“That is not the point. What is it about a trap?”
The boy got up and looked a little madly and very insolently at Ross, the blue eyes cold between lids red with weeping. Ross was surprised to find himself edging away, like a man who is to be shot at.
“We’re through with the baby-brother business.”
Upstairs, Picus had finished shaving, his body worked on as delicately and scrupulously as a cat. Whistling to himself while Felix was sobbing, whistling back his power as their idol, like a god summoning an element or in confidence like prayer. He set his tie for the last time, shook himself, laid himself down on the window seat, and drew a ring with a pearl on to his atrociously powerful hand.
And Clarence out on the high turf was not looking at the sea or the terrible crest of Gault suspended in the haze. Or at the small enamel floor he trod on, flower and leaf stars and bars and rings and crosses: or at a dozen rabbits hurrying: or at one hawk not hurrying, until he dropped faster than the eye and there would be one rabbit the less. He walked slowly, inside himself, petting his phantoms, especially a phantom of Picus, the body up at the house was behaving more and more unlike. He wondered also why Scylla had called him “mediaevalist,” because she said he assumed a form from inside and made things fit it, instead of compelling what is to do his construction for him. Hadn’t Picus invented a lying fancy to please her, to get off with her? Lying and lecherous his bird was, for a woman who had snapped him up for her body’s sake and her vanity. This went on until he saw the names he called her take body and walk to meet him out of the wood. Vanity, lechery, falsehood, and malice lolled along together across the grass, out of the trees. And because she called him mediaevalist, he saw them in archaic dress.
Scylla said to Carston on the lawn:
“So, you see, what sounded romantic excitement about the Sanc-Grail cup was real. And unfortunate?”
Carston wondered, deplored and detested the european faculty for taking the skeleton out of the cupboard. Rattling it, airing it, lecturing on it. She was winding up a discourse without enquiry into his feelings. On what he supposed was the skeleton, the world skeleton. He heard:
“If the materialist’s universe is true, not a working truth to make bridges with and things, we are a set of blind factors in a machine. And no passion has any validity and no imagination. They are just little tricks of the machine. It either is so, or it isn’t. If you hold that it isn’t, you corrupt your intellect by denying certain facts. If you stick to the facts as we have them, life is a horror and an insult. Nothing has any worth, but to tickle our sensations and oil the machine. There is no value in our passions and perceptions, or final differences between a life full of design and adventure and a life crawled out in a palace or a slum. The life of Plato or Buddha, apart from the kick of the illusion, was as futile as the lives of the daughters of Louis XV. Old talk, you say, and remember In Memoriam. But notice what is happening now people have become used to the idea. Any little boy in a Paris bar, who never heard of physics knows. Everyone gets the age’s temper. With results on their conduct— ‘Why be good any more’ they say, and the youngest ones not that. And it’s not intellectual beauty the culture-camp admire. It’s themselves for having such fine subconsciousnesses. Such an elegant sublimation of their infant interests. Watch the world with the skeleton acclimatised! Even when I was new we tried the bad to see if it might not be good. But the new lot aren’t interested. Don’t give a button for the good any more.
“And there is no evading it by any ‘service of humanity’ game. Unless you’re one of the people who get sensual kick out looking after things, why help humanity? Think of Wells’s Utopias. Birth-control, and peace and drains. And nothing left to do but report on the fauna of a further star. Our visiting-list extended to super-birds, or intellectually developed spiders. Nothing but physical adventure. Especially as we’ve picked up one priceless truth off the road, that every action brings with it its toxin and its antitoxin. If, instead of becoming cynical or scared, we started enquiry again from that—”
Felix shouted melodiously:
“I’m post-War. I’m just through getting clear of you. I admit you can scare me, but in reality you bore me. I don’t care any more. I may be a mass of inhibitions, but I’m out for myself—”
Through the grilling haze, Luxury, Malice, and Untruth strolled over the grass to Clarence. In Ross’s heart there twisted ache and dislike. Carston gave in to spiritual upset, while his body lay in a garden chair. Scylla ended:
“So even the memory of a great magic turned out to be a bird’s joke.”
Picus thought how he would appear downstairs and bewilder them again. Had enough of Scylla. Wished now he hadn’t given her that cup. Caught out he’d been by the old man, but that wasn’t over yet. Get right out and come in by another door. Make Clarence, Scylla, and the lot of ’em quite happy always. Play round his way and their way for ever. And I’ll give you leave to play till doomsday. Not mother. Too late to do that. Sort of the old man’s prisoner. Just thinking of that made him feel ill and want Clarence. Felix reached his finale.
“You’ve confused me very successfully, and you can put up with what I’ve become.”
Scylla saw that Carston had had enough, and felt stifled and alone. Clarence returned in agony up the doubling wood-path, not the straight. Ross withdrew into his picture, and Carston hung on tight to a thought: ‘We’ve all got to get out of here for a bit.’
Chapter XVIII
“Tired,” said Scylla, changing her dress, and leaving that to stare out at the wood— “Tired of your wretched beauty, your rearrangements of light on a leaf.”
“Bored,” said Picus, who had gone to meet Clarence and missed him. And he meant sad. And Clarence, giving Nanna a hand skinning the rabbits he had shot, looked at his bloody hands: “I suppose I’ve got a broken heart and these wretched feelings come in through the holes.”
“Alone,” said Felix, “when I’ve got away it’ll be the same.”
Only Ross embraced his solitude, thought of the shape of each thing he drew, until the earth seemed one growing stillness, of innumerable separate tranquillities, for ever moving, for ever at rest.
Unfortunately the members of the house-party were not behaving like that. An organic view of Felix, for instance? He damned the scene—knew that he had handled it without imagination. Besides, the boy should be wearing his “youth’s gay livery” before a livelier audience than hills and the sea.
And there was more coming through than Picus’s wiles, life opening like the unfolding of a scene. An endless screen of coromandel lacquer, the design travelling with it, fold in, fold out. Enough for Ross to know that there was design and seize the detail, a man content with the tangible, piece by piece, to whom no single object was dumb. He thought of the brickness of a brick until he seemed aware of it throughout, not side after side or two or three, but each crumb of its body, and each crumb reduced to its molecular construction, until the brick ceased to be a cube and could as easily be reformed again. And the only prayer to which he condescended was that Scylla would keep her head since there were hysterics about; then left the studio and joined the party now slowly regathering on the lawn. All but Felix. Carston did not know how to greet Picus, not it seemed in any disgrace, and telling them a story about a parson’s wife.
“So she knitted me a check sweater, and I had a pain. And I lay flat on the grass, and told a curate and another curate to play chess on my back. And I found a caterpillar and made them make love.”