“Setting up an experiment for something like that is a hell of a job. First of all, Sheldon identified seventy-six types that are within the range of the normal; of course there are some wild combinations in people who are born to severe physical trouble. Getting an experimental group together is a lot of work, because you have to interview so many people, and do a lot of explaining, and rule out the ones who could become nuisances. I guess my team and I saw well over five hundred, and managed to keep things fairly quiet to exclude jokers and nuts like Brown. We ended up with a hundred and twenty-five, who would promise to give us all their faeces, properly contained in the special receptacles we provided (and they cost a pretty penny, let me tell you), as fresh as possible, and over considerable lengths of time, because you want serial inspection if you are going to get anywhere. And we wanted as big a range of temperament as we could achieve, and not just highly intelligent young students. As I told you, Simon, we have to pay our test group, because it’s a nuisance to them, and though they understand that it’s important they have to have some recompense. We expect them to have tests whenever my medical assistant calls for it, and they have to mark a daily chart that records a few things—how they felt, for instance, on a one-to-seven scale ranging from Radiant to The Pits. I often wish we could do it with rats but human temperament can’t be examined in any cheap way.”
“Paracelsus would have liked you, Dr. Froats,” said Maria: “he rejected the study of formal anatomy for a consideration of the living body as a whole; he’d have liked what you say about faeces being a creation. Have you read his treatises on colic and bowel-worms?”
“I just know him as a name, really. I thought he was some kind of nut.”
“That’s what Murray Brown says about you.”
“Well, Murray Brown is wrong. I can’t tell him so for a while—maybe for a few years—but there’ll be a time.”
“Does that mean you’ve found what you are looking for?” I said. I felt that I had better get Maria away from Paracelsus.
“I’m not looking for anything. That’s not how science works; I’m just looking to see what’s there. If you start with a preconceived idea of what you are going to find, you are liable to find it, and be dead wrong, and maybe miss something genuine that’s under your nose. Of course we’re not just sitting on our hands here; at least half a dozen good papers from Froats, Redfern, and Oimatsu have appeared in the journals. Some interesting stuff has come up. Want to see some more pictures? Oimatsu prepares these. Wonderful! Nobody like the Japanese for fine work like this.”
These were slides showing what I understood to be extremely thin slices of faeces, cut transversely, and examined microscopically and under special light. They were of extraordinary beauty, like splendid cuttings of moss-agate, eye-agate, brecciated agate, and my mind turned to that chalcedony which John’s Revelation tells us is part of the foundations of the Holy City. But as Maria had been unsuccessful in persuading Ozy to hear about Paracelsus I thought I would have no greater success with references to the Bible. So I fished around for something which I hoped might be intelligent to say.
“I don’t suppose there’d be such a thing as a crystal-lattice in those examples?”
“No, but that’s a good guess—a shrewd guess. Not a crystal-lattice, of course, for several reasons, but call it a disposition toward a characteristic form which is pretty constant. And if it changes markedly, what do you suppose that means? I don’t know, but if I can find out”—Ozy became aware that he was yielding to unscientific enthusiasm—“I’ll know something I don’t know now.”
“Which could lead to—?”
“I wouldn’t want to guess what it might lead to. But if there is a pattern of formation which is as identifiable for everybody as a fingerprint, that would be interesting. But I’m not going to go off halfcocked. People can do that, after reading Sheldon. There was a fellow named Huxley, a brother of the scientist—I think he was a writer—and he read Sheldon and he went to foolish extremes. Of course being a writer he loved the comic extremes in the somatotypes, and he lost his head over something Sheldon keeps harping on in his two big books. And that’s humour. Sheldon keeps saying you have to deal with the somatotypes with an ever-active sense of humour, and damn it, I don’t know what he’s talking about. If a fact is a fact, surely that’s it? You don’t have to get cute about it. I’ve read a good deal, you know, in general literature, and I’ve never found a definition of humour that made any sense whatever. But this Huxley—the other one, not the scientist—goes on about how funny it would be if certain ill-matched types got married, and he thought it would be a howl to see an ectomorph shrimp and his endomorphic slob of a wife in a museum looking at the mesomorphic ideal of Greek sculpture. What’s funny about that? He rushed off in all directions about how soma affects psyche, and how perhaps the body was really the Unconscious that the psychoanalysts talk about—the unknown factor, the depth from which arises the unforeseen and uncontrollable in the human spirit. And how learning intelligently to live with the body would be the path to mental health. All very well to say, but just try and prove it. And that’s work for people like me.”
