Mr. Stoyte went on pleading. “I’ll make it worth your while,” he said. “You can have anything you care to ask for. Anything,” he repeated without any qualifying reference, this time, to reason.
“Ah,” said Dr. Obispo, “now you’re talking turkey.”
“. . . Mother-of-God,” muttered the Baby, “pray-for-us-sinners-now-and-in-the-hour-of-our-death-Amen-Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God-pray-for-us-sinners-now . . .”
“You’re talking turkey,” Dr. Obispo repeated.
PART III
Chapter I
THERE was a tap at the door of Jeremy’s work room; it was Mr. Propter who entered. He was wearing, Jeremy noticed, the same dark grey suit and black tie as he had worn at Pete’s funeral. The urban costume diminished him; he seemed smaller than in his working clothes and at the same time less himself. That weather-beaten, emphatically featured face of his—that face of a statue high up on the west front of a cathedral—looked curiously incongruous above a starched collar.
“You’ve not forgotten?” he said, when they had shaken hands.
For all reply, Jeremy pointed to his own black jacket and sponge-bag trousers. They were expected at Tarzana for the ceremonial opening of the new Stoyte Auditorium.
Mr. Propter looked at his watch. “We’ve got another few minutes before we need think of starting.” He sat down. “What’s the news?”
“Couldn’t be better,” Jeremy answered.
Mr. Propter nodded. “Now that poor Jo and the others have gone, it must be quite agreeable here.”
“All alone with twelve million dollars worth of bric-a-brac,” said Jeremy. “I have the most enormous fun.”
“How little fun you’d be having,” said Mr. Propter meditatively, “if you’d been left in company with the people who actually made the bric-a-brac. With Greco, and Rubens, and Turner, and Fra Angelico.”
“God preserve us!” said Jeremy, throwing up his hands.
“That’s the charm of art,” Mr. Propter went on. “It represents only the most amiable aspects of the most talented human beings. That’s why I’ve never been able to believe that the art of any period threw much light on the life of that period. Take a Martian; show him a representative collection of Botticellis, Peruginos and Raphaels. Could he infer from them the conditions described by Machiavelli?”
“No, he couldn’t,” Jeremy agreed. “But meanwhile, here’s another question. The conditions described by Machiavelli—were they the real conditions? Not that Machiavelli didn’t tell the truth. The things he described really happened. But did contemporaries think them as awful as they seem to us when we read about them now? We think they ought to have been miserable about what was happening. But were they?”
“Were they?” Mr. Propter repeated. “We ask the historians; and of course they can’t answer—because obviously there’s no way of compiling statistics about the sum of happiness, nor any way of comparing the feelings of people living under one set of conditions with the feelings of people living under another and quite different set. The real conditions at any given moment are the subjective conditions of the people then alive. And the historian has no way of finding out what those conditions were.”
“No way except through looking at works of art,” said Jeremy. “I’d say they do throw light on the subjective conditions. Take one of your examples. Perugino’s a contemporary of Machiavelli. That means that at least one person contrived to be cheerful all through an unpleasant period. And if one could be, why not many?” He cleared the way for a quotation with a little cough. “ ‘The state of the country never put a man off his dinner.’ ”
“Massive wisdom!” said Mr. Propter. “But remember that the state of Dr. Johnson’s England was excellent, even at its worst. What about the state of a country like China, say, or Spain—a country where a man can’t be put off his dinner, for the simple reason that there isn’t any dinner? And conversely, what about all the losses of appetite at times when everything’s going well?” He paused, smiled inquiringly at Jeremy, then shook his head. “Sometimes there’s a lot of cheerfulness as well as a lot of misery; sometimes there seems to be almost nothing but misery. That’s all the historian can say insofar as he’s a historian. Insofar as he’s a theologian, of course, or a metaphysician, he can maunder on indefinitely, like Marx or St. Augustine or Spengler.” Mr. Propter made a little grimace of distaste. “God, what a lot of bosh we’ve managed to talk in the last few thousand years!” he said.
“But it has its charm,” Jeremy insisted. “Really good bosh . . .”
“I’m barbarous enough to prefer sense,” said Mr. Propter. “That’s why, if I want a philosophy of history, I go to the psychologist.”
“ ‘Totem and Tabu?” Jeremy questioned in some astonishment.
