Chapter Twelve

 

Mrs Thwale took the old woman's arm and steered her through the door which Sebastian had opened for them.  Her perfume, as she passed him, was sweet in his nostrils - sweet, but at the same time obscurely animal, as though a whiff of sweat had been perversely mingled with the gardenias and the sandalwood.  He closed the door and returned to his place.

      'A good joke, our Queen Mother,' said Eustace.  'But one's always rather grateful when it's over.  Most people never ought to be there for more than five minutes at a time.  But that little Thwale, on the contrary ... Quite a museum piece.'

      He broke off to protest against the inadequacy of the portion of filleted sole to which Sebastian had helped himself.  A recipe from the Trois Faisans at Poitiers.  He had had to bribe the chef to get it.  Obediently Sebastian took some more.  The butler moved on to the head of the table.

      'Quite a museum piece,' he repeated.  'If I were twenty years younger, or you were five years older ... Except, of course, that you don't have to be any older, do you?'

      He beamed with a kind of arch significance.  Sebastian did his best to return the right sort of smile.

      'Verb. sap.,' Eustace continued.  'And never put off till tomorrow the pleasure you can enjoy today.'

      Sebastian said nothing.  His pleasures, he was thinking bitterly, were only those of phantasy.  When reality presented itself, he was merely terrified.  Couldn't he at least have looked her in the eyes?

      Wiping the source from his large loose lips, Eustace drank some of the champagne which had been poured into his glass.

      'Roederer 1916,' he said.  'I'm really very pleased with it.'

      Acting the part of a relishing connoisseur, Sebastian took an appreciative sip or two, then gulped down half a glassful.  It had the taste, he thought, of an apple peeled with a steel knife.

      'It's awfully good,' he said aloud.  Then, remembering Susan's latest piece, 'It's ... it's like Scarlatti's harpsichord music,' he forced himself to bring out, and blushed because it sounded so unnatural.

      But Eustace was delighted by the comparison.

      'And I'm so glad,' he added, 'that you don't take after your father.  That indifference to all the refinements of life - it's really shocking.  Just Calvinism, that's all.  Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.'

      He swallowed the last mouthful of his second helping of fish and, leaning back in his chair, looked round with pleasure at the beautifully appointed table, at the Empire furniture, at the Domenichino landscape over the mantelpiece, the life-sized goats by Rosa di Tivoli above the sideboard, at the two men-servants working with the noiseless precision of conjurers.

      'No Calvin for me,' he said.  'Give me Catholicism every time.  Father Cheeryble with his thurible; Father Chatterjee with his liturgy.  What fun they have with all their charades and conundrums!  If it weren't for the Christianity they insist on mixing in with it, I'd be converted tomorrow.'

      He leaned forward and, with a surprising deftness and delicacy of touch, rearranged the fruits in the silver bowl between the candlesticks.

      '"The beauty of holiness,"' he said, '"the beauty of holiness."  I'm delighted you used that phrase in your poem.  And, remember, it doesn't apply only to churches.  There, that's better.'  He made a final adjustment on the hothouse grapes, and leaned back again in his chair.  'I used to have a darling old butler once - never hope to find his equal.'  He sighed and shook his head.  'That man could make a dinner-party go off with the solemn perfection of High Mass at the Madeleine.'

      Creamed chicken succeeded the fish.  Eustace made a brief digression on the subject of truffles, then returned to the beauty of holiness, and from that proceeded to life as a fine art.

      'But an unrecognized fine art,' he complained.  'Its masters aren't admired; they're regarded as idlers and wasters.  The moral codes have always been framed by people like your father - or, at the very best, people like Bruno.  People like me have hardly been able to get a word in edgeways.  And when we do get our word in - as we did once or twice during the eighteenth century - nobody listens to us seriously.  And yet we demonstrably do much less mischief than the other fellows.  We don't start any wars, or Albigensian crusades, or communist revolutions.  "Live and let live" - that's our motto.  Whereas their idea of goodness is "die and make to die" - get yourself killed for your idiotic cause, and kill everybody who doesn't happen to agree with you.  Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions; it's walled and roofed with them.  Yes, and furnished too.'

