The Apple Cart

like that. He arranged the last two coronations. That was how I got my job here in the palace. All our royal people knew him quite well: he was behind the scenes with them. Pamphilius Behind the scenes and yet believed they were all real! Sempronius Yes. Believed in them with all his soul. Pamphilius Although he manufactured them himself? Sempronius Certainly. Do you suppose a baker cannot believe sincerely in the sacrifice of the Mass or in holy communion because he has baked the consecrated wafer himself? Pamphilius I never thought of that. Sempronius My father might have made millions in the theatres and film studios. But he refused to touch them because the things they represented hadn’t really happened. He didn’t mind doing the christening of Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare’s Henry the Eighth because that had really happened. It was a celebration of royalty. But not anything romantic: not though they offered him thousands. Pamphilius Did you ever ask him what he really thought about it all? But of course you didn’t: one can’t ask one’s father anything about himself. Sempronius My dear Pam: my father never thought. He didn’t know what thought meant. Very few people do, you know. He had vision: actual bodily vision, I mean; and he had an oddly limited sort of imagination. What I mean is that he couldn’t imagine anything he didn’t see; but he could imagine that what he did see was divine and holy and omniscient and omnipotent and eternal and everything that is impossible if only it looked splendid enough, and the organ was solemn enough, or the military bands brassy enough. Pamphilius You mean that he had to get everything from outside. Sempronius Exactly. He’d never have felt anything if he hadn’t had parents to feel about in his childhood, and a wife and babies to feel about when he grew up. He’d never have known anything if he hadn’t been taught at school. He couldn’t amuse himself: he had to pay oceans of money to other people to amuse him with all sorts of ghastly sports and pleasures that would have driven me into a monastery to escape from them. You see it was all ritual: he went to the Riviera every winter just as he went to church. Pamphilius By the way, is he alive? I should like to know him. Sempronius No. He died in 1962, of solitude. Pamphilius What do you mean? of solitude? Sempronius He couldn’t bear to be alone for a moment: it was death to him. Somebody had to be with him always. Pamphilius Oh well, come! That was friendly and kindly. It shows he had something inside him after all. Sempronius Not a bit. He never talked to his friends. He played cards with them. They never exchanged a thought. Pamphilius He must have been a rum old bird. Sempronius Not rum enough to be noticed. There are millions like him. Pamphilius But what about his dying of solitude? Was he imprisoned? Sempronius No. His yacht struck a reef and sank somewhere off the north of Scotland; and he managed to swim to an uninhabited island. All the rest were drowned; and he was not taken off for three weeks. When they found him he was melancholy mad, poor old boy; and he never got over it. Simply from having no one to play cards with, and no church to go to. Pamphilius

My dear Sem: one isn’t alone on an uninhabited island. My mother used to stand me on the table and make me recite about it.

He declaims.

To sit on rocks; to muse o’er flood and fell;
To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene
Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell
And mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o’er steeps and foaming falls to lean:
This is not solitude: ’tis but to hold
Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stores unrolled.

Sempronius Now you have hit the really funny thing about my father. All that about the lonely woods and the rest of it⁠—what you call Nature⁠—didn’t exist for him. It had to be something artificial to get at him. Nature to him meant nakedness; and nakedness only disgusted him. He wouldn’t look at a horse grazing in a field; but put splendid trappings on it and stick it into a procession and he just loved it. The same with men and women: they were nothing to him until they were dressed up in fancy costumes and painted and wigged and titled. To him the sacredness of the priest was the beauty of his vestment, the loveliness of women the dazzle of their jewels and robes, the charm of the countryside not in its hills and trees, nor in the blue smoke from its cottages in the winter evenings, but of its temples, palaces, mansions, park gates, and porticoed country houses. Think of the horror of that island to him! A void! a place where he was deaf and dumb and blind and lonely! If only there had been a peacock with its tail in full bloom it might have saved his reason; but all the birds were gulls; and gulls are not decorative. Our King could have lived there for thirty years with nothing but his own thoughts. You would have been all right with a fishing rod and a golf ball with a bag of clubs. I should have been as happy as a man in a picture gallery looking at the dawns and sunsets, the changing seasons, the continual miracle of life ever renewing itself. Who could be dull with pools in the rocks to watch? Yet my father, with all that under his nose, was driven mad by its nothingness. They say that where there is nothing the king loses his rights. My father found that where there is nothing a man loses his reason and dies. Pamphilius Let me add that in this palace, when the king’s letters are not ready for him at 12 o’clock, a secretary loses his job. Sempronius