Mr. Cardan shook his head. ‘Not at all absurd,’ he said. ‘I’m only telling the truth. For alas, it is true that I’ve never really been a successful parasite. I could have been a pretty effective flatterer; but unfortunately I happen to live in an age when flattery doesn’t work. I might have made a tolerably good buffoon, if I were a little stupider and a little more high-spirited. But even if I could have been a buffoon, I should certainly have thought twice before taking up that branch of parasitism. It’s dangerous being a court fool, it’s most precarious. You may please for a time; but in the end you either bore or offend your patrons. Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau is the greatest literary specimen of the type; you know what a wretched sort of life he led. No, your permanently successful parasite, at any rate in modern times, belongs to an entirely different type—a type, alas, to which by no possible ingenuity could I make myself conform.’
‘I should hope not,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, standing up for Mr. Cardan’s Better Self.
Mr. Cardan bowed his acknowledgments and continued. ‘All the really successful parasites I have come across recently belong to the same species,’ he said. ‘They’re quiet, they’re gentle, they’re rather pathetic. They appeal to the protective maternal instincts. They generally have some charming talent—never appreciated by the gross world, but recognized by the patron, vastly to his credit of course; (that flattery’s most delicate). They never offend, like the buffoon; they don’t obtrude themselves, but gaze with dog-like eyes; they can render themselves, when their presence would be tiresome, practically non-existent. The protection of them satisfies the love of dominion and the altruistic parental instinct that prompts us to befriend the weak. You could write at length about all this,’ went on Mr. Cardan, turning to Miss Thriplow. ‘You could make a big deep book out of it. I should have done it myself, if I had been an author; and but for the grace of God, I might have been. I give you the suggestion.’
In words of one syllable Miss Thriplow thanked him. She had been very mousey all through dinner. After all the risks she had run this afternoon, the floaters she had stood on the brink of, she thought it best to sit quiet and look as simple and genuine as possible. A few slight alterations in her toilet before dinner had made all the difference. She had begun by taking off the pearl necklace and even, in spite of the chastity of its design, the emerald ring. That’s better, she had said to herself as she looked at the obscure little person in the simple black frock—without a jewel, and the hands so white and frail, the face so pale and smooth—who stood opposite her in the looking-glass. ‘How frankly and innocently she looks at you with those big brown eyes!’ She could imagine Calamy saying that to Mr. Cardan; but what Mr. Cardan would answer she couldn’t quite guess; he was such a cynic. Opening a drawer, she had pulled out a black silk shawl—not the Venetian one with the long fringes, but the much less romantic bourgeois, English shawl that had belonged to her mother.
She draped it over her shoulders and with her two hands drew it together across her bosom. In the pier glass she seemed almost a nun; or better still, she thought, a little girl in a convent school—one of a hundred black-uniformed couples, with lace-frilled pantalettes coming down over their ankles, walking in a long, long crocodile, graded from five foot eight at the head to four foot nothing at the tail. But if she looped the thing up, hood fashion, over her head, she’d be still more obscure, still poorer and honester—she’d be a factory girl, click-clicking along on her clogs to the cotton mill. But perhaps that would be carrying things a little too far. After all, she wasn’t a Lancashire lass. Awfully cultured, but not spoilt; clever, but simple and genuine. That was what she was. In the end she had come down to dinner with the black shawl drawn very tightly round her shoulders. Very small and mousey. The head girl in the convent school had all the accomplishments; but, for the present, wouldn’t speak unless she were spoken to. Modestly, then, demurely, she thanked him.
‘Meanwhile,’ Mr. Cardan continued, ‘the sad fact remains that I have never succeeded in persuading anybody to become completely responsible for me. True, I’ve eaten quintals of other people’s food, drunk hectolitres of their liquor’—he raised his glass and looking over the top of it at his hostess, emptied it to her health—‘for which I’m exceedingly grateful. But I’ve never contrived to live permanently at their expense. Nor have they, for their part, shown the slightest sign of wanting to take me for ever to themselves. Mine’s not the right sort of character, alas. I’m not pathetic. I’ve never struck the ladies as being particularly in need of maternal ministrations. Indeed, if I ever had any success with them—I trust I may say so without fatuity—it was due to my strength rather than to my feebleness. At sixty-six, however . . .’ He shook his head sadly. ‘And yet one doesn’t, by compensation, become any the more pathetic.’
