After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (12 page)

Peter Claver's conception of the world had the defect of being erroneous, but the merit of being simple and dramatic. Given a personal God, dispenser of forgiveness; given heaven and hell and the absolute reality of human personalities; given the meritoriousness of mere good intentions and of unquestioning faith in a set of incorrect opinions; given the one true Church, the efficacy of priestly mediation, the magic of sacraments—given all these, it was really quite easy to convince even a newly imported slave of his sinfulness and to explain exactly what he ought to do about it. But if there is no single inspired book, no uniquely holy Church, no mediating priesthood nor sacramental magic; if there is no personal God to be placated into forgiving offences; if there are, even in the moral world, only causes and effects and the enormous complexity of interrelationships—then clearly, the task of telling people what to do about their shortcomings is much more difficult. For every individual is called on to display not only unsleeping good will but also unsleeping intelligence. And this is not all. For, if individuality is not absolute, if personalities are illusory figments of a self-will disastrously blind to the reality of a more-than-personal consciousness, of which it is the limitation and denial, then all of every human being's efforts must be directed, in the last resort, to the actualization of that more-than-personal consciousness. So that even intelligence is not sufficient as an adjunct to good will; there must also be the recollection which seeks to transform and transcend intelligence. Many are called, but few are chosen—because few even know in what salvation consists. Con sider again this man from Kansas . . . Mr. Propter sadly shook his head. Everything was against the poor fellow—his fundamentalist orthodoxy, his wounded and inflamed egotism, his nervous irritability, his low intelligence. The first three disadvantages might perhaps be removed. But could anything be done about the fourth? The nature of things is implacable towards weakness. “From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” And what were those words of Spinoza's? “A man may be excusable and nevertheless be tormented in many ways. A horse is excusable for not being a man; but nevertheless he must needs be a horse, and not a man.” All the same, there must surely be something to be done for people like the man from Kansas—something that didn't entail telling harmful untruths about the nature of things. The untruth, for example, that there is a person up aloft or the other more modern untruth to the effect that human values are absolute and that God is the nation or the party or the human race as a whole. Surely, Mr. Propter insisteo surely, there was something to be done for such people The man from Kansas had begun by resenting what ht had said about the chain of cause and effect, the network of relationships—resenting it as a personal insult. But afterwards, when he saw that he was not being blamed, that no attempt was being made to come it over him, he had begun to take an interest, to see that after all there was something in it. Little by little it might be possible to make him think a bit more realistically at least about the world of everyday life, the outside world of appearances. And when he had done that, then it mightn't be so overwhelmingly difficult for him to think a bit more realistically about himself—to conceive of that all-important ego of his as a fiction, a kind of nightmare, a frantically agitated nothingness capable, when once its frenzy had been quieted, of being filled with God, with a God conceived and experienced as a more than personal consciousness, as a free power, a pure working, a being withdrawn. . . . Suddenly, as he thus returned to his starting point, Mr. Propter became aware of the long, circuitous, unprofitable way he had travelled in order to reach it. He had come to this bench under the eucalyptus tree in order to recollect himself, in order to realize for a moment the existence of that other consciousness behind his private thoughts and feelings, that free, pure power greater than his own. He had come for this; but memories had slipped in while he was off his guard; speculations had started up, cloud upon cloud, like sea-birds rising from their nesting place to darken and eclipse the sun. Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance; and he had failed to be vigilant. It wasn't a case, he reflected ruefully, of the spirit being willing and the flesh weak. That was altogether the wrong antithesis. The spirit is always willing; but the person, who is a mind as well as a body, is always unwilling—and the person, incidentally, is not weak but extremely strong.

He looked again at the mountains, at the pale sky between the leaves, at the soft russet pinks and purples and greys of the eucalyptus trunks; then shut his eyes once more.

