After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

  “But what is appropriate?”

  “Not war, anyhow. Nor violent revolution. Nor yet politics, to any considerable extent, I should guess.” “Then what?”

  “That’s what we’ve got to discover. The main lines are clear enough. But there’s still a lot of work to be done on the practical details.”

  Pete was not listening. His mind had gone back to that time in Aragon, when life had seemed supremely significant. “But those boys, back there in Spain,” he burst out. “You didn’t know them, Mr. Propter. They were wonderful, really they were. Never mean to you, and brave, and loyal and . . . and everything.” He wrestled with the inadequacies of his vocabulary, with the fear of making an exhibition of himself by talking big, like a highbrow. “They weren’t living for themselves, I can tell you that, Mr. Propter.” He looked into the old man’s face almost supplicatingly, as though imploring him to believe. “They were living for something much bigger than themselves—like what you were talking about just now; you know, something more than just personal.”

  “And what about Hitler’s boys?” Mr. Propter asked. “What about Mussolini’s boys? What about Stalin’s boys? Do you suppose they’re not just as brave, just as kind to one another, just as loyal to their cause and just as firmly convinced that it’s the cause of justice, truth, freedom, right and honour?” He looked at Pete inquiringly; but Pete said nothing. “The fact that people have a lot of virtues,” Mr. Propter went on, “doesn’t prove anything about the goodness of their actions. You can have all the virtues—that’s to say, all except the two that really matter, understanding and compassion—you can have all the others, I say, and be a thoroughly bad man. Indeed, you can’t be really bad unless you do have most of the virtues. Look at Milton’s Satan for example. Brave, strong, generous, loyal, prudent, temperate, self-sacrificing. And let’s give the dictators the credit that’s due to them; some of them are nearly as virtuous as Satan. Not quite, I admit, but nearly. That’s why they can achieve so much evil.”

  His elbows on his knees, Pete sat in silence, frowning. “But that feeling,” he said at last, “that feeling there was between us. You know—the friendship; only it was more than just ordinary friendship. And the feeling of being there all together—fighting for the same thing—and the thing being worth while—and then the danger, and the rain, and that awful cold at nights, and the heat in summer, and being thirsty, and even those lice and the dirt—share and share alike in everything, bad or good—and knowing that tomorrow it might be your turn, or one of the other boys’—your turn for the field hospital (and the chances were they wouldn’t have enough anaesthetics, except maybe for an amputation or something like that) or your turn for the burial party. All those feelings, Mr. Propter—I just can’t believe they didn’t mean something.”

  “They meant themselves,” said Mr. Propter.

  Jeremy saw the opportunity for a counter-attack and, with a promptitude unusual in him, immediately took it. “Doesn’t the same thing apply to your feelings about eternity, or whatever it is?” he asked.

  “Of course it does,” said Mr. Propter.

  “Well, in that case, how can you claim any validity for it? The feeling means itself, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “It means itself,” Mr. Propter agreed. “But what precisely is this ‘itself? In other words, what is the nature of the feeling?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Jeremy with a shake of the head and a comically puzzled lift of the eyebrows. “I really don’t know.”

  Mr. Propter smiled. “I know you don’t want to know,” he said. “And I won’t ask you. I’ll just state the facts. The feeling in question is a non-personal experience of timeless peace. Accordingly, non-personality, timelessness and peace are what it means. Now let’s consider the feeling that Pete has been talking about. These are all personal feelings, evoked by temporal situations, and characterized by a sense of excitement. Intensification of the ego within the world of time and craving—that’s what these feelings meant.”

  “But you can’t call self-sacrifice an intensification of the ego,” said Pete.

  “I can and I do,” Mr. Propter insisted. “For the good reason that it generally is. Self-sacrifice to any but the highest cause is sacrifice to an ideal, which is simply a projection of the ego. What is commonly called self-sacrifice is the sacrifice of one part of the ego to another part, one set of personal feelings and passions for another set—as when the feelings connected with money or sex are sacrificed in order that the ego may have the feelings of superiority, solidarity and hatred which are associated with patriotism, or any kind of political or religious fanaticism.”

  Pete shook his head. “Sometimes,” he said, with a smile of rueful perplexity, “sometimes you almost talk like Dr. Obispo. You know—cynically.”