      To Sebastian, after his second glass of champagne, this remark seemed, for some reason, extremely funny, and he broke into a giggle that ended embarrassingly in a belch.  This stuff was as bad as ginger beer.

      'You're familiar, of course, with the Old Man of Moldavia?'

      'You mean the one who wouldn't believe in Our Saviour?'

      Eustace nodded.

      '"So he founded instead,"' he quoted, '"with himself as the head,' - though that's out of character, mark you; he wouldn't want to be the head; he'd just want to enjoy himself quietly and have good manners - "the cult of Decorous Behaviour."  Or, in other words, Confucianism.  But, unfortunately, China was also full of Buddhists and Taoists and miscellaneous warlords.  People with bullying temperaments, and people with inhibited, scrupulous temperaments.  Horrible people like Napoleon, and other horrible people like Pascal.  There was an Old Man of Corsica who would not believe in anything but power.  And an Old Man of Port Royal who tortured himself by believing in the God of Abraham and Isaac, not of the philosophers.  Between them, they don't give the poor Old Man of Moldavia a dog's chance.  Not in China or anywhere else.'

      He paused to help himself to the chocolate soufflé.

      'If I had the knowledge,' he went on, 'or the energy, I'd write an outline of world history.  Not in terms of geography, or climate, or economics, or politics.  None of these is fundamental.  In terms of temperament.  In terms of the eternal three-cornered struggle between the Old Man of Moldavia, the Old Man of Corsica, and the Old Man of Port Royal.'

      Eustace broke off to ask for some more cream; then continued.  Christ, of course, had been an Old Man of Port Royal.  So were Buddha and most of the other Hindus.  So was Lao-Tsu.  But Mahomet had had a lot of the Old Man of Corsica in him.  And the same, of course, was true of any number of the Christian saints and doctors.  So you get violence and rapine, practised by proselytizing bullies and justified in terms of a theology devised by introverts.  And meanwhile the poor Old Men of Moldavia get kicked and abused by everybody.  Except perhaps among the Pueblo Indians, there had never been a predominantly Moldavian society - a society where it was bad form to nourish ambitions, heretical to have a personal religion, criminal to be a leader of men, and virtuous to have a good time in peace and quietness.  Outside of Zuni and Taos, the Old Men of Moldavia had had to be content with registering a protest, with applying the brakes, with sitting down on their broad bottoms and refusing to move unless dragged.  Confucius had had the best success in moderating the furies of the Corsicans and Port Royalists; whereas, in the West, Epicurus had become a byword; Boccaccio and Rebelais and Fielding were disregarded as mere men of letters; and nobody bothered to read Bentham any more, or even John Stuart Mill.  And recently the Old Men of Port Royal had begun to be treated as badly as those of Moldavia.  Nobody read Bentham any more; but equally nobody now read À-Kempis.  Traditional Christianity was in process of becoming almost as discreditable as Epicureanism.  The philosophy of action for action, power for the sake of power, had become an established orthodoxy.  'Thou hast conquered, O go-getting Babbitt.'

      'And now,' he concluded, 'let's go and have our coffee where we can be a bit more comfortable.'

      Moving delicately and deliberately within his fragile world of incipient tipsiness, Sebastian followed his uncle into the drawing-room.

      'No, thank you,' he said politely to the offer of a cigar even larger and darker than Dr Pfeiffer's.

