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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Crome Yellow
+
+Author: Aldous Huxley
+
+Posting Date: September 26, 2008 [EBook #1999]
+Release Date: December, 1999
+[Last updated: February 22, 2015]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CROME YELLOW ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sue Asscher
+
+
+
+
+CROME YELLOW
+
+By Aldous Huxley
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All
+the trains--the few that there were--stopped at all the stations.
+Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton,
+Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally,
+Camlet-on-the-Water. Camlet was where he always got out, leaving the
+train to creep indolently onward, goodness only knew whither, into the
+green heart of England.
+
+They were snorting out of West Bowlby now. It was the next station,
+thank Heaven. Denis took his chattels off the rack and piled them neatly
+in the corner opposite his own. A futile proceeding. But one must have
+something to do. When he had finished, he sank back into his seat and
+closed his eyes. It was extremely hot.
+
+Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours
+in which he might have done so much, so much--written the perfect poem,
+for example, or read the one illuminating book. Instead of which--his
+gorge rose at the smell of the dusty cushions against which he was
+leaning.
+
+Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in
+that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what
+had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though
+his reservoir were inexhaustible. Denis groaned in the spirit, condemned
+himself utterly with all his works. What right had he to sit in the
+sunshine, to occupy corner seats in third-class carriages, to be alive?
+None, none, none.
+
+Misery and a nameless nostalgic distress possessed him. He was
+twenty-three, and oh! so agonizingly conscious of the fact.
+
+The train came bumpingly to a halt. Here was Camlet at last. Denis
+jumped up, crammed his hat over his eyes, deranged his pile of baggage,
+leaned out of the window and shouted for a porter, seized a bag in
+either hand, and had to put them down again in order to open the door.
+When at last he had safely bundled himself and his baggage on to the
+platform, he ran up the train towards the van.
+
+"A bicycle, a bicycle!" he said breathlessly to the guard. He felt
+himself a man of action. The guard paid no attention, but continued
+methodically to hand out, one by one, the packages labelled to Camlet.
+"A bicycle!" Denis repeated. "A green machine, cross-framed, name of
+Stone. S-T-O-N-E."
+
+"All in good time, sir," said the guard soothingly. He was a large,
+stately man with a naval beard. One pictured him at home, drinking tea,
+surrounded by a numerous family. It was in that tone that he must have
+spoken to his children when they were tiresome. "All in good time, sir."
+Denis's man of action collapsed, punctured.
+
+He left his luggage to be called for later, and pushed off on his
+bicycle. He always took his bicycle when he went into the country. It
+was part of the theory of exercise. One day one would get up at six
+o'clock and pedal away to Kenilworth, or Stratford-on-Avon--anywhere.
+And within a radius of twenty miles there were always Norman churches
+and Tudor mansions to be seen in the course of an afternoon's excursion.
+Somehow they never did get seen, but all the same it was nice to feel
+that the bicycle was there, and that one fine morning one really might
+get up at six.
+
+Once at the top of the long hill which led up from Camlet station, he
+felt his spirits mounting. The world, he found, was good. The far-away
+blue hills, the harvests whitening on the slopes of the ridge along
+which his road led him, the treeless sky-lines that changed as he
+moved--yes, they were all good. He was overcome by the beauty of those
+deeply embayed combes, scooped in the flanks of the ridge beneath him.
+Curves, curves: he repeated the word slowly, trying as he did so to find
+some term in which to give expression to his appreciation. Curves--no,
+that was inadequate. He made a gesture with his hand, as though to scoop
+the achieved expression out of the air, and almost fell off his bicycle.
+What was the word to describe the curves of those little valleys? They
+were as fine as the lines of a human body, they were informed with the
+subtlety of art...
+
+Galbe. That was a good word; but it was French. Le galbe evase de ses
+hanches: had one ever read a French novel in which that phrase didn't
+occur? Some day he would compile a dictionary for the use of novelists.
+Galbe, gonfle, goulu: parfum, peau, pervers, potele, pudeur: vertu,
+volupte.
+
+But he really must find that word. Curves curves...Those little valleys
+had the lines of a cup moulded round a woman's breast; they seemed the
+dinted imprints of some huge divine body that had rested on these hills.
+Cumbrous locutions, these; but through them he seemed to be getting
+nearer to what he wanted. Dinted, dimpled, wimpled--his mind wandered
+down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and
+further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.
+
+Becoming once more aware of the outer world, he found himself on the
+crest of a descent. The road plunged down, steep and straight, into a
+considerable valley. There, on the opposite slope, a little higher up
+the valley, stood Crome, his destination. He put on his brakes; this
+view of Crome was pleasant to linger over. The facade with its three
+projecting towers rose precipitously from among the dark trees of the
+garden. The house basked in full sunlight; the old brick rosily glowed.
+How ripe and rich it was, how superbly mellow! And at the same time, how
+austere! The hill was becoming steeper and steeper; he was gaining
+speed in spite of his brakes. He loosed his grip of the levers, and in
+a moment was rushing headlong down. Five minutes later he was passing
+through the gate of the great courtyard. The front door stood hospitably
+open. He left his bicycle leaning against the wall and walked in. He
+would take them by surprise.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take. All was quiet;
+Denis wandered from room to empty room, looking with pleasure at the
+familiar pictures and furniture, at all the little untidy signs of life
+that lay scattered here and there. He was rather glad that they were
+all out; it was amusing to wander through the house as though one
+were exploring a dead, deserted Pompeii. What sort of life would the
+excavator reconstruct from these remains; how would he people these
+empty chambers? There was the long gallery, with its rows of respectable
+and (though, of course, one couldn't publicly admit it) rather boring
+Italian primitives, its Chinese sculptures, its unobtrusive, dateless
+furniture. There was the panelled drawing-room, where the huge
+chintz-covered arm-chairs stood, oases of comfort among the austere
+flesh-mortifying antiques. There was the morning-room, with its pale
+lemon walls, its painted Venetian chairs and rococo tables, its mirrors,
+its modern pictures. There was the library, cool, spacious, and dark,
+book-lined from floor to ceiling, rich in portentous folios. There was
+the dining-room, solidly, portwinily English, with its great
+mahogany table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its
+eighteenth-century pictures--family portraits, meticulous animal
+paintings. What could one reconstruct from such data? There was much of
+Henry Wimbush in the long gallery and the library, something of Anne,
+perhaps, in the morning-room. That was all. Among the accumulations of
+ten generations the living had left but few traces.
+
+Lying on the table in the morning-room he saw his own book of poems.
+What tact! He picked it up and opened it. It was what the reviewers call
+"a slim volume." He read at hazard:=
+
+
+```"...But silence and the topless dark
+
+```Vault in the lights of Luna Park;
+
+```And Blackpool from the nightly gloom
+
+```Hollows a bright tumultuous tomb."=
+
+He put it down again, shook his head, and sighed. "What genius I had
+then!" he reflected, echoing the aged Swift. It was nearly six months
+since the book had been published; he was glad to think he would never
+write anything of the same sort again. Who could have been reading it,
+he wondered? Anne, perhaps; he liked to think so. Perhaps, too, she had
+at last recognised herself in the Hamadryad of the poplar sapling; the
+slim Hamadryad whose movements were like the swaying of a young tree in
+the wind. "The Woman who was a Tree" was what he had called the poem. He
+had given her the book when it came out, hoping that the poem would tell
+her what he hadn't dared to say. She had never referred to it.
+
+He shut his eyes and saw a vision of her in a red velvet cloak, swaying
+into the little restaurant where they sometimes dined together in
+London--three quarters of an hour late, and he at his table, haggard
+with anxiety, irritation, hunger. Oh, she was damnable!
+
+It occurred to him that perhaps his hostess might be in her boudoir. It
+was a possibility; he would go and see. Mrs. Wimbush's boudoir was in
+the central tower on the garden front. A little staircase cork-screwed
+up to it from the hall. Denis mounted, tapped at the door. "Come in."
+Ah, she was there; he had rather hoped she wouldn't be. He opened the
+door.
+
+Priscilla Wimbush was lying on the sofa. A blotting-pad rested on her
+knees and she was thoughtfully sucking the end of a silver pencil.
+
+"Hullo," she said, looking up. "I'd forgotten you were coming."
+
+"Well, here I am, I'm afraid," said Denis deprecatingly. "I'm awfully
+sorry."
+
+Mrs. Wimbush laughed. Her voice, her laughter, were deep and masculine.
+Everything about her was manly. She had a large, square, middle-aged
+face, with a massive projecting nose and little greenish eyes, the whole
+surmounted by a lofty and elaborate coiffure of a curiously improbable
+shade of orange. Looking at her, Denis always thought of Wilkie Bard as
+the cantatrice.=
+
+
+```"That's why I'm going to
+
+```Sing in op'ra, sing in op'ra,
+
+```Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-pop-popera."=
+
+Today she was wearing a purple silk dress with a high collar and a row
+of pearls. The costume, so richly dowagerish, so suggestive of the Royal
+Family, made her look more than ever like something on the Halls.
+
+"What have you been doing all this time?" she asked.
+
+"Well," said Denis, and he hesitated, almost voluptuously. He had a
+tremendously amusing account of London and its doings all ripe and ready
+in his mind. It would be a pleasure to give it utterance. "To begin
+with," he said...
+
+But he was too late. Mrs. Wimbush's question had been what the
+grammarians call rhetorical; it asked for no answer. It was a little
+conversational flourish, a gambit in the polite game.
+
+"You find me busy at my horoscopes," she said, without even being aware
+that she had interrupted him.
+
+A little pained, Denis decided to reserve his story for more receptive
+ears. He contented himself, by way of revenge, with saying "Oh?" rather
+icily.
+
+"Did I tell you how I won four hundred on the Grand National this year?"
+
+"Yes," he replied, still frigid and mono-syllabic. She must have told
+him at least six times.
+
+"Wonderful, isn't it? Everything is in the Stars. In the Old Days,
+before I had the Stars to help me, I used to lose thousands. Now"--she
+paused an instant--"well, look at that four hundred on the Grand
+National. That's the Stars."
+
+Denis would have liked to hear more about the Old Days. But he was too
+discreet and, still more, too shy to ask. There had been something of
+a bust up; that was all he knew. Old Priscilla--not so old then, of
+course, and sprightlier--had lost a great deal of money, dropped it
+in handfuls and hatfuls on every race-course in the country. She had
+gambled too. The number of thousands varied in the different legends,
+but all put it high. Henry Wimbush was forced to sell some of his
+Primitives--a Taddeo da Poggibonsi, an Amico di Taddeo, and four or five
+nameless Sienese--to the Americans. There was a crisis. For the first
+time in his life Henry asserted himself, and with good effect, it
+seemed.
+
+Priscilla's gay and gadding existence had come to an abrupt end.
+Nowadays she spent almost all her time at Crome, cultivating a rather
+ill-defined malady. For consolation she dallied with New Thought and the
+Occult. Her passion for racing still possessed her, and Henry, who was a
+kind-hearted fellow at bottom, allowed her forty pounds a month betting
+money. Most of Priscilla's days were spent in casting the horoscopes
+of horses, and she invested her money scientifically, as the stars
+dictated. She betted on football too, and had a large notebook in which
+she registered the horoscopes of all the players in all the teams of
+the League. The process of balancing the horoscopes of two elevens one
+against the other was a very delicate and difficult one. A match between
+the Spurs and the Villa entailed a conflict in the heavens so vast and
+so complicated that it was not to be wondered at if she sometimes made a
+mistake about the outcome.
+
+"Such a pity you don't believe in these things, Denis, such a pity,"
+said Mrs. Wimbush in her deep, distinct voice.
+
+"I can't say I feel it so."
+
+"Ah, that's because you don't know what it's like to have faith. You've
+no idea how amusing and exciting life becomes when you do believe. All
+that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. It
+makes life so jolly, you know. Here am I at Crome. Dull as ditchwater,
+you'd think; but no, I don't find it so. I don't regret the Old Days
+a bit. I have the Stars..." She picked up the sheet of paper that was
+lying on the blotting-pad. "Inman's horoscope," she explained. "(I
+thought I'd like to have a little fling on the billiards championship
+this autumn.) I have the Infinite to keep in tune with," she waved her
+hand. "And then there's the next world and all the spirits, and one's
+Aura, and Mrs. Eddy and saying you're not ill, and the Christian
+Mysteries and Mrs. Besant. It's all splendid. One's never dull for a
+moment. I can't think how I used to get on before--in the Old Days.
+Pleasure--running about, that's all it was; just running about. Lunch,
+tea, dinner, theatre, supper every day. It was fun, of course, while it
+lasted. But there wasn't much left of it afterwards. There's rather a
+good thing about that in Barbecue-Smith's new book. Where is it?"
+
+She sat up and reached for a book that was lying on the little table by
+the head of the sofa.
+
+"Do you know him, by the way?" she asked.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Mr. Barbecue-Smith."
+
+Denis knew of him vaguely. Barbecue-Smith was a name in the Sunday
+papers. He wrote about the Conduct of Life. He might even be the author
+of "What a Young Girl Ought to Know".
+
+"No, not personally," he said.
+
+"I've invited him for next week-end." She turned over the pages of the
+book. "Here's the passage I was thinking of. I marked it. I always mark
+the things I like."
+
+Holding the book almost at arm's length, for she was somewhat
+long-sighted, and making suitable gestures with her free hand, she began
+to read, slowly, dramatically.
+
+"'What are thousand pound fur coats, what are quarter million incomes?'"
+She looked up from the page with a histrionic movement of the head; her
+orange coiffure nodded portentously. Denis looked at it, fascinated.
+Was it the Real Thing and henna, he wondered, or was it one of those
+Complete Transformations one sees in the advertisements?
+
+"'What are Thrones and Sceptres?'"
+
+The orange Transformation--yes, it must be a Transformation--bobbed up
+again.
+
+"'What are the gaieties of the Rich, the splendours of the Powerful,
+what is the pride of the Great, what are the gaudy pleasures of High
+Society?'"
+
+The voice, which had risen in tone, questioningly, from sentence to
+sentence, dropped suddenly and boomed reply.
+
+"'They are nothing. Vanity, fluff, dandelion seed in the wind, thin
+vapours of fever. The things that matter happen in the heart.
+Seen things are sweet, but those unseen are a thousand times more
+significant. It is the unseen that counts in Life.'"
+
+Mrs. Wimbush lowered the book. "Beautiful, isn't it?" she said.
+
+Denis preferred not to hazard an opinion, but uttered a non-committal
+"H'm."
+
+"Ah, it's a fine book this, a beautiful book," said Priscilla, as she
+let the pages flick back, one by one, from under her thumb. "And here's
+the passage about the Lotus Pool. He compares the Soul to a Lotus Pool,
+you know." She held up the book again and read. "'A Friend of mine has
+a Lotus Pool in his garden. It lies in a little dell embowered with wild
+roses and eglantine, among which the nightingale pours forth its amorous
+descant all the summer long. Within the pool the Lotuses blossom, and
+the birds of the air come to drink and bathe themselves in its crystal
+waters...' Ah, and that reminds me," Priscilla exclaimed, shutting the
+book with a clap and uttering her big profound laugh--"that reminds me
+of the things that have been going on in our bathing-pool since you were
+here last. We gave the village people leave to come and bathe here in
+the evenings. You've no idea of the things that happened."
+
+She leaned forward, speaking in a confidential whisper; every now and
+then she uttered a deep gurgle of laughter. "...mixed bathing...saw them
+out of my window...sent for a pair of field-glasses to make sure...no
+doubt of it..." The laughter broke out again. Denis laughed too.
+Barbecue-Smith was tossed on the floor.
+
+"It's time we went to see if tea's ready," said Priscilla. She hoisted
+herself up from the sofa and went swishing off across the room, striding
+beneath the trailing silk. Denis followed her, faintly humming to
+himself:=
+
+
+```"That's why I'm going to
+
+```Sing in op'ra, sing in op'ra,
+
+```Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-pop-popera."=
+
+And then the little twiddly bit of accompaniment at the end: "ra-ra."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+The terrace in front of the house was a long narrow strip of turf,
+bounded along its outer edge by a graceful stone balustrade. Two little
+summer-houses of brick stood at either end. Below the house the ground
+sloped very steeply away, and the terrace was a remarkably high one;
+from the balusters to the sloping lawn beneath was a drop of thirty
+feet. Seen from below, the high unbroken terrace wall, built like
+the house itself of brick, had the almost menacing aspect of a
+fortification--a castle bastion, from whose parapet one looked out
+across airy depths to distances level with the eye. Below, in the
+foreground, hedged in by solid masses of sculptured yew trees, lay the
+stone-brimmed swimming-pool. Beyond it stretched the park, with its
+massive elms, its green expanses of grass, and, at the bottom of the
+valley, the gleam of the narrow river. On the farther side of the stream
+the land rose again in a long slope, chequered with cultivation. Looking
+up the valley, to the right, one saw a line of blue, far-off hills.
+
+The tea-table had been planted in the shade of one of the little
+summer-houses, and the rest of the party was already assembled about it
+when Denis and Priscilla made their appearance. Henry Wimbush had begun
+to pour out the tea. He was one of those ageless, unchanging men on the
+farther side of fifty, who might be thirty, who might be anything. Denis
+had known him almost as long as he could remember. In all those years
+his pale, rather handsome face had never grown any older; it was
+like the pale grey bowler hat which he always wore, winter and
+summer--unageing, calm, serenely without expression.
+
+Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world by the
+almost impenetrable barriers of her deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She was
+perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink-and-white complexion, and
+wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her
+ears. In the secret tower of her deafness she sat apart, looking down at
+the world through sharply piercing eyes. What did she think of men and
+women and things? That was something that Denis had never been able to
+discover. In her enigmatic remoteness Jenny was a little disquieting.
+Even now some interior joke seemed to be amusing her, for she was
+smiling to herself, and her brown eyes were like very bright round
+marbles.
+
+On his other side the serious, moonlike innocence of Mary Bracegirdle's
+face shone pink and childish. She was nearly twenty-three, but one
+wouldn't have guessed it. Her short hair, clipped like a page's, hung in
+a bell of elastic gold about her cheeks. She had large blue china eyes,
+whose expression was one of ingenuous and often puzzled earnestness.
+
+Next to Mary a small gaunt man was sitting, rigid and erect in
+his chair. In appearance Mr. Scogan was like one of those extinct
+bird-lizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had the
+shining quickness of a robin's. But there was nothing soft or gracious
+or feathery about him. The skin of his wrinkled brown face had a dry and
+scaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movements
+were marked by the lizard's disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; his
+speech was thin, fluty, and dry. Henry Wimbush's school-fellow and exact
+contemporary, Mr. Scogan looked far older and, at the same time, far
+more youthfully alive than did that gentle aristocrat with the face like
+a grey bowler.
+
+Mr. Scogan might look like an extinct saurian, but Gombauld was
+altogether and essentially human. In the old-fashioned natural histories
+of the 'thirties he might have figured in a steel engraving as a type of
+Homo Sapiens--an honour which at that time commonly fell to Lord
+Byron. Indeed, with more hair and less collar, Gombauld would have
+been completely Byronic--more than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of
+Provencal descent, a black-haired young corsair of thirty, with flashing
+teeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. He
+was jealous of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauld
+painted pictures! Still more, at the moment, he envied Gombauld his
+looks, his vitality, his easy confidence of manner. Was it surprising
+that Anne should like him? Like him?--it might even be something worse,
+Denis reflected bitterly, as he walked at Priscilla's side down the long
+grass terrace.
+
+Between Gombauld and Mr. Scogan a very much lowered deck-chair presented
+its back to the new arrivals as they advanced towards the tea-table.
+Gombauld was leaning over it; his face moved vivaciously; he smiled, he
+laughed, he made quick gestures with his hands. From the depths of the
+chair came up a sound of soft, lazy laughter. Denis started as he heard
+it. That laughter--how well he knew it! What emotions it evoked in him!
+He quickened his pace.
+
+In her low deck-chair Anne was nearer to lying than to sitting. Her
+long, slender body reposed in an attitude of listless and indolent
+grace. Within its setting of light brown hair her face had a pretty
+regularity that was almost doll-like. And indeed there were moments
+when she seemed nothing more than a doll; when the oval face, with its
+long-lashed, pale blue eyes, expressed nothing; when it was no more than
+a lazy mask of wax. She was Henry Wimbush's own niece; that bowler-like
+countenance was one of the Wimbush heirlooms; it ran in the family,
+appearing in its female members as a blank doll-face. But across this
+dollish mask, like a gay melody dancing over an unchanging fundamental
+bass, passed Anne's other inheritance--quick laughter, light ironic
+amusement, and the changing expressions of many moods. She was smiling
+now as Denis looked down at her: her cat's smile, he called it, for no
+very good reason. The mouth was compressed, and on either side of it
+two tiny wrinkles had formed themselves in her cheeks. An infinity
+of slightly malicious amusement lurked in those little folds, in the
+puckers about the half-closed eyes, in the eyes themselves, bright and
+laughing between the narrowed lids.
+
+The preliminary greetings spoken, Denis found an empty chair between
+Gombauld and Jenny and sat down.
+
+"How are you, Jenny?" he shouted to her.
+
+Jenny nodded and smiled in mysterious silence, as though the subject of
+her health were a secret that could not be publicly divulged.
+
+"How's London been since I went away?" Anne inquired from the depth of
+her chair.
+
+The moment had come; the tremendously amusing narrative was waiting for
+utterance. "Well," said Denis, smiling happily, "to begin with..."
+
+"Has Priscilla told you of our great antiquarian find?" Henry Wimbush
+leaned forward; the most promising of buds was nipped.
+
+"To begin with," said Denis desperately, "there was the Ballet..."
+
+"Last week," Mr. Wimbush went on softly and implacably, "we dug up fifty
+yards of oaken drain-pipes; just tree trunks with a hole bored through
+the middle. Very interesting indeed. Whether they were laid down by the
+monks in the fifteenth century, or whether..."
+
+Denis listened gloomily. "Extraordinary!" he said, when Mr. Wimbush had
+finished; "quite extraordinary!" He helped himself to another slice
+of cake. He didn't even want to tell his tale about London now; he was
+damped.
+
+For some time past Mary's grave blue eyes had been fixed upon him. "What
+have you been writing lately?" she asked. It would be nice to have a
+little literary conversation.
+
+"Oh, verse and prose," said Denis--"just verse and prose."
+
+"Prose?" Mr. Scogan pounced alarmingly on the word. "You've been writing
+prose?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Not a novel?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"My poor Denis!" exclaimed Mr. Scogan. "What about?"
+
+Denis felt rather uncomfortable. "Oh, about the usual things, you know."
+
+"Of course," Mr. Scogan groaned. "I'll describe the plot for you. Little
+Percy, the hero, was never good at games, but he was always clever.
+He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and
+comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with
+melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon
+his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles
+delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the
+luminous Future."
+
+Denis blushed scarlet. Mr. Scogan had described the plan of his novel
+with an accuracy that was appalling. He made an effort to laugh. "You're
+entirely wrong," he said. "My novel is not in the least like that." It
+was a heroic lie. Luckily, he reflected, only two chapters were written.
+He would tear them up that very evening when he unpacked.
+
+Mr. Scogan paid no attention to his denial, but went on: "Why will
+you young men continue to write about things that are so entirely
+uninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists? Professional
+anthropologists might find it interesting to turn sometimes from the
+beliefs of the Blackfellow to the philosophical preoccupations of the
+undergraduate. But you can't expect an ordinary adult man, like myself,
+to be much moved by the story of his spiritual troubles. And after all,
+even in England, even in Germany and Russia, there are more adults than
+adolescents. As for the artist, he is preoccupied with problems that
+are so utterly unlike those of the ordinary adult man--problems of pure
+aesthetics which don't so much as present themselves to people like
+myself--that a description of his mental processes is as boring to the
+ordinary reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about
+artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists
+regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is
+really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of
+literature, just as Professor Radium of 'Comic Cuts' is its stock man of
+science."
+
+"I'm sorry to hear I'm as uninteresting as all that," said Gombauld.
+
+"Not at all, my dear Gombauld," Mr. Scogan hastened to explain. "As a
+lover or a dipsomaniac, I've no doubt of your being a most fascinating
+specimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you're
+a bore."
+
+"I entirely disagree with you," exclaimed Mary. She was somehow always
+out of breath when she talked. And her speech was punctuated by little
+gasps. "I've known a great many artists, and I've always found their
+mentality very interesting. Especially in Paris. Tschuplitski, for
+example--I saw a great deal of Tschuplitski in Paris this spring..."
+
+"Ah, but then you're an exception, Mary, you're an exception," said Mr.
+Scogan. "You are a femme superieure."
+
+A flush of pleasure turned Mary's face into a harvest moon.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+Denis woke up next morning to find the sun shining, the sky serene. He
+decided to wear white flannel trousers--white flannel trousers and a
+black jacket, with a silk shirt and his new peach-coloured tie. And
+what shoes? White was the obvious choice, but there was something rather
+pleasing about the notion of black patent leather. He lay in bed for
+several minutes considering the problem.
+
+Before he went down--patent leather was his final choice--he looked at
+himself critically in the glass. His hair might have been more golden,
+he reflected. As it was, its yellowness had the hint of a greenish tinge
+in it. But his forehead was good. His forehead made up in height what
+his chin lacked in prominence. His nose might have been longer, but it
+would pass. His eyes might have been blue and not green. But his coat
+was very well cut and, discreetly padded, made him seem robuster than
+he actually was. His legs, in their white casing, were long and elegant.
+Satisfied, he descended the stairs. Most of the party had already
+finished their breakfast. He found himself alone with Jenny.
+
+"I hope you slept well," he said.
+
+"Yes, isn't it lovely?" Jenny replied, giving two rapid little nods.
+"But we had such awful thunderstorms last week."
+
+Parallel straight lines, Denis reflected, meet only at infinity. He
+might talk for ever of care-charmer sleep and she of meteorology till
+the end of time. Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are
+all parallel straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than
+most.
+
+"They are very alarming, these thunderstorms," he said, helping himself
+to porridge. "Don't you think so? Or are you above being frightened?"
+
+"No. I always go to bed in a storm. One is so much safer lying down."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because," said Jenny, making a descriptive gesture, "because lightning
+goes downwards and not flat ways. When you're lying down you're out of
+the current."
+
+"That's very ingenious."
+
+"It's true."
+
+There was a silence. Denis finished his porridge and helped himself
+to bacon. For lack of anything better to say, and because Mr. Scogan's
+absurd phrase was for some reason running in his head, he turned to
+Jenny and asked:
+
+"Do you consider yourself a femme superieure?" He had to repeat the
+question several times before Jenny got the hang of it.
+
+"No," she said, rather indignantly, when at last she heard what Denis
+was saying. "Certainly not. Has anyone been suggesting that I am?"
+
+"No," said Denis. "Mr. Scogan told Mary she was one."
+
+"Did he?" Jenny lowered her voice. "Shall I tell you what I think of
+that man? I think he's slightly sinister."
+
+Having made this pronouncement, she entered the ivory tower of her
+deafness and closed the door. Denis could not induce her to say anything
+more, could not induce her even to listen. She just smiled at him,
+smiled and occasionally nodded.
+
+Denis went out on to the terrace to smoke his after-breakfast pipe and
+to read his morning paper. An hour later, when Anne came down, she found
+him still reading. By this time he had got to the Court Circular and
+the Forthcoming Weddings. He got up to meet her as she approached, a
+Hamadryad in white muslin, across the grass.
+
+"Why, Denis," she exclaimed, "you look perfectly sweet in your white
+trousers."
+
+Denis was dreadfully taken aback. There was no possible retort. "You
+speak as though I were a child in a new frock," he said, with a show of
+irritation.
+
+"But that's how I feel about you, Denis dear."
+
+"Then you oughtn't to."
+
+"But I can't help it. I'm so much older than you."
+
+"I like that," he said. "Four years older."
+
+"And if you do look perfectly sweet in your white trousers, why
+shouldn't I say so? And why did you put them on, if you didn't think you
+were going to look sweet in them?"
+
+"Let's go into the garden," said Denis. He was put out; the conversation
+had taken such a preposterous and unexpected turn. He had planned a very
+different opening, in which he was to lead off with, "You look adorable
+this morning," or something of the kind, and she was to answer, "Do
+I?" and then there was to be a pregnant silence. And now she had got in
+first with the trousers. It was provoking; his pride was hurt.
+
+That part of the garden that sloped down from the foot of the terrace
+to the pool had a beauty which did not depend on colour so much as on
+forms. It was as beautiful by moonlight as in the sun. The silver of
+water, the dark shapes of yew and ilex trees remained, at all hours and
+seasons, the dominant features of the scene. It was a landscape in black
+and white. For colour there was the flower-garden; it lay to one side
+of the pool, separated from it by a huge Babylonian wall of yews. You
+passed through a tunnel in the hedge, you opened a wicket in a wall, and
+you found yourself, startlingly and suddenly, in the world of colour.
+The July borders blazed and flared under the sun. Within its high brick
+walls the garden was like a great tank of warmth and perfume and colour.
+
+Denis held open the little iron gate for his companion. "It's like
+passing from a cloister into an Oriental palace," he said, and took a
+deep breath of the warm, flower-scented air. "'In fragrant volleys they
+let fly...' How does it go?"=
+
+
+```"'Well shot, ye firemen! Oh how sweet
+
+```And round your equal fires do meet;
+
+```Whose shrill report no ear can tell,
+
+```But echoes to the eye and smell...'"=
+
+"You have a bad habit of quoting," said Anne. "As I never know the
+context or author, I find it humiliating."
+
+Denis apologized. "It's the fault of one's education. Things somehow
+seem more real and vivid when one can apply somebody else's ready-made
+phrase about them. And then there are lots of lovely names and
+words--Monophysite, Iamblichus, Pomponazzi; you bring them out
+triumphantly, and feel you've clinched the argument with the mere
+magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education."
+
+"You may regret your education," said Anne; "I'm ashamed of my lack of
+it. Look at those sunflowers! Aren't they magnificent?"
+
+"Dark faces and golden crowns--they're kings of Ethiopia. And I like
+the way the tits cling to the flowers and pick out the seeds, while the
+other loutish birds, grubbing dirtily for their food, look up in envy
+from the ground. Do they look up in envy? That's the literary touch, I'm
+afraid. Education again. It always comes back to that." He was silent.
+
+Anne had sat down on a bench that stood in the shade of an old apple
+tree. "I'm listening," she said.
+
+He did not sit down, but walked backwards and forwards in front of the
+bench, gesticulating a little as he talked. "Books," he said--"books.
+One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the
+world. Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics.
+You've no idea how many there are. I must have read twenty or thirty
+tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination.
+Weighted with that, one's pushed out into the world."
+
+He went on walking up and down. His voice rose, fell, was silent a
+moment, and then talked on. He moved his hands, sometimes he waved his
+arms. Anne looked and listened quietly, as though she were at a lecture.
+He was a nice boy, and to-day he looked charming--charming!
+
+One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about
+everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it.
+One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit
+life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even
+the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas
+everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it
+surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy? Denis came to
+a halt in front of the bench, and as he asked this last question he
+stretched out his arms and stood for an instant in an attitude of
+crucifixion, then let them fall again to his sides.
+
+"My poor Denis!" Anne was touched. He was really too pathetic as he
+stood there in front of her in his white flannel trousers. "But does one
+suffer about these things? It seems very extraordinary."
+
+"You're like Scogan," cried Denis bitterly. "You regard me as a specimen
+for an anthropologist. Well, I suppose I am."
+
+"No, no," she protested, and drew in her skirt with a gesture that
+indicated that he was to sit down beside her. He sat down. "Why can't
+you just take things for granted and as they come?" she asked. "It's so
+much simpler."
+
+"Of course it is," said Denis. "But it's a lesson to be learnt
+gradually. There are the twenty tons of ratiocination to be got rid of
+first."
+
+"I've always taken things as they come," said Anne. "It seems so
+obvious. One enjoys the pleasant things, avoids the nasty ones. There's
+nothing more to be said."
+
+"Nothing--for you. But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying
+laboriously to make myself one. I can take nothing for granted, I can
+enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, women--I have
+to invent an excuse, a justification for everything that's delightful.
+Otherwise I can't enjoy it with an easy conscience. I make up a little
+story about beauty and pretend that it has something to do with truth
+and goodness. I have to say that art is the process by which one
+reconstructs the divine reality out of chaos. Pleasure is one of the
+mystical roads to union with the infinite--the ecstasies of drinking,
+dancing, love-making. As for women, I am perpetually assuring myself
+that they're the broad highway to divinity. And to think that I'm only
+just beginning to see through the silliness of the whole thing! It's
+incredible to me that anyone should have escaped these horrors."
+
+"It's still more incredible to me," said Anne, "that anyone should have
+been a victim to them. I should like to see myself believing that men
+are the highway to divinity." The amused malice of her smile planted two
+little folds on either side of her mouth, and through their half-closed
+lids her eyes shone with laughter. "What you need, Denis, is a nice
+plump young wife, a fixed income, and a little congenial but regular
+work."
+
+"What I need is you." That was what he ought to have retorted, that
+was what he wanted passionately to say. He could not say it. His desire
+fought against his shyness. "What I need is you." Mentally he shouted
+the words, but not a sound issued from his lips. He looked at her
+despairingly. Couldn't she see what was going on inside him? Couldn't
+she understand? "What I need is you." He would say it, he would--he
+would.
+
+"I think I shall go and bathe," said Anne. "It's so hot." The
+opportunity had passed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+Mr. Wimbush had taken them to see the sights of the Home Farm, and now
+they were standing, all six of them--Henry Wimbush, Mr. Scogan, Denis,
+Gombauld, Anne, and Mary--by the low wall of the piggery, looking into
+one of the styes.
+
+"This is a good sow," said Henry Wimbush. "She had a litter of fourteen.
+
+"Fourteen?" Mary echoed incredulously. She turned astonished blue eyes
+towards Mr. Wimbush, then let them fall onto the seething mass of elan
+vital that fermented in the sty.
+
+An immense sow reposed on her side in the middle of the pen. Her round,
+black belly, fringed with a double line of dugs, presented itself to the
+assault of an army of small, brownish-black swine. With a frantic greed
+they tugged at their mother's flank. The old sow stirred sometimes
+uneasily or uttered a little grunt of pain. One small pig, the runt,
+the weakling of the litter, had been unable to secure a place at the
+banquet. Squealing shrilly, he ran backwards and forwards, trying to
+push in among his stronger brothers or even to climb over their tight
+little black backs towards the maternal reservoir.
+
+"There ARE fourteen," said Mary. "You're quite right. I counted. It's
+extraordinary."
+
+"The sow next door," Mr. Wimbush went on, "has done very badly. She only
+had five in her litter. I shall give her another chance. If she does no
+better next time, I shall fat her up and kill her. There's the boar,"
+he pointed towards a farther sty. "Fine old beast, isn't he? But he's
+getting past his prime. He'll have to go too."
+
+"How cruel!" Anne exclaimed.
+
+"But how practical, how eminently realistic!" said Mr. Scogan. "In this
+farm we have a model of sound paternal government. Make them breed,
+make them work, and when they're past working or breeding or begetting,
+slaughter them."
+
+"Farming seems to be mostly indecency and cruelty," said Anne.
+
+With the ferrule of his walking-stick Denis began to scratch the boar's
+long bristly back. The animal moved a little so as to bring himself
+within easier range of the instrument that evoked in him such delicious
+sensations; then he stood stock still, softly grunting his contentment.
+The mud of years flaked off his sides in a grey powdery scurf.
+
+"What a pleasure it is," said Denis, "to do somebody a kindness. I
+believe I enjoy scratching this pig quite as much as he enjoys being
+scratched. If only one could always be kind with so little expense or
+trouble..."
+
+A gate slammed; there was a sound of heavy footsteps.
+
+"Morning, Rowley!" said Henry Wimbush.
+
+"Morning, sir," old Rowley answered. He was the most venerable of
+the labourers on the farm--a tall, solid man, still unbent, with grey
+side-whiskers and a steep, dignified profile. Grave, weighty in his
+manner, splendidly respectable, Rowley had the air of a great English
+statesman of the mid-nineteenth century. He halted on the outskirts of
+the group, and for a moment they all looked at the pigs in a silence
+that was only broken by the sound of grunting or the squelch of a sharp
+hoof in the mire. Rowley turned at last, slowly and ponderously and
+nobly, as he did everything, and addressed himself to Henry Wimbush.
+
+"Look at them, sir," he said, with a motion of his hand towards the
+wallowing swine. "Rightly is they called pigs."
+
+"Rightly indeed," Mr. Wimbush agreed.
