Part + 

III + 

The Loves of the Parallels + 

I + 

Do all he could, Lord Hovenden had somehow found it impossible, these last few days, to get Irene for a moment to himself. The change had come about almost suddenly, just after that fellow Chelifer had made his appearance. Before he came, there had been a time⁠—beginning, strangely enough, almost as suddenly as it had ended⁠—a time of blissful happiness. Whenever during those days an opportunity for a tête-à-tête presented itself Irene had been always at hand and, what was more, always delighted to seize the opportunity. They had been for long walks together, they had swum together far out into the sea, sat together in the gardens, sometimes talking, sometimes silent; but very happy, whether they spoke or not. He had talked to her about motoring and dancing and shooting, and occasionally, feeling rather shamefaced and embarrassed by the disquieting gravity of the subject, about the working classes. And Irene had listened with pleasure to everything he said and had talked too. They found that they had many tastes in common. It had been an enchantment while it lasted. And then, all at once, with the coming of that creature Chelifer, it all came to an end. Irene was never on the spot when opportunities offered, she never suggested spontaneously, as once or twice, during the heavenly time, she had actually done, that they should go for a walk together. She had no time to talk to him; her thoughts, it seemed, were elsewhere, as with grave and preoccupied face she hurried mysteriously about the palace and the gardens. With an extreme anguish of spirit Lord Hovenden observed that it was always in the direction of Chelifer that Irene seemed to be hurrying. Did he slip out unobtrusively into the garden after lunch, Irene was sure, a moment later, to slip out after him. When he proposed a stroll with Calamy or Mr. Cardan, Irene always asked, shyly but with the pallid resolution of one who by an effort of will overcomes a natural weakness for the sake of some all-important cause, to be allowed to join the party. And if ever Chelifer and Miss Thriplow happened to find themselves for a moment together, Irene was always certain to come gliding silently after them. + 

For all this Lord Hovenden could find only one explanation. She was in love with the man. True, she never made any effort to talk to him when she was in his company; she seemed even rather intimidated by his polished silences, his pointedly insincere formulas of courtesy and compliment. And for his part Chelifer, as far as his rival could see, behaved with a perfect correctitude. Too correctly, indeed, in Hovenden’s opinion. He couldn’t tolerate the fellow’s sarcastic politeness; the man ought to be more human with little Irene. Lord Hovenden would have liked to wring his neck; wring it for two mutually exclusive offences⁠—luring the girl on and being too damned standoffish. And she looked so wretched. Looking out of its square window in the thick bright bell of copper hair, the little face, so childish in the largeness and limpidity of the eyes, in the shortness of the upper lip, had been, these last days, the face of a pathetic, not a merry child. Lord Hovenden could only suppose that she was pining with love for that creature⁠—though what the devil she contrived to see in him he, for one, couldn’t imagine. And it was so obvious, too, that old Lilian was also quite gone on the fellow and making a fool of herself about him. Did she want to compete with her Aunt Lilian? There’d be the devil and all to pay if Mrs. Aldwinkle discovered that Irene was trying to cut her out. The more he thought of the wretched business, the wretcheder it seemed. Lord Hovenden was thoroughly miserable. + 

So too was Irene. But not for the reasons Lord Hovenden supposed. It was true that she had spent most of her days since Chelifer’s arrival in following the new guest like an unhappy shadow. But it had not been on her own account, not at her own desire. Chelifer did indeed intimidate her; so far Lord Hovenden had guessed aright. He had been hopelessly at fault in imagining that Irene adored the man in spite of her fear of him. If she followed him about, it was because Mrs. Aldwinkle had asked her to. And if she looked unhappy, it was because Aunt Lilian was unhappy⁠—and a little, too, because the task which Aunt Lilian had set her was a disagreeable one; disagreeable not only in itself, but because it prevented her from continuing those pleasant talks with Hovenden. Ever since that evening when Aunt Lilian twitted her on her coldness and her blindness, Irene had made a point of seeing Hovenden as much as she could. She wanted to prove that Aunt Lilian had been wrong. She wasn’t cold, she wasn’t blind; she could see as clearly as anyone when people liked her, and she could be as warmly appreciative. And really, after the episodes with Jacques, Mario and Peter, it wasn’t fair of Aunt Lilian to tease her like that. It simply wasn’t. Moved by an indignant desire to confute Aunt Lilian as quickly as possible, she had positively made advances to Hovenden; he was so shy that, if she hadn’t, it would have been months before she could have offered her aunt anything like convincing rebuttal of her imputation. She had talked with him, gone for walks with him, quite prepared to feel at any moment the infinitude of passion. But the affair passed off, somehow, very differently from the others. She began to feel something indeed, but something quite unlike that which she had felt for Peter and Jacques. For them it had been a fizzy, exciting, restless feeling, intimately connected with large hotels, jazz bands, coloured lights and Aunt Lilian’s indefatigable desire to get everything out of life, her haunting fear that she was missing something, even in the heart of the fun. “Enjoy yourself, let yourself go,” Aunt Lilian was always telling her. And “How handsome he is! what a lovely fellow!” she would say as one of the young men passed. Irene had done her best to take Aunt Lilian’s advice. And it had seemed to her, sometimes, when she was dancing and the lights, the music, the moving crowd had blended together into a single throbbing whole, it had seemed to her that she had indeed climbed to the peak of happiness. And the young man, the Peter or Jacques whom Aunt Lilian had hypnotized her into thinking a marvel among young men, was regarded as the source of this bliss. Between the dances, under the palm trees in the garden, she had even suffered herself to be kissed; and the experience had been rather momentous. But when the time came for them to move on, Irene departed without regret. The fizzy feeling had gone flat. But with Hovenden it was different. She just liked him quietly, more and more. He was so nice and simple and eager and young. So young⁠—she liked that particularly. Irene felt that he was really younger, in spite of his age, than she. The other ones had all been older, more knowing and accomplished; all rather bold and insolent. But Hovenden wasn’t in the least like that. One felt very secure with him, Irene thought. And there was somehow no question of love when one was with him⁠—at any rate the question wasn’t at all pressing or urgent. Aunt Lilian used to ask her every evening how they were getting on and if it were getting exciting. And Irene never quite knew what to answer. She found very soon that she didn’t want to talk about Hovenden; he was so different from the others, and their friendship had nothing infinite about it. It was just a sensible friendship. She dreaded Aunt Lilian’s questions; and she found herself almost disliking Aunt Lilian when, in that dreadful bantering way of hers, she ruthlessly insisted on putting them. In some ways, indeed, the coming of Chelifer had been a relief; for Aunt Lilian became at once so profoundly absorbed in her own emotions that she had no time or inclination to think of anyone else’s. Yes, that had been a great relief. But on the other hand, the work of supervision and espionage to which Aunt Lilian had set her made it all but impossible for Irene ever to talk to Hovenden. She might as well not be there, Irene sadly reflected. Still, poor Aunt Lilian was so dreadfully unhappy. One must do all one could for her. Poor Aunt Lilian! + 

“I want to know what he thinks of me,” Aunt Lilian had said to her in the secret hours of the night. “What does he say about me to other people?” Irene answered that she had never heard him say anything about her. “Then you must listen, you must keep your ears open.” + 

But however much she listened, Irene never had anything to report. Chelifer never mentioned Aunt Lilian. For Mrs. Aldwinkle that was almost worse than if he had spoken badly of her. To be ignored was terrible. “Perhaps he likes Mary,” she had suggested. “I thought I saw him looking at her today in a strange, intent sort of way.” And Irene had been ordered to watch them. But for all she could discover, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s jealousies were utterly unfounded. Between Chelifer and Mary Thriplow there passed no word or look that the most suspicious imagination could interpret in terms of amorous intimacy. “He’s queer, he’s an extraordinary creature.” That was the refrain of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s talk about him. “He seems to care for nothing. So cold, such a fixed, frigid mask. And yet one has only to look at him⁠—his eyes, his mouth⁠—to see that underneath⁠ ⁠…” And Mrs. Aldwinkle would shake her head and sigh. And her speculations about him would go rambling on and on, round and round, treading the same ground again and again, arriving nowhere. Poor Aunt Lilian! She was dreadfully unhappy. + 

In her own mind Mrs. Aldwinkle had begun by saving Chelifer’s life. She saw herself standing there on the beach between sea and sky, and with the mountains in the middle distance, looking like one of those wonderfully romantic figures who, in the paintings of Augustus John, stand poised in a meditative and passionate ecstasy against a cosmic background. She saw herself⁠—a John down even to her flame-coloured tunic and her emerald-green parasol. And at her feet, like Shelley, like Leander washed up on the sands of Abydos, lay the young poet, pale, naked and dead. And she had bent over him, had called him back to life, had raised him up and, figuratively speaking, had carried him off in maternal arms to a haven of peace where he should gather new strength and, for his poetry, new inspiration. + 

Such were the facts as they appeared to Mrs. Aldwinkle, after passing through the dense refractive medium of her imagination. Given these facts, given the resultant situation, given her character, it was almost necessary and inevitable that Mrs. Aldwinkle should feel romantically towards her latest guest. The mere fact that he was a new arrival, hitherto unknown, and a poet at that, would have been enough in any circumstances to make Mrs. Aldwinkle take a lively interest in the young man. But seeing that she had saved him from a watery grave and was now engaged in supplying him with inspiration, she felt something more than interest. She would have been disobeying the laws of her being if she had not fallen in love with him. Moreover, he made it easier for her by being so darkly and poetically handsome. And then he was queer⁠—queer to the point of mysteriousness. His very coldness attracted while it filled her with despair. + 

“He can’t really be so utterly indifferent to everything and everybody as he makes out,” she kept insisting to Irene. + 

The desire to break down his barriers, enter into his intimacy and master his secret quickened her love. + 

From the moment of her discovery of him, in those romantic circumstances which her imagination had made so much more romantic, Mrs. Aldwinkle had tried to take possession of Chelifer; she had tried to make him as much her property as the view, or Italian art. He became at once the best living poet; but it followed as a corollary that she was his only interpreter. In haste she had telegraphed to London for copies of all his books. + 

“When I think,” she would say, leaning forward embarrassingly close and staring into his face with those bright, dangerous eyes of hers, “when I think how nearly you were drowned. Like Shelley⁠ ⁠…” She shuddered. “It’s too appalling.” + 

And Chelifer would bend his full Egyptian lips into a smile and answer: “They’d have been inconsolable on the staff of the Rabbit Fancier,” or something of the sort. Oh, queer, queer, queer! + 

“He slides away from one,” Mrs. Aldwinkle complained to her young confidante of the small hours. + 

She might try to take his barriers by storm, might try to creep subtly into his confidence from the flank, so to speak; but Chelifer was never to be caught napping. He evaded her. There was no taking possession of him. It was for nothing, so far as Mrs. Aldwinkle was concerned, that he was the best living poet and she his prophetess. + 

He evaded her⁠—evaded her not merely mentally and spiritually, but even in the flesh. For after a day or two in the Cybo Malaspina palace he developed an almost magical faculty for disappearing. One moment he’d be there, walking about in the garden or sitting in one of the saloons; something would distract Mrs. Aldwinkle’s attention, and the next moment, when she turned back towards the place where he had been, he was gone, he was utterly vanished. Mrs. Aldwinkle would search; there was no trace of him to be found. But at the next meal he’d walk in, punctual as ever; he would ask his hostess politely if she had had an agreeable morning or afternoon, whichever the case might be, and when she asked him where he had been, would answer vaguely that he’d gone for a little walk, or that he’d been writing letters. + 

After one of these disappearances Irene, who had been set by her aunt to hunt for him, finally ran him to earth on the top of the tower. She had climbed the two hundred and thirty-two steps for the sake of the commanding view of the whole garden and hillside to be obtained from the summit. If he was anywhere above ground, she ought to see him from the tower. But when at last, panting, she emerged on to the little square platform from which the ancient marquesses had dropped small rocks and molten lead on their enemies in the court below, she got a fright that nearly made her fall backwards down the steps. For as she came up through the trapdoor into the sunlight, she suddenly became aware of what seemed, to eyes that looked up from the level of the floor, a gigantic figure advancing, toweringly, towards her. + 

Irene uttered a little scream; her heart jumped violently and seemed to stop beating. + 

“Allow me,” said a very polite voice. The giant bent down and took her by the hand. It was Chelifer. “So you’ve climbed up for a bird’s-eye view of the picturesque beauties of nature?” he went on, when he had helped her up through the hatchway. “I’m very partial to bird’s-eye views myself.” + 

“You gave me such a start,” was all that Irene could say. Her face was quite pale. + 

“I’m exceedingly sorry,” said Chelifer. There was a long and, for Irene, embarrassing silence. + 

After a minute she went down again. + 

“Did you find him?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle, when her niece emerged a little while later on to the terrace. + 

Irene shook her head. Somehow she lacked the courage to tell Aunt Lilian the story of her adventure. It would make her too unhappy to think that Chelifer was prepared to climb two hundred and thirty-two steps for the sake of getting out of her way. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle tried to guard against his habit of vanishing by never, so far as it was practicable, letting him out of her sight. She arranged that he should always sit next to her at table. She took him for walks and drives in the motor car, she made him sit with her in the garden. It was with difficulty and only by the employment of stratagems that Chelifer managed to procure a moment of liberty and solitude. For the first few days of his stay Chelifer found that “I must go and write” was a good excuse to get away. Mrs. Aldwinkle professed such admiration for him in his poetical capacity that she could not decently refuse to let him go. But she soon found a way of controlling such liberty as he could get in this way by insisting that he should write under the ilex trees, or in one of the mouldering sponge-stone grottoes hollowed in the walls of the lower terrace. Vainly Chelifer protested that he loathed writing or reading out of doors. + 

“These lovely surroundings,” Mrs. Aldwinkle insisted, “will inspire you.” + 

“But the only surroundings that really inspire me,” said Chelifer, “are the lower middle class quarters of London, north of the Harrow Road, for example.” + 

“How can you say such things?” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. + 

“But I assure you,” he protested, “it’s quite true.” + 

None the less, he had to go and write under the ilexes or in the grotto. Mrs. Aldwinkle, at a moderate distance, kept him well in sight. Every ten minutes or so she would come tiptoeing into his retreat, smiling, as she imagined, like a sibyl, her finger on her lips, to lay beside his permanently virgin sheet of paper a bunch of late-flowering roses, a dahlia, some Michaelmas daisies or a few pink berries from the spindle tree. Courteously, in some charming and frankly insincere formula, Chelifer would thank her for the gift, and with a final smile, less sibylline, but sweeter, tenderer, Mrs. Aldwinkle would tiptoe away again, like Egeria bidding farewell to King Numa, leaving her inspiration to do its work. It didn’t seem to do its work very well, however. For whenever she asked him how much he had written, he regularly answered “Nothing,” smiling at her meanwhile that courteous and Sphingine smile which Mrs. Aldwinkle always found so baffling, so preeminently “queer.” + 

Often Mrs. Aldwinkle would try to lead the conversation upwards on to those high spiritual planes from which the most satisfactory and romantic approach to love is to be made. Two souls that have acclimatized themselves to the thin air of religion, art, ethics or metaphysics have no difficulty in breathing the similar atmosphere of ideal love, whose territory lies contiguous to those of the other inhabitants of high mental altitudes. Mrs. Aldwinkle liked to approach love from the heights. One landed, so to speak, by aeroplane on the snowy summit of Popocatepetl, to descend by easy stages into the tropical tierra caliente in the plains below. But with Chelifer it was impossible to gain a footing on any height at all. When, for example, Mrs. Aldwinkle started rapturously on art and the delights of being an artist, Chelifer would modestly admit to being a tolerable second-rate halma player. + 

“But how can you speak like that?” cried Mrs. Aldwinkle. “How can you blaspheme so against art and your own talent? What’s your talent for?” + 

“For editing the Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette, it appears,” Chelifer answered, courteously smiling. + 

Sometimes she started on the theme of love itself; but with no greater success. Chelifer just politely agreed with everything she said, and when she pressed him for a definite opinion of his own replied, “I don’t know.” + 

“But you must know,” Mrs. Aldwinkle insisted, “you must have some opinion. You have had experience.” + 

Chelifer shook his head. “Alas,” he deplored, “never.” + 

It was hopeless. + 

“What am I to do?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle despairingly in the small hours. + 

Wise in the experience of eighteen years, Irene suggested that the best thing to do would be to think no more about him⁠—in that way. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle only sighed and shook her head. She had started loving because she believed in love, because she wanted to love and because a romantic opportunity had presented itself. She had rescued a Poet from death. How could she help loving him? The circumstances, the person were her invention; she had fallen in love, deliberately almost, with the figments of her own imagination. But there was no deliberately falling out again. The romantic yearnings had aroused those profounder instincts of which they were but the polite and literary emanation. The man was young, was beautiful⁠—these were facts, not imaginings. These deep desires once started by the conscious mind from their sleep, once made aware of their quarry, how could they be held back? “He is a poet. For the love of poetry, for the love of passion and because I saved him from death, I love him.” If that had been all, it might have been possible for Mrs. Aldwinkle to take Irene’s advice. But from the obscure caves of her being another voice was speaking. “He is young, he is beautiful. The days are so few and short. I am growing old. My body is thirsty.” How could she cease to think of him? + 

“And suppose he did come to love me a little,” Mrs. Aldwinkle went on, taking a perverse delight in tormenting herself in every possible way, “suppose he should come to love me just a little for what I am and think and do⁠—should come to love me because, to begin with, I love him and admire his work, and because I understand what an artist feels and can sympathize with him⁠—suppose all that, wouldn’t he be repelled at the same time by the fact that I’m old?” She peered into the mirror. “My face looks terribly old,” she said. + 

“No, no,” protested Irene encouragingly. + 

“He’d be disgusted,” Mrs. Aldwinkle went on. “It would be enough to drive him away even if he were attracted in some other way.” She sighed profoundly. The tears trickled slowly down her sagging cheeks. + 

“Don’t talk like that, Aunt Lilian,” Irene implored her. “Don’t talk like that.” She felt the tears coming into her own eyes. At that moment she would have done anything, given anything to make Aunt Lilian happy. She threw her arms round Mrs. Aldwinkle’s neck and kissed her. “Don’t be unhappy,” she whispered. “Don’t think any more about it. What does it matter about that man? What does it matter? You must think only of the people who do love you. I love you, Aunt Lilian. So much, so much.” + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle suffered herself to be a little comforted. She dried her eyes. “I shall make myself look still uglier,” she said, “if I go on crying.” There was a silence. Irene went on brushing her aunt’s hair; she hoped that Aunt Lilian had turned her thoughts elsewhere. + 

“At any rate,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle at last, breaking the long silence, “my body is still young.” + 

Irene was distressed. Why couldn’t Aunt Lilian think of something else? But her distress turned into an uneasy sense of embarrassment and shame as Mrs. Aldwinkle pursued the subject started by her last words into more and more intimate detail. In spite of her five years’ training in Aunt Lilian’s school, Irene felt profoundly shocked. + 

II + 

“We two,” said Mr. Cardan one late afternoon some fortnight after Chelifer’s arrival, “we two seem to be rather left out of it.” + 

