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+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley*
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+Crome Yellow
+
+by Aldous Huxley
+
+December, 1999  [Etext #1999]
+
+
+*The Project Gutenberg Etext of Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley*
+******This file should be named crmyl10.txt or crmyl10.zip*****
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+
+
+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-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 of 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 facade.  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 a refuser,
+Un jour exigea a 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 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
+A Lisette donnait pour rien."
+
+The last note died away into an uninterrupted silence.
+
+"Are you better?" Denis whispered.  "Are you comfortable like
+this?"
+
+She nodded a Yes to both questions.
+
+"Trente moutons pour un baiser."  The sheep, the woolly mutton--
+baa, baa, baa...?  Or the shepherd?  Yes, decidedly, he felt
+himself to be the shepherd now.  He was the master, the
+protector.  A wave of courage swelled through him, warm as wine.
+He turned his head, and began to kiss her face, at first rather
+randomly, then, with more precision, on the mouth.
+
+Anne averted her head; he kissed the ear, the smooth nape that
+this movement presented him.  "No," she protested; "no, Denis."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"It spoils our friendship, and that was so jolly."
+
+"Bosh!" said Denis.
+
+She tried to explain.  "Can't you see," she said, "it isn't...it
+isn't our stunt at all."  It was true.  Somehow she had never
+thought of Denis in the light of a man who might make love; she
+had never so much as conceived the possibilities of an amorous
+relationship with him.  He was so absurdly young, so...so...she
+couldn't find the adjective, but she knew what she meant.
+
+"Why isn't it our stunt?" asked Denis.  "And, by the way, that's
+a horrible and inappropriate expression."
+
+"Because it isn't."
+
+"But if I say it is?"
+
+"It makes no difference.  I say it isn't."
+
+"I shall make you say it is."
+
+"All right, Denis.  But you must do it another time.  I must go
+in and get my ankle into hot water.  It's beginning to swell."
+
+Reasons of health could not be gainsaid.  Denis got up
+reluctantly, and helped his companion to her feet.  She took a
+cautious step.  "Ooh!"  She halted and leaned heavily on his arm.
+
+"I'll carry you," Denis offered.  He had never tried to carry a
+woman, but on the cinema it always looked an easy piece of
+heroism.
+
+"You couldn't," said Anne.
+
+"Of course I can."  He felt larger and more protective than ever.
+"Put your arms round my neck," he ordered.  She did so and,
+stooping, he picked her up under the knees and lifted her from
+the ground.  Good heavens, what a weight!  He took five
+staggering steps up the slope, then almost lost his equilibrium,
+and had to deposit his burden suddenly, with something of a bump.
+
+Anne was shaking with laughter.  "I said You couldn't, my poor
+Denis."
+
+"I can," said Denis, without conviction.  "I'll try again."
+
+"It's perfectly sweet of you to offer, but I'd rather walk,
+thanks."  She laid her hand on his shoulder and, thus supported,
+began to limp slowly up the hill.
+
+"My poor Denis!" she repeated, and laughed again.  Humiliated, he
+was silent.  It seemed incredible that, only two minutes ago, he
+should have been holding her in his embrace, kissing her.
+Incredible.  She was helpless then, a child.  Now she had
+regained all her superiority; she was once more the far-off
+being, desired and unassailable.  Why had he been such a fool as
+to suggest that carrying stunt?  He reached the house in a state
+of the profoundest depression.
+
+He helped Anne upstairs, left her in the hands of a maid, and
+came down again to the drawing-room.  He was surprised to find
+them all sitting just where he had left them.  He had expected
+that, somehow, everything would be quite different--it seemed
+such a prodigious time since he went away.  All silent and all
+damned, he reflected, as he looked at them.  Mr. Scogan's pipe
+still wheezed; that was the only sound.  Henry Wimbush was still
+deep in his account books; he had just made the discovery that
+Sir Ferdinando was in the habit of eating oysters the whole
+summer through, regardless of the absence of the justifying R.
+Gombauld, in horn-rimmed spectacles, was reading.  Jenny was
+mysteriously scribbling in her red notebook.  And, seated in her
+favourite arm-chair at the corner of the hearth, Priscilla was
+looking through a pile of drawings.  One by one she held them out
+at arm's length and, throwing back her mountainous orange head,
+looked long and attentively through half-closed eyelids.  She
+wore a pale sea-green dress; on the slope of her mauve-powdered
+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 their begin, I must say a few preliminary words
+about Sir Ferdinando, the last of the Lapiths.  At the death of
+the virtuous and unfortunate Sir Hercules, Ferdinando found
+himself in possession of the family fortune, not a little
+increased by his father's temperance and thrift; he applied
+himself forthwith to the task of spending it, which he did in an
+ample and jovial fashion.  By the time he was forty he had eaten
+and, above all, drunk and loved away about half his capital, and
+would infallibly have soon got rid of the rest in the same
+manner, if he had not had the good fortune to become so madly
+enamoured of the Rector's daughter as to make a proposal of
+marriage.  The young lady accepted him, and in less than a year
+had become the absolute mistress of Crome and her husband.  An
+extraordinary reformation made itself apparent in Sir
+Ferdinando's character.  He grew regular and economical in his
+habits; he even became temperate, rarely drinking more than a
+bottle and a half of port at a sitting.  The waning fortune of
+the Lapiths began once more to wax, and that in despite of the
+hard times (for Sir Ferdinando married in 1809 in the height of
+the Napoleonic Wars).  A prosperous and dignified old age,
+cheered by the spectacle of his children's growth and happiness--
+for Lady Lapith had already borne him three daughters, and there
+seemed no good reason why she should not bear many more of them,
+and sons as well--a patriarchal decline into the family vault,
+seemed now to be Sir Ferdinando's enviable destiny.  But
+Providence willed otherwise.  To Napoleon, cause already of such
+infinite mischief, was due, though perhaps indirectly, the
+untimely and violent death which put a period to this reformed
+existence.
+
+"Sir Ferdinando, who was above all things a patriot, had adopted,
+from the earliest days of the conflict with the French, his own
+peculiar method of celebrating our victories.  When the happy
+news reached London, it was his custom to purchase immediately a
+large store of liquor and, taking a place on whichever of the
+outgoing coaches he happened to light on first, to drive through
+the country proclaiming the good news to all he met on the road
+and dispensing it, along with the liquor, at every stopping-place
+to all who cared to listen or drink.  Thus, after the Nile, he
+had driven as far as Edinburgh; and later, when the coaches,
+wreathed with laurel for triumph, with cypress for mourning, were
+setting out with the news of Nelson's victory and death, he sat
+through all a chilly October night on the box of the Norwich
+"Meteor" with a nautical keg of rum on his knees and two cases of
+old brandy under the seat.  This genial custom was one of the
+many habits which he abandoned on his marriage.  The victories in
+the Peninsula, the retreat from Moscow, Leipzig, and the
+abdication of the tyrant all went uncelebrated.  It so happened,
+however, that in the summer of 1815 Sir Ferdinando was staying
+for a few weeks in the capital.  There had been a succession of
+anxious, doubtful days; then came the glorious news of Waterloo.
+It was too much for Sir Ferdinando; his joyous youth awoke again
+within him.  He hurried to his wine merchant and bought a dozen
+bottles of 1760 brandy.  The Bath coach was on the point of
+starting; he bribed his way on to the box and, seated in glory
+beside the driver, proclaimed aloud the downfall of the Corsican
+bandit and passed about the warm liquid joy.  They clattered
+through Uxbridge, Slough, Maidenhead.  Sleeping Reading was
+awakened by the great news.  At Didcot one of the ostlers was so
+much overcome by patriotic emotions and the 1760 brandy that he
+found it impossible to do up the buckles of the harness.  The
+night began to grow chilly, and Sir Ferdinando found that it was
+not enough to take a nip at every stage:  to keep up his vital
+warmth he was compelled to drink between the stages as well.
+They were approaching Swindon.  The coach was travelling at a
+dizzy speed--six miles in the last half-hour--when, without
+having manifested the slightest premonitory symptom of
+unsteadiness, Sir Ferdinando suddenly toppled sideways off his
+seat and fell,  head foremost, into the road.  An unpleasant jolt
+awakened the slumbering passengers.  The coach was brought to a
+standstill; the guard ran back with a light.  He found Sir
+Ferdinando still alive, but unconscious; blood was oozing from
+his mouth.  The back wheels of the coach had passed over his
+body, breaking most of his ribs and both arms.  His skull was
+fractured in two places.  They picked him up, but he was dead
+before they reached the next stage.  So perished Sir Ferdinando,
+a victim to his own patriotism.  Lady Lapith did not marry again,
+but determined to devote the rest of her life to the well-being
+of her three children--Georgiana, now five years old, and
+Emmeline and Caroline, twins of two."
+
+Henry Wimbush paused, and once more put on his pince-nez.  "So
+much by way of introduction," he said.  "Now I can begin to read
+about my grandfather."
+
+"One moment," said Mr. Scogan, "till I've refilled my pipe."
+
+Mr. Wimbush waited.  Seated apart in a corner of the room, Ivor
+was showing Mary his sketches of Spirit Life.  They spoke
+together in whispers.
+
+Mr. Scogan had lighted his pipe again.  "Fire away," he said.
+
+Henry Wimbush fired away.
+
+"It was in the spring of 1833 that my grandfather, George
+Wimbush, first made the acquaintance of the 'three lovely
+Lapiths,' as they were always called.  He was then a young man of
+twenty-two, with curly yellow hair and a smooth pink face that
+was the mirror of his youthful and ingenuous mind.  He had been
+educated at Harrow and Christ Church, he enjoyed hunting and all
+other field sports, and, though his circumstances were
+comfortable to the verge of affluence, his pleasures were
+temperate and innocent.  His father, an East Indian merchant, had
+destined him for a political career, and had gone to considerable
+expense in acquiring a pleasant little Cornish borough as a
+twenty-first birthday gift for his son.  He was justly indignant
+when, on the very eve of George's majority, the Reform Bill of
+1832 swept the borough out of existence.  The inauguration of
+George's political career had to be postponed.  At the time he
+got to know the lovely Lapiths he was waiting; he was not at all
+impatient.
+
+"The lovely Lapiths did not fail to impress him.  Georgiana, the
+eldest, with her black ringlets, her flashing eyes, her noble
+aquiline profile, her swan-like neck, and sloping shoulders, was
+orientally dazzling; and the twins, with their delicately turned-
+up noses, their blue eyes, and chestnut hair, were an identical
+pair of ravishingly English charmers.
+
+"Their conversation at this first meeting proved, however, to be
+so forbidding that, but for the invincible attraction exercised
+by their beauty, George would never have had the courage to
+follow up the acquaintance.  The twins, looking up their noses at
+him with an air of languid superiority, asked him what he thought
+of the latest French poetry and whether he liked the "Indiana" of
+George Sand.  But what was almost worse was the question with
+which Georgiana opened her conversation with him.  'In music,'
+she asked, leaning forward and fixing him with her large dark
+eyes, 'are you a classicist or a transcendentalist?'  George did
+not lose his presence of mind.  He had enough appreciation of
+music to know that he hated anything classical, and so, with a
+promptitude which did him credit, he replied, 'I am a
+transcendentalist.'  Georgiana smiled bewitchingly.  'I am glad,'
+she said; 'so am I.  You went to hear Paganini last week, of
+course.  "The prayer of Moses"--ah!'  She closed her eyes.  'Do
+you know anything more transcendental than that?'  'No,' said
+George, 'I don't.'  He hesitated, was about to go on speaking,
+and then decided that after all it would be wiser not to say--
+what was in fact true--that he had enjoyed above all Paganini's
+Farmyard Imitations.  The man had made his fiddle bray like an
+ass, cluck like a hen, grunt, squeal, bark, neigh, quack, bellow,
+and growl; that last item, in George's estimation, had almost
+compensated for the tediousness of the rest of the concert.  He
+smiled with pleasure at the thought of it.  Yes, decidedly, he
+was no classicist in music; he was a thoroughgoing
+transcendentalist.
+
+"George followed up this first introduction by paying a call on
+the young ladies and their mother, who occupied, during the
+season, a small but elegant house in the neighbourhood of
+Berkeley Square.  Lady Lapith made a few discreet inquiries, and
+having found that George's financial position, character, and
+family were all passably good, she asked him to dine.  She hoped
+and expected that her daughters would all marry into the peerage;
+but, being a prudent woman, she knew it was advisable to prepare
+for all contingencies.  George Wimbush, she thought, would make
+an excellent second string for one of the twins.
+
+"At this first dinner, George's partner was Emmeline.  They
+talked of Nature.  Emmeline protested that to her high mountains
+were a feeling and the hum of human cities torture.  George
+agreed that the country was very agreeable, but held that London
+during the season also had its charms.  He noticed with surprise
+and a certain solicitous distress that Miss Emmeline's appetite
+was poor, that it didn't, in fact, exist.  Two spoonfuls of soup,
+a morsel of fish, no bird, no meat, and three grapes--that was
+her whole dinner.  He looked from time to time at her two
+sisters; Georgiana and Caroline seemed to be quite as abstemious.
+They waved away whatever was offered them with an expression of
+delicate disgust, shutting their eyes and averting their faces
+from the proffered dish, as though the lemon sole, the duck, the
+loin of veal, the trifle, were objects revolting to the sight and
+smell.  George, who thought the dinner capital, ventured to
+comment on the sisters' lack of appetite.
+
+"'Pray, don't talk to me of eating,' said Emmeline, drooping like
+a sensitive plant.  'We find it so coarse, so unspiritual, my
+sisters and I.  One can't think of one's soul while one is
+eating.'
+
+"George agreed; one couldn't.  'But one must live,' he said.
+
+"'Alas!' Emmeline sighed.  'One must.  Death is very beautiful,
+don't you think?'  She broke a corner off a piece of toast and
+began to nibble at it languidly.  'But since, as you say, one
+must live...'  She made a little gesture of resignation.
+'Luckily a very little suffices to keep one alive.'  She put down
+her corner of toast half eaten.
+
+"George regarded her with some surprise.  She was pale, but she
+looked extraordinarily healthy, he thought; so did her sisters.
+Perhaps if you were really spiritual you needed less food.  He,
+clearly, was not spiritual.
+
+"After this he saw them frequently.  They all liked him, from
+Lady Lapith downwards.  True, he was not very romantic or
+poetical; but he was such a pleasant, unpretentious, kind-hearted
+young man, that one couldn't help liking him.  For his part, he
+thought them wonderful, wonderful, especially Georgiana.  He
+enveloped them all in a warm, protective affection.  For they
+needed protection; they were altogether too frail, too spiritual
+for this world.  They never ate, they were always pale, they
+often complained of fever, they talked much and lovingly of
+death, they frequently swooned.  Georgiana was the most ethereal
+of all; of the three she ate least, swooned most often, talked
+most of death, and was the palest--with a pallor that was so
+startling as to appear positively artificial.  At any moment, it
+seemed, she might loose her precarious hold on this material
+world and become all spirit.  To George the thought was a
+continual agony.  If she were to die...
+
+"She contrived, however, to live through the season, and that in
+spite of the numerous balls, routs, and other parties of pleasure
+which, in company with the rest of the lovely trio, she never
+failed to attend.  In the middle of July the whole household
+moved down to the country.  George was invited to spend the month
+of August at Crome.
+
+"The house-party was distinguished; in the list of visitors
+figured the names of two marriageable young men of title.  George
+had hoped that country air, repose, and natural surroundings
+might have restored to the three sisters their appetites and the
+roses of their cheeks.  He was mistaken.  For dinner, the first
+evening, Georgiana ate only an olive, two or three salted
+almonds, and half a peach.  She was as pale as ever.  During the
+meal she spoke of love.
+
+"'True love,' she said, 'being infinite and eternal, can only be
+consummated in eternity.  Indiana and Sir Rodolphe celebrated the
+mystic wedding of their souls by jumping into Niagara.  Love is
+incompatible with life.  The wish of two people who truly love
+one another is not to live together but to die together.'
+
+"'Come, come, my dear,' said Lady Lapith, stout and practical.
+'What would become of the next generation, pray, if all the world
+acted on your principles?'
+
+"'Mamma!...'  Georgiana protested, and dropped her eyes.
