“All right then,” said Dr. Obispo, “let’s go and rout out Mr. Pordage, while we’re about it.”
“Yes, let’s go and fetch old Ivory,” Virginia agreed, patting her own auburn curls in reference to Jeremy’s baldness. “He’s kind of cute, don’t you think?”
Leaving Pete to go on with the feeding of the baboons, they climbed back to the road and up a flight of steps on the further side, leading directly to the rock-cut windows of Jeremy’s room. Virginia pushed open the glass door.
“Ivory,” she called, “we’ve come to disturb you.”
Jeremy began to murmur something humorously gallant; then broke off in the middle of a sentence. He had suddenly remembered that pile of curious literature on the corner of the table. To get up and put the books into a cupboard would be to invite attention to them; he had no newspaper with which to cover them, no other books to mix them up with. There was nothing to be done. Nothing, except to hope for the best. Fervently he hoped for it; and almost immediately the worst happened. Idly, out of the need to perform some muscular action, however pointless, Virginia picked up a volume of Nerciat, opened it on one of its conscientiously detailed engravings, looked, then with wider eyes looked again and let out a whoop of startled excitement. Dr. Obispo glanced and yelled in turn; then both broke out into enormous laughter.
Jeremy sat in a misery of embarrassment, sicklily smiling, while they asked him if that was how he spent his time, if this was the sort of thing he was studying. If only people weren’t so wearisome, he was thinking, so deplorably unsubtle!
Virginia turned over the pages until she found another illustration. Once more, there was an outcry of delight, astonishment and, this time, incredulity. Was it possible? Could it really be done? She spelled out the caption under the engraving: “La volupté frappait à toutes les portes”; then petulantly shook her head. It was no good; she couldn’t understand it. Those French lessons at high school—just lousy; that was all you could say about them. They hadn’t taught her anything except a lot of nonsense about le crayon de mon oncle and savez-vous planter le chou. She’d always said that studying was mostly a waste of time; this proved it. And why did they have to print this stuff in French anyhow? At the thought that the deficiencies in the educational system of the State of Oregon might for ever prevent her from reading Andréa de Nerciat, the tears came into Virginia’s eyes. It was really too bad!
A brilliant idea occurred to Jeremy. Why shouldn’t he offer to translate the book for her—viva voce and sentence by sentence, like an interpreter at a Council Meeting of the League of Nations? Yes, why not? The more he thought of it, the better the idea seemed to him to be. His decision was made and he had begun to consider how most felicitously to phrase his offer, when Dr. Obispo quietly took the volume Virginia was hold ing, picked up the three companion volumes from the table, along with “Le Portier des Carmes” and the “Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome” and slipped the entire collection into the side pocket of his jacket.
“Don’t worry,” he said to Virginia. “I’ll translate them for you. And now let’s go back to the baboons. Pete’ll be wondering what’s happened to us. Come on, Mr. Pordage.”
In silence, but boiling inwardly with self-reproach for his own inefficiency and indignation at the doctor’s impudence, Jeremy followed them out of the French window and down the steps.
Pete had emptied his basket and was leaning against the wire, intently following with his eyes the movements of the animals within. At their approach he turned towards them. His pleasant young face was bright with excitement.
“Do you know, doc,” he said, “I believe it’s working.”
“What’s working?” asked Virginia.
Pete’s answering smile was beautiful with happiness. For, oh, how happy he was! Doubly and trebly happy. By the sweetness of her subsequent behaviour, Virginia had more than made up for the pain she had inflicted by turning away to listen to that smutty story. And after all it probably wasn’t a smutty story; he had been maligning her, thinking gratuitous evil of her. No, it certainly hadn’t been a smutty story—not smutty because, when she turned back to him, her face had looked like the face of that child in the illustrated Bible at home, that child who was gazing so innocently and cutely while Jesus said, “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” And that was not the only reason for his happiness. He was happy, too, because it looked as though those cultures of the carp’s intestinal flora were really having an effect on the baboons they had tried them on.
“I believe they’re livelier,” he explained. “And their fur—it’s kind of glossier.”
The fact gave him almost as great a satisfaction as did Virginia’s presence here in the transfiguring richness of the evening sunlight, as did the memory of her sweetness, the uplifting conviction of her essential innocence. Indeed, in some obscure way, the rejuvenation of the baboons and Virginia’s adorableness seemed to him to have a profound connexion—a connexion not only with one another, but also and at the same time with Loyalist Spain and Anti-Fascism. Three separate things, and yet one thing. There was a bit of poetry he had been made to learn at school—how did it go?
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not something or other (he could not at the moment remember what) more.
He did not love anything more than Virginia. But the fact that he cared so enormously much for science and justice, for this research and the boys back in Spain, did something to make his love for her more profound and, though it seemed a paradox, more whole-hearted.
“Well, what about moving on?” he suggested at last.
Dr. Obispo looked at his wrist watch. “I’d forgotten,” he said, “I’ve got some letters I ought to write before dinner. Guess I’ll have to see Mr. Propter some other time.”
“That’s too bad!” Pete did his best to impart to his tone and expression the cordiality of regret he did not feel. In fact, he was delighted. He admired Dr. Obispo, thought him a remarkable research worker—but not the sort of person a young innocent girl like Virginia ought to associate with. He dreaded for her the influence of so much cynicism and hard-boiledness. Besides, so far as his own relations to Virginia were concerned, Dr. Obispo was always in the way. “That’s too bad,” he repeated, and the intensity of his pleasure was such that he fairly ran up the steps leading from the baboon-enclosure to the drive—ran so fast that his heart began palpitating and missing beats. Damn that rheumatic fever!
Dr. Obispo stepped back to allow Virginia to pass and, as he did so, gave a little tap to the pocket containing “Les Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome” and tipped her a wink. Virginia winked back and followed Pete up the steps.
A few moments later Dr. Obispo was walking up the drive, the others down. Or to be more exact, Pete-and Jeremy were walking, while Virginia, to whom the idea of using one’s legs to get from anywhere to anywhere else was practically unthinkable, sat on her strawberry-and-cream-coloured scooter and, with one hand affectionately laid on Pete’s shoulder, allowed herself to be carried down by the force of gravity.
The noise of the baboons faded behind them, and at the next turn of the road there was Giambologna’s nymph, still indefatigably spouting from her polished breasts. Virginia suddenly interrupted a conversation about Clark Gable to say, in the righteously indignant tone of a vice crusader: “I just can’t figure why Uncle Jo allows that thing to stand there. It’s disgusting!”
“Disgusting?” Jeremy echoed in astonishment.
“Disgusting!” she repeated emphatically.
“Do you object to her not having any clothes on?” he asked, remembering, as he did so, those two little satin asymptotes to nudity which she herself had worn up there, in the swimming pool.
She shook her head impatiently. “It’s the way the water comes out.” She made the grimace of one who had tasted something revolting. “I think it’s horrible.”
“But why?” Jeremy insisted.
“Because it’s horrible,” was all the explanation she could give. A child of her age, which was the age, in this context, of bottle-feeding and contraception, she felt herself outraged by this monstrous piece of indelicacy from an earlier time. It was just horrible; that was all that could be said about it. Turning back to Pete, she went on talking about Clark Gable.
Opposite the entrance to the Grotto, Virginia parked her scooter. The masons had finished their work on the tomb and were gone; the place was empty. Virginia straightened her rakishly tilted yachting cap as a sign of respect; then ran up the steps, paused on the threshold to cross herself, and, entering, knelt for a few moments before the image. The others waited silently, in the roadway.
“Our
