After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (20 page)

“And naturally what applies to the word ‘love' applies to all the other words taken over from the language of everyday life and used to describe spiritual experience. Words like ‘knowledge,' ‘wisdom,' ‘power,' ‘mind,' ‘peace,' ‘joy,' ‘freedom,' ‘good.' They stand for certain things on the human level. But the things that writers force them to stand for when they describe events on the level of eternity are quite different. Hence the use of them merely confuses the issue. They just make it all but impossible for any one to know what's being talked about. And, meanwhile, you must remember that these words from the language of everyday life aren't the only trouble-makers. People who write about experiences on the level of eternity also make use of technical phrases borrowed from various systems of philosophy.”

“Isn't that your algebra of spiritual experience?” said Pete. “Isn't that the special, scientific language you've been talking about?”

“It's an attempt at such an algebra,” Mr. Propter answered. “But unfortunately a very unsuccessful attempt. Unsuccessful because this particular algebra is derived from the language of metaphysics—bad metaphysics, incidentally. The people who use it are committing themselves, whether they like it or not, to an explanation of the facts as well as a description. An explanation of actual experiences in terms of metaphysical entities, whose existence is purely hypothetical and can't be demonstrated. In other words, they're describing the facts in terms of figments of the imagination; they're explaining the known in terms of the unknown. Take a few examples. Here's one: ‘ecstasy.' It's a technical term that refers to the soul's ability to stand outside the body—and of course it carries the further implication that we know what the soul is and how it's related to the body and the rest of the universe. Or take another instance, a technical term that is essential to the Catholic theory of mysticism, ‘infused contemplation' Here the implication is that there's somebody outside us who pours a certain kind of psychological experience into our minds. The further implication is that we know who that somebody is. Or consider even ‘union with God.' ,What it means depends on the upbringing of the speaker. It may mean ‘union with the Jehovah of the Old Testament' Or it may mean ‘union with the personal deity of orthodox Christianity' It may mean what it probably would have meant, say, to Eckhart, ‘union with the impersonal Godhead of which the God of orthodoxy is an aspect and a particular limitation' Similarly, if you were an Indian, it may mean ‘union with Isvara' or ‘union with Brahman' In every case, the term implies a previous knowledge about the nature of things which are either completely unknowable, or at best only to be inferred from the nature of the experiences which the term is supposed to describe. So there,” Mr. Propter concluded, “you have the second horn of the dilemma—the horn on which all those who use the current religious vocabulary to describe their experiences on the level of eternity inevitably impale themselves.”

“And the way between the horns?” Jeremy questioned. “Isn't it the way of the professional psychologists who have written about mysticism? They've evolved a pretty sensible language. You haven't mentioned them.”

“I haven't mentioned them,” said Mr. Propter, “for the same reason as in talking about beauty I shouldn't mention professional aestheticians who had never been inside a picture gallery.”

“You mean, they don't know what they're talking about?”

Mr. Propter smiled. “I'd put it another way,” he said. “They talk about what they know. But what they know isn't worth talking about. For what they know is only the literature of mysticism—not the experience.”

“Then there's
no
way between the horns,” Jeremy concluded. His eyes twinkled behind his spectacles; he smiled like a child, taking a sly triumph in some small consummation of naughtiness. “What fun it is when there isn't a way between!” he went on. “It makes the world seem so deliciously cosy, when all the issues are barred and there's nowhere to go to with all your brass bands and shining armour. Onward, Christian soldiers! Forward, the Light Brigade! Excelsior! And all the time you're just going round and round—head to tail, follow-my Fuehrer—like Fabre's caterpillars. That really gives me a
great
deal of pleasure!”

This time Mr. Propter laughed outright. “I'm sorry to have to disappoint you,” he said. “But unfortunately there is a way between the horns. The practical way. You can go and find out what it means for yourself, by first-hand experience. Just as you can find out what El Greco's Crucifixion of St. Peter looks like by taking the elevator and going up to the hall. Only in this case, I'm afraid, there isn't any elevator. You have to go up on your own legs. And make no mistake,” he added, turning to Pete, “there's an awful lot of stairs.”

