“I’ve no use for makeshifts. Honesty is a makeshift. A makeshift for saving time. Whoever wants to save time is not fit for the society of gentlemen.”
“Hear, hear!”
“Call yourself a gentleman?” enquired another.
“Just a makeshift. You won’t hear honesty talked about in the great periods of the world’s history. It’s the small tradesman’s invention, is honesty. He hasn’t the the brains to earn anything more than three and a half per cent. That’s why he is always in such a hurry to finish his first little deal and get on with the next one. Else he’d starve. Hence honesty. Three and a half per cent! Who’s going to pick that up? People who earn three hundred don’t cackle about honesty.”
“Call yourself a gentleman? Outside!”
“I’ve no use for honesty. It’s the small man’s flapdoodle, is honesty. This world isn’t made for small men! I am talking to you over there—the funny little bounder who made the offensive remark just now.”
“Are you? Well, take that!”
A glass tumbler, which Mr. Richards dodged in quite a professional manner, came hurtling through the air and missed the bishop’s forehead by about four inches.
That crowd was past his aid. He turned to go. As he did so, a curious idea flitted through his brain. This Mr. Richards—was he, perhaps, the burglar? He was; but Mr. Heard dashed aside the horrible suspicion, mindful of the mistake he had made about Angelina’s character and how careful one must be in judging of other people. The voice, meanwhile, pursued him down the stairs.
“No, gentlemen! I’ve no use for an honest man. He always lets you down. Fortunately, he is rather rare—”
Mr. Heard slept badly that night, for the first time since his arrival on Nepenthe. It was unbearably hot. And that visit to Mrs. Meadows had also troubled him a little.
The Old Town looked different on this occasion. A sullen death-like stillness, a menacing stagnation, hung about those pink houses. Not a leaf was astir under the burning sirocco sky. Even old Caterina, when he saw her, seemed to be afflicted, somehow.
“SOFFRE, LA SIGNORA,” she said. The lady was suffering.
The bishop would not have recognized his cousin after all those years; not if he had met her in the street at least. She greeted him affectionately and they talked for a long time of family matters. It was true, then. Her husband’s leave had been again postponed. Perhaps she would travel back to England with him, and there await the arrival of Meadows. She would let him know definitely in a day or two.
He watched her carefully while she conversed, trying to reconstruct, out of that woman’s face, the childish features he dimly remembered. They were effaced. He could see what Keith had meant when he described her as “tailor-made.” There was something clear-cut about her, something not exactly harsh, but savouring of decision. She was plainly a personality—not an ordinary type. The lines of her face told their story. They had been hammered into a kind of hard efficiency. But over that exterior of tranquil self-possession was super-imposed something else—certain marks of recent trouble. Her eyes looked almost as if she had been weeping. She made a tremendous show of cheeriness, however, calling him Tommy as in olden days.
Just a little headache. This sirocco. It was bad enough when it blew in the ordinary fashion. But quite intolerable when it hung breathlessly about the air like this. Mr. Eames—he once called it PLUMBEUS AUSTER. That meant leaden, didn’t it? Everybody had headaches, more or less.
Was she speaking the truth? The bishop decided that she had an headache and that this south wind was certainly unendurable. None the less, he suspected that she was employing the common subterfuge—telling the truth, but not the whole truth; perhaps not even the main part of it. She was holding back something.
“You haven’t attended to these roses lately,” he said, observing that the flowers had not been changed and that their fallen petals strewed the tables. “They looked so fresh when I was here alone the other day.”
“What a dreadful person you are, Tommy, for noticing things. First you discover my headache, and now those flowers! I see I shall have to be careful with you. Perhaps you would like to look at my precipice and tell me if there is anything wrong with that too? You have heard of the old French lady, I daresay. She ended, you know, in not approving of it at all. We can have tea when we come back. And after that perhaps you will let me know what is wrong with baby?”
“I can tell you that without looking at him. He is teething.”
“Clever boy! As a matter of fact, he isn’t. But I had to make some excuse to the dear Duchess.”
They climbed up the short slope and found themselves looking towards the sea over the face of a dizzy cliff. A falcon, on their approach, started with rustle of wings from its ledge and then swayed crazily over the abyss. Watching this bird, the bishop felt a sudden voice in his stomach. A sensation of blackness came before his eyes—sky and sea were merged together—his feet were treading on air. He promptly sat down.
“Not an inch nearer!” he declared. “Not for a thousand pounds. If you go along that edge again, I shall have to look the other way. It makes me feel empty inside.”
“I’m not in the least giddy,” she laughed. “There was an English boy who threw himself over this cliff for a bet—you have heard the story? They never found his body. It’s a good place for throwing oneself down, isn’t it?”
She seemed to consider the idea quite seriously.
