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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Limbo, by Aldous Huxley
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: Limbo
-
-Author: Aldous Huxley
-
-Release Date: June 11, 2017 [EBook #54895]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIMBO ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Paul Haxo from page images generously made
-available by the University of Toronto and the Internet
-Archive.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-LIMBO
-
-
-
-BY THE SAME AUTHOR
-LEDA; AND OTHER POEMS
-
-
-
-LIMBO
-BY ALDOUS HUXLEY
-
-LONDON
-CHATTO & WINDUS
-1920
-
-
-
-_All rights reserved_
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-                                               PAGE
-
-FARCICAL HISTORY OF RICHARD GREENOW               1
-
-HAPPILY EVER AFTER                              116
-
-EUPOMPUS GAVE SPLENDOUR TO ART BY NUMBERS       192
-
-HAPPY FAMILIES                                  211
-
-CYNTHIA                                         245
-
-THE BOOKSHOP                                    259
-
-THE DEATH OF LULLY                              269
-
-
-
-LIMBO
-
-FARCICAL HISTORY OF RICHARD GREENOW
-
-I
-
-THE most sumptuous present that Millicent received on her seventh
-birthday was a doll's house. "With love to darling little Mill from
-Aunty Loo." Aunt Loo was immensely rich, and the doll's house was
-almost as grandiose and massive as herself.
-
-It was divided into four rooms, each papered in a different colour and
-each furnished as was fitting: beds and washstands and wardrobes in
-the upstair rooms, arm-chairs and artificial plants below. "Replete
-with every modern convenience; sumptuous appointments." There was even
-a cold collation ready spread on the dining-room table--two scarlet
-lobsters on a dish, and a ham that had been sliced into just enough to
-reveal an internal complexion of the loveliest pink and white. One
-might go on talking about the doll's house for ever, it was so
-beautiful. Such, at any rate, was the opinion of Millicent's brother
-Dick. He would spend hours opening and shutting the front door,
-peeping through the windows, arranging and rearranging the furniture.
-As for Millicent, the gorgeous present left her cold. She had been
-hoping--and, what is more, praying, fervently, every night for a
-month--that Aunty Loo would give her a toy sewing-machine (one of the
-kind that works, though) for her birthday.
-
-She was bitterly disappointed when the doll's house came instead. But
-she bore it all stoically and managed to be wonderfully polite to
-Aunty Loo about the whole affair. She never looked at the doll's
-house: it simply didn't interest her.
-
-Dick had already been at a preparatory school for a couple of terms.
-Mr. Killigrew, the headmaster, thought him a promising boy. "Has quite
-a remarkable aptitude for mathematics," he wrote in his report. "He
-has started Algebra this term and shows a"--"quite remarkable"
-scratched out (the language of reports is apt to be somewhat
-limited)--"a very unusual grasp of the subject." Mr. Killigrew didn't
-know that his pupil also took an interest in dolls: if he had, he
-would have gibed at Dick as unmercifully and in nearly the same terms
-as Dick's fellow-schoolboys--for shepherds grow to resemble their
-sheep and pedagogues their childish charges. But of course Dick would
-never have dreamt of telling anyone at school about it. He was chary
-of letting even the people at home divine his weakness, and when
-anyone came into the room where the doll's house was, he would put his
-hands in his pockets and stroll out, whistling the tune of, "There is
-a Happy Land far, far away, where they have Ham and Eggs seven times a
-day," as though he had merely stepped in to have a look at the beastly
-thing--just to give it a kick.
-
-When he wasn't playing with the doll's house, Dick spent his holiday
-time in reading, largely, devouringly. No length or
-incomprehensibility could put him off; he had swallowed down _Robert
-Elsmere_ in the three-volume edition at the age of eight. When he
-wasn't reading he used to sit and think about Things in General and
-Nothing in Particular; in fact, as Millicent reproachfully put it, he
-just mooned about. Millicent, on the other hand, was always busily
-doing something: weeding in the garden, or hoeing, or fruit-picking
-(she could be trusted not to eat more than the recognized tariff--one
-in twenty raspberries or one in forty plums); helping Kate in the
-kitchen; knitting mufflers for those beings known vaguely as The
-Cripples, while her mother read aloud in the evenings before bedtime.
-She disapproved of Dick's mooning, but Dick mooned all the same.
-
-When Dick was twelve and a half he knew enough about mathematics and
-history and the dead languages to realize that his dear parents were
-profoundly ignorant and uncultured. But, what was more pleasing to the
-dear parents, he knew enough to win a scholarship at Ęsop College,
-which is one of our Greatest Public Schools.
-
-If this were a Public School story, I should record the fact that,
-while at Ęsop, Dick swore, lied, blasphemed, repeated dirty stories,
-read the articles in _John Bull_ about brothels disguised as
-nursing-homes and satyrs disguised as curates; that he regarded his
-masters, with very few exceptions, as fools, not even always
-well-meaning. And so on. All which would be quite true, but beside the
-point. For this is not one of the conventional studies of those clever
-young men who discover Atheism and Art at School, Socialism at the
-University, and, passing through the inevitable stage of Sex and
-Syphilis after taking their B.A., turn into maturely brilliant
-novelists at the age of twenty-five. I prefer, therefore, to pass over
-the minor incidents of a difficult pubescence, touching only on those
-points which seem to throw a light on the future career of our hero.
-
-It is possible for those who desire it--incredible as the thing may
-appear--to learn something at Ęsop College. Dick even learnt a great
-deal. From the beginning he was the young Benjamin of his mathematical
-tutor, Mr. Skewbauld, a man of great abilities in his own art, and
-who, though wholly incapable of keeping a form in order, could make
-his private tuition a source of much profit to a mathematically minded
-boy. Mr. Skewbauld's house was the worst in Ęsop: Dick described it as
-a mixture between a ghetto and a home for the mentally deficient, and
-when he read in Sir Thomas Browne that it was a Vulgar Error to
-suppose that Jews stink, he wrote a letter to the _School Magazine_
-exploding that famous doctor as a quack and a charlatan, whose
-statements ran counter to the manifest facts of everyday life in Mr.
-Skewbauld's house. It may seem surprising that Dick should have read
-Sir Thomas Browne at all. But he was more than a mere mathematician.
-He filled the ample leisure, which is Ęsop's most precious gift to
-those of its Alumni who know how to use it, with much and varied
-reading in history, in literature, in physical science, and in more
-than one foreign language. Dick was something of a prodigy.
-
-"Greenow's an intellectual," was Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger's
-contemptuous verdict. "I have the misfortune to have two or three
-intellectuals in my house. They're all of them friends of his. I think
-he's a Bad Influence in the School." Copthorne-Slazenger regarded
-himself as the perfect example of _mens sana in corpore sano_, the
-soul of an English gentleman in the body of a Greek god. Unfortunately
-his legs were rather too short and his lower lip was underhung like a
-salmon's.
-
-Dick had, indeed, collected about him a band of kindred spirits. There
-was Partington, who specialized in history; Gay, who had read all the
-classical writings of the golden age and was engaged in the study of
-medięval Latin; Fletton, who was fantastically clever and had brought
-the art of being idle to a pitch never previously reached in the
-annals of Ęsop. These were his chief friends, and a queer-looking
-group they made--Dick, small and dark and nervous; Partington, all
-roundness, and whose spectacles were two moons in a moonface; Gay,
-with the stiff walk of a little old man; and Fletton, who looked like
-nobody so much as Mr. Jingle, tall and thin with a twisted, comical
-face.
-
-"An ugly skulking crew," Copthorne-Slazenger, conscious of his own
-Olympian splendour, would say as he saw them pass.
-
-With these faithful friends Dick should have been--and indeed for the
-most part was--very happy. Between them they mustered up a great stock
-of knowledge; they could discuss every subject under the sun. They
-were a liberal education and an amusement to one another. There were
-times, however, when Dick was filled with a vague, but acute,
-discontent. He wanted something which his friends could not give him;
-but what, but what? The discontent rankled under the surface, like a
-suppressed measles. It was Lord Francis Quarles who brought it out and
-made the symptoms manifest.
-
-Francis Quarles was a superb creature, with the curly forehead of a
-bull and the face and limbs of a Gręco-Roman statue. It was a sight
-worth seeing when he looked down through half-shut eyelids, in his
-usual attitude of sleepy arrogance, on the world about him. He was in
-effect what Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger imagined himself to be, and he
-shared that gentleman's dislike for Dick and his friends. "Yellow
-little atheists," he called them. He always stood up for God and the
-Church of England; they were essential adjuncts to the aristocracy.
-God, indeed, was almost a member of the Family; lack of belief in Him
-amounted to a personal insult to the name of Quarles.
-
-It was half-way through the summer term, when Dick was sixteen, on one
-of those days of brilliant sunshine and cloudless blue, when the sight
-of beautiful and ancient buildings is peculiarly poignant. Their age
-and quiet stand out in melancholy contrast against the radiant life of
-the summer; and at Ęsop the boys go laughing under their antique
-shadow; "Little victims"--you feel how right Gray was. Dick was idly
-strolling across the quadrangle, engaged in merely observing the
-beauty about him--the golden-grey chapel, with its deep geometrical
-shadows between the buttresses, the comely rose-coloured shapes of the
-brick-built Tudor buildings, the weathercocks glittering in the sun,
-the wheeling flurries of pigeons. His old discontent had seized on him
-again, and to-day in the presence of all this beauty it had become
-almost unbearable. All at once, out of the mouth of one of the dark
-little tunnelled doors pierced in the flanks of the sleeping building,
-a figure emerged into the light. It was Francis Quarles, clad in white
-flannels and the radiance of the sunshine. He appeared like a
-revelation, bright, beautiful, and sudden, before Dick's eyes. A
-violent emotion seized him; his heart leapt, his bowels were moved
-within him; he felt a little sick and faint--he had fallen in love.
-
-Francis passed by without deigning to notice him. His head was high,
-his eyes drowsy under their drooping lids. He was gone, and for Dick
-all the light was out, the beloved quadrangle was a prison-yard, the
-pigeons a loathsome flock of carrion eaters. Gay and Partington came
-up behind him with shouts of invitation. Dick walked rudely away. God!
-how he hated them and their wretched, silly talk and their yellow,
-ugly faces.
-
-The weeks that followed were full of strangeness. For the first time
-in his life Dick took to writing poetry. There was one sonnet which
-began:
-
-     Is it a vision or a waking dream?
-     Or is it truly Apollo that I see,
-     Come from his sylvan haunts in Arcady
-         { laugh and loiter
-     To  {
-         { sing and saunter by an English stream. . . .
-
-He kept on repeating the words to himself, "Sylvan haunts in Arcady,"
-"laugh and loiter" (after much thought he had adopted that as more
-liquidly melodious than "sing and saunter"). How beautiful they
-sounded!--as beautiful as Keats--more beautiful, for they were his
-own.
-
-He avoided the company of Gay and Fletton and Partington; they had
-become odious to him, and their conversation, when he could bring
-himself to listen to it, was, somehow, almost incomprehensible. He
-would sit for hours alone in his study; not working--for he could not
-understand the mathematical problems on which he had been engaged
-before the fateful day in the quadrangle--but reading novels and the
-poetry of Mrs. Browning, and at intervals writing something rather
-ecstatic of his own. After a long preparatory screwing up of his
-courage, he dared at last to send a fag with a note to Francis, asking
-him to tea; and when Francis rather frigidly refused, he actually
-burst into tears. He had not cried like that since he was a child.
-
-He became suddenly very religious. He would spend an hour on his knees
-every night, praying, praying with frenzy. He mortified the flesh with
-fasting and watching. He even went so far as to flagellate himself--or
-at least tried to; for it is very difficult to flagellate yourself
-adequately with a cane in a room so small that any violent gesture
-imperils the bric-ą-brac. He would pass half the night stark naked, in
-absurd postures, trying to hurt himself. And then, after the
-dolorously pleasant process of self-maceration was over, he used to
-lean out of the window and listen to the murmurs of the night and fill
-his spirit with the warm velvet darkness of midsummer.
-Copthorne-Slazenger, coming back by the late train from town one
-night, happened to see his moon-pale face hanging out of window and
-was delighted to be able to give him two hundred Greek lines to remind
-him that even a member of the Sixth Form requires sleep sometimes.
-
-The fit lasted three weeks. "I can't think what's the matter with you,
-Greenow," complained Mr. Skewbauld snufflingly. "You seem incapable or
-unwilling to do anything at all. I suspect the cause is constipation.
-If only everyone would take a little paraffin every night before going
-to bed! . . ." Mr. Skewbauld's self-imposed mission in life
-was the propagation of the paraffin habit. It was the universal
-panacea--the cure for every ill.
-
-His friends of before the crisis shook their heads and could only
-suppose him mad. And then the fit ended as suddenly as it had begun.
-
-It happened at a dinner-party given by the Cravisters. Dr. Cravister
-was the Headmaster of Ęsop--a good, gentle, learned old man, with
-snow-white hair and a saintly face which the spirit of comic irony had
-embellished with a nose that might, so red and bulbous it was, have
-been borrowed from the properties of a music-hall funny man. And then
-there was Mrs. Cravister, large and stately as a galleon with all
-sails set. Those who met her for the first time might be awed by the
-dignity of what an Elizabethan would have called her "swelling port."
-But those who knew her well went in terror of the fantastic spirit
-which lurked behind the outward majesty. They were afraid of what that
-richly modulated voice of hers might utter. It was not merely that she
-was malicious--and she had a gift of ever-ready irony; no, what was
-alarming in all her conversation was the element of the unexpected.
-With most people one feels comfortably secure that they will always
-say the obvious and ordinary things; with Mrs. Cravister, never. The
-best one could do was to be on guard and to try and look, when she
-made a more than usually characteristic remark, less of a bewildered
-fool than one felt.
-
-Mrs. Cravister received her guests--they were all of them boys--with
-stately courtesy. They found it pleasant to be taken so seriously, to
-be treated as perfectly grown men; but at the same time, they always
-had with Mrs. Cravister a faint uncomfortable suspicion that all her
-politeness was an irony so exquisite as to be practically
-undistinguishable from ingenuousness.
-
-"Good evening, Mr. Gay," she said, holding out her hand and shutting
-her eyes; it was one of her disconcerting habits, this shutting of the
-eyes. "What a pleasure it will be to hear you talking to us again
-about eschatology."
-
-Gay, who had never talked about eschatology and did not know the
-meaning of the word, smiled a little dimly and made a protesting
-noise.
-
-"Eschatology? What a charming subject!" The fluty voice belonged to
-Henry Cravister, the Headmaster's son, a man of about forty who worked
-in the British Museum. He was almost too cultured, too erudite.
-
-"But I don't know anything about it," said Gay desperately.
-
-"Spare us your modesty," Henry Cravister protested.
-
-His mother shook hands with the other guests, putting some at their
-ease with a charming phrase and embarrassing others by saying
-something baffling and unexpected that would have dismayed even the
-hardiest diner-out, much more a schoolboy tremblingly on his good
-behaviour. At the tail end of the group of boys stood Dick and Francis
-Quarles. Mrs. Cravister slowly raised her heavy waxen eyelids and
-regarded them a moment in silence.
-
-"The Gręco-Roman and the Gothic side by side!" she exclaimed. "Lord
-Francis is something in the Vatican, a rather late piece of work; and
-Mr. Greenow is a little gargoyle from the roof of Notre Dame de Paris.
-Two epochs of art--how clearly one sees the difference. And my
-husband, I always think, is purely Malayan in design--purely Malayan,"
-she repeated as she shook hands with the two boys.
-
-Dick blushed to the roots of his hair, but Francis' impassive
-arrogance remained unmoved. Dick stole a glance in his direction, and
-at the sight of his calm face he felt a new wave of adoring admiration
-sweeping through him.
-
-The company was assembled and complete, Mrs. Cravister looked round
-the room and remarking, "We won't wait for Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger,"
-sailed majestically in the direction of the door. She particularly
-disliked this member of her husband's staff, and lost no opportunity
-of being rude to him. Thus, where an ordinary hostess might have said,
-"Shall we come in to dinner?" Mrs. Cravister employed the formula, "We
-won't wait for Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger"; and a guest unacquainted with
-Mrs. Cravister's habits would be surprised on entering the dining-room
-to find that all the seats at the table were filled, and that the meal
-proceeded smoothly without a single further reference to the missing
-Copthorne, who never turned up at all, for the good reason that he had
-never been invited.
-
-Dinner began a little nervously and uncomfortably. At one end of the
-table the Headmaster was telling anecdotes of Ęsop in the sixties, at
-which the boys in his neighbourhood laughed with a violent nervous
-insincerity. Henry Cravister, still talking about eschatology, was
-quoting from Sidonius Apollinarius and Commodianus of Gaza. Mrs.
-Cravister, who had been engaged in a long colloquy with the butler,
-suddenly turned on Dick with the remark, "And so you have a deep,
-passionate fondness for cats," as though they had been intimately
-discussing the subject for the last hour. Dick had enough presence of
-mind to say that, yes, he did like cats--all except those Manx ones
-that had no tails.
-
-"No tails," Mrs. Cravister repeated--"no tails. Like men. How
-symbolical everything is!"
-
-Francis Quarles was sitting opposite him, so that Dick had ample
-opportunity to look at his idol. How perfectly he did everything, down
-to eating his soup! The first lines of a new poem began to buzz in
-Dick's head:
-
-    "All, all I lay at thy proud marble feet--
-     My heart, my love and all my future days.
-     Upon thy brow for ever let me gaze,
-     For ever touch thy hair: oh (something) sweet . . ."
-
-Would he be able to find enough rhymes to make it into a sonnet? Mrs.
-Cravister, who had been leaning back in her chair for the last few
-minutes in a state of exhausted abstraction, opened her eyes and said
-to nobody in particular:
-
-"Ah, how I envy the calm of those Chinese dynasties!"
-
-"Which Chinese dynasties?" a well-meaning youth inquired.
-
-"Any Chinese dynasty, the more remote the better. Henry, tell us the
-names of some Chinese dynasties."
-
-In obedience to his mother, Henry delivered a brief disquisition on
-the history of politics, art, and letters in the Far East.
-
-The Headmaster continued his reminiscences.
-
-An angel of silence passed. The boys, whose shyness had begun to wear
-off, became suddenly and painfully conscious of hearing themselves
-eating. Mrs. Cravister saved the situation.
-
-"Lord Francis knows all about birds," she said in her most thrilling
-voice. "Perhaps he can tell us why it is the unhappy fate of the
-carrion crow to mate for life."
-
-Conversation again became general. Dick was still thinking about his
-sonnet. Oh, these rhymes!--praise, bays, roundelays, amaze: greet,
-bleat, defeat, beat, paraclete. . . .
-
-       ". . . to sing the praise
-     In anthems high and solemn roundelays
-     Of Holy Father, Son and Paraclete."
-
-That was good--damned good; but it hardly seemed to fit in with the
-first quatrain. It would do for one of his religious poems, though. He
-had written a lot of sacred verse lately.
-
-Then suddenly, cutting across his ecstatic thoughts, came the sound of
-Henry Cravister's reedy voice.
-
-"But I always find Pater's style so _coarse_," it said.
-
-Something explosive took place in Dick's head. It often happens when
-one blows one's nose that some passage in the labyrinth connecting
-ears and nose and throat is momentarily blocked, and one becomes deaf
-and strangely dizzy. Then, suddenly, the mucous bubble bursts, sound
-rushes back to the brain, the head feels clear and stable once more.
-It was something like this, but transposed into terms of the spirit,
-that seemed now to have happened to Dick.
-
-It was as though some mysterious obstruction in his brain, which had
-dammed up and diverted his faculties from their normal course during
-the past three weeks, had been on a sudden overthrown. His life seemed
-to be flowing once more along familiar channels.
-
-He was himself again.
-
-"But I always find Pater's style so _coarse_."
-
-These few words of solemn foolery were the spell which had somehow
-performed the miracle. It was just the sort of remark he might have
-made three weeks ago, before the crisis. For a moment, indeed, he
-almost thought it was he himself who had spoken; his own authentic
-voice, carried across the separating gulf of days, had woken him again
-to life!
-
-He looked at Francis Quarles. Why, the fellow was nothing but a great
-prize ox, a monstrous animal. "There was a Lady loved a Swine. Honey,
-said she . . ." It was ignoble, it was ridiculous. He could have
-hidden his face in his hands for pure shame; shame tingled through his
-body. Goodness, how grotesquely he had behaved!
-
-He leaned across and began talking to Henry Cravister about Pater and
-style and books in general. Cravister was amazed at the maturity of
-the boy's mind; for he possessed to a remarkable degree that critical
-faculty which in the vast majority of boys is--and from their lack of
-experience must be--wholly lacking.
-
-"You must come and see me some time when you're in London," Henry
-Cravister said to him when the time came for the boys to get back to
-their houses. Dick was flattered; he had not said that to any of the
-others. He walked home with Gay, laughing and talking quite in his old
-fashion. Gay marvelled at the change in his companion; strange,
-inexplicable fellow! but it was pleasant to have him back again, to
-repossess the lost friend. Arrived in his room, Dick sat down to
-attack the last set of mathematical problems that had been set him.
-Three hours ago they had appeared utterly incomprehensible; now he
-understood them perfectly. His mind was like a giant refreshed,
-delighting in its strength.
-
-Next day Mr. Skewbauld congratulated him on his answers.
-
-"You seem quite to have recovered your old form, Greenow," he said.
-"Did you take my advice? Paraffin regularly . . ."
-
-Looking back on the events of the last weeks, Dick was disquieted. Mr.
-Skewbauld might be wrong in recommending paraffin, but he was surely
-right in supposing that something was the matter and required a
-remedy. What could it be? He felt so well; but that, of course, proved
-nothing. He began doing Müller's exercises, and he bought a jar of
-malt extract and a bottle of hypophosphites. After much consultation
-of medical handbooks and the encyclopędia, he came to the conclusion
-that he was suffering from anęmia of the brain; and for some time one
-fixed idea haunted him: Suppose the blood completely ceased to flow to
-his brain, suppose he were to fall down suddenly dead or, worse,
-become utterly and hopelessly paralysed. . . . Happily the
-distractions of Ęsop in the summer term were sufficiently numerous and
-delightful to divert his mind from this gloomy brooding, and he felt
-so well and in such high spirits that it was impossible to go on
-seriously believing that he was at death's door. Still, whenever he
-thought of the events of those strange weeks he was troubled. He did
-not like being confronted by problems which he could not solve. During
-the rest of his stay at school he was troubled by no more than the
-merest velleities of a relapse. A fit of moon-gazing and incapacity to
-understand the higher mathematics had threatened him one time when he
-was working rather too strenuously for a scholarship. But a couple of
-days' complete rest had staved off the peril. There had been rather a
-painful scene, too, at Dick's last School Concert. Oh, those Ęsop
-concerts! Musically speaking, of course, they are deplorable; but how
-rich from all other points of view than the merely ęsthetic! The
-supreme moment arrives at the very end when three of the most eminent
-and popular of those about to leave mount the platform together and
-sing the famous "Ęsop, Farewell." Greatest of school songs! The words
-are not much, but the tune, which goes swooning along in three-four
-time, is perhaps the masterpiece of the late organist, Dr. Pilch.
-
-Dick was leaving, but he was not a sufficiently heroic figure to have
-been asked to sing, "Ęsop, Farewell." He was simply a member of the
-audience, and one, moreover, who had come to the concert in a critical
-and mocking spirit. For, as he had an ear for music, it was impossible
-for him to take the concert very seriously. The choir had clamorously
-re-crucified the Messiah; the soloists had all done their worst; and
-now it was time for "Ęsop, Farewell." The heroes climbed on to the
-stage. They were three demi-gods, but Francis Quarles was the most
-splendid of the group as he stood there with head thrown back, eyes
-almost closed, calm and apparently unconscious of the crowd that
-seethed, actually and metaphorically, beneath him. He was wearing an
-enormous pink orchid in the buttonhole of his evening coat; his
-shirt-front twinkled with diamond studs; the buttons of his waistcoat
-were of fine gold. At the sight of him, Dick felt his heart beating
-violently; he was not, he painfully realized, master of himself.
-
-The music struck up--Dum, dum, dumdidi, dumdidi; dum, dum, dum, and so
-on. So like the _Merry Widow._ In two days' time he would have left
-Ęsop for ever. The prospect had never affected him very intensely. He
-had enjoyed himself at school, but he had never, like so many
-Ęsopians, fallen in love with the place. It remained for him an
-institution; for others it was almost an adored person. But to-night
-his spirit, rocked on a treacly ocean of dominant sevenths, succumbed
-utterly to the sweet sorrow of parting. And there on the platform
-stood Francis. Oh, how radiantly beautiful! And when he began, in his
-rich tenor, the first verse of the Valedictory:
-
-    "Farewell, Mother Ęsop,
-       Our childhood's home!
-     Our spirit is with thee,
-       Though far we roam . . ."
-
-he found himself hysterically sobbing.
-
-
-
-II
-
-CANTELOUP COLLEGE is perhaps the most frightful building in
-Oxford--and to those who know their Oxford well this will mean not a
-little. Up till the middle of last century Canteloup possessed two
-quadrangles of fifteenth-century buildings, unimpressive and petty,
-like so much of College architecture, but at least quiet, unassuming,
-decent. After the accession of Victoria the College began to grow in
-numbers, wealth, and pride. The old buildings were too small and
-unpretentious for what had now become a Great College. In the summer
-of 1867 a great madness fell upon the Master and Fellows. They hired a
-most distinguished architect, bred up in the school of Ruskin, who
-incontinently razed all the existing buildings to the ground and
-erected in their stead a vast pile in the approved Mauro-Venetian
-Gothic of the period. The New Buildings contained a great number of
-rooms, each served by a separate and almost perpendicular staircase;
-and if nearly half of them were so dark as to make it necessary to
-light them artificially for all but three hours out of the
-twenty-four, this slight defect was wholly outweighed by the striking
-beauty, from outside, of the Neo-Byzantine loopholes by which they
-were, euphemistically, "lighted."
-
-Prospects in Canteloup may not please; but man, on the other hand,
-tends to be less vile there than in many other places. There is an
-equal profusion at Canteloup of Firsts and Blues; there are Union
-orators of every shade of opinion and young men so languidly well bred
-as to take no interest in politics of any kind; there are drinkers of
-cocoa and drinkers of champagne. Canteloup is a microcosm, a whole
-world in miniature; and whatever your temperament and habits may be,
-whether you wish to drink, or row, or work, or hunt, Canteloup will
-provide you with congenial companions and a spiritual home.
-
-Lack of athletic distinction had prevented Dick from being, at Ęsop, a
-hero or anything like one. At Canteloup, in a less barbarically
-ordered state of society, things were different. His rooms in the
-Venetian gazebo over the North Gate became the meeting-place of all
-that was most intellectually distinguished in Canteloup and the
-University at large. He had had his sitting-room austerely upholstered
-and papered in grey. A large white Chinese figure of the best period
-stood pedestalled in one corner, and on the walls there hung a few
-uncompromisingly good drawings and lithographs by modern artists.
-Fletton, who had accompanied Dick from Ęsop to Canteloup, called it
-the "cerebral chamber"; and with its prevailing tone of brain-coloured
-grey and the rather dry intellectual taste of its decorations it
-deserved the name.
-
-To-night the cerebral chamber had been crammed. The Canteloup branch
-of the Fabian Society, under Dick's presidency, had been holding a
-meeting. "Art in the Socialist State" was what they had been
-discussing. And now the meeting had broken up, leaving nothing but
-three empty jugs that had once contained mulled claret and a general
-air of untidiness to testify to its having taken place at all. Dick
-stood leaning an elbow on the mantelpiece and absent-mindedly kicking,
-to the great detriment of his pumps, at the expiring red embers in the
-grate. From the depths of a huge and cavernous arm-chair, Fletton,
-pipe in mouth, fumed like a sleepy volcano.
-
-"I liked the way, Dick," he said, with a laugh--"the way you went for
-the Arty-Crafties. You utterly destroyed them."
-
-"I merely pointed out, what is sufficiently obvious, that crafts are
-not art, nor anything like it, that's all." Dick snapped out the
-words. He was nervous and excited, and his body felt as though it were
-full of compressed springs ready to jump at the most imponderable
-touch. He was always like that after making a speech.
-
-"You did it very effectively," said Fletton. There was a silence
-between the two young men.
-
-A noise like the throaty yelling of savages in rut came wafting up
-from the quadrangle on which the windows of the cerebral chamber
-opened. Dick started; all the springs within him had gone off at
-once--a thousand simultaneous Jack-in-the-boxes.
-
-"It's only Francis Quarles' dinner-party becoming vocal," Fletton
-explained. "Blind mouths, as Milton would call them."
-
-Dick began restlessly pacing up and down the room. When Fletton spoke
-to him, he did not reply or, at best, gave utterance to a monosyllable
-or a grunt.
-
-"My dear Dick," said the other at last, "you're not very good company
-to-night," and heaving himself up from the arm-chair, Fletton went
-shuffling in his loose, heelless slippers towards the door. "I'm going
-to bed."
-
-Dick paused in his lion-like prowling to listen to the receding sound
-of feet on the stairs. All was silent now: Gott sei dank. He went into
-his bedroom. It was there that he kept his piano, for it was a piece
-of furniture too smugly black and polished to have a place in the
-cerebral chamber. He had been thirsting after his piano all the time
-Fletton was sitting there, damn him! He drew up a chair and began to
-play over and over a certain series of chords. With his left hand he
-struck an octave G in the base, while his right dwelt lovingly on F,
-B, and E. A luscious chord, beloved by Mendelssohn--a chord in which
-the native richness of the dominant seventh is made more rich, more
-piercing sweet by the addition of a divine discord. G, F, B, and E--he
-let the notes hang tremulously on the silence, savoured to the full
-their angelic overtones; then, when the sound of the chord had almost
-died away, he let it droop reluctantly through D to the simple,
-triumphal beauty of C natural--the diapason closing full in what was
-for Dick a wholly ineffable emotion.
-
-He repeated that dying fall again and again, perhaps twenty times.
-Then, when he was satiated with its deliciousness, he rose from the
-piano and opening the lowest drawer of the wardrobe pulled out from
-under his evening clothes a large portfolio. He undid the strings; it
-was full of photogravure reproductions from various Old Masters. There
-was an almost complete set of Greuze's works, several of the most
-striking Ary Scheffers, some Alma Tadema, some Leighton, photographs
-of sculpture by Torwaldsen and Canova, Boecklin's "Island of the
-Dead," religious pieces by Holman Hunt, and a large packet of
-miscellaneous pictures from the Paris Salons of the last forty years.
-He took them into the cerebral chamber where the light was better, and
-began to study them, lovingly, one by one. The Cézanne lithograph, the
-three admirable etchings by Van Gogh, the little Picasso looked on,
-unmoved, from the walls.
-
-It was three o'clock before Dick got to bed. He was stiff and cold,
-but full of the satisfaction of having accomplished something. And,
-indeed, he had cause to be satisfied; for he had written the first
-four thousand words of a novel, a chapter and a half of _Heartsease
-Fitzroy: the Story of a Young Girl_.
-
-Next morning Dick looked at what he had written overnight, and was
-alarmed. He had never produced anything quite like this since the days
-of the Quarles incident at Ęsop. A relapse? He wondered. Not a serious
-one in any case; for this morning he felt himself in full possession
-of all his ordinary faculties. He must have got overtired speaking to
-the Fabians in the evening. He looked at his manuscript again, and
-read: "'Daddy, do the little girl angels in heaven have toys and
-kittens and teddy-bears?'
-
-"'I don't know,' said Sir Christopher gently. 'Why does my little one
-ask?'
-
-"'Because, daddy," said the child--'because I think that soon I too
-may be a little angel, and I should so like to have my teddy-bear with
-me in heaven.'
-
-"Sir Christopher clasped her to his breast. How frail she was, how
-ethereal, how nearly an angel already! Would she have her teddy-bear
-in heaven? The childish question rang in his ears. Great, strong man
-though he was, he was weeping. His tears fell in a rain upon her
-auburn curls.
-
-"'Tell me, daddy,' she insisted, 'will dearest God allow me my
-teddy-bear?'
-
-"'My child,' he sobbed, 'my child . . .'"
-
-The blushes mounted hot to his cheeks; he turned away his head in
-horror. He would really have to look after himself for a bit, go to
-bed early, take exercise, not do much work. This sort of thing
-couldn't be allowed to go on.
