What's Bred in the Bone

What would not Out of the Flesh?

“Everybody agrees that your first year at Oxford was a triumph,” said Basil Buys-Bozzaris.

“That’s very kind of everybody,” said Francis. He was being patronized by the fat slob Buys-Bozzaris and he was beginning to wonder how much longer he would put up with it.

“Now, now; let’s have no false modesty. You have made a nice little name as a speaker in the Union; you have gained a place on the committee of the O.U.D.S.; your sketches of Oxford Notables in the Isis are admitted to be the best things of their kind since Max Beerbohm. You are known as one of the aesthetes, but you are not a posturing fool. You must admit that’s very good.”

“Those are pastimes; I came to Oxford to work.”

“Why?”

“Well, there’s a widely accepted notion that one comes here to learn.”

“To learn what?”

“The foundation for whatever one means to do with one’s life.”

“Which is—?”

“I haven’t really decided.”

“Oh, God be praised! For a few moments I feared you might be one of those earnest Americans with a career before you. Too middle-class! But Roskalns says you told him you meant to be a painter.”

Roskalns? Who was he? Oh yes; that grubby chap who hung about the edges of the O.U.D.S. and was a private coach in modern languages. Had Francis confided in him? Possibly he had said something to somebody else when Roskalns was listening—as Roskalns always seemed to be doing. Francis decided he had had quite enough of Buys-Bozzaris.

“I think I’d better be going,” he said. “Thanks for the tea.”

“Don’t hurry. I’d like to talk a little more. I know some people you might like to meet. You’re fond of cards, I hear.”

“I play a little.”

“For pretty high stakes?”

“Enough to make it interesting.”

“And you win pretty consistently?”

“About enough to come out even.”

“Oh, better than that. Your modesty is charming.”

“I really must go.”

“Of course. But just one moment; I know some people who play regularly—really good players—and I thought you might care to join us. We don’t play for pennies.”

“Are you asking me to join some sort of club?”

“Nothing so formal. And we don’t just play; we talk, as well. I hear you like to talk.”

“What do you talk about?”

“Oh, politics. World affairs. These are lively times.”

“Several people have gone to Spain, to see what they can do there. Even more say they would be in Spain in a moment, if they could see their way clear. Is that the sort of talk?”

“No, that is youthful romanticism. We are much more serious.”

“Perhaps I could look in once or twice?”

“Of course.”

“Tonight?”

“Admirable. Any time after nine.”

A FEW DAYS LATER Francis wrote one of his letters to Colonel Copplestone:

Dear Uncle Jack:

Second year at Oxford is a great improvement. One knows where the things are that one is likely to want and where the people are one is certain not to want. The nice thing about being at Corpus is that it is so small. But that means that only first-year men and a few specials can live in college, so I am in digs, and have secured a very nice set of rooms virtually on the college doorstep. Canterbury House the place is called, because it’s by the Canterbury Gate of Christ Church. I have the top floor; big living room and small bedroom; superb view down Merton Street, which must be the prettiest street in Oxford, and the only drawback is that when Great Tom gets off his 101 peal at 9 P.M. it is almost as if he were in my bedroom. I am thinking of writing to the Dean and suggesting that this ancient custom be discontinued. Do you suppose he would listen?

Have met a few new people. The ground-floor set of rooms here—most expensive, worst view—is occupied by a man called Basil Buys-Bozzaris, which is a name to conjure with, don’t you think? He conjures a bit; a few days ago as I was running up the stairs beside his door he popped his head out and said, “A Virgo; I know him by his tread!” which was arresting enough to make me stop and chat, and he waffled a bit about astrology; rather interestingly, as a matter of fact. I don’t go for astrology by any means, but I have found that sometimes it provides useful broad clues about people. Anyhow, he wanted me to come to tea with him, and yesterday I did.

In the interim I made a few inquiries about BBB. Our landlord was very forthcoming: rich, he said, and a count, and a Bulgarian. He entertains a lot, and whenever he is having people to lunch, he has the same lunch served to himself the day before, wines and all, and then edits it for errors of cooking or choice! This impresses the landlord no end, as well it might.

Somebody else who knew a bit about him said he was an oddity. Probably thirty-five, and is here ostensibly studying international law; I am sure you know what a vague area that can be, if somebody wants to hang around a university. BBB seems to be interested in Conflict of Laws, which is of course an even more tangled briar-patch. My informant says he is one of those hangers-on all universities attract. As for being a count, I don’t know whether Bulgaria has them or has ever had them, but it is a vague title roughly indicative of some distance from the peasant class. So I knew a bit about him before going to tea.

Usual polite questions, to establish the ground. What was I studying? Flattery about some sketches I did last spring for the Isis of Oxford people who are in the eye of the University. Velvety request for my birth date and hour, as he would be delighted to cast my horoscope. I yielded; no reason not to, and I cannot resist horoscopes. And what are you interested in, I said. I am a connoisseur, said he, and this surprised me, because the room was not that of a connoisseur; just the landlord’s perfectly good, dull furniture, and a few photographs framed in silver of Middle-European-looking people—choker collars and fancy whiskers on the men, and the women with an awful lot of hair and that kind of fat that is kindly referred to as “opulence”. Not a good object anywhere, and across one corner an ikon of the Virgin in the most offensively sweet nineteenth-century taste, with a riza in decidedly not sterling silver covering all but the face and hands. BBB smiled, for he must have seen my surprise. Not a connoisseur of art, he said, but of ideas, of attitudes, of politics in the broad sense. Then he talked a bit about the present European situation, about this man Hitler in Germany, about the misery in Spain, all in a distant, removed fashion, as if only ideas and not people were involved. Asked me to come back, to play cards, and I said I would, not because I like him but because I didn’t.

The card-playing, when I went back, was interesting enough to repay me for an evening I would not ordinarily have chosen to spend in such uncomfortable circumstances. Lots to drink and expensive cigars for the grabbing, but the concentration was on two tables of bridge—all the room would comfortably hold. The atmosphere was very serious for a friendly game. BBB was the leader at one and a rather scruffy fellow called Roskalns, who coaches first-year men in Latin and does a variety of languages for others who want them (not employed by the University, an independent coach), took care of the other. The rest of us changed tables from time to time but these two remained where they were. Brisk play, and the stakes were substantially above what is usual here, where anybody who loses a pound in an evening feels he has been living dangerously. I was particularly interested in another man—in his second year at Christ Church—named Fremantle, because he is a Canadian though he has lived a good deal in England.

Fremantle had the real wild gambler’s eye. Life with my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother has taught me quite a bit about cards, and the first rule is—keep calm, don’t want to win, because the cards, or the gods, or whatever rules the table will laugh at you and take your last penny. Only what my mother calls “intelligent, watchful indifference.” will carry you through. If you see that look in somebody’s eye—that hot, craving gleam—you see somebody who has lost himself first, and will probably lose his money so long as he sits at the table. When the time came to settle up at the end of the evening Fremantle was in hock to BBB about twelve quid, and he didn’t look happy about it. I came out exactly seven shillings to the good, which was part luck and part my fourth-generation skill with the pasteboards. Anybody who has played skat with my gran and great-gran knows at least how to shuffle without dropping the cards.

Knows a few other things, too, and I kept my eye open for those. Nothing to be seen except that Roskalns has just the teeniest inclination to deal from the bottom of the deck now and then, though not very injuriously, so far as I could tell. I enjoy a mild flutter, and shall go to BBB’s evening game from time to time, though I can play cards more comfortably in several other places.

Why go, then? You know how inquisitive I am, godfather. Why has BBB one Dutch name as well as his genuine Bulgarian one? Does he float his heavy hospitality on what he makes at the table? Is Charles Fremantle really as hell-bent on ruin as he seems to be? And why, as I was leaving, did BBB give me an envelope that contained a pretty good horoscope which said, among other things, “You are very shrewd at piercing through what is hidden from others”? Sounds like a come-on. I have never found anything in my horoscope that suggested unusual perception—beyond what a caricaturist might have, of course.

Obedient to your advice, I am not writing this on College stationery, as you see. I swiped this paper the other day when I visited the Old Palace to pay my yearly respects to the R.C. chaplain, Monsignor Knollys, as my Aunt Mary-Benedetta strictly charged me to do. The chaplain is a queer bird and rather dismissive to Canadians, whom he merrily terms “colonials”. I’ll colonial him if I get the chance.

Yr. affct. godson,

Frank

TWO DAYS AFTER his evening with Buys-Bozzaris, Frank was working in his sitting-room when the door burst open after a short, loud knock, and a girl burst in.

“You’re Francis Cornish, aren’t you?” said she, and dumped an armful of books on his sofa. “I thought I’d better have a look at you. I’m Ismay Glasson, and we’re sort of cousins.”

Since his visit to Cornwall and Chegwidden House five years ago, Frank had forgotten that he had a cousin named Ismay, but he recalled her now as the terrible older sister of the obnoxious Glasson children, who had assured him that if Ismay had been at home, she would have given him a rough time. He had been rather afraid of girls then, but in the interval had gained greatly in self-possession. He would give her a rough time first.

“Marry come up, m’dirty cousin,” said he; “don’t you usually wait to be asked before you barge into a room?”

“Not usually. ‘Marry come up, m’dirty cousin’—that’s a quotation, isn’t it? You’re not reading Eng.Lit., I hope?”

“Why do you hope that?”

“Because the men who do are usually such dreadful fruits, and I’d hoped you’d be nice.”

“I am nice, but apt to be formal with strangers, as you observe.”

“Oh balls! How about giving me a glass of sherry.”

During his first year, Francis had become thoroughly habituated to the Oxford habit of swimming in sherry. He had also discovered that sherry is not the inoffensive drink innocent people suppose.

“What’ll you have? The pale, or the old walnut brown?”

“Old walnut. If not Eng.Lit., what are you reading?”

“Modern Greats.”

“That’s not so bad. The kids said something about Classics.”

“I considered Classics, but I wanted to expand a bit.”

“Probably you needed it. The kids said you mooned about and talked about King Arthur and said Cornwall was enchanted ground, like a complete ass.”

“If you judge me by the standards of your loathsome and barbarous young relatives, I suppose I was a complete ass.”

“Golly! We’re not precisely hitting it off, are we?”

“If you burst into my room when I am working and insult me, and tuck up your muddy feet on my sofa, what do you expect? You’ve been given a glass of sherry; isn’t that courtesy above and beyond anything you’ve deserved?”

“Come off it! I’m your cousin, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know. Have you any papers of identification? Not that they would say any more than your face. You have the Cornish face.”

“So have you. I’d have known you anywhere. Face like a horse, you mean.”

“I have not said you have a face like a horse. I am too well-bred, and also too mature, for this kind of verbal rough stuff. And if that means to you that I am a complete ass, or even a fruit, so be it. Go and play with your own coarse kind.”

Francis was enjoying himself. At Spook he had learned the technique of bullying girls: bully them first and they may not get to the point of bullying you, which, given a chance, they will certainly do. This girl talked tough, but was not truly self-assured. She was untidily and unbecomingly dressed. Her hair needed more combing than she had given it recently and the soft woman’s academic cap she wore was dusty and messy, as was her gown. Good legs, though the stockings had been worn for too many days without washing. But in her the Cornish face was distinguished and spirited. Like several other girls he had seen in Oxford, she might have been a beauty if she had possessed any firm conception of beauty, and related it to herself, but in her the English notion of neglected womanhood was firmly in command.

“Let’s not fight. This is good sherry. May I have another shot? Tell me about yourself.”

“No, ladies first. You tell me about yourself.”

“I’m in my first year at Lady Margaret Hall. Scholarship in modern languages, so that’s what I’m doing here. You know Charlie Fremantle, don’t you?”

“I think I’ve met him.”

“He says you met at a card game. He lost a lot. You won a lot.”

“I won seven shillings. Does Charlie fancy himself as a card-player?”

“He adores the risk. Says it makes his blood run around. He adores danger.”

“That’s expensive danger. I hope he has a long purse.”

“Longish. Longer than mine, anyhow. I’m poor but deserving. My scholarship is seventy pounds a year. My people, with many a deep-fetched groan, bring it up to two hundred.”

“Not bad. Rhodes Scholars only get three hundred, at present.”

“Oh, but they get lots of additional money for travel and this and that. What have you got?”

“I look after my own money, to some extent.”

“I see. Not going to tell. That’s your Scotch side. I know about you from Charlie, so you can’t hide anything. He says your family is stinking rich, though a bit common. The kids said you were bone mean. Wouldn’t even stand them an ice cream.”

“If they wanted ice cream, they shouldn’t have put an adder in my bed.”

“It was a dead adder.”

“I didn’t know that when I put my foot on it. Why are you at Oxford? Are you a bluestocking?”

“Maybe I am. I’m very bright in the head. I want to get into broadcasting. Or film. If not Oxford, what? The days are gone when girls just came out and went to dances and waited for Prince Charming.”

“So I hear. Well—is there anything I can do for you?”

“Doesn’t look like it, does it?”

“If you have no suggestions, I suppose I could take you to lunch.”

“Oh splendid! I’m hungry.”

“Not today. Tomorrow. That will give you time to smarten up a little. I’ll take you to the O.U.D.S. Ever been there?”

“No. I’d love that. I’ve never been. But why do you say O.U.D.S.? Why don’t you call it OUDS? Everybody does, you know.”

“Yes; I know, but I wasn’t sure you would know. Well—my club, and ladies are admitted at lunch.”

“Isn’t it full of dreadful fruits? People with sickening upper-class names like Reptilian Cork-Nethersole? Isn’t it crammed with fruits?”

“No. About one in four, at the outside. But dreadful fruits, as you so unpleasantly call them, have good food and drink and usually have lovely manners, so no throwing buns or any of that rough stuff you go in for at women’s colleges. Meet me here—downstairs, outside the door marked Buys-Bozzaris—at half past twelve. I like to be punctual. Don’t trouble to wear a hat.”

Francis thought that he had sat on his young cousin enough for the moment.

THE ADVICE ABOUT THE HAT was not simply gratuitous insult. When Ismay found herself lunching in the O.U.D.S. dining-room the following day there were two elegant ladies wearing hats at the President’s table. They were actresses, they were beauties, and the hats they wore were in the Welsh Witch fashion of the moment—great towering, steeple-crowned things with scarves of veiling hanging from the brim to the shoulders. The hats, as much as their professional ease and assurance, separated them irrevocably from the five hatless Oxford girls, of whom Ismay was one, who were dining with male friends. The O.U.D.S. did not admit women as members.

Ismay was not the aggressive brat of the day before. She was reasonably compliant, but Francis saw in her eye the rolling wickedness of a pony, which is pretending to be good when it means to throw you into a ditch.

“The ladies in the hats are Miss Johnson and Miss Gunn. They’re playing in The Wind and the Rain at the New Theatre over the way; next week they go to London. Smart, aren’t they?”

“I suppose so. It’s their job, after all.”

But this indifference was assumed. Ismay was positively school-girlish when, after lunch, a handsome young man stopped by their table and said: “Francis, I’d like to introduce you and your sister to our guests.”

When the introductions and polite compliments to the actresses were over, Francis said, “I should explain that Ismay is not my sister. A cousin.”

“My goodness, you two certainly have the family face,” said Miss Johnson, who seemed to mean it as a compliment.

“Is that chap really the president of the club?” said Ismay, when the grandees had gone.

“Yes, and consequently a tremendous Oxford swell. Jervase Featherstone; everybody agrees he’s headed for a great career. Did you see him last winter in the club production of Peer Gynt? No, of course you didn’t; you weren’t here. The London critics praised him to the skies.”

