Shadows of Ecstasy (16 page)

Sir Bernard remembered all this as he shook hands, and observed with a slight shock Suydler's large, ungainly form. The one cartoon which had really succeeded against him had beencalled “The Guessing Gorilla,” and Sir Bernard recollected with pleasure that it was not his own obsession with Africa which had remarked the likeness. The ugly face, the long hanging arms, the curled fingers, the lumbering step, had a strange likeness to a great ape plunging about the room. He shook hands, and his visitor was quite glad not to feel those huge arms clutching him. There was, he thought, altogether too much Africa about, and he almost wondered for a moment whether indeed Suydler were preferable to Considine.… But he reminded himself that it wasn't personalities but abstract states of existence with which he was concerned, and he took the chair the Prime Minister offered. The huge bulk swelled before him, loomed over him, was talking … talking.… Sir Bernard felt a great weariness come over him. The excitement, the incredibilities, of the last twenty-four hours had worn him out. And what was the good of trying to defend the intellect in this place of the death of the intellect? Witch-doctors were invading Europe, and he had gone running to an ape for help.…

“—absurd talk about possible reasons,” the Prime Minister was saying. “The whole thing's an example of the failure of organized thought. No-one can find out the root of the trouble.”

“I wonder you ask them,” Sir Bernard said.

“I don't; they tell me,” Suydler answered. “There was a man yesterday—an ex-Governor—was talking to me. I had a kind of bet with myself how many synonyms he'd use for guess—I think it was about twenty-four. We may assume—not improbable—very likely—may it not be—reasonable assumption—working hypothesis—possible surmise—news suggests—my opinion is—better theory—never a plain straightforward guess. Never used the word once.”

“It's not a favourite, except with children; they love it,” Sir Bernard said. “Perhaps,” he added, struck by a sudden thought, “that's why they're nearer the kingdom of heaven. They're more sincere. However, I came here to say that I'm not certain that I didn't dine yesterday with the High Executive. I mean—I guess I did.”

“That's fair, anyhow,” Suydler answered. “Who did you guess he was? And—not that I mind, but as a concession to the Permanent Officials—why did you guess him?”

Sir Bernard held out his papers. “It's all there,” he said.

Suydler put out an enormous hand—its shadow on the carpet stretched out, black and even more enormous—and took them. “How tidy you are,” he said, grinning, “but you always were, weren't you? Your operations were always miracles of conciseness. If you've extracted the truth now, that'll be another miracle. Excuse me while I look at them.”

He didn't take long over it; then he chuckled, put them down, and leaned back. “And you've got this Zulu king of yours?” he asked. “Ready to testify and identify and all that?”

“Certainly,” Sir Bernard said.

Suydler linked his fingers and stretched his arms out. “Well,” he said, “if you like—though I've met Considine a few times—but if you like to make a pattern with him in, I'm not sure that I won't go with you. It'll look awfully well.…‘Government discover High Executive.' Why, as of minor interest, didn't you come before?”

“Because, until I'd got the king's opinion—guess, if you like, I couldn't,” Sir Bernard explained. “And he went off into a real stupor the minute he reached Kensington—as if he had to get his own faculties into order.”

“Two hundred years—” Suydler said. “But what a price to pay! No women, no fun, no excitements. All, if I've got it right, squeezed back into yourself.” He pressed a bell. “It isn't fair to let him go on suppressing himself and misleading others, is it?—‘A long life and a dull one'—that's the end of all you theorists.”

Sir Bernard stood up. “Well,” he said, “if you think I'm right I'll go.”

A secretary came in, but Suydler kept him waiting. “Right!” he said, “no, I don't think you're right. I think your mind and his may have—what shall I say?—coincided by chance. But there's no such thing as ‘right.' It's all a question of preferring a particular momentary pattern of phenomena. There's nothing more anywhere. How can there be? At this moment the past doesn't exist, the future doesn't exist, and we know nothing much about the present!”

