I made no advances on this occasion. From the first I did nothing but

retreat. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s blue danger signals bore down on me; like an

agile pedestrian in the London traffic, I stepped aside. When she asked

what women had inspired me, I answered that nothing inspired me but the

London slums and the vulgarity of Lady Giblet. When she said that one

could see by my face that I had been unhappy, I said that that was odd;

I had always been perfectly happy. When she talked about experience,

meaning, as women generally do when they use that word, merely love, I

replied with a discussion of experience in relation to the Theory of

Knowledge. When she accused me of wearing a mask, I protested that I

paraded my naked soul for every one to see. When she asked if I had ever

been in love, I shrugged my shoulders and smiled: not to speak of. And

when she asked, at very close range, if I had ever been loved, I

answered quite truthfully that I had, but that it bored me.

But still, indomitably, she renewed the attack. There might have been

something grand about her unwavering determination—something grand, if

it had not been grotesque. Providence was teaching me yet once more that

the unsapient life is a dreary and hopeless business, and that it is,

for all practical purposes, the only life—lived everywhere by all but a

negligibly few exceptions. At least I presume that that is what

Providence was trying to impress on me. But in the process it was using

Mrs. Aldwinkle, I thought, rather hardly. I felt sorry for the poor

lady. Some hidden irrational force within herself was compelling her to

cut these capers, throw herself into these ludicrous postures, say these

stupid words and contort her face into these grimaces; she was helpless.

She just obeyed orders and did her best; but her best was ludicrous. And

not merely ludicrous but appalling. She was like a buffoon carrying a

skull.

Unflaggingly she played the deplorable part assigned to her. Every day

she brought me flowers. “I want them to blossom in your verses,” she

said. I assured her that the only scent which provoked me to write was

that of the butchers’ shops on a winter’s evening along the Harrow Road.

She smiled at me. “Don’t think I can’t understand you,” she said. “I do.

I do.” She leaned forward; her eyes shone, her perfume enveloped me, she

breathed heliotrope in my face. I could see with extraordinary

distinctness the little wrinkles round her eyes, the careless smear of

rouge at the corners of the mouth. “I do understand you,” she repeated.

She did understand me.... One night (it was at Montefiascone, on our way

back from Rome), when I was reading in bed, I heard a sound; I looked

up, and saw Mrs. Aldwinkle carefully closing the door behind her. She

was wearing a dressing-gown of sea-green silk. Her hair hung in two

thick plaits over her shoulders. When she turned round, I saw that her

face had been coloured and powdered with more than ordinary care. In

silence she advanced across the room, she sat down on the edge of my

bed. An aura of ambergris and heliotrope surrounded her.

I smiled politely, closed my book (keeping a finger, however, between

the pages to mark my place) and slightly raised my eyebrows in

interrogation. To what, I made my face inquire, do I owe the honour?...

I owed it, it seemed, to my hostess’s urgently felt need to tell me yet

once more that she understood me.

“I couldn’t bear,” she said breathlessly, “couldn’t bear to think of you

here alone. With your secret misery.” And when I made as though to

protest, she held up her hand. “Oh, don’t think I haven’t seen through

your mask. Alone with your secret misery....”

“No, really ...” I managed to put in. But Mrs. Aldwinkle would not

suffer herself to be interrupted.

“I couldn’t bear to think of your terrible loneliness,” she went on. “I

wanted you to know there was at least one person who understood.” She

leaned towards me, smiling, but with lips that trembled. All at once her

eyes filled with tears, her face contorted itself into the terrible

grimace of misery. She made a little moaning noise and, letting herself

fall forward, she hid her face against my knees. “I love you, I love

you,” she repeated in a muffled voice. Her body was shaken by recurrent

spasms of sobbing. I was left wondering what to do. This was not in the

programme. When one goes out man-eating or pheasant-shooting, one has no

business to weep over the victim. But the trouble is, of course, that

the man-eater sees herself as the victim. _Hinc illae lacrimae._ It is

impossible for two human beings to agree completely about anything.

_Quot homines_, for now that the Dictionary of Familiar Quotations has

been opened I may as well continue to make use of it, _quot homines, tot

disputandum est_. There is no agreement even about the truths of

science. One man is a geometrician; the other can only understand

analysis. One is incapable of believing in anything of which he cannot

make a working model; the other wants his truth as abstract as it is

possible to make it. But when it comes to deciding which of two people

is the victim and which the man-eater, there is nothing to be done but

abandon the attempt. Let each party stick to his own opinion. The most

successful men are those who never admit the validity of other people’s

opinions, who even deny their existence.

“My dear Lilian,” I said (she had insisted on my calling her Lilian

within a day or two of my arrival), “my dear Lilian....” I could find

nothing more to say. A successful man, I suppose, would have said

something frankly brutal, something that would have made it clear to

Mrs. Aldwinkle which of the two, in his opinion, was the victim and

which the carnivore. I lacked the force. Mrs. Aldwinkle went on sobbing.

“I love you. Couldn’t you love me a little? A little only? I would be

your slave. Your slave; I’d be your slave,” she kept repeating.

What things she said! I listened to her, feeling pity—yes, pity no

doubt—but still more, a profound embarrassment and with it anger against

the person who had thrust me into this untenable position.

“It’s no good,” I protested. “It’s impossible.”

She only began again, desperately.

How much further the scene might have prolonged itself and what might

have happened if it had been protracted, I do not know. Luckily,

however, an extraordinary commotion suddenly broke loose in the hotel.

Doors slammed, voices were raised, there was the noise of feet along the

corridors and on the stairs. Startled and alarmed, Mrs. Aldwinkle got

up, went to the door, opened it a crack and looked into the passage.

Some one hurried past; hastily she closed it again. When the coast was

clear, she slipped out into the passage and tiptoed away, leaving me

alone.

The commotion was caused by the beginning of Miss Elver’s death-agony.

Providence, having decided that my education had gone far enough, had

broken off the lesson. The means it employed were, I must say, rather

violent. A vain man might have been gratified by the reflection that one

woman had been made miserable in order that he might be taught a lesson,

while another had died—like King John, of a surfeit of lampreys—in order

that the lesson might be interrupted before it was carried too

disagreeably far. But as it happens, I am not particularly vain.

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

CHAPTER VIII

From the first nobody put very much faith in the local doctor; the mere

look of him was enough to inspire mistrust. But when across the

patient’s prostrate and comatose body he chattily confided that he had

taken his degree at the University of Siena, Mr. Cardan decided that it

was time to send for somebody else.

“Siena’s notorious,” he whispered. “It’s the place where the imbeciles

who can’t get their degrees at Bologna, or Rome, or Pisa go and have

themselves made doctors.”

Mrs. Aldwinkle, who in the middle of the tumult had suddenly reappeared

(Irene did not know from where), expressed her horror. Doctors were one

of her specialities; she was very particular about doctors. Mrs.

Aldwinkle had had a number of interesting maladies in the course of her

life—three nervous break-downs, an appendicitis, gout and various

influenzas, pneumonias and the like, but all of them aristocratic and

avowable diseases; for Mrs. Aldwinkle distinguished sharply between

complaints that are vulgar and complaints of a gentlemanly sort. Chronic

constipation, hernia, varicose veins (“bad legs” as the poor so

gruesomely call them)—these, obviously, were vulgar diseases which no

decent person could suffer from, or at any rate, suffering, talk about.

Her illnesses had all been extremely refined and correspondingly

expensive. What she did not know about doctors, English, French, Swiss,

German, Swedish and even Japanese, was not worth knowing. Mr. Cardan’s

remarks about the University of Siena impressed her profoundly.

“The only thing to do,” she said decisively, “is for Hovenden to drive

straight back to Rome and bring back a specialist. At once.” She spoke

peremptorily. It was a comfort for her, in her present distress of mind,

to be able to do something, to make arrangements, to order people about,

even herself to carry and fetch. “The Principessa gave me the name of a

wonderful man. I’ve got it written down somewhere. Come.” And she darted

off to her room.

Obediently Lord Hovenden followed her, wrote down the talismanic name

and took himself off. Chelifer was waiting for him at the bottom of the

stairs.

“I may as well come with you, if you don’t mind,” he said. “I think I

should only be in the way here.”

It was nearly half-past five when they started. The sun had not yet

risen, but it was already light. The sky was pale grey with dark clouds

low down on the horizon. There were mists in the valleys and the Lake of

Bolsena was hidden from view under what seemed the waters of a milky

sea. The air was cold. Driving out of the town, they met a train of pack

mules climbing slowly, in the midst of a jingle of bells, up the steep

street towards the market-place.

Viterbo was still asleep when they drove through. From the crest of the

Ciminian mountains they first saw the sun. By seven o’clock they were in

Rome. The sun-tipped obelisks, the gilded roofs and cupolas reached up

out of shadow into the pale blue sky. They drove up the Corso. In the

Piazza di Venezia they stopped at a café, ordered some coffee and while

it was being brought looked up in a directory the address of Mrs.

Aldwinkle’s doctor. He lived, they found, in the new quarter near the

station.

“I leave all ve talking to you,” said Hovenden, as they sipped their

coffee. “I’m no good at ve language.”

“How did you manage the other day when you had to see the doctor

yourself?” Chelifer inquired.

Lord Hovenden blushed. “Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact, ve doctor

I saw was English. But he’s gone away now,” he added hastily, for fear

that Chelifer might suggest their bringing the English doctor along too;

“gone to Naples,” he further specified, hoping by the accumulation of

circumstantial details to give greater verisimilitude to his story, “for

an operation.”

“He was a surgeon, then?” Chelifer raised his eyebrows.

Hovenden nodded. “A surgeon,” he echoed, and buried his face in his

coffee-cup.

They drove on. As they turned out of the Piazza into Trajan’s Forum,

Chelifer noticed a little crowd, mostly of street boys, pressing against

the railings on the further side of the forum. At its centre stood a

pale thin woman in dove-grey clothes whom even at this distance one

could not fail to recognise as English, or at any rate definitely not

Italian. The lady in grey was leaning over the railings, lowering very

carefully at the end of a string, to which it was ingeniously attached

by four subsidiary strings passed through holes bored in the rim, a

large aluminium pannikin filled with milk. Slowly revolving as it went

down, the pannikin was lowered to the floor of the sunken forum. Hardly

had it touched the ground when, with simultaneous mewings and purrings,

half a dozen thirsty cats came running up to it and began to lap at the

white milk. Others followed; every cranny gave up its cat. Lean toms

jumped down from their marble pedestals and trotted across the open with

the undulating, bounding gait of a running leopard. Month-old kittens

staggered up on tottering legs. In a few seconds the pannikin was

besieged by a horde of cats. The street boys whooped with delight.

“Well, I’m blowed,” said Lord Hovenden, who had slowed up to watch the

curious scene. “I believe it’s your mover.”

“I think it is,” said Chelifer, who had recognised her long ago.

“Would you like me to stop?” asked Hovenden.

Chelifer shook his head. “I think we’d better get to the doctor as

quickly as possible,” he said.

Looking back as they drove out of the forum, Chelifer saw that his

mother, faithful to her vegetarian principles, was throwing down into

the den of cats bread and cold potatoes. In the evening he imagined she

would come again. She had not taken long to find her Roman occupation.

