For a time Mr. Parham was extremely coy about Sir Bussy Woodcock’s invitation to assist at a séance.
Mr. Parham did not want to be drawn into this séance business. At the same time he did not want to fall out of touch with Sir Bussy Woodcock.
Sir Bussy Woodcock was one of those crude plutocrats with whom men of commanding intelligence, if they have the slightest ambition to be more than lookers-on at the spectacle of life, are obliged to associate nowadays. These rich adventurers are, under modern conditions, the necessary interpreters between high thought and low reality. It is regrettable that such difficult and debasing intervention should be unavoidable, but it seems to be so in this inexplicable world. Man of thought and man of action are mutually necessary — or, at any rate, the cooperation seems to be necessary to the man of thought. Plato, Confucius, Machiavelli had all to seek their princes. Nowadays, when the stuffing is out of princes, men of thought must do their best to use rich men.
Rich men amenable to use are hard to find and often very intractable when found. There was much in Sir Bussy, for example, that a fine intelligence, were it not equipped with a magnificent self-restraint, might easily have found insupportable. He was a short ruddy freckled man with a nose sculptured in the abrupt modern style and a mouth like a careless gash; he was thickset, a thing irritating in itself to an associate of long slender lines, and he moved with an impulsive rapidity of movement that was startling often and testified always to a total lack of such inhibitions as are inseparable from a cultivated mind. His manners were — voracious. When you talked to him he would jump suddenly into your pauses, and Mr. Parham, having long been accustomed to talk to muted undergraduates, had, if anything, developed his pauses. Half the good had gone from Mr. Parham if you robbed him of these significant silences. But Sir Bussy had no sense of significant silences. When you came to a significant silence, he would ask, “Meantersay?” in an entirely devastating manner. And he was always saying, “Gaw.” Continually he said it with a variety of intonations, and it never seemed to be addressed to anyone in particular. It meant nothing, or, what was more annoying, it might mean anything.
The fellow was of lowly extraction. His father had driven a hansom cab in London, while his mother was a nurse in a consumption hospital at Hampstead — the “Bussy” came from one of her more interesting patients — and their son, already ambitious at fourteen, had given up a strenuous course of Extension Lectures for an all-time job with a garrulous advertisement contractor, because, said he, there was “no GO in the other stuff.” The other “stuff,” if you please, was Wordsworth, the Reformation, Vegetable Morphology, and Economic History as interpreted by fastidious-minded and obscurely satirical young gentlemen from the elder universities.
Mr. Parham, tolerant, broad-minded, and deliberately quite modern, was always trying to forget these things. He never really forgot them, but whenever he and Sir Bussy were together he was always trying very hard to do so. Sir Bussy’s rise to wealth and power from such beginnings was one of the endless romances of modern business. Mr. Parham made a point of knowing as little about it as possible.
There the man was. In a little less than a quarter of a century, while Mr. Parham had been occupied chiefly with imperishable things — and marking examination papers upon them — Sir Bussy had become the master of a vast quantity of transitory but tangible phenomena which included a great advertising organization, an important part of the retail provision trade, a group of hotels, plantations in the tropics, cinema theatres, and many other things felt rather than known by Mr. Parham. Over these ephemerons Sir Bussy presided during those parts of his days that were withdrawn from social life, and occasionally even when he was existing socially he was summoned to telephones or indulged in inaudible asides to mysterious young men who sprang from nowhere on their account. As a consequence of these activities, always rather obscure to Mr. Parham, Sir Bussy lived in the midst of a quite terrific comfort and splendour surrounded by an obedience and a dignified obsequiousness that might have overawed a weaker or a vulgarer mind than Mr. Parham’s altogether. He appeared in a doorway at night, and marvellous chauffeurs sprang out of the darkness to the salute at his appearance; he said “Gaw,” and great butlers were ashamed. In a more luminous world things might have been different, but in this one Sir Bussy’s chauffeurs plainly regarded Mr. Parham as a rather unaccountable parcel which Sir Bussy was pleased to send about, and though the household manservants at Buntincombe, Carfex House, Marmion House, and the Hangar treated Mr. Parham as a gentleman, manifestly they did so rather through training than perception. A continual miracle, Sir Bussy was. He had acquired a colossal power of ordering people about, and it was evident to Mr. Parham that he had not the slightest idea what on the whole he wanted them to do. Meanwhile he just ordered them about. It was natural for Mr. Parham to think, “If I had the power he has, what wonderful things I could achieve.”
For instance, Sir Bussy might make history.
Mr. Parham was a lifelong student and exponent of history and philosophy. He had produced several studies — mainly round and about Richelieu and going more deeply into the mind of Richelieu than anyone has ever done before — and given short special courses upon historical themes; he had written a small volume of essays; he was general editor of Fosdyke’s popular “Philosophy of History” series, and he would sometimes write reviews upon works of scholarly distinction, reviews that appeared (often shockingly cut and mutilated) in the Empire, the Weekly Philosopher, and the Georgian Review. No one could deal with a new idea struggling to take form and wave it out of existence again more neatly and smilingly than Mr. Parham. And loving history and philosophy as he did, it was a trouble to his mind to feel how completely out of tune was the confusion of current events with anything that one could properly call fine history or fine philosophy. The Great War he realized was History, though very lumpish, brutalized, and unmanageable, and the Conference of Versailles was history also — in further declination. One could still put that Conference as a drama between this Power and that, talk of the conflict for “ascendency,” explain the “policy” of this or that man or this or that foreign office subtly and logically.
But from about 1919 onward everything had gone from bad to worse. Persons, events, had been deprived of more and more significance. Discordance, a disarray of values, invaded the flow of occurrence. Take Mr. Lloyd George, for example. How was one to treat a man like that? After a climax of the Versailles type the proper way was to culminate and let the historians get to work, as Woodrow Wilson indeed had done, and as Lincoln or Sulla or C?sar or Alexander did before him. They culminated and rounded off, inconvenient facts fell off them bit by bit, and more and more surely could they be treated HISTORICALLY. The reality of history broke through superficial appearance; the logic of events was made visible.
But now, where were the Powers and what were the forces? In the face of such things as happen today this trained historian felt like a skilled carver who was asked to cut up soup. Where were the bones?— any bones? A man like Sir Bussy ought to be playing a part in a great struggle between the New Rich and the Older Oligarchy; he ought to be an Equestrian pitted against the Patricians. He ought to round off the Close of Electoral Democracy. He ought to embody the New Phase in British affairs — the New Empire. But did he? Did he stand for anything at all? There were times when Mr. Parham felt that if he could not make Sir Bussy stand for something, something definitely, formally and historically significant, his mind would give way altogether.
Surely the ancient and time-honoured processes of history were going on still — surely they were going on. Or what could be going on? Security and predominance — in Europe, in Asia, in finance — were gravely discussed by Mr. Parham and his kindred souls in the more serious weekly and monthly reviews. There were still governments and foreign offices everywhere, and they went through the motions of a struggle for world ascendency according to the rules, decently and in order. Nothing of the slightest importance occurred now between the Powers that was not strictly confidential. Espionage had never been so universal, conscientious, and respected, and the double cross of Christian diplomacy ruled the skies from Washington to Tokio. Britain and France, America, Germany, Moscow cultivated navies and armies and carried on high dignified diplomacies and made secret agreements with and against each other just as though there had never been that stupid talk about “a war to end war.” Bolshevik Moscow, after an alarming opening phase, had settled down into the best tradition of the Czar’s Foreign Office. If Mr. Parham had been privileged to enjoy the intimacy of statesmen like Sir Austen Chamberlain and Mr. Winston Churchill or M. Poincaré, and if he could have dined with some of them, he felt sure that after dinner, with the curtains drawn and the port and the cigars moving with a pensive irregularity like chess pieces upon the reflective mahogany, things would be said, a tone would be established that would bring him back warmly and comfortably again into his complete belief in history as he had learnt it and taught it.
But somehow, in spite of his vivid illuminating books and able and sometimes quite important articles, such social occasions did not come to his assistance.
Failing such reassurances, a strange persuasion in his mind arose and gathered strength, that round and about the present appearances of historical continuity something else quite different and novel and not so much menacing as dematerializing these appearances was happening. It is hard to define what this something else was. Essentially it was a vast and increasing inattention. It was the way everybody was going on, as if all the serious things in life were no longer serious. And as if other things were. And in the more recent years of Mr. Parham’s life it had been, in particular, Sir Bussy.
One night Mr. Parham asked himself a heart-searching question. It was doubtful to him afterwards whether he had had a meditation or a nightmare, whether he had thought or dreamt he thought. Suppose, so it was put to him, that statesmen, diplomatists, princes, professors of economics, military and naval experts, and in fact all the present heirs of history, were to bring about a situation, complex, difficult, dangerous, with notes, counter notes, utterances — and even ultimatums — rising towards a declaration of war about some “question.” And suppose — oh, horror!— suppose people in general, and Sir Bussy in particular, just looked at it and said, “Gaw,” or “Meantersay?” and turned away. Turned away and went on with the things they were doing, the silly things unfit for history! What would the heirs of history do? Would the soldiers dare to hold a pistol at Sir Bussy, or the statesmen push him aside? Suppose he refused to be pushed aside and resisted in some queer circumventing way of his own. Suppose he were to say, “Cut all this right out — now.” And suppose they found they had to cut it out!
Well, what would become then of our historical inheritance? Where would the Empire be, the Powers, our national traditions and policies? It was an alien idea, this idea that the sawdust was running out of the historical tradition, so alien indeed that it surely never entered Mr. Parham’s mind when it was fully awake. There was really nothing to support it there, no group of concepts to which it could attach itself congenially, and yet, once it had secured its footing, it kept worrying at Mr. Parham’s serenity like a silly tune that has established itself in one’s brain. “They won’t obey — when the time comes they won’t obey”; that was the refrain. The generals would say, “Haw,” but the people would say, “Gaw!” And Gaw would win! In the nightmare, anyhow, Gaw won. Life after that became inconceivable to Mr. Parham. Chaos!
In which somehow, he felt, Sir Bussy might still survive, transfigured, perhaps, but surviving. Horribly. Triumphantly.
Mr. Parham came vividly and certainly awake and lay awake until dawn.
The muse of History might tell of the rise of dynasties, the ascendency of this power or that, of the onset of nationalism with Macedonia, of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of the age-long struggles of Islam and Christendom and of Latin and Greek Christianity, of the marvellous careers of Alexander and C?sar and Napoleon, unfolding the magic scroll of their records, seeking to stir up Sir Bussy to play his part, his important if subservient part in this continuing drama of hers, and Sir Bussy would reflect almost sleepily over the narrative, would seem to think nothing of the narrative, would follow some train of thought of his own into regions inaccessible to Mr. Parham, and would say, “Gaw.”
Gaw!
Mr. Parham was becoming neurasthenic. . . .
And then, to add to his troubles, there was this damned nonsense now about going to a séance and taking mediums seriously, them and their nasty, disreputable, and irritatingly inexplicable phenomena.
About dawn Mr. Parham was thinking very seriously of giving up Sir Bussy. But he had thought of that several times before and always with a similar result. Finally he went to a séance, he went to a series of séances with Sir Bussy, as this narrative will in due course relate.
When five years or more ago Mr. Parham had met Sir Bussy for the first time, the great financier had seemed to be really interested in the things of the mind, modestly but seriously interested.
Mr. Parham had talked of Michael Angelo and Botticelli at a man’s dinner given by Sebright Smith at the Rialto. It was what Mr. Parham called one of Sebright Smith’s marvellous feats of mixing and what Sebright Smith, less openly, called a “massacre.” Sebright Smith was always promising and incurring the liability for hospitality in a most careless manner, and when he had accumulated a sufficiency of obligations to bother him he gave ruthless dinners and lunches, machine-gun dinners and lunches, to work them off. Hence his secret name for these gatherings. He did not care whom he asked to meet whom, he trusted to champagne as a universal solvent, and Mr. Parham, with that liberal modern and yet cultivated mind of his, found these feasts delightfully catholic.
There is nothing like men who are not at their ease, for listening, and Mr. Parham, who was born well-informed, just let himself go. He said things about Botticelli that a more mercenary man might have made into a little book and got forty or fifty pounds for. Sir Bussy listened with an expression that anyone who did not know him might have considered malignant. But it was merely that when he was interested or when he was occupied with an idea for action he used to let the left-hand corner of his mouth hang down.
When there came a shift with the cigars and Negro singers sang Negro spirituals, Sir Bussy seized an opportunity and slipped into one of the two chairs that had become vacant on either side of Mr. Parham.
“You know about those things?” he asked, regardless of the abounding emotional richness of “Let my people go-o.”
Mr. Parham conveyed interrogation.
“Old masters, Art and all that.”
“They interest me,” said Mr. Parham, smiling with kindly friendliness, for he did not yet know the name or the power of the man to whom he was talking.
“They might have interested ME— but I cut it out. D’you ever lunch in the city?”
“Not often.”
“Well, if ever you are that way — next week, for example — ring me up at Marmion House.”
The name conveyed nothing to Mr. Parham.
“I’ll be delighted,” he said politely.
Sir Bussy, it seemed, was on his way to depart. He paused for a moment. “For all I know,” he said, “there may be a lot in Art. Do come. I was really interested.” He smiled, with a curious gleam of charm, turned off the charm, and departed briskly, in an interlude while Sebright Smith and the singers decided noisily about the next song.
Later Mr. Parham sought his host. “Who is the sturdy little man with a flushed face and wiry hair who went early?”
“Think I know everybody here?” said Sebright Smith.
“But he sat next to you!”
“Oh, THAT chap! That’s one of our conq-conquerors,” said Sebright Smith, who was drunk.
“Has he a name?”
“Has he not?” said Sebright Smith. “Sir Blasted Busy Bussy Buy-up-the-Universe Woodcock. He’s the sort of man who buys up everything. Shops and houses and factories. Estates and pot houses. Quarries. Whole trades. Buys things on the way to you. Fiddles about with them a bit before you get ’em. You can’t eat a pat of butter now in London before he’s bought and sold it. Railways he buys, hotels, cinemas and suburbs, men and women, soul and body. Mind he doesn’t buy you.”
“I’m not on the market.”
“Private treaty, I suppose,” said Sebright Smith, and realizing from Mr. Parham’s startled interrogative face that he had been guilty of some indelicacy, tried to tone it down with, “Have some more champagne?”
Mr. Parham caught the eye of an old friend and did not answer his host’s last remark. Indeed, he hardly saw any point to it, and the man was plainly drunk. He lifted a vertical hand to his friend as one might hail a cab and shouldered his way towards him.
In the course of the next few days Mr. Parham made a number of discreet inquiries about Sir Bussy, he looked him up in Who’s Who, where he found a very frank and rather self-conscious half column, and decided to accept that invitation to Marmion House in a decisive manner. If the man wanted tutoring in Art he should have tutoring in Art. Wasn’t it Lord Rosebery who said, “We must educate our masters”?
They would have a broad-minded, friendly tête-à-tête, Mr. Parham would open the golden world of Art to his host and incidentally introduce a long-cherished dream that it would cost Sir Bussy scarcely anything to make into a fine and delightful reality.
This dream, which was destined to hold Mr. Parham in resentful vassalage to Sir Bussy through long, long years of hope deferred, was the vision of a distinguished and authoritative weekly paper, with double columns and a restrained title heading, of which Mr. Parham would be the editor. It was to be one of those papers, not vulgarly gross in their circulation, but which influence opinion and direct current history throughout the civilized world. It was to be all that the Spectator, the Saturday Review, the Nation, and the New Statesman have ever been and more. It was to be largely the writing of Mr. Parham and of young men influenced and discovered by him. It was to arraign the whole spectacle of life, its public affairs, its “questions,” its science, art, and literature. It was to be understanding, advisory but always a little aloof. It was to be bold at times, stern at times, outspoken at times, but never shouting, never vulgar. As an editor one partakes of the nature of God; you are God with only one drawback, a Proprietor. But also, if you have played your cards well, you are God with a definite Agreement. And without God’s responsibility for the defects and errors of the universe you survey. You can smile and barb your wit as He cannot do. For He would be under suspicion of having led up to his own jokes.
Writing “Notes of the Week” is perhaps one of the purest pleasures life offers an intelligent, cultivated man. You encourage or you rebuke nations. You point out how Russia has erred and Germany taken your hint of the week before last. You discuss the motives of statesmen and warn bankers and colossal business adventurers. You judge judges. You have a word of kindly praise or mild contempt for the foolish multitude of writers. You compliment artists, sometimes left-handedly. The little brawling Correspondents play about your feet, writing their squabbling, protesting letters, needing sometimes your reproving pat. Every week you make or mar reputations. Criticizing everyone, you go uncriticized. You speak out of a cloud, glorious powerful and obscure. Few men are worthy of this great trust, but Mr. Parham had long felt himself among that elect minority. With difficulty he had guarded his secret, waiting for his paper as the cloistered virgin of the past waited for her lover. And here at last was Sir Bussy, Sir Bussy who could give this precious apotheosis to Mr. Parham with scarcely an effort.
He had only to say “Go” to the thing. Mr. Parham knew just where to go and just what to do. It was Sir Bussy’s great opportunity. He might evoke a God. He had neither the education nor the abilities to be a God, but he could bring a God into being.
Sir Bussy had bought all sorts of things but apparently he had never yet come into the splash and excitement of newspaper properties. It was time he did. It was time he tasted Power, Influence, and Knowledge brimming fresh from the source. His own source.
With such thoughts already pullulating in his mind Mr. Parham had gone to his first lunch at Marmion House.
Marmion House he found a busy place. It had been built by Sir Bussy. Eight and thirty companies had their offices there, and in the big archway of the Victoria Street entrance Mr. Parham was jostled by a great coming and going of swift-tripping clerks and stenographers seeking their midday refreshment. A populous lift shed passengers at every floor and left Mr. Parham alone with the lift boy for the top.
