Part + 

IV + 

The Journey + 

I + 

Lord Hovenden detached from his motor car was an entirely different being from the Lord Hovenden who lounged with such a deceptive air of languor behind the steering-wheel of a Vauxhall Velox. Half an hour spent in the roaring wind of his own speed transformed him from a shy and diffident boy into a cool-headed hero, daring not merely in the affairs of the road, but in the affairs of life as well. The fierce wind blew away his diffidence; the speed intoxicated him out of his self-consciousness. All his victories had been won while he was in the car. It was in the car⁠—eighteen months ago, before he came of age⁠—that he had ventured to ask his guardian to increase his allowance; and he had driven faster and faster until, in sheer terror, his guardian had agreed to do whatever he wished. It was on board the Velox that he had ventured to tell Mrs. Terebinth, who was seventeen years older than he, had four children and adored her husband, that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen; he had bawled it at her while they were doing seventy-five on the Great North Road. At sixty, at sixty-five, at seventy, his courage had still been inadequate to the achievement; but at seventy-five it reached the sticking-point: he had told her. And when she laughed and told him that he was an impudent young shrimp, he felt not a whit abashed, but laughed back, pressed the accelerator down a little further, and when the needle of the speedometer touched eighty, shouted through the wind and the noise of the engine: “But I love you.” Unfortunately, however, the drive came to an end soon after; all drives must come to an end, sooner or later. The affaire Terebinth went no further. If only, Lord Hovenden regretfully sighed, if only one could spend all one’s life in the Velox! But the Velox had its disadvantages. There were occasions when the heroic, speed-intoxicated self had got the timorous pedestrian into awkward scrapes. There was that time, for example, when, rolling along at sixty, he had airily promised one of his advanced political friends to make a speech at a meeting. The prospect, while one was doing sixty, had seemed not merely unalarming, but positively attractive. But what agonies he suffered when he was standing on the solid earth again, at his journey’s end! How impossibly formidable the undertaking seemed! How bitterly he cursed himself for his folly in having accepted the invitation! In the end he was reduced to telegraphing that his doctor had ordered him peremptorily to the south of France. He fled, ignominiously. + 

Today the Velox had its usual effect on him. At Vezza, when they started, he was all shyness and submission. He assented meekly to all the arrangements that Mrs. Aldwinkle made and remade every five minutes, however contradictory and impossible. He did not venture to suggest that Irene should come in his car; it was through no good management of his own, but by the mere luck of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s final caprice before the actual moment of starting, that he did in fact find her sitting next him when at last they moved off from before the palace doors. At the back sat Mr. Falx, in solitude, surrounded by suitcases. To him Lord Hovenden had even dutifully promised that he would never go more than five-and-twenty miles an hour. Pedestrian slavishness could hardly go further. + 

Heavily loaded, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s limousine started first. Miss Elver, who had begged to be granted this special favour, sat in front, next the chauffeur. An expression of perfect and absolute bliss irradiated her face. Whenever the car passed anyone by the roadside, she made a shrill hooting noise and waved her handkerchief. Luckily she was unaware of the feelings of disgust and indignation which her conduct aroused in the chauffeur; he was English and enormously genteel, he had the reputation of his country and his impeccable car to keep up. And this person waved handkerchiefs and shouted as though she were on a charabanc. Miss Elver even waved at the cows and horses, she shouted even to the cats and the chickens. + 

In the body of the car sat Mrs. Aldwinkle, Mrs. Chelifer, Chelifer and Mr. Cardan. Calamy and Miss Thriplow had decided that they had no time to go to Rome and had been left⁠—without a word of objection on Mrs. Aldwinkle’s part⁠—at the palace. The landscape slid placidly past the windows. Mr. Cardan and Mrs. Chelifer talked about traditional games. + 

Meanwhile, a couple of hundred yards behind, Lord Hovenden disgustfully sniffed the dusty air. “How intolerably slowly old Ernest drives!” he said to his companion. + 

“Aunt Lilian doesn’t allow him to do more than thirty miles an hour,” Irene explained. + 

Hovenden snorted derisively. “Firty! But must we eat veir filthy dust all ve way?” + 

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

“Or perhaps we might pass vem?” + 

“Well⁠ ⁠…” said Irene doubtfully. “I don’t think we ought to make poor Aunt Lilian eat our dust.” + 

“She wouldn’t eat it for long, if old Ernest is only allowed to do firty.” + 

“Well, in that case,” said Irene, feeling that her duty towards Aunt Lilian had been done, “in that case⁠ ⁠…” + 

Lord Hovenden accelerated. The road was broad, flat and straight. There was no traffic. In two minutes Mrs. Aldwinkle had eaten her brief, unavoidable meal of dust; the air was clear again. Far off along the white road, a rapidly diminishing cloud was all that could be seen of Lord Hovenden’s Velox. + 

“Well, fank God,” Lord Hovenden was saying in a cheerful voice, “now we can get along at a reasonable rate.” He grinned, a young ecstatic giant. + 

Irene also found the speed exhilarating. Under her grey silk mask, with its goggling windows for the eyes, her short lip was lifted in a joyful smile from the white small teeth. “It’s lovely,” she said. + 

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

But a tap on his shoulder reminded him that there was somebody else in the car besides Irene and himself. Mr. Falx was far from finding the present state of affairs splendid. Blown by the wind, his white beard shook and fluttered like a living thing in a state of mortal agitation. Behind the goggles, his dark eyes had an anxious look in them. “Aren’t you going rather fast?” he shouted, leaning forward, so as to make himself heard. + 

“Not a bit,” Hovenden shouted back. “Just ve usual speed. Perfectly safe.” His ordinary pedestrian self would never have dreamed of doing anything contrary to the wishes of the venerated master. But the young giant who sat at the wheel of the Velox cared for nobody. He went his own way. + 

They passed through the sordid outskirts of Viareggio, through the pinewoods beyond, solemn with dark green shadow, and aromatic. Islanded in their grassy meadow within the battlemented walls, the white church, the white arcaded tower miraculously poised on the verge of falling, the round white baptistery seemed to meditate in solitude of ancient glories⁠—Pisan dominion, Pisan arts and thoughts⁠—of the mysteries of religion, of inscrutable fate and unfathomed godhead, of the insignificance and the grandeur of man. + 

“Why ve deuce it shouldn’t fall,” said Hovenden, as the Leaning Tower came in sight, “I can’t imagine.” + 

They drove past the house on the water, where Byron had bored himself through an eternity of months, out of the town. After Pontedera the road became more desolate. Through a wilderness of bare, unfertile hills, between whose yellowing grasses showed a white and ghastly soil, they mounted towards Volterra. The landscape took on something of an infernal aspect; a prospect of parched hills and waterless gulleys, like the undulations of a petrified ocean, expanded interminably round them. And on the crest of the highest wave, the capital of this strange hell, stood Volterra⁠—three towers against the sky, a dome, a line of impregnable walls, and outside the walls, still outside but advancing ineluctably year by year towards them, the ravening gulf that eats its way into the flank of the hill, devouring the works of civilization after civilization, the tombs of the Etruscans, Roman villas, abbeys and medieval fortresses, renaissance churches and the houses of yesterday. + 

“Must be a bit slow, life in a town like vis,” said Hovenden, racing round the hairpin turns with an easy virtuosity that appalled Mr. Falx. + 

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

“Well, if we’d both been born vere,” replied Lord Hovenden, flushed with insolence and speed, “it wouldn’t have been so bad.” + 

They left Volterra behind them. The hellish landscape was gradually tempered with mundane greenness and amenity. They descended the headlong street of Colle. The landscape became once more completely earthly. The soil of the hills was red, like that from which God made Adam. In the steep fields grew rows of little pollard trees, from whose twisted black arms hung the festooned vines. Here and there between the trees shuffled a pair of white oxen, dragging a plough. + 

“Excellent roads, for a change,” said Lord Hovenden. On one straight stretch he managed to touch eighty-eight. Mr. Falx’s beard writhed and fluttered with the agonized motions of some captive animal. He was enormously thankful when they drew up in front of the hotel at Siena. + 

“Wonderful machine, don’t you fink?” Lord Hovenden asked him, when they had come to a standstill. + 

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

Lord Hovenden’s face fell. “I’m awfully sorry,” he apologized. The young giant in him was already giving place to the meek pedestrian. He looked at his watch. “The others won’t be here for another three-quarters of an hour, I should fink,” he added, in the hope that Mr. Falx would be mollified by the information. + 

Mr. Falx was not mollified, and when the time came, after lunch, for setting out on the Perugia road, he expressed a decided preference for a seat in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s limousine. It was decided that he should change places with Miss Elver. + 

Miss Elver had no objection to speed; indeed, it excited her. The faster they went, the more piercing became her cries of greeting and farewell, the more wildly she waved her handkerchief at the passing dogs and children. The only trouble about going so fast was that the mighty wind was always tearing the handkerchiefs from between her fingers and whirling them irretrievably into receding space. When all the four handkerchiefs in her reticule had been blown away, Miss Elver burst into tears. Lord Hovenden had to stop and lend her his coloured silk bandana. Miss Elver was enchanted by its gaudy beauty; to secure it against the assaults of the thievish wind, she made Irene tie one corner of it round her wrist. + 

“Now it’ll be all right,” she said triumphantly; lifting her goggles, she wiped away the last traces of her recent grief. + 

Lord Hovenden set off again. On the skyline, lifted high above the rolling tableland over which they were travelling, the solitary blue shape of Monte Amiata beckoned from far away. With every mile to southward the horns of the white oxen that dragged the carts became longer and longer. A sneeze⁠—one ran the risk of a puncture; a sideways toss of the head⁠—one might have been impaled on the hard and polished points. They passed through San Quirico; from that secret and melancholy garden within the walls of the ruined citadel came a whiff of sun-warmed box. In Pienza they found the Platonic idea of a city, the town with a capital T; walls with a gate in them, a short street, a piazza with a cathedral and palaces round the other three sides, another short street, another gate and then the fields, rich with corn, wine and oil; and the tall blue peak of Monte Amiata looking down across the fertile land. At Montepulciano there were more palaces and more churches; but the intellectual beauty of symmetry was replaced by a picturesque and precipitous confusion. + 

“Gosh!” said Lord Hovenden expressively, as they slid with locked wheels down a high street that had been planned for pack-asses and mules. From pedimented windows between the pilasters of the palaces, curious faces peered out at them. They tobogganed down, through the high renaissance, out of an arch of the Middle Ages, into the dateless and eternal fields. From Montepulciano they descended on to Lake Trasimene. + 

