The Pendragon Legend (24 page)

“I think the only taste that could be inferred would be hers. I have the impression that Osborne plays an extremely passive role in the friendship. But Lene Kretzsch is a robust, fine-looking
creature
. Her figure is quite perfect, in the classical sense … ”

“Do you mean she has large feet and hands, like a Greek statue?”

“Exactly.”

“Hm. And her character?”

“Very modern.”

“That is to say, of easy virtue?”

“Not exactly. She is
sachlich. Neue Sachlichkeit. Bauhaus. Nacktkultur.
The chauffeur type. Love is a psycho-physical fact. Nothing romantic or complicated about love.”

“And this is what you call ‘modern’?”

“Well, according to the international conventions drawn up by journalists and women-novelists, this objectivity is what
characterises
modern love.”

“On the other hand, one should remember that even in our grandmothers’ time women did not limit their concerns to embroidery and fainting. They were much more active and
controlling
than they are today; they just did it more gracefully. Mme de Pompadour and Queen Victoria may not have smoked pipes, but they ruled the roost. It really makes me angry when I hear this myth of the modern woman. There is no modern woman. Or modern love. There have always been people so emotionally impoverished they were incapable of investing love with anything
higher than ‘objectivity’, to use your term. It’s just that, in the old days, you couldn’t get away with propagating this debased form of love. There was too much intellectual rigour. Anyway, it was something a well-bred author just didn’t write about.

“The true artists and champions of love,” he went on, “have never been ‘objective’. For Casanova, every woman he
encountered
in the street was a goddess, and every one more beautiful than all her predecessors. That was his secret. ‘Objectivity’ … it’s man’s ability to see more in things than meets the eye that distinguishes him from the animals. ‘Objectivity’ … is there any such thing? Every one of us constructs a private universe out of his personal obsessions, and then tries to communicate with other people with hopeless little flashes of light. But enough of this … So, like St Anthony in the desert, you underwent temptation. Satan appeared at the Café Royal and promised you a journal. I just wonder what Morvin would have done if you’d taken up his offers. Where would he have got the money?”

“Well, from Mrs Roscoe’s fortune … ”

It had slipped from my tongue. I was furious with myself. I’m sure that for years no one had dared mention her name in his presence. He must have felt like a man who had been stabbed. He clutched his collar and went deathly pale.

“What’s that? … Where do you get that from?”

And now I saw that he had turned pale with anger; it was fury that was choking him. But it was too late to turn back.

“It’s what Morvin said. He used the royal ‘we’. ‘We’ll buy you a yacht … we’ll be much obliged to you’ … ”

The Earl stared at me. The expression on his face was
horrifying
. Then he lowered his head, rang for the waiter and ordered whisky.

After a long, long silence, he said, very calmly:

“St Anthony, you were tempted by the Devil. But never forget that the Devil is the father of lies. Every word Morvin utters is a lie. That’s his real crime, not the murder. To protect himself … to protect himself from me, he manages to make it all look as if Eileen St Claire is his partner in crime. He’s taken everyone in. Even Seton, the canniest Scot on the planet. But not me. I … I know her too well.”

I thought of what he had said earlier: “Each of us constructs a private universe out of his personal obsessions … ” The Earl had erected a myth about Eileen St Claire and remained attached to that myth, even though estranged from the woman herself. But I did not say this.

After another pause, he continued:

“Eileen St Claire … Mrs Roscoe … has an unfortunate nature, in several respects. There is something in her of the automaton, something not quite human, something … as if she were
permanently
locked in some sort of hypnotic trance. To say she is susceptible to influence doesn’t go far enough. She has never done what, according to her own standards, she should: she’s always surrendered to the will of others. And if anyone ever tried to snap her out of her somnambulism, she immediately hated them. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this … I never speak about these things … Perhaps because you’re a foreigner, here today, gone tomorrow … Like writing in sand … Anyway, it’s an easy game for Morvin to turn appearances against her.”

“My Lord, those appearances could have a strong basis in fact.”

“In what way?” he demanded, somewhat irritably.