It was not to be the pleasant little tête-à-tête Mr. Parham had expected when he had telephoned in the morning. He found Sir Bussy in a large dining room with a long table surrounded by quite a number of people who Mr. Parham felt from the very outset were hangers-on and parasites of the worst description. Later he was to realize that a few of them were in a sense reputable and connected with this or that of the eight and thirty companies Sir Bussy had grouped about him, but that was not the first impression. There was a gravely alert stenographer on Sir Bussy’s left-hand side whom Mr. Parham considered much too dignified in her manner and much too graceful and well dressed for her position, and there were two very young women with grossly familiar manners who called Sir Bussy “Bussy dear” and stared at Mr. Parham as though he were some kind of foreigner. Later on in the acquaintanceship Mr. Parham was to realize that these girls were Sir Bussy’s pet nieces by marriage — he had no children of his own — but at the time Mr. Parham thought the very worst of them. They were painted. There was a very, very convex, buoyant man wearing light tweeds and with an insinuating voice who asked Mr. Parham suddenly whether he didn’t think something ought to be done about Westernhanger and then slipped off into an obscure joke with one of the nieces while Mr. Parham was still wondering who or what Westernhanger might be. And there was a small, preoccupied-looking man with that sort of cylinder forehead one really ought to take off before sitting down to lunch, who Mr. Parham learnt was Sir Titus Knowles of Harley Street. There was no serious conversation at lunch but only a throwing about of remarks. A quiet man sitting between Mr. Parham and Sir Bussy asked Mr. Parham whether he did not find the architecture of the city abominable.
“Consider New York,” he said.
Mr. Parham weighed it. “New York is different.”
The quiet man after a pause for reflection said that was true but still. . . .
Sir Bussy had greeted Mr. Parham’s arrival with his flash of charm and had told him to “sit down anywhere.” Then after a little obscure badinage across the table with one of the pretty painted girls about the possibility of her playing “real tennis” in London, the host subsided into his own thoughts. Once he said, “Gaw!”— about nothing.
The lunch had none of the quiet orderliness of a West-End lunch party. Three or four young men, brisk but not dignified, in white linen jackets did the service. There were steak-and-kidney pudding and roast beef, celery for everyone in the American fashion, and a sideboard with all manner of cold meat, cold fruit tarts, and bottles of drink thereon. On the table were jugs of some sort of cup. Mr. Parham thought it best became a simple scholar and a gentleman to disdain the plutocrat’s wines and drink plain beer from a tankard. When the eating was over half the party melted away, including the graceful secretary whose face Mr. Parham was beginning to find interesting, and the rest moved with Sir Bussy into a large low lounge where there were cigars and cigarettes, coffee and liqueurs.
“We’re going to this tennis place with Tremayne,” the pretty girls announced together.
“Not Lord Tremayne!” thought Mr. Parham and regarded the abdominal case with a new interest. The fellow had been at C. C. C.
“If he tries to play tennis with clubs and solid balls after the lunch he’s eaten, he’ll drop dead,” said Sir Bussy.
“You don’t know my powers of assimilation,” said the very convex gentleman.
“Have some brandy, Tremayne, and make a job of it,” said Sir Bussy.
“Brandy,” said Tremayne to a passing servitor. “A double brandy.”
“Get his lordship some old brandy,” said Sir Bussy.
So it really was Lord Tremayne! But how inflated! Mr. Parham was already a tutor when Lord Tremayne had come up, a beautifully slender youth. He came up and he was sent down. But in the interval he had been greatly admired.
The three departed, and Sir Bussy came to Mr. Parham.
“Got anything to do this afternoon?” he asked.
Mr. Parham had nothing of a compelling nature.
“Let’s go and look at some pictures,” said Sir Bussy. “I want to. D’you mind? You seem to have ideas about them.”
“There’s so MANY pictures,” said Mr. Parham in rather a jolly tone and smiling.
“National Gallery, I mean. And the Tate, perhaps. Academy’s still open. Dealers’ shows if necessary. We ought to get round as much as we need to in the afternoon. It’s a general idea I want. And how it looks to you.”
As Sir Bussy’s Rolls-Royce went its slick, swift way westward through the afternoon traffic he made their objective clearer. “I want to LOOK at this painting,” he said, with his voice going up at the ‘look.’ “What’s it all ABOUT? What’s it all FOR? How did it get there? What does it all amount to?”
The corner of his mouth went down and he searched his companion’s face with an extraordinary mixture of hostility and appeal in his eyes.
Mr. Parham would have liked to have had notice of the question. He gave Sir Bussy his profile.
“What is Art?” questioned Mr. Parham, playing for time. “A big question.”
“Not Art — just this painting,” corrected Sir Bussy.
“It’s Art,” said Mr. Parham. “Art in its nature. One and Indivisible.”
“Gaw,” said Sir Bussy softly and became still more earnestly expectant.
“A sort of QUINTESSENCE, I suppose,” Mr. Parham tried. He waved a hand with a gesture that had earned him the unjust and unpleasant nickname of “Bunch of Fingers” among his undergraduates. For his hands were really very beautifully proportioned. “A kind of getting the concentrated quality of loveliness, of beauty, out of common experience.”
“That we certainly got to look for,” injected Sir Bussy.
“And fixing it. Making it permanent.”
Sir Bussy spoke again after a pause for reflection. He spoke with an air of confiding thoughts long suppressed. “Sure these painters haven’t been putting it over us a bit? I thought — the other night — while you were talking . . . Just an idea. . . .”
Mr. Parham regarded his host slantingly. “No,” he said slowly and judiciously, “I don’t think they’ve been PUTTING IT OVER US.” Just the least little stress on the last four words — imperceptible to Sir Bussy.
“Well, that’s what we got to see.”
A queer beginning for a queer afternoon — an afternoon with a Barbarian. But indisputably, as Sebright Smith had said, “one of our conquerors.” He wasn’t a Barbarian to be sniffed away. He fought for his barbarism like a bulldog. Mr. Parham had been taken by surprise. He wished more and more that he had had notice of the question that was pressed upon him as the afternoon wore on. Then he could have chosen his pictures and made an orderly course of it. As it was he got to work haphazard, and instead of fighting a set battle for Art and the wonder and sublimity of it, Mr. Parham found himself in the position of a commander who is called upon with the enemy already in his camp. It was a piecemeal discussion.
Sir Bussy’s attitude so far as Mr. Parham could make it out from his fragmentary and illiterate method of expressing himself, was one of skeptical inquiry. The man was uncultivated — indeed, he was glaringly uncultivated — but there was much natural intelligence in his make-up. He had evidently been impressed profoundly by the honour paid to the names of the great Princes of pictorial art by all men of taste and intelligence, and he could not see why they were exalted to such heights. So he wanted it explained to him. He had evidently vast curiosities. To-day it was Michael Angelo and Titian he questioned. To-morrow it might be Beethoven or Shakespeare. He wasn’t to be fobbed off by authority. He didn’t admit authority. He had to be met as though the acquiescence and approval of generations to these forms of greatness had never been given.
He went up the steps from the entrance to the National Gallery with such a swift assurance that the thought occurred to Mr. Parham that he had already paid a visit there. He made at once for the Italians.
“Now, here’s pictures,” he said, sweeping on through one room to another and only slowing down in the largest gallery of all. “They’re fairly interesting and amoosing. The most part. A lot of them are bright. They might be brighter, but I suppose none of them are exactly fast colour. You can see the fun the chaps have had painting them. I grant all that. I wouldn’t object to having quite a lot of them about in Carfex House. I’d like to swipe about with a brush myself a bit. But when it comes to making out they’re something more than that and speaking of them in a sort of hushed religious way as though those chaps knew something special about heaven and just let it out, I don’t get you. I don’t for the life of me get you.”
“But here, for instance,” said Mr. Parham, “this Francesca — the sweetness and delicacy — surely DIVINE isn’t too much for it.”
“Sweetness and delicacy. Divine! Well, take a spring day in England, take the little feathers on a pheasant’s breast, or bits of a sunset, or the morning light through a tumbler of flowers on a window sill. Surely things of that sort are no end sweeter and more delicate and more divine and all the rest of it than this — this PICKLED stuff.”
“Pickled!” For a moment Mr. Parham was overcome.
“Pickled prettiness,” said Sir Bussy defiantly. “Pickled loveliness, if you like. . . . And a lot of it not very lovely and not so marvellously well pickled.”
Sir Bussy continued hitting Mr. Parham while he was down. “All these Madonnas. Did they WANT to paint them or were they obliged? Who ever thought a woman sitting up on a throne like that was any catch?”
“Pickled!” Mr. Parham clung to the main theme. “NO!”
Sir Bussy, abruptly expectant, dropped the corner of his mouth and brought his face sideways towards Mr. Parham.
Mr. Parham waved his hand about and found the word he wanted. “Selected.”
He got it still better. “Selected and fixed. These men went about the world seeing — seeing with all their might. Seeing with gifts. Born to see. And they tried — and I think succeeded — in seizing something of their most intense impressions. For us. The Madonna was often — was usually — no more than an excuse. . . .”
Sir Bussy’s mouth resumed its more normal condition, and he turned with an appearance of greater respect towards the pictures again. He would give them a chance under that plea. But his scrutiny did not last for long.
“That thing,” he said, returning to the object of their original remarks.
“Francesca’s Baptism,” breathed Mr. Parham.
“To my mind it’s not a selection: it’s an assembly. Things he liked painting. The background is jolly, but only because it reminds you of things you’ve seen. I’m not going to lie down in front of it and worship. And most of this —”
He seemed to indicate the entire national collection.
“— is just painting.”
“I must contest,” said Mr. Parham. “I must contest.”
He pleaded the subtle colouring of Filippo Lippi, the elation and grace and classic loveliness of Botticelli; he spoke of richness, anatomical dexterity, virtuosity, and culminated at last in the infinite solemnity of Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks. “The mystery, the serene mystery of that shadowed woman’s face; the sweet wisdom of the Angel’s self-content,” said Mr. Parham. “Painting! It’s Revelation.”
“Gaw,” said Sir Bussy, head on one side.
He was led from picture to picture like an obstinate child. “I’m not saying the stuff’s BAD,” he repeated; “I’m not saying it isn’t interesting; but I don’t see the call for superlatives. It’s being reminded of things, and it’s you really that has the things. Taking it altogether,” and he surveyed the collection, “I’ll admit it’s clever, sensitive work, but I’m damned if I see anything divine.”
Also he made a curiously ungracious concession to culture. “After a bit,” he said, “one certainly gets one’s eye in. Like being in the dark in a cinema.”
But it would be tedious to record all his crude reactions to loveliness that have become the dearest heritage of our minds. He said Raphael was “dam’ genteel.” He rebelled at El Greco. “Byzantine solemnity,” he repeated after Mr. Parham, “it’s more like faces seen in the back of a spoon.” But he came near cheering Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way. “Gaw,” he said warmly. “Now THAT! It isn’t decent but it’s damn fine.”
He went back to it.
It was in vain that Mr. Parham tried to beguile him past the Rokeby Venus.
“Who did that?” he asked, as if he suspected Mr. Parham.
“Velasquez.”
“Well, what’s the essential difference between that and a good big photograph of a naked woman tinted and posed to excite you?”
Mr. Parham was a little ashamed to find himself arguing an issue so crude in a public place and audibly, but Sir Bussy was regarding him with that unconscious menace of his which compelled replies.
“The two things aren’t in the same world. The photograph is material, factual, personal, individual. Here the beauty, the long delightful lines of a slender human body, are merely the theme of a perfect composition. The body becomes transcendental. It is sublimated. It is robbed of all individual defect and individual coarseness.”
“Nonsense! that girl’s individualized enough for — anybody.”
“I do NOT agree. Profoundly I do NOT agree.”
“Gaw! I’m not quarrelling with the picture, only I don’t see the force of all this transcending and sublimating. I like it — just as I like that Tintoretto. But a pretty naked young woman is beautiful anywhere and anyhow, especially if you’re in the mood, and I don’t see why a poor little smut seller in the street should be run in for selling just exactly what anyone in the world can come here to see — and buy photographs of in the vestibule. It isn’t Art I’m objecting to, but the Airs Art gives itself. It’s just as if Art had been asked to dinner at Buckingham Palace and didn’t want to be seen about with its poor relations. Who got just as much right to live.”
Mr. Parham moved on with an expression of face — as if the discussion had decayed unpleasantly.
“I wonder if there is time to get on to the Tate,” he considered. “There you’ll find the British school and the wild uncharted young.” He could not refrain from a delicate, almost imperceptible sneer. “Their pictures are newer. You may find them brighter and more pleasing on that account.”
They did go on to the Tate Gallery. But Sir Bussy found no further objections to art there nor any reconciliation. His chief judgment was to ascribe “cheek” to Mr. Augustus John. As he and Mr. Parham left the building he seemed to reflect, and then he delivered himself of what was evidently his matured answer to his self-posed question for that afternoon.
“I don’t see that this Painting gets you out to anything. I don’t see that it gets you out of anything. It’s not discovery and it’s not escape. People talk as if it was a door out of this damned world. Well — IS it?”
“It has given colour and interest to thousands — myriads — of quietly observant lives.”
“Cricket can do that,” said Sir Bussy.
Mr. Parham had no answer to such a remark. For some brief moments it seemed to him that the afternoon had been a failure. He had done his best, but this was an obdurate mind, difficult to dominate, and he had, he felt, failed completely to put the idea of Art over to it. They stood side by side in silence in the evening glow, waiting for Sir Bussy’s chauffeur to realize that they had emerged. This plutocrat, thought Mr. Parham, will never understand me, never understand the objectives of a true civilization, never endow the paper I need. I must keep polite and smiling as a gentleman should, but I have wasted time and hope on him.
In the car, however, Sir Bussy displayed an unexpected gratitude, and Mr. Parham realized his pessimism had been premature.
“Well,” said Sir Bussy, “I got a lot out of this afternoon. It’s been a Great Time. You’ve interested me. I shall remember all sorts of things you’ve said about this Art. We held on fine. We looked and we looked. I think I got your point of view; I really think I have. That other evening I said, ‘I must get that chap’s point of view. He’s amazing.’ I hope this is only the first of quite a lot of times when I’m going to have the pleasure of meeting you and getting your point of view. . . . Like pretty women?”
“Eh?” said Mr. Parham.
“Like pretty women?”
“Man is mortal,” said Mr. Parham with the air of a confession.
“I’d love to see you at a party I’m giving at the Savoy. Thursday next. Supper and keep on with it. Everything fit to look at on the London stage and most of it showing. Dancing.”
“I’m not a dancing man, you know.”
“Nor me. But YOU ought to take lessons. You’ve got the sort of long leg to do it. Anyhow, we might sit in a corner together and you tell me something about Women. Like you’ve been telling me about Art. I been so busy, but I’ve always wanted to know. And you can take people down to supper whenever you feel dullish. Any number of them ready to be taken down to supper. Again and again and again and again, as the poem says. We don’t stint the supper.”
It was not clear to Mr. Parham that he would get his newspaper, but it was quite clear that he had a reasonable prospect of becoming a sort of Mentor to Sir Bussy. Just what sort of Mentor it was still too early to guess. If you will imagine Socrates as tall and formally good-looking and Alcibiades as short and energetic, and if you will suppose that unfortunate expedition to Syracuse replaced under sound advice by a masterful consolidation of Greece; if indeed you will flatten that parallel to the verge of extinction without actually obliterating it, you will get something of the flavour of Mr. Parham’s anticipations. Or perhaps Aristotle and Alexander will better serve our purpose. It is one of the endless advantages of a sound classical education that you need never see, you can never see, a human relationship in its vulgar simplicity; there is always the enrichment of these regurgitated factors. You lose all sense of current events; you simply get such history as you have swallowed repeating itself.
In this party at the Savoy Mr. Parham saw Sir Bussy seriously engaged in expenditure for the first time. A common mind would have been mightily impressed by the evident height, width, depth, and velocity of the flow, and even Mr. Parham found himself doing little sums and estimates to get an idea of what this one evening must be costing his new acquaintance. It would, Mr. Parham reckoned, have maintained a weekly of the very highest class for three years or more.
Mr. Parham made it his rule to dress correctly and well for every social occasion. He did not believe in that benefit of clergy which is used as an excuse by men of learning and intellectual distinction for low collars on high occasions and antiquated smoking jackets at dances. He thought it better to let people understand that on occasion a philosopher is fully equal to being a man of the world. His tallness permitted a drooping urbanity, a little suggestive of Lord Balfour, and on the whole he knew himself with his fine and fastidious features to be anything but ill-looking. His Gibus hat, a trifle old-fashioned in these slovenly times, kept his bunch of fingers within bounds, and his fine gold chain was plainly ancestral.
The entire Savoy had placed itself at the disposal of Sir Bussy. Its servants were his servants. In their gray plush breeches and yellow waistcoats they looked like inherited family servitors. In the cloakroom he found Sir Titus Knowles of the stupendous brow divesting himself of an extremely small black hat and a huge cloak.
“Hullo!” said Sir Titus. “YOU here!”
“Apparently,” said Mr. Parham taking it in good part.
“Ah,” said Sir Titus.
“No need for a ticket, Sir Titus,” said the receiver of cloaks. “Too well known, sir.”
Sir Titus disappeared, smiling faintly.
But Mr. Parham received a ticket for his overcoat.
He drifted past the men waiting for their womankind towards a dazzling crowd of lovely and extremely expensive-looking ladies with shining arms and shoulders and backs and a considerable variety of men. There was talk like a great and greatly fluctuating wind blowing through tin leaved trees. A sort of reception was in progress. Sir Bussy appeared abruptly.
“Good,” he said with gusto. “We must have a talk. You know Pomander Poole? She’s dying to meet you.”
He vanished, and that evening Mr. Parham never had opportunity to exchange more than two or three missile sentences with him, though he had endless glimpses of him at a distance, moodily active or artificially gay.
Miss Pomander Poole began very seriously by asking Mr. Parham his name, which Sir Bussy, through inadvertency or a momentary forgetfulness, had never mentioned. “Parham is the name of the man you are dying to meet,” said Mr. Parham, and did a dazzling smile with all his excellent teeth, except, of course, the molars at the back.
“Bussy’s more like a flea than ever to-night,” said Miss Pomander Poole. “He ought to be called the Quest. Or the little wee Grail. I’ve seen six people trying to catch him.”
She was a dark, handsome lady with tormented-looking eyes and more breadth than is fashionable. Her voice was rich and fine. She surveyed the long room before them. “Why in heaven he gives these parties I can’t imagine,” she said, and sighed and became still, to show she had finished her part in the conversation.
Mr. Parham hung fire. The name of Pomander Poole was very familiar to him, but for the life of him at that moment he could not connect it with books, articles, plays, pictures, scandals, society gossip, or the music-hall stage with any of the precision necessary if he was to talk in the easy, helpful, rather amused way becoming to a philosopher in his man-of-the-world mood. So he had to resort to what was almost questioning.