“Wasn’t there a battle here, or something?” asked Irene, when she saw the name on the map. + 

Lord Hovenden seemed to remember that there had indeed been something of the kind in this neighbourhood. “But it doesn’t make much difference, does it?” + 

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

“Nofing makes any difference,” said Lord Hovenden, making himself heard with difficulty in the teeth of a wind which his speedometer registered as blowing at forty-five miles an hour. “Except”⁠—the wind made him bold⁠—“except you.” And he added hastily, in case Irene might try to be severe. “Such a bore going downhill on a twiddly road like vis. One can’t risk ve slightest speed.” + 

But when they turned into the flat highway along the western shore of the lake, his face brightened. “Vis is more like it,” he said. The wind in their faces increased from a capful to half a gale, from half a gale to a full gale, from a full gale very nearly to a hurricane. Lord Hovenden’s spirits rose with the mounting speed. His lips curved themselves into a smile of fixed and permanent rapture. Behind the glass of his goggles his eyes were very bright. “Pretty good going,” he said. + 

“Pretty good,” echoed Irene. Under her mask, she too was smiling. Between her ears and the flaps of her leather cap the wind made a glorious roaring. She was happy. + 

The road swung round to the left following the southern shore of the lake. + 

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

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

They rushed on, the gale blew steadily in their faces. The road forked; Lord Hovenden turned the nose of his machine along the leftward branch. They lost sight of the blue water. + 

“Goodbye, Trasimene,” said Irene regretfully. It was a lovely lake; she wished she could remember what had happened there. + 

The road began to climb and twist; the wind abated to a mere half-gale. From the top of the hill, Irene was surprised to see the blue waters, which she had just taken leave of forever, sparkling two or three hundred feet below on the left. At the joyous sight Miss Elver clapped her hands and shouted. + 

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

“Taken ve wrong road,” Hovenden explained. “We’re going norf again up ve east side of ve lake. We’ll go right round. It’s too much bore to stop and turn.” + 

They rushed on. For a long time neither of them spoke. Behind them Miss Elver hooted her greetings to every living creature on the road. + 

They were filled with happiness and joy; they would have liked to go on like this forever. They rushed on. On the north shore of the lake the road straightened itself out and became flat again. The wind freshened. Far off on their respective hills Cortona and Montepulciano moved slowly, as they rushed along, like fixed stars. And now they were on the west shore once more. Perched on its jutting peninsula Castiglione del Lago reflected itself complacently in the water. “Pretty good,” shouted Lord Hovenden in the teeth of the hurricane. “By the way,” he added, “wasn’t it Hannibal or somebody who had a battle here? Wiv elephants, or somefing.” + 

“Perhaps it was,” said Irene. + 

“Not vat it matters in ve least.” + 

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

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

“Would you marry me if I asked you?” he said. The question followed naturally and by a kind of logic from what they had been saying about Hannibal and his elephants. He did not look at her as he asked the question; when one is doing sixty-seven one must keep one’s eyes on the road. + 

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Irene. + 

“I’m not talking nonsense,” Lord Hovenden protested. “I’m asking a straightforward question. Would you marry me?” + 

“No.” + 

“Why not?” + 

“I don’t know,” said Irene. + 

They had passed Castiglione. The fixed stars of Montepulciano and Cortona had set behind them. + 

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

“You know I do.” + 

“Ven why not?” + 

“Because, because⁠ ⁠… Oh, I don’t know. I wish you’d stop talking about it.” + 

The machine rushed on. Once more they were running along the southern shore. A hundred yards before the forking of the roads, Lord Hovenden broke silence. “Will you marry me?” he asked. + 

“No,” said Irene. + 

Lord Hovenden turned the nose of his machine to the left. The road climbed and twisted, the wind of their speed abated. + 

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

But Hovenden did not stop. Instead, he pressed down the accelerator. If the car got round the corners it was more by a miracle than in obedience to the laws of Newton or of nature. + 

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

From the hilltop they looked down once more upon the lake. + 

“Will you marry me?” Lord Hovenden asked again. His eyes were fixed on the road in front of him. Rapturously, triumphantly he smiled. He had never felt happier, never more daring, more overflowing with strength and power. “Will you marry me?” + 

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

They were silent for several minutes. At Castiglione del Lago he asked again. Irene repeated her answer. + 

“You’re not going to do this clown’s trick again, are you?” she asked as they approached the bifurcation of the roads. + 

“It depends if you’re going to marry me,” he answered. This time he laughed aloud; so infectiously that Irene, whose irritation was something laid on superficially over her happiness, could not help laughing too. “Are you going to?” he asked. + 

“No.” + 

Lord Hovenden turned to the left. “It’ll be late before we get to Perugia,” he said. + 

“Oo-ooh!” cried Miss Elver, as they topped the long hill. “How lovely!” She clapped her hands. Then, leaning forward, she touched Irene’s shoulder. “What a lot of lakes there are here!” she said. + 

On the north shore Lord Hovenden asked again. Cortona and Montepulciano presided at the asking. + 

“I don’t see why I should be bullied,” said Irene. Lord Hovenden found the answer more promising than those which had gone before. + 

“But you’re not being bullied.” + 

“I am,” she insisted. “You’re trying to force me to answer all at once, without thinking.” + 

“Now really,” said Hovenden, “I call vat a bit fick. Forcing you to answer all at once! But vat’s exactly what I’m not doing. I’m giving you time. We’ll go round ve lake all night, if you like.” + 

A quarter of a mile from the forking of the road, he put the question yet once more. + 

“You’re a beast,” said Irene. + 

“Vat’s not an answer.” + 

“I don’t want to answer.” + 

“You needn’t answer definitely if you don’t want to,” he conceded. “I only want you to say vat you’ll fink of it. Just say perhaps.” + 

“I don’t want to,” Irene insisted. They were very close, now, to the dividing of ways. + 

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

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

She did not finish her sentence; for the car, which had been heading towards the left, swerved suddenly to the right with such violence that Irene had to clutch at the arm of her seat to prevent herself from being thrown sideways bodily out of the machine. “Goodness!” + 

“It’s all right,” said Lord Hovenden. They were running smoothly now along the right-hand road. Ten minutes later, from the crest of a little pass, they saw Perugia on its mountain, glittering in the sunlight. They found, when they reached the hotel, that the rest of the party had long since arrived. + 

“We took ve wrong turning,” Lord Hovenden explained. “By ve way,” he added, turning to Mr. Cardan, “about vat lake we passed⁠—wasn’t it Hannibal or someone⁠ ⁠…” + 

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

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

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

Mrs. Chelifer sighed compassionately. + 

Before dinner Irene and Lord Hovenden went for a stroll in the town. The huge stone palaces lowered down at them as they passed. The sun was so low that only their highest windows, their roofs and cornices took the light. The world’s grey shadow was creeping up their flanks; but their crests were tipped with coral and ruddy gold. + 

“I like vis place,” said Lord Hovenden. In the circumstances he would have liked Wigan or Pittsburg. + 

“So do I,” said Irene. Through the window in her thick hair her face looked smiling out, merry in its childishness. + 

Leaving the stately part of the town, they plunged into the labyrinth of steep alleys, of winding passageways and staircases behind the cathedral. Built confusedly on the hillside, the tall houses seemed to grow into one another, as though they were the component parts of one immense and fantastical building, in which the alleys served as corridors. The road would burrow through the houses in a long dark tunnel, to widen out into a little well-like courtyard, open to the sky. Through open doors, at the head of an outside staircase, one saw in the bright electric light a family sitting round the soup tureen. The road turned into a flight of stairs, dipped into another tunnel, made cheerful by the lights of a subterranean wine shop opening into it. From the mouth of the bright cavern came up the smell of liquor, the sound of loud voices and reverberated laughter. + 

And then, suddenly emerging from under the high houses, they found themselves standing on the edge of an escarped slope, looking out on to a huge expanse of pale evening sky, scalloped at its fringes by the blue shapes of mountains, with the round moon, already bright, hanging serene and solemn in the midst. Leaning over the parapet, they looked down at the roofs of another quarter of the city, a hundred feet below. The colours of the world still struggled against the encroaching darkness; but a lavish municipality had already beaded the streets with yellow lights. A faint smell of wood-smoke and frying came up through the thin pure air. The silence of the sky was so capacious, so high and wide, that the noises of the town⁠—like so many small, distinctly seen objects in the midst of an immense blank prairie⁠—served but to intensify the quiet, to make the listener more conscious of its immensity in comparison with the trivial clatter at its heart. + 

“I like vis place,” Lord Hovenden repeated. + 

They stood for a long time, leaning their elbows on the parapet, saying nothing. + 

“I say,” said Hovenden suddenly, turning towards his companion a face on which all the shyness, the pedestrian’s self-deprecation had reappeared, “I’m most awfully sorry about vat silly business of going round vat beastly lake.” The young giant who sat at the wheel of the Vauxhall Velox had retired with the machine into the garage, leaving a much less formidable Hovenden to prosecute the campaign which he had so masterfully begun. The moon, the enchanting beauty of the face that looked out so pensively through its tress-framed window, the enormous silence with the little irrelevant noises at its heart, the smell of wood-smoke and fried veal cutlets⁠—all these influences had conspired to mollify Lord Hovenden’s joyous elation into a soft and sugary melancholy. His actions of this afternoon seemed to him now, in his changed mood, reprehensibly violent. He was afraid that his brutality might have ruined his cause. Could she ever forgive him for such behaviour? He was overwhelmed by self-reproach. To beg forgiveness seemed to be his only hope. “I’m awfully sorry.” + 

“Are you?” Irene turned and smiled at him. Her small white teeth showed beneath the lifted lip; in the wide-set, childish eyes there was a shining happiness. “I’m not. I didn’t mind a bit.” + 

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

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

“I was a beast,” he whispered remorsefully. + 

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

“You don’t mean⁠ ⁠…” + 

She nodded. They walked back to their hotel hand in hand. Hovenden never stopped talking and laughing all the way. Irene was silent. The kiss had made her happy too, but in a different way. + 

II + 

Time and space, matter and mind, subject, object⁠—how inextricably they got mixed, next day, on the road to Rome! The simple-minded traveller who imagines himself to be driving quietly through Umbria and Latium finds himself at the same time dizzily switchbacking up and down the periods of history, rolling on top gear through systems of political economy, scaling heights of philosophy and religion, whizzing from aesthetic to aesthetic. Dimensions are bewilderingly multiplied, and the machine which seems to be rolling so smoothly over the roads is travelling, in reality, as fast as forty horses and the human minds on board can take it, down a score of other roads, simultaneously, in all directions. + 

