but she wasn't my idea of Aphrodite, and I don't know that I'm very
much like Ares."
He looked pensively in the old Venetian mirror which hung over the
fireplace. It was a complacent look, for Lykeham was rather vain about
his personal appearance, which was, indeed, repulsive at first sight,
but had, when you looked again, a certain strange and fascinating ugly
beauty. Bearded, he would have made a passable Socrates. But Ares--no,
certainly he wasn't Ares.
"Perhaps you're Hephæstus," I suggested; but the idea was received
coldly.
Was he sure that she was a goddess? Mightn't she just have been a
nymph of sorts? Europa, for instance. Lykeham repudiated the implied
suggestion that he was a bull, nor would he hear of himself as a swan
or a shower of gold. It was possible, however, he thought, that he was
Apollo and she Daphne, reincarnated from her vegetable state. And
though I laughed heartily at the idea of his being Phoebus Apollo,
Lykeham stuck to the theory with increasing obstinacy. The more he
thought of it the more it seemed to him probable that his nymph, with
her burning cold virginal passion, was Daphne, while to doubt that he
himself was Apollo seemed hardly to occur to him.
* * * * *
It was about a fortnight later, in June, towards the end of term, that
we discovered Lykeham's Olympian identity. We had gone, Lykeham and I,
for an after-dinner walk. We set out through the pale tranquillity of
twilight, and following the towpath up the river as far as Godstow,
halted at the inn for a glass of port and a talk with the glorious old
female Falstaff in black silk who kept it. We were royally entertained
with gossip and old wine, and after Lykeham had sung a comic song
which had reduced the old lady to a quivering jelly of hysterical
laughter, we set out once more, intending to go yet a little farther
up the river before we turned back. Darkness had fallen by this time;
the stars were lighted in the sky; it was the sort of summer night to
which Marlowe compared Helen of Troy. Over the meadows invisible
peewits wheeled and uttered their melancholy cry; the far-off thunder
of the weir bore a continuous, even burden to all the other small
noises of the night. Lykeham and I walked on in silence. We had
covered perhaps a quarter of a mile when all at once my companion
stopped and began looking fixedly westward towards Witham Hill. I
paused too, and saw that he was staring at the thin crescent of the
moon, which was preparing to set in the dark woods that crowned the
eminence.
"What are you looking at?" I asked.
But Lykeham paid no attention, only muttered something to himself.
Then suddenly he cried out, "It's she!" and started off at full gallop
across the fields in the direction of the hill. Conceiving that he had
gone suddenly mad, I followed. We crashed through the first hedge
twenty yards apart. Then came the backwater; Lykeham leapt, flopped in
three-quarters of the way across, and scrambled oozily ashore. I made
a better jump and landed among the mud and rushes of the farther bank.
Two more hedges and a ploughed field, a hedge, a road, a gate, another
field, and then we were in Witham Wood itself. It was pitch black
under the trees, and Lykeham had perforce to slacken his pace a
little. I followed him by the noise he made crashing through the
undergrowth and cursing when he hurt himself. That wood was a
nightmare, but we got through it somehow and into the open glade at
the top of the hill. Through the trees on the farther side of the
clearing shone the moon, seeming incredibly close at hand. Then,
suddenly, along the very path of the moonlight, the figure of a woman
came walking through the trees into the open. Lykeham rushed towards
her and flung himself at her feet and embraced her knees; she stooped
down and smoothed his ruffled hair. I turned and walked away; it is
not for a mere mortal to look on at the embracements of the gods.
As I walked back, I wondered who on earth--or rather who in
heaven--Lykeham could be. For here was chaste Cynthia giving herself
to him in the most unequivocal fashion. Could he be Endymion? No, the
idea was too preposterous to be entertained for a moment. But I could
think of no other loved by the virgin moon. Yet surely I seemed dimly
to recollect that there had been some favoured god; for the life of me
I could not remember who. All the way back along the river path I
searched my mind for his name, and always it eluded me.
But on my return I looked up the matter in Lemprière, and almost died
of laughing when I discovered the truth. I thought of Lykeham's
Venetian mirror and his complacent side glances at his own image, and
his belief that he was Apollo, and I laughed and laughed. And when,
considerably after midnight, Lykeham got back to college, I met him in
the porch and took him quietly by the sleeve, and in his ear I
whispered, "GOAT-FOOT," and then I roared with laughter once again.