  Mr. Propter laughed. “It’s good to be cynical,” he said. “That is, if you know when to stop. Most of the things that we’re all taught to respect and reverence—they don’t deserve anything but cynicism. Take your own case. You’ve been taught to worship ideals like patriotism, social justice, science, romantic love. You’ve been told that such virtues as loyalty, temperance, courage and prudence are good in themselves, in any circumstances. You’ve been assured that self-sacrifice is always splendid and fine feelings invariably good. And it’s all nonsense, all a pack of lies that people have made up in order to justify themselves in continuing to deny God and wallow in their own egotism. Unless you’re steadily and unflaggingly cynical about the solemn twaddle that’s talked by bishops and bankers and professors and politicians and all the rest of them, you’re lost. Utterly lost. Doomed to perpetual imprisonment in your ego—doomed to be a personality in a world of personalities; and a world of personalities is this world, the world of greed and fear and hatred, of war and capitalism and dictatorship and slavery. Yes, you’ve got to be cynical, Pete. Specially cynical about all the actions and feelings you’ve been taught to suppose were good. Most of them are not good. They’re merely evils which happen to be regarded as creditable. But unfortunately, creditable evil is just as bad as discreditable evil. Scribes and Pharisees aren’t any better, in the last analysis, than publicans and sinners. Indeed, they’re often much worse. For several reasons. Being well thought of by others, they think well of themselves; and nothing so confirms an egotism as thinking well of oneself. In the next place, publicans and sinners are generally just human animals, without enough energy or self-control to do much harm. Whereas the scribes and Pharisees have all the virtues, except the only two which count, and enough intelligence to understand everything except the real nature of the world. Publicans and sinners merely fornicate and over-eat, and get drunk. The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word—these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.”

  “So what it all boils down to,” Pete concluded in a tone of angry despair, “is that there just isn’t anything you can do. Is that it?”

  “Yes and no,” said Mr. Propter, in his quiet judicial way. “On a strictly human level, the level of time and craving, I should say that it’s quite true: in the last resort, there isn’t anything you can do.”

  “But that’s just defeatism!” Pete protested.

  “Why is it defeatism to be realistic?”

  “There must be something to do!”

  “I see no ‘must’ about it.”

  “Then what about the reformers and all those people? If you’re right, they’re just wasting their time.”

  “It depends on what they think they’re doing,” said Mr. Propter. “If they think they’re just temporarily palliating particular distresses, if they see themselves as people engaged in laboriously deflecting evil from old channels into new and slightly different channels, then they can justifiably claim to be successf
ul. But if they think they’re making good appear where evil was before, why then all history clearly shows that they are wasting their time.”

  “But why can’t they make good appear where evil was before?”

  “Why do we fall when we jump out of a tenth-storey window? Because the nature of things happens to be such that we do fall. And the nature of things is such that, on the strictly human level of time and craving, you can’t achieve anything but evil. If you choose to work exclusively on that level and exclusively for the ideals and causes that are characteristic of it, then you’re insane if you expect to transform evil into good. You’re insane, because experience should have shown you that, on that level, there doesn’t happen to be any good. There are only different degrees and different kinds of evil.”

  “Then what do you want people to do?”

  “Don’t talk as though it were all my fault,” said Mr. Propter. “I didn’t invent the universe.”

  “What ought they to do, then?”

  “Well, if they want fresh varieties of evil, let them go on with what they’re doing now. But if they want good, they’ll have to change their tactics. And the encouraging thing,” Mr. Propter added in another tone, “the encouraging thing is that there are tactics which will produce good. We’ve seen that there’s nothing to be done on the strictly human level—or rather there are millions of things to be done, only none of them will achieve any good. But there is something effective to be done on the levels where good actually exists. So you see, Pete, I’m not a defeatist. I’m a strategist. I believe that if a battle is to be fought, it had better be fought under conditions in which there’s at least some chance of winning. I believe that, if you want the golden fleece, it’s more sensible to go to the place where it exists than to rush round performing prodigies of valour in a country where all the fleeces happen to be coal-black.”

  “Then where ought we to fight for good?”

  “Where good is.”

  “But where is it?”

