In and Out
On his way down the drive Carston knew what you did. In Trollope, in cases of spiritual difficulty, you consulted the vicar. Whether it turned out well depended on whether you found a good vicar or a bad. The landlord directed him. His way led through the churchyard. He noticed a staring white monument, and read on it the name of Picus’s mother.
“Old devil to bury her like that and keep it clean.” In the flagged hall, he walked up a ribbon of green matting, and saw at the end Picus playing with a blind cord.
“Tracy,” he said, “I’ve been trying to clear this up.”
“Any luck?”
“None. Have you a good vicar?”
“I left the churchyard at two in the morning, and said ‘It’s me,’ and I’ve been here since. Sick of night and mist walking. I’ve told him. Come in.”
Felix woke, rolled over in a flood of gold-spangled dust to find himself lapped in faultless health and spirits. Paris’ morning surprise for her children, last night’s debauch innocent as a game of kiss-in-the-ring. Last night’s resolution clarified and unimpaired. He had Boris to find and explain to him what he had meant. Claim his own. He shaved his hardly perceptible beard, whistling an air from Louise. Paris was waiting for him, had given him the day, now in midmorning, which would only be begun by night.
He ran through his pockets. Boris’s address was lost. There were names of unknowns, scrawled on the cabaret cards, not the shred off a bill he remembered, the splendid name scrawled in sucked purple pencil—He rushed out to find his earlier boy friend.
“My dear Felix, how should I know? Those boys sleep anywhere. You might try the quays. You’ll see him about again some night.”
“I don’t mean to wait—I’ve got to find him, if I go to the police.”
“Well, I shouldn’t do that—They probably know too much about him.” Then, incautiously—“He’s probably pretty sick after last night. They say his lungs are going.”
Curiously, that fanned Felix. The older boy for the first time liked him well. Wondered if by any chance he saw in his eyes what “one would fain call master.” It was odd.
“He used to live somewhere in the nest of hotels round the Rue Bonaparte.”
“Good,” said Felix. “I’ll try them, one by one.”
Boris woke up. The young head, a little brutal and afraid in sleep, on waking lost those expressions. “Comme j’ai fait la bombe hier,” rubbing his eyes like a baby. A sixth-floor room in a cheap hotel in old Paris has no romantic quality. It was as much as Boris could do to rise nightly like some sort of phoenix out of the ashes of old clothes, torn socks, and Russian newspapers. A miserably recognisable room, in a bitter world now burning under the sun-cracked roof, with no room in it for penniless, palace-reared brats. No excuse for the room either. A shameless, shameful pity of disorder, and want not above the trickery. Only on the lavabo shelf there was some sort of order, and a glass full of brushes for the bright white teeth.
What sort of boy was the English boy? Half Boris’s nature was curious, the other—it was a nature profoundly divided—had no interest. The indifference lay beneath, the under-waters of the stream that ran in and out, up so many curious creeks, round islands not fixed yet on any map.
His interest was chiefly whether the boy would be good for a few nights of Boris’s necessities; some food, unlimited drink, no sympathy, but a kind of companionship. Charm was what he liked, who had it for sole asset. Someone to laugh with. He would have laughed if he could have seen Felix, followed by the taxi he was too impatient to jump in and out of, entering and leaving shabby door after shabby door. He lay on his back and dodged the flies. He was very tired after four years of Paris. Four actual years, but he had never been able to calculate more than a day ahead, which must set ordinary time going differently. Also, what time had he in the sense of future, a bloody curtain between him and his land, his torn roots not fed by the transplanting? Over two hundred francs (the compatriot chauffeur had been merciful) of the English boy’s money stuffed away. It might also have startled him had he seen Felix a door nearer, a door further off. One hundred and fifty francs to pacify the old vache in the bureau below. If misery had turned the key on him, what of it? Get the second best shoes out of the cobblers. Forget till the money was gone, and in the next spell of rain take cold and go about sore-throated and aching. Till it was time to drink again. Drink to forget. Forget what did not matter. Yet if a fly brushed his caste dignity, he would rage childishly, and laugh and forgive and not forget.
Felix pitched into his room, his heart almost preceding him. Drew himself up and said languidly: “All right after last night?” Poverty that amazed him and he pitied, for a moment dismissing romance for sense.
“Get up and we’ll lunch. I’m not in Paris for long. I want you to come away with me.”
“Where?” said Boris.
“To my people in England.”
“I’ve always wanted to see England,” he said—“we like the English best of all races.”
Russians do not gush, and he was arranging his shame about the room; the shirt he had worn last night all he had on him, and his feet grimy and no slippers, and how to turn himself into a desirable object with Felix there; and how to get his clothes out with the bill not paid if he was really going away; and how they couldn’t make Felix a cocktail, and would probably refuse to send up so much as a bottle of Vichy; and how soon or if it would be safe to tell Felix about it. And if Felix was really a bore or not. And, suddenly, how bad it was to have to think like that.
