Chapter Twenty-Seven

 

After luncheon they did some sightseeing, and it was with an imagination haunted by the frescoes of San Marco and the Medicean tombs that Sebastian finally made his way home.  The sun was already low as he walked up the steep and dusty road to the villa; there were treasures of blue shadow, expanses not of stone or stucco, but of amber, trees and grass glowing with supernatural significance.  Blissfully, in a mood of effortless alertness and passivity, like a wide-eyed somnambulist, who sees, but with senses somehow not his own, who feels and thinks, but with emotions that no longer have a personal reference, a mind entirely free and unconditioned, he moved through the actual radiance around him, through the memories of what he had so lately seen and heard - the huge, smooth marbles, the saints diaphanous in the whitewashed monastery cells, the words that Bruno had spoken as they came out of the Medici chapel.

      'Michelangelo and Fra Angelico - apotheosis and deification.'

      Apotheosis - the personality exalted and intensified to the point where the person comes to be mere man or woman and becomes god-like, one of the Olympians, like that passionately pensive warrior, like those great titanesses brooding, naked, above the sarcophagi.  And over against apotheosis - deification - personality annihilated in charity, in union, so that at last the man or woman can say, 'Not I, but God in me.'

      But meanwhile here was the goat again, the one that had been eating wistaria buds under the headlamps that first evening with Uncle Eustace.  But this time it had a half-ruminated rose sticking out of the corner of its mouth - like Carmen in the opera, so that it was to the imagined strains of 'Toreador, toreador' that the creature advanced to the gate of its garden and, slowly chewing on the rose, looked out at him through the bars.  In the yellow eyes the pupils were two narrow slots of the purest, blackest mindlessness.  Sebastian reached out and caressed the long curve of a nobly semitic nose, fondled six warm and muscular inches of drooping ear, then took hold of one of the diabolic horns.  Carmen began to back away impatiently.  He tightened his grip and tried to pull her forward.  With a sudden, forceful jerk of the head, the creature broke away from him and went bounding up the steps.  A large black udder wobbled widely as she ran.  Pausing at the top of the steps, she let fall half a dozen pills of excrement, then reached up and plucked another rose for her appearance in the Second Act.  Sebastian turned and walked on through the late afternoon sunshine and his memories.  Somnambulistically happy.  But uneasily, at the back of his mind, he was aware of the other, disregarded realities - the lies he had told, the interview with Mrs Ockham that still lay ahead of him.  And perhaps that wretched child had already been questioned, whipped, deprived of food.  But no, he refused to give up his happiness before it was absolutely necessary.  Carmen with her rose and her white beard; marble and fresco; apotheosis and deification.  But why not apotragosis and caprification?  He laughed aloud.  And yet what Bruno had said, as they stood there in the Piazza del Duomo, waiting for the tram, had impressed him profoundly.  Apotheosis and deification - the only roads of escape from the unutterable wearisomeness, the silly and degrading horror of being merely yourself, of being only human.  Two roads; but in reality only the second led out into open country.  So much more promising, apparently so vastly more attractive, the first invariably turned out to be only a glorious blind alley.  Under triumphal arches, along an avenue of statuary and fountains, you marched in pomp towards an ultimate frustration - dead end of your own selfhood.  And the dead end was solid marble, of course, and adorned with the colossal monuments of your power, magnanimity and wisdom, but no less of a wall than the most grotesquely hideous of the vices down there in your old, all too human prison.  Whereas the other road ... But then the tram had come.

      'You've been incredibly kind,' he had stammered as they shook hands, and then, suddenly carried away by his feelings, 'You've made me see such a lot of things ... I'll really try.  Really....'

      The brown beaked skull had smiled, and in their deep sockets the eyes had brightened with tenderness and, once again, compassion.

      Yes, Sebastian had repeated to himself, as the tram crawled along the narrow streets towards the river, he'd really try.  Try to be more honest, to think less of himself.  To live with people and real events and not so exclusively with words.  How awful he was!  Self-hatred and remorse blended harmoniously with the feelings evoked by the afternoon sunlight and the fascinating foreignness of what it illuminated, by San Marco and the Medici chapel, by Bruno's kindness and what the man had said.  And gradually his mood had modulated out of its original ethical urgency into another key - out of the exaltation of repentance and good resolutions into the bliss of detached poetical contemplation, into this heavenly condition of somnambulism, in which he still found himself as he rounded the last hairpin of the road and saw the wrought-iron gates between their tall pillars of stone, the solemn succession of the cypress trees winding away towards the villa, out of sight, round the contour of the hill.

