Crome Yellow (14 page)

‘Yes, the Biographies are good, the Biographies are excellent,' Mr Scogan agreed. ‘I imagine them written in a very elegant Regency style – Brighton Pavilion in words – perhaps by the great Dr Lemprière himself. You know his classical dictionary? Ah!' Mr Scogan raised his hand and let it limply fall again in a gesture which implied that words failed him. ‘Read his biography of Helen; read how Jupiter, disguised as a swan, was “enabled to avail himself of his situation”
vis-à-vis
to Leda. And to think that he may have, must have written these biographies of the Great! What a work, Henry! And, owing to the idiotic arrangement of your library, it can't be read.'

‘I prefer the
Wild Goose Chase
,' said Anne. ‘A novel in six volumes – it must be restful.'

‘Restful,' Mr Scogan repeated. ‘You've hit on the right word. A
Wild Goose Chase
is sound, but a bit old-fashioned – pictures of clerical life in the fifties, you know; specimens of the landed gentry; peasants for pathos and comedy; and in the background, always the picturesque beauties of nature soberly described. All very good and solid, but, like certain puddings, just a little dull. Personally, I like much better the notion of
Thom's Works and Wanderings
. The eccentric Mr Thom of Thom's Hill. Old Tom Thom, as his intimates used to call him. He spent ten years in Tibet organizing the clarified butter industry on modern European lines, and was
able to retire at thirty-six with a handsome fortune. The rest of his life he devoted to travel and ratiocination; here is the result.' Mr Scogan tapped the dummy books. ‘And now we come to the
Tales of Knockespotch
. What a masterpiece and what a great man! Knockespotch knew how to write fiction. Ah, Denis, if you could only read Knockespotch you wouldn't be writing a novel about the wearisome development of a young man's character, you wouldn't be describing in endless, fastidious detail, cultured life in Chelsea and Bloomsbury and Hampstead. You would be trying to write a readable book. But then, alas! owing to the peculiar arrangement of our host's library, you never will read Knockespotch.'

‘Nobody could regret the fact more than I do,' said Denis.

‘It was Knockespotch,' Mr Scogan continued, ‘the great Knockespotch, who delivered us from the dreary tyranny of the realistic novel. My life, Knockespotch said, is not so long that I can afford to spend precious hours writing or reading descriptions of middle-class interiors. He said again, “I am tired of seeing the human mind bogged in a social plenum; I prefer to paint it in a vacuum, freely and sportively bombinating.”'

‘I say,' said Gombauld, ‘Knockespotch was a little obscure sometimes, wasn't he?'

‘He was,' Mr Scogan replied, ‘and with intention. It made him seem even profounder than he actually was. But it was only in his aphorisms that he was so dark and oracular. In his Tales he was always luminous. Oh, those Tales – those Tales! How shall I describe them? Fabulous characters shoot across his pages like gaily dressed performers on the trapeze. There are extraordinary adventures and still more extraordinary speculations. Intelligences and emotions, relieved of all the imbecile preoccupations of civilized life, move in intricate and subtle dances, crossing and recrossing, advancing, retreating, impinging. An immense erudition and an immense fancy go hand in hand. All the ideas of the present and of the past, on every possible subject, bob up among the Tales, smile gravely or grimace a caricature of themselves, then disappear to make place for something new. The verbal surface of his writing is rich and fantastically diversified. The wit is incessant. The . . .'

‘But couldn't you give us a specimen,' Denis broke in – ‘a concrete example?'

‘Alas!' Mr Scogan replied, ‘Knockespotch's great book is like the sword Excalibur. It remains stuck fast in this door, awaiting the coming of a writer with genius enough to draw it forth. I am not even a writer, I am not so much as qualified to attempt the task. The extraction of Knockespotch from his wooden prison I leave, my dear Denis, to you.'

‘Thank you,' said Denis.

‘
IN THE TIME
of the amiable Brantôme,' Mr Scogan was saying, ‘every debutante at the French Court was invited to dine at the King's table, where she was served with wine in a handsome silver cup of Italian workmanship. It was no ordinary cup, this goblet of the debutantes; for, inside, it had been most curiously and ingeniously engraved with a series of very lively amorous scenes. With each draught that the young lady swallowed these engravings became increasingly visible, and the Court looked on with interest, every time she put her nose in the cup, to see whether she blushed at what the ebbing wine revealed. If the debutante blushed, they laughed at her for her innocence; if she did not, she was laughed at for being too knowing.'