+
+"'In my young days,' Lady Lapith went on, 'I should have been
+laughed out of countenance if I'd said a thing like that.  But
+then in my young days souls weren't as fashionable as they are
+now and we didn't think death was at all poetical.  It was just
+unpleasant.'
+
+"'Mamma!...' Emmeline and Caroline implored in unison.
+
+"'In my young days--' Lady Lapith was launched into her subject;
+nothing, it seemed, could stop her now.  'In my young days, if
+you didn't eat, people told you you needed a dose of rhubarb.
+Nowadays...'
+
+"There was a cry; Georgiana had swooned sideways on to Lord
+Timpany's shoulder.  It was a desperate expedient; but it was
+successful.  Lady Lapith was stopped.
+
+"The days passed in an uneventful round of pleasures.  Of all the
+gay party George alone was unhappy.  Lord Timpany was paying his
+court to Georgiana, and it was clear that he was not unfavourably
+received.  George looked on, and his soul was a hell of jealousy
+and despair.  The boisterous company of the young men became
+intolerable to him; he shrank from them, seeking gloom and
+solitude.  One morning, having broken away from them on some
+vague pretext, he returned to the house alone.  The young men
+were bathing in the pool below; their cries and laughter floated
+up to him, making the quiet house seem lonelier and more silent.
+The lovely sisters and their mamma still kept their chambers;
+they did not customarily make their appearance till luncheon, so
+that the male guests had the morning to themselves.  George sat
+down in the hall and abandoned himself to thought.
+
+"At any moment she might die; at any moment she might become Lady
+Timpany.  It was terrible, terrible.  If she died, then he would
+die too; he would go to seek her beyond the grave.  If she became
+Lady Timpany...ah, then!  The solution of the problem would not
+be so simple.  If she became Lady Timpany:  it was a horrible
+thought.  But then suppose she were in love with Timpany--though
+it seemed incredible that anyone could be in love with Timpany--
+suppose her life depended on Timpany, suppose she couldn't live
+without him?  He was fumbling his way along this clueless
+labyrinth of suppositions when the clock struck twelve.  On the
+last stroke, like an automaton released by the turning clockwork,
+a little maid, holding a large covered tray, popped out of the
+door that led from the kitchen regions into the hall.  From his
+deep arm-chair George watched her (himself, it was evident,
+unobserved) with an idle curiosity.  She pattered across the room
+and came to a halt in front of what seemed a blank expense of
+panelling.  She reached out her hand and, to George's extreme
+astonishment, a little door swung open, revealing the foot of a
+winding staircase.  Turning sideways in order to get her tray
+through the narrow opening, the little maid darted in with a
+rapid crab-like motion.  The door closed behind her with a click.
+A minute later it opened again and the maid, without her tray,
+hurried back across the hall and disappeared in the direction of
+the kitchen.  George tried to recompose his thoughts, but an
+invincible curiosity drew his mind towards the hidden door, the
+staircase, the little maid.  It was in vain he told himself that
+the matter was none of his business, that to explore the secrets
+of that surprising door, that mysterious staircase within, would
+be a piece of unforgivable rudeness and indiscretion.  It was in
+vain; for five minutes he struggled heroically with his
+curiosity, but at the end of that time he found himself standing
+in front of the innocent sheet of panelling through which the
+little maid had disappeared.  A glance sufficed to show him the
+position of the secret door--secret, he perceived, only to those
+who looked with a careless eye.  It was just an ordinary door let
+in flush with the panelling.  No latch nor handle betrayed its
+position, but an unobtrusive catch sunk in the wood invited the
+thumb.  George was astonished that he had not noticed it before;
+now he had seen it, it was so obvious, almost as obvious as the
+cupboard door in the library with its lines of imitation shelves
+and its dummy books.  He pulled back the catch and peeped inside.
+The staircase, of which the degrees were made not of stone but of
+blocks of ancient oak, wound up and out of sight.  A slit-like
+window admitted the daylight; he was at the foot of the central
+tower, and the little window looked out over the terrace; they
+were still shouting and splashing in the pool below.
+
+"George closed the door and went back to his seat.  But his
+curiosity was not satisfied.  Indeed, this partial satisfaction
+had but whetted its appetite.  Where did the staircase lead?
+What was the errand of the little maid?  It was no business of
+his, he kept repeating--no business of his.  He tried to read,
+but his attention wandered.  A quarter-past twelve sounded on the
+harmonious clock.  Suddenly determined, George rose, crossed the
+room, opened the hidden door, and began to ascend the stairs.  He
+passed the first window, corkscrewed round, and came to another.
+He paused for a moment to look out; his heart beat uncomfortably,
+as though he were affronting some unknown danger.  What he was
+doing, he told himself, was extremely ungentlemanly, horribly
+underbred.  He tiptoed onward and upward.  One turn more, then
+half a turn, and a door confronted him.  He halted before it,
+listened; he could hear no sound.  Putting his eye to the
+keyhole, he saw nothing but a stretch of white sunlit wall.
+Emboldened, he turned the handle and stepped across the
+threshold.  There he halted, petrified by what he saw, mutely
+gaping.
+
+"In the middle of a pleasantly sunny little room--'it is now
+Priscilla's boudoir,' Mr. Wimbush remarked parenthetically--stood
+a small circular table of mahogany.  Crystal, porcelain, and
+silver,--all the shining apparatus of an elegant meal--were
+mirrored in its polished depths.  The carcase of a cold chicken,
+a bowl of fruit, a great ham, deeply gashed to its heart of
+tenderest white and pink, the brown cannon ball of a cold plum-
+pudding, a slender Hock bottle, and a decanter of claret jostled
+one another for a place on this festive board.  And round the
+table sat the three sisters, the three lovely Lapiths--eating!
+
+"At George's sudden entrance they had all looked towards the
+door, and now they sat, petrified by the same astonishment which
+kept George fixed and staring.  Georgiana, who sat immediately
+facing the door, gazed at him with dark, enormous eyes.  Between
+the thumb and forefinger of her right hand she was holding a
+drumstick of the dismembered chicken; her little finger,
+elegantly crooked, stood apart from the rest of her hand.  Her
+mouth was open, but the drumstick had never reached its
+destination; it remained, suspended, frozen, in mid-air.  The
+other two sisters had turned round to look at the intruder.
+Caroline still grasped her knife and fork; Emmeline's fingers
+were round the stem of her claret glass.  For what seemed a very
+long time, George and the three sisters stared at one another in
+silence.  They were a group of statues.  Then suddenly there was
+movement.  Georgiana dropped her chicken bone, Caroline's knife
+and fork clattered on her plate.  The movement propagated itself,
+grew more decisive; Emmeline sprang to her feet, uttering a cry.
+The wave of panic reached George; he turned and, mumbling
+something unintelligible as he went, rushed out of the room and
+down the winding stairs.  He came to a standstill in the hall,
+and there, all by himself in the quiet house, he began to laugh.
+
+"At luncheon it was noticed that the sisters ate a little more
+than usual.  Georgiana toyed with some French beans and a
+spoonful of calves'-foot jelly.  'I feel a little stronger to-
+day,' she said to Lord Timpany, when he congratulated her on this
+increase of appetite; 'a little more material,' she added, with a
+nervous laugh.  Looking up, she caught George's eye; a blush
+suffused her cheeks and she looked hastily away.
+
+"In the garden that afternoon they found themselves for a moment
+alone.
+
+"You won't tell anyone, George?  Promise you won't tell anyone,'
+she implored.  'It would make us look so ridiculous.  And
+besides, eating IS unspiritual, isn't it?  Say you won't tell
+anyone.'
+
+"'I will,' said George brutally.  'I'll tell everyone, unless...'
+
+"'It's blackmail.'
+
+"'I don't care, said George.  'I'll give you twenty-four hours to
+decide.'
+
+"Lady Lapith was disappointed, of course; she had hoped for
+better things--for Timpany and a coronet.  But George, after all,
+wasn't so bad.  They were married at the New Year.
+
+"My poor grandfather!" Mr. Wimbush added, as he closed his book
+and put away his pince-nez.  "Whenever I read in the papers about
+oppressed nationalities, I think of him."  He relighted his
+cigar.  "It was a maternal government, highly centralised, and
+there were no representative institutions."
+
+Henry Wimbush ceased speaking.  In the silence that ensued Ivor's
+whispered commentary on the spirit sketches once more became
+audible.  Priscilla, who had been dozing, suddenly woke up.
+
+"What?" she said in the startled tones of one newly returned to
+consciousness; "what?"
+
+Jenny caught the words.  She looked up, smiled, nodded
+reassuringly.  "It's about a ham," she said.
+
+"What's about a ham?"
+
+"What Henry has been reading."  She closed the red notebook lying
+on her knees and slipped a rubber band round it.  "I'm going to
+bed," she announced, and got up.
+
+"So am I," said Anne, yawning.  But she lacked the energy to rise
+from her arm-chair.
+
+The night was hot and oppressive.  Round the open windows the
+curtains hung unmoving.  Ivor, fanning himself with the portrait
+of an Astral Being, looked out into the darkness and drew a
+breath.
+
+"The air's like wool," he declared.
+
+"It will get cooler after midnight," said Henry Wimbush, and
+cautiously added, "perhaps."
+
+"I shan't sleep, I know."
+
+Priscilla turned her head in his direction; the monumental
+coiffure nodded exorbitantly at her slightest movement.  "You
+must make an effort," she said.  "When I can't sleep, I
+concentrate my will:  I say, 'I will sleep, I am asleep!'  And
+pop! off I go.  That's the power of thought."
+
+"But does it work on stuffy nights?" Ivor inquired.  "I simply
+cannot sleep on a stuffy night."
+
+"Nor can I," said Mary, "except out of doors."
+
+"Out of doors!  What a wonderful idea!"  In the end they decided
+to sleep on the towers--Mary on the western tower, Ivor on the
+eastern.  There was a flat expanse of leads on each of the
+towers, and you could get a mattress through the trap doors that
+opened on to them.  Under the stars, under the gibbous moon,
+assuredly they would sleep.  The mattresses were hauled up,
+sheets and blankets were spread, and an hour later the two
+insomniasts, each on his separate tower, were crying their good-
+nights across the dividing gulf.
+
+On Mary the sleep-compelling charm of the open air did not work
+with its expected magic.  Even through the mattress one could not
+fail to be aware that the leads were extremely hard.  Then there
+were noises:  the owls screeched tirelessly, and once, roused by
+some unknown terror, all the geese of the farmyard burst into a
+sudden frenzy of cackling.  The stars and the gibbous moon
+demanded to be looked at, and when one meteorite had streaked
+across the sky, you could not help waiting, open-eyed and alert,
+for the next.  Time passed; the moon climbed higher and higher in
+the sky.  Mary felt less sleepy than she had when she first came
+out.  She sat up and looked over the parapet.  Had Ivor been able
+to sleep? she wondered.  And as though in answer to her mental
+question, from behind the chimney-stack at the farther end of the
+roof a white form noiselessly emerged--a form that, in the
+moonlight, was recognisably Ivor's.  Spreading his arms to right
+and left, like a tight-rope dancer, he began to walk forward
+along the roof-tree of the house.  He swayed terrifyingly as he
+advanced.  Mary looked on speechlessly; perhaps he was walking in
+his sleep!  Suppose he were to wake up suddenly, now!  If she
+spoke or moved it might mean his death.  She dared look no more,
+but sank back on her pillows.  She listened intently.  For what
+seemed an immensely long time there was no sound.  Then there was
+a patter of feet on the tiles, followed by a scrabbling noise and
+a whispered "Damn!"  And suddenly Ivor's head and shoulders
+appeared above the parapet.  One leg followed, then the other.
+He was on the leads.  Mary pretended to wake up with a start.
+
+"Oh!" she said.  "What are you doing here?"
+
+"I couldn't sleep," he explained, "so I came along to see if you
+couldn't.  One gets bored by oneself on a tower.  Don't you find
+it so?"
+
+It was light before five.  Long, narrow clouds barred the east,
+their edges bright with orange fire.  The sky was pale and
+watery.  With the mournful scream of a soul in pain, a monstrous
+peacock, flying heavily up from below, alighted on the parapet of
+the tower.  Ivor and Mary started broad awake.
+
+"Catch him!" cried Ivor, jumping up.  "We'll have a feather."
+The frightened peacock ran up and down the parapet in an absurd
+distress, curtseying and bobbing and clucking; his long tail
+swung ponderously back and forth as he turned and turned again.
+Then with a flap and swish he launched himself upon the air and
+sailed magnificently earthward, with a recovered dignity.  But he
+had left a trophy.  Ivor had his feather, a long-lashed eye of
+purple and green, of blue and gold.  He handed it to his
+companion.
+
+"An angel's feather," he said.
+
+Mary looked at it for a moment, gravely and intently.  Her purple
+pyjamas clothed her with an ampleness that hid the lines of her
+body; she looked like some large, comfortable, unjointed toy, a
+sort of Teddy-bear--but a Teddy bear with an angel's head, pink
+cheeks, and hair like a bell of gold.  An angel's face, the
+feather of an angel's wing...Somehow the whole atmosphere of this
+sunrise was rather angelic.
+
+"It's extraordinary to think of sexual selection," she said at
+last, looking up from her contemplation of the miraculous
+feather.
+
+"Extraordinary!" Ivor echoed.  "I select you, you select me.
+What luck!"
+
+He put his arm round her shoulders and they stood looking
+eastward.  The first sunlight had begun to warm and colour the
+pale light of the dawn.  Mauve pyjamas and white pyjamas; they
+were a young and charming couple.  The rising sun touched their
+faces.  It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to
+think so, nothing in this world is not symbolical.  Profound and
+beautiful truth!
+
+"I must be getting back to my tower," said Ivor at last.
+
+"Already?"
+
+"I'm afraid so.  The varletry will soon be up and about."
+
+"Ivor..."  There was a prolonged and silent farewell.
+
+"And now," said Ivor, "I repeat my tight-rope stunt."
+
+Mary threw her arms round his neck.  "You mustn't, Ivor.  It's
+dangerous.  Please."
+
+He had to yield at last to her entreaties.  "All right," he said,
+"I'll go down through the house and up at the other end."
+
+He vanished through the trap door into the darkness that still
+lurked within the shuttered house.  A minute later he had
+reappeared on the farther tower; he waved his hand, and then sank
+down, out of sight, behind the parapet.  From below, in the
+house, came the thin wasp-like buzzing of an alarum-clock.  He
+had gone back just in time.
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+Ivor was gone.  Lounging behind the wind-screen in his yellow
+sedan he was whirling across rural England.  Social and amorous
+engagements of the most urgent character called him from hall to
+baronial hall, from castle to castle, from Elizabethan manor-
+house to Georgian mansion, over the whole expanse of the kingdom.
+To-day in Somerset, to-morrow in Warwickshire, on Saturday in the
+West riding, by Tuesday morning in Argyll--Ivor never rested.
+The whole summer through, from the beginning of July till the end
+of September, he devoted himself to his engagements; he was a
+martyr to them.  In the autumn he went back to London for a
+holiday.  Crome had been a little incident, an evanescent bubble
+on the stream of his life; it belonged already to the past.  By
+tea-time he would be at Gobley, and there would be Zenobia's
+welcoming smile.  And on Thursday morning--but that was a long,
+long way ahead.  He would think of Thursday morning when Thursday
+morning arrived.  Meanwhile there was Gobley, meanwhile Zenobia.
+
+In the visitor's book at Crome Ivor had left, according to his
+invariable custom in these cases, a poem.  He had improvised it
+magisterially in the ten minutes preceding his departure.  Denis
+and Mr. Scogan strolled back together from the gates of the
+courtyard, whence they had bidden their last farewells; on the
+writing-table in the hall they found the visitor's book, open,
+and Ivor's composition scarcely dry.  Mr. Scogan read it aloud:
+
+"The magic of those immemorial kings,
+Who webbed enchantment on the bowls of night.
+Sleeps in the soul of all created things;
+In the blue sea, th' Acroceraunian height,
+In the eyed butterfly's auricular wings
+And orgied visions of the anchorite;
+In all that singing flies and flying sings,
+In rain, in pain, in delicate delight.
+But much more magic, much more cogent spells
+Weave here their wizardries about my soul.
+Crome calls me like the voice of vesperal bells,
+Haunts like a ghostly-peopled necropole.
+Fate tears me hence.  Hard fate! since far from Crome
+My soul must weep, remembering its Home."
