Crome Yellow......................................................................................................................................................1

Aldous Huxley.........................................................................................................................................1

CHAPTER I. ............................................................................................................................................1

CHAPTER II. ...........................................................................................................................................3

CHAPTER III..........................................................................................................................................6

CHAPTER IV..........................................................................................................................................9

CHAPTER V.........................................................................................................................................13

CHAPTER VI........................................................................................................................................15

CHAPTER VII. ......................................................................................................................................20

CHAPTER VIII.....................................................................................................................................23

CHAPTER IX........................................................................................................................................25

CHAPTER X.........................................................................................................................................29

CHAPTER XI........................................................................................................................................31

CHAPTER XII. ......................................................................................................................................33

CHAPTER XIII.....................................................................................................................................36

CHAPTER XIV.....................................................................................................................................43

CHAPTER XV......................................................................................................................................44

CHAPTER XVI.....................................................................................................................................46

CHAPTER XVII. ...................................................................................................................................48

CHAPTER XVIII. ..................................................................................................................................53

CHAPTER XIX.....................................................................................................................................55

CHAPTER XX......................................................................................................................................62

CHAPTER XXI.....................................................................................................................................65

CHAPTER XXII. ...................................................................................................................................67

CHAPTER XXIII. ..................................................................................................................................71

CHAPTER XXIV..................................................................................................................................72

CHAPTER XXV. ...................................................................................................................................75

CHAPTER XXVI..................................................................................................................................79

CHAPTER XXVII. ................................................................................................................................80

CHAPTER XXVIII. ...............................................................................................................................85

CHAPTER XXIX..................................................................................................................................87

CHAPTER XXX. ...................................................................................................................................90

Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trainsthe few that there

werestopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin

Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, CamletontheWater. Camlet was where he

always got out, leaving the train to creep indolently onward, goodness only knew whither, into the green

They were snorting out of West Bowlby now. It was the next station, thank Heaven. Denis took his chattels

off the rack and piled them neatly in the corner opposite his own. A futile proceeding. But one must have

something to do. When he had finished, he sank back into his seat and closed his eyes. It was extremely hot.

Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours in which he might have done so much,

so muchwritten the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book. Instead of whichhis

Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh,

he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as

though his reservoir were inexhaustible. Denis groaned in the spirit, condemned himself utterly with all his

works. What right had he to sit in the sunshine, to occupy corner seats in thirdclass carriages, to be alive?

Misery and a nameless nostalgic distress possessed him. He was twentythree, and oh! so agonizingly

The train came bumpingly to a halt. Here was Camlet at last. Denis jumped up, crammed his hat over his

eyes, deranged his pile of baggage, leaned out of the window and shouted for a porter, seized a bag in either

hand, and had to put them down again in order to open the door. When at last he had safely bundled himself

"A bicycle, a bicycle!" he said breathlessly to the guard. He felt himself a man of action. The guard paid no

attention, but continued methodically to hand out, one by one, the packages labelled to Camlet. "A bicycle!"

"All in good time, sir," said the guard soothingly. He was a large, stately man with a naval beard. One

pictured him at home, drinking tea, surrounded by a numerous family. It was in that tone that he must have

spoken to his children when they were tiresome. "All in good time, sir." Denis's man of action collapsed,

He left his luggage to be called for later, and pushed off on his bicycle. He always took his bicycle when he

went into the country. It was part of the theory of exercise. One day one would get up at six o'clock and pedal

away to Kenilworth, or StratfordonAvonanywhere. And within a radius of twenty miles there were

always Norman churches and Tudor mansions to be seen in the course of an afternoon's excursion. Somehow

they never did get seen, but all the same it was nice to feel that the bicycle was there, and that one fine

Once at the top of the long hill which led up from Camlet station, he felt his spirits mounting. The world, he

found, was good. The faraway blue hills, the harvests whitening on the slopes of the ridge along which his

road led him, the treeless skylines that changed as he movedyes, they were all good. He was overcome by

the beauty of those deeply embayed combes, scooped in the flanks of the ridge beneath him. Curves, curves:

he repeated the word slowly, trying as he did so to find some term in which to give expression to his

appreciation. Curves no, that was inadequate. He made a gesture with his hand, as though to scoop the

achieved expression out of the air, and almost fell off his bicycle. What was the word to describe the curves

of those little valleys? They were as fine as the lines of a human body, they were informed with the subtlety

Galbe. That was a good word; but it was French. Le galbe evase de ses hanches: had one ever read a French

novel in which that phrase didn't occur? Some day he would compile a dictionary for the use of novelists.

But he really must find that word. Curves curves...Those little valleys had the lines of a cup moulded round a

woman's breast; they seemed the dinted imprints of some huge divine body that had rested on these hills.

Cumbrous locutions, these; but through them he seemed to be getting nearer to what he wanted. Dinted,

dimpled, wimpledhis mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further

Becoming once more aware of the outer world, he found himself on the crest of a descent. The road plunged

down, steep and straight, into a considerable valley. There, on the opposite slope, a little higher up the valley,

stood Crome, his destination. He put on his brakes; this view of Crome was pleasant to linger over. The

facade with its three projecting towers rose precipitously from among the dark trees of the garden. The house

basked in full sunlight; the old brick rosily glowed. How ripe and rich it was, how superbly mellow! And at

the same time, how austere! The hill was becoming steeper and steeper; he was gaining speed in spite of his

brakes. He loosed his grip of the levers, and in a moment was rushing headlong down. Five minutes later he

was passing through the gate of the great courtyard. The front door stood hospitably open. He left his bicycle

He took nobody by surprise; there was nobody to take. All was quiet; Denis wandered from room to empty

room, looking with pleasure at the familiar pictures and furniture, at all the little untidy signs of life that lay

scattered here and there. He was rather glad that they were all out; it was amusing to wander through the

house as though one were exploring a dead, deserted Pompeii. What sort of life would the excavator

reconstruct from these remains; how would he people these empty chambers? There was the long gallery,

with its rows of respectable and (though, of course, one couldn't publicly admit it) rather boring Italian

primitives, its Chinese sculptures, its unobtrusive, dateless furniture. There was the panelled drawing room,

where the huge chintzcovered armchairs stood, oases of comfort among the austere fleshmortifying

antiques. There was the morningroom, with its pale lemon walls, its painted Venetian chairs and rococo

tables, its mirrors, its modern pictures. There was the library, cool, spacious, and dark, booklined from floor

to ceiling, rich in portentous folios. There was the diningroom, solidly, portwinily English, with its great

mahogany table, its eighteenthcentury chairs and sideboard, its eighteenthcentury picturesfamily

portraits, meticulous animal paintings. What could one reconstruct from such data? There was much of Henry

Wimbush in the long gallery and the library, something of Anne, perhaps, in the morningroom. That was all.

Lying on the table in the morningroom he saw his own book of poems. What tact! He picked it up and

"...But silence and the topless dark Vault in the lights of Luna Park; And Blackpool from the nightly gloom

He put it down again, shook his head, and sighed. "What genius I had then!" he reflected, echoing the aged

Swift. It was nearly six months since the book had been published; he was glad to think he would never write

anything of the same sort again. Who could have been reading it, he wondered? Anne, perhaps; he liked to

think so. Perhaps, too, she had at last recognised herself in the Hamadryad of the poplar sapling; the slim

Hamadryad whose movements were like the swaying of a young tree in the wind. "The Woman who was a

Tree" was what he had called the poem. He had given her the book when it came out, hoping that the poem

He shut his eyes and saw a vision of her in a red velvet cloak, swaying into the little restaurant where they

sometimes dined together in Londonthree quarters of an hour late, and he at his table, haggard with

It occurred to him that perhaps his hostess might be in her boudoir. It was a possibility; he would go and see.

Mrs. Wimbush's boudoir was in the central tower on the garden front. A little staircase corkscrewed up to it

from the hall. Denis mounted, tapped at the door. "Come in." Ah, she was there; he had rather hoped she

Priscilla Wimbush was lying on the sofa. A blottingpad rested on her knees and she was thoughtfully

Mrs. Wimbush laughed. Her voice, her laughter, were deep and masculine. Everything about her was manly.

She had a large, square, middleaged face, with a massive projecting nose and little greenish eyes, the whole

surmounted by a lofty and elaborate coiffure of a curiously improbable shade of orange. Looking at her,

"That's why I'm going to Sing in op'ra, sing in op'ra, Sing in oppoppoppoppoppopera."

Today she was wearing a purple silk dress with a high collar and a row of pearls. The costume, so richly

dowagerish, so suggestive of the Royal Family, made her look more than ever like something on the Halls.

"Well," said Denis, and he hesitated, almost voluptuously. He had a tremendously amusing account of

London and its doings all ripe and ready in his mind. It would be a pleasure to give it utterance. "To begin

But he was too late. Mrs. Wimbush's question had been what the grammarians call rhetorical; it asked for no

"You find me busy at my horoscopes," she said, without even being aware that she had interrupted him.

A little pained, Denis decided to reserve his story for more receptive ears. He contented himself, by way of

"Yes," he replied, still frigid and monosyllabic. She must have told him at least six times.

"Wonderful, isn't it? Everything is in the Stars. In the Old Days, before I had the Stars to help me, I used to

lose thousands. Now"she paused an instant"well, look at that four hundred on the Grand National.

Denis would have liked to hear more about the Old Days. But he was too discreet and, still more, too shy to

ask. There had been something of a bust up; that was all he knew. Old Priscillanot so old then, of course,

and sprightlierhad lost a great deal of money, dropped it in handfuls and hatfuls on every racecourse in

the country. She had gambled too. The number of thousands varied in the different legends, but all put it

high. Henry Wimbush was forced to sell some of his Primitivesa Taddeo da Poggibonsi, an Amico di

Taddeo, and four or five nameless Sieneseto the Americans. There was a crisis. For the first time in his life

Priscilla's gay and gadding existence had come to an abrupt end. Nowadays she spent almost all her time at

Crome, cultivating a rather illdefined malady. For consolation she dallied with New Thought and the

Occult. Her passion for racing still possessed her, and Henry, who was a kindhearted fellow at bottom,

allowed her forty pounds a month betting money. Most of Priscilla's days were spent in casting the

horoscopes of horses, and she invested her money scientifically, as the stars dictated. She betted on football

too, and had a large notebook in which she registered the horoscopes of all the players in all the teams of the

League. The process of balancing the horoscopes of two elevens one against the other was a very delicate and

difficult one. A match between the Spurs and the Villa entailed a conflict in the heavens so vast and so

complicated that it was not to be wondered at if she sometimes made a mistake about the outcome.

"Such a pity you don't believe in these things, Denis, such a pity," said Mrs. Wimbush in her deep, distinct

"Ah, that's because you don't know what it's like to have faith. You've no idea how amusing and exciting life

becomes when you do believe. All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant. It

makes life so jolly, you know. Here am I at Crome. Dull as ditchwater, you'd think; but no, I don't find it so. I

don't regret the Old Days a bit. I have the Stars..." She picked up the sheet of paper that was lying on the

blotting pad. "Inman's horoscope," she explained. "(I thought I'd like to have a little fling on the billiards

championship this autumn.) I have the Infinite to keep in tune with," she waved her hand. "And then there's

the next world and all the spirits, and one's Aura, and Mrs. Eddy and saying you're not ill, and the Christian

Mysteries and Mrs. Besant. It's all splendid. One's never dull for a moment. I can't think how I used to get on

beforein the Old Days. Pleasurerunning about, that's all it was; just running about. Lunch, tea, dinner,

theatre, supper every day. It was fun, of course, while it lasted. But there wasn't much left of it afterwards.

There's rather a good thing about that in BarbecueSmith's new book. Where is it?"

She sat up and reached for a book that was lying on the little table by the head of the sofa.

Denis knew of him vaguely. BarbecueSmith was a name in the Sunday papers. He wrote about the Conduct

"I've invited him for next weekend." She turned over the pages of the book. "Here's the passage I was

Holding the book almost at arm's length, for she was somewhat longsighted, and making suitable gestures

"'What are thousand pound fur coats, what are quarter million incomes?'" She looked up from the page with a

histrionic movement of the head; her orange coiffure nodded portentously. Denis looked at it, fascinated. Was

it the Real Thing and henna, he wondered, or was it one of those Complete Transformations one sees in the

"'What are the gaieties of the Rich, the splendours of the Powerful, what is the pride of the Great, what are

The voice, which had risen in tone, questioningly, from sentence to sentence, dropped suddenly and boomed

"'They are nothing. Vanity, fluff, dandelion seed in the wind, thin vapours of fever. The things that matter

happen in the heart. Seen things are sweet, but those unseen are a thousand times more significant. It is the

"Ah, it's a fine book this, a beautiful book," said Priscilla, as she let the pages flick back, one by one, from

under her thumb. "And here's the passage about the Lotus Pool. He compares the Soul to a Lotus Pool, you

know." She held up the book again and read. "'A Friend of mine has a Lotus Pool in his garden. It lies in a

little dell embowered with wild roses and eglantine, among which the nightingale pours forth its amorous

descant all the summer long. Within the pool the Lotuses blossom, and the birds of the air come to drink and

bathe themselves in its crystal waters...' Ah, and that reminds me," Priscilla exclaimed, shutting the book with

a clap and uttering her big profound laugh"that reminds me of the things that have been going on in our

bathingpool since you were here last. We gave the village people leave to come and bathe here in the

She leaned forward, speaking in a confidential whisper; every now and then she uttered a deep gurgle of

laughter. "...mixed bathing...saw them out of my window...sent for a pair of field glasses to make sure...no

doubt of it..." The laughter broke out again. Denis laughed too. BarbecueSmith was tossed on the floor.

It's time we went to see if tea's ready," said Priscilla. She hoisted herself up from the sofa and went swishing

off across the room, striding beneath the trailing silk. Denis followed her, faintly humming to himself:

"That's why I'm going to Sing in op'ra, sing in op'ra, Sing in oppoppoppoppopera."

The terrace in front of the house was a long narrow strip of turf, bounded along its outer edge by a graceful

stone balustrade. Two little summerhouses of brick stood at either end. Below the house the ground sloped

very steeply away, and the terrace was a remarkably high one; from the balusters to the sloping lawn beneath

was a drop of thirty feet. Seen from below, the high unbroken terrace wall, built like the house itself of brick,

had the almost menacing aspect of a fortificationa castle bastion, from whose parapet one looked out

across airy depths to distances level with the eye. Below, in the foreground, hedged in by solid masses of

sculptured yew trees, lay the stonebrimmed swimmingpool. Beyond it stretched the park, with its massive

elms, its green expanses of grass, and, at the bottom of the valley, the gleam of the narrow river. On the

farther side of the stream the land rose again in a long slope, chequered with cultivation. Looking up the

The teatable had been planted in the shade of one of the little summerhouses, and the rest of the party was

already assembled about it when Denis and Priscilla made their appearance. Henry Wimbush had begun to

pour out the tea. He was one of those ageless, unchanging men on the farther side of fifty, who might be

thirty, who might be anything. Denis had known him almost as long as he could remember. In all those years

his pale, rather handsome face had never grown any older; it was like the pale grey bowler hat which he

Next him, but separated from him and from the rest of the world by the almost impenetrable barriers of her

deafness, sat Jenny Mullion. She was perhaps thirty, had a tilted nose and a pink andwhite complexion,

and wore her brown hair plaited and coiled in two lateral buns over her ears. In the secret tower of her

deafness she sat apart, looking down at the world through sharply piercing eyes. What did she think of men

and women and things? That was something that Denis had never been able to discover. In her enigmatic

remoteness Jenny was a little disquieting. Even now some interior joke seemed to be amusing her, for she

On his other side the serious, moonlike innocence of Mary Bracegirdle's face shone pink and childish. She

was nearly twentythree, but one wouldn't have guessed it. Her short hair, clipped like a page's, hung in a bell

of elastic gold about her cheeks. She had large blue china eyes, whose expression was one of ingenuous and

Next to Mary a small gaunt man was sitting, rigid and erect in his chair. In appearance Mr. Scogan was like

one of those extinct birdlizards of the Tertiary. His nose was beaked, his dark eye had the shining quickness

of a robin's. But there was nothing soft or gracious or feathery about him. The skin of his wrinkled brown

face had a dry and scaly look; his hands were the hands of a crocodile. His movements were marked by the

lizard's disconcertingly abrupt clockwork speed; his speech was thin, fluty, and dry. Henry Wimbush's

schoolfellow and exact contemporary, Mr. Scogan looked far older and, at the same time, far more

youthfully alive than did that gentle aristocrat with the face like a grey bowler.

Mr. Scogan might look like an extinct saurian, but Gombauld was altogether and essentially human. In the

oldfashioned natural histories of the 'thirties he might have figured in a steel engraving as a type of Homo

Sapiensan honour which at that time commonly fell to Lord Byron. Indeed, with more hair and less collar,

Gombauld would have been completely Byronicmore than Byronic, even, for Gombauld was of Provencal

descent, a black haired young corsair of thirty, with flashing teeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis

looked at him enviously. He was jealous of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauld painted

pictures! Still more, at the moment, he envied Gombauld his looks, his vitality, his easy confidence of

manner. Was it surprising that Anne should like him? Like him?it might even be something worse, Denis

reflected bitterly, as he walked at Priscilla's side down the long grass terrace.

Between Gombauld and Mr. Scogan a very much lowered deckchair presented its back to the new arrivals

as they advanced towards the teatable. Gombauld was leaning over it; his face moved vivaciously; he

smiled, he laughed, he made quick gestures with his hands. From the depths of the chair came up a sound of

soft, lazy laughter. Denis started as he heard it. That laughterhow well he knew it! What emotions it

In her low deckchair Anne was nearer to lying than to sitting. Her long, slender body reposed in an attitude

of listless and indolent grace. Within its setting of light brown hair her face had a pretty regularity that was

almost dolllike. And indeed there were moments when she seemed nothing more than a doll; when the oval

face, with its longlashed, pale blue eyes, expressed nothing; when it was no more than a lazy mask of wax.

She was Henry Wimbush's own niece; that bowlerlike countenance was one of the Wimbush heirlooms; it

ran in the family, appearing in its female members as a blank dollface. But across this dollish mask, like a

gay melody dancing over an unchanging fundamental bass, passed Anne's other inheritancequick laughter,

light ironic amusement, and the changing expressions of many moods. She was smiling now as Denis looked

down at her: her cat's smile, he called it, for no very good reason. The mouth was compressed, and on either

side of it two tiny wrinkles had formed themselves in her cheeks. An infinity of slightly malicious amusement

lurked in those little folds, in the puckers about the halfclosed eyes, in the eyes themselves, bright and

The preliminary greetings spoken, Denis found an empty chair between Gombauld and Jenny and sat down.

Jenny nodded and smiled in mysterious silence, as though the subject of her health were a secret that could

"How's London been since I went away?" Anne inquired from the depth of her chair.

The moment had come; the tremendously amusing narrative was waiting for utterance. "Well," said Denis,

"Has Priscilla told you of our great antiquarian find?" Henry Wimbush leaned forward; the most promising of

"Last week," Mr. Wimbush went on softly and implacably, "we dug up fifty yards of oaken drainpipes; just

tree trunks with a hole bored through the middle. Very interesting indeed. Whether they were laid down by

Denis listened gloomily. "Extraordinary!" he said, when Mr. Wimbush had finished; "quite extraordinary!"

He helped himself to another slice of cake. He didn't even want to tell his tale about London now; he was

For some time past Mary's grave blue eyes had been fixed upon him. "What have you been writing lately?"

"Prose?" Mr. Scogan pounced alarmingly on the word. "You've been writing prose?"

"Of course," Mr. Scogan groaned. "I'll describe the plot for you. Little Percy, the hero, was never good at

games, but he was always clever. He passes through the usual public school and the usual university and

comes to London, where he lives among the artists. He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries

the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders. He writes a novel of dazzling brilliance; he dabbles

delicately in Amour and disappears, at the end of the book, into the luminous Future."

Denis blushed scarlet. Mr. Scogan had described the plan of his novel with an accuracy that was appalling.

He made an effort to laugh. "You're entirely wrong," he said. "My novel is not in the least like that." It was a

heroic lie. Luckily, he reflected, only two chapters were written. He would tear them up that very evening

Mr. Scogan paid no attention to his denial, but went on: "Why will you young men continue to write about

things that are so entirely uninteresting as the mentality of adolescents and artists? Professional

anthropologists might find it interesting to turn sometimes from the beliefs of the Blackfellow to the

philosophical preoccupations of the undergraduate. But you can't expect an ordinary adult man, like myself,

to be much moved by the story of his spiritual troubles. And after all, even in England, even in Germany and

Russia, there are more adults than adolescents. As for the artist, he is preoccupied with problems that are so

utterly unlike those of the ordinary adult man problems of pure aesthetics which don't so much as present

themselves to people like myselfthat a description of his mental processes is as boring to the ordinary

reader as a piece of pure mathematics. A serious book about artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a

book about artists regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is really not worth writing

again. JeanChristophe is the stock artist of literature, just as Professor Radium of "Comic Cuts" is its stock

"Not at all, my dear Gombauld," Mr. Scogan hastened to explain. "As a lover or a dipsomaniac, I've no doubt

of your being a most fascinating specimen. But as a combiner of forms, you must honestly admit it, you're a

"I entirely disagree with you," exclaimed Mary. She was somehow always out of breath when she talked.

And her speech was punctuated by little gasps. "I've known a great many artists, and I've always found their

mentality very interesting. Especially in Paris. Tschuplitski, for exampleI saw a great deal of Tschuplitski

"Ah, but then you're an exception, Mary, you're an exception," said Mr. Scogan. "You are a femme

Denis woke up next morning to find the sun shining, the sky serene. He decided to wear white flannel

trouserswhite flannel trousers and a black jacket, with a silk shirt and his new peach coloured tie. And

what shoes? White was the obvious choice, but there was something rather pleasing about the notion of black

Before he went downpatent leather was his final choicehe looked at himself critically in the glass. His

hair might have been more golden, he reflected. As it was, its yellowness had the hint of a greenish tinge in it.

But his forehead was good. His forehead made up in height what his chin lacked in prominence. His nose

might have been longer, but it would pass. His eyes might have been blue and not green. But his coat was

very well cut and, discreetly padded, made him seem robuster than he actually was. His legs, in their white

casing, were long and elegant. Satisfied, he descended the stairs. Most of the party had already finished their

"Yes, isn't it lovely?" Jenny replied, giving two rapid little nods. "But we had such awful thunderstorms last

Parallel straight lines, Denis reflected, meet only at infinity. He might talk for ever of carecharmer sleep and

she of meteorology till the end of time. Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel

"They are very alarming, these thunderstorms," he said, helping himself to porridge. "Don't you think so? Or

"Because," said Jenny, making a descriptive gesture, "because lightning goes downwards and not flat ways.

There was a silence. Denis finished his porridge and helped himself to bacon. For lack of anything better to

say, and because Mr. Scogan's absurd phrase was for some reason running in his head, he turned to Jenny and

"Do you consider yourself a femme superieure?" He had to repeat the question several times before Jenny got

"No," she said, rather indignantly, when at last she heard what Denis was saying. "Certainly not. Has anyone

"Did he?" Jenny lowered her voice. "Shall I tell you what I think of that man? I think he's slightly sinister."

Having made this pronouncement, she entered the ivory tower of her deafness and closed the door. Denis

could not induce her to say anything more, could not induce her even to listen. She just smiled at him, smiled

Denis went out on to the terrace to smoke his afterbreakfast pipe and to read his morning paper. An hour

later, when Anne came down, she found him still reading. By this time he had got to the Court Circular and

the Forthcoming Weddings. He got up to meet her as she approached, a Hamadryad in white muslin, across

Denis was dreadfully taken aback. There was no possible retort. "You speak as though I were a child in a new

"And if you do look perfectly sweet in your white trousers, why shouldn't I say so? And why did you put

"Let's go into the garden," said Denis. He was put out; the conversation had taken such a preposterous and

unexpected turn. He had planned a very different opening, in which he was to lead off with, "You look

adorable this morning," or something of the kind, and she was to answer, "Do I?" and then there was to be a

pregnant silence. And now she had got in first with the trousers. It was provoking; his pride was hurt.

That part of the garden that sloped down from the foot of the terrace to the pool had a beauty which did not

depend on colour so much as on forms. It was as beautiful by moonlight as in the sun. The silver of water, the

dark shapes of yew and ilex trees remained, at all hours and seasons, the dominant features of the scene. It

was a landscape in black and white. For colour there was the flowergarden; it lay to one side of the pool,

separated from it by a huge Babylonian wall of yews. You passed through a tunnel in the hedge, you opened

a wicket in a wall, and you found yourself, startlingly and suddenly, in the world of colour. The July borders

blazed and flared under the sun. Within its high brick walls the garden was like a great tank of warmth and

Denis held open the little iron gate for his companion. "It's like passing from a cloister into an Oriental

palace," he said, and took a deep breath of the warm, flowerscented air. "'In fragrant volleys they let fly...'

"'Well shot, ye firemen! Oh how sweet And round your equal fires do meet; Whose shrill report no ear can

"You have a bad habit of quoting," said Anne. "As I never know the context or author, I find it humiliating."

Denis apologized. "It's the fault of one's education. Things somehow seem more real and vivid when one can

apply somebody else's readymade phrase about them. And then there are lots of lovely names and

wordsMonophysite, Iamblichus, Pomponazzi; you bring them out triumphantly, and feel you've clinched

the argument with the mere magical sound of them. That's what comes of the higher education."

"You may regret your education," said Anne; "I'm ashamed of my lack of it. Look at those sunflowers! Aren't

"Dark faces and golden crownsthey're kings of Ethiopia. And I like the way the tits cling to the flowers

and pick out the seeds, while the other loutish birds, grubbing dirtily for their food, look up in envy from the

ground. Do they look up in envy? That's the literary touch, I'm afraid. Education again. It always comes back

Anne had sat down on a bench that stood in the shade of an old apple tree. "I'm listening," she said.

He did not sit down, but walked backwards and forwards in front of the bench, gesticulating a little as he

talked. "Books," he said"books. One reads so many, and one sees so few people and so little of the world.

Great thick books about the universe and the mind and ethics. You've no idea how many there are. I must

have read twenty or thirty tons of them in the last five years. Twenty tons of ratiocination. Weighted with

He went on walking up and down. His voice rose, fell, was silent a moment, and then talked on. He moved

his hands, sometimes he waved his arms. Anne looked and listened quietly, as though she were at a lecture.

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having readymade ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and

tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts,

things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of

ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable,

horribly unhappy? Denis came to a halt in front of the bench, and as he asked this last question he stretched

out his arms and stood for an instant in an attitude of crucifixion, then let them fall again to his sides.

"My poor Denis!" Anne was touched. He was really too pathetic as he stood there in front of her in his white

flannel trousers. "But does one suffer about these things? It seems very extraordinary."

"You're like Scogan," cried Denis bitterly. "You regard me as a specimen for an anthropologist. Well, I

"No, no," she protested, and drew in her skirt with a gesture that indicated that he was to sit down beside her.

He sat down. "Why can't you just take things for granted and as they come?" she asked. "It's so much

"Of course it is," said Denis. "But it's a lesson to be learnt gradually. There are the twenty tons of

"I've always taken things as they come," said Anne. "It seems so obvious. One enjoys the pleasant things,

"Nothingfor you. But, then, you were born a pagan; I am trying laboriously to make myself one. I can take

nothing for granted, I can enjoy nothing as it comes along. Beauty, pleasure, art, womenI have to invent an

excuse, a justification for everything that's delightful. Otherwise I can't enjoy it with an easy conscience. I

make up a little story about beauty and pretend that it has something to do with truth and goodness. I have to

say that art is the process by which one reconstructs the divine reality out of chaos. Pleasure is one of the

mystical roads to union with the infinitethe ecstasies of drinking, dancing, lovemaking. As for women, I

am perpetually assuring myself that they're the broad highway to divinity. And to think that I'm only just

beginning to see through the silliness of the whole thing! It's incredible to me that anyone should have

"It's still more incredible to me," said Anne, "that anyone should have been a victim to them. I should like to

see myself believing that men are the highway to divinity." The amused malice of her smile planted two little

folds on either side of her mouth, and through their halfclosed lids her eyes shone with laughter. "What you

need, Denis, is a nice plump young wife, a fixed income, and a little congenial but regular work."

"What I need is you." That was what he ought to have retorted, that was what he wanted passionately to say.

He could not say it. His desire fought against his shyness. "What I need is you." Mentally he shouted the

words, but not a sound issued from his lips. He looked at her despairingly. Couldn't she see what was going

on inside him? Couldn't she understand? "What I need is you." He would say it, he wouldhe would.

"I think I shall go and bathe," said Anne. "It's so hot." The opportunity had passed.

Mr. Wimbush had taken them to see the sights of the Home Farm, and now they were standing, all six of

themHenry Wimbush, Mr. Scogan, Denis, Gombauld, Anne, and Maryby the low wall of the piggery,

"Fourteen?" Mary echoed incredulously. She turned astonished blue eyes towards Mr. Wimbush, then let

An immense sow reposed on her side in the middle of the pen. Her round, black belly, fringed with a double

line of dugs, presented itself to the assault of an army of small, brownishblack swine. With a frantic greed

they tugged at their mother's flank. The old sow stirred sometimes uneasily or uttered a little grunt of pain.

One small pig, the runt, the weakling of the litter, had been unable to secure a place at the banquet. Squealing

shrilly, he ran backwards and forwards, trying to push in among his stronger brothers or even to climb over

"There ARE fourteen," said Mary. "You're quite right. I counted. It's extraordinary."

"The sow next door," Mr. Wimbush went on, "has done very badly. She only had five in her litter. I shall give

her another chance. If she does no better next time, I shall fat her up and kill her. There's the boar," he pointed

towards a farther sty. "Fine old beast, isn't he? But he's getting past his prime. He'll have to go too."

"But how practical, how eminently realistic!" said Mr. Scogan. "In this farm we have a model of sound

paternal government. Make them breed, make them work, and when they're past working or breeding or

With the ferrule of his walkingstick Denis began to scratch the boar's long bristly back. The animal moved a

little so as to bring himself within easier range of the instrument that evoked in him such delicious sensations;

then he stood stock still, softly grunting his contentment. The mud of years flaked off his sides in a grey

"What a pleasure it is," said Denis, "to do somebody a kindness. I believe I enjoy scratching this pig quite as

much as he enjoys being scratched. If only one could always be kind with so little expense or trouble..."