Avoiding any immediate discussion of the nature of existence, Sir Bernard got away. Walking down Downing Street he considered the Minister. “Considine and he both look into the abyss,” he thought, “but Considine sees it beating with passion, and Suydler sees nothing. A chaos or a void? Black men, or men who are no longer white?” He saw the intellect and logical reason of man no longer as a sedate and necessary thing, but rather a narrow silver bridge passing over an immense depth, around the high guarded entrance of which thronged clouds of angry and malign presences. Often mistaking the causes and often misjudging the effects of all mortal sequences, this capacity of knowing cause and effect presented itself nevertheless to him as the last stability of man. Always approaching truth, it could never, he knew,
be
truth, for nothing can be truth till it has become one with its object, and such union it was not given to the intellect to achieve without losing its own nature. But in its divine and abstract reflection of the world, its passionless mirror of the holy law that governed the world, not in experiments or ecstasies or guesses, the supreme perfection of mortality moved. He saluted it as its child and servant, and dedicated himself again to it, for what remained to him of life, praying it to turn the light of its awful integrity upon him, and to preserve him from self-deception and greediness and infidelity and fear. “If A is the same as B,” he said, “and B is the same as C, then A is the same as C. Other things may be true; for all I know, they may be different at the same time; but this at least is true. And Considine will have to hypnotize me myself before I deny it. Suydler is wrong—a guess may be true once and twice and a thousand times, for man has known abstraction, and no gorilla of a politician can take it away from him.”

Chapter Eight

PASSING THROUGH THE MIDST OF THEM

There followed a few days of uneasy quiet. The news from Africa was vague, but more cheerfully vague. It was generally understood that organized naval measures were being taken to overcome the submarine forces of the enemy, which had succeeded in making the African coasts so dangerous and had proceeded so far afield that until such measures had been concerted and carried out the landing of fresh troops had become impossible. It was even rumoured that attacks had been made on certain European harbours, but if this were so the Government concerned saw to it that no hint was allowed to appear in the Press. Energetic operations had been planned; the more energetic movements of the enemy seemed to have ceased, though the clearance of white troops from North Africa appeared to be proceeding slowly but systematically.

The financial panic had also been stayed to some extent by Government action. For the Prime Minister had announced that, as the simplest means of meeting the emergency, the Administration had decided to make loans to the federated control of any particular industry which was seriously affected. Conditions of application, examination, payment and repayment were to be settled by a Commission set up for the purpose; the immediate affair was to steady the markets, and dazed directors of innumerable companies found themselves offered millions in order to buy up shares in their own concerns. Unfederated companies rushed to federate; all newspapers, for example, found themselves part of one large business, controlled by a common Board which immediately borrowed or was offered a subsidy of some millions, with which it repurchased the shares which Nehemiah and Ezekiel Rosenberg were throwing before the world. It looked therefore as if these devoted believers would secure their money as well as their jewels; and the coming of Messias or the building of the Temple be prepared for by the English in a general increase of taxation. Sir Bernard, as he contemplated the world, foresaw a possibility that the whole business, military and financial, would gradually expire, having ruined a great number of small shareholders, increased the financial strength of the larger, cost a great deal in armaments, and probably massacred a host of Africans in circumstances of more or less equal fighting.

“I had some expectation,” he said to Caithness as they turned into the Square, after an early afternoon walk, “of becoming a travelling doctor in my old age—probably with a donkey cart; and going from village to village, curing indigestion and collecting sixpences. You know the kind of thing—‘Travers's Pills make Stomachs Tractable'—‘Dainty Digestions Decently Doctored.' You might have joined me, and we would have put stomachs and souls right together. ‘Stomachs on the right; souls on the left: Advice free: only real cures paid for.' But I should have stipulated for no miracles.”

“Then you'd have wanted an unfair advantage,” Caithness said. “I should have to send quite a number of my patients to you; lots of them think it's their conscience when actually it's their stomachs.”

