not that he did any reading, of course; for Dr. Mulge prided himself on being able to speak almost indefinitely without a note. The reading desk was there to be intimately leaned over, to be caught hold of and passionately leaned back from, to be struck emphatically with the palm of the hand, to be dramatically walked away from and returned to.

The organ was silent. Dr. Mulge began his address—began it with a reference, of course, to Mr. Stoyte. Mr. Stoyte whose generosity . . . The realization of a Dream . . . This embodiment of an ideal in stone . . . Without Vision the people perish . . . But this Man had had Vision . . . The Vision of what Tarzana was destined to become . . . The centre, the focus, the torch bearer . . . California . . . New Culture, richer science, higher spirituality . . . (Dr. Mulge’s voice modulated from bassoon to trumpet. From vaseline with a mere flavour of port wine to undiluted fatty alcohol.) But, alas (and here the voice subsided pathetically into saxophone and lanoline), alas . . . Unable to be with us today ... A sudden distressing event . . . Carried off on the threshold of life ... A young collaborator in those scientific fields which he ventured to say were as close to Mr. Stoyte’s heart as the fields of social service and culture . . . The shock . . . The exquisitely sensitive heart under the sometimes rough exterior . . . His physician had ordered a complete and immediate change of scene . . . But in spite of physical absence, his spirit . . . We feel it among us today . . . An inspiration to all, young and old alike . . . The torch of Culture . . . The Future . . . The Ideal . . . The spirit of man . . . Great things already accomplished . . . Strengthened and guided . . . Forward . . . Onward . . . Upward . . . Faith and Hope . . . Democracy . . . Freedom . . . The imperishable heritage of Washington and Lincoln . . . The glory that was Greece reborn beside the waters of the Pacific . . . The flag . . . The mission . . . The manifest destiny . . . The will of God . . . Tarzana . . .

It was over at last. The organ played. The academic procession filed back up the aisle. The distinguished guests straggled after it.

Outside in the sunshine, Mr. Propter was buttonholed by Mrs. Pescecagniolo.

“I thought that was a wonderfully inspirational address,” she said with enthusiasm.

Mr. Propter nodded. “Almost the most inspirational address I ever listened to. And God knows,” he added, “I’ve heard a lot of them in the course of my life.”

Chapter II

EVEN in London there was a little diluted sunshine—sunshine that brightened and grew stronger as they drove through the diminishing smoke of the outer suburbs, until at last, somewhere near Esher, they had travelled into the most brilliant of early spring mornings.

Under a fur rug, Mr. Stoyte sprawled diagonally across the rear seat of the car. More for his own good, this time, than for his physician’s, he was back again on sedatives, and found it hard, before lunch, to keep awake. With a fitful stertorousness he had dozed almost from the moment they drove away from the Ritz.

Pale and with sad eyes, silently ruminating an unhappiness which five days of rain on the Atlantic and three more of London gloom had done nothing to alleviate, Virginia sat aloof in the front seat.

At the wheel (for he had thought it best to take no chauffeur on this expedition) Dr. Obispo whistled to himself and, occasionally, even sang aloud—sang “Stretti, stretti, nell-estasí d’amor” ; sang “Do you think a 1-ittle drink’U do us any harm?”; sang “I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.” It was partly the fine weather that made him so cheerful—spring-time, he said to himself, the only merry ring-time, not to mention the lesser celandines, the wind flowers, whatever they might be; the primroses in the copse. And should he ever forget his bewilderment when English people had started talking about cops in the singular and in contexts where policemen seemed deliriously out of place? “Let’s go and pick some primroses in the cops.” Surprising intestinal flora! Better even than the carp’s. Which brought him to the second reason for his satisfaction with life. They were on their way to see the two old Hauberk ladies—on their way, perhaps, to finding something interesting about the Fifth Earl, something significant about the relationship between senility and sterols and the intestinal flora o£ the carp.

With mock-operatic emphasis he burst again into song. “I drea-heamt I dwe-helt in mar-harble halls,” he proclaimed, “with vas-s-als and serfs at my si-hi-hide. And of all who assembled with-hin those walls, that I was the hope and the pri-hi-hide.”

Virginia, who had been sitting beside him, stony with misery, turned round in sudden exasperation. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she almost screamed, breaking a silence that had lasted all the way from Kingston-on-Thames. “Can’t you be quiet?”

Dr. Obispo ignored her protests. “I had riches,” he sang on (and reflected, with an inward chuckle of satisfaction as he did so, that the statement now happened to be true); “I had riches too grea-heat to cou-hount.” No; that was an exaggeration. Not at all too great to count. Just a nice little competence. Enough to give him security and the means to continue his researches without having to waste his time on a lot of sick people who ought to be dead. Two hundred thousand dollars in cash and forty-five hundred acres of land in the San Felipe Valley—land that Uncle Jo had positively sworn was just on the point of getting its irrigation water. (And if it didn’t get it, God! how he’d twist the old buzzard’s tail for him!) “Heart failure due to myocarditis of rheumatic origin.” He could have asked a lot more than two hundred thousand for that death certificate. Particularly as it hadn’t been his only service. No, sir! There had been all the mess to clear up. (The ninety-five dollar, fawn-coloured suit was ruined after all.) There had been the servants to keep away; the Baby to put to bed with a big shot of morphia; the permission to cremate the body to be obtained from the next of kin, who was a sister, living, thank God, in straitened circumstances, and at Pensacola, Florida, so that she fortunately couldn’t afford to come out to California for the funeral. And then (most ticklish of all) there had been the search for a dishonest undertaker; the discovery of a possible crook; the interview, with its veiled hints of an unfortunate accident to be hushed up, of money that was, practically speaking, no object; then, when the fellow had fired off his sanctimonious little speech about its being a duty to help a leading citizen to avoid unpleasant publicity, the abrupt change of manner, the business-like statement of the unavoidable facts and the necessary fictions, the negotiations as to price. In the end, Mr. Pengo had agreed not to notice the holes in Pete’s skull for as little as twenty-five thousand dollars.

“I had riches too gre-heat to cou-hount, could boast of a hi-high ancestral name.” Yes, decidedly, Dr. Obispo reflected, as he sang, decidedly he could have asked for a great deal more. But what would have been the point? He was a reasonable man; almost, you might say, a philosopher; modest in his ambitions, uninterested in worldly success and with tastes so simple that the most besetting of them, outside the sphere of scientific research, could be satisfied in the great majority of cases at practically no expense whatsoever, sometimes even with a net profit, as when Mrs. Bojanus had given him that solid gold cigarette case as a token of her esteem—and then there were Josephine’s pearl studs, and the green enamel cuff links with his monogram in diamonds from little what’s-her-name . . .

“But I a-halso drea-heamt which plea-heased me most,” he sang, raising his voice for this final affirmation and putting in a passionate tremolo, “that you lo-hoved me sti-hill the same, that you lo-hoved me sti-hill the same, that you loved me,” he repeated turning away for a moment from the Portsmouth road to peer with raised eyebrows and a look of amused, ironical inquiry into Virginia’s averted face, “you lo-hoved me sti-hill the same,” and, for the third time with tremendous emphasis and pathos, “that you lo-ho-ho-hoved me sti-hi-hill the same,”

He shot another glance at Virginia. She was staring straight in front of her, holding her lower lip between her teeth, as though she were in pain, but determined not to cry out.

“Did I dream correctly?” His smile was wolfish.

The Baby did not answer. From the back seat Mr. Stoyte snored like a bulldog.

“Do you lo-ho-hove me sti-hi-hill the same?” he insisted, making the car swerve to the right, as he spoke, and putting on speed to pass a row of Army lorries.

The Baby released her lip and said, “I could kill you.”

“Of course you could,” Dr. Obispo agreed. “But you won’t. Because you lo-ho-ho-hove me too much. Or rather,” he added, and his smile became more gleefully canine with every word, “you don’t lo-ho-ho-hove me; you lo-ho-ho-hove . . .” he paused for an instant: “Well, let’s say it in a more poetical way—because one can never have too much poetry, don’t you agree? you’re in lo-ho-hove with Lo-ho-ho-hove, so much in lo-ho-ho-hove that, when it came to the point, you simply couldn’t bring yourself to bump me off. Because whatever you may feel about me, I’m the boy that produces the lo-ho-ho-hoves.” He began to sing again, “I drea-heamt I ki-hilled the goo-hoo-hoo-hoose that lai-haid the go-holden e-he-heggs.”

Virginia covered her ears with her hands in an effort to shut out the sound of his voice—the hideous sound of the truth. Because, of course, it was true. Even after Pete’s death, even after she had promised Our Lady that it would never, never happen again—well, it had happened again.

Dr. Obispo continued his improvisation. “And that thu-hus I’d lo-host my so-hole excuse for showing the skin of my le-he-hegs.”

Virginia pressed her fingers more tightly over her ears. It had happened again, even though she’d said no, even though she’d got mad at him, fought with him, scratched him; but he’d only laughed and gone on; and then suddenly she was just too tired to fight any more. Too tired and too miserable. He got what he wanted; and the awful thing was that it seemed to be what she wanted—or, rather, what her unhappiness wanted; for the misery had been relieved for a time; she had been able to forget the blood; she had been able to sleep. The next morning she had despised and hated herself more than ever.

“I had grottoes and candles and doodahs galore,” Dr. Obispo sang on; then relapsed into speech: “not to mention fetishes, relics, mantras, prayer wheels, gibberish, vestments. But I also dreamt which pleased me most—or rather more, seeing that we have to rhyme with galore” (he opened his mouth and let out his richest and most tremulous notes), “that you lo-hoved me sti-hill the same, that you lo-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-hoved me . . .”

“Stopl” Virginia shouted at the top of her voice.

Uncle Jo woke up with a start. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

“She objects to my singing,” Dr. Obispo called back to him. “Goodness knows why. I have a charming voice. Particularly well adapted to a small auditorium, like this car.” He laughed with whole-hearted merriment. The Baby’s antics, as she vacillated between Priapus and the Sacred Grotto, gave him the most exquisite amusement. Along with the fine weather, the primroses in the copse and the prospect of learning something decisive about sterols and senility, they accounted for the ebullience of his good humour.

It was about half past eleven when they reached their destination. The lodge was untenanted; Dr. Obispo had to get out and open the gates himself.

Within, grass was growing over the drive and the park had sunk back towards the squalor of unmodified nature. Uprooted by past storms, dead trees lay rotting where they had fallen. On the boles of the living, great funguses grew like pale buns. The ornamental plantations had turned into little jungles, impenetrable with brambles. Perched on its knoll above the drive, the Grecian gazebo was in ruins. They rounded a curve and there was the house, Jacobean at on6 end, with strange accretions of nineteenth-century Gothic at the other. The yew hedges had grown up into high walls of shaggy greenery. The position of what had once been formal flower beds was marked by rich green circles of docks, oblongs and crescents of sow thistles and nettles. From the tufted grass of a long untended lawn emerged the tops of rusty croquet hoops.

Dr. Obispo stopped the car at the foot of the front steps and got out. As he did so, a little girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, darted out of a tunnel in the yew hedge. At the sight of the car and its occupants, the child halted, made a movement of retreat, then, reassured by a second glance, came forward.

“Look what I got,” she said in sub-standard Southern English, and held out, snout downwards, a gas mask half filled with primroses and dog’s mercury.

Gleefully, Dr. Obispo laughed. “The copsel” he cried. “You picked them in the copsel” He patted the child’s tow-coloured head. “What’s your name?”

“Millie,” the little girl answered; and then added, with a note of pride in her voice: “I ‘aven’t been somewhere for five days now.”

“Five days?”

Millie nodded triumphantly. “Granny says she’ll ‘ave to take me to the doctor.” She nodded again and smiled up at him with the expression of one who has just announced his forthcoming trip to Bali.

“Well, I think your Granny’s entirely right,” said Dr. Obispo. “Does your Granny live here?”

The child nodded affirmatively. “She’s in the kitchen,” she answered; and added irrelevantly. “She’s deaf.”

“And what about Lady Jane Hauberk?” Dr. Obispo went on. “Does she live here? And the other one—Lady Anne, isn’t that it?”

Again the child nodded. Then an expression of sly mischief appeared on her face, “Do you know what Lady Anne does?” she asked.

“What does she do?”

Millie beckoned to him to bend down so that she could put her mouth to his ear. “She makes noises in ’er stomick,” she whispered.

“You don’t say so!”

“Like birds singing,” the child added poetically. “She does it after lunch.”

Dr. Obispo patted the tow-coloured head again and said, “We’d like to see Lady Anne and Lady Jane.”

“See them?” the little girl repeated in a tone almost of alarm.

“Do you think you could go and ask your Granny to show us in?”

Millie shook her head. “She wouldn’t do it. Granny won’t let nobody come in. Some people came about these things.” She held up the gas mask. “Lady Jane, she got so angry I was frightened. But then she broke one of the lamps with her stick—you know, by mistake: bang! and the glass was all in bits, all over the floor. That made me laugh.”

“Good for you,” said Dr. Obispo. “Why shouldn’t we make you laugh again?”

The child looked at him suspiciously. “What do you mean?” Dr. Obispo assumed a conspiratorial expression and dropped his voice to a whisper. “I mean, you might let us in by one of the side doors, and we’d all walk on tiptoes, like this”—he gave a demonstration across the gravel. “And then we’d pop into the room where they’re sitting and give them a surprise. And then maybe Lady Jane will smash another lamp, and we’ll all laugh and laugh and laugh. What do you say to that?”

“Granny’d be awfully cross,” the child said dubiously.

“We won’t tell her you did it.”

“She’d find out.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” said Dr. Obispo confidently. Then, changing his tone, “Do you like candies?” he added.

The child looked at him blankly.

“Lovely candies?” he repeated voluptuously; then suddenly remembered that, in this damned country, candies weren’t called candies. What the hell did they call them? He remembered. “Lovely sweets!” He darted back to the car and returned with the expensive-looking box of chocolates that had been bought in case Virginia should feel hungry by the way. He opened the lid, let the child take one sniff, then closed it again. “Let us in,” he said, “and you can have them all.”

Five minutes later they were squeezing their way through an ogival French window at the nineteenth-century end of the house. Within, there was a twilight that smelt of dust and dry-rot and moth balls. Gradually, as the eyes became accustomed to the gloom, a draped billiard table emerged into view, a mantelpiece with a gilt clock, a bookshelf, containing the Waverly novels in crimson leather, and the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a large brown painting representing the baptism of the future Edward VII, the heads of five or six stags. Hanging on the wall near the dooj was a map of the Crimea; little flags on pins marked the position of Sebastopol and the Alma.

Still carrying the flower-filled gas mask in one hand and with the forefinger of the other pressed to her lips, Millie led the way on tiptoes along a corridor, across a darkened drawing room, through a lobby, down an other passage. Then she halted and, waiting for Dr. Obispo to come up with her, pointed.

“That’s the door,” she whispered. “They’re in there.”

Without a word, Dr. Obispo handed her the box of chocolates; the child snatched it and, like an animal with a stolen tit-bit, slipped past Virginia and Mr. Stoyte, and hurried away down the dark passage to enjoy her prize in safety. Dr. Obispo watched her go, then turned to his companions.

There was a whispered consultation, and in the end, it was agreed that Dr. Obispo should go on alone.

He walked forward, quietly opened the door, slipped through and closed it behind him.

Outside, in the corridor, the Baby and Uncle Jo waited for what seemed to them hours. Then, all at once, there was a crescendo of confused noise which culminated in the sudden emergence of Dr. Obispo. He slammed the door, pushed a key into the lock and turned it.

An instant later, from within, the door handle was violently rattled, a shrill old voice cried, “How dare you?” Then an ebony cane delivered a series of peremptory raps and the voice almost screamed, “Give me back those keys. Give them back at once.”

Dr. Obispo put the key of the door in his pocket and came down the corridor beaming with satisfaction.

“The two god-damndest looking old hags you ever saw,” he said. “One on each side of the fire, like Queen Victoria and Queen Victoria.”

A second voice joined the first; the rattling and the rapping were redoubled.

“Bang away!” Dr. Obispo shouted derisively; then, pushing Mr. Stoyte with one hand and with the other giving the Baby a familiar little slap on the buttocks, “Come on,” he said. “Come on.”

“Come on where?” Mr. Stoyte asked in a tone of resentful bewilderment. He’d never been able to figure out what this damn fool expedition across the Atlantic was for—except of course to get away from the castle. Oh, yes, they’d had to get away from the castle. No question about that; in fact the only question was whether they’d ever be able to go back to it, after what had happened—whether they’d ever be able to bathe in that pool again, for example. Christ! when he thought of it . . .

But, then, why go to England? At this season? Why not Florida or Hawaii? But no; Obispo had insisted it must be England. Because of his work, because there might be something important to be found out there. Well, he couldn’t say no to Obispo—not now, not yet. And besides he couldn’t do without the man. His nerves, his digestion—all shot to pieces. And he couldn’t sleep without dope; he couldn’t pass a cop on the street without his heart missing a beat or two. And you could say, “God is love, there is no death,” till you were blue in the face; but it didn’t make any difference. He was old, he was sick; death was coming closer and closer, and unless Obispo did something quick, unless he found out something soon . . .

In the dim corridor, Mr. Stoyte suddenly halted. “Obispo,” he said anxiously, while the Hauberk ladies hammered with ebony on the door of their prison, “Obispo, are you absolutely certain there’s no such thing as hell? Can you prove it?”

Dr. Obispo laughed. “Can you prove that the back side of the moon isn’t inhabited by green elephants?” he asked.

“No, but seriously . . .” Mr. Stoyte insisted, in anguish.

“Seriously,” Dr. Obispo gaily answered. “I can’t prove anything about any assertion that can’t be verified.” Mr. Stoyte and he had had this sort of conversation before. There was something, to his mind, exquisitely comic about chopping logic with the old man’s unreasoning terror.

The Baby listened in silence. She knew about hell; she knew what happened if you committed mortal sins—sins like letting it happen again, after you’d promised Our Lady that it wouldn’t. But Our Lady was so kind and so wonderful. And after all it had really been all that beast Sig’s fault. Her own intentions had been absolutely pure; and then Sig had come along and just made her break her word. Our Lady would understand. The awful thing was that it had happened again, when he hadn’t forced her. But even then it hadn’t really been her fault—because after all she’d been through that terrible experience; she wasn’t well; she . . .

“But do you think hell’s possible?” Mr. Stoyte began again.

“Everything is possible,” said Dr. Obispo cheerfully. He cocked an ear to listen to what the old hags were yelling back there behind the door.

“Do you think there’s one chance in a thousand it may be true? Or one in a million?”

Grinning, Dr. Obispo shrugged his shoulders. “Ask Pascal,” he suggested.

“Who’s Pascal?” Mr. Stoyte inquired, clutching despairingly at any and every straw.

“He’s dead,” Dr. Obispo positively shouted in his glee. “Dead as a door nail. And now, for God’s sake.” He seized Uncle Jo by the arm and fairly dragged him along the passage.

The terrible word reverberated through Mr. Stoyte’s imagination. “But I want to be certain,” he protested.

“Certain about what you can’t know!”

“There must be a way.”

“There isn’t. No way except dying and then seeing what happens. Where the hell is that child?” he added in another tone, and called, “Millie!”

Her face smeared with chocolate, the little girl popped up from behind an umbrella stand in the lobby. “Did you see ‘em?” she asked with her mouth full.

Dr. Obispo nodded. “They thought I was the Air Raid Precautions.”

“That’s it!” the child cried excitedly. “That was the one that made her break the lamp.”

“Come here, Millie,” Dr. Obispo commanded. The child came. “Where’s the door to the cellar?”

An expression of fear passed over Millie’s face. “It’s locked,” she answered.

Dr. Obispo nodded. “I know it,” he said. “But Lady Jane gave me the keys.” He pulled out of his pocket a ring on which were suspended three large keys.

“There’s bogies down there,” the child whispered.

“We don’t worry about bogies.”

“Granny says they’re awful,” Millie went on. “She says they’re something chronic.” Her voice broke into a whimper. “She says if I don’t go somewhere more regular-like, the bogies will come after me. But I can’t ‘elp it.” The tears began to glow. “It isn’t my fault.”

“Of course it isn’t,” said Dr. Obispo impatiently. “Nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Even constipation. But now I want you to show us the door of the cellar.”

Still in tears, Millie shook her head. “I’m frightened.”

“But you won’t have to go down into the cellar. Just show us where the door is, that’s all.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Won’t you be a nice little girl,” Dr. Obispo wheedled, “and take us to the dopr?”

Stubborn with fear, Millie continued to shake her head.

Dr. Obispo’s hand shot out and snatched the box of chocolates out of the child’s grasp. “If you don’t tell me, you won’t have any candies,” he said, and added, irritably, “sweets, I mean.”

Millie let out a scream of anguish and tried to get back at the box; but he held it high up, beyond her reach. “Only when you show us the door of the cellar,” he said; and to show that he was in earnest, he opened the box, took a handful of chocolates and popped them one after another into his mouth. “Aren’t they good!” he said, as he munched. “Aren’t they just wonderful! Do you know, I’m glad you won’t show us the door, because then I can eat them all.” He took another bite, made a grimace of ecstasy. “Ooh, goody, goody!” He smacked his lips. “Poor little Millie! She isn’t going to get any more of them.” He helped himself again.

“Oh, don’t, don’t!” the child entreated each time she saw one of the brown nuggets of bliss disappearing between Dr. Obispo’s jaws. Then a moment came when greed was stronger than fear. “I’ll show you where it is,” she screamed, like a victim succumbing to torture and promising to confess.

The effect was magical. Dr. Obispo replaced in the box the three chocolates he was still holding and closed the lid. “Come on,” he said, and held out his hand for the child to take.

“Give me the box,” she demanded.

Dr. Obispo, who understood the principles of diplomacy, shook his head. “Not till you’ve taken us to the door,” he said.

Millie hesitated for a moment; then, resigned to the hard necessity of keeping to her side of the bargain, took his hand.

Followed by Uncle Jo and the Baby, they made their way out of the lobby, back through the drawing-room, along the passage, past the map of the Crimea and across the billiard room, along another passage and into a large library. The red plush curtains were drawn; but a little light filtered between them. All round the room the brown and blue and crimson strata of classic literature ran up to within three feet of the high ceiling, and at regular intervals along the mahogany cornice stood busts of the illustrious dead. Millie pointed to Dante. “That’s Lady Jane,” she whispered confidentially.

“For Christ’s sake.” Mr. Stoyte broke out startlingly. “What’s the big idea? What the hell do you figure we’re doing?”

Dr. Obispo ignored him. “Where’s the door?” he asked.

The child pointed.

“What do you mean?” he started angrily to shout. Then he saw that what he had taken for just another section of the book-filled shelves was in fact a mere false front of wood and leather simulating thirty-three volumes of the Collected Sermons of Archbishop Stilling-fleet and (he recognized the Fifth Earl’s touch) the Complete Works, in seventy-seven volumes, of Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade. A key-hole revealed itself to a closer scrutiny.

“Give me my sweets,” the child demanded.

But Dr. Obispo was taking no risks, “Not till we see if the key fits.”

He tried and, at the second attempt, succeeded. “There you are.” He handed Millie her chocolates and at the same time opened the door. The child uttered a scream of terror and rushed away.

“What’s the big idea?” Mr. Stoyte repeated uneasily.

“The big idea,” said Dr. Obispo, as he looked down the flight of steps that descended, after a few feet, into an impenetrable darkness, “the big idea is that you may not have to find out whether there’s such a place as hell. Not yet awhile, that’s to say; not for a very long time maybe. Ah, thank God,” he added, “we shall have some light.”

Two old-fashioned bull’s-eye lanterns were standing on a shelf just inside the door. Dr. Obispo picked one of them up, shook it, held it to his nose. There was oil in it. He lit them both, handed one to Mr. Stoyte and, taking the other himself, led the way cautiously down the stairs.

A long descent; then a circular chamber cut out of the yellow sandstone. There were four doorways. They chose one of them and passed, along a narrow corridor, into a second chamber with two more doorways. A blind alley first; then another flight of steps leading to a cave full of ancient refuse. There was no second issue; laboriously, with two wrong turnings on the way, they retraced their steps to the circular chamber from which they had started, and made trial of its second doorway. A flight of descending steps; a succession of small rooms. One of these had been plastered and upon its walls early eighteenth-century hands had scratched obscene graffiti. They hurried on, down another short flight of steps into a large square room with an air shaft leading at an angle through the rock to a tiny, far-away ellipse of white light. That was all. They turned back again. Mr. Stoyte began to swear; but the doctor insisted on going on. They tried the third doorway. A passage, a suite of three rooms. Two outlets from the last, one mounting, but walled up with masonry after a little way; the other descending to a corridor on a lower level. Thirty or forty feet brought them to an opening on the left. Dr. Obispo turned his lantern into it, and the light revealed a vaulted recess, at the end of which, on a stuccoed pedestal, stood a replica in marble of the Medici Venus.

“Well, I’m damned!” said Mr. Stoyte, and then, on second thought, was seized with a kind of panic. “How the hell did that get here, Obispo?” he said, running to catch up with the doctor.

Dr. Obispo did not answer, but hurried impatiently forward.

“It’s crazy,” Mr. Stoyte went on apprehensively, as he trotted behind the doctor. “It’s downright crazy. I tell you, I don’t like it.”

Dr. Obispo broke his silence. “We might see if we can get her for the Beverly Pantheon,” he said with a wolfish joviality. “Hullo, what’s this?” he added.

They emerged from the tunnel into a fair-sized room. At the centre of the room was a circular drum of masonry, with two iron uprights rising from either side of it, and a cross-piece, from which hung a pulley.

“The well!” said Dr. Obispo, remembering a passage in the Fifth Earl’s note-book.

He almost ran towards the tunnel on the further side of the room. Ten feet from the entrance, his progress was barred by a heavy, nail-studded oak door. Dr. Obispo took out his bunch of keys, chose at random and opened the door at the first trial. They were on the threshold of a small oblong chamber. His bull’s-eye revealed a second door on the opposite wall. He started at once towards it.

“Canned beef!” said Mr. Stoyte in astonishment, as he ran the beam of his lantern over the rows of tins and jars on the shelves of a tall dresser that occupied almost the whole of one of the sides of the room. “Biloxi Shrimps. Sliced Pineapple. Boston Baked Beans,” he read out, then turned towards Dr. Obispo. “I tell you, Obispo, I don’t like it.”

The Baby had taken out a handkerchief saturated in “Shocking” and was holding it to her nose. “The smell!” she said indistinctly through its folds, and shuddered with disgust. “The smell!”

Dr. Obispo, meanwhile, was trying his keys on the lock of the other door. It opened at last. A draught of warm air flowed in, and at once the little room was filled with an intolerable stench. “Christ!” said Mr. Stoyte, and behind her handkerchief the Baby let out a scream of nauseated horror.

Dr. Obispo made a grimace and advanced along the stream of foul air. At the end of a short corridor was a third door, of iron bars, this time, like the door (Dr. Obispo reflected) of a death cell in a prison. He flashed his lantern between the bars, into the foetid darkness beyond.

From the little room Mr. Stoyte and the Baby suddenly heard an astonished exclamation and then, after a moment’s silence, a violent, explosive guffaw, succeeded by peal after peal of Dr. Obispo’s ferocious metallic laughter. Paroxysm upon uncontrollable paroxysm, the noise reverberated back and forth in the confined space. The hot, stinking air vibrated with a deafening and almost maniacal merriment.

Followed by Virginia, Mr. Stoyte crossed the room and hastened through the open door into the narrow tunnel beyond. Dr. Obispo’s laughter was getting on his nerves. “What the hell . . .” he shouted angrily as he advanced; then broke off in the middle of the sentence. “What’s that?” he whispered.

“A foetal ape,” Dr. Obispo began; but was cut short by another explosion of hilarity, that doubled him up as though with a blow in the solar plexus.

“Holy Mary,” the Baby whispered through her handkerchief.

Beyond the bars, the light of the lanterns had scooped out of the darkness a narrow world of forms and colours. On the edge of a low bed, at the centre of this world, a man was sitting, staring, as though fascinated, into the light. His legs, thickly covered with coarse reddish hair, were bare. The shirt, which was his only garment, was torn and filthy. Knotted diagonally across the powerful chest was a broad silk ribbon that had evidently once been blue. From a piece of string tied round his neck was suspended a little image of St. George and the Dragon in gold and enamel. He sat hunched up, his head thrust forward and at the same time sunk between his shoulders. With one of his huge and strangely clumsy hands, he was scratching a sore place that showed red between the hairs of his left calf.

“A foetal ape that’s had time to grow up,” Dr. Obispo managed at last to say. “It’s too good!” Laughter overtook him again. “Just look at his face!” he gasped, and pointed through the bars. Above the matted hair that concealed the jaws and cheeks, blue eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. There were no eyebrows; but under the dirty, wrinkled skin of the forehead, a great ridge of bone projected like a shelf.

Suddenly, out of the black darkness, another simian face emerged into the beam of the lantern—a face only slightly hairy, so that it was possible to see, not only the ridge above the eyes, but also the curious distortions of the lower jaws, the accretions of bone in front of the ears. Clothed in an old check ulster and some glass beads, a body followed the face into the light.

“It’s a woman,” said Virginia, almost sick with the horrified disgust she felt at the sight of those pendulous and withered dugs.

The doctor exploded into even noisier merriment.

Mr. Stoyte seized him by the shoulder and violently shook him. “Who are they?” he demanded.

Dr. Obispo wiped his eyes and drew a deep breath; the storm of his laughter was flattened to a heaving calm. As he opened his mouth to answer Mr. Stoyte’s question, the creature in the shirt suddenly turned upon the creature in the ulster and hit out at her head. The palm of the enormous hand struck the side of the face. The creature in the ulster uttered a scream of pain and rage, and shrank back out of the light. From the shadow came a shrill, furious gibbering that seemed perpetually to tremble on the verge of articulate blasphemy.

“The one with the Order of the Garter,” said Dr. Obispo, raising his voice against the tumult, “he’s the Fifth Earl of Gonister. The other’s his housekeeper.”

“But what’s happened to them?”

“Just time,” said Dr. Obispo airily.

“Time?”

“I don’t know how old the female is,” Dr. Obispo went on. “But the Earl there—let me see, he was two hundred and one last January.”

From the shadows the shrill voice continued to scream its all but articulate abuse. Impassibly the Fifth Earl scratched the sore on his leg and stared at the light.

Dr. Obispo went on talking. Slowing up of development rates . . . one of the mechanisms of evolution • . . the older an anthropoid, the stupider . . . senility and sterol poisoning , , . the intestinal flora of the carp . . . the Fifth Earl had anticipated his own discovery ... no sterol poisoning, no senility ... no death, perhaps, except through an accident . . . but meanwhile the foetal anthropoid was able to come to maturity . . . It was the finest joke he had ever known.

Without moving from where he was sitting, the Fifth Earl urinated on the floor. A shriller chattering arose from the darkness. He turned in the direction from which it came and bellowed the guttural distortions of almost forgotten obscenities.

“No need of any further experiment,” Dr. Obispo was saying. “We know it works. You can start taking the stuff at once. At once,” he repeated with sarcastic emphasis.

Mr. Stoyte said nothing.

On the other side of the bars, the Fifth Earl rose to his feet, stretched, scratched, yawned, then turned and took a couple of steps towards the boundary that separated the light from the darkness. His housekeeper’s chattering became more agitated and rapid. Affecting to pay no attention, the Earl halted, smoothed the broad ribbon of his order with the palm of his hand, then fingered the jewel at his neck, making as he did so a curious humming noise that was like a simian memory of the serenade in “Don Giovanni.” The creature in the ulster whimpered apprehensively, and her voice seemed to retreat further into the shadows. Suddenly, with a ferocious yell, the Fifth Earl sprang forward, out of the narrow universe of lantern light into the darkness beyond. There was a rush of footsteps, a succession of yelps; then a scream and the sound of blows and more screams; then no more screams, but only a stertorous growling in the dark and little cries.

Mr. Stoyte broke his silence. “How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?” he said in a slow hesitating voice. “I mean, it wouldn’t happen at once . . . there’d be a long time while a person . . . well, you know; while he wouldn’t change any. And once you get over the first shock—well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don’t you think so, Obispo?” he Insisted.

Dr. Obispo went on looking at him in silence; then threw back his head and started to laugh again.

The End

Ape and Essence

First Published 1948

I - TALLIS

It was the day of Gandhi's assassination; but on Calvary the sightseers were more interested in the contents of their picnic baskets than in the possible significance of the, after all, rather commonplace event they had turned out to witness. In spite of all the astronomers can say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: the centre of the universe is here, not there. Gandhi might be dead; but across the desk in his office, across the lunch table in the Studio Commissary, Bob Briggs was concerned to talk only about himself.

"You've always been such a help," Bob assured me, as he made ready, not without relish, to tell the latest instalment of his history.

But at bottom, as I knew very well and as Bob himself knew even better than I, he didn't really want to be helped. He liked being in a mess and, still more, he liked talking about his predicament. The mess and its verbal dramatisation made it possible for him to see himself as all the Romantic Poets rolled into one — Beddoes committing suicide, Byron committing fornication, Keats dying of Fanny Brawne, Harriet dying of Shelley. And seeing himself as all the Romantic Poets, he could forget for a little the two prime sources of his misery — the fact that he had none of their talents and very little of their sexual potency.

"We got to the point," he said (so tragically that it occurred to me that he would have done better as an actor than as a writer of screen plays), "we got to the point, Elaine and I, where we felt like. . . like Martin Luther."

"Martin Luther?" I repeated in some astonishment.

"You know — ich kann nicht anders. We just couldn't — but couldn't — do anything but go off together to Acapulco."

And Gandhi, I reflected, just couldn't do anything but resist oppression nonviolently and go to prison and finally get shot.

"So there it was," he went on. "We got on a plane and flew to Acapulco."

"Finally!"

"What do you mean, 'finally'?"

"Well, you'd been thinking about it for a long time, hadn't you?"

Bob looked annoyed. But I remembered all the previous occasions when he had talked to me about the problem. Should he or should he not make Elaine his mistress? (That was his wonderfully old-world way of putting it.) Should he or should he not ask Miriam for a divorce?

A divorce from the woman who in a very real sense was still what she had always been — his only love; but in another very real sense Elaine was also his only love — and would be still more so if he finally decided (and that was why he couldn't decide) to "make her his mistress." To be or not to be — the soliloquy had gone on for the best part of two years, and if Bob could have had his way it would have gone on for ten years longer. He liked his messes to be chronic and mainly verbal, never so acutely carnal as to put his uncertain virility to yet another humiliating test. But under the influence of his eloquence, of that baroque facade of a profile and prematurely snowy hair, Elaine had evidently grown tired of a merely chronic and platonic mess. Bob was presented with an ultimatum: it was to be either Acapulco or a clean breach.

So there he was, bound and committed to adultery no less irrevocably than Gandhi had been bound and committed to nonviolence and prison and assassination, but, one may suspect, with more and deeper misgivings. Misgivings which the event had wholly justified. For, though poor Bob didn't actually tell me what had happened at Acapulco, the fact that Elaine was now, as he put it, "acting strangely" and had been seen several times in the company of that unspeakable Moldavian baron, whose name I have fortunately forgotten, seemed to tell the whole ludicrous and pathetic story. And meanwhile Miriam had not only refused to give him a divorce: she had taken the opportunity of Bob's absence and her possession of his power of attorney to have the title to the ranch, the two cars, the four apartment houses, the corner lots at Palm Springs and all the securities transferred from his name to hers. And meanwhile he owed thirty-three thousand dollars to the Government for arrears of income tax. But when he asked his producer for that extra two hundred and fifty dollars a week which had been as good as promised him, there was only a long and pregnant silence.

"What about it, Lou?"

Measuring his words with a solemn emphasis, Lou Lublin gave his answer.

"Bob," he said, "in this Studio, at this time, not even Jesus Christ himself could get a raise."

The tone was friendly; but when Bob tried to insist, Lou had banged his desk and told him that he was being un-American. That finished it.

Bob talked on. But what a subject, I was thinking, for a great religious painting! Christ before Lublin, begging for a raise of only two hundred and fifty bucks a week and being turned down flat. It would be one of Rembrandt's favourite themes, drawn, etched, painted a score of times. Jesus turning sadly away into the darkness of unpaid income tax, while in the golden spotlight, glittering with gems and metallic highlights, Lou in an enormous turban still chuckled triumphantly over what he had done to the Man of Sorrows.

And then there would be Breughel's version of the subject. A great synoptic view of the entire Studio; a three-million-dollar musical in full production, with every technical detail faithfully reproduced; two or three thousand figures, all perfectly characterised; and in the bottom right-hand corner long search would finally reveal a Lublin, no bigger than a grasshopper, heaping contumely upon an even tinier Jesus.

"But I've had an absolutely stunning idea for an original," Bob was saying with that optimistic enthusiasm which is the desperate man's alternative to suicide. "My agent's absolutely crazy about it — thinks I ought to be able to sell it for fifty or sixty thousand."

He started to tell the story.

Still thinking of Christ before Lublin, I visualised the scene as Piero would have painted it — the composition, luminously explicit, an equation in balanced voids and solids, in harmonising and contrasting hues; the figures in adamantine repose. Lou and his assistant producers would all be wearing those Pharaonic headdresses, those huge inverted cones of white or coloured felt, which in Piero's world serve the double purpose of emphasising the solid-geometrical nature of the human body and the outlandishness of Orientals. For all their silken softness, the folds of every garment would have the inevitability and definitiveness of syllogisms carved in porphyry and throughout the whole we should feel the all-pervading presence of Plato's God, forever mathematizing chaos into the order and beauty of art.

But from the Parthenon and the Timaeus a specious logic leads to the tyranny which, in the Republic, is held up as the ideal form of government. In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet — the scientific poet — of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard as inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favourite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection. And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered and from morning till night a million school-teachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.

"And after all," Bob was saying, "there's no reason why a movie shouldn't be a work of art. It's this damned commercialism. . ."

He spoke with all the righteous indignation of an ungifted artist denouncing the scapegoat whom he has chosen to take the blame for the lamentable consequences of his own lack of talent.

"Do you think Gandhi was interested in art?" I asked.

"Gandhi? No, of course not."

"I think you're right," I agreed. "Neither in art nor in science. And that's why we killed him."

"We?"

"Yes, we. The intelligent, the active, the forward-looking, the believers in Order and Perfection. Whereas Gandhi was a reactionary who believed only in people. Squalid little individuals governing themselves, village by village, and worshiping the Brahman who is also Atman. It was intolerable. No wonder we bumped

him off."

But even as I spoke I was thinking that that wasn't the whole story. The whole story included an inconsistency, almost a betrayal. This man who believed only in people had got himself involved in the subhuman mass-madness of nationalism, in the would-be super-human, but actually diabolic, institutions of the nation-state. He got himself involved in these things, imagining that he could mitigate the madness and convert what was satanic in the state to something like humanity.  But nationalism and the politics of power had proved too much for him. It is not at the centre, not from within the organisation, that the saint can cure our regimented insanity; it is only from without, at the periphery. If he makes himself a part of the machine, in which the collective madness is incarnated, one or the other of two things is bound to happen. Either he remains himself, in which case the machine will use him as long as it can and, when he becomes unusable, reject or destroy him. Or he will be transformed into the likeness of the mechanism with and against which he works, and in this case we shall see Holy Inquisitions and alliances with any tyrant prepared to guarantee ecclesiastical privileges.

"Well, to get back to their disgusting commercialism," Bob said at last. "Let me give you an example. . ."

But I was thinking that the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence. Athena, the patroness of the arts, is also the goddess of scientific warfare, the heavenly Chief of every General Staff. We killed him because, after having briefly (and fatally) played the political game, he refused any longer to go on dreaming our dream of a national Order, a social and economic Beauty; because he tried to bring us back to the concrete and cosmic facts of real people and the inner Light.

The headlines I had seen that morning were parables; the event they recorded, an allegory and a prophecy. In that symbolic act, we who so longed for peace had rejected the only possible means to peace and had issued a warning to all who, in the future, might advocate any courses but those which lead inevitably to war.

"Well, if you've finished your coffee," said Bob, "let's go."

We rose and walked out into the sunshine. Bob took my arm and squeezed it.

"You've been enormously helpful," he assured me again.

"I wish I could believe it, Bob."

"But it's true, it's true."

And perhaps it was true, in the sense that stirring the mess before a sympathetic public made him feel better, more like the Romantics.

We walked on for a little in silence — past the Projection Rooms and between the Churrigueresque bungalows of the executives. Over the entrance to the largest of them a great bronze plaque bore the inscription, Lou Lublin Productions.

"What about that salary raise?" I asked. "Shall we go in and have another shot at it?"

Rob uttered a rueful little laugh, and there was another silence. When at last he spoke, it was in a pensive tone.

"Too bad about old Gandhi," he said. "I suppose his great secret was not wanting anything for himself."

"Yes, I suppose that was one of the secrets."

"I wish to God I didn't want things so much."

"Same here," I fervently concurred.

"And when you finally get what you want, it's never what you thought it was going to be."

Bob sighed and relapsed into silence. He was thinking, no doubt, of Acapulco, of the horrible necessity of passing from the chronic to the acute, from the vaguely verbal to the all too definitely and concretely carnal.

We emerged from the street of executive bungalows, crossed a parking lot and entered a canyon between towering sound stages. A tractor passed, pulling a low trailer, on which was the bottom half of the west door of a thirteenth-century Italian cathedral.

"That's for 'Catherine of Siena.' "

"What's that?"

"Hedda Boddy's new picture. I worked on the script two years ago. Then they gave it to Streicher. And after that it was rewritten by the OToole-Menendez-Boguslavsky team. It's lousy."

Another trailer rattled past with the upper half of the cathedral door and a pulpit by Niccolo Pisano.

"When you come to think of it," I said, "she's very like Gandhi in some ways."

"Who? Hedda?"

"No, Catherine."

"Oh, I see. I thought you were talking about the loincloth."

"I was talking about saints in politics," I said. "They didn't actually lynch her, of course; but that was only because she died too young. The consequences of her politics hadn't had time to show up. Do you go into all that in the script?"

Bob shook his head.

"Too depressing," he said. "The public likes its stars to be successful. Besides, how can you talk about church politics? It would certainly be anti-Catholic and might easily become un-American. No, we play safe — concentrate on the boy she dictated her letters to. He's wildly in love — but it's all sublimated and spiritual, and after she's dead he goes into a hermitage and prays in front of her picture. And then there's the other boy who actually made passes at her. It's mentioned in her letters. We play that for all its worth. They're still hoping to be able to sign up Humphrey. . ."

A loud hooting made us both jump.

"Look out!"

Bob caught my arm and pulled me back. From the courtyard in the rear of the Story Department a two-ton truck emerged into the roadway.

"Why don't you look where you're going?" shouted the driver as he passed.

"Idiot!" Bob yelled back; then, turning to me, "Do you see what it's loaded with?" he asked. "Scripts." He shook his head. "Taking them to the incinerator. Which is where they belong. A million dollars worth of literature." He laughed with melodramatic bitterness.

Twenty yards up the road, the truck swung sharply to the right. Its speed must have been excessive; centrifugally propelled, half a dozen of the topmost scripts spilled out into the road. Like prisoners of the Inquisition, I thought, making a miraculous escape on the way to the stake.

"The man can't drive," Bob was grumbling. "One of these days he'll kill somebody."

"But meanwhile let's see who's been saved."

I picked up the nearest of the scripts. " 'A Miss is as Good as a Male, Screenplay by Albertine Krebs.' "

Bob remembered it. It stank. "Well, what about 'Amanda'?" I turned over the pages. "It must have been a musical. Here's some poetry.

" 'Amelia needs a meal,

But Amanda needs a man. . ."

Bob wouldn't let me go on.

"Don't, don't! It made four and a half million during the Battle of the Bulge."

I dropped "Amanda" and picked up another of the spread-eagled volumes. This one, I noticed, was bound in green, not in the Studio's standard crimson.

" 'Ape and Essence,' " I read aloud from the hand-lettered front cover.

" 'Ape and Essence'?" Bob repeated in some surprise.

I turned to the flyleaf.

" 'An original Treatment by William Tallis, Cottonwood Ranch, Murcia, California.' And here's a note in pencil. 'Rejection slip sent 11-26-47. No self addressed envelope. For the Incinerator' — twice underlined."

"They get thousands of these things," Bob explained.

Meanwhile I was looking into the body of the script.

"More poetry."

"Christ!" said Bob in a tone of disgust.

" 'Surely it's obvious,' " I began reading:

"'Surely it's obvious.

Doesn't every schoolboy know it?

Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man's.

Papio's procurer, bursar to baboons,

Reason comes running, eager to ratify;

Comes, a catch-fart with Philosophy, truckling to tyrants;

Comes, a pimp for Prussia, with Hegel's Patent History;

Comes with Medicine to administer the Ape-King's aphrodisiac;

Comes, rhyming and with Rhetoric, to write his orations;

Comes with the Calculate to aim his rockets

Accurately at the orphanage across the ocean;

Comes, having aimed, with incense to impetrate

Our Lady devoutly for a direct hit.'"

There was a silence. We looked at one another questioningly.

"What do you think of it?" Bob said at last.

I shrugged my shoulders. I really didn't know.

"Anyhow, don't throw it away," he went on. "I want to see what the rest is like."

We resumed our walk, turned a final corner and there, a Franciscan convent among palm trees, was the Writers' Building.

"Tallis," Bob was saying to himself, as we entered, "William Tallis. . ." He shook his head. "Never heard of him. And anyhow, where's Murcia?"

The following Sunday we knew the answer — knew it not merely in theory and on the map, but experimentally, by going there, at eighty miles an hour, in Bob's (or rather Miriam's) Buick convertible. Murcia, California, was two red gasoline pumps and a very small grocery store on the southwestern fringe of the Mojave desert.

The long drought had broken two days before. The sky was still overcast and a cold wind blew steadily from the west. Ghostly under their roof of slate-coloured cloud, the San Gabriel mountains were white with newly fallen snow. But to the north, far out in the desert, the sun was shining in a long narrow strip of golden light. All around us were the soft rich greys and silvers, the pale golds and russets of the desert vegetation — sagebrush, burrobrush, bunch grass and buckwheat, with here and there a strangely gesticulating Joshua tree, rough barked, or furred with dry prickles, and tufted at the end of its many-elbowed arms with thick clusters of green metallic spikes.

An old deaf man, at whom we had to shout our questions, at last understood what we were talking about. Cottonwood Ranch — of course he knew it. Take that dirt road there; drive south for a mile; then turn east, follow the irrigation ditch for another three quarters of a mile, and there it was. The old man wanted to tell us much more about the place; but Bob was too impatient to listen. He threw the car into gear and we were off.

Along the irrigation ditch the cottonwoods and willows were aliens, clinging precariously, in the midst of those tough ascetic lives of the desert, to another, easier, more voluptuous mode of being. They were leafless now, the mere skeletons of trees, white against the sky; but one could imagine how intense, under the fierce clear sun, would be the emerald of their young leaves three months from now.

The car, which was being driven much too fast, crashed heavily into an unexpected dip. Bob swore.

"Why any man in his senses should choose to live at the end of a road like this, I can't imagine."

"Perhaps he takes it a little more slowly," I ventured to suggest.

Bob did not deign so much as to glance at me. The car rattled on at undiminished speed. I tried to concentrate on the view.

Out there, on the floor of the desert, there had been a noiseless, but almost explosive transformation. The clouds had shifted and the sun was now shining on the nearest of those abrupt and jagged buttes, which rose so inexplicably, like islands, out of the enormous plain. A moment before they had been black and dead. Now suddenly they had come to life between a shadowed foreground and a background of cloudy darkness. They shone as if with their own incandescence.

I touched Bob's arm and pointed.

"Now do you understand why Tallis chooses to live at the end of this road?"

He took a quick look, swerved round a fallen Joshua tree, looked again for a fraction of a second and brought his eyes back to the road.

"It reminds me of that etching by Goya — you know the one. The woman riding a stallion, and the animal's turning its head and has her dress between its teeth — trying to pull her down, trying to tear the clothes off her. And she's laughing like a maniac, in a frenzy of pleasure. And in the background there's a plain, with buttes sticking out of it, just like here. Only if you look carefully at Goya's buttes, you see that they're really crouching animals, half rats, half lizards — as big as mountains. I bought a reproduction of it for Elaine."

But Elaine, I reflected in the ensuing silence, hadn't taken the hint. She had allowed the stallion to drag her to the ground; she had lain there, laughing and laughing, uncontrollably, while the big teeth ripped at her bodice, tore the skirt to shreds, grazing the soft skin beneath with a fearful but delicious threat, with the tingling imminence of pain. And then, at Acapulco, those huge rat-lizards had stirred out of their stony sleep, and suddenly poor old Bob had found himself surrounded, not by deliciously swooning Graces, not by the laughing troop of rosy-bottomed Cupids, but by monsters.

But meanwhile we had reached our destination. Between the trees along the ditch I saw a white frame house under an enormous cottonwood, with a windmill to one side of it, a corrugated iron barn to the other. The gate was closed. Bob stopped the car and we got out. A white board had been nailed to the gatepost. On it an unskilled hand had painted a long inscription in vermilion.

The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace,

     The prurient ape's defiling touch:

And do you like the human race?

     No, not much.

THIS  MEANS  YOU,  KEEP  OUT.

"Well, we've evidently come to the right place," I said.

Bob nodded. We opened the gate, walked across a wide expanse of beaten earth and knocked at the door of the house. It was opened almost immediately by a stout elderly woman in spectacles, wearing a flowered blue cotton dress and a very old red jacket. She gave us a friendly smile.

"Car broken down?" she enquired.

We shook our heads and Bob explained that we had come to see Mr. Tallis.

"Mr. Tallis?"

The smile faded from her face; she looked grave and shook her head. "Didn't you know?" she said. "Mr. Tallis passed on six weeks ago."

"Do you mean, he's dead?"

"Passed on," she insisted, then launched out into her story.

Mr. Tallis had rented the house for a year. She and her husband went to live in the little old cabin behind the barn. It only had an outside toilet but they had been used to that back in North Dakota, and luckily it had been a warm winter. Anyhow they were glad of the money, what with prices the way they were nowadays; and Mr. Tallis couldn't have been pleasanter, once you understood that he liked his privacy.

"I suppose it was he who put up that sign on the gate?"

The old lady nodded and said that it was kind of cute; she meant to leave it there.

"Had he been sick for a long time?" I asked.

"Not sick at all," she answered. "Though he always did say he had heart trouble."

And that was why he had passed on. In the bathroom. She found him there one morning, when she came to bring him his quart of milk and a dozen eggs from the store. Stone cold. He must have laid there all night. She had never had such a shock in all her life. And then what a commotion on account of there not being any relatives that anybody knew about! The doctor was called and then the sheriff, and there had to be a court order before the poor man could even be buried, much less embalmed. And then all the books and papers and clothes had to be packed up and seals put on the boxes, and everything stored somewhere in Los Angeles, just in case there should be an heir somewhere. Well, now she and her husband were back in the house, and she felt rather badly about it, because poor Mr. Tallis still had four months of his lease to run and he'd paid everything in advance. But of course in one way she was thankful, now that the rain and snow had come at last — on account of the toilet being inside the house, not outside, like when they were living in the cabin. She paused for breath. Bob and I exchanged glances. "Well, in the circumstances," I said, "I think we'd better be going."

But the old lady wouldn't hear of it. "Come in," she insisted, "come in." We hesitated; then, accepting her invitation, followed her through a tiny entrance lobby into the living room. An oil stove was burning in a corner of the room; the air was hot and an almost tangible smell of fried food and nappies filled the house. A little old man like a leprechaun was seated in a rocking chair near the window, reading the Sunday comics. Near him a pale, preoccupied-looking young girl — she couldn't have been more than seventeen — was holding a baby in one arm and, with the other hand, buttoning her pink blouse. The child belched; a bubble of milk appeared at the corner of its mouth. The young mother left the final button undone and tenderly wiped the pouting lips. Through the open door of another room came the sound of a fresh soprano voice singing, "Now is the Hour," to the accompaniment of a guitar.

"This is my husband," said the old lady. "Mr. Coulton."

"Pleased to meet you," said the leprechaun, without looking up from his comics.

"And this is our granddaughter, Katie. She got married last year."

"So I see," said Bob. He bowed to the girl and gave her one of those fascinating smiles, for which he was so famous.

Katie looked at him as though he were merely a piece of furniture; then, fastening that final button, she turned without a word and started to climb the steep stairs that led to the upper floor.

"And these," Mrs. Coulton went on, indicating Bob and myself, "are two friends of Mr. Tallis."

We had to explain that we weren't precisely friends. All we knew of Mr. Tallis was his work; but that had interested us so much that we had come here, hoping to make his acquaintance — only to learn the tragic news of his death.

Mr. Coulton looked up from his paper.

"Sixty-six," he said. "That's all he was. I'm seventy-two myself. Seventy-two last October."

He uttered the triumphant little laugh of one who has scored a victory, then returned to Flash Gordon — Flash the invulnerable, Flash the immortal, Flash the perpetual knight errant to girls, not as they lamentably are, but as the idealists of the brassiere industry proclaim that they ought to be.

"I happened to see what Mr. Tallis had sent in to our Studio," said Bob.

Again the leprechaun looked up.

"You're in the movies?" he enquired.

Bob admitted that he was.

In the next room the music broke off suddenly in the middle of a phrase.

"One of those big shots?" Mr. Coulton enquired.

With the most charming false modesty, Bob assured him that he was only a writer who occasionally dabbled in directing.

The leprechaun nodded slowly.

"I see in the paper where that guy Goldwyn says all the big shots got to take a fifty per cent cut in their salary."

His eyes twinkled gleefully, once again he uttered his triumphant little laugh. Then abruptly disinteresting himself from reality, he returned to his myths.

Christ before Lublin! I tried to change the painful subject by asking Mrs. Coulton whether she had known that Tallis was interested in the movies. But as I spoke a sound of footsteps in the inner room distracted her attention.

I turned my head. In the doorway, dressed in a black sweater and a tartan skirt there stood — who? Lady Hamilton at sixteen, Ninon de Lenclos when she lost her virginity to Coligny, la petite Morphil, Anna Karenina in the schoolroom.

"This is Rosie," said Mrs. Coulton proudly, "our other granddaughter. Rosie's studying singing," she confided to Bob. "She wants to get into the movies."

"But how interesting!" cried Bob enthusiastically, as he rose and shook hands with the future Lady Hamilton.

"Maybe you could give her some advice," said the doting grandmother.

"I'd be only too happy. . ."

"Fetch another chair, Rosie."

The girl raised her eyelids and gave Bob a brief but intense look. "Unless you don't mind sitting in the kitchen," she said.

"Of course not!"

They vanished together into the inner room. Looking out of the window, I saw that the buttes were again in shadow. The rat-lizards had closed their eyes and were shamming death — but only to lull their victim into a sense of false security.

"It's more than luck," Mrs. Coulton was saying, "it's Providence. A big shot in the movies coming here, just when Rosie needs a helping hand."

"Just when movies are going to fold up like vaudeville," said the leprechaun without raising his eyes from the page before him.

"What makes you say those things?"

"It's not me that says them," the old man answered. "It's that Goldwyn guy."

From the kitchen came the sound of a startlingly childish laugh. Bob was evidently making headway. I foresaw another trip to Acapulco, with consequences even more disastrous than the first.

Innocently the procuress, Mrs. Coulton smiled with pleasure.

"I like your friend," she said. "Gets on well with kids. None of that stuffed shirt business."

I accepted the implied rebuke without comment and asked her again if she had known that Mr. Tallis was interested in movies.

She nodded. Yes, he'd told her that he was sending something to one of the Studios. He wanted to make some money. Not for himself; for though he'd lost most of what he once had, there was still enough to live on. No, he wanted some extra money to send to Europe. He'd been married to a German girl, way back, before the First World War. Then they'd been divorced and she had stayed on in Germany with the baby. And now there wasn't anybody left but a granddaughter. Mr. Tallis wanted to bring her over here; but the people at Washington wouldn't let him. So the next best thing was to send her a lot of money so she could eat properly and finish her education. That was why he'd written that thing for the movies.

Her words suddenly reminded me of something in Tallis's script — something about children in postwar Europe prostituting themselves for bars of chocolate. The granddaughter — had she perhaps been one of those children? "Ich give you Schokolade, du give me Liebe. Understand?" They understood only too well. One Hershey bar now; two more afterward.

"What happened to the wife?" I asked. "And the granddaughter's parents?"

"They passed on," said Mrs. Coulton. "I guess they were Jewish, or something."

"Mind you," said the leprechaun suddenly, "I don't have anything against Jews. But all the same. . ." He paused. "Maybe Hitler wasn't so dumb after all."

This time, I could see, it was to the Katzenjammer Kids that he returned.

Another peal of childish laughter broke out in the kitchen. Lady Hamilton at sixteen sounded as though she were about eleven. And yet how mature, how technically perfect had been the look with which she greeted Bob! Obviously, the most disquieting fact about Rosie was that she was simultaneously innocent and knowing, a calculating adventuress and a pigtailed schoolgirl.

"He married again," the old lady went on, ignoring both the giggle and the anti-Semitism. "Someone on the stage. He told me the name, but I've forgotten it. Anyhow it didn't last long. She went off with some other fellow. I say it served him right for going off with her when he had a wife back there in Germany. I don't think it's right, all this divorcing and marrying somebody else's husband."

In the ensuing silence I fabricated a whole biography for this man I had never seen. The young New Englander of good family. Carefully educated, but not to the point of pedantry. Naturally gifted, but not so overwhelmingly as to make him wish to exchange a life of leisure for the fatigues of professional authorship. From Harvard he had gone on to Europe, had lived gracefully, had known the best people everywhere. And then — in Munich, I felt sure — he had fallen in love. I visualised the girl, wearing the German equivalent of Liberty dresses — the daughter of some successful artist or patron of the arts. One of those almost disembodied, those as it were floating products of Wilhelmine wealth and culture; a being at once vague and intense, fascinatingly unpredictable and maddeningly idealistic, tief and German. Tallis had fallen in love, had married, had fathered a child in spite of his wife's frigidity, had been almost asphyxiated by the oppressive soulfulness of the domestic atmosphere. How fresh and healthy, by comparison, had seemed the air of Paris and the personal ambience of that young Broadway actress whom he had met vacationing there!

La belle Americaine,

Qui rend les hommes fous,

Dans deux ou trois semaines

Partira pour Corfou.

But this one didn't leave for Corfu — or if she did, it was in Tallis's company. And she wasn't frigid, she didn't float, she was neither vague, nor intense, neither deep, nor soulful, nor an art snob. What she was, unfortunately, was a bit of a bitch. And that bit had grown larger with the passage of the years. By the time he divorced her, it had become the entire animal.

Looking back from the vantage point of 1947, the Tallis of my imagination could see precisely what he had done: for the sake of a physical pleasure and the simultaneous excitement and satisfaction of an erotic imagination, he had condemned a wife and a daughter to death at the hands of maniacs, and a granddaughter to the caresses of any soldier or black marketeer with a pocketful of sweetmeats or the price of a decent meal.

Romantic fancies! I turned to Mrs. Coulton.

"Well, I wish I'd known him," I said.

"You'd have liked him," she assured me. "We all liked Mr. Tallis. I'll tell you something," she confided. "Every time I make the trip to Lancaster for the Ladies' Bridge Club, I go to the cemetery, just to visit with him."

"And I bet he hates it," said the leprechaun.

"Now, Elmer," his wife protested.

"But I heard him say it," Mr. Coulton insisted. "Time and again. 'If I die here,' he says, 'I want to be buried out in the desert.' "

"He wrote as much in that script he sent to the Studio," I said.

"He did?" Mrs. Coulton's tone was one of incredulity.

"Yes, he even describes the grave he meant to be buried in. All by itself, under a Joshua tree."

"I could have told him it wasn't legal," said the leprechaun. "Not since the morticians lobbied that bill through the legislature at Sacramento. I knew a man that had to be dug up twenty years after he was buried-way out there behind the buttes." He waved a hand in the direction of Goya's saurian rats. "It cost his nephew three hundred dollars by the time he was all through."

He chuckled at the recollection.

"I wouldn't want to be buried in the desert," said his wife emphatically.

"Why not?"

"Too lonely," she answered. "I'd hate it."

While I was wondering what to say next, the pale young mother came down the stairs carrying a nappy. She stopped for a moment to look in at the kitchen.

"Listen, Rosie," she said in a low, angry voice, "It's time you did some work for a change."

Then she turned and walked towards the entrance lobby, where an open door revealed the modern conveniences of that indoor bathroom.

"He's got diarrhoea again," she said bitterly, as she passed her grandmother.

Flushed, her eyes bright with excitement, the future Lady Hamilton emerged from the kitchen. Behind her, in the doorway, stood the future Hamilton, busily imagining that he was going to be Lord Nelson.

"Grandma," the girl announced, "Mr. Briggs thinks he can arrange for me to have a screen test."

The idiot! I got up.

"Time we were going, Bob," I said, knowing that it was already too late.

From the half-open door of the bathroom came the squelchy sound of nappies being rinsed in the toilet bowl.

"Listen!" I whispered to Bob as we passed.

"Listen to what?" he asked.

I shrugged my shoulders. Ears have they, neither do they hear.

Well, that was the nearest we ever got to Tallis in the flesh. In what follows the reader can discover the reflection of his mind. I print the text of "Ape and Essence" as I found it, without change and without comment.

II - The Script

Titles, credits and finally, to the accompaniment of trumpets and a chorus of triumphant angels, the name of the PRODUCER.

The music changes its character, and if Debussy were alive to write it, how delicate it would be, how aristocratic, how flawlessly pure of all Wagnerian lubricity and bumptiousness, all Straussian vulgarity! For here on the screen, in something better than Technicolour, it is the hour before sunrise. Night seems to linger in the darkness of an almost unruffled sea; but from the fringes of the sky a transparent pallor mounts from green through deepening blue to the zenith. In the east the morning star is still visible.

NARRATOR

Beauty inexpressible, peace beyond understanding. . .

But, alas, on our screen

This emblem of an emblem

Will probably look like

Mrs. Somebody's illustration

To a poem by Ella

Wheeler Wilcox.

Out of the sublime in Nature

Art all too often manufactures

Only the ludicrous.

But the risk must be run;

For you there, you in the audience,

Somehow and at any price,

Wilcox or worse,

Somehow you must be reminded

Be induced to remember,

Be implored to be willing to

Understand what's What.

As the Narrator speaks, we fade out of our emblem of an emblem of Eternity into the interior of a picture palace filled to capacity. The light grows a little less dim and suddenly we become aware that the audience is composed entirely of well-dressed baboons of both sexes and of all ages from first to second childhood.

NARRATOR

But man, proud man,

Drest in a little brief authority —

Most ignorant of what he is most assur'd.

His glassy essence — like an angry ape,

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As make the angels weep.

Cut to the screen, at which the apes are so attentively gazing. In a setting such as only Semiramis or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer could have imagined we see a bosomy young female baboon, in a shell-pink evening gown, her mouth painted purple, her muzzle powdered mauve, her fiery red eyes ringed with mascara. Swaying as voluptuously as the shortness of her hind legs will permit her to do, she walks onto the brightly illuminated stage of a night club and, to the clapping of two or three hundred pairs of hairy hands, appreaches the Louis XV microphone. Behind her, on all fours and secured by a light steel chain attached to a dog collar, comes Michael Faraday.

NARRATOR

"Most ignorant of what he is most assur'd . . ." And I need hardly add that what we call knowledge is merely another form of Ignorance — highly organised, of course, and eminently scientific, but for that very reason all the more complete, all the more productive of angry apes. When Ignorance was merely ignorance, we were the equivalents of lemurs, marmosets and howler monkeys. Today, thanks to that Higher Ignorance which is our knowledge, man's stature has increased to such an extent that the least among us is now a baboon, the greatest an orangutan or even, if he takes rank as a Saviour of Society, a true Gorilla.

Meanwhile the baboon-girl has reached the microphone. Turning her head, she catches sight of Faraday on his knees, in the act of straightening his bent and aching back.

"Down, sir, down!"

The tone is peremptory; she gives the old man a cut with her coral-headed riding switch. Faraday winces and obeys, the apes in the audience laugh delightedly. She blows them a kiss, then, drawing the microphone toward her, she bares her formidable teeth and starts to sing, in an expiring bedroom contralto, the latest popular success.

Love, Love, Love —

Love's the very essence

Of everything I think, of everything I do.

Give me, Give me, Give me,

Give me detumescence.

That means you.

Close-up of Faraday's face, as it registers astonishment, disgust, indignation and, finally, such shame and anguish that tears begin to flow down the furrowed cheeks.

Montage shots of the Folks in Radio Land, listening in.

A stout baboon housewife frying sausages, while the loudspeaker brings her the imaginary fulfilment and real exacerbation of her most unavowable wishes.

A baboon baby standing up in its cot, reaching over to the portable on the commode and dialling the promise of detumescence.

A middle-aged baboon financier, interrupting his reading of the stock market news to listen, with closed eyes and a smile of ecstasy. Give me, give me, give me, give me.

Two baboon teen-agers, fumbling to music in a parked car. "That mean you — ou." Close-up of mouths and paws.

Cut back to Faraday's tears. The singer turns, catches sight of his agonised face, utters a cry of rage and starts to beat him, blow after savage blow, while the audience applauds tumultuously. The gold and jasper walls of the night club evaporate and for a moment we see the figures of the ape and her captive intellect silhouetted against the dawning twilight of our first sequence. Then these too fade out, and there is only the emblem of an emblem of Eternity.

NARRATOR

The sea, the bright planet, the boundless crystal of the sky — surely you remember them! Surely! Or can it be that you have forgotten, that you have never even discovered what lies beyond the mental Zoo and the inner Asylum and all that Broadway of imaginary theatres, in which the only name in lights is always your own?

The Camera moves across the sky, and now the black serrated shape of a rocky island breaks the line of the horizon. Sailing past the island is a large, four-masted schooner. We approach, we see that tie ship flies the flag of New Zealand and is named the Canterbury. Her captain and a group of passengers are at the rail, staring intently toward the east. We look through their binoculars and discover a line of barren coast. Then, almost suddenly, the sun comes up behind the silhouette of distant mountains.

NARRATOR

This new bright day is the twentieth of February, 2108, and these men and women are members of the New Zealand Rediscovery Expedition to North America. Spared by the belligerents of the Third World War — not, I need hardly say, for any humanitarian reason, but simply because, like Equatorial Africa, it was too remote to be worth anybody's while to obliterate — New Zealand survived and even modestly flourished in an isolation which, because of the dangerously radioactive condition of the rest of the world, remained for more than a century almost absolute. Now that the danger is over, here come its first explorers, rediscovering America from the West. And meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the black men have been working their way down the Nile and across the Mediterranean. What splendid tribal dances in the bat-infested halls of the Mother of Parliaments! And the labyrinth of the Vatican — what a capital place in which to celebrate the lingering and complex rites of female circumcision! We all get precisely what we ask for.

The scene darkens; there is a noise of gunfire. When the lights come up again, there squats Dr. Albert Einstein, on a leash, behind a group of baboons in uniform.

The Camera moves across a narrow no-man's land of rubble, broken trees and corpses, and comes to rest on a second group of animals, wearing different decorations and under another flag, but with the same Dr. Albert Einstein, on an exactly similar string, squatting at the heels of their jack boots. Under the tousled aureole of hair, the good, innocent face wears an expression of pained bewilderment. The Camera travels back and forth from Einstein to Einstein. Close shots of the two identical faces, staring wistfully at each other between the polished leather boots of their respective masters.

On the sound track, the voice, the saxophones and cellos continue to yearn for detumescence.

"Is that you, Albert?" one of the Einsteins hesitantly enquires.

The other slowly nods his head.

"Albert, I'm afraid it is."

Overhead the flags of the opposing armies suddenly begin to stir in the freshening breeze. The coloured patterns open out, then fold in again upon themselves, are revealed and once more hidden.

NARRATOR

Vertical stripes, horizontal stripes, noughts and crosses, eagles and hammers. Mere arbitrary signs. But every reality to which a sign has been attached is thereby made subject to its sign. Goswami and Ali used to live at peace. But I got a flag, you got a flag, all Baboon-God's children got flags. So even Ali and Goswami got flags; and because of the flags it immediately became right and proper for the one with the foreskin to disembowel the one without a foreskin, and for the circumcised to shoot the uncircumcised, rape his wife and roast his children over slow fires.

But, meanwhile, above the bunting float the huge shapes of clouds, and beyond the clouds is that blue void which is an emblem of our glassy Essence, and at the foot of the flagstaff grows the wheat and the emerald green rice and the millet. Bread for the body and bread for the spirit. Our choice is between bread and bunting. And bunting, I need hardly add, is what we have almost unanimously chosen.

The Camera drops from the flags to the Einsteins and passes from the Einsteins to the much-decorated General Staffs in the background. All at once and simultaneously the two Field Marshalissimos shout an order. Immediately, from either side, appear baboon technicians, with fully motorised equipment for releasing aerosols. On the pressure tanks of one army are painted the words, super-tularemia, on those of their opponents, improved glanders, guaranteed 99.44% pure. Each group of technicians is accompanied by its mascot, Louis Pasteur, on a chain. On the Soundtrack there is a reminiscence of the baboon-girl. Give me, give me, give me, give me detumescence. . . . Then these voluptuous strains modulate into "Land of Hope and Glory," played by massed brass bands, and sung by a choir of fourteen thousand voices.

NARRATOR

What land, you ask? And I answer,

Any old land.

And the Glory, of course, is the Ape-King's,

As for the Hope —

Bless your little heart, there is no hope,

Only the almost infinite probability

Of consummating suddenly,

Or else by agonising inches,

The ultimate and irremediable

Detumescence.

Close shot of paws at the stopcocks; then the Camera draws back. Out of the pressure tanks two streams of yellow fog start to roll toward one another, sluggishly, across no-man's land.

NARRATOR

Glanders, my friends, Glanders — a disease of horses, not common among humans. But, never fear, Science can easily make it universal. And these are its symptoms. Violent pains in all the joints. Pustules over the whole body. Below the skin hard swellings, which finally burst and turn into sloughing ulcers. Meanwhile the mucous membrane of the nose becomes inflamed and exudes a copious discharge of stinking pus. Ulcers rapidly form within the nostrils and eat away the surrounding bone and cartilage. From the nose the infection passes to the eyes, mouth, throat and bronchial passages. Within three weeks most of the patients are dead. To see that all shall die has been the task of some of those brilliant young D.Sc's now in the employ of your government. And not of your government only: of all the other elected or self-appointed organisers of the world's collective schizophrenia. Biologists, pathologists, physiologists — here they are, after a hard day at the lab, coming home to their families. A hug from the sweet little wife. A romp with the children. A quiet dinner with friends, followed by an evening of chamber music or intelligent conversation about politics or philosophy. Then bed at eleven and the familiar ecstasies of married love. And in the morning, after orange juice and Grapenuts, off they go again to their job of discovering how yet greater numbers of families precisely like their own can be infected with a yet deadlier strain of bacillus mallei.

There is another yelp of command from the Marshalissimos. Among the booted apes in charge of either army's supply of Genius there is a violent cracking of whips, a tugging of leashes.

Close shot of the Einsteins as they try to resist.

"No, no. . . I can't."

"I tell you I can't."

"Disloyal!"

"Unpatriotic!"

"Filthy Communist!"

"Stinking bourgeois-Fascist!"

"Red Imperialist!"

"Capitalist-Monopolist!"

"Take that!"

"Take that!"

Kicked, whipped, half throttled, each of the Einsteins is finally dragged toward a kind of sentry box. Inside these boxes are instrument boards with dials, knobs and switches.

NARRATOR

Surely it's obvious.

Doesn't every schoolboy know it?

Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man's.

Papio's procurer, bursar to baboons,

Reason comes running, eager to ratify;

Comes, a catch-fart, with Philosophy, truckling to tyrants;

Comes, a pimp for Prussia, with Hegel's Patent History;

Comes with Medicine to administer the Ape-King's aphrodisiac;

Comes, rhyming and with Pihetoric, to write his orations;

Comes with the Calculus to aim his rockets

Accurately at the orphanage across the ocean;

Comes, having aimed, with incense to impetrate

Our Lady devoutly for a direct hit.

The brass bands give place to the most glutinous of Wurlitzers, "Land of Hope and Glory" to "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Followed by his very Reverend Dean and Chapter, the Right Reverend, the Baboon-Bishop of the Bronx advances majestic, his crozier in his jewelled paw, to pronounce benediction upon the two Field Marshalissimos and their patriotic proceedings.

NARRATOR

Church and State

Greed and Hate: —

Two Baboon-Persons in one Supreme Gorilla.

OMNES

Amen, amen.

THE BISHOP

In nomine Babuini. . . .

On the sound-track it is all vox humana and the angel voices of choristers.

"With the (dim) Cross of (pp) Jesus, (ff) going on before."

Huge paws hoist the Einsteins to their feet and, in a close-up, seize their wrists. Ape-guided, those fingers, which have written equations and played the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, close on the master switches and, with a horrified reluctance, slowly press them down. There is a little click, then a long silence which is broken at last by the voice of the Narrator.

NARRATOR

Even at supersonic speeds the missiles will take an appreciable time to reach their destination. So what do you say, boys, to a spot of breakfast while we're waiting for our Last Judgment!

The apes open their haversacks, throw some bread, a few carrots and two or three lumps of sugar to the Einsteins, then fall to themselves on rum and Bologna sausage.

We dissolve to the deck of the schooner, where the scientists of the Rediscovery Expedition are also breakfasting.

NARRATOR

And these are some of the survivors of that Judgment. Such nice people! And the civilization they represent — that's nice too. Nothing very exciting or spectacular of course. No Parthenons or Sistine Chapels, no Newtons or Mozarts or Shakespeares; but also no Ezzelinos, no Napoleons or Hitlers or Jay Goulds, no Inquisitions or NKVD's, no purges, pogroms or lynchings. No heights or abysses, but plenty of milk for the kids, and a reasonably high average IQ, and everything, in a quiet provincial way, thoroughly cosy and sensible and humane.

One of the men raises his binoculars and peers at the shore, now only a mile or two distant. Suddenly he utters an exclamation of delighted astonishment.

"Look!" He hands the glasses to one of his companions. "On the crest of the hill."

The other looks.

Telescopic shot of low hills. On the highest point of the ridge, three oil derricks stand silhouetted against the sky, like the equipment of a modernised and more efficient Calvary.

"Oil!" cries the second observer excitedly. "And the derricks are still standing."

"Still standing?"

There is general astonishment.

"That means," says old Professor Craigie, the geologist, "that there can't have been much of an explosion hereabouts."

"But you don't have to have explosions," explains his colleague from the Department of Nuclear Physics. "Radioactive gases do the job just as effectively and over much wider areas."

"You seem to forget the bacteria and the viruses," puts in Professor Grampian, the biologist. His tone is that of a man who feels that he has been slighted.

His young wife, who is only an anthropologist and so has nothing to contribute to the argument, contents herself with glaring angrily at the physicist.

Athletic in tweeds, but at the same time brightly intelligent behind her horn-rimmed glasses, Miss Ethel Hook, of the Department of Botany, reminds them that there was, almost certainly, a widespread employment of plant diseases. She turns for confirmation of what she says to her colleague, Dr. Poole, who nods approvingly.

"Diseases of food plants," he says in his professorial manner, "would have a long-range effect hardly less decisive than that produced by fissionable material or artificially induced pandemics. Consider, for example, the potato. . ."

"But why bother about any of this fancy stuff?" bluffly booms the engineer of the party, Dr. Cudworth. "Cut the aqueducts, and it's all over in a week. No drinky, no livey." Delighted by his own joke, he laughs enormously.

Meanwhile Dr. Schneeglock, the psychologist, sits listening with a smile of hardly disguised contempt.

"But why even bother about aqueducts?" he asks. "All you need do is just to threaten your neighbour with any of the weapons of mass destruction. Their own panic will do the rest. Remember what the psychological treatment did to New York, for example. The short-wave broadcasts from overseas, the headlines in the evening papers. And immediately there were eight millions of people trampling one another to death on the bridges and in the tunnels. And the survivors scattered through the countryside, like locusts, like a horde of plague-infected rats. Fouling the water supply. Spreading typhoid and diphtheria and venereal disease. Biting, clawing, looting, murdering, raping. Feeding on dead dogs and the corpses of children. Shot at sight by the farmers, bludgeoned by the police, machine-gunned by the State Guard, strung up by the Vigilantes. And the same thing was happening in Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Washington; in London, in Paris; in Bombay and Shanghai and Tokyo; in Moscow, in Kiev, in Stalingrad; in every capital, every manufacturing centre, every port, every railway junction, all over the world. Not a shot had been fired and civilization was already in ruins. Why the soldiers ever found it necessary to use their bombs, I really can't imagine."

NARRATOR

Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. What remains is the dumb or studiedly jocular desperation of one who is aware of the obscene Presence in the corner of the room and knows that the door is locked, that there aren't any windows. And now the thing bears down on him. He feels a hand on his sleeve, smells a stinking breath, as the executioner's assistant leans almost amorously toward him. "Your turn next, brother. Kindly step this way." And in an instant his quiet terror is transmuted into a frenzy as violent as it is futile. There is no longer a man among his fellow men, no longer a rational being speaking articulately to other rational beings; there is only a lacerated animal, screaming and struggling in the trap. For in the end fear casts out even a man's humanity. And fear, my good friends, fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life. Fear of the much touted technology which, while it raises our standard of living, increases the probability of our violently dying. Fear of the science which takes away with one hand even more than what it so profusely gives with the other. Fear of the demonstrably fatal institutions for which, in our suicidal loyalty, we are ready to kill and die. Fear of the Great Men whom we have raised, by popular acclaim, to a power which they use, inevitably, to murder and enslave us. Fear of the War we don't want and yet do everything we can to bring about.

As the Narrator speaks, we dissolve to the alfresco picnic of the baboons and their captive Einsteins. They eat and drink, with gusto, while the first two bars of "Onward Christian Soldiers" are repeated again and again, faster and faster, louder and louder. Suddenly the music is interrupted by the first of a succession of enormous explosions. Darkness. A long-drawn, deafening noise of crashing, rending, screaming, moaning. Then silence and increasing light, and once again it is the hour before sunrise, with the morning star and the delicate, pure music.

NARRATOR

Beauty inexpressible, peace beyond understanding. . .

Far off, from below the horizon, a column of rosy smoke pushes up into the sky, swells out into the likeness of an enormous toadstool and hangs there, eclipsing the solitary planet.

We dissolve again to the scene of the picnic. The baboons are all dead. Horribly disfigured by burns, the two Einsteins lie side by side under what remains of a flowering apple tree. Not far off a pressure tank is still oozing its Improved Glanders.

FIRST EINSTEIN

It's unjust, it isn't right. . .

SECOND EINSTEIN

We, who never did any harm to anybody;

FIRST EINSTEIN

We, who lived only for Truth.

NARRATOR

And that precisely is why you are dying in the murderous service of baboons. Pascal explained it all more than three hundred years ago. "We make an idol of truth; for truth without charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship." You lived for the worship of an idol. But, in the last analysis, the name of every idol is Moloch. So here you are, my friends, here you are.

Stirred by a sudden gust, the stagnant plague-fog noiselessly advances, sends a wreath of pus-coloured vapour swirling among the apple blossoms, then descends to engulf the two recumbent figures. A choking scream announces the death, by suicide, of twentieth-century science.

We dissolve to a point on the coast of Southern California, twenty miles or thereabouts due west of Los Angeles. The scientists of the Rediscovery Expedition are in the act of landing from a whaleboat. A huge sewer, shattered where it enters the sea, stands in the background.

NARRATOR

Parthenon, Coliseum —

Glory that was Greece, grandeur etcetera.

And there are all the others —

Thebes and Copan, Arezzo and Ajanta;

Bourges, taking heaven by violence,

And the Holy Wisdom, floating in repose.

But the glory that was Queen Victoria

Remains unquestionably the W.C.;

The grandeur that was Franklin Delano

Is this by far the biggest drainpipe ever —

Dry now and shattered, Ichabod, Ichabod;

And its freight of condoms (irrepressibly buoyant,

Like hope, like concupiscence) no longer whitens

This lonely beach with a galaxy as of windflowers

Or summer daisies.

Meanwhile the scientists, with Dr. Craigie at their head, have crossed the beach, scrambled up the low cliff and are making their way across the sandy and eroded plain toward the oil wells on the hills beyond.

The Camera holds on Dr. Poole, the Chief Botanist of the Expedition. Like a browsing sheep, he moves from plant to plant, examining flowers through his magnifying glass, putting away specimens in his collecting box, making notes in a little black book.

NARRATOR

Well, here he is, our hero, Dr. Alfred Poole D.Sc. Better known to his students and younger colleagues as Stagnant Poole. And the nickname, alas, is painfully apt. For though not unhandsome, as you see, though a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and by no means a fool, in the circumstances of practical life his intelligence seems to be only potential, his attractiveness no more than latent. It is as though he lived behind plate glass, could see and be seen, but never establish contact. And the fault, as Dr. Schneeglock of the Psychology Department is only too ready to tell you, the fault lies with that devoted and intensely widowed mother of his — that saint, that pillar of fortitude, that vampire, who still presides at his breakfast table and with her own hands launders his silk shirts and sacrificially darns his socks.

Miss Hook now enters the shot — enters it on a burst of enthusiasm.

"Isn't this exciting, Alfred?" she exclaims.

"Very," says Dr. Poole politely.

"Seeing Yucca gloriosa in its native habitat — who would have imagined that we'd ever get the chance? And Artemisia tridentata."

"There are still some flowers on the Artemisia," says Dr. Poole. "Do you notice anything unusual about them?"

Miss Hook examines them, and shakes her head.

"They're a great deal bigger than what's described in the old text books," he says in a tone of studiedly repressed excitement.

"A great deal bigger?" she repeats. Her face lights up. "Alfred, you don't think . . .?"

Dr. Poole nods.

"I'm ready to bet on it," he says. "Tetraploidy. Induced by irradiation with gamma rays."

"Oh, Alfred," she cries ecstatically.

NARRATOR

In her tweeds and her horn-rimmed spectacles Ethel Hook is one of those extraordinarily wholesome, amazingly efficient and intensely English girls to whom, unless one is oneself equally wholesome, equally English and even more efficient, one would so much rather not be married. Which is probably why, at thirty-five, Ethel is still without a husband. Still without a husband — but not, she dares to hope, for much longer. For though dear Alfred has not yet actually proposed, she knows (and knows that he knows) that his mother's dearest wish is for him to do so — and Alfred is the most dutiful of sons. Besides they have so much in common — botany, the University, the poetry of Wordsworth. She feels confident that before they get back to Auckland it will all be arranged — the simple ceremony with dear old Dr. Trilliams officiating, the honeymoon in the Southern Alps, the return to their sweet little house in Mount Eden, and then after eighteen months, the first baby. . .

Cut to the other members of the expedition, as they toil up the hill toward the oil wells. Professor Craigie, their leader, halts to mop his brow and to take stock of his charges.

"Where's Poole?" he asks. "And Ethel Hook?"

Somebody points and, in a long shot, we see the distant figures of the two botanists.

Cut back to Professor Craigie, who cups his hands around his mouth and shouts. "Poole, Poole!"

"Why don't you leave them to their little romance?" asks the genial Cudworth.

"Romance indeed!" Dr. Schneeglock snorts derisively.

"But she's obviously sweet on him."

"It takes two to make a romance."

"Trust a woman to get her man to pop the question."

"You might as well expect him to commit incest with his mother," says Dr. Schneeglock emphatically.

"Poole!" bellows Professor Craigie once more, and turning to the others, "I don't like people to lag behind," he says in a tone of irritation. "In a strange country. . . You never know."

He renews his shouting.

Cut back to Dr. Poole and Miss Hook. They hear the distant call, look up from their tetraploid Artemisia, wave their hands and start in pursuit of the others. Suddenly Dr. Poole catches sight of something that makes him cry aloud.

"Look!" He points a forefinger.

"What is it?"

"Echinocactus hexaedrophorus — and the most beautiful specimen."

Medium long shot from his viewpoint of a ruined bungalow among the sagebrush. Then a close shot of the cactus growing between two paving stones, near the front door. Cut back to Dr. Poole. From the leather sheath at his belt he draws a long, narrow-bladed trowel.

"You're not going to dig it up?"

His only answer is to walk over to where the cactus is growing and squat down beside it.

"Professor Craigie will be so cross," protests Miss Hook.

"Well then, run ahead and keep him quiet."

She looks at him for a few seconds with an expression of solicitude.

"I hate to leave you alone, Alfred."

"You talk as though I were five years old," he answers irritably. "Go ahead, I tell you."

He turns away and starts to dig.

Miss Hook does not immediately obey, but stands looking at him in silence for a little while longer.

NARRATOR

Tragedy is the farce that involves our sympathies, farce, the tragedy that happens to outsiders. Tweedy and breezy, wholesome and efficient, this object of the easiest kind of satire is also the subject of an Intimate Journal. What flaming sunsets she has seen and vainly attempted to describe! What velvety and voluptuous summer nights! What lyrically lovely days of springl And oh, the torrents of feeling, the temptations, the hopes, the passionate throbbing of the heart, the humiliating disappointments! And now, after all these years, after so many committee meetings attended, so many lectures delivered and examination papers corrected, now at last, moving in His mysterious way, God has made her, she feels, responsible for this helpless and unhappy man. And because he is unhappy and helpless, she loves him — not romantically of course, not as she loved that curly-headed scamp who, fifteen years ago, swept her off her feet and then married the daughter of that rich contractor, but genuinely none the less, with a strong, protective tenderness.

"All right," she says at last. "I'll go ahead. But promise you won't be long."

"Of course I won't be long."

She turns and walks away. Dr. Poole looks after her; then, with a sigh of relief at finding himself once more alone, resumes his digging.

NARRATOR

"Never," he is repeating to himself, "Never! Whatever mother may say." For though he respects Miss Hook as a botanist, relies on her as an organiser and admires her as a high-minded person, the idea of being made one flesh with her is as unthinkable as a violation of the Categorical Imperative.

Suddenly, from behind him, three villainous-looking men, black-bearded, dirty and ragged, emerge very quietly from out of the ruins of the house, stand poised for a moment, then throw themselves upon the unsuspecting botanist and, before he can so much as utter a cry, force a gag into his mouth, tie his hands behind his back and drag him down into a gully, out of sight of his companions.

We dissolve to a panoramic view of Southern California from fifty miles up in the stratosphere. As the Camera plummets downward, we hear the Narrator's voice.

NARRATOR

The sea and its clouds, the mountains glaucous-golden,

The valleys full of indigo darkness,

The drought of lion-coloured plains,

The rivers of pebbles and white sand.

And in the midst of them the City of the Angels.

Half a million houses,

Five thousand miles of streets,

Fifteen hundred thousand motor vehicles,

And more rubber goods than Akron,

More celluloid than the Soviets,

More Nylons than New Rochelle,

More brassieres than Buffalo,

More deodorants than Denver,

More oranges than anywhere,

With bigger and better girls —

The great Metrollopis of the West.

And now we are only five miles up and it becomes increasingly obvious that the great Metrollopis is a ghost town, that what was once the world's largest oasis is now its greatest agglomeration of ruins in a wasteland. Nothing moves in the streets. Dunes of sand have drifted across the concrete. The avenues of palms and pepper trees have left no trace.

The Camera comes down over a large rectangular graveyard, lying between the ferro-concrete towers of Hollywood and those of Wilshire Boulevard. We land, pass under an arched gateway, enjoy a trucking shot of mortuary gazebos. A baby pyramid. A Gothic sentry box. A marble sarcophagus surmounted by weeping seraphs. The more than life-size statue of Hedda Boddy — "affectionately known," reads the inscription on the pedestal, "as Public Sweetheart Number One. Hitch your wagon to a Star.'" We hitch and move on; and suddenly in the midst of all this desolation, here is a little group of human beings. There are four men, heavily bearded and more than a little dirty, and two young women, all of them busy with shovels in or around an opened grave and all dressed identically in shirts and trousers of tattered homespun. Over these rough garments each wears a small square apron upon which, in scarlet wool, is embroidered the word no. In addition to the aprons, the girls wear a round patch over either breast and, behind, a pair of somewhat larger patches on the seat of their trousers. Three unequivocal negatives greet us as they approach, two more, by way of Parthian shots, as they recede.

Overseeing the labourers from the roof of an adjacent mausoleum sits a man in his middle forties, tall, powerfully built, with the dark eyes and hawk nose of an Algerian corsair. A black curly beard emphasizes the moistness and redness of his full lips. Somewhat incongruously, he is dressed in a pale grey suit of mid-twentieth-century cut, a little too small for him. When we catch our first sight of him, he is absorbed in the paring of his nails.

Cut back to the gravediggers. One of them, the youngest and handsomest of the men, looks up from his shovelling, glances surreptitiously at the overseer on the roof and, seeing him busy with his nails, turns an intensely concupiscent look on the plump girl who stands, stooped over her spade, beside him. Close shot of the two prohibitory patches: no and again no, growing larger and larger the more longingly he looks. Cupped already for the deliciously imagined contact, his hand goes out, tentative, hesitant; then, with a jerk, as conscience abruptly gets the better of temptation, is withdrawn again. Biting his lip, the young man turns away and, with redoubled zeal, addresses himself once more to his digging.

Suddenly a spade strikes something hard. There is a cry of delight, a flurry of concerted activity. A moment later a handsome mahogany coffin is hoisted to the surface of the ground.

"Break it open."

"O.K., Chief."

We hear the creaking and cracking of rent wood.

"Man or woman?"

"Man."

"Fine! Spill him out."

With a yo-heave-ho they tilt the coffin and the corpse rolls out onto the sand. The eldest of the bearded gravediggers kneels down beside it and starts methodically to relieve the thing of its watch and jewellery.

NARRATOR

Thanks to the dry climate and the embalmer's art, what remains of the Managing Director of the Golden Rule Brewing Corporation looks as though it had been buried only yesterday. The cheeks are still pink with the rouge applied by the undertaker for the lying-in-state. Stitched into a perpetual smile, the upturned corners of the lips impart to the round, crumpet-like face the maddeningly enigmatic expression of a Madonna by Boltraffio.

Suddenly the lash of a dogwhip cuts across the shoulders of the kneeling gravedigger. The Camera pulls back to reveal the Chief impending, whip in hand, like the embodiment of divine Vengeance, from the height of his marble Sinai.

"Give back that ring."

"Which ring?" the man falters.

For answer the Chief administers two or three more cuts with the dog whip.

"No, no — please! Ow! I'll give it back. Stop!"

The culprit inserts two fingers into his mouth and after a little fumbling draws forth the handsome diamond ring which the deceased brewer bought for himself, when business was so hearteningly good during the Second World War.

"Put it there with the other things," commands the Chief and, as the man obeys, "Twenty-five lashes," he continues with grim relish, "that's what you're going to get this evening."

Blubbering, the man begs for indulgence — just for this once. Seeing that tomorrow is Belial Day. . . And after all he's old, he has worked faithfully all his life, has risen to the rank of a Deputy Supervisor. . . .

The Chief cuts him short.

"This is a Democracy," he says. "We're all equal before the Law. And the Law says that everything belongs to the Proletariat — in other words, it all goes to the State. And what's the penalty for robbing the State?" The man looks up at him in speechless misery. "What's the penalty?" the Chief bellows, raising his whip.

"Twenty-five lashes," comes the almost inaudible reply.

"Good! Well, that settles that, doesn't it? And now what are the clothes like?"

The younger and slimmer of the girls bends down and fingers the corpse's double-breasted black jacket.

"Nice stuff," she says. "And no stains. He hasn't leaked or anything."

"I'll try them on," says the Chief.

With some difficulty they divest the cadaver of its trousers, coat and shirt, then drop it back into the grave and shovel the earth back over its one-piece undergarment. Meanwhile the Chief takes the clothes, sniffs at them critically, then doffs the pearl-grey jacket which once belonged to the Production Manager of Western-Shakespeare Pictures Incorporated, and slips his arms into the more conservative tailoring that goes with malt liquors and the Golden Rule.

NARRATOR

Put yourself in his place. You may not know it, but a complete scribbler, or first card-engine, consists of a breast, or small swift, and two swifts, with the accompanying workers, strippers, fancies, doffers, etc. And if you don't have any carding machinery or power looms, if you don't have any electric motors to run them, or any dynamos to generate the electricity, or any turbines to turn the dynamos, or any coal to raise steam, or any blast furnaces to make steel — why then, obviously, you must depend for your fine cloth on the cemeteries of those who once enjoyed these advantages. And so long as the radioactivity persisted, there weren't even any cemeteries to exploit. For three generations the dwindling remnant of those who survived the consummation of technological progress lived precariously in the wilderness. It is only during the last thirty years that it has been safe for them to enjoy the buried remains of le comfort moderne.

Close shot of the Chief, grotesque in the borrowed jacket of a man whose arms were much shorter and whose belly was much larger than his own. The sound of approaching footsteps makes him turn his head.

In a long shot from his viewpoint we see Dr. Poole, his hands tied behind his back, trudging wearily through the sand. Behind him walk his three captors. Whenever he stumbles or slackens his pace, they prick him in the rear with needle-sharp yucca leaves and laugh uproariously to see him wince.

The Chief stares at them in astonished silence as they approach.

"What in Belial's name?" he brings out at last.

The little party comes to a halt at the foot of the mausoleum. The three members of Dr. Poole's escort bow to the Chief and tell their story. They had been fishing in their coracle off Redondo Beach; had suddenly seen a huge, strange ship coming out of the mist; had immediately paddled back to shore to escape detection. From the ruins of an old house they had watched the strangers land. Thirteen of them. And then this man had come wandering with a woman to the very threshold of their hiding place. The woman had gone away again and, while the man was grubbing in the dirt with a tiny spade, they had jumped on him from behind, gagged him, bound him and now had brought him here for questioning.

There is a long silence, broken finally by the Chief.

"Do you speak English?"

"Yes, I speak English," Dr. Poole stammers.

"Good. Untie him; hoist him up."

They hoist him — so unceremoniously that he lands on all fours at the Chiefs feet.

"Are you a priest?"

"A priest?" Dr. Poole echoes in apprehensive astonishment. He shakes his head.

"Then why don't you have a beard?"

"I. . . I shave."

"Oh, then you're not. . ." The Chief passes a finger across Dr. Poole's chin and cheek. "I see, I see. Get up."

Dr. Poole obeys.

"Where do you come from?"

"New Zealand, sir."

Dr. Poole swallows hard, wishes his mouth were less dry, his voice less tremulous with terror.

"New Zealand? Is that far?"

"Very far."

"You came in a big ship? With sails?"

Dr. Poole nods and adopting that lecture-room manner, which is always his refuge when personal contacts threaten to become too difficult, proceeds to explain why they weren't able to cross the Pacific under steam.

"There would have been no place to refuel. It's only for coastwise traffic that our shipping companies are able to make use of steamers."

"Steamers?" the Chief repeats, his face alight with interest. "You still have steamers? But that must mean you didn't have the Thing?"

Dr. Poole looks puzzled.

"I don't quite catch your meaning," he says. "What thing?"

"The Thing. You know — when He took over." Raising his hands to his forehead, he makes the sign of the horns with extended forefingers. Devoutly,

his subjects follow suit.

"You mean the Devil?" says Dr. Poole dubiously.

The other nods.

"But, but. . . I mean, really. . ."

NARRATOR

Our friend is a good Congregationalist, but, alas, on the liberal side. Which means that he has never given the Prince of this world his ontological due. To put it brutally, he doesn't believe in Him.

"Yes, He got control," the Chief explains. "He won the battle and took possession of everybody. That was when they did all this."

With a wide, comprehensive gesture he takes in the desolation that was once Los Angeles. Dr. Poole's expression brightens with understanding.

"Oh, I see. You mean the Third World War. No, we were lucky; we got off without a scratch. Owing to its peculiar geographical situation," he adds professorially, "New Zealand was of no strategic importance to. . ."

The Chief cuts short a promising lecture.

"Then you've still got trains?" he questions.

"Yes, we've still got trains," Dr. Poole answers, a little irritably. "But, as I was saying. . ."

"And the engines really work?"

"Of course they work. As I was saying. . ."

Startlingly the Chief lets out a whoop of delight and claps him on the shoulder.

"Then you can help us to get it all going again. Like in the good old days before. . ." He makes the sign of horns. "We'll have trains, real trains." And in an ecstasy of joyous anticipation, he draws Dr. Poole toward him, puts an arm round his neck and kisses him on both cheeks.

Shrinking with an embarrassment that is reinforced by disgust (for the great man seldom washes and is horribly foul-mouthed) Dr. Poole disengages himself.

"But I'm not an engineer," he protests. "I'm a botanist."

"What's that?"

"A botanist is a man who knows about plants."

"War plants?" the Chief asks hopefully.

"No, no, just plants. Things with leaves and stalks and flowers — though of course," he adds hastily, "one mustn't forget the cryptogams. And as a matter of fact the cryptogams are my special pets. New Zealand, as you probably know, is particularly rich in cryptogams. . ."

"But what about the engines?"

"Engines?" Dr. Poole repeats contemptuously. "I tell you, I don't know the difference between a steam turbine and a diesel."

"Then you can't do anything to help us get the trains running again?"

"Not a thing."

Without a word the Chief raises his right leg, places his foot against the pit of Dr. Poole's stomach, then sharply straightens the bent knee.

Close shot of Dr. Poole, as he raises himself, shaken and bruised, but with no bones broken, from the heap of sand onto which he has fallen. Over the shot we hear the Chief shouting to his retainers.

Medium shot of the gravediggers and fishermen, as they come running in response to the summons.

The Chief points down at Dr. Poole.

"Bury him."

"Alive or dead?" asks the plumper of the girls in her rich contralto voice.

The Chief looks down at her. Shot from his viewpoint. With an effort he turns away. His lips move. He is repeating the relevant passage from the Shorter Catechism. "What is the nature of woman? Answer: Woman is the vessel of the Unholy Spirit, the source of all deformity, the enemy of the race, the. . ."

"Alive or dead?" the plump girl repeats.

The Chief shrugs his shoulders.

"As you like," he answers with studied indifference.

The plump girl claps her hands.

"Goody, goody!" she cries and turns to her companions. "Come on, boys. Let's have some fun."

They close in on Dr. Poole, lift him screaming from the ground and drop him feet first into the half-filled grave of the Managing Director of the Golden Rule Brewing Corporation. While the plump girl holds him down, the men shovel the loose dry earth into place. In a very short time he is buried up to the waist.

On the sound track the victim's screams and the excited laughter of the executioners taper off into a silence that is broken by the voice of the Narrator.

NARRATOR

Cruelty and compassion come with the chromosomes;

All men are merciful and all are murderers.

Doting on dogs, they build their Dachaus;

Fire whole cities and fondle the orphans;

Are loud against lynching, but all for Oakridge;

Full of future philanthropy, but today the NKVD.

Whom shall we persecute, for whom feel pity?

It is all a matter of the moment's mores,

Of words on wood pulp, of radios roaring,

Of Communist kindergartens or first communions.

Only in the knowledge of his own Essence

Has any man ceased to be many monkeys.

The laughter and the pleas for mercy return to the sound track. Then, suddenly, we hear the Chief.

"Stand back," he shouts. "I can't see."

They obey. In silence the Chief looks down at Dr. Poole.

"You know all about plants," he says at last. "Why don't you grow some roots down there?'

The sally is greeted by enormous guffaws.

"Why don't you put out some nice little pink flowers?"

We are shown a close-up of the botanist's agonised face.

"Mercy, mercy. . ."

The voice breaks, grotesquely; there is another burst of hilarity.

"I could be useful to you. I could show you how to get better crops. You'd have more to eat."

"More to eat?" the Chief repeats with sudden interest. Then he frowns savagely. "You're lying!"

"I'm not. I swear by Almighty God."

There is a murmur of shocked protest.

"He may be almighty in New Zealand," says the Chief. "But not here — not since the Thing happened."

"But I know I can help you."

"Are you ready to swear by Belial?"

Dr. Poole's father was a clergyman and he himself is a regular churchgoer; but it is with heartfelt fervour that he does what is asked of him.

"By Belial. I swear by Almighty Belial."

Everyone makes the sign of the horns. There is a long silence.

"Dig him up."

"Oh, Chief," the plump girl protests. "That isn't fair!"

"Dig him up, you vessel of Unholiness!"

His tone carries immediate conviction; they dig with such fervour that in less than a minute Dr. Poole is out of his grave and standing rather unsteadily, at the foot of the mausoleum.

"Thank you," he manages to say; then his knees give way and he collapses.

There is a chorus of contemptuously good-humoured laughter.

The Chief leans from his marble perch. "Here, you there, the red-headed vessel." He hands the girl a bottle. "Make him drink some of this," he orders. "He's got to be able to walk. We're going back to Headquarters."

She sits down beside Dr. Poole, raises his limp body, props the wobbling head against the interdictions on her bosom, and administers the restorative.

Dissolve to a street. Four of the bearded men are carrying the Chief in a litter. The others straggle behind, moving slowly through the drifted sand. Here and there, under the porches of ruined filling stations, in the gaping doorways of office buildings, lie heaps of human bones.

Medium close shot of Dr. Poole. Still holding the bottle in his right hand, he walks a little unsteadily, singing "Annie Laurie" to himself, with intense feeling. Drunk on an empty stomach — the empty stomach, moreover, of a man whose mother has always had conscientious objections to alcohol — the strong red wine has taken prompt effect.

"And for bonny Annie Laurie

I'd lay me doon and dee. . ."

In the middle of the final phrase, the two girl grave-diggers enter the shot. Approaching the singer from behind, the plump one gives him a friendly slap on the back. Dr. Poole starts, turns around, and looks suddenly apprehensive. But her smile is reassuring.

"I'm Flossie," she says. "And I hope you're not cross with me because I wanted to bury you?"

"Oh, no, no, not a bit," Dr. Poole assures her in the tone of one who says he has no objection to the young lady lighting a cigarette.

"It's not that I had anything against you," Flossie assures him.

"Of course not."

"I just wanted a laugh, that's all."

"Quite, quite."

"People look so screamingly funny when they're being buried."

"Screamingly," Dr. Poole agrees, and forces a nervous giggle.

Feeling the need for more courage, he fortifies himself with another swig from the bottle.

"Well, see you later," says the plump girl. "I've got to go and talk to the Chief about lengthening the sleeves of his new jacket."

She gives him another slap on the back and hurries away.

Dr. Poole is left alone with her companion. He steals a glance at her. She is eighteen; she has red hair and dimples, a charming face and a slender adolescent body.

"My name's Loola," she volunteers. "What's yours?"

"Alfred," Dr. Poole replies. "My mother was a great admirer of In Memoriam," he adds by way of explanation.

"Alfred," the red-headed girl repeats. "I shall call you Alfie. I'll tell you something, Alfie: I don't really like these public burials. I don't know why I should be different from other people, but they don't make me laugh. I can't see anything funny about them."

"I'm glad to hear it," says Dr. Poole.

"You know, Alfie," she resumes, after a little silence, "you're really a very lucky man."

"Lucky?"

Loola nods.

"First of all you're dug up — and I've never seen that happen before — and now you walk straight into the Purification Ceremonies."

"Purification Ceremonies?"

"Yes, it's Belial Day tomorrow — Belial Day," she insists in response to the blank look of incomprehension on the other's face. "Don't tell me you don't know what happens on Belial Eve."

Dr. Poole shakes his head.

"But when do you have your Purification?"

"Well, we take a bath every day," says Dr. Poole, who has just been reminded, yet once more, that Loola most decidedly doesn't.

"No, no," she says impatiently. "I mean the Purification of the Race."

"Of the Race?"

"Hell, your priests don't let the deformed babies go on living, do they?"

There is a silence; then Dr. Poole counters with a question of his own.

"Are there many deformed babies born here?"

She nods affirmatively.

"Ever since the Thing — ever since He's been in charge."

She makes the sign of the horns. "They say that before that, there weren't any."

"Did anyone ever tell you about the effect of gamma rays?"

"Gamma rays? What's a gamma ray?"

"It's the reason for all those deformed children."

"You're not trying to suggest that it wasn't Belial, are you?" Her tone is one of indignant suspicion; she looks at him as St Dominic might have eyed an Albigensian heretic.

"No, no, of course not," Dr. Poole hastens to assure her. "He's the primary cause — that goes without saying." Clumsily and inexpertly, he makes the sign of the horns. "I was merely suggesting the nature of the secondary causes — the means He used to carry out His. . . His providential purpose, if you see what I mean."

His words and, still more, his pious gesture allay Loola's suspicions. Her face clears; she gives him her most charming smile. The dimples in her cheeks come to life like a pair of adorable little creatures fitfully leading a secret and autonomous existence in independence of the rest of Loola's face. Dr. Poole returns her smile, but almost instantly looks away, blushing as he does so to the roots of his hair.

NARRATOR

Out of the enormity of his respect for his mother, our poor friend here is still, at thirty-eight, a bachelor. Too full of an unnatural piety to marry, he has spent half a lifetime surreptitiously burning. Feeling that it would be a sacrilege to ask a virtuous young gentlewoman to share his bed, he inhabits, under the carapace of academic respectability, a hot and furtive world, where erotic phantasies beget an agonising repentance and adolescent desires forever struggle with the maternal precepts. And now here is Loola — Loola without the least pretension to education or good breeding, Loola au naturel with a musky redolence which, on second thought, has something really rather fascinating about it. What wonder if he reddens and (against his will, for he longs to go on looking at her) averts his eyes.

For consolation and in hope of an accession of boldness, he resorts again to the bottle. Suddenly the boulevard narrows to a mere footpath between two dunes of sand.

"After you," says Dr. Poole, politely bowing.

She smiles her acknowledgment of a courtesy, to which, in this place where men take precedence and the vessels of the Unholy Spirit follow after, she is wholly unaccustomed.

Trucking shot, from Dr. Poole's viewpoint, of Loola's back: no no, no no, no no, step after step in undulant alternation. Cut back to a close shot of Dr. Poole, gazing, wide-eyed, and from Dr. Poole's face once again to Loola's back.

NARRATOR

It is the emblem, outward, visible, tangible, of his own inner consciousness. Principle at odds with concupiscence, his mother and the Seventh Commandment superimposed upon his fancies and the facts of Life.

The dunes subside. Once more the road is wide enough for two to walk abreast. Dr. Poole steals a glance at his companion's face and sees it clouded with an expression of melancholy.

"What is it?" he asks solicitously and, greatly daring, adds "Loola" and lays a hand on her arm.

"It's terrible," she says in a tone of quiet despair.

"What's terrible?"

"Everything. You don't want to think about those things; but you're one of the unlucky ones — you can't help thinking about them. And you almost go crazy. Thinking and thinking about someone, and wanting and wanting. And you know you mustn't. And you're scared to death of what they might do if they found out. But you'd give everything in the world just for five minutes, to be free for five minutes. But no, no, no. And you clench your fists and hold yourself in — and it's like tearing yourself to pieces. And then suddenly, after all that suffering, suddenly. . ." she breaks off.

"Suddenly what?" enquires Dr. Poole.

She looks at him sharply, but sees on his face only an expression of inquiring and genuinely innocent incomprehension.

"I can't make you out," she says at last. "Is it true, what you told the Chief? You know, about your not being a priest."

All at once she blushes.

"If you don't believe me," says Dr. Poole with wine-begotten gallantry, "I'm ready to prove it."

She looks at him for a moment, then shakes her head and, in a kind of terror, turns away. Nervously she smooths her apron.

"And meanwhile," he continues, emboldened by her new-found shyness, "you haven't told me just what it is that suddenly happens."

Loola glances about her to make sure that nobody is within earshot, then speaks at last almost in a whisper.

"Suddenly He starts to take possession of everybody. For weeks he makes them think about those things — and it's against the Law, it's wicked. The men get so mad, they start hitting you and calling you a vessel, the way the priests do."

"A vessel?"

She nods.

"Vessel of the Unholy Spirit."

"Oh, I see."

"And then comes Belial Day," she goes on after a little pause. "And then. . . well, you know what that means. And afterwards, if you have a baby, the chances are that He'll punish you for what He has made you do." She shudders, then makes the sign of the horns. "I know we have to accept what He wills," she adds. "But oh, I do so hope that, if ever I have any babies, they'll be all right."

"But of course they'll be all right," cries Dr. Poole. "After all, there isn't anything wrong about you."

Delighted by his own audacity, he looks down at her.

Close shot from his viewpoint: no no no, no no no. . .

Mournfully, Loola shakes her head.

"That's where you're wrong," she says. "I've got an extra pair of nipples."

"Oh," says Dr. Poole in a tone which makes us realize that the thought of his mother has momentarily obliterated the effects of the red wine.

"Not that there's anything really bad about that," Loola hastily adds. "Even the best people have them. It's perfectly legal. They allow you up to three pairs. And seven toes and fingers. Anything over that gets liquidated at the Purification. My friend Polly — she had a baby this season. Her first one. And it's got four pairs, and no thumbs. There isn't any chance for it. In fact it's been condemned already. She's had her head shaved."

"Had her head shaved?"

"They do it to all the girls whose babies are liquidated."

"But why?"

Loola shrugs her shoulders. "Just to remind them that He's the Enemy."

NARRATOR

"To put it," as Schroedinger has said, "drastically, though perhaps a little naively, the injuriousness of a marriage between first cousins might very well be increased by the fact that their grandmother had served for a long period as an X-ray nurse. It is not a point that need worry any individual personally. But any possibility of gradually infecting the human race with unwanted latent mutations ought to be a matter of concern to the community." It ought to be; but, needless to say, it isn't. Oakridge is working three shifts a day; an atomic power plant is going up on the coast of Cumberland; and on the other side of the fence, goodness only knows what Kapitza is up to on the top of Mount Ararat, what surprises that wonderful Russian Soul, about which Dostoevsky used to write so lyrically, has in store for Russian bodies and the carcasses of Capitalists and Social Democrats.

Once again sand bars the road. They enter another winding pathway between the dunes and are suddenly alone, as though in the middle of the Sahara.

Trucking shot from Dr. Poole's viewpoint: no no, no no. . . Loola halts and turns back toward him: no no no. The Camera moves up to her face and all at once he notices that its expression is tragical.

NARRATOR

The Seventh Commandment, the Facts of Life. But there is also another Fact, to which one cannot react by a mere departmentalized negation or a no less fragmentary display of lust — the Fact of Personality.

"I don't want them to cut my hair," she says in a breaking voice.

"But they won't."

"They will."

"They can't, they mustn't." Then, amazed by his own daring, he adds, "It's much too beautiful."

Still tragic, Loola shakes her head.