+
+"I am abashed by that man," said Mr. Scogan, as old Rowley plodded off
+slowly and with dignity. "What wisdom, what judgment, what a sense of
+values! 'Rightly are they called swine.' Yes. And I wish I could, with
+as much justice, say, 'Rightly are we called men.'"
+
+They walked on towards the cowsheds and the stables of the cart-horses.
+Five white geese, taking the air this fine morning, even as they were
+doing, met them in the way. They hesitated, cackled; then, converting
+their lifted necks into rigid, horizontal snakes, they rushed off in
+disorder, hissing horribly as they went. Red calves paddled in the dung
+and mud of a spacious yard. In another enclosure stood the bull,
+massive as a locomotive. He was a very calm bull, and his face wore an
+expression of melancholy stupidity. He gazed with reddish-brown eyes at
+his visitors, chewed thoughtfully at the tangible memories of an earlier
+meal, swallowed and regurgitated, chewed again. His tail lashed savagely
+from side to side; it seemed to have nothing to do with his impassive
+bulk. Between his short horns was a triangle of red curls, short and
+dense.
+
+"Splendid animal," said Henry Wimbush. "Pedigree stock. But he's getting
+a little old, like the boar."
+
+"Fat him up and slaughter him," Mr. Scogan pronounced, with a delicate
+old-maidish precision of utterance.
+
+"Couldn't you give the animals a little holiday from producing
+children?" asked Anne. "I'm so sorry for the poor things."
+
+Mr. Wimbush shook his head. "Personally," he said, "I rather like seeing
+fourteen pigs grow where only one grew before. The spectacle of so much
+crude life is refreshing."
+
+"I'm glad to hear you say so," Gombauld broke in warmly. "Lots of life:
+that's what we want. I like pullulation; everything ought to increase
+and multiply as hard as it can."
+
+Gombauld grew lyrical. Everybody ought to have children--Anne ought to
+have them, Mary ought to have them--dozens and dozens. He emphasised his
+point by thumping with his walking-stick on the bull's leather flanks.
+Mr. Scogan ought to pass on his intelligence to little Scogans, and
+Denis to little Denises. The bull turned his head to see what was
+happening, regarded the drumming stick for several seconds, then turned
+back again satisfied, it seemed, that nothing was happening. Sterility
+was odious, unnatural, a sin against life. Life, life, and still more
+life. The ribs of the placid bull resounded.
+
+Standing with his back against the farmyard pump, a little apart, Denis
+examined the group. Gombauld, passionate and vivacious, was its centre.
+The others stood round, listening--Henry Wimbush, calm and polite
+beneath his grey bowler; Mary, with parted lips and eyes that shone with
+the indignation of a convinced birth-controller. Anne looked on through
+half-shut eyes, smiling; and beside her stood Mr. Scogan, bolt upright
+in an attitude of metallic rigidity that contrasted strangely with that
+fluid grace of hers which even in stillness suggested a soft movement.
+
+Gombauld ceased talking, and Mary, flushed and outraged, opened her
+mouth to refute him. But she was too slow. Before she could utter a
+word Mr. Scogan's fluty voice had pronounced the opening phrases of a
+discourse. There was no hope of getting so much as a word in edgeways;
+Mary had perforce to resign herself.
+
+"Even your eloquence, my dear Gombauld," he was saying--"even your
+eloquence must prove inadequate to reconvert the world to a belief in
+the delights of mere multiplication. With the gramophone, the cinema,
+and the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented
+the world with another gift, more precious even than these--the means of
+dissociating love from propagation. Eros, for those who wish it, is now
+an entirely free god; his deplorable associations with Lucina may be
+broken at will. In the course of the next few centuries, who knows?
+the world may see a more complete severance. I look forward to it
+optimistically. Where the great Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward,
+Swan of Lichfield, experimented--and, for all their scientific ardour,
+failed--our descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal
+generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state
+incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with
+the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society,
+sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros,
+beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from
+flower to flower through a sunlit world."
+
+"It sounds lovely," said Anne.
+
+"The distant future always does."
+
+Mary's china blue eyes, more serious and more astonished than ever,
+were fixed on Mr. Scogan. "Bottles?" she said. "Do you really think so?
+Bottles..."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+Mr. Barbecue-Smith arrived in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He was
+a short and corpulent man, with a very large head and no neck. In his
+earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck,
+but was comforted by reading in Balzac's "Louis Lambert" that all the
+world's great men have been marked by the same peculiarity, and for a
+simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than
+the harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and heart;
+the shorter the neck, the more closely these two organs approach one
+another; argal...It was convincing.
+
+Mr. Barbecue-Smith belonged to the old school of journalists. He sported
+a leonine head with a greyish-black mane of oddly unappetising hair
+brushed back from a broad but low forehead. And somehow he always seemed
+slightly, ever so slightly, soiled. In younger days he had gaily called
+himself a Bohemian. He did so no longer. He was a teacher now, a kind
+of prophet. Some of his books of comfort and spiritual teaching were in
+their hundred and twentieth thousand.
+
+Priscilla received him with every mark of esteem. He had never been to
+Crome before; she showed him round the house. Mr. Barbecue-Smith was
+full of admiration.
+
+"So quaint, so old-world," he kept repeating. He had a rich, rather
+unctuous voice.
+
+Priscilla praised his latest book. "Splendid, I thought it was," she
+said in her large, jolly way.
+
+"I'm happy to think you found it a comfort," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith.
+
+"Oh, tremendously! And the bit about the Lotus Pool--I thought that so
+beautiful."
+
+"I knew you would like that. It came to me, you know, from without." He
+waved his hand to indicate the astral world.
+
+They went out into the garden for tea. Mr. Barbecue-Smith was duly
+introduced.
+
+"Mr. Stone is a writer too," said Priscilla, as she introduced Denis.
+
+"Indeed!" Mr. Barbecue-Smith smiled benignly, and, looking up at Denis
+with an expression of Olympian condescension, "And what sort of things
+do you write?"
+
+Denis was furious, and, to make matters worse, he felt himself blushing
+hotly. Had Priscilla no sense of proportion? She was putting them in the
+same category--Barbecue-Smith and himself. They were both writers, they
+both used pen and ink. To Mr. Barbecue-Smith's question he answered,
+"Oh, nothing much, nothing," and looked away.
+
+"Mr. Stone is one of our younger poets." It was Anne's voice. He scowled
+at her, and she smiled back exasperatingly.
+
+"Excellent, excellent," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith, and he squeezed Denis's
+arm encouragingly. "The Bard's is a noble calling."
+
+As soon as tea was over Mr. Barbecue-Smith excused himself; he had to
+do some writing before dinner. Priscilla quite understood. The prophet
+retired to his chamber.
+
+Mr. Barbecue-Smith came down to the drawing-room at ten to eight. He was
+in a good humour, and, as he descended the stairs, he smiled to himself
+and rubbed his large white hands together. In the drawing-room someone
+was playing softly and ramblingly on the piano. He wondered who it could
+be. One of the young ladies, perhaps. But no, it was only Denis, who got
+up hurriedly and with some embarrassment as he came into the room.
+
+"Do go on, do go on," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith. "I am very fond of
+music."
+
+"Then I couldn't possibly go on," Denis replied. "I only make noises."
+
+There was a silence. Mr. Barbecue-Smith stood with his back to the
+hearth, warming himself at the memory of last winter's fires. He could
+not control his interior satisfaction, but still went on smiling to
+himself. At last he turned to Denis.
+
+"You write," he asked, "don't you?"
+
+"Well, yes--a little, you know."
+
+"How many words do you find you can write in an hour?"
+
+"I don't think I've ever counted."
+
+"Oh, you ought to, you ought to. It's most important."
+
+Denis exercised his memory. "When I'm in good form," he said, "I fancy
+I do a twelve-hundred-word review in about four hours. But sometimes it
+takes me much longer."
+
+Mr. Barbecue-Smith nodded. "Yes, three hundred words an hour at your
+best." He walked out into the middle of the room, turned round on his
+heels, and confronted Denis again. "Guess how many words I wrote this
+evening between five and half-past seven."
+
+"I can't imagine."
+
+"No, but you must guess. Between five and half-past seven--that's two
+and a half hours."
+
+"Twelve hundred words," Denis hazarded.
+
+"No, no, no." Mr. Barbecue-Smith's expanded face shone with gaiety. "Try
+again."
+
+"Fifteen hundred."
+
+"No."
+
+"I give it up," said Denis. He found he couldn't summon up much interest
+in Mr. Barbecue-Smith's writing.
+
+"Well, I'll tell you. Three thousand eight hundred."
+
+Denis opened his eyes. "You must get a lot done in a day," he said.
+
+Mr. Barbecue-Smith suddenly became extremely confidential. He pulled up
+a stool to the side of Denis's arm-chair, sat down in it, and began to
+talk softly and rapidly.
+
+"Listen to me," he said, laying his hand on Denis's sleeve. "You want to
+make your living by writing; you're young, you're inexperienced. Let me
+give you a little sound advice."
+
+What was the fellow going to do? Denis wondered: give him an
+introduction to the editor of "John o' London's Weekly", or tell him
+where he could sell a light middle for seven guineas? Mr. Barbecue-Smith
+patted his arm several times and went on.
+
+"The secret of writing," he said, breathing it into the young man's
+ear--"the secret of writing is Inspiration."
+
+Denis looked at him in astonishment.
+
+"Inspiration..." Mr. Barbecue-Smith repeated.
+
+"You mean the native wood-note business?"
+
+Mr. Barbecue-Smith nodded.
+
+"Oh, then I entirely agree with you," said Denis. "But what if one
+hasn't got Inspiration?"
+
+"That was precisely the question I was waiting for," said Mr.
+Barbecue-Smith. "You ask me what one should do if one hasn't got
+Inspiration. I answer: you have Inspiration; everyone has Inspiration.
+It's simply a question of getting it to function."
+
+The clock struck eight. There was no sign of any of the other guests;
+everybody was always late at Crome. Mr. Barbecue-Smith went on.
+
+"That's my secret," he said. "I give it you freely." (Denis made a
+suitably grateful murmur and grimace.) "I'll help you to find your
+Inspiration, because I don't like to see a nice, steady young man like
+you exhausting his vitality and wasting the best years of his life in
+a grinding intellectual labour that could be completely obviated by
+Inspiration. I did it myself, so I know what it's like. Up till the
+time I was thirty-eight I was a writer like you--a writer without
+Inspiration. All I wrote I squeezed out of myself by sheer hard work.
+Why, in those days I was never able to do more than six-fifty words an
+hour, and what's more, I often didn't sell what I wrote." He sighed.
+"We artists," he said parenthetically, "we intellectuals aren't much
+appreciated here in England." Denis wondered if there was any method,
+consistent, of course, with politeness, by which he could dissociate
+himself from Mr. Barbecue-Smith's "we." There was none; and besides,
+it was too late now, for Mr. Barbecue-Smith was once more pursuing the
+tenor of his discourse.
+
+"At thirty-eight I was a poor, struggling, tired, overworked, unknown
+journalist. Now, at fifty..." He paused modestly and made a little
+gesture, moving his fat hands outwards, away from one another, and
+expanding his fingers as though in demonstration. He was exhibiting
+himself. Denis thought of that advertisement of Nestle's milk--the two
+cats on the wall, under the moon, one black and thin, the other white,
+sleek, and fat. Before Inspiration and after.
+
+"Inspiration has made the difference," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith solemnly.
+"It came quite suddenly--like a gentle dew from heaven." He lifted his
+hand and let it fall back on to his knee to indicate the descent of the
+dew. "It was one evening. I was writing my first little book about the
+Conduct of Life--'Humble Heroisms'. You may have read it; it has been
+a comfort--at least I hope and think so--a comfort to many thousands.
+I was in the middle of the second chapter, and I was stuck. Fatigue,
+overwork--I had only written a hundred words in the last hour, and I
+could get no further. I sat biting the end of my pen and looking at the
+electric light, which hung above my table, a little above and in front
+of me." He indicated the position of the lamp with elaborate care. "Have
+you ever looked at a bright light intently for a long time?" he asked,
+turning to Denis. Denis didn't think he had. "You can hypnotise yourself
+that way," Mr. Barbecue-Smith went on.
+
+The gong sounded in a terrific crescendo from the hall. Still no sign of
+the others. Denis was horribly hungry.
+
+"That's what happened to me," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith. "I was
+hypnotised. I lost consciousness like that." He snapped his fingers.
+"When I came to, I found that it was past midnight, and I had written
+four thousand words. Four thousand," he repeated, opening his mouth very
+wide on the "ou" of thousand. "Inspiration had come to me."
+
+"What a very extraordinary thing," said Denis.
+
+"I was afraid of it at first. It didn't seem to me natural. I didn't
+feel, somehow, that it was quite right, quite fair, I might almost say,
+to produce a literary composition unconsciously. Besides, I was afraid I
+might have written nonsense."
+
+"And had you written nonsense?" Denis asked.
+
+"Certainly not," Mr. Barbecue-Smith replied, with a trace of annoyance.
+"Certainly not. It was admirable. Just a few spelling mistakes and
+slips, such as there generally are in automatic writing. But the style,
+the thought--all the essentials were admirable. After that, Inspiration
+came to me regularly. I wrote the whole of 'Humble Heroisms' like that.
+It was a great success, and so has everything been that I have written
+since." He leaned forward and jabbed at Denis with his finger. "That's
+my secret," he said, "and that's how you could write too, if you
+tried--without effort, fluently, well."
+
+"But how?" asked Denis, trying not to show how deeply he had been
+insulted by that final "well."
+
+"By cultivating your Inspiration, by getting into touch with your
+Subconscious. Have you ever read my little book, 'Pipe-Lines to the
+Infinite'?"
+
+Denis had to confess that that was, precisely, one of the few, perhaps
+the only one, of Mr. Barbecue-Smith's works he had not read.
+
+"Never mind, never mind," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith. "It's just a little
+book about the connection of the Subconscious with the Infinite. Get
+into touch with the Subconscious and you are in touch with the Universe.
+Inspiration, in fact. You follow me?"
+
+"Perfectly, perfectly," said Denis. "But don't you find that the
+Universe sometimes sends you very irrelevant messages?"
+
+"I don't allow it to," Mr. Barbecue-Smith replied. "I canalise it. I
+bring it down through pipes to work the turbines of my conscious mind."
+
+"Like Niagara," Denis suggested. Some of Mr. Barbecue-Smith's remarks
+sounded strangely like quotations--quotations from his own works, no
+doubt.
+
+"Precisely. Like Niagara. And this is how I do it." He leaned forward,
+and with a raised forefinger marked his points as he made them, beating
+time, as it were, to his discourse. "Before I go off into my trance, I
+concentrate on the subject I wish to be inspired about. Let us say I am
+writing about the humble heroisms; for ten minutes before I go into the
+trance I think of nothing but orphans supporting their little brothers
+and sisters, of dull work well and patiently done, and I focus my mind
+on such great philosophical truths as the purification and uplifting of
+the soul by suffering, and the alchemical transformation of leaden evil
+into golden good." (Denis again hung up his little festoon of quotation
+marks.) "Then I pop off. Two or three hours later I wake up again, and
+find that inspiration has done its work. Thousands of words, comforting,
+uplifting words, lie before me. I type them out neatly on my machine and
+they are ready for the printer."
+
+"It all sounds wonderfully simple," said Denis.
+
+"It is. All the great and splendid and divine things of life are
+wonderfully simple." (Quotation marks again.) "When I have to do my
+aphorisms," Mr. Barbecue-Smith continued, "I prelude my trance by
+turning over the pages of any Dictionary of Quotations or Shakespeare
+Calendar that comes to hand. That sets the key, so to speak; that
+ensures that the Universe shall come flowing in, not in a continuous
+rush, but in aphorismic drops. You see the idea?"
+
+Denis nodded. Mr. Barbecue-Smith put his hand in his pocket and pulled
+out a notebook. "I did a few in the train to-day," he said, turning over
+the pages. "Just dropped off into a trance in the corner of my carriage.
+I find the train very conducive to good work. Here they are." He cleared
+his throat and read:
+
+"The Mountain Road may be steep, but the air is pure up there, and it is
+from the Summit that one gets the view."
+
+"The Things that Really Matter happen in the Heart."
+
+It was curious, Denis reflected, the way the Infinite sometimes repeated
+itself.
+
+"Seeing is Believing. Yes, but Believing is also Seeing. If I believe in
+God, I see God, even in the things that seem to be evil."
+
+Mr. Barbecue-Smith looked up from his notebook. "That last one," he
+said, "is particularly subtle and beautiful, don't you think? Without
+Inspiration I could never have hit on that." He re-read the apophthegm
+with a slower and more solemn utterance. "Straight from the Infinite,"
+he commented reflectively, then addressed himself to the next aphorism.
+
+"The flame of a candle gives Light, but it also Burns."
+
+Puzzled wrinkles appeared on Mr. Barbecue-Smith's forehead. "I don't
+exactly know what that means," he said. "It's very gnomic. One could
+apply it, of course to the Higher Education--illuminating, but provoking
+the Lower Classes to discontent and revolution. Yes, I suppose
+that's what it is. But it's gnomic, it's gnomic." He rubbed his
+chin thoughtfully. The gong sounded again, clamorously, it seemed
+imploringly: dinner was growing cold. It roused Mr. Barbecue-Smith from
+meditation. He turned to Denis.
+
+"You understand me now when I advise you to cultivate your Inspiration.
+Let your Subconscious work for you; turn on the Niagara of the
+Infinite."
+
+There was the sound of feet on the stairs. Mr. Barbecue-Smith got up,
+laid his hand for an instant on Denis's shoulder, and said:
+
+"No more now. Another time. And remember, I rely absolutely on your
+discretion in this matter. There are intimate, sacred things that one
+doesn't wish to be generally known."
+
+"Of course," said Denis. "I quite understand."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+At Crome all the beds were ancient hereditary pieces of furniture. Huge
+beds, like four-masted ships, with furled sails of shining coloured
+stuff. Beds carved and inlaid, beds painted and gilded. Beds of walnut
+and oak, of rare exotic woods. Beds of every date and fashion from the
+time of Sir Ferdinando, who built the house, to the time of his namesake
+in the late eighteenth century, the last of the family, but all of them
+grandiose, magnificent.
+
+The finest of all was now Anne's bed. Sir Julius, son to Sir Ferdinando,
+had had it made in Venice against his wife's first lying-in. Early
+seicento Venice had expended all its extravagant art in the making of
+it. The body of the bed was like a great square sarcophagus. Clustering
+roses were carved in high relief on its wooden panels, and luscious
+putti wallowed among the roses. On the black ground-work of the panels
+the carved reliefs were gilded and burnished. The golden roses twined in
+spirals up the four pillar-like posts, and cherubs, seated at the top
+of each column, supported a wooden canopy fretted with the same carved
+flowers.
+
+Anne was reading in bed. Two candles stood on the little table beside
+her, in their rich light her face, her bare arm and shoulder took on
+warm hues and a sort of peach-like quality of surface. Here and there in
+the canopy above her carved golden petals shone brightly among profound
+shadows, and the soft light, falling on the sculptured panel of the bed,
+broke restlessly among the intricate roses, lingered in a broad caress
+on the blown cheeks, the dimpled bellies, the tight, absurd little
+posteriors of the sprawling putti.
+
+There was a discreet tap at the door. She looked up. "Come in, come in."
+A face, round and childish, within its sleek bell of golden hair, peered
+round the opening door. More childish-looking still, a suit of mauve
+pyjamas made its entrance.
+
+It was Mary. "I thought I'd just look in for a moment to say
+good-night," she said, and sat down on the edge of the bed.
+
+Anne closed her book. "That was very sweet of you."
+
+"What are you reading?" She looked at the book. "Rather second-rate,
+isn't it?" The tone in which Mary pronounced the word "second-rate"
+implied an almost infinite denigration. She was accustomed in London to
+associate only with first-rate people who liked first-rate things, and
+she knew that there were very, very few first-rate things in the world,
+and that those were mostly French.
+
+"Well, I'm afraid I like it," said Anne. There was nothing more to be
+said. The silence that followed was a rather uncomfortable one. Mary
+fiddled uneasily with the bottom button of her pyjama jacket. Leaning
+back on her mound of heaped-up pillows, Anne waited and wondered what
+was coming.
+
+"I'm so awfully afraid of repressions," said Mary at last, bursting
+suddenly and surprisingly into speech. She pronounced the words on
+the tail-end of an expiring breath, and had to gasp for new air almost
+before the phrase was finished.
+
+"What's there to be depressed about?"
+
+"I said repressions, not depressions."
+
+"Oh, repressions; I see," said Anne. "But repressions of what?"
+
+Mary had to explain. "The natural instincts of sex..." she began
+didactically. But Anne cut her short.
+
+"Yes, yes. Perfectly. I understand. Repressions! old maids and all the
+rest. But what about them?"
+
+"That's just it," said Mary. "I'm afraid of them. It's always dangerous
+to repress one's instincts. I'm beginning to detect in myself symptoms
+like the ones you read of in the books. I constantly dream that I'm
+falling down wells; and sometimes I even dream that I'm climbing up
+ladders. It's most disquieting. The symptoms are only too clear."
+
+"Are they?"
+
+"One may become a nymphomaniac if one's not careful. You've no idea how
+serious these repressions are if you don't get rid of them in time."
+
+"It sounds too awful," said Anne. "But I don't see that I can do
+anything to help you."
+
+"I thought I'd just like to talk it over with you."
+
+"Why, of course; I'm only too happy, Mary darling."
+
+Mary coughed and drew a deep breath. "I presume," she began
+sententiously, "I presume we may take for granted that an intelligent
+young woman of twenty-three who has lived in civilised society in the
+twentieth century has no prejudices."
+
+"Well, I confess I still have a few."
+
+"But not about repressions."
+
+"No, not many about repressions; that's true."
+
+"Or, rather, about getting rid of repressions."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"So much for our fundamental postulate," said Mary. Solemnity was
+expressed in every feature of her round young face, radiated from
+her large blue eyes. "We come next to the desirability of possessing
+experience. I hope we are agreed that knowledge is desirable and that
+ignorance is undesirable."
+
+Obedient as one of those complaisant disciples from whom Socrates could
+get whatever answer he chose, Anne gave her assent to this proposition.
+
+"And we are equally agreed, I hope, that marriage is what it is."
+
+"It is."
+
+"Good!" said Mary. "And repressions being what they are..."
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"There would therefore seem to be only one conclusion."
+
+"But I knew that," Anne exclaimed, "before you began."
+
+"Yes, but now it's been proved," said Mary. "One must do things
+logically. The question is now..."
+
+"But where does the question come in? You've reached your only possible
+conclusion--logically, which is more than I could have done. All that
+remains is to impart the information to someone you like--someone you
+like really rather a lot, someone you're in love with, if I may express
+myself so baldly."
+
+"But that's just where the question comes in," Mary exclaimed. "I'm not
+in love with anybody."
+
+"Then, if I were you, I should wait till you are."
+
+"But I can't go on dreaming night after night that I'm falling down a
+well. It's too dangerous."
+
+"Well, if it really is TOO dangerous, then of course you must do
+something about it; you must find somebody else."
+
+"But who?" A thoughtful frown puckered Mary's brow. "It must be somebody
+intelligent, somebody with intellectual interests that I can share.
+And it must be somebody with a proper respect for women, somebody who's
+prepared to talk seriously about his work and his ideas and about my
+work and my ideas. It isn't, as you see, at all easy to find the right
+person."
+
+"Well" said Anne, "there are three unattached and intelligent men in
+the house at the present time. There's Mr. Scogan, to begin with;
+but perhaps he's rather too much of a genuine antique. And there are
+Gombauld and Denis. Shall we say that the choice is limited to the last
+two?"
+
+Mary nodded. "I think we had better," she said, and then hesitated, with
+a certain air of embarrassment.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I was wondering," said Mary, with a gasp, "whether they really were
+unattached. I thought that perhaps you might...you might..."
+
+"It was very nice of you to think of me, Mary darling," said Anne,
+smiling the tight cat's smile. "But as far as I'm concerned, they are
+both entirely unattached."
+
+"I'm very glad of that," said Mary, looking relieved. "We are now
+confronted with the question: Which of the two?"
+
+"I can give no advice. It's a matter for your taste."
+
+"It's not a matter of my taste," Mary pronounced, "but of their merits.
+We must weigh them and consider them carefully and dispassionately."
+
+"You must do the weighing yourself," said Anne; there was still the
+trace of a smile at the corners of her mouth and round the half-closed
+eyes. "I won't run the risk of advising you wrongly."
+
+"Gombauld has more talent," Mary began, "but he is less civilised than
+Denis." Mary's pronunciation of "civilised" gave the word a special and
+additional significance. She uttered it meticulously, in the very front
+of her mouth, hissing delicately on the opening sibilant. So few people
+were civilised, and they, like the first-rate works of art, were mostly
+French. "Civilisation is most important, don't you think?"
+
+Anne held up her hand. "I won't advise," she said. "You must make the
+decision."
+
+"Gombauld's family," Mary went on reflectively, "comes from Marseilles.
+Rather a dangerous heredity, when one thinks of the Latin attitude
+towards women. But then, I sometimes wonder whether Denis is altogether
+serious-minded, whether he isn't rather a dilettante. It's very
+difficult. What do you think?"
+
+"I'm not listening," said Anne. "I refuse to take any responsibility."
+
+Mary sighed. "Well," she said, "I think I had better go to bed and think
+about it."
+
+"Carefully and dispassionately," said Anne.
+
+At the door Mary turned round. "Good-night," she said, and wondered
+as she said the words why Anne was smiling in that curious way. It
+was probably nothing, she reflected. Anne often smiled for no apparent
+reason; it was probably just a habit. "I hope I shan't dream of falling
+down wells again to-night," she added.
+
+"Ladders are worse," said Anne.
+
+Mary nodded. "Yes, ladders are much graver."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+Breakfast on Sunday morning was an hour later than on week-days, and
+Priscilla, who usually made no public appearance before luncheon,
+honoured it by her presence. Dressed in black silk, with a ruby cross as
+well as her customary string of pearls round her neck, she presided.
+An enormous Sunday paper concealed all but the extreme pinnacle of her
+coiffure from the outer world.
+
+"I see Surrey has won," she said, with her mouth full, "by four wickets.
+The sun is in Leo: that would account for it!"
+
+"Splendid game, cricket," remarked Mr. Barbecue-Smith heartily to no one
+in particular; "so thoroughly English."
+
+Jenny, who was sitting next to him, woke up suddenly with a start.
+"What?" she said. "What?"
+
+"So English," repeated Mr. Barbecue-Smith.
+
+Jenny looked at him, surprised. "English? Of course I am."
+
+He was beginning to explain, when Mrs. Wimbush vailed her Sunday paper,
+and appeared, a square, mauve-powdered face in the midst of orange
+splendours. "I see there's a new series of articles on the next world
+just beginning," she said to Mr. Barbecue-Smith. "This one's called
+'Summer Land and Gehenna.'"
+
+"Summer Land," echoed Mr. Barbecue-Smith, closing his eyes. "Summer
+Land. A beautiful name. Beautiful--beautiful."
+
+Mary had taken the seat next to Denis's. After a night of careful
+consideration she had decided on Denis. He might have less talent than
+Gombauld, he might be a little lacking in seriousness, but somehow he
+was safer.
+
+"Are you writing much poetry here in the country?" she asked, with a
+bright gravity.
+
+"None," said Denis curtly. "I haven't brought my typewriter."
+
+"But do you mean to say you can't write without a typewriter?"
+
+Denis shook his head. He hated talking at breakfast, and, besides, he
+wanted to hear what Mr. Scogan was saying at the other end of the table.
+
+"...My scheme for dealing with the Church," Mr. Scogan was saying, "is
+beautifully simple. At the present time the Anglican clergy wear their
+collars the wrong way round. I would compel them to wear, not only their
+collars, but all their clothes, turned back to frantic--coat, waistcoat,
+trousers, boots--so that every clergyman should present to the world
+a smooth facade, unbroken by stud, button, or lace. The enforcement of
+such a livery would act as a wholesome deterrent to those intending to
+enter the Church. At the same time it would enormously enhance, what
+Archbishop Laud so rightly insisted on, the 'beauty of holiness' in the
+few incorrigibles who could not be deterred."
+
+"In hell, it seems," said Priscilla, reading in her Sunday paper, "the
+children amuse themselves by flaying lambs alive."
+
+"Ah, but, dear lady, that's only a symbol," exclaimed Mr.
+Barbecue-Smith, "a material symbol of a h-piritual truth. Lambs
+signify..."
+
+"Then there are military uniforms," Mr. Scogan went on. "When scarlet
+and pipe-clay were abandoned for khaki, there were some who trembled for
+the future of war. But then, finding how elegant the new tunic was, how
+closely it clipped the waist, how voluptuously, with the lateral
+bustles of the pockets, it exaggerated the hips; when they realized the
+brilliant potentialities of breeches and top-boots, they were reassured.
+Abolish these military elegances, standardise a uniform of sack-cloth
+and mackintosh, you will very soon find that..."
+
+"Is anyone coming to church with me this morning?" asked Henry Wimbush.
+No one responded. He baited his bare invitation. "I read the lessons,
+you know. And there's Mr. Bodiham. His sermons are sometimes worth
+hearing."
+
+"Thank you, thank you," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith. "I for one prefer to
+worship in the infinite church of Nature. How does our Shakespeare put
+it? 'Sermons in books, stones in the running brooks.'" He waved his arm
+in a fine gesture towards the window, and even as he did so he became
+vaguely, but none the less insistently, none the less uncomfortably
+aware that something had gone wrong with the quotation. Something--what
+could it be? Sermons? Stones? Books?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+Mr. Bodiham was sitting in his study at the Rectory. The
+nineteenth-century Gothic windows, narrow and pointed, admitted the
+light grudgingly; in spite of the brilliant July weather, the room was
+sombre. Brown varnished bookshelves lined the walls, filled with row
+upon row of those thick, heavy theological works which the second-hand
+booksellers generally sell by weight. The mantelpiece, the over-mantel,
+a towering structure of spindly pillars and little shelves, were brown
+and varnished. The writing-desk was brown and varnished. So were the
+chairs, so was the door. A dark red-brown carpet with patterns covered
+the floor. Everything was brown in the room, and there was a curious
+brownish smell.
+
+In the midst of this brown gloom Mr. Bodiham sat at his desk. He was the
+man in the Iron Mask. A grey metallic face with iron cheek-bones and a
+narrow iron brow; iron folds, hard and unchanging, ran perpendicularly
+down his cheeks; his nose was the iron beak of some thin, delicate bird
+of rapine. He had brown eyes, set in sockets rimmed with iron; round
+them the skin was dark, as though it had been charred. Dense wiry hair
+covered his skull; it had been black, it was turning grey. His ears
+were very small and fine. His jaws, his chin, his upper lip were dark,
+iron-dark, where he had shaved. His voice, when he spoke and especially
+when he raised it in preaching, was harsh, like the grating of iron
+hinges when a seldom-used door is opened.
+
+It was nearly half-past twelve. He had just come back from church,
+hoarse and weary with preaching. He preached with fury, with passion,
+an iron man beating with a flail upon the souls of his congregation.
+But the souls of the faithful at Crome were made of india-rubber, solid
+rubber; the flail rebounded. They were used to Mr. Bodiham at Crome. The
+flail thumped on india-rubber, and as often as not the rubber slept.
+
+That morning he had preached, as he had often preached before, on the
+nature of God. He had tried to make them understand about God, what
+a fearful thing it was to fall into His hands. God--they thought of
+something soft and merciful. They blinded themselves to facts; still
+more, they blinded themselves to the Bible. The passengers on the
+"Titanic" sang "Nearer my God to Thee" as the ship was going down. Did
+they realise what they were asking to be brought nearer to? A white fire
+of righteousness, an angry fire...
+
+When Savonarola preached, men sobbed and groaned aloud. Nothing broke
+the polite silence with which Crome listened to Mr. Bodiham--only an
+occasional cough and sometimes the sound of heavy breathing. In the
+front pew sat Henry Wimbush, calm, well-bred, beautifully dressed. There
+were times when Mr. Bodiham wanted to jump down from the pulpit and
+shake him into life,--times when he would have liked to beat and kill
+his whole congregation.
+
+He sat at his desk dejectedly. Outside the Gothic windows the earth was
+warm and marvellously calm. Everything was as it had always been. And
+yet, and yet...It was nearly four years now since he had preached that
+sermon on Matthew xxiv. 7: "For nation shall rise up against nation, and
+kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences,
+and earthquakes, in divers places." It was nearly four years. He had had
+the sermon printed; it was so terribly, so vitally important that all
+the world should know what he had to say. A copy of the little pamphlet
+lay on his desk--eight small grey pages, printed by a fount of type that
+had grown blunt, like an old dog's teeth, by the endless champing and
+champing of the press. He opened it and began to read it yet once again.
+
+"'For nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom:
+and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers
+places.'
+
+"Nineteen centuries have elapsed since Our Lord gave utterance to those
+words, and not a single one of them has been without wars, plagues,
+famines, and earthquakes. Mighty empires have crashed in ruin to the
+ground, diseases have unpeopled half the globe, there have been vast
+natural cataclysms in which thousands have been overwhelmed by flood
+and fire and whirlwind. Time and again, in the course of these nineteen
+centuries, such things have happened, but they have not brought Christ
+back to earth. They were 'signs of the times' inasmuch as they were
+signs of God's wrath against the chronic wickedness of mankind, but they
+were not signs of the times in connection with the Second Coming.
+
+"If earnest Christians have regarded the present war as a true sign of
+the Lord's approaching return, it is not merely because it happens to
+be a great war involving the lives of millions of people, not merely
+because famine is tightening its grip on every country in Europe, not
+merely because disease of every kind, from syphilis to spotted fever, is
+rife among the warring nations; no, it is not for these reasons that we
+regard this war as a true Sign of the Times, but because in its origin
+and its progress it is marked by certain characteristics which seem
+to connect it almost beyond a doubt with the predictions in Christian
+Prophecy relating to the Second Coming of the Lord.
+
+"Let me enumerate the features of the present war which most clearly
+suggest that it is a Sign foretelling the near approach of the Second
+Advent. Our Lord said that 'this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached
+in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end
+come.' Although it would be presumptuous for us to say what degree of
+evangelisation will be regarded by God as sufficient, we may at least
+confidently hope that a century of unflagging missionary work has
+brought the fulfilment of this condition at any rate near. True, the
+larger number of the world's inhabitants have remained deaf to the
+preaching of the true religion; but that does not vitiate the fact that
+the Gospel HAS been preached 'for a witness' to all unbelievers from the
+Papist to the Zulu. The responsibility for the continued prevalence of
+unbelief lies, not with the preachers, but with those preached to.
+
+"Again, it has been generally recognised that 'the drying up of the
+waters of the great river Euphrates,' mentioned in the sixteenth chapter
+of Revelation, refers to the decay and extinction of Turkish power, and
+is a sign of the near approaching end of the world as we know it. The
+capture of Jerusalem and the successes in Mesopotamia are great strides
+forward in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire; though it must be
+admitted that the Gallipoli episode proved that the Turk still possesses
+a 'notable horn' of strength. Historically speaking, this drying up of
+Ottoman power has been going on for the past century; the last two years
+have witnessed a great acceleration of the process, and there can be no
+doubt that complete desiccation is within sight.
+
+"Closely following on the words concerning the drying up of Euphrates
+comes the prophecy of Armageddon, that world war with which the Second
+Coming is to be so closely associated. Once begun, the world war can
+end only with the return of Christ, and His coming will be sudden and
+unexpected, like that of a thief in the night.
+
+"Let us examine the facts. In history, exactly as in St. John's Gospel,
+the world war is immediately preceded by the drying up of Euphrates, or
+the decay of Turkish power. This fact alone would be enough to connect
+the present conflict with the Armageddon of Revelation and therefore to
+point to the near approach of the Second Advent. But further evidence of
+an even more solid and convincing nature can be adduced.
+
+"Armageddon is brought about by the activities of three unclean spirits,
+as it were toads, which come out of the mouths of the Dragon, the Beast,
+and the False Prophet. If we can identify these three powers of evil
+much light will clearly be thrown on the whole question.
+
+"The Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet can all be identified in
+history. Satan, who can only work through human agency, has used these
+three powers in the long war against Christ which has filled the last
+nineteen centuries with religious strife. The Dragon, it has been
+sufficiently established, is pagan Rome, and the spirit issuing from its
+mouth is the spirit of Infidelity. The Beast, alternatively symbolised
+as a Woman, is undoubtedly the Papal power, and Popery is the spirit
+which it spews forth. There is only one power which answers to the
+description of the False Prophet, the wolf in sheep's clothing, the
+agent of the devil working in the guise of the Lamb, and that power is
+the so-called 'Society of Jesus.' The spirit that issues from the mouth
+of the False Prophet is the spirit of False Morality.