      'Then take a cigarette,' said Eustace, as he helped himself to a Romeo and Juliet.  Damply, lovingly the unweaned lips closed on the silver lamp, and a moment later the teat was yielding its aromatic milk, his mouth was full of smoke.  Eustace breathed a sigh of contentment.  The taste of the tobacco was as new, as exquisitely a revelation as it had seemed when he was a young man; it was as though his palate were virgin and this were its first astounding introduction to pleasure.  'You should hurry up,' he said, 'and acquire the cigar habit.  It's one of the major happinesses.  And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.  Though of course,' he added, remembering Mimi, 'even love can be considerably simplified.  Very considerably.'  He took Sebastian's arm affectionately.  'You haven't seen the prize exhibit yet.'  And leading him across the room, he turned a switch.  Under the light a lovely fragment of mythology sprang into existence.  In a green glade, with the Mediterranean in the distance, and a couple of Capris offshore, Adonis lay asleep among his sleeping dogs.  Bending over him a blonde and amorous Venus was in the act of drawing aside the veil of gold-embroidered gauze which was his only covering, while a Cupid in the foreground playfully menaced her left pap with an arrow from the young hunter's quiver.

      'The incandescent copulations of gods,' Sebastian said to himself as he gazed enchanted at the picture.  Other phrases began to come to him.  'Bright with divine lust.'  'The pure lascivious innocence of heaven.'  But what made this particular incandescence so delightful was the fact that it was rendered with a touch of irony, a hint (subtly conveyed by the two white rabbits in the left-foreground, the bullfinch among the oak-leaves overhead, the three pelicans and the centaur on the distant beach) that it was all a tiny bit absurd.

      'Real love-making,' Eustace remarked, 'is seldom quite so pretty as Piero di Cosimo's idea of it.'  He turned away and began to unwrap the drawings he had bought that morning at Weyl's.  'It's a good deal more like Degas.'  He handed Sebastian the sketch of the woman drying the back of her neck.

      'When you're seduced,' he said, 'it'll probably be by someone like this rather than like that.'  He jerked his head in the direction of Piero's Venus.

      From within his private universe of champagne Sebastian answered with a giggle.

      'Or perhaps you have been seduced already?'  Eustace's tone was jocular.  'But of course it's none of my business,' he added, as Sebastian giggled again and blushed.  'Three words of advice, however.  Remember that your talent is more important than your amusement.  Also that a woman's amusement may sometimes be incompatible not only with your talent, but even with your fun.  Also that, if this should happen, flight is your only strategy.'

      He poured out some brandy into the two enormous glasses that had been brought in, sugared one of the cups of coffee, and, settling heavily into the sofa, beckoned to the boy to sit down beside him.

      Professionally, Sebastian twirled the liquor in his glass and sipped.  It tasted like the smell of methylated spirits.  He dipped a piece of sugar in his coffee and nibbled at it, as he would have done after a dose of ammoniated quinine.  Then he looked again at the drawing.

      'What's its equivalent in poetry?' he said reflectively.  'Villon?'  He shook his head.  'No.  This isn't tragic.  Donne's a little more like it - except that he's a satirist, and this man isn't.'

      'And Swift?' put in Eustace, 'doesn't know how to convey the beauty of his victims.  The fascinating contours of the dowager's hindquarters, the delicious greens and magentas in a schoolgirl's complexion - he doesn't even see these things, much less make us see them.'

      They laughed together.  Then Eustace gulped down what remained of his brandy and helped himself to some more.

      'What about Chaucer?' said Sebastian, looking up from another examination of the drawing.

      'You're right!' Eustace cried delightedly.  'You're absolutely right.  He and Degas - they knew the same secret: the beauty of ugliness, the comedy of holiness.  Now, suppose you were given the choice,' he went on.  'The Divine Comedy or The Cantebury Tales - which would you rather have written?'  And without leaving Sebastian time to answer, 'I'd choose The Cantebury Tales,' he said.  'Oh, without hesitation!  And as a man - how infinitely one would prefer to be Chaucer!  Living through the forty disastrous years after the Black Death with only one reference to the troubles in the whole of his writings - and that a comic reference!  Being an administrator and a diplomat, and not regarding the fact as having sufficient importance to require even a single mention!  Whereas Dante has to rush into party politics; and, when he backs the wrong horse, he spends the rest of his life in rage and self-pity.  Revenging himself on his political opponents by putting them into hell, and rewarding his friends by promoting them to purgatory and paradise.  What could be sillier or more squalid?  And of course, if he didn't happen to be the second greatest virtuoso of language that ever lived, there'd be nobody to say a good word for him.'

