XVIII
“Tired,” said Scylla, changing her dress, and leaving that to stare out at the wood—“Tired of your wretched beauty, your rearrangements of light on a leaf.”
“Bored,” said Picus, who had gone to meet Clarence and missed him. And he meant sad. And Clarence, giving Nanna a hand skinning the rabbits he had shot, looked at his bloody hands: “I suppose I’ve got a broken heart and these wretched feelings come in through the holes.”
“Alone,” said Felix, “when I’ve got away it’ll be the same.”
Only Ross embraced his solitude, thought of the shape of each thing he drew, until the earth seemed one growing stillness, of innumerable separate tranquillities, forever moving, forever at rest.
Unfortunately the members of the house-party were not behaving like that. An organic view of Felix, for instance? He damned the scene—knew that he had handled it without imagination. Besides, the boy should be wearing his “youth’s gay livery” before a livelier audience than hills and the sea.
And there was more coming through than Picus’s wiles, life opening like the unfolding of a scene. An endless screen of coromandel lacquer, the design travelling with it, fold in, fold out. Enough for Ross to know that there was design and seize the detail, a man content with the tangible, piece by piece, to whom no single object was dumb. He thought of the brickness of a brick until he seemed aware of it throughout, not side after side or two or three, but each crumb of its body, and each crumb reduced to its molecular construction, until the brick ceased to be a cube and could as easily be reformed again. And the only prayer to which he condescended was that Scylla would keep her head since there were hysterics about; then left the studio and joined the party now slowly regathering on the lawn. All but Felix. Carston did not know how to greet Picus, not it seemed in any disgrace, and telling them a story about a parson’s wife.
“So she knitted me a check sweater, and I had a pain. And I lay flat on the grass, and told a curate and another curate to play chess on my back. And I found a caterpillar and made them make love.”
“They don’t,” said Ross, “it’s the butterflies.”
“These did. And the first curate said check with the white bishop, and I stopped enjoying it, and hunched up and went in to get my tea, and there was a party, and I stopped thinking.”
“When do you do your thinking?”
“Never.”
Scylla said: “I wish you had, before you let this morning’s business be sprung on us. What did you do it for?”
They all waited for his answer. It came.
“Mind your own business.” Like a rude boy. And then:
“It was my mother who was driven to death.”
“That’s nothing to do with it,” said Ross.—“Pawn your father’s collection. Throw it into the sea, but don’t—”
“Don’t what?” said Picus.
Felix came out.
“Here’s what’s left of your bloody book. Nanna took it off the fire.” Ross opened it with kind hands not afraid of char-black and turned the middle pages the fire had not curled up. He stared.
“Look at this.” The book was open at a full-page photograph of the cup. Underneath was written—Early English altar-vessel. From the collection of Christopher Tracy, Esq.
While the cup was fetched from its drawer and passed from hand to hand, Carston appreciated Picus’s blissful look, untouched by relieved anxiety, not too elated or even too absorbed.
“Picus,” said Ross, “in common decency tell us what you know.”
“Now that I’ve been asked, listen. I took the cup. Mother and I used to pretend with it. Not this time, but when I came back to Tollerdown last spring. The well was brimming and I took it out to get a drink, and it slipped through my fingers like a fish. It couldn’t be got out then, and I didn’t want Clarence to fuss. He didn’t know. Once it was gone, I wondered what it was, and I this time told my father that I hadn’t seen it lately, and something he said put me on to that book. So I left it to see what would happen. And Felix fished it out with Clarence’s spear. It may have come from India. The whore who killed my mother may have used it. It suited the old man to palm it off as a church vessel and to tell you it was a poison-cup. He’s lived in India long enough, and his best friend is an archdeacon. That’s all I know. Oh yes, I curled up behind an anthill on Hangar’s ridge Carston shied at. And I stuck the cup in his room to teach him that ants don’t bite, and give him something else to think about. Oh yes, I made love to Scylla because she is a darling, and usually I’m afraid of women. And—”
“Hold up—” said Ross.
It was a great blessing that the old man had done the lying. Put untruth away in a far corner. Far corners are more difficult to get at. But what they needed then was Picus’s brightness restored.
Carston said: “It seems to me that your father’s story was a lie because he wanted the book back.”
“Trust Nanna,” said Scylla, blissfully, “she wouldn’t have the kitchen fire put out.”
“The kitchen fire, mark you,” said Felix, suddenly interested again.
Hestia is an old goddess—I think she had a name written under her altar not even the Romans might know. And in her case, their lives, the sap of their bodies was nourished at Nanna’s fire. There the sea bubbled in butter, the meat dripped its red juice, birds split into white shreds. Round it the lettuces sparkled, the roots under the wood boiled, old herbs scented the place, wine dripped in like dew, and Nanna was perhaps the only person unequivocally loved.
The wailing that went up round her: “Nanna, I’m hungry.” “Nanna, I’ve got a cold.” “Nanna, I’ve blistered my heel.” “Nanna, where are the buttons on my white waistcoat?” Nanna who liked cigarettes and silk stockings and no device for saving labour, her hair tied up like an old gipsy, and her tongue free. She had got them round this corner. All the same, a lie is harder to run to earth three counties away.
“We are left where we began,” said Felix, “with the Thoroughly Rum.”
Also, as Carston noticed, with the thoroughly boring. The adventure of the cup had happened. It had been complicated, violent, inconclusive. Now it would be too much trouble to take trouble for more trouble. For a new series of untruths or “stubborn, irreductible” facts. Not much chance of them, and difficult to get. Three counties away. As though they had been in a room together, and something had passed through that had left too raw traces for all its invisibility, had left them alone with private griefs and memories quickened. Which, if it came again, would enter by a different door. Picus, stirred by the story of his mother, victim of Victorian social stupidities in an age less agreeable and more remote than that which produced mass-cups, and complicated biographies of public characters like Huon of Bordeaux, son of Julius Caesar, and Morgan le Fay.
They were tired of it, as he saw, till another door opened. This, when his own interest for the first time was really aroused. The business was more or less out in the open. News. A story. He wanted to find out exactly what Mr. Tracy had been up to. If they were prepared to leave it alone until something else happened, he was not; anticipating a dateless, glorious moment when he would appear before them with the story complete. Hand them the finished psychology of old Mr. Tracy. A new philosophy: a fortune: the cup of the Sanc-Grail. No intention of leaving now.
Then a sound that was almost “service” rose in his thought. Not public or personal or progressive, or in relation to the “hard-eyed men of the Y.M.C.A.” Not even for results; there might be no results. As the conception grew, fortifying like a cup of wine à point, he saw an approach to Scylla, without reference to possession or to her reaction. What she did not have with these unemployed condottieri her peers. What he must do for her, and she was no spoilt American bitch.
Immediately, he stepped into another world, their world and his own. At its largest, airiest and freest. He had never been there before. He had always been there. He would always be there, never the same apprehensive, gifted, rootless man. Reckoning without his hosts, he urged another slice of cake on her, and suggested that it might be his turn to fetch the evening fish.
“We’ll go together,” she said. “A walk will do me good.”