“He’s wonderfully good-looking.”

“I suppose so. It’ll be part of his job, after all.”

“Sour grapes!”

FRANCIS HAD ACHIEVED in a high degree the Oxford pretence of doing nothing while in fact getting through a great deal of work. He had learned how to study at Colborne, where success was expected, and he had improved on his technique at Spook. At Oxford he more than satisfied his tutor, hung about the O.U.D.S. meddling a little with the decorative side of its productions, contributed occasional caricatures to the Isis, and still had time to spend many hours at the Ashmolean, acquainting himself with its splendid collection of drawings by Old Masters, almost Old Masters, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists whom nobody thought of as masters, but whose work was, to his eye, masterly.

The Ashmolean was not at that time a particularly attractive or well-organized museum. In the university tradition, it existed to serve serious students, and wanted no truck with whorish American ideas of drawing in and interesting the general public. Was it not, after all, one of the oldest museums in the Old World? It took Francis some time during his first year to persuade the museum authorities that he was a serious student of art; having done so, he was able to investigate the museum’s substantial riches without much interference. He wanted to be able to draw well. He was not so vain as to think that he might draw like a master, but it was the masters he wished to follow. So he spent countless hours copying master drawings, analysing master techniques, and to his astonishment surprising within himself ideas and insights and even flashes of emotion that belonged more to the drawings than to himself. He did not trust these whispers from the past until he met Tancred Saraceni.

That came about because Francis was a member, though not a very active one, of the Oxford Union. He would not have joined if he had not been assured in his first year that it was the thing to do. He sometimes attended debates, and on two or three occasions he had even spoken briefly on motions related to art or aesthetics about which he had something to say. Because he knew what he was talking about, when most of the other debaters did not, and because he spoke what he believed to be the truth in plain and uncompromising language, he gained a modest reputation as a wit, which amazed him greatly. He was not interested in politics, which was the great preoccupation of the Union, and his interest in the place was chiefly in its dining-room.

In his second year, however, a House Committee that was looking for something significant to do decided that the lamentable state of the frescoes around the walls of the Union’s library must be remedied. What was to be done? The budding politicians of the membership knew nothing much about painting, though they were sufficiently aware of the necessity to have some sort of taste to decorate their rooms with reproductions of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or—greatly daring—the red horses of Franz Marc. The library frescoes were, they knew, of significance; had they not been done by leaders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood? This was just the kind of thing the Union liked and understood, for they could make a debate of it: should relics of a dead past be brought back to life, or should the Union advance fearlessly into the future, getting the frescoes replaced by artists of undoubted reputation, but equally undoubted fearless modernity?

The first thing, of course, was to find out if the frescoes could be restored at all, and to this end, guided by a couple of dons who knew something about art, the Union House Committee invited the celebrated Tancred Saraceni to examine them.

The great man appeared, and demanded a ladder, from which he examined the frescoes with a flashlight and picked at them with a penknife; descending, he declared himself ready for lunch.

Francis was not a member of the House Committee but he was invited to lunch because he was supposed, from his three or four brief speeches, to know something about art. Did he not do those drawings, almost but not quite caricatures, for Isis? Was he not known to have drawings—“originals”, not reproductions—in his rooms? Just the man to talk to Saraceni. And, when asked, he was eager to meet the man who had the reputation of being the greatest restorer of pictures in the world. Even French museums, so reluctant to look outside their own country for art experts, had called upon Saraceni more than once.

Saraceni was small, very dark, and very neat. He did not look particularly like an artist; the only unusual aspect of his appearance was a pair of discreet side-whiskers that crept down beside his ears and stopped modestly just at the point where they could be described as side-whiskers at all. His customary expression was a smile, which was not mirthful, but ironic. Behind spectacles his brown eyes wandered, not perfectly synchronized, so that he sometimes seemed to be looking in two directions at once. He spoke softly and his English was perfect. Too perfect, for it betrayed him as a foreigner.

“The points to be considered are, first, whether the frescoes can be restored at all, and second, are they worth the cost of restoration?” said the President of the Union, who saw himself as a cabinet minister in embryo, and liked clarifying the obvious. “What is your frank opinion, sir?”

“As works of art, their value is very much a matter of debate,” said Saraceni, the ironical smile working at full force. “If I restore them, or supervise their restoration, they will appear as they were originally seen when the artists took down their scaffolds seventy-five years ago, and in their restored form they will last for two or three hundred years, if they are properly cared for. But of course then they will be paintings by me, or my pupils, painted precisely as Rossetti and Burne-Jones and Morris originally meant them to be, but in greatly superior paint, on properly prepared surfaces, and sealed with substances that will preserve them from damp, and smoke, and the influences that have turned them into almost incomprehensible smudges. In short, I shall do professionally what the original painters did as virtual amateurs. They knew nothing about painting on walls. They were enthusiasts.” He spoke the last word over a tiny giggle.

“But isn’t that what restoration always is?” asked another committee member.

“Oh no; a picture that has suffered damage through war, or accident, may be repaired, re-backed, re-painted where nothing of the original remains, but it is still the work of the master, sympathetically and knowledgeably revived. These pictures are ruins, because they were painted in the wrong way with the wrong kind of paint. Faint ghosts of the original paintings remain, but to bring them to life again would mean re-painting, not restoration.”

“But you could do that?”

“Certainly. You must understand: I make little claim to being an artist in the romantic sense of that mauled and blurred word. I am a fine craftsman—the best at my trade, it is said, in the world. I should rely on what craft could do; I should not call upon the Muse, but on a great deal of chemistry and skill. Not that the Muse might not assert herself, now and then. One never knows.”

“I don’t follow you, sir.”

“Well—it is an aspect of my work I do not talk about very much. But if you work on a painting with all your skill, and sympathy, and love, even if you have to re-invent much of it—as would be the case here—something of what directed the first painter may come to your aid.”

It was at this point that Francis, who had been listening attentively, felt as though he had been given a sharp, quickening tap on the brow with a tiny hammer.

“Do I understand, Signor Saraceni, that the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites might infuse you, from time to time, as you worked?”

“Ah—ah—ah! This is why I do not usually speak of such things. People like you, Mr. Cornish, may interpret them poetically—may speak of something almost like possession. I have had too much experience to speak so boldly. But consider: these men who painted the pictures we are talking about were poets; better poets than painters, except for Burne-Jones, and as you probably know he wrote very well. What was their theme? The pictures illustrate The Quest for the Grail, and that is much more a theme for a poet than a painter. Surely one can evoke the Grail spirit better in words than in images? Am I a heretic to say that each art has its sphere of supremacy, and invades another’s at its deep peril? Painting that is illustrative of a legend is only that legend at second-best. Pictures that tell a story are useless because they are immobile—they have no movement, no nuance or possibility of change, which is the soul of narrative. I suppose it is not unduly fanciful to think that the poets who made asses of themselves with these old, dirty, obliterated pictures might have something to say to somebody who was a masterly painter, even though he might be no poet?”

“You have known that to happen?”

“Oh yes, Mr. Cornish, and there is nothing spooky about it when it happens, I assure you.”

“So we might get these pictures back on our walls as Morris and Rossetti and Burne-Jones would have painted them if they had understood fresco-work?”

“Nobody can say that. Certainly they would be much better pieces of craftsmanship. And such inspiration as the original painters possessed would still be there.”

“Surely that answers all our questions,” said Francis.

“Oh no. Pardon me, there is one question of the uttermost importance that we have not touched on,” said the cabinet-minister-in-embryo. “What would you judge the cost to be?”

“I couldn’t tell you, for I have not thoroughly examined the walls under the pictures, or even measured the extent of wall that is covered,” said Saraceni. “But I am sure you know the story about the American millionaire who asked another American millionaire what it cost him to maintain his yacht? The second American millionaire said, If you have to ask that question, you can’t afford it.”

“You mean it might run up to—say, a thousand?”

“Many thousands. There would be no point in doing it any way but the best way, and the best way always runs into money. When I had done my work you would have some enthusiastic illustrations of the Grail Legend, if that is what you want.”

That effectively concluded the conversation, though there were further courtesies and assurances of mutual esteem. The House Committee was by no means displeased. It had done something, something no previous committee had done in many years. It could make a report on what it had done. So far as the pictures were concerned it really did not care if they were restored or not. The Union was, after all, a great school for budding politicians and civil servants, and this was how politicians and civil servants worked: they consulted experts and ate lunches and worked up a happy sense of behaving with great practicality. But practicality was against spending much money on art.

Francis, however, was in a high state of excitement, and with the full concurrence of the President—who was glad to have Saraceni taken off his hands, once the issue of the pictures had been settled—he invited the little man to dine with him that evening at the Randolph Hotel.

“QUITE CLEARLY, Mr. Cornish, you were the only member of the committee who knew anything about pictures. You also showed keen interest when I spoke of the influence of the original painter on the restorer. Now I must tell you once again that I meant nothing at all mystical by that. I am no spiritualist; the dead do not guide my brush. But consider: in the world of music many composers, when they have completed an opera, rough out the plan of the overture and give it to some trusted, gifted assistant, who writes it so much in the style of the master that experts cannot tell one from t’other. How many passages in Wagner’s later work were written by Peter Cornelius? We know, pretty well, but not because the music reveals it.

“It is the same in painting. Just as so many of the great masters entrusted large portions of their pictures to assistants, or apprentices, who painted draperies, or backgrounds, or even hands so well that we cannot tell where their work begins and leaves off, it is possible today for me—I don’t say for every restorer—to play the assistant to the dead master and paint convincingly in his style. Some of those assistants, you know, painted copies of masterworks for people who wanted them, but the master did not emphasize that when he presented his bill. And today it is very hard to tell some of those copies from originals. Who painted them? The master or an assistant? The experts quarrel about it all the time.

“I am the heir, not to the masters—I am properly modest, you observe—but to those gifted assistants, some of whom went on to become masters themselves. You see, in the great days of what are now so reverently called the Old Masters, art was a trade as well. The great men kept ateliers which were in effect shops, where you could go and buy anything that pleased you. It was the Romanticism of the nineteenth century that raised the painter quite above trade and made him scorn the shop—he became a child of the Muses. A neglected child, very often, for the Muses are not maternal in the commonplace sense. And as the painter was raised above trade, he often felt himself raised above craftsmanship, like those poor wretches who painted the frescoes we were looking at earlier today. They were full up and slopping over with Art, but they hadn’t troubled to master Craft. Result: they couldn’t carry out their ideas to their own satisfaction, and their work has dwindled into some dirty walls. Sad, in a way.”

“You don’t think much of the Pre-Raphaelites.”

“The ones with the best ideas, like Rossetti, could hardly draw, let alone paint. Like D.H. Lawrence, in our own time. He had more ideas than any half-dozen admired modern painters, but he couldn’t draw and he couldn’t paint. Of course, there are fools who say it didn’t matter; the conception was everything. Rubbish! A painting isn’t a botched conception.”

“Is that what’s wrong with modern art, then?”

“What’s wrong with modern art? The best of it is very fine.”

“But so much of it is so puzzling. And some of it’s plain messy.”

“It is the logical outcome of the art of the Renaissance. During those three centuries, to measure roughly, that we call the Renaissance, the mind of civilized man underwent a radical change. A psychologist would say that it changed from extraversion to introversion. The exploration of the outer world was partnered by a new exploration of the inner world, the subjective world. And it was an exploration that could not depend on the old map of religion. It was the exploration that brought forth Hamlet, instead of Gorboduc. Man began to look inside himself for all that was great and also—if he was honest, which most people aren’t—for all that was ignoble, base, evil. If the artist was a man of scope and genius, he found God and all His works within himself, and painted them for the world to recognize and admire.”

“But the moderns don’t paint God and all His works. Sometimes I can’t make out what they are painting.”

“They are painting the inner vision, and working very hard at it when they are honest, which by no means all of them are. But they depend only on themselves, unaided by religion or myth, and of course what most of them find within themselves is revelation only to themselves. And these lonely searches can quickly slide into fakery. Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision, Mr. Cornish. Look at those ruined frescoes we were examining this morning; the people who painted those—Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones—all had the inner vision linked with legend, and they chose to wrap it up in Grail pictures and sloe-eyed, sexy beauties who were half the Mother of God and half Rossetti’s overblown mistresses. But the moderns, having been hit on the head by a horrible world war, and having understood whatever they can of Sigmund Freud, are hell-bent for honesty. They are sick of what they suppose to be God, and they find something in the inner vision that is so personal that to most people it looks like chaos. But it isn’t simply chaos. It’s raw gobbets of the psyche displayed on canvas. Not very pretty and not very communicative, but they have to find their way through that to something that is communicative—though I wonder if it will be pretty.”

“It’s hell for anybody who thinks of being an artist.”

“As you do? Well—you must find your inner vision.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do. But it doesn’t come out in the modern manner.”

“Yes, I understand that. I don’t get on very well with the modern manner, either. But I must warn you: don’t try to fake the modern manner if it isn’t right for you. Find your legend. Find your personal myth. What sort of thing do you do?”

“Might I show you some of my stuff?”

“Certainly, but not now. I must leave first thing in the morning. But I shall be back in Oxford before long. Exeter College wants to consult me about its chapel. I’ll let you know in plenty of time, and I shall keep some time for you. Where shall I send a note?”

“My college is Corpus Christi. I pick up letters there. But before you go, won’t you have another cognac?”

“Certainly not, Mr. Cornish. Some of the masters drank a great deal, but we assistants and apprentices, even three centuries afterward, must keep our hands steady. I won’t have another cognac, and unless you are certain that you are a master, you won’t have one either. We must be the austere ones, we second-class men.”

It was said with the ironic grin, but for Francis, suckled at least in part on the harsh creed of Victoria Cameron, it was like an order.

LATE IN THE AUTUMN, and not long after his meeting with Saraceni, Francis was surprised and not immediately pleased to receive the following letter:

My dear grandson Francis:

I have never written to you at Oxford before this, because I did not feel that I had anything to say to a young man who was deep in advanced studies. As you know, my own education was scant, for I had to make my way in the world very young. Education makes a greater gulf in families even than making a lot of money. What has the uneducated grandfather to say to the educated grandson? But there are one or two languages I hope we still speak in common.

One is the language, which I cannot put a name to, that you and I shared when you were a lad, and used to come on afternoon jaunts with me, making the sun-pictures with my camera. It was a language of the eye, and also I think chiefly a language of light, and it gives me the greatest satisfaction to think that perhaps your turn for painting and your interest in pictures had a beginning, or at least some encouragement, there. You now speak that language as I never did. I am proud of your inclination toward art, and hope it will carry you through a happy life.

Another language is something I won’t call religion, because all through my life I have been a firm Catholic, without truly accepting everything a Catholic ought to believe. So I cannot urge you sincerely to cling to the Faith. But don’t forget it, either. Don’t forget that language, and don’t be one of those handless fellows who believes nothing. There is a fine world unknown to us, and religion is an attempt to explain it. But, unhappily, to reach everybody religion has to be an organization, and a trade for a lot of its priests, and worst of all it has to be reduced to what the largest mass of people will accept and can be expected to understand. That’s heresy, of course. I remember how angry I was when your father demanded that you be raised a Protestant. But that was a while since, and in the meantime I have wondered if the Prots are really any bigger turnip-heads than the R.C.s. As you grow old, religion becomes a lonely business.