+
+"Very nice and tasteful and tactful," said Mr. Scogan, when he
+had finished.  "I am only troubled by the butterfly's auricular
+wings.  You have a first-hand knowledge of the workings of a
+poet's mind, Denis; perhaps you can explain."
+
+"What could be simpler," said Denis.  "It's a beautiful word, and
+Ivor wanted to say that the wings were golden."
+
+"You make it luminously clear."
+
+"One suffers so much," Denis went on, "from the fact that
+beautiful words don't always mean what they ought to mean.
+Recently, for example, I had a whole poem ruined, just because
+the word 'carminative' didn't mean what it ought to have meant.
+Carminative--it's admirable, isn't it?"
+
+"Admirable," Mr. Scogan agreed.  "And what does it mean?"
+
+"It's a word I've treasured from my earliest infancy," said
+Denis, "treasured and loved.  They used to give me cinnamon when
+I had a cold--quite useless, but not disagreeable.  One poured it
+drop by drop out of narrow bottles, a golden liquor, fierce and
+fiery.  On the label was a list of its virtues, and among other
+things it was described as being in the highest degree
+carminative.  I adored the word.  'Isn't it carminative?' I used
+to say to myself when I'd taken my dose.  It seemed so
+wonderfully to describe that sensation of internal warmth, that
+glow, that--what shall I call it?--physical self-satisfaction
+which followed the drinking of cinnamon.  Later, when I
+discovered alcohol, 'carminative' described for me that similar,
+but nobler, more spiritual glow which wine evokes not only in the
+body but in the soul as well.  The carminative virtues of
+burgundy, of rum, of old brandy, of Lacryma Christi, of Marsala,
+of Aleatico, of stout, of gin, of champagne, of claret, of the
+raw new wine of this year's Tuscan vintage--I compared them, I
+classified them.  Marsala is rosily, downily carminative; gin
+pricks and refreshes while it warms.  I had a whole table of
+carmination values.  And now"--Denis spread out his hands, palms
+upwards, despairingly--"now I know what carminative really
+means."
+
+"Well, what DOES it mean?" asked Mr. Scogan, a little
+impatiently.
+
+"Carminative," said Denis, lingering lovingly over the syllables,
+"carminative.  I imagined vaguely that it had something to do
+with carmen-carminis, still more vaguely with caro-carnis, and
+its derivations, like carnival and carnation.  Carminative--there
+was the idea of singing and the idea of flesh, rose-coloured and
+warm, with a suggestion of the jollities of mi-Careme and the
+masked holidays of Venice.  Carminative--the warmth, the glow,
+the interior ripeness were all in the word.  Instead of which..."
+
+"Do come to the point, my dear Denis," protested Mr. Scogan.  "Do
+come to the point."
+
+"Well, I wrote a poem the other day," said Denis; "I wrote a poem
+about the effects of love."
+
+"Others have done the same before you," said Mr. Scogan.  "There
+is no need to be ashamed."
+
+"I was putting forward the notion," Denis went on, "that the
+effects of love were often similar to the effects of wine, that
+Eros could intoxicate as well as Bacchus.  Love, for example, is
+essentially carminative.  It gives one the sense of warmth, the
+glow.
+
+'And passion carminative as wine...'
+
+was what I wrote.  Not only was the line elegantly sonorous; it
+was also, I flattered myself, very aptly compendiously
+expressive.  Everything was in the word carminative--a detailed,
+exact foreground, an immense, indefinite hinterland of
+suggestion.
+
+'And passion carminative as wine...'
+
+I was not ill-pleased.  And then suddenly it occurred to me that
+I had never actually looked up the word in a dictionary.
+Carminative had grown up with me from the days of the cinnamon
+bottle.  It had always been taken for granted.  Carminative:  for
+me the word was as rich in content as some tremendous, elaborate
+work of art; it was a complete landscape with figures.
+
+'And passion carminative as wine...'
+
+It was the first time I had ever committed the word to writing,
+and all at once I felt I would like lexicographical authority for
+it.  A small English-German dictionary was all I had at hand.  I
+turned up C, ca, car, carm.  There it was:  'Carminative:
+windtreibend.'  Windtreibend!" he repeated.  Mr. Scogan laughed.
+Denis shook his head.  "Ah," he said, "for me it was no laughing
+matter.  For me it marked the end of a chapter, the death of
+something young and precious.  There were the years--years of
+childhood and innocence--when I had believed that carminative
+meant--well, carminative.  And now, before me lies the rest of my
+life--a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall
+know that carminative means windtreibend.
+
+'Plus ne suis ce que j'ai ete
+Et ne le saurai jamais etre.'
+
+It is a realisation that makes one rather melancholy."
+
+"Carminative," said Mr. Scogan thoughtfully.
+
+"Carminative," Denis repeated, and they were silent for a time.
+"Words," said Denis at last, "words--I wonder if you can realise
+how much I love them.  You are too much preoccupied with mere
+things and ideas and people to understand the full beauty of
+words.  Your mind is not a literary mind.  The spectacle of Mr.
+Gladstone finding thirty-four rhymes to the name 'Margot' seems
+to you rather pathetic than anything else.  Mallarme's envelopes
+with their versified addresses leave you cold, unless they leave
+you pitiful; you can't see that
+
+'Apte a ne point te cabrer, hue!
+Poste et j'ajouterai, dia!
+Si tu ne fuis onze-bis Rue
+Balzac, chez cet Heredia,'
+
+is a little miracle."
+
+"You're right," said Mr. Scogan.  "I can't."
+
+"You don't feel it to be magical?"
+
+"No."
+
+"That's the test for the literary mind," said Denis; "the feeling
+of magic, the sense that words have power.  The technical, verbal
+part of literature is simply a development of magic.  Words are
+man's first and most grandiose invention.  With language he
+created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and
+attributed power to them!  With fitted, harmonious words the
+magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats and spirits from the
+elements.  Their descendants, the literary men, still go on with
+the process, morticing their verbal formulas together, and,
+before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight
+and awe.  Rabbits out of empty hats?  No, their spells are more
+subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds.
+Formulated by their art the most insipid statements become
+enormously significant.  For example, I proffer the constatation,
+'Black ladders lack bladders.'  A self-evident truth, one on
+which it would not have been worth while to insist, had I chosen
+to formulate it in such words as 'Black fire-escapes have no
+bladders,' or, 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie.'  But
+since I put it as I do, 'Black ladders lack bladders,' it
+becomes, for all its self-evidence, significant, unforgettable,
+moving.  The creation by word-power of something out of nothing--
+what is that but magic?  And, I may add, what is that but
+literature?  Half the world's greatest poetry is simply 'Les
+echelles noires manquent de vessie,' translated into magic
+significance as, 'Black ladders lack bladders.'  And you can't
+appreciate words.  I'm sorry for you."
+
+"A mental carminative," said Mr. Scogan reflectively.  "That's
+what you need."
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+Perched on its four stone mushrooms, the little granary stood two
+or three feet above the grass of the green close.  Beneath it
+there was a perpetual shade and a damp growth of long, luxuriant
+grasses.  Here, in the shadow, in the green dampness, a family of
+white ducks had sought shelter from the afternoon sun.  Some
+stood, preening themselves, some reposed with their long bellies
+pressed to the ground, as though the cool grass were water.
+Little social noises burst fitfully forth, and from time to time
+some pointed tail would execute a brilliant Lisztian tremolo.
+Suddenly their jovial repose was shattered.  A prodigious thump
+shook the wooden flooring above their heads; the whole granary
+trembled, little fragments of dirt and crumbled wood rained down
+among them.  With a loud, continuous quacking the ducks rushed
+out from beneath this nameless menace, and did not stay their
+flight till they were safely in the farmyard.
+
+"Don't lose your temper," Anne was saying.  "Listen!  You've
+frightened the ducks.  Poor dears! no wonder."  She was sitting
+sideways in a low, wooden chair.  Her right elbow rested on the
+back of the chair and she supported her cheek on her hand.  Her
+long, slender body drooped into curves of a lazy grace.  She was
+smiling, and she looked at Gombauld through half-closed eyes.
+
+"Damn you!" Gombauld repeated, and stamped his foot again.  He
+glared at her round the half-finished portrait on the easel.
+
+"Poor ducks!" Anne repeated.  The sound of their quacking was
+faint in the distance; it was inaudible.
+
+"Can't you see you make me lose my time?" he asked.  "I can't
+work with you dangling about distractingly like this."
+
+"You'd lose less time if you stopped talking and stamping your
+feet and did a little painting for a change.  After all, what am
+I dangling about for, except to be painted?"
+
+Gombauld made a noise like a growl.  "You're awful," he said,
+with conviction.  "Why do you ask me to come and stay here?  Why
+do you tell me you'd like me to paint your portrait?"
+
+"For the simple reasons that I like you--at least, when you're in
+a good temper--and that I think you're a good painter."
+
+"For the simple reason"--Gombauld mimicked her voice--"that you
+want me to make love to you and, when I do, to have the amusement
+of running away."
+
+Anne threw back her head and laughed.  "So you think it amuses me
+to have to evade your advances!  So like a man!  If you only knew
+how gross and awful and boring men are when they try to make love
+and you don't want them to make love!  If you could only see
+yourselves through our eyes!"
+
+Gombauld picked up his palette and brushes and attacked his
+canvas with the ardour of irritation.  "I suppose you'll be
+saying next that you didn't start the game, that it was I who
+made the first advances, and that you were the innocent victim
+who sat still and never did anything that could invite or allure
+me on."
+
+"So like a man again!" said Anne.  "It's always the same old
+story about the woman tempting the man.  The woman lures,
+fascinates, invites; and man--noble man, innocent man--falls a
+victim.  My poor Gombauld!  Surely you're not going to sing that
+old song again.  It's so unintelligent, and I always thought you
+were a man of sense."
+
+"Thanks," said Gombauld.
+
+"Be a little objective," Anne went on.  "Can't you see that
+you're simply externalising your own emotions?  That's what you
+men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive.  You feel one of
+your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her
+strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of
+deliberately provoking and inviting the desire.  You have the
+mentality of savages.  You might just as well say that a plate of
+strawberries and cream deliberately lures you on to feel greedy.
+In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred women are as passive and
+innocent as the strawberries and cream."
+
+"Well, all I can say is that this must be the hundredth case,"
+said Gombauld, without looking up.
+
+Anne shrugged her shoulders and gave vent to a sigh.  "I'm at a
+loss to know whether you're more silly or more rude."
+
+After painting for a little time in silence Gombauld began to
+speak again.  "And then there's Denis," he said, renewing the
+conversation as though it had only just been broken off.  "You're
+playing the same game with him.  Why can't you leave that
+wretched young man in peace?"
+
+Anne flushed with a sudden and uncontrollable anger.  "It's
+perfectly untrue about Denis," she said indignantly.  "I never
+dreamt of playing what you beautifully call the same game with
+him."  Recovering her calm, she added in her ordinary cooing
+voice and with her exacerbating smile, "You've become very
+protective towards poor Denis all of a sudden."
+
+"I have," Gombauld replied, with a gravity that was somehow a
+little too solemn.  "I don't like to see a young man..."
+
+"...being whirled along the road to ruin," said Anne, continuing
+his sentence for him.  I admire your sentiments and, believe me,
+I share them."
+
+She was curiously irritated at what Gombauld had said about
+Denis.  It happened to be so completely untrue.  Gombauld might
+have some slight ground for his reproaches.  But Denis--no, she
+had never flirted with Denis.  Poor boy!  He was very sweet.  She
+became somewhat pensive.
+
+Gombauld painted on with fury.  The restlessness of an
+unsatisfied desire, which, before, had distracted his mind,
+making work impossible, seemed now to have converted itself into
+a kind of feverish energy.  When it was finished, he told
+himself, the portrait would be diabolic.  He was painting her in
+the pose she had naturally adopted at the first sitting.  Seated
+sideways, her elbow on the back of the chair, her head and
+shoulders turned at an angle from the rest of her body, towards
+the front, she had fallen into an attitude of indolent
+abandonment.  He had emphasised the lazy curves of her body; the
+lines sagged as they crossed the canvas, the grace of the painted
+figure seemed to be melting into a kind of soft decay.  The hand
+that lay along the knee was as limp as a glove.  He was at work
+on the face now; it had begun to emerge on the canvas, doll-like
+in its regularity and listlessness.  It was Anne's face--but her
+face as it would be, utterly unillumined by the inward lights of
+thought and emotion.  It was the lazy, expressionless mask which
+was sometimes her face.  The portrait was terribly like; and at
+the same time it was the most malicious of lies.  Yes, it would
+be diabolic when it was finished, Gombauld decided; he wondered
+what she would think of it.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+For the sake of peace and quiet Denis had retired earlier on this
+same afternoon to his bedroom.  He wanted to work, but the hour
+was a drowsy one, and lunch, so recently eaten, weighed heavily
+on body and mind.  The meridian demon was upon him; he was
+possessed by that bored and hopeless post-prandial melancholy
+which the coenobites of old knew and feared under the name of
+"accidie."  He felt, like Ernest Dowson, "a little weary."  He
+was in the mood to write something rather exquisite and gentle
+and quietist in tone; something a little droopy and at the same
+time--how should he put it?--a little infinite.  He thought of
+Anne, of love hopeless and unattainable.  Perhaps that was the
+ideal kind of love, the hopeless kind--the quiet, theoretical
+kind of love.  In this sad mood of repletion he could well
+believe it.  He began to write.  One elegant quatrain had flowed
+from beneath his pen:
+
+"A brooding love which is at most
+The stealth of moonbeams when they slide,
+Evoking colour's bloodless ghost,
+O'er some scarce-breathing breast or side..."
+
+when his attention was attracted by a sound from outside.  He
+looked down from his window; there they were, Anne and Gombauld,
+talking, laughing together.  They crossed the courtyard in front,
+and passed out of sight through the gate in the right-hand wall.
+That was the way to the green close and the granary; she was
+going to sit for him again.  His pleasantly depressing melancholy
+was dissipated by a puff of violent emotion; angrily he threw his
+quatrain into the waste-paper basket and ran downstairs.  "The
+stealth of moonbeams," indeed!
+
+In the hall he saw Mr. Scogan; the man seemed to be lying in
+wait.  Denis tried to escape, but in vain.  Mr. Scogan's eye
+glittered like the eye of the Ancient Mariner.
+
+"Not so fast," he said, stretching out a small saurian hand with
+pointed nails--"not so fast.  I was just going down to the flower
+garden to take the sun.  We'll go together."
+
+Denis abandoned himself; Mr. Scogan put on his hat and they went
+out arm in arm.  On the shaven turf of the terrace Henry Wimbush
+and Mary were playing a solemn game of bowls.  They descended by
+the yew-tree walk.  It was here, thought Denis, here that Anne
+had fallen, here that he had kissed her, here--and he blushed
+with retrospective shame at the memory--here that he had tried to
+carry her and failed.  Life was awful!
+
+"Sanity!" said Mr. Scogan, suddenly breaking a long silence.
+"Sanity--that's what's wrong with me and that's what will be
+wrong with you, my dear Denis, when you're old enough to be sane
+or insane.  In a sane world I should be a great man; as things
+are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all
+intents and purposes I don't exist.  I am just Vox et praeterea
+nihil."
+
+Denis made no response; he was thinking of other things.  "After
+all," he said to himself--"after all, Gombauld is better looking
+than I, more entertaining, more confident; and, besides, he's
+already somebody and I'm still only potential..."
+
+"Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen,"
+Mr. Scogan went on.  Denis tried not to listen, but the tireless
+insistence of Mr. Scogan's discourse gradually compelled his
+attention.  "Men such as I am, such as you may possibly become,
+have never achieved anything.  We're too sane; we're merely
+reasonable.  We lack the human touch, the compelling enthusiastic
+mania.  People are quite ready to listen to the philosophers for
+a little amusement, just as they would listen to a fiddler or a
+mountebank.  But as to acting on the advice of the men of reason
+--never.  Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man
+of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed
+the madman.  For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to
+passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is
+superficial and supererogatory--reason."
+
+They entered the garden; at the head of one of the alleys stood a
+green wooden bench, embayed in the midst of a fragrant continent
+of lavender bushes.  It was here, though the place was shadeless
+and one breathed hot, dry perfume instead of air--it was here
+that Mr. Scogan elected to sit.  He thrived on untempered
+sunlight.
