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Crome Yellow

by Aldous Huxley · English · Gutenberg #1999 · 353,102 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Crome Yellow

Author: Aldous Huxley


        
Release date: December 1, 1999 [eBook #1999]
                Most recently updated: November 8, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1999

Credits: Produced by Sue Asscher, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CROME YELLOW ***




Produced by Sue Asscher




CROME YELLOW

By Aldous Huxley




CHAPTER I.

Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All
the trains--the few that there were--stopped at all the stations.
Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton,
Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally,
Camlet-on-the-Water. Camlet was where he always got out, leaving the
train to creep indolently onward, goodness only knew whither, into the
green heart of England.

They were snorting out of West Bowlby now. It was the next station,
thank Heaven. Denis took his chattels off the rack and piled them neatly
in the corner opposite his own. A futile proceeding. But one must have
something to do. When he had finished, he sank back into his seat and
closed his eyes. It was extremely hot.

Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours
in which he might have done so much, so much--written the perfect poem,
for example, or read the one illuminating book. Instead of which--his
gorge rose at the smell of the dusty cushions against which he was
leaning.

Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in
that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what
had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though
his reservoir were inexhaustible. Denis groaned in the spirit, condemned
himself utterly with all his works. What right had he to sit in the
sunshine, to occupy corner seats in third-class carriages, to be alive?
None, none, none.

Misery and a nameless nostalgic distress possessed him. He was
twenty-three, and oh! so agonizingly conscious of the fact.

The train came bumpingly to a halt. Here was Camlet at last. Denis
jumped up, crammed his hat over his eyes, deranged his pile of baggage,
leaned out of the window and shouted for a porter, seized a bag in
either hand, and had to put them down again in order to open the door.
When at last he had safely bundled himself and his baggage on to the
platform, he ran up the train towards the van.

“A bicycle, a bicycle!” he said breathlessly to the guard. He felt
himself a man of action. The guard paid no attention, but continued
methodically to hand out, one by one, the packages labelled to Camlet.
“A bicycle!” Denis repeated. “A green machine, cross-framed, name of
Stone. S-T-O-N-E.”

“All in good time, sir,” said the guard soothingly. He was a large,
stately man with a naval beard. One pictured him at home, drinking tea,
surrounded by a numerous family. It was in that tone that he must have
spoken to his children when they were tiresome. “All in good time, sir.”
 Denis’s man of action collapsed, punctured.

He left his luggage to be called for later, and pushed off on his
bicycle. He always took his bicycle when he went into the country. It
was part of the theory of exercise. One day one would get up at six
o’clock and pedal away to Kenilworth, or Stratford-on-Avon--anywhere.
And within a radius of twenty miles there were always Norman churches
and Tudor mansions to be seen in the course of an afternoon’s excursion.
Somehow they never did get seen, but all the same it was nice to feel
that the bicycle was there, and that one fine morning one really might
get up at six.

Once at the top of the long hill which led up from Camlet station, he
felt his spirits mounting. The world, he found, was good. The far-away
blue hills, the harvests whitening on the slopes of the ridge along
which his road led him, the treeless sky-lines that changed as he
moved--yes, they were all good. He was overcome by the beauty of those
deeply embayed combes, scooped in the flanks of the ridge beneath him.
Curves, curves: he repeated the word slowly, trying as he did so to find
some term in which to give expression to his appreciation. Curves--no,
that was inadequate. He made a gesture with his hand, as though to scoop
the achieved expression out of the air, and almost fell off his bicycle.
What was the word to describe the curves of those little valleys? They
were as fine as the lines of a human body, they were informed with the
subtlety of art...

Galbe. That was a good word; but it was French. Le galbe evase de ses
hanches: had one ever read a French novel in which that phrase didn’t
occur? Some day he would compile a dictionary for the use of novelists.
Galbe, gonfle, goulu: parfum, peau, pervers, potele, pudeur: vertu,
volupte.

But he really must find that word. Curves curves...Those little valleys
had the lines of a cup moulded round a woman’s breast; they seemed the
dinted imprints of some huge divine body that had rested on these hills.
Cumbrous locutions, these; but through them he seemed to be getting
nearer to what he wanted. Dinted, dimpled, wimpled--his mind wandered
down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and
further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.

Becoming once more aware of the outer world, he found himself on the
crest of a descent. The road plunged down, steep and straight, into a
considerable valley. There, on the opposite slope, a little higher up
the valley, stood Crome, his destination. He put on his brakes; this
view of Crome was pleasant to linger over. The facade with its three
projecting towers rose precipitously from among the dark trees of the
garden. The house basked in full sunlight; the old brick rosily glowed.
How ripe and rich it was, how superbly mellow! And at the same time, how
austere! The hill was becoming steeper and steeper; he was gaining
speed in spite of his brakes. He loosed his grip of the levers, and in
a moment was rushing headlong down. Five minutes later he was passing
through the gate of the great courtyard. The front door stood hospitably
open. He left his bicycle leaning against the wall and walked in. He
would take them by surprise.



CHAPTER II.

He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take. All was quiet;
Denis wandered from room to empty room, looking with pleasure at the
familiar pictures and furniture, at all the little untidy signs of life
that lay scattered here and there. He was rather glad that they were
all out; it was amusing to wander through the house as though one
were exploring a dead, deserted Pompeii. What sort of life would the
excavator reconstruct from these remains; how would he people these
empty chambers? There was the long gallery, with its rows of respectable
and (though, of course, one couldn’t publicly admit it) rather boring
Italian primitives, its Chinese sculptures, its unobtrusive, dateless
furniture. There was the panelled drawing-room, where the huge
chintz-covered arm-chairs stood, oases of comfort among the austere
flesh-mortifying antiques. There was the morning-room, with its pale
lemon walls, its painted Venetian chairs and rococo tables, its mirrors,
its modern pictures. There was the library, cool, spacious, and dark,
book-lined from floor to ceiling, rich in portentous folios. There was
the dining-room, solidly, portwinily English, with its great
mahogany table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its
eighteenth-century pictures--family portraits, meticulous animal
paintings. What could one reconstruct from such data? There was much of
Henry Wimbush in the long gallery and the library, something of Anne,
perhaps, in the morning-room. That was all. Among the accumulations of
ten generations the living had left but few traces.

Lying on the table in the morning-room he saw his own book of poems.
What tact! He picked it up and opened it. It was what the reviewers call
“a slim volume.” He read at hazard:


               ”...But silence and the topless dark

               Vault in the lights of Luna Park;

               And Blackpool from the nightly gloom

               Hollows a bright tumultuous tomb.”

He put it down again, shook his head, and sighed. “What genius I had
then!” he reflected, echoing the aged Swift. It was nearly six months
since the book had been published; he was glad to think he would never
write anything of the same sort again. Who could have been reading it,
he wondered? Anne, perhaps; he liked to think so. Perhaps, too, she had
at last recognised herself in the Hamadryad of the poplar sapling; the
slim Hamadryad whose movements were like the swaying of a young tree in
the wind. “The Woman who was a Tree” was what he had called the poem. He
had given her the book when it came out, hoping that the poem would tell
her what he hadn’t dared to say. She had never referred to it.

He shut his eyes and saw a vision of her in a red velvet cloak, swaying
into the little restaurant where they sometimes dined together in
London--three quarters of an hour late, and he at his table, haggard
with anxiety, irritation, hunger. Oh, she was damnable!

It occurred to him that perhaps his hostess might be in her boudoir. It
was a possibility; he would go and see. Mrs. Wimbush’s boudoir was in
the central tower on the garden front. A little staircase cork-screwed
up to it from the hall. Denis mounted, tapped at the door. “Come in.”
 Ah, she was there; he had rather hoped she wouldn’t be. He opened the
door.

Priscilla Wimbush was lying on the sofa. A blotting-pad rested on her
knees and she was thoughtfully sucking the end of a silver pencil.

“Hullo,” she said, looking up. “I’d forgotten you were coming.”

“Well, here I am, I’m afraid,” said Denis deprecatingly. “I’m awfully
sorry.”

Mrs. Wimbush laughed. Her voice, her laughter, were deep and masculine.
Everything about her was manly. She had a large, square, middle-aged
face, with a massive projecting nose and little greenish eyes, the whole
surmounted by a lofty and elaborate coiffure of a curiously improbable
shade of orange. Looking at her, Denis always thought of Wilkie Bard as
the cantatrice.


               “That’s why I’m going to

               Sing in op’ra, sing in op’ra,

               Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-pop-popera.”

Today she was wearing a purple silk dress with a high collar and a row
of pearls. The costume, so richly dowagerish, so suggestive of the Royal
Family, made her look more than ever like something on the Halls.

“What have you been doing all this time?” she asked.

“Well,” said Denis, and he hesitated, almost voluptuously. He had a
tremendously amusing account of London and its doings all ripe and ready
in his mind. It would be a pleasure to give it utterance. “To begin
with,” he said...

But he was too late. Mrs. Wimbush’s question had been what the
grammarians call rhetorical; it asked for no answer. It was a little
conversational flourish, a gambit in the polite game.

“You find me busy at my horoscopes,” she said, without even being aware
that she had interrupted him.

A little pained, Denis decided to reserve his story for more receptive
ears. He contented himself, by way of revenge, with saying “Oh?” rather
icily.

“Did I tell you how I won four hundred on the Grand National this year?”

“Yes,” he replied, still frigid and mono-syllabic. She must have told
him at least six times.

“Wonderful, isn’t it? Everything is in the Stars. In the Old Days,
before I had the Stars to help me, I used to lose thousands. Now”--she
paused an instant--“well, look at that four hundred on the Grand
National. That’s the Stars.”

Denis would have liked to hear more about the Old Days. But he was too
discreet and, still more, too shy to ask. There had been something of
a bust up; that was all he knew. Old Priscilla--not so old then, of
course, and sprightlier--had lost a great deal of money, dropped it
in handfuls and hatfuls on every race-course in the country. She had
gambled too. The number of thousands varied in the different legends,
but all put it high. Henry Wimbush was forced to sell some of his
Primitives--a Taddeo da Poggibonsi, an Amico di Taddeo, and four or five
nameless Sienese--to the Americans. There was a crisis. For the first
time in his life Henry asserted himself, and with good effect, it
seemed.

Priscilla’s gay and gadding existence had come to an abrupt end.
Nowadays she spent almost all her time at Crome, cultivating a rather
ill-defined malady. For consolation she dallied with New Thought and the
Occult. Her passion for racing still possessed her, and Henry, who was a
kind-hearted fellow at bottom, allowed her forty pounds a month betting
money. Most of Priscilla’s days were spent in casting the horoscopes
of horses, and she invested her money scientifically, as the stars
dictated. She betted on football too, and had a large notebook in which
she registered the horoscopes of all the players in all the teams of
the League. The process of balancing the horoscopes of two elevens one
against the other was a very delicate and difficult one. A match between
the Spurs and the Villa entailed a conflict in the heavens so vast and
so complicated that it was not to be wondered at if she sometimes made a
mistake about the outcome.

“Such a pity you don’t believe in these things, Denis, such a pity,”
 said Mrs. Wimbush in her deep, distinct voice.

“I can’t say I feel it so.”

“Ah, that’s because you don’t know what it’s like to have faith. You’ve
no idea how amusing and exciting life becomes when you do believe. All
that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. It
makes life so jolly, you know. Here am I at Crome. Dull as ditchwater,
you’d think; but no, I don’t find it so. I don’t regret the Old Days
a bit. I have the Stars...” She picked up the sheet of paper that was
lying on the blotting-pad. “Inman’s horoscope,” she explained. “(I
thought I’d like to have a little fling on the billiards championship
this autumn.) I have the Infinite to keep in tune with,” she waved her
hand. “And then there’s the next world and all the spirits, and one’s
Aura, and Mrs. Eddy and saying you’re not ill, and the Christian
Mysteries and Mrs. Besant. It’s all splendid. One’s never dull for a
moment. I can’t think how I used to get on before--in the Old Days.
Pleasure--running about, that’s all it was; just running about. Lunch,
tea, dinner, theatre, supper every day. It was fun, of course, while it
lasted. But there wasn’t much left of it afterwards. There’s rather a
good thing about that in Barbecue-Smith’s new book. Where is it?”

She sat up and reached for a book that was lying on the little table by
the head of the sofa.

“Do you know him, by the way?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Mr. Barbecue-Smith.”

Denis knew of him vaguely. Barbecue-Smith was a name in the Sunday
papers. He wrote about the Conduct of Life. He might even be the author
of “What a Young Girl Ought to Know”.

“No, not personally,” he said.

“I’ve invited him for next week-end.” She turned over the pages of the
book. “Here’s the passage I was thinking of. I marked it. I always mark
the things I like.”

Holding the book almost at arm’s length, for she was somewhat
long-sighted, and making suitable gestures with her free hand, she began
to read, slowly, dramatically.

“‘What are thousand pound fur coats, what are quarter million incomes?’”
 She looked up from the page with a histrionic movement of the head; her
orange coiffure nodded portentously. Denis looked at it, fascinated.
Was it the Real Thing and henna, he wondered, or was it one of those
Complete Transformations one sees in the advertisements?

“‘What are Thrones and Sceptres?’”

The orange Transformation--yes, it must be a Transformation--bobbed up
again.

“‘What are the gaieties of the Rich, the splendours of the Powerful,
what is the pride of the Great, what are the gaudy pleasures of High
Society?’”

The voice, which had risen in tone, questioningly, from sentence to
sentence, dropped suddenly and boomed reply.

“‘They are nothing. Vanity, fluff, dandelion seed in the wind, thin
vapours of fever. The things that matter happen in the heart.
Seen things are sweet, but those unseen are a thousand times more
significant. It is the unseen that counts in Life.’”

Mrs. Wimbush lowered the book. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.

Denis preferred not to hazard an opinion, but uttered a non-committal
“H’m.”

“Ah, it’s a fine book this, a beautiful book,” said Priscilla, as she
let the pages flick back, one by one, from under her thumb. “And here’s
the passage about the Lotus Pool. He compares the Soul to a Lotus Pool,
you know.” She held up the book again and read. “‘A Friend of mine has
a Lotus Pool in his garden. It lies in a little dell embowered with wild
roses and eglantine, among which the nightingale pours forth its amorous
descant all the summer long. Within the pool the Lotuses blossom, and
the birds of the air come to drink and bathe themselves in its crystal
waters...’ Ah, and that reminds me,” Priscilla exclaimed, shutting the
book with a clap and uttering her big profound laugh--“that reminds me
of the things that have been going on in our bathing-pool since you were
here last. We gave the village people leave to come and bathe here in
the evenings. You’ve no idea of the things that happened.”

She leaned forward, speaking in a confidential whisper; every now and
then she uttered a deep gurgle of laughter. “...mixed bathing...saw them
out of my window...sent for a pair of field-glasses to make sure...no
doubt of it...” The laughter broke out again. Denis laughed too.
Barbecue-Smith was tossed on the floor.

“It’s time we went to see if tea’s ready,” said Priscilla. She hoisted
herself up from the sofa and went swishing off across the room, striding
beneath the trailing silk. Denis followed her, faintly humming to
himself:


               “That’s why I’m going to

               Sing in op’ra, sing in op’ra,

               Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-pop-popera.”

And then the little twiddly bit of accompaniment at the end: “ra-ra.”



CHAPTER III.

The terrace in front of the house was a long narrow strip of turf,
bounded along its outer edge by a graceful stone balustrade. Two little
summer-houses of brick stood at either end. Below the house the ground
sloped very steeply away, and the terrace was a remarkably high one;
from the balusters to the sloping lawn beneath was a drop of thirty
feet. Seen from below, the high unbroken terrace wall, built like
the house itself of brick, had the almost menacing aspect of a
fortification--a castle bastion, from whose parapet one looked out
across airy depths to distances level with the eye. Below, in the
foreground, hedged in by solid masses of sculptured yew trees, lay the
stone-brimmed swimming-pool. Beyond it stretched the park, with its
massive elms, its green expanses of grass, and, at the bottom of the
valley, the gleam of the narrow river. On the farther side of the stream
the land rose again in a long slope, chequered with cultivation. Looking
up the valley, to the right, one saw a line of blue, far-off hills.

The tea-table had been planted in the shade of one of the little
summer-houses, and the rest of the party was already assembled about it
when Denis and Priscilla made their appearance. Henry Wimbush had begun
to pour out the tea. He was one of those ageless, unchanging men on the
farther side of fifty, who might be thirty, who might be anything. Denis
had known him almost as long as he could remember. In all those years
his pale, rather handsome face had never grown any older; it was
like the pale grey bowler hat which he always wore, winter and
summer--unageing, calm, serenely without expression.

Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world by the
almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She was
perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink-and-white complexion, and
wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her
ears. In the secret tower of her deafness she sat apart, looking down at
the world through sharply piercing eyes. What did she think of men and
women and things? That was something that Denis had never been able to
discover. In her enigmatic remoteness Jenny was a little disquieting.
Even now some interior joke seemed to be amusing her, for she was
smiling to herself, and her brown eyes were like very bright round
marbles.

On his other side the serious, moonlike innocence of Mary Bracegirdle’s
face shone pink and childish. She was nearly twenty-three, but one
wouldn’t have guessed it. Her short hair, clipped like a page’s, hung in
a bell of elastic gold about her cheeks. She had large blue china eyes,
whose expression was one of ingenuous and often puzzled earnestness.

Next to Mary a small gaunt man was sitting, rigid and erect in
his chair. In appearance Mr. Scogan was like one of those extinct
bird-lizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had the
shining quickness of a robin’s. But there was nothing soft or gracious
or feathery about him. The skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry and
scaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movements
were marked by the lizard’s disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; his
speech was thin, fluty, and dry. Henry Wimbush’s school-fellow and exact
contemporary, Mr. Scogan looked far older and, at the same time, far
more youthfully alive than did that gentle aristocrat with the face like
a grey bowler.

Mr. Scogan might look like an extinct saurian, but Gombauld was
altogether and essentially human. In the old-fashioned natural histories
of the ‘thirties he might have figured in a steel engraving as a type of
Homo Sapiens--an honour which at that time commonly fell to Lord
Byron. Indeed, with more hair and less collar, Gombauld would have
been completely Byronic--more than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of
Provencal descent, a black-haired young corsair of thirty, with flashing
teeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. He
was jealous of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauld
painted pictures! Still more, at the moment, he envied Gombauld his
looks, his vitality, his easy confidence of manner. Was it surprising
that Anne should like him? Like him?--it might even be something worse,
Denis reflected bitterly, as he walked at Priscilla’s side down the long
grass terrace.

Between Gombauld and Mr. Scogan a very much lowered deck-chair presented
its back to the new arrivals as they advanced towards the tea-table.
Gombauld was leaning over it; his face moved vivaciously; he smiled, he
laughed, he made quick gestures with his hands. From the depths of the
chair came up a sound of soft, lazy laughter. Denis started as he heard
it. That laughter--how well he knew it! What emotions it evoked in him!
He quickened his pace.

In her low deck-chair Anne was nearer to lying than to sitting. Her
long, slender body reposed in an attitude of listless and indolent
grace. Within its setting of light brown hair her face had a pretty
regularity that was almost doll-like. And indeed there were moments
when she seemed nothing more than a doll; when the oval face, with its
long-lashed, pale blue eyes, expressed nothing; when it was no more than
a lazy mask of wax. She was Henry Wimbush’s own niece; that bowler-like
countenance was one of the Wimbush heirlooms; it ran in the family,
appearing in its female members as a blank doll-face. But across this
dollish mask, like a gay melody dancing over an unchanging fundamental
bass, passed Anne’s other inheritance--quick laughter, light ironic
amusement, and the changing expressions of many moods. She was smiling
now as Denis looked down at her: her cat’s smile, he called it, for no
very good reason. The mouth was compressed, and on either side of it
two tiny wrinkles had formed themselves in her cheeks. An infinity
of slightly malicious amusement lurked in those little folds, in the
puckers about the half-closed eyes, in the eyes themselves, bright and
laughing between the narrowed lids.

The preliminary greetings spoken, Denis found an empty chair between
Gombauld and Jenny and sat down.

“How are you, Jenny?” he shouted to her.

Jenny nodded and smiled in mysterious silence, as though the subject of
her health were a secret that could not be publicly divulged.

“How’s London been since I went away?” Anne inquired from the depth of
her chair.

The moment had come; the tremendously amusing narrative was waiting for
utterance. “Well,” said Denis, smiling happily, “to begin with...”

“Has Priscilla told you of our great antiquarian find?” Henry Wimbush
leaned forward; the most promising of buds was nipped.

“To begin with,” said Denis desperately, “there was the Ballet...”

“Last week,” Mr. Wimbush went on softly and implacably, “we dug up fifty
yards of oaken drain-pipes; just tree trunks with a hole bored through
the middle. Very interesting indeed. Whether they were laid down by the
monks in the fifteenth century, or whether...”