“Still on your theory the soul's wrong anyhow,” Sir Bernard pointed out.

“Quite,” Caithness answered. “But they have to understand that, not merely moan over their pains. However, the question isn't likely to arise. Things do seem to be a bit quieter now.”

The exertions of the Government and (presumably) of the police did not, however, succeed in tracing either Nigel Considine or his friends. Justified by several different kinds of warrants, an examination of the Hampstead house was carried out but with no results. Whatever staff of whatever servants had occupied it had disappeared as completely as its master. Inkamasi was examined and re-examined, but though his story was given in fuller detail, the details did not much help. It was clear that the High Executive had done no more than preserve him in case he should be wanted; the Zulus themselves, who were apparently taking an active part in the war, were (so far as news could be obtained) under the headship of another of their race, a cousin of Inkamasi's, less directly but still closely connected with the great chieftain and hero, Chaka. The king was allowed to remain in seclusion at Sir Bernard's house, where he spent his days reading, brooding, and talking sometimes to his host and to Caithness. Philip rather avoided him.

Philip indeed had his own troubles. Apart from the complete wreck of his purposes which the war had brought about, apart from the agitations which his new experiences had introduced into his inner mind, he suddenly found himself on the most extraordinarily difficult terms with Rosamond. She refused to come near Colindale Square, she occasionally even refused to see him when he went to Hampstead, and when she did see him she was in a nervous and irritable mood which was quite unlike the normal Rosamond. Philip's own meditations on the relations between love and Rosamond were thwarted and upset by the discovery that Rosamond, to all intents and purposes, wasn't there for love to have relations with. She had always kept love in its proper place, and had never displayed any particular interest in its more corporeal manifestations, suggesting by her manner that such things were a trifle silly. If he tried to explain something of the marvel which she seemed to him, she had listened placidly and with good humour, but without much gratification and with no kind of exaltation at all. His own exaltation, however, had not been exactly forbidden to thrive—until now. But now she would not have it; she shrank from and repelled it. She wouldn't be touched; she wouldn't be approached. Isabel told him that her sister was sleeping badly. But what Isabel didn't tell him was the dubious and unhappy cause of that broken sleep.

Roger, coming in early one evening, found his wife alone. He kissed her and flung himself down, and a silence gathered them up. Presently Isabel stirred: “Well, darling?” she said, “what do you think about it all?”

Roger said nothing at first, then he uttered, “I've done what I can. I've thrown over a course on the probable sources of the minor comedies of the early nineteenth century, and where Mrs. Inchbald found her plots—Mrs. Inchbald—I ask you, Isabel! Where did Mrs. Hemans get hers?—and I've talked to them for all I'm worth on the Filial Godhead and mighty forms and encountering darkness and Macbeth. I can't do more—that way. I don't know enough: I'm a baby in it, after all.”

Isabel said quietly, “You want to know more?”

Roger answered, “I want—yes, I—the thing that's me wants to know, not like wanting appletart with or without custard, but like wanting breath. There's air outside the windows, and I shall smash them to get it or I shall die. There—you asked me.”

She came and stood by him, and he took her hand. “You don't feel it like that?” he said.

“No, not like that,” she answered. “But perhaps I can't. I've been thinking, Roger darling, and I've wondered whether perhaps women don't have to do it anyhow. I mean—perhaps it's nothing very new, this power your Mr. Considine talks of—perhaps women have always known it, and that's why they've never made great art. Perhaps they
have
turned everything into themselves. Perhaps they must.”

He looked up at her, brooding. “I know,” he said, “you live and we talk about it.”

“No,” Isabel said, sitting down by him in front of the fire. “No, dearest, not only that. We only live on what you give us—imaginatively, I mean; you have to find the greater powers. You have to be the hunters and fishers and fighters when all's said and done. So perhaps you ought to go and hunt now. But we turn it more easily into ourselves than you do—for bad and good alike. And we generally do it very badly—but then you've given us so little to do it with.”