“And the way between the horns?” Jeremy questioned. “Isn’t it the way of the professional psychologists who have written about mysticism? They’ve evolved a pretty sensible language. You haven’t mentioned them.”
“I haven’t mentioned them,” said Mr. Propter, “for the same reason as in talking about beauty I shouldn’t mention professional aestheticians who had never been inside a picture gallery.”
“You mean, they don’t know what they’re talking about?”
Mr. Propter smiled. “I’d put it another way,” he said. “They talk about what they know. But what they know isn’t worth talking about. For what they know is only the literature of mysticism—not the experience.”
“Then there’s no way between the horns,” Jeremy concluded. His eyes twinkled behind his spectacles; he smiled like a child, taking a sly triumph in some small consummation of naughtiness. “What fun it is when there isn’t a way between!” he went on. “It makes the world seem so deliciously cosy, when all the issues are barred and there’s nowhere to go to with all your brass bands and shining armour. Onward, Christian soldiers! Forward, the Light Brigade! Excelsior! And all the time you’re just going round and round—head to tail, follow-my Fuehrer—like Fabre’s caterpillars. That really gives me a great deal of pleasure!”
This time Mr. Propter laughed outright. “I’m sorry to have to disappoint you,” he said. “But unfortunately there is a way between the horns. The practical way. You can go and find out what it means for yourself, by first-hand experience. Just as you can find out what El Greco’s Crucifixion of St. Peter looks like by taking the elevator and going up to the hall. Only in this case, I’m afraid, there isn’t any elevator. You have to go up on your own legs. And make no mistake,” he added, turning to Pete, “there’s an awful lot of stairs.”
Dr. Obispo straightened himself up, took the tubes of the stethoscope out of his ears and stowed the instrument away in his pocket along with the “Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome.”
“Anything bad?” Mr. Stoyte asked anxiously.
Dr. Obispo shook his head and gave him a smile of reassurance. “No influenza anyhow,” he said. “Just a slight intensification of the bronchial condition. I’ll give you something for it tonight before you go to bed.”
Mr. Stoyte’s face relaxed into cheerfulness. “Glad it was only a false alarm,” he said and turned away to get his clothes, which were lying in a heap on the sofa, under the Watteau.
From her seat at the soda counter, Virginia let out a whoop of triumph. “Isn’t that just swell!” she cried. Then in another, graver tone, “You know, Uncle Jo,” she added, “he’s got me panicked about that cough of yours. Panicked,” she repeated.
Uncle Jo grinned triumphantly and slapped his chest so hard that its hairy, almost female accumulations of flesh shivered like jellies under the blow. “Nothing wrong with me” he boasted.
Virginia watched him over the top of her glass, as he got into his shirt and knotted his tie. The expression on her innocent young face was one of perfect serenity. But behind those limpid blue eyes her mind was simmering with activity. “Was that a close call?” she kept saying to herself. “Gee, was it close!” At the recollection of that sudden violent start at the sound of the elevator gate being opened, of that wild scramble as the footsteps approached along the corridor, she felt herself tingling with a delicious mixture of fear and amusement, of apprehension and triumph. It was the sensation she used to have as a child, playing hide and seek in the dark.
A close call! And hadn’t Sig been wonderful! What presence of mind! And that stethoscope thing he pulled out of his pocket—what a brain wave! It had saved the situation! Because, without the stethoscope, Uncle Jo would have put on one of his jealousy acts. Though what right he had to be jealous, Virginia went on to reflect, with a strong sense of injury, she really didn’t know. Seeing that nothing had happened except just a little reading aloud. And anyhow why shouldn’t a girl be allowed to read that sort of thing if she wanted to? Especially as it was in French. And, besides, who was Uncle Jo to be prudish, she’d like to know? Getting mad with people only for telling you a funny story, when just look what he himself was doing all the time—and then expecting you to talk like Louisa M. Alcott, and thinking you ought to be protected from hearing so much as a dirty word! And the way he simply wouldn’t allow her to tell the truth about herself, even if she had wanted to. Making a build-up of her as somebody quite different from what she really was.
