“Well, here it is. Paramore had one passion in life—one double-distilled, quintessentially pure passion—and that passion was anthropology. There never was a stiffer, straighter, more Puritanical devotion to an idea than his. Get that into your head first, if you want to understand.”
I could be forgiven, it strikes me, for being sceptical, in the light of that neat précis I had compiled from the newspapers. “Oh, come, Hoyting,” I said, “science doesn’t recruit from liars—not even when they’ve got Paramore’s deuced cheek. You are upset.”
One look at Hoyting’s gigantic lassitude put me in the wrong. It would take more than Paramore to upset Hoyting. He was perfectly firm, though very much bored. Imagine neurasthenia and Hoyting bunking together! One can’t. Hoyting smiled.
“No, it’s not nerves. Only you people who want everything all of a piece—you irritate me. The point about Paramore is that he combined contradictions. He was magnificently human. And as I am in possession of facts, I ask you to suspend your silly judgment until I’ve done. If you know anything about me, you know that I don’t go in for theories.”
I was silent.
“It was the only thing he cared about, I tell you. Nature implants something in every man that kills him in the end. Paramore wanted recognition from a very small, almost undiscernible, group of people whom neither you nor I nor any one else gives a damn for—a few old gentlemen in frock coats and gold eye-glasses who raise their poor, thin old eyebrows over the sins of Paris, but feel a tremulous pleasure in the nastiness of Melanesia. Why did he? Just because he believed they are a sacred sect. He honestly believed that anthropology was important. He thought it was big and real and vital and solemn. He had supreme respect for facts. He put every penny he had or ever hoped to have into going out to acquire them in the bush. The bush isn’t nice. The climate distressed him, the natives shocked him, the solitudes terrified him. Why did he go? Because he held, quite austerely, the scientific attitude towards data, evidence, material. Those old gentlemen needed more facts to feed their theories with, and Paramore was the boy to get them. When there’s neither health nor wealth nor pleasure to be got from doing a thing, a man doesn’t do it except for an idea.”
“Fame?” I suggested.
“Fame? Well, even if Paramore had told the truth, he wouldn’t have had any fame that you’d notice. It was just a pathetic belief in the sanctity of those few old gentlemen who potter round among unclean visions of primitive man. They can’t, in the nature of the case, be very numerous. If you want fame, you go for the crowd. He could have done a little fancy exploring if he’d wanted fame. No! Paramore had the superstition.”
“What really happened in Australia?”
“The only interesting thing happened inside Paramore. He decided to lie.”