CHAPTER XIII

Calamy lay on his back, quite still, looking up into the darkness. Up

there, he was thinking, so near that it’s only a question of reaching

out a hand to draw back the curtaining darkness that conceals it, up

there, just above me, floats the great secret, the beauty and the

mystery. To look into the depths of that mystery, to fix the eyes of the

spirit on that bright and enigmatic beauty, to pore over the secret

until its symbols cease to be opaque and the light filters through from

beyond—there is nothing else in life, for me at any rate, that matters;

there is no rest or possibility of satisfaction in doing anything else.

All this was obvious to him now. And it was obvious, too, that he could

not do two things at once; he couldn’t at the same time lean out into

the silence beyond the futile noise and bustle—into the mental silence

that lies beyond the body—he couldn’t at the same time do this and

himself partake in the tumult; and if he wanted to look into the depths

of mind, he must not interpose a preoccupation with his bodily

appetites.

He had known all this so well and so long; and still he went on in the

same way of life. He knew that he ought to change, to do something

different, and he profoundly resented this knowledge. Deliberately he

acted against it. Instead of making an effort to get out of the noise

and bustle, to break away from his enslavement and do what he ought to

do, what he knew that, really and profoundly, he wanted to do, he had

more than once, when his bonds had seemed on the point of falling away

of themselves, deliberately tightened them. He resented this necessity

of changing, even though it was a necessity imposed on him, not from

without, but by what he knew to be the most intelligent part of his own

being. He was afraid, too, that if he changed he would be making himself

ridiculous. It was not that he desired to live as he had until a year

ago. That dreary and fatiguing routine of pleasure had become

intolerable; he had broken definitely with that. No; he pictured a sort

of graceful Latin compromise. An Epicurean cultivation of mind and body.

Breakfast at nine. Serious reading from ten till one. Luncheon prepared

by an excellent French cook. In the afternoon a walk and talk with

intelligent friends. Tea with crumpets and the most graceful of female

society. A frugal but exquisite supper. Three hours’ meditation about

the Absolute, and then bed, not unaccompanied.... It sounded charming.

But somehow it wouldn’t do. To the liver of this perfect Life of Reason

the secret, the mystery and the beauty, though they might be handled and

examined, refused to give up their significance. If one really wanted to

know about them, one must do more than meditate upon them of an evening

between the French chef’s masterpiece of maigre cooking and the night’s

rest, not in solitude. In these delightful Latin circumstances the

secret, the mystery and the beauty reduced themselves to nothing. One

thought of them only because they were amusing and to pass the time;

they were really no more important than the tea with crumpets, the

vegetarian supper and the amorous repose. If one wanted them to be more

than these, one must abandon oneself completely to the contemplation of

them. There could be no compromise.

Calamy knew this. But all the same he had made love to Mary Thriplow,

not because he had felt an overwhelming passionate necessity to do so;

but because she amused him, because her prettiness, her air of unreal

innocence exasperated his senses, more than all because he felt that a

love affair with Mary Thriplow would keep him thoroughly occupied and

prevent him from thinking about anything else. It had not. The beauty

and the mystery still hung just above him when he lay alone in the

darkness. They were still there; his affair with Mary Thriplow merely

prevented him from approaching them.

Down in the valley a clock struck one. The sound reminded him that he

had promised to go to her to-night. He found himself thinking of what

would happen when they met, of the kisses, the caresses given and

received. Angrily he tried to turn his thoughts to other themes; he

tried to think of the mystery and the beauty that floated there, above

him, on the further side of the curtaining darkness. But however

vehemently he strove to expel them, the charnel images kept returning

again and again to his mind.

“I won’t go,” he said to himself; but he knew while he was saying it

that he would. With an extraordinary vividness he imagined her lying on

the crook of his arm, extenuated, limp and shuddering, like one who has

been tormented on the rack. Yes, he knew that he would go.

The notion of torture continued to haunt his mind. He thought of those

poor wretches who, accused of sorcery, admitted after the third day’s

torment that they had indeed flown along the wind, passed through

keyholes, taken the form of wolves and conjoined themselves with incubi;

who would admit, not only these things, but also, after another hour on

the rack, that they had accomplices, that this man, that woman, that

young child were also sorcerers and servants of the devil. The spirit is

willing, but the flesh is weak. Weak in pain, but weaker still, he

thought, more inexcusably weak, in pleasure. For under the torments of

pleasure, what cowardices, what betrayals of self and of others will it

not commit! How lightly it will lie and perjure itself! How glibly, with

a word, condemn others to suffer! How abjectly it will surrender

happiness and almost life itself for a moment’s prolongation of the

delicious torture! The shame that follows is the spirit’s resentment,

its sad indignation at its bondage and humiliation.

Under the torment of pleasure, he thought, women are weaker than men.

Their weakness flatters their lover’s consciousness of strength,

gratifies his desire for power. On one of his own sex a man will vent

his love of power by making him suffer; but on a woman by making her

enjoy. It is more the pleasurable torment he inflicts than what is

inflicted upon him that delights the lover.

And since man is less weak, Calamy went on thinking, since pleasure with

him is never so annihilating that he cannot take greater pleasure in the

torment of his tormentor, is he not therefore the less excusable for

breaking faith with himself or others under the delicious torture or the

desire and anticipation of it? Man has less physical justification for

his weakness and his enslavement. Woman is made by nature to be

enslaved—by love, by children. But every now and then a man is born who

ought to be free. For such a man it is disgraceful to succumb under the

torture.

If I could free myself, he thought, I could surely do something; nothing

useful, no doubt, in the ordinary sense, nothing that would particularly

profit other people; but something that for me would be of the last

importance. The mystery floats just above me. If I were free, if I had

time, if I could think and think and slowly learn to plumb the silences

of the spirit....

The image of Mary Thriplow presented itself again to his mind’s eye.

Limply she lay in the crook of his arm, trembling as though after

torment. He shut his eyes; angrily he shook his head. The image would

not leave him. If I were free, he said to himself, if I were free....

In the end he got out of bed and opened the door. The corridor was

brightly illumined; an electric light was left burning all night. Calamy

was just about to step out, when another door a little further down the

passage was violently thrown open and Mr. Falx, his legs showing thin

and hairy below the hem of a night-shirt, impetuously emerged. Calamy

retired into the shadowed embrasure of his door. With the anxious,

harrowed expression on his face of one who suffers from colic, Mr. Falx

hurried past, looking neither to the left hand nor to the right. He

turned down another passage which entered the main corridor a few yards

away and disappeared; a door slammed. When he was out of sight, Calamy

walked softly and rapidly down the corridor, opened the fourth door on

the left and disappeared into the darkness. A little later Mr. Falx

returned, at leisure, to his room.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

PART IV: THE JOURNEY

------------------------------------------------------------------------

PART IV: The Journey

CHAPTER I

Lord Hovenden detached from his motor car was an entirely different

being from the Lord Hovenden who lounged with such a deceptive air of

languor behind the steering-wheel of a Vauxhall Velox. Half an hour

spent in the roaring wind of his own speed transformed him from a shy

and diffident boy into a cool-headed hero, daring not merely in the

affairs of the road, but in the affairs of life as well. The fierce wind

blew away his diffidence; the speed intoxicated him out of his

self-consciousness. All his victories had been won while he was in the

car. It was in the car—eighteen months ago, before he came of age—that

he had ventured to ask his guardian to increase his allowance; and he

had driven faster and faster until, in sheer terror, his guardian had

agreed to do whatever he wished. It was on board the Velox that he had

ventured to tell Mrs. Terebinth, who was seventeen years older than he,

had four children and adored her husband, that she was the most

beautiful woman he had ever seen; he had bawled it at her while they

were doing seventy-five on the Great North Road. At sixty, at

sixty-five, at seventy, his courage had still been inadequate to the

achievement; but at seventy-five it reached the sticking-point: he had

told her. And when she laughed and told him that he was an impudent

young shrimp, he felt not a whit abashed, but laughed back, pressed the

accelerator down a little further, and when the needle of the

speedometer touched eighty, shouted through the wind and the noise of

the engine: “But I love you.” Unfortunately, however, the drive came to

an end soon after; all drives must come to an end, sooner or later. The

_affaire_ Terebinth went no further. If only, Lord Hovenden regretfully

sighed, if only one could spend all one’s life in the Velox! But the

Velox had its disadvantages. There were occasions when the heroic,

speed-intoxicated self had got the timorous pedestrian into awkward

scrapes. There was that time, for example, when, rolling along at sixty,

he had airily promised one of his advanced political friends to make a

speech at a meeting. The prospect, while one was doing sixty, had seemed

not merely unalarming, but positively attractive. But what agonies he

suffered when he was standing on the solid earth again, at his journey’s

end! How impossibly formidable the undertaking seemed! How bitterly he

cursed himself for his folly in having accepted the invitation! In the

end he was reduced to telegraphing that his doctor had ordered him

peremptorily to the south of France. He fled, ignominiously.

To-day the Velox had its usual effect on him. At Vezza, when they

started, he was all shyness and submission. He assented meekly to all

the arrangements that Mrs. Aldwinkle made and remade every five minutes,

however contradictory and impossible. He did not venture to suggest that

Irene should come in his car; it was through no good management of his

own, but by the mere luck of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s final caprice before the

actual moment of starting, that he did in fact find her sitting next him

when at last they moved off from before the palace doors. At the back

sat Mr. Falx, in solitude, surrounded by suit-cases. To him Lord

Hovenden had even dutifully promised that he would never go more than

five and twenty miles an hour. Pedestrian slavishness could hardly go

further.

Heavily loaded, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s limousine started first. Miss Elver,

who had begged to be granted this special favour, sat in front, next the

chauffeur. An expression of perfect and absolute bliss irradiated her

face. Whenever the car passed any one by the roadside, she made a shrill

hooting noise and waved her handkerchief. Luckily she was unaware of the

feelings of disgust and indignation which her conduct aroused in the

chauffeur; he was English and enormously genteel, he had the reputation

of his country and his impeccable car to keep up. And this person waved

handkerchiefs and shouted as though she were on a char-à-banc. Miss

Elver even waved at the cows and horses, she shouted even to the cats

and the chickens.

In the body of the car sat Mrs. Aldwinkle, Mrs. Chelifer, Chelifer and

Mr. Cardan. Calamy and Miss Thriplow had decided that they had no time

to go to Rome and had been left—without a word of objection on Mrs.

Aldwinkle’s part—at the palace. The landscape slid placidly past the

windows. Mr. Cardan and Mrs. Chelifer talked about traditional games.

Meanwhile, a couple of hundred yards behind, Lord Hovenden disgustfully

sniffed the dusty air. “How intolerably slowly old Ernest drives!” he

said to his companion.

“Aunt Lilian doesn’t allow him to do more than thirty miles an hour,”

Irene explained.

Hovenden snorted derisively. “Firty! But must we eat veir filthy dust

all ve way?”

“Perhaps you might drop back a bit,” Irene suggested.

“Or perhaps we might pass vem?”

“Well ...” said Irene doubtfully. “I don’t think we ought to make poor

Aunt Lilian eat our dust.”

“She wouldn’t eat it for long, if old Ernest is only allowed to do

firty.”

“Well, in that case,” said Irene, feeling that her duty towards Aunt

Lilian had been done, “in that case....”

Lord Hovenden accelerated. The road was broad, flat and straight. There

was no traffic. In two minutes Mrs. Aldwinkle had eaten her brief,

unavoidable meal of dust; the air was clear again. Far off along the

white road, a rapidly diminishing cloud was all that could be seen of

Lord Hovenden’s Velox.

“Well, fank God,” Lord Hovenden was saying in a cheerful voice, “now we

can get along at a reasonable rate.” He grinned, a young ecstatic giant.