"I feel it," she says, "in my bones. I just know it'll have more than seven fingers. They'll kill it, they'll cut my hair off, they'll whip me — and He makes us do those things."

"What things?"

She looks at him for a moment without speaking; then, with an expression almost of terror, drops her eyes.

"It's because He wants us to be miserable."

Covering her face with her hands, she starts to sob uncontrollably.

NARRATOR

The wine within and, without, the musky reminder

Of those so near, warm, ripe, orby and all but

Edible Facts of Life. . . And now her tears, her tears. . .

Dr. Poole takes the girl in his arms and, while she sobs against his shoulder, strokes her hair with all the tenderness of the normal male he has momentarily become.

"Don't cry," he whispers, "don't cry. It'll be all right. I'll always be there. I won't let them do anything to you."

She permits herself gradually to be comforted. The sobbing becomes less violent and finally ceases altogether. She looks up and the smile she gives him through her tears is so unequivocally amorous that anyone but Dr. Poole would have accepted the invitation forthwith. The seconds pass and, while he is still hesitating, her expression changes, she drops her eyelids over an avowal that she suddenly feels to have been too frank, and turns away.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs, and starts to rub away her tears with the knuckles of a hand that is as grubby as a child's.

Dr. Poole takes out his handkerchief and tenderly wipes her eyes.

"You're so sweet," she says. "Not a bit like the men here."

She smiles up at him again. Like a pair of enchanting little wild animals emerging from concealment, out come the dimples.

So impulsively that he has no time to feel surprise at what he is doing, Dr. Poole takes her face between his hands and kisses her on the mouth.

Loola resists for a moment, then abandons herself in a surrender so complete as to be more active than his assault.

On the sound track "Give me detumescence" modulates into Liebestod from Tristan.

Suddenly Loola stiffens into a shuddering rigidity. Pushing him away, she stares up wildly into his face; then turns and glances over her shoulder with an expression of guilty terror.

"Loola!"

He tries to draw her close again, but she breaks away from him and starts to run along the narrow path.

NO NO, NO NO, NO NO. . . .

We dissolve to the corner of Fifth Street and Pershing Square. As of old, the Square is the hub and centre of the city's cultural life. From a shallow well in front of the Philharmonic Auditorium two women are drawing water in a goatskin, which they empty into earthenware jars for other women to carry away. From a bar slung between two rusty lamp posts hangs the carcass of a newly slaughtered ox. Standing in a cloud of flies, a man with a knife is cleaning out the entrails.

"That looks good," says the Chief genially.

The butcher grins and, with bloody fingers, makes the sign of the horns.

A few yards away stand the communal ovens. The Chief orders a halt, and graciously accepts a piece of the newly baked bread. While he is eating, ten or twelve small boys enter the shot, staggering under inordinate loads of fuel from the nearby Public Library. They tumble their burdens onto the ground and, stimulated by the blows and curses of their elders, hurry back for more. One of the bakers opens a furnace door and starts to shovel the books into the flames.

All the scholar in Dr. Poole, all the bibliophile, is outraged by the spectacle.

"But this is frightful!" he protests.

The Chief only laughs.

"In goes The Phenomenology of Spirit, out comes the corn bread. And damned good bread it is."

He takes another bite.

Meanwhile Dr. Poole has bent down and, from the very brink of destruction, has snatched to safety a charming little duodecimo Shelley.

"Thank G—" he begins, but fortunately remembers where he is and manages to check himself in time.

He slips the volume into his pocket and, turning to the Chief, "But what about culture?" he asks. "What about the social inheritance of humanity's painfully acquired wisdom? What about the best that has been thought and. . ."

"They can't read," the Chief answers with his mouth full. "No, that's not quite true. We teach all of them to read that."

He points. Medium shot from his viewpoint of Loola — Loola with dimples and all the rest, but also with the large red no on her apron, the two smaller no's on her shirt front.

"That's all the book learning they need. And now," he commands his bearers, "move on."

Trucking shot of the litter as it is carried through the doorless entrance of what was once the Biltmore Coffee Shop. Here, in the malodorous twilight, twenty or thirty women, some middle-aged, some young, some mere girls, are busily weaving on primitive looms of the kind used by the Indians of Central America.

"None of these vessels had a baby this season," the Chief explains to Dr. Poole. He frowns and shakes his head. "When they're not producing monsters, they're sterile. What we're going to do for manpower, Belial only knows. . ."

They advance further into the Coffee Shop, pass a group of three- and four-year-old children under the supervision of an aged vessel with a cleft palate and fourteen fingers and come to a halt under an archway giving access to a second dining room only slightly smaller than the first

Over the shot we hear the sound of a chorus of youthful voices reciting in unison the opening phrases of the Shorter Catechism.

"Question: What is the chief end of Man? Answer: The chief end of Man is to propitiate Belial, deprecate His enmity and avoid destruction for as long as possible."

Cut to a close shot of Dr. Poole's face, on which we see an expression of amazement mingled with a growing horror. Then a long long shot from his viewpoint. In five rows of twelve, sixty boys and girls between the ages of thirteen and fifteen stand rigidly at attention, gabbling as fast as they can in a shrill harsh monotone. Facing them, on a dais, sits a small, fat man wearing a long robe of black and white goatskins and a fur cap with a stiff leather edging, to which are attached two medium-sized horns. Beardless and sallow, his face shines with a profuse perspiration, which he is forever wiping away with the hairy sleeve of his cassock.

Cut back to the Chief, as he leans down and touches Dr. Poole on the shoulder.

"That," he whispers, "is our leading Satanic Science Practitioner. I tell you, he's an absolute whizz at Malicious Animal Magnetism."

Over the shot we hear the mindless gabble of the children.

"Question: To what fate is Man predestined? Answer: Belial has, out of his mere good pleasure, from all eternity elected all now living to everlasting perdition."

"Why does he wear horns?" asks Dr. Poole.

"He's an Archimandrite," the Chief explains. "Due for his third horn any time now."

Cut to a medium shot of the dais.

"Excellent," the Satanic Science Practitioner is saying in a high piping voice, like the voice of an extraordinarily priggish and self-satisfied small boy. "Excellent!" He wipes his forehead. "And now tell me why you deserve everlasting perdition."

There is a moment's silence. Then, in a chorus that starts a little raggedly, but soon swells to a loud unanimity, the children answer.

"Belial has perverted and corrupted us in all the parts of our being. Therefore, we are, merely on account of that corruption, deservedly condemned by Belial."

Their teacher nods approvingly.

"Such," he squeaks unctuously, "is the inscrutable justice of the Lord of Flies."

"Amen," respond the children.

All make the sign of the horns.

"And what about your duty towards your neighbour?"

"My duty towards my neighbour," comes the choral answer, "is to do my best to prevent him from doing unto me what I should like to do unto him; to subject myself to all my governors; to keep my body in absolute chastity, except during the two weeks following Belial Day; and to do my duty in that state of life to which it hath pleased Belial to condemn me."

"What is the Church?"

"The Church is the body of which Belial is the head and all possessed people are the members."

"Very good," says the Practitioner, wiping his face yet once more. "And now I need a young vessel."

He runs his eyes over the ranks of his pupils, then points a finger.

"You there. Third from the left in the second row. . . The vessel with the yellow hair. Come here."

Cut back to the group around the litter.

The bearers are grinning with happy anticipation and, looking intensely red and moist and fleshy among the black curls of the moustache and beard, even the Chiefs full lips are curved into a smile. But there is no smile on Loola's face. Pale, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and staring, she is watching the proceedings with the horror of one who has been through this kind of ordeal herself. Dr. Poole glances at her, then back at the victim, whom we now see, from his viewpoint, slowly advancing toward the dais.

"Up here," squeaks the almost babyish voice in a tone of authority. "Stand by me. Now face the class."

The child does as she is told.

Medium close shot of a tall slender girl of fifteen with the face of a Nordic madonna. no, proclaims the apron attached to the waistband of her ragged pedal pushers; no, no, the patches over her budding breasts.

The Practitioner points at her accusingly.

"Look at it," he says, wrinkling up his face into a grimace of disgust. "Did you ever see anything so revolting?"

He turns to the class.

"Boys," he squeaks. "Any of you who feels any Malicious Animal Magnetism coming out of this vessel, hold up your hand."

Cut to a long shot of the class. Without exception, all the boys are holding up their hands. Their faces wear that expression of lustful and malevolent amusement, with which the orthodox have always looked on, while their spiritual pastors torment the hereditary scapegoats or still more severely punish the heretics who threaten the interest of the Establishment.

Cut back to the Practitioner. He sighs hypocritically and shakes his head.

"I feared as much," he says. Then he turns to the girl beside him on the dais. "Now tell me," he says, "what is the Nature of Woman?"

"The Nature of Woman?" the child repeats unsteadily.

"Yes, the Nature of Woman. Hurry up!"

She glances at him with an expression of terror in her blue eyes, then turns away. Her face becomes deathly pale. Her lips tremble; she swallows hard.

"Woman," she begins, "woman. . ."

Her voice breaks, her eyes overflow with tears; in a desperate effort to control her feelings she clenches her fists and bites her lip.

"Go on!" the Practitioner shrilly shouts. And picking up a willow switch from the floor, he gives the child a sharp cut across the calves of her bare legs. "Go on!"

"Woman," the girl begins once more, "is the vessel of the Unholy Spirit, the source of all deformity, the. . . the. . . Ow!"

She winces under another blow.

The Science Practitioner laughs and the whole class follows suit.

"The enemy. . ." he prompts.

"Oh, yes — the enemy of the race, punished by Belial and calling down punishment on all those who succumb to Belial in her."

There is a long silence.

"Well," says the Practitioner at last, "that's what you are. That's what all vessels are. And now go, go!" he squeals and with sudden fury he strikes at her again and again.

Crying with pain, the child jumps down from the dais and runs back to her place in the ranks.

Cut back to the Chief. His brow is wrinkled in a frown of displeasure.

"All this progressive education!" he says to Dr. Poole. "No proper discipline. I don't know what we're coming to. Why, when I was a boy, our old Practitioner used to tie them over a bench and go to work with a birch rod. 'That'll teach you to be a vessel,' he'd say, and then swish, swish, swish! Belial, how they howled! That's what I call education. Well, I've had enough of this," he adds. "Quick march!"

As the litter moves out of the shot, the Camera holds on Loola who remains, staring in an agony of fellow feeling at the tear-wet face and heaving shoulders of the little victim in the second row. A hand touches her arm. She starts, turns apprehensively and is relieved to find herself looking into the kindly face of Dr. Poole.

"I entirely agree with you," he whispers. "It's wrong, it's unjust."

Only after she has thrown a quick look over her shoulder does Loola venture to give him a little smile of gratitude.

"Now we must go," she says.

They hurry after the others. Following the litter, they retrace their steps through the Coffee Shop, then turn to the right and enter the Cocktail Bar. At one end of the room an enormous pile of human bones reaches almost to the ceiling. Squatting on the floor, in a thick white dust, a score of craftsmen are engaged in fashioning drinking cups out of skulls, knitting needles from ulnas, flutes and recorders from the longer shank bones, ladles, shoe horns and dominoes from pelvises, and spigots out of femurs.

A halt is called, and, while one of the workmen plays "Give me Detumescence" on a shinbone flute, another presents the Chief with a superb necklace of graded vertebrae ranging in size from a baby's cervicals to the lumbars of a heavyweight boxer.

NARRATOR

"And he set me down in the midst of the valley that was full of bones; and lo, they were very dry." The dry bones of some of those who died, by thousands, by millions, in the course of those three bright summer days that, for you there, are still in the future. "And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live?" The answer, I replied, is in the negative. For though Baruch might save us (perhaps) from taking our places in such an ossuary as this, he can do nothing to avert that other, slower, nastier death. . . .

Trucking shot of the litter as it is carried up the steps into the main lobby. Here the stink is overpowering, the filth beyond description. Close-up of two rats gnawing at a mutton bone, of the flies on the purulent eyelids of a small girl. The Camera pulls back for a longer shot. Forty or fifty women, half of them with shaven heads, are sitting on the stairs, among the refuse on the floor, on the tattered remnants of ancient beds and sofas. Each of them is nursing a baby, all the babies are ten weeks old, and all those belonging to shaven mothers are deformed. Over close-ups of little faces with hare lips, little trunks with stumps instead of legs and arms, little hands with clusters of supernumerary fingers, little bodies adorned with a double row of nipples, we hear the voice of the Narrator.

NARRATOR

For this other death — not by plague, this time, not by poison, not by fire, not by artificially induced cancer, but by the squalid disintegration of the very substance of the species — this gruesome and infinitely unheroic death-in-birth could as well be the product of atomic industry as of atomic war. For in a world powered by nuclear fission everybody's grandmother would have been an X-ray technician. And not only everybody's grandmother — everybody's grandfather and father and mother as well, everybody's ancestors back to three and four and five generations of them that hate Me.

From the last of the deformed babies the Camera pulls back to Dr. Poole who is standing, his handkerchief held to his still too sensitive nose, staring with horrified bewilderment at the scene around him.

"All the babies look as if they were exactly the same age," he says, turning to Loola, who is still beside him.

"Well, what do you expect? Seeing that practically all of them were born between the tenth and the seventeenth of December."

"But that must mean that. . ." He breaks off, deeply embarrassed. "I think," he concludes hastily, "that things must be rather different here from what they are in New Zealand. . . ."

In spite of the wine, he remembers his grey-haired mother across the Pacific and, blushing guiltily, coughs and averts his eyes.

"There's Polly," cries his companion, and hurries across the room.

Mumbling apologies as he picks his way between the squatting or recumbent mothers, Dr. Poole follows her.

Polly is sitting on a straw-filled sack near what was once the Cashier's desk. She is a girl of eighteen or nineteen, small and fragile, her head shaved like that of a criminal prepared for execution. She has a face whose beauty is all in the fine bones and the big luminous eyes. It is with an expression of hurt bewilderment that those eyes now look up into Loola's face and from Loola's face move without curiosity, almost without comprehension, to that of the stranger who accompanies her.

"Darling!"

Loola bends down to kiss her friend. no no, from Dr. Poole's viewpoint. Then she sits down beside Polly and puts a comforting arm around her. Polly hides her face against the other's shoulder and both girls begin to cry. As though infected by their grief, the little monster in Polly's arms wakes up and utters a thin complaining howl. Polly raises her head from her friend's shoulder and, her face still wet with tears, looks down at the deformed child, then opens her shirt and pushing aside one of the crimson no's, gives it the breast. With an almost frantic hunger the child starts to suck.

"I love him," Polly sobs. "I don't want them to kill him."

"Darling," is all that Loola can find to say, "darling!"

A loud voice interrupts her.

"Silence there! Silence!"

Other voices take up the refrain.

"Silence!"

"Silence there!"

"Silence, silence!"

In the lobby all talk ceases abruptly and there is a long, expectant hush. Then a horn is blown and another of those strangely babyish, but self-important voices announces: "His Eminence the Arch-Vicar of Belial, Lord of the Earth, Primate of California, Servant of the Proletariat, Bishop of Hollywood."

Long shot of the hotel's main staircase. Dressed in a long robe of Anglo-Nubian goatskins and wearing a golden crown set with four tall, sharp horns, the Arch-Vicar is seen majestically descending. An acolyte holds a large goatskin umbrella over his head and he is followed by twenty or thirty ecclesiastical dignitaries, ranging in rank from three-horned Patriarchs to one-horned Presbyters and hornless Postulants. All of them, from the Arch-Vicar downward, are conspicuously beardless, sweaty and fat-rumped and, when any of them speaks, it is always in a fluting contralto.

The Chief rises from his litter and advances to meet the incarnation of spiritual authority.

NARRATOR

Church and State,

Greed and Hate: —

Two baboon-persons

In one Supreme Gorilla.

The Chief inclines his head respectfully. The Arch-Vicar raises his hands to his tiara, touches the two anterior horns, then lays his spiritually charged fingertips on the Chiefs forehead. "May you never be impaled upon His Horns."

"Amen," says the Chief; then straightening himself up and changing his tone abruptly from the devout to the briskly businesslike, "Everything OK for tonight?" he asks.

In the voice of a ten-year-old, but with the long-winded and polysyllabic unctuousness of a veteran ecclesiastic, long accustomed to playing the role of a superior being set apart from and above his fellows, the Arch-Vicar replies that all things are in order. Under the personal supervision of the Three-Horned Inquisitor and the Patriarch of Pasadena, a devoted band of Familiars and Postulants has travelled from settlement to settlement, making the yearly census. Every mother of a monster has been marked down. Heads have been shaved and the preliminary whippings administered. By this time all the guilty have been transported to one or other of the three Purification Centres at Riverside, San Diego and Los Angeles. The knives and the consecrated bull's pizzles have been made ready and, Belial willing, the ceremonies will begin at the appointed hour. Before tomorrow's sunrise the purification of the land should be complete.

Once more the Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns, then stands for a few seconds in recollected silence. Reopening his eyes, he turns to the ecclesiastics in his train.

"Go, take the shaven ones," he squeaks, "take these defiled vessels, these living testimonies of Belial's enmity, and lead them to the place of their shame."

A dozen Presbyters and Postulants hurry down the stairs and out into the crowd of mothers.

"Hurry, hurry!"

"In Belial's name."

Slowly, reluctantly, the crop-headed women rise to their feet. Their little burdens of deformity pressed against bosoms heavy with milk, they move toward the door in a silence more painfully expressive of misery than any outcry.

Medium shot of Polly on her sack of straw. A young Postulant approaches and pulls her roughly to her feet.

"Up!" he shouts in a voice of an angry and malevolent child. "Get up, you spawner of filth!"

And he slaps her across the face. Cringing away from a second blow, Polly almost runs to rejoin her fellow victims near the entrance.

Dissolve to a night sky, with stars between thin bars of cloud and a waning moon already low in the West. There is a long silence; then we begin to hear the sound of distant chanting. Gradually it becomes articulate in the words, "Glory to Belial, to Belial in the lowest," repeated again and again.

NARRATOR

An inch from the eyes the ape's black paw

Eclipses the stars, the moon, and even

Space itself.  Five stinking fingers

Are all the World.

The silhouette of a baboon's hand advances toward the Camera, grows larger and more menacing, and finally engulfs everything in blackness.

We cut to the interior of the Los Angeles Coliseum. By the smoky and intermittent light of torches we see the faces of a great congregation. Tier above tier, like massed gargoyles, spouting the groundless faith, the subhuman excitement, the collective imbecility which are the products of ceremonial religion — spouting them from black eyeholes, from quivering nostrils, from parted lips, while the chanting monotonously continues: "Glory to Belial, to Belial in the lowest." Below, in the arena, hundreds of shaven girls and women, each with her tiny monster in her arms, are kneeling before the steps of the High Altar. Awe-inspiring in their chasubles of Anglo-Nubian fur, in their tiaras of gilded horns, Patriarchs and Archimandrites, Presbyters and Postulants stand in two groups at the head of the altar steps, chanting anti-phonally in a high treble to the music of bone recorders and a battery of xylophones.

SEMICHORUS I

Glory to Belial,

SEMICHORUS II

To Belial in the lowest!

Then, after a pause, the music of the chant changes and a new phase of the service begins.

SEMICHORUS I

It is a terrible thing,

SEMICHORUS II

Terrible terrible,

SEMICHORUS I

To fall into the hands,

SEMICHORUS II

The huge hands and the hairy,

SEMICHORUS I

Into the hands of living Evil,

SEMICHORUS II

Hallelujah!

SEMICHORUS I

Into the hands of the Enemy of man,

SEMICHORUS II

Our boon companions;

SEMICHORUS I

Of the Rebel against the Order of Things —

SEMICHORUS II

And we have conspired with him against ourselves;

SEMICHORUS I

Of the great Blowfly who is the Lord of Flies,

SEMICHORUS II

Crawling in the heart;

SEMICHORUS I

Of the naked Worm that never dies,

SEMICHORUS II

And, never dying, is the source of our eternal life;

SEMICHORUS I

Of the Prince of the Powers of the Air —

SEMICHORUS II

Spitfire and Stuka, Beelzebub and Azazel, Hallelujah!

SEMICHORUS I

Of the Lord of this world;

SEMICHORUS II

And its defiler;

SEMICHORUS I

Of the great Lord Moloch,

SEMICHORUS II

Patron of all nations;

SEMICHORUS I

Of Mammon our master,

SEMICHORUS II

Omnipresent.

SEMICHORUS I

Of Lucifer the all-powerful,

SEMICHORUS II

In Church, in State;

SEMICHORUS I

Of Belial,

SEMICHORUS II

Transcendent,

SEMICHORUS I

Yet, oh, how immanent

ALL TOGETHER

Of Belial, Belial, Belial, Belial

As the chanting dies away, two hornless Postulants descend, seize the nearest of the shaven women, raise her to her feet and lead her up, dumb with terror, to where, at the head of the altar steps, the Patriarch of Pasadena stands whetting the blade of a long butcher's knife. The thickset Mexican mother stands staring at him in fascinated horror, open-mouthed. Then one of the Postulants takes the child out of her arms and holds it up before the Patriarch.

Close shot of a characteristic product of progressive technology — a harelipped, Mongolian idiot. Over the shot we hear the chanting of the Chorus.

SEMICHORUS I

I show you the sign of Belial's enmity,

SEMICHORUS II

Foul, foul;

SEMICHORUS I

I show you the fruit of Belial's grace,

SEMICHORUS II

Filth infused in filth.

SEMICHORUS I

I show you the penalty for obedience to His Will,

SEMICHORUS II

On earth as it is in Hell.

SEMICHORUS I

Who is the Breeder of all deformities?

SEMICHORUS II

Mother.

SEMICHORUS I

Who is the chosen vessel of Unholiness?

SEMICHORUS II

Mother.

SEMICHORUS I

And the curse that is on our race?

SEMICHORUS II

Mother.

SEMICHORUS I

Possessed, possessed —

SEMICHORUS II

Inwardly, outwardly:

SEMICHORUS I

Her incubus an object, her subject a succubus —

SEMICHORUS II

And both are Belial;

SEMICHORUS I

Possessed by the Blowfly.

SEMICHORUS II

Crawling and stinging,

SEMICHORUS I

Possessed by that which irresistibly

SEMICHORUS II

Goads her, drives her,

SEMICHORUS I

Like the soiled fitchew,

SEMICHORUS II

Like the sow in her season,

SEMICHORUS I

Down a steep place

SEMICHORUS II

Into filth unutterable;

SEMICHORUS I

Whence, after much wallowing,

SEMICHORUS II

After many long draughts of the swill,

SEMICHORUS I

Mother emerging, nine months later,

SEMICHORUS II

Bears this monstrous mockery of a man.

SEMICHORUS I

How then shall there be atonement?

SEMICHORUS II

By blood.

SEMICHORUS I

How shall Belial be propitiated?

SEMICHORUS II

Only by blood.

The Camera moves from the altar to where, tier above tier, the pale gargoyles stare down in hungry anticipation at the scene below. And suddenly the faces open their black mouths and start to chant in unison, hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence and ever greater volume of sound.

"Blood, blood, blood, the blood, the blood, blood, blood, the blood. . ."

We cut back to the altar. The sound of the mindless, subhuman chanting continues monotonously over the shot.

The Patriarch hands his whetstone to one of the attendant Archimandrites, and then with his left hand takes the deformed child by the neck and impales it on his knife. It utters two or three little bleating cries, and is silent.

The Patriarch turns, allows half a pint of blood to spill out on the altar, then tosses the tiny corpse into the darkness beyond. The chanting rises in a savage crescendo. "Blood, blood, the blood, the blood, blood, blood, the blood. . ."

"Drive her away!" cries the Patriarch in a commanding squeak.

In terror the mother turns and hurries down the steps. The two Postulants follow, striking at her savagely with their consecrated bulls' pizzles. The chanting is punctuated by piercing screams. From the congregation comes a noise that is half commiserating groan, half grunt of satisfaction. Flushed and a little breathless from so unusually strenuous an exercise, the plump young Postulants seize another woman — a girl this time, frail and slender almost to the point of childishness. Her face is hidden as they drag her up the steps. Then one of them steps back a little and we recognise Polly.

Thumbless, eight-nippled, the child is held up before the Patriarch.

SEMICHORUS I

Foul, foul! How shall there be atonement?

SEMICHORUS II

By blood.

SEMICHORUS I

How shall Belial be propitiated?

This time it is the entire congregation that answers. "Only by blood, blood, blood, blood, the blood. . ."

The Patriarch's left hand closes about the infant's neck.

"No, no, don't. Please!"

Polly makes a movement toward him, but is held back by the Postulants. Very deliberately, while she sobs, the Patriarch impales the child on his knife, then tosses the body into the darkness behind the altar.

There is a loud cry. We cut to a medium close shot of Dr. Poole. Conspicuous in his front-row seat, he has fainted.

Dissolve to the interior of the Unholy of Unholies. The shrine, which stands at one end of the arena's shorter axis, to the side of the high altar, is a small oblong chamber of adobe brick, with an altar at one end and, at the other, sliding doors, closed at present, except for a gap at the centre through which one can see what is going on in the arena. On a couch in the centre of the shrine reclines the Arch-Vicar. Not far off a hornless Postulant is frying pig's trotters over a charcoal brazier, and near him a two-horned Archimandrite is doing his best to revive Dr. Poole, who lies inanimate on a stretcher. Cold water and two or three sharp slaps in the face at last produce the desired result. The botanist sighs, opens his eyes, wards off another slap and sits up.

"Where am I?" he asks.

"In the Unholy of Unholies," the Archimandrite answers, "And there is his Eminence."

Dr. Poole recognises the great man and has enough presence of mind to incline his head respectfully.

"Bring a stool," commands the Arch-Vicar.

The stool is brought. He beckons to Dr. Poole, who scrambles to his feet, walks a little unsteadily across the room and sits down. As he does so a particularly loud shriek makes him turn his head.

Long shot, from his viewpoint, of the High Altar. The Patriarch is in the act of tossing yet another little monster into the darkness, while his acolytes shower blows upon its screaming mother.

Cut back to Dr. Poole, who shudders and covers his face with his hands. Over the shot we hear the monotonous chanting of the congregation. "Blood, blood, blood."

"Horrible!" says Dr. Poole, "Horrible!"

"And yet there's blood in your religion too," remarks the Arch-Vicar, smiling ironically. " 'Washed in the blood of the Lamb.' Isn't that correct?"

"Perfectly correct," Dr. Poole admits. "But we don't actually do the washing. We only talk about it — or, more often, we only sing about it, in hymns."

Dr. Poole averts his eyes. There is a silence. At this moment the Postulant approaches with a large platter, which, together with a couple of bottles, he sets down on a table beside the couch. Spearing one of the trotters with a genuine antique twentieth-century forgery of an early Georgian fork, the Arch-Vicar starts to gnaw.

"Help yourself," he squeaks between two bites. "And here's some wine," he adds, indicating one of the bottles.

Dr. Poole, who is extremely hungry, obeys with alacrity and there is another silence, loud with the noise of eating and the chant of the blood.

"You don't believe it, of course," says the Arch-Vicar at last, with his mouth full.

"But I assure you. . ." Dr. Poole protests.

His zeal to conform is excessive, and the other holds up a plumb, pork-greasy hand.

"Now, now, now! But I'd like you to know that we have good reasons for believing as we do. Ours, my dear sir, is a rational and realistic faith." There is a pause while he takes a swig from the bottle and helps himself to another trotter. "I take it that you're familiar with world history?"

"Purely as a dilettante," Dr. Poole answers modestly. But he thinks he can say that he has read most of the more obvious books on the subject — Graves's Rise and Extinction of Russia, for example; Basedow's Collapse of Western Civilization; Bright's inimitable Europe, an Autopsy; and, it goes without saying, that absolutely delightful and, though it's only a novel, that genuinely veracious book, The Last Days of Coney Island by dear old Percival Pott. "You know it, of course?"

The Arch-Vicar shakes his head.

"I don't know anything that's been published after the Thing," he answers curtly.

"But how stupid of me!" cries Dr. Poole, regretting, as so often in the past, that gushing loquacity with which he overcompensates a shyness that, left to itself, would reduce him almost to speechlessness.

"But I've read quite a bit of the stuff that came out before," the Arch-Vicar continues. "They had some pretty good libraries here in Southern California. Mined out now, for the most part. In future, I'm afraid, well have to go further afield for our fuel. But meanwhile we've baked our bread and I've managed to save three or four thousand volumes for our Seminary."

"Like the Church in the Dark Ages," says Dr. Poole with cultured enthusiasm. "Civilization has no better friend than religion. That's what my agnostic friends will never. . ." Suddenly remembering that the tenets of that Church were not quite the same as those professed by this, he breaks off and, to hide his embarrassment, takes a long pull at his bottle.

But fortunately the Arch-Vicar is too much preoccupied with his own ideas to take offence at the faux pas or even to notice it.

"As I read history," he says, "it's like this. Man pitting himself against Nature, the Ego against the Order of Things, Belial" (a perfunctory sign of the horns) "against the Other One. For a hundred thousand years or so the battle's entirely indecisive. Then, three centuries ago, almost overnight the tide starts to run uninterruptedly in one direction. Have another of these pig's feet, won't you?"

Dr. Poole helps himself to his second, while the other begins his third.

"Slowly at first, then with gathering momentum, man begins to make headway against the Order of Things." The Arch-Vicar pauses for a moment to spit out a piece of cartilage. "With more and more of the human race falling into line behind him, the Lord of Flies, who is also the Blowfly in every individual heart, inaugurates his triumphal march across a world, of which he will so soon become the undisputed Master."

Carried away by his own shrill eloquence and forgetting for a moment that he is not in the pulpit of St. Azazel's, the Arch-Vicar makes a sweeping gesture. The trotter falls off his fork. With a good-humoured laugh at his own expense, he picks it up from the floor, wipes it on the sleeve of his goat-skin cassock, takes another bite and continues.

"It began with machines and the first grain ships from the New World. Food for the hungry and a burden lifted from men's shoulders. 'Oh God, we thank Thee for all the blessings which in Thy Bounty. . .' Etcetera etcetera." The Arch-Vicar laughs derisively. "Needless to say nobody ever gets anything for nothing. God's bounties have their price, and Belial always sees that it's a stiff one. Take those machines, for example. Belial knew perfectly well that, in finding a little alleviation from toil, flesh would be subordinated to iron and mind would be made the slave of wheels. He knew that if a machine is foolproof, it must also be skillproof, talentproof, inspirationproof. Your money back if the product should be faulty, and twice your money back if you can find in it the smallest trace of genius or individuality! And then there was that good food from the New World. 'Oh God, we thank Thee. . .' But Belial knew that feeding means breeding. In the old days, when people made love, they merely increased the infantile mortality rate and lowered the expectation of life. But after the coming of the food ships, it was different. Copulation resulted in population — with a vengeance!"

Once again the Arch-Vicar utters his shrill laugh.

Dissolve to a shot through a powerful microscope of spermatozoa frantically straggling to reach their Final End, the vast moonlike ovum in the top left-hand corner of the slide. On the sound track we hear the tenor voice in the last movement of Liszt's Faust Symphony: La femme eternelle toujours nous eleve. La femme eternelle toufours . . . Cut to an aerial view of London in 1800. Then back to the Darwinian race for survival and self-perpetuation. Then to a view of London in 1900 — and again to the spermatozoa — and again to London, as the German airmen saw it in 1940. Dissolve to a close shot of the Arch-Vicar.

" 'Oh God,' " he intones in the slightly tremulous voice that is always considered appropriate to such utterances, " 'we thank Thee for all these immortal souls.'" Then, changing his tone, "These immortal souls," he goes on, "lodged in bodies that grow progressively sicklier, scabbier, scrubbier, year after year, as all the things foreseen by Belial inevitably come to pass. The overcrowding of the planet. Five hundred, eight hundred, sometimes as many as two thousand people to a square mile of food-producing land — and the land in process of being ruined by bad farming. Everywhere erosion, everywhere the leaching out of minerals. And the deserts spreading, the forests dwindling. Even in America, even in that New World, which was once the hope of the Old. Up goes the spiral of industry, down goes the spiral of soil fertility. Bigger and better, richer and more powerful — and then almost suddenly, hungrier and hungrier. Yes, Belial foresaw it all — the passage from hunger to imported food, from imported food to booming population and from booming population back to hunger again. Back to hunger. The New Hunger, the Higher Hunger, the hunger of enormous industrialised proletariats, the hunger of city dwellers with money, with all the modern conveniences, with cars and radios and every imaginable gadget, the hunger that is the cause of total wars and the total wars that are the cause of yet more hunger."

The Arch-Vicar pauses to take another swig from his bottle.

"And remember this," he adds: "even without synthetic glanders, even without the atomic bomb, Belial could have achieved all His purposes. A little more slowly, perhaps, but just as surely, men would have destroyed themselves by destroying the world they lived in. They couldn't escape. He had them skewered on both His horns. If they managed to wriggle off the horn of total war, they would find themselves impaled on starvation. And if they were starving, they would be tempted to resort to war. And just in case they should try to find a peaceful and rational way out of their dilemma, He had another subtler horn of self-destruction all ready for them. From the very beginning of the industrial revolution He foresaw that men would be made so over-weeningly bumptious by the miracles of their own technology that they would soon lose all sense of reality. And that's precisely what happened. These wretched slaves of wheels and ledgers began to congratulate themselves on being the Conquerors of Nature. Conquerors of Nature, indeed! In actual fact, of course, they had merely upset the equilibrium of Nature and were about to suffer the consequences. Just consider what they were up to during the century and a half before the Thing. Fouling the rivers, killing off the wild animals, destroying the forests, washing the topsoil into the sea, burning up an ocean of petroleum, squandering the minerals it had taken the whole of geological time to deposit. An orgy of criminal imbecility. And they called it Progress. Progress," he repeats, "Progress! I tell you, that was too rare an invention to have been the product of any merely human mind — too fiendishly ironical! There had to be Outside Help for that. There had to be the Grace of Belial, which, of course, is always forthcoming — that is, for anyone who's prepared to cooperate with it. And who isn't?"

"Who isn't?" Dr. Poole repeats with a giggle; for he feels that he has to make up somehow for his mistake about the Church in the Dark Ages.

"Progress and Nationalism — those were the two great ideas He put into their heads. Progress — the theory that you can get something for nothing; the theory that you can gain in one field without paying for your gain in another; the theory that you alone understand the meaning of history; the theory that you know what's going to happen fifty years from now; the theory that, in the teeth of all experience, you can foresee all the consequences of your present actions; the theory that Utopia lies just ahead and that, since ideal ends justify the most abominable means, it is your privilege and duty to rob, swindle, torture, enslave and murder all those who, in your opinion (which is, by definition, infallible), obstruct the onward march to the earthly paradise. Remember that phrase of Karl Marx's: 'Force is the midwife of Progress.' He might have added — but of course Belial didn't want to let the cat out of the bag at that early stage of the proceedings — that Progress is the midwife of Force. Doubly the midwife, for the fact of technological progress provides people with the instruments of ever more indiscriminate destruction, while the myth of political and moral progress serves as the excuse for using those means to the very limit. I tell you, my dear sir, an undevout historian is mad. The longer you study modern history, the more evidence you find of Belial's Guiding Hand." The Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns, refreshes himself with another drink of wine, then continues. "And then there was Nationalism — the theory that the state you happen to be subject to is the only true god, and that all other states are false gods; that all these gods, true as well as false, have the mentality of juvenile delinquents; and that every conflict over prestige, power or money is a crusade for the Good, the True and the Beautiful. The fact that such theories came, at a given moment of history, to be universally accepted is the best proof of Belial's existence, the best proof that at long last He'd won the battle."

"I don't quite follow," says Dr. Poole.

"But surely it's obvious. Here you have two notions. Each is intrinsically absurd and each leads to courses of action that are demonstrably fatal. And yet the whole of civilised humanity decides, almost suddenly, to accept these notions as guides to conduct. Why? And at Whose suggestion, Whose prompting, Whose inspiration? There can be only one answer."

"You mean, you think it was. . . it was the Devil?"

"Who else desires the degradation and destruction of the human race?"

"Quite, quite," Dr. Poole agrees. "But all the same as a Protestant Christian, I really can't. . ."

"Is that so?" says the Arch-Vicar sarcastically. "Then you know better than Luther, you know better than the whole Christian Church. Are you aware, sir, that from the second century onward no orthodox Christian believed that a man could be possessed by God? He could only be possessed by the Devil. And why did people believe that? Because the facts made it impossible for them to believe otherwise. Belial's a fact, Moloch's a fact, diabolic possession's a fact."

"I protest," cries Dr. Poole. "As a man of science. . ."

"As a man of science you're bound to accept the working hypothesis that explains the facts most plausibly. Well, what are the facts? The first is a fact of experience and observation — namely that nobody wants to suffer, wants to be degraded, wants to be maimed or killed. The second is a fact of history — the fact that, at a certain epoch, the overwhelming majority of human beings accepted beliefs and adopted courses of action that could not possibly result in anything but universal suffering, general degradation and wholesale destruction. The only plausible explanation is that they were inspired or possessed by an alien consciousness, a consciousness that willed their undoing and willed it more strongly than they were able to will their own happiness and survival."

There is a silence.

"Of course," Dr. Poole ventures at last to suggest, "those facts could be accounted for in other ways."

"But not so plausibly, not nearly so simply," insists the Arch-Vicar. "And then consider all the other evidence. Take the First World War, for example. If the people and the politicians hadn't been possessed, they'd have listened to Benedict XV or Lord Lansdowne — they'd have come to terms, they'd have negotiated a peace without victory. But they couldn't, they couldn't. It was impossible for them to act in their own self-interest. They had to do what the Belial in them dictated — and the Belial in them wanted the Communist Revolution, wanted the Fascist reaction to that revolution, wanted Mussolini and Hitler and the Politburo, wanted famine, inflation and depression; wanted armaments as a cure for unemployment; wanted the persecution of the Jews and the Kulaks; wanted the Nazis and the Communists to divide Poland and then go to war with one another. Yes, and He wanted the wholesale revival of slavery in its most brutal form. He wanted forced migrations and mass pauperization. He wanted concentration camps and gas chambers and cremation ovens. He wanted saturation bombing (what a deliciously juicy phrase!). He wanted the destruction overnight of a century's accumulation of wealth and all the potentialities of future prosperity, decency, freedom and culture. Belial wanted all this and, being the Great Blowfly in the hearts of the politicians and generals, the journalists and the Common Man, He was easily able to get the Pope ignored even by Catholics, to have Lansdowne condemned as a bad patriot, almost a traitor. And so the war dragged on for four whole years; and afterward everything went punctually according to Plan. The world situation went steadily from bad to worse, and as it worsened, men and women became progressively more docile to the leadings of the Unholy Spirit. The old beliefs in the value of the individual soul faded away; the old restraints lost their effectiveness; the old compunctions and compassions evaporated. Everything that the Other One had ever put into people's heads oozed out, and the resulting vacuum was filled by the lunatic dreams of Progress and Nationalism. Granted the validity of those dreams, it followed that mere people, living here and now, were no better than ants and bedbugs and might be treated accordingly. And they were treated accordingly, they most certainly were!"

The Arch-Vicar chuckles shrilly and helps himself to the last of the trotters.

"For his period," he continues, "old man Hitler was a pretty good specimen of a demoniac. Not so completely possessed, of course, as many of the great national leaders in the years between 1945 and the beginning of the Third World War, but definitely above the average of his own time. More than almost any of his contemporaries, he had a right to say, 'Not I, but Belial in me.' The others were possessed only in spots, only at certain times. Take the scientists, for example. Good, well-meaning men, for the most part. But He got hold of them all the same — got hold of them at the point where they ceased to be human beings and became specialists. Hence, the glanders and those bombs. And then remember that man — what was his name? — the one that was President of the United States for such a long time. . . ."

"Roosevelt?" suggests Dr. Poole.

"That's it — Roosevelt. Well, do you recall that phrase he kept repeating through the whole of the Second World War? 'Unconditional surrender, unconditional surrender.' Plenary inspiration — that's what that was. Direct and plenary inspiration!"

"You say so," demurs Dr. Poole. "But what's your proof?"

"The proof?" repeats the Arch-Vicar. "The whole of subsequent history is the proof. Look at what happened when the phrase became a policy and was actually put into practice. Unconditional surrender — how many millions of new cases of tuberculosis? How many millions of children forced to be thieves or prostituting themselves for bars of chocolate? Belial was particularly pleased about the children. And again, unconditional surrender — the ruin of Europe, the chaos in Asia, the starvation everywhere, the revolutions, the tyrannies. Unconditional surrender — and more innocents had to undergo worse suffering than at any other period in history. And, as you know very well, there's nothing that Belial likes better than the suffering of innocents. And finally, of course, there was the Thing. Unconditional surrender and bang! — just as He'd always intended. And it all happened without any miracle or special intervention, merely by natural means. The more one thinks about the workings of His Providence, the more unfathomably marvellous it seems." Devoutly, the Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns. There is a little pause. "Listen," he says, holding up his hand.

For a few seconds they sit without speaking. The dim, blurred monotone of the chant swells into audibility. "Blood, blood, blood, the blood. . ." There is a faint cry as yet another little monster is spitted on the Patriarch's knife, then the thudding of bulls' pizzles on flesh and, through the excited roaring of the congregation, a succession of loud, scarcely human screams.

"You'd hardly think he could have produced us without a miracle," the Arch-Vicar thoughtfully continues. "But He did, He did. By purely natural means, using human beings and their science as His instruments, He created an entirely new race of men, with deformity in their blood, with squalor all around them and ahead, in the future, no prospects but of more squalor, worse deformity and, finally, complete extinction. Yes, it's a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living Evil."

"Then why," asks Dr. Poole, "do you go on worshiping Him?"

"Why do you throw food to a growling tiger? To buy yourself a breathing space. To put off the horror of the inevitable, if only for a few minutes. In earth as it is in Hell — but at least one's still on earth."

"It hardly seems worth while," says Dr. Poole in the philosophical tone of one who has just dined.

Another unusually piercing scream makes him turn his head toward the door. He watches for a while in silence. This time, his expression is one in which horror has been considerably mitigated by scientific curiosity.

"Getting used to it, eh?" says the Arch-Vicar genially.

NARRATOR

Conscience, custom — the first makes cowards,

Makes saints of us sometimes, makes human beings.

The other makes Patriots, Papists, Protestants,

Makes Babbitts, Sadists, Swedes or Slovaks,

Makes killers of Kulaks, chlorinators of Jews,

Makes all who mangle, for lofty motives,

Quivering flesh, without qualm or question

To mar their certainty of Supreme Service.

Yes, my friends, remember how indignant you once felt when the Turks massacred more than the ordinary quota of Armenians, how you thanked God that you lived in a Protestant, progressive country, where such things simply couldn't happen — couldn't happen because men wore bowler hats and travelled daily to town by the eight twenty-three. And then reflect for a moment on a few of the horrors you now take for granted; the outrages against the most rudimentary human decencies that have been perpetrated on your behalf (or perhaps by your own hands); the atrocities you take your little girl to see, twice a week, on the news reel —and she finds them commonplace and boring. Twenty years hence, at this rate, your grandchildren will be turning on their television sets for a look at the gladiatorial games; and, when those begin to pall, there will be the Army's mass crucifixion of Conscientious Objectors or the skinning alive, in full colour, of the seventy thousand persons suspected, at Tegucigalpa, of un-Honduranean activities.

Meanwhile, in the Unholy of Unholies, Dr. Poole is still looking out through the crack between the sliding doors. The Arch-Vicar is picking his teeth. There is a comfortable, postprandial silence. Suddenly Dr. Poole turns to his companion.

"Something's happening," he cries excitedly. "They're leaving their seats."

"I'd been expecting that for quite a long time now," replies the Arch-Vicar, without ceasing to pick his teeth. "It's the blood that does it. That and, of course, the whipping."

"They're jumping down into the arena," Dr. Poole continues. "They're running after one another. What on earth . . . ? Oh, my God! I beg your pardon," he hastily adds. "But really, really. . ."

Much agitated, he walks away from the door.

"There are limits," he says.

"That's where you're wrong," replies the Arch-Vicar. "There are no limits. Everybody's capable of anything — but anything."

Dr. Poole does not answer. Drawn irresistibly by a force that is stronger than his will, he has returned to his old place and is staring out, avidly and in horror, at what is going on in the arena.

"It's monstrous!" he cries indignantly. "It's utterly revolting."

The Arch-Vicar rises heavily from his couch and, opening a little cupboard in the wall, takes out a pair of binoculars, which he hands to Dr. Poole.

"Try these," he says. "Night glasses. Standard Navy equipment from before the Thing. You'll see everything."

"But you don't imagine. . ."

"Not merely do I imagine," says the Arch-Vicar, with an ironically benignant smile; "I see with my own eyes. Go ahead, man. Look. You've never seen anything like this in New Zealand."

"I certainly have not," says Dr. Poole in the kind of tone his mother might have used.

All the same he finally raises the binoculars to his eyes.

Long shot from his viewpoint. It is a scene of Satyrs and Nymphs, of pursuits and captures, provocative resistances followed by the enthusiastic surrender of lips to bearded lips, of panting bosoms to the impatience of rough hands, the whole accompanied by a babel of shouting, squealing and shrill laughter.

Cut back to the Arch-Vicar, whose face is puckered into a grimace of contemptuous distaste.

"Like cats," he says at last. "Only cats have the decency not to be gregarious in their courting. And you still have doubts about Belial — even after this?"

There is a pause.

"Was this something that happened after. . . after the Thing?" Dr. Poole enquires.

"In two generations."

"Two generations!" Dr. Poole whistles. "Nothing recessive about that mutation. And don't they. . . well, I mean, don't they feel like doing this sort of thing at any other season?"

"Just for these five weeks, that's all. And we only permit two weeks of actual mating."

"Why?"

The Arch-Vicar makes the sign of the horns.

"On general principles. They have to be punished for having been punished. It's the Law of Belial. And, I may say, we really let them have it if they break the rules."

"Quite, quite," says Dr. Poole, remembering with discomfort the episode with Loola among the dunes.

"It's pretty hard for the ones who throw back to the old-style mating pattern."

"Are there many of those?"

"Between five and ten per cent of the population. We call them 'Hots.' "

"And you don't permit. . . ?"

"We beat the hell out of them when we catch them."

"But that's monstrous!"

"Of course it is," the Arch-Vicar agrees. "But remember your history. If you want solidarity, you've got to have either an external enemy or an oppressed minority. We have no external enemies, so we have to make the most of our Hots. They're what the Jews were under Hitler, what the bourgeois were under Lenin and Stalin, what the heretics used to be in Catholic countries and the Papists under the Protestants. If anything goes wrong, it's always the fault of the Hots. I don't know what we'd do without them."

"But don't you ever stop to think what they must feel?"

"Why should I? First of all, it's the law. Condign punishment for having been punished. Second, if they're discreet, they won't get punished. All they've got to do is to avoid having babies at the wrong season and to disguise the fact that they fall in love and make permanent connections with persons of the opposite sex. And, if they don't want to be discreet, they can always run away."

"Run away? Where to?"

"There's a little community up North, near Fresno. Eighty-five per cent Hot. It's a dangerous journey, of course. Very little water on the way. And if we catch them, we bury them alive. But if they choose to take the risk, they're perfectly free to do so. And then finally there's the priesthood." He makes the sign of the horns. "Any bright boy, who shows early signs of being a Hot, has his future assured: we make a priest of him."

Several seconds pass before Dr. Poole ventures to ask his next question.

"You mean, you. . . ?"

"Precisely," says the Arch-Vicar. "For the Kingdom of Hell's sake. Not to mention the strictly practical reasons. After all, the business of the community has got to be carried on somehow, and obviously the laity are in no condition to do it."

The noise from the arena swells to a momentary climax.

"Nauseous!" squeaks the Arch-Vicar with a sudden intensification of abhorrence. "And this is nothing to what it will be later on. How thankful I am that I've been preserved from such ignominy! Not they, but the Enemy of Mankind incarnate in their disgusting bodies. Kindly look over there." He draws Dr. Poole toward him; he points a thick forefinger. 'To the left of the High Altar — with that little red-headed vessel. That's the Chief. The Chief!" he repeats with derisive emphasis. "What sort of a ruler is he going to be during the next two weeks?"

Resisting the temptation to make personal remarks about a man who, though temporarily in retirement, is destined to return to power, Dr. Poole utters a nervous little laugh.

"Yes, he certainly seems to be relaxing from the cares of State."

NARRATOR

But why, why does he have to relax with Loola? Vile brute and faithless strumpet! But there is at least one consolation — and to a shy man, plagued with desires he dares not act upon, a very great consolation: Loola's conduct is the proof of an accessibility which, in New Zealand, in academic circles, in the neighbourhood of his Mother, could only be furtively dreamed about as something altogether too good to be true. And it is not only Loola who proves herself accessible. The same thing is being demonstrated, no less actively, no less vocally, by those mulatto girls, by Flossie, the plump and honey-coloured Teuton, by that enormous Armenian matron, by the little tow-headed adolescent with the big blue eyes. . . .

"Yes, that's our Chief," says the Arch-Vicar bitterly. "Until he and the other pigs stop being possessed, the Church just takes over."

Incorrigibly cultured, in spite of his overwhelming desire to be out there with Loola — or almost anyone else, if it comes to that — Dr. Poole makes an apt remark about the Spiritual Authority and the Temporal Power.

The Arch-Vicar ignores it.

"Well," he says briskly, "it's time I got down to business."

He calls a Postulant, who hands him a tallow dip, then crosses over to the altar at the east end of the shrine. Upon it stands a single candle of yellow beeswax, three or four feet high and disproportionately thick. The Arch-Vicar genuflects, lights the candle, makes the sign of the horns, then comes back to where Dr. Poole is staring out, wide-eyed with fascinated horror and shocked concupiscence, at the spectacle in the arena.

"Stand aside, please."

Dr. Poole obeys.

A Postulant slides back first one door, then the other. The Arch-Vicar steps forward and stands in the centre of the opening, touching the gilded horns of his tiara. From the musicians on the steps of the High Altar comes a shrill screeching of thighbone recorders. The noises of the crowd die away into a silence that is only occasionally punctuated by the bestial utterance of some joy or anguish too savagely violent to be repressed. Antiphonally, the priests begin to chant.

SEMICHORUS I

This is the time,

SEMICHORUS II

For Belial is merciless,

SEMICHORUS I

Time for Time's ending.

SEMICHORUS II

In the chaos of lust.

SEMICHORUS I

This is the time,

SEMICHORUS II

For Belial is in your blood,

SEMICHORUS I

Time for the birth in you

SEMICHORUS II

Of the Others, the Aliens,

SEMICHORUS I

Of Itch, of Tetter,

SEMICHORUS II

Of tumid Worm.

SEMICHORUS I

This is the time,

SEMICHORUS II

For Belial hates you,

SEMICHORUS I

Time for the Soul's death,

SEMICHORUS II

For the Person to perish,

SEMICHORUS I

Sentenced by craving,

SEMICHORUS II

And pleasure is the hangman;

SEMICHORUS I

Time for the Enemy's

SEMICHORUS II

Total triumph,

SEMICHORUS I

For the Baboon to be master,

SEMICHORUS II

That monsters may be begotten.

SEMICHORUS I

Not your will, but His,

SEMICHORUS II

That you may all be lost forever.

From the crowd rises a loud unanimous "Amen."

"His curse be on you," the Arch-Vicar intones in his high-pitched voice, then moves back to the end of the shrine and mounts the throne that stands next to the altar. From outside we hear a confused shouting that grows louder and louder, and suddenly the shrine is invaded by a throng of corybantic worshipers. They rush to the altar, they tear off one another's aprons and fling them in a mounting pile at the foot of the Arch-Vicar's throne. no, no, no — and for each no there is a triumphant shout of "Yes," followed by an unequivocal gesture toward the nearest person of the opposite sex. In the distance the priests are monotonously chanting, "Not your will, but His, that you may all be lost forever" — again and again.

Close shot of Dr. Poole, as he watches the proceedings from a corner of the oratory.

Cut back to the crowd, face after mindless, ecstatic face enters the field of view and passes out again. And there, suddenly, is Loola's face — the eyes shining, the lips parted, the dimples wildly alive. She turns her head, she catches sight of Dr. Poole.

"Alfie!" she cries.

Her tone and expression evoke an equally rapturous response.

"Loola!"

They rush together in a passionate embrace. Seconds pass. Vaselinelike, the strains of the Good Friday music from Parsifal make themselves heard on the sound track.

Then the faces come unstuck, the Camera pulls back.

"Quick, quick!"

Loola seizes his arm and drags him toward the altar.

"The apron," she says.

Dr. Poole looks down at the apron, then, blushing as red as the no embroidered upon it, averts his eyes.

"It seems so. . . so indecorous," he says.

He stretches out his hand, withdraws it, then changes his mind yet again. Taking a corner of the apron between his thumb and forefinger, he gives it a couple of feebly ineffective tweaks.

"Harder," she cries, "Much harder!"

With an almost frantic violence — for it is not only the apron that he is tearing away, it is also his mother's influence and all his inhibitions, all the conventions in which he has been brought up — Dr. Poole does as he is told. The stitching yields more easily than he had anticipated and he almost falls over backward. Recovering his balance, he stands there, looking in sheepish embarrassment from the little nappy that represents the Seventh Commandment into Loola's laughing face and then down again at the crimson prohibition. Cut back and forth: no, dimples, no, dimples, no. . . .

"Yes!" shouts Loola triumphantly. "Yes!"

Snatching the apron out of his hand, she throws it down at the foot of the throne. Then with a "Yes" and another "Yes," she rips the patches from her chest and, turning to the altar, makes her reverence to the Candle.

Medium close shot from the back of Look genuflecting. All at once an elderly man with a grey beard rushes excitedly into the shot, tears the twin no's off the seat of her homespun pants and starts to drag her toward the door of the shrine.

Giving him a slap in the face and a vigorous push, Loola breaks away and for the second time throws herself into Dr. Poole's arms.

"Yes?" she whispers.

And emphatically he answers, "Yes!"

They kiss, smile rapturously at each other, then move in the direction of the darkness beyond the sliding doors. As they pass the throne, the Arch-Vicar leans down and, smiling ironically, taps Dr. Poole on the shoulder.

"What about my field glasses?" he says.

Dissolve to a night scene of ink-black shadows and expanses of moonlight. In the background stands the mouldering pile of the Los Angeles County Museum. Amorously interlaced, Loola and Dr. Poole enter the shot, then pass into impenetrable darkness. Silhouettes of men pursuing women, or women throwing themselves on men, appear for a moment and vanish. To the accompaniment of the Good Friday music we hear a rising and falling chorus of grunts and moans, of explosively shouted obscenities and long-drawn howls of agonising delight.

NARRATOR

Consider the birds. What a delicacy in their love-making, what old-world chivalry! For although the hormones produced within the body of the breeding hen predispose her to sexual emotion, their effect is neither so intense nor of so brief a duration as that of the ovarian hormones in the blood of female mammals during oestrus. Moreover, for obvious reasons, the cock bird is in no position to enforce his desires upon an unwilling hen. Hence the prevalence among male birds of bright plumage and of an instinct for courtship. And hence the conspicuous absence of these charming things among male mammals. For where, as in the mammals, the female's amorous desires and her attractiveness to the male sex are wholly determined by chemical means, what need is there of masculine beauty of the niceties of preliminary courtship?

Among humans every day of the year is potentially the mating season. Girls are not chemically predestined during a few days, to accept the advances of the first male who presents himself. Their bodies manufacture hormones in doses sufficiently small to leave even the most temperamental of them a certain freedom of choice. That is why, unlike his fellow mammals, man has always been a wooer. But now the gamma rays have changed all that. The hereditary patterns of man's physical and mental behaviour have been given another form. Thanks to the supreme Triumph of Modern Science, sex has become seasonal, romance has been swallowed up by the oestrus and the female's chemical compulsion to mate has abolished courtship, chivalry, tenderness, love itself.

At this moment a radiant Loola and a considerably dishevelled Dr. Poole emerge from the shadows. A burly male, temporarily unattached, comes striding into the shot. At the sight of Loola, he stops. His mouth falls open, his eyes widen, he breathes heavily.

Dr. Poole gives the stranger one look, then turns nervously to his companion.

"I think perhaps it might be a good thing if we walked this way . . ."

Without a word the stranger rushes at him, gives him a push that sends him flying and takes Loola in his arms. She resists for a moment; then the chemicals in her blood impose their Categorical Imperative, and she ceases to struggle.

Making a noise like a tiger at feeding time, the stranger lifts her off her feet and carries her into the shadows.

Dr. Poole, who has had time to pick himself up, makes as though to follow, to wreak vengeance, to rescue the distressed victim. Then a combination of apprehension and modesty causes him to slacken his pace. If he advances, heaven knows what he may find himself intruding upon. And then that man, that hairy hulk of bone and muscle. . . . On the whole it might perhaps be wiser. . . . He comes to a halt and stands hesitant, not knowing what to do. Suddenly two beautiful young mulatto girls come running out of the County Museum and simultaneously throw their brown arms round his neck and cover his face with kisses.

"You great big beautiful bastard," they whisper in husky unison.

For a moment Dr. Poole hesitates between the inhibitory recollection of his mother, the fidelity to Loola prescribed by all the poets and novelists, and the warm, elastic Facts of Life. After about four seconds of moral conflict, he chooses, as we might expect, the Facts of Life. He smiles, he returns the kisses, he murmurs words which it would startle Miss Hook and almost kill his mother to hear, he encircles either body with an arm, caresses either bosom with hands that have never done anything of the kind except in unavowable imaginings. The noises of mating swell to a brief climax, then diminish. For a little while there is complete silence.

Accompanied by a train of Archimandrites, Familiars, Presbyters and Postulants, the Arch-Vicar and the Patriarch of Pasadena come pacing majestically into the shot. At the sight of Dr. Poole and the mulattos, they come to a halt. Making a grimace of disgusted abhorrence, the Patriarch spits on the ground. More tolerant, the Arch-Vicar only smiles ironically.

"Dr. Poole!" he flutes in his odd falsetto.

Guiltily, as though he had heard his mother calling, Dr. Poole drops those busy hands of his and, turning toward the Arch-Vicar, tries to assume an expression of airy innocence. "These girls," his smile is meant to imply, "who are these girls? Why, I don't even know their names. We were just having a little chat about the higher cryptogams, that's all."

"You great big beautiful . . ." begins a husky voice.

Dr. Poole coughs loudly and fends off the embrace that accompanies the words.

"Don't mind us," says the Arch-Vicar pleasantly. "After all, Belial Day comes but once a year."

Approaching, he touches the gilded horns of his tiara, then lays his hands on Dr. Poole's head.

"Yours," he says with a suddenly professional unctuousness, "has been an almost miraculously sudden conversion. Yes, almost miraculously." Then, changing his tone, "By the way," he adds, "we've had a bit of trouble with your friends from New Zealand. This afternoon somebody spotted a group of them in Beverly Hills. I guess they were looking for you."

"Yes, I suppose so."

"But they're not going to find you," says the Arch-Vicar genially. "One of our Inquisitors went out with a posse of Familiars to deal with them."

"What happened?" Dr. Poole anxiously enquires.

"Our men laid an ambush, let fly with arrows. One was killed, and the others made off with the wounded. I don't think we shall be bothered again. But just to make certain. . ." He beckons to two of his attendants. "Listen," he says. "There isn't going to be a rescue and there isn't going to be an escape. I make you responsible, do you understand?"

The two Postulants bow their heads.

"And now," says the Arch-Vicar, turning back to Dr. Poole, "well leave you to beget all the little monsters you can."

He winks, pats Dr. Poole on the cheek, then takes the Patriarch's arm and, followed by his retinue, moves away.

Dr. Poole stares after the retreating figures, then glances uneasily at the two Postulants who have been appointed to guard him.

Brown arms are thrown around his neck.

"You great big beautiful. . ."

"No, really. Not in public. Not with those men aroundl"

"What difference does that make?"

And before he has time to answer, husky, musky, dusky, the Facts of Life close in on him again, and in a complicated embrace, like some half reluctant, half blissfully consenting Laocoon, he is ravished away into the shadows. With an expression of disgust, the two Postulants simultaneously spit.

NARRATOR

L'ombre etait nuptiale, auguste et solennelle

He is interrupted by a burst of frenzied caterwauling.

NARRATOR

When I look into the fishponds in my garden,

(And not mine only, for every garden is riddled

With eel holes and reflected moons), methinks

I see a Thing armed with a rake that seems,

Out of the ooze, out of the immanence

Among the eels of heaven, to strike at me —

At Me the holy, Me divine! And yet

How tedious is a guilty conscience! How

Tedious, for that matter, an unguilty one!

What wonder if the horror of the fishponds

Draws us toward the rake? And the Thing strikes,

And I, the uneasy Person, in the mud,

Or in the liquid moonlight, thankfully

Find others than myself to have that blind

Or radiant being.

Dissolve to a medium shot of Dr. Poole asleep on the drifted sand at the foot of a towering wall of concrete. Twenty feet away one of his guards is also sleeping. The other is absorbed in an ancient copy of Forever Amber. The sun is already high in the heavens and a close shot reveals a small green lizard crawling over one of Dr. Poole's outstretched hands. He does not stir, but lies as though dead.

NARRATOR

And this, too, is the beatific being of somebody who most certainly isn't Alfred Poole D.Sc. For sleep is one of the preconditions of the Incarnation, the primary instrument of divine immanence. Sleeping, we cease to live that we may be lived (how blessedly!) by some nameless Other who takes this opportunity to restore the mind to sanity and bring healing to the abused and self-tormented body.

From breakfast to bedtime you may be doing everything in your power to outrage Nature and deny the fact of your Glassy Essence. But even the angriest ape at last grows weary of his tricks and has to sleep. And, while he sleeps, the indwelling Compassion preserves him, willy nilly, from the suicide which, in his waking hours, he has tried so frantically hard to commit. Then the sun rises again, and our ape wakes up once more to his own self and the freedom of his personal will — to yet another day of trick playing or, if he chooses, to the beginnings of self-knowledge, to the first steps toward his liberation.

A peal of excited feminine laughter cuts short the Narrator's speech. The sleeper stirs and, at a second, louder outburst, starts into full wakefulness and sits up, looking around him in bewilderment, not knowing where he is. Again that laughter. He turns his head in the direction of the sound. In a long shot from his viewpoint we see his two brown-skinned friends of the previous night emerging at full speed from behind a sand dune and darting into the ruins of the County Museum. At their heels, in concentrated silence, runs the Chief. All three disappear from view.

The sleeping Postulant wakes up and turns to his companion.

"What's that?" he asks.

"The usual thing," the other answers, without looking up from Forever Amber.

As he speaks, shrill squeals reverberate through the cavernous halls of the Museum. The Postulants look at one another in silence, then simultaneously spit.

Cut back to Dr. Poole.

"My God," he says aloud, "my God!"

He covers his face with his hands.

NARRATOR

Into the satiety of this morning-after let loose a rodent conscience and the principles learned at a mother's knee — or not infrequently across it (head downward and with shirt tails well rucked up), in condign spankings, sadly and prayerfully administered, but remembered, ironically enough, as the pretext and accompaniment of innumerable erotic daydreams, each duly followed by its remorse, and each remorse bringing with it the idea of punishment and all its attendant sensualities. And so on, indefinitely. Well, as I say, let those loose into this, and the result may easily be a religious conversion. But a conversion to what? Most ignorant of what he is most assured, our poor friend doesn't know. And here comes almost the last person he would expect to help him to discover.

As the Narrator speaks this last sentence, Loola enters the shot.

"Alfie!" she cries happily. "I was looking for you."

Cut briefly to the two Postulants, who look at her for a moment with all the distaste of enforced continence, then turn away and expectorate.

Meanwhile, after one brief glance at those "lineaments of satisfied desire," Dr. Poole guiltily averts his eyes.

"Good morning," he says in a tone of formal politeness. "I hope you. . . you slept well?"

Loola sits down beside him, opens the leather bag which she carries slung over her shoulder and extracts half a loaf of bread and five or six large oranges.

"Nobody can think of doing much cooking these days," she explains. "It's just one long picnic until the cold season begins again."

"Quite, quite," says Dr. Poole.

"You must be awfully hungry," she goes on. "After last night."

Her dimples come out of hiding, as she smiles at him.

Hot and blushing with embarrassment, Dr. Poole hastily tries to change the subject of conversation.

"Those are beautiful oranges," he remarks. "In New Zealand they don't do really well except in the extreme. . ."

"There!" says Loola, interrupting him.

She hands him a thick hunk of bread, breaks off another for herself and bites into it with strong white teeth.

"It's good," she says with her mouth full. "Why don't you eat?"

Dr. Poole who realises that, in effect, he is ravenously hungry, but who is unwilling, for the sake of decorum, to admit the fact too openly, nibbles daintily at his crust.

Loola snuggles against him and leans her head on his shoulder.

"It was fun, Alfie, wasn't it?" She takes another bite of bread and without waiting for him to answer, continues: "More fun with you than with any of the others. Did you think that too?"

She looks up at him tenderly.

Close shot from her viewpoint of Dr. Poole's expression of agonising moral discomfort.

"Alfie!" she cries, "what's the matter?"

"Perhaps it would be better," he manages at last to say, "if we talked about something else."

Loola straightens herself up and looks at him for a few seconds intently and in silence.

"You think too much," she says at last. "You mustn't think. If you think, it stops being fun." The light suddenly goes out of her face. "If you think," she goes on in a low voice, "it's terrible, terrible. It's a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living Evil. When I remember what they did to Polly and her baby. . ."

She shudders, her eyes fill with tears and she turns away.

NARRATOR

Those tears again, those symptoms of personality — the sight of them evokes a sympathy that is stronger than the sense of guilt.

Forgetting the Postulants, Dr. Poole draws Loola toward him and with whispered words, with the caresses one uses to quiet a crying child, tries to comfort her. He is so successful that, in a minute or two, she is lying quite still in the crook of his arm. Sighing happily, she opens her eyes, looks up at him and smiles with an expression of tenderness, to which the dimples add a ravishingly incongruous hint of mischief.

"This is what I've always dreamed of."

"It is?"

"But it never happened — it never could happen. Not till you came. . ." She strokes his cheek. "I wish your beard didn't have to grow," she adds. "You'll look like the other fellows then. But you aren't like them, you're quite different."

"Not so different as all that," says Dr. Poole.

He bends down and kisses her on the eyelids, on the throat, on the mouth — then draws back and looks down at her with an expression of triumphant masculinity.

"Not different in that way," she qualifies. "But different in this way." She pats his cheek again. "You and I sitting together and talking and being happy because you're you and I'm me. It doesn't happen here. Except. . . except. . ." She breaks off. Her face darkens. "Do you know what happens to people who are Hots?" she whispers.

This time it is Dr. Poole's turn to protest against thinking too much. He backs up his words with action.

Close shot of the embrace. Then cut to the two Postulants, staring disgustedly at the spectacle. As they spit, another Postulant enters the shot.

"Orders from His Eminence," he says, making the sign of the horns. "This assignment's over. You're to report back to headquarters."

Dissolve to the Canterbury. A wounded seaman, with an arrow still sticking in his shoulder, is being hoisted in a sling from the whaleboat to the deck of the schooner. On the deck lie two other victims of the Californians' archery — Dr. Cudworth with a wound in his left leg and Miss Hook. The latter has an arrow imbedded deeply in her right side. The doctor, as he bends over her, looks grave.

"Morphine," he says to his orderly. "Then we'll get her down to the surgery as quickly as we can. . ."

Meanwhile there has been a shouting of orders and suddenly we hear the noise of the donkey engine and the clanking of the anchor chain as it is wound round the capstan.

Ethel Hook opens her eyes and looks around her. An expression of distress appears on her pale face.

"You're not going to sail away and leave him?" she says. "But you can't, you can't!" She makes an effort to raise herself from the stretcher; but the movement causes so much pain that she falls back again, with a groan.

"Quiet, quiet," says the doctor soothingly, as he swabs her arm with alcohol.

"But he may still be alive," she feebly protests. "They can't desert him; they can't just wash their hands of him."

"Hold still," says the doctor and, taking the syringe from his orderly, he drives the needle into the flesh.

The clanking of the anchor chain rises to a crescendo as we dissolve to Loola and Dr. Poole.

"I'm hungry," says Loola, sitting up.

Reaching for her knapsack, she takes out what is left of the bread, breaks it in two, hands the larger fragment to Dr. Poole and sinks her teeth into the other. She finishes her mouthful and is about to start on another, when she changes her mind. Turning to her companion, she takes his hand and kisses it.

"What's that for?" he asks.

Loola shrugs her shoulders.

"I don't know. I just suddenly felt like that." She eats some more bread, then, after a ruminative silence, turns to him with the air of one who has just made an important and unexpected discovery.

"Alfie," she announces, "I believe I shall never want to say Yes to anyone except you."

Greatly moved, Dr. Poole leans forward, takes her hand and presses it to his heart.

"I feel I've only just discovered what life's all about," he says.

"Me too."

She leans against him, and like a miser irresistibly drawn to count his treasure yet once more, Dr. Poole runs his fingers through her hair, separating lock from thick lock, lifting a curl and letting it fall back noiselessly into its place.

NARRATOR

And so, by the dialectic of sentiment, these two have rediscovered for themselves that synthesis of the chemical and the personal, to which we give the names of monogamy and romantic love. In her case it was the hormone that excluded the person; in his, the person that could not come to terms with the hormone. But now there is the beginning of a larger wholeness.

Dr. Poole reaches into his pocket and pulls out the little volume which he rescued yesterday from the furnace. He opens it, turns the pages and begins to read aloud.

"'Warm fragrance seems to fall from her light dress

And her loose hair; and where some heavy tress

The air of her own speed has disentwined,

The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind;

And in the soul a wild odour is felt

Beyond the sense, like fiery dews that melt

Into the bosom of a frozen bud.'"

"What's that?" Loola asks.

"You!" He bends down and kisses her hair. "'And in the soul,'" he whispers, " 'a wild odour is felt beyond the sense.' In the soul," he repeats.

"What's the soul?" Loola asks.

"Well. . ." He hesitates; then, deciding to let Shelley give the answer, he resumes his reading.

"'See where she stands, a mortal shape indued

With love and life and light and deity,

And motion which may change, but never die,

An image of some bright Eternity,

A shadow of some golden dream; a Splendour

Leaving the third sphere pilotless; a tender

Reflection of the eternal Moon of Love. . .'"

"But I don't understand a word of it," Loola complains.

"And until today," says Dr. Poole, smiling down at her, "until today, neither did I."

We dissolve to the exterior of the Unholy of Unholies, two weeks later. Several hundreds of bearded men and slatternly women are queued up, in double file, awaiting their turn to enter the shrine. The Camera passes down the long line of dull and dirty faces, then holds on Loola and Dr. Poole, who are in the act of passing through the sliding doors.

Within all is gloom and silence. Two by two the nymphs and prancing satyrs of a few short days ago shuffle despondently past an altar, whose mighty candle is now eclipsed by a tin extinguisher. At the foot of the Arch-Vicar's empty throne lies the heap of discarded Seventh Commandments. As the procession slowly passes, the Archimandrite in charge of Public Morals hands out to every male an apron and to every female an apron and four round patches.

"Out through the side door," he repeats to each recipient.

And out through the side door, when their turn comes, Loola and Dr. Poole duly go. There, in the sunshine, a score of Postulants are busily at work, with thread and needle, stitching aprons to waistbands, patches to trouser seats and shirt fronts.

The Camera holds on Loola. Three young seminarists in Toggenberg cassocks accost her as she emerges into the open air.

She hands her apron to the first, a patch to each of the others. All three set to work simultaneously and with extraordinary rapidity. NO, NO and NO.

"Turn around, please."

Handing over her last patches, she obeys; and, while the apron specialist moves away to attend to Dr. Poole, the others ply their needles so diligently that, in half a minute, she is no less forbidding from behind than when seen from in front

"There!"

"And there!"

The two clerical tailors step aside and reveal a close shot of their handiwork. NO NO. Cut back to the Postulants, who express their sentiments by spitting in unison, then turn toward the door of the shrine.

"Next lady, please."

Wearing a look of extreme dejection, the two inseparable mulatto girls step forward together.

Cut to Dr. Poole. Aproned and bearded with a fortnight's growth of hair, he walks over to where Loola is waiting for him.

"This way, please," says a shrill voice.

In silence they take their places at the end of yet another queue. Resignedly, two or three hundred persons are waiting to be assigned their tasks by the Grand Inquisitor's Chief Assistant in charge of Public Works. Three-horned and robed impressively in a white Saanen soutane, the great man is sitting with a couple of two-horned Familiars at a large table, on which stand several steel filing cabinets salvaged from the offices of the Providential Life Insurance Company.

A series of montage shots exhibits, in twenty seconds, the slow, hour-long advance of Loola and Dr. Poole towards the well-spring of Authority. And now at last they have reached their destination. Close shot of the Grand Inquisitor's Special Assistant as he tells Dr. Poole to report to the Director of Food Production at his office in the ruins of the Administration Building of the University of Southern California. This gentleman will see that the botanist gets a laboratory, a plot of ground for his experimental planting, and up to four labourers to perform the manual work.

"Up to four labourers," the prelate repeats, "Though at ordinary times. . ."

Unauthorised, Loola breaks into the conversation.

"Oh, let me be one of the labourers," she begs. "Please."

The Grand Inquisitor's Special Assistant gives her a long withering look, then turns to his Familiars.

"And who, pray, is this young vessel of the Unholy Spirit?" he asks.

One of the Familiars extracts Loola's card from the file and provides the relevant information. Aged eighteen and hitherto sterile, the vessel in question is reported to have associated during one off-season with a notorious Hot, who was later liquidated while trying to resist arrest. Nothing however was ever proved against the said vessel and its conduct has been generally satisfactory. Said vessel has been employed, for the past year, as a miner of cemeteries and is to be similarly employed during the coming season.

"But I want to work with Alfie," she protests.

"You seem to forget," says the first Familiar, "that this is a Democracy. . ."

"A Democracy," adds his colleague, "in which every proletarian enjoys perfect freedom."

"True freedom."

"Freely doing the will of the Proletariat."

"And vox proletariate, vox Diaboli."

"While, of course, vox Diaboli, vox Ecclesiae."

"And we here are the Church's representatives."

"So you see."

"But I'm tired of cemeteries," the girl insists. "I'd like to dig up live things for a change."

There is a brief silence. Then the Grand Inquisitor's Special Assistant bends down and, from under his chair, produces a very large consecrated bull's pizzle, which he lays on the table before him. Then he turns to his subordinates.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," he says. "But my impression is that any vessel rejecting proletarian liberty is liable to twenty-five lashes for each and every such offence."

There is another silence. Pale and wide-eyed, Loola stares at the instrument of torture, then looks away, makes an effort to speak, finds herself voiceless and, swallowing hard, tries again.

"I won't resist," she manages to bring out. "I really want to be free."

"Free to go on mining cemeteries?"

She nods affirmatively.

"There's a good vessel!" says the Special Assistant.

Loola turns to Dr. Poole and, for a few seconds, they look into one another's eyes without speaking.

"Good-by, Alfie," she whispers at last.

"Good-by, Loola."

Two more seconds pass; then she drops her eyes and walks away.

"And now," says the Special Assistant to Dr. Poole, "we can get back to business. At ordinary times, as I was saying, you would be expected to make use of not more than two labourers. Do I make myself clear?"

Dr. Poole inclines his head.

We dissolve to a laboratory in which the sophomores of the University of Southern California once pursued the study of Elementary Biology. There are the usual sinks and tables, Bunsen burners and balances, cages for mice and guinea pigs, glass tanks for tadpoles. But the dust is thick over everything and scattered about the room lie half a dozen skeletons, still associated with the crumbling remains of slacks and sweaters, of Nylons and costume jewellery and brassieres.

The door opens and Dr. Poole enters, followed by the Director of Food Production, an elderly, grey-bearded man wearing homespun trousers, the standard apron and a cutaway coat that must once have belonged to the English butler of some twentieth-century motion picture executive.

"A little messy, I'm afraid," says the Director apologetically. "But I'll have the bones cleared out this afternoon and tomorrow the charvessels can dust off the tables and wash the floors."

"Quite," says Dr. Poole, "quite."

Dissolve to the same room a week later. The skeletons have been removed and thanks to the charvessels the floors, walls and furniture are almost clean. Dr. Poole has three distinguished visitors. Wearing his four horns and the brown, Anglo-Nubian habit of the Society of Moloch, the Arch-Vicar is seated beside the Chief, who is dressed in the much be-medalled uniform of a Rear-Admiral of the United States Navy, recently disinterred from Forest Lawn. At a respectful distance behind and to one side of the two Heads of Church and State sits the Director of Food Production, still disguised as a butler. Facing them, in the posture of a French Academician preparing to read his latest production to some choice and privileged audience, sits Dr. Poole.

"Shall I begin?" he asks.

The heads of Church and State exchange glances; then turn to Dr. Poole and simultaneously nod their assent. He opens his notebook and adjusts his spectacles.

"Notes on Soil Erosion and Plant Pathology in Southern California," he reads aloud. "Followed by a Preliminary Report on the Agricultural Situation and a Plan of Remedial Action for the Future. By Alfred Poole D.Sc. Assistant Professor of Botany at the University of Auckland."

As he reads, we dissolve to a slope among the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Naked but for a cactus here and there, the stony ground lies dead and mangled in the sunshine. A network of ramifying gullies furrows the hillside. Some of them are still in the infancy of erosion, others have cut their way deep into the ground. The ruins of a substantial house, half of which has already been engulfed, stand precariously at the edge of one of these strangely fretted canyons. In the plain, at the foot of the hill, dead walnut trees emerge from the dried mud in which successive rains have buried them.

Over the shot we hear the sonorous drone of Dr. Poole's voice.

"In true symbiosis," he is saying, "there is a mutually beneficial relationship between two associated organisms. The distinguishing mark of parasitism, on the other hand, is that one organism lives at the expense of another. In the end this one-sided relationship proves fatal to both parties; for the death of the host cannot but result in the death of the parasite by which it has been killed. The relationship between modern man and the planet, of which, until so recently, he regarded himself as the master, has been that, not of symbiotic partners, but of tapeworm and infested dog, of fungus and blighted potato."

Cut back to the Chief. Within its nest of curly black beard, the red-lipped mouth has opened into an enormous yawn. Over the shot Dr. Poole reads on.

"Ignoring the obvious fact that his devastation of natural resources would, in the long run, result in the ruin of his civilization and even in the extinction of his species, modern man continued, generation after generation, to exploit the earth in such a way that. . ."

"Couldn't you make it a bit snappier?" asks the Chief.

Dr. Poole begins by looking offended. Then he remembers that he is a condemned captive on probation among savages, and forces a nervous smile.

"Perhaps it might be best," he says, "if we passed without more ado to the section on Plant Pathology."

"I don't care," says the Chief, "so long as you make it snappy."

"Impatience," pipes the Arch-Vicar sententiously, "is one of Belial's favourite vices."

Dr. Poole, meanwhile, has turned over three or four pages and is ready to start again.

"Given the existing state of the soil, yield per acre would be abnormally low, even if the principal food plants were completely healthy. But they are not healthy. After viewing crops in the field, after inspecting grains, fruits and tubers in storage, after examining botanical specimens under an almost undamaged pre-Thing microscope, I feel certain that there is only one explanation for the number and variety of plant diseases now rampant in the area — namely, deliberate infection of the crops by means of fungus bombs, bacteria-bearing aerosols and the release of many species of virus-carrying aphides and other insects. Otherwise how account for the prevalence and extreme virulence of Giberella Saubinettii and Puccinia graminis? Of Phytophthora infestans and Synchitrium endobioticum? Of all the mosaic diseases due to viruses? Of Bacillus amylovorus, Bacillus carotovorus, Pseudomonas citri, Pseudomonas tumefaciens, Bacterium. . ."

Cutting short his recitation almost before it has begun, the Arch-Vicar interrupts him.

"And you still maintain," he says, "that these people weren't possessed by Belial!" He shakes his head. "It's incredible how prejudice can blind even the most intelligent, the most highly educated. . ."

"Yes, yes, we know all that," says the Chief impatiently. "But now let's cut all the cackle and get down to practical business. What can you do about all this?"

Dr. Poole clears his throat.

"The task," he says impressively, "will be long-drawn and extremely arduous."

"But I want more food now," says the Chief imperiously. "I've got to have it this very year."

Somewhat apprehensively Dr. Poole is forced to tell him that disease-resisting varieties of plants cannot be bred and tested in under ten or twelve years. And meanwhile there is the question of the land; the erosion is destroying the land, erosion must be checked at all costs. But the labour of terracing and draining and composting is enormous and must go on unremittingly, year after year. Even in the old days, when manpower and machinery were plentiful, people had failed to do what was necessary to preserve the fertility of the soil.

"It wasn't because they couldn't," puts in the Arch-Vicar. "It was because they didn't want to. Between World War II and World War III they had all the time and all the equipment they needed. But they preferred to amuse themselves with power politics, and what were the consequences?" He counts off the answers on his thick fingers. "Worse malnutrition for more people. More political unrest. Resulting in more aggressive nationalism and imperialism. And finally the Thing. And why did they choose to destroy themselves? Because that was what Belial wanted them to do, because He had taken possession. . ."

The Chief holds up his hand.

"Please, please," he protests. "This isn't a course in Apologetics or Natural Diabology. We're trying to do something."

"And unfortunately the doing will take a long time," says Dr. Poole.

"How long?"

"Well, in five years you might find yourself holding your own against erosion. In ten years there'd be a perceptible improvement. In twenty years, some of your land might be back to as much as seventy per cent of its original fertility. In fifty years. . ."

"In fifty years," puts in the Arch-Vicar, "the deformity rate will be double what it is at present. And in a hundred years the triumph of Belial will be complete. But complete!" he repeats with a childlike giggle. He makes the sign of the horns and gets up from his chair. "But meanwhile I'm all for this gentleman doing everything he can."

Dissolve to the Hollywood Cemetery. Trucking shot of the monuments, with which our earlier visit to the graveyard has already made us familiar.

Medium close shot of the statue of Hedda Boddy. The Camera drops from the figure to the pedestal and the inscription.

". . . . affectionately known as Public Sweetheart Number One. 'Hitch your wagon to a Star.' "

Over the shot we hear the sound of a spade being thrust into the ground, then the rattle of sand and gravel as the earth is tossed aside.

The Camera pulls back, and we see Loola standing in a three-foot hole, wearily digging.

The sound of footsteps makes her look up. Flossie, the plump girl of the earlier sequence, enters the shot.

"Getting on all right?" she asks.

Loola nods without speaking and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand.

"When you hit the pay dirt," the plump girl goes on, "come and report to us."

"It'll take at least an hour more," says Loola gloomily.

"Well, keep at it, kid," says Flossie in the maddeningly hearty tones of a person delivering a pep talk. "Put your back into it. Prove to them that a vessel can do as much as a man! If you work well," she goes on encouragingly, "maybe the Superintendent will let you keep the Nylons. Look at the pair I got this morning!"

She pulls the coveted trophies from her pocket. Except for a greenish discoloration around the toes, the stockings are in perfect condition.

"Oh!" cries Loola in envious admiration.

"But we didn't have any luck with the jewellery," says Flossie, as she puts the stockings away again. "Just the wedding ring and a rotten little bracelet. Let's hope this one won't let us down."

She pats the Parian stomach of Public Sweetheart Number One.

"Well, I must get back," she continues. "We're digging for the vessel who's buried under that red stone cross — you know, the big one, near the north gate."

Loola nods.

"I'll be there as soon as I make a strike," she says.

Whistling the tune of "When I survey the Wondrous Horns," the plump girl walks out of the shot. Loola sighs, and resumes her digging.

Very softly, a voice pronounces her name.

She starts violently and turns in the direction from which the sound has come.

Medium shot from her viewpoint of Dr. Poole advancing cautiously from behind the tomb of Rudolf Valentine.

Cut back to Loola.

She flushes, then turns deathly pale. Her hand goes to her heart.

"Alfie," she whispers.

He enters the shot, jumps into the grave beside her and, without a word, takes her in his arms. The kiss is passionate. Then she hides her face against his shoulder.

"I thought I should never see you any more," she says in a breaking voice.

"What did you take me for?"

He kisses her again, then holds her at arm's length and looks into her face.

"Why are you crying?" he asks.

"I can't help it."

"You're lovelier even than I remembered."

She shakes her head, unable to speak.

"Smile," he commands.

"I can't."

"Smile, smile. I want to see them again."

"See what?"

"Smile!"

With an effort, but full of a passionate tenderness, Look smiles up at him.

In her cheeks the dimples emerge from the long hibernation of her sorrow.

"There they are," he cries in delight, "there they are!"

Delicately, like a blind man reading Herrick in Braille, he passes a finger across her cheek. Loola smiles more effortlessly, the dimple deepens under his touch. He laughs with pleasure.

At the same moment the whistled tune of "When I behold the Wondrous Horns" swells from a distant pianissimo through piano to mezzo forte.

An expression of terror appears on Loola's face.

"Quick, quick!" she whispers.

With astonishing agility Dr. Poole scrabbles out of the grave.

By the time the plump girl re-enters the shot he is leaning in a studiedly casual attitude against the monument to Public Sweetheart Number One. Below him, in the pit, Loola is digging like mad.

"I forgot to tell you that we're knocking off for lunch in half an hour," Flossie begins.

Then, catching sight of Dr. Poole, she utters an exclamation of surprise.

"Good morning," says Dr. Poole politely.

There is a silence. Flossie looks from Dr. Poole to Loola and from Loola back to Dr. Poole.

"What are you doing here?" she asks suspiciously.

"I'm on my way to St. Azazel's," he answers. "The Arch-Vicar sent a message that he wanted me to attend his three lectures to the Seminarists. Belial in History — that's the subject of them."

"You've chosen a very funny way to get to St. Azazel's."

"I was looking for the Chief," Dr. Poole explains.

"Well, he's not here," says the plump girl.

There is another silence.

"In that case," says Dr. Poole, "I'd better be trotting along. Mustn't keep either of you young ladies from your duties," he adds with an artificial and entirely unconvincing brightness. "Good-by. Good-by."

He bows to the two girls, then, assuming an air of easy nonchalance, walks away.

Flossie looks after him in silence, then turns severely to Loola.

"Now listen, kid," she begins.

Loola stops digging and looks up from the grave.

"What is it, Flossie," she asks with an expression of uncomprehending innocence.

"What is it?" the other echoes derisively. "Tell me, what's written on your apron?"

Loola looks down at her apron, then back at Flossie. Her face reddens with embarrassment.

"What's written on it?" the plump girl insists.

"'No!'"

"And what's written on those patches?"

"'No!'" Loola repeats.

"And on the other ones, when you turn around?"

"'No!'"

"No, no, no, no, no," says the plump girl emphatically. "And when the Law says no, it means no. You know that as well as I do, don't you."

Loola nods her head without speaking.

"Say you know it," the other insists. "Say it."

"Yes, I know it," Loola brings out at last in a barely audible voice.

"Good. Then don't pretend you haven't been warned. And if that foreign Hot ever comes prowling around you again, just let me know. I'll see to him."

We dissolve to the interior of St. Azazel's. Once the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, St. Azazel's has undergone only the most superficial of alterations. In the chapels, the plaster figures of St. Joseph, the Magdalen, St. Anthony of Padua and St. Rose of Lima have merely been painted red and fitted with horns. On the high altar nothing has been changed except that the crucifix has been replaced by a pair of enormous horns carved out of cedar wood and hung with a wealth of rings and wrist watches, of bracelets, chains, earrings and necklaces, mined from the cemeteries or found in association with old bones and the mouldering remnants of jewel boxes.

In the body of the church some fifty Toggenberg-robed seminarists — with Dr. Poole, incongruously bearded and in tweeds, in the middle of the front row — are sitting with bowed heads while, from the pulpit, the Arch-Vicar pronounces the final words of his lecture.

"For as in the Order of Things all might, if they had so desired, have lived, so also in Belial all have been, or inevitably shall be, made to die. Amen."

There is a long silence. Then the Master of Novices rises. With a great rustling of fur, the seminarists follow suit and start to walk, two by two, and with the most perfect decorum, toward the west door.

Dr. Poole is about to follow them, when he hears a high childish voice calling his name.

Turning, he sees the Arch-Vicar beckoning from the steps of the pulpit.

"Well, what did you think of the lecture?" squeaks the great man, as Dr. Poole approaches.

"Very fine."

"Without flattery?"

"Really and truly."

The Arch-Vicar smiles with pleasure.

"I'm glad to hear it," he says.

"I specially liked what you said about religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — the retreat from Jeremiah to the Book of Judges, from the personal and therefore the universal to the national and therefore the internecine."

The Arch-Vicar nods.

"Yes, it was a pretty close shave," he says. "If they'd stuck to the personal and the universal, they'd have been in harmony with the Order of Things, and the Lord of Flies would have been done for. But fortunately Belial had plenty of allies — the nations, the churches, the political parties. He used their prejudices. He exploited their ideologies. By the time they'd developed the atomic bomb, he had people back in the state of mind they were in before 900 b.c."

"And then," says Dr. Poole, "I liked what you said about the contacts between East and West — how He persuaded each side to take only the worst the other had to offer. So the East takes Western nationalism, Western armaments, Western movies and Western Marxism; the West takes Eastern despotism, Eastern superstitions and Eastern indifference to individual life. In a word, He saw to it that mankind should make the worst of both worlds."

"Just think if they'd made the best!" squeaks the Arch-Vicar. "Eastern mysticism making sure that Western science should be properly used; the Eastern art of living refining Western energy; Western individualism tempering Eastern totalitarianism." He shakes his head in pious horror. "Why, it would have been the kingdom of heaven. Happily the grace of Belial was stronger than the Other One's grace."

He chuckles shrilly; then laying a hand on Dr. Poole's shoulder, he starts to walk with him toward the vestry.

"You know, Poole," he says, "I've got to be very fond of you." Dr. Poole mumbles his embarrassed acknowledgements.

"You're intelligent, you're well educated, you know all kinds of things that we've never learned. You could be very useful to me and, on my side, I could be very useful to you — that is," he adds, "if you were to become one of us."

"One of you?" Dr. Poole repeats doubtfully.

"Yes, one of us."

Comprehension dawns on an expressive close-up of Dr. Poole's face. He utters a dismayed "Oh!"

"I won't disguise from you," says the Arch-Vicar, "that the surgery involved is not entirely painless, nor wholly without danger. But the advantages to be gained by entering the priesthood would be so great as to outweigh any trifling risk or discomfort. Nor must we forget. . ."

"But, Your Eminence. . ." Dr. Poole protests. The Arch-Vicar holds up a plump, damp hand.

"One moment, please," he says severely. His expression is so forbidding that Dr. Poole hastens to apologise.

"I beg your pardon."

"Granted, my dear Poole, granted."

Once again the Arch-Vicar is all amiability and condescension.

"Well, as I was saying," he goes on, "we must not forget that, if you were to undergo what I may call a physiological conversion, you would be delivered from all the temptations to which, as an unmutated male, you will most certainly be exposed."

"Quite, quite," Dr. Poole agrees. "But I can assure you. . ."

"Where temptations are concerned," says the Arch-Vicar sententiously, "nobody can assure anyone of anything."

Dr. Poole remembers his recent interview with Loola in the cemetery, and feels himself blushing.

"Isn't that rather a sweeping statement?" he says without too much conviction.

The Arch-Vicar shakes his head.

"In these matters," he says, "one can never be too sweeping. And let me remind you of what happens to those who succumb to such temptations. The bulls' pizzles and the burying squad are always in readiness. And that is why, in your own interests, for your future happiness and peace of mind, I advise you — nay, I beg and implore you — to join our Order."

There is a silence. Dr. Poole swallows hard.

"I should like to be able to think it over," he says at last.

"Of course, of course," the Arch-Vicar agrees. "Take your time. Take a week."

"A week? I don't think I could decide in a week."

"Take two weeks," says the Arch-Vicar, and when Dr. Poole still shakes his head, "Take four," he adds, "take six, if you like. I'm in no hurry. I'm only concerned about you." He pats Dr. Poole on the shoulder. "Yes, my dear fellow, about you."

Dissolve to Dr. Poole at work in his experimental garden, planting out tomato seedlings. Nearly six weeks have passed. His brown beard is considerably more luxuriant, his tweed coat and flannel trousers considerably dirtier, than when we saw him last. He wears a gray homespun shirt and moccasins of local manufacture.

When the last of his seedlings is in the ground, he straightens himself up, stretches, rubs his aching back, then walks slowly to the end of the garden and stands there motionless, looking out at the view.

In a long shot, we see, as it were through his eyes, a wide prospect of deserted factories and crumbling houses, backed in the distance by a range of mountains that recedes, fold after fold, toward the east. The shadows are gulfs of indigo, and in the richly golden lights the far-off details stand out distinct and small and perfect, like the images of things in a convex mirror. In the foreground, delicately chased and stippled by the almost horizontal light, even the baldest patches of parched earth reveal an unsuspected sumptuousness of texture.

NARRATOR

There are times, and this is one of them, when the world seems purposefully beautiful, when it is as though some mind in things had suddenly chosen to make manifest, for all who choose to see, the supernatural reality that underlies all appearances.

Dr. Poole's lips move and we catch the low murmur of his words.

" 'For love and beauty and delight

There is no death nor change; their might

Exceeds our organs, which endure

No light, being themselves obscure.'"

He turns and walks back toward the entrance to the garden. Before opening the gate, he looks cautiously around him. There is no sign of an unfriendly observer. Reassured, he slips out and almost immediately turns into a winding path between sand dunes. Once again his lips move.

" 'I am the Earth,

Thy mother; she within whose stony veins

To the last fibre of the loftiest tree,

Whose thin leaves trembled in the frozen air,

Joy ran, as blood within a living frame,

When thou didst from her bosom, like a cloud

Of glory, arise, a spirit of keen joy.'"

From the footpath Dr. Poole emerges into a street flanked by small houses, each with its garage and each surrounded by the barren space that was once a plot of grass and flowers.

" 'A spirit of keen joy,' " he repeats and then sighs and shakes his head.

NARRATOR

Joy? But joy was murdered long ago. All that survives is the laughter of demons about the whipping posts, the howling of the possessed as they couple in the darkness. Joy is only for those whose life accords with the given Order of the world. For you there, the clever ones who think you can improve upon that Order, for you, the angry ones, the rebellious, the disobedient, joy is fast becoming a stranger. Those who are doomed to reap the consequences of your fantastic tricks will never so much as suspect its existence. Love, Joy and Peace — these are the fruits of the spirit that is your essence and the essence of the world. But the fruits of the ape-mind, the fruits of the monkey's presumption and revolt are hate and unceasing restlessness and a chronic misery tempered only by frenzies more horrible than itself.

Dr. Poole, meanwhile, continues on his way.

" "The world is full of woodmen,'" he says to himself,

" "The world is full of woodmen, who expel

Love's gentle dryads from the trees of life

And vex the nightingales in every dell.'"

NARRATOR

Woodmen with axes, dryad-killers with knives, nightingale-vexers with scalpels and surgical scissors.

Dr. Poole shudders and, like a man who feels himself dogged by some malevolent presence, quickens his pace. Suddenly he halts and once more looks about him.

NARRATOR

In a city of two and a half million skeletons the presence of a few thousands of the living is hardly perceptible. Nothing stirs. The silence is total and, in the midst of all these cosy little bourgeois ruins, seems conscious and in some sort conspiratorial.

His pulses quickened by hope and the fear of disappointment, Dr. Poole turns off the road and hurries along the drive that leads to the garage of Number 1993. Sagging on their rusted hinges, the double doors stand ajar. He slips between them into a musty twilight. Through a hole in the west wall of the garage a thin pencil of late afternoon sunshine reveals the left front wheel of a Super de Luxe Four-Door Chevrolet Sedan and, on the ground beside it, two skulls, one an adult's, the other evidently a child's. Dr. Poole opens the only one of the four doors which is not jammed and peers into the darkness within.

"Loola!"

He climbs into the car, sits down beside her on the disintegrated upholstery of the back seat, and takes her hand in both of his.

"Darling!"

She looks at him without speaking. In her eyes there is an expression almost of terror.

"So you were able to get away after all?"

"But Flossie still suspects something."

"Damn Flossie!" says Dr. Poole in a tone that is intended to be carefree and reassuring.

"She kept asking questions," Loola goes on. "I told her I was going out to forage for needles and cutlery."

"But all you've found is me."

He smiles at her tenderly and raises her hand to his lips; but Loola shakes her head.

"Alfie — please!"

Her tone is a supplication. He lowers her hand without kissing it.

"And yet you do love me, don't you?"

She looks at him with eyes that are wide with a frightened bewilderment, then turns away.

"I don't know, Alfie, I don't know."

"Well, I know," says Dr. Poole decidedly. "I know I love you. I know I want to be with you. Always. Till death do us part," he adds with all the fervour of an introverted sexualist suddenly converted to objectivity and monogamy.

Loola shakes her head again. "All I know is that I oughtn't to be here."

"But that's nonsense!"

"No, it isn't. I oughtn't to be here now. I oughtn't to have come those other times. It's against the Law. It's against everything that people think. It's against Him," she adds after a moment's pause. An expression of agonised distress appears on her face. "But then why did He make me so that I could feel this way about you? Why did He make me like those — like those —" She cannot bring herself to utter the abhorred word. "I used to know one of them," she goes on in a low voice. "He was sweet — almost as sweet as you are. And then they killed him."

"What's the good of thinking about other people?" says Dr. Poole. "Let's think about ourselves. Let's think how happy we could be, how happy we actually were two months ago. Do you remember? The moonlight. . . And how dark it was in the shadows! And in the soul a wild odour is felt beyond the sense. . . !"

"But we weren't doing wrong then."

"We're not doing wrong now."

"No, no, it's quite different now."

"It isn't different," he insists. "I don't feel any different from what I did then. And neither do you."

"I do," she protests — too loudly to carry conviction.

"No, you don't."

"I do."

"You don't. You've just said it. You're not like these other people — thank God!"

"Alfie!"

She makes a propitiatory sign of the horns.

"They've been turned into animals," he goes on. "You haven't. You're still a human being — a normal human being with normal human feelings."

"I'm not."

"Yes, you are."

"It isn't true," she wails. "It isn't true."

She covers her face with her hands and starts to cry.

"He'll kill me," she sobs.

"Who'll kill you?"

Loola raises her head and looks apprehensively over her shoulder, through the rear window of the car.

"He will. He knows everything we do, everything we even think or feel."

"Maybe He does," says Dr. Poole, whose Liberal-Protestant views about the Devil have been considerably modified during the past few weeks. "But if we feel and think and do the right thing, He can't hurt us."

"But what is the right thing?" she asks.

For a second or two he smiles at her without speaking.

"Here and now," he says at last, "the right thing is this."

He slips an arm about her shoulders and draws her toward him.

"No, Alfie, no!"

Panic-stricken, she tries to free herself; but he holds her tight.

"This is the right thing," he repeats. 'It mightn't always and everywhere be the right thing. But here and now it is — definitely."

He speaks with the force and authority of complete conviction. Never in all his uncertain and divided life has he thought so clearly or acted so decisively.

Loola suddenly ceases to struggle.

"Alfie, are you sure it's all right? Are you absolutely sure?"

"Absolutely sure," he replies from the depths of his new, self-validating experience. Very gently he strokes her hair.

"'A mortal shape,'" he whispers, "'indued with love and life and light and deity. A Metaphor of Spring and Youth and Morning, a Vision like incarnate April.'"

"Go on," she whispers.

Her eyelids are closed, her face wears that look of supernatural serenity which one sees upon the faces of the dead.

Dr. Poole begins again.

" 'And we will talk, until thought's melody

Become too sweet for utterance, and it die

In words, to live again in looks, which dart

With thrilling tone into the voiceless heart,

Harmonising silence without a sound.

Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound

And our veins beat together, and our lips

With other eloquence than words, eclipse

The soul that burns between them, and the wells

Which boil under our being's inmost cells,

The fountains of our deepest life, shall be

Confused in Passion's golden purity;

As mountain springs under the morning sun,

We shall become the same, we shall be one

Spirit within two frames, oh! Wherefore two?' "

There is a long silence. Suddenly Loola opens her eyes, looks at him intently for a few seconds, then throws her arms round his neck and kisses him passionately on the mouth. But even as he clasps her more closely, she breaks away from him and retreats to her end of the seat.

He tries to approach, but she holds him at arm's length.

"It can't be right," she says.

"But it is right."

She shakes her head.

"It's too good to be right, I should be too happy if it were. He doesn't want us to be happy." There is a pause. "Why do you say He can't hurt us?"

"Because there's something stronger than He is."

"Something stronger?" She shakes her head. "That was what He was always fighting against — and He won."

"Only because people helped Him to win. But they don't have to help Him. And, remember, He can never win for good."

"Why not?"

"Because He can never resist the temptation of carrying evil to the limit. And whenever evil is carried to the limit, it always destroys itself. After which the Order of Things comes to the surface again."

"But that's far away in the future."

"For the whole world, yes. But not for single individuals, not for you or me, for example. Whatever Belial may have done with the rest of the world, you and I can always work with the Order of Things not against it."

There is another silence.

"I don't think I understand what you mean," she says at last, "and I don't care." She moves back toward him and leans her head against his shoulder. "I don't care about anything," she goes on. "He can kill me if He wants to. It doesn't matter. Not now."

She raises her face towards his and, as he bends down to kiss her, the image on the screen fades into the darkness of a moonless night.

NARRATOR

L'ombre etait nuptiale, auguste et solennelle. But this time it is a nuptial darkness whose solemnity is marred by no caterwaulings, no Liebestods, no saxophones pleading for detumescence. The music with which this night is charged is clear, but undescriptive; precise and definite, but about realities that have no name; all-embracingly liquid, but never viscous, without the slightest tendency to stick possessively to what it touches and comprehends. A music with the spirit of Mozart's, delicately gay among the constant implications of tragedy; a music akin to Weber's, aristocratic and refined, and yet capable of the most reckless joy and the completest realisation of the world's agony. And is there perhaps a hint of that which, in the Ave Verum Corpus, in the G-minor Quintet, lies beyond the world of Don Giovanni? Is there a hint already of what (in Bach, sometimes, and in Beethoven, in that final wholeness of art which is analogous to holiness) transcends the Romantic integration of the tragic and the joyful, the human and the daemonic? And when, in the darkness, the lover's voice whispers again of a mortal form indued With love and life and light and deity, is there already the beginning of an understanding that beyond Epipsychidion there is Adonais and beyond Adonais, the wordless doctrine of the Pure in Heart?

Dissolve to Dr. Poole's laboratory. Sunlight pours through the tall windows, and is dazzlingly reflected from the stainless steel barrel of the microscope on the work table. The room is empty.

Suddenly the silence is broken by the sound of approaching footsteps; the door is opened and, still a butler on moccasins, the Director of Food Production looks in.

"Poole," he begins, "His Eminence has come to. . ."

He breaks off and an expression of astonishment appears on his face.

"He isn't here," he says to the Arch-Vicar who now follows him into the room.

The great man turns to the two Familiars in attendance on him.

"Go and see if Dr. Poole is in the experimental garden," he orders.

The Familiars bow, squeak, "Yes, Your Eminence," in unison, and go out.

The Arch-Vicar sits down and graciously motions to the Director to follow his example.

"I don't think I told you," he says; "I'm trying to persuade our friend here to enter religion."

"I hope Your Eminence doesn't mean to deprive us of his invaluable help in the field of food production," says the Director anxiously.

The Arch-Vicar reassures him.

"I'll see that he always has time to give you the advice you need. But meanwhile I want to make sure that the Church shall benefit by his talents and. . ."

The Familiars re-enter the room and bow.

"Well?"

"He isn't in the gardens, Your Eminence."

The Arch-Vicar frowns angrily at the Director, who quails under his look.

"I thought you said this was the day he worked in the laboratory?"

"It is, Your Eminence."

"Then why is he out?"

"I can't imagine, Your Eminence. I've never known him to change his schedule without telling me."

There is a silence.

"I don't like it," the Arch-Vicar says at last. "I don't like it at all." He turns to his Familiars. "Run back to Headquarters and have half a dozen men ride out on horseback to find him."

The Familiars bow, squeak simultaneously, and vanish.

"And as for you," says the Arch-Vicar, turning on the pale and abject figure of the Director, "if anything should have happened, you'll have to answer for it."

He rises in majestic wrath and stalks toward the door.

Dissolve to a series of montage shots.

Loola with her leather knapsack and Dr. Poole, with a pre-Thing army pack on his back, are climbing over a landslide that blocks one of those superbly engineered highways, whose remains still scar the flanks of the San Gabriel mountains.

We cut to a windswept crest. The two fugitives are looking down over the enormous expanse of the Mojave desert.

Next we find ourselves in a pine forest on the northern slope of the range. It is night. In a patch of moonlight between the trees, Dr. Poole and Loola lie sleeping under the same homespun blanket.

Cut to a rocky canyon, at the bottom of which flows a stream. The lovers have halted to drink and fill their water bottles.

And now we are in the foothills above the floor of the desert. Between the clumps of sage brush, the yuccas and the juniper bushes the walking is easy. Dr. Poole and Loola enter the shot, and the Camera trucks with them as they come striding down the slope.

"Feet sore?" he asks solicitously.

"Not too bad."

She gives him a brave smile, and shakes her head.

"I think we'd better stop pretty soon and eat something."

"Just as you think best, Alfie."

He pulls an antique map out of his pocket and studies it as he walks along.

"We're still a good thirty miles from Lancaster," he says. "Eight hours of walking. We've got to keep up our strength."

"And how far shall we get tomorrow?" Loola asks.

"A little beyond Mojave. And after that I reckon it'll take us at least two days to cross the Tehachapis and get to Bakersfield." He returns the map to his pocket. "I managed to get quite a lot of information out of the Director," he goes on. "He says those people up north are very friendly to runaways from Southern California. Won't give them back even when the government officially asks for them."

"Thank Bel. . . I mean, thank God," says Loola.

There is another silence. Suddenly Loola comes to a halt.

"Look! What's that?"

She points and from their viewpoint we see at the foot of a very tall Joshua tree, a slab of weathered concrete, standing crookedly at the head of an ancient grave, overgrown with bunch grass and buckwheat.

"Somebody must have been buried here," says Dr. Poole.

They approach and, in a close shot of the slab, we see, while Dr. Poole's voice reads aloud the following inscription:

William Tallis

1882-1948

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here

They have departed, thou shouldst now depart!

Cut back to the two lovers.

"He must have been a very sad man," says Loola.

"Perhaps not quite so sad as you imagine," says Dr. Poole, as he slips off his heavy pack and sits down beside the grave.

And while Loola opens her knapsack and takes out bread and fruit and eggs and strips of dried meat, he turns over the pages of his duodecimo Shelley.

"Here we are," he says at last. "It's the very next stanza after the one that's quoted here.

"'That Light whose smile kindles the Universe

That Beauty in which all things work and move

That Benediction, which the eclipsing Curse

Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love,

Which through the web of being blindly wove

By man and beast and earth and air and sea,

Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of

The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me

Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.'"

There is a silence. Then Loola hands him a hard boiled egg. He cracks it on the headstone and, as he peels it, scatters the white fragments of the shell over the grave.

The End

The Genius and the Goddess

First Published 1955

“The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”

“Never?” I questioned.

“Maybe from God’s point of view,” he conceded. “Never from ours. Fiction has unity, fiction has style. Facts possess neither. In the raw, existence is always one damned thing after another, and each of the damned things is simultaneously Thurber and Michelangelo, simultaneously Mickey Spillane and Maxwell and Thomas à Kempis. The criterion of reality is its intrinsic irrelevance.” And when I asked, “To what?” he waved a square brown hand in the direction of the bookshelves. “To the Best that has been Thought and Said,” he declaimed with mock portentousness. And then, “Oddly enough, the closest to reality are always the fictions that are supposed to be the least true.” He leaned over and touched the back of a battered copy of The Brothers Karamazov. “It makes so little sense that it’s almost real. Which is more than can be said for any of the academic kinds of fiction. Physics and chemistry fiction. History fiction. Philosophy fiction…” His accusing finger moved from Dirac to Toynbee, from Sorokin to Carnap. “More than can be said even for biography fiction. Here’s the latest specimen of the genre.”

From the table beside him he picked up a volume in a glossy blue dust jacket and held it up for my inspection.

“The Life of Henry Maartens “ I read out with no more interest than one accords to a household word. Then I remembered that, to John Rivers, the name had been something more and other than a household word. “You were his pupil, weren’t you?”

Rivers nodded without speaking.

“And this is the official biography?”

“The official fiction,” he amended. “An unforgettable picture of the Soap Opera scientist—you know the type—the moronic baby with the giant intellect; the sick genius battling indomitably against enormous odds; the lonely thinker who was yet the most affectionate of family men; the absent-minded professor with his head in the clouds but his heart in the right place. The facts, unfortunately, weren’t quite so simple.”

“You mean, the book’s inaccurate?”

“No, it’s all true—so far as it goes. After that, it’s all rubbish—or rather it’s non-existent. And maybe,” he added, “maybe it has to be non-existent. Maybe the total reality is always too undignified to be recorded, too senseless or too horrible to be left unfictionalized. All the same it’s exasperating, if one happens to know the facts; it’s even rather insulting, to be fobbed off with Soap Opera.”

“So you’re going to set the record straight?” I presumed.

“For the public? Heaven forbid.”

“For me, then. In private.”

“In private,” he repeated. “After all, why not?” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “A little orgy of reminiscence to celebrate one of your rare visits.”

“Anyone would think you were talking about a dangerous drug.”

“But it is a dangerous drug,” he answered. “One escapes into reminiscence as one escapes into gin or sodium amytal.”

“You forget,” I said, “I’m a writer, and the Muses are the daughters of Memory.”

“And God,” he added quickly, “is not their brother. God isn’t the son of Memory; He’s the son of Immediate Experience. You can’t worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it’s hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you’ve got to die to every other moment. That’s the most important thing I learned from Helen.”

The name evoked for me a pale young face framed in the square opening of a bell of dark, almost Egyptian hair—evoked, too, the great golden columns of Baalbek, with the blue sky and the snows of the Lebanon behind them. I was an archaeologist in those days, and Helen’s father was my boss. It was at Baalbek that I had proposed to her and been rejected.

“If she’d married me,” I said, “would I have learned it?”

“Helen practiced what she always refrained from preaching,” Rivers answered. “It was difficult not to learn from her.”

“And what about my writing, what about those daughters of Memory?”

“There would have been a way to make the best of both worlds.”

“A compromise?”

“A synthesis, a third position subtending the other two. Actually, of course, you can never make the best of one world, unless in the process you’ve learned to make the best of the other. Helen even managed to make the best of life while she was dying.”

