The day was fine and bright and really ideal for non-skiers; this year there had been very little snow and the press had made great moan about the fact that the season would be blighted because of it.
Rackstraw had seen some reference to the matter in a paper and had kept on about it until I could have strangled him. In the old days he had been, it seems, some sort of ski-champion. Though no longer allowed out he kept a close eye on weather and form. Anyway, this was none of my affair, and about half past ten we set off—she in her elegant Sherpa rig of some sort of mustard-coloured whipcord—towards the téléférique which we found quite empty. Operated by remote control, it was an eerie sort of affair, the doors flying open as one stepped upon the landing-ramp and closing behind one with a soft whiff. We had the poor snowfalls and the excited press to thank for the empty car in which we sat, sprawling at ease among our packs and other impedimenta, smoking.
A few moments’ waiting and then all of a sudden the cabin gave a soft tremor and began to slide forwards and upwards into the air, more slowly, more deliriously than any glider; and the whole range of snowy nether peaks sprang to attention and stared gravely at us as we ascended towards them, without noise or fuss. Away below us slid the earth with its villages and tracery of roads and railways—a diminishing perspective of toy-like shapes, gradually becoming more and more unreal as they receded from view. The sense of aloneness was inspiriting. Benedicta was delighted and walked from corner to corner of the cabin to exclaim and point, now at the mountains, now at the snowy villages and the dun lakeside, or at other features she thought she could recognise. The world seemed empty. Up and up we soared until we had the impression of grazing the white faces of the mountains with the steel cable of our floating cabin. “I don’t know whether Julian is doing the sensible thing” she said “in ski-ing about up here; the surfaces have been flagged here and there for danger and there have been several accidents.” The lift came slowly to a halt in all this fervent whiteness, slid up a small ramp and stopped with a scarcely perceptible shock. The doors opened and the cold world enveloped us. But the sunlight was brilliant, dazzling, and the snow squeaked under our boots like a comb in freshly washed hair. Nor was it far along the scarp to where the ski-huts stood; it was from here that the serious performers started their ascent. Benedicta had the key and we opened up the little hut which was aching with damp and cold, but fairly well equipped for camp life. There was a little stove which she soon had buzzing away—it promised us hot coffee or soup to wash down the fare we had brought. We settled ourselves in methodically enough. Then outside in the brilliant sun we smoked and had a drink together and even embarked on a snow man of ambitious size. There had been several bad avalanches that year and I was not surprised when one took place there and then, as if for our personal delectation. A white swoosh and a whole white face of the mountain opposite cracked like plaster, hesitated, and then broke away to fall hundreds of feet into the valley. The boom, as if from heavy artillery, followed upon the spectacle by half a minute almost.
“That was a good one” said Benedicta.
There were some tree stumps and a wooden table under the fir in front of the hut, and we cleared these of snow and set out plates and cutlery thereon. We had all but finished when by chance I happened to look upwards along the crescent-like sweep of the mountain above us. Something seemed to be moving up there—or so it seemed out of the corner of my eye. But no, there was nothing. The unblemished snow lay ungrooved everywhere on the runs. I turned away to the opposite side and saw with a little shock of surprise a lone skier standing among a clump of firs, watching us like a sharpshooter. We stayed for a long moment like this, unmoving, and then the figure, with the sudden movement of a Red Indian sinking his paddle into the river, propelled himself forward and began to ripple down towards us, cutting his grooves of whiteness on the clean snow.
Fast, too, very fast. “Could that be Julian?” I said, and Benedicta following the direction of my pointing finger with eyes screwed up said: “Yes. It must be.” So we stood hand in hand watching while the small dark tadpole rushed towards us, growing in size as it came, until we could see that it was a man of about medium height, rather gracefully built in a slender sort of way, and as lissom on his skis as a ballet dancer. When he had reached the little fir about fifty yards off he swerved and braked, throwing up a white fountain of snow; he took off his skis and made his way towards the hut beating the snow from his costume with his heavy mittens. “Hullo” he cried with great naturalness, as if this were not a momentous, a historic meeting, but a casual encounter between friends. “I’m Julian at last” he added. “In the flesh!” But of course in his ski get-up there was nothing very distinct to be seen as yet. Then I noticed that there was blood running from his nose. It had dried and caked on his upper lip and in the slender perfectly shaped moustache. He dabbed it with a handkerchief as he advanced, explaining as he came. “I tend towards an occasional nose-bleed up at this level—but it’s well worth it for the fun.” His nostrils were crusted with blood, though the flow appeared to have stopped.
