A rational being does not allow himself to be converted to the cult of Mumbo Jumbo; but he will have no objection to occasionally going a bit native. The worship of Mumbo Jumbo means the acceptance of taboos; going native means freedom. ‘True Freedom!’ Anthony grinned to himself; his good humour and equanimity had returned. A snob, a middle-class snob. No doubt. But there was a reason for his snobbery, a justification. And if the lordly young barbarians tended to regard him as a sort of high-class buffoon – well, that was the price he had to pay for their gift of freedom. There was no price to be paid for associating with the Fabians; but then, how little they had to give him! Socialist doctrines might to some extent theoretically liberate the intellect; but the example of the young barbarians was a liberation in the sphere of practice.
‘So frightfully sorry,’ he scribbled in his note to Brian. ‘Suddenly remembered I’d booked myself for dinner tonight.’ (‘Booked’ was one of his father’s words – a word he ordinarily detested for its affectation. Writing a lie, he had found it coming spontaneously to his pen.) ‘Alas’ (that was also a favourite locution of his father’s), ‘shan’t be able to listen to you on sin! Wish I could get out of this, but don’t see how. Yours, A.’
By the time the fruit was on the table they were all pretty drunk. Gerry Watchett was telling Scroope about that German baroness he had had on the boat, on the way to Egypt. Abinger had no audience, but was reciting limericks: the Young Lady of Wick, the Old Man of Devizes, the Young Man called Maclean – a whole dictionary of national biography. Ted and Willie were having a violent quarrel about the best way of shooting grouse. Alone of the party, Anthony was silent. Speech would have compromised the delicate happiness he was then enjoying. That last glass of champagne had made him the inhabitant of a new world, extraordinarily beautiful and precious and significant.
The apples and oranges in the silver bowl were like enormous gems. Each glass, under the candles, contained not wine, but a great yellow beryl, solid and translucent. The roses had the glossy texture of satin and the shining hardness and distinctness of form belonging to metal or glass. Even sound was frozen and crystalline. The Young Lady of Kew was the equivalent, in his ears, of a piece of sculptured jade, and that violently futile discussion about grouse seemed like a waterfall in winter. Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui, he thought with heightened pleasure. Everything was supernaturally brilliant and distinct, but at the same time how remote, how strangely irrelevant! Bright against the outer twilight of the room, the faces grouped about the table might have been things seen on the other side of a sheet of plate-glass, in an illuminated aquarium. And the aquarium was not only without, it was also, mysteriously, within him. Looking through the glass at those sea flowers and submarine gems, he was himself a fish – but a fish of genius, a fish that was also a god.
ICHTHUS – Iesos Christos theou huios soter. His divine fish-soul hung there, poised in its alien element, gazing, gazing through huge eyes that perceived everything, understood everything, but having no part in what it saw. Even his own hands lying there on the table in front of him had ceased, in any real sense, to be his. From his aquarium fastness he viewed them with the same detached and happy admiration as he felt for the fruits and flowers, or those other transfigured bits of still life, the faces of his friends. Beautiful hands! contrived – how marvellously! – to perform their innumerable functions – the pointing of double-barrelled guns at flying birds, the caressing of the thighs of German baronesses in liners, the playing of imaginary scales upon the table-cloth, so. Enchanted, he watched the movements of his fingers, the smooth sliding of the tendons under the skin. Exquisite hands!
But no more truly a part of himself, of the essential fish-soul in its timeless aquarium, than the hands of Abinger peeling that banana, the hands of Scroope carrying a match to his cigar. I am not my body, I am not my sensations, I am not even my mind; I am that I am. I om that I om. The sacred word OM represents Him. God is not limited by time. For the One is not absent from anything, and yet is separated from all things . . .
‘Hi, Professor!’ A piece of orange-peel struck him on the cheek. He started and turned round. ‘What the hell are you thinking about?’ Gerry Watchett was asking in that purposely harsh voice which it amused him to put on like a hideous mask.
The momentarily troubled waters of the aquarium had already returned to rest. A fish once more, a divine and remotely happy Fish, Anthony smiled at him with serene indulgence.
‘I was thinking about Plotinus,’ he said.
‘Why Plotinus?’
