PART THREE

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

There was a tap at the door of Jeremy's work-room; it was Mr Propter who entered.  He was wearing, Jeremy noticed, the same dark-grey suit and black tie as he had worn at Pete's funeral.  The urban costume diminished him; he seemed smaller than in his working clothes, and at the same time less himself.  That weather-beaten, emphatically featured face of his - that face of a statue high up on the west front of a cathedral - looked curiously incongruous above a starched collar.

      'You've not forgotten?' he said, when they had shaken hands.

      For all reply, Jeremy pointed to his own black jacket and sponge-bag trousers.  They were expected at Tarzana for the ceremonial opening of the new Stoyte Auditorium.

      Mr Propter looked at his watch.  'We've got another few minutes before we need think of starting.'  He sat down.  'What's the news?'

      'Couldn't be better,' Jeremy answered.

      Mr Propter nodded.  'Now that poor Jo and the others have gone, it must be quite agreeable here.'

      'All alone with twelve million dollars' worth of bric-à-brac,' said Jeremy.  'I have the most enormous fun.'

      'How little fun you'd be having,' said Mr Propter meditatively, 'if you'd been left in company with the people who actually made the bric-à-brac.  With Greco, and Rubens, and Turner, and Fra Angelico.'

      'God preserve us!' said Jeremy, throwing up his hands.

      'That's the charm of art,' Mr Propter went on.  'It represents only the most amiable aspects of the most talented human beings.  That's why I've never been able to believe that the art of any period threw much light on the life of that period.  That a Martian; show him a representative collection of Botticellis, Peruginos and Raphaels.  Could he infer from them the conditions described by Machiavelli?'

      'No, he couldn't,' Jeremy agreed.  'But meanwhile, here's another question.  The conditions described by Machiavelli - were they the real conditions?  Not that Machiavelli didn't tell the truth.  The things he described really happened.  But did contemporaries think them as awful as they seem to us when we read about them now?  We think they ought to have been miserable about what was happening.  But were they?'

      'Were they?' Mr Propter repeated.  'We ask the historians; and of course they can't answer - because obviously there's no way of compiling statistics about the sum of happiness, nor any way of comparing the feelings of people living under one set of conditions with the feelings of people living under another and quite different set.  The real conditions at any given moment are the subjective conditions of the people then alive.  And the historian has no way of finding out what those conditions were.'

      'No way except through looking at works of art,' said Jeremy.  'I'd say they do throw light on the subjective conditions. Take one of your examples.  Perugino's a contemporary of Machiavelli.  That means that at least one person contrived to be cheerful all through an unpleasant period.  And if one could be, why not many?'  He cleared the way for a quotation with a little cough.  '"The state of the country never put a man off his dinner."'

      'Massive wisdom!' said Mr Propter.  'But remember that the state of Dr Johnson's England was excellent, even at its worst.  What about the state of a country like China, say, or Spain - a country where a man can't be put off his dinner, for the simple reason that there isn't any dinner?  And conversely, what about all the losses of appetite at times when everything's going well?'  He paused, smiling enquiringly at Jeremy, then shook his head.  'Sometimes there's a lot of cheerfulness as well as a lot of misery; sometimes there seems to be almost nothing but misery.  That's all the historian can say insofar as he's a historian.  Insofar as he's a theologian, of course, or a metaphysician, he can maunder on indefinitely, like Marx or St Augustine or Spengler.'  Mr Propter made a little grimace of distaste.  'God, what a lot of bosh we've managed to talk in the last few thousand years!' he said.

      'But it has its charm,' Jeremy insisted.  'Really good bosh ...'

      'I'm barbarous enough to prefer sense,' said Mr Propter.  'That's why, if I want a philosophy of history, I go to the psychologist.'

      '"Totem and Taboo?"' Jeremy questioned in some astonishment.

      'No, no,' said Mr Propter with a certain impatience.  'Not that kind of psychologist.  I mean the religious psychologist; the one who knows by direct experience that men are capable of liberation and enlightenment.  He's the only philosophy of history whose hypothesis has been experimentally verified; therefore the only one who can make a generalization that covers the facts.'