"Morning, sir," old Rowley answered. He was the most venerable of the labourers on the farma tall, solid

man, still unbent, with grey sidewhiskers and a steep, dignified profile. Grave, weighty in his manner,

splendidly respectable, Rowley had the air of a great English statesman of the midnineteenth century. He

halted on the outskirts of the group, and for a moment they all looked at the pigs in a silence that was only

broken by the sound of grunting or the squelch of a sharp hoof in the mire. Rowley turned at last, slowly and

ponderously and nobly, as he did everything, and addressed himself to Henry Wimbush.

"Look at them, sir," he said, with a motion of his hand towards the wallowing swine. "Rightly is they called

"I am abashed by that man," said Mr. Scogan, as old Rowley plodded off slowly and with dignity. "What

wisdom, what judgment, what a sense of values! 'Rightly are they called swine.' Yes. And I wish I could, with

They walked on towards the cowsheds and the stables of the cart horses. Five white geese, taking the air this

fine morning, even as they were doing, met them in the way. They hesitated, cackled; then, converting their

lifted necks into rigid, horizontal snakes, they rushed off in disorder, hissing horribly as they went. Red

calves paddled in the dung and mud of a spacious yard. In another enclosure stood the bull, massive as a

locomotive. He was a very calm bull, and his face wore an expression of melancholy stupidity. He gazed with

reddishbrown eyes at his visitors, chewed thoughtfully at the tangible memories of an earlier meal,

swallowed and regurgitated, chewed again. His tail lashed savagely from side to side; it seemed to have

nothing to do with his impassive bulk. Between his short horns was a triangle of red curls, short and dense.

"Splendid animal," said Henry Wimbush. "Pedigree stock. But he's getting a little old, like the boar."

"Fat him up and slaughter him," Mr. Scogan pronounced, with a delicate oldmaidish precision of utterance.

"Couldn't you give the animals a little holiday from producing children?" asked Anne. "I'm so sorry for the

Mr. Wimbush shook his head. "Personally," he said, "I rather like seeing fourteen pigs grow where only one

"I'm glad to hear you say so," Gombauld broke in warmly. "Lots of life: that's what we want. I like

Gombauld grew lyrical. Everybody ought to have childrenAnne ought to have them, Mary ought to have

themdozens and dozens. He emphasised his point by thumping with his walkingstick on the bull's leather

flanks. Mr. Scogan ought to pass on his intelligence to little Scogans, and Denis to little Denises. The bull

turned his head to see what was happening, regarded the drumming stick for several seconds, then turned

back again satisfied, it seemed, that nothing was happening. Sterility was odious, unnatural, a sin against life.

Standing with his back against the farmyard pump, a little apart, Denis examined the group. Gombauld,

passionate and vivacious, was its centre. The others stood round, listeningHenry Wimbush, calm and polite

beneath his grey bowler; Mary, with parted lips and eyes that shone with the indignation of a convinced

birthcontroller. Anne looked on through halfshut eyes, smiling; and beside her stood Mr. Scogan, bolt

upright in an attitude of metallic rigidity that contrasted strangely with that fluid grace of hers which even in

Gombauld ceased talking, and Mary, flushed and outraged, opened her mouth to refute him. But she was too

slow. Before she could utter a word Mr. Scogan's fluty voice had pronounced the opening phrases of a

discourse. There was no hope of getting so much as a word in edgeways; Mary had perforce to resign herself.

"Even your eloquence, my dear Gombauld," he was saying"even your eloquence must prove inadequate to

reconvert the world to a belief in the delights of mere multiplication. With the gramophone, the cinema, and

the automatic pistol, the goddess of Applied Science has presented the world with another gift, more precious

even than thesethe means of dissociating love from propagation. Eros, for those who wish it, is now an

entirely free god; his deplorable associations with Lucina may be broken at will. In the course of the next few

centuries, who knows? the world may see a more complete severance. I look forward to it optimistically.

Where the great Erasmus Darwin and Miss Anna Seward, Swan of Lichfield, experimentedand, for all

their scientific ardour, failedour descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal generation will

take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will

supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very

base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay

Mary's china blue eyes, more serious and more astonished than ever, were fixed on Mr. Scogan. "Bottles?"

Mr. BarbecueSmith arrived in time for tea on Saturday afternoon. He was a short and corpulent man, with a

very large head and no neck. In his earlier middle age he had been distressed by this absence of neck, but was

comforted by reading in Balzac's "Louis Lambert" that all the world's great men have been marked by the

same peculiarity, and for a simple and obvious reason: Greatness is nothing more nor less than the

harmonious functioning of the faculties of the head and heart; the shorter the neck, the more closely these two

Mr. BarbecueSmith belonged to the old school of journalists. He sported a leonine head with a

greyishblack mane of oddly unappetising hair brushed back from a broad but low forehead. And somehow

he always seemed slightly, ever so slightly, soiled. In younger days he had gaily called himself a Bohemian.

He did so no longer. He was a teacher now, a kind of prophet. Some of his books of comfort and spiritual

Priscilla received him with every mark of esteem. He had never been to Crome before; she showed him round

"So quaint, so oldworld," he kept repeating. He had a rich, rather unctuous voice.

Priscilla praised his latest book. "Splendid, I thought it was," she said in her large, jolly way.

"Oh, tremendously! And the bit about the Lotus PoolI thought that so beautiful."

"I knew you would like that. It came to me, you know, from without." He waved his hand to indicate the

"Indeed!" Mr. BarbecueSmith smiled benignly, and, looking up at Denis with an expression of Olympian

Denis was furious, and, to make matters worse, he felt himself blushing hotly. Had Priscilla no sense of

proportion? She was putting them in the same categoryBarbecueSmith and himself. They were both

writers, they both used pen and ink. To Mr. BarbecueSmith's question he answered, "Oh, nothing much,

"Mr. Stone is one of our younger poets." It was Anne's voice. He scowled at her, and she smiled back

"Excellent, excellent," said Mr. BarbecueSmith, and he squeezed Denis's arm encouragingly. "The Bard's is

As soon as tea was over Mr. BarbecueSmith excused himself; he had to do some writing before dinner.

Mr. BarbecueSmith came down to the drawingroom at ten to eight. He was in a good humour, and, as he

descended the stairs, he smiled to himself and rubbed his large white hands together. In the drawingroom

someone was playing softly and ramblingly on the piano. He wondered who it could be. One of the young

ladies, perhaps. But no, it was only Denis, who got up hurriedly and with some embarrassment as he came

There was a silence. Mr. BarbecueSmith stood with his back to the hearth, warming himself at the memory

of last winter's fires. He could not control his interior satisfaction, but still went on smiling to himself. At last

Denis exercised his memory. "When I'm in good form," he said, "I fancy I do a twelvehundredword review

Mr. BarbecueSmith nodded. "Yes, three hundred words an hour at your best." He walked out into the

middle of the room, turned round on his heels, and confronted Denis again. "Guess how many words I wrote

"No, but you must guess. Between five and halfpast seven that's two and a half hours."

"I give it up," said Denis. He found he couldn't summon up much interest in Mr. BarbecueSmith's writing.

Mr. BarbecueSmith suddenly became extremely confidential. He pulled up a stool to the side of Denis's

"Listen to me," he said, laying his hand on Denis's sleeve. "You want to make your living by writing; you're

What was the fellow going to do? Denis wondered: give him an introduction to the editor of "John o'

London's Weekly", or tell him where he could sell a light middle for seven guineas? Mr. BarbecueSmith

"The secret of writing," he said, breathing it into the young man's ear"the secret of writing is Inspiration."

"Oh, then I entirely agree with you," said Denis. "But what if one hasn't got Inspiration?"

"That was precisely the question I was waiting for," said Mr. BarbecueSmith. "You ask me what one should

do if one hasn't got Inspiration. I answer: you have Inspiration; everyone has Inspiration. It's simply a

The clock struck eight. There was no sign of any of the other guests; everybody was always late at Crome.

"That's my secret," he said. "I give it you freely." (Denis made a suitably grateful murmur and grimace.) "I'll

help you to find your Inspiration, because I don't like to see a nice, steady young man like you exhausting his

vitality and wasting the best years of his life in a grinding intellectual labour that could be completely

obviated by Inspiration. I did it myself, so I know what it's like. Up till the time I was thirtyeight I was a

writer like youa writer without Inspiration. All I wrote I squeezed out of myself by sheer hard work. Why,

in those days I was never able to do more than sixfifty words an hour, and what's more, I often didn't sell

what I wrote." He sighed. "We artists," he said parenthetically, "we intellectuals aren't much appreciated here

in England." Denis wondered if there was any method, consistent, of course, with politeness, by which he

could dissociate himself from Mr. BarbecueSmith's "we." There was none; and besides, it was too late now,

"At thirtyeight I was a poor, struggling, tired, overworked, unknown journalist. Now, at fifty..." He paused

modestly and made a little gesture, moving his fat hands outwards, away from one another, and expanding his

fingers as though in demonstration. He was exhibiting himself. Denis thought of that advertisement of

Nestle's milkthe two cats on the wall, under the moon, one black and thin, the other white, sleek, and fat.

"Inspiration has made the difference," said Mr. BarbecueSmith solemnly. "It came quite suddenlylike a

gentle dew from heaven." He lifted his hand and let it fall back on to his knee to indicate the descent of the

dew. "It was one evening. I was writing my first little book about the Conduct of Life'Humble Heroisms'.

You may have read it; it has been a comfortat least I hope and think soa comfort to many thousands. I

was in the middle of the second chapter, and I was stuck. Fatigue, overworkI had only written a hundred

words in the last hour, and I could get no further. I sat biting the end of my pen and looking at the electric

light, which hung above my table, a little above and in front of me." He indicated the position of the lamp

with elaborate care. "Have you ever looked at a bright light intently for a long time?" he asked, turning to

Denis. Denis didn't think he had. "You can hypnotise yourself that way," Mr. BarbecueSmith went on.

The gong sounded in a terrific crescendo from the hall. Still no sign of the others. Denis was horribly hungry.

"That's what happened to me," said Mr. BarbecueSmith. "I was hypnotised. I lost consciousness like that."

He snapped his fingers. "When I came to, I found that it was past midnight, and I had written four thousand

words. Four thousand," he repeated, opening his mouth very wide on the "ou" of thousand. "Inspiration had

"I was afraid of it at first. It didn't seem to me natural. I didn't feel, somehow, that it was quite right, quite

fair, I might almost say, to produce a literary composition unconsciously. Besides, I was afraid I might have

"Certainly not," Mr. BarbecueSmith replied, with a trace of annoyance. "Certainly not. It was admirable.

Just a few spelling mistakes and slips, such as there generally are in automatic writing. But the style, the

thoughtall the essentials were admirable. After that, Inspiration came to me regularly. I wrote the whole of

'Humble Heroisms' like that. It was a great success, and so has everything been that I have written since." He

leaned forward and jabbed at Denis with his finger. "That's my secret," he said, "and that's how you could

"But how?" asked Denis, trying not to show how deeply he had been insulted by that final "well."

"By cultivating your Inspiration, by getting into touch with your Subconscious. Have you ever read my little

Denis had to confess that that was, precisely, one of the few, perhaps the only one, of Mr. BarbecueSmith's

"Never mind, never mind," said Mr. BarbecueSmith. "It's just a little book about the connection of the

Subconscious with the Infinite. Get into touch with the Subconscious and you are in touch with the Universe.

"Perfectly, perfectly," said Denis. "But don't you find that the Universe sometimes sends you very irrelevant

"I don't allow it to," Mr. BarbecueSmith replied. "I canalise it. I bring it down through pipes to work the

"Like Niagara," Denis suggested. Some of Mr. BarbecueSmith's remarks sounded strangely like

"Precisely. Like Niagara. And this is how I do it." He leaned forward, and with a raised forefinger marked his

points as he made them, beating time, as it were, to his discourse. "Before I go off into my trance, I

concentrate on the subject I wish to be inspired about. Let us say I am writing about the humble heroisms; for

ten minutes before I go into the trance I think of nothing but orphans supporting their little brothers and

sisters, of dull work well and patiently done, and I focus my mind on such great philosophical truths as the

purification and uplifting of the soul by suffering, and the alchemical transformation of leaden evil into

golden good." (Denis again hung up his little festoon of quotation marks.) "Then I pop off. Two or three

hours later I wake up again, and find that inspiration has done its work. Thousands of words, comforting,

uplifting words, lie before me. I type them out neatly on my machine and they are ready for the printer."

"It is. All the great and splendid and divine things of life are wonderfully simple." (Quotation marks again.)

"When I have to do my aphorisms," Mr. BarbecueSmith continued, "I prelude my trance by turning over the

pages of any Dictionary of Quotations or Shakespeare Calendar that comes to hand. That sets the key, so to

speak; that ensures that the Universe shall come flowing in, not in a continuous rush, but in aphorismic drops.

Denis nodded. Mr. BarbecueSmith put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a notebook. "I did a few in the

train today," he said, turning over the pages. "Just dropped off into a trance in the corner of my carriage. I

find the train very conducive to good work. Here they are." He cleared his throat and read:

"The Mountain Road may be steep, but the air is pure up there, and it is from the Summit that one gets the

It was curious, Denis reflected, the way the Infinite sometimes repeated itself.

"Seeing is Believing. Yes, but Believing is also Seeing. If I believe in God, I see God, even in the things that

Mr. BarbecueSmith looked up from his notebook. "That last one," he said, "is particularly subtle and

beautiful, don't you think? Without Inspiration I could never have hit on that." He reread the apophthegm

with a slower and more solemn utterance. "Straight from the Infinite," he commented reflectively, then

Puzzled wrinkles appeared on Mr. BarbecueSmith's forehead. "I don't exactly know what that means," he

said. "It's very gnomic. One could apply it, of course to the Higher Education illuminating, but provoking

the Lower Classes to discontent and revolution. Yes, I suppose that's what it is. But it's gnomic, it's gnomic."

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. The gong sounded again, clamorously, it seemed imploringly: dinner was

"You understand me now when I advise you to cultivate your Inspiration. Let your Subconscious work for

There was the sound of feet on the stairs. Mr. BarbecueSmith got up, laid his hand for an instant on Denis's

"No more now. Another time. And remember, I rely absolutely on your discretion in this matter. There are

At Crome all the beds were ancient hereditary pieces of furniture. Huge beds, like fourmasted ships, with

furled sails of shining coloured stuff. Beds carved and inlaid, beds painted and gilded. Beds of walnut and

oak, of rare exotic woods. Beds of every date and fashion from the time of Sir Ferdinando, who built the

house, to the time of his namesake in the late eighteenth century, the last of the family, but all of them

The finest of all was now Anne's bed. Sir Julius, son to Sir Ferdinando, had had it made in Venice against his

wife's first lyingin. Early seicento Venice had expended all its extravagant art in the making of it. The body

of the bed was like a great square sarcophagus. Clustering roses were carved in high relief on its wooden

panels, and luscious putti wallowed among the roses. On the black groundwork of the panels the carved

reliefs were gilded and burnished. The golden roses twined in spirals up the four pillarlike posts, and

cherubs, seated at the top of each column, supported a wooden canopy fretted with the same carved flowers.

Anne was reading in bed. Two candles stood on the little table beside her, in their rich light her face, her bare

arm and shoulder took on warm hues and a sort of peachlike quality of surface. Here and there in the canopy

above her carved golden petals shone brightly among profound shadows, and the soft light, falling on the

sculptured panel of the bed, broke restlessly among the intricate roses, lingered in a broad caress on the

blown cheeks, the dimpled bellies, the tight, absurd little posteriors of the sprawling putti.

There was a discreet tap at the door. She looked up. "Come in, come in." A face, round and childish, within

its sleek bell of golden hair, peered round the opening door. More childish looking still, a suit of mauve

It was Mary. "I thought I'd just look in for a moment to say goodnight," she said, and sat down on the edge

"What are you reading?" She looked at the book. "Rather second rate, isn't it?" The tone in which Mary

pronounced the word "secondrate" implied an almost infinite denigration. She was accustomed in London to

associate only with firstrate people who liked firstrate things, and she knew that there were very, very few

"Well, I'm afraid I like it," said Anne. There was nothing more to be said. The silence that followed was a

rather uncomfortable one. Mary fiddled uneasily with the bottom button of her pyjama jacket. Leaning back

"I'm so awfully afraid of repressions," said Mary at last, bursting suddenly and surprisingly into speech. She

pronounced the words on the tailend of an expiring breath, and had to gasp for new air almost before the

Mary had to explain. "The natural instincts of sex..." she began didactically. But Anne cut her short.

"Yes, yes. Perfectly. I understand. Repressions! old maids and all the rest. But what about them?"

"That's just it," said Mary. "I'm afraid of them. It's always dangerous to repress one's instincts. I'm beginning

to detect in myself symptoms like the ones you read of in the books. I constantly dream that I'm falling down

wells; and sometimes I even dream that I'm climbing up ladders. It's most disquieting. The symptoms are

"One may become a nymphomaniac of one's not careful. You've no idea how serious these repressions are if

"It sounds too awful," said Anne. "But I don't see that I can do anything to help you."

Mary coughed and drew a deep breath. "I presume," she began sententiously, "I presume we may take for

granted that an intelligent young woman of twentythree who has lived in civilised society in the twentieth

"So much for our fundamental postulate," said Mary. Solemnity was expressed in every feature of her round

young face, radiated from her large blue eyes. "We come next to the desirability of possessing experience. I

hope we are agreed that knowledge is desirable and that ignorance is undesirable."

Obedient as one of those complaisant disciples from whom Socrates could get whatever answer he chose,

"Yes, but now it's been proved," said Mary. "One must do things logically. The question is now..."

"But where does the question come in? You've reached your only possible conclusionlogically, which is

more than I could have done. All that remains is to impart the information to someone you likesomeone

you like really rather a lot, someone you're in love with, if I may express myself so baldly."

"But that's just where the question comes in," Mary exclaimed. "I'm not in love with anybody."

"But I can't go on dreaming night after night that I'm falling down a well. It's too dangerous."

"Well, if it really is TOO dangerous, then of course you must do something about it; you must find somebody

"But who?" A thoughtful frown puckered Mary's brow. "It must be somebody intelligent, somebody with

intellectual interests that I can share. And it must be somebody with a proper respect for women, somebody

who's prepared to talk seriously about his work and his ideas and about my work and my ideas. It isn't, as you

"Well" said Anne, "there are three unattached and intelligent men in the house at the present time. There's

Mr. Scogan, to begin with; but perhaps he's rather too much of a genuine antique. And there are Gombauld

Mary nodded. "I think we had better," she said, and then hesitated, with a certain air of embarrassment.

"I was wondering," said Mary, with a gasp, "whether they really were unattached. I thought that perhaps you

"It was very nice of you to think of me, Mary darling," said Anne, smiling the tight cat's smile. "But as far as

"I'm very glad of that," said Mary, looking relieved. "We are now confronted with the question: Which of the

"It's not a matter of my taste," Mary pronounced, "but of their merits. We must weigh them and consider

"You must do the weighing yourself," said Anne; there was still the trace of a smile at the corners of her

mouth and round the halfclosed eyes. "I won't run the risk of advising you wrongly."

"Gombauld has more talent," Mary began, "but he is less civilised than Denis." Mary's pronunciation of

"civilised" gave the word a special and additional significance. She uttered it meticulously, in the very front

of her mouth, hissing delicately on the opening sibilant. So few people were civilised, and they, like the

firstrate works of art, were mostly French. "Civilisation is most important, don't you think?"

Anne held up her hand. "I won't advise," she said. "You must make the decision."

"Gombauld's family," Mary went on reflectively, "comes from Marseilles. Rather a dangerous heredity, when

one thinks of the Latin attitude towards women. But then, I sometimes wonder whether Denis is altogether

seriousminded, whether he isn't rather a dilettante. It's very difficult. What do you think?"

Mary sighed. "Well," she said, "I think I had better go to bed and think about it."

At the door Mary turned round. "Goodnight," she said, and wondered as she said the words why Anne was

smiling in that curious way. It was probably nothing, she reflected. Anne often smiled for no apparent reason;

it was probably just a habit. "I hope I shan't dream of falling down wells again tonight," she added.

Breakfast on Sunday morning was an hour later than on weekdays, and Priscilla, who usually made no

public appearance before luncheon, honoured it by her presence. Dressed in black silk, with a ruby cross as

well as her customary string of pearls round her neck, she presided. An enormous Sunday paper concealed all

"I see Surrey has won," she said, with her mouth full, "by four wickets. The sun is in Leo: that would account

"Splendid game, cricket," remarked Mr. BarbecueSmith heartily to no one in particular; "so thoroughly

Jenny, who was sitting next to him, woke up suddenly with a start. "What?" she said. "What?"

He was beginning to explain, when Mrs. Wimbush vailed her Sunday paper, and appeared, a square,

mauvepowdered face in the midst of orange splendours. "I see there's a new series of articles on the next

world just beginning," she said to Mr. BarbecueSmith. "This one's called 'Summer Land and Gehenna.'"

"Summer Land," echoed Mr. BarbecueSmith, closing his eyes. "Summer Land. A beautiful name.

Mary had taken the seat next to Denis's. After a night of careful consideration she had decided on Denis. He

might have less talent than Gombauld, he might be a little lacking in seriousness, but somehow he was safer.

"Are you writing much poetry here in the country?" she asked, with a bright gravity.

Denis shook his head. He hated talking at breakfast, and, besides, he wanted to hear what Mr. Scogan was

"...My scheme for dealing with the Church," Mr. Scogan was saying, "is beautifully simple. At the present

time the Anglican clergy wear their collars the wrong way round. I would compel them to wear, not only their

collars, but all their clothes, turned back to franticcoat, waistcoat, trousers, bootsso that every

clergyman should present to the world a smooth facade, unbroken by stud, button, or lace. The enforcement

of such a livery would act as a wholesome deterrent to those intending to enter the Church. At the same time

it would enormously enhance, what Archbishop Laud so rightly insisted on, the 'beauty of holiness' in the few

"In hell, it seems," said Priscilla, reading in her Sunday paper, "the children amuse themselves by flaying

"Ah, but, dear lady, that's only a symbol," exclaimed Mr. BarbecueSmith, "a material symbol of a hpiritual

"Then there are military uniforms," Mr. Scogan went on. "When scarlet and pipeclay were abandoned for

khaki, there were some who trembled for the future of war. But then, finding how elegant the new tunic was,

how closely it clipped the waist, how voluptuously, with the lateral bustles of the pockets, it exaggerated the

hips; when they realized the brilliant potentialities of breeches and topboots, they were reassured. Abolish

these military elegances, standardise a uniform of sack cloth and mackintosh, you will very soon find that..."

"Is anyone coming to church with me this morning?" asked Henry Wimbush. No one responded. He baited

his bare invitation. "I read the lessons, you know. And there's Mr. Bodiham. His sermons are sometimes

"Thank you, thank you," said Mr. BarbecueSmith. "I for one prefer to worship in the infinite church of

Nature. How does our Shakespeare put it? 'Sermons in books, stones in the running brooks.'" He waved his

arm in a fine gesture towards the window, and even as he did so he became vaguely, but none the less

insistently, none the less uncomfortably aware that something had gone wrong with the quotation.

Mr. Bodiham was sitting in his study at the Rectory. The nineteenthcentury Gothic windows, narrow and

pointed, admitted the light grudgingly; in spite of the brilliant July weather, the room was sombre. Brown

varnished bookshelves lined the walls, filled with row upon row of those thick, heavy theological works

which the secondhand booksellers generally sell by weight. The mantelpiece, the overmantel, a towering

structure of spindly pillars and little shelves, were brown and varnished. The writingdesk was brown and

varnished. So were the chairs, so was the door. A dark redbrown carpet with patterns covered the floor.

In the midst of this brown gloom Mr. Bodiham sat at his desk. He was the man in the Iron Mask. A grey

metallic face with iron cheekbones and a narrow iron brow; iron folds, hard and unchanging, ran

perpendicularly down his cheeks; his nose was the iron beak of some thin, delicate bird of rapine. He had

brown eyes, set in sockets rimmed with iron; round them the skin was dark, as though it had been charred.

Dense wiry hair covered his skull; it had been black, it was turning grey. His ears were very small and fine.

His jaws, his chin, his upper lip were dark, irondark, where he had shaved. His voice, when he spoke and

especially when he raised it in preaching, was harsh, like the grating of iron hinges when a seldomused door

It was nearly halfpast twelve. He had just come back from church, hoarse and weary with preaching. He

preached with fury, with passion, an iron man beating with a flail upon the souls of his congregation. But the

souls of the faithful at Crome were made of indiarubber, solid rubber; the flail rebounded. They were used

to Mr. Bodiham at Crome. The flail thumped on india rubber, and as often as not the rubber slept.

That morning he had preached, as he had often preached before, on the nature of God. He had tried to make

them understand about God, what a fearful thing it was to fall into His hands. God they thought of

something soft and merciful. They blinded themselves to facts; still more, they blinded themselves to the

Bible. The passengers on the "Titanic" sang "Nearer my God to Thee" as the ship was going down. Did they

realise what they were asking to be brought nearer to? A white fire of righteousness, an angry fire...

When Savonarola preached, men sobbed and groaned aloud. Nothing broke the polite silence with which

Crome listened to Mr. Bodihamonly an occasional cough and sometimes the sound of heavy breathing. In

the front pew sat Henry Wimbush, calm, well bred, beautifully dressed. There were times when Mr.

Bodiham wanted to jump down from the pulpit and shake him into life, times when he would have liked to

He sat at his desk dejectedly. Outside the Gothic windows the earth was warm and marvellously calm.

Everything was as it had always been. And yet, and yet...It was nearly four years now since he had preached

that sermon on Matthew xxiv. 7: "For nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and

there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places." It was nearly four years. He had

had the sermon printed; it was so terribly, so vitally important that all the world should know what he had to

say. A copy of the little pamphlet lay on his deskeight small grey pages, printed by a fount of type that had

grown blunt, like an old dog's teeth, by the endless champing and champing of the press. He opened it and

"'For nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and

"Nineteen centuries have elapsed since Our Lord gave utterance to those words, and not a single one of them

has been without wars, plagues, famines, and earthquakes. Mighty empires have crashed in ruin to the

ground, diseases have unpeopled half the globe, there have been vast natural cataclysms in which thousands

have been overwhelmed by flood and fire and whirlwind. Time and again, in the course of these nineteen

centuries, such things have happened, but they have not brought Christ back to earth. They were 'signs of the

times' inasmuch as they were signs of God's wrath against the chronic wickedness of mankind, but they were

"If earnest Christians have regarded the present war as a true sign of the Lord's approaching return, it is not

merely because it happens to be a great war involving the lives of millions of people, not merely because

famine is tightening its grip on every country in Europe, not merely because disease of every kind, from

syphilis to spotted fever, is rife among the warring nations; no, it is not for these reasons that we regard this

war as a true Sign of the Times, but because in its origin and its progress it is marked by certain

characteristics which seem to connect it almost beyond a doubt with the predictions in Christian Prophecy

"Let me enumerate the features of the present war which most clearly suggest that it is a Sign foretelling the

near approach of the Second Advent. Our Lord said that 'this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be preached in all

the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.' Although it would be presumptuous for

us to say what degree of evangelisation will be regarded by God as sufficient, we may at least confidently

hope that a century of unflagging missionary work has brought the fulfilment of this condition at any rate

near. True, the larger number of the world's inhabitants have remained deaf to the preaching of the true

religion; but that does not vitiate the fact that the Gospel HAS been preached 'for a witness' to all unbelievers

from the Papist to the Zulu. The responsibility for the continued prevalence of unbelief lies, not with the

"Again, it has been generally recognised that 'the drying up of the waters of the great river Euphrates,'

mentioned in the sixteenth chapter of Revelation, refers to the decay and extinction of Turkish power, and is a

sign of the near approaching end of the world as we know it. The capture of Jerusalem and the successes in

Mesopotamia are great strides forward in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire; though it must be admitted

that the Gallipoli episode proved that the Turk still possesses a 'notable horn' of strength. Historically

speaking, this drying up of Ottoman power has been going on for the past century; the last two years have

witnessed a great acceleration of the process, and there can be no doubt that complete desiccation is within

"Closely following on the words concerning the drying up of Euphrates comes the prophecy of Armageddon,

that world war with which the Second Coming is to be so closely associated. Once begun, the world war can

end only with the return of Christ, and His coming will be sudden and unexpected, like that of a thief in the

"Let us examine the facts. In history, exactly as in St. John's Gospel, the world war is immediately preceded

by the drying up of Euphrates, or the decay of Turkish power. This fact alone would be enough to connect the

present conflict with the Armageddon of Revelation and therefore to point to the near approach of the Second

Advent. But further evidence of an even more solid and convincing nature can be adduced.

"Armageddon is brought about by the activities of three unclean spirits, as it were toads, which come out of

the mouths of the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet. If we can identify these three powers of evil

"The Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet can all be identified in history. Satan, who can only work

through human agency, has used these three powers in the long war against Christ which has filled the last

nineteen centuries with religious strife. The Dragon, it has been sufficiently established, is pagan Rome, and

the spirit issuing from its mouth is the spirit of Infidelity. The Beast, alternatively symbolised as a Woman, is

undoubtedly the Papal power, and Popery is the spirit which it spews forth. There is only one power which

answers to the description of the False Prophet, the wolf in sheep's clothing, the agent of the devil working in

the guise of the Lamb, and that power is the socalled 'Society of Jesus.' The spirit that issues from the mouth

"We may assume, then, that the three evil spirits are Infidelity, Popery, and False Morality. Have these three

"The spirit of Infidelity is the very spirit of German criticism. The Higher Criticism, as it is mockingly called,

denies the possibility of miracles, prediction, and real inspiration, and attempts to account for the Bible as a

natural development. Slowly but surely, during the last eighty years, the spirit of Infidelity has been robbing

the Germans of their Bible and their faith, so that Germany is today a nation of unbelievers. Higher

Criticism has thus made the war possible; for it would be absolutely impossible for any Christian nation to

"We come next to the spirit of Popery, whose influence in causing the war was quite as great as that of

Infidelity, though not, perhaps, so immediately obvious. Since the FrancoPrussian War the Papal power has

steadily declined in France, while in Germany it has steadily increased. Today France is an antipapal state,

while Germany possesses a powerful Roman Catholic minority. Two papally controlled states, Germany and

Austria, are at war with six antipapal statesEngland, France, Italy, Russia, Serbia, and Portugal. Belgium

is, of course, a thoroughly papal state, and there can be little doubt that the presence on the Allies' side of an

element so essentially hostile has done much to hamper the righteous cause and is responsible for our

comparative ill success. That the spirit of Popery is behind the war is thus seen clearly enough in the

grouping of the opposed powers, while the rebellion in the Roman Catholic parts of Ireland has merely

"The spirit of False Morality has played as great a part in this war as the two other evil spirits. The Scrap of

Paper incident is the nearest and most obvious example of Germany's adherence to this essentially unchristian

or Jesuitical morality. The end is German worldpower, and in the attainment of this end, any means are

justifiable. It is the true principle of Jesuitry applied to international politics.