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

CHAPTER IX

The funeral was not due to take place before sunset. The bearers, the

choristers, the sexton, the priest himself, most likely, were all in the

fields, picking the grapes. They had something more important to do,

while the light lasted, than to bury people. Let the dead bury their

dead. The living were there to make wine.

Mr. Cardan sat alone in the empty church. Alone; what had once been

Grace Elver lay, coffined, on a bier in the middle of the aisle. That

did not count as company; it was just so much stuff in a box. His red

knobbly face was as though frozen into stillness, all its gaiety, its

twinkling mobility were gone. It might have been the face of a dead man,

of one of the dead whose business it is to bury the dead. He sat there

grim and stony, leaning forward, his chin in his hand, his elbow on his

knee.

Three thousand six hundred and fifty days more, he was thinking; that

is, if I live another ten years. Three thousand six hundred and fifty,

and then the end of everything, the tunnelling worms.

There are such horrible ways of dying, he thought. Once, years ago, he

had a beautiful grey Angora cat. She ate too many black-beetles in the

kitchen and died vomiting shreds of her shard-torn stomach. He often

thought of that cat. One might die like that oneself, coughing up one’s

vitals.

Not that one eats many black-beetles, of course. But there is always

putrid fish. The effects are not so very different. Wretched moron! he

thought, looking at the coffin. It had been a disgusting sort of death.

Pains, vomiting, collapse, coma, then the coffin—and now the busy

ferments of putrefaction and the worms. Not a very dignified or

inspiring conclusion. No speeches, no consoling serenities, no Little

Nells or Paul Dombeys. The nearest approach to the Dickensian had been

when, in a brief spell of lucidity, she asked him about the bears he was

going to give her after they were married.

“Will they be grown up?” she asked. “Or puppies?”

“Puppies,” he answered, and she had smiled with pleasure.

Those had been almost the only articulate words she had uttered. Through

that long death-agony they were the only witnesses to the existence of

her soul. For the rest of the time she had been no more than a sick

body, mindlessly crying and muttering. The tragedy of bodily suffering

and extinction has no catharsis. Punctually it runs its dull, degrading

course, act by act to the conclusion. It ennobles neither the sufferer

nor the contemplator. Only the tragedy of the spirit can liberate and

uplift. But the greatest tragedy of the spirit is that sooner or later

it succumbs to the flesh. Sooner or later every soul is stifled by the

sick body; sooner or later there are no more thoughts, but only pain and

vomiting and stupor. The tragedies of the spirit are mere struttings and

posturings on the margin of life, and the spirit itself is only an

accidental exuberance, the products of spare vital energy, like the

feathers on the head of a hoopoo or the innumerable populations of

useless and foredoomed spermatozoa. The spirit has no significance;

there is only the body. When it is young, the body is beautiful and

strong. It grows old, its joints creak, it becomes dry and smelly; it

breaks down, the life goes out of it and it rots away. However lovely

the feathers on a bird’s head, they perish with it; and the spirit,

which is a lovelier ornament than any, perishes too. The farce is

hideous, thought Mr. Cardan, and in the worst of bad taste.

Fools do not perceive that the farce is a farce. They are the more

blessed. Wise men perceive it and take pains not to think about it.

Therein lies their wisdom. They indulge themselves in all the pleasures,

of the spirit as of the body—and especially in those of the spirit,

since they are by far the more varied, charming and delightful—and when

the time comes they resign themselves with the best grace they can

muster to the decay of the body and the extinction of its spiritual

part. Meanwhile, however, they do not think too much of death—it is an

unexhilarating theme; they do not insist too much upon the farcical

nature of the drama in which they are playing, for fear that they should

become too much disgusted with their parts to get any amusement out of

the piece at all.

The most ludicrous comedies are the comedies about people who preach one

thing and practise another, who make imposing claims and lamentably fail

to fulfil them. We preach immortality and we practise death. Tartuffe

and Volpone are not in it.

The wise man does not think of death lest it should spoil his pleasures.

But there are times when the worms intrude too insistently to be

ignored. Death forces itself sometimes upon the mind, and then it is

hard to take much pleasure in anything.

This coffin, for instance—how can a man take pleasure in the beauty of

the church in which this boxful of decaying stuff is lying? What can be

more delightful than to look up the aisle of a great church and see at

the end of a long dark vista of round-headed arches a brightly illumined

segment of the drum of the cupola—the horizontal circle contrasting

harmoniously with the perpendicular half-circles of the arches? There is

nothing lovelier among all the works of man. But the coffin lies here

under the arches, reminding the connoisseur of beauty that there is

nothing but the body and that the body suffers degradingly, dies and is

eaten by maggots.

Mr. Cardan wondered how he would die. Slowly or suddenly? After long

pain? Intelligent, still human? Or an idiot, a moaning animal? He would

die poor, now, in any case. Friends would club together and send him a

few pounds every now and then. Poor old Cardan, can’t let him die in the

workhouse. Must send him five pounds. What a bore! Extraordinary how he

manages to last so long! But he was always a tough old devil. Poor old

Cardan!

A door banged; in the hollow echoing church there was a sound of

footsteps. It was the sacristan. He came to tell Mr. Cardan that they

would soon be ready to begin. They had hurried back from the fields on

purpose. The grapes were not so plentiful nor of quite such good quality

as they had been last year. But still, one thanked God for His mercies,

such as they were.

Blessed are the fools, thought Mr. Cardan, for they shall see nothing.

Or perhaps they do see and, seeing, nevertheless comfortingly believe in

future compensations and the justice of eternity. In either case—not

seeing, or seeing but believing—they are fools. Still, believing is

probably the best solution of all, Mr. Cardan went on to reflect. For it

allows one to see and not to ignore. It permits one to accept the facts

and yet justify them. For a believer the presence of a coffin or two

would not interfere with the appreciation of Sammicheli’s architecture.

The bearers filed in, bringing with them from the fields a healthy smell

of sweat. They were dressed for the occasion in garments that ought, no

doubt, to have been surplices, but which were, in point of fact, rather

dirty and crumpled white dust-coats. They looked like a cricket eleven

entirely composed of umpires. After the bearers came the priest,

followed by a miniature umpire in a dust-coat so short that it did not

hide his bare knees. The service began. The priest reeled off his Latin

formulas as though for a wager; the bearers, in ragged and tuneless

unison, bawled back at him the incomprehensible responses. During the

longer prayers they talked to one another about the vintage. The boy

scratched first his head, then his posterior, finally picked his nose.

The priest prayed so fast that all the words fused together and became

one word. Mr. Cardan wondered why the Catholic Church did not authorise

prayer wheels. A simple little electric motor doing six or eight hundred

revolutions a minute would get through a quite astonishing amount of

pious work in a day and cost much less than a priest.

“Baa baba, baa baa, Boo-oo-baa,” bleated the priest.

“Boooo-baa,” came back from the bawling flock.

Not ceasing for a moment to pick his nose, the diminutive umpire, who

seemed to know his part as perfectly as a trained dog in a music hall,

handed the priest a censer. Waving it as he went, and rattling off his

pious Latin, he walked round and round the bier. Symbolic and religious

perfume! It had smoked in the stable of Bethlehem, in the midst of the

ammoniac smell of the beasts, the sign and symbol of the spirit. The

blue smoke floated up and was lost along the wind. On the surface of the

earth the beasts unremittingly propagate their kind; the whole earth is

a morass of living flesh. The smell of it hangs warm and heavy over all.

Here and there the incense burns; its smoke soon vanishes. The smell of

the beasts remains.

“Baa baba,” went the priest.

“Baa,” the choristers retorted, a fifth lower down the scale.

The boy produced water and a kind of whisk. Once more the priest walked

round the bier, sprinkling the water from the end of the wetted whisk;

the little umpire followed in his train, holding up the tail of his

outer garment. The bearers, meanwhile, talked to one another in serious

whispers about the grapes.

Sometimes, Mr. Cardan thought, the spirit plays its part so solemnly and

well that one cannot help believing in its reality and ultimate

significance. A ritual gravely performed is overwhelmingly convincing,

for the moment at any rate. But let it be performed casually and

carelessly by people who are not thinking of what the rite is meant to

symbolise; one perceives that there is nothing behind the symbols, that

it is only the acting that matters—the judicious acting of the body—and

that the body, the doomed, decaying body, is the one, appalling fact.

The service was over; the bearers picked up the coffin and carried it to

the hearse that stood at the church door. The priest beckoned to Mr.

Cardan to follow him into the sacristy. There, while the little umpire

put away his censer and the whisk, he presented his bill. Mr. Cardan

paid.

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

PART V: CONCLUSIONS

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

PART V: Conclusions

CHAPTER I

“What are you thinking of?”

“Nothing,” said Calamy.

“Yes, you were. You must have been thinking about something.”

“Nothing in particular,” he repeated.

“Tell me,” Mary insisted. “I want to know.”

“Well, if you really want to know,” Calamy began slowly....

But she interrupted him. “And why did you hold up your hand like that?

And spread out the fingers? I could see it, you know; against the

window.” Pitch dark it was in the room, but beyond the unshuttered

windows was a starlit night.

Calamy laughed—a rather embarrassed laugh. “Oh, you saw it, did you—the

hand? Well, as a matter of fact, it was precisely about my hand that I

was thinking.”

“About your hand?” said Mary incredulously. “That seems a queer thing to

think about.”

“But interesting if you think about it hard enough.”

“Your hands,” she said softly, in another voice, “your hands. When they

touch me....” With a feminine movement of gratitude, of thanks for a

benefit received, she pressed herself more closely against him; in the

darkness she kissed him. “I love you too much,” she whispered, “too

much.” And at the moment it was almost true. The strong complete spirit,

she had written in her note-book, must be able to love with fury,

savagely, mindlessly. Not without pride, she had found herself complete

and strong. Once, at a dinner party, she had been taken down by a large

black and lemon coloured Argentine; unfolding his napkin, he had opened

the evening’s conversation, in that fantastic trans-Pyrenean French

which was his only substitute for the Castilian, by saying, with a roll

of his black eyes and a flashing ivory smile: “Jé vois qué vous avez du

temmperramenk.” “Oh, à revendre,” she had answered gaily, throwing

herself into the light Parisian part. How marvellously amusing! But that

was Life—Life all over. She had brought the incident into a short story,

long ago. But the Argentine had looked with an expert’s eye; he was

right. “I love you too much,” she whispered in the darkness. Yes, it was

true, it was nearly true, at the moment, in the circumstances. She took

his hand and kissed it. “That’s all _I_ think about your hand,” she

said.

Calamy allowed his hand to be kissed, and as soon as it was decently

possible gently withdrew it. Invisibly, in the darkness, he made a

little grimace of impatience. He was no longer interested in kisses, at

the moment. “Yes,” he said meditatively, “that’s one way of thinking of

my hand, that’s one way in which it exists and is real. Certainly. And

that was what I was thinking about—all the different ways in which these

five fingers”—he held them up again, splayed out, against the window’s

oblong of paler darkness—“have reality and exist. All the different

ways,” he repeated slowly. “If you think of that, even for five minutes,

you find yourself plunged up to the eyes in the most portentous

mysteries.” He was silent for a moment; then added in a very serious

voice. “And I believe that if one could stand the strain of thinking

really hard about one thing—this hand, for example—really hard for

several days, or weeks, or months, one might be able to burrow one’s way

right through the mystery and really get at something—some kind of

truth, some explanation.” He paused, frowning. Down and down, through

the obscurity, he was thinking. Slowly, painfully, like Milton’s Devil,

pushing his way through chaos; in the end, one might emerge into the

light, to see the universe, sphere within sphere, hanging from the floor

of heaven. But it would be a slow, laborious process; one would need

time, one would need freedom. Above everything, freedom.