      'And what are his generalizations?' said Jeremy.  'Just the usual thing?'

      Mr Propter laughed.  'Just the usual thing,' he answered: 'the old, boring, unescapable truths.  On the human level, men live in ignorance, craving and fear.  Ignorance, craving and fear result in some temporary pleasures, in many lasting miseries, in final frustration.  The nature of the cure is obvious; the difficulties in the way of its achieving it, almost insuperable.  We have to choose between almost insuperable difficulties on the one hand and absolutely certain misery and frustration on the other.  Meanwhile, the general hypothesis remains as the intellectual key to history.  Only the religious psychologist can make any sense of Perugino and Machiavelli, for example; or of all this.'  He pointed towards the Hauberk Papers.

      Jeremy twinkled behind his glasses and patted his bald patch.  'Your true scholar,' he fluted, 'doesn't even want to make sense of it.'

      'Yes, I always tend to forget that,' said Mr Propter rather sadly.

      Jeremy coughed.  '"Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,"' he quoted from the 'Grammarian's Funeral.'

      'Gave it for his own sake,' said Mr Propter, getting out of his chair.  'Gave it regardless of the fact that the grammar he was studying was hopelessly unscientific, riddled with concealed metaphysics, utterly provincial and antiquated.  Well,' he added, 'that's what one would expect, I suppose.'  He took Jeremy's arm, and they walked together towards the elevator.  'What a curious figure old Browning is!' he continued, his mind harking back to the Grammarian.  'Such a first-rate intelligence, and at the same time such a fool.  All that preposterous stuff about romantic love!  Bringing God into it, putting it into heaven, talking as though marriage and the higher forms of adultery were identical with the beatific vision.  The silliness of it!  But, again, that's what one has to expect.'  He sighed.  'I don't know why,' he added after a pause, 'I often find myself remembering that rhyme of his - I can't even recall which poem it comes from - the one that goes: "one night he kissed My soul out in a burning mist."  My soul out in a burning mist, indeed!' he repeated.  'Really, how much I prefer Chaucer on the subject.  Do you remember?  "Thus swivèd is this carpenterès wife."  So beautifully objective and unemphatic and free of verbiage!  Browning was always rambling on about God; but I suspect he was much farther away from reality than Chaucer was, even though Chaucer never thought about God if he could possibly help it.  Chaucer had nothing between himself and eternity but his appetites.  Browning had his appetites, plus a great barrage of nonsense - nonsense, what's more, with a purpose.  For instance, that bogus mysticism wasn't merely gratuitous bosh.  It had an object.  It existed in order that Browning might be able to persuade himself that his appetites were identical with God.  "Thus swivèd in this carpenterès wife,"' he repeated, as they entered the elevator and went up with the Vermeer to the great hall.  '"My soul out in the burning mist!"'  It's extraordinary the way the whole quality of our existence can be changed by altering the words in which we think and talk about it.  We float in language like icebergs - four-fifths under the surface and only one-fifth of us projecting into the open are of immediate, non-linguistic experience.'

      The crossed the hall.  Mr Propter's car was standing outside the front door.  He took the wheel; Jeremy got in beside him.  The drove off, down the curving road, past the baboons, past Giambologna's nymph, past the Grotto, under the portcullis and across the drawbridge.

      'I so often think of that poor boy,' said Mr Propter, breaking a long silence.  'Dying so suddenly.'

      'I'd no idea his heart was as bad as that,' said Jeremy.

      'In a certain sense,' Mr Propter went on, 'I feel responsible for what happened.  I asked him to help me in the carpenter's shop.  Made him work too hard, I guess - though he insisted it was all right for him.  I ought to have realized that he had his pride - that he was young enough to feel ashamed of admitting he couldn't take it.  One's punished for being insensitive and unaware.  And so are the people one's insensitive about.'