+
+"We may assume, then, that the three evil spirits are Infidelity,
+Popery, and False Morality. Have these three influences been the real
+cause of the present conflict? The answer is clear.
+
+"The spirit of Infidelity is the very spirit of German criticism. The
+Higher Criticism, as it is mockingly called, denies the possibility of
+miracles, prediction, and real inspiration, and attempts to account for
+the Bible as a natural development. Slowly but surely, during the last
+eighty years, the spirit of Infidelity has been robbing the Germans
+of their Bible and their faith, so that Germany is to-day a nation of
+unbelievers. Higher Criticism has thus made the war possible; for it
+would be absolutely impossible for any Christian nation to wage war as
+Germany is waging it.
+
+"We come next to the spirit of Popery, whose influence in causing the
+war was quite as great as that of Infidelity, though not, perhaps, so
+immediately obvious. Since the Franco-Prussian War the Papal power has
+steadily declined in France, while in Germany it has steadily increased.
+To-day France is an anti-papal state, while Germany possesses a powerful
+Roman Catholic minority. Two papally controlled states, Germany and
+Austria, are at war with six anti-papal states--England, France, Italy,
+Russia, Serbia, and Portugal. Belgium is, of course, a thoroughly papal
+state, and there can be little doubt that the presence on the Allies'
+side of an element so essentially hostile has done much to hamper the
+righteous cause and is responsible for our comparative ill-success. That
+the spirit of Popery is behind the war is thus seen clearly enough in
+the grouping of the opposed powers, while the rebellion in the Roman
+Catholic parts of Ireland has merely confirmed a conclusion already
+obvious to any unbiased mind.
+
+"The spirit of False Morality has played as great a part in this war as
+the two other evil spirits. The Scrap of Paper incident is the nearest
+and most obvious example of Germany's adherence to this essentially
+unchristian or Jesuitical morality. The end is German world-power, and
+in the attainment of this end, any means are justifiable. It is the true
+principle of Jesuitry applied to international politics.
+
+"The identification is now complete. As was predicted in Revelation,
+the three evil spirits have gone forth just as the decay of the Ottoman
+power was nearing completion, and have joined together to make the world
+war. The warning, 'Behold, I come as a thief,' is therefore meant for
+the present period--for you and me and all the world. This war will lead
+on inevitably to the war of Armageddon, and will only be brought to an
+end by the Lord's personal return.
+
+"And when He returns, what will happen? Those who are in Christ, St.
+John tells us, will be called to the Supper of the Lamb. Those who are
+found fighting against Him will be called to the Supper of the Great
+God--that grim banquet where they shall not feast, but be feasted on.
+'For,' as St. John says, 'I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he
+cried in a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of
+heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the Great
+God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and
+the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit
+on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and
+great.' All the enemies of Christ will be slain with the sword of him
+that sits upon the horse, 'and all the fowls will be filled with their
+flesh.' That is the Supper of the Great God.
+
+"It may be soon or it may, as men reckon time, be long; but sooner or
+later, inevitably, the Lord will come and deliver the world from its
+present troubles. And woe unto them who are called, not to the Supper
+of the Lamb, but to the Supper of the Great God. They will realise
+then, but too late, that God is a God of Wrath as well as a God of
+Forgiveness. The God who sent bears to devour the mockers of Elisha,
+the God who smote the Egyptians for their stubborn wickedness, will
+assuredly smite them too, unless they make haste to repent. But perhaps
+it is already too late. Who knows but that to-morrow, in a moment even,
+Christ may be upon us unawares, like a thief? In a little while, who
+knows? The angel standing in the sun may be summoning the ravens and
+vultures from their crannies in the rocks to feed upon the putrefying
+flesh of the millions of unrighteous whom God's wrath has destroyed. Be
+ready, then; the coming of the Lord is at hand. May it be for all of
+you an object of hope, not a moment to look forward to with terror and
+trembling."
+
+Mr. Bodiham closed the little pamphlet and leaned back in his chair. The
+argument was sound, absolutely compelling; and yet--it was four years
+since he had preached that sermon; four years, and England was at peace,
+the sun shone, the people of Crome were as wicked and indifferent
+as ever--more so, indeed, if that were possible. If only he could
+understand, if the heavens would but make a sign! But his questionings
+remained unanswered. Seated there in his brown varnished chair under the
+Ruskinian window, he could have screamed aloud. He gripped the arms of
+his chair--gripping, gripping for control. The knuckles of his hands
+whitened; he bit his lip. In a few seconds he was able to relax the
+tension; he began to rebuke himself for his rebellious impatience.
+
+Four years, he reflected; what were four years, after all? It must
+inevitably take a long time for Armageddon to ripen to yeast itself up.
+The episode of 1914 had been a preliminary skirmish. And as for the war
+having come to an end--why, that, of course, was illusory. It was still
+going on, smouldering away in Silesia, in Ireland, in Anatolia; the
+discontent in Egypt and India was preparing the way, perhaps, for a
+great extension of the slaughter among the heathen peoples. The Chinese
+boycott of Japan, and the rivalries of that country and America in the
+Pacific, might be breeding a great new war in the East. The prospect,
+Mr. Bodiham tried to assure himself, was hopeful; the real, the genuine
+Armageddon might soon begin, and then, like a thief in the night...But,
+in spite of all his comfortable reasoning, he remained unhappy,
+dissatisfied. Four years ago he had been so confident; God's intention
+seemed then so plain. And now? Now, he did well to be angry. And now he
+suffered too.
+
+Sudden and silent as a phantom Mrs. Bodiham appeared, gliding
+noiselessly across the room. Above her black dress her face was pale
+with an opaque whiteness, her eyes were pale as water in a glass, and
+her strawy hair was almost colourless. She held a large envelope in her
+hand.
+
+"This came for you by the post," she said softly.
+
+The envelope was unsealed. Mechanically Mr. Bodiham tore it open.
+It contained a pamphlet, larger than his own and more elegant in
+appearance. "The House of Sheeny, Clerical Outfitters, Birmingham." He
+turned over the pages. The catalogue was tastefully and ecclesiastically
+printed in antique characters with illuminated Gothic initials. Red
+marginal lines, crossed at the corners after the manner of an Oxford
+picture frame, enclosed each page of type, little red crosses took the
+place of full stops. Mr. Bodiham turned the pages.
+
+"Soutane in best black merino. Ready to wear; in all sizes. Clerical
+frock coats. From nine guineas. A dressy garment, tailored by our own
+experienced ecclesiastical cutters."
+
+Half-tone illustrations represented young curates, some dapper, some
+Rugbeian and muscular, some with ascetic faces and large ecstatic eyes,
+dressed in jackets, in frock-coats, in surplices, in clerical evening
+dress, in black Norfolk suitings.
+
+"A large assortment of chasubles.
+
+"Rope girdles.
+
+"Sheeny's Special Skirt Cassocks. Tied by a string about the waist...When
+worn under a surplice presents an appearance indistinguishable from that
+of a complete cassock...Recommended for summer wear and hot climates."
+
+With a gesture of horror and disgust Mr. Bodiham threw the catalogue
+into the waste-paper basket. Mrs. Bodiham looked at him; her pale,
+glaucous eyes reflected his action without comment.
+
+"The village," she said in her quiet voice, "the village grows worse and
+worse every day."
+
+"What has happened now?" asked Mr. Bodiham, feeling suddenly very weary.
+
+"I'll tell you." She pulled up a brown varnished chair and sat down. In
+the village of Crome, it seemed, Sodom and Gomorrah had come to a second
+birth.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+Denis did not dance, but when ragtime came squirting out of the pianola
+in gushes of treacle and hot perfume, in jets of Bengal light, then
+things began to dance inside him. Little black nigger corpuscles jigged
+and drummed in his arteries. He became a cage of movement, a walking
+palais de danse. It was very uncomfortable, like the preliminary
+symptoms of a disease. He sat in one of the window-seats, glumly
+pretending to read.
+
+At the pianola, Henry Wimbush, smoking a long cigar through a tunnelled
+pillar of amber, trod out the shattering dance music with serene
+patience. Locked together, Gombauld and Anne moved with a harmoniousness
+that made them seem a single creature, two-headed and four-legged. Mr.
+Scogan, solemnly buffoonish, shuffled round the room with Mary. Jenny
+sat in the shadow behind the piano, scribbling, so it seemed, in a
+big red notebook. In arm-chairs by the fireplace, Priscilla and Mr.
+Barbecue-Smith discussed higher things, without, apparently, being
+disturbed by the noise on the Lower Plane.
+
+"Optimism," said Mr. Barbecue-Smith with a tone of finality, speaking
+through strains of the "Wild, Wild Women"--"optimism is the opening out
+of the soul towards the light; it is an expansion towards and into God,
+it is a h-piritual self-unification with the Infinite."
+
+"How true!" sighed Priscilla, nodding the baleful splendours of her
+coiffure.
+
+"Pessimism, on the other hand, is the contraction of the soul towards
+darkness; it is a focusing of the self upon a point in the Lower Plane;
+it is a h-piritual slavery to mere facts; to gross physical phenomena."
+
+"They're making a wild man of me." The refrain sang itself over in
+Denis's mind. Yes, they were; damn them! A wild man, but not wild
+enough; that was the trouble. Wild inside; raging, writhing--yes,
+"writhing" was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was
+hopelessly tame; outwardly--baa, baa, baa.
+
+There they were, Anne and Gombauld, moving together as though they were
+a single supple creature. The beast with two backs. And he sat in
+a corner, pretending to read, pretending he didn't want to dance,
+pretending he rather despised dancing. Why? It was the baa-baa business
+again.
+
+Why was he born with a different face? Why WAS he? Gombauld had a face
+of brass--one of those old, brazen rams that thumped against the walls
+of cities till they fell. He was born with a different face--a woolly
+face.
+
+The music stopped. The single harmonious creature broke in two. Flushed,
+a little breathless, Anne swayed across the room to the pianola, laid
+her hand on Mr. Wimbush's shoulder.
+
+"A waltz this time, please, Uncle Henry," she said.
+
+"A waltz," he repeated, and turned to the cabinet where the rolls were
+kept. He trod off the old roll and trod on the new, a slave at the
+mill, uncomplaining and beautifully well bred.=
+
+
+```"Rum; Tum; Rum-ti-ti; Tum-ti-ti..."=
+
+The melody wallowed oozily along, like a ship moving forward over a
+sleek and oily swell. The four-legged creature, more graceful, more
+harmonious in its movements than ever, slid across the floor. Oh, why
+was he born with a different face?
+
+"What are you reading?"
+
+He looked up, startled. It was Mary. She had broken from the
+uncomfortable embrace of Mr. Scogan, who had now seized on Jenny for his
+victim.
+
+"What are you reading?"
+
+"I don't know," said Denis truthfully. He looked at the title page; the
+book was called "The Stock Breeder's Vade Mecum."
+
+"I think you are so sensible to sit and read quietly," said Mary, fixing
+him with her china eyes. "I don't know why one dances. It's so boring."
+
+Denis made no reply; she exacerbated him. From the arm-chair by the
+fireplace he heard Priscilla's deep voice.
+
+"Tell me, Mr Barbecue-Smith--you know all about science, I know--" A
+deprecating noise came from Mr. Barbecue-Smith's chair. "This Einstein
+theory. It seems to upset the whole starry universe. It makes me so
+worried about my horoscopes. You see..."
+
+Mary renewed her attack. "Which of the contemporary poets do you like
+best?" she asked. Denis was filled with fury. Why couldn't this pest of
+a girl leave him alone? He wanted to listen to the horrible music, to
+watch them dancing--oh, with what grace, as though they had been made
+for one another!--to savour his misery in peace. And she came and put
+him through this absurd catechism! She was like "Mangold's Questions":
+"What are the three diseases of wheat?"--"Which of the contemporary
+poets do you like best?"
+
+"Blight, Mildew, and Smut," he replied, with the laconism of one who is
+absolutely certain of his own mind.
+
+It was several hours before Denis managed to go to sleep that night.
+Vague but agonising miseries possessed his mind. It was not only Anne
+who made him miserable; he was wretched about himself, the future, life
+in general, the universe. "This adolescence business," he repeated to
+himself every now and then, "is horribly boring." But the fact that he
+knew his disease did not help him to cure it.
+
+After kicking all the clothes off the bed, he got up and sought relief
+in composition. He wanted to imprison his nameless misery in words. At
+the end of an hour, nine more or less complete lines emerged from among
+the blots and scratchings.=
+
+
+```"I do not know what I desire
+
+```When summer nights are dark and still,
+
+```When the wind's many-voiced quire
+
+```Sleeps among the muffled branches.
+
+```I long and know not what I will:
+
+```And not a sound of life or laughter stanches
+
+```Time's black and silent flow.
+
+```I do not know what I desire,
+
+```I do not know."=
+
+He read it through aloud; then threw the scribbled sheet into the
+waste-paper basket and got into bed again. In a very few minutes he was
+asleep.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+Mr. Barbecue-Smith was gone. The motor had whirled him away to the
+station; a faint smell of burning oil commemorated his recent departure.
+A considerable detachment had come into the courtyard to speed him on
+his way; and now they were walking back, round the side of the house,
+towards the terrace and the garden. They walked in silence; nobody had
+yet ventured to comment on the departed guest.
+
+"Well?" said Anne at last, turning with raised inquiring eyebrows to
+Denis.
+
+"Well?" It was time for someone to begin.
+
+Denis declined the invitation; he passed it on to Mr Scogan. "Well?" he
+said.
+
+Mr. Scogan did not respond; he only repeated the question, "Well?"
+
+It was left for Henry Wimbush to make a pronouncement. "A very agreeable
+adjunct to the week-end," he said. His tone was obituary.
+
+They had descended, without paying much attention where they were going,
+the steep yew-walk that went down, under the flank of the terrace, to
+the pool. The house towered above them, immensely tall, with the whole
+height of the built-up terrace added to its own seventy feet of
+brick façade. The perpendicular lines of the three towers soared up,
+uninterrupted, enhancing the impression of height until it became
+overwhelming. They paused at the edge of the pool to look back.
+
+"The man who built this house knew his business," said Denis. "He was an
+architect."
+
+"Was he?" said Henry Wimbush reflectively. "I doubt it. The builder of
+this house was Sir Ferdinando Lapith, who flourished during the reign of
+Elizabeth. He inherited the estate from his father, to whom it had been
+granted at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries; for Crome was
+originally a cloister of monks and this swimming-pool their fish-pond.
+Sir Ferdinando was not content merely to adapt the old monastic
+buildings to his own purposes; but using them as a stone quarry for his
+barns and byres and outhouses, he built for himself a grand new house of
+brick--the house you see now."
+
+He waved his hand in the direction of the house and was silent, severe,
+imposing, almost menacing, Crome loomed down on them.
+
+"The great thing about Crome," said Mr. Scogan, seizing the opportunity
+to speak, "is the fact that it's so unmistakably and aggressively a work
+of art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and
+rebels against it. It has no likeness to Shelley's tower, in the
+'Epipsychidion,' which, if I remember rightly--"=
+
+
+```"'Seems not now a work of human art,
+
+```But as it were titanic, in the heart
+
+```Of earth having assumed its form and grown
+
+```Out of the mountain, from the living stone,
+
+```Lifting itself in caverns light and high.'=
+
+"No, no, there isn't any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the
+hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of
+the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and
+suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticated
+man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather
+be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish
+life. Since the days of William Morris that's a fact which we in England
+have been unable to comprehend. Civilised and sophisticated men have
+solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts,
+cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our
+cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaint
+imitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance,
+and a limited range of materials produced the hovel, which possesses
+undoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own 'as it were titanic'
+charm. We now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich
+variety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitation
+hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go further?"
+
+Henry Wimbush took up the thread of his interrupted discourse. "All that
+you say, my dear Scogan," he began, "is certainly very just, very true.
+But whether Sir Ferdinando shared your views about architecture or if,
+indeed, he had any views about architecture at all, I very much doubt.
+In building this house, Sir Ferdinando was, as a matter of fact,
+preoccupied by only one thought--the proper placing of his privies.
+Sanitation was the one great interest of his life. In 1573 he even
+published, on this subject, a little book--now extremely scarce--called,
+'Certaine Priuy Counsels' by 'One of Her Maiestie's Most Honourable
+Priuy Counsels, F.L. Knight', in which the whole matter is treated with
+great learning and elegance. His guiding principle in arranging the
+sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance
+should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it
+followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the
+house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the
+ground. It must not be thought that Sir Ferdinando was moved only by
+material and merely sanitary considerations; for the placing of his
+privies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritual
+reasons. For, he argues in the third chapter of his 'Priuy Counsels',
+the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them
+we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe.
+To counteract these degrading effects he advised that the privy should
+be in every house the room nearest to heaven, that it should be well
+provided with windows commanding an extensive and noble prospect,
+and that the walls of the chamber should be lined with bookshelves
+containing all the ripest products of human wisdom, such as the Proverbs
+of Solomon, Boethius's 'Consolations of Philosophy', the apophthegms
+of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the 'Enchiridion' of Erasmus, and all
+other works, ancient or modern, which testify to the nobility of the
+human soul. In Crome he was able to put his theories into practice. At
+the top of each of the three projecting towers he placed a privy. From
+these a shaft went down the whole height of the house, that is to
+say, more than seventy feet, through the cellars, and into a series of
+conduits provided with flowing water tunnelled in the ground on a level
+with the base of the raised terrace. These conduits emptied themselves
+into the stream several hundred yards below the fish-pond. The total
+depth of the shafts from the top of the towers to their subterranean
+conduits was a hundred and two feet. The eighteenth century, with
+its passion for modernisation, swept away these monuments of sanitary
+ingenuity. Were it not for tradition and the explicit account of them
+left by Sir Ferdinando, we should be unaware that these noble privies
+had ever existed. We should even suppose that Sir Ferdinando built
+his house after this strange and splendid model for merely aesthetic
+reasons."
+
+The contemplation of the glories of the past always evoked in Henry
+Wimbush a certain enthusiasm. Under the grey bowler his face worked
+and glowed as he spoke. The thought of these vanished privies moved
+him profoundly. He ceased to speak; the light gradually died out of his
+face, and it became once more the replica of the grave, polite hat which
+shaded it. There was a long silence; the same gently melancholy thoughts
+seemed to possess the mind of each of them. Permanence, transience--Sir
+Ferdinando and his privies were gone, Crome still stood. How brightly
+the sun shone and how inevitable was death! The ways of God were
+strange; the ways of man were stranger still...
+
+"It does one's heart good," exclaimed Mr. Scogan at last, "to hear of
+these fantastic English aristocrats. To have a theory about privies
+and to build an immense and splendid house in order to put it into
+practise--it's magnificent, beautiful! I like to think of them all: the
+eccentric milords rolling across Europe in ponderous carriages, bound
+on extraordinary errands. One is going to Venice to buy La Bianchi's
+larynx; he won't get it till she's dead, of course, but no matter; he's
+prepared to wait; he has a collection, pickled in glass bottles, of
+the throats of famous opera singers. And the instruments of renowned
+virtuosi--he goes in for them too; he will try to bribe Paganini to part
+with his little Guarnerio, but he has small hope of success. Paganini
+won't sell his fiddle; but perhaps he might sacrifice one of his
+guitars. Others are bound on crusades--one to die miserably among the
+savage Greeks, another, in his white top hat, to lead Italians against
+their oppressors. Others have no business at all; they are just giving
+their oddity a continental airing. At home they cultivate themselves at
+leisure and with greater elaboration. Beckford builds towers, Portland
+digs holes in the ground, Cavendish, the millionaire, lives in a stable,
+eats nothing but mutton, and amuses himself--oh, solely for his private
+delectation--by anticipating the electrical discoveries of half a
+century. Glorious eccentrics! Every age is enlivened by their presence.
+Some day, my dear Denis," said Mr Scogan, turning a beady bright regard
+in his direction--"some day you must become their biographer--'The Lives
+of Queer Men.' What a subject! I should like to undertake it myself."
+
+Mr. Scogan paused, looked up once more at the towering house, then
+murmured the word "Eccentricity," two or three times.
+
+"Eccentricity...It's the justification of all aristocracies. It
+justifies leisured classes and inherited wealth and privilege and
+endowments and all the other injustices of that sort. If you're to do
+anything reasonable in this world, you must have a class of people who
+are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured, not
+compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the
+name of Honest Work. You must have a class of which the members can
+think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must have
+a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in
+which eccentricity in general will be tolerated and understood. That's
+the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric
+itself--often grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages
+eccentricity in others. The eccentricities of the artist and the
+new-fangled thinker don't inspire it with that fear, loathing, and
+disgust which the burgesses instinctively feel towards them. It is a
+sort of Red Indian Reservation planted in the midst of a vast horde of
+Poor Whites--colonials at that. Within its boundaries wild men disport
+themselves--often, it must be admitted, a little grossly, a little too
+flamboyantly; and when kindred spirits are born outside the pale it
+offers them some sort of refuge from the hatred which the Poor Whites,
+en bons bourgeois, lavish on anything that is wild or out of the
+ordinary. After the social revolution there will be no Reservations;
+the Redskins will be drowned in the great sea of Poor Whites. What then?
+Will they suffer you to go on writing villanelles, my good Denis? Will
+you, unhappy Henry, be allowed to live in this house of the splendid
+privies, to continue your quiet delving in the mines of futile
+knowledge? Will Anne..."
+
+"And you," said Anne, interrupting him, "will you be allowed to go on
+talking?"
+
+"You may rest assured," Mr. Scogan replied, "that I shall not. I shall
+have some Honest Work to do."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+Blight, Mildew, and Smut..." Mary was puzzled and distressed. Perhaps
+her ears had played her false. Perhaps what he had really said was,
+"Squire, Binyon, and Shanks," or "Childe, Blunden, and Earp," or even
+"Abercrombie, Drinkwater, and Rabindranath Tagore." Perhaps. But then
+her ears never did play her false. "Blight, Mildew, and Smut." The
+impression was distinct and ineffaceable. "Blight, Mildew..." she was
+forced to the conclusion, reluctantly, that Denis had indeed pronounced
+those improbable words. He had deliberately repelled her attempts to
+open a serious discussion. That was horrible. A man who would not talk
+seriously to a woman just because she was a woman--oh, impossible!
+Egeria or nothing. Perhaps Gombauld would be more satisfactory. True,
+his meridional heredity was a little disquieting; but at least he was
+a serious worker, and it was with his work that she would associate
+herself. And Denis? After all, what WAS Denis? A dilettante, an
+amateur...
+
+Gombauld had annexed for his painting-room a little disused granary that
+stood by itself in a green close beyond the farm-yard. It was a square
+brick building with a peaked roof and little windows set high up in each
+of its walls. A ladder of four rungs led up to the door; for the granary
+was perched above the ground, and out of reach of the rats, on four
+massive toadstools of grey stone. Within, there lingered a faint smell
+of dust and cobwebs; and the narrow shaft of sunlight that came slanting
+in at every hour of the day through one of the little windows was
+always alive with silvery motes. Here Gombauld worked, with a kind of
+concentrated ferocity, during six or seven hours of each day. He was
+pursuing something new, something terrific, if only he could catch it.
+
+During the last eight years, nearly half of which had been spent in the
+process of winning the war, he had worked his way industriously through
+cubism. Now he had come out on the other side. He had begun by painting
+a formalised nature; then, little by little, he had risen from nature
+into the world of pure form, till in the end he was painting nothing but
+his own thoughts, externalised in the abstract geometrical forms of
+the mind's devising. He found the process arduous and exhilarating. And
+then, quite suddenly, he grew dissatisfied; he felt himself cramped and
+confined within intolerably narrow limitations. He was humiliated to
+find how few and crude and uninteresting were the forms he could invent;
+the inventions of nature were without number, inconceivably subtle and
+elaborate. He had done with cubism. He was out on the other side. But
+the cubist discipline preserved him from falling into excesses of nature
+worship. He took from nature its rich, subtle, elaborate forms, but his
+aim was always to work them into a whole that should have the thrilling
+simplicity and formality of an idea; to combine prodigious realism
+with prodigious simplification. Memories of Caravaggio's portentous
+achievements haunted him. Forms of a breathing, living reality emerged
+from darkness, built themselves up into compositions as luminously
+simple and single as a mathematical idea. He thought of the "Call of
+Matthew," of "Peter Crucified," of the "Lute players," of "Magdalen."
+He had the secret, that astonishing ruffian, he had the secret! And
+now Gombauld was after it, in hot pursuit. Yes, it would be something
+terrific, if only he could catch it.
+
+For a long time an idea had been stirring and spreading, yeastily,
+in his mind. He had made a portfolio full of studies, he had drawn a
+cartoon; and now the idea was taking shape on canvas. A man fallen from
+a horse. The huge animal, a gaunt white cart-horse, filled the upper
+half of the picture with its great body. Its head, lowered towards the
+ground, was in shadow; the immense bony body was what arrested the eye,
+the body and the legs, which came down on either side of the picture
+like the pillars of an arch. On the ground, between the legs of the
+towering beast, lay the foreshortened figure of a man, the head in the
+extreme foreground, the arms flung wide to right and left. A white,
+relentless light poured down from a point in the right foreground. The
+beast, the fallen man, were sharply illuminated; round them, beyond and
+behind them, was the night. They were alone in the darkness, a universe
+in themselves. The horse's body filled the upper part of the picture;
+the legs, the great hoofs, frozen to stillness in the midst of their
+trampling, limited it on either side. And beneath lay the man,
+his foreshortened face at the focal point in the centre, his arms
+outstretched towards the sides of the picture. Under the arch of the
+horse's belly, between his legs, the eye looked through into an intense
+darkness; below, the space was closed in by the figure of the prostrate
+man. A central gulf of darkness surrounded by luminous forms...
+
+The picture was more than half finished. Gombauld had been at work all
+the morning on the figure of the man, and now he was taking a rest--the
+time to smoke a cigarette. Tilting back his chair till it touched the
+wall, he looked thoughtfully at his canvas. He was pleased, and at the
+same time he was desolated. In itself, the thing was good; he knew
+it. But that something he was after, that something that would be so
+terrific if only he could catch it--had he caught it? Would he ever
+catch it?
+
+Three little taps--rat, tat, tat! Surprised, Gombauld turned his eyes
+towards the door. Nobody ever disturbed him while he was at work; it
+was one of the unwritten laws. "Come in!" he called. The door, which was
+ajar, swung open, revealing, from the waist upwards, the form of Mary.
+She had only dared to mount half-way up the ladder. If he didn't want
+her, retreat would be easier and more dignified than if she climbed to
+the top.
+
+"May I come in?" she asked.
+
+"Certainly."
+
+She skipped up the remaining two rungs and was over the threshold in
+an instant. "A letter came for you by the second post," she said. "I
+thought it might be important, so I brought it out to you." Her eyes,
+her childish face were luminously candid as she handed him the letter.
+There had never been a flimsier pretext.
+
+Gombauld looked at the envelope and put it in his pocket unopened.
+"Luckily," he said, "it isn't at all important. Thanks very much all the
+same."
+
+There was a silence; Mary felt a little uncomfortable. "May I have a
+look at what you've been painting?" she had the courage to say at last.
+
+Gombauld had only half smoked his cigarette; in any case he wouldn't
+begin work again till he had finished. He would give her the five
+minutes that separated him from the bitter end. "This is the best place
+to see it from," he said.
+
+Mary looked at the picture for some time without saying anything.
+Indeed, she didn't know what to say; she was taken aback, she was at a
+loss. She had expected a cubist masterpiece, and here was a picture of a
+man and a horse, not only recognisable as such, but even aggressively
+in drawing. Trompe-l'oeil--there was no other word to describe the
+delineation of that foreshortened figure under the trampling feet of the
+horse. What was she to think, what was she to say? Her orientations
+were gone. One could admire representationalism in the Old Masters.
+Obviously. But in a modern...? At eighteen she might have done so.
+But now, after five years of schooling among the best judges, her
+instinctive reaction to a contemporary piece of representation was
+contempt--an outburst of laughing disparagement. What could Gombauld be
+up to? She had felt so safe in admiring his work before. But now--she
+didn't know what to think. It was very difficult, very difficult.
+
+"There's rather a lot of chiaroscuro, isn't there?" she ventured at
+last, and inwardly congratulated herself on having found a critical
+formula so gentle and at the same time so penetrating.
+
+"There is," Gombauld agreed.
+
+Mary was pleased; he accepted her criticism; it was a serious
+discussion. She put her head on one side and screwed up her eyes.
+"I think it's awfully fine," she said. "But of course it's a little
+too...too...trompe-l'oeil for my taste." She looked at Gombauld, who
+made no response, but continued to smoke, gazing meditatively all the
+time at his picture. Mary went on gaspingly. "When I was in Paris this
+spring I saw a lot of Tschuplitski. I admire his work so tremendously.
+Of course, it's frightfully abstract now--frightfully abstract and
+frightfully intellectual. He just throws a few oblongs on to his
+canvas--quite flat, you know, and painted in pure primary colours. But
+his design is wonderful. He's getting more and more abstract every day.
+He'd given up the third dimension when I was there and was just thinking
+of giving up the second. Soon, he says, there'll be just the blank
+canvas. That's the logical conclusion. Complete abstraction. Painting's
+finished; he's finishing it. When he's reached pure abstraction he's
+going to take up architecture. He says it's more intellectual than
+painting. Do you agree?" she asked, with a final gasp.
+
+Gombauld dropped his cigarette end and trod on it. "Tschuplitski's
+finished painting," he said. "I've finished my cigarette. But I'm going
+on painting." And, advancing towards her, he put his arm round her
+shoulders and turned her round, away from the picture.
+
+Mary looked up at him; her hair swung back, a soundless bell of gold.
+Her eyes were serene; she smiled. So the moment had come. His arm was
+round her. He moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, and she moved with
+him. It was a peripatetic embracement. "Do you agree with him?" she
+repeated. The moment might have come, but she would not cease to be
+intellectual, serious.
+
+"I don't know. I shall have to think about it." Gombauld loosened his
+embrace, his hand dropped from her shoulder. "Be careful going down the
+ladder," he added solicitously.
+
+Mary looked round, startled. They were in front of the open door. She
+remained standing there for a moment in bewilderment. The hand that
+had rested on her shoulder made itself felt lower down her back; it
+administered three or four kindly little smacks. Replying automatically
+to its stimulus, she moved forward.
+
+"Be careful going down the ladder," said Gombauld once more.
+
+She was careful. The door closed behind her and she was alone in the
+little green close. She walked slowly back through the farmyard; she was
+pensive.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+Henry Wimbush brought down with him to dinner a budget of printed sheets
+loosely bound together in a cardboard portfolio.
+
+"To-day," he said, exhibiting it with a certain solemnity, "to-day I
+have finished the printing of my 'History of Crome'. I helped to set up
+the type of the last page this evening."
+
+"The famous History?" cried Anne. The writing and the printing of this
+Magnum Opus had been going on as long as she could remember. All her
+childhood long Uncle Henry's History had been a vague and fabulous
+thing, often heard of and never seen.
+
+"It has taken me nearly thirty years," said Mr. Wimbush. "Twenty-five
+years of writing and nearly four of printing. And now it's finished--the
+whole chronicle, from Sir Ferdinando Lapith's birth to the death of my
+father William Wimbush--more than three centuries and a half: a history
+of Crome, written at Crome, and printed at Crome by my own press."
+
+"Shall we be allowed to read it now it's finished?" asked Denis.
+
+Mr. Wimbush nodded. "Certainly," he said. "And I hope you will not find
+it uninteresting," he added modestly. "Our muniment room is particularly
+rich in ancient records, and I have some genuinely new light to throw on
+the introduction of the three-pronged fork."
+
+"And the people?" asked Gombauld. "Sir Ferdinando and the rest of
+them--were they amusing? Were there any crimes or tragedies in the
+family?"
+
+"Let me see," Henry Wimbush rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I can only
+think of two suicides, one violent death, four or perhaps five broken
+hearts, and half a dozen little blots on the scutcheon in the way of
+misalliances, seductions, natural children, and the like. No, on the
+whole, it's a placid and uneventful record."
+
+"The Wimbushes and the Lapiths were always an unadventurous, respectable
+crew," said Priscilla, with a note of scorn in her voice. "If I were to
+write my family history now! Why, it would be one long continuous blot
+from beginning to end." She laughed jovially, and helped herself to
+another glass of wine.
+
+"If I were to write mine," Mr. Scogan remarked, "it wouldn't exist.
+After the second generation we Scogans are lost in the mists of
+antiquity."
+
+"After dinner," said Henry Wimbush, a little piqued by his wife's
+disparaging comment on the masters of Crome, "I'll read you an episode
+from my History that will make you admit that even the Lapiths, in their
+own respectable way, had their tragedies and strange adventures."
+
+"I'm glad to hear it," said Priscilla.
+
+"Glad to hear what?" asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private
+interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation,
+smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last "I see," and popped back, clapping shut
+the door behind her.
+
+Dinner was eaten; the party had adjourned to the drawing-room.
+
+"Now," said Henry Wimbush, pulling up a chair to the lamp. He put on
+his round pince-nez, rimmed with tortoise-shell, and began cautiously
+to turn over the pages of his loose and still fragmentary book. He found
+his place at last. "Shall I begin?" he asked, looking up.
+
+"Do," said Priscilla, yawning.
+
+In the midst of an attentive silence Mr. Wimbush gave a little
+preliminary cough and started to read.
+
+"The infant who was destined to become the fourth baronet of the name of
+Lapith was born in the year 1740. He was a very small baby, weighing not
+more than three pounds at birth, but from the first he was sturdy and
+healthy. In honour of his maternal grandfather, Sir Hercules Occam of
+Bishop's Occam, he was christened Hercules. His mother, like many other
+mothers, kept a notebook, in which his progress from month to month was
+recorded. He walked at ten months, and before his second year was out
+he had learnt to speak a number of words. At three years he weighed but
+twenty-four pounds, and at six, though he could read and write perfectly
+and showed a remarkable aptitude for music, he was no larger and heavier
+than a well-grown child of two. Meanwhile, his mother had borne two
+other children, a boy and a girl, one of whom died of croup during
+infancy, while the other was carried off by smallpox before it reached
+the age of five. Hercules remained the only surviving child.
+
+"On his twelfth birthday Hercules was still only three feet and two
+inches in height. His head, which was very handsome and nobly shaped,
+was too big for his body, but otherwise he was exquisitely proportioned,
+and, for his size, of great strength and agility. His parents, in the
+hope of making him grow, consulted all the most eminent physicians of
+the time. Their various prescriptions were followed to the letter, but
+in vain. One ordered a very plentiful meat diet; another exercise; a
+third constructed a little rack, modelled on those employed by the Holy
+Inquisition, on which young Hercules was stretched, with excruciating
+torments, for half an hour every morning and evening. In the course of
+the next three years Hercules gained perhaps two inches. After that his
+growth stopped completely, and he remained for the rest of his life a
+pigmy of three feet and four inches. His father, who had built the most
+extravagant hopes upon his son, planning for him in his imagination
+a military career equal to that of Marlborough, found himself a
+disappointed man. 'I have brought an abortion into the world,' he would
+say, and he took so violent a dislike to his son that the boy dared
+scarcely come into his presence. His temper, which had been serene,
+was turned by disappointment to moroseness and savagery. He avoided all
+company (being, as he said, ashamed to show himself, the father of a
+lusus naturae, among normal, healthy human beings), and took to solitary
+drinking, which carried him very rapidly to his grave; for the year
+before Hercules came of age his father was taken off by an apoplexy. His
+mother, whose love for him had increased with the growth of his father's
+unkindness, did not long survive, but little more than a year after
+her husband's death succumbed, after eating two dozen of oysters, to an
+attack of typhoid fever.
