CHAPTER EIGHT

 

Mr Propter was sitting on a bench under the largest of his eucalyptus trees.  To the west the mountains were already a flat silhouette against the evening sky, but in front of him, to the north, the upper slopes were still alive with light and shadow, with rosy gold and depths of indigo.  In the foreground, the castle had put on a garment of utterly improbable splendour and romance.  Mr Propter looked at it and at the hills and up through the motionless leaves of the eucalyptus at the pale sky; then closed his eyes and noiselessly repeated Cardinal Bérulle's answer to the question: 'What is man?'  It was more than thirty years before, when he was writing his study of the Cardinal, that he had first read those words.  They had impressed him even then by the splendour and precision of their eloquence.  With the lapse of time and the growth of his experience they had come to seem more than eloquent, had come to take on ever richer connotations, ever profounder significance.  'What is man?' he whispered to himself.  'C'est en néant environné de Dieu, indigent de Dieu, capable de Dieu, et rempli de Dieu, s'il veut.'  A nothingness surrounded by God, indigent and capable of God, filled with God, if he so desires.'  And what is this God of which men are capable?  Mr Propter answered with the definition given by John Tauler in the first paragraph of his Following of Christ: 'God is a being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working.'  Man, then, is as nothingness surrounded by, and indigent of, a being withdrawn from creatures, a nothingness capable of free power, filled with a pure working if he so desires.  If he so desires, Mr Propter was distracted into reflecting with a sudden, rather bitter sadness.  But how few men ever do desire or, desiring, ever know what to wish for or how to get it!  Right knowledge is hardly less rare than the sustained good-will to act on it.  Of those few who look for God, most find, through ignorance, only such reflections of their own self-will as the God of battles, the God of the chosen people, the Prayer-Answerer, the Saviour.

      Having deviated thus far into negativity, Mr Propter was led on, through a continuing failure of vigilance, into an even less profitable preoccupation with the concrete and particular miseries of the day.  He remembered his interview that morning with Hansen, who was the agent for Jo Stoyte's estates in the valley.  Hansen's treatment of the migrants who came to pick the fruit was worse even than the average.  He had taken advantage of their number and their desperate need to force down wages.  In the groves he managed, young children were being made to work all day in the sun at the rate of two or three cents an hour.  And when the day's work was finished, the homes to which they returned were a row of verminous sties in the waste land beside the bed of the river.  For these sties, Hansen was charging a rent of ten dollars a month.  Ten dollars a month for the privilege of freezing or suffocating; of sleeping in a filthy promiscuity; of being eaten up by bedbugs and lice; of picking up ophthalmia and perhaps hookworm and amoebic dysentery.  And yet Hansen was a very decent, kindly man: one who would be shocked and indignant if he saw you hurting a dog; one who would fly to the protection of a maltreated woman or a crying child.  When Mr Propter drew this fact to his attention, Hansen had flushed darkly with anger.

      'That's different,' he had said.

      Mr Propter had tried to find out why it was different.

      It was his duty, Hansen had said.

      But how could it be his duty to treat children worse than slaves and inoculate them with hookworm?

      It was his duty to the estates.  He wasn't doing anything for himself.

      But why should doing wrong for someone else be different from doing wrong on your own behalf?  The results were exactly the same in either case.  The victims didn't suffer any less when you were doing what you called your duty than when you were acting in what you imagined might be your own interests.

      This time the anger had exploded in violent abuse.  It was the anger, Mr Propter had perceived, of the well-meaning but stupid man who is compelled against his will to ask himself indiscreet questions about what he has been doing as a matter of course.  He doesn't want to ask these questions, because he knows that if he does he will be forced either to go on with what he is doing, but with the cynic's awareness that he is doing wrong, or else, if he doesn't want to be a cynic, to change the entire pattern of his life so as to bring his desire to do right into harmony with the real facts as revealed in the course of self-interrogation.  To most people any radical change is even more odious than cynicism.  The  only way between the horns of the dilemma is to persist at all costs in the ignorance which permits one to go on doing wrong in the comforting belief that by doing so one is accomplishing one's duty - one's duty to the company, to the shareholders, to the family, the city, the state, the fatherland, the church.  For, of course, poor Hansen's case wasn't in any way unique; on a smaller scale, and therefore with less power to do evil, he was acting like all those civil servants and statesmen and prelates who go through life spreading misery and destruction in the name of their ideals and under orders from their categorical imperatives.

      Well, he hadn't go very far with Hansen, Mr Propter sadly concluded.  He'd have to try again with Jo Stoyte.  In the past, Jo had always refused to listen, on the ground that the estates were Hansen's business.  The alibi was so convenient that it would be hard, he foresaw, to break it down.

