After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

  Mr. Propter halted at what appeared to be a wayside shrine, opened a small steel door with a key he carried in his pocket, and, lifting the receiver of the telephone within, announced their presence to an invisible porter, somewhere on the other side of the moat. They walked on.

  “What are the things that make the world unsafe for animals and spirits?” Mr. Propter continued. “Obviously, greed and fear, lust for power, hatred, anger . . .”

  At this moment, a dazzling light struck them full in the face and was almost immediately turned out.

  “What in heaven’s name . . . ?” Jeremy began.

  “Don’t worry,” said Peter. “They only want to make sure it’s us, not a set of gangsters. It’s just the searchlight.”

  “Just our old friend Jo expressing his personality,” said Mr. Propter, taking Jeremy’s arm. “In other words, proclaiming to the world that he’s afraid because he’s been greedy and domineering. And he’s been greedy and domineering, among other reasons, because the present system puts a premium on those qualities. Our problem is to find a system that will give the fewest possible opportunities for unfortunate people, like Jo Stoyte, to realize their potentialities.”

  The bridge had swung down as they approached the moat, and now the boards rang hollow under their feet.

  “You’d like Socialism, Pete,” Mr. Propter continued. “But Socialism seems to be fatally committed to centralization and standardized urban mass production all round. Besides, I see too many occasions for bullying there—too many opportunities for bossy people to display their bossiness, for sluggish people to sit back and be slaves.”

  The portcullis rose, the gates slid back to receive them.

  “If you want to make the world safe for animals and spirits, you must have a system that reduces the amount of fear and greed and hatred and domineering to their minimum, which means that you must have enough economic security to get rid at least of that source of worry. Enough personal responsibility to prevent people from wallowing in sloth. Enough property to protect them from being bullied by the rich, but not enough to permit them to bully. And the same thing with political rights and authority—enough of the first for the protection of the many, too little of the second for domination by the few.”

  “Sounds like peasants to me,” said Pete dubiously.

  “Peasants plus small machines and power. Which means that they’re no longer peasants, except insofar as they’re largely self-sufficient.”

  “And who makes the machines? More peasants?”

  “No; the same sort of people as make them now. What can’t be made satisfactorily except by mass production methods, obviously has to go on being made that way. About a third of all production—that’s what it seems to amount to. The other two-thirds are more economically produced at home or in a small workshop. The immediate, practical problem is to work out the technique of that small-scale production. At present, all the research is going to the discovery of new fields for mass production.”

  In the Grotto a row of twenty-five-watt electric candles burned in perpetual devotion before the Virgin. Above, on the tennis court, the second butler, two maids and the head electrician were playing mixed doubles by the light of arc lamps.

  “And do you figure people will want to leave the cities and live the way you’re telling us, on little farms?”

  “Ah, now you’re talking, Pete!” said Mr. Propter approvingly. “Frankly, then, I don’t expect them to leave the cities, any more than I expect them to stop having wars and revolutions. All I expect is that if I do my work and it’s reasonably good, there’ll be a few people who will want to collaborate with me. That’s all.”

  “But if you’re not going to get more than just a few, what’s the point? Why not try to do something with the cities and the factories, seeing that that’s where most people are going to stay? Wouldn’t that be more practical?”

  “It depends how one defines the word,” said Mr. Propter. “For example, you seem to think that it’s practical to help a great many people to pursue a policy which is known to be fatal; but that it isn’t practical to help a very few people to pursue a policy which there is every reason to regard as sound. I don’t agree with you.”

  “But the many are there. You’ve got to do something about them.”

  “You’ve got to do something about them,” Mr. Propter agreed. “But at the same time, there are circumstances in which you can’t do anything. You can’t do anything effective about any one if he doesn’t choose or isn’t able to collaborate with you in doing the right thing. For example, you’ve got to help people who are being killed off by malaria. But in practice you can’t help them if they refuse to screen their windows and insist on taking walks near stagnant water in the twilight. It’s exactly the same with the diseases of the body politic. You’ve got to help people if they’re faced by war or ruin or enslavement, if they’re under the menace of sudden revolution or slow degeneration. You’ve got to help. But the fact remains, nevertheless, that you can’t help if they persist in the course of behaviour which originally got them into their trouble. For example, you can’t preserve people from the horrors of war if they won’t give up the pleasures of nationalism. You can’t save them from slumps and depressions so long as they go on thinking exclusively in terms of money and regarding money as the supreme good. You can’t avert revolution and enslavement if they will identify progress with the increase of centralization and prosperity with the intensifying of mass production. You can’t preserve them from collective madness and suicide if they persist in paying divine honours to ideals which are merely projections of their own personalities—in other words, if they persist in worshipping themselves rather than God. So much for conditional clauses. Now let’s consider the actual facts of the present situation. For our purposes, the most significant facts are these: the inhabitants of every civilized country are menaced; all desire passionately to be saved from impending disaster; the overwhelming majority refuse to change the habits of thought, feeling and action which are directly responsible for their present plight. In other words, they can’t be helped, because they are not prepared to collaborate with any helper who proposes a rational and realistic course of action. In these circumstances, what ought the would-be helper do?”