+
+"Hercules thus found himself at the age of twenty-one alone in the
+world, and master of a considerable fortune, including the estate and
+mansion of Crome. The beauty and intelligence of his childhood had
+survived into his manly age, and, but for his dwarfish stature, he would
+have taken his place among the handsomest and most accomplished young
+men of his time. He was well read in the Greek and Latin authors, as
+well as in all the moderns of any merit who had written in English,
+French, or Italian. He had a good ear for music, and was no indifferent
+performer on the violin, which he used to play like a bass viol, seated
+on a chair with the instrument between his legs. To the music of the
+harpsichord and clavichord he was extremely partial, but the smallness
+of his hands made it impossible for him ever to perform upon these
+instruments. He had a small ivory flute made for him, on which,
+whenever he was melancholy, he used to play a simple country air or jig,
+affirming that this rustic music had more power to clear and raise the
+spirits than the most artificial productions of the masters. From an
+early age he practised the composition of poetry, but, though conscious
+of his great powers in this art, he would never publish any specimen of
+his writing. 'My stature,' he would say, 'is reflected in my verses; if
+the public were to read them it would not be because I am a poet,
+but because I am a dwarf.' Several MS. books of Sir Hercules's poems
+survive. A single specimen will suffice to illustrate his qualities as a
+poet."=
+
+
+```"'In ancient days, while yet the world was young,
+
+```Ere Abram fed his flocks or Homer sung;
+
+```When blacksmith Tubal tamed creative fire,
+
+```And Jabal dwelt in tents and Jubal struck the lyre;
+
+```Flesh grown corrupt brought forth a monstrous birth
+
+```And obscene giants trod the shrinking earth,
+
+```Till God, impatient of their sinful brood,
+
+```Gave rein to wrath and drown'd them in the Flood.
+
+```Teeming again, repeopled Tellus bore
+
+```The lubber Hero and the Man of War;
+
+```Huge towers of Brawn, topp'd with an empty Skull,
+
+```Witlessly bold, heroically dull.
+
+```Long ages pass'd and Man grown more refin'd,
+
+```Slighter in muscle but of vaster Mind,
+
+```Smiled at his grandsire's broadsword, bow and bill,
+
+```And learn'd to wield the Pencil and the Quill.
+
+```The glowing canvas and the written page
+
+```Immortaliz'd his name from age to age,
+
+```His name emblazon'd on Fame's temple wall;
+
+```For Art grew great as Humankind grew small.
+
+```Thus man's long progress step by step we trace;
+
+```The Giant dies, the hero takes his place;
+
+```The Giant vile, the dull heroic Block:
+
+```At one we shudder and at one we mock.
+
+```Man last appears. In him the Soul's pure flame
+
+```Burns brightlier in a not inord'nate frame.
+
+```Of old when Heroes fought and Giants swarmed,
+
+```Men were huge mounds of matter scarce inform'd;
+
+```Wearied by leavening so vast a mass,
+
+```The spirit slept and all the mind was crass.
+
+```The smaller carcase of these later days
+
+```Is soon inform'd; the Soul unwearied plays
+
+```And like a Pharos darts abroad her mental rays.
+
+```But can we think that Providence will stay
+
+```Man's footsteps here upon the upward way?
+
+```Mankind in understanding and in grace
+
+```Advanc'd so far beyond the Giants' race?
+
+```Hence impious thought! Still led by GOD'S own Hand,
+
+```Mankind proceeds towards the Promised Land.
+
+```A time will come (prophetic, I descry
+
+```Remoter dawns along the gloomy sky),
+
+```When happy mortals of a Golden Age
+
+```Will backward turn the dark historic page,
+
+```And in our vaunted race of Men behold
+
+```A form as gross, a Mind as dead and cold,
+
+```As we in Giants see, in warriors of old.
+
+```A time will come, wherein the soul shall be
+
+```From all superfluous matter wholly free;
+
+```When the light body, agile as a fawn's,
+
+```Shall sport with grace along the velvet lawns.
+
+```Nature's most delicate and final birth,
+
+```Mankind perfected shall possess the earth.
+
+```But ah, not yet! For still the Giants' race,
+
+```Huge, though diminish'd, tramps the Earth's fair face;
+
+```Gross and repulsive, yet perversely proud,
+
+```Men of their imperfections boast aloud.
+
+```Vain of their bulk, of all they still retain
+
+```Of giant ugliness absurdly vain;
+
+```At all that's small they point their stupid scorn
+
+```And, monsters, think themselves divinely born.
+
+```Sad is the Fate of those, ah, sad indeed,
+
+```The rare precursors of the nobler breed!
+
+```Who come man's golden glory to foretell,
+
+```But pointing Heav'nwards live themselves in Hell.'=
+
+"As soon as he came into the estate, Sir Hercules set about remodelling
+his household. For though by no means ashamed of his deformity--indeed,
+if we may judge from the poem quoted above, he regarded himself as being
+in many ways superior to the ordinary race of man--he found the presence
+of full-grown men and women embarrassing. Realising, too, that he
+must abandon all ambitions in the great world, he determined to retire
+absolutely from it and to create, as it were, at Crome a private
+world of his own, in which all should be proportionable to himself.
+Accordingly, he discharged all the old servants of the house and
+replaced them gradually, as he was able to find suitable successors,
+by others of dwarfish stature. In the course of a few years he had
+assembled about himself a numerous household, no member of which was
+above four feet high and the smallest among them scarcely two feet and
+six inches. His father's dogs, such as setters, mastiffs, greyhounds,
+and a pack of beagles, he sold or gave away as too large and too
+boisterous for his house, replacing them by pugs and King Charles
+spaniels and whatever other breeds of dog were the smallest. His
+father's stable was also sold. For his own use, whether riding or
+driving, he had six black Shetland ponies, with four very choice piebald
+animals of New Forest breed.
+
+"Having thus settled his household entirely to his own satisfaction, it
+only remained for him to find some suitable companion with whom to share
+his paradise. Sir Hercules had a susceptible heart, and had more than
+once, between the ages of sixteen and twenty, felt what it was to love.
+But here his deformity had been a source of the most bitter humiliation,
+for, having once dared to declare himself to a young lady of his choice,
+he had been received with laughter. On his persisting, she had picked
+him up and shaken him like an importunate child, telling him to run away
+and plague her no more. The story soon got about--indeed, the young lady
+herself used to tell it as a particularly pleasant anecdote--and
+the taunts and mockery it occasioned were a source of the most acute
+distress to Hercules. From the poems written at this period we gather
+that he meditated taking his own life. In course of time, however, he
+lived down this humiliation; but never again, though he often fell in
+love, and that very passionately, did he dare to make any advances to
+those in whom he was interested. After coming to the estate and finding
+that he was in a position to create his own world as he desired it, he
+saw that, if he was to have a wife--which he very much desired, being
+of an affectionate and, indeed, amorous temper--he must choose her as
+he had chosen his servants--from among the race of dwarfs. But to find
+a suitable wife was, he found, a matter of some difficulty; for he would
+marry none who was not distinguished by beauty and gentle birth. The
+dwarfish daughter of Lord Bemboro he refused on the ground that besides
+being a pigmy she was hunchbacked; while another young lady, an orphan
+belonging to a very good family in Hampshire, was rejected by him
+because her face, like that of so many dwarfs, was wizened and
+repulsive. Finally, when he was almost despairing of success, he
+heard from a reliable source that Count Titimalo, a Venetian nobleman,
+possessed a daughter of exquisite beauty and great accomplishments, who
+was by three feet in height. Setting out at once for Venice, he went
+immediately on his arrival to pay his respects to the count, whom he
+found living with his wife and five children in a very mean apartment
+in one of the poorer quarters of the town. Indeed, the count was so far
+reduced in his circumstances that he was even then negotiating (so it
+was rumoured) with a travelling company of clowns and acrobats, who had
+had the misfortune to lose their performing dwarf, for the sale of his
+diminutive daughter Filomena. Sir Hercules arrived in time to save her
+from this untoward fate, for he was so much charmed by Filomena's grace
+and beauty, that at the end of three days' courtship he made her a
+formal offer of marriage, which was accepted by her no less joyfully
+than by her father, who perceived in an English son-in-law a rich and
+unfailing source of revenue. After an unostentatious marriage, at which
+the English ambassador acted as one of the witnesses, Sir Hercules and
+his bride returned by sea to England, where they settled down, as it
+proved, to a life of uneventful happiness.
+
+"Crome and its household of dwarfs delighted Filomena, who felt herself
+now for the first time to be a free woman living among her equals in
+a friendly world. She had many tastes in common with her husband,
+especially that of music. She had a beautiful voice, of a power
+surprising in one so small, and could touch A in alt without effort.
+Accompanied by her husband on his fine Cremona fiddle, which he played,
+as we have noted before, as one plays a bass viol, she would sing all
+the liveliest and tenderest airs from the operas and cantatas of her
+native country. Seated together at the harpsichord, they found that they
+could with their four hands play all the music written for two hands
+of ordinary size, a circumstance which gave Sir Hercules unfailing
+pleasure.
+
+"When they were not making music or reading together, which they often
+did, both in English and Italian, they spent their time in healthful
+outdoor exercises, sometimes rowing in a little boat on the lake, but
+more often riding or driving, occupations in which, because they were
+entirely new to her, Filomena especially delighted. When she had become
+a perfectly proficient rider, Filomena and her husband used often to go
+hunting in the park, at that time very much more extensive than it is
+now. They hunted not foxes nor hares, but rabbits, using a pack of
+about thirty black and fawn-coloured pugs, a kind of dog which, when not
+overfed, can course a rabbit as well as any of the smaller breeds. Four
+dwarf grooms, dressed in scarlet liveries and mounted on white Exmoor
+ponies, hunted the pack, while their master and mistress, in green
+habits, followed either on the black Shetlands or on the piebald New
+Forest ponies. A picture of the whole hunt--dogs, horses, grooms, and
+masters--was painted by William Stubbs, whose work Sir Hercules admired
+so much that he invited him, though a man of ordinary stature, to come
+and stay at the mansion for the purpose of executing this picture.
+Stubbs likewise painted a portrait of Sir Hercules and his lady driving
+in their green enamelled calash drawn by four black Shetlands. Sir
+Hercules wears a plum-coloured velvet coat and white breeches; Filomena
+is dressed in flowered muslin and a very large hat with pink feathers.
+The two figures in their gay carriage stand out sharply against a dark
+background of trees; but to the left of the picture the trees fall away
+and disappear, so that the four black ponies are seen against a pale and
+strangely lurid sky that has the golden-brown colour of thunder-clouds
+lighted up by the sun.
+
+"In this way four years passed happily by. At the end of that time
+Filomena found herself great with child. Sir Hercules was overjoyed.
+'If God is good,' he wrote in his day-book, 'the name of Lapith will be
+preserved and our rarer and more delicate race transmitted through the
+generations until in the fullness of time the world shall recognise the
+superiority of those beings whom now it uses to make mock of.' On his
+wife's being brought to bed of a son he wrote a poem to the same effect.
+The child was christened Ferdinando in memory of the builder of the
+house.
+
+"With the passage of the months a certain sense of disquiet began to
+invade the minds of Sir Hercules and his lady. For the child was growing
+with an extraordinary rapidity. At a year he weighed as much as Hercules
+had weighed when he was three. 'Ferdinando goes crescendo,' wrote
+Filomena in her diary. 'It seems not natural.' At eighteen months the
+baby was almost as tall as their smallest jockey, who was a man of
+thirty-six. Could it be that Ferdinando was destined to become a man of
+the normal, gigantic dimensions? It was a thought to which neither of
+his parents dared yet give open utterance, but in the secrecy of their
+respective diaries they brooded over it in terror and dismay.
+
+"On his third birthday Ferdinando was taller than his mother and not
+more than a couple of inches short of his father's height. 'To-day for
+the first time' wrote Sir Hercules, 'we discussed the situation. The
+hideous truth can be concealed no longer: Ferdinando is not one of us.
+On this, his third birthday, a day when we should have been rejoicing at
+the health, the strength, and beauty of our child, we wept together over
+the ruin of our happiness. God give us strength to bear this cross.'
+
+"At the age of eight Ferdinando was so large and so exuberantly healthy
+that his parents decided, though reluctantly, to send him to school.
+He was packed off to Eton at the beginning of the next half. A profound
+peace settled upon the house. Ferdinando returned for the summer
+holidays larger and stronger than ever. One day he knocked down the
+butler and broke his arm. 'He is rough, inconsiderate, unamenable to
+persuasion,' wrote his father. 'The only thing that will teach him
+manners is corporal chastisement.' Ferdinando, who at this age was
+already seventeen inches taller than his father, received no corporal
+chastisement.
+
+"One summer holidays about three years later Ferdinando returned to
+Crome accompanied by a very large mastiff dog. He had bought it from an
+old man at Windsor who had found the beast too expensive to feed. It
+was a savage, unreliable animal; hardly had it entered the house when it
+attacked one of Sir Hercules's favourite pugs, seizing the creature in
+its jaws and shaking it till it was nearly dead. Extremely put out by
+this occurrence, Sir Hercules ordered that the beast should be chained
+up in the stable-yard. Ferdinando sullenly answered that the dog was
+his, and he would keep it where he pleased. His father, growing angry,
+bade him take the animal out of the house at once, on pain of his utmost
+displeasure. Ferdinando refused to move. His mother at this moment
+coming into the room, the dog flew at her, knocked her down, and in
+a twinkling had very severely mauled her arm and shoulder; in another
+instant it must infallibly have had her by the throat, had not Sir
+Hercules drawn his sword and stabbed the animal to the heart. Turning on
+his son, he ordered him to leave the room immediately, as being unfit to
+remain in the same place with the mother whom he had nearly murdered. So
+awe-inspiring was the spectacle of Sir Hercules standing with one foot
+on the carcase of the gigantic dog, his sword drawn and still bloody, so
+commanding were his voice, his gestures, and the expression of his face
+that Ferdinando slunk out of the room in terror and behaved himself
+for all the rest of the vacation in an entirely exemplary fashion. His
+mother soon recovered from the bites of the mastiff, but the effect on
+her mind of this adventure was ineradicable; from that time forth she
+lived always among imaginary terrors.
+
+"The two years which Ferdinando spent on the Continent, making the Grand
+Tour, were a period of happy repose for his parents. But even now
+the thought of the future haunted them; nor were they able to solace
+themselves with all the diversions of their younger days. The Lady
+Filomena had lost her voice and Sir Hercules was grown too rheumatical
+to play the violin. He, it is true, still rode after his pugs, but his
+wife felt herself too old and, since the episode of the mastiff, too
+nervous for such sports. At most, to please her husband, she would
+follow the hunt at a distance in a little gig drawn by the safest and
+oldest of the Shetlands.
+
+"The day fixed for Ferdinando's return came round. Filomena, sick with
+vague dreads and presentiments, retired to her chamber and her bed.
+Sir Hercules received his son alone. A giant in a brown travelling-suit
+entered the room. 'Welcome home, my son,' said Sir Hercules in a voice
+that trembled a little.
+
+"'I hope I see you well, sir.' Ferdinando bent down to shake hands, then
+straightened himself up again. The top of his father's head reached to
+the level of his hip.
+
+"Ferdinando had not come alone. Two friends of his own age accompanied
+him, and each of the young men had brought a servant. Not for thirty
+years had Crome been desecrated by the presence of so many members of
+the common race of men. Sir Hercules was appalled and indignant, but the
+laws of hospitality had to be obeyed. He received the young gentlemen
+with grave politeness and sent the servants to the kitchen, with orders
+that they should be well cared for.
+
+"The old family dining-table was dragged out into the light and dusted
+(Sir Hercules and his lady were accustomed to dine at a small table
+twenty inches high). Simon, the aged butler, who could only just look
+over the edge of the big table, was helped at supper by the three
+servants brought by Ferdinando and his guests.
+
+"Sir Hercules presided, and with his usual grace supported a
+conversation on the pleasures of foreign travel, the beauties of art and
+nature to be met with abroad, the opera at Venice, the singing of the
+orphans in the churches of the same city, and on other topics of a
+similar nature. The young men were not particularly attentive to his
+discourses; they were occupied in watching the efforts of the butler to
+change the plates and replenish the glasses. They covered their laughter
+by violent and repeated fits of coughing or choking. Sir Hercules
+affected not to notice, but changed the subject of the conversation to
+sport. Upon this one of the young men asked whether it was true, as he
+had heard, that he used to hunt the rabbit with a pack of pug dogs. Sir
+Hercules replied that it was, and proceeded to describe the chase in
+some detail. The young men roared with laughter.
+
+"When supper was over, Sir Hercules climbed down from his chair and,
+giving as his excuse that he must see how his lady did, bade them
+good-night. The sound of laughter followed him up the stairs. Filomena
+was not asleep; she had been lying on her bed listening to the sound of
+enormous laughter and the tread of strangely heavy feet on the stairs
+and along the corridors. Sir Hercules drew a chair to her bedside
+and sat there for a long time in silence, holding his wife's hand and
+sometimes gently squeezing it. At about ten o'clock they were startled
+by a violent noise. There was a breaking of glass, a stamping of feet,
+with an outburst of shouts and laughter. The uproar continuing for
+several minutes, Sir Hercules rose to his feet and, in spite of his
+wife's entreaties, prepared to go and see what was happening. There
+was no light on the staircase, and Sir Hercules groped his way down
+cautiously, lowering himself from stair to stair and standing for a
+moment on each tread before adventuring on a new step. The noise was
+louder here; the shouting articulated itself into recognisable words
+and phrases. A line of light was visible under the dining-room door. Sir
+Hercules tiptoed across the hall towards it. Just as he approached the
+door there was another terrific crash of breaking glass and jangled
+metal. What could they be doing? Standing on tiptoe he managed to look
+through the keyhole. In the middle of the ravaged table old Simon, the
+butler, so primed with drink that he could scarcely keep his balance,
+was dancing a jig. His feet crunched and tinkled among the broken glass,
+and his shoes were wet with spilt wine. The three young men sat round,
+thumping the table with their hands or with the empty wine bottles,
+shouting and laughing encouragement. The three servants leaning against
+the wall laughed too. Ferdinando suddenly threw a handful of walnuts at
+the dancer's head, which so dazed and surprised the little man that he
+staggered and fell down on his back, upsetting a decanter and several
+glasses. They raised him up, gave him some brandy to drink, thumped
+him on the back. The old man smiled and hiccoughed. 'To-morrow,' said
+Ferdinando, 'we'll have a concerted ballet of the whole household.'
+'With father Hercules wearing his club and lion-skin,' added one of his
+companions, and all three roared with laughter.
+
+"Sir Hercules would look and listen no further. He crossed the hall once
+more and began to climb the stairs, lifting his knees painfully high
+at each degree. This was the end; there was no place for him now in the
+world, no place for him and Ferdinando together.
+
+"His wife was still awake; to her questioning glance he answered, 'They
+are making mock of old Simon. To-morrow it will be our turn.' They were
+silent for a time.
+
+"At last Filomena said, 'I do not want to see to-morrow.'
+
+"'It is better not,' said Sir Hercules. Going into his closet he wrote
+in his day-book a full and particular account of all the events of the
+evening. While he was still engaged in this task he rang for a servant
+and ordered hot water and a bath to be made ready for him at eleven
+o'clock. When he had finished writing he went into his wife's room, and
+preparing a dose of opium twenty times as strong as that which she
+was accustomed to take when she could not sleep, he brought it to her,
+saying, 'Here is your sleeping-draught.'
+
+"Filomena took the glass and lay for a little time, but did not drink
+immediately. The tears came into her eyes. 'Do you remember the songs we
+used to sing, sitting out there sulla terrazza in the summer-time?' She
+began singing softly in her ghost of a cracked voice a few bars from
+Stradella's 'Amor amor, non dormir piu.' 'And you playing on the violin,
+it seems such a short time ago, and yet so long, long, long. Addio,
+amore, a rivederti.' She drank off the draught and, lying back on the
+pillow, closed her eyes. Sir Hercules kissed her hand and tiptoed away,
+as though he were afraid of waking her. He returned to his closet, and
+having recorded his wife's last words to him, he poured into his bath
+the water that had been brought up in accordance with his orders. The
+water being too hot for him to get into the bath at once, he took down
+from the shelf his copy of Suetonius. He wished to read how Seneca had
+died. He opened the book at random. 'But dwarfs,' he read, 'he held in
+abhorrence as being lusus naturae and of evil omen.' He winced as though
+he had been struck. This same Augustus, he remembered, had exhibited in
+the amphitheatre a young man called Lucius, of good family, who was
+not quite two feet in height and weighed seventeen pounds, but had
+a stentorian voice. He turned over the pages. Tiberius, Caligula,
+Claudius, Nero: it was a tale of growing horror. 'Seneca his preceptor,
+he forced to kill himself.' And there was Petronius, who had called
+his friends about him at the last, bidding them talk to him, not of the
+consolations of philosophy, but of love and gallantry, while the life
+was ebbing away through his opened veins. Dipping his pen once more in
+the ink he wrote on the last page of his diary: 'He died a Roman death.'
+Then, putting the toes of one foot into the water and finding that it
+was not too hot, he threw off his dressing-gown and, taking a razor in
+his hand, sat down in the bath. With one deep cut he severed the artery
+in his left wrist, then lay back and composed his mind to meditation.
+The blood oozed out, floating through the water in dissolving wreaths
+and spirals. In a little while the whole bath was tinged with pink. The
+colour deepened; Sir Hercules felt himself mastered by an invincible
+drowsiness; he was sinking from vague dream to dream. Soon he was sound
+asleep. There was not much blood in his small body."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+For their after-luncheon coffee the party generally adjourned to the
+library. Its windows looked east, and at this hour of the day it was the
+coolest place in the whole house. It was a large room, fitted, during
+the eighteenth century, with white painted shelves of an elegant design.
+In the middle of one wall a door, ingeniously upholstered with rows
+of dummy books, gave access to a deep cupboard, where, among a pile of
+letter-files and old newspapers, the mummy-case of an Egyptian lady,
+brought back by the second Sir Ferdinando on his return from the Grand
+Tour, mouldered in the darkness. From ten yards away and at a first
+glance, one might almost have mistaken this secret door for a section of
+shelving filled with genuine books. Coffee-cup in hand, Mr. Scogan
+was standing in front of the dummy book-shelf. Between the sips he
+discoursed.
+
+"The bottom shelf," he was saying, "is taken up by an Encyclopaedia in
+fourteen volumes. Useful, but a little dull, as is also Caprimulge's
+'Dictionary of the Finnish Language'. The 'Biographical Dictionary'
+looks more promising. 'Biography of Men who were Born Great', 'Biography
+of Men who Achieved Greatness', 'Biography of Men who had Greatness
+Thrust upon Them', and 'Biography of Men who were Never Great at All'.
+Then there are ten volumes of 'Thom's Works and Wanderings', while the
+'Wild Goose Chase, a Novel', by an anonymous author, fills no less
+than six. But what's this, what's this?" Mr. Scogan stood on tiptoe and
+peered up. "Seven volumes of the 'Tales of Knockespotch'. The 'Tales
+of Knockespotch'," he repeated. "Ah, my dear Henry," he said, turning
+round, "these are your best books. I would willingly give all the rest
+of your library for them."
+
+The happy possessor of a multitude of first editions, Mr. Wimbush could
+afford to smile indulgently.
+
+"Is it possible," Mr. Scogan went on, "that they possess nothing more
+than a back and a title?" He opened the cupboard door and peeped inside,
+as though he hoped to find the rest of the books behind it. "Phooh!"
+he said, and shut the door again. "It smells of dust and mildew. How
+symbolical! One comes to the great masterpieces of the past, expecting
+some miraculous illumination, and one finds, on opening them, only
+darkness and dust and a faint smell of decay. After all, what is
+reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive
+self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one
+reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking. Still--the 'Tales of
+Knockespotch'..."
+
+He paused, and thoughtfully drummed with his fingers on the backs of the
+non-existent, unattainable books.
+
+"But I disagree with you about reading," said Mary. "About serious
+reading, I mean."
+
+"Quite right, Mary, quite right," Mr. Scogan answered. "I had forgotten
+there were any serious people in the room."
+
+"I like the idea of the Biographies," said Denis. "There's room for us
+all within the scheme; it's comprehensive."
+
+"Yes, the Biographies are good, the Biographies are excellent," Mr
+Scogan agreed. "I imagine them written in a very elegant Regency
+style--Brighton Pavilion in words--perhaps by the great Dr. Lempriere
+himself. You know his classical dictionary? Ah!" Mr. Scogan raised his
+hand and let it limply fall again in a gesture which implied that words
+failed him. "Read his biography of Helen; read how Jupiter, disguised
+as a swan, was 'enabled to avail himself of his situation' vis-a-vis to
+Leda. And to think that he may have, must have written these biographies
+of the Great! What a work, Henry! And, owing to the idiotic arrangement
+of your library, it can't be read."
+
+"I prefer the 'Wild Goose Chase'," said Anne. "A novel in six
+volumes--it must be restful."
+
+"Restful," Mr. Scogan repeated. "You've hit on the right word. A 'Wild
+Goose Chase' is sound, but a bit old-fashioned--pictures of clerical
+life in the fifties, you know; specimens of the landed gentry; peasants
+for pathos and comedy; and in the background, always the picturesque
+beauties of nature soberly described. All very good and solid, but, like
+certain puddings, just a little dull. Personally, I like much better
+the notion of 'Thom's Works and Wanderings'. The eccentric Mr. Thom of
+Thom's Hill. Old Tom Thom, as his intimates used to call him. He spent
+ten years in Thibet organising the clarified butter industry on modern
+European lines, and was able to retire at thirty-six with a handsome
+fortune. The rest of his life he devoted to travel and ratiocination;
+here is the result." Mr. Scogan tapped the dummy books. "And now we come
+to the 'Tales of Knockespotch'. What a masterpiece and what a great man!
+Knockespotch knew how to write fiction. Ah, Denis, if you could only
+read Knockespotch you wouldn't be writing a novel about the wearisome
+development of a young man's character, you wouldn't be describing in
+endless, fastidious detail, cultured life in Chelsea and Bloomsbury and
+Hampstead. You would be trying to write a readable book. But then, alas!
+owing to the peculiar arrangement of our host's library, you never will
+read Knockespotch."
+
+"Nobody could regret the fact more than I do," said Denis.
+
+"It was Knockespotch," Mr. Scogan continued, "the great Knockespotch,
+who delivered us from the dreary tyranny of the realistic novel. My
+life, Knockespotch said, is not so long that I can afford to spend
+precious hours writing or reading descriptions of middle-class
+interiors. He said again, 'I am tired of seeing the human mind bogged in
+a social plenum; I prefer to paint it in a vacuum, freely and sportively
+bombinating.'"
+
+"I say," said Gombauld, "Knockespotch was a little obscure sometimes,
+wasn't he?"
+
+"He was," Mr. Scogan replied, "and with intention. It made him seem even
+profounder than he actually was. But it was only in his aphorisms that
+he was so dark and oracular. In his Tales he was always luminous. Oh,
+those Tales--those Tales! How shall I describe them? Fabulous characters
+shoot across his pages like gaily dressed performers on the trapeze.
+There are extraordinary adventures and still more extraordinary
+speculations. Intelligences and emotions, relieved of all the imbecile
+preoccupations of civilised life, move in intricate and subtle dances,
+crossing and recrossing, advancing, retreating, impinging. An immense
+erudition and an immense fancy go hand in hand. All the ideas of the
+present and of the past, on every possible subject, bob up among
+the Tales, smile gravely or grimace a caricature of themselves, then
+disappear to make place for something new. The verbal surface of his
+writing is rich and fantastically diversified. The wit is incessant.
+The..."
+
+"But couldn't you give us a specimen," Denis broke in--"a concrete
+example?"
+
+"Alas!" Mr. Scogan replied, "Knockespotch's great book is like the sword
+Excalibur. It remains struck fast in this door, awaiting the coming of a
+writer with genius enough to draw it forth. I am not even a writer, I
+am not so much as qualified to attempt the task. The extraction of
+Knockespotch from his wooden prison I leave, my dear Denis, to you."
+
+"Thank you," said Denis.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+In the time of the amiable Brantome," Mr. Scogan was saying, "every
+debutante at the French Court was invited to dine at the King's table,
+where she was served with wine in a handsome silver cup of Italian
+workmanship. It was no ordinary cup, this goblet of the debutantes;
+for, inside, it had been most curiously and ingeniously engraved with a
+series of very lively amorous scenes. With each draught that the young
+lady swallowed these engravings became increasingly visible, and the
+Court looked on with interest, every time she put her nose in the cup,
+to see whether she blushed at what the ebbing wine revealed. If the
+debutante blushed, they laughed at her for her innocence; if she did
+not, she was laughed at for being too knowing."
+
+"Do you propose," asked Anne, "that the custom should be revived at
+Buckingham Palace?"
+
+"I do not," said Mr. Scogan. "I merely quoted the anecdote as an
+illustration of the customs, so genially frank, of the sixteenth
+century. I might have quoted other anecdotes to show that the customs
+of the seventeenth and eighteenth, of the fifteenth and fourteenth
+centuries, and indeed of every other century, from the time of Hammurabi
+onward, were equally genial and equally frank. The only century in which
+customs were not characterised by the same cheerful openness was the
+nineteenth, of blessed memory. It was the astonishing exception. And
+yet, with what one must suppose was a deliberate disregard of history,
+it looked upon its horribly pregnant silences as normal and natural and
+right; the frankness of the previous fifteen or twenty thousand years
+was considered abnormal and perverse. It was a curious phenomenon."
+
+"I entirely agree." Mary panted with excitement in her effort to bring
+out what she had to say. "Havelock Ellis says..."
+
+Mr. Scogan, like a policeman arresting the flow of traffic, held up his
+hand. "He does; I know. And that brings me to my next point: the nature
+of the reaction."
+
+"Havelock Ellis..."
+
+"The reaction, when it came--and we may say roughly that it set in
+a little before the beginning of this century--the reaction was to
+openness, but not to the same openness as had reigned in the earlier
+ages. It was to a scientific openness, not to the jovial frankness
+of the past, that we returned. The whole question of Amour became a
+terribly serious one. Earnest young men wrote in the public prints that
+from this time forth it would be impossible ever again to make a joke
+of any sexual matter. Professors wrote thick books in which sex was
+sterilised and dissected. It has become customary for serious young
+women, like Mary, to discuss, with philosophic calm, matters of which
+the merest hint would have sufficed to throw the youth of the sixties
+into a delirium of amorous excitement. It is all very estimable, no
+doubt. But still"--Mr. Scogan sighed.--"I for one should like to see,
+mingled with this scientific ardour, a little more of the jovial spirit
+of Rabelais and Chaucer."
+
+"I entirely disagree with you," said Mary. "Sex isn't a laughing matter;
+it's serious."
+
+"Perhaps," answered Mr. Scogan, "perhaps I'm an obscene old man. For I
+must confess that I cannot always regard it as wholly serious."
+
+"But I tell you..." began Mary furiously. Her face had flushed with
+excitement. Her cheeks were the cheeks of a great ripe peach.
+
+"Indeed," Mr. Scogan continued, "it seems to me one of few permanently
+and everlastingly amusing subjects that exist. Amour is the one human
+activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate,
+if ever so slightly, over misery and pain."
+
+"I entirely disagree," said Mary. There was a silence.
+
+Anne looked at her watch. "Nearly a quarter to eight," she said. "I
+wonder when Ivor will turn up." She got up from her deck-chair and,
+leaning her elbows on the balustrade of the terrace, looked out over the
+valley and towards the farther hills. Under the level evening light the
+architecture of the land revealed itself. The deep shadows, the bright
+contrasting lights gave the hills a new solidity. Irregularities of the
+surface, unsuspected before, were picked out with light and shade.
+The grass, the corn, the foliage of trees were stippled with intricate
+shadows. The surface of things had taken on a marvellous enrichment.
+
+"Look!" said Anne suddenly, and pointed. On the opposite side of the
+valley, at the crest of the ridge, a cloud of dust flushed by the
+sunlight to rosy gold was moving rapidly along the sky-line. "It's Ivor.
+One can tell by the speed."
+
+The dust cloud descended into the valley and was lost. A horn with the
+voice of a sea-lion made itself heard, approaching. A minute later Ivor
+came leaping round the corner of the house. His hair waved in the wind
+of his own speed; he laughed as he saw them.
+
+"Anne, darling," he cried, and embraced her, embraced Mary, very nearly
+embraced Mr. Scogan. "Well, here I am. I've come with incredulous
+speed." Ivor's vocabulary was rich, but a little erratic. "I'm not late
+for dinner, am I?" He hoisted himself up on to the balustrade, and
+sat there, kicking his heels. With one arm he embraced a large stone
+flower-pot, leaning his head sideways against its hard and lichenous
+flanks in an attitude of trustful affection. He had brown, wavy hair,
+and his eyes were of a very brilliant, pale, improbable blue. His head
+was narrow, his face thin and rather long, his nose aquiline. In old
+age--though it was difficult to imagine Ivor old--he might grow to have
+an Iron Ducal grimness. But now, at twenty-six, it was not the structure
+of his face that impressed one; it was its expression. That was charming
+and vivacious, and his smile was an irradiation. He was forever moving,
+restlessly and rapidly, but with an engaging gracefulness. His frail and
+slender body seemed to be fed by a spring of inexhaustible energy.
+
+"No, you're not late."
+
+"You're in time to answer a question," said Mr. Scogan. "We were arguing
+whether Amour were a serious matter or no. What do you think? Is it
+serious?"
+
+"Serious?" echoed Ivor. "Most certainly."
+
+"I told you so," cried Mary triumphantly.
+
+"But in what sense serious?" Mr. Scogan asked.
+
+"I mean as an occupation. One can go on with it without ever getting
+bored."
+
+"I see," said Mr. Scogan. "Perfectly."
+
+"One can occupy oneself with it," Ivor continued, "always and
+everywhere. Women are always wonderfully the same. Shapes vary a little,
+that's all. In Spain"--with his free hand he described a series of ample
+curves--"one can't pass them on the stairs. In England"--he put the tip
+of his forefinger against the tip of his thumb and, lowering his hand,
+drew out this circle into an imaginary cylinder--"In England they're
+tubular. But their sentiments are always the same. At least, I've always
+found it so."
+
+"I'm delighted to hear it," said Mr. Scogan.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+The ladies had left the room and the port was circulating. Mr. Scogan
+filled his glass, passed on the decanter, and, leaning back in his
+chair, looked about him for a moment in silence. The conversation
+rippled idly round him, but he disregarded it; he was smiling at some
+private joke. Gombauld noticed his smile.
+
+"What's amusing you?" he asked.
+
+"I was just looking at you all, sitting round this table," said Mr.
+Scogan.
+
+"Are we as comic as all that?"
+
+"Not at all," Mr. Scogan answered politely. "I was merely amused by my
+own speculations."
+
+"And what were they?"
+
+"The idlest, the most academic of speculations. I was looking at you one
+by one and trying to imagine which of the first six Caesars you would
+each resemble, if you were given the opportunity of behaving like a
+Caesar. The Caesars are one of my touchstones," Mr. Scogan explained.
+"They are characters functioning, so to speak, in the void. They
+are human beings developed to their logical conclusions. Hence their
+unequalled value as a touchstone, a standard. When I meet someone
+for the first time, I ask myself this question: Given the Caesarean
+environment, which of the Caesars would this person resemble--Julius,
+Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero? I take each trait of
+character, each mental and emotional bias, each little oddity, and
+magnify them a thousand times. The resulting image gives me his
+Caesarean formula."
+
+"And which of the Caesars do you resemble?" asked Gombauld.
+
+"I am potentially all of them," Mr. Scogan replied, "all--with the
+possible exception of Claudius, who was much too stupid to be a
+development of anything in my character. The seeds of Julius's courage
+and compelling energy, of Augustus's prudence, of the libidinousness and
+cruelty of Tiberius, of Caligula's folly, of Nero's artistic genius and
+enormous vanity, are all within me. Given the opportunities, I might
+have been something fabulous. But circumstances were against me. I was
+born and brought up in a country rectory; I passed my youth doing a
+great deal of utterly senseless hard work for a very little money. The
+result is that now, in middle age, I am the poor thing that I am. But
+perhaps it is as well. Perhaps, too, it's as well that Denis hasn't
+been permitted to flower into a little Nero, and that Ivor remains only
+potentially a Caligula. Yes, it's better so, no doubt. But it would
+have been more amusing, as a spectacle, if they had had the chance to
+develop, untrammelled, the full horror of their potentialities. It would
+have been pleasant and interesting to watch their tics and foibles and
+little vices swelling and burgeoning and blossoming into enormous and
+fantastic flowers of cruelty and pride and lewdness and avarice. The
+Caesarean environment makes the Caesar, as the special food and the
+queenly cell make the queen bee. We differ from the bees in so far that,
+given the proper food, they can be sure of making a queen every time.
+With us there is no such certainty; out of every ten men placed in the
+Caesarean environment one will be temperamentally good, or intelligent,
+or great. The rest will blossom into Caesars; he will not. Seventy and
+eighty years ago simple-minded people, reading of the exploits of the
+Bourbons in South Italy, cried out in amazement: To think that such
+things should be happening in the nineteenth century! And a few years
+since we too were astonished to find that in our still more astonishing
+twentieth century, unhappy blackamoors on the Congo and the Amazon were
+being treated as English serfs were treated in the time of Stephen.