“Left out of what?” asked Mr. Falx. + 

“Out of love,” said Mr. Cardan. He looked down over the balustrade. On the next terrace below, Chelifer and Mrs. Aldwinkle were walking slowly up and down. On the terrace below that strolled the diminished and foreshortened figures of Calamy and Miss Thriplow. “And the other two,” said Mr. Cardan, as if continuing aloud the enumeration which he and his companion had made in silence, with the eye alone, “your young pupil and the little niece, have gone for a walk in the hills. Can you ask what we’re left out of?” + 

Mr. Falx nodded. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I don’t much like the atmosphere of this house. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s an excellent woman, of course, in many respects. But⁠ ⁠…” he hesitated. + 

“Yes; but⁠ ⁠…” Mr. Cardan nodded. “I see your point.” + 

“I shall be rather glad when I have got young Hovenden away from here,” said Mr. Falx. + 

“If you get him alone I shall be surprised.” + 

Mr. Falx went on, shaking his head: “There’s a certain moral laxity, a certain self-indulgence.⁠ ⁠… I confess I don’t like this way of life. I may be prejudiced; but I don’t like it.” + 

“Everyone has his favourite vice,” said Mr. Cardan. “You forget, Mr. Falx, that we probably don’t like your way of life.” + 

“I protest,” said Mr. Falx hotly. “Is it possible to compare my way of life with the way of life in this house? Here am I, working incessantly for a noble cause, devoting myself to the public good⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Still,” said Mr. Cardan, “they do say that there’s nothing more intoxicating than talking to a crowd of people and moving them the way you want them to go; they do say, too, that it’s piercingly delicious to listen to applause. And people who have tried both have told me that the joys of power are far preferable, if only because they are a good deal more enduring, to those one can derive from wine or love. No, no, Mr. Falx; if we chose to climb on to our high horses we should be as amply justified in disapproving of your laxity and self-indulgence as you are in disapproving of ours. I always notice that the most grave and awful denunciations of obscenity in literature are to be found precisely in those periodicals whose directors are most notoriously alcoholic. And the preachers and politicians with the greatest vanity, the most inordinate itch for power and notoriety, are always those who denounce most fiercely the corruptions of the age. One of the greatest triumphs of the nineteenth century was to limit the connotation of the word ‘immoral’ in such a way that, for practical purposes, only those were immoral who drank too much or made too copious love. Those who indulged in any or all of the other deadly sins could look down in righteous indignation on the lascivious and the gluttonous. And not only could but can⁠—even now. This exaltation of two out of the seven deadly sins is most unfair. In the name of all lechers and boozers I most solemnly protest against the invidious distinction made to our prejudice. Believe me, Mr. Falx, we are no more reprehensible than the rest of you. Indeed, compared with some of your political friends, I feel I have a right to consider myself almost a saint.” + 

“Still,” said Mr. Falx, whose face, where it was not covered by his prophetical white beard, had become very red with ill-suppressed indignation, “you won’t persuade me out of my conviction that these are not the most healthy surroundings for a young fellow like Hovenden at the most impressionable period of his life. Be as paradoxical and ingenious as you like: you will not persuade me, I repeat.” + 

“No need to repeat, I assure you,” said Mr. Cardan, shaking his head. “Did you think I ever supposed I could persuade you? You don’t imagine I’d waste my time trying to persuade a full-grown man with fixed opinions of the truth of something he doesn’t already believe? If you were twelve years old, even if you were twenty, I might try. But at your age⁠—no, no.” + 

“Then why do you argue, if you don’t want to persuade?” asked Mr. Falx. + 

“For the sake of argument,” Mr. Cardan replied, “and because one must murder the time somehow. + 

Come ingannar questi noiosi e lenti + 

Giorni di vita cui si lungo tedio + 

E fastidio insoffribile accompagna + 

Or io t’insegnero. + 

I could write a better handbook of the art than old Parini.” + 

“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Falx, “but I don’t know Italian.” + 

“Nor should I,” said Mr. Cardan, “if I had your unbounded resources for killing time. Unhappily, I was born without much zeal for the welfare of the working classes.” + 

“Working classes⁠ ⁠…” Mr. Falx swooped down on the words. Passionately he began to talk. What was that text, thought Mr. Cardan, about the measure with which ye mete? How fearfully applicable it was! For the last ten minutes he’d been boring poor old Mr. Falx. And now Mr. Falx had turned round and was paying him back with his own measure⁠—but, oh Lord, pressed down and, heaven help us! running over. He looked down over the balustrade. On the lower terraces the couples were still parading up and down. He wondered what they were saying; he wished he were down there to listen. Boomingly, Mr. Falx played his prophetic part. + 

III + 

It was a pity that Mr. Cardan could not hear what his hostess was saying. He would have been delighted; she was talking about herself. It was a subject on which he specially loved to hear her. There were few people, he used to say, whose Authorized Version of themselves differed so strikingly from that Revised, formed of them by others. It was not often, however, that she gave him a chance to compare them. With Mr. Cardan she was always a little shy; he had known her so long. + 

“Sometimes,” Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying, as she walked with Chelifer on the second of the three terraces, “sometimes I wish I were less sensitive. I feel everything so acutely⁠—every slightest thing. It’s like being⁠ ⁠… like being⁠ ⁠…” she fumbled in the air with groping fingers, feeling for the right word, “like being flayed,” she concluded triumphantly, and looked at her companion. + 

Chelifer nodded sympathetically. + 

“I’m so fearfully aware,” Mrs. Aldwinkle went on, “of other people’s thoughts and feelings. They don’t have to speak to make me know what they’ve got in their minds. I know it, I feel it just by seeing them.” + 

Chelifer wondered whether she felt what was going on in his mind. He ventured to doubt it. “A wonderful gift,” he said. + 

“But it has its disadvantages,” insisted Mrs. Aldwinkle. “For example, you can’t imagine how much I suffer when people round me are suffering, particularly if I feel myself in any way to blame. When I’m ill, it makes me miserable to think of servants and nurses and people having to sit up without sleep and run up and down stairs, all because of me. I know it’s rather stupid; but, do you know, my sympathy for them is so⁠ ⁠… so⁠ ⁠… profound, that it actually prevents me from getting well as quickly as I should.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Dreadful,” said Chelifer in his polite, precise voice. + 

“You’ve no idea how deeply all suffering affects me.” She looked at him tenderly. “That day, that first day, when you fainted⁠—you can’t imagine⁠ ⁠…” + 

“I’m sorry it should have had such a disagreeable effect on you,” said Chelifer. + 

“You would have felt the same yourself⁠—in the circumstances,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, uttering the last words in a significant tone. + 

Chelifer shook his head modestly. “I’m afraid,” he answered, “I’m singularly stoical about other people’s sufferings.” + 

“Why do you always speak against yourself?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle earnestly. “Why do you malign your own character? You know you’re not what you pretend to be. You pretend to be so much harder and dryer than you really are. Why do you?” + 

Chelifer smiled. “Perhaps,” he said, “it’s to reestablish the universal average. So many people, you see, try to make themselves out softer and damper than they are. Don’t they?” + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle ignored his question. “But you,” she insisted, “I want to know about you.” She stared into his face. Chelifer smiled and said nothing. “You won’t tell me?” she went on. “But it doesn’t matter. I know already. I have an intuition about people. It’s because I’m so sensitive. I feel their character. I’m never wrong.” + 

“You’re to be envied,” said Chelifer. + 

“It’s no good thinking you can deceive me,” she went on. “You can’t. I understand you.” Chelifer sighed, inwardly; she had said that before, more than once. “Shall I tell you what you are really like?” + 

“Do.” + 

“Well, to begin with,” she said, “you’re sensitive, just as sensitive as I am. I can see that in your face, in your actions. I can hear it when you speak. You can pretend to be hard and⁠ ⁠… and⁠ ⁠… armour-plated, but I⁠ ⁠…” + 

Wearily, but with patience, Chelifer listened. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s hesitating voice, moving up and down from note to unrelated note, sounded in his ears. The words became blurred and vague. They lost their articulateness and sense. They were no more than the noise of the wind, a sound that accompanied, but did not interrupt his thoughts. Chelifer’s thoughts, at the moment, were poetical. He was engaged in putting the finishing touches to a little “Mythological Incident,” the idea of which had recently occurred to him and to which, during the last two days, he had been giving its definite form. Now it was finished; a little polishing, that was all it needed now. + 

Through the pale skeleton of woods + 

Orion walks. The north wind lays + 

Its cold lips to the twin steel flutes + 

That are his gun and plays. + 

Knee-deep he goes where, penny-wiser + 

Than all his kind who steal and hoard, + 

Year after year, some sylvan miser + 

His copper wealth has stored. + 

The Queen of Love and Beauty lays + 

In neighbouring beechen aisles her baits⁠— + 

Breadcrumbs and the golden maize. + 

Patiently she waits. + 

And when the unwary pheasant comes + 

To fill his painted maw with crumbs, + 

Accurately the sporting Queen + 

Takes aim. The bird has been. + 

Secure, Orion walks her way. + 

The Cyprian loads, presents, makes fire. + 

He falls. ’Tis Venus all entire + 

Attached to her recumbent prey. + 

Chelifer repeated the verses to himself and was not displeased. The second stanza was a little too “quaint,” perhaps; a little too⁠—how should he put it?⁠—too Walter-Crane’s-picture-book. One might omit it altogether, perhaps; or substitute, if one could think of it, something more perfectly in harmony with the silver-age, allusive elegance of the rest. As for the last verse, that was really masterly. It gave Racine his raison d’être; if Racine had never existed, it would have been necessary to invent him, merely for the sake of those last lines. + 

He falls. ’Tis Venus all entire + 

Attached to her recumbent prey. + 

Chelifer lingered over them in ecstasy. He became aware, all at once, that Mrs. Aldwinkle was addressing herself to him more directly. From inharmoniously Aeolian, her voice became once more articulate. + 

“That’s what you’re like,” she was saying. “Tell me I’m right. Say I understand you.” + 

“Perhaps,” said Chelifer, smiling. + 

Meanwhile, on the terrace below, Calamy and Miss Thriplow strolled at leisure. They were discussing a subject about which Miss Thriplow professed a special competence; it was⁠—to speak in the language of the examination room⁠—her Special Subject. They were discussing Life. “Life’s so wonderful,” Miss Thriplow was saying. “Always. So rich, so gay. This morning, for instance, I woke up and the first thing I saw was a pigeon sitting on the window sill⁠—a big fat grey pigeon with a captive rainbow pinned to his stomach.” (That phrase, peculiarly charming and felicitous, Miss Thriplow thought, had already been recorded for future reference in her notebooks.) “And then high up on the wall above the washstand there was a little black scorpion standing tail-upwards, looking quite unreal, like something out of the signs of the Zodiac. And then Eugenia came in to call me⁠—think of having one’s hot water brought by a maid called Eugenia to begin with!⁠—and spent a quarter of an hour telling me about her fiancé. It seems that he’s so dreadfully jealous. So should I be, if I were engaged to a pair of such rolling eyes. But think of all that happening before breakfast, just casually! What extravagance! But Life’s so generous, so copious.” She turned a shining face to her companion. + 

Calamy looked down at her, through half-closed eyes, smiling, with that air of sleepy insolence, of indolent power, characteristic of him, especially in his relations with women. “Generous!” he repeated. “Yes, I should think it was. Pigeons before breakfast. And at breakfast it offers you.” + 

“As if I were a broiled kipper,” said Miss Thriplow, laughing. + 

But Calamy was not disturbed by her laughter. He continued to look at her between his puckered eyelids with the same steady insolence, the same certainty of power⁠—a certainty so complete that he could afford to make no exertions; placidly, drowsily, he could await the inevitable triumph. He disquieted Miss Thriplow. That was why she liked him. + 

They strolled on. Fifteen days ago they could never have walked like this, two on a terrace, talking at leisure of Miss Thriplow’s Special Subject. Their hostess would have put an end to any such rebellious attempt at independence in the most prompt and ruthless fashion. But since the arrival of Chelifer Mrs. Aldwinkle had been too much preoccupied with the affairs of her own heart to be able to take the slightest interest in the doings, the sayings, the comings and goings of her guests. Her gaoler’s vigilance was relaxed. Her guests might talk together, might wander off alone or in couples, might say good night when they pleased; Mrs. Aldwinkle did not care. So long as they did not interfere with Chelifer, they might do what they liked. Fay ce que vouldras had become the rule in Cybo Malaspina’s palace. + 

“I can never understand,” Miss Thriplow went on, meditatively pursuing her Special Subject, “I can never understand how it is that everybody isn’t happy⁠—I mean fundamentally happy, underneath; for of course there’s suffering, there’s pain, there are a thousand reasons why one can’t always be consciously happy, on the top, if you see what I mean. But fundamentally happy, underneath⁠—how can anyone help being that? Life’s so extraordinary, so rich and beautiful⁠—there’s no excuse for not loving it always, even when one’s consciously miserable. Don’t you think so?” She was fairly carried away by her love of Life. She was young, she was ardent; she saw herself as a child who goes and turns head over heels, out of pure joy, in the perfumed haycocks. One could be as clever as one liked, but if one had that genuine love of Life it didn’t matter; one was saved. + 

“I agree,” said Calamy. “It’s always worth living, even at the worst of times. And if one happens to be in love, it’s really intoxicating.” + 

Miss Thriplow glanced at him. Calamy was walking with bent head, his eyes fixed on the ground. There was a faint smile on his lips; his eyelids were almost closed, as though he were too drowsy to keep them apart. Miss Thriplow felt annoyed. He made a remark like that and then didn’t even take the trouble to look at her. + 

“I don’t believe you’ve ever been in love,” she said. + 

“I can’t remember ever having been out of it,” Calamy answered. + 

“Which is the same thing as saying that you’ve never really been in. Not really,” Miss Thriplow repeated. She knew what the real thing was like. + 

“And you?” asked Calamy. + 

Mary Thriplow did not answer. They took two or three turns in silence. It was a folly, Calamy was thinking. He wasn’t really in love with the woman. It was a waste of time and there were other things far more important to be done, to be thought about. Other things. They loomed up enormously behind the distracting bustle of life, silently on the further side of the noise and chatter. But what were they? What was their form, their name, their meaning? Through the fluttering veil of movement it was impossible to do more than dimly guess; one might as well try to look at the stars through the London smoke. If one could stop the movement, or get away from it, then surely one would be able to see clearly the large and silent things beyond. But there was no stopping the movement and there was, somehow, no escaping from it. To check it was impossible; and the gesture of escape was ludicrous. The only sensible thing to do was to go on in the usual way and ignore the things outside the world of noise. That was what Calamy tried to do. But he was conscious, none the less, that the things were still there. They were still calmly and immutably there, however much he might agitate himself and distractedly pretend to ignore them. Mutely they claimed attention. They had claimed it, of late, with a most irritating persistence. Calamy’s response had been to make love to Mary Thriplow. That was something which ought to keep him well occupied. And up to a point it did. Up to a point. The best indoor sport, old Cardan had called it; but one demanded something better. Could he go on like this? Or if not, what should he do? The questions exasperated him. It was because the things were there, outside the tumult, that he had to ask them. They forced themselves on him, those questions. But it was intolerable to be bullied. He refused to let himself be bullied. He’d do what he damned well liked. But then, did he really like philandering with Mary Thriplow? In a way, no doubt, up to a point. But the real answer was no; frankly, no. But yes, yes, he insisted with another part of his mind. He did like it. And even if he didn’t, he’d damned well say that he did. And if necessary he’d damned well do what he didn’t like⁠—just because he chose to. He’d do what he didn’t like; and that was the end of it. He worked himself up into a kind of fury. + 

“What are you thinking about?” Miss Thriplow suddenly asked. + 

“You,” he said; and there was a savage exasperation in his voice, as though he passionately resented the fact that he was thinking about Mary Thriplow. + 

“Tiens!” she said on a note of polite curiosity. + 

“What would you say if I told you I was in love with you?” he asked. + 

“I should say that I didn’t believe you.” + 

“Do you want me to compel you to believe?” + 

“I’d be most interested to know, at any rate, how you proposed to set about it.” + 

Calamy halted, put his hand on Mary Thriplow’s shoulder and turned her round towards him. “By force, if necessary,” he said, looking into her face. + 

Miss Thriplow returned his stare. He looked insolent still, still arrogantly conscious of power; but all the drowsiness and indolence that had veiled his look were now fallen away, leaving his face bare, as it were, and burning with a formidable and satanic beauty. At the sight of this strange and sudden transformation Miss Thriplow felt at once exhilarated and rather frightened. She had never seen that expression on a man’s face before. She had aroused passions, but never a passion so violent, so dangerous as this seemed to be. + 

“By force?” By the tone of her voice, by the mockery of her smile she tried to exasperate him into yet fiercer passion. + 

Calamy tightened his grip on her shoulder. Under his hand the bones felt small and fragile. When he spoke, he found that he had been clenching his teeth. “By force,” he said. “Like this.” And taking her head between his two hands he bent down and kissed her, angrily, again and again. Why do I do this? he was thinking. This is a folly. There are other things, important things. “Do you believe me now?” he asked. + 

Mary Thriplow’s face was flushed. “You’re insufferable,” she said. But she was not really angry with him. + 

IV + 

“Why have you been so funny all vese days?” Lord Hovenden had at last brought himself to put the long-premeditated question. + 

“Funny?” Irene echoed on another note, trying to make a joke of it, as though she didn’t understand what he meant. But of course she did understand, perfectly well. + 

They were sitting in the thin luminous shadow of the olive trees. The bright sky looked down at them between the sparse twi-coloured leaves. On the parched grass about the roots of the trees the sunlight scattered an innumerable golden mintage. They were sitting at the edge of a little terrace scooped out of the steep slope, their legs dangling, their backs propped against the trunk of a hoary tree. + 

“You know,” said Hovenden. “Why did you suddenly avoid me?” + 

“Did I?” + 

“You know you did.” + 

Irene was silent for a moment before she admitted: “Yes, perhaps I did.” + 

“But why,” he insisted, “why?” + 

“I don’t know,” she answered unhappily. She couldn’t tell him about Aunt Lilian. + 

Her tone emboldened Lord Hovenden to become more insistent. “You don’t know?” he repeated sarcastically, as though he were a lawyer carrying out a cross-examination. “Perhaps you were walking in your sleep all ve time.” + 

“Don’t be stupid,” she said in a weary little voice. + 

“At any rate, I’m not too stupid to see vat you were running after vat fellow Chelifer.” Lord Hovenden became quite red in the face as he spoke. For the sake of his manly dignity, it was a pity that his th’s should sound quite so childish. + 

Irene said nothing, but sat quite still, her head bent, looking down at the slanting grove of olives. Framed within the square-cut hair, her face was sad. + 

“If you were so much interested in him, why did you suggest vat we should go for a walk vis afternoon?” he asked. “Perhaps you fought I was Chelifer.” He was possessed by an urgent desire to say disagreeable and hurting things. And yet he was perfectly aware, all the time, that he was making a fool of himself and being unfair to her. But the desire was irresistible. + 

“Why do you try to spoil everything?” she asked with an exasperating sadness and patience. + 

“I don’t try to spoil anyfing,” Hovenden answered irritably. “I merely ask a simple question.” + 

“You know I don’t take the slightest interest in Chelifer,” she said. + 

“Ven why do you trot after him all day long, like a little dog?” + 

The boy’s stupidity and insistence began to annoy her. “I don’t,” she said angrily. “And in any case it’s no business of yours.” + 