+
+"Consider, for example, the case of Luther and Erasmus."  He took
+out his pipe and began to fill it as he talked.  "There was
+Erasmus, a man of reason if ever there was one.  People listened
+to him at first--a new virtuoso performing on that elegant and
+resourceful instrument, the intellect; they even admired and
+venerated him.  But did he move them to behave as he wanted them
+to behave--reasonably, decently, or at least a little less
+porkishly than usual?  He did not.  And then Luther appears,
+violent, passionate, a madman insanely convinced about matters in
+which there can be no conviction.  He shouted, and men rushed to
+follow him.  Erasmus was no longer listened to; he was reviled
+for his reasonableness.  Luther was serious, Luther was reality--
+like the Great War.  Erasmus was only reason and decency; he
+lacked the power, being a sage, to move men to action.  Europe
+followed Luther and embarked on a century and a half of war and
+bloody persecution.  It's a melancholy story."  Mr. Scogan
+lighted a match.  In the intense light the flame was all but
+invisible.  The smell of burning tobacco began to mingle with the
+sweetly acrid smell of the lavender.
+
+"If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about
+persuading them in a maniacal manner.  The very sane precepts of
+the founders of religions are only made infectious by means of
+enthusiasms which to a sane man must appear deplorable.  It is
+humiliating to find how impotent unadulterated sanity is.
+Sanity, for example, informs us that the only way in which we can
+preserve civilisation is by behaving decently and intelligently.
+Sanity appeals and argues; our rulers persevere in their
+customary porkishness, while we acquiesce and obey.  The only
+hope is a maniacal crusade; I am ready, when it comes, to beat a
+tambourine with the loudest, but at the same time I shall feel a
+little ashamed of myself.  However"--Mr. Scogan shrugged his
+shoulders and, pipe in hand, made a gesture of resignation--"It's
+futile to complain that things are as they are.  The fact remains
+that sanity unassisted is useless.  What we want, then, is a sane
+and reasonable exploitation of the forces of insanity.  We sane
+men will have the power yet."  Mr. Scogan's eyes shone with a
+more than ordinary brightness, and, taking his pipe out of his
+mouth, he gave vent to his loud, dry, and somehow rather fiendish
+laugh.
+
+"But I don't want power," said Denis.  He was sitting in limp
+discomfort at one end of the bench, shading his eyes from the
+intolerable light.  Mr. Scogan, bolt upright at the other end,
+laughed again.
+
+"Everybody wants power," he said.  "Power in some form or other.
+The sort of power you hanker for is literary power.  Some people
+want power to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust
+for power in persecuting words, twisting them, moulding them,
+torturing them to obey you.  But I divagate."
+
+"Do you?" asked Denis faintly.
+
+"Yes," Mr. Scogan continued, unheeding, "the time will come.  We
+men of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities to the
+service of reason.  We can't leave the world any longer to the
+direction of chance.  We can't allow dangerous maniacs like
+Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go
+on casually appearing and turning everything upside down.  In the
+past it didn't so much matter; but our modern machine is too
+delicate.  A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther
+or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces.  In future, the
+men of reason must see that the madness of the world's maniacs is
+canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a
+mountain torrent driving a dynamo..."
+
+"Making electricity to light a Swiss hotel," said Denis.  "You
+ought to complete the simile."
+
+Mr. Scogan waved away the interruption.  "There's only one thing
+to be done," he said.  "The men of intelligence must combine,
+must conspire, and seize power from the imbeciles and maniacs who
+now direct us.  They must found the Rational State."
+
+The heat that was slowly paralysing all Denis's mental and bodily
+faculties, seemed to bring to Mr. Scogan additional vitality.  He
+talked with an ever-increasing energy, his hands moved in sharp,
+quick, precise gestures, his eyes shone.  Hard, dry, and
+continuous, his voice went on sounding and sounding in Denis's
+ears with the insistence of a mechanical noise.
+
+"In the Rational State," he heard Mr. Scogan saying, "human
+beings will be separated out into distinct species, not according
+to the colour of their eyes or the shape of their skulls, but
+according to the qualities of their mind and temperament.
+Examining psychologists, trained to what would now seem an almost
+superhuman clairvoyance, will test each child that is born and
+assign it to its proper species.  Duly labelled and docketed, the
+child will be given the education suitable to members of its
+species, and will be set, in adult life, to perform those
+functions which human beings of his variety are capable of
+performing."
+
+"How many species will there be?" asked Denis.
+
+"A great many, no doubt," Mr. Scogan answered; "the
+classification will be subtle and elaborate.  But it is not in
+the power of a prophet to go into details, nor is it his
+business.  I will do more than indicate the three main species
+into which the subjects of the Rational State will be divided."
+
+He paused, cleared his throat, and coughed once or twice, evoking
+in Denis's mind the vision of a table with a glass and water-
+bottle, and, lying across one corner, a long white pointer for
+the lantern pictures.
+
+"The three main species," Mr. Scogan went on, "will be these:
+the Directing Intelligences, the Men of Faith, and the Herd.
+Among the Intelligences will be found all those capable of
+thought, those who know how to attain a certain degree of
+freedom--and, alas, how limited, even among the most intelligent,
+that freedom is!--from the mental bondage of their time.  A
+select body of Intelligences, drawn from among those who have
+turned their attention to the problems of practical life, will be
+the governors of the Rational State.  They will employ as their
+instruments of power the second great species of humanity--the
+men of Faith, the Madmen, as I have been calling them, who
+believe in things unreasonably, with passion, and are ready to
+die for their beliefs and their desires.  These wild men, with
+their fearful potentialities for good or for mischief, will no
+longer be allowed to react casually to a casual environment.
+There will be no more Caesar Borgias, no more Luthers and
+Mohammeds, no more Joanna Southcotts, no more Comstocks.  The
+old-fashioned Man of Faith and Desire, that haphazard creature of
+brute circumstance, who might drive men to tears and repentance,
+or who might equally well set them on to cutting one another's
+throats, will be replaced by a new sort of madman, still
+externally the same, still bubbling with a seemingly spontaneous
+enthusiasm, but, ah, how very different from the madman of the
+past!  For the new Man of Faith will be expending his passion,
+his desire, and his enthusiasm in the propagation of some
+reasonable idea.  He will be, all unawares, the tool of some
+superior intelligence."
+
+Mr. Scogan chuckled maliciously; it was as though he were taking
+a revenge, in the name of reason, on enthusiasts.  "From their
+earliest years, as soon, that is, as the examining psychologists
+have assigned them their place in the classified scheme, the Men
+of Faith will have had their special education under the eye of
+the Intelligences.  Moulded by a long process of suggestion, they
+will go out into the world, preaching and practising with a
+generous mania the coldly reasonable projects of the Directors
+from above.  When these projects are accomplished, or when the
+ideas that were useful a decade ago have ceased to be useful, the
+Intelligences will inspire a new generation of madmen with a new
+eternal truth.  The principal function of the Men of Faith will
+be to move and direct the Multitude, that third great species
+consisting of those countless millions who lack intelligence and
+are without valuable enthusiasm.  When any particular effort is
+required of the Herd, when it is thought necessary, for the sake
+of solidarity, that humanity shall be kindled and united by some
+single enthusiastic desire or idea, the Men of Faith, primed with
+some simple and satisfying creed, will be sent out on a mission
+of evangelisation.  At ordinary times, when the high spiritual
+temperature of a Crusade would be unhealthy, the Men of Faith
+will be quietly and earnestly busy with the great work of
+education.  In the upbringing of the Herd, humanity's almost
+boundless suggestibility will be scientifically exploited.
+Systematically, from earliest infancy, its members will be
+assured that there is no happiness to be found except in work and
+obedience; they will be made to believe that they are happy, that
+they are tremendously important beings, and that everything they
+do is noble and significant.  For the lower species the earth
+will be restored to the centre of the universe and man to pre-
+eminence on the earth.  Oh, I envy the lot of the commonality in
+the Rational State!  Working their eight hours a day, obeying
+their betters, convinced of their own grandeur and significance
+and immortality, they will be marvellously happy, happier than
+any race of men has ever been.  They will go through life in a
+rosy state of intoxication, from which they will never awake.
+The Men of Faith will play the cup-bearers at this lifelong
+bacchanal, filling and ever filling again with the warm liquor
+that the Intelligences, in sad and sober privacy behind the
+scenes, will brew for the intoxication of their subjects."
+
+"And what will be my place in the Rational State?" Denis drowsily
+inquired from under his shading hand.
+
+Mr. Scogan looked at him for a moment in silence.  "It's
+difficult to see where you would fit in," he said at last.  "You
+couldn't do manual work; you're too independent and unsuggestible
+to belong to the larger Herd; you have none of the
+characteristics required in a Man of Faith.  As for the Directing
+Intelligences, they will have to be marvellously clear and
+merciless and penetrating."  He paused and shook his head.  "No,
+I can see no place for you; only the lethal chamber."
+
+Deeply hurt, Denis emitted the imitation of a loud Homeric laugh.
+"I'm getting sunstroke here," he said, and got up.
+
+Mr. Scogan followed his example, and they walked slowly away down
+the narrow path, brushing the blue lavender flowers in their
+passage.  Denis pulled a sprig of lavender and sniffed at it;
+then some dark leaves of rosemary that smelt like incense in a
+cavernous church.  They passed a bed of opium poppies, dispetaled
+now; the round, ripe seedheads were brown and dry--like
+Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads stuck on poles.
+He liked the fancy enough to impart it to Mr. Scogan.
+
+"Like Polynesian trophies..."  Uttered aloud, the fancy seemed
+less charming and significant than it did when it first occurred
+to him.
+
+There was a silence, and in a growing wave of sound the whir of
+the reaping machines swelled up from the fields beyond the garden
+and then receded into a remoter hum.
+
+"It is satisfactory to think," said Mr. Scogan, as they strolled
+slowly onward, "that a multitude of people are toiling in the
+harvest fields in order that we may talk of Polynesia.  Like
+every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to
+be paid for.  Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and
+the cultured who have to pay.  Let us be duly thankful for that,
+my dear Denis--duly thankful," he repeated, and knocked the ashes
+out of his pipe.
+
+Denis was not listening.  He had suddenly remembered Anne.  She
+was with Gombauld--alone with him in his studio.  It was an
+intolerable thought.
+
+"Shall we go and pay a call on Gombauld?" he suggested
+carelessly.  It would be amusing to see what he's doing now."
+
+He laughed inwardly to think how furious Gombauld would be when
+he saw them arriving.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+Gombauld was by no means so furious at their apparition as Denis
+had hoped and expected he would be.  Indeed, he was rather
+pleased than annoyed when the two faces, one brown and pointed,
+the other round and pale, appeared in the frame of the open door.
+The energy born of his restless irritation was dying within him,
+returning to its emotional elements.  A moment more and he would
+have been losing his temper again--and Anne would be keeping
+hers, infuriatingly.  Yes, he was positively glad to see them.
+
+"Come in, come in," he called out hospitably.
+
+Followed by Mr. Scogan, Denis climbed the little ladder and
+stepped over the threshold.  He looked suspiciously from Gombauld
+to his sitter, and could learn nothing from the expression of
+their faces except that they both seemed pleased to see the
+visitors.  Were they really glad, or were they cunningly
+simulating gladness?  He wondered.
+
+Mr. Scogan, meanwhile, was looking at the portrait.
+
+"Excellent," he said approvingly, "excellent.  Almost too true to
+character, if that is possible; yes, positively too true.  But
+I'm surprised to find you putting in all this psychology
+business."  He pointed to the face, and with his extended finger
+followed the slack curves of the painted figure.  "I thought you
+were one of the fellows who went in exclusively for balanced
+masses and impinging planes."
+
+Gombauld laughed.  "This is a little infidelity," he said.
+
+"I'm sorry," said Mr. Scogan.  "I for one, without ever having
+had the slightest appreciation of painting, have always taken
+particular pleasure in Cubismus.  I like to see pictures from
+which nature has been completely banished, pictures which are
+exclusively the product of the human mind.  They give me the same
+pleasure as I derive from a good piece of reasoning or a
+mathematical problem or an achievement of engineering.  Nature,
+or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too
+large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and
+incomprehensible.  I am at home with the works of man; if I
+choose to set my mind to it, I can understand anything that any
+man has made or thought.  That is why I always travel by Tube,
+never by bus if I can possibly help it.  For, travelling by bus,
+one can't avoid seeing, even in London, a few stray works of God
+--the sky, for example, an occasional tree, the flowers in the
+window-boxes.  But travel by Tube and you see nothing but the
+works of man--iron riveted into geometrical forms, straight lines
+of concrete, patterned expanses of tiles.  All is human and the
+product of friendly and comprehensible minds.  All philosophies
+and all religions--what are they but spiritual Tubes bored
+through the universe!  Through these narrow tunnels, where all is
+recognisably human, one travels comfortable and secure,
+contriving to forget that all round and below and above them
+stretches the blind mass of earth, endless and unexplored.  Yes,
+give me the Tube and Cubismus every time; give me ideas, so snug
+and neat and simple and well made.  And preserve me from nature,
+preserve me from all that's inhumanly large and complicated and
+obscure.  I haven't the courage, and, above all, I haven't the
+time to start wandering in that labyrinth."
+
+While Mr. Scogan was discoursing, Denis had crossed over to the
+farther side of the little square chamber, where Anne was
+sitting, still in her graceful, lazy pose, on the low chair.
+
+"Well?" he demanded, looking at her almost fiercely.  What was he
+asking of her?  He hardly knew himself.
+
+Anne looked up at him, and for answer echoed his "Well?" in
+another, a laughing key.
+
+Denis had nothing more, at the moment, to say.  Two or three
+canvases stood in the corner behind Anne's chair, their faces
+turned to the wall.  He pulled them out and began to look at the
+paintings.
+
+"May I see too?" Anne requested.
+
+He stood them in a row against the wall.  Anne had to turn round
+in her chair to look at them.  There was the big canvas of the
+man fallen from the horse, there was a painting of flowers, there
+was a small landscape.  His hands on the back of the chair, Denis
+leaned over her.  From behind the easel at the other side of the
+room Mr. Scogan was talking away.  For a long time they looked at
+the pictures, saying nothing; or, rather, Anne looked at the
+pictures, while Denis, for the most part, looked at Anne.
+
+"I like the man and the horse; don't you?" she said at last,
+looking up with an inquiring smile.
+
+Denis nodded, and then in a queer, strangled voice, as though it
+had cost him a great effort to utter the words, he said, "I love
+you."
+
+It was a remark which Anne had heard a good many times before and
+mostly heard with equanimity.  But on this occasion--perhaps
+because they had come so unexpectedly , perhaps for some other
+reason--the words provoked in her a certain surprised commotion.
+
+"My poor Denis," she managed to say, with a laugh; but she was
+blushing as she spoke.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+It was noon.  Denis, descending from his chamber, where he had
+been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about
+nothing in particular, found the drawing-room deserted.  He was
+about to go out into the garden when his eye fell on a familiar
+but mysterious object--the large red notebook in which he had so
+often seen Jenny quietly and busily scribbling.  She had left it
+lying on the window-seat.  The temptation was great.  He picked
+up the book and slipped off the elastic band that kept it
+discreetly closed.
+
+"Private.  Not to be opened," was written in capital letters on
+the cover.  He raised his eyebrows.  It was the sort of thing one
+wrote in one's Latin Grammar while one was still at one's
+preparatory school.
+
+"Black is the raven, black is the rook,
+But blacker the theif who steals this book!"
+
+It was curiously childish, he thought, and he smiled to himself.
+He opened the book.  What he saw made him wince as though he had
+been struck.
+
+Denis was his own severest critic; so, at least, he had always
+believed.  He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector
+probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul; he was
+Brown Dog to himself.  His weaknesses, his absurdities--no one
+knew them better than he did.  Indeed, in a vague way he imagined
+that nobody beside himself was aware of them at all.  It seemed,
+somehow, inconceivable that he should appear to other people as
+they appeared to him; inconceivable that they ever spoke of him
+among themselves in that same freely critical and, to be quite
+honest, mildly malicious tone in which he was accustomed to talk
+of them.  In his own eyes he had defects, but to see them was a
+privilege reserved to him alone.  For the rest of the world he
+was surely an image of flawless crystal.  It was almost
+axiomatic.