The morning was bright when they left Perugia. In the blue sky above Subasio floated a few large white clouds. Silently they rolled away down the winding hill. At the foot of the mountain, secure from the sunlight in the delicious cool of their family vault, the obese Volumni reclined along the lids of their marble ashbins, as though on couches round the dinner-table. In an eternal anticipation of the next succulent course they smiled and forever went on smiling. We enjoyed life, they seemed to say, and considered death without horror. The thought of death was the seasoning which made our five and twenty thousand dinners upon this earth yet more appetizing. + 

A few miles further on, at Assisi, the mummy of a she-saint lies in a glass case, brilliantly illumined by concealed electric lights. Think of death, says the she-saint, ponder incessantly on the decay of all things, the transience of this sublunary life. Think, think; and in the end life itself will lose all its savour; death will corrupt it; the flesh will seem a shame and a disgustfulness. Think of death hard enough and you will come to deny the beauty and the holiness of life; and, in point of fact, the mummy was once a nun. + 

“When Goethe came to Assisi,” said Mr. Cardan, as they emerged from the vaults of St. Clare, “the only thing he looked at was the portico of a second-rate Roman temple. Perhaps he wasn’t such a fool as we think him.” + 

“An admirable place for playing halma,” said Chelifer, as they entered the Teatro Metastasio. + 

Upon that rococo stage art was intended to worship itself. Everywhere now, for the last two hundred years and more, it has been worshipping itself. + 

But in the upper and the lower churches of St. Francis, Giotto and Cimabue showed that art had once worshipped something other than itself. Art there is the handmaid of religion⁠—or, as the psychoanalysts would say, more scientifically, anal-erotism is a frequent concomitant of incestuous homosexuality. + 

“I wonder,” said Mr. Cardan pensively, “if St. Francis really managed to make poverty seem so dignified, charming and attractive as they make out. I know very few poor people nowadays who cut a particularly graceful figure.” He looked at Miss Elver, who was waddling along the road like a waterbird on land, a few yards ahead. The end of one of Lord Hovenden’s bright bandanas trailed behind her in the dust; it was tied by one corner to her wrist and she had forgotten its existence. Twenty-five thousand pounds, thought Mr. Cardan, and sighed. St. Francis, Gotama Buddha⁠—they managed their affairs rather differently. But it was difficult nowadays to beg with any degree of dignity. + 

They got into the cars once more; waving the red bandana, Miss Elver said goodbye to the saints who thought so much of death that they were forced to mortify their lives. In their cool summerhouse the obese Volumni smiled contemptuously. We thought not of death, we begat children, multiplied our flocks, added acre to acre, glorified life.⁠ ⁠… Lord Hovenden accelerated; the two wisdoms, the new and the ancient law, receded into the distance. + 

Spello came tumbling down the hill to look at them. In Foligno it was market day. There were so many people that Miss Elver exhausted herself in continuous wavings and greetings. Trevi on its conical mountain was like the picture of a city in an illuminated book. By the side of the road, in the rich plain, stood factories; their tall chimneys were the slenderer repetitions of the castle towers perched high on the slopes of the hills above. In these secure and civilized times the robbers come down from their mountain fastnesses and build their watchtowers in the valleys. They were driving through progress; through progress at a mile a minute. And suddenly the cool and sparkling miracle of Clitumnus was at their right hand. The sacred spring came rushing out of the flank of the hill into a brimming pool. The banks were green with an almost English grass. There were green islands in the midst; and the weeping willow trees drooping over the water, the little bridges, transformed the Roman site into the original landscape from which a Chinese artist first drew a willow pattern. + 

“More lakes,” cried Miss Elver. + 

At Spoleto they stopped for lunch and the frescoes of Filippo Lippi, a painter Mrs. Aldwinkle particularly admired for having had the strength of mind, though a friar, to run off with a young girl at a Convent School. The shadowy apse was melodious with pious and elegant shapes and clear, pure colours. Anal-erotism was still the handmaid of incestuous homosexuality, but not exclusively. There was more than a hint in these bright forms of anal-erotism for anal-erotism’s sake. But the designer of that more than Roman cinquecento narthex at the west end of the church, he surely was a pure and unmixed coprophilite. How charming is divine philosophy! Astrology, alchemy, phrenology and animal magnetism, the N-rays, ectoplasm and the calculating horses of Elberfield⁠—these have had their turn and passed. We need not regret them; for we can boast of a science as richly popular, as easy and as all-explanatory as ever were phrenology or magic. Gall and Mesmer have given place to Freud. Filippo Lippi once had a bump of art. He is now an incestuous homosexualist with a bent towards anal-erotism. Can we doubt any longer that human intelligence progresses and grows greater? Fifty years hence, what will be the current explanation of Filippo Lippi? Something profounder, something more fundamental even than faeces and infantile incestuousness; of that we may be certain. But what, precisely what, God alone knows. How charming is divine philosophy! + 

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

They set out again. Over the pass of the Somma, down the long winding gorge to Terni. + 

On across the plain (the mountains bristling jaggedly all round) and up the hill to Narni; Narni that hangs precariously on the brink of its deep precipitous valley; on into the Sabine hills. + 

Sabine, Sabine⁠—how wildly the mere word deviated the machine from its course! Eheu, fugaces, how the days draw in⁠—was not that first said, first elegantly and compellingly said, in a Sabine farm? And the Sabine women! Only Rubens knew what they looked like and how they ought to be raped. How large and blonde they were! What glossy satin dresses they had on, what pearls! And their Roman ravishers were tanned as brown as Indians. Their muscles bulged; their eyes, their polished armour flashed. From the backs of their prancing horses they fairly dived into the foaming sea of female flesh that splashed and wildly undulated around them. The very architecture became tumultuous and orgiastic. Those were the high old times. Climbing from Narni, they drove into the heart of them. + 

But other artists than Peter Paul had passed this way. He painted only the Sabine name; they, the scene. An ancient shepherd, strayed from one of Piranesi’s ruins, watched them from a rock above the road, leaning on his staff. A flock of goats, kneeling ruminatively in the shade of an oak tree, their black bearded faces, their twisted horns sharply outlined against the bright blue sky, grouped themselves professionally⁠—good beasts! they had studied the art of pictorial composition under the best masters⁠—in momentary expectation of Rosa da Tivoli’s arrival. And the same Italianizing Dutchman was surely responsible for that flock of dusty sheep, those dogs, those lads with staves and that burly master shepherd, dressed like a capripede in goatskin breeches and mounted on the back of a little donkey, whose smallness contributed by contrast to the portly dignity of its rider. Nor were Dutchmen and Flemings the only foreign painters in this Italian scene. There were trees, there were glades in the woods, there were rocks that belonged by right of conquest to Nicolas Poussin. Half close the eyes, and that grey stone becomes a ruined sepulchre: Et ego in Arcadia⁠ ⁠… ; the village there, on the hilltop, across the valley, flowers into a little city of colonnades and cupolas and triumphal arches, and the peasants working in the fields are the people of a transcendental Arcadia gravely and soberly engaged in pursuing the True, the rationally Good and Beautiful. So much for the foreground and the middle distance. But suddenly, from the crest of a long descent, the remote wide background of Poussin’s ideal world revealed itself: the vale of the Tiber, the broken plain of the Campagna, and in the midst⁠—fantastic, improbable⁠—the solitary cone of Mount Soracte, dim and blue against the blue of the sky. + 

III + 

From the heights of the Pincio Mr. Falx denounced the city that lay spread out below him. + 

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

“But every stone of it,” said Mr. Falx, “raised by slave labour. Every stone! Millions of wretches have sweated and toiled and died”⁠—Mr. Falx’s voice rose, his language became richer and richer, he gesticulated as though he were addressing a public meeting⁠—“in order that these palaces, these stately churches, these forums, amphitheatres, cloaca maximas and what-nots might be here today to gratify your idle eyes. Is it worth it, I ask you? Is the momentary gratification of a few idlers a sufficient reason for the secular oppression of millions of human beings, their brothers, their equals in the eyes of God? Is it, I ask again? No, a thousand times no.” With his right fist Mr. Falx thumped the open palm of his left hand. “No!” + 

“But you forget,” said Mr. Cardan, “there’s such a thing as a natural hierarchy.” The words seemed to remind him of something. He looked round. At one of the little tea-tables grouped round the bandstand at the other side of the road, Miss Elver, dressed in her sack of flowered upholstery, was eating chocolate éclairs and meringues, messily, with an expression of rapture on her cream-smeared face. Mr. Cardan turned back and continued: “There are a few choice Britons who never never will be slaves, and a great many who not only will be slaves, but would be utterly lost if they were made free. Isn’t it so?” + 

“Specious,” said Mr. Falx severely. “But does the argument justify you in grinding the life out of a million human beings for the sake of a few works of art? How many thousand workmen and their wives and children lived degraded lives in order that St. Peter’s might be what it is?” + 

“Well, as a matter of fact, St. Peter’s isn’t much of a work of art,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle scornfully, feeling that she had scored a decided point in the argument. + 

