The Dark Labyrinth

Portraits

The portrait of Baird which emerged over the grubby tablecloth in Old Compton Street was of formal proportions; as a history it was uneventful, and only the calm force of Hogarth’s description made it of interest to Graecen. Hogarth was tirelessly interested in his own patients; and he could communicate his interest when he pleased. And yet, thought Graecen so often, while he listened to him, Hogarth was so much more interesting than any of his patients could be. His peculiar reticence, for example, had preserved a wall between them for a third of a century. At the University Hogarth had been a monosyllabic misanthrope, working in his own fashion — chiefly during the day with his blinds drawn and the little electric desk-lamp on. Later he had accepted a fellowship to a German University, where he spent some ten years in talking philosophy and walking in the mountains with his students. He had returned to London with a German wife whom Graecen had never seen. Hogarth lived in Herne Hill, of all places, doing some miserably-paid work as analyst for some Government Department. During this time they met frequently, but Graecen was never invited to visit his home or meet his wife. By accident he found out that Hogarth had a son — but when he asked him about it he received a blank stare. Hogarth neither denied nor corroborated the story. Yet somehow, in some fashion that Graecen could never understand, their friendship remained unimpaired by all this. Later still he was surprised to see Hogarth’s name in the catalogue of an exhibition of oil-paintings at the Leicester Gallery. The paintings were powerfully-executed landscapes, owing nothing to influence or training. Hogarth had dismissed them lightly when he mentioned them. “I did them in Germany during my student days,” he had said, without either interest or self-depreciation. That was all.

Later still Hogarth appeared on the scenes in London as a consulting psycho-analyst with a small consulting-room in Harley Street. He seemed to be immediately successful, and had written one or two rather queer books, expounding some sort of philosophy of disease that Graecen had not been able to understand. He had read one of the books, hoping perhaps that he might be able to review it for Hogarth, but it was frankly beyond his powers to understand it. And now Hogarth was busy at work at analysis — he referred to it ironically as “half-soleing the souls of the half-baked”—and into his web people like Fearmax and Baird seemed to be wandering in increasing numbers.

Baird was an only son. His father was a member of the landed gentry displaced by fortune and endeavouring to keep up standards in a world which every day found them less comprehensible or necessary. He was a Justice of the Peace in Herefordshire, a capital horseman, a regular contributor to The Field, and the author of several books about birds. Baird’s mother had died when he was three and his father had never married again. In the stone-roofed house with its neat topiary hedge and green lawn running down to the river, his life had been a quiet and a happy one. His well-regulated youth was calculated to offer him an education and an outlook fit for the inheritance his father was to leave behind; a tradition for mildness, good-breeding, and cultivation rather than culture. In those days it seemed that the genteel might inherit the earth, and that Baird might be among them.

At Charterhouse and Oxford he learned all that his father could not teach him, except by precept. He was averagely good at games and achieved some distinction by winning a music prize. At seventeen he became interested in literature and began a novel about public schools, which he was never destined to finish. At the University, like all young men, he passed through the distemper of Communism and emerged from it unscathed. He rode to hounds with unremitting ardour and shot with style. His sympathy for the working classes, while it had not completely foundered, had given way to an acceptance of the order of things. His father was an admirable companion — interested in everything — and the two of them explored places and subjects together in perfect friendship. Their taste in books and paintings differed widely, but the precept of tolerance was so well ingrained in him that he let the old man have his way in most things. He was a dutiful son.

For a time he lived in London, on a small allowance left to him by his mother, and seriously intended to “commence author”. The phrase sums up his choice of models admirably. At Oxford, Pater and Ruskin had followed hard on the heels of Marx and Engels; the nineties offered one a tremendous latitude for mannerism, and it was mannerism that informed his writing rather than manner — for he had none of his own. A member of the Wine and Food Society, he once or twice wrote essays upon the French Rally for A. J. A. Symons, in which he devoted a critical terminology, with fine discretion, to the description of hard-boiled eggs in Worcester sauce — and other matters of equal weight. During this apprenticeship he was considered rather promising; it was an opinion he himself was inclined to share.

While he could not afford to belong to clubs, his tastes led him to meet a number of artists and musicians so that he never seriously lacked for company; and he contrived to be at every cocktail party given between the Seven Dials and Hammersmith. He was, in fact, always there, a modest and handsome figure in a well-cut lounge suit, dissecting art with artists; music with critics, and life with young women of varying ages and tastes. It was during this period of his life that he had run into Campion at a cocktail party given by a publisher. Campion was quite unknown then, but quite as forthright as when they met again on the deck of the Europa. “How I abominate, how I loathe and distrust and fear all this society back-slapping,” he had said to a rather surprised Baird. He was a small, strongly-built little man with a lot of curly yellow hair coarsely pushed inside a beret. He wore sandals and an open-necked shirt. “Listen to them,” he said fiercely. He was eating rapidly as he talked. Baird looked at the party and could not for the life of him see what was so offensive about it; there were several distinguished people present. Mincon the musician was standing at the mantelpiece. He thought perhaps that Campion might be suffering from some obscure class-inferiority, and asked him pleasantly if he would care to meet the French composer, whom he knew quite well. “God, no,” said Campion in horror, “I could not be nice about his work.” This had rather shocked Baird. Mincon had been accepted everywhere as a genius. “Don’t you like it?” he asked. Campion gave him a long sober look. “Music for the credit titles of a Hollywood film,” he said quietly. “And as for these other people.” His contempt was boundless. Baird asked him why, if he disliked this kind of thing so much, he accepted invitations to parties. Campion once more gave him the cold steady look and answered: “Because of the food — can’t you see? I’m starving.” A little later he had left, and Baird had transferred his attentions to someone more pleasant — someone to whom he might confide his burning desire to write the novel of the age.

He met Alice Lidell in the tea-room of the Tate Gallery and fell in love with her at sight. She was tall and beautiful and her fine blonde hair picked up the reflected light from the long mirrors, twinkling as she combed it. Her diffidence and breeding were charming. They were immediately friends. He admired her long shapely fingers and fine northern colouring. She was, he discovered with a thrill, an art student at the Slade School and keen to be a painter herself. Their friendship survived even her description of Whistler as a “bemused sentimentalist” (a phrase he had heard a friend of hers use) and her defence of Picasso as “the only painter alive”. However, he weathered these intellectual storms and took her to lunch with his aunt — a recognized preliminary to any announcement of his engagement. His aunt approved. Alice found her collection of jade enchanting. She was equally successful with his father, who spent hours showing a rather bored Alice how to hold a gun. By this time, of course, she had decided that she would really like to marry him — he was so personable, so intelligent. His origins and antecedents were unexceptionable. Her own parents were in India and offered no objections. They were married after a short engagement, and retired to a Tudor cottage ten miles from his home, where she proposed to paint, and he to write a book on aesthetics.

This latter idea was suggested by Alice herself, who held rather unorthodox views about the current literature. “The novel is a dead end,” she told him. “The only thing left is to map out the aesthetics of the new Age.” She believed strongly in some undefined New Era of art which was being ushered in by Dadaism. Baird listened patiently. It seemed to him to be extremely important and necessary that a great critic should arise in England to take the prevailing ideas in hand and synthesize them. He was also secretly rather glad to put off the projected novel, which he felt quite incapable of handling. “The novel is a dead end,” he told his friends, “the only hope is to direct the currents of aesthetics from a vantage-point.” What exactly the vantage-point was he himself was not very clear. At any rate he felt vaguely important and pleased to be doing something, and read industriously in the British Museum every day while Alice painted.

After their marriage they moved to the cottage, where a small car, books and friends confirmed them in their happiness, and in the importance of the work each had to do. It was during this time that Baird had chanced upon a book by Hogarth and had been struck by a passage in it upon the sensibility of the artist. Alice thought it was rubbish.

“Art is a dangerous thing to play with, since it demands self-examination and self-knowledge, and many people do not really wish for either. Its true function, after all, is to insist on the existence in us of unused faculties for experience which custom has staled — or compromise to intellectual order of the society in which we find ourselves. The artist does not invent or discover; rather does he, by making himself unusually receptive, be discovered and re-created. We tend to measure artists by their powers of transmission, but even bad artists suffer of the sense of displacement and anxiety which we see recorded in the lives of the great. Benjamin Haydon and Van Gogh are equals in suffering if in nothing else. Each was lost in the labyrinth of his own spiritual discoveries.”

Alice wrinkled her pretty nose as she closed the book and handed it back to him. No, she said, in response to his question, it was just another attempt by these psychologists to put the artist in the strait-jacket of a clinical definition; she did not want to admit that the individuality of the creative man was not by its very nature beyond definition. John must find some way round the problem or he would find his book on aesthetics a study of the artist in one set of terms. This, of course, was precisely what John wanted to do, but his respect for Alice made him defer judgment until he had read through the whole of Ruskin once more. Several summers and winters passed in this pleasant frivolity. John wrote the best part of his New Aesthetics in dear workmanlike prose, but found that the book had turned out rather a frost. Several friends criticized it in typescript, and it became obvious that it was simply another of those productions by young University men which earn them, at the best, a column in a weekly journal. There was no harm in publishing, but John Baird was determined to publish something first-class or remain silent. Alice thought this very wise. She in the meantime was busy painting and reading books about painting. Less critical and far less self-conscious than her husband, she allowed her work to be shown on more than one occasion, and was known to derive comfort from criticisms written about her in the Burlington Magazine. At this time there was almost no sacrifice too great to make on behalf of her art — so strongly was she under the influence of Vincent (as she called him). She even thought that they might have a baby. “I do not feel fully awakened,” she told an astonished Baird one evening in May, “and I notice I’m painting nothing but Madonnas with infants-in-arms. My subconscious must be getting interested in pregnancy.” It was the High Renaissance of Art in England at that time — a Renaissance that was to come to an end in Sloper and Frampton — and people were in the habit of talking like that. Baird was rather taken aback by her sense of proportion, which, it seemed to him, did little credit to a married woman of several years’ standing, but he said nothing. Indeed there was nothing to say. There was no reason why they should not have a child. They were comfortably off. “You could have one by February,” he said after a brief calculation on his finger-ends. But then it was discovered that this would interfere with their yearly trip across the Channel, and the idea was temporarily shelved. Alice had been promised an introduction to Picasso (she still imagined the artists bore more than a superficial resemblance to their work) and would not trade that for a subconscious gratification.

Their life was a happy one simply because no obstacles presented themselves; but it could not last for ever. After several years John became troubled by a sense of failure, and even she felt an incurable staleness creeping into her work. They did not seem to have advanced a step towards their objectives. T. S. Eliot was not yet overthrown, and, try as she might, Alice found it impossible to make much headway. As the young man in the Oxhead Gallery said to her: “Frankly, you know, dash it all, taken by and large, as it were, everyone’s gone non-representative now. I mean to say, in England, mind you, a lot have even gone heterosexual in a desire to keep up, as it were.” It was a true if sad proposition. If it hadn’t been for the Burlington Magazine Alice would have utterly lost faith in herself. Specially as John was so gloomy and sat about all day by the river, tearing up his manuscript and repeating in hollow accents, “What the hell is the meaning of it all, anyway?” His father had given him the Parmenides for a birthday present.