And Felix, brimmed with grace, said:
“This was just to tell you. Meet me at the Foyot in an hour.”
In another room, in another hotel, in a chaos of elegant poverty, Scylla answered the telephone bell. Philip’s voice said:
“What made you let on you were engaged to Clarence the other night? He doesn’t seem to think so. Like to hear his letter?”
She was ready for that, through the occasional sense that one has lived through an event before it arrives.
“What’s that? I said nothing of the sort. If Lydia likes to think such rubbish. She must have written him one of her letters.”
The voice changed:
“I wish you hadn’t told her whatever you meant like that. She’s been upset.”
“Well, she might have married him herself once,” and rang off and sat still. This would not do. If their alliance was not to break up, she must get the idea out of Clarence’s head. Played into Clarence’s hands, she had: to finish her with Picus: give Clarence the game. Subtle-minded, he would know how to bitch things more than they were already bitched. All to bitch Lydia for bitching her. God, what a world! So much for Sanc-Grail cups and maidens. She felt positively superstitious over her own experiences. Then suffered under what seemed, after all, an unfair lack of grace. Then saw the cottage on Tollerdown, a desolation with something in it that raved. Translated it into possibility of annoyance, petty insult, even tragedy. Playing the Freud game, the name rose “Philoctetes.” Just the sort of role Clarence would pick and play badly. Did Philoctetes play well before he found his Sophocles? Oh! damn analogies. Better go down at once, make at worst an armed peace, and give him something else to think about.
A telegram:
Arriving shortly with Russian ill to live with us.
Nothing like Felix for letting you know. And Carston had gone to Tambourne with a plan. Picus might be there. Felix was coming back. All roads lay south again. Sleep at Starn that night and go over to Tollerdown in he morning. Have it out with Clarence. Might seduce Clarence and shut his mouth that way. Then to Tambourne and Carston’s news.
With serene courage, for she was uneasy, she made her preparations.
Picus introduced Carston to English ecclesiastical life. At last there would be something that he had been led to expect. The old man in his library looked and spoke right.
Picus said:
“I’ve told him all about it. He’s had the devil in his parish.”
“Well,” said the vicar, “I’ll go so far as to say that during the course of our long association, your father has illustrated my picture of hell. And, as usual, any heavenly landscape has been all around and so unobserved.” He examined the cup.
“I cannot tell you anything. A piece of worn jade, this time, for the question mark to the question we can none of us answer.”
“What is the question?” said Carston.
“Our old friend. Whether a true picture of the real is shown by our senses alone.”
“Can’t we leave it that we don’t know?”
“Then the picture we have becomes more and more unintelligible.”
“I don’t know. All I can say is that I’ve never been so bothered, never behaved so like a skunk, never so nearly fell dead in my tracks till I got down here and began to think about such things. It’s unfashionable now, you know—”
“Naturally,” said the second old man, so peaceful, so cordially, with such disinterestedness, with such interest. It was going to be a singular ecclesiastic this time. Old Mr. Tracy turned saint. Carston gave up trying to cut providence.
“Can you give us your professional view?” he said.
“My dear man, Picus comes here to be consoled for a grievance because he has given his heart away twice, and doesn’t know from which victim to ask it back. You ask my professional advice about this business of the cup; not only for its history, but on the spiritual upsets following its arrival. Here it is: say the seven penitential psalms: go carefully through your failings before man and God: communicate tomorrow at eight: come to matins and sing: attend to my sermon. In the evening sing the Magnificat and remember that when I dismiss you with the prayer Lighten our Darkness, I am saying the last word I know. (I suggest a day’s devotions because I am sure you have not done any for a long time.) Add to them the lovely sobriety of our church and our liturgy, the splendour of midsummer filtered through old glass on cold stone. That is as far as I can go in my profession, which, like the ancient mysteries, depends largely on what you bring to it. My hope is that some day somebody will bring something. In your case, Mr. Carston, clean hands and a pure heart I’ll be bound. I administer formulæ and recall memories—that work and still live. In what lies the scientific triumph but that its formulæ work?”
No one on earth before had told Carston that he had a pure heart and clean hands. He was startled, touched, nearly cried, and said:
“But we’re both in love with Scylla Taverner.”
The second old man said:
“Well, I dare say she can do with two fine young men in love with her. She’s had no soft life, with her batch of demons.”
“He means,” said Picus, “that I got off with her and he didn’t.”
“I hope,” said the second old man, “that I’m being asked for my unprofessional opinion.”
“We’re telling you,” said Picus. Carston’s courage jumped. He’d been told he had clean hands and a pure heart. Now that it had been pointed out, he saw that it was true.
“Why are you so spiteful about me, Tracy? How do you think you’ll get the best out of a man if you fool him, and show you despise him and give your sweetheart away before him?”