We shook hands, gazing at one another, while he made some perfectly conventional remark to Benedicta, perfectly at ease, perfectly insouciant. “At last,” I said “we meet.” It sounded somehow fatuous. “Felix,” he said in that warm caressing voice I knew so well (the voice of Cain) “it’s been unpardonable to neglect you so but I waited until we could talk, until you felt well and unharassed by things. You are looking fine, my boy.” I gave him a clumsy Sherpa-like bow which conveyed I hoped a hint of irony. “As well as can be expected” said I. He still kept on his heavy mica goggles tinted slightly bronze so that I could not really see his eyes properly; also of course the padded suit and the peaked snowcap successfully muffled all clear outlines of his head and body. All I saw was a very delicately cut aristocratic nose (like a bird of prey’s beak), an ordinary mouth with blurred outlines because of the bloody upper lip, and the small feminine hand with which he grasped mine. Benedicta offered to swab his lip with cotton wool and warm water but he refused with thanks saying: “O I’ll clean up when I get down to terra a little firma.” So we stood, eyeing each other keenly, until Benedicta brought out some drinks and we settled down opposite him at the wooden table to drink gin slings in the sunny whiteness. “Where to begin?” said Julian with a melodious lazy inflexion which was very seducing—the calm voice of the hypnotist. “Where to begin?” It was indeed the question of the moment. “Well, the circle can be broken at any point I suppose. But where?” He paused and added under his breath “Running into airpockets, ideas in flight!”
Then he leaned forward and tapped my hand and said: “Our old quarrel is over, finished; with what more you know now of myself, of Benedicta, you must feel a bit reassured about things, less fearful. I’ve been planning this meeting for a long time, and indeed looking forward to it, because I knew that I should have to throw myself entirely upon your mercy, to try to win your heart, Felix. Wait!” He held up a hand to prevent my interjection. “It is not what you think, it is not how you think. I wanted to talk to you a bit, not only about the firm but about the general questions it always poses for the people involved in it—like this question of freedom.” (As I watched him I saw so clearly in my mind’s eye the two grave children; he had tied up Benedicta’s mind with his excesses, and then tried to liberate her by teaching her to fence! Fool! Dry click-click of their buttoned foils. Now here he was with his nostrils full of dried blood. Another image intervened, Julian tapping away on an Arab finger-drum while the monkey on its chain chattered and masturbated furiously. And then Benedicta saying to me … O centuries later, something like “You were such a surprise it was terrifying; I watched you sleep, off your guard, just to try and verify the feeling. Caught between such tyrants as you and Julian is it a wonder I went mad? With him it was love, but an actor’s love—I knew no other.”)
But here she was at my side, very composed and smiling, smoking her little cigar and watching us. It w
as I who was trembling slightly, feeling the palms of my hands grow moist. He was so attractive, this man, that for two pins I could have reached forward and strangled him as he sat there with his poise and his bloody face. “Go on” I said. “Go on.”
He made a self-deprecating little gesture with his ungloved hand and sighed. “I am” he said. “I will. But I was just thinking rather ruefully of how much thought and feeling and will I had put into the matter of the firm over all these years—not only running my side of it as best I could, but trying to penetrate also the meaning of it and the meaning of my own life in relation to it. And of course yours, and everybody’s. The firm itself, Merlin’s firm,” he uttered the proper name with a profound, a sad bitterness “what is it exactly? It isn’t just a loosely linked association of enterprises co-ordinated under one name; its very size (like a blown-up photograph) enables us to see that it is the reflection of something, the copy of something. Though on one plane you might consider it a money-making contrivance, the very terms under which it operates reflect the basic predispositions of the culture of which it is only an offshoot. Of course it is both constricting for some and liberating for others, according to their position vis-à-vis the organism; but they can’t escape reflecting the firm, just as the firm can’t help reflecting the corpus of what, for want of a better word, we must call our civilisation. O dear, Felix, reality is kindly—but inflexible.