Dr. Obispo straightened himself up, took the tubes of the stethoscope out of his ears and stowed the instrument away in his pocket along with the “Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome.”

“Anything bad?” Mr. Stoyte asked anxiously.

Dr. Obispo shook his head and gave him a smile of reassurance. “No influenza anyhow,” he said. “Just a slight intensification of the bronchial condition. I'll give you something for it tonight before you go to bed.”

Mr. Stoyte's face relaxed into cheerfulness. “Glad it was only a false alarm,” he said and turned away to get his clothes, which were lying in a heap on the sofa, under the Watteau.

From her seat at the soda counter, Virginia let out a whoop of triumph. “Isn't that just swell!” she cried. Then in another, graver tone, “You know, Uncle Jo,” she added, “he's got me panicked about that cough of yours. Panicked,” she repeated.

Uncle Jo grinned triumphantly and slapped his chest so hard that its hairy, almost female accumulations of flesh shivered like jellies under the blow. “Nothing wrong with
me”
he boasted.

Virginia watched him over the top of her glass, as he got into his shirt and knotted his tie. The expression on her innocent young face was one of perfect serenity. But behind those limpid blue eyes her mind was simmering with activity. “Was that a close call?” she kept saying to herself. “Gee, was it close!” At the recollection of that sudden violent start at the sound of the elevator gate being opened, of that wild scramble as the footsteps approached along the corridor, she felt herself tingling with a delicious mixture of fear and amusement, of apprehension and triumph. It was the sensation she used to have as a child, playing hide and seek in the dark. A close call! And hadn't Sig been wonderful! What presence of mind! And that stethoscope thing he pulled out of his pocket—what a brain wave! It had saved the situation! Because, without the stethoscope, Uncle Jo would have put on one of his jealousy acts. Though what right he had to be jealous, Virginia went on to reflect, with a strong sense of injury, she really didn't know. Seeing that nothing had happened except just a little reading aloud. And anyhow why shouldn't a girl be allowed to read that sort of thing if she wanted to? Especially as it was in French. And, besides, who was Uncle Jo to be prudish, she'd like to know? Getting mad with people only for telling you a funny story, when just look what he himself was
doing
all the time—and then expecting you to talk like Louisa M. Alcott, and thinking you ought to be protected from hearing so much as a dirty word! And the way he simply wouldn't allow her to tell the truth about herself, even if she had wanted to. Making a build-up of her as somebody quite different from what she really was. Acting almost as though she were Daisy Mae in the comic strip and he a sort of Little Abner rescuing her in the nick of time. Though, of course, he had to admit that it had happened at least once before he came along, because if it hadn't, there'd have been no excuse for
him.
It had happened, but quite unwillingly—you know, practically a rape—or else some fellow taking advantage of her being so dumb and innocent—at the Congo Club with nothing on but a G-string and some talcum powder! And naturally she was always supposed to have hated it; crying her eyes out all the time until Uncle Jo came along; and then everything was different. But in that case, it now suddenly occurred to Virginia, if that was the way he thought about her, what the hell did he mean by coming home like this at seven-fifteen, when he'd told her he wouldn't be back till eight? The old double-crosser! Was he trying to spy on her? Because, if so, she wasn't going to stand for it; if so, then it just served him right that that was what Sig had been reading to her. He was just getting what he deserved for snooping around, trying to catch her doing something that wasn't right. Well, if
that
was how he was going to act, she'd tell Sig to come every day and read another chapter. Though how on earth the man who wrote the book was going to keep it up for a hundred and twenty days, she really couldn't imagine. Considering what had happened already in the first week—and here was she, figuring that there wasn't anything she didn't know! Well, one lived and learnt. Though there was some of it she really hadn't in the least wanted to learn. Things that made you feel sick to your stomach. Horrible! As bad as having babies! (She shuddered.) Not that there weren't a lot of funny things in the book too. The piece she had made Sig read over again—that was grand, that had given her a real kick. And that other bit where the girl . . .

“Well, Baby,” said Mr. Stoyte, as he did up the last button of his waistcoat. “You're not saying much, are you? A penny for your thoughts.”

