XV
At Starn he was refreshed again with contacts from outside. There was an unusual number of tourists, two and two on the hillpaths, swarming the square. They did him so much good that he crossed to the station to meet a down-train that held more. Not many get out at evening, where there was nothing to do but stare. All he noticed in particular was an old gentleman.
He was beginning to enjoy the country. Enjoy Starn. Would have liked to know more, its history and contemporary life. He thought the old man with a red face, in grey flannels, a local landowner; thought him back to some dignified house, and was surprised later to see him dining at the inn.
He was not known there, it seemed. There was a difficulty about a room for him. Carston felt that he should leave graciously, suggested that the old man should have his room, and he a bed anywhere. There was consultation, hesitation, acceptance, thanks. After an interval, they had settled down to coffee together.
It was easy to be charming to him. An obvious number of right things to say. In a flash that, too, had passed.
“So you’ve been staying over at Gault House with the Taverners. Did you meet my son there—Picus, I think they call him? My name’s Tracy.”
Carston thought: Be cautious, be very cautious indeed. Don’t tell lies. The old man will be going there. His eyes are the colour of his flannels. What we call stone, and never is. Stone takes light.
“Yes,” he said, “he is staying there with his friends.”
It became suddenly necessary to observe with every faculty he had. He had no idea why; not for distraction, not with reference to himself. The impression was that he was opposite someone very old—not particularly in years, but in something built by centuries of experience, and now no longer in flower. The same could be said of his son and his son’s friends, only that they were in flower, and might not cease flowering once their bodies’ bloom was done. Centuries had gone to his construction. Carston was surprised at his attention to this, until he noticed that their setting outside the inn was the setting of a play.
Before he had wished for drama, and had not found his role. Now he was too much of a man to take himself off.
The stage surpassed all romantic expectations, a town with towers, in hills high enough and low enough to set and display it equally. A fleece of stars over it, thick as the flocks on the downsides, turning, turning with the earth.
“Do you like this country?” the old man said.
“I like it immensely. I am sorry to leave. I only came down for the weekend.”
“Still, you prolonged it. This is Friday.”
Carston thought: A nice slip to start off with. I’d better be a bit more frank right away. “To tell you the truth, I’m a stranger, and I found things a bit difficult over there.”
“Would it surprise you to hear that I’ve heard that said before?”
“Not at all.”
They laughed together. Carston began to think backwards. The eighteenth century had produced this type, had set him in culture and conviction that Nature had appointed certain old men to approve and modestly direct her arrangements of air and fire. The Renaissance had kicked off that ball, now frozen into the marble and stucco that he was sure adorned his park somewhere. Behind that there was the matrix; the Middle Ages, feudalism, Christendom. Faith in a childishly planned universe as one thing. The earth one great city of gods and men. His history lessons were taking life at last.
“I detest impertinence,” the old man said—“I don’t think it will be necessary to go into that; but other people have found my son difficult. Was it anything to do with him?”
Carston thought: Picus again. In for some more. No good pretending. He said:
“I reckon. Perhaps I didn’t catch on—that he was fooling me.”
Like talking to an old stone idol; live stone idol; stone idol that walks: after something. I ate their bread, and I was rude to them. Be careful, be very careful, indeed. …
“People, I hear, have left the house before, after what I could only wish was my son’s sense of humour had come into play.”
Carston saw that it was a question which was going to lure the other on. And he longed to tell someone something.
“Who are down there now?”
He gave the names. No harm in that.
The old man meditated: “Ah! the heart of the band?”
Why a band? More news.
“My son has a bad habit. He is fond of other people’s property which may never be his. In this instance I am speaking for myself. He has a book of mine that I want. Also, it interests me to know why he should want it. And I may say that your quarrel interests me, whatever it was.”
“Don’t call it a quarrel. I just didn’t like his way of going about things.”
“And the rest of my family? We are all more or less related.”
“I was to blame in part. Lost my temper and said more than I should, and they let me go.”
“Very characteristic; of England, I mean. I am sorry. I suppose, by the way, you didn’t see about the house a book on early Church vessels? If you had, it would be easier for me to call my son to order.”
Say no; say no; say no. A fool I shall look. He’s seen I hesitated. What in hell does it matter?
“I sort of remember a book like that in the library.”
“Not in my son’s room?”
“No, I was never there.”
The old man did not seem pleasant; silent after he had been told a lie. Then he began to speak fast.
“As you have acknowledged a difficulty, I feel that I might as well tell you why I have come down—at least to find out whether that book is there or not. Why should he want it? He’s quite illiterate. Only if he has it, I shall be on the track of what may be cropping up again. You know what I mean—romantic ideas, now that we know they are lies, which are liable to fall into very silly and very evil practices. Excuses for perversions.”
Carston thought: It’s coming out. The old man has a drink in him. In vino veritas: good old Montparnasse. Again his curiosity, he said:
“There was nothing like that down there.”
The old man said: “My book’s gone—and if he has taken that he may have taken something else. There’s his cousin, Scylla, there—”
“She is beautiful—”
“I am glad to hear she is up to your new-world standards. But an affair with her mixed up with superstition and theft.”
“What is superstition over here?”
“A disgusting relic of non-understood natural law.”
“I’m at sea.”
“Of course, you are, and I’m glad to hear it, and that you saw nothing objectionable. In spite of your little difficulty, whatever it was.”