“A nothingness surrounded by God, indigent of God, capable of God and filled with God if man so desires.” And what is God? A being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working. His vigilance gradually ceased to be an act of the will, a deliberate thrusting back of irrelevant personal thoughts and wishes and feelings. For little by little these thoughts and wishes and feelings had settled like a muddy sediment in a jar of water, and as they settled, his vigilance was free to transform itself into a kind of effortless unattached awareness, at once intense and still, alert and passive—an awareness whose object was the words he had spoken and at the same time that which surrounded the words. But that which surrounded the words was the awareness itself; for this vigilance which was now an effortless awareness—what was it but an aspect, a partial expression, of that impersonal and untroubled consciousness into which the words had been dropped and through which they were slowly sinking? And as they sank they took a new significance for the awareness that was following them down into the depths of itself—a significance new not in respect to the entities connoted by the words, but rather in the mode of their comprehension, which, from being intellectual in character, had become intuitive and direct, so that the nature of man in his potentiality and of God in actuality was realized by an analogue of sensuous experience, by a kind of unmediated participation. The busy nothingness of his being experienced itself as transcended in the felt capacity for peace and purity, for the withdrawal from revulsions and desires, for the blissful freedom from personality. . . .

The sound of approaching footsteps made him open his eyes. Peter Boone and that Englishman he had sat with in the car were advancing up the path towards his seat under the eucalyptus trees. Mr. Propter raised his hand in welcome and smiled. He was fond of young Pete. There was native intelligence there and native kindliness; there was sensitiveness, generosity, a spontaneous decency of impulse and reaction. Charming and beautiful qualities! The pity was that by themselves and undirected as they were by a right knowledge of the nature of things, they should be so impotent for good, so inadequate to anything a reasonable man could call salvation. Fine gold, but still in the ore, unsmelted, unworked. Some day, perhaps, the boy would learn to use his gold. He would have to wish to learn first—and wish also to unlearn a lot of things he now regarded as self-evident and right. It would be hard for him, as hard, but for other reasons, as it would be for that poor fellow from Kansas.

“Well, Pete,” he called, “come and sit with me here. And you've brought Mr. Pordage; that's good.” He moved to the middle of the bench so that they could sit, one on either side of him. “And did you meet the Ogre?” he said to Jeremy, pointing in the direction of the castle.

Jeremy made a grimace and nodded. “I remembered the name you used to call him at school,” he said. “That made it a little easier.”

“Poor Jo,” said Mr. Propter. “Fat people are always supposed to be so happy. But who ever enjoyed being laughed at? That jolly manner they sometimes have, and the jokes they make at their own expense—it's just a case of alibis and prophylactics. They vaccinate themselves with their own ridicule so that they shan't react too violently to other people's.”

Jeremy smiled. He knew all about that. “It's a good way out of an unpleasant predicament,” he said.

Mr. Propter nodded. “But unfortunately,” he said, “it didn't happen to be Jo's way. Jo was the kind of fat boy who bluffs it out. The kind that fights. The kind that bullies or patronizes. The kind that boasts and shows off. The kind that buys popularity by treating the girls to ice-creams, even if he has to steal a dime from his grandmother's purse to do it. The kind that goes on stealing, even if he's found out and gets beaten and believes it when they tell him he'll go to hell. Poor Jo, he's been that sort of fat boy all his life.” He pointed once again in the direction of the castle. “That's his monument to a faulty pituitary. And talking of pituitaries,” he went on, turning to Pete, “how's the work been going?”

Pete had been thinking gloomily of Virginia—wondering for the hundredth time why she had left them, whether he had done anything to offend her, whether she was really tired or if there might be some other reason. At Mr. Propter's mention of work, he looked up, and his face brightened. “It's going just fine,” he answered and, in quick eager phrases, strangely compounded of slang and technical terms, he told Mr. Propter about the results they had already got with their mice and were beginning to get, so it seemed, with the baboons and the dogs.

“And if you succeed,” Mr. Propter asked, “what happens to your dogs?”