“I’ve known our host only very recently,” said Mr. Parham, plainly inviting comment.
“He doesn’t exist,” she said.
Apparently we were going to be brilliant, and if so Mr. Parham was not the man to miss his cues. “We’ve met a sort of simulacrum,” he protested.
She disregarded Mr. Parham’s words altogether. “He doesn’t exist,” she sighed. “So not only can no-one else catch him, he can’t catch himself. He’s always turning back the bedclothes and having a good look for himself, but it’s never any good.”
The lady certainly had breadth.
“He acquires wealth,” said Mr. Parham.
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” she said with the weariness of one who answers a familiar catechism. She was looking about her with her sombre, appealing eyes as she spoke, as if she were looking for someone to relieve her of Mr. Parham.
“To-night the vacuum is full of interesting people.”
“I don’t know a tithe of them.”
“I’m sufficiently unworldly to find their appearances interesting.”
“I’m sufficiently worldly to build no hopes on that.”
A second phase of awkwardness hung between Mr. Parham and his companion. He wished she could be just wiped out of existence and somebody easier put in her place. But she it was who saved the situation. “I suppose it’s too early to begin going down to supper,” she said; “down or up or wherever it is. These vacuum parties provoke feelings of extraordinary emptiness in me.”
“Well, let’s explore,” said Mr. Parham, doing his smile again and taking the lady in tow.
“I’m sure I’ve heard you lecture at the Royal Institution,” she opened.
“Never been there,” said Mr. Parham.
“I’ve seen you there. Usually two or three of you. You’re a man of science.”
“Classical, dear lady. Academic. With a few old and tested ideas like favourite pipes that I brood over again and again — and an inky forefinger.”
Now that wasn’t so bad. Miss Poole looked at him as though she had just observed his existence for the first time. A ray of interest shone and then dissolved into other preoccupations.
When we say that Mr. Parham took the lady in tow and found the supper room we defer rather to the way in which he would have liked to have it put. But in fact, as they made their way through the brilliant multitude, she was usually leading in a distraught yet purposive manner by anything between two yards and six. Supper had indeed begun noisily and vigorously, and Miss Poole, still leading, was hailed by a group of people who seemed to be not so much supping as laying in provisions. “What are you saying to-night, Pomander?” cried a handsome young man, and she melted into the centre of the group without any attempt to introduce Mr. Parham. “I’m doubting Bussy’s real existence,” answered Miss Poole, “and craving for his food.”
“Like a modern Christian and his God,” said someone.
Mr. Parham travelled round the outskirts of the group and came to the glittering tablecloth. The board was bountiful, and the only drink, it seemed to Mr. Parham, was champagne, poured from glass jugs. He tried to get drink for Miss Poole, but she was already supplied, so he drank himself, pretended to participate in the conversation of the backs that were turned towards him, looked amused, and ate a couple of chicken sandwiches with an air of careless ease. Miss Poole had brightened considerably. She smacked a large ham-faced Jew on the cheek with a paté de foie gras sandwich — for no apparent reason. Perhaps she liked him. Or perhaps it was just playfulness. She led up to and repeated her picture of Sir Bussy looking for himself in the bedclothes, and it was hailed with wild delight. Amidst the applause a small blonde youth turned round with every appearance of extreme caution, repeated the delightful invention carefully to Mr. Parham, and then forgot him again instantly.
Mr. Parham tried not to feel that the group had — as Mr. Aldous Huxley, in that physiological manner of his, might say — excreted him, but that was very much his feeling, and he was bearing up against it with a second glass of champagne when he discovered Sir Titus Knowles close beside him and evidently also undergoing elimination from an adjacent group of bright young things. “Hullo,” he said. “YOU here?”
“Rather fun,” said Sir Titus insincerely, and then out of nowhere came the most ravishing of youthful blondes, all warmth and loveliness, pretending to be out of breath and addressing herself particularly to the great consultant.
“Gentleman of the name of Parham, Sir Titus,” she said in a warm husky voice. “Meanwhile something to eat, please.”
Her immediate need was supplied. “When I asked Bussy what’s he like, he said, ‘Oh, you’ll know him when you see him.’ I got to find him, take him, and make him dance. He bet me. Parham. Shall I go round singing it? I suppose there’s about a million people here. I’ll be thrown out for accosting.”
She glanced at Sir Titus, detected a directive grimace, became alert to the situation, and faced Mr. Parham. “Of course!” she said with her mouth full. “Right in one. My name’s Gaby Greuze. You’re the handsomest man here. I might have known Bussy wouldn’t put me off with anything cheap.”
Mr. Parham’s expression mingled delight and candid disavowal. “You’ll never make me dance,” he said.
The accidental pressures of the crowd about them brought her extremely close to him. What a lovely face it was, seen so nearly! Impudent, blue eyed! The modelling of the eyelids was exquisite. The little soft corner of the drooping mouth! “I’ll make you dance. I c’d make you do no end of things. Cause why?”
She took a healthy mouthful of ham and munched.
“I like you.”
She nodded confirmation. Mr. Parham’s brilliant smile came unbidden. “I’m not going to resist for a moment, I can assure you,” he said and added with the air of a redoubtable character, “Trust me.” Like her! He could have eaten her. Yes, this was something better than the apparently premeditated brilliance of Miss Pomander Poole. He forgot that disconcerting person ostentatiously there and then. She might hit them all with sandwiches and dig everybody in the ribs with chocolate éclairs for all he cared.
Miss Gaby Greuze addressed herself to her task with deliberation and intelligence. There is nothing so private and intimate in the world as a duologue in a crowd engaged in eating and talking. The sounds of Sir Bussy’s party have already been compared to a wind in a forest of metallic leaves. Plates, knives, and dishes were added now to the orchestra. These woven sounds, this metallic tissue in the air seemed to make an arbour, a hiding place for Mr. Parham and his lovely companion. From this secret bower he had but to thrust an arm and get more champagne, salads of diverse sorts in little dishes, everything nice in aspic and fruits in their season and out of it. Then he held out his winnings to her and she smiled her thanks at him with those incredibly lovely eyes and partook. Afterwards they went off with arms entwined, roguishly seeking a “quiet corner” where she could teach him his elements before he made his début on the dancing floor. They got on together wonderfully. His fine classical face bending down to say airy nothings was caressed by the natural silk of her hair.
There was something in this experience that reminded Mr. Parham of Horace and the naughtier side of the Latin poets, and anything that reminded him of Horace and the naughtier side of the Latin poets could not, he felt, be altogether vulgar or bad. And there was a moment or so when nothing but his classical training, his high literary and university standing, his sense of the extraordinary number of unexpected corners, casual mirrors, and observant attendants in the Savoy, and also, we must add, something stern and purposeful in himself, restrained him from seizing this most provocative young woman and showing her what a man of learning and spirit could do in the way of passionate pressure with his lips. He was flushed now and none the worse looking for that.
“Don’t forget what I’ve told you,” said Miss Gaby Greuze, guiding him back towards the more frequented regions of the party; “keep your head — best keep it in your heels — and the next dance is ours. Let’s go and sit and look at them, and I’ll have a lemonade.”
Mr. Parham smiled to think what some of his undergraduates would make of it if they could see him now. He sat by his partner with his hand just a little familiarly on the back of her chair and talked like an intimate.
“I find Sir Bussy a marvel,” he said, blinking at the throng.
“He’s a very Teasing Marvel,” she said. “One of these days he’ll get his little face smacked.”
“I hope not.”
“It won’t get that damned grin of his off. He ought to find something better in life than pulling people’s legs — all the money he’s got.”
“I’ve only just been drawn into the vortex.”
But something missed fire in that remark, because she said, “It’s one of the selectest clubs in London, I believe,” and seemed to respect him more.
“And NOW,” she said, standing up, and prepared to carry Mr. Parham into the dance so soon as sufficient couples had accumulated to veil the naked bareness of the floor. She had strong arms, Mr. Parham realized with amazement, a strong will, and her instructions had been explicit. Mr. Parham had got as near as he was ever likely to get to modern dancing. “Bussy’s over there,” she said and cut a corner towards their host.
He was standing quite alone near the gesticulating black and brown band, concentrated, it would seem, upon their elusive transitions. His hands were deep in his pockets and his head swayed dreamily. Mr. Parham and his partner circled smiling about him twice before he became aware of them.
“Gaw!” said Sir Bussy, looking up at last. “It hasn’t taken you an hour!”
“This him?” she demanded triumphantly.
“That’s him,” said Sir Bussy.
“You’ve lost.”
“No. It’s you have won. I’m quite content. I congratulate you on your dancing, Parham. I knew you’d make a dancer directly I saw you. Given a proper dancing mistress. Life’s full of lessons for all of us. How d’you like her? Puts old Velasquez in his place. A young mistress is better than an old master, eh?”
“After that insult I’ll go and eat you out of house and home,” Miss Greuze retorted, missing the point of a remark for the second time that night, and she made Mr. Parham take her down to supper again without completing the dance. He would have liked to go on dancing with her forever, but apparently the dance had served her purpose.
She became curiously angry. “Bussy never leaves you with the feel of winning,” she said, “even when you’ve won. I’ll do him down one of these days — if I have to bust everything to do it. He puts ideas into one’s head.”
“What ideas?” asked Mr. Parham.
“I wonder if I told you . . .” she speculated with a strange sudden expression in her eyes, and she seemed to measure Mr. Parham.
“You can tell me anything,” said he.
“Sometimes telling means a lot. No — not just yet, anyhow. Very likely never.”
“I can hope,” said Mr. Parham, feeling that might mean anything or nothing.
At supper Mr. Parham lost her. He lost her while he was thinking over this queer little passage. He was not to learn what this idea of hers was for quite a long time. A sudden tide of young things like herself, but not so perfectly beautiful, poured round and over her and submerged and took possession of her, caressing her most intimately and calling her pet names: Gaby Sweet! Gaby Perfect! Gaby Darling! some sort of professional sisterhood of dancers or young actresses. He drifted off and was almost entangled again with Miss Pomander Poole, before he realized his danger.
For a time he was lonely, seeking but failing to restore contact with his all too popular Gaby. By some fatality during this period he seemed always to be drifting towards Pomander Poole, and an equal fatality drove her towards him. An unconscious dramatic urge in her, a mechanical trick of thinking in gestures, made it all too plain to him how little she wanted to resume their conversation. It looked as if she talked to herself also, but happily he was never quite close enough to hear. Then Lord Tremayne turned up, bright and hearty, with “You never told me what you thought about Westernhanger.”
Mr. Parham’s momentary tension was relieved when the young man added, “It’s too late now, so don’t let’s bother about it. I call it a Disgrace. . . . I doubt if you know many people in this shallow, glittering world. Eh? Ask me for anyone you fancy. I know the blessed lot.”
He then proceeded to introduce Mr. Parham to two countesses and his sister-inlaw, Lady Judy Percival, who happened to be handy, and so departed upon some quest of his own. The introductions, as people say of vaccinations, didn’t “take” very well, the three ladies fell into a talk among themselves, and Mr. Parham had a quiet, thoughtful time for a while, surveying the multitude. The elation of his success with Gabrielle Greuze had a little abated. Later on perhaps he would be able to detach her again and resume their talk. He noted Sir Titus in the distance wearing his forehead, he thought, just a trifle too much over one eye and with his arm manifestly about the waist of a slender, dark lady in green. It helped to remind Mr. Parham of his own dignity. He leant against a wall and became observantly still.
Strange to reflect that physically this night party given by a London plutocrat in a smart hotel was probably ten times as luminous, multitudinous, healthy, and lovely as any court pageant of Elizabethan or Jacobean days. Twenty times. How small and dusky such an occasion would seem if it could be trailed across this evening’s stirring spectacle! Brocades and wired dresses, none of them too fresh and clean, lit by candles and torches. Astounding, the material exuberance of our times. Yet that dim little assembly had its Shakespeare, its Bacon, its Burleigh, and its Essex. It had become history through and through. It was an everlasting fount of book writing, “studies,” comments, allusions. The lightest caresses of the Virgin queen were matters now for the gravest of scholars. Narrow rooms, perhaps, but spacious times.
But all this present thrust and gaiety!— where did it lead? Could it ever become history in any sense of the word? In the court of Queen Elizabeth they moulded the beginnings of America, they laid the foundations of modern science, they forged the English language which these people here with their slang and curt knowingness of phrase were rapidly turning to dust. A few artists there might be here, a stripling maker of modern comedies. Mr. Parham would grant something for the people who might be unknown to him, and still the balance against this parade was terrible.
The jazz music came out of the background and began to pound and massage his nerves. It beat about the gathering monstrously, as though it were looking for him, and then it would seem to discover him and come and rock him. It smote suddenly into his heart with jungle cries of infinite melancholy and then took refuge in dithering trivialities and a pretence of never having been anything but trivial. It became intimate; it became suggestively obscene. Drums and bone clappers and buzzers. He realized how necessary it was to keep on dancing or talking here, talking fast and loud, to sustain one’s self against that black cluster of musicians. How alien they were, almost of another species, with their shining exultant faces, their urgent gestures! What would the Virgin Queen, what would her dear and most faithful Burleigh have made of that bronze-faced conductor?
Queer to think it was she who had, so to speak, sown the seed of that Virginia from which in all probability he came. He seemed now to be hounding on these whites to some mysterious self-effacement and self-destruction. They moved like marionettes to his exertions. . . .
Such exercises of an observant, thoughtful, well stored mind were interrupted by the reappearance of Lord Tremayne, encumbered with one of the countesses he had already once introduced to Mr. Parham.
“Here’s the very man,” he cried joyously. “You know my cousin Lady Glassglade! If anyone can tell you all about Westernhanger, HE can. He talked about it MARVELLOUSLY the other day. Marvellously!”
Mr. Parham was left with Lady Glassglade.
The Glassglades had a place in Worcestershire and were decidedly people to know. Though what the lady could be doing here was perplexing. Sir Bussy’s social range was astonishing. She was a little smiling lady with slightly bleached hair and infinite self-possession. Mr. Parham bowed gracefully. “We are too near the band for talking,” he said. “Would you care to go down to the supper room?”
“There was such a crowd. I couldn’t get anything,” said the lady.
Mr. Parham intimated that all that could be changed.
“And I came on here because I was hungry!”
Charming! They got on very well together, and he saw that she had all she needed. He was quietly firm about it. They talked of the place in Worcestershire and of the peculiar ENGLISH charm of Oxfordshire, and then they talked of their host. Lady Glassglade thought Sir Bussy was “simply wonderful.” His judgments in business, she was told, were instinctive, so swift he was able to seize on things while other men were just going about and asking questions. He must be worth eight or ten millions.
“And yet he strikes me as a LONELY figure,” said Mr. Parham. “Lonely and detached.”
Lady Glassglade agreed that he was detached.
“We haven’t assimilated him,” said Mr. Parham, using his face to express a finely constituted social system suffering from indigestion.
“We have not,” said Lady Glassglade.
“I’ve met him quite recently,” said Mr. Parham. “He seems strangely typical of the times. All this new wealth, so sure, so bold and so incomparably lacking in noblesse oblige.”
“It IS rather like that,” said Lady Glassglade.
They both replenished their glasses with more of Sir Bussy’s champagne.
“When one considers the sense of obligation our old territorial families displayed . . .”
“Exactly,” said Lady Glassglade sadly.
And then recovering her spirits, “All the same, he’s rather fun.”
Mr. Parham looked wider and further. He glanced down the corridors of history and faced the dark menace of the future. “I wonder,” he said.
It was quite a time before he and Lady Glassglade got dissociated. Mr. Parham was wistfully humorous about a project of Oxford offering “post graduate courses” for the nouveau riche. Lady Glassglade seemed to be greatly amused by the idea.
“With tennis, table manners, grouse shooting and professional golf.”
Lady Glassglade laughed that well known merry laugh of hers. Mr. Parham was encouraged to elaborate the idea. He invented a Ritz College and a Claridge’s College and a Majestic all competing against each other. Loud speakers from the lecture rooms by each bedside.
As the night drew on Mr. Parham’s memories of Sir Bussy’s party lost the sharp distinctness of his earlier impressions. In some way he must have lost Lady Glassglade, because when he was talking of the duty under which even a nominal aristocracy lay to provide leadership for the masses, he looked round to see if she appreciated his point, and she had evidently been gone some time. A sort of golden gloom, a massive and yet humorous solemnity, had slowly but surely replaced the rhythmic glittering of his earlier mental state. He talked to strange people about their host. “He is,” said Mr. Parham, “a lonely and leaderless soul. Why? Because he has no tradition.”
He remembered standing quite quite still for a very long time, admiring and pitying a very beautiful tall and slender woman with a quiet face, who was alone and who seemed to be watching for someone who did not come. He was moved to go up to her and say very softly and clearly to her, “Why so pensive?”
Then, as startled and surprised she turned those lovely violet eyes to him, he would overwhelm her with a torrent of brilliant conversation. He would weave fact and fancy together. He would compare Sir Bussy to Trimalchio. He would give a brief but vivid account of the work of Petronius. He would go on to relate all sorts of curious impish facts about Queen Elizabeth and Cleopatra and people like that, and she would be fascinated.
“Tell me,” he said to a young man with an eye-glass who had drifted near him, and repeated, “Tell me.”
He found something queer and interesting had happened to his fingers as he gesticulated, and for a time this held his attention to the exclusion of other matters.
The young man’s expression changed from impatience to interest and sympathy. “Tell you WHAT?” he asked, getting first Mr. Parham’s almost autonomous hand and then Mr. Parham himself well into the focus of the eye-glass.
“Who is that perfect lovely lady in black and — I think they are called sequins, over there?”
“That, sir, is the Duchess of Hichester.”
“Your servant,” said Mr. Parham.
His mood had changed. He was weary of this foolish, noisy, shallow, nocturnal, glittering great party. Monstrous party. Party outside history, beginning nowhere, going nowhere. All mixed up. Duchesses and dancers. Professors, plutocrats, and parasites. He wanted to go. Only one thing delayed him for a time; he had completely lost his Gibus hat. He patted his pockets; he surveyed the circumjacent floor. It had gone.
Queer!
Far off he saw a man carrying a Gibus hat, an unmistakable Gibus. Should he whip it out of his hand with a stern “Excuse me?”