“Why don’t you think about me?” Mary Thriplow asked. She propped herself

up on one elbow and leaned over him; with her other hand she ruffled his

hair. “Don’t I bear thinking about?” she asked. She had a fistful of his

thick hair in her hand; softly she tugged at it, testingly, as though

she were preparing for something worse, were assuring her grip for a

more violent pull. She felt a desire to hurt him. Even in her arms, she

was thinking, he escaped her, he simply wasn’t there. “Don’t I bear

thinking about?” she repeated, tugging a little harder at his hair.

Calamy said nothing. The truth was, he was reflecting, that she didn’t

bear thinking about. Like a good many other things. All one’s daily life

was a skating over thin ice, was a scampering of water-beetles across

the invisible skin of depths. Stamp a little too hard, lean a shade too

heavily and you were through, you were floundering in a dangerous and

unfamiliar element. This love business, for example—it simply couldn’t

be thought of; it could only support one on condition that one never

stopped to think. But it was necessary to think, necessary to break

through and sink into the depths. And yet, insanely and desperately, one

still went skating on.

“Do you love me?” asked Mary.

“Of course,” he said; but the tone of his voice did not carry much

conviction.

Menacingly she tugged at the tuft of hair she held twined round her

fingers. It angered her that he should escape her, that he should not

give himself up completely to her. And this resentful feeling that he

did not love her enough produced in her a complementary conviction that

she loved him too much. Her anger combined with her physical gratitude

to make her feel, for the moment, peculiarly passionate. She found

herself all at once playing the part of the _grande amoureuse_, the

impassioned de Lespinasse, playing it spontaneously and without the

least difficulty. “I could hate you,” she said resentfully, “for making

me love you so much.”

“And what about me?” said Calamy, thinking of his freedom. “Haven’t I a

right to hate too?”

“No. Because you don’t love so much.”

“But that’s not the question,” said Calamy, neglecting to record his

protest against this damning impeachment. “One doesn’t resent love for

its own sake, but for the sake of what it interferes with.”

“Oh, I see,” said Mary bitterly. She was too deeply wounded even to

desire to pull his hair. She turned her back on him. “I’m sorry I should

have got in the way of your important occupations,” she said in her most

sarcastic voice. “Such as thinking about your hand.” She laughed

derisively. There was a long silence. Calamy made no attempt to break

it; he was piqued by this derisive treatment of a subject which, for

him, was serious, was in some sort sacred. It was Mary who first spoke.

“Will you tell me, then, what you were thinking?” she asked

submissively, turning back towards him. When one loves, one swallows

one’s pride and surrenders. “Will you tell me?” she repeated, leaning

over him. She took one of his hands and began to kiss it, then suddenly

bit one of his fingers so hard that Calamy cried out in pain.

“Why do you make me so unhappy?” she asked between clenched teeth. She

saw herself, as she spoke the words, lying face downward on her bed,

desperately sobbing. It needs a great spirit to be greatly unhappy.

“Make you unhappy?” echoed Calamy in a voice of irritation; he was still

smarting with the pain of that bite. “But I don’t. I make you uncommonly

happy.”

“You make me miserable,” she answered.

“Well, in that case,” said Calamy, “I’d better go away and leave you in

peace.” He slipped his arm from under her shoulders, as though he were

really preparing to go.

But Mary enfolded him in her arms. “No, no,” she implored. “Don’t go.

You mustn’t be cross with me. I’m sorry. I behaved abominably. Tell me,

please, what you were thinking about your hand. I really am interested.

Really, really.” She spoke eagerly, childishly, like the little girl at

the Royal Institution lecture.

Calamy couldn’t help laughing. “You’ve succeeded in rather damping my

enthusiasm for that subject,” he said. “I’d find it difficult to begin

now, in cold blood.”

“Please, please,” Mary insisted. Wronged, it was she who asked pardon,

she who cajoled. When one loves....

“You’ve made it almost impossible to talk anything but nonsense,” Calamy

objected. But in the end he allowed himself to be persuaded.

Embarrassed, rather awkwardly—for the spiritual atmosphere in which

these ideas had been ruminated was dissipated, and it was in the void,

so to speak, in the empty cold that his thoughts now gasped for

breath—he began his exposition. But gradually, as he spoke, the mood

returned; he became at home once more with what he was saying. Mary

listened with a fixed attention of which, even in the darkness, he was

somehow conscious.

“Well, you see,” he started hesitatingly, “it’s like this. I was

thinking of all the different ways a thing can exist—my hand for

example.”

“I see,” said Mary Thriplow sympathetically and intelligently. She was

almost too anxious to prove that she was listening, that she was

understanding everything; she saw before there was anything to see.

“It’s extraordinary,” Calamy went on, “what a lot of different modes of

existence a thing has, when you come to think about it. And the more you

think, the more obscure and mysterious everything becomes. What seemed

solid vanishes; what was obvious and comprehensible becomes utterly

mysterious. Gulfs begin opening all around you—more and more abysses, as

though the ground were splitting in an earthquake. It gives one a

strange sense of insecurity, of being in the dark. But I still believe

that, if one went on thinking long enough and hard enough, one might

somehow come through, get out on the other side of the obscurity. But

into what, precisely into what? That’s the question.” He was silent for

a moment. If one were free, he thought, one could go exploring into that

darkness. But the flesh was weak; under the threat of that delicious

torture it turned coward and traitor.

“Well?” said Mary at last. She moved closer to him, lightly, her lips

brushed across his cheek. She ran her hand softly over his shoulder and

along his arm. “Go on.”

“Very well,” he said in a business-like voice, moving a little away from

her as he spoke. He held up his hand once more against the window.

“Look,” he said. “It’s just a shape that interrupts the light. To a

child who has not yet learned to interpret what he sees, that’s all it

would be, just a shaped blotch of colour, no more significant than one

of those coloured targets representing a man’s head and shoulders that

one learns shooting on. But now, suppose I try to consider the thing as

a physicist.”

“Quite,” said Mary Thriplow; and from the movement of a floating tress

of her hair which brushed against his shoulder he knew that she was

nodding her head.

“Well then,” Calamy went on, “I have to imagine an almost inconceivable

number of atoms, each consisting of a greater or lesser number of units

of negative electricity whirling several million times a minute round a

nucleus of positive electricity. The vibrations of the atoms lying near

the surface sift out, so to speak, the electro-magnetic radiations which

fall upon them, permitting only those waves to reach our eyes which give

us the sensation of a brownish-pink colour. In passing it may be

remarked that the behaviour of light is satisfactorily explained

according to one theory of electro-dynamics, while the behaviour of the

electrons in the atom can only be explained on a theory that is entirely

inconsistent with it. Inside the atom, they tell us now, electrons move

from one orbit to another without taking any time to accomplish their

journey and without covering any space. Indeed, within the atom there is

neither space nor time. And so on and so on. I have to take most of this

on trust, I’m afraid, for I understand next to nothing about these

things. Only enough to make me feel rather dizzy when I begin to think

about them.”

“Yes, dizzy,” said Mary, “that’s the word. Dizzy.” She made a prolonged

buzzing over the z’s.

“Well then, here are two ways already in which my hand exists,” Calamy

went on. “Then there’s the chemical way. These atoms consisting of more

or fewer electrons whizzing round a nucleus of greater or lesser charge

are atoms of different elements that build themselves up in certain

architectural patterns into complicated molecules.”

Sympathetic and intelligent, Mary echoed: “Molecules.”

“Now if, like Cranmer, I were to put my right hand into the fire, to

punish it for having done something evil or unworthy (words, by the way,

which haven’t much in common with chemistry), if I were to put my hand

in the fire, these molecules would uncombine themselves into their

constituent atoms, which would then proceed to build themselves up again

into other molecules. But this leads me on at once to a set of entirely

different realities. For if I were to put my hand in the fire, I should

feel pain; and unless, like Cranmer, I made an enormous effort of will

to keep it there, I should withdraw it; or rather it would withdraw

itself almost without my knowledge and before I was aware. For I am

alive, and this hand is part of a living being, the first law of whose

existence is to preserve its life. Being alive, this hand of mine, if it

were burnt, would set about trying to repair itself. Seen by a

biologist, it reveals itself as a collection of cells, having each its

appointed function, and existing harmoniously together, never

trespassing upon one another, never proliferating into wild adventures

of growth, but living, dying and growing to one end—that the whole which

they compose may fulfil its purpose—and as though in accordance with a

preordained plan. Say that the hand is burnt. From all round the burn

the healthy cells would breed out of themselves new cells to fill in and

cover the damaged places.”

“How wonderful life is!” said Mary Thriplow. “Life....”

“Cranmer’s hand,” Calamy went on, “had done an ignoble thing. The hand

is part, not merely of a living being, but of a being that knows good

and evil. This hand of mine can do good things and bad things. It has

killed a man, for example; it has written all manner of words; it has

helped a man who was hurt; it has touched your body.” He laid his hand

on her breast; she started, she trembled involuntarily under his caress.

He ought to think that rather flattering, oughtn’t he? It was a symbol

of his power over her—of her power, alas, over him. “And when it touches

your body,” he went on, “it touches also your mind. My hand moves like

this, and it moves through your consciousness as well as here, across

your skin. And it’s my mind that orders it to move; it brings your body

into my mind. It exists in mind; it has reality as a part of my soul and

a part of yours.”

Miss Thriplow couldn’t help reflecting that there was, in all this, the

stuff for a very deep digression in one of her novels. “This thoughtful

young writer ...” would be quoted from the reviewers on the dust-cover

of her next book.

“Go on,” she said.

Calamy went on. “And so these,” he said, “are some of the ways—and there

are plenty more, of course, besides—these are some of the ways in which

my hand exists and is real. This shape which interrupts the light—it is

enough to think of it for five minutes to perceive that it exists

simultaneously in a dozen parallel worlds. It exists as electrical

charges; as chemical molecules; as living cells; as part of a moral

being, the instrument of good and evil; in the physical world and in

mind. And from this one goes on to ask, inevitably, what relationship

exists between these different modes of being. What is there in common

between life and chemistry; between good and evil and electrical

charges; between a collection of cells and the consciousness of a

caress? It’s here that the gulfs begin to open. For there isn’t any

connection—that one can see, at any rate. Universe lies on the top of

universe, layer after layer, distinct and separate....”

“Like a Neapolitan ice,” Mary’s mind flew at once to the fantastic and

unexpected comparison. “This witty young writer....” That was already on

her dust-covers.

