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
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play the cup-bearers 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 intoxication of their subjects."
"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 no place for you; only the lethal chamber."
Deeply hurt, Denis emitted the imitation of a loud Homeric laugh. "I'm
getting sunstroke here," he said, and got up.
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 dry--like Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads
stuck on poles. He liked the fancy enough to impart it to Mr. Scogan.
"Like Polynesian trophies..." Uttered aloud, the fancy seemed less
charming and significant than it did when it first occurred to him.
There was a silence, and in a growing wave of sound the whir of the
reaping machines swelled up from the fields beyond the garden and then
receded into a remoter hum.
"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 Denis--duly thankful," he repeated, and knocked
the ashes out of his pipe.
Denis was not listening. He had suddenly remembered Anne. She
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was with Gombauld--alone with him in his studio. It was an intolerable
thought.
"Shall we go and pay a call on Gombauld?" he suggested carelessly.
It would be amusing to see what he's doing now."
He laughed inwardly to think how furious Gombauld would be when
he saw them arriving.
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CHAPTER XXIII.
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
again--and Anne would be keeping hers, infuriatingly. Yes, he was
positively glad to see them.
"Come in, come in," he called out hospitably.
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 gladness? He wondered.
Mr. Scogan, meanwhile, was looking at the portrait.
"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 fellows who went in exclusively
for balanced masses and impinging planes."
Gombauld laughed. "This is a little infidelity," he said.
"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
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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
window-boxes. But travel by Tube and you see nothing but the works of
man--iron 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 religions--what 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, above all, I haven't the time to start wandering in that
labyrinth."
While Mr. Scogan was discoursing, Denis had crossed over to the
farther side of the little square chamber, where Anne was sitting, still in
her graceful, lazy pose, on the low chair.
"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.
"May I see too?" Anne requested.
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 at the pictures, while Denis, for the most part,
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looked at Anne.
"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, he said, "I love you."
It was a remark which Anne had heard a good many times before and
mostly heard with equanimity. But on this occasion--perhaps because
they had come so unexpectedly , perhaps for some other reason--the words
provoked in her a certain surprised commotion.
"My poor Denis," she managed to say, with a laugh; but she was
blushing as she spoke.
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CHAPTER XXIV.
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 drawing-room deserted. He was about to go out into
the garden when his eye fell on a familiar but mysterious object--the large
red notebook in which he had so often seen Jenny quietly and busily
scribbling. She had left it lying on the window-seat. 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 wince as though he had been
struck.
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 absurdities--no 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 the world he was surely an image of flawless
crystal. It was almost axiomatic.
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
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caricature of himself, reading (the book was upside-down). 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
turned-in feet--these 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. Barbecue-Smith; 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 simple-minded, 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
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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 swimming-pool. 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. They rushed towards it, thinking it was something
to eat.
He walked on. The profound shade of a giant ilex tree engulfed him.
Like a great wooden octopus, it spread its long arms abroad.
"Under the spreading ilex tree..."
He tried to remember who the poem was by, but couldn't.
