Part + 

V + 

Conclusions + 

I + 

“What are you thinking of?” + 

“Nothing,” said Calamy. + 

“Yes, you were. You must have been thinking about something.” + 

“Nothing in particular,” he repeated. + 

“Tell me,” Mary insisted. “I want to know.” + 

“Well, if you really want to know,” Calamy began slowly⁠ ⁠… + 

But she interrupted him. “And why did you hold up your hand like that? And spread out the fingers? I could see it, you know; against the window.” Pitch dark it was in the room, but beyond the unshuttered windows was a starlit night. + 

Calamy laughed⁠—a rather embarrassed laugh. “Oh, you saw it, did you⁠—the hand? Well, as a matter of fact, it was precisely about my hand that I was thinking.” + 

“About your hand?” said Mary incredulously. “That seems a queer thing to think about.” + 

“But interesting if you think about it hard enough.” + 

“Your hands,” she said softly, in another voice, “your hands. When they touch me⁠ ⁠…” With a feminine movement of gratitude, of thanks for a benefit received, she pressed herself more closely against him; in the darkness she kissed him. “I love you too much,” she whispered, “too much.” And at the moment it was almost true. The strong complete spirit, she had written in her notebook, must be able to love with fury, savagely, mindlessly. Not without pride, she had found herself complete and strong. Once, at a dinner party, she had been taken down by a large black and lemon coloured Argentine; unfolding his napkin, he had opened the evening’s conversation, in that fantastic trans-Pyrenean French which was his only substitute for the Castilian, by saying, with a roll of his black eyes and a flashing ivory smile: “Jé vois qué vous avez du temmperramenk.” “Oh, à revendre,” she had answered gaily, throwing herself into the light Parisian part. How marvellously amusing! But that was Life⁠—Life all over. She had brought the incident into a short story, long ago. But the Argentine had looked with an expert’s eye; he was right. “I love you too much,” she whispered in the darkness. Yes, it was true, it was nearly true, at the moment, in the circumstances. She took his hand and kissed it. “That’s all I think about your hand,” she said. + 

Calamy allowed his hand to be kissed, and as soon as it was decently possible gently withdrew it. Invisibly, in the darkness, he made a little grimace of impatience. He was no longer interested in kisses, at the moment. “Yes,” he said meditatively, “that’s one way of thinking of my hand, that’s one way in which it exists and is real. Certainly. And that was what I was thinking about⁠—all the different ways in which these five fingers”⁠—he held them up again, splayed out, against the window’s oblong of paler darkness⁠—“have reality and exist. All the different ways,” he repeated slowly. “If you think of that, even for five minutes, you find yourself plunged up to the eyes in the most portentous mysteries.” He was silent for a moment; then added in a very serious voice. “And I believe that if one could stand the strain of thinking really hard about one thing⁠—this hand, for example⁠—really hard for several days, or weeks, or months, one might be able to burrow one’s way right through the mystery and really get at something⁠—some kind of truth, some explanation.” He paused, frowning. Down and down, through the obscurity, he was thinking. Slowly, painfully, like Milton’s Devil, pushing his way through chaos; in the end, one might emerge into the light, to see the universe, sphere within sphere, hanging from the floor of heaven. But it would be a slow, laborious process; one would need time, one would need freedom. Above everything, freedom. + 

“Why don’t you think about me?” Mary Thriplow asked. She propped herself up on one elbow and leaned over him; with her other hand she ruffled his hair. “Don’t I bear thinking about?” she asked. She had a fistful of his thick hair in her hand; softly she tugged at it, testingly, as though she were preparing for something worse, were assuring her grip for a more violent pull. She felt a desire to hurt him. Even in her arms, she was thinking, he escaped her, he simply wasn’t there. “Don’t I bear thinking about?” she repeated, tugging a little harder at his hair. + 

Calamy said nothing. The truth was, he was reflecting, that she didn’t bear thinking about. Like a good many other things. All one’s daily life was a skating over thin ice, was a scampering of water-beetles across the invisible skin of depths. Stamp a little too hard, lean a shade too heavily and you were through, you were floundering in a dangerous and unfamiliar element. This love business, for example⁠—it simply couldn’t be thought of; it could only support one on condition that one never stopped to think. But it was necessary to think, necessary to break through and sink into the depths. And yet, insanely and desperately, one still went skating on. + 

“Do you love me?” asked Mary. + 

“Of course,” he said; but the tone of his voice did not carry much conviction. + 

Menacingly she tugged at the tuft of hair she held twined round her fingers. It angered her that he should escape her, that he should not give himself up completely to her. And this resentful feeling that he did not love her enough produced in her a complementary conviction that she loved him too much. Her anger combined with her physical gratitude to make her feel, for the moment, peculiarly passionate. She found herself all at once playing the part of the grande amoureuse, the impassioned de Lespinasse, playing it spontaneously and without the least difficulty. “I could hate you,” she said resentfully, “for making me love you so much.” + 

“And what about me?” said Calamy, thinking of his freedom. “Haven’t I a right to hate too?” + 

“No. Because you don’t love so much.” + 

“But that’s not the question,” said Calamy, neglecting to record his protest against this damning impeachment. “One doesn’t resent love for its own sake, but for the sake of what it interferes with.” + 

“Oh, I see,” said Mary bitterly. She was too deeply wounded even to desire to pull his hair. She turned her back on him. “I’m sorry I should have got in the way of your important occupations,” she said in her most sarcastic voice. “Such as thinking about your hand.” She laughed derisively. There was a long silence. Calamy made no attempt to break it; he was piqued by this derisive treatment of a subject which, for him, was serious, was in some sort sacred. It was Mary who first spoke. + 

“Will you tell me, then, what you were thinking?” she asked submissively, turning back towards him. When one loves, one swallows one’s pride and surrenders. “Will you tell me?” she repeated, leaning over him. She took one of his hands and began to kiss it, then suddenly bit one of his fingers so hard that Calamy cried out in pain. + 

“Why do you make me so unhappy?” she asked between clenched teeth. She saw herself, as she spoke the words, lying face downward on her bed, desperately sobbing. It needs a great spirit to be greatly unhappy. + 

“Make you unhappy?” echoed Calamy in a voice of irritation; he was still smarting with the pain of that bite. “But I don’t. I make you uncommonly happy.” + 

“You make me miserable,” she answered. + 

“Well, in that case,” said Calamy, “I’d better go away and leave you in peace.” He slipped his arm from under her shoulders, as though he were really preparing to go. + 

But Mary enfolded him in her arms. “No, no,” she implored. “Don’t go. You mustn’t be cross with me. I’m sorry. I behaved abominably. Tell me, please, what you were thinking about your hand. I really am interested. Really, really.” She spoke eagerly, childishly, like the little girl at the Royal Institution lecture. + 

Calamy couldn’t help laughing. “You’ve succeeded in rather damping my enthusiasm for that subject,” he said. “I’d find it difficult to begin now, in cold blood.” + 

“Please, please,” Mary insisted. Wronged, it was she who asked pardon, she who cajoled. When one loves⁠ ⁠… + 

“You’ve made it almost impossible to talk anything but nonsense,” Calamy objected. But in the end he allowed himself to be persuaded. Embarrassed, rather awkwardly⁠—for the spiritual atmosphere in which these ideas had been ruminated was dissipated, and it was in the void, so to speak, in the empty cold that his thoughts now gasped for breath⁠—he began his exposition. But gradually, as he spoke, the mood returned; he became at home once more with what he was saying. Mary listened with a fixed attention of which, even in the darkness, he was somehow conscious. + 

“Well, you see,” he started hesitatingly, “it’s like this. I was thinking of all the different ways a thing can exist⁠—my hand, for example.” + 

“I see,” said Mary Thriplow sympathetically and intelligently. She was almost too anxious to prove that she was listening, that she was understanding everything; she saw before there was anything to see. + 

“It’s extraordinary,” Calamy went on, “what a lot of different modes of existence a thing has, when you come to think about it. And the more you think, the more obscure and mysterious everything becomes. What seemed solid vanishes; what was obvious and comprehensible becomes utterly mysterious. Gulfs begin opening all around you⁠—more and more abysses, as though the ground were splitting in an earthquake. It gives one a strange sense of insecurity, of being in the dark. But I still believe that, if one went on thinking long enough and hard enough, one might somehow come through, get out on the other side of the obscurity. But into what, precisely into what? That’s the question.” He was silent for a moment. If one were free, he thought, one could go exploring into that darkness. But the flesh was weak; under the threat of that delicious torture it turned coward and traitor. + 