THE BOOKSHOP
IT seemed indeed an unlikely place to find a bookshop. All the other
commercial enterprises of the street aimed at purveying the barest
necessities to the busy squalor of the quarter. In this, the main
arterial street, there was a specious glitter and life produced by the
swift passage of the traffic. It was almost airy, almost gay. But all
around great tracts of slum pullulated dankly. The inhabitants did
their shopping in the grand street; they passed, holding gobbets of
meat that showed glutinous even through the wrappings of paper; they
cheapened linoleum at upholstery doors; women, black-bonneted and
black-shawled, went shuffling to their marketing with dilapidated bags
of straw plait. How should these, I wondered, buy books? And yet there
it was, a tiny shop; and the windows were fitted with shelves, and
there were the brown backs of books. To the right a large emporium
overflowed into the street with its fabulously cheap furniture; to the
left the curtained, discreet windows of an eating-house announced in
chipped white letters the merits of sixpenny dinners. Between, so
narrow as scarcely to prevent the junction of food and furniture, was
the little shop. A door and four feet of dark window, that was the
full extent of frontage. One saw here that literature was a luxury; it
took its proportionable room here in this place of necessity. Still,
the comfort was that it survived, definitely survived.
The owner of the shop was standing in the doorway, a little man,
grizzle-bearded and with eyes very active round the corners of the
spectacles that bridged his long, sharp nose.
"Trade is good?" I inquired.
"Better in my grandfather's day," he told me, shaking his head sadly.
"We grow progressively more Philistine," I suggested.
"It is our cheap press. The ephemeral overwhelms the permanent, the
classical."
"This journalism," I agreed, "or call it rather this piddling
quotidianism, is the curse of our age."
"Fit only for----" He gesticulated clutchingly with his hands as
though seeking the word.
"For the fire."
The old man was triumphantly emphatic with his, "No: for the sewer."
I laughed sympathetically at his passion. "We are delightfully at one
in our views," I told him. "May I look about me a little among your
treasures?"
Within the shop was a brown twilight, redolent with old leather and
the smell of that fine subtle dust that clings to the pages of
forgotten books, as though preservative of their secrets--like the dry
sand of Asian deserts beneath which, still incredibly intact, lie the
treasures and the rubbish of a thousand years ago. I opened the first
volume that came to my hand. It was a book of fashion-plates, tinted
elaborately by hand in magenta and purple, maroon and solferino and
puce and those melting shades of green that a yet earlier generation
had called "the sorrows of Werther." Beauties in crinolines swam with
the amplitude of pavilioned ships across the pages. Their feet were
represented as thin and flat and black, like tea-leaves shyly
protruding from under their petticoats. Their faces were egg-shaped,
sleeked round with hair of glossy black, and expressive of an
immaculate purity. I thought of our modern fashion figures, with their
heels and their arch of instep, their flattened faces and smile of
pouting invitation. It was difficult not to be a deteriorationist. I
am easily moved by symbols; there is something of a Quarles in my
nature. Lacking the philosophic mind, I prefer to see my abstractions
concretely imaged. And it occurred to me then that if I wanted an
emblem to picture the sacredness of marriage and the influence of the
home I could not do better than choose two little black feet like
tea-leaves peeping out decorously from under the hem of wide,
disguising petticoats. While heels and thoroughbred insteps should
figure--oh well, the reverse.
The current of my thoughts was turned aside by the old man's voice. "I
expect you are musical," he said.
Oh yes, I was a little; and he held out to me a bulky folio.
"Did you ever hear this?" he asked.
_Robert the Devil_: no, I never had. I did not doubt that it was a gap
in my musical education.
The old man took the book and drew up a chair from the dim
_penetralia_ of the shop. It was then that I noticed a surprising
fact: what I had, at a careless glance, taken to be a common counter I
perceived now to be a piano of a square, unfamiliar shape. The old man
sat down before it. "You must forgive any defects in its tone," he
said, turning to me. "An early Broadwood, Georgian, you know, and has
seen a deal of service in a hundred years."
