Part + 

II + 

Fragments from the Autobiography of Francis Chelifer + 

I + 

Old gentlemen in clubs were not more luxuriously cradled than I along the warm Tyrrhenian. Arms outstretched, like a live cross, I floated face upwards on that blue and tepid sea. The sun beat down on me, turning the drops on my face and chest to salt. My head was pillowed in the unruffled water; my limbs and body dimpled the surface of a pellucid mattress thirty feet thick and cherishingly resilient through all its thickness, down to the sandy bed on which it was spread. One might lie paralysed here for a lifetime and never get a bedsore. + 

The sky above me was filmy with the noonday heat. The mountains, when I turned towards the land to look for them, had almost vanished behind a veil of gauze. But the Grand Hotel, on the other hand, though not perhaps quite so grand as it appeared in its illustrated prospectus⁠—for there the front door was forty feet high and four tall acrobats standing on one another’s shoulders could not have reached to the sills of the ground-floor windows⁠—the Grand Hotel made no attempt to conceal itself; the white villas glared out unashamedly from their groves of pines; and in front of them, along the tawny beach, I could see the bathing huts, the striped umbrellas, the digging children, the bathers splashing and wallowing in the hot shallows⁠—half-naked men like statues of copper, girls in bright tunics, little boiled shrimps instead of little boys, and sleek ponderous walruses with red heads, who were the matrons in their rubber caps and their wet black bathing garments. Here and there over the surface of the sea moved what the natives called patini⁠—catamarans made of a pair of boxed-in pontoons joined together near the ends and with a high seat for the rower in the middle. Slowly, trailing behind them as they went loud wafts of Italian gallantry, giggles and song, they crawled across the flat blueness. Sometimes, at the head of its white wake, its noise and its stink, a motor boat would pass, and suddenly my transparent mattress would rock beneath me, as the waves of its passage lifted me and let me drop and lifted me up again, more and ever more languidly, till all was once more smooth. + 

So much for that. The description, as I see now that I come to reread it, is not inelegant. For though I may not have played a hand of Bridge since I was eight and have never learned Mah Jong, I can claim at least to have studied the rules of style. I have learned the art of writing well, which is the art of saying nothing elaborately. I have acquired all the literary accomplishments. But then, if I may say so without fatuity, I also have a talent. “Nothing profits more than self-esteem founded on just and right.” I have Milton on my side to justify me in my assertion. When I write well, it is not merely another way of writing badly about nothing. In this respect my effusions differ a little from those of my cultured colleagues. I occasionally have something to say, and I find that the elegant but florid saying of it is as easy to me as walking. Not, of course, that I attach the slightest importance to that. I might have as much to say as La Rochefoucauld and as much facility for saying it as Shelley. But what of that? It would be great art, you say. No doubt; but what of that? It’s a queer prejudice, this one of ours in favour of art. Religion, patriotism, the moral order, humanitarianism, social reform⁠—we have all of us, I imagine, dropped all those overboard long ago. But we still cling pathetically to art. Quite unreasonably; for the thing has far less reason for existence than most of the objects of worship we have got rid of, is utterly senseless, indeed, without their support and justification. Art for art’s sake⁠—halma for halma’s sake. It is time to smash the last and silliest of the idols. My friends, I adjure you, put away the ultimate and sweetest of the inebriants and wake up at last completely sober⁠—among the dustbins at the bottom of the area steps. + 

This little digression will suffice, I hope, to show that I labour, while writing, under no illusions. I do not suppose that anything I do has the slightest importance, and if I take so much pains in imparting beauty and elegance to these autobiographical fragments, it is chiefly from force of habit. I have practised the art of literature so long that it comes natural to me to take the pains I have always taken. You may ask why I write at all, if I regard the process as being without importance? It is a pertinent question. Why do you do this inconsistent thing? I can only plead weakness in justification. On principle I disapprove of writing; on principle I desire to live brutishly like any other ordinary human being. The flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak. I confess I grow bored. I pine for amusements other than those legitimate distractions offered by the cinema and the Palais de Danse. I struggle, I try to resist the temptation; but in the end I succumb. I read a page of Wittgenstein, I play a little Bach; I write a poem, a few aphorisms, a fable, a fragment of autobiography. I write with care, earnestly, with passion even, just as if there were some point in what I were doing, just as if it were important for the world to know my thoughts, just as if I had a soul to save by giving expression to them. But I am well aware, of course, that all these delightful hypotheses are inadmissible. In reality I write as I do merely to kill time and amuse a mind that is still, in spite of all my efforts, a prey to intellectual self-indulgence. I look forward to a placid middle age when, having finally overcome the old Adam in me, finally quenched all the extravagant spiritual cravings, I shall be able to settle down in tranquillity to that life of the flesh, that natural human existence which still, I fear, seems to me so forbidding, so austerely monotonous, so tedious. I have not yet attained to that blessed state. Hence these divagations into art; let me beg forgiveness for them. And above all, let me implore you once more not to imagine that I attach the slightest importance to them. My vanity would be hurt if I thought you did. + 

Poor Mrs. Aldwinkle, for example⁠—there was someone who could never believe that I was not an art-for-arter. “But Chelifer,” she used to say to me in her aimed, intent, breathless way, “how can you blaspheme like that against your own talent?” And I would put on my most Egyptian air⁠—I have always been accused of looking like an Egyptian sculpture⁠—my most Sphingine smile, and say: “But I am a democrat; how can I allow my talent to blaspheme against my humanity?”⁠—or something enigmatic of that kind. Poor Mrs. Aldwinkle! But I run on too fast. I have begun to talk of Mrs. Aldwinkle and you do not know who Mrs. Aldwinkle is. Nor did I, for that matter, as I reclined that morning along the soft resilient water⁠—I knew no more, then, than her name; who does not? Mrs. Aldwinkle the salonnière, the hostess, the giver of literary parties and agapae of lions⁠—is she not classical? a household word? a familiar quotation? Of course. But in the flesh, till that moment, I had never seen her. Not through any lack of exertions on her part. For only a few months before, a telegram had arrived for me at my publisher’s: “Prince Papadiamantopoulos just arrived most anxious to know best literary artistic intellectual society in London could you dine meet him Thursday eight fifteen 112 Berkeley Square Lilian Aldwinkle.” In this telegraphic form, and couched in those terms, the invitation had certainly seemed alluring. But a little judicious inquiry showed me that the prospect was not really quite so attractive as it appeared. For Prince Papadiamantopoulos turned out, in spite of his wonderfully promising title and name, to be a perfectly serious intellectual like the rest of us. More serious indeed; for I discovered, to my horror, that he was a first-class geologist and could understand the differential calculus. Among the other guests were to be at least three decent writers and one painter. And Mrs. Aldwinkle herself was rumoured to be quite well educated and not entirely a fool. I filled up the reply-paid form and took it to the nearest post office. “Much regret never dine out except in Lent Francis Chelifer.” During Lent I confidently expected to receive another invitation. I was relieved, however, and a little disappointed, to hear no more from Mrs. Aldwinkle. I should have liked her to make, in vain, a further effort to lure me from my allegiance to Lady Giblet. + 

Ah, those evenings at Lady Giblet’s⁠—I never miss a single one if I can help it. The vulgarity, ignorance and stupidity of the hostess, the incredible second-rateness of her mangy lions⁠—these are surely unique. And then those camp-followers of the arts, those delicious Bohemians who regard their ability to appreciate the paintings of the cubists and the music of Stravinsky as a sufficient justification for helping themselves freely to one another’s wives⁠—nowhere can you see such brilliant specimens of the type as at Lady Giblet’s. And the conversations one hears within those marble halls⁠—nowhere, surely, are pretensions separated from justifying facts by a vaster gulf. Nowhere can you hear the ignorant, the illogical, the incapable of thought talking so glibly about things of which they have not the slightest understanding. And then you should hear them boasting parenthetically, as they express an imbecile’s incoherent opinion, of their own clear-headedness, their modern outlook, their ruthless scientific intelligence. Surely you can find nothing so perfect in its kind as at Lady Giblet’s⁠—I at least know of nothing more complete. At Mrs. Aldwinkle’s one might very likely hear a serious conversation; never by any chance in the salon of my choice. + 

But that morning in the blue Tyrrhenian was the last of my life to be passed beyond the pale of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s acquaintanceship; it was also as nearly as possible the first of my future life. Fate seemed that morning to be in doubt whether to extinguish me completely or merely to make me acquainted with Mrs. Aldwinkle. Fortunately, as I like to think, it chose the latter alternative. But I anticipate. + 

I first saw Mrs. Aldwinkle on this particular morning without knowing who she was. From where I was lying on my mattress of blue brine I noticed a heavily laden patino bearing slowly down upon me from the shore. Perched high on the rower’s bench a tall young man was toiling languidly at the oars. His back against the bench, his hairy legs stretched out along the prow of one of the pontoons, sat a thickset oldish man with a red face and short white hair. The bow of the other pontoon accommodated two women. The elder and larger of them sat in front, trailing her legs in the water; she was dressed in a kilted bathing costume of flame-coloured silk and her hair was tied up in a pink bandana handkerchief. Immediately behind her there squatted, her knees drawn up to her chin, a very youthful slender little creature in a black maillot. In one of her hands she held a green parasol with which she kept off the sunlight from her elder companion. Within the cylinder of greenish shadow the pink and flame-coloured lady, whom I afterwards learnt to be Mrs. Aldwinkle herself, looked like a Chinese lantern lighted in a conservatory; and when an accidental movement of the young girl’s umbrella allowed the sunlight for a moment to touch her face, one could imagine that the miracle of the raising of Lazarus was being performed before one’s eyes⁠—for the green and corpse-like hue suddenly left the features, the colours of health, a little inflamed by the reflections from the bathing dress, seemed to rush back. The dead lived. But only for an instant; for the solicitous care of the young girl soon reversed the miracle. The sunshade swung back into position, the penumbra of the greenhouse enveloped the glowing lamp and the living face once more became ghastly, as though it belonged to someone who had lain for three days in the tomb. + 

At the stern, seen clearly only when the ponderous boat was already beginning to pass me, sat another young woman with a pale face and large dark eyes. A tendril of almost black hair escaped from under her bathing cap and fell, like a curling whisker, down her cheek. A handsome young man with a brown face and brown muscular arms and legs sprawled along the stern of the other pontoon, smoking a cigarette. + 

The voices that faintly came to me from the approaching boat sounded, somehow, more familiar than those I had heard from other patini. I became aware, all at once, that they were speaking English. + 

“The clouds,” I heard the old red-faced gentleman saying (he had just turned round, in obedience to a gesture from the Chinese lantern in the conservatory, to look at the piled-up masses of vapour that hung like another fantastic range above the real mountains), “the clouds you so much admire are only made possible by the earth’s excrementitious dust hanging in the air. There are thousands of particles to every cubic centimetre. The water vapour condenses round them in droplets sufficiently large to be visible. Hence the clouds⁠—marvellous and celestial shapes, but with a core of dust. What a symbol of human idealism!” The melodious voice grew louder and louder as the young man dipped and dipped his oars. “Earthy particles transfigured into heavenly forms. The heavenly forms are not self-existent, not absolute. Dust writes these vast characters across the sky.” + 

Preserve me, I thought. Did I come to Marina di Vezza to listen to this sort of thing? + 

In a voice loud but indistinct, and strangely unmusical, the Chinese lantern lady began to quote Shelley, incorrectly. “ ‘From peak to peak in a bridge-like⁠ ⁠…’ ” she began, and relapsed into silence, clawing the air in search of the synonym for shape which ought to rhyme with peak. “ ‘Over a something sea.’ I think ‘The Cloud’ is almost the loveliest of all. It’s wonderful to think that Shelley sailed in this sea. And that he was burnt only a little way off, down there.” She pointed down the coast to where, behind the haze, the interminable seafront of Viareggio stretched away mile after mile. Faintly now one might discern the ghost of its nearest outskirts. But at evening it would emerge; clear and sharp in the sloping light, as though they had been cut from gems, Palace and Grande Bretagne, Europe (già Aquila Nera) and Savoia would twinkle there, majestic toys, among the innumerable lesser inns and boardinghouses, reduced at this distance to an exquisite loveliness and so pathetically small and delicate that one could almost have wept over them. At this very moment, on the other side of the curtain of haze, a hundred thousand bathers were thronging the empty beaches where Shelley’s body had been committed to the fire. The pinewoods in which, riding out from Pisa, he hunted lovely thoughts through the silence and the fragrant shadows teemed now with life. Unnumbered country copulatives roamed at this moment through those glades.⁠ ⁠… And so forth. Style pours out of my fountain pen. In every drachm of blue-black ink a thousand mots justes are implicit, like the future characteristics of a man in a piece of chromosome. I apologize. + 

Youth, then, at the prow and pleasure at the helm⁠—and the flesh was so glossy under the noonday sun, the colours so blazingly bright, that I was really reminded of Etty’s little ravishment⁠—the laden boat passed slowly within a few yards of me. Stretched like a live cross on my mattress of brine I looked at them languidly through half-closed eyes. They looked at me; a blank incuriosity was on their faces⁠—for a glimpse only, then they averted their eyes as though I had been one of those exhausted frogs one sees, after the breeding season, floating belly upwards on the surface of a pond. And yet I was what is technically known as an immortal soul. It struck me that it would have been more reasonable if they had stopped their boat and hailed me across the water. “Good morning, stranger. How goes your soul? And what shall we do to be saved?” But on the other hand, our habit of regarding strangers as being nothing more to us than exhausted frogs probably saves a good deal of trouble. + 

“From cape to cape,” emended the red-faced gentleman, as they receded from me. + 

And very diffidently, in a soft shy voice, the solicitous young creature suggested that the something sea was a torrent sea. + 

“Whatever vat may be,” said the young rower, whose exertions under the broiling sun entitled him to take the professionally nautical, commonsense view about the matter. + 

“But it’s obvious what it is,” said the Chinese lantern lady, rather contemptuously. The young man at the stern threw away his cigarette and started meditatively whistling the tune of “Deh, vieni alla finestra” from Don Giovanni. + 

There was a silence; the boat receded, stroke after stroke. The last words I heard were uttered, drawlingly and in a rather childish voice, by the young woman in the stern. “I wish I could get brown more quickly,” she said, lifting one foot out of the water and looking at the white bare leg. “One might have been living in a cellar. Such a dreadfully unwholesome look of blanched asparagus. Or even mushrooms,” she added pensively. + 

The Chinese lantern lady said something, then the red-faced man. But the conversation had ceased to be articulately audible. Soon I could hear no more; they had gone, leaving behind them, however, the name of Shelley. It was here, along these waters, that he had sailed his flimsy boat. In one hand he held his Sophocles, with the other the tiller. His eyes looked now at the small Greek letters, now to the horizon, or landwards towards the mountains and clouds. “Port your helm, Shelley,” Captain Williams would shout. And the helm went hard over to starboard; the ship staggered, almost capsized. Then, one day, flash! the black opaque sky split right across; crash and rumble! the thunder exploded overhead and with the noise of boulders being trundled over the surface of the metal clouds, the echoes rolled about the heavens and among the mountains⁠—“from peak to peak,” it occurred to me, adopting the Chinese lantern lady’s emendation, “from peak to peak with a gong-like squeak.” (What an infamy!) And then, with a hiss and a roar, the whirl-blast was upon them. It was all over. + 

Even without the Chinese lantern lady’s hint I should probably have started thinking of Shelley. For to live on this coast, between the sea and the mountains, among alternate flawless calms and shattering sudden storms, is like living inside one of Shelley’s poems. One walks through a transparent and phantasmagorical beauty. But for the hundred thousand bathers, the jazz band in the Grand Hotel, the unbroken front which civilization, in the form of boardinghouses, presents for miles at a time to the alien and empty sea, but for all these, one might seriously lose one’s sense of reality and imagine that fancy had managed to transform itself into fact. In Shelley’s days, when the coast was all but uninhabited, a man might have had some excuse for forgetting the real nature of things. Living here in an actual world practically indistinguishable from one of imagination, a man might almost be justified for indulging his fancy to the extravagant lengths to which Shelley permitted his to go. + 

But a man of the present generation, brought up in typical contemporary surroundings, has no justifications of this sort. A modern poet cannot permit himself the mental luxuries in which his predecessors so freely wallowed. Lying there on the water, I repeated to myself some verses, inspired by reflections like these, which I had written some few months before. + 

The Holy Ghost comes sliding down + 

On Ilford, Golders Green and Penge. + 

His hosts infect him as they rot; + 

The victims take their just revenge. + 

For if of old the sons of squires + 

And livery stable keepers turned + 

To flowers and hope, to Greece and God, + 

We in our later age have learned + 

That we are native where we walk + 

Through the dim streets of Camden Town. + 

But hopeful still through twice-breathed air + 

The Holy Ghost comes shining down. + 

I wrote these lines, I remember, one dark afternoon in my office in Gog’s Court, Fetter Lane. It is in the same office, on an almost perfectly similar afternoon, that I am writing now. The reflector outside my window reflects a faint and muddy light that has to be supplemented by electricity from within. An inveterate smell of printer’s ink haunts the air. From the basement comes up the thudding and clanking of presses; they are turning out the weekly two hundred thousand copies of the Woman’s Fiction Budget. We are at the heart, here, of our human universe. Come, then, let us frankly admit that we are citizens of this mean city, make the worst of it resolutely and not try to escape. + 

To escape, whether in space or in time, you must run a great deal further now than there was any need to do a hundred years ago when Shelley boated on the Tyrrhenian and conjured up millennial visions. You must go further in space, because there are more people, more and faster vehicles. The Grand Hotel, the hundred thousand bathers, the jazz bands have introduced themselves into that Shelleian poem which is the landscape of Versilia. And the millennium which seemed in the days of Godwin not so very remote has receded further and further from us, as each Reform Bill, each victory over entrenched capitalism dashed yet another illusion to the ground. To escape, in 1924, one must go to Tibet, one must look forward to at least the year 3000; and who knows? they are probably listening-in in the Dalai Lama’s palace; and it is probable that the millennial state of a thousand years hence will be millennial only because it has contrived to make slavery, for the first time, really scientific and efficient. + 

