9

Mary Montfort had an apartment in Florence. With her was Madeleine. Raoul had not seen them since the eve of his departure for the war. Mary’s apartment was in an old palazzo in the Via Ricasoli. Her long lofty sitting-room looked over a courtyard with a wrought-iron well-head. The ceiling was painted with putti and garlands, and the high baronial mantelpiece was of carved stone. The furniture was sparse, but massive and ornate. The chairs were covered with old damask and had high backs of antique gilt. The room gave Raoul a sense of repose, and of ‘liberation of the spirit.’ It had so obviously been designed by people for whom the dignity and decoration of life had been of first importance. The beauty of Italy drugged him. No longer need he be concerned with the cruder issues; the necessity of money-making, economy of labour, absence of taste.

Mary was alone when he called. She was very glad to see him and thoroughly approved of him. She had always thought him ‘nice,’ but now his manner was better and his conversation was less pseudo-Shavian. She asked him about Melbourne.

‘I couldn’t stay in Australia,’ she said. ‘Everything has changed so dreadfully. It was bad enough before, with those hideous red villas so close to Scudamore. But now there is a whole new set of people that one simply wouldn’t have known when I was a girl. Money is the only thing that counts. In Melbourne it is indecent to be poor. Do you notice that Melbourne people scarcely ever know their poor relations? In England one’s poor relations are gentlefolk. In Melbourne I suppose the rich have so recently sprung from such queer families that they have to discard them. There are scarcely any men in Melbourne that I should care for Madeleine to marry.

‘Of course, houses like Scudamore and Carlingford should be the centres of Melbourne society, but they are all being cut up and sold. There are so few people of our sort left, nowadays. I had a letter from Uncle Arthur the other day. He says that he simply doesn’t know anyone except his relatives, now. He was rather upset at all you young people leaving Melbourne, but I can’t see that there is anything for you there unless you are going on the land, and if you do that without a great deal of capital your life becomes brutish and solitary.

‘You know, it is quite a disadvantage being an Australian,’ Mary continued. ‘In Australia, if you are quiet and don’t speak like a servant, you are thought a snob; if you aren’t a millionaire you are ignored. If you live in England, wretched middle-class English try to patronize you, expect you to cat like a savage, crack stock-whips, and spit on the floor. I have no nationality. That is why I live in Florence. It gives me a sort of British nationality. If I meet anyone I don’t tell them I’m an Australian until I have made a reasonably good impression. Then they say: “O, I should never have thought so,” and imagine that they are paying one a compliment, and the tiresome part of it is that in a way they are. There are Australians with social ambitions who go about Europe pretending they are English. Apart from the contemptibility of their behaviour, it is foolish, as probably they have no English background, no relatives or county, and the friends they make at Cannes or Aix will probably drop them in London … I think that’s Madeleine.’

There were voices outside the door. Some one said: ‘My God, it’s hot,’ and Madeleine, accompanied by a man, came into the room. She wore a yellow linen dress and a wide straw hat. She seemed to bring in with her something of the atmosphere of the dry, drowsy Italian hillside. She was carrying a bunch of pink and purple asters. She had grown into a woman but appeared to have lost none of her vivacity. Her mouth was wide and curved, with an impudent underlip. She looked at Raoul intently, and with the slight constraint with which people meet after a number of years. She hid her constraint beneath an offhand manner.

‘You don’t look very different,’ she said. ‘You haven’t got so much hair on your temples.’ She introduced him to the man with her.

‘This is Broom,’ she said.

Raoul discovered afterward that he was a very remote cousin, Plantagenet Montfort-Wrightson, hence his nickname.

Broom had been an impoverished poet and journalist until the war had removed three cousins standing between him and the state of Morleigh. With the inheritance of a comfortable income he had immediately begun to put into practice some of his pet theories.

He was about forty years of age, and had thick brown hair and a brown beard. His forehead was high and wide, and his eyes, set wide apart, were a deep violet. His nose was of the type usually given to apostles in church windows, but in spite of this and his beard, his appearance was more genially devilish than Christian.

