Carston was wondering if he was expected to come over and talk. He liked to hear Clarence talk about war. He had seen some rough stuff himself in Russia. A good soldier the man must have been. Wondered why he hadn’t stuck to it, and was now rather overdoing the art business. The others did not overdo it. Quite a good painter, too. Then he saw Scylla in the tree-tops. A limb of ilex, detached from the main height and formed perfectly. Lifted up, glittering in the insolent sky. She was upstairs, broken in pieces, in preposterously pretty, sexual wax. Picus might be there, making another. He’d go up and see. Creep in, if he wasn’t allowed to enjoy it.
Almost as good as having the girl, to have that thing of her in wax. This was as far as he got. It was quite true that the statue would have done as well. Desire in Carston was almost mental, a redecoration of his memories. Only at the moment he was between the two, the statuette and the girl, the shoulders he saw in leaf and wax and flesh, and was troubled by the repeats.
While Clarence, asleep again, dreamed he was meeting Picus as he had met him in the war, wearing his shrapnel helmet, a queer glass dish someone had found in a well. Rather a worry.
“Big magic,” said Picus. He was a boy then, his smile already gracious and timid, contrasting with a loose, haughty walk. He had said, laughing: “If you take it off, off comes my hair.” That was important. The queer fairy cup his bird wore. Some day Picus would take off his cap to him. He woke up. Something had broken in him, the sense of wrong adjustment was easier. It would come back, but now it was perfectly easy to talk to Carston, by this time also anxious to bridge the gulf between lunch and tea.
Tea was a reasonable meal, with a real human being at it, the doctor having come over from Starn to attend to Picus’s health. Carston held his attention, improvising brilliantly on aspects of his native land, wondering if he could interpret Scylla’s cordiality into the beginnings of desire. Quick work, he knew, but life in the infernal stillness was going at a pace that had New York beat. It became the doctor’s turn to talk. Carston noticed how they played in turns, the second guest after the first. “Pass the buns,” said Felix. That was the cue. Carston listened to stories of medical practice in a remote district; after a time to an accompaniment he did not at first locate. Later that it was Picus ringing with a spoon on his medicine glass.
The doctor said:
“I don’t wonder you two left Tollerdown. It’s a cheerless place at best. I only knew it in winter, going out there to deliver the shepherd’s wife. So I think of it as the darkest place that exists.”
Scylla answered: “I know. Even now when it is burnt white. I think of it the only time I was there in winter, in a storm. Wind roaring over the flint-crop and snow whirling. Lying an instant and vanishing.”
Ross said: “BE PREPARED FOR LAMBING— You hear them mewing in the dark, and see a light in a wooden box on wheels, and out comes a shepherd, with his hands covered with blood.”
The doctor said:
“Shew me the cup you got out of the well.” And when he had looked at it: “The luck of the country’s with you. I’m glad to find a few roman pots. It isn’t glass at all, too heavy. I think it’s jade. It may have been set once. I tell you, it might have been the cup of a chalice.” Intelligent interest. Carston felt quite friendly now towards the thing. The others were giving polite attention. Five people at once thinking about a spear. No, six. He was.
“One has time to remember things, shooting about this country in a Ford. Do you know it makes me think of what I remember of the cup of the Sanc-Grail?”
Picus said, meekly: “What was that?”
Carston thought: ‘How was that camp, or wasn’t it? Would one of them pick up the challenge? Of course, it was a challenge.’ Ross said: “That’s a long story,” but Scylla leaned forward, excited, and said: “The best way to get that story out is for everyone to say what he thinks or feels or remembers. The Freud game really. Start, Felix!”
“Tennyson,” said Felix.
“Oh, my dear,” said Clarence, “those awful pre-Raphaelite pictures put me off it long ago.”
Ross said: “A mass said at Corbenic.”
“Wagner,” said the doctor.
“A girl carrying it,” said Carston, staring at Scylla and trying to play.
Scylla said: “
Picus said: “You haven’t told me much.”
“Second round,” said Scylla,—“people enlarge on what they said before.”
“I said Tennyson,” said Felix, “because I hate the Keltic Twilight. And nearly all its works. I hate it because it’s a false way of telling about something that exists. No, a messy way. Responsible for the world’s worst art. Now and then it nearly comes off. Milton left it alone, and I don’t blame him. Tennyson made it idiotic with his temperance knights. Fixed it, too, enough for parody. Killed the unstated thing which I don’t mind telling you scares me.”
