South Wind

by Norman Douglas

  “Pardon me! I was using the words in a specific sense. What I mean by progress is the welding together of society for whatever ends. Progress is a centripetal movement, obliterating man in the mass. Civilization is centrifugal; it permits, it postulates, the assertion of personality. The terms are, therefore, not synonymous. They stand for hostile and divergent movements. Progress subordinates. Civilization co-ordinates. The individual emerges in civilization. He is submerged in progress.”

  “You might call civilization a placid lake,” said the American, “and the other a river or torrent.”

  “Exactly!” remarked Mr. Heard. “The one is static, the other dynamic. And which of the two, Count, would you say was the more beneficial to humanity?”

  “Ah! For my part I would not bring such consideration to bear on the point. We may deduce, from the evolution of society, that progress is the newer movement, since the State, which welds together, is of more recent growth than the individualistic family or clan. This is as far as I care to go. To debate whether one be better for mankind than the other betrays what I call an anthropomorphic turn of mind; it is therefore a problem which, so far as I am concerned, does not exist. I content myself with establishing the fact that progress and civilization are incompatible, mutually exclusive.”

  “Do you mean to say,” asked the millionaire, “that it is impossible to be progressive and civilized at the same time?”

  “That is what I mean to say. Now if America stands for progress, this old world may be permitted—with a reasonable dose of that flattery which we accord to the dead—to represent civilization. Tell me, Mr. van Koppen, how do you propose to amalgamate or reconcile such ferociously antagonistic strivings? I fear we will have to wait for the millennium.”

  “The millennium!” echoed Mr. Heard. “That is another of those unhappy words which are always cropping up in my department.”

  “Why unhappy?” asked Mr. van Koppen.

  “Because they mean nothing. The millennium will never come.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because nobody wants it to come. They want tangible things. Nobody wants a millennium.”

  “Which is very fortunate,” observed the Count. “For if they did, the Creator would be considerably embarrassed how to arrange matters, seeing that every man’s millennium differs from that of his neighbour. Mine is not the same as yours. Now I wonder, Mr. van Koppen—I wonder what your millennium would be like?”

  “I wonder! I believe I never gave it a thought. I have had other things to puzzle out.”

  And the millionaire straightway proceeded to think, in his usual clear-cut fashion. “Something with girls in it,” he soon concluded, inwardly. Then aloud:

  “I guess my millennium would be rather a contradictory sort of business. I should require tobacco, to begin with. And the affair would certainly not be complete, Count, without a great deal of your company. The millennium of other people may be more simple. That of the Duchess, for example, is at hand. She is about to join the Roman Catholic Church.”

  “That reminds me,” said Mr. Heard. “She gave me some remarkable tea-cakes not long ago. Delicious. She said they were your specialty.”

  “You have found them out, have you?” laughed the American. “I always tell her that once a man begins on those tea-cakes there is no reason on earth, that I can think of, why he should ever stop again. All the same, I nearly overate myself the other day. That was because we had a late luncheon on board. It shall never occur again—the late luncheon, I mean. Have you discovered, by the way, whether the business of Miss Wilberforce has been settled?”

  Mr. Heard shook his head.

  “Is that the person,” enquired the Count, “who is reported to drink to excess? I have never spoken to her. She belongs presumably to the lower classes—to those who extract from alcohol the pleasurable emotions which we derive from a good play, or music, or a picture gallery.”

  “She is a lady.”

  “Indeed? Then she has relapsed into the intemperance of her inferiors. That is not pretty.”

  “Temperance!” said the bishop. “Another of those words which I am always being obliged to use. Pray tell me, Count, what you mean by temperance.”

  “I should call it the exercise of our faculties and organs in such a manner as to combine the maximum of pleasure with the minimum of pain.”

  “And who is the judge of what constitutes the dividing line between use and abuse?”

  “We cannot do better, I imagine, than go to our own bodies for an answer to that question. They will tell us exactly how far we may proceed with impunity.”

