XIX
I went to the British Museum on Thursday. Walter was waiting for me on the steps, and there was another man with him. The other man was called Furze. He was a professor at some University in Wales. He was older than Walter, but not very much older. He had a very kind face, and a funny way of ducking down his head. I liked him and was glad he was there too. He had been working with Walter all the morning in the Assyrian Room, it seemed, and now he came round with us for a bit, till it was time for him to catch his train.
He did not talk much; Walter did the talking. I thought he knew quite as much about the things as Walter, but he was not so excited about them.
We looked at some Assyrian bas-reliefs of people hunting lions. They were more interesting than I had expected, and rather beautiful too, some of them—rather beautiful clean lines—but Walter said even these were too late, and we went on to cases of rougher broken things, and he explained what they once had been—pots and ovens and tiles and all sorts of household stuff.
‘You will get back to your “Urdummheit,” ’ Mr. Furze said, smiling at Walter, ‘I think these pots were not very well made.’
Walter tossed his head. He seemed self-confident here, as he had been at Howsteads; not a bit shy or nervous, as he was at Oxford.
‘Who cares if they were well made? This is not an Arts and Crafts Exhibition. Of course Praxiteles made pretty ornaments, if you want that.’
‘Well, I still maintain that if you make a pot at all, it is better to make a beautiful pot than a misshapen one.’
It was evidently an old argument. I could see that.
I agreed with Mr. Furze.
‘I do get so sick of beauty,’ Walter said. ‘Beauty is quite beside the point.’
And then he laughed, for he saw Mr. Furze was laughing.
‘What do you think, Miss Woodruffe?’ he asked.
And I said:
‘Oh, I am afraid I like beautiful pots best, if there have got to be pots at all.’
He looked at me oddly, with a troubled, perplexed expression.
‘I expect you think me a Philistine,’ he said. ‘I am too, I suppose. All these shapes and designs and proportions that people keep talking about—they just mean nothing to me. They seem to me so dull—like rows of pretty faces with no souls.’
‘When old age shall this generation waste
Thou shalt remain in midst of other woe,’
I said, and Walter wrinkled his forehead.
‘What is that?’ he asked. ‘I ought to know it, I expect, but I don’t. Poetry is another of the fringes for me. I’ve never had time for it.’
I was sorry I had used the quotation, for he looked vexed, and I had not meant to vex him.
I said:
‘It’s the Ode to a Grecian Urn. That’s what made me think of it—talking about urns.’
Walter grunted, and I realized that he did not know the Grecian Urn, but I couldn’t say, ‘It’s by Keats.’
Mr. Furze interposed.
‘Sebright is quite incorrigible,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t like Grecian Urns, and he doesn’t like poetry. He will certainly not read a poem about a Grecian Urn.’
Walter shrugged his shoulders and gave a little laugh, and I felt it had not mattered after all.
Soon after that Mr. Furze had to catch his train. I was sorry when he went away.
There was a tensity in the air when we were alone, and I felt somehow as though I were there on false pretences. Walter took me to a big stone in a square frame.
‘This is the Rosetta Stone,’ he said. ‘I think this is one of the most exciting things here.’
And he told me that there were three different languages on it, and three different scripts, and that had been the key to discovering a whole new civilization. People had worked out another language—Ancient Egyptian, he said it was—letter by letter, sign by sign, through comparing one side of the stone with the other, for the same legend was written on all three.
I could see that that was rather an exciting thing to do.
‘You know,’ he said suddenly. ‘I saw this stone first when I was ten years old. I had read about it in a book called The Wonders of Antiquity, and I came to see it with my mother, and it seemed to me even then the best thing in the world to work out new languages from old inscriptions, and discover new worlds like that—much better than discovering new things in this world. I have wanted to do it ever since, and now, partly, I can work at that; but I have to do Roman inscriptions too, because that was for a thesis to start with, to get my D.Litt., and I have to for the History school also. So I have got launched into Roman Britain, but what I really want to get at is the proto-Hittite script from Zenjirli and Sakjegöze and those things—those undeciphered hieroglyphs, you know.’
I did not know what the proto-Hittite script was then; it seems curious now to think of a time when I had not heard of it, but I thought I understood what he meant about discovering new worlds that way.
I asked:
‘Do you feel you can find out quite a lot about the people who wrote those inscriptions? Do they get quite real to you in the end?’
He said:
‘No, not like that. I don’t want them real like that. It is more to me like fitting pieces into a puzzle—thousands of tiny pieces, and a very big puzzle—and if they do fit, if even quite a small piece of the puzzle gets done, you know it’s right. That is one of the satisfactory things, it can’t be just better or worse, it must be right or wrong. Do you see what I mean at all?’
His voice changed; he asked the last question almost shyly. I think he did not expect people quite to understand.
I thought I did, and it interested me. This was a new world to me too; a cold intellectual world that I did not know at all; and I was in a mood to explore.
Afterwards we went out to tea in an A.B.C. near the Museum. At tea he was different again, more like he had been on the picnic. He was shyer and spoke more jerkily, and I felt much more that he admired me. The A.B.C. was crowded and rather noisy, and the marble top of the table was smudged with coffee that had been spilt. It seemed to me very odd to be sitting there with Walter. I seemed to be looking on from a long way off, and wondering how I came to be there.
After tea we got on to a bus. I said I could go home alone, but Walter would come with me. We did not talk very much on the bus. It was beginning to rain, and we pulled up the mackintosh cover from the seat in front.
He said good-bye to me on the steps of Campden Hill Square, and I thanked him for ‘a very interesting afternoon.’
He waited on the step.
‘May I come again?’ he asked. ‘May I take you out again?’
He asked it in his funny, jerky way, as though it mattered to him very much. I could not answer him at once. I felt somehow, irrationally, that my answer was very important.
I said:
‘You know; I don’t agree with you at all about Beauty and Poetry—and—all that sort of thing. I think perhaps I let you think this afternoon that I did agree.’
It sounded foolish even as I said it, and it was not even what I wanted to say.
He said very quietly:
‘I know that. You are the other side of life—all that I have not got, and don’t understand. I know I am one-sided. I would like to be different if I could.’
My heart began to thump. I had not realized that he would talk like that, yet. I was not ready. I wanted to go inside and shut the door, but I couldn’t shut the door while he stood there. The rain was falling faster now, and as I moved my head a little stream of water ran off the brim of my hat, down my neck.
I said:
‘I suppose everybody would like to be different if they could. I should like to have black hair, quite black and straight’; and I tried to laugh. ‘But we can’t be different really, ever.’
He said:
‘Not completely different, of course; but we can alter. People do alter. They can develop new sides in themselves without losing what they have got.’
I said:
‘It is too wet to talk any more now. Good-bye.’
He said:
‘I may come again, mayn’t I?’
I said:
‘Of course, if you like.’ I tried to answer lightly, to make what we were saying seem of no consequence.
I fumbled with my latch-key at the door. At last it opened, and a shaft of light shot out on to the steps. He turned away then and went down the steps, slowly at first and then faster. He turned down the Square to the north, towards Holland Park Road, and I went into the house. The hall was light and warm, and I shut the front door behind me with relief. Upstairs in my bedroom there was a fire. I took off my shoes and stockings and my wet coat, and then I sat down on the hearth-rug and cried for Hugo. He had never seemed so far away before.