“Oh, it’s no business of mine, is it?” said Hovenden in a provocative voice. “Fanks for ve information.” And he was pointedly silent. + 

For a long time neither of them spoke. Some dark brown sheep with bells round their necks came straying between the trees a little way down the slope. With set, sad faces the two young people looked at them. The bells made a tinkling as the creatures moved. The sweet thin noise sounded, for some reason, extremely sad in their ears. Sad, too, was the bright sky between the leaves; profoundly melancholy the redder, richer light of the declining sun, colouring the silver leaves, the grey trunks, the parched thin grass. It was Hovenden who at last broke silence. His anger, his desire to say hurting, disagreeable things had utterly evaporated; there remained only the conviction that he had made a fool of himself and been unfair⁠—only that and the profound aching love which had given his anger, his foolish cruel desire such force. “You know I don’t take the slightest interest in Chelifer.” He hadn’t known but now that she had said so, and in that tone of voice, now he knew. One couldn’t doubt; and even if one could, was it worth doubting? + 

“Look here,” he said at last, in a muffled voice, “I made a fool of myself, I’m afraid. I’ve said stupid things. I’m sorry, Irene. Will you forgive me?” + 

Irene turned towards him the little square window in her hair. Her face looked out of it smiling. She gave him her hand. “One day I’ll tell you,” she said. + 

They sat there hand in hand for what seemed to them at once a very long time and a timeless instant. They said nothing, but they were very happy. The sun set. A grey half-night came creeping in under the trees. Between the black silhouetted leaves the sky looked exceedingly pale. Irene sighed. + 

“I think we ought to be getting back,” she said reluctantly. + 

Hovenden was the first to scramble to his feet. He offered Irene his hand. She took it and raised herself lightly up, coming forward as she rose towards him. They stood for a moment very close together. Lord Hovenden suddenly took her in his arms and kissed her again and again. Irene uttered a cry. She struggled, she pushed him away. + 

“No, no,” she entreated, averting her face, leaning back, away from his kisses. “Please.” And when he let her go, she covered her face with her hands and began to cry. “Why did you spoil it again?” she asked through her tears. Lord Hovenden was overwhelmed with remorse. “We’d been so happy, such friends.” Irene dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief; but her voice still came sobbingly. + 

“I’m a brute,” said Hovenden; and he spoke with such a passion of self-condemnation that Irene couldn’t help laughing. There was something positively comic about a repentance so sudden and wholehearted. + 

“No, you’re not a brute,” she said. Her sobs and her laughter were getting curiously mixed up together. “You’re a dear and I like you. So much, so much. But you mustn’t do that, I don’t know why. It spoils everything. I was a goose to cry. But somehow⁠ ⁠…” She shook her head. “I like you so much,” she repeated. “But not like that. Not now. Some day, perhaps. Not now. You won’t spoil it again? Promise.” + 

Lord Hovenden promised devoutly. They walked home through the grey night of the olive orchard. + 

That evening at dinner the conversation turned on feminism. Under pressure from Mr. Cardan, Mrs. Aldwinkle reluctantly admitted that there was a considerable difference between Maud Valerie White and Beethoven and that Angelica Kauffmann compared unfavourably with Giotto. But she protested, on the other hand, that in matters of love women were, definitely, treated unfairly. + 

“We claim all your freedom,” she said dramatically. + 

Knowing that Aunt Lilian liked her to take part in the conversation, and remembering⁠—for she had a good memory⁠—a phrase that her aunt used at one time to employ frequently, but which had recently faded out of the catalogue of her favourite locutions, Irene gravely brought it out. “Contraception,” she pronounced, “has rendered chastity superfluous.” + 

Mr. Cardan leaned back in his chair and roared with laughter. + 

But across the prophetical face of Mr. Falx there passed a pained expression. He looked anxiously at his pupil, hoping that he had not heard, or at least had not understood what had just been said. He caught Mr. Cardan’s winking eye and frowned. Could corruption and moral laxity go further? his glance seemed to inquire. He looked at Irene; that such a youthful, innocent appearance should be wedded to so corrupt a mind appalled him. He felt glad, for Hovenden’s sake, that their stay in this bad house was not to last much longer. If it were not for the necessity of behaving politely, he would have left the place at once; like Lot, he would have shaken the dust of it from his feet. + 

V + 

“When the butcher’s boy tells you in confidence, and with an eye to a tip, that the grocer’s brother has a very fine piece of very old sculpture which he is prepared to part with for a moderate consideration, what do you suppose he means?” Walking slowly uphill among the olive trees, Mr. Cardan meditatively put the question. + 

“I suppose he means what he says,” said Miss Thriplow. + 

“No doubt,” said Mr. Cardan, halting for a moment to wipe his face, which shone, even though the sun came only slantingly through the thin foliage of the olive trees, with an excess of heat. Miss Thriplow in the green uniform of the musical comedy schoolgirl looked wonderfully cool and neat beside her unbuttoned companion. “But the point is this: what exactly is it that he says? What is a butcher’s boy likely to mean when he says that a piece of sculpture is very beautiful and very old?” They resumed their climbing. Below them, through a gap in the trees, they could see the roofs and the slender tower of the Cybo Malaspina palace, and below these again the dolls’ village of Vezza, the map-like plain, the sea. + 

“I should ask him, if you want to know.” Miss Thriplow spoke rather tartly; it was not to talk of butchers’ boys that she had accepted Mr. Cardan’s invitation to go for a walk with him. She wanted to hear Mr. Cardan’s views on life, literature and herself. He knew a thing or two, it seemed to her, about all these subjects. Too many things, and not exactly the right ones at that, about the last. Too many⁠—it was precisely for that reason that Miss Thriplow liked to talk with him. Horrors always exercise a fascination. And now, after the prolonged silence, he was starting on butchers’ boys. + 

“I have asked him,” said Mr. Cardan. “But do you suppose there’s anything intelligible to be got out of him? All I can gather is that the sculpture represents a man⁠—not a whole man, part of a man, and that it’s made of marble. Beyond that I can discover nothing.” + 

“Why do you want to discover?” asked Miss Thriplow. + 

Mr. Cardan shook his head. “Alas,” he said, “for sordid reasons. You remember what the poet wrote? + 

I have been in love, in debt and in drink + 

This many and many a year; + 

And these are three evils too great, one would think, + 

For one poor mortal to bear. + 

’Twas love that first drove me to drinking, + 

And drinking first drove me to debt, + 

And though I have struggled and struggled and strove, + 

I cannot get out of them yet. + 

There’s nothing but money can cure me + 

And ease me of all my pain; + 

’Twill pay all my debts and remove all my lets, + 

And my mistress who cannot endure me + 

Will turn to and love me again, + 

Will turn to and love me again. + 

There’s a summary of a lifetime for you. One has no regrets, of course. But still, one does need cash⁠—needs it the more, alas, the older one grows, and has less of it. What other reason, do you think, would send me sweating up this hill to talk with the village grocer about his brother’s statuary?” + 

“You mean that you’d buy it if it were worth anything?” + 

“At the lowest possible price,” confirmed Mr. Cardan. “And sell it at the highest. If I had ever adopted a profession,” he continued, “I think it would have been art dealing. It has the charm of being more dishonest than almost any other form of licensed brigandage in existence. And dishonest, moreover, in a much more amusing way. Financiers, it is true, can swindle on a larger scale; but their swindling is mostly impersonal. You may ruin thousands of trusting investors; but you haven’t the pleasure of knowing your victims. Whereas if you’re an art dealer, your swindling, though less extensive, is most amusingly personal. You meet your victims face to face and do them down. You take advantage of the ignorance or urgent poverty of the vendor to get the work for nothing. You then exploit the snobbery and the almost equally profound ignorance of the rich buyer to make him take the stuff off your hands at some fantastic price. What huge elation one must feel when one has succeeded in bringing off some splendid coup! bought a blackened panel from some decayed gentleman in need of a new suit, cleaned it up and sold it again to a rich snob who thinks that a collection and the reputation of being a patron of the ancient arts will give him a leg up in society⁠—what vast Rabelaisian mirth! No, decidedly, if I were not Diogenes and idle, I would be Alexander, critic and dealer. A really gentlemanly profession.” + 

“Can you never be serious?” asked Miss Thriplow, who would have preferred the conversation to turn on something more nearly related to her own problems. + 

Mr. Cardan smiled at her. “Can anybody fail to be serious when it’s a question of making money?” + 

“I give you up,” said Miss Thriplow. + 

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Cardan protested. “But perhaps it’s all for the best. Meanwhile, what about that butcher’s boy? What does he mean by a bit of very old sculpture? Is it the head of some rich Etruscan cheese-monger of Lunae that they’ve dug up? Some long-nosed primitive oriental with a smile of imbecile rapture on his face? Or a fragment of one of his Hellenized posterity, reclining on the lid of his sarcophagus as though along his prandial couch and staring blankly out of a head that might, if Praxiteles had carved it, have been Apollo’s, but which the Etruscan mason has fattened into an all too human grossness? Or perhaps it’s a Roman bust, so thoroughly real, lifelike and up-to-date that, but for the toga, we might almost take it for our old friend Sir William Midrash, the eminent civil servant. Or perhaps⁠—and I should like that better⁠—perhaps it dates from that strange, grey Christian dawn that followed the savage night into which the empire went down. I can imagine some fragment from Modena or Toscanella⁠—some odd, unpredictable figure bent by excess of faith into the most profoundly expressive and symbolic of attitudes: a monster physically, a barbarism, a little mumbo-jumbo, but glowing so passionately with inward life⁠—it may be lovely, it may be malignant⁠—that it is impossible to look at it with indifference or merely as a shape, ugly or beautiful. Yes. I should like the thing to be a piece of Romanesque carving. I’d give the butcher’s boy an extra five francs if it were. But if it turned out to be one of those suave Italian Gothic saints elegantly draped and leaning a little sideways, like saplings in the mystical breeze⁠—and it might be, you never can tell⁠—I’d deduct five francs. Not but what it mightn’t fetch just as much in the American market. But how they bore me, those accomplished Gothicisms, how they bore me!” + 

They were at the top of the hill. Emerging from the sloping forest of olive trees, the road now ran along a bare and almost level ridge. Some little way off, where the ground began to rise once more towards further heights, one could see a cluster of houses and a church tower. Mr. Cardan pointed. + 

“There,” he said, “we shall find out what the butcher’s boy really did mean. But in the meantime it’s amusing to go on speculating. For example, suppose it were a chunk of a bas-relief designed by Giotto. Eh? Something so grand, so spiritually and materially beautiful that you could fall down and worship it. But I’d be very well pleased, I assure you, with a bit of a sarcophagus from the earliest renaissance. Some figure marvellously bright, ethereal and pure, like an angel, but an angel, not of the kingdom of heaven; an angel of some splendid and, alas, imaginary kingdom of earth. Ah,” pursued Mr. Cardan, shaking his head, “that’s the kingdom one would like to live in⁠—the kingdom of ancient Greece, purged of every historical Greek that ever existed, and colonized out of the imaginations of modern artists, scholars and philosophers. In such a world one might live positively, so to speak⁠—live with the stream, in the direction of the main current⁠—not negatively, as one has to now, in reaction against the general trend of existence.” + 

Positive and negative living. Miss Thriplow made a mental note of the notions. It might be an idea to work up in an article. It might even throw light on her own problems. Perhaps what one suffered from was the sense of being negative and in reaction. More positiveness⁠—that was what one needed. The conversation, she thought, seemed to be growing more serious. They walked on for a moment in silence. Mr. Cardan broke it at last. + 

“Or can it possibly be,” he said, “that the grocer’s brother has lighted on some fragmentary rough-hewing by Michelangelo, begun in a frenzy while he was living among these mountains and abandoned when he left them? Some tormented Slave, struggling to free himself more of his inward than his outward chains; straining with more than human violence, but at the same time pensively, with a passion concentrated upon itself instead of explosively dissipated, as in the baroque, which all too fatally and easily developed out of him? And after all our hopes and speculations, that’s what my treasure will probably resolve itself into⁠—a bit of seventeenth-century baroque. I picture the torso of a waltzing angel in the middle of a whirlwind of draperies turning up to heaven the ecstatic eye of the clergyman in a Lyceum melodrama; or perhaps a Bacchus, dancing by a miracle of virtuosity on one marble leg, his mouth open in a tipsy laugh and the fingers of both hands splayed out to their fullest extent, just to show what can be done by a sculptor who knows his business; or the bust of a prince, prodigiously alive and characteristic, wearing a collar of Brussels lace imitated in stone down to the finest thread. The butcher’s boy kept on insisting that the thing was very beautiful as well as very old. And it’s obvious, now I come to think of it, that he’d really and sincerely like baroque and baroque only, just because it would be so familiar to him, because it would be just like everything he had been brought up to admire. For by some strange and malignant fate the Italians, once arrived at baroque, seem to have got stuck there. They are still up to the eyes in it. Consider their literature, their modern painting and architecture, their music⁠—it’s all baroque. It gesticulates rhetorically, it struts across stages, it sobs and bawls in its efforts to show you how passionate it is. In the midst, like a huge great Jesuit church, stands d’Annunzio.” + 

“I should have thought,” said Miss Thriplow with barbed ingenuousness, “that you’d have liked that sort of elaboration and virtuosity. It’s ‘amusing’⁠—isn’t that the word?” + 

“True,” answered Mr. Cardan, “I like being amused. But I demand from my art the added luxury of being moved. And, somehow, one can’t feel emotion about anything so furiously and consciously emotional as these baroque things. It’s not by making wild and passionate gestures that an artist can awake emotion in the spectator. It isn’t done that way. These seventeenth-century Italians tried to express passion by making use of passionate gestures. They only succeeded in producing something that either leaves us cold⁠—though it may, as you say, amuse us⁠—or which actually makes us laugh. Art which is to move its contemplator must itself be still; it is almost an aesthetic law. Passion must never be allowed to dissipate itself in wild splashings and boilings over. It must be shut up, so to speak, and compressed and moulded by the intellect. Concentrated within a calm, untroubled form, its strength will irresistibly move. Styles that protest too much are not fit for serious, tragical use. They are by nature suited to comedy, whose essence is exaggeration. That is why good romantic art is so rare. Romanticism, of which the seventeenth-century baroque style is a queer subspecies, makes violent gestures; it relies on violent contrasts of light and shade, on stage effects; it is ambitious to present you with emotion in the raw and palpitating form. That is to say, the romantic style is in essence a comic style. And, except in the hands of a few colossal geniuses, romantic art is, in point of historical fact, almost always comic. Think of all the hair-raising romances written during the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries; now that the novelty has worn off them, we perceive them for what they are⁠—the broadest comedies. Even writers of a great and genuine talent were betrayed by the essentially comic nature of the style into being farcical when they meant to be romantically tragical. Balzac, for example, in a hundred serious passages; George Sand in all her earlier novels; Beddoes, when he tries to make his Death’s Jest Book particularly bloodcurdling; Byron in Cain; de Musset in Rolla. And what prevents Herman Melville’s Moby Dick from being a really great book is precisely the pseudo-Shakespearean idiom in which what are meant to be the most tragical passages are couched⁠—an idiom to whose essential suitability to comedy the exceptional tragic successes of Shakespeare himself, of Marlowe and a few others has unfortunately blinded all their imitators. Moreover, if the romantic style is essentially fitted to comedy, it is also true, conversely, that the greatest comic works have been written in a romantic style. Pantagruel and the Contes Drolatiques; the conversation of Falstaff and Wilkins Micawber; Aristophanes’ Frogs; Tristram Shandy. And who will deny that the finest passages in Milton’s reverberating prose are precisely those where he is writing satirically and comically? A comic writer is a very large and copious man with a zest for all that is earthy, who unbuttons himself and lets himself freely go, following wherever his indefatigably romping spirit leads him. The unrestrained, exaggerated, wildly gesticulating manner which is the romantic manner exactly fulfils his need.” + 

Miss Thriplow listened with growing attention. This was serious; moreover, it seemed really to touch her own problems. In her new novel she had done her best to throw off the light satiric vestments in which, in the past, she had clothed her tendernesses; this time, she had decided to give the public her naked heart. Mr. Cardan was making her wonder whether she wasn’t exposing it in too palpitating a manner. + 

“When you come to pictorial art,” Mr. Cardan went on, “you find that seriousness and romanticism are even less frequently combined than in literature. The greatest triumphs of the nineteenth-century romantic style are to be found precisely among the comedians and the makers of grotesques. Daumier, for example, produced at once the most comic and the most violently romantic pictures ever made. And Doré, when he ceased from trying to paint serious pictures in the romantic style⁠—with what involuntarily ludicrous results I leave you to recall to mind⁠—and applied himself to illustrating Don Quixote and the Contes Drolatiques in the same romantic terms, Doré produced masterpieces. Indeed, the case of Doré quite clinches my argument. Here was a man who did precisely the same romantic things in both his serious and his comic works, and who succeeded in making what was meant to be sublime ludicrous and what was meant to be ludicrous sublime in its rich, extravagant, romantic grotesqueness.” + 

They had passed the outlying houses of the village and were walking slowly up its single, steep street. + 

“That’s very true,” said Miss Thriplow pensively. She was wondering whether she oughtn’t to tone down a little that description in her new novel of the agonies of the young wife when she discovers that her husband had been unfaithful to her. A dramatic moment, that. The young wife has just had her first baby⁠—with infinite suffering⁠—and now, still very frail, but infinitely happy, lies convalescent. The handsome young husband, whom she adores and who, she supposes, adores her, comes in with the afternoon post. He sits down by her bed, and putting the bunch of letters on the counterpane begins opening his correspondence. She opens hers too. Two boring notes. She tosses them aside. Without looking at the address, she opens another envelope, unfolds the sheet within and reads: “Doodlums darling, I shall be waiting for you tomorrow evening in our love-nest.⁠ ⁠…” She looks at the envelope; it is addressed to her husband. Her feelings⁠ ⁠… Miss Thriplow wondered; yes, perhaps, in the light of what Mr. Cardan had been saying, the passage was a little too palpitating. Particularly that bit where the baby is brought in to be suckled. Miss Thriplow sighed; she’d read through the chapter critically when she got home. + 

“Well,” said Mr. Cardan, interrupting the course of her thoughts, “here we are. It only remains to find out where the grocer lives, and to find out from the grocer where his brother lives, and to find out from the brother what his treasure is and how much he wants for it, and then to find someone to buy it for fifty thousand pounds⁠—and we’ll live happily ever after. What?” + 

He stopped a passing child and put his question. The child pointed up the street. They walked on. + 

At the door of his little shop sat the grocer, unoccupied at the moment, taking the sun and air and looking on at such stray drops from the flux of life as trickled occasionally along the village street. He was a stout man with a large fleshy face that looked as though it had been squeezed perpendicularly, so broadly it bulged, so close to one another the horizontal lines of eyes, nose and mouth. His cheeks and chin were black with five days’ beard⁠—for today was Thursday and shaving-time only came round on Saturday evening. Small, sly, black eyes looked out from between pouchy lids. He had thick lips, and his teeth when he smiled were yellow. A long white apron, unexpectedly clean, was tied at neck and waist and fell down over his knees. It was the apron that struck Miss Thriplow’s imagination⁠—the apron and the thought that this man wore it, draped round him like an ephod, when he was cutting up ham and sausages, when he was serving out sugar with a little shovel.⁠ ⁠… + 

