Gerontius
by
James Hamilton-Paterson

Soho Press, Inc.;

ISBN: 0939149486

Copyright 1991

other books byjames Hamilton-Paterson Gerontius poetg Option Three a
novel Dutch Alps James Hamilton -Paterson non-fiction Playing with
Water short stories The View from Mount Dog MACMILLAN LONDON

 lj Copyright C James Hamilton-Paterson i989

All rights reserved.  No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the
provisions of the Copyright Act i956

(as amended).  Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to
this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims
for damages.

First published i989 by MACMILLAN LONDON LIMITED 7" 4 Little Essex
Street London we2R 3LF and Basingstoke k1l, Associated companies in
Auckland, Delhi, Dublin, Gabor-one, Hamburg, Harare, Hong Kong,
Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, Lagos, Manzini, Melbourne, Mexico City,
Nairobi, New York, Singapore and Tokyo Reprinted i989 British Library
Cataloguing in Publication Data Hamilton-Paterson, James, i94,r
Gerontius I. Title

823'-914[Fj

,I ISBN 0-333-43I94-5

Typeset by Wyvern Typesetting Ltd, Bristol Printed and bound by Richard
Clay Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk Author's Note This novel starts from an
event: a six-weekjourney to the Amazon which the sixty-six-year-old Sir
Edward Elgar made late in I923Almost nothing is known about this
trip.

It is not certain why he decided to make it although impulsiveness and
restlessness were characteristic of him.  What he said and thought and
did in those weeks are a matter for fancy.  Such is a point ofdeparture
for a work of fiction, as it was for Eduard M6rike nearly I 40 years
ago when he began Mozart'sjourney to Prague.

The issue of truth in a novel whose central character is a man who did
once live is not easily settled.  Elgar was an artist whose life and
music have been documented by modern biographers and scholars such as
Percy M. Young, Michael Kennedy, Jerrold N?rthrop Moore and Diana
McVeagh.  Theirs have been my reference works.

and My greatest debt, though, is to the music.  It is much boringly
debated whether it is permissible to infer biographical filets from a
composer's music.  Yet that morbidly sensitive Englishman who
experienced every note he wrote and could describe one of his own works
as 'the passionate pilgrimage of a jml' is somebody this listener feels
he occasionally inhabits more or less without presumption.  Those
affinities for people we could never have met are the more pungent for
their element of invendon.  On this basis, then, the novelist proceeds
with all due recklessness.  I have deliberately taken a liberty by
turning the shadowy Helen Weaver, to whom Etgar was briefly engaged in
his twenties, into a more substantial character capable of bearing

_v_

narrative weight.  In so doing I have given her a new nationality and
a background quite different from that of a Worcester shoe merchant's
daughter.  For the rest, I tried to be as factually correct as was
interesting.

When I investigated the Booth Line records for this particular journey
a couple of very minor discrepancies with received Elgarian scholarship
did come to light.  These concern the cruise ship herself, RMS
Hildebrand.  Firstly, the various ship's logs and documents which are
still preserved show her captain's name was J. Maddrell, whereas Elgar
biographers who mention the trip at all invariably call him
'Mandrell'.

Secondly, a story is sometimes quoted to the effect that the weather
was so bad on the first part of the outward leg that the Hildebrand's
pilot could not be put off at Holyhead and had to be taken on to
Madeira.  This is odd because Madeira was the third port of call.  The
first was Oporto, the second Lisbon, both of which were major ports
with a constant traffic of vessels belonging to the Booth Line and
various other British companies, Madeira was seven hundred miles
further on; for a Liverpool-based pilot needing immediate passage home
it makes no sense.  The implication is that on this particular trip the
ship missed out the first two ports and went straight to Madeira.  It
didn't, however.  The Hildebrand's log (which lists the dates and times
of arrival and departure at every port) shows that not only did she
call at Oporto and Lisbon but took exactly as long getting there as she
always did - not what one might expect were the weather as bad as is
always stated.

So one wonders about the source of this curious, but quite unimportant,
incompatibility of accounts.  It looks as though the information might
originally have come from Elgar himself.  He could well have
this-remembered the captain's name, while far younger men proud of their
fortitude have been known to exaggerate the storms at sea they have
survived.  Nobody bothers to check a returning traveller's tales for
veracity at the time, certainly not over such trivial details.  Thus
may a novelist sixty-four years later speculate on them
affectionately.

To my acknowledged indebtedness to the authors named above I should
like to add my sincerest thanks to David Pcatc of the Booth Steamship
Company Ltd and Janet Smith of Liverpool City Libraries for their great
courtesy and help.

-vifor Ronald Blythe A train was travelling northwards from London
through the grey squalls of a winter's afternoon.  From a corner seat
in one of its carriages a man watched his country with the scurried
perspective of a railway traveller: crossing fields at a bias, chipping
off the corner of a hill, barked at by sudden brick walls and engulfed
in tunnels.  Desolate suburbias came and went and the tarred telegraph
poles kept pace.  As daylight diminished rain streaked the glass at
flat angles, blurred and wobbled the scene, pooling at the corners of
the pane in trembling pockets.  It occurred to this man (who had dog
hairs on his otherwise immaculate trouser cuffs) that he had spent much
of his life in a compartment, alone and quite still, while outside it
an activity called travel went on whose images beyond the window - ever
different, always the same - represented not distance but time flashing
by.  Days, months and years had reeled past until here he was towards
the end of a lifetime not going anywhere at sixty miles an hour.

After a while he HI asleep and sleeping dreamed a vivid dream.

Later, when events brought back the essentials of this dream, the
fragments had about them a satisfactory, vatic air as if they were true
parts of the man he believed himself to be.

He is to climb at last.

Although from his father's house it appears amid the rockfield no
bigger than a candle, this column has surely cast an immense shadow
across his life.

 He begins the chnib.  Elvcn at this early hour of morning the sun Is
bald and white.  Above film the ccclarwood rungs recede into blue glare
against which the coarse stone column tapers upward.

'Get on, boy,' shouts Rahut from near his heels.  'D'you think you're
the Only one" The words ofthis corrupt acolyte ought to bully away the
last of the dreamer's confidence.  He has been declared a day-tripper,
no longer someone who has tirelessly observed this limestone candle for
years and in all weathers, far enough away to imagine the spiritual
flame blowing from its tip night and day in invisible rags like a
beacon summoning worshippers, sceptics, the curious, the petitioners,
the humdrum devout from all corners of the world.

This unsecable smoke from a man's blazing soul has wafted like incense
across the skies of Syria and Cificia.  At festivals such as Sniffing
the Breezes entire parties of picnickers walk from Antioch to sit on
the ground at a respectful distance, singing impious songs about
spring, eating dates and idly spitting the stones in tiny trajectories
towards their saint.  For Simyun is indeed their saintand while it is
permissible for them to treat him with a certain familiarity and spit
date-stones at him from a mile away it is a big mistake for outsiders
to be heard scoffing.  Tourists do well to leave their witty remarks at
home in Athens or wherever it is they come from with their noisy
manners and bundles of biscuits stuck all over with sesame.

Climbing this ladder to this man today, now, is a terrifying honour.

Yet shouts from below the dreamer remind him that so far as Rahut is
concerned this ascent Is not the end of many years' living in Simyun's
illustrious shadow.  Rahut sees only another petitioner he has vctted
for his master's monthly ration, one more in a succession of climbers
whose coins he has pocketed.  For this Rahut is comptroller of Simyun's
portals.  He admits the world to his master's presence, exercising at
times a quirky capriciousness, If now and again he allows a beardless
village nobody up the ladder it is because he has already turned away
some rotting archimandritc or fabulous sage who has crossed seas in a
leaky boat 'just to ask the saint's advice.  The locals often wonder if
Simun knows about the money Rahut is making.  Not only is there the
matter of audiences.  He also permits the concessions of traders and
hucksters whose stalls ring the column's base from far enough away that
their cries cannot disturb Simyun's meditation.  It is Rahut who chips
pieces off the column for them to sell and it is hers those rarest and
most prized relics of all, the Rahut who gat are scented blackish
coprolites which every month or so the saint lets I fall to the sand
beneath.  Men have crossed deserts for Nvecksjust to acquire a single
fragment of these potent, fragrant truffles.  They are embodied in
lockets, rings, reliquaries, medicines; it is said there is enough
healing in a single one of Simyun's bowel movements to cure the
ailments of the entire world.

I Why, then, amid thing is waft of chicanery does the dreamer still
bother to climb?  After so many years of living in this shadow he has
to ask a question of the man who is variously considered a saint,
shaman, madman, freak.  The stories are famous, of course: how he
joined a monastery when he was sixteen and dismayed his fellowmonks by
his excessive austerities.  They say he had himself buried upright in a
hole in the ground, the sand filled back in and packed up to his chin,
thus passing the livelong Syrian summer in a forgotten corner of the
monastery garden.  It is claimed he spent more and more time thinking
up increasingly inventive privations.

One Lent he had himself walled up in his cell for the entire forty
days with nothing but a single loaf and a pitcher of water and when at
the end they broke down the wall they found both loaf and water
untouched and Simyun unmoved from the precise posture of prayer in
which the masons had last seen him.  It is commonly believed that he
was finally dismissed from the monastery not only because he made his
brothers feel they were positive sybarites by comparison but because
his superior believed Simyun was taking a perverse pleasure in such
performances.  Whatever the reason he went off into the desert and sat
on a tall stone without shade or food, relying on his disciples (for he
was already famous) to give him bread and water.  They say it was to
escape his own disciples that he began to raise his platform ever
higher above them until he lived as he does today at the top of a
column fifty-eight feet tall.

Already he has spent seventeen years standing on a circle of stone
which measures three feet across and is ringed by a wooden parapet
fitted with a crude lectern against which he may lean to doze, for up
there he might literally fall asleep and keep on failing.

It is hard to believe a mere showman would have endured a fraction of
such privations.  After all, it is not Simyun who makes any money from
his feat but Rahut.  What accrues to Simyun is world-wide fame (for
which he cares nothing) and the respectful  'Igr'niagc of the wisest
men ofthc age (for whom he temporarily pi f'(rgocs his visionary agony
to deal with their requests for advice).

Sometimes he writes Icttcrs at his lectern by way of reply, handing
them over in silence to ecclesiastical hierarchs who are hanging there
on the uppermost rungs of the ladder fifty-eight feet above the stony
ground, their eyes on a level with his ankles, the tendons offlicir
hands gleaming in the unshaded blaze in which he lives.

These letters are then carried to all parts of the world, to Asia
Minor, to Constantinop1c, Athcris, Alexandria, to be read to the
churches there.

Why is the dreamer climbing?  Why is he allowing the ground to fall
away, the distant booths to come into view with their motley of I
relics, their brilliant bolts of Chinese silks brought by the traders'
caravans from the other end of earth?  What might this man know which
could conceivably profit him, raised as the saint has been for so much
of his life above the plane of ordinary mortals' Hands and feet dumbly
answer rung by rung.  The climber cannot say how he knows, but he
nonetheless does know thaltthis man is not like those bogus anchoritcs
of Alexandria who live on fallen obelisks and are supposed to be carnal
in the grossest ways with all manner of passersby including, it is
said, sheep and goats.  The Emperor Julian himself referred to them as
'filthy and superstitious'.

Simyun, to whose life peopfc are drawn as moth to flame, has not the
least thing in common with such layabouts.  He thrives on denial; his
pains have made him pure.

The dreamer's nearing the top.  From overhead comes no sound, no
cleared throat, no scuff of shifted position, no murmuring of prayer.

Only, this blue emptiness and dazzle which surrounds him is pervaded
with a faint and uniform hiss as of the sun's rays racing through
air.

The universe is filled with his heartbeat: not a sound from below, not
a sound from above.  Off to his right, maybe a foot away or maybe a
million miles, a vertical black line runs.  It is the rope of knotted
leather strips which the saint uses to haul up his water-skins and
frugal meals, for except on days of Audience an uncured thong is
Simyun's only tangible link with the world beneath.  On days of
Audience such as today Rahut puts up this ladder for the upward
pilgrimage.  This itself is something of a test of a supplicant's
sincerity for it bounces and flexes at each footfall and the narrow
curved stonework against which its top rests seems designed to shed
rather than support ladders, to send them skidding off into space on
either side.  There have indeed been accidents.  The mayor of Sisan,
Simyun's birthplace, was killed a year or two ago when the top of the
ladder slipped.  He had gone to ask Simyun's blessing on a plan to turn
the saint's home town into an official shrine but whether a commercial
interest lay beneath this apparently pious scheme is not known.

Clinging like a beetle to the toppling ladder he made a descending are
across the blue Syrian heavens and smashed against the desert.  Amen.

Some said he was drunk.  Simyun never spoke of the matter.

In fact it is believed the saint is protected by God from all that is
trivial or defiled, that only the worthy ever get to address him.  This
I seems unlikely, for how else would he remain in touch with the dark
doings of this world such that his advice is treasured for its wise and
practical nature?  Yet perhaps God does protect Simyun from all
agencies of physical harm, maybe in recompense for the terrible pains
he inflicts on himself in sacrifice.  His mere existence has been
politically contentious and an attempt was once made to poison his
food.  But as he was hauling it up it is said a great hawk came
swooping out of an empty sky, cut the thong with its beak and carried
the food off in its claws, letting it fall to the ground a safe
distance away.  And even today on the very spot there grows a twisted
black tree of a kind no-one has ever seen before whose wood is so hard
that even a scimitar cannot nick it.  The dreamer has himself seen this
tree but would not presume tojudgc the truth of the tale.  On the other
hand he does know that boys from his village used to go out by night
and shoot at the saint for target practice as he stood there outlined
against the constellations.  And yet never once was he hit, which is
almost incredible given that even at fifteen Badur was reckoned the
finest bowman of the Three Cities.

Indeed, on one of these excursions Hadath was himself injured by an
arrow of Badur's and this can only be reckoned the saint's kindly
retribution, for the wound hurt abominably the rest of that night yet
was cured without trace by morning.  Thus it is ordained that none may
harm Simyun but Simyun himself And so the dreamer has arrived.  His
left hand is now holding the topmost rung.  On a level with his eyes
are two naked feet and ankles, hugely swollen.  Both his hands could
not encompass one of the saint's ankles, so puffed up and black are
they.  The air is filled with an extraordinary smell - extraordinary,
that is, because there are no flowers here.  How did he expect a saint
to smell?  Surely no

worse than a sick animal, having had no washing but winter rains for
seventeen years.  What one eats also determines how one smells, and
Smiyun eats no meat but only the simplest bread and pulses.

Nevertheless there is a faint scent of flowers, although no flowers the
dreamer recognises.  Maybe now and then Rahut sends up some
supplicant's precious gift, a vial of rare attar, priceless essence of
blooms which open in Tartary or China at the other end of those great
caravan trails.

The feet before his face are so huge their pain fills the entire circle
of stonework.  Between them, embedded in the stone itself, is an iron
ring from which a black chain leads up against stained rags.  He raises
his eyes to the dazzle of the sky.  Sirnyun is tethered by the neck
around which is an iron collar set with inward-facing nails.  It
pierces to the heart, the sight of this transfigured animal whose neck
is bloated and cicatrised by the ever-unhealing wounds of seventeen
years.  Otherwise the man is black with the sun where he is not grey
with ragged hair and beard.

'At last you are here, then."  His voice comes down to the dreamer who
is startled at how gentle and young it sounds.  A creature like this,
all iron and sinew and suffering, should have a voice to match - the
voice of a raven, the cracked cry of a prophet.

Is this perhaps the greeting with which he addresses all his
visitors?

'Why do you hesitate?  Step up.  Don't be alarmed, boy."

He may be all-knowing but how is it he doesn't see the evident
impossibility of fitting another person onto that tiny island of
stone?

A scarred hand reaches down at the end of an arm like the branch of a
tree which has been blasted by lightning.  The arm seems so long as to
be endless, as if stretching to another world.

Then the hand grasps the dreamer's wrist and pulls him to his feet I
and he is astonished to find the area is larger than he imagined - so
much so, indeed, that there is even room to pace about.  He is filled
with wonder, with awe.  The proximity of sainthood is overpowering.

What manner of man is this?  For, looking about him, the dreamer now
sees he is in a land of its own.  They are standing in a small
courtyard bounded on three sides by a stone parapet; on the fourth side
is, a cool white pavilion with slender spires and windows from which
puff out damask curtains.  Through an open doorway is a view of a cool
green garden, red and white flowers, the fraying spatter of a
fountain.

The sound of birdsong and water pours through to them in the
courtyard.

'I don't understand,' he says, suddenly frightened to look at the
saint.  'Are we in paradise?"

'Ah, maybe we are,' says Sirnyun.  A butterfly floats through the
doorway and alights on his wrist where it opens and shuts its brilliant
wings as if breathing sunlight.  'Whatever paradise may be."

'You don't know?"

'It's all paradise."

The dreamer thinks of Sirnyun's awesome sufferings.  He suspects he is
after all one of those desert mystics, no matter what his powers.  The
man appears to read this thought.

'For me suffering is my particular path, my gateway.  It is not so for
most of the world.  I was once as saddened as anyone by the pain of the
world.  I used to argue that a merciful God hardly needed offerings of
involuntary pain from his often guiltless creatures.

That notion made me sadder still until I realised there is no God who
needs or wants anything.  There is painjust as there is wind or cold.

I further discovered that I am the nonexistent Godjust as you are.  So
my pain is a wilful gift to myself which has enabled me to see in
different ways."

The dreamer ought to be utterly confused by these blasphemies and
obscurities.  At any rate the question which stands for him and which
he has carried like a pearl up the ladder to present to Smiyun vanishes
from his mind.  The saint takes his arm and leads him to the parapet.

On all horizons the view stretches: the distant white buildings of
Antioch, the pinkish nearby hills, Mount Admirable.

He can 'just see his house with the vineyard nearby, Rastul's herd
grazing.

'Before I learned how to do away with time,' says Sirnyunin his
young man's voice, 'I would stand here and watch the changes as they
occurred.  The city, for example, has practically doubled in size since
I first came here.  There is less cultivation in the hills but more
traders with their caravans.  I used often to be overwhelmed by the
beauty of the world.  At other times when my legs were on fire from
standing, my head was on fire with noon, my neck was ablaze with the
drag of iron and nails, I could not rise above my pain and the very
landscape became listless and hateful.  Often I cursed the nonexistent
God for my self-inflicted exile.  I Imagine that strikes you as
perverse.

He cannot reply.  If this is sainthood then the real and actual world
of its speech and living leave him without words.  Yet there is
something about it which can be understood.

'But it eased.  It always does if you keep on.  Then I saw the same
landscape but differently.  You thought my life up here was either one
long beatific vision or a boring wasteland of suffering?  Well, it is
neither.  A lot happens here, you know.  One notices everything: ants
crossing the stones, lizards in the cracks, birds in the sky, the
seasons' changing.  Can you imagine how exciting it is when winter
storms leave one roaring in space, the ground invisible below a fog of
sand?  Or when in spring the lightnings strike all round?  At such
moments I find it easy to remember I am wearing chain and yet so far no
lightning has come close enough to singe me."

As he speaks the dreamer notices it is rapidly becoming dark.

There are feeble yellow lights in the far city, closer orange glows
marking the traders' dung fires.  There is a brilliant sliver of new
moon in the sky among the limitless starfields.

'Now and then a strange beast used to prowl below,' remarks Simyun.

'It looked like half-lion, half-gazelle.  It had a choking tawny smell
like musk and burning carpets.  It came very rarely but when it did it
lay on the ground at the foot of this tower and looked up and I saw its
eyes were glowing.  Then the eyes would leave its body and float up
towards me, revolving slowly like gems - rubies, garnets, I can't tell
the stone.  When they reached me I plucked them from the air and
immediately I could be through my fists everything the beast had ever
been.  I could see far countries and feel sharp climates; I tasted
carrion and fresh kid; I was the music a shepherd makes alone in the
desert; I knew strange tongues.  Once I was filled with longing by
these things, by a ravenous yearning to pad about inviolate through all
the marches of the world for myself, hearing and tasting and doing and
seeing like my beast."

'When did he last come?"

'Three years ago.  He will never come back because I now know who he
is."

'And who is he?"

'Myself.  I can see with his eyes and hear with his ears any time I
want.  I never realised it, that's all.  I thought I had to wait for
him.

I think I have killed my significant beast."

The dreamer doesn't understand why the saint speaks half sadly as if he
had murdered a real thing.  He turns from the parapet and, glancing
towards the dark pavilion, is surprised to see a single lighted window
with behind the curtain the filmiest suggestion of ith'n the chamber
beyond.  At once he thinks of a movement w I waiting bride but as soon
as this impious and foolish notion defines itself he dismisses it.

Anchorites have no brides, saints no desire for mistresses, visionaries
who can walk amid beasts and angels in the sky surely have no need of
company.  The night breeze through the passage from the courtyard
beyond brings with it something so sweet he cannot tell if it falls on
his cars or his nose or whether he tastes it in the air.  He is so
laved by it his entire skin absorbs it from every direction, a
ravishment such as he has never known.

'What is it?"  he asks.

'What it is.  Call it what you like.  Music, why not?"

And at once it gathers in his cars and he perceives that it is, after
all, music.  But it is quite unlike anything he has ever heard before,
so beautiful and strange and new.  It arouses a longing in him that is
akin to pain and nothing seems worthwhile butjust to hear that sound
and go on listening to it for ever.

'Can you hear it?"

'I am it,' Simyun says.  'You too, of course."

In the luminous night he glimmers beside him, no longer a tortured
saint on swollen black feet and chained by the neck like a dog.  He is
powerful, lithe.  His hands rest on the parapet like a captain's
conning his ship as it forges outward across serene seas.

He is confidence.

'Can you remember your question?"  he asks.  'No, you've forgotten
it.