      He slipped through the pedestrians' wicket.  The fine gravel of the drive made a delicious crunching noise under his feet, like Grape Nuts.

 

                                             Walking on Grape Nuts and imagination,

                                             Among recollected crucifixions and these jewels

                                             Of horizontal sunlight ...

 

Suddenly, from between two cypresses, twenty or thirty yards ahead of him, a small black figure came running out into the drive.  With a start and a horrible sinking of the stomach, Sebastian recognized the little girl with the weeding basket, recognized the incarnation of his own disregarded guilty conscience, the harbinger of that reality which, in his somnambulistic detachment, he had forgotten.  Catching sight of him, the child halted and stood there staring with round black eyes.  Her face, Sebastian noticed, was paler than usual, and she had evidently been crying.  Oh, God.... He smiled at her, called 'Hullo' and waved a friendly hand.   But before he had taken five more steps the child turned and, like a frightened animal, rushed away along the path by which she had come.

      'Stop!' he shouted.

      But of course she didn't stop; and when he came to the opening between the trees, the child was nowhere to be seen.  And even if he were to follow and find her, he reflected, it wouldn't be any good.  She understood no English, he spoke no Italian.  Gloomily, Sebastian turned and walked on towards the house.

      No servants were about when he entered, and he could hear no sound from the drawing-room.  Thank God, the coast was clear.  He tiptoed across the hall and started to climb the stairs.  On the last step he halted.  A sound had caught his ear.  Somewhere behind one of those closed doors, people were talking.  Should he run the invisible blockade and go on, or beat a retreat?  Sebastian was still hesitating, when the door of what had been poor Uncle Eustace's room was thrown open and out walked old Mrs Gamble, hugging that dog of hers in one arm while Mrs Ockham held the other.  They were followed by a pale, cow-like creature, whom Sebastian recognized as the medium.  Then came Mrs Thwale and, close behind Mrs Thwale - of all horrors! - Gabriel Weyl and Mme Weyl.

      'So different from the occidental art,' Weyl was saying.  'For example, you would not desire to feel a Gothic madonna - would you, madame?'

      He dodged past Mrs Thwale and the medium, and caught Mrs Ockham by the sleeve.

      'Would you?' he insisted, as she halted and turned towards him.

      'Well, really ...' said Mrs Ockham uncertainly.

      'What's that he's saying?' the Queen Mother questioned sharply.  'I can't understand a word of it.'

      'Those folds of trecento drapery,' M. Weyl went on.  'So harsh, so emphatic!'  He made a grimace of agony and with his left hand tenderly clasped the fingers of his right, as though they had just been caught in a mousetrap.  'Qué barbaridad!'

      Still keeping his eyes fixed on the menace at the other end of the corridor, Sebastian stepped noiselessly down from the highest stair to the one below the highest.

      'Whereas a Chinese object,' M. Weyl went on; and, from agonized, his large expressive face became suddenly rapturous.  Un petit bodhisattva, par exemple ...'

      Another step down.

      '... With his draperies in liquefaction.  Like butter in the month of August.  No violence, no Gothic folds - simply quelques volutes savantes et peu profondes ...'

      Voluptuously the thick, white, hairy hands caressed the air.

      'What deliciousness for the end of the fingers!  What sublime sensuality!  What ...'

      Another step.  But this time the movement was too abrupt.  Foxy VIII turned a sharp nose towards the staircase and, wriggling frantically in Mrs Gamble's clasp, began to bark.

      'Why, it's Sebastian!' cried Mrs Ockham delightedly.  'Come along and be introduced to Monsieur and Madame Weyl.'

      Feeling like a criminal on his way to execution, Sebastian slowly mounted the last three stairs of the scaffold and walked towards the drop.  The barking grew more hysterical.