“In what way? You, My Lord, are not a great friend of Morvin. Surely, with the evidence you have against him, you would have handed him over to the police, unless you felt that perhaps Mrs Roscoe herself … ”

“That isn’t true!” he yelled, finally losing control. “How dare you speak of things you know nothing about? How can you
possibly
think you understand the motives behind what I do … ?”

At that moment, in that spontaneous outburst of unguarded arrogance, I suddenly understood him. Just minutes before, he had said that what distinguished man from the animals was the capacity to see beyond appearances. The animal sees his mate as simply another animal, but man views his as more than human.

And for a proud man no error can be more painful than to admit that in this regard he has blundered: that the woman he has chosen is not what he thought her. For a truly proud man the worst horror of disappointment in love is not the slight he has received: far, far worse is the failure of judgement that led him to construct a myth with no basis in reality. And a man as supremely proud as
the Earl of Gwynedd has thereafter to maintain the illusion, in the face of every contradictory circumstance, lest he be forced to admit to himself that he has blundered.

That was why, for all his self-control, he gave way to
superhuman
rage when anyone attacked the Eileen myth. Had I revealed at that moment that she had been my mistress he would either have refused to believe me, or he would have found some proof that she had been unable to help it: that she had been hypnotised, that it was all Morvin’s fault …

“I beg your pardon, My Lord,” I said. “It was quite wrong of me to raise the subject.”

“No, it is I who must apologise for my loss of self-control,” he replied, his old calm self again. “You must bear with me; I’m not fully in command of myself these days. While you were away there were more ‘happenings’.”

“What? Another attempt … ?”

“No, something quite different. Something altogether more horrible … ”

“For God’s sake, My Lord … ?”

“Doctor, Goethe’s
Zauberlehrling
…
Die ich rief, die Geister
… ‘I had a jewel in my hand/I dropped it on a snowy slope/It rolled and rolled and grew and grew/And soon became an avalanche’. But it’s quite another story, and not one you could possibly understand. Do please forgive my little outburst. You aren’t offended, I hope. So many people attack Eileen St Claire—it isn’t just you—and appearances certainly are against her. I can’t bear to hear them glibly passing judgement on an innocent person. It isn’t actions that speak, Bátky, not actions. Actions fall away from us like shorn hair. You have to see human beings independently of their actions, as God sees us … But perhaps we should be on our way?”

It was dark by the time we reached the car and got in. The wind searched impatiently among the trees in the woods beside the road, and every so often the bloodshot face of the full moon lit up the clouds, as they chased each other eastwards in a wild, silent ecstasy.

The Earl bore his tragic inner conflict like a rock. His silence was that of a man who intended to say nothing for months on end. The road twisted and swayed before us like a living thing.

Approaching a bend, the Earl suddenly slowed.

“Do you hear anything?” he asked.

“Only the roaring of the wind.”

We continued. But a few hundred yards further on he stopped the car and, without saying a word, got out. To my astonishment he lay down on the ground. It took me a while to work what he was doing. He had his ear to the earth and was listening intently. At last, with an inexpressibly care-worn face, he got back in the car.

We drove on, but only for a few yards. Then he turned off the road, first into a field, and then slowly back, bucking and
bouncing
, the way we had come. Finally we stopped again.

“I’m sorry about this little delay,” he said, and got out again.

The part of the field in which we had parked was separated from the main road by a hedge. The Earl stood behind it, very tense, watching the carriageway.

In the damp west wind, the place was bleak and uninviting. Here or there, in the dark, a clump of trees or the fantastic
outline
of a bush could be made out. It was the sort of field you find yourself in in a nightmare, with snakes coming at you from every direction.

What can a man do at such a time? Light a cigarette.

But I had hardly taken a puff before the Earl came dashing over to ask me not to smoke for a minute or two. With a pang, I threw the cigarette down.

Gradually I began to hear what he was listening for. It was a dull, rhythmic thudding. Of course: horses’ hooves.

At the same time something was approaching, very rapidly. I say something, because it wasn’t horsemen, it was some sort of thick fog, bowling along at terrifying speed down the middle of the road, as if driven by a gale or the chariot of Satan himself, and billowing out on either side like the smoke from a runaway train.