Never mind.  Don't bother with being mortified.  I'll tell you how it
was with me instead, and that will answer it.  I was sixteen when I
left home with my brother to become a monk.  He was a year or two
older, more mature, more sensible.  He went to an order at Tunis in
Cilicia; I entered the Brotherhood of Mysteries over on the far side of
Mount Admirable."  A pale sleeve raises to point to the east.  'But
from the first I was not like the other novices.  It was not that I was
any holier or more pious and nor was my faith any greater than
theirs.

Much of the time it was rather less, actually.

Throughout my novitiate I hated doing anything with the others, whether
it was attending services or prayers oriust gardening and working in
the kitchens.  I always yearned for my cell or the desert.

I didn't mind my fellow-men, you understand, but I knew their mere
presence blurred me in some way.  I couldn't concentrate.  I believed I
had a mission but I was unsure what it was.  My superiors despaired of
me, condemning me as guilty of the sin of abominable pride thus to set
myself apart from the rest of the community.  "Maybe I am called to be
a hermit," I told them.

"Maybe I should leave the Order and go alone into the desert among the
snakes and the little foxes to shiver at night beneath a quilt of
stars."

"You are not fit to be a hermit," they told me.  "You may have the
fortitude but you lack the humility.  You do not wish to efface
yourself; you have no desire to become lost."

'They gave me punishments, indulgences.  But even as they did so they
were playing my game.  I became notorious throughout the Order as the
most-punished novice.  I added to that notoriety by devising
mortifications of my own which outdid the worst they I wished to
inflict on me.  At last they wearied of me as incorrigible, divisive,
mad.  I was expelled, not so much with curses as with absolutions as if
I had been a crazed dog they feared might seek revenge I if too harshly
turned away.  Hardly a model monk, you're thinking, and you're
perfectly right.  What, then, was this ridiculous mission of mine?  If
I tell you perhaps you'll find it hard to believe, it's so simple and
unmomentous.  It was this: to be myself.

By creating myself, by uncovering my divinity I could reveal the divine
to the world.  It was not in me to be a monk among others but it was in
me to be what a poet will one day call me, "the watcher on the column",
which of course also implies that I am watched.  Thus I am an example,
a revelation.  Pain is a gateway, not an end in itself.  There are many
gateways, this is mine.  I recommend it to no-one but I commend to
everyone the garden which lies beyond.

'Most of the people who come to see me are fools.  No, that's
uncharitable ... not fools perhaps but not ready to understand which
questions to ask.  They want to know what they should do to lead a good
life.  You weren't going to ask that?  No; you're already too
thoughtful.  Good and bad are human value judgements without the
slightest meaning.  There, that's the language of saints.

I see you onceimagined yourself going on an immensejourney to a land
across the desert so distant that our whole world winked out on the
horizon at your back.  You fancied you eventually came across a group
of creatures or people roasting and eating one of their own kind.  And
you thought you had at last identified the common enemy, the anathema,
until one of them said, "We have heard there are monsters elsewhere in
the world who commit the ultimate blasphemy with their dead and lay
them in the earth for worms and foxes instead of taking them back into
the common body with honour and love."  And you didn't know what to
say."

'It'strue,'thedreameradmits.  'I didonceimaginesuch athing."

'Well, now you must go,' says Simyun.  'You already know what to do to
be yourself' 'Do V He is lost.  Already the night is over, or at least
the sky is becoming light.  He cannot bear to leave this man, this
music which still streams from the shadowed garden beyond the
pavilion.

'It isn't music,' comes the voice.  'You merely hear it as music.

Somebody else might perceive it as colour, another as a scent, still
another as a vision of extraordinary cities.  It never ends and nor
will it ever leave you.  It is the garden itself You need only discover
the gateway - but no-one can help you do that.  We are unique.

None can do for us although sometimes things can happen of their own
accord, out of a clear sky.  Be alert.  Use well the interval and don't
be dismayed.  Anyone who searches forced into exile, even if it is only
sixty feet up a pole.  Perhaps going on longjourneys is helpful after
all because I can tell you that one day, in many more than a thousand
years' time, a certain Jew will travel a great distance from a cold
country and visit this place.  He is a rabbi, one of the Hasidim, maybe
more thoughtful even than most.  He will stand on what he is told are
the ruins of this very column and look across at Mount Admirable as the
sun is rising,just as we are now.

So overwhelmed is he that he instinctively covers his face.  Then he
goes home to his distant country and in time he writes down his
discovery.  What he writes is this: "As the hand held before the eye
conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from
the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is
full; and he who can draw it away from before his eyes, as one who
draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds."

From somewhere beyond the parapet there sounds a strange note very like
that of the ram's horn Shofar theJews blow in their synagogues.

'It appears that I can see into the future but I'm often less
certain about the past,' Simyun adm'ts- 'For example, Whobuilithis lower?

I'm quite sure I didn't: I'm no mason.  I'm equally certain nobody else
would have done it for me.  And if they did, who paid for their
labour?

Sometimes I even wonder if I may not have invented it.  Maybe I dreamed
it into existence one night as I lay on my rock below.

Another mystery to ponder on,' and he gives a slight laugh.

As the dreamer turns to him his arm bangs against the wooden lectern
and a clawed brown hand steadies him.  His head slinks to the level of
a pair of monstrous feet from whose rotting toes curl yellow nails.  He
looks up in awe and against the sky's sudden glare glimpses the
silhouette of unkempt hair and beard, the iron collar clamped around
the running sore of neck, the fall of black chain.  As he begins his
descent the Shofar sounds again.  In no time he feels Rahut's hand on
his ankle.

'That was damned quick,' says the acolyte, chewing a fresh quid.

'Straight up and straight down, Oh, boy?  Don't suppose he had much to
say toyou.  Never mind,' he adds half to himself, 'we can fit an extra
one in before noon."

Once more the Shofar sounds and the world 'crks to a halt.

The jerk woke the sleeper in the train.  The lights in his
compartment, whose sole occupant he was, had not been switched on, out
of deference to his slumber.  Consequently the window had not turned
into a black mirror obliging him to stare at his own reflection and
that of the plump, buttoned upholstery which the LNWR considered
suitable for their First Class travellers.  Instead He could make out
scattered lights, signs of a city, hints of dockland.  At once from the
darkness beyond the rain-speckled pane came the sad blare of a ship's
siren.

'It ought to be dawn,' thought the man sleepily to himself, for by
chance it was the very note which, twenty years before, he had written
for the Shofar in his oratorio The Apostles: a clear C to herald the
rising of the sun, the beginning of a new day.  This thought stirred
another, far more recent, memory as of a fading dream which slipped
obliquely away beneath the full realisation of who and where he was:
Sir Edward Elgar On arriving at Liverpool on a late afternoon in
November 1923 to embark on a voyage up the Amazon.  Above him the
netting of the overhead luggage racks bulged with the two light leather
cases his valet had brought to Euston from the club in St James's.

Beside him on the seat lay a cane, an overcoat and a hat.  In the
guard's van was a metal cabin trunk full of the sorts of things a
gentleman might need for a six-week cruise into the primacval heart of
the world's largest unexplored tropical jungle (the phrasing was that
of the cruise company's handout).  The cabin trunk was stout and
japanned.

The valet, who had bought it a week previously in the Army &

Navy Stores, thought it looked quite the thing: serious and intrepid.

Unlike all his master's other tin and steamer trunks this one was
double-sealed against termites, the locks were acclaimed proof against
even the most nimble-fingered lascar or coolie, the hinges and corners
were reinforced with brass.  Empty, it weighed a ton.

Edward had himself classified it as appropriate in the sense that Alice
would have approved the air it gave off.  Privately he thought it
faintly absurd to go cluttered up with so many suits of clothes for so
short a time.  The memory of the trunk in the guard's van now brought
him a whiff of vexation, reminding him that for all his best intentions
it had in the end turned out impossible to make this trip I as he would
have liked, light and unencumbered.  Instead he was dragging baggage
behind him which dated back far beyond last I week and the Army &
Navy.

But then he supposed one did not shed sixty-six years merely by
abandoning habit like a heap of clothes smelling of mothballs.  Nor was
he sure he really wished to.

Imperceptibly the train started again, this tim e achieving no speed
beyond that of a noiseless gliding past unlit deserted platforms
without name which had the air of wharves.  He did not quite recognise
anything but the mere fact of knowing this to be Liverpool made it
familiar from the old days, those penniless days of a quarter century
ago when he had so often come to conduct his own works in the hopes of
making a name (a name!  the futility!), staying with Rodewald in
Huskisson Street.  It was, he suddenly realised, exactly twenty years
to the day that Rodey had died, having nearly singlehandedly turned the
largely amateur Liverpool Orchestral Society into an ensemble capable
of playing the best of the moderns: Wagner and Strauss as well as Elgar
himself.  Poor Rodey.  How typical it was that so powerful a champion
of music in England should have been a textile magnate - precisely the
sort that London snobs had made their jokes about - the trade of music
and the music of tradesmen, and so forth.  Twerps, the lot of them; so
pig-headed and cloth-eared they couldn't hear that for decades the
heart of English music had beat in the provinces, hundreds of miles
from the capital with society dunces and fashionable virtuosi playing
potpourris of Sullivan.

Well, damn them, men like Rodey had helped change that although the
poor man had scarcely lived to see it: dead at forty-three but not
before Pomp and Circumstance no.  i was dedicated to him and not before
his orchestra got first sniff at both it and no.

2.

How the twerps had gnashed their teeth in London!  More to the point,
the awful suddenness of his death had inspired the Largo of the second
symphony which was far more his memorial than the King's.  Well.  It
all seemed so long ago now.  How could he, Edward Elgar, already be
sixty-six?  It was as if Rodey appeared in the shadows on the other
side of the compartment, unaged, to confront the old buffer opposite
him.

'Still visiting Liverpool, Edward?"

'Hardly at all for years.  I'm 'just passing through.  Off to South J
America.  The Amazon, in fact."

'The Amazon?  My dear Cocky, what on earth for?  Don't tell me
Gerontius has conquered the cannibals?"

'Good Lord no.  At least, not so far as I've heard.  No, it's more of
an adventure.  A bit of a 'ape.  just to get away from it all."

'It all, Cocky?  H'm.  What does Alice have to say about it all?"

'I don't live my lifejust to .  he began huffily, but then, 'Alice is
dead."  Could he have forgotten for that instant?

'Oh Cocky.  My dear man; I'm so sorry.  For you, I mean, not for her.

After all, I'm dead too."

Silly, such conversations.  Yet nowadays after the great evisceration
of the war conversations with the dead went on all the time and all
around, so much realer were the departed than the ghosts who remembered
them, the words heard than the words spoken.

Thus, long after the dim figure opposite had been reabsorbed into the
London & North Western Railway's plush upholstery and become pure
shadow the warm and questioning voice lingered: 'Oh Cocky, what are you
writing now?  What great work is brewing for that ungrateful world?"

And there was no answer he could give.  There was no way he, the
living, could say, 'Oh Rodey ... Dear old man, I'm finished."

And 'just then the train stopped, doors began to open, people to shout
for porters.

'Sir Edward,'from the doorway.  Hell, they'd tracked him down
already.

But it was only Tom Shannon the choirman's son come to see him onto the
boat.  Stepping out of the glossy carriage to the platform Sir Edward
Elgar might have been caught in a series of' sepia pictures for the
Pall Mail Gazette: an obviously distinguished man of a somewhat
military bearing, grey haired and grey moustached, buttoning his coat
and adjusting his hat against the squalls of November rain which blew
between the train's glistening roof and the fretted overhang which
sheltered the platform.  This was Sir Edward Elgar the public figure
not so easily recognised as in the heyday of the prewar years, maybe,
but still with the same appearance of purposefulness.  A close observer
might have noticed that Edward Elgar, on the other hand, was vaguely
trying to fit the wrong hand into the wrong glove and had about those
deeply hooded eyes a remoteness like one lost in a strange land.

It was only when they reached the quay that the crui ise passengers
could appreciate quite how bad the weather was and how it was shortly
going to affect them very much indeed.  Railway travellers were, after
all, used to sliding effortlessly through the worst storms, no more
attention needing to be paid to the sluicing blusters beyond the
carriage panes than that someone might get up and lean his weight on
the leather strap to force it and the window a final notch tighter.

But here, huddled in the open-fronted sheds, the boarding travellers
were reminded they had come to the end of solid land.  In the
brilliance of overhead derrick and bunkering lights they caught
glimpses of rigging bowed into arcs by the wind, of rain-slicked
paintwork, buffeting tarpaulin and - beyond the ship's hull - an
impression of the wild surface of the Mersey.

Certain of the passengers must from the moment of dressing that morning
already have supposed themselves magically a thousand miles up the
Amazon beneath tropic skies brilliant with parakeets;

their clothes were absurdly light for an English winter evening.

They almost ran aboard, one hand pressed to their hats, up the gangway
with its slapping canvas sides, to be handed down over the calm, warm
threshold smelling faintly of oil and brass polish by
immaculately-uniformed officers.

Edward stood a little apart from the rest in the sheds, seeming not
torn' d the gusts of rain in the open doorway.  He had clearly in been
recognised by several of his fellow-travellers but gave no sign of
having noticed their glances in his direction, their whispers.  The
squalls beat the flaps of his overcoat against his legs but he
disdained to turn up his collar.  He might almost have been relishing
the elements as proof of his presence here, on this dock, on a dark
winter's evening in the north of the world.  Head tilted back and face
wet with rain he examined the Hildebrand from stem to stern as his home
for the next month and a half.  He saw an elegant small liner, graceful
almost to the point of daintiness, with a grey hull below the white
strake, white upperworks and the all-black I funnel of the Booth
Steamship Company.  He was a well-travelled man and his eye was
practised enough tojudge the vessel's tonnage at about seven thousand
and its length at some four hundred feet.

He was surprised that so large a craft would be able to go a thousand
miles up any river, even the Amazon, and wondered how many feet of
water she drew.

He shook hands briefly with his escort and walked in a soldierly manner
up the gangway.  When he was halfway up a clout of wind caught the side
of his head, lifting a spurt of grey hair and twirling his hat away
into the sky.  For an instant a dockside light caught a pale reflection
from the maker's lozenge in its crown before it vanished over the
Mersey towards New Brighton.  The Hildebrands officers were most
perturbed as they welcomed him aboard.

'It's only a hat,' he told them gruffly and then a steward led him
along a neatly-caulked deck with a strip of green carpet running down
its centre.  On the left were cabin portholes, curtained and with
lights burning inside.  On the right was a line of larger, seaward
portholes through which could be glimpsed the edge of the quay and
wooden pilings.  This passageway, after the blustrous weather outside,
was warm and quiet and trembled slightly underfoot.  Polished mahogany
handrails ran along both walls.

Eventually, after certain turnings, the steward's gleaming heels
stopped outside a door with a brass figure 2 on it.

'Your cabin, Sir Edward."  He unlocked the door and helped his
passenger over the few inches of coaming.  'Steward Pyce, sir.  I shall
do my utmost to ensure your trip will be happy and comfortable.

I'm entirely at your disposal, sir.  Should you need anything you have
only to ring the bell.  Meanwhile I shall have your luggage sent alon
as quickly as possible."

As he spoke he was helping Edward out of his wet coat, tuttutting as he
felt the sodden velour facings.  'With your permission I shall take
this away with me and have it thoroughly dried.  Dinner is not for
another two hours, sir.  Captain Maddrell does still hope to be able to
sail with the tide, that's in about forty minutes, but they say there's
quite a sea running out there tonight and perhaps in the circumstances
he'll prefer to delay a little."

'I hope not,' said Edward.  'Personally I came to travel, not to sit
tied up to a Liverpool quay."

'Ah, you're a good sailor then, sir.  Not like some others aboard, I
should fancy, judging by .

'The rougher it is the better I like it.  Oh, and you might be so good
as to ask them to be careful with my trunk.  I have some instruments in
it."

'Certainly, sir.  They'll treat it like it was eggs."  Steward Pyce
made a pecking gesture with his upper body, all that was leftin this
democratic postwar wasteland of a servant's bow, Edward reflected as
the man withdrew.

Outside, Pyce walked noiselessly off up the carpet mimicking his
passenger's gruff bravado under his breath.  ' "The rougher it is the
better I like it."  Ho.  Says you.  They all do, don't they?  They all
think they're the best sailors who ever set foot to deck until it blows
a bit and then watch 'em not turn out for breakfast.  Restaurant empty
and the cooks all sitting on their thumbs the galley looking at half a
hundredweight of toast getting cold.  Evening sir, madam,' he raised
his voice and adjusted his vowels as other passengers passed in the
wake of their own steward.  Eventually he tracked down Hempson and ran
his finger along the list his colleague was holding.  'Elgar.  Number
2. Says he's got a trunk with trombones in it and to be careful with
it."

'Not another bloody musician?  We've already got a band aboard, ain't
that enough?  Trombones, indeed."

'Ought to be thankful it's not aj'oanna, mate.

'It'll weigh,'said the man sagely,'it'll weigh.  Not one of 'em but
don't bring a ton ofjunk for six weeks.  "Kindly be dashed careful with
that, my man.  That one's got my medals in it."  ' Hempson had lost
three fingers near Arras six years ago and had pronounced views about
the officer class.

Meanwhile Edward was sitting on the edge of his bunk, staring through
the open doorway at his small sitting room its shaded with lights and
writing desk.  In one hand he still held a booking slip which read 'Sir
Edward Elgar OM.  Cabin Deluxe no.  "-.

' "Happy and comfortable......... he said to himself.  'What on earth
am I doing here?"

He got to his feet, throwing the ticket on the bunk.  In the sitting
room he stood beside the writing table and riffled the tops of the  so
that the Booth Line crest shimheaded stationery in the rack lacking
sound.  it was the vacant gesture o mcrcd with a faint husk' droom
unable to think of what to do man newly arrived in a hotel be next.

It was when, in response to the bugle, he took his seat in the
restaurant that Edward finally appreciated how at variance were the
actuality of the cruise on which he had embarked and his 11, intimate
advance fantasies of it.  He had vaguely supposed a small group of
civilised persons, none of whom had the faintest connection with music,
being car land and
1 ried for a
breathing space to an exotic
back.

He had imagined diverting, worldly conversations, tales such as those
found in Conrad and Maugham told over dinner by rubber planters
returning to their jungle fastnesses.  He had even speculated about
well, why not admit it'- some flutter of interest a .  t the taffrail,
a moonlit equatorial night bringing him and an indefinite feminine
present cc into contact like amber and silk to rub a brief crackle into
his old life.  In short he had imagined shedding himself for a few
weeks and entering a little world so absorbing and self-sufficient it
would be almost anite dutiful shipboard letters home to the imposition
having to wr ever-dwindling tally of friends and family.

It was in the restaurant he discovered the Hildebrand was carrying
nearly sixty First Class passengers, thirty-eight of whom were, making
the round trip, another three hundred were odd Steerage passengers to
be picked up in Oporto and Lisbon mainly Portuguese migrant workers, he
gathered, bound for Brazil clap eyes on and their fortunes.  There
would be no need ever to them; but even so, merely knowing about fresh
hundreds of people tucked away on another part of the ship destroyed
the last remnants of his fancy of quiet intimacy.  He did, however,
discover he had been placed at the, Captain's table and as time went by
he is'bic bulkhead was to find this mere fact created some kind of inv
i who shared this table and the rest of the between those select few
First Class.  Tonight the Captain was not at table.  He had sent his
apologies via the Chief Steward and was sure his guests would
appreciate that He was preoccupied with getting under way in one of
the severest storms for some yelars.  TIhe Booth Line prided itself its
steamers on the Madeira-ParA run but on the punctuality of ipping
companies always

record.  She ' was no less proud ofits safety ime disaster, such adow
of the most recent marit operated in the remind them that modern engine
disasters being regular enough to reecring was not invincible.  Not
three months ago the French steamer Diputi Emile Driant had foundered
off Dungeness with the loss of seventeen lives.  While Captain Maddrell
was wrestling with such problems on the bridge his passengers ate their
first meal Liverpool.

aboard still tied up to the dock in Edward was introduced to a dozen
people whose names more or less passed through his mind leaving few
traces.  Some of them seemed to fall so readily into 'types' that he
felt excused the re actually laborious gallantry of trying to remember
what they we called.  There was one of those mysterious knights of
commerce ue - Sir Somebody Pereira - port whose very nationality was
wig wine, most likely, or rubber.  Or even slaves, who could tell?  Two
spinsters going back to some benighted mission in the depths of
nowhere, all shiny knuckles and good works, A young man, practically a
boy - Peter?  Patrick?  - going to take up his first post as a clerk in
Alfred Booth & Co."s offices in Manaos.  A young woman in her twenties,
rather modern, a Miss Air, self-described ominously as 'an artist'.

There was even an explorer or botanist named - incredibly - Fortescue,
with a red face and vague mustache: the sort of features which become
visible only when surmounted by a pith helmet.

They all chattered as they ate, more, it struck him, out of excitement
at the, impending voyage than from a real desire to him they maintained
that exagmake acquaintance.  Towards i gerated respect which he had
long since come to recognise and I largely in silence often to connive
at.  The food was good; he ate it I and listened to their
conversation.

But towards the end of the meal I his reserve was overcome - maybe by
the wine or even by the others' high spirits - enough to remark: 'I'd
take a small bet that this company will be a good deal I quieter by the
same time tomorrow.  Rather less numerous, too.

"I imagine, Sir Edward, that you speak figuratively?"  said one of k
betting on the way Providence sees fit the spinsters.  'I hardly thin
to dispose the weather ... ?"

'Will anyone here offer me odds?"

'Well really, Sir Edward .

 'You think it'll be rough then, sir?"  asked the Booth's boy.  His
evident apprehensiveness seemed to be shared by a majority of those at
the table.

'my steward certainly thinks so."

'Ah, one of those old sea-dogs, is he?"  asked the explorer
sceptically.

'More of a puppy, I should say, in every sense.  But he claims
friendship with the Marconi man in whom nowadays all wisdom is
vested.