They travelled briefly in France and Spain, and the sun woke them up a bit. Everywhere they moved along the charming and romantic landscapes with the sense of having found at last their proper environment. They thought of taking a house in Venice, but gave the idea up as expensive and impracticable. The little English cottage cost a lot to keep up. In Madrid they had, enjoyably enough, a terrific quarrel — the first they had ever had. Alice had some trouble over her period and imagined that she was going to have a baby. Instead of being pleased for the sake of her unawakened subconscience, its very idea threw her into a panic. Now it seemed to her that a baby would threaten not only her art but her freedom too — the self-indulgent effortless years of conversation, travel and friendship which lay ahead. Though she still wanted the child the thought of losing both freedom and figure at one blow was too much. She became rather hysterical and, of course, John was to blame; he, for his part, found her rather tiresome as a travelling companion. After a brief passage-at-arms in which Alice broke a plate over his head, he retired to sulk in a nearby hotel until she should come to her senses.

They had both of them been staying in a villa belonging to Coréze, the little South American Jew whose brief run of glory many will remember, and whose acrobatic leaps from style to style had amazed and delighted Alice. “Bounding vitality”, she had told John, “written over every canvas.” It was written all over Coréze’s little Semitic face too. Coréze was for some time a fiery little pace-maker for the Cubists, and had impressed them both with his tales of the great men he knew. His impersonation of James Joyce writing in chalk on a blackboard was impressive to a degree. He even gave the impression that parts of Ulysses would never have been written if he, Coréze … The story of Picasso and the Pernod, too, never failed to bring the house down. His imitation of the way the Master had put the glass down and said: “Tiens — un Pernod quoi?” was funnier and more expressive than Fernandel.

When John walked out of the house, after carefully leaving the name of his hotel (so that Alice could go round and apologize), Coréze was full of sympathy and sadness. He had been flattering Alice a good deal, and had even bought a couple of her line-drawings to hang on his walls. He had prophesied great things for her. It was only natural that what had begun as a flirtation of minds should now go a step forward — at least so thought Coréze. Alice was not unwilling to bring John to heel, and what could be simpler than to pretend that she was falling in love with Coréze? As a matter of fact she was not quite sure at this stage what she felt about anything. Coréze was charming, so considerate and gentle. He took her in his arms as she was doing a pencil sketch of him and said: “Don’t let me fall in love with you, please don’t let me. It hurts too much.” There were tears in his eyes. It was rather exciting and not a little touching. “I have been so hurt by love,” murmured Coréze, getting his hand under her skirt, “it can’t happen again, it mustn’t.” His passion was very convincing. “Say you won’t make me,” he almost shouted and covered her mouth with his own before she could promise that she wouldn’t.

She wrote a note to John and asked for a final interview. Rather alarmed by this he hurried back to the villa from the terrace of the hotel. He was received in a dramatic and steely fashion. She had, she said, a confession to make. She was going to leave him for Coréze. He could not help finding her touching and pathetic as she made this confession; people (an irrational part of his mind kept interjecting) are products of their experience. Alice was now behaving rather like Lilian Gish in — what was the name of the film? For a moment John was tempted to say something extremely forcible to Coréze, but the latter had removed himself to Barcelona for a few days to be out of reach. He had a long experience of Latin husbands and did not propose to find himself once more scuffling in the fireplace over a girl he did not really want. He had excused his departure in a short heartbroken note on the grounds that he could no longer stand Alice’s presence unless she crowned his flame.

John Baird was really too lazy to get angry. He took a plane for Paris and left Alice fuming. Characteristically, the only reproach he had offered her had been of a social rather than a personal nature — for he was more outraged in his social vanity than in his feelings. “People”, he said, “simply do not behave like this. We are not Bohemians, after all.” It was this that made Alice wonder whether she really could love him or not. If only he had shown violent jealousy and determination — who knows? She might out of pity have renounced Coréze. But no, he treated her with the haughty disapproval of guardian for the erring ward. His worst reproach was, after all, to be a case of English sulks. S’blood!

John left and Coréze returned. As a matter of fact he had only retired to the house of a friend in the suburbs to pass a Jewish feast in self-examination and purification, leaving this little affair, so to speak, on the hob. Alice’s letter took a week to be forwarded on from the address in Barcelona. It gave them both time to review the situation.

Alice found in the meantime that she was not going to have a baby after all; but things had progressed so far with Coréze that she did not feel able to draw back at this stage. Besides, Coréze was always teasing her about her youth and inexperience, and this would only give him more ammunition. He would consider her naive and irresponsible. She felt more than ever that she should show herself fully emancipated, and yet.… But John had carried off all their travellers’ cheques by mistake, and there was no way of evading a decision. After all, there was the faintest hope in the world that she was going to enjoy it all.

She did not. Coréze made love to her with an art and industry which would have to be described to be fully appreciated. Her pride, her self-respect went out of the window in the short space of forty-eight hours. In the same length of time she succeeded in borrowing the price of a plane-ticket to Paris from the Consul. How bitterly she regretted the whole business. So that was what Lawrence meant with his filthy old gamekeeper with his shirt-ends tied round his neck. She would never, she felt, be much of a success as a wife again, and as the aircraft nosed over the Pyrenees she clasped her cold hands together, thinking darkly of broken faith and nunneries.

To John, sitting innocently on the terrasse of the Rotonde it seemed that some pronounced attitude of mind was called for on his part — but precisely what? How did one react to the debauching of one’s wife by some unchristian foreigner? Here again he found himself, in an obscure way, more angry because the act had offended against the laws of hospitality rather than because his personal love was deeply wounded. He discovered with a shock that he himself had disposed with sex as a problem some long time since. Its only relation to himself now seemed as a subject for conversation with lady novelists. Perhaps this was because he had achieved a certain amount of “intellectual detachment”—as he was pleased to call it. Coréze’s behaviour, he thought firmly, was unpardonable in a host. Things like that were not done in England. Or were they?

The little pile of white saucers rapidly grew on the table before him. Should he attempt a gesture of some sort — drink himself to death or ring up Chloe?

Drinks only gave him indigestion or made him sleepy. Besides, his love for Alice was so deeply and comfortably based in habit and interest, that he found it hard to bring to the surface for such boring and idiotic interrogations. He would sulk, and probably grow a moustache. Up to now Alice had always refused to let him grow one because it made his chin look so weak and undershot. He would stop at nothing now.

He looked forward to a mutual retreat and regrouping; something like a month’s holiday. But an unrepenting and violent Alice appeared suddenly at the hotel, thirsting for drama.

It took all his forbearance to avoid a serious engagement during the first quarter of an hour. Alice piled reproaches upon him for being a bad husband, for taking all the travellers’ cheques with him, and for being too cowardly even to reproach her for what she had done.

To her distracted mind it seemed unbelievable that John should be standing there in front of her exhibiting the merest pique and disapproval; in her own eyes the crime had been enlarging itself until it seemed now to be worth a more distinct response. But no. There he stood, in the middle of this drama, refusing to be drawn in beyond the gentlemanly limits laid down in Kipling’s “If”. That he should be able to sit in front of a pile of saucers, dressed in his pork pie hat, blue diceboard tie, canary-coloured cardigan and grey slacks, seemed to be almost irreverent. She noticed that he even fingered an incipient moustache once or twice in a furtive manner.

They continued to sleep in the same bed, though here again John’s caution prevented her from enjoying the scenes of which she fell so much need. He did not even try to make love to her. She had planned a dramatic scene about that. “Don’t touch me,” she had decided to say in a strangled voice, “can’t you see what i’ve been through?’’

Worse, however, was in store for them. Alice discovered that she was going to have a baby after all. There was every indication that it would be Coréze’s. The thought gave them both a fright. Even John sat up a bit. As for her, she was filled with violent self-loathing for the trick which her body had played upon her. Meanwhile, John conquered his aristocratic disgust sufficiently to carry his inexperience into the consulting-rooms of shabby gynaecologists in the Boulevard Raspail. An operation was arranged and a very cowed Alice thought desperately that poison was really better than dishonour — but submitted herself to science in the person of Dr. Magnoun, a jolly little twig of a Frenchman with an Academy rosette in his button-hole and moustache-ends waxed into a guardee stiffness. “Vous connaissez, Madame,” he said with a certain roguishness, placing her ankles in the canvas hooks hanging from the ceiling and pulling until she was practically standing on her head. “Vous connaissez lépigramme du grand génie Pascal qui dit: ‘Le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connait pas’?”

Alice returned to a little studio overlooking Parc Montsouris which John had taken. She felt old and worn, and full of a sense of dismal insufficiency. Her anger was changed to gratitude for John’s patience and kindness. He looked after her with complete devotion and did not utter a single reproach. If he had she might have rallied more quickly. As it was she spent over a month in bed. This incident effectively disrupted their lives. Their circle of Paris friends seemed to be no longer as “amusing” and as “vital” as heretofore. Alice gave up painting entirely and could not raise enough interest to visit picture galleries to criticize the work of her contemporaries. As for John, the very concerts at the Salle Pleyel became something between a mockery and a bore — so deep a gulf, it seemed, stretched between life and art.

It was at this time, when the frustrating sense of unresolved conflict was making him unhappy, that he ran into Campion again. The latter was making a name for himself. He lived in a little studio behind Alésia and was painting with his customary facility.

Campion at this time was already an expatriate of several years’ standing who had found that the life of Paris, which in those days seemed miraculously to exist only for and through the artist, was more congenial to his temper than the fogs and rigours of London. Baird was having a cognac at the Dome when he saw the small self-possessed figure approach from among the tables with the curious swiftness and stealth that always reminded him of a cat. He had seen Campion about quite often in Paris, had visited his exhibitions, and had even bought one of his nudes for Alice. They had never spoken to one another and he was surprised now to see that Campion was smiling in recognition. Baird wondered whether he was perhaps out to cadge a meal as he watched the small figure in the soiled blue shirt and grey trousers. He half-rose to greet him.

Campion was a little drunk and his eyes sparkled. As it was he had just come from a party and was looking for a victim upon whom to fasten and pour out all the dammed-up feelings of persecution and envy which the society of English people seemed to foster in him. “Baird,” he said, with a smile, “a very long time since we met.”

They sat down and ordered drinks, and Baird found not only that Campion remembered him perfectly, but he had even read two small articles he had written in which his work was mentioned favourably. It was not this, however, that was his business, for Campion almost immediately plunged into a description of his party to ease those pent-up feelings within him. Baird at once recognized behind the acid and brilliant sketches he drew of other people the familiar motive: the sense of social inferiority which had made so many artists difficult companions for him. He remembered one horrible occasion when D. H. Lawrence, upset by some imagined slight, refused to talk to him except in an outlandish Derbyshire dialect — which was intended to emphasize his peasant upbringing. Something of the same discomfort possessed him now as he heard Campion talk, and reflected that he had been born probably in Camberwell, and had left a Secondary school at sixteen. His accent sounded suspiciously correct. It was probably the result of studying the B.B.C. announcers.