Moments later the fog reached and engulfed us. It was only then that I realised it wasn’t fog but a suffocating smoke that made me feel dizzy, and whose odour reminded me of incense.

From inside the car I could no longer see as far as the hedge, where the Earl had been standing. In that strange obscurity I wasn’t even sure if he was still there—or whether he was
anywhere
at all.

I jumped down and made my way as quickly as I could through the dense blackness to where I supposed he might be. Eventually my outstretched hands came up against the low, thorny branches.

I froze in my tracks.

The sound of galloping hooves was now almost upon me, and then, with astonished eyes, I seemed to see a horseman flying past, at breakneck speed, down the highway.

Then the fog was gone.

The moon came out, revealing the last billows disappearing rapidly down the road.

“So,” I said to myself, “the Rosicrucians’ claim to invisibility was only half true.”

The Earl was back at the wheel, sitting with his head in his hands. I dared not accost him. I climbed in, and he set off for Llanvygan.

At breakfast next morning I gave Cynthia a brief outline of what had happened. Naturally I avoided any mention of Eileen St Claire; nor did I tell her about Lenglet du Fresnoy’s vision (or whatever it might be termed). I also did not tell her I had
encountered
the midnight rider.

There are some things that are true only at night. There was no way I could have discussed them. I would have been ashamed to. One is ashamed of the incomprehensible, the irrational, as though it were a form of mental illness. I tried to avoid thinking about it.

Besides, it was such a perfect summer’s day. There was nothing but Cynthia in the world—Cynthia, and her little favourites, the farmstead piglets. We ambled up to the top of a hill, sat ourselves down and basked in the sun.

When silent, she was a vision of beauty. Sitting there on the brow of the hill overlooking the farm, in the clear Welsh
sunlight
with the towers of Llanvygan in the background, she was the fulfilment of everything I saw in imagination, and loved: the Lady of the Castle, innocent and remote from the cares of man. Only piglets, chickens and mighty oak trees can understand the
touching, faintly comical yet utterly sublime mystery of young womanhood—when the young woman is well-to-do. A girl who is poor is never young in quite the same way: the seriousness of her daily cares makes her more like a man.

With her fair hair glistening in the sun, Cynthia had the silent beauty of a line of Theocritus. It was that special, brief moment of summer when you could believe time stood still and all was well with the world.

It seemed she had given herself up to the pleasure of sunshine on skin and the well-being of the body, and that there was nothing going on in her head. I felt supremely at ease myself.

She sat up, rather anxiously, and announced:

“You mustn’t get the idea I’m not thinking about anything. I can’t abide girls who just live for the moment.”

“And what are you thinking about, Cynthia?”

“I read in the morning paper that the number of unemployed in South Wales has risen by another five per cent. It’s dreadful to think that here we are, sitting on this hill, and all the time … ”

“That’ll do,” I cried, rather rudely.

It was as if she’d poured a bucket of cold water over my head. I can tolerate any form of sentimentality better than the bogus sympathy of the rich for the poor. It’s every bit as unnatural and offensive as a manual worker denying that he envies the boss’s wealth. Let the classes carry on with their mutual hatred—it’s the proper order of things—and leave me at peace in the sunshine: it happens so rarely in these islands.

“Oh, Cynthia! … ”

But there were two Cynthias. The words she had just uttered were not at all in harmony with the person I saw in her.

The Cynthia of my imagination was the sort of girl who, on the one hand, would swoon if she caught her beloved devouring a hot dog, but, if the need arose, would be capable of giving her maid a thrashing. She was the Lady of the Castle, proudly enthroned in her fairytale tower, blissfully ignorant of entire nations dying of hunger.

I had not yet abandoned the hope that Cynthia really was the person I believed her to be, it was just that she hadn’t been brought up properly. No doubt her mother was to blame. Under the
influence of who knows what disappointments of her own, her mother must have dunned into her the great middle class myth that intellect mattered, and that every one was equally human.