CHAPTER SIX

 

In the small dining-room, most of the furnishings came from the Pavilion at Brighton.  Four gilded dragons supported the red lacquered table, and two more served as caryatids on either side of a chimney-piece in the same material.  It was the Regency's dream of the Gorgeous East.  The kind of thing, Jeremy reflected, as he sat down on his scarlet and gold chair, the kind of thing that the word 'Cathay' would have conjured up in Keats's mind, for example, or Shelley's, or Lord Byron's - just as that charming 'Leda' by Etty, over there, next to the Fra Angelico's 'Annunciation,' was an accurate embodiment of their fancies on the subject of pagan mythology; was an authentic illustration (he chuckled inwardly at the thought) to the Odes to Psyche and the Grecian Urn, to Endymion and Prometheus Unbound.  An age's habits of thought and feeling and imagination are shared by all who live and work within that age - by all, from the journeyman up to the genius.  Regency is always Regency, whether you take your sample from the top of the basket or from the bottom.  In 1820, the man who shut his eyes and tried to visualize magic casements opening on the foam of faery seas would see - what?  The turrets of Brighton Pavilion.  At the thought, Jeremy smiled to himself with pleasure. Etty and Keats, Brighton and Percy Bysshe Shelley - what a delightful subject!  Much better than carp and Ossian; better inasmuch as Nash and Prince Regent were funnier than even the most aged fish.  But for conversational purposes and at the luncheon-table, even the best of subjects is worthless if there is nobody to discuss it with.  And who was there, Jeremy asked himself, who was there in this room desirous or capable of talking with him on such a theme?  Not Mr Stoyte; not, certainly, Miss Maunciple, nor the two young women who had come over from Hollywood to have lunch with her; not Dr Obispo, who cared more for mice than books; nor Peter Boone, who probably didn't even know that there were any books to care for.  The only person who might conceivably be expected to take an interest in the manifestations of the later-Georgian time spirit was the individual who had been introduced to him as Dr Herbert Mulge, Ph.D., D.D., Principal of Tarzana College.  But at the moment Dr Mulge was talking in a rich vein of something that sounded almost like pulpit eloquence about the new Auditorium which Mr Stoyte had just presented to the College and which was shortly to be given its formal opening.  Dr Mulge was a large and handsome man with a voice to match - a voice at once sonorous and suave, unctuous and ringing.  The flow of his language was slow, but steady and apparently stanchless.  In phrases full of the audible equivalents of Capital Letters, he now went on to assure Mr Stoyte and anyone else who cared to listen that it would be a Real Inspiration for the boys and girls of Tarzana to come together in the beautiful new building for their Community Activities.  For Non-Denominational Worship, for example; for the Enjoyment of the Best in Drama and Music.  Yes, what an inspiration!  The name of Stoyte would be remembered with love and reverence by successive generations of the College's Alumni and Alumnae, - would be remembered, he might say, for ever; for the Auditorium was a monumentum aere perennius, a Footprint of the Sand of Time - definitely a Footprint.  And now, Dr Mulge continued, between the mouthfuls of cream chicken, now Tarzana's Crying Need was for a new Art School.  Because, after all, Art, as we were now discovering, was one of the most potent of educational forces.  Art was the aspect under which, in this twentieth century of ours, the Religious Spirit most clearly manifested itself.  Art was the means by which Personalities could best achieve Creative Self-Expression and ...

      'Cripes!' Jeremy said to himself; and then: 'Golly!'  He smiled ruefully at the thought that he hoped to talk to this imbecile about the relation between Keats and Brighton Pavilion.

 

      Peter Boone found himself separated from Virginia by the blonder of her two young friends from Hollywood, so that he could only look at her past a foreground of rouge and eyelashes, of golden curls and a thick, almost visible perfume of gardenias.  To anyone else, this foreground might have seemed a bit distracting; but for Pete it was of no more significance than the equivalent amount of mud.  He was interested only in what was beyond the foreground - in that exquisitely abbreviated upper lip, in the little nose that made you want to cry when you looked at it, it was so elegant and impertinent, so ridiculous and angelic; in that long Florentine bob of lustrous auburn hair; in those wide-set, widely opened eyes with their twinkling surface of humour and their dark blue depths of what he was sure was an infinite tenderness, a plumbless feminine wisdom.  He loved her so much that, where his heart should have been he could feel only an aching breathlessness, a cavity which she alone could fill.

      Meanwhile, she was talking to the blonde Foreground about that new job which the Foreground had landed with the Cosmopolitan-Perlmutter Studio.  The picture was called 'Say it with Stockings,' and the Foreground was to play the part of a rich débutante who runs away from home to make a career of her own, becomes a striptease dander in a Western mining-camp and finally marries a cow-puncher, who turns out to be the son of a millionaire.