In my mind’s eye Baalbek gave place to the campus of Berkeley, and instead of the noiselessly swinging bell of dark hair there was a coil of gray; instead of a girl’s face I saw the thin drawn features of an aging woman. She must have been ill, I reflected, even then.

“I was in Athens when she died,” I said aloud.

“I remember.” And then, “I wish you’d been here,” he added. “For her sake—she was very fond of you. And, of course, for your sake too. Dying’s an art, and at our age we ought to be learning it. It helps to have seen someone who really knew how. Helen knew how to die because she knew how to live—to live now and here and for the greater glory of God. And that necessarily entails dying to there and then and tomorrow and one’s own miserable little self. In the process of living as one ought to live, Helen had been dying by daily installments. When the final reckoning came, there was practically nothing to pay. Incidentally,” Rivers went on after a little silence, “I was pretty close to the final reckoning last spring. In fact, if it weren’t for penicillin, I wouldn’t be here. Pneumonia, the old man’s friend. Now they resuscitate you, so that you can live to enjoy your arteriosclerosis or your cancer of the prostate…. So, you see, it’s all entirely posthumous. Everybody’s dead except me, and I’m living on borrowed time. If I set the record straight, it’ll be as a ghost talking about ghosts. And anyhow this is Christmas Eve; so a ghost story is quite in order. Besides, you’re a very old friend and even if you do put it all in a novel, does it really matter?”

His large lined face lit up with an expression of affectionate irony.

“If it does matter,” I assured him, “I won’t.”

This time he laughed outright.

“The strongest oaths are straw to be fire i’ the blood,” he quoted. “I’d rather entrust my daughters to Casanova than my secrets to a novelist. Literary fires are hotter even than sexual ones. And literary oaths are even strawier than the matrimonial or monastic varieties.”

I tried to protest; but he refused to listen.

“If I still wanted to keep it secret,” he said, “I wouldn’t tell you. But when you do publish, please remember the usual footnote. You know—any resemblance to any character living or dead is purely coincidental. But purely! And now let’s get back to those Maartenses. I’ve got a picture somewhere.” He hoisted himself out of his chair, walked over to the desk and opened a drawer. “All of us together—Henry and Katy and the children and me. And by a miracle,” he added, after a moment of rustling among the papers in the drawer, “it’s where it ought to be.”

He handed me the faded enlargement of a snap-shot. It showed three adults standing in front of a wooden summerhouse—a small, thin man with white hair and a beaked nose, a young giant in shirt sleeves and, between them, fair-haired, laughing, broad-shouldered and deep-bosomed, a splendid Valkyrie incongruously dressed in a hobble skirt. At their feet sat two children, a boy of nine or ten and a pigtailed elder sister in her early teens.

“How old he looks!” was my first comment. “Old enough to be his children’s grandfather.”

“And infantile enough, at fifty-six, to be Katy’s baby boy.”

“Rather a complicated incest.”

“But it worked,” Rivers insisted, “it worked so well that it had come to be a regular symbiosis. He lived on her. And she was there to be lived on—incarnate maternity.”

I looked again at the photograph.

“What a fascinating mixture of styles! Maartens is pure Gothic. His wife’s a Wagnerian heroine. The children are straight out of Mrs. Molesworth. And you, you…” I looked up at the square, leathery face that confronted me from the other side of the fireplace, then back at the snapshot. “I’d forgotten what a beauty you used to be. A Roman copy of Praxiteles.”

“Couldn’t you make me an original?” he pleaded.

I shook my head.

“Look at the nose,” I said. “Look at the modeling of the jaw. That isn’t Athens; that’s Herculaneum. But luckily girls aren’t interested in art history. For all practical amorous purposes you were the real thing, the genuine Greek god.”

Rivers made a wry face.

“I may have looked the part,” he said. “But if you think I could act it…” He shook his head. “No Ledas for me, no Daphnes, no Europas. In those days, remember, I was still the unmitigated product of a deplorable upbringing. A Lutheran minister’s son and, after the age of twelve, a widowed mother’s only consolation. Yes, her only consolation, in spite of the fact that she regarded herself as a devout Christian. Little Johnny took first, second and third place; God was just an Also Ran. And of course the only consolation had no choice but to become the model son, the star pupil, the indefatigable scholarship winner, sweating his way through college and post-graduate school with no spare time for anything more subtle than football or the Glee Club; more enlightening than the Reverend Wigman’s weekly sermon.”

“But did the girls allow you to ignore them? With a face like that?” I pointed at the curly-headed athlete in the snapshot.

Rivers was silent, then answered with another question.

“Did your mother ever tell you that the most wonderful wedding present a man could bring his bride was his virginity?”

“Fortunately not.”

“Well, mine did. And she did it, what’s more, on her knees, in the course of an extemporary prayer. She was a great one for extemporary praying,” he added parenthetically. “Better even than my father had been. The sentences flowed more evenly, the language was more genuinely sham-antique. She could discuss our financial situation or reprimand me for my reluctance to eat tapioca pudding, in the very phrases of the Epistle to the Hebrews. As a piece of linguistic virtuosity, it was quite amazing. Unfortunately I couldn’t think of it in those terms. The performer was my mother and the occasion solemn. Everything that was said, while she was talking to God, had to be taken with a religious seriousness. Particularly when it was connected with the great unmentionable subject. At twenty-eight, believe it or not, I still had that wedding present for my hypothetical bride.”

There was a silence.

“My poor John,” I said at last.

He shook his head.

“Actually it was my poor mother. She had it all worked out so perfectly. An instructorship in my old university, then an assistant professorship, then a professorship. There would never be any need for me to leave home. And when I was around forty, she’d arrange a marriage for me with some wonderful Lutheran girl who would love her like her own mother. But for the grace of God, there went John Rivers—down the drain. But the grace of God was forthcoming—with a vengeance, as it turned out. One fine morning, a few weeks after I had my Ph.D., I had a letter from Henry Maartens. He was at St. Louis then, working on atoms. Needed another research assistant, had heard good reports of me from my professor, couldn’t offer more than a scandalously small salary—but would I be interested? For a budding physicist it was the opportunity of a lifetime. For my poor mother it was the end of everything. Earnestly, agonizingly, she prayed over it. To her eternal credit, God told her to let me go.

“Ten days later a taxi deposited me on the Maartenses’ doorstep. I remember standing there in a cold sweat, trying to screw up my courage to ring the bell. Like a delinquent schoolboy who has an appointment with the Headmaster. The first elation over my wonderful good fortune had long since evaporated, and for the last few days at home, and during all the endless hours of the journey, I had been thinking only of my own inadequacy. How long would it take a man like Henry Maartens to see through a man like me? A week? A day? More likely an hour! He’d despise me; I’d be the laughingstock of the laboratory. And things would be just as bad outside the laboratory. Indeed, they might even be worse. The Maartenses had asked me to be their guest until I could find a place of my own. How extraordinarily kind! But also how fiendishly cruel! In the austerely cultured atmosphere of their home I should reveal myself for what I was—shy, stupid, hopelessly provincial. But meanwhile, the Headmaster was waiting. I gritted my teeth and pushed the button. The door was opened by one of those ancient colored retainers in an old-fashioned play. You know, the kind that was born before Abolition and has been with Miss Belinda ever since. The performance was on the corny side; but it was a sympathetic part and, though she dearly loved to ham it up, Beulah was not merely a treasure; she was, as I soon discovered, well along the road to sainthood. I explained who I was and, as I talked, she looked me over. I must have seemed satisfactory; for there and then she adopted me as a long lost member of the family, a kind of Prodigal Son just back from the husks. ‘I’ll go make you a sandwich and a nice cup of coffee,’ she insisted, and adding, ‘They’re all in here.’ She opened a door and pushed me through it. I braced myself for the Headmaster and a barrage of culture. But what I actually walked into was something which, if I had seen it fifteen years later, I might have mistaken for a parody, in the minor key, of the Marx Brothers. I was in a large, extremely untidy living room. On the sofa lay a white-haired man with his shirt collar unbuttoned, apparently dying—for his face was livid, his breath came and went with a kind of wheezing rattle. Close beside him in a rocking chair—her left hand on his forehead and a copy of William James’s Pluralistic Universe in her right—the most beautiful woman I had ever seen was quietly reading. On the floor were two children—a small red-headed boy playing with a clockwork train and a girl of fourteen with long black legs, lying on her stomach and writing poetry (I could see the shape of the stanzas) with a red pencil. All were so deeply absorbed in what they were engaged upon—playing or composing, reading or dying—that for at least half a minute my presence in the room remained completely unnoticed. I coughed, got no reaction, coughed again. The small boy raised his head, smiled at me politely but without interest, and returned to his train. I waited another ten seconds; then, in desperation, advanced into the room. The recumbent poetess blocked my path. I stepped over her. ‘Pardon me,’ I murmured. She paid no attention; but the reader of William James heard and looked up. Over the top of the Pluralistic Universe her eyes were brilliantly blue. ‘Are you the man about the gas furnace?’ she asked. Her face was so radiantly lovely that for a moment I couldn’t say a word. I could only shake my head. ‘Silly!’ said the small boy. ‘The gas man has a mustache.’ ‘I’m Rivers,’ I finally managed to mumble. ‘Rivers?’ she repeated blankly. ‘Rivers? Oh, Rivers!’ There was a sudden dawn of recognition. ‘I’m so glad…’ But before she could finish the sentence, the man with the death rattle opened a pair of ghastly eyes, made a noise like an indrawn war whoop and, jumping up, rushed toward the open window. ‘Look out!’ the small boy shouted. ‘Look out!’ There was a crash. ‘Oh, Christ!’ he added in a tone of contained despair. A whole Grand Central Station lay in ruins, reduced to its component blocks. ‘Christ!’ the child repeated; and when the poetess told him he mustn’t say Christ, ‘I’ll say something really bad,’ he menaced. ‘I’ll say…’ His lips moved in silent blasphemy.

“From the window, meanwhile, came the dreadful sound of a man being slowly hanged.

“‘Excuse me,’ said the beautiful woman. She rose, put down her book and hurried to the rescue. There was a metallic clatter. The hem of her skirt overturned a signal. The small boy uttered a shriek of rage. ‘You fool.’ he yelled. ‘You…you elephant.’

“‘Elephants,’ said the poetess didactically, ‘always look where they’re going.’ Then she screwed her head round and, for the first time, acknowledged my existence. ‘They’ve forgotten all about you,’ she explained to me in a tone of wearily contemptuous superiority. ‘That’s how things are around here.’

“Over by the window the gradual hanging was still in progress. Doubled up, as though someone had hit him below the belt, the white-haired man was fighting for air—fighting what looked and sounded like a losing battle. Beside him stood the goddess, patting his back and murmuring words of encouragement. I was appalled. This was the most terrible thing I had ever seen. A hand plucked at the cuff of my trousers. I turned and found the poetess looking up at me. She had a narrow, intense little face with gray eyes, set wide apart and a size too large. ‘Gloom,’ she said. ‘I need three words to rhyme with gloom. I’ve got room—that fits all right. And I’ve got womb—which is simply gorgeous. But what about catacomb…?’ She shook her head; then, frowning at her paper, she read aloud. ‘The something gloom Of my soul’s deep and dreary catacomb. I don’t like it, do you?’ I had to admit that I didn’t. ‘And yet it’s exactly what I want to say,’ she went on. I had a brain wave. ‘What about tomb?’ Her face lit up with pleasure and excitement. But of course, of course! What a fool she had been! The red pencil started to scribble at a furious rate. ‘The something gloom,’ she declaimed triumphantly, ‘Of my soul’s irremediable tomb.’ I must have looked dubious, for she hastily asked me if I thought irrevocable tomb would be better. Before I could answer there was another, louder sound of strangling. I glanced toward the window, then back at the poetess. ‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’ I whispered. The girl shook her head. ‘I looked it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ she answered. ‘It says there that asthma never shortened anybody’s life.’ And then, seeing that I was still disturbed, she shrugged her bony little shoulders and said, “You kind of get used to it.’”

Rivers laughed to himself as he savored the memory.

“‘You kind of get used to it,’” he repeated. “Fifty per cent of the Consolations of Philosophy in seven words. And the other fifty per cent can be expressed in six: Brother, when you’re dead, you’re dead. Or if you prefer, you can make it seven: Brother, when you’re dead, you’re not dead.”

He got up and started to mend the fire.

“Well, that was my first introduction to the Maartens family,” he said as he laid another oak log on the pile of glowing embers. “I kind of got used to everything pretty quickly. Even to the asthma. It’s remarkable how easy it is to get used to other people’s asthma. After two or three experiences I was taking Henry’s attacks as calmly as the rest of them. One moment he’d be strangling; the next he was as good as new and talking nineteen to the dozen about quantum mechanics. And he continued to repeat the performance till he was eighty-seven. Whereas I shall be lucky,” he added, giving the log a final poke, “if I go to sixty-seven. I was an athlete, you see. One of those strong-as-a-horse boys. And never a day’s illness—until, bang, comes a coronary, or whoosh go the kidneys! Meanwhile the broken reeds, like poor old Henry, go on complaining of ill health until they’re a hundred. And not merely complaining—actually suffering. Asthma, dermatitis, every variety of bellyache, inconceivable fatigues, indescribable depressions. He had a cupboard in his study and another at the laboratory, chock full of little bottles of homeopathic remedies, and he never stirred out of the house without his Rhus Tox, his Carbo Veg and Bryonia and Kali Phos. His skeptical colleagues used to laugh at him for dosing himself with medicines so prodigiously diluted that, in any given pill, there couldn’t be so much as a single molecule of the curative substance.

“But Henry was ready for them. To justify homeopathy, he had developed a whole theory of non-material fields—fields of pure energy, fields of unembodied organization. In those days it sounded preposterous. But Henry, don’t forget, was a man of genius. Those preposterous notions of his are now beginning to make sense. A few more years, and they’ll be self-evident.”

“What I’m interested in,” I said, “is the bellyaches. Did the pills work or didn’t they?”

Rivers shrugged his shoulders.

“Henry lived to eighty-seven,” he answered, as he resumed his seat.

“But wouldn’t he have lived to eighty-seven without the pills?”

“That,” said Rivers, “is a perfect example of a meaningless question. We can’t revive Henry Maartens and make him live his life over again without homeopathy. Therefore, we can never know how his self-medication was related to his longevity. And where there’s no possible operational answer, there’s no conceivable sense in the question. That’s why,” he added, “there can never be a science of history—because you can never test the truth of any of your hypotheses. Hence the ultimate irrelevance of all these books. And yet you have to read the damned things. Otherwise how can you find your way out of the chaos of immediate fact? Of course it’s the wrong way; that goes without saying. But it’s better to find even the wrong way than to be totally lost.”

“Not a very reassuring conclusion,” I ventured.

“But the best we can reach—at any rate, in our present condition.” Rivers was silent for a moment. “Well, as I say,” he resumed in another tone, “I kind of got used to Henry’s asthma, I kind of got used to all of them, to everything. So much so, indeed, that when, after a month of house hunting, I finally located a cheap and not too nasty apartment, they wouldn’t let me go. ‘Here you are,’ said Katy, ‘and here you stay.’ Old Beulah backed her up. So did Timmy and, though she was of an age and in a mood to dissent from everything anyone else approved of, so, rather grudgingly, did Ruth. Even the great man emerged for a moment from Cloud Cuckoo Land to cast a vote in favor of my staying on. That clinched it. I became a fixture; I became an honorary Maartens. It made me so happy,” Rivers went on after a pause, “that I kept thinking uneasily that there must surely be something wrong. And pretty soon I saw what it was. Happiness with the Maartenses entailed disloyalty to home. It was an admission that, all the time I lived with my mother, I had never experienced anything but constraint and a chronic sense of guilt. And now, as a member of this family of pagan strangers, I felt not merely happy, but also good, also, in an entirely unprecedented way, religious. For the first time I knew what all those words in the Epistles really meant. Grace, for example—I was chock full of grace. The newness of the spirit—it was there all the time; whereas most of what I had known with my mother was the deadening oldness of the letter. And what about First Corinthians, thirteen? What about faith, hope and charity? Well, I don’t want to boast, but I had them. Faith first of all. A redeeming faith in the universe and in my fellow man. As for the other brand of faith—that simple, Lutheran variety which my poor mother was so proud of having preserved intact, like a virginity, through all the temptations of my scientific education…” He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing can be simpler than zero; and that, I suddenly discovered, was the simple faith I had been living by for the past ten years. At St. Louis I had the genuine article—real faith in a real good, and at the same time a hope amounting to the positive conviction that everything would always be wonderful. And along with faith and hope went an overflowing charity. How could you feel affection for someone like Henry—someone so remote that he hardly knew who you were and so self-centered that he didn’t even want to know? You couldn’t be fond of him—and yet I was, I was. I liked him not merely for the obvious reasons—because he was a great man, because working with him was like having your own intelligence and insight raised to a higher power. I even liked him outside the laboratory, for the very qualities that made it all but impossible to regard him as anything but a kind of high-class monster. I had so much charity in those days that I could have loved a crocodile; I could have loved an octopus. One reads all these fictions of the sociologists, all this learned foolery by the political scientists.” With a gesture of contemptuous exasperation Rivers slapped the backs of a row of corpulent volumes on the seventh shelf. “But actually there’s only one solution, and that’s expressible in a four-letter word, so shocking that even the Marquis de Sade was chary of using it.” He spelled it out. “L-o-v-e. Or if you prefer the decent obscurity of the learned languages, Agapē, Caritas, Mahakaruna. In those days I really knew what it meant. For the first time—yes, for the first time. That was the only disquieting feature in an otherwise blissful situation. For if this was the first time I knew what loving was, what about all the other times when I had thought I knew, what about those sixteen years of being my mother’s only consolation?”

In the ensuing pause I summoned up the memory of the Mrs. Rivers who had sometimes come, with her little Johnny, to spend a Sunday afternoon with us on the farm, nearly fifty years ago. It was a memory of black alpaca, of a pale profile like the face on Aunt Esther’s cameo brooch, of a smile whose deliberate sweetness didn’t seem to match the cool appraising eyes. The picture was associated with a chilling sense of apprehension. “Give Mrs. Rivers a big kiss.” I obeyed, but with what horrified reluctance! A phrase of Aunt Esther’s came up, detached, like a single bubble, out of the depths of the past. “That poor kid,” she had said, “he just worships his mother.” He had worshiped, yes. But had he loved her?

“Is there such a word as ‘debellishment’ ?” Rivers suddenly asked.

I shook my head.

“Well, there ought to be,” he insisted. “For that’s what I resorted to in my letters home. I recorded the facts; but I systematically debellished them. I turned a revelation into something drab and ordinary and moralistic. Why was I staying on at the Maartenses? Out of a sense of duty. Because Dr. M. couldn’t drive a car and I was able to help with the fetching and carrying. Because the children had had the misfortune to strike a pair of inadequate teachers and needed all the coaching I could give them. Because Mrs. M. had been so very kind that I felt I simply had to stay and relieve her of a few of her burdens. Naturally I should have preferred my privacy; but would it have been right to put my personal inclinations before their needs? And since the question was addressed to my mother, there could, of course, be only one answer. What hypocrisy, what a pack of lies! But the truth would have been much too painful for her to hear or for me to put into words. For the truth was that I had never been happy, never loved, never felt capable of spontaneous unselfishness until the day I left home and came to live with these Amalekites.”

Rivers sighed and shook his head.

“My poor mother,” he said, “I suppose I could have been kinder to her. But however kind I might have been, it wouldn’t have altered the fundamental facts—the fact that she loved me possessively, and the fact that I didn’t want to be possessed; the fact that she was alone and had lost everything, and the fact that I had my new friends; the fact that she was a proud Stoic, living in the illusion that she was a Christian, and the fact that I had lapsed into a wholesome paganism and that, whenever I could forget her—which was every day except Sundays, when I wrote her my weekly letter—I was supremely happy. Yes, supremely happy! For me, in those days, life was an eclogue interspersed with lyrics. Everything was poetry. Driving Henry to the laboratory in my second-hand Maxwell; mowing the lawn; carrying Katy’s groceries home in the rain—pure poetry. So was taking Timmy to the station to look at engines. So was taking Ruth for walks in springtime to look for caterpillars. She took a professional interest in caterpillars,” he explained, when I expressed my surprise. “It was part of the Gloom-Tomb syndrome. Caterpillars were the nearest approach, in real life, to Edgar Allan Poe.”

“To Edgar Allan Poe?”

“‘For the play is the tragedy, Man,’” he declaimed, “‘and its hero, the Conqueror Worm. In May and June the landscape was fairly crawling with Conqueror Worms.”

“Nowadays,” I reflected, “it wouldn’t be Poe. She’d be reading Spillane or one of the more sadistic comics.”

He nodded his agreement.

“Anything, however bad, provided it has some death in it. Death,” he repeated, “preferably violent, preferably in the form of guts and corruption—it’s one of the appetites of childhood. Almost as strong as the appetite for dolls or candy or playing with the genital organs. Children need death in order to get a new, disgustingly delicious kind of thrill. No, that’s not quite accurate. They need it, as they need the other things, in order to give a specific form to the thrills they already have. Can you remember how acute your sensations were, how intensely you felt about everything, when you were a child? The rapture of raspberries and cream, the horror of fish, the hell of castor oil! And the torture of having to get up and recite before the whole class! The inexpressible joy of sitting next to the driver, with the smell of horse sweat and leather in one’s nostrils, the white road stretching away to infinity, and the fields of corn and cabbages slowly turning, as the buggy rolled past, slowly opening and shutting like enormous fans! When you’re a child, your mind is a kind of saturated solution of feeling, a suspension of all the thrills—but in a latent state, in a condition of indeterminacy. Sometimes it’s external circumstances that act as the crystallizing agent, sometimes it’s your own imagination. You want some special kind of thrill, and you deliberately work away at yourself until you get it—a bright pink crystal of pleasure, for example, a green or bruise-colored lump of fear; for fear, of course, is a thrill like any other; fear is a hideous kind of fun. At twelve, I used to enjoy the fun of scaring myself with fantasies about dying, about the hell of my poor father’s Lenten sermons. And how much scareder Ruth could get than I could! Scareder at one end of the scale and more rapturously happy at the other. And that’s true, I’d say, of most young girls. Their thrill-solution is more concentrated than ours; they can fabricate more kinds of bigger and better crystals more rapidly. Needless to say, I knew nothing about young girls in those days. But Ruth was a liberal education—a bit too liberal, as it turned out later; but we’ll come to that in due course. Meanwhile, she had begun to teach me what every young man ought to know about young girls. It was a good preparation for my career as the father of three daughters.”

Rivers drank some whisky and water, put down the glass and for a little while sucked at his pipe in silence.

“There was one particularly educative week end,” he said at last, smiling to himself at the memory. “It was during my first spring with the Maartenses. We were staying at their little farmhouse in the country, ten miles west of St. Louis. After supper, on the Saturday night, Ruth and I went out to look at the stars. There was a little hill behind the house. You climbed it, and there was the whole sky from horizon to horizon. A hundred and eighty degrees of brute inexplicable mystery. It was a good place for just sitting and saying nothing. But in those days I still felt I had a duty to improve people’s minds. So instead of leaving her in peace to look at Jupiter and the Milky Way, I trotted out the stale old facts and figures—the distance in kilometers to the nearest fixed star, the diameter of the galaxy, the latest word from Mount Wilson on the spiral nebulae. Ruth listened, but her mind wasn’t improved. Instead, she went into a kind of metaphysical panic. Such spaces, such durations, so many worlds beyond improbable worlds! And here we were, in the face of infinity and eternity, bothering our heads about science and housekeeping and being on time, about the color of hair ribbons and the weekly grades in algebra and Latin grammar! Then, in the little wood beyond the hill, an owl began calling, and at once the metaphysical panic turned into something physical—physical but at the same time occult; for this creeping at the pit of the stomach was due to the superstition that owls are wizard birds, bringers of bad luck, harbingers of death. She knew, of course, that it was all nonsense; but how transporting it was to think and act as though it were true! I tried to laugh her out of it; but Ruth wanted to feel scared and was ready to rationalize and justify her fears. ‘One of the girls in my class’s grandmother died last year,’ she told me, ‘And that night there was an owl in the garden. Right in the middle of St. Louis, where there never are any owls.’ As if to confirm her story, there was another burst of distant hooting. The child shuddered and took my arm. We started to walk down the hill in the direction of the wood. ‘It would absolutely kill me if I was alone,’ she said. And then, a moment later, ‘Did you ever read The Fall of the House of Usher?’ It was evident that she wanted to tell me the story; so I said, No, I hadn’t read it. She began. ‘It’s about a brother and sister called Usher, and they lived in a kind of castle with a black and livid tarn in front of it, and there are funguses on the walls, and the brother is called Roderick and he has such a fervid imagination that he can make up poetry without stopping to think, and he’s dark and handsome and has very large eyes and a delicate Hebrew nose, just like his twin sister, who’s called Lady Madeline, and they’re both very ill with a mysterious nervous complaint and she’s liable to go into cataleptic fits…’ And so the narrative proceeded—a snatch of remembered Poe, and then a gush of junior high school dialect of the nineteen twenties—as we walked down the grassy slope under the stars. And now we were on the road and moving toward the dark wall of woodland. Meanwhile poor Lady Madeline had died and young Mr. Usher was roaming about among the tapestries and the fungi in a state of incipient lunacy. And no wonder! ‘For said I not that my senses were acute?’ Ruth declaimed in a thrilling whisper. ‘I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them many, many days ago.’ Around us the darkness had deepened and suddenly the trees closed over us and we were engulfed in the double night of the wood. Overhead, in the roof of foliage, there was an occasional jagged gleam of a paler, bluer darkness and on either side the tunnel walls opened here and there into mysterious crevices of dim gray crape and blackened silver. And what a moldy smell of decay! What a damp chill against the cheek! It was as though Poe’s fancy had turned into sepulchral fact. We had stepped, so it seemed, into the Ushers’ family vault. ‘And then suddenly,’ Ruth was saying, ‘suddenly there was a kind of terrific bang, like when you drop a tray on a stone floor, but sort of muffled, like it was a long way underground, because, you see, there was a huge cellar under the house where all the family was buried. And a minute later there she was at the door—the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher. And there was blood on her white robes, because she’d been struggling for a whole week to get out of the casket, because of course she’d been buried alive. Lots of people are,’ Ruth explained. ‘That’s why they advise you to put it in your will—don’t bury me until you’ve touched the soles of my feet with a red-hot iron. If I don’t wake up, it’s O.K. and you can go ahead with the funeral. They hadn’t done that with the Lady Madeline, and she was just in a cataleptic fit, till she woke up in the coffin. And Roderick had heard her all those days, but for some reason he hadn’t said anything about it. And now here she was, all in white, with blood on her, reeling to and fro on the threshold, and then she gave the most frightened shriek and fell on top of him, and he shrieked too and…’ But at this moment there was a loud commotion in the invisible undergrowth. Black in the blackness, something enormous emerged on to the road just in front of us. Ruth’s scream was as loud as Madeline’s and Roderick’s combined. She clutched my arm, she hid her face against the sleeve. The apparition snorted. Ruth screamed again. There was another snort, then the clatter of retreating hoofs. ‘It’s only a stray horse,’ I said. But her knees had given way and, if I hadn’t caught her and lowered her gently to the ground, she would have fallen. There was a long silence. ‘When you’ve had enough of sitting in the dust,’ I said ironically, ‘maybe we can go on.’ ‘What would you have done if it had been a ghost?’ she asked at last. ‘I’d have run away and not come back till it was all over.’ ‘What do you mean “all over”?’ she asked. ‘Well, you know what happens to people who meet ghosts,’ I answered. ‘Either they die of fright on the spot, or else their hair turns white and they go mad.’ But instead of laughing, as I had meant her to do, Ruth said I was a beast and burst into tears. That dark clot, which the horse and Poe and her own fancy had crystallized out of her solution of feeling, was too precious a thing to be lightly parted with. You know those enormous lollipops on sticks that children lick at all day long? Well, that’s what her fear was—an all-day sucker; and she wanted to make the most of it, to go on sucking and sucking to the deliciously bitter end. It took me the best part of half an hour to get her on her feet again and in her right mind. It was after her bedtime when we got home and Ruth went straight to her room. I was afraid she’d have nightmares. Not at all. She slept like a top and came down to breakfast next morning as gay as a lark. But a lark that had read her Poe, a lark that was still interested in worms. After breakfast we went out caterpillar hunting and found something really stupendous—a big hawk-moth larva, with green and white markings and a horn on its rear end. Ruth poked it with a straw and the poor thing curled itself first one way, then the other, in a paroxysm of impotent rage and fear. ‘It writhes, it writhes,’ she chanted exultantly; ‘with mortal pangs the mimes become its food, and the angels sob at vermin fangs with human blood imbued.’ But this time the fear-crystal was no bigger than a diamond on a twenty-dollar engagement ring. The thought of death and corruption which she had savored, the previous night, for the sake of its own intrinsic bitterness, was now a mere condiment, a spice to heighten the taste of life, and make it more intoxicating. ‘ “Vermin fangs,” ’ she repeated, and gave the green worm another poke, ‘ “Vermin fangs…” ’ And in an overflow of high spirits she began to sing ‘If you were the only girl in the world’ at the top of her voice. Incidentally,” Rivers added, “how significant it is that that disgusting song should crop up as a by-product of every major massacre! It was invented in World War I, revived in World War II and was still being sporadically warbled while the slaughter was going on in Korea. The last word in sentimentality accompanies the last words in Machiavellian power politics and indiscriminate violence. Is that something to be thankful for? Or is it something to deepen one’s despair about the human race? I really don’t know—do you?”

I shook my head.

“Well, as I was saying,” he resumed, “she started singing ‘If you were the only girl in the world,’ she changed the next line to ‘and I were the vermin fangs,’ then broke off, made a dive for Grampus, the cocker spaniel, who eluded her and rushed off, full tilt across the pasture, with Ruth in hot pursuit. I followed at a walk and, when at last I caught up with her, she was standing on a little knoll, with Grampus panting at her feet. The wind was blowing and she was facing into it, like a miniature Victory of Samothrace, the hair lifting from her small flushed face, her short skirt blown back and fluttering like a flag, the cotton of her blouse pressed by the air stream against a thin little body that was still almost as flat and boyish as Timmy’s. Her eyes were closed, her lips moved in some silent rhapsody or invocation. The dog turned his head as I approached and wagged a stumpy tail; but Ruth was too far gone into her rapture to hear me. It would have been almost a sacrilege to disturb her; so I halted a few yards away and quietly sat down on the grass. As I watched her, a beatific smile parted her lips and the whole face seemed to glow as though with an inner light. Suddenly her expression changed; she uttered a little cry, opened her eyes and looked about her with an air of frightened bewilderment. ‘John!’ she called thankfully, when she caught sight of me, then ran and dropped on her knees beside me. ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘And there’s old Grampus. I almost thought…’ She broke off and, with the forefinger of her right hand, touched the tip of her nose, her lips, her chin. ‘Do I look the same?’ she asked. ‘The same,’ I assured her, ‘but if anything a little more so.’ She laughed, and it was a laugh not so much of amusement as of relief. ‘I was nearly gone,’ she confided. ‘Gone where?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It was that wind. Blowing and blowing. Blowing everything out of my head—you and Grampus and everyone else, everyone at home, everyone at school, and everything I ever knew or ever cared about. All blown away, and nothing left but the wind and the feeling of my being alive. And they were turning into the same thing and blowing away. And if I’d let go, there wouldn’t have been any stopping. I’d have crossed the mountains and gone out over the ocean and maybe right off into one of those black holes between the stars that we were looking at last night.’ She shuddered. ‘Do you think I would have died?’ she asked. ‘Or maybe gone into a catalepsy, so that they’d think I was dead, and then I’d have woken up in a coffin.’ She was back again with Edgar Allan Poe. Next day she showed me a lamentable piece of doggerel, in which the terrors of the night and the ecstasies of the morning had been reduced to the familiar glooms and tombs of all her rhyming. What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.”

“Aren’t you being unduly optimistic about experience?” I questioned. “Is it always so golden and poetical?”

“Intrinsically golden,” Rivers insisted. “Poetical by its essential nature. But of course if you’re sufficiently steeped in the tripe and hogwash dished out by the molders of public opinion, you’ll tend automatically to pollute your impressions at the source; you’ll re-create the world in the image of your own notions—and of course your own notions are everybody else’s notions; so the world you live in will consist of the Lowest Common Denominators of the local culture. But the original poetry is always there—always,” he insisted.

“Even for the old?”

“Yes, even for the old. Provided, of course, that they can recapture their lost innocence.”

“And do you ever succeed, may I ask?”

“Believe it or not,” Rivers answered, “I sometimes do. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that it sometimes happens to me. It happened yesterday, as a matter of fact, while I was playing with my grandson. From one minute to another—the transformation of lead into gold, of solemn professorial hogwash into poetry, the kind of poetry that life was all the time while I was with the Maartenses. Every moment of it.”

“Including the moments in the laboratory?”

“Those were some of the best moments,” he answered me. “Moments of paper work, moments of fiddling around with experimental gadgets, moments of discussion and argument. The whole thing was pure idyllic poetry, like something out of Theocritus or Vergil. Four young Ph.D.’s in the role of goatherd’s apprentices, with Henry as the patriarch, teaching the youngsters the tricks of his trade, dropping pearls of wisdom, spinning interminable yarns about the new pantheon of theoretical physics. He struck the lyre and rhapsodized about the metamorphosis of earth-bound Mass into celestial Energy. He sang the hopeless loves of Electron for her Nucleus. He piped of Quanta and hinted darkly at the mysteries of Indeterminacy. It was idyllic. Those were the days, remember, when you could be a physicist without feeling guilty; the days when it was still possible to believe that you were working for the greater glory of God. Now they won’t even allow you the comfort of self-deception. You’re paid by the Navy and trailed by the FBI. Not for one moment do they permit you to forget what you’re up to. Ad majorem Dei gloriam? Don’t be an idiot! Ad majorem hominis degradationem—that’s the thing you’re working for. But in 1921 infernal machines were safely in the future. In 1921 we were just a bunch of Theocritean innocents, enjoying the nicest kind of clean scientific fun. And when the fun in the laboratory was over, I’d drive Henry home in the Maxwell and there’d be fun of another kind. Sometimes it was young Timmy, having difficulties with the Rule of Three. Sometimes it was Ruth who simply couldn’t see why the square on the hypotenuse must always be equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. In this case, yes; she was ready to admit it. But why every time? They would appeal to their father. But Henry had lived so long in the world of Higher Mathematics that he had forgotten how to do sums; and he was interested in Euclid only because Euclid’s was the classical example of reasoning based upon a vicious circle. After a few minutes of utterly confounding talk, the great man would get bored and quietly fade away, leaving me to solve Timmy’s problem by some method a little simpler than vector analysis, to set Ruth’s doubts at rest by arguments a little less subversive of all faith in rationality than Hilbert’s or Poincaré’s. And then at supper there would be the noisy fun of the children telling their mother about the day’s events at school; the sacrilegious fun of Katy suddenly breaking into a soliloquy on general relativity theory with an accusing question about those flannel pants which Henry was supposed to have picked up at the cleaners; the Old Plantation fun of Beulah’s comments on the conversation, or the epic fun of one of her sustained, blow-by-blow accounts of how they used to butcher hogs back on the farm. And later, when the children had gone to bed and Henry had shut himself up in his study, there was the fun of funs—there were my evenings with Katy.”

Rivers leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

“I’m not much good at visualizing,” he said after a little silence. “But the wallpaper, I’m pretty sure, was a dusty kind of pink. And the lampshade was certainly red. It must have been red, because there was always that rich flush on her face, as she sat there darning our socks or sewing on the children’s buttons. A flush on the face, but never on the hands. The hands moved in the brightness of the unscreened light. What strong hands!” he added, smiling to himself. “What efficient hands! None of your spiritual, Blessed-Damozelish appendages! Honest-to-God hands that were good with screwdrivers; hands that could fix things when they went wrong; hands that could give a massage, or when necessary, a spanking; hands that had a genius for pastry and didn’t mind emptying slops. And the rest of her matched the hands. Her body—it was the body of a strong young matron. A matron with the face of a healthy peasant girl. No, that’s not quite right. It was the face of a goddess disguised as a healthy peasant girl. Demeter, perhaps. No, Demeter was too sad. And it wasn’t Aphrodite either; there was nothing fatal or obsessive about Katy’s femininity, nothing self-consciously sexy. If there was a goddess involved, it must have been Hera. Hera playing the part of a milkmaid—but a milkmaid with a mind, a milkmaid who had gone to college.” Rivers opened his eyes and replaced the pipe between his teeth. He was still smiling. “I remember some of the things she said about the books I used to read aloud in the evenings. H. G. Wells, for example. He reminded her of the rice paddies in her native California. Acres and acres of shiny water, but never more than two inches deep. And those ladies and gentlemen in Henry James’s novels—could they ever bring themselves, she wondered, to go to the bathroom? And D. H. Lawrence. How she loved those early books of his! All scientists ought to be compelled to take a post-graduate course in Lawrence. She said that to the Chancellor when he came to dinner. He was a most distinguished chemist; and whether it was post hoc or propter hoc, I don’t know; but his wife looked as if all her secretions were pure acetic acid. Katy’s remarks weren’t at all well received.” Rivers chuckled. “And sometimes,” he went on, “we didn’t read; we just talked. Katy told me about her childhood in San Francisco. About the balls and parties after she came out. About the three young men who were in love with her—each one richer and, if possible, stupider than the last. At nineteen she got engaged to the richest and the dumbest. The trousseau was bought, the wedding presents had begun to arrive. And then Henry Maartens came out to Berkeley as a visiting professor. She heard him lecture on the philosophy of science, and after the lecture she went to an evening party given in his honor. They were introduced. He had a nose like an eagle’s, he had pale eyes like a Siamese cat’s, he looked like the portraits of Pascal, and when he laughed, the noise was like a ton of coke going down a chute. As for what he saw—it must have passed description. I knew Katy at thirty-six, when she was Hera. At nineteen she must have been Hebe and the three Graces and all the nymphs of Diana rolled into one. And Henry, remember, had just been divorced by his first wife. Poor woman! She simply wasn’t strong enough to play the parts assigned to her—mistress to an indefatigable lover, business manager to an absentee halfwit, secretary to a man of genius, and womb, placenta and circulatory system to the psychological equivalent of a fetus. After two miscarriages and a nervous breakdown, she had packed up and gone home to her mother. Henry was on the loose, all four of him—fetus, genius, half-wit and hungry lover—in search of some woman capable of meeting the demands of a symbiotic relationship, in which all the giving would be on her side, all the ravenous and infantile taking on his. The search had been going on for the best part of a year. Henry was growing desperate. And now, suddenly, providentially, here was Katy. It was love at first sight. He took her into a corner and, ignoring everyone else in the room, started to talk to her. Needless to say, it never occurred to him that she might have her own interests and problems; it never entered his head that it might perhaps be a good thing to draw the girl out. He just let fly at her with what happened, for the moment, to be on his mind. On this occasion, it was recent developments in logic. Katy, of course, didn’t understand a word of it; but he was so manifestly a genius, it was all so unspeakably wonderful, that there and then, before the evening was over, she made her mother ask him to dinner. He came, he finished off what he had to say and, while Mrs. Hanbury and her other guests played bridge, he plunged with Katy into semiotics. Three days later there was some sort of a picnic organized by the Audubon Society, and the two of them managed to get separated from the rest of the party in an arroyo. And finally there was the evening when they went to hear La Traviata. Rum-tum-tum-tum-te-tum.” Rivers hummed the theme of the prelude to the third act. “It was irresistible—it always is. On the way home in the cab he kissed her—kissed her with an intensity of passion and at the same time a tact, an adeptness, for which the semiotics and the absent-mindedness had left her entirely unprepared. After that it became only too evident that her engagement to poor dear Randolph had been a mistake. But what a hue and cry when she announced her intention of becoming Mrs. Henry Maartens! A half-mad professor, with nothing but his salary, divorced by his first wife and old enough, into the bargain, to be her father! But all they could say was entirely irrelevant. The only things that mattered was the fact that Henry belonged to another species; and that, not Randolph’s—Homo sapiens and not Homo moronicus—was the species she now was interested in. Three weeks after the earthquake they got married. Had she ever regretted her millionaire? Regretted Randolph? To this inconceivably ridiculous question the answer was a peal of laughter. But his horses, she added as she wiped the tears from her eyes, his horses were another matter. His horses were Arabians, and the cattle on his ranch were pure-bred Herefords, and he had a big pond behind the ranch house, with all kinds of the most heavenly ducks and geese. The worst of being a poor professor’s wife in a big town was that you never had a chance of getting away from people. Sure, there were plenty of good people, intelligent people. But the soul cannot live by people alone; it needs horses, it needs pigs and waterfowl. Randolph could have provided her with all the animals her heart could desire—but at a price: himself. She had sacrificed the animals and chosen genius—genius with all its drawbacks. And frankly (she admitted it with a laugh, she talked about it with humorous detachment) frankly there were drawbacks. In his own way, albeit for entirely different reasons, Henry could be almost as dumb as Randolph himself. An idiot where human relations were concerned, a prize ass in all the practical affairs of life. But what an unboring ass, what a luminous idiot! Henry could be utterly insupportable; but he was always worth it. Always! And maybe, she paid me the compliment of adding, maybe when I got married, my wife would feel the same way about me. Insupportable, but worth it.”

“I thought you said she wasn’t consciously sexy,” I commented.

“And it’s true,” he said. “You think she was baiting her hook with flattery. She wasn’t. She was just stating a fact. I had my points; but I was also unbearable. Twenty years of formal education and a lifetime of my poor mother had produced a real monster.” On the outspread fingers of his left hand he itemized the monster’s components. “I was a learned bumpkin; I was an athlete who couldn’t say Bo to a girl; I was a pharisee with a sense of inferiority; I was a prig who secretly envied the people he disapproved of. And yet, in spite of everything, it was worth while to put up with me. I was enormously well meaning.”

“And in this case, I imagine, you did more than mean well. Were you in love with her?” I asked.

There was a little pause; then Rivers slowly nodded.

“Overwhelmingly,” he said.

“But you couldn’t say Bo to a girl.”

“This wasn’t a girl,” he answered. “This was Henry’s wife. Bo was unthinkable. Besides, I was an honorary Maartens, and that made her my honorary mother. And it wasn’t just a question of morality. I never wanted to say Bo. I loved her metaphysically, almost theologically—the way Dante loved Beatrice, the way Petrarch loved Laura. With one slight difference, however. In my case it happened to be sincere. I actually lived my idealism. No little illegitimate Petrarchs on the side. No Mrs. Alighieri, and none of those whores that Dante found it necessary to resort to. It was passion, but it was also chastity; and both at white heat. Passion and chastity,” he repeated, and shook his head. “At sixty one forgets what the words stand for. Today I only know the meaning of the word that has replaced them—indifference. Io son Beatrice,” he declaimed. “And all is dross that is not Helena. So what? Old age has something else to think about.”

Rivers was silent; and suddenly, as though to elucidate what he had been saying, there was only the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece, and the whispers of flames among the logs.

“How can anyone seriously believe in his own identity?” he went on. “In logic, A equals A. Not in fact. Me-now is one kettle of fish; me-then is another. I look at the John Rivers who felt that way about Katy. It’s like a puppet play; it’s like Romeo and Juliet through the wrong end of the opera glasses. No, it’s not even that; it’s like looking through the wrong end of the opera glasses at the ghosts of Romeo and Juliet. And Romeo once called himself John Rivers, and was in love, and had at least ten times more life and energy than at ordinary times. And the world he was living in—how totally transfigured!

“I remember how he looked at landscapes; and the colors were incomparably brighter, the patterns that things made in space unbelievably beautiful. I remember how he glanced around him in the streets, and St. Louis, believe it or not, was the most splendid city ever built. People, houses, trees, T-model Fords, dogs at lampposts—everything was more significant. Significant, you may ask, of what? And the answer is: themselves. These were realities, not symbols. Goethe was absolutely wrong. Alles vergängliche is not a Gleichnis. At every instant every transience is eternally that transience. What it signifies is its own being, and that being (as one sees so clearly when one’s in love) is the same as Being with the biggest possible B. Why do you love the woman you’re in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God’s own definition of Himself: I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representatives of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance. Could it ever stay transfigured? Maybe it could. Maybe it’s just a question of being in love with God. But that,” Rivers added, “is neither here nor there. Or rather it’s the only thing that’s either here, there or anywhere; but if we said so, we’d be cut by all our respectable friends and might even end up in the asylum. So let’s get back as quickly as possible to something a little less dangerous. Back to Katy, back to the late lamented…”

He broke off.

“Did you hear something?”

This time I distinctly did. It was the sound, muffled by distance and a heroic self-restraint, of a child’s sobbing.

Rivers got up and, thrusting his pipe into his pocket, walked to the door and opened it.

“Bimbo?” he called questioningly, and then to himself: “How the devil did he get out of his crib?”

For all answer there was a louder sob.

He moved out into the hall and a moment later there was the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.

“Bimbo,” I heard him saying, “good old Bimbo! Come to see if you could catch Santa Claus red-handed—was that it?”

The sobbing mounted to a tragic crescendo. I got up and followed my host upstairs. Rivers was sitting on the top step, his arms, gigantic in their rough tweed, around a tiny figure in blue pajamas.

“It’s grandpa,” he kept repeating. “Funny old grandpa. Bimbo’s all right with grandpa.” The sobbing gradually died down. “What made Bimbo wake up?” Rivers asked. “What made him climb out of his crib?”

“Dog,” said the child, and at the memory of his dream he began to cry again. “Big dog.”

“Dogs are funny,” Rivers assured him. “Dogs are so dumb they can’t say anything but bow-wow. Think of all the things Bimbo can say. Mummy. Weewee. Daddy. Pussycat. Dogs aren’t smart. They can’t say any of those things. Just bow-wow-wow.” He put on an imitation of a bloodhound. “Or else bow-wow-wow.” This time it was a toy Pomeranian. “Or else wo-o-o-ow.” He howled lugubriously and grotesquely. Uncertainly, between sobs, the child began to laugh. “That’s right,” said Rivers. “Bimbo just laughs at those dumb dogs. Every time he sees one, every time he hears that silly barking, he laughs and laughs and laughs.” This time the child laughed whole-heartedly. “And now,” said Rivers, “grandpa and Bimbo are going to take a walk.” Still holding the child in his arms, he got up and made his way along the corridor. “This is grandpa’s room,” he said, opening the first door. “Nothing of great interest here, I’m afraid.” The next door stood ajar; he walked in. “And this is mummy’s and daddy’s room. And here’s the closet with all mummy’s clothes. Don’t they smell good?” He sniffed loudly. The child followed suit. “Le Shocking de Schiaparelli,” Rivers went on. “Or is it Femme? Anyhow, it serves the same purpose; for it’s sex, sex, sex that makes the world go round—as, I’m sorry to say, you’ll find out, my poor Bimbo, in a very few years from now.” Tenderly he brushed his cheek against the pale floss of the child’s hair, then walked over to the full-length mirror set in the door of the bathroom. “Look at us,” he called to me. “Just look at us!”

I came and stood beside him. There we were in the glass—a pair of bent and sagging elders and, in the arms of one of them, a small, exquisite Christ child.

“And to think,” said Rivers, “to think that once we were all like that. You start as a lump of protoplasm, a machine for eating and excreting. You grow into this sort of thing. Something almost supernaturally pure and beautiful.” He laid his cheek once more against the child’s head. “Then comes a bad time with pimples and puberty. After which you have a year or two, in your twenties, of being Praxiteles. But Praxiteles soon puts on weight and starts to lose his hair, and for the next forty years you degenerate into one or other of the varieties of the human gorilla. The spindly gorilla—that’s you. Or the leather-faced variety—that’s me. Or else it’s the successful businessman type of gorilla—you know, the kind that looks like a baby’s bottom with false teeth. As for the female gorillas, the poor old things with paint on their cheeks and orchids at the prow…No, let’s not talk about them, let’s not even think.”

The child in his arms yawned at our reflections, then turned, pillowed his head on the man’s shoulder and closed his eyes. “I think we can take him back to his crib,” Rivers whispered and started toward the door.

“One feels,” he said slowly, as we stood looking down, a few minutes later, at that small face, which sleep had transfigured into the image of an unearthly serenity, “one feels so desperately sorry for them. They don’t know what they’re in for. Seventy years of ambushes and betrayals, of booby traps and deceptions.”

“And of fun,” I put in. “Fun to the pitch, sometimes, of ecstasy.”

“Of course,” Rivers agreed, as he turned away from the crib. “That’s what baits the booby traps.” He switched off the light, softly closed the door and followed me down the stairs. “Fun—every kind of fun. Sex fun, eating fun, power fun, comfort fun, possession fun, cruelty fun. But there’s either a hook in the bait, or else when you grab it, it pulls a trigger and down come the bricks or the bucket of bird lime or whatever it is that the cosmic joker has prepared for you.” We resumed our seats on either side of the fire in the library. “What sort of traps are waiting for that poor little shining creature up there in the crib? One can hardly bear to think of it. The only comfort is that there’s ignorance before the event and, after it, forgetting, or at the very least indifference. Every balcony scene turns into an affair of midgets in another universe! And in the end, of course, there’s always death. And while there is death, there is hope.” He refilled our glasses and relit his pipe. “Where was I?”

“In heaven,” I answered, “with Mrs. Maartens.”

“In heaven,” Rivers repeated. And then, after a little pause, “It lasted,” he went on, “about fifteen months. From December to the second spring, with a break of ten weeks in the summer while the family was away in Maine. Ten weeks of what was supposed to be my vacation at home, but was actually, in spite of the familiar house, in spite of my poor mother, the most desolate kind of exile. And it wasn’t only Katy that I missed. I was homesick for all of them—for Beulah in the kitchen, for Timmy on the floor with his trains, for Ruth and her preposterous poems, for Henry’s asthma and the laboratory and those extraordinary monologues of his about everything. What bliss it was, in September, to regain my paradise! Eden in autumn, with the leaves reddening, the sky still blue, the light turning from gold to silver. Then Eden in winter, Eden with the lamps lighted, the rain outside the windows, the bare trees like hieroglyphs against the sunset. And then, at the beginning of that second spring, there was a telegram from Chicago. Katy’s mother was ill. Nephritis—and those were the days before the sulfas, before penicillin. Katy packed her bags and was at the station in time to catch the next train. The two children—the three children, if you counted Henry—were left in charge of Beulah and myself. Timmy gave us no trouble at all. But the others, I assure you, the others more than made up for Timmy’s reasonableness. The poetess refused to eat her prunes at breakfast, couldn’t be bothered to brush her hair, neglected her homework. The Nobel Prize winner wouldn’t get up in the morning, cut his lectures, was late for every appointment. And there were other, graver delinquencies. Ruth broke her piggy bank and squandered a year’s accumulated savings on a make-up kit and a bottle of cheap perfume. The day after Katy left, she looked and smelt like the Whore of Babylon.”

“For the benefit of the Conqueror Worm?”

“Worms were out,” he answered. “Poe was as old-fashioned as ‘Over There’ or ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’ She’d been reading Swinburne; she’d just made the discovery of the poems of Oscar Wilde. The universe was quite different now and she herself was somebody else—another poetess with a brand-new vocabulary…. Sweet sin; desire; jasper claws; the ache of purple pulses; the raptures and roses of vice; and lips, of course, lips intertwisted and bitten till the foam has a savor of blood—all that adolescent bad taste of Late Victorian rebellion. And in Ruth’s case, the new words had been accompanied by new facts. She was no longer a little boy in a skirt and with pigtails; she was a budding woman with two little breasts that she carried about delicately and gingerly as though they were a pair of extremely valuable but rather dangerous and embarrassing zoological specimens. They were a source, one could sense, of mingled pride and shame, of intense pleasure and, therefore, of a haunting sense of guilt. How impossibly crude our language is! If you don’t mention the physiological correlates of emotion, you’re being false to the given facts. But if you do mention them, it sounds as though you were trying to be gross and cynical. Whether it’s passion or the desire of the moth for the star, whether it’s tenderness or adoration or romantic yearning—love is always accompanied by events in the nerve endings, the skin, the mucous membranes, the glandular and erectile tissues. Those who don’t say so are liars. Those who do are labeled as pornographers. It’s the fault, of course, of our philosophy of life; and our philosophy of life is the inevitable by-product of a language that separates in idea what in actual fact is always inseparable. It separates and at the same time it evaluates. One of the abstractions is ‘good,’ and the other is ‘bad.’ Judge not that ye be not judged. But the nature of language is such that we can’t help judging. What we need is another set of words. Words that can express the natural togetherness of things. Muco-spiritual, for example, or dermatocharity. Or why not mastonoetic? Why not viscerosophy? But translated, of course, out of the indecent obscurity of a learned language into something you could use in everyday speech or even in lyrical poetry. How hard it is, without those still nonexistent words, to discuss even so simple and obvious a case as Ruth’s! The best one can do is to flounder about in metaphors. A saturated solution of feelings, which can be crystallized either from the outside or the inside. Words and events that fall into the psychophysical soup and make it clot into action-producing lumps of emotion and sentiment. Then come the glandular changes, and the appearance of those charming little zoological specimens which the child carries around with so much pride and embarrassment. The thrill-solution is enriched by a new kind of sensibility that radiates from the nipples, through the skin and the nerve ends, into the soul, the subconscious, the super-conscious, the spirit. And these new psycho-erectile elements of personality impart a kind of motion to the thrill-solution, cause it to flow in a specific direction—toward the still unmapped, undifferentiated region of love. Into this flowing stream of love-oriented feeling, chance drops a variety of crystallizing agents—words, events, other people’s example, private fantasies and memories, all the innumerable devices used by the Fates to mold an individual human destiny. Ruth had the misfortune to pass from Poe to Algernon and Oscar, from the Conqueror Worm to Dolores and Salome. Combined with the new facts of her own physiology, the new literature made it absolutely necessary for the poor child to smear her mouth with lipstick and drench her combinations with synthetic violet. And worse was to follow.”

“Synthetic ambergris?”

“Much worse—synthetic love. She persuaded herself that she was passionately, Swinburneishly in love—and, of all people, with me!”

“Couldn’t she have chosen someone a little nearer her own size?” I asked.

“She’d tried,” Rivers answered, “but it hadn’t worked. I had the story from Beulah, to whom she had confided it. A tragic little story of a fifteen-year-old girl adoring a heroic young footballer and scholarship winner of seventeen. She had chosen someone more nearly her own size; but unfortunately, at that period of life, two years are an almost impassable gulf. The young hero was interested only in girls of a maturity comparable to his own—eighteen-year-olds, seventeen-year-olds, at a pinch well-developed sixteen-year-olds. A skinny little fifteen-year-old like Ruth was out of the question. She found herself in the position of a low-born Victorian maiden hopelessly adoring a duke. For a long time the young hero didn’t even notice her; and when at last she forced herself on his attention, he began by being amused and ended by being rude. That was when she started to persuade herself that she was in love with me.”

“But if seventeen was too old, why did she try twenty-eight? Why not sixteen?”

“There were several reasons. The rebuff had been public, and if she’d chosen some pimply younger substitute for the footballer, the other girls would have commiserated with her to her face and laughed at her behind her back. Love for another schoolboy was thus out of the question. But she knew no males except schoolboys and myself. There was no choice. If she was going to love anybody—and the new physiological facts inclined her to love, the new vocabulary imposed love upon her as a categorical imperative—then I was the man. It started actually several weeks before Katy left for Chicago. I had noticed a number of premonitory symptoms—blushings, silences, abrupt inexplicable exits in the middle of conversations, fits of jealous sulking if ever I seemed to prefer the mother’s company to the child’s. And then, of course, there were those love poems which she insisted, in the teeth of her own and my embarrassment, on showing me. Blisses and kisses; Lips and whips; yearning and burning; Best, blest, pressed, breast. She’d look at me intently while I read the things, and it wasn’t the merely anxious look of a literary novice awaiting the critic’s judgment; it was the damp, large, lustrous regard of an adoring spaniel, of a Counter-Reformation Magdalen, of the willing murderee at the feet of her predestined Bluebeard. It made me feel exceedingly uncomfortable, and I wondered sometimes if it wouldn’t be a good thing, for everybody’s sake, to mention the matter to Katy. But then, I argued, if my suspicions were unfounded, I should look pretty fatuous; and if I were right, I should be making trouble for poor little Ruth. Better say nothing and wait for the foolishness to blow over. Better to go on pretending that the poems were simply literary exercises which had nothing to do with real life or their author’s feelings. And so it went on, underground, like a resistance movement, like the fifth column, until the day of her mother’s departure. Driving home from the station I wondered apprehensively what would happen now that Katy’s restraining presence had been removed. Next morning brought the answer—painted cheeks, a mouth like an overripe strawberry and that perfume, that whore-house smell of her!”

“With behavior, I suppose, to match?”

“That was what I expected, of course. But oddly enough it didn’t immediately materialize. Ruth didn’t seem to feel the need of acting her new part; it was enough merely to look it. She was satisfied with the signs and emblems of the grand passion. Scenting her cotton underclothes, looking at the image in the glass of that preposterously raddled little face, she could see and smell herself as another Lola Montez, without having to establish her claim to the title by doing anything at all. And it was not merely the mirror that told her who she had become; it was also public opinion—her amazed and envious and derisive school fellows, her scandalized teachers. Their looks and comments corroborated her private fantasies. She was not the only one to know it; even other people recognized the fact that she had now become the grande amoureuse, the femme fatale. It was all so novel and exciting and absorbing that for a time, thank heaven, I was almost forgotten. Besides, I had committed the unpardonable offense of not taking her latest impersonation with proper seriousness. It was on the very first day of the new dispensation. I came downstairs to find Ruth and Beulah in the hall, hotly disputing. ‘A nice young girl like you,’ the old woman was saying. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’ The nice young girl tried to enlist me as an ally. ‘You don’t think mother will mind my using make-up, do you?’ Beulah left me no time to answer. ‘I’ll tell you what your mother will do,’ she said emphatically and with remorseless realism. ‘She’ll give you one look, then she will sit down on the davenport, turn you over her knee, pull down your drawers and give you the biggest spanking you ever had in all your life.’ Ruth gave her a look of cold and haughty contempt and said, ‘I wasn’t talking to you.’ Then she turned back in my direction. ‘What do you say, John?’ The strawberry lips wreathed themselves into what was intended to be a richly voluptuous smile; the eyes gave me a bolder version of their adoring look. ‘What do you say?’ In mere self-defense I told her the truth. ‘I’m afraid Beulah’s right,’ I said. ‘An enormous spanking.’ The smile faded, the eyes darkened and narrowed, an angry flush appeared beneath the rouge on her cheeks. ‘I think you’re absolutely disgusting,’ she said. ‘Disgusting!’ Beulah echoed. ‘Who’s disgusting, I’d like to know?’ Ruth scowled and bit her lip, but managed to ignore her. ‘How old was Juliet?’ she asked with a note of anticipated triumph in her voice. ‘A year younger than you are,’ I answered. The triumph broke through in a mocking smile. ‘But Juliet,’ I went on, ‘didn’t go to school. No classes, no homework. Nothing to think about except Romeo and painting her face—if she did paint it, which I rather doubt. Whereas you’ve got algebra, you’ve got Latin and the French irregular verbs. You’ve been given the inestimable opportunity of some day becoming a reasonably civilized young woman.’ There was a long silence. Then she said, ‘I hate you.’ It was the cry of an outraged Salome, of Dolores, justly indignant at having been mistaken for a high-school kid. Tears began to flow. Charged with the black silt of mascara, they cut their way through the alluvial plains of rouge and powder. ‘Damn you,’ she sobbed, ‘damn you!’ She wiped her eyes; then, catching sight of the horrible mess on her handkerchief, she uttered a cry of horror and rushed upstairs. Five minutes later, serene and completely repainted, she was on her way to school. And that” Rivers concluded, “was one of the reasons why our grande amoureuse paid so little attention to the object of her devouring passion, why the femme fatale preferred, during the first two weeks of her existence, to concentrate on herself rather than on the person to whom the author of the scenario had assigned the part of victim. She had tried me out and found me sadly unworthy of the role! It seemed better, for the time being, to play the piece as a monologue. In that quarter at least I was given a respite. But meanwhile my Nobel Prize winner was getting into trouble.

“On the fourth day of his emancipation, Henry sneaked off to a cocktail party given by a female musicologist with bohemian tastes. Broken reeds can never hold their liquor like gentlemen. Henry could get gloriously tipsy on tea and conversation. Martinis turned him into a maniac, who suddenly became a depressive and ended up, invariably, by vomiting. He knew it, of course; but the child in him had to assert its independence. Katy had confined him to an occasional sherry. Well, he’d show her, he’d prove that he could affront Prohibition as manfully as anyone else. When the cat’s away, the mice will play. And they’ll play (such is the curious perversity of the human heart) at games which are simultaneously dangerous and boring—games where, if you lose and retire, you feel humiliated and, if you persist and win, you wish to God you hadn’t. Henry accepted the musicologist’s invitation, and what was bound to happen duly happened. By the time he was halfway through his second drink he was making an exhibition of himself. By the end of the third he was holding the musicologist’s hand and telling her that he was the unhappiest man in the world. And a quarter of the way through the fourth he had to make a dash for the bathroom. But that wasn’t all; on the way home—he insisted on walking—he managed somehow to lose his brief case. In it were the first three chapters of his new book. From Boole to Wittgenstein. Even now, a generation later, it’s still the best introduction to modern logic. A little masterpiece! And maybe it would be still better if he hadn’t got drunk and lost the original version of the first three chapters. I deplored the loss, but welcomed its sobering effect on poor old Henry. For the next few days he was as good as gold, as reasonable, very nearly, as little Timmy. I thought my troubles were over, all the more so as the news from Chicago seemed to indicate that Katy would soon be home again. Her mother, so it seemed, was sinking. Sinking so fast that, one morning on our way to the laboratory, Henry made me stop at a haberdasher’s; he wanted to buy himself a black satin tie for the funeral. Then, electrifyingly, came the news of a miracle. At the last moment, refusing to give up hope, Katy had called in another doctor—a young man just out of Johns Hopkins, brilliant, indefatigable, up to all the latest tricks. He had started a new treatment; he had wrestled with death through the whole of a night and a day and another night. And now the battle was won; the patient had been brought back from the very brink of the grave and would live. Katy, in her letter, was exultant and I, of course, exulted in sympathy. Old Beulah went about her work loudly praising the Lord, and even the children took time off from their themes and problems, their fantasies of sex and railway trains, to rejoice. Everyone was happy except Henry. True, he kept saying that he was happy; but his unsmiling face (he could never conceal what he really felt) belied his words. He had been counting on Mrs. Hanbury’s death to bring his womb-secretary, his mother-mistress home again. And now—unexpectedly, improperly (there was no other word for it)—this interfering young squirt from Johns Hopkins had come along with his damned miracle. Someone who ought to have quietly shuffled off was now (against all the rules) out of danger. Out of danger; but still, of course, much too sick to be left alone. Katy would have to stay on in Chicago until the patient could fend for herself. Heaven only knew when the one being on whom poor old Henry depended for everything—his health, his sanity, his very life—would return to him. Hope deferred brought on several attacks of asthma. But then, providentially, came the announcement that he had been elected a Corresponding Member of the French Institute. Very flattering indeed! It cured him instantly—but, alas, not permanently. A week passed, and as day succeeded day, Henry’s sense of deprivation became a positive agony, like the withdrawal pains of a drug addict. His anguish found expression in a wild, irrational resentment. That fiendish old hag! (actually, Katy’s mother was two months his junior) That malignant malingerer! For, of course, she wasn’t really ill—nobody could be really ill that long without dying. She was just shamming. And the motive was a mixture of selfishness and spite. She wanted to keep her daughter to herself and she wanted (for the old bitch had always hated him) to prevent Katy from being where she ought to be—with her husband. I gave him a little talk about nephritis and made him reread Katy’s letters. It worked for a day or two, and after that the news was more encouraging. The patient was making such good progress that in a few days, maybe, she could safely be left in charge of a nurse and the Swedish maid. In his joy, Henry became, for the first time since I had known him, almost a normal father. Instead of retiring to his study after dinner, he played games with the children. Instead of talking about his own subjects, he tried to amuse them by making bad puns and asking riddles. ‘Why is a chicken with its head hanging down like next week?’ Obviously, because its neck’s weak. Timmy was in ecstasies and even Ruth condescended to smile. Three more days passed and it was Sunday. In the evening we played bezique and then a game of Heads, Bodies and Tails. The clock struck nine. One last round; then the children went upstairs. Ten minutes later they were in bed and calling us to come and say good night. We looked in first on Timmy. ‘Do you know this one?’ Henry asked. ‘What flower would come up if you planted bags of anger?’ The answer, of course, was sacks of rage; but as Timmy had never heard of saxifrage, it left him rather cold. We turned out the light and moved on to the next room. Ruth was in bed with the Teddy bear, who was at once her baby and her Prince Charming, beside her. She was wearing pale blue pajamas and full make-up. Her teacher had raised objections to rouge and perfume in class and, when persuasion proved unavailing, the principal had categorically forbidden them. The poetess had been reduced to painting and scenting herself at bedtime. The whole room reeked of imitation violets, and the pillow, on either side of her small face, was streaked with lipstick and mascara. These were details, however, which Henry was not the man to notice. ‘What flower,’ he asked as he approached the bed, ‘or, to be more precise, what flowering tree would come up if you were to plant a packet of old love letters?’ ‘Love letters?’ the child repeated. She glanced at me, then blushed and looked away. Forcing a laugh, she answered, in a bored superior tone, that she couldn’t guess. ‘Laburnum,’ her father brought out triumphantly; and when she didn’t understand, ‘La, burn ’em,’ he explained. ‘Don’t you get the point? They’re love letters—old love letters, and you’ve found a new admirer. So what do you do? You burn them.’ ‘But why La?’ Ruth asked. Henry gave her a brief, instructive lecture on the art of innocuous blasphemy. Gee for God, jeeze for Jesus, heck for hell, La for Lord. ‘But nobody ever says La,’ Ruth objected. ‘They did in the eighteenth century,’ Henry retorted rather testily. Far off, in the master bedroom, the telephone bell started to ring. His face brightened. ‘I have a hunch it’s Chicago calling,’ he said, as he bent down to give Ruth her goodnight kiss. ‘And another hunch,’ he added as he hurried toward the door, ‘that mother will be coming back tomorrow. Tomorrow!’ he repeated, and was gone. ‘Won’t it be wonderful,’ I said fervently, ‘if he’s right!’ Ruth nodded her head and said, ‘Yes,’ in a tone that made it sound like ‘No.’ The narrow painted face suddenly took on an expression of acute anxiety. She was thinking, no doubt, of what Beulah had said would happen when her mother came home; was seeing, was actually feeling, Dolores-Salome turned over a large maternal knee and, in spite of her being a year older than Juliet, getting resoundingly spanked. ‘Well, I’d better be going,’ I said at last. Ruth caught my hand and held it. ‘Not yet,’ she pleaded and, as she spoke, her face changed its expression. The pinched anxious look was replaced by a tremulous smile of adoration; the lips parted, the eyes widened and shone. It was as though she had suddenly remembered who I was—her slave and her predestined Bluebeard, the only reason for her assumption of the double role of fatal temptress and sacrificial victim. And tomorrow, if her mother came home, tomorrow it would be too late; the play would be over, the theater closed by order of the police. It was now or never. She squeezed my hand. ‘Do you like me, John?’ she whispered almost inaudibly. I answered in the jolly, ringing tones of an extroverted scoutmaster, ‘Of course I like you.’ ‘As much as you like mother?’ she insisted. I parried with a display of good-humored impatience. ‘What an asinine question!’ I said. ‘I like your mother the way one likes grownups. And I like you the way…’ ‘The way one likes children,’ she concluded bitterly. ‘As if that made any difference!’ ‘Well, doesn’t it?’ ‘Not to this kind of thing,’ And when I asked which kind of thing, she squeezed my hand and said, ‘Liking people,’ and gave me another of those looks of hers. There was an embarrassing pause. ‘Well, I guess I’d better be going,’ I said at last, and remembering the rhyme which Timmy always found so exquisitely humorous, ‘Good night,’ I added as I disengaged my hand, ‘sleep tight, mind the fleas don’t bite.’ The joke fell like a ton of pig iron into the silence. Unsmiling, with a focused intensity of yearning that I would have found comic if it hadn’t scared me out of my wits, she went on gazing up at me. ‘Aren’t you going to say good night to me properly?’ she asked. I bent down to administer the ritual peck on the forehead, and suddenly her arms were around my neck and it was no longer I who was kissing the child, but the child who was kissing me—on the right cheekbone first of all and then, with somewhat better aim, near the corner of the mouth. ‘Ruth!’ I protested; but before I could say more, she had kissed me again, with a clumsy kind of violence, full on the lips. I jerked myself free. ‘What did you do that for?’ I asked in an angry panic. Her face flushed, her eyes shining and enormous, she looked at me, whispered, ‘I love you,’ then turned away and buried her face in the pillow, next to the Teddy bear. ‘All right,’ I said severely. ‘This is the last time I come and say good night to you,’ and I turned to go. The bed creaked, bare feet thudded on the floor, and as I touched the doorknob she was beside me, tugging at my arm. ‘I’m sorry, John,’ she was saying incoherently. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll do anything you say. Anything…’ The eyes were all spaniel now, without a trace of the temptress. I ordered her back to bed and told her that, if she was a very good girl, I might relent. Otherwise…And with that unspoken threat I left her. First I went to my room, to wash the lipstick off my face, then walked back along the corridor toward the stairs and ultimately the library. On the landing at the head of the staircase I almost collided with Henry, as he came out of the passage leading to his wing of the house. ‘What news?’ I began. But then I saw his face and was appalled. Five minutes before he had been gaily asking riddles. Now he was an old, old man, pale as a corpse, but without the corpse’s serenity; for there was an expression in his eyes and around the mouth of unbearable suffering. ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked anxiously. He shook his head without speaking. ‘You’re sure?’ I insisted. ‘That was Katy on the phone,’ he said at last in a toneless voice. ‘She isn’t coming home.’ I asked if the old lady were worse again. ‘That’s the excuse,’ he said bitterly, then turned and walked back in the direction from which he had come. Full of concern, I followed him. There was a short passage, I remember, with the door of a bathroom at the end of it and another door on the left, opening into the master bedroom. I had never been in the room before, and it was with a shock of surprise and wonder that I now found myself confronted by the Maartenses’ extraordinary bed. It was an Early American four-poster, but of such gigantic proportions that it made me think of presidential assassinations and state funerals. In Henry’s mind, of course, the association of ideas must have been somewhat different. My catafalque was his marriage bed. The telephone, which had just condemned him to another term of solitude, stood next to the symbol and scene of his conjugal happiness. No, that’s the wrong word,” Rivers added parenthetically. “‘Conjugal’ implies a reciprocal relationship between two full-blown persons. But for Henry, Katy wasn’t a person; she was his food, she was a vital organ of his own body. When she was absent, he was like a cow deprived of grass, like a man with jaundice struggling to exist without a liver. It was an agony. ‘Maybe you’d better lie down for a while,’ I said in the wheedling tone one automatically adopts when speaking to the sick. I made a gesture in the direction of the bed. His response, this time, was like what happens if you sneeze while traversing a slope of newly fallen snow—an avalanche. And what an avalanche! Not the white, virginal variety, but a hot, palpitating dung-slide. It stank, it suffocated, it overwhelmed. From the fool’s paradise of my belated and utterly inexcusable innocence, I listened in shocked, astonished horror. ‘It’s obvious,’ he kept repeating. ‘It’s only too obvious.’ Obvious that if Katy didn’t come home, it was because she didn’t want to come home. Obvious that she must have found some other man. And obvious that this other man was the new doctor. Doctors were notoriously good lovers. They understood physiology; they knew all about the autonomic nervous system.

“Horror gave place in my mind to indignation. What was he daring to say about my Katy, about this more than woman who could only be as pure and perfect as my own almost religious passion? ‘Are you seriously implying,’ I began…But Henry wasn’t implying. He was categorically affirming. Katy was being unfaithful to him with the young squirt from Johns Hopkins.

“I told him he was mad, and he retorted that I knew nothing about sex. Which, of course, was painfully true. I tried to change the subject. It wasn’t a question of sex—it was a question of nephritis, of a mother who needed her daughter’s care. But Henry wouldn’t listen. All he now wanted was to torture himself. And if you ask why he wanted to torture himself, I can only answer that it was because he was already in agony. His was the weaker, the more dependent half of a symbiotic partnership which (so he believed) had just been dissolved abruptly. It was a surgical operation, without anesthetics. Katy’s return would have stopped the pain and instantly healed the wound. But Katy was not returning. Therefore (admire the logic!) it was necessary for Henry to inflict upon himself as much additional suffering as he possibly could. And the most effective way of doing that was to put his misery into lacerating words. To talk and talk—not, of course, to me, not even at me; only to himself—but to himself (and this was essential if he was to suffer) in my presence. The part assigned to me was not that of the supporting character actor, not even that of the bit player who serves as confidant and errand runner. No, I was merely the nameless, almost faceless extra, whose business it had been to provide the hero with his initial excuse for thinking out loud, and who now, by simply being on the spot, imparted to the overheard soliloquy a monstrousness, a sheer obscenity, which it would have lacked if the speaker had been alone. Self-activated, the dung-slide gathered momentum. From Katy’s betrayal, he passed to her choice (and this was the unkindest cut) of a younger man. Younger and therefore more virile, more indefatigably lustful. (Not to mention all that, as a doctor, he knew about physiology and the autonomic nervous system.) The person, the professional, the devoted healer—all had disappeared; and so by implication had Katy. Nothing remained except a pair of sexual functions frantically exploiting one another in the void. That he could have thought in these terms about Katy and her hypothetical lover was a proof, as I began obscurely to realize, that he thought in the same way about Katy and himself. Henry, as I’ve said, was a broken reed, and broken reeds, as you must have had innumerable occasions to observe, are apt to be ardent. Ardent, indeed, to the point of frenzy. No, that’s the wrong word. Frenzy is blind. Whereas lovers like Henry never lose their head. They take it with them, however far they go—take it with them so that they can be fully, gloatingly conscious of their own and their partners’ alienation. Actually, this was about the only thing, outside his laboratory and his library, that Henry cared to be conscious of. Most people inhabit a universe that is like French café au lait—fifty per cent skim milk and fifty per cent stale chicory, half psychophysical reality and half conventional verbiage. Henry’s universe was modeled on the highball. It was a mixture in which half a pint of the fizziest philosophical and scientific ideas all but drowned a small jigger of immediate experience, most of it strictly sexual. Broken reeds are seldom good mixers. They’re far too busy with their ideas, their sensuality and their psychosomatic complaints to be able to take an interest in other people—even their own wives and children. They live in a state of the most profound voluntary ignorance, not knowing anything about anybody, but abounding in preconceived opinions about everything. Take the education of children, for example. Henry could talk about it as an authority. He had read Piaget, he had read Dewey, he had read Montessori, he had read the psychoanalysts. It was all there in his cerebral filing cabinet, classified, categorized, instantly available. But when it came to doing something for Ruth and Timmy, he was either hopelessly incompetent or, more often, he just faded out of the picture. For of course they bored him. All children bored him. So did the overwhelming majority of adults. How could it be otherwise? Their ideas were rudimentary and their reading, non-existent. What had they to offer? Only their sentiments and their moral life, only their occasional wisdom and their frequent and pathetic lack of wisdom. In a word, only their humanity. And humanity was something in which poor Henry was incapable, congenitally, of taking an interest. Between the worlds of quantum theory and epistemology at one end of the spectrum and of sex and pain at the other, there was a kind of limbo peopled only by ghosts. And among the ghosts was about seventy-five per cent of himself. For he was as little aware of his own humanity as of other people’s. His ideas and his sensations—yes, he knew all about those. But who was the man who had the ideas and felt the sensations? And how was this man related to the things and people around him? How, above all, ought he to be related to them? I doubt if it ever occurred to Henry to ask himself such questions. In any case he didn’t ask them on this occasion. His soliloquy was not a husband’s agonized debate between love and suspicion. That would have been a fully human response to the challenge of a fully human situation—and, as such, it could never occur in the presence of a listener so raw and foolish, so incapable of giving understanding help, as was the young John Rivers of thirty years ago. No, this was essentially a less than human reaction; and one of the elements of its subhumanity was the fact, the utterly outrageous and senseless fact, that it was taking place in the presence of someone who was neither an intimate friend nor a professional counselor—merely a shocked young bumpkin with a too pious background and a pair of receptive but shuddering ears. Those poor ears! Lucidly expressed and richly documented, the scientific dirt fairly poured into them. Burton and Havelock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing and the incomparable Ploss and Bartels—like Piaget and John Dewey, they were all there in Henry’s built-in filing cabinet, accessible in the minutest detail. And in this case, it now became evident, Henry had not been content to remain the armchair expert. He had practiced what he preached; he had acted, systematically, on what he knew in theory. How difficult it is, in these days when you can discuss orgasms over the soup and flagellation with the ice cream, how extraordinarily difficult it is to remember the strength of the old taboos, the depth of the silence by which they were surrounded. As far as I was concerned, everything that Henry talked about—the techniques of love-making, the anthropology of marriage, the statistics of sexual satisfaction—was a revelation from the abyss. It was the sort of thing that decent people did not mention, did not, I had fondly imagined, even know; the sort of thing that could be discussed and understood only in brothels, at rich men’s orgies, in Montmartre and Chinatown and the French Quarter. And yet these horrors were being poured into my ears by the man whom I respected above all others, the man who, for intellect and scientific intuition, surpassed everyone I had ever known. And he was uttering his horrors in connection with the woman whom I loved as Dante had loved Beatrice; as Petrarch worshiped Laura. He was asserting, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, that Beatrice had almost insatiable appetites, that Laura had broken her marriage vows for the sake of the kind of physical sensations which any hefty brute with a good knowledge of the autonomic nervous system could so easily evoke. And even if he hadn’t been accusing Katy of unfaithfulness, I should have been appalled by what he said. For what he said implied that the horrors were as much a part of marriage as of adultery. I can hardly expect you to believe it,” Rivers added with a laugh, “but it’s the truth. Up to that moment I had no idea of what went on between husbands and wives. Or rather I had an idea, but it didn’t happen to be correct. My idea was that, outside the underworld, decent people didn’t make love except for the sake of having children—once in a lifetime in my parents’ case, twice in the Maartenses’. And now here was Henry sitting on the edge of his catafalque and soliloquizing. Soliloquizing with the lucidity of genius, the uninhibited elaboration of infantility, about all the strange and, to me, appallingly immoral things that had happened under its funereal canopy. And Katy, my Katy, had been his accomplice—not his victim, as at first I had tried to believe, but his willing and even enthusiastic accomplice. It was this enthusiasm, indeed, that made him suspect her. For if sensuality meant so much to her here, on the domestic catafalque, it must of necessity mean more to her up there in Chicago, with the young doctor. And suddenly, to my unspeakable embarrassment, Henry covered his face and began to sob.”

There was a silence.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“What could I do?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing, except make a few soothing noises and advise him to go to bed. Tomorrow he’d discover that it had all been a huge mistake. Then, on the pretext of getting him his hot milk, I hurried off to the kitchen. Beulah was in her rocking chair, reading a small book about the Second Coming. I told her that Dr. Maartens wasn’t feeling so good. She listened, nodded meaningfully as though she had expected it, then shut her eyes and, in silence, but with moving lips, prayed for a long time. After that she gave a sigh and said, ‘Empty, swept and garnished.’ Those were the words that had been given to her. And though it seemed an odd thing to say about a man who had more in his head than any six ordinary intellectuals, the phrase turned out, on second thought, to be an exact description of poor old Henry. Empty of God, swept clean of common manhood and garnished like a Christmas tree, with glittering notions. And seven other devils, worse even than stupidity and sentimentality, had moved in and taken possession. But meanwhile the milk was steaming. I poured it into a thermos and went upstairs. For a moment, as I entered the bedroom, I thought Henry had given me the slip. Then, from behind the catafalque, came a sound of movement. In the recess between the draped chintz of the four-poster and the window, Henry was standing before the open door of a small safe, let into the wall and ordinarily concealed from view by the half-length portrait of Katy in her wedding dress, which covered it. ‘Here’s your milk,’ I began in a tone of hypocritical cheerfulness. But then I noticed that the thing he had taken out of the recesses of the strongbox was a revolver; my heart missed a beat. I remembered suddenly that there was a midnight train for Chicago. Visions of the day after tomorrow’s headlines crowded in on me. FAMOUS SCIENTIST SHOOTS WIFE, SELF. Or, alternately, NOBEL PRIZE MAN HELD IN DOUBLE SLAYING. Or even MOTHER OF TWO DIES IN FLAMING LOVE NEST. I put down the thermos and, bracing myself to knock him out, if necessary, with a left to the jaw, or a short sharp jab in the solar plexus, I walked over to him. ‘If you don’t mind, Dr. Maartens,’ I said respectfully. There was no struggle, hardly so much as a conscious effort on his part to keep the revolver. Five seconds later the thing was safely in my pocket. ‘I was just looking at it,’ he said in a small flat voice. And then, after a little pause, he added, ‘It’s a funny thing, when you think of it.’ And when I asked, ‘What?’ he said, ‘Death.’ And that was the full extent of the great man’s contribution to the sum of human wisdom. Death was a funny thing when you thought of it. That was why he never thought of it—except on occasions like the present, when suffering had made him feel the need for the self-infliction of more suffering. Murder? Suicide? The ideas had not even occurred to him. All he demanded from the instrument of death was a sensation of negative sensuality—a painful reminder, in the midst of all his other pains, that someday, a long long time hence, he too would have to die.

“‘Can we shut this up again?’ I asked. He nodded. On a little table beside the bed lay the objects he had taken out of the safe while looking for the revolver. These I now replaced—Katy’s jewel box, half a dozen cases containing the gold medals presented to the great man by various learned societies, several Manila envelopes bulging with papers. And finally there were those books—all six volumes of the Studies in the Psychology of Sex, a copy of Felicia by Andrea de Nerciat and, published in Brussels, an anonymous work with illustrations, entitled Miss Floggy’s Finishing School. ‘Well, that’s that,’ I said in my jolliest bedside manner as I locked the safe door and returned him the key. Picking up the portrait I hung it again on its appointed hook. Behind the white satin and the orange blossom, behind the Madonna lilies and a face whose radiance even the ineptitude of a fifth-rate painter could not obscure, who could have divined the presence of that strangely assorted treasure—Felicia and the stock certificates, Miss Floggy and the golden symbols with which a not very grateful society rewards its men of genius?

“Half an hour later I left him and went to my room—with what a blessed sense of having escaped, of being free at last from an oppressive nightmare! But even in my room there was no security. The first thing I saw, when I switched on the light, was an envelope pinned to my pillow. I opened it and unfolded two sheets of mauve paper. It was a love poem from Ruth. This time yearning rhymed with spurning. Love confessed had caused the beloved to detest her something or other breast. It was too much for one evening. Genius kept pornography in the safe; Beatrice had been to school at Miss Floggy’s; childish innocence painted its face, addressed impassioned twaddle to young men and, if I didn’t lock my door, would soon be yearning and burning its way out of bad literature into worse reality.

“The next morning I overslept and, when I came down to breakfast, the children were already halfway through their cereal. ‘Your mother isn’t coming home, after all,’ I announced. Timmy was genuinely sorry; but though she uttered appropriate words of regret, the sudden brightening of Ruth’s eyes betrayed her; she was delighted. Anger made me cruel. I took her poem out of my pocket and laid it on the tablecloth beside the Grapenuts. ‘It’s lousy,’ I said brutally. Then without looking at her I left the room and went upstairs again to see what had happened to Henry. He had a lecture at nine-thirty and would be late unless I routed him out of bed. But when I knocked at his door a feeble voice announced that he was ill. I went in. On the catafalque lay what looked already like a dead man. I took his temperature. It was over a hundred and one. What was to be done? I ran downstairs to the kitchen to consult with Beulah. The old woman sighed and shook her head. ‘You’ll see,’ she said. ‘He’ll make her come home.’ And she told me the story of what had happened, two years before, when Katy went to France to visit her brother’s grave in one of the war cemeteries. She had hardly been gone a month when Henry took sick—so sick that they had to send a cable summoning her home. Nine days later, when Katy got back to St. Louis, he was all but dead. She entered the sick room, she laid a hand on his forehead. ‘I tell you,’ said Beulah dramatically, ‘it was just like the raising of Lazarus. Down to the doors of death and then, whoosh! all the way up again, like he was in an elevator. Three days later he was eating fried chicken and talking his head off. And he’ll do the same this time. He’ll make her come home, even if it means going to death’s door to get what he wants.’ And that,” Rivers added, “was precisely where he went—to death’s door.”

“You mean it was genuine? He wasn’t putting on an act?”

“As if the second alternative excluded the first! Of course he was putting on an act; but he put it on so successfully that he very nearly died of pneumonia. However, that was something I didn’t clearly recognize at the time. In that respect Beulah was a great deal more scientific in her approach than I. I had the exclusive superstition of germs; she believed in psychosomatic medicine. Well, I telephoned the doctor and then went back to the dining room. The children had finished their breakfast and were gone. I didn’t see them again for the best part of two weeks; for when I got home from the laboratory that evening, I found that Beulah had packed them off, on the doctor’s advice, to stay with a friendly neighbor. No more poems, no further need to lock my door. It was a great relief. I phoned to Katy on Monday night and again, with the news that we had had to engage a nurse and hire an oxygen tent, on Tuesday. Next day Henry was worse; but so, when I telephoned to Chicago, was poor Mrs. Hanbury. ‘I can’t leave her,’ Katy kept repeating in an anguish. ‘I can’t!’ To Henry, who had been counting on her return, the news was almost mortal. Within two hours his temperature had risen a whole degree and he was delirious. ‘It’s his life or Mrs. Hanbury’s,’ said Beulah, and she went to her room to pray for guidance. In about twenty-five minutes it came. Mrs. Hanbury was going to die whatever happened; but Henry would be all right if Katy came home. So she must come home. It was the doctor who finally persuaded her. ‘I don’t want to be an alarmist,’ he said over the phone that evening, ‘but…’ That did it. ‘I’ll be home by tomorrow night,’ she said. Henry was going to get his way—but only just in time.

“The doctor left. The nurse settled down to a night of watching. I went to my room. ‘Katy will be back tomorrow,’ I said to myself. ‘Katy will be back tomorrow.’ But which Katy—mine or Henry’s, Beatrice or Miss Floggy’s favorite pupil? Would everything, I wondered, be different now? Would it be possible, after the dung-slide, to feel for her as I had felt before? All that night and the next day the questions tormented me. I was still asking them when, at long last, I heard the taxi turning into the driveway. My Katy or his? A horrible foreboding sickened and paralyzed me. It was a long time before I could force myself to go and meet her. When at last I opened the front door, the luggage was already on the steps and Katy was paying off the driver. She turned her head. How pale she looked in the light of the porch lamp, how drawn and haggard! But how beautiful! More beautiful than ever—beautiful in a new, heart-rending way, so that I found myself loving her with a passion from which the last traces of impurity had been dissolved by pity and replaced by an ardor of self-sacrifice, a burning desire to help and protect, to lay down life itself in her service. And what about Henry’s soliloquy and the other Katy? What about Miss Floggy and Felicia and the Studies in the Psychology of Sex? So far as my suddenly leaping heart was concerned, they had never existed, or at any rate were totally irrelevant.

“As we entered the hall, Beulah came running out of the kitchen. Katy threw her arms round the old woman’s neck and for a long half minute the two stood there locked in a silent embrace. Then, drawing back a little, Beulah looked up searchingly into the other’s face. And as she looked, the expression of tear-stained rapture gave place to one of deepening anxiety. ‘But it isn’t you,’ she cried. ‘It’s the ghost of you. You’re almost as far gone as he is.’ Katy tried to laugh it off. She was just a bit tired, that was all. The old woman emphatically shook her head. ‘It’s the virtue,’ she said. ‘The virtue’s gone out of you. Like it went out of our dear Lord when all those sick people kept grabbing hold of him.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said Katy. But it was quite true. The virtue had gone out of her. Three weeks at her mother’s bedside had drained her of life. She was empty, a shell animated only by the will. And the will is never enough. The will can’t digest your meals for you, or lower your temperature—much less somebody else’s temperature. ‘Wait till tomorrow,’ Beulah begged, when Katy announced her intention of going up to the sickroom. ‘Get some sleep. You can’t help him now, not in the state you’re in.’ ‘I helped him last time,’ Katy retorted. ‘But last time was different,’ the old woman insisted. ‘Last time you had the virtue; you weren’t a ghost.’ ‘You and your ghosts!’ said Katy with a touch of annoyance; and, turning, she started up the stairs. I followed her.”

“Under his oxygen tent Henry was asleep or in a stupor. A gray stubble covered his chin and cheeks, and in the emaciated face the nose was enormous, like something in a caricature. Then, as we looked at him, the eyelids opened. Katy bent over the transparent window of the tent and called his name. There was no response, no sign in the pale blue eyes that he knew who she was, or even that he had seen her. ‘Henry,’ she repeated, ‘Henry! It’s me. I’ve come back.’ The wavering eyes came to a focus and a moment later there was the faintest dawn of recognition—for a few seconds only; then it faded. The eyes drifted away again, the lips began to move; he had fallen back into the world of his delirium. The miracle had miscarried; Lazarus remained unraised. There was a long silence. Then heavily, hopelessly, ‘I guess I’d better go to bed,’ Katy said at last.”

“And the miracle?” I asked. “Did she pull it off the next morning?”

“How could she? With no virtue, no life in her, nothing but her will and her anxiety. Which is worse, I wonder—being desperately ill yourself, or watching somebody you love being desperately ill? One has to begin by defining the word ‘you.’ I say you’re desperately ill. But do I mean you? Isn’t it, in fact, the new, limited personality created by the fever and the toxins? A personality without intellectual interests, without social obligations, without material concerns. Whereas the loving nurse remains her normal self, with all her memories of past happiness, all her fears for the future, all her worried awareness of a world beyond the four walls of the sickroom. And then there’s the question of death. How do you react to the prospect of death? If you’re sick enough, you reach a point where, however passionately you may be fighting for life, a part of you wouldn’t be at all sorry to die. Anything rather than this misery, this interminably squalid nightmare of finding oneself reduced to a mere lump of suffering matter! ‘Give me liberty or give me death.’ But in this case the two are identical. Liberty equals death equals the pursuit of happiness—but only, of course, for the patient, never for the nurse who loves him. She has no right to the luxury of death, to deliverance, through surrender, from her sickroom-prison. Her business is to go on fighting even when it’s perfectly obvious that the battle is lost; to go on hoping, even when there are no reasons for anything but despair; to go on praying, even when God has manifestly turned against her, even when she knows for certain that He doesn’t exist. She may be sick with grief and foreboding but she must act as though she were cheerful and serenely confident. She may have lost courage; but she must still inspire it. And meanwhile she’s working and waking beyond the limits of physical endurance. And there’s no respite; she must be constantly there, constantly available, constantly ready to give and give—to go on giving, even when she’s completely bankrupt. Yes, bankrupt,” he repeated. “That’s what Katy was. Absolutely bankrupt, but compelled by circumstances and her own will to go on spending. And, to make matters worse, the spending was fruitless. Henry didn’t get well; he merely refrained from dying. And meanwhile she was killing herself with the long, sustained effort to keep him alive. The days passed—three days, four days, I can’t remember how many. And then came the day I shall never forget. April 23rd, 1923.”

“Shakespeare’s birthday.”

“Mine too.”

“Yours?”

“Not my physical birthday,” Rivers explained. “That’s in October. My spiritual birthday. The day of my emergence from half-baked imbecility into something more nearly resembling the human form. I think,” he added, “we deserve a little more Scotch.”

He refilled our glasses.

“April the twenty-third,” he repeated. “What a day of miseries! Henry had had a bad night and was definitely worse. And when, at lunchtime, Katy’s sister telephoned from Chicago, it was to announce that the end was very close. That evening I had to read a paper before one of the local scientific societies. When I got home at eleven, I found only the nurse. Katy, she told me, was in her room, trying to get a little sleep. There was nothing I could do. I went to bed.

“Two hours later I was startled out of unconsciousness by the groping touch of a hand. The room was pitch dark; but my nostrils immediately recognized the aura of womanhood and orrisroot surrounding the unseen presence. I sat up. ‘Mrs. Maartens?’ (I still called her Mrs. Maartens) The silence was pregnant with tragedy. ‘Is Dr. Maartens worse?’ I asked anxiously. There was no immediate answer, only a movement in the darkness, only the creaking of springs as she sat down on the edge of the bed. The fringes of the Spanish shawl she had thrown over her shoulders brushed my face; the field of her fragrance enveloped me. Suddenly and with horror, I found myself remembering Henry’s soliliquy. Beatrice had appetites, Laura was a graduate of Miss Floggy’s. What blasphemy, what a hideous desecration! I was overcome by shame, and my shame deepened to an intense, remorseful self-loathing when, breaking the long silence, Katy told me in a flat expressionless voice that there had been another call from Chicago: her mother was dead. I muttered some kind of a condolence. Then the flat voice spoke again. ‘I’ve been trying to go to sleep,’ it said. ‘But I can’t; I’m too tired to sleep.’ There was a sigh of hopeless weariness, then another silence.

“‘Have you ever seen anyone die?’ the voice went on at last. But my military service hadn’t taken me to France, and when my father died, I had been staying at my grandmother’s place. At twenty-eight I knew as little of death as of that other great encroachment of the organic upon the verbal, of experience upon our notions and conventions—the act of love. ‘It’s the cutoffness that’s so terrible,’ I heard her saying. ‘You sit there helplessly, watching the connections being broken, one after the other. The connection with people, the connection with language, the connection with the physical universe. They can’t see the light, they can’t feel the warmth, they can’t breathe the air. And finally the connection with their own body begins to give way. They’re left at last hanging by a single thread—and it’s fraying away, fraying away, minute by minute.’ The voice broke and, by the muffled sound of the last words, I knew that Katy had covered her face with her hands. ‘All alone,’ she whispered, ‘absolutely alone.’ The dying, the living—everyone is alone always. There was a little whimper in the darkness, then a shuddering, convulsive movement, a hardly human cry. She was sobbing. I loved her and she was in anguish. And yet the only thing I could find to say was, ‘Don’t cry.’” Rivers shrugged his shoulders. “If you don’t believe in God or an afterlife—which of course as a minister’s son, I didn’t, except in a strictly Pickwickian sense—what else can you say in the presence of death? Besides, in this particular case, there was the grotesquely embarrassing fact that I couldn’t decide what to call her. Her grief and my compassion had made it impossible to say ‘Mrs. Maartens,’ but on the other hand ‘Katy’ might seem presumptuous, might even sound as though I were trying to exploit her tragedy for the baser purposes of a scoundrel, who found it impossible to forget Miss Floggy and the dung-slide of Henry’s subhuman soliloquy. ‘Don’t cry,’ I went on whispering, and in lieu of the prohibited endearments, of the Christian name which I dared not pronounce, I laid a timid hand on her shoulder and clumsily patted her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. And then, brokenly, ‘I promise I’ll behave properly tomorrow.’ And after another paroxysm of weeping, ‘I haven’t cried like this since before I was married.’ It was only later that the full significance of that last phrase began to dawn on me. A wife who permitted herself to cry would never have done for poor old Henry. His chronic weakness had compelled her to be unremittingly strong. But even the most stoical fortitude has its limits. That night Katy was at the end of her tether. She had suffered a total defeat—but a defeat for which, in a sense, she was grateful. Circumstances had been too much for her. But, by way of compensation, she had been granted a holiday from responsibility, had been permitted, if only for a few brief minutes, to indulge in the, for her, unprecedented luxury of tears. ‘Don’t cry,’ I kept repeating. But actually she wanted to cry, she felt the need of crying. Not to mention the fact that she had the best possible reasons for crying. Death was all around her—it had come for her mother, it was coming, inevitably, so it seemed, for her husband, it would be there in a few years for herself, in a few more years for her children. They were all moving toward the same consummation—toward the progressive cutting of the lines of communications, toward the slow, sure attrition of the sustaining threads, toward the final plunge, alone, into the emptiness.

“From somewhere far away over the housetops a clock struck the three-quarters. The chimes were a man-made insult added gratuitously to a cosmic injury—a symbol of time’s incessant passage, a reminder of the inevitable end. ‘Don’t cry,’ I implored her, and forgetting everything but my compassion, I moved my hand from the nearer to the further of her shoulders, and drew her closer. Shaken by sobs and trembling, she pressed herself against me. The clock had struck, time was bleeding away and even the living are utterly alone. Our only advantage over the dead woman up there in Chicago, over the dying man at the other end of the house, consisted in the fact that we could be alone in company, could juxtapose our solitudes and pretend that we had fused them into a community. But these, of course, were not the thoughts I was thinking then. Then there was no room in my mind for anything but love and pity and an intensely practical concern for the well-being of this goddess who had suddenly become a weeping child, this adored Beatrice who was now trembling, in just the way that little dogs can tremble, within the circle of my protecting arm. I touched the hands with which she was covering her face; they were stone cold. And the bare feet—cold as ice. ‘But you’re frozen!’ I said almost indignantly. And then, thankful that at last it was possible for me to translate my pity into useful action, ‘You must get under the bedclothes,’ I commanded. ‘At once.’ I visualized myself tenderly tucking her in, then drawing up a chair and sitting, quietly watchful, like a mother, while she went to sleep. But when I moved to get out of bed, she clung to me, she wouldn’t let me go. I tried to disengage myself, I tried to protest. ‘Mrs. Maartens!’ But it was like protesting against the clutch of a drowning child; the act was at once inhuman and useless. And meanwhile she was chilled to the bone and trembling—trembling uncontrollably. I did the only thing that was left for me to do.”

“You mean, you got under the covers too?”

“Under the covers,” he repeated, “with two cold bare arms round my neck and a shuddering, sob-shaken body pressed against my own.”

Rivers drank some whisky and leaning back in his chair, sat for a long time smoking in silence.

“The truth,” he said at last, “the whole truth and nothing but the truth. All the witnesses take the same oath and testify about the same events. The result, of course, is fifty-seven varieties of fiction. Which of them is nearest the truth? Stendhal or Meredith? Anatole France or D. H. Lawrence? The fountains of our deepest life shall be Confused in Passion’s golden purity or the Sexual Behavior in the Human Female?”

“Do you know the answer?” I inquired.

He shook his head.

“Maybe one could describe the event in relation to three co-ordinates.” In the air before him Rivers traced with the stem of his pipe two lines at right angles to one another, then from their point of intersection, added a vertical that took his hand above the level of his head. “Let one of these lines represent Katy, another the John Rivers of thirty years ago, and the third, John Rivers as I am today. Now, within this frame of reference, what can we say about the night of April 23rd, 1923? Not the whole truth, of course. But a good deal more of the truth than can be conveyed in terms of any single fiction. Let’s begin with the Katy line.” He drew it again, and for a moment the smoke of his pipe waveringly marked its position in space. “It’s the line,” he said, “of a born pagan forced by circumstances into a situation with which only a thoroughgoing Christian or Buddhist could adequately deal. It’s the line of a woman who has always been happily at home in the world and who suddenly finds herself standing on the brink of the abyss and invaded, body and mind, by the horrible black emptiness confronting her. Poor thing! She felt herself abandoned, not by God (for she was congenitally incapable of monotheism) but by the gods—all of them, from the little domestic lares and penates to the high Olympians. They had left her and taken everything with them. She had to find her gods again. She had to become a part once more of the natural, and therefore divine, order of things. She had to re-establish her contacts with life—with life at its simplest, life in its most unequivocal manifestations, as physical companionship, as the experience of animal warmth, as strong sensation, as hunger and the satisfaction of hunger. It was a matter of self-preservation. And that isn’t the whole story,” Rivers added. “She was in tears, grieving for the mother who had just died, grieving for the husband who might die tomorrow. There’s a certain affinity between the more violent emotions. Anger modulates only too easily into aggressive lust, and sorrow, if you give it a chance, will melt almost imperceptibly into the most delicious sensuality. After which, of course, He giveth His beloved sleep. In the context of bereavement, love is the equivalent of barbiturates and a trip to Hawaii. Nobody blames the widow or the orphan for resorting to these alleviations. So why condemn them for trying to preserve their life and sanity by the other simpler method?”

“I’m not condemning them,” I assured him. “But other people have other views.”

“And thirty years ago I was one of them.” He ran his pipe up and down the imaginary vertical in front of him. “The line of the virgin prig of twenty-eight, the line of the ex-Lutheran and ex-mother’s boy, the line of the Petrarchian idealist. From that position I had no choice but to think of myself as a treacherous adulterer, and of Katy as—what? The words were too hideous to be articulated. Whereas from Katy’s goddess-eye viewpoint nothing had happened that was not entirely natural, and anything that was natural was morally good. Looking at the matter from here,” (and he indicated the line of John Rivers-Now) “I’d say we were both of us half right and therefore wholly wrong—she by being beyond good and evil on the merely Olympian level (and the Olympians, of course, were nothing but a pack of superhuman animals with miraculous powers), and I by not being beyond good and evil at all, but still mired up to the ears in the all too human notions of sin and social convention. To be wholly right, she should have come down to my level and then gone further, on the other side; whereas I should have climbed to her level and, having found it unsatisfactory, pressed forward to join her at the place where one is genuinely beyond good and evil in the sense of being, not a superhuman animal, but a transfigured man or woman. If we had been at that level, should we have done what we then did? It’s an unanswerable question. And in actual fact we weren’t at that level. She was a goddess who had temporarily broken down and was finding her way home to Olympus by the road of sensuality. I was a divided soul committing a sin all the more enormous for being accompanied by the most ecstatic pleasure. Alternately and even, at moments, simultaneously, I was two people—a novice in love who had had the extraordinary good fortune to find himself in the arms of a woman at once uninhibited and motherly, profoundly tender and profoundly sensual, and a conscience-stricken wretch, ashamed of having succumbed to what he had been taught to regard as his basest passions and shocked, positively outraged (for he was censorious as well as remorseful) by the easy unconcern with which his Beatrice accepted the intrinsic excellence of pleasure, his Laura displayed her proficiency in the arts of love, and displayed it, what was more, in the solemn context of mortality. Mrs. Hanbury was dead, Henry was dying. According to all the rules, she should have been in crape and I should have been offering the consolations of philosophy. But in fact, in brute, paradoxical fact…” There was a moment of silence. “Midgets,” he went on pensively as, behind closed lids, he studied his far-off memories. “Midgets who don’t belong to my universe. And they didn’t really belong to it even then. That night of the twenty-third of April we were in the Other World, she and I, in the dark, wordless heaven of nakedness and touch and fusion. And what revelations in that heaven, what pentecosts! The visitations of her caresses were like sudden angels, like doves descending. And how hesitantly, how tardily I responded. With lips that hardly dared, with hands still fearful of blaspheming against my notions, or rather my mother’s notions, of what a good woman ought to be, of what, in fact, all good women are—in spite of which (and this was as shocking as it was wonderful) my timid blasphemies against the ideal were rewarded by an answering ecstasy of delight, by a bounty of reciprocated tenderness, beyond anything I could have imagined. But over against that nocturnal Other World stood this world—the world in which the John Rivers of 1923 did his daytime thinking and feeling; the world where this kind of thing was obviously criminal, where a pupil had cheated his master and a wife her husband; the world from whose point of view our dark heaven was the most sordid little hell and the visiting angels nothing but the manifestations of lust in a context of adultery. Lust and adultery,” Rivers repeated with a little laugh. “How old-fashioned it sounds! Nowadays we prefer to talk of drives, urges, extramarital intimacies. Is it a good thing? Or a bad thing? Or does it simply not matter one way or another? Fifty years from now Bimbo may know the answer. Meanwhile one can only record the fact that, on the verbal level, morality is simply the systematic use of bad language. Vile, base, foul—those are the linguistic foundations of ethics; and those were the words that haunted my conscience as I lay there, hour after hour, watching over Katy’s sleep. Sleep—that’s also the Other World. Otherer even than the heaven of touch. From love to sleep, from the other to the otherer. It’s that otherer otherness which invests the sleeping beloved with a quality almost of sacredness. Helpless sacredness—the thing that people adore in the Christ Child; the thing that filled me, then, with such an inexpressible tenderness. And yet it was all vile, base, foul. Those hideous monosyllables! They were like woodpeckers, hammering away at me with their cast-iron beaks. Vile, base, foul…But in the silence between two bouts of pecking I could hear Katy quietly breathing; and she was my beloved, asleep and helpless and therefore sacred, sacred in that Other World where all bad language, even all good language, is entirely irrelevant and beside the point. But that didn’t prevent those damned woodpeckers from starting up again with undiminished ferocity.

“And then, against all the conventions of fiction and good style, I must have fallen asleep. For suddenly it was dawn, and the birds were twittering in the suburban gardens, and there was Katy standing beside the bed in the act of throwing her long-fringed shawl over her shoulders. For a fraction of a second I couldn’t think why she was there. Then I remembered everything—the visitations in the darkness, the ineffable Other Worlds. But now it was morning, and we were in this world again, and I would have to call her Mrs. Maartens. Mrs. Maartens, whose mother had just died, whose husband might be dying. Vile, base, foul! How could I ever look her in the face again? But at that moment she turned and looked me in the face. I had time to see the beginnings of her old, frank, open smile; then, in an agony of shame and embarrassment, I averted my eyes. ‘I’d hoped you wouldn’t wake up,’ she whispered, and bending down, she kissed me, as a grownup kisses a child, on the forehead. I wanted to tell her that, in spite of everything, I still worshiped her; that my love was as intense as my remorse; that my gratitude for what had happened was as deep and strong as my determination that it should never happen again. But no words came; I was dumb. And so, but for quite another reason, was Katy. If she said nothing about what had happened, it was because she judged what had happened was the sort of thing it was best not to talk about. ‘It’s after six’ was all she said, as she straightened herself up. ‘I must go and relieve poor Nurse Kop-pers.’ Then she turned, opened the door noiselessly and, as noiselessly, closed it behind her. I was left alone, at the mercy of my woodpeckers. Vile, base, foul; foul, base, vile…By the time the bell rang for breakfast, my mind was made up. Rather than live a lie, rather than besmirch my ideal, I would go away—forever.

“In the hall, on my way to the dining room, I ran into Beulah. She was carrying a tray with the eggs and bacon, and humming the tune of ‘All creatures that on earth do dwell’; catching sight of me, she gave me a radiant smile and said, ‘Praise the Lord!’ I had never felt less inclined to praise Him. ‘We’re going to have a miracle,’ she went on. ‘And when I asked her how she knew we were going to have a miracle, she told me that she had just seen Mrs. Maartens in the sickroom, and Mrs. Maartens was herself again. Not a ghost any more, but her old self. The virtue had come back, and that meant that Dr. Maartens would start getting well again. ‘It’s Grace,’ she said. ‘I’ve been praying for it night and day. “Dear Lord, give Mrs. Maartens some of that Grace of Yours. Let her have the virtue back, so Dr. Maartens can get well.” And now it’s happened, it’s happened!’ And, as though to confirm what she had said, there was a rustling on the stairs behind us. We turned. It was Katy. She was dressed in black. Love and sleep had smoothed her face, and the body which yesterday had moved so wearily, at the cost of so much painful effort, was now as softly strong, as rich with life as it had been before her mother’s illness. She was a goddess once again—in mourning but uneclipsed, luminous even in her grief and resignation. The goddess came down the stairs, said good morning and asked if Beulah had told me the bad news. For a moment I thought something must have happened to Henry. ‘You mean Dr. Maartens?’ I began. She cut me short. The bad news about her mother. And suddenly I realized that, officially, I hadn’t yet heard of the melancholy event in Chicago. The blood rushed up into my cheeks and I turned away in horrible confusion. We were acting the lie already—and was I bad at it! Sadly but serenely, the goddess went on talking about that midnight telephone call, about her sister’s voice sobbing at the other end of the wire, about the last moments of the long-drawn agony. Beulah sighed noisily, said it was God’s will and that she had known it all along, then changed the subject. ‘What about Dr. Maartens?’ she asked. Had they taken his temperature? Katy nodded; they had, and it was definitely lower. ‘Didn’t I tell you so!’ the old woman said to me triumphantly. ‘It’s the grace of God, just like I said. The Lord has given her back the virtue.’ We moved into the dining room, sat down and began to eat. Heartily, as I remember. And I remember, too, that I found the heartiness rather shocking.” Rivers laughed. “How hard it is not to be a Manichee! Soul’s high, body’s low. Death’s an affair of the soul, and in that context eggs and bacon are in bad taste, and love, of course, is sheer blasphemy. And yet it’s sufficiently obvious that eggs and bacon may be the means of grace, that love may be chosen as the instrument of divine intervention.”

“You’re talking like Beulah,” I objected.

“Because there aren’t any other words to talk with. The uprush from within of something strong and wonderful, something that’s manifestly greater than yourself; the things and events which, from being neutral or downright hostile, suddenly, gratuitously, spontaneously come to your rescue—these are facts. They can be observed, they can be experienced. But if you want to talk about them, you discover that the only vocabulary is the theologian’s. Grace, Guidance, Inspiration, Providence—the words protest too much, beg all the questions before they’re asked. But there are occasions when you can’t avoid them. Here was Katy, for example. When she came back from Chicago, the virtue had gone out of her. Gone out of her so completely that she was useless to Henry and a burden to herself. Another woman might have prayed for strength, and the prayer might have been answered—because prayers do get answered sometimes. Which is absurd, which is out of the question; and yet it happens. Not, however, to people like Katy. Katy wasn’t the praying kind. For her, the supernatural was Nature; the divine was neither spiritual nor specifically human; it was in landscapes and sunshine and animals; it was in flowers, in the sour smell of little babies, in the warmth and softness of snuggling children; it was in kisses, of course, in the nocturnal apocalypses of love, in the more diffuse but no less ineffable bliss of just feeling well. She was a kind of feminine Antaeus—invincible while her feet were on the ground, a goddess so long as she was in contact with the greater goddess within her, the universal Mother without. Three weeks of attendance on a dying woman had broken that contact. Grace came when it was restored, and that happened on the night of April the twenty-third. An hour of love, five or six hours of the deeper otherness of sleep, and the emptiness was filled, the ghost reincarnated. She lived again—yet not she, of course, but the Unknown Quantity lived in her. The Unknown Quantity,” he repeated. “At one end of the spectrum it’s pure spirit, it’s the Clear Light of the Void; and at the other end it’s instinct, it’s health, it’s the perfect functioning of an organism that’s infallible so long as we don’t interfere with it; and somewhere between the two extremes is what St. Paul called ‘Christ’—the divine made human. Spiritual grace, animal grace, human grace—these aspects of the same underlying mystery, ideally, all of us should be open to all of them. In practice most of us either barricade ourselves against every form of grace or, if we open the door, open it to only one of the forms. Which isn’t, of course, enough. And yet a third of a loaf is better than no bread. How much better was manifest that morning of April twenty-fourth. Cut off from animal grace, Katy had been an impotent phantom. Restored to it, she was Hera and Demeter and Aphrodite gloriously rolled into one, with Aesculapius and the Grotto of Lourdes thrown in as a bonus—for the miracle was definitely under way. After three days at death’s door, Henry had felt the presence of the virtue in her and was responding. Lazarus was in process of being raised.”