‘Why Plotinus? But, my dear sir, isn’t it obvious? Science is reason, and reason is multitudinous.’ The fish had found a tongue; eloquence flowed from the aquarium in an effortless stream. ‘But if one happens to be feeling particularly unmultitudinous – well, what else is there to think about except Plotinus? Unless, of course, you prefer the pseudo-Dionysius, or Eckhart, or St Teresa. The flight of the alone to the Alone. Even St Thomas is forced to admit that no mind can see the divine substance unless it is divorced from bodily senses, either by death or by some rapture. Some rapture, mark you! But a rapture is always a rapture, whatever it’s due to. Whether it’s champagne, or saying OM, or squinting at your nose, or looking at a crucifix, or making love – preferably in a boat, Gerry; I’m the first to admit it; preferably in a boat. What are the wild waves saying? Rapture! Ecstasy! Fairly yelling it. Until, mark you, until, the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body, and become a living soul, while with an eye made quiet . . .’
‘There was a Young Fellow of Burma,’ Abinger suddenly declaimed.
‘Made quiet,’ Anthony repeated more loudly, ‘by the power of harmony . . .’
‘Whose betrothed had good reasons to murmur.’
‘And the deep power of joy,’ shouted Anthony, ‘we see . . .’
‘But now that they’re married he’s
‘Been taking cantharides . . .’
‘We see into the life of things. The life of things, I tell you. The life of things. And damn all Fabians!’ he added.
Anthony got back to his lodgings at about a quarter to midnight, and was unpleasantly startled, as he entered the sitting-room, to see someone rising with the violent impatience of a Jack-in-the-box from an armchair.
‘God, what a fright . . .!’
‘At last!’ said Mark Staithes. His emphatically featured face wore an expression of angry impatience. ‘I’ve been waiting nearly an hour.’ Then, with contempt, ‘You’re drunk,’ he added.
‘As though you’d never been drunk!’ Anthony retorted. ‘I remember . . .’
‘So do I,’ said Mark Staithes, interrupting him. ‘But that was in my first year.’ In his first year, when he had felt it necessary to prove that he was manly – manlier than the toughest of them, noisier, harder-drinking. ‘I’ve got something better to do now.’
‘So you imagine,’ said Anthony.
The other looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got about seven minutes,’ he said. ‘Are you sober enough to listen?’
Anthony sat down with dignity and in silence.
Short, but square-shouldered and powerful, Mark stood over him, almost menacingly. ‘It’s about Brian,’ he said.
‘About Brian?’ Then with a knowing smile, ‘That reminds me,’ Anthony added, ‘I ought to have congratulated you on being our future president.’
‘Fool!’ said Mark angrily. ‘Do you think I go about accepting charity? When he withdrew, I withdrew too.’
‘And let that dreary little Mumby walk into the job?’
‘What the devil do I care about Mumby?’
‘What do any of us care about anybody?’ said Anthony sententiously. ‘Nothing, thank God. Absolutely noth . . .’
‘What does he mean by insulting me like that?’
‘Who? Little Mumby?’
‘No; Brian, of course.’
‘He thinks he’s being nice to you.’
‘I don’t want his damned niceness,’ said Mark. ‘Why can’t he behave properly?’
‘Because it amuses him to behave like a Christian.’
‘Well, then, tell him for God’s sake to try it on someone else in future. I don’t like having Christian tricks played on me.’
‘You want a cock to fight with, in fact.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Otherwise it’s no fun being on top of the dunghill. Whereas Brian would like us all to be jolly little capons together. Well, so far as dunghills are concerned, I’m all for Brian. It’s when we come to the question of the hens that I begin to hesitate.’
Mark looked at his watch again. ‘I must go.’ At the door he turned back. ‘Don’t forget to tell him what I’ve told you. I like Brian, and I don’t want to quarrel with him. But if he tries being charitable and Christian again . . .’
‘The poor boy will forfeit your esteem for ever,’ concluded Anthony.
‘Buffoon!’ said Staithes, and, slamming the door behind him, hurried downstairs.
Left alone, Anthony took the fifth volume of the Historical Dictionary and began to read what Bayle had to say about Spinoza.
CHAPTER XI
December 8th 1926
‘Condar intra MEUM latus! It is the only place of refuge