+
+On opening the red notebook that crystal image of himself crashed
+to the ground, and was irreparably shattered.  He was not his own
+severest critic after all.  The discovery was a painful one.
+
+The fruit of Jenny's unobtrusive scribbling lay before him.  A
+caricature of himself, reading (the book was upside-down).  In
+the background a dancing couple, recognisable as Gombauld and
+Anne.  Beneath, the legend:  "Fable of the Wallflower and the
+Sour Grapes."  Fascinated and horrified, Denis pored over the
+drawing.  It was masterful.  A mute, inglorious Rouveyre appeared
+in every one of those cruelly clear lines.  The expression of the
+face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered by a feeble
+envy; the attitude of the body and limbs, an attitude of studious
+and scholarly dignity, given away by the fidgety pose of the
+turned-in feet--these things were terrible.  And, more terrible
+still, was the likeness, was the magisterial certainty with which
+his physical peculiarities were all recorded and subtly
+exaggerated.
+
+Denis looked deeper into the book.  There were caricatures of
+other people:  of Priscilla and Mr. Barbecue-Smith; of Henry
+Wimbush, of Anne and Gombauld; of Mr. Scogan, whom Jenny had
+represented in a light that was more than slightly sinister, that
+was, indeed, diabolic; of Mary and Ivor.  He scarcely glanced at
+them.  A fearful desire to know the worst about himself possessed
+him.  He turned over the leaves, lingering at nothing that was
+not his own image.  Seven full pages were devoted to him.
+
+"Private.  Not to be opened."  He had disobeyed the injunction;
+he had only got what he deserved.  Thoughtfully he closed the
+book, and slid the rubber band once more into its place.  Sadder
+and wiser, he went out on to the terrace.  And so this, he
+reflected, this was how Jenny employed the leisure hours in her
+ivory tower apart.  And he had thought her a simple-minded,
+uncritical creature!  It was he, it seemed, who was the fool.  He
+felt no resentment towards Jenny.  No, the distressing thing
+wasn't Jenny herself; it was what she and the phenomenon of her
+red book represented, what they stood for and concretely
+symbolised.  They represented all the vast conscious world of men
+outside himself; they symbolised something that in his studious
+solitariness he was apt not to believe in.  He could stand at
+Piccadilly Circus, could watch the crowds shuffle past, and still
+imagine himself the one fully conscious, intelligent, individual
+being among all those thousands.  It seemed, somehow, impossible
+that other people should be in their way as elaborate and
+complete as he in his.  Impossible; and yet, periodically he
+would make some painful discovery about the external world and
+the horrible reality of its consciousness and its intelligence.
+The red notebook was one of these discoveries, a footprint in the
+sand.  It put beyond a doubt the fact that the outer world really
+existed.
+
+Sitting on the balustrade of the terrace, he ruminated this
+unpleasant truth for some time.  Still chewing on it, he strolled
+pensively down towards the swimming-pool.  A peacock and his hen
+trailed their shabby finery across the turf of the lower lawn.
+Odious birds!  Their necks, thick and greedily fleshy at the
+roots, tapered up to the cruel inanity of their brainless heads,
+their flat eyes and piercing beaks.  The fabulists were right, he
+reflected, when they took beasts to illustrate their tractates of
+human morality.  Animals resemble men with all the truthfulness
+of a caricature.  (Oh, the red notebook!)  He threw a piece of
+stick at the slowly pacing birds.  They rushed towards it,
+thinking it was something to eat.
+
+He walked on.  The profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed
+him.  Like a great wooden octopus, it spread its long arms
+abroad.
+
+"Under the spreading ilex tree..."
+
+He tried to remember who the poem was by, but couldn't.
+
+"The smith, a brawny man is he,
+With arms like rubber bands."
+
+Just like his; he would have to try and do his Muller exercises
+more regularly.
+
+He emerged once more into the sunshine.  The pool lay before him,
+reflecting in its bronze mirror the blue and various green of the
+summer day.  Looking at it, he thought of Anne's bare arms and
+seal-sleek bathing-dress, her moving knees and feet.
+
+"And little Luce with the white legs,
+And bouncing Barbary..."
+
+Oh, these rags and tags of other people's making!  Would he ever
+be able to call his brain his own?  Was there, indeed, anything
+in it that was truly his own, or was it simply an education?
+
+He walked slowly round the water's edge.  In an embayed recess
+among the surrounding yew trees, leaning her back against the
+pedestal of a pleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus,
+executed by some nameless mason of the seicento, he saw Mary
+pensively sitting.
+
+"Hullo!" he said, for he was passing so close to her that he had
+to say something.
+
+Mary looked up.  "Hullo!" she answered in a melancholy,
+uninterested tone.
+
+In this alcove hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed
+to Denis agreeably elegiac.  He sat down beside her under the
+shadow of the pudic goddess.  There was a prolonged silence.
+
+At breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture
+postcard of Gobley Great Park.  A stately Georgian pile, with a
+facade sixteen windows wide; parterres in the foreground; huge,
+smooth lawns receding out of the picture to right and left.  Ten
+years more of the hard times and Gobley, with all its peers, will
+be deserted and decaying.  Fifty years, and the countryside will
+know the old landmarks no more.  They will have vanished as the
+monasteries vanished before them.  At the moment, however, Mary's
+mind was not moved by these considerations.
+
+On the back of the postcard, next to the address, was written, in
+Ivor's bold, large hand, a single quatrain.
+
+"Hail, maid of moonlight!  Bride of the sun, farewell!
+Like bright plumes moulted in an angel's flight,
+There sleep within my heart's most mystic cell
+Memories of morning, memories of the night."
+
+There followed a postscript of three lines:  "Would you mind
+asking one of the housemaids to forward the packet of safety-
+razor blades I left in the drawer of my washstand.  Thanks.--
+Ivor.
+
+Seated under the Venus's immemorial gesture, Mary considered life
+and love.  The abolition of her repressions, so far from bringing
+the expected peace of mind, had brought nothing but disquiet, a
+new and hitherto unexperienced misery.  Ivor, Ivor...She couldn't
+do without him now.  It was evident, on the other hand, from the
+poem on the back of the picture postcard, that Ivor could very
+well do without her.  He was at Gobley now, so was Zenobia.  Mary
+knew Zenobia.  She thought of the last verse of the song he had
+sung that night in the garden.
+
+"Le lendemain, Phillis peu sage
+Aurait donne moutons et chien
+Pour un baiser que le volage
+A Lisette donnait pour rien."
+
+Mary shed tears at the memory; she had never been so unhappy in
+all her life before.
+
+It was Denis who first broke the silence.  "The individual," he
+began in a soft and sadly philosophical tone, "is not a self-
+supporting universe.  There are times when he comes into contact
+with other individuals, when he is forced to take cognisance of
+the existence of other universes besides himself."
+
+He had contrived this highly abstract generalisation as a
+preliminary to a personal confidence.  It was the first gambit in
+a conversation that was to lead up to Jenny's caricatures.
+
+"True," said Mary; and, generalising for herself, she added,
+"When one individual comes into intimate contact with another,
+she--or he, of course, as the case may be--must almost inevitably
+receive or inflict suffering."
+
+"One is apt, Denis went on, "to be so spellbound by the spectacle
+of one's own personality that one forgets that the spectacle
+presents itself to other people as well as to oneself."
+
+Mary was not listening.  "The difficulty," she said, "makes
+itself acutely felt in matters of sex.  If one individual seeks
+intimate contact with another individual in the natural way, she
+is certain to receive or inflict suffering.  If on the other
+hand, she avoids contacts, she risks the equally grave sufferings
+that follow on unnatural repressions.  As you see, it's a
+dilemma."
+
+"When I think of my own case," said Denis, making a more decided
+move in the desired direction, "I am amazed how ignorant I am of
+other people's mentality in general, and above all and in
+particular, of their opinions about myself.  Our minds are sealed
+books only occasionally opened to the outside world."  He made a
+gesture that was faintly suggestive of the drawing off of a
+rubber band.
+
+"It's an awful problem," said Mary thoughtfully.  "One has to
+have had personal experience to realise quite how awful it is."
+
+"Exactly."  Denis nodded.  "One has to have had first-hand
+experience."  He leaned towards her and slightly lowered his
+voice.  "This very morning, for example..." he began, but his
+confidences were cut short.  The deep voice of the gong, tempered
+by distance to a pleasant booming, floated down from the house.
+It was lunch-time.  Mechanically Mary rose to her feet, and
+Denis, a little hurt that she should exhibit such a desperate
+anxiety for her food and so slight an interest in his spiritual
+experiences, followed her.  They made their way up to the house
+without speaking.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+"I hope you all realise," said Henry Wimbush during dinner, "that
+next Monday is Bank Holiday, and that you will all be expected to
+help in the Fair."
+
+"Heavens!" cried Anne.  "The Fair--I had forgotten all about it.
+What a nightmare!  Couldn't you put a stop to it, Uncle Henry?"
+
+Mr. Wimbush sighed and shook his head.  "Alas," he said, "I fear
+I cannot.  I should have liked to put an end to it years ago; but
+the claims of Charity are strong."
+
+"It's not charity we want," Anne murmured rebelliously; "it's
+justice."
+
+"Besides," Mr. Wimbush went on, "the Fair has become an
+institution.  Let me see, it must be twenty-two years since we
+started it.  It was a modest affair then.  Now..." he made a
+sweeping movement with his hand and was silent.
+
+It spoke highly for Mr. Wimbush's public spirit that he still
+continued to tolerate the Fair.  Beginning as a sort of glorified
+church bazaar, Crome's yearly Charity Fair had grown into a noisy
+thing of merry-go-rounds, cocoanut shies, and miscellaneous side
+shows--a real genuine fair on the grand scale.  It was the local
+St. Bartholomew, and the people of all the neighbouring villages,
+with even a contingent from the county town, flocked into the
+park for their Bank Holiday amusement.  The local hospital
+profited handsomely, and it was this fact alone which prevented
+Mr. Wimbush, to whom the Fair was a cause of recurrent and never-
+diminishing agony, from putting a stop to the nuisance which
+yearly desecrated his park and garden.
+
+"I've made all the arrangements already," Henry Wimbush went on.
+"Some of the larger marquees will be put up to-morrow.  The
+swings and the merry-go-round arrive on Sunday."
+
+"So there's no escape," said Anne, turning to the rest of the
+party.  "You'll all have to do something.  As a special favour
+you're allowed to choose your slavery.  My job is the tea tent,
+as usual, Aunt Priscilla..."
+
+"My dear," said Mrs. Wimbush, interrupting her, "I have more
+important things to think about than the Fair.  But you need have
+no doubt that I shall do my best when Monday comes to encourage
+the villagers."
+
+"That's splendid," said Anne.  "Aunt Priscilla will encourage the
+villagers.  What will you do, Mary?"
+
+"I won't do anything where I have to stand by and watch other
+people eat."
+
+"Then you'll look after the children's sports."
+
+"All right," Mary agreed.  "I'll look after the children's
+sports."
+
+"And Mr. Scogan?"
+
+Mr. Scogan reflected.  "May I be allowed to tell fortunes?" he
+asked at last.  "I think I should be good at telling fortunes."
+
+"But you can't tell fortunes in that costume!"
+
+"Can't I?"  Mr. Scogan surveyed himself.
+
+"You'll have to be dressed up.  Do you still persist?"
+
+"I'm ready to suffer all indignities."
+
+"Good!" said Anne; and turning to Gombauld, "You must be our
+lightning artist," she said.  "'Your portrait for a shilling in
+five minutes.'"
+
+"It's a pity I'm not Ivor," said Gombauld, with a laugh.  "I
+could throw in a picture of their Auras for an extra sixpence."
+
+Mary flushed.  "Nothing is to be gained," she said severely, "by
+speaking with levity of serious subjects.  And, after all,
+whatever your personal views may be, psychical research is a
+perfectly serious subject."
+
+"And what about Denis?"
+
+Denis made a deprecating gesture.  "I have no accomplishments,"
+he said, "I'll just be one of those men who wear a thing in their
+buttonholes and go about telling people which is the way to tea
+and not to walk on the grass."
+
+"No, no," said Anne.  "That won't do.  You must do something more
+than that."
+
+"But what?  All the good jobs are taken, and I can do nothing but
+lisp in numbers."
+
+"Well, then, you must lisp," concluded Anne.  "You must write a
+poem for the occasion--an 'Ode on Bank Holiday.'  We'll print it
+on Uncle Henry's press and sell it at twopence a copy."
+
+"Sixpence," Denis protested.  "It'll be worth sixpence."
+
+Anne shook her head.  "Twopence," she repeated firmly.  "Nobody
+will pay more than twopence."
+
+"And now there's Jenny," said Mr Wimbush.  "Jenny," he said,
+raising his voice, "what will you do?"
+
+Denis thought of suggesting that she might draw caricatures at
+sixpence an execution, but decided it would be wiser to go on
+feigning ignorance of her talent.  His mind reverted to the red
+notebook.  Could it really be true that he looked like that?
+
+"What will I do," Jenny echoed, "what will I do?"  She frowned
+thoughtfully for a moment; then her face brightened and she
+smiled.  "When I was young," she said, "I learnt to play the
+drums."
+
+"The drums?"
+
+Jenny nodded, and, in proof of her assertion, agitated her knife
+and fork, like a pair of drumsticks, over her plate.  "If there's
+any opportunity of playing the drums..." she began.
+
+"But of course," said Anne, "there's any amount of opportunity.
+We'll put you down definitely for the drums.  That's the lot,"
+she added.
+
+"And a very good lot too," said Gombauld.  "I look forward to my
+Bank Holiday.  It ought to be gay."
+
+"It ought indeed," Mr Scogan assented.  "But you may rest assured
+that it won't be.  No holiday is ever anything but a
+disappointment."
+
+"Come, come," protested Gombauld.  "My holiday at Crome isn't
+being a disappointment."
+
+"Isn't it?"  Anne turned an ingenuous mask towards him.
+
+"No, it isn't," he answered.
+
+"I'm delighted to hear it."
+
+"It's in the very nature of things," Mr. Scogan went on; "our
+holidays can't help being disappointments.  Reflect for a moment.
+What is a holiday?  The ideal, the Platonic Holiday of Holidays
+is surely a complete and absolute change.  You agree with me in
+my definition?"  Mr. Scogan glanced from face to face round the
+table; his sharp nose moved in a series of rapid jerks through
+all the points of the compass.  There was no sign of dissent; he
+continued:  "A complete and absolute change; very well.  But
+isn't a complete and absolute change precisely the thing we can
+never have--never, in the very nature of things?"  Mr. Scogan
+once more looked rapidly about him.  "Of course it is.  As
+ourselves, as specimens of Homo Sapiens, as members of a society,
+how can we hope to have anything like an absolute change?  We are
+tied down by the frightful limitation of our human faculties, by
+the notions which society imposes on us through our fatal
+suggestibility, by our own personalities.  For us, a complete
+holiday is out of the question.  Some of us struggle manfully to
+take one, but we never succeed, if I may be allowed to express
+myself metaphorically, we never succeed in getting farther than
+Southend."
+
+"You're depressing," said Anne.
+
+"I mean to be," Mr. Scogan replied, and, expanding the fingers of
+his right hand, he went on:  "Look at me, for example.  What sort
+of a holiday can I take?  In endowing me with passions and
+faculties Nature has been horribly niggardly.  The full range of
+human potentialities is in any case distressingly limited; my
+range is a limitation within a limitation.  Out of the ten
+octaves that make up the human instrument, I can compass perhaps
+two.  Thus, while I may have a certain amount of intelligence, I
+have no aesthetic sense; while I possess the mathematical
+faculty, I am wholly without the religious emotions; while I am
+naturally addicted to venery, I have little ambition and am not
+at all avaricious.  Education has further limited my scope.
+Having been brought up in society, I am impregnated with its
+laws; not only should I be afraid of taking a holiday from them,
+I should also feel it painful to try to do so.  In a word, I have
+a conscience as well as a fear of gaol.  Yes, I know it by
+experience.  How often have I tried to take holidays, to get away
+from myself, my own boring nature, my insufferable mental
+surroundings!"  Mr. Scogan sighed.  "But always without success,"
+he added, "always without success.  In my youth I was always
+striving--how hard!--to feel religiously and aesthetically.