  “On the level below the human and on the level above. On the animal level and on the level . . . well, you can take your choice of names: the level of eternity; the level, if you don’t object, of God; the level of the spirit—only that happens to be about the most ambiguous word in the language. On the lower level, good exists as the proper functioning of the organism in accordance with the laws of its own being. On the higher level, it exists in the form of a knowledge of the world without desire or aversion; it exists as the experience of eternity, as the transcendence of personality, the extension of consciousness beyond the limits imposed by the ego. Strictly human activities are activities that prevent the manifestation of good on the other two levels. For, insofar as we’re human, we’re obsessed with time, we’re passionately concerned with our personalities and with those magnified projections of our personalities which we call our policies, our ideals, our religions. And what are the results? Being obsessed with time and our egos, we are for ever craving and worrying. But nothing impairs the normal functioning of the organism like craving and revulsion, like greed and fear and worry. Directly or indirectly, most of our physical ailments and disabilities are due to worry and craving. We worry and crave ourselves into high blood pressure, heart disease, tuberculosis, peptic ulcer, low resistance to infection, neurasthenia, sexual aberrations, insanity, suicide. Not to mention all the rest.” Mr. Propter waved his hand comprehensively. “Craving even prevents us from seeing properly,” he went on. “The harder we try to see, the graver our error of accommodation. And it’s the same with bodily posture: the more we worry about doing the thing immediately ahead of us in time, the more we interfere with our correct body posture and the worse, in consequence, becomes the functioning of the entire organism. In a word, insofar as we’re human beings, we prevent ourselves from realizing the physiological and instinctive good that we’re capable of as animals. And, mutatis mutandis, the same thing is true in regard to the sphere above. Insofar as we’re human beings, we prevent ourselves from realizing the spiritual and timeless good that we’re capable of as potential inhabitants of eternity, as potential enjoyers of the beatific vision. We worry and crave ourselves out of the very possibility of transcending personality and knowing, intellectually at first and then by direct experience, the true nature of the world.”

  Mr. Propter was silent for a moment; then, with a sudden smile, “Luckily,” he went on, “most of us don’t manage to behave like human beings all the time. We forget our wretched little egos and those horrible great projections of our egos in the ideal world—forget them and relapse for a while into harmless animality. The organism gets a chance to function according to its own laws; in other words, it gets a chance to realize such good as it’s capable of. That’s why we’re as healthy and sane as we are. Even in great cities, as many as four persons out of five manage to go through life without having to be treated in a lunatic asylum. If we were consistently human, the percentage of mental cases would rise from twenty to a hundred. But fortunately most of us are incapable of consistency. The animal is always trying to resume its rights. And to some people fairly frequently, perhaps occasionally to all, there come little flashes of illumination—momentary glimpses into the nature of the world as it is for a consciousness liberated from appetite and time, of the world as it might be if we didn’t choose to deny God by being our personal selves. Those flashes come to us when we’re off our guard; then craving and worry come rushing back and the light is eclipsed once more by our personality and its lunatic ideals, its criminal policies and plans.”

  There was silence. The sun had gone. Behind the mountains to the west, a pale yellow light faded through green into a blue that deepened as it climbed. At the zenith, it was all night. Pete sat quite still, staring into the dark but still transparent sky above the northern peaks. That voice, so calm at first and then at the end so powerfully resonant, those words, now mercilessly critical of all the things to which he had given his allegiance, now charged with the half comprehended promise of things incommensurably worthier of loyalty, had left him profoundly moved and at the same time perplexed and at a loss. Everything, he saw, would have to be thought out again, from the beginning—science, politics, perhaps even love, even Virginia. He was appalled by the prospect and yet, in another part of his being, attracted; he felt resentful at the thought of Mr. Propter, but at the same time loved the disquieting old man; loved him for what he did and, above all, for what he so admirably and, in Pete’s own experience, uniquely was—disinterestedly friendly, at once serene and powerful, gentle and strong, self-effacing and yet intensely there, more present, so to speak, radiating more life than any one else.