“Well?” said Mary at last. She moved closer to him, lightly, her lips brushed across his cheek. She ran her hand softly over his shoulder and along his arm. “Go on.” + 

“Very well,” he said in a businesslike voice, moving a little away from her as he spoke. He held up his hand once more against the window. “Look,” he said. “It’s just a shape that interrupts the light. To a child who has not yet learned to interpret what he sees, that’s all it would be, just a shaped blotch of colour, no more significant than one of those coloured targets representing a man’s head and shoulders that one learns shooting on. But now, suppose I try to consider the thing as a physicist.” + 

“Quite,” said Mary Thriplow; and from the movement of a floating tress of her hair which brushed against his shoulder he knew that she was nodding her head. + 

“Well then,” Calamy went on, “I have to imagine an almost inconceivable number of atoms, each consisting of a greater or lesser number of units of negative electricity whirling several million times a minute round a nucleus of positive electricity. The vibrations of the atoms lying near the surface sift out, so to speak, the electromagnetic radiations which fall upon them, permitting only those waves to reach our eyes which give us the sensation of a brownish-pink colour. In passing it may be remarked that the behaviour of light is satisfactorily explained according to one theory of electro-dynamics, while the behaviour of the electrons in the atom can only be explained on a theory that is entirely inconsistent with it. Inside the atom, they tell us now, electrons move from one orbit to another without taking any time to accomplish their journey and without covering any space. Indeed, within the atom there is neither space nor time. And so on and so on. I have to take most of this on trust, I’m afraid, for I understand next to nothing about these things. Only enough to make me feel rather dizzy when I begin to think about them.” + 

“Yes, dizzy,” said Mary, “that’s the word. Dizzy.” She made a prolonged buzzing over the z’s. + 

“Well then, here are two ways already in which my hand exists,” Calamy went on. “Then there’s the chemical way. These atoms consisting of more or fewer electrons whizzing round a nucleus of greater or lesser charge are atoms of different elements that build themselves up in certain architectural patterns into complicated molecules.” + 

Sympathetic and intelligent, Mary echoed: “Molecules.” + 

“Now if, like Cranmer, I were to put my right hand into the fire, to punish it for having done something evil or unworthy (words, by the way, which haven’t much in common with chemistry), if I were to put my hand in the fire, these molecules would uncombine themselves into their constituent atoms, which would then proceed to build themselves up again into other molecules. But this leads me on at once to a set of entirely different realities. For if I were to put my hand in the fire, I should feel pain; and unless, like Cranmer, I made an enormous effort of will to keep it there, I should withdraw it; or rather it would withdraw itself almost without my knowledge and before I was aware. For I am alive, and this hand is part of a living being, the first law of whose existence is to preserve its life. Being alive, this hand of mine, if it were burnt, would set about trying to repair itself. Seen by a biologist, it reveals itself as a collection of cells, having each its appointed function, and existing harmoniously together, never trespassing upon one another, never proliferating into wild adventures of growth, but living, dying and growing to one end⁠—that the whole which they compose may fulfil its purpose⁠—and as though in accordance with a preordained plan. Say that the hand is burnt. From all round the burn the healthy cells would breed out of themselves new cells to fill in and cover the damaged places.” + 

“How wonderful life is!” said Mary Thriplow. “Life⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Cranmer’s hand,” Calamy went on, “had done an ignoble thing. The hand is part, not merely of a living being, but of a being that knows good and evil. This hand of mine can do good things and bad things. It has killed a man, for example; it has written all manner of words; it has helped a man who was hurt; it has touched your body.” He laid his hand on her breast; she started, she trembled involuntarily under his caress. He ought to think that rather flattering, oughtn’t he? It was a symbol of his power over her⁠—of her power, alas, over him. “And when it touches your body,” he went on, “it touches also your mind. My hand moves like this, and it moves through your consciousness as well as here, across your skin. And it’s my mind that orders it to move; it brings your body into my mind. It exists in mind; it has reality as a part of my soul and a part of yours.” + 

Miss Thriplow couldn’t help reflecting that there was, in all this, the stuff for a very deep digression in one of her novels. “This thoughtful young writer⁠ ⁠…” would be quoted from the reviewers on the dust-cover of her next book. + 

“Go on,” she said. + 

Calamy went on. “And so these,” he said, “are some of the ways⁠—and there are plenty more, of course, besides⁠—these are some of the ways in which my hand exists and is real. This shape which interrupts the light⁠—it is enough to think of it for five minutes to perceive that it exists simultaneously in a dozen parallel worlds. It exists as electrical charges; as chemical molecules; as living cells; as part of a moral being, the instrument of good and evil; in the physical world and in mind. And from this one goes on to ask, inevitably, what relationship exists between these different modes of being. What is there in common between life and chemistry; between good and evil and electrical charges; between a collection of cells and the consciousness of a caress? It’s here that the gulfs begin to open. For there isn’t any connection⁠—that one can see, at any rate. Universe lies on the top of universe, layer after layer, distinct and separate⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Like a Neapolitan ice,” Mary’s mind flew at once to the fantastic and unexpected comparison. “This witty young writer⁠ ⁠…” That was already on her dust-covers. + 

Calamy laughed. “All right,” he agreed. “Like a Neapolitan ice, if you like. What’s true in the chocolate layer, at the bottom of the ice, doesn’t hold in the vanilla at the top. And a lemon truth is different from a strawberry truth. And each one has just as much right to exist and to call itself real as every other. And you can’t explain one in terms of the others. Certainly you can’t explain the vanilla in terms of any of the lower layers⁠—you can’t explain mind as mere life, as chemistry, as physics. That at least is one thing that’s perfectly obvious and self-evident.” + 

“Obvious,” Mary agreed. “And what’s the result of it all? I really don’t see.” + 

“Neither do I,” said Calamy, speaking through an explosion of melancholy laughter. “The only hope,” he went on slowly, “is that perhaps, if you went on thinking long enough and hard enough, you might arrive at an explanation of the chocolate and the lemon by the vanilla. Perhaps it’s really all vanilla, all mind, all spirit. The rest is only apparent, an illusion. But one has no right to say so until one has thought a long time, in freedom.” + 

“In freedom?” + 

“The mind must be open, unperturbed, empty of irrelevant things, quiet. There’s no room for thoughts in a half-shut, cluttered mind. And thoughts won’t enter a noisy mind; they’re shy, they remain in their obscure hiding-places below the surface, where they can’t be got at, so long as the mind is full and noisy. Most of us pass through life without knowing that they’re there at all. If one wants to lure them out, one must clear a space for them, one must open the mind wide and wait. And there must be no irrelevant preoccupations prowling around the doors. One must free oneself of those.” + 

“I suppose I’m one of the irrelevant preoccupations,” said Mary Thriplow, after a little pause. + 

Calamy laughed, but did not deny it. + 

“If that’s so,” said Mary, “why did you make love to me?” + 

Calamy did not reply. Why indeed? He had often asked that question himself. + 

“I think it would be best,” she said, after a silence, “if we were to make an end.” She would go away, she would grieve in solitude. + 

“Make an end?” Calamy repeated. He desired it, of course, above everything⁠—to make an end, to be free. But he found himself adding, with a kind of submarine laughter below the surface of his voice: “Do you think you can make an end?” + 

“Why not?” + 

“Suppose I don’t allow you to?” Did she imagine, then, that she wasn’t in his power, that he couldn’t make her obey his will whenever he desired? “I don’t allow you,” he said, and his voice quivered with the rising mirth. He bent over her and began to kiss her on the mouth; with his hands he held and caressed her. What an insanity, he said to himself. + 

“No, no.” Mary struggled a little; but in the end she allowed herself to be overcome. She lay still, trembling, like one who has been tortured on the rack. + 

II + 

On their return, somewhat low-spirited, from Montefiascone, Mrs. Aldwinkle and her party found Mary Thriplow alone in the palace. + 

“And Calamy?” Mrs. Aldwinkle inquired. + 

“He’s gone into the mountains,” said Miss Thriplow in a serious, matter-of-fact voice. + 

“Why?” + 

“He felt like that,” Mary answered. “He wanted to be alone to think. I understand it so well. The prospect of your return filled him almost with terror. He went off two or three days ago.” + 

“Into the mountains?” echoed Mrs. Aldwinkle. “Is he sleeping in the woods, or in a cave, or something of that kind?” + 

“He’s taken a room in a peasant’s cottage on the road up to the marble quarries. It’s a lovely place.” + 