      'Sounds like a swell story,' said Virginia.  'Don't you think so, Pete?'

      Pete thought so; he was ready to think almost anything if she wanted him to.

      'That reminds me of Spain,' Virginia announced.  And while Jeremy, who had been eavesdropping on the conversation, frantically tried to imagine what train of associations had taken her from 'Say it with Stockings' to the civil war - whether it had been Cosmopolitan-Perlmutter, Anti-Semitism, Nazis, Franco; or débutante, class war, Moscow, Negrin; or striptease, modernity, radicalism, Republicans - while he was vainly speculating thus, Virginia went on to ask the young man to tell them about what he had done in Spain; and when he demurred, insisted - because it was so thrilling, because the Foreground had never heard about it, because, finally, she wanted him to.

      Pete obeyed.  Only half-articulately, in a vocabulary composed of slang and clichés, and adorned by expletives and grunts - the vocabulary, Jeremy reflected as he listened surreptitiously through the booming of Dr Mulge's eloquence, the characteristically squalid and poverty-stricken vocabulary to which the fear of being thought unsocially different or undemocratically superior, or unsportingly highbrow, condemns most young Englishmen and Americans - he began to describe his experiences as a volunteer in the International Brigade during the heroic days of 1937.  It was a touching narrative.  Through the hopelessly inadequate language, Jeremy could divine the young man's enthusiasm for liberty and justice; his courage; his love for his comrades; his nostalgia, even in the neighbourhood of that short upper lip, even in the midst of an absorbing piece of scientific research, for the life of men united in devotion to a cause, made one in the face of hardship and shared danger and impending death.

      'Gee,' he kept repeating, 'they were swell guys.'

      They were all swell - Knud, who had saved his life one day, up there in Aragon; Anton and Mack and poor little Dino, who had been killed; André, who had lost a leg; Jan, who had a wife and two children; Fritz, who'd had six months in a Nazi concentration camp; and all the others - the finest bunch of boys in the world.  And what did he do, but go and get rheumatic fever on them, and then myocarditis - which meant no more active service; no more anything except sitting around.  That was why he was here, he explained apologetically.  But, gee, it had been good while it lasted!  That time, for example, when he and Knud had gone out at night and climbed a precipice in the dark and taken a whole platoon of Moors by surprise and killed half a dozen of them and come back with a machine-gun and three prisoners....

      'And what is your opinion of Creative Work, Mr Pordage?'

      Surprised in flagrant inattention, Jeremy started guiltily.  'Creative work?' he mumbled, trying to gain a little time.  'Creative work?  Well, of course one's all for it.  Definitely,' he insisted.

      'I'm glad to hear you say so,' said Dr Mulge.  'Because that's what I want at Tarzana.  Creative work - ever more and more Creative.  Shall I tell you what is my highest ambition?'  Neither Mr Stoyte nor Jeremy made any reply.  But Dr Mulge proceeded, nevertheless, to tell them.  'it is to make of Tarzana the living Centre of the New Civilization that is coming to blossom here in the West.'  He raised a large fleshy hand in solemn asseveration.  'The Athens of the twentieth century is on the point of emerging here, in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area.  I want Tarzana to be its Parthenon and its Academe, its Stoa and its Temple of the Muses.  Religion, Art, Philosophy, Science - I want them all to find their home in Tarzana, to radiate their influence from our campus, to ...'

      In the middle of his story about the Moors and the precipice, Pete became aware that only the Foreground was listening to him.  Virginia's attention had wandered, surreptitiously at first, then frankly and avowedly - had wandered to where, on her left, the less blonde of her two friends was having something almost whispered to her by Dr Obispo.

      'What's that?' Virginia asked.

      Dr Obispo leaned towards her and began again.  The three heads, the oil-smooth black, the elaborately curly brown, the lustrous auburn, were almost touching.  By the expression on their faces Pete could see that the doctor was telling one of his dirty stories.  Alleviated for a moment by the smile she had given him when she asked him to tell them about Spain, the anguish in that panting void where his heart ought to have been came back with redoubled intensity.  It was a complicated pain, made up of jealousy and a despairing sense of loss and personal unworthiness, of a fear that his angel was being corrupted and another, deeper fear, which his conscious mind refused to formulate, a fear that the angel was not as angelic as his love had made him assume.  The flow of his narrative suddenly dried up.  He was silent.

      'Well, what happened then?' the Foreground enquired with an eagerness and an expression of hero-worshipping admiration that any other young man would have found delightfully flattering.