“How extraordinarily nice and jolly he looks!” she said enthusiastically, as they approached. + 

“Does he?” asked Mr. Cardan in some surprise. To his eyes the man looked like a hardly mitigated ruffian. + 

“So simple and happy and contented!” Miss Thriplow went on. “One envies them their lives.” She could almost have wept over the little shovel⁠—momentarily the masonic emblem of pre-lapsarian ingenuousness. “We make everything so unnecessarily complicated for ourselves, don’t we?” + 

“Do we?” said Mr. Cardan. + 

“These people have no doubts, or afterthoughts,” pursued Miss Thriplow, “or⁠—what’s worse than afterthoughts⁠—simultaneous-thoughts. They know what they want and what’s right; they feel just what they ought to feel by nature⁠—like the heroes in the Iliad⁠—and act accordingly. And the result is, I believe, that they’re much better than we are, much gooder, we used to say when we were children; the word’s more expressive. Yes, much gooder. Now you’re laughing at me!” + 

Mr. Cardan twinkled at her with benevolent irony. “I assure you I’m not,” he declared. + 

“But I shouldn’t mind if you were,” said Miss Thriplow. “For after all, in spite of all that you people may say or think, it’s the only thing that matters⁠—being good.” + 

“I entirely agree,” said Mr. Cardan. + 

“And it’s easier if you’re like that.” She nodded in the direction of the white apron. + 

Mr. Cardan nodded, a little dubiously. + 

“Sometimes,” Miss Thriplow continued, with a gush of confidence that made her words come more rapidly, “sometimes, when I get on a bus and take my ticket from the conductor, I suddenly feel the tears come into my eyes at the thought of this life, so simple and straightforward, so easy to live well, even if it is a hard one⁠—and perhaps, too, just because it is a hard one. Ours is so difficult.” She shook her head. + 

By this time they were within a few yards of the shopkeeper, who, seeing that they were proposing to enter his shop, rose from his seat at the door and darted in to take up his stand, professionally, behind the counter. + 

They followed him into the shop. It was dark within and filled with a violent smell of goat’s milk cheese, pickled tunny, tomato preserve and highly flavoured sausage. + 

“Whee-ew!” said Miss Thriplow, and pulling out a small handkerchief, she took refuge with the ghost of Parma violets. It was a pity that these simple lives in white aprons had to be passed amid such surroundings. + 

“Rather deafening, eh?” said Mr. Cardan, twinkling. “Puzza,” he added, turning to the shopkeeper. “It stinks.” + 

The man looked at Miss Thriplow, who stood there, her nose in the oasis of her handkerchief, and smiled indulgently. “I forestieri sono troppo delicati. Troppo delicati,” he repeated. + 

“He’s quite right,” said Mr. Cardan. “We are. In the end, I believe, we shall come to sacrifice everything to comfort and cleanliness. Personally, I always have the greatest suspicion of your perfectly hygienic and well-padded Utopias. As for this particular stink,” he sniffed the air, positively with relish, “I don’t really know what you have to object to it. It’s wholesome, it’s natural, it’s tremendously historical. The shops of the Etruscan grocers, you may be sure, smelt just as this does. No, on the whole, I entirely agree with our friend here.” + 

“Still,” said Miss Thriplow, speaking in a muffled voice through the folds of her handkerchief, “I shall stick to my violets. However synthetic.” + 

Having ordered a couple of glasses of wine, one of which he offered to the grocer, Mr. Cardan embarked on a diplomatic conversation about the object of his visit. At the mention of his brother and the sculpture, the grocer’s face took on an expression of altogether excessive amiability. He bent his thick lips into smiles; deep folds in the shape of arcs of circles appeared in his fat cheeks. He kept bowing again and again. Every now and then he joyously laughed, emitting a blast of garlicky breath that smelt so powerfully like acetylene that one was tempted to put a match to his mouth in the hope that he would immediately break out into a bright white flame. He confirmed all that the butcher’s boy had said. It was all quite true; he had a brother; and his brother had a piece of marble statuary that was beautiful and old, old, old. Unfortunately, however, his brother had removed from this village and had gone down to live in the plain, near the lake of Massaciuccoli, and the sculpture had gone with him. Mr. Cardan tried to find out from him what the work of art looked like; but he could gather nothing beyond the fact that it was beautiful and old and represented a man. + 

“It isn’t like this, I suppose?” asked Mr. Cardan, bending himself into the attitude of a Romanesque demon and making a demoniac grimace. + 

The grocer thought not. Two peasant women who had come in for cheese and oil looked on with a mild astonishment. These foreigners⁠ ⁠… + 

“Or like this?” He propped his elbow on the counter and, half reclining, conjured up, by his attitude and his fixed smile of imbecile ecstasy, visions of Etruscan revelry. + 

Again the grocer shook his head. + 

“Or like this?” He rolled his eyes towards heaven, like a baroque saint. + 

But the grocer seemed doubtful even of this. + 

Mr. Cardan wiped his forehead. “If I could make myself look like a Roman bust,” he said to Miss Thriplow, “or a bas-relief of Giotto, or a renaissance sarcophagus, or an unfinished group by Michelangelo, I would. But it’s beyond my powers.” He shook his head. “For the moment I give it up.” + 

He took out his pocketbook and asked for the brother’s address. The grocer gave directions; Mr. Cardan carefully took them down. Smiling and bowing, the grocer ushered them out into the street, Miss Thriplow vailed her handkerchief and drew a breath of air⁠—redolent, however, even here, of organic chemistry. + 

“Patience,” said Mr. Cardan, “tenacity of purpose. One needs them here.” + 

They walked slowly down the street. They had only gone a few yards when the noise of a violent altercation made them turn round. At the door of the shop the grocer and his two customers were furiously disputing. Voices were raised, the grocer’s deep and harsh, the women’s shrill; hands moved in violent and menacing gestures, yet gracefully withal, as was natural in the hands of those whose ancestors had taught the old masters of painting all they ever knew of expressive and harmonious movement. + 

“What is it?” asked Miss Thriplow. “It looks like the preliminaries of a murder.” + 

Mr. Cardan smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s nothing,” he said. “They’re just calling him a robber; that’s all.” He listened for a moment more to the shouting. “A little question of short weight, it seems.” He smiled at Miss Thriplow. “Should we go on?” + 

They turned away; the sound of the dispute followed them down the street. Miss Thriplow did not know whether to be grateful to Mr. Cardan for saying nothing more about her friend in the white apron. These simple folk⁠ ⁠… the little shovel for the sugar⁠ ⁠… so much better, so much gooder than we.⁠ ⁠… In the end she almost wished that he would say something about it. Mr. Cardan’s silence seemed more ironic than any words. + 

VI + 

The sun had set. Against a pale green sky the blue and purple mountains lifted a jagged silhouette. Mr. Cardan found himself alone in the middle of the flat plain at their feet. He was standing on the bank of a broad ditch, brimming with gleaming water, that stretched away in a straight line apparently for miles across the land, to be lost in the vague twilight distance. Here and there a line of tall thin poplars marked the position of other dykes, intersecting the plain in all directions. There was not a house in sight, not a human being, not even a cow or a grazing donkey. Far away on the slopes of the mountains, whose blue and purple were rapidly darkening to a uniform deep indigo, little yellow lights began to appear, singly or in clusters, attesting the presence of a village or a solitary farm. Mr. Cardan looked at them with irritation; very pretty, no doubt, but he had seen it done better on many musical comedy stages. And in any case, what was the good of a light six or seven miles away, on the hills, when he was standing in the middle of the plain, with nobody in sight, night coming on, and these horrible ditches to prevent one from taking the obvious beeline towards civilization? He had been a fool, he reflected, three or four times over: a fool to refuse Lilian’s offer of the car and go on foot (this fetish of exercise! still, he would certainly have to cut down his drinking if he didn’t take it); a fool to have started so late in the afternoon; a fool to have accepted Italian estimates of distance; and a fool to have followed directions for finding the way given by people who mixed up left and right and, when you insisted on knowing which they meant, told you that either would bring you where you wanted to go. The path which Mr. Cardan had been following seemed to have come to a sudden end in the waters of this ditch; perhaps it was a suicides’ path. The lake of Massaciuccoli should be somewhere on the further side of the ditch; but where? and how to get across? The twilight rapidly deepened. In a few minutes the sun would have gone down its full eighteen degrees below the horizon and it would be wholly dark. Mr. Cardan swore; but that got him no further. In the end he decided that the best thing to do would be to walk slowly and cautiously along this ditch, in the hope that in time one might arrive, at any rate somewhere. Meanwhile, it would be well to fortify oneself with a bite and a sup. He sat down on the grass and opening his jacket, dipped into the capacious poacher’s pockets excavated in its lining, producing first a loaf, then a few inches of a long polony, then a bottle of red wine; Mr. Cardan was always prepared against emergencies. + 

The bread was stale, the sausage rather horsey and spiced with garlic; but Mr. Cardan, who had had no tea, ate with a relish. Still more appreciatively he drank. In a little while he felt a little more cheerful. Such are the little crosses, he reflected philosophically, the little crosses one has to bear when one sets out to earn money. If he got through the evening without falling into a ditch, he’d feel that he had paid lightly for his treasure. The greatest bore was these mosquitoes; he lighted a cigar and tried to fumigate them to a respectful distance. Without much success, however. Perhaps the brutes were malarial, too. There might be a little of the disease still hanging about in these marshes; one never knew. It would be tiresome to end one’s days with recurrent fever and an enlarged spleen. It would be tiresome, for that matter, to end one’s days anyhow, in one’s bed or out, naturally or unnaturally, by the act of God or of the King’s enemies. Mr. Cardan’s thoughts took on, all at once, a dismal complexion. Old age, sickness, decrepitude; the bath-chair, the doctor, the bright efficient nurse; and the long agony, the struggle for breath, the thickening darkness, the end, and then⁠—how did that merry little song go? + 

More work for the undertaker, + 

’Nother little job for the coffin-maker. + 

At the local cemetery they are + 

Very very busy with a brand new grave. + 

He’ll keep warm next winter. + 

Mr. Cardan hummed the tune to himself cheerfully enough. But his tough, knobbly face became so hard, so strangely still, an expression of such bitterness, such a profound melancholy, appeared in his winking and his supercilious eye, that it would have startled and frightened a man to look at him. But there was nobody in that deepening twilight to see him. He sat there alone. + 

At the local cemetery they are + 

Very very busy with a brand new grave⁠ ⁠… + 

He went on humming. “If I were to fall sick,” he was thinking, “who would look after me? Suppose one were to have a stroke. Hemorrhage on the brain; partial paralysis; mumbling speech; the tongue couldn’t utter what the brain thought; one was fed like a baby; clysters; such a bright doctor, rubbing his hands and smelling of disinfectant and eau de cologne; saw nobody but the nurse; no friends; or once a week, perhaps, for an hour, out of charity; ‘Poor old Cardan, done for, I’m afraid; must send the old chap a fiver⁠—hasn’t a penny, you know; get up a subscription; what a bore; astonishing that he can last so long.⁠ ⁠…’ ” + 

He’ll keep warm next winter. + 

The tune ended on a kind of trumpet call, rising from the dominant to the tonic⁠—one dominant, three repeated tonics, drop down again to the dominant and then on the final syllable of “winter” the last tonic. Finis, and no da capo, no second movement. + 

Mr. Cardan took another swig from his bottle; it was nearly empty now. + 

Perhaps one ought to have married. Kitty, for example. She would be old now and fat; or old and thin, like a skeleton very imperfectly disguised. Still, he had been very much in love with Kitty. Perhaps it would have been a good thing if he had married her. Pooh! with a burst of mocking laughter Mr. Cardan laughed aloud savagely. Marry indeed! She looked very coy, no doubt; but you bet, she was a little tart underneath, and lascivious as you make them. He remembered her with hatred and contempt. Portentous obscenities reverberated through the chambers of his mind. + 

He thought of arthritis, he thought of gout, of cataract, of deafness.⁠ ⁠… And in any case, how many years were left him? Ten, fifteen, twenty if he were exceptional. And what years, what years! + 

Mr. Cardan emptied the bottle and replacing the cork threw it into the black water beneath him. The wine had done nothing to improve his mood. He wished to God he were back at the palace, with people round him to talk to. Alone, he was without defence. He tried to think of something lively and amusing; indoor sports, for example. But instead of indoor sports he found himself contemplating visions of disease, decrepitude, death. And it was the same when he tried to think of reasonable, serious things: what is art, for example? and what was the survival value to a species of eyes or wings or protective colouring in their rudimentary state, before they were developed far enough to see, fly or protect? Why should the individuals having the first and still quite useless variation in the direction of something useful have survived more effectively than those who were handicapped by no eccentricity? Absorbing themes. But Mr. Cardan couldn’t keep his attention fixed on them. General paralysis of the insane, he reflected, was luckily an ailment for which he had not qualified in the past; luckily! miraculously, even! But stone, but neuritis, but fatty degeneration, but diabetes.⁠ ⁠… Lord, how he wished he had somebody to talk to! + 

And all at once, as though in immediate answer to his prayer, he heard the sound of voices approaching through the now complete darkness. “Thank the Lord!” said Mr. Cardan, and scrambling to his feet he walked in the direction from which the voices came. Two black silhouettes, one tall and masculine, the other, very small, belonging to a woman, loomed up out of the dark. Mr. Cardan removed the cigar from his mouth, took off his hat and bowed in their direction. + 

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” he began, + 

“mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, + 

che la diritta via era smarrita.” + 

How lucky that Dante should also have lost his way, six hundred and twenty-four years ago! “In a word,” Mr. Cardan went on, “ho perso la mia strada⁠—though I have my doubts whether that’s very idiomatic. Forse potrebbero darmi qualche indicazione.” In the presence of the strangers and at the sound of his own voice conversing, all Mr. Cardan’s depression had vanished. He was delighted by the fantastic turn he had managed to give the conversation at its inception. Perhaps with a little ingenuity he would be able to find an excuse for treating them to a little Leopardi. It was so amusing to astonish the natives. + 

The two silhouettes, meanwhile, had halted at a little distance. When Mr. Cardan had finished his macaronic self-introduction, the taller of them answered in a harsh and, for a man’s, a shrill voice: “There’s no need to talk Italian. We’re English.” + 

“I’m enchanted to hear it,” Mr. Cardan protested. And he explained at length and in his mother tongue what had happened to him. It occurred to him, at the same time, that this was a very odd place to find a couple of English tourists. + 

The harsh voice spoke again. “There’s a path to Massarosa through the fields,” it said. “And there’s another, in the opposite direction, that joins the Viareggio road. But they’re not very easy to find in the dark, and there are a lot of ditches.” + 

“One can but perish in the attempt,” said Mr. Cardan gallantly. + 

This time it was the woman who spoke. “I think it would be better,” she said, “if you slept at our house for the night. You’ll never find the way. I almost tumbled into the ditch myself just now.” She laughed shrilly and more loudly, Mr. Cardan thought, at greater length, than was necessary. + 

“But have we room?” asked the man in a tone which showed that he was very reluctant to receive a guest. + 

“But you know we’ve got room,” the feminine voice answered in a tone of childlike astonishment. “It’s rough, though.” + 

“That doesn’t matter in the least,” Mr. Cardan assured her. “I’m most grateful to you for your offer,” he added, making haste to accept the invitation before the man could take it back. He had no desire to go wandering at night among these ditches. Moreover, the prospect of having company, and odd company, he guessed, was alluring. “Most grateful,” he repeated. + 

“Well, if you think there’s room,” said the man grudgingly. + 

“Of course there is,” the feminine voice replied, and laughed again. “Isn’t it six spare rooms that we’ve got? or is it seven? Come with us, Mr.⁠ ⁠… Mr.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Cardan.” + 

“… Mr. Cardan. We’re going straight home. Such fun,” she added, and repeated her excessive laughter. + 

Mr. Cardan accompanied them, talking as agreeably as he could all the time. The man listened in a gloomy silence. But his sister⁠—Mr. Cardan had discovered that they were brother and sister and that their name was Elver⁠—laughed heartily at the end of each of Mr. Cardan’s sentences, as though everything he said were a glorious joke; laughed extravagantly and then made some remark which showed that she could have had no idea what Mr. Cardan had meant. Mr. Cardan found himself making his conversation more and more elementary, until as they approached their destination it was frankly addressed to a child of ten. + 

“Here we are at last,” she said, as they emerged from the denser night of a little wood of poplar trees. In front of them rose the large square mass of a house, utterly black but for a single lighted window. + 

To the door, when they knocked, came an old woman with a candle. By its light Mr. Cardan saw his hosts for the first time. That the man was tall and thin he had seen even without the light; he revealed himself now as a stooping, hollow-chested creature of about forty, with long spidery legs and arms and a narrow yellow face, long-nosed, not too powerfully chinned, and lit by small and furtive grey eyes that looked mostly on the ground and seemed afraid of encountering other eyes. Mr. Cardan fancied there was something faintly clerical about his appearance. The man might be a broken-down clergyman⁠—broken-down and possibly, when one considered the furtive eyes, unfrocked as well. He was dressed in a black suit, well cut and not old, but baggy at the knees and bulgy about the pockets of the coat. The nails of his long bony hands were rather dirty and his dark brown hair was too long above the ears and at the back of his neck. + 

Miss Elver was nearly a foot shorter than her brother; but she looked as though Nature had originally intended to make her nearly as tall. For her head was too large for her body and her legs too short. One shoulder was higher than the other. In face she somewhat resembled her brother. One saw in it the same long nose, but better shaped, the same weakness of chin; compensated for, however, by an amiable, ever-smiling mouth and large hazel eyes, not at all furtive or mistrustful, but on the contrary exceedingly confiding in their glance, albeit blank and watery in their brightness and not more expressive than the eyes of a young child. Her age, Mr. Cardan surmised, was twenty-eight or thirty. She wore a queer little shapeless dress, like a sack with holes in it for the head and arms to go through, made of some white material with a large design, that looked like an inferior version of the willow pattern, printed on it in bright red. Round her neck she wore two or three sets of gaudy beads. There were bangles on her wrists, and she carried a little reticule made of woven gold chains. + 

Using gesture to supplement his scanty vocabulary, Mr. Elver gave instructions to the old woman. She left him the candle and went out. Holding the light high, he led the way from the hall into a large room. They sat down on hard uncomfortable chairs round the empty hearth. + 

“Such an uncomfy house!” said Miss Elver. “You know I don’t like Italy much.” + 

“Dear, dear,” said Mr. Cardan. “That’s bad. Don’t you even like Venice? All the boats and gondolas?” And meeting those blank infantile eyes, he felt that he might almost go on about there being no gee-gees. The cat is on the mat; the pig in the gig is a big pig; the lass on the ass a crass lass. And so on. + 

“Venice?” said Miss Elver. “I’ve not been there.” + 

“Florence, then. Don’t you like Florence?” + 

“Nor there, either.” + 

“Rome? Naples?” + 

Miss Elver shook her head. + 

“We’ve only been here,” she said. “All the time.” + 

Her brother, who had been sitting, bent forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him, looking down at the floor, broke silence. “The fact is,” he said in his harsh high voice, “my sister has to keep quiet; she’s doing a rest cure.” + 