“This sounds most interesting,” said Mr. Cardan. “I must really climb up and have a look at him.” + 

“I’m sure he’d rather you didn’t,” said Miss Thriplow. “He wants to be left alone. I understand it so well,” she repeated. + 

Mr. Cardan looked at her curiously; her face expressed a bright and serious serenity. “I’m surprised that you too don’t retire from the world,” he said, twinkling. He had not felt as cheerful as this since before the dismal day of poor Grace’s funeral. + 

Miss Thriplow smiled a Christian smile. “You think it’s a joke,” she said, shaking her head. “But it isn’t really, you know.” + 

“I’m sure it isn’t,” Mr. Cardan made haste to protest. “And believe me, I never meant to imply that it was. Never, on my word. I merely said⁠—quite seriously, I assure you⁠—that I was surprised that you too⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Well, you see, it doesn’t seem to me necessary to go away bodily,” Miss Thriplow explained. “It’s always seemed to me that one can live the hermit’s life, if one wants to, in the heart of London, anywhere.” + 

“Quite,” said Mr. Cardan. “You’re perfectly right.” + 

“I think he might have waited till I came back,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle rather resentfully. “The least he could have done was to leave a note.” She looked at Miss Thriplow angrily, as though it were she who were to blame for Calamy’s impoliteness. “Well, I must go and get out of my dusty clothes,” she added crossly, and walked away to her room. Her irritation was the disguise and public manifestation of a profound depression. They’re all going, she was thinking, they’re all slipping away. First Chelifer, now Calamy. Like all the rest. Mournfully she looked back over her life. Everybody, everything had always slipped away from her. She had always missed all the really important, exciting things; they had invariably happened, somehow, just round the corner, out of her sight. The days were so short, so few now. Death approached, approached. Why had Cardan brought that horrible imbecile creature to die in front of her like that? She didn’t want to be reminded of death. Mrs. Aldwinkle shuddered. I’m getting old, she thought; and the little clock on the mantelpiece, ticking away in the silence of her huge room, took up the refrain: Getting old, getting old, getting old, it repeated again and again, endlessly. Getting old⁠—Mrs. Aldwinkle looked at herself in the glass⁠—and that electric massage machine hadn’t arrived. True, it was on its way; but it would be weeks before it got here. The posts were so slow. Everything conspired against her. If she had had it before, if she’d looked younger⁠ ⁠… who knew? Getting old, getting old, repeated the little clock. In a couple of days from now Chelifer would be going back to England; he’d go away, he’d live apart from her, live such a wonderful, beautiful life. She’d miss it all. And Calamy had already gone; what was he doing, sitting there in the mountains? He was thinking wonderful thoughts, thoughts that might hold the secret she had always been seeking and had never found, thoughts that might bring the consolation and tranquillity of which she always so sorely stood in need. She was missing them, she’d never know them. Getting old, getting old. She took off her hat and tossed it on to the bed. It seemed to her that she was the unhappiest woman in the world. + 

That evening, while she was brushing Mrs. Aldwinkle’s hair, Irene, braving the dangers of Aunt Lilian’s terrifying fun, screwed up her courage to say: “I can never be grateful enough to you, Auntie, for having talked to me about Hovenden.” + 

“What about him?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle, from whose mind the painful events of the last few weeks had quite obliterated such trivial memories. + 

Irene blushed with embarrassment. This was a question she had not anticipated. Was it really possible that Aunt Lilian could have forgotten those momentous and epoch-making words of hers? “Why,” she began stammering, “what you said about⁠ ⁠… I mean⁠ ⁠… when you said that he looked as though⁠ ⁠… well, as though he liked me.” + 

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle without interest. + 

“Don’t you remember?” + 

“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Aldwinkle nodded. “What about it?” + 

“Well,” Irene went on, still painfully embarrassed, “you see⁠ ⁠… that made me⁠ ⁠… that made me pay attention, if you understand.” + 

“Hm,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. There was a silence. Getting old, getting old, repeated the little clock remorselessly. + 

Irene leaned forward and suddenly boiled over with confidences. “I love him so much, Aunt Lilian,” she said, speaking very rapidly, “so much, so much. It’s the real thing this time. And he loves me too. And we’re going to get married at the New Year, quite quietly; no fuss, no crowds shoving in on what isn’t their business; quietly and sensibly in a registry office. And after that we’re going in the Velox to⁠ ⁠…” + 

“What are you talking about?” said Mrs. Aldwinkle in a furious voice, and she turned round on her niece a face expressive of such passionate anger that Irene drew back, not merely astonished, but positively afraid. “You don’t mean to tell me,” Mrs. Aldwinkle began; but she could not find the words to continue. “What have you two young fools been thinking about?” she got out at last. + 

… old, getting old; the remorseless ticking made itself heard in every silence. + 

From being merry and excited in its childishness Irene’s face had become astonished and miserable. She was pale, her lips trembled a little as she spoke. “But I thought you’d be glad, Aunt Lilian,” she said. “I thought you’d be glad.” + 

“Glad because you’re making fools of yourselves?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle, savagely snorting. + 

“But it was you who first suggested,” Irene began. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle cut her short, before she could say any more, with a brusqueness that might have revealed to a more practised psychologist than Irene her consciousness of being in the wrong. “Absurd,” she said. “I suppose you’re going to tell me,” she went on sarcastically, “that it was I who told you to marry him.” + 

“I know you didn’t,” said Irene. + 

“There!” Mrs. Aldwinkle’s tone was triumphant. + 

“But you did say you wondered why I wasn’t in love⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Bah,” said Aunt Lilian, “I was just making fun. Calf loves⁠ ⁠…” + 

“But why shouldn’t I marry him?” asked Irene. “If I love him and he loves me. Why shouldn’t I?” + 

Why shouldn’t she? Yes, that was an awkward question. Getting old, getting old, muttered the clock in the brief ensuing silence. Perhaps that was half the answer. Getting old! they were all going; first Chelifer, then Calamy, now Irene. Getting old, getting old; soon she’d be quite alone. And it wasn’t only that. It was also her pride that was hurt, her love of dominion that suffered. Irene had been her slave; had worshipped her, taken her word as law, her opinions as gospel truth. Now she was transferring her allegiance. Mrs. Aldwinkle was losing a subject⁠—losing her to a more powerful rival. It was intolerable. “Why shouldn’t you marry him?” Mrs. Aldwinkle repeated the phrase ironically two or three times, while she hunted for the answer. “Why shouldn’t you marry him?” + 

“Why shouldn’t I?” Irene asked again. There were tears in her eyes; but however unhappy she might look, there was something determined and indomitable in her attitude, something obstinate in her expression and her tone of voice. Mrs. Aldwinkle had reason to fear her rival. + 

“Because you’re too young,” she said at last. It was a very feeble answer; but she had been unable to think of a better one. + 

“But, Aunt Lilian, don’t you remember? You always said that people ought to marry young. I remember so well, one time, when we talked about Juliet being only fourteen when she first saw Romeo, that you said⁠ ⁠…” + 

“That has nothing to do with it,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, cutting short her niece’s mnemonic display. Irene’s memory, Mrs. Aldwinkle had often had reason to complain, was really too good. + 

“But if you said⁠ ⁠…” Irene began again. + 

“Romeo and Juliet have nothing to do with you and Hovenden,” retorted Mrs. Aldwinkle. “I repeat: you’re too young.” + 

“I’m nineteen.” + 

“Eighteen.” + 

“Practically nineteen,” Irene insisted. “My birthday’s in December.” + 

“Marry in haste and repent at leisure,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, making use of any missile, even a proverb, that came ready to hand. “At the end of six months you’ll come back howling and complaining and asking me to get you out of the mess.” + 

“But why should I?” asked Irene. “We love one another.” + 

“They all say that. You don’t know your own minds.” + 

“But we do.” + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle suddenly changed her tactics. “And what makes you so anxious all at once to run away from me?” she asked. “Can’t you bear to stay with me a moment longer? Am I so intolerable and odious and⁠ ⁠… and⁠ ⁠… brutal and⁠ ⁠…” She clawed at the air. “Do you hate me so much that⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Aunt Lilian!” protested Irene, who had begun to cry in earnest. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle, with that tactlessness, that lack of measure that were characteristic of her, went on piling question upon rhetorical question, until in the end she completely spoiled the effect she had meant to achieve, exaggerating into ludicrousness what might otherwise have been touching. “Can’t you bear me? Have I ill-treated you? Tell me. Have I bullied you, or scolded you, or⁠ ⁠… or not given you enough to eat? Tell me.” + 