“If it’s a question of degraded lives,” put in Chelifer, “let me make a claim for the middle classes rather than the workers. Materially, perhaps, they may live a little better; but morally and spiritually, I assure you, they stand at the very heart of reality. Intellectually, of course, they are indistinguishable from the workers. All but a negligible, freakish minority in both classes belong to the three lowest Galtonian categories. But morally and spiritually they are worse off; they suffer from a greater reverence for public opinion, they are tortured by snobbery, they live perpetually in the midst of fear and hate. For if the workers are afraid of losing their jobs, so too are the burgesses, and with almost better reason⁠—for they have more to lose, have further to fall. They fall from a precarious heaven of gentility into the abysses of unrelieved poverty, into the workhouse and the glutted labour exchanges; can you wonder that they live in fear? And as for hate⁠—you can talk about the hate of the proletariat for the bourgeoisie, but it’s nothing, I assure you, to the hate that the bourgeoisie feel for the proletariat. Your burgess loathes the worker because he is afraid of him; he is terrified of the revolution that may pull him down from his genteel heaven into hell. How enviously, with what a bitter resentment, your burgess regards the slightest amelioration of the worker’s existence! To him it always seems an amelioration made at his expense. Do you remember, during the war and in the prosperous time immediately following, when the workers for the first time in history were paid a wage that enabled them to live in something like comfort, do you remember how furiously, with what a black atrabilious overflow of hatred, the middle classes denounced the riotous excesses of the idle poor? Why, the monsters even bought pianos⁠—pianos! The pianos have all been sold again, long since. The spare furniture has gone the way of all superfluities. Even the winter overcoat is pawned. The burgess, for all that the times are hard for him too, feels happier; he is revenged. He can live in a comparative tranquillity. And what a life! He lives according to his lusts, but timorously and in a conventional way; his diversions are provided for him by joint stock companies. He has no religion, but a great respect for genteel conventions which have not even the justification of a divine origin. He has heard of art and thought, and respects them because the best people respect them; but his mental capacities and his lack of education do not allow him to get any real satisfaction out of them. He is thus poorer than the savage, who, if he has never heard of art or science, is yet rich in religion and traditional lore. The life of a wild animal has a certain dignity and beauty; it is only the life of a domesticated animal that can be called degraded. The burgess is the perfectly domesticated human animal. That is why,” added Chelifer, “that is why anyone who wants to live really at the heart of human reality must live in the midst of burgessdom. In a little while, however, it won’t be necessary to make any invidious distinctions between the classes. Everyone will soon be bourgeois. The charm of the lower classes in the past consisted in the fact that they were composed of human animals in a state of relative wildness. They had a traditional wisdom and a traditional superstition; they had ancient and symbolical diversions of their own. My mother can tell you all about those,” he put in parenthetically. “That Tolstoy should have preferred the Russian peasants to his rich and literary friends is very comprehensible. The peasants were wild; the others, just as brutish at bottom, were disgustingly tame. Moreover, they were lapdogs of a perfectly useless breed; the peasants at any rate did something to justify their existence. But in the other countries of Europe and the New World the wild breed is rapidly dying out. Million-sale newspapers and radios are domesticating them at a prodigious rate. You can go a long way in England nowadays before you find a genuine wild human animal. Still, they do exist in the country and even in the more fetid and savage parts of towns. That’s why, I repeat, one must live among the suburban bourgeoisie. The degraded and domesticated are the typical human animals of the present time; it’s they who will inherit the earth in the next generation; they’re the characteristic modern reality. The wild ones are no longer typical; it would be ludicrous to be a Tolstoyan now, in western Europe. And as for the genuine men and women, as opposed to the human animals, whether wild or tame⁠—they’re so fabulously exceptional that one has no right to think of them at all. That cupola,” he pointed to the silhouette of St. Peter’s, rising high above the houses on the other side of the city, “was designed by Michelangelo. And very nice too. But what has it or he to do with us?” + 

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

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

“All very true and indeed obvious,” was Mr. Cardan’s comment. “But I can’t see why you shouldn’t allow us to amuse ourselves with Michelangelo if we want to. God knows, it’s hard enough for a man to adapt himself to circumstances; why should you deprive him of his little assistants in the difficult task? Wine, for example, learning, cigars and conversation, art, cooking, religion for those that like it, sport, love, humanitarianism, hashish and all the rest. Every man has his own recipe for facilitating the process of adaptation. Why shouldn’t he be allowed to indulge in his dope in peace? You young men are all so damned intolerant. How often have I had occasion to say it? You’re nothing but a set of prohibitionists, the whole lot of you.” + 

“Still,” said Mrs. Chelifer in her gentle and musical voice, “you can’t deny that prohibition has done a great deal of good in America.” + 

They strolled back to the tea-table, which they had left a few minutes before to look at the view. Miss Elver was just finishing an éclair. Two empty dishes stood in front of her. + 

“Had a good tea?” asked Mr. Cardan. + 

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

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

Miss Elver looked at the two empty dishes, then at Mr. Cardan. She seemed on the point of saying yes. But Mrs. Chelifer, who had taken the chair next hers, laid a hand on her arm. + 

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

Grace turned towards her; a look of disappointment and melancholy came into her eyes, but it gave place after a moment to a happier expression. She smiled, she took Mrs. Chelifer’s hand and kissed it. + 

“I like you,” she said. + 

On the back of Mrs. Chelifer’s hand her lips had left a brown print of melted chocolate. “I think you’d better just give your face a little wipe with your napkin,” Mrs. Chelifer suggested. + 

“Perhaps if you dipped the corner of it first into the hot water⁠ ⁠…” + 

There was a silence. From the open-air dancing-floor, a hundred yards away beneath the trees, came the sound, a little dimmed by the intervening distance and the pervading Roman noise, of the jazz band. Monotonously, unceasingly, the banjos throbbed out the dance rhythms. An occasional squeak indicated the presence of a violin. The trumpet could be heard tooting away with a dreary persistence at the tonic and dominant; and clear above all the rest the saxophone voluptuously caterwauled. At this distance every tune sounded exactly the same. Suddenly, from the bandstand of the tea-garden a pianist, two fiddlers and a cellist began to play the Pilgrims’ Chorus out of Tannhäuser. + 

Irene and Lord Hovenden, locked in one another’s arms, were stepping lightly, meanwhile, lightly and accurately over the concrete dance-floor. Obedient to the music of the jazz band, forty other couples stepped lightly round them. Percolating insidiously through the palisade that separated the dance-floor from the rest of the world, thin wafts of the Pilgrims’ Chorus intruded faintly upon the jazz. + 

“Listen,” said Hovenden. Dancing, they listened. “Funny it sounds when you hear bof at ve same time!” + 

But the music from beyond the palisade was not strong enough to spoil their rhythm. They listened for a little, smiling at the absurdity of this other music from outside; but they danced on uninterruptedly. After a time they did not even take the trouble to listen. + 

IV + 

Mr. Falx had expected to find no difficulty, once they were arrived in Rome, in recalling his pupil to what he considered a better and more serious frame of mind. In the bracing atmosphere of an International Labour Conference Lord Hovenden, he hoped, would recover his moral and intellectual tone. Listening to speeches, meeting foreign comrades, he would forget the corrupting charms of life under Mrs. Aldwinkle’s roof and turn to nobler and more important things. Moreover, on a young and generous spirit like his the prospect of possible persecution at the hands of the Fascists might be expected to act as a stimulant; the fact of being in opposition ought to make him feel the more ardently for the unpopular cause. So Mr. Falx calculated. + 

But it turned out in the event that he had calculated badly. Arrived in Rome, Lord Hovenden seemed to take even less interest in advanced politics than he had during the last two or three weeks at Vezza. He suffered himself, but with a reluctance that was only too obvious to Mr. Falx, to be taken to a few of the meetings of the conference. Their bracing intellectual atmosphere had no tonic effect upon him whatsoever, and he spent his time at the meetings yawning and looking with an extraordinary frequency at his watch. In the evenings, when Mr. Falx wanted to take him to see some distinguished comrade, Lord Hovenden either made some vague excuse or, more frequently, was simply undiscoverable. The next day Mr. Falx learned with distress that he had passed half the night at a Dancing Club with Irene Aldwinkle. He could only look forward hopefully to the date of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s return journey. Lord Hovenden⁠—it had been arranged before they left England⁠—would stay on with him in Rome till the end of the conference. With the removal of all temptations to frivolity he might be relied upon to re-become his better self. + 

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

“I sometimes feel I’ve raver left old Mr. Falx in ve lurch,” he confided uneasily to Irene on the evening of their second day in Rome. “But still, he can’t really expect me to spend all ve day wiv him, can he?” + 

Irene agreed that he really couldn’t. + 

“Besides,” Lord Hovenden went on, reassuring himself, “I’d really be raver out of it wiv his friends. And it’s not as if he were lonely. Vere’s such a lot of people he wants to talk to. And, you know, I fink I’d really be in ve way more van anyfing.” + 

Irene nodded. The band struck up again. Simultaneously the two young people got up and, united, stepped off on to the floor. It was a sordid and flashy cabaret, frequented by the worst sort of international and Italian public. The women were mostly prostitutes; a party of loud and tipsy young Englishmen and Americans were sitting in one corner with a pair of swarthy young natives who looked altogether too sober; the couples who took the floor danced with an excessive intimacy. Irene and Lord Hovenden were discussing the date of their wedding; they thought the cabaret delightful. + 

In the daytime, when Hovenden could get off going to the conferences, they wandered about the town buying what they imagined to be antiques for their future home. The process was a little superfluous. For, absorbed in the delights of shopping, they forgot that their future home was also a highly ancestral home. + 

“Vat looks an awfully nice dinner-service,” Lord Hovenden would say; and darting into the shop they would buy it out of hand. “A bit chipped”⁠—he shook his head. “But never mind.” Among the twenty-three valuable dinner-services with which their future home was already supplied was one of solid gold and one of silver gilt for less important occasions. Still, it was such fun buying, such fun to poke about in the shops! Under the pale blue sky of autumn the city was golden and black⁠—golden where the sunlight fell on walls of stucco or travertine, black in the shadows, deeply black under archways, within the doors of churches, glossily black where the sculptured stone of fountains shone wet with the unceasing gush of water. In the open places the sun was hot; but a little wind from the sea blew freshly, and from the mouth of narrow alleys, sun-proof these thousand years, there breathed forth wafts of a delicious vault-like coolness. They walked for hours without feeling tired. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle meanwhile went the round of the sights with Chelifer. She had hopes that the Sistine Chapel, the Appian Way at sunset, the Coliseum by moonlight, the gardens of the Villa d’Este might arouse in Chelifer’s mind emotions which should in their turn predispose him to feel romantically towards herself. The various emotions, she knew by experience, are not boxed off from one another in separate pigeonholes; and when one is stimulated it is likely that its neighbours will also be aroused. More proposals are made in the taxi, on the way home from a Wagner opera, in the face of an impressive view, within the labyrinth of a ruined palace, than in drab parlours or the streets of West Kensington. But the Appian Way, even when the solitary pine trees were black against the sunset and the ghosts were playing oboes, not for the sensual ear, in the ruined sepulchres; the Coliseum, even under the moon; the cypresses, the cascades and the jade-green pools of Tivoli⁠—all were ineffective. Chelifer never committed himself; his behaviour remained perfectly courteous. + 