      They drove past the hospital and through the orange groves in silence.  'There's a kind of pointlessness about sudden and premature death,' said Jeremy at last.  'A kind of specially acute irrelevance ...'

      'Specially acute?' Mr Propter questioned.  'No, I shouldn't say so.  It's no more irrelevant than any other human event.  If it seems more irrelevant, that's only because, of all possible events, premature death is the most glaringly out of harmony with what we imagine ourselves to be.'

      'What do you mean?' Jeremy asked.

      Mr Propter smiled.  'I mean what I presume you mean,' he answered.  'If a thing seems irrelevant, there must be something it's irrelevant to.  In this case, that something is our conception of what we are.  We think of ourselves as free, purposive beings.  But every now and then things happen to us that are incompatible with this conception.  We speak of them as accidents; we call them pointless and irrelevant.  But what's the criterion by which we judge?  The criterion is the picture we paint of ourselves in our own fancy - the highly flattering portrait of the free soul making creative choices and being the master of its fate.  Unfortunately, the picture bears no resemblance to ordinary human reality.  It's the picture of what we'd like to be, of what, indeed, we might become if we took the trouble.  To a being who is in fact the slave of circumstance there's nothing specially irrelevant about premature death.  It's the sort of event that's characteristic of the universe in which he actually lives - though not, of course, of the universe he foolishly imagines he lives in.  An accident is the collision of a train of events on the level of determinism with another train of events on the level of freedom.  We imagine that our life is full of accidents, because we imagine that our human existence is lived on the level of freedom.  In fact, it isn't.  Most of us live on the mechanical level, where events happen in accordance with the laws of large numbers.  The things we call accidental and irrelevant belong to the very essence of the world in which we elect to live.'

      Annoyed at having, by an unconsidered word, landed himself in a position which Mr Propter could show to be unwarrantably 'idealistic,' Jeremy was silent.  They drove on for a time without speaking.

      'That funeral!' Jeremy said at last; for his chronically anecdotal mind had wandered back to what was concrete, particular and odd in the situation under discussion.  'Like something out of Ronald Firbank!'  He giggled.  'I told Mr Habakkuk he ought to put steam heat into the statues.  They're dreadfully unlifelike to the touch.'  He moved his cupped hand over an imaginary marble protuberance.

      Mr Propter, who had been thinking about liberation, nodded and politely smiled.

      'And Dr Mulge's reading of the service!' Jeremy went on.  'Talk of unction!  It couldn't have been oilier even in an English cathedral.  Like vaseline with a flavour of port wine.  And the way he said, "I am the resurrection and the life" - as though he really meant it, as though he, Mulge, could personally guarantee it, in writing, on a money-back basis: the entire cost of the funeral refunded if the next world fails to give complete satisfaction.'

      'He probably even believes it,' said Mr Propter meditatively.  'In some curious Pickwickian way, of course.  You know: it's true, but you consistently act as though it weren't; it's the most important fact in the universe, but you never think about it if you can possibly avoid it.'

      'And how do you believe in it?' Jeremy asked.  'Pickwickianly or unPickwickianly?'  And when Mr Propter answered that he didn't believe in that sort of resurrection and life: 'Oho!' he went on in the tone of an indulgent father who has caught his son kissing the housemaid, 'Oho!  So there's also a Pickwickian resurrection?'

      Mr Propter laughed.  'I think there may be,' he said.

      'In which case, what has become of poor Pete?'

      'Well, to start with,' said Mr Propter slowly, 'I should say that Pete, qua Pete, doesn't exist any longer.'

      'Super-Pickwickian!' Jeremy interjected.

      'But Pete's ignorance,' Mr Propter went on, 'Pete's fears and cravings - well, I think it's quite possible that they're still somehow making trouble in the world.  Making trouble for everything and everyone, especially for themselves.  Themselves in whatever form they happen to be taking.'

      'And if by any chance Pete hadn't been ignorant and concupiscent, what then?'

      'Well, obviously,' said Mr Propter, 'there wouldn't be anything to make further trouble.'  After a moment's silence, he quoted Tauler's definition of God.  '"God is a being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working."'