  Jeremy Pordage had also found himself taking an interest in what the old man said, had even, like Pete, experienced the stirrings of a certain disquiet—a disquiet none the less disquieting for having stirred in him before. The substance of what Mr. Propter had said was familiar to him. For, of course, he had read all the significant books on the subject—would have thought himself barbarously uneducated if he hadn’t—had read Sankara and Eckhart, the Pali texts and John of the Cross, Charles de Condran and the Bardo and Patan-jali and the Pseudo-Dionysius. He had read them and been moved by them into wondering whether he oughtn’t to do something about them; and, because he had been moved in this way, he had taken the most elaborate pains to make fun of them, not only to other people, but also and above all to himself. “You’ve never bought your ticket to Athens,” the man had said—damn his eyes! Why did he want to go putting these things over on one? All one asked was to be left in peace, to take things as they came. Things as they came—one’s books, one’s little articles, and Lady Fredegond’s ear trumpet, and Palestrina, and steak and kidney pudding at the Reform, and Mae and Doris. Which reminded him that today was Friday; if he were in England it would be his afternoon at the flat in Maida Vale. Deliberately he turned his attention away from Mr. Propter and thought instead of those alternate Friday afternoons; of the pink lampshades; the sm
ell of talcum powder and perspiration; the Trojan women, as he called them because they worked so hard, in their kimonos from Marks and Spencer’s; the framed reproductions of pictures by Poynter and Alma Tadema (delicious irony that works which the Victorians had regarded as art should have come to serve, a generation later, as pornography in a trollop’s bedroom!); and, finally, the erotic routine, so matter-of-factly sordid, so conscientiously and professionally low, with a lowness and a sordidness that constituted, for Jeremy, their greatest charm, that he prized more highly than any amount of moonlight and romance, any number of lyrics and Lie-bestods. Infinite squalor in a little room! It was the apotheosis of refinement, the logical conclusion of good taste.

  Chapter X

  THIS Friday, Mr. Stoyte’s afternoon in town had been exceptionally uneventful. Nothing untoward had occurred during the preceding week. In the course of his various meetings and interviews nobody had said or done anything to make him lose his temper. The reports on business conditions had been very satisfactory. The Japs had bought another hundred thousand barrels of oil. Copper was up two cents. The demand for bentonite was definitely increasing. True, applications for bank credit had been rather disappointing; but the influenza epidemic had raised the weekly turnover of the Pantheon to a figure well above the average.

  Things went so smoothly that Mr. Stoyte was through with all his business more than an hour before he had expected. Finding himself with time to spare, he stopped, on the way home, at his agent’s to find out what was happening on the estate. The interview lasted only a few minutes—long enough, however, to put Mr. Stoyte in a fury that sent him rushing out to the car.

  “Drive to Mr. Propter’s,” he ordered with a peremptory ferocity as he slammed the door.

  What the hell did Bill Propter think he was doing? he kept indignantly asking himself. Shoving his nose into other people’s business. And all on account of those lousy bums who had come to pick the oranges! All for those tramps, those stinking, filthy hoboes! Mr. Stoyte had a peculiar hatred for the ragged hordes of transients on whom he depended for the harvesting of his crops, a hatred that was more than the rich man’s ordinary dislike of the poor. Not that he didn’t experience that complex mixture of fear and physical disgust, of stifled compassion and shame transformed by repression into chronic exasperation. He did. But over and above this common and generic dislike for poor people, he was moved by other hatreds of his own. Mr. Stoyte was a rich man who had been poor. In the six years between the time when he ran away from his father and grandmother in Nashville and the time when he had been adopted by the black sheep of the family, his Uncle Tom, in California, Jo Stoyte had learnt, as he imagined, everything there was to be known about being poor. Those years had left him with an ineradicable hatred for the circumstances of poverty and at the same time an ineradicable contempt for all those who had been too stupid, or too weak, or too unlucky to climb out of the hell into which they had fallen or been born. The poor were odious to him, not only because they were potentially a menace to his position in society, not only because their misfortunes demanded a sympathy he did not wish to give, but also because they reminded him of what he himself had suffered in the past and at the same time because the fact that they were still poor was a sufficient proof of their contemptibleness and his own superiority. And since he had suffered what they were now suffering, it was only right that they should go on suffering what he had suffered. Also, since their continued poverty proved them contemptible, it was proper that he, who was now rich, should treat them in every way as the contemptible creatures they had shown themselves to be. Such was the logic of Mr. Stoyte’s emotions. And here was Bill Propter, running counter to this logic by telling the agent that they oughtn’t to take advantage of the glut of transient labour to force down wages; that they ought, on the contrary, to raise them—raise them, if you please, at a time when these bums were swarming over the state like a plague of Mormon crickets! And not only that; they ought to build accommodations for them—cabins, like the ones that crazy fool Bill had built for them himself; two-roomed cabins at six or seven hundred dollars apiece—for bums like that, and their women, and those disgusting children who were so filthy dirty, he wouldn’t have them in his hospital; not unless they were really dying of appendicitis or something—you couldn’t refuse them then, of course. But meanwhile, what the hell did Bill Propter think he was doing? And it wasn’t the first time either that he’d tried to interfere. Gliding through the twilight of the orange groves, Mr. Stoyte kept striking the palm of his left hand with his clenched right fist.