Denis listened gloomily. “Extraordinary!” he said, when Mr. Wimbush had
finished; “quite extraordinary!” He helped himself to another slice
of cake. He didn’t even want to tell his tale about London now; he was
damped.

For some time past Mary’s grave blue eyes had been fixed upon him. “What
have you been writing lately?” she asked. It would be nice to have a
little literary conversation.

“Oh, verse and prose,” said Denis--“just verse and prose.”

“Prose?” Mr. Scogan pounced alarmingly on the word. “You’ve been writing
prose?”

“Yes.”

“Not a novel?”

“Yes.”

“My poor Denis!” exclaimed Mr. Scogan. “What about?”

Denis felt rather uncomfortable. “Oh, about the usual things, you know.”

“Of course,” Mr. Scogan groaned. “I’ll describe the plot for you. Little
Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever.
He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and
comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with
melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon
his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles
delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the
luminous Future.”

Denis blushed scarlet. Mr. Scogan had described the plan of his novel
with an accuracy that was appalling. He made an effort to laugh. “You’re
entirely wrong,” he said. “My novel is not in the least like that.” It
was a heroic lie. Luckily, he reflected, only two chapters were written.
He would tear them up that very evening when he unpacked.

Mr. Scogan paid no attention to his denial, but went on: “Why will
you young men continue to write about things that are so entirely
uninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists? Professional
anthropologists might find it interesting to turn sometimes from the
beliefs of the Blackfellow to the philosophical preoccupations of the
undergraduate. But you can’t expect an ordinary adult man, like myself,
to be much moved by the story of his spiritual troubles. And after all,
even in England, even in Germany and Russia, there are more adults than
adolescents. As for the artist, he is preoccupied with problems that
are so utterly unlike those of the ordinary adult man--problems of pure
aesthetics which don’t so much as present themselves to people like
myself--that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the
ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about
artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists
regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is
really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of
literature, just as Professor Radium of ‘Comic Cuts’ is its stock man of
science.”

“I’m sorry to hear I’m as uninteresting as all that,” said Gombauld.

“Not at all, my dear Gombauld,” Mr. Scogan hastened to explain. “As a
lover or a dipsomaniac, I’ve no doubt of your being a most fascinating
specimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you’re
a bore.”

“I entirely disagree with you,” exclaimed Mary. She was somehow always
out of breath when she talked. And her speech was punctuated by little
gasps. “I’ve known a great many artists, and I’ve always found their
mentality very interesting. Especially in Paris. Tschuplitski, for
example--I saw a great deal of Tschuplitski in Paris this spring...”

“Ah, but then you’re an exception, Mary, you’re an exception,” said Mr.
Scogan. “You are a femme superieure.”

A flush of pleasure turned Mary’s face into a harvest moon.



CHAPTER IV.

Denis woke up next morning to find the sun shining, the sky serene. He
decided to wear white flannel trousers--white flannel trousers and a
black jacket, with a silk shirt and his new peach-coloured tie. And
what shoes? White was the obvious choice, but there was something rather
pleasing about the notion of black patent leather. He lay in bed for
several minutes considering the problem.

Before he went down--patent leather was his final choice--he looked at
himself critically in the glass. His hair might have been more golden,
he reflected. As it was, its yellowness had the hint of a greenish tinge
in it. But his forehead was good. His forehead made up in height what
his chin lacked in prominence. His nose might have been longer, but it
would pass. His eyes might have been blue and not green. But his coat
was very well cut and, discreetly padded, made him seem robuster than
he actually was. His legs, in their white casing, were long and elegant.
Satisfied, he descended the stairs. Most of the party had already
finished their breakfast. He found himself alone with Jenny.

“I hope you slept well,” he said.

“Yes, isn’t it lovely?” Jenny replied, giving two rapid little nods.
“But we had such awful thunderstorms last week.”

Parallel straight lines, Denis reflected, meet only at infinity. He
might talk for ever of care-charmer sleep and she of meteorology till
the end of time. Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are
all parallel straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than
most.

“They are very alarming, these thunderstorms,” he said, helping himself
to porridge. “Don’t you think so? Or are you above being frightened?”

“No. I always go to bed in a storm. One is so much safer lying down.”

“Why?”

“Because,” said Jenny, making a descriptive gesture, “because lightning
goes downwards and not flat ways. When you’re lying down you’re out of
the current.”

“That’s very ingenious.”

“It’s true.”

There was a silence. Denis finished his porridge and helped himself
to bacon. For lack of anything better to say, and because Mr. Scogan’s
absurd phrase was for some reason running in his head, he turned to
Jenny and asked:

“Do you consider yourself a femme superieure?” He had to repeat the
question several times before Jenny got the hang of it.

“No,” she said, rather indignantly, when at last she heard what Denis
was saying. “Certainly not. Has anyone been suggesting that I am?”

“No,” said Denis. “Mr. Scogan told Mary she was one.”

“Did he?” Jenny lowered her voice. “Shall I tell you what I think of
that man? I think he’s slightly sinister.”

Having made this pronouncement, she entered the ivory tower of her
deafness and closed the door. Denis could not induce her to say anything
more, could not induce her even to listen. She just smiled at him,
smiled and occasionally nodded.

Denis went out on to the terrace to smoke his after-breakfast pipe and
to read his morning paper. An hour later, when Anne came down, she found
him still reading. By this time he had got to the Court Circular and
the Forthcoming Weddings. He got up to meet her as she approached, a
Hamadryad in white muslin, across the grass.

“Why, Denis,” she exclaimed, “you look perfectly sweet in your white
trousers.”

Denis was dreadfully taken aback. There was no possible retort. “You
speak as though I were a child in a new frock,” he said, with a show of
irritation.

“But that’s how I feel about you, Denis dear.”

“Then you oughtn’t to.”

“But I can’t help it. I’m so much older than you.”

“I like that,” he said. “Four years older.”

“And if you do look perfectly sweet in your white trousers, why
shouldn’t I say so? And why did you put them on, if you didn’t think you
were going to look sweet in them?”

“Let’s go into the garden,” said Denis. He was put out; the conversation
had taken such a preposterous and unexpected turn. He had planned a very
different opening, in which he was to lead off with, “You look adorable
this morning,” or something of the kind, and she was to answer, “Do
I?” and then there was to be a pregnant silence. And now she had got in
first with the trousers. It was provoking; his pride was hurt.

That part of the garden that sloped down from the foot of the terrace
to the pool had a beauty which did not depend on colour so much as on
forms. It was as beautiful by moonlight as in the sun. The silver of
water, the dark shapes of yew and ilex trees remained, at all hours and
seasons, the dominant features of the scene. It was a landscape in black
and white. For colour there was the flower-garden; it lay to one side
of the pool, separated from it by a huge Babylonian wall of yews. You
passed through a tunnel in the hedge, you opened a wicket in a wall, and
you found yourself, startlingly and suddenly, in the world of colour.
The July borders blazed and flared under the sun. Within its high brick
walls the garden was like a great tank of warmth and perfume and colour.

Denis held open the little iron gate for his companion. “It’s like
passing from a cloister into an Oriental palace,” he said, and took a
deep breath of the warm, flower-scented air. “‘In fragrant volleys they
let fly...’ How does it go?”


               “‘Well shot, ye firemen! Oh how sweet

               And round your equal fires do meet;

               Whose shrill report no ear can tell,

               But echoes to the eye and smell...’”

“You have a bad habit of quoting,” said Anne. “As I never know the
context or author, I find it humiliating.”

Denis apologized. “It’s the fault of one’s education. Things somehow
seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else’s ready-made
phrase about them. And then there are lots of lovely names and
words--Monophysite, Iamblichus, Pomponazzi; you bring them out
triumphantly, and feel you’ve clinched the argument with the mere
magical sound of them. That’s what comes of the higher education.”

“You may regret your education,” said Anne; “I’m ashamed of my lack of
it. Look at those sunflowers! Aren’t they magnificent?”

“Dark faces and golden crowns--they’re kings of Ethiopia. And I like
the way the tits cling to the flowers and pick out the seeds, while the
other loutish birds, grubbing dirtily for their food, look up in envy
from the ground. Do they look up in envy? That’s the literary touch, I’m
afraid. Education again. It always comes back to that.” He was silent.

Anne had sat down on a bench that stood in the shade of an old apple
tree. “I’m listening,” she said.

He did not sit down, but walked backwards and forwards in front of the
bench, gesticulating a little as he talked. “Books,” he said--“books.
One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the
world. Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics.
You’ve no idea how many there are. I must have read twenty or thirty
tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination.
Weighted with that, one’s pushed out into the world.”

He went on walking up and down. His voice rose, fell, was silent a
moment, and then talked on. He moved his hands, sometimes he waved his
arms. Anne looked and listened quietly, as though she were at a lecture.
He was a nice boy, and to-day he looked charming--charming!

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about
everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it.
One should have lived first and then made one’s philosophy to fit
life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even
the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas
everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it
surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? Denis came to
a halt in front of the bench, and as he asked this last question he
stretched out his arms and stood for an instant in an attitude of
crucifixion, then let them fall again to his sides.

“My poor Denis!” Anne was touched. He was really too pathetic as he
stood there in front of her in his white flannel trousers. “But does one
suffer about these things? It seems very extraordinary.”

“You’re like Scogan,” cried Denis bitterly. “You regard me as a specimen
for an anthropologist. Well, I suppose I am.”

“No, no,” she protested, and drew in her skirt with a gesture that
indicated that he was to sit down beside her. He sat down. “Why can’t
you just take things for granted and as they come?” she asked. “It’s so
much simpler.”

“Of course it is,” said Denis. “But it’s a lesson to be learnt
gradually. There are the twenty tons of ratiocination to be got rid of
first.”

“I’ve always taken things as they come,” said Anne. “It seems so
obvious. One enjoys the pleasant things, avoids the nasty ones. There’s
nothing more to be said.”

“Nothing--for you. But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying
laboriously to make myself one. I can take nothing for granted, I can
enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, women--I have
to invent an excuse, a justification for everything that’s delightful.
Otherwise I can’t enjoy it with an easy conscience. I make up a little
story about beauty and pretend that it has something to do with truth
and goodness. I have to say that art is the process by which one
reconstructs the divine reality out of chaos. Pleasure is one of the
mystical roads to union with the infinite--the ecstasies of drinking,
dancing, love-making. As for women, I am perpetually assuring myself
that they’re the broad highway to divinity. And to think that I’m only
just beginning to see through the silliness of the whole thing! It’s
incredible to me that anyone should have escaped these horrors.”

“It’s still more incredible to me,” said Anne, “that anyone should have
been a victim to them. I should like to see myself believing that men
are the highway to divinity.” The amused malice of her smile planted two
little folds on either side of her mouth, and through their half-closed
lids her eyes shone with laughter. “What you need, Denis, is a nice
plump young wife, a fixed income, and a little congenial but regular
work.”

“What I need is you.” That was what he ought to have retorted, that
was what he wanted passionately to say. He could not say it. His desire
fought against his shyness. “What I need is you.” Mentally he shouted
the words, but not a sound issued from his lips. He looked at her
despairingly. Couldn’t she see what was going on inside him? Couldn’t
she understand? “What I need is you.” He would say it, he would--he
would.

“I think I shall go and bathe,” said Anne. “It’s so hot.” The
opportunity had passed.



CHAPTER V.

Mr. Wimbush had taken them to see the sights of the Home Farm, and now
they were standing, all six of them--Henry Wimbush, Mr. Scogan, Denis,
Gombauld, Anne, and Mary--by the low wall of the piggery, looking into
one of the styes.

“This is a good sow,” said Henry Wimbush. “She had a litter of fourteen.

“Fourteen?” Mary echoed incredulously. She turned astonished blue eyes
towards Mr. Wimbush, then let them fall onto the seething mass of elan
vital that fermented in the sty.

An immense sow reposed on her side in the middle of the pen. Her round,
black belly, fringed with a double line of dugs, presented itself to the
assault of an army of small, brownish-black swine. With a frantic greed
they tugged at their mother’s flank. The old sow stirred sometimes
uneasily or uttered a little grunt of pain. One small pig, the runt,
the weakling of the litter, had been unable to secure a place at the
banquet. Squealing shrilly, he ran backwards and forwards, trying to
push in among his stronger brothers or even to climb over their tight
little black backs towards the maternal reservoir.

“There ARE fourteen,” said Mary. “You’re quite right. I counted. It’s
extraordinary.”

“The sow next door,” Mr. Wimbush went on, “has done very badly. She only
had five in her litter. I shall give her another chance. If she does no
better next time, I shall fat her up and kill her. There’s the boar,”
 he pointed towards a farther sty. “Fine old beast, isn’t he? But he’s
getting past his prime. He’ll have to go too.”

“How cruel!” Anne exclaimed.

“But how practical, how eminently realistic!” said Mr. Scogan. “In this
farm we have a model of sound paternal government. Make them breed,
make them work, and when they’re past working or breeding or begetting,
slaughter them.”

“Farming seems to be mostly indecency and cruelty,” said Anne.

With the ferrule of his walking-stick Denis began to scratch the boar’s
long bristly back. The animal moved a little so as to bring himself
within easier range of the instrument that evoked in him such delicious
sensations; then he stood stock still, softly grunting his contentment.
The mud of years flaked off his sides in a grey powdery scurf.

“What a pleasure it is,” said Denis, “to do somebody a kindness. I
believe I enjoy scratching this pig quite as much as he enjoys being
scratched. If only one could always be kind with so little expense or
trouble...”

A gate slammed; there was a sound of heavy footsteps.

“Morning, Rowley!” said Henry Wimbush.

“Morning, sir,” old Rowley answered. He was the most venerable of
the labourers on the farm--a tall, solid man, still unbent, with grey
side-whiskers and a steep, dignified profile. Grave, weighty in his
manner, splendidly respectable, Rowley had the air of a great English
statesman of the mid-nineteenth century. He halted on the outskirts of
the group, and for a moment they all looked at the pigs in a silence
that was only broken by the sound of grunting or the squelch of a sharp
hoof in the mire. Rowley turned at last, slowly and ponderously and
nobly, as he did everything, and addressed himself to Henry Wimbush.

“Look at them, sir,” he said, with a motion of his hand towards the
wallowing swine. “Rightly is they called pigs.”

“Rightly indeed,” Mr. Wimbush agreed.

“I am abashed by that man,” said Mr. Scogan, as old Rowley plodded off
slowly and with dignity. “What wisdom, what judgment, what a sense of
values! ‘Rightly are they called swine.’ Yes. And I wish I could, with
as much justice, say, ‘Rightly are we called men.’”

They walked on towards the cowsheds and the stables of the cart-horses.
Five white geese, taking the air this fine morning, even as they were
doing, met them in the way. They hesitated, cackled; then, converting
their lifted necks into rigid, horizontal snakes, they rushed off in
disorder, hissing horribly as they went. Red calves paddled in the dung
and mud of a spacious yard. In another enclosure stood the bull,
massive as a locomotive. He was a very calm bull, and his face wore an
expression of melancholy stupidity. He gazed with reddish-brown eyes at
his visitors, chewed thoughtfully at the tangible memories of an earlier
meal, swallowed and regurgitated, chewed again. His tail lashed savagely
from side to side; it seemed to have nothing to do with his impassive
bulk. Between his short horns was a triangle of red curls, short and
dense.

“Splendid animal,” said Henry Wimbush. “Pedigree stock. But he’s getting
a little old, like the boar.”

“Fat him up and slaughter him,” Mr. Scogan pronounced, with a delicate
old-maidish precision of utterance.

“Couldn’t you give the animals a little holiday from producing
children?” asked Anne. “I’m so sorry for the poor things.”

Mr. Wimbush shook his head. “Personally,” he said, “I rather like seeing
fourteen pigs grow where only one grew before. The spectacle of so much
crude life is refreshing.”

“I’m glad to hear you say so,” Gombauld broke in warmly. “Lots of life:
that’s what we want. I like pullulation; everything ought to increase
and multiply as hard as it can.”

Gombauld grew lyrical. Everybody ought to have children--Anne ought to
have them, Mary ought to have them--dozens and dozens. He emphasised his
point by thumping with his walking-stick on the bull’s leather flanks.
Mr. Scogan ought to pass on his intelligence to little Scogans, and
Denis to little Denises. The bull turned his head to see what was
happening, regarded the drumming stick for several seconds, then turned
back again satisfied, it seemed, that nothing was happening. Sterility
was odious, unnatural, a sin against life. Life, life, and still more
life. The ribs of the placid bull resounded.

Standing with his back against the farmyard pump, a little apart, Denis
examined the group. Gombauld, passionate and vivacious, was its centre.
The others stood round, listening--Henry Wimbush, calm and polite
beneath his grey bowler; Mary, with parted lips and eyes that shone with
the indignation of a convinced birth-controller. Anne looked on through
half-shut eyes, smiling; and beside her stood Mr. Scogan, bolt upright
in an attitude of metallic rigidity that contrasted strangely with that
fluid grace of hers which even in stillness suggested a soft movement.

Gombauld ceased talking, and Mary, flushed and outraged, opened her
mouth to refute him. But she was too slow. Before she could utter a
word Mr. Scogan’s fluty voice had pronounced the opening phrases of a
discourse. There was no hope of getting so much as a word in edgeways;
Mary had perforce to resign herself.

“Even your eloquence, my dear Gombauld,” he was saying--“even your
eloquence must prove inadequate to reconvert the world to a belief in
the delights of mere multiplication. With the gramophone, the cinema,
and the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented
the world with another gift, more precious even than these--the means of
dissociating love from propagation. Eros, for those who wish it, is now
an entirely free god; his deplorable associations with Lucina may be
broken at will. In the course of the next few centuries, who knows?
the world may see a more complete severance. I look forward to it
optimistically. Where the great Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward,
Swan of Lichfield, experimented--and, for all their scientific ardour,
failed--our descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal
generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state
incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with
the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society,
sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros,
beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from
flower to flower through a sunlit world.”

“It sounds lovely,” said Anne.

“The distant future always does.”

Mary’s china blue eyes, more serious and more astonished than ever,
were fixed on Mr. Scogan. “Bottles?” she said. “Do you really think so?
Bottles...”



CHAPTER VI.

Mr. Barbecue-Smith arrived in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He was
a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In his
earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck,
but was comforted by reading in Balzac’s “Louis Lambert” that all the
world’s great men have been marked by the same peculiarity, and for a
simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than
the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and heart;
the shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs approach one
another; argal...It was convincing.

Mr. Barbecue-Smith belonged to the old school of journalists. He sported
a leonine head with a greyish-black mane of oddly unappetising hair
brushed back from a broad but low forehead. And somehow he always seemed
slightly, ever so slightly, soiled. In younger days he had gaily called
himself a Bohemian. He did so no longer. He was a teacher now, a kind
of prophet. Some of his books of comfort and spiritual teaching were in
their hundred and twentieth thousand.

Priscilla received him with every mark of esteem. He had never been to
Crome before; she showed him round the house. Mr. Barbecue-Smith was
full of admiration.

“So quaint, so old-world,” he kept repeating. He had a rich, rather
unctuous voice.

Priscilla praised his latest book. “Splendid, I thought it was,” she
said in her large, jolly way.

“I’m happy to think you found it a comfort,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith.

“Oh, tremendously! And the bit about the Lotus Pool--I thought that so
beautiful.”

“I knew you would like that. It came to me, you know, from without.” He
waved his hand to indicate the astral world.

They went out into the garden for tea. Mr. Barbecue-Smith was duly
introduced.

“Mr. Stone is a writer too,” said Priscilla, as she introduced Denis.

“Indeed!” Mr. Barbecue-Smith smiled benignly, and, looking up at Denis
with an expression of Olympian condescension, “And what sort of things
do you write?”

Denis was furious, and, to make matters worse, he felt himself blushing
hotly. Had Priscilla no sense of proportion? She was putting them in the
same category--Barbecue-Smith and himself. They were both writers, they
both used pen and ink. To Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s question he answered,
“Oh, nothing much, nothing,” and looked away.

“Mr. Stone is one of our younger poets.” It was Anne’s voice. He scowled
at her, and she smiled back exasperatingly.

“Excellent, excellent,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith, and he squeezed Denis’s
arm encouragingly. “The Bard’s is a noble calling.”

As soon as tea was over Mr. Barbecue-Smith excused himself; he had to
do some writing before dinner. Priscilla quite understood. The prophet
retired to his chamber.

Mr. Barbecue-Smith came down to the drawing-room at ten to eight. He was
in a good humour, and, as he descended the stairs, he smiled to himself
and rubbed his large white hands together. In the drawing-room someone
was playing softly and ramblingly on the piano. He wondered who it could
be. One of the young ladies, perhaps. But no, it was only Denis, who got
up hurriedly and with some embarrassment as he came into the room.

