1
Dr. Sinclair and the children, Guy, Rory, and, of course, Arnold, were to spend Christmas at Plasencia.
By tea-time on the twenty-third they had all arrived except Rory, who was motoring down from Aldershot in his little “two-seater.”
Harry Sinclair, a big massive brown man, his fine head covered with crisp curls, was standing on the hearth-rug devouring hunks of iced cake and, completely indifferent as to whether he had an audience or not, was, in his own peculiar style—hesitating attacks, gropings for the right word which, when found, were trumpeted, bellowed, rather than uttered—delivering a lecture of great wit and acumen.
The Doña and Arnold—he scowling heavily—were talking in low tones on the outskirts of the circle; while Dick would eye them from time to time uneasily from his arm-chair.
The children—to celebrate their arrival—were having tea in the drawing-room, and both were extremely excited.
Anna’s passion for stamps was on the wane, and she no longer dreamed of Lincoln’s album so bulgy that it would not shut. She was now collecting the Waverley Novels in a uniform edition of small volumes, bound in hard green board and printed upon India paper; and following some mysterious sequence of her own that had nothing to do with chronology, she had “only got as far as the Talisman.” She was wondering if there was time before Christmas Day to convey to the Doña—very delicately of course—in what directions her desires now lay.
“The ... er ... chief merit of Shakespeare is that he is so ... er ... admirably ... er ... prosaic. The qualities we call prosaic exist only in verse, and vice versa....” (“How funny!” thought Anna, both pleased and puzzled, “Daddy is talking about Vice Versa.” She was herself just then in the middle of Anstey’s Vice Versa.) “For instance ... er ... the finest fragments of Sappho are ... er ... merely an ... er ... unadorned statement of facts! Don’t you agree, Cust?”
This purely rhetorical appeal elicited from Guy a shrieking summary of his own views on poetry; Harry’s eyes roving the while restlessly over the room, while now and then he gave an impatient grunt.
In the meantime tea and cake were going to Jasper’s head. He began to wriggle in his chair, and pretend to be a pig gobbling in a trough. As the grown-ups were too occupied to pay any attention, it was Anna who had to say: “Jasper! Don’t be silly.”
But he was not to be daunted by Anna; drawing one finger down the side of his nose he squealed out in the strange pronunciation he affected when over-excited: “Play Miss Fyles-Smith come down my nose!” (Miss Fyles-Smith, it may be remembered, was the “lady professor” who sometimes worked with Dr. Sinclair.)
The Doña stopped suddenly in the middle of something she was saying to Arnold, raised her lorgnette, and looked at Harry; he was frowning, and, with an impatient jerk of the head, turned again to Guy: “Well, as I was saying, Cust....”
It might, of course, be interpreted quite simply as merely momentarily irritation at the idiotic interruption.
“You see,” began Anna in laborious explanation, “he pretends that there’s a real Miss Fyles-Smith and a pretence one, and the pretence one is called ‘play Miss Fyles-Smith,’ and whenever he gets silly he wants people to come down his nose, and....”
Then there was a laugh in the hall, discreetly echoed by Rendall the butler.
“Hallo! That’s Rory,” said Concha, and ran out into the hall.
Teresa felt herself stiffening into an attitude of hostile criticism.
“Here he is!”
First entry of the jeune premier in a musical play:
“Well, guuurls, here we are again,” while the Beauty Chorus crowds round him and he chucks the prettiest one under the chin. Then—bang! squeak! pop! goes the orchestra and, running right up to the footlights, the smirking chorus massed behind him, he begins half singing, half speaking:
When I came back from sea
The guuurls were waiting for me.
Well, at last it was over and he was sitting at a little table eating muffins and blackberry jam.
“What have I been doing, Mrs. Lane? Oh, I’ve been leading a blameless life,” and then he grinned and, Teresa was convinced, simultaneously caught her eye, the Doña’s, Concha’s, and Jollypot’s.
She remembered when they were children how on their visits to the National Portrait Gallery, Jollypot used to explain to them that the only test of a portrait’s having been painted by a great master was whether the eyes seemed simultaneously fixed upon every one in the room; and they would all rush off to different corners of the gallery, and the eyes would certainly follow every one of them. The eyes of a male flirt have the same mysterious ubiquity.
“I do think it’s most extraordinary good of you to have me here for Christmas. I feel it’s frightful cheek for such a new friend, but I simply hadn’t the strength of mind to refuse—I did so want to come. I know I ought to have gone up to Scotland, but my uncle really much prefers having his goose to himself. He’s a sort of Old Father William, you know, can eat it up beak and all.... Yes, the shops are looking jolly. I got stuck with the little car in a queue in Regent Street the other day and I longed to jump out and smash the windows and loot everything I saw. I say, Guy, you ought to write a poem about Christmas shops....”