+Here, said I to myself, are two tremendously important and
+exciting emotions.  Life would be richer, warmer, brighter,
+altogether more amusing, if I could feel them.  I try to feel
+them.  I read the works of the mystics.  They seemed to me
+nothing but the most deplorable claptrap--as indeed they always
+must to anyone who does not feel the same emotion as the authors
+felt when they were writing.  For it is the emotion that matters.
+The written work is simply an attempt to express emotion, which
+is in itself inexpressible, in terms of intellect and logic.  The
+mystic objectifies a rich feeling in the pit of the stomach into
+a cosmology.  For other mystics that cosmology is a symbol of the
+rich feeling.  For the unreligious it is a symbol of nothing, and
+so appears merely grotesque.  A melancholy fact!  But I
+divagate."  Mr. Scogan checked himself.  "So much for the
+religious emotion.  As for the aesthetic--I was at even greater
+pains to cultivate that.  I have looked at all the right works of
+art in every part of Europe.  There was a time when, I venture to
+believe, I knew more about Taddeo da Poggibonsi, more about the
+cryptic Amico di Taddeo, even than Henry does.  To-day, I am
+happy to say, I have forgotten most of the knowledge I then so
+laboriously acquired; but without vanity I can assert that it was
+prodigious.  I don't pretend, of course, to know anything about
+nigger sculpture or the later seventeenth century in Italy; but
+about all the periods that were fashionable before 1900 I am, or
+was, omniscient.  Yes, I repeat it, omniscient.  But did that
+fact make me any more appreciative of art in general?  It did
+not.  Confronted by a picture, of which I could tell you all the
+known and presumed history--the date when it was painted, the
+character of the painter, the influences that had gone to make it
+what it was--I felt none of that strange excitement and
+exaltation which is, as I am informed by those who do feel it,
+the true aesthetic emotion.  I felt nothing but a certain
+interest in the subject of the picture; or more often, when the
+subject was hackneyed and religious, I felt nothing but a great
+weariness of spirit.  Nevertheless, I must have gone on looking
+at pictures for ten years before I would honestly admit to myself
+that they merely bored me.  Since then I have given up all
+attempts to take a holiday.  I go on cultivating my old stale
+daily self in the resigned spirit with which a bank clerk
+performs from ten till six his daily task.  A holiday, indeed!
+I'm sorry for you, Gombauld, if you still look forward to having
+a holiday."
+
+Gombauld shrugged his shoulders.  "Perhaps," he said, "my
+standards aren't as elevated as yours.  But personally I found
+the war quite as thorough a holiday from all the ordinary
+decencies and sanities, all the common emotions and
+preoccupations, as I ever want to have."
+
+"Yes," Mr. Scogan thoughtfully agreed.  "Yes, the war was
+certainly something of a holiday.  It was a step beyond Southend;
+it was Weston-super-Mare; it was almost Ilfracombe."
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+A little canvas village of tents and booths had sprung up, just
+beyond the boundaries of the garden, in the green expanse of the
+park.  A crowd thronged its streets, the men dressed mostly in
+black--holiday best, funeral best--the women in pale muslins.
+Here and there tricolour bunting hung inert.  In the midst of the
+canvas town, scarlet and gold and crystal, the merry-go-round
+glittered in the sun.  The balloon-man walked among the crowd,
+and above his head, like a huge, inverted bunch of many-coloured
+grapes, the balloons strained upwards.  With a scythe-like motion
+the boat-swings reaped the air, and from the funnel of the engine
+which worked the roundabout rose a thin, scarcely wavering column
+of black smoke.
+
+Denis had climbed to the top of one of Sir Ferdinando's towers,
+and there, standing on the sun-baked leads, his elbows resting on
+the parapet, he surveyed the scene.  The steam-organ sent up
+prodigious music.  The clashing of automatic cymbals beat out
+with inexorable precision the rhythm of piercingly sounded
+melodies.  The harmonies were like a musical shattering of glass
+and brass.  Far down in the bass the Last Trump was hugely
+blowing, and with such persistence, such resonance, that its
+alternate tonic and dominant detached themselves from the rest of
+the music and made a tune of their own, a loud, monotonous see-
+saw.
+
+Denis leaned over the gulf of swirling noise.  If he threw
+himself over the parapet, the noise would surely buoy him up,
+keep him suspended, bobbing, as a fountain balances a ball on its
+breaking crest.  Another fancy came to him, this time in metrical
+form.
+
+"My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretched
+Over a bubbling cauldron."
+
+Bad, bad.  But he liked the idea of something thin and distended
+being blown up from underneath.
+
+"My soul is a thin tent of gut..."
+
+or better--
+
+"My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane..."
+
+That was pleasing:  a thin, tenuous membrane.  It had the right
+anatomical quality.  Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy
+life.  It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of
+words into the actual vortex.  He went down slowly.  "My soul is
+a thin, tenuous membrane..."
+
+On the terrace stood a knot of distinguished visitors.  There was
+old Lord Moleyn, like a caricature of an English milord in a
+French comic paper:  a long man, with a long nose and long,
+drooping moustaches and long teeth of old ivory, and lower down,
+absurdly, a short covert coat, and below that long, long legs
+cased in pearl-grey trousers--legs that bent unsteadily at the
+knee and gave a kind of sideways wobble as he walked.  Beside
+him, short and thick-set, stood Mr. Callamay, the venerable
+conservative statesman, with a face like a Roman bust, and short
+white hair.  Young girls didn't much like going for motor drives
+alone with Mr. Callamay; and of old Lord Moleyn one wondered why
+he wasn't living in gilded exile on the island of Capri among the
+other distinguished persons who, for one reason or another, find
+it impossible to live in England.  They were talking to Anne,
+laughing, the one profoundly, the other hootingly.
+
+A black silk balloon towing a black-and-white striped parachute
+proved to be old Mrs. Budge from the big house on the other side
+of the valley.  She stood low on the ground, and the spikes of
+her black-and-white sunshade menaced the eyes of Priscilla
+Wimbush, who towered over her--a massive figure dressed in purple
+and topped with a queenly toque on which the nodding black plumes
+recalled the splendours of a first-class Parisian funeral.
+
+Denis peeped at them discreetly from the window of the morning-
+room.  His eyes were suddenly become innocent, childlike,
+unprejudiced.  They seemed, these people, inconceivably
+fantastic.  And yet they really existed, they functioned by
+themselves, they were conscious, they had minds.  Moreover, he
+was like them.  Could one believe it?  But the evidence of the
+red notebook was conclusive.
+
+It would have been polite to go and say, "How d'you do?"  But at
+the moment Denis did not want to talk, could not have talked.
+His soul was a tenuous, tremulous, pale membrane.  He would keep
+its sensibility intact and virgin as long as he could.
+Cautiously he crept out by a side door and made his way down
+towards the park.  His soul fluttered as he approached the noise
+and movement of the fair.  He paused for a moment on the brink,
+then stepped in and was engulfed.
+
+Hundreds of people, each with his own private face and all of
+them real, separate, alive:  the thought was disquieting.  He
+paid twopence and saw the Tatooed Woman; twopence more, the
+Largest Rat in the World.  From the home of the Rat he emerged
+just in time to see a hydrogen-filled balloon break loose for
+home.  A child howled up after it; but calmly, a perfect sphere
+of flushed opal, it mounted, mounted.  Denis followed it with his
+eyes until it became lost in the blinding sunlight.  If he could
+but send his soul to follow it!...
+
+He sighed, stuck his steward's rosette in his buttonhole, and
+started to push his way, aimlessly but officially, through the
+crowd.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+Mr. Scogan had been accommodated in a little canvas hut.  Dressed
+in a black skirt and a red bodice, with a yellow-and-red bandana
+handkerchief tied round his black wig, he looked--sharp-nosed,
+brown, and wrinkled--like the Bohemian Hag of Frith's Derby Day.
+A placard pinned to the curtain of the doorway announced the
+presence within the tent of "Sesostris, the Sorceress of
+Ecbatana."  Seated at a table, Mr. Scogan received his clients in
+mysterious silence, indicating with a movement of the finger that
+they were to sit down opposite him and to extend their hands for
+his inspection.  He then examined the palm that was presented
+him, using a magnifying glass and a pair of horn spectacles.  He
+had a terrifying way of shaking his head, frowning and clicking
+with his tongue as he looked at the lines.  Sometimes he would
+whisper, as though to himself, "Terrible, terrible!" or "God
+preserve us!" sketching out the sign of the cross as he uttered
+the words.  The clients who came in laughing grew suddenly grave;
+they began to take the witch seriously.  She was a formidable-
+looking woman; could it be, was it possible, that there was
+something in this sort of thing after all?  After all, they
+thought, as the hag shook her head over their hands, after
+all...And they waited, with an uncomfortably beating heart, for
+the oracle to speak.  After a long and silent inspection, Mr.
+Scogan would suddenly look up and ask, in a hoarse whisper, some
+horrifying question, such as, "Have you ever been hit on the head
+with a hammer by a young man with red hair?"  When the answer was
+in the negative, which it could hardly fail to be, Mr. Scogan
+would nod several times, saying, "I was afraid so.  Everything is
+still to come, still to come, though it can't be very far off
+now."  Sometimes, after a long examination, he would just
+whisper, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," and
+refuse to divulge any details of a future too appalling to be
+envisaged without despair.  Sesostris had a success of horror.
+People stood in a queue outside the witch's booth waiting for the
+privilege of hearing sentence pronounced upon them.
+
+Denis, in the course of his round, looked with curiosity at this
+crowd of suppliants before the shrine of the oracle.  He had a
+great desire to see how Mr. Scogan played his part.  The canvas
+booth was a rickety, ill-made structure.  Between its walls and
+its sagging roof were long gaping chinks and crannies.  Denis
+went to the tea-tent and borrowed a wooden bench and a small
+Union Jack.  With these he hurried back to the booth of
+Sesostris.  Setting down the bench at the back of the booth, he
+climbed up, and with a great air of busy efficiency began to tie
+the Union Jack to the top of one of the tent-poles.  Through the
+crannies in the canvas he could see almost the whole of the
+interior of the tent.  Mr. Scogan's bandana-covered head was just
+below him; his terrifying whispers came clearly up.  Denis looked
+and listened while the witch prophesied financial losses, death
+by apoplexy, destruction by air-raids in the next war.
+
+"Is there going to be another war?" asked the old lady to whom he
+had predicted this end.
+
+"Very soon," said Mr. Scogan, with an air of quiet confidence.
+
+The old lady was succeeded by a girl dressed in white muslin,
+garnished with pink ribbons.  She was wearing a broad hat, so
+that Denis could not see her face; but from her figure and the
+roundness of her bare arms he judged her young and pleasing.  Mr.
+Scogan looked at her hand, then whispered, "You are still
+virtuous."
+
+The young lady giggled and exclaimed, "Oh, lor'!"
+
+"But you will not remain so for long," added Mr. Scogan
+sepulchrally.  The young lady giggled again.  "Destiny, which
+interests itself in small things no less than in great, has
+announced the fact upon your hand."  Mr. Scogan took up the
+magnifying-glass and began once more to examine the white palm.
+"Very interesting," he said, as though to himself--"very
+interesting.  It's as clear as day."  He was silent.
+
+"What's clear?" asked the girl.
+
+"I don't think I ought to tell you."  Mr. Scogan shook his head;
+the pendulous brass ear-rings which he had screwed on to his ears
+tinkled.
+
+"Please, please!," she implored.
+
+The witch seemed to ignore her remark.  "Afterwards, it's not at
+all clear.  The fates don't say whether you will settle down to
+married life and have four children or whether you will try to go
+on the cinema and have none.  They are only specific about this
+one rather crucial incident."
+
+"What is it?  What is it?  Oh, do tell me!"
+
+The white muslin figure leant eagerly forward.
+
+Mr. Scogan sighed.  "Very well," he said, "if you must know, you
+must know.  But if anything untoward happens you must blame your
+own curiosity.  Listen.  Listen."  He lifted up a sharp, claw-
+nailed forefinger.  "This is what the fates have written.  Next
+Sunday afternoon at six o'clock you will be sitting on the second
+stile on the footpath that leads from the church to the lower
+road.  At that moment a man will appear walking along the
+footpath."  Mr. Scogan looked at her hand again as though to
+refresh his memory of the details of the scene.  "A man," he
+repeated--"a small man with a sharp nose, not exactly good
+looking nor precisely young, but fascinating."  He lingered
+hissingly over the word.  "He will ask you, 'Can you tell me the
+way to Paradise?' and you will answer, 'Yes, I'll show you,' and
+walk with him down towards the little hazel copse.  I cannot read
+what will happen after that."  There was a silence.
+
+"Is it really true?" asked white muslin.
+
+The witch gave a shrug of the shoulders.  "I merely tell you what
+I read in your hand.  Good afternoon.  That will be sixpence.
+Yes, I have change.  Thank you.  Good afternoon."
+
+Denis stepped down from the bench; tied insecurely and crookedly
+to the tentpole, the Union Jack hung limp on the windless air.
+"If only I could do things like that!" he thought, as he carried
+the bench back to the tea-tent.
+
+Anne was sitting behind a long table filling thick white cups
+from an urn.  A neat pile of printed sheets lay before her on the
+table.  Denis took one of them and looked at it affectionately.
+It was his poem.  They had printed five hundred copies, and very
+nice the quarto broadsheets looked.
+
+"Have you sold many?" he asked in a casual tone.
+
+Anne put her head on one side deprecatingly.  "Only three so far,
+I'm afraid.  But I'm giving a free copy to everyone who spends
+more than a shilling on his tea.  So in any case it's having a
+circulation."
+
+Denis made no reply, but walked slowly away.  He looked at the
+broadsheet in his hand and read the lines to himself relishingly
+as he walked along:
+
+"This day of roundabouts and swings,
+Struck weights, shied cocoa-nuts, tossed rings,
+Switchbacks, Aunt Sallies, and all such small
+High jinks--you call it ferial?
+A holiday?  But paper noses
+Sniffed the artificial roses
+Of round Venetian cheeks through half
+Each carnival year, and masks might laugh
+At things the naked face for shame
+Would blush at--laugh and think no blame.
+A holiday?  But Galba showed
+Elephants on an airy road;
+Jumbo trod the tightrope then,
+And in the circus armed men
+Stabbed home for sport and died to break
+Those dull imperatives that make
+A prison of every working day,
+Where all must drudge and all obey.
+Sing Holiday!  You do not know
+How to be free.  The Russian snow
+flowered with bright blood whose roses spread
+Petals of fading, fading red
+That died into the snow again,
+Into the virgin snow; and men
+From all ancient bonds were freed.
+Old law, old custom, and old creed,
+Old right and wrong there bled to death;
+The frozen air received their breath,
+A little smoke that died away;
+And round about them where they lay
+The snow bloomed roses.  Blood was there
+A red gay flower and only fair.
+Sing Holiday!  Beneath the Tree
+Of Innocence and Liberty,
+Paper Nose and Red Cockade
+Dance within the magic shade
+That makes them drunken, merry, and strong
+To laugh and sing their ferial song:
+'Free, free...!'
+But Echo answers
+Faintly to the laughing dancers,
+'Free'--and faintly laughs, and still,
+Within the hollows of the hill,
+Faintlier laughs and whispers, 'Free,'
+Fadingly, diminishingly:
+'Free,' and laughter faints away...
+Sing Holiday!  Sing Holiday!"
+
+He folded the sheet carefully and put it in his pocket.  The
+thing had its merits.  Oh, decidedly, decidedly!  But how
+unpleasant the crowd smelt!  He lit a cigarette.  The smell of
+cows was preferable.  He passed through the gate in the park wall
+into the garden.  The swimming-pool was a centre of noise and
+activity.
+
+"Second Heat in the Young Ladies' Championship."  It was the
+polite voice of Henry Wimbush.  A crowd of sleek, seal-like
+figures in black bathing-dresses surrounded him.  His grey bowler
+hat, smooth, round, and motionless in the midst of a moving sea,
+was an island of aristocratic calm.
+
+Holding his tortoise-shell-rimmed pince-nez an inch or two in
+front of his eyes, he read out names from a list.
+
+"Miss Dolly Miles, Miss Rebecca Balister, Miss Doris Gabell..."
+
+Five young persons ranged themselves on the brink.  From their
+seats of honour at the other end of the pool, old Lord Moleyn and
+Mr. Callamay looked on with eager interest.
+
+Henry Wimbush raised his hand.  There was an expectant silence.