The third language we speak in common is money, and it is because of that I am writing to you now. Money is a language I speak better than you do, but you must learn something of the grammar of money, or you cannot manage what your luck has brought you as my grandson. This is much on my mind now, because the doctors tell me that I have not a great way farther to go. Something to do with the heart.

When my will is executed, you will find that I have left you a substantial sum, for your exclusive use, apart from what you will share with my other descendants. The reason I give in my will is that you do not seem to me to be suited by nature to the family business, which is the banking and trust business, and that therefore you must not look for employment or advancement there. This looks almost like cutting you out, but that is not so at all. And this is between us: the money will set you free, I hope, from many anxieties and from a kind of employment that I do not think you would like, but only if you master the grammar of money. Money illiteracy is as restrictive as any other illiteracy. Your brother Arthur promises well as a banker, and in that work he will have opportunities to make money that will not come your way. But you will have another kind of chance. I hope this will suit your purpose.

Do not reply to this letter, for I may not be able to deal with my own letters for very long, and I do not want anyone else to read what you might say. Though if you chose to write a farewell, I should be glad of that.

With affct. good wishes …

James Ignatius McRory

Francis wrote a farewell at once, and did his utmost with it, though he was no more a master of the pen than his grandfather; lacked, indeed, the old man’s self-taught simplicity. But a telegram told him that it came too late.

Was there anything to be done? He wrote to Grand’mère and Aunt Mary-Ben, and he wrote to his mother. He considered going to Father Knollys at the Old Palace and asking for—and paying for—a requiem mass for his grandfather, but in the light of what the letter had said he thought that would be hypocritical and would make the old colonial laugh, if he knew.

Was his feeling of grief hypocritical? It struggled in his heart with a sense of release, and new freedom, a feeling of joy that he could now do with his life what he liked. His grief for the old Scots woodsman quickly turned to elation and gratitude. Hamish was the only one of his family who had ever really looked at him, and considered what he was. The only one of the whole lot, perhaps, who had ever loved the artist in him.

CHRISTMAS WAS DRAWING NEAR, and Francis decided that duty called him back to Canada. After one of those penitential mid-winter sea voyages across the Atlantic he was once again in the up-to-the-minute decor of his mother’s house, and little by little became aware of what his grandfather had meant to the Cornishes and the McRorys, and the O’Gormans. To the bankers a real regard for the old man was greatly tempered by the delightful business of administering his affairs. He seemed more splendid in death than he had ever been in life. Gerald Vincent O’Gorman in particular was loud in his praise for the way the old man had disposed of his estate. There was something for everybody. This was a Christmas indeed!

Gerry O’Gorman was understandably better pleased than was Sir Francis Cornish, for Gerry now succeeded his father-in-law as Chairman of the Board, while Sir Francis remained in his honourable but less powerful place as President. But then Lady Cornish inherited substantially, which was very agreeable to Sir Francis, and took much of the salt out of the tears of his wife. Even Francis’s younger brother, Arthur, who was just twelve, seemed enlarged by Grand-père’s death, for his future in the Cornish Trust, always sure, was now clearer than it had been before, and Arthur, at school, was taking on the air of a young financier, stylish, handsome, well-dressed, and adroit in his dealing with contemporaries and elders.

The stricken ones, of course, were Grand’mère and Mary-Ben, but even they had their benefit from the Senator’s death; had not Reverend Mother Mary-Basil from Montreal, and His Grace the Rev. Michael McRory from his archdiocese in the West, come to Blairlogie for the funeral, and stayed on to visit the two old women, dispensing comfort and good counsel that was none the less sweet for the handsome remembrances the Senator had made of his brother and sister in the great will.

The will! It seemed that they talked of nothing but the will, and the part that Francis played in it, singularized as he was by the largest of all the personal bequests (his mother and Mary-Tess were beneficiaries of a special trust), surprised and puzzled his family. It was Gerry O’Gorman who summed it up briefly and bluntly: you would think Frank could study art on less than the income from a cool million.

Not that he was just to have the income; the old man had left it to him outright. Now, what would Frank know about handling money in that quantity? But Francis remembered what his grandfather had said about learning the grammar of money, and before he took the dismal voyage back to Oxford he had given directions as to what was to be done with his money when it became available, and even Gerry had to admit that he had handled it well.

So Francis returned to Corpus Christi and Canterbury House, and the inner rooms of the Ashmolean, a rich man, in terms of what he was and what responsibilities he had. Rich, and with the prospect of being richer, for his grandfather had made him a participant in that family trust which at the moment carried Grand’mère, and Aunt, and his mother and Mary-Tess, and as these died off his portion would increase. You’re sitting pretty, boy, said Gerry, and Sir Francis, putting it with the dignity of a President, said that his future was assured.

How quick people are to say that someone’s future is assured when they mean only that he has enough money to live on! What young man of twenty-four thinks of his future as assured? In one respect, Francis knew that his future was painfully uncertain.

He had known something of girls at Spook—a little hugging and tugging at parties, though the girls of that time were cautious about what he still thought of as The Limit. He had experienced The Limit in a Toronto brothel with a thick-legged woman who came from a country district—a township—not inappropriately named Dummer, and for a month afterward he had fretted and fussed and examined himself for the marks of syphilis, until a doctor assured him that he was as clean as a whistle. On these slender experiences he was sure he knew a good deal about sex, but of love he had no conception. Now he was in love with his cousin Ismay Glasson, and she was plainly not in love with him.

Perhaps she was in love with Charlie Fremantle. He met them together often, and when he was with her she talked a good deal about Charlie. Charlie found Oxford painfully confining; he wanted to get out into the world and change it for the better, whether the world wanted it or not. He had advanced political ideas. He had read Marx—though not a great deal of him, for Charlie found thick, dense books a clog upon his soaring spirit. He had made a few Marxist speeches at the Union, and was admired by other untrammelled spirits like himself. His Marxism could be summed up as a conviction that whatever was, was wrong, and that the destruction of the existing order was the inevitable preamble to any beginning of the just society; the hope of the future lay with the workers, and all the workers needed was sympathetic leadership by people like himself, who had seen through the hypocrisy, stupidity, and bloody-mindedness of the upper class into which they themselves had been born. In all of this Ismay was his submissive disciple. If anything, she was even more vehement than he against the old (people over thirty) who had made such a mess of affairs. Of course, they dressed their ideas up in language more politically resonant than this, and they had plenty of books—or Ismay had—that supported their emotions, which they called their principles.

Charlie was just twenty-one and Ismay was nineteen. Francis, who was twenty-four, felt middle-aged and dull when he listened to them. His was not a political mind, nor was he quick in argument, but he was convinced that something was wrong with Charlie’s philosophy. Charlie had not spent three years at Carlyle Rural, or he might have thought differently about the aspirations and potentialities of the workers. Charlie’s grandfather had not hacked his way out of the forest and into the seat of a Chairman of the Board with a woodsman’s broadaxe. Educate the workers, said Charlie, and you will see the world changed within three generations. Thinking of Miss McGladdery, Francis was not so sure the workers took readily to education or to any change that went beyond their immediate and obvious betterment. Charlie was a Canadian like himself, but Charlie’s family were Old Money. Francis had seen enough of Old Money at Colborne College to know that hypocrisy, stupidity, and bloody-mindedness were just as natural to that class as Charlie said they were. Francis was cursed with an ability, not great but real, to see both sides of the question. It never occurred to him that three years in age might make a difference in Charlie’s outlook, and certainly it never entered his head that he himself had the temperament of the artist, detesting both high and low, and anxious only to be let alone to get on with his own work. Charlie was the upper class flinging itself into the struggle for justice on behalf of the oppressed; Charlie was Byron, determined to free the Greeks without having any clear notion of what or who the Greeks were; Charlie was a Grail knight of social justice.

Francis cared little what might happen to Charlie, but he grieved and brooded over Ismay. He had a strong intuition that Charlie was a bad influence, and the more he saw of Charlie at Buys-Bozzaris’s gambling sessions the stronger that intuition became. There were now too many regulars at the evening sessions for bridge, and the game had become poker; for poker Charlie had no aptitude at all. Not only was he a rash gambler; he delighted in the role of the rash gambler. He seemed almost to claw his chips toward him; he flung down his cards with an air of defiance; he took stupid risks—and lost. He did not pay, he gave IOUs which Buys-Bozzaris tucked in his waistcoat pocket almost as if he did not notice them. Francis knew quite enough of the grammar of money to know that an IOU is a very dangerous scrap of paper. Worst of all, on the rare occasions when Charlie won, he exulted in an unseemly way, as if by pillaging the Oxonians around him he was vindicating the have-not class. Francis fretted about Charlie, without quite seeing that Charlie was a fool and a gull. For Charlie had something that looked like romantic sweep and dash, and these were qualities that Francis knew he lacked utterly.

He saw a lot of Ismay, for Ismay was drawn by the easy glasses of excellent sherry, the meals at the George, the visits to the cinema and the theatre that Francis could provide, and was eager to provide. Ismay was even willing to let Francis kiss her and paw her (paw was her expression when she was impatient and wanted him to stop) as a reasonable return for the luxuries he commanded. This gave Francis even deeper anxiety; if she allowed him such liberties, what did she permit to Charlie?

He was miserable, as only a worried lover can be, but his love had another and happier aspect. Ismay was willing to pose for drawings, and he did many sketches of her.

When he had completed a particularly good one she said: “Oh, may I have that?”

“It’s not much more than a study. Let me try for a really good one.”

“No, this is terrific. Charlie would love it.”

Charlie did not love it. He was furious and tore it up, and made Ismay cry—she did not often cry—because he said he would not have that oaf Cornish looking at her in the way the sketch made it very clear that he did look at her—as a lover, an adorer.

Ismay, however, rather enjoyed Charlie’s pique, so much more fiery than Francis’s sluggish jealousy, disguised as concern, so stuffy and possessive. So things went further, and when one day Francis worked himself up to the pitch of asking Ismay if he might draw her in the nude, she consented. He was overjoyed, until she said, “But none of the old Artists-and-Models-in-Paris stuff, you understand?” which he thought reflected on his phlegmatic, objective artist’s attitude toward the unclothed figure. He admitted to himself that Ismay had a coarse streak—but that was part of her irresistible allurement. Coarse, like some splendid woman of the Renaissance aristocracy.

So he sketched Ismay in the nude, as she lay on the sofa in his sitting-room on the top floor of Canterbury House, where the light was so good and the coal fire kept the room so warm, and on many subsequent occasions he sketched her in the nude, and though his excellent experience in Mr. Devinney’s embalming parlour enabled him to do it very well, the thought of all those work-worn corpses never entered his head.

One day, when he had finished a good effort, he threw down his pad and pencil and knelt beside her on the sofa, kissing her hands and trying to keep back the tears that rushed to his eyes.

“What is it?”

“You are so beautiful, and I love you so much.”

“Oh Christ,” said Ismay. “I thought it might come to this.”

“To what?”

“To talk about love, you prize ass.”

“But I do love you. Have you no feeling for me at all?”

Ismay leaned toward him, and his face was buried between her breasts. “Yes,” she said. “I love you, Frank—but I’m not in love with you, if you understand.”

This is a nice distinction, dear to some female hearts, which people like Francis can never encompass. But he was happy, for had she not said she loved him? Being in love might follow.

So, when he had agreed to her condition that he must not talk about love, it was decided by Ismay that the afternoons of posing in the nude might continue from time to time. She liked it. It gave her a sense of living fully and richly, and Francis’s adoring eyes warmed her in places where the glow of his generous coal fire could not reach—places that Charlie did not seem to know existed.

WHO TAUGHT YOU TO DRAW? In one of the guest-rooms at Exeter, where he was staying for a few days in the Spring Term, Saraceni was looking over the sketches and finished pictures that Francis had brought him.

“Harry Furniss, I suppose.”

“Extraordinary! Just possible, but—he died—let me see—surely more than ten years ago!”

“But only from a book. How to Draw in Pen and Ink—it was my Bible when I was a boy.”

“Well, you have his vigour, but not his coarse style—his jokey, jolly-good-fellow superficial style.”

“Of course, I’ve done a great deal of copying since those days, as you can see. I copy Old Master drawings, at the Ashmolean every week. I try to capture their manner as well as their matter. As you said you did when you restored pictures.”

“Yes, and you didn’t learn anatomy from Harry Furniss, or from copying.”

“I picked it up in an embalming parlour, as a matter of fact.”

“Mother of God! There is a good deal more in you than meets the eye, Mr. Cornish.”

“I hope so. What meets the eye doesn’t make much impression, I’m afraid.”

“There speaks a man in love. Unhappily in love. In love with this model for these nude studies that you have been trying to palm off on me as some of your Old Master copies.”

Saraceni laid his hand on a group of drawings of Ismay that had cost Francis great pains. He had coated an expensive handmade paper with Chinese white mixed with enough brown bole to give it an ivory tint, and on the sheets thus prepared he had worked up some of his sketches of the nude Ismay, drawing with a silver-point that had cost him a substantial sum, touching up the drawing at last with red chalk.

“I didn’t mean to deceive you.”

“Oh, you didn’t deceive me, Mr. Cornish, though you might deceive a good many people.”

“I mean I wasn’t trying to deceive anybody. Only to work in the genuine Renaissance style.”

“And you have done so. You have imitated the manner admirably. But you haven’t been so careful about the matter. This girl, now: she is a girl of today. Everything about her figure declares it. Slim, tall for a woman, long legs—this is not a woman of the Renaissance. Her feet alone give the show away; neither the big feet of the peasant model nor the deformed feet of a woman of fortune. The Old Masters, you know, when they weren’t copying from the antique, were drawing women of a kind we do not see today. This girl, now—look at her breasts. She will probably never suckle a child, or not for long. But the women of the Renaissance did so, and their painters fancied the great motherly udders; as soon as those women had given up their virginity they seemed to be always giving suck, and by thirty-five they had flat, exhausted bladders hanging to their waists. Their private parts were torn with child-bearing, and I suppose a lot of them had piles for the same reason. Age came early in those days. The flesh that showed such rosy opulence at eighteen had lost its glow, and fat hung on bones far too small to support it well. This girl of yours will be a beauty all her life. This is the beauty you have captured with a tenderness that suggests a lover.

“I am not pretending to be clairvoyant. Looking deep into pictures is my profession. It is simple enough to see that this model is a woman of today, and the attitude of the artist to his sitter is always apparent in the picture. Every picture is several things: what the artist sees, but also what he thinks about what he sees, and because of that, in a certain sense it is a portrait of himself. All those elements are here.

“None of this is to say that this is not good work. But why go to such pains to work in the Renaissance style?”

“It seems to me to be capable of saying so much that can’t be said—or I should say that can’t be said by me—in a contemporary manner.”

“Yes, yes, and to compliment the sitter—I hope she is grateful—and to show that you see her as beyond time and place. You draw pretty well. Drawing is not so lovingly fostered now as it used to be. A modern artist may be a fine draughtsman without depending much on his skill. You love drawing simply for itself.”

“Yes. It sounds extreme, but it’s an obsession with me.”

“More than colour?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t really done much about colour.”

“I could introduce you to that, you know. But I wonder how good a draughtsman you really are. Would you submit to a test?”

“I’d be flattered that you thought it worth your trouble.”

“Taking trouble is much of my profession, also. You have your pad? Draw a straight line from the top of the page to the bottom, will you? And I mean a straight line, done freehand.”

Francis obeyed.

“Now: draw the same line from the bottom to the top, so exactly that the two lines are one.”

This was not so easily done. At one point Francis’s line varied a fraction from the first one.

