Calamy stood for a long time looking out at the scene. How beautiful it was, how beautiful! Glittering in the light, the withering trees seemed to have prepared themselves as though for a feast. For a feast—and yet it was winter and death that awaited them. Beautiful the mountains were, but menacing and terrible; terrible the deep gulf below him with its smoky vaporous shadows, far down, below the shining green. And the shadows mounted second after second as the sun declined. Beautiful, terrible and mysterious, pregnant with what enormous secret, symbolic of what formidable reality?
From the direction of the cottage below the road came a tinkle of bells and the shrill shouting of a child’s voice. Half a dozen tall black and white goats, with long black beards, long twisted horns and yellow eyes, slitted with narrow pupils, came trotting up the slope, shaking their flat bells. A little boy scrambled after them, brandishing a stick and shouting words of command. To Calamy he touched his cap; they exchanged a few words in Italian, about the rain, the goats, the best pasture; then, waving his stick and peremptorily shouting at his little flock, the child moved on up the road. The goats trotted on in front, their hoofs clicking on the stones; every now and then they paused to pull a mouthful of grass from the bank at the side of the road; but the little boy would not let them pause. ‘Via!’ he shouted, and banged them with his stick. They bounded forward. Soon herdsman and flock were out of sight.
If he had been born that little boy, Calamy wondered, would he still be working, unquestioningly, among these hills: tending the beasts, cutting wood; every now and then carting his faggots and his cheeses down the long road to Vezza? Would he, still, unquestioningly? Would he see that the mountains were beautiful, beautiful and terrible? Or would he find them merely ungrateful land, demanding great labour, giving little in return? Would he believe in heaven and hell? And fitfully, when anything went wrong, would he still earnestly invoke the aid of the infant Jesus, of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph, that patriarchal family trinity—father, mother and baby—of the Italian peasant? Would he have married? By this time, very likely, his eldest children would be ten or twelve years old—driving the goats afield with shrill yellings and brandished sticks. Would he be living quietly and cheerfully the life of a young patriarch, happy in his children, his wife, his flocks and herds? Would he be happy to live thus, close to the earth, earthily, an ancient, instinctive, animally sagacious life? It seemed hardly imaginable. And yet, after all, it was likely enough. It needs a very strong, a passionately ardent spirit to disengage itself from childish tradition, from the life which circumstances impose upon it. Was his such a spirit?
He was startled out of his speculations by the sound of his own name, loudly called from a little distance. He turned round and saw Mr. Cardan and Chelifer striding up the road towards him. Calamy waved his hand and went to meet them. Was he pleased to see them or not? He hardly knew.
‘Well,’ said Mr. Cardan, twinkling jovially, as he approached, ‘how goes life in the Thebaïd? Do you object to receiving a couple of impious visitors from Alexandria?’
Calamy laughed and shook their hands without answering.
‘Did you get wet?’ he asked, to change the conversation.
‘We hid in a cave,’ said Mr. Cardan. He looked round at the view. ‘Pretty good,’ he said encouragingly, as though it were Calamy who had made the landscape, ‘pretty good, I must say.’
‘Agreeably Wordsworthian,’ said Chelifer in his precise voice.
‘And where do you live?’ asked Mr. Cardan.
Calamy pointed to the cottage. Mr. Cardan nodded comprehendingly.
‘Hearts of gold, but a little niffy, eh?’ he asked, lifting his raised white eyebrow still higher.
‘Not to speak of,’ said Calamy.
‘Charming girls?’ Mr. Cardan went on. ‘Or goitres?’
‘Neither,’ said Calamy.
‘And how long do you propose to stay?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘Till you’ve got to the bottom of the cosmos, eh?’
Calamy smiled. ‘That’s about it.’
‘Splendid,’ said Mr. Cardan, patting him on the arm, ‘splendid. I envy you. God, what wouldn’t I give to be your age? What wouldn’t I give?’ He shook his head sadly. ‘And, alas,’ he added, ‘what could I give, in point of actual fact? I put it at about twelve hundred quid at the present time. My total fortune. Shouldn’t we sit down?’ he added on another note.