      Sebastian laughed and nodded his agreement.  The alcohol and the fact that his uncle was taking him seriously, was listening to his opinions with respect, made him feel very happy.  He drank some more brandy, and as he munched on the sugar with which he took the taste of it away, he looked again at the drawing of the woman with the towel.  Elation quickened his faculties, and almost in a flash he had a quatrain.  Pulling out his pencil and squibbling pad, he started to write.

      'What are you up to?'

      Sebastian made no answer in words, but tore off the page and handed it to his uncle.  Eustace put up his monocle and read aloud:

 

                                             To make a picture, others need

                                             All Ovid and the Nicene Creed;

                                             Degas succeeds with one tin tub,

                                             Two buttocks and a pendulous bub.

 

      He clapped Sebastian on the knee.

      'Bravo!' he cried, 'bravo!'

      He repeated the last line, and laughed until he coughed.

      'We'll make an exchange,' he said, when the fit was over and he had drunk another cup of coffee and some more brandy.  'I'll keep the poem, and you shall have the drawing.'

      'Me?'

      Eustace nodded.  It was really a pleasure to do things for somebody who responded with such wholehearted and unfeigned delight.

      'You shall have it when you go up to Oxford.  A drawing by Degas over the mantelpiece - it'll give you almost as much prestige as rowing in your college eight.  Besides,' he added, 'I know you'll love the thing for its own sake.'

      Which was a great deal more, it suddenly struck him, than could be said of his stepdaughter.  He himself had only a life-interest; after his death, everything would go to Daisy Ockham.  Not merely the stocks and shares, but this house and all that was in it, the furniture, the carpets, the china - yes, even the pictures.  His absurd little St Sebastian, his two delicious Guardis, his Magnasco, his Seurat, his Venus and Adonis - which Daisy would certainly consider too indecent to hang up in her drawing-room, in case her Girl Guides, or whatever they were, should see it and get ideas into their heads.  And perhaps she'd bring the creatures out here, to the villa.  Swarms of female puberties, pasty-faced and pimpled, wandering through his house and giggling in barbarous incomprehension at everything they saw.  The very thought of it was sickening.  But, after all, Eustace reminded himself, he wouldn't be there to care.  And being sickened in advance, with no immediate reason for one's feelings, was merely silly.  No less silly was thinking about death.  So long as one was alive, death didn't exist, except for other people.  And when one was dead, nothing existed, not even death.  So why bother?  Particularly as he was taking very good care to postpone the event.  Smoking only one of these heavenly Romeo and Juliets, drinking only one glass of brandy after dinner ... But no; he'd already drunk two.  This one that he was just raising to his lips was the third.  Well, never mind; he'd see that it didn't happen again.  Tonight he was celebrating Sebastian's arrival!  It wasn't every day that one welcomed an infant prodigy.  He took a sip, and rolled the spirit round his mouth; on tongue and palate it consummated the happiest of marriages with the clinging aroma of his cigar.

      He turned to Sebastian.

      'A penny for your thoughts.'

      The other laughed with a touch of embarrassment and answered that they weren't worth it.  But Eustace insisted.

      'Well, to begin with,' said Sebastian, 'I was thinking ... well, I was thinking how extraordinarily decent you'd been to me.'  It wasn't quite true; for his fancy had been busy with the gifts, not with the giver.  'And then,' he continued rather hurriedly; for he realized, too late as usual, that this perfunctory tribute didn't sound very convincing, 'I was thinking of the things I'd do when I had some evening clothes.'