“Ah, that was not simple, was it? Now draw a line across the page to bisect that line—or I should say those two indistinguishable lines. Yes. Now draw a line through the centre point where those two lines bisect; draw it so that I cannot see a hint of a triangle at the middle point. Yes, that is not bad.”

The next part of the test was the drawing of circles, free-hand, clockwise and anti-clockwise, concentric and in various ways eccentric. Francis managed all of this with credit, but without perfection.

“You should work on this sort of thing,” said Saraceni “You have ability, but you have not refined it to the full extent of your capabilities. This is the foundation of drawing, you must understand. Now, will you try a final test? This is rather more than command of the pencil; it is to test your understanding of mass and space. I shall sit here in this chair, as I have been doing, and you shall draw me as well as you can in five minutes. But you shall draw me as I would look if you were sitting behind me. Ready?”

Francis was wholly unprepared for this, and felt that he made a mess of it. But when Saraceni looked at the result, he laughed.

“If you think you might be interested in my profession, Mr. Cornish—and I assure you it is full of interest—write to me, or come and see me. Here is my card; my permanent address, as you see, is in Rome, though I am not often there; but it would reach me. Come and see me anyhow. I have some things that would interest you.”

“You mean I might become a restorer of old paintings?” said Francis.

“You certainly could do so, after you had worked with me. But I see you do not take that as a compliment; it suggests that your talent is not first-rate. Well, you asked me for an opinion, and you shall have it. Your talent is substantial, but not first-rate.”

“What’s wrong?”

“A lack of a certain important kind of energy. Not enough is coming up from below. There are dozens of respected artists in this country and elsewhere who cannot begin to draw as well as you, and who have certainly not as fine an eye as you, but they have something individual about their work, even when it looks crude and stupid to the uninstructed eye. What they have is what comes from below. Are you a Catholic?”

“Well—partly, I suppose.”

“I might have known. You must either be a Catholic, or not be one. The half-Catholics are not meant to be artists, any more than the half-anything-elses. Good night, Mr. Cornish. Let us meet again.”

“WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE for your birthday?”

“Money, please.”

“But Ismay, money isn’t a present. I want to give you something real.”

“What’s unreal about money?”

“Will you promise to buy something you really want?”

“Frank, what do you expect me to do with it?”

So Francis gave her a cheque for ten pounds. When Charlie came to Buys-Bozzaris’s poker-night two days later with ten pounds to risk, Francis was immediately suspicious.

“Did you give Charlie that ten quid?”

“Yes. He was in a hole.”

“But I meant it for you!”

“Charlie and I believe in property in common.”

“Oh? And what does Charlie share with you?”

“What right have you to ask that?”

“Damn it, Ismay, I love you. I’ve told you so more times than I can count.”

“I think the porter at the Examination Schools loves me; he always looks sheepish when I speak to him. But that doesn’t give him the right to ask me about my private life.”

“Don’t talk like a fool.”

“All right, I won’t. You think I’m sleeping with Charlie, don’t you? If I were—and I don’t say I am—what would it be to you? Aren’t you pushing the cousin thing a bit far?”

“It isn’t the cousin thing.”

“Do you remember what you said, the first time you spoke to me? ‘Marry come up, m’dirty cousin.’ I said I’d trace that, and I have. A chap in Eng.Lit. ran it down for me. It’s from an old play: ‘Marry come up, m’dirty Cousin; he may have such as you by the Dozen.’ Is that what you mean, Frank? Do you think I’m a whore?”

“I never heard that; I just thought it was something you said to pushy people. And you were very pushy and you still are. But not a whore. Certainly not a whore.”

“No; not a whore. But Charlie and I have ideas far beyond yours. You’ve some frightfully backwoods notions, Frank. You must understand: I won’t be questioned and I won’t be uncled by you. If that’s the way you want it, we’re through.”

Apologies. Protestations of lover-like concern for her welfare—which made her laugh. An expensive lunch at the George. An afternoon during which she posed for him again; before they settled to work, Ismay struck a number of whorish poses which tormented him, and made her laugh at his torment. And before she went, he gave her another cheque for ten pounds, because she must have a present for herself, and no, no, no, don’t stake Charlie at poker if you really care for him at all, because it will be his ruin.

What Ismay bought with the cheque Francis never knew, for he dared not ask her, and he knew from his bank statement that the cheque was not cashed. Doubtless she was keeping it until something appeared that she really wanted.

WHAT BASIL BUYS-BOZZARIS WANTED was becoming clear. After the poker sessions he always asked Francis to stay and talk for a while, and as they lived in the same house there was no need for Francis to leave before midnight; they were free of the rule governing all junior members of the University, who must be in their lodgings or their colleges by midnight, or risk expulsion. Roskalns stayed, as well, because he was not a member of the University, and could come and go as he pleased. And what was the drift of the talk?

Francis understood it long before Buys-Bozzaris knew that he did. The count (if he were a count) from Bulgaria (if that were his place of origin) had what he called advanced political ideas, and although these were not so naive as Charlie’s, they tended in Charlie’s direction. It was not difficult to broach such subjects at Oxford at that time, where it was common talk among shoals of undergraduates that the political world was, in the popular expression, “polarized”. Democracy had failed, and its forms of government might be expected to collapse at any time. Everybody with a head on his shoulders was aware, whether he formulated the thought clearly or not, that he was either a fascist or a communist, and if his head was a good head, there was only one choice. Not to take a side was to be an “indifferentist”, and when the show-down came the indifferentists would surely suffer for their foolishness. Buys-Bozzaris knew which way the cat would jump.

Certainly this political cat would not jump toward fascism, which was essentially a bourgeois concept, under the guidance of people like Hitler and Mussolini who wanted to found strong nations—even empires—on the impossible foundations of some version of capitalism. Only a Marxist world, which was to say a world in which the primary doctrines of Marx had been refined and hammered out through trial and error, had any chance of survival. Was it not time for anybody who had his eye on that jumping cat to throw in his lot with the side that would dominate the civilized world, probably in less than ten years? Wasn’t it every intelligent man’s duty to push things along?

Francis could be of help, perhaps of very great help, but until he had made a firm decision, it was not possible for Buys-Bozzaris to say precisely how it was to be done. Francis was, as Buys-Bozzaris knew—oh, yes, he was not so much the simple student of international law as a casual observer might think—a young man with a certain background. He had money; that was easily to be seen, if you knew what money was, and Buys-Bozzaris knew. He had an invaluable possession in his Canadian citizenship and his Canadian passport, because with those credentials he could go almost anywhere without arousing suspicion. Surely Francis knew that Canadian passports were greatly valued in the world of international espionage? The genuine article, capable of surviving any amount of probing, was a gift of the gods. If Francis chose, he could be immensely useful, and in the course of time his usefulness would not go unrewarded. Had Francis any idea what he was talking about?

Francis admitted that he could dimly guess what lay behind such conversation. But it was such a novel idea. He needed time to think. Gee, it had never been put to him quite that way before. (Francis thought “Gee” a good stroke; it was just what somebody like Buys-Bozzaris would expect a Canadian to say, when the heavens of political opportunity were opened to him.) Could they talk further? He had to get it sorted out, and in such matters as this, he was a slow thinker.

Take plenty of time, said Buys-Bozzaris.

FRANCIS DID take plenty of time. He did not want to attract the attention of the Bulgarian count, who seemed to watch all his comings and goings, by doing anything uncommon. So he waited until the Easter vacation to meet Colonel Copplestone and tell him all he knew. Once again they lunched at the Athenaeum. Francis understood that the Colonel thought a crowded room, with lots of noise, the best place for confidences. Two people leaning across a table, talking as quietly as possible, attracted no attention. The Colonel listened to all he had to say.

“Your man is quite well known to the profession,” he said, when Francis had finished. “Not a very serious person. Rather an ass, in fact. Quite a common type; he has no important contact with the people he talks about, and no real influence. But he likes to suggest that he has a lot of power. Of course, he scorns the out-in-the-open student Communist group: he likes subtlety and secrecy and all the allurement of the classy spy. He isn’t one, believe me. Your fellow-Canadian is much more interesting, really. Hot-heads like that can reveal quite a lot by what they do, or try to do, rather than what they know. Keep me posted.”

“I’m sorry not to have been more useful,” said Francis. This was his first attempt to show that he was worthy of the profession, and it was disappointing to find that he had not really uncovered anything.

“Oh, but you have been useful,” said the Colonel. “You’ve corroborated some information, and that’s useful. My job needs an enormous amount of work that isn’t at all dramatic, you know. Don’t be influenced by novels that suggest that extraordinary things are done by some wonderful chap working entirely on his own.”

“Aren’t there any wonderful chaps?”

“There may be. But there are far more who just get on quietly, noticing something here, something there, corroborating something for the fifteenth time.”

“Wasn’t Father wonderful?”

“You should ask him. I can guess what he’d tell you. His best work was understanding and collating things he heard from dozens of chaps who were doing what you’re doing. He was awfully good at putting two and two together.”

“And I’m likely to go on doing this for quite a while?”

“Quite a while, I should say. Yes.”

“I’m not likely to be a permanency, then?”

“Paid, you mean. Oh, my dear fellow, don’t be silly. Chaps with incomes like yours don’t get paid for the kind of thing you’re doing.”

“I see. That seems to be the English way. A while ago I was talking to the chief of the curators of the Ashmolean, asking if there were any chance of my getting an appointment there when I’ve taken my degree. ‘What private income have you?’ he asked, very first thing. Listen, Uncle Jack, suppose BBB were to offer me a job—a job with money—wouldn’t it be a temptation?”

“Not if you’ve got any brains at all. He won’t, you know, but if he did, you should tell me at once. Because you’d never get away with it. You aren’t as much alone, or as unknown, as you might suppose. But why are you fussing about money? You’ve got plenty, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but everybody seems to think I’m to be had cheap. Everybody thinks I’m a money-bags. Haven’t I any value, apart from my money?”

“Of course you have. Would I be talking to you now if you hadn’t? But nobody gets rich in the profession. And nobody who is once in it—even as far in as you are, which isn’t far—ever quite gets out of it. Do you think for a moment that your man has lashings of money from his side, to pass out to people like you? He’s probably being squeezed, and that can be very uncomfortable. Now, you just get on with what you’re doing, and if the time ever comes when we should talk about money, I’ll bring the subject up myself.”

“Very sorry, Uncle Jack.”

“Don’t mention it, Francis. And I mean that in every sense of the words.”

There had been a look in Colonel Copplestone’s eye that surprised and humbled Francis. The benevolent uncle had suddenly turned tough.

IT WAS THE FOURTH WEEK of the Oxford summer term; Trinity Term, as the ancient custom of the University called it. It was Eights Week, when the colleges raced their boats to determine which college should be Head of the River. Francis was taking a leaf out of Colonel Copplestone’s book, and he was having a very important conversation with Ismay in the open air, sitting comfortably on the upper deck of the Corpus barge, amid a din of cheering, as they ate strawberries and cream and watched the sweating oarsmen.

“I had a queer message from my bank a couple of days ago.”

“I never get anything but queer messages from my bank.”

“I’m not surprised if you go on the way you’re going.”

“Meaning what?”

“I think you know very well what. A cheque made out to you and signed by me, for a hundred and fifty pounds.”

Ismay seemed to be chewing a difficult strawberry. “What did they say?”

“Called me in to have a look at it and inquire a little.”

“What did you say?”

“Oh, we just chatted. Banker and client, you know.”

“Frank, you’ve got to understand about this. My bank cashed the cheque and I haven’t got the money.”

“I didn’t suppose you had. Charlie’s got it, hasn’t he?”

“Do we have to talk here?”

“Why not? Just keep your voice down, and if you have anything particularly important to say, whisper it when I’m shouting ‘Well rowed, Corpus!’ I’ll hear you. I have excellent hearing.”

“Oh for God’s sake don’t be so facetious! Do you suppose I’m a forger?”

“Yes. And if you want to know, I’ve suspected it for some time. Do you think I was taken in when you admired my elegant Italic hand suddenly, and wanted me to show you how it was done? You’re one of Nature’s scrawlers, Ismay; if you wanted to learn Italic, it was so you could write like me. Enough to change a cheque, for instance. And why would you want to do that, you little twister?”

“Why did the bank ask you, anyway?”

“The banks all have an agreement with the Proctors that if a junior member of the University cashes a particularly big cheque they will tip the Proctors off. It’s a way of keeping an eye on gambling. I suppose the money went to pay off Charlie’s debts to Buys-Bozzaris?”

“It will. But you’ve got to understand; Charlie was being threatened.”

“By the fat count? Don’t be funny.”

“No, by some other chaps—real thugs. Frank, Buys-Bozzaris is a crook.”

“You amaze me! Crooks on all sides! You make me tremble!”

“Oh, for God’s sake be serious!”

“I am serious. These races stir the blood. Listen to those people shouting, ‘Well rowed, Balliol!’ Doesn’t that excite you?”

“Some terrible toughs came to see Charlie and threatened him. They had all his IOUs that he gave to Buys-Bozzaris. That fat bugger had sold them!”

“Mind your language. This is the barge of the College of Corpus Christi, and we must not disgrace our sacred name. Are you surprised that BBB sold the IOUs? I suppose he needed ready cash and sold them at a discount.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like it!”

“Oh, but you will, Ismay, you will. When you’ve gone a little farther in the forging game, you’ll hear some things that will astonish you. The conversation in prison is most illuminating, I’m told.”

“Be serious, Frank. Please!”

“I can be awfully serious about a hundred and fifty nicker. That’s an underworld expression, by the way; you’ll pick up the lingo soon.”

“What did you tell the bank about the cheque?”

“As they’d cashed it, I didn’t think I needed to say much. They were looking very coy, you know the way bankers do when they think you’re a perfect devil of a fellow.”

“You mean you didn’t tell?”

“And shame my bank? When you had done such a lovely job, neatly transforming that birthday cheque for ten quid? How could they have faced me, if I’d told them it was a forgery?”

“Oh, Frank, you are a darling!”

“A darling or a complete mug, do you mean?”

“Well—it was one of those tight squeezes. I’ll make it up to you, honestly I will.”

“Honestly you will? What could you do honestly, Ismay? Sleep with me, do you suppose?”

“If that’s what you want.”

“You know it’s what I want. But not with a price on it, the price being Charlie’s skin. I don’t think that would have quite the right romantic savour, do you? Though, let’s see: woman sacrifices herself to the lust of her wealthy pursuer, to save the honour of her lover. Rather good, isn’t it? Only I don’t like the casting; either I’m the lover and Charlie is the villain, or it’s no deal. May I get you some more strawberries?”

FRANCIS WAS LOOKING FORWARD to his visit to Buys-Bozzaris. His confusion and ineptitude which had made it impossible to cope with a blow in the face or a kick in the rump at Carlyle Rural was long behind him; he was prepared to be moderately rough with the fat count if that should be necessary. His banker’s blood, which he had not known he possessed, was running hot, and he wanted his money. After dinner at Corpus he made his way the short distance back to Canterbury House, and knocked on the familiar door.

“Cornish? Happy to see you. Let me give you a drink. Am I to suppose that you have made up your mind about joining us in our political work? You can talk freely. Roskalns here is one of us, and this isn’t a poker-night, so nobody else is likely to drop in.”

“I’ve come about those IOUs that Charlie Fremantle gave you.”

“Oh—no need to worry. That’s all over. Charlie has paid, like an honest chap.”

“Come on, Basil. You flogged those notes.”

“Well—same thing, isn’t it? Charlie is clear.”

“No, Charlie bloody well isn’t clear. The money to pay came from a cheque that was forged in my name. I want a hundred and fifty pounds from you.”

