By stopping the spread of Hellenism through the Semitic world the Jews paved a way for crueller, more primitive Islam. The Jews did not kill Christ; they merely halted His progress. And paid a price, I agree, for so doing. Well, we are all wiser at last. Now is the time to recognise differences, go our separate ways. By all means let the Jews forge a homeland for themselves in Africa - but not at Gentile expense! How do we profit from our support of Israel? Why do we support her? There is one obvious answer to this question, one answer the Arab himself frequently offers, loudly and unequivocally, to the world: Now Jews control everything.
Even Mrs Cornelius refuses to take my point. I rarely discuss politics with her, of course. Now she proffers me the newspapers which tell us each year who are the richest people in the world and she says they are all Anglo-Saxons or Greeks or Swiss. The Queen is richer than anyone else in the world. ‘And is the Queen a Jew?’ she asks me.
‘Maybe,’ I tell her.
I rule nothing out.
SEVENTEEN
EVERYTHING MAN EVER IMAGINED can through our wills be made reality. That is my Faith. That was God’s final message to the world. It is the message His son incorporates and holds in holy responsibility. This is the doctrine on which my reborn Church of Byzantium shall be based. She will not be a Church who restricts and formulates. She will be a truly Greek church, expansive and all-embracing. For the word was made actual. I say this to you, brothers and sisters, and to you who would count yourselves my enemies: We are upon this earth to serve and honour God, and to redeem the Spirit of His Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and make His Word actual. Jesus brought a simple message to the world - Love One Another. Put down your arms; settle your differences with honest reasoning, not lies and guns. We are none of us perfect until we are reunited with God in Paradise, through the message and example of Jesus Christ, His Son.
Science is God’s blessed gift to us, so that we may better understand His Word and learn to do His bidding. I know this now. It sustains me through all my disappointments, not least the way I am now forced to make a living. I was repairing bicycles for a long time. And little engines of various sorts, up in the arcade past Ladbroke Road. Now the fur coats. I had started attending St Constantine’s in Bayswater. For too many years I had avoided the consolations of religion. To be absolutely honest, I think I feared religion. Today I believe in God and the tenets of the Christian religion. A godless nation cannot prosper. But mine is not what the eldest Cornelius boy calls ‘fundamentalism’. Unless it is ‘fundamentalism’ to believe in God and His Word! Klyatvoy tyazhkoyu, klyatvoy strashnoyu ...
I used to meet an émigré called Gerhardie who wrote novels. He had been successful, he said, before the War. We frequented the same art bookshop in Holland Street. We had interests in common with the proprietor, an academic, I understood, originally from Athens.
‘One must control the page as one controls a woman.’ It was Gerhardie’s favourite phrase. We walked together in Holland Park at four o’clock on a wonderful summer afternoon. That park is a godsend to lovers of beauty who cannot live all the time in fine surroundings or touch rarity with familiar fingers. ‘One must appear to let it have its head, but one must always be exerting the subtlest of guidance. This is the exquisite pleasure of real power enjoyed for its own sake.’
He was writing a story about a dog which has the intellect of an Einstein. But he still couples with bitches, sniffs turds and pisses on lamp-posts. When challenged on this he insists, ‘I might possess the mind of a man but I must still uphold my honour and dignity as a dog.’
His books were, he said, a little like P. G. Wodehouse’s, though more Russian. I took some of them out of the library. Modish things, with little perceptible plot, and observations which were barely fresh when offered to their fashionable 1920s audience, they were on the same lines as John Cowper Powys. I took them back the next day. At least ‘Mister’ Waugh had the taste to keep her dress-shop offerings relatively brief. I was able to tell my acquaintance that his books seemed ‘more substantial’ than Waugh’s and he agreed. He thought this was because for his part he had always enjoyed masculine appetites. His prose, he felt, had a more robust, continental quality to it, and he was not quite the narrow moralist. He was writing a new one, to be called Lemmings and Wrens, about creatures whose tempers are disproportionate to their power. ‘I was wondering if I shouldn’t add in gorillas, but there are difficulties, of course, with all this extra perspective.’ We stopped meeting at Holland Street. I think they had some trouble with the police. There is another Greek runs it now, they say is a hunchback, but I have never seen him in there. My literary acquaintance became even more reclusive. I had hoped to find him at the church, whose services I had recommended. The choir is adequate. For a while I used the Anglican St Mary’s at the end of Church Street, but there was a commotion, I do not remember the cause, and I felt no call to return to their bloodless fold.
I remember another great literary name of the forties and fifties, Hank Janson, telling me in the Mandrake Club that he sometimes imagined himself some slugular queen, continuing to breed entirely by intuition. All but mindless now, he had become a creature so specialised he could write his novels entirely without conscious thought. ‘Is this dangerous?’ he asked me. In the end he had to go to Spain because of the ridiculous British obscenity laws which allow a woman to be tied up and tortured in public but not to fondle her lover’s penis. ‘My covers were the nastiest things about those books. That and a bit of fladge. You can’t say “knickers” these days without some bluestocking taking the sheepshears to your knackers.’ I gave him the addresses of friends. That was in the days when the Falange kept strict discipline and Spain was the cheapest, safest nation in Europe. No longer, they tell me. The moment Franco’s hand slipped from the tiller the ship of state was doomed, prey to fresh invasion from Moor and Christian alike. Already the mark of atheism can be seen everywhere, especially in the architecture of the Costa del Sol and Nova Palma. This cheap, careless brutalism, as they proudly term it, is academic rubbish. It has nothing to do with what people require from buildings. They want human scale. Architecture is the greatest of arts, our most sublime acknowledgement of God’s purpose.
Once it was our Church determined the aesthetics of our buildings. Then honest, god-fearing merchants imitated them, perhaps with a greater eye to practicality. Kings built their monuments and princes their dynastic piles. All by way of offering to God and to their fellow-men the confirmation of their good fortune, their thanks. Those who did not build thus were soon judged atheistic misers by Nobles, Church and State alike, and gained neither friends nor honour in the Commonwealth. I do not believe it is atavistic to pine for the Golden Age. The great buildings of Asia Minor retain their mighty authority, even as ruins, because they were raised to the glory of an unchallenged Faith. Those tawny red ruins distant against an ever-demanding sun: you could smell their age even as our boat slid past them, sailing into the pearly core of the mightiest Egyptian empire, which Homer called ‘hundred-gated Thebes’.
‘Fons et origo,’ intones Quelch, ‘fons lacrimarum!’ as we remark some unostentatious tomb or temple, the limestone framed by deep vermilion hills, by yellow-green palms. ‘Typically and terribly picturesque,’ says Quelch with that sneer I no longer believe. I wish I understood the reason for his defences. I think some peculiar sense of honour, a quasi-religious understanding of Free Will, forbids his telling me why he denigrates and shuts out so much. But, of course, there is something else he is hiding.