“Do go on, do go on,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith. “I am very fond of
music.”

“Then I couldn’t possibly go on,” Denis replied. “I only make noises.”

There was a silence. Mr. Barbecue-Smith stood with his back to the
hearth, warming himself at the memory of last winter’s fires. He could
not control his interior satisfaction, but still went on smiling to
himself. At last he turned to Denis.

“You write,” he asked, “don’t you?”

“Well, yes--a little, you know.”

“How many words do you find you can write in an hour?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever counted.”

“Oh, you ought to, you ought to. It’s most important.”

Denis exercised his memory. “When I’m in good form,” he said, “I fancy
I do a twelve-hundred-word review in about four hours. But sometimes it
takes me much longer.”

Mr. Barbecue-Smith nodded. “Yes, three hundred words an hour at your
best.” He walked out into the middle of the room, turned round on his
heels, and confronted Denis again. “Guess how many words I wrote this
evening between five and half-past seven.”

“I can’t imagine.”

“No, but you must guess. Between five and half-past seven--that’s two
and a half hours.”

“Twelve hundred words,” Denis hazarded.

“No, no, no.” Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s expanded face shone with gaiety. “Try
again.”

“Fifteen hundred.”

“No.”

“I give it up,” said Denis. He found he couldn’t summon up much interest
in Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s writing.

“Well, I’ll tell you. Three thousand eight hundred.”

Denis opened his eyes. “You must get a lot done in a day,” he said.

Mr. Barbecue-Smith suddenly became extremely confidential. He pulled up
a stool to the side of Denis’s arm-chair, sat down in it, and began to
talk softly and rapidly.

“Listen to me,” he said, laying his hand on Denis’s sleeve. “You want to
make your living by writing; you’re young, you’re inexperienced. Let me
give you a little sound advice.”

What was the fellow going to do? Denis wondered: give him an
introduction to the editor of “John o’ London’s Weekly”, or tell him
where he could sell a light middle for seven guineas? Mr. Barbecue-Smith
patted his arm several times and went on.

“The secret of writing,” he said, breathing it into the young man’s
ear--“the secret of writing is Inspiration.”

Denis looked at him in astonishment.

“Inspiration...” Mr. Barbecue-Smith repeated.

“You mean the native wood-note business?”

Mr. Barbecue-Smith nodded.

“Oh, then I entirely agree with you,” said Denis. “But what if one
hasn’t got Inspiration?”

“That was precisely the question I was waiting for,” said Mr.
Barbecue-Smith. “You ask me what one should do if one hasn’t got
Inspiration. I answer: you have Inspiration; everyone has Inspiration.
It’s simply a question of getting it to function.”

The clock struck eight. There was no sign of any of the other guests;
everybody was always late at Crome. Mr. Barbecue-Smith went on.

“That’s my secret,” he said. “I give it you freely.” (Denis made a
suitably grateful murmur and grimace.) “I’ll help you to find your
Inspiration, because I don’t like to see a nice, steady young man like
you exhausting his vitality and wasting the best years of his life in
a grinding intellectual labour that could be completely obviated by
Inspiration. I did it myself, so I know what it’s like. Up till the
time I was thirty-eight I was a writer like you--a writer without
Inspiration. All I wrote I squeezed out of myself by sheer hard work.
Why, in those days I was never able to do more than six-fifty words an
hour, and what’s more, I often didn’t sell what I wrote.” He sighed.
“We artists,” he said parenthetically, “we intellectuals aren’t much
appreciated here in England.” Denis wondered if there was any method,
consistent, of course, with politeness, by which he could dissociate
himself from Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s “we.” There was none; and besides,
it was too late now, for Mr. Barbecue-Smith was once more pursuing the
tenor of his discourse.

“At thirty-eight I was a poor, struggling, tired, overworked, unknown
journalist. Now, at fifty...” He paused modestly and made a little
gesture, moving his fat hands outwards, away from one another, and
expanding his fingers as though in demonstration. He was exhibiting
himself. Denis thought of that advertisement of Nestle’s milk--the two
cats on the wall, under the moon, one black and thin, the other white,
sleek, and fat. Before Inspiration and after.

“Inspiration has made the difference,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith solemnly.
“It came quite suddenly--like a gentle dew from heaven.” He lifted his
hand and let it fall back on to his knee to indicate the descent of the
dew. “It was one evening. I was writing my first little book about the
Conduct of Life--‘Humble Heroisms’. You may have read it; it has been
a comfort--at least I hope and think so--a comfort to many thousands.
I was in the middle of the second chapter, and I was stuck. Fatigue,
overwork--I had only written a hundred words in the last hour, and I
could get no further. I sat biting the end of my pen and looking at the
electric light, which hung above my table, a little above and in front
of me.” He indicated the position of the lamp with elaborate care. “Have
you ever looked at a bright light intently for a long time?” he asked,
turning to Denis. Denis didn’t think he had. “You can hypnotise yourself
that way,” Mr. Barbecue-Smith went on.

The gong sounded in a terrific crescendo from the hall. Still no sign of
the others. Denis was horribly hungry.

“That’s what happened to me,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith. “I was
hypnotised. I lost consciousness like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“When I came to, I found that it was past midnight, and I had written
four thousand words. Four thousand,” he repeated, opening his mouth very
wide on the “ou” of thousand. “Inspiration had come to me.”

“What a very extraordinary thing,” said Denis.

“I was afraid of it at first. It didn’t seem to me natural. I didn’t
feel, somehow, that it was quite right, quite fair, I might almost say,
to produce a literary composition unconsciously. Besides, I was afraid I
might have written nonsense.”

“And had you written nonsense?” Denis asked.

“Certainly not,” Mr. Barbecue-Smith replied, with a trace of annoyance.
“Certainly not. It was admirable. Just a few spelling mistakes and
slips, such as there generally are in automatic writing. But the style,
the thought--all the essentials were admirable. After that, Inspiration
came to me regularly. I wrote the whole of ‘Humble Heroisms’ like that.
It was a great success, and so has everything been that I have written
since.” He leaned forward and jabbed at Denis with his finger. “That’s
my secret,” he said, “and that’s how you could write too, if you
tried--without effort, fluently, well.”

“But how?” asked Denis, trying not to show how deeply he had been
insulted by that final “well.”

“By cultivating your Inspiration, by getting into touch with your
Subconscious. Have you ever read my little book, ‘Pipe-Lines to the
Infinite’?”

Denis had to confess that that was, precisely, one of the few, perhaps
the only one, of Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s works he had not read.

“Never mind, never mind,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith. “It’s just a little
book about the connection of the Subconscious with the Infinite. Get
into touch with the Subconscious and you are in touch with the Universe.
Inspiration, in fact. You follow me?”

“Perfectly, perfectly,” said Denis. “But don’t you find that the
Universe sometimes sends you very irrelevant messages?”

“I don’t allow it to,” Mr. Barbecue-Smith replied. “I canalise it. I
bring it down through pipes to work the turbines of my conscious mind.”

“Like Niagara,” Denis suggested. Some of Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s remarks
sounded strangely like quotations--quotations from his own works, no
doubt.

“Precisely. Like Niagara. And this is how I do it.” He leaned forward,
and with a raised forefinger marked his points as he made them, beating
time, as it were, to his discourse. “Before I go off into my trance, I
concentrate on the subject I wish to be inspired about. Let us say I am
writing about the humble heroisms; for ten minutes before I go into the
trance I think of nothing but orphans supporting their little brothers
and sisters, of dull work well and patiently done, and I focus my mind
on such great philosophical truths as the purification and uplifting of
the soul by suffering, and the alchemical transformation of leaden evil
into golden good.” (Denis again hung up his little festoon of quotation
marks.) “Then I pop off. Two or three hours later I wake up again, and
find that inspiration has done its work. Thousands of words, comforting,
uplifting words, lie before me. I type them out neatly on my machine and
they are ready for the printer.”

“It all sounds wonderfully simple,” said Denis.

“It is. All the great and splendid and divine things of life are
wonderfully simple.” (Quotation marks again.) “When I have to do my
aphorisms,” Mr. Barbecue-Smith continued, “I prelude my trance by
turning over the pages of any Dictionary of Quotations or Shakespeare
Calendar that comes to hand. That sets the key, so to speak; that
ensures that the Universe shall come flowing in, not in a continuous
rush, but in aphorismic drops. You see the idea?”

Denis nodded. Mr. Barbecue-Smith put his hand in his pocket and pulled
out a notebook. “I did a few in the train to-day,” he said, turning over
the pages. “Just dropped off into a trance in the corner of my carriage.
I find the train very conducive to good work. Here they are.” He cleared
his throat and read:

“The Mountain Road may be steep, but the air is pure up there, and it is
from the Summit that one gets the view.”

“The Things that Really Matter happen in the Heart.”

It was curious, Denis reflected, the way the Infinite sometimes repeated
itself.

“Seeing is Believing. Yes, but Believing is also Seeing. If I believe in
God, I see God, even in the things that seem to be evil.”

Mr. Barbecue-Smith looked up from his notebook. “That last one,” he
said, “is particularly subtle and beautiful, don’t you think? Without
Inspiration I could never have hit on that.” He re-read the apophthegm
with a slower and more solemn utterance. “Straight from the Infinite,”
 he commented reflectively, then addressed himself to the next aphorism.

“The flame of a candle gives Light, but it also Burns.”

Puzzled wrinkles appeared on Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s forehead. “I don’t
exactly know what that means,” he said. “It’s very gnomic. One could
apply it, of course to the Higher Education--illuminating, but provoking
the Lower Classes to discontent and revolution. Yes, I suppose
that’s what it is. But it’s gnomic, it’s gnomic.” He rubbed his
chin thoughtfully. The gong sounded again, clamorously, it seemed
imploringly: dinner was growing cold. It roused Mr. Barbecue-Smith from
meditation. He turned to Denis.

“You understand me now when I advise you to cultivate your Inspiration.
Let your Subconscious work for you; turn on the Niagara of the
Infinite.”

There was the sound of feet on the stairs. Mr. Barbecue-Smith got up,
laid his hand for an instant on Denis’s shoulder, and said:

“No more now. Another time. And remember, I rely absolutely on your
discretion in this matter. There are intimate, sacred things that one
doesn’t wish to be generally known.”

“Of course,” said Denis. “I quite understand.”



CHAPTER VII.

At Crome all the beds were ancient hereditary pieces of furniture. Huge
beds, like four-masted ships, with furled sails of shining coloured
stuff. Beds carved and inlaid, beds painted and gilded. Beds of walnut
and oak, of rare exotic woods. Beds of every date and fashion from the
time of Sir Ferdinando, who built the house, to the time of his namesake
in the late eighteenth century, the last of the family, but all of them
grandiose, magnificent.

The finest of all was now Anne’s bed. Sir Julius, son to Sir Ferdinando,
had had it made in Venice against his wife’s first lying-in. Early
seicento Venice had expended all its extravagant art in the making of
it. The body of the bed was like a great square sarcophagus. Clustering
roses were carved in high relief on its wooden panels, and luscious
putti wallowed among the roses. On the black ground-work of the panels
the carved reliefs were gilded and burnished. The golden roses twined in
spirals up the four pillar-like posts, and cherubs, seated at the top
of each column, supported a wooden canopy fretted with the same carved
flowers.

Anne was reading in bed. Two candles stood on the little table beside
her, in their rich light her face, her bare arm and shoulder took on
warm hues and a sort of peach-like quality of surface. Here and there in
the canopy above her carved golden petals shone brightly among profound
shadows, and the soft light, falling on the sculptured panel of the bed,
broke restlessly among the intricate roses, lingered in a broad caress
on the blown cheeks, the dimpled bellies, the tight, absurd little
posteriors of the sprawling putti.

There was a discreet tap at the door. She looked up. “Come in, come in.”
 A face, round and childish, within its sleek bell of golden hair, peered
round the opening door. More childish-looking still, a suit of mauve
pyjamas made its entrance.

It was Mary. “I thought I’d just look in for a moment to say
good-night,” she said, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Anne closed her book. “That was very sweet of you.”

“What are you reading?” She looked at the book. “Rather second-rate,
isn’t it?” The tone in which Mary pronounced the word “second-rate”
 implied an almost infinite denigration. She was accustomed in London to
associate only with first-rate people who liked first-rate things, and
she knew that there were very, very few first-rate things in the world,
and that those were mostly French.

“Well, I’m afraid I like it,” said Anne. There was nothing more to be
said. The silence that followed was a rather uncomfortable one. Mary
fiddled uneasily with the bottom button of her pyjama jacket. Leaning
back on her mound of heaped-up pillows, Anne waited and wondered what
was coming.

“I’m so awfully afraid of repressions,” said Mary at last, bursting
suddenly and surprisingly into speech. She pronounced the words on
the tail-end of an expiring breath, and had to gasp for new air almost
before the phrase was finished.

“What’s there to be depressed about?”

“I said repressions, not depressions.”

“Oh, repressions; I see,” said Anne. “But repressions of what?”

Mary had to explain. “The natural instincts of sex...” she began
didactically. But Anne cut her short.

“Yes, yes. Perfectly. I understand. Repressions! old maids and all the
rest. But what about them?”

“That’s just it,” said Mary. “I’m afraid of them. It’s always dangerous
to repress one’s instincts. I’m beginning to detect in myself symptoms
like the ones you read of in the books. I constantly dream that I’m
falling down wells; and sometimes I even dream that I’m climbing up
ladders. It’s most disquieting. The symptoms are only too clear.”

“Are they?”

“One may become a nymphomaniac if one’s not careful. You’ve no idea how
serious these repressions are if you don’t get rid of them in time.”

“It sounds too awful,” said Anne. “But I don’t see that I can do
anything to help you.”

“I thought I’d just like to talk it over with you.”

“Why, of course; I’m only too happy, Mary darling.”

Mary coughed and drew a deep breath. “I presume,” she began
sententiously, “I presume we may take for granted that an intelligent
young woman of twenty-three who has lived in civilised society in the
twentieth century has no prejudices.”

“Well, I confess I still have a few.”

“But not about repressions.”

“No, not many about repressions; that’s true.”

“Or, rather, about getting rid of repressions.”

“Exactly.”

“So much for our fundamental postulate,” said Mary. Solemnity was
expressed in every feature of her round young face, radiated from
her large blue eyes. “We come next to the desirability of possessing
experience. I hope we are agreed that knowledge is desirable and that
ignorance is undesirable.”

Obedient as one of those complaisant disciples from whom Socrates could
get whatever answer he chose, Anne gave her assent to this proposition.

“And we are equally agreed, I hope, that marriage is what it is.”

“It is.”

“Good!” said Mary. “And repressions being what they are...”

“Exactly.”

“There would therefore seem to be only one conclusion.”

“But I knew that,” Anne exclaimed, “before you began.”

“Yes, but now it’s been proved,” said Mary. “One must do things
logically. The question is now...”

“But where does the question come in? You’ve reached your only possible
conclusion--logically, which is more than I could have done. All that
remains is to impart the information to someone you like--someone you
like really rather a lot, someone you’re in love with, if I may express
myself so baldly.”

“But that’s just where the question comes in,” Mary exclaimed. “I’m not
in love with anybody.”

“Then, if I were you, I should wait till you are.”

“But I can’t go on dreaming night after night that I’m falling down a
well. It’s too dangerous.”

“Well, if it really is TOO dangerous, then of course you must do
something about it; you must find somebody else.”

“But who?” A thoughtful frown puckered Mary’s brow. “It must be somebody
intelligent, somebody with intellectual interests that I can share.
And it must be somebody with a proper respect for women, somebody who’s
prepared to talk seriously about his work and his ideas and about my
work and my ideas. It isn’t, as you see, at all easy to find the right
person.”

“Well” said Anne, “there are three unattached and intelligent men in
the house at the present time. There’s Mr. Scogan, to begin with;
but perhaps he’s rather too much of a genuine antique. And there are
Gombauld and Denis. Shall we say that the choice is limited to the last
two?”

Mary nodded. “I think we had better,” she said, and then hesitated, with
a certain air of embarrassment.

“What is it?”

“I was wondering,” said Mary, with a gasp, “whether they really were
unattached. I thought that perhaps you might...you might...”

“It was very nice of you to think of me, Mary darling,” said Anne,
smiling the tight cat’s smile. “But as far as I’m concerned, they are
both entirely unattached.”

“I’m very glad of that,” said Mary, looking relieved. “We are now
confronted with the question: Which of the two?”

“I can give no advice. It’s a matter for your taste.”

“It’s not a matter of my taste,” Mary pronounced, “but of their merits.
We must weigh them and consider them carefully and dispassionately.”

“You must do the weighing yourself,” said Anne; there was still the
trace of a smile at the corners of her mouth and round the half-closed
eyes. “I won’t run the risk of advising you wrongly.”

“Gombauld has more talent,” Mary began, “but he is less civilised than
Denis.” Mary’s pronunciation of “civilised” gave the word a special and
additional significance. She uttered it meticulously, in the very front
of her mouth, hissing delicately on the opening sibilant. So few people
were civilised, and they, like the first-rate works of art, were mostly
French. “Civilisation is most important, don’t you think?”

Anne held up her hand. “I won’t advise,” she said. “You must make the
decision.”

“Gombauld’s family,” Mary went on reflectively, “comes from Marseilles.
Rather a dangerous heredity, when one thinks of the Latin attitude
towards women. But then, I sometimes wonder whether Denis is altogether
serious-minded, whether he isn’t rather a dilettante. It’s very
difficult. What do you think?”

“I’m not listening,” said Anne. “I refuse to take any responsibility.”

Mary sighed. “Well,” she said, “I think I had better go to bed and think
about it.”

“Carefully and dispassionately,” said Anne.

At the door Mary turned round. “Good-night,” she said, and wondered
as she said the words why Anne was smiling in that curious way. It
was probably nothing, she reflected. Anne often smiled for no apparent
reason; it was probably just a habit. “I hope I shan’t dream of falling
down wells again to-night,” she added.

“Ladders are worse,” said Anne.

Mary nodded. “Yes, ladders are much graver.”



CHAPTER VIII.

Breakfast on Sunday morning was an hour later than on week-days, and
Priscilla, who usually made no public appearance before luncheon,
honoured it by her presence. Dressed in black silk, with a ruby cross as
well as her customary string of pearls round her neck, she presided.
An enormous Sunday paper concealed all but the extreme pinnacle of her
coiffure from the outer world.

“I see Surrey has won,” she said, with her mouth full, “by four wickets.
The sun is in Leo: that would account for it!”

“Splendid game, cricket,” remarked Mr. Barbecue-Smith heartily to no one
in particular; “so thoroughly English.”

Jenny, who was sitting next to him, woke up suddenly with a start.
“What?” she said. “What?”

“So English,” repeated Mr. Barbecue-Smith.

Jenny looked at him, surprised. “English? Of course I am.”

He was beginning to explain, when Mrs. Wimbush vailed her Sunday paper,
and appeared, a square, mauve-powdered face in the midst of orange
splendours. “I see there’s a new series of articles on the next world
just beginning,” she said to Mr. Barbecue-Smith. “This one’s called
‘Summer Land and Gehenna.’”

“Summer Land,” echoed Mr. Barbecue-Smith, closing his eyes. “Summer
Land. A beautiful name. Beautiful--beautiful.”

Mary had taken the seat next to Denis’s. After a night of careful
consideration she had decided on Denis. He might have less talent than
Gombauld, he might be a little lacking in seriousness, but somehow he
was safer.

“Are you writing much poetry here in the country?” she asked, with a
bright gravity.

“None,” said Denis curtly. “I haven’t brought my typewriter.”

“But do you mean to say you can’t write without a typewriter?”

Denis shook his head. He hated talking at breakfast, and, besides, he
wanted to hear what Mr. Scogan was saying at the other end of the table.

“...My scheme for dealing with the Church,” Mr. Scogan was saying, “is
beautifully simple. At the present time the Anglican clergy wear their
collars the wrong way round. I would compel them to wear, not only their
collars, but all their clothes, turned back to frantic--coat, waistcoat,
trousers, boots--so that every clergyman should present to the world
a smooth facade, unbroken by stud, button, or lace. The enforcement of
such a livery would act as a wholesome deterrent to those intending to
enter the Church. At the same time it would enormously enhance, what
Archbishop Laud so rightly insisted on, the ‘beauty of holiness’ in the
few incorrigibles who could not be deterred.”

“In hell, it seems,” said Priscilla, reading in her Sunday paper, “the
children amuse themselves by flaying lambs alive.”

“Ah, but, dear lady, that’s only a symbol,” exclaimed Mr.
Barbecue-Smith, “a material symbol of a h-piritual truth. Lambs
signify...”

