‘Come, come,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘you forget that they called Bacchus Fufluns. Give them at least the credit that is due to them.’
‘But the Romans too had a fine language,’ Chelifer objected. ‘And yet they laid down immense enlargements of the sporting page of the Daily Sketch in marble tesserae on a foundation of cement.’
They climbed again towards the light. The steps were so high and her legs so short that Miss Elver had to be helped up. The tomb resounded with her laughter and shrill whooping. They emerged at last out of the ground.
On the top of a high barrow some two or three hundred yards away stood the figure of a man, distinct against the sky. He was shading his eyes with his hand and seemed to be looking for something. Irene suddenly became very red.
‘Why, I believe it’s Hovenden,’ she said in a voice that was as casual as she could make it.
Almost simultaneously the man turned his face in their direction. The shading hand went up in a gesture of greeting. A glad ‘Hullo!’ sounded across the tombs; the man skipped down from his barrow and came running across the down towards them. And Hovenden it was; Irene had seen aright.
‘Been looking for you all over ve place,’ he explained breathlessly as he came up. With the greatest heartiness he shook the hands of all present except—diplomatically—Irene’s. ‘Vey told me in ve town vat a party of foreigners was out here looking at ve cemetery or somefing. So I buzzed after you till I saw old Ernest wiv ve car at ve side of ve road. Been underground, have you?’ He looked into the dark entrance of the tomb. ‘No wonder I couldn’t . . .’
Mrs. Aldwinkle cut him short. ‘But why aren’t you in Rome with Mr. Falx?’ she asked.
Lord Hovenden’s boyish, freckled face became all at once exceedingly red. ‘Ve fact is,’ he said, looking at the ground, ‘vat I didn’t feel very well. Ve doctor said I ought to get away from Rome at once. Country air, you know. So I just left a note for Mr. Falx and . . . and here I am.’ He looked up again, smiling.
CHAPTER VI
‘But at Montefiascone,’ said Mr. Cardan, concluding the history of the German bishop who gave the famous wine of Montefiascone its curious name, ‘at Montefiascone Bishop Defuk’s servant found good wine at every shop and tavern; so that when his master arrived he found the prearranged symbol chalked up on a hundred doors. Est, Est, Est—the town was full of them. And the Bishop was so much enraptured with the drink that he decided to settle in Montefiascone for life. For life—but he drank so much that in a very short time it turned out that he had settled here for death. They buried him in the lower church, down there. On his tombstone his servant engraved the Bishop’s portrait with this brief epitaph: “Est Est Jo Defuk. Propter nimium hic est. Dominus meus mortuus est.”
Since when the wine has always been called Est Est Est. We’ll have a flask of it dry for serious drinking. And for the frivolous and the feminine, and to sip with the dessert, we’ll have a bottle of the sweet moscato. And now let’s see what there is to eat.’ He picked up the menu and holding it out at arm’s length—for he had the long sight of old age—read out slowly, with comments, the various items. It was always Mr. Cardan who ordered the dinner (although it was generally Lord Hovenden or Mrs. Aldwinkle who paid), always Mr. Cardan; for it was tacitly admitted by every one that Mr. Cardan was the expert on food and wine, the professional eater, the learned and scholarly drinker.
Seeing Mr. Cardan busy with the bill of fare, the landlord approached, rubbing his hands and cordially smiling—as well he might on a Rolls-Royce-full of foreigners—to take orders and give advice.
‘The fish,’ he confided to Mr. Cardan, ‘the fish is something special.’ He put his fingers to his lips and kissed them. ‘It comes from Bolsena, from the lake, down there.’ He pointed out of the window at the black night. Somewhere, far down through the darkness, lay the Lake of Bolsena.
Mr. Cardan held up his hand. ‘No, no,’ he objected with decision and shook his head. ‘Don’t talk to me of fish. Never safe in these little places,’ he explained to his companions. ‘Particularly in such hot weather. And then, imagine eating fish from Bolsena—a place where they have miracles, where holy wafers bleed for the edification of the pious and as a proof of the fact of transubstantiation. No, no,’ Mr. Cardan repeated, ‘fishes from Bolsena are altogether too fishy. Let’s stick to fried eggs, with fillet of veal to follow. Or a little roast capon . . .’