“How can you talk like that, Aunt Lilian?” Irene dabbed her eyes with a corner of her dressing-gown. “How can you say that I don’t love you? And you were always telling me that I ought to get married,” she added, breaking out into fresh tears. + 

“How can I say that you don’t love me?” echoed Mrs. Aldwinkle. “But is it true that you’re longing to leave me as soon as possible? Is that true or not? I merely ask what the reason is, that’s all.” + 

“But the reason is that we want to get married; we love each other.” + 

“Or that you hate me,” Mrs. Aldwinkle persisted. + 

“But I don’t hate you, Aunt Lilian. How can you say such a thing? You know I love you.” + 

“And yet you’re anxious to run away from me as fast as you possibly can,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “And I shall be left all alone, all alone.” Her voice trembled; she shut her eyes, she contorted her face in an effort to keep it closed and rigid. Between her eyelids the tears came welling out. “All alone,” she repeated brokenly. Getting old, said the little clock on the mantelpiece, getting old, getting old. + 

Irene knelt down beside her, took her hands between her own and kissed them, pressed them against her tear-wet face. “Aunt Lilian,” she begged, “Aunt Lilian.” + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle went on sobbing. + 

“Don’t cry,” said Irene, crying herself. She imagined that she alone was the cause of Aunt Lilian’s unhappiness. In reality, she was only the pretext; Mrs. Aldwinkle was weeping over her whole life, weeping at the approach of death. In that first moment of agonized sympathy and self-reproach, Irene was on the point of declaring that she would give up Hovenden, that she would spend all her life with her Aunt Lilian. But something held her back. Obscurely she was certain that it wouldn’t do, that it was impossible, that it would even be wrong. She loved Aunt Lilian and she loved Hovenden. In a way she loved Aunt Lilian more than Hovenden, now. But something in her that looked prophetically forward, something that had come through innumerable lives, out of the obscure depths of time, to dwell within her, held her back. The conscious and individual part of her spirit inclined towards Aunt Lilian. But consciousness and individuality⁠—how precariously, how irrelevantly almost, they flowered out of that ancient root of life planted in the darkness of her being! The flower was for Aunt Lilian, the root for Hovenden. + 

“But you won’t be all alone,” she protested. “We shall constantly be with you. You’ll come and stay with us.” + 

The assurance did not seem to bring much consolation to Mrs. Aldwinkle. She went on crying. The clock ticked away as busily as ever. + 

III + 

In the course of the last few days the entries in Miss Thriplow’s notebook had changed their character. From being amorous they had turned mystical. Savage and mindless passion was replaced by quiet contemplation. De Lespinasse had yielded to de Guyon. + 

“Do you remember, darling Jim,” she wrote, “how, when we were ten, we used to discuss what was the sin against the Holy Ghost? I remember we agreed that using the altar as a W.C. was probably the unforgivable sin. It’s a great pity that it isn’t, for then it would be so extremely easy to avoid committing it. No, I’m afraid it’s not quite so straightforward as that, the sin against the Holy Ghost. And it’s most perilously easy to fall into it. Stifling the voices inside you, filling the mind with so much earthy rubbish that God has no room to enter it, not giving the spirit its fair chance⁠—that’s the sin against the Holy Ghost. And it’s unforgivable because it’s irremediable. Last-minute repentances are no good. The sin and the corresponding virtue are affairs of a lifetime. And almost everybody commits the sin; they die unforgiven, and at once they begin again another life. Only when they’ve lived in the virtue of the Holy Ghost are they forgiven, let off the pains of life and allowed to sink into unity with All. Isn’t that the meaning of the text? It’s terribly difficult not to commit the sin. Whenever I stop to think, I am appalled by the badness of my own life. Oh, Jim, Jim, how easily one forgets, how unthinkingly one allows oneself to be buried under a mountain of little earthy interests! The voices are muffled, the mind is blocked up, there’s no place for the spirit of God. When I’m working, I feel it’s all right; I’m living in the virtue of the Holy Ghost. For then I’m doing the best I can. But the rest of the time, that’s when I go wrong. One can’t be doing all the time, one can’t always give out. One must also be passive, must receive. That’s what I fail to do. I flutter about, I fill my mind with lumber, I make it impossible for myself to receive. One can’t go on like this; one can’t go on sinning against the Holy Ghost⁠—not if one once realizes it.” + 

There was a line. The next note began: “To think steadily and intensely of one thing is a wonderful mental exercise; it serves to open up the mysteries that lie below the commonplace surface of existence; and perhaps, if one went on thinking long enough and hard enough, one might get through the mystery to its explanation. When I think, for example, of my hand⁠ ⁠…” The note was a long one; it covered, in Miss Thriplow’s clear, cultured writing, more than two pages of the book. + 

“Recently,” she had written after that, “I have been saying my prayers again, as I used to when I was a child. Our Father which art in heaven⁠—the words help to clear out one’s mind, to rid it of the lumber and leave it free for the coming of the spirit.” + 

The next three notes had got there by mistake. Their place was not in the secret, personal book, but in the other volume, wherein she recorded little snippets that might come in useful for her novels. Not, of course, that the entries in the secret book didn’t also come in useful for her fiction sometimes; but they were not recorded expressly for that purpose. + 

“A man in riding breeches,” the first note ran: “he makes a little creaking noise as he walks along, whipcord rubbing against whipcord, that is like the creaking noise that swans make, flying, when they move their big white wings.” + 

Then followed two lines of comic dialogue. + 

“Me. I find the ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ a most bloodcurdling story. + 

“Frenchman. Yes, yes, she bloods my curdle also.” + 

The third note recorded that “moss after a shower on a sultry day is like a sponge still damp from the hot bath.” + 

There followed a corollary to the note on prayer. “There is no doubt,” she had written, “that the actual technique of prayer⁠—the kneeling, the hiding the face in the hands, the uttering of words in an audible voice, the words being addressed into empty space⁠—helps by its mere dissimilarity from the ordinary actions of everyday life to put one into a devout frame of mind.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Tonight she sat for some time in front of the open book, pen in hand, without writing anything. She frowned pensively and bit the end of her pen. In the end she put it on record that “St. Augustine, St. Francis and St. Ignatius Loyola lived dissolute lives before their conversions.” Then, opening her other, her un-secret notebook, she wrote: “X and Y are old friends from childhood. X dashing, Y timid; Y admires X. Y marries, while X is at the war, a passionate creature who takes Y more out of pity (he is wounded) than from love. There is a child. X returns, falls in love with Y’s wife, A. Great passion amid growing anguish of mind⁠—on her part because she is deceiving Y, whom she likes and respects, and daren’t undeceive him for fear of losing the child; on his part because he feels that he ought to give up all this sort of thing and devote himself to God, etc.; in fact, he feels the premonitions of conversion. One night they decide that the time has come to part; it can’t go on⁠—she because of the deception, he because of mysticism, etc. It is a most touching scene, lasting all a last chaste night. Unfortunately Y finds out for some reason⁠—baby ill, or something of the kind⁠—that A is not staying at her mother’s as she said, but is elsewhere. Early in the morning Y comes to X’s flat to ask him to help in the search for A. Sees A’s coat and hat lying on the drawing-room sofa; understands all. In a fury flies at X, who, defending himself, kills him. The end. Question, however; doesn’t it end with too much of a click? too epigrammatically, so to speak? I wonder whether in this twentieth century one can permit oneself the luxury of such effective dramatic devices. Oughtn’t one to do it more flatly, somehow? More terre-à-terreishly, more real-lifeishly? I feel that a conclusion like that is almost an unfair advantage taken at the reader’s expense. One ought to arrange it differently. But the question is, how? Can one let them separate and show them living, she en bonne mère de famille, he as a coenobite? It would drag it out terribly, wouldn’t it? Must think of this carefully.” + 

She shut the book and put the cap on her fountain pen, feeling that she had done a good evening’s work. Calamy was now safely laid down in pickle, waiting to be consumed whenever she should be short of fictional provisions. + 

After having undressed, washed, brushed her hair, polished her nails, greased her face and cleaned her teeth, Miss Thriplow turned out the light, and kneeling down by the side of her bed said several prayers, aloud. She then got into bed, and lying on her back, with all her muscles relaxed, she began to think about God. + 

