Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (2 page)

Gerald's first reaction was to decide that Mr Pelican must be a charming man and Mr Cressett a rogue. Then angrily he told himself that he knew nothing of the world around him; he had no right to judge. Who was he to dismiss John's stories of bureaucratic tyranny? A man with large enough private means to scorn complaints against taxation as vulgar and irresponsible; a family man who had had neither the courage to walk out of the marriage he hated, nor the resolution to sustain the role of father decently. An ex-professor of medieval history who had not even fulfilled the scholarly promise of studies whose general value he now doubted. A sensualist who had never had the courage of his desires; an aesthete who could not even add to his collection of drawings without pangs of conscience about his money or his neglected historical studies. A sixty-year-old failure, in fact, and of that most boring kind, a failure with a conscience.

His heavy, handsome dark face flushed with disgust at the tediously repetitive chain of self-recrimination at which he had once more arrived. Before he opened his letters, he set himself resolutely to refresh his depressed spirits. For all the boredom of this evening's meeting of the Historical Association, for all the wretched prospect of Christmas at Inge's, today promised to be really a very pleasing one. The new catalogue of the Gruntvig collection had arrived. There was nothing to prevent him spending all day on it - to vary the pleasure of his own Johns and Daumiers and Cotmans with memories of Leonardos and Raphaels that would never be his. There was the pleasant prospect of trying to persuade old Grantham to part with that Fuseli this evening. But he felt no more cheered. He thought of that girl in Asprey's who had sold him Inge's Christmas present yesterday - he dwelt slowly upon the pleasures of her bust, her hips, the easy movement of her thighs. He could remember only that he was sixty-four, could wonder only whether his growing lust was a simple case of enlarged prostate that would 'have to be dealt with'. His spirits remained depressed.

He turned to the two letters that lay beside his plate. The handwriting of the one he recognized as Sir Edgar's; the other was unknown. He preferred the unknown.

Dear Sir [he read], I
am
preparing a Ph.D. thesis for the London University School of English Literature. My subject is "The Intellectual Climate of England at the Outbreak of the First World War'. As you may imagine, I am anxious to concentrate on what posterity has shown to be really vital in that age rather than on the conventional aspect
-
Shaw, Wells, Galsworthy, etc. Whilst, therefore, paying some attention to the foundations of the Bloomsbury school in the Cambridge thought of the early years of the century, I am devoting the major part of my thesis to D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis. In relation to the latter, I am investigating the careers of such less-known figures as
T.
E. Hulme and Gilbert Stokesay. I believe that you were a close friend of Stokesay's, and I should be glad of any personal information you may care to provide me with upon this neglected and important young poet and essayist, whose work in retrospect appears, to my generation at any rate, to reflect a seriousness and a final significance which criticism today teaches us is the only true criterion of literary merit. In particular I would be glad of any light you can throw upon his relations with his father, the historian Lionel Stokesay, and, in particular, upon the part Gilbert Stokesay played in the Anglo-Saxon excavations made at Melpham, East Folk, in
1912. I
believe that his practical association with art historians may throw valuable light on his aesthetic themes.

I have already corresponded with his widow, but she is not able to provide me with any information of importance. You may wish to know my qualifications for carrying out this task. I am a graduate of Minnesota University and North-Western University. I have majored in aesthetics, music, and literature, paying special attention to the metaphysical poets. I have attended courses in creative writing given by such eminent poets as
...

Gerald laid aside the letter without reading the signature. He had long ago decided that he had nothing to say about Gilbert Stokesay which could interest these many young people who so admired his work. He had never been able to get through any single thing that Gilbert had written.

So Dollie, he reflected with amusement, had been able to provide no information. She was probably drunk when she got the letter. He pushed her image out of his mind. He had long vowed that he would not think of her, and yet every day he did so. She had after all been the one really happy passion of his life, and, through his ineptitude and cowardice, he had ruined that happiness.