An escape in space, even if one contrives successfully to make one, is no real escape at all. A man may live in Tibet or among the Andes; but he cannot therefore deny that London and Paris actually exist, he cannot forget that there are such places as New York and Berlin. For the majority of contemporary human beings, London and Manchester are the rule; you may have fled to the eternal spring of Arequipa, but you are not living in what is, for the mass of human consciousness, reality. + 

An escape in time is no more satisfactory. You live in the radiant future, live for the future. You console yourself for the spectacle of things as they are by the thought of what they will be. And you work, perhaps, to make them be what you think they ought to be. I know all about it, I assure you. I have done it all myself⁠—lived in a state of permanent intoxication at the thought of what was to come, working happily for a gorgeous ideal of happiness. But a little reflection suffices to show how absurd these forward lookings, these labours for the sake of what is to be, really are. For, to begin with, we have no reason to suppose that there is going to be a future at all, at any rate for human beings. In the second place we do not know whether the ideal of happiness towards which we are striving may not turn out either to be totally unrealizable or, if realizable, utterly repellent to humanity. Do people want to be happy? If there were a real prospect of achieving a permanent and unvarying happiness, wouldn’t they shrink in horror from the boring consummation? And finally, the contemplation of the future, the busy working for it, does not prevent the present from existing. It merely partially blinds us to the present. + 

The same objections apply with equal force to the escapes which do not launch out into space or time, but into Platonic eternity, into the ideal. An escape into mere fancy does not prevent facts from going on; it is a disregarding of the facts. + 

Finally there are those people, more courageous than the escapers, who actually plunge into the real contemporary life around them, and are consoled by finding in the midst of its squalor, its repulsiveness and stupidity, evidences of a widespread kindliness, of charity, pity and the like. True, these qualities exist and the spectacle of them is decidedly cheering; in spite of civilization, men have not fallen below the brutes. Parents, even in human society, are devoted to their offspring; even in human society the weak and the afflicted are sometimes assisted. It would be surprising, considering the origins and affinities of man, if this were not the case. Have you ever read an obituary notice of which the subject did not possess, under his rough exterior and formidable manner, a heart of gold? And the obituarists, however cloying their literary productions, are perfectly right. We all have hearts of gold, though we are sometimes, it is true, too much preoccupied with our own affairs to remember the fact. The really cruel, the fundamentally evil man is as rare as the man of genius or the total idiot. I have never met a man with a really bad heart. And the fact is not surprising; for a man with a really bad heart is a man with certain instincts developed to an abnormal degree and certain others more or less completely atrophied. I have never met a man like Mozart for that matter. + 

Charles Dickens, it is true, managed to feel elated and chronically tearful over the existence of virtues among the squalor. “He shows,” as one of his American admirers so fruitily puts it, “that life in its rudest forms may wear a tragic grandeur; that amidst follies and excesses the moral feelings do not wholly die, and that the haunts of the blackest crime are sometimes lighted up by the presence of the noblest souls.” And very nice too. But is there any great reason to feel elated by the emergence of virtues in human society? We are not specially elated by the fact that men have livers and pancreases. Virtues are as natural to man as his digestive organs; any sober biologist, taking into consideration his gregarious instincts, would naturally expect to find them. + 

This being the case, there is nothing in these virtues à la Dickens to “write home about”⁠—as we used to say at a time when we were remarkably rich in such virtues. There is no reason to be particularly proud of qualities which we inherit from our animal forefathers and share with our household pets. The gratifying thing would be if we could find in contemporary society evidences of peculiarly human virtues⁠—the conscious rational virtues that ought to belong by definition to a being calling himself Homo Sapiens. Open-mindedness, for example, absence of irrational prejudice, complete tolerance and a steady, reasonable pursuit of social goods. But these, alas, are precisely what we fail to discover. For to what, after all, are all this squalor, this confusion and ugliness due but to the lack of the human virtues? The fact is that⁠—except for an occasional sport of Nature, born now here, now there, and always out of time⁠—we sapient men have practically no human virtues at all. Spend a week in any great town, and the fact is obvious. So complete is this lack of truly human qualities that we are reduced, if we condescend to look at reality at all, to act like Charles Dickens and congratulate the race on its merely animal virtues. The jolly, optimistic fellows who assure us that humanity is all right, because mothers love their children, poor folk pity and help one another, and soldiers die for a flag, are comforting us on the grounds that we resemble the whales, the elephants and the bees. But when we ask them to adduce evidence of human sapience, to give us a few specimens of conscious and reasonable well-doing, they rebuke us for our intellectual coldness and our general “inhumanity”⁠—which means our refusal to be content with the standards of the animals. However grateful we may feel for the existence in civilized society of these homely jungle virtues, we cannot justifiably set them off against the horrors and squalors of civilized life. The horrors and squalors arise from men’s lack of reason⁠—from their failure to be completely and sapiently human. The jungle virtues are merely the obverse of this animalism, whose Heads is instinctive kindliness and whose Tails is stupidity and instinctive cruelty. + 

So much for the last consolation of philosophy. We are left with reality. My office in Gog’s Court is situated, I repeat, at the very heart of it, the palpitating heart. + 

II + 

Gog’s Court, the navel of reality! Repeating those verses of mine in the silence, I intimately felt the truth of it. + 

For if of old the sons of squires + 

And livery stable keepers turned + 

To flowers and hope, to Greece and God, + 

We in our later age have learned + 

That we are native where we walk. + 

My voice boomed out oracularly across the flat sea. Nothing so richly increases the significance of a statement as to hear it uttered by one’s own voice, in solitude. “Resolved, so help me God, never to touch another drop!” Those solemn words, breathed out in a mist of whiskey⁠—how often, in dark nights, on icy mornings, how often have they been uttered! And the portentous imprecation seems to engage the whole universe to do battle on behalf of the Better Self against its besetting vice. Thrilling and awful moment! Merely for the sake of living through it again, for the sake of once more breaking the empty silence with the reverberating Stygian oath, it is well worth neglecting the good resolution. I say nothing of the pleasures of inebriation. + 

My own brief recital served to confirm for me the truth of my speculations. For not only was I uttering the substance of my thoughts aloud; I was voicing it in terms of a formula that had an element, I flatter myself, of magic about it. What is the secret of these verbal felicities? How does it come about that a commonplace thought embodied by a poet in some abracadabrical form seems bottomlessly profound, while a positively false and stupid notion may be made by its expression to seem true? Frankly, I don’t know. And what is more, I have never found anyone who could give an answer to the riddle. What is it that makes the two words “defunctive music” as moving as the dead march out of the Eroica and the close of Coriolan? Why should it be somehow more profoundly comic to “call Tullia’s ape a marmosite” than to write a whole play of Congreve? And the line, “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears”⁠—why should it in effect lie where it does? Mystery. This game of art strangely resembles conjuring. The quickness of the tongue deceives the brain. It has happened, after all, often enough. Old Shakespeare, for example. How many critical brains have been deceived by the quickness of his tongue! Because he can say “Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves,” and “defunctive music,” and “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” and all the rest of it, we credit him with philosophy, a moral purpose and the most penetrating psychology. Whereas his thoughts are incredibly confused, his only purpose is to entertain and he has created only three characters. One, Cleopatra, is an excellent copy from the life, like a character out of a good realistic novel, say one of Tolstoy’s. The other two⁠—Macbeth and Falstaff⁠—are fabulous imaginary figures, consistent with themselves but not real in the sense that Cleopatra is real. My poor friend Calamy would call them more real, would say that they belong to the realm of Absolute Art. And so forth. I cannot go into poor Calamy’s opinions, at any rate in this context; later on, perhaps. For me, in any case, Macbeth and Falstaff are perfectly genuine and complete mythological characters, like Jupiter or Gargantua, Medea or Mr. Winkle. They are the only two well-invented mythological monsters in the whole of Shakespeare’s collection; just as Cleopatra is the only well-copied reality. His boundless capacity for abracadabra has deceived innumerable people into imagining that all the other characters are as good. + 

But the Bard, heaven help me, is not my theme. Let me return to my recitation on the face of the waters. As I have said, my conviction “that we are native where we walk” was decidedly strengthened by the sound of my own voice pronouncing the elegant formula in which the notion was embalmed. Repeating the words, I thought of Gog’s Court, of my little room with the reflector at the window, of the light that burns in winter even at noon, of the smell of printer’s ink and the noise of the presses. I was back there, out of this irrelevant poem of a sunshiny landscape, back in the palpitating heart of things. On the table before me lay a sheaf of long galleys; it was Wednesday; I should have been correcting proofs, but I was idle that afternoon! On the blank six inches at the bottom of a galley I had been writing those lines: “For if of old the sons of squires⁠ ⁠…” Pensively, a halma player contemplating his next move, I hung over them. What were the possible improvements? There was a knock at the door. I drew a sheet of blotting paper across the bottom of the galley⁠—“Come in”⁠—and went on with my interrupted reading of the print. “… Since Himalayas were made to breed true to colour, no event has aroused greater enthusiasm in the fancier’s world than the fixation of the new Flemish-Angora type. Mr. Spargle’s achievement is indeed a nepoch-making one.⁠ ⁠…” I restored the n of nepoch to its widowed a, and looked up. Mr. Bosk, the subeditor, was standing over me. + 

“Proof of the leader, sir,” he said, bowing with that exquisitely contemptuous politeness which characterized all his dealings with me, and handed me another galley. + 

“Thank you, Mr. Bosk,” I said. + 

But Mr. Bosk did not retire. Standing there in his favourite and habitual attitude, the attitude assumed by our ancestors (of whom, indeed, old Mr. Bosk was one) in front of the half-draped marble column of the photographer’s studio, he looked at me, faintly smiling through his thin white beard. The third button of his waistcoat was undone and his right hand, like a half-posted letter, was inserted in the orifice. He rested his weight on a rigid right leg. The other leg was slightly bent, and the heel of one touching the toe of the other, his left foot made with his right a perfect right angle. I could see that I was in for a reproof. + 

“What is it, Mr. Bosk?” I asked. + 

Among the sparse hairs Mr. Bosk’s smile became piercingly sweet. He put his head archly on one side. His voice when he spoke was mellifluous. On these occasions when I was to be dressed down and put in my place his courtesy degenerated into a kind of affected girlish coquetry. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Chelifer,” he said mincingly, “I think you’ll find that rabear in Spanish does not mean ‘to wag the tail,’ as you say in your leader on the derivation of the word ‘rabbit,’ so much as ‘to wag the hind quarters.’ ” + 

“Wag the hind quarters, Mr. Bosk?” I said. “But that sounds to me a very difficult feat.” + 

“Not in Spain, apparently,” said Mr. Bosk, almost giggling. + 

“But this is England, Mr. Bosk.” + 

“Nevertheless, my authority is no less than Skeat himself.” And triumphantly, with the air of one who, at a critical moment of the game, produces a fifth ace, Mr. Bosk brought forward his left hand, which he had been keeping mysteriously behind his back. It held a dictionary; a strip of paper marked the page. Mr. Bosk laid it, opened, on the table before me; with a thick nail he pointed. “ ‘… or possibly,’ ” I read aloud, “ ‘from Spanish rabear, to wag the hind quarters.’ Right as usual, Mr. Bosk. I’ll alter it in the proof.” + 

“Thank you, sir,” said Mr. Bosk with a mock humility. Inwardly he was exulting in his triumph. He picked up his dictionary, repeated his contemptuously courteous bow and walked with a gliding noiseless motion towards the door. On the threshold he paused. “I remember that the question arose once before, sir,” he said; his voice was poisonously honeyed. “In Mr. Parfitt’s time,” and he slipped out, closing the door quietly behind him. + 

It was a Parthian shot. The name of Mr. Parfitt was meant to wound me to the quick, to bring the blush of shame to my cheek. For had not Mr. Parfitt been the perfect, complete and infallible editor? Whereas I⁠ ⁠… Mr. Bosk left it to my own conscience to decide what I was. + 

And indeed I was well aware of my shortcomings. The Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette, with which, as every schoolboy knows, is incorporated The Mouse Breeders’ Record, could hardly have had a more unsuitable editor than I. To this day, I confess, I hardly know the right end of a rabbit from the wrong. Mr. Bosk was a survivor from the grand old days of Mr. Parfitt, the founder and for thirty years the editor of the Gazette. + 

“Mr. Parfitt, sir,” he used to tell me every now and then, “was a real fancier.” His successor, by implication, was not. + 

It was at the end of the war. I was looking for a job⁠—a job at the heart of reality. The illusory nature of the position had made me decline my old college’s offer of a fellowship. I wanted something⁠—how shall I put it?⁠—more palpitating. And then in The Times I found what I had been looking for. “Wanted Editor of proved literary ability for livestock trade paper. Apply Box 92.” I applied, was interviewed, and conquered. The directors couldn’t finally resist my testimonial from the Bishop of Bosham. “A lifelong acquaintance with Mr. Chelifer and his family permits me confidently to assert that he is a young man of great ability and high moral purpose, (signed) Hartley Bosh.” I was appointed for a probationary period of six months. + 

Old Mr. Parfitt, the retiring editor, stayed on a few days at the office to initiate me into the secrets of the work. He was a benevolent old gentleman, short, thick and with a very large head. His square face was made to seem even broader than it was by the grey whiskers which ran down his cheeks to merge imperceptibly into the ends of his moustache. He knew more about mice and rabbits than any man in the country; but what he prided himself on was his literary gift. He explained to me the principles on which he wrote his weekly leaders. + 

“In the fable,” he told me, smiling already in anticipation of the end of this joke which he had been elaborating and polishing since 1892, “in the fable it is the mountain which, after a long and, if I may say so, geological labour, gives birth to the mouse. My principle, on the contrary, has always been, wherever possible, to make my mice parturate mountains.” He paused expectantly. When I had laughed, he went on. “It’s astonishing what reflections on life and art and politics and philosophy and whatnot you can get out of a mouse or a rabbit. Quite astonishing!” + 

The most notable of Mr. Parfitt’s mountain thoughts still hangs, under glass and in an Oxford frame, on the wall above the editorial desk. It was printed in the Rabbit Fancier for August 8, 1914. + 

“It is not the readers of the Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette,” Mr. Parfitt had written on that cardinal date, “who have made this war. No Mouse Breeder, I emphatically proclaim, has desired it. No! Absorbed in their harmless and indeed beneficent occupations, they have had neither the wish nor the leisure to disturb the world’s peace. If all men wholeheartedly devoted themselves to avocations like ours, there would be no war. The world would be filled with the innocent creators and fosterers of life, not, as at present, with its tigerish destroyers. Had Kaiser William the Second been a breeder of rabbits or mice, we should not find ourselves today in a world whose very existence is threatened by the unimaginable horrors of modern warfare.” + 

Noble words! Mr. Parfitt’s righteous indignation was strengthened by his fears for the future of his paper. The war, he gloomily foreboded, would mean the end of rabbit breeding. But he was wrong. Mice, it is true, went rather out of fashion between 1914 and 1918. But in the lean years of rationing, rabbits took on a new importance. In 1917 there were ten fanciers of Flemish Giants to everyone there had been before the war. Subscriptions rose, advertisements were multiplied. + 

“Rabbits,” Mr. Parfitt assured me, “did a great deal to help us win the war.” + 

And conversely, the war did so much to help rabbits that Mr. Parfitt was able to retire in 1919 with a modest but adequate fortune. It was then that I took over control. And in spite of Mr. Bosk’s contempt for my ignorance and incompetence, I must in justice congratulate myself on the way in which I piloted the concern through the evil times which followed. Peace found the English people at once less prosperous and less hungry than they had been during the war. The time had passed when it was necessary for them to breed rabbits; and they could not afford the luxury of breeding them for pleasure. Subscriptions declined, advertisements fell off. I averted an impending catastrophe by adding to the paper a new section dealing with goats. Biologically, no doubt, as I pointed out to the directors in my communication on the subject, this mingling of ruminants with rodents was decidedly unsound. But commercially, I felt sure, the innovation would be justified. It was. The goats brought half a dozen pages of advertisements in their train and several hundred new subscribers. Mr. Bosk was furious at my success; but the directors thought very highly of my capacities. + 

They did not, it is true, always approve of my leading articles. “Couldn’t you try to make them a little more popular,” suggested the managing director, “a little more practical too, Mr. Chelifer? For instance,” and clearing his throat, he unfolded the typewritten sheet of complaints which he had had prepared and had brought with him to the board meeting, “for instance, what’s the practical value of this stuff about the use of the word ‘cony’ as a term of endearment in the Elizabethan dramatists? And this article on the derivation of ‘rabbit’ ”⁠—he looked at his paper again and coughed. “Who wants to know that there’s a Walloon word robett? Or that our word may have something to do with the Spanish rabear, to wag the hind quarters? And who, by the way,” he added, looking up at me over his pince-nez with an air⁠—prematurely put on⁠—of triumph, “who ever heard of an animal wagging its hind quarters?” + 

“Nevertheless,” I said, apologetically, but firmly, as befits a man who knows that he is right, “my authority is no less than Skeat himself.” + 

The managing director, who had hoped to score a point, went on, defeated, to the next count in the indictment. “And then, Mr. Chelifer,” he said, “we don’t very much like, my fellow directors and I, we don’t much like what you say in your article on ‘Rabbit Fancying and its Lesson to Humanity.’ It may be true that breeders have succeeded in producing domesticated rabbits that are four times the weight of wild rabbits and possess only half the quantity of brains⁠—it may be true. Indeed, it is true. And a very remarkable achievement it is, Mr. Chelifer, very remarkable indeed. But that is no reason for upholding, as you do, Mr. Chelifer, that the ideal working man, at whose production the eugenist should aim, is a man eight times as strong as the present-day workman, with only a sixteenth of his mental capacity. Not that my fellow directors and I entirely disagree with what you say, Mr. Chelifer; far from it. All right-thinking men must agree that the modern workman is too well educated. But we have to remember, Mr. Chelifer, that many of our readers actually belong to that class.” + 

“Quite.” I acquiesced in the reproof. + 

“And finally, Mr. Chelifer, there is your article on the ‘Symbology of the Goat.’ We feel that the facts you have there collected, however interesting to the anthropologist and the student of folklore, are hardly of a kind to be set before a mixed public like ours.” + 

