Clarence said: “I agree with Felix. I can’t stand bad drawing.”
Ross said: “At Corbenic, wherever that was, there was a different mass. It may have been the real thing.”
The doctor said: “Parsival is like a great religious service to me.”
Carston, embarrassed at his turn coming, saw their pained faces. He said: “I supposed the girl who carried it was the female spirit of life.”
Scylla said: “I quote again:
“Thank you,” said Picus.
Later, Carston asked her to take him for a walk. The doctor went with them to the gate, and she asked him what he thought about Picus’s health.
“Everything is wrong, and nothing,” he said.—“I don’t mean by that that he invents it. His aches and pains are a mask that conceals something. What that is, I’ve never been able to find out—”
“Does Clarence know?”
“I shouldn’t care myself to know too much about Picus. Despair’s a bad bedfellow.”
Scylla said: “We know what despair is.” As if she were saying that she knew how to take a temperature. Carston went with her down the wood to the sea. Twenty-four hours before he had been alone with her for the first time. Alone with her the second time, he was almost in pain because he wished to use the moment, and did not know how. The more he planned the less he’d be able to do, who had rarely failed with women. Now the sun struck aslant, the light-chequers broadened into patches. It was damp and delicious. The evening birds were tuning up. A little sympathy is generally judicious.
“I took a walk this morning with your brother. He seemed troubled by what you found yesterday. Even now, after the talk at tea, I’m not clear what it is all about.”
Not a hint of his sex had crossed her mind. An american boy, very polished and friendly. No reason not to tell him anything there was to tell.
For the third time Carston heard the sentence: “That’s a long story. You must help me to explain.”
He answered: “You said two things at tea. The Latin bit, which means, I think, that the things underneath are the same as the things on top. And something I don’t get at all:
“Yes.”
“Then you said another thing—you said that you all knew what despair is. How can that be true?”
Scylla said: “Well, I take it that we have to know everything about being lost.”
Lost. He did not get that. If ever there existed a group sure of themselves. He mentioned it.
“Swank,” she said, “and instinct. To cover quite intolerable pain. You see we know between us pretty well all there is to know. That’s why we rag all the time. To keep things clean, and because it’s the only gentlemanly thing to do. We have our jokes, our senses, and our moments of illumination which always take a turn for the worse. See? We live fast and are always having adventures, adventures which are like patterns of another adventure going on somewhere else all the time. A very different sort of affair, a state suggested if you like in a good work of art. The things down here seem hints of it, but there is nothing to make us sure that it is a reality. Let alone that it is worth what it costs us. Quite the contrary. We get into trouble over it, it runs after us, runs away from us, runs away with us, makes fun of us and fools of us. Because of it we have no money, and the wrong lovers, and our instinct for power is starved. For we come of families which have never been without power before. And the name for all this is our subconscious minds. And between Freud and Aquinas, I’ve managed to tell you about it completely wrong. For another of its names is intellectual beauty, and another, the peace of God.”
“D’you believe in God?”
“I don’t know. All we do know is what happens to faith based on catch-as-catch-can visions.”
“Weren’t all religions based on that?”
“They were, and look at them! But now you see why we felt we were being laughed at, dangerously, when we lifted that cup out of a well on the point of a spear?”
Carston pulled himself together. “What did you mean by the other thing:
“A little poetry, a little witchery, a little joke. It’s the same thing as I said before. Now I’ll tell you something worse than what I said before.
“Along with faith fit for people like us, and good taste which are where morals end, there is no goodwill left anywhere in the world. Which started to go first, or if they all went together, or which pushed the other out, I don’t know. I’ve an idea that something else, a principal we haven’t named yet, got rid of the lot.”
Beginnings for an erotic conversation.
A turn of exasperation seized him. She was leaning on the red arm of a pine tree which stood by itself outside the wood, a crooked blue mushroom moulded by the wind. The scent from its cap mixed with the smell of wind off the tide-stripped rocks.