“It doesn’t seem possible to break either the mould of the firm or the mould of ourselves as associates or even hirelings (you might think) of the thing. Yet you seem to think it necessary, I suppose because you are a romantic in some ways. And perhaps it might be possible for some, though not in the violent and ill-considered way you seem to think necessary at your present level of understanding. Ah! You will reply that you have played a part in some of our manœuvres and so you can judge—but I wonder if you can? For example, the whole question of that upset in Athens (such a small, such a trivial part of the whole design) was not simply a question of buying the Parthenon—who would want it? The firm manipulates without owning, that is part of its charm. It is the invisible increment which it tries to conquer. A long lease was all we asked for and a say in its management, if you like. My dear chap, in this, our new Middle Ages, investment has become the motor response of all religion; not in God as he was known (he hasn’t changed), not in the psychic Fund of Funds which pretends to chime with the ways of universal nature. (That too is balls by the way.) No, for us money is sperm, and the investment of it the ritual of propitiation.
“The pattern is only repeating itself; we have placed an unobtrusive hand on much more than the Stock Exchange. Most of the Indian holy places like the Taj and Buddha’s tree and so on are in our hands; the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Grant’s Tomb. The Parthenon held out for a while purely through the muddle of Graphos, the indecision of Graphos. To wipe out the National Debt and balance the Greek budget for the first time ever … and all in exchange for a treaty involving a few dead monuments. For us they still offer a fulcrum of operation and a power-yield if looked at from the point of view of our own religion—I use the word in its anthropological sense. We have in fact begun to fit these old things into the corpus of our own contemporary culture where they can be of some use: not just brooding places for sickly poets.”
“And the United Nations?” I said.
“That has great value as a relic of the future, like the Rosetta Stone. No less than an Old Master of complete nullity which is overpriced because it happens to be the only one of its period. Do you see? Then let me go a little further. If we are reflections of our culture, and our culture represents something like the total psychic predisposition of man in terms of his destiny, dare we not ask ourselves what makes it come about, what makes it last or decay? At what point does such an animal get born?” He was breathing hard now, as if the effort to enunciate his ideas clearly were a strain. “In a world of brainless drones for the most part this question never gets asked, and it’s very few of us who can see that some of the answers anyway lie about in obscure places—like The Book of Changes, for example. Felix it’s my belief that you can touch the quiddity, the nub of the idea of a culture only if you realise that it comes out of an act of association of which the primal genetic blueprint in the strictest biological sense is the uniting of the couple, man and woman. In the compact and the seed.” Here he seemed to be suddenly overwhelmed by sadness. He faltered, hesitated, and then recovered himself to go on.
“Nature, as you know, is very class-conscious and builds as carefully as a swallow, always in hierarchies; nothing but the best will do. It’s difficult in our age where the tail is trying to wag the dog to descry any shape at all in the overall dog.
“Moreover to attempt to analyse or comprehend such matters through chimerical abstractions like capital or labour—why it’s like discussing chess in terms of ludo. The problem is not there at all. I first learned this in watching the pattern of Merlin’s investments; among them were several singular departures. Of course in his time specie, bullion bars, tallies, shares and so on still had the relative value they do today. But he went after other things as well; for example, he dreamed of owning (not owning of course, but manipulating) six of the largest diamonds in the world—what they call paragons: that’s to say a stone with the minimum weight of 100 carats. I remember him reciting their names and weights which he knew by heart. The old ‘Koh-i-noor’ of course belonged to the Queen and there was nothing he could do about that—she didn’t need money! 106 carats that was. Then the ‘Star of the South’ 125, the Pitt diamond 137, the Austrian 133, the Orloff 195, and last that monster from Borneo, 367 carats. Some of them he actually did own briefly, though of course not all; but his dream was to hold a sort of mortgage on them. He was looking always for an unchanging value or one which would increase on its own.