Seated on a fallen column in the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa, Mrs. Aldwinkle even went so far as to tell him about certain amorous passages in her past life. She told him, with various little modifications of the facts, modifications in which she herself had long ago come implicitly to believe, the story of the affair with Elzevir, the pianist⁠—such an artist! to his fingertips; with Lord Trunion⁠—such a grand seigneur of the old school! But concerning Mr. Cardan she was silent. It was not that Mrs. Aldwinkle’s mythopoeic faculties were not equal to making something very extraordinary and romantic out of Mr. Cardan. No, no; she had often described the man to those who did not know him; he was a sort of village Hampden, a mute inglorious What’s-his-name, who might have done anything⁠—but anything⁠—if he had chosen to give himself the trouble. He was a great Don Juan, actual in this case, not merely potential. He was a mocking devil’s advocate, he was even a devil. But that was because he was misunderstood⁠—misunderstood by everybody but Mrs. Aldwinkle herself. Secretly he was so sensitive and kindhearted. But one had to be gifted with intuition to find it out. And so on; she had made a capital mythical figure out of him. But an instinct of caution restrained her from showing off her myths too freely before people who were well acquainted with the originals. Chelifer had never met Lord Trunion or the immortal Elzevir. He had met Mr. Cardan. + 

But the effect of the confidences was as small as that of the romantic scenery and the stupendous works of art. Chelifer was not encouraged by them either to confide in return or to follow the example of Elzevir and Lord Trunion. He listened attentively, gave vent, when she had finished, to a few well-chosen expressions of sympathy, such as one writes to acquaintances on the deaths of their aged grandmothers, and after a considerable silence, looking at his watch, said he thought it was time to be getting back: he had promised to meet his mother for tea, and after tea, he added, he was going to take her to look at pensions. Seeing that she was going to stay in Rome the whole winter, it was worth taking some trouble about finding a nice room. Wasn’t it? Mrs. Aldwinkle was forced to agree. They set off through the parched Campagna towards the city. Mrs. Aldwinkle preserved a melancholy silence all the way. + 

On their way from the hotel to the teashop in the Piazza Venezia Mrs. Chelifer, Miss Elver and Mr. Cardan passed through the forum of Trajan. The two little churches lifted their twin domes of gold against the sky. From the floor of the forum, deep-sunk beneath the level of the road⁠—a foot for every hundred years⁠—rose the huge column, with tumbled pillars and blocks of masonry lying confusedly round its base. They paused to look round. + 

“I’ve always been a Protestant,” said Mrs. Chelifer after a moment’s silence; “but all the same I’ve always felt, whenever I came here, that Rome was somehow a special place; that God had marked it out in some peculiar way from among other cities as a place where the greatest things should happen. It’s a significant place, a portentous place⁠—though I couldn’t tell you exactly why. One just feels that it is portentous; that’s all. Look at this piazza, for example. Two florid little counter-Reformation churches, all trumpery pretentiousness and no piety; a mixed lot of ordinary houses all round, and in the hole in the middle a huge heathen memorial of slaughter. And yet for some reason it all seems to me to have a significance, a spiritual meaning; it’s important. And the same applies to everything in this extraordinary place. You can’t regard it with indifference as you can an ordinary town.” + 

“And yet,” said Mr. Cardan, “a great many tourists and all the inhabitants contrive to do so with complete success.” + 

“That’s only because they’ve never looked at the place,” said Mrs. Chelifer. “Once you’ve really looked⁠ ⁠…” + 

She was interrupted by a loud whoop from Miss Elver, who had wandered away from her companions and was looking over the railing into the sunken forum. + 

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

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

And there they were. On the sun-warmed marble of a fallen column basked a large tabby. A family of ginger kittens were playing on the ground below. Small tigers stalked between the blocks of masonry. A miniature black panther was standing up on its hind legs to sharpen its claws on the bark of a little tree. At the foot of the column lay an emaciated corpse. + 

“Puss, puss,” Miss Elver shrilly yelled. + 

“No good,” said Mr. Cardan. “They only understand Italian.” + 

Miss Elver looked at him. “Perhaps I’d better learn a little, then,” she said. “Cat’s Italian.” + 

Mrs. Chelifer meanwhile was looking down very earnestly into the forum. “Why, there are at least twenty,” she said. “How do they get there?” + 

“People who want to get rid of their cats just come and drop them over the railing into the forum,” Mr. Cardan explained. + 

“And they can’t get out?” + 

“So it seems.” + 

An expression of distress appeared on Mrs. Chelifer’s gentle face. She made a little clicking with her tongue against her teeth and sadly shook her head. “Dear, dear,” she said, “dear, dear. And how do they get fed?” + 

“I’ve no idea,” said Mr. Cardan. “Perhaps they feed on one another. People throw things down from time to time, no doubt.” + 

“There’s a dead one there, in the middle,” said Mrs. Chelifer; and a note of something like reproach came into her voice, as though she found that Mr. Cardan was to blame for the deadness of the little corpse at the foot of the triumphal column. + 

“Very dead,” said Mr. Cardan. + 

They walked on. Mrs. Chelifer did not speak; she seemed preoccupied. + 

V + 

“An pris caruns flucuthukh”; Mr. Cardan beckoned to the guide. “Bring the lamp a little nearer,” he said in Italian, and when the light had been approached, he went on slowly spelling out the primitive Greek writing on the wall of the tomb: “flucuthukh nun tithuial khues khathc anulis mulu vizile ziz riin puiian acasri flucuper pris an ti ar vus ta aius muntheri flucuthukh.” He straightened himself up. “Charming language,” he said, “charming! Ever since I learned that the Etruscans used to call the god of wine Fufluns, I’ve taken the keenest interest in their language. Fufluns⁠—how incomparably more appropriate that is than Bacchus, or Liber, or Dionysos! Fufluns, Fufluns,” he repeated with delighted emphasis. “It couldn’t be better. They had a real linguistic genius, those creatures. What poets they must have produced! ‘When Fufluns flucuthukhs the ziz’⁠—one can imagine the odes in praise of wine which began like that. You couldn’t bring together eight such juicy, boozy syllables as that in English, could you?” + 

“What about ‘Ale in a Saxon rumkin’ then?” suggested Chelifer. + 

Mr. Cardan shook his head. “It doesn’t compare with the Etruscan,” he said. “There aren’t enough consonants. It’s too light, too fizzy and trivial. Why, you might be talking about soda water.” + 

“But for all you know,” said Chelifer, “flucuthukh in Etruscan may mean soda water. Fufluns, I grant you, is apposite. But perhaps it was just a fluke. You have no evidence to show that they fitted sound to sense so aptly in other words. ‘When Fufluns flucuthukhs the ziz’ may be the translation of ‘When Bacchus drowns the hock with soda.’ You don’t know.” + 

“You’re quite right,” Mr. Cardan agreed. “I don’t. Nor does anyone else. My enthusiasm for Fufluns carried me away. Flucuthukh may not have the fruity connotation that a word with a sound like that ought to have; it may even, as you say, mean soda water. Still, I continue to hope for the best; I believe in my Etruscans. One day, when they find the key to this fossilized language, I believe I shall be justified; flucuthukh will turn out to be just as appropriate as Fufluns⁠—you mark my words! It’s a great language, I insist; a great language. Who knows? A couple of generations hence some new Busby or Keat may be drumming Etruscan syntax and Etruscan prosody into the backsides of British boyhood. Nothing would give me greater satisfaction. Latin and Greek have a certain infinitesimal practical value. But Etruscan is totally and absolutely useless. What better basis for a gentleman’s education could possibly be discovered? It’s the great dead language of the future. If Etruscan didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it.” + 

“Which is precisely what the pedagogues will have to do,” said Chelifer, “there being no Etruscan literature beyond the inscriptions and the rigmarole on the mummy-wrappings at Agram.” + 

“So much the better,” replied Mr. Cardan. “If we wrote it ourselves, we might find Etruscan literature interesting. Etruscan literature composed by Etruscans would be as boring as any other ancient literature. But if the epics were written by you, the Socratic dialogues by me, the history by some master of fiction like Miss Thriplow⁠—then we’d possess a corpus in which the rare schoolboys who can derive some profit from their education could take a real interest. And when, a generation hence, we have become as much out of date in our ideas as Tully or Horace, the literature of Etruria will be rewritten by our descendants. Each generation will use the dead language to express its own ideas. And expressed in so rich an idiom as I take Etruscan to be, the ideas will seem the more significant and memorable. For I have often noticed that an idea which, expressed in one’s native language, would seem dull, commonplace and opaque, becomes transparent to the mind’s eye, takes on a new significance when given a foreign and unfamiliar embodiment. A cracker-motto in Latin sounds much weightier and truer than the same motto in English. Indeed, if the study of dead languages has any use at all, which I should be sorry to admit, it consists in teaching us the importance of the verbal medium in which thoughts are expressed. To know the same thing in several languages is to know it (if you have any sense at all) more profoundly, more richly, than if it were known only in one. The youth who learns that the god of wine is called, in Etruscan, Fufluns has a profounder knowledge of the attributes of that divine personality than the youth who only knows him under the name of Bacchus. If I desire that archaeologists should discover the key to the Etruscan language, it is merely in order that I may have a deeper insight into the thing or idea connoted by such sumptuous words as flucuthukh or khathc. For the rest I care nothing. That they should discover the meaning of these inscriptions is a matter to me of the most complete indifference. For after all, what would they discover? Nothing that we don’t already know. They would discover that before the Romans conquered Italy men ate and drank, made love, piled up wealth, oppressed their weaker neighbours, diverted themselves with sports, made laws and so on. One could have divined as much by walking down Piccadilly any day of the week. And besides, we have their pictures.” He threw out his hand. The guide, who had been listening patiently to the incomprehensible discourse, responded to the gesture by raising his acetylene lamp. Called magically into existence by the bright white light, a crowd of gaily coloured forms appeared on the walls of the vault in which they were standing. Set in a frame of conventionalized trees, a pair of red-brown wrestlers with Egyptian eyes and the profiles of the Greeks who disport themselves round the flanks of the earliest vases were feeling for a hold. On either side of them, beyond the trees, stood two couples of long-legged black horses. Above them, in the segment of a circle between the upper line of this band of paintings and the vaulted roof, a great leopard lay couchant, white-skinned, with a pattern of black spots arranged like those on the china dogs and cats of a later age. On the wall to the left they were feasting: red-brown Etruscans reclined on couches; porcelain-white women, contrasting as voluptuously with their tanned companions as the pale, plump nymphs of Boucher with their brown pastoral lovers, sat by their sides. With hieratic gestures of mutual love they pledged one another in bowls of wine. On the opposite wall the fowlers were busy⁠—here with slings, there with nets. The sky was alive with birds. In the blue sea below they were spearing fish. A long inscription ran from right to left across the wall. The vaulted roof was painted with chequers, red, black and white. Over the low, narrow door that led from the tomb into the antechamber there knelt a benevolent white bull. Two thousand five hundred years ago they had wept here over the newly dead. + 