“Thanks, at one remove, to you!”

“Thanks, at one remove, to me,” he repeated.

“Le Cocu Miraculé. What a subject for a French farce.”

“No better than any other subject. Oedipus, for example, or Lear, or even Jesus or Gandhi—you could make a roaring farce out of any of them. It’s just a question of describing your characters from the outside, without sympathy and in violent but unpoetical language. In real life farce exists only for spectators, never for the actors. What they participate in is either a tragedy or a complicated and more or less painful psychological drama. So far as I was concerned, the farce of the cuckold’s miraculous healing was a long-drawn anguish of divided loyalties, of love in conflict with duty, of temptations resisted and then ignominiously succumbed to, of pleasures guiltily enjoyed and passionately repented, of good resolutions made, forgotten, made again and once more swept away by the torrent of irresistible desire.”

“I thought you’d made up your mind to go away.”

“I had. But that was before I saw her coming down those stairs reincarnated as a goddess. A goddess in mourning. Those emblems of bereavement kept alive the pity, the religious adoration, the sense that my beloved was a spirit who must be worshiped in spirit. But out of the black bodice rose the luminous column of the neck; between the coils of honey-colored hair the face was transfigured by a kind of unearthly radiance. What’s that thing of Blake’s?

In a wife I would require

What in whores is always found,

The lineaments of gratified desire.

“But the lineaments of gratified desire are also the lineaments of desirability, the lineaments of the promise of future satisfactions. God, how frantically I desired her! And how passionately, from the depths of my remorse, the heights of my idealism, I loathed myself for doing so! When I got back from the lab, I tried to have it out with her. But she put me off. It wasn’t the time, it wasn’t the place. Beulah might come in, or Nurse Koppers. It would be better in the evening, when we could be quiet. And so that evening she came to my room. In the darkness, in the perfumed field of her womanhood, I tried to tell her all the things I had been unable to tell her that morning—that I loved her, but we mustn’t; that I had never been so happy, nor so utterly miserable; that I would remember what had happened with the most passionate gratitude, all my life long, and that tomorrow I would pack my bags and go and never, never see her again. At that point my voice broke and I found myself sobbing. This time it was Katy’s turn to say, ‘Don’t cry,’ to offer the consolation of a hand on the shoulder, an encircling arm. The outcome, of course, was the same as it had been the night before. The same but more so—with fierier pentecosts, visitations not from mere angels, but from Thrones, Dominations, Powers, and the next morning (when, needless to say, I did not pack my bags), remorses to match the ecstasies, woodpeckers proportionately ferocious.”

“Which Katy, I gather, wasn’t pecked by?”

“And absolutely refused to talk about,” Rivers added.

“But you must have talked about them.”

“I did my best. But it takes two to make a conversation. Whenever I tried to tell her something of what was going on in my heart and mind, she either changed the subject or else, with a little laugh, with a little indulgent pat on the back of the hand, gently but very decidedly shut me up. Would it have been better, I wonder, if we had come out into the open, courageously called a spade a phallic symbol and handed one another our quivering entrails on a silver platter? Maybe it would. Or maybe it wouldn’t. The truth shall make you free; but on the other hand, let sleeping dogs lie and, above all, let lying dogs sleep. One must never forget that the most implacable wars are never the wars about things; they’re the wars about the nonsense that eloquent idealists have talked about things—in other words, the religious wars. What’s lemonade? Something you make out of lemons. And what’s a crusade? Something you make out of crosses—a course of gratuitous violence motivated by an obsession with unanalyzed symbols. ‘What do you read, my lord?’ ‘Words, words, words.’ And what’s in a word? Answer: corpses, millions of corpses. And the moral of that is, Keep your trap shut; or if you must open it, never take what comes out of it too seriously. Katy kept our traps firmly shut. She had the instinctive wisdom that taboos the four-letter words (and a fortiori the scientific polysyllables), while tacitly taking for granted the daily and nightly four-letter acts to which they refer. In silence, an act is an act is an act. Verbalized and discussed, it becomes an ethical problem, a casus belli, the source of a neurosis. If Katy had talked, where, I ask you, should we have been? In a labyrinth of intercommunicating guilts and anguishes. Some people, of course, enjoy that sort of thing. Others detest it, but feel, remorsefully, that they deserve to suffer. Katy (God bless her!) was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian’s trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there’s really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There’s no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence. What I needed most at that time was a dose of justificatory good language to counteract the effect of all that vile-base-foul. But Katy wouldn’t give it me. Good or bad, language was entirely beside the point. The point, so far as she was concerned, was her experience of the creative otherness of love and sleep. The point was finding herself once again in a state of grace. The point, finally, was her renewed ability to do something for Henry. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, not in the cookbook. Pleasure received and given, virtue restored, Lazarus raised from the dead—the eating in this case was self-evidently good. So help yourself to the pudding and don’t talk with your mouth full—it’s bad manners and it prevents you from appreciating the ambrosial flavor. It was a piece of advice too good for me to be able to take. True, I didn’t talk to her; she wouldn’t let me. But I went on talking to myself—talking and talking till the ambrosia turned into wormwood or was contaminated by the horrible gamy taste of forbidden pleasure, of sin recognized and knowingly indulged in. And meanwhile the miracle was duly proceeding. Steadily, rapidly, without a single setback, Henry was getting better.”

“Didn’t that make you feel happier about things?” I asked.

Rivers nodded his head.

“In one way, yes. Because, of course, I realized even then, even in my state of imbecile innocence, that I was indirectly responsible for the miracle. I had betrayed my master; but if I hadn’t, my master would probably be dead. Evil had been done; but good, an enormous good, had come of it. It was a kind of justification. On the other hand how horrible it seemed that grace for Katy and life for her husband should be dependent on something so intrinsically low, so utterly vile-base-foul, as bodies and their sexual satisfaction. All my idealism revolted against the notion. And yet it was obviously true.”

“And Henry?” I asked. “How much did he know or suspect about the origins of the miracle?”

“Nothing,” Rivers answered emphatically. “No, less than nothing. He was in a mood, as he emerged from the sepulcher, in which suspicion was unthinkable. ‘Rivers,’ he said to me one day when he was well enough to have me come and read to him, ‘I want to talk to you. About Katy,’ he added after a little pause. My heart stopped beating. This was the moment I had dreaded. ‘You remember that night just before I got ill?’ he went on. ‘I wasn’t in my right mind. I said all kinds of things that I oughtn’t to have said, things that weren’t true, things, for example, about Katy and that doctor from Johns Hopkins.’ But the doctor from Johns Hopkins, as he had now discovered, was a cripple. And even if the man hadn’t had infantile paralysis as a boy, Katy was utterly incapable of even thinking anything of the kind. And in a voice that trembled with feeling he proceeded to tell me how wonderful Katy was, how unspeakably fortunate he had been to win and hold a wife at once so good, so beautiful, so sensible and yet so sensitive, so strong and faithful and devoted. Without her, he would have gone mad, broken down, fizzled out. And now she had saved his life, and the thought that he had said those wild, bad, senseless things about her tormented him. So would I please forget them or, if I remembered, remember them only as the ravings of a sick man. It was a relief, of course, not to have been found out, and yet, in some ways, this was worse—worse because the display of so much trust, such abysmal ignorance, made me feel ashamed of myself—and not only of myself, of Katy too. We were a pair of cheats, conspiring against a simpleton—a simpleton who, for sentimental reasons which did him nothing but credit, was doing his best to make himself even more innocent than he was by nature.

“That evening I managed to say a little of what was on my mind. At first she tried to stop my mouth with kisses. Then, when I pushed her away, she grew angry and threatened to go back to her room. I had the sacrilegious courage to restrain her by brute force. ‘You’ve got to listen,’ I said as she struggled to free herself. And holding her at arm’s length, as one holds a dangerous animal, I poured out my tale of moral anguish. Katy heard me out; then, when it was all over, she laughed. Not sarcastically, not with the intention of wounding me, but from the sunny depths of a goddess’s amusement. ‘You can’t bear it,’ she teased. ‘You’re too noble to be a party to a deception! Can’t you ever think of anything but your own precious self? Think of me, for a change, think of Henry! A sick genius and the poor woman whose job it’s been to keep the sick genius alive and tolerably sane. His huge, crazy intellect against my instincts, his inhuman denial of life against the flow of life in me. It wasn’t easy, I’ve had to fight with every weapon that came to hand. And now here I have to listen to you—talking the most nauseous kind of Sunday School twaddle, daring to tell me—me!—you cannot live a lie—like George Washington and the cherry tree. You make me tired. I’m going to sleep.’ She yawned and, rolling over on her side, turned her back on me—the back,” Rivers added with a little snort of laughter, “the infinitely eloquent back (if you perused it in the dark, like Braille, with your finger tips) of Aphrodite Callipygos. And that, my friend, that was as near as Katy ever got to an explanation or an apologia. It left me no wiser than I was before. Indeed it left me considerably less wise; for her words prompted me to ask myself a lot of questions, to which she never vouchsafed any answers. Had she implied, for example, that this sort of thing was inevitable—at least in the circumstances of her own marriage? Had it, in actual fact, happened before? And if so, when, how often, with whom?”

“Did you ever find out?” I asked.

Rivers shook his head.

“I never got further than wondering and imagining—my God, how vividly! Which was enough, of course, to make me more miserable than I’d ever been. More miserable, and at the same time more frenziedly amorous. Why is it that, when you suspect a woman you love of having made love to somebody else, you should feel such a heightening of desire? I had loved Katy to the limit. Now I found myself loving her beyond the limit, loving her desperately and insatiably, loving her with a vengeance, if you know what I mean. Katy herself soon noticed it. ‘You’ve been looking at me,’ she complained two evenings later, ‘as though you were on a desert island and I were a beef steak. Don’t do it. People will notice. Besides, I’m not a beef steak, I’m an uncooked human being. And anyhow Henry’s almost well again, and the children will be coming home tomorrow. Things will have to go back to what they were before. We’ve got to be sensible.’ To be sensible…I promised—for tomorrow. Meanwhile—put out the light!—there was this love with a vengeance, this desire which, even in the frenzy of its consummation, retained a quality of despair. The hours passed and in due course it was tomorrow—dawn between the curtains, birds in the garden, the anguish of the final embrace, the reiterated promises that I would be sensible. And how faithfully I kept the promise! After breakfast I went up to Henry’s room and read him Rutherford’s article in the latest issue of Nature. And when Katy came in from her marketing, I called her ‘Mrs. Maartens’ and did my best to look as radiantly serene as she did. Which in my case, of course, was hypocrisy. In hers it was just a manifestation of the Olympian nature. A little before lunch, the children came home, bag and baggage, in a cab. Katy was always the all-seeing mother; but her all-seeingness was tempered, generally, by an easy tolerance of childish failings. This time, for some reason, it was different. Perhaps it was the miracle of Henry’s recovery that had gone to her head, that had given her not only a sense of power but also a desire to exercise that power in other ways. Perhaps, too, she had been intoxicated by her sudden restoration, after all those nightmare weeks, to a state of animal grace through gratified desire. Anyhow, whatever the cause may have been, whatever the extenuating circumstances, the fact remained that, on that particular day, Katy was too all-seeing by half. She loved her children and their return filled her with joy; and yet she was under a kind of compulsion, as soon as she saw them, to criticize, to find fault, to throw her maternal weight around. Within two minutes of their arrival she had pounced on Timmy for having dirty ears; within three, she had made Ruth confess that she was constipated; and, within four, had inferred, from the fact that the child didn’t want anyone to unpack for her, that she must be hiding some guilty secret. And there—when, at Katy’s orders, Beulah had opened the suitcase—there the poor little guilty secret lay revealed: a boxful of cosmetics and the half-empty bottle of synthetic violets. At the best of times Katy would have disapproved—but would have disapproved with sympathy, with an understanding chuckle. On this occasion, her disapproval was loud and sarcastic. She had the make-up kit thrown into the garbage can and herself, with an expression of nauseated disgust, poured the perfume into the toilet and pulled the plug. By the time we sat down to our meal, the poetess, red-faced and her eyes still swollen with crying, hated everybody—hated her mother for having humiliated her, hated Beulah for having been such a good prophet, hated poor Mrs. Hanbury for being dead and therefore in no further need of Katy’s ministrations, hated Henry for being well enough to have permitted this disastrous homecoming, and hated me because I had treated her as a child, had said her love poem was lousy and had shown, still more unforgivably, that I preferred her mother’s company to her own.”

“Did she suspect anything?” I asked.

“She probably suspected everything,” Rivers answered.

“But I thought you were being sensible.”

“We were. But Ruth had always been jealous of her mother. And now her mother had hurt her, and at the same time she knew—theoretically, of course, but in terms of the most violent and overblown language—the sort of things that happen when men and women like one another. Ache of purple pulses; lips intertwisted and bitten. Etcetera. Even if nothing had ever happened between Katy and me, she’d have believed that it had, and hated us accordingly, hated us with this new, more implacable kind of hate. In the past her hates had never lasted for more than a day or two. This time it was different. The hatred was unrelenting. For days on end she refused to talk to us, but sat there, through every meal, in a black silence, pregnant with unspoken criticisms and condemnations. Poor little Ruth! Dolores-Salome was, of course, a fiction, but a fiction founded on the solid facts of puberty. In outraging the fiction Katy and I, in our different ways, had outraged something real, something that was a living part of the child’s personality. She had come home with her perfume and her make-up, with her brand-new breasts and her brand-new vocabulary, with her Algernon’s notions and Oscar’s sentiments—had come home full of vaguely wonderful expectations, vaguely horrifying apprehensions; and what had happened to her? The insult of being treated as what, in fact, she still was: an irresponsible child. The outrage of not being taken seriously. The hurt and humiliation of finding herself rejected by the man she had chosen as her victim and Bluebeard, in favor of another woman—and, to make matters worse, the other woman was her own mother. Was it any wonder that all my efforts to laugh or cajole her out of her black mood were unavailing? ‘Leave her alone’ was Katy’s advice. ‘Let her stew in her own juice, until she gets sick of it.’ But the days passed and Ruth showed no signs of getting sick of it. On the contrary, she seemed to be enjoying the bitter tastes of wounded pride, of jealousy and suspicion. And then, about a week after the children’s return, something happened that turned chronic grievance into the acutest, the most ferocious animosity.

“Henry was now well enough to sit up, to walk about his room. A few days more, and he would be fully convalescent. ‘Let him spend a few weeks in the country,’ the doctor advised. But what with the bad weather in early spring, what with Katy’s absence in Chicago, the week-end farmhouse had been closed since Christmas. Before it could be lived in again, it would have to be aired and dusted and provisioned. ‘Let’s go and do the job tomorrow,’ Katy suggested to me one morning at breakfast. Startlingly, like a prairie dog popping out of its burrow, Ruth emerged from the depths of her malevolent silence. Tomorrow, she muttered angrily, she’d be at school. And that, Katy answered, was why tomorrow would be such a good day for doing the necessary chores. No work-shy poetesses mooning around and getting in the way. ‘But I must come,’ Ruth insisted with a strange kind of muffled violence. ‘Must?’ Katy echoed. ‘Why must?’ Ruth looked at her mother for a moment, then dropped her eyes. ‘Because…’ she began, thought better of it and broke off. ‘Because I want to,’ she concluded lamely. Katy laughed and told her not to be silly. ‘We’ll get off early,’ she said, turning back to me, ‘and take a picnic basket.’ The child turned very pale, tried to eat her toast but couldn’t swallow, asked to be excused and, without waiting for an answer, got up and ran out of the room. When I saw her again that afternoon, her face was a mask, blank but somehow menacing, of controlled hostility.”

From outside, in the hall, I had heard the creak of the front door being opened, then the bang of its closing. And now there was the sound of footsteps and low voices. Rivers broke off and looked at his watch.

“Only ten after eleven,” he said, and shook his head. Then, raising his voice, “Molly!” he called. “Is that you?”

Open on a square of smooth white skin, on pearls and the bodice of a scarlet evening gown, a mink coat appeared in the doorway. Above it was a young face that would have been beautiful, if its expression had been less bitterly sullen.

“Was it a nice party?” Rivers asked.

“Stinking,” said the young woman. “That’s why we’re home so early. Isn’t it, Fred?” she added, turning to a dark-haired young man who had followed her into the room. The young man gave her a look of cold distaste, and turned away. “Isn’t it?” she repeated more loudly, with a note in her voice almost of anguish.

A faint smile appeared on the averted face and there was a shrug of the broad shoulders, but no answer.

Rivers turned to me.

“You’ve met my little Molly, haven’t you?”

“When she was so high.”

“And this,” he waved his hand in the direction of the dark young man, “is my son-in-law, Fred Shaughnessy.”

I said I was pleased to meet him; but the young man didn’t even look at me. There was a silence.

Molly drew a jeweled hand across her eyes.

“I’ve got a splitting headache,” she muttered. “Guess I’ll go to bed.”

She started to walk away; then halted and, with what was evidently an enormous effort, brought herself to say, “Good night.”

“Good night,” we said in chorus. But she was already gone. Without a word, as though he were a gunman on her trail, the young man turned and followed her. Rivers sighed profoundly.

“They’ve got to the point,” he said, “where sex seems pretty dull unless it’s the consummation of a quarrel. And that, if you please, is little Bimbo’s destiny. Either life as the child of a divorced mother with a succession, until she loses her looks, of lovers or husbands. Or else life as the child of two parents who ought to be divorced but can never separate because they share an unavowable taste for torturing and being tortured. And there’s nothing in either eventuality that I can do about it. Whatever happens, the child has got to go through hell. Maybe he’ll emerge all the better and stronger for it. Maybe he’ll be utterly destroyed. Who knows? Certainly not these boys!” He pointed with the stem of his pipe at a long shelf of Freudians and Jungians. “Psychology fiction! It makes pleasant reading, it’s even rather instructive. But how much does it explain? Everything except the essentials, everything except the two things that finally determine the course of our lives, Predestination and Grace. Look at Molly, for example. She had a mother who knew how to love without wanting to possess. She had a father who at least had sense enough to try to follow his wife’s example. She had two sisters who were happy as children and grew up to be successful wives and mothers. There were no quarrels in the household, no chronic tensions, no tragedies or explosions. By all the rules of psychology fiction, Molly ought to be thoroughly sane and contented. Instead of which…” He left the sentence unfinished. “And then there’s the other kind of Predestination. Not the inner Predestination of temperament and character, but the Predestination of events—the kind of Predestination that lay in wait for me and Ruth and Katy. Even through the wrong end of the opera glasses one doesn’t like to look at it.”

There was a long silence, which I did not presume to break.

“Well,” he said at last, “let’s get back to Ruth; let’s get back to that afternoon of the day before the picnic. I came home from the laboratory, and there was Ruth in the living room, reading. She didn’t look up as I came in, so I put on my breeziest bedside manner and said, ‘Hullo, kiddums!’ She turned and gave, me a long, unsmiling, balefully blank look, then went back to her book. This time I tried a literary gambit. ‘Have you been writing any more poetry?’ I asked. ‘Yes, I have,’ she said emphatically, and there was a little smile on her face more baleful even than the previous blankness. ‘May I see it?’ To my great surprise, she said yes. The thing wasn’t quite finished; but tomorrow without fail. I forgot all about the promise; but the next morning, sure enough, as she was leaving for school, Ruth handed me one of her mauve envelopes. ‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘I hope you’ll like it.’ And giving me another menacing smile, she hurried after Timmy. I was too busy to read the poem immediately, so I slipped the envelope into my pocket and went on with the job of loading the car. Bedding, cutlery, kerosene—I piled the stuff in. Half an hour later we were off. Beulah shouted good-bye from the front steps, Henry waved at us from an upstairs window. Katy waved back and blew a kiss. ‘I feel like John Gilpin,’ she said happily as we turned out of the driveway. ‘All agog to dash through thick and thin.’ It was one of those lyrical days in early May, one of those positively Shakespearean mornings. There had been rain in the night, and now all the trees were curtseying to a fresh wind; the young leaves glittered like jewels in the sunlight; the great marbly clouds on the horizons were something Michelangelo had dreamed in a moment of ecstatic happiness and superhuman power. And then there were the flowers. Flowers in the suburban gardens, flowers in the woods and fields beyond; and every flower had the conscious beauty of a beloved face, and its fragrance was a secret from the Other World; its petals had the smoothness, under the fingers of my imagination, the silky coolness and resilience of living skin. It goes without saying, of course, that we were still being sensible. But the world was tipsy with its own perfections, crazy with excess of life. We did our work, we ate our picnic lunch, we smoked our cigarettes on deck chairs in the sun. But the sun was too hot and we decided to finish our nap indoors; and then what anybody could have told us would happen duly happened…. Happened, as I suddenly discovered between two ecstasies, under the eyes of a three-quarter-length portrait of Henry Maartens, commissioned and presented to him by the directors of some big electrical company that had profited by his professional advice, and so monstrous in its photographic realism that it had been relegated to the spare bedroom at the farm. It was one of those portraits that are always looking at you, like Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984. I turned my head, and there it was in its black cutaway coat, solemnly glaring—the very embodiment of public opinion, the painted symbol and projection of my own guilty conscience. And next to the portrait was a Victorian wardrobe with a looking-glass door that reflected the tree outside the window and, within the room, part of the bed, part of the two bodies dappled with sunlight and the moving shadows of oak leaves. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ But here, what with the portrait and the mirror, there was no possibility of ignorance. And the knowledge of what we had done became even more disquieting when, half an hour later, as I put on my jacket, I heard the crackle of stiff paper in a side pocket, and remembered Ruth’s mauve envelope. The poem, this time, was a narrative, in four-line stanzas, a kind of ballad about two adulterers, a faithless wife and her lover, before the bar of God at the Last Judgment. Standing there in the huge, accusing silence, they feel themselves being stripped by invisible hands of all their disguises, garment after garment, until at last they’re stark naked. More than stark naked, indeed; for their resurrected bodies are transparent. Lights and liver, bladder and guts, every organ, with its specific excrement—all, all are revoltingly visible. And suddenly they find that they are not alone, but on a stage, under spotlights, in the midst of millions of spectators, tier on tier of them, retching with uncontrollable disgust as they look, or jeering, denouncing, calling for vengeance, howling for the whip and the branding iron. There was a kind of Early Christian malignity about the piece, which was all the more terrifying because Ruth had been brought up completely outside the pale of that hideous kind of fundamentalism. Judgment, hell, eternal punishment—these weren’t things she’d been taught to believe in. They were notions she had adopted for her own special purposes, in order to express what she felt about her mother and myself. Jealousy, to begin with; jealousy and rebuffed love, hurt vanity, angry resentment. And the resentment had to be given a respectable motive, the anger transformed into righteous indignation. She suspected the worst of us so that she might be justified in feeling the worst. And she suspected the worst so vehemently that, in next to no time, she wasn’t guessing any more, she knew that we were guilty. And, knowing it, the child in her was outraged, the woman felt more bitterly, vengefully jealous than before. With a horrible sinking of the heart, a mounting terror in the face of an incalculable future, I read the thing to the end, read it again, then turned to where Katy was sitting before the mirror on the dressing table, pinning up her hair, smiling at the radiantly smiling image of a goddess, and humming a tune out of The Marriage of Figaro. Dove sono i bei momenti Di dolcezza e di piacer? I had always admired that divine unconcern of hers, that Olympian je m’en foutisme. Now, suddenly, it enraged me. She had no right not to be feeling what the reading of Ruth’s poem had made me feel. ‘Do you want to know,’ I said, ‘why our little Ruthy has been acting the way she has? Do you want to know what she really thinks of us?’ And crossing the room, I handed her the two sheets of purple notepaper on which the child had copied out her poem. Katy started to read. Studying her face I saw the original look of amusement (for Ruth’s poetry was a standing joke in the family) give place to an expression of serious, concentrated attention. Then a vertical wrinkle appeared on the forehead between the eyes. The frown deepened and, as she turned to the second page, she bit her lip. The goddess, after all, was vulnerable…. I had scored my point; but it was a poor sort of triumph that ended with there being two bewildered rabbits in the trap instead of one. And it was the kind of trap that Katy was totally unequipped to get out of. Most uncomfortable situations she just ignored, just sailed through as though they didn’t exist. And in effect, if she went on ignoring them long enough and serenely enough, they stopped existing. The people she had offended forgave her, because she was so beautiful and good-humored; the people who had worried themselves sick, or made complications for others, succumbed to the contagion of her godlike indifference and momentarily forgot to be neurotic or malignant. And when the technique of being serenely unaware didn’t work, there was her other gambit—the technique of rushing in where angels fear to tread; the technique of being gaily tactless, of making enormous bloomers in all innocence and simplicity, of uttering the most unmentionable truths with the most irresistible of smiles. But this was a case where neither of these methods would work. If she said nothing, Ruth would go on acting as she had acted up till now. And if she rushed in and said everything, God only knew what a disturbed adolescent might do. And meanwhile there was Henry to think of, there was her own future as the sole and, we were all convinced, the utterly indispensable support of a sick genius and his children. Ruth was in the position, and might even now be in the mood, to pull down the whole temple of their lives for the sake of spiting her mother. And there was nothing that a woman who had the temperament of a goddess, without the goddess’s omnipotence, could do about it. There was, however, something that I could do; and as we discussed our situation—for the first time, remember, since there had been a situation to discuss!—it became more and more clear what that something was. I could do what I had felt I ought to do after that first apocalyptic night—clear out.

“Katy wouldn’t hear of it at first, and I had to argue with her all the way home—argue against myself, against my own happiness. In the end she was convinced. It was the only way out of the trap.

“Ruth eyed us, when we got home, like a detective searching for clues. Then she asked me if I liked her poem. I told her—which was strictly true—that it was the best thing she had ever written. She was pleased, but did her best not to show it. The smile which lit up her face was almost instantly repressed and she asked me, in an intently meaningful way, what I had thought of the poem’s subject. I was prepared for the question and answered with an indulgent chuckle. It reminded me, I said, of the sermons my poor dear father used to preach in Lent. Then I looked at my watch, said something about urgent work and left her, as I could see by the expression on her face, discomfited. She had looked forward, I suppose, to a scene in which she would play the coldly implacable judge, while I, the culprit, gave an exhibition of cringing evasion, or broke down and confessed. But, instead, the culprit had laughed and the judge had been treated to an irrelevant joke about clergymen. I had won a skirmish; but the war still raged and could be ended, it was plain enough, only by my retreat.

“Two days later it was Friday and, as happened every Friday, the postman had brought my mother’s weekly letter, and Beulah, when she set the table for breakfast, had propped it conspicuously (for she was all for mothers) against my coffee cup. I opened, read, looked grave, read again, then lapsed into preoccupied silence. Katy took the cue and asked solicitously if I had had bad news. To which I answered, of course, that it wasn’t too good. My mother’s health…The alibi had been prepared. By that evening it was all settled. Officially, as the head of the laboratory, Henry gave me two weeks’ leave of absence. I would take the ten-thirty on Sunday morning and, in the interval, on Saturday, we would all escort the convalescent to the farm and have a farewell picnic.

“There were too many of us for one car; so Katy and the children went ahead in the family Overland. Henry and Beulah, with most of their luggage, followed in the Maxwell with me. The others had a good start on us; for when we were half a mile from home, Henry discovered, as usual, that he had forgotten some absolutely indispensable book, and we had to drive back and look for it. Ten minutes later we were on our way again. On our way, as it turned out, to that meeting with Predestination.”

Rivers finished his whisky and knocked out his pipe.

“Even through the wrong end of the opera glasses, even in another universe, inhabited by different people…” He shook his head. “There are certain things that are simply inadmissible.” There was a pause. “Well, let’s get it over with,” he said at last. “About two miles before you got to the farm there was a crossroad, where you had to turn left. It was in a wood and the leaves were so thick you couldn’t see what was coming from either side. When we got there, I slowed down, I honked my horn, I put the car into low and turned. And suddenly, as I rounded the bend, there was the Overland roadster in the ditch, upside down, and near it a big truck with its radiator smashed in. And between the two cars was a young man in blue denims kneeling by a child, who was screaming. Ten or fifteen feet away there were two things that looked like bundles of old clothes, like garbage—garbage with blood on it.”

There was another silence.

“Were they dead?” I finally asked.

“Katy died a few minutes after we came on the scene, and Ruth died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Timmy was being reserved for a worse death at Okinawa; he got off with some cuts and a couple of broken ribs. He was sitting at the back, he told us, with Katy driving, and Ruth beside her on the front seat. The two of them had been having an argument, and Ruth was mad about something—he didn’t know what, because he wasn’t listening; he was thinking of a way of electrifying his clockwork train and anyhow he never paid much attention to what Ruth said when she was mad. If you paid attention to her, it just made things worse. But his mother had paid attention. He remembered her saying, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and then, ‘I forbid you to say those things.’ And then they turned the corner, and they were going too fast and she didn’t honk the horn and that huge truck hit them broadside on. So you see,” Rivers concluded, “it was really both kinds of Predestination. The Predestination of events, and at the same time the Predestination of two temperaments, Ruth’s and Katy’s—the temperament of an outraged child, who was also a jealous woman; and the temperament of a goddess, cornered by circumstances and suddenly realizing that, objectively, she was only a human being, for whom the Olympian temperament might actually be a handicap. And the discovery was so disturbing that it made her careless, left her incapable of dealing adequately with the events by which she was predestined to be destroyed—and destroyed (but this was for my benefit, of course, this was an item in my psychological Predestination) with every refinement of physical outrage—an eye put out by a splinter of glass, the nose and lips and chin almost obliterated, rubbed out on the bloody macadam of the road. And there was a crushed right hand and the jagged ends of a broken shinbone showing through the stocking. It was something I dreamed about practically every night. Katy with her back to me; and she was either on the bed in the farmhouse, or else standing by the window in my room, throwing the shawl over her shoulders. Then she’d turn and look at me, and there was no face, only that expanse of scraped flesh, and I’d wake up screaming. I got to the point where I didn’t dare go to sleep at night.”

Listening to him, I remembered that young John Rivers whom, to my great surprise, I had found at Beirut, in ‘twenty-five, teaching physics at the American University.

“Was that why you looked so horribly ill?” I asked.

He nodded his head.

“Too little sleep and too much memory,” he said. “I was afraid of going mad, and rather than go mad, I’d decided to kill myself. Then, just in the nick of time, Predestination got to work and came up with the only brand of saving Grace that could do me any good. I met Helen.”

“At the same cocktail party,” I put in, “where I met her. Do you remember?”

“Sorry, I don’t. I don’t remember anybody on that occasion except Helen. If you’ve been saved from drowning, you remember the lifeguard, but not the spectators on the pier.”

“No wonder I never had a chance!” I said. “At the time I used to think, rather bitterly, that it was because women, even the best of them, the rare extraordinary Helens, prefer good looks to artistic sensibility, prefer brawn with brains (for I was forced to admit that you had some brains!) to brains with that exquisite je ne sais quoi which was my specialty. Now I see what your irresistible attraction was. You were unhappy.”

He nodded his agreement, and there was a long silence. A clock struck twelve.

“Merry Christmas,” I said and, finishing off my whiskey, I got up to go. “You haven’t told me what happened to poor old Henry after the accident.”

“Well, he began, of course, by having a relapse. Not a very bad one. He had nothing to gain, this time, by going to death’s door. Just a mild affair. Katy’s sister came down for the funeral and stayed on to look after him. She was like a caricature of Katy. Fat, florid, loud. Not a goddess disguised as a peasant—a barmaid imagining she was a goddess. She was a widow. Four months later Henry married her. I’d gone to Beirut by that time; so I never witnessed their connubial bliss. But from all accounts it was considerable. But the poor woman couldn’t keep her weight down. She died in ‘thirty-five. Henry quickly found himself a young blonde called Alicia. Alicia wanted to be admired for her thirty-eight-inch bust, but still more for her two-hundred-inch intellect. ‘What do you think of Schrödinger?’ you’d ask him; but it would be Alicia who answered. She saw him through to the end.”

“When did you see him last?” I asked.

“Just a few months before he died. Eighty-seven and still amazingly active, still chock-full of what his biographer likes to call ‘the undiminished blaze of intellectual power.’ To me he seemed like an over-wound clockwork monkey. Clockwork ratiocination; clockwork gestures, clockwork smiles and grimaces. And then there was the conversation. What amazingly realistic tape recordings of the old anecdotes about Planck and Rutherford and J. J. Thompson! Of his celebrated soliloquies about Logical Positivism and Cybernetics! Of reminiscences about those exciting war years when he was working on the A-bomb! Of his gaily apocalyptic speculations about the bigger and better Infernal Machines of the future! You could have sworn that it was a real human being who was talking. But gradually, as you went on listening, you began to realize that there was nobody at home. The tapes were being reeled off automatically, it was vox et praeterea nihil—the voice of Henry Maartens without his presence.”

“But isn’t that the thing you were recommending?” I asked. “Dying every moment.”

“But Henry hadn’t died. That’s the whole point. He’d merely left the clockwork running and gone somewhere else.”

“Gone where?”

“God knows. Into some kind of infantile burrow in his subconscious, I suppose. Outside, for all to see and hear, was that stupendous clockwork monkey, that undiminished blaze of intellectual power. Inside there lurked the miserable little creature who still needed flattery and reassurance and sex and a womb-substitute—the creature who would have to face the music on Henry’s deathbed. That was still frantically alive and unprepared, by any preliminary dying, totally unprepared for the decisive moment. Well, the decisive moment is over now and whatever remains of poor old Henry is probably squeaking and gibbering in the streets of Los Alamos, or maybe around the bed of his widow and her new husband. And of course nobody pays any attention, nobody gives a damn. Quite rightly. Let the dead bury their dead. And now you want to go.” He got up, took my arm and walked me out into the hall. “Drive carefully,” he said as he opened the front door. “This is a Christian country and it’s the Saviour’s birthday. Practically everybody you see will be drunk.”

The End

Island

First Published1962

1

“ATTENTION,” A VOICE BEGAN TO CALL, AND IT WAS AS THOUGH an oboe had suddenly become articulate. “Attention,” it repeated in the same high, nasal monotone. “Attention.”

Lying there like a corpse in the dead leaves, his hair matted, his face grotesquely smudged and bruised, his clothes in rags and muddy, Will Farnaby awoke with a start. Molly had called him. Time to get up. Time to get dressed. Mustn’t be late at the office.

“Thank you, darling,” he said and sat up. A sharp pain stabbed at his right knee and there were other kinds of pain in his back, his arms, his forehead.

“Attention,” the voice insisted without the slightest change of tone. Leaning on one elbow, Will looked about him and saw with bewilderment, not the gray wallpaper and yellow curtains of his London bedroom, but a glade among trees and the long shadows and slanting lights of early morning in a forest.

“Attention”?

Why did she say, “Attention”?

“Attention. Attention,” the voice insisted—how strangely, how senselessly!

“Molly?” he questioned. “Molly?”

The name seemed to open a window inside his head. Suddenly, with that horribly familiar sense of guilt at the pit of the stomach, he smelt formaldehyde, he saw the small brisk nurse hurrying ahead of him along the green corridor, heard the dry creaking of her starched clothes. “Number fifty-five,” she was saying, and then halted, opened a white door. He entered and there, on a high white bed, was Molly. Molly with bandages covering half her face and the mouth hanging cavernously open. “Molly,” he had called, “Molly…” His voice had broken, and he was crying, was imploring now, “My darling!” There was no answer. Through the gaping mouth the quick shallow breaths came noisily, again, again. “My darling, my darling…” And then suddenly the hand he was holding came to life for a moment. Then was still again.

“It’s me,” he said, “it’s Will.”

Once more the fingers stirred. Slowly, with what was evidently an enormous effort, they closed themselves over his own, pressed them for a moment and then relaxed again into lifelessness.

“Attention,” called the inhuman voice. “Attention.”

It had been an accident, he hastened to assure himself. The road was wet, the car had skidded across the white line. It was one of those things that happen all the time. The papers are full of them; he had reported them by the dozen. “Mother and three children killed in head-on crash…” But that was beside the point. The point was that, when she asked him if it was really the end, he had said yes; the point was that less than an hour after she had walked out from that last shameful interview into the rain, Molly was in the ambulance, dying.

He hadn’t looked at her as she turned to go, hadn’t dared to look at her. Another glimpse of that pale suffering face might have been too much for him. She had risen from her chair and was moving slowly across the room, moving slowly out of his life. Shouldn’t he call her back, ask her forgiveness, tell her that he still loved her? Had he ever loved her?

For the hundredth time the articulate oboe called him to attention.

Yes, had he ever really loved her?

“Good-bye, Will,” came her remembered whisper as she turned back on the threshold. And then it was she who had said it—in a whisper, from the depths of her heart. “I still love you, Will—in spite of everything.”

A moment later the door of the flat closed behind her almost without a sound. The little dry click of the latch, and she was gone.

He had jumped up, had run to the front door and opened it, had listened to the retreating footsteps on the stairs. Like a ghost at cockcrow, a faint familiar perfume lingered vanishingly on the air. He closed the door again, walked into his gray-and-yellow bedroom and looked out the widow. A few seconds passed, then he saw her crossing the pavement and getting into the car. He heard the shrill grinding of the starter, once, twice, and after that the drumming of the motor. Should he open the window? “Wait, Molly, wait,” he heard himself shouting in imagination. The window remained unopened; the car began to move, turned the corner and the street was empty. It was too late. Too late, thank God! said a gross derisive voice. Yes, thank God! And yet the guilt was there at the pit of his stomach. The guilt, the gnawing of his remorse—but through the remorse he could feel a horrible rejoicing. Somebody low and lewd and brutal, somebody alien and odious who was yet himself was gleefully thinking that now there was nothing to prevent him from having what he wanted. And what he wanted was a different perfume, was the warmth and resilience of a younger body. “Attention,” said the oboe. Yes, attention. Attention to Babs’s musky bedroom, with its strawberry-pink alcove and the two windows that looked onto the Charing Cross Road and were looked into, all night long, by the winking glare of the big sky sign for Porter’s Gin on the opposite side of the street. Gin in royal crimson—and for ten seconds the alcove was the Sacred Heart, for ten miraculous seconds the flushed face so close to his own glowed like a seraph’s, transfigured as though by an inner fire of love. Then came the yet profounder transfiguration of darkness. One, two, three, four…Ah God, make it go on forever! But punctually at the count of ten the electric clock would turn on another revelation—but of death, of the Essential Horror; for the lights, this time, were green, and for ten hideous seconds Babs’s rosy alcove became a womb of mud and, on the bed, Babs herself was corpse-colored, a cadaver galvanized into posthumous epilepsy. When Porter’s Gin proclaimed itself in green, it was hard to forget what had happened and who one was. The only thing to do was to shut one’s eyes and plunge, if one could, more deeply into the Other World of sensuality, plunge violently, plunge deliberately into those alienating frenzies to which poor Molly—Molly (“Attention”) in her bandages, Molly in her wet grave at Highgate, and Highgate, of course, was why one had to shut one’s eyes each time when the green light made a corpse of Babs’s nakedness—had always and so utterly been a stranger. And not only Molly. Behind his closed eyelids, Will saw his mother, pale like a cameo, her face spiritualized by accepted suffering, her hands made monstrous and subhuman by arthritis. His mother and, standing behind her wheelchair, already running to fat and quivering like calf’s-foot jelly with all the feelings that had never found their proper expression in consummated love, was his sister Maud.

“How can you, Will?”

“Yes, how can you?” Maud echoed tearfully in her vibrating contralto.

There was no answer. No answer, that was to say, in any words that could be uttered in their presence, that, uttered, those two martyrs—the mother to her unhappy marriage, the daughter to filial piety—could possibly understand. No answer except in words of the most obscenely scientific objectivity, the most inadmissible frankness. How could he do it? He could do it, for all practical purposes was compelled to do it, because…well, because Babs had certain physical peculiarities which Molly did not possess and behaved at certain moments in ways which Molly would have found unthinkable.

There had been a long silence; but now, abruptly, the strange voice took up its old refrain.

“Attention. Attention.”

Attention to Molly, attention to Maud and his mother, attention to Babs. And suddenly another memory emerged from the fog of vagueness and confusion. Babs’s strawberry-pink alcove sheltered another guest, and its owner’s body was shuddering ecstatically under somebody else’s caresses. To the guilt in the stomach was added an anguish about the heart, a constriction of the throat.

“Attention.”

The voice had come nearer, was calling from somewhere over there to the right. He turned his head, he tried to raise himself for a better view; but the arm that supported his weight began to tremble, then gave way, and he fell back into the leaves. Too tired to go on remembering, he lay there for a long time staring up through half-closed lids at the incomprehensible world around him. Where was he and how on earth had he got here? Not that this was of any importance. At the moment nothing was of any importance except this pain, this annihilating weakness. All the same, just as a matter of scientific interest…

This tree, for example, under which (for no known reason) he found himself lying, this column of gray bark with the groining, high up, of sun-speckled branches, this ought by rights to be a beech tree. But in that case—and Will admired himself for being so lucidly logical—in that case the leaves had no right to be so obviously evergreen. And why would a beech tree send its roots elbowing up like this above the surface of the ground? And those preposterous wooden buttresses, on which the pseudobeech supported itself—where did those fit into the picture? Will remembered suddenly his favorite worst line of poetry. “Who prop, thou ask’st, in these bad days my mind?” Answer: congealed ectoplasm, Early Dalí. Which definitely ruled out the Chilterns. So did the butterflies swooping out there in the thick buttery sunshine. Why were they so large, so improbably cerulean or velvet black, so extravagantly eyed and freckled? Purple staring out of chestnut, silver powdered over emerald, over topaz, over sapphire.

“Attention.”

“Who’s there?” Will Farnaby called in what he intended to be a loud and formidable tone; but all that came out of his mouth was a thin, quavering croak.

There was a long and, it seemed, profoundly menacing silence. From the hollow between two of the tree’s wooden buttresses an enormous black centipede emerged for a moment into view, then hurried away on its regiment of crimson legs and vanished into another cleft in the lichen-covered ectoplasm.

“Who’s there?” he croaked again.

There was a rustling in the bushes on his left and suddenly, like a cuckoo from a nursery clock, out popped a large black bird, the size of a jackdaw—only, needless to say, it wasn’t a jackdaw. It clapped a pair of white-tipped wings and, darting across the intervening space, settled on the lowest branch of a small dead tree, not twenty feet from where Will was lying. Its beak, he noticed, was orange, and it had a bald yellow patch under each eye, with canary-colored wattles that covered the sides and back of its head with a thick wig of naked flesh. The bird cocked its head and looked at him first with the right eye, then with the left. After which it opened its orange bill, whistled ten or twelve notes of a little air in the pentatonic scale, made a noise like somebody having hiccups, and then, in a chanting phrase, do do sol do, said, “Here and now, boys; here and now, boys.”

The words pressed a trigger, and all of a sudden he remembered everything. Here was Pala, the forbidden island, the place no journalist had ever visited. And now must be the morning after the afternoon when he’d been fool enough to go sailing, alone, outside the harbor of Rendang-Lobo. He remembered it all—the white sail curved by the wind into the likeness of a huge magnolia petal, the water sizzling at the prow, the sparkle of diamonds on every wave crest, the troughs of wrinkled jade. And eastwards, across the Strait, what clouds, what prodigies of sculptured whiteness above the volcanoes of Pala! Sitting there at the tiller, he had caught himself singing—caught himself, incredibly, in the act of feeling unequivocally happy.

“‘Three, three for the rivals,’” he had declaimed into the wind.

“‘Two, two for the lily-white boys, clothèd all in green-oh; One is one and all alone…’”

Yes, all alone. All alone on the enormous jewel of the sea.

“‘And ever more shall be so.’”

After which, needless to say, the thing that all the cautious and experienced yachtsmen had warned him against happened. The black squall out of nowhere, the sudden, senseless frenzy of wind and rain and waves…

“Here and now, boys,” chanted the bird. “Here and now, boys.”

The really extraordinary thing was that he should be here, he reflected, under the trees and not out there, at the bottom of the Pala Strait or, worse, smashed to pieces at the foot of the cliffs. For even after he had managed, by sheer miracle, to take his sinking boat through the breakers and run her aground on the only sandy beach in all those miles of Pala’s rockbound coast—even then it wasn’t over. The cliffs towered above him; but at the head of the cove there was a kind of headlong ravine where a little stream came down in a succession of filmy waterfalls, and there were trees and bushes growing between the walls of gray limestone. Six or seven hundred feet of rock climbing—in tennis shoes, and all the footholes slippery with water. And then, dear God! those snakes. The black one looped over the branch by which he was pulling himself up. And five minutes later, the huge green one coiled there on the ledge, just where he was preparing to step. Terror had been succeeded by a terror infinitely worse. The sight of the snake had made him start, made him violently withdraw his foot, and that sudden unconsidered movement had made him lose his balance. For a long sickening second, in the dreadful knowledge that this was the end, he had swayed on the brink, then fallen. Death, death, death. And then, with the noise of splintering wood in his ears he had found himself clinging to the branches of a small tree, his face scratched, his right knee bruised and bleeding, but alive. Painfully he had resumed his climbing. His knee hurt him excruciatingly; but he climbed on. There was no alternative. And then the light had begun to fail. In the end he was climbing almost in darkness, climbing by faith, climbing by sheer despair.

“Here and now, boys,” shouted the bird.

But Will Farnaby was neither here nor now. He was there on the rock face, he was then at the dreadful moment of falling. The dry leaves rustled beneath him; he was trembling. Violently, uncontrollably, he was trembling from head to foot.

2

SUDDENLY THE BIRD CEASED TO BE ARTICULATE AND STARTED TO scream. A small shrill human voice said, “Mynah!” and then added something in a language that Will did not understand. There was a sound of footsteps on dry leaves. Then a little cry of alarm. Then silence. Will opened his eyes and saw two exquisite children looking down at him, their eyes wide with astonishment and a fascinated horror. The smaller of them was a tiny boy of five, perhaps, or six, dressed only in a green loincloth. Beside him, carrying a basket of fruit on her head, stood a little girl some four or five years older. She wore a full crimson skirt that reached almost to her ankles; but above the waist she was naked. In the sunlight her skin glowed like pale copper flushed with rose. Will looked from one child to the other. How beautiful they were, and how faultless, how extraordinarily elegant! Like two little thoroughbreds. A round and sturdy thoroughbred, with a face like a cherub’s—that was the boy. And the girl was another kind of thoroughbred, fine-drawn, with a rather long, grave little face framed between braids of dark hair.

There was another burst of screaming. On its perch in the dead tree the bird was turning nervously this way and that; then, with a final screech, it dived into the air. Without taking her eyes from Will’s face, the girl held out her hand invitingly. The bird fluttered, settled, flapped wildly, found its balance, then folded its wings and immediately started to hiccup. Will looked on without surprise. Anything was possible now—anything. Even talking birds that would perch on a child’s finger. Will tried to smile at them; but his lips were still trembling, and what was meant to be a sign of friendliness must have seemed like a frightening grimace. The little boy took cover behind his sister.

The bird stopped hiccuping and began to repeat a word that Will did not understand. “Runa”—was that it? No, “karuna.” Definitely “karuna.”

He raised a trembling hand and pointed at the fruit in the round basket. Mangoes, bananas…His dry mouth was watering.

“Hungry,” he said. Then, feeling that in these exotic circumstances the child might understand him better if he put on an imitation of a musical-comedy Chinaman, “Me velly hungly,” he elaborated.

“Do you want to eat?” the child asked in perfect English.

“Yes—eat,” he repeated, “eat.”

“Fly away, mynah!” She shook her hand. The bird uttered a protesting squawk and returned to its perch on the dead tree. Lifting her thin little arms in a gesture that was like a dancer’s, the child raised the basket from her head, then lowered it to the ground. She selected a banana, peeled it and, torn between fear and compassion, advanced towards the stranger. In his incomprehensible language the little boy uttered a cry of warning and clutched at her skirt. With a reassuring word, the girl halted, well out of danger, and held up the fruit.

“Do you want it?” she asked.

Still trembling, Will Farnaby stretched out his hand. Very cautiously, she edged forward, then halted again and, crouching down, peered at him intently.

“Quick,” he said in an agony of impatience.

But the little girl was taking no chances. Eyeing his hand for the least sign of a suspicious movement, she leaned forward, she cautiously extended her arm.

“For God’s sake,” he implored.

“God?” the child repeated with sudden interest. “Which god?” she asked. “There are such a lot of them.”

“Any damned god you like,” he answered impatiently.

“I don’t really like any of them,” she answered. “I like the Compassionate One.”

“Then be compassionate to me,” he begged. “Give me that banana.”

Her expression changed. “I’m sorry,” she said apologetically. Rising to her full height, she took a quick step forward and dropped the fruit into his shaking hand.

“There,” she said and, like a little animal avoiding a trap, she jumped back, out of reach.

The small boy clapped his hands and laughed aloud. She turned and said something to him. He nodded his round head, and saying “Okay, boss,” trotted away, through a barrage of blue and sulphur butterflies, into the forest shadows on the further side of the glade.

“I told Tom Krishna to go and fetch someone,” she explained.

Will finished his banana and asked for another, and then for a third. As the urgency of his hunger diminished, he felt a need to satisfy his curiosity.

“How is it that you speak such good English?” he asked.

“Because everybody speaks English,” the child answered.

“Everybody?”

“I mean, when they’re not speaking Palanese.” Finding the subject uninteresting, she turned, waved a small brown hand and whistled.

“Here and now, boys,” the bird repeated yet once more, then fluttered down from its perch on the dead tree and settled on her shoulder. The child peeled another banana, gave two-thirds of it to Will and offered what remained to the mynah.

“Is that your bird?” Will asked.

She shook her head.

“Mynahs are like the electric light,” she said. “They don’t belong to anybody.”

“Why does he say those things?”

“Because somebody taught him,” she answered patiently. What an ass! her tone seemed to imply.

“But why did they teach him those things? Why ‘Attention’? Why ‘Here and now’?”

“Well…” She searched for the right words in which to explain the self-evident to this strange imbecile. “That’s what you always forget, isn’t it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not being here and now.”

“And the mynahs fly about reminding you—is that it?”

She nodded. That, of course, was it. There was a silence.

“What’s your name?” she inquired.

Will introduced himself.

“My name’s Mary Sarojini MacPhail.”

“MacPhail?” It was too implausible.

“MacPhail,” she assured him.

“And your little brother is called Tom Krishna?” She nodded. “Well, I’m damned!”

“Did you come to Pala by the airplane?”

“I came out of the sea.”

“Out of the sea? Do you have a boat?”

“I did have one.” With his mind’s eye Will saw the waves breaking over the stranded hulk, heard with his inner ear the crash of their impact. Under her questioning he told her what had happened. The storm, the beaching of the boat, the long nightmare of the climb, the snakes, the horror of falling…He began to tremble again, more violently than ever.

Mary Sarojini listened attentively and without comment. Then, as his voice faltered and finally broke, she stepped forward and, the bird still perched on her shoulder, kneeled down beside him.

“Listen, Will,” she said, laying a hand on his forehead. “We’ve got to get rid of this.” Her tone was professional and calmly authoritative.

“I wish I knew how,” he said between chattering teeth.

“How?” she repeated. “But in the usual way, of course. Tell me again about those snakes and how you fell down.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to.”

“Of course you don’t want to,” she said. “But you’ve got to. Listen to what the mynah’s saying.”

“Here and now, boys,” the bird was still exhorting. “Here and now, boys.”

“You can’t be here and now,” she went on, “until you’ve got rid of those snakes. Tell me.”

“I don’t want to, I don’t want to.” He was almost in tears.

“Then you’ll never get rid of them. They’ll be crawling about inside your head forever. And serve you right,” Mary Sarojini added severely.

He tried to control the trembling; but his body had ceased to belong to him. Someone else was in charge, someone malevolently determined to humiliate him, to make him suffer.

“Remember what happened when you were a little boy,” Mary Sarojini was saying. “What did your mother do when you hurt yourself?”

She had taken him in her arms, had said, “My poor baby, my poor little baby.”

“She did that?” The child spoke in a tone of shocked amazement. “But that’s awful! That’s the way to rub it in. ‘My poor baby,’” she repeated derisively, “it must have gone on hurting for hours. And you’d never forget it.”

Will Farnaby made no comment, but lay there in silence, shaken by irrepressible shudderings.

“Well, if you won’t do it yourself, I’ll have to do it for you. Listen, Will: there was a snake, a big green snake, and you almost stepped on him. You almost stepped on him, and it gave you such a fright that you lost your balance, you fell. Now say it yourself—say it!”

“I almost stepped on him,” he whispered obediently. “And then I…” He couldn’t say it. “Then I fell,” he brought out at last, almost inaudibly.

All the horror of it came back to him—the nausea of fear, the panic start that had made him lose his balance, and then worse fear and the ghastly certainty that it was the end.

“Say it again.”

“I almost stepped on him. And then…”

He heard himself whimpering.

“That’s right, Will. Cry—cry!”

The whimpering became a moaning. Ashamed, he clenched his teeth, and the moaning stopped.

“No, don’t do that,” she cried. “Let it come out if it wants to. Remember that snake, Will. Remember how you fell.”

The moaning broke out again and he began to shudder more violently than ever.

“Now tell me what happened.”

“I could see its eyes, I could see its tongue going in and out.”

“Yes, you could see his tongue. And what happened then?”

“I lost my balance, I fell.”

“Say it again, Will.” He was sobbing now. “Say it again,” she insisted.

“I fell.”

“Again.”

It was tearing him to pieces, but he said it. “I fell.”

“Again, Will.” She was implacable. “Again.”

“I fell, I fell. I fell…”

Gradually the sobbing died down. The words came more easily and the memories they aroused were less painful.

“I fell,” he repeated for the hundredth time.

“But you didn’t fall very far,” Mary Sarojini now said.

“No, I didn’t fall very far,” he agreed.

“So what’s all the fuss about?” the child inquired.

There was no malice or irony in her tone, not the slightest implication of blame. She was just asking a simple, straightforward question that called for a simple, straightforward answer. Yes, what was all the fuss about? The snake hadn’t bitten him; he hadn’t broken his neck. And anyhow it had all happened yesterday. Today there were these butterflies, this bird that called one to attention, this strange child who talked to one like a Dutch uncle, looked like an angel out of some unfamiliar mythology and within five degrees of the equator was called, believe it or not, MacPhail. Will Farnaby laughed aloud.

The little girl clapped her hands and laughed too. A moment later the bird on her shoulder joined in with peal upon peal of loud demonic laughter that filled the glade and echoed among the trees, so that the whole universe seemed to be fairly splitting its sides over the enormous joke of existence.

3

“WELL, I’M GLAD IT’S ALL SO AMUSING,” A DEEP VOICE SUDDENLY commented.

Will Farnaby turned and saw, smiling down at him, a small spare man dressed in European clothes and carrying a black bag. A man, he judged, in his late fifties. Under the wide straw hat the hair was thick and white, and what a strange beaky nose! And the eyes—how incongruously blue in the dark face!

“Grandfather!” he heard Mary Sarojini exclaiming.

The stranger turned from Will to the child.

“What was so funny?” he asked.

“Well,” Mary Sarojini began, and paused for a moment to marshal her thoughts. “Well, you see, he was in a boat and there was that storm yesterday and he got wrecked—somewhere down there. So he had to climb up the cliff. And there were some snakes, and he fell down. But luckily there was a tree, so he only had a fright. Which was why he was shivering so hard, so I gave him some bananas and I made him go through it a million times. And then all of a sudden he saw that it wasn’t anything to worry about. I mean, it’s all over and done with. And that made him laugh. And when he laughed, I laughed. And then the mynah bird laughed.”

“Very good,” said her grandfather approvingly. “And now,” he added, turning back to Will Farnaby, “after the psychological first aid, let’s see what can be done for poor old Brother Ass. I’m Dr. Robert MacPhail, by the way. Who are you?”

“His name’s Will,” said Mary Sarojini before the young man could answer. “And his other name is Far-something.”

“Farnaby, to be precise. William Asquith Farnaby. My father, as you might guess, was an ardent Liberal. Even when he was drunk. Especially when he was drunk.” He gave vent to a harsh derisive laugh strangely unlike the full-throated merriment which had greeted his discovery that there was really nothing to make a fuss about.

“Didn’t you like your father?” Mary Sarojini asked with concern.

“Not as much as I might have,” Will answered.

“What he means,” Dr. MacPhail explained to the child, “is that he hated his father. A lot of them do,” he added parenthetically.

Squatting down on his haunches, he began to undo the straps of his black bag.

“One of our ex-imperialists, I assume,” he said over his shoulder to the young man.

“Born in Bloomsbury,” Will confirmed.

“Upper class,” the doctor diagnosed, “but not a member of the military or county subspecies.”

“Correct. My father was a barrister and political journalist. That is, when he wasn’t too busy being an alcoholic. My mother, incredible as it may seem, was the daughter of an archdeacon. An archdeacon,” he repeated, and laughed again as he had laughed over his father’s taste for brandy.

Dr. MacPhail looked at him for a moment, then turned his attention once more to the straps.

“When you laugh like that,” he remarked in a tone of scientific detachment, “your face becomes curiously ugly.”

Taken aback, Will tried to cover his embarrassment with a piece of facetiousness. “It’s always ugly,” he said.

“On the contrary, in a Baudelairean sort of way it’s rather beautiful. Except when you choose to make noises like a hyena. Why do you make those noises?”

“I’m a journalist,” Will explained. “Our Special Correspondent, paid to travel about the world and report on the current horrors. What other kind of noise do you expect me to make? Coo-coo? Blah-blah? Marx-Marx?” He laughed again, then brought out one of his well-tried witticisms. “I’m the man who won’t take yes for an answer.”

“Pretty,” said Dr. MacPhail. “Very pretty. But now let’s get down to business.” Taking a pair of scissors out of his bag, he started to cut away the torn and bloodstained trouser leg that covered Will’s injured knee.

Will Farnaby looked up at him and wondered, as he looked, how much of this improbable Highlander was still Scottish and how much Palanese. About the blue eyes and the jutting nose there could be no doubt. But the brown skin, the delicate hands, the grace of movement—these surely came from somewhere considerably south of the Tweed.

“Were you born here?” he asked.

The doctor nodded affirmatively. “At Shivapuram, on the day of Queen Victoria’s funeral.”

There was a final click of the scissors, and the trouser leg fell away, exposing the knee. “Messy,” was Dr. MacPhail’s verdict after a first intent scrutiny. “But I don’t think there’s anything too serious.” He turned to his granddaughter. “I’d like you to run back to the station and ask Vijaya to come here with one of the other men. Tell them to pick up a stretcher at the infirmary.”

Mary Sarojini nodded and, without a word, rose to her feet and hurried away across the glade.

Will looked after the small figure as it receded—the red skirt swinging from side to side, the smooth skin of the torso glowing rosily golden in the sunlight.

“You have a very remarkable granddaughter,” he said to Dr. MacPhail.

“Mary Sarojini’s father,” said the doctor after a little silence, “was my eldest son. He died four months ago—a mountain-climbing accident.”

Will mumbled his sympathy, and there was another silence.

Dr. MacPhail uncorked a bottle of alcohol and swabbed his hands.

“This is going to hurt a bit,” he warned. “I’d suggest that you listen to that bird.” He waved a hand in the direction of the dead tree, to which, after Mary Sarojini’s departure, the mynah had returned.

“Listen to him closely, listen discriminatingly. It’ll keep your mind off the discomfort.”

Will Farnaby listened. The mynah had gone back to its first theme.

“Attention,” the articulate oboe was calling. “Attention.”

“Attention to what?” he asked, in the hope of eliciting a more enlightening answer than the one he had received from Mary Sarojini.

“To attention,” said Dr. MacPhail.

“Attention to attention?”

“Of course.”

“Attention,” the mynah chanted in ironical confirmation.

“Do you have many of these talking birds?”

“There must be at least a thousand of them flying about the island. It was the Old Raja’s idea. He thought it would do people good. Maybe it does, though it seems rather unfair to the poor mynahs. Fortunately, however, birds don’t understand pep talks. Not even St. Francis’. Just imagine,” he went on, “preaching sermons to perfectly good thrushes and goldfinches and chiff-chaffs! What presumption! Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut and let the birds preach to him? And now,” he added in another tone, “you’d better start listening to our friend in the tree. I’m going to clean this thing up.”

“Attention.”

“Here goes.”

The young man winced and bit his lip.

“Attention. Attention. Attention.”

Yes, it was quite true. If you listened intently enough, the pain wasn’t so bad.

“Attention. Attention…”

“How you ever contrived to get up that cliff,” said Dr. MacPhail, as he reached for the bandage, “I cannot conceive.”

Will managed to laugh. “Remember the beginning of Erewhon,” he said. “‘As luck would have it, Providence was on my side.’”

From the further side of the glade came the sound of voices. Will turned his head and saw Mary Sarojini emerging from between the trees, her red skirt swinging as she skipped along. Behind her, naked to the waist and carrying over his shoulder the bamboo poles and rolled-up canvas of a light stretcher, walked a huge bronze statue of a man, and behind the giant came a slender, dark-skinned adolescent in white shorts.

“This is Vijaya Bhattacharya,” said Dr. MacPhail as the bronze statue approached. “Vijaya is my assistant.”

“In the hospital?”

Dr. MacPhail shook his head. “Except in emergencies,” he said, “I don’t practice any more. Vijaya and I work together at the Agricultural Experimental Station. And Murugan Mailendra” (he waved his hand in the direction of the dark-skinned boy) “is with us temporarily, studying soil science and plant breeding.”

Vijaya stepped aside and, laying a large hand on his companion’s shoulder, pushed him forward. Looking up into that beau tiful, sulky young face, Will suddenly recognized, with a start of surprise, the elegantly tailored youth he had met, five days before, at Rendang-Lobo, had driven with in Colonel Dipa’s white Mercedes all over the island. He smiled, he opened his mouth to speak, then checked himself. Almost imperceptibly but quite unmistakenly, the boy had shaken his head. In his eyes Will saw an expression of anguished pleading. His lips moved soundlessly. “Please,” he seemed to be saying, “please…” Will readjusted his face.

“How do you do, Mr. Mailendra,” he said in a tone of casual formality.

Murugan looked enormously relieved. “How do you do,” he said, and made a little bow.

Will looked round to see if the others had noticed what had happened. Mary Sarojini and Vijaya, he saw, were busy with the stretcher and the doctor was repacking his black bag. The little comedy had been played without an audience. Young Murugan evidently had his reasons for not wanting it to be known that he had been in Rendang. Boys will be boys. Boys will even be girls. Colonel Dipa had been more than fatherly towards his young protégé, and towards the Colonel, Murugan had been a good deal more than filial—he had been positively adoring. Was it merely hero worship, merely a schoolboy’s admiration for the strong man who had carried out a successful revolution, liquidated the opposition, and installed himself as dictator? Or were other feelings involved? Was Murugan playing Antinoüs to this black-mustached Hadrian? Well, if that was how he felt about middle-aged military gangsters, that was his privilege. And if the gangster liked pretty boys, that was his. And perhaps, Will went on to reflect, that was why Colonel Dipa had refrained from making a formal introduction. “This is Muru” was all he had said when the boy was ushered into the presidential office. “My young friend Muru,” and he had risen, had put his arm around the boy’s shoulders, had led him to the sofa and sat down beside him. “May I drive the Mercedes?” Murugan had asked. The dictator had smiled indulgently and nodded his sleek black head. And that was another reason for thinking that more than mere friendliness was involved in that curious relationship. At the wheel of the Colonel’s sports car Murugan was a maniac. Only an infatuated lover would have entrusted himself, not to mention his guest, to such a chauffeur. On the flat between Rendang-Lobo and the oil fields the speedometer had twice touched a hundred and ten; and worse, much worse, was to follow on the mountain road from the oil fields to the copper mines. Chasms yawned, tires screeched round corners, water buffaloes emerged from bamboo thickets a few feet ahead of the car, ten-ton lorries came roaring down on the wrong side of the road. “Aren’t you a little nervous?” Will had ventured to ask. But the gangster was pious as well as infatuated. “If one knows that one is doing the will of Allah—and I do know it, Mr. Farnaby—there is no excuse for nervousness. In those circumstances, nervousness would be blasphemy.” And as Murugan swerved to avoid yet another buffalo, he opened his gold cigarette case and offered Will a Balkan Sobranje.

“Ready,” Vijaya called.

Will turned his head and saw the stretcher lying on the ground beside him.

“Good!” said Dr. MacPhail. “Let’s lift him onto it. Carefully. Carefully…”

A minute later the little procession was winding its way up the narrow path between the trees. Mary Sarojini was in the van, her grandfather brought up the rear and, between them, came Murugan and Vijaya at either end of the stretcher.

From his moving bed Will Farnaby looked up through the green darkness as though from the floor of a living sea. Far overhead, near the surface, there was a rustling among the leaves, a noise of monkeys. And now it was a dozen hornbills hopping, like the figments of a disordered imagination, through a cloud of orchids.

“Are you comfortable?” Vijaya asked, bending solicitously to look into his face.

Will smiled back at him.

“Luxuriously comfortable,” he said.

“It isn’t far,” the other went on reassuringly. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Where’s ‘there’?”

“The Experimental Station. It’s like Rothamsted. Did you ever go to Rothamsted when you were in England?”

Will had heard of it, of course, but never seen the place.

“It’s been going for more than a hundred years,” Vijaya went on.

“A hundred and eighteen, to be precise,” said Dr. MacPhail. “Lawes and Gilbert started their work on fertilizers in 1843. One of their pupils came out here in the early fifties to help my grandfather get our station going. Rothamsted in the tropics—that was the idea. In the tropics and for the tropics.”

There was a lightening of the green gloom and a moment later the litter emerged from the forest into the full glare of tropical sunshine. Will raised his head and looked about him. They were not far from the floor of an immense amphitheater. Five hundred feet below stretched a wide plain, checkered with fields, dotted with clumps of trees and clustered houses. In the other direction the slopes climbed up and up, thousands of feet towards a semicircle of mountains. Terrace above green or golden terrace, from the plain to the crenelated wall of peaks, the rice paddies followed the contour lines, emphasizing every swell and recession of the slope with what seemed a deliberate and artful intention. Nature here was no longer merely natural; the landscape had been composed, had been reduced to its geometrical essences, and rendered, by what in a painter would have been a miracle of virtuosity, in terms of these sinuous lines, these streaks of pure bright color.

“What were you doing in Rendang?” Dr. Robert asked, breaking a long silence.

“Collecting materials for a piece on the new regime.”

“I wouldn’t have thought the Colonel was newsworthy.”

“You’re mistaken. He’s a military dictator. That means there’s death in the offing. And death is always news. Even the remote smell of death is news.” He laughed. “That’s why I was told to drop in on my way back from China.”

And there had been other reasons which he preferred not to mention. Newspapers were only one of Lord Aldehyde’s interests. In another manifestation he was the Southeast Asia Petroleum Company, he was Imperial and Foreign Copper Limited. Officially, Will had come to Rendang to sniff the death in its militarized air; but he had also been commissioned to find out what the dictator felt about foreign capital, what tax rebates he was prepared to offer, what guarantees against nationalization. And how much of the profits would be exportable? How many native technicians and administrators would have to be employed? A whole battery of questions. But Colonel Dipa had been most affable and co-operative. Hence that hair-raising drive, with Murugan at the wheel, to the copper mines. “Primitive, my dear Farnaby, primitive. Urgently in need, as you can see for yourself, of modern equipment.” Another meeting had been arranged—arranged, Will now remembered, for this very morning. He visualized the Colonel at his desk. A report from the chief of police. “Mr. Farnaby was last seen sailing a small boat singlehanded into the Pala Strait. Two hours later a storm of great violence…Presumed dead…” Instead of which, here he was, alive and kicking, on the forbidden island.

“They’ll never give you a visa,” Joe Aldehyde had said at their last interview. “But perhaps you could sneak ashore in disguise. Wear a burnous or something, like Lawrence of Arabia.”

With a straight face, “I’ll try,” Will had promised.

“Anyhow, if you ever do manage to land in Pala, make a beeline for the palace. The Rani—that’s their Queen Mother—is an old friend of mine. Met her for the first time six years ago at Lugano. She was staying there with old Voegeli, the investment banker. His girl friend is interested in spiritualism and they staged a séance for me. A trumpet medium, genuine Direct Voice—only unfortunately it was all in German. Well, after the lights were turned on, I had a long talk with her.”

“With the trumpet?”

“No, no. With the Rani. She’s a remarkable woman. You know, the Crusade of the Spirit.”

“Was that her invention?”

“Absolutely. And personally I prefer it to Moral Rearmament. It goes down better in Asia. We had a long talk about it that evening. And after that we talked about oil. Pala’s full of oil. Southeast Asia Petroleum has been trying to get in on it for years. So have all the other companies. Nothing doing. No oil concessions to anyone. It’s their fixed policy. But the Rani doesn’t agree with it. She wants to see the oil doing some good in the world. Financing the Crusade of the Spirit, for example. So, as I say, if ever you get to Pala, make a beeline for the palace. Talk to her. Get the inside story about the men who make the decisions. Find out if there’s a pro-oil minority and ask how we could help them to carry on the good work.” And he had ended by promising Will a handsome bonus if his efforts should be crowned with success. Enough to give him a full year of freedom. “No more reporting. Nothing but High Art, Art, A-ART.” And he had uttered a scatalogical laugh as though the word had an s at the end of it and not a t. Unspeakable creature! But all the same he wrote for the unspeakable creature’s vile papers and was ready, for a bribe, to do the vile creature’s dirty work. And now, incredibly, here he was on Palanese soil. As luck would have it, Providence had been on his side—for the express purpose, evidently, of perpetrating one of those sinister practical jokes which are Providence’s specialty.

He was called back to present reality by the sound of Mary Sarojini’s shrill voice. “Here we are!”

Will raised his head again. The little procession had turned off the highway and was passing through an opening in a white stuccoed wall. To the left, on a rising succession of terraces, stood lines of low buildings shaped by peepul trees. Straight ahead an avenue of tall palms sloped down to a lotus pool, on the further side of which sat a huge stone Buddha. Turning to the left, they climbed between flowering trees and through blending perfumes to the first terrace. Behind a fence, motionless except for his ruminating jaws, stood a snow-white humped bull, godlike in his serene and mindless beauty. Europa’s lover receded into the past, and here were a brace of Juno’s birds trailing their feathers over the grass. Mary Sarojini unlatched the gate of a small garden.

“My bungalow,” said Dr. MacPhail, and turning to Murugan, “Let me help you to negotiate the steps.”

4

TOM KRISHNA AND MARY SAROJINI HAD GONE TO TAKE THEIR siesta with the gardener’s children next door. In her darkened living room Susila MacPhail sat alone with her memories of past happiness and the present pain of her bereavement. The clock in the kitchen struck the half hour. It was time for her to go. With a sigh she rose, put on her sandals and walked out into the tremendous glare of the tropical afternoon. She looked up at the sky. Over the volcanoes enormous clouds were climbing towards the zenith. In an hour it would be raining. Moving from one pool of shadow to the next, she made her way along the tree-lined path. With a sudden rattle of quills a flock of pigeons broke out of one of the towering peepul trees. Green-winged and coral-billed, their breasts changing color in the light like mother-of-pearl, they flew off towards the forest. How beautiful they were, how unutterably lovely! Susila was on the point of turning to catch the expression of delight on Dugald’s upturned face; then, checking herself, she looked down at the ground. There was no Dugald any more; there was only this pain, like the pain of the phantom limb that goes on haunting the imagination, haunting even the perceptions of those who have undergone an amputation. “Amputation,” she whispered to herself, “amputation…” Feeling her eyes fill with tears, she broke off. Amputation was no excuse for self-pity and, for all that Dugald was dead, the birds were as beautiful as ever and her children, all the other children, had as much need to be loved and helped and taught. If his absence was so constantly present, that was to remind her that henceforward she must love for two, live for two, take thought for two, must perceive and understand not merely with her own eyes and mind but with the mind and eyes that had been his and, before the catastrophe, hers too in a communion of delight and intelligence.

But here was the doctor’s bungalow. She mounted the steps, crossed the veranda and walked into the living room. Her father-in-law was seated near the window, sipping cold tea from an earthenware mug and reading the Revue de Mycologie. He looked up as she approached, and gave her a welcoming smile.

“Susila, my dear! I’m so glad you were able to come.”

She bent down and kissed his stubbly cheek.

“What’s all this I hear from Mary Sarojini?” she asked. “Is it true she found a castaway?”

“From England—but via China, Rendang, and a shipwreck. A journalist.”

“What’s he like?”

“The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve endings and his cleverness won’t allow it.”

“So I suppose he’s very unhappy.”

“So unhappy that he has to laugh like a hyena.”

“Does he know he laughs like a hyena?”

“Knows and is rather proud of it. Even makes epigrams about it. ‘I’m the man who won’t take yes for an answer.’”

“Is he badly hurt?” she asked.

“Not badly. But he’s running a temperature. I’ve started him on antibiotics. Now it’s up to you to raise his resistance and give the vis medicatrix naturae a chance.”

“I’ll do my best.” Then, after a silence, “I went to see Lakshmi,” she said, “on my way back from school.”

“How did you find her?”

“About the same. No, perhaps a little weaker than yesterday.”

“That’s what I felt when I saw her this morning.”

“Luckily the pain doesn’t seem to get any worse. We can still handle it psychologically. And today we worked on the nausea. She was able to drink something. I don’t think there’ll be any more need for intravenous fluids.”

“Thank goodness!” he said. “Those IV’s were a torture. Such enormous courage in the face of every real danger; but whenever it was a question of a hypodermic or a needle in a vein, the most abject and irrational terror.”

He thought of the time, in the early days of their marriage, when he had lost his temper and called her a coward for making such a fuss. Lakshmi had cried and, having submitted to her martyrdom, had heaped coals of fire upon his head by begging to be forgiven. “Lakshmi, Lakshmi…” And now in a few days she would be dead. After thirty-seven years. “What did you talk about?” he asked aloud.

“Nothing in particular,” Susila answered. But the truth was that they had talked about Dugald and that she couldn’t bring herself to repeat what had passed between them. “My first baby,” the dying woman had whispered. “I didn’t know that babies could be so beautiful.” In their skull-deep, skull-dark sockets the eyes had brightened, the bloodless lips had smiled. “Such tiny, tiny hands,” the faint hoarse voice went on, “such a greedy little mouth!” And an almost fleshless hand tremblingly touched the place where, before last year’s operation, her breast had been. “I never knew,” she repeated. And, before the event, how could she have known? It had been a revelation, an apocalypse of touch and love. “Do you know what I mean?” And Susila had nodded. Of course she knew—had known it in relation to her own two children, known it, in those other apocalypses of touch and love, with the man that little Dugald of the tiny hands and greedy mouth had grown into. “I used to be afraid for him,” the dying woman had whispered. “He was so strong, such a tyrant, he could have hurt and bullied and destroyed. If he’d married another woman…I’m so thankful it was you!” From the place where the breast had been the fleshless hand moved out and came to rest on Susila’s arm. She had bent her head and kissed it. They were both crying.

Dr. MacPhail sighed, looked up and, like a man who has climbed out of the water, gave himself a little shake. “The castaway’s name is Farnaby,” he said. “Will Farnaby.”

“Will Farnaby,” Susila repeated. “Well, I’d better go and see what I can do for him.” She turned and walked away.

Dr. MacPhail looked after her, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He thought of his son, he thought of his wife—of Lakshmi slowly wasting to extinction, of Dugald like a bright fiery flame suddenly snuffed out. Thought of the incomeprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny. “Poor girl,” he said to himself, remembering the look on Susila’s face when he had told her of what had happened to Dugald, “poor girl!” Meanwhile there was this article on Hallucinogenic mushrooms in the Revue de Mycologie. That was another of the irrelevancies that somehow took its place in the pattern. The words of one of the old Raja’s queer little poems came to his mind.

All things, to all things

perfectly indifferent,

perfectly work together

in discord for a Good beyond

good, for a Being more

timeless in transience, more

eternal in its dwindling than

God there in heaven.

The door creaked, and an instant later Will heard light footsteps and the rustle of skirts. Then a hand was laid on his shoulder and a woman’s voice, low-pitched and musical, asked him how he was feeling.

“I’m feeling miserable,” he answered without opening his eyes.

There was no self-pity in his tone, no appeal for sympathy—only the angry matter-of-factness of a Stoic who has finally grown sick of the long farce of impassibility and is resentfully blurting out the truth.

“I’m feeling miserable.”

The hand touched him again. “I’m Susila MacPhail,” said the voice “Mary Sarojini’s mother.”

Reluctantly Will turned his head and opened his eyes. An adult, darker version of Mary Sarojini was sitting there beside the bed, smiling at him with friendly solicitude. To smile back at her would have cost him too great an effort; he contented himself with saying “How do you do,” then pulled the sheet a little higher and closed his eyes again.

Susila looked down at him in silence—at the bony shoulders, at the cage of ribs under a skin whose Nordic pallor made him seem, to her Palanese eyes, so strangely frail and vulnerable, at the sunburnt face, emphatically featured like a carving intended to be seen at a distance—emphatic and yet sensitive, the quivering, more than naked face, she found herself thinking, of a man who has been flayed and left to suffer.

“I hear you’re from England,” she said at last.

“I don’t care where I’m from,” Will muttered irritably. “Nor where I’m going. From hell to hell.”

“I was in England just after the war,” she went on. “As a student.”

He tried not to listen; but ears have no lids; there was no escape from that intruding voice.

“There was a girl in my psychology class,” it was saying: “her people lived at Wells. She asked me to stay with them for the first month of the summer vacation. Do you know Wells?”

Of course he knew Wells. Why did she pester him with her silly reminiscences?

“I used to love walking there by the water,” Susila went on, “looking across the moat at the cathedral”—and thinking, while she looked at the cathedral, of Dugald under the palm trees on the beach, of Dugald giving her her first lesson in rock climbing. “You’re on the rope. You’re perfectly safe. You can’t possibly fall…” Can’t possibly fall, she repeated bitterly—and then remembered here and now, remembered that she had a job to do, remembered, as she looked again at the flayed emphatic face, that here was a human being in pain. “How lovely it was,” she went on, “and how marvelously peaceful!”

The voice, it seemed to Will Farnaby, had become more musical and in some strange way more remote. Perhaps that was why he no longer resented its intrusion.

“Such an extraordinary sense of peace. Shanti, shanti, shanti. The peace that passes understanding.”

The voice was almost chanting now—chanting, it seemed, out of some other world.

“I can shut my eyes,” it chanted on, “can shut my eyes and see it all so clearly. Can see the church—and it’s enormous, much taller than the huge trees round the bishop’s palace. Can see the green grass and the water and the golden sunlight on the stones and the slanting shadows between the buttresses. And listen! I can hear the bells. The bells and the jackdaws. The jackdaws in the tower—can you hear the jackdaws?”

Yes, he could hear the jackdaws, could hear them almost as clearly as he now heard those parrots in the trees outside his window. He was here and at the same time he was there—here in this dark, sweltering room near the equator, but also there, outdoors in that cool hollow at the edge of the Mendips, with the jackdaws calling from the cathedral tower and the sound of the bells dying away into the green silence.

“And there are white clouds,” the voice was saying, “and the blue sky between them is so pale, so delicate, so exquisitely tender.”

Tender, he repeated, the tender blue sky of that April weekend he had spent there, before the disaster of their marriage, with Molly. There were daisies in the grass and dandelions, and across the water towered up the huge church, challenging the wildness of those soft April clouds with its austere geometry. Challenging the wildness, and at the same time complementing it, coming to terms with it in perfect reconciliation. That was how it should have been with himself and Molly—how it had been then.

“And the swans,” he now heard the voice dreamily chanting, “the swans…”

Yes, the swans. White swans moving across a mirror of jade and jet—a breathing mirror that heaved and trembled, so that their silvery images were forever breaking and coming together again, disintegrating and being made whole.

“Like the inventions of heraldry. Romantic, impossibly beautiful. And yet there they are—real birds in a real place. So near to me now that I can almost touch them—and yet so far away, thousands of miles away. Far away on that smooth water, moving as if by magic, softly, majestically…”

Majestically, moving majestically, with the dark water lifting and parting as the curved white breasts advanced—lifting, parting, sliding back in ripples that widened in a gleaming arrowhead behind them. He could see them moving across their dark mirror, could hear the jackdaws in the tower, could catch, through this nearer mingling of disinfectants and gardenias, the cold, flat, weedy smell of that Gothic moat in the faraway green valley.

“Effortlessly floating.”

“Effortlessly floating.” The words gave him a deep satisfaction.

“I’d sit there,” she was saying, “I’d sit there looking and looking, and in a little while I’d be floating too. I’d be floating with the swans on that smooth surface between the darkness below and the pale tender sky above. Floating at the same time on that other surface between here and far away, between then and now.” And between remembered happiness, she was thinking, and this insistent, excruciating presence of an absence. “Floating,” she said aloud, “on the surface between the real and the imagined, between what comes to us from the outside and what comes to us from within, from deep, deep down in here.”

She laid her hand on his forehead, and suddenly the words transformed themselves into the things and events for which they stood; the images turned into facts. He actually was floating.

“Floating,” the voice softly insisted. “Floating like a white bird on the water. Floating on a great river of life—a great smooth silent river that flows so still, so still, you might almost think it was asleep. A sleeping river. But it flows irresistibly.

“Life flowing silently and irresistibly into ever fuller life, into a living peace all the more profound, all the richer and stronger and more complete because it knows all your pain and unhappiness, knows them and takes them into itself and makes them one with its own substance. And it’s into that peace that you’re floating now, floating on this smooth silent river that sleeps and is yet irresistible, and is irresistible precisely because it’s sleeping. And I’m floating with it.” She was speaking for the stranger. She was speaking on another level for herself. “Effortlessly floating. Not having to do anything at all. Just letting go, just allowing myself to be carried along, just asking this irresistible sleeping river of life to take me where it’s going—and knowing all the time that where it’s going is where I want to go, where I have to go: into more life, into living peace. Along the sleeping river, irresistibly, into the wholeness of reconciliation.”

Involuntarily, unconsciously, Will Farnaby gave a deep sigh. How silent the world had become! Silent with a deep crystalline silence, even though the parrots were still busy out there beyond the shutters, even though the voice still chanted here beside him! Silence and emptiness and through the silence and the emptiness flowed the river, sleeping and irresistible.

Susila looked down at the face on the pillow. It seemed suddenly very young, childlike in its perfect serenity. The frowning lines across the forehead had disappeared. The lips that had been so tightly closed in pain were parted now, and the breath came slowly, softly, almost imperceptibly. She remembered suddenly the words that had come into her mind as she looked down, one moonlit night, at the transfigured innocence of Dugald’s face: “She giveth her beloved sleep.”

“Sleep,” she said aloud. “Sleep.”

The silence seemed to become more absolute, the emptiness more enormous.

“Asleep on the sleeping river,” the voice was saying. “And above the river, in the pale sky, there are huge white clouds. And as you look at them, you begin to float up towards them. Yes, you begin to float up towards them, and the river now is a river in the air, an invisible river that carries you on, carries you up, higher and higher.”

Upwards, upwards through the silent emptiness. The image was the thing, the words became the experience.

“Out of the hot plain,” the voice went on, “effortlessly, into the freshness of the mountains.”

Yes, there was the Jungfrau, dazzlingly white against the blue. There was Monte Rosa…

“How fresh the air feels as you breathe it. Fresh, pure, charged with life!”

He breathed deeply and the new life flowed into him. And now a little wind came blowing across the snowfields, cool against his skin, deliciously cool. And, as though echoing his thoughts, as though describing his experience, the voice said, “Coolness. Coolness and sleep. Through coolness into more life. Through sleep into reconciliation, into wholeness, into living peace.”

Half an hour later Susila re-entered the sitting room.

“Well?” her father-in-law questioned. “Any success?”

She nodded.

“I talked to him about a place in England,” she said. “He went off more quickly than I’d expected. After that I gave him some suggestions about his temperature…”

“And the knee, I hope.”

“Of course.”

“Direct suggestions?”

“No, indirect. They’re always better. I got him to be conscious of his body image. Then I made him imagine it much bigger than in everyday reality—and the knee much smaller. A miserable little thing in revolt against a huge and splendid thing. There can’t be any doubt as to who’s going to win.” She looked at the clock on the wall. “Goodness, I must hurry. Otherwise I’ll be late for my class at school.”

5

THE SUN WAS JUST RISING AS DR. ROBERT ENTERED HIS WIFE’S room at the hospital. An orange glow, and against it the jagged silhouette of the mountains. Then suddenly a dazzling sickle of incandescence between two peaks. The sickle became a half circle and the first long shadows, the first shafts of golden light crossed the garden outside the window. And when one looked up again at the mountains there was the whole unbearable glory of the risen sun.

Dr. Robert sat down by the bed, took his wife’s hand and kissed it. She smiled at him, then turned again towards the window.

“How quickly the earth turns!” she whispered, and then after a silence, “One of these mornings,” she added, “it’ll be my last sunrise.”

Through the confused chorus of bird cries and insect noises, a mynah was chanting, “Karuna. Karuna…”

“Karuna,” Lakshmi repeated. “Compassion…”

“Karuna. Karuna,” the oboe voice of Buddha insisted from the garden.

“I shan’t be needing it much longer,” she went on. “But what about you? Poor Robert, what about you?”

“Somehow or other one finds the necessary strength,” he said.

“But will it be the right kind of strength? Or will it be the strength of armor, the strength of shut-offness, the strength of being absorbed in your work and your ideas and not caring a damn for anything else? Remember how I used to come and pull your hair and make you pay attention? Who’s going to do that when I’m gone?”

A nurse came in with a glass of sugared water. Dr. Robert slid a hand under his wife’s shoulders and lifted her to a sitting position. The nurse held the glass to her lips. Lakshmi drank a little water, swallowed with difficulty, then drank again and yet once more. Turning from the proffered glass, she looked up at Dr. Robert. The wasted face was illumined by a strangely incongruous twinkle of pure mischief.

“‘I the Trinity illustrate,’” the faint voice hoarsely quoted, “‘sipping watered orange pulp; in three sips the Arian frustrate’…” She broke off. “What a ridiculous thing to be remembering. But then I always was pretty ridiculous, wasn’t I?”

Dr. Robert did his best to smile back at her. “Pretty ridiculous,” he agreed.

“You used to say I was like a flea. Here one moment and then, hop! somewhere else, miles away. No wonder you could never educate me!”

“But you educated me all right,” he assured her. “If it hadn’t been for you coming in and pulling my hair and making me look at the world and helping me to understand it, what would I be today? A pedant in blinkers—in spite of all my training. But luckily I had the sense to ask you to marry me, and luckily you had the folly to say yes and then the wisdom and intelligence to make a good job of me. After thirty-seven years of adult education I’m almost human.”

“But I’m still a flea.” She shook her head. “And yet I did try. I tried very hard. I don’t know if you ever realized it, Robert: I was always on tiptoes, always straining up towards the place where you were doing your work and your thinking and your reading. On tiptoes, trying to reach it, trying to get up there beside you. Goodness, how tiring it was! What an endless series of efforts! And all of them quite useless. Because I was just a dumb flea hopping about down here among the people and the flowers and the cats and dogs. Your kind of highbrow world was a place I could never climb up to, much less find my way in. When this thing happened” (she raised her hand again to her absent breast) “I didn’t have to try any more. No more school, no more homework. I had a permanent excuse.”

There was a long silence.

“What about taking another sip?” said the nurse at last.

“Yes, you ought to drink some more,” Dr. Robert agreed.

“And ruin the Trinity?” Lakshmi gave him another of her smiles. Through the mask of age and mortal sickness Dr. Robert suddenly saw the laughing girl with whom, half a lifetime ago, and yet only yesterday, he had fallen in love.

An hour later Dr. Robert was back in his bungalow.

“You’re going to be all alone this morning,” he announced, after changing the dressing on Will Farnaby’s knee. “I have to drive down to Shivapuram for a meeting of the Privy Council. One of our student nurses will come in around twelve to give you your injection and get you something to eat. And in the afternoon, as soon as she’s finished her work at the school, Susila will be dropping in again. And now I must be going.” Dr. Robert rose and laid his hand for a moment on Will’s arm. “Till this evening.” Halfway to the door he halted and turned back. “I almost forgot to give you this.” From one of the side pockets of his sagging jacket he pulled out a small green booklet. “It’s the Old Raja’s Notes on What’s What, and on What It Might be Reasonable to Do about What’s What.”

“What an admirable title!” said Will as he took the proffered book.

“And you’ll like the contents, too,” Dr. Robert assured him. “Just a few pages, that’s all. But if you want to know what Pala is all about, there’s no better introduction.”

“Incidentally,” Will asked, “who is the Old Raja?”

“Who was he, I’m afraid. The Old Raja died in ’thirty-eight—after a reign three years longer than Queen Victoria’s. His eldest son died before he did, and he was succeeded by his grandson, who was an ass—but made up for it by being shortlived. The present Raja is his great-grandson.”

“And, if I may ask a personal question, how does anybody called MacPhail come into the picture?”

“The first MacPhail of Pala came into it under the Old Raja’s grandfather—the Raja of the Reform, we call him. Between them, he and my great-grandfather invented modern Pala. The Old Raja consolidated their work and carried it further. And today we’re doing our best to follow in his footsteps.”

Will held up the Notes on What’s What.

“Does this give the history of the reforms?”

Dr. Robert shook his head. “It merely states the underlying principles. Read about those first. When I get back from Shivapuram this evening, I’ll give you a taste of the history. You’ll have a better understanding of what was actually done if you start by knowing what had to be done—what always and everywhere has to be done by anyone who has a clear idea about what’s what. So read it, read it. And don’t forget to drink your fruit juice at eleven.”

Will watched him go, then opened the little green book and started to read.

I

Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.

If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.

What in fact I am, if only the Manichee I think I am would allow me to know it, is the reconciliation of yes and no lived out in total acceptance and the blessed experience of Not-Two.

In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap.

Because his aspiration to perpetuate only the “yes” in every pair of opposites can never, in the nature of things, be realized, the insulated Manichee I think I am condemns himself to endlessly repeated frustration, endlessly repeated conflicts with other aspiring and frustrated Manichees.

Conflicts and frustrations—the theme of all history and almost all biography. “I show you sorrow,” said the Buddha realistically. But he also showed the ending of sorrow—self-knowledge, total acceptance, the blessed experience of Not-Two.

II

Knowing who in fact we are results in Good Being, and Good Being results in the most appropriate kind of good doing. But good doing does not of itself result in Good Being. We can be virtuous without knowing who in fact we are. The beings who are merely good are not Good Beings; they are just pillars of society.

Most pillars are their own Samsons. They hold up, but sooner or later they pull down. There has never been a society in which most good doing was the product of Good Being and therefore constantly appropriate. This does not mean that there will never be such a society or that we in Pala are fools for trying to call it into existence.

III

The Yogin and the Stoic—two righteous egos who achieve their very considerable results by pretending, systematically, to be somebody else. But it is not by pretending to be somebody else, even somebody supremely good and wise, that we can pass from insulated Manichee-hood to Good Being.

Good Being is knowing who in fact we are; and in order to know who in fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are and what this bad habit of thought compels us to feel and do. A moment of clear and complete knowledge of what we think we are, but in fact are not, puts a stop, for the moment, to the Manichean charade. If we renew, until they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are not, we may find ourselves, all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are.

Concentration, abstract thinking, spiritual exercises—systematic exclusions in the realm of thought. Asceticism and hedonism—systematic exclusions in the realms of sensation, feeling and action. But Good Being is in the knowledge of who in fact one is in relation to all experiences. So be aware—aware in every context, at all times and whatever, creditable or discreditable, pleasant or unpleasant, you may be doing or suffering. This is the only genuine yoga, the only spiritual exercise worth practicing.

The more a man knows about individual objects, the more he knows about God. Translating Spinoza’s language into ours, we can say: The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly, one fine morning, realizing who in fact he is—or rather Who (capital W) in Fact (capital F) “he” (between quotation marks) Is (capital I).

St. John was right. In a blessedly speechless universe, the Word was not only with God; it was God. As a something to be believed in. God is a projected symbol, a reified name. God = “God.”

Faith is something very different from belief. Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul’s words, Mohammed’s words, Marx’s words, Hitler’s words—people take them too seriously, and what happens? What happens is the senseless ambivalence of history—sadism versus duty, or (incomparably worse) sadism as duty; devotion counterbalanced by organized paranoia; sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church’s inquisitors and crusaders. Faith, on the contrary, can never be taken too seriously. For Faith is the empirically justified confidence in our capacity to know who in fact we are, to forget the belief-intoxicated Manichee in Good Being. Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

There was a tap at the door. Will looked up from his book.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me,” said a voice that brought back unpleasant memories of Colonel Dipa and that nightmarish drive in the white Mercedes. Dressed only in white sandals, white shorts, and a platinum wrist watch, Murugan was advancing towards the bed.

“How nice of you to come and see me!”

Another visitor would have asked him how he was feeling; but Murugan was too wholeheartedly concerned with himself to be able even to simulate the slightest interest in anyone else. “I came to the door three-quarters of an hour ago,” he said in tones of aggrieved complaint. “But the old man hadn’t left, so I had to go home again. And then I had to sit with my mother and the man who’s staying with us while they were having their breakfast…”

“Why couldn’t you come in while Dr. Robert was here?” Will asked. “Is it against the rules for you to talk to me?”

The boy shook his head impatiently. “Of course not. I just didn’t want him to know the reason for my coming to see you.”

“The reason?” Will smiled. “Visiting the sick is an act of charity—highly commendable.”

His irony was lost upon Murugan, who went on steadily thinking about his own affairs. “Thank you for not telling them you’d seen me before,” he said abruptly, almost angrily. It was as though he resented having to acknowledge his obligation and were furious with Will for having done him the good turn which demanded this acknowledgment.

“I could see you didn’t want me to say anything about it,” said Will. “So of course I didn’t.”

“I wanted to thank you,” Murugan muttered between his teeth and in a tone that would have been appropriate to “You dirty swine!”

“Don’t mention it,” said Will with mock politeness.

What a delicious creature! he was thinking as he looked, with amused curiosity, at that smooth golden torso, that averted face, regular as a statue’s but no longer Olympian, no longer classical—a Hellenistic face, mobile and all too human. A vessel of incomparable beauty—but what did it contain? It was a pity, he reflected, that he hadn’t asked that question a little more seriously before getting involved with his unspeakable Babs. But then Babs was a female. By the sort of heterosexual he was, the sort of rational question he was now posing was unaskable. As no doubt it would be, by anyone susceptible to boys, in regard to this bad-blooded little demigod sitting at the end of his bed. “Didn’t Dr. Robert know you’d gone to Rendang?” he asked.

“Of course he knew. Everybody knew it. I’d gone there to fetch my mother. She was staying there with some of her relations. I went over to bring her back to Pala. It was absolutely official.”

“Then why didn’t you want me to say that I’d met you over there?”

Murugan hesitated for a moment, then looked up at Will defiantly. “Because I didn’t want them to know I’d been seeing Colonel Dipa.”

Oh, so that was it! “Colonel Dipa’s a remarkable man,” he said aloud, fishing with sugared bait for confidences.

Surprisingly unsuspicious, the fish rose at once. Murugan’s sulky face lit up with enthusiasm and there, suddenly, was Antinoüs in all the fascinating beauty of his ambiguous adolescence. “I think he’s wonderful,” he said, and for the first time since he had entered the room he seemed to recognize Will’s existence and give him the friendliest of smiles. The Colonel’s wonderfulness had made him forget his resentment, had made it possible for him, momentarily, to love everybody—even this man to whom he owed a rankling debt of gratitude. “Look at what he’s doing for Rendang!”

“He’s certainly doing a great deal for Rendang,” said Will noncommittally.

A cloud passed across Murugan’s radiant face. “They don’t think so here,” he said, frowning. “They think he’s awful.”

“Who thinks so?”

“Practically everybody!”

“So they didn’t want you to see him?”

With the expression of an urchin who has cocked a snook while the teacher’s back is turned, Murugan grinned triumphantly. “They thought I was with my mother all the time.”

Will picked up the cue at once. “Did your mother know you were seeing the Colonel?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“And had no objection?”

“She was all for it.”

And yet, Will felt quite sure, he hadn’t been mistaken when he thought of Hadrian and Antinoüs. Was the woman blind? Or didn’t she wish to see what was happening?

“But if she doesn’t mind,” he said aloud, “why should Dr. Robert and the rest of them object?” Murugan looked at him suspiciously. Realizing that he had ventured too far into forbidden territory, Will hastily drew a red herring across the trail. “Do they think,” he asked with a laugh, “that he might convert you to a belief in military dictatorship?”

The red herring was duly followed, and the boy’s face relaxed into a smile. “Not that, exactly,” he answered, “but something like it. It’s all so stupid,” he added with a shrug of the shoulders. “Just idiotic protocol.”

“Protocol?” Will was genuinely puzzled.

“Weren’t you told anything about me?”

“Only what Dr. Robert said yesterday.”

“You mean, about my being a student?” Murugan threw back his head and laughed.

“What’s so funny about being a student?”

“Nothing—nothing at all.” The boy looked away again. There was a silence. Still averted, “The reason,” he said at last, “why I’m not supposed to see Colonel Dipa is that he’s the head of a state and I’m the head of a state. When we meet, it’s international politics.”

“What do you mean?”

“I happen to be the Raja of Pala.”

“The Raja of Pala?”

“Since ’fifty-four. That was when my father died.”

“And your mother, I take it, is the Rani?”

“My mother is the Rani.”

Make a beeline for the palace. But here was the palace making a beeline for him. Providence, evidently, was on the side of Joe Aldehyde and working overtime.

“Were you the eldest son?” he asked.

“The only son,” Murugan replied. And then, stressing his uniqueness still more emphatically, “The only child,” he added.

“So there’s no possible doubt,” said Will. “My goodness! I ought to be calling you Your Majesty. Or at least Sir.” The words were spoken laughingly; but it was with the most perfect seriousness and a sudden assumption of regal dignity that Murugan responded to them.

“You’ll have to call me that at the end of next week,” he said. “After my birthday. I shall be eighteen. That’s when a Raja of Pala comes of age. Till then I’m just Murugan Mailendra. Just a student learning a little bit about everything—including plant breeding,” he added contemptuously—“so that, when the time comes, I shall know what I’m doing.”

“And when the time comes, what will you be doing?” Between this pretty Antinoüs and his portentous office there was a contrast which Will found richly comic. “How do you propose to act?” he continued on a bantering note. “Off with their heads? L’état c’est moi?”

Seriousness and regal dignity hardened into rebuke. “Don’t be stupid.”

Amused, Will went through the motions of apology. “I just wanted to find out how absolute you were going to be.”

“Pala is a constitutional monarchy,” Murugan answered gravely.

“In other words, you’re just going to be a symbolic figurehead—to reign, like the Queen of England, but not rule.”

Forgetting his regal dignity, “No, no,” Murugan almost screamed. “Not like the Queen of England. The Raja of Pala doesn’t just reign; he rules.” Too much agitated to sit still, Murugan jumped up and began to walk about the room. “He rules constitutionally; but, by God, he rules, he rules!” Murugan walked to the window and looked out. Turning back after a moment of silence, he confronted Will with a face transfigured by its new expression into an emblem, exquisitely molded and colored, of an all too familiar kind of psychological ugliness. “I’ll show them who’s the boss around here,” he said in a phrase and tone which had obviously been borrowed from the hero of some American gangster movie. “These people think they can push me around,” he went on, reciting from the dismally commonplace script, “the way they pushed my father around. But they’re making a big mistake.” He uttered a sinister snigger and wagged his beautiful, odious head. “A big mistake,” he repeated.

The words had been spoken between clenched teeth and with scarcely moving lips; the lower jaw had been thrust out so as to look like the jaw of a comic strip criminal; the eyes glared coldly between narrowed lids. At once absurd and horrible. Antinoüs had become the caricature of all the tough guys in all the B-pictures from time immemorial.

“Who’s been running the country during your minority?” he now asked.

“Three sets of old fogeys,” Murugan answered contemptuously. “The Cabinet, the House of Representatives and then, representing me, the Raja, the Privy Council.”

“Poor old fogeys!” said Will. “They’ll soon be getting the shock of their lives.” Entering gaily into the spirit of delinquency, he laughed aloud. “I only hope I’ll still be around to see it happening.”

Murugan joined in the laughter—joined in it, not as the sinisterly mirthful Tough Guy, but with one of those sudden changes of mood and expression that would make it, Will foresaw, so hard for him to play the Tough Guy part, as the triumphant urchin of a few minutes earlier. “The shock of their lives,” he repeated happily.

“Have you made any specific plans?”

“I most certainly have,” said Murugan. On his mobile face the triumphant urchin made way for the statesman, grave but condescendingly affable, at a press conference. “Top priority: get this place modernized. Look at what Rendang has been able to do because of its oil royalties.”

“But doesn’t Pala get any oil royalties?” Will questioned with that innocent air of total ignorance which he had found by long experience to be the best way of eliciting information from the simpleminded and the self-important.

“Not a penny,” said Murugan. “And yet the southern end of the island is fairly oozing with the stuff. But except for a few measly little wells for home consumption, the old fogeys won’t do anything about it. And what’s more, they won’t allow anyone else to do anything about it.” The statesman was growing angry; there were hints now in his voice and expression of the Tough Guy. “All sorts of people have made offers—Southeast Asia Petroleum, Shell, Royal Dutch, Standard of California. But the bloody old fools won’t listen.”

“Can’t you persuade them to listen?”

“I’ll damn well make them listen,” said the Tough Guy.

“That’s the spirit!” Then, casually, “Which of the offers do you think of accepting?” he asked.

“Colonel Dipa’s working with Standard of California, and he thinks it might be best if we did the same.”

“I wouldn’t do that without at least getting a few competing bids.”

“That’s what I think too. So does my mother.”

“Very wise.”

“My mother’s all for Southeast Asia Petroleum. She knows the Chairman of the Board, Lord Aldehyde.”

“She knows Lord Aldehyde? But how extraordinary!” The tone of delighted astonishment was thoroughly convincing. “Joe Aldehyde is a friend of mine. I write for his papers. I even serve as his private ambassador. Confidentially,” he added, “that’s why we took that trip to the copper mines. Copper is one of Joe’s sidelines. But of course his real love is oil.”

Murugan tried to look shrewd. “What would he be prepared to offer?”

Will picked up the cue and answered, in the best movie-tycoon style, “Whatever Standard offers plus a little more.”

“Fair enough,” said Murugan out of the same script, and nodded sagely. There was a long silence. When he spoke again, it was as the statesman granting an interview to representatives of the press.

“The oil royalties,” he said, “will be used in the following manner: twenty-five percent of all moneys received will go to World Reconstruction.”

“May I ask,” Will enquired deferentially, “precisely how you propose to reconstruct the world?”

“Through the Crusade of the Spirit. Do you know about the Crusade of the Spirit?”

“Of course. Who doesn’t?”

“It’s a great world movement,” said the statesman gravely. “Like Early Christianity. Founded by my mother.”

Will registered awe and astonishment.

“Yes, founded by my mother,” Murugan repeated, and he added impressively, “I believe it’s man’s only hope.”

“Quite,” said Will Farnaby, “quite.”

“Well, that’s how the first twenty-five percent of the royalties will be used,” the statesman continued. “The remainder will go into an intensive program of industrialization.” The tone changed again. “These old idiots here only want to industrialize in spots and leave all the rest as it was a thousand years ago.”

“Whereas you’d like to go the whole hog. Industrialization for industrialization’s sake.”

“No, industrialization for the country’s sake. Industrialization to make Pala strong. To make other people respect us. Look at Rendang. Within five years they’ll be manufacturing all the rifles and mortars and ammunition they need. It’ll be quite a long time before they can make tanks. But meanwhile they can buy them from Skoda with their oil money.”

“How soon will they graduate to H-bombs?” Will asked ironically.

“They won’t even try,” Murugan answered. “But after all,” he added, “H-bombs aren’t the only absolute weapons.” He pronounced the phrase with relish. It was evident that he found the taste of “absolute weapons” positively delicious. “Chemical and biological weapons—Colonel Dipa calls them the poor man’s H-bombs. One of the first things I’ll do is to build a big insecticide plant.” Murugan laughed and winked an eye. “If you can make insecticides,” he said, “you can make nerve gas.”

Will remembered that still unfinished factory in the suburbs of Rendang-Lobo.

“What’s that?” he had asked Colonel Dipa as they flashed past it in the white Mercedes.

“Insecticides,” the Colonel had answered. And showing his gleaming white teeth in a genial smile, “We shall soon be exporting the stuff all over Southeast Asia.”

At the time, of course, he had thought that the Colonel merely meant what he said. But now…Will shrugged his mental shoulders. Colonels will be colonels and boys, even boys like Murugan, will be gun-loving boys. There would always be plenty of jobs for special correspondents on the trail of death.

“So you’ll strengthen Pala’s army?” Will said aloud.

“Strengthen it? No—I’ll create it. Pala doesn’t have an army.”

“None at all?”

“Absolutely nothing. They’re all pacifists.” The p was an explosion of disgust, the s’s hissed contemptuously. “I shall have to start from scratch.”

“And you’ll militarize as you industrialize, is that it?”

“Exactly.”

Will laughed. “Back to the Assyrians! You’ll go down in history as a true revolutionary.”

“That’s what I hope,” said Murugan. “Because that’s what my policy is going to be—Continuing Revolution.”

“Very good!” Will applauded.

“I’ll just be continuing the revolution that was started more than a hundred years ago by Dr. Robert’s great-grandfather when he came to Pala and helped my great-great-grandfather to put through the first reforms. Some of the things they did were really wonderful. Not all of them, mind you,” he qualified; and with the absurd solemnity of a schoolboy playing Polonius in an end-of-term performance of Hamlet he shook his curly head in grave, judicial disapproval. “But at least they did something. Whereas nowadays we’re governed by a set of do-nothing conservatives. Conservatively primitive—they won’t lift a finger to bring in modern improvements. And conservatively radical—they refuse to change any of the old bad revolutionary ideas that ought to be changed. They won’t reform the reforms. And I tell you, some of those so-called reforms are absolutely disgusting.”

“Meaning, I take it, that they have something to do with sex?”

Murugan nodded and turned away his face. To his astonishment, Will saw that he was blushing.

“Give me an example,” he demanded.

But Murugan could not bring himself to be explicit.

“Ask Dr. Robert,” he said, “ask Vijaya. They think that sort of thing is simply wonderful. In fact they all do. That’s one of the reasons why nobody wants to change. They’d like everything to go on as it is, in the same old disgusting way, forever and ever.”

“Forever and ever,” a rich contralto voice teasingly repeated.

“Mother!” Murugan sprang to his feet.

Will turned and saw in the doorway a large florid woman swathed (rather incongruously, he thought; for that kind of face and build usually went with mauve and magenta and electric blue) in clouds of white muslin. She stood there smiling with a conscious mysteriousness, one fleshy brown arm upraised, with its jeweled hand pressed against the doorjamb, in the pose of the great actress, the acknowledged diva, pausing at her first entrance to accept the plaudits of her adorers on the other side of the footlights. In the background, waiting patiently for his cue, stood a tall man in a dove-gray Dacron suit whom Murugan, peering past the massive embodiment of maternity that almost filled the doorway, now greeted as Mr. Bahu.

Still in the wings, Mr. Bahu bowed without speaking.

Murugan turned again to his mother. “Did you walk here?” he asked. His tone expressed incredulity and an admiring solicitude. Walking here—how unthinkable! But if she had walked, what heroism! “All the way?”

“All the way, my baby,” she echoed, tenderly playful. The uplifted arm came down, slid round the boy’s slender body, pressed it, engulfed in floating draperies, against the enormous bosom, then released it again. “I had one of my Impulses.” She had a way, Will noticed, of making you actually hear the capital letters at the beginning of the words she meant to emphasize. “My Little Voice said, ‘Go and see this Stranger at Dr. Robert’s house. Go!’ ‘Now?’ I said. ‘Malgré la chaleur?’ Which makes my Little Voice lose patience. ‘Woman,’ it says, ‘hold your silly tongue and do as you’re told.’ So here I am, Mr. Farnaby.” With hand outstretched and surrounded by a powerful aura of sandalwood oil, she advanced towards him.

Will bowed over the thick bejeweled fingers and mumbled something that ended in “Your Highness.”

“Bahu!” she called, using the royal prerogative of the unadorned surname.

Responding to his long-awaited cue, the supporting actor made his entrance and was introduced as His Excellency, Abdul Bahu, the Ambassador of Rendang: “Abdul Pierre Bahu—car sa mère est parisienne. But he learned his English in New York.”

He looked, Will thought as he shook the Ambassador’s hand, like Savonarola—but a Savonarola with a monocle and a tailor in Savile Row.

“Bahu,” said the Rani, “is Colonel Dipa’s Brains Trust.”

“Your Highness, if I may be permitted to say so, is much too kind to me and not nearly kind enough to the Colonel.”

His words and manner were courtly to the point of being ironical, a parody of deference and self-abasement.

“The brains,” he went on, “are where brains ought to be—in the head. As for me, I am merely a part of Rendang’s sympathetic nervous system.”

“Et combien sympathique!” said the Rani. “Among other things, Mr. Farnaby, Bahu is the Last of the Aristocrats. You should see his country place! Like The Arabian Nights! One claps one’s hands—and instantly there are six servants ready to do one’s bidding. One has a birthday—and there is a fête nocturne in the gardens. Music, refreshments, dancing girls; two hundred retainers carrying torches. The life of Harun al-Rashid, but with modern plumbing.”

“It sounds quite delightful,” said Will, remembering the villages through which he had passed in Colonel Dipa’s white Mercedes—the wattled huts, the garbage, the children with ophthalmia, the skeleton dogs, the women bent double under enormous loads.

“And such taste,” the Rani went on, “such a well-stored mind and, through it all” (she lowered her voice) “such a deep and unfailing Sense of the Divine.”

Mr. Bahu bowed his head, and there was a silence.