+To-day we are no longer surprised at these things. The Black and Tans
+harry Ireland, the Poles maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti
+slaughter their poorer countrymen: we take it all for granted. Since the
+war we wonder at nothing. We have created a Caesarean environment and a
+host of little Caesars has sprung up. What could be more natural?"
+
+Mr. Scogan drank off what was left of his port and refilled the glass.
+
+"At this very moment," he went on, "the most frightful horrors are taking
+place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed,
+disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with
+the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the
+rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three
+seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but
+do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.
+We feel sympathy, no doubt; we represent to ourselves imaginatively the
+sufferings of nations and individuals and we deplore them. But, after
+all, what are sympathy and imagination? Precious little, unless the
+person for whom we feel sympathy happens to be closely involved in our
+affections; and even then they don't go very far. And a good thing too;
+for if one had an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently
+sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the sufferings of other
+people, one would never have a moment's peace of mind. A really
+sympathetic race would not so much as know the meaning of happiness.
+But luckily, as I've already said, we aren't a sympathetic race. At
+the beginning of the war I used to think I really suffered, through
+imagination and sympathy, with those who physically suffered. But after
+a month or two I had to admit that, honestly, I didn't. And yet I
+think I have a more vivid imagination than most. One is always alone in
+suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer,
+but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world."
+
+There was a pause. Henry Wimbush pushed back his chair.
+
+"I think perhaps we ought to go and join the ladies," he said.
+
+"So do I," said Ivor, jumping up with alacrity. He turned to Mr. Scogan.
+"Fortunately," he said, "we can share our pleasures. We are not always
+condemned to be happy alone."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+Ivor brought his hands down with a bang on to the final chord of his
+rhapsody. There was just a hint in that triumphant harmony that the
+seventh had been struck along with the octave by the thumb of the left
+hand; but the general effect of splendid noise emerged clearly enough.
+Small details matter little so long as the general effect is good. And,
+besides, that hint of the seventh was decidedly modern. He turned round
+in his seat and tossed the hair back out of his eyes.
+
+"There," he said. "That's the best I can do for you, I'm afraid."
+
+Murmurs of applause and gratitude were heard, and Mary, her large china
+eyes fixed on the performer, cried out aloud, "Wonderful!" and gasped
+for new breath as though she were suffocating.
+
+Nature and fortune had vied with one another in heaping on Ivor
+Lombard all their choicest gifts. He had wealth and he was perfectly
+independent. He was good looking, possessed an irresistible charm of
+manner, and was the hero of more amorous successes than he could well
+remember. His accomplishments were extraordinary for their number and
+variety. He had a beautiful untrained tenor voice; he could improvise,
+with a startling brilliance, rapidly and loudly, on the piano. He was a
+good amateur medium and telepathist, and had a considerable first-hand
+knowledge of the next world. He could write rhymed verses with an
+extraordinary rapidity. For painting symbolical pictures he had a
+dashing style, and if the drawing was sometimes a little weak, the
+colour was always pyrotechnical. He excelled in amateur theatricals
+and, when occasion offered, he could cook with genius. He resembled
+Shakespeare in knowing little Latin and less Greek. For a mind like his,
+education seemed supererogatory. Training would only have destroyed his
+natural aptitudes.
+
+"Let's go out into the garden," Ivor suggested. "It's a wonderful
+night."
+
+"Thank you," said Mr. Scogan, "but I for one prefer these still more
+wonderful arm-chairs." His pipe had begun to bubble oozily every time he
+pulled at it. He was perfectly happy.
+
+Henry Wimbush was also happy. He looked for a moment over his pince-nez
+in Ivor's direction and then, without saying anything, returned to
+the grimy little sixteenth-century account books which were now his
+favourite reading. He knew more about Sir Ferdinando's household
+expenses than about his own.
+
+The outdoor party, enrolled under Ivor's banner, consisted of Anne,
+Mary, Denis, and, rather unexpectedly, Jenny. Outside it was warm and
+dark; there was no moon. They walked up and down the terrace, and Ivor
+sang a Neapolitan song: "Stretti, stretti"--close, close--with something
+about the little Spanish girl to follow. The atmosphere began to
+palpitate. Ivor put his arm round Anne's waist, dropped his head
+sideways onto her shoulder, and in that position walked on, singing as
+he walked. It seemed the easiest, the most natural, thing in the world.
+Denis wondered why he had never done it. He hated Ivor.
+
+"Let's go down to the pool," said Ivor. He disengaged his embrace and
+turned round to shepherd his little flock. They made their way along the
+side of the house to the entrance of the yew-tree walk that led down to
+the lower garden. Between the blank precipitous wall of the house and
+the tall yew trees the path was a chasm of impenetrable gloom. Somewhere
+there were steps down to the right, a gap in the yew hedge. Denis, who
+headed the party, groped his way cautiously; in this darkness, one
+had an irrational fear of yawning precipices, of horrible spiked
+obstructions. Suddenly from behind him he heard a shrill, startled,
+"Oh!" and then a sharp, dry concussion that might have been the sound
+of a slap. After that, Jenny's voice was heard pronouncing, "I am going
+back to the house." Her tone was decided, and even as she pronounced the
+words she was melting away into the darkness. The incident, whatever it
+had been, was closed. Denis resumed his forward groping. From somewhere
+behind Ivor began to sing again, softly:=
+
+
+```"Phillis plus avare que tendre
+
+```Ne gagnant rien à refuser,
+
+```Un jour exigea à Silvandre
+
+```Trente moutons pour un baiser."=
+
+The melody drooped and climbed again with a kind of easy languor; the
+warm darkness seemed to pulse like blood about them.=
+
+
+```"Le lendemain, nouvelle affaire:
+
+```Pour le berger le troc fut bon..."=
+
+"Here are the steps," cried Denis. He guided his companions over the
+danger, and in a moment they had the turf of the yew-tree walk under
+their feet. It was lighter here, or at least it was just perceptibly
+less dark; for the yew walk was wider than the path that had led them
+under the lea of the house. Looking up, they could see between the high
+black hedges a strip of sky and a few stars.=
+
+
+```"Car il obtint de la bergere..."=
+
+Went on Ivor, and then interrupted himself to shout, "I'm going to run
+down," and he was off, full speed, down the invisible slope, singing
+unevenly as he went:=
+
+
+```"Trente baisers pour un mouton."=
+
+The others followed. Denis shambled in the rear, vainly exhorting
+everyone to caution: the slope was steep, one might break one's neck.
+What was wrong with these people, he wondered? They had become like
+young kittens after a dose of cat-nip. He himself felt a certain
+kittenishness sporting within him; but it was, like all his emotions,
+rather a theoretical feeling; it did not overmasteringly seek to express
+itself in a practical demonstration of kittenishness.
+
+"Be careful," he shouted once more, and hardly were the words out of his
+mouth when, thump! there was the sound of a heavy fall in front of
+him, followed by the long "F-f-f-f-f" of a breath indrawn with pain and
+afterwards by a very sincere, "Oo-ooh!" Denis was almost pleased; he had
+told them so, the idiots, and they wouldn't listen. He trotted down the
+slope towards the unseen sufferer.
+
+Mary came down the hill like a runaway steam-engine. It was tremendously
+exciting, this blind rush through the dark; she felt she would never
+stop. But the ground grew level beneath her feet, her speed insensibly
+slackened, and suddenly she was caught by an extended arm and brought to
+an abrupt halt.
+
+"Well," said Ivor as he tightened his embrace, "you're caught now,
+Anne."
+
+She made an effort to release herself. "It's not Anne. It's Mary."
+
+Ivor burst into a peal of amused laughter. "So it is!" he exclaimed. "I
+seem to be making nothing but floaters this evening. I've already made
+one with Jenny." He laughed again, and there was something so jolly
+about his laughter that Mary could not help laughing too. He did not
+remove his encircling arm, and somehow it was all so amusing and natural
+that Mary made no further attempt to escape from it. They walked along
+by the side of the pool, interlaced. Mary was too short for him to be
+able, with any comfort, to lay his head on her shoulder. He rubbed his
+cheek, caressed and caressing, against the thick, sleek mass of her
+hair. In a little while he began to sing again; the night trembled
+amorously to the sound of his voice. When he had finished he kissed her.
+Anne or Mary: Mary or Anne. It didn't seem to make much difference which
+it was. There were differences in detail, of course; but the general
+effect was the same; and, after all, the general effect was the
+important thing.
+
+Denis made his way down the hill.
+
+"Any damage done?" he called out.
+
+"Is that you, Denis? I've hurt my ankle so--and my knee, and my hand.
+I'm all in pieces."
+
+"My poor Anne," he said. "But then," he couldn't help adding, "it was
+silly to start running downhill in the dark."
+
+"Ass!" she retorted in a tone of tearful irritation; "of course it was."
+
+He sat down beside her on the grass, and found himself breathing the faint,
+delicious atmosphere of perfume that she carried always with her.
+
+"Light a match," she commanded. "I want to look at my wounds."
+
+He felt in his pockets for the match-box. The light spurted and then
+grew steady. Magically, a little universe had been created, a world of
+colours and forms--Anne's face, the shimmering orange of her dress, her
+white, bare arms, a patch of green turf--and round about a darkness that
+had become solid and utterly blind. Anne held out her hands; both were
+green and earthy with her fall, and the left exhibited two or three red
+abrasions.
+
+"Not so bad," she said. But Denis was terribly distressed, and his
+emotion was intensified when, looking up at her face, he saw that the
+trace of tears, involuntary tears of pain, lingered on her eyelashes.
+He pulled out his handkerchief and began to wipe away the dirt from
+the wounded hand. The match went out; it was not worth while to light
+another. Anne allowed herself to be attended to, meekly and gratefully.
+"Thank you," she said, when he had finished cleaning and bandaging her
+hand; and there was something in her tone that made him feel that she
+had lost her superiority over him, that she was younger than he,
+had become, suddenly, almost a child. He felt tremendously large and
+protective. The feeling was so strong that instinctively he put his
+arm about her. She drew closer, leaned against him, and so they sat in
+silence. Then, from below, soft but wonderfully clear through the still
+darkness, they heard the sound of Ivor's singing. He was going on with
+his half-finished song:=
+
+
+```"Le lendemain Phillis plus tendre,
+
+```Ne voulant deplaire au berger,
+
+```Fut trop heureuse de lui rendre
+
+```Trente moutons pour un baiser."
+
+There was a rather prolonged pause. It was as though time were being
+allowed for the giving and receiving of a few of those thirty kisses.
+Then the voice sang on:=
+
+
+```"Le lendemain Phillis peu sage
+
+```Aurait donne moutons et chien
+
+```Pour un baiser que le volage
+
+```À Lisette donnait pour rien."=
+
+The last note died away into an uninterrupted silence.
+
+"Are you better?" Denis whispered. "Are you comfortable like this?"
+
+She nodded a Yes to both questions.
+
+"Trente moutons pour un baiser." The sheep, the woolly mutton--baa,
+baa, baa...? Or the shepherd? Yes, decidedly, he felt himself to be
+the shepherd now. He was the master, the protector. A wave of courage
+swelled through him, warm as wine. He turned his head, and began to kiss
+her face, at first rather randomly, then, with more precision, on the
+mouth.
+
+Anne averted her head; he kissed the ear, the smooth nape that this
+movement presented him. "No," she protested; "no, Denis."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"It spoils our friendship, and that was so jolly."
+
+"Bosh!" said Denis.
+
+She tried to explain. "Can't you see," she said, "it isn't...it isn't
+our stunt at all." It was true. Somehow she had never thought of Denis
+in the light of a man who might make love; she had never so much as
+conceived the possibilities of an amorous relationship with him. He was
+so absurdly young, so...so...she couldn't find the adjective, but she
+knew what she meant.
+
+"Why isn't it our stunt?" asked Denis. "And, by the way, that's a
+horrible and inappropriate expression."
+
+"Because it isn't."
+
+"But if I say it is?"
+
+"It makes no difference. I say it isn't."
+
+"I shall make you say it is."
+
+"All right, Denis. But you must do it another time. I must go in and get
+my ankle into hot water. It's beginning to swell."
+
+Reasons of health could not be gainsaid. Denis got up reluctantly, and
+helped his companion to her feet. She took a cautious step. "Ooh!" She
+halted and leaned heavily on his arm.
+
+"I'll carry you," Denis offered. He had never tried to carry a woman,
+but on the cinema it always looked an easy piece of heroism.
+
+"You couldn't," said Anne.
+
+"Of course I can." He felt larger and more protective than ever. "Put
+your arms round my neck," he ordered. She did so and, stooping, he
+picked her up under the knees and lifted her from the ground. Good
+heavens, what a weight! He took five staggering steps up the slope, then
+almost lost his equilibrium, and had to deposit his burden suddenly,
+with something of a bump.
+
+Anne was shaking with laughter. "I said you couldn't, my poor Denis."
+
+"I can," said Denis, without conviction. "I'll try again."
+
+"It's perfectly sweet of you to offer, but I'd rather walk, thanks." She
+laid her hand on his shoulder and, thus supported, began to limp slowly
+up the hill.
+
+"My poor Denis!" she repeated, and laughed again. Humiliated, he was
+silent. It seemed incredible that, only two minutes ago, he should
+have been holding her in his embrace, kissing her. Incredible. She was
+helpless then, a child. Now she had regained all her superiority; she
+was once more the far-off being, desired and unassailable. Why had he
+been such a fool as to suggest that carrying stunt? He reached the house
+in a state of the profoundest depression.
+
+He helped Anne upstairs, left her in the hands of a maid, and came down
+again to the drawing-room. He was surprised to find them all sitting
+just where he had left them. He had expected that, somehow, everything
+would be quite different--it seemed such a prodigious time since he went
+away. All silent and all damned, he reflected, as he looked at them. Mr.
+Scogan's pipe still wheezed; that was the only sound. Henry Wimbush was
+still deep in his account books; he had just made the discovery that Sir
+Ferdinando was in the habit of eating oysters the whole summer through,
+regardless of the absence of the justifying R. Gombauld, in horn-rimmed
+spectacles, was reading. Jenny was mysteriously scribbling in her red
+notebook. And, seated in her favourite arm-chair at the corner of the
+hearth, Priscilla was looking through a pile of drawings. One by one she
+held them out at arm's length and, throwing back her mountainous orange
+head, looked long and attentively through half-closed eyelids. She wore
+a pale sea-green dress; on the slope of her mauve-powdered decolletage
+diamonds twinkled. An immensely long cigarette-holder projected at an
+angle from her face. Diamonds were embedded in her high-piled
+coiffure; they glittered every time she moved. It was a batch of Ivor's
+drawings--sketches of Spirit Life, made in the course of tranced tours
+through the other world. On the back of each sheet descriptive titles
+were written: "Portrait of an Angel, 15th March '20;" "Astral Beings
+at Play, 3rd December '19;" "A Party of Souls on their Way to a Higher
+Sphere, 21st May '21." Before examining the drawing on the obverse of
+each sheet, she turned it over to read the title. Try as she could--and
+she tried hard--Priscilla had never seen a vision or succeeded in
+establishing any communication with the Spirit World. She had to be
+content with the reported experiences of others.
+
+"What have you done with the rest of your party?" she asked, looking up
+as Denis entered the room.
+
+He explained. Anne had gone to bed, Ivor and Mary were still in the
+garden. He selected a book and a comfortable chair, and tried, as far as
+the disturbed state of his mind would permit him, to compose himself
+for an evening's reading. The lamplight was utterly serene; there was no
+movement save the stir of Priscilla among her papers. All silent and all
+damned, Denis repeated to himself, all silent and all damned...
+
+It was nearly an hour later when Ivor and Mary made their appearance.
+
+"We waited to see the moon rise," said Ivor.
+
+"It was gibbous, you know," Mary explained, very technical and
+scientific.
+
+"It was so beautiful down in the garden! The trees, the scent of the
+flowers, the stars..." Ivor waved his arms. "And when the moon came up,
+it was really too much. It made me burst into tears." He sat down at the
+piano and opened the lid.
+
+"There were a great many meteorites," said Mary to anyone who would
+listen. "The earth must just be coming into the summer shower of them.
+In July and August..."
+
+But Ivor had already begun to strike the keys. He played the garden,
+the stars, the scent of flowers, the rising moon. He even put in a
+nightingale that was not there. Mary looked on and listened with parted
+lips. The others pursued their occupations, without appearing to be
+seriously disturbed. On this very July day, exactly three hundred and
+fifty years ago, Sir Ferdinando had eaten seven dozen oysters. The
+discovery of this fact gave Henry Wimbush a peculiar pleasure. He had
+a natural piety which made him delight in the celebration of memorial
+feasts. The three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the seven dozen
+oysters...He wished he had known before dinner; he would have ordered
+champagne.
+
+On her way to bed Mary paid a call. The light was out in Anne's room,
+but she was not yet asleep.
+
+"Why didn't you come down to the garden with us?" Mary asked.
+
+"I fell down and twisted my ankle. Denis helped me home."
+
+Mary was full of sympathy. Inwardly, too, she was relieved to find
+Anne's non-appearance so simply accounted for. She had been vaguely
+suspicious, down there in the garden--suspicious of what, she hardly
+knew; but there had seemed to be something a little louche in the way
+she had suddenly found herself alone with Ivor. Not that she minded, of
+course; far from it. But she didn't like the idea that perhaps she was
+the victim of a put-up job.
+
+"I do hope you'll be better to-morrow," she said, and she commiserated
+with Anne on all she had missed--the garden, the stars, the scent of
+flowers, the meteorites through whose summer shower the earth was now
+passing, the rising moon and its gibbosity. And then they had had such
+interesting conversation. What about? About almost everything. Nature,
+art, science, poetry, the stars, spiritualism, the relations of the
+sexes, music, religion. Ivor, she thought, had an interesting mind.
+
+The two young ladies parted affectionately.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+The nearest Roman Catholic church was upwards of twenty miles away.
+Ivor, who was punctilious in his devotions, came down early to breakfast
+and had his car at the door, ready to start, by a quarter to ten. It was
+a smart, expensive-looking machine, enamelled a pure lemon yellow and
+upholstered in emerald green leather. There were two seats--three if you
+squeezed tightly enough--and their occupants were protected from
+wind, dust, and weather by a glazed sedan that rose, an elegant
+eighteenth-century hump, from the midst of the body of the car.
+
+Mary had never been to a Roman Catholic service, thought it would be an
+interesting experience, and, when the car moved off through the great
+gates of the courtyard, she was occupying the spare seat in the sedan.
+The sea-lion horn roared, faintlier, faintlier, and they were gone.
+
+In the parish church of Crome Mr. Bodiham preached on 1 Kings vi. 18:
+"And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops"--a sermon of
+immediately local interest. For the past two years the problem of the
+War Memorial had exercised the minds of all those in Crome who had
+enough leisure, or mental energy, or party spirit to think of such
+things. Henry Wimbush was all for a library--a library of local
+literature, stocked with county histories, old maps of the district,
+monographs on the local antiquities, dialect dictionaries, handbooks
+of the local geology and natural history. He liked to think of the
+villagers, inspired by such reading, making up parties of a Sunday
+afternoon to look for fossils and flint arrow-heads. The villagers
+themselves favoured the idea of a memorial reservoir and water supply.
+But the busiest and most articulate party followed Mr. Bodiham in
+demanding something religious in character--a second lich-gate, for
+example, a stained-glass window, a monument of marble, or, if possible,
+all three. So far, however, nothing had been done, partly because the
+memorial committee had never been able to agree, partly for the more
+cogent reason that too little money had been subscribed to carry out any
+of the proposed schemes. Every three or four months Mr. Bodiham preached
+a sermon on the subject. His last had been delivered in March; it was
+high time that his congregation had a fresh reminder.
+
+"And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops."
+
+Mr. Bodiham touched lightly on Solomon's temple. From thence he passed
+to temples and churches in general. What were the characteristics of
+these buildings dedicated to God? Obviously, the fact of their, from
+a human point of view, complete uselessness. They were unpractical
+buildings "carved with knops." Solomon might have built a
+library--indeed, what could be more to the taste of the world's wisest
+man? He might have dug a reservoir--what more useful in a parched city
+like Jerusalem? He did neither; he built a house all carved with knops,
+useless and unpractical. Why? Because he was dedicating the work to God.
+There had been much talk in Crome about the proposed War Memorial. A
+War Memorial was, in its very nature, a work dedicated to God. It was a
+token of thankfulness that the first stage in the culminating world-war
+had been crowned by the triumph of righteousness; it was at the same
+time a visibly embodied supplication that God might not long delay the
+Advent which alone could bring the final peace. A library, a reservoir?
+Mr. Bodiham scornfully and indignantly condemned the idea. These were
+works dedicated to man, not to God. As a War Memorial they were totally
+unsuitable. A lich-gate had been suggested. This was an object which
+answered perfectly to the definition of a War Memorial: a useless work
+dedicated to God and carved with knops. One lich-gate, it was true,
+already existed. But nothing would be easier than to make a second
+entrance into the churchyard; and a second entrance would need a second
+gate. Other suggestions had been made. Stained-glass windows, a monument
+of marble. Both these were admirable, especially the latter. It was high
+time that the War Memorial was erected. It might soon be too late.
+At any moment, like a thief in the night, God might come. Meanwhile a
+difficulty stood in the way. Funds were inadequate. All should subscribe
+according to their means. Those who had lost relations in the war might
+reasonably be expected to subscribe a sum equal to that which they would
+have had to pay in funeral expenses if the relative had died while at
+home. Further delay was disastrous. The War Memorial must be built at
+once. He appealed to the patriotism and the Christian sentiments of all
+his hearers.
+
+Henry Wimbush walked home thinking of the books he would present to the
+War Memorial Library, if ever it came into existence. He took the path
+through the fields; it was pleasanter than the road. At the first
+stile a group of village boys, loutish young fellows all dressed in the
+hideous ill-fitting black which makes a funeral of every English Sunday
+and holiday, were assembled, drearily guffawing as they smoked their
+cigarettes. They made way for Henry Wimbush, touching their caps as he
+passed. He returned their salute; his bowler and face were one in their
+unruffled gravity.
+
+In Sir Ferdinando's time, he reflected, in the time of his son, Sir
+Julius, these young men would have had their Sunday diversions even at
+Crome, remote and rustic Crome. There would have been archery, skittles,
+dancing--social amusements in which they would have partaken as members
+of a conscious community. Now they had nothing, nothing except Mr.
+Bodiham's forbidding Boys' Club and the rare dances and concerts
+organised by himself. Boredom or the urban pleasures of the county
+metropolis were the alternatives that presented themselves to these poor
+youths. Country pleasures were no more; they had been stamped out by the
+Puritans.
+
+In Manningham's Diary for 1600 there was a queer passage, he remembered,
+a very queer passage. Certain magistrates in Berkshire, Puritan
+magistrates, had had wind of a scandal. One moonlit summer night they
+had ridden out with their posse and there, among the hills, they had
+come upon a company of men and women, dancing, stark naked, among the
+sheepcotes. The magistrates and their men had ridden their horses into
+the crowd. How self-conscious the poor people must suddenly have felt,
+how helpless without their clothes against armed and booted horsemen!
+The dancers were arrested, whipped, gaoled, set in the stocks; the
+moonlight dance is never danced again. What old, earthy, Panic rite came
+to extinction here? he wondered. Who knows?--perhaps their ancestors had
+danced like this in the moonlight ages before Adam and Eve were so much
+as thought of. He liked to think so. And now it was no more. These weary
+young men, if they wanted to dance, would have to bicycle six miles to
+the town. The country was desolate, without life of its own, without
+indigenous pleasures. The pious magistrates had snuffed out for ever a
+little happy flame that had burned from the beginning of time.=
+
+
+```"And as on Tullia's tomb one lamp burned clear,
+
+```Unchanged for fifteen hundred year..."=
+
+He repeated the lines to himself, and was desolated to think of all the
+murdered past.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+Henry Wimbush's long cigar burned aromatically. The "History of Crome"
+lay on his knee; slowly he turned over the pages.
+
+"I can't decide what episode to read you to-night," he said
+thoughtfully. "Sir Ferdinando's voyages are not without interest. Then,
+of course, there's his son, Sir Julius. It was he who suffered from the
+delusion that his perspiration engendered flies; it drove him finally to
+suicide. Or there's Sir Cyprian." He turned the pages more rapidly. "Or
+Sir Henry. Or Sir George...No, I'm inclined to think I won't read about
+any of these."
+
+"But you must read something," insisted Mr. Scogan, taking his pipe out
+of his mouth.
+
+"I think I shall read about my grandfather," said Henry Wimbush, "and
+the events that led up to his marriage with the eldest daughter of the
+last Sir Ferdinando."
+
+"Good," said Mr. Scogan. "We are listening."
+
+"Before I begin reading," said Henry Wimbush, looking up from the
+book and taking off the pince-nez which he had just fitted to his
+nose--"before I begin, I must say a few preliminary words about Sir
+Ferdinando, the last of the Lapiths. At the death of the virtuous and
+unfortunate Sir Hercules, Ferdinando found himself in possession of the
+family fortune, not a little increased by his father's temperance and
+thrift; he applied himself forthwith to the task of spending it, which
+he did in an ample and jovial fashion. By the time he was forty he had
+eaten and, above all, drunk and loved away about half his capital, and
+would infallibly have soon got rid of the rest in the same manner, if
+he had not had the good fortune to become so madly enamoured of the
+Rector's daughter as to make a proposal of marriage. The young lady
+accepted him, and in less than a year had become the absolute mistress
+of Crome and her husband. An extraordinary reformation made itself
+apparent in Sir Ferdinando's character. He grew regular and economical
+in his habits; he even became temperate, rarely drinking more than
+a bottle and a half of port at a sitting. The waning fortune of the
+Lapiths began once more to wax, and that in despite of the hard times
+(for Sir Ferdinando married in 1809 in the height of the Napoleonic
+Wars). A prosperous and dignified old age, cheered by the spectacle of
+his children's growth and happiness--for Lady Lapith had already borne
+him three daughters, and there seemed no good reason why she should not
+bear many more of them, and sons as well--a patriarchal decline into the
+family vault, seemed now to be Sir Ferdinando's enviable destiny. But
+Providence willed otherwise. To Napoleon, cause already of such infinite
+mischief, was due, though perhaps indirectly, the untimely and violent
+death which put a period to this reformed existence.
+
+"Sir Ferdinando, who was above all things a patriot, had adopted, from
+the earliest days of the conflict with the French, his own peculiar
+method of celebrating our victories. When the happy news reached London,
+it was his custom to purchase immediately a large store of liquor and,
+taking a place on whichever of the outgoing coaches he happened to light
+on first, to drive through the country proclaiming the good news to all
+he met on the road and dispensing it, along with the liquor, at every
+stopping-place to all who cared to listen or drink. Thus, after the
+Nile, he had driven as far as Edinburgh; and later, when the coaches,
+wreathed with laurel for triumph, with cypress for mourning, were
+setting out with the news of Nelson's victory and death, he sat through
+all a chilly October night on the box of the Norwich 'Meteor' with a
+nautical keg of rum on his knees and two cases of old brandy under the
+seat. This genial custom was one of the many habits which he abandoned
+on his marriage. The victories in the Peninsula, the retreat from
+Moscow, Leipzig, and the abdication of the tyrant all went uncelebrated.
+It so happened, however, that in the summer of 1815 Sir Ferdinando was
+staying for a few weeks in the capital. There had been a succession of
+anxious, doubtful days; then came the glorious news of Waterloo. It was
+too much for Sir Ferdinando; his joyous youth awoke again within him. He
+hurried to his wine merchant and bought a dozen bottles of 1760 brandy.
+The Bath coach was on the point of starting; he bribed his way on to
+the box and, seated in glory beside the driver, proclaimed aloud the
+downfall of the Corsican bandit and passed about the warm liquid joy.
+They clattered through Uxbridge, Slough, Maidenhead. Sleeping Reading
+was awakened by the great news. At Didcot one of the ostlers was so
+much overcome by patriotic emotions and the 1760 brandy that he found it
+impossible to do up the buckles of the harness. The night began to grow
+chilly, and Sir Ferdinando found that it was not enough to take a nip
+at every stage: to keep up his vital warmth he was compelled to drink
+between the stages as well. They were approaching Swindon. The coach
+was travelling at a dizzy speed--six miles in the last half-hour--when,
+without having manifested the slightest premonitory symptom of
+unsteadiness, Sir Ferdinando suddenly toppled sideways off his seat
+and fell, head foremost, into the road. An unpleasant jolt awakened the
+slumbering passengers. The coach was brought to a standstill; the
+guard ran back with a light. He found Sir Ferdinando still alive, but
+unconscious; blood was oozing from his mouth. The back wheels of the
+coach had passed over his body, breaking most of his ribs and both arms.
+His skull was fractured in two places. They picked him up, but he was
+dead before they reached the next stage. So perished Sir Ferdinando,
+a victim to his own patriotism. Lady Lapith did not marry again, but
+determined to devote the rest of her life to the well-being of her three
+children--Georgiana, now five years old, and Emmeline and Caroline,
+twins of two."
+
+Henry Wimbush paused, and once more put on his pince-nez. "So much
+by way of introduction," he said. "Now I can begin to read about my
+grandfather."
+
+"One moment," said Mr. Scogan, "till I've refilled my pipe."
+
+Mr. Wimbush waited. Seated apart in a corner of the room, Ivor was
+showing Mary his sketches of Spirit Life. They spoke together in
+whispers.
+
+Mr. Scogan had lighted his pipe again. "Fire away," he said.
+
+Henry Wimbush fired away.
+
+"It was in the spring of 1833 that my grandfather, George Wimbush, first
+made the acquaintance of the 'three lovely Lapiths,' as they were always
+called. He was then a young man of twenty-two, with curly yellow hair
+and a smooth pink face that was the mirror of his youthful and ingenuous
+mind. He had been educated at Harrow and Christ Church, he enjoyed
+hunting and all other field sports, and, though his circumstances were
+comfortable to the verge of affluence, his pleasures were temperate and
+innocent. His father, an East Indian merchant, had destined him for a
+political career, and had gone to considerable expense in acquiring a
+pleasant little Cornish borough as a twenty-first birthday gift for his
+son. He was justly indignant when, on the very eve of George's majority,
+the Reform Bill of 1832 swept the borough out of existence. The
+inauguration of George's political career had to be postponed. At the
+time he got to know the lovely Lapiths he was waiting; he was not at all
+impatient.
+
+"The lovely Lapiths did not fail to impress him. Georgiana, the eldest,
+with her black ringlets, her flashing eyes, her noble aquiline profile,
+her swan-like neck, and sloping shoulders, was orientally dazzling; and
+the twins, with their delicately turned-up noses, their blue eyes, and
+chestnut hair, were an identical pair of ravishingly English charmers.
+
+"Their conversation at this first meeting proved, however, to be so
+forbidding that, but for the invincible attraction exercised by their
+beauty, George would never have had the courage to follow up the
+acquaintance. The twins, looking up their noses at him with an air of
+languid superiority, asked him what he thought of the latest French
+poetry and whether he liked the 'Indiana' of George Sand. But what
+was almost worse was the question with which Georgiana opened her
+conversation with him. 'In music,' she asked, leaning forward and
+fixing him with her large dark eyes, 'are you a classicist or a
+transcendentalist?' George did not lose his presence of mind. He had
+enough appreciation of music to know that he hated anything classical,
+and so, with a promptitude which did him credit, he replied, 'I am a
+transcendentalist.' Georgiana smiled bewitchingly. 'I am glad,' she
+said; 'so am I. You went to hear Paganini last week, of course. "The
+prayer of Moses"--ah!' She closed her eyes. 'Do you know anything more
+transcendental than that?' 'No,' said George, 'I don't.' He hesitated,
+was about to go on speaking, and then decided that after all it would be
+wiser not to say--what was in fact true--that he had enjoyed above all
+Paganini's Farmyard Imitations. The man had made his fiddle bray like
+an ass, cluck like a hen, grunt, squeal, bark, neigh, quack, bellow, and
+growl; that last item, in George's estimation, had almost compensated
+for the tediousness of the rest of the concert. He smiled with pleasure
+at the thought of it. Yes, decidedly, he was no classicist in music; he
+was a thoroughgoing transcendentalist.
+
+"George followed up this first introduction by paying a call on the
+young ladies and their mother, who occupied, during the season, a small
+but elegant house in the neighbourhood of Berkeley Square. Lady Lapith
+made a few discreet inquiries, and having found that George's financial
+position, character, and family were all passably good, she asked him to
+dine. She hoped and expected that her daughters would all marry into
+the peerage; but, being a prudent woman, she knew it was advisable to
+prepare for all contingencies. George Wimbush, she thought, would make
+an excellent second string for one of the twins.
+
+"At this first dinner, George's partner was Emmeline. They talked of
+Nature. Emmeline protested that to her high mountains were a feeling and
+the hum of human cities torture. George agreed that the country was very
+agreeable, but held that London during the season also had its charms.
+He noticed with surprise and a certain solicitous distress that Miss
+Emmeline's appetite was poor, that it didn't, in fact, exist. Two
+spoonfuls of soup, a morsel of fish, no bird, no meat, and three
+grapes--that was her whole dinner. He looked from time to time at her
+two sisters; Georgiana and Caroline seemed to be quite as abstemious.
+They waved away whatever was offered them with an expression of delicate
+disgust, shutting their eyes and averting their faces from the proffered
+dish, as though the lemon sole, the duck, the loin of veal, the trifle,
+were objects revolting to the sight and smell. George, who thought the
+dinner capital, ventured to comment on the sisters' lack of appetite.
+
+"'Pray, don't talk to me of eating,' said Emmeline, drooping like a
+sensitive plant. 'We find it so coarse, so unspiritual, my sisters and
+I. One can't think of one's soul while one is eating.'
+
+"George agreed; one couldn't. 'But one must live,' he said.
+
+"'Alas!' Emmeline sighed. 'One must. Death is very beautiful, don't you
+think?' She broke a corner off a piece of toast and began to nibble
+at it languidly. 'But since, as you say, one must live...' She made a
+little gesture of resignation. 'Luckily a very little suffices to keep
+one alive.' She put down her corner of toast half eaten.
+
+"George regarded her with some surprise. She was pale, but she looked
+extraordinarily healthy, he thought; so did her sisters. Perhaps if
+you were really spiritual you needed less food. He, clearly, was not
+spiritual.
+
+"After this he saw them frequently. They all liked him, from Lady Lapith
+downwards. True, he was not very romantic or poetical; but he was such a
+pleasant, unpretentious, kind-hearted young man, that one couldn't
+help liking him. For his part, he thought them wonderful, wonderful,
+especially Georgiana. He enveloped them all in a warm, protective
+affection. For they needed protection; they were altogether too frail,
+too spiritual for this world. They never ate, they were always pale,
+they often complained of fever, they talked much and lovingly of death,
+they frequently swooned. Georgiana was the most ethereal of all; of the
+three she ate least, swooned most often, talked most of death, and was
+the palest--with a pallor that was so startling as to appear positively
+artificial. At any moment, it seemed, she might loose her precarious
+hold on this material world and become all spirit. To George the thought
+was a continual agony. If she were to die...
+
+"She contrived, however, to live through the season, and that in spite
+of the numerous balls, routs, and other parties of pleasure which, in
+company with the rest of the lovely trio, she never failed to attend. In
+the middle of July the whole household moved down to the country. George
+was invited to spend the month of August at Crome.
+
+"The house-party was distinguished; in the list of visitors figured
+the names of two marriageable young men of title. George had hoped that
+country air, repose, and natural surroundings might have restored to
+the three sisters their appetites and the roses of their cheeks. He was
+mistaken. For dinner, the first evening, Georgiana ate only an olive,
+two or three salted almonds, and half a peach. She was as pale as ever.
+During the meal she spoke of love.
+
+"'True love,' she said, 'being infinite and eternal, can only be
+consummated in eternity. Indiana and Sir Rodolphe celebrated the mystic
+wedding of their souls by jumping into Niagara. Love is incompatible
+with life. The wish of two people who truly love one another is not to
+live together but to die together.'
+
+"'Come, come, my dear,' said Lady Lapith, stout and practical. 'What
+would become of the next generation, pray, if all the world acted on
+your principles?'
+
+"'Mamma!...' Georgiana protested, and dropped her eyes.
+
+"'In my young days,' Lady Lapith went on, 'I should have been laughed
+out of countenance if I'd said a thing like that. But then in my young
+days souls weren't as fashionable as they are now and we didn't think
+death was at all poetical. It was just unpleasant.'