Calamy laughed. “All right,” he agreed. “Like a Neapolitan ice, if you

like. What’s true in the chocolate layer, at the bottom of the ice,

doesn’t hold in the vanilla at the top. And a lemon truth is different

from a strawberry truth. And each one has just as much right to exist

and to call itself real as every other. And you can’t explain one in

terms of the others. Certainly you can’t explain the vanilla in terms of

any of the lower layers—you can’t explain mind as mere life, as

chemistry, as physics. That at least is one thing that’s perfectly

obvious and self-evident.”

“Obvious,” Mary agreed. “And what’s the result of it all? I really don’t

see.”

“Neither do I,” said Calamy, speaking through an explosion of melancholy

laughter. “The only hope,” he went on slowly, “is that perhaps, if you

went on thinking long enough and hard enough, you might arrive at an

explanation of the chocolate and the lemon by the vanilla. Perhaps it’s

really all vanilla, all mind, all spirit. The rest is only apparent, an

illusion. But one has no right to say so until one has thought a long

time, in freedom.”

“In freedom?”

“The mind must be open, unperturbed, empty of irrelevant things, quiet.

There’s no room for thoughts in a half-shut, cluttered mind. And

thoughts won’t enter a noisy mind; they’re shy, they remain in their

obscure hiding-places below the surface, where they can’t be got at, so

long as the mind is full and noisy. Most of us pass through life without

knowing that they’re there at all. If one wants to lure them out, one

must clear a space for them, one must open the mind wide and wait. And

there must be no irrelevant preoccupations prowling around the doors.

One must free oneself of those.”

“I suppose I’m one of the irrelevant preoccupations,” said Mary

Thriplow, after a little pause.

Calamy laughed, but did not deny it.

“If that’s so,” said Mary, “why did you make love to me?”

Calamy did not reply. Why indeed? He had often asked that question

himself.

“I think it would be best,” she said, after a silence, “if we were to

make an end.” She would go away, she would grieve in solitude.

“Make an end?” Calamy repeated. He desired it, of course, above

everything—to make an end, to be free. But he found himself adding, with

a kind of submarine laughter below the surface of his voice. “Do you

think you _can_ make an end?”

“Why not?”

“Suppose I don’t allow you to?” Did she imagine, then, that she wasn’t

in his power, that he couldn’t make her obey his will whenever he

desired? “I _don’t_ allow you,” he said, and his voice quivered with the

rising mirth. He bent over her and began to kiss her on the mouth; with

his hands he held and caressed her. What an insanity, he said to

himself.

“No, no.” Mary struggled a little; but in the end she allowed herself to

be overcome. She lay still, trembling, like one who has been tortured on

the rack.

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

CHAPTER II

On their return, somewhat low-spirited, from Montefiascone, Mrs.

Aldwinkle and her party found Mary Thriplow alone in the palace.

“And Calamy?” Mrs. Aldwinkle inquired.

“He’s gone into the mountains,” said Miss Thriplow in a serious,

matter-of-fact voice.

“Why?”

“He felt like that,” Mary answered. “He wanted to be alone to think. I

understand it so well. The prospect of your return filled him almost

with terror. He went off two or three days ago.”

“Into the mountains?” echoed Mrs. Aldwinkle. “Is he sleeping in the

woods, or in a cave, or something of that kind?”

“He’s taken a room in a peasant’s cottage on the road up to the marble

quarries. It’s a lovely place.”

“This sounds most interesting,” said Mr. Cardan. “I must really climb up

and have a look at him.”

“I’m sure he’d rather you didn’t,” said Miss Thriplow. “He wants to be

left alone. I understand it so well,” she repeated.

Mr. Cardan looked at her curiously; her face expressed a bright and

serious serenity. “I’m surprised that you too don’t retire from the

world,” he said, twinkling. He had not felt as cheerful as this since

before the dismal day of poor Grace’s funeral.

Miss Thriplow smiled a Christian smile. “You think it’s a joke,” she

said, shaking her head. “But it isn’t really, you know.”

“I’m sure it isn’t,” Mr. Cardan made haste to protest. “And believe me,

I never meant to imply that it was. Never, on my word. I merely

said—quite seriously, I assure you—that I was surprised that you

too....”

“Well, you see, it doesn’t seem to me necessary to go away bodily,” Miss

Thriplow explained. “It’s always seemed to me that one can live the

hermit’s life, if one wants to, in the heart of London, anywhere.”

“Quite,” said Mr. Cardan. “You’re perfectly right.”

“I think he might have waited till I came back,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle

rather resentfully. “The least he could have done was to leave a note.”

She looked at Miss Thriplow angrily, as though it were she who were to

blame for Calamy’s impoliteness. “Well, I must go and get out of my

dusty clothes,” she added crossly and walked away to her room. Her

irritation was the disguise and public manifestation of a profound

depression. They’re all going, she was thinking, they’re all slipping

away. First Chelifer, now Calamy. Like all the rest. Mournfully she

looked back over her life. Everybody, everything had always slipped away

from her. She had always missed all the really important, exciting

things; they had invariably happened, somehow, just round the corner,

out of her sight. The days were so short, so few now. Death approached,

approached. Why had Cardan brought that horrible imbecile creature to

die in front of her like that? She didn’t want to be reminded of death.

Mrs. Aldwinkle shuddered. I’m getting old, she thought; and the little

clock on the mantel-piece, ticking away in the silence of her huge room,

took up the refrain: Getting old, getting old, getting old, it repeated

again and again, endlessly. Getting old—Mrs. Aldwinkle looked at herself

in the glass—and that electric massage machine hadn’t arrived. True, it

was on its way; but it would be weeks before it got here. The posts were

so slow. Everything conspired against her. If she had had it before, if

she’d looked younger ... who knew? Getting old, getting old, repeated

the little clock. In a couple of days from now Chelifer would be going

back to England; he’d go away, he’d live apart from her, live such a

wonderful, beautiful life. She’d miss it all. And Calamy had already

gone; what was he doing, sitting there in the mountains? He was thinking

wonderful thoughts, thoughts that might hold the secret she had always

been seeking and had never found, thoughts that might bring the

consolation and tranquillity of which she always so sorely stood in

need. She was missing them, she’d never know them. Getting old, getting

old. She took off her hat and tossed it on to the bed. It seemed to her

that she was the unhappiest woman in the world.

That evening, while she was brushing Mrs. Aldwinkle’s hair, Irene,

braving the dangers of Aunt Lilian’s terrifying fun, screwed up her

courage to say: “I can never be grateful enough to you, Auntie, for

having talked to me about Hovenden.”

“What about him?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle, from whose mind the painful

events of the last few weeks had quite obliterated such trivial

memories.

Irene blushed with embarrassment. This was a question she had not

anticipated. Was it really possible that Aunt Lilian could have

forgotten those momentous and epoch-making words of hers? “Why,” she

began stammering, “what you said about ... I mean ... when you said that

he looked as though ... well, as though he liked me.”

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle without interest.

“Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Aldwinkle nodded. “What about it?”

“Well,” Irene went on, still painfully embarrassed, “you see ... that

made me ... that made me pay attention, if you understand.”

“Hm,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. There was a silence. Getting old, getting

old, repeated the little clock remorselessly.

Irene leaned forward and suddenly boiled over with confidences. “I love

him so much, Aunt Lilian,” she said, speaking very rapidly, “so much, so

much. It’s the real thing this time. And he loves me too. And we’re

going to get married at the New Year, quite quietly; no fuss, no crowds

shoving in on what isn’t their business; quietly and sensibly in a

registry office. And after that we’re going in the Velox to....”

“What are you talking about?” said Mrs. Aldwinkle in a furious voice,

and she turned round on her niece a face expressive of such passionate

anger that Irene drew back, not merely astonished, but positively

afraid. “You don’t mean to tell me,” Mrs. Aldwinkle began; but she could

not find the words to continue. “What have you two young fools been

thinking about?” she got out at last.

... old, getting old; the remorseless ticking made itself heard in every

silence.

From being merry and excited in its childishness Irene’s face had become

astonished and miserable. She was pale, her lips trembled a little as

she spoke. “But I thought you’d be glad, Aunt Lilian,” she said. “I

thought you’d be glad.”

“Glad because you’re making fools of yourselves?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle,

savagely snorting.

“But it was you who first suggested,” Irene began.

Mrs. Aldwinkle cut her short, before she could say any more, with a

brusqueness that might have revealed to a more practised psychologist

than Irene her consciousness of being in the wrong. “Absurd,” she said.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me,” she went on sarcastically, “that it

was I who told you to marry him.”

“I know you didn’t,” said Irene.

“There!” Mrs. Aldwinkle’s tone was triumphant.

“But you did say you wondered why I wasn’t in love....”

“Bah,” said Aunt Lilian, “I was just making fun. Calf loves....”

“But why shouldn’t I marry him?” asked Irene. “If I love him and he

loves me. Why shouldn’t I?”

Why shouldn’t she? Yes, that was an awkward question. Getting old,

getting old, muttered the clock in the brief ensuing silence. Perhaps

that was half the answer. Getting old! they were all going; first

Chelifer, then Calamy, now Irene. Getting old, getting old; soon she’d

be quite alone. And it wasn’t only that. It was also her pride that was

hurt, her love of dominion that suffered. Irene had been her slave; had

worshipped her, taken her word as law, her opinions as gospel truth. Now

she was transferring her allegiance. Mrs. Aldwinkle was losing a

subject—losing her to a more powerful rival. It was intolerable. “Why

shouldn’t you marry him?” Mrs. Aldwinkle repeated the phrase ironically

two or three times, while she hunted for the answer. “Why shouldn’t you

marry him?”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Irene asked again. There were tears in her eyes; but

however unhappy she might look, there was something determined and

indomitable in her attitude, something obstinate in her expression and

her tone of voice. Mrs. Aldwinkle had reason to fear her rival.

“Because you’re too young,” she said at last. It was a very feeble

answer; but she had been unable to think of a better one.

“But, Aunt Lilian, don’t you remember? You always said that people ought

to marry young. I remember so well, one time, when we talked about

Juliet being only fourteen when she first saw Romeo, that you said....”

“That has nothing to do with it,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, cutting short her

niece’s mnemonic display. Irene’s memory, Mrs. Aldwinkle had often had

reason to complain, was really too good.

“But if you said ...” Irene began again.

“Romeo and Juliet have nothing to do with you and Hovenden,” retorted

Mrs. Aldwinkle. “I repeat: you’re too young.”

“I’m nineteen.”

“Eighteen.”

“Practically nineteen,” Irene insisted. “My birthday’s in December.”

“Marry in haste and repent at leisure,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, making use

of any missive, even a proverb, that came ready to hand. “At the end of

six months you’ll come back howling and complaining and asking me to get

you out of the mess.”

“But why should I?” asked Irene. “We love one another.”

“They all say that. You don’t know your own minds.”

“But we do.”

Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly changed her tactics. “And what makes you so

anxious all at once to run away from me?” she asked. “Can’t you bear to

stay with me a moment longer? Am I so intolerable and odious and ... and

... brutal and....” She clawed at the air. “Do you hate me so much

that....”

“Aunt Lilian!” protested Irene, who had begun to cry in earnest.

Mrs. Aldwinkle, with that tactlessness, that lack of measure that were

characteristic of her, went on piling question upon rhetorical question,

until in the end she completely spoiled the effect she had meant to

achieve, exaggerating into ludicrousness what might otherwise have been

touching. “Can’t you bear me? Have I ill-treated you? Tell me. Have I

bullied you, or scolded you, or ... or not given you enough to eat? Tell

me.”