"The identification is now complete. As was predicted in Revelation, the three evil spirits have gone forth just

as the decay of the Ottoman power was nearing completion, and have joined together to make the world war.

The warning, 'Behold, I come as a thief,' is therefore meant for the present periodfor you and me and all

the world. This war will lead on inevitably to the war of Armageddon, and will only be brought to an end by

"And when He returns, what will happen? Those who are in Christ, St. John tells us, will be called to the

Supper of the Lamb. Those who are found fighting against Him will be called to the Supper of the Great

Godthat grim banquet where they shall not feast, but be feasted on. 'For,' as St. John says, 'I saw an angel

standing in the sun; and he cried in a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come

and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the Great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the

flesh of captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the

flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great.' All the enemies of Christ will be slain with the

sword of him that sits upon the horse, 'and all the fowls will be filled with their flesh.' That is the Supper of

"It may be soon or it may, as men reckon time, be long; but sooner or later, inevitably, the Lord will come

and deliver the world from its present troubles. And woe unto them who are called, not to the Supper of the

Lamb, but to the Supper of the Great God. They will realise then, but too late, that God is a God of Wrath as

well as a God of Forgiveness. The God who sent bears to devour the mockers of Elisha, the God who smote

the Egyptians for their stubborn wickedness, will assuredly smite them too, unless they make haste to repent.

But perhaps it is already too late. Who knows but that tomorrow, in a moment even, Christ may be upon us

unawares, like a thief? In a little while, who knows? The angel standing in the sun may be summoning the

ravens and vultures from their crannies in the rocks to feed upon the putrefying flesh of the millions of

unrighteous whom God's wrath has destroyed. Be ready, then; the coming of the Lord is at hand. May it be

for all of you an object of hope, not a moment to look forward to with terror and trembling."

Mr. Bodiham closed the little pamphlet and leaned back in his chair. The argument was sound, absolutely

compelling; and yet it was four years since he had preached that sermon; four years, and England was at

peace, the sun shone, the people of Crome were as wicked and indifferent as evermore so, indeed, if that

were possible. If only he could understand, if the heavens would but make a sign! But his questionings

remained unanswered. Seated there in his brown varnished chair under the Ruskinian window, he could have

screamed aloud. He gripped the arms of his chair gripping, gripping for control. The knuckles of his hands

whitened; he bit his lip. In a few seconds he was able to relax the tension; he began to rebuke himself for his

Four years, he reflected; what were four years, after all? It must inevitably take a long time for Armageddon

to ripen to yeast itself up. The episode of 1914 had been a preliminary skirmish. And as for the war having

come to an endwhy, that, of course, was illusory. It was still going on, smouldering away in Silesia, in

Ireland, in Anatolia; the discontent in Egypt and India was preparing the way, perhaps, for a great extension

of the slaughter among the heathen peoples. The Chinese boycott of Japan, and the rivalries of that country

and America in the Pacific, might be breeding a great new war in the East. The prospect, Mr. Bodiham tried

to assure himself, was hopeful; the real, the genuine Armageddon might soon begin, and then, like a thief in

the night...But, in spite of all his comfortable reasoning, he remained unhappy, dissatisfied. Four years ago he

had been so confident; God's intention seemed then so plain. And now? Now, he did well to be angry. And

Sudden and silent as a phantom Mrs. Bodiham appeared, gliding noiselessly across the room. Above her

black dress her face was pale with an opaque whiteness, her eyes were pale as water in a glass, and her strawy

The envelope was unsealed. Mechanically Mr. Bodiham tore it open. It contained a pamphlet, larger than his

own and more elegant in appearance. "The House of Sheeny, Clerical Outfitters, Birmingham." He turned

over the pages. The catalogue was tastefully and ecclesiastically printed in antique characters with

illuminated Gothic initials. Red marginal lines, crossed at the corners after the manner of an Oxford picture

frame, enclosed each page of type, little red crosses took the place of full stops. Mr. Bodiham turned the

Clerical frock coats. From nine guineas. A dressy garment, tailored by our own experienced ecclesiastical

Halftone illustrations represented young curates, some dapper, some Rugbeian and muscular, some with

ascetic faces and large ecstatic eyes, dressed in jackets, in frockcoats, in surplices, in clerical evening dress,

Sheeny's Special Skirt Cassocks. Tied by a string about the waist...When worn under a surplice presents an

appearance indistinguishable from that of a complete cassock...Recommended for summer wear and hot

With a gesture of horror and disgust Mr. Bodiham threw the catalogue into the wastepaper basket. Mrs.

Bodiham looked at him; her pale, glaucous eyes reflected his action without comment.

"The village," she said in her quiet voice, "the village grows worse and worse every day."

"I'll tell you." She pulled up a brown varnished chair and sat down. In the village of Crome, it seemed,

Denis did not dance, but when ragtime came squirting out of the pianola in gushes of treacle and hot perfume,

in jets of Bengal light, then things began to dance inside him. Little black nigger corpuscles jigged and

drummed in his arteries. He became a cage of movement, a walking palais de danse. It was very

uncomfortable, like the preliminary symptoms of a disease. He sat in one of the windowseats, glumly

At the pianola, Henry Wimbush, smoking a long cigar through a tunnelled pillar of amber, trod out the

shattering dance music with serene patience. Locked together, Gombauld and Anne moved with a

harmoniousness that made them seem a single creature, two headed and fourlegged. Mr. Scogan, solemnly

buffoonish, shuffled round the room with Mary. Jenny sat in the shadow behind the piano, scribbling, so it

seemed, in a big red notebook. In armchairs by the fireplace, Priscilla and Mr. BarbecueSmith discussed

higher things, without, apparently, being disturbed by the noise on the Lower Plane.

"Optimism," said Mr. BarbecueSmith with a tone of finality, speaking through strains of the "Wild, Wild

Women""optimism is the opening out of the soul towards the light; it is an expansion towards and into

"Pessimism, on the other hand, is the contraction of the soul towards darkness; it is a focusing of the self

upon a point in the Lower Plane; it is a hpiritual slavery to mere facts; to gross physical phenomena."

"They're making a wild man of me." The refrain sang itself over in Denis's mind. Yes, they were; damn them!

A wild man, but not wild enough; that was the trouble. Wild inside; raging, writhingyes, "writhing" was

the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardlybaa, baa, baa.

There they were, Anne and Gombauld, moving together as though they were a single supple creature. The

beast with two backs. And he sat in a corner, pretending to read, pretending he didn't want to dance,

Why was he born with a different face? Why WAS he? Gombauld had a face of brassone of those old,

brazen rams that thumped against the walls of cities till they fell. He was born with a different facea

The music stopped. The single harmonious creature broke in two. Flushed, a little breathless, Anne swayed

"A waltz," he repeated, and turned to the cabinet where the rolls were kept. He trod off the old roll and trod

on the new, a slave at the mill, uncomplaining and beautifully well bred. "Rum; Tum; Rumtiti;

Tumtiti..." The melody wallowed oozily along, like a ship moving forward over a sleek and oily swell. The

four legged creature, more graceful, more harmonious in its movements than ever, slid across the floor. Oh,

He looked up, startled. It was Mary. She had broken from the uncomfortable embrace of Mr. Scogan, who

"I don't know," said Denis truthfully. He looked at the title page; the book was called "The Stock Breeder's

"I think you are so sensible to sit and read quietly," said Mary, fixing him with her china eyes. "I don't know

Denis made no reply; she exacerbated him. From the armchair by the fireplace he heard Priscilla's deep

"Tell me, Mr BarbecueSmithyou know all about science, I know" A deprecating noise came from Mr.

BarbecueSmith's chair. "This Einstein theory. It seems to upset the whole starry universe. It makes me so

Mary renewed her attack. "Which of the contemporary poets do you like best?" she asked. Denis was filled

with fury. Why couldn't this pest of a girl leave him alone? He wanted to listen to the horrible music, to

watch them dancingoh, with what grace, as though they had been made for one another!to savour his

misery in peace. And she came and put him through this absurd catechism! She was like "Mangold's

Questions": "What are the three diseases of wheat?""Which of the contemporary poets do you like best?"

"Blight, Mildew, and Smut," he replied, with the laconism of one who is absolutely certain of his own mind.

It was several hours before Denis managed to go to sleep that night. Vague but agonising miseries possessed

his mind. It was not only Anne who made him miserable; he was wretched about himself, the future, life in

general, the universe. "This adolescence business," he repeated to himself every now and then, "is horribly

After kicking all the clothes off the bed, he got up and sought relief in composition. He wanted to imprison

his nameless misery in words. At the end of an hour, nine more or less complete lines emerged from among

"I do not know what I desire When summer nights are dark and still, When the wind's manyvoiced quire

Sleeps among the muffled branches. I long and know not what I will: And not a sound of life or laughter

stanches Time's black and silent flow. I do not know what I desire, I do not know."

He read it through aloud; then threw the scribbled sheet into the wastepaper basket and got into bed again.

Mr. BarbecueSmith was gone. The motor had whirled him away to the station; a faint smell of burning oil

commemorated his recent departure. A considerable detachment had come into the courtyard to speed him on

his way; and now they were walking back, round the side of the house, towards the terrace and the garden.

They walked in silence; nobody had yet ventured to comment on the departed guest.

It was left for Henry Wimbush to make a pronouncement. "A very agreeable adjunct to the weekend," he

They had descended, without paying much attention where they were going, the steep yewwalk that went

down, under the flank of the terrace, to the pool. The house towered above them, immensely tall, with the

whole height of the builtup terrace added to its own seventy feet of brick facade. The perpendicular lines of

the three towers soared up, uninterrupted, enhancing the impression of height until it became overwhelming.

"The man who built this house knew his business," said Denis. "He was an architect."

"Was he?" said Henry Wimbush reflectively. "I doubt it. The builder of this house was Sir Ferdinando Lapith,

who flourished during the reign of Elizabeth. He inherited the estate from his father, to whom it had been

granted at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries; for Crome was originally a cloister of monks and

this swimmingpool their fishpond. Sir Ferdinando was not content merely to adapt the old monastic

buildings to his own purposes; but using them as a stone quarry for his barns and byres and outhouses, he

He waved his hand in the direction of the house and was silent. severe, imposing, almost menacing, Crome

"The great thing about Crome," said Mr. Scogan, seizing the opportunity to speak, "is the fact that it's so

unmistakably and aggressively a work of art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and rebels

against it. It has no likeness to Shelley's tower, in the 'Epipsychidion,' which, if I remember rightly

"'Seems not now a work of human art, But as it were titanic, in the heart Of earth having assumed its form

and grown Out of the mountain, from the living stone, Lifting itself in caverns light and high.'

No, no, there isn't any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the hovels of the peasantry should look as

though they had grown out of the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and suitable.

But the house of an intelligent, civilised, and sophisticated man should never seem to have sprouted from the

clods. It should rather be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish life. Since the

days of William Morris that's a fact which we in England have been unable to comprehend. Civilised and

sophisticated men have solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts, cottage

architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows,

studiedly quaint imitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance, and a limited range of

materials produced the hovel, which possesses undoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own 'as it were

titanic' charm. We now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich variety of materials for the

purpose of building millions of imitation hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go

Henry Wimbush took up the thread of his interrupted discourse. "All that you say, my dear Scogan," he

began, "is certainly very just, very true. But whether Sir Ferdinando shared your views about architecture or

if, indeed, he had any views about architecture at all, I very much doubt. In building this house, Sir

Ferdinando was, as a matter of fact, preoccupied by only one thoughtthe proper placing of his privies.

Sanitation was the one great interest of his life. In 1573 he even published, on this subject, a little booknow

extremely scarcecalled, 'Certaine Priuy Counsels' by 'One of Her Maiestie's Most Honourable Priuy

Counsels, F.L. Knight', in which the whole matter is treated with great learning and elegance. His guiding

principle in arranging the sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance should

separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it followed inevitably that the privies were to be

placed at the top of the house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the ground. It must

not be thought that Sir Ferdinando was moved only by material and merely sanitary considerations; for the

placing of his privies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritual reasons. For, he argues in

the third chapter of his 'Priuy Counsels', the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them

we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe. To counteract these degrading effects he

advised that the privy should be in every house the room nearest to heaven, that it should be well provided

with windows commanding an extensive and noble prospect, and that the walls of the chamber should be

lined with bookshelves containing all the ripest products of human wisdom, such as the Proverbs of Solomon,

Boethius's 'Consolations of Philosophy', the apophthegms of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the 'Enchiridion'

of Erasmus, and all other works, ancient or modern, which testify to the nobility of the human soul. In Crome

he was able to put his theories into practice. At the top of each of the three projecting towers he placed a

privy. From these a shaft went down the whole height of the house, that is to say, more than seventy feet,

through the cellars, and into a series of conduits provided with flowing water tunnelled in the ground on a

level with the base of the raised terrace. These conduits emptied themselves into the stream several hundred

yards below the fish pond. The total depth of the shafts from the top of the towers to their subterranean

conduits was a hundred and two feet. The eighteenth century, with its passion for modernisation, swept away

these monuments of sanitary ingenuity. Were it not for tradition and the explicit account of them left by Sir

Ferdinando, we should be unaware that these noble privies had ever existed. We should even suppose that Sir

Ferdinando built his house after this strange and splendid model for merely aesthetic reasons."

The contemplation of the glories of the past always evoked in Henry Wimbush a certain enthusiasm. Under

the grey bowler his face worked and glowed as he spoke. The thought of these vanished privies moved him

profoundly. He ceased to speak; the light gradually died out of his face, and it became once more the replica

of the grave, polite hat which shaded it. There was a long silence; the same gently melancholy thoughts

seemed to possess the mind of each of them. Permanence, transienceSir Ferdinando and his privies were

gone, Crome still stood. How brightly the sun shone and how inevitable was death! The ways of God were

"It does one's heart good," exclaimed Mr. Scogan at last, "to hear of these fantastic English aristocrats. To

have a theory about privies and to build an immense and splendid house in order to put it into practiseit's

magnificent, beautiful! I like to think of them all: the eccentric milords rolling across Europe in ponderous

carriages, bound on extraordinary errands. One is going to Venice to buy La Bianchi's larynx; he won't get it

till she's dead, of course, but no matter; he's prepared to wait; he has a collection, pickled in glass bottles, of

the throats of famous opera singers. And the instruments of renowned virtuosi he goes in for them too; he

will try to bribe Paganini to part with his little Guarnerio, but he has small hope of success. Paganini won't

sell his fiddle; but perhaps he might sacrifice one of his guitars. Others are bound on crusadesone to die

miserably among the savage Greeks, another, in his white top hat, to lead Italians against their oppressors.

Others have no business at all; they are just giving their oddity a continental airing. At home they cultivate

themselves at leisure and with greater elaboration. Beckford builds towers, Portland digs holes in the ground,

Cavendish, the millionaire, lives in a stable, eats nothing but mutton, and amuses himselfoh, solely for his

private delectationby anticipating the electrical discoveries of half a century. Glorious eccentrics! Every

age is enlivened by their presence. Some day, my dear Denis," said Mr Scogan, turning a beady bright regard

in his direction"some day you must become their biographer'The Lives of Queer Men.' What a subject!

Mr. Scogan paused, looked up once more at the towering house, then murmured the word "Eccentricity," two

"Eccentricity...It's the justification of all aristocracies. It justifies leisured classes and inherited wealth and

privilege and endowments and all the other injustices of that sort. If you're to do anything reasonable in this

world, you must have a class of people who are secure, safe from public opinion, safe from poverty, leisured,

not compelled to waste their time in the imbecile routines that go by the name of Honest Work. You must

have a class of which the members can think and, within the obvious limits, do what they please. You must

have a class in which people who have eccentricities can indulge them and in which eccentricity in general

will be tolerated and understood. That's the important thing about an aristocracy. Not only is it eccentric

itselfoften grandiosely so; it also tolerates and even encourages eccentricity in others. The eccentricities of

the artist and the newfangled thinker don't inspire it with that fear, loathing, and disgust which the burgesses

instinctively feel towards them. It is a sort of Red Indian Reservation planted in the midst of a vast horde of

Poor Whitescolonials at that. Within its boundaries wild men disport themselvesoften, it must be

admitted, a little grossly, a little too flamboyantly; and when kindred spirits are born outside the pale it offers

them some sort of refuge from the hatred which the Poor Whites, en bons bourgeois, lavish on anything that

is wild or out of the ordinary. After the social revolution there will be no Reservations; the Redskins will be

drowned in the great sea of Poor Whites. What then? Will they suffer you to go on writing villanelles, my

good Denis? Will you, unhappy Henry, be allowed to live in this house of the splendid privies, to continue

"You may rest assured," Mr. Scogan replied, "that I shall not. I shall have some Honest Work to do."

Blight, Mildew, and Smut..." Mary was puzzled and distressed. Perhaps her ears had played her false.

Perhaps what he had really said was, "Squire, Binyon, and Shanks," or "Childe, Blunden, and Earp," or even

"Abercrombie, Drinkwater, and Rabindranath Tagore." Perhaps. But then her ears never did play her false.

"Blight, Mildew, and Smut." The impression was distinct and ineffaceable. "Blight, Mildew..." she was

forced to the conclusion, reluctantly, that Denis had indeed pronounced those improbable words. He had

deliberately repelled her attempts to open a serious discussion. That was horrible. A man who would not talk

seriously to a woman just because she was a womanoh, impossible! Egeria or nothing. Perhaps Gombauld

would be more satisfactory. True, his meridional heredity was a little disquieting; but at least he was a serious

worker, and it was with his work that she would associate herself. And Denis? After all, what WAS Denis? A

Gombauld had annexed for his paintingroom a little disused granary that stood by itself in a green close

beyond the farm yard. It was a square brick building with a peaked roof and little windows set high up in

each of its walls. A ladder of four rungs led up to the door; for the granary was perched above the ground,

and out of reach of the rats, on four massive toadstools of grey stone. Within, there lingered a faint smell of

dust and cobwebs; and the narrow shaft of sunlight that came slanting in at every hour of the day through one

of the little windows was always alive with silvery motes. Here Gombauld worked, with a kind of

concentrated ferocity, during six or seven hours of each day. He was pursuing something new, something

During the last eight years, nearly half of which had been spent in the process of winning the war, he had

worked his way industriously through cubism. Now he had come out on the other side. He had begun by

painting a formalised nature; then, little by little, he had risen from nature into the world of pure form, till in

the end he was painting nothing but his own thoughts, externalised in the abstract geometrical forms of the

mind's devising. He found the process arduous and exhilarating. And then, quite suddenly, he grew

dissatisfied; he felt himself cramped and confined within intolerably narrow limitations. He was humiliated to

find how few and crude and uninteresting were the forms he could invent; the inventions of nature were

without number, inconceivably subtle and elaborate. He had done with cubism. He was out on the other side.

But the cubist discipline preserved him from falling into excesses of nature worship. He took from nature its

rich, subtle, elaborate forms, but his aim was always to work them into a whole that should have the thrilling

simplicity and formality of an idea; to combine prodigious realism with prodigious simplification. Memories

of Caravaggio's portentous achievements haunted him. Forms of a breathing, living reality emerged from

darkness, built themselves up into compositions as luminously simple and single as a mathematical idea. He

thought of the "Call of Matthew," of "Peter Crucified," of the "Lute players," of "Magdalen." He had the

secret, that astonishing ruffian, he had the secret! And now Gombauld was after it, in hot pursuit. Yes, it

For a long time an idea had been stirring and spreading, yeastily, in his mind. He had made a portfolio full of

studies, he had drawn a cartoon; and now the idea was taking shape on canvas. A man fallen from a horse.

The huge animal, a gaunt white carthorse, filled the upper half of the picture with its great body. Its head,

lowered towards the ground, was in shadow; the immense bony body was what arrested the eye, the body and

the legs, which came down on either side of the picture like the pillars of an arch. On the ground, between the

legs of the towering beast, lay the foreshortened figure of a man, the head in the extreme foreground, the

arms flung wide to right and left. A white, relentless light poured down from a point in the right foreground.

The beast, the fallen man, were sharply illuminated; round them, beyond and behind them, was the night.

They were alone in the darkness, a universe in themselves. The horse's body filled the upper part of the

picture; the legs, the great hoofs, frozen to stillness in the midst of their trampling, limited it on either side.

And beneath lay the man, his foreshortened face at the focal point in the centre, his arms outstretched towards

the sides of the picture. Under the arch of the horse's belly, between his legs, the eye looked through into an

intense darkness; below, the space was closed in by the figure of the prostrate man. A central gulf of darkness

The picture was more than half finished. Gombauld had been at work all the morning on the figure of the

man, and now he was taking a restthe time to smoke a cigarette. Tilting back his chair till it touched the

wall, he looked thoughtfully at his canvas. He was pleased, and at the same time he was desolated. In itself,

the thing was good; he knew it. But that something he was after, that something that would be so terrific if

Three little tapsrat, tat, tat! Surprised, Gombauld turned his eyes towards the door. Nobody ever disturbed

him while he was at work; it was one of the unwritten laws. "Come in!" he called. The door, which was ajar,

swung open, revealing, from the waist upwards, the form of Mary. She had only dared to mount halfway up

the ladder. If he didn't want her, retreat would be easier and more dignified than if she climbed to the top.

She skipped up the remaining two rungs and was over the threshold in an instant. "A letter came for you by

the second post," she said. "I thought it might be important, so I brought it out to you." Her eyes, her childish

face were luminously candid as she handed him the letter. There had never been a flimsier pretext.

Gombauld looked at the envelope and put it in his pocket unopened. "Luckily," he said, "it isn't at all

There was a silence; Mary felt a little uncomfortable. "May I have a look at what you've been painting?" she

Gombauld had only half smoked his cigarette; in any case he wouldn't begin work again till he had finished.

He would give her the five minutes that separated him from the bitter end. "This is the best place to see it

Mary looked at the picture for some time without saying anything. Indeed, she didn't know what to say; she

was taken aback, she was at a loss. She had expected a cubist masterpiece, and here was a picture of a man

and a horse, not only recognisable as such, but even aggressively in drawing. Trompel'oeilthere was no

other word to describe the delineation of that foreshortened figure under the trampling feet of the horse. What

was she to think, what was she to say? Her orientations were gone. One could admire representationalism in

the Old Masters. Obviously. But in a modern...? At eighteen she might have done so. But now, after five

years of schooling among the best judges, her instinctive reaction to a contemporary piece of representation

was contemptan outburst of laughing disparagement. What could Gombauld be up to? She had felt so safe

in admiring his work before. But nowshe didn't know what to think. It was very difficult, very difficult.

"There's rather a lot of chiaroscuro, isn't there?" she ventured at last, and inwardly congratulated herself on

Mary was pleased; he accepted her criticism; it was a serious discussion. She put her head on one side and

screwed up her eyes. "I think it's awfully fine," she said. "But of course it's a little too...too...trompel'oeil for

my taste." She looked at Gombauld, who made no response, but continued to smoke, gazing meditatively all

the time at his picture. Mary went on gaspingly. "When I was in Paris this spring I saw a lot of Tschuplitski. I

admire his work so tremendously. Of course, it's frightfully abstract nowfrightfully abstract and frightfully

intellectual. He just throws a few oblongs on to his canvasquite flat, you know, and painted in pure

primary colours. But his design is wonderful. He's getting more and more abstract every day. He'd given up

the third dimension when I was there and was just thinking of giving up the second. Soon, he says, there'll be

just the blank canvas. That's the logical conclusion. Complete abstraction. Painting's finished; he's finishing

it. When he's reached pure abstraction he's going to take up architecture. He says it's more intellectual than

Gombauld dropped his cigarette end and trod on it. "Tschuplitski's finished painting," he said. "I've finished

my cigarette. But I'm going on painting." And, advancing towards her, he put his arm round her shoulders

Mary looked up at him; her hair swung back, a soundless bell of gold. Her eyes were serene; she smiled. So

the moment had come. His arm was round her. He moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, and she moved with

him. It was a peripatetic embracement. "Do you agree with him?" she repeated. The moment might have

"I don't know. I shall have to think about it." Gombauld loosened his embrace, his hand dropped from her

Mary looked round, startled. They were in front of the open door. She remained standing there for a moment

in bewilderment. The hand that had rested on her shoulder made itself felt lower down her back; it

administered three or four kindly little smacks. Replying automatically to its stimulus, she moved forward.

She was careful. The door closed behind her and she was alone in the little green close. She walked slowly

Henry Wimbush brought down with him to dinner a budget of printed sheets loosely bound together in a

"Today," he said, exhibiting it with a certain solemnity, "to day I have finished the printing of my 'History

"The famous History?" cried Anne. The writing and the printing of this Magnum Opus had been going on as

long as she could remember. All her childhood long Uncle Henry's History had been a vague and fabulous

"It has taken me nearly thirty years," said Mr. Wimbush. "Twentyfive years of writing and nearly four of

printing. And now it's finishedthe whole chronicle, from Sir Ferdinando Lapith's birth to the death of my

father William Wimbushmore than three centuries and a half: a history of Crome, written at Crome, and

Mr. Wimbush nodded. "Certainly," he said. "And I hope you will not find it uninteresting," he added

modestly. "Our muniment room is particularly rich in ancient records, and I have some genuinely new light to

"And the people?" asked Gombauld. "Sir Ferdinando and the rest of themwere they amusing? Were there

"Let me see," Henry Wimbush rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I can only think of two suicides, one violent

death, four or perhaps five broken hearts, and half a dozen little blots on the scutcheon in the way of

misalliances, seductions, natural children, and the like. No, on the whole, it's a placid and uneventful record."

"The Wimbushes and the Lapiths were always an unadventurous, respectable crew," said Priscilla, with a

note of scorn in her voice. "If I were to write my family history now! Why, it would be one long continuous

blot from beginning to end." She laughed jovially, and helped herself to another glass of wine.

"If I were to write mine," Mr. Scogan remarked, "it wouldn't exist. After the second generation we Scogans

"After dinner," said Henry Wimbush, a little piqued by his wife's disparaging comment on the masters of

Crome, "I'll read you an episode from my History that will make you admit that even the Lapiths, in their

"Glad to hear what?" asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private interior world like a cuckoo from a

clock. She received an explanation, smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last "I see," and popped back, clapping shut

"Now," said Henry Wimbush, pulling up a chair to the lamp. He put on his round pincenez, rimmed with

tortoiseshell, and began cautiously to turn over the pages of his loose and still fragmentary book. He found

In the midst of an attentive silence Mr. Wimbush gave a little preliminary cough and started to read.

"The infant who was destined to become the fourth baronet of the name of Lapith was born in the year 1740.

He was a very small baby, weighing not more than three pounds at birth, but from the first he was sturdy and

healthy. In honour of his maternal grandfather, Sir Hercules Occam of Bishop's Occam, he was christened

Hercules. His mother, like many other mothers, kept a notebook, in which his progress from month to month

was recorded. He walked at ten months, and before his second year was out he had learnt to speak a number

of words. At three years he weighed but twentyfour pounds, and at six, though he could read and write

perfectly and showed a remarkable aptitude for music, he was no larger and heavier than a wellgrown child

of two. Meanwhile, his mother had borne two other children, a boy and a girl, one of whom died of croup

during infancy, while the other was carried off by smallpox before it reached the age of five. Hercules

"On his twelfth birthday Hercules was still only three feet and two inches in height. His head, which was very

handsome and nobly shaped, was too big for his body, but otherwise he was exquisitely proportioned, and,

for his size, of great strength and agility. His parents, in the hope of making him grow, consulted all the most

eminent physicians of the time. Their various prescriptions were followed to the letter, but in vain. One

ordered a very plentiful meat diet; another exercise; a third constructed a little rack, modelled on those

employed by the Holy Inquisition, on which young Hercules was stretched, with excruciating torments, for

half an hour every morning and evening. In the course of the next three years Hercules gained perhaps two

inches. After that his growth stopped completely, and he remained for the rest of his life a pigmy of three feet

and four inches. His father, who had built the most extravagant hopes upon his son, planning for him in his

imagination a military career equal to that of Marlborough, found himself a disappointed man. 'I have brought

an abortion into the world,' he would say, and he took so violent a dislike to his son that the boy dared

scarcely come into his presence. His temper, which had been serene, was turned by disappointment to

moroseness and savagery. He avoided all company (being, as he said, ashamed to show himself, the father of

a lusus naturae, among normal, healthy human beings), and took to solitary drinking, which carried him very

rapidly to his grave; for the year before Hercules came of age his father was taken off by an apoplexy. His

mother, whose love for him had increased with the growth of his father's unkindness, did not long survive,

but little more than a year after her husband's death succumbed, after eating two dozen of oysters, to an attack

"Hercules thus found himself at the age of twentyone alone in the world, and master of a considerable

fortune, including the estate and mansion of Crome. The beauty and intelligence of his childhood had

survived into his manly age, and, but for his dwarfish stature, he would have taken his place among the

handsomest and most accomplished young men of his time. He was well read in the Greek and Latin authors,

as well as in all the moderns of any merit who had written in English, French, or Italian. He had a good ear

for music, and was no indifferent performer on the violin, which he used to play like a bass viol, seated on a

chair with the instrument between his legs. To the music of the harpsichord and clavichord he was extremely

partial, but the smallness of his hands made it impossible for him ever to perform upon these instruments. He

had a small ivory flute made for him, on which, whenever he was melancholy, he used to play a simple

country air or jig, affirming that this rustic music had more power to clear and raise the spirits than the most

artificial productions of the masters. From an early age he practised the composition of poetry, but, though

conscious of his great powers in this art, he would never publish any specimen of his writing. 'My stature,' he

would say, 'is reflected in my verses; if the public were to read them it would not be because I am a poet, but

because I am a dwarf.' Several MS. books of Sir Hercules's poems survive. A single specimen will suffice to

"'In ancient days, while yet the world was young, Ere Abram fed his flocks or Homer sung; When blacksmith

Tubal tamed creative fire, And Jabal dwelt in tents and Jubal struck the lyre; Flesh grown corrupt brought

forth a monstrous birth And obscene giants trod the shrinking earth, Till God, impatient of their sinful brood,

Gave rein to wrath and drown'd them in the Flood. Teeming again, repeopled Tellus bore The lubber Hero

and the Man of War; Huge towers of Brawn, topp'd with an empty Skull, Witlessly bold, heroically dull.