Irene also found the speed exhilarating. Under her grey silk mask, with

its goggling windows for the eyes, her short lip was lifted in a joyful

smile from the white small teeth. “It’s lovely,” she said.

“I’m glad you like it,” said Hovenden. “Vat’s splendid.”

But a tap on his shoulder reminded him that there was somebody else in

the car besides Irene and himself. Mr. Falx was far from finding the

present state of affairs splendid. Blown by the wind, his white beard

shook and fluttered like a living thing in a state of mortal agitation.

Behind the goggles, his dark eyes had an anxious look in them. “Aren’t

you going rather fast?” he shouted, leaning forward, so as to make

himself heard.

“Not a bit,” Hovenden shouted back. “Just ve usual speed. Perfectly

safe.” His ordinary pedestrian self would never have dreamed of doing

anything contrary to the wishes of the venerated master. But the young

giant who sat at the wheel of the Velox cared for nobody. He went his

own way.

They passed through the sordid outskirts of Viareggio, through the

pinewoods beyond, solemn with dark green shadow, and aromatic. Islanded

in their grassy meadow within the battlemented walls, the white church,

the white arcaded tower miraculously poised on the verge of falling, the

round white baptistery seemed to meditate in solitude of ancient

glories—Pisan dominion, Pisan arts and thoughts—of the mysteries of

religion, of inscrutable fate and unfathomed godhead, of the

insignificance and the grandeur of man.

“Why ve deuce it shouldn’t fall,” said Hovenden, as the Leaning Tower

came in sight, “I can’t imagine.”

They drove past the house on the water, where Byron had bored himself

through an eternity of months, out of the town. After Pontedera the road

became more desolate. Through a wilderness of bare, unfertile hills,

between whose yellowing grasses showed a white and ghastly soil, they

mounted towards Volterra. The landscape took on something of an infernal

aspect; a prospect of parched hills and waterless gulleys, like the

undulations of a petrified ocean, expanded interminably round them. And

on the crest of the highest wave, the capital of this strange hell,

stood Volterra—three towers against the sky, a dome, a line of

impregnable walls, and outside the walls, still outside but advancing

ineluctably year by year towards them, the ravening gulf that eats its

way into the flank of the hill, devouring the works of civilisation

after civilisation, the tombs of the Etruscans, Roman villas, abbeys and

mediaeval fortresses, renaissance churches and the houses of yesterday.

“Must be a bit slow, life in a town like vis,” said Hovenden, racing

round the hairpin turns with an easy virtuosity that appalled Mr. Falx.

“Think if one had been born there,” said Irene.

“Well, if we’d both been born vere,” replied Lord Hovenden, flushed with

insolence and speed, “it wouldn’t have been so bad.”

They left Volterra behind them. The hellish landscape was gradually

tempered with mundane greenness and amenity. They descended the headlong

street of Colle. The landscape became once more completely earthly. The

soil of the hills was red, like that from which God made Adam. In the

steep fields grew rows of little pollard trees, from whose twisted black

arms hung the festooned vines. Here and there between the trees shuffled

a pair of white oxen, dragging a plough.

“Excellent roads, for a change,” said Lord Hovenden. On one straight

stretch he managed to touch eighty-eight. Mr. Falx’s beard writhed and

fluttered with the agonised motions of some captive animal. He was

enormously thankful when they drew up in front of the hotel at Siena.

“Wonderful machine, don’t you fink?” Lord Hovenden asked him, when they

had come to a standstill.

“You go much too fast,” said Mr. Falx severely.

Lord Hovenden’s face fell. “I’m awfully sorry,” he apologised. The young

giant in him was already giving place to the meek pedestrian. He looked

at his watch. “The others won’t be here for another three-quarters of an

hour, I should fink,” he added, in the hope that Mr. Falx would be

mollified by the information.

Mr. Falx was not mollified, and when the time came, after lunch, for

setting out on the Perugia road, he expressed a decided preference for a

seat in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s limousine. It was decided that he should change

places with Miss Elver.

Miss Elver had no objection to speed; indeed, it excited her. The faster

they went, the more piercing became her cries of greeting and farewell,

the more wildly she waved her handkerchief at the passing dogs and

children. The only trouble about going so fast was that the mighty wind

was always tearing the handkerchiefs from between her fingers and

whirling them irretrievably into receding space. When all the four

handkerchiefs in her reticule had been blown away, Miss Elver burst into

tears. Lord Hovenden had to stop and lend her his coloured silk bandana.

Miss Elver was enchanted by its gaudy beauty; to secure it against the

assaults of the thievish wind, she made Irene tie one corner of it round

her wrist.

“Now it’ll be all right,” she said triumphantly; lifting her goggles,

she wiped away the last traces of her recent grief.

Lord Hovenden set off again. On the sky-line, lifted high above the

rolling table-land over which they were travelling, the solitary blue

shape of Monte Amiata beckoned from far away. With every mile to

southward the horns of the white oxen that dragged the carts became

longer and longer. A sneeze—one ran the risk of a puncture; a sideways

toss of the head—one might have been impaled on the hard and polished

points. They passed through San Quirico; from that secret and melancholy

garden within the walls of the ruined citadel came a whiff of sun-warmed

box. In Pienza they found the Platonic idea of a city, the town with a

capital T; walls with a gate in them, a short street, a piazza with a

cathedral and palaces round the other three sides, another short street,

another gate and then the fields, rich with corn, wine and oil; and the

tall blue peak of Monte Amiata looking down across the fertile land. At

Montepulciano there were more palaces and more churches; but the

intellectual beauty of symmetry was replaced by a picturesque and

precipitous confusion.

“Gosh!” said Lord Hovenden expressively, as they slid with locked wheels

down a high street that had been planned for pack-asses and mules. From

pedimented windows between the pilasters of the palaces, curious faces

peered out at them. They tobogganed down, through the high renaissance,

out of an arch of the Middle Ages, into the dateless and eternal fields.

From Montepulciano they descended on to Lake Trasimene.

“Wasn’t there a battle here, or something?” asked Irene, when she saw

the name on the map.

Lord Hovenden seemed to remember that there had indeed been something of

the kind in this neighbourhood. “But it doesn’t make much difference,

does it?”

Irene nodded; it certainly didn’t seem to make much difference.

“Nofing makes any difference,” said Lord Hovenden, making himself heard

with difficulty in the teeth of a wind which his speedometer registered

as blowing at forty-five miles an hour. “Except”—the wind made him

bold—“except you.” And he added hastily, in case Irene might try to be

severe. “Such a bore going down-hill on a twiddly road like vis. One

can’t risk ve slightest speed.”

But when they turned into the flat highway along the western shore of

the lake, his face brightened. “Vis is more like it,” he said. The wind

in their faces increased from a capful to half a gale, from half a gale

to a full gale, from a full gale very nearly to a hurricane. Lord

Hovenden’s spirits rose with the mounting speed. His lips curved

themselves into a smile of fixed and permanent rapture. Behind the glass

of his goggles his eyes were very bright. “Pretty good going,” he said.

“Pretty good,” echoed Irene. Under her mask, she too was smiling.

Between her ears and the flaps of her leather cap the wind made a

glorious roaring. She was happy.

The road swung round to the left following the southern shore of the

lake.

“We shall soon be at Perugia,” said Hovenden regretfully. “What a bore!”

And Irene, though she said nothing, inwardly agreed with him.

They rushed on, the gale blew steadily in their faces. The road forked;

Lord Hovenden turned the nose of his machine along the leftward branch.

They lost sight of the blue water.

“Good-bye, Trasimene,” said Irene regretfully. It was a lovely lake; she

wished she could remember what had happened there.

The road began to climb and twist; the wind abated to a mere half gale.

From the top of the hill, Irene was surprised to see the blue waters,

which she had just taken leave of for ever, sparkling two or three

hundred feet below on the left. At the joyous sight Miss Elver clapped

her hands and shouted.

“Hullo,” Irene said, surprised. “That’s odd, isn’t it?”

“Taken ve wrong road,” Hovenden explained. “We’re going norf again up ve

east side of ve lake. We’ll go right round. It’s too much bore to stop

and turn.”

They rushed on. For a long time neither of them spoke. Behind them Miss

Elver hooted her greetings to every living creature on the road.

They were filled with happiness and joy; they would have liked to go on

like this for ever. They rushed on. On the north shore of the lake the

road straightened itself out and became flat again. The wind freshened.

Far off on their respective hills Cortona and Montepulciano moved

slowly, as they rushed along, like fixed stars. And now they were on the

west shore once more. Perched on its jutting peninsula Castiglione del

Lago reflected itself complacently in the water. “Pretty good,” shouted

Lord Hovenden in the teeth of the hurricane. “By the way,” he added,

“wasn’t it Hannibal or somebody who had a battle here? Wiv elephants, or

somefing.”

“Perhaps it was,” said Irene.

“Not vat it matters in ve least.”

“Not in the least.” She laughed under her mask.

Hovenden laughed too. He was happy, he was joyful, he was daring.

“Would you marry me if I asked you?” he said. The question followed

naturally and by a kind of logic from what they had been saying about

Hannibal and his elephants. He did not look at her as he asked the

question; when one is doing sixty-seven one must keep one’s eyes on the

road.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Irene.

“I’m not talking nonsense,” Lord Hovenden protested. “I’m asking a

straightforward question. Would you marry me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” said Irene.

They had passed Castiglione. The fixed stars of Montepulciano and

Cortona had set behind them.

“Don’t you like me?” shouted Lord Hovenden. The wind had swelled into a

hurricane.

“You know I do.”

“Ven why not?”

“Because, because ... oh, I don’t know. I wish you’d stop talking about

it.”

The machine rushed on. Once more they were running along the southern

shore. A hundred yards before the forking of the roads, Lord Hovenden

broke silence. “Will you marry me?” he asked.

“No,” said Irene.

Lord Hovenden turned the nose of his machine to the left. The road

climbed and twisted, the wind of their speed abated.

“Stop,” said Irene. “You’ve taken the wrong turn again.”

But Hovenden did not stop. Instead, he pressed down the accelerator. If

the car got round the corners it was more by a miracle than in obedience

to the laws of Newton or of nature.

“Stop!” cried Irene again. But the car went on.

From the hill-top they looked down once more upon the lake.

“Will you marry me?” Lord Hovenden asked again. His eyes were fixed on

the road in front of him. Rapturously, triumphantly he smiled. He had

never felt happier, never more daring, more overflowing with strength

and power. “Will you marry me?”

“No,” said Irene. She felt annoyed; how stupidly he was behaving!

They were silent for several minutes. At Castiglione del Lago he asked

again. Irene repeated her answer.

“You’re not going to do this clown’s trick again, are you?” she asked as

they approached the bifurcation of the roads.

“It depends if you’re going to marry me,” he answered. This time he

laughed aloud; so infectiously that Irene, whose irritation was

something laid on superficially over her happiness, could not help

laughing too. “_Are_ you going to?” he asked.

“No.”

Lord Hovenden turned to the left. “It’ll be late before we get to

Perugia,” he said.

“Oo-ooh!” cried Miss Elver, as they topped the long hill. “How lovely!”

She clapped her hands. Then, leaning forward, she touched Irene’s

shoulder. “What a lot of lakes there are here!” she said.

On the north shore Lord Hovenden asked again. Cortona and Montelpuciano

presided at the asking.

“I don’t see why I should be bullied,” said Irene. Lord Hovenden found

the answer more promising than those which had gone before.

“But you’re not being bullied.”

“I am,” she insisted. “You’re trying to force me to answer all at once,

without thinking.”

“Now really,” said Hovenden, “I call vat a bit fick. Forcing you to

answer all at once! But vat’s exactly what I’m not doing. I’m giving you

time. We’ll go round ve lake all night, if you like.”