But how was Mr. Parham to prove it was his Gibus hat?
Mr. Parham woke up with a start. He remembered now quite clearly that he had put down his Gibus hat on the table in the supper room. Some officious attendant had no doubt whisked it aside. He must write to the Savoy people about it in the morning.
“Sir” or “Dear Sirs” or “Mr. Parham presents his compliments.” Not too austere. Not too familiar. . . . Ta ra ra — ink a-poo poo.
If he had left his Gibus he seemed to have brought home the greater part of the jazz band. He had got it now in his head, and there, with all the irrepressible vigour of the Negro musician, it was still energetically at work. It had a large circular brassy headache for a band stand. Since it rendered sleep impossible and reading for some reason undesirable, Mr. Parham thought it best to lie still in the dark — or rather the faint dawn — abandoning himself to the train of thought it trailed after it.
It had been a SILLY evening.
Oh! a silly evening!
Mr. Parham found himself filled with a sense of missed opportunities, of distractions foolishly pursued, of a lack of continuity and self-control.
That girl Gaby Greuze — she had been laughing at him. Anyhow, she might have been laughing at him. HAD she been laughing at him?
The endocranial orchestra had evoked the figure of Sir Bussy, alone and unprotected, standing, waving his head to its subtropical exuberances. Moody he had seemed, mentally vacant for the moment. It would of course have been perfectly easy to catch him in that phase, caught him and got hold of him. Mr. Parham could have gone up to him and said something pregnant to him, quietly but clearly.
“Vanitas vanitatum,” he could have said, for example, and, since one never knows where one may not strike upon virgin ignorance in these new men, a translation might have been added tactfully and at once: “Vanity of vanities.”
And why? Because he had no past. Because he had lost touch with the past. A man who has no past has no future. And so on to the forward-looking attitude — and the influential weekly.
But instead of telling this to Sir Bussy himself, straight and plain, Mr. Parham had just wandered about telling it to Gaby Greuze, to Lady Glassglade, to casual strangers, any old people. “I am not used to action,” groaned Mr. Parham to his God. “I am not direct. And opportunity passes me by.”
For a time he lay and wondered if it would not be good for all scholars and men of thought to be OBLIGED to take decisive action of some sort at least once a day. Then their wills would become nervous and muscular. But then —? Would they lose critical acuteness? Would they become crude?
After a time he was back arguing in imagination with Sir Bussy.
“You think this life is pleasure,” he would say. “It is not. It is nothing. It is less than nothing. It is efflorescence.”
“Efflorescence.” A good word. This was an Age of Efflorescence. If a parallel was wanted one must read Petronius. When Rome was still devouring the world. That too was an Age of Efflorescence. Everywhere a hastening from one meretricious pleasure to another. Old fashions abandoned for the mere love of novelty. These ridiculous little black evening hats, for instance, instead of the stately Gibus. (Come to think of it, it was hardly worth while to recover that Gibus. He would have to get one of these evening slouches.) No precedence. No restriction. Duchesses, countesses, diplomatists, fashionable physicians, rubbing shoulders with pretty chorus girls, inky adventuresses, artists, tradesmen, actors, movie stars, coloured singers, Casanovas and Cagliostros — PLEASED to mingle with them — no order, no sense of function. One had to say to fellows like Sir Bussy, “Through some strange dance of accident power has come to you. But beware of power that does not carry on and develop tradition. Think of the grave high figures of the past: C?sar, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth, Richelieu (you should read my little book), Napoleon, Washington, Garibaldi, Lincoln, William Ewart Gladstone, kings, priests and prophets, statesmen and thinkers, builders of Powers; the increasing purpose, the onward march! Think of great armoured angels and beautiful intent symbolic faces! Our Imperial Destinies! The Destiny of France! Our Glorious Navy! Embattled flags! Here now is the sword of power in your hands! Is it to do nothing more than cut innumerable sandwiches for supper?”
Again Mr. Parham spoke aloud in the night. “Nay!” he said.
He was suddenly reminded of the champagne.
Efflorescence was really a very good word. No, NOT effervescence, efflorescence. If only one had a weekly, what a scathing series of articles reviewing modern tendencies might there not be under that general title! People would ask, “Have you seen ‘Efflorescence’ again in the Paramount Weekly? Pitiless!”
It was a bother that the band inside his headache did not know when to leave off. It went so and it went so. . . . What a lot of champagne there had been! Efflorescence and effervescence.
He saw himself giving a little book to Sir Bussy almost sacramentally. “Here,” he would say, “is a book to set you thinking. I know it is too much to ask you to read it through, short though it is, but at least read the title, The Undying Past. Does that convey nothing to you?”
He saw himself standing gravely while Sir Bussy tried uneasily to get past him.
After all efflorescence, as the chemists had taught us to use the word nowadays, implies a considerable amount of original stuff still undecayed. Beneath this glittering froth, this levity, this champagne drinking and jazz dancing, this careless mixing of incompatible social elements, far beneath was the old enduring matter of human life, the toil, the sustained purpose, the precedences, the loyalties, the controls. On the surface the artist of life might seem to be a slightly negroid Fragonard, but below stern spirits were planning the outline of stupendous destinies. Governments and foreign offices were still at their immemorial work; the soldiers gathered in their barracks and the great battleships ploughed remorselessly the vainly slapping waves. Religious teachers inculcated loyalty and obedience; the business men ordered their argosies across the oceans, and the social conflicts muttered about the factories. There was likely to be grave economic trouble this winter. “The grim spectre of want.” Sir Bussy indeed lived in a dream world of uninterrupted indulgence. But all dreams come to an end.
The spirit of Carlyle, the spirit of the Hebrew prophets entered into Mr. Parham. It was like some obscure stern sect coming to a meeting in a back-street chapel. One by one they came. High above the severe lines of that little back-street facade, the red planet Mars ruled his sky. The band in his headache played wilder, more threatening airs.
“Verily,” he whispered and, “Repent. . . . Yesss.”
The real stern things of life gathered unobtrusively but surely, prepared when the time came to blow their clarions, prepared to rouse this trivial world again to fresh effort and grim resolve, to unbend the fluttering flag, to exalt and test the souls of men, to ennoble them by sacrifice and suffering.
The wailing multitude would call for guidance. What could men like Sir Bussy give it?
“And yet I would have stood by your side,” Mr. Parham would say. “I would have stood by your side.”
For a time Mr. Parham’s mind seemed to be full of marching troops, host by host, corps by corps, regiment after regiment, company upon company. They marched to the rhythm of the Negro band, and as they marched they receded. Down a long vista they receded and the music receded.
The face of Mr. Parham became firm and hard and calm in the darkness. Stern resolve brooded over the troubled frothing of his thoughts and subdued them. The champagne made one last faint protest.
Presently his lips relaxed. His mouth fell a little open. . . .
A deep, regular, increasing sawing of his breath told the mouse behind the skirting that Mr. Parham was asleep.
Such were the opening phases of the friendship of Mr. Parham and Sir Bussy Woodcock. It was destined to last nearly six years. The two men attracted and repelled each other in about equal measure, and in that perhaps lay the sustaining interest of their association. In its more general form in Mr. Parham’s mind, the relationship was a struggle to subdue this mysteriously able, lucky adventurer to the Parham conception of the universe, to involve him in political affairs and advise and direct him when these affairs became perplexing, to build him up into a great and central figure (with a twin star) in the story of the Empire and the world. In its more special aspect the relationship was to be one of financial support for Mr. Parham and the group of writers and university teachers he would gather round him, to steer the world — as it had always been steered. When the history of the next half century came to be written people would say, “There was the finger of Parham,” or, “He was one of Parham’s Young Men.” But how difficult it was to lead this financial rhinoceros, as Mr. Parham, in the secrecy of his own thoughts, would sometimes style his friend, towards any definite conception of a r?le and a policy outside the now almost automatic process of buying up everything and selling it for more.
At times the creature seemed quite haphazard, a reckless spendthrift who could gain more than he spent. He would say, “Gaw! I’m going to have a lark,” and one had either to drop out of the world about him or hang on to him into the oddest and strangest of places.
There were phases of passionate resentment in Mr. Parham’s experience, but then again there were phases of clear and reasonable hope. Sir Bussy would suddenly talk about political parties with a knowledge, a shrewdness that amazed his friend. “Fun to push ’em all over,” he would say. And once or twice he talked of Rothermere, Beaverbrook, Burnham, Riddel, with curiosity and something like envy. Late at night on each occasion it was, other people, people one suspected, were present, and Mr. Parham could not bring him to the point of a proposal.
Then off went everything like dead leaves before a gale, a vast hired yacht to the Baltic, to Maine, Newfoundland, and the Saint Lawrence River, and the strangest people packed aboard. Or Mr. Parham found himself surveying the Mediterranean from a Nice hotel of which Sir Bussy had taken a floor for Christmas. Once or twice he would come most unexpectedly to his Mentor, so full of purpose in his eyes, that Mr. Parham felt the moment had come. Once he took him suddenly just they two, to see Stravinsky’s Noces at Monte Carlo and once in London a similar humility of approach preluded a visit to hear the Lener Quartette.
“Pleasant,” said Sir Bussy, coming away. “Pleasant sounds. It cleans and soothes. And more. It’s —” his poor untrained mind, all destitute of classical precedents, sought for an image —“it’s like putting your head down a rabbit hole and hearing a fairy world going on. A world neither here nor there. Is there anything more to it than that?”
“Oh!” said Mr. Parham, as though he cried to God; “windows upon heaven!”
“Gaw!”
“We went there — we went there SAILCLOTH. It turned us to silk.”
“Well — DID it? It sounds as if it was telling you something, but does it tell you anything? This music. It gets excited and joyous, for no reason, just as you get excited and joyous in dreams; it’s sad and tender — about nothing. They’re burying a dead beetle in fairyland. It stirs up appropriate memories. Your mind runs along according to the rhythm. But all to no effect. It doesn’t give you anything real. It doesn’t let you out. Just a finer sort of smoking,” said Sir Bussy.
Mr. Parham shrugged his shoulders. No good to get this savage books on “How to Listen to Music.” He did listen, and this was what he made of it.
But one sentence lingered in Mr. Parham’s mind: “It doesn’t,” said Sir Bussy, “LET YOU OUT.”
Did he want to be let out of this gracious splendid world of ours, built foursquare on the pillars of history, with its honours, its precedences, its mighty traditions? Could he mean that?
Mr. Parham was reminded of another scene when Sir Bussy had betrayed very much that same thought. They were recrossing the Atlantic to the Azores after visiting Newfoundland. The night was gloriously calm and warm. Before turning in Mr. Parham, who had been flirting rather audaciously with one of the pretty young women who adorned Sir Bussy’s parties so abundantly, came out on the promenade deck to cool his nerves and recall some lines of Horace that had somehow got bent in his memory and would return to him only in a queerly distorted form. He had had a moment of daring, and the young thing had pretended fright and gone to bed. Fun — and essentially innocent.
At the rail Mr. Parham discovered his host, black and exceedingly little against the enormous deep-blue sky.
“Phosphorescence?” asked Mr. Parham in an encouraging tenor.
Sir Bussy did not seem to hear. His hands were deep in his trouser-pockets. “Gaw,” he said. “Look at all this wet — under that GHASTLY moon!”
At times his attitudes took Mr. Parham’s breath away. One might think the moon had just appeared, that it had no established position, that it was not Diana and Astarte, Isis and a thousand sweet and lovely things.
“Curious,” this strange creature went on. “We’re half outside the world here. We are. We’re actually on a bulge, Parham. That way you go down a curve to America, and THAT way you go down a curve to your old Europe — and all that frowsty old art and history of yours.”
“It was ‘frowsty old Europe,’ as you call it, sent this yacht up here.”
“No fear! it got away.”
“It can’t stay here. It has to go back.”
“This time,” said Sir Bussy after a pause.
He stared for a moment or so at the moon with, if anything, an increasing distaste, made a gesture of his hand as if to dismiss it, and then, slowly and meditatively, went below, taking no further notice of Mr. Parham.
But Mr. Parham remained.
What was it this extravagant little monster wanted, in this quite admirable world? Why trouble one’s mind about a man who could show ingratitude for that gracious orb of pale caressing light? It fell upon the world like the silver and gossamer robes of an Indian harem. It caressed and provoked the luminosities that flashed and flickered in the water. It stirred with an infinite gentleness. It incited to delicately sensuous adventure.
Mr. Parham pushed his yachting cap back from his forehead in a very doggish manner, thrust his hands into the pockets of his immaculate ducks and paced the deck, half hoping to hear a rustle or a giggle that would have confessed that earlier retreat insincere. But she really had turned in, and it was only when Mr. Parham had done likewise that he began to think over Sir Bussy and his ocean of “wet — under that GHASTLY moon.” . . .
But this work, it is well to remind ourselves and the reader, is the story of a metapsychic séance and its stupendous consequences, and our interest in these two contrasted characters must not let it become a chronicle of the travels and excursions of Sir Bussy and Mr. Parham. They went once in a multitudinous party to Henley, and twice they visited Oxford together to get the flavour. How Mr. Parham’s fellow dons fell over each other to get on good terms with Sir Bussy, and how Mr. Parham despised them! But bringing Sir Bussy down made a real difference to Mr. Parham’s standing at Oxford. For a time Sir Bussy trifled with the Turf. The large strange parties he assembled at the Hangar and at Buntingcombe and Carfex House perpetually renewed Mr. Parham’s amazement that he should know so many different sorts of people and such queer people and be at such pains to entertain them and so tolerant of some of the things they did. They got up to all sorts of things, and he let them. It seemed to Mr. Parham he was chiefly curious to know what they got out of what they got up to. Several times they discussed it together.
“Not a horse on the Turf,” said Sir Bussy, “is being run absolutely straight.”
“But surely —!”
“Honourable men there, certainly. They keep the rules because there’d be no fun in it if they didn’t. It would just go to pieces, and nobody wants it to go to pieces. But do you think they run a horse all out to win every time? Nobody dreams of such a thing.”
“You mean that every horse is pulled?”
“No. No. NO. But it isn’t allowed to strain itself unduly at the beginning. That’s quite a different thing.”
Mr. Parham’s face expressed his comprehension of the point. Poor human nature!
“Why do you bother about it?”
“My father the cab driver used to drive broken-down race horses he said, and was always backing Certs. It interfered with my education. I’ve always wanted to see this end of it. And I inherit an immense instinct for human weakness from my mother.”
“But it’s costly?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Sir Bussy, with a sigh. “I seem always to see what they are up to. Before they see I see it. I make money on the Turf. I ALWAYS make money.”
His face seemed to accuse the universe, and Mr. Parham made a sympathetic noise.
When Mr. Parham went to Newmarket or a race meeting with Sir Bussy he saw to it that his own costume was exactly right. At Ascot he would be in a silky gray morning coat and white spatterdashes and a gray top hat with a black band; the most sporting figure there he was; and when they went to Henley he was in perfect flannels and an Old Arvonian blazer, not a new one but one a little faded and grubby and with one patch of tar. He was a perfect yachtsman on yachts, and at Cannes he never failed to have that just-left-the-tennis-round-the-corner touch, which is the proper touch for Cannes. His was one of those rare figures that could wear plus-fours with distinction. His sweaters were chosen with care, for even a chameleon can be correct. Never did he disfigure a party; often, indeed, he would pull one together and define its place and purpose.
The yachtsman ensemble was the hardest to preserve because Mr. Parham had more than an average disposition towards seasickness. There he differed from Sir Bussy, who was the better pleased the rougher the water and the smaller the boat. “I can’t help it,” said Sir Bussy. “It’s the law of my nature. What I get I keep.”
But if Mr. Parham’s reactions were prompt they were cheerful. “Nelson,” he would say, after his time of crisis. “He would be sick for two or three days every time he went to sea. That consoles me. The spirit indeed is unwilling but the flesh is weak.”
Sir Bussy seemed to appreciate that.
By thus falling into line with things, by refusing to be that social misfit, the intractable and untidy don, Mr. Parham avoided any appearance of parasitism in his relations with Sir Bussy and kept his own self-respect unimpaired. He was “RIGHT THERE”; he was not an intrusion. He had never dressed well before, though he had often wanted to do so, and this care for his costume made rather serious inroads upon his modest capital, but he kept his aim steadily in view. If one is to edit a weekly that will sway the world one must surely look man of the world enough to do it. And there came a phase in his relations with Sir Bussy when he had to play the r?le of a man of the world all he knew how.
It has to be told, though for some reasons it would be pleasanter to omit it. But it is necessary to illuminate the factors of antagonism and strife within this strange association with its mutual scrutiny, its masked and hidden criticisms.
Perhaps — if the reader is young . . .
Yet even the young reader may want to know.
Let us admit that this next section, though illuminating, is not absolutely essential to the understanding of the story. It is not improper, it is not coarse, but frankly — it envisages something — shall we call it “Eighteenth Century”?— in Mr. Parham’s morals. If it is not an essential part of the story it is at any rate very necessary to our portrait of Mr. Parham.
Happily we need not enter into details. The method and manner of the affair are quite secondary. We can draw a veil directly the latchkey of Miss Gaby Greuze clicks against the latch of Miss Gaby Greuze’s sumptuous flat, and it need not be withdrawn again until Mr. Parham re-emerges from that same flat looking as respectable as a suburban embezzler going to church. As respectable? Except for a certain glory. An exaltation. Such as no mere thief of money ever knew.
Fragments of a conversation follow, a conversation it is undesirable to locate.
“I’ve always liked you since first we met,” said Gaby. . . .
“It was a sort of promise.” . . .
“How quick you were to understand. You ARE quick! I see you watching people — summing them up.” . . .
“It must be wonderful to know all you know,” said Gaby, “and think all you think. You make me feel — so shallow!”
“What need have YOU for the helm of Athene?” Mr. Parham exclaimed.
“Well, a woman likes to feel at the helm now and then,” said Gaby, with her usual infelicity of apprehension, and for a time she seemed moody.
But she said Mr. Parham was very beautifully made. His smile when she said it lit the flat. And so strong. Did he take much exercise? Tennis. She would play tennis if she wasn’t afraid of muscle in the wrong place. Exercise, she said, was ever so much better than taking exercises except for that. Of course, there WERE exercises one took. Some that made one supple and were good for one’s carriage and figure. Had Mr. Parham ever seen her sort of exercises? Well . . .
