world, no place for him and Ferdinando together.
"His wife was still awake; to her questioning glance he answered,
'They are making mock of old Simon. To-morrow it will be our turn.'
They were silent for a time.
"At last Filomena said, 'I do not want to see to-morrow.'
"'It is better not,' said Sir Hercules. Going into his closet he wrote in
his day-book 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
sleeping-draught.'
"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 summer-time?'
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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 dressing-gown 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 much blood in his small body."
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CHAPTER XIV.
For their after-luncheon 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
letter-files and old newspapers, the mummy-case 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. Coffee-cup in hand, Mr. Scogan was
standing in front of the dummy book-shelf. Between the sips he
discoursed.
"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 library for them."
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
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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 oneself thinking. Still--the 'Tales of Knockespotch'..."
He paused, and thoughtfully drummed with his fingers on the backs of
the non-existent, 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 room."
"I like the idea of the Biographies," said Denis. "There's room for us
all within the scheme; it's comprehensive."
"Yes, the Biographies are good, the Biographies are excellent," Mr
Scogan agreed. "I imagine them written in a very elegant Regency style-
Brighton Pavilion in words--perhaps 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' vis-a-vis 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
library, it can't be read."
"I prefer the 'Wild Goose Chase'," said Anne. "A novel in six
volumes--it must be restful."
"Restful," Mr. Scogan repeated. "You've hit on the right word. A
'Wild Goose Chase' is sound, but a bit old-fashioned--pictures 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
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spent ten years in Thibet organising the clarified butter industry on modern
European lines, and was able to retire at thirty-six 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."
"Nobody could regret the fact more than I do," said Denis.
"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 middle-class
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 Tales--those 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
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to make place for something new. The verbal surface of his writing is
rich and fantastically diversified. The wit is incessant. The..."
"But couldn't you give us a specimen," Denis broke in--"a concrete
example?"
"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, my dear Denis, to you."
"Thank you," said Denis.
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CHAPTER XV.
"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 says..."
Mr. Scogan, like a policeman arresting the flow of traffic, held up his
hand. "He does; I know. And that brings me to my next point: the
nature of the reaction."
"Havelock Ellis..."
"The reaction, when it came--and we may say roughly that it set in a
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little before the beginning of this century--the 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