“You see them,” continued Mr. Cardan, “hunting, drinking, playing, making love. What else could you expect them to do? This writing will tell us no more than we know already. True, I want to know what it means, but only because I hope that the brown man may be saying to the white lady: ‘Flucuthukh to me only with thine eyes,’ or words to that effect, ‘and I will flucuthukh with mine.’ If that was what they really were saying, it would throw an entirely new light on the notion of drinking. An entirely new light.” + 

“It would throw no new light on love, if lovers they are,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle mournfully. + 

“Wouldn’t it?” Mr. Cardan queried. “But imagine if flucuthukh turned out to mean, not drink, but love. I assure you that the feelings denoted by such a word would be quite different from those we sum up by ‘love.’ You can make a good guess from the sound of the word in any language what the people who speak it mean when they talk of love. Amour, for example⁠—that long ou sound with the rolled r at the end of it, how significant it is! Ou⁠—you have to push your lips into a snout-like formation, as though you were going to kiss. Then, briskly, rrr⁠—you growl like a dog. Could anything be more perfectly expressive of the matter-of-fact lasciviousness which passes for love in nine-tenths of French fiction and drama? And Liebe⁠—what a languishing, moonlit, sentimental sound the long ie has! And how apt, too, is the bleating labial by which it is followed!⁠—be⁠—be. It is a sheep whose voice is choked by emotion. All German romanticism is implied in the sound of the word. And German romanticism, a little détraqué, turns quite logically into expressionismus and the wild erotic extravagance of contemporary German fiction. As for our love⁠—that’s characteristically noncommittal and diffident. That dim little monosyllable illustrates our English reluctance to call a spade a spade. It is the symbol of our national repressions. All our hypocrisy and all the beautiful platonism of our poetry is there. Love⁠ ⁠…” Mr. Cardan whispered the word, and holding up his finger for silence cocked his ear to catch the faint echoes of his voice reverberating from wall to wall under the sepulchral vault. “Love.⁠ ⁠… How utterly different is our English emotion from that connoted by amore! Amore⁠—you fairly sing the second syllable, in a baritone voice, from the chest, with a little throaty tremolo on the surface to make it sound more palpitating. Amore⁠—it’s the name of the quality that Stendhal so much admired in the Italians and the absence of which in his own countrymen, and more especially countrywomen, made him rank Paris below Milan or Rome⁠—it’s the apt and perfectly expressive name of passion.” + 

“How true!” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, brightening for a moment through her gloom. This compliment to her Italian language and Italian character touched and pleased her. “The very sound of amore is passionate. If the English knew what passion meant, they’d have found a more expressive word than love. That’s certain. But they don’t know.” She sighed. + 

“Quite so,” said Mr. Cardan. “Amore, we see, can mean nothing else than Southern passion. But now, suppose that flucuthukh should turn out to be the Etruscan for ‘love’⁠—what then? Amour connotes lasciviousness, Liebe sentiment, amore passion. To what aspect of the complex phenomenon of love can flucuthukh refer? The microbe Staphylococcus pyogenes produces in some patients boils, in others sties in the eye; in certain cases it is even responsible for keratitis punctata. It is the same with love. The symptoms vary in different individuals. But owing to the boundless suggestibility and imitativeness of man, the commonest symptoms at any given period tend to become universal in any one society. Whole peoples take the disease in the same way; one suffers from amour, another from Liebe and so on. But now imagine a people to whom love was flucuthukh. What can have been the particular symptoms of the general amorous disease to which such a name was given? One cannot guess. But at least it is fascinating to speculate.” + 

One after the other the party filed out through the narrow door into the anteroom of the sepulchre and up the steep flight of steps leading to the surface of the ground. Blinking in the bright afternoon light, they stepped out on to the bare and windy down. + 

It was a solitary place. The arches of a ruined aqueduct went striding along the ridge, and following their long recession the eye came at last to rest on the walls and tall towers of Corneto. To the left the hog-backed down sloped seawards; on the further side of the narrow plain at its foot stretched the Mediterranean. On the right lay a deep valley, shut in on the further side by a great round hill. Its grassy flanks were furrowed and pitted with what had once been the works of man. Once, on that hill, had stood the sacred city, Tarquinii of the Etruscans. The long bare down on which they were standing had been, through how many centuries? its necropolis. In little houses hollowed out of the chalky stone slept the innumerable dead. Here and there the top of a vault was broken through; from the hollow darkness within came up even at high summer an immemorial coolness. Here and there the surface of the down swelled up into round grass-grown barrows. It was from the heart of one of these tumuli that they had now emerged. The guide put out his lamp and shut the door upon the Etruscan ghosts. They walked for a few hundred yards through geological time⁠—between the sea and the hills, under the floating clouds; on the skyline the Middle Ages pricked up their towers; the smudged and flattened relics of Etruria undulated almost imperceptibly under the grass; from the Roman road in the plain below came up the distant hooting of a motor car. + 

The sound of the motor horn aroused Irene from the thoughtful trance in which, sad-faced and childish, this time, pathetically, she was walking. She had been silent and melancholy ever since, yesterday morning, they had left Rome; Lord Hovenden had stayed behind with Mr. Falx. The long-drawn hooting of the electric horn seemed to remind her of something. She looked down towards the seaboard plain. A cloud of white dust was advancing along the Maremman road from the direction of Civita Vecchia. It hung, opaque, over half a mile of road, fading slowly to transparency towards the tail. At the head, where the dust was thickest, a small black object moved like a rapidly crawling insect across the map-like expanse of plain, drawing the cloud after it. From the opposite direction came another black-headed comet of dust. Like two white serpents they approached one another, as though rushing to battle. Nearer, nearer they came. Irene stopped still to look at them. She was filled with a horrible apprehension. It seemed impossible that they should not crash together. Nearer, nearer. The heads of the two serpents seemed almost to be touching one another. Suppose, just suppose that one of the cars was his.⁠ ⁠… Inevitably they must collide. Crash and smash⁠—oh, the horror of it! Irene shut her eyes. A few seconds later she opened them. The two white snakes had merged together into one very thick opaque snake. It was impossible to see the little black heads at all. For one horrible moment she thought that they must have destroyed one another. But they reappeared after a little, receding now one from the other, no more approaching. The two serpents were still one serpent, but two-headed, a long amphisbaena. Then, gradually, the middle of the amphisbaena began to grow thin, to fade; a little clump of trees showed through it, dimly at first, mistily, then clearly. The amphisbaena had fallen in half and the two white snakes crawled on, one northwards, the other towards the south, and between their fading tails was a wide and ever wider gap. Irene heaved a deep sigh of relief and ran on after the others. It seemed to her that she had been the witness of a catastrophe miraculously averted. She felt much happier than she had felt all day. On a wide road two automobiles had passed one another. That was all. + 

The guide was unlocking the door that gave entrance to another excavated barrow. He relit his lamp and led the way down the steep steps into the tomb. On one wall they were horse-racing and wrestling, hieratically, all in profile. A goddess⁠—or perhaps it was merely the Lady Mayoress of the city⁠—wearing that high bonnet-shaped coiffure which the Roman matrons were afterwards to borrow from their neighbours, was distributing the prizes. On the other walls they were feasting. The red-brown men, the white-skinned ladies reclined along their couches. A musician stood by, playing on his double flute, and a female dancer, dressed in what looked rather like a Persian costume, was dancing a shawl dance for the diversion of the diners. + 

“They seem to have had simple tastes,” said Mr. Cardan. “There’s nothing very sophisticated or fin de siècle here⁠—no bull-baiting by naked female acrobats, as at Cnossos; no gladiatorial fights, no wholesale butchering of animals, no boring matches with brass knuckle-dusters, as in the Roman arenas. A nice school-boyish sort of people, it looks to me. Not quite civilized enough to be exigeant about their pleasures.” + 

“And not yet quite civilized enough,” added Chelifer, “to be really vulgar. In that respect they fall a long way behind the later Romans. Do you know that huge mosaic in the Lateran museum? It comes from one of the Imperial baths, I forget which, and consists of portraits of the principal sporting heroes of the epoch⁠—boxers and wrestlers⁠—with their trainers and backers. These last are treated very respectfully by the mosaic-maker, who represents them wearing togas and standing in the noblest attitudes. One sees at a glance that they are the gens bien, the sportsmen, the amateurs⁠—in a word, the monied interest. The athletes are portrayed in a state of nature, and are indeed so excessively natural that one could easily mistake the heavyweight boxers for gorillas peeled of their superfluous hair. Under each portrait is a caption with the name of the hero represented. The whole thing reminds one very much of the sporting page in a picture paper⁠—only it is a page that is forty feet long by thirty wide, and made, not of wood-pulp, but of the most durable materials ever devised by the ingenuity of man for the embodiment and visible eternization of his thoughts. And it is, I think, precisely the size and everlastingness of the frightful thing that makes it so much worse than the similar page from our picture papers. To make ephemeral heroes of professional sportsmen and prizefighters is bad enough; but that a people should desire to immortalize their fame is surely indicative of a profounder vulgarity and abjection. Like the Roman mob, the mobs of our modern capitals delight in sports and exercises which they themselves do not practise; but at any rate, the fame of our professionals lasts only a day after their triumph. We do not print their effigies on marble pavements made to live down a hundred generations of men. We print them on wood-pulp, which is much the same as printing them on water. It is comforting to think that by the year two thousand one hundred the whole of contemporary journalism, literature and thought will have crumbled to dust. The mosaic, however, will still be in its present state of perfect preservation. Nothing short of dynamite or an earthquake will ever totally destroy the effigies of those Imperial boxers. And a very good thing, too, for the future historians of Rome. For no man can claim that he has really understood the Roman empire till he has studied that mosaic. That pavement is a vessel filled with the quintessence of Roman reality. A drop of that reality is enough to shrivel up all the retrospective Utopias that historians have ever made or ever can make out of the chronicles of ancient Rome. After looking at that mosaic a man can have no more generous illusions about the people who admired it or the age in which it was made. He will realize that Roman civilization was not merely just as sordid as ours, but if anything more sordid. But in these Etruscan vaults,” Chelifer added, looking round at the frescoed walls, “one gets no such impression of organized and efficient beastliness as one gets from the Roman mosaic. There’s a freshness, as you say, Mr. Cardan, a certain jolly schoolboyishness about all the fun they represent. But I have no doubt, of course, that the impression is entirely fallacious. Their art has a certain archaic charm; but the artists were probably quite as sophisticated and quite as repulsive as their Roman successors.” + 