The other directors murmured their assent. There was a prolonged silence. + 

III + 

I remember an advertisement⁠—for some sort of cough drops I think it was⁠—which used to figure very largely in my boyhood on the back covers of the illustrated weeklies. Over the legend, “A Pine Forest in every Home,” appeared a picture of three or four magnificent Norway spruces growing out of the drawing-room carpet, while the lady of the house, her children and guests took tea, with a remarkable air of unconcern and as though it was quite natural to have a sequoia sprouting out of the hearthrug, under their sanitary and aromatic shade. A Pine Forest in every Home.⁠ ⁠… But I have thought of something even better. A Luna Park in every Office. A British Empire Exhibition Fun Fair in every Bank. An Earl’s Court in every Factory. True, I cannot claim to bring every attraction of the Fun Fair into your place of labour⁠—only the switchback, the water-shoot and the mountain railway. Merry-go-round, wiggle-woggle, flip-flap and the like are beyond the power of my magic to conjure up. Horizontal motion and a rotary giddiness I cannot claim to reproduce; my speciality is headlong descents, breathlessness and that delicious sickening feeling that your entrails have been left behind on an upper storey. Those who chafe at the tameness and sameness of office life, who pine for a little excitement to diversify the quotidian routine, should experiment with this little recipe of mine and bring the water-shoot into the countinghouse. It is quite simple. All you have got to do is to pause for a moment in your work and ask yourself: Why am I doing this? What is it all for? Did I come into the world, supplied with a soul which may very likely be immortal, for the sole purpose of sitting every day at this desk? Ask yourself these questions thoughtfully, seriously. Reflect even for a moment on their significance⁠—and I can guarantee that, firmly seated though you may be in your hard or your padded chair, you will feel all at once that the void has opened beneath you, that you are sliding headlong, fast and faster, into nothingness. + 

For those who cannot dispense with formularies and fixed prayers, I recommend this little catechism, to be read through in office hours whenever time hangs a little heavy. + 

Q. Why am I working here? + 

A. In order that Jewish stockbrokers may exchange their Rovers for Armstrong-Siddeleys, buy the latest jazz records and spend the weekend at Brighton. + 

Q. Why do I go on working here? + 

A. In the hope that I too may some day be able to spend the weekend at Brighton. + 

Q. What is progress? + 

A. Progress is stockbrokers, more stockbrokers and still more stockbrokers. + 

Q. What is the aim of social reformers? + 

A. The aim of social reformers is to create a state in which every individual enjoys the greatest possible amount of freedom and leisure. + 

Q. What will the citizens of this reformed state do with their freedom and leisure? + 

A. They will do, presumably, what the stockbrokers do with these things today, e.g. spend the weekend at Brighton, ride rapidly in motor vehicles and go to the theatre. + 

Q. On what condition can I live a life of contentment? + 

A. On the condition that you do not think. + 

Q. What is the function of newspapers, cinemas, radios, motorbikes, jazz bands, etc? + 

A. The function of these things is the prevention of thought and the killing of time. They are the most powerful instruments of human happiness. + 

Q. What did Buddha consider the most deadly of the deadly sins? + 

A. Unawareness, stupidity. + 

Q. And what will happen if I make myself aware, if I actually begin to think? + 

A. Your swivel chair will turn into a trolley on the mountain railway, the office floor will gracefully slide away from beneath you and you will find yourself launched into the abyss. + 

Down, down, down! The sensation, though sickening, is really delightful. Most people, I know, find it a little too much for them and consequently cease to think, in which case the trolley reconverts itself into the swivel chair, the floor closes up and the hours at the desk seem once more to be hours passed in a perfectly reasonable manner; or else, more rarely, flee in panic horror from the office to bury their heads like ostriches in religion or whatnot. For a strong-minded and intelligent person both courses are inadmissible; the first because it is stupid and the second because it is cowardly. No self-respecting man can either accept unreflectingly or, having reflected upon it, irresponsibly run away from the reality of human life. The proper course, I flatter myself, is that which I have adopted. Having sought out the heart of reality⁠—Gog’s Court, to be explicit⁠—I have taken up my position there; and though fully aware of the nature of the reality by which I am surrounded, though deliberately keeping myself reminded of the complete imbecility of what I am doing, I yet remain heroically at my post. My whole time is passed on the switchback; all my life is one unceasing slide through nothing. + 

All my life, I insist; for it is not merely into Gog’s Court that I magically introduce the fun of the fair. I so arrange my private life that I am sliding even out of office hours. My heart, to borrow the poetess’s words, is like a singing bird whose nest is permanently in a water-shoot. Miss Carruthers’s boardinghouse in Chelsea is, I assure you, as suitable a place to slither in as any east of Temple Bar. I have lived there now for four years. I am a pillar of the establishment and every evening, when I sit down to dinner with my fellow guests, I feel as though I were taking my place in a specially capacious family trolley on the switchback railway. All aboard! and away we go. With gathering momentum the trolley plunges down into vacancy. + 

Let me describe an evening on the Domestic water-shoot. At the head of the table sits Miss Carruthers herself; thirty-seven, plump though unmarried, with a face broadening towards the base and very flabby about the cheeks and chin⁠—bull-doggy, in a word; and the snub nose, staring at you out of its upward-tilted nostrils, the small brown eyes do not belie the comparison. And what activity! never walks, but runs about her establishment like a demoniac, never speaks but shrilly shouts, carves the roast beef with scientific fury, laughs like a giant woodpecker. She belongs to a distinguished family which would never, in its days of glory, have dreamed of allowing one of its daughters to become what Miss Carruthers calls, applying to herself the most humiliating of titles and laughing as she does so, to emphasize the picturesque contrast between what she is by birth and what circumstance has reduced her to becoming, “a common lodging-house keeper.” She is a firm believer in her class, and to her more distinguished guests deplores the necessity under which she labours to admit into her establishment persons not really, really⁠ ⁠… She is careful not to mix people of different sorts together. Her most genteel guests sit the closest to her at table; it is implied that, in the neighbourhood of Miss Carruthers, they will feel at home. For years I have had the honour of sitting at her left hand; for if less prosperous than Mrs. Cloudesley Shove, the broker’s widow (who sits in glory on the right), I have at least attended in my youth an ancient seat of learning. + 

The gong reverberates; punctually I hurry down to the dining-room. With fury and precision, like a conductor immersed in a Wagner overture, Miss Carruthers is carving the beef. + 

“Evening, Mr. Chelifer,” she loudly calls, without interrupting her labours. “What news have you brought back with you from the city today?” + 

Affably I smile, professionally I rub the hands. “Well, I don’t know that I can think of any.” + 

“Evening, Mrs. Fox. Evening, Mr. Fox.” The two old people take their places near the further end of the table. They are not quite, quite⁠ ⁠… “Evening, Miss Monad.” Miss Monad does responsible secretarial work and sits next to the Fox’s. “Evening, Mr. Quinn. Evening, Miss Webber. Evening, Mrs. Crotch.” But the tone in which she responds to Mr. Dutt’s courteous greeting is much less affable. Mr. Dutt is an Indian⁠—a black man, Miss Carruthers calls him. Her “Evening, Mr. Dutt” shows that she knows her place and hopes that the man of the inferior race knows his. The servant comes in with a steaming dish of greens. Crambe ripetita⁠—inspiring perfume! Mentally I burst into song. + 

These like remorse inveterate memories, + 

Being of cabbage, are prophetic too + 

Of future feasts, when Mrs. Cloudesley Shove + 

Will still recall lamented Cloudesley. + 

Still + 

Among the moonlit cedars Philomel + 

Calls back to mind, again, again, + 

The ancient pain, the everlasting pain; + 

And still inveterately the haunted air + 

Remembers and foretells that roses were + 

Red and tomorrow will again be red, + 

But, “Cloudesley, Cloudesley!” Philomel in vain + 

Sobs on the night; for Cloudesley Shove is dead.⁠ ⁠… + 

And in the flesh, as though irresistibly summoned by my incantation, Mrs. Cloudesley Shove blackens the doorway with her widowhood. + 

“Not a very naice day,” says Mrs. Cloudesley, as she sits down. + 

“Not at all,” Miss Carruthers heartily agrees. And then, without turning from the beef, without abating for an instant the celerity of her carving, “Fluffy!” she shouts through the increasing din, “don’t giggle like that.” + 

Politely Mr. Chelifer half raises himself from his chair as Miss Fluffy comes tumbling, on the tail end of her giggle, into the chair next to his. Always the perfect gent. + 

“I wasn’t giggling, Miss Carruthers,” Fluffy protests. Her smile reveals above the roots of her teeth a line of almost bloodless gums. + 

“Quite true,” says young Mr. Brimstone, following her less tumultuously from the door and establishing himself in the seat opposite, next to Mrs. Cloudesley. “She wasn’t giggling. She was merely cachinnating.” + 

Everybody laughs uproariously, even Miss Carruthers, though she does not cease to carve. Mr. Brimstone remains perfectly grave. Behind his rimless pince-nez there is hardly so much as a twinkle. As for Miss Fluffy, she fairly collapses. + 

“What a horrible man!” she screams through her laughter, as soon as she has breath enough to be articulate. And picking up her bread, she makes as though she were going to throw it across the table in Mr. Brimstone’s face. + 

Mr. Brimstone holds up a finger. “Now you be careful,” he admonishes. “If you don’t behave, you’ll be put in the corner and sent to bed without your supper.” + 

There is a renewal of laughter. + 

Miss Carruthers intervenes. “Now don’t tease her, Mr. Brimstone.” + 

“Tease?” says Mr. Brimstone, in the tone of one who has been misjudged. “But I was only applying moral suasion, Miss Carruthers.” + 

Inimitable Brimstone! He is the life and soul of Miss Carruthers’s establishment. So serious, so clever, such an alert young city man⁠—but withal so exquisitely waggish, so gallant! To see him with Fluffy⁠—it’s as good as a play. + 

“There!” says Miss Carruthers, putting down her carving tools with a clatter. Loudly, energetically, she addresses herself to her duties as a hostess. “I went to Buszard’s this afternoon,” she proclaims, not without pride. We old county families have always bought our chocolate at the best shops. “But it isn’t what it used to be.” She shakes her head; the high old feudal times are past. “It isn’t the same. Not since the A.B.C. took it over.” + 

“Do you see,” asks Mr. Brimstone, becoming once more his serious self, “that the new Lyons Corner House in Piccadilly Circus will be able to serve fourteen million meals a year?” Mr. Brimstone is always a mine of interesting statistics. + 

“No, really?” Mrs. Cloudesley is astonished. + 

But old Mr. Fox, who happens to have read the same evening paper as Mr. Brimstone, takes almost the whole credit of Mr. Brimstone’s erudition to himself by adding, before the other has time to say it: “Yes, and that’s just twice as many meals as any American restaurant can serve.” + 

“Good old England!” cried Miss Carruthers patriotically. “These Yanks haven’t got us beaten in everything yet.” + 

“So naice, I always think, these Corner Houses,” says Mrs. Cloudesley. “And the music they play is really quite classical, you know, sometimes.” + 

“Quite,” says Mr. Chelifer, savouring voluptuously the pleasure of dropping steeply from the edge of the convivial board into interstellar space. + 

“And so sumptuously decorated,” Mrs. Cloudesley continues. + 

But Mr. Brimstone knowingly lets her know that the marble on the walls is less than a quarter of an inch thick. + 

And the conversation proceeds. “The Huns,” says Miss Carruthers, “are only shamming dead.” Mr. Fox is in favour of a business government. Mr. Brimstone would like to see a few strikers shot, to encourage the rest; Miss Carruthers agrees. From below the salt Miss Monad puts in a word for the working classes, but her remark is treated with the contempt it deserves. Mrs. Cloudesley finds Charlie Chaplin so vulgar, but likes Mary Pickford. Miss Fluffy thinks that the Prince of Wales ought to marry a nice simple English girl. Mr. Brimstone says something rather cutting about Mrs. Asquith and Lady Diana Manners. Mrs. Cloudesley, who has a profound knowledge of the Royal Family, mentions the Princess Alice. Contrapuntally to this, Miss Webber and Mr. Quinn have been discussing the latest plays and Mr. Chelifer has engaged Miss Fluffy in a conversation which soon occupies the attention of all the persons sitting at the upper end of the table⁠—a conversation about flappers. Mrs. Cloudesley, Miss Carruthers and Mr. Brimstone agree that the modern girl is too laxly brought up. Miss Fluffy adheres in piercing tones to the opposite opinion. Mr. Brimstone makes some splendid jokes at the expense of coeducation, and all concur in deploring cranks of every variety. Miss Carruthers, who has a short way with dissenters, would like to see them tarred and feathered⁠—all except pacifists, who, like strikers, could do with a little shooting. Lymphatic Mrs. Cloudesley, with sudden and surprising ferocity, wants to treat the Irish in the same way. (Lamented Cloudesley had connections with Belfast.) But at this moment a deplorable incident occurs. Mr. Dutt, the Indian, who ought never, from his lower sphere, even to have listened to the conversation going on in the higher, leans forward and speaking loudly across the intervening gulf ardently espouses the Irish cause. His eloquence rolls up the table between two hedges of horrified silence. For a moment nothing can be heard but ardent nationalistic sentiments and the polite regurgitation of prune stones. In the presence of this shocking and unfamiliar phenomenon nobody knows exactly what to do. But Miss Carruthers rises, after the first moment, to the occasion. + 

“Ah, but then, Mr. Dutt,” she says, interrupting his tirade about oppressed nationalities, “you must remember that Mrs. Cloudesley Shove is English. You can hardly expect to understand what she feels. Can you?” + 

We all feel inclined to clap. Without waiting to hear Mr. Dutt’s reply, and leaving three prunes uneaten on her plate, Miss Carruthers gets up and sweeps with dignity towards the door. Loudly, in the corridor, she comments on the insolence of black men. And what ingratitude, too! + 

“After I had made a special exception in his case to my rule against taking coloured people!” + 

We all sympathize. In the drawing-room the conversation proceeds. Headlong the trolley plunges. + 

A home away from home⁠—that was how Miss Carruthers described her establishment in the prospectus. It was the awayness of it that first attracted me to the place. The vast awayness from what I had called home up till the time I first stayed there⁠—that was what made me decide to settle for good at Miss Carruthers’s. From the house where I was born Miss Carruthers’s seemed about as remote as any place one could conveniently find. + 

“I remember, I remember⁠ ⁠…” It is a pointless and futile occupation, difficult none the less not to indulge in. I remember. Our house at Oxford was dark, spiky and tall. Ruskin himself, it was said, had planned it. The front windows looked out on to the Banbury Road. On rainy days, when I was a child, I used to spend whole mornings staring down into the thoroughfare. Every twenty minutes a tramcar drawn by two old horses, trotting in their sleep, passed with an undulating motion more slowly than a man could walk. The little garden at the back once seemed enormous and romantic, the rocking-horse in the nursery a beast like an elephant. The house is sold now and I am glad of it. They are dangerous, these things and places inhabited by memory. It is as though, by a process of metempsychosis, the soul of dead events goes out and lodges itself in a house, a flower, a landscape, in a group of trees seen from the train against the skyline, an old snapshot, a broken penknife, a book, a perfume. In these memory-charged places, among these things haunted by the ghosts of dead days, one is tempted to brood too lovingly over the past, to live it again, more elaborately, more consciously, more beautifully and harmoniously, almost as though it were an imagined life in the future. Surrounded by these ghosts one can neglect the present in which one bodily lives. I am glad the place is sold; it was dangerous. Evviva Miss Carruthers! + 

Nevertheless my thoughts, as I lay on the water that morning, reverted from the Home Away to the other home from which it was so distant. I recalled the last visit I had paid to the old house, a month or two since, just before my mother finally decided herself to move out. Mounting the steps that led up to the ogival porch I had felt like an excavator on the threshold of a tomb. I tugged at the wrought-iron bell pull; joints creaked, wires wheezily rattled, and far off, as though accidentally, by an afterthought, tinkled the cracked bell. In a moment the door would open, I should walk in, and there, there in the unrifled chamber the royal mummy would be lying⁠—my own. + 

Nothing within those Gothic walls ever changed. Imperceptibly the furniture grew older; the wallpapers and the upholstery recalled with their noncommittal russets and sage-greens the refinements of another epoch. And my mother herself, pale and grey-haired, draped in the dateless dove-grey dresses she had always worn, my mother was still the same. Her smile was the same dim gentle smile; her voice still softly modulated, like a studied and cultured music, from key to key. Her hair was hardly greyer⁠—for it had whitened early and I was a late-born child⁠—than I always remember it to have been. Her face was hardly more deeply wrinkled. She walked erect, seemed still as active as ever, she had grown no thinner and no stouter. + 

And she was still surrounded by those troops of derelict dogs, so dreadfully profuse, poor beasts! in their smelly gratitude. There were still the same moth-eaten cats picked up starving at a street corner to be harboured in luxury⁠—albeit on a diet that was, on principle, strictly vegetarian⁠—in the best rooms of the house. Poor children still came for buns and tea and traditional games in the garden⁠—so traditional, very often, that nobody but my mother had ever heard of them; still came, when the season happened to be winter, for gloves and woolly stockings and traditional games indoors. And the writing-table in the drawing-room was piled high, as it had always been piled, with printed appeals for some deserving charity. And still in her beautiful calligraphy my mother addressed the envelopes that were to contain them, slowly, one after another⁠—and each a little work of art, like a page from a medieval missal, and each destined, without reprieve, to the wastepaper basket. + 

All was just as it had always been. Ah, but not quite, all the same! For though the summer term was in full swing and the afternoon bright, the little garden behind the house was deserted and unmelodious. Where were the morris dancers, where the mixolydian strains? And remembering that music, those dances, those distant afternoons, I could have wept. + 

In one corner of the lawn my mother used to sit at the little harmonium; I sat beside her to turn the pages of the music. In the opposite corner were grouped the dancers. My mother looked up over the top of the instrument; melodiously she inquired: + 