They were lovely exercises.
She patted his cheek and said, “NICE man!” She said that several times.
And she said, “You are what I should call simple.”
“Delicate,” she added, noting a question in his face, “but not complex.”
She said this with a distant, pensive look in her eyes. She was admiring the sheen on her beautiful arm and wrist, and then she said, “And when one is being as lovely as one can be to you, whatever else you do or say, anyhow, you don’t say, ‘Gaw!’”
She compressed her lips and nodded. “Gaw!” she repeated; “as though he had found you out in something that not for a minute you had ever felt or intended.
“Making you feel — like some insect.”
She began to weep unrestrainedly, and suddenly she threw herself once more into Mr. Parham’s arms.
Poor, poor little woman, sensitive, ardent, generous, and so misunderstood! . . .
When Mr. Parham met the unsuspecting Sir Bussy again after this adventure a great pride and elation filled him. Touched with a not unpleasant remorse. He had to put an extra restraint upon his disposition towards condescension. But afterwards he found Sir Bussy looking at him curiously, and feelings of a less agreeable kind, a faint apprehension, mingled with his glory.
When Mr. Parham encountered Gaby Greuze once more, and it is notable how difficult it became to meet her again except in the most transitory way, this glory of his glowed with a passionate warmth that called for the utmost self-control. But always a man of honour respects a modest woman’s innate craving for secrecy. Not even the roses in her bosom must suspect. She was evasive; she wished to be evasive. Delicately and subtly Mr. Parham came to realize that for him and his fellow sinner it was best that it should be as if this bright delicious outbreak of passion had never occurred.
Nevertheless, there it was; he was one up on Sir Bussy.
This mutual frequentation of Sir Bussy and Mr. Parham necessarily had intermissions, because of Mr. Parham’s duty to his university and his influence upon the rising generation, and because also of perceptible fluctuations in Sir Bussy’s need of him. And as time went on and the two men came to understand each other more acutely, clashes of opinion had to be recognized. Imperceptibly Sir Bussy passed from a monosyllabic reception of Mr. Parham’s expositions of the state of the world and the life of man to more definitely skeptical comments. And at times Mr. Parham, because he had so strong a sense of the necessity of dominating Sir Bussy and subduing his untrained ignorance to intelligible purposes, became, it may be, a little authoritative in his argument and a trifle overbearing in his manner. And then Sir Bussy would seem almost not to like him for a time and would say, “Gaw,” and turn away.
For a few weeks, or even it might be for a month or so, Mr. Parham would have no more abnormal social adventures, and then quite abruptly and apropos of any old thing Sir Bussy would manifest a disposition to scrutinize Mr. Parham’s point of view again, and the excursions and expeditions would be renewed.
A hopeful friendship it was throughout on Mr. Parham’s side, but at no time was it a completely harmonious one. He found Sir Bussy’s choice of associates generally bad and often lamentable. He was constantly meeting people who crossed and irritated him beyond measure. With them he would dispute, even acrimoniously. Through them it was possible to say all sorts of things at Sir Bussy that it might have been undesirable to say directly to him.
There were times when it seemed almost as if Sir Bussy invited people merely to annoy Mr. Parham, underbred contradictory people with accents and the most preposterous views. There was a crazy eclecticism about his hospitality. He would bring in strange Americans with notions rather than ideas about subjects like currency and instalment buying, subjects really more impossible than indecency, wrong sorts of Americans, carping and aggressive, or he would invite Scandinavian ideologists, or people in a state of fresh disillusionment or fresh enthusiasm from Russia, even actual Bolsheviks, Mr. Bernard Shaw and worse, self-made authors, a most unpleasant type, wild talkers like Mr. J. B. S. Haldane, saying the most extravagant things. Once there was a Chinaman who said at the end of a patient, clear exposition of the British conception of self-government and the part played by social and intellectual influence in our affairs, “I see England at least is still looled by mandolins,” whatever that might mean. He nodded his gold spectacles towards Mr. Parham, so probably he imagined it did mean something. Most subtly and insidiously Sir Bussy would sow the seeds of a dispute amid such discordant mixtures and sit in a sort of intellectual rapture, mouth dropping, while Mr. Parham, sometimes cool but sometimes glowing, dealt with the fallacies, plain errors, misconceptions, and misinformation that had arisen. “Gaw!” Sir Bussy would whisper.
No support, no real adhesion, no discipleship; only that colourless “Gaw.” Even after a quite brilliant display. It was discouraging. Never the obvious suggestion to give this fount of sound conviction and intellectual power its legitimate periodic form.
But the cumulative effect of these disputes upon Mr. Parham was not an agreeable one. He always managed to carry off these wrangles with his colours flying, for he had practised upon six generations of undergraduates; he knew exactly when to call authority to the aid of argument and, in the last resort, refer his antagonist back to his studies effectively and humiliatingly, but at bottom, in its essence, Mr. Parham’s mental substance was delicate and fine, and this succession of unbelieving, interrogative, and sometimes even flatly contradictory people left their scars upon him — scars that rankled. It was not that they produced the slightest effect upon his essential ideas of the Empire and its Necessary Predominance in World Affairs, of the Historical Task and Destiny of the English, of the R?les of Class and Law in the world and of his Loyalties and Institutions, but they gave him a sense of a vast, dangerous, gathering repudiation of these so carefully shaped and established verities. The Americans, particularly since the war, seemed to have slipped away, mysteriously and unawares, from the commanding ideas of his world. They brought a horrible tacit suggestion to Sir Bussy’s table that these ideas were now queer and old-fashioned.
Renegades! What on earth had they better? What in the names of Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Raleigh, the Mayflower, Tennyson, Nelson, and Queen Victoria had these people better? Nowadays more and more they seemed to be infected with an idea that they were off and away after some new and distinctive thing of their own.
There they were, and there were a hundred and twenty million of them with most of the gold in the world — out of hand. It was not that they had any ideas worth considering to put in the place of Mr. Parham’s well wrought and tested set. Positive suggestions he could deal with. One foolish visitor breathed the words “World State.” Mr. Parham smiled all his teeth at him and waved his fingers.
“My DEAR sir,” said Mr. Parham, with a kind of deep richness in his tone. And it sufficed.
Another said, “League of Nations.”
“Poor Wilson’s decaying memorial,” said Mr. Parham.
All the time, behind his valiant front this gnawing away of Mr. Parham’s confidence went on, his confidence that these ideas of his, right though they certainly were, would be honestly and properly endorsed and sustained, at home and abroad, when next they were put to the test. In 1914 they had been tested; had they been overstrained? Imperceptibly he drifted into that state of nervous uncertainty we have attempted to convey in our opening section. Was history keeping its grip? Would the game still be played? The world was going through a phase of moral and intellectual disintegration; its bonds relaxed; its definite lines crumbled. Suppose, for example, a crisis came in Europe and some strong man at Westminster flashed the sword of Britannia from the scabbard. Would the ties of Empire hold? Suppose the Dominions cabled “This is not our war. Tell us about it.” They had already done something of the sort when the Turks had returned to Constantinople. They might do it again and more completely. Suppose the Irish Free State at our backs found our spirited gesture the occasion for ungracious conduct. Suppose instead of the brotherly applause and envious sympathy of 1914, a noise like the noise of skinners sharpening their knives came from America. Suppose once again in our still unconscripted land Royal Proclamations called for men and that this time, in stead of another beautiful carnival of devotion like that of 1914 — how splendid that had been!— they preferred to remain interrogative. Suppose they asked, “Can’t it be stopped?” or, “Is the whole thing worth while?” The Labour Movement had always had a left wing nefariously active, undermining the nation’s forces, destroying confidence, destroying pride in service, willingness to do and die. Amazing how we tolerated it! Suppose, too, the business men proved even more wicked than they were in 1914.
For Mr. Parham knew. They had been wicked; they had driven a bargain. They were not the patriots they seemed.
An after-dinner conversation at Carfex House crystallized these floating doubts. When it took place Sir Bussy had already embarked upon those psychic experiments that were to revolutionize his relations to Mr. Parham. But this dinner was an interlude. The discussion centred upon and would not get away from the topic of the Next War. It was a man’s dinner, and the most loquacious guest was an official from Geneva, Sir Walter Atterbury, a figure of importance in the League of Nations Secretariat, an apparently unassuming but really very set and opinionated person. But there was also an American banker, Mr. Hamp, a gray-faced, elderly spectacled man, who said strange things in a solemn manner, and there was Austin Camelford, the industrial chemist, who was associated with Sir Bussy in all sorts of business enterprises and who linked with him the big combinations of Romer Steinhart Crest & Co. He it was who recalled to Mr. Parham’s mind the cynicism of the business men in 1914. He was a lank and lean creature with that modern trick of saying the wildest nonsense as though it was obvious and universally recognized fact. There was also a young American from one of these newfangled Western universities where they teach things like salesmanship and universal history. He was too young to say very much, but what he said was significant.
At first it was Atterbury did most of the talking and, he talked evidently with the approval of the others. Then Mr. Parham was moved to intervene and correct some of the man’s delusions — for delusions they plainly were. The talk became more general, and certain things that came from Camelford and Hamp brought home to Mr. Parham’s mind the widening estrangement of industry and finance from the guiding concepts of history. Towards the end Sir Bussy by some fragmentary comments of an entirely hostile sort, set the seal to a thoroughly disconcerting evening.
Sir Walter, trailing clouds of idealism from this Geneva of his, took it for granted that everyone present wanted to see war staved off forever from the world. Apparently he could conceive no other view as possible in intelligent company. And yet, oddly enough, he realized that the possibility of fresh wars was opening wider every year. He showed himself anxious and perplexed, as well he might, distressed by a newborn sense of the inadequacy of his blessed League to ward off the storms he saw gathering about it. He complained of the British government and the French government, of schools and colleges and literature, of armaments and experts, of a world-wide indifference to the accumulating stresses that made for war. The Anglo-American naval clash had distressed him particularly. It was the “worst thing that had happened for a long time.” He was facty and explicit after the manner of his type. Four or five years ago one did not get these admissions of failure, these apprehensions and heart sinkings, from Geneva.
Mr. Parham let him run on. He was all for facts from well informed sources, and so far from wanting to suppress Sir Walter, his disposition was to give him all the rope he wanted. If that weekly had been in existence he would have asked him to write a couple of articles for it. At the normal rates. And then flicked aside his pacificist implications with a bantering editorial paragraph or so.
At this dinner he resorted to parallel tactics. For a time he posed as one under instruction, asking questions almost respectfully, and then his manner changed. His intelligent interrogations gave place to a note of rollicking common sense. He revealed that this official’s admissions of the impotence of the League had been meat and drink to him. He recalled one or two of Sir Walter’s phrases and laughed kindly with his head a little on one side. “But what did you EXPECT?” he said. “What DID you expect?”
And after all was said and done, asked Mr. Parham, was it so bad? Admittedly the extravagant hopes of some sort of permanent world peace, some world Utopia, that had run about like an epidemic in 1918, were, we realized now, mere fatigue phenomena, with no force of will behind them. The French, the Italians, most lucid minded and realistic of peoples, had never entertained such dreams. Peace, now, as always, rested on an armed balance of power.
Sir Walter attempted contradiction. The Canadian boundary?
“The pressure in that case lies elsewhere,” said Mr. Parham, with a confidence that excluded discussion of what these words might mean.
“Your armed balance of power is steadily eating up every scrap of wealth industrial progress can produce,” said Sir Walter. “The military force of France at present is colossal. All the European budgets show an increase in armaments, and people like Mussolini jeer at the Kellogg Pact even as they sign it. The very Americans make the clearest reservation that the Pact doesn’t mean anything that matters. They won’t fight for it. They won’t let it interfere with the Monroe Doctrine. They sign the Pact and reserve their freedom of action and go on with the armament race. More and more the world drifts back to the state of affairs of 1913.
“The most serious thing,” Sir Walter went on, “is the increasing difficulty of keeping any counter movement going. It’s the obstinate steadiness of the drive that dismays me. It’s not only that the accumulation of wealth is being checked and any rise in the standard of living prevented by these immense preparations, but the intellectual and moral advance is also slowing down on account of it. Patriotism is killing mental freedom. France has ceased to think since 1919, and Italy is bound and gagged. Long before actual war returns, freedom of speech may be held up by the patriotic censorship in every country in Europe. What are we to do about it? What is there to do?”
“I suggest that there is nothing to do,” said Mr. Parham. “And I don’t in the least mind. May I speak with the utmost frankness — as one man to another — as a realist in a world of human beings, very human beings? Frankly, I put it to you that we do not want this pacificist movement of yours. It is a dream. The stars in their courses fight against it. The armed man keepeth his house until a stronger cometh. Such is the course of history, my dear sir. So it has ever been. What is this free speech of yours but the liberty to talk nonsense and set mischief afoot? For my own part I would not hesitate for a moment in the choice between disorganizing babble and national necessity. Can you really mourn the return of discipline and order to countries that were in a fair way to complete social dissolution?”
He recalled one of those striking facts that drive reality home to the most obdurate minds. “In 1919, when my niece went to Italy for her honeymoon, she had two handbags stolen from the train, and on her return her husband’s valise went astray from the booked luggage and never turned up again. That was the state of affairs before the strong hand took hold.
“NO,” said Mr. Parham in a clear, commanding tone, so as to keep the rostrum while he returned to the general question. “As to the facts I see eye to eye with you. Yet not in the same spirit. We enter upon a phase of armament mightier than that which preceded the Great War. Granted. But the broad lines of the struggle shape themselves, they shape themselves — rationally and logically. They are in the nature of things. They cannot be evaded.”
Something almost confidential crept into his manner. He indicated regions of the tablecloth by gestures of his hands, and his voice sank. Sir Walter watched him, open eyed. His brows wrinkled with something like dismay.
“Here,” said Mr. Parham, “in the very centre of the Old World, illimitably vast, potentially more powerful than most of the rest of the world put together —” he paused as if fearing to be overheard —“is RUSSIA. It really does not matter in the least whether she is Czarist or Bolshevik. She is the final danger — the overwhelming enemy. Grow she must. She has space. She has immense resources. She strikes at us, through Turkey as always, through Afghanistan as always, and now through China. Instinctively she does that; necessarily. I do not blame her. But preserve ourselves we must. What will Germany do? Cleave to the East? Cleave to the West? Who can tell? A student nation, a secondary people, a disputed territory. We win her if we can but I do not count on her. The policy imposed upon the rest of the world is plain. WE MUST CIRCUMVENT RUSSIA; we must encircle this threat of the great plains before it overwhelms us. As we encircled the lesser threat of the Hohenzollerns. In time. On the West, here, we outflank her with our ally France and Poland her pupil; on the East with our ally Japan. We reach at her through India. We strive to point the spearhead of Afghanistan against her. We hold Gibraltar on her account; we watch Constantinople on her account. America is drawn in with us, necessarily our ally, willy-nilly, because she cannot let Russia strike through China to the sea. There you have the situation of the world. Broadly and boldly seen. Fraught with immense danger — yes. Tragic — if you will. But fraught also with limitless possibilities of devotion and courage.”
Mr. Parham paused. When it was evident he had fully paused Sir Bussy whispered his habitual monosyllable. Sir Walter cracked a nut and accepted port.
“There you are,” he said with a sigh in his voice, “if Mr.—?”
“Parham, sir.”
“If Mr. Parham said that in any European capital from Paris to Tokio, it would be taken quite seriously. Quite seriously. That’s where we are, ten years from the Armistice.”
Camelford, who had been listening hitherto, now took up the discourse. “That is perfectly true,” he said. “These governments of ours are like automata. They were evolved originally as fighting competitive things and they do not seem able to work in any other way. They prepare for war and they prepare war. It is like the instinctive hunting of a pet cat. However much you feed the beast, it still kills birds. It is made so. And they are made so. Until you destroy or efface them that is what they will do. When you went to Geneva, Sir Walter, I submit with all respect you thought they’d do better than they have done. A lot better?”
“I did,” said Sir Walter. “I confess I’ve had a lot of disillusionment — particularly in the last three or four years.”
“We live in a world of the wildest paradox today,” said Camelford. “It’s like an egg with an unbreakable shell, or a caterpillar that has got perplexed and is half a winged insect and the other half crawler. We can’t get out of our governments. We grow in patches and all wrong. Certain things become international — cosmopolitan. Banking, for instance,”— he turned to Hamp.
“Banking, sir, has made immense strides in that direction since the war,” said Hamp. “I say without exaggeration, immense strides. Yes. We have been learning to work together. As we never thought of doing in prewar days. But all the same, don’t you imagine we bankers think we can stop war. We know better than that. Don’t expect it of us. Don’t put too much on us. We can’t fight popular clamour, and we can’t fight a mischievous politician who stirs it up. Above all, we can’t fight the printing press. While these sovereign governments of yours can turn paper into money we can be put out of action with the utmost ease. Don’t imagine we are that mysterious unseen power, the Money Power, your parlour Bolsheviks talk about. We bankers are what conditions have made us and we are limited by our conditions.”
“OUR position is fantastic,” said Camelford. “When I say ‘our’ I mean the chemical industries of the world, my associates, that is, here and abroad. I’m glad to say I can count Sir Bussy now among them.”
Sir Bussy’s face was a mask.
“Take one instance to show what I mean by ‘fantastic,’” Camelford went on. “We in our various ramifications, are the only people able to produce gas on the scale needed in modern war. Practically now all the chemical industries of the world are so linked that I can say ‘we.’ Well, we have perhaps a hundred things necessary for modern warfare more or less under our control, and gas is the most important. If these sovereign Powers which still divide the world up in such an inconvenient way, contrive another war, they will certainly have to use gas, whatever agreements they may have made about it beforehand. And we, our great network of interests, are seeing to it that they will have plenty of gas, good reliable gas at reasonable business rates, all and more than they need. We supply all of them now and probably if war comes we shall still supply all of them — both sides. We may break up our associations a bit for the actual war, but that will be a mere incidental necessity. And so far we haven’t been able to do anything else in our position than what we are doing. Just like you bankers, we are what circumstances have made us. There’s nothing sovereign about US. We aren’t governments with the power to declare war or make peace. Such influence as we have with governments and war offices is limited and indirect. Our position is that of dealers simply. We sell gas just as other people sell the Army meat or cabbages.