“No, looked at in this wider context things become vastly richer and more subtle than our polite social reformers would have us believe. Nature is an organism not a system, and will always punish those who try to strap her into a system. She will overturn the apple-cart—a horse with its leading-rein cut, careering over a cliff: that is what is happening today in a way. On the other hand we ants must use our reason as much as possible in order to try to descry the hazy outlines of human destiny in nature as it evolves around us. We are trapped, do you see?
“Nature improvises out of pure joy, always with a miracle in hand; why can’t man?—or perhaps he could if he tried. Why do we build these wormcasts around us like civilisations, defensive walled cities, ghettos, currencies? Then another terrifying thought pops into one’s head: the very concept of order may never have entered nature’s own head. Man has tried to impose his own from fear of the fathomless darkness which lies beyond every idea, every hope? Is it all self-deceit? No Felix, it isn’t—but how haltingly one begins to see the ‘signatures’ of things—the sigil left by the master mason, nature. Yes. Yes. Don’t shake your head! They are to be seen. The imprint is there in the matter, in the form things take, in the way societies cohere about a set of basic propositions, form around mysterious points of mind like God or Love. One little misinterpretation of the data and the thing goes sour. Look at our little love-asylum—everyone seeking for somebody with whom they can be thoroughly weak!
“And then all this whine about personal freedom—everyone feels it is his right to worry himself about the matter. They don’t see, you don’t see, that nothing can be done in this field unless the firm itself becomes free; then and only then could the notion of a personal freedom be assured. And even while the poor fool is waving his arms and talking about freewill he is being subtly grooved by his culture, formed by it—money, fashions, architecture, laws, machines, foods. At what point can he really say that he stands free and clear away from the pattern in which he was cradled and by which he was formed? God! will we never see more than one profile of reality at a time? Yet it has been man’s wildest hope one day to turn the s
tatue round and gaze at it face to face. Perhaps this too is a delusion based on faulty conjectures about its sovereign nature.”
There was a long pause while he lit a short cigar from the packet which Benedicta had brought with her. “I suppose you might agree that reality is sufficiently implausible to cause people great anxiety?”
“The aphorism refuses to argue, Julian. That is perhaps its strength—or perhaps its weakness. Look both ways before crossing the road.”
“Felix” he said, smiling and patting my knee once more. “I can see that you are following me and it makes me glad. But I have more to say about the firm—this tiny microcosm which has formed itself without consulting us and which is not based simply upon human cupidity so much as on a fear of the outer darkness. It would be like taking a stern moral tone with a pigeon for being forced to eat grain to keep alive. And then think of all the different types of society formed by nature from infusoria and fossils up to helpless dinosaurs with a pea for a head. Don’t we belong, culturally speaking, to the same canon—woven out of the invisible by powers we don’t clearly understand and can only manipulate in certain tiny areas? Think, Felix.”
I was thinking; O yes, I was thinking.
“How do cultures come about, how do they vanish? We would give anything to know. Can the firm and its structure perhaps inform us a little—that’s the point? Well, to break a chain you must hit a link I suppose—the fragile link upon which the whole structure depends. One such link in man’s culture is the fragile link of association of one with another, articles of faith, contracts, marriages, vows and so on. Snap the link and the primordial darkness leaks in, the culture disintegrates, and man becomes the coolie he really is when there is no frame of culture to ennoble him, to interpret himself to himself. A crisis comes about. Then the providers, the secret mole-like makers of the new, go to work to repair the link, or to put in a new one. How easy to break and how laborious to repair! Only a few men in every age are fitted for the grim task, the exhausting task. For them the job in hand is self-evident, but to everyone else it seems a mystery that has got out of hand.