Campion had been patronized by a gentleman and he was reacting to it now. His description of Lady Sholter barking like a shotgun and dropping her monocle to shake hands with him, was a masterpiece of ferocious miming. “The English, my God, the English,” he said, pleased to have found an audience that did not contest his opinions. “The granite-bound idiocy and moral superiority. The planetary atmosphere of self-satisfaction each of them carries around, to look at himself through. It is staggering.” He moved his toes in his sandals as he talked with exquisite pleasure. He was enjoying himself. “The sense of ritual they had evolved to cover their disastrous negation — their impotence.”

Baird listened carefully and politely, observing his man with interest. Campion’s small round face gleamed golden in the light of the street-lamps. His white, well-kept hands moved as he talked in a series of small graphic gestures as if they were drawing very lightly in the air the scenes he was describing.

Campion was doubly annoyed, because, in going to this party, he had broken a self-imposed rule. He had thought perhaps that this time it might be different — but no. Ferocious, and full of a suffocating sense of self-limitation, he had left it after a quarter of an hour. “To be patronized, to be permitted entry because of my talent rather than because of myself — that’s what angers me.”

Baird asked why he had gone. Campion gave a mirthless bark of a laugh. “I was told by old Mrs. Dubois that Lady Sholter was anxious to meet me, not only because she thought I was a significant artist, but because she wanted to commission someone to design her a studio for her castle. Idiot that I am, I went partly out of flattery and partly because I cannot afford to turn down two hundred pounds at my time of life.” He drank deeply and ordered another drink. “Not a bit of it,” he said. “She took one look at my clothes and said: ‘Oh, but there’s some mistake. You can’t be Archie Worm’s friend can you? Were you at Eton with Archie?’ Madame Dubois whispered ‘Lord Worms’ in my ear in an ecstatic voice. Was I at Eton with him? Well, my dear Baird, it turned out that I had been mistaken for Campion the couturier.”

Baird protested that this might have happened to anyone, but Campion would not hear of it. Only the English, it seemed, could be boorish or ignorant. “It’s because they despise art in England,” said Campion. “The artist is expected to be a sort of potboy or bagman.” He laughed again. “Architectural drawings for Lady Sholter! English architecture, like the English character, is founded on the Draught. You should have seen them. What a fool I am!”

Baird was getting a little tired. “Schwabe says that the Englishman deserves neither his literature nor his penis — caring so little for either,” he said in a half-hearted attempt to be jocular. Campion was staring at him with his peculiar wide-eyed stare which seemed to combine impudence and candour in equal parts. “As a victim of an English upbringing I suppose I ought to defend myself,” said Baird. Campion was no longer listening. He scratched his foot through the web of his sandal. “A world of druids and bores,” he said softly. The greater part of his rage had evaporated and he was once more becoming the pleasant and equable companion he normally was.

The two men talked in a desultory fashion, and Baird confessed that he wanted to get away for a complete rest. “And how are your wife’s paintings?” asked Campion, who had once seen Alice and thought her beautiful. Baird made some evasive remark and they parted.

He wound his way home slowly to find that Alice was already in bed, reading. “I’ve decided to go away for a bit,” he said, surprising himself, for he did not know that he had come to any decision. “I need a rest.”

She did not even look up from her book.

She had been cultivating a stoical and speechless reserve of late. “Very well,” she said in a tone which was tinged ever so slightly with anxiety. It was the first time in their lives that he had shown any initiative.

That was how Baird began his travels, drifting south into Italy and Greece, gradually emptying his ambitions one by one into the slow wake of a life which, curiously enough, seemed only now to be beginning. A year in Athens, a winter in Syria, confirmed the first fugitive feelings of happiness at being alone. When he got a letter from Alice asking for a divorce it was with a curious indifference that he read it, sitting in an olive-grove in Poros. A casual friend from Paris whom he encountered in Beirut told him that Alice was going to marry Campion — or said she was. Old Madame Dubois, whose trail he crossed as she was on her way to winter in Egypt, told him that Campion would never marry anyone and asked politely whether he was happy. Sitting on the terrace of the Café Moka, he admitted that he was very happy. “You have become a Mediterranean man, eh?” said the old lady, with her distinguished face concentrated upon his like a burning-glass in the shadow of that absurd straw hat. “It happens to people sometimes, you know.” Baird tried to tell her something of his recent journeys, but found them completely lacking in the kind of detail which could make small-talk. No, he had not looked up the Adlers in Jerusalem, nor the Habib family in Beirut. He had, in fact, done none of the things he had been advised to do. He had presented not a single letter of introduction. He had been drifting vaguely about, he told her, becoming a sub-tropical man by degrees. The old lady sucked her iced coffee through a straw, watching his face closely all the time. There was just a tinge of mockery in her eyes. “You’ve got broader and older-looking,” she said at last, removing the small creamy moustache she had allowed to form upon her upper lip with a lace handkerchief. “No doubt you are beginning to enjoy love-making too, without all your silly Anglo-Saxon sentiment?” He had indeed become broader and older-looking; it was partly due to the moustache. But he searched for some way to make the change more concrete so that it could be expressed in words. What could one say? The fundamental factor could, it seemed, only be expressed in negatives, like the first principle of the Hindu religions. “Nothing means very much any more,” he said, and added anxiously, lest the phrase should bear a false interpretation. “I mean by that I am quite happy and full of life; but I don’t try to feel through books any more. I can’t.” She smiled with her beautiful young-girl face, and laid a small tender hand on his wrist. “The world is so large,” she said, “and a lifetime so short, and people so lovable and cruel and exciting.”

It was indeed large, he thought, letting his mind slip back across the kaleidoscope of the last few years, from the courtyard of the fortune-teller in Fez to the day spent under the fig-tree in Poros: from a face reflected in a Damascus water-jar to a cafe in Horns.

“I think that it is only in the south that they warm themselves at life instead of transforming it into bad literature,” said the old lady. Baird lit a cigarette.

He said: “I’ve begun a novel inside. It should take five years to experience and a year to write. It will be my only justification for taking such a long holiday from myself.” He was surprised to see from this that he did consider himself (his English self) as someone quite separate, and his present life not simply an extension of the past — that peach-fed existence of parties and pretensions.

Madame Dubois settled her hands more deeply in her gloves.

“Let me tell you why I come to Egypt every year,” she said, with the faintest suspicion of archness. “Fifteen years ago, in spring (she said the word with that little upcast inflexion of pleasure, as Parisians do) I fell in love. I was already married. I was in the temple at Baalbec and I met a young Greek officer. He was also married. We determined that though experience was to be respected — and ours was that spontaneous unfolding inevitable sequence of meetings which one covers with the inadequate word I have just used for the experience of love; while that had to be respected, the common forms of life too had their due. He had two children. I had a husband so gracious and human that I could not bear to hurt him. I come to Egypt every year, leaving George to his banking, and relive the experience which a year’s domestic propinquity would kill but which had not died throughout these years. He has a little studio in the Arab quarter. We meet in secret. Each year it gets better. Oh my friend, all this was fifteen years ago, and here I am, an old lady. But this secret friendship, so superficial that a week of marriage would kill it, is one of the lovely things of my life.”

She excused herself for a moment and crossed the café to the counter to buy some cakes. She had left her book and handbag on the table. Somewhere a radio played the piercing quarter-tones of some Arabic dance. Baird picked up the book and idly turned the pages. It was a little anthology of aphorisms. He noticed that she had placed an exclamation mark beside one of the aphorisms. “L’ amour maternel est le seul bonbeur qui dépasse ce qu’ on en espérait,” he read. Madame Dubois, of course, had only that adopted daughter who was always away in Montreux at a Convent. The pencil-mark had scored into the soft white paper. “L’amour maternel!” Well, there remained mountain-ranges to be crossed for all of us; paradoxically enough, travel was only a sort of metaphorical journey — an outward symbol of an inward march upon reality.

Madame Dubois returned with a packet of crystallized fruit and some cream cakes of deleterious hue. “We have feasts,” she said. “Orgies of iced cakes and Russian tea in the little studio. And I tell him once more the plot of the novel which I shall never write; and he brings me the presents he has had six months to choose.” Blessed are the happy.

The war was approaching, he reflected, as he rode eastward across the deadly green Egyptian delta to Alexandria. There was perhaps only a year of this life to spend before the barriers came down. He stood up and examined his face in the pocket mirror of the carriage, steadying himself against the swaying of the train by placing his braced legs far apart. The face that stared back at him was certainly the face of a person. It was good, very good, to feel at last a responsibility for his own mind and body: to be rich with increase.

Madame Dubois had said, on that last evening: “I think, you know, that you have discovered the south, and you know that the only life for you is one of curiosity — sexual curiosity and metaphysical speculation.”

In Haifa he was pounced upon, as he was having his shoes cleaned, by Miss Dombey, of all people. Rufous-red, burnt to brickdust by the sun and her perpetual pent-up rage against people for having dark skins, Miss Dombey was travelling for a missionary society. “Fancy seeing you here,” she said. “I heard you were drifting round the Mediterranean.”

“Drifting,” thought Baird. It could not have been better put; in Miss Dombey’s mouth the word carried a suppressed pejorative inflexion. Drifting was something that “remittance men” did. It was, however, impossible to escape from her. They had a cup of tea, and between them reconstructed the fragments of that old overcast life when Miss Dombey cycled to Thorsham every Saturday to change her books at the library and take Bible class for the vicar. The rain, the steaming fields. He heard fairly regularly from his father. Outside in the dusky street a thin rain began to fall, as if to heighten the verisimilitude of the atmosphere created by the tea-cups and the scrannel-harsh voice of Miss Dombey. She was fuller of freckles than a peacock’s tail, he found himself thinking. Each freckle an eye, and every eye an inquisition. Now she wanted to talk about Alice. He changed the subject abruptly and told her about his little Moorish house in Fez, omitting any mention of the kohl-painted pair of dark eyes that watched the dusty road by the cypresses so anxiously for him. Miss Dombey had been sent east upon what she described as “the Lord’s business.” Leaving England had been a revelation. She had always heard of the “backward” races, she said, but had never realized how backward and savage they were. “The filth,” she said challengingly, when he tried to defend Cairo and Jerusalem. Miss Dombey obliged with two examples of Egyptian life which were incontestably true to character. Walking down Kasr El Nil she had seen a little man in a black suit and hat approaching her. He had no nose, but in the space where the nose should have been was the cork of a bottle, across which lay the rim of his spectacles. On another occasion, travelling third the better to observe her quarry (the fellah), she had noticed that a strange smell of burning was emanating from the man seated next to her. He had a lighted cigarette in his hand which had burnt down to the flesh of the finger. He felt nothing. She realized that the smell was that of burnt flesh. The man was a leper! She recounted these ancedotes with triumphant gestures and Baird had to admit that his Middle East was dirty; but how varied, and how delightful. “It’s the same everywhere,” said Miss Dombey, “same people saying the same things.” That also was true. Everywhere there was the conventional Latin situation — hopeless broken-down provincial societies talking Lycée French and making Cirque Medrano love. But everywhere, too, the seduction of blue water and islands, and the occasional slant-eyed dark person who demanded only a fugitive devotion of the body, being unable to touch the heart or perhaps not even desiring it. How could one make this clear to Miss Dombey? He could imagine the expression on her face if he should say that he had become a sub-tropical man. “I must go,” he said, “the taxi for Beirut is leaving in a few minutes.” He shook her warmly by the hand and left her standing there in her torn mackintosh, with her uncombed, untidy red hair shaking in the wind from the open door.