“Come, come,” said Mr. Cardan, “you forget that they called Bacchus Fufluns. Give them at least the credit that is due to them.” + 

“But the Romans too had a fine language,” Chelifer objected. “And yet they laid down immense enlargements of the sporting page of the Daily Sketch in marble tesserae on a foundation of cement.” + 

They climbed again towards the light. The steps were so high and her legs so short that Miss Elver had to be helped up. The tomb resounded with her laughter and shrill whooping. They emerged at last out of the ground. + 

On the top of a high barrow some two or three hundred yards away stood the figure of a man, distinct against the sky. He was shading his eyes with his hand and seemed to be looking for something. Irene suddenly became very red. + 

“Why, I believe it’s Hovenden,” she said in a voice that was as casual as she could make it. + 

Almost simultaneously the man turned his face in their direction. The shading hand went up in a gesture of greeting. A glad “Hullo!” sounded across the tombs; the man skipped down from his barrow and came running across the down towards them. And Hovenden it was; Irene had seen aright. + 

“Been looking for you all over ve place,” he explained breathlessly as he came up. With the greatest heartiness he shook the hands of all present except⁠—diplomatically⁠—Irene’s. “Vey told me in ve town vat a party of foreigners was out here looking at ve cemetery or somefing. So I buzzed after you till I saw old Ernest wiv ve car at ve side of ve road. Been underground, have you?” He looked into the dark entrance of the tomb. “No wonder I couldn’t⁠ ⁠…” + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle cut him short. “But why aren’t you in Rome with Mr. Falx?” she asked. + 

Lord Hovenden’s boyish, freckled face became all at once exceedingly red. “Ve fact is,” he said, looking at the ground, “vat I didn’t feel very well. Ve doctor said I ought to get away from Rome at once. Country air, you know. So I just left a note for Mr. Falx and⁠ ⁠… and here I am.” He looked up again, smiling. + 

VI + 

“But at Montefiascone,” said Mr. Cardan, concluding the history of the German bishop who gave the famous wine of Montefiascone its curious name, “at Montefiascone Bishop Defuk’s servant found good wine at every shop and tavern; so that when his master arrived he found the prearranged symbol chalked up on a hundred doors. Est, Est, Est⁠—the town was full of them. And the Bishop was so much enraptured with the drink that he decided to settle in Montefiascone for life. For life⁠—but he drank so much that in a very short time it turned out that he had settled here for death. They buried him in the lower church, down there. On his tombstone his servant engraved the Bishop’s portrait with this brief epitaph: ‘Est Est Jo Defuk. Propter nimium hic est. Dominus meus mortuus est.’ Since when the wine has always been called Est Est Est. We’ll have a flask of it dry for serious drinking. And for the frivolous and the feminine, and to sip with the dessert, we’ll have a bottle of the sweet moscato. And now let’s see what there is to eat.” He picked up the menu and holding it out at arm’s length⁠—for he had the long sight of old age⁠—read out slowly, with comments, the various items. It was always Mr. Cardan who ordered the dinner (although it was generally Lord Hovenden or Mrs. Aldwinkle who paid), always Mr. Cardan; for it was tacitly admitted by everyone that Mr. Cardan was the expert on food and wine, the professional eater, the learned and scholarly drinker. + 

Seeing Mr. Cardan busy with the bill of fare, the landlord approached, rubbing his hands and cordially smiling⁠—as well he might on a Rolls-Royce-full of foreigners⁠—to take orders and give advice. + 

“The fish,” he confided to Mr. Cardan, “the fish is something special.” He put his fingers to his lips and kissed them. “It comes from Bolsena, from the lake, down there.” He pointed out of the window at the black night. Somewhere, far down through the darkness, lay the Lake of Bolsena. + 

Mr. Cardan held up his hand. “No, no,” he objected with decision and shook his head. “Don’t talk to me of fish. Never safe in these little places,” he explained to his companions. “Particularly in such hot weather. And then, imagine eating fish from Bolsena⁠—a place where they have miracles, where holy wafers bleed for the edification of the pious and as a proof of the fact of transubstantiation. No, no,” Mr. Cardan repeated, “fishes from Bolsena are altogether too fishy. Let’s stick to fried eggs, with fillet of veal to follow. Or a little roast capon⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I want fish,” said Miss Elver. The passionate earnestness of her tone contrasted strikingly with the airiness of Mr. Cardan’s banter. + 

“I really wouldn’t, you know,” said Mr. Cardan. + 

“But I like fish.” + 

“But it may be unwholesome. You never can tell.” + 

“But I want it,” Miss Elver insisted. “I love fish.” Her large lower lip began to tremble, her eyes filled with tears. “I want it.” + 

“Well, then, of course you shall have it,” said Mr. Cardan, making haste to console her. “Of course, if you really like it. I was only afraid that it mightn’t perhaps be good. But it probably will be.” + 

Miss Elver took comfort, blew her long nose and smiled. “Thank you, Tommy,” she said, and blushed as she pronounced the name. + 

After dinner they went out into the piazza for coffee and liqueurs. The square was crowded and bright with lights. In the middle the band of the local Philharmonic Society was giving its Sunday evening concert. Planted on the rising ground above the piazza Sammicheli’s great church solemnly impended. The lights struck up, illuminating its pilastered walls. The cupola stood out blackly against the sky. + 

“The choice,” said Mr. Cardan, looking round the piazza, “seems to lie between the Café Moderno and the Bar Ideale. Personally, I should be all for the ideal rather than the real if it wasn’t for the disagreeable fact that in a bar one has to stand. Whereas in a café, however crassly materialistic, one can sit down. I’m afraid the Moderno forces itself upon us.” + 

He led the way in the direction of the café. + 

“Talking of Bars,” said Chelifer, as they sat down at a little table in front of the café, “has it ever occurred to you to enumerate the English words that have come to have an international currency? It’s a somewhat curious selection, and one which seems to me to throw a certain light on the nature and significance of our Anglo-Saxon civilization. The three words from Shakespeare’s language that have a completely universal currency are Bar, Sport and W.C. They’re all just as good Finnish now as they are good English. Each of these words possesses what I may call a family. Round the idea ‘Bar’ group themselves various other international words, such as Bitter, Cocktail, Whiskey and the like. ‘Sport’ boasts a large family⁠—Match, for example, Touring Club, the verb to Box, Cycle-Car, Performance (in the sporting sense) and various others. The idea of hydraulic sanitation has only one child that I can think of, namely Tub. Tub⁠—it has a strangely old-world sound in English nowadays; but in Yugo-Slavia, on the other hand, it is exceedingly up-to-date. Which leads us on to that very odd class of international English words that have never been good English at all. A Smoking for example, a Dancing, a Five-o’clock⁠—these have never existed except on the continent of Europe. As for High-Life, so popular a word in Athens, where it is spelt iota, gamma, lambda, iota, phi⁠—that dates from a remote, mid-Victorian epoch in the history of our national culture.” + 

“And Spleen,” said Mr. Cardan, “you forget Spleen. That comes from much further back. A fine aristocratic word, that; we were fools to allow it to become extinct. One has to go to France to hear it uttered now.” + 

“The word may be dead,” said Chelifer, “but the emotion, I fancy, has never flourished more luxuriantly than now. The more material progress, the more wealth and leisure, the more standardized amusements⁠—the more boredom. It’s inevitable, it’s the law of Nature. The people who have always suffered from spleen and who are still the principal victims, are the prosperous, leisured and educated. At present they form a relatively small minority; but in the Utopian state where everybody is well off, educated and leisured, everybody will be bored; unless for some obscure reason the same causes fail to produce the same effects. Only two or three hundred people out of every million could survive a lifetime in a really efficient Utopian state. The rest would simply die of spleen. In this way, it may be, natural selection will work towards the evolution of the superman. Only the intelligent will be able to bear the almost intolerable burden of leisure and prosperity. The rest will simply wither away, or cut their throats⁠—or, perhaps more probably, return in desperation to the delights of barbarism and cut one another’s throats, not to mention the throats of the intelligent.” + 

“That certainly sounds the most likely and natural ending,” said Mr. Cardan. “If of two possible alternatives one is in harmony with our highest aspirations and the other is, humanly speaking, absolutely pointless and completely wasteful, then, you may be sure, Nature will choose the second.” + 

At half-past ten Miss Elver complained that she did not feel very well. Mr. Cardan sighed and shook his head. “These miraculous fishes,” he said. They went back to the hotel. + 

“Luckily,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle that evening while Irene was brushing her hair, “luckily I never had any babies. They spoil the figure so frightfully.” + 

“Still,” Irene ventured to object, “still⁠ ⁠… they must be rather fun, all the same.” + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle pretexted a headache and sent her to bed almost at once. At half-past two in the morning Irene was startled out of her sleep by a most melancholy groaning and crying from the room next to hers. “Oo, Oo! Ow!” It was Grace Elver’s voice. Irene jumped out of bed and ran to see what was the matter. She found Miss Elver lying in a tumbled bed, writhing with pain. + 

“What is it?” she asked. + 

Miss Elver made no articulate answer. “Oo, Oo,” she kept repeating, turning her head from side to side as though in the hope of escaping from the obsessing pain. + 

Irene ran to her aunt’s bedroom, knocked at the door and, getting no answer, walked in. “Aunt Lilian,” she called in the darkness, and louder, “Aunt Lilian!” There was still no sound. Irene felt for the switch and turned on the light. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s bed was empty. Irene stood there for a moment looking dubiously at the bed, wondering, speculating. From down the corridor came the repeated “Oo, Oo!” of Grace Elver’s inarticulate pain. Roused by the sound from her momentary inaction, Irene turned, stepped across the passage and began knocking at Mr. Cardan’s door. + 

In the sporting calendar the most interesting events are booked for the autumnal months. There is no hunting in the spring. And even in Italy there is a brief close season for songbirds that lasts from the coming of the nightingales to the departure of the last swallow. The fun, the real fun, starts only in the autumn. Grouse-shooting, partridge-shooting⁠—these are the gay preliminaries. But the great day is the First of October, when the massacre of the gaudy pheasant begins. Crack! crack!⁠—the double barrels make music in the fading woods. And a little later the harmonious dogs join in and the hoof, as the Latin poet so aptly puts it, the hoof shakes the putrid field with quadrupedantical sound. Winter is made gay with the noise of hunting. + 