“Why, their life's prolonged,” Pete answered triumphantly.

“Yes, yes, I know that,” said the older man. “What I meant to ask was something different. A dog's a wolf that hasn't fully developed. It's more like the foetus of a wolf than an adult wolf; isn't that so?”

Pete nodded.

“In other words,” Mr. Propter went on, “it's a mild, tractable animal because it has never grown up into savagery. Isn't that supposed to be one of the mechanisms of evolutionary development?”

Pete nodded again. “There's a kind of glandular equilibrium,” he explained. “Then a mutation comes along and knocks it sideways. You get a new equilibrium that happens to retard the development rate. You grow up; but you do it so slowly that you're dead before you've stopped being like your great-great-grandfather's foetus.”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Propter. “So what happens if you prolong the life of an animal that has evolved that way?”

Pete laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “Guess we'll have to wait and see,” he said.

“It would be a bit disquieting,” said Mr. Propter, “if your dogs grew back in the process of growing up.”

Pete laughed again delightedly. “Think of the dowagers being chased by their own Pekinese,” he said.

Mr. Propter looked at him curiously and was silent for a moment, as though waiting to see whether Pete would make any further comment. The comment did not come. “I'm glad you feel so happy about it,” he said. Then, turning to Jeremy, “It is not, if I remember rightly, Mr. Pordage,” he went on, “it is not growing like a tree in bulk doth make men better be.”

“Or standing long an oak, three hundred years,” said Jeremy, smiling with the pleasure which an apt quotation always gave him.

“What shall we all be doing at three hundred?” Mr. Propter speculated. “Do you suppose you'd still be a scholar and a gentleman?”

Jeremy coughed and patted his bald head. “One will certainly have stopped being a gentleman,” he answered. “One's begun to stop even now, thank heaven.”

“But the scholar will stay the course?”

“There's a lot of books in the British Museum.”

“And you, Pete?” said Mr. Propter. “Do you suppose you'll still be doing scientific research?”

“Why not? What's to prevent you from going on with it for ever?” the young man answered emphatically.

“For ever?” Mr. Propter repeated. “You don't think you'd get a bit bored? One experiment after another. Or one book after another,” he added in an aside to Jeremy. “In general, one damned thing after another. You don't think that would prey on your mind a bit?”

“I don't see why,” said Pete.

“Time doesn't bother you, then?”

Pete shook his head. “Why should it?”

“Why shouldn't it?” said Mr. Propter, smiling at him with an amused affection. “Time's a pretty bothersome thing, you know.”

“Not if you aren't scared of dying or growing old.”

“Yes, it is,” Mr. Propter insisted; “even if you're not scared. It's nightmarish in itself—intrinsically nightmarish, if you see what I mean.”

“Intrinsically?” Pete looked at him perplexed. “I don't get it,” he said. “Intrinsically nightmarish . . . ?”

“Nightmarish in the present tense, of course,” Jeremy put in. “But if one takes it in the fossil state—in the form of the Hauberk Papers, for example . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.

“Oh, pleasant enough,” said Mr. Propter, agreeing with his implied conclusion. “But after all, history isn't the real thing. Past time is only evil at a distance; and, of course, the study of past time is itself a process in time. Cataloguing bits of fossil evil can never be more than an
ersatz
for the experience of eternity.” He glanced curiously at Pete, wondering how the boy would respond to what he was saying. Plunging like this into the heart of the matter, beginning at the very core and centre of the mystery—it was risky; there was a danger of evoking nothing but bewilderment, or alternatively nothing but angry derision. Pete's, he could see, was more nearly the first reaction; but it was a bewilderment that seemed to be tempered by interest; he looked as though he wanted to find out what it was all about.

Meanwhile, Jeremy had begun to feel that this conversation was taking a most undesirable turn. “What precisely are we supposed to be talking about?” he asked acidulously. “The New Jerusalem?”