“Here?” asked Mr. Cardan. “Doesn’t she find it a bit hot? Rather relaxing?” + 

“Yes, it’s awfully hot, isn’t it?” said Miss Elver. “I’m always telling Philip that.” + 

“I should have thought you’d have been better at the sea, or in the mountains,” said Mr. Cardan. + 

Mr. Elver shook his head. “The doctors,” he said mysteriously, and did not go on. + 

“And the risk of malaria?” + 

“That’s all rot,” said Mr. Elver, with so much violence, such indignation, that Mr. Cardan could only imagine that he was a landed proprietor in these parts and meant to develop his estate as a health resort. + 

“Oh, of course it’s mostly been got rid of,” he said mollifyingly. “The Maremma isn’t what it was.” + 

Mr. Elver said nothing, but scowled at the floor. + 

VII + 

The dining-room was also large and bare. Four candles burned on the long narrow table; their golden brightness faded in the remoter corners to faint twilight; the shadows were huge and black. Entering, Mr. Cardan could fancy himself Don Juan walking down to supper in the Commander’s vault. + 

Supper was at once dismal and exceedingly lively. While his sister chattered and laughed unceasingly with her guest, Mr. Elver preserved throughout the meal an unbroken silence. Gloomily he ate his way through the mixed and fragmentary meal which the old woman kept bringing in, relay after unexpected relay, on little dishes from the kitchen. Gloomily too, with the air of a weak man who drinks to give himself courage and the illusion of strength, he drank glass after glass of the strong red wine. He kept his eyes fixed most of the time on the tablecloth in front of his plate; but every now and then he would look up for a second to dart a glance at the other two⁠—for a moment only, then, fearful of being caught in the act and looked at straight in the face, he turned away again. + 

Mr. Cardan enjoyed his supper. Not that the food was particularly good; it was not. The old woman was one of those inept practitioners of Italian cookery who disguise their shortcomings under floods of tomato sauce, with a pinch of garlic thrown in to make the disguise impenetrable. No, what Mr. Cardan enjoyed was the company. It was a long time since he had sat down with such interesting specimens. One’s range, he reflected, is altogether too narrowly limited. One doesn’t know enough people; one’s acquaintanceship isn’t sufficiently diversified. Burglars, for example, millionaires, imbeciles, clergymen, Hottentots, sea captains⁠—one’s personal knowledge of these most interesting human species is quite absurdly small. Tonight, it seemed to him, he was doing something to widen his range. + 

“I’m so glad we met you,” Miss Elver was saying. “In the dark⁠—such a start you gave me too!” She shrieked with laughter. “We were getting so dull here. Weren’t we, Phil?” She appealed to her brother; but Mr. Elver said nothing, did not even look up. “So dull. I’m awfully glad you were there.” + 

“Not so glad as I am, I assure you,” said Mr. Cardan gallantly. + 

Miss Elver looked at him for a moment, coyly and confidentially; then putting up her hand to her face, as though she were screening herself from Mr. Cardan’s gaze, she turned away, tittering. Her face became quite red. She peeped at him between her fingers and tittered again. + 

It occurred to Mr. Cardan that he’d be in for a breach of promise case very soon if he weren’t careful. Tactfully he changed the subject; asked her what sort of food she liked best and learned that her favourites were strawberries, cream ice and mixed chocolates. + 

The dessert had been eaten. Mr. Elver suddenly looked up and said: “Grace, I think you ought to go to bed.” + 

Miss Elver’s face, from having been bright with laughter, became at once quite overcast. A film of tears floated up into her eyes, making them seem more lustrous; she looked at her brother appealingly. “Must I go?” she said. “Just this once!” She tried to coax him. “This once!” + 

But Mr. Elver was not to be moved. “No, no,” he said sternly. “You must go.” + 

His sister sighed and made a little whimpering sound. But she got up, all the same, and walked obediently towards the door. She was almost on the threshold, when she halted, turned and ran back to say good night to Mr. Cardan. “I’m so glad,” she said, “that we found you. Such fun. Good night. But you mustn’t look at me like that.” She put up her hand again to her face. “Oh, not like that.” And still giggling, she ran out of the room. + 

There was a long silence. + 

“Have some wine,” said Mr. Elver at last, and pushed the flask in Mr. Cardan’s direction. + 

Mr. Cardan replenished his glass and then, politely, did the same for his host. Wine⁠—it was the only thing that was likely to make this dismal devil talk. With his practised and professional eye, Mr. Cardan thought he could detect in his host’s expression certain hardly perceptible symptoms of incipient tipsiness. A spidery creature like that, thought Mr. Cardan contemptuously, couldn’t be expected to hold his liquor well; and he had been putting it down pretty steadily all through supper. A little more and, Mr. Cardan was confident, he’d be as clay in the hands of a sober interrogator (and Mr. Cardan could count on being sober for at least three bottles longer than a poor feeble creature like this); he’d talk, he’d talk; the only difficulty would be to get him to stop talking. + 

“Thanks,” said Mr. Elver, and gloomily gulped down the replenished glass. + 

That’s the style, thought Mr. Cardan; and in his liveliest manner he began to tell the story of the grocer’s brother’s statue and of his pursuit of it, ending up with an account, already more florid than the previous version, of how he lost himself. + 

“I console myself superstitiously,” he concluded, “by the reflection that fate wouldn’t have put me to these little troubles and inconveniences if it weren’t intending to do something handsome by me in the end. I’m paying in advance; but I trust I’m paying for something round and tidy. All the same, what a curse this hunt for money is!” + 

Mr. Elver nodded. “It’s the root of all evil,” he said, and emptied his glass. Unobtrusively Mr. Cardan replenished it. + 

“Quite right,” he confirmed. “And it’s twice cursed, if you’ll allow me to play Portia for a moment: it curses him that hath⁠—can you think of a single really rich person of your acquaintance who wouldn’t be less avaricious, less tyrannous, self-indulgent and generally porkish if he didn’t pay supertax? And it also curses him that hath not, making him do all manner of absurd, humiliating, discreditable things which he’d never think of doing if the hedgerows grew breadfruit and bananas and grapes enough to keep one in free food and liquor.” + 

“It curses him that hath not the most,” said Mr. Elver with a sudden savage animation. This was a subject, evidently, on which he felt deeply. He looked sharply at Mr. Cardan for a moment, then turned away to dip his long nose once more in his tumbler. + 

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Cardan judicially. “At any rate there are more complaints about this curse than about the other. Those that have not complain about their own fate. Those that have do not, it is only those in contact with them⁠—and since the havers are few these too are few⁠—who complain of the curse of having. In my time I have belonged to both categories. Once I had; and I can see that to my fellow men I must then have been intolerable. Now”⁠—Mr. Cardan drew a deep breath and blew it out between trumpeting lips, to indicate the way in which the money had gone⁠—“now I have not. The curse of insolence and avarice has been removed from me. But what low shifts, what abjections this not-having has, by compensation, reduced me to! Swindling peasants out of their artistic property, for example!” + 

“Ah, but that’s not so bad,” cried Mr. Elver excitedly, “as what I’ve had to do. That’s nothing at all. You’ve never been an advertisement canvasser.” + 

“No,” Mr. Cardan admitted, “I’ve never been an advertisement canvasser.” + 

“Then you can’t know what the curse of not-having really is. You can’t have an idea. You’ve no right to talk about the curse.” Mr. Elver’s harsh, unsteady voice rose and fell excitedly as he talked. “No right,” he repeated. + 

“Perhaps I haven’t,” said Mr. Cardan mollifyingly. He took the opportunity to pour out some more wine for his host. Nobody has a right, he reflected, to be more miserable than we are. Each one of us is the most unhappily circumstanced creature in the world. Hence it’s enormously to our credit that we bear up and get on as well as we do. + 

“Look here,” Mr. Elver went on confidentially, and he tried to look Mr. Cardan squarely in the face as he spoke; but the effort was too great and he had to avert his eyes; “look here, let me tell you.” He leaned forward eagerly and slapped the table in front of where Mr. Cardan was sitting to emphasize what he was saying and to call his guest’s attention to it. “My father was a country parson,” he began, talking rapidly and excitedly. “We were very poor⁠—horribly. Not that he minded much: he used to read Dante all the time. That annoyed my mother⁠—I don’t know why. You know the smell of very plain cooking? Steamed puddings⁠—the very thought of them makes me sick now.” He shuddered. “There were four of us then. But my brother was killed in the war and my elder sister died of influenza. So now there’s only me and the one you saw tonight.” He tapped his forehead. “She never grew up, but got stuck somehow. A moron.” He laughed compassionlessly. “Though I don’t know why I need tell you that. For it’s obvious enough, isn’t it?” + 

Mr. Cardan said nothing. His host flinched away from his half-winking, half-supercilious gaze, and fortifying himself with another gulp of wine, which Mr. Cardan a moment later unobtrusively made good from the flask, went on: + 

“Four of us,” he repeated. “You can imagine it wasn’t easy for my father. And my mother died when we were still children. Still, he managed to send us to a rather shabby specimen of the right sort of school, and we’d have gone on to the university if we could have got scholarships. But we didn’t.” At this Mr. Elver, on whom the wine seemed quite suddenly to be making its effect, laughed loudly, as though he had made a very good joke. “So my brother went into an engineering firm, and it was just being arranged, at goodness knows what sort of a sacrifice, that I should be turned into a solicitor, when pop! my father falls down dead with heart failure. Well, he was all right rambling about the Paradiso. But I had to scramble into the nearest job available. That was how I came to be an advertisement canvasser. Oh Lord!” He put his hand over his eyes, as though to shut out some disgusting vision. “Talk of the curse of not-having! For a monthly magazine it was⁠—the sort of one with masses of little ads for indigestion cures; and electric belts to make you strong; and art by correspondence; and Why Wear a Truss? and superfluous hair-killers; and pills to enlarge the female figure; and laboursaving washing machines on the instalment system; and Learn to Play the Piano without Practising; and thirty-six reproductions of nudes from the Paris Salon for five bob; and drink cures in plain wrapper, strictly confidential, and all the rest. There were hundreds and hundreds of small advertisers. I used to spend all my days running round to shops and offices, cajoling old advertisers to renew or fishing for new ones. And, God! how horrible it was! Worming one’s way in to see people who didn’t want to see one and to whom one was only a nuisance, a sort of tiresome beggar on the hunt for money. How polite one had to be to insolent underlings, strong in their office and only too delighted to have an opportunity to play the bully in their turn! And then there was that terrible cheerful, frank, manly manner one had to keep up all the time. The ‘I put it to you, sir,’ straight from the shoulder business; the persuasive honesty, the earnestness and the frightful pretence one had to keep up so strenuously and continuously that one believed in what one was talking about, thought the old magazine a splendid proposition and regarded the inventor of advertisements as the greatest benefactor the human race has ever known. And what a presence one had to have! I could never achieve a presence, somehow. I could never even look neat. And you had to try and impress the devils as a keen, competent salesman. God, it was awful! And the way some of them would treat you. As the damnedest bore in the world⁠—that was the best you could hope. But sometimes they treated you as a robber and a swindler. It was your fault if an insufficient number of imbeciles hadn’t bought galvanic belly bands or learned to play like Busoni without practising. It was your fault; and they’d fly in a rage and curse at you, and you had to be courteous and cheery and tactful and always enthusiastic in the face of it. Good Lord, is there anything more horrible than having to face an angry man? I don’t know why, but it’s somehow so profoundly humiliating to take part in a squabble, even when one’s the aggressor. One feels afterwards that one’s no better than a dog. But when one’s the victim of somebody else’s anger⁠—that’s awful. That’s simply awful,” he repeated, and brought his hand with a clap on to the table to emphasize his words. “I’m not built for that sort of thing. I’m not a bully or a fighter. They used to make me almost ill, those scenes. I couldn’t sleep, thinking of them⁠—remembering those that were past and looking forward with terror to the ones that were coming. People talk about Dostoevsky’s feelings when he was marched out into the barrack square, tied to a post with the firing party lined up in front of him, and then, at the very last second, when his eyes were already bandaged, reprieved. But I tell you I used to go through his experiences half a dozen times a day, nerving myself to face some inevitable interview, the very thought of which made me sick with apprehension. And for me there was no reprieve. The execution was gone through with, to the very end. Good Lord, how often I’ve hesitated at the door of some old bully’s office, all in a bloody sweat, hesitating to cross the threshold. How often I’ve turned back at the last moment and turned into a pub for a nip of brandy to steady my nerves, or gone to a chemist for a pick-me-up! You can’t imagine what I suffered then!” He emptied his glass, as though to drown the rising horror. “Nobody can imagine,” he repeated, and his voice quivered with the anguish of his self-pity. “And then how little one got in return! One suffered daily torture for the privilege of being hardly able to live. And all the things one might have done, if one had had capital! To know for an absolute certainty that⁠—given ten thousand⁠—one could turn them into a hundred thousand in two years; to have the whole plan worked out down to its smallest details, to have thought out exactly how one would live when one was rich, and meanwhile to go on living in poverty and squalor and slavery⁠—that’s the curse of not-having. That’s what I suffered.” Overcome by wine and emotion, Mr. Elver burst into tears. + 

Mr. Cardan patted him on the shoulder. He was too tactful to offer the philosophical consolation that such suffering is the lot of nine-tenths of the human race. Mr. Elver, he could see, would never have forgiven such a denial of his dolorous uniqueness. “You must have courage,” said Mr. Cardan, and pressing the glass into Mr. Elver’s hand he added: “Drink some of this. It’ll do you good.” + 

Mr. Elver drank and wiped his eyes. “But I’ll make them smart for it one day,” he said, banging the table with his fist. The violent self-pity of a moment ago transformed itself into an equally violent anger. “I’ll make them all pay for what I suffered. When I’m rich.” + 

“That’s the spirit,” said Mr. Cardan encouragingly. + 

“Thirteen years of it I had,” Mr. Elver went on. “And two and a half years during the war, dressed in uniform and filling up forms in a wooden hut at Leeds; but that was better than touting for advertisements. Thirteen years. Penal servitude with torture. But I’ll pay them, I’ll pay them.” He banged the table again. + 

“Still,” said Mr. Cardan, “you seem to have got out of it now all right. Living here in Italy is a sign of freedom; at least I hope so.” + 

At these words Mr. Elver’s anger against “them” suddenly dropped. His face took on a mysterious and knowing expression. He smiled to himself what was meant to be a dark, secret and satanic smile, a smile that should be all but imperceptible to the acutest eye. But he found, in his tipsiness, that the smile was growing uncontrollably broader and broader; he wanted to grin, to laugh aloud. Not that what he was secretly thinking about was at all funny; it was not, at any rate when he was sober. But now the whole world seemed to swim in a bubbly sea of hilarity. Moreover, the muscles of his face, when he started to smile satanically, had all at once got out of hand and were insisting on expanding what should have been the expression of Lucifer’s darkest and most fearful thoughts into a bumpkin’s grin. Hastily Mr. Elver extinguished his face in his glass, in the hope of concealing from his guest that rebellious smile. He emerged again choking. Mr. Cardan had to pat him on the back. When it was all over, Mr. Elver reassumed his mysterious expression and nodded significantly. “Perhaps,” he said darkly, not so much in response to anything Mr. Cardan had said as on general principles, so to speak, and to indicate that the whole situation was in the last degree dubious, dark and contingent⁠—contingent on a whole chain of further contingencies. + 

Mr. Cardan’s curiosity was roused by the spectacle of this queer pantomime; he refilled his host’s glass. “Still,” he insisted, “if you hadn’t freed yourself, how would you be staying here⁠—” in this horrible marsh, he had almost added; but he checked himself and said “in Italy” instead. + 

The other shook his head. “I can’t tell you,” he said darkly, and again the satanic smile threatened to enlarge itself to imbecility. + 

Mr. Cardan relapsed into silence, content to wait. From the expression on Mr. Elver’s face he could see that the effort of keeping a secret would be, for his host, intolerably great. The fruit must be left to ripen of itself. He said nothing and looked pensively into one of the dark corners of the tomb-like chamber as though occupied with his own thoughts. + 

Mr. Elver sat hunched up in his chair, frowning at the table in front of him. Every now and then he took a sip of wine. Tipsily mutable, his mood changed all at once from hilarious to profoundly gloomy. The silence, the darkness funereally tempered by the four unwavering candles, worked on his mind. What a moment since had seemed an uproarious joke now presented itself to his thoughts as appalling. He felt a great need to unburden himself, to transfer responsibilities on to other shoulders, to get advice that should confirm him in his course. Furtively, for a glimpse only, he looked at his guest. How abstractedly and regardlessly he was staring into vacancy! Not a thought, no sympathy for poor Philip Elver. Ah, if he only knew.⁠ ⁠… + 

He broke silence at last. “Tell me,” he said abruptly, and it seemed to his drunken mind that he was displaying an incredible subtlety in his method of approaching the subject; “do you believe in vivisection?” + 

Mr. Cardan was surprised by the question. “Believe in it?” he echoed. “I don’t quite know how one can believe in vivisection. I think it useful, if that’s what you mean.” + 

“You don’t think it’s wrong?” + 

“No,” said Mr. Cardan. + 

“You think it doesn’t matter cutting up animals?” + 

“Not if the cutting serves some useful human purpose.” + 

“You don’t think animals have got rights?” pursued Mr. Elver with a clarity and tenacity that, in a drunken man, surprised Mr. Cardan. This was a subject, it was clear, on which Mr. Elver must long have meditated. “Just like human beings?” + 

“No,” said Mr. Cardan. “I’m not one of those fools who think that one life is as good as another, simply because it is a life; that a grasshopper is as good as a dog and a dog as good as a man. You must recognize a hierarchy of existences.” + 

“A hierarchy,” exclaimed Mr. Elver, delighted with the word, “a hierarchy⁠—that’s it. That’s exactly it. A hierarchy. And among human beings too?” he added. + 

“Yes, of course,” Mr. Cardan affirmed. “The life of the soldier who killed Archimedes isn’t worth the life of Archimedes. It’s the fundamental fallacy of democracy and humanitarian Christianity to suppose that it is. Though of course,” Mr. Cardan added pensively, “one has no justifying reason for saying so, but only one’s instinctive taste. For the soldier, after all, may have been a good husband and father, may have spent the nonprofessional, unsoldierly portions of his life in turning the left cheek and making two blades of grass grow where only one grew before. If, like Tolstoy, your tastes run to good fatherhood, left cheeks and agriculture, then you’ll say that the life of the soldier is worth just as much as the life of Archimedes⁠—much more, indeed; for Archimedes was a mere geometrician, who occupied himself with lines and angles, curves and surfaces, instead of with good and evil, husbandry and religion. But if, on the contrary, one’s tastes are of a more intellectual cast, then one will think as I think⁠—that the life of Archimedes is worth the lives of several billion of even the most amiable soldiers. But as for saying which point of view is right⁠—” Mr. Cardan shrugged his shoulders. “Partner, I leave it to you.” + 

Mr. Elver seemed rather disappointed by the inconclusive turn that his guest’s discourse had taken. “But still,” he insisted, “it’s obvious that a wise man’s better than a fool. There is a hierarchy.” + 