Murugan, meanwhile, had pushed up a chair. Without so much as a backward glance—regally confident that someone must always, in the very nature of things, be at hand to guard against mishaps and loss of dignity—the Rani sat down with all the majestic emphasis of her hundred kilograms.

“I hope you don’t feel that my visit is an intrusion,” she said to Will. He assured her that he didn’t; but she continued to apologize. “I would have given warning,” she said, “I would have asked your permission. But my Little Voice says, ‘No—you must go now.’ Why? I cannot say. But no doubt we shall find out in due course.” She fixed him with her large, bulging eyes and gave him a mysterious smile. “And now, first of all, how are you, dear Mr. Farnaby?”

“As you see, ma’am, in very good shape.”

“Truly?” The bulging eyes scrutinized his face with an intentness that he found embarrassing. “I can see that you’re the kind of heroically considerate man who will go on reassuring his friends even on his deathbed.”

“You’re very flattering,” he said. “But as it happens, I am in good shape. Amazingly so, all things considered—miraculously so.”

“Miraculous,” said the Rani, “was the very word I used when I heard about your escape. It was a miracle.”

“‘As luck would have it,’” Will quoted again from Erewhon, “‘Providence was on my side.’”

Mr. Bahu started to laugh; but noticing that the Rani had evidently failed to get the point, changed his mind and adroitly turned the sound of merriment into a loud cough.

“How true!” the Rani was saying, and her rich contralto thrillingly vibrated. “Providence is always on our side.” And when Will raised a questioning eyebrow, “I mean,” she elaborated, “in the eyes of those who Truly Understand” (capital T, capital U). “And this is true even when all things seem to conspire against us—même dans le désastre. You understand French, of course, Mr. Farnaby?” Will nodded. “It often comes to me more easily than my own native tongue, or English or Palanese. After so many years in Switzerland,” she explained, “first at school. And again, later on, when my poor baby’s health was so precarious” (she patted Murugan’s bare arm) “and we had to go and live in the mountains. Which illustrates what I was saying about Providence always being on our side. When they told me that my little boy was on the brink of consumption, I forgot everything I’d ever learnt. I was mad with fear and anguish, I was indignant against God for having allowed such a thing to happen. What Utter Blindness! My baby got well, and those years among the Eternal Snows were the happiest of our lives—weren’t they, darling?”

“The happiest of our lives,” the boy agreed, with what almost sounded like complete sincerity.

The Rani smiled triumphantly, pouted her full red lips, and with a faint smack parted them again in a long-distance kiss. “So you see, my dear Farnaby,” she went on, “you see. It’s really self-evident. Nothing happens by Accident. There’s a Great Plan, and within the Great Plan innumerable little plans. A little plan for each and every one of us.”

“Quite,” said Will politely. “Quite.”

“There was a time,” the Rani continued, “when I knew it only with my intellect. Now I know it with my heart. I really…” she paused for an instant to prepare for the utterance of the mystic majuscule, “Understand.”

“Psychic as hell.” Will remembered what Joe Aldehyde had said of her. And surely that lifelong frequenter of séances should know.

“I take it, ma’am,” he said, “that you’re naturally psychic.”

“From birth,” she admitted. “But also and above all by training. Training, needless to say, in Something Else.”

“Something else?”

“In the life of the Spirit. As one advances along the Path, all the sidhis, all the psychic gifts and miraculous powers, develop spontaneously.”

“Is that so?”

“My mother,” Murugan proudly assured him, “can do the most fantastic things.”

“N’exagérons pas, chéri.”

“But it’s the truth,” Murugan insisted.

“A truth,” the Ambassador put in, “which I can confirm. And I confirm it,” he added, smiling at his own expense, “with a certain reluctance. As a lifelong skeptic about these things, I don’t like to see the impossible happening. But I have an unfortunate weakness for honesty. And when the impossible actually does happen, before my eyes, I’m compelled malgré moi to bear witness to the fact. Her Highness does do the most fantastic things.”

“Well, if you like to put it that way,” said the Rani, beaming with pleasure. “But never forget, Bahu, never forget. Miracles are of absolutely no importance. What’s important is the Other Thing—the Thing one comes to at the end of the Path.”

“After the Fourth Initiation,” Murugan specified. “My mother…”

“Darling!” The Rani had raised a finger to her lips. “These are things one doesn’t talk about.”

“I’m sorry,” said the boy. There was a long and pregnant silence.

The Rani closed her eyes, and Mr. Bahu, letting fall his monocle, reverentially followed suit and became the image of Savonarola in silent prayer. What was going on behind that austere, that almost fleshless mask of recollectedness? Will looked and wondered.

“May I ask,” he said at last, “how you first came, ma’am, to find the Path?”

For a second or two the Rani said nothing, merely sat there with her eyes shut, smiling her Buddha smile of mysterious bliss. “Providence found it for me,” she answered at last.

“Quite, quite. But there must have been an occasion, a place, a human instrument.”

“I’ll tell you.” The lids fluttered apart and once again he found himself under the bright unswerving glare of those protuberant eyes of hers.

The place had been Lausanne; the time, the first year of her Swiss education; the chosen instrument, darling little Mme Buloz. Darling little Mme Buloz was the wife of darling old Professor Buloz, and old Professor Buloz was the man to whose charge, after careful enquiry and much anxious thought, she had been committed by her father, the late Sultan of Rendang. The Professor was sixty-seven, taught geology and was a Protestant of so austere a sect that, except for drinking a glass of claret with his dinner, saying his prayers only twice a day, and being strictly monogamous, he might almost have been a Muslim. Under such guardianship a princess of Rendang would be intellectually stimulated, while remaining morally and doctrinally intact. But the Sultan had reckoned without the Professor’s wife. Mme Buloz was only forty, plump, sentimental, bubblingly enthusiastic and, though officially of her husband’s Protestant persuasion, a newly converted and intensely ardent Theosophist. In a room at the top of the tall house near the Place de la Riponne she had her Oratory, to which, whenever she could find time, she would secretly retire to do breathing exercises, practice concentration, and raise Kundalini. Strenuous disciplines! But the reward was transcendentally great. In the small hours of a hot summer night, while the darling old Professor lay rhythmically snoring two floors down, she had become aware of a Presence: the Master Koot Hoomi was with her.

The Rani made an impressive pause.

“Extraordinary,” said Mr. Bahu.

“Extraordinary,” Will dutifully echoed.

The Rani resumed her narrative. Irrepressibly happy, Mme Buloz had been unable to keep her secret. She had dropped mysterious hints, had passed from hints to confidences, from confidences to an invitation to the Oratory and a course of instruction. In a very short time Koot Hoomi was bestowing greater favors upon the novice than upon her teacher.

“And from that day to this,” she concluded, “the Master has helped me to Go Forward.”

To go forward, Will asked himself, into what? Koot Hoomi only knew. But whatever it was that she had gone forward into, he didn’t like it. There was an expression on that large florid face which he found peculiarly distasteful—an expression of domineering calm, of serene and unshakable self-esteem. She reminded him in a curious way of Joe Aldehyde. Joe was one of those happy tycoons who feel no qualms, but rejoice without inhibition in their money and in all that their money will buy in the way of influence and power. And here—albeit clothed in white muslin, mystic, wonderful—was another of Joe Aldehyde’s breed: a female tycoon who had cornered the market, not in soya beans or copper, but in Pure Spirituality and the Ascended Masters, and was now happily rubbing her hands over the exploit.

“Here’s one example of what He’s done for me,” the Rani went on. “Eight years ago—to be exact, on the twenty-third of November, 1952—the Master came to me in my morning Meditation. Came in Person, came in Glory. ‘A great Crusade is to be launched,’ He said, ‘a World Movement to save Humanity from self-destruction. And you, my child, are the Appointed Instrument.’ ‘Me? A World Movement? But that’s absurd,’ I said. ‘I’ve never made a speech in my whole life. I’ve never written a word for publication. I’ve never been a leader or an organizer.’ ‘Nevertheless,’ He said (and He gave one of these indescribably beautiful smiles of His), ‘nevertheless it is you who will launch this Crusade—the World-Wide Crusade of the Spirit. You will be laughed at, you will be called a fool, a crank, a fanatic. The dogs bark; the Caravan passes. From tiny, laughable beginnings the Crusade of the Spirit is destined to become a Mighty Force. A force for Good, a force that will ultimately Save the World.’ And with that He left me. Left me stunned, bewildered, scared out of my wits. But there was nothing for it; I had to obey. I did obey. And what happened? I made speeches, and He gave me eloquence. I accepted the burden of leadership and, because He was walking invisibly at my side, people followed me. I asked for help, and the money came pouring in. So here I am.” She threw out her thick hands in a gesture of self-depreciation, she smiled a mystic smile. A poor thing, she seemed to be saying, but not my own—my Master’s, Koot Hoomi’s. “Here I am,” she repeated.

“Here, praise God,” said Mr. Bahu devoutly, “you are.”

After a decent interval Will asked the Rani if she had always kept up the practices so providentially learned in Mme Buloz’s Oratory.

“Always,” she answered. “I could no more do without Meditation than I could do without Food.”

“Wasn’t it rather difficult after you were married? I mean, before you went back to Switzerland. There must have been so many tiresome official duties.”

“Not to mention all the unofficial ones,” said the Rani in a tone that implied whole volumes of unfavorable comment upon her late husband’s character, Weltanschauung and sexual habits. She opened her mouth to elaborate on the theme, then closed it again and looked at Murugan. “Darling,” she called.

Murugan, who was absorbedly polishing the nails of his left hand upon the open palm of his right, looked up with a guilty start. “Yes, Mother?”

Ignoring the nails and his evident inattention to what she had been saying, the Rani gave him a seducing smile. “Be an angel,” she said, “and go and fetch the car. My Little Voice doesn’t say anything about walking back to the bungalow. It’s only a few hundred yards,” she explained to Will. “But in this heat, and at my age…”

Her words called for some kind of flattering rebuttal. But if it was too hot to walk, it was also too hot, Will felt, to put forth the very considerable amount of energy required for a convincing show of bogus sincerity. Fortunately a professional diplomat, a practiced courtier was on hand to make up for the uncouth journalist’s deficiencies. Mr. Bahu uttered a peal of lighthearted laughter, then apologized for his merriment.

“But it was really too funny! ‘At my age,’” he repeated, and laughed again. “Murugan is not quite eighteen, and I happen to know how old—how very young—the Princess of Rendang was when she married the Raja of Pala.”

Murugan, meanwhile, had obediently risen and was kissing his mother’s hand.

“Now we can talk more freely,” said the Rani when he had left the room. And freely—her face, her tone, her bulging eyes, her whole quivering frame registering the most intense disapproval—she now let fly. De mortuis…She wouldn’t say anything about her husband except that he was a typical Palanese, a true representative of his country. For the sad truth was that Pala’s smooth bright skin concealed the most horrible rottenness.

“When I think what they tried to do to my Baby, two years ago, when I was on my world tour for the Crusade of the Spirit.” With a jingling of bracelets she lifted her hands in horror. “It was an agony for me to be parted from him for so long; but the Master had sent me on a Mission, and my Little Voice told me that it wouldn’t be right for me to take my Baby with me. He’d lived abroad for so long. It was high time for him to get to know the country he was to rule. So I decided to leave him here. The Privy Council appointed a committee of guardianship. Two women with growing boys of their own and two men—one of whom, I regret to say” (more in sorrow than in anger), “was Dr. Robert MacPhail. Well, to cut a long story short, no sooner was I safely out of the country than those precious guardians, to whom I’d entrusted my Baby, my Only Son, set to work systematically—systematically, Mr. Farnaby—to undermine my influence. They tried to destroy the whole edifice of Moral and Spiritual Values which I had so laboriously built up over the years.”

Somewhat maliciously (for of course he knew what the woman was talking about), Will expressed his astonishment. The whole edifice of moral and spiritual values? And yet nobody could have been kinder than Dr. Robert and the others, no Good Samaritans were ever more simply and effectively charitable.

“I’m not denying their kindness,” said the Rani. “But after all kindness isn’t the only virtue.”

“Of course not,” Will agreed, and he listed all the qualities that the Rani seemed most conspicuously to lack. “There’s also sincerity. Not to mention truthfulness, humility, selflessness…”

“You’re forgetting Purity,” said the Rani severely. “Purity is fundamental, Purity is the sine qua non.”

“But here in Pala, I gather, they don’t think so.”

“They most certainly do not,” said the Rani. And she went on to tell him how her poor Baby had been deliberately exposed to impurity, even actively encouraged to indulge in it with one of those precocious, promiscuous girls of whom, in Pala, there were only too many. And when they found that he wasn’t the sort of boy who would seduce a girl (for she had brought him up to think of Woman as essentially Holy), they had encouraged the girl to do her best to seduce him.

Had she, Will wondered, succeeded? Or had Antinoüs already been girlproofed by little friends of his own age or, still more effectively, by some older, more experienced and authoritative pederast, some Swiss precursor of Colonel Dipa?

“But that wasn’t the worst.” The Rani lowered her voice to a horrified stage whisper. “One of the mothers on the committee of guardianship—one of the mothers, mind you—advised him to take a course of lessons.”

“What sort of lessons?”

“In what they euphemistically call Love.” She wrinkled up her nose as though she had smelt raw sewage. “Lessons, if you please,” and disgust turned into indignation, “from some Older Woman.”

“Heavens!” cried the Ambassador.

“Heavens!” Will dutifully echoed. Those older women, he could see, were competitors much more dangerous, in the Rani’s eyes, than even the most precociously promiscuous of girls. A mature instructress in love would be a rival mother, enjoying the monstrously unfair advantage of being free to go the limits of incest.

“They teach…” The Rani hesitated. “They teach Special Techniques.”

“What sort of techniques?” Will enquired.

But she couldn’t bring herself to go into the repulsive particulars. And anyhow it wasn’t necessary, for Murugan (bless his heart!) had refused to listen to them. Lessons in immorality from someone old enough to be his mother—the very idea of it had made him sick. No wonder. He had been brought up to reverence the Ideal of Purity. “Brahmacharya, if you know what that means.”

“Quite,” said Will.

“And this is another reason why his illness was such a blessing in disguise, such a real godsend. I don’t think I could have brought him up that way in Pala. There are too many bad influences here. Forces working against Purity, against the Family, even against Mother Love.”

Will pricked up his ears. “Did they even reform mothers?”

She nodded. “You just can’t imagine how far things have gone here. But Koot Hoomi knew what kind of dangers we would have to run in Pala. So what happens? My Baby falls ill, and the doctors order us to Switzerland. Out of harm’s way.”

“How was it,” Will asked, “that Koot Hoomi let you go off on your Crusade? Didn’t he foresee what would happen to Murugan as soon as your back was turned?”

“He foresaw everything,” said the Rani. “The temptations, the resistance, the massed assault by all the Powers of Evil and then, at the very last moment, the rescue. For a long time,” she explained, “Murugan didn’t tell me what was happening. But after three months the assaults of the Powers of Evil were too much for him. He dropped hints; but I was too completely absorbed in my Master’s business to be able to take them. Finally he wrote me a letter in which it was all spelled out—in detail. I canceled my last four lectures in Brazil and flew home as fast as the jets would carry me. A week later we were back in Switzerland. Just my Baby and I—alone with the Master.”

She closed her eyes, and an expression of gloating ecstasy appeared upon her face. Will looked away in distaste. This self-canonized world-savior, this clutching and devouring mother—had she ever, for a single moment, seen herself as others saw her? Did she have any idea of what she had done, what she was still doing, to her poor silly little son? To the first question the answer was certainly no. About the second one could only speculate. Perhaps she honestly didn’t know what she had made of the boy. But perhaps, on the other hand, she did know. Knew and preferred what was happening with the Colonel to what might happen if the boy’s education were taken in hand by a woman. The woman might supplant her; the Colonel, she knew, would not.

“Murugan told me that he intended to reform these so-called reforms.”

“I can only pray,” said the Rani in a tone that reminded Will of his grandfather, the Archdeacon, “that he’ll be given the Strength and Wisdom to do it.”

“And what do you think of his other projects?” Will asked. “Oil? Industries? An army?”

“Economics and politics aren’t exactly my strong point,” she answered with a little laugh which was meant to remind him that he was talking to someone who had taken the Fourth Initiation. “Ask Bahu what he thinks.”

“I have no right to offer an opinion,” said the Ambassador. “I’m an outsider, the representative of a foreign power.”

“Not so very foreign,” said the Rani.

“Not in your eyes, ma’am. And not, as you know very well, in mine. But in the eyes of the Palanese government—yes. Completely foreign.”

“But that,” said Will, “doesn’t prevent you from having opinions. It only prevents you from having the locally orthodox opinions. And incidentally,” he added, “I’m not here in my professional capacity. You’re not being interviewed, Mr. Ambassador. All this is strictly off the record.”

“Strictly off the record, then, and strictly as myself and not as an official personage, I believe that our young friend is perfectly right.”

“Which implies, of course, that you believe the policy of the Palanese government to be perfectly wrong.”

“Perfectly wrong,” said Mr. Bahu—and the bony, emphatic mask of Savonarola positively twinkled with his Voltairean smile—“perfectly wrong because all too perfectly right.”

“Right?” the Rani protested. “Right?”

“Perfectly right,” he explained, “because so perfectly designed to make every man, woman, and child on this enchanting island as perfectly free and happy as it’s possible to be.”

“But with a False Happiness,” the Rani cried, “a freedom that’s only for the Lower Self.”

“I bow,” said the Ambassador, duly bowing, “to Your Highness’s superior insight. But still, high or low, true or false, happiness is happiness and freedom is most enjoyable. And there can be no doubt that the politics inaugurated by the original Reformers and developed over the years have been admirably well adapted to achieving these two goals.”

“But you feel,” said Will, “that these are undesirable goals?”

“On the contrary, everybody desires them. But unfortunately they’re out of context, they’ve become completely irrelevant to the present situation of the world in general and Pala in particular.”

“Are they more irrelevant now than they were when the Reformers first started to work for happiness and freedom?”

The Ambassador nodded. “In those days Pala was still completely off the map. The idea of turning it into an oasis of freedom and happiness made sense. So long as it remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society. Pala was completely viable, I’d say, until about 1905. Then, in less than a single generation, the world completely changed. Movies, cars, airplanes, radio. Mass production, mass slaughter, mass communication and, above all, plain mass—more and more people in bigger and bigger slums or suburbs. By 1930 any clear-sighted observer could have seen that, for three quarters of the human race, freedom and happiness were almost out of the question. Today, thirty years later, they’re completely out of the question. And meanwhile the outside world has been closing in on this little island of freedom and happiness. Closing in steadily and inexorably, coming nearer and nearer. What was once a viable ideal is now no longer viable.”

“So Pala will have to be changed—is that your conclusion?”

Mr. Bahu nodded. “Radically.”

“Root and branch,” said the Rani with a prophet’s sadistic gusto.

“And for two cogent reasons,” Mr. Bahu went on. “First, because it simply isn’t possible for Pala to go on being different from the rest of the world. And, second, because it isn’t right that it should be different.”

“Not right for people to be free and happy?”

Once again the Rani said something inspirational about false happiness and the wrong kind of freedom.

Mr. Bahu deferentially acknowledged her interruption, then turned back to Will.

“Not right,” he insisted. “Flaunting your blessedness in the face of so much misery—it’s sheer hubris, it’s a deliberate affront to the rest of humanity. It’s even a kind of affront to God.”

“God,” the Rani murmured voluptuously, “God…”

Then, reopening her eyes, “These people in Pala,” she added, “they don’t believe in God. They only believe in Hypnotism and Pantheism and Free Love.” She emphasized the words with indignant disgust.

“So now,” said Will, “you’re proposing to make them miserable in the hope that this will restore their faith in God. Well, that’s one way of producing a conversion. Maybe it’ll work. And maybe the end will justify the means.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But I do see,” he added, “that, good or bad, and regardless of what the Palanese may feel about it, this thing is going to happen. One doesn’t have to be much of a prophet to foretell that Murugan is going to succeed. He’s riding the wave of the future. And the wave of the future is undoubtedly a wave of crude petroleum. Talking of crudity and petroleum,” he added, turning to the Rani, “I understand that you’re acquainted with my old friend, Joe Aldehyde.”

“You know Lord Aldehyde?”

“Well.”

“So that’s why my Little Voice was so insistent!” Closing her eyes again, she smiled to herself and slowly nodded her head. “Now I Understand.” Then, in another tone, “How is that dear man?” she asked.

“Still characteristically himself,” Will assured her.

“And what a rare self! L’homme au cerf-volant—that’s what I call him.”

“The man with the kite?” Will was puzzled.

“He does his work down here,” she explained; “but he holds a string in his hand, and at the other end of the string is a kite, and the kite is forever trying to go higher, higher, Higher. Even while he’s at work, he feels the constant Pull from Above, feels the Spirit tugging insistently at the flesh. Think of it! A man of affairs, a great Captain of Industry—and yet, for him, the only thing that Really Matters is the Immortality of the Soul.”

Light dawned. The woman had been talking about Joe Aldehyde’s addiction to spiritualism. He thought of those weekly séances with Mrs. Harbottle, the automatist; with Mrs. Pym, whose control was a Kiowa Indian called Bawbo; with Miss Tuke and her floating trumpet out of which a squeaky whisper uttered oracular words that were taken down in shorthand by Joe’s private secretary: “Buy Australian cement; don’t be alarmed by the fall in Breakfast Foods; unload forty percent of your rubber shares and invest the money in IBM and Westinghouse…”

“Did he ever tell you,” Will asked, “about that departed stockbroker who always knew what the market was going to do next week?”

“Sidhis,” said the Rani indulgently. “Just sidhis. What else can you expect? After all, he’s only a Beginner. And in this present life business is his karma. He was predestined to do what he’s done, what he’s doing, what he’s going to do. And what he’s going to do,” she added impressively and paused in a listening pose, her finger lifted, her head cocked, “what he’s going to do—that’s what my Little Voice is saying—includes some great and wonderful things here in Pala.”

What a spiritual way of saying, This is what I want to happen! Not as I will but as God wills—and by a happy coincidence God’s will and mine are always identical. Will chuckled inwardly, but kept the straightest of faces.

“Does your Little Voice say anything about Southeast Asia Petroleum?” he asked.

The Rani listened again, then nodded. “Distinctly.”

“But Colonel Dipa, I gather, doesn’t say anything but ‘Standard of California.’ Incidentally,” Will went on, “why does Pala have to worry about the Colonel’s taste in oil companies?”

“My government,” said Mr. Bahu sonorously, “is thinking in terms of a Five-Year Plan for Interisland Economic Co-ordination and Co-operation.”

“Does Interisland Co-ordination and Co-operation mean that Standard has to be granted a monopoly?”

“Only if Standard’s terms were more advantageous than those of its competitors.”

“In other words,” said the Rani, “only if there’s nobody who will pay us more.”

“Before you came,” Will told her, “I was discussing this subject with Murugan. Southeast Asia Petroleum, I said, will give Pala whatever Standard gives Rendang plus a little more.”

“Fifteen percent more?”

“Let’s say ten.”

“Make it twelve and a half.”

Will looked at her admiringly. For someone who had taken the Fourth Initiation she was doing pretty well.

“Joe Aldehyde will scream with agony,” he said. “But in the end, I feel certain, you’ll get your twelve and a half.”

“It would certainly be a most attractive proposition,” said Mr. Bahu.

“The only trouble is that the Palanese government won’t accept it.”

“The Palanese government,” said the Rani, “will soon be changing its policy.”

“You think so?”

“I KNOW it,” the Rani answered in a tone that made it quite clear that the information had come straight from the Master’s mouth.

“When the change of policy comes, would it help,” Will asked, “if Colonel Dipa were to put in a good word for Southeast Asia Petroleum?”

“Undoubtedly.”

Will turned to Mr. Bahu. “And would you be prepared, Mr. Ambassador, to put in a good word with Colonel Dipa?”

In polysyllables, as though he were addressing a plenary session of some international organization, Mr. Bahu hedged diplomatically. On the one hand, yes; but on the other hand, no. From one point of view, white; but from a different angle, distinctly black.

Will listened in polite silence. Behind the mask of Savonarola, behind the aristocratic monocle, behind the ambassadorial verbiage he could see and hear the Levantine broker in quest of his commission, the petty official cadging for a gratuity. And for her enthusiastic sponsorship of Southeast Asia Petroleum, how much had the royal initiate been promised? Something, he was prepared to bet, pretty substantial. Not for herself, of course, no no! For the Crusade of the Spirit, needless to say, for the greater glory of Koot Hoomi.

Mr. Bahu had reached the peroration of his speech to the international organization. “It must therefore be understood,” he was saying, “that any positive action on my part must remain contingent upon circumstances as, when, and if these circumstances arise. Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly,” Will assured him. “And now,” he went on with deliberately indecent frankness, “let me explain my position in this matter. All I’m interested in is money. Two thousand pounds without having to do a hand’s turn of work. A year of freedom just for helping Joe Aldehyde to get his hands on Pala.”

“Lord Aldehyde,” said the Rani, “is remarkably generous.”

“Remarkably,” Will agreed, “considering how little I can do in this matter. Needless to say, he’d be still more generous to anyone who could be of greater help.”

There was a long silence. In the distance a mynah bird was calling monotonously for attention. Attention to avarice, attention to hypocrisy, attention to vulgar cynicism…There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” Will called out and, turning to Mr. Bahu, “Let’s continue this conversation some other time,” he said.

Mr. Bahu nodded.

“Come in,” Will repeated.

Dressed in a blue skirt and a short buttonless jacket that left her midriff bare and only sometimes covered a pair of apple-round breasts, a girl in her late teens walked briskly into the room. On her smooth brown face a smile of friendliest greeting was punctuated at either end by dimples. “I’m Nurse Appu,” she began. “Radhu Appu.” Then, catching sight of Will’s visitors, she broke off. “Oh, excuse me, I didn’t know…”

She made a perfunctory knicks to the Rani.

Mr. Bahu, meanwhile, had courteously risen to his feet. “Nurse Appu,” he cried enthusiastically. “My little ministering angel from the Shivapuram hospital. What a delightful surprise!”

For the girl, it was evident to Will, the surprise was far from delightful.

“How do you do, Mr. Bahu,” she said without a smile and, quickly turning away, started to busy herself with the straps of the canvas bag she was carrying.

“Your Highness has probably forgotten,” said Mr. Bahu; “but I had to have an operation last summer. For hernia,” he specified. “Well, this young lady used to come and wash me every morning. Punctually at eight-forty-five. And now, after having vanished for all these months, here she is again!”

“Synchronicity,” said the Rani oracularly. “It’s all part of the Plan.”

“I’m supposed to give Mr. Farnaby an injection,” said the little nurse, looking up, still unsmiling, from her professional bag.

“Doctor’s orders are doctor’s orders,” cried the Rani, overacting the role of royal personage deigning to be playfully gracious. “To hear is to obey. But where’s my chauffeur?”

“Your chauffeur’s here,” called a familiar voice.

Beautiful as a vision of Ganymede, Murugan was standing in the doorway. A look of amusement appeared on the little nurse’s face.

“Hullo, Murugan—I mean, Your Highness.” She bobbed another curtsy, which he was free to take as a mark of respect or of ironic mockery.

“Oh, hullo, Radha,” said the boy in a tone that was meant to be distantly casual. He walked past her to where his mother was sitting. “The car,” he said, “is at the door. Or rather the so-called car.” With a sarcastic laugh, “It’s a Baby Austin, 1954 vintage,” he explained to Will. “The best that this highly civilized country can provide for its royal family. Rendang gives its ambassador a Bentley,” he added bitterly.

“Which will be calling for me at this address in about ten minutes,” said Mr. Bahu, looking at his watch. “So may I be permitted to take leave of you here, Your Highness?”

The Rani extended her hand. With all the piety of a good Catholic kissing a cardinal’s ring, he bent over it; then, straightening himself up, he turned to Will.

“I’m assuming—perhaps unjustifiably—that Mr. Farnaby can put up with me for a little longer. May I stay?”

Will assured the Ambassador that he would be delighted.

“And I hope,” said Mr. Bahu to the little nurse, “that there will be no objections on medical grounds?”

“Not on medical grounds,” said the girl in a tone that implied the existence of the most cogent nonmedical objections.

Assisted by Murugan, the Rani hoisted herself out of her chair. “Au revoir, mon cher Farnaby,” she said as she gave him her jeweled hand. Her smile was charged with a sweetness that Will found positively menacing.

“Good-bye, ma’am.”

She turned, patted the little nurse’s cheek, and sailed out of the room. Like a pinnace in the wake of a full-rigged ship of the line, Murugan trailed after her.

6

“GOLLY!” THE LITTLE NURSE EXPLODED, WHEN THE DOOR WAS safely closed behind them.

“I entirely agree with you,” said Will.

The Voltairean light twinkled for a moment on Mr. Bahu’s evangelical face. “Golly,” he repeated. “It was what I heard an English schoolboy saying when he first saw the Great Pyramid. The Rani makes the same kind of impression. Monumental. She’s what the Germans call eine grosse Seele.” The twinkle had faded, the face was unequivocally Savonarola’s, the words, it was obvious, were for publication.

The little nurse suddenly started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Will asked.

“I suddenly saw the Great Pyramid all dressed up in white muslin,” she gasped. “Dr. Robert calls it the mystic’s uniform.”

“Witty, very witty!” said Mr. Bahu. “And yet,” he added diplomatically, “I don’t know why mystics shouldn’t wear uniforms, if they feel like it.”

The little nurse drew a deep breath, wiped the tears of merriment from her eyes, and began to make her preparations for giving the patient his injection.

“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” she said to Will. “You’re thinking I’m much too young to do a good job.”

“I certainly think you’re very young.”

“You people go to a university at eighteen and stay there for four years. We start at sixteen and go on with our education till we’re twenty-four—half-time study and half-time work. I’ve been doing biology and at the same time doing this job for two years. So I’m not quite such a fool as I look. Actually I’m a pretty good nurse.”

“A statement,” said Mr. Bahu, “which I can unequivocally confirm. Miss Radha is not merely a good nurse; she’s an absolutely first-rate one.”

But what he really meant, Will felt sure as he studied the expression on that face of a much-tempted monk, was that Miss Radha had a first-rate midriff, first-rate navel, and first-rate breasts. But the owner of the navel, midriff and breasts had clearly resented Savonarola’s admiration, or at any rate the way it had been expressed. Hopefully, overhopefully, the rebuffed Ambassador was returning the attack.

The spirit lamp was lighted and, while the needle was being boiled, little Nurse Appu took her patient’s temperature.

“Ninety-nine point two.”

“Does that mean I have to be banished?” Mr. Bahu enquired.

“Not so far as he’s concerned,” the girl answered.

“So please stay,” said Will.

The little nurse gave him his injection of antibiotic, then, from one of the bottles in her bag, stirred a tablespoonful of some greenish liquid into half a glass of water.

“Drink this.”

It tasted like one of those herbal concoctions that health-food enthusiasts substitute for tea.

“What is it?” Will asked, and was told that it was an extract from a mountain plant related to valerian.

“It helps people to stop worrying,” the little nurse explained, “without making them sleepy. We give it to convalescents. It’s useful, too, in mental cases.”

“Which am I? Mental or convalescent?”

“Both,” she answered without hesitation.

Will laughed aloud. “That’s what comes of fishing for compliments.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” she assured him. “All I meant was that I’ve never met anybody from the outside who wasn’t a mental case.”

“Including the Ambassador?”

She turned the question back upon the questioner. “What do you think?”

Will passed it on to Mr. Bahu. “You’re the expert in this field,” he said.

“Settle it between yourselves,” said the little nurse. “I’ve got to go and see about my patient’s lunch.”

Mr. Bahu watched her go; then, raising his left eyebrow, he let fall his monocle and started methodically to polish the lens with his handkerchief. “You’re aberrated in one way,” he said to Will. “I’m aberrated in another. A schizoid (isn’t that what you are?) and, from the other side of the world, a paranoid. Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life. Were you ever interested in power?” he asked after a moment of silence.

“Never.” Will shook his head emphatically. “One can’t have power without committing oneself.”

“And for you the horror of being committed outweighs the pleasure of pushing other people around?”

“By a factor of several thousand times.”

“So it was never a temptation?”

“Never.” Then after a pause, “Let’s get down to business,” Will added in another tone.

“To business,” Mr. Bahu repeated. “Tell me something about Lord Aldehyde.”

“Well, as the Rani said, he’s remarkably generous.”

“I’m not interested in his virtues, only his intelligence. How bright is he?”

“Bright enough to know that nobody does anything for nothing.”

“Good,” said Mr. Bahu. “Then tell him from me that for effective work by experts in strategic positions he must be prepared to lay out at least ten times what he’s going to pay you.”

“I’ll write him a letter to that effect.”

“And do it today,” Mr. Bahu advised. “The plane leaves Shivapuram tomorrow evening, and there won’t be another outgoing mail for a whole week.”

“Thank you for telling me,” said Will. “And now—Her Highness and the shockable stripling being gone—let’s move on to the next temptation. What about sex?”

With the gesture of a man who tries to rid himself of a cloud of importunate insects, Mr. Bahu waved a brown and bony hand back and forth in front of his face. “Just a distraction, that’s all. Just a nagging, humiliating vexation. But an intelligent man can always cope with it.”

“How difficult it is,” said Will, “to understand another man’s vices!”

“You’re right. Everybody should stick to the insanity that God has seen fit to curse him with. Pecca fortiter—that was Luther’s advice. But make a point of sinning your own sins, not someone else’s. And above all don’t do what the people of this island do. Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat—and the boat is perpetually sinking.”

“In spite of which, no rat is justified in leaving it. Is that what you’re saying?”

“A few of them may sometimes try to leave. But they never get very far. History and the other rats will always see to it that they drown with the rest of us. That’s why Pala doesn’t have the ghost of a chance.”

Carrying a tray, the little nurse re-entered the room.

“Buddhist food,” she said, as she tied a napkin round Will’s neck. “All except the fish. But we’ve decided that fishes are vegetables within the meaning of the act.”

Will started to eat.

“Apart from the Rani and Murugan and us two here,” he asked after swallowing the first mouthful, “how many people from the outside have you ever met?”

“Well, there was that group of American doctors,” she answered. “They came to Shivapuram last year, while I was working at the Central Hospital.”

“What were they doing here?”

“They wanted to find out why we have such a low rate of neurosis and cardiovascular trouble. Those doctors!” She shook her head. “I tell you, Mr. Farnaby, they really made my hair stand on end—made everybody’s hair stand on end in the whole hospital.”

“So you think our medicine’s pretty primitive?”

“That’s the wrong word. It isn’t primitive. It’s fifty percent terrific and fifty percent nonexistent. Marvelous antibiotics—but absolutely no methods for increasing resistance, so that antibiotics won’t be necessary. Fantastic operations—but when it comes to teaching people the way of going through life without having to be chopped up, absolutely nothing. And it’s the same all along the line. Alpha Plus for patching you up when you’ve started to fall apart; but Delta Minus for keeping you healthy. Apart from sewerage systems and synthetic vitamins, you don’t seem to do anything at all about prevention. And yet you’ve got a proverb: prevention is better than cure.”

“But cure,” said Will, “is so much more dramatic than prevention. And for the doctors it’s also a lot more profitable.”

“Maybe for your doctors,” said the little nurse. “Not for ours. Ours get paid for keeping people well.”

“How is it to be done?”

“We’ve been asking that question for a hundred years, and we’ve found a lot of answers. Chemical answers, psychological answers, answers in terms of what you eat, how you make love, what you see and hear, how you feel about being who you are in this kind of world.”

“And which are the best answers?”

“None of them is best without the others.”

“So there’s no panacea.”

“How can there be?” And she quoted the little rhyme that every student nurse had to learn by heart on the first day of her training.

“‘I’am a crowd, obeying as many laws

As it has members. Chemically impure

Are all ‘my’ beings. There’s no single cure

For what can never have a single cause.”

“So whether it’s prevention or whether it’s cure, we attack on all the fronts at once. All the fronts,” she insisted, “from diet to autosuggestion, from negative ions to meditation.”

“Very sensible,” was Will’s comment.

“Perhaps a little too sensible,” said Mr. Bahu. “Did you ever try to talk sense to a maniac?” Will shook his head. “I did once.” He lifted the graying lock that slanted obliquely across his forehead. Just below the hairline a jagged scar stood out, strangely pale against the brown skin. “Luckily for me, the bottle he hit me with was pretty flimsy.” Smoothing his ruffled hair, he turned to the little nurse. “Don’t ever forget, Miss Radha; to the senseless nothing is more maddening than sense. Pala is a small island completely surrounded by twenty-nine hundred million mental cases. So beware of being too rational. In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king.” Mr. Bahu’s face was positively twinkling with Voltairean glee. “He gets lynched.”

Will laughed perfunctorily, then turned again to the little nurse.

“Don’t you have any candidates for the asylum?” he asked.

“Just as many as you have—I mean in proportion to the population. At least that’s what the textbook says.”

“So living in a sensible world doesn’t seem to make any difference.”

“Not to the people with the kind of body chemistry that’ll turn them into psychotics. They’re born vulnerable. Little troubles that other people hardly notice can bring them down. We’re just beginning to find out what it is that makes them so vulnerable. We’re beginning to be able to spot them in advance of a breakdown. And once they’ve been spotted, we can do something to raise their resistance. Prevention again—and, of course, on all the fronts at once.”

“So being born into a sensible world will make a difference even for the predestined psychotic.”

“And for the neurotics it has already made a difference. Your neurosis rate is about one in five or even four. Ours is about one in twenty. The one that breaks down gets treatment, on all fronts, and the nineteen who don’t break down have had prevention on all the fronts. Which brings me back to those American doctors. Three of them were psychiatrists, and one of the psychiatrists smoked cigars without stopping and had a German accent. He was the one that was chosen to give us a lecture. What a lecture!” The little nurse held her head between her hands. “I never heard anything like it.”

“What was it about?”

“About the way they treat people with neurotic symptoms. We just couldn’t believe our ears. They never attack on all the fronts; they only attack on about half of one front. So far as they’re concerned, the physical fronts don’t exist. Except for a mouth and an anus, their patient doesn’t have a body. He isn’t an organism, he wasn’t born with a constitution or a temperament. All he has is the two ends of a digestive tube, a family and a psyche. But what sort of psyche? Obviously not the whole mind, not the mind as it really is. How could it be that when they take no account of a person’s anatomy, or biochemistry or physiology? Mind abstracted from body—that’s the only front they attack on. And not even on the whole of that front. The man with the cigar kept talking about the unconscious. But the only unconscious they ever pay attention to is the negative unconscious, the garbage that people have tried to get rid of by burying it in the basement. Not a single word about the positive unconscious. No attempt to help the patient to open himself up to the life force or the Buddha Nature. And no attempt even to teach him to be a little more conscious in his everyday life. You know: ‘Here and now, boys.’ ‘Attention.’” She gave an imitation of the mynah birds. “These people just leave the unfortunate neurotic to wallow in his old bad habits of never being all there in present time. The whole thing is just pure idiocy! No, the man with the cigar didn’t even have that excuse; he was as clever as clever can be. So it’s not idiocy. It must be something voluntary, something self-induced—like getting drunk or talking yourself into believing some piece of foolishness because it happens to be in the Scriptures. And then look at their idea of what’s normal. Believe it or not, a normal human being is one who can have an orgasm and is adjusted to his society.” Once again the little nurse held her head between her hands. “It’s unimaginable! No question about what you do with your orgasms. No question about the quality of your feelings and thoughts and perceptions. And then what about the society you’re supposed to be adjusted to? Is it a mad society or a sane one? And even if it’s pretty sane, is it right that anybody should be completely adjusted to it?”

With another of his twinkling smiles, “Those whom God would destroy,” said the Ambassador, “He first makes mad. Or alternatively, and perhaps even more effectively, He first makes them sane.” Mr. Bahu rose and walked to the window. “My car has come for me. I must be getting back to Shivapuram and my desk.” He turned to Will and treated him to a long and flowery farewell. Then, switching off the Ambassador, “Don’t forget to write that letter,” he said. “It’s very important.” He smiled conspiratorially and, passing his thumb back and forth across the first two fingers of his right hand, he counted out invisible money.

“Thank goodness,” said the little nurse when he had gone.

“What was his offense?” Will enquired. “The usual thing?”

“Offering money to someone you want to go to bed with—but she doesn’t like you. So you offer more. Is that usual where he comes from?”

“Profoundly usual,” Will assured her.

“Well, I didn’t like it.”

“So I could see. And here’s another question. What about Murugan?”

“What makes you ask?”

“Curiosity. I noticed that you’d met before. Was that when he was here two years ago without his mother?”

“How did you know about that?”

“A little bird told me—or rather an extremely massive bird.”

“The Rani! She must have made it sound like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“But unfortunately I was spared the lurid details. Dark hints—that was all she gave me. Hints, for example, about veteran Messalinas giving lessons in love to innocent young boys.”

“And did he need those lessons!”

“Hints, too, about a precocious and promiscuous girl of his own age.”

Nurse Appu burst out laughing.

“Did you know her?”

“The precocious and promiscuous girl was me.”

“You? Does the Rani know it?”

“Murugan only gave her the facts, not the names. For which I’m very grateful. You see, I’d behaved pretty badly. Losing my head about someone I didn’t really love and hurting someone I did. Why is one so stupid?”

“The heart has its reasons,” said Will, “and the endocrines have theirs.”

There was a long silence. He finished the last of his cold boiled fish and vegetables. Nurse Appu handed him a plate of fruit salad.

“You’ve never seen Murugan in white satin pajamas,” she said.

“Have I missed something?”

“You’ve no idea how beautiful he looks in white satin pajamas. Nobody has any right to be so beautiful. It’s indecent. It’s taking an unfair advantage.”

It was the sight of him in those white satin pajamas from Sulka that had finally made her lose her head. Lose it so completely that for two months she had been someone else—an idiot who had gone chasing after a person who couldn’t bear her and had turned her back on the person who had always loved her, the person she herself had always loved.

“Did you get anywhere with the pajama boy?” Will asked.

“As far as a bed,” she answered. “But when I started to kiss him, he jumped out from between the sheets and locked himself in the bathroom. He wouldn’t come out until I’d passed his pajamas through the transom and given him my word of honor that he wouldn’t be molested. I can laugh about it now; but at the time, I tell you, at the time…” She shook her head. “Pure tragedy. They must have guessed, from the way I carried on, what had happened. Precocious and promiscuous girls, it was obvious, were no good. What he needed was regular lessons.”

“And the rest of the story I know,” said Will. “Boy writes to Mother, Mother flies home and whisks him off to Switzerland.”

“And they didn’t come back until about six months ago. And for at least half of that time they were in Rendang, staying with Murugan’s aunt.”

Will was on the point of mentioning Colonel Dipa, then remembered that he had promised Murugan to be discreet and said nothing.

From the garden came the sound of a whistle.

“Excuse me,” said the little nurse and went to the window. Smiling happily at what she saw, she waved her hand. “It’s Ranga.”

“Who’s Ranga?”

“That friend of mine I was talking about. He wants to ask you some questions. May he come in for a minute?”

“Of course.”

She turned back to the window and made a beckoning gesture.

“This means, I take it, that the white satin pajamas are completely out of the picture.”

She nodded. “It was only a one-act tragedy. I found my head almost as quickly as I’d lost it. And when I’d found it, there was Ranga, the same as ever, waiting for me.” The door swung open and a lanky young man in gym shoes and khaki shorts came into the room.

“Ranga Karakuran,” he announced as he shook Will’s hand.

“If you’d come five minutes earlier,” said Radha, “you’d have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Bahu.”

“Was he here?” Ranga made a grimace of disgust.

“Is he as bad as all that?” Will asked.

Ranga listed the indictments. “A: He hates us. B: He’s Colonel Dipa’s tame jackal. C: He’s the unofficial ambassador of all the oil companies. D: The old pig made passes at Radha. And E: He goes about giving lectures about the need for a religious revival. He’s even published a book about it. Complete with preface by someone at the Harvard Divinity School. It’s all part of the campaign against Palanese independence. God is Dipa’s alibi. Why can’t criminals be frank about what they’re up to? All this disgusting idealistic hogwash—it makes one vomit.”

Radha stretched out her hand and gave his ear three sharp tweaks.

“You little…” he began angrily; then broke off and laughed. “You’re quite right,” he said. “All the same, you didn’t have to pull quite so hard.”

“Is that what you always do when he gets worked up?” Will enquired of Radha.

“Whenever he gets worked up at the wrong moment, or over things he can’t do anything about.”

Will turned to the boy. “And do you ever have to tweak her ear?”

Ranga laughed. “I find it more satisfactory,” he said, “to smack her bottom. Unfortunately, she rarely needs it.”

“Does that mean she’s better balanced than you are?”

“Better balanced? I tell you, she’s abnormally sane.”

“Whereas you’re merely normal?”

“Maybe a little left of center.” He shook his head. “I get horribly depressed sometimes—feel I’m no good for anything.”

“Whereas in fact,” said Radha, “he’s so good that they’ve given him a scholarship to study biochemistry at the University of Manchester.”

“What do you do with him when he plays these despairing, miserable-sinner tricks on you? Pull his ears?”

“That,” she said, “and…well, other things.” She looked at Ranga and Ranga looked at her. Then they both burst out laughing.

“Quite,” said Will. “Quite. And these other things being what they are,” he went on, “is Ranga looking forward to the prospect of leaving Pala for a couple of years?”

“Not much,” Ranga admitted.

“But he has to go,” said Radha firmly.

“And when he gets there,” Will wondered, “is he going to be happy?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” said Ranga.

“Well, you won’t like the climate, you won’t like the food, you won’t like the noises or the smells or the architecture. But you’ll almost certainly like the work and you’ll probably find that you can like quite a lot of the people.”

“What about the girls?” Radha enquired.

“How do you want me to answer that question?” he asked. “Consolingly or truthfully?”

“Truthfully.”

“Well, my dear, the truth is that Ranga will be a wild success. Dozens of girls are going to find him irresistible. And some of those girls will be charming. How will you feel if he can’t resist?”

“I’ll be glad for his sake.”

Will turned to Ranga. “And will you be glad if she consoles herself, while you’re away, with another boy?”

“I’d like to be,” he said. “But whether I actually shall be glad—that’s another question.”

“Will you make her promise to be faithful?”

“I won’t make her promise anything.”

“Even though she’s your girl?”

“She’s her own girl.”

“And Ranga’s his own boy,” said the little nurse. “He’s free to do what he likes.”

Will thought of Babs’s strawberry-pink alcove and laughed ferociously. “And free above all,” he said, “to do what he doesn’t like.” He looked from one young face to the other and saw that he was being eyed with a certain astonishment. In another tone and with a different kind of smile, “But I’d forgotten,” he added. “One of you is abnormally sane and the other is only a little left of center. So how can you be expected to understand what this mental case from the outside is talking about?” And without leaving them time to answer his question, “Tell me,” he asked, “how long is it—” He broke off. “But perhaps I’m being indiscreet. If so, just tell me to mind my own business. But I would like to know, just as a matter of anthropological interest, how long you two have been friends.”

“Do you mean ‘friends’?” asked the little nurse. “Or do you mean ‘lovers’?”

“Why not both, while we’re about it?”

“Well, Ranga and I have been friends since we were babies. And we’ve been lovers—except for that miserable white pajama episode—since I was fifteen and a half and he was seventeen—just about two and a half years.”

“And nobody objected?”

“Why should they?”

“Why, indeed,” Will echoed. “But the fact remains that, in my part of the world, practically everybody would have objected.”

“What about other boys?” Ranga asked.

“In theory they are even more out of bounds than girls. In practice…Well, you can guess what happens when five or six hundred male adolescents are cooped up together in a boarding school. Does that sort of thing ever go on here?”

“Of course.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Surprised? Why?”

“Seeing that girls aren’t out of bounds.”

“But one kind of love doesn’t exclude the other.”

“And both are legitimate?”

“Naturally.”

“So that nobody would have minded if Murugan had been interested in another pajama boy?”

“Not if it was a good sort of relationship.”

“But unfortunately,” said Radha, “the Rani had done such a thorough job that he couldn’t be interested in anyone but her—and, of course, himself.”

“No boys?”

“Maybe now. I don’t know. All I know is that in my day there was nobody in his universe. No boys and, still more emphatically, no girls. Only Mother and masturbation and the Ascended Masters. Only jazz records and sports cars and Hitlerian ideas about being a Great Leader and turning Pala into what he calls a Modern State.”

“Three weeks ago,” said Ranga, “he and the Rani were at the palace, in Shivapuram. They invited a group of us from the university to come and listen to Murugan’s ideas—on oil, on industrialization, on television, on armaments, on the Crusade of the Spirit.”

“Did he make any converts?”

Ranga shook his head. “Why would anyone want to exchange something rich and good and endlessly interesting for something bad and thin and boring? We don’t feel any need for your speedboats or your television, your wars and revolutions, your revivals, your political slogans, your metaphysical nonsense from Rome and Moscow. Did you ever hear of maithuna?” he asked.

“Maithuna? What’s that?”

“Let’s start with the historical background,” Ranga answered; and with the engaging pedantry of an undergraduate delivering a lecture about matters which he himself has only lately heard of, he launched forth. “Buddhism came to Pala about twelve hundred years ago, and it came not from Ceylon, which is what one would have expected, but from Bengal, and through Bengal, later on, from Tibet. Result: we’re Mahayanists, and our Buddhism is shot through and through with Tantra. Do you know what Tantra is?”

Will had to admit that he had only the haziest notion.

“And to tell you the truth,” said Ranga, with a laugh that broke irrepressibly through the crust of his pedantry, “I don’t really know much more than you do. Tantra’s an enormous subject and most of it, I guess, is just silliness and superstition—not worth bothering about. But there’s a hard core of sense. If you’re a Tantrik, you don’t renounce the world or deny its value; you don’t try to escape into a Nirvana apart from life, as the monks of the Southern School do. No, you accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself.”

“Good talk,” said Will in a tone of polite skepticism.

“And something more besides,” Ranga insisted. “That’s the difference,” he added—and youthful pedantry modulated into the eagerness of youthful proselytism—“that’s the difference between your philosophy and ours. Western philosophers, even the best of them—they’re nothing more than good talkers. Eastern philosophers are often rather bad talkers, but that doesn’t matter. Talk isn’t the point. Their philosophy is pragmatic and operational. Like the philosophy of modern physics—except that the operations in question are psychological and the results transcendental. Your metaphysicians make statements about the nature of man and the universe; but they don’t offer the reader any way of testing the truth of those statements. When we make statements, we follow them up with a list of operations that can be used for testing the validity of what we’ve been saying. For example, tat tvam asi, ‘thou are That’—the heart of all our philosophy. Tat tvam asi,” he repeated. “It looks like a proposition in metaphysics; but what it actually refers to is a psychological experience, and the operations by means of which the experience can be lived through are described by our philosophers, so that anyone who’s willing to perform the necessary operations can test the validity of tat tvam asi for himself. The operations are called yoga, or dhyana, or Zen—or, in certain special circumstances, maithuna.”

“Which brings us back to my original question. What is maithuna?”

“Maybe you’d better ask Radha.”

Will turned to the little nurse. “What is it?”

“Maithuna,” she answered gravely, “is the yoga of love.”

“Sacred or profane?”

“There’s no difference.”

“That’s the whole point,” Ranga put in. “When you do maithuna, profane love is sacred love.”

“Buddhatvan yoshidyonisansritan,” the girl quoted.

“None of your Sanskirt! What does it mean?”

“How would you translate Buddhatvan, Ranga?”

“Buddhaness, Buddheity, the quality of being enlightened.”

Radha nodded and turned back to Will. “It means that Buddhaness is in the yoni.”

“In the yoni?” Will remembered those little stone emblems of the Eternal Feminine that he had bought, as presents for the girls at the office, from a hunchbacked vendor of bondieuseries at Benares. Eight annas for a black yoni; twelve for the still more sacred image of the yoni-lingam. “Literally in the yoni?” he asked. “Or metaphorically?”

“What a ridiculous question!” said the little nurse, and she laughed her clear unaffected laugh of pure amusement. “Do you think we make love metaphorically? Buddhatvan yoshidyonisansritan,” she repeated. “It couldn’t be more completely and absolutely literal.”

“Did you ever hear of the Oneida Community?” Ranga now asked.

Will nodded. He had known an American historian who specialized in nineteenth-century communities. “But why do you know about it?” he asked.

“Because it’s mentioned in all our textbooks of applied philosophy. Basically, maithuna is the same as what the Oneida people called Male Continence. And that was the same as what Roman Catholics mean by coitus reservatus.”

“Reservatus,” the little nurse repeated. “It always makes me want to laugh. ‘Such a reserved young man’!” The dimples reappeared and there was a flash of white teeth.

“Don’t be silly,” said Ranga severely. “This is serious.”

She expressed her contrition. “But reservatus was really too funny.”

“In a word,” Will concluded, “it’s just birth control without contraceptives.”

“But that’s only the beginning of the story,” said Ranga. “Maithuna is also something else. Something even more important.” The undergraduate pedant had reasserted himself. “Remember,” he went on earnestly, “remember the point that Freud was always harping on.”

“Which point? There were so many.”

“The point about the sexuality of children. What we’re born with, what we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a sexuality that isn’t concentrated on the genitals; it’s a sexuality diffused throughout the whole organism. That’s the paradise we inherit. But the paradise gets lost as the child grows up. Maithuna is the organized attempt to regain that paradise.” He turned to Radha. “You’ve got a good memory,” he said. “What’s that phrase of Spinoza’s that they quote in the applied philosophy book?”

“‘Make the body capable of doing many things,’” she recited. “‘This will help you to perfect the mind and so to come to the intellectual love of God.’”

“Hence all the yogas,” said Ranga. “Including maithuna.”

“And it’s a real yoga,” the girl insisted. “As good as raja yoga, or karma yoga, or bhakti yoga. In fact, a great deal better, so far as most people are concerned. Maithuna really gets them there.”

“What’s ‘there’?” Will asked.

“‘There’ is where you know.”

“Know what?”

“Know who in fact you are—and believe it or not,” she added, “tat tvam asi—thou art That, and so am I: That is me.” The dimples came to life, the teeth flashed. “And That’s also him.” She pointed at Ranga. “Incredible, isn’t it?” She stuck out her tongue at him. “And yet it’s a fact.”

Ranga smiled, reached out and with an extended forefinger touched the tip of her nose. “And not merely a fact,” he said. “A revealed truth.” He gave the nose a little tap. “A revealed truth,” he repeated. “So mind your P’s and Q’s, young woman.”

“What I’m wondering,” said Will, “is why we aren’t all enlightened—I mean, if it’s just a question of making love with a rather special kind of technique. What’s the answer to that?”

“I’ll tell you,” Ranga began.

But the girl cut him short. “Listen,” she said, “listen!”

Will listened. Faint and far off, but still distinct, he heard the strange inhuman voice that had first welcomed him to Pala. “Attention,” it was saying. “Attention, Attention…”

“That bloody bird again!”

“But that’s the secret.”

“Attention? But a moment ago you were saying it was something else. What about that young man who’s so reserved?”

“That’s just to make it easier to pay attention.”

“And it does make it easier,” Ranga confirmed. “And that’s the whole point of maithuna. It’s not the special technique that turns love-making into yoga; it’s the kind of awareness that the technique makes possible. Awareness of one’s sensations and awareness of the not-sensation in every sensation.”

“What’s a not-sensation?”

“It’s the raw material for sensation that my not-self provides me with.”

“And you can pay attention to your not-self?”

“Of course.”

Will turned to the little nurse. “You too?”

“To myself,” she answered, “and at the same time to my not-self. And to Ranga’s not-self, and to Ranga’s self, and to Ranga’s body, and to my body and everything it’s feeling. And to all the love and the friendship. And to the mystery of the other person—the perfect stranger, who’s the other half of your own self, and the same as your not-self. And all the while one’s paying attention to all the things that, if one were sentimental, or worse, if one were spiritual like the poor old Rani, one would find so unromantic and gross and sordid even. But they aren’t sordid, because one’s also paying attention to the fact that, when one’s fully aware of them, those things are just as beautiful as all the rest, just as wonderful.”

“Maithuna is dhyana,” Ranga concluded. A new word, he evidently felt, would explain everything.

“But what is dhyana?” Will asked.

“Dhyana is contemplation.”

“Contemplation.”

Will thought of that strawberry-pink alcove above the Charing Cross Road. Contemplation was hardly the word he would have chosen. And yet even there, on second thoughts, even there he had found a kind of deliverance. Those alienations in the changing light of Porter’s Gin were alienations from his odious daytime self. They were also, unfortunately, alienations from all the rest of his being—alienations from love, from intelligence, from common decency, from all consciousness but that of an excruciating frenzy by corpse-light or in the rosy glow of the cheapest, vulgarest illusion. He looked again at Radha’s shining face. What happiness! What a manifest conviction, not of the sin that Mr. Bahu was so determined to make the world safe for, but of its serene and blissful opposite! It was profoundly touching. But he refused to be touched. Noli me tangere—it was a categorical imperative. Shifting the focus of his mind, he managed to see the whole thing as reassuringly ludicrous. What shall we do to be saved? The answer is in four letters.

Smiling at his own little joke, “Were you taught maithuna at school?” he asked ironically.

“At school,” Radha answered with a simple matter-of-factness that took all the Rabelaisian wind out of his sails.

“Everybody’s taught it,” Ranga added.

“And when does the teaching begin?”

“About the same time as trigonometry and advanced biology. That’s between fifteen and fifteen and a half.”

“And after they’ve learned maithuna, after they’ve gone out into the world and got married—that is, if you ever do get married?”

“Oh, we do, we do,” Radha assured him.

“Do they still practice it?”

“Not all of them, of course. But a good many do.”

“All the time?”

“Except when they want to have a baby.”

“And those who don’t want to have babies, but who might like to have a little change from maithuna—what do they do?”

“Contraceptives,” said Ranga laconically.

“And are the contraceptives available?”

“Available! They’re distributed by the government. Free, gratis, and for nothing—except of course that they have to be paid for out of taxes.”

“The postman,” Radha added, “delivers a thirty-night supply at the beginning of each month.”

“And the babies don’t arrive?”

“Only those we want. Nobody has more than three, and most people stop at two.”

“With the result,” said Ranga, reverting, with the statistics, to his pedantic manner, “that our population is increasing at less than a third of one percent per annum. Whereas Rendang’s increase is as big as Ceylon’s—almost three percent. And China’s is two percent, and India’s about one point seven.”

“I was in China only a month ago,” said Will. “Terrifying! And last year I spent four weeks in India. And before India in Central America, which is outbreeding even Rendang and Ceylon. Has either of you been in Rendang-Lobo?”

Ranga nodded affirmatively.

“Three days in Rendang,” he explained. “If you get into the Upper Sixth, it’s part of the advanced sociology course. They let you see for yourself what the Outside is like.”

“And what did you think of the Outside?” Will enquired.

Ranga answered with another question. “When you were in Rendang-Lobo, did they show you the slums?”

“On the contrary, they did their best to prevent me from seeing the slums. But I gave them the slip.”

Gave them the slip, he was vividly remembering, on his way back to the hotel from that grisly cocktail party at the Rendang Foreign Office. Everybody who was anybody was there. All the local dignitaries and their wives—uniforms and medals, Dior and emeralds. All the important foreigners—diplomats galore, British and American oilmen, six members of the Japanese trade mission, a lady pharmacologist from Leningrad, two Polish engineers, a German tourist who just happened to be a cousin of Krupp von Bohlen, an enigmatic Armenian representing a very important financial consortium in Tangier, and, beaming with triumph, the fourteen Czech technicians who had come with last month’s shipment of tanks and cannon and machine guns from Skoda. “And these are the people,” he had said to himself as he walked down the marble steps of the Foreign Office into Liberty Square, “these are the people who rule the world. Twenty-nine hundred millions of us at the mercy of a few scores of politicians, a few thousands of tycoons and generals and moneylenders. Ye are the cyanide of the earth—and the cyanide will never, never lose its savor.”

After the glare of the cocktail party, after the laughter and the luscious smells of canapés and Chanel-sprayed women, those alleys behind the brand-new Palace of Justice had seemed doubly dark and noisome. Those poor wretches camping out under the palm trees of Independence Avenue more totally abandoned by God and man than even the homeless, hopeless thousands he had seen sleeping like corpses in the streets of Calcutta. And now he thought of that little boy, that tiny potbellied skeleton, whom he had picked up, bruised and shaken by a fall from the back of the little girl, scarcely larger than himself, who was carrying him—had picked up and, led by the other child, had carried back, carried down, to the windowless cellar that, for nine of them (he had counted the dark ringwormy heads), was home.

“Keeping babies alive,” he said, “healing the sick, preventing the sewage from getting into the water supply—one starts with doing things that are obviously and intrinsically good. And how does one end? One ends by increasing the sum of human misery and jeopardizing civilization. It’s the kind of cosmic practical joke that God seems really to enjoy.”

He gave the young people one of his flayed, ferocious grins.

“God has nothing to do with it,” Ranga retorted, “and the joke isn’t cosmic, it’s strictly man-made. These things aren’t like gravity or the second law of thermodynámics; they don’t have to happen. They happen only if people are stupid enough to allow them to happen. Here in Pala we haven’t allowed them to happen, so the joke hasn’t been played on us. We’ve had good sanitation for the best part of a century—and still we’re not overcrowded, we’re not miserable, we’re not under a dictatorship. And the reason is very simple: we chose to behave in a sensible and realistic way.”

“How on earth were you able to choose?” Will asked.

“The right people were intelligent at the right moment,” said Ranga. “But it must be admitted—they were also very lucky. In fact Pala as a whole has been extraordinarily lucky. It’s had the luck, first of all, never to have been anyone’s colony. Rendang has a magnificent harbor. That brought them an Arab invasion in the Middle Ages. We have no harbor, so the Arabs left us alone and we’re still Buddhists or Shivaites—that is, when we’re not Tantrik agnostics.”

“Is that what you are?” Will enquired. “A Tantrik agnostic?”

“With Mahayana trimmings,” Ranga qualified. “Well, to return to Rendang. After the Arabs it got the Portuguese. We didn’t. No harbor, no Portuguese. Therefore no Catholic minority, no blasphemous nonsense about its being God’s will that people should breed themselves into subhuman misery, no organized resistance to birth control. And that isn’t our only blessing: After a hundred and twenty years of the Portuguese, Ceylon and Rendang got the Dutch. And after the Dutch came the English. We escaped both those infestations. No Dutch, no English, and therefore no planters, no coolie labor, no cash crops for export, no systematic exhaustion of our soil. Also no whisky, no Calvinism, no syphilis, no foreign administrators. We were left to go our own way and take responsibility for our own affairs.”

“You certainly were lucky.”

“And on top of that amazing good luck,” Ranga went on, “there was the amazing good management of Murugan the Reformer and Andrew MacPhail. Has Dr. Robert talked to you about his great-grandfather?”

“Just a few words, that’s all.”

“Did he tell you about the founding of the Experimental Station?”

Will shook his head.

“The Experimental Station,” said Ranga, “had a lot to do with our population policy. It all began with a famine. Before he came to Pala, Dr. Andrew spent a few years in Madras. The second year he was there, the monsoon failed. The crops were burnt up, the tanks and even the wells went dry. Except for the English and the rich, there was no food. People died like flies. There’s a famous passage in Dr. Andrew’s memoirs about the famine. A description and then a comment. He’d had to listen to a lot of sermons when he was a boy, and there was one he kept remembering now, as he worked among the starving Indians. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone’—that was the text, and the preacher had been so eloquent that several people were converted. ‘Man cannot live by bread alone.’ But without bread, he now saw, there is no mind, no spirit, no inner light, no Father in Heaven. There is only hunger, there is only despair and then apathy and finally death.”

“Another of the cosmic jokes,” said Will. “And this one was formulated by Jesus himself. ‘To those who have shall be given, and from those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have’—the bare possibility of being human. It’s the cruelest of all God’s jokes, and also the commonest. I’ve seen it being played on millions of men and women, millions of small children—all over the world.”

“So you can understand why that famine made such an indelible impression on Dr. Andrew’s mind. He was resolved, and so was his friend the Raja, that in Pala, at least, there should always be bread. Hence their decision to set up the Experimental Station. Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics was a great success. In a few years we had new strains of rice and maize and millet and breadfruit. We had better breeds of cattle and chickens. Better ways of cultivating and composting; and in the fifties we built the first superphosphate factory east of Berlin. Thanks to all these things people were eating better, living longer, losing fewer children. Ten years after the founding of Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics the Raja took a census. The population had been stable, more or less, for a century. Now it had started to rise. In fifty or sixty years, Dr. Andrew foresaw, Pala would be transformed into the kind of festering slum that Rendang is today. What was to be done? Dr. Andrew had read his Malthus. ‘Food production increases arithmetically; population increases geometrically. Man has only two choices: he can either leave the matter to Nature, who will solve the population problem in the old familiar way, by famine, pestilence and war: or else (Malthus being a clergyman) he can keep down his numbers by moral restraint.’”

“Mor-ral r-restr-raint,” the little nurse repeated, rolling her r’s in the Indonesian parody of a Scottish divine. “Mor-ralr-restr-raint! Incidentally,” she added, “Dr. Andrew had just married the Raja’s sixteen-year-old niece.”

“And that,” said Ranga, “was yet another reason for revising Malthus. Famine on this side, restraint on that. Surely there must be some better, happier, humaner way between the Malthusian horns. And of course there was such a way even then, even before the age of rubber and spermicides. There were sponges, there was soap, there were condoms made of every known waterproof material from oiled silk to the blind gut of sheep. The whole armory of Paleo-Birth Control.”

“And how did the Raja and his subjects react to Paleo-Birth Control? With horror?”

“Not at all. They were good Buddhists, and every good Buddhist knows that begetting is merely postponed assassination. Do your best to get off the Wheel of Birth and Death, and for heaven’s sake don’t go about putting superfluous victims onto the Wheel. For a good Buddhist, birth control makes metaphysical sense. And for a village community of rice growers, it makes social and economic sense. There must be enough young people to work the fields and support the aged and the little ones. But not too many of them; for then neither the old nor the workers nor their children will have enough to eat. In the old days, couples had to have six children in order to raise two or three. Then came clean water and the Experimental Station. Out of six children five now survived. The old patterns of breeding had ceased to make sense. The only objection to Paleo-Birth Control was its crudity. But fortunately there was a more aesthetic alternative. The Raja was a Tantrik initiate and had learned the yoga of love. Dr. Andrew was told about maithuna and, being a true man of science, agreed to try it. He and his young wife were given the necessary instruction.”

“With what results?”

“Enthusiastic approval.”

“That’s the way everybody feels about it,” said Radha.

“Now, now, none of your sweeping generalizations! Some feel that way, others don’t. Dr. Andrew was one of the enthusiasts. The whole matter was lengthily discussed. In the end they decided that contraceptives should be like education—free, tax-supported and, though not compulsory, as nearly as possible universal. For those who felt the need for something more refined, there would be instruction in the yoga of love.”

“Do you mean to tell me that they got away with it?”

“It wasn’t really so difficult. Maithuna was orthodox. People weren’t being asked to do anything against their religion. On the contrary, they were being given a flattering opportunity to join the elect by learning something esoteric.”

“And don’t forget the most important point of all,” the little nurse chimed in. “For women—all women, and I don’t care what you say about sweeping generalizations—the yoga of love means perfection, means being transformed and taken out of themselves and completed.” There was a brief silence. “And now,” she resumed in another, brisker tone, “it’s high time we left you to your siesta.”

“Before you go,” said Will, “I’d like to write a letter. Just a brief note to my boss to say that I’m alive and in no immediate danger of being eaten by the natives.”

Radha went foraging in Dr. Robert’s study and came back with paper, pencil and an envelope.

“Veni, vidi,” Will scrawled. “I was wrecked, I met the Rani and her collaborator from Rendang, who implies that he can deliver the goods in return for baksheesh to the tune (he was specific) of twenty thousand pounds. Shall I negotiate on this basis? If you cable Proposed article OK, I shall go ahead. If No hurry for article I shall let the matter drop. Tell my mother I am safe and shall soon be writing.”

“There,” he said as he handed the envelope, sealed and addressed, to Ranga. “May I ask you to buy me a stamp and get this off in time to catch tomorrow’s plane?”

“Without fail,” the boy promised.

Watching them go, Will felt a twinge of conscience. What charming young people! And here he was, plotting with Bahu and the forces of history to subvert their world. He comforted himself with the thought that, if he didn’t do it, somebody else would. And even if Joe Aldehyde did get his concession, they could still go on making love in the style to which they were accustomed. Or couldn’t they?

From the door the little nurse turned back for a final word. “No reading now,” she wagged her finger at him. “Go to sleep.”

“I never sleep during the day,” Will assured her, with a certain perverse satisfaction.

7

HE COULD NEVER GO TO SLEEP DURING THE DAY; BUT WHEN HE looked next at his watch, the time was twenty-five past four, and he was feeling wonderfully refreshed. He picked up Notes on What’s What, and resumed his interrupted reading:

Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.

This was as far as he had got this morning; and now here was a new section, the fifth:

Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact—sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

Will turned the page. A sheet of notepaper fluttered onto the bed. He picked it up and glanced at it. Twenty lines of small clear writing and at the bottom of the page the initials S. M. Not a letter evidently; a poem and therefore public property. He read:

Somewhere between brute silence and last Sunday’s

Thirteen hundred thousand sermons;

Somewhere between

Calvin on Christ (God help us!) and the lizards;

Somewhere between seeing and speaking, somewhere

Between our soiled and greasy currency of words

And the first star, the great moths fluttering

About the ghosts of flowers,

Lies the clear place where I, no longer I,

Nevertheless remember

Love’s nightlong wisdom of the other shore;

And, listening to the wind, remember too

That other night, that first of widowhood,

Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark.

Mine, mine, all mine, mine inescapably!

But I, no longer I,

In this clear place between my thought and silence

See all I had and lost, anguish and joys,

Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass,

Blue, unpossessed and open.

“Like gentians,” Will repeated to himself, and thought of that summer holiday in Switzerland when he was twelve; thought of the meadow, high above Grindelwald, with its unfamiliar flowers, its wonderful un-English butterflies; thought of the dark-blue sky and the sunshine and the huge shining mountains on the other side of the valley. And all his father had found to say was that it looked like an advertisement for Nestlé’s milk chocolate. “Not even real chocolate,” he had insisted with a grimace of disgust. “Milk chocolate.” After which there had been an ironic comment on the water color his mother was painting—so badly (poor thing!) but with such loving and conscientious care. “The milk chocolate advertisement that Nestlé rejected.” And now it was his turn. “Instead of just mooning about with your mouth open, like the village idiot, why not do something intelligent for a change? Put in some work on your German grammar, for example.” And diving into the rucksack, he had pulled out, from among the hard-boiled eggs and the sandwiches, the abhorred little brown book. What a detestable man! And yet, if Susila was right, one ought to be able to see him now, after all these years, glowing like a gentian—Will glanced again at the last line of the poem—“blue, unpossessed and open.”

“Well…” said a familiar voice.

He turned toward the door. “Talk of the devil,” he said. “Or rather read what the devil has written.” He held up the sheet of notepaper for her inspection.

Susila glanced at it. “Oh that,” she said. “If only good intentions were enough to make good poetry!” She sighed and shook her head.

“I was trying to think of my father as a gentian,” he went on. “But all I get is the persistent image of the most enormous turd.”

“Even turds,” she assured him, “can be seen as gentians.”

“But only, I take it, in the place you were writing about—the clear place between thought and silence?”

Susila nodded.

“How do you get there?”

“You don’t get there. There comes to you. Or rather there is really here.”

“You’re just like little Radha,” he complained. “Parroting what the Old Raja says at the beginning of this book.”

“If we repeat it,” she said, “it’s because it happens to be true. If we didn’t repeat it, we’d be ignoring the facts.”

“Whose facts?” he asked. “Certainly not mine.”

“Not at the moment,” she agreed. “But if you were to do the kind of things that the Old Raja recommends, they might be yours.”

“Did you have parent trouble?” he asked after a little silence. “Or could you aways see turds as gentians?”

“Not at that age,” she answered. “Children have to be Manichean dualists. It’s the price we must all pay for learning the rudiments of being human. Seeing turds as gentians, or rather seeing both gentians and turds as Gentians with a capital G—that’s a postgraduate accomplishment.”

“So what did you do about your parents? Just grin and bear the unbearable? Or did your father and mother happen to be bearable?”

“Bearable separately,” she answered. “Especially my father. But quite unbearable together—unbearable because they couldn’t bear one another. A bustling, cheerful, outgoing woman married to a man so fastidiously introverted that she got on his nerves all the time—even, I suspect, in bed. She never stopped communicating, and he never started. With the result that he thought she was shallow and insincere, she thought he was heartless, contemptuous and without normal human feelings.”

“I’d have expected that you people would know better than to walk into that kind of trap.”

“We do know better,” she assured him. “Boys and girls are specifically taught what to expect of people whose temperament and physique are very different from their own. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that the lessons don’t seem to have much effect. Not to mention the fact that in some cases the psychological distance between the people involved is really too great to be bridged. Anyhow, the fact remains that my father and mother never managed to make a go of it. They’d fallen in love with one another—goodness knows why. But when they came to close quarters, she found herself being constantly hurt by his inaccessibility, while her uninhibited good-fellowship made him fairly cringe with embarrassment and distaste. My sympathies were always with my father. Physically and temperamentally I’m very close to him, not in the least like my mother. I remember, even as a tiny child, how I used to shrink away from her exuberance. She was like a permanent invasion of one’s privacy. She still is.”

“Do you have to see a lot of her?”

“Very little. She has her own job and her own friends. In our part of the world ‘Mother’ is strictly the name of a function. When the function has been duly fulfilled, the title lapses; the ex-child and the woman who used to be called ‘Mother’ establish a new kind of relationship. If they get on well together, they continue to see a lot of one another. If they don’t, they drift apart. Nobody expects them to cling, and clinging isn’t equated with loving—isn’t regarded as anything particularly creditable.”

“So all’s well now. But what about then? What happened when you were a child, growing up between two people who couldn’t bridge the gulf that separated them? I know what that means—the fairy-story ending in reverse, ‘And so they lived unhappily ever after.’”

“And I’ve no doubt,” said Susila, “that if we hadn’t been born in Pala, we would have lived unhappily ever after. As it was, we got on, all things considered, remarkably well.”

“How did you manage to do that?”

“We didn’t; it was all managed for us. Have you read what the Old Raja says about getting rid of the two thirds of sorrow that’s homemade and gratuitous?”

Will nodded. “I was just reading it when you came in.”

“Well, in the bad old days,” she went on, “Palanese families could be just as victimizing, tyrant-producing and liar-creating as yours can be today. In fact they were so awful that Dr. Andrew and the Raja of the Reform decided that something had to be done about it. Buddhist ethics and primitive village communism were skillfully made to serve the purposes of reason, and in a single generation the whole family system was radically changed.” She hesitated for a moment. “Let me explain,” she went on, “in terms of my own particular case—the case of an only child of two people who couldn’t understand one another and were always at cross-purposes or actually quarreling. In the old days, a little girl brought up in those surroundings would have emerged as either a wreck, a rebel, or a resigned hypocritical conformist. Under the new dispensation I didn’t have to undergo unnecessary suffering, I wasn’t wrecked or forced into rebellion or resignation. Why? Because from the moment I could toddle, I was free to escape.”

“To escape?” he repeated. “To escape?” It seemed too good to be true.

“Escape,” she explained, “is built into the new system. Whenever the parental Home Sweet Home becomes too unbearable, the child is allowed, is actively encouraged—and the whole weight of public opinion is behind the encouragement—to migrate to one of its other homes.”

“How many homes does a Palanese child have?”

“About twenty on the average.”

“Twenty? My God!”

“We all belong,” Susila explained, “to an MAC—a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old-timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents—everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teen-agers.”

Will shook his head. “Making twenty families grow where only one grew before.”

“But what grew before was your kind of family. The twenty are all our kind.” As though reading instructions from a cookery book, “Take one sexually inept wage slave,” she went on, “one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice. Our recipe is rather different: Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection.”

“And what comes out of your open pan?” he asked.

“An entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family. Twenty pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and ex-mothers, and forty or fifty assorted children of all ages.”

“Do people stay in the same adoption club all their lives?”

“Of course not. Grown-up children don’t adopt their own parents or their own brothers and sisters. They go out and adopt another set of elders, a different group of peers and juniors. And the members of the new club adopt them and, in due course, their children. Hybridization of microcultures—that’s what our sociologists call the process. It’s as beneficial, on its own level, as the hybridization of different strains of maize or chickens. Healthier relationships in more responsible groups, wider sympathies and deeper understandings. And the sympathies and understandings are for everyone in the MAC from babies to centenarians.”

“Centenarians? What’s your expectation of life?”

“A year or two more than yours,” she answered. “Ten percent of us are over sixty-five. The old get pensions, if they can’t earn. But obviously pensions aren’t enough. They need something useful and challenging to do; they need people they can care for and be loved by in return. The MAC’s fulfill those needs.”

“It all sounds,” said Will, “suspiciously like the propaganda for one of the new Chinese communes.”

“Nothing,” she assured him, “could be less like a commune than an MAC. An MAC isn’t run by the government, it’s run by its members. And we’re not militaristic. We’re not interested in turning out good party members; we’re only interested in turning out good human beings. We don’t inculcate dogmas. And finally we don’t take the children away from their parents; on the contrary, we give the children additional parents and the parents additional children. That means that even in the nursery we enjoy a certain degree of freedom; and our freedom increases as we grow older and can deal with a wider range of experience and take on greater responsibilities. Whereas in China there’s no freedom at all. The children are handed over to official baby-tamers, whose business it is to turn them into obedient servants of the State. Things are a great deal better in your part of the world—better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state-appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They’re foisted on you by hereditary predestination. You can’t get rid of them, can’t take a holiday from them, can’t go to anyone else for a change of moral or psychological air. It’s freedom, if you like—but freedom in a telephone booth.”

“Locked in,” Will elaborated, “(and I’m thinking now of myself) with a sneering bully, a Christian martyr, and a little girl who’d been frightened by the bully and blackmailed by the martyr’s appeal to her better feelings into a state of quivering imbecility. That was the home from which, until I was fourteen and my aunt Mary came to live next door, I never escaped.”

“And your unfortunate parents never escaped from you.”

“That’s not quite true. My father used to escape into brandy and my mother into High Anglicanism. I had to serve out my sentence without the slightest mitigation. Fourteen years of family servitude. How I envy you! Free as a bird!”

“Not so lyrical! Free, let’s say, as a developing human being, free as a future woman—but no freer. Mutual Adoption guarantees children against injustice and the worst consequences of parental ineptitude. It doesn’t guarantee them against discipline, or against having to accept responsibilities. On the contrary, it increases the number of their responsibilities; it exposes them to a wide variety of disciplines. In your predestined and exclusive families, children, as you say, serve a long prison term under a single set of parental jailers. These parental jailers may, of course, be good, wise and intelligent. In that case the little prisoners will emerge more or less unscathed. But in point of fact most of your parental jailers are not conspicuously good, wise or intelligent. They’re apt to be well-meaning but stupid, or not well-meaning and frivolous, or else neurotic, or occasionally downright malevolent, or frankly insane. So God help the young convicts committed by law and custom and religion to their tender mercies! But now consider what happens in a large, inclusive, voluntary family. No telephone booths, no predestined jailers. Here the children grow up in a world that’s a working model of society at large, a small-scale but accurate version of the environment in which they’re going to have to live when they’re grown up. ‘Holy,’ ‘healthy,’ ‘whole’—they all come from the same root and carry different overtones of the same meaning. Etymologically, and in fact, our kind of family, the inclusive and voluntary kind, is the genuine holy family. Yours is the unholy family.”

“Amen,” said Will, and thought again of his own childhood, thought too of poor little Murugan in the clutches of the Rani. “What happens,” he asked after a pause, “when the children migrate to one of their other homes? How long do they stay there?”

“It all depends. When my children get fed up with me, they seldom stay away for more than a day or two. That’s because, fundamentally, they’re very happy at home. I wasn’t, and so when I walked out, I’d sometimes stay away for a whole month.”

“And did your deputy parents back you up against your real mother and father?”

“It’s not a question of doing anything against anybody. All that’s being backed up is intelligence and good feeling, and all that’s being opposed is unhappiness and its avoidable causes. If a child feels unhappy in his first home, we do our best for him in fifteen or twenty second homes. Meanwhile the father and mother get some tactful therapy from the other members of their Mutual Adoption Club. In a few weeks the parents are fit to be with their children again, and the children are fit to be with their parents. But you mustn’t think,” she added, “that it’s only when they’re in trouble that children resort to their deputy parents and grandparents. They do it all the time, whenever they feel the need for a change or some kind of new experience. And it isn’t just a social whirl. Wherever they go, as deputy children, they have their responsibilities as well as their rights—brushing the dog, for example, cleaning out the birdcages, minding the baby while the mother’s doing something else. Duties as well as privileges—but not in one of your airless little telephone booths. Duties and privileges in a big, open, unpredestined, inclusive family, where all the seven ages of man and a dozen different skills and talents are represented, and in which children have experience of all the important and significant things that human beings do and suffer—working, playing, loving, getting old, being sick, dying…” She was silent, thinking of Dugald and Dugald’s mother; then, deliberately changing her tone, “But what about you?” she went on. “I’ve been so busy talking about families that I haven’t even asked you how you’re feeling. You certainly look a lot better than when I saw you last.”

“Thanks to Dr. MacPhail. And also thanks to someone who, I suspect, was definitely practicing medicine without a license. What on earth did you do to me yesterday afternoon?”

Susila smiled. “You did it to yourself,” she assured him. “I merely pressed the buttons.”

“Which buttons?”

“Memory buttons, imagination buttons.”

“And that was enough to put me into a hypnotic trance?”

“If you like to call it that.”

“What else can one call it?”

“Why call it anything? Names are such question-beggars. Why not be content with just knowing that it happened?”

“But what did happen?”

“Well, to begin with, we made some kind of contact, didn’t we?”

“We certainly did,” he agreed. “And yet I don’t believe I even so much as looked at you.”

He was looking at her now, though—looking and wondering, as he looked, who this strange little creature really was, what lay behind the smooth grave mask of the face, what the dark eyes were seeing as they returned his scrutiny, what she was thinking.

“How could you look at me?” she said. “You’d gone off on your vacation.”

“Or was I pushed off?”

“Pushed? No.” She shook her head. “Let’s say seen off, helped off.” There was a moment of silence. “Did you ever,” she resumed, “try to do a job of work with a child hanging around?”

Will thought of the small neighbor who had offered to help him paint the dining-room furniture, and laughed at the memory of his exasperation.

“Poor little darling!” Susila went on. “He means so well, he’s so anxious to help.”

“But the paint’s on the carpet, the fingerprints are all over the walls…”

“So that in the end you have to get rid of him. ‘Run along, little boy! Go and play in the garden!’”

There was a silence.

“Well?” he questioned at last.

“Don’t you see?”

Will shook his head.

“What happens when you’re ill, when you’ve been hurt? Who does the repairing? Who heals the wounds and throws off the infection? Do you?”

“Who else?”

“You?” she insisted. “You? The person that feels the pain and does the worrying and thinks about sin and money and the future! Is that you capable of doing what has to be done?”

“Oh, I see what you’re driving at.”

“At last!” she mocked.

“Send me to play in the garden so that the grown-ups can do their work in peace. But who are the grown-ups?”

“Don’t ask me,” she answered. “That’s a question for a neurotheologian.”

“Meaning what?” he asked.

“Meaning precisely what it says. Somebody who thinks about people in terms, simultaneously, of the Clear Light of the Void and the vegetative nervous system. The grown-ups are a mixture of Mind and physiology.”

“And the children?”

“The children are the little fellows who think they know better than the grown-ups.”

“And so must be told to run along and play.”

“Exactly.”

“Is your sort of treatment standard procedure in Pala?” he asked.

“Standard procedure,” she assured him. “In your part of the world doctors get rid of the children by poisoning them with barbiturates. We do it by talking to them about cathedrals and jackdaws.” Her voice had modulated into a chant. “About white clouds floating in the sky, white swans floating on the dark, smooth, irresistible river of life…”

“Now, now,” he protested. “None of that!”

A smile lit up the grave dark face, and she began to laugh. Will looked at her with astonishment. Here, suddenly, was a different person, another Susila MacPhail, gay, mischievous, ironical.

“I know your tricks,” he added, joining in the laughter.

“Tricks?” Still laughing, she shook her head. “I was just explaining how I did it.”

“I know exactly how you did it. And I also know that it works. What’s more, I give you leave to do it again—whenever it’s necessary.”

“If you like,” she said more seriously, “I’ll show you how to press your own buttons. We teach it in all our elementary schools. The three R’s plus rudimentary SD.”

“What’s that?”

“Self-Determination. Alias Destiny Control.”

“Destiny Control?” He raised his eyebrows.

“No, no,” she assured him, “we’re not quite such fools as you seem to think. We know perfectly well that only a part of our destiny is controllable.”

“And you control it by pressing your own buttons?”

“Pressing our own buttons and then visualizing what we’d like to happen.”

“But does it happen?”

“In many cases it does.”

“Simple!” There was a note of irony in his voice.

“Wonderfully simple,” she agreed. “And yet, so far as I know, we’re the only people who systematically teach DC to their children. You just tell them what they’re supposed to do and leave it at that. Behave well, you say. But how? You never tell them. All you do is give them pep talks and punishments. Pure idiocy.”

“Pure unadulterated idiocy,” he agreed, remembering Mr. Crabbe, his housemaster, on the subject of masturbation, remembering the canings and the weekly sermons and the Commination Service on Ash Wednesday. “Cursed is he that lieth with his neighbor’s wife. Amen.”

“If your children take the idiocy seriously, they grow up to be miserable sinners. And if they don’t take it seriously, they grow up to be miserable cynics. And if they react from miserable cynicism, they’re apt to go Papist or Marxist. No wonder you have to have all those thousands of jails and churches and Communist cells.”

“Whereas in Pala, I gather, you have very few.”

Susila shook her head.

“No Alcatrazes here,” she said. “No Billy Grahams or Mao Tse-tungs or Madonnas of Fátima. No hells on earth and no Christian pie in the sky, no Communist pie in the twenty-second century. Just men and women and their children trying to make the best of the here and now, instead of living somewhere else, as you people mostly do, in some other time, some other homemade imaginary universe. And it really isn’t your fault. You’re almost compelled to live that way because the present is so frustrating. And it’s frustrating because you’ve never been taught how to bridge the gap between theory and practice, between your New Year’s resolutions and your actual behavior.”

“‘For the good that I would,’” he quoted, “‘I do not; and the evil that I would not, that I do.’”

“Who said that?”

“The man who invented Christianity—St. Paul.”

“You see,” she said, “the highest possible ideals, and no methods for realizing them.”

“Except the supernatural method of having them realized by Somebody Else.”

Throwing back his head, Will Farnaby burst into song.

“There is a fountain fill’d with blood,

Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins,

And sinners plunged beneath that flood

Are cleansed of all their stains.”

Susila had covered her ears. “It’s really obscene,” she said.

“My housemaster’s favorite hymn,” Will explained. “We used to sing it about once a week, all the time I was at school.”

“Thank goodness,” she said, “there was never any blood in Buddhism! Gautama lived till eighty and died from being too courteous to refuse bad food. Violent death always seems to call for more violent death. ‘If you won’t believe that you’re redeemed by my redeemer’s blood, I’ll drown you in your own.’ Last year I took a course at Shivapuram in the history of Christianity.” Susila shuddered at the memory. “What a horror! And all because that poor ignorant man didn’t know how to implement his good intentions.”

“And most of us,” said Will, “are still in the same old boat. The evil that we would not, that we do. And how!”

Reacting unforgivably to the unforgivable, Will Farnaby laughed derisively. Laughed because he had seen the goodness of Molly and then, with open eyes, had chosen the pink alcove and, with it, Molly’s unhappiness, Molly’s death, his own gnawing sense of guilt, and then the pain, out of all proportion to its low and essentially farcical cause, the agonizing pain that he had felt when Babs in due course did what any fool must have known she inevitably would do—turned him out of her infernal gin-illumined paradise, and took another lover.

“What’s the matter?” Susila asked.

“Nothing. Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re not very good at hiding your feelings. You were thinking of something that made you unhappy.”

“You’ve got sharp eyes,” he said, and looked away.

There was a long silence. Should he tell her? Tell her about Babs, about poor Molly, about himself, tell her all the dismal and senseless things he had never, even when he was drunk, told even his oldest friends? Old friends knew too much about one, too much about the other parties involved, too much about the grotesque and complicated game which (as an English gentleman who was also a bohemian, also a would-be poet, also—in mere despair, because he knew he could never be a good poet—a hard-boiled journalist, and the private agent, very well paid, of a rich man whom he despised) he was always so elaborately playing. No, old friends would never do. But from this dark little outsider, this stranger to whom he already owed so much and with whom, though he knew nothing about her, he was already so intimate, there would come no foregone conclusions, no ex parte judgments—would come perhaps, he found himself hoping (he who had trained himself never to hope!), some unexpected enlightenment, some positive and practical help. (And, God knew, he needed help—though God also knew only too well that he would never say so, never sink so low as to ask for it.)

Like a muezzin in his minaret, one of the talking birds began to shout from the tall palm beyond the mango trees, “Here and now, boys. Here and now, boys.”

Will decided to take the plunge—but to take it indirectly, by talking first, not about his problems, but about hers. Without looking at Susila (for that, he felt, would be indecent), he began to speak.

“Dr. MacPhail told me something about…about what happened to your husband.”

The words turned a sword in her heart; but that was to be expected, that was right and inevitable. “It’ll be four months next Wednesday,” she said. And then, meditatively, “Two people,” she went on after a little silence, “two separate individuals—but they add up to something like a new creation. And then suddenly half of this new creature is amputated; but the other half doesn’t die—can’t die, mustn’t die.”

“Mustn’t die?”

“For so many reasons—the children, oneself, the whole nature of things. But needless to say,” she added, with a little smile that only accentuated the sadness in her eyes, “needless to say the reasons don’t lessen the shock of the amputation or make the aftermath any more bearable. The only thing that helps is what we were talking about just now—Destiny Control. And even that…” She shook her head. “DC can give you a completely painless childbirth. But a completely painless bereavement—no. And of course that’s as it should be. It wouldn’t be right if you could take away all the pain of a bereavement; you’d be less than human.”

“Less than human,” he repeated. “Less than human…” Three short words; but how completely they summed him up! “The really terrible thing,” he said aloud, “is when you know it’s your fault that the other person died.”

“Were you married?” she asked.

“For twelve years. Until last spring…”

“And now she’s dead?”

“She died in an accident.”

“In an accident? Then how was it your fault?”

“The accident happened because…well, because the evil that I didn’t want to do, I did. And that day it came to a head. The hurt of it confused and distracted her, and I let her drive away in the car—let her drive away into a head-on collision.”

“Did you love her?”

He hesitated for a moment, then slowly shook his head.

“Was there somebody else—somebody you cared for more?”

“Somebody I couldn’t have cared for less.” He made a grimace of sardonic self-mockery.

“And that was the evil you didn’t want to do, but did?”

“Did and went on doing until I’d killed the woman I ought to have loved, but didn’t. Went on doing it even after I’d killed her, even though I hated myself for doing it—yes, and really hated the person who made me do it.”

“Made you do it, I suppose, by having the right kind of body?”

Will nodded, and there was a silence.

“Do you know what it’s like,” he asked at length, “to feel that nothing is quite real—including yourself?”

Susila nodded. “It sometimes happens when one’s just on the point of discovering that everything, including oneself, is much more real than one ever imagined. It’s like shifting gears: you have to go into neutral before you change into high.”

“Or low,” said Will. “In my case, the shift wasn’t up, it was down. No, not even down; it was into reverse. The first time it happened I was waiting for a bus to take me home from Fleet Street. Thousands upon thousands of people, all on the move, and each of them unique, each of them the center of the universe. Then the sun came out from behind a cloud. Everything was extraordinarily bright and clear; and suddenly, with an almost audible click, they were all maggots.”

“Maggots?”

“You know, those little pale worms with black heads that one sees on rotten meat. Nothing had changed, of course; people’s faces were the same, their clothes were the same. And yet they were all maggots. Not even real maggots—just the ghosts of maggots, just the illusion of maggots. And I was the illusion of a spectator of maggots. I lived in that maggot world for months. Lived in it, worked in it, went out to lunch and dinner in it—all without the least interest in what I was doing. Without the least enjoyment or relish, completely desireless and, as I discovered when I tried to make love to a young woman I’d had occasional fun with in the past, completely impotent.”

“What did you expect?”

“Precisely that.”

“Then why on earth…?”

Will gave her one of his flayed smiles and shrugged his shoulders. “As a matter of scientific interest. I was an entomologist investigating the sex life of the phantom maggot.”

“After which, I suppose, everything seemed even more unreal.”

“Even more,” he agreed, “if that was possible.”

“But what brought on the maggots in the first place?”

“Well, to begin with,” he answered, “I was my parents’ son. By Bully Boozer out of Christian Martyr. And on top of being my parents’ son,” he went on after a little pause, “I was my aunt Mary’s nephew.”

“What did your aunt Mary have to do with it?”

“She was the only person I ever loved, and when I was sixteen she got cancer. Off with the right breast; then, a year later, off with the left. And after that nine months of X rays and radiation sickness. Then it got into the liver, and that was the end. I was there from start to finish. For a boy in his teens it was a liberal education—but liberal.”

“In what?” Susila asked.

“In Pure and Applied Pointlessness. And a few weeks after the close of my private course in the subject came the grand opening of the public course. World War II. Followed by the nonstop refresher course of Cold War I. And all this time I’d been wanting to be a poet and finding out that I simply don’t have what it takes. And then, after the war, I had to go into journalism to make money. What I wanted was to go hungry, if necessary, but try to write something decent—good prose at least, seeing that it couldn’t be good poetry. But I’d reckoned without those darling parents of mine. By the time he died, in January of ’forty-six, my father had got rid of all the little money our family had inherited and by the time she was blessedly a widow, my mother was crippled with arthritis and had to be supported. So there I was in Fleet Street, supporting her with an ease and a success that were completely humiliating.”

“Why humiliating?”

“Wouldn’t you be humiliated if you found yourself making money by turning out the cheapest, flashiest kind of literary forgery? I was a success because I was so irremediably second-rate.”

“And the net result of it all was maggots?”

He nodded. “Not even real maggots: phantom maggots. And here’s where Molly came into the picture. I met her at a high-class maggot party in Bloomsbury. We were introduced, we made some politely inane conversation about nonobjective painting. Not wanting to see any more maggots, I didn’t look at her; but she must have been looking at me. Molly had very pale gray-blue eyes,” he added parenthetically, “eyes that saw everything—she was incredibly observant, but observed without malice or censoriousness, seeing the evil, if it was there, but never condemning it, just feeling enormously sorry for the person who was under compulsion to think those thoughts and do that odious kind of thing. Well, as I say, she must have been looking at me while we talked; for suddenly she asked me why I was so sad. I’d had a couple of drinks and there was nothing impertinent or offensive about the way she asked the question; so I told her about the maggots. ‘And you’re one of them,’ I finished up, and for the first time I looked at her. ‘A blue-eyed maggot with a face like one of the holy women in attendance at a Flemish crucifixion.’”

“Was she flattered?”

“I think so. She’d stopped being a Catholic; but she still had a certain weakness for crucifixions and holy women. Anyhow, next morning she called me at breakfast time. Would I like to drive down into the country with her? It was Sunday and, by a miracle, fine. I accepted. We spent an hour in a hazel copse, picking primroses and looking at the little white windflowers. One doesn’t pick the windflowers,” he explained, “because in an hour they’re withered. I did a lot of looking in that hazel copse—looking at flowers with the naked eye and then looking into them through the magnifying glass that Molly had brought with her. I don’t know why, but it was extraordinarily therapeutic—just looking into the hearts of primroses and anemones. For the rest of the day I saw no maggots. But Fleet Street was still there, waiting for me, and by lunchtime on Monday the whole place was crawling with them as thickly as ever. Millions of maggots. But now I knew what to do about them. That evening I went to Molly’s studio.”

“Was she a painter?”

“Not a real painter, and she knew it. Knew it and didn’t resent it, just made the best of having no talent. She didn’t paint for art’s sake; she painted because she liked looking at things, liked the process of trying meticulously to reproduce what she saw. That evening she gave me a canvas and a palette, and told me to do likewise.”

“And did it work?”

“It worked so well that when a couple of months later I cut open a rotten apple, the worm at its center wasn’t a maggot—not subjectively, I mean. Objectively, yes; it was all that a maggot should be, and that’s how I portrayed it, how we both portrayed it—for we always painted the same things at the same time.”

“What about the other maggots, the phantom maggots outside the apple?”

“Well, I still had relapses, especially in Fleet Street and at cocktail parties; but the maggots were definitely fewer, definitely less haunting. And meanwhile something new was happening in the studio. I was falling in love—falling in love because love is catching and Molly was so obviously in love with me—why, God only knows.”

“I can see several possible reasons why. She might have loved you because…” Susila eyed him appraisingly and smiled. “Well, because you’re quite an attractive kind of queer fish.”

He laughed. “Thank you for a handsome compliment.”

“On the other hand,” Susila went on, “(and this isn’t quite so complimentary), she might have loved you because you made her feel so damned sorry for you.”

“That’s the truth, I’m afraid. Molly was a born Sister of Mercy.”

“And a Sister of Mercy, unfortunately, isn’t the same as a Wife of Love.”

“Which I duly discovered,” he said.

“After your marriage, I suppose.”

Will hesitated for a moment. “Actually,” he said, “it was before. Not because, on her side, there had been any urgency of desire, but only because she was so eager to do anything to please me. Only because, on principle, she didn’t believe in conventions and was all for freely loving, and more surprisingly” (he remembered the outrageous things she would so casually and placidly give utterance to even in his mother’s presence) “all for freely talking about that freedom.”

“You knew it beforehand,” Susila summed up, “and yet you still married her.”

Will nodded his head without speaking.

“Because you were a gentleman, I take it, and a gentleman keeps his word.”

“Partly for that rather old-fashioned reason, but also because I was in love with her.”

“Were you in love with her?”

“Yes. No, I don’t know. But at the time I did know. At least I thought I knew. I was really convinced that I was really in love with her. And I knew, I still know, why I was convinced. I was grateful to her for having exorcised those maggots. And besides the gratitude there was respect. There was admiration. She was so much better and honester than I was. But unfortunately, you’re right: a Sister of Mercy isn’t the same as a Wife of Love. But I was ready to take Molly on her own terms, not on mine. I was ready to believe that her terms were better than mine.”

“How soon,” Susila asked, after a long silence, “did you start having affairs on the side?”

Will smiled his flayed smile. “Three months to the day after our wedding. The first time was with one of the secretaries at the office. Goodness, what a bore! After that there was a young painter, a curlyheaded little Jewish girl whom Molly had helped with money while she was studying at the Slade. I used to go to her studio twice a week, from five to seven. It was almost three years before Molly found out about it.”

“And, I gather, she was upset?”

“Much more than I’d ever thought she’d be.”

“So what did you do about it?”

Will shook his head. “This is where it begins to get complicated,” he said. “I had no intention of giving up my cocktail hours with Rachel; but I hated myself for making Molly so unhappy. At the same time I hated her for being unhappy. I resented her suffering and the love that had made her suffer; I felt that they were unfair, a kind of blackmail to force me to give up my innocent fun with Rachel. By loving me so much and being so miserable about what I was doing—what she really forced me to do—she was putting pressure on me, she was trying to restrict my freedom. But meanwhile she was genuinely unhappy; and though I hated her for blackmailing me with her unhappiness, I was filled with pity for her. Pity,” he repeated, “not compassion. Compassion is suffering-with, and what I wanted at all costs was to spare myself the pain her suffering caused me, and avoid the painful sacrifices by which I could put an end to her suffering. Pity was my answer, being sorry for her from the outside, if you see what I mean—sorry for her as a spectator, an aesthete, a connoisseur in excruciations. And this aesthetic pity of mine was so intense, every time her unhappiness came to a head, that I could almost mistake it for love. Almost, but never quite. For when I expressed my pity in physical tenderness (which I did because that was the only way of putting a temporary stop to her unhappiness and to the pain her unhappiness was inflicting on me), that tenderness was always frustrated before it could come to its natural consummation. Frustrated because, by temperament, she was only a Sister of Mercy, not a wife. And yet, on every level but the sensual, she loved me with a total commitment—a commitment that called for an answering commitment on my part. But I wouldn’t commit myself, maybe I genuinely couldn’t. So instead of being grateful for her self-giving, I resented it. It made claims on me, claims that I refused to acknowledge. So there we were, at the end of every crisis, back at the beginning of the old drama—the drama of a love incapable of sensuality self-committed to a sensuality incapable of love and evoking strangely mixed responses of guilt and exasperation, of pity and resentment, sometimes of real hatred (but always with an undertone of remorse), the whole accompanied by, contrapuntal to, a succession of furtive evenings with my little curlyheaded painter.”

“I hope at least they were enjoyable,” said Susila.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Only moderately. Rachel could never forget that she was an intellectual. She had a way of asking what one thought of Piero di Cosimo at the most inopportune moments. The real enjoyment and of course the real agony—I never experienced them until Babs appeared on the scene.”

“When was that?”

“Just over a year ago. In Africa.”

“Africa?”

“I’d been sent there by Joe Aldehyde.”

“That man who owns newspapers?”

“And all the rest. He was married to Molly’s aunt Eileen. An exemplary family man, I may add. That’s why he’s so serenely convinced of his own righteousness, even when he’s engaged in the most nefarious financial operations.”

“And you’re working for him?”

Will nodded. “That was his wedding present to Molly—a job for me on the Aldehyde papers at almost twice the salary I’d been getting from my previous employers. Princely! But then he was very fond of Molly.”

“How did he react to Babs?”

“He never knew about her—never knew that there was any reason for Molly’s accident.”

“So he goes on employing you for your dead wife’s sake?”

Will shrugged his shoulders. “The excuse,” he said, “is that I have my mother to support.”

“And of course you wouldn’t enjoy being poor.”

“I certainly wouldn’t.”

There was a silence.

“Well,” said Susila at last, “let’s get back to Africa.”

“I’d been sent there to do a series on Negro Nationalism. Not to mention a little private hanky-panky in the business line for Uncle Joe. It was on the plane, flying home from Nairobi. I found myself sitting next to her.”

“Next to the young woman you couldn’t have liked less?”

“Couldn’t have liked less,” he repeated, “or disapproved of more. But if you’re an addict you’ve got to have your dope—the dope that you know in advance is going to destroy you.”

“It’s a funny thing,” she said reflectively, “but in Pala we have hardly any addicts.”

“Not even sex addicts?”

“The sex addicts are also person addicts. In other words, they’re lovers.”

“But even lovers sometimes hate the people they love.”

“Naturally. Because I always have the same name and the same nose and eyes, it doesn’t follow that I’m always the same woman. Recognizing that fact and reacting to it sensibly—that’s part of the Art of Loving.”

As succinctly as he could, Will told her the rest of the story. It was the same story, now that Babs had come on the scene, as it had been before—the same but much more so. Babs had been Rachel raised, so to speak, to a higher power—Rachel squared, Rachel to the nth. And the unhappiness that, because of Babs, he had inflicted upon Molly was proportionately greater than anything she had had to suffer on account of Rachel. Proportionately greater, too, had been his own exasperation, his own resentful sense of being blackmailed by her love and suffering, his own remorse and pity, his own determination, in spite of the remorse and the pity, to go on getting what he wanted, what he hated himself for wanting, what he resolutely refused to do without. And meanwhile Babs had become more demanding, was claiming ever more and more of his time—time not only in the strawberry-pink alcove, but also outside, in restaurants, and nightclubs, at her horrible friends’ cocktail parties, on weekends in the country. “Just you and me, darling,” she would say, “all alone together.” All alone together in an isolation that gave him the opportunity to plumb the almost unfathomable depths of her mindlessness and vulgarity. But through all his boredom and distaste, all his moral and intellectual repugnance, the craving persisted. After one of those dreadful weekends, he was as hopelessly a Babs addict as he had been before. And on her side, on her own Sister-of-Mercy level, Molly had remained, in spite of everything, no less hopelessly a Will Farnaby addict. Hopelessly so far as he was concerned—for his one wish was that she should love him less and allow him to go to hell in peace. But, so far as Molly herself was concerned, the addiction was always and irrepressibly hopeful. She never ceased to expect the transfiguring miracle that would change him into the kind, unselfish, loving Will Farnaby whom (in the teeth of all the evidence, all the repeated disappointments) she stubbornly insisted on regarding as his true self. It was only in the course of that last fatal interview, only when (stifling his pity and giving free rein to his resentment of her blackmailing unhappiness) he had announced his intention of leaving her and going to live with Babs—it was only then that hope had finally given place to hopelessness. “Do you mean it, Will—do you really mean it?” “I really mean it.” It was in hopelessness, in utter hopelessness, that she had walked out to the car, had driven away into the rain—into her death. At the funeral, when the coffin was lowered into the grave, he had promised himself that he would never see Babs again. Never, never, never again. That evening, while he was sitting at his desk trying to write an article on “What’s Wrong with Youth,” trying not to remember the hospital, the open grave, and his own responsibility for everything that had happened, he was startled by the shrill buzzing of the doorbell. A belated message of condolence, no doubt…He had opened, and there, instead of the telegram, was Babs—dramatically without makeup and all in black.

“My poor, poor Will!” They had sat down on the sofa in the living room, and she had stroked his hair and both of them had cried.

“When pain and anguish wring the brow, a ministering angel thou.” An hour later, needless to say, they were naked and in bed. After which he had moved, earth to earth, into the pink alcove. Within three months, as any fool could have foreseen, Babs had begun to tire of him; within four, an absolutely divine man from Kenya had turned up at a cocktail party. One thing had led to another and when, three days later, Babs came home, it was to prepare the alcove for a new tenant and give notice to the old.

“Do you really mean it, Babs?”

She really meant it.

There was a rustling in the bushes outside the window and an instant later, startlingly loud and slightly out of time, “Here and now, boys,” shouted a talking bird.

“Shut up!” Will shouted back.

“Here and now, boys,” the mynah repeated. “Here and now, boys. Here and—”

“Shut up!”

There was silence.

“I had to shut him up,” Will explained, “because of course he’s absolutely right. Here, boys; now, boys. Then and there are absolutely irrelevant. Or aren’t they? What about your husband’s death, for example? Is that irrelevant?”

Susila looked at him for a moment in silence, then slowly nodded her head. “In the context of what I have to do now—yes, completely irrelevant. That’s something I had to learn.”

“Does one learn how to forget?”

“It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living.” She gave him a sad little smile and added, “It isn’t easy.”

“It isn’t easy,” Will repeated. And suddenly all his defenses were down, all his pride had left him. “Will you help me?” he asked.

“It’s a bargain,” she said, and held out her hand.

A sound of footsteps made them turn their heads. Dr. MacPhail had entered the room.

8

“GOOD EVENING, MY DEAR. GOOD EVENING, MR. FARNABY.”

The tone was cheerful—not, Susila was quick to notice, with any kind of synthetic cheerfulness, but naturally, genuinely. And yet, before coming here, he must have stopped at the hospital, must have seen Lakshmi as Susila herself had seen her only an hour or two since, more dreadfully emaciated than ever, more skull-like and discolored. Half a long lifetime of love and lovalty and mutual forgiveness—and in another day or two it would be all over; he would be alone. But sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof—sufficient unto the place and the person. “One has no right,” her father-in-law had said to her one day as they were leaving the hospital together, “one has no right to inflict one’s sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn’t sad. One just has to accept one’s grief and one’s absurd attempts to be a stoic. Accept, accept…” His voice broke. Looking up at him, she saw that his face was wet with tears. Five minutes later they were sitting on a bench, at the edge of the lotus pool, in the shadow of the huge stone Buddha. With a little plop, sharp and yet liquidly voluptuous, an unseen frog dived from its round leafy platform into the water. Thrusting up from the mud, the thick green stems with their turgid buds broke through into the air, and here and there the blue or rosy symbols of enlightenment had opened their petals to the sun and the probing visitations of flies and tiny beetles and the wild bees from the jungle. Darting, pausing in mid-flight, darting again, a score of glittering blue and green dragonflies were hawking for midges.

“Tathata,” Dr. Robert had whispered. “Suchness.”

For a long time they sat there in silence. Then, suddenly, he had touched her shoulder.

“Look!”

She lifted her eyes to where he was pointing. Two small parrots had perched on the Buddha’s right hand and were going through the ritual of courtship.

“Did you stop again at the lotus pool?” Susila asked aloud.

Dr. Robert gave her a little smile and nodded his head.

“How was Shivapuram?” Will enquired.

“Pleasant enough in itself,” the doctor answered. “Its only defect is that it’s so close to the outside world. Up here one can simply ignore the organized insanities and get on with one’s work. Down there, with all those antennae and listening posts and channels of communication that a government has to have, the outside world is perpetually breathing down one’s neck. One hears it, feels it, smells it—yes, smells it.”

“Has anything more than usually disastrous happened since I’ve been here?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary at your end of the world. I wish I could say the same about our end.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“The trouble is our next-door neighbor, Colonel Dipa. To begin with, he’s made another deal with the Czechs.”

“More armaments?”

“Sixty million dollars’ worth. It was on the radio this morning.”

“But what on earth for?”

“The usual reasons. Glory and power. The pleasures of vanity and the pleasures of bullying. Terrorism and military parades at home; conquests and Te Deums abroad. And that brings me to the second item of unpleasant news. Last night the Colonel delivered another of his celebrated Greater Rendang speeches.”

“Greater Rendang? What’s that?”

“You may well ask,” said Dr. Robert. “Greater Rendang is the territory controlled by the Sultans of Rendang-Lobo between 1447 and 1483. It included Rendang, the Nicobar Islands, about thirty percent of Sumatra and the whole of Pala. Today, it’s Colonel Dipa’s Irredenta.”

“Seriously?”

“With a perfectly straight face. No, I’m wrong. With a purple, distorted face and at the top of a voice that he has trained, after long practice, to sound exactly like Hitler’s. Greater Rendang or death!”

“But the great powers would never allow it.”

“Maybe they wouldn’t like to see him in Sumatra. But Pala—that’s another matter.” He shook his head. “Pala, unfortunately, is in nobody’s good books. We don’t want the Communists; but neither do we want the capitalists. Least of all do we want the wholesale industrialization that both parties are so anxious to impose on us—for different reasons, of course. The West wants it because our labor costs are low and investors’ dividends will be correspondingly high. And the East wants it because industrialization will create a proletariat, open fresh fields for Communist agitation and may lead in the long run to the setting up of yet another People’s Democracy. We say no to both of you, so we’re unpopular everywhere. Regardless of their ideologies, all the Great Powers may prefer a Rendang-controlled Pala with oil fields to an independent Pala without. If Dipa attacks us, they’ll say it’s most deplorable; but they won’t lift a finger. And when he takes us over and calls the oilmen in, they’ll be delighted.”