Long ages pass'd and Man grown more refin'd, Slighter in muscle but of vaster Mind, Smiled at his

grandsire's broadsword, bow and bill, And learn'd to wield the Pencil and the Quill. The glowing canvas and

the written page Immortaliz'd his name from age to age, His name emblazon'd on Fame's temple wall; For Art

grew great as Humankind grew small. Thus man's long progress step by step we trace; The Giant dies, the

hero takes his place; The Giant vile, the dull heroic Block: At one we shudder and at one we mock. Man last

appears. In him the Soul's pure flame Burns brightlier in a not inord'nate frame. Of old when Heroes fought

and Giants swarmed, Men were huge mounds of matter scarce inform'd; Wearied by leavening so vast a

mass, The spirit slept and all the mind was crass. The smaller carcase of these later days Is soon inform'd; the

Soul unwearied plays And like a Pharos darts abroad her mental rays. But can we think that Providence will

stay Man's footsteps here upon the upward way? Mankind in understanding and in grace Advanc'd so far

beyond the Giants' race? Hence impious thought! Still led by GOD'S own Hand, Mankind proceeds towards

the Promised Land. A time will come (prophetic, I descry Remoter dawns along the gloomy sky), When

happy mortals of a Golden Age Will backward turn the dark historic page, And in our vaunted race of Men

behold A form as gross, a Mind as dead and cold, As we in Giants see, in warriors of old. A time will come,

wherein the soul shall be From all superfluous matter wholly free; When the light body, agile as a fawn's,

Shall sport with grace along the velvet lawns. Nature's most delicate and final birth, Mankind perfected shall

possess the earth. But ah, not yet! For still the Giants' race, Huge, though diminish'd, tramps the Earth's fair

face; Gross and repulsive, yet perversely proud, Men of their imperfections boast aloud. Vain of their bulk, of

all they still retain Of giant ugliness absurdly vain; At all that's small they point their stupid scorn And,

monsters, think themselves divinely born. Sad is the Fate of those, ah, sad indeed, The rare precursors of the

nobler breed! Who come man's golden glory to foretell, But pointing Heav'nwards live themselves in Hell.'

"As soon as he came into the estate, Sir Hercules set about remodelling his household. For though by no

means ashamed of his deformityindeed, if we may judge from the poem quoted above, he regarded himself

as being in many ways superior to the ordinary race of manhe found the presence of fullgrown men and

women embarrassing. Realising, too, that he must abandon all ambitions in the great world, he determined to

retire absolutely from it and to create, as it were, at Crome a private world of his own, in which all should be

proportionable to himself. Accordingly, he discharged all the old servants of the house and replaced them

gradually, as he was able to find suitable successors, by others of dwarfish stature. In the course of a few

years he had assembled about himself a numerous household, no member of which was above four feet high

and the smallest among them scarcely two feet and six inches. His father's dogs, such as setters, mastiffs,

greyhounds, and a pack of beagles, he sold or gave away as too large and too boisterous for his house,

replacing them by pugs and King Charles spaniels and whatever other breeds of dog were the smallest. His

father's stable was also sold. For his own use, whether riding or driving, he had six black Shetland ponies,

"Having thus settled his household entirely to his own satisfaction, it only remained for him to find some

suitable companion with whom to share his paradise. Sir Hercules had a susceptible heart, and had more than

once, between the ages of sixteen and twenty, felt what it was to love. But here his deformity had been a

source of the most bitter humiliation, for, having once dared to declare himself to a young lady of his choice,

he had been received with laughter. On his persisting, she had picked him up and shaken him like an

importunate child, telling him to run away and plague her no more. The story soon got aboutindeed, the

young lady herself used to tell it as a particularly pleasant anecdoteand the taunts and mockery it

occasioned were a source of the most acute distress to Hercules. From the poems written at this period we

gather that he meditated taking his own life. In course of time, however, he lived down this humiliation; but

never again, though he often fell in love, and that very passionately, did he dare to make any advances to

those in whom he was interested. After coming to the estate and finding that he was in a position to create his

own world as he desired it, he saw that, if he was to have a wifewhich he very much desired, being of an

affectionate and, indeed, amorous temperhe must choose her as he had chosen his servantsfrom among

the race of dwarfs. But to find a suitable wife was, he found, a matter of some difficulty; for he would marry

none who was not distinguished by beauty and gentle birth. The dwarfish daughter of Lord Bemboro he

refused on the ground that besides being a pigmy she was hunchbacked; while another young lady, an orphan

belonging to a very good family in Hampshire, was rejected by him because her face, like that of so many

dwarfs, was wizened and repulsive. Finally, when he was almost despairing of success, he heard from a

reliable source that Count Titimalo, a Venetian nobleman, possessed a daughter of exquisite beauty and great

accomplishments, who was by three feet in height. Setting out at once for Venice, he went immediately on his

arrival to pay his respects to the count, whom he found living with his wife and five children in a very mean

apartment in one of the poorer quarters of the town. Indeed, the count was so far reduced in his circumstances

that he was even then negotiating (so it was rumoured) with a travelling company of clowns and acrobats,

who had had the misfortune to lose their performing dwarf, for the sale of his diminutive daughter Filomena.

Sir Hercules arrived in time to save her from this untoward fate, for he was so much charmed by Filomena's

grace and beauty, that at the end of three days' courtship he made her a formal offer of marriage, which was

accepted by her no less joyfully than by her father, who perceived in an English soninlaw a rich and

unfailing source of revenue. After an unostentatious marriage, at which the English ambassador acted as one

of the witnesses, Sir Hercules and his bride returned by sea to England, where they settled down, as it proved,

"Crome and its household of dwarfs delighted Filomena, who felt herself now for the first time to be a free

woman living among her equals in a friendly world. She had many tastes in common with her husband,

especially that of music. She had a beautiful voice, of a power surprising in one so small, and could touch A

in alt without effort. Accompanied by her husband on his fine Cremona fiddle, which he played, as we have

noted before, as one plays a bass viol, she would sing all the liveliest and tenderest airs from the operas and

cantatas of her native country. Seated together at the harpsichord, they found that they could with their four

hands play all the music written for two hands of ordinary size, a circumstance which gave Sir Hercules

"When they were not making music or reading together, which they often did, both in English and Italian,

they spent their time in healthful outdoor exercises, sometimes rowing in a little boat on the lake, but more

often riding or driving, occupations in which, because they were entirely new to her, Filomena especially

delighted. When she had become a perfectly proficient rider, Filomena and her husband used often to go

hunting in the park, at that time very much more extensive than it is now. They hunted not foxes nor hares,

but rabbits, using a pack of about thirty black and fawncoloured pugs, a kind of dog which, when not

overfed, can course a rabbit as well as any of the smaller breeds. Four dwarf grooms, dressed in scarlet

liveries and mounted on white Exmoor ponies, hunted the pack, while their master and mistress, in green

habits, followed either on the black Shetlands or on the piebald New Forest ponies. A picture of the whole

huntdogs, horses, grooms, and masterswas painted by William Stubbs, whose work Sir Hercules

admired so much that he invited him, though a man of ordinary stature, to come and stay at the mansion for

the purpose of executing this picture. Stubbs likewise painted a portrait of Sir Hercules and his lady driving

in their green enamelled calash drawn by four black Shetlands. Sir Hercules wears a plumcoloured velvet

coat and white breeches; Filomena is dressed in flowered muslin and a very large hat with pink feathers. The

two figures in their gay carriage stand out sharply against a dark background of trees; but to the left of the

picture the trees fall away and disappear, so that the four black ponies are seen against a pale and strangely

lurid sky that has the goldenbrown colour of thunder clouds lighted up by the sun.

"In this way four years passed happily by. At the end of that time Filomena found herself great with child. Sir

Hercules was overjoyed. 'If God is good,' he wrote in his daybook, 'the name of Lapith will be preserved

and our rarer and more delicate race transmitted through the generations until in the fullness of time the world

shall recognise the superiority of those beings whom now it uses to make mock of.' On his wife's being

brought to bed of a son he wrote a poem to the same effect. The child was christened Ferdinando in memory

"With the passage of the months a certain sense of disquiet began to invade the minds of Sir Hercules and his

lady. For the child was growing with an extraordinary rapidity. At a year he weighed as much as Hercules

had weighed when he was three. 'Ferdinando goes crescendo,' wrote Filomena in her diary. 'It seems not

natural.' At eighteen months the baby was almost as tall as their smallest jockey, who was a man of

thirtysix. Could it be that Ferdinando was destined to become a man of the normal, gigantic dimensions? It

was a thought to which neither of his parents dared yet give open utterance, but in the secrecy of their

"On his third birthday Ferdinando was taller than his mother and not more than a couple of inches short of his

father's height. 'Today for the first time' wrote Sir Hercules, 'we discussed the situation. The hideous truth

can be concealed no longer: Ferdinando is not one of us. On this, his third birthday, a day when we should

have been rejoicing at the health, the strength, and beauty of our child, we wept together over the ruin of our

"At the age of eight Ferdinando was so large and so exuberantly healthy that his parents decided, though

reluctantly, to send him to school. He was packed off to Eton at the beginning of the next half. A profound

peace settled upon the house. Ferdinando returned for the summer holidays larger and stronger than ever. One

day he knocked down the butler and broke his arm. 'He is rough, inconsiderate, unamenable to persuasion,'

wrote his father. 'The only thing that will teach him manners is corporal chastisement.' Ferdinando, who at

this age was already seventeen inches taller than his father, received no corporal chastisement.

"One summer holidays about three years later Ferdinando returned to Crome accompanied by a very large

mastiff dog. He had bought it from an old man at Windsor who had found the beast too expensive to feed. It

was a savage, unreliable animal; hardly had it entered the house when it attacked one of Sir Hercules's

favourite pugs, seizing the creature in its jaws and shaking it till it was nearly dead. Extremely put out by this

occurrence, Sir Hercules ordered that the beast should be chained up in the stableyard. Ferdinando sullenly

answered that the dog was his, and he would keep it where he pleased. His father, growing angry, bade him

take the animal out of the house at once, on pain of his utmost displeasure. Ferdinando refused to move. His

mother at this moment coming into the room, the dog flew at her, knocked her down, and in a twinkling had

very severely mauled her arm and shoulder; in another instant it must infallibly have had her by the throat,

had not Sir Hercules drawn his sword and stabbed the animal to the heart. Turning on his son, he ordered him

to leave the room immediately, as being unfit to remain in the same place with the mother whom he had

nearly murdered. So aweinspiring was the spectacle of Sir Hercules standing with one foot on the carcase of

the gigantic dog, his sword drawn and still bloody, so commanding were his voice, his gestures, and the

expression of his face that Ferdinando slunk out of the room in terror and behaved himself for all the rest of

the vacation in an entirely exemplary fashion. His mother soon recovered from the bites of the mastiff, but

the effect on her mind of this adventure was ineradicable; from that time forth she lived always among

"The two years which Ferdinando spent on the Continent, making the Grand Tour, were a period of happy

repose for his parents. But even now the thought of the future haunted them; nor were they able to solace

themselves with all the diversions of their younger days. The Lady Filomena had lost her voice and Sir

Hercules was grown too rheumatical to play the violin. He, it is true, still rode after his pugs, but his wife felt

herself too old and, since the episode of the mastiff, too nervous for such sports. At most, to please her

husband, she would follow the hunt at a distance in a little gig drawn by the safest and oldest of the

"The day fixed for Ferdinando's return came round. Filomena, sick with vague dreads and presentiments,

retired to her chamber and her bed. Sir Hercules received his son alone. A giant in a brown travellingsuit

entered the room. 'Welcome home, my son,' said Sir Hercules in a voice that trembled a little.

"'I hope I see you well, sir.' Ferdinando bent down to shake hands, then straightened himself up again. The

"Ferdinando had not come alone. Two friends of his own age accompanied him, and each of the young men

had brought a servant. Not for thirty years had Crome been desecrated by the presence of so many members

of the common race of men. Sir Hercules was appalled and indignant, but the laws of hospitality had to be

obeyed. He received the young gentlemen with grave politeness and sent the servants to the kitchen, with

"The old family diningtable was dragged out into the light and dusted (Sir Hercules and his lady were

accustomed to dine at a small table twenty inches high). Simon, the aged butler, who could only just look

over the edge of the big table, was helped at supper by the three servants brought by Ferdinando and his

"Sir Hercules presided, and with his usual grace supported a conversation on the pleasures of foreign travel,

the beauties of art and nature to be met with abroad, the opera at Venice, the singing of the orphans in the

churches of the same city, and on other topics of a similar nature. The young men were not particularly

attentive to his discourses; they were occupied in watching the efforts of the butler to change the plates and

replenish the glasses. They covered their laughter by violent and repeated fits of coughing or choking. Sir

Hercules affected not to notice, but changed the subject of the conversation to sport. Upon this one of the

young men asked whether it was true, as he had heard, that he used to hunt the rabbit with a pack of pug

dogs. Sir Hercules replied that it was, and proceeded to describe the chase in some detail. The young men

"When supper was over, Sir Hercules climbed down from his chair and, giving as his excuse that he must see

how his lady did, bade them goodnight. The sound of laughter followed him up the stairs. Filomena was not

asleep; she had been lying on her bed listening to the sound of enormous laughter and the tread of strangely

heavy feet on the stairs and along the corridors. Sir Hercules drew a chair to her bedside and sat there for a

long time in silence, holding his wife's hand and sometimes gently squeezing it. At about ten o'clock they

were startled by a violent noise. There was a breaking of glass, a stamping of feet, with an outburst of shouts

and laughter. The uproar continuing for several minutes, Sir Hercules rose to his feet and, in spite of his

wife's entreaties, prepared to go and see what was happening. There was no light on the staircase, and Sir

Hercules groped his way down cautiously, lowering himself from stair to stair and standing for a moment on

each tread before adventuring on a new step. The noise was louder here; the shouting articulated itself into

recognisable words and phrases. A line of light was visible under the diningroom door. Sir Hercules tiptoed

across the hall towards it. Just as he approached the door there was another terrific crash of breaking glass

and jangled metal. What could they be doing? Standing on tiptoe he managed to look through the keyhole. In

the middle of the ravaged table old Simon, the butler, so primed with drink that he could scarcely keep his

balance, was dancing a jig. His feet crunched and tinkled among the broken glass, and his shoes were wet

with spilt wine. The three young men sat round, thumping the table with their hands or with the empty wine

bottles, shouting and laughing encouragement. The three servants leaning against the wall laughed too.

Ferdinando suddenly threw a handful of walnuts at the dancer's head, which so dazed and surprised the little

man that he staggered and fell down on his back, upsetting a decanter and several glasses. They raised him

up, gave him some brandy to drink, thumped him on the back. The old man smiled and hiccoughed.

'Tomorrow,' said Ferdinando, 'we'll have a concerted ballet of the whole household.' 'With father Hercules

wearing his club and lionskin,' added one of his companions, and all three roared with laughter.

"Sir Hercules would look and listen no further. He crossed the hall once more and began to climb the stairs,

lifting his knees painfully high at each degree. This was the end; there was no place for him now in the world,

"His wife was still awake; to her questioning glance he answered, 'They are making mock of old Simon.

"'It is better not,' said Sir Hercules. Going into his closet he wrote in his daybook a full and particular

account of all the events of the evening. While he was still engaged in this task he rang for a servant and

ordered hot water and a bath to be made ready for him at eleven o'clock. When he had finished writing he

went into his wife's room, and preparing a dose of opium twenty times as strong as that which she was

accustomed to take when she could not sleep, he brought it to her, saying, 'Here is your sleepingdraught.'

"Filomena took the glass and lay for a little time, but did not drink immediately. The tears came into her eyes.

'Do you remember the songs we used to sing, sitting out there sulla terrazza in the summertime?' She began

singing softly in her ghost of a cracked voice a few bars from Stradella's 'Amor amor, non dormir piu.' 'And

you playing on the violin, it seems such a short time ago, and yet so long, long, long. Addio, amore, a

rivederti.' She drank off the draught and, lying back on the pillow, closed her eyes. Sir Hercules kissed her

hand and tiptoed away, as though he were afraid of waking her. He returned to his closet, and having

recorded his wife's last words to him, he poured into his bath the water that had been brought up in

accordance with his orders. The water being too hot for him to get into the bath at once, he took down from

the shelf his copy of Suetonius. He wished to read how Seneca had died. He opened the book at random. 'But

dwarfs,' he read, 'he held in abhorrence as being lusus naturae and of evil omen.' He winced as though he had

been struck. This same Augustus, he remembered, had exhibited in the amphitheatre a young man called

Lucius, of good family, who was not quite two feet in height and weighed seventeen pounds, but had a

stentorian voice. He turned over the pages. Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero: it was a tale of growing

horror. 'Seneca his preceptor, he forced to kill himself.' And there was Petronius, who had called his friends

about him at the last, bidding them talk to him, not of the consolations of philosophy, but of love and

gallantry, while the life was ebbing away through his opened veins. Dipping his pen once more in the ink he

wrote on the last page of his diary: 'He died a Roman death.' Then, putting the toes of one foot into the water

and finding that it was not too hot, he threw off his dressinggown and, taking a razor in his hand, sat down

in the bath. With one deep cut he severed the artery in his left wrist, then lay back and composed his mind to

meditation. The blood oozed out, floating through the water in dissolving wreaths and spirals. In a little while

the whole bath was tinged with pink. The colour deepened; Sir Hercules felt himself mastered by an

invincible drowsiness; he was sinking from vague dream to dream. Soon he was sound asleep. There was not

For their afterluncheon coffee the party generally adjourned to the library. Its windows looked east, and at

this hour of the day it was the coolest place in the whole house. It was a large room, fitted, during the

eighteenth century, with white painted shelves of an elegant design. In the middle of one wall a door,

ingeniously upholstered with rows of dummy books, gave access to a deep cupboard, where, among a pile of

letterfiles and old newspapers, the mummycase of an Egyptian lady, brought back by the second Sir

Ferdinando on his return from the Grand Tour, mouldered in the darkness. From ten yards away and at a first

glance, one might almost have mistaken this secret door for a section of shelving filled with genuine books.

Coffeecup in hand, Mr. Scogan was standing in front of the dummy bookshelf. Between the sips he

"The bottom shelf," he was saying, "is taken up by an Encyclopaedia in fourteen volumes. Useful, but a little

dull, as is also Caprimulge's 'Dictionary of the Finnish Language'. The 'Biographical Dictionary' looks more

promising. 'Biography of Men who were Born Great', 'Biography of Men who Achieved Greatness',

'Biography of Men who had Greatness Thrust upon Them', and 'Biography of Men who were Never Great at

All'. Then there are ten volumes of 'Thom's Works and Wanderings', while the 'Wild Goose Chase, a Novel',

by an anonymous author, fills no less than six. But what's this, what's this?" Mr. Scogan stood on tiptoe and

peered up. "Seven volumes of the 'Tales of Knockespotch'. The 'Tales of Knockespotch'," he repeated. "Ah,

my dear Henry," he said, turning round, "these are your best books. I would willingly give all the rest of your

The happy possessor of a multitude of first editions, Mr. Wimbush could afford to smile indulgently.

"Is it possible," Mr. Scogan went on, "that they possess nothing more than a back and a title?" He opened the

cupboard door and peeped inside, as though he hoped to find the rest of the books behind it. "Phooh!" he said,

and shut the door again. "It smells of dust and mildew. How symbolical! One comes to the great masterpieces

of the past, expecting some miraculous illumination, and one finds, on opening them, only darkness and dust

and a faint smell of decay. After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of

excessive self indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent

He paused, and thoughtfully drummed with his fingers on the backs of the nonexistent, unattainable books.

"But I disagree with you about reading," said Mary. "About serious reading, I mean."

"Quite right, Mary, quite right," Mr. Scogan answered. "I had forgotten there were any serious people in the

"I like the idea of the Biographies," said Denis. "There's room for us all within the scheme; it's

"Yes, the Biographies are good, the Biographies are excellent," Mr Scogan agreed. "I imagine them written in

a very elegant Regency styleBrighton Pavilion in wordsperhaps by the great Dr. Lempriere himself.

You know his classical dictionary? Ah!" Mr. Scogan raised his hand and let it limply fall again in a gesture

which implied that words failed him. "Read his biography of Helen; read how Jupiter, disguised as a swan,

was 'enabled to avail himself of his situation' visavis to Leda. And to think that he may have, must have

written these biographies of the Great! What a work, Henry! And, owing to the idiotic arrangement of your

"I prefer the 'Wild Goose Chase'," said Anne. "A novel in six volumesit must be restful."

"Restful," Mr. Scogan repeated. "You've hit on the right word. A 'Wild Goose Chase' is sound, but a bit

oldfashionedpictures of clerical life in the fifties, you know; specimens of the landed gentry; peasants for

pathos and comedy; and in the background, always the picturesque beauties of nature soberly described. All

very good and solid, but, like certain puddings, just a little dull. Personally, I like much better the notion of

'Thom's Works and Wanderings'. The eccentric Mr. Thom of Thom's Hill. Old Tom Thom, as his intimates

used to call him. He spent ten years in Thibet organising the clarified butter industry on modern European

lines, and was able to retire at thirtysix with a handsome fortune. The rest of his life he devoted to travel and

ratiocination; here is the result." Mr. Scogan tapped the dummy books. "And now we come to the 'Tales of

Knockespotch'. What a masterpiece and what a great man! Knockespotch knew how to write fiction. Ah,

Denis, if you could only read Knockespotch you wouldn't be writing a novel about the wearisome

development of a young man's character, you wouldn't be describing in endless, fastidious detail, cultured life

in Chelsea and Bloomsbury and Hampstead. You would be trying to write a readable book. But then, alas!

owing to the peculiar arrangement of our host's library, you never will read Knockespotch."

"It was Knockespotch," Mr. Scogan continued, "the great Knockespotch, who delivered us from the dreary

tyranny of the realistic novel. My life, Knockespotch said, is not so long that I can afford to spend precious

hours writing or reading descriptions of middleclass interiors. He said again, 'I am tired of seeing the human

mind bogged in a social plenum; I prefer to paint it in a vacuum, freely and sportively bombinating.'"

"I say," said Gombauld, "Knockespotch was a little obscure sometimes, wasn't he?"

"He was," Mr. Scogan replied, "and with intention. It made him seem even profounder than he actually was.

But it was only in his aphorisms that he was so dark and oracular. In his Tales he was always luminous. Oh,

those Talesthose Tales! How shall I describe them? Fabulous characters shoot across his pages like gaily

dressed performers on the trapeze. There are extraordinary adventures and still more extraordinary

speculations. Intelligences and emotions, relieved of all the imbecile preoccupations of civilised life, move in

intricate and subtle dances, crossing and recrossing, advancing, retreating, impinging. An immense erudition

and an immense fancy go hand in hand. All the ideas of the present and of the past, on every possible subject,

bob up among the Tales, smile gravely or grimace a caricature of themselves, then disappear to make place

for something new. The verbal surface of his writing is rich and fantastically diversified. The wit is incessant.

"Alas!" Mr. Scogan replied, "Knockespotch's great book is like the sword Excalibur. It remains struck fast in

this door, awaiting the coming of a writer with genius enough to draw it forth. I am not even a writer, I am

not so much as qualified to attempt the task. The extraction of Knockespotch from his wooden prison I leave,

"In the time of the amiable Brantome," Mr. Scogan was saying, "every debutante at the French Court was

invited to dine at the King's table, where she was served with wine in a handsome silver cup of Italian

workmanship. It was no ordinary cup, this goblet of the debutantes; for, inside, it had been most curiously

and ingeniously engraved with a series of very lively amorous scenes. With each draught that the young lady

swallowed these engravings became increasingly visible, and the Court looked on with interest, every time

she put her nose in the cup, to see whether she blushed at what the ebbing wine revealed. If the debutante

blushed, they laughed at her for her innocence; if she did not, she was laughed at for being too knowing."

"Do you propose," asked Anne, "that the custom should be revived at Buckingham Palace?"

"I do not," said Mr. Scogan. "I merely quoted the anecdote as an illustration of the customs, so genially frank,

of the sixteenth century. I might have quoted other anecdotes to show that the customs of the seventeenth and

eighteenth, of the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, and indeed of every other century, from the time of

Hammurabi onward, were equally genial and equally frank. The only century in which customs were not

characterised by the same cheerful openness was the nineteenth, of blessed memory. It was the astonishing

exception. And yet, with what one must suppose was a deliberate disregard of history, it looked upon its

horribly pregnant silences as normal and natural and right; the frankness of the previous fifteen or twenty

thousand years was considered abnormal and perverse. It was a curious phenomenon."

"I entirely agree." Mary panted with excitement in her effort to bring out what she had to say. "Havelock Ellis

Mr. Scogan, like a policeman arresting the flow of traffic, held up his hand. "He does; I know. And that

"The reaction, when it cameand we may say roughly that it set in a little before the beginning of this

centurythe reaction was to openness, but not to the same openness as had reigned in the earlier ages. It was

to a scientific openness, not to the jovial frankness of the past, that we returned. The whole question of

Amour became a terribly serious one. Earnest young men wrote in the public prints that from this time forth it

would be impossible ever again to make a joke of any sexual matter. Professors wrote thick books in which

sex was sterilised and dissected. It has become customary for serious young women, like Mary, to discuss,

with philosophic calm, matters of which the merest hint would have sufficed to throw the youth of the sixties

into a delirium of amorous excitement. It is all very estimable, no doubt. But still"Mr. Scogan sighed."I

for one should like to see, mingled with this scientific ardour, a little more of the jovial spirit of Rabelais and

"I entirely disagree with you," said Mary. "Sex isn't a laughing matter; it's serious."

"Perhaps," answered Mr. Scogan, "perhaps I'm an obscene old man. For I must confess that I cannot always

"But I tell you..." began Mary furiously. Her face had flushed with excitement. Her cheeks were the cheeks of

"Indeed," Mr. Scogan continued, "it seems to me one of few permanently and everlastingly amusing subjects

that exist. Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if

Anne looked at her watch. "Nearly a quarter to eight," she said. "I wonder when Ivor will turn up." She got up

from her deck chair and, leaning her elbows on the balustrade of the terrace, looked out over the valley and

towards the farther hills. Under the level evening light the architecture of the land revealed itself. The deep

shadows, the bright contrasting lights gave the hills a new solidity. Irregularities of the surface, unsuspected

before, were picked out with light and shade. The grass, the corn, the foliage of trees were stippled with

"Look!" said Anne suddenly, and pointed. On the opposite side of the valley, at the crest of the ridge, a cloud

of dust flushed by the sunlight to rosy gold was moving rapidly along the skyline. "It's Ivor. One can tell by

The dust cloud descended into the valley and was lost. A horn with the voice of a sealion made itself heard,

approaching. A minute later Ivor came leaping round the corner of the house. His hair waved in the wind of

"Anne, darling," he cried, and embraced her, embraced Mary, very nearly embraced Mr. Scogan. "Well, here

I am. I've come with incredulous speed." Ivor's vocabulary was rich, but a little erratic. "I'm not late for

dinner, am I?" He hoisted himself up on to the balustrade, and sat there, kicking his heels. With one arm he

embraced a large stone flowerpot, leaning his head sideways against its hard and lichenous flanks in an

attitude of trustful affection. He had brown, wavy hair, and his eyes were of a very brilliant, pale, improbable

blue. His head was narrow, his face thin and rather long, his nose aquiline. In old age though it was

difficult to imagine Ivor oldhe might grow to have an Iron Ducal grimness. But now, at twentysix, it was

not the structure of his face that impressed one; it was its expression. That was charming and vivacious, and

his smile was an irradiation. He was forever moving, restlessly and rapidly, but with an engaging

gracefulness. His frail and slender body seemed to be fed by a spring of inexhaustible energy.

"You're in time to answer a question," said Mr. Scogan. "We were arguing whether Amour were a serious

"One can occupy oneself with it," Ivor continued, "always and everywhere. Women are always wonderfully

the same. Shapes vary a little, that's all. In Spain"with his free hand he described a series of ample

curves"one can't pass them on the stairs. In England"he put the tip of his forefinger against the tip of his

thumb and, lowering his hand, drew out this circle into an imaginary cylinder"In England they're tubular.

The ladies had left the room and the port was circulating. Mr. Scogan filled his glass, passed on the decanter,

and, leaning back in his chair, looked about him for a moment in silence. The conversation rippled idly round

him, but he disregarded it; he was smiling at some private joke. Gombauld noticed his smile.

"Not at all," Mr. Scogan answered politely. "I was merely amused by my own speculations."

"The idlest, the most academic of speculations. I was looking at you one by one and trying to imagine which

of the first six Caesars you would each resemble, if you were given the opportunity of behaving like a Caesar.

The Caesars are one of my touchstones," Mr. Scogan explained. "They are characters functioning, so to

speak, in the void. They are human beings developed to their logical conclusions. Hence their unequalled

value as a touchstone, a standard. When I meet someone for the first time, I ask myself this question: Given

the Caesarean environment, which of the Caesars would this person resemble Julius, Augustus, Tiberius,

Caligula, Claudius, Nero? I take each trait of character, each mental and emotional bias, each little oddity,

and magnify them a thousand times. The resulting image gives me his Caesarean formula."