“Which dance shall we have next, Mr. Toft? ‘Trenchmore’? Or ‘Omnium Gatherum’? Or ‘John Come Kiss Me Now’? Or what do you say to ‘Up Tails All’? Or ‘Rub Her Down with Straw’? Or ‘An Old Man’s a Bed Full of Bones’? Such an embarras de richesse, isn’t there?” + 

And Mr. Toft would break away from his little company of dancers and come across the lawn wiping his face⁠—for “Hoite-cum-Toite” a moment before had been a most furious affair. It was a grey face with vague indeterminate features and a bright almost clerical smile in the middle of it. When he spoke it was in a very rich voice. + 

“Suppose we try ‘Fading,’ Mrs. Chelifer,” he suggested. “ ‘Fading Is a Fine Dance’⁠—you remember the immortal words of the Citizen’s Wife in the Knight of the Burning Pestle? Ha ha!” And he gave utterance to a little laugh, applausive of his own wit. For to Mr. Toft every literary allusion was a joke, and the obscurer the allusion the more exquisite the waggery. It was rarely, alas, that he found anyone to share his merriment. My mother was one of the few people who always made a point of smiling whenever Mr. Toft laughed at himself. She smiled even when she could not track the allusion to its source. Sometimes she even went so far as to laugh. But my mother had no facility for laughter; by nature she was a grave and gentle smiler. + 

And so “Fading” it would be. My mother touched the keys and the gay, sad mixolydian air came snoring out of the harmonium like a strangely dissipated hymn tune. “One, two, three⁠ ⁠…” called Mr. Toft richly. And then in unison all five⁠—the don, the two undergraduates, the two young ladies from North Oxford⁠—would beat the ground with their feet, would prance and stamp till the garters of little bells round the gentlemen’s grey flannel trousers (it went without saying, for some reason, that the ladies should not wear them) jingled like the bells of a runaway hansom-cab horse. One, two, three.⁠ ⁠… The Citizen’s Wife (ha ha!) was right. Fading is a fine dance indeed. Everybody dances Fading. Poor Mr. Toft had faded out of Oxford, had danced completely out of life, like Lycidas (tee-hee!) before his prime. Influenza had faded him. And of the undergraduates who had danced here, first and last, with Mr. Toft⁠—how many of them had danced Fading under the German barrage? Young Flint, the one who used always to address his tutor as “Mr. Toft⁠—oh, I mean Clarence” (for Mr. Toft was one of those genial boyish dons who insisted on being called by their Christian names), young Flint was dead for certain. And Ramsden too, I had a notion that Ramsden too was dead. + 

And then there were the young women from North Oxford. What, for example, of Miss Dewball’s cheeks? How had those cabbage roses weathered the passage of the years? But for Miss Higlett, of course, there could be no more fading, no further desiccation. She was already a harebell baked in sand. Unwithering Higlett, blowsy Dewball.⁠ ⁠… + 

And I myself, I too had faded. The Francis Chelifer who, standing by the dissipated harmonium, had turned the pages of his mother’s music, was as wholly extinct as Mr. Toft. Within this Gothic tomb reposed his mummy. My weekend visits were archaeological expeditions. + 

“Now that poor Mr. Toft’s dead,” I asked as we walked, my mother and I, that afternoon, up and down the little garden behind the house, “isn’t there anyone else here who’s keen on morris dancing?” Or were those folky days, I wondered, forever past? + 

My mother shook her head. “The enthusiasm for it is gone,” she said sadly. “This generation of undergraduates doesn’t seem to take much interest in that kind of thing. I don’t really know,” she added, “what it is interested in.” + 

What indeed, I reflected. In my young days it had been Social Service and Fabianism; it had been long hearty walks in the country at four and a half miles an hour, with draughts of Five X beer at the end of them, and Rabelaisian song and conversations with yokels in incredibly picturesque little wayside inns; it had been reading parties in the Lakes and climbing in the Jura; it had been singing in the Bach Choir and even⁠—though somehow I had never been able quite to rise to that⁠—even morris dancing with Mr. Toft.⁠ ⁠… But Fading is a fine dance, and all these occupations seemed now a little queer. Still, I caught myself envying the being who had lived within my skin and joined in these activities. + 

“Poor Toft!” I meditated. “Do you remember the way he had of calling great men by little pet names of his own? Just to show that he was on terms of familiarity with them, I suppose. Shakespeare was always Shake-bake, which was short, in its turn, for Shake-Bacon. And Oven, tout court, was Beethoven.” + 

“And always J. S. B. for Bach,” my mother continued, smiling elegiacally. + 

“Yes, and Pee Em for Philipp Emanuel Bach. And Madame Dudevant for George Sand, or, alternatively, I remember, ‘The Queen’s Monthly Nurse’⁠—because Dickens thought she looked like that the only time he saw her.” I recalled the long-drawn and delighted laughter which used to follow that allusion. + 

“You were never much of a dancer, dear boy.” My mother sadly shook her head over the past. + 

“Ah, but at any rate,” I answered, “at any rate I was a Fabian. And I went for hearty long walks in the country. I drank my pint of Five X at the Red Lion.” + 

“I wish you could have gone without the beer,” said my mother. That I had not chosen to be a total abstainer had always a little distressed her. Moreover, I had a taste for beefsteaks. + 

“It was my substitute for morris dancing, if you follow me.” + 

But I don’t think she did follow me. We took two or three turns up and down the lawn in silence. + 

“How is your paper doing?” she asked at last. + 

I told her with a great show of enthusiasm about the cross between Angoras and Himalayans which we had just announced. + 

“I often wish,” she said after a pause, “that you had accepted the college’s offer. It would have been so good to have you here, filling the place your dear father occupied.” + 

She looked at me sadly. I smiled back at her as though from across a gulf. The child, I thought, grows up to forget that he is of the same flesh with his parents; but they do not forget. I wished, for her sake, that I were only five years old. + 

IV + 

At five years old, among other things, I used to write poems which my mother thoroughly and wholeheartedly enjoyed. There was one about larks which she still preserves, along with the locks of my pale childish hair, the faded photographs, the precocious drawings of railway trains and all the other relics of the period. + 

Oh lark, how you do fly + 

Right up into the sky. + 

How loud he sings + 

And quickly wags his wings. + 

The sun does shine, + 

The weather is fine. + 

Father says, Hark, + 

Do you hear the lark? + 

My mother likes that poem better, I believe, than anything I have written since. And I dare say that my father, if he had lived, would have shared her opinion. But then he was an ardent Wordsworthian. He knew most of the Prelude by heart. Sometimes, unexpectedly breaking that profound and godlike silence with which he always enveloped himself, he would quote a line or two. The effect was always portentous; it was as though an oracle had spoken. + 

I remember with particular vividness one occasion when Wordsworth broke my father’s prodigious silence. It was one Easter time, when I was about twelve. We had gone to North Wales for the holidays; my father liked walking among hills and even amused himself occasionally with a little mild rock climbing. Easter was early that year, the season backward and inclement; there was snow on all the hills. On Easter Sunday my father, who considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing, suggested that we should climb to the top of Snowdon. We started early; it was cold; white misty clouds shut off the distant prospects. Silently we trudged upwards through the snow. Like the page of King Wenceslas I followed in my father’s footsteps, treading in the holes he had kicked in the snow. Every now and then he would look round to see how I was getting on. Icy dewdrops hung in his brown beard. Gravely he smiled down on me as I came panting up, planting my small feet in his large tracks. He was a huge man, tall and broad-shouldered, with a face that might have been the curly-bearded original of one of those Greek busts of middle-aged statesmen or philosophers. Standing beside him, I always felt particularly small and insignificant. When I had come up with him, he would pat me affectionately on the shoulder with his large heavy hand, then turning his face towards the heights he addressed himself once more to the climb. Not a word was spoken. + 

As the sun mounted higher, the clouds dispersed. Through the rifted mist we saw the sky. Great beams of yellow light went stalking across the slopes of snow. By the time we reached the summit the sky was completely clear; the landscape opened out beneath us. The sun was shining brightly, but without heat; the sky was pale blue, remote and icy. Every northern slope of the glittering hills was shadowed with transparent blues or purples. Far down, to the westward, was the scalloped and indented coast, and seeming in its remoteness utterly calm, the grey sea stretched upwards and away towards the horizon. We stood there for a long time in silence, gazing at the astonishing landscape. Sometimes, I remember, I stole an anxious look at my father. What was he thinking about? I wondered. Huge and formidable he stood there, leaning on his ice-axe, turning his dark bright eyes slowly and meditatively this way and that. He spoke no word. I did not dare to break the silence. In the end he straightened himself up. He raised his ice-axe and with an emphatic gesture dug the pointed ferrule into the snow. “Bloody fine!” he said slowly in his deep, cavernous voice. He said no more. In silence we retraced our steps towards the Pen-y-pass Hotel. + 

But my father had not, as I supposed, spoken his last word. When we were about halfway down I was startled and a little alarmed to hear him suddenly begin to speak. “For I have learned,” he began abruptly (and he seemed to be speaking less for my benefit than to himself), “to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity, not harsh, nor grating, but of ample power to chasten and subdue. And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the minds of men.” I listened to him with a kind of terror. The strange words (I had no idea at that time whence they came) reverberated mysteriously in my mind. It seemed an oracle, a divine revelation. My father ceased speaking as abruptly as he had begun. The words hung, as it were, isolated in the midst of his portentous silence. We walked on. My father spoke no more till on the threshold of the inn, sniffing the frozen air, he remarked with a profound satisfaction: “Onions!” And then, after a second sniff: “Fried.” + 

“A sense of something far more deeply interfused.” Ever since that day those words, pronounced in my father’s cavernous voice, have rumbled through my mind. It took me a long time to discover that they were as meaningless as so many hiccups. Such is the nefarious influence of early training. + 

My father, however, who never contrived to rid himself of the prejudices instilled into him in childhood, went on believing in his Wordsworthian formulas till the end. Yes, he too, I am afraid, would have preferred the precocious larks to my maturer lucubrations. And yet, how competently I have learned to write! In mere justice to myself I must insist on it. Not, of course, that it matters in the least. The larks might be my masterpiece; it would not matter a pin. Still, I insist. I insist.⁠ ⁠… + 

V + 

“Quite the little poet”⁠—how bitterly poor Keats resented the remark! Perhaps because he secretly knew that it was just. For Keats, after all, was that strange, unhappy chimaera⁠—a little artist and a large man. Between the writer of the Odes and the writer of the letters there is all the gulf that separates a halma player from a hero. + 

Personally, I do not go in for heroic letters. I only modestly lay claim to being a competent second-class halma player⁠—but a good deal more competent, I insist (though of course it doesn’t matter), than when I wrote about the larks. “Quite the little poet”⁠—always and, alas, incorrigibly I am that. + 

Let me offer you a specimen of my matured competence. I select it at random, as the reviewers say, from my long-projected and never-to-be-concluded series of poems on the first six Caesars. My father, I flatter myself, would have liked the title. That, at any rate, is thoroughly Wordsworthian; it is in the great tradition of that immortal “Needle Case in the Form of a Harp.” “Caligula Crossing the Bridge of Boats Between Baiae and Puteoli. By Peter Paul Rubens (b. 1577: d. 1640).” The poem itself, however, is not very reminiscent of the Lake District. + 

Prow after prow the floating ships + 

Bridge the blue gulf; the road is laid. + 

And Caesar on a piebald horse + 

Prances with all his cavalcade. + 

Drunk with their own quick blood they go. + 

The waves flash as with seeing eyes; + 

The tumbling cliffs mimic their speed, + 

And they have filled the vacant skies + 

With waltzing Gods and Virtues, set + 

The Sea Winds singing with their shout, + 

Made Vesta’s temple on the headland + 

Spin like a twinkling roundabout. + 

The twined caduceus in his hand, + 

And having golden wings for spurs, + 

Young Caesar dressed as God looks on + 

And cheers his jolly mariners; + 

Cheers as they heave from off the bridge + 

The trippers from the seaside town; + 

Laughs as they bang the bobbing heads + 

And shove them bubbling down to drown. + 

There sweeps a spiral whirl of gesture + 

From the allegoric sky: + 

Beauty, like conscious lightning, runs + 

Through Jove’s ribbed trunk and Juno’s thigh, + 

Slides down the flank of Mars and takes + 

From Virtue’s rump a dizzier twist, + 

Licks round a cloud and whirling stoops + 

Earthwards to Caesar’s lifted fist. + 

A burgess tumbles from the bridge + 

Headlong, and hurrying Beauty slips + 

From Caesar through the plunging legs + 

To the blue sea between the ships. + 

Reading it through, I flatter myself that this is very nearly up to international halma form. A little more, and I shall be playing in critical test-matches against Monsieur Cocteau and Miss Amy Lowell. Enormous honour! I shrink from beneath its impendence. + 

But ah! those Caesars. They have haunted me for years. I have had such schemes for putting half the universe into two or three dozen poems about those monsters. All the sins, to begin with, and complementarily all the virtues.⁠ ⁠… Art, science, history, religion⁠—they too were to have found their place. And God knows what besides. But they never came to much, these Caesars. The notion, I soon came to see, was too large and pretentious ever to be realized. I began (deep calls to deep) with Nero, the artist. “Nero and Sporus walking in the gardens of the Golden House.” + 

Dark stirrings in the perfumed air + 

Touch your cheeks, lift your hair. + 

With softer fingers I caress, + 

Sporus, all your loveliness. + 

Round as a fruit, tree-tangled, shines + 

The moon; and fireflies in the vines, + 

Like stars in a delirious sky, + 

Gleam and go out. Unceasingly + 

The fountains fall, the nightingales + 

Sing. But time flows and love avails + 

Nothing. The Christians smoulder red; + 

Their brave blue-hearted flames are dead. + 

And you, sweet Sporus, you and I, + 

We too must die, we too must die. + 

But the soliloquy which followed was couched in a more philosophic key. I set forth in it all the reasons for halma’s existence⁠—reasons which, at the time when I composed the piece, I almost believed in still. One lives and learns. Meanwhile, here it is. + 

The Christians by whose muddy light + 

Dimly, dimly I divine + 

Your eyes and see your pallid beauty + 

Like a pale night-primrose shine + 

Colourless in the dark, revere + 

A God who slowly died that they + 

Might suffer the less; who bore the pain + 

Of all time in a single day, + 

The pain of all men in a single + 

Wounded body and sad heart. + 

The yellow marble smooth as water + 

Builds me a Golden House; and there + 

The marble gods sleep in their strength + 

And the white Parian girls are fair. + 

Roses and waxen oleanders, + 

Green grape bunches and the flushed peach⁠— + 

All beautiful things I taste, touch, see, + 

Knowing, loving, becoming each. + 

The ship went down, my mother swam: + 

I wedded and myself was wed; + 

Old Claudius died of emperor-bane: + 

Old Seneca too slowly bled. + 

The wild beast and the victim both, + 

The ravisher and the wincing bride; + 

King of the world and a slave’s slave, + 

Terror-haunted, deified⁠— + 

An artist, O sweet Sporus, an artist, + 

All these I am and needs must be. + 

Is the tune Lydian? I have loved you. + 

And you have heard my symphony + 

Of wailing voices and clashed brass, + 

With long shrill flutings that suspend + 

Pain o’er a muttering gulf of terrors, + 

And piercing breathless joys that end + 

In agony⁠—could I have made + 

My song of Furies were the bane + 

Still sap within the hemlock stalk, + 

The red swords virgin bright again? + 

Or take a child’s love that is all + 

Worship, all tenderness and trust, + 

A dawn-web, dewy and fragile⁠—take + 

And with the violence of lust + 

Tear and defile it. You shall hear + 

The breaking dumbness and the thin + 

Harsh crying that is the very music + 

Of shame and the remorse of sin. + 

Christ died; the artist lives for all; + 

Loves, and his naked marbles stand + 

Pure as a column on the sky, + 

Whose lips, whose breast and thighs demand + 

Not our humiliation, not + 

The shuddering of an after shame; + 

And of his agonies men know + 

Only the beauty born of them. + 

Christ died, but living Nero turns + 

Your mute remorse to song; he gives + 

To idiot fate eyes like a lover’s, + 

And while his music plays, God lives. + 

Romantic and noble sentiments! I protest, they do me credit. + 

And then there are the fragments about Tiberius; Tiberius, need I add, the representative in my symbolic scheme of love. Here is one. “In the Gardens at Capri.” (All my scenes are laid in gardens, I notice, at night, under the moon. Perhaps the fact is significant. Who knows?) + 

Hour after hour the stars + 

Move, and the moon towards remoter night + 

Averts her cheek. + 

Blind now, these gardens yet remember + 

That there were crimson petals glossy with light, + 

And their remembrance is this scent of roses. + 

Hour after hour the stars march slowly on, + 

And year by year mysteriously the flowers + 

Unfold the same bright pattern towards the sky. + 

Incurious under the streaming stars, + 

Breathing this new yet immemorial perfume + 

Unmoved, I lie along the tumbled bed; + 

And the two women who are my bedfellows, + 

Whose breath is sour with wine and their soft bodies + 

Still hot and rank, sleep drunkenly at my side. + 

Commendable, I should now think, this fixture of the attention upon the relevant, the human reality in the centre of the pointless landscape. It was just at the time I wrote this fragment that I was learning the difficult art of this exclusive concentration on the relevant. They were painful lessons. War had prepared me to receive them; Love was the lecturer. + 