A quarter of a mile from the forking of the road, he put the question

yet once more.

“You’re a beast,” said Irene.

“Vat’s not an answer.”

“I don’t want to answer.”

“You needn’t answer definitely if you don’t want to,” he conceded. “I

only want you to say vat you’ll fink of it. Just say perhaps.”

“I don’t want to,” Irene insisted. They were very close, now, to the

dividing of ways.

“Just perhaps. Just say you’ll fink of it.”

“Well, I’ll think,” said Irene. “But mind, it doesn’t commit....”

She did not finish her sentence; for the car, which had been heading

towards the left, swerved suddenly to the right with such violence that

Irene had to clutch at the arm of her seat to prevent herself from being

thrown sideways bodily out of the machine. “Goodness!”

“It’s all right,” said Lord Hovenden. They were running smoothly now

along the right-hand road. Ten minutes later, from the crest of a little

pass, they saw Perugia on its mountain, glittering in the sunlight. They

found, when they reached the hotel, that the rest of the party had long

since arrived.

“We took ve wrong turning,” Lord Hovenden explained. “By ve way,” he

added, turning to Mr. Cardan, “about vat lake we passed—wasn’t it

Hannibal or some one....”

“Such a lot of lakes,” Miss Elver was telling Mrs. Chelifer. “Such a

lot!”

“Only one, surely, my dear,” Mrs. Chelifer mildly insisted.

But Miss Elver wouldn’t hear of it. “Lots and lots.”

Mrs. Chelifer sighed compassionately.

Before dinner Irene and Lord Hovenden went for a stroll in the town. The

huge stone palaces lowered down at them as they passed. The sun was so

low that only their highest windows, their roofs and cornices took the

light. The world’s grey shadow was creeping up their flanks; but their

crests were tipped with coral and ruddy gold.

“I like vis place,” said Lord Hovenden. In the circumstances he would

have liked Wigan or Pittsburg.

“So do I,” said Irene. Through the window in her thick hair her face

looked smiling out, merry in its childishness.

Leaving the stately part of the town, they plunged into the labyrinth of

steep alleys, of winding passage-ways and staircases behind the

cathedral. Built confusedly on the hillside, the tall houses seemed to

grow into one another, as though they were the component parts of one

immense and fantastical building, in which the alleys served as

corridors. The road would burrow through the houses in a long dark

tunnel, to widen out into a little well-like courtyard, open to the sky.

Through open doors, at the head of an outside staircase, one saw in the

bright electric light a family sitting round the soup tureen. The road

turned into a flight of stairs, dipped into another tunnel, made

cheerful by the lights of a subterranean wine shop opening into it. From

the mouth of the bright cavern came up the smell of liquor, the sound of

loud voices and reverberated laughter.

And then, suddenly emerging from under the high houses, they found

themselves standing on the edge of an escarped slope, looking out on to

a huge expanse of pale evening sky, scalloped at its fringes by the blue

shapes of mountains, with the round moon, already bright, hanging serene

and solemn in the midst. Leaning over the parapet, they looked down at

the roofs of another quarter of the city, a hundred feet below. The

colours of the world still struggled against the encroaching darkness;

but a lavish municipality had already beaded the streets with yellow

lights. A faint smell of wood-smoke and frying came up through the thin

pure air. The silence of the sky was so capacious, so high and wide,

that the noises of the town—like so many small, distinctly seen objects

in the midst of an immense blank prairie—served but to intensify the

quiet, to make the listener more conscious of its immensity in

comparison with the trivial clatter at its heart.

“I like vis place,” Lord Hovenden repeated.

They stood for a long time, leaning their elbows on the parapet, saying

nothing.

“I say,” said Hovenden suddenly, turning towards his companion a face on

which all the shyness, the pedestrian’s self-deprecation had reappeared,

“I’m most awfully sorry about vat silly business of going round vat

beastly lake.” The young giant who sat at the wheel of the Vauxhall

Velox had retired with the machine into the garage, leaving a much less

formidable Hovenden to prosecute the campaign which he had so

masterfully begun. The moon, the enchanting beauty of the face that

looked out so pensively through its tress-framed window, the enormous

silence with the little irrelevant noises at its heart, the smell of

wood-smoke and fried veal cutlets—all these influences had conspired to

mollify Lord Hovenden’s joyous elation into a soft and sugary

melancholy. His actions of this afternoon seemed to him now, in his

changed mood, reprehensibly violent. He was afraid that his brutality

might have ruined his cause. Could she ever forgive him for such

behaviour? He was overwhelmed by self-reproach. To beg forgiveness

seemed to be his only hope. “I’m awfully sorry.”

“Are you?” Irene turned and smiled at him. Her small white teeth showed

beneath the lifted lip; in the wide-set, childish eyes there was a

shining happiness. “I’m not. I didn’t mind a bit.”

Lord Hovenden took her hand. “You didn’t mind? Not at all?”

She shook her head. “You remember that day under the olive trees?”

“I was a beast,” he whispered remorsefully.

“I was a goose,” said Irene. “But I feel different now.”

“You don’t mean....”

She nodded. They walked back to their hotel hand in hand. Hovenden never

stopped talking and laughing all the way. Irene was silent. The kiss had

made her happy too, but in a different way.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER II

Time and space, matter and mind, subject, object—how inextricably they

got mixed, next day, on the road to Rome! The simple-minded traveller

who imagines himself to be driving quietly through Umbria and Latium

finds himself at the same time dizzily switchbacking up and down the

periods of history, rolling on top gear through systems of political

economy, scaling heights of philosophy and religion, whizzing from

aesthetic to aesthetic. Dimensions are bewilderingly multiplied, and the

machine which seems to be rolling so smoothly over the roads is

travelling, in reality, as fast as forty horses and the human minds on

board can take it, down a score of other roads, simultaneously, in all

directions.

The morning was bright when they left Perugia. In the blue sky above

Subasio floated a few large white clouds. Silently they rolled away down

the winding hill. At the foot of the mountain, secure from the sunlight

in the delicious cool of their family vault, the obese Volumni reclined

along the lids of their marble ashbins, as though on couches round the

dinner-table. In an eternal anticipation of the next succulent course

they smiled and for ever went on smiling. We enjoyed life, they seemed

to say, and considered death without horror. The thought of death was

the seasoning which made our five and twenty thousand dinners upon this

earth yet more appetising.

A few miles further on, at Assisi, the mummy of a she-saint lies in a

glass case, brilliantly illumined by concealed electric lights. Think of

death, says the she-saint, ponder incessantly on the decay of all

things, the transience of this sublunary life. Think, think; and in the

end life itself will lose all its savour; death will corrupt it; the

flesh will seem a shame and a disgustfulness. Think of death hard enough

and you will come to deny the beauty and the holiness of life; and, in

point of fact, the mummy was once a nun.

“When Goethe came to Assisi,” said Mr. Cardan, as they emerged from the

vaults of St. Clare, “the only thing he looked at was the portico of a

second-rate Roman temple. Perhaps he wasn’t such a fool as we think

him.”

“An admirable place for playing halma,” said Chelifer, as they entered

the Teatro Metastasio.

Upon that rococo stage art was intended to worship itself. Everywhere

now, for the last two hundred years and more, it has been worshipping

itself.

But in the upper and the lower churches of St. Francis, Giotto and

Cimabue showed that art had once worshipped something other than itself.

Art there is the handmaid of religion—or, as the psycho-analysts would

say, more scientifically, anal-erotism is a frequent concomitant of

incestuous homosexuality.

“I wonder,” said Mr. Cardan pensively, “if St. Francis really managed to

make poverty seem so dignified, charming and attractive as they make

out. I know very few poor people nowadays who cut a particularly

graceful figure.” He looked at Miss Elver, who was waddling along the

road like a water-bird on land, a few yards ahead. The end of one of

Lord Hovenden’s bright bandanas trailed behind her in the dust; it was

tied by one corner to her wrist and she had forgotten its existence.

Twenty-five thousand pounds, thought Mr. Cardan, and sighed. St.

Francis, Gotama Buddha—they managed their affairs rather differently.

But it was difficult nowadays to beg with any degree of dignity.

They got into the cars once more; waving the red bandana, Miss Elver

said good-bye to the saints who thought so much of death that they were

forced to mortify their lives. In their cool summer-house the obese

Volumni smiled contemptuously. We thought not of death, we begat

children, multiplied our flocks, added acre to acre, glorified life....

Lord Hovenden accelerated; the two wisdoms, the new and the ancient law,

receded into the distance.

Spello came tumbling down the hill to look at them. In Foligno it was

market day. There were so many people that Miss Elver exhausted herself

in continuous wavings and greetings. Trevi on its conical mountain was

like the picture of a city in an illuminated book. By the side of the

road, in the rich plain, stood factories; their tall chimneys were the

slenderer repetitions of the castle towers perched high on the slopes of

the hills above. In these secure and civilised times the robbers come

down from their mountain fastnesses and build their watch-towers in the

valleys. They were driving through progress; through progress at a mile

a minute. And suddenly the cool and sparkling miracle of Clitumnus was

at their right hand. The sacred spring came rushing out of the flank of

the hill into a brimming pool. The banks were green with an almost

English grass. There were green islands in the midst; and the weeping

willow trees drooping over the water, the little bridges, transformed

the Roman site into the original landscape from which a Chinese artist

first drew a willow pattern.

“More lakes,” cried Miss Elver.

At Spoleto they stopped for lunch and the frescoes of Filippo Lippi, a

painter Mrs. Aldwinkle particularly admired for having had the strength

of mind, though a friar, to run off with a young girl at a Convent

School. The shadowy apse was melodious with pious and elegant shapes and

clear, pure colours. Anal-erotism was still the handmaid of incestuous

homosexuality, but not exclusively. There was more than a hint in these

bright forms of anal-erotism for anal-erotism’s sake. But the designer

of that more than Roman _cinquecento_ narthex at the west end of the

church, he surely was a pure and unmixed coprophilite. How charming is

divine philosophy! Astrology, alchemy, phrenology and animal magnetism,

the N-rays, ectoplasm and the calculating horses of Elberfield—these

have had their turn and passed. We need not regret them; for we can

boast of a science as richly popular, as easy and as all-explanatory as

ever were phrenology or magic. Gall and Mesmer have given place to

Freud. Filippo Lippi once had a bump of art. He is now an incestuous

homosexualist with a bent towards anal-erotism. Can we doubt any longer

that human intelligence progresses and grows greater? Fifty years hence,

what will be the current explanation of Filippo Lippi? Something

profounder, something more fundamental even than faeces and infantile

incestuousness; of that we may be certain. But what, precisely what, God

alone knows. How charming is divine philosophy!

“I like vese paintings,” Lord Hovenden whispered to Irene.

They set out again. Over the pass of the Somma, down the long winding

gorge to Terni.

On across the plain (the mountains bristling jaggedly all round) and up

the hill to Narni; Narni that hangs precariously on the brink of its

deep precipitous valley; on into the Sabine hills.

Sabine, Sabine—how wildly the mere word deviated the machine from its

course! _Eheu, fugaces_, how the days draw in—was not that first said,

first elegantly and compellingly said, in a Sabine farm? And the Sabine

women! Only Rubens knew what they looked like and how they ought to be

raped. How large and blonde they were! What glossy satin dresses they

had on, what pearls! And their Roman ravishers were tanned as brown as

Indians. Their muscles bulged; their eyes, their polished armour

flashed. From the backs of their prancing horses they fairly dived into

the foaming sea of female flesh that splashed and wildly undulated

around them. The very architecture became tumultuous and orgiastic.

Those were the high old times. Climbing from Narni, they drove into the

heart of them.

