David said they had no visas for anywhere. They were looking for Truth, he added.
‘Aren’t you afraid you may end up in gaol?’
He said, loftily, that Truth flourished in gaols, specially in Eastern ones.
‘We are the bridge,’ he added, ‘between pre-war humanity with its selfishness and materialistic barriers against reality and the new race of World Citizens. We are trying to indoctrinate ourselves with wider concepts and for this we realize that we need the purely contemplative wisdom which comes from following the Road.’
Mildred Jungfleisch now had her clue. As soon as she realized that David was not on an ordinary House and Gardens honeymoon, but was in search of Truth, she knew exactly where she was and how to cope. She dropped the Place Stanislas and Grosbois and brought out such phrases as ‘Mind-stretching interpretation of the Cosmos’, ‘Interchange of ideas between sentient contemporary human creatures’, ‘Explode the forms and habits of thought imposed by authority’, ‘I once took a course in illogism and I fully realize the place it should hold in contemporary thought’, ‘Atmosphere of positive thinking – change is life’.
One saw why she was such an asset in society; she could produce the right line of talk in its correct jargon for every occasion. She never put a foot wrong. David was clearly both delighted and amazed to find so kindred a spirit at his parents’ table; they talked deeply until the end of dinner. Their neighbours lost interest in the conversation as soon as it moved from personal to eternal issues (the highlight having been the disclosure that David did not know the age of his own baby) and the usual parrot-house noise of a French dinner party broke out. As for the student of modern languages, she never opened her mouth. M. Hué, who was next her, tried all sorts of gambits in French, English, German, Portuguese and Norwegian. She merely looked as if she thought he was about to strike her and held her peace.
I now tried to put these children out of my mind for the present and do my duty as a hostess.
‘What does patibulaire mean?’ I asked M. Bouche-Bontemps. I thought M. Béguin had the grace to look embarrassed; he turned hurriedly to his neighbour.
‘Patibulum is Latin for a gibbet.’
‘I see exactly.’
M. Bouche-Bontemps was very kind and tactful. Instead of abruptly wrenching the conversation in an obvious manner from the subject which was clearly preoccupying me, he began talking about difficult young persons of former days. In seventeenth-century England there were the Ti Tyre Tu, educated gangsters who called themselves after the first line of Virgil’s first eclogue. In the 1830s, ‘the same length of time from Waterloo as we are from Dunkirk’, young Frenchmen called Bousingos, like the Ti Tyre Tu, wore strange clothes and committed lurid crimes. I could have wished he had left out the lurid crimes, but I saw the connexion.
‘I don’t know about England,’ he said, ‘but in France mothers are frightened of making their children frown. They love them so much that they cannot bear to see a shadow on their happiness; they never scold or thwart them in any way. I see my daughter-in-law allowing everything, there’s no authority outside school and the children do exactly as they like in their spare time. I am horrified when I see what it is that they do like. They never open a book, the girls don’t do embroidery, the boy, though he is rather musical, doesn’t learn the piano. They play stupid games with a great ball and go to the cinema. We used to be taken to the Matinée Classique at the Français and dream of Le Cid – that’s quite old fashioned – it’s The Kid now. How will it end?’
‘I think you’ll find they will grow out of it and become like everybody else.’
‘Who is everybody else, though – you and me and the Ambassador or some American film actor?’
‘You and me,’ I said firmly. ‘To our own children we must be the norm, surely. They may react from our values for a while but in the end they will come back to them.’
‘But these grandchildren of mine are getting so big – they don’t seem to change. They still throw that idiotic football at each other as soon as their lessons are over.’
‘Good for the health, that’s one thing.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t want them to win the Olympic games. Furthermore healthy children are generally stupid. Those wise old monks knew what they were doing when they founded the universities in unhealthy places. I hate health – the more over-populated the world becomes the more people bother about it. Hünde, wollt ihr ewig leben? says I!’
‘To your own grandchildren?’
‘Specially to them!’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I am very serious, however. This is a moment in the history of the world when brains are needed more than anything else. If we don’t produce them in Western Europe where will they come from? Not from America where a school is a large, light building with a swimming-pool. Nor from Russia where they are too earnest to see the wood for the trees. As for all the rest, they may have clever thoughts about Karl Marx and so on, but they are not adult. If the children of our old civilization don’t develop as they ought to, the world will indeed become a dangerous playground.’
I said, ‘My two grown-up boys were perfect when they were little, very, very brilliant, longing to learn, all for Le Cid as opposed to The Kid. They both did well at Oxford. Now look at them. Bearded David there, with a first in Greats