“How can you talk like that, Aunt Lilian?” Irene dabbed her eyes with a

corner of her dressing-gown. “How can you say that I don’t love you? And

you were always telling me that I ought to get married,” she added,

breaking out into fresh tears.

“How can I say that you don’t love me?” echoed Mrs. Aldwinkle. “But is

it true that you’re longing to leave me as soon as possible? Is that

true or not? I merely ask what the reason is, that’s all.”

“But the reason is that we want to get married; we love each other.”

“Or that you hate me,” Mrs. Aldwinkle persisted.

“But I don’t hate you, Aunt Lilian. How can you say such a thing? You

know I love you.”

“And yet you’re anxious to run away from me as fast as you possibly

can,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “And I shall be left all alone, all alone.”

Her voice trembled; she shut her eyes, she contorted her face in an

effort to keep it closed and rigid. Between her eyelids the tears came

welling out. “All alone,” she repeated brokenly. Getting old, said the

little clock on the mantel-piece, getting old, getting old.

Irene knelt down beside her, took her hands between her own and kissed

them, pressed them against her tear-wet face. “Aunt Lilian,” she begged,

“Aunt Lilian.”

Mrs. Aldwinkle went on sobbing.

“Don’t cry,” said Irene, crying herself. She imagined that she alone was

the cause of Aunt Lilian’s unhappiness. In reality, she was only the

pretext; Mrs. Aldwinkle was weeping over her whole life, weeping at the

approach of death. In that first moment of agonised sympathy and

self-reproach, Irene was on the point of declaring that she would give

up Hovenden, that she would spend all her life with her Aunt Lilian. But

something held her back. Obscurely she was certain that it wouldn’t do,

that it was impossible, that it would even be wrong. She loved Aunt

Lilian and she loved Hovenden. In a way she loved Aunt Lilian more than

Hovenden, now. But something in her that looked prophetically forward,

something that had come through innumerable lives, out of the obscure

depths of time, to dwell within her, held her back. The conscious and

individual part of her spirit inclined towards Aunt Lilian. But

consciousness and individuality—how precariously, how irrelevantly

almost, they flowered out of that ancient root of life planted in the

darkness of her being! The flower was for Aunt Lilian, the root for

Hovenden.

“But you won’t be all alone,” she protested. “We shall constantly be

with you. You’ll come and stay with us.”

The assurance did not seem to bring much consolation to Mrs. Aldwinkle.

She went on crying. The clock ticked away as busily as ever.

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

CHAPTER III

In the course of the last few days the entries in Miss Thriplow’s

note-book had changed their character. From being amorous they had

turned mystical. Savage and mindless passion was replaced by quiet

contemplation. De Lespinasse had yielded to de Guyon.

“Do you remember, darling Jim,” she wrote, “how, when we were ten, we

used to discuss what was the sin against the Holy Ghost? I remember we

agreed that using the altar as a W.C. was probably the unforgivable sin.

It’s a great pity that it isn’t, for then it would be so extremely easy

to avoid committing it. No, I’m afraid it’s not quite so straightforward

as that, the sin against the Holy Ghost. And it’s most perilously easy

to fall into it. Stifling the voices inside you, filling the mind with

so much earthy rubbish that God has no room to enter it, not giving the

spirit its fair chance—that’s the sin against the Holy Ghost. And it’s

unforgivable because it’s irremediable. Last-minute repentances are no

good. The sin and the corresponding virtue are affairs of a lifetime.

And almost everybody commits the sin; they die unforgiven, and at once

they begin again another life. Only when they’ve lived in the virtue of

the Holy Ghost are they forgiven, let off the pains of life and allowed

to sink into unity with All. Isn’t that the meaning of the text? It’s

terribly difficult not to commit the sin. Whenever I stop to think, I am

appalled by the badness of my own life. Oh, Jim, Jim, how easily one

forgets, how unthinkingly one allows oneself to be buried under a

mountain of little earthy interests! The voices are muffled, the mind is

blocked up, there’s no place for the spirit of God. When I’m working, I

feel it’s all right; I’m living in the virtue of the Holy Ghost. For

then I’m doing the best I can. But the rest of the time, that’s when I

go wrong. One can’t be doing all the time, one can’t always give out.

One must also be passive, must receive. That’s what I fail to do. I

flutter about, I fill my mind with lumber, I make it impossible for

myself to receive. One can’t go on like this; one can’t go on sinning

against the Holy Ghost—not if one once realises it.”

There was a line. The next note began: “To think steadily and intensely

of one thing is a wonderful mental exercise; it serves to open up the

mysteries that lie below the commonplace surface of existence; and

perhaps, if one went on thinking long enough and hard enough, one might

get through the mystery to its explanation. When I think, for example,

of my hand....” The note was a long one; it covered, in Miss Thriplow’s

clear, cultured writing, more than two pages of the book.

“Recently,” she had written after that, “I have been saying my prayers

again, as I used to when I was a child. Our Father which art in

heaven—the words help to clear out one’s mind, to rid it of the lumber

and leave it free for the coming of the spirit.”

The next three notes had got there by mistake. Their place was not in

the secret, personal book, but in the other volume, wherein she recorded

little snippets that might come in useful for her novels. Not, of

course, that the entries in the secret book didn’t also come in useful

for her fiction sometimes; but they were not recorded expressly for that

purpose.

“A man in riding breeches,” the first note ran: “he makes a little

creaking noise as he walks along, whipcord rubbing against whipcord,

that is like the creaking noise that swans make, flying, when they move

their big white wings.”

Then followed two lines of comic dialogue.

“_Me._ I find the _Fall of the House of Usher_ a most blood-curdling

story.

“_Frenchman._ Yes, yes, she bloods my curdle also.”

The third note recorded that “moss after a shower on a sultry day is

like a sponge still damp from the hot bath.”

There followed a corollary to the note on prayer. “There is no doubt,”

she had written, “that the actual technique of prayer—the kneeling, the

hiding the face in the hands, the uttering of words _in an audible

voice_, the words being addressed into empty space—helps by its mere

dissimilarity from the ordinary actions of everyday life to put one into

a devout frame of mind....”

To-night she sat for some time in front of the open book, pen in hand,

without writing anything. She frowned pensively and bit the end of her

pen. In the end she put it on record that “St. Augustine, St. Francis

and St. Ignatius Loyola lived dissolute lives before their conversions.”

Then, opening her other, her un-secret note-book, she wrote: “X and Y

are old friends from childhood. X dashing, Y timid; Y admires X. Y

marries, while X is at the war, a passionate creature who takes Y more

out of pity (he is wounded) than from love. There is a child. X returns,

falls in love with Y’s wife, A. Great passion amid growing anguish of

mind—on her part because she is deceiving Y, whom she likes and

respects, and daren’t undeceive him for fear of losing the child; on his

part because he feels that he ought to give up all this sort of thing

and devote himself to God, etc.; in fact, he feels the premonitions of

conversion. One night they decide that the time has come to part; it

can’t go on—she because of the deception, he because of mysticism, etc.

It is a most touching scene, lasting all a last chaste night.

Unfortunately Y finds out for some reason—baby ill, or something of the

kind—that A is not staying at her mother’s as she said, but is

elsewhere. Early in the morning Y comes to X’s flat to ask him to help

in the search for A. Sees A’s coat and hat lying on the drawing-room

sofa; understands all. In a fury flies at X, who, defending himself,

kills him. The end. Question, however; doesn’t it end with too much of a

click? too epigrammatically, so to speak? I wonder whether in this

twentieth century one can permit oneself the luxury of such effective

dramatic devices. Oughtn’t one to do it more _flatly_, somehow? More

terre-à-terreishly, more real-lifeishly? I feel that a conclusion like

that is almost an unfair advantage taken at the reader’s expense. One

ought to arrange it differently. But the question is, how? Can one let

them separate and show them living, she _en bonne mère de famille_, he

as a coenobite? It would drag it out terribly, wouldn’t it? Must think

of this carefully.”

She shut the book and put the cap on her fountain pen, feeling that she

had done a good evening’s work. Calamy was now safely laid down in

pickle, waiting to be consumed whenever she should be short of fictional

provisions.

After having undressed, washed, brushed her hair, polished her nails,

greased her face and cleaned her teeth, Miss Thriplow turned out the

light, and kneeling down by the side of her bed said several prayers,

aloud. She then got into bed, and lying on her back, with all her

muscles relaxed, she began to think about God.

God is a spirit, she said to herself, a spirit, a spirit. She tried to

picture something huge and empty, but alive. A huge flat expanse of

sand, for example, and over it a huge blank dome of sky; and above the

sand everything should be tremulous and shimmering with heat—an

emptiness that was yet alive. A spirit, an all-pervading spirit. God is

a spirit. Three camels appeared on the horizon of the sandy plain and

went lolloping along in an absurd ungainly fashion from left to right.

Miss Thriplow made an effort and dismissed them. God is a spirit, she

said aloud. But of all animals camels are really almost the queerest;

when one thinks of their frightfully supercilious faces, with their

protruding under lips like the last Hapsburg kings of Spain.... No, no;

God is a spirit, all-pervading, everywhere. All the universes are made

one in him. Layer upon layer.... A Neapolitan ice floated up out of the

darkness. She had never liked Neapolitan ices since that time, at the

Franco-British exhibition, when she had eaten one and then taken a ride

on Sir Hiram Maxim’s Captive Flying Machines. Round and round and round.

Lord, how she had been sick, afterwards, in the Blue Grotto of Capri!

“Sixpence each, ladies and gentlemen, only sixpence each for a trip to

the celebrated Blue Grotto of Capri, the celebrated Blue Grotto, ladies

and gentlemen....” How sick! It must have been most awkward for the

grown-ups.... But God is a spirit. All the universes are one in the

spirit. Mind and matter in all their manifestations—all one in the

spirit. All one—she and the stars and the mountains and the trees and

the animals and the blank spaces between the stars and ... and the fish,

the fish in the Aquarium at Monaco.... And what fish! What extravagant

fantasies! But no more extravagant or fantastic, really, than the

painted and jewelled old women outside. It might make a very good

episode in a book—a couple of those old women looking through the glass

at the fishes. Very beautifully and discreetly described; and the

fundamental similarity between the creatures on either side of the glass

would just be delicately implied—not stated, oh, not stated; that would

be too coarse, that would spoil everything, but just implied, by the

description, so that the intelligent reader could take the hint. And

then in the Casino ... Miss Thriplow brusquely interrupted herself. God

is a spirit. Yes. Where was she? All things are one, ah yes, yes. All,

all, all, she repeated. But to arrive at the realisation of their

oneness one must climb up into the spirit. The body separates, the

spirit unites. One must give up the body, the self; one must lose one’s

life to gain it. Lose one’s life, empty oneself of the separating Me.

She clasped her hands tightly together, tighter, tighter, as though she

were squeezing out her individual life between them. If she could

squeeze it all out, make herself quite empty, then the other life would

come rushing in to take its place.

Miss Thriplow lay quite still, hardly breathing. Empty, she said to

herself every now and then, quite empty. She felt wonderfully tranquil.