It was getting late, and I rose to go, because it was clear that Ozy had shown us all he meant to show. But as I prepared to leave I remembered his wife. Now it is not tactful in these days to ask about the wives of one’s friends too particularly, in case they are wives no longer. But I thought I’d plunge.
“How’s Peggy?”
“Good of you to ask, Simon. She’ll be delighted you remembered her. Poor Peg.”
“Not unwell, I hope? Of course I remember her as our top cheerleader.”
“Wasn’t she marvellous? Wonderful figure, and every ounce of it rubber, you’d have said. A real fireball. God, you should see her now.”
“Very sorry she isn’t well.”
“She’s well enough. But her type, you know—her somatotype. She’s a PPJ—what Sheldon calls a Pyknic Practical Joke. Pyknic, you understand? Of course, Greek’s your thing. Compact: rubbery. But the balance of her three elements was just that tiny bit off, a 442, and—well, now she weighs well over two hundred, poor kid, and she’s barely five foot three. No; no children. She keeps cheerful, though. Takes a lot of night courses at one of the community colleges—Dog Grooming, Awake Alive and Aware Through Yoga, Writing for Fun and Profit—that crap. I’m here so much at night, you see.”
I saw. The Rum Old Joker had been a bit rowdy with Ozy and Peggy, and even if Ozy’s sense of humour had been more active than it was, he could hardly have been expected to relish that one.
As we walked up the campus together, Maria said: “I wonder if Professor Froats is a magus.”
“I think he’d be surprised if you suggested it.”
“Yes, he seemed very dismissive about Paracelsus. But it was Paracelsus who said that the holy men who serve the forces of nature are magi, because they can do what others are incapable of doing, and that is because they have a special gift. Surely Ozias Froats works under the protection of the Thrice-Divine Hermes. Anyway I hope so: he won’t get far if he doesn’t. I wish he’d read Paracelsus. He said that each man’s soul accords with the design of his lineaments and arteries. I’m sure Sheldon would have agreed.”
“Sheldon appears to have had a sense of humour. He wouldn’t mind a sixteenth-century alchemist getting in ahead of him. But not Ozy.”
“It’s a pity about science, isn’t it?”
“Miss Theotoky, that is very much a humanist remark, and you must be careful with it. We humanists are an endangered species. In Paracelsus’s time the energy of universities resided in the conflict between humanism and theology; the energy of the modern university lives in the love-affair between government and science, and sometimes the two are so close it makes you shudder. If you want a magus, look for one in Clement Hollier.”
With that we parted, but I thought she gave me a surprised glance.
I walked on toward Ploughwright, thinking about
faeces. What a lot we had found out about the prehistoric past from the study of fossilized dung of long-vanished animals. A miraculous thing, really; a recovery of the past from what was carelessly rejected. And in the Middle Ages, how concerned people who lived close to the world of nature were with the faeces of animals. And what a variety of names they had for them: the Crotels of a Hare, the Friants of a Boar, the Spraints of an Otter, the Werderobe of a Badger, the Waggying of a Fox, the Fumets of a Deer. Surely there might be some words for the material so near to the heart of Ozy Froats better than shit? What about the Problems of a President, the Backward Passes of a Footballer, the Deferrals of a Dean, the Odd Volumes of a Librarian, the Footnotes of a Ph.D., the Low Grades of a Freshman, the Anxieties of an Untenured Professor? As for myself, might it not appropriately be called the Collect for the Day?