+"When I say 'Go,' go.  Go!" he said.  There was an almost
+simultaneous splash.
+
+Denis pushed his way through the spectators.  Somebody plucked
+him by the sleeve; he looked down.  It was old Mrs. Budge.
+
+"Delighted to see you again, Mr. Stone," she said in her rich,
+husky voice.  She panted a little as she spoke, like a short-
+winded lap-dog.  It was Mrs. Budge who, having read in the "Daily
+Mirror" that the Government needed peach stones--what they needed
+them for she never knew--had made the collection of peach stones
+her peculiar "bit" of war work.  She had thirty-six peach trees
+in her walled garden, as well as four hot-houses in which trees
+could be forced, so that she was able to eat peaches practically
+the whole year round.  In 1916 she ate 4200 peaches, and sent the
+stones to the Government.  In 1917 the military authorities
+called up three of her gardeners, and what with this and the fact
+that it was a bad year for wall fruit, she only managed to eat
+2900 peaches during that crucial period of the national
+destinies.  In 1918 she did rather better, for between January
+1st and the date of the Armistice she ate 3300 peaches.  Since
+the Armistice she had relaxed her efforts; now she did not eat
+more than two or three peaches a day.  Her constitution, she
+complained, had suffered; but it had suffered for a good cause.
+
+Denis answered her greeting by a vague and polite noise.
+
+"So nice to see the young people enjoying themselves," Mrs. Budge
+went on.  "And the old people too, for that matter.  Look at old
+Lord Moleyn and dear Mr. Callamay.  Isn't it delightful to see
+the way they enjoy themselves?"
+
+Denis looked.  He wasn't sure whether it was so very delightful
+after all.  Why didn't they go and watch the sack races?  The two
+old gentlemen were engaged at the moment in congratulating the
+winner of the race; it seemed an act of supererogatory
+graciousness; for, after all, she had only won a heat.
+
+"Pretty little thing, isn't she?" said Mrs. Budge huskily, and
+panted two or three times.
+
+"Yes," Denis nodded agreement.  Sixteen, slender, but nubile, he
+said to himself, and laid up the phrase in his memory as a happy
+one.  Old Mr. Callamay had put on his spectacles to congratulate
+the victor, and Lord Moleyn, leaning forward over his walking-
+stick, showed his long ivory teeth, hungrily smiling.
+
+"Capital performance, capital," Mr. Callamay was saying in his
+deep voice.
+
+The victor wriggled with embarrassment.  She stood with her hands
+behind her back, rubbing one foot nervously on the other.  Her
+wet bathing-dress shone, a torso of black polished marble.
+
+"Very good indeed," said Lord Moleyn.  His voice seemed to come
+from just behind his teeth, a toothy voice.  It was as though a
+dog should suddenly begin to speak.  He smiled again, Mr.
+Callamay readjusted his spectacles.
+
+"When I say 'Go,' go.  Go!"
+
+Splash!  The third heat had started.
+
+"Do you know, I never could learn to swim," said Mrs. Budge.
+
+"Really?"
+
+"But I used to be able to float."
+
+Denis imagined her floating--up and down, up and down on a great
+green swell.  A blown black bladder; no, that wasn't good, that
+wasn't good at all.  A new winner was being congratulated.  She
+was atrociously stubby and fat.  The last one, long and
+harmoniously, continuously curved from knee to breast, had been
+an Eve by Cranach; but this, this one was a bad Rubens.
+
+"...go--go--go!"  Henry Wimbush's polite level voice once more
+pronounced the formula.  Another batch of young ladies dived in.
+
+Grown a little weary of sustaining a conversation with Mrs.
+Budge, Denis conveniently remembered that his duties as a steward
+called him elsewhere.  He pushed out through the lines of
+spectators and made his way along the path left clear behind
+them.  He was thinking again that his soul was a pale, tenuous
+membrane, when he was startled by hearing a thin, sibilant voice,
+speaking apparently from just above his head, pronounce the
+single word "Disgusting!"
+
+He looked up sharply.  The path along which he was walking passed
+under the lee of a wall of clipped yew.  Behind the hedge the
+ground sloped steeply up towards the foot of the terrace and the
+house; for one standing on the higher ground it was easy to look
+over the dark barrier.  Looking up, Denis saw two heads
+overtopping the hedge immediately above him.  He recognised the
+iron mask of Mr. Bodiham and the pale, colourless face of his
+wife.  They were looking over his head, over the heads of the
+spectators, at the swimmers in the pond.
+
+"Disgusting!" Mrs. Bodiham repeated, hissing softly.
+
+The rector turned up his iron mask towards the solid cobalt of
+the sky.  "How long?" he said, as though to himself; "how long?"
+He lowered his eyes again, and they fell on Denis's upturned
+curious face.  There was an abrupt movement, and Mr. and Mrs.
+Bodiham popped out of sight behind the hedge.
+
+Denis continued his promenade.  He wandered past the merry-go-
+round, through the thronged streets of the canvas village; the
+membrane of his soul flapped tumultuously in the noise and
+laughter.  In a roped-off space beyond, Mary was directing the
+children's sports.  Little creatures seethed round about her,
+making a shrill, tinny clamour; others clustered about the skirts
+and trousers of their parents.  Mary's face was shining in the
+heat; with an immense output of energy she started a three-legged
+race.  Denis looked on in admiration.
+
+"You're wonderful," he said, coming up behind her and touching
+her on the arm.  "I've never seen such energy."
+
+She turned towards him a face, round, red, and honest as the
+setting sun; the golden bell of her hair swung silently as she
+moved her head and quivered to rest.
+
+"Do you know, Denis," she said, in a low, serious voice, gasping
+a little as she spoke--"do you know that there's a woman here who
+has had three children in thirty-one months?"
+
+"Really," said Denis, making rapid mental calculations.
+
+"It's appalling.  I've been telling her about the Malthusian
+League.  One really ought..."
+
+But a sudden violent renewal of the metallic yelling announced
+the fact that somebody had won the race.  Mary became once more
+the centre of a dangerous vortex.  It was time, Denis thought, to
+move on; he might be asked to do something if he stayed too long.
+
+He turned back towards the canvas village.  The thought of tea
+was making itself insistent in his mind.  Tea, tea, tea.  But the
+tea-tent was horribly thronged.  Anne, with an unusual expression
+of grimness on her flushed face, was furiously working the handle
+of the urn; the brown liquid spurted incessantly into the
+proffered cups.  Portentous, in the farther corner of the tent,
+Priscilla, in her royal toque, was encouraging the villagers.  In
+a momentary lull Denis could hear her deep, jovial laughter and
+her manly voice.  Clearly, he told himself, this was no place for
+one who wanted tea.  He stood irresolute at the entrance to the
+tent.  A beautiful thought suddenly came to him; if he went back
+to the house, went unobtrusively, without being observed, if he
+tiptoed into the dining-room and noiselessly opened the little
+doors of the sideboard--ah, then!  In the cool recess within he
+would find bottles and a siphon; a bottle of crystal gin and a
+quart of soda water, and then for the cups that inebriate as well
+as cheer...
+
+A minute later he was walking briskly up the shady yew-tree walk.
+Within the house it was deliciously quiet and cool.  Carrying his
+well-filled tumbler with care, he went into the library.  There,
+the glass on the corner of the table beside him, he settled into
+a chair with a volume of Sainte-Beuve.  There was nothing, he
+found, like a Causerie du Lundi for settling and soothing the
+troubled spirits.  That tenuous membrane of his had been too
+rudely buffeted by the afternoon's emotions; it required a rest.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+Towards sunset the fair itself became quiescent.  It was the hour
+for the dancing to begin.  At one side of the village of tents a
+space had been roped off.  Acetylene lamps, hung round it on
+posts, cast a piercing white light.  In one corner sat the band,
+and, obedient to its scraping and blowing, two or three hundred
+dancers trampled across the dry ground, wearing away the grass
+with their booted feet.  Round this patch of all but daylight,
+alive with motion and noise, the night seemed preternaturally
+dark.  Bars of light reached out into it, and every now and then
+a lonely figure or a couple of lovers, interlaced, would cross
+the bright shaft, flashing for a moment into visible existence,
+to disappear again as quickly and surprisingly as they had come.
+
+Denis stood by the entrance of the enclosure, watching the
+swaying, shuffling crowd.  The slow vortex brought the couples
+round and round again before him, as though he were passing them
+in review.  There was Priscilla, still wearing her queenly toque,
+still encouraging the villagers--this time by dancing with one of
+the tenant farmers.  There was Lord Moleyn, who had stayed on to
+the disorganised, passoverish meal that took the place of dinner
+on this festal day; he one-stepped shamblingly, his bent knees
+more precariously wobbly than ever, with a terrified village
+beauty.  Mr. Scogan trotted round with another.  Mary was in the
+embrace of a young farmer of heroic proportions; she was looking
+up at him, talking, as Denis could see, very seriously.  What
+about? he wondered.  The Malthusian League, perhaps.  Seated in
+the corner among the band, Jenny was performing wonders of
+virtuosity upon the drums.  Her eyes shone, she smiled to
+herself.  A whole subterranean life seemed to be expressing
+itself in those loud rat-tats, those long rolls and flourishes of
+drumming.  Looking at her, Denis ruefully remembered the red
+notebook; he wondered what sort of a figure he was cutting now.
+But the sight of Anne and Gombauld swimming past--Anne with her
+eyes almost shut and sleeping, as it were, on the sustaining
+wings of movement and music--dissipated these preoccupations.
+Male and female created He them...There they were, Anne and
+Gombauld, and a hundred couples more--all stepping harmoniously
+together to the old tune of Male and Female created He them.  But
+Denis sat apart; he alone lacked his complementary opposite.
+They were all coupled but he; all but he...
+
+Somebody touched him on the shoulder and he looked up.  It was
+Henry Wimbush.
+
+"I never showed you our oaken drainpipes," he said.  "Some of the
+ones we dug up are lying quite close to here.  Would you like to
+come and see them?"
+
+Denis got up, and they walked off together into the darkness.
+The music grew fainter behind them.  Some of the higher notes
+faded out altogether.  Jenny's drumming and the steady sawing of
+the bass throbbed on, tuneless and meaningless in their ears.
+Henry Wimbush halted.
+
+"Here we are," he said, and, taking an electric torch out of his
+pocket, he cast a dim beam over two or three blackened sections
+of tree trunk, scooped out into the semblance of pipes, which
+were lying forlornly in a little depression in the ground.
+
+"Very interesting," said Denis, with a rather tepid enthusiasm.
+
+They sat down on the grass.  A faint white glare, rising from
+behind a belt of trees, indicated the position of the dancing-
+floor.  The music was nothing but a muffled rhythmic pulse.
+
+"I shall be glad," said Henry Wimbush, "when this function comes
+at last to an end."
+
+"I can believe it."
+
+"I do not know how it is," Mr. Wimbush continued, "but the
+spectacle of numbers of my fellow-creatures in a state of
+agitation moves in me a certain weariness, rather than any gaiety
+or excitement.  The fact is, they don't very much interest me.
+They're aren't in my line.  You follow me?  I could never take
+much interest, for example, in a collection of postage stamps.
+Primitives or seventeenth-century books--yes.  They are my line.
+But stamps, no.  I don't know anything about them; they're not my
+line.  They don't interest me, they give me no emotion.  It's
+rather the same with people, I'm afraid.  I'm more at home with
+these pipes."  He jerked his head sideways towards the hollowed
+logs.  "The trouble with the people and events of the present is
+that you never know anything about them.  What do I know of
+contemporary politics?  Nothing.  What do I know of the people I
+see round about me?  Nothing.  What they think of me or of
+anything else in the world, what they will do in five minutes'
+time, are things I can't guess at.  For all I know, you may
+suddenly jump up and try to murder me in a moment's time."
+
+"Come, come," said Denis.
+
+"True," Mr. Wimbush continued, "the little I know about your past
+is certainly reassuring.  But I know nothing of your present, and
+neither you nor I know anything of your future.  It's appalling;
+in living people, one is dealing with unknown and unknowable
+quantities.  One can only hope to find out anything about them by
+a long series of the most disagreeable and boring human contacts,
+involving a terrible expense of time.  It's the same with current
+events; how can I find out anything about them except by devoting
+years to the most exhausting first-hand study, involving once
+more an endless number of the most unpleasant contacts?  No, give
+me the past.  It doesn't change; it's all there in black and
+white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and
+decorously and, above all, privately--by reading.  By reading I
+know a great deal of Caesar Borgia, of St. Francis, of Dr.
+Johnson; a few weeks have made me thoroughly acquainted with
+these interesting characters, and I have been spared the tedious
+and revolting process of getting to know them by personal
+contact, which I should have to do if they were living now.  How
+gay and delightful life would be if one could get rid of all the
+human contacts!  Perhaps, in the future, when machines have
+attained to a state of perfection--for I confess that I am, like
+Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the
+perfectibility of machinery--then, perhaps, it will be possible
+for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in a dignified
+seclusion, surrounded by the delicate attentions of silent and
+graceful machines, and entirely secure from any human intrusion.
+It is a beautiful thought."
+
+"Beautiful," Denis agreed.  "But what about the desirable human
+contacts, like love and friendship?"
+
+The black silhouette against the darkness shook its head.  "The
+pleasures even of these contacts are much exaggerated," said the
+polite level voice.  "It seems to me doubtful whether they are
+equal to the pleasures of private reading and contemplation.
+Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only
+because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books
+were scarce and difficult to reproduce.  The world, you must
+remember, is only just becoming literate.  As reading becomes
+more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number
+of people will discover that books will give them all the
+pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.  At
+present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate
+in large herds and to make a noise; in future their natural
+tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet.  The proper study of
+mankind is books."
+
+"I sometimes think that it may be," said Denis; he was wondering
+if Anne and Gombauld were still dancing together.
+
+"Instead of which," said Mr. Wimbush, with a sigh, "I must go and
+see if all is well on the dancing-floor."  They got up and began
+to walk slowly towards the white glare.  "If all these people
+were dead," Henry Wimbush went on, "this festivity would be
+extremely agreeable.  Nothing would be pleasanter than to read in
+a well-written book of an open-air ball that took place a century
+ago.  How charming! one would say; how pretty and how amusing!
+But when the ball takes place to-day, when one finds oneself
+involved in it, then one sees the thing in its true light.  It
+turns out to be merely this."  He waved his hand in the direction
+of the acetylene flares.  "In my youth," he went on after a
+pause, "I found myself, quite fortuitously, involved in a series
+of the most phantasmagorical amorous intrigues.  A novelist could
+have made his fortune out of them, and even if I were to tell
+you, in my bald style, the details of these adventures, you would
+be amazed at the romantic tale.  But I assure you, while they
+were happening--these romantic adventures--they seemed to me no
+more and no less exciting than any other incident of actual life.
+To climb by night up a rope-ladder to a second-floor window in an
+old house in Toledo seemed to me, while I was actually performing
+this rather dangerous feat, an action as obvious, as much to be
+taken for granted, as--how shall I put it?--as quotidian as
+catching the 8.52 from Surbiton to go to business on a Monday
+morning.  Adventures and romance only take on their adventurous
+and romantic qualities at second-hand.  Live them, and they are
+just a slice of life like the rest.  In literature they become as
+charming as this dismal ball would be if we were celebrating its
+tercentenary."  They had come to the entrance of the enclosure
+and stood there, blinking in the dazzling light.  "Ah, if only we
+were!" Henry Wimbush added.
+
+Anne and Gombauld were still dancing together.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+It was after ten o'clock.  The dancers had already dispersed and
+the last lights were being put out.  To-morrow the tents would be
+struck, the dismantled merry-go-round would be packed into
+waggons and carted away.  An expanse of worn grass, a shabby
+brown patch in the wide green of the park, would be all that
+remained.  Crome Fair was over.
+
+By the edge of the pool two figures lingered.
+
+"No, no, no," Anne was saying in a breathless whisper, leaning
+backwards, turning her head from side to side in an effort to
+escape Gombauld's kisses.  "No, please.  No."  Her raised voice
+had become imperative.
+
+Gombauld relaxed his embrace a little.  "Why not?" he said.  "I
+will."
+
+With a sudden effort Anne freed herself.  "You won't," she
+retorted.  "You've tried to take the most unfair advantage of
+me."
+
+"Unfair advantage?" echoed Gombauld in genuine surprise.
