‘We claim all your freedom,’ she said dramatically.
Knowing that Aunt Lilian liked her to take part in the conversation, and remembering—for she had a good memory—a phrase that her aunt used at one time to employ frequently, but which had recently faded out of the catalogue of her favourite locutions, Irene gravely brought it out. ‘Contraception,’ she pronounced, ‘has rendered chastity superfluous.’
Mr. Cardan leaned back in his chair and roared with laughter.
But across the prophetical face of Mr. Falx there passed a pained expression. He looked anxiously at his pupil, hoping that he had not heard, or at least had not understood what had just been said. He caught Mr. Cardan’s winking eye and frowned. Could corruption and moral laxity go further? his glance seemed to inquire. He looked at Irene; that such a youthful, innocent appearance should be wedded to so corrupt a mind appalled him. He felt glad, for Hovenden’s sake, that their stay in this bad house was not to last much longer. If it were not for the necessity of behaving politely, he would have left the place at once; like Lot, he would have shaken the dust of it from his feet.
CHAPTER V
‘When the butcher’s boy tells you in confidence, and with an eye to a tip, that the grocer’s brother has a very fine piece of very old sculpture which he is prepared to part with for a moderate consideration, what do you suppose he means?’ Walking slowly up-hill among the olive trees, Mr. Cardan meditatively put the question.
‘I suppose he means what he says,’ said Miss Thriplow.
‘No doubt,’ said Mr. Cardan, halting for a moment to wipe his face, which shone, even though the sun came only slantingly through the thin foliage of the olive trees, with an excess of heat. Miss Thriplow in the green uniform of the musical comedy schoolgirl looked wonderfully cool and neat beside her unbuttoned companion. ‘But the point is this: what exactly is it that he says? What is a butcher’s boy likely to mean when he says that a piece of sculpture is very beautiful and very old?’ They resumed their climbing. Below them, through a gap in the trees, they could see the roofs and the slender tower of the Cybo Malaspina palace, and below these again the dolls’ village of Vezza, the map-like plain, the sea.
‘I should ask him, if you want to know.’ Miss Thriplow spoke rather tartly; it was not to talk of butchers’ boys that she had accepted Mr. Cardan’s invitation to go for a walk with him. She wanted to hear Mr. Cardan’s views on life, literature and herself. He knew a thing or two, it seemed to her, about all these subjects. Too many things, and not exactly the right ones at that, about the last. Too many—it was precisely for that reason that Miss Thriplow liked to talk with him. Horrors always exercise a fascination. And now, after the prolonged silence, he was starting on butchers’ boys.
‘I have asked him,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘But do you suppose there’s anything intelligible to be got out of him? All I can gather is that the sculpture represents a man—not a whole man, part of a man, and that it’s made of marble. Beyond that I can discover nothing.’
‘Why do you want to discover?’ asked Miss Thriplow.
Mr. Cardan shook his head. ‘Alas,’ he said, ‘for sordid reasons. You remember what the poet wrote?
I have been in love, in debt and in drink
This many and many a year;
And these are three evils too great, one would think,
For one poor mortal to bear.
’Twas love that first drove me to drinking,
And drinking first drove me to debt,
And though I have struggled and struggled and strove,
I cannot get out of them yet.
There’s nothing but money can cure me
And ease me of all my pain;
’Twill pay all my debts and remove all my lets,
And my mistress who cannot endure me
Will turn to and love me again,
Will turn to and love me again.
There’s a summary of a lifetime for you. One has no regrets, of course. But still, one does need cash—needs it the more, alas, the older one grows, and has less of it. What other reason, do you think, would send me sweating up this hill to talk with the village grocer about his brother’s statuary?’
‘You mean that you’d buy it if it were worth anything?’