"I am potentially all of them," Mr. Scogan replied, "allwith the possible exception of Claudius, who was

much too stupid to be a development of anything in my character. The seeds of Julius's courage and

compelling energy, of Augustus's prudence, of the libidinousness and cruelty of Tiberius, of Caligula's folly,

of Nero's artistic genius and enormous vanity, are all within me. Given the opportunities, I might have been

something fabulous. But circumstances were against me. I was born and brought up in a country rectory; I

passed my youth doing a great deal of utterly senseless hard work for a very little money. The result is that

now, in middle age, I am the poor thing that I am. But perhaps it is as well. Perhaps, too, it's as well that

Denis hasn't been permitted to flower into a little Nero, and that Ivor remains only potentially a Caligula.

Yes, it's better so, no doubt. But it would have been more amusing, as a spectacle, if they had had the chance

to develop, untrammelled, the full horror of their potentialities. It would have been pleasant and interesting to

watch their tics and foibles and little vices swelling and burgeoning and blossoming into enormous and

fantastic flowers of cruelty and pride and lewdness and avarice. The Caesarean environment makes the

Caesar, as the special food and the queenly cell make the queen bee. We differ from the bees in so far that,

given the proper food, they can be sure of making a queen every time. With us there is no such certainty; out

of every ten men placed in the Caesarean environment one will be temperamentally good, or intelligent, or

great. The rest will blossom into Caesars; he will not. Seventy and eighty years ago simpleminded people,

reading of the exploits of the Bourbons in South Italy, cried out in amazement: To think that such things

should be happening in the nineteenth century! And a few years since we too were astonished to find that in

our still more astonishing twentieth century, unhappy blackamoors on the Congo and the Amazon were being

treated as English serfs were treated in the time of Stephen. Today we are no longer surprised at these

things. The Black and Tans harry Ireland, the Poles maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti slaughter their

poorer countrymen: we take it all for granted. Since the war we wonder at nothing. We have created a

Caesarean environment and a host of little Caesars has sprung up. What could be more natural?"

At this very moment," he went on, "the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world.

People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with

the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second.

After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy

life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not. We feel sympathy, no doubt; we represent to

ourselves imaginatively the sufferings of nations and individuals and we deplore them. But, after all, what are

sympathy and imagination? Precious little, unless the person for whom we feel sympathy happens to be

closely involved in our affections; and even then they don't go very far. And a good thing too; for if one had

an imagination vivid enough and a sympathy sufficiently sensitive really to comprehend and to feel the

sufferings of other people, one would never have a moment's peace of mind. A really sympathetic race would

not so much as know the meaning of happiness. But luckily, as I've already said, we aren't a sympathetic race.

At the beginning of the war I used to think I really suffered, through imagination and sympathy, with those

who physically suffered. But after a month or two I had to admit that, honestly, I didn't. And yet I think I

have a more vivid imagination than most. One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one

happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world."

"So do I," said Ivor, jumping up with alacrity. He turned to Mr. Scogan. "Fortunately," he said, "we can share

Ivor brought his hands down with a bang on to the final chord of his rhapsody. There was just a hint in that

triumphant harmony that the seventh had been struck along with the octave by the thumb of the left hand; but

the general effect of splendid noise emerged clearly enough. Small details matter little so long as the general

effect is good. And, besides, that hint of the seventh was decidedly modern. He turned round in his seat and

Murmurs of applause and gratitude were heard, and Mary, her large china eyes fixed on the performer, cried

out aloud, "Wonderful!" and gasped for new breath as though she were suffocating.

Nature and fortune had vied with one another in heaping on Ivor Lombard all their choicest gifts. He had

wealth and he was perfectly independent. He was good looking, possessed an irresistible charm of manner,

and was the hero of more amorous successes than he could well remember. His accomplishments were

extraordinary for their number and variety. He had a beautiful untrained tenor voice; he could improvise, with

a startling brilliance, rapidly and loudly, on the piano. He was a good amateur medium and telepathist, and

had a considerable firsthand knowledge of the next world. He could write rhymed verses with an

extraordinary rapidity. For painting symbolical pictures he had a dashing style, and if the drawing was

sometimes a little weak, the colour was always pyrotechnical. He excelled in amateur theatricals and, when

occasion offered, he could cook with genius. He resembled Shakespeare in knowing little Latin and less

Greek. For a mind like his, education seemed supererogatory. Training would only have destroyed his natural

"Thank you," said Mr. Scogan, "but I for one prefer these still more wonderful armchairs." His pipe had

Henry Wimbush was also happy. He looked for a moment over his pincenez in Ivor's direction and then,

without saying anything, returned to the grimy little sixteenthcentury account books which were now his

favourite reading. He knew more about Sir Ferdinando's household expenses than about his own.

The outdoor party, enrolled under Ivor's banner, consisted of Anne, Mary, Denis, and, rather unexpectedly,

Jenny. Outside it was warm and dark; there was no moon. They walked up and down the terrace, and Ivor

sang a Neapolitan song: "Stretti, stretti"close, closewith something about the little Spanish girl to

follow. The atmosphere began to palpitate. Ivor put his arm round Anne's waist, dropped his head sideways

onto her shoulder, and in that position walked on, singing as he walked. It seemed the easiest, the most

natural, thing in the world. Denis wondered why he had never done it. He hated Ivor.

"Let's go down to the pool," said Ivor. He disengaged his embrace and turned round to shepherd his little

flock. They made their way along the side of the house to the entrance of the yew tree walk that led down to

the lower garden. Between the blank precipitous wall of the house and the tall yew trees the path was a chasm

of impenetrable gloom. Somewhere there were steps down to the right, a gap in the yew hedge. Denis, who

headed the party, groped his way cautiously; in this darkness, one had an irrational fear of yawning

precipices, of horrible spiked obstructions. Suddenly from behind him he heard a shrill, startled, "Oh!" and

then a sharp, dry concussion that might have been the sound of a slap. After that, Jenny's voice was heard

pronouncing, "I am going back to the house." Her tone was decided, and even as she pronounced the words

she was melting away into the darkness. The incident, whatever it had been, was closed. Denis resumed his

"Phillis plus avare que tendre Ne gagnant rien a refuser, Un jour exigea a Silvandre Trente moutons pour un

The melody drooped and climbed again with a kind of easy languor; the warm darkness seemed to pulse like

"Here are the steps," cried Denis. He guided his companions over the danger, and in a moment they had the

turf of the yewtree walk under their feet. It was lighter here, or at least it was just perceptibly less dark; for

the yew walk was wider than the path that had led them under the lea of the house. Looking up, they could

Went on Ivor, and then interrupted himself to shout, "I'm going to run down," and he was off, full speed,

The others followed. Denis shambled in the rear, vainly exhorting everyone to caution: the slope was steep,

one might break one's neck. What was wrong with these people, he wondered? They had become like young

kittens after a dose of catnip. He himself felt a certain kittenishness sporting within him; but it was, like all

his emotions, rather a theoretical feeling; it did not overmasteringly seek to express itself in a practical

"Be careful," he shouted once more, and hardly were the words out of his mouth when, thump! there was the

sound of a heavy fall in front of him, followed by the long "Fffff" of a breath indrawn with pain and

afterwards by a very sincere, "Ooooh!" Denis was almost pleased; he had told them so, the idiots, and they

Mary came down the hill like a runaway steamengine. It was tremendously exciting, this blind rush through

the dark; she felt she would never stop. But the ground grew level beneath her feet, her speed insensibly

slackened, and suddenly she was caught by an extended arm and brought to an abrupt halt.

Ivor burst into a peal of amused laughter. "So it is!" he exclaimed. "I seem to be making nothing but floaters

this evening. I've already made one with Jenny." He laughed again, and there was something so jolly about

his laughter that Mary could not help laughing too. He did not remove his encircling arm, and somehow it

was all so amusing and natural that Mary made no further attempt to escape from it. They walked along by

the side of the pool, interlaced. Mary was too short for him to be able, with any comfort, to lay his head on

her shoulder. He rubbed his cheek, caressed and caressing, against the thick, sleek mass of her hair. In a little

while he began to sing again; the night trembled amorously to the sound of his voice. When he had finished

he kissed her. Anne or Mary: Mary or Anne. It didn't seem to make much difference which it was. There

were differences in detail, of course; but the general effect was the same; and, after all, the general effect was

"Is that you, Denis? I've hurt my ankle soand my knee, and my hand. I'm all in pieces."

"My poor Anne," he said. "But then," he couldn't help adding, "it was silly to start running downhill in the

He sat down beside on the grass, and found himself breathing the faint, delicious atmosphere of perfume that

He felt in his pockets for the matchbox. The light spurted and then grew steady. Magically, a little universe

had been created, a world of colours and formsAnne's face, the shimmering orange of her dress, her white,

bare arms, a patch of green turfand round about a darkness that had become solid and utterly blind. Anne

held out her hands; both were green and earthy with her fall, and the left exhibited two or three red abrasions.

"Not so bad," she said. But Denis was terribly distressed, and his emotion was intensified when, looking up at

her face, he saw that the trace of tears, involuntary tears of pain, lingered on her eyelashes. He pulled out his

handkerchief and began to wipe away the dirt from the wounded hand. The match went out; it was not worth

while to light another. Anne allowed herself to be attended to, meekly and gratefully. "Thank you," she said,

when he had finished cleaning and bandaging her hand; and there was something in her tone that made him

feel that she had lost her superiority over him, that she was younger than he, had become, suddenly, almost a

child. He felt tremendously large and protective. The feeling was so strong that instinctively he put his arm

about her. She drew closer, leaned against him, and so they sat in silence. Then, from below, soft but

wonderfully clear through the still darkness, they heard the sound of Ivor's singing. He was going on with his

"Le lendemain Phillis plus tendre, Ne voulant deplaire au berger, Fut trop heureuse de lui rendre Trente

There was a rather prolonged pause. It was as though time were being allowed for the giving and receiving of

"Le lendemain Phillis peu sage Aurait donne moutons et chien Pour un baiser que le volage A Lisette donnait

"Trente moutons pour un baiser." The sheep, the woolly mutton baa, baa, baa...? Or the shepherd? Yes,

decidedly, he felt himself to be the shepherd now. He was the master, the protector. A wave of courage

swelled through him, warm as wine. He turned his head, and began to kiss her face, at first rather randomly,

Anne averted her head; he kissed the ear, the smooth nape that this movement presented him. "No," she

She tried to explain. "Can't you see," she said, "it isn't...it isn't our stunt at all." It was true. Somehow she had

never thought of Denis in the light of a man who might make love; she had never so much as conceived the

possibilities of an amorous relationship with him. He was so absurdly young, so...so...she couldn't find the

"Why isn't it our stunt?" asked Denis. "And, by the way, that's a horrible and inappropriate expression."

"All right, Denis. But you must do it another time. I must go in and get my ankle into hot water. It's

Reasons of health could not be gainsaid. Denis got up reluctantly, and helped his companion to her feet. She

"I'll carry you," Denis offered. He had never tried to carry a woman, but on the cinema it always looked an

"Of course I can." He felt larger and more protective than ever. "Put your arms round my neck," he ordered.

She did so and, stooping, he picked her up under the knees and lifted her from the ground. Good heavens,

what a weight! He took five staggering steps up the slope, then almost lost his equilibrium, and had to deposit

"It's perfectly sweet of you to offer, but I'd rather walk, thanks." She laid her hand on his shoulder and, thus

"My poor Denis!" she repeated, and laughed again. Humiliated, he was silent. It seemed incredible that, only

two minutes ago, he should have been holding her in his embrace, kissing her. Incredible. She was helpless

then, a child. Now she had regained all her superiority; she was once more the faroff being, desired and

unassailable. Why had he been such a fool as to suggest that carrying stunt? He reached the house in a state

He helped Anne upstairs, left her in the hands of a maid, and came down again to the drawingroom. He was

surprised to find them all sitting just where he had left them. He had expected that, somehow, everything

would be quite differentit seemed such a prodigious time since he went away. All silent and all damned, he

reflected, as he looked at them. Mr. Scogan's pipe still wheezed; that was the only sound. Henry Wimbush

was still deep in his account books; he had just made the discovery that Sir Ferdinando was in the habit of

eating oysters the whole summer through, regardless of the absence of the justifying R. Gombauld, in

hornrimmed spectacles, was reading. Jenny was mysteriously scribbling in her red notebook. And, seated in

her favourite armchair at the corner of the hearth, Priscilla was looking through a pile of drawings. One by

one she held them out at arm's length and, throwing back her mountainous orange head, looked long and

attentively through halfclosed eyelids. She wore a pale seagreen dress; on the slope of her

mauvepowdered decolletage diamonds twinkled. An immensely long cigarette holder projected at an angle

from her face. Diamonds were embedded in her highpiled coiffure; they glittered every time she moved. It

was a batch of Ivor's drawingssketches of Spirit Life, made in the course of tranced tours through the other

world. On the back of each sheet descriptive titles were written: "Portrait of an Angel, 15th March '20;"

"Astral Beings at Play, 3rd December '19;" "A Party of Souls on their Way to a Higher Sphere, 21st May

'21." Before examining the drawing on the obverse of each sheet, she turned it over to read the title. Try as

she couldand she tried hardPriscilla had never seen a vision or succeeded in establishing any

communication with the Spirit World. She had to be content with the reported experiences of others.

"What have you done with the rest of your party?" she asked, looking up as Denis entered the room.

He explained. Anne had gone to bed, Ivor and Mary were still in the garden. He selected a book and a

comfortable chair, and tried, as far as the disturbed state of his mind would permit him, to compose himself

for an evening's reading. The lamplight was utterly serene; there was no movement save the stir of Priscilla

among her papers. All silent and all damned, Denis repeated to himself, all silent and all damned...

"It was so beautiful down in the garden! The trees, the scent of the flowers, the stars..." Ivor waved his arms.

"And when the moon came up, it was really too much. It made me burst into tears." He sat down at the piano

"There were a great many meteorites," said Mary to anyone who would listen. "The earth must just be

But Ivor had already begun to strike the keys. He played the garden, the stars, the scent of flowers, the rising

moon. He even put in a nightingale that was not there. Mary looked on and listened with parted lips. The

others pursued their occupations, without appearing to be seriously disturbed. On this very July day, exactly

three hundred and fifty years ago, Sir Ferdinando had eaten seven dozen oysters. The discovery of this fact

gave Henry Wimbush a peculiar pleasure. He had a natural piety which made him delight in the celebration

of memorial feasts. The three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the seven dozen oysters...He wished he had

On her way to bed Mary paid a call. The light was out in Anne's room, but she was not yet asleep.

Mary was full of sympathy. Inwardly, too, she was relieved to find Anne's nonappearance so simply

accounted for. She had been vaguely suspicious, down there in the gardensuspicious of what, she hardly

knew; but there had seemed to be something a little louche in the way she had suddenly found herself alone

with Ivor. Not that she minded, of course; far from it. But she didn't like the idea that perhaps she was the

"I do hope you'll be better tomorrow," she said, and she commiserated with Anne on all she had

missedthe garden, the stars, the scent of flowers, the meteorites through whose summer shower the earth

was now passing, the rising moon and its gibbosity. And then they had had such interesting conversation.

What about? About almost everything. Nature, art, science, poetry, the stars, spiritualism, the relations of the

The nearest Roman Catholic church was upwards of twenty miles away. Ivor, who was punctilious in his

devotions, came down early to breakfast and had his car at the door, ready to start, by a quarter to ten. It was

a smart, expensivelooking machine, enamelled a pure lemon yellow and upholstered in emerald green

leather. There were two seatsthree if you squeezed tightly enoughand their occupants were protected

from wind, dust, and weather by a glazed sedan that rose, an elegant eighteenth century hump, from the

Mary had never been to a Roman Catholic service, thought it would be an interesting experience, and, when

the car moved off through the great gates of the courtyard, she was occupying the spare seat in the sedan. The

In the parish church of Crome Mr. Bodiham preached on 1 Kings vi. 18: "And the cedar of the house within

was carved with knops"a sermon of immediately local interest. For the past two years the problem of the

War Memorial had exercised the minds of all those in Crome who had enough leisure, or mental energy, or

party spirit to think of such things. Henry Wimbush was all for a librarya library of local literature, stocked

with county histories, old maps of the district, monographs on the local antiquities, dialect dictionaries,

handbooks of the local geology and natural history. He liked to think of the villagers, inspired by such

reading, making up parties of a Sunday afternoon to look for fossils and flint arrowheads. The villagers

themselves favoured the idea of a memorial reservoir and water supply. But the busiest and most articulate

party followed Mr. Bodiham in demanding something religious in charactera second lichgate, for

example, a stainedglass window, a monument of marble, or, if possible, all three. So far, however, nothing

had been done, partly because the memorial committee had never been able to agree, partly for the more

cogent reason that too little money had been subscribed to carry out any of the proposed schemes. Every three

or four months Mr. Bodiham preached a sermon on the subject. His last had been delivered in March; it was

Mr. Bodiham touched lightly on Solomon's temple. From thence he passed to temples and churches in

general. What were the characteristics of these buildings dedicated to God? Obviously, the fact of their, from

a human point of view, complete uselessness. They were unpractical buildings "carved with knops." Solomon

might have built a libraryindeed, what could be more to the taste of the world's wisest man? He might have

dug a reservoirwhat more useful in a parched city like Jerusalem? He did neither; he built a house all

carved with knops, useless and unpractical. Why? Because he was dedicating the work to God. There had

been much talk in Crome about the proposed War Memorial. A War Memorial was, in its very nature, a work

dedicated to God. It was a token of thankfulness that the first stage in the culminating worldwar had been

crowned by the triumph of righteousness; it was at the same time a visibly embodied supplication that God

might not long delay the Advent which alone could bring the final peace. A library, a reservoir? Mr. Bodiham

scornfully and indignantly condemned the idea. These were works dedicated to man, not to God. As a War

Memorial they were totally unsuitable. A lichgate had been suggested. This was an object which answered

perfectly to the definition of a War Memorial: a useless work dedicated to God and carved with knops. One

lichgate, it was true, already existed. But nothing would be easier than to make a second entrance into the

churchyard; and a second entrance would need a second gate. Other suggestions had been made.

Stainedglass windows, a monument of marble. Both these were admirable, especially the latter. It was high

time that the War Memorial was erected. It might soon be too late. At any moment, like a thief in the night,

God might come. Meanwhile a difficulty stood in the way. Funds were inadequate. All should subscribe

according to their means. Those who had lost relations in the war might reasonably be expected to subscribe a

sum equal to that which they would have had to pay in funeral expenses if the relative had died while at

home. Further delay was disastrous. The War Memorial must be built at once. He appealed to the patriotism

Henry Wimbush walked home thinking of the books he would present to the War Memorial Library, if ever it

came into existence. He took the path through the fields; it was pleasanter than the road. At the first stile a

group of village boys, loutish young fellows all dressed in the hideous illfitting black which makes a funeral

of every English Sunday and holiday, were assembled, drearily guffawing as they smoked their cigarettes.

They made way for Henry Wimbush, touching their caps as he passed. He returned their salute; his bowler

In Sir Ferdinando's time, he reflected, in the time of his son, Sir Julius, these young men would have had their

Sunday diversions even at Crome, remote and rustic Crome. There would have been archery, skittles,

dancingsocial amusements in which they would have partaken as members of a conscious community.

Now they had nothing, nothing except Mr. Bodiham's forbidding Boys' Club and the rare dances and concerts

organised by himself. Boredom or the urban pleasures of the county metropolis were the alternatives that

presented themselves to these poor youths. Country pleasures were no more; they had been stamped out by

In Manningham's Diary for 1600 there was a queer passage, he remembered, a very queer passage. Certain

magistrates in Berkshire, Puritan magistrates, had had wind of a scandal. One moonlit summer night they had

ridden out with their posse and there, among the hills, they had come upon a company of men and women,

dancing, stark naked, among the sheepcotes. The magistrates and their men had ridden their horses into the

crowd. How selfconscious the poor people must suddenly have felt, how helpless without their clothes

against armed and booted horsemen! The dancers were arrested, whipped, gaoled, set in the stocks; the

moonlight dance is never danced again. What old, earthy, Panic rite came to extinction here? he wondered.

Who knows? perhaps their ancestors had danced like this in the moonlight ages before Adam and Eve

were so much as thought of. He liked to think so. And now it was no more. These weary young men, if they

wanted to dance, would have to bicycle six miles to the town. The country was desolate, without life of its

own, without indigenous pleasures. The pious magistrates had snuffed out for ever a little happy flame that

"And as on Tullia's tomb one lamp burned clear, Unchanged for fifteen hundred year..."

He repeated the lines to himself, and was desolated to think of all the murdered past.

Henry Wimbush's long cigar burned aromatically. The "History of Crome" lay on his knee; slowly he turned

"I can't decide what episode to read you tonight," he said thoughtfully. "Sir Ferdinando's voyages are not

without interest. Then, of course, there's his son, Sir Julius. It was he who suffered from the delusion that his

perspiration engendered flies; it drove him finally to suicide. Or there's Sir Cyprian." He turned the pages

more rapidly. "Or Sir Henry. Or Sir George...No, I'm inclined to think I won't read about any of these."

"But you must read something," insisted Mr. Scogan, taking his pipe out of his mouth.

"I think I shall read about my grandfather," said Henry Wimbush, "and the events that led up to his marriage

"Before I begin reading," said Henry Wimbush, looking up from the book and taking off the pincenez which

he had just fitted to his nose"before their begin, I must say a few preliminary words about Sir Ferdinando,

the last of the Lapiths. At the death of the virtuous and unfortunate Sir Hercules, Ferdinando found himself in

possession of the family fortune, not a little increased by his father's temperance and thrift; he applied himself

forthwith to the task of spending it, which he did in an ample and jovial fashion. By the time he was forty he

had eaten and, above all, drunk and loved away about half his capital, and would infallibly have soon got rid

of the rest in the same manner, if he had not had the good fortune to become so madly enamoured of the

Rector's daughter as to make a proposal of marriage. The young lady accepted him, and in less than a year

had become the absolute mistress of Crome and her husband. An extraordinary reformation made itself

apparent in Sir Ferdinando's character. He grew regular and economical in his habits; he even became

temperate, rarely drinking more than a bottle and a half of port at a sitting. The waning fortune of the Lapiths

began once more to wax, and that in despite of the hard times (for Sir Ferdinando married in 1809 in the

height of the Napoleonic Wars). A prosperous and dignified old age, cheered by the spectacle of his

children's growth and happiness for Lady Lapith had already borne him three daughters, and there seemed

no good reason why she should not bear many more of them, and sons as wella patriarchal decline into the

family vault, seemed now to be Sir Ferdinando's enviable destiny. But Providence willed otherwise. To

Napoleon, cause already of such infinite mischief, was due, though perhaps indirectly, the untimely and

"Sir Ferdinando, who was above all things a patriot, had adopted, from the earliest days of the conflict with

the French, his own peculiar method of celebrating our victories. When the happy news reached London, it

was his custom to purchase immediately a large store of liquor and, taking a place on whichever of the

outgoing coaches he happened to light on first, to drive through the country proclaiming the good news to all

he met on the road and dispensing it, along with the liquor, at every stoppingplace to all who cared to listen

or drink. Thus, after the Nile, he had driven as far as Edinburgh; and later, when the coaches, wreathed with

laurel for triumph, with cypress for mourning, were setting out with the news of Nelson's victory and death,

he sat through all a chilly October night on the box of the Norwich "Meteor" with a nautical keg of rum on

his knees and two cases of old brandy under the seat. This genial custom was one of the many habits which

he abandoned on his marriage. The victories in the Peninsula, the retreat from Moscow, Leipzig, and the

abdication of the tyrant all went uncelebrated. It so happened, however, that in the summer of 1815 Sir

Ferdinando was staying for a few weeks in the capital. There had been a succession of anxious, doubtful

days; then came the glorious news of Waterloo. It was too much for Sir Ferdinando; his joyous youth awoke

again within him. He hurried to his wine merchant and bought a dozen bottles of 1760 brandy. The Bath

coach was on the point of starting; he bribed his way on to the box and, seated in glory beside the driver,

proclaimed aloud the downfall of the Corsican bandit and passed about the warm liquid joy. They clattered

through Uxbridge, Slough, Maidenhead. Sleeping Reading was awakened by the great news. At Didcot one

of the ostlers was so much overcome by patriotic emotions and the 1760 brandy that he found it impossible to

do up the buckles of the harness. The night began to grow chilly, and Sir Ferdinando found that it was not

enough to take a nip at every stage: to keep up his vital warmth he was compelled to drink between the stages

as well. They were approaching Swindon. The coach was travelling at a dizzy speedsix miles in the last

halfhourwhen, without having manifested the slightest premonitory symptom of unsteadiness, Sir

Ferdinando suddenly toppled sideways off his seat and fell, head foremost, into the road. An unpleasant jolt

awakened the slumbering passengers. The coach was brought to a standstill; the guard ran back with a light.

He found Sir Ferdinando still alive, but unconscious; blood was oozing from his mouth. The back wheels of

the coach had passed over his body, breaking most of his ribs and both arms. His skull was fractured in two

places. They picked him up, but he was dead before they reached the next stage. So perished Sir Ferdinando,

a victim to his own patriotism. Lady Lapith did not marry again, but determined to devote the rest of her life

to the wellbeing of her three childrenGeorgiana, now five years old, and Emmeline and Caroline, twins

Henry Wimbush paused, and once more put on his pincenez. "So much by way of introduction," he said.

Mr. Wimbush waited. Seated apart in a corner of the room, Ivor was showing Mary his sketches of Spirit

"It was in the spring of 1833 that my grandfather, George Wimbush, first made the acquaintance of the 'three

lovely Lapiths,' as they were always called. He was then a young man of twentytwo, with curly yellow hair

and a smooth pink face that was the mirror of his youthful and ingenuous mind. He had been educated at

Harrow and Christ Church, he enjoyed hunting and all other field sports, and, though his circumstances were

comfortable to the verge of affluence, his pleasures were temperate and innocent. His father, an East Indian

merchant, had destined him for a political career, and had gone to considerable expense in acquiring a

pleasant little Cornish borough as a twentyfirst birthday gift for his son. He was justly indignant when, on

the very eve of George's majority, the Reform Bill of 1832 swept the borough out of existence. The

inauguration of George's political career had to be postponed. At the time he got to know the lovely Lapiths

"The lovely Lapiths did not fail to impress him. Georgiana, the eldest, with her black ringlets, her flashing

eyes, her noble aquiline profile, her swanlike neck, and sloping shoulders, was orientally dazzling; and the

twins, with their delicately turned up noses, their blue eyes, and chestnut hair, were an identical pair of

"Their conversation at this first meeting proved, however, to be so forbidding that, but for the invincible

attraction exercised by their beauty, George would never have had the courage to follow up the acquaintance.

The twins, looking up their noses at him with an air of languid superiority, asked him what he thought of the

latest French poetry and whether he liked the "Indiana" of George Sand. But what was almost worse was the

question with which Georgiana opened her conversation with him. 'In music,' she asked, leaning forward and

fixing him with her large dark eyes, 'are you a classicist or a transcendentalist?' George did not lose his

presence of mind. He had enough appreciation of music to know that he hated anything classical, and so, with

a promptitude which did him credit, he replied, 'I am a transcendentalist.' Georgiana smiled bewitchingly. 'I

am glad,' she said; 'so am I. You went to hear Paganini last week, of course. "The prayer of Moses"ah!'

She closed her eyes. 'Do you know anything more transcendental than that?' 'No,' said George, 'I don't.' He

hesitated, was about to go on speaking, and then decided that after all it would be wiser not to say what

was in fact truethat he had enjoyed above all Paganini's Farmyard Imitations. The man had made his fiddle

bray like an ass, cluck like a hen, grunt, squeal, bark, neigh, quack, bellow, and growl; that last item, in

George's estimation, had almost compensated for the tediousness of the rest of the concert. He smiled with

pleasure at the thought of it. Yes, decidedly, he was no classicist in music; he was a thoroughgoing

"George followed up this first introduction by paying a call on the young ladies and their mother, who

occupied, during the season, a small but elegant house in the neighbourhood of Berkeley Square. Lady Lapith

made a few discreet inquiries, and having found that George's financial position, character, and family were

all passably good, she asked him to dine. She hoped and expected that her daughters would all marry into the

peerage; but, being a prudent woman, she knew it was advisable to prepare for all contingencies. George

Wimbush, she thought, would make an excellent second string for one of the twins.

"At this first dinner, George's partner was Emmeline. They talked of Nature. Emmeline protested that to her

high mountains were a feeling and the hum of human cities torture. George agreed that the country was very

agreeable, but held that London during the season also had its charms. He noticed with surprise and a certain

solicitous distress that Miss Emmeline's appetite was poor, that it didn't, in fact, exist. Two spoonfuls of soup,

a morsel of fish, no bird, no meat, and three grapesthat was her whole dinner. He looked from time to time

at her two sisters; Georgiana and Caroline seemed to be quite as abstemious. They waved away whatever was

offered them with an expression of delicate disgust, shutting their eyes and averting their faces from the

proffered dish, as though the lemon sole, the duck, the loin of veal, the trifle, were objects revolting to the

sight and smell. George, who thought the dinner capital, ventured to comment on the sisters' lack of appetite.

"'Pray, don't talk to me of eating,' said Emmeline, drooping like a sensitive plant. 'We find it so coarse, so

unspiritual, my sisters and I. One can't think of one's soul while one is eating.'

"'Alas!' Emmeline sighed. 'One must. Death is very beautiful, don't you think?' She broke a corner off a piece

of toast and began to nibble at it languidly. 'But since, as you say, one must live...' She made a little gesture of

resignation. 'Luckily a very little suffices to keep one alive.' She put down her corner of toast half eaten.

"George regarded her with some surprise. She was pale, but she looked extraordinarily healthy, he thought;

so did her sisters. Perhaps if you were really spiritual you needed less food. He, clearly, was not spiritual.

