Armed With Madness полностью

Carston said: “It isn’t what you think, at all, Mr. Tracy. I’ve nothing against your son in general. I reckon now that I was jealous. You see, I’m in love with Miss Taverner, and his easy ways angered me. That’s why I left.”

At once he ceased to be an object of interest. But he was believed. Fooled the old man who was down there, up to less good than anyone else. The bells stopped. There was a feeling that the air had been emptied for ever. A cow mooed. Life started again. He went on easily:

“Funny how a love you feel is hopeless spoils your judgment. Goodness knows I never noticed anything of what you suggest. I just couldn’t get inside their life, and I wanted to get into hers—”

“There was that book in the library,” said the old man.

Inspiration came lighdy.

“You half talked me into that. Now I remember it had a book-plate in it, Felix Taverner’s.” ‘If I fool him too much, he’ll go to bed. And I ought to warn them. Warn them of what? That the old man knows the cup’s gone. Certainly. Picus is the sort to take it out on Scylla. The Sanc-Grail theory’s bust anyhow. Tell ’em that.’ He listened to a theory of the rights of owners to their property which sounded exaggerated even in the mouth of an elderly english collector.

The old red lips moved unpleasantly in their thatch of dead-white hair:

Prupperty: prupperty: prupperty.

The earth one great city of gods and men.

He began to live again in moments of insight. They were exceedingly unlike the flashes by which they are generally described, more like obstructions removed, revealing a landscape that had always been there.

The old man seemed to have come out of the Roman world. That was difficult to understand, except on a theory that times are grouped otherwise than in sequences. What had his kind been doing at the time of the Roman world? When they had been pouring out of Britain, who had been pouring in? The ancestors of the peasants Carston had seen; but it was not a question of ancestors. There had been a story then of a king, a comitatus called Arthur, whose business had been divided between chasing barbarians and looking for a cup. A kind of intermezzo in history, in a time called the Dark Ages, which had produced a story about starlight. Suns of centuries had succeeded it, while the story had lived obscurely in some second-rate literature, and more obscurely, and as an unknown quality, in the imaginations of men like Picus and Scylla, Felix, Clarence, Ross. A very bad old man was putting an unpleasant finger into that pie. Carston was sure of one thing, that he disliked him more than his son. The old man was studying him, with coldness fired by brandy.

“I can’t exactly promise to avenge your wrongs, Mr. Carston. But I assure you my son will regret it if he has tampered with my collection. If he has with him a small jade cup, quite ageless in appearance, and slightly ornamented, and if he has persuaded himself that it has some superstitious history, my visit may afford you some satisfaction.”

Carston thought: ‘He is mad about property, and he hates his son. And his son’s lover, and youth and imagination, and all there is to love over there. He believes in something too. In the thing which he accuses in his son. Whatever that is. Something I can no more imagine in Picus than that Picus doesn’t wash. The devils believe backwards. I can’t grudge the man a trick or two with that behind him. Now I know the father, I can’t hate the son any more.’

He noticed the bad moral that if he had stayed over there and behaved himself, he would not have had this interesting insight into his late hosts’ private lives. Another brandy went down. He wanted to go for the old man on their behalf, and excited with drink he needed to talk. So long as he did not say the word cup.

“I assure you, sir, you won’t find anything a father would object to in that house.” ‘He knows why I am saying this, because I’ve seen him.’

“They strike me as people who have loved and suffered a great deal. That purifies.”

“From what?”

“From being like what you say— From only thinking of yourself.” It is not agreeable to be dismissed like a baby. He had to remember that the old man hadn’t seen through him.

“If you were to ask me, I should say that they were looking for something. Miss Taverner told me one day that what they wanted had been lost out of the world.”

“When and what?” said the old man.

“I don’t quite get their dates. Might have been any time, the Middle Ages, or the day before yesterday—a thing that’s been lost—”

“There was only one thing lost of a symbolic value in the Middle Ages,” said the old man.

Then Carston’s cups influenced him to obvious caution—then to dreams. He saw Picus making pretty things, Felix laughing, Ross painting, Clarence sleeping, Scylla running away into thunder over burnt grass: running in, in love, through a rain wall.