It was five o’clock; the sun was low in the sky. Dressed in white shoes and socks, white shorts, a yachting cap and a pink silk sweater, Virginia had come to see the feeding of the baboons.
Its engine turned off, her rose-coloured motor scooter stood parked at the side of the road thirty or forty feet above the cage. In company with Dr. Obispo and Pete, she had gone down to have a closer look at the animals.
Just opposite the point at which they were standing, on a shelf of artificial rock, sat a baboon mother, holding in her arms the withered and disintegrating corpse of the baby she would not abandon even though it had been dead for a fortnight. Every now and then, with an intense, automatic affection, she would lick the little cadaver. Tufts of greenish fur and even pieces of skin detached themselves under the vigorous action of her tongue. Delicately, with black fingers, she would pick the hairs out of her mouth, then begin again. Above her, at the mouth of a little cave, two young males suddenly got into a fight. The air was filled with screams and barks and the gnashing of teeth. Then one of the two combatants ran away and, in a moment, the other had forgotten all about the fight and was searching for pieces of dandruff on his chest. To the right, on another shelf of rock a formidable old male, leather-snouted, with the grey bobbed hair of a seventeenth-century Anglican divine, stood guard over his submissive female. It was a vigilant watch; for if she ventured to move without his leave, he turned and bit her; and meanwhile the small black eyes, the staring nostrils at the end of the truncated snout, kept glancing this way and that with an unsleeping suspicion. From the basket he was carrying, Pete threw a potato in his direction, then a carrot and another potato. With a vivid flash of magenta buttocks the old baboon darted down from his perch on the artificial mountain, seized the carrot and, while he was eating it, stuffed one potato into his left cheek, the other into the right; then, still biting at the carrot, advanced towards the wire and looked up for more. The coast was clear. The young male, who had been looking for dandruff suddenly saw his opportunity. Chattering with excitement, he bounded down to the shelf on which, too frightened to follow her master, the little female was still squatting. Within ten seconds they had begun to copulate.
Virginia clapped her hands with pleasure. “Aren’t they cute!” she cried. “Aren’t they human!
Another burst of screaming and barking almost drowned her words.
Pete interrupted his distribution of food to say that it was a long while since he had seen Mr. Propter. Why shouldn’t they all go down the hill and pay a call on him.
“From the monkey cage to the Propter paddock,” said Dr. Obispo, “and from the Propter paddock back to the Stoyte house and the Maunciple kennel. What do you say, angel?”
Virginia was throwing potatoes to the old male—throwing them in such a way as to induce him to turn, to retrace his steps towards the shelf on which he had left his female. Her hope was that, if she got him to go back far enough, he’d see how the girl friend passed the time when he was away. “Yes, let’s go and see old Proppy,” she said, without turning round. She tossed another potato into the enclosure. With a flutter of grey bobbed hair the baboon pounced on it; but instead of looking up and catching Mrs. B. having her romance with the ice-man, the exasperating animal immediately turned round towards the wire, asking for more. “Stupid old fool!” Virginia shouted and this time threw the potato straight at him; it caught him on the nose. She laughed and turned towards the others. “I like old Proppy,” she said. “He scares me a bit; but I like him.”
“All right then,” said Dr. Obispo, “let’s go and rout out Mr. Pordage, while we’re about it.”
“Yes, let’s go and fetch old Ivory,” Virginia agreed, patting her own auburn curls in reference to Jeremy’s baldness. “He’s kind of cute, don’t you think?”
Leaving Pete to go on with the feeding of the baboons, they climbed back to the road and up a flight of steps on the further side, leading directly to the rock-cut windows of Jeremy’s room. Virginia pushed open the glass door.
“Ivory,” she called, “we’ve come to disturb you.”
Jeremy began to murmur something humorously gallant; then broke off in the middle of a sentence. He had suddenly remembered that pile of curious literature on the corner of the table. To get up and put the books into a cupboard would be to invite attention to them; he had no newspaper with which to cover them, no other books to mix them up with. There was nothing to be done. Nothing, except to hope for the best. Fervently he hoped for it; and almost immediately the worst happened. Idly, out of the need to perform some muscular action, however pointless, Virginia picked up a volume of Nerciat, opened it on one of its conscientiously detailed engravings, looked, then with wider eyes looked again and let out a whoop of startled excitement. Dr. Obispo glanced and yelled in turn; then both broke out into enormous laughter.