+
+"'Mamma!...' Emmeline and Caroline implored in unison.
+
+"'In my young days--' Lady Lapith was launched into her subject;
+nothing, it seemed, could stop her now. 'In my young days, if you didn't
+eat, people told you you needed a dose of rhubarb. Nowadays...'
+
+"There was a cry; Georgiana had swooned sideways on to Lord Timpany's
+shoulder. It was a desperate expedient; but it was successful. Lady
+Lapith was stopped.
+
+"The days passed in an uneventful round of pleasures. Of all the gay
+party George alone was unhappy. Lord Timpany was paying his court to
+Georgiana, and it was clear that he was not unfavourably received.
+George looked on, and his soul was a hell of jealousy and despair. The
+boisterous company of the young men became intolerable to him; he shrank
+from them, seeking gloom and solitude. One morning, having broken away
+from them on some vague pretext, he returned to the house alone. The
+young men were bathing in the pool below; their cries and laughter
+floated up to him, making the quiet house seem lonelier and more silent.
+The lovely sisters and their mamma still kept their chambers; they did
+not customarily make their appearance till luncheon, so that the male
+guests had the morning to themselves. George sat down in the hall and
+abandoned himself to thought.
+
+"At any moment she might die; at any moment she might become Lady
+Timpany. It was terrible, terrible. If she died, then he would die
+too; he would go to seek her beyond the grave. If she became Lady
+Timpany...ah, then! The solution of the problem would not be so simple.
+If she became Lady Timpany: it was a horrible thought. But then suppose
+she were in love with Timpany--though it seemed incredible that anyone
+could be in love with Timpany--suppose her life depended on Timpany,
+suppose she couldn't live without him? He was fumbling his way along
+this clueless labyrinth of suppositions when the clock struck twelve. On
+the last stroke, like an automaton released by the turning clockwork, a
+little maid, holding a large covered tray, popped out of the door that
+led from the kitchen regions into the hall. From his deep arm-chair
+George watched her (himself, it was evident, unobserved) with an idle
+curiosity. She pattered across the room and came to a halt in front of
+what seemed a blank expense of panelling. She reached out her hand and,
+to George's extreme astonishment, a little door swung open, revealing
+the foot of a winding staircase. Turning sideways in order to get her
+tray through the narrow opening, the little maid darted in with a rapid
+crab-like motion. The door closed behind her with a click. A minute
+later it opened again and the maid, without her tray, hurried back
+across the hall and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. George
+tried to recompose his thoughts, but an invincible curiosity drew his
+mind towards the hidden door, the staircase, the little maid. It was in
+vain he told himself that the matter was none of his business, that to
+explore the secrets of that surprising door, that mysterious staircase
+within, would be a piece of unforgivable rudeness and indiscretion.
+It was in vain; for five minutes he struggled heroically with his
+curiosity, but at the end of that time he found himself standing in
+front of the innocent sheet of panelling through which the little maid
+had disappeared. A glance sufficed to show him the position of the
+secret door--secret, he perceived, only to those who looked with
+a careless eye. It was just an ordinary door let in flush with the
+panelling. No latch nor handle betrayed its position, but an unobtrusive
+catch sunk in the wood invited the thumb. George was astonished that he
+had not noticed it before; now he had seen it, it was so obvious,
+almost as obvious as the cupboard door in the library with its lines
+of imitation shelves and its dummy books. He pulled back the catch and
+peeped inside. The staircase, of which the degrees were made not
+of stone but of blocks of ancient oak, wound up and out of sight.
+A slit-like window admitted the daylight; he was at the foot of the
+central tower, and the little window looked out over the terrace; they
+were still shouting and splashing in the pool below.
+
+"George closed the door and went back to his seat. But his curiosity
+was not satisfied. Indeed, this partial satisfaction had but whetted
+its appetite. Where did the staircase lead? What was the errand of the
+little maid? It was no business of his, he kept repeating--no business
+of his. He tried to read, but his attention wandered. A quarter-past
+twelve sounded on the harmonious clock. Suddenly determined, George
+rose, crossed the room, opened the hidden door, and began to ascend
+the stairs. He passed the first window, corkscrewed round, and came
+to another. He paused for a moment to look out; his heart beat
+uncomfortably, as though he were affronting some unknown danger. What
+he was doing, he told himself, was extremely ungentlemanly, horribly
+underbred. He tiptoed onward and upward. One turn more, then half a
+turn, and a door confronted him. He halted before it, listened; he could
+hear no sound. Putting his eye to the keyhole, he saw nothing but a
+stretch of white sunlit wall. Emboldened, he turned the handle and
+stepped across the threshold. There he halted, petrified by what he saw,
+mutely gaping.
+
+"In the middle of a pleasantly sunny little room--'it is now Priscilla's
+boudoir,' Mr. Wimbush remarked parenthetically--stood a small circular
+table of mahogany. Crystal, porcelain, and silver,--all the shining
+apparatus of an elegant meal--were mirrored in its polished depths. The
+carcase of a cold chicken, a bowl of fruit, a great ham, deeply gashed
+to its heart of tenderest white and pink, the brown cannon ball of
+a cold plum-pudding, a slender Hock bottle, and a decanter of claret
+jostled one another for a place on this festive board. And round the
+table sat the three sisters, the three lovely Lapiths--eating!
+
+"At George's sudden entrance they had all looked towards the door, and
+now they sat, petrified by the same astonishment which kept George fixed
+and staring. Georgiana, who sat immediately facing the door, gazed at
+him with dark, enormous eyes. Between the thumb and forefinger of her
+right hand she was holding a drumstick of the dismembered chicken; her
+little finger, elegantly crooked, stood apart from the rest of her hand.
+Her mouth was open, but the drumstick had never reached its destination;
+it remained, suspended, frozen, in mid-air. The other two sisters had
+turned round to look at the intruder. Caroline still grasped her knife
+and fork; Emmeline's fingers were round the stem of her claret glass.
+For what seemed a very long time, George and the three sisters stared
+at one another in silence. They were a group of statues. Then suddenly
+there was movement. Georgiana dropped her chicken bone, Caroline's knife
+and fork clattered on her plate. The movement propagated itself, grew
+more decisive; Emmeline sprang to her feet, uttering a cry. The wave of
+panic reached George; he turned and, mumbling something unintelligible
+as he went, rushed out of the room and down the winding stairs. He came
+to a standstill in the hall, and there, all by himself in the quiet
+house, he began to laugh.
+
+"At luncheon it was noticed that the sisters ate a little more than
+usual. Georgiana toyed with some French beans and a spoonful of
+calves'-foot jelly. 'I feel a little stronger to-day,' she said to Lord
+Timpany, when he congratulated her on this increase of appetite; 'a
+little more material,' she added, with a nervous laugh. Looking up, she
+caught George's eye; a blush suffused her cheeks and she looked hastily
+away.
+
+"In the garden that afternoon they found themselves for a moment alone.
+
+"You won't tell anyone, George? Promise you won't tell anyone,' she
+implored. 'It would make us look so ridiculous. And besides, eating IS
+unspiritual, isn't it? Say you won't tell anyone.'
+
+"'I will,' said George brutally. 'I'll tell everyone, unless...'
+
+"'It's blackmail.'
+
+"'I don't care, said George. 'I'll give you twenty-four hours to
+decide.'
+
+"Lady Lapith was disappointed, of course; she had hoped for better
+things--for Timpany and a coronet. But George, after all, wasn't so bad.
+They were married at the New Year.
+
+"My poor grandfather!" Mr. Wimbush added, as he closed his book and
+put away his pince-nez. "Whenever I read in the papers about oppressed
+nationalities, I think of him." He relighted his cigar. "It was
+a maternal government, highly centralised, and there were no
+representative institutions."
+
+Henry Wimbush ceased speaking. In the silence that ensued Ivor's
+whispered commentary on the spirit sketches once more became audible.
+Priscilla, who had been dozing, suddenly woke up.
+
+"What?" she said in the startled tones of one newly returned to
+consciousness; "what?"
+
+Jenny caught the words. She looked up, smiled, nodded reassuringly.
+"It's about a ham," she said.
+
+"What's about a ham?"
+
+"What Henry has been reading." She closed the red notebook lying on
+her knees and slipped a rubber band round it. "I'm going to bed," she
+announced, and got up.
+
+"So am I," said Anne, yawning. But she lacked the energy to rise from
+her arm-chair.
+
+The night was hot and oppressive. Round the open windows the curtains
+hung unmoving. Ivor, fanning himself with the portrait of an Astral
+Being, looked out into the darkness and drew a breath.
+
+"The air's like wool," he declared.
+
+"It will get cooler after midnight," said Henry Wimbush, and cautiously
+added, "perhaps."
+
+"I shan't sleep, I know."
+
+Priscilla turned her head in his direction; the monumental coiffure
+nodded exorbitantly at her slightest movement. "You must make an
+effort," she said. "When I can't sleep, I concentrate my will: I say,
+'I will sleep, I am asleep!' And pop! off I go. That's the power of
+thought."
+
+"But does it work on stuffy nights?" Ivor inquired. "I simply cannot
+sleep on a stuffy night."
+
+"Nor can I," said Mary, "except out of doors."
+
+"Out of doors! What a wonderful idea!" In the end they decided to sleep
+on the towers--Mary on the western tower, Ivor on the eastern. There
+was a flat expanse of leads on each of the towers, and you could get a
+mattress through the trap doors that opened on to them. Under the stars,
+under the gibbous moon, assuredly they would sleep. The mattresses were
+hauled up, sheets and blankets were spread, and an hour later the two
+insomniasts, each on his separate tower, were crying their good-nights
+across the dividing gulf.
+
+On Mary the sleep-compelling charm of the open air did not work with its
+expected magic. Even through the mattress one could not fail to be aware
+that the leads were extremely hard. Then there were noises: the owls
+screeched tirelessly, and once, roused by some unknown terror, all the
+geese of the farmyard burst into a sudden frenzy of cackling. The stars
+and the gibbous moon demanded to be looked at, and when one meteorite
+had streaked across the sky, you could not help waiting, open-eyed and
+alert, for the next. Time passed; the moon climbed higher and higher in
+the sky. Mary felt less sleepy than she had when she first came out.
+She sat up and looked over the parapet. Had Ivor been able to sleep? she
+wondered. And as though in answer to her mental question, from
+behind the chimney-stack at the farther end of the roof a white form
+noiselessly emerged--a form that, in the moonlight, was recognisably
+Ivor's. Spreading his arms to right and left, like a tight-rope dancer,
+he began to walk forward along the roof-tree of the house. He swayed
+terrifyingly as he advanced. Mary looked on speechlessly; perhaps he was
+walking in his sleep! Suppose he were to wake up suddenly, now! If she
+spoke or moved it might mean his death. She dared look no more, but sank
+back on her pillows. She listened intently. For what seemed an immensely
+long time there was no sound. Then there was a patter of feet on the
+tiles, followed by a scrabbling noise and a whispered "Damn!" And
+suddenly Ivor's head and shoulders appeared above the parapet. One leg
+followed, then the other. He was on the leads. Mary pretended to wake up
+with a start.
+
+"Oh!" she said. "What are you doing here?"
+
+"I couldn't sleep," he explained, "so I came along to see if you
+couldn't. One gets bored by oneself on a tower. Don't you find it so?"
+
+It was light before five. Long, narrow clouds barred the east, their
+edges bright with orange fire. The sky was pale and watery. With the
+mournful scream of a soul in pain, a monstrous peacock, flying heavily
+up from below, alighted on the parapet of the tower. Ivor and Mary
+started broad awake.
+
+"Catch him!" cried Ivor, jumping up. "We'll have a feather." The
+frightened peacock ran up and down the parapet in an absurd distress,
+curtseying and bobbing and clucking; his long tail swung ponderously
+back and forth as he turned and turned again. Then with a flap and swish
+he launched himself upon the air and sailed magnificently earthward,
+with a recovered dignity. But he had left a trophy. Ivor had his
+feather, a long-lashed eye of purple and green, of blue and gold. He
+handed it to his companion.
+
+"An angel's feather," he said.
+
+Mary looked at it for a moment, gravely and intently. Her purple pyjamas
+clothed her with an ampleness that hid the lines of her body; she looked
+like some large, comfortable, unjointed toy, a sort of Teddy-bear--but
+a Teddy bear with an angel's head, pink cheeks, and hair like a bell
+of gold. An angel's face, the feather of an angel's wing...Somehow the
+whole atmosphere of this sunrise was rather angelic.
+
+"It's extraordinary to think of sexual selection," she said at last,
+looking up from her contemplation of the miraculous feather.
+
+"Extraordinary!" Ivor echoed. "I select you, you select me. What luck!"
+
+He put his arm round her shoulders and they stood looking eastward. The
+first sunlight had begun to warm and colour the pale light of the dawn.
+Mauve pyjamas and white pyjamas; they were a young and charming couple.
+The rising sun touched their faces. It was all extremely symbolic;
+but then, if you choose to think so, nothing in this world is not
+symbolical. Profound and beautiful truth!
+
+"I must be getting back to my tower," said Ivor at last.
+
+"Already?"
+
+"I'm afraid so. The varletry will soon be up and about."
+
+"Ivor..." There was a prolonged and silent farewell.
+
+"And now," said Ivor, "I repeat my tight-rope stunt."
+
+Mary threw her arms round his neck. "You mustn't, Ivor. It's dangerous.
+Please."
+
+He had to yield at last to her entreaties. "All right," he said, "I'll
+go down through the house and up at the other end."
+
+He vanished through the trap door into the darkness that still lurked
+within the shuttered house. A minute later he had reappeared on the
+farther tower; he waved his hand, and then sank down, out of sight,
+behind the parapet. From below, in the house, came the thin wasp-like
+buzzing of an alarum-clock. He had gone back just in time.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+Ivor was gone. Lounging behind the wind-screen in his yellow sedan he
+was whirling across rural England. Social and amorous engagements of the
+most urgent character called him from hall to baronial hall, from castle
+to castle, from Elizabethan manor-house to Georgian mansion, over
+the whole expanse of the kingdom. To-day in Somerset, to-morrow in
+Warwickshire, on Saturday in the West riding, by Tuesday morning in
+Argyll--Ivor never rested. The whole summer through, from the
+beginning of July till the end of September, he devoted himself to his
+engagements; he was a martyr to them. In the autumn he went back to
+London for a holiday. Crome had been a little incident, an evanescent
+bubble on the stream of his life; it belonged already to the past. By
+tea-time he would be at Gobley, and there would be Zenobia's welcoming
+smile. And on Thursday morning--but that was a long, long way ahead. He
+would think of Thursday morning when Thursday morning arrived. Meanwhile
+there was Gobley, meanwhile Zenobia.
+
+In the visitor's book at Crome Ivor had left, according to his
+invariable custom in these cases, a poem. He had improvised it
+magisterially in the ten minutes preceding his departure. Denis and Mr.
+Scogan strolled back together from the gates of the courtyard, whence
+they had bidden their last farewells; on the writing-table in the hall
+they found the visitor's book, open, and Ivor's composition scarcely
+dry. Mr. Scogan read it aloud:=
+
+
+```"The magic of those immemorial kings,
+
+```Who webbed enchantment on the bowls of night.
+
+```Sleeps in the soul of all created things;
+
+```In the blue sea, th' Acroceraunian height,
+
+```In the eyed butterfly's auricular wings
+
+```And orgied visions of the anchorite;
+
+```In all that singing flies and flying sings,
+
+```In rain, in pain, in delicate delight.
+
+```But much more magic, much more cogent spells
+
+```Weave here their wizardries about my soul.
+
+```Crome calls me like the voice of vesperal bells,
+
+```Haunts like a ghostly-peopled necropole.
+
+````Fate tears me hence. Hard fate! since far from Crome
+
+````My soul must weep, remembering its Home."=
+
+"Very nice and tasteful and tactful," said Mr. Scogan, when he had
+finished. "I am only troubled by the butterfly's auricular wings. You
+have a first-hand knowledge of the workings of a poet's mind, Denis;
+perhaps you can explain."
+
+"What could be simpler," said Denis. "It's a beautiful word, and Ivor
+wanted to say that the wings were golden."
+
+"You make it luminously clear."
+
+"One suffers so much," Denis went on, "from the fact that beautiful
+words don't always mean what they ought to mean. Recently, for example,
+I had a whole poem ruined, just because the word 'carminative' didn't
+mean what it ought to have meant. Carminative--it's admirable, isn't
+it?"
+
+"Admirable," Mr. Scogan agreed. "And what does it mean?"
+
+"It's a word I've treasured from my earliest infancy," said Denis,
+"treasured and loved. They used to give me cinnamon when I had a
+cold--quite useless, but not disagreeable. One poured it drop by drop
+out of narrow bottles, a golden liquor, fierce and fiery. On the label
+was a list of its virtues, and among other things it was described as
+being in the highest degree carminative. I adored the word. 'Isn't it
+carminative?' I used to say to myself when I'd taken my dose. It seemed
+so wonderfully to describe that sensation of internal warmth, that glow,
+that--what shall I call it?--physical self-satisfaction which
+followed the drinking of cinnamon. Later, when I discovered alcohol,
+'carminative' described for me that similar, but nobler, more spiritual
+glow which wine evokes not only in the body but in the soul as well.
+The carminative virtues of burgundy, of rum, of old brandy, of Lacryma
+Christi, of Marsala, of Aleatico, of stout, of gin, of champagne, of
+claret, of the raw new wine of this year's Tuscan vintage--I compared
+them, I classified them. Marsala is rosily, downily carminative; gin
+pricks and refreshes while it warms. I had a whole table of carmination
+values. And now"--Denis spread out his hands, palms upwards,
+despairingly--"now I know what carminative really means."
+
+"Well, what DOES it mean?" asked Mr. Scogan, a little impatiently.
+
+"Carminative," said Denis, lingering lovingly over the syllables,
+"carminative. I imagined vaguely that it had something to do with
+carmen-carminis, still more vaguely with caro-carnis, and its
+derivations, like carnival and carnation. Carminative--there was the
+idea of singing and the idea of flesh, rose-coloured and warm, with
+a suggestion of the jollities of mi-Careme and the masked holidays of
+Venice. Carminative--the warmth, the glow, the interior ripeness were
+all in the word. Instead of which..."
+
+"Do come to the point, my dear Denis," protested Mr. Scogan. "Do come to
+the point."
+
+"Well, I wrote a poem the other day," said Denis; "I wrote a poem about
+the effects of love."
+
+"Others have done the same before you," said Mr. Scogan. "There is no
+need to be ashamed."
+
+"I was putting forward the notion," Denis went on, "that the effects
+of love were often similar to the effects of wine, that Eros could
+intoxicate as well as Bacchus. Love, for example, is essentially
+carminative. It gives one the sense of warmth, the glow.=
+
+     ````'_And passion carminative as wine_...'=
+
+was what I wrote. Not only was the line elegantly sonorous; it was also,
+I flattered myself, very aptly compendiously expressive. Everything
+was in the word carminative--a detailed, exact foreground, an immense,
+indefinite hinterland of suggestion.=
+
+     ````'_And passion carminative as wine_...'=
+
+I was not ill-pleased. And then suddenly it occurred to me that I had
+never actually looked up the word in a dictionary. Carminative had grown
+up with me from the days of the cinnamon bottle. It had always been
+taken for granted. Carminative: for me the word was as rich in content
+as some tremendous, elaborate work of art; it was a complete landscape
+with figures.=
+
+     ````'_And passion carminative as wine_...'=
+
+It was the first time I had ever committed the word to writing, and all
+at once I felt I would like lexicographical authority for it. A small
+English-German dictionary was all I had at hand. I turned up C, ca,
+car, carm. There it was: 'Carminative: windtreibend.' Windtreibend!" he
+repeated. Mr. Scogan laughed. Denis shook his head. "Ah," he said, "for
+me it was no laughing matter. For me it marked the end of a chapter, the
+death of something young and precious. There were the years--years
+of childhood and innocence--when I had believed that carminative
+meant--well, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my
+life--a day, perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that
+carminative means windtreibend.=
+
+
+````'Plus ne suis ce que j'ai ete
+
+````Et ne le saurai jamais etre.'=
+
+It is a realisation that makes one rather melancholy."
+
+"Carminative," said Mr. Scogan thoughtfully.
+
+"Carminative," Denis repeated, and they were silent for a time. "Words,"
+said Denis at last, "words--I wonder if you can realise how much I love
+them. You are too much preoccupied with mere things and ideas and people
+to understand the full beauty of words. Your mind is not a literary
+mind. The spectacle of Mr. Gladstone finding thirty-four rhymes to
+the name 'Margot' seems to you rather pathetic than anything else.
+Mallarmé's envelopes with their versified addresses leave you cold,
+unless they leave you pitiful; you can't see that=
+
+
+````'Apte à ne point te cabrer, hue!
+
+````Poste et j'ajouterai, dia!
+
+````Si tu ne fuis onze-bis Rue
+
+````Balzac, chez cet Hérédia,'=
+
+is a little miracle."
+
+"You're right," said Mr. Scogan. "I can't."
+
+"You don't feel it to be magical?"
+
+"No."
+
+"That's the test for the literary mind," said Denis; "the feeling of
+magic, the sense that words have power. The technical, verbal part of
+literature is simply a development of magic. Words are man's first and
+most grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe;
+what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them! With fitted,
+harmonious words the magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats and
+spirits from the elements. Their descendants, the literary men, still
+go on with the process, morticing their verbal formulas together, and,
+before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe.
+Rabbits out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful,
+for they evoke emotions out of empty minds. Formulated by their art the
+most insipid statements become enormously significant. For example, I
+proffer the constatation, 'Black ladders lack bladders.' A self-evident
+truth, one on which it would not have been worth while to insist, had
+I chosen to formulate it in such words as 'Black fire-escapes have no
+bladders,' or, 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie.' But since I
+put it as I do, 'Black ladders lack bladders,' it becomes, for all
+its self-evidence, significant, unforgettable, moving. The creation by
+word-power of something out of nothing--what is that but magic? And, I
+may add, what is that but literature? Half the world's greatest poetry
+is simply 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie,' translated into
+magic significance as, 'Black ladders lack bladders.' And you can't
+appreciate words. I'm sorry for you."
+
+"A mental carminative," said Mr. Scogan reflectively. "That's what you
+need."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+Perched on its four stone mushrooms, the little granary stood two or
+three feet above the grass of the green close. Beneath it there was a
+perpetual shade and a damp growth of long, luxuriant grasses. Here, in
+the shadow, in the green dampness, a family of white ducks had sought
+shelter from the afternoon sun. Some stood, preening themselves, some
+reposed with their long bellies pressed to the ground, as though the
+cool grass were water. Little social noises burst fitfully forth, and
+from time to time some pointed tail would execute a brilliant Lisztian
+tremolo. Suddenly their jovial repose was shattered. A prodigious thump
+shook the wooden flooring above their heads; the whole granary trembled,
+little fragments of dirt and crumbled wood rained down among them.
+With a loud, continuous quacking the ducks rushed out from beneath this
+nameless menace, and did not stay their flight till they were safely in
+the farmyard.
+
+"Don't lose your temper," Anne was saying. "Listen! You've frightened
+the ducks. Poor dears! no wonder." She was sitting sideways in a low,
+wooden chair. Her right elbow rested on the back of the chair and she
+supported her cheek on her hand. Her long, slender body drooped into
+curves of a lazy grace. She was smiling, and she looked at Gombauld
+through half-closed eyes.
+
+"Damn you!" Gombauld repeated, and stamped his foot again. He glared at
+her round the half-finished portrait on the easel.
+
+"Poor ducks!" Anne repeated. The sound of their quacking was faint in
+the distance; it was inaudible.
+
+"Can't you see you make me lose my time?" he asked. "I can't work with
+you dangling about distractingly like this."
+
+"You'd lose less time if you stopped talking and stamping your feet and
+did a little painting for a change. After all, what am I dangling about
+for, except to be painted?"
+
+Gombauld made a noise like a growl. "You're awful," he said, with
+conviction. "Why do you ask me to come and stay here? Why do you tell me
+you'd like me to paint your portrait?"
+
+"For the simple reasons that I like you--at least, when you're in a good
+temper--and that I think you're a good painter."
+
+"For the simple reason"--Gombauld mimicked her voice--"that you want
+me to make love to you and, when I do, to have the amusement of running
+away."
+
+Anne threw back her head and laughed. "So you think it amuses me to have
+to evade your advances! So like a man! If you only knew how gross and
+awful and boring men are when they try to make love and you don't want
+them to make love! If you could only see yourselves through our eyes!"
+
+Gombauld picked up his palette and brushes and attacked his canvas with
+the ardour of irritation. "I suppose you'll be saying next that you
+didn't start the game, that it was I who made the first advances, and
+that you were the innocent victim who sat still and never did anything
+that could invite or allure me on."
+
+"So like a man again!" said Anne. "It's always the same old story about
+the woman tempting the man. The woman lures, fascinates, invites; and
+man--noble man, innocent man--falls a victim. My poor Gombauld! Surely
+you're not going to sing that old song again. It's so unintelligent, and
+I always thought you were a man of sense."
+
+"Thanks," said Gombauld.
+
+"Be a little objective," Anne went on. "Can't you see that you're simply
+externalising your own emotions? That's what you men are always doing;
+it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some
+woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her
+of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire. You
+have the mentality of savages. You might just as well say that a plate
+of strawberries and cream deliberately lures you on to feel greedy. In
+ninety-nine cases out of a hundred women are as passive and innocent as
+the strawberries and cream."
+
+"Well, all I can say is that this must be the hundredth case," said
+Gombauld, without looking up.
+
+Anne shrugged her shoulders and gave vent to a sigh. "I'm at a loss to
+know whether you're more silly or more rude."
+
+After painting for a little time in silence Gombauld began to speak
+again. "And then there's Denis," he said, renewing the conversation as
+though it had only just been broken off. "You're playing the same game
+with him. Why can't you leave that wretched young man in peace?"
+
+Anne flushed with a sudden and uncontrollable anger. "It's perfectly
+untrue about Denis," she said indignantly. "I never dreamt of playing
+what you beautifully call the same game with him." Recovering her calm,
+she added in her ordinary cooing voice and with her exacerbating smile,
+"You've become very protective towards poor Denis all of a sudden."
+
+"I have," Gombauld replied, with a gravity that was somehow a little too
+solemn. "I don't like to see a young man..."
+
+"...being whirled along the road to ruin," said Anne, continuing his
+sentence for him. "I admire your sentiments and, believe me, I share
+them."
+
+She was curiously irritated at what Gombauld had said about Denis. It
+happened to be so completely untrue. Gombauld might have some slight
+ground for his reproaches. But Denis--no, she had never flirted with
+Denis. Poor boy! He was very sweet. She became somewhat pensive.
+
+Gombauld painted on with fury. The restlessness of an unsatisfied
+desire, which, before, had distracted his mind, making work impossible,
+seemed now to have converted itself into a kind of feverish energy. When
+it was finished, he told himself, the portrait would be diabolic. He was
+painting her in the pose she had naturally adopted at the first sitting.
+Seated sideways, her elbow on the back of the chair, her head and
+shoulders turned at an angle from the rest of her body, towards the
+front, she had fallen into an attitude of indolent abandonment. He had
+emphasised the lazy curves of her body; the lines sagged as they crossed
+the canvas, the grace of the painted figure seemed to be melting into
+a kind of soft decay. The hand that lay along the knee was as limp as
+a glove. He was at work on the face now; it had begun to emerge on the
+canvas, doll-like in its regularity and listlessness. It was Anne's
+face--but her face as it would be, utterly unillumined by the inward
+lights of thought and emotion. It was the lazy, expressionless mask
+which was sometimes her face. The portrait was terribly like; and at the
+same time it was the most malicious of lies. Yes, it would be diabolic
+when it was finished, Gombauld decided; he wondered what she would think
+of it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+For the sake of peace and quiet Denis had retired earlier on this same
+afternoon to his bedroom. He wanted to work, but the hour was a drowsy
+one, and lunch, so recently eaten, weighed heavily on body and mind. The
+meridian demon was upon him; he was possessed by that bored and hopeless
+post-prandial melancholy which the coenobites of old knew and feared
+under the name of "accidie." He felt, like Ernest Dowson, "a little
+weary." He was in the mood to write something rather exquisite and
+gentle and quietist in tone; something a little droopy and at the same
+time--how should he put it?--a little infinite. He thought of Anne, of
+love hopeless and unattainable. Perhaps that was the ideal kind of love,
+the hopeless kind--the quiet, theoretical kind of love. In this sad mood
+of repletion he could well believe it. He began to write. One elegant
+quatrain had flowed from beneath his pen:=
+
+
+```"A brooding love which is at most
+
+````The stealth of moonbeams when they slide,
+
+```Evoking colour's bloodless ghost,
+
+````O'er some scarce-breathing breast or side..."=
+
+when his attention was attracted by a sound from outside. He looked down
+from his window; there they were, Anne and Gombauld, talking, laughing
+together. They crossed the courtyard in front, and passed out of sight
+through the gate in the right-hand wall. That was the way to the
+green close and the granary; she was going to sit for him again. His
+pleasantly depressing melancholy was dissipated by a puff of violent
+emotion; angrily he threw his quatrain into the waste-paper basket and
+ran downstairs. "The stealth of moonbeams," indeed!
+
+In the hall he saw Mr. Scogan; the man seemed to be lying in wait. Denis
+tried to escape, but in vain. Mr. Scogan's eye glittered like the eye of
+the Ancient Mariner.
+
+"Not so fast," he said, stretching out a small saurian hand with pointed
+nails--"not so fast. I was just going down to the flower garden to take
+the sun. We'll go together."
+
+Denis abandoned himself; Mr. Scogan put on his hat and they went out arm
+in arm. On the shaven turf of the terrace Henry Wimbush and Mary were
+playing a solemn game of bowls. They descended by the yew-tree walk.
+It was here, thought Denis, here that Anne had fallen, here that he
+had kissed her, here--and he blushed with retrospective shame at the
+memory--here that he had tried to carry her and failed. Life was awful!
+
+"Sanity!" said Mr. Scogan, suddenly breaking a long silence.
+"Sanity--that's what's wrong with me and that's what will be wrong with
+you, my dear Denis, when you're old enough to be sane or insane. In
+a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious
+establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don't
+exist. I am just Vox et praeterea nihil."
+
+Denis made no response; he was thinking of other things. "After all,"
+he said to himself--"after all, Gombauld is better looking than I, more
+entertaining, more confident; and, besides, he's already somebody and
+I'm still only potential..."
+
+"Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen," Mr.
+Scogan went on. Denis tried not to listen, but the tireless insistence
+of Mr. Scogan's discourse gradually compelled his attention. "Men such
+as I am, such as you may possibly become, have never achieved anything.
+We're too sane; we're merely reasonable. We lack the human touch, the
+compelling enthusiastic mania. People are quite ready to listen to the
+philosophers for a little amusement, just as they would listen to a
+fiddler or a mountebank. But as to acting on the advice of the men of
+reason--never. Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of
+reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.
+For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and
+the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and
+supererogatory--reason."
+
+They entered the garden; at the head of one of the alleys stood a green
+wooden bench, embayed in the midst of a fragrant continent of lavender
+bushes. It was here, though the place was shadeless and one breathed
+hot, dry perfume instead of air--it was here that Mr. Scogan elected to
+sit. He thrived on untempered sunlight.
+
+"Consider, for example, the case of Luther and Erasmus." He took out
+his pipe and began to fill it as he talked. "There was Erasmus, a man
+of reason if ever there was one. People listened to him at first--a
+new virtuoso performing on that elegant and resourceful instrument, the
+intellect; they even admired and venerated him. But did he move them to
+behave as he wanted them to behave--reasonably, decently, or at least a
+little less porkishly than usual? He did not. And then Luther appears,
+violent, passionate, a madman insanely convinced about matters in which
+there can be no conviction. He shouted, and men rushed to follow
+him. Erasmus was no longer listened to; he was reviled for his
+reasonableness. Luther was serious, Luther was reality--like the Great
+War. Erasmus was only reason and decency; he lacked the power, being a
+sage, to move men to action. Europe followed Luther and embarked on
+a century and a half of war and bloody persecution. It's a melancholy
+story." Mr. Scogan lighted a match. In the intense light the flame was
+all but invisible. The smell of burning tobacco began to mingle with the
+sweetly acrid smell of the lavender.
+
+"If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about persuading
+them in a maniacal manner. The very sane precepts of the founders of
+religions are only made infectious by means of enthusiasms which to a
+sane man must appear deplorable. It is humiliating to find how impotent
+unadulterated sanity is. Sanity, for example, informs us that the only
+way in which we can preserve civilisation is by behaving decently and
+intelligently. Sanity appeals and argues; our rulers persevere in their
+customary porkishness, while we acquiesce and obey. The only hope is a
+maniacal crusade; I am ready, when it comes, to beat a tambourine with
+the loudest, but at the same time I shall feel a little ashamed of
+myself. However"--Mr. Scogan shrugged his shoulders and, pipe in hand,
+made a gesture of resignation--"It's futile to complain that things are
+as they are. The fact remains that sanity unassisted is useless. What
+we want, then, is a sane and reasonable exploitation of the forces of
+insanity. We sane men will have the power yet." Mr. Scogan's eyes shone
+with a more than ordinary brightness, and, taking his pipe out of his
+mouth, he gave vent to his loud, dry, and somehow rather fiendish laugh.
+
+"But I don't want power," said Denis. He was sitting in limp discomfort
+at one end of the bench, shading his eyes from the intolerable light.
+Mr. Scogan, bolt upright at the other end, laughed again.
+
+"Everybody wants power," he said. "Power in some form or other. The sort
+of power you hanker for is literary power. Some people want power
+to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust for power in
+persecuting words, twisting them, moulding them, torturing them to obey
+you. But I divagate."
+
+"Do you?" asked Denis faintly.
+
+"Yes," Mr. Scogan continued, unheeding, "the time will come. We men
+of intelligence will learn to harness the insanities to the service of
+reason. We can't leave the world any longer to the direction of chance.
+We can't allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like
+Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on casually appearing and turning
+everything upside down. In the past it didn't so much matter; but our
+modern machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War,
+another Luther or two, and the whole concern will go to pieces. In
+future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world's
+maniacs is canalised into proper channels, is made to do useful work,
+like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo..."
+
+"Making electricity to light a Swiss hotel," said Denis. "You ought to
+complete the simile."
+
+Mr. Scogan waved away the interruption. "There's only one thing to be
+done," he said. "The men of intelligence must combine, must conspire,
+and seize power from the imbeciles and maniacs who now direct us. They
+must found the Rational State."
+
+The heat that was slowly paralysing all Denis's mental and bodily
+faculties, seemed to bring to Mr. Scogan additional vitality. He talked
+with an ever-increasing energy, his hands moved in sharp, quick, precise
+gestures, his eyes shone. Hard, dry, and continuous, his voice went
+on sounding and sounding in Denis's ears with the insistence of a
+mechanical noise.
+
+"In the Rational State," he heard Mr. Scogan saying, "human beings will
+be separated out into distinct species, not according to the colour of
+their eyes or the shape of their skulls, but according to the qualities
+of their mind and temperament. Examining psychologists, trained to what
+would now seem an almost superhuman clairvoyance, will test each child
+that is born and assign it to its proper species. Duly labelled and
+docketed, the child will be given the education suitable to members of
+its species, and will be set, in adult life, to perform those functions
+which human beings of his variety are capable of performing."
+
+"How many species will there be?" asked Denis.
+
+"A great many, no doubt," Mr. Scogan answered; "the classification will
+be subtle and elaborate. But it is not in the power of a prophet to go
+into details, nor is it his business. I will do more than indicate the
+three main species into which the subjects of the Rational State will be
+divided."
+
+He paused, cleared his throat, and coughed once or twice, evoking in
+Denis's mind the vision of a table with a glass and water-bottle, and,
+lying across one corner, a long white pointer for the lantern pictures.