      He shook his head.  'Oh, nothing much.'

      'But those Moors ...'

      'Hell!' he said impatiently.  'What does it matter, anyhow?'

      His words were drowned by a violent explosion of laughter that sent the three conspiratorial heads, the black, the brown, the lovely auburn, flying apart from one another.  He looked up at Virginia and saw a face distorted with mirth.  At what? he asked himself in agony, trying to measure the extent of her corruption; and a kind of telescoped and synthetic memory of all the schoolboy stories, all the jokes and limericks he had ever heard, rushed in upon him.

      Was it at that one that she was laughing?  Or at that?  Or, God, perhaps at that; and the more he hoped and prayed, the more insanely sure he became that that was the one it had been.

      '... above all,' Dr Mulge was saying, 'Creative Work in the Arts.  Hence the crying need for a new Art School, an Art School worthy of Tarzana, worthy of the highest traditions of ...'

      The girls' shrill laughter exploded with a force of hilarity proportionate to the strength of the surrounding social taboos.  Mr Stoyte turned sharply in the direction from which the noise had come.

      'What's the joke?' he asked suspiciously.  He wasn't going to have his Baby listen to smut.  He disapproved of smut in mixed company almost as wholeheartedly as his grandmother, the Plymouth Sister, had done.  'What's all that noise about?'

      It was Dr Obispo who answered.  He'd been telling them a funny story he'd heard over the radio, he explained with suave politeness that was like a sarcasm.  Something delightfully amusing.  Perhaps Mr Stoyte would like to have him repeat it.

      Mr Stoyte grunted ferociously and turned away.

      A glance at his host's scowling face convinced Dr Mulge that it would be better to postpone discussion of the Art School to another, more propitious occasion.  It was disappointing; for it seemed to him that he had been making good progress.  But, there! such things would happen.  Dr Mulge was a college president chronically in quest of endowments; he knew all about the rich.  Knew, for example, that they were like gorillas, creatures not easily domesticated, deeply suspicious, alternately bored and bad-tempered.  You had to approach them with caution, to handle them gently and with a boundless cunning.  And even then they might suddenly turn savage on you and show their teeth.  Half a lifetime of experience with bankers and steel-magnates and retired meat-packers had taught Dr Mulge to take such little setbacks as today's with a truly philosophic patience.  Brightly, with a smile on his large, imperial-Roman face, he turned to Jeremy.  'And what do you think of our Californian weather, Mr Pordage?' he asked.

      Meanwhile, Virginia had noticed the expression on Pete's face and immediately divined the causes of his misery.  Poor Pete!  But really, if he thought she had nothing better to do than always be listening to his talk about that silly old war in Spain - or if it wasn't Spain, it was the laboratory; and they did vivisection there, which was just awful; because, after all, when you were hunting, the animals had a chance of getting away, particularly if you were a bad shot, like she was; besides, hunting was full of thrills and you got such a kick from being up there in the mountains in the good air; whereas Pete cut them up underground in that cellar place.... No, if he thought she had nothing better to do than that, he made a big mistake.  All the same, he was a nice boy; and talk about being in love!  It was nice having people around who felt that way about you; made you feel kind of good.  Though it could be rather a nuisance sometimes.  Because they got to feel they had some claim on you; they figured they had a right to tell you things and interfere.  Pete didn't do that in so many words; but he had a way of looking at you - like a dog would do if it suddenly started criticizing you for taking another cocktail.  Saying it with eyes, like Hedy Lamarr - only it wasn't the same thing as Hedy was saying with her eyes; in fact, just the opposite.  It was just the opposite now - and what had she done?  Got bored with that silly old war and listened in to what Sig was saying to Mary Lou.  Well, all she could say was that she wasn't going to have anyone interfering with the way she chose to live her own life.  That was her business.  Why, he was almost as bad, the way he looked at her, as Uncle Jo, or her mother, or Father O'Reilly.  Only, of course, they didn't just look; they said things.  Not that he meant badly, of course, poor Pete; he was just a kid, just unsophisticated and, on top of everything, in love the way a kid is - like the high-school boy in Deanna Durbin's last picture.  Poor Pete, she thought again.  It was tough luck on him; but the fact was she never had been attracted by that big, fair, Cary Grant sort of boy.  They just didn't appeal to her; that was all there was to it.  She liked him; and she enjoyed his being in love with her.  But that was all.

      Across the corner of the table she caught his eye, gave him a dazzling smile and invited him, if he had half an hour to spare after lunch, to come and teach her and the girls how to pitch horseshoes.