He had spent several months in the Lebanon among the little Druse villages, and was travelling towards Gaza once more in a crowded second-class compartment, when he heard that war had been declared. A couple of Egyptians in their red tarbushes were eagerly reading an Arabic paper; opposite him an old Hebrew and his son were arguing in French about the possibilities of fighting spreading to the Middle East. As the train started rolling slowly away from the flower-scented groves of cultivation towards the twilit desert that stretched between them and Egypt, the old man was repeating: “A war is nothing at all.” He was, like all Orientals, equipped with a massive rosary which he drew backwards and forwards through his fingers as he talked, touching the larger amber stones voluptuously. Baird could see the venal old face with its dark eye-pouches quickened by the thought of war and its profits; the movement of men and armies, the millions of tons of provisions — concrete, steel, tobacco, and medical stores — which would be spewed out and wasted in every theatre. “It is nothing,” he repeated; how many wars, expulsions, evacuations had he seen that he could think of war in Europe with nothing more than the restless cupidity of his race? He was urging his son to join the army at the first opportunity. “Syria will be a bastion,” he repeated. But it was obvious from his face that he was thinking how much a son in uniform could help him to get contracts for fruit or wool or firewood. Their argument became quite heated. “But the war will never come here,” said the younger man and his father’s face fell, while the face of one of the Egyptians in uniform brightened considerably.

Baird wrapped himself in his coat and tried to sleep. It seemed to him that he had never been so well-equipped for death. He confronted the idea with an utter calm. He was not to know, however, how much worse than simple death a war could be, with its power to deaden and whip the sensibility into emptiness; he was not to foresee the dreadful post-war world which became a frantic hunt, not for values, but for the elementary feelings upon which any sense of community is founded. No. That remained to be revealed apocalyptically by Hogarth in the little smoke-filled room in Harley Street.

At the time when Graecen was offering his diffident services to his old regiment and writing a poem for The Times which echoed all the proper sentiments: at a time when Fearmax decided to enter a “retreat of atonement” and Mr. Truman became a machine-gunner; Baird, with no specific aim or determination found that three languages and a public school translated him comfortably into the uniform of a second lieutenant. The deathly staleness of Cairo and its climate were soon enough exchanged. He was happy. The terrible feeling of moral insensibility — the Gleichbgultigkeit that Böcklin afterwards spoke of on the Cretan mountains, before he killed him — that was an unforeseen enemy lying in futurity.

He saw a short fierce action in Libya, and the retreat across Crete; phenomena more exhilarating than frightening to a temperament as equably based in common-sense. But the first signs of discontent were already there. It was becoming difficult to stand the restricted, stupefying, idiotic system of Army life, which excluded every privacy and every comfort. Seeking for something with more freedom, he happened upon an embryonic department of counter-espionage in need of linguists.

Axelos, in the course of an exhausting interview, examined his claim to a knowledge of Greek, German and French, with penetration and care. He looked more like a Turkish brigand than a British colonel as he sat behind the shaded light, with his large hands spread before him on the green baize table. He was to found the little section in whose service Baird was so singularly successful. Axelos’s small eye, deep-set and angry like the rhinoceros, could, he found, be persuaded to shine with laughter. Once he actually saw him open his mouth and expel a little soundless air in laughter. But, in general, it was a consistent picture he took away with him, of a large man with a vulture’s profile and perfect teeth, seated over a table that was too small for him, on a chair without space enough between its legs to accommodate his fat and hairy calves. He was cynical about everything from the British character, which he found fatuous and boring, to the policy of the Foreign Office, which he considered frivolous and unimaginative.

It was due to Axelos, however, that Baird found himself grappling with a blowing parachute on a windy hillside in Crete early in 1942—struggling with the rearing and plunging silk like a man trying to put out a fire. The night before he left he had run into Campion of all people; a small stern-looking Campion dressed in a major’s uniform which came through the barbed-wire enclosure at G.H.Q. with an almost affected military stiffness. “Baird,” cried Campion with delight, catching his arm. “At last someone I can talk to.” They made their way down to a Syrian restaurant in the centre of Cairo. There appeared to be a great deal Campion wished to get off his chest, and for some reason or other, he seemed to consider Baird a suitable recipient for his confidence. “Now it’s going hell’s bells,” he said as they attacked their quails and rice. “A million imbeciles blowing each other’s arms and legs off with incredible gallantry, and decorating each other with whatever members they have left. The pot hunting, the laissez faire, the idiocy.” He was speechless with rage and disgust. “What on earth have you or I to do with a war?” It was a question Baird had never asked himself. Campion pressed him. “You, for example? It’s the death of everything we believe in. Even the excuse that Hitler is at our throats can’t blind us to the fact that we have quite a number of our own Hitlers, and our own organized Fascio,” Baird sighed.

“Wait a minute,” he said, wallowing in the wake of Campion’s divagations. “How is it that you are a major?” Campion’s snort of laughter could be heard over the whole room. “My dear Baird,” he said reprovingly, as if his companion was demanding the answer to a question he should know only too well. “My dear fellow, when war broke out I made the supreme sacrifice. I joined the Ministry of Political War. Later on I found that if my choice was to lie between having my brains blown out, and having them permanently awash with the dirty bilge of political work, I would rather choose the former.” He drank some more wine. “I tell you quite firmly that I do not intend to get killed in this nonsensical business. It is to this end that I have succeeded in getting myself this handsome job on the War Graves Commission. It is the only really academic job left in this world today. We are still investigating the sites of graves left over from the last war. The work is so slow and the pay so high that we do not expect to finish our researches into this war before Armistice Day, 1999. Of course, once or twice I have been in a tight spot. We were almost captured in that Libyan show owing to curiosity about seventeen heroes who got themselves buried on a dune near Siwa during 1917. All the fun of the fair, Baird.”

Baird looked at him narrowly and wondered why it was that he must be permanently in revolt. He missed one of the common pleasures of community — that of participation. “Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose you would defend yourself by saying that you were a coward but not a complete imbecile. But apart from the moral justification for the war — and partial as it is — I think it justified within the narrow frame of reference. People will be happier if we win — in the long run. Apart from that, perhaps the difference between you and other people is that you have a sensibility to look after and work to do with it, while a great number of us are still looking for ourselves, and some of us might even find ourselves in this war, through it.…” He broke off in some confusion, for Campion’s cynical impertinent eyes were upon him. “So you’ve sold out,” he said. “The English artist, with the load of sentiment, as ever.…” For a moment he seemed to be looking for a phrase. “You ought to do well,” he said. “They are looking for war-poets to help me to justify their messy little rodent-conception of life. The how-bravely-we-are-suffering-school. What a shameful disgusting business. One can only hope the whole lot of them meet in the obituary columns of The Times Literary Supplement.”

“Well,” said Baird, angered by this sally, “that is neither here nor there. I dare say most people’s behaviour is pretty questionable even in peace-time. The test is whether you are happy.” Campion folded his arms. “Ah, yes,” he said in a small voice, “Ah, yes. And I have never been happy, I don’t think. Not once in my life. Or perhaps only when I was a child.”

It was odd the next morning to find oneself struggling on the wet grass of a Cretan hillside with a parachute harness. Baird thought of Campion often during the first few days of his mission in Crete. He had forgotten to ask him about Alice; but perhaps it was just as well.

Baird found himself sharing the command of a small group of guerillas with one other young officer and the Abbot John, that venerable old figure, whose resistance to the Germans during their occupation of Crete was widely written-up in the Press of two continents. The Abbot John was an imposing figure, with his massive patriarchal head and its tufted eyebrows, curly beard and ear-rings. Having renounced brigandage in 1923 and retired to the Monastery of St. Luke, he found a sudden invasion of the island not entirely uninteresting. It enabled him to revert to something of his old life. Things had been very quiet of late, and he welcomed a diversion from the relentless quest for holiness. Like all Greeks, he was without difficulty able to combine the mystic and the man of action. In his Byzantine belt, with its square iron studs, he carried not only several hand-grenades and a pistol, but also a tiny prayer-book attached to the buckle by a chain. He was at first so gruff as to be almost rude, and Baird was beginning to repent of his decision to accept the Cretan assignment, when a small incident suddenly made them firm friends. The Abbot John had a tame raven, an amusing and impertinent old bird called “Koax”. It was the life and soul of the headquarters in which the Abbot lived when the weather was too bad or the omens unpropitious for a sortie into German-held territory; “Koax” hopped about all day in the large caves which marked the entrance of the labyrinth, making itself as much of a privileged nuisance as any court jester. It could swear mildly in Greek, and was now learning to do the same in English. It was always picking up scraps and hopping off into the shadows with them, and even managed to build itself a ramshackle nest high up in the roof above the natural vent which served them as a smoke-stack. “Koax”, however, suddenly became extremely ill, due no doubt to something it had eaten in a greedy moment, and was only nursed back to life by the united devotion of the company; but to Baird fell the happy thought, when the bird seemed about to die, to feed it on brandy in a teaspoon. After one dose “Koax” rallied, and after a couple of days was back in his old form. This made the Abbot a firm friend. “Say ‘thank you’,” he would tell the bird as it flew up on to his shoulder, “Say ‘thank you’ to the officer,” And “Koax” would give a little shriek and clap his wings.

The little group of saboteurs lived for almost two years in a comradeship and humour that was never tested. Baird learned the Cretan dances, and studied the particularities of the Cretan wines. His particular task was to build a small guerilla army, and to this end he devoted all his energies, backed by the hard-swearing Abbot. They operated from the mouth of the labyrinth, above the village of Cefalû, where later Axelos was to make his discoveries, and where the darkness was to dose down on Fearmax, Campion and poor Miss Dombey. Despite its uglier moments, the life was at first merely tiring in the physical sense, in every other way there was the exhilaration to be enjoyed of freedom (the solitude of these immense white mountains in winter and autumn) and remoteness of control over his own actions. War, in terms of ambush and bluff, was something new and it taught him concentration and spareness without touching the springs of a nature already formed in an unreflective soldierly automatism. It was only after a considerable length of time that the strain began to tell. “I’m fed up,” he told the old man one day, “my ten days in Cairo did me no good at all. I’m going to find another job. I’m getting numb.” The Abbot John regarded him keenly from under his bushy eyebrows. He nodded. “I know how you feel. It is always the same. After a long time one gets sick of the killing. One feels nothing — neither hate nor pity. It’s like the soul getting pins and needles.”