But other artists than Peter Paul had passed this way. He painted only

the Sabine name; they, the scene. An ancient shepherd, strayed from one

of Piranesi’s ruins, watched them from a rock above the road, leaning on

his staff. A flock of goats, kneeling ruminatively in the shade of an

oak tree, their black bearded faces, their twisted horns sharply

outlined against the bright blue sky, grouped themselves

professionally—good beasts! they had studied the art of pictorial

composition under the best masters—in momentary expectation of Rosa da

Tivoli’s arrival. And the same Italianising Dutchman was surely

responsible for that flock of dusty sheep, those dogs, those lads with

staves and that burly master shepherd, dressed like a capripede in

goatskin breeches and mounted on the back of a little donkey, whose

smallness contributed by contrast to the portly dignity of its rider.

Nor were Dutchmen and Flemings the only foreign painters in this Italian

scene. There were trees, there were glades in the woods, there were

rocks that belonged by right of conquest to Nicolas Poussin. Half close

the eyes, and that grey stone becomes a ruined sepulchre: _Et ego in

Arcadia_ ...; the village there, on the hill-top, across the valley,

flowers into a little city of colonnades and cupolas and triumphal

arches, and the peasants working in the fields are the people of a

transcendental Arcadia gravely and soberly engaged in pursuing the True,

the rationally Good and Beautiful. So much for the foreground and the

middle distance. But suddenly, from the crest of a long descent, the

remote wide background of Poussin’s ideal world revealed itself: the

vale of the Tiber, the broken plain of the Campagna, and in the

midst—fantastic, improbable—the solitary cone of Mount Soracte, dim and

blue against the blue of the sky.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER III

From the heights of the Pincio Mr. Falx denounced the city that lay

spread out below him.

“Marvellous, isn’t it?” Mrs. Aldwinkle had said. Rome was one of her

private properties.

“But every stone of it,” said Mr. Falx, “raised by slave labour. Every

stone! Millions of wretches have sweated and toiled and died”—Mr. Falx’s

voice rose, his language became richer and richer, he gesticulated as

though he were addressing a public meeting—“in order that these palaces,

these stately churches, these forums, amphitheatres, cloaca maximas and

what-nots might be here to-day to gratify your idle eyes. Is it worth

it, I ask you? Is the momentary gratification of a few idlers a

sufficient reason for the secular oppression of millions of human

beings, their brothers, their equals in the eyes of God? Is it, I ask

again? No, a thousand times no.” With his right fist Mr. Falx thumped

the open palm of his left hand. “No!”

“But you forget,” said Mr. Cardan, “there’s such a thing as a natural

hierarchy.” The words seemed to remind him of something. He looked

round. At one of the little tea-tables grouped round the band-stand at

the other side of the road, Miss Elver, dressed in her sack of flowered

upholstery, was eating chocolate éclairs and meringues, messily, with an

expression of rapture on her cream-smeared face. Mr. Cardan turned back

and continued: “There are a few choice Britons who never never will be

slaves, and a great many who not only will be slaves, but would be

utterly lost if they were made free. Isn’t it so?”

“Specious,” said Mr. Falx severely. “But does the argument justify you

in grinding the life out of a million human beings for the sake of a few

works of art? How many thousand workmen and their wives and children

lived degraded lives in order that St. Peter’s might be what it is?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, St. Peter’s isn’t much of a work of art,”

said Mrs. Aldwinkle scornfully, feeling that she had scored a decided

point in the argument.

“If it’s a question of degraded lives,” put in Chelifer, “let me make a

claim for the middle classes rather than the workers. Materially,

perhaps, they may live a little better; but morally and spiritually, I

assure you, they stand at the very heart of reality. Intellectually, of

course, they are indistinguishable from the workers. All but a

negligible, freakish minority in both classes belong to the three lowest

Galtonian categories. But morally and spiritually they are worse off;

they suffer from a greater reverence for public opinion, they are

tortured by snobbery, they live perpetually in the midst of fear and

hate. For if the workers are afraid of losing their jobs, so too are the

burgesses, and with almost better reason—for they have more to lose,

have further to fall. They fall from a precarious heaven of gentility

into the abysses of unrelieved poverty, into the workhouse and the

glutted labour exchanges; can you wonder that they live in fear? And as

for hate—you can talk about the hate of the proletariat for the

bourgeoisie, but it’s nothing, I assure you, to the hate that the

bourgeoisie feel for the proletariat. Your burgess loathes the worker

because he is afraid of him; he is terrified of the revolution that may

pull him down from his genteel heaven into hell. How enviously, with

what a bitter resentment, your burgess regards the slightest

amelioration of the worker’s existence! To him it always seems an

amelioration made at his expense. Do you remember, during the war and in

the prosperous time immediately following, when the workers for the

first time in history were paid a wage that enabled them to live in

something like comfort, do you remember how furiously, with what a black

atrabilious overflow of hatred, the middle classes denounced the riotous

excesses of the idle poor? Why, the monsters even bought pianos—pianos!

The pianos have all been sold again, long since. The spare furniture has

gone the way of all superfluities. Even the winter overcoat is pawned.

The burgess, for all that the times are hard for him too, feels happier;

he is revenged. He can live in a comparative tranquillity. And what a

life! He lives according to his lusts, but timorously and in a

conventional way; his diversions are provided for him by joint stock

companies. He has no religion, but a great respect for genteel

conventions which have not even the justification of a divine origin. He

has heard of art and thought, and respects them because the best people

respect them; but his mental capacities and his lack of education do not

allow him to get any real satisfaction out of them. He is thus poorer

than the savage, who, if he has never heard of art or science, is yet

rich in religion and traditional lore. The life of a wild animal has a

certain dignity and beauty; it is only the life of a domesticated animal

that can be called degraded. The burgess is the perfectly domesticated

human animal. That is why,” added Chelifer, “that is why any one who

wants to live really at the heart of human reality must live in the

midst of burgessdom. In a little while, however, it won’t be necessary

to make any invidious distinctions between the classes. Every one will

soon be bourgeois. The charm of the lower classes in the past consisted

in the fact that they were composed of human animals in a state of

relative wildness. They had a traditional wisdom and a traditional

superstition; they had ancient and symbolical diversions of their own.

My mother can tell you all about those,” he put in parenthetically.

“That Tolstoy should have preferred the Russian peasants to his rich and

literary friends is very comprehensible. The peasants were wild; the

others, just as brutish at bottom, were disgustingly tame. Moreover,

they were lap-dogs of a perfectly useless breed; the peasants at any

rate did something to justify their existence. But in the other

countries of Europe and the New World the wild breed is rapidly dying

out. Million-sale newspapers and radios are domesticating them at a

prodigious rate. You can go a long way in England nowadays before you

find a genuine wild human animal. Still, they do exist in the country

and even in the more fetid and savage parts of towns. That’s why, I

repeat, one must live among the suburban bourgeoisie. The degraded and

domesticated are the typical human animals of the present time; it’s

they who will inherit the earth in the next generation; they’re the

characteristic modern reality. The wild ones are no longer typical; it

would be ludicrous to be a Tolstoyan now, in western Europe. And as for

the genuine men and women, as opposed to the human animals, whether wild

or tame—they’re so fabulously exceptional that one has no right to think

of them at all. That cupola,” he pointed to the silhouette of St.

Peter’s, rising high above the houses on the other side of the city,

“was designed by Michelangelo. And very nice too. But what has it or he

to do with us?”

“Blasphemy!” cried Mrs. Aldwinkle, flying to the defence of Buonarroti.

Mr. Falx harked back to an earlier grievance. “You malign human nature,”

he said.

“All very true and indeed obvious,” was Mr. Cardan’s comment. “But I

can’t see why you shouldn’t allow us to amuse ourselves with

Michelangelo if we want to. God knows, it’s hard enough for a man to

adapt himself to circumstances; why should you deprive him of his little

assistants in the difficult task? Wine, for example, learning, cigars

and conversation, art, cooking, religion for those that like it, sport,

love, humanitarianism, hashish and all the rest. Every man has his own

recipe for facilitating the process of adaptation. Why shouldn’t he be

allowed to indulge in his dope in peace? You young men are all so damned

intolerant. How often have I had occasion to say it? You’re nothing but

a set of prohibitionists, the whole lot of you.”

“Still,” said Mrs. Chelifer in her gentle and musical voice, “you can’t

deny that prohibition has done a great deal of good in America.”

They strolled back to the tea-table, which they had left a few minutes

before to look at the view. Miss Elver was just finishing an éclair. Two

empty dishes stood in front of her.

“Had a good tea?” asked Mr. Cardan.

Miss Elver nodded; her mouth was too full to speak.

“Perhaps you’d like some more cakes?” he suggested.

Miss Elver looked at the two empty dishes, then at Mr. Cardan. She

seemed on the point of saying yes. But Mrs. Chelifer, who had taken the

chair next hers, laid a hand on her arm.

“I don’t think Grace really wants any more,” she said.

Grace turned towards her; a look of disappointment and melancholy came

into her eyes, but it gave place after a moment to a happier expression.

She smiled, she took Mrs. Chelifer’s hand and kissed it.

“I like you,” she said.

On the back of Mrs. Chelifer’s hand her lips had left a brown print of

melted chocolate. “I think you’d better just give your face a little

wipe with your napkin,” Mrs. Chelifer suggested.

“Perhaps if you dipped the corner of it first into the hot water....”

There was a silence. From the open-air dancing-floor, a hundred yards

away beneath the trees, came the sound, a little dimmed by the

intervening distance and the pervading Roman noise, of the jazz band.

Monotonously, unceasingly, the banjos throbbed out the dance rhythms. An

occasional squeak indicated the presence of a violin. The trumpet could

be heard tooting away with a dreary persistence at the tonic and

dominant; and clear above all the rest the saxophone voluptuously

caterwauled. At this distance every tune sounded exactly the same.

Suddenly, from the band-stand of the tea-garden a pianist, two fiddlers

and a ’cellist began to play the Pilgrims’ Chorus out of _Tannhäuser_.

Irene and Lord Hovenden, locked in one another’s arms, were stepping

lightly, meanwhile, lightly and accurately over the concrete

dance-floor. Obedient to the music of the jazz band, forty other couples

stepped lightly round them. Percolating insidiously through the palisade

that separated the dance-floor from the rest of the world, thin wafts of

the Pilgrims’ Chorus intruded faintly upon the jazz.

“Listen,” said Hovenden. Dancing, they listened. “Funny it sounds when

you hear bof at ve same time!”

But the music from beyond the palisade was not strong enough to spoil

their rhythm. They listened for a little, smiling at the absurdity of

this other music from outside; but they danced on uninterruptedly. After

a time they did not even take the trouble to listen.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER IV

Mr. Falx had expected to find no difficulty, once they were arrived in

Rome, in recalling his pupil to what he considered a better and more

serious frame of mind. In the bracing atmosphere of an International

Labour Conference Lord Hovenden, he hoped, would recover his moral and

intellectual tone. Listening to speeches, meeting foreign comrades, he

would forget the corrupting charms of life under Mrs. Aldwinkle’s roof

and turn to nobler and more important things. Moreover, on a young and

generous spirit like his the prospect of possible persecution at the

hands of the Fascists might be expected to act as a stimulant; the fact

of being in opposition ought to make him feel the more ardently for the

unpopular cause. So Mr. Falx calculated.

But it turned out in the event that he had calculated badly. Arrived in

Rome, Lord Hovenden seemed to take even less interest in advanced

politics than he had during the last two or three weeks at Vezza. He

suffered himself, but with a reluctance that was only too obvious to Mr.