This brash young American little knew what sore places he was invading with his clumsy fingers. Dollie and Melpham! The two forbidden subjects of his thoughts, the constant underlying preoccupations of his depressions. If he were to tell what he sometimes believed to be Gilbert's real part in the Melpham excavations, he would indeed throw light on his dead friend's aesthetic theories.

He turned to Sir Edgar's letter in desperation.

Dear Middleton, I should be glad of a word with you before Pforzheim's lecture tonight. You will find me in the ante-room. It is possible that Association business may come up at the end of the lecture, if Pforzheim doesn't go on for too long. If it does, we may be sure that the question of the editorship of the
History
will be raised. While I do not in any way want to force you into a premature decision, I should be glad to have some idea of what you intend. I have already told you how deeply I, and not only I, but the great majority of your colleagues, hope that you will accept the editorial duties, but we cannot for too long postpone our decision. In any case, some intimation of your feelings before the lecture would be a helpful guide to me in my direction of any discussion that may arise.

Yours sincerely, Edgar Iffley.

They already knew his decision, Gerald thought angrily; he had made it as plain as he could that he did not intend to become editor. It was sheer sentimentality their asking him, a refusal to give up the belief of 'promise' in a man over sixty. If they did not want Arthur Clun, and he could well understand that they might not, then let them have the courage to say so and appoint some younger man. The trouble was that, through fear of Clun's appointment, all the younger people - Roberts, Stringwell-Anderson, and the rest - had made him their candidate.

Well, he would not be bullied into it by the affection of old-stagers like Sir Edgar or the fears of his ex-pupils like Roberts. As to 'intimations of his feelings' - his feelings were his own affair. If he were to tell them, it would be that he had long felt that detailed scholarship such as Clun favoured was insufficient, disreputable, crossword-puzzle work, and historical generalizations were an equally disreputable pseudo-philosophic moralizing of the kind that old Stokesay had indulged in at the end of his life. All this seeking for the truth of the past should be in abeyance until we had reached some conclusions about the truth of the present. In any case, who was he to dabble in truth-telling when he had evaded the truth, past and present, for most of his life? If they chivvied him, he would raise the red herring of his projected work on England under Edward the Confessor. The long-promised work to succeed his book on Cnut was by now an old enough chestnut to embarrass any of them if he brought it up.

He rose from the table in bitter mood. Weighed down with doubts, struggling with his depression, he made his way to his study to telephone his wife. As he walked through the hall, he caught sight of his handsome, flushed features, his tall erect figure in the long gilt mirror and was disgusted. 'Good God!' he thought, 'what a bloody, shameful waste!'

Rose Lorimer, struggling with weighed-down shopping baskets, made her immense way among the marble and mosaic of the Corner House, caught a passing view of herself in a mirror and was pleased. She had always affirmed that women scholars were primarily women and should not disregard the demands of feminine fashion. To advertise learning by disregard of dress was to be odd, and Dr Lorimer disliked oddity more than anything. The vast intellectual excitement of her researches since the war had not left her a lot of time for thinking about clothes, but her mother had always said that with a good fur coat, however old, one could not go wrong; and for her own part, she had added a bold dash of colour to cheer our drab English winter - woman's contribution to banish gloom. Twenty years ago, of course, she reflected, straw hats with flowers would have been out of place in December, but the dictates of fashion were so much less strict nowadays, it seemed. And then Dr Lorimer had always loved artificial flowers, especially roses.