God was surely very near. The silence grew more profound, her spirit

became calmer and emptier. Yes, God was very near.

Perhaps it was the distant roaring of a train in the valley far below

that reminded her of the noise of the whirling drill; or perhaps the

thin bright line of light that came in, through a chink in the top of

the rickety old door, from the illuminated corridor, to reach half

across the ceiling above her—perhaps it was this long sharp probe of

brightness that reminded her of a surgical instrument. Whatever may have

been the cause, Miss Thriplow suddenly found herself thinking of her

dentist. Such a charming man; he had a china bull-dog on the

mantel-piece of his consulting-room and a photograph of his wife and

twins. His hair wouldn’t lie down. He had such kind grey eyes. And he

was an enthusiast. “This is an instrument of which I’m particularly

fond, Miss Thriplow,” he used to say, picking out a little curved

harpoon from his armoury. “A little wider, please, if you don’t

mind....” What about a story of a dentist who falls in love with one of

his patients? He shows her all the instruments, enthusiastically, wants

her to like his favourites as much as he does. He pretends that there’s

more wrong with her teeth than there really is, in order to see her more

often.

The dentist grew dim, he began the same gesture again and again, very

slowly, but could never finish it, having forgotten, half-way through

the act, what he meant to do. At last he disappeared altogether. Miss

Thriplow had fallen into a profound and tranquil sleep.

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

CHAPTER IV

It had been raining, stormily; but now the wind had fallen and between

the heavy clouds the sun was brightly shining. The yellowing chestnut

trees stood motionless in the still bright air, glittering with

moisture. A noise of rapidly running water filled the ear. The grass of

the steep meadows shone in the sunlight. Calamy stepped out from the

dark and frowsty living-room of the cottage and walked up the steep path

on to the road. He halted here and looked about him. The road at this

point was terraced out of one of the sides of a deep valley. The ground

rose steeply, in places almost precipitously, above it. Below it the

green mountain meadows, brilliant in the sunshine and dotted here and

there with clumps of chestnut trees, fell away into the depths of the

valley, which the afternoon sun had left already in a vaporous smoky

shadow. Profoundly shadowed, too, were the hills on the further side of

the narrow cleft. Huge black masses, smoky with the same vapour as that

which floated at the bottom of the valley, they rose up almost in

silhouette against the bright light beyond. The sun looked down, over

their clouded summits, across the intervening gulf, touching the green

hillside, on the slope of which Calamy was standing, with a radiance

that, in contrast to the dark hills opposite, seemed almost unearthly.

To the right, at the head of the valley, a great pinnacle of naked rock,

pale brown and streaked here and there with snow-white veins of marble,

reached up into the clouds and above them, so that the summit shone like

a precious stone in the sunlight, against the blue of the sky. A band of

white vapour hung round the shoulders of the mountain. Beneath it

appeared the lower buttresses of rock and the long slopes of hanging

wood and meadowland falling away into the valley, all shadowy under the

clouds, shadowy and dead, save where, here and there, a great golden

beam broke through, touching some chosen tract of grass or woodland or

rock with an intense and precarious life.

Calamy stood for a long time looking out at the scene. How beautiful it

was, how beautiful! Glittering in the light, the withering trees seemed

to have prepared themselves as though for a feast. For a feast—and yet

it was winter and death that awaited them. Beautiful the mountains were,

but menacing and terrible; terrible the deep gulf below him with its

smoky vaporous shadows, far down, below the shining green. And the

shadows mounted second after second as the sun declined. Beautiful,

terrible and mysterious, pregnant with what enormous secret, symbolic of

what formidable reality?

From the direction of the cottage below the road came a tinkle of bells

and the shrill shouting of a child’s voice. Half a dozen tall black and

white goats, with long black beards, long twisted horns and yellow eyes,

slitted with narrow pupils, came trotting up the slope, shaking their

flat bells. A little boy scrambled after them, brandishing a stick and

shouting words of command. To Calamy he touched his cap; they exchanged

a few words in Italian, about the rain, the goats, the best pasture;

then, waving his stick and peremptorily shouting at his little flock,

the child moved on up the road. The goats trotted on in front, their

hoofs clicking on the stones; every now and then they paused to pull a

mouthful of grass from the bank at the side of the road; but the little

boy would not let them pause. “Via!” he shouted, and banged them with

his stick. They bounded forward. Soon herdsman and flock were out of

sight.

If he had been born that little boy, Calamy wondered, would he still be

working, unquestioningly, among these hills: tending the beasts, cutting

wood; every now and then carting his faggots and his cheeses down the

long road to Vezza? Would he, still, unquestioningly? Would he see that

the mountains were beautiful, beautiful and terrible? Or would he find

them merely ungrateful land, demanding great labour, giving little in

return? Would he believe in heaven and hell? And fitfully, when anything

went wrong, would he still earnestly invoke the aid of the infant Jesus,

of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph, that patriarchal family

trinity—father, mother and baby—of the Italian peasant? Would he have

married? By this time, very likely, his eldest children would be ten or

twelve years old—driving the goats afield with shrill yellings and

brandished sticks. Would he be living quietly and cheerfully the life of

a young patriarch, happy in his children, his wife, his flocks and

herds? Would he be happy to live thus, close to the earth, earthily, an

ancient, instinctive, animally sagacious life? It seemed hardly

imaginable. And yet, after all, it was likely enough. It needs a very

strong, a passionately ardent spirit to disengage itself from childish

tradition, from the life which circumstances impose upon it. Was his

such a spirit?

He was startled out of his speculations by the sound of his own name,

loudly called from a little distance. He turned round and saw Mr. Cardan

and Chelifer striding up the road towards him. Calamy waved his hand and

went to meet them. Was he pleased to see them or not? He hardly knew.

“Well,” said Mr. Cardan, twinkling jovially, as he approached, “how goes

life in the Thebaid? Do you object to receiving a couple of impious

visitors from Alexandria?”

Calamy laughed and shook their hands without answering.

“Did you get wet?” he asked, to change the conversation.

“We hid in a cave,” said Mr. Cardan. He looked round at the view.

“Pretty good,” he said encouragingly, as though it were Calamy who had

made the landscape, “pretty good, I must say.”

“Agreeably Wordsworthian,” said Chelifer in his precise voice.

“And where do you live?” asked Mr. Cardan.

Calamy pointed to the cottage. Mr. Cardan nodded comprehendingly.

“Hearts of gold, but a little niffy, eh?” he asked, lifting his raised

white eyebrow still higher.

“Not to speak of,” said Calamy.

“Charming girls?” Mr. Cardan went on. “Or goitres?”

“Neither,” said Calamy.

“And how long do you propose to stay?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Till you’ve got to the bottom of the cosmos, eh?”

Calamy smiled. “That’s about it.”

“Splendid,” said Mr. Cardan, patting him on the arm, “splendid. I envy

you. God, what wouldn’t I give to be your age? What wouldn’t I give?” He

shook his head sadly. “And, alas,” he added, “what could I give, in

point of actual fact? I put it at about twelve hundred quid at the

present time. My total fortune. Shouldn’t we sit down?” he added on

another note.

Calamy led the way down the little path. Along the front of the cottage,

under the windows, ran a long bench. The three men sat down. The sun

shone full upon them; it was pleasantly warm. Beneath them was the

narrow valley with its smoky shadows; opposite, the black hills,

cloud-capped and silhouetted against the brightness of the sky about the

sun.

“And the trip to Rome,” Calamy inquired, “was that agreeable?”

“Tolerably,” said Chelifer, with precision.

“And Miss Elver?” he addressed himself politely to Mr. Cardan.

Mr. Cardan looked up at him. “Hadn’t you heard?” he asked.

“Heard what?”

“She’s dead.” Mr. Cardan’s face became all at once very hard and still.

“I’m sorry,” said Calamy. “I didn’t know.” He thought it more tactful to

proffer no further condolences. There was a silence.

“That’s something,” said Mr. Cardan at last, “that you’ll find it rather

difficult to contemplate away, however long and mystically you stare at

your navel.”

“What?” asked Calamy.

“Death,” Mr. Cardan answered. “You can’t get over the fact that, at the

end of everything, the flesh gets hold of the spirit, and squeezes the

life out of it, so that a man turns into something that’s no better than

a whining sick animal. And as the flesh sickens the spirit sickens,

manifestly. Finally the flesh dies and putrefies; and the spirit

presumably putrefies too. And there’s an end of your omphaloskepsis,

with all its by-products, God and justice and salvation and all the rest

of them.”

“Perhaps it is,” said Calamy. “Let’s admit it as certain, even. I don’t

see that it makes the slightest difference....”

“No difference?”

Calamy shook his head. “Salvation’s not in the next world; it’s in this.

One doesn’t behave well here for the sake of a harp and wings after one

is dead—or even for the sake of contemplating throughout eternity the

good, the true and the beautiful. If one desires salvation, it’s

salvation here and now. The kingdom of God is within you—if you’ll

excuse the quotation,” he added, turning with a smile to Mr. Cardan.

“The conquest of that kingdom, now, in this life—that’s your

salvationist’s ambition. There may be a life to come, or there may not;

it’s really quite irrelevant to the main issue. To be upset because the

soul may decay with the body is really mediaeval. Your mediaeval

theologian made up for his really frightful cynicism about this world by

a childish optimism about the next. Future justice was to compensate for

the disgusting horrors of the present. Take away the life to come and

the horrors remain, untempered and unpalliated.”

“Quite so,” said Chelifer.

“Seen from the mediaeval point of view,” Calamy went on, “the prospect

is most disquieting. The Indians—and for that matter the founder of

Christianity—supply the corrective with the doctrine of salvation in

this life, irrespective of the life to come. Each man can achieve

salvation in his own way.”

“I’m glad you admit that,” said Mr. Cardan. “I was afraid you’d begin

telling us that we all had to live on lettuces and look at our navels.”

“I have it from no less an authority than yourself,” Calamy answered,

laughing, “that there are—how many?—eighty-four thousand—isn’t

it?—different ways of achieving salvation.”

“Fully,” said Mr. Cardan, “and a great many more for going to the devil.

But all this, my young friend,” he pursued, shaking his head, “doesn’t

in any way mitigate the disagreeableness of slowly becoming _gaga_,

dying and being eaten by worms. One may have achieved salvation in this

life, certainly; but that makes it none the less insufferable that, at

the end of the account, one’s soul should inevitably succumb to one’s

body. I, for example, am saved—I put the case quite hypothetically, mind

you—I have been living in a state of moral integrity and this-worldly

salvation for the last half century, ever since I reached the age of

puberty. Let this be granted. Have I, for this reason, any the less

cause to be distressed by the prospect, in a few years’ time, of

becoming a senile imbecile, blind, deaf, toothless, witless, without

interest in anything, partially paralysed, revolting to my fellows—and

all the rest of the Burtonian catalogue? When my soul is at the mercy of

my slowly rotting body, what will be the use of salvation then?”

“It will have profited during the fifty years of healthy life,” said

Calamy.

“But I’m talking about the unhealthy years,” Mr. Cardan insisted, “when

the soul’s at the mercy of the body.”

