“Reassure me, at least,” he said, “that this would have happened without me.”
“Of course. Much worse if it hadn’t been for you.” They stopped talking.
“I tried to help you,” he said, “it is your turn.” Saw the effort she made, thought how easy these people were to spur.
“Let’s go up and tackle Picus,” she said—“there is one thing about staying in bed, it runs to earth.”
“No,” said Carston, “you must excuse me. I’ve had about enough of that chap.”
“So,” said Scylla, “for the moment, have I.”
“Seems to me he played a mean trick on you all—What I don’t see is why. Or why it should have got you.”
The other side of the house Ross was seeing Felix flung in a chair, hearing the nervous sobbing his own cool voice could not control. Nor could he control in himself his aversion to speak or to help.
“What in hell do we come here for? I told Scylla to sell those shares and we’d have been at Biarritz.”
“It would have been the same at Biarritz.”
“You might be. I should be different there. You’re looking for something. I’m not. And I hope when you get it you’ll like it. Looking for the Sanc-Grail. It’s always the same story. The Golden Fleece or the philosopher’s stone, or perpetual motion, or Atlantis or the lost tribes or God. All ways of walking into the same trap. And Scylla gets into bed with old Tracy’s son.”
“That is not the point. What is it about a trap?”
The boy got up and looked a little madly and very insolently at Ross, the blue eyes cold between lids red with weeping. Ross was surprised to find himself edging away, like a man who is to be shot at.
“We’re through with the baby-brother business.”
Upstairs, Picus had finished shaving, his body worked on as delicately and scrupulously as a cat. Whistling to himself while Felix was sobbing, whistling back his power as their idol, like a god summoning an element or in confidence like prayer. He set his tie for the last time, shook himself, laid himself down on the window seat, and drew a ring with a pearl on to his atrociously powerful hand.
And Clarence out on the high turf was not looking at the sea or the terrible crest of Gault suspended in the haze. Or at the small enamel floor he trod on, flower and leaf stars and bars and rings and crosses: or at a dozen rabbits hurrying: or at one hawk not hurrying, until he dropped faster than the eye and there would be one rabbit the less. He walked slowly, inside himself, petting his phantoms, especially a phantom of Picus, the body up at the house was behaving more and more unlike. He wondered also why Scylla had called him “medievalist,” because she said he assumed a form from inside and made things fit it, instead of compelling what is to do his construction for him. Hadn’t Picus invented a lying fancy to please her, to get off with her? Lying and lecherous his bird was, for a woman who had snapped him up for her body’s sake and her vanity. This went on until he saw the names he called her take body and walk to meet him out of the wood. Vanity, lechery, falsehood, and malice lolled along together across the grass, out of the trees. And because she called him medievalist, he saw them in archaic dress.
Scylla said to Carston on the lawn:
“So, you see, what sounded romantic excitement about the Sanc-Grail cup was real. And unfortunate?”
Carston wondered, deplored and detested the European faculty for taking the skeleton out of the cupboard. Rattling it, airing it, lecturing on it. She was winding up a discourse without enquiry into his feelings. On what he supposed was the skeleton, the world skeleton. He heard:
“If the materialist’s universe is true, not a working truth to make bridges with and things, we are a set of blind factors in a machine. And no passion has any validity and no imagination. They are just little tricks of the machine. It either is so, or it isn’t. If you hold that it isn’t, you corrupt your intellect by denying certain facts. If you stick to the facts as we have them, life is a horror and an insult. Nothing has any worth, but to tickle our sensations and oil the machine. There is no value in our passions and perceptions, or final differences between a life full of design and adventure and a life crawled out in a palace or a slum. The life of Plato or Buddha, apart from the kick of the illusion, was as futile as the lives of the daughters of Louis XV. Old talk, you say, and remember In Memoriam. But notice what is happening now people have become used to the idea. Any little boy in a Paris bar, who never heard of physics knows. Everyone gets the age’s temper. With results on their conduct—‘Why be good any more’ they say, and the youngest ones not that. And it’s not intellectual beauty the culture-camp admire. It’s themselves for having such fine subconsciousnesses. Such an elegant sublimation of their infant interests. Watch the world with the skeleton acclimatised! Even when I was new we tried the bad to see if it might not be good. But the new lot aren’t interested. Don’t give a button for the good any more.
“And there is no evading it by any ‘service of humanity’ game. Unless you’re one of the people who get sensual kick out looking after things, why help humanity? Think of Wells’s Utopias. Birth-control, and peace and drains. And nothing left to do but report on the fauna of a further star. Our visiting-list extended to super-birds, or intellectually developed spiders. Nothing but physical adventure. Especially as we’ve picked up one priceless truth off the road, that every action brings with it its toxin and its antitoxin. If, instead