It was indeed something like the failure of experience itself to register; he killed now with a numbness and abstraction that passed for strength of mind; but it was as if he were acting in his sleep. As if he were a somnambulist leading his small parties out to ambush patrols or to examine installations. Now it was out of all this that Böcklin’s death arose; and yet at first it was simply a term in a crowded life based on animal values — fear, cunning, lice, damp blankets, snow.

Böcklin was the remaining survivor of a German mission visiting the island, which had strayed into an ambush laid for them by the Abbot. He was a rather self-conscious, almost effeminate figure, and he showed a quixotic expectancy of death when he was captured that made the Abbot, who was usually merciless to Germans, stay his hand. His English was almost perfect, and Baird discovered that he had been educated partly in England and partly in France. A Bavarian, his gentleness of manner and politeness completely won over the old man. “Since we did not kill him at the first rush,” said the Abbot looking slowly round the little group of huddled figures which had fallen among the stacked leaves round the olive-boles, “we cannot kill him now, eh?” It was not a decision to be approved easily. If he should escape.…

It was, however, becoming increasingly difficult to remind the Abbot that he came under the orders of H.Q. Cairo, and that military decisions affecting the whole guerilla group should come from the British officers present. The Abbot had never been to Cairo. He thought it was somewhere near Singapore. While he liked the British and accepted their help, he showed no desire to be ordered about in his own country. Baird opened his mouth to protest against Böcklin being alive when he saw that he had fallen in with the baggage donkeys, his young slight figure shivering in the thin field-grey uniform. They began the long trek back to the mouth of the labyrinth.

During the brief fortnight that Böcklin was with them, he proved to be a quiet and good-natured addition to the band. He took his turn at the cooking and sweeping, ran errands, played with “Koax”, and became very friendly with the dour Cretan mountaineers; indeed they liked him so much that once they even set him on guard with a loaded rifle while they slept. Baird, returning to the network of caves, saw the shadow of an armed German on guard and very nearly shot him. Böcklin handed over his rifle and retired to his corner without a word. The next day he said: “Captain, do not scold the guard. They accepted me as one of them, and by the laws of hospitality I was bound not to escape or to harm them.”

On another occasion he brought them food to a little observation post overlooking the plain from which Baird was watching the movements of a German patrol through glasses. “Who sent you up here?” he cried irritably, realizing that a prisoner should not be allowed to know too much. “The Abbot,” said Böcklin. Baird gave a sigh and turned back to watch the group of small grey-blue figures crossing the plain in open order. The mad Greeks, with their irrepressible friendliness and naïvéti, would be the. death of them all. They liked Böcklin and immediately accepted him as one of them. Well, come to think of it, why not?

He looked at the keen features and yellow hair of the German, who was sitting behind a bush, arms clasped round his knees. “Böcklin,” he said, “what did you do before you joined up?” Böcklin hung his head for a moment and looked confused. “I was going to be a priest, Captain,” he said with a clumsy attempt to bring his heels smartly together in the manner of the approved salute accorded to officers by the common soldier. Baird said nothing for a long time. The patrol in the valley moved slowly across the sodden field combing the copses. They had obviously been sent out after the Abbot. “Did you”, he said, lighting a cigarette, “believe in this war?” Böcklin, who had relapsed into reverie once more, went rigid at the knees and produced the faint simulacrum of a salute. “I did not believe either in the peace or the war, Captain,” he said. His face flushed again. He was obviously afraid of appearing impertinent. Baird grunted. “I suppose the German people will be as pleased when it’s over as we will,” he said, and, to his surprise, Böcklin shook his head slowly. “You are still fresh,” he said, “you can enjoy. We have had years now, and there is only — I do not know how to say it in English.” Baird turned to him and said in German: “Say it in German.” It was then that he heard from Böcklin’s lips the word which was afterwards to sum up, far more accurately than any other in French or English, his feeling for the world—Gleichgultigkeit.

The next day the Abbot received a present of a whole lamb, and, despite Baird’s protests, the mountaineers set to work to spit it and set it to turn on the huge fire which blazed in the fireplace. “German patrols?” said the Abbot loftily. It would take more than that to keep him from having some real meat to eat for a change. It was perhaps the smoke that gave them away.

At dawn a German patrol opened fire on the guard who was manning the light machine-gun on the outer rock-face. Wakened by the sharp scream of lead thrown off the rock-face and the hoarse winnowing noise of tommy-guns, the whole party awoke and found that their secret headquarters — not to mention the whole plan of operations — was in danger.

The only hope was to retreat further into the labyrinth along the main tunnel, which was known to two of the men who were shepherds. In a small rock chamber, too, was housed the transmitting set which kept Cairo informed of their activities. Böcklin could not go with them. In the confusion and the shouting Baird made his decision.

Böcklin must have followed his reasoning perfectly, for he sat at the entrance of one of the caves, trying to register a pathetic indifference, his thin hands in trouser-pockets. Laird came up to him at a run. In his hand he held a heavy captured Luger. Pressing the muzzle to the head of the boy he fired. The report was deafening in that confined space. The body, knocked from the old ammunition box on which it had been sitting, was thrown against the side of the rock, and fell back artfully like a character in a play, upon its back. His thick blond hair hid the wound. As Baird looked down at him he heard him draw one long and perfectly calm breath.

Now the hunt was up, and the whole party raced into the labyrinth, the Abbot holding a large leg of lamb in his left hand as he uttered terrible threats against the “cuckold bastards” who had interrupted their sleep. He was also laughing, for excitement always made him a little hysterical.

Later in the day the enemy patrol withdrew and they were able to return to their headquarters. Nothing had been touched and it seemed as if by some chance the enemy had missed the narrow entrance to the grotto. Böcklin’s body lay where it had fallen and they set about burying it in a shallow grave under the single cypress tree. The Abbot was angry that the German had had to be killed, but he said nothing. Two days later a signal recalled Baird to Cairo to prepare for another theatre of war, and the whole incident passed from his mind. He was glad to leave Crete. He had become stale.

The war unrolled itself gradually; an infinity of boredom settled down over him which even the goads of action could not make him forget. He became more than tired now. He was losing his nerve. He felt around him the gathering unrest of armies which had realized at last that this war was only to be a foundation-stone for a yet bigger and more boring war — the atomic war. Peace came so late as to be an anti-climax. Baird found himself once more at home in the dirty constricted industrial suburb that England had become. His father was very old and very worn. He was glad to see him again, but their long estrangement had widened their common interests. They had nothing to say to each other.

It was during the ice-bound January that followed the year of the peace that Baird began to dream of Böcklin. He saw him one night holding a lighted match to his cigarette. He saw himself place the revolver to his temple and press the trigger. For a time it took quite an effort of memory to disinter Böcklin from among his other memories of dead friends and enemies. Then he remembered. After that he dreamed of him frequently. Sometimes he had just fired the shot and Böcklin was falling away from him towards the rock — almost as if he had taken flight. At others he simply saw the white face detached from its surroundings and, as he watched, the nostrils slowly brim with blood from the shattered brain-case, and noiselessly spill over into the surrounding darkness. He awoke always in great anguish of mind and could not go to sleep again. As a conscious recollection it meant nothing to him — he had seen plenty of uglier scenes. Why, then, should his memory select this particular scene with which to trouble his sleep?

This is why he found himself one day in Hogarth’s consulting-room, facing not only the problem of Böcklin’s dream, but also the other — the pre-occupation which seemed somehow bound up with it — his Gleichgultigkeit: that feeling of dreadful moral insensibility and detachment which is the peculiar legacy of wars. It seemed then bizarre to imagine that psycho-analysis should have anything to say to him, but he liked Hogarth, with his massive Baconian cranium and his blunt hands. And he felt that at least the insomnia might have a mechanical reason.

In those days Hogarth was not, as he is now, the chopping-block for débutantes with palace nerves; he was not, as he is today, consulted upon the sexual maladjustments of earls and financiers. His reputation, which was still growing, rested upon a lengthy hospital practice and two volumes on the nature of the subconscious which the Medical Year had characterized as “too daring by far in their sweeping assumptions”. Their author’s appearance belied any suggestion of daring, however; if his mind was a reflection of his physiognomy, then it must have been a blunt and heavy weapon — by no means a scalpel.

Hogarth was immense and of heavy build, with the clumsiness of a water-buffalo in movement. His thick brown hair, chopped off short and clipped round the ears, fell upon a low white forehead which topped off the coarse blunt nose and immature chin of a Neronian bust. One of his eyes was blue; the other was flecked with a honey-coloured spot towards the outer part of the iris. His hands, too, were of different sizes — an acromegalic feature which one did not easily notice since he kept them for preference buried in his trouser-pockets. His clothes were as baggy as a Dutchman and smelt strongly of tobacco. As he rose to shake hands Baird saw that his ears, which were prominent and covered with a fine blond fur, were set away from his head, giving him a curious and slightly comical expression. His voice too added in some measure to this impression, for it was displeasing, and had odd variations in it. If he tried to raise it too suddenly it broke disconcertingly.

At that time Hogarth’s theatre of operations was a small shabby room at the corner of Harley Street and Marylebone Road. He had, however, a private door which opened on to mews, and he also shared part of the building with other medical men. He travelled up every day from his suburb with a paper parcel containing his lunch and a green canister full of cold tea.

From the moment Baird met him he realized that his habits and pretensions had come under a disturbing and steady scrutiny. He attempted a politeness, but he saw that Hogarth did not answer his smile; and indeed cut him short with a brusque question: “Why did you come to me?” It was not calculated to put him at his ease; nor were the other questions that Hogarth asked in his strangely varying voice, but he passed from annoyance to relief when he realized that his defences were being tested at all the obvious points. More than that. He was really being observed for the first time as a sort of specimen. Hogarth’s eyes were resting on his fingers. Following the direction of his gaze Baird found himself for the first time regarding his own hands as if they belonged to another man. What could one make of them? Were they the hands of an artist, a writer, a criminal?

He noticed a great bull-nosed pipe which lay fully-charged on the desk before the analyst. On the bookshelf in the corner, upon a jumble of medical papers, he saw a soft green Tyrolean hat with a bright cock-pheasant’s feather in it tucked into the cord. “I notice”, said Hogarth idly, “that on your tunic there is a little green piece where you obviously have worn some medals — a faded spot there.” He delighted in the unconscious intention. “Did you leave them off before coming to see me?” It had been the merest whim that morning to put on his clean tunic; he had forgotten the campaign medals and the M.C. Hogarth put back his head and said rather sententiously: “In my job whims like that might count for a lot. Tell me why you did it.”