‘At the lowest possible price,’ confirmed Mr. Cardan. ‘And sell it at the highest. If I had ever adopted a profession,’ he continued, ‘I think it would have been art dealing. It has the charm of being more dishonest than almost any other form of licensed brigandage in existence. And dishonest, moreover, in a much more amusing way. Financiers, it is true, can swindle on a larger scale; but their swindling is mostly impersonal. You may ruin thousands of trusting investors; but you haven’t the pleasure of knowing your victims. Whereas if you’re an art dealer, your swindling, though less extensive, is most amusingly personal. You meet your victims face to face and do them down. You take advantage of the ignorance or urgent poverty of the vendor to get the work for nothing. You then exploit the snobbery and the almost equally profound ignorance of the rich buyer to make him take the stuff off your hands at some fantastic price. What huge elation one must feel when one has succeeded in bringing off some splendid coup! bought a blackened panel from some decayed gentleman in need of a new suit, cleaned it up and sold it again to a rich snob who thinks that a collection and the reputation of being a patron of the ancient arts will give him a leg up in society—what vast Rabelaisian mirth! No, decidedly, if I were not Diogenes and idle, I would be Alexander, critic and dealer. A really gentlemanly profession.’
‘Can you never be serious?’ asked Miss Thriplow, who would have preferred the conversation to turn on something more nearly related to her own problems.
Mr. Cardan smiled at her. ‘Can anybody fail to be serious when it’s a question of making money?’
‘I give you up,’ said Miss Thriplow.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mr. Cardan protested. ‘But perhaps it’s all for the best. Meanwhile, what about that butcher’s boy? What does he mean by a bit of very old sculpture? Is it the head of some rich Etruscan cheese-monger of Lunae that they’ve dug up? Some long-nosed primitive oriental with a smile of imbecile rapture on his face? Or a fragment of one of his Hellenized posterity, reclining on the lid of his sarcophagus as though along his prandial couch and staring blankly out of a head that might, if Praxiteles had carved it, have been Apollo’s, but which the Etruscan mason has fattened into an all too human grossness? Or perhaps it’s a Roman bust, so thoroughly real, life-like and up-to-date that, but for the toga, we might almost take it for our old friend Sir William Midrash, the eminent civil servant. Or perhaps—and I should like that better—perhaps it dates from that strange, grey Christian dawn that followed the savage night into which the empire went down. I can imagine some fragment from Modena or Toscanella—some odd, unpredictable figure bent by excess of faith into the most profoundly expressive and symbolic of attitudes: a monster physically, a barbarism, a little mumbo-jumbo, but glowing so passionately with inward life—it may be lovely, it may be malignant—that it is impossible to look at it with indifference or merely as a shape, ugly or beautiful. Yes. I should like the thing to be a piece of Romanesque carving. I’d give the butcher’s boy an extra five francs if it were. But if it turned out to be one of those suave Italian Gothic saints elegantly draped and leaning a little sideways, like saplings in the mystical breeze—and it might be, you never can tell—I’d deduct five francs. Not but what it mightn’t fetch just as much in the American market. But how they bore me, those accomplished Gothicisms, how they bore me!’
They were at the top of the hill. Emerging from the sloping forest of olive trees, the road now ran along a bare and almost level ridge. Some little way off, where the ground began to rise once more towards further heights, one could see a cluster of houses and a church tower. Mr. Cardan pointed.
‘There,’ he said, ‘we shall find out what the butcher’s boy really did mean. But in the meantime it’s amusing to go on speculating. For example, suppose it were a chunk of a bas-relief designed by Giotto. Eh? Something so grand, so spiritually and materially beautiful that you could fall down and worship it. But I’d be very well pleased, I assure you, with a bit of a sarcophagus from the earliest renaissance. Some figure marvellously bright, ethereal and pure, like an angel, but an angel, not of the kingdom of heaven; an angel of some splendid and, alas, imaginary kingdom of earth. Ah,’ pursued Mr. Cardan, shaking his head, ‘that’s the kingdom one would like to live in—the kingdom of ancient Greece, purged of every historical Greek that ever existed, and colonized out of the imaginations of modern artists, scholars and philosophers. In such a world one might live positively, so