  “He’s got to do something” said Pete.

  “Even if he thereby accelerates the process of destruction?” Mr. Propter smiled sadly. “Doing for doing’s sake,” he went on. “I prefer Oscar Wilde. Bad art can’t do so much harm as ill-considered political action. Doing good on any but the tiniest scale requires more intelligence than most people possess. They ought to be content with keeping out of mischief; it’s easier and it doesn’t have such frightful results as trying to do good in the wrong way. Twiddling the thumbs and having good manners are much more helpful, in most cases, than rushing about with good intentions, doing things.”

  Floodlighted, Giambologna’s nymph was still inde-fatigably spouting away against the velvet background of the darkness. Electricity and sculpture, Jeremy was thinking as he looked at her—predestined partners. The things that old Bernini could have done with a battery of projectors! The startling lights, the rich fantastic shadows! The female mystics in orgasm, the conglobulated angels, the skeletons whizzing up out of papal tombs like sky-rockets, the saints in their private hurricane of flapping draperies and wind-blown marble curls! What fun! What splendour! What self-parodying emphasis! What staggering beauty! What enormous bad taste! And what a shame that the man should have had to be content with mere daylight and tallow candles!

  “No,” Mr. Propter was saying in answer to a protesting question from the young man, “no, I certainly wouldn’t advise their abandonment. I’d advise the constant reiteration of the truths they’ve been told again and again during the past three thousand years. And, in the intervals, I’d do active work on the techniques of a better system, and, I’d collaborate with the few who understand what the system is and are ready to pay the price demande
d for its realization. Incidentally, the price, measured in human terms, is enormously high. Though, of course, much lower than the price demanded by the nature of things from those who persist in behaving in the standard human way. Much lower than the price of war, for example—particularly war with contemporary weapons. Much lower than the price of economic depression and political enslavement.”

  “And what happens,” Jeremy asked in a fluting voice, “what happens when you’ve had your war? Will the few be any better off than the many?”

  “Oddly enough,” Mr. Propter answered, “there’s just a chance they may be. For this reason. If they’ve learnt the technique of self-sufficiency they’ll find it easier to survive a time of anarchy than the people who depend for their livelihood on a highly centralized and specialized organization. You can’t work for the good without incidentally preparing yourself for the worst.”

  He stopped speaking, and they walked on through a silence broken only by the sound, from somewhere high overhead in the castle, of two radios tuned to different stations. The baboons, on the contrary, were already asleep.

  Chapter XII

  IN THE columned Lady Chapel, with its hat racks and its Magnascos, its Brancusi and its Etruscan sarcophagus used as an umbrella stand, Jeremy Pordage began, all of a sudden, to feel himself more cheerful and at home.

  “It’s as though one were walking into the mind of a lunatic,” he said smiling happily, as he hung up his hat and followed the others into the great hall. “Or, rather, an idiot,” he qualified. “Because I suppose a lunatic’s a person with a one-track mind. Whereas this . . .” he made a circular gesture . . . “this is a no-track mind. No-track because infinity-track. It’s the mind of an idiot of genius. Positively stuffed with the best that has been thought and said.” He pronounced the phrase with a kind of old-maidish precision that made it sound entirely ludicrous. “Greece, Mexico, backsides, crucifixions, machinery, George IV, Amida Buddha, science, Christian science, Turkish baths—anything you like to mention. And every item is perfectly irrelevant to every other item.” He rubbed his hands together, he twinkled delightedly through his bifocals. “Disquieting at first. But do you know? I’m beginning to enjoy it. I find I really rather like living inside an idiot.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Mr. Propter, matter-of-factly. “It’s a common taste.”

  Jeremy was offended. “One wouldn’t have thought this sort of thing was very common,” he said, nodding in the direction of the Greco.

  “It isn’t,” Mr. Propter agreed. “But you can live in an idiot-universe without going to the expense of actually constructing it out of ferro-concrete and filling it with works of art.”

  There was a pause while they entered the lift.

  “You can live inside a cultural idiot,” Mr. Propter went on. “Inside a patchwork of mutually irrelevant words and bits of information. Or, if you’re a lowbrow, you can live in the idiot world of the homme moyen sensuel—the world where the irrelevances consist of newspapers and baseball, of sex and worry, of advertising and money and halitosis and keeping up with the Joneses. There’s a hierarchy of idiocies. Naturally, you and I prefer the classiest variety.”

  The elevator came to a halt. Pete opened the gate, and they stepped out into the white-washed corridor of the sub-sub-basement.