‘What have you been doing with yourself, and what are you going to do with yourself?’ Madeleine asked.

‘I’ve been to the war and to Australia, and now I’m going to London,’ said Raoul comprehensively.

‘What are you going to London for?’

‘To be a journalist.’

Broom smiled.

‘London’s a hole for anyone with less than two thousand a year,’ said Madeleine. ‘You’re quite mad to go there.’

‘It shows a nice nature to go mad after the war,’ said Broom. He sat down near Raoul and smiled.

Mary excused herself and left the room. Broom opened the door for her so quietly and quickly that Raoul felt clumsy and ill-mannered.

‘Don’t take any notice of Broom,’ said Madeleine. ‘He’s corrupt. He filches all my young men, and he’s a bachelor with nineteen children.’

‘They are very healthy children,’ said Broom.

‘What age are they?’

‘Oh, all about the same age.’

‘Talking of which—’ began Madeleine.

‘There is no necessity to talk of them,’ Broom protested.

‘I wasn’t going to. I was going to tell you a nice story. I was in a church in Rome, and a priest was saying mass, when a little boy dashed in and pushed aside the sacristan, and said, “I always serve papa.”’

‘You can’t tell a story,’ said Broom.

‘I told it very well, and it is amusing, isn’t it?’ Madeleine turned to Raoul.

Raoul grinned awkwardly. He was not accustomed to this kind of chaff. He wondered that Broom was not furious at Madeleine’s imputations, even if they were made in jest. But he found that Madeleine was already beginning to have her old effect on him, to bring him a kind of cheerfulness, a ‘liberation of the spirit’ even greater than that produced by Perugino.

‘If Broom is going to be rude,’ she said, ‘I shall go and change my clothes.’

Broom smiled again, with that curious, satisfied, polite smile which he had turned on Raoul. Again he was holding the door.

‘I’m sorry to leave you alone with him,’ she said to Raoul. ‘Believe nothing he says. I’ll be back in ten minutes.’

‘You are from Australia?’ Broom said, sitting down again. ‘It must be an interesting country, but I cannot afford the time to go there. I cannot bear to be long away from Italy. Italy and Bloomsbury are the only possible habitats for civilized man.’

‘Italy is wonderful,’ said Raoul enthusiastically.

Broom smiled.

‘I have occasionally had to review books of Australian verse,’ he said. ‘It seemed to me to be characterized by a rather weak expansiveness, an effort to swallow the universe at a gulp.’

Raoul felt his face becoming red. He hoped Broom had read none of his verse. ‘Weak expansiveness’ was a horribly accurate description of it.

‘Among the Australian women poets,’ Broom continued, ‘there is a curious endeavour, as I think Arnold Bennett or someone said, to complicate the Deity with erotic impulse. Of course, it is a truism that one kind of religious fervour is fundamentally sexual, and one can understand a religious poet unconsciously using the language of sexual attraction. We have the exquisite hymns, “Jesu dulcis memoria,” and “Jesu decus angelicum,” which might express any man’s yearning for his lover, but it is difficult to see why those who apparently have discarded the religion of Jehovah should drag it in to make a grand paean of the sexual act. Of course, Wagner has done the same sort of thing in the “Liebestod” of Tristan. But nature has designed the physical side of love as a game, not as a national anthem.’ Broom smiled again. ‘Don’t you think so?’ he asked.

Broom, when with conventional gentlewomen of Mary’s type, was courteous and smiling and made appropriate, well-bred replies to their remarks. They found him so charming and ‘nice’ that they shut their ears to the slanders that were breathed against him, but when he found himself alone with a moderately intelligent young man or woman who had no conversational taboos, he would pour out his theories of life and letters like a vial of scented oil over their heads. His voice flowed evenly on, its very quietness and careful enunciation forbidding interruption. He did not take part in a conversation, he loosened on the air one of the many essays stored in his mind. At the end of his discourse he would add, ‘Don’t you think so?’—a charming concession to his listener’s existence and right to an opinion.