+
+"Yes, unfair advantage.  You attack me after I've been dancing
+for two hours, while I'm still reeling drunk with the movement,
+when I've lost my head, when I've got no mind left but only a
+rhythmical body!  It's as bad as making love to someone you've
+drugged or intoxicated."
+
+Gombauld laughed angrily.  "Call me a White Slaver and have done
+with it."
+
+"Luckily," said Anne, "I am now completely sobered, and if you
+try and kiss me again I shall box your ears.  Shall we take a few
+turns round the pool?" she added.  "The night is delicious."
+
+For answer Gombauld made an irritated noise.  They paced off
+slowly, side by side.
+
+"What I like about the painting of Degas..."  Anne began in her
+most detached and conversational tone.
+
+"Oh, damn Degas!" Gombauld was almost shouting.
+
+From where he stood, leaning in an attitude of despair against
+the parapet of the terrace, Denis had seen them, the two pale
+figures in a patch of moonlight, far down by the pool's edge.  He
+had seen the beginning of what promised to be an endless
+passionate embracement, and at the sight he had fled.  It was too
+much; he couldn't stand it.  In another moment, he felt, he would
+have burst into irrepressible tears.
+
+Dashing blindly into the house, he almost ran into Mr. Scogan,
+who was walking up and down the hall smoking a final pipe.
+
+"Hullo!" said Mr. Scogan, catching him by the arm; dazed and
+hardly conscious of what he was doing or where he was, Denis
+stood there for a moment like a somnambulist.  "What's the
+matter?" Mr. Scogan went on.  "you look disturbed, distressed,
+depressed."
+
+Denis shook his head without replying.
+
+"Worried about the cosmos, eh?" Mr. Scogan patted him on the arm.
+"I know the feeling," he said.  "It's a most distressing symptom.
+'What's the point of it all?  All is vanity.  What's the good of
+continuing to function if one's doomed to be snuffed out at last
+along with everything else?'  Yes, yes.  I know exactly how you
+feel.  It's most distressing if one allows oneself to be
+distressed.  But then why allow oneself to be distressed?  After
+all, we all know that there's no ultimate point.  But what
+difference does that make?"
+
+At this point the somnambulist suddenly woke up.  "What?" he
+said, blinking and frowning at his interlocutor.  "What?"  Then
+breaking away he dashed up the stairs, two steps at a time.
+
+Mr. Scogan ran to the foot of the stairs and called up after him.
+"It makes no difference, none whatever.  Life is gay all the
+same, always, under whatever circumstances--under whatever
+circumstances," he added, raising his voice to a shout.  But
+Denis was already far out of hearing, and even if he had not
+been, his mind to-night was proof against all the consolations of
+philosophy.  Mr. Scogan replaced his pipe between his teeth and
+resumed his meditative pacing.  "Under any circumstances," he
+repeated to himself.  It was ungrammatical to begin with; was it
+true?  And is life really its own reward?  He wondered.  When his
+pipe had burned itself to its stinking conclusion he took a drink
+of gin and went to bed.  In ten minutes he was deeply, innocently
+asleep.
+
+Denis had mechanically undressed and, clad in those flowered silk
+pyjamas of which he was so justly proud, was lying face downwards
+on his bed.  Time passed.  When at last he looked up, the candle
+which he had left alight at his bedside had burned down almost to
+the socket.  He looked at his watch; it was nearly half-past one.
+His head ached, his dry, sleepless eyes felt as though they had
+been bruised from behind, and the blood was beating within his
+ears a loud arterial drum.  He got up, opened the door, tiptoed
+noiselessly along the passage, and began to mount the stairs
+towards the higher floors.  Arrived at the servants' quarters
+under the roof, he hesitated, then turning to the right he opened
+a little door at the end of the corridor.  Within was a pitch-
+dark cupboard-like boxroom, hot, stuffy, and smelling of dust and
+old leather.  He advanced cautiously into the blackness, groping
+with his hands.  It was from this den that the ladder went up to
+the leads of the western tower.  He found the ladder, and set his
+feet on the rungs; noiselessly, he lifted the trap-door above his
+head; the moonlit sky was over him, he breathed the fresh, cool
+air of the night.  In a moment he was standing on the leads,
+gazing out over the dim, colourless landscape, looking
+perpendicularly down at the terrace seventy feet below.
+
+Why had he climbed up to this high, desolate place?  Was it to
+look at the moon?  Was it to commit suicide?  As yet he hardly
+knew.  Death--the tears came into his eyes when he thought of it.
+His misery assumed a certain solemnity; he was lifted up on the
+wings of a kind of exaltation.  It was a mood in which he might
+have done almost anything, however foolish.  He advanced towards
+the farther parapet; the drop was sheer there and uninterrupted.
+A good leap, and perhaps one might clear the narrow terrace and
+so crash down yet another thirty feet to the sun-baked ground
+below.  He paused at the corner of the tower, looking now down
+into the shadowy gulf below, now up towards the rare stars and
+the waning moon.  He made a gesture with his hand, muttered
+something, he could not afterwards remember what; but the fact
+that he had said it aloud gave the utterance a peculiarly
+terrible significance.  Then he looked down once more into the
+depths.
+
+"What ARE you doing, Denis?" questioned a voice from somewhere
+very close behind him.
+
+Denis uttered a cry of frightened surprise, and very nearly went
+over the parapet in good earnest.  His heart was beating
+terribly, and he was pale when, recovering himself, he turned
+round in the direction from which the voice had come.
+
+"Are you ill?"
+
+In the profound shadow that slept under the eastern parapet of
+the tower, he saw something he had not previously noticed--an
+oblong shape.  It was a mattress, and someone was lying on it.
+Since that first memorable night on the tower, Mary had slept out
+every evening; it was a sort of manifestation of fidelity.
+
+"It gave me a fright," she went on, "to wake up and see you
+waving your arms and gibbering there.  What on earth were you
+doing?"
+
+Denis laughed melodramatically.  "What, indeed!" he said.  If she
+hadn't woken up as she did, he would be lying in pieces at the
+bottom of the tower; he was certain of that, now.
+
+"You hadn't got designs on me, I hope?" Mary inquired, jumping
+too rapidly to conclusions.
+
+"I didn't know you were here," said Denis, laughing more bitterly
+and artificially than before.
+
+"What IS the matter, Denis?"
+
+He sat down on the edge of the mattress, and for all reply went
+on laughing in the same frightful and improbable tone.
+
+An hour later he was reposing with his head on Mary's knees, and
+she, with an affectionate solicitude that was wholly maternal,
+was running her fingers through his tangled hair.  He had told
+her everything, everything:  his hopeless love, his jealousy, his
+despair, his suicide--as it were providentially averted by her
+interposition.  He had solemnly promised never to think of self-
+destruction again.  And now his soul was floating in a sad
+serenity.  It was embalmed in the sympathy that Mary so
+generously poured.  And it was not only in receiving sympathy
+that Denis found serenity and even a kind of happiness; it was
+also in giving it.  For if he had told Mary everything about his
+miseries, Mary, reacting to these confidences, had told him in
+return everything, or very nearly everything, about her own.
+
+"Poor Mary!"  He was very sorry for her.  Still, she might have
+guessed that Ivor wasn't precisely a monument of constancy.
+
+"Well," she concluded, "one must put a good face on it."  She
+wanted to cry, but she wouldn't allow herself to be weak.  There
+was a silence.
+
+"Do you think," asked Denis hesitatingly--"do you really think
+that she...that Gombauld..."
+
+"I'm sure of it," Mary answered decisively.  There was another
+long pause.
+
+"I don't know what to do about it," he said at last, utterly
+dejected.
+
+"You'd better go away," advised Mary.  "It's the safest thing,
+and the most sensible."
+
+"But I've arranged to stay here three weeks more."
+
+"You must concoct an excuse."
+
+"I suppose you're right."
+
+"I know I am," said Mary, who was recovering all her firm self-
+possession.  "You can't go on like this, can you?"
+
+"No, I can't go on like this," he echoed.
+
+Immensely practical, Mary invented a plan of action.
+Startlingly, in the darkness, the church clock struck three.
+
+"You must go to bed at once," she said.  "I'd no idea it was so
+late."
+
+Denis clambered down the ladder, cautiously descended the
+creaking stairs.  His room was dark; the candle had long ago
+guttered to extinction.  He got into bed and fell asleep almost
+at once.
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+Denis had been called, but in spite of the parted curtains he had
+dropped off again into that drowsy, dozy state when sleep becomes
+a sensual pleasure almost consciously savoured.  In this
+condition he might have remained for another hour if he had not
+been disturbed by a violent rapping at the door.
+
+"Come in," he mumbled, without opening his eyes.  The latch
+clicked, a hand seized him by the shoulder and he was rudely
+shaken.
+
+"Get up, get up!"
+
+His eyelids blinked painfully apart, and he saw Mary standing
+over him, bright-faced and earnest.
+
+"Get up!" she repeated.  "You must go and send the telegram.
+Don't you remember?"
+
+"O Lord!"  He threw off the bed-clothes; his tormentor retired.
+
+Denis dressed as quickly as he could and ran up the road to the
+village post office.  Satisfaction glowed within him as he
+returned.  He had sent a long telegram, which would in a few
+hours evoke an answer ordering him back to town at once--on
+urgent business.  It was an act performed, a decisive step taken
+--and he so rarely took decisive steps; he felt pleased with
+himself.  It was with a whetted appetite that he came in to
+breakfast.
+
+"Good-morning," said Mr. Scogan.  "I hope you're better."
+
+"Better?"
+
+"You were rather worried about the cosmos last night."
+
+Denis tried to laugh away the impeachment.  "Was I?" he lightly
+asked.
+
+"I wish," said Mr. Scogan, "that I had nothing worse to prey on
+my mind.  I should be a happy man."
+
+"One is only happy in action," Denis enunciated, thinking of the
+telegram.
+
+He looked out of the window.  Great florid baroque clouds floated
+high in the blue heaven.  A wind stirred among the trees, and
+their shaken foliage twinkled and glittered like metal in the
+sun.  Everything seemed marvellously beautiful.  At the thought
+that he would soon be leaving all this beauty he felt a momentary
+pang; but he comforted himself by recollecting how decisively he
+was acting.
+
+"Action," he repeated aloud, and going over to the sideboard he
+helped himself to an agreeable mixture of bacon and fish.
+
+Breakfast over, Denis repaired to the terrace, and, sitting
+there, raised the enormous bulwark of the "Times" against the
+possible assaults of Mr. Scogan, who showed an unappeased desire
+to go on talking about the Universe.  Secure behind the crackling
+pages, he meditated.  In the light of this brilliant morning the
+emotions of last night seemed somehow rather remote.  And what if
+he had seen them embracing in the moonlight?  Perhaps it didn't
+mean much after all.  And even if it did, why shouldn't he stay?
+He felt strong enough to stay, strong enough to be aloof,
+disinterested, a mere friendly acquaintance.  And even if he
+weren't strong enough...
+
+"What time do you think the telegram will arrive?" asked Mary
+suddenly, thrusting in upon him over the top of the paper.
+
+Denis started guiltily.  "I don't know at all," he said.
+
+"I was only wondering," said Mary, "because there's a very good
+train at 3.27, and it would be nice if you could catch it,
+wouldn't it?"
+
+"Awfully nice," he agreed weakly.  He felt as though he were
+making arrangements for his own funeral.  Train leaves Waterloo
+3.27.  No flowers...Mary was gone.  No, he was blowed if he'd let
+himself be hurried down to the Necropolis like this.  He was
+blowed.  The sight of Mr. Scogan looking out, with a hungry
+expression, from the drawing-room window made him precipitately
+hoist the "Times" once more.  For a long while he kept it
+hoisted.  Lowering it at last to take another cautious peep at
+his surroundings, he found himself, with what astonishment!
+confronted by Anne's faint, amused, malicious smile.  She was
+standing before him,--the woman who was a tree,--the swaying
+grace of her movement arrested in a pose that seemed itself a
+movement.
+
+"How long have you been standing there?" he asked, when he had
+done gaping at her.
+
+"Oh, about half an hour, I suppose," she said airily.  "You were
+so very deep in your paper--head over ears--I didn't like to
+disturb you."
+
+"You look lovely this morning," Denis exclaimed.  It was the
+first time he had ever had the courage to utter a personal remark
+of the kind.
+
+Anne held up her hand as though to ward off a blow.  "Don't
+bludgeon me, please."   She sat down on the bench beside him.  He
+was a nice boy, she thought, quite charming; and Gombauld's
+violent insistences were really becoming rather tiresome.  "Why
+don't you wear white trousers?" she asked.  "I like you so much
+in white trousers."
+
+"They're at the wash," Denis replied rather curtly.  This white-
+trouser business was all in the wrong spirit.  He was just
+preparing a scheme to manoeuvre the conversation back to the
+proper path, when Mr. Scogan suddenly darted out of the house,
+crossed the terrace with clockwork rapidity, and came to a halt
+in front of the bench on which they were seated.
+
+"To go on with our interesting conversation about the cosmos," he
+began, "I become more and more convinced that the various parts
+of the concern are fundamentally discrete...But would you mind,
+Denis, moving a shade to your right?"  He wedged himself between
+them on the bench.  "And if you would shift a few inches to the
+left, my dear Anne...Thank you.  Discrete, I think, was what I
+was saying."
+
+"You were," said Anne.  Denis was speechless.
+
+They were taking their after luncheon coffee in the library when
+the telegram arrived.  Denis blushed guiltily as he took the
+orange envelope from the salver and tore it open.  "Return at
+once.  Urgent family business."  It was too ridiculous.  As if he
+had any family business!  Wouldn't it be best just to crumple the
+thing up and put it in his pocket without saying anything about
+it?  He looked up; Mary's large blue china eyes were fixed upon
+him, seriously, penetratingly.  He blushed more deeply than ever,
+hesitated in a horrible uncertainty.
+
+"What's your telegram about?" Mary asked significantly.
+
+He lost his head, "I'm afraid," he mumbled, "I'm afraid this
+means I shall have to go back to town at once."  He frowned at
+the telegram ferociously.
+
+"But that's absurd, impossible," cried Anne.  She had been
+standing by the window talking to Gombauld; but at Denis's words
+she came swaying across the room towards him.
+
+"It's urgent," he repeated desperately.
+
+"But you've only been here such a short time," Anne protested.
+
+"I know," he said, utterly miserable.  Oh, if only she could
+understand!  Women were supposed to have intuition.
+
+"If he must go, he must," put in Mary firmly.
+
+"Yes, I must."  He looked at the telegram again for inspiration.
+"You see, it's urgent family business," he explained.
+
+Priscilla got up from her chair in some excitement.  "I had a
+distinct presentiment of this last night," she said.  "A distinct
+presentiment."
+
+"A mere coincidence, no doubt," said Mary, brushing Mrs. Wimbush
+out of the conversation.  "There's a very good train at 3.27."
+She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece.  "You'll have nice
+time to pack."
+
+"I'll order the motor at once."  Henry Wimbush rang the bell.
+The funeral was well under way.  It was awful, awful.
+
+"I am wretched you should be going," said Anne.
+
+Denis turned towards her; she really did look wretched.  He
+abandoned himself hopelessly, fatalistically to his destiny.
+This was what came of action, of doing something decisive.  If
+only he'd just let things drift!  If only...
+
+"I shall miss your conversation," said Mr. Scogan.
+
+Mary looked at the clock again.  "I think perhaps you ought to go
+and pack," she said.
+
+Obediently Denis left the room.  Never again, he said to himself,
+never again would he do anything decisive.  Camlet, West Bowlby,
+Knipswich for Timpany, Spavin Delawarr; and then all the other
+stations; and then, finally, London.  The thought of the journey
+appalled him.  And what on earth was he going to do in London
+when he got there?  He climbed wearily up the stairs.  It was
+time for him to lay himself in his coffin.
+
+The car was at the door--the hearse.  The whole party had
+assembled to see him go.  Good-bye, good-bye.  Mechanically he
+tapped the barometer that hung in the porch; the needle stirred
+perceptibly to the left.  A sudden smile lighted up his
+lugubrious face.
+
+"'It sinks and I am ready to depart,'" he said, quoting Landor
+with an exquisite aptness.  He looked quickly round from face to
+face.  Nobody had noticed.  He climbed into the hearse.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley
+