-
-He went to bed at half-past nine that night, and woke up the following
-morning to find that he had added a dozen or more closely written
-pages to his original manuscript during the night. He supposed he must
-have written them in his sleep. It was all very disquieting. The days
-passed by; every morning a fresh instalment was added to the rapidly
-growing bulk of _Heartsease Fitzroy_. It was as though some goblin,
-some Lob-lie-by-the-Fire, came each night to perform the appointed
-task, vanishing before the morning. In a little while Dick's alarm
-wore off; during the day he was perfectly well; his mind functioned
-with marvellous efficiency. It really didn't seem to matter what he
-did in his sleep provided he was all right in his waking hours. He
-almost forgot about _Heartsease_, and was only reminded of her
-existence when by chance he opened the drawer in which the steadily
-growing pile of manuscript reposed.
-
-In five weeks _Heartsease Fitzroy_ was finished. Dick made a parcel of
-the manuscript and sent it to a literary agent. He had no hopes of any
-publisher taking the thing; but he was in sore straits for money at
-the moment, and it seemed worth trying, on the off-chance. A fortnight
-later Dick received a letter beginning: "DEAR MADAM,--Permit me to
-hail in you a new authoress of real talent. _Heartsease Fitzroy_ is
-GREAT,"--and signed "EBOR W. SIMS, Editor, _Hildebrand's Home
-Weekly_."
-
-Details of the circulation of _Hildebrand's Home Weekly_ were printed
-at the head of the paper; its average net sale was said to exceed
-three and a quarter millions. The terms offered by Mr. Sims seemed to
-Dick positively fabulous. And there would be the royalties on the
-thing in book form after the serial had run its course.
-
-The letter arrived at breakfast; Dick cancelled all engagements for
-the day and set out immediately for a long and solitary walk. It was
-necessary to be alone, to think. He made his way along the Seven
-Bridges Road, up Cumnor Hill, through the village, and down the
-footpath to Bablock Hithe, thence to pursue the course of the
-"stripling Thames"--haunted at every step by the Scholar Gipsy, damn
-him! He drank beer and ate some bread and cheese in a little inn by a
-bridge, farther up the river; and it was there, in the inn parlour,
-surrounded by engravings of the late Queen, and breathing the slightly
-mouldy preserved air bottled some three centuries ago into that
-hermetically sealed chamber--it was there that he solved the problem,
-perceived the strange truth about himself.
-
-He was a hermaphrodite.
-
-A hermaphrodite, not in the gross obvious sense, of course, but
-spiritually. Two persons in one, male and female. Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
-Hyde: or rather a new William Sharp and Fiona MacLeod--a more
-intelligent William, a vulgarer Fiona. Everything was explained; the
-deplorable Quarles incident was simple and obvious now. A sentimental
-young lady of literary tastes writing sonnets to her Ouida guardsman.
-And what an unerring flair Mr. Sims had shown by addressing him so
-roundly and unhesitatingly as "madam"!
-
-Dick was elated at this discovery. He had an orderly mind that
-disliked mysteries. He had been a puzzle to himself for a long time;
-now he was solved. He was not in the least distressed to discover this
-abnormality in his character. As long as the two parts of him kept
-well apart, as long as his male self could understand mathematics, and
-as long as his lady novelist's self kept up her regular habit of
-writing at night and retiring from business during the day, the
-arrangement would be admirable. The more he thought about it, the more
-it seemed an ideal state of affairs. His life would arrange itself so
-easily and well. He would devote the day to the disinterested pursuit
-of knowledge, to philosophy and mathematics, with perhaps an
-occasional excursion into politics. After midnight he would write
-novels with a feminine pen, earning the money that would make his
-unproductive male labours possible. A kind of spiritual _souteneur_.
-But the fear of poverty need haunt him no more; no need to become a
-wage-slave, to sacrifice his intelligence to the needs of his belly.
-Like a gentleman of the East, he would sit still and smoke his
-philosophic pipe while the womenfolk did the dirty work. Could
-anything be more satisfactory?
-
-He paid for his bread and beer, and walked home, whistling as he went.
-
-
-
-III
-
-TWO months later the first instalment of _Heartsease Fitzroy: the
-Story of a Young Girl_, by Pearl Bellairs, appeared in the pages of
-_Hildebrand's Home Weekly_. Three and a quarter millions read and
-approved. When the story appeared in book form, two hundred thousand
-copies were sold in six weeks; and in the course of the next two years
-no less than sixteen thousand female infants in London alone were
-christened Heartsease. With her fourth novel and her two hundred and
-fiftieth Sunday paper article, Pearl Bellairs was well on her way to
-becoming a household word.
-
-Meanwhile Dick was in receipt of an income far beyond the wildest
-dreams of his avarice. He was able to realize the two great ambitions
-of his life--to wear silk underclothing and to smoke good (but really
-good) cigars.
-
-
-
-IV
-
-DICK went down from Canteloup in a blaze of glory. The most brilliant
-man of his generation, exceptional mind, prospects, career. But his
-head was not turned. When people congratulated him on his academic
-successes, he thanked them politely and then invited them to come and
-see his Memento Mori. His Memento Mori was called Mr. Glottenham and
-could be found at any hour of the day in the premises of the Union, or
-if it was evening, in the Senior Common Room at Canteloup. He was an
-old member of the College, and the dons in pity for his age and
-loneliness had made him, some years before, a member of their Common
-Room. This act of charity was as bitterly regretted as any generous
-impulse in the history of the world. Mr. Glottenham made the life of
-the Canteloup fellows a burden to them; he dined in Hall with fiendish
-regularity, never missing a night, and he was always the last to leave
-the Common Room. Mr. Glottenham did not prepossess at a first glance;
-the furrows of his face were covered with a short grey sordid stubble;
-his clothes were disgusting with the spilth of many years of dirty
-feeding; he had the shoulders and long hanging arms of an ape--an ape
-with a horribly human look about it. When he spoke, it was like the
-sound of a man breaking coke; he spoke incessantly and on every
-subject. His knowledge was enormous; but he possessed the secret of a
-strange inverted alchemy--he knew how to turn the richest gold to
-lead, could make the most interesting topic so intolerably tedious
-that it was impossible, when he talked, not to loathe it.
-
-This was the death's-head to which Dick, like an ancient philosopher
-at a banquet, would direct the attention of his heartiest
-congratulators. Mr. Glottenham had had the most dazzling academic
-career of his generation. His tutors had prophesied for him a future
-far more brilliant than that of any of his contemporaries. They were
-now Ministers of State, poets, philosophers, judges, millionaires. Mr.
-Glottenham frequented the Union and the Canteloup Senior Common Room,
-and was--well, he was just Mr. Glottenham. Which was why Dick did not
-think too highly of his own laurels.
-
-
-
-V
-
-"WHAT shall I do? what ought I to do?" Dick walked up and down the
-room smoking, furiously and without at all savouring its richness, one
-of his opulent cigars.
-
-"My dear," said Cravister--for it was in Cravister's high-ceilinged
-Bloomsbury room that Dick was thus unveiling his distress of
-spirit--"my dear, this isn't a revival meeting. You speak as though
-there were an urgent need for your soul to be saved from hell fire.
-It's not as bad as that, you know."
-
-"But it _is_ a revival meeting," Dick shouted in exasperation--"it is.
-I'm a revivalist. You don't know what it's like to have a feeling
-about your soul. I'm terrifyingly earnest; you don't seem to
-understand that. I have all the feelings of Bunyan without his
-religion. I regard the salvation of my soul as important. How simple
-everything would be if one could go out with those creatures in
-bonnets and sing hymns like, 'Hip, hip for the blood of the Lamb,
-hurrah!' or that exquisite one:
-
-    "'The bells of Hell ring tingalingaling
-        For you, but not for me.
-      For me the angels singalingaling;
-        They've got the goods for me.'
-
-Unhappily it's impossible."
-
-"Your ideas," said Cravister in his flutiest voice, "are somewhat
-Gothic. I think I can understand them, though of course I don't
-sympathize or approve. My advice to people in doubt about what course
-of action they ought to pursue is always the same: do what you want
-to."
-
-"Cravister, you're hopeless," said Dick, laughing. "I suppose I am
-rather Gothic, but I do feel that the question of ought as well as of
-want does arise."
-
-Dick had come to his old friend for advice about Life. What ought he
-to do? The indefatigable pen of Pearl Bellairs solved for him the
-financial problem. There remained only the moral problem: how could he
-best expend his energies and his time? Should he devote himself to
-knowing or doing, philosophy or politics? He felt in himself the
-desire to search for truth and the ability--who knows?--to find it. On
-the other hand, the horrors of the world about him seemed to call on
-him to put forth all his strength in an effort to ameliorate what was
-so patently and repulsively bad. Actually, what had to be decided was
-this: Should he devote himself to the researches necessary to carry
-out the plan, long ripening in his brain, of a new system of
-scientific philosophy; or should he devote his powers and Pearl
-Bellairs' money in propaganda that should put life into the English
-revolutionary movement? Great moral principles were in the balance.
-And Cravister's advice was, do what you want to!
-
-After a month of painful indecision, Dick, who was a real Englishman,
-arrived at a satisfactory compromise. He started work on his new
-Synthetic Philosophy, and at the same time joined the staff of the
-_Weekly International_, to which he contributed both money and
-articles. The weeks slipped pleasantly and profitably along. The
-secret of happiness lies in congenial work, and no one could have
-worked harder than Dick, unless it was the indefatigable Pearl
-Bellairs, whose nightly output of five thousand words sufficed to
-support not only Dick but the _Weekly International_ as well. These
-months were perhaps the happiest period of Dick's life. He had
-friends, money, liberty; he knew himself to be working well; and it
-was an extra, a supererogatory happiness that he began at this time to
-get on much better with his sister Millicent than he had ever done
-before. Millicent had come up to Oxford as a student at St. Mungo Hall
-in Dick's third year. She had grown into a very efficient and very
-intelligent young woman. A particularly handsome young woman as well.
-She was boyishly slender, and a natural grace kept on breaking through
-the somewhat rigid deportment, which she always tried to impose upon
-herself, in little beautiful gestures and movements that made the
-onlooker catch his breath with astonished pleasure.
-
-    "Wincing she was as is a jolly colt,
-     Straight as a mast and upright as a bolt:"
-
-Chaucer had as good an eye for youthful grace as for mormals and
-bristly nostrils and thick red jovial villainousness.
-
-Millicent lost no time in making her presence at St. Mungo's felt.
-Second- and third-year heroines might snort at the forwardness of a
-mere fresh-girl, might resent the complete absence of veneration for
-their glory exhibited by this youthful bejauna; Millicent pursued her
-course unmoved. She founded new societies and put fresh life into the
-institutions which already existed at St. Mungo's to take cocoa and
-discuss the problems of the universe. She played hockey like a
-tornado, and she worked alarmingly hard. Decidedly, Millicent was a
-Force, very soon the biggest Force in the St. Mungo world. In her
-fifth term she organized the famous St. Mungo general strike, which
-compelled the authorities to relax a few of the more intolerably
-tyrannical and anachronistic rules restricting the liberty of the
-students. It was she who went, on behalf of the strikers, to interview
-the redoubtable Miss Prosser, Principal of St. Mungo's. The
-redoubtable Miss Prosser looked grim and invited her to sit down,
-Millicent sat down and, without quailing, delivered a short but
-pointed speech attacking the fundamental principles of the St. Mungo
-system of discipline.
-
-"Your whole point of view," she assured Miss Prosser, "is radically
-wrong. It's an insult to the female sex; it's positively obscene. Your
-root assumption is simply this: that we're all in a chronic state of
-sexual excitement; leave us alone for a moment and we'll immediately
-put our desires into practice. It's disgusting. It makes me blush.
-After all, Miss Prosser, we are a college of intelligent women, not an
-asylum of nymphomaniacs."
-
-For the first time in her career, Miss Prosser had to admit herself
-beaten. The authorities gave in--reluctantly and on only a few points;
-but the principle had been shaken, and that, as Millicent pointed out,
-was what really mattered.
-
-Dick used to see a good deal of his sister while he was still in
-residence at Canteloup, and after he had gone down he used to come
-regularly once a fortnight during term to visit her. That horrible
-mutual reserve, which poisons the social life of most families and
-which had effectively made of their brotherly and sisterly relation a
-prolonged discomfort in the past, began to disappear. They became the
-best of friends.
-
-"I like you, Dick, a great deal better than I did," said Millicent one
-day as they were parting at the gate of St. Mungo's after a long walk
-together.
-
-Dick took off his hat and bowed. "My dear, I reciprocate the
-sentiment. And, what's more, I esteem and admire you. So there."
-
-Millicent curtsied, and they laughed. They both felt very happy.
-
-
-
-VI
-
-"WHAT a life!" said Dick, with a sigh of weariness as the train moved
-out of Euston.
-
-Not a bad life, Millicent thought.
-
-"But horribly fatiguing. I am quite outreined by it."
-
-"Outreined" was Dick's translation of _éreinté_. He liked using words
-of his own manufacture; one had to learn his idiom before one could
-properly appreciate his intimate conversation.
-
-Dick had every justification for being outreined. The spring and
-summer had passed for him in a whirl of incessant activity. He had
-written three long chapters of the _New Synthetic Philosophy_, and had
-the material for two more ready in the form of notes. He had helped to
-organize and bring to its successful conclusion the great carpenters'
-strike of May and June. He had written four pamphlets and a small army
-of political articles. And this comprised only half his labour; for
-nightly, from twelve till two, Pearl Bellairs emerged to compose the
-masterpieces which supplied Dick with his bread and butter. _Apes in
-Purple_ had been published in May. Since then she had finished _La
-Belle Dame sans Morality_, and had embarked on the first chapters of
-_Daisy's Voyage to Cythera_. Her weekly articles, "For the Girls of
-Britain," had become, during this period, a regular and favourite
-feature in the pages of _Hildebrand's Sabbath_, that prince of Sunday
-papers. At the beginning of July, Dick considered that he had earned a
-holiday, and now they were off, he and Millicent, for the North.
-
-Dick had taken a cottage on the shore of one of those long salt-water
-lochs that give to the west coast of Scotland such a dissipated
-appearance on the map. For miles around there was not a living soul
-who did not bear the name of Campbell--two families only excepted, one
-of whom was called Murray-Drummond and the other Drummond-Murray.
-However, it was not for the people that Dick and Millicent had come,
-so much as for the landscape, which made up in variety for anything
-that the inhabitants might lack. Behind the cottage, in the midst of a
-narrow strip of bog lying between the loch and the foot of the
-mountains, stood one of the numerous tombs of Ossian, a great barrow
-of ancient stones. And a couple of miles away the remains of Deirdre's
-Scottish refuge bore witness to the Celtic past. The countryside was
-dotted with the black skeletons of medięval castles. Astonishing
-country, convulsed into fantastic mountain shapes, cut and indented by
-winding fiords. On summer days the whole of this improbable landscape
-became blue and remote and aerially transparent. Its beauty lacked all
-verisimilitude. It was for that reason that Dick chose the
-neighbourhood for his holidays. After the insistent actuality of
-London this frankly unreal coast was particularly refreshing to a
-jaded spirit.
-
-"Nous sommes ici en plein romantisme," said Dick on the day of their
-arrival, making a comprehensive gesture towards the dream-like
-scenery, and for the rest of his holiday he acted the part of a young
-romantic of the palmy period. He sat at the foot of Ossian's tomb and
-read Lamartine; he declaimed Byron from the summit of the mountains
-and Shelley as he rowed along the loch. In the evening he read George
-Sand's _Indiana_; he agonized with the pure, but passionate, heroine,
-while his admiration for Sir Brown, her English lover, the impassive
-giant who never speaks and is always clothed in faultless hunting
-costume, knew no bounds. He saturated himself in the verses of Victor
-Hugo, and at last almost came to persuade himself that the words,
-_Dieu_, _infinité_, _eternité_, with which the works of that
-deplorable genius are so profusely sprinkled, actually possessed some
-meaning, though what that meaning was he could not, even in his most
-romantic transports, discover. Pearl Bellairs, of course, understood
-quite clearly their significance, and though she was a very poor
-French scholar she used sometimes to be moved almost to tears by the
-books she found lying about when she came into existence after
-midnight. She even copied out extracts into her notebooks with a view
-to using them in her next novel.
-
-    "Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,
-     Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots,"
-
-was a couplet which struck her as sublime.
-
-Millicent, meanwhile, did the housekeeping with extraordinary
-efficiency, took a great deal of exercise, and read long, serious
-books; she humoured her brother in his holiday romanticism, but
-refused to take part in the game.
-
-The declaration of war took them completely by surprise. It is true
-that a _Scotsman_ found its way into the cottage by about lunch-time
-every day, but it was never read, and served only to light fires and
-wrap up fish and things of that sort. No letters were being forwarded,
-for they had left no address; they were isolated from the world. On
-the fatal morning Dick had, indeed, glanced at the paper, without
-however noticing anything out of the ordinary. It was only later when,
-alarmed by the rumours floating round the village shop, he came to
-examine his _Scotsman_ more closely, that he found about half-way down
-the third column of one of the middle pages an admirable account of
-all that had been so tragically happening in the last twenty-four
-hours; he learnt with horror that Europe was at war and that; his
-country too had entered the arena. Even in the midst of his anguish of
-spirit he could not help admiring the _Scotsman's_ splendid
-impassivity--no headlines, no ruffling of the traditional aristocratic
-dignity. Like Sir Rodolphe Brown in _Indiana_, he thought, with a
-sickly smile.
-
-Dick determined to start for London at once. He felt that he must act,
-or at least create the illusion of action; he could not stay quietly
-where he was. It was arranged that he should set out that afternoon,
-while Millicent should follow a day or two later with the bulk of the
-luggage. The train which took him to Glasgow was slower than he
-thought it possible for any train to be. He tried to read, he tried to
-sleep; it was no good. His nervous agitation was pitiable; he made
-little involuntary movements with his limbs, and every now and then
-the muscles of his face began twitching in a spasmodic and
-uncontrollable tic. There were three hours to wait in Glasgow; he
-spent them in wandering about the streets. In the interminable summer
-twilight the inhabitants of Glasgow came forth into the open to amuse
-themselves; the sight almost made him sick. Was it possible that there
-should be human beings so numerous and so uniformly hideous? Small,
-deformed, sallow, they seemed malignantly ugly, as if on purpose. The
-words they spoke were incomprehensible. He shuddered; it was an alien
-place--it was hell.
-
-The London train was crammed. Three gross Italians got into Dick's
-carriage, and after they had drunk and eaten with loud, unpleasant
-gusto, they prepared themselves for sleep by taking off their boots.
-Their feet smelt strongly ammoniac, like a cage of mice long
-uncleaned. Acutely awake, while the other occupants of the compartment
-enjoyed a happy unconsciousness, he looked at the huddled carcasses
-that surrounded him. The warmth and the smell of them was suffocating,
-and there came to his mind, with the nightmarish insistence of a fixed
-idea, the thought that every breath they exhaled was saturated with
-disease. To be condemned to sit in a hot bath of consumption and
-syphilis--it was too horrible! The moment came at last when he could
-bear it no longer; he got up and went into the corridor. Standing
-there, or sitting sometimes for a few dreary minutes in the lavatory,
-he passed the rest of the night. The train roared along without a
-stop. The roaring became articulate: in the days of his childhood
-trains used to run to the tune of "Lancashire, to Lancashire, to fetch
-a pocket-handkercher; to Lancashire, to Lancashire . . ." But to-night
-the wheels were shouting insistently, a million times over, two words
-only--"the War, the War; the War, the War." He tried desperately to
-make them say something else, but they refused to recite Milton; they
-refused to go to Lancashire; they went on with their endless Tibetan
-litany--the War, the War, the War.
-
-By the time he reached London, Dick was in a wretched state. His
-nerves were twittering and jumping within him; he felt like a walking
-aviary. The tic in his face had become more violent and persistent. As
-he stood in the station, waiting for a cab, he overheard a small child
-saying to its mother, "What's the matter with that man's face,
-mother?"
-
-"Sh--sh, darling," was the reply. "It's rude."
-
-Dick turned and saw the child's big round eyes fixed with fascinated
-curiosity upon him, as though he were a kind of monster. He put his
-hand to his forehead and tried to stop the twitching of the muscles
-beneath the skin. It pained him to think that he had become a
-scarecrow for children.
-
-Arrived at his flat, Dick drank a glass of brandy and lay down for a
-rest. He felt exhausted--ill. At half-past one he got up, drank some
-more brandy, and crept down into the street. It was intensely hot; the
-pavements reverberated the sunlight in a glare which hurt his eyes;
-they seemed to be in a state of grey incandescence. A nauseating smell
-of wetted dust rose from the roadway, along which a water-cart was
-slowly piddling its way. He realized suddenly that he ought not to
-have drunk all that brandy on an empty stomach; he was definitely
-rather tipsy. He had arrived at that state of drunkenness when the
-senses perceive things clearly, but do not transmit their knowledge to
-the understanding. He was painfully conscious of this division, and it
-needed all the power of his will to establish contact between his
-parted faculties. It was as though he were, by a great and prolonged
-effort, keeping his brain pressed against the back of his eyes; as
-soon as he relaxed the pressure, the understanding part slipped back,
-the contact was broken, and he relapsed into a state bordering on
-imbecility. The actions which ordinarily one does by habit and without
-thinking, he had to perform consciously and voluntarily. He had to
-reason out the problem of walking--first the left foot forward, then
-the right. How ingeniously he worked his ankles and knees and hips!
-How delicately the thighs slid past one another!
-
-He found a restaurant and sat there drinking coffee and trying to eat
-an omelette until he felt quite sober. Then he drove to the offices of
-the _Weekly International_ to have a talk with Hyman, the editor.
-Hyman was sitting in his shirt-sleeves, writing.
-
-He lifted his head as Dick came in. "Greenow," he shouted delightedly,
-"we were all wondering what had become of you. We thought you'd joined
-the Army."
-
-Dick shook his head, but did not speak; the hot stuffy smell of
-printer's ink and machinery combined with the atrocious reek of
-Hyman's Virginian cigarettes to make him feel rather faint. He sat
-down on the window-ledge, so as to be able to breathe an
-uncontaminated air.
-
-"Well," he said at last, "what about it?"
-
-"It's going to be hell."
-
-"Did you suppose I thought it was going to be paradise?" Dick replied
-irritably. "Internationalism looks rather funny now, doesn't it?"
-
-"I believe in it more than ever I did," cried Hyman. His face lit up
-with the fervour of his enthusiasm. It was a fine face, gaunt,
-furrowed, and angular, for all that he was barely thirty, looking as
-though it had been boldly chiselled from some hard stone. "The rest of
-the world may go mad; we'll try and keep our sanity. The time will
-come when they'll see we were right."
-
-Hyman talked on. His passionate sincerity and singleness of purpose
-were an inspiration to Dick. He had always admired Hyman--with the
-reservations, of course, that the man was rather a fanatic and not so
-well-educated as he might have been--but to-day he admired him more
-than ever. He was even moved by that perhaps too facile eloquence
-which of old had been used to leave him cold. After promising to do a
-series of articles on international relations for the paper, Dick went
-home, feeling better than he had done all day.
-
-He decided that he would begin writing his articles at once. He
-collected pens, paper, and ink and sat down in a business-like way at
-his bureau. He remembered distinctly biting the tip of his pen-holder;
-it tasted rather bitter.
-
-And then he realized he was standing in Regent Street, looking in at
-one of the windows of Liberty's.
-
-For a long time he stood there quite still, absorbed to all appearance
-in the contemplation of a piece of peacock-blue fabric. But all his
-attention was concentrated within himself, not on anything outside. He
-was wondering--wondering how it came about that he was sitting at his
-writing-table at one moment, and standing, at the next, in Regent
-Street. He hadn't--the thought flashed upon him--he hadn't been
-drinking any more of that brandy, had he? No, he felt himself to be
-perfectly sober. He moved slowly away and continued to speculate as he
-walked.
-
-At Oxford Circus he bought an evening paper. He almost screamed aloud
-when he saw that the date printed at the head of the page was August
-12th. It was on August 7th that he had sat down at his writing-table
-to compose those articles. Five days ago, and he had not the faintest
-recollection of what had happened in those five days.
-
-He made all haste back to the flat. Everything was in perfect order.
-He had evidently had a picnic lunch that morning--sardines, bread and
-jam, and raisins; the remains of it still covered the table. He opened
-the sideboard and took out the brandy bottle. Better make quite sure.
-He held it up to the light; it was more than three-quarters full. Not
-a drop had gone since the day of his return. If brandy wasn't the
-cause, then what was?
-
-As he sat there thinking, he began in an absent-minded way to look at
-his evening paper. He read the news on the front page, then turned to
-the inner sheets. His eye fell on these words printed at the head of
-the column next the leading article:
-
-"To the Women of the Empire. Thoughts in War-Time. By Pearl Bellairs."
-Underneath in brackets: "The first of a series of inspiring patriotic
-articles by Miss Bellairs, the well-known novelist."
-
-Dick groaned in agony. He saw in a flash what had happened to his five
-missing days. Pearl had got hold of them somehow, had trespassed upon
-his life out of her own reserved nocturnal existence. She had taken
-advantage of his agitated mental state to have a little fun in her own
-horrible way.
-
-He picked up the paper once more and began to read Pearl's article.
-"Inspiring and patriotic": those were feeble words in which to
-describe Pearl's shrilly raucous chauvinism. And the style! Christ! to
-think that he was responsible, at least in part, for this.
-Responsible, for had not the words been written by his own hand and
-composed in some horrible bluebeard's chamber of his own brain? They
-had, there was no denying it. Pearl's literary atrocities had never
-much distressed him; he had long given up reading a word she wrote.
-Her bank balance was the only thing about her that interested him. But
-now she was invading the sanctities of his private life. She was
-trampling on his dearest convictions, denying his faith. She was a
-public danger. It was all too frightful.
-
-He passed the afternoon in misery. Suicide or brandy seemed the only
-cures. Not very satisfactory ones, though. Towards evening an
-illuminating idea occurred to him. He would go and see Rogers. Rogers
-knew all about psychology--from books, at any rate: Freud, Jung,
-Morton Prince, and people like that. He used to try hypnotic
-experiments on his friends and even dabbled in amateur psychotherapy.
-Rogers might help him to lay the ghost of Pearl. He ate a hasty dinner
-and went to see Rogers in his Kensington rooms.
-
-Rogers was sitting at a table with a great book open in front of him.
-The reading-lamp, which was the only light in the room, brightly
-illumined one side of the pallid, puffy, spectacled face, leaving the
-other in complete darkness, save for a little cedilla of golden light
-caught on the fold of flesh at the corner of his mouth. His huge
-shadow crossed the floor, began to climb the wall, and from the
-shoulders upwards mingled itself with the general darkness of the
-room.
-
-"Good evening, Rogers," said Dick wearily. "I wish you wouldn't try
-and look like Rembrandt's 'Christ at Emmaus' with these spectacular
-chiaroscuro effects."
-
-Rogers gave vent to his usual nervous giggling laugh. "This is very
-nice of you to come and see me, Greenow."
-
-"How's the Board of Trade?" Rogers was a Civil Servant by profession.
-
-"Oh, business as usual, as the _Daily Mail_ would say." Rogers laughed
-again as though he had made a joke.
-
-After a little talk of things indifferent, Dick brought the
-conversation round to himself.
-
-"I believe I'm getting a bit neurasthenic," he said. "Fits of
-depression, nervous pains, lassitude, anęmia of the will. I've come to
-you for professional advice. I want you to nose out my suppressed
-complexes, analyse me, dissect me. Will you do that for me?"
-
-Rogers was evidently delighted. "I'll do my best," he said, with
-assumed modesty. "But I'm no good at the thing, so you mustn't expect
-much."
-
-"I'm at your disposal," said Dick.
-
-Rogers placed his guest in a large arm-chair. "Relax your muscles and
-think of nothing at all." Dick sat there flabby and abstracted while
-Rogers made his preparations. His apparatus consisted chiefly in a
-notebook and a stop-watch. He seated himself at the table.
-
-"Now," he said solemnly, "I want you to listen to me. I propose to
-read out a list of words; after each of the words you must say the
-first word that comes into your head. The very first, mind, however
-foolish it may seem. And say it as soon as it crosses your mind; don't
-wait to think. I shall write down your answers and take the time
-between each question and reply."
-
-Rogers cleared his throat and started.
-
-"Mother," he said in a loud, clear voice. He always began his analyses
-with the family. For since the majority of kinks and complexes date
-from childhood, it is instructive to investigate the relations between
-the patient and those who surrounded him at an early age. "Mother."
-
-"Dead," replied Dick immediately. He had scarcely known his mother.
-
-"Father."
-
-"Dull." One and a fifth seconds' interval.
-
-"Sister." Rogers pricked his ears for the reply: his favourite
-incest-theory depended on it.
-
-"Fabian Society," said Dick, after two seconds' interval. Rogers was a
-little disappointed. He was agreeably thrilled and excited by the
-answer he received to his next word: "Aunt."
-
-The seconds passed, bringing nothing with them; and then at last there
-floated into Dick's mind the image of himself as a child, dressed in
-green velvet and lace, a perfect Bubbles boy, kneeling on Auntie Loo's
-lap and arranging a troop of lead soldiers on the horizontal
-projection of her corsage.
-
-"Bosom," he said.
-
-Rogers wrote down the word and underlined it. Six and three-fifths
-seconds: very significant. He turned now to the chapter of possible
-accidents productive of nervous shocks.
-
-"Fire."
-
-"Coal."
-
-"Sea."
-
-"Sick."
-
-"Train."
-
-"Smell."
-
-And so on. Dull answers all the time. Evidently, nothing very
-catastrophic had ever happened to him. Now for a frontal attack on the
-fortress of sex itself.
-
-"Women." There was rather a long pause, four seconds, and then Dick
-replied, "Novelist." Rogers was puzzled.
-
-"Breast."
-
-"Chicken." That was disappointing. Rogers could find no trace of those
-sinister moral censors, expurgators of impulse, suppressors of
-happiness. Perhaps the trouble lay in religion.
-
-"Christ," he said.
-
-Dick replied, "Amen," with the promptitude of a parish clerk.
-
-"God."
-
-Dick's mind remained a perfect blank. The word seemed to convey to him
-nothing at all. God, God. After a long time there appeared before his
-inward eye the face of a boy he had known at school and at Oxford, one
-Godfrey Wilkinson, called God for short.
-
-"Wilkinson." Ten seconds and a fifth.
-
-A few more miscellaneous questions, and the list was exhausted. Almost
-suddenly, Dick fell into a kind of hypnotic sleep. Rogers sat pensive
-in front of his notes; sometimes he consulted a text-book. At the end
-of half an hour he awakened Dick to tell him that he had had, as a
-child, consciously or unconsciously, a great Freudian passion for his
-aunt; that later on he had had another passion, almost religious in
-its fervour and intensity, for somebody called Wilkinson; and that the
-cause of all his present troubles lay in one or other of these
-episodes. If he liked, he (Rogers) would investigate the matter
-further with a view to establishing a cure.
-
-Dick thanked him very much, thought it wasn't worth taking any more
-trouble, and went home.
-
-
-
-VII
-
-MILLICENT was organizing a hospital supply dépōt, organizing
-indefatigably, from morning till night. It was October; Dick had not
-seen his sister since those first hours of the war in Scotland; he had
-had too much to think about these last months to pay attention to
-anyone but himself. To-day, at last, he decided that he would go and
-pay her a visit. Millicent had commandeered a large house in
-Kensington from a family of Jews, who were anxious to live down a
-deplorable name by a display of patriotism. Dick found her sitting
-there in her office--young, formidable, beautiful, severe--at a big
-desk covered with papers.
-
-"Well," said Dick, "you're winning the war, I see."
-
-"You, I gather, are not," Millicent replied.
-
-"I believe in the things I always believed in."
-
-"So do I."
-
-"But in a different way, my dear--in a different way," said Dick
-sadly. There was a silence.
-
-"Had we better quarrel?" Millicent asked meditatively.
-
-"I think we can manage with nothing worse than a coolness--for the
-duration."
-
-"Very well, a coolness."
-
-"A smouldering coolness."