Musing in this frivolous strain I went to bed.
(4)
I THOUGHT IT WOULD NOT be long before Hollier pushed Parlabane in my direction, and sure enough he turned up the night after I had visited Ozias Froats.
I was not in a good mood, because I had been haunted all day by Ozy’s humbling estimate of my physical—and by implication my spiritual—condition. A 425, soft, chunky, doubtless headed toward undeniable fat. I make frequent resolves to go to the Athletic Building every day, and get myself into trim, and if I were not so busy I would do it. Now, at a blow, Ozy had suggested that fat was part of my destiny, an inescapable burden, an outward and visible sign of an inward and only partly visible love of comfort. Had I been deceiving myself? Did my students speak of me as Fatso? But then, if the Fairy Carabosse had appeared at my christening with her spiteful gift of adiposity, there had been other and better-natured fairies who had made me intelligent and energetic. But because human nature inclines toward dissatisfaction, it was the fat that rankled.
Worse, he had suggested that I was the sort of man who broke wind a great deal. Everyone recognizes, surely, that with the passing of time this trivial physical mannerism is likely to increase? No priest who has done much visiting among the old must be reminded of it. Need Froats have made a point of it before Maria Magdalena Theotoky?
This was a new reason for disquiet. Why should I care what she thought? But I did care, and I cared about what people thought of her. Hollier’s revelation had annoyed me; he ought to keep his great paws off his students (no, no, that’s unjust) he should not have taken advantage of his position as a teacher, however elated he was about his work. I thought of Balzac, driven by unconquerable lust, rushing at his kitchen-maid and, when he had taken her against the wall, screaming in her face, ‘You have cost me a chapter!’ and rushing back to his writing-table. I had not liked the suggestion that Maria was a singer of bawdy songs in public; if she had done so, there must have been some reason for it.
Darcourt, I thought, you are being a fool about that girl. Why? Because of her beauty, I decided; beauty clear through, for it was beauty not only of feature but of movement, and that rarest of beauties, a beautiful low voice. A man may admire beauty, surely, without reproaching himself? A man may wish not to seem fat and ridiculous, a Crypto-Farter, in the presence of such an astonishing work of God? Froats had not, I remembered, made a guess at her type, and it could not have been reticence, for Ozy had none. Was it—good God, could it be?—that he recognized in her a PPJ, another Peppy Peggy who would explode into grossness before she was thirty? No, it could not be: Peggy had been pneumatic and exuberant, and neither word applied to Maria.
My forty feet of Literary Gut was not in the best of moods when Parlabane came; I had denied it a sweet at dinner. This sort of denial may be the path to Heaven for some people, but not for me; it makes me cranky.
“Sim, you old darling? I’ve been neglecting you, and I’m ashamed. Do you want to beat Johnny? Three on each paddy with a hard, hard ruler?”
I suppose he thought of this as taking up from where we had left off, twenty-five years ago. He had loved to prattle in this campy way, because he knew it made me laugh. But I had never played that game except on the surface; I had never been one of his ‘boys’, the student gang who called themselves Gentleman’s Relish. I was interested in them—fascinated might be a better word—but I never wanted to join them in the intimacies that bound them together, whatever those may have been. That I never really knew, because although they talked a lot about homosexuality, most of them had, after graduation, married and settled into what looked like the uttermost bourgeois respectability, leavened by occasional divorce and remarriage. One was now on the Bench, and was addressed as My Lord by obsequious or mock-obsequious lawyers. I suppose that, like Parlabane himself, they had played the field; one or two, I knew, had been on gusty terms with omnivorous Elsie Whistlecraft, who had thought of herself as a great hetaera, inducting the dewy young into the arts of love. A lot of young men try varied aspects of sex before they settle on the one that suits them best, which is usually the ordinary one. But I had been cautious, discreet, and probably craven, and I had never been one of Parlabane’s ‘boys’. But it had once tickled me to hear him talk as if I were.