      'Such as taking the entire Gaiety chorus out to supper at Ciro's?'

      Caught in the discreditable act of daydreaming, Sebastian blushed.  He had been imagining himself at the Savoy, not indeed with the whole Gaiety chorus, but very definitely with the two girls who were going to be at Tom Boveney's party.  And then one of the girls had turned into Mrs Thwale.

      'Am I right?'

      'Well ... not exactly,' Sebastian answered.

      'Not exactly,' Eustace repeated with benevolent irony.  'Of course, you realize,' he added, 'that you'll always be disappointed?'

      'With what?'

      'With girls, with parties, with experience in general.  Nobody who has any kind of creative imagination can possibly be anything but disappointed with real life.  When I was young, I used to be miserable because I hadn't any talents - nothing but a little taste and cleverness.  But not I'm not sure one isn't happier that way.  People like you aren't really commensurable with the world they live in.  Whereas people like me are completely adapted to it.'  He removed the teat from between his large damp lips to take another sip of brandy.

      'Your business isn't doing things,' he resumed.  'It isn't even living.  It's writing poetry.  Vox et praeterea nihil, that's what you are and what you ought to be.  Or rather voces, not vox.  All the voices in the world.  Like Chaucer.  Like Shakespeare.  The Miller's voice and the Parson's voice, Desdemona's and Caliban's and Kent's and Polonius's.  All of them, impartially.'

      'Impartially,' Sebastian repeated, slowly.

      Yes, that was good; that was exactly what he'd been trying to think about himself, but had never quite succeeded, because such thoughts didn't fit into the ethical and philosophical patterns which he had been brought up to regard as axiomatic.  Voices, all the voices impartially.  He was delighted by the thought.

      'Of course,' Eustace was saying, 'you could always argue that you live more intensely in your mental world-substitute than we who only wallow in the real thing.  And I'd be inclined to admit it.  But the trouble is that you can't be content to stick to your beautiful ersatz.  You have to descend into evening clothes and Ciro's and chorus girls - and perhaps even politics and committee meetings, God help us!  With lamentable results.  Because you're not at home with these lumpy bits of matter.  They depress you, they bewilder you, they shock you and sicken you and make a fool of you.  And yet they still tempt you; and they'll go on tempting you, all your life.  Tempting you to embark on actions which you know in advance can only make you miserable and distract you from the one thing you can do properly, the one thing that people value you for.'

      It was interesting to be talked about in this way; but the stimulative effects of the alcohol had worn off, and Sebastian felt himself almost suddenly invaded by a kind of stupor that obliterated all thoughts of poetry, voices, evening clothes.  Surreptitiously he yawned.  His uncle's words came to him through a kind of fog that thickened and then thinned again, permitting the significance to shine through for a little, then rolled in once more, obscuring everything.

      '.... Fascinatio nugacitatis,' Eustace was saying.  'It's translated quite differently in the English version of the Apocrypha.  But how wonderful in the Vulgate!  The magic of triviality - the being spellbound by mere footling.  How well I know the fascination!  And how frightfully intense it is!  Trifles for trifles' sake.  And yet, what's the alternative?  Behaving like the Old Man of Corsica, or some kind of horrible religious fanatic....'

      Once again darkness invaded Sebastian's mind, a stupor diversified only by quivering streaks of dizziness and a faint nausea.  He yearned to be in bed.  Very distinct and silvery, a clock struck the half-hour.

      'Half-past ten,' Eustace proclaimed.  '"Time, time and half a time.  The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time."'  He gave vent to a belch.  'That's what I like about champagne - it makes one so poetical.  All the lovely refuse of fifty years of indiscriminate reading comes floating to the surface.  O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!'

      O lente, lente ... Funereally slow black horses moved through the fog.  And suddenly Sebastian realized that his chin had dropped involuntarily on to his chest.  He woke up with a start.