Falx, to be taken to a few of the meetings of the conference. Their

bracing intellectual atmosphere had no tonic effect upon him whatsoever

and he spent his time at the meetings yawning and looking with an

extraordinary frequency at his watch. In the evenings, when Mr. Falx

wanted to take him to see some distinguished comrade, Lord Hovenden

either made some vague excuse or, more frequently, was simply

undiscoverable. The next day Mr. Falx learned with distress that he had

passed half the night at a Dancing Club with Irene Aldwinkle. He could

only look forward hopefully to the date of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s return

journey. Lord Hovenden—it had been arranged before they left

England—would stay on with him in Rome till the end of the conference.

With the removal of all temptations to frivolity he might be relied upon

to re-become his better self.

Lord Hovenden’s conscience, meanwhile, occasionally troubled him.

“I sometimes feel I’ve raver left old Mr. Falx in ve lurch,” he confided

uneasily to Irene on the evening of their second day in Rome. “But

still, he can’t really expect me to spend all ve day wiv him, can he?”

Irene agreed that he really couldn’t.

“Besides,” Lord Hovenden went on, reassuring himself, “I’d really be

raver out of it wiv his friends. And it’s not as if he were lonely.

Vere’s such a lot of people he wants to talk to. And, you know, I fink

I’d really be in ve way more van anyfing.”

Irene nodded. The band struck up again. Simultaneously the two young

people got up and, united, stepped off on to the floor. It was a sordid

and flashy cabaret, frequented by the worst sort of international and

Italian public. The women were mostly prostitutes; a party of loud and

tipsy young Englishmen and Americans were sitting in one corner with a

pair of swarthy young natives who looked altogether too sober; the

couples who took the floor danced with an excessive intimacy. Irene and

Lord Hovenden were discussing the date of their wedding; they thought

the cabaret delightful.

In the day-time, when Hovenden could get off going to the conferences,

they wandered about the town buying what they imagined to be antiques

for their future home. The process was a little superfluous. For,

absorbed in the delights of shopping, they forgot that their future home

was also a highly ancestral home.

“Vat looks an awfully nice dinner-service,” Lord Hovenden would say; and

darting into the shop they would buy it out of hand. “A bit chipped”—he

shook his head. “But never mind.” Among the twenty-three valuable

dinner-services with which their future home was already supplied was

one of solid gold and one of silver gilt for less important occasions.

Still, it was such fun buying, such fun to poke about in the shops!

Under the pale blue sky of autumn the city was golden and black—golden

where the sunlight fell on walls of stucco or travertine, black in the

shadows, deeply black under archways, within the doors of churches,

glossily black where the sculptured stone of fountains shone wet with

the unceasing gush of water. In the open places the sun was hot; but a

little wind from the sea blew freshly, and from the mouth of narrow

alleys, sun-proof these thousand years, there breathed forth wafts of a

delicious vault-like coolness. They walked for hours without feeling

tired.

Mrs. Aldwinkle meanwhile went the round of the sights with Chelifer. She

had hopes that the Sistine Chapel, the Appian Way at sunset, the

Coliseum by moonlight, the gardens of the Villa d’Este might arouse in

Chelifer’s mind emotions which should in their turn predispose him to

feel romantically towards herself. The various emotions, she knew by

experience, are not boxed off from one another in separate pigeon-holes;

and when one is stimulated it is likely that its neighbours will also be

aroused. More proposals are made in the taxi, on the way home from a

Wagner opera, in the face of an impressive view, within the labyrinth of

a ruined palace, than in drab parlours or the streets of West

Kensington. But the Appian Way, even when the solitary pine trees were

black against the sunset and the ghosts were playing oboes, not for the

sensual ear, in the ruined sepulchres; the Coliseum, even under the

moon; the cypresses, the cascades and the jade-green pools of Tivoli—all

were ineffective. Chelifer never committed himself; his behaviour

remained perfectly courteous.

Seated on a fallen column in the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa, Mrs.

Aldwinkle even went so far as to tell him about certain amorous passages

in her past life. She told him, with various little modifications of the

facts, modifications in which she herself had long ago come implicitly

to believe, the story of the affair with Elzevir, the pianist—such an

artist! to his finger-tips; with Lord Trunion—such a _grand seigneur_ of

the old school! But concerning Mr. Cardan she was silent. It was not

that Mrs. Aldwinkle’s mythopoeic faculties were not equal to making

something very extraordinary and romantic out of Mr. Cardan. No, no; she

had often described the man to those who did not know him; he was a sort

of village Hampden, a mute inglorious What’s-his-name, who might have

done anything—but anything—if he had chosen to give himself the trouble.

He was a great Don Juan, actual in this case, not merely potential. He

was a mocking devil’s advocate, he was even a devil. But that was

because he was misunderstood—misunderstood by everybody but Mrs.

Aldwinkle herself. Secretly he was so sensitive and kind-hearted. But

one had to be gifted with intuition to find it out. And so on; she had

made a capital mythical figure out of him. But an instinct of caution

restrained her from showing off her myths too freely before people who

were well acquainted with the originals. Chelifer had never met Lord

Trunion or the immortal Elzevir. He _had_ met Mr. Cardan.

But the effect of the confidences was as small as that of the romantic

scenery and the stupendous works of art. Chelifer was not encouraged by

them either to confide in return or to follow the example of Elzevir and

Lord Trunion. He listened attentively, gave vent, when she had finished,

to a few well-chosen expressions of sympathy, such as one writes to

acquaintances on the deaths of their aged grandmothers, and after a

considerable silence, looking at his watch, said he thought it was time

to be getting back: he had promised to meet his mother for tea, and

after tea, he added, he was going to take her to look at _pensions_.

Seeing that she was going to stay in Rome the whole winter, it was worth

taking some trouble about finding a nice room. Wasn’t it? Mrs. Aldwinkle

was forced to agree. They set off through the parched Campagna towards

the city. Mrs. Aldwinkle preserved a melancholy silence all the way.

On their way from the hotel to the tea-shop in the Piazza Venezia Mrs.

Chelifer, Miss Elver and Mr. Cardan passed through the forum of Trajan.

The two little churches lifted their twin domes of gold against the sky.

From the floor of the forum, deep-sunk beneath the level of the road—a

foot for every hundred years—rose the huge column, with tumbled pillars

and blocks of masonry lying confused round its base. They paused to look

round.

“I’ve always been a Protestant,” said Mrs. Chelifer after a moment’s

silence; “but all the same I’ve always felt, whenever I came here, that

Rome was somehow a special place; that God had marked it out in some

peculiar way from among other cities as a place where the greatest

things should happen. It’s a significant place, a portentous

place—though I couldn’t tell you exactly why. One just feels that it is

portentous; that’s all. Look at this piazza, for example. Two florid

little counter-Reformation churches, all trumpery pretentiousness and no

piety; a mixed lot of ordinary houses all round, and in the hole in the

middle a huge heathen memorial of slaughter. And yet for some reason it

all seems to me to have a significance, a spiritual meaning; it’s

important. And the same applies to everything in this extraordinary

place. You can’t regard it with indifference as you can an ordinary

town.”

“And yet,” said Mr. Cardan, “a great many tourists and all the

inhabitants contrive to do so with complete success.”

“That’s only because they’ve never looked at the place,” said Mrs.

Chelifer. “Once you’ve really looked....”

She was interrupted by a loud whoop from Miss Elver, who had wandered

away from her companions and was looking over the railing into the

sunken forum.

“What is it?” called Mr. Cardan. They hurried across the street towards

her.

“Look,” cried Miss Elver, pointing down, “look. All the cats!”

And there they were. On the sun-warmed marble of a fallen column basked

a large tabby. A family of ginger kittens were playing on the ground

below. Small tigers stalked between the blocks of masonry. A miniature

black panther was standing up on its hind legs to sharpen its claws on

the bark of a little tree. At the foot of the column lay an emaciated

corpse.

“Puss, puss,” Miss Elver shrilly yelled.

“No good,” said Mr. Cardan. “They only understand Italian.”

Miss Elver looked at him. “Perhaps I’d better learn a little, then,” she

said. “Cat’s Italian.”

Mrs. Chelifer meanwhile was looking down very earnestly into the forum.

“Why, there are at least twenty,” she said. “How do they get there?”

“People who want to get rid of their cats just come and drop them over

the railing into the forum,” Mr. Cardan explained.

“And they can’t get out?”

“So it seems.”

An expression of distress appeared on Mrs. Chelifer’s gentle face. She

made a little clicking with her tongue against her teeth and sadly shook

her head. “Dear, dear,” she said, “dear, dear. And how do they get fed?”

“I’ve no idea,” said Mr. Cardan. “Perhaps they feed on one another.

People throw things down from time to time, no doubt.”

“There’s a dead one there, in the middle,” said Mrs. Chelifer; and a

note of something like reproach came into her voice, as though she found

that Mr. Cardan was to blame for the deadness of the little corpse at

the foot of the triumphal column.

“Very dead,” said Mr. Cardan.

They walked on. Mrs. Chelifer did not speak; she seemed preoccupied.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER V

“_An pris caruns flucuthukh_”; Mr. Cardan beckoned to the guide. “Bring

the lamp a little nearer,” he said in Italian, and when the light had

been approached, he went on slowly spelling out the primitive Greek

writing on the wall of the tomb: “_flucuthukh nun tithuial khues khathc

anulis mulu vizile ziz riin puiian acasri flucuper pris an ti ar vus ta

aius muntheri flucuthukh_.” He straightened himself up. “Charming

language,” he said, “charming! Ever since I learned that the Etruscans

used to call the god of wine Fufluns, I’ve taken the keenest interest in

their language. Fufluns—how incomparably more appropriate that is than

Bacchus, or Liber, or Dionysos! Fufluns, _Fufluns_,” he repeated with

delighted emphasis. “It couldn’t be better. They had a real linguistic

genius, those creatures. What poets they must have produced! ‘When

Fufluns _flucuthukhs_ the _ziz_’—one can imagine the odes in praise of

wine which began like that. You couldn’t bring together eight such

juicy, boozy syllables as that in English, could you?”

“What about ‘Ale in a Saxon rumkin then’?” suggested Chelifer.

Mr. Cardan shook his head. “It doesn’t compare with the Etruscan,” he

said. “There aren’t enough consonants. It’s too light, too fizzy and

trivial. Why, you might be talking about soda water.”

“But for all you know,” said Chelifer, “_flucuthukh_ in Etruscan may

mean soda water. Fufluns, I grant you, is apposite. But perhaps it was

just a fluke. You have no evidence to show that they fitted sound to

sense so aptly in other words. ‘When Fufluns _flucuthukhs_ the _ziz_’

may be the translation of ‘When Bacchus drowns the hock with soda.’ You

don’t know.”

“You’re quite right,” Mr. Cardan agreed. “I don’t. Nor does any one

else. My enthusiasm for Fufluns carried me away. _Flucuthukh_ may not

have the fruity connotation that a word with a sound like that ought to

have; it may even, as you say, mean soda water. Still, I continue to

hope for the best; I believe in my Etruscans. One day, when they find

the key to this fossilised language, I believe I shall be justified;

_flucuthukh_ will turn out to be just as appropriate as Fufluns—you mark

my words! It’s a great language, I insist; a great language. Who knows?

A couple of generations hence some new Busby or Keate may be drumming

Etruscan syntax and Etruscan prosody into the backsides of British

boyhood. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction. Latin and Greek

have a certain infinitesimal practical value. But Etruscan is totally

and absolutely useless. What better basis for a gentleman’s education

could possibly be discovered? It’s the great dead language of the

future. If Etruscan didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it.”

“Which is precisely what the pedagogues will have to do,” said Chelifer,

“there being no Etruscan literature beyond the inscriptions and the

rigmarole on the mummy-wrappings at Agram.”