+
+"The three main species," Mr. Scogan went on, "will be these: the
+Directing Intelligences, the Men of Faith, and the Herd. Among the
+Intelligences will be found all those capable of thought, those who know
+how to attain a certain degree of freedom--and, alas, how limited, even
+among the most intelligent, that freedom is!--from the mental bondage of
+their time. A select body of Intelligences, drawn from among those who
+have turned their attention to the problems of practical life, will
+be the governors of the Rational State. They will employ as their
+instruments of power the second great species of humanity--the men of
+Faith, the Madmen, as I have been calling them, who believe in things
+unreasonably, with passion, and are ready to die for their beliefs and
+their desires. These wild men, with their fearful potentialities for
+good or for mischief, will no longer be allowed to react casually to
+a casual environment. There will be no more Caesar Borgias, no more
+Luthers and Mohammeds, no more Joanna Southcotts, no more Comstocks. The
+old-fashioned Man of Faith and Desire, that haphazard creature of brute
+circumstance, who might drive men to tears and repentance, or who might
+equally well set them on to cutting one another's throats, will be
+replaced by a new sort of madman, still externally the same, still
+bubbling with a seemingly spontaneous enthusiasm, but, ah, how very
+different from the madman of the past! For the new Man of Faith will be
+expending his passion, his desire, and his enthusiasm in the propagation
+of some reasonable idea. He will be, all unawares, the tool of some
+superior intelligence."
+
+Mr. Scogan chuckled maliciously; it was as though he were taking a
+revenge, in the name of reason, on enthusiasts. "From their earliest
+years, as soon, that is, as the examining psychologists have assigned
+them their place in the classified scheme, the Men of Faith will have
+had their special education under the eye of the Intelligences. Moulded
+by a long process of suggestion, they will go out into the world,
+preaching and practising with a generous mania the coldly reasonable
+projects of the Directors from above. When these projects are
+accomplished, or when the ideas that were useful a decade ago have
+ceased to be useful, the Intelligences will inspire a new generation of
+madmen with a new eternal truth. The principal function of the Men of
+Faith will be to move and direct the Multitude, that third great species
+consisting of those countless millions who lack intelligence and are
+without valuable enthusiasm. When any particular effort is required of
+the Herd, when it is thought necessary, for the sake of solidarity, that
+humanity shall be kindled and united by some single enthusiastic desire
+or idea, the Men of Faith, primed with some simple and satisfying creed,
+will be sent out on a mission of evangelisation. At ordinary times, when
+the high spiritual temperature of a Crusade would be unhealthy, the
+Men of Faith will be quietly and earnestly busy with the great work of
+education. In the upbringing of the Herd, humanity's almost boundless
+suggestibility will be scientifically exploited. Systematically, from
+earliest infancy, its members will be assured that there is no happiness
+to be found except in work and obedience; they will be made to believe
+that they are happy, that they are tremendously important beings, and
+that everything they do is noble and significant. For the lower species
+the earth will be restored to the centre of the universe and man to
+pre-eminence on the earth. Oh, I envy the lot of the commonality in the
+Rational State! Working their eight hours a day, obeying their betters,
+convinced of their own grandeur and significance and immortality, they
+will be marvellously happy, happier than any race of men has ever been.
+They will go through life in a rosy state of intoxication, from which
+they will never awake. The Men of Faith will play the cup-bearers at
+this lifelong bacchanal, filling and ever filling again with the warm
+liquor that the Intelligences, in sad and sober privacy behind the
+scenes, will brew for the intoxication of their subjects."
+
+"And what will be my place in the Rational State?" Denis drowsily
+inquired from under his shading hand.
+
+Mr. Scogan looked at him for a moment in silence. "It's difficult to see
+where you would fit in," he said at last. "You couldn't do manual work;
+you're too independent and unsuggestible to belong to the larger Herd;
+you have none of the characteristics required in a Man of Faith. As for
+the Directing Intelligences, they will have to be marvellously clear and
+merciless and penetrating." He paused and shook his head. "No, I can see
+no place for you; only the lethal chamber."
+
+Deeply hurt, Denis emitted the imitation of a loud Homeric laugh. "I'm
+getting sunstroke here," he said, and got up.
+
+Mr. Scogan followed his example, and they walked slowly away down the
+narrow path, brushing the blue lavender flowers in their passage. Denis
+pulled a sprig of lavender and sniffed at it; then some dark leaves of
+rosemary that smelt like incense in a cavernous church. They passed a
+bed of opium poppies, dispetaled now; the round, ripe seedheads were
+brown and dry--like Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads
+stuck on poles. He liked the fancy enough to impart it to Mr. Scogan.
+
+"Like Polynesian trophies..." Uttered aloud, the fancy seemed less
+charming and significant than it did when it first occurred to him.
+
+There was a silence, and in a growing wave of sound the whir of the
+reaping machines swelled up from the fields beyond the garden and then
+receded into a remoter hum.
+
+"It is satisfactory to think," said Mr. Scogan, as they strolled slowly
+onward, "that a multitude of people are toiling in the harvest fields in
+order that we may talk of Polynesia. Like every other good thing in this
+world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however,
+it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. Let us be
+duly thankful for that, my dear Denis--duly thankful," he repeated, and
+knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
+
+Denis was not listening. He had suddenly remembered Anne. She was with
+Gombauld--alone with him in his studio. It was an intolerable thought.
+
+"Shall we go and pay a call on Gombauld?" he suggested carelessly. "It
+would be amusing to see what he's doing now."
+
+He laughed inwardly to think how furious Gombauld would be when he saw
+them arriving.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+Gombauld was by no means so furious at their apparition as Denis had
+hoped and expected he would be. Indeed, he was rather pleased than
+annoyed when the two faces, one brown and pointed, the other round and
+pale, appeared in the frame of the open door. The energy born of his
+restless irritation was dying within him, returning to its emotional
+elements. A moment more and he would have been losing his temper
+again--and Anne would be keeping hers, infuriatingly. Yes, he was
+positively glad to see them.
+
+"Come in, come in," he called out hospitably.
+
+Followed by Mr. Scogan, Denis climbed the little ladder and stepped over
+the threshold. He looked suspiciously from Gombauld to his sitter, and
+could learn nothing from the expression of their faces except that they
+both seemed pleased to see the visitors. Were they really glad, or were
+they cunningly simulating gladness? He wondered.
+
+Mr. Scogan, meanwhile, was looking at the portrait.
+
+"Excellent," he said approvingly, "excellent. Almost too true to
+character, if that is possible; yes, positively too true. But I'm
+surprised to find you putting in all this psychology business." He
+pointed to the face, and with his extended finger followed the slack
+curves of the painted figure. "I thought you were one of the fellows who
+went in exclusively for balanced masses and impinging planes."
+
+Gombauld laughed. "This is a little infidelity," he said.
+
+"I'm sorry," said Mr. Scogan. "I for one, without ever having had
+the slightest appreciation of painting, have always taken particular
+pleasure in Cubismus. I like to see pictures from which nature has been
+completely banished, pictures which are exclusively the product of the
+human mind. They give me the same pleasure as I derive from a good piece
+of reasoning or a mathematical problem or an achievement of engineering.
+Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is
+too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and
+incomprehensible. I am at home with the works of man; if I choose to
+set my mind to it, I can understand anything that any man has made or
+thought. That is why I always travel by Tube, never by bus if I can
+possibly help it. For, travelling by bus, one can't avoid seeing, even
+in London, a few stray works of God--the sky, for example, an occasional
+tree, the flowers in the window-boxes. But travel by Tube and you see
+nothing but the works of man--iron riveted into geometrical forms,
+straight lines of concrete, patterned expanses of tiles. All is human
+and the product of friendly and comprehensible minds. All philosophies
+and all religions--what are they but spiritual Tubes bored through the
+universe! Through these narrow tunnels, where all is recognisably human,
+one travels comfortable and secure, contriving to forget that all round
+and below and above them stretches the blind mass of earth, endless
+and unexplored. Yes, give me the Tube and Cubismus every time; give me
+ideas, so snug and neat and simple and well made. And preserve me from
+nature, preserve me from all that's inhumanly large and complicated and
+obscure. I haven't the courage, and, above all, I haven't the time to
+start wandering in that labyrinth."
+
+While Mr. Scogan was discoursing, Denis had crossed over to the farther
+side of the little square chamber, where Anne was sitting, still in her
+graceful, lazy pose, on the low chair.
+
+"Well?" he demanded, looking at her almost fiercely. What was he asking
+of her? He hardly knew himself.
+
+Anne looked up at him, and for answer echoed his "Well?" in another, a
+laughing key.
+
+Denis had nothing more, at the moment, to say. Two or three canvases
+stood in the corner behind Anne's chair, their faces turned to the wall.
+He pulled them out and began to look at the paintings.
+
+"May I see too?" Anne requested.
+
+He stood them in a row against the wall. Anne had to turn round in her
+chair to look at them. There was the big canvas of the man fallen from
+the horse, there was a painting of flowers, there was a small landscape.
+His hands on the back of the chair, Denis leaned over her. From behind
+the easel at the other side of the room Mr. Scogan was talking away.
+For a long time they looked at the pictures, saying nothing; or, rather,
+Anne looked at the pictures, while Denis, for the most part, looked at
+Anne.
+
+"I like the man and the horse; don't you?" she said at last, looking up
+with an inquiring smile.
+
+Denis nodded, and then in a queer, strangled voice, as though it had
+cost him a great effort to utter the words, he said, "I love you."
+
+It was a remark which Anne had heard a good many times before and mostly
+heard with equanimity. But on this occasion--perhaps because they had
+come so unexpectedly, perhaps for some other reason--the words provoked
+in her a certain surprised commotion.
+
+"My poor Denis," she managed to say, with a laugh; but she was blushing
+as she spoke.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+It was noon. Denis, descending from his chamber, where he had been
+making an unsuccessful effort to write something about nothing in
+particular, found the drawing-room deserted. He was about to go out into
+the garden when his eye fell on a familiar but mysterious object--the
+large red notebook in which he had so often seen Jenny quietly and
+busily scribbling. She had left it lying on the window-seat. The
+temptation was great. He picked up the book and slipped off the elastic
+band that kept it discreetly closed.
+
+"Private. Not to be opened," was written in capital letters on the
+cover. He raised his eyebrows. It was the sort of thing one wrote in
+one's Latin Grammar while one was still at one's preparatory school.=
+
+
+```"Black is the raven, black is the rook,
+
+```But blacker the thief who steals this book!"=
+
+It was curiously childish, he thought, and he smiled to himself. He
+opened the book. What he saw made him wince as though he had been
+struck.
+
+Denis was his own severest critic; so, at least, he had always believed.
+He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the
+palpitating entrails of his own soul; he was Brown Dog to himself.
+His weaknesses, his absurdities--no one knew them better than he did.
+Indeed, in a vague way he imagined that nobody beside himself was aware
+of them at all. It seemed, somehow, inconceivable that he should appear
+to other people as they appeared to him; inconceivable that they ever
+spoke of him among themselves in that same freely critical and, to be
+quite honest, mildly malicious tone in which he was accustomed to talk
+of them. In his own eyes he had defects, but to see them was a privilege
+reserved to him alone. For the rest of the world he was surely an image
+of flawless crystal. It was almost axiomatic.
+
+On opening the red notebook that crystal image of himself crashed to
+the ground, and was irreparably shattered. He was not his own severest
+critic after all. The discovery was a painful one.
+
+The fruit of Jenny's unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A caricature
+of himself, reading (the book was upside-down). In the background a
+dancing couple, recognisable as Gombauld and Anne. Beneath, the legend:
+"Fable of the Wallflower and the Sour Grapes." Fascinated and horrified,
+Denis pored over the drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious
+Rouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The
+expression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered
+by a feeble envy; the attitude of the body and limbs, an attitude of
+studious and scholarly dignity, given away by the fidgety pose of the
+turned-in feet--these things were terrible. And, more terrible still,
+was the likeness, was the magisterial certainty with which his physical
+peculiarities were all recorded and subtly exaggerated.
+
+Denis looked deeper into the book. There were caricatures of other
+people: of Priscilla and Mr. Barbecue-Smith; of Henry Wimbush, of Anne
+and Gombauld; of Mr. Scogan, whom Jenny had represented in a light that
+was more than slightly sinister, that was, indeed, diabolic; of Mary and
+Ivor. He scarcely glanced at them. A fearful desire to know the worst
+about himself possessed him. He turned over the leaves, lingering at
+nothing that was not his own image. Seven full pages were devoted to
+him.
+
+"Private. Not to be opened." He had disobeyed the injunction; he had
+only got what he deserved. Thoughtfully he closed the book, and slid the
+rubber band once more into its place. Sadder and wiser, he went out on
+to the terrace. And so this, he reflected, this was how Jenny employed
+the leisure hours in her ivory tower apart. And he had thought her a
+simple-minded, uncritical creature! It was he, it seemed, who was the
+fool. He felt no resentment towards Jenny. No, the distressing thing
+wasn't Jenny herself; it was what she and the phenomenon of her red
+book represented, what they stood for and concretely symbolised. They
+represented all the vast conscious world of men outside himself; they
+symbolised something that in his studious solitariness he was apt not to
+believe in. He could stand at Piccadilly Circus, could watch the
+crowds shuffle past, and still imagine himself the one fully conscious,
+intelligent, individual being among all those thousands. It seemed,
+somehow, impossible that other people should be in their way as
+elaborate and complete as he in his. Impossible; and yet, periodically
+he would make some painful discovery about the external world and the
+horrible reality of its consciousness and its intelligence. The red
+notebook was one of these discoveries, a footprint in the sand. It put
+beyond a doubt the fact that the outer world really existed.
+
+Sitting on the balustrade of the terrace, he ruminated this unpleasant
+truth for some time. Still chewing on it, he strolled pensively down
+towards the swimming-pool. A peacock and his hen trailed their shabby
+finery across the turf of the lower lawn. Odious birds! Their necks,
+thick and greedily fleshy at the roots, tapered up to the cruel inanity
+of their brainless heads, their flat eyes and piercing beaks. The
+fabulists were right, he reflected, when they took beasts to illustrate
+their tractates of human morality. Animals resemble men with all the
+truthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, the red notebook!) He threw a piece
+of stick at the slowly pacing birds. They rushed towards it, thinking it
+was something to eat.
+
+He walked on. The profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed him. Like
+a great wooden octopus, it spread its long arms abroad.=
+
+
+```"Under the spreading ilex tree..."=
+
+He tried to remember who the poem was by, but couldn't.=
+
+
+```"The smith, a brawny man is he,
+
+```With arms like rubber bands."=
+
+Just like his; he would have to try and do his Muller exercises more
+regularly.
+
+He emerged once more into the sunshine. The pool lay before him,
+reflecting in its bronze mirror the blue and various green of the
+summer day. Looking at it, he thought of Anne's bare arms and seal-sleek
+bathing-dress, her moving knees and feet.=
+
+
+```"And little Luce with the white legs,
+
+```And bouncing Barbary..."=
+
+Oh, these rags and tags of other people's making! Would he ever be able
+to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was
+truly his own, or was it simply an education?
+
+He walked slowly round the water's edge. In an embayed recess among
+the surrounding yew trees, leaning her back against the pedestal of a
+pleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus, executed by some nameless
+mason of the seicento, he saw Mary pensively sitting.
+
+"Hullo!" he said, for he was passing so close to her that he had to say
+something.
+
+Mary looked up. "Hullo!" she answered in a melancholy, uninterested
+tone.
+
+In this alcove hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to
+Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down beside her under the shadow of the
+pudic goddess. There was a prolonged silence.
+
+At breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture postcard
+of Gobley Great Park. A stately Georgian pile, with a facade sixteen
+windows wide; parterres in the foreground; huge, smooth lawns receding
+out of the picture to right and left. Ten years more of the hard times
+and Gobley, with all its peers, will be deserted and decaying. Fifty
+years, and the countryside will know the old landmarks no more. They
+will have vanished as the monasteries vanished before them. At the
+moment, however, Mary's mind was not moved by these considerations.
+
+On the back of the postcard, next to the address, was written, in Ivor's
+bold, large hand, a single quatrain.
+
+
+``"Hail, maid of moonlight! Bride of the sun, farewell!
+
+```Like bright plumes moulted in an angel's flight,
+
+``There sleep within my heart's most mystic cell
+
+```Memories of morning, memories of the night."
+
+There followed a postscript of three lines: "Would you mind asking one
+of the housemaids to forward the packet of safety-razor blades I left in
+the drawer of my washstand. Thanks.--Ivor."
+
+Seated under the Venus's immemorial gesture, Mary considered life
+and love. The abolition of her repressions, so far from bringing the
+expected peace of mind, had brought nothing but disquiet, a new and
+hitherto unexperienced misery. Ivor, Ivor...She couldn't do without him
+now. It was evident, on the other hand, from the poem on the back of the
+picture postcard, that Ivor could very well do without her. He was at
+Gobley now, so was Zenobia. Mary knew Zenobia. She thought of the last
+verse of the song he had sung that night in the garden.=
+
+
+```"Le lendemain, Phillis peu sage
+
+```Aurait donne moutons et chien
+
+```Pour un baiser que le volage
+
+```A Lisette donnait pour rien."=
+
+Mary shed tears at the memory; she had never been so unhappy in all her
+life before.
+
+It was Denis who first broke the silence. "The individual," he began in
+a soft and sadly philosophical tone, "is not a self-supporting universe.
+There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when
+he is forced to take cognisance of the existence of other universes
+besides himself."
+
+He had contrived this highly abstract generalisation as a preliminary
+to a personal confidence. It was the first gambit in a conversation that
+was to lead up to Jenny's caricatures.
+
+"True," said Mary; and, generalising for herself, she added, "When one
+individual comes into intimate contact with another, she--or he, of
+course, as the case may be--must almost inevitably receive or inflict
+suffering."
+
+"One is apt," Denis went on, "to be so spellbound by the spectacle of
+one's own personality that one forgets that the spectacle presents
+itself to other people as well as to oneself."
+
+Mary was not listening. "The difficulty," she said, "makes itself
+acutely felt in matters of sex. If one individual seeks intimate contact
+with another individual in the natural way, she is certain to receive or
+inflict suffering. If on the other hand, she avoids contacts, she risks
+the equally grave sufferings that follow on unnatural repressions. As
+you see, it's a dilemma."
+
+"When I think of my own case," said Denis, making a more decided move in
+the desired direction, "I am amazed how ignorant I am of other people's
+mentality in general, and above all and in particular, of their opinions
+about myself. Our minds are sealed books only occasionally opened to
+the outside world." He made a gesture that was faintly suggestive of the
+drawing off of a rubber band.
+
+"It's an awful problem," said Mary thoughtfully. "One has to have had
+personal experience to realise quite how awful it is."
+
+"Exactly." Denis nodded. "One has to have had first-hand experience." He
+leaned towards her and slightly lowered his voice. "This very morning,
+for example..." he began, but his confidences were cut short. The deep
+voice of the gong, tempered by distance to a pleasant booming, floated
+down from the house. It was lunch-time. Mechanically Mary rose to her
+feet, and Denis, a little hurt that she should exhibit such a desperate
+anxiety for her food and so slight an interest in his spiritual
+experiences, followed her. They made their way up to the house without
+speaking.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+I hope you all realise," said Henry Wimbush during dinner, "that next
+Monday is Bank Holiday, and that you will all be expected to help in the
+Fair."
+
+"Heavens!" cried Anne. "The Fair--I had forgotten all about it. What a
+nightmare! Couldn't you put a stop to it, Uncle Henry?"
+
+Mr. Wimbush sighed and shook his head. "Alas," he said, "I fear I
+cannot. I should have liked to put an end to it years ago; but the
+claims of Charity are strong."
+
+"It's not charity we want," Anne murmured rebelliously; "it's justice."
+
+"Besides," Mr. Wimbush went on, "the Fair has become an institution. Let
+me see, it must be twenty-two years since we started it. It was a modest
+affair then. Now..." he made a sweeping movement with his hand and was
+silent.
+
+It spoke highly for Mr. Wimbush's public spirit that he still continued
+to tolerate the Fair. Beginning as a sort of glorified church
+bazaar, Crome's yearly Charity Fair had grown into a noisy thing of
+merry-go-rounds, cocoanut shies, and miscellaneous side shows--a real
+genuine fair on the grand scale. It was the local St. Bartholomew, and
+the people of all the neighbouring villages, with even a contingent from
+the county town, flocked into the park for their Bank Holiday amusement.
+The local hospital profited handsomely, and it was this fact alone which
+prevented Mr. Wimbush, to whom the Fair was a cause of recurrent and
+never-diminishing agony, from putting a stop to the nuisance which
+yearly desecrated his park and garden.
+
+"I've made all the arrangements already," Henry Wimbush went on. "Some
+of the larger marquees will be put up to-morrow. The swings and the
+merry-go-round arrive on Sunday."
+
+"So there's no escape," said Anne, turning to the rest of the party.
+"You'll all have to do something. As a special favour you're allowed
+to choose your slavery. My job is the tea tent, as usual, Aunt
+Priscilla..."
+
+"My dear," said Mrs. Wimbush, interrupting her, "I have more important
+things to think about than the Fair. But you need have no doubt that I
+shall do my best when Monday comes to encourage the villagers."
+
+"That's splendid," said Anne. "Aunt Priscilla will encourage the
+villagers. What will you do, Mary?"
+
+"I won't do anything where I have to stand by and watch other people
+eat."
+
+"Then you'll look after the children's sports."
+
+"All right," Mary agreed. "I'll look after the children's sports."
+
+"And Mr. Scogan?"
+
+Mr. Scogan reflected. "May I be allowed to tell fortunes?" he asked at
+last. "I think I should be good at telling fortunes."
+
+"But you can't tell fortunes in that costume!"
+
+"Can't I?" Mr. Scogan surveyed himself.
+
+"You'll have to be dressed up. Do you still persist?"
+
+"I'm ready to suffer all indignities."
+
+"Good!" said Anne; and turning to Gombauld, "You must be our lightning
+artist," she said. "'Your portrait for a shilling in five minutes.'"
+
+"It's a pity I'm not Ivor," said Gombauld, with a laugh. "I could throw
+in a picture of their Auras for an extra sixpence."
+
+Mary flushed. "Nothing is to be gained," she said severely, "by speaking
+with levity of serious subjects. And, after all, whatever your personal
+views may be, psychical research is a perfectly serious subject."
+
+"And what about Denis?"
+
+Denis made a deprecating gesture. "I have no accomplishments," he said,
+"I'll just be one of those men who wear a thing in their buttonholes and
+go about telling people which is the way to tea and not to walk on the
+grass."
+
+"No, no," said Anne. "That won't do. You must do something more than
+that."
+
+"But what? All the good jobs are taken, and I can do nothing but lisp in
+numbers."
+
+"Well, then, you must lisp," concluded Anne. "You must write a poem for
+the occasion--an 'Ode on Bank Holiday.' We'll print it on Uncle Henry's
+press and sell it at twopence a copy."
+
+"Sixpence," Denis protested. "It'll be worth sixpence."
+
+Anne shook her head. "Twopence," she repeated firmly. "Nobody will pay
+more than twopence."
+
+"And now there's Jenny," said Mr Wimbush. "Jenny," he said, raising his
+voice, "what will you do?"
+
+Denis thought of suggesting that she might draw caricatures at sixpence
+an execution, but decided it would be wiser to go on feigning ignorance
+of her talent. His mind reverted to the red notebook. Could it really be
+true that he looked like that?
+
+"What will I do," Jenny echoed, "what will I do?" She frowned
+thoughtfully for a moment; then her face brightened and she smiled.
+"When I was young," she said, "I learnt to play the drums."
+
+"The drums?"
+
+Jenny nodded, and, in proof of her assertion, agitated her knife
+and fork, like a pair of drumsticks, over her plate. "If there's any
+opportunity of playing the drums..." she began.
+
+"But of course," said Anne, "there's any amount of opportunity. We'll
+put you down definitely for the drums. That's the lot," she added.
+
+"And a very good lot too," said Gombauld. "I look forward to my Bank
+Holiday. It ought to be gay."
+
+"It ought indeed," Mr Scogan assented. "But you may rest assured that it
+won't be. No holiday is ever anything but a disappointment."
+
+"Come, come," protested Gombauld. "My holiday at Crome isn't being a
+disappointment."
+
+"Isn't it?" Anne turned an ingenuous mask towards him.
+
+"No, it isn't," he answered.
+
+"I'm delighted to hear it."
+
+"It's in the very nature of things," Mr. Scogan went on; "our holidays
+can't help being disappointments. Reflect for a moment. What is a
+holiday? The ideal, the Platonic Holiday of Holidays is surely a
+complete and absolute change. You agree with me in my definition?" Mr.
+Scogan glanced from face to face round the table; his sharp nose moved
+in a series of rapid jerks through all the points of the compass. There
+was no sign of dissent; he continued: "A complete and absolute change;
+very well. But isn't a complete and absolute change precisely the thing
+we can never have--never, in the very nature of things?" Mr. Scogan
+once more looked rapidly about him. "Of course it is. As ourselves, as
+specimens of Homo Sapiens, as members of a society, how can we hope to
+have anything like an absolute change? We are tied down by the frightful
+limitation of our human faculties, by the notions which society imposes
+on us through our fatal suggestibility, by our own personalities. For
+us, a complete holiday is out of the question. Some of us struggle
+manfully to take one, but we never succeed, if I may be allowed to
+express myself metaphorically, we never succeed in getting farther than
+Southend."
+
+"You're depressing," said Anne.
+
+"I mean to be," Mr. Scogan replied, and, expanding the fingers of his
+right hand, he went on: "Look at me, for example. What sort of a holiday
+can I take? In endowing me with passions and faculties Nature has been
+horribly niggardly. The full range of human potentialities is in
+any case distressingly limited; my range is a limitation within a
+limitation. Out of the ten octaves that make up the human instrument,
+I can compass perhaps two. Thus, while I may have a certain amount
+of intelligence, I have no aesthetic sense; while I possess the
+mathematical faculty, I am wholly without the religious emotions; while
+I am naturally addicted to venery, I have little ambition and am not
+at all avaricious. Education has further limited my scope. Having been
+brought up in society, I am impregnated with its laws; not only should
+I be afraid of taking a holiday from them, I should also feel it painful
+to try to do so. In a word, I have a conscience as well as a fear of
+gaol. Yes, I know it by experience. How often have I tried to take
+holidays, to get away from myself, my own boring nature, my insufferable
+mental surroundings!" Mr. Scogan sighed. "But always without
+success," he added, "always without success. In my youth I was always
+striving--how hard!--to feel religiously and aesthetically. Here, said
+I to myself, are two tremendously important and exciting emotions. Life
+would be richer, warmer, brighter, altogether more amusing, if I could
+feel them. I try to feel them. I read the works of the mystics. They
+seemed to me nothing but the most deplorable claptrap--as indeed they
+always must to anyone who does not feel the same emotion as the authors
+felt when they were writing. For it is the emotion that matters. The
+written work is simply an attempt to express emotion, which is in itself
+inexpressible, in terms of intellect and logic. The mystic objectifies
+a rich feeling in the pit of the stomach into a cosmology. For other
+mystics that cosmology is a symbol of the rich feeling. For the
+unreligious it is a symbol of nothing, and so appears merely grotesque.
+A melancholy fact! But I divagate." Mr. Scogan checked himself. "So much
+for the religious emotion. As for the aesthetic--I was at even greater
+pains to cultivate that. I have looked at all the right works of art
+in every part of Europe. There was a time when, I venture to believe,
+I knew more about Taddeo da Poggibonsi, more about the cryptic Amico
+di Taddeo, even than Henry does. To-day, I am happy to say, I have
+forgotten most of the knowledge I then so laboriously acquired; but
+without vanity I can assert that it was prodigious. I don't pretend, of
+course, to know anything about nigger sculpture or the later seventeenth
+century in Italy; but about all the periods that were fashionable before
+1900 I am, or was, omniscient. Yes, I repeat it, omniscient. But did
+that fact make me any more appreciative of art in general? It did not.
+Confronted by a picture, of which I could tell you all the known and
+presumed history--the date when it was painted, the character of the
+painter, the influences that had gone to make it what it was--I felt
+none of that strange excitement and exaltation which is, as I am
+informed by those who do feel it, the true aesthetic emotion. I felt
+nothing but a certain interest in the subject of the picture; or more
+often, when the subject was hackneyed and religious, I felt nothing but
+a great weariness of spirit. Nevertheless, I must have gone on looking
+at pictures for ten years before I would honestly admit to myself that
+they merely bored me. Since then I have given up all attempts to take
+a holiday. I go on cultivating my old stale daily self in the resigned
+spirit with which a bank clerk performs from ten till six his daily
+task. A holiday, indeed! I'm sorry for you, Gombauld, if you still look
+forward to having a holiday."
+
+Gombauld shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps," he said, "my standards
+aren't as elevated as yours. But personally I found the war quite as
+thorough a holiday from all the ordinary decencies and sanities, all the
+common emotions and preoccupations, as I ever want to have."
+
+"Yes," Mr. Scogan thoughtfully agreed. "Yes, the war was certainly
+something of a holiday. It was a step beyond Southend; it was
+Weston-super-Mare; it was almost Ilfracombe."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+A little canvas village of tents and booths had sprung up, just beyond
+the boundaries of the garden, in the green expanse of the park. A crowd
+thronged its streets, the men dressed mostly in black--holiday best,
+funeral best--the women in pale muslins. Here and there tricolour
+bunting hung inert. In the midst of the canvas town, scarlet and gold
+and crystal, the merry-go-round glittered in the sun. The balloon-man
+walked among the crowd, and above his head, like a huge, inverted
+bunch of many-coloured grapes, the balloons strained upwards. With a
+scythe-like motion the boat-swings reaped the air, and from the funnel
+of the engine which worked the roundabout rose a thin, scarcely wavering
+column of black smoke.
+
+Denis had climbed to the top of one of Sir Ferdinando's towers, and
+there, standing on the sun-baked leads, his elbows resting on the
+parapet, he surveyed the scene. The steam-organ sent up prodigious
+music. The clashing of automatic cymbals beat out with inexorable
+precision the rhythm of piercingly sounded melodies. The harmonies were
+like a musical shattering of glass and brass. Far down in the bass
+the Last Trump was hugely blowing, and with such persistence, such
+resonance, that its alternate tonic and dominant detached themselves
+from the rest of the music and made a tune of their own, a loud,
+monotonous see-saw.
+
+Denis leaned over the gulf of swirling noise. If he threw himself over
+the parapet, the noise would surely buoy him up, keep him suspended,
+bobbing, as a fountain balances a ball on its breaking crest. Another
+fancy came to him, this time in metrical form.=
+
+
+```"My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretched
+
+```Over a bubbling cauldron."=
+
+Bad, bad. But he liked the idea of something thin and distended being
+blown up from underneath.=
+
+
+```"My soul is a thin tent of gut..."=
+
+or better--=
+
+
+```"My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane..."=
+
+That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical
+quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time
+for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual
+vortex. He went down slowly. "My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane..."
+
+On the terrace stood a knot of distinguished visitors. There was old
+Lord Moleyn, like a caricature of an English milord in a French comic
+paper: a long man, with a long nose and long, drooping moustaches and
+long teeth of old ivory, and lower down, absurdly, a short covert coat,
+and below that long, long legs cased in pearl-grey trousers--legs that
+bent unsteadily at the knee and gave a kind of sideways wobble as
+he walked. Beside him, short and thick-set, stood Mr. Callamay, the
+venerable conservative statesman, with a face like a Roman bust, and
+short white hair. Young girls didn't much like going for motor drives
+alone with Mr. Callamay; and of old Lord Moleyn one wondered why he
+wasn't living in gilded exile on the island of Capri among the other
+distinguished persons who, for one reason or another, find it impossible
+to live in England. They were talking to Anne, laughing, the one
+profoundly, the other hootingly.
+
+A black silk balloon towing a black-and-white striped parachute proved
+to be old Mrs. Budge from the big house on the other side of the valley.
+She stood low on the ground, and the spikes of her black-and-white
+sunshade menaced the eyes of Priscilla Wimbush, who towered over her--a
+massive figure dressed in purple and topped with a queenly toque on
+which the nodding black plumes recalled the splendours of a first-class
+Parisian funeral.
+
+Denis peeped at them discreetly from the window of the morning-room.
+His eyes were suddenly become innocent, childlike, unprejudiced. They
+seemed, these people, inconceivably fantastic. And yet they really
+existed, they functioned by themselves, they were conscious, they
+had minds. Moreover, he was like them. Could one believe it? But the
+evidence of the red notebook was conclusive.
+
+It would have been polite to go and say, "How d'you do?" But at the
+moment Denis did not want to talk, could not have talked. His soul was a
+tenuous, tremulous, pale membrane. He would keep its sensibility intact
+and virgin as long as he could. Cautiously he crept out by a side
+door and made his way down towards the park. His soul fluttered as he
+approached the noise and movement of the fair. He paused for a moment on
+the brink, then stepped in and was engulfed.
+
+Hundreds of people, each with his own private face and all of them real,
+separate, alive: the thought was disquieting. He paid twopence and saw
+the Tatooed Woman; twopence more, the Largest Rat in the World. From the
+home of the Rat he emerged just in time to see a hydrogen-filled balloon
+break loose for home. A child howled up after it; but calmly, a perfect
+sphere of flushed opal, it mounted, mounted. Denis followed it with his
+eyes until it became lost in the blinding sunlight. If he could but send
+his soul to follow it!...
+
+He sighed, stuck his steward's rosette in his buttonhole, and started to
+push his way, aimlessly but officially, through the crowd.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+Mr. Scogan had been accommodated in a little canvas hut. Dressed in a
+black skirt and a red bodice, with a yellow-and-red bandana handkerchief
+tied round his black wig, he looked--sharp-nosed, brown, and
+wrinkled--like the Bohemian Hag of Frith's Derby Day. A placard pinned
+to the curtain of the doorway announced the presence within the tent of
+"Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana." Seated at a table, Mr. Scogan
+received his clients in mysterious silence, indicating with a movement
+of the finger that they were to sit down opposite him and to extend
+their hands for his inspection. He then examined the palm that was
+presented him, using a magnifying glass and a pair of horn spectacles.
+He had a terrifying way of shaking his head, frowning and clicking with
+his tongue as he looked at the lines. Sometimes he would whisper, as
+though to himself, "Terrible, terrible!" or "God preserve us!" sketching
+out the sign of the cross as he uttered the words. The clients who came
+in laughing grew suddenly grave; they began to take the witch seriously.
+She was a formidable-looking woman; could it be, was it possible, that
+there was something in this sort of thing after all? After all, they
+thought, as the hag shook her head over their hands, after all...And
+they waited, with an uncomfortably beating heart, for the oracle to
+speak. After a long and silent inspection, Mr. Scogan would suddenly
+look up and ask, in a hoarse whisper, some horrifying question, such as,
+"Have you ever been hit on the head with a hammer by a young man with
+red hair?" When the answer was in the negative, which it could hardly
+fail to be, Mr. Scogan would nod several times, saying, "I was afraid
+so. Everything is still to come, still to come, though it can't be
+very far off now." Sometimes, after a long examination, he would just
+whisper, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," and refuse
+to divulge any details of a future too appalling to be envisaged without
+despair. Sesostris had a success of horror. People stood in a queue
+outside the witch's booth waiting for the privilege of hearing sentence
+pronounced upon them.
+
+Denis, in the course of his round, looked with curiosity at this crowd
+of suppliants before the shrine of the oracle. He had a great desire
+to see how Mr. Scogan played his part. The canvas booth was a rickety,
+ill-made structure. Between its walls and its sagging roof were long
+gaping chinks and crannies. Denis went to the tea-tent and borrowed a
+wooden bench and a small Union Jack. With these he hurried back to the
+booth of Sesostris. Setting down the bench at the back of the booth,
+he climbed up, and with a great air of busy efficiency began to tie the
+Union Jack to the top of one of the tent-poles. Through the crannies in
+the canvas he could see almost the whole of the interior of the tent.
+Mr. Scogan's bandana-covered head was just below him; his terrifying
+whispers came clearly up. Denis looked and listened while the witch
+prophesied financial losses, death by apoplexy, destruction by air-raids
+in the next war.
+
+"Is there going to be another war?" asked the old lady to whom he had
+predicted this end.
+
+"Very soon," said Mr. Scogan, with an air of quiet confidence.
+
+The old lady was succeeded by a girl dressed in white muslin, garnished
+with pink ribbons. She was wearing a broad hat, so that Denis could not
+see her face; but from her figure and the roundness of her bare arms
+he judged her young and pleasing. Mr. Scogan looked at her hand, then
+whispered, "You are still virtuous."
+
+The young lady giggled and exclaimed, "Oh, lor'!"
+
+"But you will not remain so for long," added Mr. Scogan sepulchrally.
+The young lady giggled again. "Destiny, which interests itself in small
+things no less than in great, has announced the fact upon your hand."
+Mr. Scogan took up the magnifying-glass and began once more to examine
+the white palm. "Very interesting," he said, as though to himself--"very
+interesting. It's as clear as day." He was silent.
+
+"What's clear?" asked the girl.