Virginia raised that childishly short upper lip in a smile that made his heart melt with tenderness and desire. “I was thinking about you, Uncle Jo,” she said.

“A
ND
very nice too,” Jeremy said aloud.
Transparent
was the word, he reflected. The meaning was there like a fly in amber. Or, rather, there was no fly; there was only the amber; and the amber was the meaning. He looked at his watch. Three minutes to midnight. He closed his Wordsworth—and to think, he went on bitterly to remind himself, to think that he might have been refreshing his memory of “Félicia”!—laid the volume down on the table beside his bed and took off his glasses. Deprived of their six and a half diopters of correction, his eyes were instantly reduced to a state of physiological despair. Curved crystal had become their element; unspectacled, they were like a pair of jellied sea creatures, suddenly taken out of water. Then the light went out; and it was as though the poor things had been mercifully dropped, for safe keeping, into an aquarium.

Jeremy stretched under the bed-clothes and yawned. What a day! But now, thank God, the paradise of bed. The Blessed Damozel leaned out from the gold bed of heaven. But these sheets were cotton ones, not linen; which was really a bit discreditable in a house like this! A house full of Rubenses and Grecos—and your sheets were cotton! But that Crucifixion of St. Peter—what a really staggering machine! At least as good as the Assumption at Toledo. Which had probably been blown up by this time, incidentally. Just to demonstrate what happened when people took things too seriously. Not but that, he went on to reflect, there wasn't something rather impressive about that old Propter-Object. (For that was what he had decided to call the man in his own mind and when he wrote to his mother; the Propter-Object.) A bit of an Ancient Mariner, perhaps. The wedding guest, he beat his breast on occasions; ought perhaps to have beaten it more often than he had done, seeing what a frightful subversion of all the common decencies and,
a fortiori,
the common indecencies (such as Félicia, such as every other Friday afternoon in Maida Vale), the creature was inculcating. Not without a considerable persuasiveness, damn his glittering eyes! For this particular Mariner not only held you with that eye of his; he was also and simultaneously the loud bassoon you wanted to hear. One listened without reluctance—though of course one had no intention of permitting one's own particular little structure of decencies and indecencies to be subverted. One was not going to allow religion (of all things!) to invade the sanctities of private life. An Englishman's home is his castle; and curiously enough, an American's castle, as he had discovered after the first shock began to wear off, was turning out to be this particular Englishman's home. His spiritual home. Because it was the embodiment of an imbecile's no-track mind. Because there were no issues and nothing led anywhere and the dilemmas had an infinity of horns and you went round and round, like Fabre's caterpillars, in a closed universe of utter cosiness—round and round among the Hauberk Papers, from St. Peter to La Petite Morphil to Giambologna to the gilded Bodhisattvas in the cellar to the baboons to the Marquis de Sade to St. François de Sales to Felicia and round again in due course to St. Peter. Round and round, like caterpillars inside the mind of an imbecile; round and round in an infinite cosiness of issueless thoughts and feelings and actions, of hermetically bottled art and learning, of culture for its own sake, of self-sufficient little decencies and indecencies, of impassable dilemmas and moral questions sufficiently answered by the circumambient idiocy.

Round and round, round and round, from Peter's feet to Morphil's little buttocks to the baboons', from the beautiful Chinese spiral of the folds in the Buddha's robe to the humming-bird drinking in mid-air to Peter's feet again with the nails in them . . . His drowsiness darkened into sleep.