‘Do you propose,' asked Anne, ‘that the custom should be revived at Buckingham Palace?'

‘I do not,' said Mr Scogan. ‘I merely quoted the anecdote as an illustration of the customs, so genially frank, of the sixteenth century. I might have quoted other anecdotes to show that the customs of the seventeenth and eighteenth, of the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, and indeed of every other century, from the time of Hammurabi onward, were equally genial and equally frank. The only century in which customs were not characterized by the same cheerful openness was the nineteenth, of blessed memory. It was the astonishing exception. And yet, with what one must suppose was a deliberate disregard of history, it looked upon its horribly pregnant silences as normal and natural and right; the frankness of the previous fifteen or twenty thousand years was considered abnormal and perverse. It was a curious phenomenon.'

‘I entirely agree.' Mary panted with excitement in her effort to bring out what she had to say. ‘Havelock Ellis says . . .'

Mr Scogan, like a policeman arresting the flow of traffic, held up his hand. ‘He does; I know. And that brings me to my next point: the nature of the reaction.'

‘Havelock Ellis . . .'

‘The reaction, when it came – and we may say roughly that it set in a little before the beginning of this century – the reaction was to openness, but not to the same openness as had reigned in the earlier ages. It was to a scientific openness, not to the jovial frankness of the past, that we returned. The whole question of Amour became a terribly serious one. Earnest young men wrote in the public prints that from this time forth it would be impossible ever again to make a joke of any sexual matter. Professors wrote thick books in which sex was sterilized and dissected. It has become customary for serious young women, like Mary, to discuss, with philosophic calm, matters of which the merest hint would have sufficed to throw the youth of the sixties into a delirium of amorous excitement. It is all very estimable, no doubt. But still' – Mr Scogan sighed – ‘I for one should like to see, mingled with this scientific ardour, a little more of the jovial spirit of Rabelais and Chaucer.'

‘I entirely disagree with you,' said Mary. ‘Sex isn't a laughing matter; it's serious.'

‘Perhaps,' answered Mr Scogan, ‘perhaps I'm an obscene old man, for I must confess that I cannot always regard it as wholly serious.'

‘But I tell you . . .' began Mary furiously. Her face had flushed with excitements. Her cheeks were the cheeks of a great ripe peach.

‘Indeed,' Mr Scogan continued, ‘it seems to me one of the few permanently and everlasting amusing subjects that exist. Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.'

‘I entirely disagree,' said Mary. There was a silence.

Anne looked at her watch. ‘Nearly a quarter to eight,' she said. ‘I wonder when Ivor will turn up.' She got up from her deck-chair and, leaning her elbows on the balustrade of the terrace, looked out over the valley and towards the farther hills. Under the level evening light the architecture of the land revealed itself. The deep shadows, the bright contrasting lights gave the hills a new solidity. Irregularities of the surface, unsuspected before, were picked out with light and shade. The grass, the corn, the foliage of trees were stippled
with intricate shadows. The surface of things had taken on a marvellous enrichment.

‘Look!' said Anne suddenly, and pointed. On the opposite side of the valley, at the crest of the ridge, a cloud of dust flushed by the sunlight to rosy gold was moving rapidly along the sky-line. ‘It's Ivor. One can tell by the speed.'

The dust cloud descended into the valley and was lost. A horn with the voice of a sea-lion made itself heard, approaching. A minute later Ivor came leaping round the corner of the house. His hair waved in the wind of his own speed; he laughed as he saw them.

‘Anne darling,' he cried, and embraced her, embraced Mary, very nearly embraced Mr Scogan. ‘Well, here I am. I've come with incredulous speed.' Ivor's vocabulary was rich, but a little erratic. ‘I'm not late for dinner, am I?' He hoisted himself up on to the balustrade, and sat there, kicking his heels. With one arm he embraced a large stone flowerpot, leaning his head sideways against its hard and lichenous flanks in an attitude of trustful affection. He had brown, wavy hair, and his eyes were of a very brilliant, pale, improbable blue. His head was narrow, his face thin and rather long, his nose aquiline. In old age – though it was difficult to imagine Ivor old – he might grow to have an Iron Ducal grimness. But now, at twenty-six, it was not the structure of his face that impressed one; it was its expression. That was charming and vivacious, and his smile was an irradiation. He was for ever moving, restlessly and rapidly, but with an engaging gracefulness. His frail and slender body seemed to be fed by a spring of inexhaustible energy.