“Then there are military uniforms,” Mr. Scogan went on. “When scarlet
and pipe-clay were abandoned for khaki, there were some who trembled for
the future of war. But then, finding how elegant the new tunic was, how
closely it clipped the waist, how voluptuously, with the lateral
bustles of the pockets, it exaggerated the hips; when they realized the
brilliant potentialities of breeches and top-boots, they were reassured.
Abolish these military elegances, standardise a uniform of sack-cloth
and mackintosh, you will very soon find that...”

“Is anyone coming to church with me this morning?” asked Henry Wimbush.
No one responded. He baited his bare invitation. “I read the lessons,
you know. And there’s Mr. Bodiham. His sermons are sometimes worth
hearing.”

“Thank you, thank you,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith. “I for one prefer to
worship in the infinite church of Nature. How does our Shakespeare put
it? ‘Sermons in books, stones in the running brooks.’” He waved his arm
in a fine gesture towards the window, and even as he did so he became
vaguely, but none the less insistently, none the less uncomfortably
aware that something had gone wrong with the quotation. Something--what
could it be? Sermons? Stones? Books?



CHAPTER IX.

Mr. Bodiham was sitting in his study at the Rectory. The
nineteenth-century Gothic windows, narrow and pointed, admitted the
light grudgingly; in spite of the brilliant July weather, the room was
sombre. Brown varnished bookshelves lined the walls, filled with row
upon row of those thick, heavy theological works which the second-hand
booksellers generally sell by weight. The mantelpiece, the over-mantel,
a towering structure of spindly pillars and little shelves, were brown
and varnished. The writing-desk was brown and varnished. So were the
chairs, so was the door. A dark red-brown carpet with patterns covered
the floor. Everything was brown in the room, and there was a curious
brownish smell.

In the midst of this brown gloom Mr. Bodiham sat at his desk. He was the
man in the Iron Mask. A grey metallic face with iron cheek-bones and a
narrow iron brow; iron folds, hard and unchanging, ran perpendicularly
down his cheeks; his nose was the iron beak of some thin, delicate bird
of rapine. He had brown eyes, set in sockets rimmed with iron; round
them the skin was dark, as though it had been charred. Dense wiry hair
covered his skull; it had been black, it was turning grey. His ears
were very small and fine. His jaws, his chin, his upper lip were dark,
iron-dark, where he had shaved. His voice, when he spoke and especially
when he raised it in preaching, was harsh, like the grating of iron
hinges when a seldom-used door is opened.

It was nearly half-past twelve. He had just come back from church,
hoarse and weary with preaching. He preached with fury, with passion,
an iron man beating with a flail upon the souls of his congregation.
But the souls of the faithful at Crome were made of india-rubber, solid
rubber; the flail rebounded. They were used to Mr. Bodiham at Crome. The
flail thumped on india-rubber, and as often as not the rubber slept.

That morning he had preached, as he had often preached before, on the
nature of God. He had tried to make them understand about God, what
a fearful thing it was to fall into His hands. God--they thought of
something soft and merciful. They blinded themselves to facts; still
more, they blinded themselves to the Bible. The passengers on the
“Titanic” sang “Nearer my God to Thee” as the ship was going down. Did
they realise what they were asking to be brought nearer to? A white fire
of righteousness, an angry fire...

When Savonarola preached, men sobbed and groaned aloud. Nothing broke
the polite silence with which Crome listened to Mr. Bodiham--only an
occasional cough and sometimes the sound of heavy breathing. In the
front pew sat Henry Wimbush, calm, well-bred, beautifully dressed. There
were times when Mr. Bodiham wanted to jump down from the pulpit and
shake him into life,--times when he would have liked to beat and kill
his whole congregation.

He sat at his desk dejectedly. Outside the Gothic windows the earth was
warm and marvellously calm. Everything was as it had always been. And
yet, and yet...It was nearly four years now since he had preached that
sermon on Matthew xxiv. 7: “For nation shall rise up against nation, and
kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences,
and earthquakes, in divers places.” It was nearly four years. He had had
the sermon printed; it was so terribly, so vitally important that all
the world should know what he had to say. A copy of the little pamphlet
lay on his desk--eight small grey pages, printed by a fount of type that
had grown blunt, like an old dog’s teeth, by the endless champing and
champing of the press. He opened it and began to read it yet once again.

“‘For nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom:
and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers
places.’

“Nineteen centuries have elapsed since Our Lord gave utterance to those
words, and not a single one of them has been without wars, plagues,
famines, and earthquakes. Mighty empires have crashed in ruin to the
ground, diseases have unpeopled half the globe, there have been vast
natural cataclysms in which thousands have been overwhelmed by flood
and fire and whirlwind. Time and again, in the course of these nineteen
centuries, such things have happened, but they have not brought Christ
back to earth. They were ‘signs of the times’ inasmuch as they were
signs of God’s wrath against the chronic wickedness of mankind, but they
were not signs of the times in connection with the Second Coming.

“If earnest Christians have regarded the present war as a true sign of
the Lord’s approaching return, it is not merely because it happens to
be a great war involving the lives of millions of people, not merely
because famine is tightening its grip on every country in Europe, not
merely because disease of every kind, from syphilis to spotted fever, is
rife among the warring nations; no, it is not for these reasons that we
regard this war as a true Sign of the Times, but because in its origin
and its progress it is marked by certain characteristics which seem
to connect it almost beyond a doubt with the predictions in Christian
Prophecy relating to the Second Coming of the Lord.

“Let me enumerate the features of the present war which most clearly
suggest that it is a Sign foretelling the near approach of the Second
Advent. Our Lord said that ‘this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached
in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end
come.’ Although it would be presumptuous for us to say what degree of
evangelisation will be regarded by God as sufficient, we may at least
confidently hope that a century of unflagging missionary work has
brought the fulfilment of this condition at any rate near. True, the
larger number of the world’s inhabitants have remained deaf to the
preaching of the true religion; but that does not vitiate the fact that
the Gospel HAS been preached ‘for a witness’ to all unbelievers from the
Papist to the Zulu. The responsibility for the continued prevalence of
unbelief lies, not with the preachers, but with those preached to.

“Again, it has been generally recognised that ‘the drying up of the
waters of the great river Euphrates,’ mentioned in the sixteenth chapter
of Revelation, refers to the decay and extinction of Turkish power, and
is a sign of the near approaching end of the world as we know it. The
capture of Jerusalem and the successes in Mesopotamia are great strides
forward in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire; though it must be
admitted that the Gallipoli episode proved that the Turk still possesses
a ‘notable horn’ of strength. Historically speaking, this drying up of
Ottoman power has been going on for the past century; the last two years
have witnessed a great acceleration of the process, and there can be no
doubt that complete desiccation is within sight.

“Closely following on the words concerning the drying up of Euphrates
comes the prophecy of Armageddon, that world war with which the Second
Coming is to be so closely associated. Once begun, the world war can
end only with the return of Christ, and His coming will be sudden and
unexpected, like that of a thief in the night.

“Let us examine the facts. In history, exactly as in St. John’s Gospel,
the world war is immediately preceded by the drying up of Euphrates, or
the decay of Turkish power. This fact alone would be enough to connect
the present conflict with the Armageddon of Revelation and therefore to
point to the near approach of the Second Advent. But further evidence of
an even more solid and convincing nature can be adduced.

“Armageddon is brought about by the activities of three unclean spirits,
as it were toads, which come out of the mouths of the Dragon, the Beast,
and the False Prophet. If we can identify these three powers of evil
much light will clearly be thrown on the whole question.

“The Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet can all be identified in
history. Satan, who can only work through human agency, has used these
three powers in the long war against Christ which has filled the last
nineteen centuries with religious strife. The Dragon, it has been
sufficiently established, is pagan Rome, and the spirit issuing from its
mouth is the spirit of Infidelity. The Beast, alternatively symbolised
as a Woman, is undoubtedly the Papal power, and Popery is the spirit
which it spews forth. There is only one power which answers to the
description of the False Prophet, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, the
agent of the devil working in the guise of the Lamb, and that power is
the so-called ‘Society of Jesus.’ The spirit that issues from the mouth
of the False Prophet is the spirit of False Morality.

“We may assume, then, that the three evil spirits are Infidelity,
Popery, and False Morality. Have these three influences been the real
cause of the present conflict? The answer is clear.

“The spirit of Infidelity is the very spirit of German criticism. The
Higher Criticism, as it is mockingly called, denies the possibility of
miracles, prediction, and real inspiration, and attempts to account for
the Bible as a natural development. Slowly but surely, during the last
eighty years, the spirit of Infidelity has been robbing the Germans
of their Bible and their faith, so that Germany is to-day a nation of
unbelievers. Higher Criticism has thus made the war possible; for it
would be absolutely impossible for any Christian nation to wage war as
Germany is waging it.

“We come next to the spirit of Popery, whose influence in causing the
war was quite as great as that of Infidelity, though not, perhaps, so
immediately obvious. Since the Franco-Prussian War the Papal power has
steadily declined in France, while in Germany it has steadily increased.
To-day France is an anti-papal state, while Germany possesses a powerful
Roman Catholic minority. Two papally controlled states, Germany and
Austria, are at war with six anti-papal states--England, France, Italy,
Russia, Serbia, and Portugal. Belgium is, of course, a thoroughly papal
state, and there can be little doubt that the presence on the Allies’
side of an element so essentially hostile has done much to hamper the
righteous cause and is responsible for our comparative ill-success. That
the spirit of Popery is behind the war is thus seen clearly enough in
the grouping of the opposed powers, while the rebellion in the Roman
Catholic parts of Ireland has merely confirmed a conclusion already
obvious to any unbiased mind.

“The spirit of False Morality has played as great a part in this war as
the two other evil spirits. The Scrap of Paper incident is the nearest
and most obvious example of Germany’s adherence to this essentially
unchristian or Jesuitical morality. The end is German world-power, and
in the attainment of this end, any means are justifiable. It is the true
principle of Jesuitry applied to international politics.

“The identification is now complete. As was predicted in Revelation,
the three evil spirits have gone forth just as the decay of the Ottoman
power was nearing completion, and have joined together to make the world
war. The warning, ‘Behold, I come as a thief,’ is therefore meant for
the present period--for you and me and all the world. This war will lead
on inevitably to the war of Armageddon, and will only be brought to an
end by the Lord’s personal return.

“And when He returns, what will happen? Those who are in Christ, St.
John tells us, will be called to the Supper of the Lamb. Those who are
found fighting against Him will be called to the Supper of the Great
God--that grim banquet where they shall not feast, but be feasted on.
‘For,’ as St. John says, ‘I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he
cried in a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of
heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the Great
God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and
the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit
on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and
great.’ All the enemies of Christ will be slain with the sword of him
that sits upon the horse, ‘and all the fowls will be filled with their
flesh.’ That is the Supper of the Great God.

“It may be soon or it may, as men reckon time, be long; but sooner or
later, inevitably, the Lord will come and deliver the world from its
present troubles. And woe unto them who are called, not to the Supper
of the Lamb, but to the Supper of the Great God. They will realise
then, but too late, that God is a God of Wrath as well as a God of
Forgiveness. The God who sent bears to devour the mockers of Elisha,
the God who smote the Egyptians for their stubborn wickedness, will
assuredly smite them too, unless they make haste to repent. But perhaps
it is already too late. Who knows but that to-morrow, in a moment even,
Christ may be upon us unawares, like a thief? In a little while, who
knows? The angel standing in the sun may be summoning the ravens and
vultures from their crannies in the rocks to feed upon the putrefying
flesh of the millions of unrighteous whom God’s wrath has destroyed. Be
ready, then; the coming of the Lord is at hand. May it be for all of
you an object of hope, not a moment to look forward to with terror and
trembling.”

Mr. Bodiham closed the little pamphlet and leaned back in his chair. The
argument was sound, absolutely compelling; and yet--it was four years
since he had preached that sermon; four years, and England was at peace,
the sun shone, the people of Crome were as wicked and indifferent
as ever--more so, indeed, if that were possible. If only he could
understand, if the heavens would but make a sign! But his questionings
remained unanswered. Seated there in his brown varnished chair under the
Ruskinian window, he could have screamed aloud. He gripped the arms of
his chair--gripping, gripping for control. The knuckles of his hands
whitened; he bit his lip. In a few seconds he was able to relax the
tension; he began to rebuke himself for his rebellious impatience.

Four years, he reflected; what were four years, after all? It must
inevitably take a long time for Armageddon to ripen to yeast itself up.
The episode of 1914 had been a preliminary skirmish. And as for the war
having come to an end--why, that, of course, was illusory. It was still
going on, smouldering away in Silesia, in Ireland, in Anatolia; the
discontent in Egypt and India was preparing the way, perhaps, for a
great extension of the slaughter among the heathen peoples. The Chinese
boycott of Japan, and the rivalries of that country and America in the
Pacific, might be breeding a great new war in the East. The prospect,
Mr. Bodiham tried to assure himself, was hopeful; the real, the genuine
Armageddon might soon begin, and then, like a thief in the night...But,
in spite of all his comfortable reasoning, he remained unhappy,
dissatisfied. Four years ago he had been so confident; God’s intention
seemed then so plain. And now? Now, he did well to be angry. And now he
suffered too.

Sudden and silent as a phantom Mrs. Bodiham appeared, gliding
noiselessly across the room. Above her black dress her face was pale
with an opaque whiteness, her eyes were pale as water in a glass, and
her strawy hair was almost colourless. She held a large envelope in her
hand.

“This came for you by the post,” she said softly.

The envelope was unsealed. Mechanically Mr. Bodiham tore it open.
It contained a pamphlet, larger than his own and more elegant in
appearance. “The House of Sheeny, Clerical Outfitters, Birmingham.” He
turned over the pages. The catalogue was tastefully and ecclesiastically
printed in antique characters with illuminated Gothic initials. Red
marginal lines, crossed at the corners after the manner of an Oxford
picture frame, enclosed each page of type, little red crosses took the
place of full stops. Mr. Bodiham turned the pages.

“Soutane in best black merino. Ready to wear; in all sizes. Clerical
frock coats. From nine guineas. A dressy garment, tailored by our own
experienced ecclesiastical cutters.”

Half-tone illustrations represented young curates, some dapper, some
Rugbeian and muscular, some with ascetic faces and large ecstatic eyes,
dressed in jackets, in frock-coats, in surplices, in clerical evening
dress, in black Norfolk suitings.

“A large assortment of chasubles.

“Rope girdles.

“Sheeny’s Special Skirt Cassocks. Tied by a string about the waist...When
worn under a surplice presents an appearance indistinguishable from that
of a complete cassock...Recommended for summer wear and hot climates.”

With a gesture of horror and disgust Mr. Bodiham threw the catalogue
into the waste-paper basket. Mrs. Bodiham looked at him; her pale,
glaucous eyes reflected his action without comment.

“The village,” she said in her quiet voice, “the village grows worse and
worse every day.”

“What has happened now?” asked Mr. Bodiham, feeling suddenly very weary.

“I’ll tell you.” She pulled up a brown varnished chair and sat down. In
the village of Crome, it seemed, Sodom and Gomorrah had come to a second
birth.



CHAPTER X.

Denis did not dance, but when ragtime came squirting out of the pianola
in gushes of treacle and hot perfume, in jets of Bengal light, then
things began to dance inside him. Little black nigger corpuscles jigged
and drummed in his arteries. He became a cage of movement, a walking
palais de danse. It was very uncomfortable, like the preliminary
symptoms of a disease. He sat in one of the window-seats, glumly
pretending to read.

At the pianola, Henry Wimbush, smoking a long cigar through a tunnelled
pillar of amber, trod out the shattering dance music with serene
patience. Locked together, Gombauld and Anne moved with a harmoniousness
that made them seem a single creature, two-headed and four-legged. Mr.
Scogan, solemnly buffoonish, shuffled round the room with Mary. Jenny
sat in the shadow behind the piano, scribbling, so it seemed, in a
big red notebook. In arm-chairs by the fireplace, Priscilla and Mr.
Barbecue-Smith discussed higher things, without, apparently, being
disturbed by the noise on the Lower Plane.

“Optimism,” said Mr. Barbecue-Smith with a tone of finality, speaking
through strains of the “Wild, Wild Women”--“optimism is the opening out
of the soul towards the light; it is an expansion towards and into God,
it is a h-piritual self-unification with the Infinite.”

“How true!” sighed Priscilla, nodding the baleful splendours of her
coiffure.

“Pessimism, on the other hand, is the contraction of the soul towards
darkness; it is a focusing of the self upon a point in the Lower Plane;
it is a h-piritual slavery to mere facts; to gross physical phenomena.”

“They’re making a wild man of me.” The refrain sang itself over in
Denis’s mind. Yes, they were; damn them! A wild man, but not wild
enough; that was the trouble. Wild inside; raging, writhing--yes,
“writhing” was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was
hopelessly tame; outwardly--baa, baa, baa.

There they were, Anne and Gombauld, moving together as though they were
a single supple creature. The beast with two backs. And he sat in
a corner, pretending to read, pretending he didn’t want to dance,
pretending he rather despised dancing. Why? It was the baa-baa business
again.

Why was he born with a different face? Why WAS he? Gombauld had a face
of brass--one of those old, brazen rams that thumped against the walls
of cities till they fell. He was born with a different face--a woolly
face.

The music stopped. The single harmonious creature broke in two. Flushed,
a little breathless, Anne swayed across the room to the pianola, laid
her hand on Mr. Wimbush’s shoulder.

“A waltz this time, please, Uncle Henry,” she said.

“A waltz,” he repeated, and turned to the cabinet where the rolls were
kept. He trod off the old roll and trod on the new, a slave at the
mill, uncomplaining and beautifully well bred.


               “Rum; Tum; Rum-ti-ti; Tum-ti-ti...”

The melody wallowed oozily along, like a ship moving forward over a
sleek and oily swell. The four-legged creature, more graceful, more
harmonious in its movements than ever, slid across the floor. Oh, why
was he born with a different face?

“What are you reading?”

He looked up, startled. It was Mary. She had broken from the
uncomfortable embrace of Mr. Scogan, who had now seized on Jenny for his
victim.

“What are you reading?”

“I don’t know,” said Denis truthfully. He looked at the title page; the
book was called “The Stock Breeder’s Vade Mecum.”

“I think you are so sensible to sit and read quietly,” said Mary, fixing
him with her china eyes. “I don’t know why one dances. It’s so boring.”

Denis made no reply; she exacerbated him. From the arm-chair by the
fireplace he heard Priscilla’s deep voice.

“Tell me, Mr Barbecue-Smith--you know all about science, I know--” A
deprecating noise came from Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s chair. “This Einstein
theory. It seems to upset the whole starry universe. It makes me so
worried about my horoscopes. You see...”

Mary renewed her attack. “Which of the contemporary poets do you like
best?” she asked. Denis was filled with fury. Why couldn’t this pest of
a girl leave him alone? He wanted to listen to the horrible music, to
watch them dancing--oh, with what grace, as though they had been made
for one another!--to savour his misery in peace. And she came and put
him through this absurd catechism! She was like “Mangold’s Questions”:
“What are the three diseases of wheat?”--“Which of the contemporary
poets do you like best?”

“Blight, Mildew, and Smut,” he replied, with the laconism of one who is
absolutely certain of his own mind.

It was several hours before Denis managed to go to sleep that night.
Vague but agonising miseries possessed his mind. It was not only Anne
who made him miserable; he was wretched about himself, the future, life
in general, the universe. “This adolescence business,” he repeated to
himself every now and then, “is horribly boring.” But the fact that he
knew his disease did not help him to cure it.

After kicking all the clothes off the bed, he got up and sought relief
in composition. He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words. At
the end of an hour, nine more or less complete lines emerged from among
the blots and scratchings.


               “I do not know what I desire

               When summer nights are dark and still,

               When the wind’s many-voiced quire

               Sleeps among the muffled branches.

               I long and know not what I will:

               And not a sound of life or laughter stanches

               Time’s black and silent flow.

               I do not know what I desire,

               I do not know.”

He read it through aloud; then threw the scribbled sheet into the
waste-paper basket and got into bed again. In a very few minutes he was
asleep.



CHAPTER XI.

Mr. Barbecue-Smith was gone. The motor had whirled him away to the
station; a faint smell of burning oil commemorated his recent departure.
A considerable detachment had come into the courtyard to speed him on
his way; and now they were walking back, round the side of the house,
towards the terrace and the garden. They walked in silence; nobody had
yet ventured to comment on the departed guest.

“Well?” said Anne at last, turning with raised inquiring eyebrows to
Denis.

“Well?” It was time for someone to begin.

Denis declined the invitation; he passed it on to Mr Scogan. “Well?” he
said.

Mr. Scogan did not respond; he only repeated the question, “Well?”

It was left for Henry Wimbush to make a pronouncement. “A very agreeable
adjunct to the week-end,” he said. His tone was obituary.