Calamy was silent for a moment. “It’s difficult,” he said pensively,

“it’s horribly difficult. The fundamental question is this: Can you talk

of the soul being at the mercy of the body, can you give any kind of an

explanation of mind in terms of matter? When you reflect that it’s the

human mind that has invented space, time and matter, picking them out of

reality in a quite arbitrary fashion—can you attempt to explain a thing

in terms of something it has invented itself? That’s the fundamental

question.”

“It’s like the question of the authorship of the _Iliad_,” said Mr.

Cardan. “The author of that poem is either Homer or, if not Homer,

somebody else of the same name. Similarly, philosophically and even,

according to the new physics, scientifically speaking, matter may not be

matter, _really_. But the fact remains that something having all the

properties we have always attributed to matter is perpetually getting in

our way, and that our minds do, in point of fact, fall under the

dominion of certain bits of this matter, known as our bodies, changing

as they change and keeping pace with their decay.”

Calamy ran his fingers perplexedly through his hair. “Yes, of course,

it’s devilishly difficult,” he said. “You can’t help behaving _as if_

things really were as they seem to be. At the same time, there _is_ a

reality which is totally different and which a change in our physical

environment, a removal of our bodily limitations would enable us to get

nearer to. Perhaps by thinking hard enough....” He paused, shaking his

head. “How many days did Gotama spend under the bo-tree? Perhaps if you

spend long enough and your mind is the right sort of mind, perhaps you

really do get, in some queer sort of way, beyond the limitations of

ordinary existence. And you see that everything that seems real is in

fact entirely illusory—_maya_, in fact, the cosmic illusion. Behind it

you catch a glimpse of reality.”

“But what bosh your mystics talk about it,” said Mr. Cardan. “Have you

ever read Boehme, for example? Lights and darknesses, wheels and

compunctions, sweets and bitters, mercury, salt and sulphur—it’s a

rigmarole.”

“It’s only to be expected,” said Calamy. “How is a man to give an

account of something entirely unlike the phenomena of known existence in

a language invented to describe these phenomena? You might give a deaf

man a most detailed verbal description of the Fifth Symphony; but he

wouldn’t be much the wiser for it, and he’d think you were talking pure

balderdash—which from his point of view you would be....”

“True,” said Mr. Cardan; “but I have my doubts whether any amount of

sitting under bo-trees really makes it possible for any one to wriggle

out of human limitations and get behind phenomena.”

“Well, I’m inclined to think that it does make it possible,” said

Calamy. “There we must agree to differ. But even if it is impossible to

get at reality, the fact that reality exists and is manifestly very

different from what we ordinarily suppose it to be, surely throws some

light on this horrible death business. Certainly, as things seem to

happen, it’s as if the body did get hold of the soul and kill it. But

the real facts of the case may be entirely different. The body as we

know it is an invention of the mind. What is the reality on which the

abstracting, symbolising mind does its work of abstraction and

symbolism? It is possible that, at death, we may find out. And in any

case, what is death, _really_?”

“It’s a pity,” put in Chelifer, in his dry, clear, accurate voice, “it’s

a pity that the human mind didn’t do its job of invention a little

better while it was about it. We might, for example, have made our

symbolic abstraction of reality in such a way that it would be

unnecessary for a creative and possibly immortal soul to be troubled

with the haemorrhoids.”

Calamy laughed. “Incorrigible sentimentalist!”

“Sentimentalist?” echoed Chelifer, on a note of surprise.

“A sentimentalist inside out,” said Calamy, nodding affirmatively. “Such

wild romanticism as yours—I imagined it had been extinct since the

deposition of Louis-Philippe.”

Chelifer laughed good-humouredly. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said.

“Though I must say I myself should have handed out the prize for

sentimentality to those who regard what is commonly known as reality—the

Harrow Road, for example, or the Café de la Rotonde in Paris—as a mere

illusion, who run away from it and devote their time and energy to

occupations which Mr. Cardan sums up and symbolises in the word

omphaloskepsis. Aren’t they the soft-heads, the all-too-susceptible and

sentimental imbeciles?”

“On the contrary,” Calamy replied, “in point of historical fact they’ve

generally been men of the highest intelligence. Buddha, Jesus, Lao-tse,

Boehme, in spite of his wheels and compunctions, his salt and sulphur,

Swedenborg. And what about Sir Isaac Newton, who practically abandoned

mathematics for mysticism after he was thirty? Not that he was a

particularly good mystic; he wasn’t. But he tried to be; and it can’t be

said that he was remarkable for the softness of his head. No, it’s not

fools who turn mystics. It takes a certain amount of intelligence and

imagination to realise the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of

the world in which we live. The fools, the innumerable fools, take it

all for granted, skate about cheerfully on the surface and never think

of inquiring what’s underneath. They’re content with appearances, such

as your Harrow Road or Café de la Rotonde, call them realities and

proceed to abuse any one who takes an interest in what lies underneath

these superficial symbols, a romantic imbecile.”

“But it’s cowardice to run away,” Chelifer insisted. “One has no right

to ignore what for ninety-nine out of every hundred human beings is

reality—even though it mayn’t actually be the real thing. One has no

right.”

“Why not?” asked Calamy. “One has a right to be six foot nine inches

high and to take sixteens in boots. One has a right, even though there

are not more than three or four in every million like one. Why hasn’t

one the right to be born with an unusual sort of mind, a mind that can’t

be content with the surface-life of appearances?”

“But such a mind is irrelevant, a freak,” said Chelifer. “In real

life—or if you prefer it, in the life that we treat as if it were

real—it’s the other minds that preponderate, that are the rule. The

brutish minds. I repeat, you haven’t the right to run away from that. If

you want to know what human life is, you must be courageous and live as

the majority of human beings actually do live. It’s singularly

revolting, I assure you.”

“There you are again with your sentimentality,” complained Calamy.

“You’re just the common variety of sentimentalist reversed. The ordinary

kind pretends that so-called real life is more rosy than it actually is.

The reversed sentimentalist gloats over its horrors. The bad principle

is the same in both cases—an excessive preoccupation with what is

illusory. The man of sense sees the world of appearances neither too

rosily nor too biliously and passes on. There is the ulterior reality to

be looked for; it is more interesting....”

“Then you’d condemn out of hand all the countless human beings whose

life is passed on the surface?”

“Of course not,” Calamy replied. “Who would be such a fool as to condemn

a fact? These people exist; it’s obvious. They have their choice of Mr.

Cardan’s eighty-four thousand paths to salvation. The path I choose will

probably be different from others. That’s all.”

“Very likely,” said Mr. Cardan, who had been engaged in lighting a

cigar, “very likely they’ll find the road to their salvation more easily

than you will find the road to yours. Being simpler, they’ll have within

them fewer causes for disharmony. Many of them are still practically in

the tribal state, blindly obeying the social code that has been

suggested into them from childhood. That’s the prelapsarian state;

they’ve not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—or

rather it’s the whole tribe, not the individual, that has eaten. And the

individual is so much a part of the tribe that it doesn’t occur to him

to act against its ordinances, any more than it occurs to my teeth to

begin violently biting my tongue of their own accord. Those simple

souls—and there are still a lot of them left, even among the motor

buses—will find their way to salvation very easily. The difficulty

begins when the individuals begin to get thoroughly conscious of

themselves apart from the tribe. There’s an immense number of people who

ought to be tribal savages, but who have been made conscious of their

individuality. They can’t obey tribal morality blindly and they’re too

feeble to think for themselves. I should say that the majority of people

in a modern educated democratic state are at that stage—too conscious of

themselves to obey blindly, too inept to be able to behave in a

reasonable manner on their own account. Hence that delightful

contemporary state of affairs which so rejoices the heart of our friend

Chelifer. We fall most horribly between two stools—the tribe and the

society of conscious intelligent beings.”

“It’s comforting to think,” said Chelifer, “that modern civilisation is

doing its best to re-establish the tribal régime, but on an enormous,

national and even international scale. Cheap printing, wireless

telephones, trains, motor cars, gramophones and all the rest are making

it possible to consolidate tribes, not of a few thousands, but of

millions. To judge from the Middle Western novelists, the process seems

already to have gone a long way in America. In a few generations it may

be that the whole planet will be covered by one vast American-speaking

tribe, composed of innumerable individuals, all thinking and acting in

exactly the same way, like the characters in a novel by Sinclair Lewis.

It’s a most pleasing speculation—though, of course,” Chelifer added

guardedly, “the future is no concern of ours.”

Mr. Cardan nodded and puffed at his cigar. “That’s certainly a

possibility,” he said. “A probability almost; for I don’t see that it’s

in the least likely that we shall be able to breed a race of beings, at

any rate within the next few thousand years, sufficiently intelligent to

be able to form a stable non-tribal society. Education has made the old

tribalism impossible and has done nothing—nor ever will do anything—to

make the non-tribal society possible. It will be necessary, therefore,

if we require social stability, to create a new kind of tribalism, on

the basis of universal education for the stupid, using the press,

wireless and all the rest as the instruments by which the new order is

to be established. In a generation or two of steady conscious work it

ought to be possible, as Chelifer says, to turn all but two or three

hundred in every million of the inhabitants of the planet into

Babbitts.”

“Perhaps a slightly lower standard would be necessary,” suggested

Chelifer.

“It’s a remarkable thing,” pursued Mr. Cardan meditatively, “that the

greatest and most influential reformer of modern times, Tolstoy, should

also have proposed a reversion to tribalism as the sole remedy to

civilised restlessness and uncertainty of purpose. But while we propose

a tribalism based on the facts—or should I say the appearances?”—Mr.

Cardan twinkled amicably at Calamy—“of modern life, Tolstoy proposed a

return to the genuine, primordial, uneducated, dirty tribalism of the

savage. That won’t do, of course; because it’s hardly probable, once

they have tasted it, that men will allow _le confort moderne_, as they

call it in hotels, to be taken from them. Our suggestion is the more

practicable—the creation of a planet-wide tribe of Babbitts. They’d be

much easier to propagate, now, than moujiks. But still the principle

remains the same in both projects—a return to the tribal state. And when

Tolstoy and Chelifer and myself agree about anything, believe me,” said

Mr. Cardan, “there’s something in it. By the way,” he added, “I hope we

haven’t been hurting your susceptibilities, Calamy. You’re not moujiking

up here, are you? Digging and killing pigs and so on. Are you? I trust

not.”

Calamy shook his head, laughing. “I cut wood in the mornings, for

exercise,” he said. “But not on principle, I assure you, not on

principle.”

“Ah, that’s all right,” said Mr. Cardan. “I was afraid you might be

doing it on principle.”

“It would be a stupidity,” said Calamy. “What would be the point of

doing badly something for which I have no aptitude; something, moreover,

which would prevent me from doing the thing for which it seems to me

just possible I may have some native capacity.”

“And what, might I ask,” said Mr. Cardan with an assumed diffidence and

tactful courtesy, “what may that thing be?”

“That’s rather biting,” said Calamy, smiling. “But you may well ask. For

it has certainly been hard to see, until now, what my peculiar talent

was. I’ve not even known myself. Was it making love? or riding? or

shooting antelopes in Africa? or commanding a company of infantry? or

desultory reading at lightning speeds? or drinking champagne? or a good

memory? or my bass voice? Or what? I’m inclined to think it was the

first: making love.”