+
+"I don't think I ought to tell you." Mr. Scogan shook his head; the
+pendulous brass ear-rings which he had screwed on to his ears tinkled.
+
+"Please, please!" she implored.
+
+The witch seemed to ignore her remark. "Afterwards, it's not at all
+clear. The fates don't say whether you will settle down to married life
+and have four children or whether you will try to go on the cinema
+and have none. They are only specific about this one rather crucial
+incident."
+
+"What is it? What is it? Oh, do tell me!"
+
+The white muslin figure leant eagerly forward.
+
+Mr. Scogan sighed. "Very well," he said, "if you must know, you
+must know. But if anything untoward happens you must blame your
+own curiosity. Listen. Listen." He lifted up a sharp, claw-nailed
+forefinger. "This is what the fates have written. Next Sunday afternoon
+at six o'clock you will be sitting on the second stile on the footpath
+that leads from the church to the lower road. At that moment a man will
+appear walking along the footpath." Mr. Scogan looked at her hand again
+as though to refresh his memory of the details of the scene. "A man," he
+repeated--"a small man with a sharp nose, not exactly good looking nor
+precisely young, but fascinating." He lingered hissingly over the word.
+"He will ask you, 'Can you tell me the way to Paradise?' and you will
+answer, 'Yes, I'll show you,' and walk with him down towards the little
+hazel copse. I cannot read what will happen after that." There was a
+silence.
+
+"Is it really true?" asked white muslin.
+
+The witch gave a shrug of the shoulders. "I merely tell you what I read
+in your hand. Good afternoon. That will be sixpence. Yes, I have change.
+Thank you. Good afternoon."
+
+Denis stepped down from the bench; tied insecurely and crookedly to the
+tentpole, the Union Jack hung limp on the windless air. "If only I could
+do things like that!" he thought, as he carried the bench back to the
+tea-tent.
+
+Anne was sitting behind a long table filling thick white cups from an
+urn. A neat pile of printed sheets lay before her on the table. Denis
+took one of them and looked at it affectionately. It was his poem. They
+had printed five hundred copies, and very nice the quarto broadsheets
+looked.
+
+"Have you sold many?" he asked in a casual tone.
+
+Anne put her head on one side deprecatingly. "Only three so far, I'm
+afraid. But I'm giving a free copy to everyone who spends more than a
+shilling on his tea. So in any case it's having a circulation."
+
+Denis made no reply, but walked slowly away. He looked at the broadsheet
+in his hand and read the lines to himself relishingly as he walked
+along:=
+
+
+```"This day of roundabouts and swings,
+
+```Struck weights, shied cocoa-nuts, tossed rings,
+
+```Switchbacks, Aunt Sallies, and all such small
+
+```High jinks--you call it ferial?
+
+```A holiday? But paper noses
+
+```Sniffed the artificial roses
+
+```Of round Venetian cheeks through half
+
+```Each carnival year, and masks might laugh
+
+```At things the naked face for shame
+
+```Would blush at--laugh and think no blame.
+
+```A holiday? But Galba showed
+
+```Elephants on an airy road;
+
+```Jumbo trod the tightrope then,
+
+```And in the circus armed men
+
+```Stabbed home for sport and died to break
+
+```Those dull imperatives that make
+
+```A prison of every working day,
+
+```Where all must drudge and all obey.
+
+```Sing Holiday! You do not know
+
+```How to be free. The Russian snow
+
+```Flowered with bright blood whose roses spread
+
+```Petals of fading, fading red
+
+```That died into the snow again,
+
+```Into the virgin snow; and men
+
+```From all ancient bonds were freed.
+
+```Old law, old custom, and old creed,
+
+```Old right and wrong there bled to death;
+
+```The frozen air received their breath,
+
+```A little smoke that died away;
+
+```And round about them where they lay
+
+```The snow bloomed roses. Blood was there
+
+```A red gay flower and only fair.
+
+```Sing Holiday! Beneath the Tree
+
+```Of Innocence and Liberty,
+
+```Paper Nose and Red Cockade
+
+```Dance within the magic shade
+
+```That makes them drunken, merry, and strong
+
+```To laugh and sing their ferial song:
+
+```'Free, free...!'=
+
+
+````But Echo answers
+
+```Faintly to the laughing dancers,
+
+```'Free'--and faintly laughs, and still,
+
+```Within the hollows of the hill,
+
+```Faintlier laughs and whispers, 'Free,'
+
+```Fadingly, diminishingly:
+
+```'Free,' and laughter faints away...
+
+```Sing Holiday! Sing Holiday!"=
+
+He folded the sheet carefully and put it in his pocket. The thing had
+its merits. Oh, decidedly, decidedly! But how unpleasant the crowd
+smelt! He lit a cigarette. The smell of cows was preferable. He passed
+through the gate in the park wall into the garden. The swimming-pool was
+a centre of noise and activity.
+
+"Second Heat in the Young Ladies' Championship." It was the polite
+voice of Henry Wimbush. A crowd of sleek, seal-like figures in black
+bathing-dresses surrounded him. His grey bowler hat, smooth, round, and
+motionless in the midst of a moving sea, was an island of aristocratic
+calm.
+
+Holding his tortoise-shell-rimmed pince-nez an inch or two in front of
+his eyes, he read out names from a list.
+
+"Miss Dolly Miles, Miss Rebecca Balister, Miss Doris Gabell..."
+
+Five young persons ranged themselves on the brink. From their seats of
+honour at the other end of the pool, old Lord Moleyn and Mr. Callamay
+looked on with eager interest.
+
+Henry Wimbush raised his hand. There was an expectant silence. "When I
+say 'Go,' go. Go!" he said. There was an almost simultaneous splash.
+
+Denis pushed his way through the spectators. Somebody plucked him by the
+sleeve; he looked down. It was old Mrs. Budge.
+
+"Delighted to see you again, Mr. Stone," she said in her rich, husky
+voice. She panted a little as she spoke, like a short-winded lap-dog.
+It was Mrs. Budge who, having read in the "Daily Mirror" that the
+Government needed peach stones--what they needed them for she never
+knew--had made the collection of peach stones her peculiar "bit" of war
+work. She had thirty-six peach trees in her walled garden, as well as
+four hot-houses in which trees could be forced, so that she was able
+to eat peaches practically the whole year round. In 1916 she ate 4200
+peaches, and sent the stones to the Government. In 1917 the military
+authorities called up three of her gardeners, and what with this and the
+fact that it was a bad year for wall fruit, she only managed to eat 2900
+peaches during that crucial period of the national destinies. In 1918
+she did rather better, for between January 1st and the date of the
+Armistice she ate 3300 peaches. Since the Armistice she had relaxed her
+efforts; now she did not eat more than two or three peaches a day. Her
+constitution, she complained, had suffered; but it had suffered for a
+good cause.
+
+Denis answered her greeting by a vague and polite noise.
+
+"So nice to see the young people enjoying themselves," Mrs. Budge went
+on. "And the old people too, for that matter. Look at old Lord Moleyn
+and dear Mr. Callamay. Isn't it delightful to see the way they enjoy
+themselves?"
+
+Denis looked. He wasn't sure whether it was so very delightful after
+all. Why didn't they go and watch the sack races? The two old gentlemen
+were engaged at the moment in congratulating the winner of the race; it
+seemed an act of supererogatory graciousness; for, after all, she had
+only won a heat.
+
+"Pretty little thing, isn't she?" said Mrs. Budge huskily, and panted
+two or three times.
+
+"Yes," Denis nodded agreement. Sixteen, slender, but nubile, he said to
+himself, and laid up the phrase in his memory as a happy one. Old Mr.
+Callamay had put on his spectacles to congratulate the victor, and Lord
+Moleyn, leaning forward over his walking-stick, showed his long ivory
+teeth, hungrily smiling.
+
+"Capital performance, capital," Mr. Callamay was saying in his deep
+voice.
+
+The victor wriggled with embarrassment. She stood with her hands behind
+her back, rubbing one foot nervously on the other. Her wet bathing-dress
+shone, a torso of black polished marble.
+
+"Very good indeed," said Lord Moleyn. His voice seemed to come from just
+behind his teeth, a toothy voice. It was as though a dog should suddenly
+begin to speak. He smiled again, Mr. Callamay readjusted his spectacles.
+
+"When I say 'Go,' go. Go!"
+
+Splash! The third heat had started.
+
+"Do you know, I never could learn to swim," said Mrs. Budge.
+
+"Really?"
+
+"But I used to be able to float."
+
+Denis imagined her floating--up and down, up and down on a great green
+swell. A blown black bladder; no, that wasn't good, that wasn't good at
+all. A new winner was being congratulated. She was atrociously stubby
+and fat. The last one, long and harmoniously, continuously curved from
+knee to breast, had been an Eve by Cranach; but this, this one was a bad
+Rubens.
+
+"...go--go--go!" Henry Wimbush's polite level voice once more pronounced
+the formula. Another batch of young ladies dived in.
+
+Grown a little weary of sustaining a conversation with Mrs. Budge,
+Denis conveniently remembered that his duties as a steward called him
+elsewhere. He pushed out through the lines of spectators and made his
+way along the path left clear behind them. He was thinking again that
+his soul was a pale, tenuous membrane, when he was startled by hearing
+a thin, sibilant voice, speaking apparently from just above his head,
+pronounce the single word "Disgusting!"
+
+He looked up sharply. The path along which he was walking passed under
+the lee of a wall of clipped yew. Behind the hedge the ground sloped
+steeply up towards the foot of the terrace and the house; for one
+standing on the higher ground it was easy to look over the dark barrier.
+Looking up, Denis saw two heads overtopping the hedge immediately above
+him. He recognised the iron mask of Mr. Bodiham and the pale, colourless
+face of his wife. They were looking over his head, over the heads of the
+spectators, at the swimmers in the pond.
+
+"Disgusting!" Mrs. Bodiham repeated, hissing softly.
+
+The rector turned up his iron mask towards the solid cobalt of the sky.
+"How long?" he said, as though to himself; "how long?" He lowered his
+eyes again, and they fell on Denis's upturned curious face. There was an
+abrupt movement, and Mr. and Mrs. Bodiham popped out of sight behind the
+hedge.
+
+Denis continued his promenade. He wandered past the merry-go-round,
+through the thronged streets of the canvas village; the membrane of
+his soul flapped tumultuously in the noise and laughter. In a roped-off
+space beyond, Mary was directing the children's sports. Little creatures
+seethed round about her, making a shrill, tinny clamour; others
+clustered about the skirts and trousers of their parents. Mary's face
+was shining in the heat; with an immense output of energy she started a
+three-legged race. Denis looked on in admiration.
+
+"You're wonderful," he said, coming up behind her and touching her on
+the arm. "I've never seen such energy."
+
+She turned towards him a face, round, red, and honest as the setting
+sun; the golden bell of her hair swung silently as she moved her head
+and quivered to rest.
+
+"Do you know, Denis," she said, in a low, serious voice, gasping a
+little as she spoke--"do you know that there's a woman here who has had
+three children in thirty-one months?"
+
+"Really," said Denis, making rapid mental calculations.
+
+"It's appalling. I've been telling her about the Malthusian League. One
+really ought..."
+
+But a sudden violent renewal of the metallic yelling announced the fact
+that somebody had won the race. Mary became once more the centre of a
+dangerous vortex. It was time, Denis thought, to move on; he might be
+asked to do something if he stayed too long.
+
+He turned back towards the canvas village. The thought of tea was
+making itself insistent in his mind. Tea, tea, tea. But the tea-tent was
+horribly thronged. Anne, with an unusual expression of grimness on her
+flushed face, was furiously working the handle of the urn; the brown
+liquid spurted incessantly into the proffered cups. Portentous, in
+the farther corner of the tent, Priscilla, in her royal toque, was
+encouraging the villagers. In a momentary lull Denis could hear her
+deep, jovial laughter and her manly voice. Clearly, he told himself,
+this was no place for one who wanted tea. He stood irresolute at the
+entrance to the tent. A beautiful thought suddenly came to him; if he
+went back to the house, went unobtrusively, without being observed, if
+he tiptoed into the dining-room and noiselessly opened the little doors
+of the sideboard--ah, then! In the cool recess within he would find
+bottles and a siphon; a bottle of crystal gin and a quart of soda water,
+and then for the cups that inebriate as well as cheer...
+
+A minute later he was walking briskly up the shady yew-tree walk. Within
+the house it was deliciously quiet and cool. Carrying his well-filled
+tumbler with care, he went into the library. There, the glass on the
+corner of the table beside him, he settled into a chair with a volume of
+Sainte-Beuve. There was nothing, he found, like a Causerie du Lundi for
+settling and soothing the troubled spirits. That tenuous membrane of his
+had been too rudely buffeted by the afternoon's emotions; it required a
+rest.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+Towards sunset the fair itself became quiescent. It was the hour for the
+dancing to begin. At one side of the village of tents a space had been
+roped off. Acetylene lamps, hung round it on posts, cast a piercing
+white light. In one corner sat the band, and, obedient to its scraping
+and blowing, two or three hundred dancers trampled across the dry
+ground, wearing away the grass with their booted feet. Round this patch
+of all but daylight, alive with motion and noise, the night seemed
+preternaturally dark. Bars of light reached out into it, and every now
+and then a lonely figure or a couple of lovers, interlaced, would cross
+the bright shaft, flashing for a moment into visible existence, to
+disappear again as quickly and surprisingly as they had come.
+
+Denis stood by the entrance of the enclosure, watching the swaying,
+shuffling crowd. The slow vortex brought the couples round and round
+again before him, as though he were passing them in review. There
+was Priscilla, still wearing her queenly toque, still encouraging the
+villagers--this time by dancing with one of the tenant farmers. There
+was Lord Moleyn, who had stayed on to the disorganised, passoverish
+meal that took the place of dinner on this festal day; he one-stepped
+shamblingly, his bent knees more precariously wobbly than ever, with a
+terrified village beauty. Mr. Scogan trotted round with another. Mary
+was in the embrace of a young farmer of heroic proportions; she was
+looking up at him, talking, as Denis could see, very seriously. What
+about? he wondered. The Malthusian League, perhaps. Seated in the corner
+among the band, Jenny was performing wonders of virtuosity upon the
+drums. Her eyes shone, she smiled to herself. A whole subterranean life
+seemed to be expressing itself in those loud rat-tats, those long rolls
+and flourishes of drumming. Looking at her, Denis ruefully remembered
+the red notebook; he wondered what sort of a figure he was cutting now.
+But the sight of Anne and Gombauld swimming past--Anne with her eyes
+almost shut and sleeping, as it were, on the sustaining wings of
+movement and music--dissipated these preoccupations. Male and female
+created He them...There they were, Anne and Gombauld, and a hundred
+couples more--all stepping harmoniously together to the old tune of Male
+and Female created He them. But Denis sat apart; he alone lacked his
+complementary opposite. They were all coupled but he; all but he...
+
+Somebody touched him on the shoulder and he looked up. It was Henry
+Wimbush.
+
+"I never showed you our oaken drainpipes," he said. "Some of the ones
+we dug up are lying quite close to here. Would you like to come and see
+them?"
+
+Denis got up, and they walked off together into the darkness. The music
+grew fainter behind them. Some of the higher notes faded out altogether.
+Jenny's drumming and the steady sawing of the bass throbbed on, tuneless
+and meaningless in their ears. Henry Wimbush halted.
+
+"Here we are," he said, and, taking an electric torch out of his pocket,
+he cast a dim beam over two or three blackened sections of tree trunk,
+scooped out into the semblance of pipes, which were lying forlornly in a
+little depression in the ground.
+
+"Very interesting," said Denis, with a rather tepid enthusiasm.
+
+They sat down on the grass. A faint white glare, rising from behind a
+belt of trees, indicated the position of the dancing-floor. The music
+was nothing but a muffled rhythmic pulse.
+
+"I shall be glad," said Henry Wimbush, "when this function comes at last
+to an end."
+
+"I can believe it."
+
+"I do not know how it is," Mr. Wimbush continued, "but the spectacle
+of numbers of my fellow-creatures in a state of agitation moves in me
+a certain weariness, rather than any gaiety or excitement. The fact is,
+they don't very much interest me. They're aren't in my line. You follow
+me? I could never take much interest, for example, in a collection of
+postage stamps. Primitives or seventeenth-century books--yes. They are
+my line. But stamps, no. I don't know anything about them; they're not
+my line. They don't interest me, they give me no emotion. It's rather
+the same with people, I'm afraid. I'm more at home with these pipes."
+He jerked his head sideways towards the hollowed logs. "The trouble with
+the people and events of the present is that you never know anything
+about them. What do I know of contemporary politics? Nothing. What do I
+know of the people I see round about me? Nothing. What they think of
+me or of anything else in the world, what they will do in five minutes'
+time, are things I can't guess at. For all I know, you may suddenly jump
+up and try to murder me in a moment's time."
+
+"Come, come," said Denis.
+
+"True," Mr. Wimbush continued, "the little I know about your past is
+certainly reassuring. But I know nothing of your present, and neither
+you nor I know anything of your future. It's appalling; in living
+people, one is dealing with unknown and unknowable quantities. One can
+only hope to find out anything about them by a long series of the most
+disagreeable and boring human contacts, involving a terrible expense
+of time. It's the same with current events; how can I find out anything
+about them except by devoting years to the most exhausting first-hand
+study, involving once more an endless number of the most unpleasant
+contacts? No, give me the past. It doesn't change; it's all there
+in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and
+decorously and, above all, privately--by reading. By reading I know a
+great deal of Caesar Borgia, of St. Francis, of Dr. Johnson; a few weeks
+have made me thoroughly acquainted with these interesting characters,
+and I have been spared the tedious and revolting process of getting to
+know them by personal contact, which I should have to do if they were
+living now. How gay and delightful life would be if one could get rid
+of all the human contacts! Perhaps, in the future, when machines have
+attained to a state of perfection--for I confess that I am, like
+Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility
+of machinery--then, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like
+myself, desire it, to live in a dignified seclusion, surrounded by the
+delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure
+from any human intrusion. It is a beautiful thought."
+
+"Beautiful," Denis agreed. "But what about the desirable human contacts,
+like love and friendship?"
+
+The black silhouette against the darkness shook its head. "The pleasures
+even of these contacts are much exaggerated," said the polite level
+voice. "It seems to me doubtful whether they are equal to the pleasures
+of private reading and contemplation. Human contacts have been so highly
+valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment
+and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce. The world, you
+must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more
+and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people
+will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social
+life and none of its intolerable tedium. At present people in search
+of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a
+noise; in future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and
+quiet. The proper study of mankind is books."
+
+"I sometimes think that it may be," said Denis; he was wondering if Anne
+and Gombauld were still dancing together.
+
+"Instead of which," said Mr. Wimbush, with a sigh, "I must go and see if
+all is well on the dancing-floor." They got up and began to walk slowly
+towards the white glare. "If all these people were dead," Henry Wimbush
+went on, "this festivity would be extremely agreeable. Nothing would be
+pleasanter than to read in a well-written book of an open-air ball that
+took place a century ago. How charming! one would say; how pretty
+and how amusing! But when the ball takes place to-day, when one finds
+oneself involved in it, then one sees the thing in its true light. It
+turns out to be merely this." He waved his hand in the direction of
+the acetylene flares. "In my youth," he went on after a pause, "I
+found myself, quite fortuitously, involved in a series of the most
+phantasmagorical amorous intrigues. A novelist could have made his
+fortune out of them, and even if I were to tell you, in my bald style,
+the details of these adventures, you would be amazed at the romantic
+tale. But I assure you, while they were happening--these romantic
+adventures--they seemed to me no more and no less exciting than any
+other incident of actual life. To climb by night up a rope-ladder to a
+second-floor window in an old house in Toledo seemed to me, while I was
+actually performing this rather dangerous feat, an action as obvious, as
+much to be taken for granted, as--how shall I put it?--as quotidian as
+catching the 8.52 from Surbiton to go to business on a Monday morning.
+Adventures and romance only take on their adventurous and romantic
+qualities at second-hand. Live them, and they are just a slice of life
+like the rest. In literature they become as charming as this dismal ball
+would be if we were celebrating its tercentenary." They had come to
+the entrance of the enclosure and stood there, blinking in the dazzling
+light. "Ah, if only we were!" Henry Wimbush added.
+
+Anne and Gombauld were still dancing together.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+It was after ten o'clock. The dancers had already dispersed and the
+last lights were being put out. To-morrow the tents would be struck, the
+dismantled merry-go-round would be packed into waggons and carted away.
+An expanse of worn grass, a shabby brown patch in the wide green of the
+park, would be all that remained. Crome Fair was over.
+
+By the edge of the pool two figures lingered.
+
+"No, no, no," Anne was saying in a breathless whisper, leaning
+backwards, turning her head from side to side in an effort to escape
+Gombauld's kisses. "No, please. No." Her raised voice had become
+imperative.
+
+Gombauld relaxed his embrace a little. "Why not?" he said. "I will."
+
+With a sudden effort Anne freed herself. "You won't," she retorted.
+"You've tried to take the most unfair advantage of me."
+
+"Unfair advantage?" echoed Gombauld in genuine surprise.
+
+"Yes, unfair advantage. You attack me after I've been dancing for two
+hours, while I'm still reeling drunk with the movement, when I've lost
+my head, when I've got no mind left but only a rhythmical body! It's as
+bad as making love to someone you've drugged or intoxicated."
+
+Gombauld laughed angrily. "Call me a White Slaver and have done with
+it."
+
+"Luckily," said Anne, "I am now completely sobered, and if you try and
+kiss me again I shall box your ears. Shall we take a few turns round the
+pool?" she added. "The night is delicious."
+
+For answer Gombauld made an irritated noise. They paced off slowly, side
+by side.
+
+"What I like about the painting of Degas..." Anne began in her most
+detached and conversational tone.
+
+"Oh, damn Degas!" Gombauld was almost shouting.
+
+From where he stood, leaning in an attitude of despair against the
+parapet of the terrace, Denis had seen them, the two pale figures in
+a patch of moonlight, far down by the pool's edge. He had seen the
+beginning of what promised to be an endless passionate embracement,
+and at the sight he had fled. It was too much; he couldn't stand it. In
+another moment, he felt, he would have burst into irrepressible tears.
+
+Dashing blindly into the house, he almost ran into Mr. Scogan, who was
+walking up and down the hall smoking a final pipe.
+
+"Hullo!" said Mr. Scogan, catching him by the arm; dazed and hardly
+conscious of what he was doing or where he was, Denis stood there for
+a moment like a somnambulist. "What's the matter?" Mr. Scogan went on.
+"you look disturbed, distressed, depressed."
+
+Denis shook his head without replying.
+
+"Worried about the cosmos, eh?" Mr. Scogan patted him on the arm. "I
+know the feeling," he said. "It's a most distressing symptom. 'What's
+the point of it all? All is vanity. What's the good of continuing to
+function if one's doomed to be snuffed out at last along with everything
+else?' Yes, yes. I know exactly how you feel. It's most distressing if
+one allows oneself to be distressed. But then why allow oneself to be
+distressed? After all, we all know that there's no ultimate point. But
+what difference does that make?"
+
+At this point the somnambulist suddenly woke up. "What?" he said,
+blinking and frowning at his interlocutor. "What?" Then breaking away he
+dashed up the stairs, two steps at a time.
+
+Mr. Scogan ran to the foot of the stairs and called up after him. "It
+makes no difference, none whatever. Life is gay all the same, always,
+under whatever circumstances--under whatever circumstances," he added,
+raising his voice to a shout. But Denis was already far out of hearing,
+and even if he had not been, his mind to-night was proof against all
+the consolations of philosophy. Mr. Scogan replaced his pipe between his
+teeth and resumed his meditative pacing. "Under any circumstances," he
+repeated to himself. It was ungrammatical to begin with; was it true?
+And is life really its own reward? He wondered. When his pipe had burned
+itself to its stinking conclusion he took a drink of gin and went to
+bed. In ten minutes he was deeply, innocently asleep.
+
+Denis had mechanically undressed and, clad in those flowered silk
+pyjamas of which he was so justly proud, was lying face downwards on
+his bed. Time passed. When at last he looked up, the candle which he
+had left alight at his bedside had burned down almost to the socket. He
+looked at his watch; it was nearly half-past one. His head ached, his
+dry, sleepless eyes felt as though they had been bruised from behind,
+and the blood was beating within his ears a loud arterial drum. He got
+up, opened the door, tiptoed noiselessly along the passage, and began
+to mount the stairs towards the higher floors. Arrived at the servants'
+quarters under the roof, he hesitated, then turning to the right he
+opened a little door at the end of the corridor. Within was a pitch-dark
+cupboard-like boxroom, hot, stuffy, and smelling of dust and old
+leather. He advanced cautiously into the blackness, groping with his
+hands. It was from this den that the ladder went up to the leads of
+the western tower. He found the ladder, and set his feet on the rungs;
+noiselessly, he lifted the trap-door above his head; the moonlit sky was
+over him, he breathed the fresh, cool air of the night. In a moment
+he was standing on the leads, gazing out over the dim, colourless
+landscape, looking perpendicularly down at the terrace seventy feet
+below.
+
+Why had he climbed up to this high, desolate place? Was it to look at
+the moon? Was it to commit suicide? As yet he hardly knew. Death--the
+tears came into his eyes when he thought of it. His misery assumed
+a certain solemnity; he was lifted up on the wings of a kind of
+exaltation. It was a mood in which he might have done almost anything,
+however foolish. He advanced towards the farther parapet; the drop was
+sheer there and uninterrupted. A good leap, and perhaps one might clear
+the narrow terrace and so crash down yet another thirty feet to the
+sun-baked ground below. He paused at the corner of the tower, looking
+now down into the shadowy gulf below, now up towards the rare stars and
+the waning moon. He made a gesture with his hand, muttered something,
+he could not afterwards remember what; but the fact that he had said
+it aloud gave the utterance a peculiarly terrible significance. Then he
+looked down once more into the depths.
+
+"What ARE you doing, Denis?" questioned a voice from somewhere very
+close behind him.
+
+Denis uttered a cry of frightened surprise, and very nearly went over
+the parapet in good earnest. His heart was beating terribly, and he was
+pale when, recovering himself, he turned round in the direction from
+which the voice had come.
+
+"Are you ill?"
+
+In the profound shadow that slept under the eastern parapet of the
+tower, he saw something he had not previously noticed--an oblong
+shape. It was a mattress, and someone was lying on it. Since that first
+memorable night on the tower, Mary had slept out every evening; it was a
+sort of manifestation of fidelity.
+
+"It gave me a fright," she went on, "to wake up and see you waving your
+arms and gibbering there. What on earth were you doing?"
+
+Denis laughed melodramatically. "What, indeed!" he said. If she hadn't
+woken up as she did, he would be lying in pieces at the bottom of the
+tower; he was certain of that, now.
+
+"You hadn't got designs on me, I hope?" Mary inquired, jumping too
+rapidly to conclusions.
+
+"I didn't know you were here," said Denis, laughing more bitterly and
+artificially than before.
+
+"What IS the matter, Denis?"
+
+He sat down on the edge of the mattress, and for all reply went on
+laughing in the same frightful and improbable tone.
+
+An hour later he was reposing with his head on Mary's knees, and she,
+with an affectionate solicitude that was wholly maternal, was running
+her fingers through his tangled hair. He had told her everything,
+everything: his hopeless love, his jealousy, his despair, his
+suicide--as it were providentially averted by her interposition. He had
+solemnly promised never to think of self-destruction again. And now his
+soul was floating in a sad serenity. It was embalmed in the sympathy
+that Mary so generously poured. And it was not only in receiving
+sympathy that Denis found serenity and even a kind of happiness; it
+was also in giving it. For if he had told Mary everything about his
+miseries, Mary, reacting to these confidences, had told him in return
+everything, or very nearly everything, about her own.
+
+"Poor Mary!" He was very sorry for her. Still, she might have guessed
+that Ivor wasn't precisely a monument of constancy.
+
+"Well," she concluded, "one must put a good face on it." She wanted to
+cry, but she wouldn't allow herself to be weak. There was a silence.
+
+"Do you think," asked Denis hesitatingly--"do you really think that
+she...that Gombauld..."
+
+"I'm sure of it," Mary answered decisively. There was another long
+pause.
+
+"I don't know what to do about it," he said at last, utterly dejected.
+
+"You'd better go away," advised Mary. "It's the safest thing, and the
+most sensible."
+
+"But I've arranged to stay here three weeks more."
+
+"You must concoct an excuse."
+
+"I suppose you're right."
+
+"I know I am," said Mary, who was recovering all her firm
+self-possession. "You can't go on like this, can you?"
+
+"No, I can't go on like this," he echoed.
+
+Immensely practical, Mary invented a plan of action. Startlingly, in the
+darkness, the church clock struck three.
+
+"You must go to bed at once," she said. "I'd no idea it was so late."
+
+Denis clambered down the ladder, cautiously descended the creaking
+stairs. His room was dark; the candle had long ago guttered to
+extinction. He got into bed and fell asleep almost at once.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+Denis had been called, but in spite of the parted curtains he had
+dropped off again into that drowsy, dozy state when sleep becomes a
+sensual pleasure almost consciously savoured. In this condition he might
+have remained for another hour if he had not been disturbed by a violent
+rapping at the door.
+
+"Come in," he mumbled, without opening his eyes. The latch clicked, a
+hand seized him by the shoulder and he was rudely shaken.
+
+"Get up, get up!"
+
+His eyelids blinked painfully apart, and he saw Mary standing over him,
+bright-faced and earnest.
+
+"Get up!" she repeated. "You must go and send the telegram. Don't you
+remember?"
+
+"O Lord!" He threw off the bed-clothes; his tormentor retired.
+
+Denis dressed as quickly as he could and ran up the road to the village
+post office. Satisfaction glowed within him as he returned. He had sent
+a long telegram, which would in a few hours evoke an answer ordering
+him back to town at once--on urgent business. It was an act performed,
+a decisive step taken--and he so rarely took decisive steps; he felt
+pleased with himself. It was with a whetted appetite that he came in to
+breakfast.
+
+"Good-morning," said Mr. Scogan. "I hope you're better."
+
+"Better?"
+
+"You were rather worried about the cosmos last night."
+
+Denis tried to laugh away the impeachment. "Was I?" he lightly asked.
+
+"I wish," said Mr. Scogan, "that I had nothing worse to prey on my mind.
+I should be a happy man."
+
+"One is only happy in action," Denis enunciated, thinking of the
+telegram.
+
+He looked out of the window. Great florid baroque clouds floated high
+in the blue heaven. A wind stirred among the trees, and their shaken
+foliage twinkled and glittered like metal in the sun. Everything seemed
+marvellously beautiful. At the thought that he would soon be leaving
+all this beauty he felt a momentary pang; but he comforted himself by
+recollecting how decisively he was acting.
+
+"Action," he repeated aloud, and going over to the sideboard he helped
+himself to an agreeable mixture of bacon and fish.
+
+Breakfast over, Denis repaired to the terrace, and, sitting there,
+raised the enormous bulwark of the "Times" against the possible assaults
+of Mr. Scogan, who showed an unappeased desire to go on talking about
+the Universe. Secure behind the crackling pages, he meditated. In
+the light of this brilliant morning the emotions of last night seemed
+somehow rather remote. And what if he had seen them embracing in the
+moonlight? Perhaps it didn't mean much after all. And even if it did,
+why shouldn't he stay? He felt strong enough to stay, strong enough to
+be aloof, disinterested, a mere friendly acquaintance. And even if he
+weren't strong enough...
+
+"What time do you think the telegram will arrive?" asked Mary suddenly,
+thrusting in upon him over the top of the paper.
+
+Denis started guiltily. "I don't know at all," he said.
+
+"I was only wondering," said Mary, "because there's a very good train at
+3.27, and it would be nice if you could catch it, wouldn't it?"
+
+"Awfully nice," he agreed weakly. He felt as though he were making
+arrangements for his own funeral. Train leaves Waterloo 3.27. No
+flowers...Mary was gone. No, he was blowed if he'd let himself be
+hurried down to the Necropolis like this. He was blowed. The sight of
+Mr. Scogan looking out, with a hungry expression, from the drawing-room
+window made him precipitately hoist the "Times" once more. For a long
+while he kept it hoisted. Lowering it at last to take another cautious
+peep at his surroundings, he found himself, with what astonishment!
+confronted by Anne's faint, amused, malicious smile. She was standing
+before him,--the woman who was a tree,--the swaying grace of her
+movement arrested in a pose that seemed itself a movement.
+
+"How long have you been standing there?" he asked, when he had done
+gaping at her.
+
+"Oh, about half an hour, I suppose," she said airily. "You were so very
+deep in your paper--head over ears--I didn't like to disturb you."
+
+"You look lovely this morning," Denis exclaimed. It was the first time
+he had ever had the courage to utter a personal remark of the kind.
+
+Anne held up her hand as though to ward off a blow. "Don't bludgeon me,
+please." She sat down on the bench beside him. He was a nice boy, she
+thought, quite charming; and Gombauld's violent insistences were really
+becoming rather tiresome. "Why don't you wear white trousers?" she
+asked. "I like you so much in white trousers."
+
+"They're at the wash," Denis replied rather curtly. This white-trouser
+business was all in the wrong spirit. He was just preparing a scheme
+to manoeuvre the conversation back to the proper path, when Mr. Scogan
+suddenly darted out of the house, crossed the terrace with clockwork
+rapidity, and came to a halt in front of the bench on which they were
+seated.
+
+"To go on with our interesting conversation about the cosmos," he began,
+"I become more and more convinced that the various parts of the concern
+are fundamentally discrete...But would you mind, Denis, moving a shade
+to your right?" He wedged himself between them on the bench. "And if
+you would shift a few inches to the left, my dear Anne...Thank you.
+Discrete, I think, was what I was saying."
+
+"You were," said Anne. Denis was speechless.
+
+They were taking their after luncheon coffee in the library when the
+telegram arrived. Denis blushed guiltily as he took the orange envelope
+from the salver and tore it open. "Return at once. Urgent family
+business." It was too ridiculous. As if he had any family business!
+Wouldn't it be best just to crumple the thing up and put it in his
+pocket without saying anything about it? He looked up; Mary's large blue
+china eyes were fixed upon him, seriously, penetratingly. He blushed
+more deeply than ever, hesitated in a horrible uncertainty.
+
+"What's your telegram about?" Mary asked significantly.
+
+He lost his head, "I'm afraid," he mumbled, "I'm afraid this means
+I shall have to go back to town at once." He frowned at the telegram
+ferociously.
+
+"But that's absurd, impossible," cried Anne. She had been standing by
+the window talking to Gombauld; but at Denis's words she came swaying
+across the room towards him.
+
+"It's urgent," he repeated desperately.
+
+"But you've only been here such a short time," Anne protested.
+
+"I know," he said, utterly miserable. Oh, if only she could understand!
+Women were supposed to have intuition.
+
+"If he must go, he must," put in Mary firmly.
+
+"Yes, I must." He looked at the telegram again for inspiration. "You
+see, it's urgent family business," he explained.
+
+Priscilla got up from her chair in some excitement. "I had a distinct
+presentiment of this last night," she said. "A distinct presentiment."
+
+"A mere coincidence, no doubt," said Mary, brushing Mrs. Wimbush out of
+the conversation. "There's a very good train at 3.27." She looked at the
+clock on the mantelpiece. "You'll have nice time to pack."
+
+"I'll order the motor at once." Henry Wimbush rang the bell. The funeral
+was well under way. It was awful, awful.
+
+"I am wretched you should be going," said Anne.
+
+Denis turned towards her; she really did look wretched. He abandoned
+himself hopelessly, fatalistically to his destiny. This was what came of
+action, of doing something decisive. If only he'd just let things drift!
+If only...
+
+"I shall miss your conversation," said Mr. Scogan.
+
+Mary looked at the clock again. "I think perhaps you ought to go and
+pack," she said.
+
+Obediently Denis left the room. Never again, he said to himself, never
+again would he do anything decisive. Camlet, West Bowlby, Knipswich for
+Timpany, Spavin Delawarr; and then all the other stations; and then,
+finally, London. The thought of the journey appalled him. And what on
+earth was he going to do in London when he got there? He climbed wearily
+up the stairs. It was time for him to lay himself in his coffin.
+
+The car was at the door--the hearse. The whole party had assembled to
+see him go. Good-bye, good-bye. Mechanically he tapped the barometer
+that hung in the porch; the needle stirred perceptibly to the left. A
+sudden smile lighted up his lugubrious face.
+
+"'It sinks and I am ready to depart,'" he said, quoting Landor with an
+exquisite aptness. He looked quickly round from face to face. Nobody had
+noticed. He climbed into the hearse.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CROME YELLOW ***
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