-
-"Good," said Millicent briskly. "Let it start smouldering at once. I
-must get on with my work. Good-bye, Dick. God bless you. Let me know
-sometimes how you get on."
-
-"No need to ask how you get on," said Dick with a smile, as he shook
-her hand. "I know by experience that you always get on, only too well,
-ruthlessly well."
-
-He went out. Millicent returned to her letters with concentrated
-ardour; a frown puckered the skin between her eyebrows.
-
-Probably, Dick reflected as he made his way down the stairs, he
-wouldn't see her again for a year or so. He couldn't honestly say that
-it affected him much. Other people became daily more and more like
-ghosts, unreal, thin, vaporous; while every hour the consciousness of
-himself grew more intense and all-absorbing. The only person who was
-more than a shadow to him now was Hyman of the _Weekly International_.
-In those first horrible months of the war, when he was wrestling with
-Pearl Bellairs and failing to cast her out, it was Hyman who kept him
-from melancholy and suicide. Hyman made him write a long article every
-week, dragged him into the office to do sub-editorial work, kept him
-so busy that there were long hours when he had no time to brood over
-his own insoluble problems. And his enthusiasm was so passionate and
-sincere that sometimes even Dick was infected by it; he could believe
-that life was worth living and the cause worth fighting for. But not
-for long; for the devil would return, insistent and untiring. Pearl
-Bellairs was greedy for life; she was not content with her short
-midnight hours; she wanted the freedom of whole days. And whenever
-Dick was overtired, or ill or nervous, she leapt upon him and stamped
-him out of existence, till enough strength came back for him to
-reassert his personality. And the articles she wrote! The short
-stories! The recruiting songs! Dick dared not read them; they were
-terrible, terrible.
-
-
-
-VIII
-
-THE months passed by. The longer the war lasted, the longer it seemed
-likely to last. Dick supported life somehow. Then came the menace of
-conscription. The _Weekly International_ organized a great
-anti-conscription campaign, in which Hyman and Dick were the leading
-spirits. Dick was almost happy. This kind of active work was new to
-him and he enjoyed it, finding it exciting and at the same time
-sedative. For a self-absorbed and brooding mind, pain itself is an
-anodyne. He enjoyed his incessant journeys, his speechmaking to queer
-audiences in obscure halls and chapels; he liked talking with earnest
-members of impossible Christian sects, pacifists who took not the
-faintest interest in the welfare of humanity at large, but were wholly
-absorbed in the salvation of their own souls and in keeping their
-consciences clear from the faintest trace of blood-guiltiness. He
-enjoyed the sense of power which came to him, when he roused the
-passion of the crowd to enthusiastic assent, or breasted the storm of
-antagonism. He enjoyed everything--even getting a bloody nose from a
-patriot hired and intoxicated by a great evening paper to break up one
-of his meetings. It all seemed tremendously exciting and important at
-the time. And yet when, in quiet moments, he came to look back on his
-days of activity, they seemed utterly empty and futile. What was left
-of them? Nothing, nothing at all. The momentary intoxication had died
-away, the stirred ant's-nest had gone back to normal life. Futility of
-action! There was nothing permanent, or decent, or worth while, except
-thought. And of that he was almost incapable now. His mind, when it
-was not occupied by the immediate and actual, turned inward morbidly
-upon itself. He looked at the manuscript of his book and wondered
-whether he would ever be able to go on with it. It seemed doubtful.
-Was he, then, condemned to pass the rest of his existence enslaved to
-the beastliness and futility of mere quotidian action? And even in
-action his powers were limited; if he exerted himself too much--and
-the limits of fatigue were soon reached--Pearl Bellairs, watching
-perpetually like a hungry tigress for her opportunity, leapt upon him
-and took possession of his conscious faculties. And then, it might be
-for a matter of hours or of days, he was lost, blotted off the
-register of living souls, while she performed, with intense and
-hideous industry, her self-appointed task. More than once his
-anti-conscription campaigns had been cut short and he himself had
-suddenly disappeared from public life, to return with the vaguest
-stories of illness or private affairs--stories that made his friends
-shake their heads and wonder which it was among the noble army of
-vices that poor Dick Greenow was so mysteriously addicted to. Some
-said drink, some said women, some said opium, and some hinted at
-things infinitely darker and more horrid. Hyman asked him point-blank
-what it was, one morning when he had returned to the office after
-three days' unaccountable absence.
-
-Dick blushed painfully. "It isn't anything you think," he said.
-
-"What is it, then?" Hyman insisted.
-
-"I can't tell you," Dick replied desperately and in torture, "but I
-swear it's nothing discreditable. I beg you won't ask me any more."
-
-Hyman had to pretend to be satisfied with that.
-
-
-
-IX
-
-A TACTICAL move in the anti-conscription campaign was the foundation
-of a club, a place where people with pacific or generally advanced
-ideas could congregate.
-
-"A club like this would soon be the intellectual centre of London,"
-said Hyman, ever sanguine.
-
-Dick shrugged his shoulders. He had a wide experience of pacifists.
-
-"If you bring people together," Hyman went on, "they encourage one
-another to be bold--strengthen one another's faith."
-
-"Yes," said Dick dyspeptically. "When they're in a herd, they can
-believe that they're much more numerous and important than they really
-are."
-
-"But, man, they are numerous, they are important!" Hyman shouted and
-gesticulated.
-
-Dick allowed himself to be persuaded into an optimism which he knew to
-be ill-founded. The consolations of religion do not console the less
-efficaciously for being illusory.
-
-It was a longtime before they could think of a suitable name for their
-club. Dick suggested that it should be called the Sclopis Club. "Such
-a lovely name," he explained. "Sclopis--Sclopis; it tastes precious in
-the mouth." But the rest of the committee would not hear of it; they
-wanted a name that meant something. One lady suggested that it should
-be called the Everyman Club; Dick objected with passion. "It makes one
-shudder," he said. The lady thought it was a beautiful and uplifting
-name, but as Mr. Greenow was so strongly opposed, she wouldn't press
-the claims of Everyman. Hyman wanted to call it the Pacifist Club, but
-that was judged too provocative. Finally, they agreed to call it the
-Novembrist Club, because it was November and they could think of no
-better title.
-
-The inaugural dinner of the Novembrist Club was held at Piccolomini's
-Restaurant. Piccolomini is in, but not exactly of, Soho, for it is a
-cross between a Soho restaurant and a Corner House, a hybrid which
-combines the worst qualities of both parents--the dirt and
-inefficiency of Soho, the size and vulgarity of Lyons. There is a
-large upper chamber reserved for agapes. Here, one wet and dismal
-winter's evening, the Novembrists assembled.
-
-Dick arrived early, and from his place near the door he watched his
-fellow-members come in. He didn't much like the look of them. "Middle
-class" was what he found himself thinking; and he had to admit, when
-his conscience reproached him for it, that he did not like the middle
-classes, the lower middle classes, the lower classes. He was, there
-was no denying it, a bloodsucker at heart--cultured and intelligent,
-perhaps, but a bloodsucker none the less.
-
-The meal began. Everything about it was profoundly suspect. The spoons
-were made of some pale pinchbeck metal, very light and flimsy; one
-expected them to melt in the soup, or one would have done, if the soup
-had been even tepid. The food was thick and greasy. Dick wondered what
-it really looked like under the concealing sauces. The wine left an
-indescribable taste that lingered on the palate, like the savour of
-brass or of charcoal fumes.
-
-From childhood upwards Dick had suffered from the intensity of his
-visceral reactions to emotion. Fear and shyness were apt to make him
-feel very sick, and disgust produced in him a sensation of intolerable
-queasiness. Disgust had seized upon his mind to-night. He grew paler
-with the arrival of every dish, and the wine, instead of cheering him,
-made him feel much worse. His neighbours to right and left ate with
-revolting heartiness. On one side sat Miss Gibbs, garishly dressed in
-ill-assorted colours that might be called futuristic; on the other was
-Mr. Something in pince-nez, rather ambrosial about the hair. Mr.
-Something was a poet, or so the man who introduced them had said. Miss
-Gibbs was just an ordinary member of the Intelligentsia, like the rest
-of us.
-
-The Lower Classes, the Lower Classes . . .
-
-"Are you interested in the Modern Theatre?" asked Mr. Something in his
-mellow voice. Too mellow--oh, much too mellow!
-
-"Passably," said Dick.
-
-"So am I," said Mr. Thingummy. "I am a vice-president of the
-Craftsmen's League of Joy, which perhaps you may have heard of."
-
-Dick shook his head; this was going to be terrible.
-
-"The objects of the Craftsmen's League of Joy," Mr. Thingummy
-continued, "or rather, one of the objects--for it has many--is to
-establish Little Theatres in every town and village in England, where
-simple, uplifting, beautiful plays might be acted. The people have no
-joy."
-
-"They have the cinema and the music hall," said Dick. He was filled
-with a sudden senseless irritation. "They get all the joy they want
-out of the jokes of the comics and the legs of the women."
-
-"Ah, but that is an impure joy," Mr. What's-his-name protested.
-
-"Impure purple, Herbert Spenser's favourite colour," flashed
-irrelevantly through Dick's brain.
-
-"Well, speaking for myself," he said aloud, "I know I get more joy out
-of a good pair of legs than out of any number of uplifting plays of
-the kind they'd be sure to act in your little theatres. The people ask
-for sex and you give them a stone."
-
-How was it, he wondered, that the right opinions in the mouths of
-these people sounded so horribly cheap and wrong? They degraded what
-was noble; beauty became fly-blown at their touch. Their intellectual
-tradition was all wrong. Lower classes, it always came back to that.
-When they talked about war and the International, Dick felt a hot
-geyser of chauvinism bubbling up in his breast. In order to say
-nothing stupid, he refrained from speaking at all. Miss Gibbs switched
-the conversation on to art. She admired all the right people. Dick
-told her that he thought Sir Luke Fildes to be the best modern artist.
-But his irritation knew no bounds when he found out a little later
-that Mr. Something had read the poems of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke.
-He felt inclined to say, "You may have read them, but of course you
-can't understand or appreciate them."
-
-Lower Classes . . .
-
-How clear and splendid were the ideas of right and justice! If only
-one could filter away the contaminating human element. . . . Reason
-compelled him to believe in democracy, in internationalism, in
-revolution; morality demanded justice for the oppressed. But neither
-morality nor reason would ever bring him to take pleasure in the
-company of democrats or revolutionaries, or make him find the
-oppressed, individually, any less antipathetic.
-
-At the end of this nauseating meal, Dick was called on to make a
-speech. Rising to his feet, he began stammering and hesitating; he
-felt like an imbecile. Then suddenly inspiration came. The great
-religious ideas of Justice and Democracy swept like a rushing wind
-through his mind, purging it of all insignificant human and personal
-preferences or dislikes. He was filled with pentecostal fire. He spoke
-in a white heat of intellectual passion, dominating his hearers,
-infecting them with his own high enthusiasm. He sat down amid cheers.
-Miss Gibbs and Mr. Thingummy leaned towards him with flushed, shining
-faces.
-
-"That was wonderful, Mr. Greenow. I've never heard anything like it,"
-exclaimed Miss Gibbs, with genuine, unflattering enthusiasm.
-
-Mr. Thing said something poetical about a trumpet-call. Dick looked
-from one to the other with blank and fishy eyes. So it was for these
-creatures he had been speaking!
-
-Good God! . . .
-
-
-
-X
-
-DICK'S life was now a monotonous nightmare. The same impossible
-situation was repeated again and again. If it were not for the fact
-that he knew Pearl Bellairs to be entirely devoid of humour, Dick
-might have suspected that she was having a little quiet fun with him,
-so grotesque were the anomalies of his double life. Grotesque, but
-dreary, intolerably dreary. Situations which seem, in contemplation,
-romantic and adventurous have a habit of proving, when actually
-experienced, as dull and daily as a bank clerk's routine. When you
-read about it, a Jekyll and Hyde existence sounds delightfully
-amusing; but when you live through it, as Dick found to his cost, it
-is merely a boring horror.
-
-In due course Dick was called up by the Military Authorities. He
-pleaded conscientious objection. The date of his appearance before the
-Tribunal was fixed. Dick did not much relish the prospect of being a
-Christian martyr; it seemed an anachronism. However, it would have to
-be done. He would be an absolutist; there would be a little buffeting,
-spitting, and scourging, followed by an indefinite term of hard
-labour. It was all very unpleasant. But nothing could be much more
-unpleasant than life as he was now living it. He didn't even mind very
-much if they killed him. Being or not being--the alternatives left him
-equally cold.
-
-The days that preceded his appearance before the Tribunal were busy
-days, spent in consulting solicitors, preparing speeches, collecting
-witnesses.
-
-"We'll give you a good run for your money," said Hyman. "I hope
-they'll be feeling a little uncomfortable by the time they have done
-with you, Greenow."
-
-"Not nearly so uncomfortable as I shall be feeling," Dick replied,
-with a slightly melancholy smile.
-
-The South Marylebone Tribunal sat in a gloomy and fetid chamber in a
-police station. Dick, who was extremely sensitive to his surroundings,
-felt his fatigue and nervousness perceptibly increase as he entered
-the room. Five or six pitiable creatures with paralytic mothers or
-one-man businesses were briskly disposed of, and then it was Dick's
-turn to present himself before his judges. He looked round the court,
-nodded to Hyman, smiled at Millicent, who had so far thawed their
-wartime coolness as to come and see him condemned, caught other
-friendly eyes. It was as though he were about to be electrocuted. The
-preliminaries passed off; he found himself answering questions in a
-loud, clear voice. Then the Military Representative began to loom
-horribly large. The Military Representative was a solicitor's clerk
-disguised as a lieutenant in the Army Service Corps. He spoke in an
-accent that was more than genteel; it was rich, noble, aristocratic.
-Dick tried to remember where he had heard a  man speaking like that
-before. He had it now. Once when he had been at Oxford after term was
-over. He had gone to see the Varieties, which come twice nightly and
-with cheap seats to the theatre after the undergraduates have
-departed. One of the turns had been a Nut, a descendant of the bloods
-and Champagne Charlies of earlier days. A young man in an alpaca
-evening suit and a monocle. He had danced, sung a song, spoken some
-patter. Sitting in the front row of the stalls, Dick had been able to
-see the large, swollen, tuberculous glands in his neck. They wobbled
-when he danced or sang. Fascinatingly horrible, those glands; and the
-young man, how terribly, painfully pathetic. . . . When the Military
-Representative spoke, he could hear again that wretched Nut's
-rendering of the Eton and Oxford voice. It unnerved him.
-
-"What is your religion, Mr. Greenow?" the Military Representative
-asked.
-
-Fascinated, Dick looked to see whether he too had tuberculous glands.
-The Lieutenant had to repeat his question sharply. When he was
-irritated, his voice went back to its more natural nasal twang. Dick
-recovered his presence of mind.
-
-"I have no religion," he answered.
-
-"But, surely, sir, you must have some kind of religion."
-
-"Well, if I must, if it's in the Army Regulations, you had better put
-me down as an Albigensian, or a Bogomile, or, better still, as a
-Manichean. One can't find oneself in this court without possessing a
-profound sense of the reality and active existence of a power of evil
-equal to, if not greater than, the power of good."
-
-"This is rather irrelevant, Mr. Greenow," said the Chairman.
-
-"I apologize." Dick bowed to the court.
-
-"But if," the Military Representative continued--"if your objection is
-not religious, may I ask what it is?"
-
-"It is based on a belief that all war is wrong, and that the
-solidarity of the human race can only be achieved in practice by
-protesting against war, wherever it appears and in whatever form."
-
-"Do you disbelieve in force, Mr. Greenow?"
-
-"You might as well ask me if I disbelieve in gravitation. Of course, I
-believe in force: it is a fact."
-
-"What would you do if you saw a German violating your sister?" said
-the Military Representative, putting his deadliest question.
-
-"Perhaps I had better ask my sister first," Dick replied. "She is
-sitting just behind you in the court."
-
-The Military Representative was covered with confusion. He coughed and
-blew his nose. The case dragged on. Dick made a speech; the Military
-Representative made a speech; the Chairman made a speech. The
-atmosphere of the court-room grew fouler and fouler. Dick sickened and
-suffocated in the second-hand air. An immense lassitude took
-possession of him; he did not care about anything--about the cause,
-about himself, about Hyman or Millicent or Pearl Bellairs. He was just
-tired. Voices buzzed and drawled in his ears--sometimes his own voice,
-sometimes other people's. He did not listen to  what they said. He was
-tired--tired of all this idiotic talk, tired of the heat and smell.
-. . .
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-Tired of picking up very thistly wheat sheaves and propping them up in
-stooks on the yellow stubble. For that was what, suddenly, he found
-himself doing. Overhead the sky expanded in endless steppes of
-blue-hot cobalt. The pungent prickly dust of the dried sheaves plucked
-at his nose with imminent sneezes, made his eyes smart and water. In
-the distance a reaping-machine whirred and hummed. Dick looked blankly
-about him, wondering where he was. He was thankful, at any rate, not
-to be in that sweltering court-room; and it was a mercy, too, to have
-escaped from the odious gentility of the Military Representative's
-accent. And, after all, there were worse occupations than harvesting.
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-Gradually, and bit by bit, Dick pieced together his history. He had,
-it seemed, done a cowardly and treacherous thing: deserted in the face
-of the enemy, betrayed his cause. He had a bitter letter from Hyman.
-"Why couldn't you have stuck it out? I thought it was in you. You've
-urged others to go to prison for their beliefs, but you get out of it
-yourself by sneaking off to a soft alternative service job on a
-friend's estate. You've brought discredit on the whole movement." It
-was very painful, but what could he answer? The truth was so
-ridiculous that nobody could be expected to swallow it. And yet the
-fact was that he had been as much startled to find himself working at
-Crome as anyone. It was all Pearl's doing.
-
-He had found in his room a piece of paper covered with the large,
-flamboyant feminine writing which he knew to be Pearl's. It was
-evidently the rough copy of an article on the delights of being a
-land-girl: dewy dawns, rosy children's faces, quaint cottages, mossy
-thatch, milkmaids, healthy exercise. Pearl was being a land-girl; but
-he could hardly explain the fact to Hyman. Better not attempt to
-answer him.
-
-Dick hated the manual labour of the farm. It was hard, monotonous,
-dirty, and depressing. It inhibited almost completely the functions of
-his brain. He was unable to think about anything at all; there was no
-opportunity to do anything but feel uncomfortable. God had not made
-him a Caliban to scatter ordure over fields, to pick up ordure from
-cattle-yards. His rōle was Prospero.
-
-"Ban, Ban, Caliban"--it was to that derisive measure that he pumped
-water, sawed wood, mowed grass; it was a march for his slow, clotted
-feet as he followed the dung-carts up the winding lanes. "Ban, Ban,
-Caliban--Ban, Ban, Ban . . ."
-
-"Oh, that bloody old fool Tolstoy," was his profoundest reflection on
-a general subject in three months of manual labour and communion with
-mother earth.
-
-He hated the work, and his fellow-workers hated him. They mistrusted
-him because they could not understand him, taking the silence of his
-overpowering shyness for arrogance and the contempt of one class for
-another. Dick longed to become friendly with them. His chief trouble
-was that he did not know what to say. At meal-times he would spend
-long minutes in cudgelling his brains for some suitable remark to
-make. And even if he thought of something good, like--"It looks as
-though it were going to be a good year for roots," he somehow
-hesitated to speak, feeling that such a remark, uttered in his
-exquisitely modulated tones, would be, somehow, a little ridiculous.
-It was the sort of thing that ought to be said rustically, with plenty
-of Z's and long vowels, in the manner of William Barnes. In the end,
-for lack of courage to act the yokel's part, he generally remained
-silent. While the others were eating their bread and cheese with
-laughter and talk, he sat like the skeleton at the feast--a skeleton
-that longed to join in the revelry, but had not the power to move its
-stony jaws. On the rare occasions that he actually succeeded in
-uttering something, the labourers looked at one another in surprise
-and alarm, as though it were indeed a skeleton that had spoken.
-
-He was not much more popular with the other inhabitants of the
-village. Often, in the evenings, as he was returning from work, the
-children would pursue him, yelling. With the unerringly cruel instinct
-of the young they had recognized in him a fit object for abuse and
-lapidation. An outcast member of another class, from whom that class
-in casting him out had withdrawn its protection, an alien in speech
-and habit, a criminal, as their zealous schoolmaster lost no
-opportunity of reminding them, guilty of the blackest treason against
-God and man--he was the obviously predestined victim of childish
-persecution. When stones began to fly, and dung and precocious
-obscenity, he bowed his head and pretended not to notice that anything
-unusual was happening. It was difficult, however, to look quite
-dignified.
-
-There were occasional short alleviations to the dreariness of his
-existence. One day, when he was engaged in his usual occupation of
-manuring, a familiar figure suddenly appeared along the footpath
-through the field. It was Mrs. Cravister. She was evidently staying at
-the big house; one of the Manorial dachshunds preceded her. He took
-off his cap.
-
-"Mr. Greenow!" she exclaimed, coming to a halt. "Ah, what a pleasure
-to see you again! Working on the land: so Tolstoyan. But I trust it
-doesn't affect your ęsthetic ideas in the same way as it did his.
-Fifty peasants singing together is music; but Bach's chromatic
-fantasia is mere gibbering incomprehensibility."
-
-"I don't do this for pleasure," Dick explained. "It's hard labour,
-meted out to the Conscientious Objector."
-
-"Of course, of course," said Mrs. Cravister, raising her hand to
-arrest any further explanation. "I had forgotten. A conscientious
-objector, a Bible student. I remember how passionately devoted you
-were, even at school, to the Bible."
-
-She closed her eyes and nodded her head several times.
-
-"On the contrary----" Dick began; but it was no good. Mrs. Cravister
-had determined that he should be a Bible student and it was no use
-gainsaying her. She cut him short.
-
-"Dear me, the Bible. . . . What a style! That alone would prove it to
-have been directly inspired. You remember how Mahomet appealed to the
-beauty of his style as a sign of his divine mission. Why has nobody
-done the same for the Bible? It remains for you, Mr. Greenow, to do
-so. You will write a book about it. How I envy you!"
-
-"The style is very fine," Dick ventured, "but don't you think the
-matter occasionally leaves something to be desired?"
-
-"The matter is nothing," cried Mrs. Cravister, making a gesture that
-seemed to send all meaning flying like a pinch of salt along the
-wind--"nothing at all. It's the style that counts. Think of Madame
-Bovary."
-
-"I certainly will," said Dick.
-
-Mrs. Cravister held out her hand. "Good-bye. Yes, I certainly envy
-you. I envy you your innocent labour and your incessant study of that
-most wonderful of books. If I were asked, Mr. Greenow, what book I
-should take with me to a desert island, what single solitary book, I
-should certainly say the Bible, though, indeed, there are moments when
-I think I should choose _Tristram Shandy_. Good-bye."
-
-Mrs. Cravister sailed slowly away. The little brown basset trotted
-ahead, straining his leash. One had the impression of a great ship
-being towed into harbour by a diminutive tug.
-
-Dick was cheered by this glimpse of civilization and humanity. The
-unexpected arrival, one Saturday afternoon, of Millicent was not quite
-such an unmixed pleasure. "I've come to see how you're getting on,"
-she announced, "and to put your cottage straight and make you
-comfortable."
-
-"Very kind of you," said Dick. He didn't want his cottage put
-straight.
-
-Millicent was in the Ministry of Munitions now, controlling three
-thousand female clerks with unsurpassed efficiency. Dick looked at her
-curiously, as she talked that evening of her doings. "To think I
-should have a sister like that," he said to himself. She was
-terrifying.
-
-"You do enjoy bullying other people!" he exclaimed at last. "You've
-found your true vocation. One sees now how the new world will be
-arranged after the war. The women will continue to do all the
-bureaucratic jobs, all that entails routine and neatness and
-interfering with other people's affairs. And man, it is to be hoped,
-will be left free for the important statesman's business, free for
-creation and thought. He will stay at home and give proper education
-to the children, too. He is fit to do these things, because his mind
-is disinterested and detached. It's an arrangement which will liberate
-all man's best energies for their proper uses. The only flaw I can see
-in the system is that you women will be so fiendishly and ruthlessly
-tyrannical in your administration."
-
-"You can't seriously expect me to argue with you," said Millicent.
-
-"No, please don't. I am not strong enough. My dung-carrying has taken
-the edge off all my reasoning powers."
-
-Millicent spent the next morning in completely rearranging Dick's
-furniture. By lunch-time every article in the cottage was occupying a
-new position.
-
-"That's much nicer," said Millicent, surveying her work and seeing
-that it was good.
-
-There was a knock at the door. Dick opened it and was astonished to
-find Hyman.
-
-"I just ran down to see how you were getting on," he explained.
-
-"I'm getting on very well since my sister rearranged my furniture,"
-said Dick. He found it pleasing to have an opportunity of exercising
-his long unused powers of malicious irony. This was very mild, but
-with practice he would soon come on to something more spiteful and
-amusing.
-
-Hyman shook hands with Millicent, scowling as he did so. He was
-irritated that she was there; he wanted to talk with Dick alone. He
-turned his back on her and began addressing Dick.
-
-"Well," he said, "I haven't seen you since the fatal day. How is the
-turnip-hoeing?"
-
-"Pretty beastly," said Dick.
-
-"Better than doing hard labour in a gaol, I suppose?"
-
-Dick nodded his head wearily, foreseeing what must inevitably come.
-
-"You've escaped that all right," Hyman went on.
-
-"Yes; you ought to be thankful," Millicent chimed in.
-
-"I still can't understand why you did it, Greenow. It was a blow to
-me. I didn't expect it of you." Hyman spoke with feeling. "It was
-desertion; it was treason."
-
-"I agree," said Millicent judicially. "He ought to have stuck to his
-principles."
-
-"He ought to have stuck to what was right, oughtn't he, Miss Greenow?"
-Hyman turned towards Millicent, pleased at finding someone who shared
-his views.
-
-"Of course," she replied--"of course. I totally disagree with you
-about what is right. But if he believed it right not to fight, he
-certainly ought to have gone to prison for his belief."
-
-Dick lit a pipe with an air of nonchalance. He tried to disguise the
-fact that he was feeling extremely uncomfortable under these two pairs
-of merciless, accusing eyes.
-
-"To my mind, at any rate," said Millicent, "your position seems quite
-illogical and untenable, Dick."
-
-It was a relief to be talked to and not about.
-
-"I'm sorry about that," said Dick rather huskily--not a very
-intelligent remark, but what was there to say?
-
-"Of course, it's illogical and untenable. Your sister is quite right."
-Hyman banged the table.
-
-"I can't understand what induced you to take it up----"
-
-"After you'd said you were going to be one of the absolutes," cried
-Hyman, interrupting and continuing Millicent's words.
-
-"Why?" said Millicent.
-
-"Why, why, why?" Hyman echoed.
-
-Dick, who had been blowing out smoke at a great rate, put down his
-pipe. The taste of the tobacco was making him feel rather sick. "I
-wish you would stop," he said wearily. "If I gave you the real
-reasons, you wouldn't believe me. And I can't invent any others that
-would be in the least convincing."
-
-"I believe the real reason is that you were afraid of prison."
-
-Dick leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. He did not mind being
-insulted now; it made no difference. Hyman and Millicent were still
-talking about him, but what they said did not interest him; he
-scarcely listened.
-
-They went back to London together in the evening.
-
-"Very intelligent woman, your sister," said Hyman just before they
-were starting. "Pity she's not on the right side about the war and so
-forth."
-
-Four weeks later Dick received a letter in which Hyman announced that
-he and Millicent had decided to get married.
-
-"I am happy to think," Dick wrote in his congratulatory reply, "that
-it was I who brought you together."
-
-He smiled as he read through the sentence; that was what the Christian
-martyr might say to the two lions who had scraped acquaintance over
-his bones in the amphitheatre.
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-One warm afternoon in the summer of 1918, Mr. Hobart, Clerk to the
-Wibley Town Council, was disturbed in the midst of his duties by the
-sudden entry into his office of a small dark man, dressed in corduroys
-and gaiters, but not having the air of a genuine agricultural
-labourer.
-
-"What may I do for you?" inquired Mr. Hobart.
-
-"I have come to inquire about my vote," said the stranger.
-
-"Aren't you already registered?"
-
-"Not yet. You see, it isn't long since the Act was passed giving us
-the vote."
-
-Mr. Hobart stared.
-
-"I don't quite follow," he said.
-
-"I may not look it," said the stranger, putting his head on one side
-and looking arch--"I may not look it, but I will confess to you,
-Mr.--er--Mr.--er----"
-
-"Hobart."
-
-"Mr. Hobart, that I am a woman of over thirty."
-
-Mr. Hobart grew visibly paler. Then, assuming a forced smile and
-speaking as one speaks to a child or a spoiled animal, he said:
-
-"I see--I see. Over thirty, dear me."
-
-He looked at the bell, which was over by the fireplace at the other
-side of the room, and wondered how he should ring it without rousing
-the maniac's suspicions.
-
-"Over thirty," the stranger went on. "You know my woman's secret. I am
-Miss Pearl Bellairs, the novelist. Perhaps you have read some of my
-books. Or are you too busy?"
-
-"Oh no, I've read several," Mr. Hobart replied, smiling more and more
-brightly and speaking in even more coaxing and indulgent tones.
-
-"Then we're friends already, Mr. Hobart. Anyone who knows my books,
-knows me. My whole heart is in them. Now, you must tell me all about
-my poor little vote. I shall be very patriotic with it when the time
-comes to use it."
-
-Mr. Hobart saw his opportunity.
-
-"Certainly, Miss Bellairs," he said. "I will ring for my clerk and
-we'll--er--we'll take down the details."
-
-He got up, crossed the room, and rang the bell with violence.
-
-"I'll just go and see that he brings the right books," he added, and
-darted to the door. Once outside in the passage, he mopped his face
-and heaved a sigh of relief. That had been a narrow shave, by Jove. A
-loony in the office--dangerous-looking brute, too.
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-On the following day Dick woke up and found himself in a bare
-whitewashed room, sparsely furnished with a little iron bed, a
-washstand, a chair, and table. He looked round him in surprise. Where
-had he got to this time? He went to the door and tried to open it; it
-was locked. An idea entered his mind: he was in barracks somewhere;
-the Military Authorities must have got hold of him somehow in spite of
-his exemption certificate. Or perhaps Pearl had gone and enlisted.
-. . . He turned next to the window, which was barred. Outside, he
-could see a courtyard, filled, not with soldiers, as he had expected,
-but a curious motley crew of individuals, some men and some women,
-wandering hither and thither with an air of complete aimlessness. Very
-odd, he thought--very odd. Beyond the courtyard, on the farther side
-of a phenomenally high wall, ran a railway line and beyond it a
-village, roofed with tile and thatch, and a tall church spire in the
-midst. Dick looked carefully at the spire. Didn't he know it?
-Surely--yes, those imbricated copper plates with which it was covered,
-that gilded ship that served as wind vane, the little gargoyles at the
-corner of the tower there could be no doubt; it was Belbury church.
-Belbury--that was where the . . . No, no; he wouldn't believe it. But
-looking down again into that high-walled courtyard, full of those
-queer, aimless folk, he was forced to admit it. The County Asylum
-stands at Belbury. He had often noticed it from the train, a huge,
-gaunt building of sausage-coloured brick, standing close to the
-railway, on the opposite side of the line to Belbury village and
-church. He remembered how, the last time he had passed in the train,
-he had wondered what they did in the asylum. He had regarded it then
-as one of those mysterious, unapproachable places, like Lhassa or a
-Ladies' Lavatory, into which he would never penetrate. And now, here
-he was, looking out through the bars, like any other madman. It was
-all Pearl's doing, as usual. If there had been no bars, he would have
-thrown himself out of the window.
-
-He sat down on his bed and began to think about what he should do. He
-would have to be very sane and show them by his behaviour and speech
-that he was no more mad than the commonalty of mankind. He would be
-extremely dignified about it all. If a warder or a doctor or somebody
-came in to see him, he would rise to his feet and say in the calmest
-and severest tones: "May I ask, pray, why I am detained here and upon
-whose authority?" That ought to stagger them. He practised that
-sentence, and the noble attitude with which he would accompany it, for
-the best part of an hour. Then, suddenly, there was the sound of a key
-in the lock. He hastily sat down again on the bed. A brisk little man
-of about forty, clean shaven and with pince-nez, stepped into the
-room, followed by a nurse and a warder in uniform. The doctor! Dick's
-heart was beating with absurd violence; he felt like an amateur actor
-at the first performance of an imperfectly rehearsed play. He rose,
-rather unsteadily, to his feet, and in a voice that quavered a little
-with an emotion he could not suppress, began:
-
-"Pray I ask, may . . ."