They had descended, without paying much attention where they were going,
the steep yew-walk that went down, under the flank of the terrace, to
the pool. The house towered above them, immensely tall, with the whole
height of the built-up terrace added to its own seventy feet of
brick façade. The perpendicular lines of the three towers soared up,
uninterrupted, enhancing the impression of height until it became
overwhelming. They paused at the edge of the pool to look back.

“The man who built this house knew his business,” said Denis. “He was an
architect.”

“Was he?” said Henry Wimbush reflectively. “I doubt it. The builder of
this house was Sir Ferdinando Lapith, who flourished during the reign of
Elizabeth. He inherited the estate from his father, to whom it had been
granted at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries; for Crome was
originally a cloister of monks and this swimming-pool their fish-pond.
Sir Ferdinando was not content merely to adapt the old monastic
buildings to his own purposes; but using them as a stone quarry for his
barns and byres and outhouses, he built for himself a grand new house of
brick--the house you see now.”

He waved his hand in the direction of the house and was silent, severe,
imposing, almost menacing, Crome loomed down on them.

“The great thing about Crome,” said Mr. Scogan, seizing the opportunity
to speak, “is the fact that it’s so unmistakably and aggressively a work
of art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and
rebels against it. It has no likeness to Shelley’s tower, in the
‘Epipsychidion,’ which, if I remember rightly--“


               “‘Seems not now a work of human art,

               But as it were titanic, in the heart

               Of earth having assumed its form and grown

               Out of the mountain, from the living stone,

               Lifting itself in caverns light and high.’

“No, no, there isn’t any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the
hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of
the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and
suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticated
man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather
be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish
life. Since the days of William Morris that’s a fact which we in England
have been unable to comprehend. Civilised and sophisticated men have
solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts,
cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our
cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaint
imitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance,
and a limited range of materials produced the hovel, which possesses
undoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own ‘as it were titanic’
charm. We now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich
variety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitation
hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go further?”

Henry Wimbush took up the thread of his interrupted discourse. “All that
you say, my dear Scogan,” he began, “is certainly very just, very true.
But whether Sir Ferdinando shared your views about architecture or if,
indeed, he had any views about architecture at all, I very much doubt.
In building this house, Sir Ferdinando was, as a matter of fact,
preoccupied by only one thought--the proper placing of his privies.
Sanitation was the one great interest of his life. In 1573 he even
published, on this subject, a little book--now extremely scarce--called,
‘Certaine Priuy Counsels’ by ‘One of Her Maiestie’s Most Honourable
Priuy Counsels, F.L. Knight’, in which the whole matter is treated with
great learning and elegance. His guiding principle in arranging the
sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance
should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it
followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the
house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the
ground. It must not be thought that Sir Ferdinando was moved only by
material and merely sanitary considerations; for the placing of his
privies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritual
reasons. For, he argues in the third chapter of his ‘Priuy Counsels’,
the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them
we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe.
To counteract these degrading effects he advised that the privy should
be in every house the room nearest to heaven, that it should be well
provided with windows commanding an extensive and noble prospect,
and that the walls of the chamber should be lined with bookshelves
containing all the ripest products of human wisdom, such as the Proverbs
of Solomon, Boethius’s ‘Consolations of Philosophy’, the apophthegms
of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the ‘Enchiridion’ of Erasmus, and all
other works, ancient or modern, which testify to the nobility of the
human soul. In Crome he was able to put his theories into practice. At
the top of each of the three projecting towers he placed a privy. From
these a shaft went down the whole height of the house, that is to
say, more than seventy feet, through the cellars, and into a series of
conduits provided with flowing water tunnelled in the ground on a level
with the base of the raised terrace. These conduits emptied themselves
into the stream several hundred yards below the fish-pond. The total
depth of the shafts from the top of the towers to their subterranean
conduits was a hundred and two feet. The eighteenth century, with
its passion for modernisation, swept away these monuments of sanitary
ingenuity. Were it not for tradition and the explicit account of them
left by Sir Ferdinando, we should be unaware that these noble privies
had ever existed. We should even suppose that Sir Ferdinando built
his house after this strange and splendid model for merely aesthetic
reasons.”

The contemplation of the glories of the past always evoked in Henry
Wimbush a certain enthusiasm. Under the grey bowler his face worked
and glowed as he spoke. The thought of these vanished privies moved
him profoundly. He ceased to speak; the light gradually died out of his
face, and it became once more the replica of the grave, polite hat which
shaded it. There was a long silence; the same gently melancholy thoughts
seemed to possess the mind of each of them. Permanence, transience--Sir
Ferdinando and his privies were gone, Crome still stood. How brightly
the sun shone and how inevitable was death! The ways of God were
strange; the ways of man were stranger still...

“It does one’s heart good,” exclaimed Mr. Scogan at last, “to hear of
these fantastic English aristocrats. To have a theory about privies
and to build an immense and splendid house in order to put it into
practise--it’s magnificent, beautiful! I like to think of them all: the
eccentric milords rolling across Europe in ponderous carriages, bound
on extraordinary errands. One is going to Venice to buy La Bianchi’s
larynx; he won’t get it till she’s dead, of course, but no matter; he’s
prepared to wait; he has a collection, pickled in glass bottles, of
the throats of famous opera singers. And the instruments of renowned
virtuosi--he goes in for them too; he will try to bribe Paganini to part
with his little Guarnerio, but he has small hope of success. Paganini
won’t sell his fiddle; but perhaps he might sacrifice one of his
guitars. Others are bound on crusades--one to die miserably among the
savage Greeks, another, in his white top hat, to lead Italians against
their oppressors. Others have no business at all; they are just giving
their oddity a continental airing. At home they cultivate themselves at
leisure and with greater elaboration. Beckford builds towers, Portland
digs holes in the ground, Cavendish, the millionaire, lives in a stable,
eats nothing but mutton, and amuses himself--oh, solely for his private
delectation--by anticipating the electrical discoveries of half a
century. Glorious eccentrics! Every age is enlivened by their presence.
Some day, my dear Denis,” said Mr Scogan, turning a beady bright regard
in his direction--“some day you must become their biographer--‘The Lives
of Queer Men.’ What a subject! I should like to undertake it myself.”

Mr. Scogan paused, looked up once more at the towering house, then
murmured the word “Eccentricity,” two or three times.

“Eccentricity...It’s the justification of all aristocracies. It
justifies leisured classes and inherited wealth and privilege and
endowments and all the other injustices of that sort. If you’re to do
anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who
are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not
compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the
name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can
think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have
a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in
which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That’s
the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric
itself--often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages
eccentricity in others. The eccentricities of the artist and the
new-fangled thinker don’t inspire it with that fear, loathing, and
disgust which the burgesses instinctively feel towards them. It is a
sort of Red Indian Reservation planted in the midst of a vast horde of
Poor Whites--colonials at that. Within its boundaries wild men disport
themselves--often, it must be admitted, a little grossly, a little too
flamboyantly; and when kindred spirits are born outside the pale it
offers them some sort of refuge from the hatred which the Poor Whites,
en bons bourgeois, lavish on anything that is wild or out of the
ordinary. After the social revolution there will be no Reservations;
the Redskins will be drowned in the great sea of Poor Whites. What then?
Will they suffer you to go on writing villanelles, my good Denis? Will
you, unhappy Henry, be allowed to live in this house of the splendid
privies, to continue your quiet delving in the mines of futile
knowledge? Will Anne...”

“And you,” said Anne, interrupting him, “will you be allowed to go on
talking?”

“You may rest assured,” Mr. Scogan replied, “that I shall not. I shall
have some Honest Work to do.”



CHAPTER XII.

Blight, Mildew, and Smut...” Mary was puzzled and distressed. Perhaps
her ears had played her false. Perhaps what he had really said was,
“Squire, Binyon, and Shanks,” or “Childe, Blunden, and Earp,” or even
“Abercrombie, Drinkwater, and Rabindranath Tagore.” Perhaps. But then
her ears never did play her false. “Blight, Mildew, and Smut.” The
impression was distinct and ineffaceable. “Blight, Mildew...” she was
forced to the conclusion, reluctantly, that Denis had indeed pronounced
those improbable words. He had deliberately repelled her attempts to
open a serious discussion. That was horrible. A man who would not talk
seriously to a woman just because she was a woman--oh, impossible!
Egeria or nothing. Perhaps Gombauld would be more satisfactory. True,
his meridional heredity was a little disquieting; but at least he was
a serious worker, and it was with his work that she would associate
herself. And Denis? After all, what WAS Denis? A dilettante, an
amateur...

Gombauld had annexed for his painting-room a little disused granary that
stood by itself in a green close beyond the farm-yard. It was a square
brick building with a peaked roof and little windows set high up in each
of its walls. A ladder of four rungs led up to the door; for the granary
was perched above the ground, and out of reach of the rats, on four
massive toadstools of grey stone. Within, there lingered a faint smell
of dust and cobwebs; and the narrow shaft of sunlight that came slanting
in at every hour of the day through one of the little windows was
always alive with silvery motes. Here Gombauld worked, with a kind of
concentrated ferocity, during six or seven hours of each day. He was
pursuing something new, something terrific, if only he could catch it.

During the last eight years, nearly half of which had been spent in the
process of winning the war, he had worked his way industriously through
cubism. Now he had come out on the other side. He had begun by painting
a formalised nature; then, little by little, he had risen from nature
into the world of pure form, till in the end he was painting nothing but
his own thoughts, externalised in the abstract geometrical forms of
the mind’s devising. He found the process arduous and exhilarating. And
then, quite suddenly, he grew dissatisfied; he felt himself cramped and
confined within intolerably narrow limitations. He was humiliated to
find how few and crude and uninteresting were the forms he could invent;
the inventions of nature were without number, inconceivably subtle and
elaborate. He had done with cubism. He was out on the other side. But
the cubist discipline preserved him from falling into excesses of nature
worship. He took from nature its rich, subtle, elaborate forms, but his
aim was always to work them into a whole that should have the thrilling
simplicity and formality of an idea; to combine prodigious realism
with prodigious simplification. Memories of Caravaggio’s portentous
achievements haunted him. Forms of a breathing, living reality emerged
from darkness, built themselves up into compositions as luminously
simple and single as a mathematical idea. He thought of the “Call of
Matthew,” of “Peter Crucified,” of the “Lute players,” of “Magdalen.”
 He had the secret, that astonishing ruffian, he had the secret! And
now Gombauld was after it, in hot pursuit. Yes, it would be something
terrific, if only he could catch it.

For a long time an idea had been stirring and spreading, yeastily,
in his mind. He had made a portfolio full of studies, he had drawn a
cartoon; and now the idea was taking shape on canvas. A man fallen from
a horse. The huge animal, a gaunt white cart-horse, filled the upper
half of the picture with its great body. Its head, lowered towards the
ground, was in shadow; the immense bony body was what arrested the eye,
the body and the legs, which came down on either side of the picture
like the pillars of an arch. On the ground, between the legs of the
towering beast, lay the foreshortened figure of a man, the head in the
extreme foreground, the arms flung wide to right and left. A white,
relentless light poured down from a point in the right foreground. The
beast, the fallen man, were sharply illuminated; round them, beyond and
behind them, was the night. They were alone in the darkness, a universe
in themselves. The horse’s body filled the upper part of the picture;
the legs, the great hoofs, frozen to stillness in the midst of their
trampling, limited it on either side. And beneath lay the man,
his foreshortened face at the focal point in the centre, his arms
outstretched towards the sides of the picture. Under the arch of the
horse’s belly, between his legs, the eye looked through into an intense
darkness; below, the space was closed in by the figure of the prostrate
man. A central gulf of darkness surrounded by luminous forms...

The picture was more than half finished. Gombauld had been at work all
the morning on the figure of the man, and now he was taking a rest--the
time to smoke a cigarette. Tilting back his chair till it touched the
wall, he looked thoughtfully at his canvas. He was pleased, and at the
same time he was desolated. In itself, the thing was good; he knew
it. But that something he was after, that something that would be so
terrific if only he could catch it--had he caught it? Would he ever
catch it?

Three little taps--rat, tat, tat! Surprised, Gombauld turned his eyes
towards the door. Nobody ever disturbed him while he was at work; it
was one of the unwritten laws. “Come in!” he called. The door, which was
ajar, swung open, revealing, from the waist upwards, the form of Mary.
She had only dared to mount half-way up the ladder. If he didn’t want
her, retreat would be easier and more dignified than if she climbed to
the top.

“May I come in?” she asked.

“Certainly.”

She skipped up the remaining two rungs and was over the threshold in
an instant. “A letter came for you by the second post,” she said. “I
thought it might be important, so I brought it out to you.” Her eyes,
her childish face were luminously candid as she handed him the letter.
There had never been a flimsier pretext.

Gombauld looked at the envelope and put it in his pocket unopened.
“Luckily,” he said, “it isn’t at all important. Thanks very much all the
same.”

There was a silence; Mary felt a little uncomfortable. “May I have a
look at what you’ve been painting?” she had the courage to say at last.

Gombauld had only half smoked his cigarette; in any case he wouldn’t
begin work again till he had finished. He would give her the five
minutes that separated him from the bitter end. “This is the best place
to see it from,” he said.

Mary looked at the picture for some time without saying anything.
Indeed, she didn’t know what to say; she was taken aback, she was at a
loss. She had expected a cubist masterpiece, and here was a picture of a
man and a horse, not only recognisable as such, but even aggressively
in drawing. Trompe-l’oeil--there was no other word to describe the
delineation of that foreshortened figure under the trampling feet of the
horse. What was she to think, what was she to say? Her orientations
were gone. One could admire representationalism in the Old Masters.
Obviously. But in a modern...? At eighteen she might have done so.
But now, after five years of schooling among the best judges, her
instinctive reaction to a contemporary piece of representation was
contempt--an outburst of laughing disparagement. What could Gombauld be
up to? She had felt so safe in admiring his work before. But now--she
didn’t know what to think. It was very difficult, very difficult.

“There’s rather a lot of chiaroscuro, isn’t there?” she ventured at
last, and inwardly congratulated herself on having found a critical
formula so gentle and at the same time so penetrating.

“There is,” Gombauld agreed.

Mary was pleased; he accepted her criticism; it was a serious
discussion. She put her head on one side and screwed up her eyes.
“I think it’s awfully fine,” she said. “But of course it’s a little
too...too...trompe-l’oeil for my taste.” She looked at Gombauld, who
made no response, but continued to smoke, gazing meditatively all the
time at his picture. Mary went on gaspingly. “When I was in Paris this
spring I saw a lot of Tschuplitski. I admire his work so tremendously.
Of course, it’s frightfully abstract now--frightfully abstract and
frightfully intellectual. He just throws a few oblongs on to his
canvas--quite flat, you know, and painted in pure primary colours. But
his design is wonderful. He’s getting more and more abstract every day.
He’d given up the third dimension when I was there and was just thinking
of giving up the second. Soon, he says, there’ll be just the blank
canvas. That’s the logical conclusion. Complete abstraction. Painting’s
finished; he’s finishing it. When he’s reached pure abstraction he’s
going to take up architecture. He says it’s more intellectual than
painting. Do you agree?” she asked, with a final gasp.

Gombauld dropped his cigarette end and trod on it. “Tschuplitski’s
finished painting,” he said. “I’ve finished my cigarette. But I’m going
on painting.” And, advancing towards her, he put his arm round her
shoulders and turned her round, away from the picture.

Mary looked up at him; her hair swung back, a soundless bell of gold.
Her eyes were serene; she smiled. So the moment had come. His arm was
round her. He moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, and she moved with
him. It was a peripatetic embracement. “Do you agree with him?” she
repeated. The moment might have come, but she would not cease to be
intellectual, serious.

“I don’t know. I shall have to think about it.” Gombauld loosened his
embrace, his hand dropped from her shoulder. “Be careful going down the
ladder,” he added solicitously.

Mary looked round, startled. They were in front of the open door. She
remained standing there for a moment in bewilderment. The hand that
had rested on her shoulder made itself felt lower down her back; it
administered three or four kindly little smacks. Replying automatically
to its stimulus, she moved forward.

“Be careful going down the ladder,” said Gombauld once more.

She was careful. The door closed behind her and she was alone in the
little green close. She walked slowly back through the farmyard; she was
pensive.



CHAPTER XIII.

Henry Wimbush brought down with him to dinner a budget of printed sheets
loosely bound together in a cardboard portfolio.

“To-day,” he said, exhibiting it with a certain solemnity, “to-day I
have finished the printing of my ‘History of Crome’. I helped to set up
the type of the last page this evening.”

“The famous History?” cried Anne. The writing and the printing of this
Magnum Opus had been going on as long as she could remember. All her
childhood long Uncle Henry’s History had been a vague and fabulous
thing, often heard of and never seen.

“It has taken me nearly thirty years,” said Mr. Wimbush. “Twenty-five
years of writing and nearly four of printing. And now it’s finished--the
whole chronicle, from Sir Ferdinando Lapith’s birth to the death of my
father William Wimbush--more than three centuries and a half: a history
of Crome, written at Crome, and printed at Crome by my own press.”

“Shall we be allowed to read it now it’s finished?” asked Denis.

Mr. Wimbush nodded. “Certainly,” he said. “And I hope you will not find
it uninteresting,” he added modestly. “Our muniment room is particularly
rich in ancient records, and I have some genuinely new light to throw on
the introduction of the three-pronged fork.”

“And the people?” asked Gombauld. “Sir Ferdinando and the rest of
them--were they amusing? Were there any crimes or tragedies in the
family?”

“Let me see,” Henry Wimbush rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I can only
think of two suicides, one violent death, four or perhaps five broken
hearts, and half a dozen little blots on the scutcheon in the way of
misalliances, seductions, natural children, and the like. No, on the
whole, it’s a placid and uneventful record.”

“The Wimbushes and the Lapiths were always an unadventurous, respectable
crew,” said Priscilla, with a note of scorn in her voice. “If I were to
write my family history now! Why, it would be one long continuous blot
from beginning to end.” She laughed jovially, and helped herself to
another glass of wine.

“If I were to write mine,” Mr. Scogan remarked, “it wouldn’t exist.
After the second generation we Scogans are lost in the mists of
antiquity.”

“After dinner,” said Henry Wimbush, a little piqued by his wife’s
disparaging comment on the masters of Crome, “I’ll read you an episode
from my History that will make you admit that even the Lapiths, in their
own respectable way, had their tragedies and strange adventures.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Priscilla.

“Glad to hear what?” asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private
interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation,
smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last “I see,” and popped back, clapping shut
the door behind her.

Dinner was eaten; the party had adjourned to the drawing-room.

“Now,” said Henry Wimbush, pulling up a chair to the lamp. He put on
his round pince-nez, rimmed with tortoise-shell, and began cautiously
to turn over the pages of his loose and still fragmentary book. He found
his place at last. “Shall I begin?” he asked, looking up.

“Do,” said Priscilla, yawning.

In the midst of an attentive silence Mr. Wimbush gave a little
preliminary cough and started to read.

“The infant who was destined to become the fourth baronet of the name of
Lapith was born in the year 1740. He was a very small baby, weighing not
more than three pounds at birth, but from the first he was sturdy and
healthy. In honour of his maternal grandfather, Sir Hercules Occam of
Bishop’s Occam, he was christened Hercules. His mother, like many other
mothers, kept a notebook, in which his progress from month to month was
recorded. He walked at ten months, and before his second year was out
he had learnt to speak a number of words. At three years he weighed but
twenty-four pounds, and at six, though he could read and write perfectly
and showed a remarkable aptitude for music, he was no larger and heavier
than a well-grown child of two. Meanwhile, his mother had borne two
other children, a boy and a girl, one of whom died of croup during
infancy, while the other was carried off by smallpox before it reached
the age of five. Hercules remained the only surviving child.

“On his twelfth birthday Hercules was still only three feet and two
inches in height. His head, which was very handsome and nobly shaped,
was too big for his body, but otherwise he was exquisitely proportioned,
and, for his size, of great strength and agility. His parents, in the
hope of making him grow, consulted all the most eminent physicians of
the time. Their various prescriptions were followed to the letter, but
in vain. One ordered a very plentiful meat diet; another exercise; a
third constructed a little rack, modelled on those employed by the Holy
Inquisition, on which young Hercules was stretched, with excruciating
torments, for half an hour every morning and evening. In the course of
the next three years Hercules gained perhaps two inches. After that his
growth stopped completely, and he remained for the rest of his life a
pigmy of three feet and four inches. His father, who had built the most
extravagant hopes upon his son, planning for him in his imagination
a military career equal to that of Marlborough, found himself a
disappointed man. ‘I have brought an abortion into the world,’ he would
say, and he took so violent a dislike to his son that the boy dared
scarcely come into his presence. His temper, which had been serene,
was turned by disappointment to moroseness and savagery. He avoided all
company (being, as he said, ashamed to show himself, the father of a
lusus naturae, among normal, healthy human beings), and took to solitary
drinking, which carried him very rapidly to his grave; for the year
before Hercules came of age his father was taken off by an apoplexy. His
mother, whose love for him had increased with the growth of his father’s
unkindness, did not long survive, but little more than a year after
her husband’s death succumbed, after eating two dozen of oysters, to an
attack of typhoid fever.