He opened the lid, and the yellow keys grinned at me in the darkness
like the teeth of an ancient horse.
The old man rustled pages till he found a desired place. "The ballet
music," he said: "it's fine. Listen to this."
His bony, rather tremulous hands began suddenly to move with an
astonishing nimbleness, and there rose up, faint and tinkling against
the roar of the traffic, a gay pirouetting music. The instrument
rattled considerably and the volume of sound was thin as the trickle
of a drought-shrunken stream: but, still, it kept tune and the melody
was there, filmy, aerial.
"And now for the drinking-song," cried the old man, warming excitedly
to his work. He played a series of chords that mounted modulating
upwards towards a breaking-point; so supremely operatic as positively
to be a parody of that moment of tautening suspense, when the singers
are bracing themselves for a burst of passion. And then it came, the
drinking chorus. One pictured to oneself cloaked men, wildly jovial
over the emptiness of cardboard flagons.
"Versiam' a tazza piena
Il generoso umor . . ."
The old man's voice was cracked and shrill, but his enthusiasm made up
for any defects in execution. I had never seen anyone so
wholeheartedly a reveller.
He turned over a few more pages. "Ah, the 'Valse Infernale,'" he said.
"That's good." There was a little melancholy prelude and then the
tune, not so infernal perhaps as one might have been led to expect,
but still pleasant enough. I looked over his shoulder at the words and
sang to his accompaniment.
"Demoni fatali
Fantasmi d'orror,
Dei regni infernali
Plaudite al signor."
A great steam-driven brewer's lorry roared past with its annihilating
thunder and utterly blotted out the last line. The old man's hands
still moved over the yellow keys, my mouth opened and shut; but there
was no sound of words or music. It was as though the fatal demons, the
phantasms of horror, had made a sudden irruption into this peaceful,
abstracted place.
I looked out through the narrow door. The traffic ceaselessly passed;
men and women hurried along with set faces. Phantasms of horror, all
of them: infernal realms wherein they dwelt. Outside, men lived under
the tyranny of things. Their every action was determined by the orders
of mere matter, by money, and the tools of their trade and the
unthinking laws of habit and convention. But here I seemed to be safe
from things, living at a remove from actuality; here where a bearded
old man, improbable survival from some other time, indomitably played
the music of romance, despite the fact that the phantasms of horror
might occasionally drown the sound of it with their clamour.
"So: will you take it?" The voice of the old man broke across my
thoughts. "I will let you have it for five shillings." He was holding
out the thick, dilapidated volume towards me. His face wore a look of
strained anxiety. I could see how eager he was to get my five
shillings, how necessary, poor man! for him. He has been, I thought
with an unreasonable bitterness--he has been simply performing for my
benefit, like a trained dog. His aloofness, his culture--all a
business trick. I felt aggrieved. He was just one of the common
phantasms of horror masquerading as the angel of this somewhat comic
paradise of contemplation. I gave him a couple of half-crowns and he
began wrapping the book in paper.
"I tell you," he said, "I'm sorry to part with it. I get attached to
my books, you know; but they always have to go."
He sighed with such an obvious genuineness of feeling that I repented
of the judgment I had passed upon him. He was a reluctant inhabitant
of the infernal realms, even as was I myself.
Outside they were beginning to cry the evening papers: a ship sunk,
trenches captured, somebody's new stirring speech. We looked at one
another--the old bookseller and I--in silence. We understood one
another without speech. Here were we in particular, and here was the
whole of humanity in general, all faced by the hideous triumph of
things. In this continued massacre of men, in this old man's enforced
sacrifice, matter equally triumphed. And walking homeward through
Regent's Park, I too found matter triumphing over me. My book was
unconscionably heavy, and I wondered what in the world I should do
with a piano score of _Robert the Devil_ when I had got it home. It
would only be another thing to weigh me down and hinder me; and at the
moment it was very, oh, abominably, heavy. I leaned over the railings
that ring round the ornamental water, and as unostentatiously as I
could, I let the book fall into the bushes.