Her name was Barbara Waters. I saw her first when I was about fourteen. She was a month or two older than I. It was at one of those enormous water picnics on the Cherwell that were organized from time to time during the summer vacation by certain fiery and energetic spirits among the dons’ wives. We would start out at seven, half a dozen punt-loads of us, from the most northerly of the Oxford boathouses and make our way upstream for an hour or so until night had fairly set in. Then, disembarking in some solitary meadow, we would spread cloths, unpack hampers, eat hilariously. And there were so many midges that even the schoolboys were allowed to smoke cigarettes to keep them off⁠—even the schoolgirls. And how knowingly and with what a relish we, the boys, puffed away, blowing the smoke through our noses, opening our mouths like frogs to make rings! But the girls always managed to make their cigarettes come to pieces, got the tobacco into their mouths and, making faces, had to pick the bitter-tasting threads of it from between their lips. In the end, after much giggling, they always threw their cigarettes away, not half smoked; the boys laughed, contemptuously and patronizingly. And finally we packed ourselves into the punts again and floated home, singing; our voices across the water sounded preternaturally sweet. A yellow moon as large as a pumpkin shone overhead; there were gleamings on the crests of the ripples and in the troughs of the tiny waves, left in the wake of the punts, shadows of almost absolute blackness. The leaves of the willow trees shone like metal. A white mist lay along the meadows. Corncrakes incessantly ran their thumbs along the teeth of combs. A faint weedy smell came up from the river; the aroma of tobacco cut violently across it in pungent gusts; sometimes the sweet animal smell of cows insinuated itself into the watery atmosphere, and looking between the willows, we would see a company of the large and gentle beasts kneeling in the grass, their heads and backs projecting like the crests of mountains above the mist, still hard at work, though the laborious day was long since over, chewing and chewing away at a green breakfast that had merged into luncheon, at the tea that had become in due course a long-drawn-out vegetarian dinner. Munchily, squelchily, they moved their indefatigable jaws. The sound came faintly to us through the silence. Then a small clear voice would begin singing “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” or “Greensleeves.” + 

Sometimes, for the fun of the thing, though it was quite unnecessary, and if the weather happened to be really warm, positively disagreeable, we would light a fire, so that we might have the pleasure of eating our cold chicken and salmon mayonnaise with potatoes baked⁠—or generally either half baked or burnt⁠—in their jackets among the glowing cinders. It was by the light of one of these fires that I first saw Barbara. The punt in which I came had started some little time after the others; we had had to wait for a late arrival. By the time we reached the appointed supping place the others had disembarked and made all ready for the meal. The younger members of the party had collected materials for a fire, which they were just lighting as we approached. A group of figures, pale and colourless in the moonlight, were standing or sitting round the white cloth. In the black shadow of a huge elm tree a few yards further off moved featureless silhouettes. Suddenly a small flame spurted from a match and was shielded between a pair of hands that were transformed at once into hands of transparent coral. The silhouettes began to live a fragmentary life. The fire-bearing hands moved round the pyre; two or three new little flames were born. Then, to the sound of a great hurrah, the bonfire flared up. In the heart of the black shadow of the elm tree a new small universe, far vivider than the ghostly world of moonlight beyond, was suddenly created. By the light of the bright flames I saw half a dozen familiar faces belonging to the boys and girls I knew. But I hardly noticed them; I heeded only one face, a face I did not know. The leaping flame revealed it apocalyptically. Flushed, bright and with an air of being almost supernaturally alive in the quivering, changing light of the flames, it detached itself with an incredible clarity and precision from against a background of darkness which the fire had made to seem yet darker. It was the face of a young girl. She had dark hair with ruddy golden lights in it. The nose was faintly aquiline. The openings of the eyes were narrow, long and rather slanting, and the dark eyes looked out through them as though through mysterious loopholes, brilliant, between the fringed eyelids, with an intense and secret and unutterable happiness. + 

The mouth seemed to share in the same exquisite secret. Not full, but delicately shaped, the unparted lips were curved into a smile that seemed to express a delight more piercing than any laughter, any outburst of joy could give utterance to. The corners of the mouth were drawn upwards so that the line of the meeting of the lips was parallel with her tilted eyes. And this slanting close-lipped smile seemed as though suspended on two little folds that wrinkled the cheeks at the corners of the mouth. The face, which was rather broad across the cheekbones, tapered away to a pointed chin, small and firm. Her neck was round and slender; her arms, which were bare in her muslin dress, very thin. + 

The punt moved slowly against the current. I gazed and gazed at the face revealed by the flickering light of the fire. It seemed to me that I had never seen anything so beautiful and wonderful. What was the secret of that inexpressible joy? What nameless happiness dwelt behind those dark-fringed eyes, that silent, unemphatic, close-lipped smile? Breathlessly I gazed. I felt the tears coming into my eyes⁠—she was so beautiful. And I was almost awed, I felt something that was almost fear, as though I had suddenly come into the presence of more than a mere mortal being, into the presence of life itself. The flame leapt up. Over the silent, secret-smiling face the tawny reflections came and went, as though wild blood were fluttering deliriously beneath the skin. The others were shouting, laughing, waving their arms. She remained perfectly still, close-lipped and narrow-eyed, smiling. Yes, life itself was standing there. + 

The punt bumped against the bank. “Catch hold,” somebody shouted, “catch hold, Francis.” + 

Reluctantly I did as I was told; I felt as though something precious were being killed within me. + 

In the years that followed I saw her once or twice. She was an orphan, I learned, and had relations in Oxford with whom she came occasionally to stay. When I tried to speak to her, I always found myself too shy to do more than stammer or say something trivial or stupid. Serenely, looking at me steadily between her eyelids, she answered. I remember not so much what she said as the tone in which she spoke⁠—cool, calm, assured, as befitted the embodiment of life itself. + 

“Do you play tennis?” I would ask in desperation⁠—and I could have wept at my own stupidity and lack of courage. Why are you so beautiful? What do you think about behind your secret eyes? Why are you so inexplicably happy? Those were the questions I wanted to ask her. + 

“Yes, I love tennis,” she gravely answered. + 

Once, I remember, I managed to advance so far along the road of coherent and intelligent conversation as to ask her what books she liked best. She looked at me unwaveringly while I spoke. It was I who reddened and turned away. She had an unfair advantage ever me⁠—the advantage of being able to look out from between her narrowed eyelids as though from an ambush. I was in the open and utterly without protection. + 

“I don’t read much,” she said at last, when I had finished. “I don’t really very much like reading.” + 

My attempt to approach, to make contact, was baffled. At the same time I felt that I ought to have known that she wouldn’t like reading. After all, what need was there for her to read? When one is life itself, one has no use for mere books. Years later she admitted that she had always made an exception for the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter. When I was seventeen she went to live with another set of relations in South Africa. + 

Time passed. I thought of her constantly. All that I read of love in the poets arranged itself significantly round the memory of that lovely and secretly smiling face. My friends would boast about their little adventures. I smiled unenviously, knowing not merely in theory but by actual experience that that sort of thing was not love. Once, when I was a freshman at the university, I myself, at the end of a tipsy evening in a night club, lapsed from the purity in which I had lived up till then. Afterwards, I was horribly ashamed. And I felt that I had made myself unworthy of love. In consequence⁠—the link of cause and effect seems to me now somewhat difficult to discover, but at the time, I know, I found my action logical enough⁠—in consequence I overworked myself, won two university prizes, became an ardent revolutionary and devoted many hours of my leisure to “social service” in the college Mission. I was not a good social servant, got on only indifferently well with fierce young adolescents from the slums and thoroughly disliked every moment I spent in the Mission. But it was precisely for that reason that I stuck to the job. Once or twice, even, I consented to join in the morris dancing in my mother’s garden. I was making myself worthy⁠—for what? I hardly know. The possibility of marriage seemed almost infinitely remote; and somehow I hardly desired it. I was fitting myself to go on loving and loving, and incidentally to do great things. + 

Then came the war. From France I wrote her a letter, in which I told her all the things I had lacked the power to say in her presence. I sent the letter to the only address I knew⁠—she had left it years before⁠—not expecting, not even hoping very much, that she would receive it. I wrote it for my own satisfaction, in order to make explicit all that I felt. I had no doubt that I should soon be dead. It was a letter addressed not so much to a woman as to God, a letter of explanation and apology posted to the universe. + 

In the winter of 1916 I was wounded. At the end of my spell in hospital I was reported unfit for further active service and appointed to a post in the contracts department of the Air Board. I was put in charge of chemicals, celluloid, rubber tubing, castor oil, linen and balloon fabrics. I spent my time haggling with German Jews over the price of chemicals and celluloid, with Greek brokers over the castor oil, with Ulstermen over the linen. Spectacled Japanese came to visit me with samples of crêpe de Chine which they tried to persuade me⁠—and they offered choice cigars⁠—would be both better and cheaper than cotton for the manufacture of balloons. Of every one of the letters I dictated first eleven, then seventeen, and finally, when the department had flowered to the height of its prosperity, twenty-two copies were made, to be noted and filed by the various subsections of the ministry concerned. The Hotel Cecil was filled with clerks. In basements two stories down beneath the surface of the ground, in attics above the level of the surrounding chimney-pots, hundreds of young women tapped away at typewriters. In a subterranean ballroom, that looked like the setting for Belshazzar’s feast, a thousand cheap lunches were daily consumed. In the hotel’s best bedrooms overlooking the Thames sat the professional civil servants of long standing with letters after their names, the big business men who were helping to win the war, the staff officers. A fleet of very large motor cars waited for them in the courtyard. Sometimes, when I entered the office of a morning, I used to imagine myself a visitor from Mars.⁠ ⁠… + 

One morning⁠—it was after I had been at the Air Board for several months⁠—I found myself faced with a problem which could only be solved after consultation with an expert in the Naval Department. The naval people lived in the range of buildings on the opposite side of the courtyard from that in which our offices were housed. It was only after ten minutes of labyrinthine wanderings that I at last managed to find the man I was looking for. He was a genial fellow, I remember; asked me how I liked Bolo House (which was the nickname among the knowing of our precious Air Board office), gave me an East Indian cheroot and even offered whiskey and soda. After that we settled down to a technical chat about non-inflammable celluloid. I left him at last, much enlightened. + 

“So long,” he called after me. “And if ever you want to know any mortal thing about acetone or any other kind of bloody dope, come to me and I’ll tell you.” + 

“Thanks,” I said. “And if by any chance you should happen to want to know about Apollonius Rhodius, shall we say, or Chaucer, or the history of the three-pronged fork⁠ ⁠…” + 

He roared very heartily. “I’ll come to you,” he concluded. + 

Still laughing, I shut the door behind me and stepped out into the corridor. A young woman was hurrying past with a thick bundle of papers in her hand, humming softly as she went. Startled by my sudden emergence, she turned and looked at me. As though with fear, my heart gave a sudden thump, then seemed to stop for a moment altogether, seemed to drop down within me. + 

“Barbara!” + 

At the sound of the name she halted and looked at me with that steady unwavering gaze between the narrowed eyelids that I knew so well. A little frown appeared on her forehead; puzzled, she pursed her lips. Then all at once her face brightened, she laughed; the light in the dark eyes joyously quivered and danced. + 

“Why, it’s Francis Chelifer,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t know you for the first minute. You’ve changed.” + 

“You haven’t,” I said. “You’re just the same.” + 

She said nothing, but smiled, close-lipped, and from between her lashes looked at me as though from an ambush. In her young maturity she was more beautiful than ever. Whether I was glad or sorry to see her again, I hardly know. But I do know that I was moved, profoundly; I was shaken and troubled out of whatever equanimity I possessed. That memory of a kind of symbolic loveliness for which and by which I had been living all these years was now reincarnated and stood before me, no longer a symbol, but an individual; it was enough to make one feel afraid. + 

“I thought you were in South Africa,” I went on. “Which is almost the same as saying I thought you didn’t exist.” + 

“I came home a year ago.” + 

“And you’ve been working here ever since?” + 

Barbara nodded. + 

“And you’re working in Bolo House too?” she asked. + 

“For the last six months.” + 

“Well I never! And to think we never met before! But how small the world is⁠—how absurdly small.” + 

We met for luncheon. + 

“Did you get my letter?” I summoned up courage to ask her over the coffee. + 

Barbara nodded. “It was months and months on its way,” she said; and I did not know whether she made the remark deliberately, in order to stave off for a moment the inevitable discussion of the letter, or if she made it quite spontaneously and without afterthought, because she found it interesting that the letter should have been so long on its way. “It went to South Africa and back again,” she explained. + 

“Did you read it?” + 

“Of course.” + 

“Did you understand what I meant?” As I asked the question I wished that I had kept silence. I was afraid of what the answer might be. + 

She nodded and said nothing, looking at me mysteriously, as though she had a secret and profound comprehension of everything. + 

“It was something almost inexpressible,” I said. Her look encouraged me to go on. “Something so deep and so vast that there were no words to describe it. You understood? You really understood?” + 

Barbara was silent for some time. Then with a little sigh she said: “Men are always silly about me. I don’t know why.” + 

I looked at her. Could she really have uttered those words? She was still smiling as life itself might smile. And at that moment I had a horrible premonition of what I was going to suffer. Nevertheless I asked how soon I might see her again. Tonight? Could she dine with me tonight? Barbara shook her head; this evening she was engaged. What about lunch tomorrow? “I must think.” And she frowned, she pursed her lips. No, she remembered in the end, tomorrow was no good. Her first moment of liberty was at dinnertime two days later. + 

I returned to my work that afternoon feeling particularly Martian. Eight thick files relating to the Imperial Cellulose Company lay on my desk. My secretary showed me the experts’ report on proprietary brands of castor oil, which had just come in. A rubber tubing man was particularly anxious to see me. And did I still want her to get a trunk call through to Belfast about that linen business? Pensively I listened to what she was saying. What was it all for? + 

“Are men often silly about you, Miss Masson?” it suddenly occurred to me to ask. I looked up at my secretary, who was waiting for me to answer her questions and tell her what to do. + 

Miss Masson became surprisingly red and laughed in an embarrassed, unnatural way. “Why, no,” she said. “I suppose I’m an ugly duckling.” And she added: “It’s rather a relief. But what makes you ask?” + 

She had reddish hair, bobbed and curly, a very white skin and brown eyes. About twenty-three, I supposed; and she wasn’t an ugly duckling at all. I had never talked to her except about business, and seldom looked at her closely, contenting myself with being merely aware that she was there⁠—a secretary, most efficient. + 

“What makes you ask?” A strange expression that was like a look of terror came into Miss Masson’s eyes. + 

“Oh, I don’t know. Curiosity. Perhaps you’ll see if you can get me through to Belfast some time in the afternoon. And tell the rubber tubing man that I can’t possibly see him.” + 

Miss Masson’s manner changed. She smiled at me efficiently, secretarially. Her eyes became quite impassive. “You can’t possibly see him,” she repeated. She had a habit of repeating what other people had just said, even reproducing like an echo opinions or jokes uttered an instant before as though they were her own. She turned away and walked towards the door. I was left alone with the secret history of the Imperial Cellulose Company, the experts’ report on proprietary brands of castor oil, and my own thoughts. + 

Two days later Barbara and I were dining very expensively at a restaurant where the diners were able very successfully to forget that the submarine campaign was in full swing and that food was being rationed. + 

“I think the decorations are so pretty,” she said, looking round her. “And the music.” (Mrs. Cloudesley Shove thought the same of the Corner Houses.) + 

While she looked round at the architecture, I looked at her. She was wearing a rose-coloured evening dress, cut low and without sleeves. The skin of her neck and shoulders was very white. There was a bright rose in the opening of her corsage. Her arms without being bony were still very slender, like the arms of a little girl; her whole figure was slim and adolescent. + 

“Why do you stare at me like that?” she asked, when the fascination of the architecture was exhausted. She had heightened the colour of her cheeks and faintly smiling lips. Between the darkened eyelids her eyes looked brighter than usual. + 

“I was wondering why you were so happy. Secretly happy, inside, all by yourself. What’s the secret? That’s what I was wondering.” + 

“Why shouldn’t I be happy?” she asked. “But, as a matter of fact,” she added an instant later, “I’m not happy. How can one be happy when thousands of people are being killed every minute and millions more are suffering?” She tried to look grave, as though she were in church. But the secret joy glittered irrepressibly through the slanting narrow openings of her eyes. Within its ambush her soul kept incessant holiday. + 

I could not help laughing. “Luckily,” I said, “our sympathy for suffering is rarely strong enough to prevent us from eating dinner. Do you prefer lobster or salmon?” + 

“Lobster,” said Barbara. “But how stupidly cynical you are! You don’t believe what I say. But I do assure you, there’s not a moment when I don’t remember all those killed and wounded. And poor people too: the way they live⁠—in the slums. One can’t be happy. Not really.” She shook her head. + 

I saw that if I pursued this subject of conversation, thus forcing her to continue her pretence of being in church, I should ruin her evening and make her thoroughly dislike me. The waiter with the wine list made a timely diversion. I skimmed the pages. “What do you say to a quart of champagne cup?” I suggested. + 

“That would be delicious,” she said, and was silent, looking at me meanwhile with a questioning, undecided face that did not know how to adjust itself⁠—whether to continued gravity or to a more natural cheerfulness. + 

I put an end to her indecision by pointing to a diner at a neighbouring table and whispering: “Have you ever seen anything so like a tapir?” + 

She burst into a peal of delighted laughter; not so much because what I had said was particularly funny, but because it was such a tremendous relief to be allowed to laugh again with a good conscience. + 

“Or wouldn’t you have said an anteater?” she suggested, looking in the direction I had indicated and then leaning across the table to speak the words softly and intimately into my ear. Her face approached, dazzlingly beautiful. I could have cried aloud. The secret happiness in her eyes was youth, was health, was uncontrollable life. The close lips smiled with a joyful sense of power. A rosy perfume surrounded her. The red rose between her breasts was brilliant against the white skin. I was aware suddenly that under the glossy silk of her dress was a young body, naked. Was it for this discovery that I had been preparing myself all these years? + 

After dinner we went to a music hall, and when the show was over to a night club where we danced. She told me that she went dancing almost every night. I did not ask with whom. She looked appraisingly at all the women who came in, asked me if I didn’t think this one very pretty, that most awfully attractive; and when, on the contrary, I found them rather repulsive, she was annoyed with me for being insufficiently appreciative of her sex. She pointed out a red-haired woman at another table and asked me if I liked women with red hair. When I said that I preferred Buckle’s History of Civilization, she laughed as though I had said something quite absurdly paradoxical. It was better when she kept silence; and fortunately she had a great capacity for silence, could use it even as a defensive weapon, as when, to questions that at all embarrassed or nonplussed her, she simply returned no answer, however often they were repeated, smiling all the time mysteriously and as though from out of another universe. + 