“A hundred and fifty—Oh, come, Cornish, Charlie owed me exactly ninety-seven pounds, fourteen and eleven pence, and I haven’t had it yet. I am expecting a visit from the collectors, this evening, as a matter of fact. Did that naughty boy sophisticate a cheque for a hundred and fifty? That wasn’t very honest of him, was it?”

“No, and it wasn’t very honest of you to give those notes to collectors, as you call them, who are shaking Charlie down for a hundred and fifty, out of which you will presumably get your ninety-seven, fourteen and eleven. I want the names of those fellows. I’m going to turn them over to the Proctors.”

“Now, now, Cornish, you’re heated. You wouldn’t do that. There are rules, unwritten rules, among gentlemen about debts of this sort. Not bringing in the Proggins is almost Rule Number One. Of course Rule Number One is, always pay up.”

“But not with my money.”

“What about my money? Why are you talking to me? Talk to Charlie. He’s the naughty boy.”

“I’ll certainly talk to Charlie. But I’m out a hundred and fifty, and I thought you might have been paid already.”

“Not a bean. I’m waiting, as I told you. And I shall have something to say to those collectors. A hundred and fifty pounds for a debt of ninety-seven, fourteen and eleven. It’s outrageous!”

“Yes, and so is selling IOUs. Why didn’t you collect yourself?”

“Oh, Cornish, you’re impossible. One has a certain position. One doesn’t go about with a little greasy book, rapping on doors. Or do they, where you come from?”

“Never mind where I come from.”

This might have become rancorous, if there had not been a tap on the door. If Francis had not been so busy with Buys-Bozzaris, he could have heard shuffling and whispering outside. Roskalns answered, tried to shut the door after he had peeped through a crack, and was flung backward, as two determined men thrust their way in. In Oxford there are several gradations of society: members of the University, in all their diversity, attendants and servants of members of the University, in all their diversity, and people who are not associated with the University, who are also various, but look entirely different from the other two classes. These men were very plainly of class number three.

“Look here, Mr. Booze-Bozzaris, this will never do. Young Fremantle has scarpered.”

“You mean he has gone?”

“What I said. Scarpered.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well then, let me put you straight. We visited him, as per arrangement, and he said, gimme a little time to get the money together, and we said rightyho, but no funny stuff, see? Let’s have it, and in cash. Because we are well aware that there can be dishonesty in these matters of collection, and we didn’t want none of that. So we kept an eye on the place, and he came and went, and came and went, quite normal. It’s one of the colleges he’s in; New College. Whenever we inquires, the porter says he’s in. But those fellows would say anything. When we didn’t see him yesterday we went quiet up to his rooms, and the long and short of it is, he scarpered.”

“You’re telling me you can’t pay me?”

“What do you mean, pay you, Mr. Booze-Bozzaris? We paid you fifty quid on account for those notes, agreeing to make up the rest of the ninety-seven, fourteen and eleven after we’d collected from Fremantle—”

“After you collected a hundred and fifty quid from him, you mean,” said Buys-Bozzaris.

“That’s by the way. We have to have something for our trouble and risk, haven’t we? But now we shall have to ask for that fifty quid back, because we been diddled.”

“But not by me.”

“Never mind who by. Let’s have it.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Now look, Mr. Booze-Bozzaris, we don’t want trouble in any shape nor form, but it’s pay up now or my colleague here may have to do a little persuading.”

The colleague, who said nothing, cleared his throat softly, and flexed his hands, rather like a pianist. For the first time the collector who did the talking spoke to Francis. “You’ll want to leave, sir,” he said; “this is just some private business.”

“Not private from me,” said Francis. “I have some money to recover from Charlie myself.”

“This is getting too complicated altogether,” said the collector. “We got no time to waste. Now just stand perfectly still, Mr. Booze-Bozzaris, and you two other gents keep out of the way, while my colleague makes a search that will be perfectly polite and easy, so long as there is no resistance.”

The colleague moved toward Basil gently but firmly, his hands extended as if he might be going to tickle him. Buys-Bozzaris backed toward a corner, and as he did so his hand went to the pocket of his jacket.

“Oh no you don’t!” said the talking collector. The colleague seized the arm that Buys-Bozzaris jerked upward. The pistol caught in the top of his pocket, went off with a roar that was like a cannon in the room, and Buys-Bozzaris fell to the floor with a scream that was louder still.

“Christ! Shot himself!” said the collector.

“Shot off his goolies!” said the colleague, speaking for the first time. The two rushed to the door, through the small hall and into the street, and were gone.

Gunfire in Oxford is uncommon. The University Statutes strictly forbid it. In a few seconds Mr. Tasnim Khan from the first floor, Mr. Westerby from the second, Mr. Colney-Overend from across the hall, and the landlord were all in the room, shouting contradictory advice. It was Francis who lugged Buys-Bozzaris into a chair, and it became apparent that he had shot himself, not very seriously, in the foot.

Half an hour later the injured man, moaning like a cow in labour, had been taken by Roskalns to the Radcliffe Infirmary in a taxi. Francis had been with the landlord to hunt up the Proctors, and give an account of the affair which said only that two men had visited the Bulgarian, demanded money related apparently to a debt, that nobody had fired a gun at anyone, and the wound was pure accident. The Junior Proctor, who heard it all, raised his eyebrows at the word “pure”, took names, warned Francis not to leave Oxford until the matter had been fully investigated, and called the hospital to say that Buys-Bozzaris was not to be released until he had been questioned.

Francis went to Lady Margaret Hall, where, as it still lacked a quarter of an hour before the closing of the gate, he was able to have a short talk with Ismay.

“Oh yes, Charlie’s scarpered. I knew he would.”

“Where’s he gone?”

“I don’t suppose it matters if you know, because he won’t be back and he won’t be found. He’s gone to Spain to join the Cause.”

“Which of the many possible Causes would that be?”

“The Loyalists, obviously. Thinking as he does.”

“Well—at least your name hasn’t been mentioned. And won’t be, if you have enough sense to keep your mouth shut.”

“Thanks, Frank. You’re sweet.”

“That’s what I’m beginning to be afraid of.”

BEING SWEET might mean being a gull, but there were compensations. Francis was invited by his Aunt Prudence Glasson to spend a fortnight at St. Columb Hall, the Glasson family seat, when the Oxford term ended. He seemed, said Aunt Prudence, to have become a great chum of Ismay’s, and they would be delighted to welcome him, as it was such a long time since he had stayed at nearby Chegwidden. At that time, Francis remembered, the Glassons had not troubled to ask him to visit them, though Aunt Prudence was his father’s sister, and her pestilent younger children had seen a great deal of him and found him mockable. But he had no mind for resentment; the thought of having Ismay under his eye for two weeks, without Charlie and the pleasures of Oxford to distract her, was irresistible.

The horrible children had become more tolerable since last he saw them. The two girls, Isabel and Amabel, were lumpy, fattish schoolgirls, who blushed painfully if he spoke to them and giggled and squirmed when he reminded them of the dead adder in his bed. Their older brother, Roderick, who was seventeen, was at this stage very much a product of Winchester, and seemed to have become a Civil Servant without ever having been a youth; but he was not seen much, as he spent a lot of time winding himself up for a scholarship examination that lay some time in the future. Ismay alone retained any of the wildness he had associated with his Glasson cousins.

She was offhand and dismissive with her mother, and contradicted her father on principle. The older Roderick Glasson, it is true, provoked contradiction; he was of the same political stripe as Uncle Arthur Cornish—that is to say, his Toryism was a cautious echo of an earlier day—and though he never quite sank to saying that he didn’t know what things were coming to, he used the word “nowadays” frequently in a way that showed he expected nothing from a world gone mad, a world that had forgotten the great days before 1914. This extended even to female beauty.

“You should have seen your mother when your father married her,” he said to Francis. “An absolute stunner. There aren’t any women like that now. They’ve broken the mould.”

“If he had seen his mother when his father married her,” said Ismay, “it would have been rather a scandal, wouldn’t it?”

“Ismay, darling, don’t catch Daddy up on everything he says,” said Aunt Prudence, and a familiar wrangle was renewed.

“Well, why can’t people say what they mean, and not simply waffle?”

“You know perfectly well what I meant, but you can’t resist any opportunity to show how clever you’ve become at Oxford.”

“If you didn’t want me to become clever at Oxford, you shouldn’t have nagged me to go for that miserable, inadequate scholarship. I could have stayed at home and studied stupidity. That would have had the advantage of being cheap.”

“As I suppose you are too old to be sent from the table, Ismay, I have no recourse but to leave it myself. Francis, would you like a cigar?”

“We’ve finished anyway, and I wish you wouldn’t take refuge in Christian-martyring, Daddy. It isn’t argument.”

“I do so well remember your mother’s wedding,” said Aunt Prudence, the peacemaker. “But Francis, didn’t you have an older brother? I seem to remember a letter from Switzerland, from your father.”

“There was an older brother, also Francis, but he died.”

It was the memory of that older Francis that softened the opinions of the living Francis about Ismay and her parents. In a world that contained such secrets as the Looner, these disputes seemed trivial. What did Wordsworth call it? The still, sad music of humanity—to chasten and subdue? Something like that. The underlying, deep grief of things. One must try to understand, to overlook sharp edges. Of course he was on Ismay’s side, but certainly not as a combatant. Her parents were dull and tedious, and she was too young, too radiant and full of life, to have learned to be patient. Probably she had never had to be patient about anything. Without knowing it, Francis’s view of family life was much like that of Shakespeare; parents, unless they happened to be stars like King Lear, were minor roles, obstructive, comic, and not to be too much heeded. Only Coriolanus paid attention to his mother, and look what happened to him!

If Shakespeare was not present in his mind, the Grail legend had returned to it in full force. Once again he was on the holy ground of Cornwall, and the pedal-point of his passion for Ismay was the story of Tristan and Iseult, and another more primitive and magical tale.

A passion it certainly was. He was twenty-four years old, so he did not moon and brood like a boy, but he ached for Ismay, and longed to see her happy and pleased with life. He had the lover’s unjustified belief that love begets love. It was impossible that he should love Ismay so much without her loving him by infection. He did not think ill of himself; he did not consider himself deficient, compared with other young men. But faced with the splendour of Ismay he could only hope that she might let him serve her, devote his life to her and whatever she wanted.

Ismay knew all of this, and therefore it was perhaps surprising that she let him persuade her to spend a day with him at Tintagel. She tormented him, of course. Shouldn’t they take Isabel and Amabel, who did not get many outings; they mustn’t be selfish, must they? But it was Francis’s intention, on this occasion, to be wholly selfish.

They had a fine day for their picnic, though as it was Cornwall it was certainly not a dry day. Ismay had never been to Tintagel, and Francis held forth about its history: the castle of the Black Prince, and before that the monastic community that had gathered around the hermitage of St. Juliot, and, far back in the mists, Arthur, that mysterious fifth-century figure who might have been the last preserver of Roman order and Roman culture in a Britain overrun by savage northerners, or—even better—have been the mighty figure of Welsh legend.

“Did he live here?” said Ismay, who seemed to be yielding a little to the nature of the story and the spirit of the place.

“Born here, and strangely begotten here.”

“Why strangely?”

“His mother was a wonderfully beautiful princess, who was wife to the Duke of Cornwall. Her name was Ygraine. A very great Celtic chieftain, Uther Pendragon, saw her and desired her and could not rest until he had possessed her. So he took counsel of the magician, Merlin, and Merlin surrounded this castle with a magical spell, so that when her husband was absent Uther Pendragon was able to come to her in her husband’s guise, and it was here that he begot the marvellous child who grew to be Arthur.”

“Didn’t the Duke ever find out?”

“The Duke had no luck; he was killed and cuckolded the same night, though not by the same man. Arthur was brought up by another knight, Sir Ector, and educated by Merlin.”

“Lucky lad.”

“Yes. Didn’t you ever learn any of this at school? You, a Cornish girl—a Cornish princess.”

“My school thought mythology meant Greeks.”

“Not a patch on the great Northern and Celtic stuff.”

Thus Francis began the casting of a spell that had been long working in his mind, and with such success that Ismay yielded to it, becoming tenderer and more compliant than he had ever known her, until at last on a motor rug in the embrace of what might have been part of the Black Prince’s castle, or one of the hermitages of the companions of St. Juliot, or just possibly a remnant of that castle of Duke Gorlois (who figures ignominiously in legend as cuckolds must) in which Arthur was begotten, he possessed Ismay, and it seemed to him that the world could never have been so splendid, or blessing so perfect, since the days of the great legend.

Ismay was subdued as they made their way back to the Glasson family car (itself almost a vehicle of legend) and walked somewhat uneasily.

“Anything wrong?”

“Not seriously. But there were a few stones under that rug. Frank, do you know the one—

There was a young fellow named Dockery

Who was screwing his girl in a rockery;

Oh what did she wail

As they thumped on the shale?

“This isn’t a fuck—it’s a mockery!”

Francis was so lost in the splendour of the afternoon that he was ready to accept this as the plain-spoken jesting of the age of legend, befitting a Celtic princess.

FRANCIS HAD TAKEN SERIOUSLY Saraceni’s advice that he should stop flirting with colour and find out what it truly was. That meant working in oils, and except for some tentative messing he had never done much with oils, and knew he must make a serious beginning. When he left Cornwall, reluctantly but aware that his fortnight could not be extended, he went to Paris, and during the summer months worked almost every day at La Grande Chaumière, an art school directed at the time by Othon Friesz. He bought the tickets that were sold by the concierge, arrived early and left late, spoiled a substantial amount of canvas, and achieved some dreadful messes of dirty colour until, in time, he was able to put into practice the few precepts Friesz threw to him, almost inaudibly and apparently with contempt.

Always paint fat on lean. Always lay in your warms over your colds. The groundwork should be done in paint well thinned with turpentine: afterward your fat colour, mixed with mastic or Venice turps. Don’t mess your paint about on the palette: fresh paint gives the best quality. Never put more of a colour over the same colour. Always paint warm on cold and after your body coat every successive coat must be thinner until you get to the top. Always fat on lean.

Simplicity itself, like the few notes Mozart wrote on the back of a letter and gave to his pupil Sussmayer to explain how to compose music. But not easy to do. It was Francis’s skill in drawing that saved him from abject failure. There were plenty of students in the atelier who knew nothing of drawing, and from their easels Friesz sometimes turned with a murmured “Quelle horreur!” But Friesz did not turn up often. Having given advice, he allowed the student to struggle until he had mastered it or abandoned the contest. Friesz provided a place to work, an ambience, a name, and infrequent, good advice; it was enough.

After ten weeks of hard work Francis thought he had earned a holiday, and would go to Rome. He would see the sights of Rome, and he would find out if Tancred Saraceni had meant anything more than pleasantry when he said to hunt him up.

Saraceni meant much more than that. He insisted that Francis stay with him, and allow him to display the wonders of the great city. There was more than enough room in his apartment.

The apartment was a marvel of splendid clutter. For thirty years Tancred Saraceni had never been able to deny himself a bargain, or a good piece of painting or furniture, or tapestry, or embroidery, or sculpture, whenever one turned up that he could afford, and in his life such things turned up all the time. It was not a pack-rat’s nest and there was not a thing in it that was not fine of its own kind; everything was disposed with taste and effect, so far as space allowed. But even in the generous space of that apartment there were limitations, and though Saraceni would not have admitted it, the limitations had long ago been exceeded. The effect was overwhelming.