“But see how it works out. I was figuring at it the other day. Very roughly, of course. Suppose we put the casualties in the next big war at, say, five million and the gas ones at about three — that, I think, is a very moderate estimate, but then you see I’m convinced the next war will be a gas war — every man gassed will have paid us, on the average, anything between four-pence and three-and-tenpence, according to the Powers engaged, for the manufacture, storage, and delivery of the gas he gets. My estimate is naturally approximate. A greater number of casualties will, of course, reduce the cost to the individual. But each of these predestined gasees — if I may coin a word — is now paying something on that scale year by year in taxation — and we of the big chemical international are seeing that the supply won’t fail him. We’re a sort of gas club. Like a goose club. Raffle at the next great war. YOUR ticket’s death in agony, YOURS a wheezing painful lung and poverty, YOU’RE a blank, lucky chap! You won’t get any good out of it, but you won’t get any of the torture. It seems crazy to me, but it seems reasonable to everyone else, and what are we to fly in the face of the Instincts and Institutions of Mankind?”
Mr. Parham played with the nutcrackers and said nothing. This Camelford was an offensive cynic. He would rob even death in battle of its dignity. Gasees!
“The Gasees Club doesn’t begin to exhaust the absurdities of the present situation,” Camelford went on. “All these damned war offices, throughout the world have what they call secrets. Oh!— Their SECRETS! The fuss. The precautions. Our people in England, I mean our war-office people, have a gas, a wonderful gas — L. It’s General Gerson’s own pet child. His only child. Beastly filth. Tortures you and then kills you. He gloats over it. It needs certain rare earths and minerals that we produce at Cayme in Cornwall. You’ve heard of our new works there — rather a wonderful place in its way. Some of our young men do astonishing work. We’ve got a whole string of compounds that might be used for the loveliest purposes. And in a way they are coming into use. Only unhappily you can also get this choke stink out of one of our products. Or THEY can — and we have to pretend we don’t know what they want it for. Secret, you know. Important military secret. The scientific industrial world is keeping secrets like that for half a dozen governments. . . . It’s childish. It’s insane.”
Mr. Parham shook his head privately as one who knows better.
“Do I understand,” said Hamp, feeling his way cautiously, “that you know of that new British gas — I’ve heard whispers —?”
He broke off interrogatively.
“We have to know more or less. We have to sit on one side and look on and pretend not to see or know while your spies and experts and our spies and experts poke about trying to turn pure science into pure foolery. . . . Boy scout spying and boy scout chemists. . . . It can’t go on. And yet it IS going on. That is the situation. That is where the world’s persistence in independent sovereign governments is taking us. What can we do? You say you can do nothing. I wonder. We might cut off the supply of this pet gas for the British; we might cut off certain high explosives and other material that are the darling secrets of the Germans and your people. There’d have to be a tussle with some of our own associates. But I think we could do it now. . . . Suppose we did make the attempt. Would it alter things much? Suppose they had the pluck to arrest us. The Common Fool would be against us.”
“The Common Fool!” cried Mr. Parham, roused at last. “By that, sir, you mean that the whole tenor of human experience would be against you. What else can there be but these governments at which you cavil? What do they stand for? The common life and thought of mankind. And — forgive me if I put you in difficulties — who are YOU? Would you abolish government? Would you set up some extraordinary super-government, some freemasonry of bankers and scientific men to rule the world by conspiracy?”
“AND scientific men! Bankers AND scientific men! Oh, we TRY to be scientific men in our way,” protested Hamp, seeking sympathy by beaming through his spectacles at Sir Bussy.
“I think I would look for some new way of managing human affairs,” said Camelford, answering Mr. Parham’s question. “I think sooner or later we shall have to try something of the sort. I think science will have to take control.”
“That is to say Treason and a new International,” flashed Mr. Parham. “Without even the social envy of the proletariat to support you!”
“Why not?” murmured Sir Bussy.
“And how are you superior people going to deal with the Common Fool — who is, after all, mankind?”
“You could educate him to support you,” said Atterbury. “He’s always been very docile when you’ve caught him young.”
“Something very like a fresh start,” said Camelford. “A new sort of world. It’s not so incredible. Modern political science is in its infancy. It’s a century or so younger than chemistry or biology. I suppose that to begin with we should have a new sort of education, on quite other lines. Scrap all these poisonous national histories of yours, for example, and start people’s minds clean by telling them what the world might be for mankind.”
Sir Bussy nodded assent. Mr. Parham found his nod faintly irritating. He restrained an outbreak.
“Unhappily for your idea of fresh starts,” he said, “the Days of Creation are over, and now one day follows another.”
He liked that. It was a good point to make.
In the pause Sir Walter addressed himself to Camelford. “That idea of yours about the gasees club is very vivid. I could have used that in a lecture I gave, a week ago.”
The young American, who had taken no part in the discussion hitherto, now ventured timidly: “I think perhaps you Europeans, if I might say so, are disposed to underestimate the sort of drive there was behind the Kellogg Pact. It may seem fruitless — who can tell yet?— but mind you there was something made that gun. It’s in evidence, even if it’s no more than evidence. The Kellogg Pact isn’t the last proposition of that sort you’ll get from America.”
He reddened as he said his piece, but clearly he had something definite behind what he said.
“I admit that,” said Sir Walter. “In America there is still an immense sentiment towards world peace, and you find something of the same sort in a less developed form everywhere. But it gets no organized expression, no effective development. It remains merely a sentiment. It isn’t moving on to directive action. That’s what’s worrying my mind more and more. Before we can give that peace feeling real effectiveness there has to be a tremendous readjustment of ideas.”
Mr. Parham nodded his assent with an air of indifference and consumed a few grapes.
And then it seemed to him that these other men began to talk with a deliberate disregard of what he had been saying. Or, to be more precise, with a deliberate disregard of the indisputable correctness of what he had been saying. It was not as if it had not been said, it was not as if it had been said and required answering, but it was as if a specimen had been laid upon the table.
In the later stages of Sir Bussy’s ample and varied dinners Mr. Parham was apt to experience fluctuations of mood. At one moment he would be solid and strong and lucidly expressive, and then he would flush, and waves of anger and suspicion would wash through his mind. And now suddenly, as he listened to the talk — and for a while he did no more than listen — he had that feeling which for some time had been haunting him more and more frequently, that the world, with a sort of lax malice, was slipping away from all that was sane and fine and enduring in human life. To put it plainly, these men were plotting openly and without any disguise, the subordination of patriotism, loyalty, discipline, and all the laboured achievements of statecraft to some vague international commonweal, some fantastic organization of cosmopolitan finance and cosmopolitan industrialism. They were saying things every whit as outrageous as the stuff for which we sent the talkative Bolshevik spinning back to his beloved Russia. And they were going on with this after all he had said so plainly and clearly about political realities. Was it any good to speak further?
Yet could he afford to let it go unchallenged? There sat Sir Bussy, drinking it in!
They talked. They talked.
“When first I went to Geneva,” said Sir Walter, “I didn’t realize how little could be done there upon the basis of current mentality. I didn’t know how definitely existing patriotisms were opposed to the beginnings of an international consciousness. I thought they might fade down in time to a generous rivalry in the service of mankind. But while we try to build up a permanent world peace away there in Geneva, every schoolmaster and every cadet corps in England and every school in France is training the next generation to smash anything of the sort, is doing everything possible to carry young and generous minds back to the exploded delusions of wartime patriotism. . . . All over the world it seems to be the same.”
The young American, shy in the presence of his seniors, could but make a noise of protest like one who stirs in his sleep. Thereby he excepted his native land.
“Then,” said Mr. Parham, doing his smile but with a slight involuntary sneer of his left nostril, “you’d begin this great new civilization that is to come, by shutting up our schools?”
“He’d CHANGE ’em,” corrected Sir Bussy.
“Scrap schools, colleges, churches, universities, armies, navies, flags, and honour, and start the millennium from the ground upwards,” derided Mr. Parham.
“Why not?” said Sir Bussy, with a sudden warning snarl in his voice.
“That,” said Hamp, with that profundity of manner, that air of marking an epoch by some simple remark, of which only Americans possess the secret, “is just what quite a lot of us are hesitating to say. WHY NOT? Sir Bussy, you got right down to the bottom of things with that ‘Why not?’”
The speaker’s large dark gray eyes strongly magnified by his spectacles went from face to face; his cheeks were flushed.
“We’ve scrapped carriages and horses, we’re scrapping coal fires and gas lighting, we’ve done with the last big wooden ships, we can hear and see things now on the other side of the world and do a thousand — miracles, I call them — that would have been impossible a hundred years ago. What if frontiers too are out of date? What if countries and cultures have become too small? Why should we go on with the schools and universities that served the ends of our great-grandfathers, and with the governments that were the latest fashion in constitutions a century and a half ago?”
“I presume,” said Mr. Parham unheeded, addressing himself to the flowers on the table before him, “because the dealings of man with man are something entirely different from mechanical operations.”
“I see no reason why there shouldn’t be invention in psychology, just as much as in chemistry or physics,” said Camelford.
“Your world peace, when you examine it,” said Mr. Parham, “flies in the face of the fundamental institutions — the ancient and tested institutions of mankind — the institutions that have made man what he is. That is the reason.”
“The institutions of mankind,” contradicted Camelford, with tranquil assurance, “are just as fundamental and no more fundamental than a pair of trousers. If the world grows out of them and they become inconvenient, it won’t kill anything essential in man to get others. That, I submit, is what he has to set about doing now. He grows more and more independent of the idea that his pants are him. If our rulers and teachers won’t attempt to let out or replace the old garments, so much the worse for them. In the long run. Though for a time, as Sir Walter seems to think, the tension may fall on us. In the long run we shall have to get a new sort of management for our affairs and a new sort of teacher for our sons — however tedious and troublesome it may be to get them — however long and bloody the time of change may be.”
“Big proposition,” said Mr. Hamp.
“Which ought to make it all the more attractive to a citizen of the land of big propositions,” said Camelford.
“Why should we be so confoundedly afraid of scrapping things?” said Sir Bussy. “If the schools do mischief and put back people’s children among the ideas that made the war, why not get rid of ’em? Scrap our stale schoolmasters. We’d get a new sort of school all right.”
“And the universities?” said Mr. Parham, amused, with his voice going high.
Sir Bussy turned on him and regarded him gravely.
“Parham,” he said slowly, “you’re infernally well satisfied with the world. I’m not. You’re afraid it may change into something else. You want to stop it right here and now. Or else you may have to learn something new and throw away the old bag of tricks. Yes — I know you. That’s your whole mind. You’re afraid that a time will come when all the important things of today will just not matter a rap; when what that chap Napoleon fancied was his Destiny or what old Richelieu imagined to be a fine forward foreign policy, will matter no more to intelligent people than —” he sought for an image and drew it slowly out of his mind —“the ideas of some old buck rabbit in the days of Queen Elizabeth.”
The attack was so direct, so deliberately offensive in its allusion to Mr. Parham’s masterly studies of Richelieu, that for the moment that gentleman had nothing to say.
“Gaw,” said Sir Bussy, “when I hear talk like this it seems to me that this Tradition of yours is only another word for Putrefaction. The clean way with Nature is dying and being born. Same with human institutions — only more so. How can we live unless we scrap and abolish? How can a town be clean without a dust destructor? What’s your history really? Simply what’s been left over from the life of yesterday. Egg shells and old tin cans.”
“Now THAT’S a thought,” said Hamp and turned appreciative horn spectacles to Sir Bussy.
“The greatest of reformers, gentlemen,” said Hamp, with a quavering of the voice, “told the world it had to be born again. And that, as I read the instruction, covered everybody and everything in it.”
“It’s a big birth we want this time,” said Camelford.
“God grant it isn’t a miscarriage,” said Sir Walter.
He smiled at his own fancy. “If we WILL make the birth chamber an arsenal, we may have the guns going off — just at the wrong moment.”
Mr. Parham, still and stiff, smoked his excellent cigar. He knocked off his ash into his ash tray with a firm hand. His face betrayed little of his resentment at Sir Bussy’s insult. Merely it insisted upon dignity. But behind that marble mask the thoughts stormed. Should he get up right there and depart? In silence? In contemptuous silence? Or perhaps with a brief bitter speech: “Gentlemen, I’ve heard enough folly for tonight. Perhaps you do not realize the incalculable mischief such talk as this can do. For me at least international affairs are grave realities.”
He raised his eyes and found Sir Bussy, profoundly pensive but in no way hostile, regarding him.
A moment — a queer moment, and something faded out in Mr. Parham.
“Have a little more of this old brandy,” said Sir Bussy in that persuasive voice of his.
Mr. Parham hesitated, nodded gravely — as it were forgivingly — seemed to wake up, smiled ambiguously, and took some more of the old brandy.
But the memory of that conversation was to rankle in Mr. Parham’s mind and inflame his imagination like a barbed and poisoned arrowhead that would not be removed. He would find himself reprobating its tendencies aloud as he walked about Oxford, his habit of talking to himself was increased by it, and it broke his rest of nights and crept into his dreams. A deepening hatred of modern scientific influences that he had hitherto kept at the back of his mind, was now, in spite of his instinctive resistance, creeping into the foreground. One could deal with the financial if only the scientific would leave it alone. The banker and the merchant are as old as Rome and Babylon. One could deal with Sir Bussy if it were not for the insidious influence of such men as Camelford and their vast materialistic schemes. They were something new. He supplied force, but they engendered ideas. He could resist and deflect, but they could change.
That story about an exclusive British gas . . . !
With Camelford overlooking it like a self-appointed God. Proposing to cut off the supply. Proposing in effect to stand out of war and make the game impossible. The strike, the treason, of the men of science and the modern men of enterprise. Could they work such a strike? The most fretting it was of all the riddles in our contemporary world. And while these signs of Anglo-Saxon decadence oppressed him, came Mussolini’s mighty discourse to the Italian Nation on the Eve of the General Elections of 1929. That ringing statement of Fascist aims, that assertion of the paramount need of a sense of the state, of discipline and energy, had a clarity, a nobility, a boldness and power altogether beyond the quality of anything one heard in English. Mr. Parham read it and re-read it. He translated it into Latin and it was even more splendid. He sought to translate it, but that was more difficult, into English prose. “This is a man,” said Mr. Parham. “Is there no other man of his kind?”
And late one evening he found himself in his bedroom in Pontingale Street before his mirror. For Mr. Parham possessed a cheval glass. He had gone far in his preparation for bed. He had put on his dressing gown, leaving one fine arm and shoulder free for gesticulation. And with appropriate movements of his hand, he was repeating these glorious words of the great dictator.
“Your Excellencies, Comrades, Gentlemen,” he was saying.
“Now do not think that I wish to commit the sin of immodesty in telling you that all this work, of which I have given a summarised and partial résumé, has been activated by my mind. The work of legislation, of putting schemes into action, of control and of the creation of new institutions, has formed only a part of my efforts. There is another part, not so well-known, but the existence of which will be manifest to you through the following figures which may be of interest: I have granted over 60,000 audiences; I have dealt with 1,887,112 cases of individual citizens, received directly by my Private Secretary. . . .
“In order to withstand this strain I have put my body in training; I have regulated my daily work; I have reduced to a minimum any loss of time and energy and I have adopted this rule, which I recommend to all Italians. The day’s work must be methodically and regularly completed within the day. No work must be left over. The ordinary work must proceed with an almost mechanical regularity. My collaborators, whom I recall with pleasure and whom I wish to thank publicly, have imitated me. The hard work has appeared light to me, partly because it is varied, and I have resisted the strain because my will was sustained by my faith. I have assumed — as was my duty — both the small and the greater responsibilities.”
Mr. Parham ceased to quote. He stared at the not ungraceful figure in the mirror.
“Has Britain no such Man?”
But the real business we have in hand in this book is to tell of the Master Spirit. A certain prelude has been necessary to our story, but now that we are through with it we can admit it was no more than a prelude. Here at the earliest possible moment the actual story starts. There shall be nothing else but story-telling now right to the end of the book.
Mr. Parham’s metapsychic experiences were already beginning before the conversation recorded in the previous section. They began, or at least the seed of them was sown, in a train bringing Sir Bussy and a party of friends back to London from Oxford after one of Mr. Parham’s attempts to impose something of the ripeness and dignity of that ancient home of thought, upon his opulent friend. It was the occasion of Lord Fluffingdon’s great speech on the imperial soul. They had seen honorary degrees conferred upon a Royal Princess, an Indian Rajah, the expenditure secretary of a wealthy American millionaire and one of the most brilliant and successful collectors of honours in the world, three leading but otherwise undistinguished conservative politicians, and a Scotch comedian. It had been a perfect day in the sunshine, rich late Gothic old gardens, robes, smiles, and mellow compliments. The company had been the picked best of Who’s Who dressed up for the occasion, and Lord Fluffingdon had surpassed expectation. In the compartment with Sir Bussy and Mr. Parham were Hereward Jackson, just in the enthusiastic stages of psychic research, and Sir Titus Knowles, and the spacious open-mindedness of Sir Oliver Lodge, slow, conscientious, and lucid, ruled the discussion.
Hereward Jackson started the talk about psychic phenomena. Sir Titus Knowles was fiercely and vulgarly skeptical and early lost his always very thin and brittle temper. Sir Bussy said little.
Nearly six years of intermittent association had lit no spark of affection between Sir Titus and Mr. Parham. For Mr. Parham Sir Titus combined all that is fearful in the medical man, who at any moment may tell you to take off everything and be punched about anywhere, and all that is detestable in the scientist. They rarely talked, and when they did contradictions flew like sparks from the impact.
“The mediums as a class are rogues and tricksters,” said Sir Titus. “It’s common knowledge.”
“Ah, THERE!” said Mr. Parham, cutting in, “there you have the positivism and assurance of — if you’ll pardon the adjective — old-fashioned science.”
“Precious few who haven’t been caught at it,” said Sir Titus, turning from Hereward Jackson to this new attack upon his flank.
“On SOME occasions, but not on ALL occasions,” said Mr. Parham. “We have to be logical even upon such irritating questions as this.”
Normally he would have kept himself smilingly aloof and skeptical. It was his genuine hatred for the harsh mentality of Sir Titus that had drawn him in. But there he was, before he knew it, taking up a position of open-minded inquiry close to Sir Oliver’s, and much nearer to Jackson’s omnivorous faith, than to doubt and denial. For a time Sir Titus was like a baited badger. “Look at the facts!” he kept barking. “Look at the actual facts!”