“Well, I personally should say there was,” said Mr. Cardan. “But I can’t speak for others.” He saw that he had been carried away by the pleasures of speculation into saying things his host did not want to hear. To almost all men, even when they are sober, a suspense of judgment is extraordinarily distasteful. And Mr. Elver was far from sober; moreover, Mr. Cardan began to suspect, this philosophic conversation was a tortuous introduction to personal confidences. If one wanted the confidences one must agree with the would-be confider’s opinion. That was obvious. + 

“Good,” said Mr. Elver. “Then you’ll admit that an intelligent man is worth more than an imbecile, a moron; ha ha, a moron.⁠ ⁠…” And at this word he burst into violent and savage laughter, which, becoming more and more extravagant as it prolonged itself, turned at last into an uncontrollable screaming and sobbing. + 

His chair turned sideways to the table, his legs crossed, the fingers of one hand playing caressingly with his wine glass, the other manipulating his cigar, Mr. Cardan looked on, while his host, the tears streaming down his cheeks, his narrow face distorted almost out of recognition, laughed and sobbed, now throwing himself back in his chair, now covering his face with his hands, now bending forward over the table to rest his forehead on his arms, while his whole body shook and shook with the repeated and uncontrollable spasms. A disgusting sight, thought Mr. Cardan; and a disgusting specimen too. He began to have an inkling of what the fellow was up to. Translate “intelligent man” and “moron” into “me” and “my sister’⁠—for the general, the philosophical in any man’s conversation must always be converted into the particular and personal if you want to understand him⁠—interpret in personal terms what he had said about vivisection, animal rights and the human hierarchy, and there appeared, as the plain transliteration of the cipher⁠—what? Something that looked exceedingly villainous, thought Mr. Cardan. + 

“Then I suppose,” he said in a very cool and level voice, when the other had begun to recover from his fit, “I suppose it’s your sister who has the liberating cash.” + 

Mr. Elver glanced at him, with an expression of surprise, almost of alarm, on his face. His eyes wavered away from Mr. Cardan’s steady, genial gaze. He took refuge in his tumbler. “Yes,” he said, when he had taken a gulp. “How did you guess?” + 

Mr. Cardan shrugged his shoulders. “Purely at random,” he said. + 

“After my father died,” Mr. Elver explained, “she went to live with her godmother, who was the old lady at the big house in our parish. A nasty old woman she was. But she took to Grace, she kind of adopted her. When the old bird died at the beginning of this year, Grace found she’d been left twenty-five thousand.” + 

For all comment, Mr. Cardan clicked his tongue against his palate and slightly raised his eyebrows. + 

“Twenty-five thousand,” the other repeated. “A half-wit, a moron! What can she do with it?” + 

“She can take you to Italy,” Mr. Cardan suggested. + 

“Oh, of course we can live on the interest all right,” said Mr. Elver contemptuously. “But when I think how I could multiply it.” He leaned forward eagerly, looking into Mr. Cardan’s face for a second, then the shifty grey eyes moved away and fixed themselves on one of the buttons of Mr. Cardan’s coat, from which they would occasionally dart upwards again to reconnoitre and return. “I’ve worked it out, you see,” he began, talking so quickly that the words tumbled over one another and became almost incoherent. “The Trade Cycle.⁠ ⁠… I can prophesy exactly what’ll happen at any given moment. For instance⁠ ⁠…” He rambled on in a series of complicated explanations. + 

“Well, if you’re as certain as all that,” said Mr. Cardan when he had finished, “why don’t you get your sister to lend you the money?” + 

“Why not?” Mr. Elver repeated gloomily and leaned back again in his chair. “Because that blasted old hag had the capital tied up. It can’t be touched.” + 

“Perhaps she lacked faith in the Trade Cycle,” Mr. Cardan suggested. + 

“God rot her!” said the other fervently. “And when I think of what I’d do with the money when I’d made really a lot. Science, art⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Not to mention revenge on your old acquaintances,” said Mr. Cardan, cutting him short. “You’ve worked out the whole programme?” + 

“Everything,” said Mr. Elver. “There’d never have been anything like it. And now this damned fool of an old woman goes and gives the money to her pet moron and makes it impossible for me to touch it.” He ground his teeth with rage and disgust. + 

“But if your sister were to die unmarried,” said Mr. Cardan, “the money, I suppose, would be yours.” + 

The other nodded. + 

“It’s a very hierarchical question, certainly,” said Mr. Cardan. In the vault-like room there was a prolonged silence. + 

Mr. Elver had reached the final stage of intoxication. Almost suddenly he began to feel weak, profoundly weary and rather ill. Anger, hilarity, the sense of satanic power⁠—all had left him. He desired only to go to bed as soon as possible; at the same time he doubted his capacity to get there. He shut his eyes. + 

Mr. Cardan looked at the limp and sodden figure with an expert’s eye, scientifically observing it. It was clear to him that the creature would volunteer no more; that it had come to a state when it could hardly think of anything but the gradually mounting nausea within it. It was time to change tactics. He leaned forward, and tapping his host’s arm launched a direct attack. + 

“So you brought the poor girl here to get rid of her,” he said. + 

Mr. Elver opened his eyes and flashed at his tormentor a hunted and terrified look. His face became very pale. He turned away. “No, no, not that.” His voice had sunk to an unsteady whisper. + 

“Not that?” Mr. Cardan echoed scornfully. “But it’s obvious. And you’ve as good as been telling me so for the last half-hour.” + 

Mr. Elver could only go on whispering: “No.” + 

Mr. Cardan ignored the denial. “How did you propose to do it?” he asked. “It’s always risky, whatever way you choose, and I shouldn’t put you down as being particularly courageous. How, how?” + 

The other shook his head. + 

Mr. Cardan insisted, ruthlessly. “Ratsbane?” he queried. “Steel?⁠—no, you wouldn’t have the guts for that. Or did you mean that she should tumble by accident into one of those convenient ditches?” + 

“No, no. No.” + 

“But I insist on being told,” said Mr. Cardan truculently, and he thumped the table till the reflections of the candles in the brimming glasses quivered and rocked. + 

Mr. Elver put his face in his hands and burst into tears. “You’re a bully,” he sobbed, “a dirty bully, like all the rest.” + 

“Come, come,” Mr. Cardan protested encouragingly. “Don’t take it so hardly. I’m sorry I upset you. You mustn’t think,” he added, “that I have any of the vulgar prejudices about this affair. I’m not condemning you. Far from it. I don’t want to use your answers against you. I merely ask out of curiosity⁠—pure curiosity. Cheer up, cheer up. Try a little more wine.” + 

But Mr. Elver was feeling too deplorably sick to be able to think of wine without horror. He refused it, shuddering. “I didn’t mean to do anything,” he whispered. “I meant it just to happen.” + 

“Just to happen? Yours must be a very hopeful nature,” said Mr. Cardan. + 

“It’s in Dante, you know. My father brought us up on Dante; I loathed the stuff,” he added, as though it had been castor oil. “But things stuck in my mind. Do you remember the woman who tells how she died: ‘Siena mi fe’, disfecemi Maremma’? Her husband shut her up in a castle in the Maremma and she died of fever. Do you remember?” + 

Mr. Cardan nodded. + 

“That was the idea. I had the quinine: I’ve been taking ten grains a day ever since I arrived⁠—for safety’s sake. But there doesn’t seem to be any fever here nowadays,” Mr. Elver added. “We’ve been here nine weeks.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“And nothing’s happened!” Mr. Cardan leaned back in his chair and roared with laughter. “Well, the moral of that,” he added, when he had breath enough to begin talking again, “the moral of that is: See that your authorities are up to date.” + 

But Mr. Elver was past seeing a joke. He got up from his chair and stood unsteadily, supporting himself with a hand on the table. “Would you mind helping me to my room?” he faintly begged. “I don’t feel very well.” + 

Mr. Cardan helped him first into the garden. “You ought to learn to carry your liquor more securely,” he said, when the worst was over. “That’s another of the evening’s morals.” + 

When he had lighted his host to bed, Mr. Cardan went to his appointed room and undressed. It was a long time before he fell asleep. The mosquitoes, partly, and partly his own busy thoughts, were responsible for his wakefulness. + 

VIII + 

Next morning Mr. Cardan was down early. The first thing he saw in the desolate garden before the house was Miss Elver. She was dressed in a frock cut on the same sack-like lines as her last night’s dress, but made of a gaudy, large-patterned material that looked as though it had been designed for the upholstery of chairs and sofas, not of the human figure. Her beads were more numerous and more brilliant than before. She carried a parasol of brightly flowered silk. + 

Emerging from the house, Mr. Cardan found her in the act of tying a bunch of Michaelmas daisies to the tail of a large white maremman dog that stood, its mouth open, its pink tongue lolling out and its large brown eyes fixed, so it seemed, meditatively on the further horizon, waiting for Miss Elver to have finished the operation. But Miss Elver was very slow and clumsy. The fingers of her stubby little hands seemed to find the process of tying a bow in a piece of ribbon extraordinarily difficult. Once or twice the dog looked round with a mild curiosity to see what was happening at the far end of its anatomy. It did not seem in the least to resent the liberties Miss Elver was taking with its tail, but stood quite still, resigned and waiting. Mr. Cardan was reminded of that enormous tolerance displayed by dogs and cats of even the most fiendish children. Perhaps, in a flash of Bergsonian intuition, the beast had realized the childish essence of Miss Elver’s character, had recognized the infant under the disguise of the full-grown woman. Dogs are good Bergsonians, thought Mr. Cardan. Men, on the other hand, are better Kantians. He approached softly. + 

Miss Elver had at last succeeded in tying the bow to her satisfaction; the dog’s white tail was tipped with a rosette of purple flowers. She straightened herself up and looked admiringly at her handiwork. “There!” she said at last, addressing herself to the dog. “Now you can run away. Now you look lovely.” + 

The dog took the hint and trotted off, waving his flower-tipped tail. + 

Mr. Cardan stepped forward. “ ‘Neat but not gaudy,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘genteel but not expensive, like the gardener’s dog with a primrose tied to his tail.’ Good morning.” He took off his hat. + 

But Miss Elver did not return his salutation. Taken by surprise, she had stood, as though petrified, staring at him with stretched eyes and open mouth while he spoke. At Mr. Cardan’s “good morning,” which was the first word of his that she had understood, the enchantment of stillness seemed to be lifted from her. She burst into a nervous laugh, covered her blushing face with her hands⁠—for a moment only⁠—then turned and ran down the path, ungainly as an animal moving in an element not its own, to take refuge behind a clump of rank bushes at the end of the garden. Seeing her run, the big dog came bounding after her, joyously barking. One Michaelmas daisy dropped to the ground, then another. In a moment they were all gone and the ribbon with them. + 

Slowly, cautiously, as though he were stalking a shy bird, and with a reassuring air of being absorbed in anything rather than the pursuit of a runaway, Mr. Cardan walked after Miss Elver down the path. Between the leaves of the bushes he caught glimpses of her bright frock; sometimes, with infinite circumspection, and certain, it was clear, that she was escaping all notice, she peeped at Mr. Cardan round the edge of the bush. Gambolling round her, the dog continued to bark. + 

Arrived within five or six yards of Miss Elver’s hiding-place, Mr. Cardan halted. “Come now,” he said cajolingly, “what’s there so frightening about me? Take a good look at me. I don’t bite. I’m quite tame.” + 

The leaves of the bushes shook; from behind them came a peal of shrill laughter. + 

“I don’t even bark, like your stupid dog,” Mr. Cardan went on. “And if you tied a bunch of flowers on to my tail I should never have the bad manners to get rid of them in the first two minutes like that rude animal.” + 

There was more laughter. + 

“Won’t you come out?” + 

There was no answer. + 

“Oh, very well then,” said Mr. Cardan, in the tone of one who is deeply offended, “I shall go away. Goodbye.” He retraced his steps for a few yards, then turned off to the right along a little path that led to the garden gate. When he was about three-quarters of the way along it, he heard the sound of hurrying footsteps coming up behind him. He walked on, pretending to notice nothing. There was a touch on his arm. + 

“Don’t go. Please.” Miss Elver’s voice spoke imploringly. He looked round, as though startled. “I won’t run away again. But you mustn’t look at me like that.” + 

“Like what?” asked Mr. Cardan. + 

Miss Elver put up a screening hand and turned away. “Like I don’t know what,” she said. + 

Mr. Cardan thought he perfectly understood; he pursued the subject no further. “Well, if you promise not to run away,” he said, “I won’t go.” + 

Miss Elver’s face shone with pleasure and gratitude. “Thank you,” she said. “Should we go and look at the chickens? They’re round at the back.” + 

They went round to the back. Mr. Cardan admired the chickens. “You like animals?” he asked. + 

“I should think so,” said Miss Elver rapturously, and nodded. + 

“Have you ever had a parrot of your own?” + 

“No.” + 

“Or a monkey?” + 

She shook her head. + 

“Not even a Shetland pony?” asked Mr. Cardan on a note of astonishment. + 

Miss Elver’s voice trembled as she again had to answer “No.” At the thought of all these enchanting things she had never possessed, the tears came into her eyes. + 

“In my house,” said Mr. Cardan, conjuring up fairy palaces as easily as Aladdin, “there are hundreds of them. I’ll give you some when you come to stay with me.” + 

Miss Elver’s face became bright again. “Will you?” she said, “Oh, that would be nice, that would be nice. And do you keep bears?” + 

“One or two,” said Mr. Cardan modestly. + 

“Well⁠ ⁠…” Miss Elver looked up at him, her blank bright eyes opened to their fullest extent. She paused, drew a deep breath and let it slowly out again. “It must be a nice house,” she added at last, turning away and nodding slowly at every word, “a nice house. That’s all I can say.” + 

“You’d like to come and stay?” asked Mr. Cardan. + 

“I should think I would,” Miss Elver replied decidedly, looking up at him again. Then suddenly she blushed, she put up her hands. “No, no, no,” she protested. + 

“Why not?” asked Mr. Cardan. + 

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” And she began to laugh. + 

“Remember the bears,” said Mr. Cardan. + 

“Yes. But⁠ ⁠…” She left the sentence unfinished. The old woman came to the back door and rang the bell for breakfast. Ungainly as a diving-bird on land, Miss Elver scuttled into the house. Her companion followed more slowly. In the dining-room, less tomb-like in the bright morning light, breakfast was waiting. Mr. Cardan found his hostess already eating with passion, as though her life depended on it. + 

“I’m so hungry,” she explained with her mouth full. “Phil’s late,” she added. + 

“Well, I’m not surprised,” said Mr. Cardan, as he sat down and unfolded his napkin. + 

When he came down at last, it was in the guise of a cleric so obviously unfrocked, so deplorably seedy and broken-down that Mr. Cardan felt almost sorry for him. + 

“Nothing like good strong coffee,” he said cheerfully, as he filled his host’s cup. Mr. Elver looked on, feeling too melancholy and too ill to speak. For a long time he sat motionless in his chair, without moving, lacking the strength to stretch out his hand to his cup. + 

“Why don’t you eat, Phil?” asked his sister, as she decapitated her second egg. “You generally eat such a lot.” + 

Goaded, as though by a taunt, Philip Elver reached for his coffee and swallowed down a gulp. He even took some toast and buttered it; but he could not bring himself to eat. + 

At half-past ten Mr. Cardan left the house. He told his host that he was going in search of his sculpture; and he comforted Miss Elver, who, seeing him put on his hat and take his walking stick, had begun to whimper, by assuring her that he would be back to luncheon. Following the old woman’s directions, Mr. Cardan soon found himself on the shores of the shallow lake of Massaciuccoli. A mile away, on the further shore, he could see the clustering pink and whitewashed houses of the village in which, he knew, the grocer’s brother lived and kept his treasure. But instead of proceeding directly to the goal of his pilgrimage, Mr. Cardan lighted a cigar and lay down on the grass at the side of the path. It was a bright clear day. Over the mountains floated great clouds, hard-edged against the sky, firm and massive as though carved from marble and seeming more solid than the marble mountains beneath. A breeze stirred the blue water of the lake into innumerable dazzling ripples. It rustled among the leaves of the poplars and the sound was like that of the sea heard from far off. In the midst of the landscape lay Mr. Cardan, pensively smoking his cigar; the smoke of it drifted away along the wind. + 

Twenty-five thousand pounds, Mr. Cardan was thinking. If one were to invest them in the seven percent. Hungarian Loan, they would bring in seventeen hundred and fifty a year. And if one lived in Italy that went a long way; one could consider oneself rich on that. A nice house in Siena, or Perugia, or Bologna⁠—Bologna he decided would be the best; there was nothing to compare with Bolognese cooking. A car⁠—one could afford to keep something handsome. Plenty of nice books, nice people to stay with one all the time, jaunts in comfort through Europe. A secure old age; the horrors of decrepitude in poverty forever averted. The only disadvantage⁠—one’s wife happened to be a harmless idiot. Still, she’d obviously be most devoted; she’d do her best. And one would make her happy, one would even allow her a domesticated bear. In fact, Mr. Cardan assured himself, it was the poor creature’s only chance of happiness. If she stayed with her brother, he’d find some substitute for the inefficient anopheles sooner or later. If she fell into the hands of an adventurer in need of her money, the chances were that he’d be a great deal more of a scoundrel than Tom Cardan. In fact, Mr. Cardan saw, he could easily make out a case for its being his bounden duty, for the poor girl’s sake, to marry her. That would do very nicely for romantic spirits like Lilian Aldwinkle. For them, he’d be the gallant rescuer, the Perseus, the chivalrous St. George. Less enthusiastic souls might look at the twenty-five thousand and smile. But let them smile. After all, Mr. Cardan asked himself, a grin more or less⁠—what does it matter? No, the real problem, the real difficulty was himself. Could he do it? Wasn’t it, somehow, a bit thick⁠—an idiot? Wasn’t it too⁠—too Russian? Too Stavroginesque? + 

True, his motive would be different from the Russian’s. He would marry his idiot for comfort and a placid old age⁠—not for the sake of strengthening his moral fibres by hard exercise, not in the voluptuous hope of calling new scruples and finer remorses into existence, or in the religious hope of developing the higher consciousness by leading a low life. But on the other hand, nothing could prevent the life from being, in point of fact, thoroughly low; and he couldn’t guarantee his conscience against the coming of strange qualms. Would seventeen hundred and fifty per annum be a sufficient compensation? + 

For more than an hour Mr. Cardan lay there, smoking, looking at the bright lake, at the ethereal fantastic mountains and the marbly clouds, listening to the wind among the leaves and the occasional faraway sounds of life, and pondering all the time. In the end he decided that seventeen hundred and fifty, or even the smaller income that would result from investment in something a little safer than seven percent Hungarian Loan, was a sufficient compensation. He’d do it. Mr. Cardan got up, threw away the stump of his second cigar and walked slowly back towards the house. As he approached it through the little plantation of poplar trees Miss Elver, who had been on the lookout for his return, came running out of the gate to meet him. The gaudy upholstery material blazed up as she passed out of the shade of the house into the sunlight, her coloured beads flashed. Uttering shrill little cries and laughing, she ran towards him. Mr. Cardan watched her as she came on. He had seen frightened cormorants bobbing their heads in a ludicrous anxiety from side to side. He had seen penguins waving their little flappers, scuttling along, undignified, on their short legs. He had seen vultures with trailing wings hobbling and hopping, ungainly, over the ground. Memories of all these sights appeared before his mind’s eye as he watched Miss Elver’s approach. He sighed profoundly. + 