As Baird began to talk in his deep and rather musical voice the elder man assembled himself to listen. As always, he was calling up all his long clinical experience and trying to marry it to that part of his mind which in his books he calls the “Inself”. He was busy attempting to record the outlines of this newcomer’s personality, recording the physique, the texture and colour of the skin; the determined short upper lip and the large forehead. His opening questions were really the merest gambits. It was necessary to see whether Baird could talk, could think about himself and objectify the thought in words. At the same time, the frailer side of his own mind was wearily thinking how little, at the most, one can know about another human being. Hogarth was full of that sickness which the faintest success breeds in a man of sensibility. He allowed the voice, with its pleasant modulations, to tell him more than the phrases it uttered. Its harshness was natural to it and not a reflection of an interior distress.

“Do you dream much?”

“I have a nightmare which keeps returning.”

“Are you married?”

“Divorced.”

“Regular army?”

“I’ve signed on for another three years.”

Slowly through these opening statements he seemed to see the type and colour of Baird’s anxiety opening like a paper flower in water. He slipped open the drawer of his desk and inserted a paw. He always kept a packet of boiled sweets to suck as he worked. He put one on his tongue with a quick gesture and settled himself further in his oak chair. It was hard and cruel work, he was reflecting, to bore down through the carapace of pride, self-esteem, apathy; dragging out the forgotten or the discarded from the rubbish-heap of another man’s experience. Particularly so when what he had to give was not a mechanical cure — a particular focus of trauma or anxiety, a particular fact or incident — but a technique and a stance. And how did this come about? Not through any will of his own — it was as if he had turned down his conscious self to the smallest bud of flame. No. It all happened by a fluke — by an extra-sensory awareness which was being called up now from inside him ready to penetrate and seize. He felt, as he listened, quite light and empty, quite devoid of will or ambition or desire — or even interest in his patient.

Baird, it seemed, was well-read and familiar with the general theories of Freud and Adler. So much the worse. But, at any rate, he could express himself freely and without difficulty and he seemed honest enough. It was enough for the first “wax impression”, as he called it. It only remained to see what reciprocal impression he had made on the younger man.

“Well, that’ll be a guinea,” said Hogarth with a sigh as the clock struck. “Now will you go away and think me over? If you decide that you want me to help you come back tomorrow at nine. Tonight I would like you to go out and get drunk, if possible. A hangover loosens up the mind no end, and makes you able to dissociate fluently. Will you do that? Good. If you don’t want to go on with me telephone me before half past eight tomorrow.”

The sunlight suddenly shone in at the murky window and turned the lobes of his ears to coral as he stood up awkwardly on one leg. He had already placed his pipe between his teeth and was fumbling for a box of matches. Baird had not yet told him about the Böcklin dream; well, it could wait until tomorrow. He felt a tinge of chagrin to be thus dismissed at the striking of a clock. “Well, Doctor Hogarth,” he said. “Thank you very much.” Hogarth folded his cheque up and put it in his pocket. He nodded and blew a couple of puffs on his pipe.

In the waiting-room Fearmax was waiting, walking up and down like a metronome with his hands behind his back. In his hand he held some folded papers. His hat and stick lay upon the sofa. He looked tired and ill. Baird went out into the rainy street wondering whether Hogarth could be of any use to him, and whether the Böcklin dream would return.

His analysis progressed more slowly even than his friendship — for Hogarth, that dealer in sensibility often found that his best way towards a cure was to turn a patient into a friend. Baird found him a fascinating character with his ponderous medical equipment backed up by an intuition which was completely female and amoral. Between them they worked towards Böcklin’s ghost through the muddled debris of a life which Baird himself had never stopped to examine properly. Hogarth’s analytical technique was an uncompromising one; it not only combed out the purely factual data of a life, but it made the liver of it realize his responsibilities in regard to it. “Why do you think you are here?” “What sort of purpose do you imagine you have in life?” “Do you feel that you have ever contributed towards the well-being of another person?” Such were some of the questions which managed to get sandwiched in between others as cogent. “Why did you forget your latch-key?” “What do you think of when you see a spilled ink-pot?” “Do you enjoy pain?”

Together they disinterred Böcklin from his unceremonious grave. They recovered, it seemed, every thought and action connected with the incident and with those hundred and one other incidents which appeared to be connected to it in his memory. They became great friends, and when the work became too painful to continue — when the big metal ash-trays were brimming with charred tobacco and cigarette-ends — they would put on their overcoats and walk for hours along the Embankment. Hogarth would explain his theories about the structure of the psyche and give him summaries of his own condition, which were not always comprehensible. And yet behind it all, Baird felt, there was design and purpose in what he said; he was a man trying to grapple with a philosophy not only of disease, but also of life.

“All right. You kill Böcklin. It is a senseless and beastly murder; but then you are pressed into the service of murder. In the abstract, murder is being committed in your name all over the world. But this actual act shakes you. Now though killing him may be the source of a moral guilt, I’d like to know whether it illustrates merely the guilt for that act, or a much more deep-seated guilt about your role in society. Böcklin may simply be an illustration. But in point of fact your life indicates another, and — may I say? — more fruitful disturbance. You were unhappy before the war too, you say. As a puritan living unpuritanly you would have been. You found an inability to enjoy because your education, with its gentlemanly prohibitions, had taught you merely how to endure. Sometimes—” here Hogarth affectionately put his arm round the shoulders of the younger man. “Sometimes, Baird, I think there is only politics left for you — the last refuge of the diseased ego. You notice how all the young men are burning to reform things? It’s to escape the terrible nullity and emptiness and guilt of the last six years. They are now going to nationalize everything, including joy, sex and sleep. There will be enough for everyone now because the Government will control it. Those who can’t sleep will be locked up.”

They walked in silence for a quarter of a mile along the deserted Embankment, their footsteps sounding hollow in the crisp night air.

“And yet,” pursued Hogarth, “I think I see also symptoms of a purely metaphysical disturbance going on too; you are not alone, you know, in anything except the fact that it has chosen a single incident from your own life to illustrate what is common to the whole of your generation. I tell you everywhere the young men are sleeping with the night-light burning. You ask me about Böcklin and I say this is less interesting than that other feeling which you have been telling me about — what the old Abbot called ‘pins and needles of the soul’ and Böcklin himself called ‘Gleichgultigkeit’. It seems to me that this sharpening of focus, this aridity of feeling, this sense of inner frustration, must be leading to a kind of inner growth at the end of which lies mystical experience. Now you are laughing at me again.” He placed his pork-pie hat firmly on his head and walked a few steps in silence. “It seems to me that when you have exhausted action (which is always destructive) and people and the material things, there comes a great empty gap. That is what you have reached — the great hurdle which stands on this side of the real joyous life of the inside self. Then comes illumination — dear, oh dear. I know it sounds nonsense, but it’s the poverty of language that is at fault. What do you think the medical term for William Blake would be? A euphoric? A hysterical pycnik? It’s too absurd. The next few years will be a crisis not only for you but your generation too. You are approaching spiritual puberty — the world is. It is hard going I know — but there is always worse ahead, I have found. Yet there is a merciful law by which nothing heavier than you can bear is ever put upon you. Remember it! It is not the burden which causes you pain — the burden of excessive sensibility — but the degree of your refusal to accept responsibility for it. That sets up a stress and conflict. It sounds balls, doesn’t it? Well, so does St. John of the Cross, I suppose.”

They stopped at an early coffee-stall and ordered the plate of sausage and mash that Hogarth so loved to eat before he caught his last tram back to Balham. They smiled at each other over a cup of steaming coffee and wrangled good-naturedly about who should pay.

“Admit it,” said Hogarth. “I’m talking about something that you don’t understand at all. Gibberish, eh?”

Baird shook his head. “It sounds like sense — with a fourth dimension added to it. It reminds me a good deal of the Californian prophets, Huxley, Maugham, et alia.”

“Ah,” said Hogarth, “the propaganda squad.”

“The sphere and navel group. New World Taoists.”

“Well, you are not very far wrong; for although I think some of them have the answer, it often represents little more than a retrenchment upon an original pragmatism. Dealing in revelation, they obviously lack the true illumination. Why? Because if they had the secret they could perfectly carry on with the Christian corpus — you would not need these humpty-dumpty Eastern religions to fall back on, with their athleticism. A mass attack on the Gita has the effect of merely getting sections of it printed in the Reader’s Digest. To what end? It is mere non-creative theorizing. If we could get the West to study the Karma Sutra it would be more to the point. If we could unfreeze the Dutch canal of the average man’s blood up here.… Hullo! My tram.”

Hogarth was always in an ecstasy of apprehension lest he miss the last tram. “No it isn’t,” he said, turning back. “And while I’m on the subject of pins and needles I might ask you to tell me just what you want to do with your life.”

Baird shrugged his shoulders. “I wanted to write once. I was born a yeoman, I think, and pressed too early into the science of arms. You are right about my being merely typical. The whole of my generation believes in nothing beyond the aimless death-activity. We were sold into slavery — action — while we were unformed. Now we don’t belong anywhere, don’t want to have homes and families and roots. We are a sort of Hitler Youth, used to armies, and battles and small adventures. I thought of enlisting in this civil war in China when my time is up. If it’s still on, I mean.”

“Nothing more appropriate,” said Hogarth ironically. “You evade your own civil war in order to stick your nose into someone else’s. Why don’t you commit suicide and have done with it?”

“I have thought of that. More than you imagine.”

“Here comes my tram,” said Hogarth for the tenth time, and launched himself into space like a goose, his neck thrust forward. It was not. He returned rather crestfallen, adjusting his crooked hat brim and dusting ash off his lapels with both hands. “I have an idea,” he said. “To what sort of merit on earth do you attach importance? Are you proud of your medals? Your prowess with women? Would you like to have children? Be a doctor and save people? At what point of your character do you flow out? No. Don’t tell me,” he added hurriedly, catching sight of his Balham tram at last, “I don’t give a hang. I’m trying to get you to draw your own portrait.”

He clutched the rail and boarded the groaning monster. Then, thinking of something more he wanted to say, he turned his huge body round and leaning out, shouted, “Or is it something beyond all these things?” His voice rose as the distance widened. The other passengers standing outside regarded him with concern. “Do you think it is somewhere in the region we call God? Ask yourself? Eh? Just ask yourself.” He was borne gesticulating out of earshot. The look of concern on the faces of the other passengers changed to one of relief. They looked at one another knowingly. It was clear that he was a harmless religious maniac.

It was not unlike editing a very long and very dreary film, thought Baird walking homeward across London. Immense discursive spools of recollection run through at every sitting — the greater part of it irrelevant: mocking in its irrelevance. Still the experience had done him good; he had been able to expand to the full extent in his talk at least. And, as Hogarth said, the major function of analysis seemed to consist of reliving and re-digesting experience. He felt lighter, more buoyant in himself. Only the dream of Böcklin did not vanish.

One Wednesday, Hogarth, who was very interested in painting, took him to a gallery where, among other things, he saw several of Campion’s great raving canvases, and one that he recognized as Alice’s; Hogarth examined the former with great attention and reverence. “The only English painter,” he said. Baird was quite charmed to see Hogarth’s look of awe when he said that he knew Campion. “Another candidate for your clinic,” he said. “No doubt,” said Hogarth softly, “no doubt.” He stood back and admired the powerful landscape which has since become famous — Campion’s Tree Near Arles. “But so long as he can keep spitting it out in pictures he’s all right,” he added. He made no comment on Alice’s picture.