      From Hansen and Jo Stoyte his thoughts wandered to that newly arrived family of transients from Kansas, to whom he had given one of his cabins.  The three undernourished children, with the teeth already rotting in their mouths; the woman, emaciated by God knew what complication of diseases, deep-sunken already in apathy and weakness; the husband, alternately resentful and self-pitying, violent and morose.

      He had gone with the man to get some vegetables from the garden plots and a rabbit for the family supper.  Sitting there, skinning the rabbit, he had had to listen to outbursts of incoherent complaint and indignation.  Complaint and indignation against the wheat market, which had broken each time he had begun to do well.  Against the banks he had borrowed money from and been unable to repay.  Against the droughts and winds that had reduced his farm to a hundred and sixty acres of dust and wilderness.  Against the luck that had always been against him.  Against the folks who had treated him so meanly, everywhere, all his life.

      Dismally familiar story!  With inconsiderable variations, he had heard it a thousand times before.  Sometimes they were sharecroppers from further south, dispossessed by the owners in a desperate effort to make the farming pay.  Sometimes, like this man, they had owned their own place and been dispossessed, not by financiers, but by the forces of nature - forces of nature which they themselves had made destructive by tearing up the grass and planting nothing but wheat.  Sometimes they had been hired men, displaced by the tractors.  All of them had come to California as to a promised land; and California had already reduced them to a condition of wandering peonage and was fast transforming them into Untouchables.  Only a saint, Mr Propter reflected, only a saint, could be a peon and a pariah with impunity, because only a saint would accept the position gladly and as though he had chosen it of his own free will.  Poverty and suffering ennoble only when they are voluntary.  By involuntary poverty and suffering men are made worse.  It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an involuntarily poor man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  Here, for example, was this poor devil from Kansas.  How had he reacted to involuntary poverty and suffering?  So far as Mr Propter could judge, he was compensating himself for his misfortunes by brutality to those weaker than himself.  The way he yelled at the children ... It was an all too familiar symptom.

      When the rabbit was skinned and gutted, Mr Propter had interrupted his companion's monologue.

      'Do you know which is the stupidest text in the Bible?' he had suddenly asked.

      Startled, and evidently a bit shocked, the man from Kansas had shaken his head.

      'It's this,' Mr Propter had said, as he got up and handed him to carcass of the rabbit.  '"They hated me without a cause."'

      Under the eucalyptus tree, Mr Propter wearily sighed.  Pointing out to unfortunate people that, in part at any rate, they were pretty certainly responsible for their own misfortunes; explaining to them that ignorance and stupidity are no less severely punished by the nature of things than deliberate malice - these were never agreeable tasks.  Never agreeable, but, so far as he could see, always necessary.  For what hope, he asked himself, what faintest glimmer of hope is there for a man who really believes that 'they hated me without a cause' and that he had no part in his own disasters?  Obviously, no hope whatever.  We see, as a matter of brute fact, that disasters and hatreds are never without causes; we also see that some at least of those causes are generally under the control of the people who suffer the disasters or are the object of the hatred.  In some measure they are directly or indirectly responsible.  Directly, by the commission of stupid or malicious acts.  Indirectly, by the omission to be as intelligent and compassionate as they might be.  And if they make this omission, it is generally because they choose to conform unthinkingly to local standards, and the current way of living.  Mr Propter's thoughts returned to the poor fellow from Kansas.  Self-righteous, no doubt disagreeable to the neighbours, an incompetent farmer; but that wasn't the whole story.  His gravest offence had been to accept the world in which he found himself as normal, rational and right.  Like all the others, he had allowed the advertisers to multiply his wants; he had learned to equate happiness with possessions, and prosperity with money to spend in a shop.  Like all the others, he had abandoned any idea of subsistence farming to think exclusively in terms of a cash crop; and he had gone on thinking in those terms, even when the crop no longer gave him any cash.  Then, like all the others, he had got into debt with the banks.  And finally, like all the others, he had learned that what the experts had been saying for a generation was perfectly true: in a semi-arid country it is grass that holds down the soil; tear up the grass, the soil will go.  In due course, it had gone.

      The man from Kansas was now a peon and a pariah; and the experience was making a worse man of him.

      St Peter Claver was another of the historical personages to whom Mr Propter had devoted a study.  When the slave-ships came into the harbour of Cartagena, Peter Claver was the only white man to venture down into the holds.  There, in the unspeakable stench and heat, in the vapours of pus and excrement, he tended the sick, he dressed the ulcers of those whom their manacles had wounded, he held in his arms the men who had given way to despair and spoke to them words of comfort and affection - and in the intervals talked to them about their sins.  Their sins!  The modern humanitarian would laugh, if he were not shocked.  And yet - such was the conclusion to which Mr Propter had gradually and reluctantly come - and yet St Peter Claver was probably right.  Not completely right, of course; for, acting on wrong knowledge, no man, however well-intentioned, can be more than partially right.  But as nearly right, at any rate, as a good man with a counter-Reformation Catholic philosophy could expect to be.  Right in insisting that, whatever the circumstances in which he finds himself, a human being always has omissions to make good, commissions whose effects must, if possible, be neutralized.  Right in believing that it is well even for the most brutally sinned against to be reminded of their own shortcomings.

