And Clarence out on the high turf was not looking at the sea or the terrible crest of Gault suspended in the haze. Or at the small enamel floor he trod on, flower and leaf stars and bars and rings and crosses: or at a dozen rabbits hurrying: or at one hawk not hurrying, until he dropped faster than the eye and there would be one rabbit the less. He walked slowly, inside himself, petting his phantoms, especially a phantom of Picus, the body up at the house was behaving more and more unlike. He wondered also why Scylla had called him “mediaevalist,” because she said he assumed a form from inside and made things fit it, instead of compelling what is to do his construction for him. Hadn’t Picus invented a lying fancy to please her, to get off with her? Lying and lecherous his bird was, for a woman who had snapped him up for her body’s sake and her vanity. This went on until he saw the names he called her take body and walk to meet him out of the wood. Vanity, lechery, falsehood, and malice lolled along together across the grass, out of the trees. And because she called him mediaevalist, he saw them in archaic dress.
Scylla said to Carston on the lawn:
“So, you see, what sounded romantic excitement about the Sanc-Grail cup was real. And unfortunate?”
Carston wondered, deplored and detested the european faculty for taking the skeleton out of the cupboard. Rattling it, airing it, lecturing on it. She was winding up a discourse without enquiry into his feelings. On what he supposed was the skeleton, the world skeleton. He heard:
“If the materialist’s universe is true, not a working truth to make bridges with and things, we are a set of blind factors in a machine. And no passion has any validity and no imagination. They are just little tricks of the machine. It either is so, or it isn’t. If you hold that it isn’t, you corrupt your intellect by denying certain facts. If you stick to the facts as we have them, life is a horror and an insult. Nothing has any worth, but to tickle our sensations and oil the machine. There is no value in our passions and perceptions, or final differences between a life full of design and adventure and a life crawled out in a palace or a slum. The life of Plato or Buddha, apart from the kick of the illusion, was as futile as the lives of the daughters of Louis XV. Old talk, you say, and remember
“And there is no evading it by any ‘service of humanity’ game. Unless you’re one of the people who get sensual kick out looking after things, why help humanity? Think of Wells’s Utopias. Birth-control, and peace and drains. And nothing left to do but report on the fauna of a further star. Our visiting-list extended to super-birds, or intellectually developed spiders.
Felix shouted melodiously:
“I’m post-War. I’m just through getting clear of you. I admit you can scare me, but in reality you bore me. I don’t care any more. I may be a mass of inhibitions, but I’m out for myself—”
Through the grilling haze, Luxury, Malice, and Untruth strolled over the grass to Clarence. In Ross’s heart there twisted ache and dislike. Carston gave in to spiritual upset, while his body lay in a garden chair. Scylla ended:
“So even the memory of a great magic turned out to be a bird’s joke.”
Picus thought how he would appear downstairs and bewilder them again. Had enough of Scylla. Wished now he hadn’t given her that cup. Caught out he’d been by the old man, but that wasn’t over yet. Get right out and come in by another door. Make Clarence, Scylla, and the lot of ’em quite happy always. Play round his way and their way for ever.
“You’ve confused me very successfully, and you can put up with what I’ve become.”