Raoul had always been a keen Wagnerite and had inclined to the ‘national anthem’ view of eroticism, but he had never discussed this subject, not even with Rabelaisian fellow subalterns in the front-line trenches.

He said: ‘I don’t know,’ rather shyly, but with interest. He had never met anyone like Broom. The men he had known, with as polished an appearance and manners, had all held ‘sound’ views about the church and the state, and the marriage laws and the Germans. Broom, from long experience, could gauge accurately the effect of a trial address on what he would describe to himself as a potential pupil. A little diffidence pleased and excited him. He marked Raoul down as a soul to be enlarged and enlightened by contact with his own carefully garnered philosophy.

He led the conversation to Florence, and then offered to conduct Raoul over some of the sights. Raoul was delighted. Hitherto he had suffered for want of an experienced guide and companion in his sight-seeing.

The next afternoon Broom took him over the Bargello. He led the way and poured out a steady flow of art-criticism and philosophy. Beforehand, he gave him luncheon at his villa near the Porta Romana. It was a new building, and free from the grandiose medievalism of Mary’s apartment. The floor of his sitting-room was covered with large squares of black and white marble. The walls were decorated in the manner of a Greek vase, but with life-sized figures. There was a divan, a set of four Adam chairs, and a huge Adam writing-table before the windows. There were no books, except two in use, on a low table by the divan.

‘I keep my books in a library upstairs,’ Broom explained. ‘I don’t think that one should appear surrounded, as it were, by the mechanism of one’s mind. To entertain one’s friends in a library is like giving them a meal in the larder.’ He was wearing a blue linen shirt, open at the throat, fawn flannel trousers and a pair of scarlet canvas shoes. His arms and ankles and throat were as sunburned as his face.

‘In the comparative privacy of one’s home it seems foolish to suffocate in clothes,’ he said, smiling.

An Italian boy, also in a blue linen shirt, but with green shoes, announced luncheon. The dining-room had a floor of unpolished oak, imported from England. Over the mantelpiece was a painting by Sims, a naked youth standing by a pile of sunlit fruits. Between the windows was a Hermes of Praxiteles, painted in natural colours. Throughout the meal Raoul was uncomfortably conscious of this startlingly realistic figure, standing motionless, but like an actual human being on his right.

On the table were bowls of peaches, grapes, and figs, and a bunch of zinnias.

‘I live very simply,’ said Broom, ‘from the desire to extract the maximum of enjoyment from life. I don’t stuff my body with the acids of meat and alcohol, and accelerate the process of decay. So many aesthetes apply their aestheticism only to their surroundings, and not to themselves. It is a crime not to have a beautiful body. No one should be physically distasteful to his fellows. A day should be appointed on which the unfit should be given hemlock. It is a tragedy of our age that the sane mind is never found in the beautiful body. In the physically perfect public schoolboy is found every insanity of snobbery and jingoism, and it is mournful to watch his gradual bloating as an undergraduate, or clerk in the stock exchange.’

He broke off to speak in Italian to the boy behind his chair.

‘The perfection of the human mind and body is the only thing of the slightest consequence, the only reason for our existence. That is a platitude, but platitudes are the only truths. I govern my life by platitudes, and my friends consider me immoral and bizarre. Human existence will only be tolerable when the whole world is immoral and bizarre. Ah! From a platitude I have evolved an epigram.’

Broom laughed with satisfaction at his own wit. His eyes had thick dark lashes, his head a picturesque animation. His teeth were strong and white, and his eyes clear. There was a glow of health in his skin, and life in the fine glossy brown of his hair and beard.

He was peeling and eating peaches, and his movements and expression conveyed the same zest for life, the same gusto, which Raoul years ago, at Crosspatrick, had connected with Uncle Simon.

After luncheon they went back to the room like a Greek vase.

‘As I do not wish to rot my liver I don’t take liqueurs. As I don’t wish to blacken my teeth and go blind I don’t smoke, but I keep these poisons for my guests. Would you like a cigarette or chartreuse? Forgive the gracelessness of my invitation.’