“No, no,” said Mr. Propter with a certain impatience. “Not that kind of psychologist. I mean the religious psychologist; the one who knows by direct experience that men are capable of liberation and enlightenment. He’s the only philosopher of history whose hypothesis has been experimentally verified; therefore the only one who can make a generalization that covers the facts.”
“And what are his generalizations?” said Jeremy. “Just the usual thing?”
Mr. Propter laughed. “Just the usual thing,” he answered. “The old, boring, inescapable truths. On the human level, men live in ignorance, craving and fear. Ignorance, craving and fear result in some temporary pleasures, in many lasting miseries, in final frustration. The nature of the cure is obvious; the difficulties in the way of achieving it, almost insuperable. We have to choose between almost insuperable difficulties on the one hand and absolutely certain misery and frustration on the other. Meanwhile, the general hypothesis remains as the intellectual key to history. Only the religious psychologist can make any sense of Perugino and Machia-velli, for example; or of all this.” He pointed towards the Hauberk Papers.
Jeremy twinkled behind his glasses and patted his bald patch. “Your true scholar,” he fluted, “doesn’t even want to make sense of it.”
“Yes, I always tend to forget that,” said Mr. Propter rather sadly.
Jeremy coughed. “ ‘Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,’ ” he quoted from the “Grammarian’s Funeral.”
“Gave it for his own sake,” said Mr. Propter, getting out of his chair. “Gave it regardless of the fact that the grammar he was studying was hopelessly unscientific, riddled with concealed metaphysics, utterly provincial and antiquated. Well,” he added, “that’s what one would expect, I suppose.” He took Jeremy’s arm, and they walked together towards the elevator. “What a curious figure old Browning is!” he continued, his mind harking back to the Grammarian. “Such a first-rate intelligence, and at the same time such a fool. All that preposterous stuff about romantic love! Bringing God into it, putting it into heaven, talking as though marriage and the higher forms of adultery were identical with the beatific vision. The silliness of it! But, again, that’s what one has to expect.” He sighed. “I don’t know why,” he added after a pause, “I often find myself remembering that rhyme of his—I can’t even recall which poem it comes from—the one that goes: ‘One night he kissed My soul out in a burning mist.’ My soul out in a burning mist, indeed!” he repeated. “Really, how much I prefer Chaucer on the subject.
Do you remember? ‘Thus swivfèd is this carpenterès wife.’ So beautifully objective and unemphatic and free of verbiage! Browning was always rambling on about God; but I suspect he was much further away from reality than Chaucer was, even though Chaucer never thought about God, if he could possibly help it. Chaucer had nothing between himself and eternity but his appetites. Browning had his appetites, plus a great barrage of nonsense—nonsense, what’s more, with a purpose. For, of course, that bogus mysticism wasn’t merely gratuitous bosh. It had an object. It existed in order that Browning might be able to persuade himself that his appetites were identical with God. ‘Thus swivèd is this carpenterès wife,’ ” he repeated, as they entered the elevator and went up with Vermeer to the great hall. “ ‘My soul out in a burning mist.’ It’s extraordinary the way the whole quality of our existence can be changed by altering the words in which we think and talk about it. We float in language like icebergs—four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open air of immediate, non-linguistic experience.”
They crossed the hall. Mr. Propter’s car was standing outside the front door. He took the wheel; Jeremy got in beside him. They drove off, down the curving road, past the baboons, past Giambologna’s nymph, past the Grotto, under the portcullis and across the drawbridge.
“I so often think of that poor boy,” said Mr. Propter, breaking a long silence. “Dying so suddenly.”
“I’d no idea his heart was as bad as that,” said Jeremy.
“In a certain sense,” Mr. Propter went on, “I feel responsible for what happened. I asked him to help me in the carpenter’s shop. Made him work too hard, I guess—though he insisted it was all right for him. I ought to have realized that he had his pride—that he was young enough to feel ashamed of admitting he couldn’t take it. One’s punished for being insensitive and unaware. And so are the people one’s insensitive about.”
They drove past the hospital and through the orange groves in silence. “There’s a kind of pointlessness about sudden and premature death,” said Jeremy at last. “A kind of specially acute irrelevance . . .”
“Specially acute?” Mr. Propter questioned. “No, I shouldn’t say so. It’s no
