Professor Lamotte was still recouping his powers after the assault on his gouty foot, and he was startled when McVarish leaned across him and said to Professor Burns: "Roberta, have I ever shown you my penis-bone?"
Professor Burns, a zoologist, did not turn a hair. "Have you truly got one? I know they used to be common, but it's ages since I saw one."
Urky detached an object with a gold handle from his watch-chain and handed it to her. "Eighteenth century; very fine."
"Oh, what a beauty. Look, Professor Lamotte, it's the penis-bone of a raccoon; very popular as toothpicks in an earlier day. And tailors used them for ripping out basting. Very nice, Urky. But I'll bet you haven't got a kangaroo-scrotum tobacco pouch; my brother sent me one from Australia."
Professor Lamotte regarded the penis-bone with distaste. "Don't you find it rather disagreeable?" he said.
"I don't pick my teeth with it," said Urky; "I just show it to ladies on social occasions."
"You astonish me," said Lamotte.
"Oh come off it, René; you – a Frenchman! Subtle wits like to refresh themselves with a whiff of mild indecency. La nostalgic de la boue and all that. Indecency and even filth – letting the hard-run intellect off the chain. Like Rabelais, you know."
"I know Rabelais is very much your man," said Lamotte.
"A family connection," said Urky; "my ancestor, Sir Thomas Urquhart – the first and still the greatest translator of Rabelais into English."
"Yes, he improved on Rabelais a good deal," said Lamotte. But Urky was insensitive to any irony but his own. He proceeded to inform Professor Burns about Sir Thomas Urquhart, with occasional gamy quotations.
As I prowled round the table, about my Vice-Warden's business, Arthur Cornish, I was glad to see, was getting on well with Professor Aronson, the University's big man on computer science. They were talking about Fortran, the language of formula and translation, in which Arthur, as a man deeply concerned with banking and investment, had a professional interest.
"Do you think we ought to tackle Mrs. Skeldergate later about what is being said in the Legislature about poor Ozias Froats?" said Penelope Raven to Gyllenborg. "Really, they've got him all wrong. Not that I know anything about what he's doing, but nobody could be such a fool as some of those idiots are pretending."
"I wouldn't, if I were you," said Gyllenborg. "Remember our rule: never talk business or ask for favours on Guest Night. And I'll add something: never attempt to explain science to people who want to misunderstand. Froats will be all right; the people who know have no misgivings about him. What's going on in the Legislature is just democracy on the rampage; everybody having his uninformed say. Never explain things; my lifelong rule."
"But I like explaining," said Penny. "People have such nutty ideas about universities and the people who work in them. Did you see the obituary that appeared of poor Ellerman? You wouldn't have known it was the same man we knew. The facts were more or less right, but they gave no sense of what he had been, and he was damned good. If they'd wanted to crucify him, of course, it would have been easy. That crack-brained continuous romance he wrote, which was supposed to be such a secret and which he kept confiding in everybody about; a sort of Dream-Woman he invented for his private delectation, and made love to in quasi-Elizabethan prose. If anybody got hold of that –"
"They won't," said Professor Stromwell, from across the table; "it's gone forever."
"Really?" said Penny. "What happened?"
"I burned it myself," said Stromwell. "Ellerman wanted it out of the way."
"But oughtn't it to have gone to Archives?"
"In my opinion, too much goes to Archives, and anything that is in Archives gains a wholly ridiculous importance because of it. Judge a man by what he publishes, not by what he hides in a bottom drawer."
"Was it as raunchy as he hinted?"
"I don't know. He asked me not to read it, and I didn't."
"And thus another great romance is lost," said Penny. "He may have been a considerable artist in pornography."
"No, not a man who was so devoted to the university ideal as Ellerman," said Professor Hitzig. "If he had been an artist primarily he would not have been so happy here. The characteristic of the artist is discontent. Universities may produce fine critics, but not artists. We are wonderful people, we university people, but we are apt to forget the limitations of learning, which cannot create or beget."
"Oh, come on!" said Penny; "That's going too far. I could name you lots of artists who have lived in universities."
"For every one you name, I'll name you a score who didn't," said Hitzig. "Scientists are what universities produce best and oftenest. Science is discovery and revelation, and that is not art."
"Aha! "The reverent inquiry into nature," said Penny.
"Finding a gaping hole in exact knowledge and plugging it, to the world's great benefit," said Gyllenborg.
"Then what do you call the Humanities?" said Penny. "Civilization, I suppose."
"Civilization rests on two things," said Hitzig; "the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?"
"Fermentation is undoubtedly science," said Gyllenborg; "but voluntary inhibition must be psychology, and if anybody suggests that psychology is a science I shall scream."
"No, no; you are on my ground now," said Stromwell; "inhibition of defecation is in essence a theological matter, and unquestionably one of the effects of the Fall of Man. And that, as everybody now recognizes, means the dawn of personal consciousness, the separation of the individual from the tribe, or mass. Animals have no such power of inhibition, as every stage-manager who has to get a horse on and offstage without a mishap will assure you. Animals know themselves but dimly – even more dimly than we, the masters of the world. When Man ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge he became aware of himself as something other than a portion of his surroundings, and he dropped his last, carefree turd, as he, with wandering steps and slow, from Eden took his solitary way. After that he had, literally, to mind his step, not to speak of his Ps and Qs."
" 'His solitary way'," said Penny Raven. "Just like Milton, the old sour-belly! What about Eve?"
"Every child repeats the experience of recognizing himself as unique," said Hitzig, ignoring the feminist outburst.
"Every child repeats the whole history of life, beginning as a fish, before he begins to experience inhibition," said Gyllenborg.
"Every child repeats the Fall of Man, quits the Paradise of the womb, and is launched into the painful world," said Stromwell. "Sub-Warden, have those people up the way completely forgotten that decanters are supposed to be passed?"
I tore myself away from a disquisition by Arthur Cornish on loan-sharking – of which of course he disapproved, although it fascinated him – and made another tour of the table to see that everyone was all right, and speed the decanters on their way. They had come to rest in front of Professor Mukadassi, who did not drink wine, and seemed absorbed in the talk of Hollier. I was glad Clem was enjoying himself, because he is not really a clubbable man.
"What I call cultural fossils," he was saying, "are parts of human belief or behaviour that have become so imbedded in the surrounding life that nobody questions them. I remember going to church with some English relatives when I was a boy, and noticing that a lot of the country women, as they came in, made a tiny curtsy to a blank wall. When I asked why, nobody knew, but my cousin inquired of the vicar, and he said that before the Reformation a statue of the Virgin had stood there, and although Cromwell's men had destroyed it, they could not destroy the local habit, as evinced in the women's behaviour. Years ago I paid a brief call at Pitcairn Island, and it was like stepping back into the earliest days of the nineteenth century; the last immigrants to that island were soldiers from Wellington's troops, and their descendants still spoke the authentic speech of Sam Weller, and said "Veil, sir", and "Werry good". When my Father was a boy every well-brought-up Canadian child learned that "herb" was pronounced without the "h"; you still hear it now and again, and modern Englishmen think it's ignorance, though it's really cultural history. These things are trifles, but among races that keep much to themselves, like some of the nomads of the East, or our surviving real Gypsies, all kinds of ideas persist, that are worth investigating. We tend to think of human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible – that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways. Which throws a new light on the whole business of mythology; the myths are not dead, just different in understanding and application. Perhaps superstition is just myth, dimly perceived and unthinkingly revered. If you think superstition is dead, visit one of our examination halls, and count the fetishes and ju-jus that the students bring in with them."