Raoul accepted a cigarette.

‘We must go in ten minutes,’ said Broom, ‘because a literary friend is coming to see me. Do you care for literary people? I can’t bear them. They are not human beings. They are a hash of the books they have read. They have no opinions beyond their taste in authors. There is nothing of themselves in their minds. They are a mass of authorities. One’s mind is only capable of a certain extent of awareness. Literary people are only aware of huge, indigestible, secondhand masses of other people’s impressions. They have no awareness left for life itself. Rimbaud became a great poet when he gave up poetry. The well-read man in his library is not unlike an overfed man surrounded by quantities of food. The lives of both are disproportionate, inharmonious. One should take from one’s books only sufficient to enhance life itself.’

When Raoul finally left Broom, he walked along the Lung Arno to his hotel. The sun was hot and he stopped now and then under an awning, to look in the windows of a shop. He bought a set of rough linen table mats for Sophie.

After a siesta he went round to Mary’s apartment for tea. It was full of people, some of whom were speaking Italian, some French, and some English.

Madeleine drew him aside into a corner.

‘Here you see the great world,’ she said. ‘A French prince, a Catanian marchese, an English baronet who daren’t live in England, and all the rest are donnas and contessinas. Tanti loves them because they haven’t got Australian drawls and they have perfect manners. The prince cheats at cards and the Catanian takes drugs, and Donna Paola has nine lovers at once. I don’t blame her, but nine does seem immoderate. It was about her that the story of the beautiful children was first told.’

‘What story?’

‘She has six children, and some one said to her: “What beautiful children you have, Madame.” She said: “Ah, yes, I chose their fathers for their looks.” Like Broom, you know.’

‘Do you mean Broom is the father of one?’ asked Raoul, mildly shocked.

‘Good gracious, no! He would never have consented. He considers Donna Paola unwholesome, not harmoniously attended to natural life, or some rot. I mean he chose like Donna Paola.’

‘Chose what?’

‘Oh, lord, do buck up. Don’t you know? He has five very natural children, not nineteen—that was an exaggeration. He chose their mothers for their looks. He’s mad on eugenics. They are brought up in a village near Spezia, with no religion and no clothes, except when necessary for warmth. He has been bathing with them all the summer somewhere in the Adriatic. They live on vegetables. They never tell lies, they abhor ugliness, moral and physical, they sing hymns to each other and to the sun, the fountain of life, and they are taught to regard nothing as evil, but only as inconvenient. I expect they will all have babies by the time they are fifteen.’

‘Does Cousin Mary know?’

‘She pretends she doesn’t, because Broom is so very much the distinguished, cultivated gentleman when he isn’t half naked in his own house. And he is of the sacred Montfort blood. It’s extraordinary what a lot old maids think of their clan. She gets to know celebrities through Broom. Although he doesn’t write anything now, all sorts of authors collect round him. One young poet told me that the courage of Broom’s life was an inspiration. I can’t see that it requires much courage to live in aesthetic luxury on four thousand a year.’

Raoul laughed immoderately, and the prince, who was talking to Mary, turned to see the cause of this schoolboy outburst, breaking on the even babel of the salon. Raoul smothered his mirth.

‘He looks beastly acid,’ he said.

‘These rotten aristocrats have no sense of fun,’ said Madeleine. ‘They are always like this crowd to-day. They go about with their smooth tired faces, saying little witty spiteful things, smiling faintly, and trying to seduce you.’

‘But what an extraordinary crowd for Cousin Mary to be mixed up with—Broom and all these people.’

‘She loves their conversation and their manners. She has never been taught to look below the surface, and she has always had so many rough surfaces to grate on her that she simply wallows in this French polish.’

Raoul had a sudden revulsion of feeling. His forehead wrinkled and his eyes were troubled. He felt that discontent with the world that had throbbed through his discussions with Mabel. He saw across a gulf of ten years the Gothic-Arabian arches of St. Paul’s, Melbourne, and the Maluka’s stern noble face, and heard his voice echoing along the aisles:

‘The face of an angel and the heart of a beast.’