God is a spirit, she said to herself, a spirit, a spirit. She tried to picture something huge and empty, but alive. A huge flat expanse of sand, for example, and over it a huge blank dome of sky; and above the sand everything should be tremulous and shimmering with heat⁠—an emptiness that was yet alive. A spirit, an all-pervading spirit. God is a spirit. Three camels appeared on the horizon of the sandy plain and went lolloping along in an absurd ungainly fashion from left to right. Miss Thriplow made an effort and dismissed them. God is a spirit, she said aloud. But of all animals camels are really almost the queerest; when one thinks of their frightfully supercilious faces, with their protruding under lips like the last Hapsburg kings of Spain⁠ ⁠… No, no; God is a spirit, all-pervading, everywhere. All the universes are made one in him. Layer upon layer⁠ ⁠… A Neapolitan ice floated up out of the darkness. She had never liked Neapolitan ices since that time, at the Franco-British exhibition, when she had eaten one and then taken a ride on Sir Hiram Maxim’s Captive Flying Machines. Round and round and round. Lord, how she had been sick, afterwards, in the Blue Grotto of Capri! “Sixpence each, ladies and gentlemen, only sixpence each for a trip to the celebrated Blue Grotto of Capri, the celebrated Blue Grotto, ladies and gentlemen.⁠ ⁠…” How sick! It must have been most awkward for the grownups.⁠ ⁠… But God is a spirit. All the universes are one in the spirit. Mind and matter in all their manifestations⁠—all one in the spirit. All one⁠—she and the stars and the mountains and the trees and the animals and the blank spaces between the stars and⁠ ⁠… and the fish, the fish in the Aquarium at Monaco.⁠ ⁠… And what fish! What extravagant fantasies! But no more extravagant or fantastic, really, than the painted and jewelled old women outside. It might make a very good episode in a book⁠—a couple of those old women looking through the glass at the fishes. Very beautifully and discreetly described; and the fundamental similarity between the creatures on either side of the glass would just be delicately implied⁠—not stated, oh, not stated; that would be too coarse, that would spoil everything, but just implied, by the description, so that the intelligent reader could take the hint. And then in the Casino⁠ ⁠… Miss Thriplow brusquely interrupted herself. God is a spirit. Yes. Where was she? All things are one, ah yes, yes. All, all, all, she repeated. But to arrive at the realization of their oneness one must climb up into the spirit. The body separates, the spirit unites. One must give up the body, the self; one must lose one’s life to gain it. Lose one’s life, empty oneself of the separating Me. She clasped her hands tightly together, tighter, tighter, as though she were squeezing out her individual life between them. If she could squeeze it all out, make herself quite empty, then the other life would come rushing in to take its place. + 

Miss Thriplow lay quite still, hardly breathing. Empty, she said to herself every now and then, quite empty. She felt wonderfully tranquil. God was surely very near. The silence grew more profound, her spirit became calmer and emptier. Yes, God was very near. + 

Perhaps it was the distant roaring of a train in the valley far below that reminded her of the noise of the whirling drill; or perhaps the thin bright line of light that came in, through a chink in the top of the rickety old door, from the illuminated corridor, to reach half across the ceiling above her⁠—perhaps it was this long sharp probe of brightness that reminded her of a surgical instrument. Whatever may have been the cause, Miss Thriplow suddenly found herself thinking of her dentist. Such a charming man; he had a china bulldog on the mantelpiece of his consulting-room and a photograph of his wife and twins. His hair wouldn’t lie down. He had such kind grey eyes. And he was an enthusiast. “This is an instrument of which I’m particularly fond, Miss Thriplow,” he used to say, picking out a little curved harpoon from his armoury. “A little wider, please, if you don’t mind.⁠ ⁠…” What about a story of a dentist who falls in love with one of his patients? He shows her all the instruments, enthusiastically, wants her to like his favourites as much as he does. He pretends that there’s more wrong with her teeth than there really is, in order to see her more often. + 

The dentist grew dim, he began the same gesture again and again, very slowly, but could never finish it, having forgotten, halfway through the act, what he meant to do. At last he disappeared altogether. Miss Thriplow had fallen into a profound and tranquil sleep. + 

IV + 

It had been raining, stormily; but now the wind had fallen and between the heavy clouds the sun was brightly shining. The yellowing chestnut trees stood motionless in the still bright air, glittering with moisture. A noise of rapidly running water filled the ear. The grass of the steep meadows shone in the sunlight. Calamy stepped out from the dark and frowsty living-room of the cottage and walked up the steep path on to the road. He halted here and looked about him. The road at this point was terraced out of one of the sides of a deep valley. The ground rose steeply, in places almost precipitously, above it. Below it the green mountain meadows, brilliant in the sunshine and dotted here and there with clumps of chestnut trees, fell away into the depths of the valley, which the afternoon sun had left already in a vaporous smoky shadow. Profoundly shadowed, too, were the hills on the further side of the narrow cleft. Huge black masses, smoky with the same vapour as that which floated at the bottom of the valley, they rose up almost in silhouette against the bright light beyond. The sun looked down, over their clouded summits, across the intervening gulf, touching the green hillside, on the slope of which Calamy was standing, with a radiance that, in contrast to the dark hills opposite, seemed almost unearthly. To the right, at the head of the valley, a great pinnacle of naked rock, pale brown and streaked here and there with snow-white veins of marble, reached up into the clouds and above them, so that the summit shone like a precious stone in the sunlight, against the blue of the sky. A band of white vapour hung round the shoulders of the mountain. Beneath it appeared the lower buttresses of rock and the long slopes of hanging wood and meadowland falling away into the valley, all shadowy under the clouds, shadowy and dead, save where, here and there, a great golden beam broke through, touching some chosen tract of grass or woodland or rock with an intense and precarious life. + 

Calamy stood for a long time looking out at the scene. How beautiful it was, how beautiful! Glittering in the light, the withering trees seemed to have prepared themselves as though for a feast. For a feast⁠—and yet it was winter and death that awaited them. Beautiful the mountains were, but menacing and terrible; terrible the deep gulf below him with its smoky vaporous shadows, far down, below the shining green. And the shadows mounted second after second as the sun declined. Beautiful, terrible and mysterious, pregnant with what enormous secret, symbolic of what formidable reality? + 

From the direction of the cottage below the road came a tinkle of bells and the shrill shouting of a child’s voice. Half a dozen tall black and white goats, with long black beards, long twisted horns and yellow eyes, slitted with narrow pupils, came trotting up the slope, shaking their flat bells. A little boy scrambled after them, brandishing a stick and shouting words of command. To Calamy he touched his cap; they exchanged a few words in Italian, about the rain, the goats, the best pasture; then, waving his stick and peremptorily shouting at his little flock, the child moved on up the road. The goats trotted on in front, their hoofs clicking on the stones; every now and then they paused to pull a mouthful of grass from the bank at the side of the road; but the little boy would not let them pause. “Via!” he shouted, and banged them with his stick. They bounded forward. Soon herdsman and flock were out of sight. + 

If he had been born that little boy, Calamy wondered, would he still be working, unquestioningly, among these hills: tending the beasts, cutting wood; every now and then carting his faggots and his cheeses down the long road to Vezza? Would he, still, unquestioningly? Would he see that the mountains were beautiful, beautiful and terrible? Or would he find them merely ungrateful land, demanding great labour, giving little in return? Would he believe in heaven and hell? And fitfully, when anything went wrong, would he still earnestly invoke the aid of the infant Jesus, of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph, that patriarchal family trinity⁠—father, mother and baby⁠—of the Italian peasant? Would he have married? By this time, very likely, his eldest children would be ten or twelve years old⁠—driving the goats afield with shrill yellings and brandished sticks. Would he be living quietly and cheerfully the life of a young patriarch, happy in his children, his wife, his flocks and herds? Would he be happy to live thus, close to the earth, earthily, an ancient, instinctive, animally sagacious life? It seemed hardly imaginable. And yet, after all, it was likely enough. It needs a very strong, a passionately ardent spirit to disengage itself from childish tradition, from the life which circumstances impose upon it. Was his such a spirit? + 

He was startled out of his speculations by the sound of his own name, loudly called from a little distance. He turned round and saw Mr. Cardan and Chelifer striding up the road towards him. Calamy waved his hand and went to meet them. Was he pleased to see them or not? He hardly knew. + 

“Well,” said Mr. Cardan, twinkling jovially, as he approached, “how goes life in the Thebaïd? Do you object to receiving a couple of impious visitors from Alexandria?” + 

Calamy laughed and shook their hands without answering. + 

“Did you get wet?” he asked, to change the conversation. + 

“We hid in a cave,” said Mr. Cardan. He looked round at the view. “Pretty good,” he said encouragingly, as though it were Calamy who had made the landscape, “pretty good, I must say.” + 