“Well?” she pursued. “Have you any fault to find with my precipice?”
“I have. It ought to be railed in. It is dangerous. What a temptation this cliff must be to anyone who has an enemy to dispose of! It would be so simple,” he added, laughing.
“That advantage has never struck me before….”
These and other things passed through Mr. Heard’s mind as he lay in bed that evening. He came to the conclusion that he could not quite make his cousin out. Had something upset her? And what did she mean by that sudden conundrum:
“Do you know anything, Tommy, about our laws of illegitimacy?”
“Nothing,” he had replied, “except that they are a disgrace to a civilized country. Everybody knows that.”
She seemed to be disappointed. Perhaps she mistrusted him. The thought gave him a little pain. He had done nothing to merit mistrust. He was frank and open himself; he liked others to be the same.
What was the use of thinking about it? He knew tantalizingly little about his cousin—nothing but scraps of information gathered from his mother’s letters to him. He would call again in a day or two and make some definite arrangements about their journey to England. Perhaps he had talked more dully than usual…. Or could it be the south wind?
Neither of these explanations was wholly convincing.
CHAPTER XV
Nothing was happening. For the first time since many years, the Nepenthe season threatened to be a failure. It was the dullest spring on record. And yet there was a quality in that heavy atmosphere which seemed to threaten mischief. Everybody agreed that it had never been quite so bad as this. Meanwhile, people yawned. They were bored stiff. As a source of gossip, those two burglaries were a negligible quantity. So was the little accident which had just happened to Mr. Keith, who ruefully declared he had done it on purpose, in order to liven things up. No one was likely to be taken in by this kind of talk, because the accident was of an inglorious and even ludicrous kind.
Being very short-sighted he had managed to stumble backwards, somehow or other, into a large receptacle of lime which was being slaked for patching up a wall. Lime, in that condition, is boiling hot. Mr. Keith’s trousers were rather badly scalded. He was sensitive on that point. He suffered a good deal. People came to express their sympathy. The pain made him more tedious, long-winded and exhortatory than usual. At that particular moment Denis was being victimized. He had thoughtlessly called to express his sympathy, to see those celebrated cannas, and because he could not bear to be alone with his thoughts just then.
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“Suffering!” exclaimed Mr. Keith. “That is what you young poets want. At present you are too unperplexed and glib. Suffering! It would enlarge your repertoire; it would make you more human, individual, and truthful. What is the unforgivable sin in poetry? Lack of candour. How shall there be candour if the poet lacks worldly experience? Suffering! That is what you people want. It would make men of you.”
Mr. Keith was considerably denser than Count Caloveglia. But even he, during this oration, could not help noticing that it jarred on his listener’s nerves; there was something wrong, he concluded.
Denis had not a word to say in reply. As if anyone could be more suffering than himself! He was full of a dumb ache. He marvelled at Keith’s obtuseness.
“Come and see my cannas,” said the other with a kind of brutal tactfulness. “There is a curious story attached to them. I must tell it to you one of these days. It sounds like a fairy tale. You like fairy tales?”
“I do,” replied Denis.
“Then we have one point in common. I could listen to them for hours. There is something eternal about them. If you ever want to get anything out of me, Denis, tell me a fairy tale.”
“I must remember that,” replied Denis with a wan smile. “There is one thing I should very much like to get out of you; the secret of your zest in life. You have so many interests. How do you manage it?”
“Heredity, I suppose. It has given me a kind of violent driving power. I take things by the throat. Have you ever heard of Thomas Keith, a soldier in a Highland regiment, who became governor of the Holy City of Medina? No, I suppose you have not. And yet he must have been a remarkable man, to obtain this unique position in the world. No interest in Arabian history? Why not? Well, Thomas Keith—that is my stock. Pirates and adventurers. Of course I live sensibly. Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague. You will find that a pretty good recipe, Denis.”
The young man wondered whether the prescription would be of any avail for his particular complaint.
Then they went into the garden, Mr. Keith hobbling painfully with two sticks and indulging in very bad language. They paused awhile under some trellis work covered with a profusion of Japanese convolvuluses, pale blue, slate colour, rose-tinted, purple, deep red, with white and coloured bands, a marvellous display of fragile beauty.
“I have never seen anything like it!” declared Denis.
“They die away in winter. I get fresh seeds every year from Japan, the latest varieties. How they cling for support to the wooden framework! How delicate and fair! One hardly dares to touch them. Are you always going to be a convolvulus, Denis?”
“Me? Oh, I see what you mean. Were you never a convolvulus, Mr. Keith?”
His friend laughed.
“It must have been a good while ago. You don’t like advice, do you? Have you ever heard of that Sparker affair?”