“So much the better,” replied Mr. Cardan. “If we wrote it ourselves, we

might find Etruscan literature interesting. Etruscan literature composed

by Etruscans would be as boring as any other ancient literature. But if

the epics were written by you, the Socratic dialogues by me, the history

by some master of fiction like Miss Thriplow—then we’d possess a corpus

in which the rare schoolboys who can derive some profit from their

education could take a real interest. And when, a generation hence, we

have become as much out of date in our ideas as Tully or Horace, the

literature of Etruria will be re-written by our descendants. Each

generation will use the dead language to express its own ideas. And

expressed in so rich an idiom as I take Etruscan to be, the ideas will

seem the more significant and memorable. For I have often noticed that

an idea which, expressed in one’s native language, would seem dull,

commonplace and opaque, becomes transparent to the mind’s eye, takes on

a new significance when given a foreign and unfamiliar embodiment. A

cracker-motto in Latin sounds much weightier and truer than the same

motto in English. Indeed, if the study of dead languages has any use at

all, which I should be sorry to admit, it consists in teaching us the

importance of the verbal medium in which thoughts are expressed. To know

the same thing in several languages is to know it (if you have any sense

at all) more profoundly, more richly, than if it were known only in one.

The youth who learns that the god of wine is called, in Etruscan,

Fufluns has a profounder knowledge of the attributes of that divine

personality than the youth who only knows him under the name of Bacchus.

If I desire that archaeologists should discover the key to the Etruscan

language, it is merely in order that I may have a deeper insight into

the thing or idea connoted by such sumptuous words as _flucuthukh_ or

_khathc_. For the rest I care nothing. That they should discover the

meaning of these inscriptions is a matter to me of the most complete

indifference. For after all, what would they discover? Nothing that we

don’t already know. They would discover that before the Romans conquered

Italy men ate and drank, made love, piled up wealth, oppressed their

weaker neighbours, diverted themselves with sports, made laws and so on.

One could have divined as much by walking down Piccadilly any day of the

week. And besides, we have their pictures.” He threw out his hand. The

guide, who had been listening patiently to the incomprehensible

discourse, responded to the gesture by raising his acetylene lamp.

Called magically into existence by the bright white light, a crowd of

gaily coloured forms appeared on the walls of the vault in which they

were standing. Set in a frame of conventionalised trees, a pair of

red-brown wrestlers with Egyptian eyes and the profiles of the Greeks

who disport themselves round the flanks of the earliest vases were

feeling for a hold. On either side of them, beyond the trees, stood two

couples of long-legged black horses. Above them, in the segment of a

circle between the upper line of this band of paintings and the vaulted

roof, a great leopard lay couchant, white-skinned, with a pattern of

black spots arranged like those on the china dogs and cats of a later

age. On the wall to the left they were feasting: red-brown Etruscans

reclined on couches; porcelain-white women, contrasting as voluptuously

with their tanned companions as the pale, plump nymphs of Boucher with

their brown pastoral lovers, sat by their sides. With hieratic gestures

of mutual love they pledged one another in bowls of wine. On the

opposite wall the fowlers were busy—here with slings, there with nets.

The sky was alive with birds. In the blue sea below they were spearing

fish. A long inscription ran from right to left across the wall. The

vaulted roof was painted with chequers, red, black and white. Over the

low, narrow door that led from the tomb into the ante-chamber there

knelt a benevolent white bull. Two thousand five hundred years ago they

had wept here over the newly dead.

“You see them,” continued Mr. Cardan, “hunting, drinking, playing,

making love. What else could you expect them to do? This writing will

tell us no more than we know already. True, I want to know what it

means, but only because I hope that the brown man may be saying to the

white lady: ‘_Flucuthukh_ to me only with thine eyes,’ or words to that

effect, ‘and I will _flucuthukh_ with mine.’ If that was what they

really were saying, it would throw an entirely new light on the notion

of drinking. An entirely new light.”

“It would throw no new light on love, if lovers they are,” said Mrs.

Aldwinkle mournfully.

“Wouldn’t it?” Mr. Cardan queried. “But imagine if _flucuthukh_ turned

out to mean, not drink, but love. I assure you that the feelings denoted

by such a word would be quite different from those we sum up by ‘love.’

You can make a good guess from the sound of the word in any language

what the people who speak it mean when they talk of love. _Amour_, for

example—that long ou sound with the rolled r at the end of it, how

significant it is! Ou—you have to push your lips into a snout-like

formation, as though you were going to kiss. Then, briskly, rrr—you

growl like a dog. Could anything be more perfectly expressive of the

matter-of-fact lasciviousness which passes for love in nine-tenths of

French fiction and drama? And _Liebe_—what a languishing, moonlit,

sentimental sound the long ie has! And how apt, too, is the bleating

labial by which it is followed!—be,—be. It is a sheep whose voice is

choked by emotion. All German romanticism is implied in the sound of the

word. And German romanticism, a little _détraqué_, turns quite logically

into expressionismus and the wild erotic extravagance of contemporary

German fiction. As for our _love_—that’s characteristically

non-committal and diffident. That dim little monosyllable illustrates

our English reluctance to call a spade a spade. It is the symbol of our

national repressions. All our hypocrisy and all the beautiful platonism

of our poetry is there. Love....” Mr. Cardan whispered the word, and

holding up his finger for silence cocked his ear to catch the faint

echoes of his voice reverberating from wall to wall under the sepulchral

vault. “Love.... How utterly different is our English emotion from that

connoted by _amore_! _Amore_—you fairly sing the second syllable, in a

baritone voice, from the chest, with a little throaty tremolo on the

surface to make it sound more palpitating. _Amore_—it’s the name of the

quality that Stendhal so much admired in the Italians and the absence of

which in his own countrymen, and more especially countrywomen, made him

rank Paris below Milan or Rome—it’s the apt and perfectly expressive

name of passion.”

“How true!” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, brightening for a moment through her

gloom. This compliment to her Italian language and Italian character

touched and pleased her. “The very sound of _amore_ is passionate. If

the English knew what passion meant, they’d have found a more expressive

word than love. That’s certain. But they don’t know.” She sighed.

“Quite so,” said Mr. Cardan. “_Amore_, we see, can mean nothing else

than Southern passion. But now, suppose that _flucuthukh_ should turn

out to be the Etruscan for love—what then? _Amour_ connotes

lasciviousness, _Liebe_ sentiment, _amore_ passion. To what aspect of

the complex phenomenon of love can _flucuthukh_ refer? The microbe

Staphylococcus pyogenes produces in some patients boils, in others sties

in the eyes; in certain cases it is even responsible for _keratitis

punctata_. It is the same with love. The symptoms vary in different

individuals. But owing to the boundless suggestibility and imitativeness

of man, the commonest symptoms at any given period tend to become

universal in any one society. Whole peoples take the disease in the same

way; one suffers from _amour_, another from _Liebe_ and so on. But now

imagine a people to whom love was _flucuthukh_. What can have been the

particular symptoms of the general amorous disease to which such a name

was given? One cannot guess. But at least it is fascinating to

speculate.”

One after the other the party filed out through the narrow door into the

ante-room of the sepulchre and up the steep flight of steps leading to

the surface of the ground. Blinking in the bright afternoon light, they

stepped out on to the bare and windy down.

It was a solitary place. The arches of a ruined aqueduct went striding

along the ridge, and following their long recession the eye came at last

to rest on the walls and tall towers of Corneto. To the left the

hog-backed down sloped seawards; on the further side of the narrow plain

at its foot stretched the Mediterranean. On the right lay a deep valley,

shut in on the further side by a great round hill. Its grassy flanks

were furrowed and pitted with what had once been the works of man. Once,

on that hill, had stood the sacred city, Tarquinii of the Etruscans. The

long bare down on which they were standing had been, through how many

centuries? its necropolis. In little houses hollowed out of the chalky

stone slept the innumerable dead. Here and there the top of a vault was

broken through; from the hollow darkness within came up even at high

summer an immemorial coolness. Here and there the surface of the down

swelled up into round grass-grown barrows. It was from the heart of one

of these tumuli that they had now emerged. The guide put out his lamp

and shut the door upon the Etruscan ghosts. They walked for a few

hundred yards through geological time—between the sea and the hills,

under the floating clouds; on the sky-line the Middle Ages pricked up

their towers; the smudged and flattened relics of Etruria undulated

almost imperceptibly under the grass; from the Roman road in the plain

below came up the distant hooting of a motor car.

The sound of the motor horn aroused Irene from the thoughtful trance in

which, sad-faced and childish, this time, pathetically, she was walking.

She had been silent and melancholy ever since, yesterday morning, they

had left Rome; Lord Hovenden had stayed behind with Mr. Falx. The

long-drawn hooting of the electric horn seemed to remind her of

something. She looked down towards the sea-board plain. A cloud of white

dust was advancing along the Maremman road from the direction of Civita

Vecchia. It hung, opaque, over half a mile of road, fading slowly to

transparency towards the tail. At the head, where the dust was thickest,

a small black object moved like a rapidly crawling insect across the

map-like expanse of plain, drawing the cloud after it. From the opposite

direction came another black-headed comet of dust. Like two white

serpents they approached one another, as though rushing to battle.

Nearer, nearer they came. Irene stopped still to look at them. She was

filled with a horrible apprehension. It seemed impossible that they

should not crash together. Nearer, nearer. The heads of the two serpents

seemed almost to be touching one another. Suppose, just suppose that one

of the cars was his.... Inevitably they must collide. Crash and

smash—oh, the horror of it! Irene shut her eyes. A few seconds later she

opened them. The two white snakes had merged together into one very

thick opaque snake. It was impossible to see the little black heads at

all. For one horrible moment she thought that they must have destroyed

one another. But they reappeared after a little, receding now one from

the other, no more approaching. The two serpents were still one serpent,

but two-headed, a long amphisbaena. Then, gradually, the middle of the

amphisbaena began to grow thin, to fade; a little clump of trees showed

through it, dimly at first, mistily, then clearly. The amphisbaena had

fallen in half and the two white snakes crawled on, one northwards, the

other towards the south, and between their fading tails was a wide and

ever wider gap. Irene heaved a deep sigh of relief and ran on after the

others. It seemed to her that she had been the witness of a catastrophe

miraculously averted. She felt much happier than she had felt all day.

On a wide road two automobiles had passed one another. That was all.

The guide was unlocking the door that gave entrance to another excavated

barrow. He relit his lamp and led the way down the steep steps into the

tomb. On one wall they were horse-racing and wrestling, hieratically,

all in profile. A goddess—or perhaps it was merely the Lady Mayoress of

the city—wearing that high bonnet-shaped coiffure which the Roman

matrons were afterwards to borrow from their neighbours, was

distributing the prizes. On the other walls they were feasting. The

red-brown men, the white-skinned ladies reclined along their couches. A

musician stood by, playing on his double flute, and a female dancer,

dressed in what looked rather like a Persian costume, was dancing a

shawl dance for the diversion of the diners.

“They seem to have had simple tastes,” said Mr. Cardan. “There’s nothing

very sophisticated or _fin de siècle_ here—no bull-baiting by naked

female acrobats, as at Cnossos; no gladiatorial fights, no wholesale

butchering of animals, no boxing matches with brass knuckle-dusters, as

in the Roman arenas. A nice school-boyish sort of people, it looks to

me. Not quite civilised enough to be _exigeant_ about their pleasures.”