Even old sea-dogs have given up lifting their muzzles to the sky.  They
shove up aerials instead."

'It's quite miraculous and mysterious,' said the other spinster, giving
him a sharp look he could not interpret.

From somewhere overhead came a melancholy C, loud enough to thrill the
panelling and the table and the deck beneath their feet.

'Maybe we're off at last?"

But the glimpses of lamplit quay beyond the portholes remained
unchanging.  However, several guests took this as the moment to leave
the table.  As Edward himself stood up the first spinster made a
nervous leaning gesture with her chest which implied that the eight or
so feet of air between them was a momentarily intimate space.

'Despite our little contretemps I really must tell you, Sir Edward, how
immensely honoured we are to have you with us."

He muttered something.  'Muh, ah, very kind."

'But I should explain that it's a particular honour for me.  You see, I
sang in the chorus at the first performance of your wonderful Apostles
in Birmingham."

'I am sorry, madam, that you should have thus wasted the precious hours
of your youth."

'Wasted?  Sir Edward!  It was the greatest possible privilege.  It was
probably the single most memorable event of my life.  For all that it
was so long ago I remember it vividly.  The year was nineteen hundred
and three."

'I shouldn't wonder.  But I believe the only thing worth remembering
about that year was Rock Sand winning the Derby and the Two Thousand
Guineas and the St Le ler.  Two to five on.  Not much chance for a
killing with a horse like that.  Now if you will ;p excuse me.

'Pg,' he said to himself as he strode off down the passage to his
cabin.  'Pig-pig-pig."  But then, as if to convince himself that his
rebuff had been justified, 'She's ghastly.  Is there no end to these J
dried-up creatures who hover around choral societies like vultures?  I
expect her friend sings drawing-room ballads in K sharp.  Cursed pair
of sirens."

'Pig He let himself into his cabin.  His trunk had arrived and seemed
to take up most of the bedroom floor.  Its new lacquer glittered
malevolently.  Coffin, strongbox ... ; certainly it had the air of
buried things about it, either of things decayed or of things
concealed.  Because he had not wanted valeting by a stranger he had not
given Pyce the key.  He now laid out his own night things, uncovering
in the depths of the trunk several polished mahogany boxes with rounded
edges, brass carrying handles and keyholes.

The lid of each was inlaid with a rectangular ivory wafer where a name
could be imprinted; they were all blank.

He read for a while in his dressing-gown, wishing to take refuge from
that part of his brain which was vibrating with events, his day's
travelling, the new surroundings.  Beneath these lay the deeper upset
of a life made suddenly rootless and aimless.  His present existence
seemed encompassed by the dingy walls of clubs and flats despite his
recent move from Hampstead back to Worcestershire.  Now that Alice was
gone the London place had outlived its purpose.  In relief he had
returned to the county of his birth where he could finally turn his
back on that endless metropolitan coming-and-going which had made
Severn House so difficult to work in.  Visitors, dinners, receptions,
theatre-parties;

telephone, telephone, telephone.  Lady Elgar had revelled in it.

Only he had known that each time the footman opened the front door
another bar remained unwritten and another few pence unearned to pay
that footman's wages.  Footmen.  Dear God, he was a composer.  Why did
he have to live like a character in Earnest where young moneyed swells
could mess about at the piano while the butler brought in cucumber
sandwiches?  Damn them all, he thought, without trying to identify
'them' or, for that matter, having to decide whether he himself were
included.  A little hummock of bitterness heaped itself momentarily,
lurched him and rolled on even as the other, the reading part of his
brain resisted its interfering with the kind of serene melancholy he
hoped might permit sleep.

Why had he brought Tennyson to read, of all people?  Griefs, longings,
loves, ships, boxes, death.  The rumble of wheels above the dreamless
head.  He closed the volume and went into the bedroom.  As he did so
the carpet transmitted another C to his slipper-soles which was then
taken up muffledly by the air within the panelled box of his cabin.

This time although the sound died away the carpet remained trembling.

When finally he laid his head on his pillow he could hear distant
machinery and marvelled at the smooth rumblings of steel, the tons of
hot castings and whirling axles on which his life would depend for the
next month or two.  For a moment he was conscious of savage pressures
in boilers studded with bolts.

'Calm sea.  Prosperous voyage.  Codswallop."  On the brink of sleep
more jumbled phrases came to him: 'The watcher on the column' and
'autumnal man'.  It was what came of leafing through Tennyson before
going to bed.

He awoke once during the night, his eyes opening onto a dim circle of
light.  His first thought was of a hospital or nursing room, one of
those places of disquiet and transience whose doors have round
observation panes let into them through which white-caped heads were
visible from time to time like a muster of ghosts waiting to be
joined.

Another operation?  The pitching of the room still further bemused
him.

just before a doleful calm panic set in he remembered where he was and
consciously stopped his pyjama'ed arm before it could reach the switch
on the bedside lamp.  He was on his way to Brazil.  Brazil?  He must be
mad.  Therefore the circle of light was the curtained porthole giving
onto the shelter deck.

The Hildebrands plates quivered to waves and machinery.  For a moment
the motion was disagreeably like his recurrent attacks of Nl6nire's
disease which had so debilitated him during the war; but once he knew
the movement was real and not a trick of the inner ear he began to
enjoy it.  It was surely rougher now than it had been on any of those
crossings he had made to the Continent rougher, come to that, than on
his transatlantic trips to New York in the Mauretania.  After a
particularly violent lurch which made the toothglass in the bathroom
rattle in its retaining ring he thought it might even be rougher than
it had been for the Mediterranean cruise with the Royal Navy in 1905 For
a while he debated getting up but gradually an inertia stole over him
which was more like abandonment.  Why worry?  Things had run their
course.  If by some wilful alchemy his emptied life now consisted of
being in a plunging steel box heading towards a dark continent he had
never wished to see, why not?  As soon do that as continue desolately
shifting between the unsettled poles of Kempsey - still all packing
cases which he now feared to unpack and the London clubs where he lived
out of suitcases.  What drearier rut for an artist than that which led
between servile slipperdom in the shires and the billiard rooms, smoke
rooms and theatre crush-bars of the city?  The shunting back and forth,
the search for a quiet place where the departing Muse might once again
be persuaded to settle: such very restlessness guaranteed it never
would.  Perhaps, then, in Brazil.  Perhaps what had deserted him in
fading England was now waiting among the energetic canopies of vast
forests, its jewelled wings folded.  It seemed unlikely; but then
everything did.

It is the moment between dusk and dark when the forest stops breathing
in and prepares for its night-long exhalation.  With the vanishing of
sunset's colour the water slides around the river bend like liquid
slate, its surface scrawled faintly with poolings and involutions.  The
first fireflies blink over the mud among the rot and tangle at the
jungle's edge.  At the last moment of visibility a shadow comes and
goes on the water although the air above seems to hold nothing more
substantial than moths and midges certainly nothing which could draw
beneath it the outline ofjagged wings.  This slow flap as of membranes
supporting a most ancient thing crabs its way upstream at an angle and
is lost almost as soon as the eye thinks to have seen its shadow.  A
strange cry comes from invisible mid-river and at once a thousand frogs
burst into steady unison.

Anybody who has felt nightfall's breeze off the river expire beneath
damp heat rolling out of the jungle may also sense behind j the rising
whoops and screams and chitterings the combined tension of ciliary
muscles as unnumbered pairs of eyes adjust their lenses to the dark on
all sides.  Only man becomes more blind.  Yet there is a man here at
this moment, watching this scene.  It would be better to say he surveys
it, for he is not standing on the shore but high above it.  There is a
small clearing from which the branchless trunk of a dead tree soars
straight up.  Its base is swathed in moss; above this the shaft rises,
glimmering where bark has peeled in scrolls.  At the top is a makeshift
platform of branches lashed roughly together in a rocs nest and on this
he stands.

There is about this figure a great attentiveness.  The very fact of its
watching changes the scene in some way.  In every direction for a
thousand miles night hides the unrecorded, the inchoate.  But this tiny
patch of Brazil is different: it is being observed and experienced.  It
is even being loved.  For the smells and sounds of the forest, as they
rise from below and reach across from the adjacentjungle canopy, are
fond to him.  Even the stinging insects which cluster about exposed
skin are familiar, a necessary part of the mysterious cycle in motion
about his axle-tree.  Years of this rigorous pursuit have sharpened his
night vision and he easily identifies various animals which pass the
foot of his tree.  In fact there is a lamp in this eyrie but so content
with the darkness is he that tonight, as often, he has delayed lighting
it.  Once he does so his night vision will be destroyed for the rest of
his vigil and it is a faculty he is loth to lose.  Meanwhile the sky
flickers soundlessly to distant lightning.  Sometimes he smiles when it
crosses his mind to I wonder what people would think if they could see
him standing up here in the dark being eaten by insects.  Those who
didn't know might suppose him mad - the victim, maybe, of some
self-imposed penance.  And those who did - well, they too might find
something extreme in a mode of behaviour which so courted discomfort
and even danger.

There is a sudden breath of air across one cheek.  He is tremblingly
alert but does not move his head.  His ears strain for the sound of
something he can sense approaching, for whose arrival he yearns.  A
heavy body moves through the undergrowth below, but it is not that.  A
night bird crossing the river cries chakk-chakk, chakkchakk, in a
crescendo as it passes overhead.  Following the sound with his eyes the
watcher glimpses a blunt head crossing a starfield.  It is not that,
either; its diminishing cry is swallowed up.

But in this limp tropic air there is a new tautness.  Out there is some
creature for which he has affinity.  His sensibility has honed itself
and is seldom wrong.  Again the breath of air although the night is st
ill.  He imagines a light furry weight settle on the back of one hand
or on his neck.  Despite himself his skin crawls.  He feels for the
lamp and strikes a match.

The flare of light alarms certain creatures.  There is the sound of
wingbcats as a dazzled bird rushes for darkness.  From the foot of the
tree comes a startled snapping of twigs.  But other things home in on
the light and circle it in ecstasy.  Beetles batter the platform with a
crack of shards, carom off the lamp glass.  The watcher is being spun
into a whirling cocoon of insects.  He catches the sparks of eyes,
flashes of plumage.  They are a wonder to him, the extravagant colours,
the tigerish markings.  It is this prodigality he chiefly loves: this
profusion of colour and design for neither the light of day nor the
eyes of man.  The revelation of this concealed world has made the days
less preeminent, less shallow.

And then he feels again the close breeze at one cheek and this time
makes out a darting at the light's edge.  Finally it comes completely
out of the darkness to him: a moth the size of a pipistrelle clad in
soft gold down.  It settles on his shirt-front and he gazes down at it
expectantly and with wonder.  He notes the rapid tremble of its
forewings, a stiff blur as it crawls an inch or two closer to his
throat.  Presently it stops and relaxes and he can see its hindwings
are patterned like watered silk.  Delicately anus deposits an amber
drop of liquid on his shirt.

He stares into its eyes and thinks of his own hundred faces in those
tiny gold seeds.  The antennae are thick as beige feathers; the moth
holds them high like the horns of an oryx making it look both quizzical
and fierce.

Slowly its abdomen pulses.

Seen from out on the river the light at the top of the tree is bright
but scarcely illumines anything.  It is there, high up in the air, for
itself, on its stalk like a single dandelion opening short yellow
petals.  If a boat were to pass in midstream it would appear a lone
bloom indeed, maybe the only light in an entire dark continent.

Because it is unique it is a focus, a centre of activity, a
contemplative node.  To be carried past it out there on the dark
current would be to have one's attention moriopolised, for as long as
it remained visible, by nothing more complex than a light up a tree.

But as the boat rounded the bend and a swathe of forest extinguished it
the mind would be unable to let go the image it retained.  From now on
thejourney would be different, the night itself changed by the fact of
having seen this: a lone figure standing on its high wooden tower in
the middle of Brazil, motionless and waiting in the mothy air.

The next morning Steward Pyce almost concealed his disappointment on
finding Cabin no.  "-S occupant positively chipper.

Looking for all the world like a displaced squire Edward was striding
about the shelter deck saying happily famous things under his breath as
the ship lurched and fell.  Through the tightly-dogged portholes were
visible steep wastes of green-grey water marbled with the scud of
broken foam.  The Hildebrand bounced and slammed, its twin screws
vibrating as their tips gashed the surface and then quictening as they
were thrust back beneath a deep tonnage of water.

'By golly, that was a corker!  'Morning, Pyce.  Any chance of breakfast
yet?"

'Every chance, I should say, sir.  There'll be quite a lot of it to
spare this morning."

'Coughing in their stables, are they?  So much for theJollyJack Tar
supposed to be lurking within every Englishman.  I think I win my
bet."

'I'm afraid they are not all blessed with sea-legs like yours, Sir
Edward.  And the Marconi man says it will probably get worse.

There's been a transmission from an American vessel out in the Atlantic
to the west of us and they're taking it green quite badly.

We've not even been able to put the pilot off at Holyhead like we
usually do.  He's still aboard and looks like being so for some time
yet.  The Captain says he's not keen on dropping him at Le Havre: wants
to keep well clear of Biscay and I'm glad to hear it."

Edward made an agreeably rolling progress to the restaurant where his
spirits were still further lifted by the vista of empty tables.  Only a
few of them had been laid, their cloths dampened with water.  At these
a handful of breakfasters was sitting.  As he passed they greeted each
other with convivial nods in mutual recognition of their superiority to
the landlubbers still groaning weakly in their bunks below.  At his own
table he found Captain Maddrell himself and Miss Air the 'artist'.  His
estimate of her went up.

'I was beginning to despair, sir,' the Captain said after he had
introduced himself.  'I could hardly believe we had only one decent
sailor at this table.  It seems we have two.  Now you will think it
rude of me, sir, but I really must be excused.  This weather has us all
aback - or it would have if we had sails."

'Of course,' said Edward.  'Besides, I'm sure Miss Air and I will feel
all the safer knowing you're going back to the bridge to steer this
tub."

'In that case you'll be distressed to learn that I'm going to do no
such thing.  As a matter of fact I'm going to bed.  I've been steering
this tub, as you put it, all night and it's time to turn in.  But don't
worry; you'll be in good hands.  Why don't you pay us a visit later on
if you're interested?  See how the old Hildebrand runs?"

'Oh, I'd like that.  How do I get to the bridge?"

Just ask any of the stewards or an officer.  You'd be most welcome.  If
you're feeling really intrepid we might even be able to say that the
Master of the King's Musick actually took the helm."

41 say,' said Edward when the Captain had left, 'there's a forthright
sort of cove.  Nary a word minced.  That's quite 'oily.  I love
bridges, especially when there's a bit of a swell ... I'm sorry we
didn't talk last night.  I'm not much at meeting people, you see.

All I know about you is that you're Miss Air the artist."

'Please do call me Molly, Sir Edward.  I imagine it'll prove quite
difficult to keep up an indiscriminate formality all the way to Brazil
and anyway, one needs to reserve the right to be formal for those
special cases one wants to keep at arm's length."

'Well, thank God for an honest person.  That's two in as many
minutes.

If this keeps up I'm going to enjoy this trip.  Do you suppose it's the
proximity of a watery grave which knocks the bunkum out of people?"

'Not in my case, Sir Edward, though I can't speak for the Captain.  I'm
afraid I'm seldom less frank than I am at this moment.  It has never
done me the least good."  She could hardly interpret the look she
caught coming from, it seemed, his very skull so deep-set were his
eyes.

'Oh, I he began.  Then, 'I really,can't resist your name.

Might I pass you the marmalade imaginaire?"  With a courtly gesture he
set the earthenware marmalade pot on the dampened cloth in front of
her.

'I thought I'd already heard them all.  I think it's very dashing of
you to be original while breakfasting on a sinking ship."

'Oh) are we really?  Mightn't the Captain have told us?"

'Captains don't like panic.  It scares them more than drowning.

But it's true I don't know that we're actually sinking.  We keep going
up and down but on balance I'd say we go down further than we come
up.

These things are cumulative."

Later he took from his trunk a blank leather-bound book portentously
labelled 'Journal' in gold lettering on its spine.  He had decided to
keep a diary of the voyage, although 'decided' was perhaps too
intentional a word to describe having bought it impulsively on seeing
it in a stationer's.  It had been the day he booked his passage equally
on impulse, since here he was on the high seas barely a fortnight
later.  Despair had a way of making one do things which then took on an
air of spurious purpose.  A ticket to a far place, a new leaf ... It
seemed implausible.  And yet ...

Boarded in terrible weather.  Lost my hat.  What idiotic phantasy was
it of a little steel island detaching itself from these depressing
shores & sailing away into sunshine with a select complement of souls
aboard?  The ship's a monster - well over a hundred yards long - albeit
an elegant one & seems full of cocky stewards, shifty men & made-up
women smoking.  Unsure about my immediate fellows since most are too
busy down below trying to turn themselves inside out.  Molly Air has
style & a fine name (?chin H apt.  Maddrell's breezy & I think mayn't
be above poking fun at opera?).  C us.  Difficult to mind much.  Hisjob
isn't to be sociable but an expert shipdriver.  Ancient landlubbers
like me must be as trying as those people who used once (once!) to come
up after concerts & start off, 'I'm afraid I'm thoroughly ignorant
about music, Sir Edward, but I want to tell you .  .

."

Still, Maddrell has invited me up to the bridge later - his organ-loft
- so I ought to be flattered & am.

Hempson and Pyce were enjoying a cigarette and a bottle of sherry
filched from the bar.  They were comfortably asprawl on First Class
sheets and tablecloths in no.  i Linen Store, a warm and rocking nest
with a good many steampipcs crossing its walls and ceiling.

Each lay on racks on either side of the narrow gangway dividing the
room, Pyce with his boots on a pile of face towels, Hempson with his on
a heap of pillow cases.  Now and then they would stick out a hand and
the bottle or a cigarette would be passed across.

This was only one of several bunk-botes scattered throughout the ship
where members of the crew could go into illicit retreat, chiefly to
smoke and drink and philosophise.  On this particular morning the two
men had company: a pregnant cat asleep on a deep litter of
freshly-laundered table napkins.

'They're here again,' Pyce was saying.  'Dickins andjones."  This was
their nickname for an unlikely pair of confidence tricksters who from
time to time joined the cruises under a variety of names.

'I saw 'em.  Same cabin as last time, if I remember right.  Gave 'em a
wink, too, as an old pal."

'What did they do?"

'Nab, Po-faced.  Professionals, aren't they?  They've got their job,
we've got ours.  Live and let live, say U 'Right, and good luck to
'em.

Except I hope it's not my passengers they fleece.  I don't need the
bother, I really don't.  It's always the rich ones who cut up worst."

'Like that Yank you picked on?"

'How in hell was I supposed to know he was a ruddy magician, I Hemp?

Bit of a misunderstanding, that's all."

'You said.  Still, probably best to keep your nose clean this time
around.  Otherwise Chiefie'll dump you.  You watch him, Ernie.

That one's got a streak of meanness in him."

'Not the only streak he's got.  Seen that new waiter with the hair he's
put aboard?  Blimey."The two men smoked in silence for a bit, staring
up at the wood slats supporting the linen on the shelf above.

When Pyce next spoke the suddenness of the sound made the cat stretch
all four legs stiffly out without opening an eye and then twist its
head still deeper into the linen so its throat lay uppermost with a
somnolent pulse ticking.  'And what about this new MO, ch?

A rum 'un all right.  Shouldn't fancy his sick parades."

'Douggic says he's knife-happy.  Likes a drink now and again, too, so
I've heard.  And they say there was something funny about him resigning
the Army.  He's dark."

'What was that, then?"

'Nobody seems to know.  Could be a streak there, too."

'Ah, the old Hildebrand gets worse and worse ... Do you ever wonder
what we're all doing?  I mean, tooling backwards and forwards across
the Atlantic.  Of course, I know what we're doing, making a living,
but.  . ."  Pyce blew an inarticulate cloud of smoke over the sleeping
cat.  'Sometimes I get thinking about it and it all suddenly seems
funny.  But when I try to explain, like now, it all goes back to being
obvious.  We're making a living.  But the Old Man's only a bus driver,
isn't he?  This is 'just the number i i, except it goes to Brazil
instead of the Town Hall or the Red Lion.

So what's all this stuff for?"  He gestured largely with the nearly
empty bottle.  An amber ejaculation of sherry flopped across the
bedsheets.  'All this classy stuff, all that champagne and oysters and
caviar and dance bands.  You don't get caviar and dance bands on the
number i i. Know what I mean?"

A 'I know what you are,' his friend told him kindly.  'Bit squiffy."

'You do know, Hemp.  You know exactly what it's like when we get to the
other side.  The sun beating down and the shithawks up in the sky and
trees as far as the eye can see and the blokes there just living their
lives when up comes the Hildebrand, the old number i i, regular as the
timetable promises.  I mean, what do they think about it all?  About
us?  Where do they think we're going?  We just past chucking stuff over
the side and laughing and giggling.

"You've seen 'em, Hemp.  You can't throw a dried pea over the rail
without some little brown scrawny bugger paddling up in a tree trunk to
nick it.  There's nothing we chuck over they don't go for:

empty tins, old crates, ends of rope.  They can use it all.  I dunno.

What is it we're doing, driving round the ruddy globe dancing and
giggling and throwing stuff away?"

'Do give over,' Hempson said.  'And pass me that bottle before it all
... You rotten brighter, you've scoffed the lot."  you spill

'It spilt a bit."

'Know what you are, Ernie?"  Hempson's tone was half cross, half
affectionate and something like envy gave an edge to his accusation.

'You're a trouble-maker.  You've got the mind of a trouble-maker, you
have.  Me, I've had enough trouble."  And he stared at his own gappy
hand.  But Pyce wasn't looking.  He was following the contours of the
lumps in the cat's belly very gently with a fingertip.

'Am-az-on,' he murmured in time with his caresses.  'Am-az-on."