Why overwhelming? Because it was vastly more than the sum of its parts. It was a collection various in kind, but coherent in representing the taste of one avid, brilliant, greatly gifted connoisseur. It was Saraceni swollen to immense proportions. It was a man’s mind, the size of a house.

The apartment itself was part of an old palace that faced what had once been a charming little square with a fountain playing gently in its middle. But that had been in the days before the motor car degraded and despoiled Rome as it has degraded and despoiled so many cities. Now the little square was every day parked full of cars that came and went, leaving their stink on the heavy September air. The little fountain still played, but its basin was full of food wrappers and trash, rarely cleared out. Because the air outside was fouled by cars, Saraceni logically refused to open his windows, and this did nothing to lighten the oppressive feeling of his dwelling. Literally it had an air of an earlier day.

He was alone. A woman came every morning and did such cleaning as he would permit; he dusted all the objects of art, and himself polished whatever needed to be polished. He had been married, yes, to a wonderful English lady who had at last decided that she could no longer bear to live under such circumstances, and they had parted amicably. Tancredo, she had said, you must make a decision—shall it be the collection or me? He had not needed long to decide. My dearest one, he had said, the collection is timeless and you, alas that it should be so, are trapped in time. She had laughed so marvellously that he had almost been tempted to change his mind, but had not done so, in the end. A wonderful woman! They met and had delightful encounters every time he visited England. He had a daughter, also, but she was happily married and lived in Florence, where he saw her from time to time. She could not be tempted back to the apartment, even for a brief visit.

Saraceni was philosophical about the lonely state. He had made his choice. If it was art or human relationships, art unquestionably had the prior call.

He was an admirable host. He took Francis everywhere, and showed him things that even a privileged tourist could not have seen. It may not be said that at the Vatican doors flew open, because they moved gently on oiled hinges, but there were few doors that did not move for Saraceni; there were cardinalical palaces to which the public was not admitted, but where the chamberlain knew Saraceni as a privileged friend of the household. And in many great churches, chapels, and palaces he let it be known, with modesty, that such-and-such a splendid piece had regained its beauty because he had worked on it.

“You keep the Renaissance in repair,” said Francis, meaning it as a joke.

But Saraceni did not take it as a joke. “I do,” said he; “it is a trust that must be taken very seriously. But it is not repair. Call it re-creation. That demands special knowledge and special techniques. But if you want to know what these are, you must come and work with me.” And he looked intently at Francis.

“I must get my degree first. No sense spending two years on it and then chucking it away. I have a third year to go. Then, if you will have me.”

“By then I shall be busy on a long and tricky problem. A private collection that has been allowed to decline fearfully. But I think much of it may be reclaimed. I shall want an assistant. I promise that you could learn a great deal.”

“I have everything to learn. Working in Paris I have found out what a totally incompetent painter I am.”

“No, no, no; you have learned some basic things, and it takes time to make them work for you. All that you tell me about laying fat over lean, and so forth, is excellent, and you were doing it with modern paint. If you come to me you will have to learn to do it with old paint, which is harder in some ways, easier in others.”

“Old paint? Where does it come from?”

“I make it. Make it as the masters made it. They did not buy their paint in tubes, you know. They mixed their own, and much of the work is to discover what they used, and how they mixed it. Did you know that Nicholas Hillyard used ear-wax in those splendid Elizabethan miniatures? What is ear-wax, when you have painstakingly gathered the yield of many ears? I know. Chemistry is the secret. You cannot satisfactorily repair an old picture with a paint that is too much unlike what the painter used. And when you have done that—Ah, well, you shall see what follows, what must follow if restoration is to be that, and not simply cobbler’s work.”

At night they sat in the awesome apartment sipping Scotch whisky, which was Saraceni’s preferred tipple, and as they mellowed, Francis talked about his own taste in art. He was inclined to deplore the fact that, strive as he would, he liked the painting of an earlier day better than that of contemporary artists. What was he to make of himself? How could he hope to be an artist, even of the humblest rank, if he did not live and feel in tune with his own time? When the paintings that haunted him were not modern either in technique or in taste? The Bronzino, for instance …

“Ah, the Bronzino, The so-called Allegory of Love. Who gave it that inexpressive name, I wonder? It is not about love at its highest, but about Luxury—the indulgence of the senses. For all its erotic splendour and evocation of sensual pleasure it is a profoundly moral picture. Those old painters were great moralists, you know, even such a man as Angelo Bronzino, who so many imperceptive critics have called a cold and heartless artist. Surely you have seen the morality behind it?”

“I’ve looked at it literally for hours, and the more I look the less I know what is behind it.”

“Then you must look again. You, who once won a prize for Classics!”

“It isn’t really a classical theme. Venus and Cupid are the principal figures, but not doing anything I can associate with any classical reference I know.”

“You must understand the classics as the Renaissance understood them, which is not the way a boys’ school understands them. You must penetrate the classical world, which is by no means dead, I assure you; classical morality, classical feeling. Venus is tempting her son Cupid to a display of love that is certainly not simply filial. Is not that what many mothers do? Since Freud there has been a great deal of cocktail-hour chatter about the Oedipus complex and the love of a son for his mother, but who ventures on the dangerous theme of the mother’s part in that affair? Come now, Francis, has your mother, whose beauty I have heard you praise, never flirted with you? Never caressed you in a way that was not strictly maternal?”

“She never put her tongue in my mouth or coaxed me to play with her breast, if that is what you are talking about.”

“Well—but the possibility—was there never the possibility? If you had been of the pagan world and hot for pleasure, and not frightened out of your wits by Christianity, might you have recognized the possibility?”

“Maestro, I don’t really follow you.”

“I puzzle over it sometimes. So much talk since Dr. Freud about fathers who rouse erotic feeling in their daughters: never any talk about mothers who do the same with their sons. Does such one-sidedness seem really likely?”

“Where I grew up we had lots of incest. I knew one fellow, the son of a logger who was killed in the forest, and from twelve years of age onward he had to stand and deliver for his mother at least five times a week. When last I heard of him he had two brothers who were probably his sons. He never married; no necessity, I suppose. But that was in what the Renaissance would call very primitive conditions.”

“Don’t be too sure what the Renaissance would call it. But I speak of possibilities, not of completed acts. Possibilities—things that merely float in the air and are never brought to earth—can be extremely influential. It is the artist’s privilege to seize such possibilities and to make pictures of them, and such pictures are among the most powerful we have. What is a picture of the Madonna—and we have seen many of them this week—but a picture of a Mother and her Son.”

“A Holy Mother and the Son of God.”

“In the worlds of myth and art all mothers are holy because that is what we feel in the depths of our hearts. No, not the heart: that is where modern people think they feel. During the Renaissance they would have said, the liver. In the gut, in fact. Worship of the Mother, real or mythical, comes from the gut. Have you never wondered why in so many of those pictures Joseph, the earthly father, looks such a nincompoop? In the very best of them Joseph is not even permitted to enter. That is one of the unspoken foundation stones of our mighty Faith, Francis; the love affair between Mother and Son, and according to the Scriptures no other woman ever challenged her place of supremacy. But in these Madonnas there is nothing overtly erotic. There is in Bronzino; in that picture he cast off the Christian chains and showed truth as he saw it, of love despised and rejected.

“Have you really looked at the picture? You have looked at the artist’s achievement, but have you understood what he is saying? Venus holds an apple in one hand, and an arrow in the other. What does that say: I tempt you, and I have a wound for you. And look at all the secondary figures—the raving figure of Jealousy behind Cupid, speaking so clearly of despair, of love despised and rejected; the little figure of Pleasure who is about to pelt the toying lovers with rose leaves—see at his feet the thorns and those masks of the concealments and cheats of the world, marked with the bitterness of age; and who is that creature behind the laughing Pleasure—a wistful, appealing face, a rich gown that might almost blind us to her lion’s feet, her serpent’s sting, and her hands that offer both a honeycomb and something beastly—that must be the Cheat—Fraude, in Latin—who can so prettily turn love to madness. Who are the old man and the young woman at the top of the picture? They are plainly Time and Truth, who are drawing aside the mantle that shows the world what is involved in such love as this. Time—and his daughter Truth. A very moral picture, is it not?”

“Certainly as you interpret it, and as I have never heard anyone else explain it I cannot quarrel with you. But I’m horrified that Bronzino thought of love in that way.”

“So you might well be. But he didn’t, you know. The picture that has enthralled you in the National Gallery in London was half of a design that was meant to be two tapestries. One tapestry is completed and you can see it in Florence, in the Arazzi Gallery. It is called L’innocentia del Bronzino and it shows Innocence threatened by a dog (for Envy), a lion (for Fury), a wolf (for Greed), and a snake (for Treachery); Innocence is being powerfully protected by Justice, a female figure with a mighty sword, and there again you will see Time with his hourglass and his wings (because he flies, as every parrot knows) and he is taking the cloak from a naked girl, who of course is Truth, his daughter. So really the pictures ought to be called the Allegories of Truth and Luxury, and they are splendid Renaissance sermons. Together they tell us much about life and about love, as it appeared to a Christian mind refreshed by the newly found classicism.”

“Maestro, you remind me very much of my dear old Aunt Mary-Ben. She insisted that pictures were moral lessons, and told stories. But you should have seen the pictures she showed me to prove it.”

“I am quite sure I have seen many of them. Their morality is of their own time, and the stories they tell are sweet and pretty, suited to people who wanted a sweetly pretty, stunted art. But they are in a long tradition quite different from those innumerable landscapes and figure pictures, and abstracts painted by men who did not want to tell anybody anything except what their personal vision discovered in easily accessible things. The tradition that your aunt and I admire, in our different ways, is not to be brushed aside, nor should its works be discussed as though they belonged to the other, purely objective tradition. There is nothing in the least wrong with having something to say, and saying it as best you can, even if you are a painter. The best moderns often do it, you know. One thinks of Picasso. Think about him.”

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to think of Picasso, or of anything but immediate concerns, after Frank had read the letter which was sent on from Corpus and reached him two days before he was to return to England.

Dear Frank:

The news is that I am well and truly up the spout. Two months gone. I had meant to keep this jolly secret from the parents until you were back in England, but that hasn’t been possible. Not that I am all bagged out, and stumbling about in my bare feet like Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but some determined chucking up in the a.m. gave the show away. So there have been great family conferences, and after Daddy had had his prolonged and mournful say, and Mum had wept, the question was: what to do? My suggestion that I go to London and have the little intruder given what-for by a really competent doctor was shouted down. Daddy is a churchwarden and takes it greatly to heart. What they want is a wedding. Keep your hair on. They do not in the least regard you as an old black ram who has tupped their white ewe. (Shakes.) Indeed there were one or two nasty hints that they thought their white ewe might have been a not-unwilling collaborator. No, they think you a highly desirable parti, as they used to say in Mum’s day. When I said that I didn’t know if you would want to marry me they said that blood was thicker than water (messier, too) and we were cousins (which in other circs they might well have thought an objection), and there was a lot more to be said for it than just saving face. The Glassons, as you will have divined, have an awful lot of face and precious little else. So—what about it? Don’t waste time. Think hard and let me know. If my plan is to be taken, it must be done pretty soon.

Love, and all that that implies,

Ismay

After a morning’s reflection Francis sent a telegram:

PROCEED WEDDING PLANS INSTANTER STOP WITH YOU IN A WEEK LOVE TO ALL

FRANK

The eagerness in the telegram was not from the heart. Francis did not want to marry Ismay, or anybody; he discovered that what he really wanted was to be in love, but not tied down to marriage, of which his experience had not been particularly appetizing. Against abortion he had an insuperable Catholic objection, partnered by an equally insuperable Calvinist objection that sprang from his association with Victoria Cameron. How had it happened? Why had he not taken precautions? The answer to that was that he thought precautions unromantic, and with Ismay at Tintagel, everything must be romantic. A standing prick has no conscience; that was a piece of bleak wisdom he had acquired at Colborne College, and that would certainly be the way the Glassons would look at it. The fact that he had not meant it in that spirit at all simply could not be explained and was irrelevant to the situation. What was to be done? He couldn’t for a moment think of leaving Ismay in the lurch, quite apart from the fact that the Glassons and his own parents would probably hunt him down and kill him if he did such a dirty trick. His career, about which he had no firm plans but vast, unmoulded expectations, would be a ruin, for Ismay only fitted into that scene as The Ideal Beloved, not by any means as a wife and mother. He was to be the Grail Knight who ventured forth, returning to his lady only between adventures. But after all thoughts of this sort had been rehearsed again and again, the nagging feeling crept into his consciousness that he was really a very dim young man, considering that he was twenty-six and thought to be clever.

Greeting the Glassons in his new character caused him greater dread than reunion with a pregnant Ismay. He had not then got, nor would he ever get, Dr. Upper fully out of his system, and deep within himself he thought that he had done a dirty thing, and would doubtless be appropriately punished. But when he arrived at the nearest railway station to St. Columb’s Hall the Glasson parents greeted him with more warmth than they had ever shown before, and his most difficult task was to kiss Ismay on the station platform with the proper sort of affection—as accepted wooer rather than as too successful seducer. Nobody said anything about what was in all their minds until after tea, when Roderick Glasson suggested with terrible casualness that he and Francis might take a walk.

All that was said on that walk was said a score of times afterward, the intention becoming clearer every time. It was too bad that things had been a little premature, but Francis must realize that we were living in 1935, and not in the dark ages of Queen Victoria, and with clever management all would be well. The marriage would take place in a little over a fortnight’s time; the banns had already been called once in the parish church. It would be a quiet affair—not more than sixty or seventy people. Then Ismay and Francis would go somewhere on an extended wedding trip, and when they returned in a year or so with a child, who was to be the wiser? Whose business was it, after all, but the family’s?

Francis was aware that this was a path that had already been travelled in the family history, but Roderick Glasson could not have known why it struck so coldly into his heart. It was from Victoria Cameron that he had heard of his parents’ return from such a wedding trip with the Looner. God! Would this child be another such goblin as that? Did he carry that dark inheritance? Reason was against it, but a strain of the mythical in Francis’s thinking put reason firmly in its place. Was the Looner a punishment for something? He dared not contemplate what it might be, for he was sure his parents had never put themselves in such a pickle as he and Ismay had done. Everything about them made it unthinkable. In any case he was unquestionably his father’s truly begotten son; the family face was the clearest evidence. The Looner must have been bad luck of some sort. But what sort?

It was incoherent; it was superstitious; it was irrational, this mass of torturing speculation, but it was unquestionably real. And what did the telegram mean that reached him from Canada?

NEWS TODAY FROM RODERICK WE SEND LOVE AND CONGRATULATIONS CANNOT ATTEND WEDDING WORD TO WISE BE VERY CAREFUL ABOUT ALL MONEY ARRANGEMENTS

FATHER

Money arrangements? He had already had some hint of that. The Glassons, Roderick explained during another walk, were feeling the pinch, as did all landowners. Rents had not kept up with expenditures; taxes were punitive; without heavy investment in equipment agriculture could not survive. New money spent on the estate was imperative if large sales of portions of land that had been part of the Glasson patrimony for generations were to be avoided. Not that sales would bridge the gap for long. Roderick had looked into the future fearlessly, and he saw only one hope for St. Columb Hall and its estates, and that hope was—new money. It was a case of substantial re-financing now or—well, eventual ruin.

Had Francis ever given any thought to agriculture? No, Francis had not. He didn’t think he wanted to be a landowner and farmer.