“Agreeably Wordsworthian,” said Chelifer in his precise voice. + 

“And where do you live?” asked Mr. Cardan. + 

Calamy pointed to the cottage. Mr. Cardan nodded comprehendingly. + 

“Hearts of gold, but a little niffy, eh?” he asked, lifting his raised white eyebrow still higher. + 

“Not to speak of,” said Calamy. + 

“Charming girls?” Mr. Cardan went on. “Or goitres?” + 

“Neither,” said Calamy. + 

“And how long do you propose to stay?” + 

“I haven’t the faintest idea.” + 

“Till you’ve got to the bottom of the cosmos, eh?” + 

Calamy smiled. “That’s about it.” + 

“Splendid,” said Mr. Cardan, patting him on the arm, “splendid. I envy you. God, what wouldn’t I give to be your age? What wouldn’t I give?” He shook his head sadly. “And, alas,” he added, “what could I give, in point of actual fact? I put it at about twelve hundred quid at the present time. My total fortune. Shouldn’t we sit down?” he added on another note. + 

Calamy led the way down the little path. Along the front of the cottage, under the windows, ran a long bench. The three men sat down. The sun shone full upon them; it was pleasantly warm. Beneath them was the narrow valley with its smoky shadows; opposite, the black hills, cloud-capped and silhouetted against the brightness of the sky about the sun. + 

“And the trip to Rome,” Calamy inquired, “was that agreeable?” + 

“Tolerably,” said Chelifer, with precision. + 

“And Miss Elver?” he addressed himself politely to Mr. Cardan. + 

Mr. Cardan looked up at him. “Hadn’t you heard?” he asked. + 

“Heard what?” + 

“She’s dead.” Mr. Cardan’s face became all at once very hard and still. + 

“I’m sorry,” said Calamy. “I didn’t know.” He thought it more tactful to proffer no further condolences. There was a silence. + 

“That’s something,” said Mr. Cardan at last, “that you’ll find it rather difficult to contemplate away, however long and mystically you stare at your navel.” + 

“What?” asked Calamy. + 

“Death,” Mr. Cardan answered. “You can’t get over the fact that, at the end of everything, the flesh gets hold of the spirit, and squeezes the life out of it, so that a man turns into something that’s no better than a whining sick animal. And as the flesh sickens the spirit sickens, manifestly. Finally the flesh dies and putrefies; and the spirit presumably putrefies too. And there’s an end of your omphaloskepsis, with all its byproducts, God and justice and salvation and all the rest of them.” + 

“Perhaps it is,” said Calamy. “Let’s admit it as certain, even. I don’t see that it makes the slightest difference.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“No difference?” + 

Calamy shook his head. “Salvation’s not in the next world; it’s in this. One doesn’t behave well here for the sake of a harp and wings after one is dead⁠—or even for the sake of contemplating throughout eternity the good, the true and the beautiful. If one desires salvation, it’s salvation here and now. The kingdom of God is within you⁠—if you’ll excuse the quotation,” he added, turning with a smile to Mr. Cardan. “The conquest of that kingdom, now, in this life⁠—that’s your salvationist’s ambition. There may be a life to come, or there may not; it’s really quite irrelevant to the main issue. To be upset because the soul may decay with the body is really medieval. Your medieval theologian made up for his really frightful cynicism about this world by a childish optimism about the next. Future justice was to compensate for the disgusting horrors of the present. Take away the life to come and the horrors remain, untempered and unpalliated.” + 

“Quite so,” said Chelifer. + 

“Seen from the medieval point of view,” Calamy went on, “the prospect is most disquieting. The Indians⁠—and for that matter the founder of Christianity⁠—supply the corrective with the doctrine of salvation in this life, irrespective of the life to come. Each man can achieve salvation in his own way.” + 

“I’m glad you admit that,” said Mr. Cardan. “I was afraid you’d begin telling us that we all had to live on lettuces and look at our navels.” + 

“I have it from no less an authority than yourself,” Calamy answered, laughing, “that there are⁠—how many?⁠—eighty-four thousand⁠—isn’t it?⁠—different ways of achieving salvation.” + 

“Fully,” said Mr. Cardan, “and a great many more for going to the devil. But all this, my young friend,” he pursued, shaking his head, “doesn’t in any way mitigate the disagreeableness of slowly becoming gaga, dying and being eaten by worms. One may have achieved salvation in this life, certainly; but that makes it none the less insufferable that, at the end of the account, one’s soul should inevitably succumb to one’s body. I, for example, am saved⁠—I put the case quite hypothetically, mind you⁠—I have been living in a state of moral integrity and this-worldly salvation for the last half-century, ever since I reached the age of puberty. Let this be granted. Have I, for this reason, any the less cause to be distressed by the prospect, in a few years’ time, of becoming a senile imbecile, blind, deaf, toothless, witless, without interest in anything, partially paralysed, revolting to my fellows⁠—and all the rest of the Burtonian catalogue? When my soul is at the mercy of my slowly rotting body, what will be the use of salvation then?” + 

“It will have profited during the fifty years of healthy life,” said Calamy. + 

“But I’m talking about the unhealthy years,” Mr. Cardan insisted, “when the soul’s at the mercy of the body.” + 

Calamy was silent for a moment. “It’s difficult,” he said pensively, “it’s horribly difficult. The fundamental question is this: Can you talk of the soul being at the mercy of the body, can you give any kind of an explanation of mind in terms of matter? When you reflect that it’s the human mind that has invented space, time and matter, picking them out of reality in a quite arbitrary fashion⁠—can you attempt to explain a thing in terms of something it has invented itself? That’s the fundamental question.” + 

“It’s like the question of the authorship of the Iliad,” said Mr. Cardan. “The author of that poem is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name. Similarly, philosophically and even, according to the new physics, scientifically speaking, matter may not be matter, really. But the fact remains that something having all the properties we have always attributed to matter is perpetually getting in our way, and that our minds do, in point of fact, fall under the dominion of certain bits of this matter, known as our bodies, changing as they change and keeping pace with their decay.” + 

Calamy ran his fingers perplexedly through his hair. “Yes, of course, it’s devilishly difficult,” he said. “You can’t help behaving as if things really were as they seem to be. At the same time, there is a reality which is totally different and which a change in our physical environment, a removal of our bodily limitations, would enable us to get nearer to. Perhaps by thinking hard enough⁠ ⁠…” He paused, shaking his head. “How many days did Gotama spend under the bo-tree? Perhaps if you spend long enough and your mind is the right sort of mind, perhaps you really do get, in some queer sort of way, beyond the limitations of ordinary existence. And you see that everything that seems real is in fact entirely illusory⁠—maya, in fact, the cosmic illusion. Behind it you catch a glimpse of reality.” + 

“But what bosh your mystics talk about it,” said Mr. Cardan. “Have you ever read Boehme, for example? Lights and darknesses, wheels and compunctions, sweets and bitters, mercury, salt and sulphur⁠—it’s a rigmarole.” + 

“It’s only to be expected,” said Calamy. “How is a man to give an account of something entirely unlike the phenomena of known existence in a language invented to describe these phenomena? You might give a deaf man a most detailed verbal description of the Fifth Symphony; but he wouldn’t be much the wiser for it, and he’d think you were talking pure balderdash⁠—which from his point of view you would be.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“True,” said Mr. Cardan; “but I have my doubts whether any amount of sitting under bo-trees really makes it possible for anyone to wriggle out of human limitations and get behind phenomena.” + 

“Well, I’m inclined to think that it does make it possible,” said Calamy. “There we must agree to differ. But even if it is impossible to get at reality, the fact that reality exists and is manifestly very different from what we ordinarily suppose it to be, surely throws some light on this horrible death business. Certainly, as things seem to happen, it’s as if the body did get hold of the soul and kill it. But the real facts of the case may be entirely different. The body as we know it is an invention of the mind. What is the reality on which the abstracting, symbolizing mind does its work of abstraction and symbolism? It is possible that, at death, we may find out. And in any case, what is death, really?” + 

“It’s a pity,” put in Chelifer, in his dry, clear, accurate voice, “it’s a pity that the human mind didn’t do its job of invention a little better while it was about it. We might, for example, have made our symbolic abstraction of reality in such a way that it would be unnecessary for a creative and possibly immortal soul to be troubled with the haemorrhoids.” + 

