The great press of talent in search of occupation which had thronged the Ministry during its first weeks had now dropped to a mere handful; the doorkeeper was schooled to detect and deter the job seekers. No one wanted another reorganization for some time to come. Mr. Bentley’s office became an enclave of culture in a barbaric world. It was here that the Ivory Tower was first discussed.
“Art for Art’s sake, Geoffrey. Back to the lily and the lotus, away from these dusty young immortelles, these dandelions sprouting on the vacant lot.”
“A kind of new Yellow Book,” suggested Mr. Bentley sympathetically.
Ambrose turned sharply from his contemplation of Mrs. Siddons. “Geoffrey. How can you be so unkind?”
“My dear Ambrose…”
“That’s just what they’ll call it.”
“Who will?”
“Parsnip,” said Ambrose with venom, “Pimpernell, Poppet and Tom. They’ll say we’re deserting the workers’ cause.”
“I’m not aware that I ever joined it,” said Mr. Bentley. “I claim to be one of the very few living Liberals.”
“We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by economists.”
“I haven’t.”
“For years now we’ve allowed ourselves to think of nothing but concrete mixers and tractors.”
“I haven’t,” said Mr. Bentley crossly. “I’ve thought a great deal about Nolleykins.”
“Well,” said Ambrose, “I’ve had enough. Il faut en finir” and added: “Nous gagnerons parce que nous sommes les plus forts.”
Later he said, “I was never a Party member.”
“Party?”
“Communist Party. I was what they call, in their horrible jargon, a fellow traveller.”
“Ah.”
“Geoffrey, they do the most brutal things, don’t they, to Communists who try to leave the Party?”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Geoffrey, you don’t think they’d do that to fellow travellers, do you?”
“I don’t expect so.”
“But they might?”
“Oh yes, they might.”
“Oh dear.”
Later he said, “You know, Geoffrey, even in fascist countries they have underground organizations. Do you think the underground organizations would get hold of us?”
“Who?”
“The fellow travellers.”
“Really it’s too ridiculous to talk like this of fellow travellers and the underground. It sounds like strap-hangers on the Bakerloo railway.”
“It’s all very well for you to laugh. You were never one of them.”
“But my dear Ambrose, why should these political friends of yours mind so very much, if you produce a purely artistic paper?”
“I heard of a cellist in America. He’d been a member of the Party and he accepted an invitation to play at an anniversary breakfast of the Revolutionary Dames. It was during the Scottsboro trials when feeling was running high. They tied him to a lamppost and covered him with tar and set him on fire.”
“The Revolutionary Dames did?”
“No, no, the Communists.”
After a long pause he said:
“But Russia’s doing very badly in Finland.”
“Yes.”
“If only we knew what was going to happen.”
He returned pensively to the Religious Department. “This is more in your line than mine,” said the Catholic representative, handing him a cutting from a Swiss paper.
It said that Storm Troopers had attended a Requiem Mass in Salzburg. Ambrose clipped it to a piece of paper and wrote “Copies to Free Thought, the Atheist Advertiser, and to Godless Sunday at Home”; then he placed it in his basket marked OUT. Two yards distant the nonconformist minister was checking statistics about the popularity of beer-gardens among Nazi officials. The Church of England clergyman was making the most of some rather scrappy Dutch information about cruelty to animals in Bremen. There was no foundation here for an ivory tower, thought Ambrose, no cloud to garland its summit, and his thoughts began to soar larklike into a tempera, fourteenth-century sky; into a heaven of flat, blank blue with white clouds, cross-hatched with gold leaf on their sunward edges; a vast altitude painted with shaving soap on a panel of lapis lazuli; he stood on a high, sugary pinnacle, on a new Tower of Babel; like a muezzin calling his message to a world of domes and clouds; beneath him, between him and the absurd little figures bobbing and bending on their striped praying mats, lay fathoms of clear air where doves sported with the butterflies.
Most of Mrs. Sothill’s Garden Party Only list were people of late middle age who, on retirement from work in the cities or abroad, had bought the smaller manor houses and the larger rectories; houses that once had been supported on the rent of a thousand acres and a dozen cottages now went with a paddock and a walled garden, and their life subsisted on unsupported pensions and savings. To these modest landholders the rural character of the neighborhood was a matter of particular jealousy. Magnates like Freddy would eagerly sell off outlying farms for development. It was the G.P.O. list who suffered and protested. A narrow corner could not be widened or a tree lopped to clear the telegraph wires without it being noted and regretted in those sunny morning-rooms. These were benevolent, companionable people; their carefully limited families were “out in the world” and came to them only for occasional visits. Their daughters had flats and jobs and lives of their own in London; their sons were self-supporting in the services and in business. The tribute of Empire flowed gently into the agricultural countryside, tithe barns were converted into village halls, the boy scouts had a new bell tent and the district nurse a motor car; the old box pews were taken out of the churches, the galleries demolished, the Royal Arms and the Ten Commandments moved from behind the altar and replaced with screens of blue damask supported at the four corners with gilt Sarum angels; the lawns were close-mown, fertilized and weeded, and from their splendid surface rose clumps of pampas grass and yucca; year in, year out, gloved hands grubbed in the rockeries, gloved hands snipped in the herbaceous borders; baskets of bass stood beside trays of visiting-cards on the hall tables. Now in the dead depths of winter when ice stood thick on the lily ponds, and the kitchen gardens at night were a litter of sacking, these good people fed the birds daily with the crumbs from the dining-room table and saw to it that no old person in the village went short of coal.
It was this unfamiliar world that Basil contemplated in the leather-bound pages of Mrs. Sothill’s address book. He contemplated it as a marauder might look down from the hills into the fat pastures below; as Hannibal’s infantry had looked down from the snow-line as the first elephants tried the etched footholds which led to the Lombardy plains below them and went lurching and trumpeting over the edge.
After the successful engagement at North Grappling, Basil took Doris into the nearest town and fed her liberally on fried fish and chipped potatoes; afterwards he took her to the cinema, allowed her to hold his hand in a fierce and sticky grasp throughout the length of two deeply sentimental films, and brought her back to Malfrey in a state of entranced docility.
“You don’t like blondes, do you?” she asked anxiously in the car.
“Yes, very much.”
“More than brunettes?”
“I’m not particular.”
“They say like goes to like. She’s dark.”
“Who?”
“Her you call your sister.”
“Doris, you must get this idea out of your head. Mrs. Sothill is my sister.”
“You aren’t sweet on her?”