  “In that case,” said the millionaire, “if you drink a little too much occasionally—only occasionally, I mean!—you would not call that intemperance?”

  “Certainly not. We are not Puritans here. We do not give wrong names to things. What you suggest would be by the way of a change, I presume—like the eating of a pike: something we do not indulge in every day. If I were to come home a little joyful now and then, do you know what these people would say? They would say: ‘The old gentleman is pleased to be merry to-night. Bless his heart! May the wind do him good.’ But if I behaved as Miss Wilberforce is reported to do, they would say: ‘That old man is losing self-control. He is growing intemperate. Every evening! It is not a pretty sight.’ They never call it wrong. Their mode of condemnation is to say that it is not pretty. The ethical moment, you observe, is replaced by an aesthetic one. That is the Mediterranean note. It is the merit of the Roman Church that she left us some grains of common sense in regard to minor morals.”

  The bishop remarked:

  “What I have seen of the local Catholicism strikes me as a kind of pantomime. That is the fault of my upbringing, no doubt.”

  “Oh, I am not referring to externals! Externally, of course, our Church is the purest rococo—”

  Mr. Heard was expanding in this congenial atmosphere; he felt himself in touch with permanent things. He glanced at the speaker. How charming he looked, this silvery-haired old aristocrat! His ample and gracious personality, his leisurely discourse—how well they accorded with the environment! He suggested, in manner, the secret of youth and all that is glad, unclouded, eternal; he was a reflection, a belated flower, of the classic splendour which lay in ruins about him. Such a man, he thought, deserves to be happy and successful. What joy it must have been to a person of his temperament—the chance discovery of the Locri Faun!

  A great stillness brooded upon the enclosure beyond. The shadows had shifted. Sunny patches lay, distributed in fresh patterns, upon the old brickwork flooring. An oval shaft of light, glinting through the foliage, had struck the pedestal of the Faun and was stealthily crawling up its polished surface. He looked at the statue. It was still slumbering in the shade. But a subtle change had spread over the figure, or was it, he wondered, merely a change in the state of his own mind, due to what the Count had said? There was energy, now, in those tense muscles. The slightest touch, he felt, would unseal the enchantment and cause life to flow through the dull metal.

  Mr. van Koppen was slightly ruffled.

  “Are you not a little hard on the Puritans?” he asked. “Where would we have been without them in America?”

  “And after all,” added the bishop, “they cleared up an infinity of abuses. They were temperate, at all events! Too temperate in some matters, I am inclined to think; they did not always allow for human weakness. They went straight back to the Bible.”

  The Count shook his head slowly.

  “The Bible,” he said, “is the most intemperate book I have ever read.”

  “Dear me!”

  Mr. van Koppen, a tactful person, scented danger ahead. He remarked:

  “I did not know Italians read the Bible. Where did you become acquainted with it?”

  “In New York. I often amused myself strolling about the Jewish quarter there and studying the inhabitants. Wonderful types, wonderful poses! But hard to decipher, for a person of my race. O
ne day I said to myself: I will read their literature; it may be of assistance. I went through the Talmud and the Bible. They helped me to understand those people and their point of view.”

  “What is their point of view?”

  “That God is an overseer. This, I think, is the keynote of the Bible. And it explains why the Bible has always been regarded as an exotic among Greco-Latin races, who are all pagans at heart. Our God is not an overseer; he is a partaker. For the rest, we find the whole trend of the Bible, its doctrinal tone, antagonistic to those ideals of equanimity and moderation which, however disregarded in practice, have always been held up hereabouts as theoretically desirable. In short, we Southerners lack what you possess: an elective affinity with that book. One may wonder how the morality of those tawny Semites was enabled to graft itself upon your alien white-skinned race with such tenacity as to influence your whole national development. Well, I think I have at last puzzled it out,” he added, “to my own satisfaction at least.”