“What can you do about Colonel Dipa?” Will asked.

“Except for passive resistance, nothing. We have no army and no powerful friends. The Colonel has both. The most we can do, if he starts making trouble, is to appeal to the United Nations. Meanwhile we shall remonstrate with the Colonel about this latest Greater Rendang effusion. Remonstrate through our minister in Rendang-Lobo, and remonstrate with the great man in person when he pays his state visit to Pala ten days from now.”

“A state visit?”

“For the young Raja’s coming-of-age celebrations. He was asked a long time ago, but he never let us know for certain whether he was coming or not. Today it was finally settled. We’ll have a summit meeting as well as a birthday party. But let’s talk about something more rewarding. How did you get on today, Mr. Farnaby?”

“Not merely well—gloriously. I had the honor of a visit from your reigning monarch.”

“Murugan?”

“Why didn’t you tell me he was your reigning monarch?”

Dr. Robert laughed. “You might have asked for an interview.”

“Well, I didn’t. Nor from the Queen Mother.”

“Did the Rani come too?”

“At the command of her Little Voice. And, sure enough, the Little Voice sent her to the right address. My boss, Joe Aldehyde, is one of her dearest friends.”

“Did she tell you that she’s trying to bring your boss here, to exploit our oil?”

“She did indeed.”

“We turned down his latest offer less than a month ago. Did you know that?”

Will was relieved to be able to answer quite truthfully that he didn’t. Neither Joe Aldehyde nor the Rani had told him of this most recent rebuff. “My job,” he went on, a little less truthfully, “is in the wood-pulp department, not in petroleum.” There was a silence. “What’s my status here?” he asked at last. “Undesirable alien?”

“Well, fortunately you’re not an armament salesman.”

“Nor a missionary,” said Susila.

“Nor an oilman—though on that count you might be guilty by association.”

“Nor even, so far as we know, a uranium prospector.”

“Those,” Dr. Robert concluded, “are the Alpha Plus undesirables. As a journalist you rank as a Beta. Not the kind of person we should ever dream of inviting to Pala. But also not the kind who, having managed to get here, requires to be summarily deported.”

“I’d like to stay here for as long as it’s legally possible,” said Will.

“May I ask why?”

Will hesitated. As Joe Aldehyde’s secret agent and a reporter with a hopeless passion for literature, he had to stay long enough to negotiate with Bahu and earn his year of freedom. But there were other, more avowable reasons. “If you don’t object to personal remarks,” he said, “I’ll tell you.”

“Fire away,” said Dr. Robert.

“The fact is that, the more I see of you people the better I like you. I want to find out more about you. And in the process,” he added, glancing at Susila, “I might find out some interesting things about myself. How long shall I be allowed to stay?”

“Normally we’d turn you out as soon as you’re fit to travel. But if you’re seriously interested in Pala, above all if you’re seriously interested in yourself—well, we might stretch a point. Or shouldn’t we stretch that point? What do you say, Susila? After all, he does work for Lord Aldehyde.”

Will was on the point of protesting again that his job was in the wood-pulp department; but the words stuck in his throat and he said nothing. The seconds passed. Dr. Robert repeated his question.

“Yes,” Susila said at last, “we’d be taking a certain risk. But personally…personally I’d be ready to take it. Am I right?” she turned to Will.

“Well, I think you can trust me. At least I hope you can.” He laughed, trying to make a joke of it; but to his annoyance and embarrassment, he felt himself blushing. Blushing for what? he demanded resentfully of his conscience. If anybody was being double-crossed, it was Standard of California. And once Dipa had moved in, what difference would it make who got the concession? Which would you rather be eaten by—a wolf or a tiger? So far as the lamb is concerned, it hardly seems to matter. Joe would be no worse than his competitors. All the same, he wished he hadn’t been in such a hurry to send off that letter. And why, why couldn’t that dreadful woman have left him in peace?

Through the sheet he felt a hand on his undamaged knee. Dr. Robert was smiling down at him.

“You can have a month here,” he said. “I’ll take full responsibility for you. And we’ll do our best to show you everything.”

“I’m very grateful to you.”

“When in doubt,” said Dr. Robert, “always act on the assumption that people are more honorable than you have any solid reason for supposing they are. That was the advice the Old Raja gave me when I was a young man.” Turning to Susila, “Let’s see,” he said, “how old were you when the Old Raja died?”

“Just eight.”

“So you remember him pretty well.”

Susila laughed. “Could anyone ever forget the way he used to talk about himself. ‘Quote “I” (unquote) like sugar in my tea.’ What a darling man.”

“And what a great one!”

Dr. MacPhail got up and, crossing to the bookcase that stood between the door and the wardrobe, pulled out of its lowest shelf a thick red album, much the worse for tropical weather and fish insects. “There’s a picture of him somewhere,” he said as he turned over the pages. “Here we are.”

Will found himself looking at the faded snapshot of a little old Hindu in spectacles and a loincloth, engaged in emptying the contents of an extremely ornate silver sauceboat over a small squat pillar.

“What is he doing?” he asked.

“Anointing a phallic symbol with melted butter,” the doctor answered. “It was a habit my poor father could never break him of.”

“Did your father disapprove of phalluses?”

“No, no,” said Dr. MacPhail. “My father was all for them. It was the symbol that he disapproved of.”

“Why the symbol?”

“Because he thought that people ought to take their religion warm from the cow, if you see what I mean. Not skimmed or pasteurized or homogenized. Above all not canned in any kind of theological or liturgical container.”

“And the Raja had a weakness for containers?”

“Not for containers in general. Just this one particular tin can. He’d always felt a special attachment to the family lingam. It was made of black basalt, and was at least eight hundred years old.”

“I see,” said Will Farnaby.

“Buttering the family lingam—it was an act of piety, it expressed a beautiful sentiment about a sublime idea. But even the sublimest of ideas is totally different from the cosmic mystery it’s supposed to stand for. And the beautiful sentiments connected with the sublime idea—what do they have in common with the direct experience of the mystery? Nothing whatsoever. Needless to say, the Old Raja knew all this perfectly well. Better than my father. He’d drunk the milk as it came from the cow, he’d actually been the milk. But the buttering of lingams was a devotional practice he just couldn’t bear to give up. And, I don’t have to tell you, he should never have been asked to give it up. But where symbols were concerned, my father was a puritan. He’d amended Goethe—Alles vergängliche ist NICHT ein Gleichnis. His ideal was pure experimental science at one end of the spectrum and pure experimental mysticism at the other. Direct experience on every level and then clear, rational statements about those experiences. Lingams and crosses, butter and holy water, sutras, gospels, images, chanting—he’d have liked to abolish them all.”

“Where would the arts have come in?” Will questioned.

“They wouldn’t have come in at all,” Dr. MacPhail answered. “And that was my father’s blindest spot—poetry. He said he liked it; but in fact he didn’t. Poetry for its own sake, poetry as an autonomous universe, out there, in the space between direct experience and the symbols of science—that was something he simply couldn’t understand. Let’s find his picture.”

Dr. MacPhail turned back the pages of the album and pointed to a craggy profile with enormous eyebrows.

“What a Scotsman!” Will commented.

“And yet his mother and his grandmother were Palanese.”

“One doesn’t see a trace of them.”

“Whereas his grandfather, who hailed from Perth, might almost have passed for a Rajput.”

Will peered into the ancient photograph of a young man with an oval face and black side-whiskers, leaning his elbow on a marble pedestal on which, bottom upwards, stood his inordinately tall top hat.

“Your great-grandfather?”

“The first MacPhail of Pala. Dr. Andrew. Born 1822, in the Royal Burgh, where his father, James MacPhail, owned a rope mill. Which was properly symbolical; for James was a devout Calvinist, and being convinced that he himself was one of the elect, derived a deep and glowing satisfaction from the thought of all those millions of his fellow men going through life with the noose of predestination about their necks, and Old Nobodaddy Aloft counting the minutes to spring the trap.”

Will laughed.

“Yes,” Dr. Robert agreed, “it does seem pretty comic. But it didn’t then. Then it was serious—much more serious than the H-bomb is today. It was known for certain that ninety-nine point nine percent of the human race were condemned to everlasting brimstone. Why? Either because they’d never heard of Jesus; or, if they had, because they couldn’t believe sufficiently strongly that Jesus had delivered them from the brimstone. And the proof that they didn’t believe sufficiently strongly was the empirical, observable fact that their souls were not at peace. Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind. But perfect peace of mind is something that practically nobody possesses. Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith. Therefore practically everybody is predestined to eternal punishment. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

“One wonders,” said Susila, “why they didn’t all go mad.”

“Fortunately most of them believed only with the tops of their heads. Up here.” Dr. MacPhail tapped his bald spot. “With the tops of their heads they were convinced it was the Truth with the largest possible T. But their glands and their guts knew better—knew that it was all sheer bosh. For most of them, Truth was true only on Sundays, and then only in a strictly Pickwickian sense. James MacPhail knew all this and was determined that his children should not be mere Sabbath-day believers. They were to believe every word of the sacred nonsense even on Mondays, even on half-holiday afternoons; and they were to believe with their whole being, not merely up there, in the attic. Perfect faith and the perfect peace that goes with it were to be forced into them. How? By giving them hell now and threatening them with hell hereafter. And if, in their devilish perversity, they refused to have perfect faith, and be at peace, give them more hell and threaten hotter fires. And meanwhile tell them that good works are as filthy rags in the sight of God; but punish them ferociously for every misdemeanor. Tell them that by nature they’re totally depraved, then beat them for being what they inescapably are.”

Will Farnaby turned back to the album.

“Do you have a picture of this delightful ancestor of yours?”

“We had an oil painting,” said Dr. MacPhail. “But the dampness was too much for the canvas, and then the fish insects got into it. He was a splendid specimen. Like a High Renaissance picture of Jeremiah. You know—majestic, with an inspired eye and the kind of prophetic beard that covers such a multitude of physiognomic sins. The only relic of him that remains is a pencil drawing of his house.”

He turned back another page and there it was.

“Solid granite,” he went on, “with bars on all the windows. And, inside that cozy little family Bastille, what systematic inhumanity! Systematic inhumanity in the name, needless to say, of Christ and for righteousness’ sake. Dr. Andrew left an unfinished autobiography, so we know all about it.”

“Didn’t the children get any help from their mother?”

Dr. MacPhail shook his head.

“Janet MacPhail was a Cameron and as good a Calvinist as James himself. Maybe an even better Calvinist than he was. Being a woman, she had further to go, she had more instinctive decencies to overcome. But she did overcome them—heroically. Far from restraining her husband, she urged him on, she backed him up. There were homilies before breakfast and at the midday dinner; there was the catechism on Sundays and learning the Epistles by heart; and every evening, when the day’s delinquencies had been added up and assessed, methodical whipping, with a whalebone riding switch on the bare buttocks, for all six children, girls as well as boys, in order of seniority.”

“It always makes me feel slightly sick,” said Susila. “Pure sadism.”

“No, not pure,” said Dr. MacPhail. “Applied sadism. Sadism with an ulterior motive, sadism in the service of an ideal, as the expression of a religious conviction. And that’s a subject,” he added, turning to Will, “that somebody ought to make a historical study of—the relation between theology and corporal punishment in childhood. I have a theory that, wherever little boys and girls are systematically flagellated, the victims grow up to think of God as ‘Wholly Other’—isn’t that the fashionable argot in your part of the world? Wherever, on the contrary, children are brought up without being subjected to physical violence, God is immanent. A people’s theology reflects the state of its children’s bottoms. Look at the Hebrews—enthusiastic child-beaters. And so were all good Christians in the Ages of Faith. Hence Jehovah, hence Original Sin and the infinitely offended Father of Roman and Protestant orthodoxy. Whereas among Buddhists and Hindus education has always been nonviolent. No laceration of little buttocks—therefore tat tvam asi, thou art That, mind from Mind is not divided. And look at the Quakers. They were heretical enough to believe in the Inner Light, and what happened? They gave up beating their children and were the first Christian denomination to protest against the institution of slavery.”

“But child-beating,” Will objected, “has quite gone out of fashion nowadays. And yet it’s precisely at this moment that it has become modish to hold forth about the Wholly Other.”

Dr. MacPhail waved the objection away. “It’s just a case of reaction following action. By the second half of the nineteenth century freethinking humanitarianism had become so strong that even good Christians were influenced by it and stopped beating their children. There were no weals on the younger generation’s posterior; consequently, it ceased to think of God as the Wholly Other and proceeded to invent New Thought, Unity, Christian Science—all the semi-Oriental heresies in which God is the Wholly Identical. The movement was well under way in William James’s day, and it’s been gathering momentum ever since. But thesis always invites antithesis and in due course the heresies begat Neo-Orthodoxy. Down with the Wholly Identical and back to the Wholly Other! Back to Augustine, back to Martin Luther—back, in a word, to the two most relentlessly flagellated bottoms in the whole history of Christian thought. Read the Confessions, read the Table Talk. Augustine was beaten by his schoolmaster and laughed at by his parents when he complained. Luther was systematically flogged not only by his teachers and his father, but even by his loving mother. The world has been paying for the scars on his buttocks ever since. Prussianism and the Third Reich—without Luther and his flagellation theology these monstrosities could never have come into existence. Or take the flagellation theology of Augustine, as carried to its logical conclusions by Calvin and swallowed whole by pious folk like James MacPhail and Janet Cameron. Major premise: God is Wholly Other. Minor premise: man is totally depraved. Conclusion: Do to your children’s bottoms what was done to yours, what your Heavenly Father has been doing to the collective bottom of humanity ever since the Fall: whip, whip, whip!”

There was a silence. Will Farnaby looked again at the drawing of the granite person in the rope walk, and thought of all the grotesque and ugly phantasies promoted to the rank of supernatural facts, all the obscene cruelties inspired by those phantasies, all the pain inflicted and the miseries endured because of them. And when it wasn’t Augustine with his “benignant asperity,” it was Robespierre, it was Stalin; when it wasn’t Luther exhorting the princes to kill the peasants, it was a genial Mao reducing them to slavery.

“Don’t you sometimes despair?” he asked.

Dr. MacPhail shook his head. “We don’t despair,” he said, “because we know that things don’t necessarily have to be as bad as in fact they’ve always been.”

“We know that they can be a great deal better,” Susila added. “Know it because they already are a great deal better, here and now, on this absurd little island.”

“But whether we shall be able to persuade you people to follow our example, or whether we shall even be able to preserve our tiny oasis of humanity in the midst of your worldwide wilderness of monkeys—that, alas,” said Dr. MacPhail, “is another question. One’s justified in feeling extremely pessimistic about the current situation. But despair, radical despair—no, I can’t see any justification for that.”

“Not even when you read history?”

“Not even when I read history.”

“I envy you. How do you manage to do it?”

“By remembering what history is—the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma.”

He turned again to the album. “Let’s get back to the house in the Royal Burgh, back to James and Janet, and the six children whom Calvin’s God, in His inscrutable malevolence, had condemned to their tender mercies. ‘The rod and reproof bring wisdom; but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.’ Indoctrination reinforced by psychological stress and physical torture—the perfect Pavlovian setup. But, unfortunately for organized religion and political dictatorship, human beings are much less reliable as laboratory animals than dogs. On Tom, Mary and Jean the conditioning worked as it was meant to work. Tom became a minister, and Mary married a minister and duly died in childbirth. Jean stayed at home, nursed her mother through a long grim cancer and for the next twenty years was slowly sacrificed to the aging and finally senile and driveling patriarch. So far, so good. But with Annie, the fourth child, the pattern changed. Annie was pretty. At eighteen she was proposed to by a captain of dragoons. But the captain was an Anglican and his views on total depravity and God’s good pleasure were criminally incorrect. The marriage was forbidden. It looked as though Annie were predestined to share the fate of Jean. She stuck it out for ten years; then, at twenty-eight, she got herself seduced by the second mate of an East Indiaman. There were seven weeks of almost frantic happiness—the first she had ever known. Her face was transfigured by a kind of supernatural beauty, her body glowed with life. Then the Indiaman sailed for a two-year voyage for Madras and Macao. Four months later, pregnant, friendless and despairing, Annie threw herself into the Tay. Meanwhile Alexander, the next in line, had run away from school and joined a company of actors. In the house by the rope walk nobody, thenceforward, was ever allowed to refer to his existence. And finally there was Andrew, the youngest, the Benjamin. What a model child! He was obedient, he loved his lessons, he learned the Epistles by heart faster and more accurately than any of the other children had done. Then, just in time to restore her faith in human wickedness, his mother caught him one evening playing with his genitals. He was whipped till the blood came; was caught again a few weeks later and again whipped, sentenced to solitary confinement on bread and water, told that he had almost certainly committed the sin against the Holy Ghost and that it was undoubtedly on account of that sin that his mother had been afflicted with cancer. For the rest of his childhood Andrew was haunted by recurrent nightmares of hell. Haunted, too, by recurrent temptations and, when he succumbed to them—which of course he did, but always in the privacy of the latrine at the bottom of the garden—by yet more terrifying visions of the punishments in store for him.”

“And to think,” Will Farnaby commented, “to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time.”

“Agreed,” said Dr. MacPhail. “But mightn’t there be a third possibility? Mightn’t there be a tale told by somebody who is neither an imbecile nor a paranoiac?”

“Somebody, for a change, completely sane,” said Susila.

“Yes, for a change,” Dr. MacPhail repeated. “For a blessed change. And luckily, even under the old dispensation, there were always plenty of people whom even the most diabolic upbringing couldn’t ruin. By all the rules of the Freudian and Pavlovian games, my great-grandfather ought to have grown up to be a mental cripple. In fact, he grew up to be a mental athlete. Which only shows,” Dr. Robert added parenthetically, “how hopelessly inadequate your two highly touted systems of psychology really are. Freudism and behaviorism—poles apart but in complete agreement when it comes to the facts of the built-in, congenital differences between individuals. How do your pet psychologists deal with these facts? Very simply. They ignore them. They blandly pretend that the facts aren’t there. Hence their complete inability to cope with the human situation as it really exists, or even to explain it theoretically. Look at what happened, for example, in this particular case. Andrew’s brothers and sisters were either tamed by their conditioning or destroyed. Andrew was neither destroyed nor tamed. Why? Because the roulette wheel of heredity had stopped turning at a lucky number. He had a more resilient constitution than the others, a different anatomy, different biochemistry and different temperament. His parents did their worst, as they had done with all the rest of their unfortunate brood. Andrew came through with flying colors, almost without a scar.”

“In spite of the sin against the Holy Ghost?”

“That, happily, was something he got rid of during his first year of medical studies at Edinburgh. He was only a boy—just over seventeen. (They started young in those days.) In the dissecting room the boy found himself listening to the extravagant obscenities and blasphemies with which his fellow students kept up their spirits among the slowly rotting cadavers. Listening at first with horror, with a sickening fear that God would surely take vengeance. But nothing happened. The blasphemers flourished, the loud-mouthed fornicators escaped with nothing worse than a dose, every now and then, of the clap. Fear gave place in Andrew’s mind to a wonderful sense of relief and deliverance. Greatly daring, he began to risk a few ribald jokes of his own. His first utterance of a four-letter word—what a liberation, what a genuinely religious experience! And meanwhile, in his spare time, he read Tom Jones, he read Hume’s ‘Essay on Miracles,’ he read the infidel Gibbon. Putting the French he had learned at school to good account, he read La Mettrie, he read Dr. Cabanis. Man is a machine, the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. How simple it all was, how luminously obvious! With all the fervor of a convert at a revival meeting, he decided for atheism. In the circumstances it was only to be expected. You can’t stomach St. Augustine any more, you can’t go on repeating the Athanasian rigmarole. So you pull the plug and send them down the drain. What bliss! But not for very long. Something, you discover, is missing. The experimental baby was flushed out with the theological dirt and soapsuds. But nature abhors a vacuum. Bliss gives place to a chronic discomfort, and now you’re afflicted, generation after generation, by a succession of Wesleys, Puseys, Moodys and Billys—Sunday and Graham—all working like beavers to pump the theology back out of the cesspool. They hope, of course, to recover the baby. But they never succeed. All that a revivalist can do is to siphon up a little of the dirty water. Which, in due course, has to be thrown out again. And so on, indefinitely. It’s really too boring and, as Dr. Andrew came at last to realize, wholly unnecessary. Meanwhile here he was, in the first flush of his new-found freedom. Excited, exultant—but quietly excited, exultant behind that appearance of grave and courteous detachment which he habitually presented to the world.”

“What about his father?” Will asked. “Did they have a battle?”

“No battle. Andrew didn’t like battles. He was the sort of man who always goes his own way, but doesn’t advertise the fact, doesn’t argue with people who prefer another road. The old man was never given the opportunity of putting on his Jeremiah act. Andrew kept his mouth shut about Hume and La Mettrie and went through the traditional motions. But when his training was finished, he just didn’t come home. Instead, he went to London and signed up, as surgeon and naturalist, on HMS Melampus, bound for the South Seas with orders to chart, survey, collect specimens and protect Protestant missionaries and British interests. The cruise of the Melampus lasted for a full three years. They called at Tahiti, they spent two months on Samoa and a month in the Marquesas group. After Perth, the islands seemed like Eden—but an Eden innocent unfortunately not only of Calvinism and capitalism and industrial slums, but also of Shakespeare and Mozart, also of scientific knowledge and logical thinking. It was paradise, but it wouldn’t do, it wouldn’t do. They sailed on. They visited Fiji and the Carolines and the Solomons. They charted the northern coast of New Guinea and, in Borneo, a party went ashore, trapped a pregnant orangutan and climbed to the top of Mount Kinabalu. Then followed a week at Panay, a fortnight in the Mergui Archipelago. After which they headed west to the Andamans and from the Andamans to the mainland of India. While ashore, my great-grandfather was thrown from his horse and broke his right leg. The captain of the Melampus found another surgeon and sailed for home. Two months later, as good as new, Andrew was practicing medicine at Madras. Doctors were scarce in those days and sickness fearfully common. The young man began to prosper. But life among the merchants and officials of the presidency was oppressively boring. It was an exile, but an exile without any of the compensations of exile, an exile without adventure or strangeness, a banishment merely to the provinces, to the tropical equivalent of Swansea or Huddersfield. But still he resisted the temptation to book a passage on the next homebound ship. If he stuck it out for five years, he would have enough money to buy a good practice in Edinburgh—no, in London, in the West End. The future beckoned, rosy and golden. There would be a wife, preferably with auburn hair and a modest competence. There would be four or five children—happy, unwhipped and atheistic. And his practice would grow, his patients would be drawn from circles ever more exalted. Wealth, reputation, dignity, even a knighthood. Sir Andrew MacPhail stepping out of his brougham in Belgrave Square. The great Sir Andrew, physician to the Queen. Summoned to St. Petersburg to operate on the Grand Duke, to the Tuileries, to the Vatican, to the Sublime Porte. Delightful phantasies! But the facts, as it turned out, were to be far more interesting. One fine morning a brown-skinned stranger called at the surgery. In halting English he gave an account of himself. He was from Pala and had been commanded by His Highness, the Raja, to seek out and bring back with him a skillful surgeon from the West. The rewards would be princely. Princely, he insisted. There and then Dr. Andrew accepted the invitation. Partly, of course, for the money; but mostly because he was bored, because he needed a change, needed a taste of adventure. A trip to the Forbidden Island—the lure was irresistible.”

“And remember,” Susila interjected, “in those days Pala was much more forbidden than it is now.”

“So you can imagine how eagerly young Dr. Andrew jumped at the opportunity now offered by the Raja’s ambassador. Ten days later his ship dropped anchor off the north coast of the forbidden island. With his medicine chest, his bag of instruments, and a small tin trunk containing his clothes and a few indispensable books, he was rowed in an outrigger canoe through the pounding surf, carried in a palanquin through the streets of Shivapuram and set down in the inner courtyard of the royal palace. His royal patient was eagerly awaiting him. Without being given time to shave or change his clothes, Dr. Andrew was ushered into the presence—the pitiable presence of a small brown man in his early forties, terribly emaciated under his rich brocades, his face so swollen and distorted as to be barely human, his voice reduced to a hoarse whisper. Dr. Andrew examined him. From the maxillary antrum, where it had its roots, a tumor had spread in all directions. It had filled the nose, it had pushed up into the socket of the right eye, it had half blocked the throat. Breathing had become difficult, swallowing acutely painful, and sleep an impossibility—for whenever he dropped off, the patient would choke and wake up frantically struggling for air. Without radical surgery, it was obvious, the Raja would be dead within a couple of months. With radical surgery, much sooner. Those were the good old days, remember—the good old days of septic operations without benefit of chloroform. Even in the most favorable circumstances surgery was fatal to one patient out of four. Where conditions were less propitious, the odds declined—fifty-fifty, thirty to seventy, zero to a hundred. In the present case the prognosis could hardly have been worse. The patient was already weak and the operation would be long, difficult and excruciatingly painful. There was a good chance that he would die on the operating table and a virtual certainty that, if he survived, it would only be to die a few days later of blood poisoning. But if he should die, Dr. Andrew now reflected, what would be the fate of the alien surgeon who had killed a king? And, during the operation, who would hold the royal patient down while he writhed under the knife? Which of his servants or courtiers would have the strength of mind to disobey, when the master screamed in agony or positively commanded them to let him go?

“Perhaps the wisest thing would be to say, here and now, that the case was hopeless, that he could do nothing, and ask to be sent back to Madras forthwith. Then he looked again at the sick man. Through the grotesque mask of his poor deformed face the Raja was looking at him intently—looking with the eyes of a condemned criminal begging the judge for mercy. Touched by the appeal, Dr. Andrew gave him a smile of encouragement and all at once, as he patted the thin hand, he had an idea. It was absurd, crackbrained, thoroughly discreditable; but all the same, all the same…

“Five years before, he suddenly remembered, while he was still at Edinburgh, there had been an article in The Lancet, an article denouncing the notorious Professor Elliotson for his advocacy of animal magnetism. Elliotson had had the effrontery to talk of painless operations performed on patients in the mesmeric trance.

“The man was either a gullible fool or an unscrupulous knave. The so-called evidence for such nonsense was manifestly worthless. It was all sheer humbug, quackery, downright fraud—and so on for six columns of righteous indignation. At the time—for he was still full of La Mettrie and Hume and Cabanis—Dr. Andrew had read the article with a glow of orthodox approval. After which he had forgotten about the very existence of animal magnetism. Now, at the Raja’s bedside, it all came back to him—the mad professor, the magnetic passes, the amputations without pain, the low death rate and the rapid recoveries. Perhaps, after all, there might be something in it. He was deep in these thoughts when, breaking a long silence, the sick man spoke to him. From a young sailor who had deserted his ship at Rendang-Lobo and somehow made his way across the Strait, the Raja had learned to speak English with remarkable fluency, but also, in faithful imitation of his teacher, with a strong Cockney accent. That Cockney accent,” Dr. MacPhail repeated with a little laugh. “It turns up again and again in my great-grandfather’s memoirs. There was something, to him, inexpressibly improper about a king who spoke like Sam Weller. And in this case the impropriety was more than merely social. Besides being a king, the Raja was a man of intellect and the most exquisite refinement; a man, not only of deep religious convictions (any crude oaf can have deep religious convictions), but also of deep religious experience and spiritual insight. That such a man should express himself in Cockney was something that an Early Victorian Scotsman who had read The Pickwick Papers could never get over. Nor, in spite of all my great-grandfather’s tactful coaching, could the Raja ever get over his impure diphthongs and dropped aitches. But all that was in the future. At their first tragic meeting, that shocking, lower-class accent seemed strangely touching. Laying the palms of his hands together in a gesture of supplication, the sick man whispered, ‘’Elp me, Dr. MacPhile, ’elp me.’

“The appeal was decisive. Without any further hesitation, Dr. Andrew took the Raja’s thin hands between his own and began to speak in the most confident tone about a wonderful new treatment recently discovered in Europe and employed as yet by only a handful of the most eminent physicians. Then, turning to the attendants who had been hovering all this time in the background, he ordered them out of the room. They did not understand the words; but his tone and accompanying gestures were unmistakably clear. They bowed and withdrew. Dr. Andrew took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves and started to make those famous magnetic passes, about which he had read with so much skeptical amusement in The Lancet. From the crown of the head, over the face and down the trunk to the epigastrium, again and again until the patient falls into a trance—‘or until’ (he remembered the derisive comments of the anonymous writer of the article) ‘until the presiding charlatan shall choose to say that his dupe is now under the magnetic influence.’ Quackery, humbug and fraud. But all the same, all the same…He worked away in silence. Twenty passes, fifty passes. The sick man sighed and closed his eyes. Sixty, eighty, a hundred, a hundred and twenty. The heat was stifling, Dr. Andrew’s shirt was drenched with sweat, and his arms ached. Grimly he repeated the same absurd gesture. A hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy-five, two hundred. It was all fraud and humbug; but all the same he was determined to make this poor devil go to sleep, even if it took him the whole day to do it. ‘You are going to sleep,’ he said aloud as he made the two hundred and eleventh pass. ‘You are going to sleep.’ The sick man seemed to sink more deeply into his pillows, and suddenly Dr. Andrew caught the sound of a rattling wheeze. ‘This time,’ he added quickly, ‘you are not going to choke. There’s plenty of room for the air to pass, and you’re not going to choke.’ The Raja’s breathing grew quiet. Dr. Andrew made a few more passes, then decided that it would be safe to take a rest. He mopped his face, then rose, stretched his arms and took a couple of turns up and down the room. Sitting down again by the bed, he took one of the Raja’s sticklike wrists and felt for the pulse. An hour before it had been running at almost a hundred; now the rate had fallen to seventy. He raised the arm: the hand hung limp like a dead man’s. He let go, and the arm dropped by its own weight and lay, inert and unmoving, where it had fallen. ‘Your Highness,’ he said, and again, more loudly, ‘Your Highness.’ There was no answer. It was all quackery, humbug and fraud, but all the same it worked, it obviously worked.”

A large, brightly colored mantis fluttered down onto the rail at the foot of the bed, folded its pink and white wings, raised its small flat head, and stretched out its incredibly muscular front legs in the attitude of prayer. Dr. MacPhail pulled out a magnifying glass and bent forward to examine it.

“Gongylus gongyloides,” he pronounced. “It dresses itself up to look like a flower. When unwary flies and moths come sailing in to sip the nectar, it sips them. And if it’s a female, she eats her lovers.” He put the glass away and leaned back in his chair. “What one likes most about the universe,” he said to Will Farnaby, “is its wild improbability. Gongylus gongyloides, Homo sapiens, my great-grandfather’s introduction to Pala and hypnosis—what could be more unlikely?”

“Nothing,” said Will. “Except perhaps my introduction to Pala and hypnosis, Pala via a shipwreck and a precipice; hypnosis by way of a soliloquy about an English cathedral.”

Susila laughed. “Fortunately I didn’t have to make all those passes over you. In this climate! I really admire Dr. Andrew. It sometimes takes three hours to anesthetize a person with the passes.”

“But in the end he succeeded?”

“Triumphantly.”

“And did he actually perform the operation?”

“Yes, he actually performed the operation,” said Dr. MacPhail. “But not immediately. There had to be a long preparation. Dr. Andrew began by telling his patient that henceforward he would be able to swallow without pain. Then, for the next three weeks, he fed him up. And between meals he put him into trance and kept him asleep until it was time for another feeding. It’s wonderful what your body will do for you if you only give it a chance. The Raja gained twelve pounds and felt like a new man. A new man full of new hope and confidence. He knew he was going to come through his ordeal. And so, incidentally, did Dr. Andrew. In the process of fortifying the Raja’s faith he had fortified his own. It was not a blind faith. The operation, he felt quite certain, was going to be successful. But this unshakable confidence did not prevent him from doing everything that might contribute to its success. Very early in the proceedings he started to work on the trance. The trance, he kept telling his patient, was becoming deeper every day, and on the day of the operation it would be much deeper than it had ever been before. It would also last longer. ‘You’ll sleep,’ he assured the Raja, ‘for four full hours after the operation’s over; and when you awake, you won’t feel the slightest pain.’ Dr. Andrew made these affirmations with a mixture of total skepticism and complete confidence. Reason and past experience assured him that all this was impossible. But in the present context past experience had proved to be irrelevant. The impossible had already happened, several times. There was no reason why it shouldn’t happen again. The important thing was to say that it would happen—so he said it, again and again. All this was good; but better still was Dr. Andrew’s invention of the rehearsal.”

“Rehearsal of what?”

“Of the surgery. They ran through the procedure half a dozen times. The last rehearsal was on the morning of the operation. At six, Dr. Andrew came to the Raja’s room and, after a little cheerful talk, began to make the passes. In a few minutes the patient was in deep trance. Stage by stage, Dr. Andrew described what he was going to do. Touching the cheekbone near the Raja’s right eye, he said, ‘I begin by stretching the skin. And now with this scalpel’ (and he drew the tip of a pencil across the cheek) ‘I make an incision. You feel no pain, of course—not even the slightest discomfort. And now the underlying tissues are being cut and you still feel nothing at all. You just lie there, comfortably asleep, while I dissect the cheek back to the nose. Every now and then I stop to tie a blood vessel; then I go on again. And when that part of the work is done, I’m ready to start on the tumor. It has its roots there in the antrum and it has grown upwards, under the cheekbone, into the eye socket, and downwards into the gullet. And as I cut it loose, you lie there as before, feeling nothing, perfectly comfortable, completely relaxed. And now I lift your head.’ Suiting his action to the words, he lifted the Raja’s head and bent it forward on the limp neck. ‘I lift it and bend it so that you can get rid of the blood that’s run down into your mouth and throat. Some of the blood has got into your windpipe, and you cough a little to get rid of it; but it doesn’t wake you.’ The Raja coughed once or twice, then, when Dr. Andrew released his hold, dropped back onto the pillows, still fast asleep. ‘And you don’t choke even when I work on the lower end of the tumor in your gullet.’ Dr. Andrew opened the Raja’s mouth and thrust two fingers down his throat. ‘It’s just a question of pulling it loose, that’s all. Nothing in that to make you choke. And if you have to cough up the blood, you can do it in your sleep. Yes, in your sleep, in this deep, deep sleep.’

“That was the end of the rehearsal. Ten minutes later, after making some more passes and telling his patient to sleep still more deeply, Dr. Andrew began the operation. He stretched the skin, he made the incision, he dissected the cheek, he cut the tumor away from its roots in the antrum. The Raja lay there perfectly relaxed, his pulse firm and steady at seventy-five, feeling no more pain than he had felt during the make-believe of the rehearsal. Dr. Andrew worked on the throat; there was no choking. The blood flowed into the windpipe; the Raja coughed but did not awake. Four hours after the operation was over, he was still sleeping; then, punctual to the minute, he opened his eyes, smiled at Dr. Andrew between his bandages and asked, in his singsong Cockney, when the operation was to start. After a feeding and a sponging, he was given some more passes and told to sleep for four more hours and to get well quickly. Dr. Andrew kept it up for a full week. Sixteen hours of trance each day, eight of waking. The Raja suffered almost no pain and, in spite of the thoroughly septic conditions under which the operation had been performed and the dressings renewed, the wounds healed without suppuration. Remembering the horrors he had witnessed in the Edinburgh infirmary, the yet more frightful horrors of the surgical wards at Madras, Dr. Andrew could hardly believe his eyes. And now he was given another opportunity to prove to himself what animal magnetism could do. The Raja’s eldest daughter was in the ninth month of her first pregnancy. Impressed by what he had done for her husband, the Rani sent for Dr. Andrew. He found her sitting with a frail frightened girl of sixteen, who knew just enough broken Cockney to be able to tell him she was going to die—she and her baby too. Three black birds had confirmed it by flying on three successive days across her path. Dr. Andrew did not try to argue with her. Instead, he asked her to lie down, then started to make the passes. Twenty minutes later the girl was in a deep trance. In his country, Dr. Andrew now assured her, black birds were lucky—a presage of birth and joy. She would bear her child easily and without pain. Yes, with no more pain than her father had felt during his operation. No pain at all, he promised, no pain whatsoever.

“Three days later, and after three or four more hours of intensive suggestion, it all came true. When the Raja woke up for his evening meal, he found his wife sitting by his bed. ‘We have a grandson,’ she said, ‘and our daughter is well. Dr. Andrew has said that tomorrow you may be carried to her room, to give them both your blessing.’ At the end of a month the Raja dissolved the Council of Regency and resumed his royal powers. Resumed them, in gratitude to the man who had saved his life and (the Rani was convinced of it) his daughter’s life as well, with Dr. Andrew as his chief adviser.”

“So he didn’t go back to Madras?”

“Not to Madras. Not even to London. He stayed here in Pala.”

“Trying to change the Raja’s accent?”

“And trying, rather more successfully, to change the Raja’s kingdom.”

“Into what?”

“That was a question he couldn’t have answered. In those early days he had no plan—only a set of likes and dislikes. There were things about Pala that he liked, and plenty of others that he didn’t like at all. Things about Europe that he detested, and things he passionately approved of. Things he had seen on his travels that seemed to make good sense, and things that filled him with disgust. People, he was beginning to understand, are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom. Might it not be possible, on this forbidden island, to avoid the cankers, minimize the nippings, and make the individual blooms more beautiful? That was the question to which, implicitly at first, then with a growing awareness of what they were really up to, Dr. Andrew and the Raja were trying to find an answer.”

“And did they find an answer?”

“Looking back,” said Dr. MacPhail, “one’s amazed by what those two men accomplished. The Scottish doctor and the Palanese king, the Calvinist-turned-atheist and the pious Mahayana Buddhist—what a strangely assorted pair! But a pair, very soon, of firm friends; a pair, moreover, of complementary temperaments and talents, with complementary philosophies and complementary stocks of knowledge, each man supplying the other’s deficiencies, each stimulating and fortifying the other’s native capacities. The Raja’s was an acute and subtle mind; but he knew nothing of the world beyond the confines of his island, nothing of physical science, nothing of European technology, European art, European ways of thinking. No less intelligent, Dr. Andrew knew nothing, of course, about Indian painting and poetry and philosophy. He also knew nothing, as he gradually discovered, about the science of the human mind and the art of living. In the months that followed the operation each became the other’s pupil and the other’s teacher. And of course that was only a beginning. They were not merely private citizens concerned with their private improvement. The Raja had a million subjects and Dr. Andrew was virtually his prime minister. Private improvement was to be the preliminary to public improvement. If the king and the doctor were now teaching one another to make the best of both worlds—the Oriental and the European, the ancient and the modern—it was in order to help the whole nation to do the same. To make the best of both worlds—what am I saying? To make the best of all the worlds—the worlds already realized within the various cultures and, beyond them, the worlds of still unrealized potentialities. It was an enormous ambition, an ambition totally impossible of fulfillment; but at least it had the merit of spurring them on, of making them rush in where angels feared to tread—with results that sometimes proved, to everybody’s astonishment, that they had not been quite such fools as they looked. They never succeeded, of course, in making the best of all the worlds; but by dint of boldly trying they made the best of many more worlds than any merely prudent or sensible person would have dreamed of being able to reconcile and combine.”

“‘If the fool would persist in his folly,’” Will quoted from The Proverbs of Hell, “‘he would become wise.’”

“Precisely,” Dr. Robert agreed. “And the most extravagant folly of all is the folly described by Blake, the folly that the Raja and Dr. Andrew were now contemplating—the enormous folly of trying to make a marriage between hell and heaven. But if you persist in that enormous folly, what an enormous reward! Provided, of course, that you persist intelligently. Stupid fools get nowhere; it’s only the knowledgeable and clever ones whose folly can make them wise or produce good results. Fortunately these two fools were clever. Clever enough, for example, to embark on their folly in a modest and appealing way. They began with pain relievers. The Palanese were Buddhists. They knew how misery is related to mind. You cling, you crave, you assert yourself—and you live in a homemade hell. You become detached—and you live in peace. ‘I show you sorrow,’ the Buddha had said, ‘and I show you the ending of sorrow.’ Well, here was Dr. Andrew with a special kind of mental detachment which would put an end at least to one kind of sorrow, namely, physical pain. With the Raja himself or, for the women, the Rani and her daughter acting as interpreters, Dr. Andrew gave lessons in his new-found art to groups of midwives and physicians, of teachers, mothers, invalids. Painless childbirth—and forthwith all the women of Pala were enthusiastically on the side of the innovators. Painless operations for stone and cataract and hemorrhoids—and they had won the approval of all the old and the ailing. At one stroke more than half the adult population became their allies, prejudiced in their favor, friendly in advance, or at least open-minded, toward the next reform.”

“Where did they go from pain?” Will asked.

“To agriculture and language. To bread and communication. They got a man out from England to establish Rothamsted-in-the-Tropics, and they set to work to give the Palanese a second language. Pala was to remain a forbidden island; for Dr. Andrew wholeheartedly agreed with the Raja that missionaries, planters and traders were far too dangerous to be tolerated. But, while the foreign subversives must not be allowed to come in, the natives must somehow be helped to get out—if not physically, at least with their minds. But their language and their archaic version of the Brahmi alphabet were a prison without windows. There could be no escape for them, no glimpse of the outside world until they had learned English and could read the Latin script. Among the courtiers, the Raja’s linguistic accomplishments had already set a fashion. Ladies and gentlemen larded their conversation with scraps of Cockney, and some of them had even sent to Ceylon for English-speaking tutors. What had been a mode was now transformed into a policy. English schools were set up and a staff of Bengali printers, with their presses and their fonts of Caslon and Bodoni, were imported from Calcutta. The first English book to be published at Shivapuram was a selection from The Arabian Nights, the second, a translation of The Diamond Sutra, hitherto available only in Sanskrit and in manuscript. For those who wished to read about Sindbad and Marouf, and for those who were interested in the Wisdom of the Other Shore, there were now two cogent reasons for learning English. That was the beginning of the long educational process that turned us at last into a bilingual people. We speak Palanese when we’re cooking, when we’re telling funny stories, when we’re talking about love or making it. (Incidentally, we have the richest erotic and sentimental vocabulary in Southeast Asia.) But when it comes to business, or science, or speculative philosophy, we generally speak English. And most of us prefer to write in English. Every writer needs a literature as his frame of reference; a set of models to conform to or depart from. Pala had good painting and sculpture, splendid architecture, wonderful dancing, subtle and expressive music—but no real literature, no national poets or dramatists or storytellers. Just bards reciting Buddhist and Hindu myths; just a lot of monks preaching sermons and splitting metaphysical hairs. Adopting English as our stepmother tongue, we gave ourselves a literature with one of the longest pasts and certainly the widest of presents. We gave ourselves a background, a spiritual yardstick, a repertory of styles and techniques, an inexhaustible source of inspiration. In a word, we gave ourselves the possibility of being creative in a field where we had never been creative before. Thanks to the Raja and my great-grandfather, there’s an Anglo-Palanese literature—of which, I may add, Susila here is a contemporary light.”

“On the dim side,” she protested.

Dr. MacPhail shut his eyes, and, smiling to himself, began to recite:

“Thus-Gone to Thus-Gone, I with a Buddha’s hand

Offer the unplucked flower, the frog’s soliloquy

Among the lotus leaves, the milk-smeared mouth

At my full breast and love and, like the cloudless

Sky that makes possible mountains and setting moon,

This emptiness that is the womb of love

This poetry of silence.”

He opened his eyes again. “And not only this poetry of silence,” he said. “This science, this philosophy, this theology of silence. And now it’s high time you went to sleep.” He rose and moved towards the door. “I’ll go and get you a glass of fruit juice.”

9

“‘PATRIOTISM IS NOT ENOUGH.’ BUT NEITHER IS ANYTHING ELSE. Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything will really do.”

“Attention!” shouted a faraway bird.

Will looked at his watch. Five to twelve. He closed his Notes on What’s What and picking up the bamboo alpenstock which had once belonged to Dugald MacPhail, he set out to keep his appointment with Vijaya and Dr. Robert. By the short cut the main building of the Experimental Station was less than a quarter of a mile from Dr. Robert’s bungalow. But the day was oppressively hot, and there were two flights of steps to be negotiated. For a convalescent with his right leg in a splint, it was a considerable journey.

Slowly, painfully, Will made his way along the winding path and up the steps. At the top of the second flight he halted to take breath and mop his forehead; then keeping close to the wall, where there was still a narrow strip of shade, he moved on towards a signboard marked LABORATORY.

The door beneath the board was ajar; he pushed it open and found himself on the threshold of a long, high-ceilinged room. There were the usual sinks and worktables, the usual glass-fronted cabinets full of bottles and equipment, the usual smells of chemicals and caged mice. For the first moment Will was under the impression that the room was untenanted, but no—almost hidden from view by a bookcase that projected at right angles from the wall, young Murugan was seated at a table, intently reading. As quietly as he could—for it was always amusing to take people by surprise—Will advanced into the room. The whirring of an electric fan covered the sound of his approach, and it was not until he was within a few feet of the bookcase that Murugan became aware of his presence. The boy started guiltily, shoved his book with panic haste into a leather briefcase and, reaching for another, smaller volume that lay open on the table beside the briefcase, drew it within reading range. Only then did he turn to face the intruder.

Will gave him a reassuring smile. “It’s only me.”

The look of angry defiance gave place, on the boy’s face, to one of relief.

“I thought it was…” He broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished.

“You thought it was someone who would bawl you out for not doing what you’re supposed to do—is that it?”

Murugan grinned and nodded his curly head.

“Where’s everyone else?” Will asked.

“They’re out in the fields—pruning or pollinating or something.” His tone was contemptuous.

“And so, the cats being away, the mouse duly played. What were you studying so passionately?”

With innocent disingenuousness, Murugan held up the book he was now pretending to read. “It’s called Elementary Ecology,” he said.

“So I see,” said Will. “But what I asked you was what were you reading?”

“Oh, that,” Murugan shrugged his shoulders. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

“I’m interested in everything that anyone tries to hide,” Will assured him. “Was it pornography?”

Murugan dropped his playacting and looked genuinely offended. “Who do you take me for?”

Will was on the point of saying that he took him for an average boy, but checked himself. To Colonel Dipa’s pretty young friend, “average boy” might sound like an insult or an innuendo. Instead he bowed with mock politeness. “I beg Your Majesty’s pardon,” he said. “But I’m still curious,” he added in another tone. “May I?” He laid a hand on the bulging briefcase.

Murugan hesitated for a moment, then forced a laugh. “Go ahead.”

“What a tome!” Will pulled the ponderous volume out of the bag and laid it on the table. “Sears, Roebuck and Co.,” he read aloud, “Spring and Summer Catalog.”

“It’s last year’s,” said Murugan apologetically. “But I don’t suppose there’s been much change since then.”

“There,” Will assured him, “you’re mistaken. If the styles weren’t completely changed every year, there’d be no reason for buying new things before the old ones are worn out. You don’t understand the first principles of modern consumerism.” He opened at random. “‘Soft Platform Wedgies in Wide Widths.’” Opened at another place and found the description and image of a Whisper-Pink Bra in Dacron and Pima cotton. Turned the page and here, memento mori, was what the bra-buyer would be wearing twenty years later—A Strap-Controlled Front, Cupped to Support Pendulous Abdomen.

“It doesn’t get really interesting,” said Murugan, “until near the end of the book. It has thirteen hundred and fifty-eight pages,” he added parenthetically. “Imagine! Thirteen hundred and fifty-eight!”

Will skipped the next seven hundred and fifty pages.

“Ah, this is more like it,” he said. “‘Our Famous .22 Revolvers and Automatics.’” And here, a little further on, were the Fibre Glass Boats, here were the High Thrust Inboard Engines, here was a 12-hp Outboard for only $234.95—and the Fuel Tank was included. “That’s extraordinarily generous!”

But Murugan, it was evident, was no sailor. Taking the book, he leafed impatiently through a score of additional pages.

“Look at this Italian Style Motor Scooter!” And while Will looked, Murugan read aloud. “‘This sleek Speedster gives up to 110 Miles per Gallon of Fuel.’ Just imagine!” His normally sulky face was glowing with enthusiasm. “And you can get up to sixty miles per gallon even on this 14.5-hp Motorcycle. And it’s guaranteed to do seventy-five miles an hour—guaranteed!”

“Remarkable!” said Will. Then, curiously, “Did somebody in America send you this glorious book?” he asked.

Murugan shook his head. “Colonel Dipa gave it to me.”

“Colonel Dipa?” What an odd kind of present from Hadrian to Antinoüs! He looked again at the picture of the motorbike, then back at Murugan’s glowing face. Light dawned; the Colonel’s purpose revealed itself. The serpent tempted me, and I did eat. The tree in the midst of the garden was called the Tree of Consumer Goods, and to the inhabitants of every underdeveloped Eden the tiniest taste of its fruit, and even the sight of its thirteen hundred and fifty-eight leaves, had power to bring the shameful knowledge that, industrially speaking, they were stark-naked. The future Raja of Pala was being made to realize that he was no more than the untrousered ruler of a tribe of savages.

“You ought,” Will said aloud, “to import a million of these catalogues and distribute them—gratis, of course, like contraceptives—to all your subjects.”

“What for?”

“To whet their appetite for possessions. Then they’ll start clamoring for Progress—oil wells, armaments, Joe Aldehyde, Soviet technicians.”

Murugan frowned and shook his head. “It wouldn’t work.”

“You mean, they wouldn’t be tempted? Not even by Sleek Speedsters and Whisper-Pink Bras? But that’s incredible!”

“It may be incredible,” said Murugan bitterly, “but it’s a fact. They’re just not interested.”

“Not even the young ones?”

“I’d say especially the young ones.”

Will Farnaby pricked up his ears. This lack of interest was profoundly interesting. “Can you guess why?” he asked.

“I don’t guess,” the boy answered. “I know.” And as though he had suddenly decided to stage a parody of his mother, he began to speak in a tone of righteous indignation that was absurdly out of keeping with his age and appearance. “To begin with, they’re much too busy with…” He hesitated, then the abhorred word was hissed out with a disgustful emphasis. “With sex.”

“But everybody’s busy with sex. Which doesn’t keep them from whoring after sleek speedsters.”

“Sex is different here,” Murugan insisted.

“Because of the yoga of love?” Will asked, remembering the little nurse’s rapturous face.

The boy nodded. “They’ve got something that makes them think they’re perfectly happy, and they don’t want anything else.”

“What a blessed state!”

“There’s nothing blessed about it,” Murugan snapped. “It’s just stupid and disgusting. No progress, only sex, sex, sex. And of course that beastly dope they’re all given.”

“Dope?” Will repeated in some astonishment. Dope in a place where Susila had said there were no addicts? “What kind of dope?”

“It’s made out of toadstools. Toadstools!” He spoke in a comical caricature of the Rani’s vibrant tone of outraged spirituality.

“Those lovely red toadstools that gnomes used to sit on?”

“No, these are yellow. People used to go out and collect them in the mountains. Nowadays the things are grown in special fungus beds at the High Altitude Experimental Station. Scientifically cultivated dope. Pretty, isn’t it?”

A door slammed and there was a sound of voices, of footsteps approaching along a corridor. Abruptly, the indignant spirit of the Rani took flight, and Murugan was once again the conscience-stricken schoolboy furtively trying to cover up his delinquencies. In a trice Elementary Ecology had taken the place of Sears, Roebuck, and the suspiciously bulging briefcase was under the table. A moment later, stripped to the waist and shining like oiled bronze with the sweat of labor in the noonday sun, Vijaya came striding into the room. Behind him came Dr. Robert. With the air of a model student, interrupted in the midst of his reading by trespassers from the frivolous outside world, Murugan looked up from his book. Amused, Will threw himself at once wholeheartedly into the part that had been assigned to him.

“It was I who got here too early,” he said in response to Vijaya’s apologies for their being so late. “With the result that our young friend here hasn’t been able to get on with his lessons. We’ve been talking our heads off.”

“What about?” Dr. Robert asked.

“Everything. Cabbages, kings, motor scooters, pendulous abdomens. And when you came in, we’d just embarked on toadstools. Murugan was telling me about the fungi that are used here as a source of dope.”

“What’s in a name?” said Dr. Robert, with a laugh. “Answer, practically everything. Having had the misfortune to be brought up in Europe, Murugan calls it dope and feels about it all the disapproval that, by conditioned reflex, the dirty word evokes. We, on the contrary, give the stuff good names—the moksha-medicine, the reality revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill. And we know, by direct experience, that the good names are deserved. Whereas our young friend here has no firsthand knowledge of the stuff and can’t be persuaded even to give it a try. For him, it’s dope and dope is something that, by definition, no decent person ever indulges in.”

“What does His Highness say to that?” Will asked.

Murugan shook his head. “All it gives you is a lot of illusions,” he muttered. “Why should I go out of my way to be made a fool of?”

“Why indeed?” said Vijaya with good-humored irony. “Seeing that, in your normal condition, you alone of the human race are never made a fool of and never have illusions about anything!”

“I never said that,” Murugan protested. “All I mean is that I don’t want any of your false samadhi.”

“How do you know it’s false?” Dr. Robert enquired.

“Because the real thing only comes to people after years and years of meditation and tapas and…well, you know—not going with women.”

“Murugan,” Vijaya explained to Will, “is one of the Puritans. He’s outraged by the fact that, with four hundred milligrams of moksha-medicine in their bloodstreams, even beginners—yes, and even boys and girls who make love together—can catch a glimpse of the world as it looks to someone who has been liberated from his bondage to the ego.”

“But it isn’t real,” Murugan insisted.

“Not real!” Dr. Robert repeated. “You might as well say that the experience of feeling well isn’t real.”

“You’re begging the question,” Will objected. “An experience can be real in relation to something going on inside your skull but completely irrelevant to anything outside.”

“Of course,” Dr. Robert agreed.

“Do you know what goes on inside your skull, when you’ve taken a dose of the mushroom?”

“We know a little.”

“And we’re trying all the time to find out more,” Vijaya added.

“For example,” said Dr. Robert, “we’ve found that the people whose EEG doesn’t show any alpha-wave activity when they’re relaxed aren’t likely to respond significantly to the moksha-medicine. That means that, for about fifteen percent of the population, we have to find other approaches to liberation.”

“Another thing we’re just beginning to understand,” said Vijaya, “is the neurological correlate of these experiences. What’s happening in the brain when you’re having a vision? And what’s happening when you pass from a premystical to a genuinely mystical state of mind?”

“Do you know?” Will asked.

“‘Know’ is a big word. Let’s say we’re in a position to make some plausible guesses. Angels and New Jerusalems and Madonnas and Future Buddhas—they’re all related to some kind of unusual stimulation of the brain areas of primary projection—the visual cortex, for example. Just how the moksha-medicine produces those unusual stimuli we haven’t yet found out. The important fact is that, somehow or other, it does produce them. And somehow or other, it also does something unusual to the silent areas of the brain, the areas not specifically concerned with perceiving, or moving, or feeling.”

“And how do the silent areas respond?” Will enquired.

“Let’s start with what they don’t respond with. They don’t respond with visions or auditions, they don’t respond with telepathy or clairvoyance or any other kind of parapsychological performance. None of that amusing premystical stuff. Their response is the full-blown mystical experience. You know—One in all and All in one. The basic experience with its corollaries—boundless compassion, fathomless mystery and meaning.”

“Not to mention joy,” said Dr. Robert, “inexpressible joy.”

“And the whole caboodle is inside your skull,” said Will. “Strictly private. No reference to any external fact except a toadstool.”

“Not real,” Murugan chimed in. “That’s exactly what I was trying to say.”

“You’re assuming,” said Dr. Robert, “that the brain produces consciousness. I’m assuming that it transmits consciousness. And my explanation is no more farfetched than yours. How on earth can a set of events belonging to one order be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and incommensurable order? Nobody has the faintest idea. All one can do is to accept the facts and concoct hypotheses. And one hypothesis is just about as good, philosophically speaking, as another. You say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which causes them to produce a set of subjective events to which people have given the name ‘mystical experience.’ I say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain which opens some kind of neurological sluice and so allows a larger volume of Mind with a large ‘M’ to flow into your mind with a small ‘m.’ You can’t demonstrate the truth of your hypothesis, and I can’t demonstrate the truth of mine. And even if you could prove that I’m wrong, would it make any practical difference?”

“I’d have thought it would make all the difference,” said Will.

“Do you like music?” Dr. Robert asked.

“More than most things.”

“And what, may I ask, does Mozart’s G-Minor Quintet refer to? Does it refer to Allah? Or Tao? Or the second person of the Trinity? Or the Atman-Brahman?”

Will laughed. “Let’s hope not.”

“But that doesn’t make the experience of the G-Minor Quintet any less rewarding. Well, it’s the same with the kind of experience that you get with the moksha-medicine, or through prayer and fasting and spiritual exercises. Even if it doesn’t refer to anything outside itself, it’s still the most important thing that ever happened to you. Like music, only incomparably more so. And if you give the experience a chance, if you’re prepared to go along with it, the results are incomparably more therapeutic and transforming. So maybe the whole thing does happen inside one’s skull. Maybe it is private and there’s no unitive knowledge of anything but one’s own physiology. Who cares? The fact remains that the experience can open one’s eyes and make one blessed and transform one’s whole life.” There was a long silence. “Let me tell you something,” he resumed, turning to Murugan. “Something I hadn’t intended to talk about to anybody. But now I feel that perhaps I have a duty, a duty to the throne, a duty to Pala and all its people—an obligation to tell you about this very private experience. Perhaps the telling may help you to be a little more understanding about your country and its ways.” He was silent for a moment; then in a quietly matter-of-fact tone, “I suppose you know about my wife,” he went on.

His face still averted, Murugan nodded. “I was sorry,” he mumbled, “to hear she was so ill.”

“It’s a matter of a few days now,” said Dr. Robert. “Four or five at the most. But she’s still perfectly lucid, perfectly conscious of what’s happening to her. Yesterday she asked me if we could take the moksha-medicine together. We’d taken it together,” he added parenthetically, “once or twice each year for the last thirty-seven years—ever since we decided to get married. And now once more—for the last time, the last, last time. There was a risk involved, because of the damage to the liver. But we decided it was a risk worth taking. And as it turned out, we were right. The moksha-medicine—the dope, as you prefer to call it—hardly upset her at all. All that happened to her was the mental transformation.”

He was silent, and Will suddenly became aware of the squeak and scrabble of caged rats and, through the open window, the babel of tropical life and the call of a distant mynah bird. “Here and now, boys. Here and now…”

“You’re like that mynah,” said Dr. Robert at last. “Trained to repeat words you don’t understand or know the reason for, ‘It isn’t real. It isn’t real.’ But if you’d experienced what Lakshmi and I went through yesterday you’d know better. You’d know it was much more real than what you call reality. More real than what you’re thinking and feeling at this moment. More real than the world before your eyes. But not real is what you’ve been taught to say. Not real, not real.” Dr. Robert laid a hand affectionately on the boy’s shoulder. “You’ve been told that we’re just a set of self-indulgent dope takers, wallowing in illusions and false samadhis. Listen, Murugan—forget all the bad language that’s been pumped into you. Forget it at least to the point of making a single experiment. Take four hundred milligrams of moksha-medicine and find out for yourself what it does, what it can tell you about your own nature, about this strange world you’ve got to live in, learn in, suffer in, and finally die in. Yes, even you will have to die one day—maybe fifty years from now, maybe tomorrow. Who knows? But it’s going to happen, and one’s a fool if one doesn’t prepare for it.” He turned to Will. “Would you like to come along while we take our shower and get into some clothes?”

Without waiting for an answer, he walked out through the door that led into that central corridor of the long building. Will picked up his bamboo staff and, accompanied by Vijaya, followed him out of the room.

“Do you suppose that made any impression on Murugan?” he asked Vijaya when the door had closed behind them.

Vijaya shrugged his shoulders. “I doubt it.”

“What with his mother,” said Will, “and his passion for internal-combustion engines, he’s probably impervious to anything you people can say. You should have heard him on the subject of motor scooters!”

“We have heard him,” said Dr. Robert, who had halted in front of a blue door and was waiting for them to come up with him. “Frequently. When he comes of age, scooters are going to become a major political issue.”

Vijaya laughed. “To scoot or not to scoot, that is the question.”

“And it isn’t only in Pala that it’s the question,” Dr. Robert added. “It’s the question that every underdeveloped country has to answer one way or the other.”

“And the answer,” said Will, “is always the same. Wherever I’ve been—and I’ve been almost everywhere—they’ve opted wholeheartedly for scooting. All of them.”

“Without exception,” Vijaya agreed. “Scooting for scooting’s sake, and to hell with all considerations of fulfillment, self-knowledge, liberation. Not to mention common or garden health or happiness.”

“Whereas we,” said Dr. Robert, “have always chosen to adapt our economy and technology to human beings—not our human beings to somebody else’s economy and technology. We import what we can’t make; but we make an import only what we can afford. And what we can afford is limited not merely by our supply of pounds and marks and dollars, but also primarily—primarily,” he insisted—“by our wish to be happy, our ambition to become fully human. Scooters, we’ve decided after carefully looking into the matter, are among the things—the very numerous things—we simply can’t afford. Which is something poor little Murugan will have to learn the hard way—seeing that he hasn’t learned, and doesn’t want to learn, the easy way.”

“Which is the easy way?” Will asked.

“Education and reality-revealers. Murugan has had neither. Or rather he’s had the opposite of both. He’s had miseducation in Europe—Swiss governesses, English tutors, American movies, everybody’s advertisements—and he’s had reality eclipsed for him by his mother’s brand of spirituality. So it’s no wonder he pines for scooters.”

“But his subjects, I gather, do not.”

“Why should they? They’ve been taught from infancy to be fully aware of the world, and to enjoy their awareness. And, on top of that, they have been shown the world and themselves and other people as these are illumined and transfigured by reality-revealers. Which helps them, of course, to have an intenser awareness and a more understanding enjoyment, so that the most ordinary things, the most trivial events, are seen as jewels and miracles. Jewels and miracles,” he repeated emphatically. “So why should we resort to scooters or whisky or television or Billy Graham or any other of your distractions and compensations?”

“‘Nothing short of everything will really do,’” Will quoted. “I see now what the Old Raja was talking about. You can’t be a good economist unless you’re also a good psychologist. Or a good engineer without being the right kind of metaphysician.”

“And don’t forget all the other sciences,” said Dr. Robert. “Pharmacology, sociology, physiology, not to mention pure and applied autology, neurotheology, metachemistry, mycomysticism, and the ultimate science,” he added, looking away so as to be more alone with his thoughts of Lakshmi in the hospital, “the science that sooner or later we shall all have to be examined in—thanatology.” He was silent for a moment; then, in another tone, “Well, let’s go and get washed up,” he said and, opening the blue door, led the way into a long changing room with a row of showers and wash basins at one end and on the opposite wall, tiers of lockers and a large hanging cupboard.

Will took a seat and while his companions lathered themselves at the basins, went on with their conversations.

“Would it be permissible,” he asked, “for a miseducated alien to try a truth-and-beauty pill?”

The answer was another question. “Is your liver in good order?” Dr. Robert enquired.

“Excellent.”

“And you don’t seem to be more than mildly schizophrenic. So I can’t see any counterindication.”

“Then I can make the experiment?”

“Whenever you like.”

He stepped into the nearest shower stall and turned on the water. Vijaya followed suit.

“Aren’t you supposed to be intellectuals?” Will asked when the two men had emerged again and were drying themselves.

“We do intellectual work,” Vijaya answered.

“Then why all this horrible honest toil?”

“For a very simple reason: this morning I had some spare time.”

“So did I,” said Dr. Robert.

“So you went out into the fields and did a Tolstoy act.”

Vijaya laughed. “You seem to imagine we do it for ethical reasons.”

“Don’t you?”

“Certainly not. I do muscular work, because I have muscles; and if I don’t use my muscles I shall become a bad-tempered sitting-addict.”

“With nothing between the cortex and the buttocks,” said Dr. Robert. “Or rather with everything—but in a condition of complete unconsciousness and toxic stagnation. Western intellectuals are all sitting-addicts. That’s why most of you are so repulsively unwholesome. In the past even a duke had to do a lot of walking, even a moneylender, even a metaphysician. And when they weren’t using their legs, they were jogging about on horses. Whereas now, from the tycoon to his typist, from the logical positivist to the positive thinker, you spend nine tenths of your time on foam rubber. Spongy seats for spongy bottoms—at home, in the office, in cars and bars, in planes and trains and buses. No moving of legs, no struggles with distance and gravity—just lifts and planes and cars, just foam rubber and an eternity of sitting. The life force that used to find an outlet through striped muscle gets turned back on the viscera and the nervous system, and slowly destroys them.”

“So you take to digging and delving as a form of therapy?”

“As prevention—to make therapy unnecessary. In Pala even a professor, even a government official, generally puts in two hours of digging and delving each day.”

“As part of his duties?”

“And as part of his pleasure.”

Will made a grimace. “It wouldn’t be part of my pleasure.”

“That’s because you weren’t taught to use your mind-body in the right way,” Vijaya explained. “If you’d been shown how to do things with the minimum of strain and the maximum of awareness, you’d enjoy even honest toil.”

“I take it that your children all get this kind of training.”

“From the first moment they start doing for themselves. For example, what’s the proper way of handling yourself while you’re buttoning your clothes?” And suiting action to words, Vijaya started to button the shirt he had just slipped into. “We answer the question by actually putting their heads and bodies into the physiologically best position. And we encourage them at the same time to notice how it feels to be in the physiologically best position, to be aware of what the process of doing up buttons consists of in terms of touches and pressures and muscular sensations. By the time they’re fourteen they’ve learned how to get the most and the best—objectively and subjectively—out of any activity they may undertake. And that’s when we start them working. Ninety minutes a day at some kind of manual job.”

“Back to good old child labor!”

“Or rather,” said Dr. Robert, “forward from bad new child idleness. You don’t allow your teen-agers to work; so they have to blow off steam in delinquency or else throttle down steam till they’re ready to become domesticated sitting-addicts. And now,” he added, “it’s time to be going. I’ll lead the way.”

In the laboratory, when they entered, Murugan was in the act of locking his briefcase against all prying eyes. “I’m ready,” he said and, tucking the thirteen hundred and fifty-eight pages of the Newest Testament under his arm, he followed them out into the sunshine. A few minutes later, crammed into an ancient jeep, the four of them were rolling along the road that led, past the paddock of the white bull, past the lotus pool and the huge stone Buddha, out through the gate of the Station Compound to the highway. “I’m sorry we can’t provide more comfortable transportation,” said Vijaya as they bumped and rattled along.

Will patted Murugan’s knee. “This is the man you should be apologizing to,” he said. “The one whose soul yearns for Jaguars and Thunderbirds.”

“It’s a yearning, I’m afraid,” said Dr. Robert from the back seat, “that will have to remain unsatisfied.”

Murugan made no comment, but smiled the secret contemptuous smile of one who knows better.

“We can’t import toys,” Dr. Robert went on. “Only essentials.”

“Such as?”

“You’ll see in a moment.” They rounded a curve, and there beneath them were the thatched roofs and tree-shaded gardens of a considerable village. Vijaya pulled up at the side of the road and turned off the motor. “You’re looking at New Rothamsted,” he said. “Alias Madalia. Rice, vegetables, poultry, fruit. Not to mention two potteries and a furniture factory. Hence those wires.” He waved his hand in the direction of the long row of pylons that climbed up the terraced slope behind the village, dipped out of sight over the ridge, and reappeared, far away, marching up from the floor of the next valley towards the green belt of mountain jungle and the cloudy peaks beyond and above. “That’s one of the indispensable imports—electrical equipment. And when the waterfalls have been harnessed and you’ve strung up the transmission lines, here’s something else with a high priority.” He directed a pointing finger at a windowless block of cement that rose incongruously from among the wooden houses near the upper entrance to the village.

“What is it?” Will asked. “Some kind of electric oven?”

“No, the kilns are over on the other side of the village. This is the communal freezer.”

“In the old days,” Dr. Robert explained, “we used to lose about half of all the perishables we produced. Now we lose practically nothing. Whatever we grow is for us, not for the circumambient bacteria.”

“So now you have enough to eat.”

“More than enough. We eat better than any other country in Asia, and there’s a surplus for export. Lenin used to say that electricity plus socialism equals communism. Our equations are rather different. Electricity minus heavy industry plus birth control equals democracy and plenty. Electricity plus heavy industry minus birth control equals misery, totalitarianism and war.”

“Incidentally,” Will asked, “who owns all this? Are you capitalists or state socialists?”

“Neither. Most of the time we’re co-operators. Palanese agriculture has always been an affair of terracing and irrigation. But terracing and irrigation call for pooled efforts and friendly agreements. Cutthroat competition isn’t compatible with rice-growing in a mountainous country. Our people found it quite easy to pass from mutual aid in a village community to streamlined cooperative techniques for buying and selling and profit sharing and financing.”

“Even co-operative financing?”

Dr. Robert nodded. “None of those bloodsucking usurers that you find all over the Indian countryside. And no commercial banks in your Western style. Our borrowing and lending system was modeled on those credit unions that Wilhelm Raiffeisen set up more than a century ago in Germany. Dr. Andrew persuaded the Raja to invite one of Raiffeisen’s young men to come here and organize a cooperative banking system. It’s still going strong.”

“And what do you use for money?” Will asked.

Dr. Robert dipped into his trouser pocket and pulled out a handful of silver, gold and copper.

“In a modest way,” he explained, “Pala’s a gold-producing country. We mine enough to give our paper a solid metallic backing. And the gold supplements our exports. We can pay spot cash for expensive equipment like those transmission lines and the generators at the other end.”

“You seem to have solved your economic problems pretty successfully.”

“Solving them wasn’t difficult. To begin with, we never allowed ourselves to produce more children than we could feed, clothe, house, and educate into something like full humanity. Not being overpopulated, we have plenty. But, although we have plenty, we’ve managed to resist the temptation that the West has now succumbed to—the temptation to overconsume. We don’t give ourselves coronaries by guzzling six times as much saturated fat as we need. We don’t hypnotize ourselves into believing that two television sets will make us twice as happy as one television set. And finally we don’t spend a quarter of the gross national product preparing for World War III or even World War’s baby brother, Local War MMMCCCXXXIII. Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster. Ignorance, militarism and breeding, these three—and the greatest of these is breeding. No hope, not the slightest possibility, of solving the economic problem until that’s under control. As population rushes up, prosperity goes down.” He traced the descending curve with an outstretched finger. “And as prosperity goes down, discontent and rebellion” (the forefinger moved up again), “political ruthlessness and one-party rule, nationalism and bellicosity begin to rise. Another ten or fifteen years of uninhibited breeding, and the whole world, from China to Peru via Africa and the Middle East, will be fairly crawling with Great Leaders, all dedicated to the suppression of freedom, all armed to the teeth by Russia or America or, better still, by both at once, all waving flags, all screaming for Lebensraum.”

“What about Pala?” Will asked. “Will you be blessed with a Great Leader ten years from now?”

“Not if we can help it,” Dr. Robert answered. “We’ve always done everything possible to make it very difficult for a Great Leader to arise.”

Out of the corner of his eye Will saw that Murugan was making a face of indignant and contemptuous disgust. In his fancy Antinoüs evidently saw himself as a Carlylean Hero. Will turned back to Dr. Robert.

“Tell me how you do it,” he said.

“Well, to begin with we don’t fight wars or prepare for them. Consequently, we have no need for conscription, or military hierarchies, or a unified command. Then there’s our economic system: it doesn’t permit anybody to become more than four or five times as rich as the average. That means that we don’t have any captains of industry or omnipotent financiers. Better still, we have no omnipotent politicians or bureaucrats. Pala’s a federation of self-governing units, geographical units, professional units, economic units—so there’s plenty of scope for small-scale initiative and democratic leaders, but no place for any kind of dictator at the head of a centralized government. Another point: we have no established church, and our religion stresses immediate experience and deplores belief in unverifiable dogmas and the emotions which that belief inspires. So we’re preserved from the plagues of popery, on the one hand, and fundamentalist revivalism, on the other. And along with transcendental experience we systematically cultivate skepticism. Discouraging children from taking words too seriously, teaching them to analyze whatever they hear or read—this is an integral part of the school curriculum. Result: the eloquent rabble-rouser, like Hitler or our neighbor across the Strait, Colonel Dipa, just doesn’t have a chance here in Pala.”

This was too much for Murugan. Unable to contain himself, “But look at the energy Colonel Dipa generates in his people,” he burst out. “Look at all the devotion and self-sacrifice. We don’t have anything like that here.”

“Thank God,” said Dr. Robert devoutly.

“Thank God,” Vijaya echoed.

“But these things are good,” the boy protested. “I admire them.”

“I admire them too,” said Dr. Robert. “Admire them in the same way as I admire a typhoon. Unfortunately that kind of energy and devotion and self-sacrifice happens to be incompatible with liberty, not to mention reason and human decency. But decency, reason and liberty are what Pala has been working for, ever since the time of your namesake, Murugan the Reformer.”

From under his seat Vijaya pulled out a tin box and, lifting the lid, distributed a first round of cheese and avocado sandwiches. “We’ll have to eat as we go.” He started the motor and with one hand, the other being busy with his sandwich, swung the little car onto the road. “Tomorrow,” he said to Will, “I’ll show you the sights of the village, and the still more remarkable sight of my family eating their lunch. Today we have an appointment in the mountains.”

Near the entrance to the village he turned the jeep into a side road that went winding steeply up between terraced fields of rice and vegetables, interspersed with orchards and, here and there, plantations of young trees destined, Dr. Robert explained, to supply the pulp mills of Shivapuram with their raw material.

“How many papers does Pala support?” Will enquired and was surprised to learn that there was only one. “Who enjoys the monopoly? The government? The party in power? The local Joe Aldehyde?”

“Nobody enjoys a monopoly,” Dr. Robert assured him. “There’s a panel of editors representing half a dozen different parties and interests. Each of them gets his allotted space for comment and criticism. The reader’s in a position to compare their arguments and make up his own mind. I remember how shocked I was the first time I read one of your big-circulation newspapers. The bias of the headlines, the systematic one-sidedness of the reporting and the commentaries, the catchwords and slogans instead of argument. No serious appeal to reason. Instead, a systematic effort to install conditioned reflexes in the minds of the voters—and, for the rest, crime, divorce, anecdotes, twaddle, anything to keep them distracted, anything to prevent them from thinking.”

The car climbed on and now they were on a ridge between two headlong descents, with a tree-fringed lake down at the bottom of a gorge to their left and to the right a broader valley where, between two tree-shaded villages, like an incongruous piece of pure geometry, sprawled a huge factory.

“Cement?” Will questioned.

Dr. Robert nodded. “One of the indispensable industries. We produce all we need and a surplus for export.”

“And those villages supply the manpower?”

“In the intervals of agriculture and work in the forest and the sawmills.”

“Does that kind of part-time system work well?”

“It depends what you mean by ‘well.’ It doesn’t result in maximum efficiency. But then in Pala maximum efficiency isn’t the categorical imperative that it is with you. You think first of getting the biggest possible output in the shortest possible time. We think first of human beings and their satisfactions. Changing jobs doesn’t make for the biggest output in the fewest days. But most people like it better than doing one kind of job all their lives. If it’s a choice between mechanical efficiency and human satisfaction, we choose satisfaction.”

“When I was twenty,” Vijaya now volunteered, “I put in four months at that cement plant—and after that ten weeks making superphosphates and then six months in the jungle, as a lumberjack.”

“All this ghastly honest toil!”

“Twenty years earlier,” said Dr. Robert, “I did a stint at the copper smelters. After which I had a taste of the sea on a fishing boat. Sampling all kinds of work—it’s part of everybody’s education. One learns an enormous amount that way—about things and skills and organizations, about all kinds of people and their ways of thinking.”

Will shook his head. “I’d still rather get it out of a book.”

“But what you can get out of a book is never it. At bottom,” Dr. Robert added, “all of you are still Platonists. You worship the word and abhor matter!”

“Tell that to the clergymen,” said Will. “They’re always reproaching us with being crass materialists.”

“Crass,” Dr. Robert agreed, “but crass precisely because you’re such inadequate materialists. Abstract materialism—that’s what you profess. Whereas we make a point of being materialists concretely—materialistic on the wordless levels of seeing and touching and smelling, of tensed muscles and dirty hands. Abstract materialism is as bad as abstract idealism; it makes immediate spiritual experience almost impossible. Sampling different kinds of work in concrete materialism is the first, indispensable step in our education for concrete spirituality.”

“But even the most concrete materialism,” Vijaya qualified, “won’t get you very far unless you’re fully conscious of what you’re doing and experiencing. You’ve got to be completely aware of the bits of matter you’re handling, the skills you’re practicing, the people you work with.”

“Quite right,” said Dr. Robert. “I ought to have made it clear that concrete materialism is only the raw stuff of a fully human life. It’s through awareness, complete and constant awareness, that we transform it into concrete spirituality. Be fully aware of what you’re doing, and work becomes the yoga of work, play becomes the yoga of play, everyday living becomes the yoga of everyday living.”

Will thought of Ranga and the little nurse. “And what about love?”

Dr. Robert nodded. “That too. Awareness transfigures it, turns love-making into the yoga of love-making.”

Murugan gave an imitation of his mother looking shocked.

“Psychophysical means to a transcendental end,” said Vijaya, raising his voice against the grinding screech of the low gear into which he had just shifted, “that, primarily, is what all these yogas are. But they’re also something else, they’re also devices for dealing with the problems of power.” He shifted back to a quieter gear and lowered his voice to its normal tone. “The problems of power,” he repeated. “And they confront you on every level of organization—every level, from national governments down to nurseries and honeymooning couples. For it isn’t merely a question of making things hard for the Great Leaders. There are all the millions of small-scale tyrants and persecutors, all the mute inglorious Hitlers, the village Napoleons, the Calvins and Torquemadas of the family. Not to mention all the brigands and bullies stupid enough to get themselves labeled as criminals. How does one harness the enormous power these people generate and set it to work in some useful way—or at least prevent it from doing harm?”

“That’s what I want you to tell me,” said Will. “Where do you start?”

“We start everywhere at once,” Vijaya answered. “But since one can’t say more than one thing at a time, let’s begin by talking about the anatomy and physiology of power. Tell him about your biochemical approach to the subject, Dr. Robert.”

“It started,” said Dr. Robert, “nearly forty years ago, while I was studying in London. Started with prison visiting on weekends and reading history whenever I had a free evening. History and prisons,” he repeated. “I discovered that they were closely related. The record of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind (that’s Gibbon, isn’t it?) and the place where unsuccessful crimes and follies are visited with a special kind of misfortune. Reading my books and talking to my jailbirds, I found myself asking questions. What kind of people became dangerous delinquents—the grand delinquents of the history books, the little ones of Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubbs? What kinds of people are moved by the lust for power, the passion to bully and domineer? And the ruthless ones, the men and women who know what they want and have no qualms about hurting and killing in order to get it, the monsters who hurt and kill, not for profit, but gratuitously, because hurting and killing are such fun—who are they? I used to discuss these questions with the experts—doctors, psychologists, social scientists, teachers. Mantegazza and Galton had gone out of fashion, and most of my experts assured me that the only valid answers to these questions were answers in terms of culture, economics, and the family. It was all a matter of mothers and toilet training, of early conditioning and traumatic environments. I was only half convinced. Mothers and toilet training and the circumambient nonsense—these were obviously important. But were they all-important? In the course of my prison visiting I’d begun to see evidence of some kind of a built-in pattern—or rather of two kinds of built-in patterns; for dangerous delinquents and power-loving troublemakers don’t belong to a single species. Most of them, as I was beginning to realize even then, belong to one or other of two distinct and dissimilar species—the Muscle People and the Peter Pans. I’ve specialized in the treatment of Peter Pans.”

“The boys who never grow up?” Will queried.

“‘Never’ is the wrong word. In real life Peter Pan always ends by growing up. He merely grows up too late—grows up physiologically more slowly than he grows up in terms of birthdays.”

“What about girl Peter Pans?”

“They’re very rare. But the boys are as common as blackberries. You can expect one Peter Pan among every five or six male children. And among problem children, among the boys who can’t read, won’t learn, don’t get on with anyone, and finally turn to the more violent forms of delinquency, seven out of ten turn out, if you take an X ray of the bones of the wrist, to be Peter Pans. The rest are mostly Muscle People of one sort or another.”

“I’m trying to think,” said Will, “of a good historical example of a delinquent Peter Pan.”

“You don’t have to go far afield. The most recent, as well as the best and biggest, was Adolf Hitler.”

“Hitler?” Murugan’s tone was one of shocked astonishment. Hitler was evidently one of his heroes.

“Read the Führer’s biography,” said Dr. Robert. “A Peter Pan if ever there was one. Hopeless at school. Incapable either of competing or co-operating. Envying all the normally successful boys—and, because he envied, hating them and, to make himself feel better, despising them as inferior beings. Then came the time for puberty. But Adolf was sexually backward. Other boys made advances to girls, and the girls responded. Adolf was too shy, too uncertain of his manhood. And all the time incapable of steady work, at home only in the compensatory Other World of his fancy. There, at the very least, he was Michelangelo. Here, unfortunately, he couldn’t draw. His only gifts were hatred, low cunning, a set of indefatigable vocal cords and a talent for nonstop talking at the top of his voice from the depths of his Peter-Panic paranoia. Thirty or forty million deaths and heaven knows how many billions of dollars—that was the price the world had to pay for little Adolf’s retarded maturation. Fortunately most of the boys who grow up too slowly never get a chance of being more than minor delinquents. But even minor delinquents, if there are enough of them, can exact a pretty stiff price. That’s why we try to nip them in the bud—or rather, since we’re dealing with Peter Pans, that’s why we try to make their nipped buds open out and grow.”

“And do you succeed?”

Dr. Robert nodded. “It isn’t hard. Particularly if you start early enough. Between four and a half and five all our children get a thorough examination. Blood tests, psychological tests, somatotyping; then we X ray their wrists and give them an EEG. All the cute little Peter Pans are spotted without fail, and appropriate treatment is started immediately. Within a year practically all of them are perfectly normal. A crop of potential failures and criminals, potential tyrants and sadists, potential misanthropes and revolutionaries for revolution’s sake, has been transformed into a crop of useful citizens who can be governed adandena asatthena—without punishment and without a sword. In your part of the world delinquency is still left to clergymen, social workers and the police. Nonstop sermons and supportive therapy; prison sentences galore. With what results? The delinquency rate goes steadily up and up. No wonder. Words about sibling rivalry and hell and the personality of Jesus are no substitutes for biochemistry. A year in jail won’t cure a Peter Pan of his endocrine disbalance or help the ex-Peter Pan to get rid of his psychological consequences. For Peter-Panic delinquency, what you need is early diagnosis and three pink capsules a day before meals. Given a tolerable environment, the result will be sweet reasonableness and a modicum of the cardinal virtues within eighteen months. Not to mention a fair chance, where before there hadn’t been the faintest possibility, of eventual prajnaparamita and karuna, eventual wisdom and compassion. And now get Vijaya to tell you about the Muscle People. As you may perhaps have observed, he’s one of them.” Leaning forward, Dr. Robert thumped the giant’s broad back. “Solid beef!” And he added, “How lucky for us poor shrimps that the animal isn’t savage.”

Vijaya took one hand off the wheel, beat his chest and uttered a loud ferocious roar. “Don’t tease the gorilla,” he said, and laughed good-humoredly. Then, “Think of the other great dictator,” he said to Will, “think of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. Hitler’s the supreme example of the delinquent Peter Pan. Stalin’s the supreme example of the delinquent Muscle Man. Predestined, by his shape, to be an extravert. Not one of your soft, round, spill-the-beans extraverts who pine for indiscriminate togetherness. No—the trampling, driving extravert, the one who always feels impelled to Do Something and is never inhibited by doubts or qualms, by sympathy or sensibility. In his will, Lenin advised his successors to get rid of Stalin: the man was too fond of power and too apt to abuse it. But the advice came too late. Stalin was already so firmly entrenched that he couldn’t be ousted. Ten years later his power was absolute. Trotsky had been scotched; all his old friends had been bumped off. Now, like God among the choiring angels, he was alone in a cozy little heaven peopled only by flatterers and yes-men. And all the time he was ruthlessly busy, liquidating kulaks, organizing collectives, building an armament industry, shifting reluctant millions from farm to factory. Working with a tenacity, a lucid efficiency of which the German Peter Pan, with his apocalyptic phantasies and his fluctuating moods, was utterly incapable. And in the last phase of the war, compare Stalin’s strategy with Hitler’s. Cool calculation pitted against compensatory daydreams, clear-eyed realism against the rhetorical nonsense that Hitler had finally talked himself into believing. Two monsters, equal in delinquency, but profoundly dissimilar in temperament, in unconscious motivation, and finally in efficiency. Peter Pans are wonderfully good at starting wars and revolutions; but it takes Muscle Men to carry them through to a successful conclusion. Here’s the jungle,” Vijaya added in another tone, waving a hand in the direction of a great cliff of trees that seemed to block their further ascent.

A moment later they had left the glare of the open hillside and had plunged into a narrow tunnel of green twilight that zigzagged up between walls of tropical foliage. Creepers dangled from the overarching branches and between the trunks of huge trees grew ferns and dark-leaved rhododendrons with a dense profusion of shrubs and bushes that for Will, as he looked about him, were namelessly unfamiliar. The air was stiflingly damp and there was a hot, acrid smell of luxuriant green growth and of that other kind of life which is decay. Muffled by the thick foliage, Will heard the ringing of distant axes, the rhythmic screech of a saw. The road turned yet once more and suddenly the green darkness of the tunnel gave place to sunshine. They had entered a clearing in the forest. Tall and broad-shouldered, half a dozen almost naked woodcutters were engaged in lopping the branches from a newly felled tree. In the sunshine hundreds of blue and amethyst butterflies chased one another, fluttering and soaring in an endless random dance. Over a fire at the further side of the clearing an old man was slowly stirring the contents of an iron caldron. Nearby a small tame deer, fine-limbed and elegantly dappled, was quietly grazing.

“Old friends,” said Vijaya, and shouted something in Palanese. The woodcutters shouted back and waved their hands. Then the road swung sharply to the left and they were climbing again up the green tunnel between the trees.

“Talk of Muscle Men,” said Will as they left the clearing. “Those were really splendid specimens.”

“That kind of physique,” said Vijaya, “is a standing temptation. And yet among all these men—and I’ve worked with scores of them—I’ve never met a single bully, a single potentially dangerous power lover.”

“Which is just another way,” Murugan broke in contemptuously, “of saying that nobody here has any ambition.”

“What’s the explanation?” Will asked.

“Very simple, so far as the Peter Pans are concerned. They’re never given a chance to work up an appetite for power. We cure them of their delinquency before it’s had time to develop. But the Muscle Men are different. They’re just as muscular here, just as tramplingly extraverted, as they are with you. So why don’t they turn into Stalins or Dipas, or at the least into domestic tyrants? First of all, our social arrangements offer them very few opportunities for bullying their families, and our political arrangements make it practically impossible for them to domineer on any larger scale. Second, we train the Muscle Men to be aware and sensitive, we teach them to enjoy the commonplaces of everyday existence. This means that they always have an alternative—innumerable alternatives—to the pleasure of being the boss. And finally we work directly on the love of power and domination that goes with this kind of physique in almost all its variations. We canalize this love of power and we deflect it—turn it away from people and on to things. We give them all kinds of difficult tasks to perform—strenuous and violent tasks that exercise their muscles and satisfy their craving for domination—but satisfy it at nobody’s expense and in ways that are either harmless or positively useful.”

“So these splendid creatures fell trees instead of felling people—is that it?”

“Precisely. And when they’ve had enough of the woods, they can go to sea, or try their hands at mining, or take it easy, relatively speaking, on the rice paddies.”

Will Farnaby suddenly laughed.

“What’s the joke?”

“I was thinking of my father. A little woodchopping might have been the making of him—not to mention the salvation of his wretched family. Unfortunately he was an English gentleman. Woodchopping was out of the question.”

“Didn’t he have any physical outlet for his energies?”

Will shook his head. “Besides being a gentleman,” he explained, “my father thought he was an intellectual. But an intellectual doesn’t hunt or shoot or play golf; he just thinks and drinks. Apart from brandy, my father’s only amusements were bullying, auction bridge, and the theory of politics. He fancied himself as a twentieth-century version of Lord Acton—the last, lonely philosopher of Liberalism. You should have heard him on the iniquities of the modern omnipotent state! ‘Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolutely.’ After which he’d down another brandy and go back with renewed gusto to his favorite pastime—trampling on his wife and children.”

“And if Acton himself didn’t behave in that way,” said Dr. Robert, “it was merely because he happened to be virtuous and intelligent. There was nothing in his theories to restrain a delinquent Muscle Man or an untreated Peter Pan from trampling on anyone he could get his feet on. That was Acton’s fatal weakness. As a political theorist he was altogether admirable. As a practical psychologist he was almost nonexistent. He seems to have thought that the power problem could be solved by good social arrangements, supplemented, of course, by sound morality and a spot of revealed religion. But the power problem has its roots in anatomy and biochemistry and temperament. Power has to be curbed on the legal and political levels; that’s obvious. But it’s also obvious that there must be prevention on the individual level. On the level of instinct and emotion, on the level of the glands and the viscera, the muscles and the blood. If I can ever find the time, I’d like to write a little book on human physiology in relation to ethics, religion, politics and law.”

“Law,” Will echoed. “I was just going to ask you about law. Are you absolutely swordless and punishmentless? Or do you still need judges and policemen?”

“We still need them,” said Dr. Robert. “But we don’t need nearly so many of them as you do. In the first place, thanks to preventive medicine and preventive education, we don’t commit many crimes. And in the second place, most of the few crimes that are committed are dealt with by the criminal’s MAC. Group therapy within a community that has assumed group responsibility for the delinquent. And in difficult cases the group therapy is supplemented by medical treatment and a course of moksha-medicine experiences, directed by somebody with an exceptional degree of insight.”

“So where do the judges come in?”

“The judge listens to the evidence, decides whether the accused person is innocent or guilty, and if he’s guilty, remands him to his MAC and, where it seems advisable, to the local panel of medical and mycomystical experts. At stated intervals the experts and the MAC report back to the judge. When the reports are satisfactory, the case is closed.”

“And if they’re never satisfactory?”

“In the long run,” said Dr. Robert, “they always are.”

There was a silence.

“Did you ever do any rock climbing?” Vijaya suddenly asked.

Will laughed. “How do you think I came by my game leg?”

“That was forced climbing. Did you ever climb for fun?”

“Enough,” said Will, “to convince me that I wasn’t much good at it.”

Vijaya glanced at Murugan. “What about you, while you were in Switzerland?”

The boy blushed deeply and shook his head. “You can’t do any of those things,” he muttered, “if you have a tendency to TB.”

“What a pity!” said Vijaya. “It would have been so good for you.”

Will asked, “Do people do a lot of climbing in these mountains?”

“Climbing’s an integral part of the school curriculum.”

“For everybody?”

“A little for everybody. With more advanced rock work for the full-blown Muscle People—that’s about one in twelve of the boys and one in twenty-seven of the girls. We shall soon be seeing some youngsters tackling their first post-elementary climb.”

The green tunnel widened, brightened, and suddenly they were out of the dripping forest on a wide shelf of almost level ground, walled in on three sides by red rocks that towered up two thousand feet and more into a succession of jagged crests and isolated pinnacles. There was a freshness in the air and, as they passed from sunshine into the shadow of a floating island of cumulus, it was almost cool. Dr. Robert leaned forward and pointed, through the windshield, at a group of white buildings on a little knoll near the center of the plateau.

“That’s the High Altitude Station,” he said. “Seven thousand feet up, with more than five thousand acres of good flat land, where we can grow practically anything that grows in southern Europe. Wheat and barley; green peas and cabbages, lettuce and tomatoes (the fruit won’t set where night temperatures are over sixty-eight); gooseberries, strawberries, walnuts, greengages, peaches, apricots. Plus all the valuable plants that are native to high mountains at this latitude—including the mushrooms that our young friend here so violently disapproves of.”

“Is this the place we’re bound for?” Will asked.

“No, we’re going higher.” Dr. Robert pointed to the last outpost of the range, a ridge of dark-red rock from which the land sloped down on one side to the jungle and on the other mounted precipitously towards an unseen summit lost in the clouds. “Up to the old Shiva temple where the pilgrims used to come every spring and autumn equinox. It’s one of my favorite places in the whole island. When the children were small, we used to go up there for picnics, Lakshmi and I, almost every week. How many years ago!” A note of sadness had come into his voice. He sighed and, leaning back in his seat, closed his eyes.

They turned off the road that led to the High Altitude Station and began to climb again.

“Entering the last, worst lap,” said Vijaya. “Seven hairpin turns and half a mile of unventilated tunnel.”

He shifted into first gear and conversation became impossible. Ten minutes later they had arrived.

10

CAUTIOUSLY MANEUVERING HIS IMMOBILIZED LEG, WILL CLIMBED out of the car and looked about him. Between the red soaring crags to the south and the headlong descents in every other direction the crest of the ridge had been leveled, and at the midpoint of this long narrow terrace stood the temple—a great red tower of the same substance as the mountains, massive, four-sided, vertically ribbed. A thing of symmetry in contrast with the rocks, but regular not as Euclidean abstractions are regular; regular with the pragmatic geometry of a living thing. Yes, of a living thing; for all the temple’s richly textured surfaces, all its bounding contours against the sky curved organically inwards, narrowing as they mounted towards a ring of marble, above which the red stone swelled out again, like the seed capsule of a flowering plant, into a flattened, many-ribbed dome that crowned the whole.

“Built about fifty years before the Norman Conquest,” said Dr. Robert.

“And looks,” Will commented, “as though it hadn’t been built by anybody—as though it had grown out of the rock. Grown like the bud of an agave, on the point of rocketing up into a twelve-foot stalk and an explosion of flowers.”

Vijaya touched his arm. “Look,” he said. “A party of Elementaries coming down.”

Will turned towards the mountain and saw a young man in nailed boots and climbing clothes working his way down a chimney in the face of the precipice. At a place where the chimney offered a convenient resting place he halted and, throwing back his head, gave utterance to a loud Alpine yodel. Fifty feet above him a boy came out from behind a buttress of rock, lowered himself from the ledge on which he was standing and started down the chimney.

“Does it tempt you?” Vijaya asked, turning to Murugan.

Heavily overacting the part of the bored, sophisticated adult who has something better to do than watch the children at play, Murugan shrugged his shoulders. “Not in the slightest.” He moved away and, sitting down on the weatherworn carving of a lion, pulled a gaudily bound American magazine out of his pocket and started to read.

“What’s the literature?” Vijaya asked.

“Science Fiction.” There was a ring of defiance in Murugan’s voice.

Dr. Robert laughed. “Anything to escape from Fact.”

Pretending not to have heard him, Murugan turned a page and went on reading.

“He’s pretty good,” said Vijaya, who had been watching the young climber’s progress. “They have an experienced man at each end of the rope,” he added. “You can’t see the number-one man. He’s behind that buttress in a parallel chimney thirty or forty feet higher up. There’s a permanent iron spike up there, where you can belay the rope. The whole party could fall, and they’d be perfectly safe.”

Spread-eagled between footholds in either wall of the narrow chimney, the leader kept shouting up instructions and encouragement. Then, as the boy approached, he yielded his place, climbed down another twenty feet and, halting, yodeled again. Booted and trousered, a tall girl with her hair in pigtails appeared from behind the buttress and lowered herself into the chimney.

“Excellent!” said Vijaya approvingly as he watched her.

Meanwhile, from a low building at the foot of the cliff—the tropical version, evidently, of an Alpine hut—a group of young people had come out to see what was happening. They belonged, Will was told, to three other parties of climbers who had taken their Postelementary Test earlier in the day.

“Does the best team win a prize?” Will asked.

“Nobody wins anything,” Vijaya answered. “This isn’t a competition. It’s more like an ordeal.”

“An ordeal,” Dr. Robert explained, “which is the first stage of their initiation out of childhood into adolescence. An ordeal that helps them to understand the world they’ll have to live in, helps them to realize the omnipresence of death, the essential precariousness of all existence. But after the ordeal comes the revelation. In a few minutes these boys and girls will be given their first experience of the moksha-medicine. They’ll all take it together, and there’ll be a religious ceremony in the temple.”

“Something like the Confirmation Service?”

“Except that this is more than just a piece of theological rigmarole. Thanks to the moksha-medicine, it includes an actual experience of the real thing.”

“The real thing?” Will shook his head. “Is there such a thing? I wish I could believe it.”

“You’re not being asked to believe it,” said Dr. Robert. “The real thing isn’t a proposition; it’s a state of being. We don’t teach our children creeds or get them worked up over emotionally charged symbols. When it’s time for them to learn the deepest truths of religion, we set them to climb a precipice and then give them four hundred milligrams of revelation. Two firsthand experiences of reality, from which any reasonably intelligent boy or girl can derive a very good idea of what’s what.”

“And don’t forget the dear old power problem,” said Vijaya. “Rock climbing’s a branch of applied ethics; it’s another preventive substitute for bullying.”

“So my father ought to have been an Alpinist as well as a woodchopper.”

“One may laugh,” said Vijaya, duly laughing. “But the fact remains that it works. It works. First and last I’ve climbed my way out of literally scores of the ugliest temptations to throw my weight around—and my weight being considerable,” he added, “incitements were correspondingly strong.”

“There seems to be only one catch,” said Will. “In the process of climbing your way out of temptation, you might fall and…” Suddenly remembering what had happened to Dugald MacPhail, he broke off.

It was Dr. Robert who finished the sentence. “Might fall,” he said slowly, “and kill yourself. Dugald was climbing alone,” he went on after a little pause. “Nobody knows what happened. The body wasn’t found till the next day.” There was a long silence.

“Do you still think this is a good idea?” Will asked, pointing with his bamboo staff at the tiny figures crawling so laboriously on the face of that headlong wilderness of naked rock.

“I still think it’s a good idea,” said Dr. Robert.

“But poor Susila….”

“Yes, poor Susila,” Dr. Robert repeated. “And poor children, poor Lakshmi, poor me. But if Dugald hadn’t made a habit of risking his life, it might have been poor everybody for other reasons. Better court the danger of killing yourself than court the danger of killing other people, or at the very least making them miserable. Hurting them because you’re naturally aggressive and too prudent, or too ignorant, to work off your aggression on a precipice. And now,” he continued in another tone, “I want to show you the view.”

“And I’ll go and talk to those boys and girls.” Vijaya walked away towards the group at the foot of the red crags.

Leaving Murugan to his Science Fiction, Will followed Dr. Robert through a pillared gateway and across the wide stone platform that surrounded the temple. At one corner of this platform stood a small domed pavilion. They entered and, crossing to the wide unglazed window, looked out. Rising to the line of the horizon, like a solid wall of jade and lapis, was the sea. Below them, after a sheer fall of a thousand feet, lay the green of the jungle. Beyond the jungle, folded vertically into combe and buttress, terraced horizontally into a huge man-made staircase of innumerable fields, the lower slopes went steeply down into a wide plain, at whose furthest verge, between the market gardens and the palm-fringed beach, stretched a considerable city. Seen from this high vantage point in its shining completeness, it looked like the tiny, meticulous painting of a city in a medieval book of hours.

“There’s Shivapuram,” said Dr. Robert. “And that complex of buildings on the hill beyond the river—that’s the great Buddhist temple. A little earlier than Borobudur, and the sculpture is as fine as anything in Further India.” There was a silence. “This little summerhouse,” he resumed, “is where we used to eat our picnics when it was raining. I shall never forget the time when Dugald (he must have been about ten) amused himself by climbing up here on the window ledge and standing on one leg in the attitude of the dancing Shiva. Poor Lakshmi, she was scared out of her wits. But Dugald was a born steeplejack. Which only makes the accident even more incomprehensible.” He shook his head; then, after another silence, “The last time we all came up here,” he said, “was eight or nine months ago. Dugald was still alive and Lakshmi wasn’t yet too weak for a day’s outing with her grandchildren. He did that Shiva stunt again for the benefit of Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini. On one leg; and he kept his arms moving so fast that one could have sworn there were four of them.” Dr. Robert broke off. Picking up a flake of mortar from the floor, he tossed it out of the window. “Down, down, down…Empty space. Pascal avait son gouffre. How strange that this should be at once the most powerful symbol of death and the most powerful symbol of the fullest, intensest life.” Suddenly his face lighted up. “Do you see that hawk?”

“A hawk?”

Dr. Robert pointed to where, halfway between their eyrie and the dark roof of the forest, a small brown incarnation of speed and rapine lazily wheeled on unmoving wings. “It reminds me of a poem that the Old Raja once wrote about this place.” Dr. Robert was silent for a moment, then started to recite:

“Up here, you ask me,

Up here aloft where Shiva

Dances above the world,

What the devil do I think I’m doing?

No answer, friend—except

That hawk below us turning,

Those black and arrowy swifts

Trailing long silver wires across the air—

The shrillness of their crying.

How far, you say, from the hot plains,

How far, reproachfully, from all my people!

And yet how close! For here between the cloudy

Sky and the sea below, suddenly visible,

I read their luminous secret and my own.”

“And the secret, I take it, is this empty space.”

“Or rather what this empty space is the symbol of—the Buddha Nature in all our perpetual perishing. Which reminds me…” He looked at his watch.

“What’s next on the program?” Will asked as they stepped out into the glare.

“The service in the temple,” Dr. Robert answered. “The young climbers will offer their accomplishment to Shiva—in other words, to their own Suchness visualized as God. After which they’ll go on to the second part of their initiation—the experience of being liberated from themselves.”

“By means of the moksha-medicine?”

Dr. Robert nodded. “Their leaders give it them before they leave the Climbing Association’s hut. Then they come over to the temple. The stuff starts working during the service. Incidentally,” he added, “the service is in Sanskrit, so you won’t understand a word of it. Vijaya’s address will be in English—he speaks in his capacity as president of the Climbing Association. So will mine. And of course the young people will mostly talk in English.”

Inside the temple there was a cool, cavernous darkness, tempered only by the faint daylight filtering in through a pair of small latticed windows and by the seven lamps that hung, like a halo of yellow, quivering stars, above the head of the image on the altar. It was a copper statue, no taller than a child, of Shiva. Surrounded by a flame-fringed glory, his four arms gesturing, his braided hair wildly flying, his right foot treading down a dwarfish figure of the most hideous malignity, his left foot gracefully lifted, the god stood there, frozen in mid-ecstasy. No longer in their climbing dress, but sandaled, bare-breasted and in shorts or brightly colored skirts, a score of boys and girls, together with the six young men who had acted as their leaders and instructors, were sitting cross-legged on the floor. Above them, on the highest of the altar steps, an old priest, shaven and yellow-robed, was intoning something sonorous and incomprehensible. Leaving Will installed on a convenient ledge, Dr. Robert tiptoed over to where Vijaya and Murugan were sitting and squatted down beside them.

The splendid rumble of Sanskrit gave place to a high nasal chant, and the chanting in due course was succeeded by a litany, priestly utterance alternating with congregational response.

And now incense was burned in a bass thurible. The old priest held up his two hands for silence, and through a long pregnant time of the most perfect stillness the thread of gray incense smoke rose straight and unwavering before the god, then as it met the draft from the windows broke and was lost to view in an invisible cloud that filled the whole dim space with the mysterious fragrance of another world. Will opened his eyes and saw that, alone of all the congregation, Murugan was restlessly fidgeting. And not merely fidgeting—making faces of impatient disapproval. He himself had never climbed; therefore climbing was merely silly. He himself had always refused to try the moksha-medicine; therefore those who used it were beyond the pale. His mother believed in the Ascended Masters and chatted regularly with Koot Hoomi; therefore the image of Shiva was a vulgar idol. What an eloquent pantomime, Will thought as he watched the boy. But alas for poor little Murugan, nobody was paying the slightest attention to his antics.

“Shivayanama,” said the old priest, breaking the long silence, and again, “Shivayanama.” He made a beckoning gesture.

Rising from her place, the tall girl whom Will had seen working her way down the precipice mounted the altar steps. Standing on tiptoe, her oiled body gleaming like a second copper statue in the light of the lamps, she hung a garland of pale-yellow flowers on the uppermost of Shiva’s two left arms. Then, laying palm to palm, she looked up into the god’s serenely smiling face and, in a voice that faltered at first, but gradually grew steadier, began to speak:

“O you the creator, you the destroyer, you who sustain and make an end,

Who in sunlight dance among the birds and the children at their play,

Who at midnight dance among corpses in the burning grounds,

You Shiva, you dark and terrible Bhairava,

You Suchness and Illusion, the Void and All Things,

You are the lord of life, and therefore I have brought you flowers;

You are the lord of death, and therefore I have brought you my heart—

This heart that is now your burning ground.

Ignorance there and self shall be consumed with fire.

That you may dance, Bhairava, among the ashes.

That you may dance, Lord Shiva, in a place of flowers,

And I dance with you.”

Raising her arms, the girl made a gesture that hinted at the ecstatic devotion of a hundred generations of dancing worshipers, then turned away and walked back into the twilight. “Shivayanama,” somebody cried out. Murugan snorted contemptuously as the refrain was taken up by other young voices. “Shivayanama, Shivayanama…” The old priest started to intone another passage from the Scripture. Halfway through his recitation a small gray bird with a crimson head flew in through one of the latticed windows, fluttered wildly around the altar lamps, then, chattering in loud indignant terror, darted out again. The chanting continued, swelled to a climax, and ended in the whispered prayer for peace: Shanti shanti shanti. The old priest now turned towards the altar, picked up a long taper and, borrowing flame from one of the lamps above Shiva’s head, proceeded to light seven other lamps that hung within a deep niche beneath the slab on which the dancer stood. Glinting on polished convexities of metal, their light revealed another statue—this time of Shiva and Parvati, of the Arch-Yogin seated and, while two of his four hands held aloft the symbolic drum and fire, caressing with the second pair the amorous Goddess, with her twining legs and arms, by whom, in this eternal embrace of bronze, he was bestridden. The old priest waved his hand. This time it was a boy, dark-skinned and powerfully muscled, who stepped into the light. Bending down, he hung the garland he was carrying about Parvati’s neck; then, twisting the long flower chain, dropped a second loop of white orchids over Shiva’s head.

“Each is both,” he said.

“Each is both,” the chorus of young voices repeated.

Murugan violently shook his head.

“O you who are gone,” said the dark-skinned boy, “who are gone, who are gone to the other shore, who have landed on the other shore, O you enlightenment and you other enlightenment, you liberation made one with liberation, you compassion in the arms of infinite compassion.”

“Shivayanama.”

He went back to his place. There was a long silence. Then Vijaya rose to his feet and began to speak.

“Danger,” he said, and again, “danger. Danger deliberately and yet lightly accepted. Danger shared with a friend, a group of friends. Shared consciously, shared to the limits of awareness so that the sharing and the danger become a yoga. Two friends roped together on a rock face. Sometimes three friends or four. Each totally aware of his own straining muscles, his own skill, his own fear, and his own spirit transcending the fear. And each, of course, aware at the same time of all the others, concerned for them, doing the right things to make sure that they’ll be safe. Life at its highest pitch of bodily and mental tension, life more abundant, more inestimably precious, because of the ever-present threat of death. But after the yoga of danger there’s the yoga of the summit, the yoga of rest and letting go, the yoga of complete and total receptiveness, the yoga that consists in consciously accepting what is given as it is given, without censorship by your busy moralistic mind, without any additions from your stock of secondhand ideals, your even larger stock of wishful phantasies. You just sit there with muscles relaxed and a mind open to the sunlight and the clouds, open to distance and the horizon, open in the end to that formless, wordless Not-Thought which the stillness of the summit permits you to divine, profound and enduring, within the twittering flux of your everyday thinking.

“And now it’s time for the descent, time for a second bout of the yoga of danger, time for a renewal of tension and the awareness of life in its glowing plenitude as you hang precariously on the brink of destruction. Then at the foot of the precipice you unrope, you go striding down the rocky path toward the first trees. And suddenly you’re in the forest, and another kind of yoga is called for—the yoga of the jungle, the yoga that consists of being totally aware of life at the near-point, jungle life in all its exuberance and its rotting, crawling squalor, all its melodramatic ambivalence of orchids and centipedes, of leeches and sunbirds, of the drinkers of nectar and the drinkers of blood. Life bringing order out of chaos and ugliness, life performing its miracles of birth and growth, but performing them, it seems, for no other purpose than to destroy itself. Beauty and horror, beauty,” he repeated, “and horror. And then suddenly, as you come down from one of your expeditions in the mountains, suddenly you know that there’s a reconciliation. And not merely a reconciliation. A fusion, an identity. Beauty made one with horror in the yoga of the jungle. Life reconciled with the perpetual imminence of death in the yoga of danger. Emptiness identified with selfhood in the Sabbath yoga of the summit.”

There was silence. Murugan yawned ostentatiously. The old priest lighted another stick of incense and, muttering, waved it before the dancer, waved it again around the cosmic love-making of Shiva and the Goddess.

“Breathe deeply,” said Vijaya, “and as you breathe pay attention to this smell of incense. Pay your whole attention to it; know it for what it is—an ineffable fact beyond words, beyond reason and explanation. Know it in the raw. Know it as a mystery. Perfume, women and prayer—those were the three things that Mohammed loved above all others. The inexplicable data of breathed incense, touched skin, felt love and beyond them, the mystery of mysteries, the One in plurality, the Emptiness that is all, the Suchness totally present in every appearance, at every point and instant. So breathe,” he repeated, “breathe,” and in a final whisper, as he sat down, “breathe.”

“Shivayanama,” murmured the old priest ecstatically.

Dr. Robert rose and started towards the altar, then halted, turned back, and beckoned to Will Farnaby.

“Come and sit with me,” he whispered, when Will had caught up with him. “I’d like you to see their faces.”

“Shan’t I be in the way?”

Dr. Robert shook his head, and together they moved forward, climbed and, three quarters of the way up the altar stair, sat down side by side in the penumbra between darkness and the light of the lamps. Very quietly Dr. Robert began to talk about Shiva-Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance.

“Look at his image,” he said. “Look at it with these new eyes that the moksha-medicine has given you. See how it breathes and pulses, how it grows out of brightness into brightness ever more intense. Dancing through time and out of time, dancing ever-lastingly and in the eternal now. Dancing and dancing in all the worlds at once. Look at him.”

Scanning those upturned faces, Will noted, now in one, now in another, the dawning illuminations of delight, recognition, understanding, the signs of worshiping wonder that quivered on the brinks of ecstasy or terror.