-
-Then, realizing that something had gone wrong, he hesitated,
-stammered, and came to a pause.
-
-The doctor turned to the nurse.
-
-"Did you hear that?" he asked. "He called me May. He seems to think
-everybody's a woman, not only himself."
-
-Turning to Dick with a cheerful smile, he went on:
-
-"Sit down, Miss Bellairs, please sit down."
-
-It was too much. Dick burst into tears, flung himself upon the bed,
-and buried his face in the pillow. The doctor looked at him as he lay
-there sobbing, his whole body shaken and convulsed.
-
-"A bad case, I fear."
-
-And the nurse nodded.
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-For the next three days Dick refused to eat. It was certainly
-unreasonable, but it seemed the only way of making a protest. On the
-fourth day the doctor signed a certificate to the effect that forcible
-feeding had become necessary. Accompanied by two warders and a nurse,
-he entered Dick's room.
-
-"Now, Miss Bellairs," he said, making a last persuasive appeal, "do
-have a little of this nice soup. We have come to have lunch with you."
-
-"I refuse to eat," said Dick icily, "as a protest against my unlawful
-detention in this place. I am as sane as any of you here."
-
-"Yes, yes." The doctor's voice was soothing. He made a sign to the
-warders. One was very large and stout, the other wiry, thin, sinister,
-like the second murderer in a play. They closed in on Dick.
-
-"I won't eat and I won't be made to eat!" Dick cried. "Let me go!" he
-shouted at the fat warder, who had laid a hand on his shoulder. His
-temper was beginning to rise.
-
-"Now, do behave yourself," said the fat warder. "It ain't a bit of use
-kicking up a row. Now, do take a little of this lovely soup," he added
-wheedlingly.
-
-"Let me go!" Dick screamed again, all his self-control gone. "I will
-not let myself be bullied."
-
-He began to struggle violently. The fat warder put an arm round his
-shoulders, as though he were an immense mother comforting an irritable
-child. Dick felt himself helpless; the struggle had quite exhausted
-him; he was weaker than he had any idea of. He began kicking the fat
-man's shins; it was the only way he could still show fight.
-
-"Temper, temper," remonstrated the warder, more motherly than ever.
-The thin warder stooped down, slipped a strap round the kicking legs,
-and drew it tight. Dick could move no more. His fury found vent in
-words--vain, abusive, filthy words, such as he had not used since he
-was a schoolboy.
-
-"Let me go," he screamed--"let me go, you devils! You beasts, you
-swine! beasts and swine!" he howled again and again.
-
-They soon had him securely strapped in a chair, his head held back
-ready for the doctor and his horrible-looking tubes. They were pushing
-the horrors up his nostrils. He coughed and choked, spat, shouted
-inarticulately, retched. It was like having a spoon put on your tongue
-and being told to say A-a-h, but worse; it was like jumping into the
-river and getting water up your nose--how he had always hated
-that!--only much worse. It was like almost everything unpleasant, only
-much, much worse than all. He exhausted himself struggling against his
-utterly immovable bonds. They had to carry him to his bed, he was so
-weak.
-
-He lay there, unmoving--for he was unable to move--staring at the
-ceiling. He felt as though he were floating on air, unsupported, solid
-no longer; the sensation was not unpleasant. For that reason he
-refused to let his mind dwell upon it; he would think of nothing that
-was not painful, odious, horrible. He thought about the torture which
-had just been inflicted on him and of the monstrous injustice of which
-he was a victim. He thought of the millions who had been and were
-still being slaughtered in the war; he thought of their pain, all the
-countless separate pains of them; pain incommunicable, individual,
-beyond the reach of sympathy; infinities of pain pent within frail
-finite bodies; pain without sense or object, bringing with it no hope
-and no redemption, futile, unnecessary, stupid. In one supreme
-apocalyptic moment he saw, he felt the universe in all its horror.
-
-They forcibly fed him again the following morning and again on the day
-after. On the fourth day pneumonia, the result of shock, complicated
-by acute inflammation of the throat and pleura, set in. The fever and
-pain gained ground. Dick had not the strength to resist their ravages,
-and his condition grew hourly worse. His mind, however, continued to
-work clearly--too clearly. It occurred to him that he might very
-likely die. He asked for pencil and paper to be brought him, and
-putting forth all the little strength he had left, he began to make
-his testament.
-
-"I am perfectly sane," he wrote at the top of the page, and underlined
-the words three times. "I am confined here by the most intol. injust."
-As soon as he began, he realized how little time and strength were
-left him; it was a waste to finish the long words. "They are killing
-me for my opins. I regard this war and all wars as utter bad.
-Capitalists' war. The devils will be smashed sooner later. Wish I
-could help. But it won't make any difference," he added on a new line
-and as though by an afterthought. "World will always be hell. Cap. or
-Lab., Engl. or Germ.--all beasts. One in a mill. is GOOD. I wasn't.
-Selfish intellect. Perhaps Pearl Bellairs better. If die, send corp.
-to hosp. for anatomy. Useful for once in my life!"
-
-Quite suddenly, he lapsed into delirium. The clear lucidity of his
-mind became troubled. The real world disappeared from before his eyes,
-and in its place he saw a succession of bright, unsteady visions
-created by his sick fantasy. Scenes from his childhood, long
-forgotten, bubbled up and disappeared. Unknown, hideous faces crowded
-in upon him; old friends revisited him. He was living in a bewildering
-mixture of the familiar and the strange. And all the while, across
-this changing unsubstantial world, there hurried a continual,
-interminable procession of dromedaries--countless high-domed beasts,
-with gargoyle faces and stiff legs and necks that bobbed as though on
-springs. Do what he could, he was unable to drive them away. He lost
-his temper with the brutes at last, struck at them, shouted; but in
-vain. The room rang with his cries of, "Get away, you beasts. Bloody
-humps. None of your nonconformist faces here." And while he was
-yelling and gesticulating (with his left hand only), his right hand
-was still busily engaged in writing. The words were clear and legible;
-the sentences consecutive and eminently sane. Dick might rave, but
-Pearl Bellairs remained calm and in full possession of her deplorable
-faculties. And what was Pearl doing with her busy pencil, while Dick,
-like a frenzied Betsy Trotwood, shouted at the trespassing camels? The
-first thing she did was to scratch out all that poor Dick had said
-about the war. Underneath it she wrote:
-
-"We shall not sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly . . ." And
-then, evidently finding that memorable sentence too long, particularly
-so since the addition of Poland and Czecho-Slovakia to the list of
-Allies, she began again.
-
-"We are fighting for honour and the defence of Small Nationalities.
-Plucky little Belgium! We went into the war with clean hands."
-
-A little of Pearl's thought seemed at this moment to have slopped over
-into Dick's mind; for he suddenly stopped abusing his dromedaries and
-began to cry out in the most pitiable fashion, "Clean hands, clean
-hands! I can't get mine clean. I can't, I can't, I can't. I
-contaminate everything." And he kept rubbing his left hand against the
-bed-clothes and putting his fingers to his nose, only to exclaim,
-"Ugh, they still stink of goat!" and then to start rubbing again.
-
-The right hand wrote on unperturbed. "No peace with the Hun until he
-is crushed and humiliated. Self-respecting Britons will refuse to
-shake a Hunnish hand for many a long year after the war. No more
-German waiters. Intern the Forty-Seven Thousand Hidden Hands in High
-Places!"
-
-At this point, Pearl seemed to have been struck by a new idea. She
-took a clean page and began:
-
-"To the Girls of England. I am a woman and proud of the fact. But,
-girls, I blushed for my sex to-day when I read in the papers that
-there had been cases of English girls talking to Hun prisoners, and
-not only talking to them, but allowing themselves to be kissed by
-them. Imagine! Clean, healthy British girls allowing themselves to be
-kissed by the swinish and bloodstained lips of the unspeakable Hun! Do
-you wonder that I blush for my sex? Stands England where she did? No,
-emphatically no, if these stories are true, and true--sadly and with a
-heavy bleeding heart do I admit it--true they are."
-
-"Clean hands, clean hands," Dick was still muttering, and applying his
-ringers to his nose once more, "Christ," he cried, "how they stink!
-Goats, dung . . ."
-
-"Is there any excuse for such conduct?" the pencil continued. "The
-most that can be said in palliation of the offence is that girls are
-thoughtless, that they do not consider the full significance of their
-actions. But listen to me, girls of all ages, classes and creeds, from
-the blue-eyed, light-hearted flapper of sixteen to the stern-faced,
-hard-headed business woman--listen to me. There is a girlish charm
-about thoughtlessness, but there is a point beyond which
-thoughtlessness becomes criminal. A flapper may kiss a Hun without
-thinking what she is doing, merely for the fun of the thing; perhaps,
-even, out of misguided pity. Will she repeat the offence if she
-realizes, as she must realize if she will only think, that this
-thoughtless fun, this mawkish and hysterical pity, is nothing less
-than Treason? Treason--it is a sinister word, but . . ."
-
-The pencil stopped writing; even Pearl was beginning to grow tired.
-Dick's shouting had died away to a hoarse, faint whisper. Suddenly her
-attention was caught by the last words that Dick had written--the
-injunction to send his body, if he died, to a hospital for an anatomy.
-She put forth a great effort.
-
-"NO. NO," she wrote in huge capitals. "Bury me in a little country
-churchyard, with lovely marble angels like the ones in St. George's at
-Windsor, over Princess Charlotte's tomb. Not anatomy. Too horrible,
-too disgus . . ."
-
-The coma which had blotted out Dick's mind fell now upon hers as well.
-Two hours later Dick Greenow was dead; the fingers of his right hand
-still grasped a pencil. The scribbled papers were thrown away as being
-merely the written ravings of a madman; they were accustomed that sort
-of thing at the asylum.
-
-
-
-HAPPILY EVER AFTER
-
-I
-
-AT the best of times it is a long way from Chicago to Blaybury in
-Wiltshire, but war has fixed between them a great gulf. In the
-circumstances, therefore, it seemed an act of singular devotion on the
-part of Peter Jacobsen to have come all the way from the Middle West,
-in the fourth year of war, on a visit to his old friend Petherton,
-when the project entailed a single-handed struggle with two Great
-Powers over the question of passports and the risk, when they had been
-obtained, of perishing miserably by the way, a victim of
-frightfulness.
-
-At the expense of much time and more trouble Jacobsen had at last
-arrived; the gulf between Chicago and Blaybury was spanned. In the
-hall of Petherton's house a scene of welcome was being enacted under
-the dim gaze of six or seven brown family portraits by unknown masters
-of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
-
-Old Alfred Petherton, a grey shawl over his shoulders--for he had to
-be careful, even in June, of draughts and colds--was shaking his
-guest's hand with interminable cordiality.
-
-"My dear boy," he kept repeating, "it _is_ a pleasure to see you. My
-dear boy . . ."
-
-Jacobsen limply abandoned his forearm and waited in patience.
-
-"I can never be grateful enough," Mr. Petherton went on--"never
-grateful enough to you for having taken all this endless trouble to
-come and see an old decrepit man--for that's what I am now, that's
-what I am, believe me."
-
-"Oh, I assure you . . ." said Jacobsen, with vague deprecation. "Le
-vieux crétin qui pleurniche," he said to himself. French was a
-wonderfully expressive language, to be sure.
-
-"My digestion and my heart have got much worse since I saw you last.
-But I think I must have told you about that in my letters."
-
-"You did indeed, and I was most grieved to hear it."
-
-"Grieved"--what a curious flavour that word had! Like somebody's tea
-which used to recall the most delicious blends of forty years ago. But
-it was decidedly the _mot juste_. It had the right obituary note about
-it.
-
-"Yes," Mr. Petherton continued, "my palpitations are very bad now.
-Aren't they, Marjorie?" He appealed to his daughter who was standing
-beside him.
-
-"Father's palpitations are very bad," she replied dutifully.
-
-It was as though they were talking about some precious heirloom long
-and lovingly cherished.
-
-"And my digestion. . . . This physical infirmity makes all mental
-activity so difficult. All the same, I manage to do a little useful
-work. We'll discuss that later, though. You must be feeling tired and
-dusty after your journey down. I'll guide you to your room. Marjorie,
-will you get someone to take up his luggage?"
-
-"I can take it myself," said Jacobsen, and he picked up a small
-gladstone-bag that had been deposited by the door.
-
-"Is that all?" Mr. Petherton asked.
-
-"Yes, that's all."
-
-As one living the life of reason, Jacobsen objected to owning things.
-One so easily became the slave of things and not their master. He
-liked to be free; he checked his possessive instincts and limited his
-possessions to the strictly essential. He was as much or as little at
-home at Blaybury or Pekin. He could have explained all this if he
-liked. But in the present case it wasn't worth taking the trouble.
-
-"This is your humble chamber," said Mr. Petherton, throwing open the
-door of what was, indeed, a very handsome spare-room, bright with
-chintzes and cut flowers and silver candlesticks. "A poor thing, but
-your own."
-
-Courtly grace! Dear old man! Apt quotation! Jacobsen unpacked his bag
-and arranged its contents neatly and methodically in the various
-drawers and shelves of the wardrobe.
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-It was a good many years now since Jacobsen had come in the course of
-his grand educational tour to Oxford. He spent a couple of years
-there, for he liked the place, and its inhabitants were a source of
-unfailing amusement to him.
-
-A Norwegian, born in the Argentine, educated in the United States, in
-France, and in Germany; a man with no nationality and no prejudices,
-enormously old in experience, he found something very new and fresh
-and entertaining about his fellow-students with their comic
-public-school traditions and fabulous ignorance of the world. He had
-quietly watched them doing their little antics, feeling all the time
-that a row of bars separated them from himself, and that he ought,
-after each particularly amusing trick, to offer them a bun or a
-handful of pea-nuts. In the intervals of sight-seeing in this strange
-and delightful Jardin des Plantes he read Greats, and it was through
-Aristotle that he had come into contact with Alfred Petherton, fellow
-and tutor of his college.
-
-The name of Petherton is a respectable one in the academic world. You
-will find it on the title-page of such meritorious, if not exactly
-brilliant, books as _Plato's Predecessors_, _Three Scottish
-Metaphysicians_, _Introduction to the Study of Ethics_, _Essays in
-Neo-Idealism_. Some of his works are published in cheap editions as
-text-books.
-
-One of those curious inexplicable friendships that often link the most
-unlikely people had sprung up between tutor and pupil, and had lasted
-unbroken for upwards of twenty years. Petherton felt a fatherly
-affection for the younger man, together with a father's pride, now
-that Jacobsen was a man of world-wide reputation, in having, as he
-supposed, spiritually begotten him. And now Jacobsen had travelled
-three or four thousand miles across a world at war just to see the old
-man. Petherton was profoundly touched.
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-"Did you see any submarines on the way over?" Marjorie asked, as she
-and Jacobsen were strolling together in the garden after breakfast the
-next day.
-
-"I didn't notice any; but then I am very unobservant about these
-things."
-
-There was a pause. At last, "I suppose there is a great deal of
-war-work being done in America now?" said Marjorie.
-
-Jacobsen supposed so; and there floated across his mind a vision of
-massed bands, of orators with megaphones, of patriotic sky-signs, of
-streets made perilous by the organized highway robbery of Red Cross
-collectors. He was too lazy to describe it all; besides, she wouldn't
-see the point of it.
-
-"I should like to be able to do some war-work," Marjorie explained
-apologetically. "But I have to look after father, and there's the
-housekeeping, so I really haven't the time."
-
-Jacobsen thought he detected a formula for the benefit of strangers.
-She evidently wanted to make things right about herself in people's
-minds. Her remark about the housekeeping made Jacobsen think of the
-late Mrs. Petherton, her mother; she had been a good-looking,
-painfully sprightly woman with a hankering to shine in University
-society at Oxford. One quickly learned that she was related to bishops
-and country families; a hunter of ecclesiastical lions and a snob. He
-felt glad she was dead.
-
-"Won't it be awful when there's no war-work," he said. "People will
-have nothing to do or think about when peace comes."
-
-"I shall be glad. Housekeeping will be so much easier."
-
-"True. There are consolations."
-
-Marjorie looked at him suspiciously; she didn't like being laughed at.
-What an undistinguished-looking little man he was! Short, stoutish,
-with waxed brown moustaches and a forehead that incipient baldness had
-made interminably high. He looked like the sort of man to whom one
-says: "Thank you, I'll take it in notes with a pound's worth of
-silver." There were pouches under his eyes and pouches under his chin,
-and you could never guess from his expression what he was thinking
-about. She was glad that she was taller than he and could look down on
-him.
-
-Mr. Petherton appeared from the house, his grey shawl over his
-shoulders and the crackling expanse of the _Times_ between his hands.
-
-"Good morrow," he cried.
-
-To the Shakespearian heartiness of this greeting Marjorie returned her
-most icily modern "Morning." Her father always said "Good morrow"
-instead of "Good morning," and the fact irritated her with unfailing
-regularity every day of her life.
-
-"There's a most interesting account," said Mr. Petherton, "by a young
-pilot of an air fight in to-day's paper," and as they walked up and
-down the gravel path he read the article, which was a column and a
-half in length.
-
-Marjorie made no attempt to disguise her boredom, and occupied herself
-by reading something on the other side of the page, craning her neck
-round to see.
-
-"Very interesting," said Jacobsen when it was finished.
-
-Mr. Petherton had turned over and was now looking at the Court
-Circular page.
-
-"I see," he said, "there's someone called Beryl Camberley-Belcher
-going to be married. Do you know if that's any relation of the Howard
-Camberley-Belchers, Marjorie?"
-
-"I've no idea who the Howard Camberley-Belchers are," Marjorie
-answered rather sharply.
-
-"Oh, I thought you did. Let me see. Howard Camberley-Belcher was at
-college with me. And he had a brother called James--or was it
-William?--and a sister who married one of the Riders, or at any rate
-some relation of the Riders; for I know the Camberley-Belchers and the
-Riders used to fit in somewhere. Dear me, I'm afraid my memory for
-names is going."
-
-Marjorie went indoors to prepare the day's domestic campaign with the
-cook. When that was over she retired to her sitting-room and unlocked
-her very private desk. She must write to Guy this morning. Marjorie
-had known Guy Lambourne for years and years, almost as long as she
-could remember. The Lambournes were old family friends of the
-Pethertons: indeed they were, distantly, connections; they "fitted in
-somewhere," as Mr. Petherton would say--somewhere, about a couple of
-generations back. Marjorie was two years younger than Guy; they were
-both only children; circumstances had naturally thrown them a great
-deal together. Then Guy's father had died, and not long afterwards his
-mother, and at the age of seventeen Guy had actually come to live with
-the Pethertons, for the old man was his guardian. And now they were
-engaged; had been, more or less, from the first year of the war.
-
-Marjorie took pen, ink, and paper. "DEAR GUY," she began--("_We_
-aren't sentimental," she had once remarked, with a mixture of contempt
-and secret envy, to a friend who had confided that she and her fiancé
-never began with anything less than Darling.)--"I am longing for
-another of your letters. . . ." She went through the usual litany of
-longing. "It was father's birthday yesterday; he is sixty-five. I
-cannot bear to think that some day you and I will be as old as that.
-Aunt Ellen sent him a Stilton cheese--a useful war-time present. How
-boring housekeeping is. By dint of thinking about cheeses my mind is
-rapidly turning into one--a Gruyčre; where there isn't cheese there
-are just holes, full of vacuum . . ."
-
-She didn't really mind housekeeping so much. She took it for granted,
-and did it just because it was there to be done. Guy, on the contrary,
-never took anything for granted; she made these demonstrations for his
-benefit.
-
-"I read Keats's letters, as you suggested, and thought them _too_
-beautiful . . ."
-
-At the end of a page of rapture she paused and bit her pen. What was
-there to say next? It seemed absurd one should have to write letters
-about the books one had been reading. But there was nothing else to
-write about; nothing ever happened. After all, what had happened in
-her life? Her mother dying when she was sixteen; then the excitement
-of Guy coming to live with them; then the war, but that hadn't meant
-much to her; then Guy falling in love, and their getting engaged. That
-was really all. She wished she could write about her feelings in an
-accurate, complicated way, like people in novels; but when she came to
-think about it, she didn't seem to have any feelings to describe.
-
-She looked at Guy's last letter from France. "Sometimes," he had
-written, "I am tortured by an intense physical desire for you. I can
-think of nothing but your beauty, your young, strong body. I hate
-that; I have to struggle to repress it. Do you forgive me?" It rather
-thrilled her that he should feel like that about her: he had always
-been so cold, so reserved, so much opposed to sentimentality--to the
-kisses and endearments she would, perhaps, secretly have liked. But he
-had seemed so right when he said, "We must love like rational beings,
-with our minds, not with our hands and lips." All the same . . .
-
-She dipped her pen in the ink and began to write again. "I know the
-feelings you spoke of in your letter. Sometimes I long for you in the
-same way. I dreamt the other night I was holding you in my arms, and
-woke up hugging the pillow." She looked at what she had written. It
-was too awful, too vulgar! She would have to scratch it out. But no,
-she would leave it in spite of everything, just to see what he would
-think about it. She finished the letter quickly, sealed and stamped
-it, and rang for the maid to take it to the post. When the servant had
-gone, she shut up her desk with a bang. Bang--the letter had gone,
-irrevocably.
-
-She picked up a large book lying on the table and began to read. It
-was the first volume of the _Decline and Fall_. Guy had said she must
-read Gibbon; she wouldn't be educated till she had read Gibbon. And so
-yesterday she had gone to her father in his library to get the book.
-
-"Gibbon," Mr. Petherton had said, "certainly, my dear. How delightful
-it is to look at these grand old books again. One always finds
-something new every time."
-
-Marjorie gave him to understand that she had never read it. She felt
-rather proud of her ignorance.
-
-Mr. Petherton handed the first of eleven volumes to her. "A great
-book," he murmured--"an essential book. It fills the gap between your
-classical history and your medięval stuff."
-
-"Your" classical history, Marjorie repeated to herself, "your"
-classical history indeed! Her father had an irritating way of taking
-it for granted that she knew everything, that classical history was as
-much hers as his. Only a day or two before he had turned to her at
-luncheon with, "Do you remember, dear child, whether it was Pomponazzi
-who denied the personal immortality of the soul, or else that queer
-fellow, Laurentius Valla? It's gone out of my head for the moment."
-Marjorie had quite lost her temper at the question--much to the
-innocent bewilderment of her poor father.
-
-She had set to work with energy on the Gibbon; her bookmarker
-registered the fact that she had got through one hundred and
-twenty-three pages yesterday. Marjorie started reading. After two
-pages she stopped. She looked at the number of pages still remaining
-to be read--and this was only the first volume. She felt like a wasp
-sitting down to eat a vegetable marrow. Gibbon's bulk was not
-perceptibly diminished by her first bite. It was too long. She shut
-the book and went out for a walk. Passing the Whites' house, she saw
-her friend, Beatrice White that was, sitting on the lawn with her two
-babies. Beatrice hailed her, and she turned in.
-
-"Pat a cake, pat a cake," she said. At the age of ten months, baby
-John had already learnt the art of patting cakes. He slapped the
-outstretched hand offered him, and his face, round and smooth and pink
-like an enormous peach, beamed with pleasure.
-
-"Isn't he a darling!" Marjorie exclaimed. "You know, I'm sure he's
-grown since last I saw him, which was on Tuesday."
-
-"He put on eleven ounces last week," Beatrice affirmed.
-
-"How wonderful! His hair's coming on splendidly . . ."
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-It was Sunday the next day. Jacobsen appeared at breakfast in the
-neatest of black suits. He looked, Marjorie thought, more than ever
-like a cashier. She longed to tell him to hurry up or he'd miss the
-8.53 for the second time this week and the manager would be annoyed.
-Marjorie herself was, rather consciously, not in Sunday best.
-
-"What is the name of the Vicar?" Jacobsen inquired, as he helped
-himself to bacon.
-
-"Trubshaw. Luke Trubshaw, I believe."
-
-"Does he preach well?"
-
-"He didn't when I used to hear him. But I don't often go to church
-now, so I don't know what he's like these days."
-
-"Why don't you go to church?" Jacobsen inquired, with a silkiness of
-tone which veiled the crude outlines of his leading question.
-
-Marjorie was painfully conscious of blushing. She was filled with rage
-against Jacobsen. "Because," she said firmly, "I don't think it
-necessary to give expression to my religious feelings by making a lot
-of"--she hesitated a moment--"a lot of meaningless gestures with a
-crowd of other people."
-
-"You used to go," said Jacobsen.
-
-"When I was a child and hadn't thought about these things."
-
-Jacobsen was silent, and concealed a smile in his coffee-cup. Really,
-he said to himself, there ought to be religious conscription for
-women--and for most men, too. It was grotesque the way these people
-thought they could stand by themselves--the fools, when there was the
-infinite authority of organized religion to support their ridiculous
-feebleness.
-
-"Does Lambourne go to church?" he asked maliciously, and with an air
-of perfect naļveté and good faith.
-
-Marjorie coloured again, and a fresh wave of hatred surged up within
-her. Even as she had said the words she had wondered whether Jacobsen
-would notice that the phrase "meaningless gestures" didn't ring very
-much like one of her own coinages. "Gesture"--that was one of Guy's
-words, like "incredible," "exacerbate," "impinge," "sinister." Of
-course all her present views about religion had come from Guy. She
-looked Jacobsen straight in the face and replied:
-
-"Yes, I think he goes to church pretty regularly. But I really don't
-know: his religion has nothing to do with me."
-
-Jacobsen was lost in delight and admiration.
-
-Punctually at twenty minutes to eleven he set out for church. From
-where she was sitting in the summer-house Marjorie watched him as he
-crossed the garden, incredibly absurd and incongruous in his black
-clothes among the blazing flowers and the young emerald of the trees.
-Now he was hidden behind the sweet-briar hedge, all except the hard
-black melon of his bowler hat, which she could see bobbing along
-between the topmost sprays.
-
-She went on with her letter to Guy. ". . . What a strange man Mr.
-Jacobsen is. I suppose he is very clever, but I can't get very much
-out of him. We had an argument about religion at breakfast this
-morning; I rather scored off him. He has now gone off to church all by
-himself;--I really couldn't face the prospect of going with him--I
-hope he'll enjoy old Mr. Trubshaw's preaching!"
-
-Jacobsen did enjoy Mr. Trubshaw's preaching enormously. He always made
-a point, in whatever part of Christendom he happened to be, of
-attending divine service. He had the greatest admiration of churches
-as institutions. In their solidity and unchangeableness he saw one of
-the few hopes for humanity. Further, he derived great pleasure from
-comparing the Church as an institution--splendid, powerful,
-eternal--with the childish imbecility of its representatives. How
-delightful it was to sit in the herded congregation and listen to the
-sincere outpourings of an intellect only a little less limited than
-that of an Australian aboriginal! How restful to feel oneself a member
-of a flock, guided by a good shepherd--himself a sheep! Then there was
-the scientific interest (he went to church as student of anthropology,
-as a Freudian psychologist) and the philosophic amusement of counting
-the undistributed middles and tabulating historically the exploded
-fallacies in the parson's discourse.
-
-To-day Mr. Trubshaw preached a topical sermon about the Irish
-situation. His was the gospel of the _Morning Post_, slightly tempered
-by Christianity. It was our duty, he said, to pray for the Irish first
-of all, and if that had no effect upon recruiting, why, then, we must
-conscribe them as zealously as we had prayed before.
-
-Jacobsen leaned back in his pew with a sigh of contentment. A
-connoisseur, he recognized that this was the right stuff.
-
-"Well," said Mr. Petherton over the Sunday beef at lunch, "how did you
-like our dear Vicar?"
-
-"He was splendid," said Jacobsen, with grave enthusiasm. "One of the
-best sermons I've ever heard."
-
-"Indeed? I shall really have to go and hear him again. It must be
-nearly ten years since I listened to him."
-
-"He's inimitable."
-
-Marjorie looked at Jacobsen carefully. He seemed to be perfectly
-serious. She was more than ever puzzled by the man.
-
-The days went slipping by, hot blue days that passed like a flash
-almost without one's noticing them, cold grey days, seeming
-interminable and without number, and about which one spoke with a
-sense of justified grievance, for the season was supposed to be
-summer. There was fighting going on in France--terrific battles, to
-judge from the headlines in the _Times_; but, after all, one day's
-paper was very much like another's. Marjorie read them dutifully, but
-didn't honestly take in very much; at least she forgot about things
-very soon. She couldn't keep count with the battles of Ypres, and when
-somebody told her that she ought to go and see the photographs of the
-_Vindictive_, she smiled vaguely and said Yes, without remembering
-precisely what the _Vindictive_ was--a ship, she supposed.
-
-Guy was in France, to be sure, but he was an Intelligence Officer now,
-so that she was hardly anxious about him at all. Clergymen used to say
-that the war was bringing us all back to a sense of the fundamental
-realities of life. She supposed it was true: Guy's enforced absences
-were a pain to her, and the difficulties of housekeeping continually
-increased and multiplied.
-
-Mr. Petherton took a more intelligent interest in the war than did his
-daughter. He prided himself on being able to see the thing as a whole,
-on taking an historical, God's-eye view of it all. He talked about it
-at meal-times, insisting that the world must be made safe for
-democracy. Between meals he sat in the library working at his
-monumental History of Morals. To his dinner-table disquisitions
-Marjorie would listen more or less attentively, Jacobsen with an
-unfailing, bright, intelligent politeness. Jacobsen himself rarely
-volunteered a remark about the war; it was taken for granted that he
-thought about it in the same way as all other right-thinking folk.
-Between meals he worked in his room or discussed the morals of the
-Italian Renaissance with his host. Marjorie could write to Guy that
-nothing was happening, and that but for his absence and the weather
-interfering so much with tennis, she would be perfectly happy.
-
-Into the midst of this placidity there fell, delightful bolt from the
-blue, the announcement that Guy was getting leave at the end of July.
-"DARLING," Marjorie wrote, "I am so excited to think that you will be
-with me in such a little--such a long, long time." Indeed, she was so
-excited and delighted that she realized with a touch of remorse how
-comparatively little she had thought of him when there seemed no
-chance of seeing him, how dim a figure in absence he was. A week later
-she heard that George White had arranged to get leave at the same time
-so as to see Guy. She was glad; George was a charming boy, and Guy was
-so fond of him. The Whites were their nearest neighbours, and ever
-since Guy had come to live at Blaybury he had seen a great deal of
-young George.
-
-"We shall be a most festive party," said Mr. Petherton. "Roger will be
-coming to us just at the same time as Guy."
-
-"I'd quite forgotten Uncle Roger," said Marjorie. "Of course, his
-holidays begin then, don't they?"
-
-The Reverend Roger was Alfred Petherton's brother and a master at one
-of our most glorious public schools. Marjorie hardly agreed with her
-father in thinking that his presence would add anything to the
-"festiveness" of the party. It was a pity he should be coming at this
-particular moment. However, we all have our little cross to bear.
-
-Mr. Petherton was feeling playful. "We must bring down," he said, "the
-choicest Falernian, bottled when Gladstone was consul, for the
-occasion. We must prepare wreaths and unguents and hire a flute player
-and a couple of dancing girls . . ."
-
-He spent the rest of the meal in quoting Horace, Catullus, the Greek
-Anthology, Petronius, and Sidonius Apollinarius. Marjorie's knowledge
-of the dead languages was decidedly limited. Her thoughts were
-elsewhere, and it was only dimly and as it were through a mist that
-she heard her father murmuring--whether merely to himself or with the
-hope of eliciting an answer from somebody, she hardly knew--"Let me
-see: how does that epigram go?--that one about the different kinds of
-fish and the garlands of roses, by Meleager, or is it Poseidippus?
-. . ."