We had been at the night club about an hour, when a stoutish and flabby young man, very black-haired, very dark-skinned, with a large fleshy nose and a nostril curved in an opulent oriental volute, came sauntering in with a lordly air of possession. He wore a silver monocle in his left eye, and among the irrepressible black stubbles of his chin the grains of poudre de riz glittered like little snowflakes. Catching sight of Barbara he smiled, lavishly, came up to our table and spoke to her. Barbara seemed very glad to see him. + 

“Such a clever man,” she explained, when he had moved away to another table with the red-haired lady to whom I preferred the History of Civilization. “He’s a Syrian. You ought to get to know him. He writes poetry too, you know.” + 

I was unhappy the whole evening; but at the same time I wished it would never end. I should have liked to go on forever sitting in that stuffy cellar, where the jazz band sounded so loud that it seemed to be playing inside one’s head. I would have breathed the stale air and wearily danced forever, I would even have listened forever to Barbara’s conversation⁠—forever, so that I might have been allowed to be near her, to look at her, to speculate, until she next spoke, on the profound and lovely mysteries behind her eyes, on the ineffable sources of that secret joy which kept her faintly and yet how intently and how rapturously smiling. + 

The weeks passed. I saw her almost every day. And every day I loved her more violently and painfully, with a love that less and less resembled the religious passion of my boyhood. But it was the persistent memory of that passion which made my present desire so parching and tormenting, that filled me with a thirst that no possible possession could assuage. No possible possession, since whatever I might possess, as I realized more and more clearly each time I saw her, would be utterly different from what I had desired all these years to possess. I had desired all beauty, all that exists of goodness and truth, symbolized and incarnate in one face. And now the face drew near, the lips touched mine; and what I had got was simply a young woman with a “temperament,” as the euphemists who deplore the word admiringly and lovingly qualify the lascivious thing. And yet, against all reason, in spite of all the evidence, I could not help believing that she was somehow and secretly what I had imagined her. My love for her as a symbol strengthened my desire for her as an individual woman. + 

All this, were it to happen to me now, would seem perfectly natural and normal. If I were to make love to a young woman, I should know precisely what I was making love to. But that, in those days, was something I still had to learn. In Barbara’s company I was learning it with a vengeance. I was learning that it is possible to be profoundly and slavishly in love with someone for whom one has no esteem, whom one does not like, whom one regards as a bad character and who, finally, not only makes one unhappy but bores one. And why not, I might now ask, why not? That things should be like this is probably the most natural thing in the world. But in those days I imagined that love ought always to be mixed up with affection and admiration, with worship and an intellectual rapture, as unflagging as that which one experiences during the playing of a symphony. Sometimes, no doubt, love does get involved with some or all of these things; sometimes these things exist by themselves, apart from love. But one must be prepared to swallow one’s love completely neat and unadulterated. It is a fiery, crude and somewhat poisonous draught. + 

Every hour I spent with Barbara brought fresh evidence of her inability to play the ideal part my imagination had all these years been assigning to her. She was selfish, thirsty for pleasures of the most vulgar sort, liked to bask in an atmosphere of erotic admiration, amused herself by collecting adorers and treating them badly, was stupid and a liar⁠—in other words, was one of the normal types of healthy young womanhood. I should have been less disturbed by these discoveries if only her face had been different. Unfortunately, however, the healthy young woman who now revealed herself had the same features as that symbolic child on the memory of whose face I had brooded through all an ardent adolescence. And the contrast between what she was and what⁠—with that dazzling and mysteriously lovely face⁠—she ought to have been, what in my imagination she indeed had been, was a perpetual source of surprise and pain. And at the same time the nature of my passion for her had changed⁠—changed inevitably and profoundly, the moment she ceased to be a symbol and became an individual. Now, I desired her; before, I had loved her for God’s sake and almost as though she were herself divine. And contrasting this new love with the love I had felt before, I was ashamed, I fancied myself unworthy, base, an animal. And I tried to persuade myself that if she seemed different it was because I felt differently and less nobly towards her. And sometimes, when we sat silent through long summer twilights under the trees in the Park, or at my Chelsea rooms, looking out on to the river, I could persuade myself for a precarious moment that Barbara was what she had been in my imagination and that I felt towards her now what I had felt towards the memory of her. In the end, however, Barbara would break the magic silence and with it the illusion. + 

“It’s such a pity,” she would say pensively, “that July hasn’t got an r in it. Otherwise we might have had supper in an oyster bar.” + 

Or else, remembering that I was a literary man, she would look at the gaudy remains of the sunset and sigh. “I wish I were a poet,” she would say. + 

And I was back again among the facts, and Barbara was once more a tangible young woman who bored me, but whom I desired⁠—with what a definite and localized longing!⁠—to kiss, to hold fast and caress. + 

It was a longing which, for some time, I rigorously suppressed. I fought against it as against an evil thing, too horribly unlike my previous love, too outrageously incompatible with my conception of Barbara’s higher nature. I had not yet learned to reconcile myself to the fact that Barbara’s higher nature was an invention of my own, a figment of my proper imagination. + 

One very hot evening in July I drove her to the door of the house in Regent Square, Bloomsbury, in which she occupied a little flat under the roof. We had been dancing and it was late; a hunchbacked moon had climbed a third of the way up the sky and was shining down into the square over the shoulder of the church that stands on its eastern side. I paid off the cabman and we were left alone on the pavement. I had been bored and irritated the whole evening; but at the thought that I should have to bid her good night and walk off by myself I was filled with such an anguish that the tears came into my eyes. I stood there in silent irresolution, looking into her face. It was calmly and mysteriously smiling as though to itself and for some secret reason; her eyes were very bright. She too was silent, not restlessly, not irresolutely as I was silent, but easily, with a kind of majesty. She could live in silence, when she so desired, like a being in its proper element. + 

“Well,” I brought myself to say at last, “I must go.” + 

“Why not come in for a final cup of tea?” she suggested. + 

Actuated by that spirit of perversity which makes us do what we do not want to do, what we know will make us suffer as much as it is possible in the given circumstance to suffer, I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I must get back.” + 

I had never longed for anything more passionately than I longed to accept Barbara’s invitation. + 

She repeated it. “Do come in,” she said. “It won’t take a minute to make tea on the gas ring.” + 

Again I shook my head, in too much anguish, this time, to be able to speak. My trembling voice, I was afraid, would have betrayed me. Instinctively I knew that if I went into the house with her we should become lovers. My old determination to resist what had seemed the baser desires strengthened my resolution not to go in. + 

“Well, if you won’t,” she shrugged her shoulders, “then good night.” Her voice had a note of annoyance in it. + 

I shook her hand and walked dumbly away. When I had gone ten yards my resolution abjectly broke down. I turned. Barbara was still standing on the doorstep, trying to fit the latchkey into the lock. + 

“Barbara,” I called in a voice that sounded horribly unnatural in my own ears. I hurried back. She turned to look at me. “Do you mind if I change my mind and accept your invitation after all? I find I really am rather thirsty.” What a humiliation, I thought. + 

She laughed. “What a goose you are, Francis.” And she added in a bantering tone: “If you weren’t such a silly old dear I’d tell you to go to the nearest horse-trough and drink there.” + 

“I’m sorry,” I said. Standing once more close to her, breathing once again her rosy perfume, I felt as I had felt when, a child, I had run down from my terrifying night nursery to find my mother sitting in the dining-room⁠—reassured, relieved of a hideous burden, incredibly happy, but at the same time profoundly miserable in the consciousness that what I was doing was against all the rules, was a sin, the enormity of which I could judge from the very mournful tenderness of my mother’s eyes and the severe, portentous silence out of which, as though from a thundercloud, my huge and bearded father looked at me like an outraged god. I was happy, being with Barbara; I was utterly miserable because I was not with her, so to speak, in the right way: I was not I; she, for all that the features were the same, was no longer herself. I was happy at the thought that I should soon be kissing her; miserable because that was not how I wanted to love my imaginary Barbara; miserable too, when I secretly admitted to myself the existence of the real Barbara, because I felt it an indignity to be the slave of such a mistress. + 

“Of course, if you want me to go,” I said, reacting feebly again towards revolt, “I’ll go.” And desperately trying to be facetious, “I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be best if I drowned myself in that horse-trough,” I added. + 

“As you like,” she said lightly. The door was open now; she walked into the darkness. I followed her, closing the door behind me carefully. We groped our way up steep dark stairs. She unlocked another door, turned a switch. The sudden light was dazzling. + 

“All’s well that ends well,” she said, smiling at me, and she slipped the cloak from off her bare shoulders. + 

On the contrary, I thought, it was the tragedy of errors. I stepped towards her, I stretched out my hands and gripped her by her two thin arms a little below the shoulder. I bent down and kissed her averted cheek; she turned her face towards me, and it was her mouth. + 

There is no future, there is no more past; + 

No roots nor fruits, but momentary flowers. + 

Lie still, only lie still and night will last + 

Silent and dark, not for a space of hours, + 

But everlastingly. Let me forget + 

All but your perfume, every night but this, + 

The shame, the fruitless weeping, the regret. + 

Only lie still: this faint and quiet bliss + 

Shall flower upon the brink of sleep and spread + 

Till there is nothing else but you and I + 

Clasped in a timeless silence. But like one + 

Who, doomed to die, at morning will be dead, + 

I know, though night seem dateless, that the sky + 

Must brighten soon before tomorrow’s sun. + 

It was then that I learned to live only in the moment⁠—to ignore causes, motives, antecedents, to refuse responsibility for what should follow. It was then that I learned, since the future was always bound to be a painful repetition of what had happened before, never to look forward for comfort or justification, but to live now and here in the heart of human reality, in the very centre of the hot dark hive. But there is a spontaneous thoughtlessness which no thoughtful pains can imitate. Being what I am, I shall never rival with those little boys who throw their baby sisters over the cliff for the sake of seeing the delightful splash; never put a pistol to my head and for the mere fun of the thing pull the trigger; never, looking down from the gallery at Covent Garden at the thronged Wagnerites or Saint-Saënsians in the stalls below, lightly toss down that little hand-grenade (however piercingly amusing the jest might be), which I still preserve, charged with its pound of high explosive, in my hatbox, ready for all emergencies. Such gorgeous carelessness of all but the immediate sensation I can only remotely imitate. But I do my best, and I did it always conscientiously with Barbara. Still, the nights always did come to an end. And even during them, lapped in the temperament, I could never, even for an instant, be quite unaware of who she was, who I was and had been and would be tomorrow. The recollection of these things deprived every rapture of its passionate integrity and beneath the surface of every calm and silent trance spread out a profound uneasiness. Kissing her I wished that I were not kissing her, holding her in my arms I wished that it were somebody else I was holding. And sometimes in the dark quiet silences I thought that it would be better if I were dead. + 

Did she love me? At any rate she often said so, even in writing. I have all her letters still⁠—a score of scribbled notes sent up by messenger from one wing of the Hotel Cecil to the other and a few longer letters written when she was on her holiday or weekending somewhere apart from me. Here, I spread out the sheets. It is a competent, well-educated writing; the pen rarely leaves the paper, running on from letter to letter, from word to word. A rapid writing, flowing, clear and legible. Only here and there, generally towards the ends of her brief notes, is the clarity troubled; there are scrawled words made up of formless letters. I pore over them in an attempt to interpret their meaning. “I adore you, my beloved⁠ ⁠… kiss you a thousand times⁠ ⁠… long for it to be night⁠ ⁠… love you madly.” These are the fragmentary meanings I contrive to disengage from the scribbles. We write such things illegibly for the same reason as we clothe our bodies. Modesty does not permit us to walk naked, and the expression of our most intimate thoughts, our most urgent desires and secret memories, must not⁠—even when we have so far done violence to ourselves as to commit the words to paper⁠—be too easily read and understood. Pepys, when he recorded the most scabrous details of his loves, is not content with writing in cipher; he breaks into bad French as well. And I remember, now that I mention Pepys, having done the same sort of thing in my own letters to Barbara; winding up with a “Bellissima, ti voglio un bene enorme,” or a “Je t’embrasse un peu partout.” + 

But did she love me? In a kind of way I think she did. I gratified her vanity. Her successes so far had mostly been with genial young soldiers. She had counted few literary men among her slaves. And being infected with the queer snobbery of those who regard an artist, or anyone calling himself by that name, as somehow superior to other beings⁠—she was more impressed by a Café Royal loafer than by an efficient officer, and considered that it was a more arduous and finer thing to be able to paint, or even appreciate, a cubist picture or play a piece by Bartok on the piano than to run a business or plead in a court of law⁠—being therefore deeply convinced of my mysterious importance and significance⁠—she was flattered to have me abjectly gambolling around her. There is a German engraving of the sixteenth century, made at the time of the reaction against scholasticism, which represents a naked Teutonic beauty riding on the back of a bald and bearded man, whom she directs with a bridle and urges on with a switch. The old man is labelled Aristotle. After two thousand years of slavery to the infallible sage it was a good revenge. To Barbara, no doubt, I appeared as a kind of minor Aristotle. But what made the comparison somewhat less flattering to me was the fact that she was equally gratified by the attentions of another literary man, the swarthy Syrian with the blue jowl and the silver monocle. Even more gratified, I think; for he wrote poems which were frequently published in the monthly magazines (mine, alas, were not) and, what was more, he never lost an opportunity of telling people that he was a poet; he was forever discussing the inconveniences and compensating advantages of possessing an artistic temperament. That, for a time at any rate, she preferred me to the Syrian was due to the fact that I was quite unattached and far more hopelessly in love with Barbara than he. The red-haired and, to me, inferior substitute for Buckle’s History engrossed the greater part of his heart at this time. Moreover, he was a calm and experienced lover who did not lose his head about trifles. From me Barbara got passion of a kind she could not have hoped for from the Syrian⁠—a passion which, in spite of my reluctance, in spite of my efforts to resist it, reduced me to a state of abjection at her feet. It is pleasant to be worshipped, to command and inflict pain; Barbara enjoyed these things as much as anyone. + 

It was the Syrian who in the end displaced me. I had noticed in October that friends from South Africa, with whom it was necessary for Barbara to lunch and dine, kept arriving in ever increasing quantities. And when it wasn’t friends from South Africa it was Aunt Phoebe, who had become suddenly importunate. Or old Mr. Goble, the one who had known her grandfather so well. + 

When I asked her to describe these festivities, she either said: “Oh, it was dreadfully dull. We talked about the family,” or merely smiled, shrugged her shoulders and retired into her impregnable silence. + 

“Why do you lie to me?” I asked. + 

She preserved her silence and her secret smile. + 

There were evenings when I insisted that she should throw over the friends from South Africa and dine with me. Reluctantly she would consent; but she took her revenge on these occasions by talking about all the jolly men she had known. + 

One evening, when, in spite of all my entreaties, my threats and commands, she had gone to dine with Aunt Phoebe in Golders Green and stay the night, I kept watch in Regent Square. It was a damp, cold night. From nine o’clock till past midnight I remained at my post, marching up and down opposite the house where she lived. As I walked I ran the point of my stick with a rattling noise along the railings which surrounded the gardens in the middle of the square; that rattling accompanied my thoughts. From the dank black trees overhead an occasional heavy drop would fall. I must have walked twelve miles that evening. + 

In those three hours I thought of many things. I thought of the suddenly leaping bonfire and the young face shining in the darkness. I thought of my boyish love, and then how I had seen that face again and the different love it had inspired in the man. I thought of kisses, caresses, whispers in the darkness. I thought of the Syrian with his black eyebrows and his silver monocle, his buttery dark skin damply shining through the face-powder, and the powder snowy white among the black stubbles of his jowl. She was probably with him at this moment. Monna Vanna, Monna Bice⁠—“Love’s not so pure and abstract as they use to say, who have no mistress but their Muse.” Reality gives imagination the lie direct. Barbara is the truth, I thought, and that she likes the man with the silver monocle is the truth, and that I have slept with her is the truth, and that he has too is quite probably the truth. + 

And it is the truth that men are cruel and stupid and that they suffer themselves to be driven even to destruction by shepherds as stupid as themselves. I thought of my passion for universal justice, of my desire that all men should be free, leisured, educated, of my imaginations of a future earth peopled by human beings who should live according to reason. But of what use is leisure, when leisure is occupied with listening-in and going to football matches? freedom, when men voluntarily enslave themselves to politicians like those who now rule the world? education, when the literate read the evening papers and the fiction magazines? And the future, the radiant future⁠—supposing that it should differ from the past in anything but the spread of material comfort and spiritual uniformity, suppose it conceivably were to be in some way superior, what has that to do with me? Nothing whatever. Nothing, nothing, nothing. + 

I was interrupted in my meditations by a policeman who came up to me, politely touched his helmet and asked me what I was doing. “I seen you walking up and down here for the last hour,” he said. I gave him half a crown and told him I was waiting for a lady. The policeman laughed discreetly. I laughed too. Indeed, the joke was a marvellously good one. When he was gone, I went on with my walking. + 

And this war, I thought. Was there the slightest prospect that any good would come of it? The war to end war! The argument was forcible enough this time; it was backed up with a kick in the breech, the most terrific kick ever administered. But would it convince humanity more effectively than any other argument had ever done? + 

Still, men are courageous, I thought, are patient, kind, self-sacrificing. But they are all the contradictory things, as well⁠—and both, good and bad, because they can’t help it. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. Everything arises from a great primeval animal stupidity. That is the deepest of all realities⁠—stupidity, the being unaware. + 

And the aware, the not stupid⁠—they are the odd exceptions, they are irrelevant to the great reality, they are lies like the ideal of love, like dreams of the future, like belief in justice. To live among their works is to live in a world of bright falsehoods, apart from the real world; it is to escape. Escape is cowardly; to be comforted by what is untrue or what is irrelevant to the world in which we live is stupid. + 

And my own talents, such as they are, are irrelevant. So is the art to whose service I devote them, a lying consolation. A Martian would find the writing of phrases containing words of similar sound at fixed recurrent intervals as queer as buying castor oil for the lubrification of machines of destruction. I remembered the lines I had written for Barbara⁠—the cheerful comic-amorous lines⁠—at the time of the last epidemic of air raids. The octosyllables jingled in my head. + 