Jeremy sat in a misery of embarrassment, sicklily smiling, while they asked him if that was how he spent his time, if this was the sort of thing he was studying. If only people weren’t so wearisome, he was thinking, so deplorably unsubtle!
Virginia turned over the pages until she found another illustration. Once more, there was an outcry of delight, astonishment and, this time, incredulity. Was it possible? Could it really be done? She spelled out the caption under the engraving: “La volupté frappait à toutes les portes”; then petulantly shook her head. It was no good; she couldn’t understand it. Those French lessons at high school—just lousy; that was all you could say about them. They hadn’t taught her anything except a lot of nonsense about le crayon de mon oncle and savez-vous planter le chou. She’d always said that studying was mostly a waste of time; this proved it. And why did they have to print this stuff in French anyhow? At the thought that the deficiencies in the educational system of the State of Oregon might for ever prevent her from reading Andréa de Nerciat, the tears came into Virginia’s eyes. It was really too bad!
A brilliant idea occurred to Jeremy. Why shouldn’t he offer to translate the book for her—viva voce and sentence by sentence, like an interpreter at a Council Meeting of the League of Nations? Yes, why not? The more he thought of it, the better the idea seemed to him to be. His decision was made and he had begun to consider how most felicitously to phrase his offer, when Dr. Obispo quietly took the volume Virginia was hold ing, picked up the three companion volumes from the table, along with “Le Portier des Carmes” and the “Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome” and slipped the entire collection into the side pocket of his jacket.
“Don’t worry,” he said to Virginia. “I’ll translate them for you. And now let’s go back to the baboons. Pete’ll be wondering what’s happened to us. Come on, Mr. Pordage.”
In silence, but boiling inwardly with self-reproach for his own inefficiency and indignation at the doctor’s impudence, Jeremy followed them out of the French window and down the steps.
Pete had emptied his basket and was leaning against the wire, intently following with his eyes the movements of the animals within. At their approach he turned towards them. His pleasant young face was bright with excitement.
“Do you know, doc,” he said, “I believe it’s working.”
“What’s working?” asked Virginia.
Pete’s answering smile was beautiful with happiness. For, oh, how happy he was! Doubly and trebly happy. By the sweetness of her subsequent behaviour, Virginia had more than made up for the pain she had inflicted by turning away to listen to that smutty story. And after all it probably wasn’t a smutty story; he had been maligning her, thinking gratuitous evil of her. No, it certainly hadn’t been a smutty story—not smutty because, when she turned back to him, her face had looked like the face of that child in the illustrated Bible at home, that child who was gazing so innocently and cutely while Jesus said, “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” And that was not the only reason for his happiness. He was happy, too, because it looked as though those cultures of the carp’s intestinal flora were really having an effect on the baboons they had tried t
hem on.
“I believe they’re livelier,” he explained. “And their fur—it’s kind of glossier.”
The fact gave him almost as great a satisfaction as did Virginia’s presence here in the transfiguring richness of the evening sunlight, as did the memory of her sweetness, the uplifting conviction of her essential innocence. Indeed, in some obscure way, the rejuvenation of the baboons and Virginia’s adorableness seemed to him to have a profound connexion—a connexion not only with one another, but also and at the same time with Loyalist Spain and Anti-Fascism. Three separate things, and yet one thing. There was a bit of poetry he had been made to learn at school—how did it go?
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not something or other (he could not at the moment remember what) more.
He did not love anything more than Virginia. But the fact that he cared so enormously much for science and justice, for this research and the boys back in Spain, did something to make his love for her more profound and, though it seemed a paradox, more whole-hearted.
“Well, what about moving on?” he suggested at last.
Dr. Obispo looked at his wrist watch. “I’d forgotten,” he said, “I’ve got some letters I ought to write before dinner. Guess I’ll have to see Mr. Propter some other time.”