In another room on the same floor of the donjon Pete Boone was not even trying to get to sleep; he was trying, on the contrary, to figure things out. To figure out science and Mr. Propter, social justice and eternity and Virginia and Anti-Fascism. It wasn't easy. Because if Mr. Propter was right, then you'd have to start thinking quite differently about almost everything. “Disinterested quest for truth”—that was what you said (if you were ever forced to say anything so embarrassing) about why you were a biologist. And in the case of Socialism it was “humanity,” it was “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” it was “progress”—and, of course, that linked up with biology again: happiness and progress through science as well as Socialism. And while happiness and progress were on the way there was loyalty to the cause. He remembered a piece about loyalty by Josiah Royce, a piece he had had to read in his sophomore year at college. Something about all loyal people grasping in their own way some form of religious truth—winning some kind of genuine religious insight. It had made a big impression on him at the time. He had just lost his faith in that old Blood-of-the-Lamb business he'd been brought up in, and this had come as a kind of reassurance, had made him feel that after all he
was
religious even if he didn't go to church any more—religious because he was loyal. Loyal to causes, loyal to friends. He had been religious, it had always seemed to him, over there in Spain. Religious, again, when he felt that way about Virginia. And yet, if Mr. Propter was right, old Royce's ideas about loyalty were all wrong. Being loyal didn't of itself give you religious insight. On the contrary, it might prevent you from having insight—indeed, was absolutely certain to prevent you, if you gave your loyalty to anything less than the highest cause of all and the highest cause of all (if Mr. Propter was right) was almost terrible in its farness and strangeness. Almost terrible; and yet the more he thought about it, the more dubious he felt about everything else. Perhaps it really was the highest. But if it was, then Socialism wasn't enough. And it wasn't enough, because humanity wasn't enough. Because the greatest happiness didn't happen to be in the place where people had thought it was, because you couldn't make it come by doing things in the sort of fields you worked in if you were a social reformer. The best you could do in those fields was to make it easier for people to go on to where the greatest happiness could be had. And, of course, what applied to Socialism would apply to biology or any other science, if you thought of it as a means to progress. Because, if Mr. Propter was right, then what people called progress wasn't progress. That is, it wouldn't be progress, unless it had made it easier for people to go on to where the greatest happiness actually was. Easier, in other words, to be loyal to the highest cause of all. And, obviously, if that was your standard, you had to think twice about using progress as a justification for science. And then there was that disinterested quest for truth. But again, if Mr. Propter was right, biology and the rest were the disinterested quest for only one aspect of truth. But a half-truth was a falsehood, and it remained a falsehood even when you'd told it in the belief that it was the whole truth. So it looked as though
that
justification wouldn't do either—or at any rate as though it wouldn't do unless you were at the same time disinterestedly trying to discover the other aspect of truth, the aspect you were looking for when you gave your loyalty to the highest cause of all. And meanwhile what about Virginia, he asked himself in mounting anguish, what about Virginia? For, if Mr. Propter was right, then even Virginia wasn't enough, even Virginia might actually be an obstacle to prevent him from giving his loyalty to the highest cause of all. Even those eyes and her innocence and that utterly adorable mouth; even what he felt about her; even love itself, even the best kind of love (for he could honestly say that he hated the other kind—that dreadful brothel in Barcelona, for example, and here, at home, those huggings after the third or fourth cocktail, those gropings by the roadside in a parked car)—yes, even the best kind of love might be inadequate, might actually be worse than inadequate. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not something or other more.” Hitherto, something or other had been his biology, his socialism. But now these had turned out to be inadequate, or even, taken as ends in themselves, worse than inadequate. No loyalty was good in itself, or brought religious insight, except loyalty to the highest cause of all. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not the highest cause of all more.” But the question, the agonizing question, was this: Could you love the highest cause of all and go on feeling as you did about Virginia? The worst love was obviously incompatible with loyalty to the highest cause of all. Obviously so; because the worst love was just being loyal to your own physiology, whereas, if Mr. Propter was right, you couldn't be loyal to the highest cause of all without denying such loyalties to yourself. But was the best love so fundamentally different, after all, from the worst? The worst was being loyal to your physiology. It was hateful to admit it; but so too was the best: being loyal to your physiology and at the same time (which was its distinguishing mark) loyal also to your higher feelings—to that empty ache of longing, to that infinity of tenderness, to that adoration, that happiness, those pains, that sense of solitude, that longing for identity. You were loyal to these, and being loyal to these was the definition of the best kind of love, of what people called romance and praised as the most wonderful thing in life. But being loyal to these was being loyal to yourself; and you couldn't be loyal to yourself and loyal at the same time to the highest cause of all.