Edward, exploring, found the ship's library empty but for a man in a
white mess-jacket busy with a rag and a pot of beeswax.  For all its
overtones of clubland - reinforced by the ghosts of half a million
cigars and pipes wafting in from the carpet and furnishings of the
smoke room next door - the place had the air of being used rather than
consulted.  A brisk marine smell hung about the pages of the books he
took down at random.  Also quite different from the volumes in London
clubs (which seemed to acquire a uniform walnut hue as if they had
become pickled in gloom) these were unusually pale about the cover and
spine, presumably from having been taken up on deck.

And a weird selection they were, too, shelved without much attempt at
classification.  Between a Baroness Orczy and Conan Doyle's The Lost
World he found the same edition of Longfellow he remembered his mother
having.  There was a shelf labelled 'Geography and Exploration' on
which were a handful of novels as well as books dealing largely with
South America: Bouncing Gold: the Stock of Rubber, In the Jungles of
Venezuela, Where Stood Stout Cortez, An Economic and Regional Geography
of South America excellent condition), Secret Rites of the Amazon
Tribes (all the photographs torn out) Browsing with amusement and
pleasure he selected a couple of good yarns for bedtime reading.

Looking up he caught sight of a handsome brass ship's chronometer on
the bulkhead above the shelves.  Ten-thirty surely counted as
mid-morning, a reasonable time for visiting bridges?  He was 'just
turning away when something made him look more closely at the books in
the top shelf.

There, outwardly no different from any of the dozens like it on either
side, was volume i of Caroline Alice Roberts' Marchcroft Manor.  On
tiptoe he reached it down.  Inside the cover he found a cancelled Ex
Libr's sticker for someone in Gloucester he had never heard of, then a
rubber-stamped rubric in violet ink: NOT FOR TROOPS, itself cancelled
and 'The Booth SS Co. Ltd' printed opposite.  Opening it haphazardly
he foundjulian De Tressanay's sentiments on discovering that he had
'just inherited the Marchcroft estate: 'I who have never thought of
landedproperty, except to expatiate on the criminality of its tenure in
general, and now I, of all people, I suddenly find mysef the possessor
of a large domain and old Baronial mansion, eveg stone of which could
probably bear testimony to the dread of violence and oppression
committed by its rapaciousfeudal owners .

Poor Alice.  How painful to recall her second-hand radicalism from

that distant era of Ruskin and Octavia Hill.  Even more painful to
wonder whether he might not have caused its demise as well as that of
her writing itself.  One more damned sacrifice ... He searched, not
over-zealously, for the second volume but failed to find it.  He had
never known what to say about her own stuff.  She had given up novels
on their marriage and from then on he had avoided having to
passJudgement on her poetry by setting it from time to time.  As he
left the library he pondered the Arch-jester's nasty little jab.

Why that particular book of all books on board this particular ship of
all ships?

A short time later as Pyce conducted him to the bridge there were other
things which welcomely claimed his attention.  Having passed from
panelled and carpeted reaches through iron doors into more workaday
regions thickly covered in sticky white paint he vaguely expected the
bridge to be windswept and was surprised to find it calm and warm.

Nobody staggered in and out with running oilskins.  Mugs of tea tilted
their circular brown puddles securely in metal holders.  Neatly-pressed
trouser-legs braced themselves easily apart; peaked faces stared ahead
through streaming rectangular panes.  They might all have been watching
a motion picture of a tumultuous seascape but for the movement of the
tea and the yielding at their hips.  He clutched at a brass something
and tried to foresee the Hildebrand's various tilts and plunges.

Captain Maddrell, evidently a short sleeper, was standing slightly to
one side of the helmsman on his grating, glancing into the binnacle as
the man held the bows as nearly head-on to the south-westerly advance
of waves as possible.

'I think we can ease off a point or two southwards, Skinner,' he
said.

'Aye-aye, sir."  The spokes twirled.

The Captain went into the chart-room whose louvred door was dogged ajar
and could be seen bending over a lit table on which lay maps, dividers,
protractor, ruler.  Looking round, Edward could see into another,
similar room full of ebonite panels, knobs, switches and ranks of
glowing valves.  The Marconi man sat at his wireless, his back to the
bridge, earphones on his head, away in some aetherial world of his own
where electric blips and scratches announced human presences also
abroad on these tossing wastes of ocean.  Now and again his hand flexed
on the Morse key as he added his own instrumental voice to some arcane
dialogue.

Abruptly the Captain reappeared, uncapped a speaking-tube, blew into it
and spoke.  The inscribed plate above the speakingtube one of a bank
arrayed like little organ-pipes - read 'Engine Room no.  "-.  Then he
turned.

'Mr Mushet, Mr Mushet.  You're a lucky fellow and no mistake.

A free holiday in Madeira.  Next time we'll arrange to bring the wife
and nippers."

But the man he was addressing, standing to one side in a white jersey
and stained cap, was maybe soured by the news.  Eloquent as to his
dismal thin beard he only stared out of a side window back to where the
tip of Cornwall might have been many hours ago.

'It's not to be helped, Mr Maddrell,'he said at last.  'Not if a man
will sail in the first place, that is."

'You're an old woman, Mushet."  The Captain was clearly not put out.

Cap pushed well back on his head so that the stubby black visor winked
over his fringe in the light he was mischievously at ease - at home,
Edward thought, in a way he had not been down below in the restaurant
at breakfast.  In the air these men shared was an equable passion.

Their least movement - hand on brass, twirl of wooden spokes, raising
mug to lips - had something in it of loyalty to each other and to their
living island.  Sir Sidney Colvin, as much Conrad's friend as Edward's,
had recently read him a passage in which one of that writer's sentences
had stuck in his mind as a true perception of a world from which he
felt himself excluded.  'The ship, this ship, our ship, the ship we
serve, is the moral symbol of our life."  Moral.  Where was its
equivalent in the lonely business on which he had expended his own
years?  Where the morality in such untrammelled selfishness?  His mind
gave something like a mutter of envy for whatever crucial experiences
of muscle and eye and instinct that writer must have had with whom he
shared a birth-year.  One could so easily tire of the inner voice,
always unassuaged like a bully yapping and baiting.  Wistful bully,
wishing now to have lived more brightly, to have had time off in the
unequivocations of action.

'Sir Edward,' the Captain interrupted his self-disgust from across the
bridge.  'Come and meet a miserable man."

It was that, it occurred to him as he went over: not for many years had
he remained in a room ungreeted for so long, nor had he been summoned
so amiably by a stranger.  There was something in the Captain which
reminded him of the old gardener at Birchwood who had taught him
hedging, coopering, a dozen other basic crafts, now scornful, now
taciturn, very occasionally shedding a word of praise like a dead
scale.  But how Edward - hands scratched and blistered, sweating in his
thorn-proof trousers- had glowed at the word!  Such men were in charge
of their lives, responsible for what befell them.  They might really
say anything to anyone with impunity.  Absurdly, he yearned for their
acceptance as he had never longed for applause, never had wished to
throw himself upon those vegetable rows of fur and feather receding
into an auditorium's shadows, gloved hands whirring against glittering
bosoms like things dead and dry fretted in a hedgerow.

'Mr Mushet, I'd like to introduce the Hildebrands most illustrious
passenger: Sir Edward Elgar, Master of the King's Musick - Mr Mushet.

The unfortunate Mushet is our pilot - or rather he was when he was
needed.  Normally a cutter takes him off at Holyhead but in these
conditions it couldn't be done.  We might have carried him on to Le
Havre, but the French coast is as bad as ours at present.  The tales
the wireless man is telling nearly make us inclined to skip Oporto and
Lisbon and plough straight on to Madeira.  His best chance of a short
holiday is in Madeira."

'But couldn't you have put him off on the South Coast safely to the
east of the Isle of Wight, say?"

'Good heavens, Sir Edward, ours is a commercial shipping line.

We don't make wide detours, burn up valuable coal and delay our d. s
for the convenience of the world's Mushets.  He's a passenger vagabond,
is Mushet.  Never boards a ship without a toothbrush, a spare pair of
socks and his papers.  For all he knows an hour's trip down the Mersey
can turn into a passage to the Ivory Coast.

That's the life, oh?"

'Not when a man's fifty-two and feels the sun."  The pilot spoke gazing
out of the window as if expecting the skyline of Liverpool still to
heave into sight.

'Mr Mushet,' the Captain explained, 'sailed on this ship for nearly
five years within recent memory, Sir Edward, and not once in that time
did we ever hear him complain of feeling the sun."

'And nor would a man who treks to and fro between Iceland and
Norway."

'You had another route in those days?"

'The Captain here's referring to the war."

Edward looked around the bridge as if some vestige of that awesome
conflict were still visible as splashes of dried blood or the odd shell
casing overlooked in a corner.  'This ship served?"

'It did indeed, Sir Edward, and most gallantly too.  Three of us on
this bridge today were bluejackcts in her throughout the duration:
that's First Lieutenant Simon Givens yonder.  Have a warmer and I'll
tell you.  Tea or cocoa?  We don't touch coffee on the bridge although
if you wish it we can have a steward descend to more Bohemian zones to
fetch some.  But our galley understands cocoa.  It talks cocoa in its
sleep."

'Cocoa would be splendid.  Incidentally, I must correct you rather
belatedly as to something you said at breakfast and just now when you
introduced me.  I'm not the Master of the King's Musick, you know.  In
England they reserve that kind of thing for the right sort of man.

Cambridge academics mostly, I believe; real composers."  judging from a
sharp glance the heat with which this was said was not lost on the
Captain but he only said mildly, 'Then I stand corrected, sir."  As if
to cover the moment's awkwardness he moved purposefully to place
himself once more by the coxswain, watching waves and compass.

His posture was that of a doctor attentive and silent next to a
patient, deliberately not feeling the pulse but listening to all the
sounds of a living body.

'She loves it,' he said happily.  'Feel her.  Tight.  She thrums.  Not
a groan anywhere.  When I first can lit sight of her my thought was,
"H'm- pretty ship.  Soft, maybe."  But I was wrong.  Wrong about the
soft, I mean, for that was in late 'I 3 when she was in civil trim and
the old world was still going strong.  She was young then, not three
years from her maiden voyage.  Black hull, white strake and upperworks,
black funnel.  Neat, graceful.  No clutter anywhere.  Somethin after
all of a steam yacht about her, what with that sheer, light stern.  The
masts -' and through the blurred glass the fore-truckjabbed at the
shattered sky '- were both white up to the halfway point and the
topmasts plain varnished wood.

They should have kept that, in my opinion.  Maybe they'll change it
yet.

'Ah, it was happy running in those days.  Only ten years ago but it's
not the same world we sail across today and they're no longer the same
ports we reach, either.  Not merely that they've changed physically
because Pard, for example, Manaos, they've hardly altered at all.  A
few motor cars apiece, maybe, but not much different.  It's the feel,
I can't put it more exactly than that.  There are no edges to anything
now?"  He glanced for confirmation at his distinguished passenger as he
had suddenly remembered, halfapologetic, that there stood a man who had
already been over forty at the turn of the century and who no doubt
felt even more acutely the falling-away of what had once seemed
permanent.

'Well, as I say, she was a pretty ship.  But then the war came and the
Admiralty bagged her for their own."

'Did you have guns?"

'Eight.  When they converted her to HMS Hildebrand they changed her
quite a bit.  All her upperworks were grey and later on they painted
the hull grey as well.  So elegant she was."  The Captain might have
been remembering a woman glimpsed in his youth who had on the instant
set up a model for the elusive thing, the obj .  ec .  t which wounds
fervently before it vanishes.  'I can see her now, sitting on the water
in Scapa Flow, light as a dove.  But she had claws.  They gave her six
quick-firers and two i i -inch howitzers before assigning us to the
Northern Patrol: either Iccland to St Kilda or 2o degrees west to the
Norwegian coast.  We were supposed to maintain the blockade of Germany,
which meant boarding any ship we intercepted.  If we found a German
raider we were to engage it 'And did you?"

'Oh, several times.  The worst was in 1917.  We were on convoy escort
work by then, a -Q" ship.  We were taking a convoy into the Clyde when
torpedoes began scurrying about.  Wherever you looked you could see
their white tracks.  The place was crawling with German submarines.

The Drake took a fish amidships right next to us while we were pounding
away at one of the subs on the surface.  To this day I think we killed
it for it disappeared in a cloud of smoke and steam."

Surely we got it,' said Mr Mushct.  'If we didn't we're not the heroes
we've been telling everyone we are."

There was nothing of reproof in his tone.  The Captain said mildly,
'Oh, heroes.  H'en.  They were good days, weren't they?"

'The Drake went down,' objected the pilot.

'Capsized at anchor.  She made it after all to Rathlin Sound.

Notice served.  Minimal losses."

'But was this ship ever hit?"

'Never once, Sir Edward.  Oh, plenty of times by shrapnel, odd rounds
of this and that, slight damage to upperworks.  But never anything
serious.  Never anything serious at all.  You couldn' t believe it, a
dainty tropical cruise ship with borrowed teeth prowling the sea with
submarines for company without getting a hole in her.  For that matter,
coming through arctic weather with her heart uncooled.  None of our
sister ships on this Brazil run was as lucky.  All three of them went
down in 1917, you know.  Hilau was torpedoed in the North Sea, so was
the Antony; and the Lanfranc was sunk too, for all that she'd been
converted into a hospital ship.  By the time she was decommissioned
the old Hildebrand was the only one left.  Still is, come to that,
although they keep talking about building another Hilag.  But I'm not
sure the trade's there as it used to be before the war.  Those were our
great days.  You're aboard a real survivor, Sir Edward.  The
Hildebrand's the last of the old world, our old.  . ."he let the
sentence wander off.  'You'll forgive me I hope, sir,' he resumed.  'I
have a weakness.  I like to talk about my ship.

Damned selfish of me.  I'm afraid I'm sadly ignorant of music."

'Thank God for that.  I am too."

Several of those on the bride looked round with surprise before fixing
their faces back where they had been, attentive to the ocean ahead as
if it could hardly be distinguished from their Captain's narrative.

'Ignorant, Sir Edward?  Surely you're 'oking.  Or perhaps ... If it
comes to that I suppose I'm aware of J my own ignorance of the sea.  No
man can ever really know the sea.  No doubt the same might be said of
music.  They're things of a lifetime."

'That's a grim thought.  Personally, I was just making a living and not
very much of one, either, for a good many years.  It was a trade,
that's all.  It served me for a while.  I'm thoroughly bored by it
now.

If you ask me there's a lot more to living than sitting at a table
breaking one's head over a tune.  This, for example."

Staring at him now Captain Maddrell saw something boyish in the
distinguished and slightly portly man, excited by being at the front of
the ship as it bounded along over precipices of water, dropping and
slamming and rising again.

'I can see why you despise us,' said this man.

'I despise you, sir?  Where could you get that idea?"

'I mean us passengers.  We're cargo, that's all.  A fretful, moaning
cargo which has to be appeased.  Too many changes of clothing to be
serious."

 'No, sir.  We none of us feel that at all.  Though since you're so
lways apprehensive when I wear
my social cap.  I'm no hand at table talk, as you'll have reallsed at
breakfast this morning.  I ... well, the Purser's an excellent man for
that.  He's never so happy as when he's helping to plan games or
getting the band to play a special tune for the is couples."

'The band?  You don't mean there's a blasted band aboard?"

'Yes, sir.  For the dancing.  Tommy Hawtree and the Melodeers, I
believe they call themselves."

'Great God.  This is awful."

Really, discovering there's a band aboard has chilled me rather.

First Alice's book ... Next they'll start 'Salut d'Amour' or 'Rosemary'
in the middle of an otherwise blameless sole meunire.  It's hardly a
new idea, bands on board passenger ships - look at the wretched
'Titanic' & remember those trips to Sanford in America - but I suppose
it was yet another part of my silly phantasy - that at least one could
get several thousand miles away from music.  The time can't be far away
when it'll be virtually impossible to hear silence.  Motor cars and
aeroplanes everywhere, bands everywhere, maybe even the wireless will
find a way of setting a nigger minstrel to dog the heels of every last
sane man on earth.  Oh!  I feel querulous but don't want to be.  It
isn't me, but it has come to serve as me just as it serves everyone
else old enough to be too lacerated & weary to put anything back in its
right place.

The 12 - exhilarating!  I felt dis-honoured before such plain men as
Maddrell.  All those dratted honours of mine - those meaningless bits
of gold and ribbon I pretended to covet for Alice's sake - they fell
into dust as he spoke about the war aboard the 'Hildebrand'.  I only
ever felt honoured by the OM although it was such a new Order nobody in
Worcester thought it worth a fig in i9i i. That was the year after
Florence Nightingale received it on her death-bed.  'Too kind, too kind
she murmured but those present swore she had no idea what it was; as
far as she was concerned they were giving her the Last Rites.  But
vheii I first heard the King was intending me to have it in the
Coronation flonotirs List - that first dreadful thought like a
telegraph message %AhIzzing through the brain - Oh, they don't want me
to write anything more - & then at last the pleasure &c.  Ten or
fifteen years earlier mL honours could have come as encouragement; as
it was they fell into my life with the dead weight of full stops.  I
know it's stupid to think of my life as ending with that List in i 9 i
i but that's the thought which came & betrayed me.  Probably the very
moment of this ship's launching, judging J from what the Captain
said.

Such interlocking trivia ... So when he talked about the war I felt I'd
been neutered - hadn't even any son to have hung maggoty and inglorious
on that barbed wire like so many thousands, had been too old for this
body to have been worthy even of a common grave with them - I had 'just
to make tunes.  (In any case the best tune of the war was 'Keep the
Home Fires Burning' by Ivor Novello I think although immodestly I
can't get out of my head that he might never have written such a good
one had I not done P&C first - the falling fourths altho' his are
concealed as falling thirds which are really appoggiaturas).  What a
mockery that I should have had a sword.  What better sign of official
impotence than the awarding of an outmoded weapon?

Maybe one day the King will dole out diamond-studded Mills bombs or
gold-plated Webleys to pink-cheeked dodderers.  The sword, of course,
went into the ground with Alice three years ago, stupid damned thing, I
couldn't bear to see it.  It's in the best place, in all senses.  It
was what she wanted for me & that part she can keep as far as I'm
concerned.

Well, finally it seems I've wasted my life.  It's a hard age at which
to drink spider-juice but I submit.  Suddenly on the bridge this
morning I felt the flimsiness of all my substance, but not so much
because I'd missed something.  Quite the contrary - it was because of
something of which I've had all too much: myself.  I doubt it ever
occurs to people who are not cursed with this 'urge to create'
(whatever that is) how, far from living in sublime communion with one's
Muse, one grows thoroughly to hate her.  Oh I do hate that familiar
voice - her voice, my voice which has ever since I can remember
provided a commentary on everything I looked at, everything I did,
every moment of my life.  When one is a child one is spellbound by a
voice which speaks with such immediacy to ear & eye & nose.  'Translate
me,' it used to say & the sun made a tune on the skin of my forearms as
I sat in classrooms with high windows.  'Take me down,' it said,
speaking as aspen leaves trembling uneasily, their white always seeming
to blow against late afternoon banks of dark cloud water meadows with a
few lonely cows and me.  The voice was always at once of exhilaration &
sadness.  It's the sadness one remembers best with increasing years:
the exhilaration has come to feel like empty gesturing.

Those Shed books I take down and look at still, those various boyhood
scribblings which still remain unused (few indeed) - no longer bring
back those days as immediately as they once did, despite what I tell
myself & friends.  They merely bring back all the other occasions I've
tried to re-live them.  No more the real moment, the whizzing
imperative, the yell by which things served notice that they were ripe
to give dictation.  Yet still that fossil voice demands my fossil
attention.  Not even Wordsworth had the power to stop once he'd reduced
it to a trade.  We'll never understand it.  People tell me about my
'imperishable gifts to Humanity'- kindly, as they think.  Well enough
for Humanity, say I. But those of us who are haunted by that cracked
old voice & plagued by that sniveller who demands more & more attention
- we're the ones left with ashes.

The egregious Pyce has 'just been in to ask whether I would wish him
to unpack my trombones and have them polished.  I can't understand the
fellow's impertinence - I give him far less trouble than any of the
other passengers who are still supine in their bunks endlessly ringing
for soda or beef tea yet he singles me out for such silly pranks.  I
shall think of a way of putting him in his place.  Trombones indeed.

Knavish he is.

In any case plenty of people become distinguished literary gentlemen.

Why should I not have been at ease enough with my own Muse to have
turned myself into a distinguished musical gent?  I may look like one,
I may sound like one but underneath it all I know I'm not.  Nothing to
do with class or anything like that - Parry's not a musical gent
because he went to Eton but because he writes music like one.  I
started out by being wayward and have ended by being at war.  Why?

I've not written enouzh.  Stanford writes more in a year than I ever
did in ten.  So did Mackenzie, even if the results were narcotic.  (How
kind of that newspaper critic reviewing 'The Troubadour' when he said
the audience were reluctant to leave the theatre afterwards, forbearing
to explain that snow was failing outside, the theatre was delightfully
warm and the entire audience comfortably asleep.) My own etTorts seem
largely to have gone into warfare with myself.  But why?

The gale blew throughout the second and third days of the voyage and
the Captain, apprised by wireless of conditions off the coast of Spain
and Portugal, kept toying with the idea of proceeding directly to
Madeira.  This was no light decision since eleven of his passengers
were bound for Oporto, including the knight of commerce at Sir Edward
El ar's table.  A further eighteen were headed for Lisbon.  The
remaining passengers were also expecting to go on short excursions at
both stops, to wine lodges at Leix6es for the ritual tasting of
ten-year-old port and in cars from Lisbon to the Moorish town of
Cintra.  There they would wander on wobbly legs to the castle of Pena
on the summit and through the grottoed Gardens of Monscrratc dug into
the hillside.

In the event the Hildebrand kept to her scheduled course, reaching the
mouth of the Douro at midday on November 18th.