At Scudamore he could cheerfully denounce Victorian morals and beliefs, the chivalry which leaped to open a door for a woman of birth, but which sweated the seamstress and the charwoman, which sacrificed the prostitute to the virtue of one’s wife and daughters. He might write rather precious articles, denouncing Australia’s lack of culture, her cathedrals, and advocating a fuller, fresher conception of life and religion. But now, when he was with the fruit of a long civilization in this room, or when he met a practical exponent of a fuller, fresher conception of life and religion in Broom, he was more repelled than attracted. He would have preferred the garden at Scudamore, or half an hour with the Maluka. He wished the Maluka would come into this room. How would he appear among these people? But when he pictured him there the figure of the Maluka suddenly shrank. That just and kindly clergyman, shepherding his boys through the cricket-field of life to the eternal mansion prepared for them by their elder brother, Jesus Christ, would seem incongruous in this French-polished world. That was the distressing fact. It was the Maluka who would appear incongruous, not the smooth prince, nor the decadent baronet. Their very indifference, and lack of preoccupation with the earnest inconsistencies of revealed religion, gave them an urbanity, a breadth of outlook, which at once would place a serious clergyman at a disadvantage. And how would he appear beside Broom? He would think Broom a beast. But one could see that Broom was not a beast, in spite of his five children. That was why the figure of the Maluka had shrunk, because Raoul realized that there was a very definite limit put upon his intelligence. But Raoul felt a great love for the Maluka and a homesickness for St. Saviour’s, and rather wished that he might have journeyed always with that comfortable family to the mansion of Christ.

As he walked away he had more strongly than ever the sense of being without nationality and people, and the beauty of Florence, which at first had appeared so charming, a mingling of Renaissance fecundity with Franciscan piety, now seemed to mask a spiritual decay. He supposed that his home-life had been exceptionally wholesome and that, in spite of Jackie, it had held more than usual of natural affection.

Broom called for him at three o’clock on the following day. He was in a large yellow Fiat, driven by a chauffeur, and offered to take him to San Eremo, a monastery on the summit of Monte Scenario, a few miles beyond Fiesole.

‘I never drive,’ he said. ‘I hate being the slave of machinery. To control a horse is a pleasure, but I find nothing enjoyable in fidgeting with gears. The supreme pleasure is bathing on horseback. It is not surpassed by the pleasures of love.’

As they drove out of Florence Raoul told him of Mary’s party.

‘I have an unfortunate habit,’ said Broom, ‘of regarding every human being I meet as a specimen, a work of art, and all those people look as if they had come out of a second-rate Vernis Martin cabinet. They are absolutely without significance. They move about between Biarritz, Aix, Paris, and Rome, playing bridge and golf, and sleeping together. What they live on and why they live I can’t imagine.’

‘Madeleine doesn’t think much of them.’

‘Madeleine has no right to give an opinion of anyone,’ said Broom irritably. ‘She is absolutely without morals. Is it because she’s an Australian, or because she is uneducated?’

‘I don’t know that Australians have fewer morals than other people,’ said Raoul sulkily.

‘No. I didn’t mean to cast any reflection on Australian morals,’ said Broom, again with that curious smile. ‘But she is a primitive. She interests and annoys me. She has no reticences, no conversational reticences, at any rate. She will ask you to wait while she changes her bloomers. If she hasn’t half a dozen lovers it is only because she has no inclination to those provided. If she had one, she would say: “You know, I slept with so-and-so last night, and he would kick me in the back.” But she is tolerable as a human work of art because she is without pretence or prudery, and physically she is perfect.’

The car roared up the last stretch of hill into the square of Fiesole.

‘Have you been to Fiesole?’ Broom asked.

‘Yes, it was the first place I came to,’ said Raoul rather eagerly.