      'Be quiet, Foxy,' rasped the Queen Mother.  Then, tempering command by argument, 'After all,' she added, 'he's a perfectly harmless boy.  Perfectly harmless.'

      'Sebastian Barnack, my stepfather's nephew,' Mrs Ockham explained.

      Sebastian looked up, expecting to meet a smile of ironic recognition, a voluble declaration that the Weyls had met him before.  But, instead, the wife merely inclined her head politely, while the man held out a hand and said:

      'Enchanted to make your acquaintance, sir.'

      'Enchanted,' Sebastian mumbled back, trying to look and behave as though this were the usual kind of ordinary unimportant introduction.

      'Without doubt,' said M. Weyl, 'you share your uncle's love of the arts?'

      'Oh, rather ... I mean, I ...'

      'The Chinese collection alone!'  M. Weyl clasped his hands and looked up to heaven.  'And the fact that he kept most of it in his  bedroom,' he went on, turning back to Mrs Ockham, 'for no other eyes than his own!  What delicacy, what sensibility!'

      'I'd sell the whole lot if I were you, Daisy,' put in the Queen Mother.  'Sell 'em for cash and buy yourself a Rolls.  It's an economy in the end.'

      'How true!' breathed M. Weyl in the tone of one who comments reverently on an utterance by Rabindranath Tagore.

      'Well, I don't know about the Rolls,' said Mrs Ockham, who had been thinking of how she could use the money to help her poor girls.  Then, to avoid further discussion with her grandmother, she hastily changed the subject.  'I wanted to talk to Monsieur Weyl about the drawing,' she continued, turning to Sebastian.  'So Veronica rang him up after luncheon, and he very kindly offered to come up here immediately.'

      'No kindness at all,' protested M. Weyl.  'A pleasure and at the same time a sacred duty to the memory of our dear defunct.'  He laid his hand on his heart.

      'Monsieur Weyl is very optimistic,' Mrs Ockham went on.  'He doesn't think it was stolen.  In fact, he's absolutely certain we shall find it again.'

      'Daisy, you're talking nonsense,' barked the Queen Mother.  'Nobody can be certain about that drawing except Eustace.  That's why I sent for Mrs Byfleet again - and the quicker we get to our séance again, the better.'

      There was a silence, and Sebastian knew that the moment had come for him to keep his promise.  If he failed to act now, if he didn't immediately hand over the drawing and explain what had happened, it might be too late.  But to confess in public, before that awful man and the Queen Mother and Mrs Thwale - the prospect was appalling.  And yet he had promised, he had promised.  Sebastian swallowed hard and passed the tip of his tongue over his dry lips.  But it was Mrs Gamble who broke the silence.

      'Nothing will convince me that it wasn't stolen,' she went on emphatically.  'Nothing except an assurance from Eustace's own lips.'

      'Not even the fact that it has been already found?' said M. Weyl.

      His eyes twinkled, his tone and expression were those of a man on the verge of delighted laughter.

      'Already found?' Mrs Ockham repeated questioningly.

      Like a conjurer materializing rabbits, M. Weyl reached out and twitched the thin, flat parcel from under Sebastian's left arm.

      'In its original wrapping,' he said, as he broke the string.  'I recognize my paper of emballage.'  And with a flourish, as though it were not rabbits this time, but infant unicorns, he pulled out the drawing and handed it to Mrs Ockham.  'And as for our jeune farceur,' he went on, 'who holds himself there saying nothing with a funebrial face as if he was at an interment ...' He exploded in a great guffaw and clapped Sebastian on the shoulder.

      'What's that, what's that?' cried the Queen Mother, darting blind glances from one face to another.  'The boy's found it, has he?'

      '"Elle est retrouvée,"' M. Weyl declaimed.

 

                                             'Elle est retrouvée.

                                             Quoi?  L'éternité.

                                             C'est la mer allée

                                             Avec le soleil.

 

But seriously, my friend, seriously ... Where?  Not by chance in the place where I always said it must be?  Not in ...?'  He paused, then leaned forward and whispered in Sebastian's ear, '...In the place where even the king goes on foot - enfin, the toilet cabinet?'

      Sebastian hesitated for a moment, then nodded his head.

      'There's a little space between the medicine cupboard and the wall,' he whispered.