Calamy led the way down the little path. Along the front of the cottage, under the windows, ran a long bench. The three men sat down. The sun shone full upon them; it was pleasantly warm. Beneath them was the narrow valley with its smoky shadows; opposite, the black hills, cloud-capped and silhouetted against the brightness of the sky about the sun.
‘And the trip to Rome,’ Calamy inquired, ‘was that agreeable?’
‘Tolerably,’ said Chelifer, with precision.
‘And Miss Elver?’ he addressed himself politely to Mr. Cardan.
Mr. Cardan looked up at him. ‘Hadn’t you heard?’ he asked.
‘Heard what?’
‘She’s dead.’ Mr. Cardan’s face became all at once very hard and still.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Calamy. ‘I didn’t know.’ He thought it more tactful to proffer no further condolences. There was a silence.
‘That’s something,’ said Mr. Cardan at last, ‘that you’ll find it rather difficult to contemplate away, however long and mystically you stare at your navel.’
‘What?’ asked Calamy.
‘Death,’ Mr. Cardan answered. ‘You can’t get over the fact that, at the end of everything, the flesh gets hold of the spirit, and squeezes the life out of it, so that a man turns into something that’s no better than a whining sick animal. And as the flesh sickens the spirit sickens, manifestly. Finally the flesh dies and putrefies; and the spirit presumably putrefies too. And there’s an end of your omphaloskepsis, with all its by-products, God and justice and salvation and all the rest of them.’
‘Perhaps it is,’ said Calamy. ‘Let’s admit it as certain, even. I don’t see that it makes the slightest difference. . . .’
‘No difference?’
Calamy shook his head. ‘Salvation’s not in the next world; it’s in this. One doesn’t behave well here for the sake of a harp and wings after one is dead—or even for the sake of contemplating throughout eternity the good, the true and the beautiful. If one desires salvation, it’s salvation here and now. The kingdom of God is within you—if you’ll excuse the quotation,’ he added, turning with a smile to Mr. Cardan. ‘The conquest of that kingdom, now, in this life—that’s your salvationist’s ambition. There may be a life to come, or there may not; it’s really quite irrelevant to the main issue. To be upset because the soul may decay with the body is really mediaeval. Your mediaeval theologian made up for his really frightful cynicism about this world by a childish optimism about the next. Future justice was to compensate for the disgusting horrors of the present. Take away the life to come and the horrors remain, untempered and unpalliated.’
‘Quite so,’ said Chelifer.
‘Seen from the mediaeval point of view,’ Calamy went on, ‘the prospect is most disquieting. The Indians—and for that matter the founder of Christianity—supply the corrective with the doctrine of salvation in this life, irrespective of the life to come. Each man can achieve salvation in his own way.’
‘I’m glad you admit that,’ said Mr. Cardan. ‘I was afraid you’d begin telling us that we all had to live on lettuces and look at our navels.’
‘I have it from no less an authority than yourself,’ Calamy answered, laughing, ‘that there are—how many?—eighty-four thousand—isn’t it?—different ways of achieving salvation.’
‘Fully,’ said Mr. Cardan, ‘and a great many more for going to the devil. But all this, my young friend,’ he pursued, shaking his head, ‘doesn’t in any way mitigate the disagreeableness of slowly becoming gaga, dying and being eaten by worms. One may have achieved salvation in this life, certainly; but that makes it none the less insufferable that, at the end of the account, one’s soul should inevitably succumb to one’s body. I, for example, am saved—I put the case quite hypothetically, mind you—I have been living in a state of moral integrity and this-worldly salvation for the last half-century, ever since I reached the age of puberty. Let this be granted. Have I, for this reason, any the less cause to be distressed by the prospect, in a few years’ time, of becoming a senile imbecile, blind, deaf, toothless, witless, without interest in anything, partially paralysed, revolting to my fellows—and all the rest of the Burtonian catalogue? When my soul is at the mercy of my slowly rotting body, what will be the use of salvation then?’
‘It will have profited