Such had been the effects of the weather on her passengers, however,
that practically no-one disembarked at Leixces clutching their Booth
Line tramway coupons for the seven-mile ride into Oporto.  Even Edward
himself felt out of sorts, as much from the contagion of finding
himself aboard a ship ofinvalids as from any real sickness.  They
sailed again at i i pm, arriving at Lisbon the following noon.  Still
Edward kept listlessly to his cabin except to take tea in the Care aft
of the smoke room.  There he met Molly Air.

Through the portholes were glimpses of white subtropical buildings
against a grey sky, looking bleak and uninviting.

'We can console ourselves that we shall't be missing it at its best,'
she told him as they shared a table.  'Cintra and all that, I mean.  I
made the excursion myself in early June a little while ago and it was
ravishing then, 'just as Byron described.  You cool J yourself up there
in the courts and halls of the castle, it's all glittery arabesques and
fountains and arcades.  Then you're whirled down straight to the
Estorils, baking riviera beaches with gardens behind them full of
oranges, pepper trees, mimosas and eucalyptus.

Everywhere there are geraniums and bougainvillaea: nothing but savage
colour and bright heat to remind you of all those marvelous long miles
between you and England.  But it wouldn't be the same in November,
especially not in weather like this.

Cintra would just seem cold, the castle gloomy, the beaches deserted.

I'm afraid of that out-of-season feeling, aren't you?  It suggests time
rushing by and emptiness.  It also always seems to imply that everyone
else knows something you don't and is elsewhere."

He hardly knew how to respond, taken aback by the vividness of her
description and her tone.  That little rhetorical turn 'aren't you?"

was somehow informal enough to suggest intimacy but without the least
presumption.  It casually implied a friendship stretching back several
years, precisely the sort of thing which normally made him bristle.

'I didn't know you'd made this trip before?"

'Eighteen months ago.  I went to Manaos on this very ship but I came
back on another.  An adventure, I suppose.  Having got to Manaos I
thought well, it's silly to come all this way for just five days and
then go straight back home again.  So I simply caught a river steamer
and went on to Iquitos in Peru.  That's another thirteen hundred miles
upstream.  It's a strange feeling getting further away from the
Atlantic and ever closer to the Pacific.  It really is like breaking
through into the other half of the globe, the one which doesn't have
all the familiar place-names.  Except for Darien, of course."

'You don't mean to tell me that you made the trip on your own?

Surely your ... er,husband ... ?"

'If by that you mean unaccompanied, yes.  But it was all right, you
know.  The Iquitos steamers also belong to Booth's."

'But what made you embark on such a trip in the first place?"

'Sir Edward, are you good at answering direct questions about
yourself?"

'Not a bit, no.  I had no business asking.  Pray accept my
apologies."

'Oh, I don't need them.  All I meant was it would take time for me to
tell you enough for it to seem less like an act of wilful truancy.  One
explanation would be simple: I'm an artist and a botanist.  I like
painting exotica.  The further into Brazil we steamed the more I
realised how much I loved tropical landscapes.  All that grand gloom,
sudden colour, huge skies full of clouds straight from the lungs of the
jungle.  I thought if Marianne 9 J North could have done botanical
paintings in Sarawak and places then so might I in the Amazon.  It's
still far less explored even than Borneo and hundreds of times
bigger.

I want to be the first to paint peculiar orchids, huge gorges with
unnamed falls whose spray drifts like smoke for miles.  I want to see
things no-one else in En land or Europe has ever seen before.  No doubt
it sounds silly to you, but those are my reasons."

'All of them?"

'Well no, of course not.  I've grown apart from my family.

Different views, you know.  Also I was a nurse in France for a year
before the Armistice.  You can imagine it was all butimpossible to go
back to being demure, dependent, innocent if you like.  Since when I've
never been able to settle - along with thousands of others like me, I'd
think.  But I need hardly tell you about war, Sir Edward."

He wondered what this Modern Woman meant.  Surely not the Boer War?

Perhaps a son, two sons slain at Ypres, the Somme?

Maybe it was 'just that she was still young enough for someone of J his
age to have no particular past; beyond a certain point any personal
history would strike her as equally likely.  As far as she knew he
might once not have been a composer, might at forty have held a
commission in the Dragoons, have served - for heaven's sake - in the
Crimea even though he had not actually been born.

'I think you're very brave,' he said.

'But I'm not."The creases from her nose to the corners of her lips were
accentuated by her seriousness, a natural mask her face assumed along
lines of old horror or resolve.  'I'm finally doing what I want.  I
should think that took abominable selfishness rather than couraThe Car
was practically deserted.  The continued absence of most passengers was
emphasised by the occasional wan couple or jovial stranger who moved
about the ship looking for divers'

I ion.

Sometimes it seemed as though Molly Air and he were the only people
aboard a vessel carrying them off to some unspecified place and for
some unguessable purpose - to found a new race, maybe, or collaborate
on a new ballet safe from the interruptions and curiosity of the
metropolitan world.

'And what is Manaos like once we get there?  If we ever do?"

'Wonderful.  On the way down.  You presumably knowit was the centre of
the rubber boom twenty years ago?  I'm afraid a cad of an Englishman, a
Mr Wickham, put paid to it by smuggling rubber seedlings to Malaya or
somewhere out East with a similar climate.

Or maybe his name was Wickstead and it was Ceylon?  I heard so many
people grouse about it I've quite forgotten the details.  In any case
Manaos's glory is fading.  It already has that marvelous feeling of
decadence and nostalgia even though the economy's only just beginning
to suffer.  People wander around moaning about going broke but they
don't do anything much about it.  just mope in cafes and spit in the
river and mop their foreheads and laugh.

Most of the real brigands have moved out or are mellowing.  The foreign
business community is ageing visibly.  Nothing much now between the
older generation of entrepreneurs - especially Germans: you wait till
you see them, concerts at the Schiller Institute and boys like the one
at our table - Peter?  - who are all homesick.

Fever-meat, I'm afraid.  They're invalided home within six months.  All
day they sit on clerks' stools perspiring, and they I've

trains stopped and I couldn't get manuscript paper for love or
money.

We heard a lot of shooting one morning and my daughter Carice insisted
on going with me to see what all the fuss was about.

It turned out that the troops had opened fire on crowds of
demonstrators.  It's a terrible thing for an army to have to shoot its
own countrymen.  The rioters were Socialists, but even so.  When we
reached the Piazza di Gese it was all over - I was too late, as
usual.

But you know how even the aftermath of dramatic incidents is as xciting
sometimes as the events themselves?  The streets were full of soldiers
and bright sunshine: glittering fixed bayonets and shining badges and
buttons.  The square itself was empty except for the cavalry picketed
along one side.  The brilliant uniforms, the gleaming steel all under
that intense Italian sky made one heady.

The air, I remember, was quite still.  Some of the poor horses were
nervous and the echoes of their hooves clopped round the pi iazza and
from the side-streets leading to it from all directions you could hear
the restless crowds, backed up and murmuring.  The smell of gunpowder
was everywhere.  There was something historic, barbaric even, which I
confess I found intensely thrilling.  I mean it wasn't at all hard to
imagine the Colosseum two thousand years ago, the flashings of steel,
the roars and groans of the crowd, and then tiny individual human
screams lost in the middle of all that implacable baying.  Then we
suddenly noticed bloodstains on the cobbles: in one place a whole
puddle of blood with dust settling on it and all sorts of red scrapings
and daubings as if bleeding people had been hurriedly dragged away.

And everywhere around the walls there were white pocks in the old
stonework.  But only afterwards did I really feel shame that for qu
some time - until I saw the human evidence - I had enjoyed it.

For a while Edward stared ahead in a kind of horror, quite unsure how
what had begun as reminiscence should have been turned by some
malicious inner voice into confession.  But the Captain said helpfully:
'The human animal, sir.  It's in all of us, like as not."  Then, 'Would
you be at all interested in the engine room?

Our Chief down there is always happy to show off his infernal den."

Edward gave a start.  'I say, I should.  But there's since I'm here .

And for fifteen minutes Sir Edward Elgar took the helm of the
Hildebrand.  The cox stood with his back to the bulkhead, at case,
looking nowhere in particular as Edward initially gave the spokes one
thing several nervous twitches and finally, beginning to sense the
ship's weight and desire to turn her head, spinning the wheel.  Captain
 MaddrclI took up his customary position behind the helmsman, I
enough aside to read the compass over his shoulder, giving advi I
ice.

'Feel her through, Sir Edward.  See that series of rollers ahead?

She'll slice the first two but the next one will begin to turn her.

You need to lay off to starboard a few points bit more ... hold her
there.  Oh, feel how she takes them?  There's a real heart to this
ship.  But the weather's slackening.  I believe we're through the
worst."

'It looks no different to me.  But I say, this is a lark."  For,
whatever anguishes and peppery despondencies had contrived to mould
this grey-haired man into the simulacrum of a courtier, the deep eyes
were full of a far younger happiness.  As he watched a path sort out of
the malleable wastes ahead he might have been conning a skiff past a
notorious weir on the Severn fifty years earlier, so avid and childish
was his expression, such pleasure was there in the feeling of lively
wood beneath the hand, so beguiling of ultimate fate.

That night the wind dropped, the sea lessened and the Hildebrand ran
out from beneath the westernmost edge of a slab of cloud which pressed
down over Europe like funerary marble.  The first stirrings of night
life were felt as the more resilient passengers threw off malaise and
donned formal dress.  The carpeted corridors and stairwells which had
previously lain empty but for the lugubrious tread of the doctor and
a few diehards now trickled with highly polished shoes as circulation
began returning to the ship's arteries.

At the heels of certain of these shoes - not all of them women's
trailed whiffs of Guerlain.

'Odd how quickly one recovcrs ... I say, Bernard, it's odd how quickly
one recovers."

'I heard you."

'My clear, you do look ever so slightly fragile.  But terribly brave,
too.  Like a meringue on the Western Front.  Rather becoming, I should
say.  Goodness,.when I think how badly I wanted to die this I afternoon
and now I'm ready for anything."

'I can well imagine.  But as far as this girl's concerned anything's
off the menu at present."  just then a tall waiter emerged from a I
the illusion of captaincy over his door and hurried by, leaving an
impression of oiled hair and long lashes.  'On the other hand .

'On the other hand if that's on the menu you might just force yourself
to a little nibble."

'I rather think one might stretch to a mouthful ... For the first time
I'm beginning to be glad I came.  What a sheik."

'Well you can't have it, you're still too tottery.  In your present
condition you might keel over entirely.  There's nothing at all chic
about being buried at sea.  Not when you were planning to lie in state
at St Michael's, Chester Square, surrounded by loyal subjects in
wildest mourning.  Anyway, did you see the look he gave me?"

'I did.  Pure dismay.  I shall reassure and comfort him at the RI
earliest opportunity."

'I really think, Bernard, you'd much better leave that one to me.

For the sake of your health."

'You're so caddish, Desmond."

'Howling."

And the giggles and Guerlain died away.

Elsewhere quite, in a middle-aged saloon, two middle-aged ladies had
been persuaded to try their luck in a friendly game.

'I suppose just this once,' one of them was saying dubiously.

'A little flutter never hurt anyone,' insisted her new partner whose
silly-ass monocle nearly disguised a certain canniness of expression.

'We shall't be playing for money.  just matchsticks or something.

Well, pennies then."

'I'm an awful dunce at cards,' said the other middle-aged lady.

The two men swapped glances.

'You'll soon get the hang of it,' urged the man with the monocle.

'Look, why don't we have a dry run to clear away the cobwebs?"

An hour later it could be observed that his beady expression had
changed to one of glumness.

'It's coming back to me now,' his partner was saying.

Still later unspoken recriminations hung in little black clouds over
the table.

'One never really forgets a card game, does one?  It's like
bicycling.

One may get a little rusty but the knack never disappears completely, I
find."

'I wish I could say the same for the money we've been losing,'

said the man with the monocle bitterly.

'Oh dear oh dear, I'm awfully sorry to be such a dunce."  And had the
two men been less distracted they would surely have noticed the look
the ladies briefly exchanged, for it was one of pure mischief.  'I tell
you what, why don't we do something quite unladylike and play poker
instead?  Then it's everyone for himself' But there was no doubt luck
was running against the monocled man that night.  The ineptness his
erstwhile partner had shown in her bidding seemed at last to have
settled down into the occasional moment of recklessness.  The rest of
the time she made respectable little wins and by the end of the
evening's play had done rather well.

'Goodness,' she said, 'you did have some awful hands, Mr Barstow, you
poor man.  I can't think what got into the cards tonight.  Normally I'm
the one forever trying to make a pair of fours sound like a straight
flush or whatever it's called.  Why don't we all try again tomorrow?

Your luck will have changed by then.  Do let's."

That same evening also marked the beginnings of several shipboard
romances.  The shared oppression and enforced reclusiveness of the
first days of the voyage made for flurries of alliance as eye caught
speculative eye.  Gentlemen in full fig came upon each other preening
themselves anxiously before washroom mirrors and remarks were heard
about'the corker in the blue dress with the little dog'.  The younger
element soon found their way into each other's cabins (where all sorts
of shrieks and evidence of high jinks were wafted into the corridors by
opening and closing doors) while the youngest element of all, two
morose boys of ten, met at dinner and loathed one another on sight.

But things were as yet exploratory, uncertain.  What everyone asked
themselves was, 'Am I going to get any fun?  And if so, when might it
start?", a question hardly confined to newly-assembled cruise
passengers.

'What do you think?"  asked one of the card-playing ladies of the other
as they prepared for bed in their shared cabin.  'I quite fancy my Mr
Monocle.  Barstow - such a reliable, straightforward name and, unless
I'm much mistaken, a straightforward gentleman.

Straightforwardly greedy, I mean.  Did you notice his tiepin?"

'Oh yes, and his cuff-links.  Whereas mine .  . ."

'I'm afraid there was something ever so slightly declass6 about yours,
wasn't there?  All that talk about nipping over to Brazil to settle
some contracts.  You saw his hands?  That one's accustomed to hugging
something heavier than a nease."

'Golly, how Sherlockian we're becoming in our old age."

'My dear, a commercial traveller's a commercial traveller, dress him up
how you may and send him to the other side of the world if '11.  No, I
don't think you can look upon that one as a man of substance.  Bad
luck."

'Never mind.  It was a start, wasn't it?"

'I'm going to turn the light out now.  Ow.  How very hot these glass
shades become."  The two ladies lay and listened to the engines and the
sea catching at the rivet-heads only an inch or two of steel plating
away from their blanketed feet.  From somewhere maybe the deck above or
the deck below them - came an occasional muffled strain of dance music,
a sedate waltz as befitted the lateness of the hour.  'Yes, it's a
start.  I like the look of things.

You know that feeling?  It's going to be an interesting trip."

Then.  What price Sir Edward Elgar, though?"

'llnder no circumstances."  The voice came from the darkness in a firm
tone as if its owner had come up on one elbow to make the point.

'Dearest, 'just think ... Position, wealth, and I'm sure I rememJ her
hearing his wife died recently."

'Absolutely not."

'Well it seems a pity.  Rather a waste, I mean.  He has the eye, did
you notice?  And don't come all over virtuous, it's such a bore.  A
touch hypocritical, too."

'I suppose he has, yes.  Yes, of course I noticed if you insist."

'Oh I do insist.  I also reserve the right to imagine you becoming more
predatoU as the voyage, wears on.  Anyway, I thought we'd long since
agreed that anyone with the eye was fair game."

From either bed there came the sounds of two old friends from whom
little was hidden quietly enjoying a 'okc.

J 'I forbid you to have designs on the Master of the King's Musick."

More laughter.  All around them in the starlight the wave-tops wrung
their hands unseen and fled continuously astern.

Oblivious of how his presence was already beginning to affect the plans
of at least two people aboard, Edward was at that moment returning to
his cabin after a bluff evening with new acquaintances.  Still restless
with smoke and cliattcr he postponed sleep for a while and instead
settled down at the desk with his journal.

Maddrell was complimentary on my helmsmanship in a gruff sort of way.

Told him it wasn't unlike conducting & nor is it.  As a beginner one
had the same feeling of being run away with and then of immense power &
one's least will cause everything to skid off or sing.  Maybe I should
have act been Captain Maddrell although it's by no means certain what
sort of a composer he might have made.  Probably rather good: well-made
light music which everybody likes to hum and which earns.

Well I could do that too, and did it, except that I never wanted to
have to.  If only I could have made a halfway decent living out of
'serious' stuff I would probably have dabbled quite pleasurably in the
odd 'popular' piece - & why not?  it's perfectly respectable to be a
tunesmith.  That time hearing someone whistle the viola tune from
Alassic, in the street who it was or where they heard it lawd nose but
oh!  the pleasure.  It's the greatest compliment a composer can be paid
(but compliments don't buy groceries) and I thought yes, I took the
tune down so that other people could hear it too.  I would certainly
much rather have done salon pieces which people could whistle than all
those glees and part-songs for beastly little choral clubs to massacre
earnestly.  One of those odious commissions (for a pittance, naturally)
actually paralysed me with hatred.  My hand Wou Id not move across the
page.  It took five days to write a line, such bosh, nobody would have
wanted to whistle it & we ate bread that week but precious little
else.

I did once tell somebody (pompous ass that I am) that I was folksong,
mainly a retort called forth by their endlessly trying to get me to say
what I thought about the 'new music' (esp.  V. Williams) and all that
Cecil Sharpery.  Perhaps it wasn't so far off the truth.  If ancient
folksongs were the distillates of a culture & its language then it
wd.

be surprising if I who knew the sound of the wind on the Malvern Hills
quite as well as Piers Plowman had not occasionally captured something
of the essential melody which lies beyond mere tune.  And anyway if
folksongs are songs the folk sing then 'Land of Hope & Glory' - curse
every one of its bars - surely qualifies.  Not something I ever want to
hear again, not even whistled in the street.  How I've come to detest
the thing!  You can't joke with the public: they know nothing but what
they do know is always enough to hang you.  All my music has now shrunk
to that single tune, quite undeserved what's more since it wasn't my
idea to put words to it but the King's.  They don't fit - of course
poorJaeger was right about that drop to
whatever words had been shoehorned into it would have sounded vulgar.

But dear old Nim didn't have the full weight of the House of
Saxe-CoburgGotha bearing down on him, only consumption, and that makes
a man unafraid of kings.  Mind you I don't regret the original tune as
it was in P&C - it knocked 'em for six as I knew it would - but I never
intended a thing which came to me one morning while I was probably
sawing wood or something (the rhythm?) should become a perennial excuse
for a national bellow.

Well, it was the box office & I played to it & God knows I needed to.

One surely can hardly blame penurious artists for trying to make a bit
of chink, even a tMng when they can thogh in the long run it never pays
because you get labelled by the public's taste, fickle & ignorant as it
is.

Nobody now gives much of a damn for any of my music, only a remaining
handful of dear ones who remember the great times; now we're
fellowdinosaurs who haven't yet crept decently down 'into our coal-seam
and i oined the fossils of a forgotten age.  But I do live and breathe,
I lash my tall & still can bite & take pleasure in doing so.  The
single exception to the fate of everything I've written seems to be
'Land of Hope', belted out with bombast & that has anyway become
national property - it's no longer by me, just another of those purple
tunes like 'Rool, Britanyah' and 'Gawd Save'which make the public climb
onto its hind legs and yell with a tear in its eye (two tears if
there's a pint in its stomach).  Oh, foolish!

spending a lifetime despising the British public's musical taste & I
realise now my scorn was misdirected.  It was really self-loathing for
bothering with such things anyway.  One is an artist & there's an end
to it.  No use trying to suck up to posterity - posterity's inscrutable
& doesn't pay last mont Is gas bill.  When dreamers of dreams get
turned into national figures you can be damned sure their dreams are
misunderstood.  Poor old Kipling, now - a case in point.  He complains
he's so well known by a famous line here and there but never by the
next line which undoes it & still less by all those hundreds of poems
which He unread in the Collected Works.  Alas it's the same for me &
probably for all of us.  The people who are known by whole pages at a
time are either a hundred years dead or Arthur Sullivan which amounts
to the same thing.  I know some of my things are alive and will last
but it won't be me who reaps the least benefit from them - nor ever did
just a lot of conceited asses not yet even born, conductors & fiddlers
& bawlers who are more thought of than the composers without whose
music they would be nobodies.  Or coxswains.

Later We've all lost our faith, those of our generation - Hardy,
Kipling, Conrad - we all went through the motions of producing stuff as
if everything were all right, or at least still possible - as if that
eye in the sky were still looking down with compassion.  But I & since
that filthy war we all know i I It never was - such scenes of carnage
it would have to have witnessed unblinking - & now we've all woken up to
the fact that it's dead.  It's all as dead as the machinery roaring
everywhere (soon no more horses, no more hooves cropping through the
streets, no more friendly smells of fresh sweat & honest dung).  I'm
like a man who as a child once heard a marvelous bird sing in a
miraculous tree & has spent a lifetime trying to take down its song
only to discover too late that it was only a cuckoo clock, springs &

pulleys & cogs.

What a fool!

Later that night the Hildebrand, relieved of the sensation of butting
into banks of solid felt, flew easily with its complement of sleeping
lives high above an unseen terrain of mountains, crevasses and plains
of silt.  Among these suspended sleepers none at that moment knew where
he was nor where he was bound, and there was at least one who even on
waking might not have wished to settle on any particular landscape the
reposeless slow whirling of his unease.

When dawn broke on the port side a grey track of smoothly undulant
water led from the ship to a cream-and-gold focal point on the
horizon.