It is the same in the greater year of certain feminine lives.⁠ ⁠… Pop! pop!⁠—on the First of October they go out to shoot the pheasant. A few weeks later, tally-ho, they hunt the fox. And on Guy Fawkes’s day the man-eating season begins. My hostess, when she picked me up on the beach of Marina di Vezza, had reached a point in her year somewhere between pheasant-shooting and man-eating. They say that foxes enjoy being hunted; but I venture to doubt the truth of this comforting hypothesis. Experientia does it, as Mrs. Micawber’s papa (ha ha! from Mr. Toft)⁠ ⁠… Etcetera. + 

If loving without being loved in return may be ranked as one of the most painful of experiences, being loved without loving is certainly one of the most boring. Perhaps no experience is better calculated to make one realize the senselessness of the passion. The spectacle of someone making a fool of himself arouses only laughter. When one is playing the fool oneself, one weeps. But when one is neither the active imbecile nor the disinterested spectator, but the unwilling cause of somebody else’s folly⁠—then it is that one comes to feel that weariness and that disgust which are the proper, the human reaction to any display of the deep animal stupidity that is the root of all evil. + 

Twice in my life have I experienced these salutary horrors of boredom⁠—once by my own fault, because I asked to be loved without loving; and once because I had the misfortune to be picked up on the beach, limp as seaweed, between the First of October and Guy Fawkes’s day. The experiences were disagreeable while they lasted; but on the other hand, they were highly didactic. The first of them rounded off, so to speak, the lesson I had learned from Barbara. The second episode was staged by Providence, some few years later, to remind me of the first and to print what the Americans would call its “message” still more indelibly upon my mind. Providence has been remarkably persistent in its efforts to sober me. To what end I cannot imagine. + 

Poor Miss Masson! She was a very good secretary. By the end of 1917 she knew all that it was possible to know about rubber tubing and castor oil. It was unfortunate for everyone concerned that Providence should have destined her to instruct me yet more deeply in the fearful mysteries of love. True, I brought it on myself. Providence, on that occasion, elected to act indirectly and threw the blame on me. I accept it all⁠—all the more willingly since my act shows in the most illuminating manner what are the consequences, the frightful consequences, of stupidity. There is a certain satisfaction to be derived from having personally proved the truth of one’s own wisdom by acting in defiance of its precepts. + 

Yes, I brought it on myself. For it was I who made the first advances. It was I who, out of pure wantonness, provoked the sleeping, or at least well-disciplined tiger that lay hidden in Dorothy Masson’s heart⁠—put my walking-stick between the bars and, against all the rules, poked it rudely in the ribs. I got what I asked for. + 

I was like that wanton Blackamoor in one of old Busch’s misanthropically comic picture-books. + 

Ein Mohr aus Bosheit und Pläsier + 

Schiesst auf das Elefantentier. + 

With his little arrow he punctures the placid pachyderm; and the pachyderm takes his revenge, elaborately, through fourteen subsequent woodcuts. + 

My only excuse⁠—the recentness of that ludicrous catastrophe with which the tragedy of Barbara had concluded⁠—was an excuse that might equally have served as an additional reason against doing what I did; I ought, after having once been bitten, to have shown myself twice shy. But in the state of misery in which I found myself I hoped that a second bite might distract my attention from the anguish of the first. And even this is not precisely accurate; for I never anticipated that the second would really be a bite at all. I looked forward merely to a kind of playful diversion, not to anything painful. True, when I found how serious the affair threatened to become for Dorothy Masson, I might have guessed that it would soon be serious also for myself, and have drawn back. But, inspired by that high-spirited irresponsibility which I have come since then so highly to admire in the natural, brutish human specimen, I refused to consider possible consequences and went on in the course I had begun. I was not in the least in love with the woman; nor did her person inspire me with any specific desire. My motive forces were misery, mingled with a kind of exasperation, and the vague itch of recurrent appetite. More than half of the world’s “affairs” have no more definite reasons for occurring. Ennui and itch are their first causes. Subsequently imagination may come into play and love will be born. Or experience may beget specific desires and in so doing may render one party necessary to the happiness of the other, or each to each. Or perhaps there will be no development at all and the affair will end placidly as it began, in itch and ennui. + 

But there are cases, of which mine was one, where one party may be inspired by the mere indefinite wantonness I have been describing, while the other is already imagination-ridden and in love. Poor Dorothy! There came into her eyes when I kissed her a look such as I had never seen in any other human eyes before or since. It was the look one sees in the eyes of a dog when its master is angry and raises his whip⁠—a look of absolute self-abasement mingled with terror. There was something positively appalling in seeing those eyes staring at one out of a woman’s face. To see a human being reduced in one’s arms to the condition of a frightened and adoring dog is a shocking thing. And the more so in this case since it was completely indifferent to me whether she was in my arms or not. But when she raised her face and looked at me for a moment with those abject and terrified eyes of hers, it was not merely indifferent to me; it was even positively distasteful. The sight of those large-pupilled eyes, in which there was no glimmer of a human rational soul, but only an animal’s terror and abasement, made me feel at once guilty and, complementarily, angry, resentful and hostile. + 

“Why do you look at me like that?” I asked her once. “As though you were frightened of me.” + 

She did not answer; but only hid her face against my shoulder, and pressed me more closely in her arms. Her body shook with involuntary startings and tremblings. Casually, from force of habit, I caressed her. The trembling became more violent. “Don’t,” she implored me in a faint hoarse whisper, “don’t.” But she pressed me still closer. + 

She was frightened, it seemed, not of me but of herself, of that which lay sleeping in the depths of her being and whose awakening threatened to overwhelm, to blot for a moment out of existence that well-ordered, reasonable soul which was the ruler at ordinary times of her life. She was afraid of the power within her that could make her become something other than her familiar self. She was fearful of losing her self-mastery. And at the same time there was nothing else that she desired. The sleeping power within her had begun to stir and there was no resisting it. Vainly, hopelessly, she continued to attempt the impossible. She went on trying to resist, and her resistance quickened her desire to yield. She was afraid and yet invited my awakening kisses. And while she whispered to me imploringly, like one who begs for mercy, she pressed me in her arms. I, meanwhile, had begun to realize all the potentialities for boredom implicit in the situation. And how boring it did in fact turn out to be! To be pursued by restless warmth when all that one desires is cool peace; to be perpetually and quite justly accused of remissness in love and to have to deny the accusation, feebly, for the sake of politeness; to be compelled to pass hours in tedious company⁠—what an affliction, what a martyrdom it is! I came to feel extremely sorry for those pretty women who are perpetually being courted by a swarm of men. But the pretty women, I reflected, had this advantage over me: that they were by nature a good deal more interested in love than I. Love is their natural business, the reason of their existence; however distasteful their suitors may personally be to them, they cannot find them as completely boring and insufferable as would, placed in similar circumstances, a person to whom love as such is fundamentally rather uninteresting. The most tedious lover atones a little, in the eyes of the courted lady, for his personal insupportableness by the generic fact of being a lover. Lacking a native enthusiasm for love, I found it more difficult to support the martyrdom of being loved by Miss Masson. + 

But such an affair, you will object, is a typical piece of reality. True; but at that time I was not quite such a believer in the real and earnest side of life as I am now. And even now I should regard it as something of a work of supererogation to associate with realities of so exceptionally penetrative a nature. A sober man, if he is logical and courageous, is bound to pass his life between Gog’s Court and Miss Carruthers’s. But he is not bound to make love to Miss Carruthers or to provoke the clinging affections of Fluffy. That would be too much⁠—so it seems to me, at any rate at present; though perhaps the time may come when I shall feel strong enough to take my reality in these stiff doses. There is an electric machine used by masseurs for driving iodine into stiffened joints. Love acts like this machine; it serves to drive the lover’s personality into the mind of the beloved. I am strong enough at present to be able to bathe in the personalities of ordinary human animals; but I should be suffocated, I should faint away, if the muddy swill were to be pumped into my spiritual system by the penetrating electricity of love. + 

Miss Masson stood one Galtonian class higher than Miss Carruthers or Fluffy. One out of every four people is a Fluffy; only one out of every six is a Dorothy Masson. It makes a slight but perceptible difference. None the less, how much I suffered! When I brought her a few orchids as a present, remarking as I gave them to her that they looked so delightfully like artificial flowers, she would thank me and say she adored orchids, adding after a moment’s pause for thought that she liked them because they looked so like artificial flowers. And she laughed softly to herself, she looked up at me for confirmatory applause. For that little habit alone I sometimes felt that I could have murdered her. But her solicitude, her reproaches, expressed or more often mute (for she rarely made scenes, but only looked at me with those sad brown eyes), her incessant desire to be close to me, to touch me, to kiss and be kissed⁠—these were almost enough to drive me to suicide. It lasted for more than a year, an eternity. And technically it still lasts; for I never broke with her, never dramatically quitted her, but only quietly and gradually faded out of her life like the Cheshire Cat. Sometimes, even, we still meet. And still, as though nothing had happened, I take her in my arms and kiss her, till that strange expression of abject terror comes again into her eyes, till she implores me, in a voice made faint with excessive desire, to spare her well-disciplined everyday soul and not deliver it into the power of the fearful thing that is waking darkly within her. And still as she speaks she presses me closer, she offers her stretched throat to my kisses. And before and after, we talk about politics and common friends. And still as of old she echoes the last phrase I have spoken, still softly laughs and still expects me to admire her original thoughts. Finally I take my leave. + 

“You’ll come again soon?” she asks, looking up into my face with eyes that are full of sadness and apprehension, of questions unuttered, of unexpressed reproaches. I kiss her hand. “Of course,” I say. And I go away, taking pains as I walk down the street not to speculate on the subject of her thoughts. + 

But Providence seems to have thought my connection with Dorothy inadequately instructive. Dorothy, after all, was only twenty-six when the episode began. Hers was that vernal and flowery season during which, even in Italy, warblers are not shot. It would be another twenty years before she reached her First of October; thirty, perhaps, before the man-eating season should begin. And it was I who had made the first advances. But for my exhibition of Bosheit und Pläsier the boring history would never have unrolled itself. But Providence, anxious, for some inscrutable reason, to teach me a yet more memorable lesson, went so far as almost to drown me, so determined was it that I should fall into the hands of the suitable schoolmistress. I was to learn how ludicrously dreadful, as well as how boring, love can be. + 

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 everyone 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. Someone 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. + 

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 breakdowns, 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 marketplace. + 

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 recognize 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 recognized 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. + 

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 authorize 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 symbolize; 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. + 