There was no want of artificial flowers in the Corner House entrance hall. An enormous cardboard turkey and an enormous cardboard goose, owing their inspiration to somewhat vulgarized memories of Walt Disney, held between them the message
MERRY
XMAS
made entirely of white and pink satin roses. As the tableau revolved, the turkey changed to a Christmas pudding and the goose to a mince-pie, each suitably adorned with a wide grin and two little legs;
AND
A
PROSPEROUS
NEW
YEAR
they announced, this time in real chrysanthemums. Dr Lorimer thought amusedly of Christmas, so rich in pagan symbols; the Real Masters of the Church had taken small pains to disguise their victory there. Muffled voices at the back of her mind pressed her to change her tense -
take
small pains, it said. In two days' time, she thought, Initiates everywhere - in northern Europe, and farther even than that - will be working their old magical spells of health and renewal over their unsuspecting Christian flocks. In England here, their archbishop - King Fisher - she smiled to think of the significance of the name, would be at the head of them. So old a mystery concealed for so long from so many, but not from her. She shook herself and drove off the voices. Knowledge led one into such strange dreams. It was all over long ago, of course. Nevertheless, the early Christian missionaries bought their pagan converts at high price with the ceremonial adulteration of their Saviour's birthday.

She tucked her giant legs with difficulty beneath one of the small tables and looked at the menu with a certain puritan alarm at its luxurious array of dishes. Choice was made simpler for one, she reflected, at her usual 'ordinary' Lyons or A.B.C. She sighed at the uneasy prospect of sensual choice. Clarissa Crane, however, appeared to be such a distinguished novelist, and novelists, no doubt, were used to living luxuriously. A few years ago she would not have imagined herself introducing a novelist as a guest at the Annual Lecture, but Miss Crane's letter had sounded so very interested; and if the academical world insisted on its narrow limits, then other means of disseminating the truth must be found.

Clarissa Crane, searching the vast marble tea-room with a certain distaste, suddenly recognized her learned hostess and felt deeply embarrassed. In all this drab collection of matinée-goers and pantomime parties, that only could be her. She had expected somebody dowdy, indeed had worn her old green tweed suit in deference to the academic occasion, but she had not been prepared for someone quite so outrageously odd, so completely a 'fright'. Dr Lorimer was mountainous, not only up and down, but round and round as well, and then her clothes were so strange - that old, old fur coat, making almost no pretence of the large safety-pins that held it together, and, above the huge, aimlessly smiling grey face, a small toque composed entirely of artificial pink roses and set askew on a bundle of tumbling black coils and escaping hairpins. Clarissa, with a sensitive novelist's eye, dreaded to think into what strange realm the poor creature's mind had strayed; with a woman of the world's tact, however, she cried, 'Dr Lorimer, this is so awfully kind of you! '

'Not at all, dear, I was only too glad to be of help. It's so seldom that Clio can aid the other muses, isn't it?'  Dr Lorimer's voice was strangely small coming out of her massive form, like a little girl's reciting a party piece. Its childish effect was the greater after Clarissa Crane's sophisticated, strangled contralto: 'I do hope I can help you,' Rose said, 'because your novel sounds so very, very interesting.' Her mind strayed away over the novels
she
had read -
The Forsyte Saga, The Last Days of Pompeii,
a book called
Beau Sabreur,
and, of course, a number more when she was a girl.
They
hadn't been interesting at all, she remembered.

'Thank you,' said Clarissa, 'I'm sure you can. Taking me to this frightfully important lecture in itself, and then, I wanted to know ..

Rose Lorimer interrupted her question, 'We'd better choose something to eat, dear, first,' she said, and looked at Clarissa over the top of the menu with a sort of shy leer. She was not normally given to calling people 'dear' or to leering at them, but she had somehow arrived at this approach as suitable for so unusual a companion as a smart lady novelist. It was a manner that recalled à poor stage performance of a bawd and suggested a subconscious appraisal of her guest that was hardly complimentary. 'Will you have an ice, dear?'  she asked, and then, remembering the seasonable cold weather, she added, 'or there seems to be sundries,' and she lingered over the wondrous range of dishes in print before her.

'Oh, no, just some tea,' Clarissa said, and then, fearing to hurt the poor creature's feelings, added, 'and some toast would be nice.'

'Toast,' repeated Rose. 'What with, dear?'

'Oh, just butter.' Clarissa feared being involved with sardines.

'I don't see toast and
butter,'
said Rose, who
had
in fact got involved with the sardine section, 'Oh, yes, I do. It's farther down.
Buttered
toast,' she explained.