  The bishop interposed with a laugh:

  “I may tell you, Count, that I am not in the Episcopal mood to-day. Not at all. Never felt less Episcopal in my life. For that matter, it is our English ecclesiastics who have dealt some of the most serious blows at Biblical authority of late, with their modern exegesis. Pray go on!”

  “I imagine it is nothing but a matter of racial temperament.”

  “Goth and Latin?”

  “One does not always like to employ such terms; they are so apt to cover deficiency of ideas, or to obscure the issue. But certainly the sun which colours our complexion and orders our daily habits, influences at the same time our character and outlook. The almost hysterical changes of light and darkness, summer and winter, which have impressed themselves on the literature of the North, are unknown here. Northern people, whether from climatic or other causes, are prone to extremes, like their own myths and sagas. The Bible is essentially a book of extremes. It is a violent document. The Goth or Anglo-Saxon has taken kindly to this book because it has always suited his purposes. It has suited his purposes because, according to his abruptly varying moods, he has never been at a loss to discover therein exactly what he wanted—authority for every grade of emotional conduct, from savage vindictiveness to the most abject self-abasement. One thing he would never have found, had he cared to look for it—an incitement to live the life of reason, to strive after intellectual honesty and self-respect, and to keep his mind open to the logic of his five senses. That is why, during the troubled Middle Ages when the oscillations of national and individual life were yet abrupter—when, therefore, that classical quality of temperance was more than ever at a discount—the Bible took so firm a hold upon you. Its unquiet teachings responded to the unquiet yearnings of men. Your conservatism, your reverence for established institutions, has done the rest. No! I do not call to mind any passages in the Bible commending the temperate philosophic life; though it would be strange if so large a miscellany did not contain a few sound reflections. Temperance,” he concluded, as though speaking to himself—“temperance! All the rest is embroidery.”

  Mr. Heard was thoughtful. The American observed:

  “That side of the case never struck me before. How about Solomon’s proverbs?”

  “Maxims of exhaustion, my dear friend. It is easy to preach to me. I am an old man. I can read Solomon with a certain patience. We want something for our children—something which does not blight or deny, but vivifies and guides aright; something which makes them hold up their heads. A friend, an older brother; not a pedagogue. I would never recommend a boy to study these writings. They would lower his spirits and his self-respect. Solomon, like all reformed debauchees, has a depressing influence on the young.”

  “Do you know England well?” asked Mr. Heard.

  “Very little. I have spent a few days in Liverpool and London, here and there, on my periodical journeyings to the States. Kind friends supply me with English books and papers; the excellent Sir Herbert Street sends me more than I can possibly digest! I confess that much of what I read was an enigma to me till I had studied the Bible. Its teachings seem to have filtered, warm and fluid, through the veins of your national and private life. Then, slowly, they froze hard, congealing the whole body into a kind of crystal. Your ethics are stereotyped in black-letter characters. A gargoyle morality.”

  “It is certainly difficult,” said Mr. van Koppen, “for an Anglo-Saxon to appraise this book objectively. His mind has been saturated with it in childhood to such an extent as to take on a definite bias.”

  “Like the ancients with their ILIAD. Where is a truer poet than Homer? Yet the worship of him became a positive bane to independent creative thought. What good things could be written about the withering influence of Homer upon the intellectual life of Rome!”

  The bishop asked:

  “You think the Bible has done the same for us?”

  “I think it accounts for some Byzantine traits in your national character and for the formlessness and hesitancy which I, at least, seem to detect in the demeanour of many individual Anglo-Saxons. They realize that their traditional upbringing is opposed to truth. It gives them a sense of insecurity. It makes them shy and awkward. Poise! That is what they need, and what this unbalanced Eastern stuff will never give them.”

  “The withering influences of Homer: surely that is a bad sign?” asked the American.

  “And that of the Bible?” added Mr. Heard.