“Look closely,” Dr. Robert insisted. “Look still more closely.” Then, after a long minute of silence, “Dancing in all the worlds at once,” he repeated. “In all the worlds. And first of all in the world of matter. Look at the great round halo, fringed with the symbols of fire, within which the god is dancing. It stands for Nature, for the world of mass and energy. Within it Shiva-Nataraja dances the dance of endless becoming and passing away. It’s his lila, his cosmic play. Playing for the sake of playing, like a child. But this child is the Order of Things. His toys are galaxies, his playground is infinite space and between finger and finger every interval is a thousand million light-years. Look at him there on the altar. The image is man-made, a little contraption of copper only four feet high. But Shiva-Nataraja fills the universe, is the universe. Shut your eyes and see him towering into the night, follow the boundless stretch of those arms and the wild hair infinitely flying.

“Nataraja at play among the stars and in the atoms. But also,” he added, “also at play within every living thing, every sentient creature, every child and man and woman. Play for play’s sake. But now the playground is conscious, the dance floor is capable of suffering. To us, this play without purpose seems a kind of insult. What we would really like is a God who never destroys what he has created. Or if there must be pain and death, let them be meted out by a God of righteousness, who will punish the wicked and reward the good with everlasting happiness. But in fact the good get hurt, the innocent suffer. Then let there be a God who sympathizes and brings comfort. But Nataraja only dances. His play is a play impartially of death and of life, of all evils as well as of all goods. In the uppermost of his right hands he holds the drum that summons being out of not-being. Rub-a-dub-dub—the creation tattoo, the cosmic reveille. But now look at the uppermost of his left hands. It brandishes the fire by which all that has been created is forthwith destroyed. He dances this way—what happiness! Dances that way—and oh, the pain, the hideous fear, the desolation! Then hop, skip and jump. Hop into perfect health. Skip into cancer and senility. Jump out of the fullness of life into nothingness, out of nothingness again into life. For Nataraja it’s all play, and the play is an end in itself, ever-lastingly purposeless. He dances because he dances, and the dancing is his maha-sukha, his infinite and eternal bliss. Eternal bliss,” Dr. Robert repeated and again, but questioningly, “Eternal bliss?” He shook his head. “For us there’s no bliss, only the oscillation between happiness and terror and a sense of outrage at the thought that our pains are as integral a part of Nataraja’s dance as our pleasures, our dying as our living. Let’s quietly think about that for a little while.”

The seconds passed, the silence deepened. Suddenly, startlingly, one of the girls began to sob. Vijaya left his place and, kneeling down beside her, laid a hand on her shoulder. The sobbing died down.

“Suffering and sickness,” Dr. Robert resumed at last, “old age, decrepitude, death. I show you sorrow. But that wasn’t the only thing the Buddha showed us. He also showed us the ending of sorrow.”

“Shivayanama,” the old priest cried triumphantly.

“Open your eyes again and look at Nataraja up there on the altar. Look closely. In his upper right hand, as you’ve already seen, he holds the drum that calls the world into existence and in his upper left hand he carries the destroying fire. Life and death, order and disintegration, impartially. But now look at Shiva’s other pair of hands. The lower right hand is raised and the palm is turned outwards. What does that gesture signify? It signifies, ‘Don’t be afraid; it’s All Right.’ But how can anyone in his senses fail to be afraid? How can anyone pretend that evil and suffering are all right, when it’s so obvious that they’re all wrong? Nataraja has the answer. Look now at his lower left hand. He’s using it to point down at his feet. And what are his feet doing? Look closely and you’ll see that the right foot is planted squarely on a horrible little subhuman creature—the demon, Muyalaka. A dwarf, but immensely powerful in his malignity, Muyalaka is the embodiment of ignorance, the manifestation of greedy, possessive selfhood. Stamp on him, break his back! And that’s precisely what Nataraja is doing. Trampling the little monster down under his right foot. But notice that it isn’t at this trampling right foot that he points his finger; it’s at the left foot, the foot that, as he dances, he’s in the act of raising from the ground. And why does he point at it? Why? That lifted foot, that dancing defiance of the force of gravity—it’s the symbol of release, of moksha, of liberation. Nataraja dances in all the worlds at once—in the world of physics and chemistry, in the world of ordinary, all-too-human experience, in the world finally of Suchness, of Mind, of the Clear Light…. And now,” Dr. Robert went on after a moment of silence, “I want you to look at the other statue, the image of Shiva and the Goddess. Look at them there in their little cave of light. And now shut your eyes and see them again—shining, alive, glorified. How beautiful! And in their tenderness what depths of meaning! What wisdom beyond all spoken wisdoms in that sensual experience of spiritual fusion and atonement! Eternity in love with time. The One joined in marriage to the many, the relative made absolute by its union with the One. Nirvana identified with samsara, the manifestation in time and flesh and feeling of the Buddha Nature.”

“Shivayanama.” The old priest lighted another stick of incense and softly, in a succession of long-drawn melismata, began to chant something in Sanskrit. On the young faces before him Will could read the marks of a listening serenity, the hardly perceptible, ecstatic smile that welcomes a sudden insight, a revelation of truth or of beauty. In the background, meanwhile, Murugan sat wearily slumped against a pillar, picking his exquisitely Grecian nose.

“Liberation,” Dr. Robert began again, “the ending of sorrow, ceasing to be what you ignorantly think you are and becoming what you are in fact. For a little while, thanks to the moksha-medicine, you will know what it’s like to be what in fact you are, what in fact you always have been. What a timeless bliss! But, like everything else, this timelessness is transient. Like everything else, it will pass. And when it has passed, what will you do with this experience? What will you do with all the other similar experiences that the moksha-medicine will bring you in the years to come? Will you merely enjoy them as you would enjoy an evening at the puppet show, and then go back to business as usual, back to behaving like the silly delinquents you imagine yourselves to be? Or, having glimpsed, will you devote your lives to the business, not at all as usual, of being what you are in fact? All that we older people can do with our teachings, all that Pala can do for you with its social arrangements, is to provide you with techniques and opportunities. And all that the moksha-medicine can do is to give you a succession of beatific glimpses, an hour or two, every now and then, of enlightening and liberating grace. It remains for you to decide whether you’ll co-operate with the grace and take those opportunities. But that’s for the future. Here and now, all you have to do is to follow the mynah bird’s advice: Attention! Pay attention and you’ll find yourselves, gradually or suddenly, becoming aware of the great primordial facts behind these symbols on the altar.”

“Shivayanama!” The old priest waved his stick of incense. At the foot of the altar steps the boys and girls sat motionless as statues. A door creaked, there was a sound of footsteps. Will turned his head and saw a short, thickset man picking his way between the young contemplatives. He mounted the steps and, bending down, murmured something in Dr. Robert’s ear, then turned and walked back towards the door.

Dr. Robert laid a hand on Will’s knee. “It’s a royal command,” he whispered, with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders. “That was the man in charge of the Alpine hut. The Rani has just telephoned to say that she has to see Murugan as soon as possible. It’s urgent.” Laughing noiselessly, he rose and helped Will to his feet.

11

WILL FARNABY HAD MADE HIS OWN BREAKFAST AND, WHEN DR. Robert returned from his early-morning visit to the hospital, was drinking his second cup of Palanese tea and eating toasted breadfruit with pumelo marmalade.

“Not too much pain in the night,” was Dr. Robert’s response to his enquiries. “Lakshmi had four or five hours of good sleep, and this morning she was able to take some broth.”

They could look forward, he continued, to another day of respite. And so, since it tired the patient to have him there all the time, and since life, after all, had to go on and be made the best of, he had decided to drive up to the High Altitude Station and put in a few hours’ work on the research team in the pharmaceutical laboratory.

“Work on the moksha-medicine?”

Dr. Robert shook his head. “That’s just a matter of repeating a standard operation—something for technicians, not for the researchers. They’re busy with something new.”

And he began to talk about the indoles recently isolated from the ololiuqui seeds that had been brought in from Mexico last year and were now being grown in the station’s botanic garden. At least three different indoles, of which one seemed to be extremely potent. Animal experiments indicated that it affected the reticular system….

Left to himself, Will sat down under the overhead fan and went on with his reading of the Notes on What’s What:

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

In Pala, after three generations of Reform, there are no sheeplike flocks and no ecclesiastical Good Shepherds to shear and castrate; there are no bovine or swinish herds and no licensed drovers, royal or military, capitalistic or revolutionary, to brand, confine and butcher. There are only voluntary associations of men and women on the road to full humanity.

Tunes or pebbles, processes or substantial things? “Tunes,” answer Buddhism and modern science. “Pebbles,” say the classical philosophers of the West. Buddhism and modern science think of the world in terms of music. The image that comes to mind when one reads the philosophers of the West is a figure in a Byzantine mosaic, rigid, symmetrical, made up of millions of little squares of some stony material and firmly cemented to the walls of a windowless basilica.

The dancer’s grace and, forty years on, her arthritis—both are functions of the skeleton. It is thanks to an inflexible framework of bones that the girl is able to do her pirouettes, thanks to the same bones, grown a little rusty, that the grandmother is condemned to a wheelchair. Analogously, the firm support of a culture is the prime-condition of all individual originality and creativeness; it is also their principal enemy. The thing in whose absence we cannot possibly grow into a complete human being is, all too often, the thing that prevents us from growing.

A century of research on the moksha-medicine has clearly shown that quite ordinary people are perfectly capable of having visionary or even fully liberating experiences. In this respect the men and women who make and enjoy high culture are no better off than the lowbrows. High experience is perfectly compatible with low symbolic expression.

The expressive symbols created by Palanese artists are no better than the expressive symbols created by artists elsewhere. Being the products of happiness and a sense of fulfillment, they are probably less moving, perhaps less satisfying aesthetically, than the tragic or compensatory symbols created by victims of frustration and ignorance, of tyranny, war and guilt-fostering, crime-inciting superstitions. Palanese superiority does not lie in symbolic expression but in an art which, though higher and far more valuable than all the rest, can yet be practiced by everyone—the art of adequately experiencing, the art of becoming more intimately acquainted with all the worlds that, as human beings, we find ourselves inhabiting. Palanese culture is not to be judged as (for lack of any better criterion) we judge other cultures. It is not to be judged by the accomplishments of a few gifted manipulators of artistic or philosophical symbols. No, it is to be judged by what all the members of the community, the ordinary as well as the extraordinary, can and do experience in every contingency and at each successive intersection of time and eternity.

The telephone bell had started to ring. Should he let it ring or would it be better to answer and let the caller know that Dr. Robert was out for the day? Deciding on the second course, Will lifted the receiver.

“Dr. MacPhail’s bungalow,” he said, in a parody of secretarial efficiency. “But the doctor is out for the day.”

“Tant mieux,” said the rich royal voice at the other end of the wire. “How are you, mon cher Farnaby?”

Taken aback, Will stammered out his thanks for Her Highness’ gracious enquiry.

“So they took you,” said the Rani, “to see one of their so-called initiations yesterday afternoon.”

Will had recovered sufficiently from his surprise to respond with a neutral word and in the most noncommittal of tones. “It was most remarkable,” he said.

“Remarkable,” said the Rani, dwelling emphatically on the spoken equivalents of pejorative and laudatory capital letters, “but only as the Blasphemous Caricature of TRUE Initiation. They’ve never learned to make the elementary distinction between the Natural Order and the Supernatural.”

“Quite,” Will murmured. “Quite…”

“What did you say?” the voice at the other end of the line demanded.

“Quite,” Will repeated more loudly.

“I’m glad you agree. But I didn’t call you,” the Rani went on, “to discuss the difference between the Natural and the Supernatural—Supremely Important as that difference is. No, I called you about a more urgent matter.”

“Oil?”

“Oil,” she confirmed. “I’ve just received a very disquieting communication from my Personal Representative in Rendang. Very Highly Placed,” she added parenthetically, “and invariably Well Informed.”

Will found himself wondering which of all those sleek and much bemedaled guests at the Foreign Office cocktail party had double-crossed his fellow double-crossers—himself, of course, included.

“Within the last few days,” the Rani went on, “representatives of no less than three Major Oil Companies, European and American, have flown into Rendang-Lobo. My informant tells me that they’re already working on the four or five Key Figures in the Administration who might, at some future date, be influential in deciding who is to get the concession for Pala.”

Will clicked his tongue disapprovingly.

Considerable sums, she hinted, had been, if not directly offered, at least named and temptingly dangled.

“Nefarious,” he commented.

Nefarious, the Rani agreed, was the word. And that was why Something must be Done About It, and Done Immediately. From Bahu she had learned that Will had already written to Lord Aldehyde, and within a few days a reply would doubtless be forthcoming. But a few days were too long. Time was of the essence—not only because of what those rival companies were up to, but also (and the Rani lowered her voice mysteriously) for Other Reasons. “Now, now!” her Little Voice kept exhorting. “Now, without delay!” Lord Aldehyde must be informed by cable of what was happening (the faithful Bahu, she added parenthetically, had offered to transmit the message in code by way of the Rendang Legation in London) and along with the information must go an urgent request that he empower his Special Correspondent to take such steps—at this stage the appropriate steps would be predominantly of a financial nature—as might be necessary to secure the triumph of their Common Cause.

“So with your permission,” the voice concluded, “I’ll tell Bahu to send the cable immediately. In our joint names, Mr. Farnaby, yours and Mine. I hope, mon cher, that this will be agreeable to you.”

It wasn’t at all agreeable, but there seemed to be no excuse, seeing that he had already written that letter to Joe Aldehyde, for demurring. And so, “Yes, of course,” he cried with a show of enthusiasm belied by his long dubious pause, before the words were uttered, in search of an alternative answer. “We ought to get the reply sometime tomorrow,” he added.

“We shall get it tonight,” the Rani assured him.

“Is that possible?”

“With God” (con espressione) “all things are possible.”

“Quite,” he said, “quite. But still…”

“I go by what my Little Voice tells me. ‘Tonight,’ it’s saying. And ‘he will give Mr. Farnaby carte blanche’—carte blanche,” she repeated with gusto. “‘And Farnaby will be completely successful.’”

“I wonder?” he said doubtfully.

“You must be successful.”

“Must be?”

“Must be,” she insisted.

“Why?”

“Because it was God who inspired me to launch the Crusade of the Spirit.”

“I don’t quite get the connection.”

“Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you,” she said. Then, after a moment of silence, “But after all, why not? If Our Cause triumphs, Lord Aldehyde has promised to back the Crusade with all his resources. And since God wants the Crusade to succeed, Our Cause cannot fail to triumph.”

“Q.E.D.,” he wanted to shout, but restrained himself. It wouldn’t be polite. And anyhow this was no joking matter.

“Well, I must call Bahu,” said the Rani. “A bientôt, my dear Farnaby.” And she rang off.

Shrugging his shoulders, Will turned back to the Notes on What’s What. What else was there to do?

Dualism…Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.

“I” affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; “am” denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. “I am.” Two tiny words, but what an enormity of untruth! The religiously-minded dualist calls homemade spirits from the vasty deep; the nondualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.

There was the noise of an approaching car, then silence as the motor was turned off, then the slamming of a door and the sound of footsteps on gravel, on the steps of the veranda.

“Are you ready?” called Vijaya’s deep voice.

Will put down the Notes on What’s What, picked up his bamboo staff, and hoisting himself to his feet, walked to the front door.

“Ready and champing at the bit,” he said as he stepped out onto the veranda.

“Then let’s go.” Vijaya took his arm. “Careful of these steps,” he recommended.

Dressed all in pink and with corals round her neck and in her ears, a plump, round-faced woman in her middle forties was standing beside the jeep.

“This is Leela Rao,” said Vijaya. “Our librarian, secretary, treasurer, and general keeper-in-order. Without her we’d be lost.”

She looked, Will thought as he shook hands with her, like a browner version of one of those gentle but inexhaustibly energetic English ladies who, when their children are grown, go in for good works or organized culture. Not too intelligent, poor dears; but how selfless, how devoted, how genuinely good—and, alas, how boring!

“I was hearing of you,” Mrs. Rao volunteered as they rattled along past the lotus pond and out onto the highway, “from my young friends, Radha and Ranga.”

“I hope,” said Will, “that they approved of me as heartily as I approved of them.”

Mrs. Rao’s face brightened with pleasure. “I’m so glad you like them!”

“Ranga’s exceptionally bright,” Vijaya put in.

And so delicately balanced, Mrs. Rao elaborated, between introversion and the outside world. Always tempted—and how strongly!—to escape into the Arhat’s Nirvana or the scientists’ beautifully tidy little paradise of pure abstraction. Always tempted, but often resisting temptation; for Ranga, the Arhat-scientist, was also another kind of Ranga, a Ranga capable of compassion, ready, if one knew how to make the right kind of appeal, to lay himself open to the concrete realities of life, to be aware, concerned and actively helpful. How fortunate for him and for everyone else that he had found a girl like little Radha, a girl so intelligently simple, so humorous and tender, so richly endowed for love and happiness! Radha and Ranga, Mrs. Rao confided, had been among her favorite pupils.

Pupils, Will patronizingly assumed, in some kind of Buddhist Sunday school. But in fact, as he was now flabbergasted to learn, it was in the yoga of love that this devoted settlement worker had been, for the past six years and in the intervals of librarianship, instructing the young. By the kinds of methods, Will supposed, that Murugan had shrunk from and the Rani, in her all but incestuous possessiveness, had found so outrageous. He opened his mouth to question her. But his reflexes had been conditioned in higher latitude and by settlement workers of another species. The questions simply refused to pass his lips. And now it was too late to ask them. Mrs. Rao had begun to talk about her other avocation.

“If you knew,” she was saying, “what trouble we have with books in this climate! The paper rots, the glue liquefies, the bindings disintegrate, the insects devour. Literature and the tropics are really incompatible.”

“And if one’s to believe your Old Raja,” said Will, “literature is incompatible with a lot of other local features besides your climate—incompatible with human integrity, incompatible with philosophical truth, incompatible with individual sanity and a decent social system, incompatible with everything except dualism, criminal lunacy, impossible aspiration, and unnecessary guilt. But never mind.” He grinned ferociously. “Colonel Dipa will put everything right. After Pala has been invaded and made safe for war and oil and heavy industry, you’ll undoubtedly have a Golden Age of literature and theology.”

“I’d like to laugh,” said Vijaya. “The only trouble is that you’re probably right. I have an uncomfortable feeling that my children will grow up to see your prophecy come true.”

They left their jeep, parked between an oxcart and a brand-new Japanese lorry, at the entrance to the village, and proceeded on foot. Between thatched houses, set in gardens shaded by palms and papayas and breadfruit trees, the narrow street led to a central marketplace. Will halted and, leaning on his bamboo staff, looked around him. On one side of the square stood a charming piece of Oriental rococo with a pink stucco facade and gazebos at the four corners—evidently the town hall. Facing it, on the opposite side of the square, rose a small temple of reddish stone, with a central tower on which, tier after tier, a host of sculptured figures recounted the legends of the Buddha’s progress from spoiled child to Tathagata. Between these two monuments, more than half of the open space was covered by a huge banyan tree. Along its winding and shadowy aisles were ranged the stalls of a score of merchants and market women. Slanting down through chinks in the green vaulting overhead, the long probes of sunlight picked out here a row of black-and-yellow water jars, there a silver bracelet, a painted wooden toy, a bolt of cotton print; here a pile of fruits, and a girl’s gaily flowered bodice, there the flash of laughing teeth and eyes, the ruddy gold of a naked torso.

“Everybody looks so healthy,” Will commented, as they made their way between the stalls under the great tree.

“They look healthy because they are healthy,” said Mrs. Rao.

“And happy—for a change.” He was thinking of the faces he had seen in Calcutta, in Manila, in Rendang-Lobo—the faces, for that matter, one saw every day in Fleet Street and the Strand. “Even the women,” he noted, glancing from face to face, “even the women look happy.”

“They don’t have ten children,” Mrs. Rao explained.

“They don’t have ten children where I come from,” said Will. “In spite of which…‘Marks of weakness marks of woe.’” He halted for a moment to watch a middle-aged market woman weighing out slices of sun-dried breadfruit for a very young mother with a baby in a carrying bag on her back. “There’s a kind of radiance,” he concluded.

“Thanks to maithuna,” said Mrs. Rao triumphantly. “Thanks to the yoga of love.” Her face shone with a mixture of religious fervor and professional pride.

They walked out from under the shade of the banyan, across a stretch of fierce sunlight, up a flight of worn steps, and into the gloom of the temple. A golden Bodhisattva loomed, gigantic, out of the darkness. There was a smell of incense and fading flowers, and from somewhere behind the statue the voice of an unseen worshiper was muttering an endless litany. Noiselessly, on bare feet, a little girl came hurrying in from a side door. Paying no attention to the grown-ups she climbed with the agility of a cat onto the altar and laid a spray of white orchids on the statue’s upturned palm. Then, looking up into the huge golden face, she murmured a few words, shut her eyes for a moment, murmured again, then turned, scrambled down and, softly singing to herself, went out by the door through which she had entered.

“Charming,” said Will, as he watched her go. “Couldn’t be prettier. But precisely what does a child like that think she’s doing? What kind of religion is she supposed to be practicing?”

“She’s practicing,” Vijaya explained, “the local brand of Mahayana Buddhism, with a bit of Shivaism, probably, on the side.”

“And do you highbrows encourage this kind of thing?”

“We neither encourage nor discourage. We accept it. Accept it as we accept that spider web up there on the cornice. Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can’t help making flytraps, and men can’t help making symbols. That’s what the human brain is there for—to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols. Sometimes the symbols correspond fairly closely to some of the aspects of the external reality behind our experience; then you have science and common sense. Sometimes, on the contrary, the symbols have almost no connection with external reality; then you have paranoia and delirium. More often there’s a mixture, part realistic and part fantastic; that’s religion. Good religion or bad religion—it depends on the blending of the cocktail. For example, in the kind of Calvinism that Dr. Andrew was brought up in, you’re given only the tiniest jigger of realism to a whole jugful of malignant fancy. In other cases the mixture is more wholesome. Fifty-fifty, or even sixty-forty, even seventy-thirty in favor of truth and decency. Our local Old-Fashioned contains a remarkably small admixture of poison.”

Will nodded. “Offerings of white orchids to an image of compassion and enlightenment—it certainly seems harmless enough. And after what I saw yesterday, I’d be prepared to put in a good word for cosmic dancing and divine copulation.”

“And remember,” said Vijaya, “this sort of thing isn’t compulsory. Everybody’s given a chance to go further. You asked what that child thinks she’s doing. I’ll tell you. With one part of her mind, she thinks she’s talking to a person—an enormous, divine person who can be cajoled with orchids into giving her what she wants. But she’s already old enough to have been told about the profounder symbols behind Amitabha’s statue and about the experiences that give birth to those profounder symbols. Consequently with another part of her mind she knows perfectly well that Amitabha isn’t a person. She even knows, because it’s been explained to her, that if prayers are sometimes answered it’s because, in this very odd psychophysical world of ours, ideas have a tendency, if you concentrate your mind on them, to get themselves realized. She knows too that this temple isn’t what she still likes to think it is—the house of Buddha. She knows it’s just a diagram of her own unconscious mind—a dark little cubbyhole with lizards crawling upside down on the ceiling and cockroaches in all the crevices. But at the heart of the verminous darkness sits Enlightenment. And that’s another thing the child is doing—she’s unconsciously learning a lesson about herself, she’s being told that if she’d only stop giving herself suggestions to the contrary, she might discover that her own busy little mind is also Mind with a large M.”

“And how soon will the lesson be learned? When will she stop giving herself those suggestions?”

“She may never learn. A lot of people don’t. On the other hand, a lot of people do.”

He took Will’s arm and led him into the deeper darkness behind the image of Enlightenment. The chanting grew more distinct, and there, hardly visible in the shadows, sat the chanter—a very old man, naked to the waist and, except for his moving lips, as rigidly still as Amitabha’s golden statue.

“What’s he intoning?” Will asked.

“Something in Sanskrit.”

Seven incomprehensible syllables, again and again.

“Good old vain repetition!”

“Not necessarily vain,” Mrs. Rao objected. “Sometimes it really gets you somewhere.”

“It gets you somewhere,” Vijaya elaborated, “not because of what the words mean or suggest, but simply because they’re being repeated. You could repeat Hey Diddle Diddle and it would work just as well as Om or Kyrie Eleison or La ila illa ’llah. It works because when you’re busy with the repetition of Hey Diddle Diddle or the name of God, you can’t be entirely preoccupied with yourself. The only trouble is that you can hey-diddle-diddle yourself downwards as well as upwards—down into the not-thought of idiocy as well as up into the not-thought of pure awareness.”

“So, I take it, you wouldn’t recommend this kind of thing,” said Will, “to our little friend with the orchids?”

“Not unless she were unusually jittery or anxious. Which she isn’t. I know her very well; she plays with my children.”

“Then what would you do in her case?”

“Among other things,” said Vijaya, “I’d take her, in another year or so, to the place we’re going to now.”

“What place?”

“The meditation room.”

Will followed him through an archway and along a short corridor. Heavy curtains were parted and they stepped into a large whitewashed room with a long window, to their left, that opened onto a little garden planted with banana and breadfruit trees. There was no furniture, only a scattering on the floor of small square cushions. On the wall opposite the window hung a large oil painting. Will gave it a glance, then approached to look into it more closely.

“My word!” he said at last. “Who is it by?”

“Gobind Singh.”

“And who’s Gobind Singh?”

“The best landscape painter Pala ever produced. He died in ’forty-eight.”

“Why haven’t we ever seen anything by him?”

“Because we like his work too well to export any of it.”

“Good for you,” said Will. “But bad for us.” He looked again at the picture. “Did this man ever go to China?”

“No; but he studied with a Cantonese painter who was living in Pala. And of course he’d seen plenty of reproductions of Sung landscapes.”

“A Sung master,” said Will, “who chose to paint in oils and was interested in chiaroscuro.”

“Only after he went to Paris. That was in 1910. He struck up a friendship with Vuillard.”

Will nodded. “One might have guessed as much from this extraordinary richness of texture.” He went on looking at the picture in silence. “Why do you hang it in the meditation room?” he asked at last.

“Why do you suppose?” Vijaya countered.

“Is it because this thing is what you call a diagram of the mind?”

“The temple was a diagram. This is something much better. It’s an actual manifestation. A manifestation of Mind with a large M in an individual mind in relation to a landscape, to canvas and to the experience of painting. It’s a picture, incidentally, of the next valley to the west. Painted from the place where the power lines disappear over the ridge.”

“What clouds!” said Will. “And the light!”

“The light,” Vijaya elaborated, “of the last hour before dusk. It’s just stopped raining and the sun has come out again, brighter than ever. Bright with the preternatural brightness of slanting light under a ceiling of cloud, the last, doomed, afternoon brightness that stipples every surface it touches and deepens every shadow.”

“Deepens every shadow,” Will repeated to himself, as he looked into the picture. The shadow of that huge, high continent of cloud, darkening whole mountain ranges almost to blackness; and in the middle distance the shadows of island clouds. And between dark and dark was the blaze of young rice, or the red heat of plowed earth, the incandescence of naked limestone, the sumptuous darks and diamond glitter of evergreen foliage. And here at the center of the valley stood a group of thatched houses, remote and tiny, but how clearly seen, how perfect and articulate, how profoundly significant! Yes, significant. But when you asked yourself, “Of what?” you found no answer. Will put the question into words.

“What do they mean?” Vijaya repeated. “They mean precisely what they are. And so do the mountains, so do the clouds, so do the lights and darks. And that’s why this is a genuinely religious image. Pseudoreligious pictures always refer to something else, something beyond the things they represent—some piece of metaphysical nonsense, some absurd dogma from the local theology. A genuinely religious image is always intrinsically meaningful. So that’s why we hang this kind of painting in our meditation room.”

“Always landscapes?”

“Almost always. Landscapes can really remind people of who they are.”

“Better than scenes from the life of a saint or savior?”

Vijaya nodded. “It’s the difference, to begin with, between objective and subjective. A picture of Christ or Buddha is merely the record of something observed by a behaviorist and interpreted by a theologian. But when you’re confronted with a landscape like this, it’s psychologically impossible for you to look at it with the eyes of a J. B. Watson or the mind of a Thomas Aquinas. You’re almost forced to submit to your immediate experience; you’re practically compelled to perform an act of self-knowing.”

“Self-knowing?”

“Self-knowing,” Vijaya insisted. “This view of the next valley is a view, at one remove, of your own mind, of everybody’s mind as it exists above and below the level of personal history. Mysteries of darkness; but the darkness teems with life. Apocalypses of light; and the light shines out as brightly from the flimsy little houses as from the trees, the grass, the blue spaces between the clouds. We do our best to disprove the fact, but a fact it remains; man is as divine as nature, as infinite as the Void. But that’s getting perilously close to theology, and nobody was ever saved by a notion. Stick to the data, stick to the concrete facts.” He pointed a finger at the picture. “The fact of half a village in sunshine and half in shadow and in secret. The fact of those indigo mountains and of the more fantastic mountains of vapor above them. The fact of blue lakes in the sky, lakes of pale green and raw sienna on the sunlit earth. The fact of this grass in the foreground, this clump of bamboos only a few yards down the slope, and the fact, at the same time, of those faraway peaks and the absurd little houses two thousand feet below in the valley. Distance,” he added parenthetically, “their ability to express the fact of distance—that’s yet another reason why landscapes are the most genuinely religious pictures.”

“Because distance lends enchantment to the view?”

“No; because it lends reality. Distance reminds us that there’s a lot more to the universe than just people—that there’s even a lot more to people than just people. It reminds us that there are mental spaces inside our skulls as enormous as the spaces out there. The experience of distance, of inner distance and outer distance, of distance in time and distance in space—it’s the first and fundamental religious experience. ‘O Death in life, the days that are no more’—and O the places, the infinite number of places that are not this place! Past pleasures, past unhappinesses and insights—all so intensely alive in our memories and yet all dead, dead without hope of resurrection. And the village down there in the valley so clearly seen even in the shadow, so real and indubitable, and yet so hopelessly out of reach, incommunicado. A picture like this is the proof of man’s capacity to accept all the deaths in life, all the yawning absences surrounding every presence. To my mind,” Vijaya added, “the worst feature of your nonrepresentational art is its systematic two-dimensionality, its refusal to take account of the universal experience of distance. As a colored object, a piece of abstract expressionism can be very handsome. It can also serve as a kind of glorified Rorschach inkblot. Everybody can find in it a symbolic expression of his own fears, lusts, hatreds, and daydreams. But can one ever find in it those more than human (or should one say those other than all too human) facts that one discovers in oneself when the mind is confronted by the outer distances of nature, or by the simultaneously inner and outer distances of a painted landscape like this one we’re looking at? All I know is that in your abstractions I don’t find the realities that reveal themselves here, and I doubt if anyone else can. Which is why this fashionable abstract nonobjective expressionism of yours is so fundamentally irreligious—and also, I may add, why even the best of it is so profoundly boring, so bottomlessly trivial.”

“Do you come here often?” Will asked after a silence.

“Whenever I feel like meditating in a group rather than alone.”

“How often is that?”

“Once every week or so. But of course some people like to do it oftener—and some much more rarely, or even never. It depends on one’s temperament. Take our friend Susila, for example—she needs big doses of solitude; so she hardly ever comes to the meditation room. Whereas Shanta (that’s my wife) likes to look in here almost every day.”

“So do I,” said Mrs. Rao. “But that’s only to be expected,” she added with a laugh. “Fat people enjoy company—even when they’re meditating.”

“And do you meditate on this picture?” Will asked.

“Not on it. From it, if you see what I mean. Or rather parallel with it. I look at it, and the other people look at it, and it reminds us all of who we are and what we aren’t, and how what we aren’t might turn into who we are.”

“Is there any connection,” Will asked, “between what you’ve been talking about and what I saw up there in the Shiva temple?”

“Of course there is,” she answered. “The moksha-medicine takes you to the same place as you get to in meditation.”

“So why bother to meditate?”

“You might as well ask, Why bother to eat your dinner?”

“But, according to you, the moksha-medicine is dinner.”

“It’s a banquet,” she said emphatically. “And that’s precisely why there has to be meditation. You can’t have banquets every day. They’re too rich and they last too long. Besides, banquets are provided by a caterer; you don’t have any part in the preparation of them. For your everyday diet you have to do your own cooking. The moksha-medicine comes as an occasional treat.”

“In theological terms,” said Vijaya, “the moksha-medicine prepares one for the reception of gratuitous graces—premystical visions or the full-blown mystical experiences. Meditation is one of the ways in which one co-operates with those gratuitous graces.”

“How?”

“By cultivating the state of mind that makes it possible for the dazzling ecstatic insights to become permanent and habitual illuminations. By getting to know oneself to the point where one won’t be compelled by one’s unconscious to do all the ugly, absurd, self-stultifying things that one so often finds oneself doing.”

“You mean, it helps one to be more intelligent?”

“Not more intelligent in relation to science or logical argument—more intelligent on the deeper level of concrete experiences and personal relationships.”

“More intelligent on that level,” said Mrs. Rao, “even though one may be very stupid upstairs.” She patted the top of her head. “I’m too dumb to be any good at the things that Dr. Robert and Vijaya are good at—genetics and biochemistry and philosophy and all the rest. And I’m no good at painting or poetry or acting. No talents and no cleverness. So I ought to feel horribly inferior and depressed. But in fact I don’t—thanks entirely to the moksha-medicine and meditation. No talents or cleverness. But when it comes to living, when it comes to understanding people and helping them, I feel myself growing more and more sensitive and skillful. And when it comes to what Vijaya calls gratuitous graces…” She broke off. “You could be the greatest genius in the world, but you wouldn’t have anything more than what I’ve been given. Isn’t that true, Vijaya?”

“Perfectly true.”

She turned back to Will. “So you see, Mr. Farnaby, Pala’s the place for stupid people. The greatest happiness of the greatest number—and we stupid ones are the greatest number. People like Dr. Robert and Vijaya and my darling Ranga—we recognize their superiority, we know very well that their kind of intelligence is enormously important. But we also know that our kind of intelligence is just as important. And we don’t envy them, because we’re given just as much as they are. Sometimes even more.”

“Sometimes,” Vijaya agreed, “even more. For the simple reason that a talent for manipulating symbols tempts its possessors into habitual symbol manipulation, and habitual symbol manipulation is an obstacle in the way of concrete experiencing and the reception of gratuitous graces.”

“So you see,” said Mrs. Rao, “you don’t have to feel too sorry for us.” She looked at her watch. “Goodness, I shall be late for Dillip’s dinner if I don’t hurry.”

She started briskly towards the door.

“Time, time, time,” Will mocked. “Time even in this place of timeless meditation. Time for dinner breaking incorrigibly into eternity.” He laughed. Never take yes for an answer. The nature of things is always no.

Mrs. Rao halted for a moment and looked back at him.

“But sometimes,” she said with a smile, “it’s eternity that miraculously breaks into time—even into dinnertime. Good-bye.” She waved her hand and was gone.

“Which is better,” Will wondered aloud as he followed Vijaya through the dark temple, out into the noonday glare, “which is better—to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?”

12

“HERE WE ARE,” SAID VIJAYA, WHEN THEY HAD REACHED THE END of the short street that led downhill from the marketplace. He opened a wicket gate and ushered his guest into a tiny garden, at the further end of which, on its low stilts, stood a small thatched house.

From behind the bungalow a yellow mongrel dog rushed out and greeted them with a frenzy of ecstatic yelps and jumps and tail-waggings. A moment later a large green parrot, with white cheeks and a bill of polished jet, came swooping down from nowhere and landed with a squawk and a noisy fluttering of wings on Vijaya’s shoulder.

“Parrots for you,” said Will, “mynahs for little Mary Sarojini. You people seem to be on remarkably good terms with the local fauna.”

Vijaya nodded. “Pala is probably the only country in which an animal theologian would have no reason for believing in devils. For animals everywhere else, Satan, quite obviously, is Homo sapiens.”

They climbed the steps to the veranda and walked through the open front door into the bungalow’s main living room. Seated on a low chair near the window, a young woman in blue was nursing her baby son. She lifted a heart-shaped face that narrowed down from a broad forehead to a delicately pointed chin, and gave them a welcoming smile.

“I’ve brought Will Farnaby,” said Vijaya as he bent down to kiss her.

Shanta held out her free hand to the stranger.

“I hope Mr. Farnaby doesn’t object to nature in the raw,” she said. As though to give point to her words, the baby withdrew his mouth from the brown nipple, and belched. A white bubble of milk appeared between his lips, swelled up and burst. He belched again, then resumed his sucking. “Even at eight months,” she added, “Rama’s table manners are still rather primitive.”

“A fine specimen,” said Will politely. He was not much interested in babies and had always been thankful for those repeated miscarriages which had frustrated all Molly’s hopes and longings for a child. “Who’s he going to look like—you or Vijaya?”

Shanta laughed and Vijaya joined in, enormously, an octave lower.

“He certainly won’t look like Vijaya,” she answered.

“Why not?”

“For the sufficient reason,” said Vijaya, “that I’m not genetically responsible.”

“In other words, the baby isn’t Vijaya’s son.”

Will looked from one laughing face to the other, then shrugged his shoulders. “I give up.”

“Four years ago,” Shanta explained, “we produced a pair of twins who are the living image of Vijaya. This time we thought it would be fun to have a complete change. We decided to enrich the family with an entirely new physique and temperament. Did you ever hear of Gobind Singh?”

“Vijaya has just been showing me his painting in your meditation room.”

“Well, that’s the man we chose for Rama’s father.”

“But I understood he was dead.”

Shanta nodded. “But his soul goes marching along.”

“What do you mean?”

“DF and AI.”

“DF and AI?”

“Deep Freeze and Artificial Insemination.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Actually,” said Vijaya, “we developed the techniques of AI about twenty years before you did. But of course we couldn’t do much with it until we had electric power and reliable refrigerators. We got those in the late twenties. Since then we’ve been using AI in a big way.”

“So you see,” Shanta chimed in, “my baby might grow up to be a painter—that is, if that kind of talent is inherited. And even if it isn’t he’ll be a lot more endomorphic and viscerotonic than his brothers or either of his parents. Which is going to be very interesting and educative for everybody concerned.”

“Do many people go in for this kind of thing?” Will asked.

“More and more. In fact I’d say that practically all the couples who decide to have a third child now go in for AI. So do quite a lot of those who mean to stop at number two. Take my family, for example. There’s been some diabetes among my father’s people; so they thought it best—he and my mother—to have both their children by AI. My brother’s descended from three generations of dancers and, genetically, I’m the daughter of Dr. Robert’s first cousin, Malcolm Chakravarti-MacPhail, who was the Old Raja’s private secretary.”

“And the author,” Vijaya added, “of the best history of Pala. Chakravarti-MacPhail was one of the ablest men of his generation.”

Will looked at Shanta, then back again at Vijaya.

“And has the ability been inherited?” he asked.

“So much so,” Vijaya answered, “that I have the greatest difficulty in maintaining my position of masculine superiority. Shanta has more brains than I have; but fortunately she can’t compete with my brawn.”

“Brawn,” Shanta repeated sarcastically, “brawn… I seem to remember a story about a young lady called Delilah.”

“Incidentally,” Vijaya went on, “Shanta has thirty-two half brothers and twenty-nine half sisters. And more than a third of them are exceptionally bright.”

“So you’re improving the race.”

“Very definitely. Give us another century, and our average IQ will be up to a hundred and fifteen.”

“Whereas ours, at the present rate of progress, will be down to about eighty-five. Better medicine—more congenital deficiencies preserved and passed on. It’ll make things a lot easier for future dictators.” At the thought of this cosmic joke he laughed aloud. Then, after a silence, “What about the ethical and religious aspects of AI?” he asked.

“In the early days,” said Vijaya, “there were a good many conscientious objectors. But now the advantages of AI have been so clearly demonstrated, most married couples feel that it’s more moral to take a shot at having a child of superior quality than to run the risk of slavishly reproducing whatever quirks and defects may happen to run in the husband’s family. Meanwhile the theologians have got busy. AI has been justified in terms of reincarnation and the theory of karma. Pious fathers now feel happy at the thought that they’re giving their wife’s children a chance of creating a better destiny for themselves and their posterity.”

“A better destiny?”

“Because they carry the germ plasm of a better stock. And the stock is better because it’s the manifestation of a better karma. We have a central bank of superior stocks. Superior stocks of every variety of physique and temperament. In your kind of environment, most people’s heredity never gets a fair chance. In ours, it does. And incidentally we have excellent genealogical and anthropometric records going back as far as the eighteen-seventies. So you see we’re not working entirely in the dark. For example, we know that Gobind Singh’s maternal grandmother was a gifted medium and lived to ninety-six.”

“So you see,” said Shanta, “we may even have a centenarian clairvoyant in the family.” The baby belched again. She laughed. “The oracle has spoken—as usual, very enigmatically.” Turning to Vijaya, “If you want lunch to be ready on time,” she added, “you’d better go and do something about it. Rama’s going to keep me busy for at least another ten minutes.”

Vijaya rose, laid one hand on his wife’s shoulder and with the other gently rubbed the baby’s brown back.

Shanta bent down and passed her cheek across the top of the child’s downy head. “It’s father,” she whispered. “Good father, good, good….”

Vijaya administered a final pat, then straightened himself up. “You were wondering,” he said to Will, “how it is that we get on so well with the local fauna. I’ll show you.” He raised his hand. “Polly. Polly.” Cautiously, the big bird stepped from his shoulder to the extended forefinger. “Polly’s a good bird,” he chanted. “Polly’s a very good bird.” He lowered his hand to the point where a contact was made between the bird’s body and the child’s, then moved it slowly, feathers against brown skin, back and forth, back and forth. “Polly’s a good bird,” he repeated, “a good bird.”

The parrot uttered a succession of low chuckles, then leaned forward from its perch on Vijaya’s finger and very gently nibbled at the child’s tiny ear.

“Such a good bird,” Shanta whispered, taking up the refrain. “Such a good bird.”

“Dr. Andrew picked up the idea,” said Vijaya, “while he was serving as a naturalist on the Melampus. From a tribe in northern New Guinea. Neolithic people; but like you Christians and us Buddhists, they believed in love. And unlike us and you, they’d invented some very practical ways of making their belief come true. This technique was one of their happiest discoveries. Stroke the baby while you’re feeding him; it doubles his pleasure. Then, while he’s sucking and being caressed, introduce him to the animal or person you want him to love. Rub his body against theirs; let there be a warm physical contact between child and love object. At the same time repeat some word like ‘good.’ At first he’ll understand only your tone of voice. Later on, when he learns to speak, he’ll get the full meaning. Food plus caress plus contact plus ‘good’ equals love. And love equals pleasure, love equals satisfaction.”

“Pure Pavlov.”

“But Pavlov purely for a good purpose. Pavlov for friendliness and trust and compassion. Whereas you prefer to use Pavlov for brainwashing, Pavlov for selling cigarettes and vodka and patriotism. Pavlov for the benefit of dictators, generals and tycoons.”

Refusing any longer to be left out in the cold, the yellow mongrel had joined the group and was impartially licking every piece of sentient matter within its reach—Shanta’s arm, Vijaya’s hand, the parrot’s feet, the baby’s backside. Shanta drew the dog closer and rubbed the child against its furry flank.

“And this is a good good dog,” she said. “Dog Toby, good good dog Toby.”

Will laughed. “Oughtn’t I to get into the act?”

“I was going to suggest it,” Shanta answered, “only I was afraid you’d think it was beneath your dignity.”

“You can take my place,” said Vijaya. “I must go and see about our lunch.”

Still carrying the parrot, he walked out through the door that led into the kitchen. Will pulled up his chair and, leaning forward, began to stroke the child’s tiny body.

“This is another man,” Shanta whispered. “A good man, baby. A good man.”

“How I wish it were true!” he said with a rueful little laugh.

“Here and now it is true.” And bending down again over the child, “He’s a good man,” she repeated. “A good good man.”

He looked at her blissful, secretly smiling face, he felt the smoothness and warmth of the child’s tiny body against his fingertips. Good, good, good…He too might have known this goodness—but only if his life had been completely different from what in fact, in senseless and disgusting fact, it was. So never take yes for an answer, even when, as now, yes is self-evident. He looked again with eyes deliberately attuned to another wavelength of value, and saw the caricature of a Memling altarpiece. “Madonna with Child, Dog, Pavlov and Casual Acquaintance.” And suddenly he could almost understand, from the inside, why Mr. Bahu so hated these people. Why he was so bent—in the name, as usual and needless to say, of God—on their destruction.

“Good,” Shanta was still murmuring to her baby, “good, good, good.”

Too good—that was their crime. It simply wasn’t permissible. And yet how precious it was! And how passionately he wished that he might have had a part in it! “Pure sentimentality!” he said to himself; and then aloud, “Good, good, good,” he echoed ironically. “But what happens when the child grows a little bigger and discovers that a lot of things and people are thoroughly bad, bad, bad?”

“Friendliness evokes friendliness,” she answered.

“From the friendly—yes. But not from the greedy, not from the power lovers, not from the frustrated and embittered. For them, friendliness is just weakness, just an invitation to exploit, to bully, to take vengeance with impunity.”

“But one has to run the risk, one has to make a beginning. And luckily no one’s immortal. The people who’ve been conditioned to swindling and bullying and bitterness will all be dead in a few years. Dead, and replaced by men and women brought up in the new way. It happened with us; it can happen with you.”

“It can happen,” he agreed. “But in the context of H-bombs and nationalism and fifty million more people every single year, it almost certainly won’t.”

“You can’t tell till you try.”

“And we shan’t try as long as the world is in its present state. And, of course, it will remain in its present state until we do try. Try and, what’s more, succeed at least as well as you’ve succeeded. Which brings me back to my original question. What happens when good, good, good discovers that, even in Pala, there’s a lot of bad, bad, bad? Don’t the children get some pretty unpleasant shocks?”

“We try to inoculate them against those shocks.”

“How? By making things unpleasant for them while they’re still young?”

“Not unpleasant. Let’s say real. We teach them love and confidence, but we expose them to reality, reality in all its aspects. And then give them responsibilities. They’re made to understand that Pala isn’t Eden or the Land of Cockaigne. It’s a nice place all right. But it will remain nice only if everybody works and behaves decently. And meanwhile the facts of life are the facts of life. Even here.”

“What about the facts of life in those bloodcurdling snakes I met halfway up the precipice? You can say ‘good, good, good’ as much as you like; but snakes will still bite.”

“You mean, they still can bite. But will they in fact make use of their ability?”

“Why shouldn’t they?”

“Look over there,” said Shanta. He turned his head and saw that what she was pointing at was a niche in the wall behind him. Within the niche was a stone Buddha, about half life-size, seated upon a curiously grooved cylindrical pedestal and surmounted by a kind of lead-shaped canopy that tapered down behind him into a broad pillar. “It’s a small replica,” she went on, “of the Buddha in the Station Compound—you know, the huge figure by the lotus pool.”

“Which is a magnificent piece of sculpture,” he said. “And the smile really gives one an inkling of what the Beatific Vision must be like. But what has it got to do with snakes?”

“Look again.”

He looked. “I don’t see anything specially significant.”

“Look harder.”

The seconds passed. Then, with a shock of surprise, he noticed something strange and even disquieting. What he had taken for an oddly ornamented cylindrical pedestal had suddenly revealed itself as a huge coiled snake. And that downward tapering canopy under which the Buddha was sitting was the expanded hood, with the flattened head at the center of its leading edge, of a giant cobra.

“My God!” he said. “I hadn’t noticed. How unobservant can one be?”

“Is this the first time you’ve seen the Buddha in this context?”

“The first time. Is there some legend?”

She nodded. “One of my favorites. You know about the Bodhi Tree, of course?”

“Yes, I know about the Bodhi Tree.”

“Well, that wasn’t the only tree that Gautama sat under at the time of his Enlightenment. After the Bodhi Tree, he sat for seven days under a banyan, called the Tree of the Goatherd. And after that he moved on to the Tree of Muchalinda.”

“Who was Muchalinda?”

“Muchalinda was the King of the Snakes and, being a god, he knew what was happening. So when the Buddha sat down under his tree, the Snake King crawled out of his hole, yards and yards of him, to pay Nature’s homage to Wisdom. Then a great storm blew up from the west. The divine cobra wrapped its coils round the more than divine man’s body, spread its hood over his head and, for the seven days his contemplation lasted, sheltered the Tathagata from the wind and rain. So there he sits to this day, with cobra beneath him, cobra above him, conscious simultaneously of cobra and the Clear Light and their ultimate identity.”

“How very different,” said Will, “from our view of snakes!”

“And your view of snakes is supposed to be God’s view—remember Genesis.”

“‘I will put enmity between thee and the woman,’” he quoted, “‘and between her seed and thy seed.’”

“But Wisdom never puts enmity anywhere. All those senseless pointless cockfights between Man and Nature, between Nature and God, between the Flesh and the Spirit! Wisdom doesn’t make those insane separations.”

“Nor does Science.”

“Wisdom takes Science in its stride and goes a stage further.”

“And what about totemism?” Will went on. “What about the fertility cults? They didn’t make any separations. Were they Wisdom?”

“Of course they were—primitive Wisdom, Wisdom on the neolithic level. But after a time people begin to get self-conscious and the old Dark Gods come to seem disreputable. So the scene changes. Enter the Gods of Light, enter the Prophets, enter Pythagoras and Zoroaster, enter the Jains and the early Buddhists. Between them they usher in the Age of the Cosmic Cockfight—Ormuzd versus Ahriman, Jehovah versus Satan and the Baalim, Nirvana as opposed to Samsara, appearance over against Plato’s Ideal Reality. And except in the minds of a few Tankriks and Mahayanists and Taoists and heretical Christians, the cockfight went on for the best part of two thousand years.”

“After which?” he questioned.

“After which you get the beginnings of modern biology.”

Will laughed. “‘God said, Let Darwin be,’ and there was Nietzsche, Imperialism and Adolf Hitler.”

“All that,” she agreed. “But also the possibility of a new kind of Wisdom for everybody. Darwin took the old totemism and raised it to the level of biology. The fertility cults reappeared as genetics and Havelock Ellis. And now it’s up to us to take another half turn up the spiral. Darwinism was the old neolithic Wisdom turned into scientific concepts. The new conscious Wisdom—the kind of Wisdom that was prophetically glimpsed in Zen and Taoism and Tantra—is biological theory realized in living practice, is Darwinism raised to the level of compassion and spiritual insight. So you see,” she concluded, “there isn’t any earthly reason—much less any heavenly reason—why the Buddha, or anyone else for that matter, shouldn’t contemplate the Clear Light as manifested in a snake.”

“Even though the snake might kill him?”

“Even though it might kill him.”

“And even though it’s the oldest and most universal of phallic symbols?”

Shanta laughed. “‘Meditate under the Tree of Muchalinda’—that’s the advice we give to every pair of lovers. And in the intervals between those loving meditations remember what you were taught as children; snakes are your brothers; snakes have a right to your compassion and your respect; snakes, in a word, are good, good, good.”

“Snakes are also poisonous, poisonous, poisonous.”

“But if you remember that they’re just as good as they’re poisonous, and act accordingly, they won’t use their poison.”

“Who says so?”

“It’s an observable fact. People who aren’t frightened of snakes, people who don’t approach them with the fixed belief that the only good snake is a dead snake, hardly ever get bitten. Next week I’m borrowing our neighbor’s pet python. For a few days I’ll be giving Rama his lunch and dinner in the coils of the Old Serpent.”

From outside the house came the sound of high-pitched laughter, then a confusion of children’s voices interrupting one another in English and Palanese. A moment later, looking very tall and maternal by comparison with her charges, Mary Sarojini walked into the room flanked by a pair of identical four-year-olds and followed by the sturdy cherub who had been with her when Will first opened his eyes on Pala.

“We picked up Tara and Arjuna at the kindergarten,” Mary Sarojini explained as the twins hurled themselves upon their mother.

With the baby in one arm and the other round the two little boys, Shanta smiled her thanks. “That was very kind of you.”

It was Tom Krishna who said, “You’re welcome.” He stepped forward and, after a moment of hesitation, “I was wondering…” he began, then broke off and looked appealingly at his sister. Mary Sarojini shook her head.

“What were you wondering?” Shanta enquired.

“Well, as a matter of fact, we were both wondering…I mean, could we come and have dinner with you?”

“Oh, I see.” Shanta looked from Tom Krishna’s face to Mary Sarojini’s and back again. “Well, you’d better go and ask Vijaya if there’s enough to eat. He’s doing the cooking today.”

“Okay,” said Tom Krishna without enthusiasm. With slow reluctant steps he crossed the room and went out through the door into the kitchen. Shanta turned to Mary Sarojini. “What happened?”

“Well, Mother’s told him at least fifty times that she doesn’t like his bringing lizards into the house. But this morning he did it again. So she got very cross with him.”

“And you decided you’d better come and have dinner here?”

“If it isn’t convenient, Shanta, we could try the Raos or the Rajajinnadasas.”

“I’m quite sure it will be convenient,” Shanta assured her. “I only thought it would be good for Tom Krishna to have a little talk with Vijaya.”

“You’re perfectly right,” said Mary Sarojini gravely. Then, very businesslike, “Tara, Arjuna,” she called. “Come with me to the bathroom and we’ll get washed up. They’re pretty grubby,” she said to Shanta as she led them away.

Will waited until they were out of earshot, then turned to Shanta. “I take it that I’ve just been seeing a Mutual Adoption Club in action.”

“Fortunately,” said Shanta, “in very mild action. Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini get on remarkably well with their mother. There’s no personal problem there—only the problem of destiny, the enormous and terrible problem of Dugald’s being dead.”

“Will Susila marry again?” he asked.

“I hope so. For everybody’s sake. Meanwhile, it’s good for the children to spend a certain amount of time with one or other of their deputy fathers. Specially good for Tom Krishna. Tom Krishna’s just reaching the age when little boys discover their maleness. He still cries like a baby; but the next moment he’s bragging and showing off and bringing lizards into the house—just to prove he’s two hundred percent a he-man. That’s why I sent him to Vijaya. Vijaya’s everything Tom Krishna likes to imagine he is. Three yards high, two yards wide, terrifically strong, immensely competent. When he tells Tom Krishna how he ought to behave, Tom Krishna listens—listens as he would never listen to me or his mother saying the same things. And Vijaya does say the same things as we would say. Because, on top of being two hundred percent male, he’s almost fifty percent sensitive-feminine. So, you see, Tom Krishna is really getting the works. And now,” she concluded, looking down at the sleeping child in her arms, “I must put this young man to bed and get ready for lunch.”

13

WASHED AND BRUSHED, THE TWINS WERE ALREADY IN THEIR HIGH chairs. Mary Sarojini hung over them like a proud but anxious mother. At the stove Vijaya was ladling rice and vegetables out of an earthenware pot. Cautiously and with an expression on his face of focused concentration, Tom Krishna carried each bowl, as it was filled, to the table.

“There!” said Vijaya when the last brimming bowl had been sent on its way. He wiped his hands, walked over to the table and took his seat. “Better tell our guest about grace,” he said to Shanta.

Turning to Will, “In Pala,” she explained, “we don’t say grace before meals. We say it with meals. Or rather we don’t say grace; we chew it.”

“Chew it?”

“Grace is the first mouthful of each course—chewed and chewed until there’s nothing left of it. And all the time you’re chewing you pay attention to the flavor of the food, to its consistency and temperature, to the pressures on your teeth and the feel of the muscles in your jaws.”

“And meanwhile, I suppose, you give thanks to the Enlightened One, or Shiva, or whoever it may be?”

Shanta shook her head emphatically. “That would distract your attention, and attention is the whole point. Attention to the experience of something given, something you haven’t invented. Not the memory of a form of words addressed to somebody in your imagination.” She looked round the table. “Shall we begin?”

“Hurrah!” the twins shouted in unison, and picked up their spoons.

For a long minute there was a silence, broken only by the twins who had not yet learned to eat without smacking their lips.

“May we swallow now?” asked one of the little boys at last.

Shanta nodded. Everyone swallowed. There was a clinking of spoons and a burst of talk from full mouths.

“Well,” Shanta enquired, “what did your grace taste like?”

“It tasted,” said Will, “like a long succession of different things. Or rather a succession of variations on the fundamental theme of rice and turmeric and red peppers and zucchini and something leafy that I don’t recognize. It’s interesting how it doesn’t remain the same. I’d never really noticed that before.”

“And while you were paying attention to these things, you were momentarily delivered from daydreams, from memories, from anticipations, from silly notions—from all the symptoms of you.”

“Isn’t tasting me?”

Shanta looked down the length of the table to her husband. “What would you say, Vijaya?”

“I’d say it was halfway between me and not-me. Tasting is not-me doing something for the whole organism. And at the same time tasting is me being conscious of what’s happening. And that’s the point of our chewing-grace—to make the me more conscious of what the not-me is up to.”

“Very nice,” was Will’s comment. “But what’s the point of the point?”

It was Shanta who answered. “The point of the point,” she said, “is that when you’ve learned to pay closer attention to more of the not-you in the environment (that’s the food) and more of the not-you in your own organism (that’s your taste sensations), you may suddenly find yourself paying attention to the not-you on the further side of consciousness, or perhaps it would be better,” Shanta went on, “to put it the other way round. The not-you on the further side of consciousness will find it easier to make itself known to a you that has learned to be more aware of its not-you on the side of physiology.” She was interrupted by a crash, followed by a howl from one of the twins. “After which,” she continued as she wiped up the mess on the floor, “one has to consider the problem of me and not-me in relation to people less than forty-two inches high. A prize of sixty-four thousand crores of rupees will be given to anyone who comes up with a foolproof solution.” She wiped the child’s eyes, had him blow his nose, then gave him a kiss and went to the stove for another bowl of rice.

“What are your chores for this afternoon?” Vijaya asked when lunch was over.

“We’re on scarecrow duty,” Tom Krishna answered importantly.

“In the field just below the schoolhouse,” Mary Sarojini added.

“Then I’ll take you there in the car,” said Vijaya. Turning to Will Farnaby, “Would you like to come along?” he asked.

Will nodded. “And if it’s permissible,” he said, “I’d like to see the school, while I’m about it—sit in, maybe, at some of the classes.”

Shanta waved good-bye to them from the veranda and a few minutes later they came in sight of the parked jeep.

“The school’s on the other side of the village,” explained Vijaya as he started the motor. “We have to take the bypass. It goes down and then up again.”

Down through terraced fields of rice and maize and sweet potatoes, then on the level, along a contour line, with a muddy little fishpond on the left and an orchard of breadfruit trees on the right, and finally up again through more fields, some green, some golden—and there was the schoolhouse, white and spacious under its towering shade trees.

“And down there,” said Mary Sarojini, “are our scarecrows.”

Will looked in the direction she was pointing. In the nearest of the terraced fields below them the yellow rice was almost ready to harvest. Two small boys in pink loincloths and a little girl in a blue skirt were taking turns at pulling the strings that set in motion two life-sized marionettes attached to poles at either end of the narrow field. The puppets were of wood, beautifully carved and clothed, not in rags, but in the most splendid draperies. Will looked at them in astonishment.

“Solomon in all his glory,” he exclaimed, “was not arrayed like one of these.”

But then Solomon, he went on to reflect, was only a king; these gorgeous scarecrows were beings of a higher order. One was a Future Buddha, the other a delightfully gay, East Indian version of God the Father as one sees him in the Sistine Chapel, swooping down over the newly created Adam. With each tug of the string the Future Buddha wagged his head, uncrossed his legs from the lotus posture, danced a brief fandango in the air, then crossed them again and sat motionless for a moment until another jerk of the string once more disturbed his meditations. God the Father, meanwhile, waved his outstretched arm, wagged his forefinger in portentous warning, opened and shut his horsehair-fringed mouth and rolled a pair of eyes which, being made of glass, flashed comminatory fire at any bird that dared to approach the rice. And all the time a brisk wind was fluttering his draperies, which were bright yellow, with a bold design—in brown, white and black—of tigers and monkeys, while the Future Buddha’s magnificent robes of red and orange rayon bellied and flapped around him with an Aeolian jingling of dozens of little silver bells.

“Are all your scarecrows like this?” Will asked.

“It was the Old Raja’s idea,” Vijaya answered. “He wanted to make the children understand that all gods are homemade, and that it’s we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.”

“Make them dance,” said Tom Krishna, “make them wiggle.” He laughed delightedly.

Vijaya stretched out an enormous hand and patted the child’s dark curly head. “That’s the spirit!” And turning back to Will, “Quote ‘gods’ unquote,” he said in what was evidently an imitation of the Old Raja’s manner, “—their one great merit apart from scaring birds and quote ‘sinners’ unquote, and occasionally, perhaps, consoling the miserable, consists in this: being raised aloft on poles, they have to be looked up at; and when anyone looks up, even at a god, he can hardly fail to see the sky beyond. And what’s the sky? Air and scattered light; but also a symbol of that boundless and (excuse the metaphor) pregnant emptiness out of which everything, the living and the inanimate, the puppet makers and their divine marionettes, emerge into the universe we know—or rather that we think we know.”

Mary Sarojini, who had been listening intently, nodded her head. “Father used to say,” she volunteered, “that looking up at birds in the sky was even better. Birds aren’t words, he used to say. Birds are real. Just as real as the sky.” Vijaya brought the car to a standstill. “Have a good time,” he said as the children jumped out. “Make them dance and wiggle.”

Shouting, Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini ran down to join the little group in the field below the road.

“And now for the more solemn aspects of education.” Vijaya turned the jeep into the driveway that led up to the schoolhouse. “I’ll leave the car here and walk back to the station. When you’ve had enough, get someone to drive you home.” He turned off the ignition and handed Will the key.

In the school office Mrs. Narayan, the Principal, was talking across her desk to a white-haired man with a long, rather doleful face like the face of a lined and wrinkled bloodhound.

“Mr. Chandra Menon,” Vijaya explained when the introductions had been made, “is our Under-Secretary of Education.”

“Who is paying us,” said the Principal, “one of his periodical visits of inspection.”

“And who thoroughly approves of what he sees,” the Under-Secretary added with a courteous bow in Mrs. Narayan’s direction.

Vijaya excused himself. “I have to get back to my work,” he said and moved towards the door.

“Are you specially interested in education?” Mr. Menon enquired.

“Specially ignorant would be more like it,” Will answered. “I was merely brought up, never educated. That’s why I’d like to have a look at the genuine article.”

“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” the Under-Secretary assured him. “New Rothamsted is one of our best schools.”

“What’s your criterion of a good school?” Will asked.

“Success.”

“In what? Winning scholarships? Getting ready for jobs? Obeying the local categorical imperatives?”

“All that, of course,” said Mr. Menon. “But the fundamental question remains. What are boys and girls for?”

Will shrugged his shoulders. “The answer depends on where you happen to be domiciled. For example, what are boys and girls for in America? Answer: for mass consumption. And the corollaries of mass consumption are mass communications, mass advertising, mass opiates in the form of television, meprobamate, positive thinking and cigarettes. And now that Europe has made the breakthrough into mass production, what will its boys and girls be for? For mass consumption and all the rest—just like the boys and girls in America. Whereas in Russia there’s a different answer. Boys and girls are for strengthening the national state. Hence all those engineers and science teachers, not to mention fifty divisions ready for instant combat and equipped with everything from tanks to H-bombs and long-range rockets. And in China it’s the same, but a good deal more so. What are boys and girls for there? For cannon fodder, industry fodder, agriculture fodder, road-building fodder. So East is East and West is West—for the moment. But the twain may meet in one or other of two ways. West may get so frightened of East they it will give up thinking that boys and girls are for mass consumption and decide instead that they’re for cannon fodder and strengthening the state. Alternatively East may find itself under such pressure from the appliance-hungry masses who long to go Western, that it will have to change its mind and say that boys and girls are really for mass consumption. But that’s for the future. As of now, the current answers to your question are mutually exclusive.”

“And both of the answers,” said Mr. Menon, “are different from ours. What are Palanese boys and girls for? Neither for mass consumption, nor for strengthening the state. The state has to exist, of course. And there has to be enough for everybody. That goes without saying. It’s only on those conditions that boys and girls can discover what in fact they are for—only on those conditions that we can do anything about it.”

“And what in fact are they for?”

“For actualization, for being turned into full-blown human beings.”

Will nodded. “Notes on What’s What,” he commented. “Become what you really are.”

“The Old Raja,” said Mr. Menon, “was mainly concerned with what people really are on the level that’s beyond individuality. And of course we’re just as much interested in that as he was. But our first business is elementary education, and elementary education has to deal with individuals in all their diversity of shape, size, temperament, gifts and deficiencies. Individuals in their transcendent unity are the affair of higher education. That begins in adolescence and is given concurrently with advanced elementary education.”

“Begins, I take it,” said Will, “with the first experience of the moksha-medicine.”

“So you’ve heard about the moksha-medicine?”

“I’ve even seen it in action.”

“Dr. Robert,” the Principal explained, “took him yesterday to see an initiation.”

“By which,” added Will, “I was profoundly impressed. When I think of my religious training…” He left the sentence eloquently unfinished.

“Well, as I was saying,” Mr. Menon continued, “adolescents get both kinds of education concurrently. They’re helped to experience their transcendental unity with all other sentient beings and at the same time they’re learning, in their psychology and physiology classes, that each one of us has his own constitutional uniqueness, everybody’s different from everybody else.”

“When I was at school,” said Will, “the pedagogues did their best to iron out those differences, or at least to plaster them over with the same Late Victorian ideal—the ideal of the scholarly but Anglican football-playing gentleman. But now tell me what you do about the fact that everybody’s different from everybody else.”

“We begin,” said Mr. Menon, “by assessing the differences. Precisely who or what, anatomically, biochemically and psychologically, is this child? In the organic hierarchy, which takes precedence—his gut, his muscles, or his nervous system? How near does he stand to the three polar extremes? How harmonious or how disharmonious is the mixture of his component elements, physical and mental? How great is his inborn wish to dominate, or to be sociable, or to retreat into his inner world? And how does he do his thinking and perceiving and remembering? Is he a visualizer or a nonvisualizer? Does his mind work with images or with words, with both at once, or with neither? How close to the surface is his storytelling faculty? Does he see the world as Wordsworth and Traherne saw it when they were children? And, if so, what can be done to prevent the glory and the freshness from fading into the light of common day? Or, in more general terms, how can we educate children on the conceptual level without killing their capacity for intense nonverbal experience? How can we reconcile analysis with vision? And there are dozens of other questions that must be asked and answered. For example, does this child absorb all the vitamins in his food or is he subject to some chronic deficiency that, if it isn’t recognized and treated, will lower his vitality, darken his mood, make him see ugliness, feel boredom and think foolishness or malice? And what about his blood sugar? What about his breathing? What about his posture and the way he uses his organism when he’s working, playing, studying? And there are all the questions that have to do with special gifts. Does he show signs of having a talent for music, for mathematics, for handling words, for observing accurately and for thinking logically and imaginatively about what he has observed? And finally how suggestible is he going to be when he grows up? All children are good hypnotic subjects—so good that four out of five of them can be talked into somnambulism. In adults the proportion is reversed. Four out of five of them can never be talked into somnambulism. Out of any hundred children, which are the twenty who will grow up to be suggestible to the pitch of somnambulism?”

“Can you spot them in advance?” Will asked. “And if so, what’s the point of spotting them?”

“We can spot them,” Mr. Menon answered. “And it’s very important that they should be spotted. Particularly important in your part of the world. Politically speaking, the twenty percent that can be hypnotized easily and to the limit is the most dangerous element in your societies.”

“Dangerous?”

“Because these people are the propagandist’s predestined victims. In an old-fashioned, prescientific democracy, any spellbinder with a good organization behind him can turn that twenty percent of potential somnambulists into an army of regimented fanatics dedicated to the greater glory and power of their hypnotist. And under a dictatorship these same potential somnambulists can be talked into implicit faith and mobilized as the hard core of the omnipotent party. So you see it’s very important for any society that values liberty to be able to spot the future somnambulists when they’re young. Once they’ve been spotted, they can be hypnotized and systematically trained not to be hypnotizable by the enemies of liberty. And at the same time, of course, you’d be well advised to reorganize your social arrangements so as to make it difficult or impossible for the enemies of liberty to arise or have any influence.”

“Which is the state of things, I gather, in Pala?”

“Precisely,” said Mr. Menon. “And that’s why our potential somnambulists don’t constitute a danger.”

“Then why do you go to the trouble of spotting them in advance?”

“Because, if it’s properly used, their gift is so valuable.”

“For Destiny Control?” Will questioned, remembering those therapeutic swans and all the things that Susila had said about pressing one’s own buttons.

The Under-Secretary shook his head. “Destiny Control doesn’t call for anything more than a light trance. Practically everybody’s capable of that. The potential somnambulists are the twenty percent who can go into very deep trance. And it’s in very deep trance—and only in very deep trance—that a person can be taught how to distort time.”

“Can you distort time?” Will enquired.

Mr. Menon shook his head. “Unfortunately I could never go deep enough. Everything I know had to be learned the long, slow way. Mrs. Narayan was more fortunate. Being one of the privileged twenty percent, she could take all kinds of educational short cuts that were completely closed to the rest of us.”

“What sort of short cuts?” Will asked, turning to the Principal.

“Short cuts to memorizing,” she answered, “short cuts to calculating and thinking and problem solving. One starts by learning how to experience twenty seconds as ten minutes, a minute as half an hour. In deep trance it’s really very easy. You listen to the teacher’s suggestions and you sit there quietly for a long, long time. Two full hours—you’d be ready to take your oath on it. When you’ve been brought back, you look at your watch. Your experience of two hours was telescoped into exactly four minutes of clock time.”

“How?”

“Nobody knows how,” said Mr. Menon. “But all those anecdotes about drowning men seeing the whole of their life unfolding before them in a few seconds are substantially true. The mind and the nervous system—or rather some minds and some nervous systems—happen to be capable of this curious feat; that’s all that anybody knows. We discovered the fact about sixty years ago, and since then we’ve been exploiting it. Exploiting it, among other things, for educational purposes.”

“For example,” Mrs. Narayan resumed, “here’s a mathematical problem. In your normal state it might take you the best part of half an hour to solve. But now you distort time to the point where one minute is subjectively the equivalent of thirty minutes. Then you set to work on your problem. Thirty subjective minutes later it’s solved. But thirty subjective minutes are one clock minute. Without the least sense of rush or strain you’ve been working as fast as one of those extraordinary calculating boys, who turn up from time to time. Future geniuses like Ampére and Gauss, or future idiots like Dase—but all of them, by some built-in trick of time distortion, capable of getting through an hour’s hard work in a couple of minutes—sometimes in a matter of seconds. I’m only an average student; but I could go into deep trance, which meant that I could be taught how to telescope my time into a thirtieth of its normal span. Result: I was able to cover far more intellectual ground than I could possibly have covered if I’d had to do all my learning in the ordinary way. You can imagine what happens when somebody with a genius IQ is also capable of time distortion. The results are fantastic!”

“Unfortunately,” said Mr. Menon, “they’re not very common. In the last two generations we’ve had precisely two time distorters of real genius, and only five or six runners-up. But what Pala owes to those few is incalculable. So it’s no wonder that we keep a sharp lookout for potential somnambulists!”

“Well, you certainly ask plenty of searching questions about your little pupils,” Will concluded after a brief silence. “What do you do when you’ve found the answers?”

“We start educating accordingly,” said Mr. Menon. “For example, we ask questions about every child’s physique and temperament. When we have the answers, we sort out all the shyest, tensest, most overresponsive and introverted children, and assemble them in a single group. Then, little by little, the group is enlarged. First a few children with tendencies towards indiscriminate sociability are introduced. Then one or two little muscle men and muscle women—children with tendencies towards aggressiveness and love of power. It’s the best method, we’ve found, for getting little boys and girls at the three polar extremes to understand and tolerate one another. After a few months of carefully controlled mixing, they’re ready to admit that people with a different kind of hereditary makeup have just as good a right to exist as they have.”

“And the principle,” said Mrs. Narayan, “is explicitly taught as well as progressively applied. In the lower forms we do the teaching in terms of analogies with familiar animals. Cats like to be by themselves. Sheep like being together. Martens are fierce and can’t be tamed. Guinea pigs are gentle and friendly. Are you a cat person or a sheep person, a guinea-pig person or a marten person? Talk about it in animal parables, and even very small children can understand the fact of human diversity and the need for mutual forbearance, mutual forgiveness.”

“And later on,” said Mr. Menon, “when they come to read the Gita, we tell them about the link between constitution and religion. Sheep people and guinea-pig people love ritual and public ceremonies and revivalistic emotion; their temperamental preferences can be directed into the Way of Devotion. Cat people like to be alone, and their private broodings can become the Way of Self-Knowledge. Marten people want to do things, and the problem is how to transform their driving aggressiveness into the Way of Disinterested Action.”

“And the way to the Way of Disinterested Action is what I was looking at yesterday,” said Will. “The way that leads through woodchopping and rock climbing—is that it?”

“Woodchopping and rock climbing,” said Mr. Menon, “are special cases. Let’s generalize and say that the way to all the Ways leads through the redirection of power.”

“What’s that?”

“The principle is very simple. You take the power generated by fear or envy or too much noradrenalin, or else by some built-in urge that happens, at the moment, to be out of place—you take it and, instead of using it to do something unpleasant to someone else, instead of repressing it and so doing something unpleasant to yourself, you consciously direct it along a channel where it can do something useful, or, if not useful, at least harmless.”

“Here’s a simple case,” said the Principal. “An angry or frustrated child has worked up enough power for a burst of crying, or bad language, or a fight. If the power generated is sufficient for any of those things, it’s sufficient for running, or dancing, more than sufficient for five deep breaths. I’ll show you some dancing later on. For the moment, let’s confine ourselves to breathing. Any irritated person who takes five deep breaths releases a lot of tension and so makes it easier for himself to behave rationally. So we teach our children all kinds of breathing games, to be played whenever they’re angry or upset. Some of the games are competitive. Which of two antagonists can inhale most deeply and say ‘OM’ on the outgoing breath for the longest time? It’s a duel that ends, almost without fail, in reconciliation. But of course there are many occasions when competitive breathing is out of place. So here’s a little game that an exasperated child can play on his own, a game that’s based on the local folklore. Every Palanese child has been brought up on Buddhist legends, and in most of these pious fairy stories somebody has a vision of a celestial being. A Bodhisattva, say, in an explosion of lights, jewels and rainbows. And along with the glorious vision there’s always an equally glorious olfaction; the fireworks are accompanied by an unutterably delicious perfume. Well, we take these traditional phantasies—which are all based, needless to say, on actual visionary experiences of the kind induced by fasting, sensory deprivation or mushrooms—and we set them to work. Violent feelings, we tell the children, are like earthquakes. They shake us so hard that cracks appear in the wall that separates our private selves from the shared, universal Buddha Nature. You get cross, something inside of you cracks and, through the crack, out comes a whiff of the heavenly smell of enlightenment. Like champak, like ylang-ylang, like gardenias—only infinitely more wonderful. So don’t miss this heavenliness that you’ve accidentally released. It’s there every time you get cross. Inhale it, breathe it in, fill your lungs with it. Again and again.”

“And they actually do it?”

“After a few weeks of teaching, most of them do it as a matter of course. And, what’s more, a lot of them really smell that perfume. The old repressive ‘Thou shalt not’ has been translated into a new expressive and rewarding ‘Thou shalt.’ Potentially harmful power has been redirected into channels where it’s not merely harmless, but may actually do some good. And meanwhile, of course, we’ve been giving the children systematic and carefully graduated training in perception and the proper use of language. They’re taught to pay attention to what they see and hear, and at the same time they’re asked to notice how their feelings and desires affect what they experience of the outer world, and how their language habits affect not only their feelings and desires but even their sensations. What my ears and my eyes record is one thing; what the words I use and the mood I’m in and the purposes I’m pursuing allow me to perceive, make sense of and act upon is something quite different. So you see it’s all brought together into a single educational process. What we give the children is simultaneously a training in perceiving and imagining, a training in applied physiology and psychology, a training in practical ethics and practical religion, a training in the proper use of language, and a training in self-knowledge. In a word, a training of the whole mind-body in all its aspects.”

“What’s the relevance,” Will asked, “of all this elaborate training of the mind-body to formal education? Does it help a child to do sums, or write grammatically, or understand elementary physics?”

“It helps a lot,” said Mr. Menon. “A trained mind-body learns more quickly and more thoroughly than an untrained one. It’s also more capable of relating facts to ideas, and both of them to its own ongoing life.” Suddenly and surprisingly—for that long melancholy face gave one the impression of being incompatible with any expression of mirth more emphatic than a rather weary smile—he broke into a loud long peal of laughter.

“What’s the joke?”

“I was thinking of two people I met last time I was in England. At Cambridge. One of them was an atomic physicist, the other was a philosopher. Both extremely eminent. But one had a mental age, outside the laboratory, of about eleven and the other was a compulsive eater with a weight problem that he refused to face. Two extreme examples of what happens when you take a clever boy, give him fifteen years of the most intensive formal education and totally neglect to do anything for the mind-body which has to do the learning and the living.”

“And your system, I take it, doesn’t produce that kind of academic monster?”

The Under-Secretary shook his head. “Until I went to Europe, I’d never seen anything of the kind. They’re grotesquely funny,” he added. “But, goodness, how pathetic! And, poor things, how curiously repulsive!”

“Being pathetically and curiously repulsive—that’s the price we pay for specialization.”

“For specialization,” Mr. Menon agreed, “but not in the sense you people ordinarily use the word. Specialization in that sense is necessary and inevitable. No specialization, no civilization. And if one educates the whole mind-body along with the symbol-using intellect, that kind of necessary specialization won’t do much harm. But you people don’t educate the mind-body. Your cure for too much scientific specialization is a few more courses in the humanities. Excellent! Every education ought to include courses in the humanities. But don’t let’s be fooled by the name. By themselves, the humanities don’t humanize. They’re simply another form of specialization on the symbolic level. Reading Plato or listening to a lecture on T. S. Eliot doesn’t educate the whole human being; like courses in physics or chemistry, it merely educates the symbol manipulator and leaves the rest of the living mind-body in its pristine state of ignorance and ineptitude. Hence all those pathetic and repulsive creatures that so astonished me on my first trip abroad.”

“What about formal education?” Will now asked. “What about indispensable information and the necessary intellectual skills? Do you teach the way we do?”

“We teach the way you’re probably going to teach in another ten or fifteen years. Take mathematics, for example. Historically mathematics began with the elaboration of useful tricks, soared up into metaphysics and finally explained itself in terms of structure and logical transformations. In our schools we reverse the historical process. We begin with structure and logic; then, skipping the metaphysics, we go on from general principles to particular applications.”

“And the children understand?”

“Far better than they understand when one starts with utilitarian tricks. From about five onwards practically any intelligent child can learn practically anything, provided always that you present it to him in the right way. Logic and structure in the form of games and puzzles. The children play and, incredibly quickly, they catch the point. After which you can go on to practical applications. Taught in this way, most children can learn at least three times as much, four times as thoroughly, in half the time. Or consider another field where one can use games to implant an understanding of basic principles. All scientific thinking is in terms of probability. The old eternal verities are merely a high degree of likeliness; the immutable laws of nature are just statistical averages. How does one get these profoundly unobvious notions into children’s heads? By playing roulette with them, by spinning coins and drawing lots. By teaching them all kinds of games with cards and boards and dice.”

“Evolutionary Snakes and Ladders—that’s the most popular game with the little ones,” said Mrs. Narayan. “Another great favorite is Mendelian Happy Families.”

“And a little later,” Mr. Menon added, “we introduce them to a rather complicated game played by four people with a pack of sixty specially designed cards divided into three suits. Psychological bridge, we call it. Chance deals you your hand, but the way you play it is a matter of skill, bluff and co-operation with your partner.”

“Psychology, Mendelism, Evolution—your education seems to be heavily biological,” said Will.

“It is,” Mr. Menon agreed. “Our primary emphasis isn’t on physics and chemistry; it’s on the sciences of life.”

“Is that a matter of principle?”

“Not entirely. It’s also a matter of convenience and economic necessity. We don’t have the money for large-scale research in physics and chemistry, and we don’t really have any practical need for that kind of research—no heavy industries to be made more competitive, no armaments to be made more diabolical, not the faintest desire to land on the backside of the moon. Only the modest ambition to live as fully human beings in harmony with the rest of life on this island at this latitude on this planet. We can take the results of your researches in physics and chemistry and apply them, if we want to or can afford it, to our own purposes. Meanwhile we’ll concentrate on the research which promises to do us the greatest good—in the sciences of life and mind. If the politicians in the newly independent countries had any sense,” he added, “they’d do the same. But they want to throw their weight around; they want to have armies, they want to catch up with the motorized television addicts of America and Europe. You people have no choice,” he went on. “You’re irretrievably committed to applied physics and chemistry, with all their dismal consequences, military, political and social. But the underdeveloped countries aren’t committed. They don’t have to follow your example. They’re still free to take the road we’ve taken—the road of applied biology, the road of fertility control and the limited production and selective industrialization which fertility control makes possible, the road that leads towards happiness from the inside out, through health, through awareness, through a change in one’s attitude towards the world; not towards the mirage of happiness from the outside in, through toys and pills and nonstop distractions. They could still choose our way; but they don’t want to, they want to be exactly like you, God help them. And as they can’t possibly do what you’ve done—at any rate within the time they’ve set themselves—they’re foredoomed to frustration and disappointment, predestined to the misery of social breakdown and anarchy, and then to the misery of enslavement by tyrants. It’s a completely foreseeable tragedy, and they’re walking into it with their eyes open.”

“And we can’t do anything about it,” the Principal added.

“Can’t do anything,” said Mr. Menon, “except go on doing what we’re doing now and hoping against hope that the example of a nation that has found a way of being happily human may be imitated. There’s very little chance of it; but it just might happen.”

“Unless Greater Rendang happens first.”

“Unless Greater Rendang happens first,” Mr. Menon gravely agreed. “Meanwhile we have to get on with our job, which is education. Is there anything more that you’d like to hear about, Mr. Farnaby?”

“Lots more,” said Will. “For example, how early do you start your science teaching?”

“We start it at the same time we start multiplication and division. First lessons in ecology.”

“Ecology? Isn’t that a bit complicated?”

“That’s precisely the reason why we begin with it. Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and the country around it. Rub it in.”

“And let me add,” said the Principal, “that we always teach the science of relationship in conjunction with the ethics of relationship. Balance, give and take, no excesses—it’s the rule in nature and, translated out of fact into morality, it ought to be the rule among people. As I said before, children find it very easy to understand an idea when it’s presented to them in a parable about animals. We give them an up-to-date version of Aesop’s Fables. Not the old anthropomorphic fictions, but true ecological fables with built-in, cosmic morals. And another wonderful parable for children is the story of erosion. We don’t have any good examples of erosion here; so we show them photographs of what has happened in Rendang, in India and China, in Greece and the Levant, in Africa and America—all the places where greedy, stupid people have tried to take without giving, to exploit without love or understanding. Treat Nature well, and Nature will treat you well. Hurt or destroy Nature, and Nature will soon destroy you. In a Dust Bowl, ‘Do as you would be done by’ is self-evident—much easier for a child to recognize and understand than in an eroded family or village. Psychological wounds don’t show—and anyhow children know so little about their elders. And, having no standards of comparison, they tend to take even the worst situation for granted, as though it were part of the nature of things. Whereas the difference between ten acres of meadow and ten acres of gullies and blowing sand is obvious. Sand and gullies are parables. Confronted by them, it’s easy for the child to see the need for conservation and then to go on from conservation to morality—easy for him to go on from the Golden Rule in relation to plants and animals and the earth that supports them to the Golden Rule in relation to human beings. And here’s another important point. The morality to which a child goes on from the facts of ecology and the parables of erosion is a universal ethic. There are no Chosen People in nature, no Holy Lands, no Unique Historical Revelations. Conservation morality gives nobody an excuse for feeling superior, or claiming special privileges. ‘Do as you would be done by’ applies to our dealings with all kinds of life in every part of the world. We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence. Elementary ecology leads straight to elementary Buddhism.”

“A few weeks ago,” said Will after a moment of silence, “I was looking at Thorwald’s book about what happened in eastern Germany between January and May of 1945. Have either of you read it?”

They shook their heads.

“Then don’t,” Will advised. “I was in Dresden five months after the February bombing. Fifty or sixty thousand civilians—mostly refugees running away from the Russians—burned alive in a single night. And all because little Adolf had never learned ecology,” he smiled his flayed ferocious smile, “never been taught the first principles of conservation.” One made a joke of it because it was too horrible to be talked about seriously.

Mr. Menon rose and picked up his briefcase.

“I must be going.” He shook hands with Will. It had been a pleasure, and he hoped that Mr. Farnaby would enjoy his stay in Pala. Meanwhile, if he wanted to know more about Palanese education, he had only to ask Mrs. Narayan. Nobody was better qualified to act as a guide and instructor.

“Would you like to visit some of the classrooms?” Mrs. Narayan asked, when the Under-Secretary had left.

Will rose and followed her out of the room and along a corridor.

“Mathematics,” said the Principal as she opened a door. “And this is the Upper Fifth. Under Mrs. Anand.”

Will bowed as he was introduced. The white-haired teacher gave a welcoming smile and whispered, “We’re deep, as you see, in a problem.”

He looked about him. At their desks a score of boys and girls were frowning, in a concentrated, pencil-biting silence, over their notebooks. The bent heads were sleek and dark. Above the white or khaki shorts, above the long gaily colored skirts, the golden bodies glistened in the heat. Boys’ bodies that showed the cage of the ribs beneath the skin, girls’ bodies, fuller, smoother, with the swell of small breasts, firm, high-set, elegant as the inventions of a rococo sculptor of nymphs. And everyone took them completely for granted. What a comfort, Will reflected, to be in a place where the Fall was an exploded doctrine!

Meanwhile Mrs. Anand was explaining—sotto voce so as not to distract the problem solvers from their task—that she always divided her classes into two groups. The group of the visualizers, who thought in geometrical terms, like the ancient Greeks, and the group of the nonvisualizers who preferred algebra and imageless abstractions. Somewhat reluctantly Will withdrew his attention from the beautiful unfallen world of young bodies and resigned himself to taking an intelligent interest in human diversity and the teaching of mathematics.

They took their leave at last. Next door, in a pale-blue classroom decorated with paintings of tropical animals, Bodhisattvas and their bosomy Shaktis, the Lower Fifth were having their biweekly lesson in Elementary Applied Philosophy. Breasts here were smaller, arms thinner and less muscular. These philosophers were only a year away from childhood.

“Symbols are public,” the young man at the blackboard was saying as Will and Mrs. Narayan entered the room. He drew a row of little circles, numbered them 1, 2, 3, 4, and n. “These are people,” he explained. Then from each of the little circles he drew a line that connected it with a square at the left of the board. S he wrote in the center of the square. “S is the system of symbols that the people use when they want to talk to one another. They all speak the same language—English, Palanese, Eskimo, it depends where they happen to live. Words are public; they belong to all the speakers of a given language; they’re listed in dictionaries. And now let’s look at the things that happen out there.” He pointed through the open window. Gaudy against a white cloud, half a dozen parrots came sailing into view, passed behind a tree and were gone. The teacher drew a second square at the opposite side of the board, labeled it E for “events” and connected it by lines to the circles. “What happens out there is public—or at least fairly public,” he qualified. “And what happens when somebody speaks or writes words—that’s also public. But the things that go on inside these little circles are private. Private.” He laid a hand on his chest. “Private.” He rubbed his forehead. “Private.” He touched his eyelids and the tip of his nose with a brown forefinger. “Now let’s make a simple experiment. Say the word ‘pinch.’”

“Pinch,” said the class in ragged unison. “Pinch…”

“P-I-N-C-H—pinch. That’s public, that’s something you can look up in the dictionary. But now pinch yourselves. Hard! Harder!”

To an accompaniment of giggles, of aies and ows, the children did as they were told.

“Can anybody feel what the person sitting next to him is feeling?”

There was a chorus of noes.

“So it looks,” said the young man, “as though there were—let’s see, how many are we?” He ran his eyes over the desks before him. “It looks as though there were twenty-three distinct and separate pains. Twenty-three in this one room. Nearly three thousand million of them in the whole world. Plus the pains of all the animals. And each of these pains is strictly private. There’s no way of passing the experience from one center of pain to another center of pain. No communication except indirectly through S.” He pointed to the square at the left of the board, then to the circles at the center. “Private pains here in 1, 2, 3, 4, and n. News about private pains out here at S, where you can say ‘pinch,’ which is a public word listed in a dictionary. And notice this: there’s only one public word, ‘pain,’ for three thousand million private experiences, each of which is probably about as different from all the others as my nose is different from your noses and your noses are different from one another. A word only stands for the ways in which things or happenings of the same general kind are like one another. That’s why the word is public. And, being public, it can’t possibly stand for the ways in which happenings of the same general kind are unlike one another.”

There was a silence. Then the teacher looked up and asked a question.

“Does anyone here know about Mahakasyapa?”

Several hands were raised. He pointed his finger at a little girl in a blue skirt and a necklace of shells sitting in the front row.

“You tell us, Amiya.”

Breathlessly and with a lisp, Amiya began.

“Mahakathyapa,” she said, “wath the only one of the dithipleth that underthtood what the Buddha wath talking about.”

“And what was he talking about?”

“He wathn’t talking. That’th why they didn’t underthtand.”

“But Mahakasyapa understood what he was talking about even though he wasn’t talking—is that it?”

The little girl nodded. That was it exactly. “They thought he wath going to preatth a thermon,” she said, “but he didn’t. He jutht picked a flower and held it up for everybody to look at.”

“And that was the sermon,” shouted a small boy in a yellow loincloth, who had been wriggling in his seat, hardly able to contain his desire to impart what he knew. “But nobody could underthand that kind of a thermon. Nobody but Mahakathyapa.”

“So what did Mahakasyapa say when the Buddha held up that flower?”

“Nothing!” the yellow loincloth shouted triumphantly.

“He jutht thmiled,” Amiya elaborated. “And that thowed the Buddha that he underthtood what it wath all about. So he thmiled back, and they jutht that there, thmiling and thmiling.”

“Very good,” said the teacher. “And now,” he turned to the yellow loincloth, “let’s hear what you think it was that Mahakasyapa understood.”

There was a silence. Then, crestfallen, the child shook his head. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

“Does anyone else know?”

There were several conjectures. Perhaps he’d understood that people get bored with sermons—even the Buddha’s sermons. Perhaps he liked flowers as much as the Compassionate One did. Perhaps it was a white flower, and that made him think of the Clear Light. Or perhaps it was blue, and that was Shiva’s color.

“Good answers,” said the teacher. “Especially the first one. Sermons are pretty boring—especially for the preacher. But here’s a question. If any of your answers had been what Mahakasyapa understood when Buddha held up the flower, why didn’t he come out with it in so many words?”

“Perhapth he wathn’t a good thpeaker.”

“He was an excellent speaker.”

“Maybe he had a sore throat.”

“If he’d had a sore throat, he wouldn’t have smiled so happily.”

“You tell us,” called a shrill voice from the back of the room.

“Yes, you tell us,” a dozen other voices chimed in.

The teacher shook his head. “If Mahakasyapa and the Compassionate One couldn’t put it into words, how can I? Meanwhile let’s take another look at these diagrams on the blackboard. Public words, more or less public events, and then people, completely private centers of pain and pleasure. “Completely private?” he questioned. “But perhaps that isn’t quite true. Perhaps, after all, there is some kind of communication between the circles—not in the way I’m communicating with you now, through words, but directly. And maybe that was what the Buddha was talking about when his wordless flower-sermon was over. ‘I have the treasure of the unmistakable teachings,’ he said to his disciples, ‘the wonderful Mind of Nirvana, the true form without form, beyond all words, the teaching to be given and received outside of all doctrines. This I have now handed to Mahakasyapa.’” Picking up the chalk again, he traced a rough ellipse that enclosed within its boundaries all the other diagrams on the board—the little circles representing human beings, the square that stood for events, and the other square that stood for words and symbols. “All separate,” he said, “and yet all one. People, events, words—they’re all manifestations of Mind, of Suchness, of the Void. What Buddha was implying and what Mahakasyapa understood was that one can’t speak these teachings, one can only be them. Which is something you’ll all discover when the moment comes for your initiation.”

“Time to move on,” the Principal whispered. And when the door had closed behind them and they were standing again in the corridor, “We use this same kind of approach,” she said to Will, “in our science teaching, beginning with botany.”

“Why with botany?”

“Because it can be related so easily to what was being talked about just now—the Mahakasyapa story.”

“Is that your starting point?”

“No, we start prosaically with the textbook. The children are given all the obvious, elementary facts, tidily arranged in the standard pigeonholes. Undiluted botany—that’s the first stage. Six or seven weeks of it. After which they get a whole morning of what we call bridge building. Two and a half hours during which we try to make them relate everything they’ve learned in the previous lessons to art, language, religion, self-knowledge.”

“Botany and self-knowledge—how do you build that bridge?”

“It’s really quite simple,” Mrs. Narayan assured him. “Each of the children is given a common flower—a hibiscus, for example, or better still (because the hibiscus has no scent) a gardenia. Scientifically speaking, what is a gardenia? What does it consist of? Petals, stamens, pistil, ovary, and all the rest of it. The children are asked to write a full analytical description of the flower, illustrated by an accurate drawing. When that’s done there’s a short rest period, at the close of which the Mahakasyapa story is read to them and they’re asked to think about it. Was Buddha giving a lesson in botany? Or was he teaching his disciples something else? And, if so, what?”

“What indeed?”

“And of course, as the story makes clear, there’s no answer that can be put into words. So we tell the boys and girls to stop thinking and just look. ‘But don’t look analytically,’ we tell them, ‘don’t look as scientists, even as gardeners. Liberate yourselves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you. Look at it as though you’d never seen anything of the kind before, as though it had no name and belonged to no recognizable class. Look at it alertly but passively, receptively, without labeling or judging or comparing. And as you look at it, inhale its mystery, breathe in the spirit of sense, the smell of the wisdom of the Other Shore.’”

“All this,” Will commented, “sounds very like what Dr. Robert was saying at the initiation ceremony.”

“Of course it does,” said Mrs. Narayan. “Learning to take the Mahakasyapa’s-eye view of things is the best preparation for the moksha-medicine experience. Every child who comes to initiation comes to it after a long education in the art of being receptive. First the gardenia as a botanical specimen. Then the same gardenia in its uniqueness, the gardenia as the artist sees it, the even more miraculous gardenia seen by the Buddha and Mahakasyapa. And it goes without saying,” she added, “that we don’t confine ourselves to flowers. Every course the children take is punctuated by periodical bridge-building sessions. Everything from dissected frogs to the spiral nebulae, it all gets looked at receptively as well as conceptually, as a fact of aesthetic or spiritual experience as well as in terms of science or history or economics. Training in receptivity is the complement and antidote to training in analysis and symbol manipulation. Both kinds of training are absolutely indispensable. If you neglect either of them you’ll never grow into a fully human being.”

There was a silence. “How should one look at other people?” Will asked at last. “Should one take the Freud’s-eye view or the Cézanne’s-eye view? The Proust’s-eye view or the Buddha’s-eye view?”

Mrs. Narayan laughed. “Which view are you taking of me?” she asked.

“Primarily, I suppose, the sociologist’s-eye view,” he answered. “I’m looking at you as the representative of an unfamiliar culture. But I’m also being aware of you receptively. Thinking, if you don’t mind my saying so, that you seem to have aged remarkably well. Well aesthetically, well intellectually and psychologically, and well spiritually, whatever that word means—and if I make myself receptive it means something important. Whereas, if I choose to project instead of taking in, I can conceptualize it into pure nonsense.” He uttered a mildly hyenalike laugh.

“If one chooses to,” said Mrs. Narayan, “one can always substitute a bad ready-made notion for the best insights of receptivity. The question is, why should one want to make that kind of choice? Why shouldn’t one choose to listen to both parties and harmonize their views? The analyzing tradition-bound concept maker and the alertly passive insight receiver—neither is infallible; but both together can do a reasonably good job.”

“Just how effective is your training in the art of being receptive?” Will now enquired.

“There are degrees of receptivity,” she answered. “Very little of it in a science lesson, for example. Science starts with observation; but the observation is always selective. You have to look at the world through a lattice of projected concepts. Then you take the moksha-medicine, and suddenly there are hardly any concepts. You don’t select and immediately classify what you experience; you just take it in. It’s like that poem of Wordsworth’s, ‘Bring with you a heart that watches and receives.’ In these bridge-building sessions I’ve been describing there’s still quite a lot of busy selecting and projecting, but not nearly so much as in the preceding science lessons. The children don’t suddenly turn into little Tathagatas; they don’t achieve the pure receptivity that comes with the moksha-medicine. Far from it. All one can say is that they learn to go easy on names and notions. For a little while they’re taking in a lot more than they give out.”

“What do you make them do with what they’ve taken in?”

“We merely ask them,” Mrs. Narayan answered, with a smile, “to attempt the impossible. The children are told to translate their experience into words. As a piece of pure, unconceptualized giveness, what is this flower, this dissected frog, this planet at the other end of the telescope? What does it mean? What does it make you think, feel, imagine, remember? Try to put it down on paper. You won’t succeed, of course; but try all the same. It’ll help you to understand the difference between words and events, between knowing about things and being acquainted with them. ‘And when you’ve finished writing,’ we tell them, ‘look at the flower again and, after you’ve looked, shut your eyes for a minute or two. Then draw what came to you when your eyes were closed. Draw whatever it may have been—something vague or vivid, something like the flower itself or something entirely different. Draw what you saw or even what you didn’t see, draw it and color it with your paints or crayons. Then take another rest and, after that, compare your first drawing with the second; compare the scientific description of the flower with what you wrote about it when you weren’t analyzing what you saw, when you behaved as though you didn’t know anything about the flower and just permitted the mystery of its existence to come to you, like that, out of the blue. Then compare your drawings and writings with the drawings and writings of the other boys and girls in the class. You’ll notice that the analytical descriptions and illustrations are very similar, whereas the drawings and writings of the other kind are very different one from another. How is all this connected with what you have learned in school, at home, in the jungle, in the temple?’ Dozens of questions, and all of them insistent. The bridges have to be built in all directions. One starts with botany—or any other subject in the school curriculum—and one finds oneself, at the end of a bridge-building session, thinking about the nature of language, about different kinds of experience, about metaphysics and the conduct of life, about analytical knowledge and the wisdom of the Other Shore.”

“How on earth,” Will asked, “did you ever manage to teach the teachers who now teach the children to build these bridges?”

“We began teaching teachers a hundred and seven years ago,” said Mrs. Narayan. “Classes of young men and women who had been educated in the traditional Palanese way. You know—good manners, good agriculture, good arts and crafts, tempered by folk medicine, old-wives’ physics and biology and a belief in the power of magic and the truth of fairy tales. No science, no history, no knowledge of anything going on in the outside world. But these future teachers were pious Buddhists; most of them practiced meditation and all of them had read or listened to quite a lot of Mahayana philosophy. That meant that in the fields of applied metaphysics and psychology they’d been educated far more thoroughly and far more realistically than any group of future teachers in your part of the world. Dr. Andrew was a scientifically trained, antidogmatic humanist, who had discovered the value of pure and applied Mahayana. His friend, the Raja, was a Tantrik Buddhist, who had discovered the value of pure and applied science. Both, consequently, saw very clearly that, to be capable of teaching children to become fully human in a society fit for fully human beings to live in, a teacher would first have to be taught how to make the best of both worlds.”

“And how did those early teachers feel about it? Didn’t they resist the process?”

Mrs. Narayan shook her head. “They didn’t resist, for the good reason that nothing precious had been attacked. Their Buddhism was respected. All they were asked to give up was the old-wives’ science and the fairy tales. And in exchange for those they got all kinds of much more interesting facts and much more useful theories. And these exciting things from your Western world of knowledge and power and progress were now to be combined with, and in a sense subordinated to, the theories of Buddhism and the psychological facts of applied metaphysics. There was really nothing in that best-of-both-worlds program to offend the susceptibilities of even the touchiest and most ardent of religious patriots.”

“I’m wondering about our future teachers,” said Will after a silence. “At this late stage, would they be teachable? Could they possibly learn to make the best of both worlds?”

“Why not? They wouldn’t have to give up any of the things that are really important to them. The non-Christian could go on thinking about man and the Christian could go on worshiping God. No change, except that God would have to be thought of as immanent and man would have to be thought of as potentially self-transcendent.”

“And you think they’d make those changes without any fuss?” Will laughed. “You’re an optimist.”

“An optimist,” said Mrs. Narayan, “for the simple reason that, if one tackles a problem intelligently and realistically, the results are apt to be fairly good. This island justifies a certain optimism. And now let’s go and have a look at the dancing class.”

They crossed a tree-shaded courtyard and, pushing through a swing door, passed out of silence into the rhythmic beat of a drum and the screech of fifes repeating over and over again a short pentatonic tune that to Will’s ears sounded vaguely Scotch.

“Live music or canned?” he asked.

“Japanese tape,” Mrs. Narayan answered laconically. She opened a second door that gave access to a large gymnasium where two bearded young men and an amazingly agile little old lady in black satin slacks were teaching some twenty or thirty little boys and girls the steps of a lively dance.

“What’s this?” Will asked. “Fun or education?”

“Both,” said the Principal. “And it’s also applied ethics. Like those breathing exercises we were talking about just now—only more effective because so much more violent.”

“So stamp it out,” the children were chanting in unison. And they stamped their small sandaled feet with all their might. “So stamp it out!” A final furious stamp and they were off again, jigging and turning, into another movement of the dance.

“This is called the Rakshasi Hornpipe,” said Mrs. Narayan.

“Rakshasi?” Will questioned. “What’s that?”

“A Rakshasi is a species of demon. Very large, and exceedingly unpleasant. All the ugliest passions personified. The Rakshasi Hornpipe is a device for letting off those dangerous heads of steam raised by anger and frustration.”

“So stamp it out!” The music had come round again to the choral refrain. “So stamp it out!”

“Stamp again,” cried the little old lady setting a furious example. “Harder! Harder!”

“Which did more,” Will speculated, “for morality and rational behavior—the Bacchic orgies or the Republic? the Nicomachean Ethics or corybantic dancing?”

“The Greeks,” said Mrs. Narayan, “were much too sensible to think in terms of either-or. For them, it was always not-only-but-also. Not only Plato and Aristotle, but also the maenads. Without those tension-reducing hornpipes, the moral philosophy would have been impotent, and without the moral philosophy the hornpipers wouldn’t have known where to go next. All we’ve done is to take a leaf out of the old Greek book.”

“Very good!” said Will approvingly. Then remembering (as sooner or later, however keen his pleasure and however genuine his enthusiasm, he always did remember) that he was the man who wouldn’t take yes for an answer, he suddenly broke into laughter. “Not that it makes any difference in the long run,” he said. “Corybantism couldn’t stop the Greeks from cutting one another’s throats. And when Colonel Dipa decides to move, what will your Rakshasi Hornpipes do for you? Help you to reconcile yourselves to your fate, perhaps—that’s all.”

“Yes, that’s all,” said Mrs. Narayan. “But being reconciled to one’s fate—that’s already a great achievement.”

“You seem to take it all very calmly.”

“What would be the point of taking it hysterically? It wouldn’t make our political situation any better; it would merely make our personal situation a good deal worse.”

“So stamp it out,” the children shouted again in unison, and the boards trembled under their pounding feet. “So stamp it out.”

“Don’t imagine,” Mrs. Narayan resumed, “that this is the only kind of dancing we teach. Redirecting the power generated by bad feelings is important. But equally important is directing good feelings and right knowledge into expression. Expressive movements, in this case, expressive gesture. If you had come yesterday, when our visiting master was here, I could have shown you how we teach that kind of dancing. Not today unfortunately. He won’t be here again before Tuesday.”

“What sort of dancing does he teach?”

Mrs. Narayan tried to describe it. No leaps, no high kicks, no running. The feet always firmly on the ground. Just bendings and sideways motions of the knees and hips. All expression confined to the arms, wrists and hands, to the neck and head, the face and, above all, the eyes. Movement from the shoulders upwards and outwards—movement intrinsically beautiful and at the same time charged with symbolic meaning. Thought taking shape in ritual and stylized gesture. The whole body transformed into a hieroglyph, a succession of hieroglyphs, or attitudes modulating from significance to significance like a poem or a piece of music. Movements of the muscles representing movements of Consciousness, the passage of Suchness into the many, of the many into the immanent and ever-present One.

“It’s meditation in action,” she concluded. “It’s the metaphysics of the Mahayana expressed, not in words, but through symbolic movements and gestures.”

They left the gymnasium by a different door from that through which they had entered and turned left along a short corridor.

“What’s the next item?” Will asked.

“The Lower Fourth,” Mrs. Narayan answered, “and they’re working on Elementary Practical Psychology.”

She opened a green door.

“Well, now you know,” Will heard a familiar voice saying. “Nobody has to feel pain. You told yourselves that the pin wouldn’t hurt—and it didn’t hurt.”

They stepped into the room and there, very tall in the midst of a score of plump or skinny little brown bodies, was Susila MacPhail. She smiled at them, pointed to a couple of chairs in a corner of the room, and turned back to the children. “Nobody has to feel pain,” she repeated. “But never forget: pain always means that something is wrong. You’ve learned to shut pain off, but don’t do it thoughtlessly, don’t do it without asking yourselves the question: What’s the reason for this pain? And if it’s bad, or if there’s no obvious reason for it, tell your mother about it, or your teacher, or any grown-up in your Mutual Adoption Club. Then shut off the pain. Shut it off knowing that, if anything needs to be done, it will be done. Do you understand?…And now,” she went on, after all the questions had been asked and answered. “Now let’s play some pretending games. Shut your eyes and pretend you’re looking at that poor old mynah bird with one leg that comes to school every day to be fed. Can you see him?”

Of course they could see him. The one-legged mynah was evidently an old friend.

“See him just as clearly as you saw him today at lunchtime. And don’t stare at him, don’t make any effort. Just see what comes to you, and let your eyes shift—from his beak to his tail, from his bright little round eye to his one orange leg.”

“I can hear him too,” a little girl volunteered. “He’s saying ‘Karuna, karuna!’”

“That’s not true,” another child said indignantly. “He’s saying ‘Attention!’”

“He’s saying both those things,” Susila assured them. “And probably a lot of other words besides. But now we’re going to do some real pretending. Pretend that there are two one-legged mynah birds. Three one-legged mynah birds. Four one-legged mynah birds. Can you see all four of them?”

They could.

“Four one-legged mynah birds at the four corners of a square, and a fifth one in the middle. And now let’s make them change their color. They’re white now. Five white mynah birds with yellow heads and one orange leg. And now the heads are blue. Bright blue—and the rest of the bird is pink. Five pink birds with blue heads. And they keep changing. They’re purple now. Five purple birds with white heads and each of them has one pale-green leg. Goodness, what’s happening! There aren’t five of them; there are ten. No, twenty, fifty, a hundred. Hundreds and hundreds. Can you see them?” Some of them could—without the slightest difficulty; and for those who couldn’t go the whole hog, Susila proposed more modest goals.

“Just make twelve of them,” she said. “Or if twelve is too many, make ten, make eight. That’s still an awful lot of mynahs. And now,” she went on, when all the children had conjured up all the purple birds that each was capable of creating, “now they’re gone.” She clapped her hands. “Gone! Every single one of them. There’s nothing there. And now you’re not going to see mynahs, you’re going to see me. One me in yellow. Two mes in green. Three mes in blue with pink spots. Four mes in the brightest red you ever saw.” She clapped her hands again. “All gone. And this time it’s Mrs. Narayan and that funny-looking man with a stiff leg who came in with her. Four of each of them. Standing in a big circle in the gymnasium. And now they’re dancing the Rakshasi Hornpipe. ‘So stamp it out, so stamp it out.’”

There was a general giggle. The dancing Wills and Principals must have looked richly comical.

Susila snapped her fingers.

“Away with them! Vanish! And now each of you sees three of your mothers and three of your fathers running round the playground. Faster, faster, faster! And suddenly they’re not there any more. And then they are there. But next moment they aren’t. They are there, they aren’t. They are, they aren’t…”

The giggles swelled into squeals of laughter and at the height of the laughter a bell rang. The lesson in Elementary Practical Psychology was over.

“What’s the point of it all?” Will asked when the children had run off to play and Mrs. Narayan had returned to her office.

“The point,” Susila answered, “is to get people to understand that we’re not completely at the mercy of our memory and our phantasies. If we’re disturbed by what’s going on inside our heads, we can do something about it. It’s all a question of being shown what to do and then practicing—the way one learns to write or play the flute. What those children you saw here were being taught is a very simple technique—a technique that we’ll develop later on into a method of liberation. Not complete liberation, of course. But half a loaf is a great deal better than no bread. This technique won’t lead you to the discovery of your Buddha Nature: but it may help you to prepare for that discovery—help you by liberating you from the hauntings of your own painful memories, your remorses, your causeless anxieties about the future.”

“‘Hauntings,’” Will agreed, “is the word.”

“But one doesn’t have to be haunted. Some of the ghosts can be laid quite easily. Whenever one of them appears, just give it the imagination treatment. Deal with it as we dealt with those mynahs, as we dealt with you and Mrs. Narayan. Change its clothes, give it another nose, multiply it, tell it to go away, call it back again and make it do something ridiculous. Then abolish it. Just think what you could have done about your father, if someone had taught you a few of these simple little tricks when you were a child! You thought of him as a terrifying ogre. But that wasn’t necessary. In your fancy you could have turned the ogre into a grotesque. Into a whole chorus of grotesques. Twenty of them doing a tap dance and singing, ‘I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls.’ A short course in Elementary Practical Psychology, and your whole life might have been different.”

How would he have death with Molly’s death, Will wondered as they walked out towards the parked jeep. What rites of imaginative exorcism could he have practiced on that white, musk-scented succubus who was the incarnation of his frantic and abhorred desires?

But here was the jeep. Will handed Susila the keys and laboriously hoisted himself into his seat. Very noisily, as though it were under some neurotic compulsion to overcompensate for its diminutive stature, a small and aged car approached from the direction of the village, turned into the driveway and, still clattering and shuddering, came to a halt beside the jeep.

They turned. There, leaning out of the window of the royal Baby Austin, was Murugan, and beyond him, vast in white muslin and billowy like a cumulus cloud, sat the Rani. Will bowed in her direction and evoked the most gracious of smiles, which was switched off as soon as she turned to Susila, whose greeting was acknowledged only with the most distant of nods.

“Going for a drive?” Will asked politely.

“Only as far as Shivapuram,” said the Rani.

“If this wretched little crate will hold together that long,” Murugan added bitterly. He turned the ignition key. The motor gave a last obscene hiccup and died.