Roderick laughed, almost musically. No question of that. The estate must go to Roderick, his only son. Not that it was tied down by law, but that was how it had always been. However, young Roderick had set his heart on a career in Whitehall, and certainly he seemed to have a talent that way. Now if—just suppose—Francis and Ismay lived at a very decent dower house on the property, and Roderick and Prudence lived at the Hall until at last they were forced by the inevitable to leave it (manly acceptance of age and death here, almost like the “business” of a none too accomplished actor), it would be possible to totally re-finance the estate, and a family property—Francis was already a cousin and would soon be doubly family—would be revitalized in the best possible way. Francis wouldn’t have to worry about the farm; Roderick knew farming like the palm of his hand, and they had an excellent agent who, with real money strength behind him, would put things in apple-pie order before you knew it. In time, young Roderick would return, and anyway he would always have St. Columb’s behind him. Francis could do whatever he pleased. Paint, if he liked. Mess about with Cornish history and legend, if it suited him. He would be, Roderick thought the phrase was, a sleeping partner. It was not said how the sleeping partner was to benefit, except in terms of moral satisfaction.

Slowly, it sank in. This was why the Glassons were so philosophical about Ismay’s false step, over which they might otherwise be raising the roof. The price of Ismay was—one million Canadian dollars, with accrued interest, because Francis had not been drawing heavily on his income. Of course, they knew all about it; the Cornishes of Chegwidden would have gossiped and probably exaggerated. One million Canadian dollars was rather more than two hundred thousand pounds, which to people like the Glassons was wealth illimitable.

That was where the price began. The larger part would be his thraldom to life in a dower house, under the shadow of St. Columb’s and the shadow of Chegwidden, free to paint and dream about myth if he were fool enough to want to do that. He was to be the money-bags, that was plain. More kids, undoubtedly. But such a fate could be avoided; the Glassons could not trap him there. No; after thinking about it painfully and honestly, Francis recognized that it was the money that really meant most, and he was brought to the shameful conclusion that he wanted Ismay, but he didn’t like her price.

Still, as Grandfather McRory always said, nobody has your money so long as it’s still in your own pocket. Roderick Glasson seemed to think that money would be made over to him in lumps. Francis made it clear that the uttermost he could manage so far ahead as he could see, was four thousand pounds paid quarterly for the first year. This was not true, for not only had he his grandfather’s handsome bequest, but he also received enough from the trust that included his aunts and his mother to make up a good income in itself. But as Francis sat in his bedroom and did reckonings, he was astonished to find how fond of money he was, and how reluctant to let any of it out of his grasp. When he stated his terms to his uncle, Roderick’s face fell, but as he had no way of knowing what Francis really possessed, he had to make the best of it. After all, Francis pointed out, he would have to support Ismay and probably Aunt Prudence somewhere on the Continent for the greater part of a year, and that would be another call on his income. Capital, he explained, was not a thing one ever diminished. Roderick nodded sagely at this, knowing very well that he had himself diminished his capital almost to invisibility, and that this was what had brought him to his present position. But he was optimistic; after the first year things might look very different.

Ismay and Aunt Prudence on the Continent, said Roderick, as it sank in. But where would Francis be? At Oxford, said Francis. He was determined not to sacrifice his degree and he had another year to go. But what did he need with a degree? It would be useless if he were living the life of a country gentleman. Roderick had no degree; he had come out of the Navy to assume the splendours and miseries of St. Columb’s when he inherited it, and had never felt the want of a university training. It was at this point that Ismay joined in the genteel wrangling; she too wanted to complete her studies and receive some sort of university stamp. Francis had thought about that, too. She certainly could not return to Oxford; the colleges did not encourage married undergraduates—indeed objected to them, and understandably so. But she could go to the continent, and pursue her modern-language studies very effectively at Lausanne, and live near by at Montreux; continental universities did not give as much individual concern to their students as did Oxford. Such a stay abroad would dissemble the early arrival of the child, which was also a consideration. He would pay—within reason.

“You’ve got it all planned, haven’t you?” said Ismay to him when her parents were not near. “You’ve got them completely outgeneralled.” She spoke with admiration.

“It’s a short plan,” said he; “but it gives us a year to think about what we intend to do. I don’t want to settle here and become ‘Francis Cornish, whose sensitive landscapes follow in the path of B.W. Leader’.” He was really thinking about the profession, of which he had said nothing to Ismay, and which he was determined not to mention unless it became inescapable. Ismay as the Desired One was being replaced in his heart and mind by Ismay the Promised One, not to say the Inescapable One, and there were some things she must not know. She was worse than a blabber; she was a hinter. It gave her pleasure to rouse curiosity and speculation about dangerous things.

These family deliberations took place in the evenings, after Aunt Prudence and in a lesser degree Uncle Roderick had spent a toilsome day planning the wedding. So much to do! And all to be done on a shoestring—for the Glassons insisted that it would be indefensible, and even perhaps unchancy, to let Francis pay for any part of that. They greatly enjoyed the excitement, protesting that they did not know how they could get through another day like the one just completed.

Two nights before the wedding day Francis and Ismay escaped from the general hubbub, and were walking in a lane at dusk. Overhead the sky was deepening from a colour which reminded Francis of the cloak that Time and Truth deploy so effectively in the Bronzino Allegory.

“You feel trapped, don’t you?” said Ismay.

“Do you?”

“Yes, but my trap is a physical one. The kid. That has to be dealt with before I can do anything else. But you’re not trapped in that way.”

“No, but I have an obligation. Surely you see that? Apart from loving you, and wanting to marry you, of course.”

“Oh Frank, don’t be so stuffy! I hate to think what your upbringing must have been. You’ve still got a chance.”

“How?”

“Scarper, of course.”

“Desert you? Now?”

“It’s been done.”

“Not by me. I’d feel the most terrible shit.”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“Maybe not. But I’d think so.”

“All right, my dear-O-dear. It’s your neck.”

“I’m really surprised you think I might.”

“Don’t ever say I didn’t give you a chance.”

“You’re a tough little nut, Ismay.”

“Not the Celtic princess of your dreams? Maybe I’m more like a Celtic princess of reality than you suppose. From all I’ve heard they could be very tough nuts, too.”

When the wedding day came neighbours arrived from far and wide: county families, the professional bourgeoisie, tenants of St. Columb’s (who had been badgered by the agent into presenting the couple with a mantel clock, engraved in suitably modified feudal terms), such old women as attended all weddings and funerals without distinction of class, and the Bishop of Truro, who did not read the Marriage Service, but gave the blessing afterward. Ismay, tidy for once, and robed in virgin white, looked so lovely that Francis’s heart ached toward her. The Service was read by the local parson, who was from the very lowest shelf of the Low Church cupboard. He stressed the admonition that marriage was not to be taken in hand wantonly, to satisfy men’s carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding, but for the propagation of children. All of this he spat out with such distaste that he alarmed Ismay’s two sisters, Isabel and Amabel, present in white dresses to signify virginity in its rawest and meatiest guise, and caused the Glassons and Francis to wonder if the good man smelt a rat. But it was soon over; “The Voice That Breathed o’er Eden” was sung, the Bishop said his say, and Francis and Ismay had been licensed to go to bed in future without shame.

The wedding had not bothered Francis unduly, but the wedding breakfast was a different matter. At this affair, which was held on the lawn at St. Columb’s because it was a fineish day, Roderick Glasson the Younger took charge, and conducted the affair in the manner of a Best Man who was aimed at Whitehall, and wanted everything to be done with precision, and with only such enthusiasm as was compatible with his ideal of elegance—which kept enthusiasm well in check.

Roderick gave a good impression of what he would be like at forty-five. He read, like one communicating a knotty minute to a Civil Service superior, some telegrams of congratulation, most of which were from Canada and one or two from Oxford friends which had to be read with restraint. The Bride was toasted by Uncle Arthur Cornish, who described her in terms that made Ismay giggle unsuitably and chilled Francis, who detected in it allusions to his money, and satisfaction that it was not going out of the family. Francis replied, briefly, and made insincere protestations of humility and gratitude toward the Bride’s parents, who liked that part of his speech very much, but thought it could have been even more forcibly put. As he spoke, Francis had to overcome whispering among the guests who had not met him, and hissed, “An American? Nobody told me he was an American.” “Not American—Canadian.” “Well, what’s the difference?” “They’re touchier, that’s what.” “They say he’s very wealthy.” “Oh, so that’s it.” Then the Best Man toasted the bridesmaids, and was arch about the fact that, as they were his little sisters, he could not say too much in their favour, but he had hopes that they would improve. The bridesmaids took this with scarlet faces and occasional murmurs of Oh, I say, Roddy, pack it in, can’t you? Roderick told about the time he and his sisters had put a dead adder in the groom’s bed, and an indecency had to be frowned down when Old George Trethewey, a cousin but not a favourite, shouted drunkenly that they’d put something a damned sight better in his bed now. And finally the tenant who farmed the biggest of St. Columb’s farms toasted The Happy Couple, and was somewhat indiscreet in hinting that the coming of new blood (he did not say new money) into the family promised well for the future of agriculture at St. Columb’s. But at last it was over, the wedding cake had been deflowered and distributed, every hand had been shaken; the Bride had flung her bouquet from the front door with such force that it took her sister Amabel full in the face, and the couple sped away in a hired car toward Truro, where they were to catch a train.

In Lausanne there was no difficulty about having Ismay entered as a student, with credit for the year she had already completed at Oxford. In Montreux it was not hard to find a pension with a living room and a bedroom, the latter containing a couch on which she or Aunt Prudence could sleep when they occupied the place together. But it all meant laying out money in sums small and large, and Francis, who had never had experience of this sort of slow bleeding, undertaken in a cause which was not nearest his heart, suffered an early bout of the outraged parsimony which was to visit him so often in later life. Stinginess does nothing to improve the looks, and Ismay commented that he was becoming hatchet-faced.

His life with Ismay was agreeable, but it had none of the old lustre. She was more beautiful than ever, and the carelessness with which she had always dressed now seemed a fine disdain for trivialities. Only a very sharp eye would have discerned that she was pregnant, but when she was naked she had a new opulence, and Francis drew her as often as was possible. A really beautiful woman should have a figure like a ’cello, he said, running his hand appreciatively over her swelling belly. But though he loved her, he had ceased to worship her, and sometimes they snapped at one another, because Ismay’s broad speech, which he had once thought so delightful, grated on his nerves now.

“Well, if you didn’t like the way I talk, you shouldn’t have knocked me up.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use vulgar expressions like that, as if we were that sort of person. If you want to talk dirty, talk dirty, but for God’s sake don’t talk common.”

Irritatingly, Ismay would respond to this sort of thing by singing Ophelia’s song, quietly and reflectively, in a Cockney accent:

B’Jeez and by Saint Charity,

Alack and fie for shame!

Young men will do’t, if they come to’t;

By cock, they are to blame.

Quoth she, before you tumbled me,

You promised me to wed,

So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun,

An thou hadst not come to my bed.

“That should be all right,” she murmured, apparently to the walls. “Shakespeare. Good old Shakers, the darling of the OUDS. Nothing common about him. You can’t get classier than Shakers.”

Francis could not linger in Montreux. He had to return to Oxford, and he did so with no time to spare before the beginning of the Michaelmas Term. He had made a mess of things with Ismay, he told himself. Not that he was sorry to have married her, but that should have come later. Now he had to leave her when surely she needed him with her—though she had been calm enough when he went. After all, Aunt Prudence was going to her in a few weeks. He knew nothing about the matter, but he had a vague impression that a pregnant woman needed her husband close by, to run out and get her pickles and ice cream if she should have a sick fancy for them in the middle of the night, and to gloat romantically over the new life that was gathering within her. The doctor in Montreux had taken it philosophically when he explained that he must return to England, and assured him that everything would be quite all right. Well—it had to be all right. He was determined to get his degree, and get the best class he could manage. This sudden bump in the road should not rob him of that. So he settled to work, and worked very hard, almost entirely giving up drawing and painting, and refusing a tempting offer to assist a distinguished designer in preparing a garden performance of The Tempest for the OUDS.

He was able to spend Christmas with Ismay, and found her, now obviously pregnant, and even more obviously a European student, accustomed to speak French more often than English, and deep in Spanish studies. She had enjoyed herself, once she had persuaded her mother to return to England and stop fussing over her. This sort of student life suited her as the formality of Oxford had never done. They spent, on the whole, a very amicable Christmas holiday, much of it in Ismay’s living-room, smoking countless stinking French cigarettes and pursuing their university work. They conversed entirely in French and Ismay liked his lingering French-Canadian accent. It was “of the people” she said and she approved of anything that was of the people.

He was with her in February, when the child was born. Pensions are not accommodated to childbirth, and Ismay was in a small private hospital, which cost a lot of money. Aunt Prudence was there, too, and she and Francis had an uneasy time of it in the pension rooms. Francis hauled the couch out of the bedroom into the sitting-room for himself, and Aunt Prudence, though well aware that the bed was due to her sex and seniority, nevertheless accused herself daily of being a nuisance.

The child was born without incident, but surrounded by the usual grandmotherly and fatherly anxiety. Indeed, Francis was nervously wretched until he had seen the little girl and been assured by the doctor that she was perfect in every way. Had he expected anything else? Francis did not say what he had feared.

“She’s the absolute image of her father,” said Aunt Prudence, smiling at Francis.

“Yes, she’s the image of her father,” Ismay agreed, smiling at no one.

To Francis the child looked like every baby he had ever seen, but he did not say so.

The question of a name for the child arose almost at once. Francis had no ideas, but Ismay was perhaps more maternal than she liked to admit. The child was sucking at her breast when she made a suggestion.

“Let’s call her Charlotte.”

“All right. But why?”

“After her father.”

Francis looked blank.

“Frank, I’ve been trying to get around to this for quite a while, but the time never seemed just right. But this is it. You know, of course, that this is Charlie’s child?”

Francis still looked blank.

“Well, it is. I know for a certainty. We were very close before he scarpered.”

“And you sucked me in to give cover for Charlie’s child?”

“I suppose I did. But don’t think I liked doing it. You’re a dear, and you’ve behaved beautifully. But there’s a basic difference between you and Charlie: he’s the kind that makes things happen, and you’re the kind things happen to, and for me there’s no question of choice. Don’t forget that before the wedding I gave you a chance to get away, and you decided not to take it. This is Charlie’s child.”

“Does Charlie know?”

“I don’t suppose he knows or cares. I’ve had some indirect news of him, and you know how things are hotting up in Spain, so I suppose that if he did know he couldn’t do anything about it. He’s got bigger fish to fry.”

“Ismay, this puts the lid on it.”

“I didn’t expect you to be pleased, and I honestly meant to say something earlier, but you see how it is. I wanted to be square with you, and now I have.”

“Oh, so that’s what you’ve been, is it? Square? Ismay, I’d hate to be near when you were being crooked.”

BACK TO OXFORD, miserable and beaten so far as his marriage was concerned, but with a compensating fierce ambition to distinguish himself in his Final Schools, which he faced in June. It is impossible to prepare for Final Schools by extreme exertions during the last ten weeks; preparation should have been well begun two years before. That was when Francis had started to work, and thus his last ten weeks was free for finishing touches, rather than the acquirement of basic knowledge. His tutor was pleased with him—or as pleased as a tutor ever admits to being—and polished him up to a fine gloss. The consequence was that when he had written his papers and waited out the obligatory period during which they were read and marked, he had the satisfaction of seeing his name posted in the First Class. He telegraphed to Canada, and the next day received an answer: “Congratulations. Love to Ismay and Charlotte.” Did his parents, then, see them as a happy trio, a Holy Family, with Baby Bunting prettily innocent of Daddy’s distinction?