Walking across Oxford Street Baird said: “All English women kiss with their mouths shut. Now if your psychological axiom is true …”

“What axiom?”

“The identification of the mouth with the more intimate organism — then you have a thesis.…”

“What thesis?”

“Well, it explains the abnormal sexual emphasis of the English male in his dress — old school tie, bowler-hats, large pipes — like yours, Hogarth, if I may say so — and amnion-like tobacco-pouches.”

“Young man,” said Hogarth, “it is extremely unkind of you to wing your analyst like that. According to the text-books I must represent God to you — I must be above criticism.”

“Well, I feel neither here nor there as regards God. I let you represent my father, however. If he had given me half the advice you have I’d be a more thawed-out character. Anyway, Hogarth, you’ve made a mess of the analysis by letting me become your friend. I see you in a context now. As a father, for example, you are charming and touching.”

Hogarth suddenly blushed scarlet. Baird was recalling that every Wednesday they had lunch together, after which Hogarth would allow him to keep him company to Balham where he lived with an only son and a middle-aged housekeeper. Together they lunched, and afterwards walked in the park each holding a small grubby hand. Hogarth was at his most endearing when he was with the child; all through the winter they would visit the shabby little park with its nude trees and crisp brown water — its three dejected ducks gabbling at their own reflections. Hogarth’s son was nine and full of enthusiasm for the toy boat his father had made for him. It was a brave little cutter which bore the legend Europa upon its smart white breast. Hogarth himself was fascinated by the technique of sailing, and was hardly less eager than the boy to propose new ways of setting the sail, or a new run across the pond. Baird could see him now, down on one knee at the concrete margin, watching the little ship flutter and heel through the circles of still water under the willow-tree, or turn over on its side and run from one corner to the other of the pond without a fault.

“Father, it’s not set properly.”

“Yes it is: be patient.”

In an ecstasy of apprehension they watch it come into the wind and hang trembling. Hogarth is making ludicrous gestures at the boat, as if trying to coax it towards them. His pipe goes so hard that the dottle gleams red. His trousers are baggy and dusty at the knee. From time to time his son slips an absent hand into his vast pockets in search of boiled sweet to suck. It is a moment of intense excitement, for the little craft has turned over on its side and threatens to sink. Hogarth and the boy squat down and begin to paddle the water with their hands in the hope of creating concentric ripples which will draw it within reach. Hogarth groans. Their attempts are useless it seems. The boy starts to take off his shoes, but his father, fearful of letting him get his feet wet, lumbers into the pond, shoes and all, and skids uncouthly out to where the boat lies, flapping hard. He comes ashore laughing and cursing at the same time. Mrs. Gregory is going to scold him again for his wet feet.

“That’s the third salvage he’s done this month,” says the boy, shaking the water from the flapping canvas of the Europa.

Afterwards, walking home to tea, their noses and fingers burned blue with cold, the father and son wrangle interminably about the boat, the one protesting that the mast is too high and the sail area too large, the other shrilly maintaining that the Europa would be better for a little extra lead on her keel.

Hogarth lives in one of those common-place semi-detached villas. In the cosy little front parlour a big coal fire is blazing and Mrs. Gregory has laid out an excellent tea: muffins fume in butter on the fender. They get out of their wet things and draw up chairs: and the boy, fetching a sigh, says thankfully, “It’s so wonderful. I’m glad I haven’t got a mother, Dad.” Hogarth looks at him indulgently. He is so secure and happy in a habit of male friendship, a male world with its triumphant relations to purpose and adventure. “Women always spoil things,” he says. Presently Mrs. Gregory will come in with her silly talk about unwashed hands and wet socks. Hogarth smiles.

“What do you think, Baird?” he asks.

Hogarth’s own wife, whose picture stands on the mantelpiece, was much younger than he when they married. Her face is smooth and round and innocent in a Germanic way: she was a student of Hogarth’s.

Now he has taken up his spectacles and placed them upon his nose. A radiant contentment shines upon his face. His feet are clad in old battered carpet-slippers, one of which has a convenient hole in the sole; convenient because he enjoys holding to the fire his slippered foot, into which a toasting fork has been cunningly lodged.

At such moments Baird is filled with envy for the elder man as he watches him taking his ease, while on the carpet at their feet the boy strips the Europa and sets the canvas to dry.

On April Fool’s Day Hogarth gave it up. “Baird,” he said, “we’ve reached a point where we are over-elaborating the problem. We are indulging you and pandering to the bloody dream. I’ve got all the factual data I need; you’ve had the whole works. But somewhere I must have made a mess of it, or else you need to keep on dreaming the dream until something happens to you — I mean until you change inside. You know, the dream may be simply a sort of prompting to change inside; it’s possible that it might be necessary to you — until you change. It’s no good following it down the time-track any farther. Anyway, our method is not inclusive enough. Come back in a thousand years when psychology has become an adult science. Meanwhile I’m going to suggest something.”

Baird put out his cigarette and listened attentively.

“Can you get away abroad now?”

“I should think so. On sick leave. Why?”

“To Crete?”

Baird looked surprised and a trifle pained. “It is part of your system to propose long and expensive journeys to your poorer patients?” he said ironically. But Hogarth continued seriously.

“I’m suggesting something that would occur to any intelligent Hottentot. That you should return like a good murderer to the scene of your crime. Dig up Böcklin with your own hands once more. It’s just an idea. I know it sounds shocking. But get him buried in a cemetery or something. Take a responsible line. It’s worth it: you might come to terms with him — who knows? Besides I’m tired of indulging your maimed literary genius. Think it over.”

Baird sat for a moment in silence. They looked at each other. “It’s a curious thing,” he said, “but I was offered a mission about a month ago to do precisely that. To go to Crete and try and find something out for the Intelligence people.”

Hogarth spread his hands out. “Well, there you are. What more do you want? Accept, my dear fellow.”

It was more easily said than done; the idea was rather a startling one, and Baird felt that he needed time to think it over. “And by the way,” said Hogarth, as he was putting on his mackintosh, “let me know when you are off: and don’t forget you are a tenner behind with your payments — the child is going to school soon, you know.”

In the vestibule, Baird met Fearmax. He had called to leave a cheque for Hogarth. From time to time during the last few months when their paths had crossed they had been in the habit of exchanging civilities. Now Fearmax walked down to the corner of the street with Baird. He looked pale and tired. He walked with an eccentric springiness beside the young man, remarking that spring would soon be here, though it was plain to see that his mind was not on the weather. He said that he was going abroad for a short holiday — to Egypt he thought. He hoped the weather would not be too hot. Baird, who knew what Cairo could be like in June and July, said nothing. It was not the best time of the year to visit Egypt, and he wondered whether Hogarth knew of the journey. “Hogarth is a remarkable man,” said Fearmax with vehemence, “a very remarkable man. He has been of considerable use to me — both as a friend and a doctor,” Baird found it curious that Hogarth had never introduced them. “He has attended all my séances this year: I’ve been trying to put him in communication with his dead wife, you know.” This was rather an interesting sidelight on Hogarth. Fearmax shook his head and sighed, watching the shining toecaps of his shoes as they performed their eccentric progress under him.

Baird suggested that the Lebanon or Greece would provide a cooler climate for a rest during the late spring and summer than Egypt, and Fearmax nodded very precisely. “I wish, however,” he said, “to make one or two observations on the pyramids. And I imagined the sea-journey will be refreshing. I am going on … Let me see.” He fumbled in his wallet and produced a green ticket for Baird’s inspection. “A large comfortable summer-cruise boat, the Europa. It is only half-full I’m told.”

It was this piece of information that decided Baird, for want of any other, to ask for a reservation on the Europa before he next visited Hogarth. The civil servant in the dingy office above the roar of Whitehall had been more than accommodating. There were certain independent inquiries that the Foreign Office would like made in Crete. It appeared that a certain quantity of small arms had been shipped across from an organization in Palestine. It had been gathered and hidden in caves — possibly the labyrinth which had been mentioned recently in the Press as having been discovered by Axelos. The Foreign Office would like to know what it meant. It might mean a danger to the monarchy in Greece, which England had determined to maintain. Could Baird undertake such an inquiry and report back as soon as possible?

It sounded to Baird as if the old Abbot John had once more tired of his search for higher truth and was entering politics — for want of a war to interest him and exploit his talents as a man of action. It would not be so unpromising an adventure as he had at first thought. He would go and see; the investigation into the Böcklin business would fit into place neatly enough. He wondered, as he pressed Hogarth’s bell, whether Axelos would remember him after all these years?

He found a note waiting for him. Hogarth was out, but the note suggested a rendezvous in a familiar pub later that evening. Baird spent the rest of his time packing and touring the bookshops for suitable reading material with which to while away the journey. He did not fancy that Fearmax’s conversation would provide sufficient entertainment to justify setting forth bookless.

He was surprised to meet Graecen. He knew his work slightly, and did not like it; but the man was pleasant and friendly, and apparently an old friend of Hogarth. The analyst himself was delighted with the news that Baird was going; he had been kept in touch with developments by phone, and had heard all the details.

“Graecen will introduce you to Axelos,” he said, “who will interest you a great deal. He’s a real character from a film — a German film. No doubt you could stay at Cefalû.”.

Graecen was charitable enough to echo these sentiments. The invitation he had received was explicit enough; and he liked the look of this young Army officer who seemed to be, for a change, moderately well-read and whose manners had not been abbreviated with his weaning. He was also secretly rather glad to have at least one acquaintance on the Europa. The sudden prospect of leaving England — almost in itself a death — perplexed and troubled him. London, which he loathed normally, seemed to him for the few days left, too enchanting a capital to lose. He walked across the Green Park, hat in hand, talking softly to himself, wondering what could be expected of a future which had been so clearly and abruptly circumscribed. It hurt him too that Hogarth’s manner showed no special tenderness or consideration towards himself. Indeed, Hogarth protested firmly that he did hot believe that his old friend was under sentence; when Graecen pressed him and gave him his proofs, Hogarth simply snorted and laughed. “Well, if it’s death, Dickie,” he said. “It’s death. You may steal a march on us, but we’ll catch you up in the end. See if we don’t.”

Another of Graecen’s preoccupations had been with the question of the Cefalû statues. He had managed to get the chemical expert of the Museum to part with small quantities of his reagents without, he thought, arousing his suspicions as to the validity of Axelos’s claims. The new nitrous oxide process promised to tell one, in the case of stone-cutting, not only the approximate age of the stone but also the nature of the instrument used to shape it. With these he hoped to keep a sharp check on his eccentric friend.