“There are some people we have to see,” the Rani went on. “Or rather One Person,” she added in a tone charged with conspiratorial significance. She smiled at Will and very nearly winked.

Pretending not to understand that she was talking about Bahu, Will uttered a noncommittal “Quite,” and commiserated with her on all the work and worry that the preparations for next week’s coming-of-age party must entail.

Murugan interrupted him. “What are you doing out here?” he asked.

“I’ve spent the afternoon taking an intelligent interest in Palanese education.”

“Palanese education,” the Rani echoed. And again, sorrowfully, “Palanese” (pause) “Education.” She shook her head.

“Personally,” said Will, “I liked everything I saw and heard of it—from Mr. Menon and the Principal to Elementary Practical Psychology, as taught,” he added, trying to bring Susila into the conversation, “by Mrs. MacPhail here.”

Still studiedly ignoring Susila, the Rani pointed a thick accusing finger at the scarecrows in the field below.

“Have you seen those, Mr. Farnaby?”

He had indeed. “And where but in Pala,” he asked, “can one find scarecrows which are simultaneously beautiful, efficient, and metaphysically significant?”

“And which,” said the Rani in a voice that was vibrant with a kind of sepulchral indignation, “not only scare the birds away from the rice; they also scare little children away from the very idea of God and His Avatars.” She raised her hand. “Listen!”

Tom Krishna and Mary Sarojini had been joined by five or six small companions and were making a game of tugging at the strings that worked the supernatural marionettes. From the group came a sound of shrill voices piping in unison. At their second repetition, Will made out the words of the chantey.

Pully, hauly, tug with a will;

The gods wiggle-waggle, but the sky stands still.

“Bravo!” he said, and laughed.

“I’m afraid I can’t be amused,” said the Rani severely. “It isn’t funny. It’s Tragic, Tragic.”

Will stuck to his guns. “I understand,” he said, “that these charming scarecrows were an invention of Murugan’s grandfather.”

“Murugan’s grandfather,” said the Rani, “was a very remarkable man. Remarkably intelligent, but no less remarkably perverse. Great gifts—but, alas, how maleficently used! And what made it all so much worse, he was full of False Spirituality.”

“False Spirituality?” Will eyed the enormous specimen of True Spirituality and, through the reek of hot petroleum products, inhaled the incenselike, otherworldly smell of sandalwood. “False Spirituality?” And suddenly he found himself wondering—wondering and then, with a shudder, imagining—what the Rani would look like if suddenly divested of her mystic’s uniform and exposed, exuberantly and steatopygously naked, to the light. And now multiply her into a trinity of undressed obesities, into two trinities, ten trinities. Applied Practical Psychology—with a vengeance!

“Yes, False Spirituality,” the Rani was repeating. “Talking about Liberation; but always, because of his obstinate refusal to follow the True Path, always working for greater Bondage. Acting the part of humility. But in his heart, he was so full of pride, Mr. Farnaby, that he refused to recognize any Spiritual Authority Higher than his own. The Masters, the Avatars, the Great Tradition—they meant nothing to him. Nothing at all. Hence those dreadful scarecrows. Hence that blasphemous rhyme that the children have been taught to sing. When I think of those Poor Innocent Little Ones being deliberately perverted, I find it hard to contain myself, Mr. Farnaby, I find it…”

“Listen, Mother,” said Murugan, who had been glancing impatiently and ever more openly at his wrist watch, “if we want to be back by dinnertime we’d better get going.” His tone was rudely authoritative. Being at the wheel of a car—even of this senile Baby Austin—made him feel, it was evident, considerably larger than life. Without waiting for the Rani’s answer he started the motor, shifted into low and, with a wave of the hand, drove off.

“Good riddance,” said Susila.

“Don’t you love your dear Queen?”

“She makes my blood boil.”

“So stamp it out,” Will chanted teasingly.

“You’re quite right,” she agreed, with a laugh. “But unfortunately this was an occasion when it just wasn’t feasible to do a Rakshasi Hornpipe.” Her face brightened with a sudden flash of mischief, and without warning she punched him, surprisingly hard, in the ribs. “There!” she said. “Now I feel much better.”

14

SHE STARTED THE MOTOR AND THEY DROVE OFF—DOWN TO THE bypass, up again to the high road beyond the other end of the village, and on into the compound of the Experimental Station. Susila pulled up at a small thatched bungalow like all the others. They climbed the six steps that led up to the veranda and entered a whitewashed living room.

To the left was a wide window with a hammock slung between the two wooden pillars at either side of the projecting bay. “For you,” she said, pointing to the hammock. “You can put your leg up.” And when Will had lowered himself into the net, “What shall we talk about?” she asked as she pulled up a wicker chair and sat down beside him.

“What about the good, the true and the beautiful? Or maybe,” he grinned, “the ugly, the bad and the even truer.”

“I’d thought,” she said, ignoring his attempt at a witticism, “that we might go on where we left off last time—go on talking about you.”

“That was precisely what I was suggesting—the ugly, the bad and the truer than all official truth.”

“Is this just an exhibition of your conversational style?” she asked. “Or do you really want to talk about yourself?”

“Really,” he assured her, “desperately. Just as desperately as I don’t want to talk about myself. Hence, as you may have noticed, my unflagging interest in art, science, philosophy, politics, literature—any damned thing rather than the only thing that ultimately has any importance.”

There was a long silence. Then in a tone of casual reminiscence, Susila began to talk about Wells Cathedral, about the calling of the jackdaws, about the white swans floating between the reflections of the floating clouds. In a few minutes he too was floating.

“I was very happy all the time I was at Wells,” she said. “Wonderfully happy. And so were you, weren’t you?”

Will made no answer. He was remembering those days in the green valley, years ago, before he and Molly were married, before they were lovers. What peace! What a solid, living, maggotless world of springing grass and flowers! And between them had flowed the kind of natural, undistorted feeling that he hadn’t experienced since those far-off days when Aunt Mary was alive. The only person he had ever really loved—and here, in Molly, was her successor. What blessedness! Love transposed into another key—but the melody, the rich and subtle harmonies were the same. And then, on the fourth night of their stay, Molly had knocked on the wall that separated their rooms, and he had found her door ajar, had groped his way in darkness to the bed where, conscientiously naked, the Sister of Mercy was doing her best to play the part of the Wife of Love. Doing her best and (how disastrously!) failing.

Suddenly, as happened almost every afternoon, there was a loud rushing of wind and, muffled by distance, a hollow roaring of rain on thick foliage—a roaring that grew louder and louder as the shower approached. A few seconds passed, and then the raindrops were hammering insistently on the windowpanes. Hammering as they had hammered on the windows of his study that day of their last interview. “Do you really mean it, Will?”

The pain and shame of it made him want to cry aloud. He bit his lip.

“What are you thinking of?” Susila asked.

It wasn’t a matter of thinking. He was actually seeing her, actually hearing her voice. “Do you really mean it, Will?” And through the sound of the rain he heard himself answering, “I really mean it.”

On the windowpane—was it here? or was it there, was it then?—the roar had diminished, as the gust spent itself, to a pattering whisper.

“What are you thinking of?” Susila insisted.

“I’m thinking of what I did to Molly.”

“What was it that you did to Molly?”

He didn’t want to answer; but Susila was inexorable.

“Tell me what it was that you did.”

Another violent gust made the windows rattle. It was raining harder now—raining, it seemed to Will Farnaby, on purpose, raining in such a way that he would have to go on remembering what he didn’t want to remember, would be compelled to say out loud the shameful things he must at all costs keep to himself.

“Tell me.”

Reluctantly and in spite of himself, he told her.

“‘Do you really mean it, Will?’” And because of Babs—Babs, God help him! Babs, believe it or not!—he really did mean it, and she had walked out into the rain.

“The next time I saw her was in the hospital.”

“Was it still raining?” Susila asked.

“Still raining.”

“As hard as it’s raining now?”

“Very nearly.” And what Will heard was no longer this afternoon shower in the tropics but the steady drumming on the window of the little room where Molly lay dying.

“It’s me,” he was saying through the sound of the rain, “it’s Will.” Nothing happened; and then suddenly he felt the almost imperceptible movement of Molly’s hand within his own. The voluntary pressure and then, after a few seconds, the involuntary release, the total limpness.

“Tell me again, Will.”

He shook his head. It was too painful, too humiliating.

“Tell me again,” she insisted. “It’s the only way.”

Making an enormous effort, he started to tell the odious story yet once more. Did he really mean it? Yes, he really meant it—meant to hurt, meant perhaps (did one ever know what one really intended?) to kill. All for Babs, or the World Well Lost. Not his world, of course—Molly’s world and, at the center of that world, the life that had created it. Snuffed out for the sake of that delicious smell in the darkness, of those muscular reflexes, that enormity of enjoyment, those consummate and intoxicatingly shameless skills.

“Good-bye, Will.” And the door had closed behind her with a faint, dry click.

He wanted to call her back. But Babs’s lover remembered the skills, the reflexes, and within its aura of musk, a body agonizing in the extremity of pleasure. Remembered these things and, standing at the window, watched the car move away through the rain, watched and was filled, as it turned the corner, with a shameful exultation. Free at last! Even freer, as he discovered three hours later in the hospital, than he had supposed. For now he was feeling the last faint pressure of her fingers; feeling the final message of her love. And then the message was interrupted. The hand went limp and now, suddenly, appallingly, there was no sound of breathing. “Dead,” he whispered, and felt himself choking. “Dead.”

“Suppose it hadn’t been your fault,” said Susila, breaking a long silence. “Suppose that she’d suddenly died without your having had anything to do with it. Wouldn’t that have been almost as bad?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, it’s more than just feeling guilty about Molly’s death. It’s death itself, death as such, that you find so terrible.” She was thinking of Dugald now. “So senselessly evil.”

“Senselessly evil,” he repeated. “Yes, perhaps that’s why I had to be a professional execution watcher. Just because it was all so senseless, so utterly bestial. Following the smell of death from one end of the earth to the other. Like a vulture. Nice comfortable people just don’t have any idea what the world is like. Not exceptionally, as it was during the war, but all the time. All the time.” And as he spoke he was seeing, in a vision as brief and comprehensive and intensely circumstantial as a drowning man’s, all the hateful scenes he had witnessed in the course of those well-paid pilgrimages to every hellhole and abattoir revolting enough to qualify as News. Negroes in South Africa, the man in the San Quentin gas chamber, mangled bodies in an Algerian farmhouse, and everywhere mobs, everywhere policemen and paratroopers, everywhere those dark-skinned children, stick-legged, potbellied, with flies on their raw eyelids, everywhere the nauseating smells of hunger and disease, the awful stench of death. And then suddenly, through the stench of death, mingled and impregnated with the stench of death, he was breathing the musky essence of Babs. Breathing the essence of Babs and remembering his little joke about the chemistry of purgatory and paradise. Purgatory is tetraethylene diamine and sulfureted hydrogen; paradise, very definitely, is symtrinitropsibutyl toluene, with an assortment of organic impurities—ha—ha—ha! (Oh, the delights of social life!) And then, quite suddenly, the odors of love and death gave place to a rank animal smell—a smell of dog.

The wind swelled up again into violence and the driving raindrops hammered and splashed against the panes.

“Are you still thinking of Molly?” Susila asked.

“I was thinking of something I’d completely forgotten,” he answered. “I can’t have been more than four years old when it happened, and now it’s all come back to me. Poor Tiger.”

“Who was poor Tiger?” she questioned.

Tiger, his beautiful red setter. Tiger, the only source of light in that dismal house where he had spent his childhood. Tiger, dear dear Tiger. In the midst of all that fear and misery, between the two poles of his father’s sneering hate of everything and everybody and his mother’s self-conscious self-sacrifice, what effortless good will, what spontaneous friendliness, what a bounding, barking irrepressible joy! His mother used to take him on her knee and tell him about God and Jesus. But there was more God in Tiger than in all her Bible stories. Tiger, so far as he was concerned, was the Incarnation. And then one day the Incarnation came down with distemper.

“What happened then?” Susila asked.

“His basket’s in the kitchen, and I’m there, kneeling beside it. And I’m stroking him—but his fur feels quite different from what it felt like before he was sick. Kind of sticky. And there’s a bad smell. If I didn’t love him so much, I’d run away, I couldn’t bear to be near him. But I do love him, I love him more than anything or anybody. And while I stroke him, I keep telling him that he’ll soon be well again. Very soon—tomorrow morning. And then all of a sudden he starts to shudder, and I try to stop the shuddering by holding his head between my hands. But it doesn’t do any good. The trembling turns into a horrible convulsion. It makes me feel sick to look at it, and I’m frightened. I’m dreadfully frightened. Then the shuddering and the twitching die down and in a little while he’s absolutely still. And when I lift his head and then let go, the head falls back—thump, like a piece of meat with a bone inside.”

Will’s voice broke, the tears were streaming down his cheeks, he was shaken by the sobs of a four-year-old grieving for his dog and confronted by the awful, inexplicable fact of death. With the mental equivalent of a click and a little jerk, his consciousness seemed to change gear. He was an adult again, and he had ceased to float.

“I’m sorry.” He wiped his eyes and blew his nose. “Well, that was my first introduction to the Essential Horror. Tiger was my friend, Tiger was my only consolation. That was something, obviously, that the Essential Horror couldn’t tolerate. And it was the same with my Aunt Mary. The only person I ever really loved and admired and completely trusted; and, Christ, what the Essential Horror did to her!”

“Tell me,” said Susila.

Will hesitated, then, shrugging his shoulders, “Why not?” he said. “Mary Frances Farnaby, my father’s younger sister. Married at eighteen, just a year before the outbreak of the First World War, to a professional soldier. Frank and Mary, Mary and Frank—what harmony, what happiness!” He laughed. “Even outside of Pala there one can find occasional islands of decency. Tiny little atolls, or even, every now and then, a full-blown Tahiti—but always totally surrounded by the Essential Horror. Two young people on their private Pala. Then, one fine morning, it was August 4, 1914, Frank went overseas with the Expeditionary Force, and on Christmas Eve Mary gave birth to a deformed child that survived long enough for her to see for herself what the E.H. can do when it really tries. Only God can make a microcephalous idiot. Three months later, needless to say, Frank was hit by a piece of shrapnel and died in due course of gangrene…. All that,” Will went on after a little silence, “was before my time. When I first knew her, in the twenties, Aunt Mary was devoting herself to the aged. Old people in institutions, old people cooped up in their own homes, old people living on and on as a burden to their children and grandchildren. Struldbrugs, Tithonuses. And the more hopeless the decrepitude, the more crotchety and querulous the character, the better. As a child, how I hated Aunt Mary’s old people! They smelt bad, they were frighteningly ugly, they were always boring and generally cross. But Aunt Mary really loved them—loved them through thick and thin, loved them in spite of everything. My mother used to talk a lot about Christian charity; but somehow one never believed what she said, just as one never felt any love in all the self-sacrificing things she was always forcing herself to do—no love, only duty. Whereas with Aunt Mary one was never in the slightest doubt. Her love was like a kind of physical radiation, something one could almost sense as heat or light. When she took me to stay with her in the country and later, when she came to town and I used to go and see her almost every day, it was like escaping from a refrigerator into the sunshine. I could feel myself coming alive in that light of hers, that radiating warmth. Then the Essential Horror got busy again. At the beginning she made a joke of it. ‘Now I’m an Amazon,’ she said after the first operation.”

“Why an Amazon?” Susila asked.

“The Amazons had their right breast amputated. They were warriors and the breast got in the way when they were shooting with the long bow. ‘Now I’m an Amazon,’” he repeated, and with his mind’s eye could see the smile on that strong aquiline face, could hear, with his mind’s ear, the tone of amusement in that clear, ringing voice. “But a few months later the other breast had to be cut off. After that there were the X rays, the radiation sickness and then, little by little, the degradation.” Will’s face took on its look of flayed ferocity. “If it weren’t so unspeakably hideous, it would be really funny. What a masterpiece of irony! Here was a soul that radiated goodness and love and heroic charity. Then, for no known reason, something went wrong. Instead of flouting it, a little piece of her body started to obey the second law of thermodynamics. And as the body broke down, the soul began to lose its virtue, its very identity. The heroism went out of her, the love and the goodness evaporated. For the last months of her life she was no more the Aunt Mary I had loved and admired; she was somebody else, somebody (and this was the ironist’s final and most exquisite touch) almost indistinguishable from the worst and weakest of the old people she had once befriended and been a tower of strength to. She had to be humiliated and degraded; and when the degradation was complete, she was slowly, and with a great deal of pain, put to death in solitude. In solitude,” he insisted. “For of course nobody can help, nobody can ever be present. People may stand by while you’re suffering and dying; but they’re standing by in another world. In your world you’re absolutely alone. Alone in your suffering and your dying, just as you’re alone in love, alone even in the most completely shared pleasure.”

The essences of Babs and of Tiger, and when the cancer had gnawed a hole in the liver and her wasted body was impregnated with that strange, aromatic smell of contaminated blood, the essence of Aunt Mary dying. And in the midst of those essences, sickeningly or intoxicatedly aware of them, was an isolated consciousness, a child’s, a boy’s, a man’s, forever isolated, irremediably alone. “And on top of everything else,” he went on, “this woman was only forty-two. She didn’t want to die. She refused to accept what was being done to her. The Essential Horror had to drag her down by main force. I was there; I saw it happening.”

“And that’s why you’re the man who won’t take yes for an answer?”

“How can anyone take yes for an answer?” he countered. “Yes is just pretending, just positive thinking. The facts, the basic and ultimate facts, are always no. Spirit? No! Love? No! Sense, meaning, achievement? No!”

Tiger exuberantly alive and joyful and full of God. And then Tiger transformed by the Essential Horror into a packet of garbage, which the vet had to come and be paid for removing. And after Tiger, Aunt Mary. Maimed and tortured, dragged in the mud, degraded and finally, like Tiger, transformed into a packet of garbage—only this time it was the undertaker who had removed it, and a clergyman was hired to make believe that it was all, in some sublime and Pickwickian sense, perfectly O.K. Twenty years later another clergyman had been hired to repeat the same strange rigmarole over Molly’s coffin. “If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.”

Will uttered another of his hyena laughs. “What impeccable logic, what sensibility, what ethical refinement!”

“But you’re the man who won’t take yes for an answer. So why raise any objections?”

“I oughtn’t to,” he agreed. “But one remains an aesthete, one likes to have the no said with style. ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’” He screwed up his face in an expression of disgust.

“And yet,” said Susila, “in a certain sense the advice is excellent. Eating, drinking, dying—three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don’t live it and, if ever they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies—but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference.”

“And rises again from the dead?” he asked sarcastically.

“That’s one of the questions the Buddha always refused to discuss. Believing in eternal life never helped anybody to live in eternity. Nor, of course, did disbelieving. So stop all your pro-ing and con-ing (that’s the Buddha’s advice) and get on with the job.”

“Which job?”

“Everybody’s job—enlightenment. Which means, here and now, the preliminary job of practicing all the yogas of increased awareness.”

“But I don’t want to be more aware,” said Will. “I want to be less aware. Less aware of horrors like Aunt Mary’s death and the slums of Rendang-Lobo. Less aware of hideous sights and loathsome smells—even of some delicious smells,” he added as he caught, through the remembered essences of dog and cancer of the liver, a civetlike whiff of the pink alcove. “Less aware of my fat income and other people’s subhuman poverty. Less aware of my own excellent health in an ocean of malaria and hookworm, of my own safely sterilized sex fun in the ocean of starving babies. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ What a blessed state of affairs! But unfortunately I do know what I’m doing. Only too well. And here you go, asking me to be even more aware than I am already.”

“I’m not asking anything,” she said. “I’m merely passing on the advice of a succession of shrewd old birds, beginning with Gautama and ending with the Old Raja. Start by being fully aware of what you think you are. It’ll help you to become aware of what you are in fact.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “One thinks one’s something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe. But in fact one’s merely a slight delay in the ongoing march of entropy.”

“And that precisely is the first half of the Buddha’s message. Transience, no permanent soul, inevitable sorrow. But he didn’t stop there, the message had a second half. This temporary slowdown of entropy is also pure undiluted Suchness. This absence of a permanent soul is also the Buddha Nature.”

“Absence of a soul—that’s easy to cope with. But what about the presence of cancer, the presence of slow degradation? What about hunger and overbreeding and Colonel Dipa? Are they pure Suchness?”

“Of course. But, needless to say, it’s desperately difficult for the people who are deeply involved in any of those evils to discover their Buddha Nature. Public health and social reform are the indispensable preconditions of any kind of general enlightenment.”

“But in spite of public health and social reform, people still die. Even in Pala,” he added ironically.

“Which is why the corollary of welfare has to be dhyana—all the yogas of living and dying, so that you can be aware, even in the final agony, of who in fact, and in spite of everything, you really are.”

There was a sound of footsteps on the planking of the veranda, and a childish voice called, “Mother!”

“Here I am, darling,” Susila called back.

The front door was flung open and Mary Sarojini came hurrying into the room.

“Mother,” she said breathlessly, “they want you to come at once. It’s Granny Lakshmi. She’s…” Catching sight for the first time of the figure in the hammock, she started and broke off. “Oh! I didn’t know you were here.”

Will waved his hand to her without speaking. She gave him a perfunctory smile, then turned back to her mother. “Granny Lakshmi suddenly got much worse,” she said, “and Grandpa Robert is still up at the High Altitude Station, and they can’t get through to him on the telephone.”

“Did you run all the way?”

“Except where it’s really too steep.”

Susila put her arm round the child and kissed her, then very brisk and businesslike, rose to her feet.

“It’s Dugald’s mother,” she said.

“Is she…?” He glanced at Mary Sarojini, then back at Susila. Was death taboo? Could one mention it before children?

“You mean, is she dying?”

He nodded.

“We’ve been expecting it, of course,” Susila went on. “But not today. Today she seemed a little better.” She shook her head. “Well, I have to go and stand by—even if it is another world. And actually,” she added, “it isn’t quite so completely other as you think. I’m sorry we had to leave our business unfinished; but there’ll be other opportunities. Meanwhile what do you want to do? You can stay here. Or I’ll drop you at Dr. Robert’s. Or you can come with me and Mary Sarojini.”

“As a professional execution watcher?”

“Not as a professional execution watcher,” she answered emphatically. “As a human being, as someone who needs to know how to live and then how to die. Needs it as urgently as we all do.”

“Needs it,” he said, “a lot more urgently than most. But shan’t I be in the way?”

“If you can get out of your own way, you won’t be in anyone else’s.”

She took his hand and helped him out of the hammock. Two minutes later they were driving past the lotus pool and the huge Buddha meditating under the cobra’s hood, past the white bull, out through the main gate of the compound. The rain was over, in a green sky enormous clouds glowed like archangels. Low in the west the sun was shining with a brightness that seemed almost supernatural.

Soles occidere et redire possunt;

nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,

nox est perpetua una dormienda.

Da mi basia mille.

Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses; kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers.

“What do you say to people who are dying?” he asked. “Do you tell them not to bother their heads about immortality and get on with the job?”

“If you like to put it that way—yes, that’s precisely what we do. Going on being aware—it’s the whole art of dying.”

“And you teach the art?”

“I’d put it another way. We help them to go on practicing the art of living even while they’re dying. Knowing who in fact one is, being conscious of the universal and impersonal life that lives itself through each of us—that’s the art of living, and that’s what one can help the dying to go on practicing. To the very end. Maybe beyond the end.”

“Beyond?” he questioned. “But you said that was something that the dying aren’t supposed to think about.”

“They’re not being asked to think about it. They’re being helped, if there is such a thing, to experience it. If there is such a thing,” she repeated, “if the universal life goes on, when the separate me-life is over.”

“Do you personally think it does go on?”

Susila smiled. “What I personally think is beside the point. All that matters is what I may impersonally experience while I’m living, when I’m dying, maybe when I’m dead.”

She swung the car into a parking space and turned off the engine. On foot they entered the village. Work was over for the day and the main street was so densely thronged that it was hard for them to pass.

“I’m going ahead by myself,” Susila announced. Then to Mary Sarojini, “Be at the hospital in about an hour,” she said. “Not before.” She turned and, threading her way between the slowly promenading groups, was soon lost to view.

“You’re in charge now,” said Will, smiling down at the child by his side.

Mary Sarojini nodded gravely and took his hand. “Let’s go and see what’s happening in the square,” she said.

“How old is your Granny Lakshmi?” Will asked as they started to make their way along the crowded street.

“I don’t really know,” Mary Sarojini answered. “She looks terribly old. But maybe that’s because she’s got cancer.”

“Do you know what cancer is?” he asked.

Mary Sarojini knew perfectly well. “It’s what happens when part of you forgets all about the rest of you and carries on the way people do when they’re crazy—just goes on blowing itself up and blowing itself up as if there was nobody else in the whole world. Sometimes you can do something about it. But generally it just goes on blowing itself up until the person dies.”

“And that’s what has happened, I gather, to your Granny Lakshmi.”

“And now she needs someone to help her die.”

“Does your mother often help people die?”

The child nodded. “She’s awfully good at it.”

“Have you ever seen anyone die?”

“Of course,” Mary Sarojini answered, evidently surprised that such a question should be asked. “Let me see.” She made a mental calculation. “I’ve seen five people die. Six, if you count babies.”

“I hadn’t seen anyone die when I was your age.”

“You hadn’t?”

“Only a dog.”

“Dogs die easier than people. They don’t talk about it beforehand.”

“How do you feel about…about people dying?”

“Well, it isn’t nearly so bad as having babies. That’s awful. Or at least it looks awful. But then you remind yourself that it doesn’t hurt at all. They’ve turned off the pain.”

“Believe it or not,” said Will, “I’ve never seen a baby being born.”

“Never?” Mary Sarojini was astonished. “Not even when you were at school?”

Will had a vision of his headmaster in full canonicals conducting three hundred black-coated boys on a tour of the Lying-In Hospital. “Not even at school,” he said aloud.

“You never saw anybody dying, and you never saw anybody having a baby. How did you get to know things?”

“In the school I went to,” he said, “we never got to know things, we only got to know words.”

The child looked up at him, shook her head and, lifting a small brown hand, significantly tapped her forehead. “Crazy,” she said. “Or were your teachers just stupid?”

Will laughed. “They were high-minded educators dedicated to mens sana in corpore sano and the maintenance of our sublime Western Tradition. But meanwhile tell me something. Weren’t you ever frightened?”

“By people having babies?”

“No, by people dying. Didn’t that scare you?”

“Well, yes—it did,” she said after a moment of silence.

“So what did you do about it?”

“I did what they teach you to do—tried to find out which of me was frightened and why she was frightened.”

“And which of you was it?”

“This one.” Mary Sarojini pointed a forefinger into her open mouth. “The one that does all the talking. Little Miss Gibber—that’s what Vijaya calls her. She’s always talking about all the nasty things I remember, all the huge, wonderful, impossible things I imagine I can do. She’s the one that gets frightened.”

“Why is she so frightened?”

“I suppose it’s because she gets talking about all the awful things that might happen to her. Talking out loud or talking to herself. But there’s another one who doesn’t get frightened.”

“Which one is that?”

“The one that doesn’t talk—just looks and listens and feels what’s going on inside. And sometimes,” Mary Sarojini added, “sometimes she suddenly sees how beautiful everything is. No, that’s wrong. She sees it all the time, but I don’t—not unless she makes me notice it. That’s when it suddenly happens. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! Even dog’s messes.” She pointed at a formidable specimen almost at their feet.

From the narrow street they had emerged into the marketplace. The last of the sunlight still touched the sculptured spire of the temple, the little pink gazebos on the roof of the town hall; but here in the square there was premonition of twilight and under the great banyan tree it was already night. On the stalls between its pillars and hanging ropes the market women had turned on their lights. In the leafy darkness there were islands of form and color, and from hardly visible nonentity brown-skinned figures stepped for a moment into brilliant existence, then back again into nothingness. The spaces between the tall buildings echoed with a confusion of English and Palanese, of talk and laughter, of street cries and whistled tunes, of dogs barking, parrots screaming. Perched on one of the pink gazebos, a pair of mynah birds called indefatigably for attention and compassion. From an open-air kitchen at the center of the square rose the appetizing smell of food on the fire. Onions, peppers, turmeric, fish frying, cakes baking, rice on the boil—and through these good gross odors, like a reminder from the Other Shore, drifted the perfume, thin and sweet and ethereally pure, of the many-colored garlands on sale beside the fountain.

Twilight deepened and suddenly, from high overhead, the arc lamps were turned on. Bright and burnished against the rosy copper of oiled skin, the women’s necklaces and rings and bracelets came alive with glittering reflections. Seen in the downward-striking light, every contour became more dramatic, every form seemed to be more substantial, more solidly there. In eye sockets, under nose and chin the shadows deepened. Modeled by light and darkness young breasts grew fuller and the faces of the old were more emphatically lined and hollowed.

Hand in hand they made their way through the crowd.

A middle-aged woman greeted Mary Sarojini, then turned to Will. “Are you that man from the Outside?” she asked.

“Almost infinitely from the outside,” he assured her.

She looked at him for a moment in silence, then smiled encouragingly and patted his cheek.

“We’re all very sorry for you,” she said.

They moved on, and now they were standing on the fringes of a group assembled at the foot of the temple steps to listen to a young man who was playing a long-necked, lute-like instrument and singing in Palanese. Rapid declamation alternated with long-drawn, almost birdlike melismata on a single vowel sound, and then a cheerful and strongly accented tune that ended in a shout. A roar of laugher went up from the crowd. A few more bars, another line or two of recitative, and the singer struck his final chord. There was applause and more laughter and a chorus of incomprehensible commentary.

“What’s it all about?” Will asked.

“It’s about girls and boys sleeping together,” Mary Sarojini answered.

“Oh—I see.” He felt a pang of guilty embarrassment; but, looking down into the child’s untroubled face, he could see that his concern was uncalled for. It was evident that boys and girls sleeping together were as completely to be taken for granted as going to school or eating three meals a day—or dying.

“And the part that made them laugh,” Mary Sarojini went on, “was where he said the Future Buddha won’t have to leave home and sit under the Bodhi Tree. He’ll have his Enlightenment while he’s in bed with the princess.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Will asked.

She nodded emphatically. “It would mean that the princess would be enlightened too.”

“You’re perfectly right,” said Will. “Being a man, I hadn’t thought of the princess.”

The lute player plucked a queer unfamiliar progression of chords, followed them with a ripple of arpeggios and began to sing, this time in English.

“Everyone talks of sex; take none of them seriously—

Not whore nor hermit, neither Paul nor Freud.

Love—and your lips, her breasts will change mysteriously

Into Themselves, the Suchness and the Void.”

The door of the temple swung open. A smell of incense mingled with the ambient onions and fried fish. An old woman emerged and very cautiously lowered her unsteady weight from stair to stair.

“Who were Paul and Freud?” Mary Sarojini asked as they moved away.

Will began with a brief account of Original Sin and the Scheme of Redemption. The child heard him out with concentrated attention.

“No wonder the song says, Don’t take them seriously,” she concluded.

“After which,” said Will, “we come to Dr. Freud and the Oedipus Complex.”

“Oedipus?” Mary Sarojini repeated. “But that’s the name of a marionette show. I saw it last week, and they’re giving it again tonight. Would you like to see it? It’s nice.”

“Nice?” he repeated. “Nice? Even when the old lady turns out to be his mother and hangs herself? Even when Oedipus puts out his eyes?”

“But he doesn’t put out his eyes,” said Mary Sarojini.

“He does where I hail from.”

“Not here. He only says he’s going to put out his eyes, and she only tries to hang herself. They’re talked out of it.”

“Who by?”

“The boy and girl from Pala.”

“How do they get into the act?” Will asked.

“I don’t know. They’re just there. ‘Oedipus in Pala’—that’s what the play is called. So why shouldn’t they be there?”

“And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?”

“Just in the nick of time. She’s slipped the rope round her neck and he’s got hold of two huge pins. But the boy and girl from Pala tell them not to be silly. After all, it was an accident. He didn’t know that the old man was his father. And anyhow the old man began it, hit him over the head, and that made Oedipus lose his temper—and nobody had ever taught him to dance the Rakshasi Hornpipe. And when they made him a king, he had to marry the old queen. She was really his mother; but neither of them knew it. And of course all they had to do when they did find out was just to stop being married. That stuff about marrying his mother being the reason why everybody had to die of a virus—all that was just nonsense, just made up by a lot of poor stupid people who didn’t know any better.”

“Dr. Freud thought that all little boys really want to marry their mothers and kill their fathers. And the other way round for little girls—they want to marry their fathers.”

“Which fathers and mothers?” Mary Sarojini asked. “We have such a lot of them.”

“You mean, in your Mutual Adoption Club?”

“There’s twenty-two of them in our MAC.”

“Safety in numbers!”

“But of course poor old Oedipus never had an MAC. And besides they’d taught him all that horrible stuff about God getting furious with people every time they made a mistake.”

They had pushed their way through the crowd and now found themselves at the entrance to a small roped-off enclosure, in which a hundred or more spectators had already taken their seats. At the further end of the enclosure the gaily painted proscenium of a puppet theater glowed red and gold in the light of powerful flood lamps. Pulling out a handful of the small change with which Dr. Robert had provided him, Will paid for two tickets. They entered and sat down on a bench.

A gong sounded, the curtain of the little proscenium noiselessly rose and there, white pillars on a pea-green ground, was the façade of the royal palace of Thebes with a much-whiskered divinity sitting in a cloud above the pediment. A priest exactly like the god, except that he was somewhat smaller and less exuberantly draped, entered from the right, bowed to the audience, then turned towards the palace and shouted “Oedipus” in piping tones that seemed comically incongruous with his prophetic beard. To a flourish of trumpets the door swung open and, crowned and heroically buskined, the king appeared. The priest made obeisance, the royal puppet gave him leave to speak.

“Give ear to our afflictions,” the old man piped.

The king cocked his head and listened.

“I hear the groans of dying men,” he said. “I hear the shriek of widows, the sobbing of the motherless, the mutterings of prayer and supplication.”

“Supplication!” said the deity in the clouds. “That’s the spirit.” He patted himself on the chest.

“They had some kind of a virus,” Mary Sarojini explained in a whisper. “Like Asian flu, only a lot worse.”

“We repeat the appropriate litanies,” the old priest querulously piped, “we offer the most expensive sacrifices, we have the whole population living in chastity and flagellating itself every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But the flood of death spreads ever more widely, rises higher and ever higher. So help us, King Oedipus, help us.”

“Only a god can help.”

“Hear, hear!” shouted the presiding deity.

“But by what means?”

“Only a god can say.”

“Correct,” said the god in his basso profundo, “absolutely correct.”

“Creon, my wife’s brother, has gone to consult the oracle. When he returns—as very soon he must—we shall know what heaven advises.”

“What heaven bloody well commands!” the basso profoundo emended.

“Were people really so silly?” Mary Sarojini asked, as the audience laughed.

“Really and truly,” Will assured her.

A phonograph started to play the Dead March in Saul.

From left to right a black-robed procession of mourners carrying sheeted biers passed slowly across the front of the stage. Puppet after puppet—and as soon as the group had disappeared on the right it would be brought in again from the left. The procession seemed endless, the corpses innumerable.

“Dead,” said Oedipus as he watched them pass. “And another dead. And yet another, another.”

“That’ll teach them!” the basso profundo broke in. “I’ll learn you to be a toad!”

Oedipus continued:

“The soldier’s bier, the whore’s; the babe stone-cold

Pressed to the ache of unsucked breasts; the youth in horror

Turning away from the black swollen face

That from his moonlit pillow once looked up,

Eager for kisses. Dead, all dead,

Mourned by the soon to die and by the doomed

Borne with reluctant footing to the abhorred

Garden of cypresses where one huge pit

Yawns to receive them, stinking to the moon.”

While he was speaking, two new puppets, a boy and a girl in the gayest of Palanese finery, entered from the right and, moving in the opposite direction to the black-robed mourners, took their stand, arm in arm, downstage and a little left of center.

“But we, meanwhile,” said the boy when Oedipus had finished:

“Are bound for rosier gardens and the absurd

Apocalyptic rite that in the mind

Calls forth from the touched skin and melting flesh

The immanent Infinite.”

“What about Me?” the basso profundo rumbled from the welkin. “You seem to forget that I’m Wholly Other.”

Endlessly the black procession to the cemetery still shuffled on. But now the Dead March was interrupted in mid-phrase. Music gave place to a single deep note—tuba and double bass—prolonged interminably. The boy in the foreground held up his hand.

“Listen! The drone, the everlasting burden.”

In unison with the unseen instruments the mourners began to chant. “Death, death, death, death…”

“But life knows more than one note,” said the boy.

“Life,” the girl chimed in, “can sing both high and low.”

“And your unceasing drone of death serves only to make a richer music.”

“A richer music,” the girl repeated.

And with that, tenor and treble, they started to vocalize a wandering arabesque of sound wreathed, as it were, about the long rigid shaft of the ground bass.

The drone and the singing diminished gradually into silence; the last of the mourners disappeared and the boy and girl in the foreground retired to a corner where they could go on with their kissing undisturbed.

There was another flourish of trumpets and, obese in a purple tunic, in came Creon, fresh from Delphi and primed with oracles. For the next few minutes the dialogue was all in Palanese, and Mary Sarojini had to act as interpreter.

“Oedipus asks him what God said; and the other one says that what God said was that it was all because of some man having killed the old king, the one before Oedipus. Nobody had ever caught him, and the man was still living in Thebes, and this virus that was killing everybody had been sent by God—that’s what Creon says he was told—as a punishment. I don’t know why all these people who hadn’t done anything to anybody had to be punished; but that’s what he says God said. And the virus won’t stop till they catch the man that killed the old king and send him away from Thebes. And of course Oedipus says he’s going to do everything he can to find the man and get rid of him.”

From his downstage corner the boy began to declaim, this time in English:

“God, most Himself when most sublimely vague,

Talks, when His talk is plain, the ungodliest bosh.

Repent, He roars, for Sin has caused the plague.

But we say ‘Dirt—so wash.’”

While the audience was still laughing, another group of mourners emerged from the wings and slowly crossed the stage.

“Karuna,” said the girl in the foreground, “compassion. The suffering of the stupid is as real as any other suffering.”

Feeling a touch on his arm, Will turned and found himself looking into the beautiful sulky face of young Murugan.

“I’ve been hunting for you everywhere,” he said angrily, as though Will had concealed himself on purpose just to annoy him. He spoke so loudly that many heads were turned and there were calls for quiet.

“You weren’t at Dr. Robert’s, you weren’t at Susila’s,” the boy nagged on, regardless of the protests.

“Quiet, quiet…”

“Quiet!” came a tremendous shout from Basso Profundo in the clouds. “Things have come to a pretty pass,” the voice added grumblingly, “when God simply can’t hear Himself speak.”

“Hear, hear,” said Will, joining in the general laughter. He rose and, followed by Murugan and Mary Sarojini, hobbled towards the exit.

“Didn’t you want to see the end?” Mary Sarojini asked, and turning to Murugan, “You really might have waited,” she said in a tone of reproof.

“Mind your own business!” Murugan snapped.

Will laid a hand on the child’s shoulder. “Luckily,” he said, “your account of the end was so vivid that I don’t have to see it with my own eyes. And of course,” he added ironically, “His Highness must always come first.”

Murugan pulled an envelope out of the pocket of those white silk pajamas which had so bedazzled the little nurse and handed it to Will. “From my mother.” And he added, “It’s urgent.”

“How good it smells!” Mary Sarojini commented, sniffing at the rich arua of sandalwood that surrounded the Rani’s missive.

Will unfolded three sheets of heaven-blue notepaper embossed with five golden lotuses under a princely crown. How many underlinings, what a profusion of capital letters! He started to read.

Ma Petite Voix, cher Farnaby, avait raison—AS USUAL! I had been TOLD again and again what Our Mutual Friend was predestined to do for poor little Pala and (through the financial support which Pala will permit him to contribute to the Crusade of the Spirit) for the WHOLE WORLD. So when I read his cable (which arrived a few minutes ago, by way of the faithful Bahu and his diplomatic colleague in London), it came as NO surprise to learn that Lord A. has given you Full Powers (and, it goes without saying, the WHEREWITHAL) to negotiate on his behalf—on our behalf; for his advantage is also yours, mine and (since in our different ways we are all Crusaders) the SPIRIT’S!!

But the arrival of Lord A.’s cable is not the only piece of news I have to report. Events (as we learned this afternoon from Bahu) are rushing towards the Great Turning Point of Palanese History—rushing far more rapidly than I had previously thought to be possible. For reasons which are partly political (the need to offset a recent decline in Colonel D.’s popularity), partly Economic (the burdens of Defense are too onerous to be borne by Rendang alone) and partly Astrological (these days, say the Experts, are uniquely favorable for a joint venture by Rams—myself and Murugan—and that typical Scorpion, Colonel D.) it has been decided to precipitate an Action originally planned for the night of the lunar eclipse next November. This being so, it is essential that the three of us here should meet without delay to decide what must be Done, in these new and swiftly changing Circumstances, to promote our special interests, material and Spiritual. The so-called “Accident” which brought you to our shores at this most critical Moment of Time was, as you must recognize, Manifestly Providential. It remains for us to collaborate, as dedicated Crusaders, with that divine POWER which has so unequivocally espoused our Cause. SO COME AT ONCE! Murugan has the motorcar and will bring you to our modest Bungalow, where, I assure you, my dear Farnaby, you will receive a very warm welcome from bien sincèrement vôtre, Fatima R.

Will folded up the three odorous sheets of scrawled blue paper and replaced them in their envelope. His face was expressionless; but behind this mask of indifference he was violently angry. Angry with this ill-mannered boy before him, so ravishing in his white silk pajamas, so odious in his spoiled silliness. Angry, as he caught another whiff of the letter, with that grotesque monster of a woman, who had begun by ruining her son, in the name of mother love and chastity, and was now egging him on, in the name of God and an assortment of Ascended Masters, to become a bomb-dropping spiritual crusader under the oily banner of Joe Aldehyde. Angry, above all, with himself for having so wantonly become involved with this ludicrously sinister couple, in heaven only knew what kind of a vile plot against all the human decencies that his refusal to take yes for an answer had never prevented him from secretly believing in and (how passionately!) longing for.

“Well, shall we go?” said Murugan in a tone of airy confidence. He was evidently assuming as axiomatic that, when Fatima R. issued a command, obedience must necessarily be complete and unhesitating.

Feeling the need to give himself a little more time to cool off, Will made no immediate answer. Instead, he turned away to look at the now distant puppets. Jocasta, Oedipus and Creon were sitting on the palace steps, waiting, presumably, for the arrival of Tiresias. Overhead, Basso Profundo was momentarily napping. A party of black-robed mourners was crossing the stage. Near the footlights the boy from Pala had begun to declaim in blank verse:

“Light and Compassion,” he was saying,

“Light and Compassion—how unutterably

Simple our Substance! But the Simple waited,

Age after age, for intricacies sufficient

To know their One in multitude, their Everything

Here, now, their Fact in fiction; waited and still

Waits on the absurd, on incommensurables

Seamlessly interwoven—oestrin with

Charity, truth with kidney function, beauty

With chyle, bile, sperm, and God with dinner, God

With dinner’s absence or the sound of bells

Suddenly—one, two, three—in sleepless ears.”

There was a ripple of plucked strings, then the long-drawn notes of a flute.

“Shall we go?” Murugan repeated.

But Will held up his hand for silence. The girl puppet had moved to the center of the stage and was singing:

“Thought is the brain’s three milliards

Of cells from the inside out.

Billions of games of billiards

Marked up as Faith and Doubt.

“My Faith, but their collisions;

My logic, their enzymes;

Their pink epinephrin, my visions;

Their white epinephrin, my crimes.

“Since I am the felt arrangement

Of ten to the ninth times three,

Each atom in its estrangement

Must yet be prophetic of me.”

Losing all patience, Murugan caught hold of Will’s arm and gave him a savage pinch. “Are you coming?” he shouted.

Will turned on him angrily. “What the devil do you think you’re doing, you little fool?” He jerked his arm out of the boy’s grasp.

Intimidated, Murugan changed his tone. “I just wanted to know if you were ready to come to my mother’s.”

“I’m not ready,” Will answered, “because I’m not going.”

“Not going?” Murugan cried in a tone of incredulous amazement. “But she expects you, she…”

“Tell your mother I’m very sorry, but I have a prior engagement. With someone who’s dying,” Will added.

“But this is frightfully important.”

“So is dying.”

Murugan lowered his voice. “Something’s happening,” he whispered.

“I can’t hear you,” Will shouted through the confused noises of the crowd.

Murugan glanced about him apprehensively, then risked a somewhat louder whisper. “Something’s happening, something tremendous.”

“Something even more tremendous is happening at the hospital.”

“We just heard…” Murugan began. He looked around again, then shook his head. “No, I can’t tell you—not here. That’s why you must come to the bungalow. Now. There’s no time to lose.”

Will glanced at his watch. “No time to lose,” he echoed and, turning to Mary Sarojini, “We must get going,” he said. “Which way?”

“I’ll show you,” she said, and they set off hand in hand.

“Wait,” Murugan implored, “wait!” Then, as Will and Mary Sarojini held on their course, he came dodging through the crowd in pursuit. “What shall I tell her?” he wailed at their heels.

The boy’s terror was comically abject. In Will’s mind anger gave place to amusement. He laughed aloud. Then, halting, “What would you tell her, Mary Sarojini?” he asked.

“I’d tell her exactly what happened,” said the child. “I mean, if it was my mother. But then,” she added on second thought, “my mother isn’t the Rani.” She looked up at Murugan. “Do you belong to an MAC?” she enquired.

Of course he didn’t. For the Rani the very idea of a Mutual Adoption Club was a blasphemy. Only God could make a Mother. The Spiritual Crusader wanted to be alone with her God-given victim.

“No MAC.” Mary Sarojini shook her head. “That’s awful! You might have gone and stayed for a few days with one of your other mothers.”

Still terrified by the prospect of having to tell his only mother about the failure of his mission, Murugan began to harp almost hysterically on a new variant of the old theme. “I don’t know what she’ll say,” he kept repeating. “I don’t know what she’ll say.”

“There’s only one way to find out what she’ll say,” Will told him. “Go home and listen.”

“Come with me,” Murugan begged. “Please.” He clutched at Will’s arm.

“I told you not to touch me.” The clutching hand was hastily withdrawn. Will smiled again. “That’s better!” He raised his staff in a farewell gesture. “Bonne nuit, Altesse.” Then to Mary Sarojini, “Lead on, MacPhail,” he said in high good humor.

“Were you putting it on?” Mary Sarojini asked. “Or were you really angry?”

“Really and truly,” he assured her. Then he remembered what he had seen in the school gymnasium. He hummed the opening notes of the Rakshasi Hornpipe and banged the pavement with his ironshod staff.

“Ought I to have stamped it out?”

“Maybe it would have been better.”

“You think so?”

“He’s going to hate you as soon as he’s stopped being frightened.”

Will shrugged his shoulders. He couldn’t care less. But as the past receded and the future approached, as they left the arc lamps of the marketplace and climbed the steep dark street that wound uphill to the hospital, his mood began to change. Lead on, MacPhail—but towards what, and away from what? Towards yet another manifestation of the Essential Horror and away from all hope of that blessed year of freedom which Joe Aldehyde had promised and that it would be so easy and (since Pala was doomed in any event) not so immoral or treacherous to earn. And not only away from the hope of freedom; away quite possibly, if the Rani complained to Joe and if Joe became sufficiently indignant, from any further prospects of well-paid slavery as a professional execution watcher. Should he turn back, should he try to find Murugan, offer apologies, do whatever that dreadful woman ordered him to do? A hundred yards up the road, the lights of the hospital could be seen shining between the trees.

“Let’s rest for a moment,” he said.

“Are you tired?” Mary Sarojini enquired solicitously.

“A little.”

He turned and, leaning on his staff, looked down at the marketplace. In the light of the arc lamps the town hall glowed pink, like a monumental serving of raspberry sherbet. On the temple spire he could see, frieze above frieze, the exuberant chaos of Indic sculpture—elephants and Bodhisattvas, demons, supernatural girls with breasts and enormous bottoms, capering Shivas, rows of past and future Buddhas in quiet ecstasy. Below, in the space between sherbet and mythology, seethed the crowd, and somewhere in that crowd was a sulky face and a pair of white satin pajamas. Should he go back? It would be the sensible, the safe, the prudent thing to do. But an inner voice—not little, like the Rani’s, but stentorian—shouted, “Squalid! Squalid!” Conscience? No. Morality? Heaven forbid! But supererogatory squalor, ugliness and vulgarity beyond the call of duty—these were things which, as a man of taste, one simply couldn’t be a party to.

“Well, shall we go on?” he said to Mary Sarojini.

They entered the lobby of the hospital. The nurse at the desk had a message for them from Susila. Mary Sarojini was to go directly to Mrs. Rao’s, where she and Tom Krishna would spend the night. Mr. Farnaby was to be asked to come at once to Room 34.

“This way,” said the nurse, and held open a swing door.

Will stepped forward. The conditioned reflex of politeness clicked automatically into action. “Thank you,” he said, and smiled. But it was with a dull, sick feeling in the pit of the stomach that he went hobbling towards the apprehended future.

“The last door on the left,” said the nurse. But now she had to get back to her desk in the lobby. “So I’ll leave you to go on alone,” she added as the door closed behind her.

Alone, he repeated to himself, alone—and the apprehended future was identical with the haunting past, the Essential Horror was timeless and ubiquitous. This long corridor with its green-painted walls was the very same corridor along which, a year ago, he had walked to the little room where Molly lay dying. The nightmare was recurrent. Foredoomed and conscious, he moved on towards its horrible consummation. Death, yet another vision of death.

Thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four…He knocked and waited, listening to the beating of his heart. The door opened and he found himself face to face with little Radha.

“Susila was expecting you,” she whispered.

Will followed her into the room. Rounding a screen, he caught a glimpse of Susila’s profile silhouetted against a lamp, of a high bed, of a dark emaciated face on the pillow, of arms that were no more than parchment-covered bones, of clawlike hands. Once again the Essential Horror. With a shudder he turned away. Radha motioned him to a chair near the open window. He sat down and closed his eyes—closed them physically against the present, but, by that very act, opened them inwardly upon that hateful past of which the present had reminded him. He was there in that other room, with Aunt Mary. Or rather with the person who had once been Aunt Mary, but was now this hardly recognizable somebody else—somebody who had never so much as heard of the charity and courage which had been the very essence of Aunt Mary’s being; somebody who was filled with an indiscriminate hatred for all who came near her, loathing them, whoever they might be, simply because they didn’t have cancer, because they weren’t in pain, had not been sentenced to die before their time. And along with this malignant envy of other people’s health and happiness had gone a bitterly querulous self-pity, an abject despair.

“Why to me? Why should this thing have happened to me?”

He could hear the shrill complaining voice, could see that tearstained and distorted face. The only person he had ever really loved or wholeheartedly admired. And yet, in her degradation, he had caught himself despising her—despising, positively hating.

To escape from the past, he reopened his eyes. Radha, he saw, was sitting on the floor, cross-legged and upright, in the posture of meditation. In her chair beside the bed Susila seemed to be holding the same kind of focused stillness. He looked at the face on the pillow. That too was still, still with a serenity that might almost have been the frozen calm of death. Outside, in the leafy darkness, a peacock suddenly screamed. Deepened by contrast, the ensuing silence seemed to grow pregnant with mysterious and appalling meanings.

“Lakshmi.” Susila laid a hand on the old woman’s wasted arm. “Lakshmi,” she said again more loudly. The death-calm face remained impassive. “You mustn’t go to sleep.”

Not go to sleep? But for Aunt Mary, sleep—the artificial sleep that followed the injections—had been the only respite from the self-lacerations of self-pity and brooding fear.

“Lakshmi!”

The face came to life.

“I wasn’t really asleep,” the old woman whispered. “It’s just my being so weak. I seem to float away.”

“But you’ve got to be here,” said Susila. “You’ve got to know you’re here. All the time.” She slipped an additional pillow under the sick woman’s shoulders and reached for a bottle of smelling salts that stood on the bed table.

Lakshmi sniffed, opened her eyes, and looked up into Susila’s face. “I’d forgotten how beautiful you were,” she said. “But then Dugald always did have good taste.” The ghost of a mischievous smile appeared for a moment on the fleshless face. “What do you think, Susila?” she added after a moment and in another tone. “Shall we see him again? I mean, over there?”

In silence Susila stroked the old woman’s hand. Then, suddenly smiling, “How would the Old Raja have asked that question?” she said. “Do you think ‘we’ (quote, unquote) shall see ‘him’ (quote, unquote) ‘over there’ (quote, unquote)?”

“But what do you think?”

“I think we’ve all come out of the same light, and we’re all going back into the same light.”

Words, Will was thinking, words, words, words. With an effort, Lakshmi lifted a hand and pointed accusingly at the lamp on the bed table.

“It glares in my eyes,” she whispered.

Susila untied the red silk handkerchief knotted around her throat and draped it over the lamp’s parchment shade. From white and mercilessly revealing, the light became as dimly, warmly rosy as the flush, Will found himself thinking, on Babs’s rumpled bed, whenever Porter’s Gin proclaimed itself in crimson.

“That’s much better,” said Lakshmi. She shut her eyes. Then, after a long silence, “The light,” she broke out, “the light. It’s here again.” Then after another pause, “Oh, how wonderful,” she whispered at last, “how wonderful!” Suddenly she winced and bit her lip.

Susila took the old woman’s hand in both of hers. “Is the pain bad?” she asked.

“It would be bad,” Lakshmi explained, “if it were really my pain. But somehow it isn’t. The pain’s here; but I’m somewhere else. It’s like what you discover with the moksha-medicine. Nothing really belongs to you. Not even your pain.”

“Is the light still there?”

Lakshmi shook her head. “And looking back, I can tell you exactly when it went away. It went away when I started talking about the pain not being really mine.”

“And yet what you were saying was good.”

“I know—but I was saying it.” The ghost of an old habit of irreverent mischief flitted once again across Lakshmi’s face.

“What are you thinking of?” Susila asked.

“Socrates.”

“Socrates?”

“Gibber, gibber, gibber—even when he’d actually swallowed the stuff. Don’t let me talk, Susila. Help me to get out of my own light.”

“Do you remember that time last year,” Susila began after a silence, “when we all went up to the old Shiva temple above the High Altitude Station? You and Robert and Dugald and me and the two children—do you remember?”

Lakshmi smiled with pleasure at the recollection.

“I’m thinking specially of that view from the west side of the temple—the view out over the sea. Blue, green, purple—and the shadows of the clouds were like ink. And the clouds themselves—snow, lead, charcoal, satin. And while we were looking, you asked a question. Do you remember, Lakshmi?”

“You mean, about the Clear Light?”

“About the Clear Light,” Susila confirmed. “Why do people speak of Mind in terms of Light? Is it because they’ve seen the sunshine and found it so beautiful that it seems only natural to identify the Buddha Nature with the clearest of all possible Clear Lights? Or do they find the sunshine beautiful because, consciously or unconsciously, they’ve been having revelations of Mind in the form of Light ever since they were born? I was the first to answer,” said Susila, smiling to herself. “And as I’d just been reading something by some American behaviorist, I didn’t stop to think—I just gave you the (quote, unquote) ‘scientific point of view.’ People equate Mind (whatever that may be) with hallucinations of light, because they’ve looked at a lot of sunsets and found them very impressive. But Robert and Dugald would have none of it. The Clear Light, they insisted, comes first. You go mad about sunsets because sunsets remind you of what’s always been going on, whether you knew it or not, inside your skull and outside space and time. You agreed with them, Lakshmi—do you remember? You said, ‘I’d like to be on your side, Susila, if only because it isn’t good for these men of ours to be right all the time. But in this case—surely it’s pretty obvious—in this case they are right.’ Of course they were right, and of course I was hopelessly wrong. And, needless to say, you had known the right answer before you asked the question.”

“I never knew anything,” Lakshmi whispered. “I could only see.”

“I remember your telling me about seeing the Clear Light,” said Susila. “Would you like me to remind you of it?”

The sick woman nodded her head.

“When you were eight years old,” said Susila. “That was the first time. An orange butterfly on a leaf, opening and shutting its wings in the sunshine—and suddenly there was the Clear Light of pure Suchness blazing through it, like another sun.”

“Much brighter than the sun,” Lakshmi whispered.

“But much gentler. You can look into the Clear Light and not be blinded. And now remember it. A butterfly on a green leaf, opening and shutting its wings—and it’s the Buddha Nature totally present, it’s the Clear Light outshining the sun. And you were only eight years old.”

“What had I done to deserve it?”

Will found himself remembering that evening, a week or so before her death, when Aunt Mary had talked about the wonderful times they had had together in her little Regency house near Arundel where he had spent the better part of all his holidays. Smoking out the wasps’ nests with fire and brimstone, having picnics on the downs or under the beeches. And then the sausage rolls at Bognor, the gypsy fortuneteller who had prophesied that he would end up as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the black-robed, red-nosed verger who had chased them out of Chichester Cathedral because they had laughed too much. “Laughed too much,” Aunt Mary had repeated bitterly. “Laughed too much…”

“And now,” Susila was saying, “think of that view from the Shiva temple. Think of those lights and shadows on the sea, those blue spaces between the clouds. Think of them, and then let go of your thinking. Let go of it, so that the not-Thought can come through. Things into Emptiness. Emptiness into Suchness. Suchness into things again, into your own mind. Remember what it says in the Sutra. ‘Your own consciousness shining, void, inseparable from the great Body of Radiance, is subject neither to birth nor death, but is the same as the immutable Light, Buddha Amitabha.’”

“The same as the light,” Lakshmi repeated. “And yet it’s all dark again.”

“It’s dark because you’re trying too hard,” said Susila. “Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. ‘Lightly, child, lightly. You’ve got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.’ I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I’m going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi…Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell. And, of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the Clear Light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling. On tiptoes; and no luggage, not even a sponge bag. Completely unencumbered.”

Completely unencumbered…Will thought of poor Aunt Mary sinking deeper and deeper with every step into the quicksands. Deeper and deeper until, struggling and protesting to the last, she had gone down, completely and forever, into the Essential Horror. He looked again at the fleshless face on the pillow and saw that it was smiling.

“The Light,” came the hoarse whisper, “the Clear Light. It’s here—along with the pain, in spite of the pain.”

“And where are you?” Susila asked.

“Over there, in the corner.” Lakshmi tried to point, but the raised hand faltered and fell back, inert, on the coverlet. “I can see myself there. And she can see my body on the bed.”

“Can she see the Light?”

“No. The Light’s here, where my body is.”

The door of the sickroom was quietly opened. Will turned his head and was in time to see Dr. Robert’s small spare figure emerging from behind the screen into the rosy twilight.

Susila rose and motioned him to her place beside the bed. Dr. Robert sat down and, leaning forward, took his wife’s hand in one of his and laid the other on her forehead.

“It’s me,” he whispered.

“At last…”

A tree, he explained, had fallen across the telephone line. No communication with the High Altitude Station except by road. They had sent a messenger in a car, and the car had broken down. More than two hours had been lost. “But thank goodness,” Dr. Robert concluded, “here I finally am.”

The dying woman sighed profoundly, opened her eyes for a moment and looked up at him with a smile, then closed them again. “I knew you’d come.”

“Lakshmi,” he said very softly. “Lakshmi.” He drew the tips of his fingers across the wrinkled forehead, again and again. “My little love.” There were tears on his cheeks; but his voice was firm and he spoke with the tenderness not of weakness, but of power.

“I’m not over there any more,” Lakshmi whispered.

“She was over there in the corner,” Susila explained to her father-in-law. “Looking at her body here on the bed.”

“But now I’ve come back. Me and the pain, me and the Light, me and you—all together.”

The peacock screamed again and, through the insect noises that in this tropical night were the equivalent of silence, far off but clear came the sound of gay music, flutes and plucked strings and the steady throbbing of drums.

“Listen,” said Dr. Robert. “Can you hear it? They’re dancing.”

“Dancing,” Lakshmi repeated. “Dancing.”

“Dancing so lightly,” Susila whispered. “As though they had wings.”

The music swelled up again into audibility.

“It’s the Courting Dance,” Susila went on.

“The Courting Dance. Robert, do you remember?”

“Could I ever forget?”

Yes, Will said to himself, could one ever forget? Could one ever forget that other distant music and, nearby, unnaturally quick and shallow, the sound of dying breath in a boy’s ears? In the house across the street somebody was practicing one of those Brahms Waltzes that Aunt Mary had loved to play. One-two and three and One-two and three and O-o-o-ne two three, One- and One and Two-Three and One and…The odious stranger who had once been Aunt Mary stirred out of her artificial stupor and opened her eyes. An expression of the most intense malignity had appeared on the yellow, wasted face. “Go and tell them to stop,” the harsh, unrecognizable voice had almost screamed. And then the lines of malignity had changed into the lines of despair, and the stranger, the pitiable odious stranger started to sob uncontrollably. Those Brahms Waltzes—they were the pieces, out of all her repertory, that Frank had loved best.

Another gust of cool air brought with it a louder strain of the gay, bright music.

“All those young people dancing together,” said Dr. Robert. “All that laughter and desire, all that uncomplicated happiness! It’s all here, like an atmosphere, like a field of force. Their joy and our love—Susila’s love, my love—all working together, all reinforcing one another. Love and joy enveloping you, my darling; love and joy carrying you up into the peace of the Clear Light. Listen to the music. Can you still hear it, Lakshmi?”

“She’s drifted away again,” said Susila. “Try to bring her back.”

Dr. Robert slipped an arm under the emaciated body and lifted it into a sitting posture. The head drooped sideways onto his shoulder.

“My little love,” he kept whispering. “My little love…”

Her eyelids fluttered open for a moment. “Brighter,” came the barely audible whisper, “brighter.” And a smile of happiness intense almost to the point of elation transfigured her face.

Through his tears Dr. Robert smiled back at her. “So now you can let go, my darling.” He stroked her gray hair. “Now you can let go. Let go,” he insisted. “Let go of this poor old body. You don’t need it any more. Let it fall away from you. Leave it lying here like a pile of worn-out clothes.”

In the fleshless face the mouth had fallen carvernously open, and suddenly the breathing became stertorous.

“My love, my little love…” Dr. Robert held her more closely. “Let go now, let go. Leave it here, your old worn-out body, and go on. Go on, my darling, go on into the Light, into the peace, into the living peace of the Clear Light…”

Susila picked up one of the limp hands and kissed it, then turned to little Radha.

“Time to go,” she whispered, touching the girl’s shoulder.

Interrupted in her meditation, Radha opened her eyes, nodded and, scrambling to her feet, tiptoed silently towards the door. Susila beckoned to Will and, together, they followed her. In silence the three of them walked along the corridor. At the swing door Radha took her leave.

“Thank you for letting me be with you,” she whispered.

Susila kissed her. “Thank you for helping to make it easier for Lakshmi.”

Will followed Susila across the lobby and out into the warm odorous darkness. In silence they started to walk downhill towards the marketplace.

“And now,” he said at last, speaking under a strange compulsion to deny his emotion in a display of the cheapest kind of cynicism, “I suppose she’s trotting off to do a little maithuna with her boy friend.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Susila calmly, “she’s on night duty. But if she weren’t, what would be the objection to her going on from the yoga of death to the yoga of love?”

Will did not answer immediately. He was thinking of what had happened between himself and Babs on the evening of Molly’s funeral. The yoga of antilove, the yoga of resented addiction, of lust and the self-loathing that reinforces the self and makes it yet more loathsome.

“I’m sorry I tried to be unpleasant,” he said at last.

“It’s your father’s ghost. We’ll have to see if we can exorcise it.”

They had crossed the marketplace and now, at the end of the short street that led out of the village, they had come to the open space where the jeep was parked. As Susila turned the car onto the highway, the beam of their headlamps swept across a small green car that was turning downhill into the bypass.

“Don’t I recognize the royal Baby Austin?”

“You do,” said Susila, and wondered where the Rani and Murugan could be going at this time of night.

“They’re up to no good,” Will guessed. And on a sudden impulse he told Susila of his roving commission from Joe Aldehyde, his dealings with the Queen Mother and Mr. Bahu.

“You’d be justified in deporting me tomorrow,” he concluded.

“Not now that you’ve changed your mind,” she assured him. “And anyhow nothing you did could have affected the real issue. Our enemy is oil in general. Whether we’re exploited by Southeast Asia Petroleum or Standard of California makes no difference.”

“Did you know that Murugan and the Rani were conspiring against you?”

“They make no secret of it.”

“Then why don’t you get rid of them?”

“Because they would be brought back immediately by Colonel Dipa. The Rani is a princess of Rendang. If we expelled her, it would be a casus belli.”

“So what can you do?”

“Try to keep them in order, try to change their minds, hope for a happy outcome, and be prepared for the worst.”

“And what will you do if the worst happens?”

“Try to make the best of it, I suppose. Even in the worst society an individual retains a little freedom. One perceives in private, one remembers and imagines in private, one loves in private, and one dies in private—even under Colonel Dipa.” Then after a silence, “Did Dr. Robert say you could have the moksha-medicine?” she asked. And when Will nodded, “Would you like to try it?”

“Now?”

“Now. That is, if you don’t mind being up all night with it.”

“I’d like nothing better.”

“You may find that you never liked anything worse,” Susila warned him. “The moksha-medicine can take you to heaven; but it can also take you to hell. Or else to both, together or alternately. Or else (if you’re lucky, or if you’ve made yourself ready) beyond either of them. And then beyond the beyond, back to where you started from—back to here, back to New Rothamsted, back to business as usual. Only now, of course, business as usual is completely different.”

15

ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR…THE CLOCK IN THE KITCHEN STRUCK twelve. How irrelevantly, seeing that time had ceased to exist! The absurd, importunate bell had sounded at the heart of a timelessly present Event, of a Now that changed incessantly in a dimension, not of seconds and minutes, but of beauty, of significance, of intensity, of deepening mystery.

“Luminous bliss.” From the shallows of his mind the words rose like bubbles, came to the surface, and vanished into the infinite spaces of living light that now pulsed and breathed behind his closed eyelids. “Luminous bliss.” That was as near as one could come to it. But it—this timeless and yet ever-changing Event—was something that words could only caricature and diminish, never convey. It was not only bliss, it was also understanding. Understanding of everything, but without knowledge of anything. Knowledge involved a knower and all the infinite diversity of known and knowable things. But here, behind his closed lids, there was neither spectacle nor spectator. There was only this experienced fact of being blissfully one with Oneness.

In a succession of revelations, the light grew brighter, the understanding deepened, the bliss became more impossibly, more unbearably intense. “Dear God!” he said to himself. “Oh, my dear God.” Then, out of another world, he heard the sound of Susila’s voice.

“Do you feel like telling me what’s happening?”

It was a long time before Will answered her. Speaking was difficult. Not because there was any physical impediment. It was just that speech seemed so fatuous, so totally pointless. “Light,” he whispered at last.

“And you’re there, looking at the light?”

“Not looking at it,” he answered, after a long reflective pause. “Being it. Being it,” he repeated emphatically.

Its presence was his absence. William Asquith Farnaby—ultimately and essentially there was no such person. Ultimately and essentially there was only a luminous bliss, only a knowledgeless understanding, only union with unity in a limitless, undifferentiated awareness. This, self-evidently, was the mind’s natural state. But no less certainly there had also been that professional execution watcher, that self-loathing Babs addict; there were also three thousand millions of insulated consciousnesses, each at the center of a nightmare world, in which it was impossible for anyone with eyes in his head or a grain of honesty to take yes for an answer. By what sinister miracle had the mind’s natural state been transformed into all these Devil’s Islands of wretchedness and delinquency?

In the firmament of bliss and understanding, like bats against the sunset, there was a wild crisscrossing of remembered notions and the hangovers of past feelings. Bat-thoughts of Plotinus and the Gnostics, of the One and its emanations, down, down into thickening horror. And then bat-feelings of anger and disgust as the thickening horrors became specific memories of what the essentially nonexistent William Asquith Farnaby had seen and done, inflicted and suffered.

But behind and around and somehow even within those flickering memories was the firmament of bliss and peace and understanding. There might be a few bats in the sunset sky; but the fact remained that the dreadful miracle of creation had been reversed. From a preternaturally wretched and delinquent self he had been unmade into pure mind, mind in its natural state, limitless, undifferentiated, luminously blissful, knowledgelessly understanding.

Light here, light now. And because it was infinitely here and timelessly now, there was nobody outside the light to look at the light. The fact was the awareness, the awareness the fact.

From that other world, somewhere out there to the right, came the sound once more of Susila’s voice.

“Are you feeling happy?” she asked.

A surge of brighter radiance swept away all those flickering thoughts and memories. There was nothing now except a crystalline transparency of bliss.

Without speaking, without opening his eyes, he smiled and nodded.

“Eckhart called it God,” she went on. “‘Felicity so ravishing, so inconceivably intense that no one can describe it. And in the midst of it God glows and flames without ceasing.’”

God glows and flames… It was so startlingly, so comically right that Will found himself laughing aloud. “God like a house on fire,” he gasped. “God-the-Fourteenth-of-July.” And he exploded once more into cosmic laughter.

Behind his closed eyelids an ocean of luminous bliss poured upwards like an inverted cataract. Poured upwards from union into completer union, from impersonality into a yet more absolute transcendence of selfhood.

“God-the-Fourteenth-of-July,” he repeated and, from the heart of the cataract, gave vent to a final chuckle of recognition and understanding.

“What about the fifteenth of July?” Susila questioned. “What about the morning after?”

“There isn’t any morning after.”

She shook her head. “It sounds suspiciously like Nirvana.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Pure Spirit, one hundred percent proof—that’s a drink that only the most hardened contemplation guzzlers indulge in. Bodhisattvas dilute their Nirvana with equal parts of love and work.”

“This is better,” Will insisted.

“You mean, it’s more delicious. That’s why it’s such an enormous temptation. The only temptation that God could succumb to. The fruit of the ignorance of good and evil. What heavenly lusciousness, what a supermango! God had been stuffing Himself with it for billions of years. Then all of a sudden, up comes Homo sapiens, out pops the knowledge of good and evil. God had to switch to a much less palatable brand of fruit. You’ve just eaten a slice of the original supermango, so you can sympathize with Him.”

A chair creaked, there was a rustle of skirts, then a series of small busy sounds that he was unable to interpret. What was she doing? He could have answered that question by simply opening his eyes. But who cared, after all, what she might be doing? Nothing was of any importance except this blazing uprush of bliss and understanding.

“Supermango to fruit of knowledge—I’m going to wean you,” she said, “by easy stages.”

There was a whirring sound. From the shallows, a bubble of recognition reached the surface of consciousness. Susila had been putting a record on the turntable of a phonograph and now the machine was in motion.

“Johann Sebastian Bach,” he heard her saying. “The music that’s closest to silence, closest, in spite of its being so highly organized, to pure, hundred percent proof Spirit.”

The whirring gave place to musical sounds. Another bubble of recognition came shooting up; he was listening to the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto.

It was the same, of course, as the Fourth Brandenburg he had listened to so often in the past—the same and yet completely different. This Allegro—he knew it by heart. Which meant that he was in the best possible position to realize that he had never really heard it before. To begin with, it was no longer he, William Asquith Farnaby, who was hearing it. The Allegro was revealing itself as an element in the great present Event, a manifestation at one remove of the luminous bliss. Or perhaps that was putting it too mildly. In another modality this Allegro was the luminous bliss; it was the knowledgeless understanding of everything apprehended through a particular piece of knowledge; it was undifferentiated awareness broken up into notes and phrases and yet still all-comprehendingly itself. And of course all this belonged to nobody. It was at once in here, out there, and nowhere. The music which, as William Asquith Farnaby, he had heard a hundred times before, he had been reborn as an unowned awareness. Which was why he was now hearing it for the first time. Unowned, the Fourth Brandenburg had an intensity of beauty, a depth of intrinsic meaning, incomparably greater than anything he had ever found in the same music when it was his private property.

“Poor idiot” came up in a bubble of ironic comment. The poor idiot hadn’t wanted to take yes for an answer in any field but the aesthetic. And all the time he had been denying, by the mere fact of being himself, all the beauty and meaning he so passionately longed to say yes to. William Asquith Farnaby was nothing but a muddy filter, on the hither side of which human beings, nature, and even his beloved art had emerged bedimmed and bemired, less, other and uglier than themselves. Tonight, for the first time, his awareness of a piece of music was completely unobstructed. Between mind and sound, mind and pattern, mind and significance, there was no longer any babel of biographical irrelevances to drown the music or make a senseless discord. Tonight’s Fourth Brandenburg was a pure datum—no, a blessed donum—uncorrupted by the personal history, the secondhand notions, the ingrained stupidities with which, like every self, the poor idiot, who wouldn’t (and in art plainly couldn’t) take yes for an answer, had overlaid the gifts of immediate experience.

And tonight’s Fourth Brandenburg was not merely an unowned Thing in Itself; it was also, in some impossible way, a Present Event with an infinite duration. Or rather (and still more impossibly, seeing that it had three movements and was being played at its usual speed) it was without duration. The metronome presided over each of its phrases; but the sum of its phrases was not a span of seconds and minutes. There was a tempo, but no time. So what was there?

“Eternity,” Will was forced to answer. It was one of those metaphysical dirty words which no decent-minded man would dream of pronouncing even to himself, much less in public. “Eternity, my brethren,” he said aloud. “Eternity, blah-blah.” The sarcasm, as he might have known it would, fell completely flat. Tonight those four syllables were no less concretely significant than the four letters of the other class of tabooed words. He began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Eternity,” he answered. “Believe it or not, it’s as real as shit.”

“Excellent!” she said approvingly.

He sat there motionlessly attentive, following with ear and inward eye the interwoven streams of sound, the interwoven streams of congruous and equivalent lights, that flowed on timelessly from one sequence to another. And every phrase of this well-worn familiar music was an unprecedented revelation of beauty that went pouring upwards, like a multitudinous fountain, into another revelation as novel and amazing as itself. Stream within stream—the stream of the solo violin, the streams of the two recorders, the manifold streams of the harpsichord and the little orchestra of assorted strings. Separate, distinct, individual—and yet each of the streams was a function of all the rest, each was itself in virtue of its relationship to the whole of which it was a component.

“Dear God!” he heard himself whispering.

In the timeless sequence of change the recorders were holding a single long-drawn note. A note without upper partials, clear, pellucid, divinely empty. A note (the word came bubbling up) of pure contemplation. And here was another inspirational obscenity that had now acquired a concrete meaning and might be uttered without a sense of shame. Pure contemplation, unconcerned, beyond contingency, outside the context of moral judgments. Through the uprushing lights he caught a glimpse, in memory, of Radha’s shining face as she talked of love as contemplation, of Radha once again, sitting cross-legged, in a focused intensity of stillness, at the foot of the bed where Lakshmi lay dying. This long pure note was the meaning of her words, the audible expression of her silence. But, always, flowing through and along with the heavenly emptiness of that contemplative fluting was the rich sound, vibration within passionate vibration, of the violin. And surrounding them both—the notes of contemplative detachment and the notes of passionate involvement—was this network of sharp dry tones plucked from the wires of the harpsichord. Spirit and instinct, action and vision—and around them the web of intellect. They were comprehended by discursive thought, but comprehended, it was obvious, only from the outside, in terms of an order of experience radically different from that which discursive thinking professes to explain.

“It’s like a Logical Positivist,” he said.

“What is?”

“That harpsichord.”

Like a Logical Positivist, he was thinking in the shallows of his mind, while in the depths the great Event of light and sound timelessly unfolded. Like a Logical Positivist talking about Plotinus and Julie de Lespinasse.

The music changed again, and now it was the violin that sustained (how passionately!) the long-drawn note of contemplation, while the two recorders took up the theme of active involvement and repeated it—the identical form imposed upon another substance—in the mode of detachment. And here, dancing in and out between them, was the Logical Positivist, absurd but indispensable, trying to explain, in a language incommensurable with the facts, what is was all about.

In the Eternity that was as real as shit, he went on listening to these interwoven streams of sound, went on looking at these interwoven streams of light, went on actually being (out there, in here, and nowhere) all that he saw and heard. And now, abruptly, the character of the light underwent a change. These interwoven streams, which were the first fluid differentiations of an understanding on the further side of all particular knowledge, had ceased to be a continuum. Instead, there was, all of a sudden, this endless succession of separate forms—forms still manifestly charged with the luminous bliss of undifferentiated being, but limited now, isolated, individualized. Silver and rose, yellow and pale green and gentian blue, an endless succession of luminous spheres came swimming up from some hidden source of forms and, in time with the music, purposefully constellated themselves into arrays of unbelievable complexity and beauty. An inexhaustible fountain that sprayed out into conscious patternings, into lattices of living stars. And as he looked at them, as he lived their life and the life of this music that was their equivalent, they went on growing into other lattices that filled the three dimensions of an inner space and changed incessantly in another, timeless dimension of quality and significance.

“What are you hearing?” Susila asked.

“Hearing what I see,” he answered. “And seeing what I hear.”

“And how would you describe it?”

“What it looks like,” Will answered, after a long silence, “what it sounds like, is the creation. Only it’s not a one-shot affair. It’s nonstop, perpetual creation.”

“Perpetual creation out of no-what nowhere into something somewhere—is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“You’re making progress.”

If words had come more easily and, when spoken, had been a little less pointless, Will would have explained to her that knowledgeless understanding and luminous bliss were a damn sight better than even Johann Sebastian Bach.

“Making progress,” Susila repeated. “But you’ve still got a long way to go. What about opening your eyes?”

Will shook his head emphatically.

“It’s time you gave yourself a chance of discovering what’s what.”

“What’s what is this,” he muttered.

“It isn’t,” she assured him. “All you’ve been seeing and hearing and being is only the first what. Now you must look at the second one. Look, and then bring the two together into a single inclusive what’s-what. So open your eyes, Will. Open them wide.”

“All right,” he said at last and reluctantly, with an apprehensive sense of impending misfortune, he opened his eyes. The inner illumination was swallowed up in another kind of light. The fountain of forms, the colored orbs in their conscious arrays and purposefully changing lattices gave place to a static composition of uprights and diagonals, of flat planes and curving cylinders, all carved out of some material that looked like living agate, and all emerging from a matrix of living and pulsating mother-of-pearl. Like a blind man newly healed and confronted for the first time by the mystery of light and color, he stared in uncomprehending astonishment. And then, at the end of another twenty timeless bars of the Fourth Brandenburg, a bubble of explanation rose into consciousness. He was looking, Will suddenly perceived, at a small square table, and beyond the table at a rocking chair, and beyond the rocking chair at a blank wall of whitewashed plaster. The explanation was reassuring for in the eternity that he had experienced between the opening of his eyes and the emergent knowledge of what he was looking at, the mystery confronting him had deepened from inexplicable beauty to a consummation of shining alienness that filled him, as he looked, with a kind of metaphysical terror. Well, this terrifying mystery consisted of nothing but two pieces of furniture and an expanse of wall. The fear was allayed, but the wonder only increased. How was it possible that things so familiar and commonplace could be this? Obviously it wasn’t possible; and yet there it was, there it was.

His attention shifted from the geometrical constructions in brown agate to their pearly background. Its name, he knew, was “wall” but in experienced fact it was a living process, a continuing series of transubstantiations from plaster and whitewash into the stuff of a supernatural body—into a god-flesh that kept modulating, as he looked at it, from glory to glory. Out of what the word bubbles had tried to explain away as mere calcimine some shaping spirit was evoking an endless succession of the most delicately discriminated hues, at once faint and intense, that emerged out of latency and went flushing across the god-body’s divinely radiant skin. Wonderful, wonderful! And there must be other miracles, new worlds to conquer and be conquered by. He turned his head to the left and there (appropriate words had bubbled up almost immediately) was the large marble-topped table at which they had eaten their supper. And now, thick and fast, more bubbles began to rise. This breathing apocalypse called “table” might be thought of as a picture by some mystical Cubist, some inspired Juan Gris with the soul of Traherne and a gift for painting miracles with conscious gems and the changing moods of water-lily petals.

Turning his head a little further to the left he was startled by a blaze of jewelry. And what strange jewelry! Narrow slabs of emerald and topaz, of ruby and sapphire and lapis lazuli, blazing away, row above row, like so many bricks in a wall of the New Jerusalem. Then—at the end, not in the beginning—came the word, in the beginning were the jewels, the stained-glass windows, the walls of paradise. It was only now, at long last, that the word “bookcase” presented itself for consideration.

Will raised his eyes from the book-jewels and found himself at the heart of a tropical landscape. Why? Where? Then he remembered that, when (in another life) he first entered the room, he had noticed, over the bookcase, a large, bad water color. Between sand dunes and clumps of palms a widening estuary receding towards the open sea, and above the horizon enormous mountains of cloud towered into a pale sky. “Feeble,” came bubbling up from the shallows. The work, only too obviously, of a not very gifted amateur. But that was now beside the point, for the landscape had ceased to be a painting and was now the subject of the painting—a real river, real sea, real sand glaring in the sunshine, real trees against a real sky. Real to the nth, real to the point of absoluteness. And this real river mingling with a real sea was his own being engulfed in God. “‘God’ between quotation marks?” enquired an ironical bubble. “Or God (!) in a modernist, Pickwickian sense?” Will shook his head. The answer was just plain God—the God one couldn’t possibly believe in, but who was self-evidently the fact confronting him. And yet this river was still a river, this sea the Indian Ocean. Not something else in fancy dress. Unequivocally themselves. But at the same time unequivocally God.

“Where are you now?” Susila asked.

Without turning his head in her direction, Will answered, “In heaven, I suppose,” and pointed at the landscape.

“In heaven—still? When are you going to make a landing down here?”

Another bubble of memory came up from the silted shallows. “‘Something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light’—of something or other.”

“But Wordsworth also talked about the still sad music of humanity.”

“Luckily,” said Will, “there are no humans in this landscape.”

“Not even any animals,” she added, with a little laugh. “Only clouds and the most deceptively innocent-looking vegetables. That’s why you’d better look at what’s on the floor.”

Will dropped his eyes. The grain on the floorboards was a brown river, and the brown river was an eddying, ongoing diagram of the world’s divine life. At the center of that diagram was his own right foot, bare under the straps of its sandal, and startlingly three-dimensional, like the marble foot, revealed by a searchlight, of some heroic statue. “Boards,” “grain,” “foot”—through the glib explanatory words the mystery stared back at him, impenetrable and yet, paradoxically, understood. Understood with that knowledgeless understanding to which, in spite of sensed objects and remembered names, he was still open.

Suddenly, out of the tail of his eye, he caught a glimpse of quick, darting movement. Openness to bliss and understanding was also, he realized, an openness to terror, to total incomprehension. Like some alien creature lodged within his chest and struggling in anguish, his heart started to beat with a violence that made him tremble. In the hideous certainty that he was about to meet the Essential Horror, Will turned his head and looked.

“It’s one of Tom Krishna’s pet lizards,” she said reassuringly.

The light was as bright as ever; but the brightness had changed its sign. A glow of sheer evil radiated from every gray-green scale of the creature’s back, from its obsidian eyes and the pulsing of its crimson throat, from the armored edges of its nostrils and its slitlike mouth. He turned away. In vain. The Essential Horror glared out of everything he looked at. Those compositions by the mystical Cubist—they had turned into intricate machines for doing nothing malevolently. That tropical landscape, in which he had experienced the union of his own being with the being of God—it was now simultaneously the most nauseating of Victorian oleographs and the actuality of hell. On their shelves, the rows of book-jewels beamed with a thousand watts of darkness visible. And how cheap these gems of the abyss had become, how indescribably vulgar! Where there had been gold and pearl and precious stones there were only Christmas-tree decorations, only the shallow glare of plastic and varnished tin. Everything still pulsed with life, but with the life of an infinitely sinister bargain basement. And that, the music now affirmed, that was what Omnipotence was perpetually creating—a cosmic Woolworth stocked with mass-produced horrors. Horrors of vulgarity and horrors of pain, of cruelty and tastelessness, of imbecility and deliberate malice.

“Not a gecko,” he heard Susila saying, “not one of our nice little house lizards. A hulking stranger from outdoors, one of the bloodsuckers. Not that they suck blood, of course. They merely have red throats and go purple in the face when they get excited. Hence that stupid name. Look! There he goes!”

Will looked down again. Preternaturally real, the scaly horror with its black blank eyes, its murderer’s mouth, its blood-red throat pumping away while the rest of the body lay stretched along the floor as still as death, was now within six inches of his foot.

“He’s seen his dinner,” said Susila. “Look over there to your left, on the edge of the matting.”

He turned his head.

“Gongylus gongyloides,” she went on. “Do you remember?”

Yes, he remembered. The praying mantis that had settled on his bed. But that was in another existence. What he had seen then was merely a rather odd-looking insect. What he saw now was a pair of inch-long monsters, exquisitely grisly, in the act of coupling. Their bluish pallor was barred and veined with pink, and the wings that fluttered continuously, like petals in a breeze, were shaded at the edges with deepening violet. A mimicry of flowers. But the insect forms were undisguisable. And now even the flowery colors had undergone a change. Those quivering wings were the appendages of two brightly enameled gadgets in the bargain basement, two little working models of a nightmare, two miniaturized machines for copulation. And now one of the nightmare machines, the female, had turned the small flat head, all mouth and bulging eyes, at the end of its long neck—had turned it and (dear God!) had begun to devour the head of the male machine. First a purple eye was chewed out, then half the bluish face. What was left of the head fell to the ground. Unrestrained by the weight of the eyes and jaws, the severed neck waved wildly. The female machine snapped at the oozing stump, caught it and, while the headless male uninterruptedly kept up his parody of Ares in the arms of Aphrodite, methodically chewed.

Out of the corner of his eye Will glimpsed another spurt of movement, turned his head sharply, and was in time to see the lizard crawling towards his foot. Nearer, nearer. He averted his eyes in terror. Something touched his toes and went tickling across his instep. The tickling ceased; but he could sense a little weight on his foot, a dry scaly contact. He wanted to scream; but his voice was gone and, when he tried to move, his muscles refused to obey him.

Timelessly the music had turned into the final Presto. Horror briskly on the march, horror in rococo fancy dress leading the dance.

Utterly still, except for the pulse in its red throat, the scaly horror on his instep lay staring with expressionless eyes at its predestined prey. Interlocked, the two little working models of a nightmare quivered like windblown petals and were shaken spasmodically by the simultaneous agonies of death and copulation. A timeless century passed; bar after bar, the gay little dance of death went on and on. Suddenly there was a scrabbling against his skin of tiny claws. The bloodsucker had crawled down from his instep to the floor. For a long life-span it lay there absolutely still. Then, with incredible speed, it darted across the boards and onto the matting. The slitlike mouth opened and closed again. Protruding from between the champing jaws, the edge of a violet-tinted wing still fluttered, like an orchid petal in the breeze; a pair of legs waved wildly for a moment, then disappeared from view.

Will shuddered and closed his eyes; but across the frontier between things sensed and things remembered, things imagined, the horror pursued him. In the fluorescent glare of the inner light an endless column of tin-bright insects and gleaming reptiles marched up diagonally, from left to right, out of some hidden source of nightmare towards an unknown and monstrous consummation. Gongylus gongyloides by millions and, in the midst of them, innumerable bloodsuckers. Eating and being eaten—forever.

And all the while—fiddle, flute and harpsichord—the final Presto of the Fourth Brandenburg kept trotting timelessly forward. What a jolly little rococo death march! Left, right; left, right…But what was the word of command for hexapods? And suddenly they weren’t hexapods any longer; they were bipeds. The endless column of insects had turned abruptly into an endless column of soldiers. Marching as he had seen the Brown Shirts marching through Berlin, a year before the war. Thousands upon thousands of them, their banners fluttering, their uniforms glowing in the infernal brightness like floodlit excrement. Numberless as insects, and each of them moving with the precision of a machine, the perfect docility of a performing dog. And the faces, the faces! He had seen the close-ups on the German newsreel, and here they were again, preternaturally real and three-dimensional and alive. The monstrous face of Hitler with his mouth open, yelling. And then the faces of assorted listeners. Huge idiot faces, blankly receptive. Faces of wide-eyed sleepwalkers. Faces of young Nordic angels rapt in the Beatific Vision. Faces of baroque saints going into ecstasy. Faces of lovers on the brink of orgasm. One Folk, One Realm, One Leader. Union with the unity of an insect swarm. Knowledgeless understanding of nonsense and diabolism. And then the newsreel camera had cut back to the serried ranks, the swastikas, the brass bands, the yelling hypnotist on the rostrum. And here once again, in the glare of his inner light, was the brown insectlike column, marching endlessly to the tunes of this rococo horror music. Onward Nazi soldiers. Onward Marxists. Onward Christian soldiers, and Muslims. Onward every chosen people, every Crusader and Holy War maker. Onward into misery, into all wickedness, into death. And suddenly Will found himself looking at what the marching column would become when it had reached its destination—thousands of corpses in the Korean mud, innumerable packets of garbage littering the African desert. And here (for the scene kept changing with bewildering rapidity and suddenness), here were the five flyblown bodies he had seen only a few months ago, faces upwards and their throats gashed, in the courtyard of an Algerian farm. Here, out of a past almost twenty years earlier, was that old woman, dead and stark naked in the rubble of a stucco house in St. John’s Wood. And here, without transition, was his own gray and yellow bedroom, with the reflection in the mirror on the wardrobe door of two pale bodies, his and Babs’s, frantically coupling to the accompaniment of his memories of Molly’s funeral and the strains, from Radio Stuttgart, of the Good Friday music out of Parsifal.

The scene changed again and, festooned with tin stars and fairy lamps, Aunt Mary’s face smiled at him gaily and then was transformed before his eyes into the face of the whining, malignant stranger who had taken her place during those last dreadful weeks before the final transformation into garbage. A radiance of love and goodness, and then a blind had been drawn, a shutter closed, a key turned in the lock, and there they were—she in her cemetery and he in his private prison sentenced to solitary confinement and, one unspecified fine morning, to death. The Agony in the Bargain Basement. The Crucifixion among the Christmas-tree decorations. Outside or in, with the eyes open or with the eyes closed, there was no escape.

“No escape,” he whispered, and the words confirmed the fact, transformed it into a hideous certitude that kept opening out, opening down, into depth below depth of malignant vulgarity, hell beyond hell of utterly pointless suffering.

And this suffering (it came to him with the force of a revelation)—this suffering was not merely pointless; it was also cumulative, it was also self-perpetuating. Surely enough, frightfully enough, as it had come to Molly and Aunt Mary and all the others, death would come also to him. Would come to him, but never to this fear, this sickening disgust, these lacerations of remorse and self-loathing. Immortal in its pointlessness, suffering would go on forever. In all other respects one was grotesquely, despicably finite. Not in respect to suffering. This dark little inspissated clot that one called “I” was capable of suffering to infinity and, in spite of death, the suffering would go on forever. The pains of living and the pains of dying, the routine of successive agonies in the bargain basement and the final crucifixion in a blaze of tin and plastic vulgarity—reverberating, continuously amplified, they would always be there. And the pains were incommunicable, the isolation complete. The awareness that one existed was an awareness that one was always alone. Just as much alone in Babs’s musky alcove as one had been alone with one’s earache or one’s broken arm, as one would be alone with one’s final cancer, alone, when one thought it was all over, with the immortality of suffering.

He was aware, all of a sudden, that something was happening to the music. The tempo had changed. Rallentando. It was the end. The end of everything for everyone. The jaunty little death dance had piped the marchers on and on to the edge of the cliff. And now here it was, and they were tottering on the brink. Rallentando, rallentando. The dying fall, the fall into dying. And punctually, inevitably, here were the two anticipated chords, the consummation, the expectant dominant and then, finis, the loud unequivocal tonic. There was a scratching, a sharp click, and then silence. Through the open window he could hear the distant frogs and the shrill monotonous rasp of insect noises. And yet in some mysterious way the silence remained unbroken. Like flies in a block of amber, the sounds were embedded in a transparent soundlessness which they were powerless to destroy or even modify, and to which they remained completely irrelevant. Timelessly, from intensity to intensity, the silence deepened. Silence in ambush, a watching, conspiratorial silence incomparably more sinister than the grisly little rococo death march which had preceded it. This was the abyss to whose brink the music had piped him. To the brink, and now over the brink into this everlasting silence.

“Infinite suffering,” he whispered. “And you can’t speak, you can’t even cry out.”

A chair creaked, silk rustled, he felt the wind of movement against his face, the nearness of a human presence. Behind his closed lids he was somehow aware that Susila was kneeling there in front of him. An instant later he felt her hands touching his face—the palms against his cheeks, the fingers on his temples.

The clock in the kitchen made a little whirring noise, then started to strike the hour. One, two, three, four. Outside in the garden a gusty breeze whispered intermittently among the leaves. A cock crowed and a moment later, from a long way off, came an answering call, and almost simultaneously another and another. Then an answer to the answers, and more answers in return. A counterpoint of challenges challenged, of defiances defied. And now a different kind of voice joined in the chorus. Articulate but inhuman. “Attention,” it called through the crowing and the insect noises. “Attention. Attention. Attention.”

“Attention,” Susila repeated; and as she spoke, he felt her fingers starting to move over his forehead. Lightly, lightly, from the brows up to the hair, from either temple to the midpoint between the eyes. Up and down, back and forth, soothing away the mind’s contractions, smoothing out the furrows of bewilderment and pain. “Attention to this.” And she increased the pressure of her palms against his cheekbones, of her fingertips above his ears. “To this,” she repeated. “To now. Your face between my two hands.” The pressure was relaxed, the fingers started to move again across his forehead.

“Attention.” Through a ragged counterpoint of crowing, the injunction was insistently repeated. “Attention. Attention. Atten…” The inhuman voice broke off in midword.

Attention to her hands on his face? Or attention to this dreadful glare of the inner light, to this uprush of tin and plastic stars and, through the barrage of vulgarity, to this packet of garbage that had once been Molly, to the whorehouse looking glass, to all those countless corpses in the mud, the dust, the rubble. And here were the lizards again and Gongylus gongyloides by the million, here were the marching columns, the rapt, devoutly listening faces of Nordic angels.

“Attention,” the mynah bird began to call again from the other side of the house. “Attention.”

Will shook his head. “Attention to what?”

“To this.” And she dug her nails into the skin of his forehead. “This. Here and now. And it isn’t anything so romantic as suffering and pain. It’s just the feel of fingernails. And even if it were much worse, it couldn’t possibly be forever or to infinity. Nothing is forever, nothing is to infinity. Except, maybe, the Buddha Nature.”

She moved her hands, and the contact now was no longer with nails but with skin. The fingertips slid down over his brows and, very lightly, came to rest on his closed eyelids. For the first wincing moment he was mortally afraid. Was she preparing to put out his eyes? He sat there, ready at her first move to throw back his head and jump to his feet. But nothing happened. Little by little his fears died away; the awareness of this intimate, unexpected, potentially dangerous contact remained. An awareness so acute and, because the eyes were supremely vulnerable, so absorbing that he had nothing to spare for the inner light or the horrors and vulgarities revealed by it.

“Pay attention,” she whispered.

But it was impossible not to pay attention. However, gently and delicately, her fingers had probed to the very quick of his consciousness. And how intensely alive, he now noticed, those fingers were! What a strange tingling warmth flowed out of them!

“It’s like an electric current,” he marveled.

“But luckily,” she said, “the wire carries no messages. One touches and, in the act of touching, one’s touched. Complete communication, but nothing communicated. Just an exchange of life, that’s all.” Then, after a pause, “Do you realize, Will,” she went on, “that in all these hours we’ve been sitting here—all these centuries in your case, all these eternities—you haven’t looked at me once? Not once. Are you afraid of what you might see?”

He thought over the question and finally nodded his head. “Maybe that’s what it was,” he said. “Afraid of seeing something I’d have to be involved with, something I might have to do something about.”

“So you stuck to Bach and landscapes and the Clear Light of the Void.”

“Which you wouldn’t let me go on looking at,” he complained.

“Because the Void won’t do you much good unless you can see its light in Gongylus gongyloides. And in people,” she added. “Which is sometimes considerably more difficult.”

“Difficult?” He thought of the marching columns, of the bodies in the mirror, of all those other bodies face downwards in the mud, and shook his head. “It’s impossible.”

“No, not impossible,” she insisted. “Sunyata implies karuna. The Void is light; but it’s also compassion. Greedy contemplatives want to possess themselves of the light without bothering about compassion. Merely good people try to be compassionate and refuse to bother about the light. As usual, it’s a question of making the best of both worlds. And now,” she added, “it’s time for you to open your eyes and see what a human being really looks like.”

The fingertips moved up from his eyelids to his forehead, moved out to the temples, moved down to the cheeks, to the corners of the jaw. An instant later he felt their touch on his own fingers, and she was holding his two hands in hers.

Will opened his eyes and, for the first time since he had taken the moksha-medicine, found himself looking her squarely in the face.

“Dear God,” he whispered at last.

Susila laughed. “Is it as bad as the bloodsucker?” she asked.

But this was not a joking matter. Will shook his head impatiently and went on looking. The eye sockets were mysterious with shadow and, except for a little crescent of illumination on the cheekbone, so was all the right side of her face. The left side glowed with a living, golden radiance—preternaturally bright, but with a brightness that was neither the vulgar and sinister glare of darkness visible nor yet that blissful incandescence revealed, in the far-off dawn of his eternity, behind his closed lids and, when he had opened his eyes, in the book-jewels, the compositions of the mystical Cubists, the transfigured landscape. What he was seeing now was the paradox of opposites indissolubly wedded, of light shining out of darkness, of darkness at the very heart of light.

“It isn’t the sun,” he said at last, “and it isn’t Chartres. Nor the infernal bargain basement, thank God. It’s all of them together, and you’re recognizably you, and I’m recognizably me—though, needless to say, we’re both completely different. You and me by Rembrandt, but Rembrandt about five thousand times more so.” He was silent for a moment; then, nodding his head in confirmation of what he had just said, “Yes, that’s it,” he went on. “Sun into Chartres, and then stained-glass windows into bargain basement. And the bargain basement is also the torture chamber, the concentration camp, the charnel house with Christmas-tree decorations. And now the bargain basement goes into reverse, picks up Chartres and a slice of the sun, and backs out into this—into you and me by Rembrandt. Does that make any sense to you?”

“All the sense in the world,” she assured him.

But Will was too busy looking at her to be able to pay much attention to what she was saying. “You’re so incredibly beautiful,” he said at last. “But it wouldn’t matter if you were incredibly ugly; you’d still be a Rembrandt-but-five-thousand-times-more-so. Beautiful, beautiful,” he repeated. “And yet I don’t want to sleep with you. No, that isn’t true. I would like to sleep with you. Very much indeed. But it won’t make any difference if I never do. I shall go on loving you—loving you in the way one’s supposed to love people if one’s a Christian. Love,” he repeated, “love. It’s another of those dirty words. ‘In love,’ ‘make love’—those are all right. But plain ‘love’—that’s an obscenity I couldn’t pronounce. But now, now…” He smiled and shook his head. “Believe it or not, now I can understand what it means when they say, ‘God is love.’ What manifest nonsense. And yet it happens to be true. Meanwhile there’s this extraordinary face of yours.” He leaned forward to look into it more closely. “As though one were looking into a crystal ball,” he added incredulously. “Something new all the time. You can’t imagine…”

But she could imagine. “Don’t forget,” she said, “I’ve been there myself.”

“Did you look at people’s faces?”

She nodded. “At my own in the glass. And of course at Dugald’s. Goodness, that last time we took the moksha-medicine together! He started by looking like a hero out of some impossible mythology—of Indians in Iceland, of Vikings in Tibet. And then, without warning, he was Maitreya Buddha. Obviously, self-evidently Maitreya Buddha. Such a radiance! I can still see…”

She broke off, and suddenly Will found himself looking at Incarnate Bereavement with seven swords in her heart. Reading the signs of pain in the dark eyes, about the corners of the full-lipped mouth, he knew that the wound had been very nearly mortal and, with a pang in his own heart, that it was still open, still bleeding. He pressed her hands. There was nothing, of course, that one could say, no words, no consolations of philosophy—only this shared mystery of touch, only this communication from skin to skin of a flowing infinity.

“One slips back so easily,” she said at last. “Much too easily. And much too often.” She drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders.

Before his eyes the face, the whole body, underwent another change. There was strength enough, he could see, in that small frame to make head against any suffering; a will that would be more than a match for all the swords that fate might stab her with. Almost menacing in her determined serenity, a dark Circean goddess had taken the place of the Mater Dolorosa. Memories of that quiet voice talking so irresistibly about the swans and the cathedral, about the clouds and the smooth water, came rushing up. And as he remembered, the face before him seemed to glow with the consciousness of triumph. Power, intrinsic power—he saw the expression of it, he sensed its formidable presence and shrank away from it.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

She looked at him for a moment without speaking; then, gaily smiling, “Don’t be so scared,” she said. “I’m not the female mantis.”

He smiled back at her—smiled back at a laughing girl with a weakness for kisses and the frankness to invite them.

“Thank the Lord!” he said, and the love which had shrunk away in fear came flowing back in a tide of happiness.

“Thank Him for what?”

“For having given you the grace of sensuality.”

She smiled again. “So that cat’s out of the bag.”

“All that power,” he said, “all that admirable, terrible will! You might have been Lucifer. But fortunately, providentially…” He disengaged his right hand and with the tip of its stretched forefinger touched her lips. “The blessed gift of sensuality—it’s been your salvation. Half your salvation,” he qualified, remembering the gruesomely loveless frenzies in the pink alcove, “one of your salvations. Because, of course, there’s this other thing, this knowing who in fact you are.” He was silent for a moment. “Mary with swords in her heart,” he went on, “and Circe, and Ninon de Lenclos and now—who? Somebody like Juliana of Norwich or Catherine of Genoa. Are you really all these people?”

“Plus an idiot,” she assured him. “Plus a rather worried and not very efficient mother. Plus a bit of the little prig and day-dreamer I was as a child. Plus, potentially, the old dying woman who looked out at me from the mirror the last time we took the moksha-medicine together. And then Dugald looked and saw what he would be like in another forty years. Less than a month later,” she added, “he was dead.”

One slips back too easily, one slips back too often…Half in mysterious darkness, half mysteriously glowing with golden light, her face had turned once again into a mask of suffering. Within their shadowy orbits the eyes, he could see, were closed. She had retreated into another time and was alone, somewhere else, with the swords and her open wound. Outside, the cocks were crowing again, and a second mynah bird had begun to call, half a tone higher than the first, for compassion.

“Karuna.”

“Attention. Attention.”

“Karuna.”

Will raised his hand once more and touched her lips.

“Do you hear what they’re saying?”

It was a long time before she answered. Then, raising her hand, she took hold of his extended finger and pressed it hard against her lower lip. “Thank you,” she said, and opened her eyes again.

“Why thank me? You taught me what to do.”

“And now it’s you who have to teach your teacher.”

Like a pair of rival gurus each touting his own brand of spirituality, “Karuna, attention,” shouted the mynah birds; then, as they drowned out one another’s wisdom in overlapping competition, “Runattenshkarattunshon.” Proclaiming that he was the never-impotent owner of all females, the invincible challenger of every spurious pretender to maleness, a cockerel in the next garden shrilly announced his divinity.

A smile broke through the mask of suffering; from her private world of swords and memory, Susila had returned to the present. “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” she said. “How I love him! Just like Tom Krishna when he goes around asking people to feel his muscles. And those preposterous mynah birds, so faithfully repeating the good advice they can’t understand. They’re just as adorable as my little bantam.”

“And what about the other kind of biped?” he asked. “The less adorable variety.”

For all answer she leaned forward, caught him by the forelock and, pulling his head down, kissed him on the tip of his nose. “And now it’s time you moved your legs,” she said. Climbing to her feet, she held out her hand to him. He took it and she pulled him up from his chair.

“Negative crowing and parroted antiwisdom,” she said. “That’s what some of the other kind of bipeds go in for.”

“What’s to guarantee that I shan’t return to my vomit?” he asked.

“You probably will,” she cheerfully assured him. “But you’ll also probably come back again to this.”

There was a spurt of movement at their feet.

Will laughed. “There goes my poor little scrabbling incarnation of evil.”

She took his arm, and together they walked over to the open window. Announcing the near approach of dawn, a little wind fitfully rattled the palm fronds. Below them, rooted invisibly in the moist, acrid-smelling earth, was a hibiscus bush—a wild profusion of bright glossy leaves and vermilion trumpets, evoked from the double darkness of night and overarching trees by a shaft of lamplight from within the room.

“It isn’t possible,” he said incredulously. He was back again with God-the-Fourteenth-of-July.

“It isn’t possible,” she agreed. “But like everything else in the universe, it happens to be a fact. And now that you’ve finally recognized my existence, I’ll give you leave to look to your heart’s content.”

He stood there motionless, gazing, gazing through a timeless succession of mounting intensities and ever-profounder significances. Tears filled his eyes and overflowed at last onto his cheeks. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away.

“I can’t help it,” he apologized.

He couldn’t help it because there was no other way in which he could express his thankfulness. Thankfulness for the privilege of being alive and a witness to this miracle, of being, indeed, more than a witness—a partner in it, an aspect of it. Thankfulness for these gifts of luminous bliss and knowledgeless understanding. Thankfulness for being at once this union with the divine unity and yet this finite creature among other finite creatures.

“Why should one cry when one’s grateful?” he said as he put his handkerchief away. “Goodness knows. But one does.” A memory bubble popped up from the sludge of past reading. “‘Gratitude is heaven itself,’” he quoted. “Pure gibberish! But now I see that Blake was just recording a simple fact. It is heaven itself.”

“And all the more heavenly,” she said, “for being heaven on earth and not heaven in heaven.”

Startlingly, through the crowing and the croaking, through the insect noises and the duet of the rival gurus, came the sound of distant musketry.

“What on earth is that?” she wondered.

“Just the boys playing with fireworks,” he answered gaily.

Susila shook her head. “We don’t encourage those kinds of fireworks. We don’t even possess them.”

From the highway beyond the walls of the compound a roar of heavy vehicles climbing in low gear swelled up louder and louder. Over the noise, a voice at once stentorian and squeaky bellowed incomprehensibly through a loudspeaker.

In their setting of velvet shadow the leaves were like thin shavings of jade and emerald, and from the heart of their gem-bright chaos fantastically sculptured rubies flared out into five-pointed stars. Gratitude, gratitude. His eyes filled again with tears.

Snatches of the shrill bellowing resolved themselves into recognizable words. Against his will, he found himself listening.

“People of Pala,” he heard; then the voice blasted into amplified inarticulateness. Squeak, roar, squeak, and then, “Your Raja speaking…remain calm…welcome your friends from across the Strait…”

Recognition dawned. “It’s Murugan.”

“And he’s with Dipa’s soldiers.”

“Progress,” the uncertain excited voice was saying. “Modern life…” And then, moving on from Sears, Roebuck to the Rani and Koot Hoomi, “Truth,” it squeaked, “values…genuine spirituality…oil.”

“Look,” said Susila, “look! They’re turning into the compound.”

Visible in a gap between two clumps of bamboos, the beams of a procession of headlamps shone for a moment on the left cheek of the great stone Buddha by the lotus pool and passed by, hinted again at the blessed possibility of liberation and again passed by.

“The throne of my father,” bawled the gigantically amplified squeak, “joined to the throne of my mother’s ancestors…Two sister nations marching forward, hand in hand, into the future…To be known henceforth as the United Kingdom of Rendang and Pala…The United Kingdom’s first prime minister, that great political and spiritual leader, Colonel Dipa…”

The procession of headlamps disappeared behind a long range of buildings and the shrill bellowing died down into incoherence. Then the lights re-emerged and once again the voice became articulate.

“Reactionaries,” it was furiously yelling. “Traitors to the principles of the permanent revolution…”

In a tone of horror, “They’re stopping at Dr. Robert’s bungalow,” Susila whispered.

The voice had said its last word, the headlamps and the roaring motors had been turned off. In the dark expectant silence the frogs and the insects kept up their mindless soliloquies, the mynah birds reiterated their good advice. “Attention, Karuna.” Will looked down at his burning bush and saw the Suchness of the world and his own being blazing away with the clear light that was also (how obviously now!) compassion—the clear light that, like everyone else, he had always chosen to be blind to, the compassion to which he had always preferred his tortures, endured or inflicted, in a bargain basement, his squalid solitudes, with the living Babs or the dying Molly in the foreground, with Joe Aldehyde in the middle distance and, in the remoter background, the great world of impersonal forces and proliferating numbers, of collective paranoias, and organized diabolism. And always, everywhere, there would be the yelling or quietly authoritative hypnotists; and in the train of the ruling suggestion givers, always and everywhere, the tribes of buffoons and hucksters, the professional liars, the purveyors of entertaining irrelevances. Conditioned from the cradle, unceasingly distracted, mesmerized systematically, their uniformed victims would go on obediently marching and countermarching, go on, always and everywhere, killing and dying with the perfect docility of trained poodles. And yet in spite of the entirely justified refusal to take yes for an answer, the fact remained and would remain always, remain everywhere—the fact that there was this capacity even in a paranoiac for intelligence, even in a devil worshiper for love; the fact that the ground of all being could be totally manifest in a flowering shrub, a human face; the fact that there was a light and that this light was also compassion.

There was the sound of a single shot; then a burst of shots from an automatic rifle.

Susila covered her face with her hands. She was trembling uncontrollably.

He put an arm round her shoulders and held her close.

The work of a hundred years destroyed in a single night. And yet the fact remained—the fact of the ending of sorrow as well as the fact of sorrow.

The starters screeched; engine after engine roared into action. The headlamps were turned on and, after a minute of noisy maneuvering, the cars started to move slowly back along the road by which they had come.

The loudspeaker brayed out the opening bars of a martial and at the same time lascivious hymn tune, which Will recognized as the national anthem of Rendang. Then the Wurlitzer was switched off, and here once again was Murugan.

“This is your Raja speaking,” the excited voice proclaimed. After which, da capo, there was a repetition of the speech about Progress, Values, Oil, True Spirituality. Abruptly, as before, the procession disappeared from sight and hearing. A minute later it was in view again, with its wobbly countertenor bellowing the praises of the newly united kingdom’s first prime minister.

The procession crawled on and now, from the right this time, the headlamps of the first armored car lit up the serenely smiling face of enlightenment. For an instant only, and then the beam moved on. And here was the Tathagata for the second time, the third, the fourth, the fifth. The last of the cars passed by. Disregarded in the darkness, the fact of enlightenment remained. The roaring of the engines diminished, the squeaking rhetoric lapsed into an inarticulate murmur, and as the intruding noises died away, out came the frogs again, out came the uninterruptable insects, out came the mynah birds.

“Karuna. Karuna.” And a semitone lower, “Attention.”

The End