      'Faith,' his uncle was saying, 'they can never do without a faith.  Always the need of some nonsensical ideal that blinds them to reality and makes them behave like lunatics.  And look at the results in our history!'  He took another swig of brandy, then sucked voluptuously at his cigar.  'First it's God they believe in - not three Gaseous Vertebrates, but one Gaseous Vertebrate.  And what happens?  They get the Pope, they get the Holy Office, they get Calvin and John Knox and the wars of religion.  Then they grow bored with God, and it's war and massacre in the name of Humanity.  Humanity and Progress, Progress and Humanity.  Have you ever read Bouvard et Pécuchet, by the way?'

      Rather belatedly, Sebastian started out of his coma and said no.

      'What a book!' the other exclaimed.  'Incomparably the finest thing Flaubert ever did.  It's one of the great philosophical poems of the world - and probably the last that will ever be written.  For, of course, after Bouvard et Pécuchet there just isn't anything more to say.  Dante and Milton merely justified the ways of God.  But Flaubert really goes down to the root of things.  He justifies the ways of Fact.  The ways of Fact as they affect, not only man, but God as well - and not only the Gaseous Vertebrate, but all the other fantastic products of human imbecility, including, of course, our dear old friend, Inevitable Progress.  Inevitable Progress!' he repeated.  'Only one more indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics, and there we are - there we are in the Golden Future.  But needless to say, in the very nature of things, the future can't be golden.  For the simple reason that nobody ever gets anything for nothing.  Massacre always has to be paid for, and its price is a state of things that absolutely guarantees you against achieving the good which the massacre was intended to achieve.  And the same is true even of bloodless revolutions.  Every notable advance in technique or organization has to be paid for, and in most cases the debit is more or less equivalent to the credit.  Except of course when it's more than equivalent, as it has been with universal education, for example, or wireless, or these damned aeroplanes.  In which case, of course, your progress is a step backwards and downwards.  Backwards and downwards,' he repeated; and, taking the cigar out of his mouth, he threw back his head and gave vent to a long peal of wheezy laughter.  Then, all at once, he broke off, and his large face screwed itself up into a grimace of pain.  He raised a hand to his chest.

      'Heartburn,' he said, shaking his head.  'That's the trouble with white wine.  I've had to give up Hock and Riesling completely; and sometimes even champagne....'

      Eustace made another grimace, and bit his lip.  The pain subsided a little.  With some difficulty he heaved himself up out of his deep seat.

      'Luckily,' he added, with a smile, 'there's almost nothing that a little bicarbonate of soda won't set right.'

      He reinserted the teat and walked out of the drawing-room, across the hall and along the little passage that led to the downstairs lavatory.

      Left to himself, Sebastian rose, uncorked the brandy and poured what remained in his glass back into the bottle.  Then he drank some soda-water and felt distinctly better.  Going to one of the windows, he pushed aside the curtain and looked out.  A moon was shining.  Against the sky, the cypresses were obelisks of solid darkness.  At their feet stood the pale gesticulating statues, and behind and below, far off, were the lights of Florence.  And doubtless there were slums down there, like the slums of Camden Town, and tarts in blue at the street corners, and all the stink and the stupidity, all the miseries and humiliations.  But here was only order and intention, significance and beauty.  Here was a fragment of the world in which human beings ought to be living.

      Suddenly, in an act of pure intellectual apprehension, he was aware of the poem he was going to write about this garden.  Not of its accidents - the metrical arrangements, the words and sentences - but of its essential form and animating spirit.  The form and spirit of a long pensive lyric; of a poetical reflection intensified to the point of cry and song, and sustained in its intensity by a kind of enduring miracle.  For a moment he knew it perfectly, his unwritten poem - and the knowledge filled him with an extraordinary happiness.  Then it was gone.

      He let the curtain drop, walked back to his chair and sat down to wrestle with the problems of composition.  Two minutes later he was fast asleep.