‘I want fish,’ said Miss Elver. The passionate earnestness of her tone contrasted strikingly with the airiness of Mr. Cardan’s banter.
‘I really wouldn’t, you know,’ said Mr. Cardan.
‘But I like fish.’
‘But it may be unwholesome. You never can tell.’
‘But I want it,’ Miss Elver insisted. ‘I love fish.’ Her large lower lip began to tremble, her eyes filled with tears. ‘I want it.’
‘Well, then, of course you shall have it,’ said Mr. Cardan, making haste to console her. ‘Of course, if you really like it. I was only afraid that it mightn’t perhaps be good. But it probably will be.’
Miss Elver took comfort, blew her long nose and smiled. ‘Thank you, Tommy,’ she said, and blushed as she pronounced the name.
After dinner they went out into the piazza for coffee and liqueurs. The square was crowded and bright with lights. In the middle the band of the local Philharmonic Society was giving its Sunday evening concert. Planted on the rising ground above the piazza Sammicheli’s great church solemnly impended. The lights struck up, illuminating its pilastered walls. The cupola stood out blackly against the sky.
‘The choice,’ said Mr. Cardan, looking round the piazza, ‘seems to lie between the Café Moderno and the Bar Ideale. Personally, I should be all for the ideal rather than the real if it wasn’t for the disagreeable fact that in a bar one has to stand. Whereas in a café, however crassly materialistic, one can sit down. I’m afraid the Moderno forces itself upon us.’
He led the way in the direction of the café.
‘Talking of Bars,’ said Chelifer, as they sat down at a little table in front of the café, ‘has it ever occurred to you to enumerate the English words that have come to have an international currency? It’s a somewhat curious selection, and one which seems to me to throw a certain light on the nature and significance of our Anglo-Saxon civilization. The three words from Shakespeare’s language that have a completely universal currency are Bar, Sport and W.C. They’re all just as good Finnish now as they are good English. Each of these words possesses what I may call a family. Round the idea “Bar” group themselves various other international words, such as Bitter, Cocktail, Whiskey and the like. “Sport” boasts a large family—Match, for example, Touring Club, the verb to Box, Cycle-Car, Performance (in the sporting sense) and various others. The idea of hydraulic sanitation has only one child that I can think of, namely Tub. Tub—it has a strangely old-world sound in English nowadays; but in Yugo-Slavia, on the other hand, it is exceedingly up-to-date. Which leads us on to that very odd class of international English words that have never been good English at all. A Smoking for example, a Dancing, a Five-o’clock—these have never existed except on the continent of Europe. As for High-Life, so popular a word in Athens, where it is spelt iota, gamma, lambda, iota, phi—that dates from a remote, mid-Victorian epoch in the history of our national culture.’
‘And Spleen,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘you forget Spleen. That comes from much further back. A fine aristocratic word, that; we were fools to allow it to become extinct. One has to go to France to hear it uttered now.’
‘The word may be dead,’ said Chelifer, I but the emotion, I fancy, has never flourished more luxuriantly than now. The more material progress, the more wealth and leisure, the more standardized amusements—the more boredom. It’s inevitable, it’s the law of Nature. The people who have always suffered from spleen and who are still the principal victims, are the prosperous, leisured and educated. At present they form a relatively small minority; but in the Utopian state where everybody is well off, educated and leisured, everybody will be bored; unless for some obscure reason the same causes fail to produce the same effects.
Only two or three hundred people out of every million could survive a lifetime in a really efficient Utopian state. The rest would simply die of spleen. In this way, it may be, natural selection will work towards the evolution of the super-man. Only the intelligent will be able to bear the almost intolerable burden of leisure and prosperity. The rest will simply wither away, or cut their throats—or, perhaps more probably, return in desperation to the delights of barbarism and cut one another’s throats, not to mention