-
-
-
-II
-
-GUY and Jacobsen were walking in the Dutch garden, an incongruous
-couple. On Guy military servitude had left no outwardly visible mark;
-out of uniform, he still looked like a tall, untidy undergraduate; he
-stooped and drooped as much as ever; his hair was still bushy and, to
-judge by the dim expression of his face, he had not yet learnt to
-think imperially. His khaki always looked like a disguise, like the
-most absurd fancy dress. Jacobsen trotted beside him, short, fattish,
-very sleek, and correct. They talked in a desultory way about things
-indifferent. Guy, anxious for a little intellectual exercise after so
-many months of discipline, had been trying to inveigle his companion
-into a philosophical discussion. Jacobsen consistently eluded his
-efforts; he was too lazy to talk seriously; there was no profit that
-he could see to be got out of this young man's opinions, and he had
-not the faintest desire to make a disciple. He preferred, therefore,
-to discuss the war and the weather. It irritated him that people
-should want to trespass on the domain of thought--people who had no
-right to live anywhere but on the vegetative plane of mere existence.
-He wished they would simply be content to _be_ or _do_, not try, so
-hopelessly, to think, when only one in a million can think with the
-least profit to himself or anyone else.
-
-Out of the corner of his eye he looked at the dark, sensitive face of
-his companion; he ought to have gone into business at eighteen, was
-Jacobsen's verdict. It was bad for him to think; he wasn't strong
-enough.
-
-A great sound of barking broke upon the calm of the garden. Looking
-up, the two strollers saw George White running across the green turf
-of the croquet lawn with a huge fawn-coloured dog bounding along at
-his side.
-
-"Morning," he shouted. He was hatless and out of breath. "I was taking
-Bella for a run, and thought I'd look in and see how you all were."
-
-"What a lovely dog!" Jacobsen exclaimed.
-
-"An old English mastiff our--one aboriginal dog. She has a pedigree
-going straight back to Edward the Confessor."
-
-Jacobsen began a lively conversation with George on the virtues and
-shortcomings of dogs. Bella smelt his calves and then lifted up her
-gentle black eyes to look at him. She seemed satisfied.
-
-He looked at them for a little; they were too much absorbed in their
-doggy conversation to pay attention to him. He made a gesture as
-though he had suddenly remembered something, gave a little grunt, and
-with a very preoccupied expression on his face turned to go towards
-the house. His elaborate piece of by-play escaped the notice of the
-intended spectators; Guy saw that it had, and felt more miserable and
-angry and jealous than ever. They would think he had slunk off because
-he wasn't wanted--which was quite true--instead of believing that he
-had something very important to do, which was what he had intended
-they should believe.
-
-A cloud of self-doubt settled upon him. Was his mind, after all,
-worthless, and the little things he had written--rubbish, not
-potential genius as he had hoped? Jacobsen was right in preferring
-George's company. George was perfect, physically, a splendid creature;
-what could he himself claim?
-
-"I'm second-rate," he thought--"second-rate, physically, morally,
-mentally. Jacobsen is quite right."
-
-The best he could hope to be was a pedestrian literary man with quiet
-tastes.
-
-NO, no, no! He clenched his hands and, as though to register his
-resolve before the universe, he said, aloud:
-
-"I will do it; I will be first-rate, I will."
-
-He was covered with confusion on seeing a gardener pop up, surprised
-from behind a bank of rose-bushes. Talking to himself--the man must
-have thought him mad!
-
-He hurried on across the lawn, entered the house, and ran upstairs to
-his room. There was not a second to lose; he must begin at once. He
-would write something--something that would last, solid, hard,
-shining. . . .
-
-"Damn them all! I will do it, I can . . ."
-
-There were writing materials and a table in his room. He selected a
-pen--with a Relief nib he would be able to go on for hours without
-getting tired--and a large square sheet of writing-paper.
-
-     "HATCH HOUSE,
-         BLAYBURY,
-            WILTS.
-   Station: Cogham, 3 miles; Nobes Monacorum, 4½ miles."
-
-Stupid of people to have their stationery printed in red, when black
-or blue is so much nicer! He inked over the letters.
-
-He held up the paper to the light; there was a watermark, "Pimlico
-Bond." What an admirable name for the hero of a novel! Pimlico Bond.
-. . .
-
-    "There's be-eef in the la-arder
-     And du-ucks in the pond;
-     Crying dilly dilly, dilly dilly . . ."
-
-He bit the end of his pen. "What I want to get," he said to himself,
-"is something very hard, very external. Intense emotion, but one will
-somehow have got outside it." He made a movement of hands, arms, and
-shoulders, tightening his muscles in an effort to express to himself
-physically that hardness and tightness and firmness of style after
-which he was struggling!
-
-He began to draw on his virgin paper. A woman, naked, one arm lifted
-over her head, so that it pulled up her breast by that wonderful
-curving muscle that comes down from the shoulder. The inner surface of
-the thighs, remember, is slightly concave. The feet, seen from the
-front, are always a difficulty.
-
-It would never do to leave that about. What would the servants think?
-He turned the nipples into eyes, drew heavy lines for nose, mouth, and
-chin, slopped on the ink thick; it made a passable face now--though an
-acute observer might have detected the original nudity. He tore it up
-into very small pieces.
-
-A crescendo booming filled the house. It was the gong. He looked at
-his watch. Lunch-time, and he had done nothing. O God! . . .
-
-
-
-III
-
-IT was dinner-time on the last evening of Guy's leave. The uncovered
-mahogany table was like a pool of brown unruffled water within whose
-depths flowers and the glinting shapes of glass and silver hung dimly
-reflected. Mr. Petherton sat at the head of the board, flanked by his
-brother Roger and Jacobsen. Youth, in the persons of Marjorie, Guy,
-and George White, had collected at the other end. They had reached the
-stage of dessert.
-
-"This is excellent port," said Roger, sleek and glossy like a well-fed
-black cob under his silken clerical waistcoat. He was a strong,
-thick-set man of about fifty, with a red neck as thick as his head.
-His hair was cropped with military closeness; he liked to set a good
-example to the boys, some of whom showed distressing "ęsthetic"
-tendencies and wore their hair long.
-
-"I'm glad you like it. I mayn't touch it myself, of course. Have
-another glass." Alfred Petherton's face wore an expression of
-dyspeptic melancholy. He was wishing he hadn't taken quite so much of
-that duck.
-
-"Thank you, I will." Roger took the decanter with a smile of
-satisfaction. "The tired schoolmaster is worthy of his second glass.
-White, you look rather pale; I think you must have another." Roger had
-a hearty, jocular manner, calculated to prove to his pupils that he
-was not one of the slimy sort of parsons, not a Creeping Jesus.
-
-There was an absorbing conversation going on at the youthful end of
-the table. Secretly irritated at having been thus interrupted in the
-middle of it, White turned round and smiled vaguely at Roger.
-
-"Oh, thank you, sir," he said, and pushed his glass forward to be
-filled. The "sir" slipped out unawares; it was, after all, such a
-little while since he had been a schoolboy under Roger's dominion.
-
-"One is lucky," Roger went on seriously, "to get any port wine at all
-now. I'm thankful to say I bought ten dozen from my old college some
-years ago to lay down; otherwise I don't know what I should do. My
-wine merchant tells me he couldn't let me have a single bottle.
-Indeed, he offered to buy some off me, if I'd sell. But I wasn't
-having any. A bottle in the cellar is worth ten shillings in the
-pocket these days. I always say that port has become a necessity now
-one gets so little meat. Lambourne! you are another of our brave
-defenders; you deserve a second glass."
-
-"No, thanks," said Guy, hardly looking up. "I've had enough." He went
-on talking to Marjorie--about the different views of life held by the
-French and the Russians.
-
-Roger helped himself to cherries. "One has to select them carefully,"
-he remarked for the benefit of the unwillingly listening George.
-"There is nothing that gives you such stomach-aches as unripe
-cherries."
-
-"I expect you're glad, Mr. Petherton, that holidays have begun at
-last?" said Jacobsen.
-
-"Glad? I should think so. One is utterly dead beat at the end of the
-summer term. Isn't one, White?"
-
-White had taken the opportunity to turn back again and listen to Guy's
-conversation; recalled, like a dog who has started off on a forbidden
-scent, he obediently assented that one did get tired at the end of the
-summer term.
-
-"I suppose," said Jacobsen, "you still teach the same old
-things--Cęsar, Latin verses, Greek grammar, and the rest? We Americans
-can hardly believe that all that still goes on."
-
-"Thank goodness," said Roger, "we still hammer a little solid stuff
-into them. But there's been a great deal of fuss lately about new
-curriculums and so forth. They do a lot of science now and things of
-that kind, but I don't believe the children learn anything at all.
-It's pure waste of time."
-
-"So is all education, I dare say," said Jacobsen lightly.
-
-"Not if you teach them discipline. That's what's wanted--discipline.
-Most of these little boys need plenty of beating, and they don't get
-enough now. Besides, if you can't hammer knowledge in at their heads,
-you can at least beat a little in at their tails."
-
-"You're very ferocious, Roger," said Mr. Petherton, smiling. He was
-feeling better; the duck was settling down.
-
-"No, it's the vital thing. The best thing the war has brought us is
-discipline. The country had got slack and wanted tightening up."
-Roger's face glowed with zeal.
-
-From the other end of the table Guy's voice could be heard saying, "Do
-you know César Franck's 'Dieu s'avance ą travers la lande'? It's one
-of the finest bits of religious music I know."
-
-Mr. Petherton's face lighted up; he leaned forward. "No," he said,
-throwing his answer unexpectedly into the midst of the young people's
-conversation. "I don't know it; but do you know this? Wait a minute."
-He knitted his brows, and his lips moved as though he were trying to
-recapture a formula. "Ah, I've got it. Now, can you tell me this? The
-name of what famous piece of religious music do I utter when I order
-an old carpenter, once a Liberal but now a renegade to Conservatism,
-to make a hive for bees?"
-
-Guy gave it up; his guardian beamed delightedly.
-
-"Hoary Tory, oh, Judas! Make a bee-house," he said. "Do you see?
-Oratorio _Judas Maccabeus._"
-
-Guy could have wished that this bit of flotsam from Mr. Petherton's
-sportive youth had not been thus washed up at his feet. He felt that
-he had been peeping indecently close into the dark backward and abysm
-of time.
-
-"That was a good one," Mr. Petherton chuckled. "I must see if I can
-think of some more."
-
-Roger, who was not easily to be turned away from his favourite topic,
-waited till this irrelevant spark of levity had quite expired, and
-continued: "It's a remarkable and noticeable fact that you never seem
-to get discipline combined with the teaching of science or modern
-languages. Who ever heard of a science master having a good house at a
-school? Scientists' houses are always bad."
-
-"How very strange!" said Jacobsen.
-
-"Strange, but a fact. It seems to me a great mistake to give them
-houses at all if they can't keep discipline. And then there's the
-question of religion. Some of these men never come to chapel except
-when they're on duty. And then, I ask you, what happens when they
-prepare their boys for Confirmation? Why, I've known boys come to me
-who were supposed to have been prepared by one or other of these men,
-and, on asking them, I've found that they know nothing whatever about
-the most solemn facts of the Eucharist.--May I have some more of those
-excellent cherries please, White?--Of course, I do my best in such
-cases to tell the boys what I feel personally about these solemn
-things. But there generally isn't the time; one's life is so crowded;
-and so they go into Confirmation with only the very haziest knowledge
-of what it's all about. You see how absurd it is to let anyone but the
-classical men have anything to do with the boys' lives."
-
-"Shake it well, dear," Mr. Petherton was saying to his daughter, who
-had come with his medicine.
-
-"What is that stuff?" asked Roger.
-
-"Oh, it's merely my peptones. I can hardly digest at all without it,
-you know."
-
-"You have all my sympathies. My poor colleague, Flexner, suffers from
-chronic colitis. I can't imagine how he goes on with his work."
-
-"No, indeed. I find I can do nothing strenuous."
-
-Roger turned and seized once more on the unhappy George. "White," he
-said, "let this be a lesson to you. Take care of your inside; it's the
-secret of a happy old age."
-
-Guy looked up quickly. "Don't worry about his old age," he said in a
-strange harsh voice, very different from the gentle, elaborately
-modulated tone in which he generally spoke. "He won't have an old age.
-His chances against surviving are about fourteen to three if the war
-goes on another year."
-
-"Come," said Roger, "don't let's be pessimistic."
-
-"But I'm not. I assure you, I'm giving you a most rosy view of
-George's chance of reaching old age."
-
-It was felt that Guy's remarks had been in poor taste. There was a
-silence; eyes floated vaguely and uneasily, trying not to encounter
-one another. Roger cracked a nut loudly. When he had sufficiently
-relished the situation, Jacobsen changed the subject by remarking:
-
-"That was a fine bit of work by our destroyers this morning, wasn't
-it?"
-
-"It did one good to read about it," said Mr. Petherton. "Quite the
-Nelson touch."
-
-Roger raised his glass. "Nelson!" he said, and emptied it at a gulp.
-"What a man! I am trying to persuade the Headmaster to make Trafalgar
-Day a holiday. It is the best way of reminding boys of things of that
-sort."
-
-"A curiously untypical Englishman to be a national hero, isn't he?"
-said Jacobsen. "So emotional and lacking in Britannic phlegm."
-
-The Reverend Roger looked grave. "There's one thing I've never been
-able to understand about Nelson, and that is, how a man who was so
-much the soul of honour and of patriotism could have been--er--immoral
-with Lady Hamilton. I know people say that it was the custom of the
-age, that these things meant nothing then, and so forth; but all the
-same, I repeat, I cannot understand how a man who was so intensely a
-patriotic Englishman could have done such a thing."
-
-"I fail to see what patriotism has got to do with it," said Guy.
-
-Roger fixed him with his most pedagogic look and said slowly and
-gravely, "Then I am sorry for you. I shouldn't have thought it was
-necessary to tell an Englishman that purity of morals is a national
-tradition: you especially, a public-school man."
-
-"Let us go and have a hundred up at billiards," said Mr. Petherton.
-"Roger, will you come? And you, George, and Guy?"
-
-"I'm so incredibly bad," Guy insisted, "I'd really rather not."
-
-"So am I," said Jacobsen.
-
-"Then, Marjorie, you must make the fourth."
-
-The billiard players trooped out; Guy and Jacobsen were left alone,
-brooding over the wreckage of dinner. There was a long silence. The
-two men sat smoking, Guy sitting in a sagging, crumpled attitude, like
-a half-empty sack abandoned on a chair, Jacobsen very upright and
-serene.
-
-"Do you find you can suffer fools gladly?" asked Guy abruptly.
-
-"Perfectly gladly."
-
-"I wish I could. The Reverend Roger has a tendency to make my blood
-boil."
-
-"But such a good soul," Jacobsen insisted.
-
-"I dare say, but a monster all the same."
-
-"You should take him more calmly. I make a point of never letting
-myself be moved by external things. I stick to my writing and
-thinking. Truth is beauty, beauty is truth, and so forth: after all,
-they're the only things of solid value." Jacobsen looked at the young
-man with a smile as he said these words. There is no doubt, he said to
-himself, that that boy ought to have gone into business; what a
-mistake this higher education is, to be sure.
-
-"Of course, they're the only things," Guy burst out passionately. "You
-can afford to say so because you had the luck to be born twenty years
-before I was, and with five thousand miles of good deep water between
-you and Europe. Here am I, called upon to devote my life, in a very
-different way from which you devote yours to truth and beauty--to
-devote my life to--well, what? I'm not quite sure, but I preserve a
-touching faith that it is good. And you tell me to ignore external
-circumstances. Come and live in Flanders a little and try . . ." He
-launched forth into a tirade about agony and death and blood and
-putrefaction.
-
-"What is one to do?" he concluded despairingly. "What the devil is
-right? I had meant to spend my life writing and thinking, trying to
-create something beautiful or discover something true. But oughtn't
-one, after all, if one survives, to give up everything else and try to
-make this hideous den of a world a little more habitable?"
-
-"I think you can take it that a world which has let itself be
-dragooned into this criminal folly is pretty hopeless. Follow your
-inclinations; or, better, go into a bank and make a lot of money."
-
-Guy burst out laughing, rather too loudly. "Admirable, admirable!" he
-said. "To return to our old topic of fools: frankly, Jacobsen, I
-cannot imagine why you should elect to pass your time with my dear old
-guardian. He's a charming old man, but one must admit----" He waved
-his hand.
-
-"One must live somewhere," said Jacobsen. "I find your guardian a most
-interesting man to be with.--Oh, do look at that dog!" On the
-hearth-rug Marjorie's little Pekingese, Confucius, was preparing to
-lie down and go to sleep. He went assiduously through the solemn farce
-of scratching the floor, under the impression, no doubt, that he was
-making a comfortable nest to lie in. He turned round and round,
-scratching earnestly and methodically. Then he lay down, curled
-himself up in a ball, and was asleep in the twinkling of an eye.
-
-"Isn't that too wonderfully human!" exclaimed Jacobsen delightedly.
-Guy thought he could see now why Jacobsen enjoyed living with Mr.
-Petherton. The old man was so wonderfully human.
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-Later in the evening, when the billiards was over and Mr. Petherton
-had duly commented on the anachronism of introducing the game into
-Anthony and Cleopatra, Guy and Marjorie went for a stroll in the
-garden. The moon had risen above the trees and lit up the front of the
-house with its bright pale light that could not wake the sleeping
-colours of the world.
-
-"Moonlight is the proper architectural light," said Guy, as they stood
-looking at the house. The white light and the hard black shadows
-brought out all the elegance of its Georgian symmetry.
-
-"Look, here's the ghost of a rose." Marjorie touched a big cool
-flower, which one guessed rather than saw to be red, a faint equivocal
-lunar crimson. "And, oh, smell the tobacco-plant flowers. Aren't they
-delicious!"
-
-"I always think there's something very mysterious about perfume
-drifting through the dark like this. It seems to come from some
-perfectly different immaterial world, peopled by unembodied
-sensations, phantom passions. Think of the spiritual effect of incense
-in a dark church. One isn't surprised that people have believed in the
-existence of the soul."
-
-They walked on in silence. Sometimes, accidentally, his hand would
-brush against hers in the movement of their march. Guy felt an
-intolerable emotion of expectancy, akin to fear. It made him feel
-almost physically sick.
-
-"Do you remember," he said abruptly, "that summer holiday our families
-spent together in Wales? It must have been nineteen four or five. I
-was ten and you were eight or thereabouts."
-
-"Of course I remember," cried Marjorie. "Everything. There was that
-funny little toy railway from the slate quarries."
-
-"And do you remember our gold-mine? All those tons of yellow ironstone
-we collected and hoarded in a cave, fully believing they were nuggets.
-How incredibly remote it seems!"
-
-"And you had a wonderful process by which you tested whether the stuff
-was real gold or not. It all passed triumphantly as genuine, I
-remember!"
-
-"Having that secret together first made us friends, I believe."
-
-"I dare say," said Marjorie. "Fourteen years ago--what a time! And you
-began educating me even then: all that stuff you told me about
-gold-mining, for instance."
-
-"Fourteen years," Guy repeated reflectively, "and I shall be going out
-again to-morrow . . ."
-
-"Don't speak about it. I am so miserable when you're away." She
-genuinely forgot what a delightful summer she had had, except for the
-shortage of tennis.
-
-"We must make this the happiest hour of our lives. Perhaps it may be
-the last we shall be together." Guy looked up at the moon, and he
-perceived, with a sudden start, that it was a sphere islanded in an
-endless night, not a flat disk stuck on a wall not so very far away.
-It filled him with an infinite dreariness; he felt too insignificant
-to live at all.
-
-"Guy, you mustn't talk like that," said Marjorie appealingly.
-
-"We've got twelve hours," said Guy in a meditative voice, "but that's
-only clock-work time. You can give an hour the quality of
-everlastingness, and spend years which are as though they had never
-been. We get our immortality here and now; it's a question of quality,
-not of quantity. I don't look forward to golden harps or anything of
-that sort. I know that when I am dead, I shall be dead; there isn't
-any afterwards. If I'm killed, my immortality will be in your memory.
-Perhaps, too, somebody will read the things I've written, and in his
-mind I shall survive, feebly and partially. But in your mind I shall
-survive intact and whole."
-
-"But I'm sure we shall go on living after death. It can't be the end."
-Marjorie was conscious that she had heard those words before. Where?
-Oh yes, it was earnest Evangeline who had spoken them at the school
-debating society.
-
-"I wouldn't count on it," Guy replied, with a little laugh. "You may
-get such a disappointment when you die." Then in an altered voice, "I
-don't want to die. I hate and fear death. But probably I shan't be
-killed after all. All the same . . ." His voice faded out. They
-stepped into a tunnel of impenetrable darkness between two tall
-hornbeam hedges. He had become nothing but a voice, and now that had
-ceased; he had disappeared. The voice began again, low, quick,
-monotonous, a little breathless. "I remember once reading a poem by
-one of the old Provenēal troubadours, telling how God had once granted
-him supreme happiness; for the night before he was to set out for the
-Crusade, it had been granted him to hold his lady in his arms--all the
-short eternal night through. Ains que j'aille oltre mer: when I was
-going beyond sea." The voice stopped again. They were standing at the
-very mouth of the hornbeam alley, looking out from that close-pent
-river of shadow upon an ocean of pale moonlight.
-
-"How still it is." They did not speak; they hardly breathed. They
-became saturated with the quiet.
-
-Marjorie broke the silence. "Do you want me as much as all that, Guy?"
-All through that long, speechless minute she had been trying to say
-the words, repeating them over to herself, longing to say them aloud,
-but paralysed, unable to. And at last she had spoken them,
-impersonally, as though through the mouth of someone else. She heard
-them very distinctly, and was amazed at the matter-of-factness of the
-tone.
-
-Guy's answer took the form of a question. "Well, suppose I were killed
-now," he said, "should I ever have really lived?"
-
-They had stepped out of the cavernous alley into the moonlight. She
-could see him clearly now, and there was something so drooping and
-dejected and pathetic about him, he seemed so much of a great,
-overgrown child that a wave of passionate pitifulness rushed through
-her, reinforcing other emotions less maternal. She longed to take him
-in her arms, stroke his hair, lullaby him, baby-fashion, to sleep upon
-her breast. And Guy, on his side, desired nothing better than to give
-his fatigues and sensibilities to her maternal care, to have his eyes
-kissed fast, and sleep to her soothing. In his relations with
-women--but his experience in this direction was deplorably small--he
-had, unconsciously at first but afterwards with a realization of what
-he was doing, played this child part. In moments of self-analysis he
-laughed at himself for acting the "child stunt," as he called it. Here
-he was--he hadn't noticed it yet--doing it again, drooping, dejected,
-wholly pathetic, feeble . . .
-
-Marjorie was carried away by her emotion. She would give herself to
-her lover, would take possession of her helpless, pitiable child. She
-put her arms round his neck, lifted her face to his kisses, whispered
-something tender and inaudible.
-
-Guy drew her towards him and began kissing the soft, warm mouth. He
-touched the bare arm that encircled his neck; the flesh was resilient
-under his fingers; he felt a desire to pinch it and tear it.
-
-It had been just like this with that little slut Minnie. Just the
-same--all horrible lust. He remembered a curious physiological fact
-out of Havelock Ellis. He shuddered as though he had touched something
-disgusting, and pushed her away.
-
-"No, no, no. It's horrible; it's odious. Drunk with moonlight and
-sentimentalizing about death. . . . Why not just say with Biblical
-frankness, Lie with me--Lie with me?"
-
-That this love, which was to have been so marvellous and new and
-beautiful, should end libidinously and bestially like the affair,
-never remembered without a shiver of shame, with Minnie (the vulgarity
-of her!)--filled him with horror.
-
-Marjorie burst into tears and ran away, wounded and trembling, into
-the solitude of the hornbeam shadow. "Go away, go away," she sobbed,
-with such intensity of command that Guy, moved by an immediate remorse
-and the sight of tears to stop her and ask forgiveness, was
-constrained to let her go her ways.
-
-A cool, impersonal calm had succeeded almost immediately to his
-outburst. Critically, he examined what he had done, and judged it, not
-without a certain feeling of satisfaction, to be the greatest
-"floater" of his life. But at least the thing was done and couldn't be
-undone. He took the weak-willed man's delight in the irrevocability of
-action. He walked up and down the lawn smoking a cigarette and
-thinking, clearly and quietly--remembering the past, questioning the
-future. When the cigarette was finished he went into the house.
-
-He entered the smoking-room to hear Roger saying, ". . . It's the poor
-who are having the good time now. Plenty to eat, plenty of money, and
-no taxes to pay. No taxes--that's the sickening thing. Look at
-Alfred's gardener, for instance. He gets twenty-five or thirty bob a
-week and an uncommon good house. He's married, but only has one child.
-A man like that is uncommonly well off. He ought to be paying
-income-tax; he can perfectly well afford it."
-
-Mr. Petherton was listening somnolently, Jacobsen with his usual keen,
-intelligent politeness; George was playing with the blue Persian
-kitten.
-
-It had been arranged that George should stay the night, because it was
-such a bore having to walk that mile and a bit home again in the dark.
-Guy took him up to his room and sat down on the bed for a final
-cigarette, while George was undressing. It was the hour of
-confidence--that rather perilous moment when fatigue has relaxed the
-fibres of the mind, making it ready and ripe for sentiment.
-
-"It depresses me so much," said Guy, "to think that you're only twenty
-and that I'm just on twenty-four. You will be young and sprightly when
-the war ends; I shall be an old antique man."
-
-"Not so old as all that," George answered, pulling off his shirt. His
-skin was very white, face, neck, and hands seeming dark brown by
-comparison; there was a sharply demarcated high-water mark of sunburn
-at throat and wrist.
-
-"It horrifies me to think of the time one is wasting in this bloody
-war, growing stupider and grosser every day, achieving nothing at all.
-It will be five, six--God knows how many--years cut clean out of one's
-life. You'll have the world before you when it's all over, but I shall
-have spent my best time."
-
-"Of course, it doesn't make so much difference to me," said George
-through a foam of tooth-brushing; "I'm not capable of doing anything
-of any particular value. It's really all the same whether I lead a
-blameless life broking stocks or spend my time getting killed. But for
-you, I agree, it's too bloody. . . ."
-
-Guy smoked on in silence, his mind filled with a languid resentment
-against circumstance. George put on his pyjamas and crept under the
-sheet; he had to curl himself up into a ball, because Guy was lying
-across the end of the bed, and he couldn't put his feet down.
-
-"I suppose," said Guy at last, meditatively--"I suppose the only
-consolations are, after all, women and wine. I shall really have to
-resort to them. Only women are mostly so fearfully boring and wine is
-so expensive now."
-
-"But not all women!" George, it was evident, was waiting to get a
-confidence off his chest.
-
-"I gather you've found the exceptions."
-
-George poured forth. He had just spent six months at Chelsea--six
-dreary months on the barrack square; but there had been lucid
-intervals between the drills and the special courses, which he had
-filled with many notable voyages of discovery among unknown worlds.
-And chiefly, Columbus to his own soul, he had discovered all those
-psychological intricacies and potentialities, which only the passions
-bring to light. _Nosce teipsum_, it has been commanded; and a
-judicious cultivation of the passions is one of the surest roads to
-self-knowledge. To George, at barely twenty, it was all so amazingly
-new and exciting, and Guy listened to the story of his adventures with
-admiration and a touch of envy. He regretted the dismal and cloistered
-chastity--broken only once, and how sordidly! Wouldn't he have learnt
-much more, he wondered--have been a more real and better human being
-if he had had George's experiences? He would have profited by them
-more than George could ever hope to do. There was the risk of George's
-getting involved in a mere foolish expense of spirit in a waste of
-shame. He might not be sufficiently an individual to remain himself in
-spite of his surroundings; his hand would be coloured by the dye he
-worked in. Guy felt sure that he himself would have run no risk; he
-would have come, seen, conquered, and returned intact and still
-himself, but enriched by the spoils of a new knowledge. Had he been
-wrong after all? Had life in the cloister of his own philosophy been
-wholly unprofitable?
-
-He looked at George. It was not surprising that the ladies favoured
-him, glorious ephebus that he was.
-
-"With a face and figure like mine," he reflected, "I shouldn't have
-been able to lead his life, even if I'd wanted to." He laughed
-inwardly.
-
-"You really must meet her," George was saying enthusiastically.
-
-Guy smiled. "No, I really mustn't. Let me give you a bit of perfectly
-good advice. Never attempt to share your joys with anyone else. People
-will sympathize with pain, but not with pleasure. Good night, George."
-
-He bent over the pillow and kissed the smiling face that was as smooth
-as a child's to his lips.
-
-Guy lay awake for a long time, and his eyes were dry and aching before
-sleep finally came upon him. He spent those dark interminable hours
-thinking--thinking hard, intensely, painfully. No sooner had he left
-George's room than a feeling of intense unhappiness took hold of him.
-"Distorted with misery," that was how he described himself; he loved
-to coin such phrases, for he felt the artist's need to express as well
-as to feel and think. Distorted with misery, he went to bed; distorted
-with misery, he lay and thought and thought. He had, positively, a
-sense of physical distortion: his guts were twisted, he had a hunched
-back, his legs were withered. . . .
-
-He had the right to be miserable. He was going back to France
-to-morrow, he had trampled on his mistress's love, and he was
-beginning to doubt himself, to wonder whether his whole life hadn't
-been one ludicrous folly.
-
-He reviewed his life, like a man about to die. Born in another age, he
-would, he supposed, have been religious. He had got over religion
-early, like the measles--at nine a Low Churchman, at twelve a Broad
-Churchman, and at fourteen an Agnostic--but he still retained the
-temperament of a religious man. Intellectually he was a Voltairian,
-emotionally a Bunyanite. To have arrived at this formula was, he felt,
-a distinct advance in self-knowledge. And what a fool he had been with
-Marjorie! The priggishness of his attitude--making her read Wordsworth
-when she didn't want to. Intellectual love--his phrases weren't always
-a blessing; how hopelessly he had deceived himself with words! And now
-this evening the crowning outrage, when he had behaved to her like a
-hysterical anchorite dealing with a temptation. His body tingled, at
-the recollection, with shame.
-
-An idea occurred to him; he would go and see her, tiptoe downstairs to
-her room, kneel by her bed, ask for her forgiveness. He lay quite
-still imagining the whole scene. He even went so far as to get out of
-bed, open the door, which made a noise in the process like a peacock's
-scream, quite unnerving him, and creep to the head of the stairs. He
-stood there a long time, his feet growing colder and colder, and then
-decided that the adventure was really too sordidly like the episode at
-the beginning of Tolstoy's _Resurrection_. The door screamed again as
-he returned; he lay in bed, trying to persuade himself that his
-self-control had been admirable and at the same time cursing his
-absence of courage in not carrying out what he had intended.
-
-He remembered a lecture he had given Marjorie once on the subject of
-Sacred and Profane Love. Poor girl, how had she listened in patience?
-He could see her attending with such a serious expression on her face
-that she looked quite ugly. She looked so beautiful when she was
-laughing or happy; at the Whites', for instance, three nights ago,
-when George and she had danced after dinner and he had sat, secretly
-envious, reading a book in the corner of the room and looking
-superior. He wouldn't learn to dance, but always wished he could. It
-was a barbarous, aphrodisiacal occupation, he said, and he preferred
-to spend his time and energies in reading. Salvationist again! What a
-much wiser person George had proved himself than he. He had no
-prejudices, no theoretical views about the conduct of life; he just
-lived, admirably, naturally, as the spirit or the flesh moved him. If
-only he could live his life again, if only he could abolish this
-evening's monstrous stupidity. . . .
-
-Marjorie also lay awake. She too felt herself distorted with misery.
-How odiously cruel he had been, and how much she longed to forgive
-him! Perhaps he would come in the dark, when all the house was asleep,
-tiptoeing into the room very quietly to kneel by her bed and ask to be
-forgiven. Would he come, she wondered? She stared into the blackness
-above her and about her, willing him to come, commanding him--angry
-and wretched because he was so slow in coming, because he didn't come
-at all. They were both of them asleep before two.
-
-Seven hours of sleep make a surprising difference to the state of
-mind. Guy, who thought he was distorted for life, woke to find himself
-healthily normal. Marjorie's angers and despairs had subsided. The
-hour they had together between breakfast and Guy's departure was
-filled with almost trivial conversation. Guy was determined to say
-something about last's night incident. But it was only at the very
-last moment, when the dog-cart was actually at the door, that he
-managed to bring out some stammered repentance for what had happened
-last night.
-
-"Don't think about it," Marjorie had told him. So they had kissed and
-parted, and their relations were precisely the same as they had been
-before Guy came on leave.