Broom smiled. Raoul began to dislike him. His smile was infuriating. It suggested amusement at the odd behaviour of individuals of the human species.

‘People always seem to rush to Fiesole,’ he said, ‘partly, I think, because of its musical name, and partly because Oscar Wilde mentions it in a poem.’ Raoul was uncomfortable. Broom unerringly placed a cold finger on all the warm sensitive spots of his soul, and gradually shrivelled it.

‘I suppose you saw the Mino da Fiesole altar-piece in the Duomo?’

‘No, I’m afraid I didn’t,’ said Raoul. ‘I spent most of the time at San Francesco. I just looked at the cathedral.’

‘We might stop and see it.’

When they came out of the cathedral Broom was more mellow.

‘Mino da Fiesole,’ he said. ‘His name is a lyric. One day I must take you to the Badia. The best carvings are there.’

They drove on past square flat-roofed villas, surrounded by cypresses and vineyards. The vines, laden with purple fruit, trailed over the silvery-green olives, and on the silvery-green hills were splashes of purple shadow.

In Australia Raoul had associated all true civilization with the cool green countries of the north, where only hitherto he had found it. A hot climate had for him inevitably meant newness and crudity. Yet here, in a climate not unlike that of the districts round Melbourne, had flowered an art and a culture, the greatest since that of Greece in the fifth century B.C. This similarity of climate seemed to give Australia a greater value in his eyes, finer potentialities.

They came into higher regions, on to wide grassy uplands where cattle grazed, and here and there were farmhouses. It was the first time that Raoul had seen cattle since his arrival in Italy. The air was cooler. In every direction one could see for miles. Broom pointed out, on a far distant hill, a faint white speck which was Vallombrosa. Raoul had a vague desire to go there, and see the brooks, strewn with autumnal leaves. The knots in his brain loosened themselves. He had a very pleasant sense of peace, almost of home-coming, and did not realize at first that it was given by the presence of cows. Cows had been a feature of the landscape at Crosspatrick.

Broom for the time being had ceased talking. Apparently he did not regard this part of the country so much as his personal possession.

They left the car at the foot of a steep stony track, which led up through a pine wood to the monastery of San Eremo. In a desultory fashion they looked round the dull sixteenth century convent, which was without interest save for its position on the summit of the mountain. They came out on to a terrace, whence the panorama was even more magnificent than that which they had seen on the way up.

Broom had a brief voluble conversation with the monk who was showing them round, and who then left them alone on the terrace. He sat on the stone coping, looking down into the pine wood.

‘It is curious,; he said, ‘how actual physical height appeals to religious people. But I think that their aim is not so much to get nearer God as to be above their fellows. One does feel sublimely superior when standing on a high place. Have you ever flown in an airplane? The world is just a map below one, the greatest palaces are less than toys, and all the affairs of men have dwindled to proportionate insignificance. It is the most peaceful feeling that I know. But one does not feel nearer any god there may be. One feels a god one’s self, being able to view with such great detachment, from so great a height, the puny activities of mankind. It must be disastrous to any spiritual humility to live at this eminence. Don’t you think so?’

He did not wait for Raoul’s reply.

‘I should think it must be very difficult for people living on a height to have any fixed convictions. The Archbishop of Canterbury is doubtless an intelligent man, and so, probably, is the Chief Rabbi, and so is Bertrand Russell, and so is H. G. Wells. Yet the profound convictions of these four men are poles apart. It is inconceivable that any one of the four should be absolutely right, and the other three absolutely wrong. Yet each is obliged to maintain that he is. To make a virtue of consistency has been one of the greatest moral errors. The light on the face of truth is always changing. We cannot photograph it at one moment and say: “There is truth, established for ever.” The philosopher must demand the right to be inconsistent. We may hold separate threads of truth which it may seem can never be woven into one pattern. But we cannot reconcile everything till we know everything. Until we know everything we may hold almost entirely conflicting opinions. Only the stupid man can be entirely consistent. The cultivated man can never have any final opinion; therefore the cultivated man can never have any religion, or any morals, except provisionally.