“And not yet quite civilised enough,” added Chelifer, “to be really

vulgar. In that respect they fall a long way behind the later Romans. Do

you know that huge mosaic in the Lateran museum? It comes from one of

the Imperial baths, I forget which, and consists of portraits of the

principal sporting heroes of the epoch—boxers and wrestlers—with their

trainers and backers. These last are treated very respectfully by the

mosaic-maker, who represents them wearing togas and standing in the

noblest attitudes. One sees at a glance that they are the _gens bien_,

the sportsmen, the amateurs—in a word, the monied interest. The athletes

are portrayed in a state of nature, and are indeed so excessively

natural that one could easily mistake the heavyweight boxers for

gorillas peeled of their superfluous hair. Under each portrait is a

caption with the name of the hero represented. The whole thing reminds

one very much of the sporting page in a picture paper—only it is a page

that is forty feet long by thirty wide, and made, not of wood-pulp, but

of the most durable materials ever devised by the ingenuity of man for

the embodiment and visible eternisation of his thoughts. And it is, I

think, precisely the size and everlastingness of the frightful thing

that makes it so much worse than the similar page from our picture

papers. To make ephemeral heroes of professional sportsmen and

prize-fighters is bad enough; but that a people should desire to

immortalise their fame is surely indicative of a profounder vulgarity

and abjection. Like the Roman mob, the mobs of our modern capitals

delight in sports and exercises which they themselves do not practise;

but at any rate, the fame of our professionals lasts only a day after

their triumph. We do not print their effigies on marble pavements made

to live down a hundred generations of men. We print them on wood-pulp,

which is much the same as printing them on water. It is comforting to

think that by the year two thousand one hundred the whole of

contemporary journalism, literature and thought will have crumbled to

dust. The mosaic, however, will still be in its present state of perfect

preservation. Nothing short of dynamite or an earthquake will ever

totally destroy the effigies of those Imperial boxers. And a very good

thing, too, for the future historians of Rome. For no man can claim that

he has really understood the Roman empire till he has studied that

mosaic. That pavement is a vessel filled with the quintessence of Roman

reality. A drop of that reality is enough to shrivel up all the

retrospective Utopias that historians have ever made or ever can make

out of the chronicles of ancient Rome. After looking at that mosaic a

man can have no more generous illusions about the people who admired it

or the age in which it was made. He will realise that Roman civilisation

was not merely just as sordid as ours, but if anything more sordid. But

in these Etruscan vaults,” Chelifer added, looking round at the frescoed

walls, “one gets no such impression of organised and efficient

beastliness as one gets from the Roman mosaic. There’s a freshness, as

you say, Mr. Cardan, a certain jolly schoolboyishness about all the fun

they represent. But I have no doubt, of course, that the impression is

entirely fallacious. Their art has a certain archaic charm; but the

artists were probably quite as sophisticated and quite as repulsive as

their Roman successors.”

“Come, come,” said Mr. Cardan, “you forget that they called Bacchus

Fufluns. Give them at least the credit that is due to them.”

“But the Romans too had a fine language,” Chelifer objected. “And yet

they laid down immense enlargements of the sporting page of the _Daily

Sketch_ in marble tesserae on a foundation of cement.”

They climbed again towards the light. The steps were so high and her

legs so short that Miss Elver had to be helped up. The tomb resounded

with her laughter and shrill whooping. They emerged at last out of the

ground.

On the top of a high barrow some two or three hundred yards away stood

the figure of a man, distinct against the sky. He was shading his eyes

with his hand and seemed to be looking for something. Irene suddenly

became very red.

“Why, I believe it’s Hovenden,” she said in a voice that was as casual

as she could make it.

Almost simultaneously the man turned his face in their direction. The

shading hand went up in a gesture of greeting. A glad “Hullo!” sounded

across the tombs; the man skipped down from his barrow and came running

across the down towards them. And Hovenden it was; Irene had seen

aright.

“Been looking for you all over ve place,” he explained breathlessly as

he came up. With the greatest heartiness he shook the hands of all

present except—diplomatically—Irene’s. “Vey told me in ve town vat a

party of foreigners was out here looking at ve cemetery or somefing. So

I buzzed after you till I saw old Ernest wiv ve car at ve side of ve

road. Been underground, have you?” He looked into the dark entrance of

the tomb. “No wonder I couldn’t....”

Mrs. Aldwinkle cut him short. “But why aren’t you in Rome with Mr.

Falx?” she asked.

Lord Hovenden’s boyish, freckled face became all at once exceedingly

red. “Ve fact is,” he said, looking at the ground, “vat I didn’t feel

very well. Ve doctor said I ought to get away from Rome at once. Country

air, you know. So I just left a note for Mr. Falx and ... and here I

am.” He looked up again, smiling.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VI

“But at Montefiascone,” said Mr. Cardan, concluding the history of the

German bishop who gave the famous wine of Montefiascone its curious

name, “at Montefiascone Bishop Defuk’s servant found good wine at every

shop and tavern; so that when his master arrived he found the

prearranged symbol chalked up on a hundred doors. _Est, Est, Est_—the

town was full of them. And the Bishop was so much enraptured with the

drink that he decided to settle in Montefiascone for life. For life—but

he drank so much that in a very short time it turned out that he had

settled here for death. They buried him in the lower church, down there.

On his tombstone his servant engraved the Bishop’s portrait with this

brief epitaph. ‘_Est Est Jo Defuk. Propter nimium hic est. Dominus meus

mortuus est._’ Since when the wine has always been called Est Est Est.

We’ll have a flask of it dry for serious drinking. And for the frivolous

and the feminine, and to sip with the dessert, we’ll have a bottle of

the sweet _moscato_. And now let’s see what there is to eat.” He picked

up the menu and holding it out at arm’s length—for he had the long sight

of old age—read out slowly, with comments, the various items. It was

always Mr. Cardan who ordered the dinner (although it was generally Lord

Hovenden or Mrs. Aldwinkle who paid), always Mr. Cardan; for it was

tacitly admitted by every one that Mr. Cardan was the expert on food and

wine, the professional eater, the learned and scholarly drinker.

Seeing Mr. Cardan busy with the bill of fare, the landlord approached,

rubbing his hands and cordially smiling—as well he might on a

Rolls-Royce-full of foreigners—to take orders and give advice.

“The fish,” he confided to Mr. Cardan, “the fish is something special.”

He put his fingers to his lips and kissed them. “It comes from Bolsena,

from the lake, down there.” He pointed out of the window at the black

night. Somewhere, far down through the darkness, lay the Lake of

Bolsena.

Mr. Cardan held up his hand. “No, no,” he objected with decision and

shook his head. “Don’t talk to me of fish. Never safe in these little

places,” he explained to his companions. “Particularly in such hot

weather. And then, imagine eating fish from Bolsena—a place where they

have miracles, where holy wafers bleed for the edification of the pious

and as a proof of the fact of transubstantiation. No, no,” Mr. Cardan

repeated, “fishes from Bolsena are altogether too fishy. Let’s stick to

fried eggs, with fillet of veal to follow. Or a little roast capon....”

“I want fish,” said Miss Elver. The passionate earnestness of her tone

contrasted strikingly with the airiness of Mr. Cardan’s banter.

“I really wouldn’t, you know,” said Mr. Cardan.

“But I like fish.”

“But it may be unwholesome. You never can tell.”

“But I want it,” Miss Elver insisted. “I love fish.” Her large lower lip

began to tremble, her eyes filled with tears. “I _want_ it.”

“Well, then, of course you shall have it,” said Mr. Cardan, making haste

to console her. “Of course, if you really like it. I was only afraid

that it mightn’t perhaps be good. But it probably will be.”

Miss Elver took comfort, blew her long nose and smiled. “Thank you,

Tommy,” she said, and blushed as she pronounced the name.

After dinner they went out into the piazza for coffee and liqueurs. The

square was crowded and bright with lights. In the middle the band of the

local Philharmonic Society was giving its Sunday evening concert.

Planted on the rising ground above the piazza Sammicheli’s great church

solemnly impended. The lights struck up, illuminating its pilastered

walls. The cupola stood out blackly against the sky.

“The choice,” said Mr. Cardan, looking round the piazza, “seems to lie

between the Café Moderno and the Bar Ideale. Personally, I should be all

for the ideal rather than the real if it wasn’t for the disagreeable

fact that in a bar one has to stand. Whereas in a café, however crassly

materialistic, one can sit down. I’m afraid the Moderno forces itself

upon us.”

He led the way in the direction of the café.

“Talking of Bars,” said Chelifer, as they sat down at a little table in

front of the café, “has it ever occurred to you to enumerate the English

words that have come to have an international currency? It’s a somewhat

curious selection, and one which seems to me to throw a certain light on

the nature and significance of our Anglo-Saxon civilisation. The three

words from Shakespeare’s language that have a completely universal

currency are Bar, Sport and W.C. They’re all just as good Finnish now as

they are good English. Each of these words possesses what I may call a

family. Round the idea ‘Bar’ group themselves various other

international words, such as Bitter, Cocktail, Whiskey and the like.

‘Sport’ boasts a large family—Match, for example, Touring Club, the verb

to Box, Cycle-Car, Performance (in the sporting sense) and various

others. The idea of hydraulic sanitation has only one child that I can

think of, namely, Tub. Tub—it has a strangely old-world sound in English

nowadays; but in Yugo-Slavia, on the other hand, it is exceedingly

up-to-date. Which leads us on to that very odd class of international

English words that have never been good English at all. A Smoking for

example, a Dancing, a Five-o’clock—these have never existed except on

the continent of Europe. As for High-Life, so popular a word in Athens,

where it is spelt iota, gamma, lambda, iota, phi—that dates from a

remote, mid-Victorian epoch in the history of our national culture.”

“And Spleen,” said Mr. Cardan, “you forget Spleen. That comes from much

further back. A fine aristocratic word, that; we were fools to allow it

to become extinct. One has to go to France to hear it uttered now.”

“The word may be dead,” said Chelifer, “but the emotion, I fancy, has

never flourished more luxuriantly than now. The more material progress,

the more wealth and leisure, the more standardised amusements—the more

boredom. It’s inevitable, it’s the law of Nature. The people who have

always suffered from spleen and who are still the principal victims, are

the prosperous, leisured and educated. At present they form a relatively

small minority; but in the Utopian state where everybody is well off,

educated and leisured, everybody will be bored; unless for some obscure

reason the same causes fail to produce the same effects. Only two or

three hundred people out of every million could survive a lifetime in a

really efficient Utopian state. The rest would simply die of spleen. In

this way, it may be, natural selection will work towards the evolution

of the super-man. Only the intelligent will be able to bear the almost

intolerable burden of leisure and prosperity. The rest will simply

wither away, or cut their throats—or, perhaps more probably, return in

desperation to the delights of barbarism and cut one another’s throats,

not to mention the throats of the intelligent.”

“That certainly sounds the most likely and natural ending,” said Mr.

Cardan. “If of two possible alternatives one is in harmony with our

highest aspirations and the other is, humanly speaking, absolutely

pointless and completely wasteful, then, you may be sure, Nature will

choose the second.”

At half-past ten Miss Elver complained that she did not feel very well.

Mr. Cardan sighed and shook his head. “These miraculous fishes,” he

said. They went back to the hotel.

“Luckily,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle that evening while Irene was brushing her

hair, “luckily I never had any babies. They spoil the figure so

frightfully.”

“Still,” Irene ventured to object, “still ... they must be rather fun,

all the same.”

Mrs. Aldwinkle pretexted a headache and sent her to bed almost at once.

At half-past two in the morning Irene was startled out of her sleep by a

most melancholy groaning and crying from the room next to hers. “Oo, Oo!

Ow!” It was Grace Elver’s voice. Irene jumped out of bed and ran to see

what was the matter. She found Miss Elver lying in a tumbled bed,

writhing with pain.

“What is it?” she asked.

Miss Elver made no articulate answer. “Oo, Oo,” she kept repeating,

turning her head from side to side as though in the hope of escaping

from the obsessing pain.