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-George was sent out a week or two later, and a month after that they
-heard at Blaybury that he had lost a leg--fortunately below the knee.
-
-"Poor boy!" said Mr. Petherton. "I must really write a line to his
-mother at once."
-
-Jacobsen made no comment, but it was a surprise to him to find how
-much he had been moved by the news. George White had lost a leg; he
-couldn't get the thought out of his head. But only below the knee; he
-might be called lucky. Lucky--things are deplorably relative, he
-reflected. One thanks God because He has thought fit to deprive one of
-His creatures of a limb.
-
-"Neither delighteth He in any man's legs," eh? Nous avons changé tout
-cela.
-
-George had lost a leg. There would be no more of that Olympian speed
-and strength and beauty. Jacobsen conjured up before his memory a
-vision of the boy running with his great fawn-coloured dog across
-green expanses of grass. How glorious he had looked, his fine brown
-hair blowing like fire in the wind of his own speed, his cheeks
-flushed, his eyes very bright. And how easily he ran, with long,
-bounding strides, looking down at the dog that jumped and barked at
-his side!
-
-He had had a perfection, and now it was spoilt. Instead of a leg he
-had a stump. _Moignon_, the French called it; there was the right
-repulsive sound about _moignon_ which was lacking in "stump." Soignons
-le moignon en l'oignant d'oignons.
-
-Often, at night before he went to sleep, he couldn't help thinking of
-George and the war and all the millions of _moignons_ there must be in
-the world. He had a dream one night of slimy red knobbles, large
-polyp-like things, growing as he looked at them, swelling between his
-hands--_moignons_, in fact.
-
-George was well enough in the late autumn to come home. He had learnt
-to hop along on his crutches very skilfully, and his preposterous
-donkey-drawn bath-chair soon became a familiar object in the lanes of
-the neighbourhood. It was a grand sight to behold when George rattled
-past at the trot, leaning forward like a young Phoebus in his chariot
-and urging his unwilling beast with voice and crutch. He drove over to
-Blaybury almost every day; Marjorie and he had endless talks about
-life and love and Guy and other absorbing topics. With Jacobsen he
-played piquet and discussed a thousand subjects. He was always gay and
-happy--that was what especially lacerated Jacobsen's heart with pity.
-
-
-
-IV
-
-THE Christmas holidays had begun, and the Reverend Roger was back
-again at Blaybury. He was sitting at the writing-table in the
-drawing-room, engaged, at the moment, in biting the end of his pen and
-scratching his head. His face wore an expression of perplexity; one
-would have said that he was in the throes of literary composition.
-Which indeed he was: "Beloved ward of Alfred Petherton . . ." he said
-aloud. "Beloved ward . . ." He shook his head doubtfully.
-
-The door opened and Jacobsen came into the room. Roger turned round at
-once.
-
-"Have you heard the grievous news?" he said.
-
-"No. What?"
-
-"Poor Guy is dead. We got the telegram half an hour ago."
-
-"Good God!" said Jacobsen in an agonized voice which seemed to show
-that he had been startled out of the calm belonging to one who leads
-the life of reason. He had been conscious ever since George's
-mutilation that his defences were growing weaker; external
-circumstance was steadily encroaching upon him. Now it had broken in
-and, for the moment, he was at its mercy. Guy dead. . . . He pulled
-himself together sufficiently to say, after a pause, "Well, I suppose
-it was only to be expected sooner or later. Poor boy."
-
-"Yes, it's terrible, isn't it?" said Roger, shaking his head. "I am
-just writing out an announcement to send to the _Times_. One can
-hardly say 'the beloved ward of Alfred Petherton,' can one? It doesn't
-sound quite right; and yet one would like somehow to give public
-expression to the deep affection Alfred felt for him. 'Beloved
-ward'--no, decidedly it won't do."
-
-"You'll have to get round it somehow," said Jacobsen. Roger's presence
-somehow made a return to the life of reason easier.
-
-"Poor Alfred," the other went on. "You've no idea how hardly he takes
-it. He feels as though he had given a son."
-
-"What a waste it is!" Jacobsen exclaimed. He was altogether too deeply
-moved.
-
-"I have done my best to console Alfred. One must always bear in mind
-for what Cause he died."
-
-"All those potentialities destroyed. He was an able fellow, was Guy."
-Jacobsen was speaking more to himself than to his companion, but Roger
-took up the suggestion.
-
-"Yes, he certainly was that. Alfred thought he was very promising. It
-is for his sake I am particularly sorry. I never got on very well with
-the boy myself. He was too eccentric for my taste. There's such a
-thing as being too clever, isn't there? It's rather inhuman. He used
-to do most remarkable Greek iambics for me when he was a boy. I dare
-say he was a very good fellow under all that cleverness and queerness.
-It's all very distressing, very grievous."
-
-"How was he killed?"
-
-"Died of wounds yesterday morning. Do you think it would be a good
-thing to put in some quotation at the end of the announcement in the
-paper? Something like, 'Dulce et Decorum,' or 'Sed Miles, sed Pro
-Patria,' or 'Per Ardua ad Astra'?"
-
-"It hardly seems essential," said Jacobsen.
-
-"Perhaps not." Roger's lips moved silently; he was counting.
-"Forty-two words. I suppose that counts as eight lines. Poor Marjorie!
-I hope she won't feel it too bitterly. Alfred told me they were
-unofficially engaged."
-
-"So I gathered."
-
-"I am afraid I shall have to break the news to her. Alfred is too much
-upset to be able to do anything himself. It will be a most painful
-task. Poor girl! I suppose as a matter of fact they would not have
-been able to marry for some time, as Guy had next to no money. These
-early marriages are very rash. Let me see: eight times three shillings
-is one pound four, isn't it? I suppose they take cheques all right?"
-
-"How old was he?" asked Jacobsen.
-
-"Twenty-four and a few months."
-
-Jacobsen was walking restlessly up and down the room. "Just reaching
-maturity! One is thankful these days to have one's own work and
-thoughts to take the mind off these horrors."
-
-"It's terrible, isn't it?--terrible. So many of my pupils have been
-killed now that I can hardly keep count of the number."
-
-There was a tapping at the French window; it was Marjorie asking to be
-let in. She had been cutting holly and ivy for the Christmas
-decorations, and carried a basket full of dark, shining leaves.
-
-Jacobsen unbolted the big window and Marjorie came in, flushed with
-the cold and smiling. Jacobsen had never seen her looking so handsome:
-she was superb, radiant, like Iphigenia coming in her wedding garments
-to the sacrifice.
-
-"The holly is very poor this year," she remarked. "I am afraid we
-shan't make much of a show with our Christmas decorations."
-
-Jacobsen took the opportunity of slipping out through the French
-window. Although it was unpleasantly cold, he walked up and down the
-flagged paths of the Dutch garden, hatless and overcoatless, for quite
-a long time.
-
-Marjorie moved about the drawing-room fixing sprigs of holly round the
-picture frames. Her uncle watched her, hesitating to speak; he was
-feeling enormously uncomfortable.
-
-"I am afraid," he said at last, "that your father's very upset this
-morning." His voice was husky; he made an explosive noise to clear his
-throat.
-
-"Is it his palpitations?" Marjorie asked coolly; her father's
-infirmities did not cause her much anxiety.
-
-"No, no." Roger realized that his opening gambit had been a mistake.
-"No. It is--er--a more mental affliction, and one which, I fear, will
-touch you closely too. Marjorie, you must be strong and courageous; we
-have just heard that Guy is dead."
-
-"Guy dead?" She couldn't believe it; she had hardly envisaged the
-possibility; besides, he was on the Staff. "Oh, Uncle Roger, it isn't
-true."
-
-"I am afraid there is no doubt. The War Office telegram came just
-after you had gone out for the holly."
-
-Marjorie sat down on the sofa and hid her face in her hands. Guy dead;
-she would never see him again, never see him again, never; she began
-to cry.
-
-Roger approached and stood, with his hand on her shoulder, in the
-attitude of a thought-reader. To those overwhelmed by sorrow the touch
-of a friendly hand is often comforting. They have fallen into an
-abyss, and the touching hand serves to remind them that life and God
-and human sympathy still exist, however bottomless the gulf of grief
-may seem. On Marjorie's shoulder her uncle's hand rested with a damp,
-heavy warmth that was peculiarly unpleasant.
-
-"Dear child, it is very grievous, I know; but you must try and be
-strong and bear it bravely. We all have our cross to bear. We shall be
-celebrating the Birth of Christ in two days' time; remember with what
-patience He received the cup of agony. And then remember for what
-Cause Guy has given his life. He has died a hero's death, a martyr's
-death, witnessing to Heaven against the powers of evil." Roger was
-unconsciously slipping into the words of his last sermon in the school
-chapel. "You should feel pride in his death as well as sorrow. There,
-there, poor child." He patted her shoulder two or three times.
-"Perhaps it would be kinder to leave you now."
-
-For some time after her uncle's departure Marjorie sat motionless in
-the same position, her body bent forward, her face in her hands. She
-kept on repeating the words, "Never again," and the sound of them
-filled her with despair and made her cry. They seemed to open up such
-a dreary grey infinite vista--"never again." They were as a spell
-evoking tears.
-
-She got up at last and began walking aimlessly about the room. She
-paused in front of a little old black-framed mirror that hung near the
-window and looked at her reflection in the glass. She had expected
-somehow to look different, to have changed. She was surprised to find
-her face entirely unaltered: grave, melancholy perhaps, but still the
-same face she had looked at when she was doing her hair this morning.
-A curious idea entered her head; she wondered whether she would be
-able to smile now, at this dreadful moment. She moved the muscles of
-her face and was overwhelmed with shame at the sight of the mirthless
-grin that mocked her from the glass. What a beast she was! She burst
-into tears and threw herself again on the sofa, burying her face in a
-cushion. The door opened, and by the noise of shuffling and tapping
-Marjorie recognized the approach of George White on his crutches. She
-did not look up. At the sight of the abject figure on the sofa, George
-halted, uncertain what he should do. Should he quietly go away again,
-or should he stay and try to say something comforting? The sight of
-her lying there gave him almost physical pain. He decided to stay.
-
-He approached the sofa and stood over her, suspended on his crutches.
-Still she did not lift her head, but pressed her face deeper into the
-smothering blindness of the cushion, as though to shut out from her
-consciousness all the external world. George looked down at her in
-silence. The little delicate tendrils of hair on the nape of her neck
-were exquisitely beautiful.
-
-"I was told about it," he said at last, "just now, as I came in. It's
-too awful. I think I cared for Guy more than for almost anyone in the
-world. We both did, didn't we?"
-
-She began sobbing again. George was overcome with remorse, feeling
-that he had somehow hurt her, somehow added to her pain by what he had
-said. "Poor child, poor child," he said, almost aloud. She was a year
-older than he, but she seemed so helplessly and pathetically young now
-that she was crying.
-
-Standing up for long tired him, and he lowered himself, slowly and
-painfully, into the sofa beside her. She looked up at last and began
-drying her eyes.
-
-"I'm so wretched, George, so specially wretched because I feel I
-didn't act rightly towards darling Guy. There were times, you know,
-when I wondered whether it wasn't all a great mistake, our being
-engaged. Sometimes I felt I almost hated him. I'd been feeling so
-odious about him these last weeks. And now comes this, and it makes me
-realize how awful I've been towards him." She found it a relief to
-confide and confess; George was so sympathetic, he would understand.
-"I've been a beast."
-
-Her voice broke, and it was as though something had broken in George's
-head. He was overwhelmed with pity; he couldn't bear it that she
-should suffer.
-
-"You mustn't distress yourself unnecessarily, Marjorie dear," he
-begged her, stroking the back of her hand with his large hard palm.
-"Don't."
-
-Marjorie went on remorselessly. "When Uncle Roger told me just now, do
-you know what I did? I said to myself, Do I really care? I couldn't
-make out. I looked in the glass to see if I could tell from my face.
-Then I suddenly thought I'd see whether I could laugh, and I did. And
-that made me feel how detestable I was, and I started crying again.
-Oh, I have been a beast, George, haven't I?"
-
-She burst into a passion of tears and hid her face once more in the
-friendly cushion. George couldn't bear it at all. He laid his hand on
-her shoulder and bent forward, close to her, till his face almost
-touched her hair. "Don't," he cried. "Don't, Marjorie. You mustn't
-torment yourself like this. I know you loved Guy; we both loved him.
-He would have wanted us to be happy and brave and to go on with
-life--not make his death a source of hopeless despair." There was a
-silence, broken only by the agonizing sound of sobbing. "Marjorie,
-darling, you mustn't cry."
-
-"There, I'm not," said Marjorie through her tears. "I'll try to stop.
-Guy wouldn't have wanted us to cry for him. You're right; he would
-have wanted us to live for him--worthily, in his splendid way."
-
-"We who knew him and loved him must make our lives a memorial of him."
-In ordinary circumstances George would have died rather than make a
-remark like that. But in speaking of the dead, people forget
-themselves and conform to the peculiar obituary convention of thought
-and language. Spontaneously, unconsciously, George had conformed.
-
-Marjorie wiped her eyes. "Thank you, George. You know so well what
-darling Guy would have liked. You've made me feel stronger to bear it.
-But, all the same, I do feel odious for what I thought about him
-sometimes. I didn't love him enough. And now it's too late. I shall
-never see him again." The spell of that "never" worked again: Marjorie
-sobbed despairingly.
-
-George's distress knew no bounds. He put his arm round Marjorie's
-shoulders and kissed her hair. "Don't cry, Marjorie. Everybody feels
-like that sometimes, even towards the people they love most. You
-really mustn't make yourself miserable."
-
-Once more she lifted her face and looked at him with a heart-breaking,
-tearful smile. "You have been too sweet to me, George. I don't know
-what I should have done without you."
-
-"Poor darling!" said George. "I can't bear to see you unhappy." Their
-faces were close to one another, and it seemed natural that at this
-point their lips should meet in a long kiss. "We'll remember only the
-splendid, glorious things about Guy," he went on--"what a wonderful
-person he was, and how much we loved him." He kissed her again.
-
-"Perhaps our darling Guy is with us here even now," said Marjorie,
-with a look of ecstasy on her face.
-
-"Perhaps he is," George echoed.
-
-It was at this point that a heavy footstep was heard and a hand
-rattled at the door. Marjorie and George moved a little farther apart.
-The intruder was Roger, who bustled in, rubbing his hands with an air
-of conscious heartiness, studiously pretending that nothing untoward
-had occurred. It is our English tradition that we should conceal our
-emotions. "Well, well," he said. "I think we had better be going in to
-luncheon. The bell has gone."
-
-
-
-EUPOMPUS GAVE SPLENDOUR TO ART BY NUMBERS
-
-"I HAVE made a discovery," said Emberlin as I entered his room.
-
-"What about?" I asked.
-
-"A discovery," he replied, "about _Discoveries_." He radiated an
-unconcealed satisfaction; the conversation had evidently gone exactly
-as he had intended it to go. He had made his phrase, and, repeating it
-lovingly--"A discovery about _Discoveries_"--he smiled benignly at me,
-enjoying my look of mystification--an expression which, I confess, I
-had purposely exaggerated in order to give him pleasure. For Emberlin,
-in many ways so childish, took an especial delight in puzzling and
-nonplussing his acquaintances; and these small triumphs, these little
-"scores" off people afforded him some of his keenest pleasures. I
-always indulged his weakness when I could, for it was worth while
-being on Emberlin's good books. To be allowed to listen to his
-post-prandial conversation was a privilege indeed. Not only was he
-himself a consummately good talker, but he had also the power of
-stimulating others to talk well. He was like some subtle wine,
-intoxicating just to the Meredithian level of tipsiness. In his
-company you would find yourself lifted to the sphere of nimble and
-mercurial conceptions; you would suddenly realize that some miracle
-had occurred, that you were living no longer in a dull world of
-jumbled things but somewhere above the hotch-potch in a glassily
-perfect universe of ideas, where all was informed, consistent,
-symmetrical. And it was Emberlin who, godlike, had the power of
-creating this new and real world. He built it out of words, this
-crystal Eden, where no belly-going snake, devourer of quotidian dirt,
-might ever enter and disturb its harmonies. Since I first knew
-Emberlin I have come to have a greatly enhanced respect for magic and
-all the formules of its liturgy. If by words Emberlin can create a new
-world for me, can make my spirit slough off completely the domination
-of the old, why should not he or I or anyone, having found the
-suitable phrases, exert by means of them an influence more vulgarly
-miraculous upon the world of mere things? Indeed, when I compare
-Emberlin and the common or garden black magician of commerce, it seems
-to me that Emberlin is the greater thaumaturge. But let that pass; I
-am straying from my purpose, which was to give some description of the
-man who so confidentially whispered to me that he had made a discovery
-about _Discoveries_.
-
-In the best sense of the word, then, Emberlin was academic. For us who
-knew him his rooms were an oasis of aloofness planted secretly in the
-heart of the desert of London. He exhaled an atmosphere that combined
-the fantastic speculativeness of the undergraduate with the more
-mellowed oddity of incredibly wise and antique dons. He was immensely
-erudite, but in a wholly unencyclopędic way--a mine of irrelevant
-information, as his enemies said of him. He wrote a certain amount,
-but, like Mallarmé, avoided publication, deeming it akin to "the
-offence of exhibitionism." Once, however, in the folly of youth, some
-dozen years ago, he had published a volume of verses. He spent a good
-deal of time now in assiduously collecting copies of his book and
-burning them. There can be but very few left in the world now. My
-friend Cope had the fortune to pick one up the other day--a little
-blue book, which he showed me very secretly. I am at a loss to
-understand why Emberlin wishes to stamp out all trace of it. There is
-nothing to be ashamed of in the book; some of the verses, indeed, are,
-in their young ecstatic fashion, good. But they are certainly
-conceived in a style that is unlike that of his present poems. Perhaps
-it is that which makes him so implacable against them. What he writes
-now for very private manuscript circulation is curious stuff. I
-confess I prefer the earlier work; I do not like the stony, hard-edged
-quality of this sort of thing--the only one I can remember of his
-later productions. It is a sonnet on a porcelain figure of a woman,
-dug up at Cnossus:
-
-    "Her eyes of bright unwinking glaze
-     All imperturbable do not
-     Even make pretences to regard
-     The jutting absence of her stays
-     Where many a Syrian gallipot
-     Excites desire with spilth of nard.
-     The bistred rims above the fard
-     Of cheeks as red as bergamot
-     Attest that no shamefaced delays
-     Will clog fulfilment nor retard
-     Full payment of the Cyprian's praise
-     Down to the last remorseful jot.
-     Hail priestess of we know not what
-     Strange cult of Mycenean days!"
-
-Regrettably, I cannot remember any of Emberlin's French poems. His
-peculiar muse expresses herself better, I think, in that language than
-in her native tongue.
-
-Such is Emberlin; such, I should rather say, _was_ he, for, as I
-propose to show, he is not now the man that he was when he whispered
-so confidentially to me, as I entered the room, that he had made a
-discovery about _Discoveries_.
-
-I waited patiently till he had finished his little game of
-mystification and, when the moment seemed ripe, I asked him to explain
-himself. Emberlin was ready to open out.
-
-"Well," he began, "these are the facts--a tedious introduction, I
-fear, but necessary. Years ago, when I was first reading Ben Jonson's
-_Discoveries_, that queer jotting of his, 'Eupompus gave splendour to
-Art by Numbers,' tickled my curiosity. You yourself must have been
-struck by the phrase, everybody must have noticed it; and everybody
-must have noticed too that no commentator has a word to say on the
-subject. That is the way of commentators--the obvious points fulsomely
-explained and discussed, the hard passages, about which one might want
-to know something passed over in the silence of sheer ignorance.
-'Eupompus gave splendour to Art by Numbers'--the absurd phrase stuck
-in my head. At one time it positively haunted me. I used to chant it
-in my bath, set to music as an anthem. It went like this, so far as I
-remember"--and he burst into song: "'Eupompus, Eu-u-pompus gave
-sple-e-e-endour . . .'" and so on, through all the repetitions, the
-dragged-out rises and falls of a parodied anthem.
-
-"I sing you this," he said when he had finished, "just to show you
-what a hold that dreadful sentence took upon my mind. For eight years,
-off and on, its senselessness has besieged me. I have looked up
-Eupompus in all the obvious books of reference, of course. He is there
-all right--Alexandrian artist, eternized by some wretched little
-author in some even wretcheder little anecdote, which at the moment I
-entirely forget; it had nothing, at any rate, to do with the
-embellishment of art by numbers. Long ago I gave up the search as
-hopeless; Eupompus remained for me a shadowy figure of mystery, author
-of some nameless outrage, bestower of some forgotten benefit upon the
-art that he practised. His history seemed wrapt in an impenetrable
-darkness. And then yesterday I discovered all about him and his art
-and his numbers. A chance discovery, than which few things have given
-me a greater pleasure.
-
-"I happened upon it, as I say, yesterday when I was glancing through a
-volume of Zuylerius. Not, of course, the Zuylerius one knows," he
-added quickly, "otherwise one would have had the heart out of
-Eupompus' secret years ago."
-
-"Of course," I repeated, "not the familiar Zuylerius."
-
-"Exactly," said Emberlin, taking seriously my flippancy, "not the
-familiar John Zuylerius, Junior, but the elder Henricus Zuylerius, a
-much less--though perhaps undeservedly so--renowned figure than his
-son. But this is not the time to discuss their respective merits. At
-any rate, I discovered in a volume of critical dialogues by the elder
-Zuylerius, the reference, to which, without doubt, Jonson was
-referring in his note. (It was of course a mere jotting, never meant
-to be printed, but which Jonson's literary executors pitched into the
-book with all the rest of the available posthumous materials.)
-'Eupompus gave splendour to Art by Numbers'--Zuylerius gives a very
-circumstantial account of the process. He must, I suppose, have found
-the sources for it in some writer now lost to us."
-
-Emberlin paused a moment to muse. The loss of the work of any ancient
-writer gave him the keenest sorrow. I rather believe he had written a
-version of the unrecovered books of Petronius. Some day I hope I shall
-be permitted to see what conception Emberlin has of the _Satyricon_ as
-a whole. He would, I am sure, do Petronius justice--almost too much,
-perhaps.
-
-"What was the story of Eupompus?" I asked. "I am all curiosity to
-know."
-
-Emberlin heaved a sigh and went on.
-
-"Zuylerius' narrative," he said, "is very bald, but on the whole
-lucid; and I think it gives one the main points of the story. I will
-give it you in my own words; that is preferable to reading his Dutch
-Latin. Eupompus, then, was one of the most fashionable
-portrait-painters of Alexandria. His clientele was large, his business
-immensely profitable. For a half-length in oils the great courtesans
-would pay him a month's earnings. He would paint likenesses of the
-merchant princes in exchange for the costliest of their outlandish
-treasures. Coal-black potentates would come a thousand miles out of
-Ethiopia to have a miniature limned on some specially choice panel of
-ivory; and for payment there would be camel-loads of gold and spices.
-Fame, riches, and honour came to him while he was yet young; an
-unparalleled career seemed to lie before him. And then, quite
-suddenly, he gave it all up--refused to paint another portrait. The
-doors of his studio were closed. It was in vain that clients, however
-rich, however distinguished, demanded admission; the slaves had their
-order; Eupompus would see no one but his own intimates."
-
-Emberlin made a pause in his narrative.
-
-"What was Eupompus doing?" I asked.
-
-"He was, of course," said Emberlin, "occupied in giving splendour to
-Art by Numbers. And this, as far as I can gather from Zuylerius, is
-how it all happened. He just suddenly fell in love with numbers--head
-over ears, amorous of pure counting. Number seemed to him to be the
-sole reality, the only thing about which the mind of man could be
-certain. To count was the one thing worth doing, because it was the
-one thing you could be sure of doing right. Thus, art, that it may
-have any value at all, must ally itself with reality--must, that is,
-possess a numerical foundation. He carried the idea into practice by
-painting the first picture in his new style. It was a gigantic canvas,
-covering several hundred square feet--I have no doubt that Eupompus
-could have told you the exact area to an inch--and upon it was
-represented an illimitable ocean covered, as far as the eye could
-reach in every direction, with a multitude of black swans. There were
-thirty-three thousand of these black swans, each, even though it might
-be but a speck on the horizon, distinctly limned. In the middle of the
-ocean was an island, upon which stood a more or less human figure
-having three eyes, three arms and legs, three breasts and three
-navels. In the leaden sky three suns were dimly expiring. There was
-nothing more in the picture; Zuylerius describes it exactly. Eupompus
-spent nine months of hard work in painting it. The privileged few who
-were allowed to see it pronounced it, finished, a masterpiece. They
-gathered round Eupompus in a little school, calling themselves the
-Philarithmics. They would sit for hours in front of his great work,
-contemplating the swans and counting them; according to the
-Philarithmics, to count and to contemplate were the same thing.
-
-"Eupompus' next picture, representing an orchard of identical trees
-set in quincunxes, was regarded with less favour by the connoisseurs.
-His studies of crowds were, however, more highly esteemed; in these
-were portrayed masses of people arranged in groups that exactly
-imitated the number and position of the stars making up various of the
-more famous constellations. And then there was his famous picture of
-the amphitheatre, which created a furore among the Philarithmics.
-Zuylerius again gives us a detailed description. Tier upon tier of
-seats are seen, all occupied by strange Cyclopean figures. Each tier
-accommodates more people than the tier below, and the number rises in
-a complicated but regular progression. All the figures seated in the
-amphitheatre possess but a single eye, enormous and luminous, planted
-in the middle of the forehead: and all these thousands of single eyes
-are fixed, in a terrible and menacing scrutiny, upon a dwarf-like
-creature cowering pitiably in the arena. . . . He alone of the
-multitude possesses two eyes.
-
-"I would give anything to see that picture," Emberlin added, after a
-pause. "The colouring, you know; Zuylerius gives no hint, but I feel
-somehow certain that the dominant tone must have been a fierce
-brick-red--a red granite amphitheatre filled with a red-robed
-assembly, sharply defined against an implacable blue sky."
-
-"Their eyes would be green," I suggested.
-
-Emberlin closed his eyes to visualize the scene and then nodded a slow
-and rather dubious assent.
-
-"Up to this point," Emberlin resumed at length, "Zuylerius' account is
-very clear. But his descriptions of the later philarithmic art become
-extremely obscure; I doubt whether he understood in the least what it
-was all about. I will give you such meaning as I manage to extract
-from his chaos. Eupompus seems to have grown tired of painting merely
-numbers of objects. He wanted now to represent Number itself. And then
-he conceived the plan of rendering visible the fundamental ideas of
-life through the medium of those purely numerical terms into which,
-according to him, they must ultimately resolve themselves. Zuylerius
-speaks vaguely of a picture of Eros, which seems to have consisted of
-a series of interlacing planes. Eupompus' fancy seems next to have
-been taken by various of the Socratic dialogues upon the nature of
-general ideas, and he made a series of illustrations for them in the
-same arithmo-geometric style. Finally there is Zuylerius' wild
-description of the last picture that Eupompus ever painted. I can make
-very little of it. The subject of the work, at least, is clearly
-stated; it was a representation of Pure Number, or God and the
-Universe, or whatever you like to call that pleasingly inane
-conception of totality. It was a picture of the cosmos seen, I take
-it, through a rather Neoplatonic _camera obscura--_very clear and in
-small. Zuylerius suggests a design of planes radiating out from a
-single point of light. I dare say something of the kind came in.
-Actually, I have no doubt, the work was a very adequate rendering in
-visible form of the conception of the one and the many, with all the
-intermediate stages of enlightenment between matter and the _Fons
-Deitatis_. However, it's no use speculating what the picture may have
-been going to look like. Poor old Eupompus went mad before he had
-completely finished it and, after he had dispatched two of the
-admiring Philarithmics with a hammer, he flung himself out of the
-window and broke his neck. That was the end of him, and that was how
-he gave splendour, regrettably transient, to Art by Numbers."
-
-Emberlin stopped. We brooded over our pipes in silence; poor old
-Eupompus!
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-That was four months ago, and to-day Emberlin is a confirmed and
-apparently irreclaimable Philarithmic, a quite whole-hearted
-Eupompian.
-
-It was always Emberlin's way to take up the ideas that he finds in
-books and to put them into practice. He was once, for example, a
-working alchemist, and attained to considerable proficiency in the
-Great Art. He studied mnemonics under Bruno and Raymond Lully, and
-constructed for himself a model of the latter's syllogizing machine,
-in hopes of gaining that universal knowledge which the Enlightened
-Doctor guaranteed to its user. This time it is Eupompianism, and the
-thing has taken hold of him. I have held up to him all the hideous
-warnings that I can find in history. But it is no use.
-
-There is the pitiable spectacle of Dr. Johnson under the tyranny of an
-Eupompian ritual, counting the posts and the paving-stones of Fleet
-Street. He himself knew best how nearly a madman he was.
-
-And then I count as Eupompians all gamblers, all calculating boys, all
-interpreters of the prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse; then too
-the Elberfeld horses, most complete of all Eupompians.
-
-And here was Emberlin joining himself to this sect, degrading himself
-to the level of counting beasts and irrational children and men, more
-or less insane. Dr. Johnson was at least born with a strain of the
-Eupompian aberration in him; Emberlin is busily and consciously
-acquiring it. My expostulations, the expostulations of all his
-friends, are as yet unavailing. It is in vain that I tell Emberlin
-that counting is the easiest thing in the world to do, that when I am
-utterly exhausted, my brain, for lack of ability to perform any other
-work, just counts and reckons, like a machine, like an Elberfeld
-horse. It all falls on deaf ears; Emberlin merely smiles and shows me
-some new numerical joke that he has discovered. Emberlin can never
-enter a tiled bathroom now without counting how many courses of tiles
-there are from floor to ceiling. He regards it as an interesting fact
-that there are twenty-six rows of tiles in his bathroom and thirty-two
-in mine, while all the public lavatories in Holborn have the same
-number. He knows now how many paces it is from any one point in London
-to any other. I have given up going for walks with him. I am always
-made so distressingly conscious by his preoccupied look, that he is
-counting his steps.
-
-His evenings, too, have become profoundly melancholy; the
-conversation, however well it may begin, always comes round to the
-same nauseating subject. We can never escape numbers; Eupompus haunts
-us. It is not as if we were mathematicians and could discuss problems
-of any interest or value. No, none of us are mathematicians, least of
-all Emberlin. Emberlin likes talking about such points as the
-numerical significance of the Trinity, the immense importance of its
-being three in one, not forgetting the even greater importance of its
-being one in three. He likes giving us statistics about the speed of
-light or the rate of growth in fingernails. He loves to speculate on
-the nature of odd and even numbers. And he seems to be unconscious how
-much he has changed for the worse. He is happy in an exclusively
-absorbing interest. It is as though some mental leprosy had fallen
-upon his intelligence.
-
-In another year or so, I tell Emberlin, he may almost be able to
-compete with the calculating horses on their own ground. He will have
-lost all traces of his reason, but he will be able to extract cube
-roots in his head. It occurs to me that the reason why Eupompus killed
-himself was not that he was mad; on the contrary, it was because he
-was, temporarily, sane. He had been mad for years, and then suddenly
-the idiot's self-complacency was lit up by a flash of sanity. By its
-momentary light he saw into what gulfs of imbecility he had plunged.
-He saw and understood, and the full horror, the lamentable absurdity
-of the situation made him desperate. He vindicated Eupompus against
-Eupompianism, humanity against the Philarithmics. It gives me the
-greatest pleasure to think that he disposed of two of that hideous
-crew before he died himself.
-
-
-
-HAPPY FAMILIES
-
-THE scene is a conservatory. Luxuriant tropical plants are seen
-looming through a greenish aquarium twilight, punctuated here and
-there by the surprising pink of several Chinese lanterns hanging from
-the roof or on the branches of trees, while a warm yellow radiance
-streams out from the ball-room by a door on the left of the scene.
-Through the glass of the conservatory, at the back of the stage, one
-perceives a black-and-white landscape under the moon--expanses of
-snow, lined and dotted with coal-black hedges and trees. Outside is
-frost and death: but within the conservatory all is palpitating and
-steaming with tropical life and heat. Enormous fantastic plants
-encumber it; trees, creepers that writhe with serpentine life, orchids
-of every kind. Everywhere dense vegetation; horrible flowers that look
-like bottled spiders, like suppurating wounds; flowers with eyes and
-tongues, with moving, sensitive tentacles, with breasts and teeth and
-spotted skins.