“That’s too bad!” Pete did his best to impart to his tone and expression the cordiality of regret he did not feel. In fact, he was delighted. He admired Dr. Obispo, thought him a remarkable research worker—but not the sort of person a young innocent girl like Virginia ought to associate with. He dreaded for her the influence of so much cynicism and hard-boiledness. Besides, so far as his own relations to Virginia were concerned, Dr. Obispo was always in the way. “That’s too bad,” he repeated, and the intensity of his pleasure was such that he fairly ran up the steps leading from the baboon-enclosure to the drive—ran so fast that his heart began palpitating and missing beats. Damn that rheumatic fever!
Dr. Obispo stepped back to allow Virginia to pass and, as he did so, gave a little tap to the pocket containing “Les Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome” and tipped her a wink. Virginia winked back and followed Pete up the steps.
A few moments later Dr. Obispo was walking up the drive, the others down. Or to be more exact, Pete-and Jeremy were walking, while Virginia, to whom the idea of using one’s legs to get from anywhere to anywhere else was practically unthinkable, sat on her strawberry-and-cream-coloured scooter and, with one hand affectionately laid on Pete’s shoulder, allowed herself to be carried down by the force of gravity.
The noise of the baboons faded behind them, and at the next turn of the road there was Giambologna’s nymph, still indefatigably spouting from her polished breasts. Virginia suddenly interrupted a conversation about Clark Gable to say, in the righteously indignant tone of a vice crusader: “I just can’t figure why Uncle Jo allows that thing to stand there. It’s disgusting!”
“Disgusting?” Jeremy echoed in astonishment.
“Disgusting!” she repeated emphatically.
“Do you object to her not having any clothes on?” he asked, remembering, as he did so, those two little satin asymptotes to nudity which she herself had worn up there, in the swimming pool.
She shook her head impatiently. “It’s the way the water comes out.” She made the grimace of one who had tasted something revolting. “I think it’s horrible.”
“But why?” Jeremy insisted.
“Because it’s horrible,” was all the explanation she could give. A child of her age, which was the age, in this context, of bottle-feeding and contraception, she felt herself outraged by this monstrous piece of indelicacy from an earlier time. It was just horrible; that was all that could be said about it. Turning back to Pete, she went on talking about Clark Gable.
Opposite the entrance to the Grotto, Virginia parked her scooter. The masons had finished their work on the tomb and were gone; the place was empty. Virginia straightened her rakishly tilted yachting cap as a sign of respect; then ran up the steps, paused on the threshold to cross herself, and, entering, knelt for a few moments before the image. The others waited silently, in the roadway.
“Our Lady was so wonderful to me when I had sinus trouble last summer,” Virginia explained to Jeremy when she emerged again. “That’s why I got Uncle Jo to make this Grotto for Her. Wasn’t it gorgeous when the Archbishop came for the consecration!” she added, turning to Pete.
Pete nodded affirmatively.
“I haven’t even had a cold since She’s been here,” Virginia went on, as she took her seat on the scooter. Her face fairly shone with triumph; every victory for the Queen of Heaven was also a personal success for Virginia Maunciple. Then abruptly and without warning, as though she were doing a screen test and had received the order to register fatigue and self-pity, she passed a hand across her forehead, sighed profoundly and, in a tone of utter dejection and discouragement, said, “All the same, I’m feeling pretty tired this evening. Guess I was in the sun too much right after lunch. Maybe I’d better go and lie down a bit,” And affectionately but very firmly rejecting Pete’s offer to go back with her to the castle, she wheeled her scooter round, so that it faced uphill, gave the young man a last, particularly charming, almost amorous smile and look, said, “Good-bye, Pete darling,” and, opening the throttle of the engine, shot off with gathering momentum and an accelerating roll of explosions up the steep curving road, out of sight. Five minutes later she was in her boudoir, fixing a chocolate and banana split at the soda fountain. Seated in a gilded armchair upholstered in satin couleur fesse de nymphe, Dr. Obispo was reading aloud and translating as he went along from the first volume of “Les Cent-Vingt Jours.”