By the time the sun had risen in a sky which had in it only a few
remaining tatters of cloud the water was gentle.  It had also taken on
shades of transparent indigo and blue which mark warmer latitudes and
on which suds sit blindingly white for as long as it takes a ship's
hull to pass.  Gradually passengers began emerging on deck, pale and
rubbery and uncertain in their dress, to blink at the ocean.  Taking
heart at the sight they all disappeared again and up from below, like
the scent of fresh toast, there drifted the subdued clatter of crockery
and silverware as the first solid nourishment for nearly six days
displaced the nightmare memories of beef tea and water biscuits.  It
was a breakfasting ship whose decks Edward strolled with Molly.

'I know it's customary to observe that we all become different people
when we travel,' she said, 'but I really do feel reborn.  No doubt I
shouldn't say so to a celebrated patriot but now we've left that storm
behind I really think we're at last out of the clutches of England.

I'm afraid for me the country has a malign aura of gloom which extends
far beyond its coastline, like territorial waters or something.  Now
you're shocked, I bet."

'Only by the news that I'm a celebrated patriot.  I didn't know
that."

'Surely you'rcjoking, Sir Edward?  Knighted for services, friend of
Royalty, composer of national song?"

'I suppose I love my country - the few remaining bits which haven't yet
been ruined by concrete and asphalt and other industrial eyesores, that
is.  And maybe I love my countrymen some of 'em.  But as an artist
yourself you should know that artists don't have countries in the way
other people do.  If they're as unlucky as I've been then bits of their
work - invariably not the best bits, either - get taken up and people
go around saying how exactly they fit the national mood.  All of a
sudden an ordinary Worcestershire countryman, which is what I am, finds
himself touted as the embodiment ofJohn Bull.  It's not a role I
relish."

'Oh ... But I thought, well, Master of the King's .  . ."

The ferocity with which he cut her off made her stare straight out over
the rail like a ticked-off child who dare not look at its accuser.

'For the last time, I am not the Master of the King's Musick.

That post is currently held by Sir Walter Parratt and has been since
the eightecri-nineties.  I am no longer the master even of my own
music, let alone the King's."

The sheer pain of this last sentence, spoken as he turned abruptly away
to stare at the black funnel uttering its racing black coils, silenced
her instinctive protest that this was positively the first she'd ever
heard of it.

'I'm extremely sorry if I offended you."  She did not say this
especially meekly but more with the dispassion which comes from being
accustomed to ordinary bad behaviour.  That was what one had to say; it
was thus one sued for peace.

'Offended?  I'm not offended.  I'm .  just bored beyond bearing that
wherever I go people feel they've got to talk about music, music,
music.  Damn all music!  Why ruin a perfectly beautiful morning with
this incessant gabble about music?"

The injustice of this fresh outburst, instead of silencing her as j it
had silenced so many, actually stung Molly to say an unthinkable
thing.

Not knowing nor even caring whether this man beside her embodied the
State or an Art or was mere1v some kind of distinguished-looking puppet
she said: 'That is probably the most childish thing I ever heard a
grown man say.  We were talking about patriotism; it was you who
suddenly began a tirade about music.  Five years ago I was watching
horribly wounded men die - boys, most of them, children even - and not
one of them behaved in such a nursery fashion.

You've evidently lived a very indulged life, Sir Edward."

She walked away up the deck and vanished down a companionway.  He was
left staring at the impassive slide of water, the speed of whose
hissing lacework of foam reminded him of how fast he was being carried
ever further from the known, or at least the familiar.

What on earth was he doing here?  He'd never wanted to come on this
stupid trip.  Who had taken this mad decision for him?  Who had
recommended this very shipping line?  Sybil, damn her.  And the thought
came and went too fast to be put into words, like a sick chord, 'How
dare Alice leave me like this?"while that same fleeting sound also
encompassed her chiding 'South America?  Oh Eduare, I hardly think .  .

."

He had a sudden glimpse of the frightening and empty waywardness to
which a life was subject once ordinary domestic restraints had
dissolved.  What was to prevent ... ?  And the answer always came,
Nothing.  Nothing might prevent anything.  And the dazzling wound in
the water was forced open beneath his eyes to close raggedly somewhere
under the Red Ensign at the stern, the scar of the ship's wake
stretching back and back to the vacant line of sky and water.

Whatever crassness or self-pity might have swallowed him for the rest
of the day was staved off by the appearance at his elbow of Steward
Pyce in a white mess-jacket.

'I have a message for you, Sir Edward.  Chief Engineer Stanford
presents his compliments and would be happy to see you at your
convenience in the engine room."

Edward continued to stare downwards.  'Stanford?  Is that really his
name?"

'Chief En ineer Stanford, sir.  Yes sir."

'Dear God.  I suppose there isn't a cabin boy named Delibes, is
there?

Or a grease-monkey called Dvoiik aboard?  No Saint-Sans in the
stokehold?"

'No sir."  Pyce was perplexed.  'No foreigners aboard.  Not as crewmen,
leastways.  And certainly no Germans.  I can't see any of the lads
wanting to share a berth with a Hun."  Then, evidently wondering
whether he might not have been a little outspoken (Elgar, now, that
didn't sound particularly English, did it?) he added a conciliatory
'Bygones be bygones, sir, of course.  Water under the bridge.  Live and
let .

'Show me."

As Pyce led the way below Edward said 'I wonder if you would be so good
as to get me a couple of things?"

'Of course, sir.  All part of the .

'I need a small bucket - well, perhaps a large tin with a stout handle
and some light cord.  Say about thirty feet.  Can you do that?"

'Stout cord, sir.  Light bucket.  Can do, sir.  Any particular ... ?"

Just those, thank you Pyce.  When I say bucket maybe that would be a
bit large.  More of a can with a handle.  Hold about a quart, shall we
say?"  And as they both stooped to enter the first of a series of
round-cornered metal doors set rather high in the wall Pyce caught the
words 'my instruments'.  It's his bloody trombones, the Steward
thought.  What on earth can he be up to?  He tried to imagine any
activity - regardless of plausibility - which could possibly involve
such equipment.  He gave up as he ushered his passenger through a last
hatchway, grasping the lintel with an extended hand so the
distinguished grey head might bang itself on nothing harder than his
knuckles.

Edward passed into a rocketing cavern where sound and smell merged into
one another and became the single effluvium of power.

The noise itself was a sustained low howl and monstrous panting as
though the Hildebrands metal flanks heaved with her efforts to drive
through the ocean.  An hour later he returned to the upper air deafer
and with the uncertain tread of an invalid.  Once in the bright breeze
he was again conscious of the onward rushing of the ship, a feeling now
informed by images of the implacable force of great engines.  Never
mind, he thought, only for a few weeks.  But as the memory of that
appalling breakfast-time conversation with Molly Air re-surfaced a
familiar swell of despair rose up from beneath and then receded,
leaving him beached on the exposed deck like a castaway.  'We could
none of us have foreseen how stranded we should become,' he thought,
and, 'We do not belong here."

Yet once again his desolation was broken into by the sudden appearance
of Steward Pyce.  This time the man carried a coil of light cord and a
small metal drum which had been roughly pierced at the rim and fitted
with a wire handle.

'Were these what you had in mind, sir?"  After some thought and a
speculative conversation with Hempson he had decided that this was part
of the equipment for a new game his passenger had devised, something
like deck-quoits but involving throwing things into a tin rather than
over a peg.  The string was probably to enable a player to twitch the
tin at a distance to spoil his opponent's aim.

He had not yet decided on what these people would be throwing into the
tin - coins, probably, even bloody sovereigns, seeing the money some of
them could afford to leave lying around on their dressing-tables.

Well, you had to be idle rich to come on a jaunt like this in the first
place, didn't you?  Upwards of forty-eight quid was what the round trip
cost a First Class passenger.  Forty-eight quid.

'Just the thing,' his own passenger was saying, looking pleased for the
first time.  Gloomy sort of cove, Pyce reflected.  You'd hardly have
thought an old jam tin from the galley would cheer him up like that.

'Is this thing clean?"

'Clean, sir?"  What was this?  'Oh yes sir.  Cook gave it a good
washing out."

'Well, very good then.  That'll be all."

From the way in which he put tin and cord at his feet the man was not
going to be more forthcoming.  A little disappointed Pyce withdrew but
only to the ample cover of an engine room duct whose mouth perpetually
gulped the cool wind of their passage.  He fiddled idly with the latch
mechanism controlling the angle to which the duct could be swivelled so
that any passenger on deck might suppose him properly occupied, while
every now and then covertly watching the distant figure at the rail.

Suddenly it stooped in the stiff manner of the portly and tied one end
of the cord to the handle of the tin.  Then Sir Edward gave a swift
glance about him and, evidently reassured that he was not watched,
began to lower the tin over the ship's side.  There was a pause during
which his grey hair was twitched by the breeze then a sharp 'God damn
it!"  reached the Steward's ear.  Sir Edward could be seen hauling in
the cord hand over hand very fast.  On the end was nothing but a piece
of bent wire.

Pyce, who from the moment his passenger had begun lowering the tin had
known what would happen, smiled to himself.  'Silly beggar,' he
thought.  'What did he imagine at fourteen knots?"  He moved off to
another part of the deck but not so far away that Sir  Edward would
not be able to spot him almost immediately.  He was not at all
surprised by the man's appearance at his side within minutes.

'I'm afraid you'll think me a complete idiot, Pyce,' Edward began,
offering the bent wire.  'I was fiddling with that can when it IR I
somehow unhitched itself and fell overboard.  I wonder if I could
trouble you for something a little stouter?  A bucket perhaps?"

As he went to fetch one the Steward pondered this inept little
falsehood and pondered still more the outcome of an attempt to lower a
heavy galvanised iron bucket into the whizzing sea.

'Probably pull his stupid arms off,' Pyce told the stores man with
satisfaction.

'Lose a perfectly good bucket in any case.  Give him this one, look,
it's patched.  Hanged if I'm turning over a new one."

'Don't you worry, I'll do it for him.  Better have some proper rope
while you're at it."

Up in the sunlight he approached Edward blithely, swinging the
bucket.

'Now then, sir, you want some sea-water 'Oh, Pyce.  Er, well, while
you're here with a bucket I wouldn't mind so me of that as well."  And
his distinguished passenger shot him a hot unreadable glance from his
deep-set eyes.  'But not here."

'No sir, it'll be easier if we do it from the stern."

'Afraid not.  No, I want it from up front."

'You want water from the bows rather than from the stern?"This isn't
eccentric, he thought, it's stark staring.  'I think you'll find it's
pretty much the same water, sir.  Sea up front and sea behind."

'That's maybe what it looks like to you, Pyce, but I can assure you it
isn't at all the same to my instruments."

'No sir?"  The man was going to give his trombones a drink, that was
the only possible thing.  Pyce wondered whether he should see the MO
informally, of course, just to find out if there was any chance of this
man going right off his chump.  There had been that American last year
who had tried to walk on the water.  You just couldn't tell.  It
usually wasn't the noisy ones at all- it was the quiet, well-mannered,
purposeful sort you had to watch.

'Well, sir, if it's from the bows you'd perhaps better let me get it
for you.  It's a tidy drop to the water up there and that bucket's I
going to weigh a bit when it's full."

N Together they made their way forrard past the bridge to the very F 58
bows where the deck narrowed to a cramped clutter of ironwork
windlasses, chain lockers, a small derrick - and the stern plunged
vertically to cleave the water far below like a sharp grey headland.

'You shouldn't really be here, sir,' said Pyce as he let the bucket
fall to the water trailing an impeccably-judged length of slack, then
extricating it with an expert flick the moment it had begun to fill.

It had taken a fraction of a second.  Soon the bucketful of Atlantic
came up over the rail, the water still revolving as the last
effervescence cleared.  'There you are."

From aninside pocket Edward produced a silver hip-flask which he
unstoppered and plunged into the bucket.  When it was full he corked
it.

'Very much obliged, Pyce.  You can throw the rest away now- I have what
I need."

From his vantage point on the bridge Captain Maddrell had been watching
with puzzlement.

'That steward, Pyce, what the hell does he think he's up to?"  he said,
presumably to Mr Mushet who was slouched in his customary corner
nearby.

'Is that the musician fellow he's got with him?"

'You know damn well it is.  Pyce should never have taken a passenger up
there.  I don't care if it's the Prince of Wales, he's not freely being
given the unrestricted freedom of my ship.  Company regs are quite definite
on the point.  If some passenger takes a header into the briny from the
bows we won't have a leg to stand on in court.

Look good in the Echo, wouldn't it?  "Booths Murder Nation's
Composer"."

Allowing a discretionary ten minutes to elapse before sending for him
the Captain had Pyce uneasily climbing the bridge stairs.

This was emphatically not the steward's territory; he normally had
nothing to do with the ship's officers, being answerable to the Chief
Steward.  Once on the bridge he stood to attention, conscious of how
out of place his white mess-jacket looked amid the blue serge and
knitted pullovers of professional mariners.

'At ease, Pyce.  You again, chI want an explanation."

'Sir, Sir Edward insisted, sir."

'Did he, by Jove.  And if he'd insisted on taking all his clothes off
and climbin the ruddy mast you'd have given him a leg-up, is that
it?"

'Sir, of course not, sir.  But he's my passenger sir .

'Blast your passengers.  What in God's name gets into you?  That
American fellow.  Scandalous.  Right, you know Ship's Regs."

'Sir."

'Clear breach.  I'll get Chief to dock your wages.  Now get off my
bridge.  If it happens again I may bring back the old naval tradition
of keel-hauling.  D'ye know what keel-hauling is?"

'No sir."

'Not very nice is what it is, Steward.  Not very nice at all.  Go."

But much to his own surprise Pyce stood his ground.

'It's about my passenger, sir."

Captain Maddrell, who had already turned away, inflated his face in a
fine imitation of disciplinary rage.

'Are you deaf, Pyce?"

'No sir.  But Mr Elgar, that is Sir Edward .

'Good God man, who's Master of this vessel?"

'You are sir."

'Then d'ye think a captain wishes to hear a steward's impertinent
complaints about a passenger?  Don't you think he might have better
things to do, like getting us all to Madeira in one piece?"

'Sir.  But I think he's mad."

'Probably the only thing you two have in common, then."  Over by the
window the pilot gave an acidic snort.  'Whatever it is I don't wish to
hear it.  For the last time, get out."

All right Kaiser Maddrell, thought Pyce as he gave an unnautiCal salute
and left the bridge, I've done my bit.  If the old idiot starts
prowling your ship gibbering and waving knives at people I'll be the
first to go and put my feet up with Hempson in the galley.

The Hildebrand ploughed on another mile or two before Captain Maddrell
spoke aloud.  'What d'ye think that darrinfool steward meant, "mad"?

Did Sir Edward strike anyone else on this bridge as mad?"

Long familiarity with their captain enabled the others to recognise
this as rhetoric and nobody spoke.  But their unexpressed replies hung
on the air: 'No madder than most civilians."Aren't all passengers?"

'What does it matter?"  The Captain alone answered his own question
with the sophisticated thought that to a man like Steward Pyce anyone
of a higher social order and an artistic bent probably did strike him
as an alien being.

Inside Cabin no.  2 Edward was happily opening the polished mahogany
boxes he had brought.  He would have unpacked them the first night but
fearful for their safety in the ship's violent movement had left them
among the shirts and suits and underwear which largely filled the
massive cabin trunk.  Now at last he had them ranged on the writing
table.  From the porthole above it a brilliant stream of light, bounced
first off the sea and then reflected from the white-painted shelter
deck outside, fell onto the wooden surfaces.  The grain shone, the
ivory nameplates gleamed, the brass sparkled.  Some quality of the
light in these reflections, some persistent afterglow from a lifetime's
forgotten summers filled him with quiet exuberance.  Unlocking the
tallest case he drew off the cover of a microscope, a handsome brass
instrument with a choice of three objective lenses.  Peering down it to
assure himself that it was none the worse for its rough passage he
flexed and swivelled the concave mirror underneath to gather the light
into a single disc of glare.  Satisfied he opened a second case, a nest
of glass slides each fitting into its grooves.  He lifted out one or
two and held them up.  None was cracked.  Light winked off their
polished edges, made momentary jewels of the stains, the rubies and
topazes and amethysts set at their centres.  The last of the cases
yielded a compact field kit: small bottles of dyes and reagents,
various tweezers, spare slides and cover-slides, tiny gummed paper
labels, mapping pen and a thimble-bottle of indian ink.

About all this equipment there hung a subtle air of professionalism,
for although it was beautifully maintained clearly none of it was
new.

Various blots and spillages inside the compartments hinted at long use
while inside the lid of each box was an old paper label inscribed
'Ruthvenjevons MD, Bombay'.  Edward had not liked to remove these
labels: it had seemed presumptuous for a mere hobbyist.  Besides, he
always had in the back of his mind to track down this doctor, discover
when - and if - he had died, and how such personal things should have
found their way into the anonymous mart of the saleroom.

It did not cross his mind that the unknown doctor might, like himself,
finally have tired of his lilife's work and have willingly swapped the
tools of his trade for some congenial new pursuit.  It was thus,
shortly after moving into Severn House, he had impulsively but without
regret sold his Gagliano violin and bought a billiard table with the
proceeds.  Golly how cross Alice had been ... And now over the last
eighteen months an obsession with microscopy had grown so it almost
displaced - or perhaps was complementing - a lifetime's varied
hobbies.

Woe to artists with a scientific bent!  he might once have said,
thinking of fatal distraction and of Saint-Sans, among other things a
competent enough astronomer to have had a telescope built to his own
ifications.  Woe to artists whose talent is seen as subtracting
specifically from their genius!  For Edward there never had been a time when bouts
of intense creative work had not alternated with a lassitude full of
loathing for music.  At such periods the hedging-andditching, the
chemistry experiments, the bicycling, the barrelmaking, the
kite-flying, the motoring had seemed like remissions from a long and
nagging illness, stretches of normality when an ordinary life became
possible once more.  Yet always it had returned like a malign
influence, the half-hated half-loved with imperative, as I its
monstrous egoism it was making the claim that beneath the guise of
seriousness the little crazes merely concealed the one part of him
which was truly serious and which consumed him.

With nothing but pleasure he now tipped the contents of his hipflask
into a carefully-rinsed toothglass and with an eye dropper took a
sample of the sea-water.  For half an hour he bent over his microscope,
bathed in sunlight, occasionally grunting.  'Oh look!"  he would
murmur.

'Oh how perfect!"  Far beneath him the engines prowled peacefully in
their confines, the ship hummed along so steadily it might have been on
wheels.  Shadows fleeted past the porthole as the last passengers
hatched out and fluttered to the upper regions trailing fragments of
conversation.

4 I... well, not at any rate with that dress," I told her .

'Betty's taste ... !'

buy some more in Funchal .

Sometimes the grey-haired man at the table prepared a slide, light
flashing off silver tweezers as he delicately settled a tiny wafer of
glass to cover the bead of moisture containing the specimen.

Finally he sat back and rubbed his eyes before going to the cabin trunk
and rootling in it like a schoolboy with a fine disregard for crushed
shirt-fronts.  He came up with two books, one of them obviously new:
Minchin's Introduction to the Study of the Protozoa.  The other was
Murray and Hjort's The Depths of the Ocean, Back at the table he spent
the next hour leafing through their pages, often peering down the
microscope to verify his identifications.

When the bugle went for luncheon Edward was much restored and went with
every expectation that he would see Molly Air and be able to apologise
to her.  But she was not there; her empty place mocked him.  For the
first time the restaurant was reasonably full.

As he left he was conscious as always of people's eyes upon him and of
brief lapses of conversation at the tables he passed.  The mere
awareness stiffened his back and bristled his mustache.  Nosy
blighters.  He marched out, but wearily.  Returning to the cabin he
wrote a note on ship's stationery: Dear Miss Air, I missedyou at
luncheon when I had hoped to apologisefor what must have seemed like
brusqueness earlier this morning.  I had no call to vent spleen on an
innocentfellow-passenger.  Mightyou reassure a lonely old composer by
permitting him to make amends?

Yrs, Edward Elgar He rang the service bell but no Pyce came.  Instead a
cabin boy stuck his cropped head around the door.

'Would you kindly take this to Miss Air?  I'm afraid I don't know her
cabin number."

'Miss Hare, sir?"

'Not Hare, Air."

'Miss 'are, sir.  Right away."

Edward gravely pressed a sixpence upon the child who disappeared and
could be heard whistling his way along the deck outside.  He allowed
himself a pleasurable smile then once more seated himself at the table
intending to continue with the microscope but falling instead into a
light doze from which he awoke disgruntled.  In a mood of mid-afternoon
melancholy the sudden thought of going up above and parading in a
boater, an old widower amid couples playing deck-quoits or flirting,
was horrid.

He reminded himself that there were plenty of single people, Molly
herself included, to say nothing of the missionary spinsters.  This
thought made things no better, however.  He wondered what to do.

He missed the ticker-tape machines with their news from Epsom and
Sandown, Thirsk and Doncaster.  He missed The Times and the theatre
reviews.  He missed his dogs.

As he had gone about his rounds through darkened cabins full of reek Dr
Ashe could think of nothing.but the disaster which had come upon him.

In all twenty years of Army life - in the sundry wanderings, postings
and finally decimations of his regiment - he had never felt so lost and
adrift.  It was the sounds he missed as much as anything, those
familiar sounds by which his inner clock was set: the scrunch of boots
outside the window, the distant wails of command, the brick yards
echoing to horses in their harness.

And above all the bugles, hailing the sun and bidding it farewell,
accompanying the flag up and down its pole, exhorting, alerting,
summoning, inspiring.  In this tin can amid the waves, by contrast, the
only bugle call was a single note, a mockery blown by some hopeless
matelot with brilliantine to invite the already overfed to yet further
meals.

What had he to do with these people?  True, many of them had as yet
eaten very little but one could tell from the spineless way they lolled
in their bunks and moaned that they were rotted with selfindulgence.

It was impossible to keep the company of vermin who refused to take
responsibility for themselves.  At least there was comfort in knowing
he had taken his own responsibility for that affair at Aldershot.