“Well, as a matter of fact, it is an amazing flora and fauna,” cried Guy, moving away from Harry and the fire: “Sucking pigs with oranges in their mouths, toy giraffes ... and all these frocks—Redfern mysteriously blossoming as though it were St. John’s Eve, the wassail-bowl of Revell crowned with imitation flowers....”
“Go it! Go it!” laughed Rory.
“Oh Rory, it was too priceless—do you remember that exquisite mannequin at Revell’s, a lovely thing with heavenly ankles? Well, the other day I was at the Berkeley with Frida and ...” and Concha successfully narrowed his attention into a channel of her own digging.
What energy to dig channels, to be continually on the alert, to fight!
Much better, like Horace’s arena-wearied gladiator, to seek the rudis of dismissal.
The Doña made a little sign to Arnold, and they both got up and left the room, Dick suspiciously following them with his eyes.
The talk and laughter like waves went on beating round Teresa.
Now Guy was turning frantic glances towards her and talking louder and more shrilly than usual—evidently he thought he was saying something particularly brilliant, and wanted her to hear it.
“Bergson seems to look upon the intellectuals as so many half-witted old colonels, living in a sort of Bath, at any rate a geometrical town—all squares and things, and each square built by a philosopher or school of thought: Berkeley Square, Russell Square, Oxford Crescent....”
“Well, the War did one good thing, at any rate, it silenced Bergson,” said Harry impatiently, “I don’t think he has any influence now, but not being er ... er ... a Fellow of King’s, I’m not well up in what ... er ... the young are thinking.”
“Oh well, here are the young—you’d better ask ’em,” chuckled Dick, since the departure of his wife and son, once more quite natural and genial: “Anna, do you read Bergson?”
“No!” she answered sulkily and a little scornfully—she liked the “grown-ups” to pay her attention, but not that sort of attention.
“There you are, Harry!” chuckled Dick triumphantly; though what his cause was for triumph must remain a mystery.
“Quite right, old thing! I don’t read him either—much too deep for you and me. What are you reading just now?” said Rory, beckoning her to his side.
She at once became friendly again: “I’m reading Vice Versa,” and she chuckled reminiscently, “And ... I’ve just finished the Talisman ... and I’d like to read Kenilworth.”
What a pity the Doña was not there to hear! But perhaps one of them would tell her what she had said, and she would guess.
“Which do you like best, Richard Cœur de Lion or Richard Bultitude?” asked Guy.
“Richard Bultitude!” laughed Rory scornfully, “Do you hear that, Anna? He thinks the old buffer’s name was Richard! But we know better; we know it was Paul, don’t we?”
Anna would have liked to have shared with Rory an appearance of superior knowledge; but honesty forced her to say: “Oh but the little boy was Richard Bultitude—Dickie, you know; his real name was Richard.”
“There, Rory! There!” shouted Guy triumphantly.
“Do you remember that girl’s—I can’t remember her name, that one that shoots a billet-doux at Mr. Bultitude in church—well, her papa, the old boy that gave the responses all wrong ‘in a loud confident voice,’ doesn’t he remind you rather of Uncle Jimmy?” said Rory to Guy.
“The best character in ... er ... that book is the German master, who ... er ...” began Harry.
“Oh yes, a heavenly creature—‘I veel make a leetle choke to agompany it’!” shrieked Concha.
“I hate Dulcie—I think she’s silly,” said Anna; but no one was listening to her, they were launched upon a “grown-up” discussion of Vice Versa that might last them till it was time to dress for dinner ... a rosy English company, red-mufflered, gaitered, bottle-green-coated, with shrieks of laughter keeping the slide “boiling” in the neighbourhood of Dingley Dell.
Teresa, as usual, sitting apart, felt in despair—what could be done with such material? A ceaseless shower of insignificant un-co-related events, and casual, ephemeral talk ... she must not submit to the tyranny of detail, the gluttony that wanted everything ... she must mythologise, ruthlessly prune ... hacking away through the thick foliage of words, chopping off the superfluous characters, so that at last the plot should become visible.
Anna, rather resenting that what she looked upon as a children’s book should be commandeered by the grown-ups for their own silly talk in which she could not share, went off to the billiard-room to play herself tunes on the gramophone.
Jasper had long since sneaked off with ’Snice for a second tea in the kitchen.
Then Guy left the group of Anstey amateurs and came and sat down beside Teresa.
“Have you been reading anything?” he asked; and without waiting for an answer, and slightly colouring, he said eagerly: “I’ve been learning Spanish, you know.”
“Have you? Do you like it?”
And that was all! How often had he rehearsed the conversation, or, rather, the disquisition, that ought at this point to have arisen: “Those who know the delicate sophistication of Lazarillo de Tormes feel less amazement when from an Amadis-pastoral Euphues-rotted Europe an urbane yet compelling voice begins very quietly: ‘In a village of la Mancha, the name of which I do not care to recollect, there lived not long ago a knight’....”