"After this he saw them frequently. They all liked him, from Lady Lapith downwards. True, he was not very

romantic or poetical; but he was such a pleasant, unpretentious, kindhearted young man, that one couldn't

help liking him. For his part, he thought them wonderful, wonderful, especially Georgiana. He enveloped

them all in a warm, protective affection. For they needed protection; they were altogether too frail, too

spiritual for this world. They never ate, they were always pale, they often complained of fever, they talked

much and lovingly of death, they frequently swooned. Georgiana was the most ethereal of all; of the three she

ate least, swooned most often, talked most of death, and was the palestwith a pallor that was so startling as

to appear positively artificial. At any moment, it seemed, she might loose her precarious hold on this material

world and become all spirit. To George the thought was a continual agony. If she were to die...

"She contrived, however, to live through the season, and that in spite of the numerous balls, routs, and other

parties of pleasure which, in company with the rest of the lovely trio, she never failed to attend. In the middle

of July the whole household moved down to the country. George was invited to spend the month of August at

"The houseparty was distinguished; in the list of visitors figured the names of two marriageable young men

of title. George had hoped that country air, repose, and natural surroundings might have restored to the three

sisters their appetites and the roses of their cheeks. He was mistaken. For dinner, the first evening, Georgiana

ate only an olive, two or three salted almonds, and half a peach. She was as pale as ever. During the meal she

"'True love,' she said, 'being infinite and eternal, can only be consummated in eternity. Indiana and Sir

Rodolphe celebrated the mystic wedding of their souls by jumping into Niagara. Love is incompatible with

life. The wish of two people who truly love one another is not to live together but to die together.'

"'Come, come, my dear,' said Lady Lapith, stout and practical. 'What would become of the next generation,

"'In my young days,' Lady Lapith went on, 'I should have been laughed out of countenance if I'd said a thing

like that. But then in my young days souls weren't as fashionable as they are now and we didn't think death

"'In my young days' Lady Lapith was launched into her subject; nothing, it seemed, could stop her now. 'In

my young days, if you didn't eat, people told you you needed a dose of rhubarb. Nowadays...'

"There was a cry; Georgiana had swooned sideways on to Lord Timpany's shoulder. It was a desperate

"The days passed in an uneventful round of pleasures. Of all the gay party George alone was unhappy. Lord

Timpany was paying his court to Georgiana, and it was clear that he was not unfavourably received. George

looked on, and his soul was a hell of jealousy and despair. The boisterous company of the young men became

intolerable to him; he shrank from them, seeking gloom and solitude. One morning, having broken away

from them on some vague pretext, he returned to the house alone. The young men were bathing in the pool

below; their cries and laughter floated up to him, making the quiet house seem lonelier and more silent. The

lovely sisters and their mamma still kept their chambers; they did not customarily make their appearance till

luncheon, so that the male guests had the morning to themselves. George sat down in the hall and abandoned

"At any moment she might die; at any moment she might become Lady Timpany. It was terrible, terrible. If

she died, then he would die too; he would go to seek her beyond the grave. If she became Lady Timpany...ah,

then! The solution of the problem would not be so simple. If she became Lady Timpany: it was a horrible

thought. But then suppose she were in love with Timpanythough it seemed incredible that anyone could be

in love with Timpany suppose her life depended on Timpany, suppose she couldn't live without him? He

was fumbling his way along this clueless labyrinth of suppositions when the clock struck twelve. On the last

stroke, like an automaton released by the turning clockwork, a little maid, holding a large covered tray,

popped out of the door that led from the kitchen regions into the hall. From his deep armchair George

watched her (himself, it was evident, unobserved) with an idle curiosity. She pattered across the room and

came to a halt in front of what seemed a blank expense of panelling. She reached out her hand and, to

George's extreme astonishment, a little door swung open, revealing the foot of a winding staircase. Turning

sideways in order to get her tray through the narrow opening, the little maid darted in with a rapid crablike

motion. The door closed behind her with a click. A minute later it opened again and the maid, without her

tray, hurried back across the hall and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. George tried to recompose

his thoughts, but an invincible curiosity drew his mind towards the hidden door, the staircase, the little maid.

It was in vain he told himself that the matter was none of his business, that to explore the secrets of that

surprising door, that mysterious staircase within, would be a piece of unforgivable rudeness and indiscretion.

It was in vain; for five minutes he struggled heroically with his curiosity, but at the end of that time he found

himself standing in front of the innocent sheet of panelling through which the little maid had disappeared. A

glance sufficed to show him the position of the secret doorsecret, he perceived, only to those who looked

with a careless eye. It was just an ordinary door let in flush with the panelling. No latch nor handle betrayed

its position, but an unobtrusive catch sunk in the wood invited the thumb. George was astonished that he had

not noticed it before; now he had seen it, it was so obvious, almost as obvious as the cupboard door in the

library with its lines of imitation shelves and its dummy books. He pulled back the catch and peeped inside.

The staircase, of which the degrees were made not of stone but of blocks of ancient oak, wound up and out of

sight. A slitlike window admitted the daylight; he was at the foot of the central tower, and the little window

looked out over the terrace; they were still shouting and splashing in the pool below.

"George closed the door and went back to his seat. But his curiosity was not satisfied. Indeed, this partial

satisfaction had but whetted its appetite. Where did the staircase lead? What was the errand of the little maid?

It was no business of his, he kept repeatingno business of his. He tried to read, but his attention wandered.

A quarterpast twelve sounded on the harmonious clock. Suddenly determined, George rose, crossed the

room, opened the hidden door, and began to ascend the stairs. He passed the first window, corkscrewed

round, and came to another. He paused for a moment to look out; his heart beat uncomfortably, as though he

were affronting some unknown danger. What he was doing, he told himself, was extremely ungentlemanly,

horribly underbred. He tiptoed onward and upward. One turn more, then half a turn, and a door confronted

him. He halted before it, listened; he could hear no sound. Putting his eye to the keyhole, he saw nothing but

a stretch of white sunlit wall. Emboldened, he turned the handle and stepped across the threshold. There he

"In the middle of a pleasantly sunny little room'it is now Priscilla's boudoir,' Mr. Wimbush remarked

parentheticallystood a small circular table of mahogany. Crystal, porcelain, and silver,all the shining

apparatus of an elegant mealwere mirrored in its polished depths. The carcase of a cold chicken, a bowl of

fruit, a great ham, deeply gashed to its heart of tenderest white and pink, the brown cannon ball of a cold

plum pudding, a slender Hock bottle, and a decanter of claret jostled one another for a place on this festive

board. And round the table sat the three sisters, the three lovely Lapithseating!

"At George's sudden entrance they had all looked towards the door, and now they sat, petrified by the same

astonishment which kept George fixed and staring. Georgiana, who sat immediately facing the door, gazed at

him with dark, enormous eyes. Between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand she was holding a

drumstick of the dismembered chicken; her little finger, elegantly crooked, stood apart from the rest of her

hand. Her mouth was open, but the drumstick had never reached its destination; it remained, suspended,

frozen, in midair. The other two sisters had turned round to look at the intruder. Caroline still grasped her

knife and fork; Emmeline's fingers were round the stem of her claret glass. For what seemed a very long time,

George and the three sisters stared at one another in silence. They were a group of statues. Then suddenly

there was movement. Georgiana dropped her chicken bone, Caroline's knife and fork clattered on her plate.

The movement propagated itself, grew more decisive; Emmeline sprang to her feet, uttering a cry. The wave

of panic reached George; he turned and, mumbling something unintelligible as he went, rushed out of the

room and down the winding stairs. He came to a standstill in the hall, and there, all by himself in the quiet

"At luncheon it was noticed that the sisters ate a little more than usual. Georgiana toyed with some French

beans and a spoonful of calves'foot jelly. 'I feel a little stronger to day,' she said to Lord Timpany, when he

congratulated her on this increase of appetite; 'a little more material,' she added, with a nervous laugh.

Looking up, she caught George's eye; a blush suffused her cheeks and she looked hastily away.

"You won't tell anyone, George? Promise you won't tell anyone,' she implored. 'It would make us look so

ridiculous. And besides, eating IS unspiritual, isn't it? Say you won't tell anyone.'

"Lady Lapith was disappointed, of course; she had hoped for better thingsfor Timpany and a coronet. But

"My poor grandfather!" Mr. Wimbush added, as he closed his book and put away his pincenez. "Whenever I

read in the papers about oppressed nationalities, I think of him." He relighted his cigar. "It was a maternal

Henry Wimbush ceased speaking. In the silence that ensued Ivor's whispered commentary on the spirit

sketches once more became audible. Priscilla, who had been dozing, suddenly woke up.

"What?" she said in the startled tones of one newly returned to consciousness; "what?"

Jenny caught the words. She looked up, smiled, nodded reassuringly. "It's about a ham," she said.

"What Henry has been reading." She closed the red notebook lying on her knees and slipped a rubber band

"So am I," said Anne, yawning. But she lacked the energy to rise from her armchair.

The night was hot and oppressive. Round the open windows the curtains hung unmoving. Ivor, fanning

himself with the portrait of an Astral Being, looked out into the darkness and drew a breath.

"It will get cooler after midnight," said Henry Wimbush, and cautiously added, "perhaps."

Priscilla turned her head in his direction; the monumental coiffure nodded exorbitantly at her slightest

movement. "You must make an effort," she said. "When I can't sleep, I concentrate my will: I say, 'I will

"But does it work on stuffy nights?" Ivor inquired. "I simply cannot sleep on a stuffy night."

"Out of doors! What a wonderful idea!" In the end they decided to sleep on the towersMary on the western

tower, Ivor on the eastern. There was a flat expanse of leads on each of the towers, and you could get a

mattress through the trap doors that opened on to them. Under the stars, under the gibbous moon, assuredly

they would sleep. The mattresses were hauled up, sheets and blankets were spread, and an hour later the two

insomniasts, each on his separate tower, were crying their good nights across the dividing gulf.

On Mary the sleepcompelling charm of the open air did not work with its expected magic. Even through the

mattress one could not fail to be aware that the leads were extremely hard. Then there were noises: the owls

screeched tirelessly, and once, roused by some unknown terror, all the geese of the farmyard burst into a

sudden frenzy of cackling. The stars and the gibbous moon demanded to be looked at, and when one

meteorite had streaked across the sky, you could not help waiting, openeyed and alert, for the next. Time

passed; the moon climbed higher and higher in the sky. Mary felt less sleepy than she had when she first

came out. She sat up and looked over the parapet. Had Ivor been able to sleep? she wondered. And as though

in answer to her mental question, from behind the chimneystack at the farther end of the roof a white form

noiselessly emergeda form that, in the moonlight, was recognisably Ivor's. Spreading his arms to right and

left, like a tightrope dancer, he began to walk forward along the rooftree of the house. He swayed

terrifyingly as he advanced. Mary looked on speechlessly; perhaps he was walking in his sleep! Suppose he

were to wake up suddenly, now! If she spoke or moved it might mean his death. She dared look no more, but

sank back on her pillows. She listened intently. For what seemed an immensely long time there was no

sound. Then there was a patter of feet on the tiles, followed by a scrabbling noise and a whispered "Damn!"

And suddenly Ivor's head and shoulders appeared above the parapet. One leg followed, then the other. He

"I couldn't sleep," he explained, "so I came along to see if you couldn't. One gets bored by oneself on a tower.

It was light before five. Long, narrow clouds barred the east, their edges bright with orange fire. The sky was

pale and watery. With the mournful scream of a soul in pain, a monstrous peacock, flying heavily up from

"Catch him!" cried Ivor, jumping up. "We'll have a feather." The frightened peacock ran up and down the

parapet in an absurd distress, curtseying and bobbing and clucking; his long tail swung ponderously back and

forth as he turned and turned again. Then with a flap and swish he launched himself upon the air and sailed

magnificently earthward, with a recovered dignity. But he had left a trophy. Ivor had his feather, a

longlashed eye of purple and green, of blue and gold. He handed it to his companion.

Mary looked at it for a moment, gravely and intently. Her purple pyjamas clothed her with an ampleness that

hid the lines of her body; she looked like some large, comfortable, unjointed toy, a sort of Teddybearbut

a Teddy bear with an angel's head, pink cheeks, and hair like a bell of gold. An angel's face, the feather of an

"It's extraordinary to think of sexual selection," she said at last, looking up from her contemplation of the

He put his arm round her shoulders and they stood looking eastward. The first sunlight had begun to warm

and colour the pale light of the dawn. Mauve pyjamas and white pyjamas; they were a young and charming

couple. The rising sun touched their faces. It was all extremely symbolic; but then, if you choose to think so,

Mary threw her arms round his neck. "You mustn't, Ivor. It's dangerous. Please."

He had to yield at last to her entreaties. "All right," he said, "I'll go down through the house and up at the

He vanished through the trap door into the darkness that still lurked within the shuttered house. A minute

later he had reappeared on the farther tower; he waved his hand, and then sank down, out of sight, behind the

parapet. From below, in the house, came the thin wasplike buzzing of an alarumclock. He had gone back

Ivor was gone. Lounging behind the windscreen in his yellow sedan he was whirling across rural England.

Social and amorous engagements of the most urgent character called him from hall to baronial hall, from

castle to castle, from Elizabethan manor house to Georgian mansion, over the whole expanse of the

kingdom. Today in Somerset, tomorrow in Warwickshire, on Saturday in the West riding, by Tuesday

morning in ArgyllIvor never rested. The whole summer through, from the beginning of July till the end of

September, he devoted himself to his engagements; he was a martyr to them. In the autumn he went back to

London for a holiday. Crome had been a little incident, an evanescent bubble on the stream of his life; it

belonged already to the past. By teatime he would be at Gobley, and there would be Zenobia's welcoming

smile. And on Thursday morningbut that was a long, long way ahead. He would think of Thursday

morning when Thursday morning arrived. Meanwhile there was Gobley, meanwhile Zenobia.

In the visitor's book at Crome Ivor had left, according to his invariable custom in these cases, a poem. He had

improvised it magisterially in the ten minutes preceding his departure. Denis and Mr. Scogan strolled back

together from the gates of the courtyard, whence they had bidden their last farewells; on the writingtable in

the hall they found the visitor's book, open, and Ivor's composition scarcely dry. Mr. Scogan read it aloud:

"The magic of those immemorial kings, Who webbed enchantment on the bowls of night. Sleeps in the soul

of all created things; In the blue sea, th' Acroceraunian height, In the eyed butterfly's auricular wings And

orgied visions of the anchorite; In all that singing flies and flying sings, In rain, in pain, in delicate delight.

But much more magic, much more cogent spells Weave here their wizardries about my soul. Crome calls me

like the voice of vesperal bells, Haunts like a ghostlypeopled necropole. Fate tears me hence. Hard fate!

"Very nice and tasteful and tactful," said Mr. Scogan, when he had finished. "I am only troubled by the

butterfly's auricular wings. You have a firsthand knowledge of the workings of a poet's mind, Denis;

"What could be simpler," said Denis. "It's a beautiful word, and Ivor wanted to say that the wings were

"One suffers so much," Denis went on, "from the fact that beautiful words don't always mean what they ought

to mean. Recently, for example, I had a whole poem ruined, just because the word 'carminative' didn't mean

"It's a word I've treasured from my earliest infancy," said Denis, "treasured and loved. They used to give me

cinnamon when I had a coldquite useless, but not disagreeable. One poured it drop by drop out of narrow

bottles, a golden liquor, fierce and fiery. On the label was a list of its virtues, and among other things it was

described as being in the highest degree carminative. I adored the word. 'Isn't it carminative?' I used to say to

myself when I'd taken my dose. It seemed so wonderfully to describe that sensation of internal warmth, that

glow, thatwhat shall I call it?physical selfsatisfaction which followed the drinking of cinnamon. Later,

when I discovered alcohol, 'carminative' described for me that similar, but nobler, more spiritual glow which

wine evokes not only in the body but in the soul as well. The carminative virtues of burgundy, of rum, of old

brandy, of Lacryma Christi, of Marsala, of Aleatico, of stout, of gin, of champagne, of claret, of the raw new

wine of this year's Tuscan vintageI compared them, I classified them. Marsala is rosily, downily

carminative; gin pricks and refreshes while it warms. I had a whole table of carmination values. And

now"Denis spread out his hands, palms upwards, despairingly"now I know what carminative really

"Carminative," said Denis, lingering lovingly over the syllables, "carminative. I imagined vaguely that it had

something to do with carmencarminis, still more vaguely with carocarnis, and its derivations, like carnival

and carnation. Carminativethere was the idea of singing and the idea of flesh, rosecoloured and warm,

with a suggestion of the jollities of miCareme and the masked holidays of Venice. Carminativethe

warmth, the glow, the interior ripeness were all in the word. Instead of which..."

"Do come to the point, my dear Denis," protested Mr. Scogan. "Do come to the point."

"Well, I wrote a poem the other day," said Denis; "I wrote a poem about the effects of love."

"Others have done the same before you," said Mr. Scogan. "There is no need to be ashamed."

"I was putting forward the notion," Denis went on, "that the effects of love were often similar to the effects of

wine, that Eros could intoxicate as well as Bacchus. Love, for example, is essentially carminative. It gives

was what I wrote. Not only was the line elegantly sonorous; it was also, I flattered myself, very aptly

compendiously expressive. Everything was in the word carminativea detailed, exact foreground, an

I was not illpleased. And then suddenly it occurred to me that I had never actually looked up the word in a

dictionary. Carminative had grown up with me from the days of the cinnamon bottle. It had always been

taken for granted. Carminative: for me the word was as rich in content as some tremendous, elaborate work

It was the first time I had ever committed the word to writing, and all at once I felt I would like

lexicographical authority for it. A small EnglishGerman dictionary was all I had at hand. I turned up C, ca,

car, carm. There it was: 'Carminative: windtreibend.' Windtreibend!" he repeated. Mr. Scogan laughed. Denis

shook his head. "Ah," he said, "for me it was no laughing matter. For me it marked the end of a chapter, the

death of something young and precious. There were the yearsyears of childhood and innocencewhen I

had believed that carminative meantwell, carminative. And now, before me lies the rest of my lifea day,

perhaps, ten years, half a century, when I shall know that carminative means windtreibend.

"Carminative," Denis repeated, and they were silent for a time. "Words," said Denis at last, "wordsI

wonder if you can realise how much I love them. You are too much preoccupied with mere things and ideas

and people to understand the full beauty of words. Your mind is not a literary mind. The spectacle of Mr.

Gladstone finding thirtyfour rhymes to the name 'Margot' seems to you rather pathetic than anything else.

Mallarme's envelopes with their versified addresses leave you cold, unless they leave you pitiful; you can't

'Apte a ne point te cabrer, hue! Poste et j'ajouterai, dia! Si tu ne fuis onzebis Rue Balzac, chez cet Heredia,'

"That's the test for the literary mind," said Denis; "the feeling of magic, the sense that words have power. The

technical, verbal part of literature is simply a development of magic. Words are man's first and most

grandiose invention. With language he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and

attributed power to them! With fitted, harmonious words the magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats

and spirits from the elements. Their descendants, the literary men, still go on with the process, morticing their

verbal formulas together, and, before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe. Rabbits

out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds.

Formulated by their art the most insipid statements become enormously significant. For example, I proffer

the constatation, 'Black ladders lack bladders.' A selfevident truth, one on which it would not have been

worth while to insist, had I chosen to formulate it in such words as 'Black fireescapes have no bladders,' or,

'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie.' But since I put it as I do, 'Black ladders lack bladders,' it becomes,

for all its selfevidence, significant, unforgettable, moving. The creation by wordpower of something out of

nothing what is that but magic? And, I may add, what is that but literature? Half the world's greatest poetry

is simply 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie,' translated into magic significance as, 'Black ladders lack

Perched on its four stone mushrooms, the little granary stood two or three feet above the grass of the green

close. Beneath it there was a perpetual shade and a damp growth of long, luxuriant grasses. Here, in the

shadow, in the green dampness, a family of white ducks had sought shelter from the afternoon sun. Some

stood, preening themselves, some reposed with their long bellies pressed to the ground, as though the cool

grass were water. Little social noises burst fitfully forth, and from time to time some pointed tail would

execute a brilliant Lisztian tremolo. Suddenly their jovial repose was shattered. A prodigious thump shook

the wooden flooring above their heads; the whole granary trembled, little fragments of dirt and crumbled

wood rained down among them. With a loud, continuous quacking the ducks rushed out from beneath this

nameless menace, and did not stay their flight till they were safely in the farmyard.

"Don't lose your temper," Anne was saying. "Listen! You've frightened the ducks. Poor dears! no wonder."

She was sitting sideways in a low, wooden chair. Her right elbow rested on the back of the chair and she

supported her cheek on her hand. Her long, slender body drooped into curves of a lazy grace. She was

"Damn you!" Gombauld repeated, and stamped his foot again. He glared at her round the halffinished

"Poor ducks!" Anne repeated. The sound of their quacking was faint in the distance; it was inaudible.

"Can't you see you make me lose my time?" he asked. "I can't work with you dangling about distractingly

"You'd lose less time if you stopped talking and stamping your feet and did a little painting for a change.

Gombauld made a noise like a growl. "You're awful," he said, with conviction. "Why do you ask me to come

"For the simple reasons that I like youat least, when you're in a good temperand that I think you're a

"For the simple reason"Gombauld mimicked her voice"that you want me to make love to you and, when

Anne threw back her head and laughed. "So you think it amuses me to have to evade your advances! So like a

man! If you only knew how gross and awful and boring men are when they try to make love and you don't

Gombauld picked up his palette and brushes and attacked his canvas with the ardour of irritation. "I suppose

you'll be saying next that you didn't start the game, that it was I who made the first advances, and that you

were the innocent victim who sat still and never did anything that could invite or allure me on."

"So like a man again!" said Anne. "It's always the same old story about the woman tempting the man. The

woman lures, fascinates, invites; and mannoble man, innocent manfalls a victim. My poor Gombauld!

Surely you're not going to sing that old song again. It's so unintelligent, and I always thought you were a man

"Be a little objective," Anne went on. "Can't you see that you're simply externalising your own emotions?

That's what you men are always doing; it's so barbarously naive. You feel one of your loose desires for some

woman, and because you desire her strongly you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately

provoking and inviting the desire. You have the mentality of savages. You might just as well say that a plate

of strawberries and cream deliberately lures you on to feel greedy. In ninetynine cases out of a hundred

"Well, all I can say is that this must be the hundredth case," said Gombauld, without looking up.

Anne shrugged her shoulders and gave vent to a sigh. "I'm at a loss to know whether you're more silly or

After painting for a little time in silence Gombauld began to speak again. "And then there's Denis," he said,

renewing the conversation as though it had only just been broken off. "You're playing the same game with

Anne flushed with a sudden and uncontrollable anger. "It's perfectly untrue about Denis," she said

indignantly. "I never dreamt of playing what you beautifully call the same game with him." Recovering her

calm, she added in her ordinary cooing voice and with her exacerbating smile, "You've become very

"I have," Gombauld replied, with a gravity that was somehow a little too solemn. "I don't like to see a young

"...being whirled along the road to ruin," said Anne, continuing his sentence for him. I admire your

She was curiously irritated at what Gombauld had said about Denis. It happened to be so completely untrue.

Gombauld might have some slight ground for his reproaches. But Denisno, she had never flirted with

Gombauld painted on with fury. The restlessness of an unsatisfied desire, which, before, had distracted his

mind, making work impossible, seemed now to have converted itself into a kind of feverish energy. When it

was finished, he told himself, the portrait would be diabolic. He was painting her in the pose she had

naturally adopted at the first sitting. Seated sideways, her elbow on the back of the chair, her head and

shoulders turned at an angle from the rest of her body, towards the front, she had fallen into an attitude of

indolent abandonment. He had emphasised the lazy curves of her body; the lines sagged as they crossed the

canvas, the grace of the painted figure seemed to be melting into a kind of soft decay. The hand that lay along

the knee was as limp as a glove. He was at work on the face now; it had begun to emerge on the canvas,

dolllike in its regularity and listlessness. It was Anne's facebut her face as it would be, utterly

unillumined by the inward lights of thought and emotion. It was the lazy, expressionless mask which was

sometimes her face. The portrait was terribly like; and at the same time it was the most malicious of lies. Yes,

it would be diabolic when it was finished, Gombauld decided; he wondered what she would think of it.

For the sake of peace and quiet Denis had retired earlier on this same afternoon to his bedroom. He wanted to

work, but the hour was a drowsy one, and lunch, so recently eaten, weighed heavily on body and mind. The

meridian demon was upon him; he was possessed by that bored and hopeless postprandial melancholy

which the coenobites of old knew and feared under the name of "accidie." He felt, like Ernest Dowson, "a

little weary." He was in the mood to write something rather exquisite and gentle and quietist in tone;

something a little droopy and at the same timehow should he put it?a little infinite. He thought of Anne,

of love hopeless and unattainable. Perhaps that was the ideal kind of love, the hopeless kindthe quiet,

theoretical kind of love. In this sad mood of repletion he could well believe it. He began to write. One elegant

"A brooding love which is at most The stealth of moonbeams when they slide, Evoking colour's bloodless

when his attention was attracted by a sound from outside. He looked down from his window; there they were,

Anne and Gombauld, talking, laughing together. They crossed the courtyard in front, and passed out of sight

through the gate in the righthand wall. That was the way to the green close and the granary; she was going

to sit for him again. His pleasantly depressing melancholy was dissipated by a puff of violent emotion;

angrily he threw his quatrain into the wastepaper basket and ran downstairs. "The stealth of moonbeams,"

In the hall he saw Mr. Scogan; the man seemed to be lying in wait. Denis tried to escape, but in vain. Mr.

"Not so fast," he said, stretching out a small saurian hand with pointed nails"not so fast. I was just going

Denis abandoned himself; Mr. Scogan put on his hat and they went out arm in arm. On the shaven turf of the

terrace Henry Wimbush and Mary were playing a solemn game of bowls. They descended by the yewtree

walk. It was here, thought Denis, here that Anne had fallen, here that he had kissed her, hereand he

blushed with retrospective shame at the memoryhere that he had tried to carry her and failed. Life was

"Sanity!" said Mr. Scogan, suddenly breaking a long silence. "Sanitythat's what's wrong with me and that's

what will be wrong with you, my dear Denis, when you're old enough to be sane or insane. In a sane world I

should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and

Denis made no response; he was thinking of other things. "After all," he said to himself"after all,

Gombauld is better looking than I, more entertaining, more confident; and, besides, he's already somebody

"Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen," Mr. Scogan went on. Denis tried not to

listen, but the tireless insistence of Mr. Scogan's discourse gradually compelled his attention. "Men such as I

am, such as you may possibly become, have never achieved anything. We're too sane; we're merely

reasonable. We lack the human touch, the compelling enthusiastic mania. People are quite ready to listen to

the philosophers for a little amusement, just as they would listen to a fiddler or a mountebank. But as to

acting on the advice of the men of reason never. Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man

of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to

what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and

They entered the garden; at the head of one of the alleys stood a green wooden bench, embayed in the midst

of a fragrant continent of lavender bushes. It was here, though the place was shadeless and one breathed hot,

dry perfume instead of airit was here that Mr. Scogan elected to sit. He thrived on untempered sunlight.

"Consider, for example, the case of Luther and Erasmus." He took out his pipe and began to fill it as he

talked. "There was Erasmus, a man of reason if ever there was one. People listened to him at firsta new

virtuoso performing on that elegant and resourceful instrument, the intellect; they even admired and

venerated him. But did he move them to behave as he wanted them to behavereasonably, decently, or at

least a little less porkishly than usual? He did not. And then Luther appears, violent, passionate, a madman

insanely convinced about matters in which there can be no conviction. He shouted, and men rushed to follow

him. Erasmus was no longer listened to; he was reviled for his reasonableness. Luther was serious, Luther

was reality like the Great War. Erasmus was only reason and decency; he lacked the power, being a sage,

to move men to action. Europe followed Luther and embarked on a century and a half of war and bloody

persecution. It's a melancholy story." Mr. Scogan lighted a match. In the intense light the flame was all but

invisible. The smell of burning tobacco began to mingle with the sweetly acrid smell of the lavender.

"If you want to get men to act reasonably, you must set about persuading them in a maniacal manner. The

very sane precepts of the founders of religions are only made infectious by means of enthusiasms which to a

sane man must appear deplorable. It is humiliating to find how impotent unadulterated sanity is. Sanity, for

example, informs us that the only way in which we can preserve civilisation is by behaving decently and

intelligently. Sanity appeals and argues; our rulers persevere in their customary porkishness, while we

acquiesce and obey. The only hope is a maniacal crusade; I am ready, when it comes, to beat a tambourine

with the loudest, but at the same time I shall feel a little ashamed of myself. However"Mr. Scogan

shrugged his shoulders and, pipe in hand, made a gesture of resignation"It's futile to complain that things

are as they are. The fact remains that sanity unassisted is useless. What we want, then, is a sane and

reasonable exploitation of the forces of insanity. We sane men will have the power yet." Mr. Scogan's eyes

shone with a more than ordinary brightness, and, taking his pipe out of his mouth, he gave vent to his loud,

"But I don't want power," said Denis. He was sitting in limp discomfort at one end of the bench, shading his

eyes from the intolerable light. Mr. Scogan, bolt upright at the other end, laughed again.

"Everybody wants power," he said. "Power in some form or other. The sort of power you hanker for is

literary power. Some people want power to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust for power in

persecuting words, twisting them, moulding them, torturing them to obey you. But I divagate."

"Yes," Mr. Scogan continued, unheeding, "the time will come. We men of intelligence will learn to harness

the insanities to the service of reason. We can't leave the world any longer to the direction of chance. We

can't allow dangerous maniacs like Luther, mad about dogma, like Napoleon, mad about himself, to go on

casually appearing and turning everything upside down. In the past it didn't so much matter; but our modern

machine is too delicate. A few more knocks like the Great War, another Luther or two, and the whole concern

will go to pieces. In future, the men of reason must see that the madness of the world's maniacs is canalised

into proper channels, is made to do useful work, like a mountain torrent driving a dynamo..."

"Making electricity to light a Swiss hotel," said Denis. "You ought to complete the simile."