     

There was an onyx ashtray on the lavatory windowsill.  Very carefully, so as not to disturb its faultless combustion, Eustace put down his cigar, then turned and opened the door of the little medicine cupboard above the washbasin.  It was always kept well stocked, so that, if ever during the day he had any need of internal or external first aid, it would be unnecessary for him to go upstairs to the bathroom.  In ten years, he liked to say, he had spared himself as much climbing as would have taken him to the top of Mount Everest.

      From the row of medicaments on the upper shelf he selected the bicarbonate of soda, unscrewed the stopper and shook out into his left palm four of the white tablets.  He was in the act of replacing the bottle, when another spasm of this strangely violent heartburn made him decide to double the dose.  He filled a glass, and began to swallow the tablets one by one, with a sip of water after each.  Two, three, four, five, six ... And then suddenly the pain was like a red-hot poker boring through his chest.  He felt dizzy, and a whirling blackness obscured the outside world.  Groping blindly, his hands slid across the wall and found the smooth enamelled cistern of the toilet.  He lowered himself unsteadily on to the seat and almost immediately felt a good deal better.  'It must have been that bloody fish,' he said to himself.  The recipe called for a lot of cream, and he had taken two helpings.  He swallowed the last two tablets, drank the rest of the water and, reaching out, set down the glass on the windowsill.  Just as his arm was at full stretch the pain returned - but in a new form; for it had now become, in some indescribable way, obscene as well as agonizing.  And all at once he found himself panting for breath and in the clutch of a terror more intense than any fear he had ever experienced before.  It was terror, for a few seconds, absolutely pure and unmotivated.  Then all at once the pain shot down his left arm - nauseating, disgusting, like being hit in the wind, like getting a blow in the genitals - and in a flash the causeless fear crystallized into a fear of heart failure, of death.

      Death, death, death.  He remembered what Dr Burgess had told him last time he went for a consultation.  'The old pump can't put up with indefinite abuse.'  And his wife - she too ... But with her it hadn't come suddenly.  There had been years and years of sofas and nurses and strophanthine drops.  Quite an agreeable existence, really.  He wouldn't mind that at all; he'd even give up smoking altogether.

      More excruciating than ever, the pain returned.  The pain and the awful fear of death.

      'Help!' he tried to call.  But all the sound he could produce was a faint hoarse bark.  'Help!'  Why didn't they come?  Bloody servants!  And that damned boy there, just across the hall in the drawing-room.

      'Sebastian!'  The shout produced no more than a whisper.  'Don't let me die.  Don't let me ...’ Suddenly he was gasping with a strange crowing noise.  There was no air, no air.  And suddenly he remembered that beastly glacier where they had taken him climbing when he was a boy of twelve.  Whooping and gasping in the snow, and vomiting his breakfast, while his father stood there with John and the Swiss guide, smiling in a superior sort of way and telling him it was only a touch of mountain sickness.  The memory vanished; and nothing remained but the crowing for breath, this pressure on the darkened eyes, this precipitated thudding of blood in the ears, and the pain increasing and increasing, as though some pitiless hand were gradually tightening a screw, until at last - ah, Christ! Christ! but it was impossible to scream - something seemed to crack and give way; and suddenly there was a kind of tearing.  The stab of that redoubled anguish brought him to his feet.  He took three steps towards the door and turned the key backwards in the lock; but before he could open, his knees gave way and he fell.  Face downwards on the tiled floor, he continued to gasp for a little, more and more stertorously.  But there was no air; only a smell of cigar smoke.