‘It is a pity,’ Broom continued thoughtfully, ‘that the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells cannot be shut up together in this convent. With them we might put Shaw, Einstein, the Prime Minister, and the Pope. Then, after a year, they would be let out to see what they could make of the world. But “reason is no match for convictions which do not rise out of reason.”

‘Puritan people are the most blasphemous,’ he announced suddenly. His strong white teeth flashed above his beard, and he looked as if he would bite any religious person who came near him.

‘They observe the world about them, teeming with life, starred with beauty, they say it is created by God, the most minute detail of a flower, the mechanism of sexual pleasure, and then, achieving an astonishing mental gymnastic, they say it is vain and evil, and the only hope of joy is beyond the corruption of the grave. If they are so ungracious in refusing the present sensible gifts of God, He is not likely to offer them great attractions in another life.’

‘But …’ began Raoul.

‘D’you mind not interrupting for a moment?’ said Broom calmly. ‘I am just following out a train of thought … All the supernatural side of religion is a mental soporific. I do not say that religion itself, a rule of life to govern the harmonious development of mind and body, is harmful. It is necessary.

‘I said I felt like a god in an airplane, but it is a very minor sort of god, after all. From here we can just see, across the Mugnone, where Florence lies. Over there is Vallombrosa. Below us the herds on those sun-swept uplands are small as ants. We think we can see a great deal. But look upward. The walls of space are curved, and beyond are other universes, containing other suns, vast replicas of those minute universes of electrons and atoms which form our bodies, and this wall, and the needles of those pines. And we are asked to believe that the mind conceiving this intolerable mathematical problem of creation, the large spheres of space and the mixing of pollens, the thrusting of foul growths in jungle swamps, the whirling of moons, and the mating of jaguars, has been revealed to us once for all. No one could accept it for a moment who had not swallowed the idea with his mother’s milk. There again are platitudes. We can never escape them … I have held your attention longer than was considerate. Let us leave this spot, dedicated to such blasphemies.’

Broom smiled, as Raoul thought, insolently, at the polite monk who showed them out. In the court before the convent a bishop was extending his cross to a little group of women and youths, who in turn reverently kissed it.

Broom gave a snort of disgust.

‘One tries to regard with urbane detachment the curious customs of one’s fellows, but at times one becomes sick of the stale rags of our civilization and our beliefs.’

They walked down the stony path through the wood. The clear air was full of the scent of pines. Here and there on the wide pastures below them, little groups of farm buildings made longer shadows on the grass. Raoul, with Broom beside him, felt for the first time, with an almost painful keenness, that ‘liberation of the spirit’ of which he had written. Before he had used the expression to describe the unusual pleasure which the mellowed and elaborate art of Italy had given him.

In Victoria he had stood on the sides of the mountains near Healesville, surveying the calm beauty of the valleys below him, but then the prospect had been of a new country, and his appreciation of it was not complicated by any desire, excepting perhaps the wish to build a neat Georgian manor-house on the banks of the Yarra.

He looked at Broom, walking beside him. He certainly was a perfect animal. Raoul had looked him up in a ‘Landed Gentry’ at Mary’s. He was not forty, but forty-nine. A certain largeness of the bones of his forehead, and the look of experience in his eyes alone suggested his age. Apart from these things he might have been twenty-five. He moved more lightly and quickly than Raoul. There was a kind of derisive mirth in his face, which, apart from his monologues, made him an uncomfortable companion. Yet Raoul wanted to see more of him.

‘I think you are an enemy of the human race,’ he said, when once more they were in the car.

Broom laughed.

‘Not at all. I am the enemy of its enemies.’

‘But the human race is made up of those things which you condemn. I mean that so large a part of its spirit is formed by those superstitions, those rags of civilization you want to destroy. If you like the human race you must love its faults, and its absurdities, almost its diseases.’

‘There speaks the decadent artist. Love the poor, the leper, the maimed. I want to breed them out, and therefore am an enemy of the human race.’