But when the next full moon invites + 

New bugaboos and fly-by-nights, + 

Let us seek out some deep alcove, + 

Some immemorial haunt of love. + 

There we’ll retire with cakes and wine + 

And dare the imbecile to shine.⁠ ⁠… + 

I was just repeating them to myself, when a taxi turned into the quiet square, rolled slowly along the curb and came to a halt in front of the house where Barbara lived. By the dim light of a muffled street lamp I saw two people stepping out of it, a man and a woman. The masculine silhouette moved forward and, bending over his hand, began to count money by the light of the little lamp at the recording clock-face. In the narrow beam I saw the glitter of a monocle. Money clinked, the taxi drove away. The two figures mounted the steps; the door opened before them, they passed into the house. + 

I walked away, repeating to myself every injurious and abusive word that can be applied to a woman. I felt, if anything, rather relieved. It pleased me to think that all was over, all was now definitely and forever done with. + 

“ ’Night, sir.” + 

It was the friendly policeman; I thought I heard an almost imperceptible note of amusement in his voice. + 

For the next four days I made no sign of life. Every day I hoped that she would write or telephone to ask what had become of me. She did nothing of the kind. My sense of relief had turned into a feeling of misery. On the fifth day, as I was going out to lunch, I met her in the courtyard. She made no reference to the unprecedented length of my silence. I said none of the bitter things that I had planned to say in the event of just such an accidental meeting as this. Instead, I asked her, I implored her even, to come to lunch. Barbara declined the invitation; she had a South African engagement. + 

“Come to dinner, then,” I abjectly begged. Humiliation, I felt, could go no further. I would give anything to be received back into grace. + 

Barbara shook her head. “I wish I could,” she said. “But that tiresome old Mr. Goble⁠ ⁠…” + 

VI + 

Such, then, were the phantoms that my recitation called up to dance on the surface of the Tyrrhenian. Salutarily they reminded me that I was only on my holiday, that the landscape in the midst of which I was now floating was hardly better than an illusion and that life was only real and earnest during the eleven months of each year which I spent between Gog’s Court and Miss Carruthers’s. I was a democratic Englishman and a Londoner at that, living in an age when the Daily Mail sells two million copies every morning; I had no right to so much sunlight, so tepid and clear a sea, such spiky mountains, such clouds, such blue expanses of sky; I had no right to Shelley; and if I were a true democrat, then I ought not even to think. But again I must plead my congenital weakness. + 

Couched on the water, I was dreaming of the ideal democratic state where no irrelevant Holy Ghost-possessed exception should trouble the flat serenity of the rule⁠—the rule of Cloudesley and Carruthers, Fluffy and the alert, inimitable Brimstone⁠—when all at once I became aware that a sailing-boat was coming up behind me, was right on top of me, in fact. The white sail towered over me; with a little sizzling ripple at the prow, with a clop clop of tiny waves against its flanks, the brown varnished boat bore quickly down on me. It is a horrible thing to be afraid, to be shaken by that sudden spasm of fear which cannot be controlled because it comes so quickly that the controlling forces of the mind are taken unaware. Every cell in the body, it seems, feels terror; from a man one is humiliated for a moment into a congeries of shrinking amoebae. One descends the scale of being; one drops down the evolutionary gamut to become for a second no more than a startled and terrified beast. One moment I had been dozing on my translucent mattress, like a philosopher; the next I was inarticulately shouting, frantically moving my limbs to escape from the approaching and now inevitable peril. + 

“Hi!” I was yelling, and then something caught me a fearful crack on the side of the head and pushed me down into the water. I was conscious of swallowing a vast quantity of brine, of breathing water into my lungs and violently choking. Then for a time I knew nothing; the blow must momentarily have stunned me. I became more or less conscious again, to find myself just coming to the surface, my face half in, half out of water. I was coughing and gasping⁠—coughing to get rid of the water that was in my lungs, gasping for air. Both processes, I now perceive, achieved exactly the contrary of what they were intended to achieve. For I coughed up all the stationary air that was in my lungs and, my mouth being under water, I drew in fresh gulps of brine. Meanwhile my blood, loaded with carbonic acid gas, kept rushing to my lungs in the hope of exchanging the deadly stuff for oxygen. In vain; there was no oxygen to exchange it for. + 

I felt an extraordinary pain in the back of my neck⁠—not excruciating, but dull; dull and far-reaching and profound, and at the same time strangely disgusting⁠—a sickening, revolting sort of pain. The nerves controlling my respiratory system were giving up in despair; that disgusting pain in my neck was their gesture of farewell, their last spasm of agony. Slowly I ceased to be conscious; I faded gradually out of life like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. The last thing that was left of me, that continued to hang in my consciousness when everything else had vanished, was the pain. + 

In the circumstances, I know, it would have been the classical thing if all my past life had unwound itself in a flash before the mind’s eye. Whiz⁠—an uninteresting drama in thirty-two reels ought duly to have run its course and I should have remembered everything, from the taste of the baby food in my bottle to the taste of yesterday’s marsala at the Grand Hotel, from my first caning to my last kiss. In point of fact, however, none of the correct things happened. The last thoughts I remember thinking as I went down were about the Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette and my mother. In a final access of that conscientiousness which has haunted and handicapped me all my life long, I reflected that I ought to have another leading article ready by next Friday. And it struck me very forcibly that my mother would be most seriously inconvenienced when she arrived in a few days’ time to find that I was no longer in a position to accompany her on her journey to Rome. + 

When I next came to my senses I was lying face downwards on the beach with somebody sitting astride of my back, as though we were playing horses, using Professor Schaefer’s method of producing artificial respiration. “Uno, due, tre, quattro”⁠—and at every “quattro” the man on my back threw his weight forward on to his hands, which were resting, one on either side of the spine, on my lower ribs. The contents of my lungs were violently expelled. Then my rescuer straightened himself up again, the pressure was relaxed and my lungs replenished themselves with air. “Uno, due, tre, quattro”⁠—the process began again. + 

“He’s breathing! He’s all right. He’s opening his eyes!” + 

Carefully, as though I were a crate of very valuable china, they turned me right way up. I was aware of the strong sunshine, of a throbbing headache centred somewhere above the left temple, of a crowd of people standing round. With deliberation and consciously I breathed the air; loud voices shouted instructions. Two people began to rub the soles of my feet. A third ran up with a child’s bucket full of sun-scorched sand and poured it on the pit of my stomach. This happy thought immediately had an immense success. All the curious and sympathetic spectators who had been standing round my corpse, looking on while Professor Schaefer was being applied to me and wishing that they could do something to help, now discovered that there was actually something helpful that they could do. They could help to restore my circulation by sprinkling hot sand on me. In a moment I had a dozen sympathizers busy around me, skimming the cream off the hot tideless beach in little buckets, with spades or in the palms of their scooping hands, to pour it over me. In a few seconds I was almost buried under a mound of burning grey sand. On the faces of all my good Samaritans I noticed an expression of childlike earnestness. They rushed backwards and forwards with their little buckets as though there were nothing more serious in life than building sand castles on the stomachs of drowned men. And the children themselves joined in. Horrified at first by the spectacle of my limp and livid corpse, they had clung to paternal hands, shrunk away behind protecting skirts, looking on while Professor Schaefer was being practised on me, with a reluctant and disgusted curiosity. But when I had come alive again, when they saw their elders burying me with sand and understood that it was really only a tremendously good game, then how violent was their reaction! Shrilly laughing, whooping with excitement and delight, they rushed on me with their little implements. It was only with difficulty that they could be prevented from throwing handfuls of sand in my face, from pouring it into my ears, from making me eat it. And one small boy, ambitious to do something that nobody else had done, rushed down to the sea, filled his bucket with water and stale foam, ran back and emptied its contents, with what a shout of triumph! plop, from a height on to my solar plexus. + 

That was too much for my gravity. I began to laugh. But I did not get very far with my laughter. For after the first outburst of it, when I wanted to take breath for the next, I found that I had forgotten how to breathe, and it was only after a long choking struggle that I managed to reacquire the art. The children were frightened; this was no part of the delightful game. The grownups stopped being helpful and allowed themselves to be driven away from my corpse by the competent authorities. An umbrella was planted in the sand behind me. Within its rosy shadow I was left in peace to make secure my precarious footing on existence. For a long time I lay with my eyes shut. An immensely long way off, it seemed, somebody was still rubbing my feet. Periodically, somebody else pushed a spoon with brandy and milk in it into my mouth. I felt very tired, but wonderfully comfortable. And it seemed to me at that moment that there could be nothing more exquisitely pleasurable than merely breathing. + 

After a while, I felt sufficiently strong and sufficiently safe in my strength to open my eyes again and look about me. How novel, how wonderfully charming everything seemed! The first thing I saw was a half-naked young giant crouching obsequiously at my feet, rubbing my bloodless soles and ankles. Under his shining copper skin there was a sliding of muscles. His face was like a Roman’s, his hair jet black and curly. When he noticed that I had opened my eyes and was looking at him he smiled, and his teeth were brilliantly white, his brown eyes flashed from a setting of shiny bluish enamel. + 

A voice asked me in Italian how I was feeling. I looked round. A stout man with a large red, rubbery face and a black moustache was sitting beside me. In one hand he held a teacup, in the other a spoon. He was dressed in white duck. The sweat was pouring off his face; he looked as though he had been buttered. From all round his very bright black eyes little wrinkles spread out like rays from a gloria. He proffered the spoon. I swallowed. The backs of his large brown hands were covered with fine hairs. + 

“I am the doctor,” he explained, and smiled. + 

I nodded and smiled back. It seemed to me that I had never seen such a lovely doctor before. + 

And then, when I looked up, there was the blue sky, beautifully scalloped by the edge of the pink umbrella. And lowering my eyes I saw people standing round looking at me⁠—all smiling. Between them I caught glimpses of the blue sea. + 

“Belli sono,” I said to the doctor, and shut my eyes again. + 

And many men so beautiful.⁠ ⁠… In the bloodred darkness behind my eyelids I listened to their voices. Slowly, voluptuously, I breathed the salty air. The young giant went on rubbing my feet. With an effort I lifted one of my hands and laid it on my chest. Lightly, like a blind man feeling for the sense of a page of Braille, I ran my fingers over the smooth skin. I felt the ribs and the little depressions between them. And all at once, under my finger tips, I was aware of a hardly perceptible throbbing⁠—pulse, pulse, pulse⁠—it was that I had been searching for. The blind fingers creeping across the page had spelled out a strange word. I did not try to interpret it. It was enough to be glad that the word was there. For a long time I lay quite still, feeling my beating heart. + 

“Si sente meglio?” asked the doctor. + 

I opened my eyes. “Mi sento felice.” He smiled at me. The rays round the twin bright glories of his eyes emphasized themselves. It was as though the holy symbol had somehow suddenly become more holy. + 

“It is good not to be dead,” he said. + 

“It is very good.” + 

And I looked once more at the sky and the pink umbrella overhead. I looked at the young giant, so strong and yet so docile at my feet. I turned my eyes to right and left. The circle of curious spectators had dissolved. Out of danger, I had ceased to be an object of sympathy or curiosity. The holidaymakers were going about their business as usual. I watched them, happily. + 

A young couple in bathing dresses walked slowly past me towards the sea. Their faces, their necks and shoulders, their bare arms and legs were burned to a soft transparent brown. They walked slowly, holding hands, walked with such a grace, such an easy majesty that I felt like weeping. They were very young, they were tall, slender and strong. They were beautiful as a couple of young thoroughbred horses; gracefully, idly, majestically they seemed to be walking in a world that was beyond good and evil. It did not matter what they might do or say; they were justified by the mere fact that they existed. They paused, looked at me for a moment, one with brown eyes, one with grey, flashed at me with their white teeth, asked how I was, and when I told them that I was better, smiled again and passed on. + 

A little girl dressed in a primrose-coloured garment that was paler in tone than her dark face and limbs came running up, halted two or three yards away and began to look at me earnestly. Her eyes were very large and fringed by absurdly long black lashes. Above them there expanded an immense domed forehead that would have done credit to a philosopher. Her snub nose was so small that you hardly noticed it was there at all. Black and frizzy, her hair stood out, in a state of permanent explosion, round her head. For a long time she stared at me. I stared back. + 

“What do you want?” I asked at last. + 

And suddenly, at the sound of my voice, the child was overwhelmed by shyness. She covered her face with her forearm as though she were warding off a blow. Then, after a second or two, she peeped out at me cautiously from under her elbow. Her face had become quite red. I called again. It was once too often. She turned and ran away, ran back to her family, who were sitting, twenty yards down the beach, in the precarious and shifting oasis of shadow cast by a large striped umbrella. I saw her hurl herself into the arms of a large placid mother in white muslin. Then, having successfully abolished my existence by burying her face in the comfortable bosom, she slid down again from her mother’s knee and went on playing with her little sister, serenely, as though the untoward incident had never occurred. + 

Mournfully, from somewhere in the distance, came the long, suspended cry of the vendor of doughnuts. “Bomboloni.” Two young American marchesas in purple bathing gowns went past, talking together on one note, in indefatigable even voices. “… and he has such a lovely mentality,” I heard one of them saying. “But what I like,” said the other, who seemed to have acquired more completely the Latin habit of mind, “what I like is his teeth.” A middle-aged man, with the large stomach that comes of too much pasta, and a very thin little boy of twelve now entered my field of vision, all wet and shiny from the sea. The hot sand burned their feet and they went hopping across the scorching beach with an agility which it was good to see. But the soles of mad Concetta’s feet were made of hornier stuff. Barefooted, she walked down every morning from the mountains, carrying her basket of fruit over one arm and holding in the other hand a long staff. She hawked her wares along the beach, she went the round of the villas until her basket was empty. Then she walked back again, across the plain and up into the hills. Turning from the fat man and the little thin boy I saw her standing before me. She was dressed in a stained and tattered old dress. Her grey hair escaped in wisps from under a wide straw hat. Her old face was eager, thin and sharp; the wrinkled skin was like brown parchment stretched over the bones. Leaning on her staff, she looked at me for a little in silence. + 

“So you’re the drowned foreigner,” she said at last. + 

“If he were drowned, how could he be alive?” asked the doctor. The young giant found this exquisitely witty; he laughed profoundly, out of the depths of his huge chest. “Go away now, Concetta,” the doctor went on. “He must be kept quiet. We can’t have you treating him to one of your discourses.” + 

Concetta paid no attention to him. She was used to this sort of thing. + 

“The mercy of God,” she began, shaking her head, “where should we be without it? You are young, signorino. You still have time to do much. God has preserved you. I am old. But I lean on the cross.” And straightening herself up, she lifted her staff. A crosspiece of wood had been nailed near the top of it. Affectionately she kissed it. “I love the cross,” she said. “The cross is beautiful, the cross is⁠ ⁠…” But she was interrupted by a young nurserymaid who came running up to ask for half a kilo of the best grapes. Theology could not be allowed to interfere with business. Concetta took out her little steelyard, put a bunch of grapes in the pan and moved the weight back and forth along the bar in search of equilibrium. The nurserymaid stood by. She had a round face, red cheeks, dimples, black hair and eyes like black buttons. She was as plump as a fruit. The young giant looked up at her in frank admiration. She rolled the buttons towards him⁠—for an instant, then utterly ignored him, and humming nonchalantly to herself as though she were alone on a desert island and wanted to keep her spirits up, she gazed pensively away at the picturesque beauties of nature. + 

“Six hundred grams,” said Concetta. + 

The nurserymaid paid for them, and still humming, still on her desert island, she walked off, taking very small steps, undulating rotundly, like a moon among wind-driven clouds. The young giant stopped rubbing my feet and stared after her. With the moon’s beauty and the moon’s soft pace the nurserymaid tottered along, undulating unsteadily on her high heels across the sand. + 

Rabear, I thought: old Skeat was perfectly right to translate the word as he did. + 

“Bella grassa,” said the doctor, voicing what were obviously the young giant’s sentiments. Mine too; for after all, she was alive, obeyed the laws of her nature, walked in the sun, ate grapes and rabear’d. I shut my eyes again. Pulse, pulse, pulse; the heart beat steadily under my fingers. I felt like Adam, newly created and weak like a butterfly fresh from its chrysalis⁠—the red clay still too wet and limp to allow of my standing upright. But soon, when it had dried to firmness, I should arise and scamper joyously about this span new world, and be myself a young giant, a graceful and majestic thoroughbred, a child, a wondering Bedlamite. + 

There are some people who contrive to pass their lives in a state of permanent convalescence. They behave at every moment as though they had been miraculously preserved from death the moment before; they live exhilaratedly for the mere sake of living and can be intoxicated with happiness just because they happen not to be dead. For those not born convalescent it may be that the secret of happiness consists in being half-drowned regularly three times a day before meals. I recommend it as a more drastic alternative to my “water-shoot-in-every-office” remedy for ennui. + 

“You’re alone here?” asked the doctor. + 

I nodded. + 

“No relations?” + 

“Not at present.” + 

“No friends of any kind?” + 

I shook my head. + 

“H’m,” he said. + 

He had a wart growing on one side of his nose where it joined the cheek. I found myself studying it intently; it was a most interesting wart, whitish, but a little flushed on its upper surface. It looked like a small unripe cherry. “Do you like cherries?” I asked. + 

The doctor seemed rather surprised. “Yes,” he said, after a moment’s silence and with great deliberation, as though he had been carefully weighing the matter in his mind. + 

“So do I.” And I burst out laughing. This time, however, my breathing triumphantly stood the strain. “So do I. But not unripe ones,” I added, gasping with mirth. It seemed to me that nothing funnier had ever been said. + 

And then Mrs. Aldwinkle stepped definitely into my life. For, looking round, still heaving with the after-swell of my storm of laughter, I suddenly saw the Chinese lantern lady of the patino standing before me. Her flame-coloured costume, a little less radiant now that it was wet, still shone among the aquarium shadows of her green parasol, and her face looked as though it were she who had been drowned, not I. + 

“They tell me that you’re an Englishman,” she said in the same ill-controlled, unmusical voice I had heard, not long since, misquoting Shelley. + 

Still tipsy, still lightheaded with convalescence, I laughingly admitted it. + 

“I hear you were nearly drowned.” + 

“Quite right,” I said, still laughing; it was such a marvellous joke. + 

“I’m most sorry to hear⁠ ⁠…” She had a way of leaving her sentences unfinished. The words would tail off into a dim inarticulate blur of sound. + 