  “Nothing like an idiot-universe if you want a quiet irresponsible life. That is, provided you can stand the idiocy,” Mr. Propter added. “A lot of people can’t. After a time, they get tired of their no-track world. They feel the need of being concentrated and directed. They want their lives to have some sense. That’s when they go Communist, or join the Church of Rome, or take up with the Oxford Group. Anything provided it will make them one-trackers. And, of course, in the overwhelming majority of cases they choose the wrong track. Inevitably. Because there are a million wrong tracks and only one right—a million ideals, a million projections of personality, and only one God and one beatific vision. From no-track idiocy most of them pass on to some one-track lunacy, generally criminal. It makes them feel better, of course; but, pragmatically, the last state is always worse than the first. If you don’t want the only thing worth having, my advice is: Stick to idiocy. Is this where you work?” he went on in another tone, as Jeremy opened the door of his vaulted study. “And those are the Hauberk Papers, I take it. Plenty of them. The title’s extinct, isn’t it?”

  Jeremy nodded. “And so’s the family—or very nearly. Nothing left but two old maids in a haunted house without any money.” He twinkled, uttered his little preparatory cough and, patting his bald crown, said with an exaggerated precision: “Decayed gentlewomen.” Exquisite locution! It was one of his favourites. “And the decay must have gone pretty far,” he added. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have sold the papers. They’ve refused all previous offers.”

  “How fortunate one is not to belong to an ancient family!” said Mr. Propter. “All those inherited loyalties to bricks and mortar, all those obligations to tombstones and bits of paper and painted canvases!” He shook his head. “What a dismal form of compulsory idolatry.”

  Jeremy, meanwhile, had crossed the room, opened a drawer and returned with a file of papers which he handed to Mr. Propter. “Look at these.”

  Mr. Propter looked. “From Molinos!” he said in surprise.

  “I thought that would be your cup of tea,” said Jeremy, deriving a sly pleasure from talking about mysticism in the most absurdly inappropriate language.

  Mr. Propter smiled. “My cup of tea,” he repeated. “But not my favourite blend. There was something not quite right about poor Molinos. A strain of—how shall I put it?—of negative sensuality. He enjoyed suffering. Mental suffering, the dark night of the soul—he really wallowed in it. No doubt, poor fellow, he sincerely believed he was destroying self-will; but without his being aware of it, he was always turning the process of destruction into another affirmation of self-will. Which was a pity,” Mr. Propter added, taking the letters to the light, to look at them more closely, “because he certainly did have some first-hand experience of reality. Which only shows that you’re never certain of getting there, even when you’ve come near enough to see what sort of thing you’re going to. Here’s a fine sentence,” he put in parenthetically. “ ‘Ame a Dios,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘como es en si y no como se lo dice y forma su imagination.’ ”

  Jeremy almost laughed. The coincidence that Mr. Propter should have picked on the same passage as had caught Dr. Obispo’s eye that morning gave him a peculiar satisfaction. “Pity he couldn’t have read a little Kant,” he said. “Dios en si seems to be much the same as Ding an sich. Unknowable by the human mind.”

  “Unknowable by the personal human mind,” Mr. Propter agreed, “because personality is self-will, and self-will is the negation of reality, the denial of God. So far as the ordinary human personality is concerned, Kant is perfectly right in saying that the thing in itself is unknowable. Dios en si can’t be comprehended by a consciousness dominated by an ego. But now suppose there were some way of eliminating the ego from consciousness. If you could do this, you’d get close to reality, you’d be in a position to comprehend Dios en si. Now, the interesting thing is that, as a matter of brute fact, this can be done, has been done again and again. Kant’s blind alley is for people who choose to remain on the human level. If you choose to climb on to the level of eternity, the impasse no longer exists.”

  There was a silence. Mr. Propter turned over the sheets, pausing every now and then to decipher a line or two of the fine caligraphy. “ ‘Tres maneras hay de silencio,’ ” he read aloud after a moment. “ ‘El primero es de palabras, el segundo de deseos y el tercero de pensamientos.’ He writes nicely, don’t you think? Probably that had a lot to do with his extraordinary success. How disastrous when a man knows how to say the wrong things in the right way! Incidentally,” he added, looking up with a smile into Jeremy’s face, “how few great stylists have ever said any of the right things. That’s one of the troubles about
education in the humanities. The best that has been thought and said. Very nice. But best in which way? Alas, only in form. The content is generally deplorable.” He turned back to the letters. After a moment, another passage caught his attention. “ ‘Oirá y leerd el hombre racional estas espirituales materias, pero no llegerá, dice San Pablo, a comprenderlas: Animalis homo non percipit ea quae sunt spiritus.’ And not merely animalis homo,” Mr. Propter commented. “Also humanus homo. Indeed, above all humanus homo. And you might even add that humanus homo non percipit ea quae sunt animalis. Insofar as we think as strictly human beings, we fail to understand what is below us no less than what is above. And then there’s a further trouble. Suppose we stop thinking in a strictly human fashion; suppose we make it possible for ourselves to have direct intuitions of the non-human realities in which, so to speak, we’re imbedded. Well and good. But what happens when we try to pass on the knowledge so acquired? We’re floored. The only vocabulary at our disposal is a vocabulary primarily intended for thinking strictly human thoughts about strictly human concerns. But the things we want to talk about are non-human realities and non-human ways of thinking. Hence the radical inadequacy of all statements about our animal nature and, even more, of all statements about God or spirit, or eternity.”