“I’m so glad you’ve come back,” Miss Elver cried breathlessly, as she approached, “I was really afraid you were going right away.” She shook his hand earnestly and looked up into his face. “You’ve not forgotten about the monkeys and the Shetland ponies, have you?” she added, rather anxiously. + 

Mr. Cardan smiled. “Of course not,” he answered; and he added gallantly: “How could I forget anything that gives you pleasure?” He squeezed her hand and, bending down, kissed it. + 

Miss Elver’s face flushed very red, then, the moment after, became exceedingly pale. Her breath came quickly and unsteadily. She shut her eyes. A shuddering ran through her; she wavered on her feet, she seemed on the point of falling. Mr. Cardan caught her by the arm and held her up. This was going to be worse, he thought, than he had imagined; more Stavroginesque. To faint when he kissed her hand⁠—kissed it almost ironically⁠—that was too much. But probably, he reflected, nothing of the kind had ever happened to her before. How many men had ever so much as spoken to her? It was understandable. + 

“My good child⁠—really now.” He slightly shook her arm. “Pull yourself together. If you’re going to faint like this I shall never be able to trust you with a bear. Come, come.” + 

Still, the understanding of a thing does not alter it. It remains what it was when it was still uncomprehended. Seventeen hundred and fifty per annum⁠—but at this rate it looked as though that would hardly be enough. + 

Miss Elver opened her eyes and looked at him. Into their blankness had come that look of anxious, unhappy love with which a child looks at his mother when he thinks that she is going to leave him. Mr. Cardan could not have felt more remorseful if he had committed a murder. + 

What every weakness, every vice? + 

Tom Cardan, all were thine. + 

All the same, there were certain things the doing of which one felt to be an outrage. Still, one had to think of those seventeen hundred and fifty pounds; one had to think of old age in solitude and poverty. + 

Leaving Miss Elver to play by herself in the garden, Mr. Cardan went indoors. He found his host sitting behind closed jalousies in a greenish twilight, his head on his hand. + 

“Feeling better?” asked Mr. Cardan cheerfully; and getting no answer, he went on to tell a long, bright story of how he had searched for the grocer’s brother, only to find, at last, that he was away from home and would be away till tomorrow. “So I hope you won’t mind,” he concluded, “if I trespass on your charming hospitality for another night. Your sister has most kindly told me that I might.” + 

Mr. Elver turned on him a glance of concentrated loathing and averted his eyes. He said nothing. + 

Mr. Cardan drew up a chair and sat down. “There’s a most interesting little book,” he said, looking at his host with a genial twinkling expression, “by a certain Mr. W. H. S. Jones called ‘Malaria: a factor in the history of Greece and Rome,’ or some such title. He shows how the disease may quite suddenly obtain a footing in countries hitherto immune and in the course of a few generations bring a whole culture, a powerful empire to the ground. Conversely he shows how it is got rid of. Drainage, quinine, wire-netting⁠ ⁠…” The other stirred uneasily in his chair; but Mr. Cardan went on ruthlessly. When the bell rang for luncheon he was talking to Mr. Elver about the only way in which the Yellow Peril might be permanently averted. + 

“First,” he said, laying the forefinger of his right hand against the thumb of his left, “first you must introduce malaria into Japan. Japan’s immune, so far; it’s a crying scandal. You must start by remedying that. And secondly,” he moved on to the index, “you must see that the Chinese never have a chance to stamp out the disease in their country. Four hundred million malarial Chinamen may be viewed with equanimity. But four hundred million healthy ones⁠—that’s a very different matter. The spread of malaria among the yellow races⁠—there’s a cause,” said Mr. Cardan, rising from his chair, “a cause to which some good European might profitably devote himself. You, who take so much interest in the subject, Mr. Elver, you might find a much worse vocation. Shall we go into lunch?” Mr. Elver rose, totteringly. “I have a tremendous appetite,” his guest went on, patting him on his bent back. “I hope you have too.” + 

Mr. Elver at last broke silence. “You’re a damned bully,” he whispered in a passion of misery and futile rage, “a damned stinking bully.” + 

“Come, come,” said Mr. Cardan. “I protest against ‘stinking.’ ” + 

IX + 

Early the next morning Mr. Cardan and his hostess left the house and walked rapidly away through the fields in the direction of the lake. They had told the old woman that they would be back to a late breakfast. Mr. Elver was not yet awake; Mr. Cardan had left instructions that he was not to be called before half-past nine. + 

The ground was still wet with dew when they set out; the poplar trees threw shadows longer than themselves. The air was cool; it was a pleasure to walk. Mr. Cardan strode along at four miles an hour; and like a diver out of water, like a soaring bird reduced to walk the earth, Miss Elver trotted along at his side, rolling and hopping as she walked, as though she were mounted, not on feet, but on a set of eccentric wheels of different diameters. Her face seemed to shine with happiness; every now and then she looked at Mr. Cardan with shy adoration, and if she happened to catch his eye she would blush, turn away her head and laugh. Mr. Cardan was almost appalled by the extent of his success and the ease with which it had been obtained. He might make a slave of the poor creature, might keep her shut up in a rabbit-hutch, and, provided he showed himself now and again to be worshipped, she would be perfectly happy. The thought made Mr. Cardan feel strangely guilty. + 

“When we’re married,” said Miss Elver suddenly, “shall we have some children?” + 

Mr. Cardan smiled rather grimly. “The trouble about children,” he said, “is that the bears might eat them. You can never be quite sure of bears. Remember Elisha’s bears and those bad children.” + 

Miss Elver’s face became thoughtful. She walked on for a long time in silence. + 

They came to the lake, lying placid and very bright under the pale early-morning sky. At the sight of it Miss Elver clapped her hands with pleasure; she forgot in an instant all her troubles. The fatal incompatibility between bears and children ceased to preoccupy her. “What lovely water!” she cried, and bending down she picked up a pebble from the path and threw it into the lake. + 

But Mr. Cardan did not permit her to linger. “There’s no time to lose,” he said, and taking her arm he hurried her on. + 

“Where are we going to?” asked Miss Elver. + 

He pointed to the village on the further shore of the lake. “From there,” he said, “we’ll take some sort of cab or cart.” + 

The prospect of driving in a cart entirely reconciled Miss Elver to parting at such short notice with the lake. “That’ll be lovely,” she declared, and trotted on so fast that Mr. Cardan had to quicken his pace in order to keep up with her. + 

While the little carriage was being made ready and the horse put in and harnessed⁠—hastelessly, as these things are always done in Italy, with dignity and at leisure⁠—Mr. Cardan went to visit the grocer’s brother. Now that he had come so far it would be foolish to miss the opportunity of seeing the treasure. The grocer’s brother was himself a grocer, and so like his relative that Mr. Cardan could almost fancy it was Miss Thriplow’s virtuous and simple friend from the hilltop to whom he was now speaking in the plain. When Mr. Cardan explained his business the man bowed, wreathed himself in smiles, laughed and blew acetylene into his face just as his brother had done. He expatiated on the beauty and the antiquity of his treasure, and when Mr. Cardan begged him to make haste and show him the sculpture, he would not suffer himself to be interrupted, but went on lyrically with his description, repeating the same phrases again and again and gesticulating until he began to sweat. At last, when he considered Mr. Cardan worked up to a due state of preliminary enthusiasm, the grocer opened the door at the back of the shop and mysteriously beckoned to his visitor to follow him. They walked down a dark passage, through a kitchen full of tumbling children on whom one had to be careful not to tread, across a little yard and into a mouldering outhouse. The grocer led the way, walking all the time on tiptoe and speaking only in a whisper⁠—for what reason Mr. Cardan could not imagine, unless it was to impress him with the profound importance of the affair, and perhaps to suggest that the beauty and antiquity of the work of art were such that it was only barefoot and in silence that it should be approached. + 

“Wait there,” he whispered impressively, as they entered the outhouse. + 

Mr. Cardan waited. The grocer tiptoed across to the further corner of the shed. Mysteriously draped in sacking, something that might have been an ambushed man stood motionless in the shadow. The grocer halted in front of it and, standing a little to one side so as to give Mr. Cardan an uninterrupted view of the marvel to be revealed, took hold of a corner of the sacking, and with a magnificently dramatic gesture whisked it off. + 

There emerged the marble effigy of what in the imagination of a monumental mason of 1830 figured as a Poet. A slenderer Byron with yet more hyacinthine hair and a profile borrowed from one of Canova’s Greeks, he stood, leaning against a truncated column, his marble eyes turned upwards in pursuit of the flying Muse. A cloak hung lankly from his shoulders; a vine leaf was all the rest of his costume. On the top of the truncated column lay a half-opened marble scroll, which the Poet’s left hand held down for fear it should be blown clean away by the wind of inspiration. His right, it was evident, had originally poised above the virgin page a stylus. But the hand, alas, and the whole forearm almost to the elbow were gone. At the base of the column was a little square tablet on which, if the figure had ever been put to its proper monumental use, should have been written the name and claims to fame of the poet upon whose tomb it was to stand. But the tablet was blank. At the time this statue was carved there had evidently been a dearth of lyrists in the principality of Massa Carrara. + 

“E bellissimo!” said the grocer’s brother, standing back and looking at it with a connoisseur’s enthusiasm. + 

“Davvero,” Mr. Cardan agreed. He thought sadly of his recumbent Etruscan, his sarcophagus by Jacopo della Quercia, his Romanesque demon. Still, he reflected, even a bas-relief by Giotto would hardly have brought him five-and-twenty thousand pounds. + 

X + 

Mr. Cardan returned to the palace of the Cybo Malaspina to find that the number of guests had been increased during his absence by the arrival of Mrs. Chelifer. Mrs. Aldwinkle had not been particularly anxious to have Chelifer’s mother in the house, but finding that Chelifer was preparing to leave as soon as his mother should arrive, she peremptorily insisted on giving the lady hospitality. + 

“It’s absurd,” she argued, “to go down again to that horrible hotel at Marina di Vezza, stay there uncomfortably for a few days and then go to Rome by train. You must bring your mother here, and then, when it’s time for Mr. Falx to go to his conference, we’ll all go to Rome in the car. It’ll be far pleasanter.” + 

Chelifer tried to object; but Mrs. Aldwinkle would not hear of objections. When Mrs. Chelifer arrived at the station of Vezza she found Francis waiting for her on the platform with Mrs. Aldwinkle, in yellow tussore and a floating white veil, at his side. The welcome she got from Mrs. Aldwinkle was far more effusively affectionate than that which she got from her son. A little bewildered, but preserving all her calm and gentle dignity, Mrs. Chelifer suffered herself to be led towards the Rolls-Royce. + 

“We all admire your son so enormously,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “He’s so⁠—how shall I say?⁠—so post bellum, so essentially one of us.” Mrs. Aldwinkle made haste to establish her position among the youngest of the younger generation. “All that one only dimly feels he expresses. Can you be surprised at our admiration?” + 

So far Mrs. Chelifer was rather surprised by everything. It took her some time to get used to Mrs. Aldwinkle. Nor was the aspect of the palace calculated to allay her astonishment. + 

“A superb specimen of early baroque,” Mrs. Aldwinkle assured her, pointing with her parasol. But even after she knew the dates, it all seemed to Mrs. Chelifer rather queer. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle remained extremely cordial to her new guest; but in secret she disliked Mrs. Chelifer extremely. There would have been small reason, in any circumstances, for Mrs. Aldwinkle to have liked her. The two women had nothing in common; their views of life were different and irreconcilable, they had lived in separate worlds. At the best of times Mrs. Aldwinkle would have found her guest bourgeoise and bornée. As things actually were she loathed her. And no wonder; for in his mother Chelifer had a permanent and unexceptionable excuse for getting away from Mrs. Aldwinkle. Mrs. Aldwinkle naturally resented the presence in her house of this cause and living justification of infidelity. At the same time it was necessary for her to keep on good terms with Mrs. Chelifer; for if she quarrelled with the mother, it was obvious that the son would take himself off. Inwardly chafing, Mrs. Aldwinkle continued to treat her with the same gushing affection as at first. + 

To Mrs. Aldwinkle’s guests the arrival of Mrs. Chelifer was more welcome than to herself. Mr. Falx found in her a more sympathetic and comprehensible soul than he could discover in his hostess. To Lord Hovenden and Irene her arrival meant the complete cessation of Irene’s duties as a spy; they liked her well enough, moreover, for her own sake. + 

“A nice old fing,” was how Lord Hovenden summed her up. + 

Miss Thriplow affected almost to worship her. + 

“She’s so wonderfully good and simple and integral, if you understand what I mean,” Miss Thriplow explained to Calamy. “To be able to be so undividedly enthusiastic about folk-songs and animals’ rights and all that sort of thing⁠—it’s really wonderful. She’s a lesson to us,” Miss Thriplow concluded, “a lesson.” Mrs. Chelifer became endowed, for her, with all the qualities that the village grocer had unfortunately not possessed. The symbol of his virtues⁠—if only he had possessed them⁠—had been the white apron; Mrs. Chelifer’s integrity was figured forth by her dateless grey dresses. + 

“She’s one of Nature’s Quakeresses,” Miss Thriplow declared. “If only one could be born like that!” There had been a time, not so long ago, when she had aspired to be one of Nature’s Guardswomen. “I never knew that anything so good and dove-coloured existed outside of Academy subject-pictures of 1880. You know: ‘A Pilgrim Mother on Board the Mayflower,’ or something of that sort. It’s absurd in the Academy. But it’s lovely in real life.” + 

Calamy agreed. + 

But the person who most genuinely liked Mrs. Chelifer was Grace Elver. From the moment she set eyes on Mrs. Chelifer, Grace was her doglike attendant. And Mrs. Chelifer responded by practically adopting her for the time being. When he learned the nature of her tastes and occupations, Mr. Cardan explained her kindness to himself by the hypothesis that poor Grace was the nearest thing to a stray dog or cat that Mrs. Chelifer could find. Conversely, Grace’s love at first sight must be due to the realization by that catlike mind that here was a born protector and friend. In any case, he was exceedingly grateful to Mrs. Chelifer for having made her appearance when she did. Her presence in the house made easy what would otherwise have been a difficult situation. + 

That Mrs. Aldwinkle would be impressed by the romantic story of Grace’s abduction Mr. Cardan had always been certain. And when he told the story, she was impressed, though less profoundly than Mr. Cardan had hoped; she was too much preoccupied with her own affairs to be able to respond with her customary enthusiasm to what, at other times, would have been an irresistible appeal. About her reception of the story, then, Mr. Cardan had never entertained a doubt; he knew that she would find it romantic. But that was no guarantee that she would like the heroine of the story. From what he knew of her, which was a great deal, Mr. Cardan felt sure that she would very quickly find poor Grace exceedingly tiresome. He knew her lack of patience and her intolerance. Grace would get on her nerves; Lilian would be unkind, and goodness only knew what scenes might follow. Mr. Cardan had brought her to the palace meaning to stay only a day or two and then take his leave, before Mrs. Aldwinkle had had time to get poor Grace on her nerves. But the presence of Mrs. Chelifer made him change his mind. Her affectionate protection was a guarantee against Mrs. Aldwinkle’s impatience; more important still, it had the best possible effect on Grace herself. In Mrs. Chelifer’s presence she behaved quietly and sensibly, like a child doing its best to make a good impression. Mrs. Chelifer, moreover, kept a tenderly watchful eye on her appearance and her manners; kept her up to the mark about washing her hands and brushing her hair, dropped a gentle hint when she was not behaving as well as she ought to at table, and checked her propensity to eat too much of the things she liked and not enough of those she didn’t like. Mrs. Chelifer, it was obvious, had the best possible influence over her. When they were married, Mr. Cardan decided, he would frequently invite Mrs. Chelifer to stay⁠—preferably, though she was a very nice old thing, while he was away from home. Meanwhile, secure that his residence at the palace of the Cybo Malaspina would be marred by no disagreeable incidents, he wrote to his lawyer to make the necessary arrangements about his marriage. + 

For her part, Mrs. Chelifer was delighted to have found Grace. As Mr. Cardan had divined, she missed her cats and dogs, her poor children and traditional games. It was very reluctantly that she had at last given up the old Oxford house; very reluctantly, though the arguments that Francis had used to persuade her were unanswerable. It was too large for her, it was full of those medieval labour-creating devices of which Mr. Ruskin and his architectural followers were so fond, it cost more to keep up than she could afford; moreover, it was unhealthy, she was regularly ill there every winter; the doctors had been urging her for years past to get out of the Thames valley. Yes, the arguments were quite unanswerable; but it had been a long time before she had finally made up her mind to leave the place. Forty years of her life had been passed there; she was loth to part with all those memories. And then there were the dogs and the poor children, all her old friends and her charities. In the end, however, she had allowed herself to be persuaded. The house was sold; it was arranged that she should spend the winter in Rome. + 

“Now you’re free,” her son had said. + 

But Mrs. Chelifer rather mournfully shook her head. “I don’t know that I very much like being free,” she answered. “I shall be without occupation in Rome. I look forward to it almost with dread.” + 

Francis reassured her. “You’ll soon find something,” he said. “Don’t be afraid of that.” + 

“Shall I?” Mrs. Chelifer questioned doubtfully. They were walking together in the little garden at the back of the house; looking round her at the familiar grass plot and flower beds, she sighed. + 

But Francis was right; dogs, poor children or their equivalents are fortunately not rare. At the end of the first stage of her journey Mrs. Chelifer had found, in Grace Elver, a compensation for what she had abandoned at Oxford. Attending to poor Grace she was happy. + 

For the rest of the party Miss Elver’s arrival had no special or personal significance. For them she was just Mr. Cardan’s half-wit; that was all. Even Mary Thriplow, who might have been expected to take an interest in so genuine a specimen of the simple soul, paid little attention to her. The fact was that Grace was really too simple to be interesting. Simplicity is no virtue unless you are potentially complicated. Mrs. Chelifer, being with all her simplicity a woman of intelligence, threw light, Miss Thriplow felt, on her own case. Grace was simple only as a child or an imbecile is simple; her didactic value was therefore nil. Miss Thriplow remained faithful to Mrs. Chelifer. + 

XI + 

It was night. Half undressed, Irene was sitting on the edge of her bed stitching away at an unfinished garment of pale pink silk. Her head was bent over her work and her thick hair hung perpendicularly down on either side, making an angle with her tilted face. The light clung richly to her bare arms and shoulders, was reflected by the curved and glossy surfaces of her tight-drawn stockings. Her face was extremely grave; the tip of her tongue appeared between her teeth. It was a difficult job. + 