“You don’t mean to say—”
“Yes. That was me. That was my little contribution to the gaiety of University life. So you see I am in the position to give advice to people like yourself. I think you should cultivate the function of the real, and try to remain in contact with phenomena. Noumena are bad for a youngster. But perhaps you are not interested in psychology?”
“Not exactly, I’m afraid,” replied Denis, who was more anxious to see those cannas.
“So I perceive. Wouldn’t you get more fun out of life if you were? I am nearly done with psychology now,” he added. “It was the Greek philosophers before then. When I take up a subject this is what I do. I don’t ask what are Aristotle’s teachings or relations to his age or to humanity. That would lead me too far. I ask myself: what has this fellow got to say to me? To me, you understand. To me.”
“That must simplify matters.”
“It does,” replied Keith, quite unaware of the faint tinge of College irony in the other’s words. “Direct experience comes only from life. But you can get a kind of substitute out of books. Perhaps you are afraid of them? Take the fellows by the throat! See what they have to say. Make them disgorge. Get at their facts. Pull them to pieces. I tell you what, Denis. You must go through a course of Samuel Butler. You are moving in the same direction; perhaps he may be a warning to you. I took him up, I remember, during my biological period. He was exactly like yourself—bewildered by phenomena.”
Denis, meekly resigned, enquired:
“Was he?”
“I spent nearly a week over Butler. I found him interesting not for what he writes, but for what he is. A landmark. Think of when he wrote. It was an age of giants—Darwin and the rest of them. Their facts were too much for him; they impinged on some obscure old prejudices of his. They drove him into a clever perversity of humour. They account for his cat-like touches, his contrariness, his fondness for scoring off everybody from the Deity downwards, his premeditated irresponsibilities, his—”
“Did he not prove that the Odyssey was written by a woman?”
“He did. Anything to escape from realities—that was his maxim. He puzzled his contemporaries. But we can now locate him with absolute certainty. He personifies the Revolt from Reason. SURTOUT, MON AMI, POINT DE ZELE. He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity—a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation. He was always wavering between the two in an attitude of suburban defiance, reconciling what is irreconcilable by extracting funny analogies all round for the edification of “nice people” like himself. Oh, very English! He did not lack candour or intelligence. Nor do you. He understood the teachings of the giants. So do you. But they irked him. To revenge himself he laid penny crackers under their pedestals. His whole intellectual fortune was spent in buying penny crackers. There was something cheeky and pre-adolescent about him—a kind of virginal ferocity. That iridescent charm of sexlessness which somebody, one of these days, must be good enough to analyse for us! He lacked the male attributes of humility, reverence and sense of proportion.”
Mr. Keith paused, but it was only to take breath.
“Did he?” enquired Denis. “The sense of proportion—”
“The tail of a cow was just as important to him as the tail of a comet; more important, if it could be turned into a joke. Look at the back of his mind and you will always see the same thing: horror of a fact. That is what lies before you, Denis, if, in a world of facts, you refuse to assimilate them. They will disagree with you, as they disagreed with Butler. They will drive you where they drove him—into abstractions. Others went the same way. The painter Watts, for instance. He also suffered under the reign of giants. He also took refuge in abstractions. Faith leading Hope towards Despair. Why don’t you write a book about these things, Denis?”
“I am going to be an artist.”
“An Artist? That is better than a poet. Verse-making is a little out of date, is it not? It corresponds to juvenile stages of human development. Poets are a case of genepistasis. If they would at least get a new stock of ideas! Their demonology is so hopelessly threadbare. But why an artist? I think you were made for a bank manager, Denis. Don’t look so surprised. Everybody grows up, you know. Shelley, if he had lived long enough, would have become a passable gentleman farmer. You can take my word for that.”
“I suppose I shall have to,” replied the young man.
“Don’t take Mr. Keith’s word for anything!” said a voice behind his shoulder.
It was Don Francesco, who had come upon them unawares. He now removed his hat and began to mop his forehead and various double chins with a many-tinted handkerchief as large as a tablecloth.
“My dear Don Francesco!” said Keith. “You always interrupt me in the middle of my sermons. What shall we do with you?”
“Give me something to drink,” replied the priest. “Else I shall evaporate, leaving nothing but a grease stain on this beautiful garden path.”
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nbsp; “To evaporate,” said Keith, with a tinge of sadness in his voice. “What an ideal resolution!”
“I’ll get some wine out of the house,” suggested Denis politely. “But first of all tell me this. Mr. Keith has been giving me his recipe for happiness. What is yours?”
“Happiness is a question of age. The bachelor of forty—he is the happy man.”
“That does not help me much,” said Denis. “But I’ll get your wine, all the same.”
He went.
“A nice young fellow,” observed the priest. “This little accident of yours,” he continued, “does not reflect itself on your face. You always look like a baby, Keith. What is your secret? I believe you have concluded a pact with the devil for your soul.”
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