“Hercules thus found himself at the age of twenty-one alone in the
world, and master of a considerable fortune, including the estate and
mansion of Crome. The beauty and intelligence of his childhood had
survived into his manly age, and, but for his dwarfish stature, he would
have taken his place among the handsomest and most accomplished young
men of his time. He was well read in the Greek and Latin authors, as
well as in all the moderns of any merit who had written in English,
French, or Italian. He had a good ear for music, and was no indifferent
performer on the violin, which he used to play like a bass viol, seated
on a chair with the instrument between his legs. To the music of the
harpsichord and clavichord he was extremely partial, but the smallness
of his hands made it impossible for him ever to perform upon these
instruments. He had a small ivory flute made for him, on which,
whenever he was melancholy, he used to play a simple country air or jig,
affirming that this rustic music had more power to clear and raise the
spirits than the most artificial productions of the masters. From an
early age he practised the composition of poetry, but, though conscious
of his great powers in this art, he would never publish any specimen of
his writing. ‘My stature,’ he would say, ‘is reflected in my verses; if
the public were to read them it would not be because I am a poet,
but because I am a dwarf.’ Several MS. books of Sir Hercules’s poems
survive. A single specimen will suffice to illustrate his qualities as a
poet.”


               “‘In ancient days, while yet the world was young,

               Ere Abram fed his flocks or Homer sung;

               When blacksmith Tubal tamed creative fire,

               And Jabal dwelt in tents and Jubal struck the lyre;

               Flesh grown corrupt brought forth a monstrous birth

               And obscene giants trod the shrinking earth,

               Till God, impatient of their sinful brood,

               Gave rein to wrath and drown’d them in the Flood.

               Teeming again, repeopled Tellus bore

               The lubber Hero and the Man of War;

               Huge towers of Brawn, topp’d with an empty Skull,

               Witlessly bold, heroically dull.

               Long ages pass’d and Man grown more refin’d,

               Slighter in muscle but of vaster Mind,

               Smiled at his grandsire’s broadsword, bow and bill,

               And learn’d to wield the Pencil and the Quill.

               The glowing canvas and the written page

               Immortaliz’d his name from age to age,

               His name emblazon’d on Fame’s temple wall;

               For Art grew great as Humankind grew small.

               Thus man’s long progress step by step we trace;

               The Giant dies, the hero takes his place;

               The Giant vile, the dull heroic Block:

               At one we shudder and at one we mock.

               Man last appears. In him the Soul’s pure flame

               Burns brightlier in a not inord’nate frame.

               Of old when Heroes fought and Giants swarmed,

               Men were huge mounds of matter scarce inform’d;

               Wearied by leavening so vast a mass,

               The spirit slept and all the mind was crass.

               The smaller carcase of these later days

               Is soon inform’d; the Soul unwearied plays

               And like a Pharos darts abroad her mental rays.

               But can we think that Providence will stay

               Man’s footsteps here upon the upward way?

               Mankind in understanding and in grace

               Advanc’d so far beyond the Giants’ race?

               Hence impious thought! Still led by GOD’S own Hand,

               Mankind proceeds towards the Promised Land.

               A time will come (prophetic, I descry

               Remoter dawns along the gloomy sky),

               When happy mortals of a Golden Age

               Will backward turn the dark historic page,

               And in our vaunted race of Men behold

               A form as gross, a Mind as dead and cold,

               As we in Giants see, in warriors of old.

               A time will come, wherein the soul shall be

               From all superfluous matter wholly free;

               When the light body, agile as a fawn’s,

               Shall sport with grace along the velvet lawns.

               Nature’s most delicate and final birth,

               Mankind perfected shall possess the earth.

               But ah, not yet! For still the Giants’ race,

               Huge, though diminish’d, tramps the Earth’s fair face;

               Gross and repulsive, yet perversely proud,

               Men of their imperfections boast aloud.

               Vain of their bulk, of all they still retain

               Of giant ugliness absurdly vain;

               At all that’s small they point their stupid scorn

               And, monsters, think themselves divinely born.

               Sad is the Fate of those, ah, sad indeed,

               The rare precursors of the nobler breed!

               Who come man’s golden glory to foretell,

               But pointing Heav’nwards live themselves in Hell.’

“As soon as he came into the estate, Sir Hercules set about remodelling
his household. For though by no means ashamed of his deformity--indeed,
if we may judge from the poem quoted above, he regarded himself as being
in many ways superior to the ordinary race of man--he found the presence
of full-grown men and women embarrassing. Realising, too, that he
must abandon all ambitions in the great world, he determined to retire
absolutely from it and to create, as it were, at Crome a private
world of his own, in which all should be proportionable to himself.
Accordingly, he discharged all the old servants of the house and
replaced them gradually, as he was able to find suitable successors,
by others of dwarfish stature. In the course of a few years he had
assembled about himself a numerous household, no member of which was
above four feet high and the smallest among them scarcely two feet and
six inches. His father’s dogs, such as setters, mastiffs, greyhounds,
and a pack of beagles, he sold or gave away as too large and too
boisterous for his house, replacing them by pugs and King Charles
spaniels and whatever other breeds of dog were the smallest. His
father’s stable was also sold. For his own use, whether riding or
driving, he had six black Shetland ponies, with four very choice piebald
animals of New Forest breed.

“Having thus settled his household entirely to his own satisfaction, it
only remained for him to find some suitable companion with whom to share
his paradise. Sir Hercules had a susceptible heart, and had more than
once, between the ages of sixteen and twenty, felt what it was to love.
But here his deformity had been a source of the most bitter humiliation,
for, having once dared to declare himself to a young lady of his choice,
he had been received with laughter. On his persisting, she had picked
him up and shaken him like an importunate child, telling him to run away
and plague her no more. The story soon got about--indeed, the young lady
herself used to tell it as a particularly pleasant anecdote--and
the taunts and mockery it occasioned were a source of the most acute
distress to Hercules. From the poems written at this period we gather
that he meditated taking his own life. In course of time, however, he
lived down this humiliation; but never again, though he often fell in
love, and that very passionately, did he dare to make any advances to
those in whom he was interested. After coming to the estate and finding
that he was in a position to create his own world as he desired it, he
saw that, if he was to have a wife--which he very much desired, being
of an affectionate and, indeed, amorous temper--he must choose her as
he had chosen his servants--from among the race of dwarfs. But to find
a suitable wife was, he found, a matter of some difficulty; for he would
marry none who was not distinguished by beauty and gentle birth. The
dwarfish daughter of Lord Bemboro he refused on the ground that besides
being a pigmy she was hunchbacked; while another young lady, an orphan
belonging to a very good family in Hampshire, was rejected by him
because her face, like that of so many dwarfs, was wizened and
repulsive. Finally, when he was almost despairing of success, he
heard from a reliable source that Count Titimalo, a Venetian nobleman,
possessed a daughter of exquisite beauty and great accomplishments, who
was by three feet in height. Setting out at once for Venice, he went
immediately on his arrival to pay his respects to the count, whom he
found living with his wife and five children in a very mean apartment
in one of the poorer quarters of the town. Indeed, the count was so far
reduced in his circumstances that he was even then negotiating (so it
was rumoured) with a travelling company of clowns and acrobats, who had
had the misfortune to lose their performing dwarf, for the sale of his
diminutive daughter Filomena. Sir Hercules arrived in time to save her
from this untoward fate, for he was so much charmed by Filomena’s grace
and beauty, that at the end of three days’ courtship he made her a
formal offer of marriage, which was accepted by her no less joyfully
than by her father, who perceived in an English son-in-law a rich and
unfailing source of revenue. After an unostentatious marriage, at which
the English ambassador acted as one of the witnesses, Sir Hercules and
his bride returned by sea to England, where they settled down, as it
proved, to a life of uneventful happiness.

“Crome and its household of dwarfs delighted Filomena, who felt herself
now for the first time to be a free woman living among her equals in
a friendly world. She had many tastes in common with her husband,
especially that of music. She had a beautiful voice, of a power
surprising in one so small, and could touch A in alt without effort.
Accompanied by her husband on his fine Cremona fiddle, which he played,
as we have noted before, as one plays a bass viol, she would sing all
the liveliest and tenderest airs from the operas and cantatas of her
native country. Seated together at the harpsichord, they found that they
could with their four hands play all the music written for two hands
of ordinary size, a circumstance which gave Sir Hercules unfailing
pleasure.

“When they were not making music or reading together, which they often
did, both in English and Italian, they spent their time in healthful
outdoor exercises, sometimes rowing in a little boat on the lake, but
more often riding or driving, occupations in which, because they were
entirely new to her, Filomena especially delighted. When she had become
a perfectly proficient rider, Filomena and her husband used often to go
hunting in the park, at that time very much more extensive than it is
now. They hunted not foxes nor hares, but rabbits, using a pack of
about thirty black and fawn-coloured pugs, a kind of dog which, when not
overfed, can course a rabbit as well as any of the smaller breeds. Four
dwarf grooms, dressed in scarlet liveries and mounted on white Exmoor
ponies, hunted the pack, while their master and mistress, in green
habits, followed either on the black Shetlands or on the piebald New
Forest ponies. A picture of the whole hunt--dogs, horses, grooms, and
masters--was painted by William Stubbs, whose work Sir Hercules admired
so much that he invited him, though a man of ordinary stature, to come
and stay at the mansion for the purpose of executing this picture.
Stubbs likewise painted a portrait of Sir Hercules and his lady driving
in their green enamelled calash drawn by four black Shetlands. Sir
Hercules wears a plum-coloured velvet coat and white breeches; Filomena
is dressed in flowered muslin and a very large hat with pink feathers.
The two figures in their gay carriage stand out sharply against a dark
background of trees; but to the left of the picture the trees fall away
and disappear, so that the four black ponies are seen against a pale and
strangely lurid sky that has the golden-brown colour of thunder-clouds
lighted up by the sun.

“In this way four years passed happily by. At the end of that time
Filomena found herself great with child. Sir Hercules was overjoyed.
‘If God is good,’ he wrote in his day-book, ‘the name of Lapith will be
preserved and our rarer and more delicate race transmitted through the
generations until in the fullness of time the world shall recognise the
superiority of those beings whom now it uses to make mock of.’ On his
wife’s being brought to bed of a son he wrote a poem to the same effect.
The child was christened Ferdinando in memory of the builder of the
house.

“With the passage of the months a certain sense of disquiet began to
invade the minds of Sir Hercules and his lady. For the child was growing
with an extraordinary rapidity. At a year he weighed as much as Hercules
had weighed when he was three. ‘Ferdinando goes crescendo,’ wrote
Filomena in her diary. ‘It seems not natural.’ At eighteen months the
baby was almost as tall as their smallest jockey, who was a man of
thirty-six. Could it be that Ferdinando was destined to become a man of
the normal, gigantic dimensions? It was a thought to which neither of
his parents dared yet give open utterance, but in the secrecy of their
respective diaries they brooded over it in terror and dismay.

“On his third birthday Ferdinando was taller than his mother and not
more than a couple of inches short of his father’s height. ‘To-day for
the first time’ wrote Sir Hercules, ‘we discussed the situation. The
hideous truth can be concealed no longer: Ferdinando is not one of us.
On this, his third birthday, a day when we should have been rejoicing at
the health, the strength, and beauty of our child, we wept together over
the ruin of our happiness. God give us strength to bear this cross.’

“At the age of eight Ferdinando was so large and so exuberantly healthy
that his parents decided, though reluctantly, to send him to school.
He was packed off to Eton at the beginning of the next half. A profound
peace settled upon the house. Ferdinando returned for the summer
holidays larger and stronger than ever. One day he knocked down the
butler and broke his arm. ‘He is rough, inconsiderate, unamenable to
persuasion,’ wrote his father. ‘The only thing that will teach him
manners is corporal chastisement.’ Ferdinando, who at this age was
already seventeen inches taller than his father, received no corporal
chastisement.

“One summer holidays about three years later Ferdinando returned to
Crome accompanied by a very large mastiff dog. He had bought it from an
old man at Windsor who had found the beast too expensive to feed. It
was a savage, unreliable animal; hardly had it entered the house when it
attacked one of Sir Hercules’s favourite pugs, seizing the creature in
its jaws and shaking it till it was nearly dead. Extremely put out by
this occurrence, Sir Hercules ordered that the beast should be chained
up in the stable-yard. Ferdinando sullenly answered that the dog was
his, and he would keep it where he pleased. His father, growing angry,
bade him take the animal out of the house at once, on pain of his utmost
displeasure. Ferdinando refused to move. His mother at this moment
coming into the room, the dog flew at her, knocked her down, and in
a twinkling had very severely mauled her arm and shoulder; in another
instant it must infallibly have had her by the throat, had not Sir
Hercules drawn his sword and stabbed the animal to the heart. Turning on
his son, he ordered him to leave the room immediately, as being unfit to
remain in the same place with the mother whom he had nearly murdered. So
awe-inspiring was the spectacle of Sir Hercules standing with one foot
on the carcase of the gigantic dog, his sword drawn and still bloody, so
commanding were his voice, his gestures, and the expression of his face
that Ferdinando slunk out of the room in terror and behaved himself
for all the rest of the vacation in an entirely exemplary fashion. His
mother soon recovered from the bites of the mastiff, but the effect on
her mind of this adventure was ineradicable; from that time forth she
lived always among imaginary terrors.

“The two years which Ferdinando spent on the Continent, making the Grand
Tour, were a period of happy repose for his parents. But even now
the thought of the future haunted them; nor were they able to solace
themselves with all the diversions of their younger days. The Lady
Filomena had lost her voice and Sir Hercules was grown too rheumatical
to play the violin. He, it is true, still rode after his pugs, but his
wife felt herself too old and, since the episode of the mastiff, too
nervous for such sports. At most, to please her husband, she would
follow the hunt at a distance in a little gig drawn by the safest and
oldest of the Shetlands.

“The day fixed for Ferdinando’s return came round. Filomena, sick with
vague dreads and presentiments, retired to her chamber and her bed.
Sir Hercules received his son alone. A giant in a brown travelling-suit
entered the room. ‘Welcome home, my son,’ said Sir Hercules in a voice
that trembled a little.

“‘I hope I see you well, sir.’ Ferdinando bent down to shake hands, then
straightened himself up again. The top of his father’s head reached to
the level of his hip.

“Ferdinando had not come alone. Two friends of his own age accompanied
him, and each of the young men had brought a servant. Not for thirty
years had Crome been desecrated by the presence of so many members of
the common race of men. Sir Hercules was appalled and indignant, but the
laws of hospitality had to be obeyed. He received the young gentlemen
with grave politeness and sent the servants to the kitchen, with orders
that they should be well cared for.

“The old family dining-table was dragged out into the light and dusted
(Sir Hercules and his lady were accustomed to dine at a small table
twenty inches high). Simon, the aged butler, who could only just look
over the edge of the big table, was helped at supper by the three
servants brought by Ferdinando and his guests.

“Sir Hercules presided, and with his usual grace supported a
conversation on the pleasures of foreign travel, the beauties of art and
nature to be met with abroad, the opera at Venice, the singing of the
orphans in the churches of the same city, and on other topics of a
similar nature. The young men were not particularly attentive to his
discourses; they were occupied in watching the efforts of the butler to
change the plates and replenish the glasses. They covered their laughter
by violent and repeated fits of coughing or choking. Sir Hercules
affected not to notice, but changed the subject of the conversation to
sport. Upon this one of the young men asked whether it was true, as he
had heard, that he used to hunt the rabbit with a pack of pug dogs. Sir
Hercules replied that it was, and proceeded to describe the chase in
some detail. The young men roared with laughter.

“When supper was over, Sir Hercules climbed down from his chair and,
giving as his excuse that he must see how his lady did, bade them
good-night. The sound of laughter followed him up the stairs. Filomena
was not asleep; she had been lying on her bed listening to the sound of
enormous laughter and the tread of strangely heavy feet on the stairs
and along the corridors. Sir Hercules drew a chair to her bedside
and sat there for a long time in silence, holding his wife’s hand and
sometimes gently squeezing it. At about ten o’clock they were startled
by a violent noise. There was a breaking of glass, a stamping of feet,
with an outburst of shouts and laughter. The uproar continuing for
several minutes, Sir Hercules rose to his feet and, in spite of his
wife’s entreaties, prepared to go and see what was happening. There
was no light on the staircase, and Sir Hercules groped his way down
cautiously, lowering himself from stair to stair and standing for a
moment on each tread before adventuring on a new step. The noise was
louder here; the shouting articulated itself into recognisable words
and phrases. A line of light was visible under the dining-room door. Sir
Hercules tiptoed across the hall towards it. Just as he approached the
door there was another terrific crash of breaking glass and jangled
metal. What could they be doing? Standing on tiptoe he managed to look
through the keyhole. In the middle of the ravaged table old Simon, the
butler, so primed with drink that he could scarcely keep his balance,
was dancing a jig. His feet crunched and tinkled among the broken glass,
and his shoes were wet with spilt wine. The three young men sat round,
thumping the table with their hands or with the empty wine bottles,
shouting and laughing encouragement. The three servants leaning against
the wall laughed too. Ferdinando suddenly threw a handful of walnuts at
the dancer’s head, which so dazed and surprised the little man that he
staggered and fell down on his back, upsetting a decanter and several
glasses. They raised him up, gave him some brandy to drink, thumped
him on the back. The old man smiled and hiccoughed. ‘To-morrow,’ said
Ferdinando, ‘we’ll have a concerted ballet of the whole household.’
‘With father Hercules wearing his club and lion-skin,’ added one of his
companions, and all three roared with laughter.

“Sir Hercules would look and listen no further. He crossed the hall once
more and began to climb the stairs, lifting his knees painfully high
at each degree. This was the end; there was no place for him now in the
world, no place for him and Ferdinando together.

“His wife was still awake; to her questioning glance he answered, ‘They
are making mock of old Simon. To-morrow it will be our turn.’ They were
silent for a time.

“At last Filomena said, ‘I do not want to see to-morrow.’

“‘It is better not,’ said Sir Hercules. Going into his closet he wrote
in his day-book a full and particular account of all the events of the
evening. While he was still engaged in this task he rang for a servant
and ordered hot water and a bath to be made ready for him at eleven
o’clock. When he had finished writing he went into his wife’s room, and
preparing a dose of opium twenty times as strong as that which she
was accustomed to take when she could not sleep, he brought it to her,
saying, ‘Here is your sleeping-draught.’

“Filomena took the glass and lay for a little time, but did not drink
immediately. The tears came into her eyes. ‘Do you remember the songs we
used to sing, sitting out there sulla terrazza in the summer-time?’ She
began singing softly in her ghost of a cracked voice a few bars from
Stradella’s ‘Amor amor, non dormir piu.’ ‘And you playing on the violin,
it seems such a short time ago, and yet so long, long, long. Addio,
amore, a rivederti.’ She drank off the draught and, lying back on the
pillow, closed her eyes. Sir Hercules kissed her hand and tiptoed away,
as though he were afraid of waking her. He returned to his closet, and
having recorded his wife’s last words to him, he poured into his bath
the water that had been brought up in accordance with his orders. The
water being too hot for him to get into the bath at once, he took down
from the shelf his copy of Suetonius. He wished to read how Seneca had
died. He opened the book at random. ‘But dwarfs,’ he read, ‘he held in
abhorrence as being lusus naturae and of evil omen.’ He winced as though
he had been struck. This same Augustus, he remembered, had exhibited in
the amphitheatre a young man called Lucius, of good family, who was
not quite two feet in height and weighed seventeen pounds, but had
a stentorian voice. He turned over the pages. Tiberius, Caligula,
Claudius, Nero: it was a tale of growing horror. ‘Seneca his preceptor,
he forced to kill himself.’ And there was Petronius, who had called
his friends about him at the last, bidding them talk to him, not of the
consolations of philosophy, but of love and gallantry, while the life
was ebbing away through his opened veins. Dipping his pen once more in
the ink he wrote on the last page of his diary: ‘He died a Roman death.’
Then, putting the toes of one foot into the water and finding that it
was not too hot, he threw off his dressing-gown and, taking a razor in
his hand, sat down in the bath. With one deep cut he severed the artery
in his left wrist, then lay back and composed his mind to meditation.
The blood oozed out, floating through the water in dissolving wreaths
and spirals. In a little while the whole bath was tinged with pink. The
colour deepened; Sir Hercules felt himself mastered by an invincible
drowsiness; he was sinking from vague dream to dream. Soon he was sound
asleep. There was not much blood in his small body.”



CHAPTER XIV.