“Not at all a bad talent,” said Mr. Cardan judicially.

“But not, I find, one that one can go on cultivating indefinitely,” said

Calamy. “And the same is true of the others—true at any rate for me....

No, if I had no aptitudes but those, I might certainly as well devote

myself exclusively to digging the ground. But I begin to find in myself

a certain aptitude for meditation which seems to me worth cultivating.

And I doubt if one can cultivate meditation at the same time as the

land. So I only cut wood for exercise.”

“That’s good,” said Mr. Cardan. “I should be sorry to think you were

doing anything actively useful. You retain the instincts of a gentleman;

that’s excellent....”

“Satan!” said Calamy, laughing. “But do you suppose I don’t know very

well that you can make out the most damning case against the idle

anchorite who sits looking at his navel while other people work? Do you

suppose I haven’t thought of that?”

“I’m sure you have,” Mr. Cardan answered, genially twinkling.

“The case looks damning enough, no doubt. But it’s only really cogent

when the anchorite doesn’t do his job properly, when he’s born to be

active and not contemplative. The imbeciles who rush about bawling that

action is the end of life, and that thought has no value except in so

far as it leads to action, are speaking only for themselves. There are

eighty-four thousand paths. The pure contemplative has a right to one of

them.”

“I should be the last to deny it,” said Mr. Cardan.

“And if I find that it’s not my path,” pursued Calamy, “I shall turn

back and try what can be done in the way of practical life. Up till now,

I must say I’ve not seen much hope for myself that way. But then, it

must be admitted, I didn’t look for the road in places where I was very

likely to find it.”

“What has always seemed to me to be the chief objection to protracted

omphaloskepsis,” said Mr. Cardan, after a little silence, “is the fact

that you’re left too much to your personal resources; you have to live

on your own mental fat, so to speak, instead of being able to nourish

yourself from outside. And to know yourself becomes impossible; because

you can’t know yourself except in relation to other people.”

“That’s true,” said Calamy. “Part of yourself you can certainly get to

know only in relation to what is outside. In the course of twelve or

fifteen years of adult life I think I’ve got to know that part of me

very thoroughly. I’ve met a lot of people, been in a great many curious

situations, so that almost every potentiality latent in that part of my

being has had a chance to unfold itself into actuality. Why should I go

on? There’s nothing more I really want to know about that part of

myself; nothing more, of any significance, I imagine, that I could get

to know by contact with what is external. On the other hand, there is a

whole universe within me, unknown and waiting to be explored; a whole

universe that can only be approached by way of introspection and patient

uninterrupted thought. Merely to satisfy curiosity it would surely be

worth exploring. But there are motives more impelling than curiosity to

persuade me. What one may find there is so important that it’s almost a

matter of life and death to undertake the search.”

“Hm,” said Mr. Cardan. “And what will happen at the end of three months’

chaste meditation when some lovely young temptation comes toddling down

this road, ‘balancing her haunches,’ as Zola would say, and rolling the

large black eye? What will happen to your explorations of the inward

universe then, may I ask?”

“Well,” said Calamy, “I hope they’ll proceed uninterrupted.”

“You hope? Piously?”

“And I shall certainly do my best to see that they do,” Calamy added.

“It won’t be easy,” Mr. Cardan assured him.

“I know.”

“Perhaps you’ll find that you can explore simultaneously both the

temptation and the interior universe.”

Calamy shook his head. “Alas, I’m afraid that’s not practicable. It

would be delightful if it were. But for some reason it isn’t. Even in

moderation it won’t do. I know that, more or less, by experience. And

the authorities are all agreed about it.”

“But after all,” said Chelifer, “there have been religions that

prescribed indulgence in these particular temptations as a discipline

and ceremony at certain seasons and to celebrate certain feasts.”

“But they didn’t pretend,” Calamy answered, “that it was a discipline

that made it easy for those who underwent it to explore the inward

universe of mind.”

“Perhaps they did,” objected Chelifer. “After all, there’s no golden

rule. At one time and in one place you honour your father and your

mother when they grow old; elsewhere and at other periods you knock them

on the head and put them into the _pot-au-feu_. Everything has been

right at one time or another and everything has been wrong.”

“That’s only true with reservations,” said Calamy, “and the reservations

are the most important part. There’s a parallel, it seems to me, between

the moral and the physical world. In the physical world you call the

unknowable reality the Four-Dimensional Continuum. The Continuum is the

same for all observers; but when they want to draw a picture of it for

themselves, they select different axes for their graphs, according to

their different motions—and according to their different minds and

physical limitations. Human beings have selected three-dimensional space

and time as their axes. Their minds, their bodies and the earth on which

they live being what they are, human beings could not have done

otherwise. Space and time are necessary and inevitable ideas for us. And

when we want to draw a picture of that other reality in which we live—is

it different, or is it somehow, incomprehensibly, the same?—we choose,

unescapably—we cannot fail to choose, those axes of reference which we

call good and evil; the laws of our being make it necessary for us to

see things under the aspects of good and evil. The reality remains the

same; but the axes vary with the mental position, so to speak, and the

varying capacities of different observers. Some observers are

clearer-sighted and in some way more advantageously placed than others.

The incessantly changing social conventions and moral codes of history

represent the shifting axes of reference chosen by the least curious,

most myopic and worst-placed observers. But the axes chosen by the best

observers have always been startlingly like one another. Gotama, Jesus

and Lao-tse, for example; they lived sufficiently far from one another

in space, time and social position. But their pictures of reality

resemble one another very closely. The nearer a man approaches these in

penetration, the more nearly will his axes of moral reference correspond

with theirs. And when all the most acute observers agree in saying that

indulgence in these particular amusements interferes with the

exploration of the spiritual world, then one can be pretty sure it’s

true. In itself, no doubt, the natural and moderate satisfaction of the

sexual instincts is a matter quite indifferent to morality. It is only

in relation to something else that the satisfaction of a natural

instinct can be said to be good or bad. It might be bad, for example, if

it involved deceit or cruelty. It is certainly bad when it enslaves a

mind that feels, within itself, that it ought to be free—free to

contemplate and recollect itself.”

“No doubt,” said Mr. Cardan. “But as a practical man, I can only say

that it’s going to be most horribly difficult to preserve that freedom.

That balancing of haunches....” He waved his cigar from side to side. “I

shall call again in six months and see how you feel about it all then.

It’s extraordinary what an effect the natural appetites do have on good

resolutions. Satiated, one thinks regeneration will be so easy; but when

one’s hungry again, how hard it seems.”

They were silent. From the depths of the valley the smoky shadows had

climbed higher and higher up the slope. The opposite hills were now

profoundly black and the clouds in which their peaks were involved had

become dark and menacing save where, on their upper surfaces, the sun

touched them with, as it declined, an ever richer light. The shadow had

climbed up to within a hundred feet of where they were sitting, soon it

would envelop them. With a great jangling of bells and a clicking of

small hard hoofs the six tall piebald goats came trotting down the steep

path from the road. The little boy ran behind them, waving his stick.

“Eia-oo!” he shouted with a kind of Homeric fury; but at the sight of

the three men sitting on the bench outside the house he suddenly became

silent, blushed and slunk unheroically away, hardly daring to whisper to

the goats while he drove them into their stable for the night.

“Dear me,” said Chelifer, who had followed the movements of the animals

with a certain curiosity, “I believe those are the first goats I have

seen, or smelt, in the flesh since I took to writing about them in my

paper. Most interesting. One tends to forget that the creatures really

exist.”

“One tends to forget that anything or any one really exists, outside

oneself,” said Mr. Cardan. “It’s always a bit of a shock to find that

they do.”

“Three days hence,” said Chelifer meditatively, “I shall be at my office

again. Rabbits, goats, mice; Fetter Lane; the family _pension_. All the

familiar horrors of reality.”

“Sentimentalist!” mocked Calamy.

“Meanwhile,” said Mr. Cardan, “Lilian has suddenly decided to move on to

Monte Carlo. I go with her, of course; one can’t reject free meals when

they’re offered.” He threw away his cigar, got up and stretched himself.

“Well, we must be getting down before it gets dark.”

“I shan’t see you again for some time, then?” said Calamy.

“I shall be here again at the end of six months, never fear,” said Mr.

Cardan. “Even if I have to come at my own expense.”

They climbed up the steep little path on to the road.

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

Calamy watched them go, watched them till they were out of sight round a

bend in the road. A profound melancholy settled down upon him. With

them, he felt, had gone all his old, familiar life. He was left quite

alone with something new and strange. What was to come of this parting?

Or perhaps, he reflected, nothing would come of it. Perhaps he had been

a fool.

The cottage was in the shadow now. Looking up the slope he could see a

clump of trees still glittering as though prepared for a festival above

the rising flood of darkness. And at the head of the valley, like an

immense precious stone, glowing with its own inward fire, the limestone

crags reached up through the clouds into the pale sky. Perhaps he had

been a fool, thought Calamy. But looking at that shining peak, he was

somehow reassured.

THE END

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

Transcriber’s Notes

This file uses _underscores_ to indicate italic text.

Some inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been

retained.

Itemized changes from the original text:

• p. 9: changed “Princess” to “Princes” (Princes of Massa and Carrara,

Dukes of Vezza)

• p. 45: removed comma between “that” and “against” (reaction, like

that against the)

• p. 78: changed “that” to “than” (that’s easier said than done)

• p. 85: changed “Mrs” to “Mrs.” (Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled)

• p. 106: changed “called” to “calling” (a being calling himself Homo

Sapiens)

• p. 110: changed “God’s” to “Gog’s” (Gog’s Court)

• p. 110: changed “Himalayas” to “Himalayans” (Since Himalayans were

made to breed true to colour)

• p. 177: changed “flattered” to “flattened” (flattened domes of

foliage)

• p. 181: changed “you” to “your” (I’ve always ... admired your work)

• p. 182: changed “intelligensia” to “intelligentsia” (the cosmos, the

intelligentsia, love....)

• p. 220: changed “Its” to “It’s” (It’s ‘amusing’—isn’t that the word?)

• p. 227: changed period to question mark (Should we go on?)

• p. 253: changed “Carden” to “Cardan” (Next morning Mr. Cardan was

down early)

• p. 309: changed “povery” to “poverty” (the abysses of unrelieved

poverty)

• p. 321: changed “Keat” to “Keate” (some new Busby or Keate)

• p. 326: changed “Maremann” to “Maremman” (the Maremman road)

Hyphenation was changed in some words for consistency:

• p. 47: Changed “anal erotism” to “anal-erotism” to match five other

occurrences

• p. 85: Changed “straight-forward” to “straightforward” to match four

other occurrences

• p. 93: Changed “life-time” to “lifetime” to match three other

occurrences

• p. 300: Changed “hill-side” to “hillside” to match two other

occurrences

• p. 346: Changed “tip-toed” to “tiptoed” to match two other

occurrences

Inconsistent hyphenation was retained for the words:

• “bed-chamber”/“bedchamber”

• “finger-tips”/“finger tips”

• “good-morning”/“good morning”

• “grouse-shooting”/“grouse shooting”

• “walking-stick”/“walking stick”

New original cover art included with this eBook

is granted to the public domain.