‘No, you're not late.'

‘You're in time to answer a question,' said Mr Scogan. ‘We were arguing whether Amour were a serious matter or no. What do you think? Is it serious?'

‘Serious?' echoed Ivor. ‘Most certainly.'

‘I told you so,' cried Mary triumphantly.

‘But in what sense serious?' Mr Scogan asked.

‘I mean as an occupation. One can go on with it without ever getting bored.'

‘I see,' said Mr Scogan. ‘Perfectly.'

‘One can occupy oneself with it,' Ivor continued, ‘always and everywhere. Women are always wonderfully the same.
Shapes vary a little, that's all. In Spain' – with his free hand he described a series of ample curves – ‘one can't pass them on the stairs. In England' – he put the tip of his forefinger against the tip of his thumb and, lowering his hand, drew out this circle into an imaginary cylinder – ‘in England they're tubular. But their sentiments are always the same. At least, I've always found it so.'

‘I'm delighted to hear it,' said Mr Scogan.

THE LADIES HAD
left the room and the port was circulating. Mr Scogan filled his glass, passed on the decanter, and, leaning back in his chair, looked about him for a moment in silence. The conversation rippled idly round him, but he disregarded it; he was smiling at some private joke. Gombauld noticed his smile.

‘What's amusing you?' he asked.

‘I was just looking at you all, sitting round this table,' said Mr Scogan.

‘Are we as comic as all that?'

‘Not at all,' Mr Scogan answered politely. ‘I was merely amused by my own speculations.'

‘And what were they?'

‘The idlest, the most academic of speculations. I was looking at you one by one and trying to imagine which of the first Caesars you would each resemble, if you were given the opportunity of behaving like a Caesar. The Caesars are one of my touchstones,' Mr Scogan explained. ‘They are characters functioning, so to speak, in the void. They are human beings developed to their logical conclusions. Hence their unequalled value as a touchstone, a standard. When I meet someone for the first time, I ask myself this question: Given the Caesarean environment, which of the Caesars would this person resemble – Julius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero? I take each trait of character, each mental and emotional bias, each little oddity, and magnify them a thousand times. The resulting image gives me his Caesarean formula.'

‘And which of the Caesars do you resemble?' asked Gombauld.

‘I am potentially all of them,' Mr Scogan replied, ‘all – with the possible exception of Claudius, who was much too stupid to be a development of anything in my character. The seeds of Julius's courage and compelling energy, of Augustus's prudence, of the libidinousness and cruelty of Tiberius, of Caligula's folly, of Nero's artistic genius and
enormous vanity, are all within me. Given the opportunities, I might have been something fabulous. But circumstances were against me. I was born and brought up in a country rectory; I passed my youth doing a great deal of utterly senseless hard work for a very little money. The result is that now, in middle age, I am the poor thing that I am. But perhaps it is as well. Perhaps, too, it's as well that Denis hasn't been permitted to flower into a little Nero, and that Ivor remains only potentially a Caligula. Yes, it's better so, no doubt. But it would have been more amusing, as a spectacle, if they had had the chance to develop, untrammelled, the full horror of their potentialities. It would have been pleasant and interesting to watch their tics and foibles and little vices swelling and burgeoning and blossoming into enormous and fantastic flowers of cruelty and pride and lewdness and avarice. The Caesaraean environment makes the Caesar, as the special food and the queenly cell make the queen bee. We differ from the bees in so far that, given the proper food, they can be sure of making a queen every time. With us there is no such certainty; out of every ten men placed in the Caesarean environment one will be temperamentally good, or intelligent, or great. The rest will blossom into Caesars; he will not. Seventy and eighty years ago simple-minded people, reading of the exploits of the Bourbons in South Italy, cried out in amazement: To think that such things should be happening in the nineteenth century! And a few years since we too were astonished to find that in our still more astonishing twentieth century, unhappy blackamoors on the Congo and the Amazon were being treated as English serfs were treated in the time of Stephen. Today we are no longer surprised at these things. The Black and Tans harry Ireland, the Poles maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti slaughter their poorer countrymen: we take it all for granted. Since the war we wonder at nothing. We have created a Caesarean environment and a host of little Caesars has sprung up. What could be more natural?'