“That’s just what I HAVE looked at,” said Hereward Jackson. . . .
It did not occur to Mr. Parham that he had let himself in for more than a stimulating discussion until Sir Bussy spoke to him and the others, but chiefly to him, out of his corner.
“I didn’t know Parham was open-minded like this,” he said.
And presently: “Have you ever seen any of this stuff, Parham? We ought to go and see some, if you think like that.”
If Mr. Parham had been alert he might have nipped the thing in the bud then and there, but he was not alert that afternoon. He hardly realized that Sir Bussy had pinned him.
And so all that follows followed.
For a month or so Mr. Parham opposed and evaded Sir Bussy’s pressure towards psychic research. It wasn’t at all the sort of thing to do, nowadays. It had been vulgarized. Their names were certain to be used freely in the most undignified connections. And at the bottom of his heart Mr. Parham did not believe that there was the shadow of an unknown reality in these obscure performances.
But never had he had such occasion to appreciate the force and tenacity of Sir Bussy’s will. He would lie awake at nights wondering why his own will was so inadequate in its resistance. Was it possible, he questioned, that a fine education and all the richness and subtlety that only the classics, classical philosophy, and period history can impart, were incompatible with a really vigorous practical thrust. Oxford educated for quality, but did it educate for power?
Yet he had always assumed he was preparing his Young Men for positions of influence and power. It was a disagreeable novelty for him to ask if anything was wrong with his own will and if so, what it was that was wrong. And it seemed to him that if only he had believed in the efficacy of prayer, he would have prayed first and foremost for some tremendous affluence of will that would have borne away Sir Bussy’s obstinacy like a bubble in a torrent. So that it would not be necessary to evade and oppose it afresh day after day. And at last, as he perceived he must, yield to it.
All the private heart searchings of this period of resistance and delay were shot with the reiteration of what had been through all the six years of intercourse an unsettled perplexity. What was Sir Bussy doing this for? Did he really want to know that there was some sort of chink or retractile veil that led out of this sane world of ours into worlds of unknown wonder, and through which maybe that unknown wonder might presently break into our common day? Did he hope for his “way out of it” here? Or was he simply doing this — as he seemed to have done so many other queer things — to vex, puzzle, and provoke queer reactions in Mr. Parham, Sir Titus, and various other intimates? Or was there a confusion in that untrained intelligence between both sets of motives?
Whatever his intentions, Sir Bussy got his way. One October evening after an exceptionally passoverish dinner at Marmion House, Mr. Parham found himself with Sir Titus, Hereward Jackson, and Sir Bussy in Sir Bussy’s vast smooth car, in search of 97 Buggins Street, in the darker parts of the borough of Wandsworth, Mr. Hereward Jackson assisting the chauffeur spasmodically, unhelpfully, and dangerously at the obscurer corners. The peculiar gifts of a certain Mr. Carnac Williams were to be studied and considered.
The medium had been recommended by the best authorities, and Hereward Jackson had already visited this place before. Their hostess was to be old Mrs. Mountain, a steadfast pillar in the spiritualist movement in dark days and prosperous days alike, and this first essay would, it was hoped, display some typical phenomena, voices, messages, perhaps a materialization, nothing very wonderful, but a good beginner’s show.
97 Buggins Street was located at last, a dimly lit double-fronted house with steps up to a door with a fanlight.
Old Mrs. Mountain appeared in the passage behind the small distraught domestic who had admitted her guests. She was a comfortable, shapeless old lady in black, with a mid-Victorian lace cap, lace ruffles, and a lace apron. She was disposed to be nervously affable and charming. She welcomed Hereward Jackson with a copious friendliness. “And here’s your friends,” she said. “Mr. Smith, shall we say? And Mr. Jones and Mr. Brown. Naming no names. Welcome all! Last night he was WONDERFUL.”
Hereward Jackson explained over his shoulder: “Best to be pseudonymous,” he said.
She ushered them into a room of her own period, with a cottage piano topped with a woollen mat on which were a pot of some fine-leaved fern and a pile of music, a mantel adorned with a large mirror and many ornaments, a central table with a red cloth and some books, a gas pendant, hanging bookshelves, large gilt-framed oleograph landscapes, a small sofa, a brightly burning fire, and a general air of comfort. Cushions, small mats, and antimacassars abounded, and there was an assemblage of stuffed linnets and canaries under a glass shade. It was a room to eat muffins in. Four people, rather drawn together about the fire and with something defensive in their grouping, stood awaiting the new inquirers. An overgrown-looking young man of forty with a large upturned white face and an expression of strained indifference was “my son Mr. Mountain.” A little blonde woman was Miss — something or other; a tall woman in mourning with thin cheeks, burning eyes, and a high colour was “a friend who joins us,” and the fourth was Mr. Carnac Williams, the medium for the evening.
“Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones, Mr. Brown,” said Mrs. Mountain, “and this gentleman you know.”
The little blonde woman glowed the friendliness of a previous encounter at Hereward Jackson, and Mr. Mountain hesitated and held out a flabby hand to shake Sir Bussy’s.
Mr. Parham’s first reaction to the medium was dislike. The man was obviously poor, and the dark, narrow eyes in his white face were quick and evasive. He carried his hands bent at the wrist as if he reserved the palms and his manner was a trifle too deferential to Sir Bussy for that complete lack of information about the visitors attributed to the home team.
“I can’t answer for anything,” said Mr. Williams in flat, loud tones. “I’m merely a tool.”
“A wonderful tool last night,” said Mrs. Mountain.
“I knew nothing,” said Mr. Williams.
“It was very wonderful to ME,” said the tall woman in a soft musical voice and seemed restrained by emotion from saying more.
There was a moment’s silence.
“Our normal procedure,” said Mr. Mountain, betraying a slight lisp in his speech, “is to go upstairs. The room on the first floor is prepared — oh! you’ll be able to satisfy yourselves it’s not been prepared in any wrong sense. Recently we have been so fortunate as to get actual materializations — a visitant. Our atmosphere has been favourable. . . . If nothing happens to change it . . . But shall we go upstairs?”
The room upstairs seemed very bare in comparison with the crowded cosiness of the room below. It had been cleared of bric-à-brac. There was a large table surrounded by chairs. One of them was an armchair, destined for Mrs. Mountain, and by it stood a small occasional table bearing a gramophone; the rest were those chairs with bun-like seats so characteristic of the Early Maple period. A third table carried some loose flowers, a tambourine, and a large slate, which was presently discovered to be painted with phosphorescent paint. One corner had been curtained off. “That’s the cabinet,” said Mrs. Mountain. “You’re quite welcome to search it.”
On a small table inside it there were ropes, a candle, sealing wax, and other material.
“We aren’t for searching to-night,” said Sir Bussy. “We’re just beginners and ready to take your word for almost anything. We want to get your point of view and all that. It’s afterwards we’ll make trouble.”
“A very fair and reasonable way of approaching the spirits,” said Williams. “I feel we’ll have a good atmosphere.”
Mr. Parham looked cynically impartial.
“If we’re not to apply any tests . . .” began Sir Titus, with a note of protest.
“We’ll just watch this time,” said Sir Bussy. “I’ll let you have some tests all right later.”
“We don’t mind tests,” said Williams. “There’s a lot about this business I’d like to have tested up to the hilt. For I understand it no more than you do. I’m just a vehicle.”
“Yaa,” said Sir Titus.
Mr. Mountain proceeded with his explanations. They had been working with a few friends at spirit appearances. Their recent custom had been to get the most skeptical person present to tie up Williams in his chair as hard and firmly as possible. Then hands were joined in the normal way. Then, in complete darkness, except for the faint glimmer of phosphorescence from the slate, they waited. Mrs. Mountain would keep the gramophone going and had a small weak flashlight for the purpose. The person next her could check her movements. The thread of music was very conducive to phenomena, they found. They need not wait in silence, for that sometimes produced a bad atmosphere. They might make light but not frivolous conversation or simple comments until things began to happen.
“There’s nothing mysterious or magical about it,” said Mr. Mountain.
“YOU’LL do the tying up,” said Hereward Jackson to Sir Titus.
“I know a knot or two,” said Sir Titus ominously. “Do we strip him first?”
“Oo!” said Mr. Mountain reproachfully and indicated the ladies. The question of stripping or anything but a superficial searching was dropped.
Mr. Parham stood in unaffected boredom studying the rather fine lines of the lady in mourning while these preliminaries were settled. She was, he thought, a very sympathetic type. The other woman was a trifle blowsy and much too prepossessed by the medium and Hereward Jackson. The rest of these odd people he disliked, though he bore himself with a courtly graciousness towards old Mrs. Mountain. What intolerable folly it all was!
After eternities of petty fussing the medium was tied up, the knots sealed, and the circle formed. Mr. Parham had placed himself next to the lady in black, and on the other side he fell into contact with the flabby Mountain. Sir Bussy, by a sort of natural precedence, had got between the medium and the old lady. Sir Titus, harshly vigilant, had secured the medium’s left. The lights were turned out. For several dreary centuries nothing happened except a dribble of weak conversation and an uneasy rustling from the medium. Once he moaned. “HE’S GOING OFF!” said Mrs. Mountain. The finger of the lady in mourning twitched, and Mr. Parham was stirred to answering twitches, but it amounted to nothing, and Mr. Parham’s interest died away.
Sir Bussy began a conversation with Hereward Jackson about the prospects of Wildcat for the Derby.
“DARLING MUMMY,” came in a faint falsetto from outside the circle.
“What was that?” barked Sir Titus sharply.
“Ssh!” from Sir Bussy.
The lady beside Mr. Parham stirred slightly, and the pressure of her hand beside his intensified. She made a noise as though she wanted to speak, but nothing came but a sob.
“My DEAR lady!” said Mr. Parham softly, deeply moved.
“Just a fla, Mummy. I can’t stop to-night. The’s others want to come.”
Something flopped lightly and softly on the table; it proved afterwards to be a chrysanthemum. There was a general silence, and Mr. Parham realized that the lady beside him was weeping noiselessly. “Milly — sweetheart,” she whispered. “Good-night, dear. Good-night.”
Mr. Parham hadn’t reckoned on this sort of thing. It made his attention wander. His fine nature responded too readily to human feeling. He hardly noticed at first a queer sound that grew louder, a slobbering and slopping sound that was difficult to locate.
“That’s the ectoplasm,” said old Mrs. Mountain, “working.”
Mr. Parham brought his mind, which had been concentrated on conveying the very deepest sympathy of a strong silent man through his little finger, back to the more general issues of the séance.
Mrs. Mountain started the gramophone for the fourth or fifth repetition of that French horn solo when Tristan is waiting for Isolde. One saw a dim circle of light and her hand moving the needle. Then the light went out with a click and Wagner resumed.
Mr. Mountain was talking to the spinster lady about the best way to get back to Battersea.
“Ssssh!” said Sir Titus, as if blowing off steam.
Things were happening. “DAMN!” said Sir Titus.
“Steady!” said Sir Bussy. “Don’t break the circle.”
“I was struck by a tin box,” said Sir Titus, “or something as hard!”
“No need to move,” said Sir Bussy unkindly.
“Struck on the back of the head,” said Sir Titus.
“It may have been the tambourine,” said Mr. Mountain.
“Flas!” said the medium’s voice, and something soft, cold, and moist struck Mr. Parham in the face and fell in his hand.
“Keep the circle, please,” said old Mrs. Mountain.
Certainly this was exciting in a queer, tedious, unpleasant sort of way. After each event there was a wide expectant interval.
“Our friend is coming,” said the medium’s voice. “Our dear visitant.”
The tambourine with a faint jingle floated over the table far out of reach. It drifted towards Sir Titus. “If you touch me again!” threatened Sir Titus, and the tambourine thought better of it and, it would seem, made its way back to the other table.
A light hand rested for a moment on Mr. Parham’s shoulder. Was it a woman’s hand? He turned quietly and was startled to find something with a faint bluish luminosity beside him. It was the phosphorescent slate.
“Look!” said Hereward Jackson.
Sir Titus grunted.
A figure was gliding noiselessly and evenly outside the circle. It held the luminous slate and raised and lowered this against its side to show a robed woman’s figure with a sort of nun’s coif. “She’s come,” sighed Mrs. Mountain very softly.
It seemed a long time before this visitant spoke.
“Lee-tle children,” said a womanly falsetto. “Leetle children.”
“Who’s the lady?” asked Sir Bussy.
The figure became invisible.
After a little pause the medium answered from his place. “St. Catherine.”
The name touched a fount of erudition in Mr. Parham. “WHICH St. Catherine?”
“Just St. Catherine.”
“But there were TWO St. Catherines — or more,” said Mr. Parham. “Two who had mystical marriages with the Lord. St. Catherine of Alexandria, whose symbol is the wheel — the patroness of spinsters generally and the Catherinettes of Paris in particular — and St. Catherine of Siena. There’s a picture by Memling — perfectly lovely thing. And, yes — there WAS a third one, a Norwegian St. Catherine, if I remember rightly. And possibly others. Couldn’t she tell us? I would so like to know.”
A silence followed this outbreak.
“She’s never told us anything of that,” said Mrs. Mountain.
“I THINK it’s St. Catherine of Siena,” said the spinster lady.
“She is a very sweet lady, anyhow,” said Hereward Jackson.
“Can we be told this?” asked Sir Bussy.
The medium’s voice replied very softly. “She prefers not to discuss these things. For us she wishes to be just our dear friend, the Lady Catherine. She comes on a mission of mercy.”
“Don’t press it,” said Sir Bussy.
After a tedious interval St. Catherine became faintly visible again. She kissed Sir Titus softly on the top of his high forehead, leaving him audibly unreconciled, and then she floated back to the left of Mr. Parham.
“I came to tell you,” she said, “that the little one is happy — so happy. She plays with flas — lovelier flas than you ever saw. Asphodel. And lovely flas like that. She is with me, under my special care. So she was able to come to you.” . . .
The dim figure faded into utter darkness. “Farewell, my DEAR ones.”
“Gaw!” said a familiar voice.
The gramophone ran down with a scratching sound. A deep silence followed, broken for a time only by the indignant breathing of Sir Titus Knowles.
“WET kisses,” he said.
The darkness was impenetrable. Then Mrs. Mountain began to fumble with the gramophone, revealing a little glow of light that made the rest of the darkness deeper; a certain amount of scraping and shuffling became audible, and the medium was heard to groan. “I am tired,” he complained, “I am terribly tired.” Then, to judge by a string of sloppy noises, he seemed to be retracting his ectoplasm.
“That was very interesting,” said Sir Bussy suddenly. “All the same —” he went on and then paused —“it isn’t what I want. It was very kind of St. Catherine, whichever St. Catherine she was, to leave Bliss and all that and visit us. And I LIKED her kissing Sir Titus. It showed a nice disposition. He’s not a man you’d kiss for pleasure. But . . . I don’t know if any of you have seen that great fat book by Baron Schrenck-Notzing. Sort of like a scientific book. I’ve been reading that. What HE got was something different from this.”
His voice paused interrogatively.
“Could we have the light up?” said Mr. Mountain.
“In a minute I shall be able to bear it,” said Williams, very faint and faded. “Just one more minute.”
“Then we shall SEE,” said Sir Titus.
“I think we might break the circle now,” said Mrs. Mountain and rose rustlingly. The hand Mr. Parham had been touching slipped out of his reach.
The light seemed blinding at first; the room was bleakly uncomfortable, and everybody looked ghastly. The medium’s face was a leaden white, he was leaning back in his chair, in which he was still tied, with his head rolling slackly from side to side as though his neck were broken. Sir Titus set himself to examine his knots forthwith. It reminded Mr. Parham of the examination of a casualty. Sir Bussy watched Sir Titus. Mr. Mountain and Hereward Jackson stood up and leant over the table. “The sealing wax intact,” said Sir Titus. “The knots good and twisted round the chair, just as I left them. HULLO!”
“Found something?” asked Hereward Jackson.
“Yes. The thread of cotton between the coat collar and the chair back has been snapped.”
“That always gets broken somehow,” said Mr. Mountain, with scientific detachment.
“But WHY?” asked Sir Titus.
“We needn’t bother about that now,” said Sir Bussy, and the medium made noises in his throat and opened and closed his eyes.
“Shall we give him water?” asked the spinster lady.
Water was administered.
Sir Bussy was brooding over his fists on the table. “I want more than this,” he said and addressed himself to the medium. “You see, Mr. Williams, this is a very good show you have put up, but it isn’t what I am after. In this sort of thing there are degrees and qualities, as in all sorts of things.”
Williams still appeared very dazed. “Were there any phenomena?” he asked of the company.
“Wonderful,” said old Mrs. Mountain, with reassuring nods of the head, and the spinster lady echoed, “Beautiful. It was St. Catherine again.”
The lady in black was too moved for words.
Sir Bussy regarded Williams sideways with that unpleasing dropping of his nether lip. “You could do better than this under different conditions,” he said in a quasi-confidential manner.
“Test conditions,” said Sir Titus.
“This is a friendly atmosphere, of course,” said the medium and regarded Sir Bussy with a mixture of adventure and defensiveness in his eyes. He had come awake very rapidly and was now quite alert. The water had done him good.
“I perceive that,” said Sir Bussy.
“Under severer conditions the phenomena might be more difficult.”
“That too I perceive.”
“I’d be willing to participate in an investigation,” said Williams in a tone that was almost businesslike.
“After what I’ve seen and heard and felt to-night,” said Sir Titus, “I prophesy only one end to such an investigation — Exposure.”
“How CAN you say such a thing?” cried the spinster lady and turned to Hereward Jackson. “Tell him he is mistaken.”
Hereward Jackson had played a markedly unaggressive part that evening. “No doubt he is,” he said. “Let us be open-minded. I don’t think Mr. Williams need shirk an investigation under tests.”
“Fair tests,” said Williams.
“I’d see they were fair,” said Hereward Jackson.
He became thoughtful. “There is such a thing as assisted phenomena,” he mused aloud.
“For my part, mind you,” said Williams, “I’m altogether passive, whatever happens.”
“But,” said Mr. Mountain in tenoring remonstrance to Sir Bussy, “doesn’t this evening satisfy you, sir?”
“This was a very amiable show,” said Sir Bussy. “But it left a lot to be desired.”
“It did,” said Sir Titus.
“You mean to say there was anything not straightforward?” challenged Mr. Mountain.