And surely she might have shown a little emotion—was it not just a little touching that entirely for her sake he should have taken the trouble to learn Spanish?
“Well, what have you been reading in Spanish—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?”
Though this was only a joke, he felt sore and nettled, and said sulkily: “What’s that? I’ve never heard of it.”
“You lie, Guy, you lie! You have heard of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and you have heard of If Winter Comes; because from what you tell me of your parents they probably talk of both incessantly, and....”
“You’re quite right, as a matter of fact,” laughed Guy, delighted that she should remember what he had told her about the manners and customs of his parents, “they talked of nothing else at one time. It made them feel that at last they were able to understand and sympathise with what my generation was after. My father began one night at dinner, ‘Very interesting book that, Guy, If Winter Comes—very well written book, very clever; curious book—painful though, painful!’ And my mother tried to discuss some one called Mabel’s character with me. It was no good my saying I hadn’t read it—it only made them despise me and think I wasn’t dans le mouvement, after all.”
“There, you see!” laughed Teresa; “Well, what are you reading in Spanish?”
“Calderon’s Autos,” and then he launched into one of his excited breathless disquisitions: “As a matter of fact, I was rather disappointed at first. I knew, of course, that they were written in glorification of the Eucharist and that they were bound to be symbolic, and ‘flowery and starry,’ and all the rest of it—man very tiny in comparison with the sun and the moon and the stars and the Cross—but the unregenerate part of me—I suppose it’s some old childhood’s complex—has a secret craving for genre. Every fairy story I read when I was a child was a disappointment till I came upon Morris’s Prose Romances, and then at last I found three dimensional knights and princesses, and a whole fairy countryside where things went on happening even when Morris and I weren’t looking at them: cows being milked, horses being shod, lovers wandering in lanes; and one knew every hill and every tree, and could take the short cut from one village to another in the dark. And I’d hoped, secretly, that the autos were going to be a little bit like that ... that the characters would be at once abstractions—Grace, the Mosaic Law, and so on—and at the same time real seventeenth century Spaniards, as solid as Sancho Panza, gossiping in taverns, and smelling of dung and garlic. But, of course, I came to see that the real thing was infinitely finer—the plays of a theologian, a priest who had listened in the confessional to disembodied voices whispering their sins, and who kept, like a bird in a cage, a poet’s soul among the scholastic traditions of his intellect, so that gothic decorations flower all round the figure of Theology, as in some Spanish Cathedral ...” he paused to take breath, and then added: “I say—I thought you wouldn’t mind—but I’ve brought you for Christmas an edition of the Autos—I think you’ll like them.”
“Thank you ever so much, I should love to read them,” said Teresa with unusual warmth.
She had been considerably excited by what he had said. An auto that was at once realistic and allegorical—there were possibilities in the idea.
She sat silent for a few seconds, thinking; and then she became conscious of Harry’s voice holding forth on some topic to the group round the fire: “... really ... er ... a ... er ... tragic conflict. The one thing that gave colour and ... er ... significance to her drab spinsterhood was the conviction that these experiences were supernatural. The spiritual communion ... the ... er ... er ... in fact the conversations with the invisible ‘Friend’ became more and more frequent, and more and more ... er ... satisfying, and indeed of nightly occurrence. Then she happened to read a book by Freud or some one and ... er ... the fat was in the fire—or, rather, something that undergoes a long period of smouldering before it breaks into flames was in the fire. Remember, she was nearly fifty, and a Swiss Calvinist, but she had really remarkable intellectual pluck. Slowly she began to test her mystical experiences by the theories of Freud and Co., and was forced in time to admit that they sprang entirely from ... er ... suppressed ... er ... er ... erotic desires. I gather the modern school of psychologists hold all so-called mystical experiences do. Leuba said....”
Here Jollypot, who had been sitting in a corner with her crochet, a silent listener, got up, very white and wide-eyed, and left the room.
Teresa’s heart contracted. They were ruthless creatures, that English fire-lit band—tearing up Innocence, while its roots shrieked like those of a mandrake.
But she had got a sudden glimpse into the inner life of Jollypot.
Then she too, left the room; as for once the talk had been pregnant, and she wanted to think.
Sexual desires concealed under mystical experiences ... a Eucharistic play. Unamuno said that the Eucharist owed its potency to the fact that it stood for immortality, for life. But it was also, she realised, the “bread not made of wheat,” therefore it must stand for the man-made things as well—these vain yet lovely yearnings that differentiate him from flowers and beasts, and which are apt to run counter to the life he shares with these. The Eucharist, then, could stand either for life, the blind biological force, or for the enemy of life—the dreams and shadows that haunt the soul of man; the enemy of that blind biological force, yes, but also its flower, because it grows out of it....