“Everyone goes to bed with me,” said Picus—“always.”
“Now that’s a new thing to sulk about,” said the vicar. “I am very useless. I cannot tell you about the cup. I cannot judge which of you does or should or could love Picus best. Or Clarence. Or you. His father will probably tell us as much truth as he finds convenient. But when I think of that sensitive, frustrated, pain-racked man who has given his life for you, Picus, alone on Tollerdown, in the fairy-house he made for you—I judge no man. And I do not think it just for you, with your temperament to have the responsibility.”
“Nor,” said Picus, passionately, “do I.”
“Nor,” said the second old man, “why Scylla should be your leader and your neglected toy. Nor why you who all wish Felix well should have become his poison. In this business there are no easy answers, and we are left with our honour to lighten us.”
Picus said: “Lighten what?”
“This story as I see it,” said the second old man, “is true Sanc-Grail. The cup may have been an ashtray in a Cairo club. But it seems to me that you are having something like a ritual. A find, illumination, doubt, and division, collective and then dispersed. A land enchanted and disenchanted with the rapidity of a cinema. Adventures. Danger and awe and love. What has Felix found in Paris that brings him home so quick? Our virtues we keep to serve these emergencies. Our virtue to induce them.”
“M’yes,” said Picus—“but there ought to be sharper detail. It was Clarence’s spear that started me.”
Carston said: “It is true. It has happened like that.” He was in a state of consciousness unique to him. Not vision, but wonder become a state, an impregnation of being: that excited and held him in absolute rest. An expectancy more real than the old furniture, the two men with him, the shallow stream that tore past the window, water whistling to itself, a running trap for light.
More than an approach to wonder. Wonder was the answer, and familiar objects out of their categories. He also saw Picus without prejudice, and loved him.
A flock of telegrams was brought in. Carston opened his, brought in from the Star.
Going to Tollerdown then home come along Felix arriving sick Russian live with us.
“Whoops, my dear,” said Picus.
The vicar opened two:
Coming south take care of us Scylla.
Is Picus with you? Clarence.
“The grail knights are gathering, it seems. This only I see clearly. Either this is a curiously coincidental hash, or we are taking part in events, only part of which are happening on the earth we see. Meanwhile, I approve the spacious dustbin into which you throw most things, and have seen everything thrown.”
“Then you believe there is a moral search?” said Carston, ignoring what paralleled with his wonder.
“I do. Even unprofessionally. As valid and as open to revision as research in the electromagnetic field. Practically I advise you to stick to your tastes as gentlemen and your love of art. You’re so damnably proud and fastidious you’ll do that anyhow.”
“Felix,” said Carston, eloquently, “I really couldn’t do justice to the way that boy behaved. The way he treated his sister; has and will again.”
“He seems to be arriving from Paris on an orgy of tending the sick.”
“Feeding the hungry,” said Picus. “I know Russians. I wonder what we’re in for?”
The second old man said:
“I’ll take him off your hands if he is any good. The young are getting worth watching again.”
Carston said:
“I wish the cup could be disposed of.”
“I’ll go over to the Star,” said Picus, “and wait for my father’s idea of convincing you. I’ve a lech on the boots.”
When they were alone, Carston said with an effort:
“My intentions are very sincere towards Scylla Taverner.”
“I think they are. So are his. I’ll marry her to either of you with a psalm of joy if it works out that way. But you do realise that your relation with her will not be the same as hers with Picus? Young men think sex is all the same, or at best a sacred or profane love, when it’s as varied as art.”
They chatted. Picus brought back a letter with a black seal.
Cup found in the vestry in the church of St. Hilary-under-Llyn sometime in July 1881. Given to me by the rector, the rev. John Norris, as it could not be identified as church property. Believed by me, on the authority of (a string of names followed), to be a cup of the rare but occasionally found chalices of the Celtic church.
“The Llyn is on the Welsh marches,” said the vicar, “and the man’s dead.”
Carston said:
“Then we get nowhere.”
“Nowhere. Only in ghost-stories, and those not the best, do you get anywhere that way.”
“But what are we going to do with the damned thing? It can’t lie about the house like a green eye that doesn’t wink. The man’s dead. Suppose the authorities stick by Mr. Tracy. Or don’t? This has been a fool’s errand—”
“I have an idea,” said the vicar. “Take it back to Tollerdown and replace it where you found it. If the next drought sends it up in a suspicious manner, well and good. It seems to like wells. And truth, if she prefers not to talk, can return to one.”
Carston said: “I like that.”
“Good,” said Picus, “learn it to be a toad.” Both prayed he would add—“I’ll be off with it and look up Clarence.”
Not at all.
“I’m not ready yet. Someone had better take it and fetch him. And Scylla. He gets ideas in his head when he’s alone there. Carston, you started travelling about with the thing. Go and drop it and bring them back. There’s a train tomorrow that starts at six.”