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﻿The Project Gutenberg EBook of Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley

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Title: Crome Yellow

Author: Aldous Huxley

Posting Date: September 26, 2008 [EBook #1999]
Release Date: December, 1999
Last Updated: November 8, 2016

Language: English

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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CROME YELLOW ***




Produced by Sue Asscher




CROME YELLOW

By Aldous Huxley




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 evase 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, gonfle, goulu: parfum, peau, pervers, potele, pudeur: vertu,
volupte.

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 facade 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 recognised 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 cork-screwed
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-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 mono-syllabic. 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 race-course 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-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, moonlike 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 school-fellow 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
Provencal 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 to 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 Blackfellow 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 superieure.”

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 superieure?” 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! Oh 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 of 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 to-day 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 onto the seething mass of elan
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 or
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 so 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 emphasised 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 unappetising 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 Nestle’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 little 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 hypnotise 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
hypnotised. I lost consciousness like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“When I came to, I found that it was past midnight, 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 canalise 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 to-day,” he said, turning over
the pages. “Just dropped off into a trance in the 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 Ferdinando,
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 ground-work 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 civilised 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 civilised than
Denis.” Mary’s pronunciation of “civilised” 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 civilised, and they, like the first-rate works of art, were mostly
French. “Civilisation 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 to-night,” 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 frantic--coat, waistcoat,
trousers, boots--so that every clergyman should present to the world
a smooth facade, 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 pipe-clay 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, standardise 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 over-mantel,
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 was 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 realise 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
evangelisation 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 recognised that ‘the drying up of the
waters of the great river Euphrates,’ mentioned in the sixteenth chapter
of Revelation, 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 Revelation 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 symbolised
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 to-day 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.
To-day 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 Revelation,
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 realise
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 to-morrow, 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 look 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.



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 on 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 arm-chair 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 agonising 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-voiced 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, civilised, 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. Civilised 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 Counsels, 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, Boethius’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 modernisation, 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
his 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
practise--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
new-fangled 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, Drinkwater, 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 attempts 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 close beyond the farm-yard. 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 formalised 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, externalised 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 recognisable as such, but even aggressively
in drawing. Trompe-l’oeil--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’oeil 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 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 or 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.

“To-day,” he said, exhibiting it with a certain solemnity, “to-day 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 at 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 the 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. Realising, 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
his 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 by 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 recognise 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. ‘To-day 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 had 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, Sir 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 recognisable 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. ‘To-morrow,’ 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. To-morrow it will be our turn.’ They were
silent for a time.

“At last Filomena said, ‘I do not want to see to-morrow.’

“‘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 the 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 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. Lempriere
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-a-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 Thibet organising 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 civilised 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 struck 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 Brantome,” 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 characterised 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
sterilised 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
excitement. Her cheeks were the cheeks of a great ripe peach.

“Indeed,” Mr. Scogan continued, “it seems to me one of few permanently
and everlastingly 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
flower-pot, 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 forever 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 six 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
Caesarean 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.
To-day 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 onto 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 bergere...”

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 deplaire 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 donne moutons et chien

               Pour un baiser que le volage

               À 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 decolletage
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 anniversary 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 to-morrow,” 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
immediately 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
organised 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
sheepcotes. 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 were 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 he turned over the pages.

“I can’t decide what episode to read you to-night,” 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 Napoleon, cause already of such infinite
mischief, was due, though perhaps indirectly, the untimely and 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 on 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 pince-nez. “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 protested 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 suppose
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 expense 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
crab-like 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 centralised, 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 band 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 recognisably
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. To-day in Somerset, to-morrow 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 visitor’s 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 visitor’s 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
have 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, palms 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
derivations, 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-Careme 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 could
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 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 windtreibend.


                   ‘Plus ne suis ce que j’ai ete

                   Et ne le saurai jamais etre.’

It is a realisation 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 realise 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.
Mallarmé’s 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 Hérédia,’

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 echelles 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 echelles 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 you only 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
externalising your own emotions? That’s what you men are always doing;
it’s so barbarously naive. 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
emphasised 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 thought 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 civilisation 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 wants 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 canalised 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 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 know
how to attain 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 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 evangelisation. 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 commonality 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 seedheads 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 than 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 recognisably 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, recognisable 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 symbolised. They
represented all the vast conscious world of men outside himself; they
symbolised 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
pudic 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 facade 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 donne 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 cognisance of the existence of other universes
besides himself.”

He had contrived this highly abstract generalisation 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, generalising 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 realise 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 realise,” 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, cocoanut 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 to-morrow. 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 Wimbush. “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 try 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. To-day, 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 Tatooed 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 in 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 skirt 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
tentpole, 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 broadsheets
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 armed 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 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 had
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
Rubens.

“...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 recognised 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, tinny 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 sideboard--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 disorganised, passoverish
meal that took the place of dinner on 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 drainpipes,” 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. The fact is,
they don’t very much interest me. They’re 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 to-day, 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. To-morrow 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 endless 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 to-night 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 trap-door 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 went 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 sideboard 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 am 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 sinks 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.





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