I often think it would be best not to attempt the solution of the
problem of life. Living is hard enough without complicating the
process by thinking about it. The wisest thing, perhaps, is to take
for granted the "wearisome condition of humanity, born under one law,
to another bound," and to leave the matter at that, without an attempt
to reconcile the incompatibles. Oh, the absurd difficulty of it all!
And I have, moreover, wasted five shillings, which is serious, you
know, in these thin times.
THE DEATH OF LULLY
THE sea lay in a breathing calm, and the galley, bosomed in its
transparent water, stirred rhythmically to the slow pulse of its
sleeping life. Down below there, fathoms away through the
crystal-clear Mediterranean, the shadow of the ship lazily swung,
moving, a long dark patch, very slowly back and forth across the white
sand of the sea-bottom--very slowly, a scarcely perceptible advance
and recession of the green darkness. Fishes sometimes passed, now
hanging poised with idly tremulous fins, now darting onwards,
effortless and incredibly swift; and always, as it seemed, utterly
aimless, whether they rested or whether they moved; as the life of
angels their life seemed mysterious and unknowable.
All was silence on board the ship. In their fetid cage below decks the
rowers slept where they sat, chained, on their narrow benches. On deck
the sailors lay sleeping or sat in little groups playing at dice. The
fore-part of the deck was reserved, it seemed, for passengers of
distinction. Two figures, a man and a woman, were reclining there on
couches, their faces and half-bared limbs flushed in the coloured
shadow that was thrown by the great red awning stretched above them.
It was a nobleman, the sailors had heard, and his mistress that they
had on board. They had taken their passage at Scanderoon, and were
homeward bound for Spain. Proud as sin these Spaniards were; the man
treated them like slaves or dogs. As for the woman, she was well
enough, but they could find as good a face and pair of breasts in
their native Genoa. If anyone so much as looked at her from half the
ship's length away it sent her possessor into a rage. He had struck
one man for smiling at her. Damned Catalonian, as jealous as a stag;
they wished him the stag's horns as well as its temper.
It was intensely hot even under the awning. The man woke from his
uneasy sleep and reached out to where on a little table beside him
stood a deep silver cup of mixed wine and water. He drank a gulp of
it; it was as warm as blood and hardly cooled his throat. He turned
over and, leaning on his elbow, looked at his companion. She on her
back, quietly breathing through parted lips, still asleep. He leaned
across and pinched her on the breast, so that she woke up with a
sudden start and cry of pain.
"Why did you wake me?" she asked.
He laughed and shrugged his shoulders. He had, indeed, had no reason
for doing so, except that he did not like it that she should be
comfortably asleep, while he was awake and unpleasantly conscious of
the heat.
"It is hotter than ever," he said, with a kind of gloomy satisfaction
at the thought that she would now have to suffer the same discomforts
as himself. "The wine scorches instead of cooling; the sun seems no
lower down the sky."
The woman pouted. "You pinched me cruelly," she said. "And I still do
not know why you wanted to wake me."
He smiled again, this time with a good-humoured lasciviousness. "I
wanted to kiss you," he said. He passed his hand over her body
possessively, as a man might caress a dog.
Suddenly the quiet of the afternoon was shattered. A great clamour
rose up, ragged and uneven, on the air. Shrill yells pierced the dull
rumbling growl of bass voices, pierced the sound of beaten drums and
hammered metal.
"What are they doing in the town?" asked the woman anxiously of her
lover.
"God knows," he answered. "Perhaps the heathen hounds are making some
trouble with our men."
He got up and walked to the rail of the ship. A quarter of a mile
away, across the smooth water of the bay, stood the little African
town at which they had stopped to call. The sunlight showed everything
with a hard and merciless definition. Sky, palms, white houses, domes,
and towers seemed as though made from some hard enamelled metal. A
ridge of low red hills rolled away to right and left. The sunshine
gave to everything in the scene the same clarity of detail, so that to
the eye of the onlooker there was no impression of distance. The whole
thing seemed to be painted in flat upon a single plane.