“That DEAR voice!” cried old Mrs. Mountain.
“The BEAUTY of it!” said the spinster lady.
“If you force me to speak,” said Sir Titus, “I accuse this man Williams of impudent imposture.”
“That goes too far,” said Hereward Jackson; “much too far. That’s dogma on the other side.”
Mr. Parham had stood aloof from the dispute he saw was gathering. He found it ugly and painful. He disbelieved in the phenomena almost as strongly as he disliked the disbelief of Sir Titus. He felt deeply for the little group which had gone on so happily from one revelation to another, invaded now by brawling denial, and brawling accusations, threatened by brawling exposure. Particularly he felt for the lady in mourning. She turned her eyes to him as if in appeal, and they were bright with unshed tears. Chivalry and pity stormed his heart.
“I agree,” he said. “I agree with Mr. Hereward Jackson. It is possible the medium, consciously or not, ASSISTED the phenomena. But the messages were REAL.”
Her face lit with gratitude and became an altogether beautiful face. And he did not even know her name!
“And the spirit of my dear one WAS present?” she implored.
Mr. Parham met the eye of Sir Titus and met it with hard determination. “Something came to us here from outside,” he said; “a message, an intimation, the breath of a soul — call it what you will.”
And having said this, the seed of belief was sown in Mr. Parham. For never before had he found reason to doubt his own word.
“And you are interested? You want to learn more?” pressed old Mrs. Mountain.
Mr. Parham went deeper and assented.
Had he heard Sir Bussy say, “Gaw,” or was that expletive getting on his nerves?
“Now, let’s get things a bit clearer,” said Williams. He was addressing himself directly to Sir Bussy. “I’m not answerable for what happens on these occasions. I go off. I’m not present, so to speak. I’m a mere instrument. You know more of what happens than I do.”
He glanced from Sir Bussy to old Mrs. Mountain and then came back to Sir Bussy. There was an air of scared enterprise about him that made Mr. Parham think of some rascally valet who plans the desertion of an old and kindly master while still in his employment. It was as plain as daylight that he knew who Sir Bussy was and regarded him as a great opportunity, an opportunity that had to be snatched even at the cost of some inconsistency. His manner admitted an element of imposture in all they had seen that night. And it was plain that Hereward Jackson’s convictions moved in accordance with his.
And yet he seemed to believe, and Hereward Jackson seemed to believe, that there was more than trickery in it. Insensibly Mr. Parham assimilated the “something in it” point of view. He found himself maintaining it quite ably against Sir Titus.
Williams, after much devious talk, came at last to his point. “If you four gentlemen mean business, and if one could be treated as some of these pampered foreign mediums are treated,” he said, “these Eva C’s and Eusapia Palladinos and such-like, one might manage to give as good or better than they give. I’m only a passive thing in these affairs, but have I ever had a fair chance of showing what was in me?”
“Gaw,” said Sir Bussy. “You shall have your chance.”
Williams was evidently almost as frightened as he was grateful at his success. He thought at once of the need of securing a line of retreat if that should prove necessary. He turned to the old lady.
“They’ll strip me naked and powder my feet. They’ll take flashlight photographs of me with the ectoplasm oozing out of me. They’ll very likely kill me. It won’t be anything like our good times here. But when they are through with it you’ll see they’ll have justified me. They’ll have justified me and justified all the faith you’ve shown in me.”
Once Sir Bussy had launched himself and his friends upon these metapsychic experiments he pursued the investigation with his customary intemperance. Carnac Williams was only one of several lines of investigation. It is a commonplace of psychic literature that the more a medium concentrates on the ectoplasm and materializations, the less is he or she capable of clairvoyance and the transmission of spirit messages. Carnac Williams was to develop along the former line. Meanwhile Sir Bussy took competent advice and secured the frequent presence of the more interesting clairvoyants available in London.
Carfex House was spacious, and Sir Bussy had a great supply of secretaries and under butlers. Rooms were told off for the materialization work and others for the reception of messages from the great beyond, and alert and attentive helpers learnt the names and business of the experts and showed them to their proper apartments. The materialization quarters were prepared most elaborately by Sir Titus Knowles. He was resolved to make them absolutely spirit-tight; to make any ectoplasm that was exuded in them feel as uncomfortable and unwelcome as ectoplasm could.
He and Williams carried on an interminable wrangle about hangings, lighting, the legitimate use of flashlight photography, and the like. Sir Titus even stood out, most unreasonably, against a black velvet cabinet and conceded Williams black tights for the sake of decency with an ill grace. “We aren’t going to have any women about,” said Sir Titus. Williams showed himself amazingly temperamental and Sir Titus was mulishly obstinate; Sir Bussy, Hereward Jackson, and Mr. Parham acted as their final court of appeal and pleased neither party. Hereward Jackson was consistently for Williams.
On the whole Williams got more from them than Sir Titus, chiefly because of Mr. Parham’s lack of intellectual sympathy with the latter. Constantly the casting vote fell to Mr. Parham. With secret delight he heard of — and on several occasions he assisted at — an increasing output of ectoplasm that it entirely defeated Sir Titus to explain. He was forbidden, by the rules and the hypothesis that it might conceivably cause the death of his adversary, to leap forward and grab the stuff. It bubbled out of the corners of Williams’s mouth, a horrid white creeping fluid, it flowed from his chest, it accumulated upon his knees; and it was withdrawn with a sort of sluggish alacrity. On the ninth occasion this hitherto shapeless matter took on the rude suggestions of hands and a human face, and a snapshot was achieved.
The tests and restrictions imposed upon the trances of the clairvoyants were, from the nature of the case, less rigorous than those directly controlled by Sir Titus, and their results developed rather in advance of the Williams manifestations.
The communications differed widely in quality. One medium professed a Red Indian control and also transmitted messages from a gentleman who had lived in Susa, “many years ago, long before the time of Abraham.” It was very difficult to determine where the Red Indian left off and where the ancient from Susa began. Moreover, “bad spirits” got in on the Susa communications, and departed friends of Hereward Jackson sent messages to say that it was “splendid” where they were, and that they were “so happy,” and wished everyone could be told about it, but faded out under further interrogation in the most unsatisfactory fashion. At an early stage Sir Bussy decided that he had had “enough of that gammon” and this particular practitioner was paid off and retired. There were several such failures. The details varied, but the common factor was a lack of elementary credibility. Two women mediums held out downstairs, while upstairs in the special room Williams, week by week, thrust his enlarging and developing ectoplasm into the pale and formidable disbelief of Sir Titus.
Of the two women downstairs one was a middle-aged American with no appeal for Mr. Parham; the other was a much more interesting and attractive type. She was dusky, with a curiously beautiful oval olive-tinted face and she said she was the young widow of an English merchant in Mauritius. Her name was Nanette Pinchot. She was better educated than the common run of psychic material and had very high recommendations from some of the greatest investigators in Paris and Berlin. She spoke English with a pleasing staccato. Neither she nor the American lady professed to be controlled by the usual ghost, and this was new to all the Carfex House investigators. The American lady had trances of a fit-like nature that threw her slanting-wise across her chair in inelegant attitudes. Mrs. Pinchot, when entranced, sat like a pensive cat, with her head inclined forward and her hands folded neatly in her lap. Neither lady had heard of the other. The one lodged with cousins in Highbury; the other stayed in a Kensington hotel. But their line of revelation was the same. Each professed to feel a mighty afflatus from an unknown source which had thrust all commonplace controls aside. There were moments when Mr. Parham was reminded of the Hebrew prophets when they said, “the Voice of the Lord came upon me.” But this voice was something other than the Voice of the Lord.
Mrs. Pinchot gave the fuller messages. The American lady gave descriptive matter rather than positive statements. She would say, “Where am I? I am afraid. I am in a dark place. An arcade. No, not an arcade, a passage. A great huge passage. Pillars and faces on either side, faces carved on the pillars, terrible faces. Faces of Destiny! It is dark and cold and there is a wind blowing. The light is dim. I do not know where the light comes from. It is very dim. The Spirit, which is Will and Power, is coming down the passage like a mighty wind, seeking a way. How great and lonely the passage is! I am so small, so cold, and so afraid. I am smaller. I am driven like a dead leaf before the wind of the great Spirit. Why was I put into this dreadful place? Let me out! OH, LET ME OUT!”
Her distress became evident. She writhed and had to be recalled to the things of this world.
By an extraordinary coincidence Mrs. Pinchot also spoke of a great passage down which something was coming. But she did not feel herself actually in the passage, nor was she personally afraid. “There is a corridor,” she said. “A breeze of expectation blows down it from some unknown source. And Power is coming. It is as if I hear the tramp of iron footfalls drawing near.”
Hereward Jackson did not hear these things said. That made it more remarkable that he should bring back a report from Portsmouth. “There is a new Spirit coming into the world,” he said. “A man in Portsea has been saying that. He is a medium, and suddenly he has given up saying anything else and taken to warning us of a new time close at hand. It is not the spirit of any departed person. It is a Spirit from Outside seeking to enter the world.”
Mr. Parham found something rather impressive in these convergent intimations. From the first he had observed Mrs. Pinchot closely, and he found it difficult to believe her capable of any kind of fraud, collusion, or mystification. The friendly candour of her normal bearing passed over without a change into her trance condition. He had some opportunities of studying her when she was not under séance conditions; he twice took her out to tea at Rumpelmayer’s and afterwards persuaded Sir Bussy to have her down at the Hangar for a week-end. So he was able to hear her talking naturally and easily about art, foreign travel, ideas in general, and even public affairs. She was really cultivated. She had a fine, inquiring, discriminating mind. She had great breadth of view. She evidently found an intelligent pleasure in his conversation. He talked to her as he rarely talked to women, for commonly his attitude to the opposite sex was light and playful or indulgent and protective. But he found she could even understand his anxieties for the world’s affairs, his sense of a threatening anarchism and dissolution in the texture of society, and his feeling for the need of stronger and clearer guidance in our periodic literature. Sometimes she would even anticipate things he was going to say. But when he asked her about the Spirit that was coming into the world she knew nothing of it. Her séance life was quite detached from her daily life. He gave her his books on Richelieu with a friendly inscription and copies of some of his graver articles and addresses. She said they were no ordinary articles.
From the outset she had made it plain that she realized that this new circle she had entered was very different in quality from the usual gathering of the credulous and curious with which a medium has to deal. “People talk of the stupidity of spirit communications,” she said at the first meeting. “But does anyone ever consider the vulgar quality of the people to whom these communications have to be made?”
This time, she felt, the grouping was of a different order. She said she liked to have Sir Titus there particularly, for his hard, clear doubt was like walking on a level firm floor. Sir Titus bowed his forehead with an acknowledgment that was not as purely ironical as it might have been. To great men like Sir Bussy, to sympathetic minds like Hereward Jackson, to learning and mental power, spirits and powers might be attracted who would disdain the vague inquiries of the suburban curious.
“And you really believe,” said Mr. Parham, “these messages that come through you come from the dead?”
“Not a bit of it,” said Mrs. Pinchot in that sharp definitive way of hers; “I’ve never believed anything so nonsensical. The dead can do nothing. If these influences are from people who have passed over, they come because these people still live on. But what the living power may be that moves me to speech I do not know. I don’t find any proof that all the intimations, or even most of the intimations we receive, come from ghosts — if one may use that old word for once. Even if some certainly do.”
“Not disembodied spirits?” said Hereward Jackson.
“Sometimes I think it must be something more, something different and something much more general. Even when the names of departed friends are used. How am I to know? I am the only person in your circle who has never heard my own messages. It may be all delusion. It’s quite possibly all delusion. We people with psychic gifts are a queer race. We transmit. What we transmit we do not know. But it’s you stabler people who have to explain the things that come through us. We are limited by what people expect. When they expect nothing but vulgar ghosts and silly private messages, what else can we transmit? How can we pass on things they could not begin to understand?”
“True,” said Mr. Parham, “true.”
“When you get greater minds as receivers you will get greater messages.”
That too was reasonable.
“But there’s something in it very wonderful, something that science knows nothing about.”
“Ah! there I agree,” said Mr. Parham.
In the earlier séances with her there was a sort of “control” in evidence. “I am the messenger of the Advent,” he declared.
“A departed spirit?” asked Jackson.
“How can I be departed when I am here?”
“Are there such things as angels, then?” asked Mr. Parham.
(“Gaw!”)
“Messengers. ‘Angel’ means ‘messenger.’ Yes, I am a messenger.”
“Of someone — or of something — some power which comes?” asked Mr. Parham with a new helpfulness in his voice.
“Of someone who seeks a hold upon life, of someone with great power of mastery latent, who seeks to grapple with the world.”
“He’d better try upstairs,” injected Sir Titus.
“Here, where there are already will and understanding, he finds his helpers.”
“But who is this Being who comes? Has he been on earth before?”
“A conquering spirit which watches still over the world it has done so much to mould.”
“Who is he?”
“Who WAS he?”
“The corridor is long, and he is far away. I am tired. The medium is tired. The effort to speak to you is great because of the Strong Doubter who sits among you. But it is worth while. It is only the beginning. Keep on. I can stay but a little while longer now, but I will return to you.”
“But what is he coming for? What does he want to do?”
There was no answer. The medium remained for some time in a state of insensibility before she came to. Even then she felt faint and begged to be allowed to lie down for a time before she left Carfex House.
So it was that Mr. Parham remembered the answers obtained in the first of the séances with Mrs. Pinchot that really took a strong hold of his imagination. The actual sequence of the transmission was perhaps more confused, but this was what stood out in his memory.
It would indeed be a mighty miracle if some new Power did come into human affairs. How much there was to change! A miracle altogether desirable. He was still skeptical of the idea of an actual spirit coming to earth, but it was very pleasant to toy with the idea that something, some actual anticipation of coming things, was being symbolized in these riddles.
The detailed records of all séances, even the most successful ones, are apt to make copious and tedious reading for those who are not engaged in their special study, and it would serve no useful purpose to relate them here. Mr. Parham’s predilection for Mrs. Pinchot helped greatly in the development of that “something-init” attitude, which he had first assumed at the Williams séance in Buggins Street. Released from any insistence upon the ghostly element and the survival of the pettier aspects of personalities, the phenomena of the trance state seemed to him to become much more rational and credible. There was something that stirred him profoundly in this suggestion of hovering powers outside our world seeking for some means, a congenial temperament, an understanding mentality, by which they could operate and intervene in its affairs. He imagined entities like the great spirit forms evoked and pictured by Blake and G. F. Watts; he dreamt at last of mighty shapes.
Who was this great being who loomed up over his receptive imagination in these Carfex House séances? He asked if it was Napoleon the First, and the answer was, “Yes and no”; not Napoleon and more than Napoleon. Hereward Jackson asked if it was Alexander the Great and got exactly the same answer. Mr. Parham in the night or while walking along the street, would find himself talking in imagination to this mysterious and mighty impending spirit. It would seem to stand over him and think with him as in his morning or evening paper he read fresh evidences of the nerveless conduct of the world’s affairs and the steady moral deterioration of our people.
His preoccupation with these two clairvoyants led to a certain neglect on his part of the researches of Sir Titus upon Carnac Williams. More and more was he coming to detest the hard and limited materialism of the scientific intelligence. He wanted to think and know as little of these operations as possible. The irritation produced by the normal comments of Sir Titus upon the clairvoyant mediums, and particularly upon Mrs. Pinchot and the American lady, was extreme. Sir Titus was no gentleman; at times his phrases were almost intolerably gross, and on several occasions Mr. Parham was within an ace of fierce reprisals. He almost said things that would have had the force of blows. The proceedings at these materialization séances were unbearably tedious. It took hours that seemed like ?ons to get a few ectoplasmic gutterings. The pleasure of seeing how much they baffled Sir Titus waned. On at least three occasions, Mr. Parham passed beyond the limits of boredom and fell asleep in his chair, and after that he stayed away for a time.
His interest in Carnac Williams was reawakened after that ninth séance in which a face and hands became discernible. He was at Oxford at the time but he returned to London to hear a very striking account of the tenth apparition from Hereward Jackson. “When at first it became plain,” said Hereward Jackson, “it might have been a crumpled diminutive of yourself. Then, as it grew larger, it became more and more like Napoleon.”
Instantly Mr. Parham connected this with his conception of the great Spirit that Mrs. Pinchot had presented as looming over the Carfex House inquiries. And the early resemblance to himself was also oddly exciting. “I must see that,” he said. “Certainly I must come and see this materialization stuff again. It isn’t fair to Sir Titus for me to keep so much away.”
He talked it over with Mrs. Pinchot. She showed she was entirely ignorant of what was going on in the room upstairs, and she found the triple coincidence of the Napoleonic allusion very remarkable. For the American lady had also spoken of Buonaparte and Sargon and Genghis Khan in a rambling but disturbing message.
It was like a sound of trumpets from the Unknown, first on this side and then on that.
Once more Mr. Parham faced the long silences and boredoms of the tense and noiseless grapple of Sir Titus and Williams. It was after dinner, and he knew that for a couple of hours at least nothing could possibly occur. Hereward Jackson seemed in a happier mood, quietly expectant. Sir Bussy, with a certain impatience that had been increasing at every recent séance, tried to abbreviate or at least accelerate the customary strippings, searchings, markings, and sealings. But his efforts were unavailing.
“Now you have drawn me into it,” said Sir Titus in that strident voice of his, “I will not relax one jot or one tittle in these precautions until I have demonstrated forever the farcical fraudulence of all this solemn spooking. I shan’t grudge any price I pay for a full and complete exposure. If anyone wants to go, let him go. So long as some witness remains. But I’d rather die than scamp the job at this stage.”
“Oh, Gaw!” said Sir Bussy, and Mr. Parham felt that at any time now these researches might come to a violent end.
The little man settled into his armchair, pulled thoughtfully at his lower lip for a time and then lapsed, it seemed, into profound meditation.
At last the fussing was over and the vigil began. Silence fell and continued and expanded and wrapped about Mr. Parham closer and closer. Very dimly one saw the face of Williams, against the velvet blackness of the recess. He would lie for a long time with his mouth open, and then groan weakly and snore and stir and adopt a new attitude. Each time Mr. Parham heard the sharp rustle of Sir Titus Knowles’s alertness.
After a time Mr. Parham found himself closing his eyes. It was curious. He still saw the pallid brow and cheekbone of Williams when his eyes were closed.