      He turned the car off the main road, into the avenue of pepper trees that wound across the green lawns of the Tarzana Campus.  The new Auditorium loomed up, austerely romanesque.  Mr Propter parked his old Ford among the lustrous Cadillacs and Chryslers and Packards already lined up in front of it, and they entered.  The press photographers at the entrance looked them over, saw at a glance that they were neither bankers, nor movie stars, nor corporation lawyers, nor dignitaries of any church, nor senators, and turned away contemptuous.

      The students were already in their places.  Under their stares, Jeremy and Mr Propter were ushered down the aisle to the rows of seats reserved for distinguished guests.  And what distinction!  There, in the front row, was Sol R. Katzenblum, the President of Abraham Lincoln Pictures Incorporated and a pillar of Moral Re-Armament; there, beside him, was the Bishop of Santa Monica; there too was Mr Pescecagniolo, of the Bank of the Far West.  The Grand Duchess Eulalie was sitting next to Senator Bardolph; and in the next row were two of the Engels Brothers and Gloria Bossom, who was chatting with Rear-Admiral Shotoverk.  The orange robe and permanently waved beard belonged to Swami Yogalinga, founder of the School of Personality.  Beside him sat the Vice-President of Consol Oil and Mrs Wagner ...

      Suddenly the organ burst out, full blast, into the Tarzana Anthem.  The academic procession filed in.  Two by two, in their gowns and hoods and tasselled mortarboards, the Doctors of Divinity, of Philosophy, of Science, of Law, of Letters, of Music, shuffled down the aisle and up the steps on to the platform, where their seats had been prepared for them in a wide arc close to the backdrop.  At the centre of the stage stood a reading-desk, and at the reading-desk stood Dr Mulge.  Not that he did any reading, of course; for Dr Mulge prided himself on being able to speak almost indefinitely without a note.  The reading-desk was there to be intimately leant over, to be caught hold of and passionately leant back from, to be struck emphatically with the palm of the hand, to be dramatically walked away from and returned to.

      The organ was silent.  Dr Mulge began his address - began it with a reference, of course, to Mr Stoyte.  Mr Stoyte whose generosity ... The realization of a Dream ... This embodiment of an ideal in Stone ... The Man of Vision.  Without Vision the people perish ... But this Man had had Vision ... The Vision of what Tarzana was destined to become .. The centre, the focus, the torchbearer ... California ... New Culture, richer science, higher spirituality ... (Dr Mulge's voice modulated from bassoon to trumpet.  From vaseline with a mere flavour of port wine to undiluted fatty alcohol.)  But, alas (and here the voice subsided pathetically into saxophone and lanoline), alas ... Unable to be with us today ... A sudden distressing event ... Carried off on the threshold of life ... A young collaborator in those scientific fields which he ventured to say were as close to Mr Stoyte's heart as the fields of social service and culture ... The shock ... The exquisitely sensitive heart under the sometimes rough exterior ... His physician had ordered a complete and immediate change of scene ... But in spite of physical absence, his spirit ... We feel it among us today ... An inspiration to all, young and old alike ... The torch of Culture ... The Future ... The Ideal ... The Spirit of Man ... Great things already accomplished ... God had walked in power through this campus ... Strengthened and guided ... Forward ... Onward ... Upward ... Faith and Hope ... Democracy ... Freedom ... the imperishable heritage of Washington and Lincoln ... The glory that was Greece reborn beside the waters of the Pacific ... The flag ... The mission ... The manifest destiny ... The will of God ... Tarzana ...

      It was over at last.  The organ played.  The academic procession filed back up the aisle.  The distinguished guests straggled after it.

      Outside, in the sunshine, Mr Propter was buttonholed by Mrs Pescecagniolo.

      'I thought that was a wonderfully inspirational address,' she said with enthusiasm.

      Mr Propter nodded.  'Almost the most inspirational address I ever listened to.  And God knows,' he said, 'I've heard a lot of them in the course of my life.'