Resigning his commission after so much honourable service had earned
him the baffled sympathy of fellowofficers who, if they couldn't have
been expected to deduce the real cause, had accepted the evasion of
'personal considerations', that oil stock explanation which might
conceal a thousand different urgencies.  Since then he had received a
letter which led him to believe no further enquiry would be pursued.

The military had a sixth sense where taint was concerned and his own
regiment was no exception.  Unruffled waters would be allowed to close
seamlessly over the place where his respected head had last dropped
from sight.  From the Army's point of view he no longer existed.

Returning to his quarters he locked the door and poured himself a
tumbler of whisky.  For half an hour he sat unrelaxed at his empty
table, drinking steadily and finishin the best part of half the
bottle.

Then he got to his feet and stripped to the waist, letting his
shirt hang by its tails from the waistband of his trousers.  He took
out a small canvas roll of surgical instruments, the field kit he had
carried in France, and selecting a scalpel clipped in a fresh blade.

Then he stood in front of the mirror and examined himself minutely,
angling up the lamp on the table beside him so as to bathe his upper
body with light.  Deep shadows were thrown in the hollows of his torso
which had the flayed look of a mediaeval saint whose life was not
separable from punishment.  With the blade he drew a deep five-inch
line high up across the left side of his chest and without pausing
another in exact parallel half an inch above it.

He repeated these pairs of cuts twice, moving upwards so that his work
was not obscured by the blood which welled from the incisions and
streamed freely down his ribs.  He studied the cuts in the mirror
before, apparently satisfied, pouring himself another glass of whisky
which he drank off in three gulps.  Then he turned back to the mirror
and carefully began etching a series of vertical cuts between the
parallel lines like irregularly-spaced sleepers on a railway track.  It
took him a minute and more and his face the lamplight betrayed nothing
as he worked.  By the time he had finished his dangling shirt was
spotted with blood and the waistband on his left side sopped in it.

Laying down the scalpel Dr Asher once more dispassionately examined his
chest with its fresh grid of hatch-marks and the crimson sheen which
drenched his white skin with shimmering and mesmeric beauty.  In the
brilliance of the electric light the colour was rich and vibrant as the
juice which embodied it sank slowly downwards from the wounds.  The
doctor took a handful of lint, soaked it in surgical spirit and pressed
it to his chest.  Only then did an expression cross his face
momentarily, a quick grimace, a spasm nearly of disgust.  He pressed
the pad still tighter then suddenly took it away.  In the instant
before blood sprang back to blur the pattern the filling red strokes on
his skin formed the outline of the ribbons he had worn, the medals he
had won:

MC, DSC, the many campaign awards, the insignia of his service.

He took a fresh pad, sprinkled it this time with iodine and taped it
across the wounds.  Gasping almost inaudibly as he moved he cleaned up
his body, put on a fresh shirt, changed his trousers, adjusted his tie
in the mirror.  He lit a cigarette with fingers which scarcely shook,
finished both it and another tumbler of whisky, unlocked the door and
went out on his rounds.

IV

Day started badly, terse with Air girl.  Of course I've apologised but
don't know why I slid.  Then visit to engine room where the Chief
m off even in
mid-Atlantic.

Stainer

& Mackenzie will be lurking somewhere, office-boys in Manaos
probably.

Engines huge, the heat & din expunged me - exhilarating in its way.

Looked at a sample of sea-water - some wonderful diatoms & organisms,
among them Ostracods, Tunicates & Dinoflagellates.  It would be
interesting to get samples from deep water but can't imagine how.

Maybe some kind of bottle with a sprung top which could be opened by a
string at a measured depth?

V. perverse to be keeping a journal.  The noise is all written down
(long J since) & most of it printed; why can't the rest be silence?

But something nags.  Why slid.  people in their sixties find their
thoughts turning always & always to childhood?  Why are my dreams
haunted by rivers, lost voices, sounds which can't be notated?

Everything says to me 'long ago', nothing %,cry much says 'now'.

There's a horrible account of poor Schumann in his madness sitting all
day feebly making lists of rivers and place-names interspersed by
musical dreams.  He awoke from one of these calling feverishly for 4S
paper since he had heard the most angelic music too beautiful for human
cars.  He scribbled it down while it was fading like Tartim and
his'Devil's Trill'sonata orColeridge and'Kubla Khan'-and when Brahms
came & read it he found an imperfect version of the slow mvt.  theme of
Schumann's own vln.  concerto.  I wept when I heard that story couldn't
help myself, it's too close to something I can't put my finger on.

Maybe it isn't written on the wind after all, maybe we're taking our
own dictation.

Whatever we're doing I'm certain we began it in infancy.  In those few
short years free of the least vestige of labour the act of vision was
completed.  The lifework we followed was merely agonising & fallacious
transcription.  How mis-timed it is, that silly reverence accorded the
famous artist in his studio, the composer in his study, the poet at his
table (hush!  for a great work is taking shape!).  For who on seeing a
child poking a chrysalis with a twig or watching water flow around a
stone while he plays on the river-bank could seriously suppose this
very moment might be the true birth of a symphony?  When I wrote to
dear Nim (all those years ago) that the trees were singing my music or
maybe I'd sung theirs some such phrase - it wasn't fanciful.  No doubt
they do sing a different song to each pair of ears; but those were
precisely the notes which came to me as these ears heard what these
eyes saw.  They were what I had heard as a child down by the Severn and
the Terne: the wind in the reeds & the willows, the slow slide of
arterial England which at the time I idiotically supposed to be
everlasting.

Miserable deception, all of it.  The musical vision was so definite,
the inner voice so urgent one always believed it did correspond to
reality in 'this I saw & knew' etc. Such were the notes, & only those
some way notes, made by the wind passing through the trees & by the
trees as the wind passed through them.  Anyone who couldn't hear it was
deaf or had the soul of a stone.  Alas for the years it took to see why
I was wrong.

When Alice died dear Frank Schuster showered me with 'helpful
texts'among them a Polish mystic called Rabbi Nachmann of Bratslav
(born the same year as Beethoven, I remember) & a buddhist book which
had a neatly illustrative story.  A famous Patriarch & a novice monk
are on a hillside together looking down at their monastery on its crag,
prayer-flags fluttering in the pure Tibetan breeze.  After a bit the
monk asks 'Is it the wind or the flag which moves?"  to which the
Patriarch replies 'Neither, it's the mind."

So a composer's mind is his alone & what he may hear in the wind
corresponds to nothing except in himself.  Ah, gross fool to expect
public acclaim for private vision' But how deceptive & swamping that
certainty used to be ... In those days I think there was no quiver of a
leaf, no furl of a wing, no veiled or flashing human glance which
couldn't render itself into music.  I heard everything: the passing of
a cloud, the passing of a waggon, the passingofa life - I cd.  hear it
all & still can when I manage to convince myself it's worth the
trick.

The smell of toast or the slicing of a black pudding (especially the
ones we used to get from Moron's, juicy, with skins that 2ck!  at a
steel knife point); the feel of a word like'owl'or'slumber'; even
ideas: all these things fall at once into notes, phrases, harmony,
rhythm.

Why?  How?  It's as if there were a single raw material of all art
which different people perceive with different senses, according to
talent.  I happen to hear it; but when a tune first comes I don't
always recognise it as music straight away - I'm not quite sure what it
is.  Like Gerontius I'm uncertain: 'I cannot of that music rightly
say/Whether I hear or touch or taste the tones."  Strange how only now
do I dare admit to the private page (23 years on) that it was this
passage in Newman's poem which decided me to set it.  I never even
dared tell poor Alice that.  The dear, sweet thing was blind to all but
her 'highest motives'.  Yet the truth is it had nothing, whatever to do
with religion (& of course everybody was bound to misread it - 'stinks
of incense', 'too much Mary' &c &c.  Well, it was my mother who
converted to Catholicism four years after she married and five years
bursts

before I was born, not I. I was never a convert).  It was not so much
the quality of Newman's verse - I could perfectly well see at the time
it was patchy - but the dramatic poetic vision.  It was wonderfully
imaginative, that idea of a freshly-detached soul being borne along
without either location or time.  It's never clear what he's become,
with what senses he perceives things, how fast he's being impelled on
his way by the 'uniform and gentle pressure'.  So when (meaningless
questions!) one wonders where the d1vvel he's got to and how long has
elapsed since his death (is he dead?) it's a real shock to us when he
hears the voices of his friends singing the Subvenite around his
death-bed.  It was that which really convinced me: the being in two
worlds at once, the dissolution of place & time.

That & the stillness, the solitariness, the cessation of everything
except music whether of angels or devils, earthly voices or lofty
pines.  If I immersed myself in dogma beforehand it was largely to guar
against the in o solecisms for which I slid.  have been publicly
pilloried (& with what glee!).  That & the fact that I was still not
quite decided whether I mightn't do the oratorio on Judas instead - a
nice idea after all & not without its radical aspects in those stuffy
days.  Why a 'religious' work at all?  I find myself asking with
near-incredulity in 1923 in a world I share with Stravinsky,
Schoenberg, Ravel.  Because, damn and blast it, in England at that time
a big choral work was the safest way of getting a serious hearing &
'big choral work' meant a potpourri of biblical texts for the leather
lungs of massed Yorks.  spinsters.  That's how far behind England was
musically.

So my motivation in setting 'G' had nothing to do with any personal
commitment to the Church & still less was it an expression of faith (or
even much interest) in the notion of survival after death.  But it
would never have done to admit it.  People - individuals as well as the
Great British Public - are much too dense to understand such things.

You always have to toe some notional line no matter what your real
views.  It's odd the way publics never understand private matters,
given that they after all consist of individuals, but they can't or
won't.  It's like a conspiracy.  So the critics saddled me with Rome &
the wretch Gerontlus (who is after all me and nobody else) had to make
his own way in a hostile world after the worst launching in English
musical history not as a poetic hero but as the eponym of'an
oratorio'.

Well they can weigh him down how they will: his wings will always lift
him.  There's a vast heart in him; cut him anywhere & he still
bleeds.

Despite his name he's a young man after all &, to these biased old ears
at least, still fresh.

Later The cabin boy with the aitches has just brought me a letter from
Molly Air.  She too appears to have a heart.

Dear Sir Edward, If I were certain where the taffrail was I
couldprobably say I was sketching there during luncheon; I seldomfeel
hungg in the sun.  Your graceful apology is accepted with the alacriy
it deserves.  Might we not go ashore together at Funchal?  I can
showyou what to avoid.

Most sincerely, Molly Air I call that generous and shall respond
accordingly.  Wherever Funchal might be it'll be by feminine company, I
slid.  say.

Reading through the above twaddle after a pleasant dinner marred only
by the sound of a dance band somewhere not far enough away: the bit
about there being a single raw material of all art strikes me still as
a tenable theory but it certainly depends on how it's phrased.  That
day I exploded at Roger Fry & his asinine remark about all the arts
being essentially the same - I think I told him that music was written
on the skies to be noted down & couldn't be compared to some stupid
imitation (I must have been thinking of those overpaid nude-lady
painters like Long.  Anyway it was a good lunch-time philosopher's
put-down).  Since then, thanks to GBS who was also present, I've come
to think Fry actually meant something not much different from my own
idea: he just put it badly & at an unfortunate juncture - I'd had a
bellyful of hearing about the vast sums of money & honours which hack
painters & popular novelists get while musicians are fobbed off with a
pittance & left practically to starve.  Maybe all fond all the arts are
the same but they certainly don't get pi!Lid the same.  Nor are all
artists the same, not by a long chalk.  One thinks of the Singing Dames
Butt & Melba: solid humbug from first note to last.  As for Edwin Long
RAThe only decent thing he ever begat was the house Norman Shaw built
for him & in which I lived until a few months ago.  It beggared me.

But then I don't paint naked bits of stuff & so am not paid
accordingly.

A Rropos being able to 'put' anything to music: I've since remembered
Donald Tovey writing to me years ago saying he knew it sounded like
balderdash but he'd often caught himself actually solving some mental
problem in the key of A minor where he'd failed utterly to reason it
out in words.  How well I understand that.  He went on to say that
somebody in Shax - Hamlet, I imagine - was inexplicable if one stopped
to analyse his character but perfectly convincing if one didn't.  Tovey
claimed Shax achieved this by subtle artistic devices which were
absolutely significant but quite beyond the reach of words & hence of
analysis.  Words, he said, do not represent actual ideas but only
particular cases of ideas.  The real idea goes on being in A minorjust
as Shax's artistic methods are closer to being in (say) A minor than
in words ... Well of course Donald's famous for being brainy &
intelleckshul.  But I always can remember the gist of that letter, if
only to think how ironic it makes much of his own music criticism which
relies all too heavily on wordage, much of it purple & fanciful to a
degree.  Luckily nobody in Germany's read any of it or English music
have an even lower reputation for unseriousness than it has
anyway.

Still, something in what he says rings true.  In those dear old days
when I used to go shopping for Alice on the bicycle (when she would let
me out) I simply made a list in a certain key.  Then all I had to do in
the village shop was remember the key & the list would come back at
once.

I never forgot anything.  Come to that, why was the hat I lost coming
aboard this ship in E?  I remember the very day I bought it & put it
on: it sat on my head in E major & ever since then whenever I wore it
the day changed key.  This only sounds silly when you write it down:
putting on an E major hat is after all no dafter than putting on a
brown one.

There was something else, too, before going to bed - oh yes, about
Gerontius.  By not blabbing to people about its real origins I no doubt
spared them dismay & myself no end of trouble.  But one thing which did
upset those 'in the know' was what Jaeger called the Prayer Theme.

Richard Strauss told me he thought it was the precise shape of a man at
prayer but I never informed him that this miraculously holy motif was
originally suggested by a friend's bulldog musing about having to wear
a muzzle.  Alice never said a word about that: I think she actually
convinced herself she didn't know.  But she did.  It was there in
Sinclair's visitors' book at Hereford in black & white.  I'm afraid
people are generally rather illy about such things - going into shock
on discovering that half the best si bits of the 'Christmas Oratorio'
were written as birthday greetings to the local Elector's wife etc,
starting life as rather risqu love-duets & suchlike.

It's the Great Public again.  They do not understand art so they can't
understand creativity.  They really believe there's a distinction
between religious & secular, poor dears.  Gerontius wasjolly secular.

But I fear only God (doubtful) & I wot that.  And now neither of us
much cares.

That night as most of the passengers - including Edward - slept, the
Hildebrand sighted a far-off lighthouse and ninety minutes later
dropped anchor in Funchal harbour so that when they first came on deck
in the morning they found themselves suddenly dwarfed by the threadbare
mountains of Madeira seemingly at arm's length.  Instead of a great
emptiness of sky the drabbish steep hills with their mufflers of
terraced olives bore down on top of them.

Pleased (in some cases downright relieved) to see land again many
nonetheless intuited a sense of displacement.  Where exactly were
they?

What were these islands?  Detached remnants of Africa?

Vestiges of scenery which hinted mockingly at remembered bits of
Mediterranea?  Certain of those on deck tapped their hats casually on
the rail while waiting for the motor launches to ferry them ashore.

There was perturbation in this gesture; it expressed an imaginative
impasse to which they had come.  If, their musing selves insisted, if
on the straight line between the British Isles and the mouth of the
Amazon were no dry land and if one could leave wintry Europe and a
fortnight later reach malarial tropics, what would a theoretical
halfway house look like?  There was no answer to this, even though a
few quite enjoyed the speculation of a gradually changing sea-bed
thrusting itself up in mid-Atlantic to show how far the transformations
had advanced.  But however they imagined the result, Madeira was not
quite it.  Somehow the Portuguese element was wrong, the ochre and
khaki rocks amid all that blue ocean too parched.  Maybe the sight of
the odd parakeet might have saved things: were these not also known as
the Canary Isles?  Many in the speeding launches rather thought they
were.

Holding his straw panama on his knees and wearing a dandyish linen
jacket, silk handkerchief fluttering in breast pocket, Edward was
skimmed across the dimpled surface of the harbour.  Beside him sat
Molly.  On her head was an intrepid hat which had the air of having
come between many a torrid sun and its owner's thick brown hair.  It
was the colour of sand and had around it a narrow ribbon of much the
same tint but with a faint and mountainous line reminiscent of an
effect of watered silk wandering up and down its surface.

This delineated the tide-marks of sweat which had resisted all
launderings.  The hat's broad-brim bent in the launch's breeze; the
string beneath her chin was taut as she kept her head tipped back to
survey the terraces with their scattering of whitewashed villas.

When they disembarked she asked: 'Are you a good tourist, Sir
Edward?"

'I used to be an inveterate si lit-seer, if that's the same thing."

'It probably is if they're the same sights as everyone else's.  I
imagined that in your case they mightn't be."

 'Maybe one does try to bring a different mind to them."

'Well I can tell you there isn't much in the way of sights here for
people on a long journey with only a few hours to spend.  There's a J
sort of cathedral if you like sort of cathedrals.  It's got a quite
pretty Moorish roof of cedarwood.  More to the point, there's a
restaurant I happened upon which does beautifully tender squid stewed
in their own ink.  You can cut them with a fork.  Are you partial to
squid, Sir Edward?"

'I've had them fried in Italy.  I found I liked them better when they
weren't called "squid": there's something unappetising about that
word.

Disguised as calamariftitti, however, they were agreeably marine.

"Stewed in ink" is not an enticing description, either, for anyone who
has made his living with a pen."

'As someone who intends to make it with a brush I assure you they're
enchanting.  A bed of white rice and black puddles strewn with fat pink
shapes like finger-stalls with collar-stiffeners in them.

The colours are most eccentric."

'Good heavens, Miss Air.  If I were wearing my hat I should raise it to
your stomach.  There's something about the colour black I don't at all
associate with food."

'Have you never eaten black pudding, then?"

'Touche!  You've hit on a great favourite of mine.  Only better not
tell anyone or they'll think you invented our acquaintance.  Who was
that gentleman you so recently described, now?  Celebrated patriot,
friend of Royalty, heir-presumptuous to the mastership of the King's
Musick?  They're not going to believe a stuffed ass like that eats
black pudding.  And comes back for seconds if there's another pint of
beer to go with it."

'My turn to cry "Touche!", Sir Edward.  Please don't remind me."

'It's already out of my mind.  Not the black puddings, though.

Do you know until quite recently I lived in Hampstead, which is not by
any means the most deprived quarter of London.  You can get most things
in Hampstead, even some fairly exotic food for the various foreigners
of substance who stay there from time to time.

But do you think one can obtain something as stalwartly English as
black pudding?  I used to have to take the bus all the way down to
Fleet Street and patronise a little shop which has them delivered fresh
from Birmingham every week.  My wife objected strenuously.

She thought it was infra dig."

'Which?  Bus or sausage?"

'Both, I'm afraid.  I was quite unrepentant.  The one was a necessary
economy, the other sheer pleasure.  Not but what she wasn't perfectly
happy to eat it herself in the old days ... Where are we going,
incidentally?  Have you any idea?"

'Yes, to the top of Bella Monte.  I took the liberty of buying us
tickets from the Chief Steward.  We get a round trip including a late
breakfast at the top.  Or an early luncheon."

'That's absurd,' said Edward sharply, then, 'You're too kind.

One's not used to having arrangements made by young ladies one scarcely
... I'm a bit nonplussed."

'But not for long,' Molly said cheerfully.

Above them the mountain obscured a good part of the blue sky.

Its topmost crags seemed as near or as distant as the moon which, as a
ghost of its night-time self, perversely lingered in the light of
morning and balanced upon Madeira like an eroded pearl.  With the herd
instinct common among day-trippers their fellowpassengers, most of whom
presumably had never been to Funchal before, found themselves getting
gingerly into drawn-up bullock waggons.

'I can't see this getting us very far,' Edward observed as he stooped
under the gay cretonne canopy and settled himself on a hard wooden seat
covered in leather.  'Don't tell the gentleman up front but I think
somebody has pinched his wheels."

'Ah, there's a reason for that which you may not know.  Many centuries
ago a certain Teofilo was appointed first Bishop of Madeira, a young
man whose conversion to Christianity had taken place while witnessing
the martyrdom of St Catherine.  He fetched up in Lisbon as a mendicant
theologian famous for two things: his charity and his horror of wheels
- for ever since that awful day he couldn't bear to see anything which
reminded him of Catherine's torment."

'He must have had a trying time crossing Europe."

'Abominable.  He walked, of course, and to drown the sound of carts and
carriages on the few roads he was forced to take he used to stop, face
the ditch and sing a psalm as loud as he could.  You can imagine he
arrived in Lisbon after an unconscionable time and quite hoarse.  But
what nowadays would be thought eccentricity was in those times
accounted piety and he rose rapidly in the Church.  When he was
appointed Bishop here he was for the first

time able to exercise real power in the service of his pet aversion.

He simply banned all wheels on Madeira."

With a jerk the bullock took up the slack in its harness and they J set
off along the cobbles, rumbling and juddering.

'This is nothing but a sled!'

'Exactly,' said Molly.  'They all are.  Not a wheel among them.

Oh, you'll see'wheels here now and then.  After all, despite the
monstrous piety and conservatism of the Madeirans it is nearly eleven
centuries since Teofilo died.  But not many - you look.  I believe
these things are called carros,' she added.

'Pray excuse me,' broke in a gentle voice from the seats behind them,
'but I couldn't help overhearing your account."  Turning, they found
the two spinsters from their table leaning forward.

'Good morning, Sir Edward.  Good morning,' these ladies said in
parenthesis.  'But,' continued the first, 'surely your version is at
variance with the explanation given in Calix6es?"  She held up a
battered red volume.

'All, Calix6es,' said Molly, somewhat in the indulgent tone of a
renowned chemist being lectured by his great-aunt on phlogiston.

'I don't believe anybody takes Calix6es very seriously nowadays, not
since that extraordinary hoax ... But here we are.  We have to get out
here."