Chapter VIII
MR. PROPTER was sitting on a bench under the largest of his eucalyptus trees. To the west the mountains were already a flat silhouette against the evening sky, but in front of him, to the north the upper slopes were still alive with light and shadow, with rosy gold and depths of indigo. In the foreground, the castle had put on a garment of utterly improbable splendour and romance. Mr. Propter looked at it and at the hills and up through the motionless leaves of the eucalyptus at the pale sky; then closed his eyes and noiselessly repeated Cardinal Bérulle’s answer to the question: What is man? It was more than thirty years before, when he was writing his study of the Cardinal, that he had first read those words. They had impressed him even then by the splendour and precision of their eloquence. With the lapse of time and the growth of his experience they had come to seem more than eloquent, had come to take on ever richer connotations, ever profounder significances. “What is man?” he whispered to himself. “Cest un niant environné de Dieu, indigent de Dieu, capable de Dieu, et rempli de Dieu, s’il veut.” A nothingness surrounded by God; indigent and capable of God, filled with God if he so desires. And what is this God of which men are capable? Mr. Propter answered with the definition given by John Tauler in the first paragraph of his “Following of Christ”: “God is a being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working.” Man, then, is as nothingness surrounded by, and indigent of, a being withdrawn from creatures, a nothingness capable of free power, filled with a pure working if he so desires. If he so desires, Mr. Propter was distracted into reflecting, with a sudden but rather bitter sadness. But how few men ever do desire or, desiring, ever know what to wish for or how to get it! Right knowledge is hardly less rare than the sustained good will to act on it. Of those few who look for God, most find, through ignorance, only such reflections of their own self-will as the God of battles, the God of the chosen people, the Prayer-Answerer, the Saviour.
Having deviated thus far into negativity, Mr. Propter was led on, through a continuing failure of vigilance, into an even less profitable preoccupation with the concrete and particular miseries of the day. He remembered his interview that morning, with Hansen, who was the agent for Jo Stoyte’s estates in the valley. Hansen’s treatment of the migrants who came to pick the fruit was worse even than the
average. He had taken advantage of their number and their desperate need to force down wages. In the groves he managed, young children were being made to work all day in the sun at the rate of two or three cents an hour. And when the day’s work was finished, the homes to which they returned were a row of verminous sties in the waste land beside the bed of the river. For these sties, Hansen was charging a rent of ten dollars a month. Ten dollars a month for the privilege of freezing or suffocating; of sleeping in a filthy promiscuity; of being eaten up by bed bugs and lice; of picking up ophthalmia and perhaps hookworm and amoebic dysentery. And yet Hansen was a very decent, kindly man. One who would be shocked and indignant if he saw you hurting a dog; one who would fly to the protection of a maltreated woman or a crying child. When Mr. Propter drew this fact to his attention, Hansen had flushed darkly with anger.
“That’s different,” he had said.
Mr. Propter had tried to find out why it was different.
It was his duty, Hansen had said.
But how could it be his duty to treat children worse than slaves and inoculate them with hookworm?
It was his duty to the estates. He wasn’t doing anything for himself.
But why should doing wrong for someone else be different from doing wrong on your own behalf? The results were exactly the same in either case. The victims didn’t suffer any less when you were doing what you called your duty than when you were acting in what you imagined might be your own interest.
This time the anger had exploded in violent abuse. It was the anger, Mr. Propter had perceived, of the well-meaning but stupid man who is compelled against his will to ask himself indiscreet questions about what he has been doing as a matter of course. He doesn’t want to ask these questions because he knows that if he does he will be forced either to go on with what he is doing, but with the cynic’s awareness that he is doing wrong, or else, if he doesn’t want to be a cynic, to change the entire pattern of his life so as to bring his desire to do right into harmony with the real facts as revealed in the course of self-interrogation. To most people radical change is even more odious than cynicism. The only way between the horns of the dilemma is to persist at all costs in the ignorance which permits one to go on doing wrong in the comforting belief that by doing so one is accomplishing one’s duty—one’s duty to the company, to the shareholders, to the family, the city, the state, the fatherland, the Church. For, of course, poor Hansen’s case wasn’t in any way unique; on a smaller scale and therefore with less power to do evil, he was acting like all those civil servants and statesmen and prelates, who go through life, spreading misery and destruction, in the name of their ideals and under orders from their categorical imperatives.