-
-The strains of a waltz float in through the ball-room door, and to
-that slow, soft music there enter, in parallel processions, the two
-families which are respectively Mr. Aston J. Tyrrell and Miss Topsy
-Garrick.
-
-The doyen of the Tyrrell family is a young and perhaps too cultured
-literary man with rather long, dark brown hair, a face well cut and
-sensitive, if a trifle weak about the lower jaw, and a voice whose
-exquisite modulations could only be the product of education at one of
-the two Great Universities. We will call him plain Aston. Miss Topsy,
-the head of the Garrick family, is a young woman of not quite twenty,
-with sleek, yellow hair hanging, like a page's, short and thick about
-her ears; boyish, too, in her slenderness and length of leg--boyish,
-but feminine and attractive to the last degree. Miss Topsy paints
-charmingly, sings in a small, pure voice that twists the heart and
-makes the bowels yearn in the hearing of it, is well educated, and has
-read, or at least heard of, most of the best books in three languages,
-knows something, too, of economics and the doctrines of Freud.
-
-They enter arm in arm, fresh from the dance, trailing behind them with
-their disengaged hands two absurd ventriloquist's dummies of
-themselves. They sit down on a bench placed in the middle of the stage
-under a kind of arbour festooned with fabulous flowers. The other
-members of the two families lurk in the tropical twilight of the
-background.
-
-Aston advances his dummy and makes it speak, moving its mouth and
-limbs appropriately by means of the secret levers which his hand
-controls.
-
-ASTON'S DUMMY.
-
-What a perfect floor it is to-night!
-
-TOPSY'S DUMMY.
-
-Yes, it's like ice, isn't it? And such a good band.
-
-ASTON'S DUMMY.
-
-Oh yes, a very good band.
-
-TOPSY'S DUMMY.
-
-They play at dinner-time at the Necropole, you know.
-
-ASTON'S DUMMY.
-
-Really! (_A long, uncomfortable silence._)
-
-(_From under a lofty twangum tree emerges the figure of CAIN
-WASHINGTON TYRRELL, ASTON'S negro brother--for the TYRRELLS, I regret
-to say, have a lick of the tar-brush in them and CAIN is a Mendelian
-throwback to the pure Jamaican type. CAIN is stout and his black face
-shines with grease. The whites of his eyes are like enamel, his smile
-is chryselephantine. He is dressed in faultless evening dress and a
-ribbon of seals tinkles on his stomach. He walks with legs wide apart,
-the upper part of his body thrown back and his belly projecting, as
-though he were supporting the weight of an Aristophanic actor's
-costume. He struts up and down in front of the couple on the seat,
-grinning and slapping himself on the waistcoat._)
-
-CAIN.
-
-What hair, nyum nyum! and the nape of her neck; and her body--how
-slender! and what lovely movements, nyum nyum! (_Approaching ASTON and
-speaking into his ear._) Eh? eh? eh?
-
-ASTON.
-
-Go away, you pig. Go away. (_He holds up his dummy as a shield: CAIN
-retires discomfited._)
-
-ASTON'S DUMMY.
-
-Have you read any amusing novels lately?
-
-TOPSY.
-
-(_Speaking over the head of her dummy._) No; I never read novels. They
-are mostly so frightful, aren't they?
-
-ASTON.
-
-(_Enthusiastically._) How splendid! Neither do I. I only write them
-sometimes, that's all. (_They abandon their dummies, which fall limply
-into one another's arms and collapse on to the floor with an expiring
-sigh._)
-
-TOPSY.
-
-You write them? I didn't know. . . .
-
-ASTON.
-
-Oh, I'd very much rather you didn't know. I shouldn't like you ever to
-read one of them. They're all awful: still, they keep the pot boiling,
-you know. But tell me, what do you read?
-
-TOPSY.
-
-Mostly history, and philosophy, and a little criticism and psychology,
-and lots of poetry.
-
-ASTON.
-
-My dear young lady! how wonderful, how altogether unexpectedly
-splendid. (_CAIN emerges with the third brother, SIR JASPER, who is a
-paler, thinner, more sinister and aristocratic ASTON._)
-
-CAIN.
-
-Nyum nyum nyum. . . .
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-What a perfect sentence that was of yours, Aston: quite Henry
-Jamesian! "My dear young lady"--as though you were forty years her
-senior; and the rare old-worldliness of that "altogether unexpectedly
-splendid"! Admirable. I don't remember your ever employing quite
-exactly this opening gambit before: but of course there were things
-very like it. (_To CAIN._) What a nasty spectacle you are, Cain,
-gnashing your teeth like that!
-
-CAIN.
-
-Nyum nyum nyum.
-
-(_ASTON and TOPSY are enthusiastically talking about books: the two
-brothers, finding themselves quite unnoticed, retire into the shade of
-their twangum tree. BELLE GARRICK has been hovering behind TOPSY for
-some time past. She is more obviously pretty than her sister,
-full-bosomed and with a loose, red, laughing mouth. Unable to attract
-TOPSY'S attention, she turns round and calls, "HENRIKA." A pale face
-with wide, surprised eyes peeps round the trunk, hairy like a
-mammoth's leg, of a kadapoo tree with magenta leaves and
-flame-coloured blossoms. This is HENRIKA, TOPSY'S youngest sister. She
-is dressed in a little white muslin frock set off with blue ribbons._)
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-(_Tiptoes forward._) Here I am; what is it? I was rather frightened of
-that man. But he really seems quite nice and tame, doesn't he?
-
-BELLE.
-
-Of course he is! What a goose you are to hide like that!
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-He seems a nice, quiet, gentle man; and _so_ clever.
-
-BELLE.
-
-What good hands he has, hasn't he? (_Approaching TOPSY and whispering
-in her ear._) Your hair's going into your eyes, my dear. Toss it back
-in that pretty way you have. (_TOPSY tosses her head; the soft, golden
-bell of hair quivers elastically about her ears._) That's right!
-
-CAIN.
-
-(_Bounding into the air and landing with feet apart, knees bent, and a
-hand on either knee._) Oh, nyum nyum!
-
-ASTON.
-
-Oh, the beauty of that movement! It simply makes one catch one's
-breath with surprised pleasure, as the gesture of a perfect dancer
-might.
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-Beautiful, wasn't it?--a pleasure purely ęsthetic and ęsthetically
-pure. Listen to Cain.
-
-ASTON.
-
-(_To TOPSY._) And do you ever try writing yourself? I'm sure you ought
-to.
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-Yes, yes, we're sure you ought to. Eh, Cain?
-
-TOPSY.
-
-Well, I have written a little poetry--or rather a few bad verses--at
-one time or another.
-
-ASTON.
-
-Really now! What about, may I ask?
-
-TOPSY.
-
-Well . . . (_hesitating_) about different things, you know. (_She fans
-herself rather nervously._)
-
-BELLE.
-
-(_Leaning over TOPSY'S shoulder and addressing ASTON directly._)
-Mostly about Love. (_She dwells long and voluptuously on the last
-word, pronouncing it "lovv" rather than "luvv."_)
-
-CAIN.
-
-Oh, dat's good, dat's good; dat's dam good. (_In moments of emotion
-CAIN'S manners and language savour more obviously than usual of the
-Old Plantation._) Did yoh see her face den?
-
-BELLE.
-
-(_Repeats, slowly and solemnly._) Mostly about Love.
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-Oh, oh. (_She covers her face with her hands._) How could you? It
-makes me tingle all over. (_She runs behind the kadapoo tree again._)
-
-ASTON.
-
-(_Very seriously and intelligently._) Really. That's very interesting.
-I wish you'd let me see what you've done some time.
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-We always like to see these things, don't we, Aston? Do you remember
-Mrs. Towler? How pretty she was! And the way we criticized her
-literary productions. . . .
-
-ASTON.
-
-Mrs. Towler. . . . (_He shudders as though he had touched something
-soft and filthy._) Oh, don't, Jasper, don't!
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-Dear Mrs. Towler! We were very nice about her poems, weren't we? Do
-you remember the one that began:
-
-    "My Love is like a silvern flower-de-luce
-       Within some wondrous dream-garden pent:
-     God made my lovely lily not for use,
-       But for an ornament."
-
-Even Cain, I believe, saw the joke of that.
-
-ASTON.
-
-Mrs. Towler--oh, my God! But this is quite different: this girl really
-interests me.
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-Oh yes, I know, I know. She interests you too, Cain, doesn't she?
-
-CAIN.
-
-(_Prances two or three steps of a cake-walk and sings._) Oh, ma honey,
-oh, ma honey.
-
-ASTON.
-
-But, I tell you, this is quite different.
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-Of course it is. Any fool could see that it was. I've admitted it
-already.
-
-ASTON.
-
-(_To TOPSY._) You will show them me, won't you? I should so much like
-to see them.
-
-TOPSY.
-
-(_Covered with confusion._) No, I really couldn't. You're a
-professional, you see.
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-(_From behind the kadapoo tree._) No, you mustn't show them to him.
-They're really mine, you know, a great many of them.
-
-BELLE.
-
-Nonsense! (_She stoops down and moves TOPSY'S foot in such a way that
-a very well-shaped, white-stockinged leg is visible some way up the
-calf. Then, to TOPSY._) Pull your skirt down, my dear. You're quite
-indecent.
-
-CAIN.
-
-(_Putting up his monocle._) Oh, nyum nyum, ma honey! Come wid me to
-Dixie Land. . . .
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-H'm, a little conscious, don't you think?
-
-ASTON.
-
-But even professionals are human, my dear young lady. And perhaps I
-might be able to give you some help with your writings.
-
-TOPSY.
-
-That's awfully kind of you, Mr. Tyrrell.
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-Oh, don't let him see them. I don't want him to. Don't let him.
-
-ASTON.
-
-(_With heavy charm._) It always interests me so much when I hear of
-the young--and I trust you won't be offended if I include you in their
-number--when I hear of the young taking to writing. It is one of the
-most important duties that we of the older generation can perform--to
-help and encourage the young with their work. It's a great service to
-the cause of Art.
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-That was what I was always saying to Mrs. Towler, if I remember
-rightly.
-
-TOPSY.
-
-I can't tell you, Mr. Tyrrell, how delightful it is to have one's work
-taken seriously. I am so grateful to you. May I send you my little
-efforts, then?
-
-CAIN.
-
-(_Executes a step dance to the furious clicking of a pair of bones._)
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-I congratulate you, Aston. A most masterful bit of strategy.
-
-BELLE.
-
-I wonder what he'll do next. Isn't it exciting? Topsy, toss your head
-again. That's right. Oh, I wish something would happen!
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-What have you done? Oh, Topsy, you really mustn't send him my poems.
-
-BELLE.
-
-You said he was such a nice man just now.
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-Oh yes, he's nice, I know. But then he's a man, you must admit that. I
-don't want him to see them.
-
-TOPSY.
-
-(_Firmly._) You're being merely foolish, Henrika. Mr. Tyrrell, a very
-distinguished literary man, has been kind enough to take an interest
-in my work. His criticism will be the greatest help to me.
-
-BELLE.
-
-Of course it will, and he has such charming eyes. (_A pause. The
-music, which has, all this while, been faintly heard through the
-ball-room door, becomes more audible. They are playing a rich, creamy
-waltz._) What delicious music! Henrika, come and have a dance. (_She
-seizes HENRIKA round the waist and begins to waltz. HENRIKA is
-reluctant at first, but little by little the rhythm of the dance takes
-possession of her till, with her half-closed eyes and languorous,
-trance-like movements, she might figure as the visible living symbol
-of the waltz. ASTON and TOPSY lean back in their seats, marking the
-time with a languid beating of the hand. CAIN sways and swoons and
-revolves in his own peculiar and inimitable version of the dance._)
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-(_Who has been watching the whole scene with amusement._) What a
-pretty spectacle! "Music hath charms. . . ."
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-(_In an almost extinct voice._) Oh, Belle, Belle, I could go on
-dancing like this for ever. I feel quite intoxicated with it.
-
-TOPSY.
-
-(_To ASTON._) What a jolly tune this is!
-
-ASTON.
-
-Isn't it? It's called "Dreams of Desire," I believe.
-
-BELLE.
-
-What a pretty name!
-
-TOPSY.
-
-These are wonderful flowers here.
-
-ASTON.
-
-Let's go and have a look at them.
-
-(_They get up and walk round the conservatory. The flowers light up as
-they pass; in the midst of each is a small electric globe._)
-
-ASTON.
-
-This purple one with eyes is the assafoetida flower. Don't put your
-nose too near; it has a smell like burning flesh. This is a
-Cypripedium from Sumatra. It is the only man-eating flower in the
-world. Notice its double set of teeth. (_He puts a stick into the
-mouth of the flower, which instantly snaps to, like a steel trap._)
-Nasty, vicious brute! These blossoms like purple sponges belong to the
-twangum tree; when you squeeze them they ooze blood. This is the
-Jonesia, the octopus of the floral world: each of its eight tentacles
-is armed with a sting capable of killing a horse. Now this is a most
-interesting and instructive flower--the patchouli bloom. It is perhaps
-the most striking example in nature of structural specialization
-brought about by Evolution. If only Darwin had lived to see the
-patchouli plant! You have heard of flowers specially adapting
-themselves to be fertilized by bees or butterflies or spiders and
-such-like? Well, this plant which grows in the forests of Guatemala
-can only be fertilized by English explorers. Observe the structure of
-the flower; at the base is a flat, projecting pan, containing the
-pistil; above it an overarching tube ending in a spout. On either side
-a small crevice about three-quarters of an inch in length may be
-discerned in the fleshy lobes of the calix. The English traveller
-seeing this plant is immediately struck by its resemblance to those
-penny-in-the-slot machines which provide scent for the public in the
-railway stations at home. Through sheer force of habit he takes a
-penny from his pocket and inserts it in one of the crevices or slots.
-Immediate result--a jet of highly scented liquid pollen is discharged
-from the spout upon the pistil lying below, and the plant is
-fertilized. Could anything be more miraculous? And yet there are those
-who deny the existence of God. Poor fools!
-
-TOPSY.
-
-Wonderful! (_Sniffing._) What a good scent.
-
-ASTON.
-
-The purest patchouli.
-
-BELLE.
-
-How delicious! Oh, my dear . . . (_She shuts her eyes in ecstasy._)
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-(_Drowsily._) Delicious, 'licious. . . .
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-I always like these rather _canaille_ perfumes. Their effect is
-admirable.
-
-ASTON.
-
-This is the leopard-flower. Observe its spotted skin and its thorns
-like agate claws. This is the singing Alocusia--Alocusia
-Cantatrix--discovered by Humboldt during his second voyage to the
-Amazons. If you stroke its throat in the right place, it will begin to
-sing like a nightingale. Allow me. (_He takes her by the wrist and
-guides her fingers towards the palpitating throat of a gigantic flower
-shaped like a gramophone trumpet. The Alocusia bursts into song; it
-has a voice like Caruso's._)
-
-CAIN.
-
-Oh, nyum nyum! What a hand! Oh, ma honey. (_He runs a thick black
-finger along TOPSY'S arm._)
-
-TOPSY.
-
-What a remarkable flower!
-
-BELLE.
-
-I wonder whether he stroked my arm like that by accident or on
-purpose.
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-(_Gives a little shiver._) He's touching me, he's touching me! But
-somehow I feel so sleepy I can't move.
-
-TOPSY.
-
-(_She moves on towards the next flower: BELLE does not allow her to
-disengage her hand at once._) What a curious smell this one has!
-
-ASTON.
-
-Be careful, be careful! That's the chloroform plant.
-
-TOPSY.
-
-Oh, I feel quite dizzy and faint. That smell and the heat . . . (_She
-almost falls: ASTON puts out his arm and holds her up._)
-
-ASTON.
-
-Poor child!
-
-CAIN.
-
-Poh chile, poh chile! (_He hovers round her, his hands almost touching
-her, trembling with excitement: his white eyeballs roll horribly._)
-
-ASTON.
-
-I'll open the door. The air will make you feel better. (_He opens the
-conservatory door, still supporting TOPSY with his right arm. The wind
-is heard, fearfully whistling: a flurry of snow blows into the
-conservatory. The flowers utter piercing screams of rage and fear;
-their lights flicker wildly; several turn perfectly black and drop on
-to the floor writhing in agony. The floral octopus agitates its
-tentacles; the twangum blooms drip blood; all the leaves of all the
-trees clap together with a dry, scaly sound._)
-
-TOPSY.
-
-(_Faintly._) Thank you; that's better.
-
-ASTON.
-
-(_Closing the door._) Poor child! Come and sit down again; the
-chloroform flower is a real danger. (_Much moved, he leads her back
-towards the seat._)
-
-CAIN.
-
-(_Executes a war dance round the seated couple._) Poh chile, poh
-chile! Nyum nyum nyum.
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-One perceives the well-known dangers of playing the Good Samaritan
-towards an afflicted member of the opposite sex. Pity has touched even
-our good Cain to tears.
-
-BELLE.
-
-Oh, I wonder what's going to happen! It's so exciting. I'm so glad
-Henrika's gone to sleep.
-
-TOPSY.
-
-It was silly of me to go all faint like that.
-
-ASTON.
-
-I ought to have warned you in time of the chloroform flower.
-
-BELLE.
-
-But it's such a lovely feeling now--like being in a very hot bath with
-lots of verbena bath-salts, and hardly able to move with limpness, but
-just ever so comfortable and happy.
-
-ASTON.
-
-How do you feel now? I'm afraid you're looking very pale. Poor child!
-
-CAIN.
-
-Poh chile, poh chile! . . .
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-I don't know much about these things, but it seems to me, my dear
-Aston, that the moment has decidedly arrived.
-
-ASTON.
-
-I'm so sorry. You poor little thing . . . (_He kisses her very gently
-on the forehead._)
-
-BELLE.
-
-A--a--h.
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-Oh! He kissed me: but he's so kind and good, so kind and good. (_She
-stirs and falls back again into her drowsy trance._)
-
-CAIN.
-
-Poh chile, poh chile! (_He leans over ASTON'S shoulder and begins
-rudely kissing TOPSY'S trance-calm, parted lips. TOPSY opens her eyes
-and sees the black, greasy face, the chryselephantine smile, the pink,
-thick lips, the goggling eyeballs of white enamel. She screams.
-HENRIKA springs up and screams too. TOPSY slips on to the floor, and
-CAIN and ASTON are left face to face with HENRIKA, pale as death and
-with wide-open, terrified eyes. She is trembling in every limb._)
-
-ASTON.
-
-(_Gives CAIN a push that sends him sprawling backwards, and falls on
-his knees before the pathetic figure of HENRIKA._) Oh, I'm so sorry,
-I'm so sorry. What a beast I am! I don't know what I can have been
-thinking of to do such a thing.
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-My dear boy, I'm afraid you and Cain knew only too well what you were
-thinking of. Only too well . . .
-
-ASTON.
-
-Will you forgive me? I can't forgive myself.
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-Oh, you hurt me, you frightened me so much. I can't bear it. (_She
-cries._)
-
-ASTON.
-
-O God! O God! (_The tears start into his eyes also. He takes HENRIKA'S
-hand and begins to kiss it._) I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-If you're not very careful, Aston, you'll have Cain to deal with
-again. (_CAIN has picked himself up and is creeping stealthily towards
-the couple in the centre of the conservatory._)
-
-ASTON.
-
-(_Turning round._) Cain, you brute, go to hell! (_CAIN slinks back._)
-Oh, will you forgive me for having been such a swine? What can I do?
-
-TOPSY.
-
-(_Who has recovered her self-possession, rises to her feet and pushes
-HENRIKA into the background._) Thank you, it is really quite all
-right. I think it would be best to say no more about it, to forget
-what has happened.
-
-ASTON.
-
-Will you forgive me, then?
-
-TOPSY.
-
-Of course, of course. Please get up, Mr. Tyrrell.
-
-ASTON.
-
-(_Climbing to his feet._) I can't think how I ever came to be such a
-brute.
-
-TOPSY.
-
-(_Coldly._) I thought we had agreed not to talk about this incident
-any further. (_There is a silence._)
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-Well, Aston? This has been rather fun.
-
-BELLE.
-
-I wish you hadn't been quite so cold with him, Topsy. Poor man! He
-really is very sorry. One can see that.
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-But did you see that awful face? (_She shudders and covers her eyes._)
-
-ASTON.
-
-(_Picking up his dummy and manipulating it._) It is very hot in here,
-is it not? Shall we go back to the dancing-room?
-
-TOPSY.
-
-(_Also takes up her dummy._) Yes, let us go back.
-
-ASTON'S DUMMY.
-
-Isn't that "Roses in Picardy" that the band is playing?
-
-TOPSY'S DUMMY.
-
-I believe it is. What a very good band, don't you think?
-
-ASTON'S DUMMY.
-
-Yes; it plays during dinner, you know, at the Necropole. (_To
-JASPER._) Lord, what a fool I am! I'd quite forgotten; it was she who
-told me so as we came in.
-
-TOPSY'S DUMMY.
-
-At the Necropole? Really.
-
-ASTON'S DUMMY.
-
-A very good band and a very good floor.
-
-TOPSY'S DUMMY.
-
-Yes, it's a perfect floor, isn't it? Like glass. . . . (_They go out,
-followed by their respective families. BELLE supports HENRIKA, who is
-still very weak after her shock._)
-
-BELLE.
-
-How exciting it was, wasn't it, Henrika?
-
-HENRIKA.
-
-Wasn't it awful--too awful! Oh, that face. . . . (_CAIN follows ASTON
-out in silence and dejection. SIR JASPER brings up the rear of the
-procession. His face wears its usual expression of slightly bored
-amusement. He lights a cigarette._)
-
-SIR JASPER.
-
-Charming evening, charming evening. . . . Now it's over, I wonder
-whether it ever existed. (_He goes out. The conservatory is left
-empty. The flowers flash their luminous pistils; the eyes of the
-assafoetida blossoms solemnly wink; leaves shake and sway and rustle;
-several of the flowers are heard to utter a low chuckle, while the
-Alocusia, after whistling a few derisive notes, finally utters a loud,
-gross Oriental hiccough._)
-
-THE CURTAIN SLOWLY DESCENDS.
-
-
-
-CYNTHIA
-
-WHEN, some fifty years hence, my grandchildren ask me what I did when
-I was at Oxford in the remote days towards the beginning of our
-monstrous century, I shall look back across the widening gulf of time
-and tell them with perfect good faith that I never worked less than
-eight hours a day, that I took a keen interest in Social Service, and
-that coffee was the strongest stimulant in which I indulged. And they
-will very justly say--but I hope I shall be out of hearing. That is
-why I propose to write my memoirs as soon as possible, before I have
-had time to forget, so that having the truth before me I shall never
-in time to come be able, consciously or unconsciously, to tell lies
-about myself.
-
-At present I have no time to write a complete account of that decisive
-period in my history. I must content myself therefore with describing
-a single incident of my undergraduate days. I have selected this one
-because it is curious and at the same time wholly characteristic of
-Oxford life before the war.
-
-My friend Lykeham was an Exhibitioner at Swellfoot College. He
-combined blood (he was immensely proud of his Anglo-Saxon descent and
-the derivation of his name from Old English _lycam_, a corpse) with
-brains. His tastes were eccentric, his habits deplorable, the range of
-his information immense. As he is now dead, I will say no more about
-his character.
-
-To proceed with my anecdote: I had gone one evening, as was my custom,
-to visit him in his rooms at Swellfoot. It was just after nine when I
-mounted the stairs, and great Tom was still tolling.
-
-    "In Thomae laude
-     Resono bim bam sine fraude,"
-
-as the charmingly imbecile motto used to run, and to-night he was
-living up to it by bim-bamming away in a persistent _basso profondo_
-that made an astonishing background of discord to the sound of frantic
-guitar playing which emanated from Lykeham's room. From the fury of
-his twanging I could tell that something more than usually cataclysmic
-had happened, for mercifully it was only in moments of the greatest
-stress that Lykeham touched his guitar.
-
-I entered the room with my hands over my ears. "For God's sake----" I
-implored. Through the open window Tom was shouting a deep E flat, with
-a spread chord of under- and over-tones, while the guitar gibbered
-shrilly and hysterically in D natural. Lykeham laughed, banged down
-his guitar on to the sofa with such violence that it gave forth a
-trembling groan from all its strings, and ran forward to meet me. He
-slapped me on the shoulder with painful heartiness; his whole face
-radiated joy and excitement.
-
-I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures.
-There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.
-
-"You are perspiring," I said coldly.
-
-Lykeham mopped himself, but went grinning.
-
-"Well, what is it this time?" I asked. "Are you engaged to be married
-again?"
-
-Lykeham burst forth with the triumphant pleasure of one who has at
-last found an opportunity of disburdening himself of an oppressive
-secret. "Far better than that," he cried.
-
-I groaned. "Some more than usually unpleasant amour, I suppose." I
-knew that he had been in London the day before, a pressing engagement
-with the dentist having furnished an excuse to stay the night.
-
-"Don't be gross," said Lykeham, with a nervous laugh which showed that
-my suspicions had been only too well founded.
-
-"Well, let's hear about the delectable Flossie or Effie or whatever
-her name was," I said, with resignation.
-
-"I tell you she was a goddess."
-
-"The goddess of reason, I suppose."
-
-"A goddess," Lykeham continued; "the most wonderful creature I've ever
-seen. And the extraordinary thing is," he added confidentially, and
-with ill-suppressed pride, "that it seems I myself am a god of sorts."
-
-"Of gardens; but do come down to facts."
-
-"I'll tell you the whole story. It was like this: Last night I was in
-town, you know, and went to see that capital play that's running at
-the Prince Consort's. It's one of those ingenious combinations of
-melodrama and problem play, which thrill you to the marrow and at the
-same time give you a virtuous feeling that you've been to see
-something serious. Well, I rolled in rather late, having secured an
-admirable place in the front row of the dress circle. I trampled in
-over the populace, and casually observed that there was a girl sitting
-next me, whom I apologized to for treading on her toes. I thought no
-more about her during the first act. In the interval, when the lights
-were on again, I turned round to look at things in general and
-discovered that there was a goddess sitting next me. One only had to
-look at her to see she was a goddess. She was quite incredibly
-beautiful--rather pale and virginal and slim, and at the same time
-very stately. I can't describe her; she was simply perfect--there's
-nothing more to be said."
-
-"Perfect," I repeated, "but so were all the rest."
-
-"Fool!" Lykeham answered impatiently. "All the rest were just damned
-women. This was a goddess, I tell you. Don't interrupt me any more. As
-I was looking with astonishment at her profile, she turned her head
-and looked squarely at me. I've never seen anything so lovely; I
-almost swooned away. Our eyes met----"
-
-"What an awful novelist's expression!" I expostulated.
-
-"I can't help it; there's no other word. Our eyes did meet, and we
-both fell simultaneously in love."
-
-"Speak for yourself."
-
-"I could see it in her eyes. Well, to go on. We looked at one another
-several times during that first interval, and then the second act
-began. In the course of the act, entirely accidentally, I knocked my
-programme on to the floor, and reaching down to get it I touched her
-hand. Well, there was obviously nothing else to do but to take hold of
-it."
-
-"And what did she do?"
-
-"Nothing. We sat like that the whole of the rest of the act,
-rapturously happy and----"
-
-"And quietly perspiring palm to palm. I know exactly, so we can pass
-over that. Proceed."
-
-"Of course you don't know in the least; you've never held a goddess's
-hand. When the lights went up again I reluctantly dropped her hand,
-not liking the thought of the profane crowd seeing us, and for want of
-anything better to say, I asked her if she actually was a goddess. She
-said it was a curious question, as she'd been wondering what god I
-was. So we said, how incredible: and I said I was sure she was a
-goddess, and she said she was certain I was a god, and I bought some
-chocolates, and the third act began. Now, it being a melodrama, there
-was of course in the third act a murder and burglary scene, in which
-all the lights were turned out. In this thrilling moment of total
-blackness I suddenly felt her kiss me on the cheek."
-
-"I thought you said she was virginal."
-
-"So she was--absolutely, frozenly virginal; but she was made of a sort
-of burning ice, if you understand me. She was virginally
-passionate--just the combination you'd expect to find in a goddess. I
-admit I was startled when she kissed me, but with infinite presence of
-mind I kissed her back, on the mouth. Then the murder was finished and
-the lights went on again. Nothing much more happened till the end of
-the show, when I helped her on with her coat and we went out together,
-as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and got into a
-taxi. I told the man to drive somewhere where we could get supper, and
-he drove there."
-
-"Not without embracements by the way?"
-
-"No, not without certain embracements."
-
-"Always passionately virginal?"
-
-"Always virginally passionate."
-
-"Proceed."
-
-"Well, we had supper--a positively Olympian affair, nectar and
-ambrosia and stolen hand-pressures. She became more and more wonderful
-every moment. My God, you should have seen her eyes! The whole soul
-seemed to burn in their depths, like fire under the sea----"
-
-"For narrative," I interrupted him, "the epic or heroic style is
-altogether more suitable than the lyrical."
-
-"Well, as I say, we had supper, and after that my memory becomes a
-sort of burning mist."
-
-"Let us make haste to draw the inevitable veil. What was her name?"
-
-Lykeham confessed that he didn't know; as she was a goddess, it didn't
-really seem to matter what her earthly name was. How did he expect to
-find her again? He hadn't thought of that, but knew she'd turn up
-somehow. I told him he was a fool, and asked which particular goddess
-he thought she was and which particular god he himself.
-
-"We discussed that," he said. "We first thought Ares and Aphrodite;
-but she wasn't my idea of Aphrodite, and I don't know that I'm very
-much like Ares."
-
-He looked pensively in the old Venetian mirror which hung over the
-fireplace. It was a complacent look, for Lykeham was rather vain about
-his personal appearance, which was, indeed, repulsive at first sight,
-but had, when you looked again, a certain strange and fascinating ugly
-beauty. Bearded, he would have made a passable Socrates. But Ares--no,
-certainly he wasn't Ares.
-
-"Perhaps you're Hephęstus," I suggested; but the idea was received
-coldly.
-
-Was he sure that she was a goddess? Mightn't she just have been a
-nymph of sorts? Europa, for instance. Lykeham repudiated the implied
-suggestion that he was a bull, nor would he hear of himself as a swan
-or a shower of gold. It was possible, however, he thought, that he was
-Apollo and she Daphne, reincarnated from her vegetable state. And
-though I laughed heartily at the idea of his being Phoebus Apollo,
-Lykeham stuck to the theory with increasing obstinacy. The more he
-thought of it the more it seemed to him probable that his nymph, with
-her burning cold virginal passion, was Daphne, while to doubt that he
-himself was Apollo seemed hardly to occur to him.
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-It was about a fortnight later, in June, towards the end of term, that
-we discovered Lykeham's Olympian identity. We had gone, Lykeham and I,
-for an after-dinner walk. We set out through the pale tranquillity of
-twilight, and following the towpath up the river as far as Godstow,
-halted at the inn for a glass of port and a talk with the glorious old
-female Falstaff in black silk who kept it. We were royally entertained
-with gossip and old wine, and after Lykeham had sung a comic song
-which had reduced the old lady to a quivering jelly of hysterical
-laughter, we set out once more, intending to go yet a little farther
-up the river before we turned back. Darkness had fallen by this time;
-the stars were lighted in the sky; it was the sort of summer night to
-which Marlowe compared Helen of Troy. Over the meadows invisible
-peewits wheeled and uttered their melancholy cry; the far-off thunder
-of the weir bore a continuous, even burden to all the other small
-noises of the night. Lykeham and I walked on in silence. We had
-covered perhaps a quarter of a mile when all at once my companion
-stopped and began looking fixedly westward towards Witham Hill. I
-paused too, and saw that he was staring at the thin crescent of the
-moon, which was preparing to set in the dark woods that crowned the
-eminence.
-
-"What are you looking at?" I asked.
-
-But Lykeham paid no attention, only muttered something to himself.
-Then suddenly he cried out, "It's she!" and started off at full gallop
-across the fields in the direction of the hill. Conceiving that he had
-gone suddenly mad, I followed. We crashed through the first hedge
-twenty yards apart. Then came the backwater; Lykeham leapt, flopped in
-three-quarters of the way across, and scrambled oozily ashore. I made
-a better jump and landed among the mud and rushes of the farther bank.