Ismay and the child were at St. Columb’s; Aunt Prudence had insisted that a summer in the country, with country food and air, was just what Ismay and Baby needed. It was to St. Columb’s, therefore, that Francis sent his second telegram about his academic success. He was surprised to receive a telephone call on the following day. The telephone was not a favourite agent of the Glassons, nor was Oxford, with its great population of students and its paucity of telephones, an easy place with which to communicate. But Uncle Roderick called, and Francis was found by the Porter of Corpus, and there, in the Porter’s lodge, while one undergraduate bought a stamp and another inquired about the whereabouts of his bicycle, he heard his uncle, distant and mouse-like of voice, saying that Ismay was not at St. Columb’s but had said she was going up to Oxford for a couple of days to see Francis. That had been a week ago. Was she not with him?

It was on the following day that he received a letter from Lausanne:

Dear Frank:

It’s no good pretending something will work when it obviously won’t. By the time this reaches you I shall be in Spain. I know where Charlie is, and I’m joining him. Don’t try to find me, because you won’t. But don’t worry. I shall be all right, or if I’m not I shall be all wrong in a cause I think is more important than any personal considerations. You are the best of chaps, I know, and won’t let Little Charlie down, and of course when I get back (and if I do) I’ll take on again. Sorry about the money. But really you love that stuff too much for your own good. Love,

Ismay

The money, he discovered, was what he had deposited in an account for her use. She had cleared it out.

Scarpered!

“I WANT TO BEAT UP a woman with my fists. Are you interested, and if so what would your price be?”

Francis had put his question to at least eight prostitutes on Piccadilly, and had had eight refusals, ranging from amusement to affront. Obviously he was in the wrong district. These girls, most of them fragile and pretty, were high-priced tarts, not hungry enough to consider his proposal. He found his way into Soho, and on the fourth try had better luck.

She was fortyish, with badly dyed hair and a gown trimmed with imitation fur. On the stout side, and underneath a heavy paint job her face was stupid but kindly.

“Well—I don’t know what to say. I’ve had gentlemen who had special tastes, of course. But usually it’s them that wants to be beaten up. A few slaps, you know, and some rough talk. But I don’t know. With your fists, was it you said?”

“Yes. Fists.”

“I’d have to think it over. Talk it over with my friend, really. Have you got a moment?”

From the depths of her bosom she pulled out a crucifix which, when she put it in her lips, proved to be a little whistle, on a chain. She gave a discreet double tweet. Very soon a small, dark man, quietly dressed and wearing a statesman’s black Homburg, appeared, and the woman whispered to him.

“How rough would this be?” asked the man.

“Hard to say, till I got into it.”

“Well—it could come very dear. Broken teeth, now. Bruising. That could put her out of business for a fortnight. No; I don’t think we could look at it, not at any price that would make sense.”

“Would one good punch be any help?” said the woman, who seemed to have a pitying heart. “One good punch at, say, ten quid?”

“Twenty,” said the man, hastily.

They went to the woman’s flat, which was near by.

“You understand I’ve got to stick around,” said the man. “This isn’t your ordinary call. You might get carried away, and not in control of yourself. I’ve got to stick around, for both your sakes.”

The woman was undressing, with rapid professional skill.

“No need for that,” said Francis.

“Oh, I think she’d better,” said the man. “In fact, I’d say she’d rather, seeing as you’re paying. Professional, you understand. Her birthday suit is her working clothes, isn’t it?”

“Okay. Ready when you are,” said the woman, now naked and bracing herself on stout legs. She had, Francis saw with an embalmer’s eye, an appendicitis scar of the old-fashioned kind that looks rather like a beetle with outspread legs.

Francis raised his fist, and to summon anger he thought hard of Ismay at her most defiant, her most derisive, her most sluttish. But it would not come. It was the Looner who dominated his feeling, not as an image, but as an influence, and he could not strike. He sat down suddenly on the bed, and to his deep shame burst into sobs.

“Oh, the poor love,” said the woman. “Can’t you, darling?” She pushed a box of tissue handkerchiefs toward him. “Don’t feel it so. There’s lots that can’t, the other way, you know. They’ve very good reasons, too.”

“He needs a drink,” said the man.

“No, I think he needs a cup of tea,” said the woman. “Just put on the electric, will you, Jimsie? There, there, now. You tell me about it.” She sat beside Francis and drew his head down on her large scented breast. “What did she do to you, eh? She must have done something. What was it? Come on, tell me.”

So Francis found himself sitting on the bed with the woman, who had pulled a silk peignoir trimmed with rather worn marabou about her, and her ponce, or her bully, or whatever the term might be for Jimsie, sipping hot, strong tea, giving a shortened, edited version of what Ismay had done. The woman made comforting noises, but it was Jimsie who spoke.

“Don’t take me up wrong,” he said, “but it certainly looks as if she done the dirty on you. But why? That’s the way we have to look at it. There’s always a reason, and it may not be one you’d ever think of. Why, would you say?”

“Because she loves another man,” said Francis.

“O Gawd; sod love!” said Jimsie. “You never know where you are with it. A great cause of trouble.” And as he went on to anatomize love, as it appeared to him both as a man and as a professional dealer in sexual satisfaction, it seemed to Francis that he heard the voice of Tancred Saraceni, explaining the Bronzino Allegory. The face that was clearest in the picture, as he thought of it, was the woman-headed beast with a lion’s claws and a dragon’s tail, who proffered the sweet and the bitter in her outstretched hands. The figure called the Cheat, or in Saraceni’s Latin explication, Fraude. He must have whispered the name.

“Fraudy? I should think it was fraudy, and rotten, too, walking out on you and the baby,” said the woman.

When at last Francis was fit to go, he offered the woman two tenpound notes.

“Oh, no dear,” said she; “I couldn’t think of it. You never had your punch, you see. Not that I’d have blamed you if you’d really socked me.”

“No, that wasn’t the agreement,” said the man, taking the notes himself, swiftly but delicately. “You’ve got to consider time spent, and an agreement entered into even if not carried out. But I’ll say this, sir. This night does you credit. You’ve behaved like a gentleman.”

“Oh, sod being a gentleman,” said Francis, then regretted it, and shook hands with them both before running down the stairs into the Soho street.

THE PREMISES of Sir Geoffrey Duveen and Company were elegant and awesome; Francis would never have presumed to enter on his own volition, but it was here that Colonel Copplestone had said he was to meet him, and the wording of the message had suggested without actually saying so that it was a matter of importance. Something of importance was just what Francis needed. He had never felt so insignificant, so diminished, so exploited in his life since the days at Carlyle Rural. He was smartly dressed and punctual as he presented himself in the great London centre of art dealing and art exportation. The Colonel was in a small panelled room in which hung three pictures that made Francis’s eyes pop. This was the sort of thing that very rich collectors could afford, and that they looked to the Duveen Company to supply.

“But you have your degree. First Class honours; I saw it in The Times. Just remind me of what that degree implies.”

The Colonel seemed inclined to brush aside Francis’s story of his marriage and its outcome as something of secondary importance. How callous these old fellows were!

“Well, it’s called Modern Greats, but the formal name is Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. I concentrated on philosophy, and having a Classics degree already I had a certain advantage over the men who worked with translations; you begin at Descartes, but it’s very useful to know what came before. And modern languages: mine were French and German. The politics is pretty much British constitutional stuff. I did as little economics as I could. Not my thing: I prefer my astrology without water.”

“Aha. Well, you didn’t waste your time at Oxford,” said the Colonel. “Don’t let the other thing bother you too much. Painful, of course, but I can offer you something that will make you forget it—or almost forget it.”

“In the profession?”

“Yes. Not bang in the middle of the profession, of course. That’s for quite a different sort of chap. But something you can do very well, I should think. Better than anyone else available at the moment, certainly. I want you to work with Tancred Saraceni.”

“Is he—?”

“Most certainly not. And you must never let him think you are, or you’ll be in the soup. No; Saraceni is in a queer game of his own, which interests us at the moment, and could be important. By the way, quite a few people who believe in that sort of thing say he has the Evil Eye. I don’t completely dismiss that, so watch your step. You told me he had suggested that you might like to work with him? Learn his special trade, or craft, or whatever he calls it?”

“Yes, but I’m not really sure that’s what I want. I want to be a painter, not a craftsman who tarts up paintings that have been allowed to decay.”

“Yes, but what the profession wants is that somebody should be with Saraceni on the job he’s undertaking now. Do you know anything about the Düsterstein collection?”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s not well known, though these people here at Duveen’s know about it, of course. It’s their business to know such things. It’s a lot of Renaissance and post-Renaissance and Counter-Reformation pictures—not all of them the best, I believe, but still remarkable—that are housed in Schloss Düsterstein in Lower Bavaria, about seventy miles from Munich. The owner is the Gräfin von Ingelheim, and she is interested in having her pictures put in A-1 condition, with a view to sale. Not a vulgar sell-out, you understand; not an ‘Everything Must Be Sold To The Walls By The End Of The Month’ thing. No, a gradual, very high-class unloading that should bring in a great deal of money. We want to know where the pictures are going. She’s persuaded Saraceni to do the work of getting the stuff ready, rather on the quiet, without actually being secret. Saraceni needs an assistant, and we would like the assistant to be a member of the profession. And that’s you, my boy.”

“I’m to report to you? But what? And how?”

“No written reports to me, unless something totally unlikely happens. But you’ll come back to England now and then, won’t you? Don’t you want to see little Charlotte and find out how she is getting on? What kind of a father would you be if you didn’t? But there will also be another form of written report, and this afternoon you had better go to Harley Street, where Sir Owen Williams-Owen will see you, and take a look at your heart, and tell you how to report back to him on how it’s getting on.”

It was plain to Francis that Uncle Jack was enjoying being mysterious, and that his best course was to play straight man, and let his instructions come in due course.

“Williams-Owen knows all about hearts. He will give you a regimen of health that you must follow, which will include regular reports to him on how your heart is functioning. How many heartbeats after strenuous exercise—that sort of thing. But in actual fact it will be a key to observations we want you to make about trains.

“Schloss Düsterstein sits in a considerable estate, with some parkland and a lot of farms. Less than a mile from the house, or the castle or whatever it is, there is a branch of a railway, and that branch leads to a large compound—a concentration camp, as Lord Kitchener called them, to which freight and cattle cars are taken from time to time, not on any regular schedule but always late at night. You can tell how many cars there are because the train travels quite slowly—what they call a Bummelzug—and at one place it crosses an intersection point, and makes a characteristic sound with its wheels. If you keep your ears open, and count the times you hear that sound, and then divide by two, you can reckon the number of freight or goods vans that have passed over the point, and are thus bound for the camp. And that’s what you report to Williams-Owen, every fortnight, according to a scheme he will give you, in a letter in which you can whimper and play the hypochondriac as much as you please. He’ll see that the information gets to the right place.”

“It’s better than staying here and feeling sorry for myself, I suppose.”

“Much better. It’s your first professional job, and if you haven’t thought so already, you’re damned lucky to get it.”

“Well, but what about—oh, sod being a gentleman! Sorry to be sordid, Uncle Jack, but—am I paid anything?”

“As I told you, this is something of a sideline, and we haven’t any appropriation for it. But I think you may count on something eventually. Anyhow, you needn’t pretend to me that you need money. I’ve heard about your grandfather’s will. Your father mentioned it in a letter.”

“I see. I’m in training, as it were?”

“No; it’s a real job. But take my advice, Frank, don’t fuss about money. The profession is run on a shoestring, and there are lots of people fighting for a quarter-inch of the string already. When there’s anything for you, you can rely on me to let you know. But if there’s no money, I can at least offer you some information. We know where Charlie Fremantle is.”

“Is she with him?”

“I suppose so. He’s in a very hot place to be at the moment. If those two are counting on a peaceful old age, they’re out of their minds. Oh, and your friend Buys-Bozzaris is dead.”

“What? How?”

“Carelessness. Actually he was a futile agent, and his recruiting was a joke; Charlie Fremantle was the only fish he caught, and even Charlie—who is an idiot—managed to cheat him about some gambling money. So Basil found himself in what we might call an untenable position, and it looks as if he shot himself.”

“I don’t believe it. I doubt if he could hit himself—on purpose, anyhow.”

“Perhaps not. Perhaps he had expert assistance—Well, anything more?”

“Just a matter of curiosity, Uncle Jack. These goods vans—these freight cars—what’s in them?”

“People.”

YOUR MAN WAS LUCKY to be quit of Ismay, said the Lesser Zadkiel.

—My man was lucky to have known her, said the Daimon Maimas. She doesn’t show up well in Francis’s story: an unscrupulous little sexual teaser and a crook about money; if she had stayed with him, what sort of cat-and-dog life would they have had? They would have torn one another apart and quite soon she would have betrayed him with somebody. But she thought herself a free agent, and that always leads to trouble.

—Oh quite. She was really an adjunct of Charlie Fremantle; one aspect of his fate. Odd, isn’t it, that these adventurous, feather-brained fools like Charlie always have some woman who is ready to put up with anything to serve him and his folly? My records show it again and again.

—What lies before her in Spain? Scampering around from one squalid, endangered hovel to another, always under threat, often under gunfire, imagining she is serving the people’s cause—which neither she nor Charlie could have defined—but really just Charlie’s woman and slave. If pity lay in my sphere, said the Daimon, I think I should pity her.

—But pity is not in your sphere, brother. You don’t even pity poor Francis, who broke his heart over her.

—Certainly not. A heart is never really stout until it has broken and mended at least once. Francis might be grateful to me for finding him such an interesting heart-breaker. Lots of men break their hearts over women who are no more interesting than turnips.

—Yet he knew she was no good. Not to him, anyway. What was she to him?

—Surely you remember how, in his bedroom at Blairlogie, he used to posture in front of his mirror, rigged up as a sort of woman? Searching for the Mystical Marriage, though he didn’t know it; looking for the woman in himself, for the completion of himself, and he thought he had found it in Ismay. And he most certainly did find part of it in Ismay, for she was what he was not, she had qualities he would never possess, and she had the beauty and the sluttish irresistible charm to make him love her whatever she did, and whatever he knew about her. I think I did rather well in enlarging his life with Ismay.

—As when she told him he was the kind of man things happened to, and not the kind that made them happen?

—Oh, come, brother, you were not taken in by that old chestnut, were you? You know as well as I that people often make the most astonishing reversals of what seems to be their basic nature, when they are compelled to do it. Really, my dear colleague, you astonish me! I don’t wish to be offensive, but here we are, a couple of Minor Immortals, watching Francis’s life unfold before us, as you have it filed away in your archive, and yet sometimes you talk as if we were no wiser than a pair of human beings watching television, where the unexpected, the unpredictable is rigorously forbidden to happen. The laws of such melodrama are not binding on us, brother. You have typed Francis, and you talk of Ismay as if she were vanished forever. As for me, you seem to degrade me to the level of that detestable theological fraud, a Guardian Angel! Come, come!

—Don’t scold, brother. I am sorry if I have appeared to underestimate your daimonic role in this affair. But I have so much to do with mortals that sometimes I think a little of their sentimentality is rubbing off on me.

—Don’t be distracted by trivialities, said the Daimon Maimas. What do the theologians say? Circumcise yourself as to the heart and not as to the foreskin. And never neglect what is bred in the bone. Do you think it was bred in Francis to be a victim all his life? How would that reflect on me? As a rather superior mortal once said to a sentimental friend, Clear your mind of cant! Shall we continue?