“Don’t mention it,” I begged her. “It isn’t at all disagreeable, you know. Afterwards, at any rate⁠ ⁠…” I stared at her affectionately and with my convalescent’s boundless curiosity. She stared back at me. Her eyes, I thought, must have the same bulge as those little red lenses one screws to the rear forks of bicycles; they collected all the light diffused around them and reflected it again with a concentrated glitter. + 

“I came to ask whether I could be of any assistance,” said the Chinese lantern lady. + 

“Most kind.” + 

“You’re alone here?” + 

“Quite, for the present.” + 

“Then perhaps you might care to come and stay a night or two at my house, until you’re entirely⁠ ⁠…” She mumbled, made a gesture that implied the missing word and went on. “I have a house over there.” She waved her hand in the direction of the mountainous section of the Shelleian landscape. + 

Gleefully, in my tipsy mood, I accepted her invitation. “Too delightful,” I said. Everything, this morning, was too delightful. I should have accepted with genuine, unmixed pleasure an invitation to stay with Miss Carruthers or Mr. Brimstone. + 

“And your name?” she asked. “I don’t know that yet.” + 

“Chelifer.” + 

“Chelifer? Not Francis Chelifer?” + 

“Francis Chelifer,” I affirmed. + 

“Francis Chelifer!” Positively, her soul was in my name. “But how wonderful! I’ve wanted to meet you for years.” + 

For the first time since I had risen intoxicated from the dead I had an awful premonition of tomorrow’s sobriety. I remembered for the first time that round the corner, only just round the corner, lay the real world. + 

“And what’s your name?” I asked apprehensively. + 

“Lilian Aldwinkle,” said the Chinese lantern lady; and she shaped her lips into a smile that was positively piercing in its sweetness. The blue lamps that were her eyes glittered with such a focused intensity that even the colour-blind chauffeurs who see green omnibuses rolling down Piccadilly and in the Green Park blood-coloured grass and vermilion trees would have known them for the danger signals they were. + 

An hour later I was reclining on cushions in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s Rolls-Royce. There was no escape. + 

VII + 

No escape.⁠ ⁠… But I was still tipsy enough not seriously to desire escape. My premonition of sobriety had been no more than a momentary flash. It came and it passed again, almost immediately, as I became once more absorbed in what seemed to me the endless and lovely comedy that was being acted all around me. It was enough for me that I existed and that things were happening to me. I was carried by two or three young giants to the hotel, I was dressed, my clothes were packed for me. In the entrance hall, while I was waiting for Mrs. Aldwinkle to come and fetch me, I made some essays at walking; the feebleness of my legs was a source to me of delighted laughter. + 

Dressed in pale yellow tussore with a large straw hat on her head, Mrs. Aldwinkle finally appeared. Her guests, she explained, had gone home in another machine; I should be able to lie flat, or very nearly, in her empty car. And in case I felt bad⁠—she shook a silver brandy flask at me. Escape? I did not so much as think of it, I was enchanted. + 

Luxuriously I reclined among the cushions. Mrs. Aldwinkle tapped the forward-looking window. The chauffeur languidly moved his hand and the machine rolled forward, nosing its way through the crowd of admiring car-fanciers which, in Italy, collects as though by magic round every stationary automobile. And Mrs. Aldwinkle’s was a particularly attractive specimen. Young men called to their friends: “Venite. È una Ro-Ro.” And in awed voices little boys whispered to one another: “Una Ro-Ro.” The crowd reluctantly dispersed before our advance; we glided away from before the Grand Hotel, turned into the main street, crossed the piazza, in the centre of which, stranded high and dry by the receding sea, stood the little pink fort which had been built by the Princes of Massa Carrara to keep watch on a Mediterranean made dangerous by Barbary pirates, and rolled out of the village by the road leading across the plain towards the mountains. + 

Shuffling along in a slowly moving cloud of dust, a train of white oxen advanced, shambling and zigzagging along the road to meet us. Eight yoke of them there were, a long procession, with half a dozen drivers shouting and tugging at the leading ropes and cracking their whips. They were dragging a low truck, clamped to which was a huge monolith of flawless white marble. Uneasily, as we crawled past them, the animals shook their heads, turning this way and that, as though desperately seeking some way of escape. Their long curving horns clashed together; their soft white dewlaps shook; and into their blank brown eyes there came a look of fear, an entreaty that we should take pity on their invincible stupidity and remember that they simply could not, however hard they tried, get used to motor cars. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle pointed at the monolith. “Imagine what Michelangelo could have made out of that,” she said. Then, noticing that her pointing hand still grasped the silver flask, she became very solicitous. “You’re sure you wouldn’t like a sip of this?” she asked, leaning forward. The twin blue danger signals glittered in my face. Her garments exhaled a scent in which there was ambergris. Her breath smelt of heliotrope cachous. But even now I did not take fright; I made no effort to escape. Guided by their invincible stupidity, the white oxen had behaved more sensibly than I. + 

We rolled on. The hills came nearer. The faraway peaks of bare limestone were hidden by the glowing mass of the tilled and wooded foothills. Happily I looked at those huge hilly forms. “How beautiful!” I said. Mrs. Aldwinkle seemed to take my words as a personal compliment. + 

“I’m so glad you think so. So awfully⁠ ⁠…” she replied in the tone of an author to whom you have just said that you enjoyed his last book so much. + 

We drew nearer; the hills towered up, they opposed themselves like a huge wall. But the barrier parted before us; we passed through the gates of a valley that wound up into the mountain. Our road now ran parallel with the bed of a torrent. In the flanks of the hill to our right a marble quarry made a huge bare scar, hundreds of feet long. The crest of the hill was fringed with a growth of umbrella pines. The straight slender tree trunks jetted up thirty feet without a branch; their wide-spreading flattened domes of foliage formed a thin continuous silhouette, between which and the dark mass of the hill one could see a band of sky, thinly barred by the bare stems. It was as though, to emphasize the outlines of his hills, an artist had drawn a fine and supple brush stroke parallel with the edge of the silhouette and a little apart from it. + 

We rolled on. The high road narrowed into the squalid street of a little town. The car crept along, hooting as it went. + 

“Vezza,” Mrs. Aldwinkle explained. “Michelangelo used to come here for his marbles.” + 

“Indeed?” I was charmed to hear it. + 

Over the windows of a large shop filled with white crosses, broken columns and statues, I read the legend: “Anglo-American Tombstone Company.” We emerged from the narrow street on to an embankment running along the edge of a river. From the opposite bank the ground rose steeply. + 

“There,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle on a note of triumph as we crossed the bridge, “that’s my house.” She pointed up. From the hilltop a long façade stared down through twenty windows; a tall tower pricked the sky. “The palace was built in 1630,” she began. I even enjoyed the history lesson. + 

We had crossed the bridge, we were climbing by a steep and winding road through what was almost a forest of olive trees. The abrupt grassy slope had been built up into innumerable little terraces on which the trees were planted. Here and there, in the grey luminous shadow beneath the trees, little flocks of sheep were grazing. The barefooted children who attended them came running to the side of the road to watch us passing. + 

“I like to think of these old princely courts,” Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying. “Like abbeys of⁠ ⁠… abbeys of⁠ ⁠…” She shook her brandy flask impatiently. “You know⁠ ⁠… in Thingumy.” + 

“Abbeys of Thelema,” I suggested. + 

“That’s it,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle. “Sort of retiring-places where people were free to live intelligently. That’s what I want to make this house. I’m so delighted to have met you like this. You’re exactly the sort of person I want.” She leaned forward, smiling and glittering. But even at the prospect of entering the Abbey of Thelema I did not blench. + 

At this moment the car passed through a huge gateway. I caught a glimpse of a great flight of steps, set between cypresses, mounting up past a series of terraced landings to a carved doorway in the centre of the long façade. The road turned, the car swung round and the vista was closed. By an ilex avenue that wound round the flank of the hill we climbed more gradually towards the house, which we approached from the side. The road landed us finally in a large square court opposite a shorter reproduction of the great façade. At the head of a double flight of steps, curving horseshoe fashion from the landing at its threshold, a tall pompous doorway surmounted by a coat of arms cavernously invited. The car drew up. + 

And about time too, as I notice on rereading what I have written. Few things are more profoundly boring and unprofitable than literary descriptions. For the writer, it is true, there is a certain amusement to be derived from the hunt for apt expressive words. Carried away by the excitement of the chase he dashes on, regardless of the poor readers who follow toilsomely through his stiff and clayey pages like the runners at the tail of a hunt, seeing nothing of the fun. All writers are also readers⁠—though perhaps I should make exceptions in favour of a few of my colleagues who make a speciality of native wood-notes⁠—and must therefore know how dreary description is. But that does not prevent them from inflicting upon others all that they themselves have suffered. Indeed I sometimes think that some authors must write as they do purely out of a desire for revenge. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle’s other guests had arrived and were waiting for us. I was introduced and found them all equally charming. The little niece rushed to Mrs. Aldwinkle’s assistance; the young man who had rowed the patino rushed in his turn to the little niece’s and insisted on carrying all the things of which she had relieved her aunt. The old man with the red face, who had talked about the clouds, looked on benevolently at this little scene. But another elderly gentleman with a white beard, whom I had not seen before, seemed to view it with a certain disapproval. The young lady who had talked about the whiteness of her legs and who turned out to be my distinguished colleague, Miss Mary Thriplow, was now dressed in a little green frock with a white turned-down collar, white cuffs and buttons, which made her look like a schoolgirl in a comic opera by Offenbach. The brown young man stood near her. + 

I got out of the car, refused all proffered assistance and contrived, a little wamblingly, it is true, to mount the steps. + 

“You must be very careful for a little,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle with a maternal solicitude. “These,” she added, waving her hand in the direction of a vista of empty saloons, the entrance to which we were just then passing, “these are the apartments of the Princesses.” + 

We walked right through the house into a great quadrangle surrounded on three sides by buildings and on the fourth, towards the rising hill, by an arcade. On a pedestal in the centre of the court stood a more than life-sized marble statue, representing, my hostess informed me, the penultimate Prince of Massa Carrara, wearing a very curly full-bottomed wig, Roman kilts, buskins, and one of those handsome classical breastplates which have the head of a Gorgon embossed in the middle of the chest and a little dimple to indicate the position of the navel in the middle of the round and polished belly. With the expression of one who is about to reveal a delightful secret and who can hardly wait until the moment of revelation comes to give vent to his pleasure, Mrs. Aldwinkle, smiling as it were below the surface of her face, led me to the foot of the statue. “Look!” she said. It was one of those pretty peepshows on which, for the sake of five minutes’ amusement and titillation of the eye, Grand Monarchs used to spend the value of a rich province. From the central arch of the arcade a flight of marble steps climbed up to where, set against a semicircle of cypresses, at the crest of the hill, a little round temple played gracefully at paganism, just as the buskined and corseleted statue in the court below played heroically at Plutarch. + 

“And now look here!” said Mrs. Aldwinkle; and taking me round to the other side of the statue, she led me towards a great door in the centre of the long range of buildings opposite the arcade. It was open; a vaulted corridor, like a tunnel, led clean through the house. Through it I could see the blue sky and the remote horizon of the sea. We walked along it; from the further threshold I found myself looking down the flight of steps which I had seen from below, at the entrance gate. It was a stage scene, but made of solid marble and with growing trees. + 

“What do you think of that?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle. + 

“Magnificent,” I answered, with an enthusiasm that was beginning to be tempered by a growing physical weariness. + 

“Such a view,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, poking at it with the tip of her sunshade. “The contrast between the cypresses and the olive trees⁠ ⁠…” + 

“But the view’s still lovelier from the temple,” said the little niece, who was evidently very anxious to make me realize the full pricelessness of her Aunt Lilian’s possessions. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle turned on her. “How utterly thoughtless you are!” she said severely. “Do try to remember that poor Mr. Chelifer is still suffering from the effects of his accident. And you expect him to go climbing up to the temple!” + 

The little niece blushed and drooped beneath the reproach. We sat down. + 

“How are you feeling now?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle, remembering once more to be solicitous.⁠ ⁠… “Too appalling to think,” she added, “how nearly⁠ ⁠… And I’ve always so enormously admired your work.” + 

“So have I,” declared my colleague in the green frock. “Most awfully. Still, I confess, I find some of your things a little, how shall I say, a little alembicated. I like my poetry to be rather straightforwarder.” + 

“A very sophisticated desire,” said the red-faced gentleman. “Really simple, primitive people like their poetry to be as complicated, conventional, artificial and remote from the language of everyday affairs as possible. We reproach the eighteenth century with its artificiality. But the fact is that Beowulf is couched in a diction fifty times more complicated and unnatural than that of the Essay on Man. And when you compare the Icelandic Sagas with Dr. Johnson, you find that it’s the Doctor who lisps and prattles. Only the most complicated people, living in the midst of the most artificial surroundings, desire their poetry to be simple and straightforward.” + 

I shut my eyes and allowed the waves of conversation to roll over me. And what a classy conversation! Prince Papadiamantopoulos could hardly have kept the ball rolling on a higher level. Fatigue was sobering me. + 

Fatigue, the body’s weariness⁠—some industrious little scientific emmet ought to catalogue and measure all its various effects. All⁠—for it isn’t enough to show that when wage-slaves have worked too long they tend to fall into the machines and get pulped. The fact is interesting, no doubt; but there are other facts of no less significance. There is the fact, for example, that slight fatigue increases our capacity for sentiment. Those compromising love letters are always written in the small hours; it is at night, not when we are fresh and reposed, that we talk about ideal love and indulge our griefs. Under the influence of slight fatigue we feel more ready than at other times to discuss the problems of the universe, to make confidences, to dogmatize about the nature of God and to draw up plans for the future. We are also inclined to be more languidly voluptuous. When, however, the fatigue is increased beyond a certain point, we cease entirely to be sentimental, voluptuous, metaphysical or confiding. We cease to be aware of anything but the decrepitude of our being. We take no further interest in other people or the outside world⁠—no further interest unless they will not leave us in peace, when we come to hate them with a deep but ineffectual loathing, mingled with disgust. + 

With me, fatigue had almost suddenly passed the critical point. My convalescent’s delight in the world evaporated. My fellow beings no longer seemed to me beautiful, strange and amiable. Mrs. Aldwinkle’s attempts to bring me into the conversation exasperated me; when I looked at her, I thought her a monster. I realized, too late (which made the realization the more vexatious), what I had let myself in for when I accepted Mrs. Aldwinkle’s invitation. Fantastic surroundings, art, classy chats about the cosmos, the intelligentsia, love.⁠ ⁠… It was too much, even on a holiday. + 

I shut my eyes. Sometimes, when Mrs. Aldwinkle interpellated me, I said yes or no, without much regard to the sense of her remark. Discussion raged around me. From the alembication of my poetry they had gone on to art in general. Crikey, I said to myself, crikey.⁠ ⁠… I did my best to close the ears of my mind; and for some little time I did, indeed, contrive to understand nothing of what was said. I thought of Miss Carruthers, of Fluffy and Mr. Brimstone, of Gog’s Court and Mr. Bosk. + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle’s voice, raised by irritation to a peculiar loudness, made itself audible to my muffled mind. “How often have I told you, Cardan,” it said, “that you understand nothing of modern art?” + 

“At least a thousand times,” Mr. Cardan replied cheerfully. “But bless your heart,” he added (and I opened my eyes in time to see his benevolent smile), “I never mind at all.” + 

The smile was evidently too much for Mrs. Aldwinkle’s patience. With the gesture of a queen who implies that the audience is at an end she rose from her seat. “Just time,” she said, looking at her watch, “there’s just time. I really must give Mr. Chelifer some idea of the inside of the palace before lunch. You’d like to come?” She smiled at me like a siren. + 

Too polite to remind her of her recent outburst against the little niece, I declared myself delighted by the idea. Wamblingly I followed her into the house. Behind me I heard the young rower exclaiming on a note of mingled astonishment and indignation: “But a moment ago she was saying that Mr. Chelifer was too ill to⁠ ⁠…” + 

“Ah, but that was different,” said the voice of the red-faced man. + 

“Why was it different?” + 

“Because, my young friend, the other fellow is in all cases the rule; but I am invariably the exception. Shall we follow?” + 

Mrs. Aldwinkle made me look at painted ceilings till I almost fell down from giddiness. She dragged me through room after baroque room; then drove me up dark stairs into the Middle Ages. By the time we were back in the trecento I was so much exhausted that I could hardly stand. My knees trembled, I felt sick. + 

“This is the old armoury,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle with mounting enthusiasm. “And there are the stairs leading up to the tower.” She pointed to a low archway, through which, in a dusty twilight, the bottom of a steep stair could be seen corkscrewing up to unknown heights. “There are two hundred and thirty-two steps,” she added. + 

At this moment the gong for luncheon rumbled remotely from the other end of the huge empty house. + 

“Thank God!” said the red-faced man devoutly. + 

But our hostess, it was evident, had no feeling for punctuality. “What a bore!” she exclaimed. “But never mind. We can make time. I wanted just to run up the tower before lunch. There’s such a wonderful bird’s-eye⁠ ⁠…” She looked inquiringly round. “What do you think, all of you? Shouldn’t we just dash up? It won’t take a minute.” She repeated the siren smile. “Do let’s. Do!” And without waiting for the result of her plebiscite she walked rapidly towards the stairs. + 

I followed her. But before I had taken five steps, the floor, the walls of the room seemed to fade into the distance. There was a roaring in my ears. It grew suddenly dark. I felt myself falling. For the second time since breakfast I lost consciousness. + 

When I came to, I was lying on the floor, with my head on Mrs. Aldwinkle’s knees; and she was dabbing my forehead with a wet sponge. The first objects of which I was aware were her bright blue eyes hanging over me, very close, very bright and alarming. “Poor fellow,” she was saying, “poor fellow.” Then, looking up, she shouted angrily to the owners of the various legs and skirts which I distinguished mistily to right and left of me: “Stand back, you must stand back! Do you want to suffocate the poor fellow?” + 