Irene ran to her aunt’s bedroom, knocked at the door and, getting no

answer, walked in. “Aunt Lilian,” she called in the darkness, and

louder, “Aunt Lilian!” There was still no sound. Irene felt for the

switch and turned on the light. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s bed was empty. Irene

stood there for a moment looking dubiously at the bed, wondering,

speculating. From down the corridor came the repeated “Oo, Oo!” of Grace

Elver’s inarticulate pain. Roused by the sound from her momentary

inaction, Irene turned, stepped across the passage and began knocking at

Mr. Cardan’s door.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VII

Selections from Francis Chelifer

In the sporting calendar the most interesting events are booked for

the autumnal months. There is no hunting in the spring. And even in

Italy there is a brief close season for song-birds that lasts from the

coming of the nightingales to the departure of the last swallow. The

fun, the real fun, starts only in the autumn. Grouse-shooting,

partridge-shooting—these are the gay preliminaries. But the great day

is the First of October, when the massacre of the gaudy pheasant

begins. Crack! crack!—the double barrels make music in the fading

woods. And a little later the harmonious dogs join in and the hoof, as

the Latin poet so aptly puts it, the hoof shakes the putrid field with

quadrupedantical sound. Winter is made gay with the noise of hunting.

It is the same in the greater year of certain feminine lives.... Pop!

pop!—on the First of October they go out to shoot the pheasant. A few

weeks later, tally-ho, they hunt the fox. And on Guy Fawkes’s day the

man-eating season begins. My hostess, when she picked me up on the beach

of Marina di Vezza, had reached a point in her year somewhere between

pheasant-shooting and man-eating. They say that foxes enjoy being

hunted; but I venture to doubt the truth of this comforting hypothesis.

Experientia does it, as Mrs. Micawber’s papa (ha ha! from Mr. Toft)....

Etcetera.

If loving without being loved in return may be ranked as one of the most

painful of experiences, being loved without loving is certainly one of

the most boring. Perhaps no experience is better calculated to make one

realise the senselessness of the passion. The spectacle of some one

making a fool of himself arouses only laughter. When one is playing the

fool oneself, one weeps. But when one is neither the active imbecile nor

the disinterested spectator, but the unwilling cause of somebody else’s

folly—then it is that one comes to feel that weariness and that disgust

which are the proper, the human reaction to any display of the deep

animal stupidity that is the root of all evil.

Twice in my life have I experienced these salutary horrors of

boredom—once by my own fault, because I asked to be loved without

loving; and once because I had the misfortune to be picked up on the

beach, limp as seaweed, between the First of October and Guy Fawkes’s

day. The experiences were disagreeable while they lasted; but on the

other hand, they were highly didactic. The first of them rounded off, so

to speak, the lesson I had learned from Barbara. The second episode was

staged by Providence, some few years later, to remind me of the first

and to print what the Americans would call its “message” still more

indelibly upon my mind. Providence has been remarkably persistent in its

efforts to sober me. To what end I cannot imagine.

Poor Miss Masson! She was a very good secretary. By the end of 1917 she

knew all that it was possible to know about rubber tubing and castor

oil. It was unfortunate for every one concerned that Providence should

have destined her to instruct me yet more deeply in the fearful

mysteries of love. True, I brought it on myself. Providence, on that

occasion, elected to act indirectly and threw the blame on me. I accept

it all—all the more willingly since my act shows in the most

illuminating manner what are the consequences, the frightful

consequences, of stupidity. There is a certain satisfaction to be

derived from having personally proved the truth of one’s own wisdom by

acting in defiance of its precepts.

Yes, I brought it on myself. For it was I who made the first advances.

It was I who, out of pure wantonness, provoked the sleeping, or at least

well-disciplined tiger that lay hidden in Dorothy Masson’s heart—put my

walking-stick between the bars and, against all the rules, poked it

rudely in the ribs. I got what I asked for.

I was like that wanton Blackamoor in one of old Busch’s misanthropically

comic picture-books.

Ein Mohr aus Bosheit und Pläsier

Schiesst auf das Elefantentier.

With his little arrow he punctures the placid pachyderm; and the

pachyderm takes his revenge, elaborately, through fourteen subsequent

woodcuts.

My only excuse—the recentness of that ludicrous catastrophe with which

the tragedy of Barbara had concluded—was an excuse that might equally

have served as an additional reason against doing what I did; I ought,

after having once been bitten, to have shown myself twice shy. But in

the state of misery in which I found myself I hoped that a second bite

might distract my attention from the anguish of the first. And even this

is not precisely accurate; for I never anticipated that the second would

really be a bite at all. I looked forward merely to a kind of playful

diversion, not to anything painful. True, when I found how serious the

affair threatened to become for Dorothy Masson, I might have guessed

that it would soon be serious also for myself, and have drawn back. But,

inspired by that high-spirited irresponsibility which I have come since

then so highly to admire in the natural, brutish human specimen, I

refused to consider possible consequences and went on in the course I

had begun. I was not in the least in love with the woman; nor did her

person inspire me with any specific desire. My motive forces were

misery, mingled with a kind of exasperation, and the vague itch of

recurrent appetite. More than half of the world’s “affairs” have no more

definite reasons for occurring. Ennui and itch are their first causes.

Subsequently imagination may come into play and love will be born. Or

experience may beget specific desires and in so doing may render one

party necessary to the happiness of the other, or each to each. Or

perhaps there will be no development at all and the affair will end

placidly as it began, in itch and ennui.

But there are cases, of which mine was one, where one party may be

inspired by the mere indefinite wantonness I have been describing, while

the other is already imagination-ridden and in love. Poor Dorothy! There

came into her eyes when I kissed her a look such as I have never seen in

any other human eyes before or since. It was the look one sees in the

eyes of a dog when its master is angry and raises his whip—a look of

absolute self-abasement mingled with terror. There was something

positively appalling in seeing those eyes staring at one out of a

woman’s face. To see a human being reduced in one’s arms to the

condition of a frightened and adoring dog is a shocking thing. And the

more so in this case since it was completely indifferent to me whether

she was in my arms or not. But when she raised her face and looked at me

for a moment with those abject and terrified eyes of hers, it was not

merely indifferent to me; it was even positively distasteful. The sight

of those large-pupilled eyes, in which there was no glimmer of a human

rational soul, but only an animal’s terror and abasement, made me feel

at once guilty and, complementarily, angry, resentful and hostile.

“Why do you look at me like that?” I asked her once. “As though you were

frightened of me.”

She did not answer; but only hid her face against my shoulder, and

pressed me more closely in her arms. Her body shook with involuntary

startings and tremblings. Casually, from force of habit, I caressed her.

The trembling became more violent. “Don’t,” she implored me in a faint

hoarse whisper, “don’t.” But she pressed me still closer.

She was frightened, it seemed, not of me but of herself, of that which

lay sleeping in the depths of her being and whose awakening threatened

to overwhelm, to blot for a moment out of existence that well-ordered,

reasonable soul which was the ruler at ordinary times of her life. She

was afraid of the power within her that could make her become something

other than her familiar self. She was fearful of losing her

self-mastery. And at the same time there was nothing else that she

desired. The sleeping power within her had begun to stir and there was

no resisting it. Vainly, hopelessly, she continued to attempt the

impossible. She went on trying to resist, and her resistance quickened

her desire to yield. She was afraid and yet invited my awakening kisses.

And while she whispered to me imploringly, like one who begs for mercy,

she pressed me in her arms. I, meanwhile, had begun to realise all the

potentialities for boredom implicit in the situation. And how boring it

did in fact turn out to be! To be pursued by restless warmth when all

that one desires is cool peace; to be perpetually and quite justly

accused of remissness in love and to have to deny the accusation,

feebly, for the sake of politeness; to be compelled to pass hours in

tedious company—what an affliction, what a martyrdom it is! I came to

feel extremely sorry for those pretty women who are perpetually being

courted by a swarm of men. But the pretty women, I reflected, had this

advantage over me: that they were by nature a good deal more interested

in love than I. Love is their natural business, the reason of their

existence; however distasteful their suitors may personally be to them,

they cannot find them as completely boring and insufferable as would,

placed in similar circumstances, a person to whom love as such is

fundamentally rather uninteresting. The most tedious lover atones a

little, in the eyes of the courted lady, for his personal

insupportableness by the generic fact of being a lover. Lacking a native

enthusiasm for love, I found it more difficult to support the martyrdom

of being loved by Miss Masson.

But such an affair, you will object, is a typical piece of reality.

True; but at that time I was not quite such a believer in the real and

earnest side of life as I am now. And even now I should regard it as

something of a work of supererogation to associate with realities of so

exceptionally penetrative a nature. A sober man, if he is logical and

courageous, is bound to pass his life between Gog’s Court and Miss

Carruthers’s. But he is not bound to make love to Miss Carruthers or to

provoke the clinging affections of Fluffy. That would be too much—so it

seems to me, at any rate at present; though perhaps the time may come

when I shall feel strong enough to take my reality in these stiff doses.

There is an electric machine used by masseurs for driving iodine into

stiffened joints. Love acts like this machine; it serves to drive the

lover’s personality into the mind of the beloved. I am strong enough at

present to be able to bathe in the personalities of ordinary human

animals; but I should be suffocated, I should faint away, if the muddy

swill were to be pumped into my spiritual system by the penetrating

electricity of love.

Miss Masson stood one Galtonian class higher than Miss Carruthers or

Fluffy. One out of every four people is a Fluffy; only one out of every

six is a Dorothy Masson. It makes a slight but perceptible difference.

None the less, how much I suffered! When I brought her a few orchids as

a present, remarking as I gave them to her that they looked so

delightfully like artificial flowers, she would thank me and say she

adored orchids, adding after a moment’s pause for thought that she liked

them because they looked so like artificial flowers. And she laughed

softly to herself, she looked up at me for confirmatory applause. For

that little habit alone I sometimes felt that I could have murdered her.

But her solicitude, her reproaches, expressed or more often mute (for

she rarely made scenes, but only looked at me with those sad brown

eyes), her incessant desire to be close to me, to touch me, to kiss and

be kissed—these were almost enough to drive me to suicide. It lasted for

more than a year, an eternity. And technically it still lasts; for I

never broke with her, never dramatically quitted her, but only quietly

and gradually faded out of her life like the Cheshire Cat. Sometimes,

even, we still meet. And still, as though nothing had happened, I take

her in my arms and kiss her, till that strange expression of abject

terror comes again into her eyes, till she implores me, in a voice made

faint with excessive desire, to spare her well-disciplined everyday soul

and not deliver it into the power of the fearful thing that is waking

darkly within her. And still as she speaks she presses me closer, she

offers her stretched throat to my kisses. And before and after, we talk

about politics and common friends. And still as of old she echoes the

last phrase I have spoken, still softly laughs and still expects me to

admire her original thoughts. Finally I take my leave.

“You’ll come again soon?” she asks, looking up into my face with eyes

that are full of sadness and apprehension, of questions unuttered, of

unexpressed reproaches. I kiss her hand. “Of course,” I say. And I go

away, taking pains as I walk down the street not to speculate on the

subject of her thoughts.

But Providence seems to have thought my connection with Dorothy

inadequately instructive. Dorothy, after all, was only twenty-six when

the episode began. Hers was that vernal and flowery season during which,

even in Italy, warblers are not shot. It would be another twenty years

before she reached her First of October; thirty, perhaps, before the

man-eating season should begin. And it was I who had made the first

advances. But for my exhibition of _Bosheit und Pläsier_ the boring

history would never have unrolled itself. But Providence, anxious, for

some inscrutable reason, to teach me a yet more memorable lesson, went

so far as almost to drown me, so determined was it that I should fall

into the hands of the suitable schoolmistress. I was to learn how

ludicrously dreadful, as well as how boring, love can be.