For their after-luncheon coffee the party generally adjourned to the
library. Its windows looked east, and at this hour of the day it was the
coolest place in the whole house. It was a large room, fitted, during
the eighteenth century, with white painted shelves of an elegant design.
In the middle of one wall a door, ingeniously upholstered with rows
of dummy books, gave access to a deep cupboard, where, among a pile of
letter-files and old newspapers, the mummy-case of an Egyptian lady,
brought back by the second Sir Ferdinando on his return from the Grand
Tour, mouldered in the darkness. From ten yards away and at a first
glance, one might almost have mistaken this secret door for a section of
shelving filled with genuine books. Coffee-cup in hand, Mr. Scogan
was standing in front of the dummy book-shelf. Between the sips he
discoursed.

“The bottom shelf,” he was saying, “is taken up by an Encyclopaedia in
fourteen volumes. Useful, but a little dull, as is also Caprimulge’s
‘Dictionary of the Finnish Language’. The ‘Biographical Dictionary’
looks more promising. ‘Biography of Men who were Born Great’, ‘Biography
of Men who Achieved Greatness’, ‘Biography of Men who had Greatness
Thrust upon Them’, and ‘Biography of Men who were Never Great at All’.
Then there are ten volumes of ‘Thom’s Works and Wanderings’, while the
‘Wild Goose Chase, a Novel’, by an anonymous author, fills no less
than six. But what’s this, what’s this?” Mr. Scogan stood on tiptoe and
peered up. “Seven volumes of the ‘Tales of Knockespotch’. The ‘Tales
of Knockespotch’,” he repeated. “Ah, my dear Henry,” he said, turning
round, “these are your best books. I would willingly give all the rest
of your library for them.”

The happy possessor of a multitude of first editions, Mr. Wimbush could
afford to smile indulgently.

“Is it possible,” Mr. Scogan went on, “that they possess nothing more
than a back and a title?” He opened the cupboard door and peeped inside,
as though he hoped to find the rest of the books behind it. “Phooh!”
 he said, and shut the door again. “It smells of dust and mildew. How
symbolical! One comes to the great masterpieces of the past, expecting
some miraculous illumination, and one finds, on opening them, only
darkness and dust and a faint smell of decay. After all, what is
reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive
self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one’s mind; one
reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking. Still--the ‘Tales of
Knockespotch’...”

He paused, and thoughtfully drummed with his fingers on the backs of the
non-existent, unattainable books.

“But I disagree with you about reading,” said Mary. “About serious
reading, I mean.”

“Quite right, Mary, quite right,” Mr. Scogan answered. “I had forgotten
there were any serious people in the room.”

“I like the idea of the Biographies,” said Denis. “There’s room for us
all within the scheme; it’s comprehensive.”

“Yes, the Biographies are good, the Biographies are excellent,” Mr
Scogan agreed. “I imagine them written in a very elegant Regency
style--Brighton Pavilion in words--perhaps by the great Dr. Lempriere
himself. You know his classical dictionary? Ah!” Mr. Scogan raised his
hand and let it limply fall again in a gesture which implied that words
failed him. “Read his biography of Helen; read how Jupiter, disguised
as a swan, was ‘enabled to avail himself of his situation’ vis-a-vis to
Leda. And to think that he may have, must have written these biographies
of the Great! What a work, Henry! And, owing to the idiotic arrangement
of your library, it can’t be read.”

“I prefer the ‘Wild Goose Chase’,” said Anne. “A novel in six
volumes--it must be restful.”

“Restful,” Mr. Scogan repeated. “You’ve hit on the right word. A ‘Wild
Goose Chase’ is sound, but a bit old-fashioned--pictures of clerical
life in the fifties, you know; specimens of the landed gentry; peasants
for pathos and comedy; and in the background, always the picturesque
beauties of nature soberly described. All very good and solid, but, like
certain puddings, just a little dull. Personally, I like much better
the notion of ‘Thom’s Works and Wanderings’. The eccentric Mr. Thom of
Thom’s Hill. Old Tom Thom, as his intimates used to call him. He spent
ten years in Thibet organising the clarified butter industry on modern
European lines, and was able to retire at thirty-six with a handsome
fortune. The rest of his life he devoted to travel and ratiocination;
here is the result.” Mr. Scogan tapped the dummy books. “And now we come
to the ‘Tales of Knockespotch’. What a masterpiece and what a great man!
Knockespotch knew how to write fiction. Ah, Denis, if you could only
read Knockespotch you wouldn’t be writing a novel about the wearisome
development of a young man’s character, you wouldn’t be describing in
endless, fastidious detail, cultured life in Chelsea and Bloomsbury and
Hampstead. You would be trying to write a readable book. But then, alas!
owing to the peculiar arrangement of our host’s library, you never will
read Knockespotch.”

“Nobody could regret the fact more than I do,” said Denis.

“It was Knockespotch,” Mr. Scogan continued, “the great Knockespotch,
who delivered us from the dreary tyranny of the realistic novel. My
life, Knockespotch said, is not so long that I can afford to spend
precious hours writing or reading descriptions of middle-class
interiors. He said again, ‘I am tired of seeing the human mind bogged in
a social plenum; I prefer to paint it in a vacuum, freely and sportively
bombinating.’”

“I say,” said Gombauld, “Knockespotch was a little obscure sometimes,
wasn’t he?”

“He was,” Mr. Scogan replied, “and with intention. It made him seem even
profounder than he actually was. But it was only in his aphorisms that
he was so dark and oracular. In his Tales he was always luminous. Oh,
those Tales--those Tales! How shall I describe them? Fabulous characters
shoot across his pages like gaily dressed performers on the trapeze.
There are extraordinary adventures and still more extraordinary
speculations. Intelligences and emotions, relieved of all the imbecile
preoccupations of civilised life, move in intricate and subtle dances,
crossing and recrossing, advancing, retreating, impinging. An immense
erudition and an immense fancy go hand in hand. All the ideas of the
present and of the past, on every possible subject, bob up among
the Tales, smile gravely or grimace a caricature of themselves, then
disappear to make place for something new. The verbal surface of his
writing is rich and fantastically diversified. The wit is incessant.
The...”

“But couldn’t you give us a specimen,” Denis broke in--“a concrete
example?”

“Alas!” Mr. Scogan replied, “Knockespotch’s great book is like the sword
Excalibur. It remains struck fast in this door, awaiting the coming of a
writer with genius enough to draw it forth. I am not even a writer, I
am not so much as qualified to attempt the task. The extraction of
Knockespotch from his wooden prison I leave, my dear Denis, to you.”

“Thank you,” said Denis.



CHAPTER XV.

In the time of the amiable Brantome,” Mr. Scogan was saying, “every
debutante at the French Court was invited to dine at the King’s table,
where she was served with wine in a handsome silver cup of Italian
workmanship. It was no ordinary cup, this goblet of the debutantes;
for, inside, it had been most curiously and ingeniously engraved with a
series of very lively amorous scenes. With each draught that the young
lady swallowed these engravings became increasingly visible, and the
Court looked on with interest, every time she put her nose in the cup,
to see whether she blushed at what the ebbing wine revealed. If the
debutante blushed, they laughed at her for her innocence; if she did
not, she was laughed at for being too knowing.”

“Do you propose,” asked Anne, “that the custom should be revived at
Buckingham Palace?”

“I do not,” said Mr. Scogan. “I merely quoted the anecdote as an
illustration of the customs, so genially frank, of the sixteenth
century. I might have quoted other anecdotes to show that the customs
of the seventeenth and eighteenth, of the fifteenth and fourteenth
centuries, and indeed of every other century, from the time of Hammurabi
onward, were equally genial and equally frank. The only century in which
customs were not characterised by the same cheerful openness was the
nineteenth, of blessed memory. It was the astonishing exception. And
yet, with what one must suppose was a deliberate disregard of history,
it looked upon its horribly pregnant silences as normal and natural and
right; the frankness of the previous fifteen or twenty thousand years
was considered abnormal and perverse. It was a curious phenomenon.”

“I entirely agree.” Mary panted with excitement in her effort to bring
out what she had to say. “Havelock Ellis says...”

Mr. Scogan, like a policeman arresting the flow of traffic, held up his
hand. “He does; I know. And that brings me to my next point: the nature
of the reaction.”

“Havelock Ellis...”

“The reaction, when it came--and we may say roughly that it set in
a little before the beginning of this century--the reaction was to
openness, but not to the same openness as had reigned in the earlier
ages. It was to a scientific openness, not to the jovial frankness
of the past, that we returned. The whole question of Amour became a
terribly serious one. Earnest young men wrote in the public prints that
from this time forth it would be impossible ever again to make a joke
of any sexual matter. Professors wrote thick books in which sex was
sterilised and dissected. It has become customary for serious young
women, like Mary, to discuss, with philosophic calm, matters of which
the merest hint would have sufficed to throw the youth of the sixties
into a delirium of amorous excitement. It is all very estimable, no
doubt. But still”--Mr. Scogan sighed.--“I for one should like to see,
mingled with this scientific ardour, a little more of the jovial spirit
of Rabelais and Chaucer.”

“I entirely disagree with you,” said Mary. “Sex isn’t a laughing matter;
it’s serious.”

“Perhaps,” answered Mr. Scogan, “perhaps I’m an obscene old man. For I
must confess that I cannot always regard it as wholly serious.”

“But I tell you...” began Mary furiously. Her face had flushed with
excitement. Her cheeks were the cheeks of a great ripe peach.

“Indeed,” Mr. Scogan continued, “it seems to me one of few permanently
and everlastingly amusing subjects that exist. Amour is the one human
activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate,
if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.”

“I entirely disagree,” said Mary. There was a silence.

Anne looked at her watch. “Nearly a quarter to eight,” she said. “I
wonder when Ivor will turn up.” She got up from her deck-chair and,
leaning her elbows on the balustrade of the terrace, looked out over the
valley and towards the farther hills. Under the level evening light the
architecture of the land revealed itself. The deep shadows, the bright
contrasting lights gave the hills a new solidity. Irregularities of the
surface, unsuspected before, were picked out with light and shade.
The grass, the corn, the foliage of trees were stippled with intricate
shadows. The surface of things had taken on a marvellous enrichment.

“Look!” said Anne suddenly, and pointed. On the opposite side of the
valley, at the crest of the ridge, a cloud of dust flushed by the
sunlight to rosy gold was moving rapidly along the sky-line. “It’s Ivor.
One can tell by the speed.”

The dust cloud descended into the valley and was lost. A horn with the
voice of a sea-lion made itself heard, approaching. A minute later Ivor
came leaping round the corner of the house. His hair waved in the wind
of his own speed; he laughed as he saw them.

“Anne, darling,” he cried, and embraced her, embraced Mary, very nearly
embraced Mr. Scogan. “Well, here I am. I’ve come with incredulous
speed.” Ivor’s vocabulary was rich, but a little erratic. “I’m not late
for dinner, am I?” He hoisted himself up on to the balustrade, and
sat there, kicking his heels. With one arm he embraced a large stone
flower-pot, leaning his head sideways against its hard and lichenous
flanks in an attitude of trustful affection. He had brown, wavy hair,
and his eyes were of a very brilliant, pale, improbable blue. His head
was narrow, his face thin and rather long, his nose aquiline. In old
age--though it was difficult to imagine Ivor old--he might grow to have
an Iron Ducal grimness. But now, at twenty-six, it was not the structure
of his face that impressed one; it was its expression. That was charming
and vivacious, and his smile was an irradiation. He was forever moving,
restlessly and rapidly, but with an engaging gracefulness. His frail and
slender body seemed to be fed by a spring of inexhaustible energy.

“No, you’re not late.”

“You’re in time to answer a question,” said Mr. Scogan. “We were arguing
whether Amour were a serious matter or no. What do you think? Is it
serious?”

“Serious?” echoed Ivor. “Most certainly.”

“I told you so,” cried Mary triumphantly.

“But in what sense serious?” Mr. Scogan asked.

“I mean as an occupation. One can go on with it without ever getting
bored.”

“I see,” said Mr. Scogan. “Perfectly.”

“One can occupy oneself with it,” Ivor continued, “always and
everywhere. Women are always wonderfully the same. Shapes vary a little,
that’s all. In Spain”--with his free hand he described a series of ample
curves--“one can’t pass them on the stairs. In England”--he put the tip
of his forefinger against the tip of his thumb and, lowering his hand,
drew out this circle into an imaginary cylinder--“In England they’re
tubular. But their sentiments are always the same. At least, I’ve always
found it so.”

“I’m delighted to hear it,” said Mr. Scogan.



CHAPTER XVI.

The ladies had left the room and the port was circulating. Mr. Scogan
filled his glass, passed on the decanter, and, leaning back in his
chair, looked about him for a moment in silence. The conversation
rippled idly round him, but he disregarded it; he was smiling at some
private joke. Gombauld noticed his smile.

“What’s amusing you?” he asked.

“I was just looking at you all, sitting round this table,” said Mr.
Scogan.

“Are we as comic as all that?”

“Not at all,” Mr. Scogan answered politely. “I was merely amused by my
own speculations.”

“And what were they?”

“The idlest, the most academic of speculations. I was looking at you one
by one and trying to imagine which of the first six Caesars you would
each resemble, if you were given the opportunity of behaving like a
Caesar. The Caesars are one of my touchstones,” Mr. Scogan explained.
“They are characters functioning, so to speak, in the void. They
are human beings developed to their logical conclusions. Hence their
unequalled value as a touchstone, a standard. When I meet someone
for the first time, I ask myself this question: Given the Caesarean
environment, which of the Caesars would this person resemble--Julius,
Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero? I take each trait of
character, each mental and emotional bias, each little oddity, and
magnify them a thousand times. The resulting image gives me his
Caesarean formula.”

“And which of the Caesars do you resemble?” asked Gombauld.

“I am potentially all of them,” Mr. Scogan replied, “all--with the
possible exception of Claudius, who was much too stupid to be a
development of anything in my character. The seeds of Julius’s courage
and compelling energy, of Augustus’s prudence, of the libidinousness and
cruelty of Tiberius, of Caligula’s folly, of Nero’s artistic genius and
enormous vanity, are all within me. Given the opportunities, I might
have been something fabulous. But circumstances were against me. I was
born and brought up in a country rectory; I passed my youth doing a
great deal of utterly senseless hard work for a very little money. The
result is that now, in middle age, I am the poor thing that I am. But
perhaps it is as well. Perhaps, too, it’s as well that Denis hasn’t
been permitted to flower into a little Nero, and that Ivor remains only
potentially a Caligula. Yes, it’s better so, no doubt. But it would
have been more amusing, as a spectacle, if they had had the chance to
develop, untrammelled, the full horror of their potentialities. It would
have been pleasant and interesting to watch their tics and foibles and
little vices swelling and burgeoning and blossoming into enormous and
fantastic flowers of cruelty and pride and lewdness and avarice. The
Caesarean environment makes the Caesar, as the special food and the
queenly cell make the queen bee. We differ from the bees in so far that,
given the proper food, they can be sure of making a queen every time.
With us there is no such certainty; out of every ten men placed in the
Caesarean environment one will be temperamentally good, or intelligent,
or great. The rest will blossom into Caesars; he will not. Seventy and
eighty years ago simple-minded people, reading of the exploits of the
Bourbons in South Italy, cried out in amazement: To think that such
things should be happening in the nineteenth century! And a few years
since we too were astonished to find that in our still more astonishing
twentieth century, unhappy blackamoors on the Congo and the Amazon were
being treated as English serfs were treated in the time of Stephen.
To-day we are no longer surprised at these things. The Black and Tans
harry Ireland, the Poles maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti
slaughter their poorer countrymen: we take it all for granted. Since the
war we wonder at nothing. We have created a Caesarean environment and a
host of little Caesars has sprung up. What could be more natural?”

Mr. Scogan drank off what was left of his port and refilled the glass.

“At this very moment,” he went on, “the most frightful horrors are taking
place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed,
disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with
the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the
rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three
seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but
do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.
We feel sympathy, no doubt; we represent to ourselves imaginatively the
sufferings of nations and individuals and we deplore them. But, after
all, what are sympathy and imagination? Precious little, unless the
person for whom we feel sympathy happens to be closely involved in our
affections; and even then they don’t go very far. And a good thing too;
for if one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently
sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other
people, one would never have a moment’s peace of mind. A really
sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness.
But luckily, as I’ve already said, we aren’t a sympathetic race. At
the beginning of the war I used to think I really suffered, through
imagination and sympathy, with those who physically suffered. But after
a month or two I had to admit that, honestly, I didn’t. And yet I
think I have a more vivid imagination than most. One is always alone in
suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer,
but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.”

There was a pause. Henry Wimbush pushed back his chair.

“I think perhaps we ought to go and join the ladies,” he said.

“So do I,” said Ivor, jumping up with alacrity. He turned to Mr. Scogan.
“Fortunately,” he said, “we can share our pleasures. We are not always
condemned to be happy alone.”



CHAPTER XVII.

Ivor brought his hands down with a bang on to the final chord of his
rhapsody. There was just a hint in that triumphant harmony that the
seventh had been struck along with the octave by the thumb of the left
hand; but the general effect of splendid noise emerged clearly enough.
Small details matter little so long as the general effect is good. And,
besides, that hint of the seventh was decidedly modern. He turned round
in his seat and tossed the hair back out of his eyes.

“There,” he said. “That’s the best I can do for you, I’m afraid.”

Murmurs of applause and gratitude were heard, and Mary, her large china
eyes fixed on the performer, cried out aloud, “Wonderful!” and gasped
for new breath as though she were suffocating.

Nature and fortune had vied with one another in heaping on Ivor
Lombard all their choicest gifts. He had wealth and he was perfectly
independent. He was good looking, possessed an irresistible charm of
manner, and was the hero of more amorous successes than he could well
remember. His accomplishments were extraordinary for their number and
variety. He had a beautiful untrained tenor voice; he could improvise,
with a startling brilliance, rapidly and loudly, on the piano. He was a
good amateur medium and telepathist, and had a considerable first-hand
knowledge of the next world. He could write rhymed verses with an
extraordinary rapidity. For painting symbolical pictures he had a
dashing style, and if the drawing was sometimes a little weak, the
colour was always pyrotechnical. He excelled in amateur theatricals
and, when occasion offered, he could cook with genius. He resembled
Shakespeare in knowing little Latin and less Greek. For a mind like his,
education seemed supererogatory. Training would only have destroyed his
natural aptitudes.

“Let’s go out into the garden,” Ivor suggested. “It’s a wonderful
night.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Scogan, “but I for one prefer these still more
wonderful arm-chairs.” His pipe had begun to bubble oozily every time he
pulled at it. He was perfectly happy.

Henry Wimbush was also happy. He looked for a moment over his pince-nez
in Ivor’s direction and then, without saying anything, returned to
the grimy little sixteenth-century account books which were now his
favourite reading. He knew more about Sir Ferdinando’s household
expenses than about his own.

The outdoor party, enrolled under Ivor’s banner, consisted of Anne,
Mary, Denis, and, rather unexpectedly, Jenny. Outside it was warm and
dark; there was no moon. They walked up and down the terrace, and Ivor
sang a Neapolitan song: “Stretti, stretti”--close, close--with something
about the little Spanish girl to follow. The atmosphere began to
palpitate. Ivor put his arm round Anne’s waist, dropped his head
sideways onto her shoulder, and in that position walked on, singing as
he walked. It seemed the easiest, the most natural, thing in the world.
Denis wondered why he had never done it. He hated Ivor.

“Let’s go down to the pool,” said Ivor. He disengaged his embrace and
turned round to shepherd his little flock. They made their way along the
side of the house to the entrance of the yew-tree walk that led down to
the lower garden. Between the blank precipitous wall of the house and
the tall yew trees the path was a chasm of impenetrable gloom. Somewhere
there were steps down to the right, a gap in the yew hedge. Denis, who
headed the party, groped his way cautiously; in this darkness, one
had an irrational fear of yawning precipices, of horrible spiked
obstructions. Suddenly from behind him he heard a shrill, startled,
“Oh!” and then a sharp, dry concussion that might have been the sound
of a slap. After that, Jenny’s voice was heard pronouncing, “I am going
back to the house.” Her tone was decided, and even as she pronounced the
words she was melting away into the darkness. The incident, whatever it
had been, was closed. Denis resumed his forward groping. From somewhere
behind Ivor began to sing again, softly:


               “Phillis plus avare que tendre

               Ne gagnant rien à refuser,

               Un jour exigea à Silvandre

               Trente moutons pour un baiser.”

The melody drooped and climbed again with a kind of easy languor; the
warm darkness seemed to pulse like blood about them.


               “Le lendemain, nouvelle affaire:

               Pour le berger le troc fut bon...”

“Here are the steps,” cried Denis. He guided his companions over the
danger, and in a moment they had the turf of the yew-tree walk under
their feet. It was lighter here, or at least it was just perceptibly
less dark; for the yew walk was wider than the path that had led them
under the lea of the house. Looking up, they could see between the high
black hedges a strip of sky and a few stars.