Round her, on the walls of the enormous room which had once been the bedchamber of the Cardinal Alderano Malaspina, fluttered an army of gesticulating shapes. Over the door sat God the Father, dressed in a blue crêpe de Chine tunic and enveloped in a mantle of red velvet, which fluttered in the divine afflatus as though it had been so much bunting. His right hand was extended; and in obedience to the gesture a squadron of angels went flying down one of the side walls towards the window. At a prie-Dieu in the far corner knelt Cardinal Malaspina, middle-aged, stout, with a barbiche and moustache, and looking altogether, Irene thought, like the current British idea of a French chef. The Archangel Michael, at the head of his troop of Principalities and Powers, was hovering in the air above him, and with an expression on his face of mingled condescension and respect⁠—condescension, inasmuch as he was the plenipotentiary of the Padre Eterno, and respect, in view of the fact that His Eminence was a brother of the Prince of Massa Carrara⁠—was poising above the prelate’s head the red symbolic hat that was to make him a Prince of the Church. On the opposite wall the Cardinal was represented doing battle with the powers of darkness. Dressed in scarlet robes he stood undaunted on the brink of the bottomless pit. Behind him was a carefully painted view of the Malaspina palace, with a group of retainers and handsome coaches in the middle distance and, immediately behind their Uncle, whom they gallantly supported by their prayers, the Cardinal’s nephews. From the pit came up legions of hideous devils who filled the air with the flapping of their wings. But the Cardinal was more than a match for them. Raising a crucifix above his head, he conjured them to return to the flames. And the foiled devils, gnashing their teeth and trembling with terror, were hurled back towards the pit. Head foremost, tail foremost, in every possible position they came hurtling down towards the floor. When she lay in bed, Irene could see half a dozen devils diving down at her; and when she woke up in the morning, a pair of plunging legs waved frantically within a foot of her opening eyes. In the wall space over the windows the Cardinal’s cultured leisures were allegorically celebrated. Nine Muses and three Graces, attended by a troop of Hours, reclined or stood, or danced in studied postures; while the Cardinal himself, enthroned in the midst, listened to their conversation and proffered his own opinions without appearing to notice the fact that all the ladies were stark naked. No one but the most polished and accomplished man of the world could have behaved in the circumstances with such perfect savoir-vivre. + 

In the midst of the Cardinal’s apotheosis and entirely oblivious of it, Irene stitched away at her pink chemise. Undressing, just now, she had caught sight of it lying here in her workbasket; she hadn’t been able to resist the temptation of adding a touch or two there and then. It was going to be one of her masterpieces when it was done. She held it out in her two hands, at arm’s length, and looked at it, lovingly and critically. It was simply too lovely. + 

Ever since Chelifer’s arrival she had been able to do a lot of work on her underclothes. Mrs. Aldwinkle, absorbed by her unhappy passion, had completely forgotten that she had a niece who ought to be writing lyrics and painting in watercolours. Irene was free to devote all her time to her sewing. She did not neglect the opportunity. But every now and then her conscience would suddenly prick her and she would ask herself whether, after all, it was quite fair to take advantage of poor Aunt Lilian’s mournful preoccupation to do what she did not approve of. She would wonder if she oughtn’t, out of loyalty to Aunt Lilian, to stop sewing and make a sketch or write a poem. Once or twice in the first days she even acted on the advice of her conscience. But when in the evening she brought Aunt Lilian her sketch of the temple, and the lyric beginning “O Moon, how calmly in the midnight sky⁠ ⁠…”⁠—brought them with a certain triumph, a consciousness of virtuous actions duly performed⁠—that distracted lady showed so little interest in these artistic tokens of niecely duty and affection that Irene felt herself excused henceforward from making any further effort to practise the higher life. She went on with her stitching. Her conscience, it is true, still troubled her at times; but she did nothing about it. + 

This evening she felt no conscientious qualm. The garment was so lovely that even Aunt Lilian, she felt sure, would have approved of it. It was a work of art⁠—a work of art that deserved that honourable title just as richly as “O Moon, how calmly in the midnight sky”; perhaps even more richly. + 

Irene folded up the unfinished masterpiece in rose, put it away, and went on with her undressing. Tonight, she decided, as she brushed her hair, she would tell Aunt Lilian how right she had been about Hovenden. That ought to please her. “How grateful I am,” she would say. And she’d tell her how much she liked him⁠—almost, almost in that way. Not quite yet. But soon; she felt somehow that it might happen soon. And it would be the real thing. Real and solid. Not flimsy and fizzy and imaginary, like the episodes with Peter and Jacques and the rest of them. + 

She put on her dressing-gown and walked down the long corridor to Mrs. Aldwinkle’s room. Cardinal Alderano was left alone with his devils and the obsequious angels, his nine naked Muses and the Eternal Father. + 

When Irene came in, Aunt Lilian was sitting in front of her looking-glass, rubbing skin food into her face. + 

“It appears,” she said, looking at herself in the glass, critically, as Irene had looked at her masterpiece of fine sewing, “that there’s such a wonderful electric massage machine. I forget who told me about it.” + 

“Was it Lady Belfry?” Irene suggested. The image of Lady Belfry’s face floated up before her mind’s eye⁠—smooth, pink, round, youthful looking, but with that factitious and terribly precarious youthfulness of beauty scientifically preserved. + 

“Perhaps it was,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “I must certainly get one of them. Write to Harrods’ about it tomorrow, will you, darling?” + 

Irene began the nightly brushing of her aunt’s hair. There was a long silence. How should she begin about Hovenden? Irene was thinking. She must begin in some way that would show how really and genuinely serious it all was. She must begin in such a way that Aunt Lilian would have no possible justification for taking up a playful tone about it. At all costs, Aunt Lilian must not be allowed to talk to her in that well-known and dreaded vein of bludgeoning banter; on no account must she be given an opportunity for saying: “Did she think then that her silly old auntie didn’t notice?” or anything of that kind. But to find the completely fun-proof formula was not so easy. Irene searched for it long and thoughtfully. She was not destined to find it. For Aunt Lilian, who had also been thinking, suddenly broke the silence. + 

“I sometimes doubt,” she said, “whether he takes any interest in women at all. Fundamentally, unconsciously, I believe he’s a homosexualist.” + 

“Perhaps,” said Irene gravely. She knew her Havelock Ellis. + 

For the next half-hour Mrs. Aldwinkle and her niece discussed the interesting possibility. + 

XII + 

Miss Thriplow was writing in her secret notebook. “There are people,” she wrote, “who seem to have no capacity for feeling deeply or passionately about anything. It is a kind of emotional impotence for which one can only pity them profoundly. Perhaps there are more of these people nowadays than there were. But that’s only an impression; one has no facts to go on, no justifying documents. But if it’s the case, it’s due, I suppose, to our intellectualizing education. One has to have a strong emotional constitution to be able to stand it. And then one lives so artificially that many of the profounder instincts rarely get an opportunity for displaying themselves. Fear, for example, and all the desperate passions evoked by the instinct of self-preservation in face of danger or hunger. Thousands of civilized people pass through life condemned to an almost complete ignorance of these emotions.” + 

Miss Thriplow drew a line under this paragraph and began again a little further down the page. + 

“To love primitively, with fury. To be no more civilized, but savage. No more critical, but wholeheartedly passionate. No more a troubled and dubious mind, but a young, healthy body certain and unwavering in its desires. The beast knows everything, says Uncle Yerochka in Tolstoy. Not everything; no. But he knows, at any rate, all the things the mind does not know. The strong complete spirit must know what the beast knows as well as what the mind knows.” + 

She drew another line. + 

“His hands are so strong and firm, and yet touch so softly. His lips are soft. Where his neck joins his body, in front, between the two strong tendons, where they converge towards the collar bone, is a boldly marked depression in the flesh that looks as though it had been made by the thumb of an artist god, so beautiful it is. So beautiful⁠ ⁠…” + 

It occurred to Miss Thriplow that there would be an excellent article to be written round the theme of masculine beauty. In the Song of Solomon it is described as lyrically as feminine beauty. It is rare to find modern poetesses expressing so frank an admiration. In the Paris Salons it is the female nude which prevails; the male is exceptional and, when complete, seems a little shocking. How different from the state of things in Pompeii! Miss Thriplow bit the end of her pen. Yes, decidedly, it would make a capital article. + 

“His skin is white and smooth,” she went on writing. “How strong he is! His eyes are sleepy; but sometimes they seem to wake up and he looks at me so piercingly and commandingly that I am frightened. But I like being frightened⁠—by him.” + 

Another line. Miss Thriplow would have written more on this subject; but she was always apprehensive that somebody might find her notebook and read it. She did not want that to happen till she was dead. Miss Thriplow made an asterisk by the side of the first of the evening’s notes. In the margin of the blank page opposite she scratched a similar sign, to indicate that what she was going to write now was in the nature of an appendix or corollary to what she had written in the first note. + 

“Certain people,” she wrote, “who have no natural capacity for profound feeling are yet convinced, intellectually, that they ought to feel profoundly. The best people, they think, have formidable instincts. They want to have them too. They are the emotional snobs. This type, I am sure, is new. In the eighteenth century people tried to make out that they were rational and polished. The cult of the emotions began in the nineteenth. It has had a new turn given to it by Bergsonism and Romain-Rollandism in the twentieth century. It is fashionable now to be exactly the opposite of what it was fashionable to be in the eighteenth century. So that you get emotionally impotent people simulating passion with their minds. Hypocrites of instinct, they often more than half deceive themselves. And, if they are intelligent, they completely deceive all but the most observant of those around them. They act the emotional part better than those who actually feel the emotions. It is Diderot’s paradox of the comedian, in real life; the less you feel, the better you represent feeling. But while the comedian on the stage plays only for the audience in the theatre, those in real life perform as much for an inward as an outward gallery; they ask for applause also from themselves and, what is more, they get it; though always, I suppose, with certain secret reservations. What a curious type it is! I have known many specimens of it.” + 

Miss Thriplow stopped writing and thought of the specimens she had known. There was a surprisingly large number of them. Every human being is inclined to see his own qualities and weaknesses in others. Inevitably: since his own mental and moral attributes are the only ones of which he has any personal experience. The man who visualizes his multiplication table in a fantastic and definite picture imagines that all other men must do the same; the musician cannot conceive of a mind that is irresponsive to music. Similarly the ambitious man presumes that all his fellows are actuated by his own desire to achieve distinction and power. The sensualist sees sensuality everywhere. The mean man takes it for granted that everybody else is mean. But it must not be thought that the possessor of a vice who sees his own weakness in all his fellows therefore condones that weakness. We rarely give our own weaknesses their specific name, and are aware of them only in a vague and empirical fashion. The conscious and educated part of us condemns the vice to which we are congenitally subject. At the same time, our personal knowledge of the vice⁠—a knowledge not conscious or intellectual, but obscure, practical and instinctive⁠—tends to direct the attention of the superficial, educated part of the mind to manifestations of this particular weakness, tends even to make it detect such manifestations when they do not exist; so that we are constantly struck by the ludicrous spectacle of the avaricious passionately condemning avarice in others much more generous than themselves, of the lascivious crying out on lasciviousness, the greedy criticizing greed. Their education has taught them that these vices are blameworthy, while their personal and empirical knowledge of them causes them to take a special interest in these weaknesses and to see signs of them everywhere. + 

If the number of Miss Thriplow’s friends who belonged to the type of the emotionally impotent was surprisingly large, the fact was due to a tendency in Miss Thriplow herself towards precisely this spiritual weakness. Being by nature a good deal more acute and self-analytic than most of the men and women who indignantly castigate their own inveterate sins, Miss Thriplow was not unaware, while she criticized others, of the similar defect in herself. She could not help suspecting, when she read Dostoevsky and Chekhov, that she was organized differently from these Russians. It seemed to her that she felt nothing so acutely, with such an intricate joy or misery as did they. And even before she had started reading the Russians, Miss Thriplow had come to the painful conclusion that if the Brontë sisters were emotionally normal, then she must be decidedly subnormal. And even if they weren’t quite normal, even if they were feverish, she desired to be like them; they seemed to her entirely admirable. It was the knowledge of her subnormality (which she had come, however, to attribute to a lack of opportunities⁠—we lead such sheltered, artificial lives⁠—for the display of her potential passions and emotions) that had made Miss Thriplow so passionate an admirer of fine spontaneous feelings. It caused her at the same time to be willing and anxious to embrace every opportunity that presented itself for the testing of her reactions. It is experience that makes us aware of what we are; if it were not for contacts with the world outside ourselves we should have no emotions at all. In order to get to know her latent emotional self, Miss Thriplow desired to have as much experience, to make as many contacts with external reality as possible. When the external reality was of an unusual character and offered to be particularly fruitful in emotional revelations, she sought it with a special eagerness. Thus, a love affair with Calamy had seemed to her fraught with the most interesting emotional possibilities. She would have liked him well enough even if his drowsiness had concealed no inward fires. But the conviction that there was something “queer,” as Mrs. Aldwinkle would say, and dangerous about the man made her imagine at every stage of their intimacy that she liked him better than she actually did; made her anxious to advance to further stages in the hope that, as he revealed himself, ampler and more interesting revelations of her own hidden soul might there be awaiting her. She had had her reward; Calamy had already genuinely frightened her, had revealed himself as excitingly brutal. + 

“You exasperate me so much,” he had said, “that I could wring your neck.” + 

And there were moments when she half believed that he really would kill her. It was a new kind of love. She abandoned herself to it with a fervour which she found, taking its temperature, very admirable. The flood of passion carried her along; Miss Thriplow took notes of her sensations on the way and hoped that there would be more and intenser sensations to record in the future. + 

XIII + 

Calamy lay on his back, quite still, looking up into the darkness. Up there, he was thinking, so near that it’s only a question of reaching out a hand to draw back the curtaining darkness that conceals it, up there, just above me, floats the great secret, the beauty and the mystery. To look into the depths of that mystery, to fix the eyes of the spirit on that bright and enigmatic beauty, to pore over the secret until its symbols cease to be opaque and the light filters through from beyond⁠—there is nothing else in life, for me at any rate, that matters; there is no rest or possibility of satisfaction in doing anything else. + 

All this was obvious to him now. And it was obvious, too, that he could not do two things at once; he couldn’t at the same time lean out into the silence beyond the futile noise and bustle⁠—into the mental silence that lies beyond the body⁠—he couldn’t at the same time do this and himself partake in the tumult; and if he wanted to look into the depths of mind, he must not interpose a preoccupation with his bodily appetites. + 

He had known all this so well and so long; and still he went on in the same way of life. He knew that he ought to change, to do something different, and he profoundly resented this knowledge. Deliberately he acted against it. Instead of making an effort to get out of the noise and bustle, to break away from his enslavement and do what he ought to do, what he knew that, really and profoundly, he wanted to do, he had more than once, when his bonds had seemed on the point of falling away of themselves, deliberately tightened them. He resented this necessity of changing, even though it was a necessity imposed on him, not from without, but by what he knew to be the most intelligent part of his own being. He was afraid, too, that if he changed he would be making himself ridiculous. It was not that he desired to live as he had until a year ago. That dreary and fatiguing routine of pleasure had become intolerable; he had broken definitely with that. No; he pictured a sort of graceful Latin compromise. An Epicurean cultivation of mind and body. Breakfast at nine. Serious reading from ten till one. Luncheon prepared by an excellent French cook. In the afternoon a walk and talk with intelligent friends. Tea with crumpets and the most graceful of female society. A frugal but exquisite supper. Three hours’ meditation about the Absolute, and then bed, not unaccompanied.⁠ ⁠… It sounded charming. But somehow it wouldn’t do. To the liver of this perfect Life of Reason the secret, the mystery and the beauty, though they might be handled and examined, refused to give up their significance. If one really wanted to know about them, one must do more than meditate upon them of an evening between the French chef’s masterpiece of maigre cooking and the night’s rest, not in solitude. In these delightful Latin circumstances the secret, the mystery and the beauty reduced themselves to nothing. One thought of them only because they were amusing and to pass the time; they were really no more important than the tea with crumpets, the vegetarian supper and the amorous repose. If one wanted them to be more than these, one must abandon oneself completely to the contemplation of them. There could be no compromise. + 

Calamy knew this. But all the same he had made love to Mary Thriplow, not because he had felt an overwhelming passionate necessity to do so; but because she amused him, because her prettiness, her air of unreal innocence exasperated his senses, more than all because he felt that a love affair with Mary Thriplow would keep him thoroughly occupied and prevent him from thinking about anything else. It had not. The beauty and the mystery still hung just above him when he lay alone in the darkness. They were still there; his affair with Mary Thriplow merely prevented him from approaching them. + 

Down in the valley a clock struck one. The sound reminded him that he had promised to go to her tonight. He found himself thinking of what would happen when they met, of the kisses, the caresses given and received. Angrily he tried to turn his thoughts to other themes; he tried to think of the mystery and the beauty that floated there, above him, on the further side of the curtaining darkness. But however vehemently he strove to expel them, the charnel images kept returning again and again to his mind. + 

“I won’t go,” he said to himself; but he knew while he was saying it that he would. With an extraordinary vividness he imagined her lying on the crook of his arm, extenuated, limp and shuddering, like one who has been tormented on the rack. Yes, he knew that he would go. + 

The notion of torture continued to haunt his mind. He thought of those poor wretches who, accused of sorcery, admitted after the third day’s torment that they had indeed flown along the wind, passed through keyholes, taken the form of wolves and conjoined themselves with incubi; who would admit, not only these things, but also, after another hour on the rack, that they had accomplices, that this man, that woman, that young child were also sorcerers and servants of the devil. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Weak in pain, but weaker still, he thought, more inexcusably weak, in pleasure. For under the torments of pleasure, what cowardices, what betrayals of self and of others will it not commit! How lightly it will lie and perjure itself! How glibly, with a word, condemn others to suffer! How abjectly it will surrender happiness and almost life itself for a moment’s prolongation of the delicious torture! The shame that follows is the spirit’s resentment, its sad indignation at its bondage and humiliation. + 

Under the torment of pleasure, he thought, women are weaker than men. Their weakness flatters their lover’s consciousness of strength, gratifies his desire for power. On one of his own sex a man will vent his love of power by making him suffer; but on a woman by making her enjoy. It is more the pleasurable torment he inflicts than what is inflicted upon him that delights the lover. + 

And since man is less weak, Calamy went on thinking, since pleasure with him is never so annihilating that he cannot take greater pleasure in the torment of his tormentor, is he not therefore the less excusable for breaking faith with himself or others under the delicious torture or the desire and anticipation of it? Man has less physical justification for his weakness and his enslavement. Woman is made by nature to be enslaved⁠—by love, by children. But every now and then a man is born who ought to be free. For such a man it is disgraceful to succumb under the torture. + 

If I could free myself, he thought, I could surely do something; nothing useful, no doubt, in the ordinary sense, nothing that would particularly profit other people; but something that for me would be of the last importance. The mystery floats just above me. If I were free, if I had time, if I could think and think and slowly learn to plumb the silences of the spirit⁠ ⁠… + 

The image of Mary Thriplow presented itself again to his mind’s eye. Limply she lay in the crook of his arm, trembling as though after torment. He shut his eyes; angrily he shook his head. The image would not leave him. If I were free, he said to himself, if I were free⁠ ⁠… + 

In the end he got out of bed and opened the door. The corridor was brightly illumined; an electric light was left burning all night. Calamy was just about to step out, when another door a little further down the passage was violently thrown open and Mr. Falx, his legs showing thin and hairy below the hem of a nightshirt, impetuously emerged. Calamy retired into the shadowed embrasure of his door. With the anxious, harrowed expression on his face of one who suffers from colic, Mr. Falx hurried past, looking neither to the left hand nor to the right. He turned down another passage which entered the main corridor a few yards away and disappeared; a door slammed. When he was out of sight, Calamy walked softly and rapidly down the corridor, opened the fourth door on the left and disappeared into the darkness. A little later Mr. Falx returned, at leisure, to his room. + 