Mr. Falx, whose moral ideas were simple and orthodox, shook his head; he didn’t like this sort of thing. Mr. Cardan, moreover, puzzled him. ‘Well,’ he pronounced, ‘all that I can say is this: when we’ve been in power for a little there won’t be any parasites of Mr. Cardan’s kind for the simple reason that there won’t be any parasites of any kind. They’ll all be doing their bit.’
‘Luckily,’ said Mr. Cardan, helping himself again to the mixed fry, ‘I shall be dead by that time. I couldn’t face the world after Mr. Falx’s friends have dosed it with Keating’s and vermifuge. Ah, all you young people,’ he went on, turning to Miss Thriplow, ‘what a fearful mistake you made, being born when you were!’
‘I wouldn’t change,’ said Miss Thriplow.
‘Nor would I,’ Calamy agreed.
‘Nor I,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle echoed, ardently associating herself with the party of youth. She felt as young as they did. Younger indeed; for having been young when the world was younger, she had the thoughts and the feelings of a generation that had grown up placidly in sheltered surroundings—or perhaps had not grown up at all. The circumstances which had so violently and unnaturally matured her juniors had left her, stiffened as she already was by time into a definite mould, unchanged. Spiritually, they were older than she.
‘I don’t see that it would be possible to live in a more exciting age,’ said Calamy. ‘The sense that everything’s perfectly provisional and temporary—everything, from social institutions to what we’ve hitherto regarded as the most sacred scientific truths—the feeling that nothing, from the Treaty of Versailles to the rationally explicable universe, is really safe, the intimate conviction that anything may happen, anything may be discovered—another war, the artificial creation of life, the proof of continued existence after death—why, it’s all infinitely exhilarating.’
‘And the possibility that everything may be destroyed?’ questioned Mr. Cardan.
‘That’s exhilarating too,’ Calamy answered, smiling.
Mr. Cardan shook his head. ‘It may be rather tame of me,’ he said, ‘but I confess, I prefer a more quiet life. I persist that you made a mistake in so timing your entry into the world that the period of your youth coincided with the war and your early maturity with this horribly insecure and unprosperous peace. How incomparably better I managed my existence! I made my entry in the late fifties—almost a twin to The Origin of Species. . . . I was brought up in the simple faith of nineteenth-century materialism; a faith untroubled by doubts and as yet unsophisticated by that disquieting scientific modernism which is now turning the staunchest mathematical physicists into mystics. We were all wonderfully optimistic then; believed in progress and the ultimate explicability of everything in terms of physics and chemistry, believed in Mr. Gladstone and our own moral and intellectual superiority over every other age. And no wonder. For we were growing richer and richer every day. The lower classes, whom it was still permissible to call by that delightful name, were still respectful, and the prospect of revolution was still exceedingly remote. True, we were at the same time becoming faintly but uncomfortably aware that these lower classes led a rather disagreeable life, and that perhaps the economic laws were not quite so unalterable by human agency as Mr. Buckle had so comfortingly supposed.
And when our dividends came rolling in—I still had dividends at that time,’ said Mr. Cardan parenthetically and sighed—‘came rolling in as regular as the solstices, we did, it is true, feel almost a twinge of social conscience. But we triumphantly allayed those twinges by subscribing to Settlements in the slums, or building, with a little of our redundant cash, a quite superfluous number of white-tiled lavatories for our workers. Those lavatories were to us what papal indulgences were to the less enlightened contemporaries of Chaucer. With the bill for those lavatories in our waistcoat pocket we could draw our next quarter’s dividends with a conscience perfectly