Mr. Scogan waved away the interruption. "There's only one thing to be done," he said. "The men of

intelligence must combine, must conspire, and seize power from the imbeciles and maniacs who now direct

The heat that was slowly paralysing all Denis's mental and bodily faculties, seemed to bring to Mr. Scogan

additional vitality. He talked with an everincreasing energy, his hands moved in sharp, quick, precise

gestures, his eyes shone. Hard, dry, and continuous, his voice went on sounding and sounding in Denis's ears

"In the Rational State," he heard Mr. Scogan saying, "human beings will be separated out into distinct

species, not according to the colour of their eyes or the shape of their skulls, but according to the qualities of

their mind and temperament. Examining psychologists, trained to what would now seem an almost

superhuman clairvoyance, will test each child that is born and assign it to its proper species. Duly labelled

and docketed, the child will be given the education suitable to members of its species, and will be set, in adult

life, to perform those functions which human beings of his variety are capable of performing."

"A great many, no doubt," Mr. Scogan answered; "the classification will be subtle and elaborate. But it is not

in the power of a prophet to go into details, nor is it his business. I will do more than indicate the three main

He paused, cleared his throat, and coughed once or twice, evoking in Denis's mind the vision of a table with a

glass and water bottle, and, lying across one corner, a long white pointer for the lantern pictures.

"The three main species," Mr. Scogan went on, "will be these: the Directing Intelligences, the Men of Faith,

and the Herd. Among the Intelligences will be found all those capable of thought, those who know how to

attain a certain degree of freedomand, alas, how limited, even among the most intelligent, that freedom

is!from the mental bondage of their time. A select body of Intelligences, drawn from among those who

have turned their attention to the problems of practical life, will be the governors of the Rational State. They

will employ as their instruments of power the second great species of humanitythe men of Faith, the

Madmen, as I have been calling them, who believe in things unreasonably, with passion, and are ready to die

for their beliefs and their desires. These wild men, with their fearful potentialities for good or for mischief,

will no longer be allowed to react casually to a casual environment. There will be no more Caesar Borgias, no

more Luthers and Mohammeds, no more Joanna Southcotts, no more Comstocks. The oldfashioned Man of

Faith and Desire, that haphazard creature of brute circumstance, who might drive men to tears and

repentance, or who might equally well set them on to cutting one another's throats, will be replaced by a new

sort of madman, still externally the same, still bubbling with a seemingly spontaneous enthusiasm, but, ah,

how very different from the madman of the past! For the new Man of Faith will be expending his passion, his

desire, and his enthusiasm in the propagation of some reasonable idea. He will be, all unawares, the tool of

Mr. Scogan chuckled maliciously; it was as though he were taking a revenge, in the name of reason, on

enthusiasts. "From their earliest years, as soon, that is, as the examining psychologists have assigned them

their place in the classified scheme, the Men of Faith will have had their special education under the eye of

the Intelligences. Moulded by a long process of suggestion, they will go out into the world, preaching and

practising with a generous mania the coldly reasonable projects of the Directors from above. When these

projects are accomplished, or when the ideas that were useful a decade ago have ceased to be useful, the

Intelligences will inspire a new generation of madmen with a new eternal truth. The principal function of the

Men of Faith will be to move and direct the Multitude, that third great species consisting of those countless

millions who lack intelligence and are without valuable enthusiasm. When any particular effort is required of

the Herd, when it is thought necessary, for the sake of solidarity, that humanity shall be kindled and united by

some single enthusiastic desire or idea, the Men of Faith, primed with some simple and satisfying creed, will

be sent out on a mission of evangelisation. At ordinary times, when the high spiritual temperature of a

Crusade would be unhealthy, the Men of Faith will be quietly and earnestly busy with the great work of

education. In the upbringing of the Herd, humanity's almost boundless suggestibility will be scientifically

exploited. Systematically, from earliest infancy, its members will be assured that there is no happiness to be

found except in work and obedience; they will be made to believe that they are happy, that they are

tremendously important beings, and that everything they do is noble and significant. For the lower species the

earth will be restored to the centre of the universe and man to pre eminence on the earth. Oh, I envy the lot

of the commonality in the Rational State! Working their eight hours a day, obeying their betters, convinced of

their own grandeur and significance and immortality, they will be marvellously happy, happier than any race

of men has ever been. They will go through life in a rosy state of intoxication, from which they will never

awake. The Men of Faith will play the cupbearers at this lifelong bacchanal, filling and ever filling again

with the warm liquor that the Intelligences, in sad and sober privacy behind the scenes, will brew for the

"And what will be my place in the Rational State?" Denis drowsily inquired from under his shading hand.

Mr. Scogan looked at him for a moment in silence. "It's difficult to see where you would fit in," he said at

last. "You couldn't do manual work; you're too independent and unsuggestible to belong to the larger Herd;

you have none of the characteristics required in a Man of Faith. As for the Directing Intelligences, they will

have to be marvellously clear and merciless and penetrating." He paused and shook his head. "No, I can see

Deeply hurt, Denis emitted the imitation of a loud Homeric laugh. "I'm getting sunstroke here," he said, and

Mr. Scogan followed his example, and they walked slowly away down the narrow path, brushing the blue

lavender flowers in their passage. Denis pulled a sprig of lavender and sniffed at it; then some dark leaves of

rosemary that smelt like incense in a cavernous church. They passed a bed of opium poppies, dispetaled now;

the round, ripe seedheads were brown and drylike Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads stuck

"Like Polynesian trophies..." Uttered aloud, the fancy seemed less charming and significant than it did when

There was a silence, and in a growing wave of sound the whir of the reaping machines swelled up from the

"It is satisfactory to think," said Mr. Scogan, as they strolled slowly onward, "that a multitude of people are

toiling in the harvest fields in order that we may talk of Polynesia. Like every other good thing in this world,

leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have

to pay. Let us be duly thankful for that, my dear Denisduly thankful," he repeated, and knocked the ashes

Denis was not listening. He had suddenly remembered Anne. She was with Gombauldalone with him in

"Shall we go and pay a call on Gombauld?" he suggested carelessly. It would be amusing to see what he's

He laughed inwardly to think how furious Gombauld would be when he saw them arriving.

Gombauld was by no means so furious at their apparition as Denis had hoped and expected he would be.

Indeed, he was rather pleased than annoyed when the two faces, one brown and pointed, the other round and

pale, appeared in the frame of the open door. The energy born of his restless irritation was dying within him,

returning to its emotional elements. A moment more and he would have been losing his temper againand

Anne would be keeping hers, infuriatingly. Yes, he was positively glad to see them.

Followed by Mr. Scogan, Denis climbed the little ladder and stepped over the threshold. He looked

suspiciously from Gombauld to his sitter, and could learn nothing from the expression of their faces except

that they both seemed pleased to see the visitors. Were they really glad, or were they cunningly simulating

"Excellent," he said approvingly, "excellent. Almost too true to character, if that is possible; yes, positively

too true. But I'm surprised to find you putting in all this psychology business." He pointed to the face, and

with his extended finger followed the slack curves of the painted figure. "I thought you were one of the

"I'm sorry," said Mr. Scogan. "I for one, without ever having had the slightest appreciation of painting, have

always taken particular pleasure in Cubismus. I like to see pictures from which nature has been completely

banished, pictures which are exclusively the product of the human mind. They give me the same pleasure as I

derive from a good piece of reasoning or a mathematical problem or an achievement of engineering. Nature,

or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly

pointless and incomprehensible. I am at home with the works of man; if I choose to set my mind to it, I can

understand anything that any man has made or thought. That is why I always travel by Tube, never by bus if I

can possibly help it. For, travelling by bus, one can't avoid seeing, even in London, a few stray works of God

the sky, for example, an occasional tree, the flowers in the windowboxes. But travel by Tube and you see

nothing but the works of maniron riveted into geometrical forms, straight lines of concrete, patterned

expanses of tiles. All is human and the product of friendly and comprehensible minds. All philosophies and

all religionswhat are they but spiritual Tubes bored through the universe! Through these narrow tunnels,

where all is recognisably human, one travels comfortable and secure, contriving to forget that all round and

below and above them stretches the blind mass of earth, endless and unexplored. Yes, give me the Tube and

Cubismus every time; give me ideas, so snug and neat and simple and well made. And preserve me from

nature, preserve me from all that's inhumanly large and complicated and obscure. I haven't the courage, and,

While Mr. Scogan was discoursing, Denis had crossed over to the farther side of the little square chamber,

"Well?" he demanded, looking at her almost fiercely. What was he asking of her? He hardly knew himself.

Anne looked up at him, and for answer echoed his "Well?" in another, a laughing key.

Denis had nothing more, at the moment, to say. Two or three canvases stood in the corner behind Anne's

chair, their faces turned to the wall. He pulled them out and began to look at the paintings.

He stood them in a row against the wall. Anne had to turn round in her chair to look at them. There was the

big canvas of the man fallen from the horse, there was a painting of flowers, there was a small landscape. His

hands on the back of the chair, Denis leaned over her. From behind the easel at the other side of the room Mr.

Scogan was talking away. For a long time they looked at the pictures, saying nothing; or, rather, Anne looked

"I like the man and the horse; don't you?" she said at last, looking up with an inquiring smile.

Denis nodded, and then in a queer, strangled voice, as though it had cost him a great effort to utter the words,

It was a remark which Anne had heard a good many times before and mostly heard with equanimity. But on

this occasionperhaps because they had come so unexpectedly , perhaps for some other reasonthe words

"My poor Denis," she managed to say, with a laugh; but she was blushing as she spoke.

It was noon. Denis, descending from his chamber, where he had been making an unsuccessful effort to write

something about nothing in particular, found the drawingroom deserted. He was about to go out into the

garden when his eye fell on a familiar but mysterious objectthe large red notebook in which he had so

often seen Jenny quietly and busily scribbling. She had left it lying on the windowseat. The temptation was

great. He picked up the book and slipped off the elastic band that kept it discreetly closed.

"Private. Not to be opened," was written in capital letters on the cover. He raised his eyebrows. It was the sort

of thing one wrote in one's Latin Grammar while one was still at one's preparatory school.

"Black is the raven, black is the rook, But blacker the theif who steals this book!"

It was curiously childish, he thought, and he smiled to himself. He opened the book. What he saw made him

Denis was his own severest critic; so, at least, he had always believed. He liked to think of himself as a

merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul; he was Brown Dog to himself. His

weaknesses, his absurditiesno one knew them better than he did. Indeed, in a vague way he imagined that

nobody beside himself was aware of them at all. It seemed, somehow, inconceivable that he should appear to

other people as they appeared to him; inconceivable that they ever spoke of him among themselves in that

same freely critical and, to be quite honest, mildly malicious tone in which he was accustomed to talk of

them. In his own eyes he had defects, but to see them was a privilege reserved to him alone. For the rest of

On opening the red notebook that crystal image of himself crashed to the ground, and was irreparably

shattered. He was not his own severest critic after all. The discovery was a painful one.

The fruit of Jenny's unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A caricature of himself, reading (the book was

upsidedown). In the background a dancing couple, recognisable as Gombauld and Anne. Beneath, the

legend: "Fable of the Wallflower and the Sour Grapes." Fascinated and horrified, Denis pored over the

drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious Rouveyre appeared in every one of those cruelly clear lines.

The expression of the face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered by a feeble envy; the attitude of

the body and limbs, an attitude of studious and scholarly dignity, given away by the fidgety pose of the

turnedin feetthese things were terrible. And, more terrible still, was the likeness, was the magisterial

certainty with which his physical peculiarities were all recorded and subtly exaggerated.

Denis looked deeper into the book. There were caricatures of other people: of Priscilla and Mr.

BarbecueSmith; of Henry Wimbush, of Anne and Gombauld; of Mr. Scogan, whom Jenny had represented

in a light that was more than slightly sinister, that was, indeed, diabolic; of Mary and Ivor. He scarcely

glanced at them. A fearful desire to know the worst about himself possessed him. He turned over the leaves,

lingering at nothing that was not his own image. Seven full pages were devoted to him.

"Private. Not to be opened." He had disobeyed the injunction; he had only got what he deserved.

Thoughtfully he closed the book, and slid the rubber band once more into its place. Sadder and wiser, he went

out on to the terrace. And so this, he reflected, this was how Jenny employed the leisure hours in her ivory

tower apart. And he had thought her a simpleminded, uncritical creature! It was he, it seemed, who was the

fool. He felt no resentment towards Jenny. No, the distressing thing wasn't Jenny herself; it was what she and

the phenomenon of her red book represented, what they stood for and concretely symbolised. They

represented all the vast conscious world of men outside himself; they symbolised something that in his

studious solitariness he was apt not to believe in. He could stand at Piccadilly Circus, could watch the crowds

shuffle past, and still imagine himself the one fully conscious, intelligent, individual being among all those

thousands. It seemed, somehow, impossible that other people should be in their way as elaborate and

complete as he in his. Impossible; and yet, periodically he would make some painful discovery about the

external world and the horrible reality of its consciousness and its intelligence. The red notebook was one of

these discoveries, a footprint in the sand. It put beyond a doubt the fact that the outer world really existed.

Sitting on the balustrade of the terrace, he ruminated this unpleasant truth for some time. Still chewing on it,

he strolled pensively down towards the swimmingpool. A peacock and his hen trailed their shabby finery

across the turf of the lower lawn. Odious birds! Their necks, thick and greedily fleshy at the roots, tapered up

to the cruel inanity of their brainless heads, their flat eyes and piercing beaks. The fabulists were right, he

reflected, when they took beasts to illustrate their tractates of human morality. Animals resemble men with all

the truthfulness of a caricature. (Oh, the red notebook!) He threw a piece of stick at the slowly pacing birds.

He walked on. The profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed him. Like a great wooden octopus, it spread

He emerged once more into the sunshine. The pool lay before him, reflecting in its bronze mirror the blue and

various green of the summer day. Looking at it, he thought of Anne's bare arms and sealsleek

Oh, these rags and tags of other people's making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his own? Was there,

He walked slowly round the water's edge. In an embayed recess among the surrounding yew trees, leaning

her back against the pedestal of a pleasantly comic version of the Medici Venus, executed by some nameless

"Hullo!" he said, for he was passing so close to her that he had to say something.

In this alcove hewed out of the dark trees, the atmosphere seemed to Denis agreeably elegiac. He sat down

beside her under the shadow of the pudic goddess. There was a prolonged silence.

At breakfast that morning Mary had found on her plate a picture postcard of Gobley Great Park. A stately

Georgian pile, with a facade sixteen windows wide; parterres in the foreground; huge, smooth lawns receding

out of the picture to right and left. Ten years more of the hard times and Gobley, with all its peers, will be

deserted and decaying. Fifty years, and the countryside will know the old landmarks no more. They will have

vanished as the monasteries vanished before them. At the moment, however, Mary's mind was not moved by

On the back of the postcard, next to the address, was written, in Ivor's bold, large hand, a single quatrain.

"Hail, maid of moonlight! Bride of the sun, farewell! Like bright plumes moulted in an angel's flight, There

sleep within my heart's most mystic cell Memories of morning, memories of the night."

There followed a postscript of three lines: "Would you mind asking one of the housemaids to forward the

packet of safety razor blades I left in the drawer of my washstand. Thanks. Ivor.

Seated under the Venus's immemorial gesture, Mary considered life and love. The abolition of her

repressions, so far from bringing the expected peace of mind, had brought nothing but disquiet, a new and

hitherto unexperienced misery. Ivor, Ivor...She couldn't do without him now. It was evident, on the other

hand, from the poem on the back of the picture postcard, that Ivor could very well do without her. He was at

Gobley now, so was Zenobia. Mary knew Zenobia. She thought of the last verse of the song he had sung that

"Le lendemain, Phillis peu sage Aurait donne moutons et chien Pour un baiser que le volage A Lisette

Mary shed tears at the memory; she had never been so unhappy in all her life before.

It was Denis who first broke the silence. "The individual," he began in a soft and sadly philosophical tone, "is

not a self supporting universe. There are times when he comes into contact with other individuals, when he

is forced to take cognisance of the existence of other universes besides himself."

He had contrived this highly abstract generalisation as a preliminary to a personal confidence. It was the first

"True," said Mary; and, generalising for herself, she added, "When one individual comes into intimate contact

with another, sheor he, of course, as the case may bemust almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering."

"One is apt, Denis went on, "to be so spellbound by the spectacle of one's own personality that one forgets

Mary was not listening. "The difficulty," she said, "makes itself acutely felt in matters of sex. If one

individual seeks intimate contact with another individual in the natural way, she is certain to receive or inflict

suffering. If on the other hand, she avoids contacts, she risks the equally grave sufferings that follow on

"When I think of my own case," said Denis, making a more decided move in the desired direction, "I am

amazed how ignorant I am of other people's mentality in general, and above all and in particular, of their

opinions about myself. Our minds are sealed books only occasionally opened to the outside world." He made

"It's an awful problem," said Mary thoughtfully. "One has to have had personal experience to realise quite

"Exactly." Denis nodded. "One has to have had firsthand experience." He leaned towards her and slightly

lowered his voice. "This very morning, for example..." he began, but his confidences were cut short. The

deep voice of the gong, tempered by distance to a pleasant booming, floated down from the house. It was

lunchtime. Mechanically Mary rose to her feet, and Denis, a little hurt that she should exhibit such a

desperate anxiety for her food and so slight an interest in his spiritual experiences, followed her. They made

"I hope you all realise," said Henry Wimbush during dinner, "that next Monday is Bank Holiday, and that

"Heavens!" cried Anne. "The FairI had forgotten all about it. What a nightmare! Couldn't you put a stop to

Mr. Wimbush sighed and shook his head. "Alas," he said, "I fear I cannot. I should have liked to put an end to

"Besides," Mr. Wimbush went on, "the Fair has become an institution. Let me see, it must be twentytwo

years since we started it. It was a modest affair then. Now..." he made a sweeping movement with his hand

It spoke highly for Mr. Wimbush's public spirit that he still continued to tolerate the Fair. Beginning as a sort

of glorified church bazaar, Crome's yearly Charity Fair had grown into a noisy thing of merrygorounds,

cocoanut shies, and miscellaneous side showsa real genuine fair on the grand scale. It was the local St.

Bartholomew, and the people of all the neighbouring villages, with even a contingent from the county town,

flocked into the park for their Bank Holiday amusement. The local hospital profited handsomely, and it was

this fact alone which prevented Mr. Wimbush, to whom the Fair was a cause of recurrent and never

diminishing agony, from putting a stop to the nuisance which yearly desecrated his park and garden.

"I've made all the arrangements already," Henry Wimbush went on. "Some of the larger marquees will be put

"So there's no escape," said Anne, turning to the rest of the party. "You'll all have to do something. As a

special favour you're allowed to choose your slavery. My job is the tea tent, as usual, Aunt Priscilla..."

"My dear," said Mrs. Wimbush, interrupting her, "I have more important things to think about than the Fair.

But you need have no doubt that I shall do my best when Monday comes to encourage the villagers."

"That's splendid," said Anne. "Aunt Priscilla will encourage the villagers. What will you do, Mary?"

Mr. Scogan reflected. "May I be allowed to tell fortunes?" he asked at last. "I think I should be good at telling

"Good!" said Anne; and turning to Gombauld, "You must be our lightning artist," she said. "'Your portrait for

"It's a pity I'm not Ivor," said Gombauld, with a laugh. "I could throw in a picture of their Auras for an extra

Mary flushed. "Nothing is to be gained," she said severely, "by speaking with levity of serious subjects. And,

after all, whatever your personal views may be, psychical research is a perfectly serious subject."

Denis made a deprecating gesture. "I have no accomplishments," he said, "I'll just be one of those men who

wear a thing in their buttonholes and go about telling people which is the way to tea and not to walk on the

"But what? All the good jobs are taken, and I can do nothing but lisp in numbers."

"Well, then, you must lisp," concluded Anne. "You must write a poem for the occasionan 'Ode on Bank

Holiday.' We'll print it on Uncle Henry's press and sell it at twopence a copy."

Anne shook her head. "Twopence," she repeated firmly. "Nobody will pay more than twopence."

"And now there's Jenny," said Mr Wimbush. "Jenny," he said, raising his voice, "what will you do?"

Denis thought of suggesting that she might draw caricatures at sixpence an execution, but decided it would be

wiser to go on feigning ignorance of her talent. His mind reverted to the red notebook. Could it really be true

"What will I do," Jenny echoed, "what will I do?" She frowned thoughtfully for a moment; then her face

brightened and she smiled. "When I was young," she said, "I learnt to play the drums."

Jenny nodded, and, in proof of her assertion, agitated her knife and fork, like a pair of drumsticks, over her

"But of course," said Anne, "there's any amount of opportunity. We'll put you down definitely for the drums.

"And a very good lot too," said Gombauld. "I look forward to my Bank Holiday. It ought to be gay."

"It ought indeed," Mr Scogan assented. "But you may rest assured that it won't be. No holiday is ever

"Come, come," protested Gombauld. "My holiday at Crome isn't being a disappointment."

"It's in the very nature of things," Mr. Scogan went on; "our holidays can't help being disappointments.

Reflect for a moment. What is a holiday? The ideal, the Platonic Holiday of Holidays is surely a complete

and absolute change. You agree with me in my definition?" Mr. Scogan glanced from face to face round the

table; his sharp nose moved in a series of rapid jerks through all the points of the compass. There was no sign

of dissent; he continued: "A complete and absolute change; very well. But isn't a complete and absolute

change precisely the thing we can never havenever, in the very nature of things?" Mr. Scogan once more

looked rapidly about him. "Of course it is. As ourselves, as specimens of Homo Sapiens, as members of a

society, how can we hope to have anything like an absolute change? We are tied down by the frightful

limitation of our human faculties, by the notions which society imposes on us through our fatal suggestibility,

by our own personalities. For us, a complete holiday is out of the question. Some of us struggle manfully to

take one, but we never succeed, if I may be allowed to express myself metaphorically, we never succeed in

"I mean to be," Mr. Scogan replied, and, expanding the fingers of his right hand, he went on: "Look at me, for

example. What sort of a holiday can I take? In endowing me with passions and faculties Nature has been

horribly niggardly. The full range of human potentialities is in any case distressingly limited; my range is a

limitation within a limitation. Out of the ten octaves that make up the human instrument, I can compass

perhaps two. Thus, while I may have a certain amount of intelligence, I have no aesthetic sense; while I

possess the mathematical faculty, I am wholly without the religious emotions; while I am naturally addicted

to venery, I have little ambition and am not at all avaricious. Education has further limited my scope. Having

been brought up in society, I am impregnated with its laws; not only should I be afraid of taking a holiday

from them, I should also feel it painful to try to do so. In a word, I have a conscience as well as a fear of gaol.

Yes, I know it by experience. How often have I tried to take holidays, to get away from myself, my own

boring nature, my insufferable mental surroundings!" Mr. Scogan sighed. "But always without success," he

added, "always without success. In my youth I was always strivinghow hard!to feel religiously and

aesthetically. Here, said I to myself, are two tremendously important and exciting emotions. Life would be

richer, warmer, brighter, altogether more amusing, if I could feel them. I try to feel them. I read the works of

the mystics. They seemed to me nothing but the most deplorable claptrapas indeed they always must to

anyone who does not feel the same emotion as the authors felt when they were writing. For it is the emotion

that matters. The written work is simply an attempt to express emotion, which is in itself inexpressible, in

terms of intellect and logic. The mystic objectifies a rich feeling in the pit of the stomach into a cosmology.

For other mystics that cosmology is a symbol of the rich feeling. For the unreligious it is a symbol of nothing,

and so appears merely grotesque. A melancholy fact! But I divagate." Mr. Scogan checked himself. "So much

for the religious emotion. As for the aestheticI was at even greater pains to cultivate that. I have looked at

all the right works of art in every part of Europe. There was a time when, I venture to believe, I knew more

about Taddeo da Poggibonsi, more about the cryptic Amico di Taddeo, even than Henry does. Today, I am

happy to say, I have forgotten most of the knowledge I then so laboriously acquired; but without vanity I can

assert that it was prodigious. I don't pretend, of course, to know anything about nigger sculpture or the later

seventeenth century in Italy; but about all the periods that were fashionable before 1900 I am, or was,

omniscient. Yes, I repeat it, omniscient. But did that fact make me any more appreciative of art in general? It

did not. Confronted by a picture, of which I could tell you all the known and presumed historythe date

when it was painted, the character of the painter, the influences that had gone to make it what it wasI felt

none of that strange excitement and exaltation which is, as I am informed by those who do feel it, the true

aesthetic emotion. I felt nothing but a certain interest in the subject of the picture; or more often, when the

subject was hackneyed and religious, I felt nothing but a great weariness of spirit. Nevertheless, I must have

gone on looking at pictures for ten years before I would honestly admit to myself that they merely bored me.

Since then I have given up all attempts to take a holiday. I go on cultivating my old stale daily self in the

resigned spirit with which a bank clerk performs from ten till six his daily task. A holiday, indeed! I'm sorry

Gombauld shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps," he said, "my standards aren't as elevated as yours. But

personally I found the war quite as thorough a holiday from all the ordinary decencies and sanities, all the

"Yes," Mr. Scogan thoughtfully agreed. "Yes, the war was certainly something of a holiday. It was a step

A little canvas village of tents and booths had sprung up, just beyond the boundaries of the garden, in the

green expanse of the park. A crowd thronged its streets, the men dressed mostly in blackholiday best,

funeral bestthe women in pale muslins. Here and there tricolour bunting hung inert. In the midst of the

canvas town, scarlet and gold and crystal, the merrygoround glittered in the sun. The balloonman walked

among the crowd, and above his head, like a huge, inverted bunch of manycoloured grapes, the balloons

strained upwards. With a scythelike motion the boatswings reaped the air, and from the funnel of the

engine which worked the roundabout rose a thin, scarcely wavering column of black smoke.

Denis had climbed to the top of one of Sir Ferdinando's towers, and there, standing on the sunbaked leads,

his elbows resting on the parapet, he surveyed the scene. The steamorgan sent up prodigious music. The

clashing of automatic cymbals beat out with inexorable precision the rhythm of piercingly sounded melodies.

The harmonies were like a musical shattering of glass and brass. Far down in the bass the Last Trump was

hugely blowing, and with such persistence, such resonance, that its alternate tonic and dominant detached

themselves from the rest of the music and made a tune of their own, a loud, monotonous see saw.

Denis leaned over the gulf of swirling noise. If he threw himself over the parapet, the noise would surely

buoy him up, keep him suspended, bobbing, as a fountain balances a ball on its breaking crest. Another fancy

"My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretched Over a bubbling cauldron."

Bad, bad. But he liked the idea of something thin and distended being blown up from underneath.

That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical quality. Tight blown, quivering in

the blast of noisy life. It was time for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual

On the terrace stood a knot of distinguished visitors. There was old Lord Moleyn, like a caricature of an

English milord in a French comic paper: a long man, with a long nose and long, drooping moustaches and

long teeth of old ivory, and lower down, absurdly, a short covert coat, and below that long, long legs cased in

pearlgrey trouserslegs that bent unsteadily at the knee and gave a kind of sideways wobble as he walked.

Beside him, short and thickset, stood Mr. Callamay, the venerable conservative statesman, with a face like a

Roman bust, and short white hair. Young girls didn't much like going for motor drives alone with Mr.

Callamay; and of old Lord Moleyn one wondered why he wasn't living in gilded exile on the island of Capri

among the other distinguished persons who, for one reason or another, find it impossible to live in England.

A black silk balloon towing a blackandwhite striped parachute proved to be old Mrs. Budge from the big

house on the other side of the valley. She stood low on the ground, and the spikes of her blackandwhite

sunshade menaced the eyes of Priscilla Wimbush, who towered over hera massive figure dressed in purple

and topped with a queenly toque on which the nodding black plumes recalled the splendours of a firstclass

Denis peeped at them discreetly from the window of the morning room. His eyes were suddenly become

innocent, childlike, unprejudiced. They seemed, these people, inconceivably fantastic. And yet they really

existed, they functioned by themselves, they were conscious, they had minds. Moreover, he was like them.

It would have been polite to go and say, "How d'you do?" But at the moment Denis did not want to talk,

could not have talked. His soul was a tenuous, tremulous, pale membrane. He would keep its sensibility intact

and virgin as long as he could. Cautiously he crept out by a side door and made his way down towards the

park. His soul fluttered as he approached the noise and movement of the fair. He paused for a moment on the

Hundreds of people, each with his own private face and all of them real, separate, alive: the thought was

disquieting. He paid twopence and saw the Tatooed Woman; twopence more, the Largest Rat in the World.

From the home of the Rat he emerged just in time to see a hydrogenfilled balloon break loose for home. A

child howled up after it; but calmly, a perfect sphere of flushed opal, it mounted, mounted. Denis followed it

with his eyes until it became lost in the blinding sunlight. If he could but send his soul to follow it!...

He sighed, stuck his steward's rosette in his buttonhole, and started to push his way, aimlessly but officially,

Mr. Scogan had been accommodated in a little canvas hut. Dressed in a black skirt and a red bodice, with a

yellowandred bandana handkerchief tied round his black wig, he lookedsharpnosed, brown, and

wrinkledlike the Bohemian Hag of Frith's Derby Day. A placard pinned to the curtain of the doorway

announced the presence within the tent of "Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana." Seated at a table, Mr.

Scogan received his clients in mysterious silence, indicating with a movement of the finger that they were to

sit down opposite him and to extend their hands for his inspection. He then examined the palm that was

presented him, using a magnifying glass and a pair of horn spectacles. He had a terrifying way of shaking his

head, frowning and clicking with his tongue as he looked at the lines. Sometimes he would whisper, as

though to himself, "Terrible, terrible!" or "God preserve us!" sketching out the sign of the cross as he uttered

the words. The clients who came in laughing grew suddenly grave; they began to take the witch seriously.

She was a formidable looking woman; could it be, was it possible, that there was something in this sort of

thing after all? After all, they thought, as the hag shook her head over their hands, after all...And they waited,

with an uncomfortably beating heart, for the oracle to speak. After a long and silent inspection, Mr. Scogan

would suddenly look up and ask, in a hoarse whisper, some horrifying question, such as, "Have you ever been

hit on the head with a hammer by a young man with red hair?" When the answer was in the negative, which it

could hardly fail to be, Mr. Scogan would nod several times, saying, "I was afraid so. Everything is still to

come, still to come, though it can't be very far off now." Sometimes, after a long examination, he would just

whisper, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," and refuse to divulge any details of a future too

appalling to be envisaged without despair. Sesostris had a success of horror. People stood in a queue outside

the witch's booth waiting for the privilege of hearing sentence pronounced upon them.