Acting almost as though she were Daisy Mae in the comic strip and he a sort of Little Abner rescuing her in the nick of time. Though, of course, he had to admit that it had happened at least once before he came along, because if it hadn’t, there’d have been no excuse for him. It had happened, but quite unwillingly—you know, practically a rape—or else some fellow taking advantage of her being so dumb and innocent—at the Congo Club with nothing on but a G-string and some talcum powder! And naturally she was always supposed to have hated it; crying her eyes out all the time until Uncle Jo came along; and then everything was different. But in that case, it now suddenly occurred to Virginia, if that was the way he thought about her, what the hell did he mean by coming home like this at seven-fifteen, when he’d told her he wouldn’t be back till eight? The old double-crosser! Was he trying to spy on her? Because, if so, she wasn’t going to stand for it; if so, then it just served him right that that was what Sig had been reading to her.
He was just getting what he deserved for snooping around, trying to catch her doing something that wasn’t right. Well, if that was how he was going to act, she’d tell Sig to come every day and read another chapter. Though how on earth the man who wrote the book was going to keep it up for a hundred and twenty days, she really couldn’t imagine. Considering what had happened already in the first week—and here was she, figuring that there wasn’t anything she didn’t know! Well, one lived and learnt. Though there was some of it she really hadn’t in the least wanted to learn. Things that made you feel sick to your stomach. Horrible! As bad as having babies! (She shuddered.) Not that there weren’t a lot of funny things in the book too. The piece she had made Sig read over again—that was grand, that had given her a real kick. And that other bit where the girl . . .
“Well, Baby,” said Mr. Stoyte, as he did up the last button of his waistcoat. “You’re not saying much, are you? A penny for your thoughts.”
Virginia raised that childishly short upper lip in a smile that made his heart melt with tenderness and desire. “I was thinking about you, Uncle Jo,” she said.
Chapter XIII
If thou appear untouch’d by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine;
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year;
And worshipps’t at the Temple’s inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.
“AND very nice too,” Jeremy said aloud. Transparent was the word, he reflected. The meaning was there like a fly in amber. Or, rather, there was no fly; there was only the amber; and the amber was the meaning. He looked at his watch. Three minutes to midnight. He closed his Wordsworth—and to think, he went on bitterly to remind himself, to think that he might have been refreshing his memory of “Félicia”!—laid the volume down on the table beside his bed and took off his glasses. Deprived of their six and a half diopters of correction, his eyes were instantly reduced to a state of physiological despair. Curved crystal had become their element; unspectacled, they were like a pair of jellied sea creatures, suddenly taken out of water. Then the light went out; and it was as though the poor things had been mercifully dropped, for safe keeping, into an aquarium.
Jeremy stretched under the bed-clothes and yawned. What a day! But now, thank God, the paradise of bed. The Blessed Damozel leaned out from the gold bed of heaven. But these sheets were cotton ones, not linen; which was really a bit discreditable in a house like this! A house full of Rubenses and Grecos—and your sheets were cotton! But that Crucifixion of St. Peter—what a really staggering machine! At least as good as the Assumption at Toledo. Which had probably been blown up by this time, incidentally. Just to demonstrate what happened when people took things too seriously. Not but that, he went on to reflect, there wasn’t something rather impressive about that old Propter-Object. (For that was what he had decided to call the man in his own mind and when he wrote to his mother; the Propter-Object.)
A bit of an Ancient Mariner, perhaps. The wedding guest, he beat his breast on occasions; ought perhaps to have beaten it more often than he had done, seeing what a frightful subversion of all the common decencies and, a fortiori, the common indecencies (such as Félicia, such as every other Friday afternoon in Maida Vale), the creature was inculcating. Not without a considerable persuasiveness, damn his