A foolish state of mind, but who has not been foolish, one way or another? It would not do now, after a quarter of a century. I suppose I was austere.
“Well, John, I had heard you were back, and I expected you’d come to see me some time.”
“I’ve left it inexcusably long. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, as we say in the trade. But here I am. I hear great things of you. Excellent books.”
“Not bad, I hope.”
“And a priest. Well—better get it over with; you can see from my habit that I’ve had a change of mind. I think I have you to thank for that, at least in part. During the past years, I’ve thought of you often, you know. Things you used to say kept recurring. You were wiser than I. And I turned to the Church at last.”
“You had a shot at being a monk. Let’s put it that way. But obviously it hasn’t worked.”
“Don’t be rough on me, Sim. I’ve had a rotten time. Everything seemed to go sour. Surely you aren’t surprised that I turned at last to the place where nothing can go sour.”
“Can’t it? Then what are you doing here?”
“You would understand, if anybody would. I entered the S.S.M. because I wanted to get away from all the things that had made my life a hell—the worst of which was my own self-will. Abandon self-will, I thought, and you may find peace, and with it salvation. If thou bear the Cross cheerfully, it will bear thee.”
“Thomas à Kempis—an unreliable guide for a man like you, John.”
“Really? I’d have thought he was very much your man.”
“He isn’t. Which is not to say I don’t pay him all proper respect. But he’s for the honest, you know, and you have never been quite honest. No, don’t interrupt, I’m not insulting you; but Thomas à Kempis’s kind of honesty is impossible for a man with as much subtlety as you have always possessed. Just as Thomas Aquinas was always too subtle a man to be a safe guide for you, because you blotted up his subtlety but kept your fingers crossed about his principles.”
“Is that so? You seem to be a great authority about me.”
“Fair play; when we were younger you set up to be a great authority about me.—I gather you were not able to bear the Cross cheerfully, so you skipped out of the monastery.”
“You lent me the money for that. I can never be grateful enough.”
“Divide any gratitude you have between me and Clem Hollier. Unless there were others on your five-hundred-dollar campaign list.”
“You never thought a measly five hundred would do the job, did you?”
“That was certainly what your eloquent letter suggested.”
“Well, that’s water over the dam. I had to get out, by hook or crook.”
“An unfortunate choice of expression.”
“God, you’ve turned nasty! We are brothers in the Faith, surely. Haven’t you any charity?”
“I have thought a good d
eal about what charity is, John, and it isn’t being a patsy. Why did you have to get out of the Sacred Mission? Were they getting ready to throw you out?”
“No such luck! But they wouldn’t let me move toward becoming a priest.”
“Funny thing! And why was that, pray tell?”
“You are slipping back into undergraduate irony. Look, I’ll level with you: have you ever been in one of those places?”
“A retreat or two when I was younger.”
“Could you face a lifetime of it? Listen, Sim, I won’t have you treating me as some nitwit penitent. I’m not knocking the Order; they gave me what I asked for, which was the Bread of Heaven. But I have to have a scrape of the butter and jam of the intellect on that Bread, or it chokes me! And listening to Father Prior’s homilies was like first-year philosophy, without any of the doubts given a fair chance. I have to have some play of intellect in my life, or I go mad! And I have to have some humour in life—not the simple-minded jokes the Provincial got off now and then when he was being chummy with the brothers, and not the infant-class dirty jokes some of the postulants whispered at recreation hour, to show that they had once been men of the world. I’ve got to have the big salutary humour that saves—like that bloody Rabelais I hear so much about these days. I have to have something to put some yeast into the unleavened Bread of Heaven. If they’d let me be a priest I could have brought something useful to their service, but they wouldn’t have it, and I think their rejection was nothing but spite and envy!”