      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 upon 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 transcend and transform intelligence.  Many are called, but few are chosen - because few even know in what salvation consists.  Consider 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 insisted, surely there was something to be done for such people.  The man from Kansas had begun by resenting what he 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 seabirds 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 were 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 revulsion 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 the 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 us 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 a 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.'

      Peter 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 you 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 should 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?'

      Mr Propter smiled at him good-humouredly.  'It's all right,' he said, 'I won't say a word about harps or wings.'

      'Well, that's something,' said Jeremy.

      'I never could get much satisfaction out of meaningless discourse,' Mr Propter continued.  'I like the words I use to bear some relation to facts.  That's why I'm interested in eternity - psychological eternity.  Because it's a fact.'

      'For you, perhaps,' said Jeremy in a tone which implied that more civilized people didn't suffer from these hallucinations.

      'For anyone who chooses to fulfil the conditions under which it can be experienced.'

      'And why should anyone choose to fulfil them?'

      'Why should anyone choose to go to Athens to see the Parthenon?  Because it's worth the bother.  And the same is true of eternity.  The experience of timeless good is worth all the trouble it involved.'

      '"Timeless good,"' Jeremy repeated with distaste.  'I don't know what the words mean.'

      'Why should you?' said Mr Propter.  'One doesn't know the full meaning of the word "Parthenon" until one has actually seen the thing.'

      'Yes, but at least I've seen photographs of the Parthenon; I've read descriptions.'

      'You've read descriptions of timeless good,' Mr Propter answered.  'Dozens of them.  In all the literatures of philosophy and religion.  You've read them; but you've never bought your ticket for Athens.'

      In a resentful silence, Jeremy had to admit to himself that this was true.  The fact that it was true made him disapprove of the conversation even more profoundly than he had done before.

      'As for time,' Mr Propter was saying to Pete, 'what is it, in this particular context, but the medium in which evil propagates itself, the element in which evil lives and outside of which it dies?  Indeed, it's more than the element of evil, more than merely its medium.  If you carry your analysis far enough, you'll find that time is evil.  One of the aspects of its essential substance.'

      Jeremy listened with growing discomfort and a mounting irritation.  His fears had been justified; the old boy was launching out into the worst kind of theology.  Eternity, timeless experience of good, time as the substance of evil - it was bad enough, God knew, in books; but, fired at you like this, point-blank, by somebody who really took it seriously, why, it was really frightful.  Why on earth couldn't people live their lives in a rational, civilized way?  Why couldn't they take things as they came?  Breakfast at nine, lunch at one-thirty, tea at five.  And conversation.  And the daily walk with Mr Gladstone, the Yorkshire terrier.  And the library; the Works of Voltaire in eighty-three volumes; the inexhaustible treasure of Horace Walpole; and for a change the Divine Comedy; and then, in case you might be tempted to take the Middle Ages too seriously, Salimbene's autobiography and the Miller's Tale.  And sometimes calls in the afternoon - the Rector, Lady Fredegond with her ear-trumpet, Mr Veal.  And political discussions - except that in these last months, since the Anchluss and Munich, one had found that political discussion was one of the unpleasant things it was wise to avoid.  And the weekly journey to London, with lunch at the Reform, and always dinner with old Thripp of the British Museum; and a chat with one's poor brother Tom at the Foreign Office (only that too was rapidly becoming one of the things to be avoided).  And then, of course, the London Library; and Vespers at Westminster Cathedral, if they happened to be singing Palestrina; and every alternate week, between five and six-thirty, an hour and a half with Mae or Doris in their flat in Maida Vale.  Infinite squalor in a little room, as he liked to call it; abysmally delightful.  Those were the things that came; why couldn't they take them, quietly and sensibly?  But no, they had to gibber about eternity and all the rest.  That sort of stuff always made Jeremy want to be blasphemous - to ask whether God had a boyau rectum, to protest, like the Japanese in the anecdote, that he was altogether flummoxed and perplexed by position of Honourable Bird.  But, unfortunately, the present was one of those peculiarly exasperating cases where such reactions were out of place.  For, after all, old Propter had written Short Studies; what he said couldn't just be dismissed as the vapourings of a deficient mind.  Besides, he hadn't talked Christianity, so that jokes about anthropomorphism were beside the point.  It was really too exasperating!  He assumed an expression of haughty detachment and even started to hum 'The Honeysuckle and the Bee.'  The impression he wanted to give was that of a superior being who really couldn't be expected to waste his time listening to stuff like this.

      A comic spectacle, Mr Propter reflected as he looked at him; except, of course, that it was so extremely depressing.