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
myself--that 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. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of literature, just as
Professor Radium of "Comic Cuts" is its stock man of science."
'I'm sorry to hear I'm as uninteresting as all that," said Gombauld.
"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 bore."
"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 example-
I saw a great deal of Tschuplitski in Paris this spring..."
"Ah, but then you're an exception, Mary, you're an exception," said Mr.
Scogan. "You are a femme superieure."
A flush of pleasure turned Mary's face into a harvest moon.
15
CHAPTER IV.
Denis woke up next morning to find the sun shining, the sky serene.
He decided to wear white flannel trousers--white 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 patent leather. He lay in bed for
several minutes considering the problem.
Before he went down--patent leather was his final choice--he 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 breakfast. He found himself alone with Jenny.
"I hope you slept well," he said.
"Yes, isn't it lovely?" Jenny replied, giving two rapid little nods. "But
we had such awful thunderstorms last week."
Parallel straight lines, Denis reflected, meet only at infinity. He might
talk for ever of care-charmer sleep and she of meteorology till the end of
time. Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel
straight lines. Jenny was only a little more parallel than most.
"They are very alarming, these thunderstorms," he said, helping
himself to porridge. "Don't you think so? Or are you above being
frightened?"
"No. I always go to bed in a storm. One is so much safer lying
down."
"Why?"
"Because," said Jenny, making a descriptive gesture, "because
lightning goes downwards and not flat ways. When you're lying down
you're out of the current."
16
"That's very ingenious."
"It's true."
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 asked:
"Do you consider yourself a femme superieure?" He had to repeat
the question several times before Jenny got the hang of it.
"No," she said, rather indignantly, when at last she heard what Denis
was saying. "Certainly not. Has anyone been suggesting that I am?"
"No," said Denis. "Mr. Scogan told Mary she was one."
"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
and occasionally nodded.
Denis went out on to the terrace to smoke his after-breakfast 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 the grass.
"Why, Denis," she exclaimed, "you look perfectly sweet in your white
trousers."
Denis was dreadfully taken aback. There was no possible retort.
"You speak as though I were a child in a new frock," he said, with a show
of irritation.
"But that's how I feel about you, Denis dear."
"Then you oughtn't to."
"But I can't help it. I'm so much older than you."
"I like that," he said. "Four years older."
"And if you do look perfectly sweet in your white trousers, why
shouldn't I say so? And why did you put them on, if you didn't think you
were going to look sweet in them?"
17
"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 flower-garden; 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 perfume and colour.
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, flower-scented air. "'In fragrant volleys they let fly...'
How does it go?
"'Well shot, ye firemen! Oh how sweet And round your equal fires
do meet; Whose shrill report no ear can tell, But echoes to the eye and
smell...'"
"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
ready-made phrase about them. And then there are lots of lovely names
and words--Monophysite, 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
18
of it. Look at those sunflowers! Aren't they magnificent?"
"Dark faces and golden crowns--they'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 to that." He was silent.
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 that,
one's pushed out into the world."
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. He was a nice boy, and to-day he looked charming--charming!
One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made 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 suppose I am."
"No, no," she protested, and drew in her skirt with a gesture that
19
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 simpler."
"Of course it is," said Denis. "But it's a lesson to be learnt gradually.
There are the twenty tons of ratiocination to be got rid of first."
"I've always taken things as they come," said Anne. "It seems so
obvious. One enjoys the pleasant things, avoids the nasty ones. There's
nothing more to be said."
"Nothing--for 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, women--I 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 infinite--the ecstasies of drinking, dancing, love-making.
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 escaped these horrors."
"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 half-closed 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 would--he
would.
20
"I think I shall go and bathe," said Anne. "It's so hot." The
opportunity had passed.
21
CHAPTER V.
Mr. Wimbush had taken them to see the sights of the Home Farm, and
now they were standing, all six of them--Henry Wimbush, Mr. Scogan,
Denis, Gombauld, Anne, and Mary--by the low wall of the piggery,
looking into one of the styes.
"This is a good sow," said Henry Wimbush. "She had a litter of
fourteen.
"Fourteen?" Mary echoed incredulously. She turned astonished blue
eyes towards Mr. Wimbush, then let them fall onto the seething mass of
elan vital that fermented in the sty.
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, brownish-black 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