“Tell me,” said Carston, “what do you expect me to have seen?”
The old man considered: “A strained, shall we say, morbid situation between my son and Scylla Taverner. Repetition in another key with Clarence Lake. Remember, the idea of the first comes from you. The latter, I have frequently observed with disgust. So long as there has been no mention of a cup—”
Cup. My God! And I’m half in mine. Carston heard a noise like bells he distinguished for the blood in his ears. Then there rang over Starn a variation on three notes, flood-tide pouring into the hill circle, passing out down the valleys, striking and hushed at once on the grass cloth of the hills.
“Don’t tell,” said Starn bells. “Don’t tell. Don’t tell!”
He thought: I must tell something, I need to. There must be something I can tell. Not tell on them.
The old man was talking with something in his voice of a stallion’s scream:
“My son’s after Scylla Taverner with a piece out of my collection. As if I didn’t know where I got it, and all about it. And what put him up to it? And what’ll that neurotic hussy make of it? But if he did it, I’ve got a surprise for them. Its story’ll be the surprise, if he doesn’t mind being turned out with his fancy girl—”
Not tell on them.
Carston said: “It isn’t what you think, at all, Mr. Tracy. I’ve nothing against your son in general. I reckon now that I was jealous. You see, I’m in love with Miss Taverner, and his easy ways angered me. That’s why I left.”
At once he ceased to be an object of interest. But he was believed. Fooled the old man who was down there, up to less good than anyone else. The bells stopped. There was a feeling that the air had been emptied forever. A cow mooed. Life started again. He went on easily:
“Funny how a love you feel is hopeless spoils your judgment. Goodness knows I never noticed anything of what you suggest. I just couldn’t get inside their life, and I wanted to get into hers—”
“There was that book in the library,” said the old man.
Inspiration came lighdy.
“You half talked me into that. Now I remember it had a bookplate in it, Felix Taverner’s.” If I fool him too much, he’ll go to bed. And I ought to warn them. Warn them of what? That the old man knows the cup’s gone. Certainly. Picus is the sort to take it out on Scylla. The Sanc-Grail theory’s bust anyhow. Tell ’em that. He listened to a theory of the rights of owners to their property which sounded exaggerated even in the mouth of an elderly English collector.
The old red lips moved unpleasantly in their thatch of dead-white hair:
Prupperty: prupperty: prupperty.
The earth one great city of gods and men.
He began to live again in moments of insight. They were exceedingly unlike the flashes by which they are generally described, more like obstructions removed, revealing a landscape that had always been there.
The old man seemed to have come out of the Roman world. That was difficult to understand, except on a theory that times are grouped otherwise than in sequences. What had his kind been doing at the time of the Roman world? When they had been pouring out of Britain, who had been pouring in? The ancestors of the peasants Carston had seen; but it was not a question of ancestors. There had been a story then of a king, a comitatus called Arthur, whose business had been divided between chasing barbarians and looking for a cup. A kind of intermezzo in history, in a time called the Dark Ages, which had produced a story about starlight. Suns of centuries had succeeded it, while the story had lived obscurely in some second-rate literature, and more obscurely, and as an unknown quality, in the imaginations of men like Picus and Scylla, Felix, Clarence, Ross. A very bad old man was putting an unpleasant finger into that pie. Carston was sure of one thing, that he disliked him more than his son. The old man was studying him, with coldness fired by brandy.
“I can’t exactly promise to avenge your wrongs, Mr. Carston. But I assure you my son will regret it if he has tampered with my collection. If he has with him a small jade cup, quite ageless in appearance, and slightly ornamented, and if he has persuaded himself that it has some superstitious history, my visit may afford you some satisfaction.”
Carston thought: He is mad about property, and he hates his son. And his son’s lover, and youth and imagination, and all there is to love over there. He believes in something too. In the thing which he accuses in his son. Whatever that is. Something I can no more imagine in Picus than that Picus doesn’t wash. The devils believe backwards. I can’t grudge the man a trick or two with that behind him. Now I know the father, I can’t hate the son any more.
He noticed the bad moral that if he had stayed over there and behaved himself, he would not have had this interesting insight into his late hosts’ private lives. Another brandy went down. He wanted to go for the old man on their behalf, and excited with drink he needed to talk. So long as he did not say the word cup.
“I assure you, sir, you won’t find anything a father would object to in that house.” He knows why I am saying this, because I’ve seen him.
“They strike me as people who have loved and suffered a great deal. That purifies.”
“From what?”
“From being like what you say—From only thinking of yourself.” It is not agreeable to be dismissed like a baby. He had to remember that the old man hadn’t seen through him.
“If you were to ask me, I should say that they were looking for something. Miss Taverner told me one day that what they wanted had been lost out of the world.”
“When and what?” said the old man.
“I don’t quite get their dates. Might have been any time, the Middle Ages, or the day before yesterday—a thing that’s been lost—”
“There was only one thing lost of a symbolic value in the Middle Ages,” said the old man.
Then Carston’s cups influenced him to obvious caution—then to dreams. He saw Picus making pretty things, Felix laughing, Ross painting, Clarence sleeping, Scylla running away into thunder over burnt grass: running in, in love, through a rain wall.
The energy that had got him away must get him back, and damned early. He arranged to be called, arranged for a car, without question that the morning would find him in the same mind.