The young man returned to his couch under the awning and lay down. It
was hotter than ever, or seemed so, at least, since he had made the
exertion of getting up. He thought of high cool pastures in the hills,
with the pleasant sound of streams, far down and out of sight in their
deep channels. He thought of winds that were fresh and scented--winds
that were not mere breaths of dust and fire. He thought of the shade
of cypresses, a narrow opaque strip of darkness; and he thought too of
the green coolness, more diffused and fluid and transparent, of
chestnut groves. And he thought of the people he remembered sitting
under the trees--young people, gay and brightly dressed, whose life
was all gaiety and deliciousness. There were the songs that they
sang--he recalled the voices and the dancing of the strings. And there
were perfumes and, when one drew closer, the faint intoxicating
fragrance of a woman's body. He thought of the stories they told; one
in particular came to his mind, a capital tale of a sorcerer who
offered to change a peasant's wife into a mare, and how he gulled the
husband and enjoyed the woman before his eyes, and the delightful
excuses he made when she failed to change her shape. He smiled to
himself at the thought of it, and stretching out a hand touched his
mistress. Her bosom was soft to his fingers and damp with sweat; he
had an unpleasant notion that she was melting in the heat.
"Why do you touch me?" she asked.
He made no reply, but turned away from her. He wondered how it would
come to pass that people would rise again in the body. It seemed
curious, considering the manifest activities of worms. And suppose one
rose in the body that one possessed in age. He shuddered, picturing to
himself what this woman would be like when she was sixty, seventy. She
would be beyond words repulsive. Old men too were horrible. They
stank, and their eyes were rheumy and rosiny, like the eyes of deer.
He decided that he would kill himself before he grew old. He was
eight-and-twenty now. He would give himself twelve years more. Then he
would end it. His thoughts dimmed and faded away into sleep.
The woman looked at him as he slept. He was a good man, she thought,
though sometimes cruel. He was different from all the other men she
had known. Once, when she was sixteen and a beginner in the business
of love, she had thought that all men were always drunk when they made
love. They were all dirty and like beasts; she had felt herself
superior to them. But this man was a nobleman. She could not
understand him; his thoughts were always obscure. She felt herself
infinitely inferior to him. She was afraid of him and his occasional
cruelty; but still he was a good man, and he might do what he liked
with her.
From far off came the sound of oars, a rhythmical splash and creak.
Somebody shouted, and from startlingly close at hand one of the
sailors hallooed back.
The young man woke up with a start.
"What is it?" he asked, turning with an angry look to the girl, as
though he held her to be responsible for this breaking in upon his
slumbers.
"The boat, I think," she said. "It must be coming back from the
shore."
The boat's crew came up over the side, and all the stagnant life of
the ship flowed excitedly round them. They were the centre of a vortex
towards which all were drawn. Even the young Catalonian, for all his
hatred of these stinking Genoese shipmen, was sucked into the eddy.
Everybody was talking at once, and in the general hubbub of question
and answer there was nothing coherent to be made out. Piercingly
distinct above all the noise came the voice of the little cabin-boy,
who had been to shore with the boat's crew. He was running round to
everyone in turn repeating: "I hit one of them. You know. I hit one.
With a stone on the forehead. Didn't he bleed, ooh! didn't he just!"
And he would dance with uncontrollable excitement.
The captain held up his hand and shouted for silence. "One at a time,
there," he ordered, and when order had a little been restored, added
grumblingly, "Like a pack of dogs on a bone. You talk, boatswain."
"I hit one of them," said the boy. Somebody cuffed him over the head,
and he relapsed into silence.
When the boatswain's story had rambled through labyrinths of
digression, over countless obstacles of interruptions and emendations,
to its conclusion, the Spaniard went back to join his companion under
the awning. He had assumed again his habitual indifference.
"Nearly butchered," he said languidly, in response to her eager
questions. "They"--he jerked a hand in the direction of the
town--"they were pelting an old fellow who had come there preaching
the Faith. Left him dead on the beach. Our men had to run for it."
She could get no more out of him; he turned over and pretended to go
to sleep.
* * * * *
Towards evening they received a visit from the captain. He was a
large, handsome man, with gold ear-rings glinting from among a bush of
black hair.
"Divine Providence," he remarked sententiously, after the usual
courtesies had passed, "has called upon us to perform a very notable
work."
"Indeed?" said the young man.
"No less a work," continued the captain, "than to save from the
clutches of the infidels and heathen the precious remains of a holy
martyr."