-Two more hedges and a ploughed field, a hedge, a road, a gate, another
-field, and then we were in Witham Wood itself. It was pitch black
-under the trees, and Lykeham had perforce to slacken his pace a
-little. I followed him by the noise he made crashing through the
-undergrowth and cursing when he hurt himself. That wood was a
-nightmare, but we got through it somehow and into the open glade at
-the top of the hill. Through the trees on the farther side of the
-clearing shone the moon, seeming incredibly close at hand. Then,
-suddenly, along the very path of the moonlight, the figure of a woman
-came walking through the trees into the open. Lykeham rushed towards
-her and flung himself at her feet and embraced her knees; she stooped
-down and smoothed his ruffled hair. I turned and walked away; it is
-not for a mere mortal to look on at the embracements of the gods.
-
-As I walked back, I wondered who on earth--or rather who in
-heaven--Lykeham could be. For here was chaste Cynthia giving herself
-to him in the most unequivocal fashion. Could he be Endymion? No, the
-idea was too preposterous to be entertained for a moment. But I could
-think of no other loved by the virgin moon. Yet surely I seemed dimly
-to recollect that there had been some favoured god; for the life of me
-I could not remember who. All the way back along the river path I
-searched my mind for his name, and always it eluded me.
-
-But on my return I looked up the matter in Lempričre, and almost died
-of laughing when I discovered the truth. I thought of Lykeham's
-Venetian mirror and his complacent side glances at his own image, and
-his belief that he was Apollo, and I laughed and laughed. And when,
-considerably after midnight, Lykeham got back to college, I met him in
-the porch and took him quietly by the sleeve, and in his ear I
-whispered, "GOAT-FOOT," and then I roared with laughter once again.
-
-
-
-THE BOOKSHOP
-
-IT seemed indeed an unlikely place to find a bookshop. All the other
-commercial enterprises of the street aimed at purveying the barest
-necessities to the busy squalor of the quarter. In this, the main
-arterial street, there was a specious glitter and life produced by the
-swift passage of the traffic. It was almost airy, almost gay. But all
-around great tracts of slum pullulated dankly. The inhabitants did
-their shopping in the grand street; they passed, holding gobbets of
-meat that showed glutinous even through the wrappings of paper; they
-cheapened linoleum at upholstery doors; women, black-bonneted and
-black-shawled, went shuffling to their marketing with dilapidated bags
-of straw plait. How should these, I wondered, buy books? And yet there
-it was, a tiny shop; and the windows were fitted with shelves, and
-there were the brown backs of books. To the right a large emporium
-overflowed into the street with its fabulously cheap furniture; to the
-left the curtained, discreet windows of an eating-house announced in
-chipped white letters the merits of sixpenny dinners. Between, so
-narrow as scarcely to prevent the junction of food and furniture, was
-the little shop. A door and four feet of dark window, that was the
-full extent of frontage. One saw here that literature was a luxury; it
-took its proportionable room here in this place of necessity. Still,
-the comfort was that it survived, definitely survived.
-
-The owner of the shop was standing in the doorway, a little man,
-grizzle-bearded and with eyes very active round the corners of the
-spectacles that bridged his long, sharp nose.
-
-"Trade is good?" I inquired.
-
-"Better in my grandfather's day," he told me, shaking his head sadly.
-
-"We grow progressively more Philistine," I suggested.
-
-"It is our cheap press. The ephemeral overwhelms the permanent, the
-classical."
-
-"This journalism," I agreed, "or call it rather this piddling
-quotidianism, is the curse of our age."
-
-"Fit only for----" He gesticulated clutchingly with his hands as
-though seeking the word.
-
-"For the fire."
-
-The old man was triumphantly emphatic with his, "No: for the sewer."
-
-I laughed sympathetically at his passion. "We are delightfully at one
-in our views," I told him. "May I look about me a little among your
-treasures?"
-
-Within the shop was a brown twilight, redolent with old leather and
-the smell of that fine subtle dust that clings to the pages of
-forgotten books, as though preservative of their secrets--like the dry
-sand of Asian deserts beneath which, still incredibly intact, lie the
-treasures and the rubbish of a thousand years ago. I opened the first
-volume that came to my hand. It was a book of fashion-plates, tinted
-elaborately by hand in magenta and purple, maroon and solferino and
-puce and those melting shades of green that a yet earlier generation
-had called "the sorrows of Werther." Beauties in crinolines swam with
-the amplitude of pavilioned ships across the pages. Their feet were
-represented as thin and flat and black, like tea-leaves shyly
-protruding from under their petticoats. Their faces were egg-shaped,
-sleeked round with hair of glossy black, and expressive of an
-immaculate purity. I thought of our modern fashion figures, with their
-heels and their arch of instep, their flattened faces and smile of
-pouting invitation. It was difficult not to be a deteriorationist. I
-am easily moved by symbols; there is something of a Quarles in my
-nature. Lacking the philosophic mind, I prefer to see my abstractions
-concretely imaged. And it occurred to me then that if I wanted an
-emblem to picture the sacredness of marriage and the influence of the
-home I could not do better than choose two little black feet like
-tea-leaves peeping out decorously from under the hem of wide,
-disguising petticoats. While heels and thoroughbred insteps should
-figure--oh well, the reverse.
-
-The current of my thoughts was turned aside by the old man's voice. "I
-expect you are musical," he said.
-
-Oh yes, I was a little; and he held out to me a bulky folio.
-
-"Did you ever hear this?" he asked.
-
-_Robert the Devil_: no, I never had. I did not doubt that it was a gap
-in my musical education.
-
-The old man took the book and drew up a chair from the dim
-_penetralia_ of the shop. It was then that I noticed a surprising
-fact: what I had, at a careless glance, taken to be a common counter I
-perceived now to be a piano of a square, unfamiliar shape. The old man
-sat down before it. "You must forgive any defects in its tone," he
-said, turning to me. "An early Broadwood, Georgian, you know, and has
-seen a deal of service in a hundred years."
-
-He opened the lid, and the yellow keys grinned at me in the darkness
-like the teeth of an ancient horse.
-
-The old man rustled pages till he found a desired place. "The ballet
-music," he said: "it's fine. Listen to this."
-
-His bony, rather tremulous hands began suddenly to move with an
-astonishing nimbleness, and there rose up, faint and tinkling against
-the roar of the traffic, a gay pirouetting music. The instrument
-rattled considerably and the volume of sound was thin as the trickle
-of a drought-shrunken stream: but, still, it kept tune and the melody
-was there, filmy, aerial.
-
-"And now for the drinking-song," cried the old man, warming excitedly
-to his work. He played a series of chords that mounted modulating
-upwards towards a breaking-point; so supremely operatic as positively
-to be a parody of that moment of tautening suspense, when the singers
-are bracing themselves for a burst of passion. And then it came, the
-drinking chorus. One pictured to oneself cloaked men, wildly jovial
-over the emptiness of cardboard flagons.
-
-    "Versiam' a tazza piena
-     Il generoso umor . . ."
-
-The old man's voice was cracked and shrill, but his enthusiasm made up
-for any defects in execution. I had never seen anyone so
-wholeheartedly a reveller.
-
-He turned over a few more pages. "Ah, the 'Valse Infernale,'" he said.
-"That's good." There was a little melancholy prelude and then the
-tune, not so infernal perhaps as one might have been led to expect,
-but still pleasant enough. I looked over his shoulder at the words and
-sang to his accompaniment.
-
-    "Demoni fatali
-     Fantasmi d'orror,
-     Dei regni infernali
-     Plaudite al signor."
-
-A great steam-driven brewer's lorry roared past with its annihilating
-thunder and utterly blotted out the last line. The old man's hands
-still moved over the yellow keys, my mouth opened and shut; but there
-was no sound of words or music. It was as though the fatal demons, the
-phantasms of horror, had made a sudden irruption into this peaceful,
-abstracted place.
-
-I looked out through the narrow door. The traffic ceaselessly passed;
-men and women hurried along with set faces. Phantasms of horror, all
-of them: infernal realms wherein they dwelt. Outside, men lived under
-the tyranny of things. Their every action was determined by the orders
-of mere matter, by money, and the tools of their trade and the
-unthinking laws of habit and convention. But here I seemed to be safe
-from things, living at a remove from actuality; here where a bearded
-old man, improbable survival from some other time, indomitably played
-the music of romance, despite the fact that the phantasms of horror
-might occasionally drown the sound of it with their clamour.
-
-"So: will you take it?" The voice of the old man broke across my
-thoughts. "I will let you have it for five shillings." He was holding
-out the thick, dilapidated volume towards me. His face wore a look of
-strained anxiety. I could see how eager he was to get my five
-shillings, how necessary, poor man! for him. He has been, I thought
-with an unreasonable bitterness--he has been simply performing for my
-benefit, like a trained dog. His aloofness, his culture--all a
-business trick. I felt aggrieved. He was just one of the common
-phantasms of horror masquerading as the angel of this somewhat comic
-paradise of contemplation. I gave him a couple of half-crowns and he
-began wrapping the book in paper.
-
-"I tell you," he said, "I'm sorry to part with it. I get attached to
-my books, you know; but they always have to go."
-
-He sighed with such an obvious genuineness of feeling that I repented
-of the judgment I had passed upon him. He was a reluctant inhabitant
-of the infernal realms, even as was I myself.
-
-Outside they were beginning to cry the evening papers: a ship sunk,
-trenches captured, somebody's new stirring speech. We looked at one
-another--the old bookseller and I--in silence. We understood one
-another without speech. Here were we in particular, and here was the
-whole of humanity in general, all faced by the hideous triumph of
-things. In this continued massacre of men, in this old man's enforced
-sacrifice, matter equally triumphed. And walking homeward through
-Regent's Park, I too found matter triumphing over me. My book was
-unconscionably heavy, and I wondered what in the world I should do
-with a piano score of _Robert the Devil_ when I had got it home. It
-would only be another thing to weigh me down and hinder me; and at the
-moment it was very, oh, abominably, heavy. I leaned over the railings
-that ring round the ornamental water, and as unostentatiously as I
-could, I let the book fall into the bushes.
-
-I often think it would be best not to attempt the solution of the
-problem of life. Living is hard enough without complicating the
-process by thinking about it. The wisest thing, perhaps, is to take
-for granted the "wearisome condition of humanity, born under one law,
-to another bound," and to leave the matter at that, without an attempt
-to reconcile the incompatibles. Oh, the absurd difficulty of it all!
-And I have, moreover, wasted five shillings, which is serious, you
-know, in these thin times.
-
-
-
-THE DEATH OF LULLY
-
-THE sea lay in a breathing calm, and the galley, bosomed in its
-transparent water, stirred rhythmically to the slow pulse of its
-sleeping life. Down below there, fathoms away through the
-crystal-clear Mediterranean, the shadow of the ship lazily swung,
-moving, a long dark patch, very slowly back and forth across the white
-sand of the sea-bottom--very slowly, a scarcely perceptible advance
-and recession of the green darkness. Fishes sometimes passed, now
-hanging poised with idly tremulous fins, now darting onwards,
-effortless and incredibly swift; and always, as it seemed, utterly
-aimless, whether they rested or whether they moved; as the life of
-angels their life seemed mysterious and unknowable.
-
-All was silence on board the ship. In their fetid cage below decks the
-rowers slept where they sat, chained, on their narrow benches. On deck
-the sailors lay sleeping or sat in little groups playing at dice. The
-fore-part of the deck was reserved, it seemed, for passengers of
-distinction. Two figures, a man and a woman, were reclining there on
-couches, their faces and half-bared limbs flushed in the coloured
-shadow that was thrown by the great red awning stretched above them.
-
-It was a nobleman, the sailors had heard, and his mistress that they
-had on board. They had taken their passage at Scanderoon, and were
-homeward bound for Spain. Proud as sin these Spaniards were; the man
-treated them like slaves or dogs. As for the woman, she was well
-enough, but they could find as good a face and pair of breasts in
-their native Genoa. If anyone so much as looked at her from half the
-ship's length away it sent her possessor into a rage. He had struck
-one man for smiling at her. Damned Catalonian, as jealous as a stag;
-they wished him the stag's horns as well as its temper.
-
-It was intensely hot even under the awning. The man woke from his
-uneasy sleep and reached out to where on a little table beside him
-stood a deep silver cup of mixed wine and water. He drank a gulp of
-it; it was as warm as blood and hardly cooled his throat. He turned
-over and, leaning on his elbow, looked at his companion. She on her
-back, quietly breathing through parted lips, still asleep. He leaned
-across and pinched her on the breast, so that she woke up with a
-sudden start and cry of pain.
-
-"Why did you wake me?" she asked.
-
-He laughed and shrugged his shoulders. He had, indeed, had no reason
-for doing so, except that he did not like it that she should be
-comfortably asleep, while he was awake and unpleasantly conscious of
-the heat.
-
-"It is hotter than ever," he said, with a kind of gloomy satisfaction
-at the thought that she would now have to suffer the same discomforts
-as himself. "The wine scorches instead of cooling; the sun seems no
-lower down the sky."
-
-The woman pouted. "You pinched me cruelly," she said. "And I still do
-not know why you wanted to wake me."
-
-He smiled again, this time with a good-humoured lasciviousness. "I
-wanted to kiss you," he said. He passed his hand over her body
-possessively, as a man might caress a dog.
-
-Suddenly the quiet of the afternoon was shattered. A great clamour
-rose up, ragged and uneven, on the air. Shrill yells pierced the dull
-rumbling growl of bass voices, pierced the sound of beaten drums and
-hammered metal.
-
-"What are they doing in the town?" asked the woman anxiously of her
-lover.
-
-"God knows," he answered. "Perhaps the heathen hounds are making some
-trouble with our men."
-
-He got up and walked to the rail of the ship. A quarter of a mile
-away, across the smooth water of the bay, stood the little African
-town at which they had stopped to call. The sunlight showed everything
-with a hard and merciless definition. Sky, palms, white houses, domes,
-and towers seemed as though made from some hard enamelled metal. A
-ridge of low red hills rolled away to right and left. The sunshine
-gave to everything in the scene the same clarity of detail, so that to
-the eye of the onlooker there was no impression of distance. The whole
-thing seemed to be painted in flat upon a single plane.
-
-The young man returned to his couch under the awning and lay down. It
-was hotter than ever, or seemed so, at least, since he had made the
-exertion of getting up. He thought of high cool pastures in the hills,
-with the pleasant sound of streams, far down and out of sight in their
-deep channels. He thought of winds that were fresh and scented--winds
-that were not mere breaths of dust and fire. He thought of the shade
-of cypresses, a narrow opaque strip of darkness; and he thought too of
-the green coolness, more diffused and fluid and transparent, of
-chestnut groves. And he thought of the people he remembered sitting
-under the trees--young people, gay and brightly dressed, whose life
-was all gaiety and deliciousness. There were the songs that they
-sang--he recalled the voices and the dancing of the strings. And there
-were perfumes and, when one drew closer, the faint intoxicating
-fragrance of a woman's body. He thought of the stories they told; one
-in particular came to his mind, a capital tale of a sorcerer who
-offered to change a peasant's wife into a mare, and how he gulled the
-husband and enjoyed the woman before his eyes, and the delightful
-excuses he made when she failed to change her shape. He smiled to
-himself at the thought of it, and stretching out a hand touched his
-mistress. Her bosom was soft to his fingers and damp with sweat; he
-had an unpleasant notion that she was melting in the heat.
-
-"Why do you touch me?" she asked.
-
-He made no reply, but turned away from her. He wondered how it would
-come to pass that people would rise again in the body. It seemed
-curious, considering the manifest activities of worms. And suppose one
-rose in the body that one possessed in age. He shuddered, picturing to
-himself what this woman would be like when she was sixty, seventy. She
-would be beyond words repulsive. Old men too were horrible. They
-stank, and their eyes were rheumy and rosiny, like the eyes of deer.
-He decided that he would kill himself before he grew old. He was
-eight-and-twenty now. He would give himself twelve years more. Then he
-would end it. His thoughts dimmed and faded away into sleep.
-
-The woman looked at him as he slept. He was a good man, she thought,
-though sometimes cruel. He was different from all the other men she
-had known. Once, when she was sixteen and a beginner in the business
-of love, she had thought that all men were always drunk when they made
-love. They were all dirty and like beasts; she had felt herself
-superior to them. But this man was a nobleman. She could not
-understand him; his thoughts were always obscure. She felt herself
-infinitely inferior to him. She was afraid of him and his occasional
-cruelty; but still he was a good man, and he might do what he liked
-with her.
-
-From far off came the sound of oars, a rhythmical splash and creak.
-Somebody shouted, and from startlingly close at hand one of the
-sailors hallooed back.
-
-The young man woke up with a start.
-
-"What is it?" he asked, turning with an angry look to the girl, as
-though he held her to be responsible for this breaking in upon his
-slumbers.
-
-"The boat, I think," she said. "It must be coming back from the
-shore."
-
-The boat's crew came up over the side, and all the stagnant life of
-the ship flowed excitedly round them. They were the centre of a vortex
-towards which all were drawn. Even the young Catalonian, for all his
-hatred of these stinking Genoese shipmen, was sucked into the eddy.
-Everybody was talking at once, and in the general hubbub of question
-and answer there was nothing coherent to be made out. Piercingly
-distinct above all the noise came the voice of the little cabin-boy,
-who had been to shore with the boat's crew. He was running round to
-everyone in turn repeating: "I hit one of them. You know. I hit one.
-With a stone on the forehead. Didn't he bleed, ooh! didn't he just!"
-And he would dance with uncontrollable excitement.
-
-The captain held up his hand and shouted for silence. "One at a time,
-there," he ordered, and when order had a little been restored, added
-grumblingly, "Like a pack of dogs on a bone. You talk, boatswain."
-
-"I hit one of them," said the boy. Somebody cuffed him over the head,
-and he relapsed into silence.
-
-When the boatswain's story had rambled through labyrinths of
-digression, over countless obstacles of interruptions and emendations,
-to its conclusion, the Spaniard went back to join his companion under
-the awning. He had assumed again his habitual indifference.
-
-"Nearly butchered," he said languidly, in response to her eager
-questions. "They"--he jerked a hand in the direction of the
-town--"they were pelting an old fellow who had come there preaching
-the Faith. Left him dead on the beach. Our men had to run for it."
-
-She could get no more out of him; he turned over and pretended to go
-to sleep.
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-Towards evening they received a visit from the captain. He was a
-large, handsome man, with gold ear-rings glinting from among a bush of
-black hair.
-
-"Divine Providence," he remarked sententiously, after the usual
-courtesies had passed, "has called upon us to perform a very notable
-work."
-
-"Indeed?" said the young man.
-
-"No less a work," continued the captain, "than to save from the
-clutches of the infidels and heathen the precious remains of a holy
-martyr."
-
-The captain let fall his pompous manner. It was evident that he had
-carefully prepared these pious sentences, they rolled so roundly off
-his tongue. But he was eager now to get on with his story, and it was
-in a homelier style that he went on: "If you knew these seas as well
-as I--and it's near twenty years now that I've been sailing
-them--you'd have some knowledge of this same holy man that--God rot
-their souls for it!--these cursed Arabs have done to death here. I've
-heard of him more than once in my time, and not always well spoken of;
-for, to tell the honest truth, he does more harm with his preachments
-to good Christian traders than ever he did good to black-hearted
-heathen dogs. Leave the bees alone, I say, and if you can get a little
-honey out of them quietly, so much the better; but he goes about among
-the beehives with a pole, stirring up trouble for himself and others
-too. Leave them alone to their damnation, is what I say, and get what
-you can from them this side of hell. But, still, he has died a holy
-martyr's death. God rest his soul! A martyr is a wonderful thing, you
-know, and it's not for the likes of us to understand what they mean by
-it all.
-
-"They do say, too, that he could make gold. And, to my mind, it would
-have been a thing more pleasing to God and man if he had stopped at
-home minting money for poor folks and dealing it round, so that
-there'd be no need to work any more and break oneself for a morsel of
-bread. Yes, he was great at gold-making and at the books too. They
-tell me he was called the Illuminated Doctor. But I know him still as
-plain Lully. I used to hear of him from my father, plain Lully, and no
-better once than he should have been.
-
-"My father was a shipwright in Minorca in those days--how long since?
-Fifty, sixty years perhaps. He knew him then; he has often told me the
-tale. And a raffish young dog he was. Drinking, drabbing, and dicing
-he outdid them all, and between the bouts wrote poems, they say, which
-was more than the rest could do. But he gave it all up on the sudden.
-Gave away his lands, quitted his former companions, and turned hermit
-up in the hills, living alone like a fox in his burrow, high up above
-the vines. And all because of a woman and his own qualmish stomach."
-
-The shipmaster paused and helped himself to a little wine. "And what
-did this woman do?" the girl asked curiously.
-
-"Ah, it's not what she did but what she didn't do," the captain
-answered, with a leer and wink. "She kept him at his distance--all but
-once, all but once; and that was what put him on the road to being a
-martyr. But there, I'm outrunning myself. I must go more soberly.
-
-"There was a lady of some consequence in the island--one of the
-Castellos, I think she was; her first name has quite slipped my
-memory--Anastasia, or something of the kind. Lully conceives a passion
-for her, and sighs and importunes her through I know not how many
-months and years. But her virtue stands steady as the judgment seat.
-Well, in the end, what happens was this. The story leaked out after it
-was all over, and he was turned hermit in the mountains. What
-happened, I say, was this. She tells him at last that he may come and
-see her, fixing some solitary twilight place and time, her own room at
-nightfall. You can guess how he washes and curls and scents himself,
-shaves his chin, chews anises, musks over whatever of the goat may
-cling about the body. Off he goes, dreaming swoons and ecstasies,
-foretasting inconceivable sweets. Arrived, he finds the lady a little
-melancholy--her settled humour, but a man might expect a smile at such
-a time. Still, nothing abashed, he falls at her feet and pours out his
-piteous case, telling her he has sighed through seven years, not
-closed an eye for above a hundred nights, is forepined to a shadow,
-and, in a word, will perish unless she show some mercy. She, still
-melancholy her--settled humour, mark you--makes answer that she is
-ready to yield, and that her body is entirely his. With that, she lets
-herself be done with as he pleases, but always sorrowfully. 'You are
-all mine,' says he--'all mine'--and unlaces her gorgeret to prove the
-same. But he was wrong. Another lover was already in her bosom, and
-his kisses had been passionate--oh, burning passionate, for he had
-kissed away half her left breast. From the nipple down it had all been
-gnawed away by a cancer.
-
-"Bah, a man may see as bad as that any day in the street or at
-church-doors where beggars most congregate. I grant you that it is a
-nasty sight, worm-eaten flesh, but still--not enough, you will agree,
-to make yourself a hermit over. But there, I told you he had a
-queasiness of the stomach. But doubtless it was all in God's plan to
-make a holy martyr of him. But for that same queasiness of his, he
-would still be living there, a superannuated rake; or else have died
-in very foul odour, instead of passing, all embalmed with sanctity, to
-Paradise Gate.
-
-"I know not what happened to him between his hermit-hood and his quest
-for martyrdom. I saw him first a dozen years ago, down Tunis way. They
-were always clapping him into prison or pulling out his beard for
-preaching. This time, it seems, they have made a holy martyr of him,
-done the business thoroughly with no bungling. Well, may he pray for
-our souls at the throne of God. I go in secretly to-night to steal his
-body. It lies on the shore there beyond the jetty. It will be a
-notable work, I tell you, to bring back so precious a corpse to
-Christendom. A most notable work. . . ."
-
-The captain rubbed his hands.
-
-*  *  *  *  *
-
-It was after midnight, but there was still a bustle of activity on
-board the galley. At any moment they were expecting the arrival of the
-boat with the corpse of the martyr. A couch, neatly draped in black,
-with at its head and foot candles burning two by two, had been set out
-on the poop for the reception of the body. The captain called the
-young Spaniard and his mistress to come and see the bier.
-
-"That's a good bit of work for you," he said, with justifiable pride.
-"I defy anyone to make a more decent resting-place for a martyr than
-that is. It could hardly have been done better on shore, with every
-appliance at hand. But we sailors, you know, can make anything out of
-nothing. A truckle-bed, a strip of tarred canvas, and four tallow dips
-from the cabin lanterns--there you are, a bier for a king."
-
-He hurried away, and a little later the young man and the girl could
-hear him giving orders and cursing somewhere down below. The candles
-burned almost without a tremor in the windless air, and the
-reflections of the stars were long, thin tracks of fire along the
-utterly calm water.
-
-"Were there but perfumed flowers and the sound of a lute," said the
-young Spaniard, "the night would tremble into passion of its own
-accord. Love should come unsought on such a night as this, among these
-black waters and the stars that sleep so peacefully on their bosom."
-
-He put his arm round the girl and bent his head to kiss her. But she
-averted her face. He could feel a shudder run her through the body.
-
-"Not to-night," she whispered. "I think of the poor dead man. I would
-rather pray."
-
-"No, no," he cried. "Forget him. Remember only that we are alive, and
-that we have but little time and none to waste."
-
-He drew her into the shadow under the bulwark, and, sitting down on a
-coil of rope, crushed her body to his own and began kissing her with
-fury. She lay, at first, limp in his arms, but gradually she kindled
-to his passion.
-
-A plash of oars announced the approach of the boat. The captain
-hallooed into the darkness: "Did you find him?"
-
-"Yes, we have him here," came back the answer.
-
-"Good. Bring him alongside and we'll hoist him up. We have the bier in
-readiness. He shall lie in state to-night."
-
-"But he's not dead," shouted back the voice from the night.
-
-"Not dead?" repeated the captain, thunderstruck. "But what about the
-bier, then?"
-
-A thin, feeble voice came back. "Your work will not be wasted, my
-friend. It will be but a short time before I need your bier."
-
-The captain, a little abashed, answered in a gentler tone, "We
-thought, holy father, that the heathens had done their worst and that
-Almighty God had already given you the martyr's crown."
-
-By this time the boat had emerged from the darkness. In the stern
-sheets an old man was lying, his white hair and beard stained with
-blood, his Dominican's robe torn and fouled with dust. At the sight of
-him, the captain pulled off his cap and dropped upon his knees.
-
-"Give us your blessing, holy father," he begged.
-
-The old man raised his hand and wished him peace.
-
-They lifted him on board and, at his own desire, laid him upon the
-bier which had been prepared for his dead body. "It would be a waste
-of trouble," he said, "to put me anywhere else, seeing I shall in any
-case be lying there so soon."
-
-So there he lay, very still under the four candles. One might have
-taken him for dead already, but that his eyes, when he opened them,
-shone so brightly.
-
-He dismissed from the poop everyone except the young Spaniard. "We are
-countrymen," he said, "and of noble blood, both of us. I would rather
-have you near me than anyone else."
-
-The sailors knelt for a blessing and disappeared; soon they could be
-heard weighing the anchor; it was safest to be off before day. Like
-mourners at either side of the lighted bier crouched the Spaniard and
-his mistress. The body of the old man, who was not yet dead, lay quiet
-under the candles. The martyr was silent for some time, but at last he
-opened his eyes and looked at the young man and the woman.
-
-"I too," he said, "was in love, once. In this year falls the jubilee
-of my last earthly passion; fifty years have run since last I longed
-after the flesh--fifty years since God opened my eyes to the
-hideousness of the corruption that man has brought upon himself.
-
-"You are young, and your bodies are clean and straight, with no blotch
-or ulcer or leprous taint to mar their much-desired beauty; but
-because of your outward pride, your souls, it may be, fester inwardly
-the more.
-
-"And yet God made all perfect; it is but accident and the evil of will
-that causes defaults. All metals should be gold, were it not that
-their elements willed evilly in their desire to combine. And so with
-men: the burning sulphur of passion, the salt of wisdom, the nimble
-mercurial soul should come together to make a golden being,
-incorruptible and rustless. But the elements mingle jarringly, not in
-a pure harmony of love, and gold is rare, while lead and iron and
-poisonous brass that leaves a taste as of remorse behind it are
-everywhere common.
-
-"God opened my eyes to it before my youth had too utterly wasted
-itself to rottenness. It was half a hundred years ago, but I see her
-still, my Ambrosia, with her white, sad face and her naked body and
-that monstrous ill eating away at her breast.
-
-"I have lived since then trying to amend the evil, trying to restore,
-as far as my poor powers would go, some measure of original perfection
-to the corrupted world. I have striven to give to all metals their
-true nature, to make true gold from the false, the unreal, the
-accidental metals, lead and copper and tin and iron. And I have
-essayed that more difficult alchemy, the transformation of men. I die
-now in my effort to purge away that most foul dross of misbelief from
-the souls of these heathen men. Have I achieved anything? I know not."
-
-The galley was moving now, its head turned seaward. The candles
-shivered in the wind of its speed, casting uncertain, changing shadows
-upon his face. There was a long silence on the poop. The oars creaked
-and splashed. Sometimes a shout would come up from below, orders given
-by the overseer of the slaves, a curse, the sound of a blow. The old
-man spoke again, more weakly now, as though to himself.
-
-"I have had eighty years of it," he said--"eighty years in the midst
-of this corroding sea of hatred and strife. A man has need to keep
-pure and unalloyed his core of gold, that little centre of perfection
-with which all, even in this declination of time, are born. All other
-metal, though it be as tough as steel, as shining-hard as brass, will
-melt before the devouring bitterness of life. Hatred, lust, anger--the
-vile passions will corrode your will of iron, the warlike pomp of your
-front of brass. It needs the golden perfection of pure love and pure
-knowledge to withstand them.
-
-"God has willed that I should be the stone--weak, indeed, in
-virtue--that has touched and transformed at least a little of baser
-metal into the gold that is above corruption. But it is hard
-work--thankless work. Man has made a hell of his world, and has set up
-gods of pain to rule it. Goatish gods, that revel and feast on the
-agony of it all, poring over the tortured world, like those hateful
-lovers, whose lust burns darkly into cruelty.
-
-"Fever goads us through life in a delirium of madness. Thirsting for
-the swamps of evil whence the fever came, thirsting for the mirages of
-his own delirium, man rushes headlong he knows not whither. And all
-the time a devouring cancer gnaws at his entrails. It will kill him in
-the end, when even the ghastly inspiration of fever will not be enough
-to whip him on. He will lie there, cumbering the earth, a heap of
-rottenness and pain, until at last the cleansing fire comes to sweep
-the horror away.
-
-"Fever and cancer; acids that burn and corrode. . . . I have had
-eighty years of it. Thank God, it is the end."
-
-It was already dawn; the candles were hardly visible now in the light,
-faded to nothing, like souls in prosperity. In a little while the old
-man was asleep.
-
-The captain tiptoed up on to the poop and drew the young Spaniard
-aside for a confidential talk.
-
-"Do you think he will die to-day?" he asked.
-
-The young man nodded.
-
-"God rest his soul," said the captain piously. "But do you think it
-would be best to take his body to Minorca or to Genoa? At Minorca they
-would give much to have their own patron martyr. At the same time it
-would add to the glory of Genoa to possess so holy a relic, though he
-is in no way connected with the place. It's there is my difficulty.
-Suppose, you see, that my people of Genoa did not want the body, he
-being from Minorca and not one of them. I should look a fool then,
-bringing it in in state. Oh, it's hard, it's hard. There's so much to
-think about. I am not sure but what I hadn't better put in at Minorca
-first. What do you think?"
-
-The Spaniard shrugged his shoulder. "I have no advice to offer."
-
-"Lord," said the captain as he bustled away, "life is a tangled knot
-to unravel."
-
-
-PRINTED BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH
-
-
-
-Transcriber's Note
-
-This transcription is based on images scanned from a copy made
-available by the University of Toronto and posted by the Internet
-Archive at:
-
-     archive.org/details/limbohux00huxluoft
-
-The following changes were noted:
-
--- p. 70: "Let it start smouldering at once I must--Inserted period
-after "once".
-
--- p. 196: Even make pretences to re ard--Changed "re ard" to
-"regard".
-
--- p. 203: Eupompus' next picture, representing an orchard of
-identical trees--As this paragraph is a continuation of Emberlin's
-speech, an opening double quotation mark was inserted at the beginning
-of the paragraph.
-
--- p. 243: How exciting it was, wasn't it, HENRIKA?--Changed "HENRIKA"
-from small caps to "Henrika".
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Limbo, by Aldous Huxley
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