Calamy laughed. “Incorrigible sentimentalist!” + 

“Sentimentalist?” echoed Chelifer, on a note of surprise. + 

“A sentimentalist inside out,” said Calamy, nodding affirmatively. “Such wild romanticism as yours⁠—I imagined it had been extinct since the deposition of Louis-Philippe.” + 

Chelifer laughed good-humouredly. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “Though I must say I myself should have handed out the prize for sentimentality to those who regard what is commonly known as reality⁠—the Harrow Road, for example, or the Café de la Rotonde in Paris⁠—as a mere illusion, who run away from it and devote their time and energy to occupations which Mr. Cardan sums up and symbolizes in the word omphaloskepsis. Aren’t they the soft-heads, the all-too-susceptible and sentimental imbeciles?” + 

“On the contrary,” Calamy replied, “in point of historical fact they’ve generally been men of the highest intelligence. Buddha, Jesus, Lao-tsze, Boehme, in spite of his wheels and compunctions, his salt and sulphur, Swedenborg. And what about Sir Isaac Newton, who practically abandoned mathematics for mysticism after he was thirty? Not that he was a particularly good mystic; he wasn’t. But he tried to be; and it can’t be said that he was remarkable for the softness of his head. No, it’s not fools who turn mystics. It takes a certain amount of intelligence and imagination to realize the extraordinary queerness and mysteriousness of the world in which we live. The fools, the innumerable fools, take it all for granted, skate about cheerfully on the surface and never think of inquiring what’s underneath. They’re content with appearances, such as your Harrow Road or Café de la Rotonde, call them realities and proceed to abuse anyone who takes an interest in what lies underneath these superficial symbols, as a romantic imbecile.” + 

“But it’s cowardice to run away,” Chelifer insisted. “One has no right to ignore what for ninety-nine out of every hundred human beings is reality⁠—even though it mayn’t actually be the real thing. One has no right.” + 

“Why not?” asked Calamy. “One has a right to be six foot nine inches high and to take sixteens in boots. One has a right, even though there are not more than three or four in every million like one. Why hasn’t one the right to be born with an unusual sort of mind, a mind that can’t be content with the surface-life of appearances?” + 

“But such a mind is irrelevant, a freak,” said Chelifer. “In real life⁠—or if you prefer it, in the life that we treat as if it were real⁠—it’s the other minds that preponderate, that are the rule. The brutish minds. I repeat, you haven’t the right to run away from that. If you want to know what human life is, you must be courageous and live as the majority of human beings actually do live. It’s singularly revolting, I assure you.” + 

“There you are again with your sentimentality,” complained Calamy. “You’re just the common variety of sentimentalist reversed. The ordinary kind pretends that so-called real life is more rosy than it actually is. The reversed sentimentalist gloats over its horrors. The bad principle is the same in both cases⁠—an excessive preoccupation with what is illusory. The man of sense sees the world of appearances neither too rosily nor too biliously and passes on. There is the ulterior reality to be looked for; it is more interesting.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Then you’d condemn out of hand all the countless human beings whose life is passed on the surface?” + 

“Of course not,” Calamy replied. “Who would be such a fool as to condemn a fact? These people exist; it’s obvious. They have their choice of Mr. Cardan’s eighty-four thousand paths to salvation. The path I choose will probably be different from others. That’s all.” + 

“Very likely,” said Mr. Cardan, who had been engaged in lighting a cigar, “very likely they’ll find the road to their salvation more easily than you will find the road to yours. Being simpler, they’ll have within them fewer causes for disharmony. Many of them are still practically in the tribal state, blindly obeying the social code that has been suggested into them from childhood. That’s the pre-lapsarian state; they’ve not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil⁠—or rather it’s the whole tribe, not the individual, that has eaten. And the individual is so much a part of the tribe that it doesn’t occur to him to act against its ordinances, any more than it occurs to my teeth to begin violently biting my tongue of their own accord. Those simple souls⁠—and there are still a lot of them left, even among the motor buses⁠—will find their way to salvation very easily. The difficulty begins when the individuals begin to get thoroughly conscious of themselves apart from the tribe. There’s an immense number of people who ought to be tribal savages, but who have been made conscious of their individuality. They can’t obey tribal morality blindly and they’re too feeble to think for themselves. I should say that the majority of people in a modern educated democratic state are at that stage⁠—too conscious of themselves to obey blindly, too inept to be able to behave in a reasonable manner on their own account. Hence that delightful contemporary state of affairs which so rejoices the heart of our friend Chelifer. We fall most horribly between two stools⁠—the tribe and the society of conscious intelligent beings.” + 

“It’s comforting to think,” said Chelifer, “that modern civilization is doing its best to reestablish the tribal regime, but on an enormous, national and even international scale. Cheap printing, wireless telephones, trains, motor cars, gramophones and all the rest are making it possible to consolidate tribes, not of a few thousands, but of millions. To judge from the Middle Western novelists, the process seems already to have gone a long way in America. In a few generations it may be that the whole planet will be covered by one vast American-speaking tribe, composed of innumerable individuals, all thinking and acting in exactly the same way, like the characters in a novel by Sinclair Lewis. It’s a most pleasing speculation⁠—though, of course,” Chelifer added guardedly, “the future is no concern of ours.” + 

Mr. Cardan nodded and puffed at his cigar. “That’s certainly a possibility,” he said. “A probability almost; for I don’t see that it’s in the least likely that we shall be able to breed a race of beings, at any rate within the next few thousand years, sufficiently intelligent to be able to form a stable non-tribal society. Education has made the old tribalism impossible and has done nothing⁠—nor ever will do anything⁠—to make the non-tribal society possible. It will be necessary, therefore, if we require social stability, to create a new kind of tribalism, on the basis of universal education for the stupid, using the press, wireless and all the rest as the instruments by which the new order is to be established. In a generation or two of steady conscious work it ought to be possible, as Chelifer says, to turn all but two or three hundred in every million of the inhabitants of the planet into Babbitts.” + 

“Perhaps a slightly lower standard would be necessary,” suggested Chelifer. + 

“It’s a remarkable thing,” pursued Mr. Cardan meditatively, “that the greatest and most influential reformer of modern times, Tolstoy, should also have proposed a reversion to tribalism as the sole remedy to civilized restlessness and uncertainty of purpose. But while we propose a tribalism based on the facts⁠—or should I say the appearances?”⁠—Mr. Cardan twinkled amicably at Calamy⁠—“of modern life, Tolstoy proposed a return to the genuine, primordial, uneducated, dirty tribalism of the savage. That won’t do, of course; because it’s hardly probable, once they have tasted it, that men will allow le confort moderne, as they call it in hotels, to be taken from them. Our suggestion is the more practicable⁠—the creation of a planet-wide tribe of Babbitts. They’d be much easier to propagate, now, than muzhiks. But still the principle remains the same in both projects⁠—a return to the tribal state. And when Tolstoy and Chelifer and myself agree about anything, believe me,” said Mr. Cardan, “there’s something in it. By the way,” he added, “I hope we haven’t been hurting your susceptibilities, Calamy. You’re not muzhiking up here, are you? Digging and killing pigs and so on. Are you? I trust not.” + 

Calamy shook his head, laughing. “I cut wood in the mornings, for exercise,” he said. “But not on principle, I assure you, not on principle.” + 

“Ah, that’s all right,” said Mr. Cardan. “I was afraid you might be doing it on principle.” + 

“It would be a stupidity,” said Calamy. “What would be the point of doing badly something for which I have no aptitude; something, moreover, which would prevent me from doing the thing for which it seems to me just possible I may have some native capacity.” + 

“And what, might I ask,” said Mr. Cardan with an assumed diffidence and tactful courtesy, “what may that thing be?” + 

“That’s rather biting,” said Calamy, smiling. “But you may well ask. For it has certainly been hard to see, until now, what my peculiar talent was. I’ve not even known myself. Was it making love? or riding? or shooting antelopes in Africa? or commanding a company of infantry? or desultory reading at lightning speeds? or drinking champagne? or a good memory? or my bass voice? Or what? I’m inclined to think it was the first: making love.” + 

“Not at all a bad talent,” said Mr. Cardan judicially. + 

“But not, I find, one that one can go on cultivating indefinitely,” said Calamy. “And the same is true of the others⁠—true at any rate for me.⁠ ⁠… No, if I had no aptitudes but those, I might certainly as well devote myself exclusively to digging the ground. But I begin to find in myself a certain aptitude for meditation which seems to me worth cultivating. And I doubt if one can cultivate meditation at the same time as the land. So I only cut wood for exercise.” + 