His mood, however, as they all drove down to Southampton in his big car, was one of sentimental taciturnity. He was leaving England — perhaps for ever. Baird sat in front with the driver, while in the back Hogarth and his son held an endless discussion as to the capabilities of the car. Graecen saw the hedgerows flowing by with a sharp and useless regret; every turning of the great main road held memories for him — memories of great country houses buried in trees: houses where he had spent so much of his time idling, flirting, and cultivating the fine five senses. There, beyond Winchester, was Bolser, where he had had that miserable love affair with Anne Granchester. What a bitch! How miserable he had been, and how ineffectual. The road bent northward through an immense avenue of dusty oaks. Behind them, hidden from sight, lay the old house. It belonged to the National Trust now. And what had happened to Anne? She, by rights, should also belong to the National Trust, he found himself thinking vindictively. She had become in later years a sort of beauty spot trampled flat by the feet of the worshippers; a sort of Niagara Falls of a woman. Why had she never let him love her? He grimaced and tucked his chin deeper in his coat collar. At any rate she had been good for two not unsatisfactory sonnets. What a life, he thought — or rather what a death. Leopardi could not face it when it finally came. Could he? He held his breath for a second and closed his eyes, imagining what it felt like to surrender his identity. Nothing. He felt nothing, heard nothing save the soft uniform ticking of his own heart. Hogarth was speaking.

“You know, Dickie,” he was saying. “It’s very romantic of you to go off like this into the blue — very romantic.”

Graecen was flattered. It was really, when you considered it. A poet en route for Elysium. It was curious that he had never written a poem about death.

Baird leaned back from his seat beside the driver and suggested lunch at a wayside inn. They all got out in the rain and hurried indoors. It was still cold.

“Ah,” said Hogarth. “How lucky you are to go south.”

“Yes,” said Baird, whose enthusiasm mounted at the thought of the perennial blue skies and temperate winds of the Mediterranean. It was as if a film had lain over everything — the magic of Greece, Egypt, Syria. He felt the premonitory approach of the happiness he had known before the war.

They had an excellent meal before continuing their journey. Graecen, who had rather a tendency to be frugal when it came to ordering food, stood them a lavish lunch. His cigar-case was full too: so that they settled back in the car with the air of millionaires making a pilgrimage to Carlsbad.

“This chap Fearmax,” said Baird suddenly. “What is he?”

Hogarth looked at him for a second, and quietly closed one eye. “I want Dickie to meet him,” he said. “He is the founder of a psychic society — almost a religious brotherhood. Dickie, he will do your horoscope, read your palm, and terrify you.”

Graecen looked rather alarmed. He was very superstitious. “I think you do him an injustice,” said Baird, and Hogarth nodded. He said: “Fearmax is most interesting. He has hold of one end of the magic cord of knowledge. There’s no doubt that he is a very curious fellow, and a suffering one. I hope the blue sky does him good too.”

They cruised down to the dock, where the Europa lay at the great wharf, like a rich banker smoking a cigar. Hogarth’s son was thrilled by her size and the opulence of her lines. It was too late for prolonged conversation, and when Hogarth and son stumbled ashore after an admiring inspection of Graecen’s state-room, there was little to do but to wave to them, and watch them get into the big car. There was no sign of Fearmax. Baird noticed the couple he afterwards came to know as the Trumans standing at the rail waving shyly to an old lady who stood sniffing on the pier.

A thin spring rain was falling once more. The gleaming cobbles stretched away into the middle distance — a long aisle of masts and funnels. Graecen stood for a little while gazing over the side with a sudden sense of hopeless depression. The boat-train was in and a straggle of passengers advanced towards the gangway of the Europa followed by their baggage piled high on trucks.

“I expect we’ll leave tonight,” he said.

“Yes,” said Baird, his heart suddenly leaping at the idea; he settled his neck back against the wet collar of his coat and repeated the words to himself slowly. They would cleave that blank curtain of spring mists, dense with wheeling sea-birds, and broach the gradual blue horizon in which Spain lay hidden, and the Majorcas. He wondered why Graecen should look so downcast.

“I suppose you feel sad, leaving England?” he said lightly; it was merely a conversational politeness. He was not really interested in anything but this feeling of joy which slowly grew inside him at the prospect of leaving it all behind.

“Yes and no,” said Graecen guardedly. He was sad because there was no one who shared his confidence in the matter of his death-sentence. He felt all of a sudden damnably alone; he wondered whether there was a ship’s doctor to whom he could speak openly — to create that sense of dependency without which his happiness could not outface the shadow which lay over him. Baird was pleasant enough — but too self-contained and uncommunicative. He went below to supervise his own unpacking.

It was now that Miss Dombey came down the deck at full tilt, being dragged along by her fox-terrier, which advanced in a series of half-strangled bounds towards the ship’s cat. “John,” she cried in piercing recognition, and would have been carried quite past him had not the lead conveniently caught itself in some obstruction. It was an unexpected displeasure. Miss Dombey was still the red-freckled parson’s daughter he had known so long ago in the country; only she had become more strident, more dishevelled, less attentive to her dress as the urgency of her Mission had increased: the Second Coming, he remembered, had been predicted for the following year. Miss Dombey had been working frantically to advertise its approach in the hope of preparing as many souls as possible for the judgment they would have to face. Her voice sounded more harsh, more emphatic and crackling than ever. She talked like someone with a high temperature. She was going to Egypt to try and prepare the infidel for the expected event. Baird swallowed his displeasure and exchanged a quarter of an hour’s small talk about the village. Miss Dombey had seen his father: she said so with the faintest reproach. He was looking much older and seemed to have fewer interests. Tobin was bedridden, and his wife had been gored by a bull. Miss Tewksbury, the postmistress, had been sentenced to six months for writing poison pen letters to the Vicar’s wife: it was curious — she had always been so fond of the Vicar.

Baird excused himself and went below full of annoyance at the thought that he was going to have her for a travelling companion. Through an open door he caught sight of Fearmax wrestling with a cabin-trunk. So he had arrived after all. His own dispositions were easily made. He had taken the barest necessities for the journey. The two anthologies he put aside for the moment. His little India-paper copy of the Phaedo seemed to be the sort of thing one always took on journeys and never read. Lying in his bunk and idly turning the pages he fell asleep, and when he awoke there was that faint interior stir of excitement, that faint preoccupied stillness of a great ship heading out to sea, that told him they were off. It was true. A strip of dark sea curled between them and the bleak grey cliffs with their small fractured groups of houses shining dun and drab in the late evening light. The Europa moved without a tremor — as if she were moving down rails. A bell rang somewhere, and the fans in the corridors suddenly started to bore out their little furry cones of sound. Then they too fell silent; and from the very heart of his preoccupation he distinguished the small even pulse of the ship’s engines driving them southward.

Baird entered the saloon in dread of Miss Dombey, for he saw that he would sooner or later have to introduce her to Graecen — the innocent Graecen who had done nothing to deserve such an imposition. To his surprise, however, they seemed to get on quite well together. It was perhaps because no sooner had he introduced Miss Dombey than he found she had introduced her own Mission. “Thousands are living in the shadow of death,” she said juicily to Graecen. “And my job is to prepare them for the state of death, to wake them up, to shrive them, if necessary.” This struck something of a chord in Graecen’s heart. He had been pondering on his condition as he unpacked, and these forthright propositions seemed to him to refer almost directly to his own mental and spiritual state. Had he thought enough of death? Had he prepared himself? The idea had seemed repugnant to a poet, a hedonist. Miss Dombey’s vehemence gave him a jolt. It was like meeting a prophet. She clawed her hair off her forehead and gave him a brief outline of what was going to happen when the Second Coming started to be fulfilled. Graecen listened to her with incredulity mixed with a certain not unpleasant fear; it reminded him of his childhood at Rickshaw Hall — the stories of hellfire and brimstone which his mother had told him and which he had believed. Miss Dombey was enchanted by so influential a convert. She pressed upon him no less than five separate tracts, which he promised to study at leisure. Baird looked on curiously at this little scene, wondering whether Graecen’s obvious good nature made him indulgent; but, to his surprise, when Miss Dombey left them, he turned to him and said: “Baird, what an extraordinary woman. Thank you for introducing her.” In some obscure way he felt glad to be in touch with someone actively concerned with death — even if it wasn’t his particular death. The tracts, however, were awful. He tried to read them but gave it up as hopeless. The prose, to begin with, was so bad; one could not be carried away by fairy tales of the Second Coming written in this Praed Street vein. Nevertheless, Graecen clung to Miss Dombey.

As for Fearmax, he was concerned with problems of a different order. He lay for hours in his cabin with his eyes fixed on the ceiling. His door was always open, so that whenever he passed Baird could look in and see him there, hands crossed on his breast, collar open, staring at the paintwork. He did not appear to any meals for the first twenty-four hours and Baird wondered idly if he were having a severe bout of seasickness; yet his door stood open, and whenever Baird passed it he saw him lying there. Led by the promptings no less of curiosity than of courtesy, he at last tapped at the door and put his head in, asking Fearmax in his pleasant way if he could be of any use to him. For a time he did not seem to hear — but at last, with an effort, he turned in the bunk and raised himself on one elbow.

“That’s kind of you,” he said hoarsely. “Very kind. No. I am just resting, that’s all. I do not suffer from sea-sickness. But I hate journeys. Do come in.”

The cabin was heavy with the smell of cigar-smoke. There were several large stoutly-bound books lying beside the bunk, a rosary, and a number of yellow envelopes full of papers. Fearmax looked pale and weary.

“I’ve never been out of England before,” he said. “It’s rather a big adventure for me — like the start of a new chapter; and I am trying to read the omens. They are very strange, very strange.”

Between the wall and the bulkhead lay a bound set of Ephemerides, and a notebook covered with jottings. “Omens?” said Baird. (“Omens?” said Graecen later in a much higher key of superstition, of anxiety, when Fearmax made the same remark.)

“You probably don’t believe in astrology?” said Fearmax. What was one to say? It was on the tip of Baird’s tongue to reply, “Not since the atom bomb was discovered,” but he checked himself. Fearmax went on in his hoarse voice.

“I didn’t myself once, but even if it’s an inexact science I’ve found that it could tell me things: potentialities of my own character, for example: forces inherent in the world around me. At any rate I worked out a progressed chart today in the train for the next few months. It shows some curious things. As far as I can see I am in danger of being lost in one of the tunnels of the Great Pyramid.”

Baird stifled his amusement. There was something oddly impressive about Fearmax. He did not talk like a quack, but like a man who had been genuinely in search of something — some principle of truth or order in the world: and who had failed in his quest. With a bony finger the medium traced out the houses and planets on his chart, talking of conjunctions and trines. The influence of Saturn caused him considerable anxiety it appeared. He had no fear for the journey while he was at sea — the influences are favourable. But somewhere on land, in the company of others, there was to be an accident. The nature of that accident he could not guess as yet — nor whether it would be fatal. He simply knew it would assist him in his discovery of “The Absolute”.

It was an odd word to hear at such a time and place, Baird thought. But then Fearmax, as Hogarth said, was an odd person. To be engaged in a search for The Absolute was, however, a fine medieval conception. He wondered what it could meant