               “Car il obtint de la bergere...”

Went on Ivor, and then interrupted himself to shout, “I’m going to run
down,” and he was off, full speed, down the invisible slope, singing
unevenly as he went:


               “Trente baisers pour un mouton.”

The others followed. Denis shambled in the rear, vainly exhorting
everyone to caution: the slope was steep, one might break one’s neck.
What was wrong with these people, he wondered? They had become like
young kittens after a dose of cat-nip. He himself felt a certain
kittenishness sporting within him; but it was, like all his emotions,
rather a theoretical feeling; it did not overmasteringly seek to express
itself in a practical demonstration of kittenishness.

“Be careful,” he shouted once more, and hardly were the words out of his
mouth when, thump! there was the sound of a heavy fall in front of
him, followed by the long “F-f-f-f-f” of a breath indrawn with pain and
afterwards by a very sincere, “Oo-ooh!” Denis was almost pleased; he had
told them so, the idiots, and they wouldn’t listen. He trotted down the
slope towards the unseen sufferer.

Mary came down the hill like a runaway steam-engine. It was tremendously
exciting, this blind rush through the dark; she felt she would never
stop. But the ground grew level beneath her feet, her speed insensibly
slackened, and suddenly she was caught by an extended arm and brought to
an abrupt halt.

“Well,” said Ivor as he tightened his embrace, “you’re caught now,
Anne.”

She made an effort to release herself. “It’s not Anne. It’s Mary.”

Ivor burst into a peal of amused laughter. “So it is!” he exclaimed. “I
seem to be making nothing but floaters this evening. I’ve already made
one with Jenny.” He laughed again, and there was something so jolly
about his laughter that Mary could not help laughing too. He did not
remove his encircling arm, and somehow it was all so amusing and natural
that Mary made no further attempt to escape from it. They walked along
by the side of the pool, interlaced. Mary was too short for him to be
able, with any comfort, to lay his head on her shoulder. He rubbed his
cheek, caressed and caressing, against the thick, sleek mass of her
hair. In a little while he began to sing again; the night trembled
amorously to the sound of his voice. When he had finished he kissed her.
Anne or Mary: Mary or Anne. It didn’t seem to make much difference which
it was. There were differences in detail, of course; but the general
effect was the same; and, after all, the general effect was the
important thing.

Denis made his way down the hill.

“Any damage done?” he called out.

“Is that you, Denis? I’ve hurt my ankle so--and my knee, and my hand.
I’m all in pieces.”

“My poor Anne,” he said. “But then,” he couldn’t help adding, “it was
silly to start running downhill in the dark.”

“Ass!” she retorted in a tone of tearful irritation; “of course it was.”

He sat down beside her on the grass, and found himself breathing the faint,
delicious atmosphere of perfume that she carried always with her.

“Light a match,” she commanded. “I want to look at my wounds.”

He felt in his pockets for the match-box. The light spurted and then
grew steady. Magically, a little universe had been created, a world of
colours and forms--Anne’s face, the shimmering orange of her dress, her
white, bare arms, a patch of green turf--and round about a darkness that
had become solid and utterly blind. Anne held out her hands; both were
green and earthy with her fall, and the left exhibited two or three red
abrasions.

“Not so bad,” she said. But Denis was terribly distressed, and his
emotion was intensified when, looking up at her face, he saw that the
trace of tears, involuntary tears of pain, lingered on her eyelashes.
He pulled out his handkerchief and began to wipe away the dirt from
the wounded hand. The match went out; it was not worth while to light
another. Anne allowed herself to be attended to, meekly and gratefully.
“Thank you,” she said, when he had finished cleaning and bandaging her
hand; and there was something in her tone that made him feel that she
had lost her superiority over him, that she was younger than he,
had become, suddenly, almost a child. He felt tremendously large and
protective. The feeling was so strong that instinctively he put his
arm about her. She drew closer, leaned against him, and so they sat in
silence. Then, from below, soft but wonderfully clear through the still
darkness, they heard the sound of Ivor’s singing. He was going on with
his half-finished song:


               “Le lendemain Phillis plus tendre,

               Ne voulant deplaire au berger,

               Fut trop heureuse de lui rendre

               Trente moutons pour un baiser.”

There was a rather prolonged pause. It was as though time were being
allowed for the giving and receiving of a few of those thirty kisses.
Then the voice sang on:


               “Le lendemain Phillis peu sage

               Aurait donne moutons et chien

               Pour un baiser que le volage

               À Lisette donnait pour rien.”

The last note died away into an uninterrupted silence.

“Are you better?” Denis whispered. “Are you comfortable like this?”

She nodded a Yes to both questions.

“Trente moutons pour un baiser.” The sheep, the woolly mutton--baa,
baa, baa...? Or the shepherd? Yes, decidedly, he felt himself to be
the shepherd now. He was the master, the protector. A wave of courage
swelled through him, warm as wine. He turned his head, and began to kiss
her face, at first rather randomly, then, with more precision, on the
mouth.

Anne averted her head; he kissed the ear, the smooth nape that this
movement presented him. “No,” she protested; “no, Denis.”

“Why not?”

“It spoils our friendship, and that was so jolly.”

“Bosh!” said Denis.

She tried to explain. “Can’t you see,” she said, “it isn’t...it isn’t
our stunt at all.” It was true. Somehow she had never thought of Denis
in the light of a man who might make love; she had never so much as
conceived the possibilities of an amorous relationship with him. He was
so absurdly young, so...so...she couldn’t find the adjective, but she
knew what she meant.

“Why isn’t it our stunt?” asked Denis. “And, by the way, that’s a
horrible and inappropriate expression.”

“Because it isn’t.”

“But if I say it is?”

“It makes no difference. I say it isn’t.”

“I shall make you say it is.”

“All right, Denis. But you must do it another time. I must go in and get
my ankle into hot water. It’s beginning to swell.”

Reasons of health could not be gainsaid. Denis got up reluctantly, and
helped his companion to her feet. She took a cautious step. “Ooh!” She
halted and leaned heavily on his arm.

“I’ll carry you,” Denis offered. He had never tried to carry a woman,
but on the cinema it always looked an easy piece of heroism.

“You couldn’t,” said Anne.

“Of course I can.” He felt larger and more protective than ever. “Put
your arms round my neck,” he ordered. She did so and, stooping, he
picked her up under the knees and lifted her from the ground. Good
heavens, what a weight! He took five staggering steps up the slope, then
almost lost his equilibrium, and had to deposit his burden suddenly,
with something of a bump.

Anne was shaking with laughter. “I said you couldn’t, my poor Denis.”

“I can,” said Denis, without conviction. “I’ll try again.”

“It’s perfectly sweet of you to offer, but I’d rather walk, thanks.” She
laid her hand on his shoulder and, thus supported, began to limp slowly
up the hill.

“My poor Denis!” she repeated, and laughed again. Humiliated, he was
silent. It seemed incredible that, only two minutes ago, he should
have been holding her in his embrace, kissing her. Incredible. She was
helpless then, a child. Now she had regained all her superiority; she
was once more the far-off being, desired and unassailable. Why had he
been such a fool as to suggest that carrying stunt? He reached the house
in a state of the profoundest depression.

He helped Anne upstairs, left her in the hands of a maid, and came down
again to the drawing-room. He was surprised to find them all sitting
just where he had left them. He had expected that, somehow, everything
would be quite different--it seemed such a prodigious time since he went
away. All silent and all damned, he reflected, as he looked at them. Mr.
Scogan’s pipe still wheezed; that was the only sound. Henry Wimbush was
still deep in his account books; he had just made the discovery that Sir
Ferdinando was in the habit of eating oysters the whole summer through,
regardless of the absence of the justifying R. Gombauld, in horn-rimmed
spectacles, was reading. Jenny was mysteriously scribbling in her red
notebook. And, seated in her favourite arm-chair at the corner of the
hearth, Priscilla was looking through a pile of drawings. One by one she
held them out at arm’s length and, throwing back her mountainous orange
head, looked long and attentively through half-closed eyelids. She wore
a pale sea-green dress; on the slope of her mauve-powdered decolletage
diamonds twinkled. An immensely long cigarette-holder projected at an
angle from her face. Diamonds were embedded in her high-piled
coiffure; they glittered every time she moved. It was a batch of Ivor’s
drawings--sketches of Spirit Life, made in the course of tranced tours
through the other world. On the back of each sheet descriptive titles
were written: “Portrait of an Angel, 15th March ‘20;” “Astral Beings
at Play, 3rd December ‘19;” “A Party of Souls on their Way to a Higher
Sphere, 21st May ‘21.” Before examining the drawing on the obverse of
each sheet, she turned it over to read the title. Try as she could--and
she tried hard--Priscilla had never seen a vision or succeeded in
establishing any communication with the Spirit World. She had to be
content with the reported experiences of others.

“What have you done with the rest of your party?” she asked, looking up
as Denis entered the room.

He explained. Anne had gone to bed, Ivor and Mary were still in the
garden. He selected a book and a comfortable chair, and tried, as far as
the disturbed state of his mind would permit him, to compose himself
for an evening’s reading. The lamplight was utterly serene; there was no
movement save the stir of Priscilla among her papers. All silent and all
damned, Denis repeated to himself, all silent and all damned...

It was nearly an hour later when Ivor and Mary made their appearance.

“We waited to see the moon rise,” said Ivor.

“It was gibbous, you know,” Mary explained, very technical and
scientific.

“It was so beautiful down in the garden! The trees, the scent of the
flowers, the stars...” Ivor waved his arms. “And when the moon came up,
it was really too much. It made me burst into tears.” He sat down at the
piano and opened the lid.

“There were a great many meteorites,” said Mary to anyone who would
listen. “The earth must just be coming into the summer shower of them.
In July and August...”

But Ivor had already begun to strike the keys. He played the garden,
the stars, the scent of flowers, the rising moon. He even put in a
nightingale that was not there. Mary looked on and listened with parted
lips. The others pursued their occupations, without appearing to be
seriously disturbed. On this very July day, exactly three hundred and
fifty years ago, Sir Ferdinando had eaten seven dozen oysters. The
discovery of this fact gave Henry Wimbush a peculiar pleasure. He had
a natural piety which made him delight in the celebration of memorial
feasts. The three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the seven dozen
oysters...He wished he had known before dinner; he would have ordered
champagne.

On her way to bed Mary paid a call. The light was out in Anne’s room,
but she was not yet asleep.

“Why didn’t you come down to the garden with us?” Mary asked.

“I fell down and twisted my ankle. Denis helped me home.”

Mary was full of sympathy. Inwardly, too, she was relieved to find
Anne’s non-appearance so simply accounted for. She had been vaguely
suspicious, down there in the garden--suspicious of what, she hardly
knew; but there had seemed to be something a little louche in the way
she had suddenly found herself alone with Ivor. Not that she minded, of
course; far from it. But she didn’t like the idea that perhaps she was
the victim of a put-up job.

“I do hope you’ll be better to-morrow,” she said, and she commiserated
with Anne on all she had missed--the garden, the stars, the scent of
flowers, the meteorites through whose summer shower the earth was now
passing, the rising moon and its gibbosity. And then they had had such
interesting conversation. What about? About almost everything. Nature,
art, science, poetry, the stars, spiritualism, the relations of the
sexes, music, religion. Ivor, she thought, had an interesting mind.

The two young ladies parted affectionately.



CHAPTER XVIII.

The nearest Roman Catholic church was upwards of twenty miles away.
Ivor, who was punctilious in his devotions, came down early to breakfast
and had his car at the door, ready to start, by a quarter to ten. It was
a smart, expensive-looking machine, enamelled a pure lemon yellow and
upholstered in emerald green leather. There were two seats--three if you
squeezed tightly enough--and their occupants were protected from
wind, dust, and weather by a glazed sedan that rose, an elegant
eighteenth-century hump, from the midst of the body of the car.

Mary had never been to a Roman Catholic service, thought it would be an
interesting experience, and, when the car moved off through the great
gates of the courtyard, she was occupying the spare seat in the sedan.
The sea-lion horn roared, faintlier, faintlier, and they were gone.

In the parish church of Crome Mr. Bodiham preached on 1 Kings vi. 18:
“And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops”--a sermon of
immediately local interest. For the past two years the problem of the
War Memorial had exercised the minds of all those in Crome who had
enough leisure, or mental energy, or party spirit to think of such
things. Henry Wimbush was all for a library--a library of local
literature, stocked with county histories, old maps of the district,
monographs on the local antiquities, dialect dictionaries, handbooks
of the local geology and natural history. He liked to think of the
villagers, inspired by such reading, making up parties of a Sunday
afternoon to look for fossils and flint arrow-heads. The villagers
themselves favoured the idea of a memorial reservoir and water supply.
But the busiest and most articulate party followed Mr. Bodiham in
demanding something religious in character--a second lich-gate, for
example, a stained-glass window, a monument of marble, or, if possible,
all three. So far, however, nothing had been done, partly because the
memorial committee had never been able to agree, partly for the more
cogent reason that too little money had been subscribed to carry out any
of the proposed schemes. Every three or four months Mr. Bodiham preached
a sermon on the subject. His last had been delivered in March; it was
high time that his congregation had a fresh reminder.

“And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops.”

Mr. Bodiham touched lightly on Solomon’s temple. From thence he passed
to temples and churches in general. What were the characteristics of
these buildings dedicated to God? Obviously, the fact of their, from
a human point of view, complete uselessness. They were unpractical
buildings “carved with knops.” Solomon might have built a
library--indeed, what could be more to the taste of the world’s wisest
man? He might have dug a reservoir--what more useful in a parched city
like Jerusalem? He did neither; he built a house all carved with knops,
useless and unpractical. Why? Because he was dedicating the work to God.
There had been much talk in Crome about the proposed War Memorial. A
War Memorial was, in its very nature, a work dedicated to God. It was a
token of thankfulness that the first stage in the culminating world-war
had been crowned by the triumph of righteousness; it was at the same
time a visibly embodied supplication that God might not long delay the
Advent which alone could bring the final peace. A library, a reservoir?
Mr. Bodiham scornfully and indignantly condemned the idea. These were
works dedicated to man, not to God. As a War Memorial they were totally
unsuitable. A lich-gate had been suggested. This was an object which
answered perfectly to the definition of a War Memorial: a useless work
dedicated to God and carved with knops. One lich-gate, it was true,
already existed. But nothing would be easier than to make a second
entrance into the churchyard; and a second entrance would need a second
gate. Other suggestions had been made. Stained-glass windows, a monument
of marble. Both these were admirable, especially the latter. It was high
time that the War Memorial was erected. It might soon be too late.
At any moment, like a thief in the night, God might come. Meanwhile a
difficulty stood in the way. Funds were inadequate. All should subscribe
according to their means. Those who had lost relations in the war might
reasonably be expected to subscribe a sum equal to that which they would
have had to pay in funeral expenses if the relative had died while at
home. Further delay was disastrous. The War Memorial must be built at
once. He appealed to the patriotism and the Christian sentiments of all
his hearers.

Henry Wimbush walked home thinking of the books he would present to the
War Memorial Library, if ever it came into existence. He took the path
through the fields; it was pleasanter than the road. At the first
stile a group of village boys, loutish young fellows all dressed in the
hideous ill-fitting black which makes a funeral of every English Sunday
and holiday, were assembled, drearily guffawing as they smoked their
cigarettes. They made way for Henry Wimbush, touching their caps as he
passed. He returned their salute; his bowler and face were one in their
unruffled gravity.

In Sir Ferdinando’s time, he reflected, in the time of his son, Sir
Julius, these young men would have had their Sunday diversions even at
Crome, remote and rustic Crome. There would have been archery, skittles,
dancing--social amusements in which they would have partaken as members
of a conscious community. Now they had nothing, nothing except Mr.
Bodiham’s forbidding Boys’ Club and the rare dances and concerts
organised by himself. Boredom or the urban pleasures of the county
metropolis were the alternatives that presented themselves to these poor
youths. Country pleasures were no more; they had been stamped out by the
Puritans.

In Manningham’s Diary for 1600 there was a queer passage, he remembered,
a very queer passage. Certain magistrates in Berkshire, Puritan
magistrates, had had wind of a scandal. One moonlit summer night they
had ridden out with their posse and there, among the hills, they had
come upon a company of men and women, dancing, stark naked, among the
sheepcotes. The magistrates and their men had ridden their horses into
the crowd. How self-conscious the poor people must suddenly have felt,
how helpless without their clothes against armed and booted horsemen!
The dancers were arrested, whipped, gaoled, set in the stocks; the
moonlight dance is never danced again. What old, earthy, Panic rite came
to extinction here? he wondered. Who knows?--perhaps their ancestors had
danced like this in the moonlight ages before Adam and Eve were so much
as thought of. He liked to think so. And now it was no more. These weary
young men, if they wanted to dance, would have to bicycle six miles to
the town. The country was desolate, without life of its own, without
indigenous pleasures. The pious magistrates had snuffed out for ever a
little happy flame that had burned from the beginning of time.


               “And as on Tullia’s tomb one lamp burned clear,

               Unchanged for fifteen hundred year...”

He repeated the lines to himself, and was desolated to think of all the
murdered past.



CHAPTER XIX.

Henry Wimbush’s long cigar burned aromatically. The “History of Crome”
 lay on his knee; slowly he turned over the pages.

“I can’t decide what episode to read you to-night,” he said
thoughtfully. “Sir Ferdinando’s voyages are not without interest. Then,
of course, there’s his son, Sir Julius. It was he who suffered from the
delusion that his perspiration engendered flies; it drove him finally to
suicide. Or there’s Sir Cyprian.” He turned the pages more rapidly. “Or
Sir Henry. Or Sir George...No, I’m inclined to think I won’t read about
any of these.”

“But you must read something,” insisted Mr. Scogan, taking his pipe out
of his mouth.

“I think I shall read about my grandfather,” said Henry Wimbush, “and
the events that led up to his marriage with the eldest daughter of the
last Sir Ferdinando.”

“Good,” said Mr. Scogan. “We are listening.”

“Before I begin reading,” said Henry Wimbush, looking up from the
book and taking off the pince-nez which he had just fitted to his
nose--“before I begin, I must say a few preliminary words about Sir
Ferdinando, the last of the Lapiths. At the death of the virtuous and
unfortunate Sir Hercules, Ferdinando found himself in possession of the
family fortune, not a little increased by his father’s temperance and
thrift; he applied himself forthwith to the task of spending it, which
he did in an ample and jovial fashion. By the time he was forty he had
eaten and, above all, drunk and loved away about half his capital, and
would infallibly have soon got rid of the rest in the same manner, if
he had not had the good fortune to become so madly enamoured of the
Rector’s daughter as to make a proposal of marriage. The young lady
accepted him, and in less than a year had become the absolute mistress
of Crome and her husband. An extraordinary reformation made itself
apparent in Sir Ferdinando’s character. He grew regular and economical
in his habits; he even became temperate, rarely drinking more than
a bottle and a half of port at a sitting. The waning fortune of the
Lapiths began once more to wax, and that in despite of the hard times
(for Sir Ferdinando married in 1809 in the height of the Napoleonic
Wars). A prosperous and dignified old age, cheered by the spectacle of
his children’s growth and happiness--for Lady Lapith had already borne
him three daughters, and there seemed no good reason why she should not
bear many more of them, and sons as well--a patriarchal decline into the
family vault, seemed now to be Sir Ferdinando’s enviable destiny. But
Providence willed otherwise. To Napoleon, cause already of such infinite
mischief, was due, though perhaps indirectly, the untimely and violent
death which put a period to this reformed existence.

“Sir Ferdinando, who was above all things a patriot, had adopted, from
the earliest days of the conflict with the French, his own peculiar
method of celebrating our victories. When the happy news reached London,
it was his custom to purchase immediately a large store of liquor and,
taking a place on whichever of the outgoing coaches he happened to light
on first, to drive through the country proclaiming the good news to all
he met on the road and dispensing it, along with the liquor, at every
stopping-place to all who cared to listen or drink. Thus, after the
Nile, he had driven as far as Edinburgh; and later, when the coaches,
wreathed with laurel for triumph, with cypress for mourning, were
setting out with the news of Nelson’s victory and death, he sat through
all a chilly October night on the box of the Norwich ‘Meteor’ with a
nautical keg of rum on his knees and two cases of old brandy under the
seat. This genial custom was one of the many habits which he abandoned
on his marriage. The victories in the Peninsula, the retreat from
Moscow, Leipzig, and the abdication of the tyrant all went uncelebrated.
It so happened, however, that in the summer of 1815 Sir Ferdinando was
staying for a few weeks in the capital. There had been a succession of
anxious, doubtful days; then came the glorious news of Waterloo. It was
too much for Sir Ferdina

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