 

      With a sudden start Sebastian woke into a consciousness of pins and needles in his left leg.  He looked around him and, for a second or two, was unable to remember where he was.  Then everything fell into place - the journey, and Uncle Eustace, and the strange disquieting incarnation of Mary Esdaile.  His eye fell on the drawing, which was lying where his uncle had left it, on the sofa.  He leaned over and picked it up.  'Two buttocks and a pendulous bub.'  A genuine Degas, and Uncle Eustace was going to give it to him.  And the evening clothes too!  He would have to wear them secretly, hide them in the intervals.  Otherwise his father would be quite capable of taking them away from him.  Susan would let him keep them in her room.  Or Aunt Alice, for that matter; for in this case Aunt Alice was as much on his side as Susan herself.  And luckily his father would still be abroad when Tom Boveney gave his party.

      Musically, the clock on the mantelpiece went ding-dong, and then repeated itself, ding-dong, ding-dong.  Sebastian looked up and was amazed to see that the time was a quarter to twelve.  And it had been only a little after half-past ten when Uncle Eustace left the room.

      He jumped up, walked to the door and looked out.  The hall was empty, all the house was silent.

      Softly, for fear of waking anybody, he ventured a discreet call.

      'Uncle Eustace!'

      There was no answer.

      Did he go upstairs and never come down again?  Or perhaps, Sebastian speculated uneasily, perhaps he had come back, found him asleep and left him there - as a joke.  Yes, that was probably what had happened.  And tomorrow he'd never hear the end of it.  Curled up in the armchair like a tired child!  Sebastian felt furious with himself for having succumbed so easily to a couple of glasses of champagne.  The only consolation was that Uncle Eustace wouldn't be unpleasantly sarcastic.  Just a bit playful, that was all.  But the danger was that he might be playful in front of the others - in front of that horrible old she-devil, in front of Mrs Thwale; and the prospect of being treated as a baby in front of Mrs Thwale was particularly distasteful and humiliating.

      Frowning to himself, he rubbed his nose in perplexed uncertainty.  Then, since it was obvious that Uncle Eustace had no intention of coming down again at this hour, he decided to go to bed.

      Turning out the lights in the drawing-room, he made his way upstairs.  Someone, he found, had unpacked for him while he was at dinner.  A pair of faded pink pyjamas had been neatly laid out on the majestic bed; the celluloid comb with the three broken teeth and the wood-backed hairbrushes had taken their place incongruously among the crystal and silver fittings of the dressing-table.  At the sight he winced.  What must the servants think?  As he undressed, he wondered how much he would have to tip them when he went away.

      It was late; but the luxurious opportunity of taking a midnight bath was not to be missed.  Carrying his pyjamas over his arm, Sebastian entered the bathroom, and having, by unthinking force of habit, carefully locked the door behind him, turned on the water.  Lying there in the deliciously enveloping warmth, he thought about that garden in the moonlight and the poem he intended to write.  It would be something like 'Tintern Abbey', like Shelley's thing on Mont Blanc - but of course quite different and contemporary.  For he would use all the resources of non-poetic as well as of poetic diction; would intensify lyricism with irony, the beautiful with the grotesque.  'A sense of something far more deeply interfused' - that might have been all right in 1800, but not now.  It was too easy now, too complacent.  Today the something interfused would have to be presented in conjunction with the horrors it was interfused with.  And that, of course, meant an entirely different kind of versification.  Changeable and uneven to fit a subject matter that would modulate from God Flat Minor to Sex Major and Squalor Natural.  He chuckled over his little invention and conjured up the picture of Mary Esdaile in that moonlit garden.  Mary Esdaile among the statues, as pale as they, and, between the meshes of her black lace, much nakeder.

      But why Mary Esdaile?  Why not her incarnation, her real presence?  Real to the point of being disquieting, but beautiful, terribly desirable.  And perhaps Mrs Thwale was as passionate as her imaginary counterpart, as unashamedly voluptuous as the Venus in Uncle Eustace's picture.  Three comic pelicans and a centaur - and in the foreground the pure lascivious innocence of heaven, the incandescent copulation of a goddess, who certainly knew what she wanted, with her mortal lover.  What self-abandonment, what laughter and light-heartedness!  Voluptuously he imagined himself a consenting Adonis.