Denis, in the course of his round, looked with curiosity at this crowd of suppliants before the shrine of the

oracle. He had a great desire to see how Mr. Scogan played his part. The canvas booth was a rickety,

illmade structure. Between its walls and its sagging roof were long gaping chinks and crannies. Denis went

to the teatent and borrowed a wooden bench and a small Union Jack. With these he hurried back to the

booth of Sesostris. Setting down the bench at the back of the booth, he climbed up, and with a great air of

busy efficiency began to tie the Union Jack to the top of one of the tentpoles. Through the crannies in the

canvas he could see almost the whole of the interior of the tent. Mr. Scogan's bandanacovered head was just

below him; his terrifying whispers came clearly up. Denis looked and listened while the witch prophesied

"Is there going to be another war?" asked the old lady to whom he had predicted this end.

The old lady was succeeded by a girl dressed in white muslin, garnished with pink ribbons. She was wearing

a broad hat, so that Denis could not see her face; but from her figure and the roundness of her bare arms he

judged her young and pleasing. Mr. Scogan looked at her hand, then whispered, "You are still virtuous."

"But you will not remain so for long," added Mr. Scogan sepulchrally. The young lady giggled again.

"Destiny, which interests itself in small things no less than in great, has announced the fact upon your hand."

Mr. Scogan took up the magnifyingglass and began once more to examine the white palm. "Very

interesting," he said, as though to himself"very interesting. It's as clear as day." He was silent.

"I don't think I ought to tell you." Mr. Scogan shook his head; the pendulous brass earrings which he had

The witch seemed to ignore her remark. "Afterwards, it's not at all clear. The fates don't say whether you will

settle down to married life and have four children or whether you will try to go on the cinema and have none.

Mr. Scogan sighed. "Very well," he said, "if you must know, you must know. But if anything untoward

happens you must blame your own curiosity. Listen. Listen." He lifted up a sharp, claw nailed forefinger.

"This is what the fates have written. Next Sunday afternoon at six o'clock you will be sitting on the second

stile on the footpath that leads from the church to the lower road. At that moment a man will appear walking

along the footpath." Mr. Scogan looked at her hand again as though to refresh his memory of the details of

the scene. "A man," he repeated"a small man with a sharp nose, not exactly good looking nor precisely

young, but fascinating." He lingered hissingly over the word. "He will ask you, 'Can you tell me the way to

Paradise?' and you will answer, 'Yes, I'll show you,' and walk with him down towards the little hazel copse. I

The witch gave a shrug of the shoulders. "I merely tell you what I read in your hand. Good afternoon. That

Denis stepped down from the bench; tied insecurely and crookedly to the tentpole, the Union Jack hung limp

on the windless air. "If only I could do things like that!" he thought, as he carried the bench back to the

Anne was sitting behind a long table filling thick white cups from an urn. A neat pile of printed sheets lay

before her on the table. Denis took one of them and looked at it affectionately. It was his poem. They had

Anne put her head on one side deprecatingly. "Only three so far, I'm afraid. But I'm giving a free copy to

everyone who spends more than a shilling on his tea. So in any case it's having a circulation."

Denis made no reply, but walked slowly away. He looked at the broadsheet in his hand and read the lines to

"This day of roundabouts and swings, Struck weights, shied cocoanuts, tossed rings, Switchbacks, Aunt

Sallies, and all such small High jinksyou call it ferial? A holiday? But paper noses Sniffed the artificial

roses Of round Venetian cheeks through half Each carnival year, and masks might laugh At things the naked

face for shame Would blush atlaugh and think no blame. A holiday? But Galba showed Elephants on an

airy road; Jumbo trod the tightrope then, And in the circus armed men Stabbed home for sport and died to

break Those dull imperatives that make A prison of every working day, Where all must drudge and all obey.

Sing Holiday! You do not know How to be free. The Russian snow flowered with bright blood whose roses

spread Petals of fading, fading red That died into the snow again, Into the virgin snow; and men From all

ancient bonds were freed. Old law, old custom, and old creed, Old right and wrong there bled to death; The

frozen air received their breath, A little smoke that died away; And round about them where they lay The

snow bloomed roses. Blood was there A red gay flower and only fair. Sing Holiday! Beneath the Tree Of

Innocence and Liberty, Paper Nose and Red Cockade Dance within the magic shade That makes them

drunken, merry, and strong To laugh and sing their ferial song: 'Free, free...!' But Echo answers Faintly to the

laughing dancers, 'Free'and faintly laughs, and still, Within the hollows of the hill, Faintlier laughs and

whispers, 'Free,' Fadingly, diminishingly: 'Free,' and laughter faints away... Sing Holiday! Sing Holiday!"

He folded the sheet carefully and put it in his pocket. The thing had its merits. Oh, decidedly, decidedly! But

how unpleasant the crowd smelt! He lit a cigarette. The smell of cows was preferable. He passed through the

gate in the park wall into the garden. The swimmingpool was a centre of noise and activity.

"Second Heat in the Young Ladies' Championship." It was the polite voice of Henry Wimbush. A crowd of

sleek, seallike figures in black bathingdresses surrounded him. His grey bowler hat, smooth, round, and

Holding his tortoiseshellrimmed pincenez an inch or two in front of his eyes, he read out names from a

Five young persons ranged themselves on the brink. From their seats of honour at the other end of the pool,

Henry Wimbush raised his hand. There was an expectant silence. "When I say 'Go,' go. Go!" he said. There

Denis pushed his way through the spectators. Somebody plucked him by the sleeve; he looked down. It was

"Delighted to see you again, Mr. Stone," she said in her rich, husky voice. She panted a little as she spoke,

like a short winded lapdog. It was Mrs. Budge who, having read in the "Daily Mirror" that the Government

needed peach stoneswhat they needed them for she never knewhad made the collection of peach stones

her peculiar "bit" of war work. She had thirtysix peach trees in her walled garden, as well as four

hothouses in which trees could be forced, so that she was able to eat peaches practically the whole year

round. In 1916 she ate 4200 peaches, and sent the stones to the Government. In 1917 the military authorities

called up three of her gardeners, and what with this and the fact that it was a bad year for wall fruit, she only

managed to eat 2900 peaches during that crucial period of the national destinies. In 1918 she did rather better,

for between January 1st and the date of the Armistice she ate 3300 peaches. Since the Armistice she had

relaxed her efforts; now she did not eat more than two or three peaches a day. Her constitution, she

"So nice to see the young people enjoying themselves," Mrs. Budge went on. "And the old people too, for

that matter. Look at old Lord Moleyn and dear Mr. Callamay. Isn't it delightful to see the way they enjoy

Denis looked. He wasn't sure whether it was so very delightful after all. Why didn't they go and watch the

sack races? The two old gentlemen were engaged at the moment in congratulating the winner of the race; it

seemed an act of supererogatory graciousness; for, after all, she had only won a heat.

"Pretty little thing, isn't she?" said Mrs. Budge huskily, and panted two or three times.

"Yes," Denis nodded agreement. Sixteen, slender, but nubile, he said to himself, and laid up the phrase in his

memory as a happy one. Old Mr. Callamay had put on his spectacles to congratulate the victor, and Lord

Moleyn, leaning forward over his walking stick, showed his long ivory teeth, hungrily smiling.

The victor wriggled with embarrassment. She stood with her hands behind her back, rubbing one foot

nervously on the other. Her wet bathingdress shone, a torso of black polished marble.

"Very good indeed," said Lord Moleyn. His voice seemed to come from just behind his teeth, a toothy voice.

It was as though a dog should suddenly begin to speak. He smiled again, Mr. Callamay readjusted his

Denis imagined her floatingup and down, up and down on a great green swell. A blown black bladder; no,

that wasn't good, that wasn't good at all. A new winner was being congratulated. She was atrociously stubby

and fat. The last one, long and harmoniously, continuously curved from knee to breast, had been an Eve by

"...gogogo!" Henry Wimbush's polite level voice once more pronounced the formula. Another batch of

Grown a little weary of sustaining a conversation with Mrs. Budge, Denis conveniently remembered that his

duties as a steward called him elsewhere. He pushed out through the lines of spectators and made his way

along the path left clear behind them. He was thinking again that his soul was a pale, tenuous membrane,

when he was startled by hearing a thin, sibilant voice, speaking apparently from just above his head,

He looked up sharply. The path along which he was walking passed under the lee of a wall of clipped yew.

Behind the hedge the ground sloped steeply up towards the foot of the terrace and the house; for one standing

on the higher ground it was easy to look over the dark barrier. Looking up, Denis saw two heads overtopping

the hedge immediately above him. He recognised the iron mask of Mr. Bodiham and the pale, colourless face

of his wife. They were looking over his head, over the heads of the spectators, at the swimmers in the pond.

The rector turned up his iron mask towards the solid cobalt of the sky. "How long?" he said, as though to

himself; "how long?" He lowered his eyes again, and they fell on Denis's upturned curious face. There was an

Denis continued his promenade. He wandered past the merrygo round, through the thronged streets of the

canvas village; the membrane of his soul flapped tumultuously in the noise and laughter. In a ropedoff space

beyond, Mary was directing the children's sports. Little creatures seethed round about her, making a shrill,

tinny clamour; others clustered about the skirts and trousers of their parents. Mary's face was shining in the

heat; with an immense output of energy she started a threelegged race. Denis looked on in admiration.

"You're wonderful," he said, coming up behind her and touching her on the arm. "I've never seen such

She turned towards him a face, round, red, and honest as the setting sun; the golden bell of her hair swung

"Do you know, Denis," she said, in a low, serious voice, gasping a little as she spoke"do you know that

"It's appalling. I've been telling her about the Malthusian League. One really ought..."

But a sudden violent renewal of the metallic yelling announced the fact that somebody had won the race.

Mary became once more the centre of a dangerous vortex. It was time, Denis thought, to move on; he might

He turned back towards the canvas village. The thought of tea was making itself insistent in his mind. Tea,

tea, tea. But the teatent was horribly thronged. Anne, with an unusual expression of grimness on her flushed

face, was furiously working the handle of the urn; the brown liquid spurted incessantly into the proffered

cups. Portentous, in the farther corner of the tent, Priscilla, in her royal toque, was encouraging the villagers.

In a momentary lull Denis could hear her deep, jovial laughter and her manly voice. Clearly, he told himself,

this was no place for one who wanted tea. He stood irresolute at the entrance to the tent. A beautiful thought

suddenly came to him; if he went back to the house, went unobtrusively, without being observed, if he tiptoed

into the diningroom and noiselessly opened the little doors of the sideboardah, then! In the cool recess

within he would find bottles and a siphon; a bottle of crystal gin and a quart of soda water, and then for the

A minute later he was walking briskly up the shady yewtree walk. Within the house it was deliciously quiet

and cool. Carrying his wellfilled tumbler with care, he went into the library. There, the glass on the corner

of the table beside him, he settled into a chair with a volume of SainteBeuve. There was nothing, he found,

like a Causerie du Lundi for settling and soothing the troubled spirits. That tenuous membrane of his had

Towards sunset the fair itself became quiescent. It was the hour for the dancing to begin. At one side of the

village of tents a space had been roped off. Acetylene lamps, hung round it on posts, cast a piercing white

light. In one corner sat the band, and, obedient to its scraping and blowing, two or three hundred dancers

trampled across the dry ground, wearing away the grass with their booted feet. Round this patch of all but

daylight, alive with motion and noise, the night seemed preternaturally dark. Bars of light reached out into it,

and every now and then a lonely figure or a couple of lovers, interlaced, would cross the bright shaft, flashing

for a moment into visible existence, to disappear again as quickly and surprisingly as they had come.

Denis stood by the entrance of the enclosure, watching the swaying, shuffling crowd. The slow vortex

brought the couples round and round again before him, as though he were passing them in review. There was

Priscilla, still wearing her queenly toque, still encouraging the villagersthis time by dancing with one of

the tenant farmers. There was Lord Moleyn, who had stayed on to the disorganised, passoverish meal that

took the place of dinner on this festal day; he onestepped shamblingly, his bent knees more precariously

wobbly than ever, with a terrified village beauty. Mr. Scogan trotted round with another. Mary was in the

embrace of a young farmer of heroic proportions; she was looking up at him, talking, as Denis could see, very

seriously. What about? he wondered. The Malthusian League, perhaps. Seated in the corner among the band,

Jenny was performing wonders of virtuosity upon the drums. Her eyes shone, she smiled to herself. A whole

subterranean life seemed to be expressing itself in those loud rattats, those long rolls and flourishes of

drumming. Looking at her, Denis ruefully remembered the red notebook; he wondered what sort of a figure

he was cutting now. But the sight of Anne and Gombauld swimming pastAnne with her eyes almost shut

and sleeping, as it were, on the sustaining wings of movement and musicdissipated these preoccupations.

Male and female created He them...There they were, Anne and Gombauld, and a hundred couples moreall

stepping harmoniously together to the old tune of Male and Female created He them. But Denis sat apart; he

alone lacked his complementary opposite. They were all coupled but he; all but he...

"I never showed you our oaken drainpipes," he said. "Some of the ones we dug up are lying quite close to

Denis got up, and they walked off together into the darkness. The music grew fainter behind them. Some of

the higher notes faded out altogether. Jenny's drumming and the steady sawing of the bass throbbed on,

"Here we are," he said, and, taking an electric torch out of his pocket, he cast a dim beam over two or three

blackened sections of tree trunk, scooped out into the semblance of pipes, which were lying forlornly in a

They sat down on the grass. A faint white glare, rising from behind a belt of trees, indicated the position of

"I shall be glad," said Henry Wimbush, "when this function comes at last to an end."

"I do not know how it is," Mr. Wimbush continued, "but the spectacle of numbers of my fellowcreatures in

a state of agitation moves in me a certain weariness, rather than any gaiety or excitement. The fact is, they

don't very much interest me. They're aren't in my line. You follow me? I could never take much interest, for

example, in a collection of postage stamps. Primitives or seventeenthcentury booksyes. They are my line.

But stamps, no. I don't know anything about them; they're not my line. They don't interest me, they give me

no emotion. It's rather the same with people, I'm afraid. I'm more at home with these pipes." He jerked his

head sideways towards the hollowed logs. "The trouble with the people and events of the present is that you

never know anything about them. What do I know of contemporary politics? Nothing. What do I know of the

people I see round about me? Nothing. What they think of me or of anything else in the world, what they will

do in five minutes' time, are things I can't guess at. For all I know, you may suddenly jump up and try to

"True," Mr. Wimbush continued, "the little I know about your past is certainly reassuring. But I know

nothing of your present, and neither you nor I know anything of your future. It's appalling; in living people,

one is dealing with unknown and unknowable quantities. One can only hope to find out anything about them

by a long series of the most disagreeable and boring human contacts, involving a terrible expense of time. It's

the same with current events; how can I find out anything about them except by devoting years to the most

exhausting firsthand study, involving once more an endless number of the most unpleasant contacts? No,

give me the past. It doesn't change; it's all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it

comfortably and decorously and, above all, privatelyby reading. By reading I know a great deal of Caesar

Borgia, of St. Francis, of Dr. Johnson; a few weeks have made me thoroughly acquainted with these

interesting characters, and I have been spared the tedious and revolting process of getting to know them by

personal contact, which I should have to do if they were living now. How gay and delightful life would be if

one could get rid of all the human contacts! Perhaps, in the future, when machines have attained to a state of

perfectionfor I confess that I am, like Godwin and Shelley, a believer in perfectibility, the perfectibility of

machinerythen, perhaps, it will be possible for those who, like myself, desire it, to live in a dignified

seclusion, surrounded by the delicate attentions of silent and graceful machines, and entirely secure from any

"Beautiful," Denis agreed. "But what about the desirable human contacts, like love and friendship?"

The black silhouette against the darkness shook its head. "The pleasures even of these contacts are much

exaggerated," said the polite level voice. "It seems to me doubtful whether they are equal to the pleasures of

private reading and contemplation. Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because

reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce. The

world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and

widespread, an everincreasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of

social life and none of its intolerable tedium. At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to

congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and

"I sometimes think that it may be," said Denis; he was wondering if Anne and Gombauld were still dancing

"Instead of which," said Mr. Wimbush, with a sigh, "I must go and see if all is well on the dancingfloor."

They got up and began to walk slowly towards the white glare. "If all these people were dead," Henry

Wimbush went on, "this festivity would be extremely agreeable. Nothing would be pleasanter than to read in

a wellwritten book of an openair ball that took place a century ago. How charming! one would say; how

pretty and how amusing! But when the ball takes place today, when one finds oneself involved in it, then

one sees the thing in its true light. It turns out to be merely this." He waved his hand in the direction of the

acetylene flares. "In my youth," he went on after a pause, "I found myself, quite fortuitously, involved in a

series of the most phantasmagorical amorous intrigues. A novelist could have made his fortune out of them,

and even if I were to tell you, in my bald style, the details of these adventures, you would be amazed at the

romantic tale. But I assure you, while they were happeningthese romantic adventuresthey seemed to me

no more and no less exciting than any other incident of actual life. To climb by night up a ropeladder to a

secondfloor window in an old house in Toledo seemed to me, while I was actually performing this rather

dangerous feat, an action as obvious, as much to be taken for granted, ashow shall I put it?as quotidian

as catching the 8.52 from Surbiton to go to business on a Monday morning. Adventures and romance only

take on their adventurous and romantic qualities at secondhand. Live them, and they are just a slice of life

like the rest. In literature they become as charming as this dismal ball would be if we were celebrating its

tercentenary." They had come to the entrance of the enclosure and stood there, blinking in the dazzling light.

It was after ten o'clock. The dancers had already dispersed and the last lights were being put out. Tomorrow

the tents would be struck, the dismantled merrygoround would be packed into waggons and carted away.

An expanse of worn grass, a shabby brown patch in the wide green of the park, would be all that remained.

"No, no, no," Anne was saying in a breathless whisper, leaning backwards, turning her head from side to side

in an effort to escape Gombauld's kisses. "No, please. No." Her raised voice had become imperative.

With a sudden effort Anne freed herself. "You won't," she retorted. "You've tried to take the most unfair

"Yes, unfair advantage. You attack me after I've been dancing for two hours, while I'm still reeling drunk

with the movement, when I've lost my head, when I've got no mind left but only a rhythmical body! It's as

"Luckily," said Anne, "I am now completely sobered, and if you try and kiss me again I shall box your ears.

For answer Gombauld made an irritated noise. They paced off slowly, side by side.

"What I like about the painting of Degas..." Anne began in her most detached and conversational tone.

From where he stood, leaning in an attitude of despair against the parapet of the terrace, Denis had seen them,

the two pale figures in a patch of moonlight, far down by the pool's edge. He had seen the beginning of what

promised to be an endless passionate embracement, and at the sight he had fled. It was too much; he couldn't

stand it. In another moment, he felt, he would have burst into irrepressible tears.

Dashing blindly into the house, he almost ran into Mr. Scogan, who was walking up and down the hall

"Hullo!" said Mr. Scogan, catching him by the arm; dazed and hardly conscious of what he was doing or

where he was, Denis stood there for a moment like a somnambulist. "What's the matter?" Mr. Scogan went

"Worried about the cosmos, eh?" Mr. Scogan patted him on the arm. "I know the feeling," he said. "It's a

most distressing symptom. 'What's the point of it all? All is vanity. What's the good of continuing to function

if one's doomed to be snuffed out at last along with everything else?' Yes, yes. I know exactly how you feel.

It's most distressing if one allows oneself to be distressed. But then why allow oneself to be distressed? After

all, we all know that there's no ultimate point. But what difference does that make?"

At this point the somnambulist suddenly woke up. "What?" he said, blinking and frowning at his interlocutor.

Mr. Scogan ran to the foot of the stairs and called up after him. "It makes no difference, none whatever. Life

is gay all the same, always, under whatever circumstancesunder whatever circumstances," he added,

raising his voice to a shout. But Denis was already far out of hearing, and even if he had not been, his mind

tonight was proof against all the consolations of philosophy. Mr. Scogan replaced his pipe between his teeth

and resumed his meditative pacing. "Under any circumstances," he repeated to himself. It was ungrammatical

to begin with; was it true? And is life really its own reward? He wondered. When his pipe had burned itself to

its stinking conclusion he took a drink of gin and went to bed. In ten minutes he was deeply, innocently

Denis had mechanically undressed and, clad in those flowered silk pyjamas of which he was so justly proud,

was lying face downwards on his bed. Time passed. When at last he looked up, the candle which he had left

alight at his bedside had burned down almost to the socket. He looked at his watch; it was nearly halfpast

one. His head ached, his dry, sleepless eyes felt as though they had been bruised from behind, and the blood

was beating within his ears a loud arterial drum. He got up, opened the door, tiptoed noiselessly along the

passage, and began to mount the stairs towards the higher floors. Arrived at the servants' quarters under the

roof, he hesitated, then turning to the right he opened a little door at the end of the corridor. Within was a

pitch dark cupboardlike boxroom, hot, stuffy, and smelling of dust and old leather. He advanced cautiously

into the blackness, groping with his hands. It was from this den that the ladder went up to the leads of the

western tower. He found the ladder, and set his feet on the rungs; noiselessly, he lifted the trapdoor above

his head; the moonlit sky was over him, he breathed the fresh, cool air of the night. In a moment he was

standing on the leads, gazing out over the dim, colourless landscape, looking perpendicularly down at the

Why had he climbed up to this high, desolate place? Was it to look at the moon? Was it to commit suicide?

As yet he hardly knew. Deaththe tears came into his eyes when he thought of it. His misery assumed a

certain solemnity; he was lifted up on the wings of a kind of exaltation. It was a mood in which he might

have done almost anything, however foolish. He advanced towards the farther parapet; the drop was sheer

there and uninterrupted. A good leap, and perhaps one might clear the narrow terrace and so crash down yet

another thirty feet to the sunbaked ground below. He paused at the corner of the tower, looking now down

into the shadowy gulf below, now up towards the rare stars and the waning moon. He made a gesture with his

hand, muttered something, he could not afterwards remember what; but the fact that he had said it aloud gave

the utterance a peculiarly terrible significance. Then he looked down once more into the depths.

"What ARE you doing, Denis?" questioned a voice from somewhere very close behind him.

Denis uttered a cry of frightened surprise, and very nearly went over the parapet in good earnest. His heart

was beating terribly, and he was pale when, recovering himself, he turned round in the direction from which

In the profound shadow that slept under the eastern parapet of the tower, he saw something he had not

previously noticedan oblong shape. It was a mattress, and someone was lying on it. Since that first

memorable night on the tower, Mary had slept out every evening; it was a sort of manifestation of fidelity.

"It gave me a fright," she went on, "to wake up and see you waving your arms and gibbering there. What on

Denis laughed melodramatically. "What, indeed!" he said. If she hadn't woken up as she did, he would be

"You hadn't got designs on me, I hope?" Mary inquired, jumping too rapidly to conclusions.

"I didn't know you were here," said Denis, laughing more bitterly and artificially than before.

He sat down on the edge of the mattress, and for all reply went on laughing in the same frightful and

An hour later he was reposing with his head on Mary's knees, and she, with an affectionate solicitude that

was wholly maternal, was running her fingers through his tangled hair. He had told her everything,

everything: his hopeless love, his jealousy, his despair, his suicideas it were providentially averted by her

interposition. He had solemnly promised never to think of self destruction again. And now his soul was

floating in a sad serenity. It was embalmed in the sympathy that Mary so generously poured. And it was not

only in receiving sympathy that Denis found serenity and even a kind of happiness; it was also in giving it.

For if he had told Mary everything about his miseries, Mary, reacting to these confidences, had told him in

"Poor Mary!" He was very sorry for her. Still, she might have guessed that Ivor wasn't precisely a monument

"Well," she concluded, "one must put a good face on it." She wanted to cry, but she wouldn't allow herself to

"Do you think," asked Denis hesitatingly"do you really think that she...that Gombauld..."

"You'd better go away," advised Mary. "It's the safest thing, and the most sensible."

"I know I am," said Mary, who was recovering all her firm self possession. "You can't go on like this, can

Immensely practical, Mary invented a plan of action. Startlingly, in the darkness, the church clock struck

Denis clambered down the ladder, cautiously descended the creaking stairs. His room was dark; the candle

had long ago guttered to extinction. He got into bed and fell asleep almost at once.

Denis had been called, but in spite of the parted curtains he had dropped off again into that drowsy, dozy state

when sleep becomes a sensual pleasure almost consciously savoured. In this condition he might have

remained for another hour if he had not been disturbed by a violent rapping at the door.

"Come in," he mumbled, without opening his eyes. The latch clicked, a hand seized him by the shoulder and

His eyelids blinked painfully apart, and he saw Mary standing over him, brightfaced and earnest.

"Get up!" she repeated. "You must go and send the telegram. Don't you remember?"

Denis dressed as quickly as he could and ran up the road to the village post office. Satisfaction glowed within

him as he returned. He had sent a long telegram, which would in a few hours evoke an answer ordering him

back to town at onceon urgent business. It was an act performed, a decisive step taken and he so rarely

took decisive steps; he felt pleased with himself. It was with a whetted appetite that he came in to breakfast.

"I wish," said Mr. Scogan, "that I had nothing worse to prey on my mind. I should be a happy man."

He looked out of the window. Great florid baroque clouds floated high in the blue heaven. A wind stirred

among the trees, and their shaken foliage twinkled and glittered like metal in the sun. Everything seemed

marvellously beautiful. At the thought that he would soon be leaving all this beauty he felt a momentary

"Action," he repeated aloud, and going over to the sideboard he helped himself to an agreeable mixture of

Breakfast over, Denis repaired to the terrace, and, sitting there, raised the enormous bulwark of the "Times"

against the possible assaults of Mr. Scogan, who showed an unappeased desire to go on talking about the

Universe. Secure behind the crackling pages, he meditated. In the light of this brilliant morning the emotions

of last night seemed somehow rather remote. And what if he had seen them embracing in the moonlight?

Perhaps it didn't mean much after all. And even if it did, why shouldn't he stay? He felt strong enough to stay,

strong enough to be aloof, disinterested, a mere friendly acquaintance. And even if he weren't strong

"What time do you think the telegram will arrive?" asked Mary suddenly, thrusting in upon him over the top

"I was only wondering," said Mary, "because there's a very good train at 3.27, and it would be nice if you

"Awfully nice," he agreed weakly. He felt as though he were making arrangements for his own funeral. Train

leaves Waterloo 3.27. No flowers...Mary was gone. No, he was blowed if he'd let himself be hurried down to

the Necropolis like this. He was blowed. The sight of Mr. Scogan looking out, with a hungry expression,

from the drawingroom window made him precipitately hoist the "Times" once more. For a long while he

kept it hoisted. Lowering it at last to take another cautious peep at his surroundings, he found himself, with

what astonishment! confronted by Anne's faint, amused, malicious smile. She was standing before him,the

woman who was a tree,the swaying grace of her movement arrested in a pose that seemed itself a

"How long have you been standing there?" he asked, when he had done gaping at her.

"Oh, about half an hour, I suppose," she said airily. "You were so very deep in your paperhead over

"You look lovely this morning," Denis exclaimed. It was the first time he had ever had the courage to utter a

Anne held up her hand as though to ward off a blow. "Don't bludgeon me, please." She sat down on the bench

beside him. He was a nice boy, she thought, quite charming; and Gombauld's violent insistences were really

becoming rather tiresome. "Why don't you wear white trousers?" she asked. "I like you so much in white

"They're at the wash," Denis replied rather curtly. This white trouser business was all in the wrong spirit. He

was just preparing a scheme to manoeuvre the conversation back to the proper path, when Mr. Scogan

suddenly darted out of the house, crossed the terrace with clockwork rapidity, and came to a halt in front of

"To go on with our interesting conversation about the cosmos," he began, "I become more and more

convinced that the various parts of the concern are fundamentally discrete...But would you mind, Denis,

moving a shade to your right?" He wedged himself between them on the bench. "And if you would shift a

few inches to the left, my dear Anne...Thank you. Discrete, I think, was what I was saying."

They were taking their after luncheon coffee in the library when the telegram arrived. Denis blushed guiltily

as he took the orange envelope from the salver and tore it open. "Return at once. Urgent family business." It

was too ridiculous. As if he had any family business! Wouldn't it be best just to crumple the thing up and put

it in his pocket without saying anything about it? He looked up; Mary's large blue china eyes were fixed upon

him, seriously, penetratingly. He blushed more deeply than ever, hesitated in a horrible uncertainty.

He lost his head, "I'm afraid," he mumbled, "I'm afraid this means I shall have to go back to town at once."

"But that's absurd, impossible," cried Anne. She had been standing by the window talking to Gombauld; but

"I know," he said, utterly miserable. Oh, if only she could understand! Women were supposed to have

"Yes, I must." He looked at the telegram again for inspiration. "You see, it's urgent family business," he

Priscilla got up from her chair in some excitement. "I had a distinct presentiment of this last night," she said.

"A mere coincidence, no doubt," said Mary, brushing Mrs. Wimbush out of the conversation. "There's a very

good train at 3.27." She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. "You'll have nice time to pack."

"I'll order the motor at once." Henry Wimbush rang the bell. The funeral was well under way. It was awful,

Denis turned towards her; she really did look wretched. He abandoned himself hopelessly, fatalistically to his

destiny. This was what came of action, of doing something decisive. If only he'd just let things drift! If only...

Mary looked at the clock again. "I think perhaps you ought to go and pack," she said.

Obediently Denis left the room. Never again, he said to himself, never again would he do anything decisive.

Camlet, West Bowlby, Knipswich for Timpany, Spavin Delawarr; and then all the other stations; and then,

finally, London. The thought of the journey appalled him. And what on earth was he going to do in London

when he got there? He climbed wearily up the stairs. It was time for him to lay himself in his coffin.

The car was at the doorthe hearse. The whole party had assembled to see him go. Goodbye, goodbye.

Mechanically he tapped the barometer that hung in the porch; the needle stirred perceptibly to the left. A

"'It sinks and I am ready to depart,'" he said, quoting Landor with an exquisite aptness. He looked quickly