“That’s good,” said Mr. Cardan. “I should be sorry to think you were doing anything actively useful. You retain the instincts of a gentleman; that’s excellent.⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Satan!” said Calamy, laughing. “But do you suppose I don’t know very well that you can make out the most damning case against the idle anchorite who sits looking at his navel while other people work? Do you suppose I haven’t thought of that?” + 

“I’m sure you have,” Mr. Cardan answered, genially twinkling. + 

“The case looks damning enough, no doubt. But it’s only really cogent when the anchorite doesn’t do his job properly, when he’s born to be active and not contemplative. The imbeciles who rush about bawling that action is the end of life, and that thought has no value except in so far as it leads to action, are speaking only for themselves. There are eighty-four thousand paths. The pure contemplative has a right to one of them.” + 

“I should be the last to deny it,” said Mr. Cardan. + 

“And if I find that it’s not my path,” pursued Calamy, “I shall turn back and try what can be done in the way of practical life. Up till now, I must say I’ve not seen much hope for myself that way. But then, it must be admitted, I didn’t look for the road in places where I was very likely to find it.” + 

“What has always seemed to me to be the chief objection to protracted omphaloskepsis,” said Mr. Cardan, after a little silence, “is the fact that you’re left too much to your personal resources; you have to live on your own mental fat, so to speak, instead of being able to nourish yourself from outside. And to know yourself becomes impossible; because you can’t know yourself except in relation to other people.” + 

“That’s true,” said Calamy. “Part of yourself you can certainly get to know only in relation to what is outside. In the course of twelve or fifteen years of adult life I think I’ve got to know that part of me very thoroughly. I’ve met a lot of people, been in a great many curious situations, so that almost every potentiality latent in that part of my being has had a chance to unfold itself into actuality. Why should I go on? There’s nothing more I really want to know about that part of myself; nothing more, of any significance, I imagine, that I could get to know by contact with what is external. On the other hand, there is a whole universe within me, unknown and waiting to be explored; a whole universe that can only be approached by way of introspection and patient uninterrupted thought. Merely to satisfy curiosity it would surely be worth exploring. But there are motives more impelling than curiosity to persuade me. What one may find there is so important that it’s almost a matter of life and death to undertake the search.” + 

“Hm,” said Mr. Cardan. “And what will happen at the end of three months’ chaste meditation when some lovely young temptation comes toddling down this road, ‘balancing her haunches,’ as Zola would say, and rolling the large black eye? What will happen to your explorations of the inward universe then, may I ask?” + 

“Well,” said Calamy, “I hope they’ll proceed uninterrupted.” + 

“You hope? Piously?” + 

“And I shall certainly do my best to see that they do,” Calamy added. + 

“It won’t be easy,” Mr. Cardan assured him. + 

“I know.” + 

“Perhaps you’ll find that you can explore simultaneously both the temptation and the interior universe.” + 

Calamy shook his head. “Alas, I’m afraid that’s not practicable. It would be delightful if it were. But for some reason it isn’t. Even in moderation it won’t do. I know that, more or less, by experience. And the authorities are all agreed about it.” + 

“But after all,” said Chelifer, “there have been religions that prescribed indulgence in these particular temptations as a discipline and ceremony at certain seasons and to celebrate certain feasts.” + 

“But they didn’t pretend,” Calamy answered, “that it was a discipline that made it easy for those who underwent it to explore the inward universe of mind.” + 

“Perhaps they did,” objected Chelifer. “After all, there’s no golden rule. At one time and in one place you honour your father and your mother when they grow old; elsewhere and at other periods you knock them on the head and put them into the pot-au-feu. Everything has been right at one time or another and everything has been wrong.” + 

“That’s only true with reservations,” said Calamy, “and the reservations are the most important part. There’s a parallel, it seems to me, between the moral and the physical world. In the physical world you call the unknowable reality the Four-Dimensional Continuum. The Continuum is the same for all observers; but when they want to draw a picture of it for themselves, they select different axes for their graphs, according to their different motions⁠—and according to their different minds and physical limitations. Human beings have selected three-dimensional space and time as their axes. Their minds, their bodies and the earth on which they live being what they are, human beings could not have done otherwise. Space and time are necessary and inevitable ideas for us. And when we want to draw a picture of that other reality in which we live⁠—is it different, or is it somehow, incomprehensibly, the same?⁠—we choose, unescapably⁠—we cannot fail to choose, those axes of reference which we call good and evil; the laws of our being make it necessary for us to see things under the aspects of good and evil. The reality remains the same; but the axes vary with the mental position, so to speak, and the varying capacities of different observers. Some observers are clearer-sighted and in some way more advantageously placed than others. The incessantly changing social conventions and moral codes of history represent the shifting axes of reference chosen by the least curious, most myopic and worst-placed observers. But the axes chosen by the best observers have always been startlingly like one another. Gotama, Jesus and Lao-tsze, for example; they lived sufficiently far from one another in space, time and social position. But their pictures of reality resemble one another very closely. The nearer a man approaches these in penetration, the more nearly will his axes of moral reference correspond with theirs. And when all the most acute observers agree in saying that indulgence in these particular amusements interferes with the exploration of the spiritual world, then one can be pretty sure it’s true. In itself, no doubt, the natural and moderate satisfaction of the sexual instincts is a matter quite indifferent to morality. It is only in relation to something else that the satisfaction of a natural instinct can be said to be good or bad. It might be bad, for example, if it involved deceit or cruelty. It is certainly bad when it enslaves a mind that feels, within itself, that it ought to be free⁠—free to contemplate and recollect itself.” + 

“No doubt,” said Mr. Cardan. “But as a practical man, I can only say that it’s going to be most horribly difficult to preserve that freedom. That balancing of haunches⁠ ⁠…” He waved his cigar from side to side. “I shall call again in six months and see how you feel about it all then. It’s extraordinary what an effect the natural appetites do have on good resolutions. Satiated, one thinks regeneration will be so easy; but when one’s hungry again, how hard it seems.” + 

They were silent. From the depths of the valley the smoky shadows had climbed higher and higher up the slope. The opposite hills were now profoundly black and the clouds in which their peaks were involved had become dark and menacing save where, on their upper surfaces, the sun touched them with, as it declined, an ever richer light. The shadow had climbed up to within a hundred feet of where they were sitting, soon it would envelop them. With a great jangling of bells and a clicking of small hard hoofs the six tall piebald goats came trotting down the steep path from the road. The little boy ran behind them, waving his stick. “Eia-oo!” he shouted with a kind of Homeric fury; but at the sight of the three men sitting on the bench outside the house he suddenly became silent, blushed and slunk unheroically away, hardly daring to whisper to the goats while he drove them into their stable for the night. + 

“Dear me,” said Chelifer, who had followed the movements of the animals with a certain curiosity, “I believe those are the first goats I have seen, or smelt, in the flesh since I took to writing about them in my paper. Most interesting. One tends to forget that the creatures really exist.” + 

“One tends to forget that anything or anyone really exists, outside oneself,” said Mr. Cardan. “It’s always a bit of a shock to find that they do.” + 

“Three days hence,” said Chelifer meditatively, “I shall be at my office again. Rabbits, goats, mice; Fetter Lane; the family pension. All the familiar horrors of reality.” + 

“Sentimentalist!” mocked Calamy. + 

“Meanwhile,” said Mr. Cardan, “Lilian has suddenly decided to move on to Monte Carlo. I go with her, of course; one can’t reject free meals when they’re offered.” He threw away his cigar, got up and stretched himself. “Well, we must be getting down before it gets dark.” + 

“I shan’t see you again for some time, then?” said Calamy. + 

“I shall be here again at the end of six months, never fear,” said Mr. Cardan. “Even if I have to come at my own expense.” + 

They climbed up the steep little path on to the road. + 

“Goodbye.” + 

“Goodbye.” + 

Calamy watched them go, watched them till they were out of sight round a bend in the road. A profound melancholy settled down upon him. With them, he felt, had gone all his old, familiar life. He was left quite alone with something new and strange. What was to come of this parting? + 

Or perhaps, he reflected, nothing would come of it. Perhaps he had been a fool. + 

The cottage was in the shadow now. Looking up the slope he could see a clump of trees still glittering as though prepared for a festival above the rising flood of darkness. And at the head of the valley, like an immense precious stone, glowing with its own inward fire, the limestone crags reached up through the clouds into the pale sky. Perhaps he had been a fool, thought Calamy. But looking at that shining peak, he was somehow reassured. + 