  “How shall a plant survive, save by withering now and then? If the ancients had not exhausted themselves with Homer, the soil might not have been ready for our Renaissance. A bad sign? Who can tell! Good and bad—I question whether these are respectable words to use.”

  “You are content, as you observed before, to establish a fact?”

  “Amply content. I leave the rest to the academicians. And the only fact we seem to have established is that your notions of morality resemble my notions of beauty in this one point: neither of them are up to date. You will have be admire a steam-engine. Why? Because of its delicately adjusted mechanism, its perfect adaptation to modern needs. So be it. I will modify my conception of what is fair in appearance. I will admire your steam-engine, and thereby bring my ideals of beauty up to date. Will you modify your conception of what is fair in conduct? Will you admire something more adapted to modern needs than those intemperate Hebrew doctrines; something with more delicately adjusted mechanism? The mendicant friar, that flower of Oriental ethics—he is not up to date. He resembles all Semites. He lacks self-respect. He apologizes for being alive. It is not pretty—to apologize for being alive!”

  The American observed:

  “I should say that even our greatest bigots, nowadays, don’t take those old doctrines as seriously as you seem to think.”

  “I daresay they don’t. But they profess to reproach themselves for not doing so. And this is more contemptible. It adds insincerity to imbecility.”

  A sunny smile played about his face as he spoke these words. It was evident that his thoughts were already far away. The bishop, following the direction of his glance, saw that it rested upon the statuette of the Faun whose head and shoulders were now enveloped in a warm beam of light. Under that genial touch the old relic seemed to have woke up from its slumber. Blood was throbbing in its veins. It was inn movement; it dominated the scene in its emphatic affirmation of joy.

  Mr. Heard, his eyes fixed upon the statuette, now realized the significance of what had been said. He began to see more clearly. Soon it dawned upon him that not joy alone was expressed by the figure. Another quality, more evasive yet more compelling, resided in its subtle grace: the element of mystery. There, emprisoned in the bronze, dwelt some benignant oracle.

  Puzzle as he would, that oracle refused to clothe itself in words.

  What could it be?

  A message of universal application, “loving and enigmatical,” as the old man had called it. True! It was a greeting from an unknown friend in an unknown land; something
familiar from the dim past or distant future; something that spoke of well-being—plain to behold, hard to expound, like the dawning smile of childhood.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  Towards evening, Mr. van Koppen drove the bishop down in the carriage which he usually hired for the whole of his stay on Nepenthe. They said little, having talked themselves out with the Count. The American seemed to be thinking about something. Mr. Heard’s eye roamed over the landscape, rather anxiously.

  “I don’t like that new cloud above the volcano,” he observed.

  “Looks like ashes. Looks as if it might drift in our direction, doesn’t it, if the wind were strong enough to move it? Do you see much of the Count?” he enquired.

  “Not as much as I should like. What excellent veal cutlets those were! So white and tender. Quite different from the veal we get in England. And that aromatic wine went uncommonly well with them. It was his own growth, I suppose.”

  “Very likely. From that little vineyard which produces so many good things.” He chuckled softly. “As to English veal—I never yet tasted any worth eating. If you don’t slaughter a calf till it’s grown into a cow—why, you’re not likely to get anything but beef.”

  “They say the English cannot cook, in spite of the excellence of their prime materials.”

  “I think the prime materials are at fault. They sacrifice everything to size. It’s barbaric. Those greasy Southdown sheep! It’s the same with their fowls; they’re large, but insipid—very different from the little things you get down here. Now a goose is capital fodder. But if you grow him only for his weight, you destroy his quality and flavour; you get a lump of blubber instead of a bird.”

  “Apple sauce?”

  “I don’t like apples in any shape. A sour kind of potato, I call them. They eat an awful lot of apples in our country. That is what makes so many of our women as flat as boards, in front and behind—especially in the Eastern States. It’s apple-eating. Apples ought to be taxed. They ruin the female figure. I’m not sure that they don’t sour the character as well.”