“They’re eaten hollow with Communism,” said Basil, introducing himself in the part of agent provocateur. “You can’t stop a rot that’s been going on twenty years by imprisoning a handful of deputies, Half the thinking men in France have begun looking to Germany as their real ally.”
“Please Basil, don’t start politics. Anyway we were talking of Fogs, not Frogs.”
“Oh, Fogs.” Basil attempted to tell of a foggy adventure of his own, sailing a yawl round Bear Island, but Ambrose was elated tonight and in no mood for these loose leaves of Conrad drifting in the high wind of his talk. “We must return to the Present,” he said prophetically.
“Oh dear,” said Mr. Bentley. “Why?”
“Everyone is either looking back or forward. Those with reverence and good taste, like you, my dear Geoffrey, look back to an Augustan Age; those with generous hearts and healthy lives and the taste of the devil, like Poppet Green over there, look forward to a Marxian Jerusalem. We must accept the Present.”
“You would say, wouldn’t you,” said Basil, persevering, “that Hitler was a figure of the Present?”
“I regard him as a page for Punch,” said Ambrose. “To the Chinese scholar the military hero was the lowest of human types, the subject for ribaldry. We must return to Chinese scholarship.”
“It’s a terribly difficult language, I believe,” said Mr. Bentley.
“I knew a Chink in Valparaiso…” began Basil; but Ambrose was now in full gallop.
“European scholarship has never lost its monastic character,” he said. “Chinese scholarship deals with taste and wisdom, not with the memorizing of facts. In China the man whom we make a don sat for the Imperial examinations and became a bureaucrat. Their scholars were lonely men of few books and fewer pupils, content with a single concubine, a pine tree and the prospect of a stream. European culture has become conventual; we must make it coenobitic.”
“I knew a hermit in the Ogaden Desert once…”
“Invasions swept over China; the Empire split up into warring kingdoms. The scholars lived their frugal and idyllic lives undisturbed, occasionally making exquisite private jokes which they wrote on leaves and floated downstream.”
“I read a lot of Chinese poetry once,” said Mr. Bentley, “in the translation, of course. I became fascinated by it. I would read of a sage who, as you say, lived frugally and idyllically. He had a cottage and a garden and a view. Each flower had its proper mood and phase of the climate; he would smell the jasmine after recovering from the toothache and the lotus when drinking tea with a monk. There was a little clearing where the full moon cast no shadow, where his concubine would sit and sing to him when he got drunk. Every aspect of this little garden corresponded to some personal mood of the most tender and refined sort. It was quite intoxicating to read.”
“It is.”
“This sage had no tame dog, but he had a cat and a mother. Every morning he greeted his mother on his knees and every evening, in winter, he put charcoal under her mattress and himself drew the bed-curtains. It sounded the most exquisite existence.”
“It was.”
“And then,” said Mr. Bentley, “I found a copy of the Daily Mirror in a railway carriage and I read an article there by Godfrey Winn about his cottage and his flowers and his moods, and for the life of me, Ambrose, I couldn’t see the difference between that young gentleman and Yuan Ts’e-tsung.”
It was cruel of Mr. Bentley to say this, but it may be argued for him that he had listened to Ambrose for three hours and now that Basil had joined their table he wanted to go home to bed.
The interruption deflated Ambrose and allowed Basil to say, “These scholars of yours, Ambrose ? they didn’t care if their empire was invaded?”
“Not a hoot, my dear, not a tinker’s hoot.”
“And you’re starting a paper to encourage this sort of scholarship.”
Basil sat back and ordered a drink, as an advocate in a film will relax, saying in triumph, “Mr. District Attorney, your witness.”
There were four hours of darkness to go when Cedric arrived at the port of embarkation. There was a glimmer of light in some of the offices along the quayside, but the quay itself and the ship were in complete darkness; the top-hamper was just discernible as a darker mass against the dark sky. An E.S.O. told Cedric to leave his gear on the quay. The advanced working party were handling that. He left his valise and carried his suitcase up the gangway; at the head an invisible figure directed him to the first-class quarters forward. He found his C.O. in the saloon.
“Hullo, Lyne. You’re back already. Lucky. Billy Allgood broke his collar-bone on leave and isn’t coming with us. You’d better take charge of the embarkation. There’s a hell of a lot to do. Some blasted Highlanders have come to the wrong ship and are all over our troop decks. Had any dinner?”
“I got some oysters in London before starting.”
“Very wise. I tried to get something kept hot. Told them we should all be coming on board hungry, but they’re still working peace-time routine here. This is all I could raise.”
He pointed to a large, silvery tray where, disposed on a napkin, lay a dozen lozenges of toast covered with sardines, slivers of cheese and little glazed pieces of tongue. This was the tray that was always brought to the first-class saloon at ten o’clock at night.
“Come back when you’ve found your cabin.”
Cedric found his cabin, perfectly in order, complete with three towels of different sizes and the photograph of a moustached man putting on his life jacket in the correct manner. He left his suitcase and returned to the C.O.
“Our men will be coming on board in an hour and a half. I don’t know what the devil these Highlanders are doing. Find out and clear them off.”
“Very good, Colonel.”
Cedric plunged down again into the darkness and found the E.S.O. They studied the embarkation orders with the aid of a dimmed torch. There was no doubt about it; the Highlanders were in the wrong ship. This was the