The fleet of carros had stopped outside a rack-railway station,
happening to coincide with the arrival of a funicular train consisting
of half a dozen coaches of weird aspect, having been constructed at an
angle corresponding to that of the gradient.  Little rattly
parallelograms, they drew into the platform and awaited new 7 custom.

Expressions of interest and amusement made themselves audible, mingled
with one or two notes of dismay; but in the event lo I twenty more or
less resigned Britons soon found themselves seated in staggered rows
being hauled upwards.  As the winding-station with its
quickly-suppressed images of ad hoc bits of wiring and loose girders
fell away, so did the electrical whine of the motors until they were
ascending in almost complete silence.

'It's quite like ballooning,' offered the red-checked explorer,
Fortescue.  The face which still needed a pith helmet to give it shape
was babyish with pleasure.  He had brought a pair of binoculars with
him, Molly noticed.

Somewhere beneath them a cable transmitted a soft thrum and cogs
engaged the metal teeth of the rack with no more than a crackle of
grease.  On either side terraces, villas and bulks of naked rock
slipped away, and as they did so the passengers' spirits rose in the
morning air.  Gradually the town spread itself below, the harbour
became a map, the Hildebrand - glimpsed now and then among the
hydrangeas - a grey-and-white model.  The warm scent of baked earth,
dew and dust rose in pockets.  Some late butterflies investigated the
fig-trees' remaining leaves.  Windings of narrow cobbled roadway
disappeared beneath them, re-emerging to turn abruptly aside and fall
from sight.

'It's a pity it's so late in the year,' Molly said.  'Spring must be
amazingly beautiful - just look at all the plants: mimosa, hydrangeas,
lilies, agapanthus, to say nothing of the things people have growing up
their houses.  Simply between the harbour and the station I saw
bougainvillaea, wisteria, strelitzia, hibiscus and jacaranda."

'Very showy,' a lady remarked.

'Even so.  When I was here injune it was much clearer from the
vegetation that we were passing from a hot zone to a more temperate one
as we went up.  For instance those fields down there behind the town
were full of sugar cane and rice but by this point it's mostly grapes
and wheat.  I did some sketches in wash: the colour changes were
wonderfully subtle."

'You can still tell from the trees,' Edward pointed out.  'It's all
palms and figs down there but it looks as if those are pines and oaks
we're coming to.  I wonder how high up we are?"

This had been one of those semi-public conversations which
selfconsciously include people who otherwise could not be excluded
except by whispering.  Fortescue was able to volunteer without
embarrassment: 'About a thousand feet, I'd say.  Give or take."

'Is this a balloonist speaking?"

'As a matter of fact I haven't done that much ballooning, sir.  But I
can certainly speak as a pilot."

'You've flown in an aeroplane?"  Edward's interest was that of someone
who had long ago discovered an enthusiasm for motoring and logically
regarded flight as the next step.

'Many,'admitted Fortescue.  'I was in the RFC a goodish while."

Something in his tone implied recognition that war heroes were becoming
unfashionable and he hardly wished to be pressed.  'The altimeters were
not always reliable, you see, so we became not bad at judging
height.

Had to be, really.  No trick to it,' he added modestly as if someone
were likely to imply there were.  'Anybody could do it with a bit of
practice.  In any case I've cheated."  The amorphous face beamed round
upon the occupants of the carriage.

'Have you been here before?"  Molly asked him.

'Not a bit of it.  But the guide book gives the height of this mountain
as three thousand feet and while we were still on the ship I took
notice of various features.  This line of forest we're coming up to is
about halfway, for instance.  And that whitish splash that looks as 1
if somebody's tipped paint over the cliff, that's at about two thousand
feet."

This evidently professional approach to landscape by someone claiming
to be a pilot and reputed to be an explorer made Molly look at
Fortescue with some attention for the first time.  Suddenly the
binoculars on their lanyard about his neck looked like a tool rather
than a prop, and quite well-worn at that.

'You were wise to bring those,' she said.  'The view from the top is
quite spectacular."

'I never travel without 'em."

Baby's dummy, she thought, unaccountably touched by his innocent meaty
cheeks, the formless clump of hairs on his upper lip.

Roughly at the point where he had indicated the two-thousandfoot mark
they reached a depressed-looking clearing in the middle of which stood
a huge house of un-Madeiran aspect.  Here the train halted but nobody
got in or out and after a minute it started again.

'What an extraordinary house.  It looks like the sort of hotel one
blunders on towards nightfall in Scotland."

'Or one of those places which advertise in the back of Ward Lock's
Guide to Harro ate.  You know, "Premier position.  Near Moors and
Gardens.  Electric light throughout.  Lift to all Floors"."

"Special Suicide Suite",' put in Fortescue and went an immediate red.

'Well realy,' said one of the spinsters, she and her companion turning
away abruptly to glare out of the windows.

Despite the season the little terminus of Monte at the summit was
bright with potted flowers.  A uniformed official with operatic
moustaches bowed to them as they disembarked and directed their
attention to a nearby house where, he intimated, quite exceptional cups
of chocolate and glasses of port might he had of his wife.

'Later,' they said in English and with gestures of stirring above their
abdomens mimed that they had already breakfasted or maybe that the
sudden ascent had destroyed all appetite.  The official made several
more melancholy bows and then went and watered his geraniums using a
wine flask with an exaggeratedly long neck.  The sun winked off the
frogging on his shoulders and made pinkly translucent the ears of a
motheaten tabby cat dozing on a folded copy of 0 Correio.  A notice
board nearby announced the height above sea level.  The voices of
today's visitors died away.

They straggled across a shady square which, had they been able to
ignore the surrounding terrain, they might easily have supposed a
well-visited Mediterranean village.  But in one direction lay a gloomy
pine forest in front of which a single-storey building with tall
windows stood amid the sort of terraces on which tourists take tea and
tell each other how lucky they are to be there.

'I say, what an abominable place,' said Edward.

'Isn't it?"  Molly agreed.  'That's the - ' she consulted her ticket
the Chalet-Restaurant "Esplanade" in which we're entitled to eat and
drink."

'But not to be merry, I shouldn't think.  How awful pines are.

What's that church over there?"

'Our Lady of Something, I forget.  But when I was here before happened
quite by chance to coincide with an immense event.  The place was
stuffed with bishops and sightseers.  We almost missed our boat because
the trains were all full.  It turned out they were cementing up the
Austrian Emperor into his tomb.  Charles the Somethingth - Fourth,
possibly?  Lots of processions, trumpets and whatnot.  And about a
million little brown choirboys all with cropped heads and nionkeyish
grins.  We sat on that verandah thingy and made jokes about
Catholics.

Oh heavens, I suppose you're not by any chance.  . . You are, aren't
you?  Sir Edward, I'm most ... I mean, of course I shouldn't have .

.

."

Much as her confusion amused him he ended it by reassuring her that he
was not remotely offended.  'I daresay it was pretty much of a
spectacle."

'Oh it was.  But even so.  I'm afraid I'm always putting my foot in it
like that,' she said gratefully.  'Now, we don't want breakfast yet, do
we?"  she turned to Fortescue and the spinsters who were a pace or two
behind in the delicate manner of those who might or might not be
considered part of a group.  'Let's earn it, then."

'You've planned us some exercise?"  Fortescue asked her.  She thought
he still had the air of a puppy eager to make amends after a noisome
gaffe.

'Only a little.  But having come this far it's well worth getting the
view.  You'd think people would be glad to stretch their legs after
lying in their bunks for the best part of a week."  She glanced
meaningfully towards a divergent group of fellow-passengers who were
heading determinedly for the Chalet-Restaurant 'Esplanade' before she
led off along a path skirting the forest of Pines.

They walked uphill to where the cranium of the mountain broke through
all pretence of plants and soil, a fissured plateau of baked rock
meeting head-on the subtropical sun.  All of a sudden they stopped
being on Madeira and were instead on a point above the surface of the
globe.  In nearly every direction the sea stretched its crinkling sheet
over the rim of the world like a drumskin on which solar rays and
meteorites were falling in motionless profusion, making a great empty
pattering sound they felt rather than heard.

There was the sense of having been lifted out of the world, of having
been extracted from it even as their memories of it as containing large
and solid things such as buildings were replaced by the panorama of
Funchal below, a mere map of a town on a toy lanet.  This majestic
detachment was still further heightened by P the brilliantly clear
morning air, the windless expanse of blue above them and the ruffled
pan of deeper blue below, neither of which elements seemed to contain
them.  What was more, the far0 if northern port they had left behind,
somewhere over many a stormy horizon together with unreal images of
urban fogs and glum wintering, belonged now to a different planet and
to people other than themselves.

Fortescue was studying the harbour with his glasses.  Edward could see
the Hildebrand was being joined by a rectangular vessel whose stern
trailed a short white stalk of foam.

'I think we're going to take coal on,' he said around his lenses.  'It
looks like some sort of lighter."

'The Chief Engineer told me we burn about seventy tons a day, but maybe
we burned more coming through that storm.  This really is a splendid
vantage point.  I suppose you aviators get quite used to views like
this."

'Not at all, sir,' said Fortescue surprisingly.  'That is, one becomes
accustomed to them but so far as I'm concerned they're never boring.

Still, to get the full effect you do need that feeling of hanging in
air instead of standing on an edge.  You've never been up in an
aeroplane I presume, sir?"

'Not yet, I'm afraid."

'Oh, you must.  It's really the only thing.  You'd be amazed by how
solid it is.  The air, I mean to say."

Edward thought of standing on Worcestershire Beacon in a gale, leaning
against the wind, letting more and more of his weight tilt off his toes
until for a fraction of a second the airstream might actually have been
supporting his body like a yielding bed until he fell forward with a
laugh.  Oh days.

'I must make the effort,' he said half to himself.

'I really would, sir.  It won't cost you much 'just to do a flip from J
some aerodrome but once you've got a taste for it there's no knowing
where it'll stop.  All sorts of people are taking to the air now.

Someone told me there's even a titled lady in her seventies - a
duchess, I think - who's learned to fly and is buying her own
machine."

'You're such a convincing salesman I can only suppose you must sell the
things."

Fortescue laughed.  'Not a bit of it.  Really, I'm just enthusiastic
because I've spent so much time in the cockpit."

'I hope you'll excuse me but I believe you introduced yourself on our
first evening as an explorer?  Is this the latest craze, exploring by
air?"

'It may become so, sir.  The advantages are obvious."  And he told a
story of a scheme he and an old comrade had dreamed up, to go to
unmapped areas of the world and offer to carry out aerial surveying on
behalf of governments.  The Amazon region had seemed to them a sensible
choice since so much was completely uncharted but, as the recent rubber
boom had shown, there was clearly untold wealth to he had there.  He
had already made an exploratory visit to confirm this and now, having
raised the capital in Europe, he was returning to Amazonas to put the
scheme into operation.  The old comrade had gone on ahead; Fortescue
was following on with two machines.

'But for some reason you had to leave them behind?"  hazarded Edward.

'No, the '

y re aboard the H'ldebrand.  They're all crated up in the hold.  I must
say I was a bit bothered in case they got too badly shaken about by
that weather.  But they're both stout little buses.

Johnny - that's Johnny Proctor - has got our two old riggers and
fitters from service days with him and they'll have them together in a
jiffy."

'I believe you're an adventurer,' said Molly who had been listening
with evident interest.

'Well I suppose it is a bit of a lark.  But we've both sunk so much
money into it now we've got to make it work or frankly we'll be on our
uppers.  It's a commercial proposition, all right.  Regular government
salary plus we can undertake work on commission for interested
parties.

What I mean is, we can map a river for the Brazilians but we might tell
only Fry's or Cadbury's that its banks are lined with cocoa forest,
what?"  And though his thirtyish baby's face creased and dimpled Molly
noticed a beadiness in his eyes as if behind the amiable, malleable
world his outer person created as he moved through it certain hard
experiences lay which had fixed all manner of edges and limits beyond
which there would be no budzinL,.

By now others of the party who had also spurned the comforts of the
'Esplanade' had followed on and were scattered across the rock.

Edward, Molly, Fortescue and the two spinsters had remained loosely
together and at last turned from the panorama of Funchal and its
harbour towards an inland view of Madeira.  They reached a point from
which they could see a hillside opposite them and several hundred feet
lower.  This was largely covered in scrub except where vast rectangular
bites had been taken from its core of ochre rock.  Whatever had once
been quarried here must have been exhausted or no longer worth the
effort to mine since the working was quite obviously abandoned.  Some
rusted crane-jibs lay on its floor but all the access tracks were now
covered in the ubiquitous tough bushes.

'I sketched here too,' said Molly.  'I liked those iron-coloured
stains.  I suppose it used to be for iron ore."

'Now there I can be of information,' came the unexpected remark of the
spinster who had earlier addressed her in the carro.

'Ah, you know what it is, then?"

'I do indeed.  They are the worn-out workings of a cake-mine."

Molly tried to think what substance this might be when rendered in
Portuguese, as she presumed this was.  Calque?  Queique?

Maybe after all it was a technical English word for china clay or
something.

'What did they do with this cake?"  she asked, hoping for clues.

'Exported it, mainly,' said the spinster.  'It was of particularly I
fine quality just here.  Its colour which you noted is believed by
geologists to have originated from beds of clay first laid down in the
Pleistocene Era.  It was on that very spot over there it was first
excavated in any quantity for export around the world.  As a matter of
fact it's your maligned Calix6es we have to thank for the archival
discovery that Bishop Teofilo died not as believed from apoplexy
brought on by hearing a child bowl its hoop beneath his palace window
but from a surfeit of Madeira cake - a substance to which he became
hopelessly addicted quite late in life."

This was delivered so precisely in the expected dreary monotone of one
who imparts guide-book information that it was a moment or two before
anyone could find no reason not to laugh.

'By Jove, Molly,' said Edward, wiping his eyes.  'I do believe you've
been japed.  And by a master-japist, too."

Molly Air had gone a slight red at this unimagined reversal of
casting.

'Well,' she said, 'I deserved that."

I' "Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!"  ' 'I hardly think that, Sir
Edward,' said the tall lady.  'Merely someone else who tries to relieve
life's awful expectedness with a little flexing of the imagination.

You've no idea how dreary our two lives are shortly going to be."  She
indicated her companion.  'Mrs Hammond and I do our best to keep
ourselves amused, but in the interior of Ceari or Piaui that's often
impossible for whole weeks at a stretch."

If Edward was surprised by the'Mrs'he gave no sign."I suppose life in
the Missions can't always be as, well, fulfilling as the rest of us
imagine."  Then he added, as if invoking some kind of authority, 'My
own sister Dot's a nun.  In fact she's a Mother Superior."

'I think you're under some misapprehension, Sir Edward,' said Mrs
Hammond.  'Dora and I are rejoining our husbands in Pari.

We're just business wives, you know.  Part of the little British
community there, except that sometimes we go with the men on their
trips to the interior.  We've no connection with any mission.

To be frank, we're neither of us very religious at all."

'In that case I beg both your pardons."

 'I'm afraid, Kate, that Sir Edward looked at us, saw two dowdy
creatures and drew the obvious conclusion."

'Scarcely helped, Dora, by your choral reminiscences of yesteryear."

'Nor by your pretence of being shocked by betting."

These two mischievous women at once managed to produce, as if by the
magic of their candour, an intimacy among the others which had that
quality of appearing inevitable only now it had happened.  On the way
down to the 'Esplanade' Dora Bellamy said: 'I'm a prankster, Sir
Edward, but not a liar.  I promise you I shall't mention it again but
what I said our first evening about being deeply affected by singing in
The Apostles was utterly the truth.  There.  Now we should have some
lime-juice or chocolate or something."

How 'ocular were Britons abroad, thought Edward.  Maybe it J was a
relief from the formalities of home or perhaps just the seeping-through
of a genial contempt for the rest of the world spreading from a damaged
heart, as a stain on the outside of luggage betrays an object broken
within.  But at the same time he knew he was being made up to by all
three women and was very far from disliking it.  Avoiding the bleak
expanse of the chalet's terrace they went round to the garden at the
back where he sat quietly at a metal table while the brilliant November
sunshine fell through trellised vines patchily onto his grey hair and
linen jacket.  Like a cat on a newspaper he basked; but the
restaurateur's wife, supervising the refreshments and covertly noting
the distinction of her party's oldest member, noticed also the
alertness in the way he sat which only partly concealed a remoteness in
the gaze he sent at his neighbours' faces, at the calves of the
serving-girl, at the sky between the leaves.

'Well, Sir Edward, are you ready for an experience?"  Molly asked
him.

'I'm always that."  He set down his cup.

'Good."  She led the way down through a gap in some oleanders towards
the square.  They found themselves at the end of a cobbled roadway much
stained with grease.  The thin soles of their shoes made tacky noises
'as they crossed it.  To one side was drawn up a line of curious
vehicles.  They were wicker sleds of lighter design than their
counterparts down in Funchal, clearly not drawn by bullocks.  Nearby
loitered a group of swarthy youths wearing some sort of national
costume.  Their thighs bulged and their bare arms were sinewy.

'Heavens,' said Edward faintly.  'D'you not think the railway?"

'On no account.  You wanted an experience: this is one."

The wicker creaked as they settled themselves.

'Do you mean we're going to toboggan down to the town?"

'Oh yes."

Behind them once again sat Mrs Hammond and Mrs Bellamy.

'I say, I'm not faint-hearted, but, you know, stopping ... ?  Might we
not shoot off the mountain" 'Don't worry, Sir Edward, they've thought
of that.  Nobody's in business to kill their own customers."

'Sweeney Todd?"

'Nonetheless, this is a much-used form of public transport.

You'll enjoy it."

A pair of buttocks appeared at Edward's car, sheathed in crimson
cloth.

A spasm ran beneath, the material bulged in implausible lumps and they
were off.  It soon became apparent - to everyone's unexpressed relief
that this was not to be a nightmare career down a piste but an ungainly
slither down a cobbled road at a stiffjogging pace.  Once it was clear
that the two young men who ran on either side were not going to let go
the ropes they held and with which they steered the sled around the
sharp bends the passengers relaxed and enjoyed their unusual descent.

The cobbles were not too uneven and slick with repeated oilings.  Now
and again one of the youths reached inside for a can and, still
jogging, poured a stream of oil over the upturned snout of the nearest
metal runner which curved away beneath the sled.  For a while the
scrunching and grinding lessened.

Soon they had left solemn stretches of pines behind and had entered the
lands where villas appeared momentarily behind wrought-iron gates and
whitewashed walls.  Sometimes they shot through a tiny tunnel as the
roadway curved beneath the funicular track and for a moment the dank
hole roared with the screech of iron, the slapping of feet and panting
of the men.  Then sunli lit blazed again and the sound fell away on
either side into the patches of tobacco!  roots and bleached maize
stalks.  Towards the end of the journey the Caminho became more
populous with trudging peasants, water-carriers and the occasional
ox.

As they

approached them the runners would yell.

'I like the way he shouts at 'em to go faster,' said Edward.  The
excitement of their hectic descent was in his voice as he half turned
to include those behind.

'Do you know Portuguese, Sir Edward?"  Kate asked him.

'Nary a word."

'Well, "Afasta!"  actually means "Get out of the way!"' 'All the same
they're doing it quite quickly."

The first roofs of the town swam up and the road tipped sharply into a
last steep descent.  At the same instant both men jumped onto the
sled's runners as if to add their lot to a final suicidal rush.

But perversely their additional weight merely slowed the thing and
brought it to a perfect halt by a ticket collector wearing a crimson
head-scarf The experience was over.

'Surely the most preposterous mode of transport ever invented,'
observed Edward as he climbed stiffly out.  'Tobogganing on cobbles:
talk about crude.  Your Bishop Whatsit has a lot to answer for."

'Poor Teofilo,' said Molly.  'He was a troubled man.  I fear his name will not outlive our visit."

'How do you mean?  He's in that guide book of Mrs Bellamy's."

But Dora simply handed him the battered red book.  It was a copy from
the ship's library of Conan Doyle's The Lost World.

'Now do you see to what extremities of games intelligent people like
ourselves are reduced?"  said Kate.

Fortescue's sled had now arrived.  'I made that about four miles in
twenty minutes,'he said cheerfully.  'I wasJust beginning to miss the
twentieth century."

'That's something I can't imagine,' Edward told him.  'I often wish I
had missed it.  In a funny way I think I probably have after all This
feeling intensified during the early luncheon they took together in a
restaurant overlooking the harbour.  Several hundred yards away the
Hildebrand lay reassuringly at anchor, the thinnest wisp of smoke
driftin from her funnel.  She was due to sail at twothirty so nobody
needed divide their attention between the dishes of seafood and the
clock on the wall.  The mood of the table was animated.  They told
stories, as travellers usually do: of other times, other little
adventures, other company.  But even as he spoke Edward could hear the
drone of some imaginary biographer describing the scene as recalled
later by one of the others.  'Sir Edward, no mean raconteur himself,
drew on memories of a long and varied life to the great amusement of
everyone present."  What were these stories of his, many times told, if
not fables of a distant self, a self who had lived forty-three years in
a different century?  He was nearly twice the age of anybody else at
table.  The things he remembered best had happened years before they
were born and if dragged up into the light of present day - weighted
with a little over-explanation and set adrift in this treacherous
company with incomprension?  Better keep silence.  The conversation turned to fairies as
then might they not sink down again contaminate
Fortescue, evidently neither ill-read nor unreflective for a man of
action, leafed through The Lost World and remarked that he'd always
found it odd that a 'scientific' author of Conan Doyle's character, a
doctor, a man of acutely forensic imagination, should in his later
years have developed a passion for photographs of fairies.

'As far as I know he's convinced the camera sees things the eye
can't,'said Edward."If X-rays can do that - or a microscope, come to
that - why might not a camera?"

'There was a witch who came through ParA last year claiming the same
thing, do you remember, Kate?"  asked Dora.  'That blackamoor with the
French name, Madame Vcyrou, Voisy, something like that."

'Oh her.  She claimed to be an ectoplasmist.  One took a photograph of
her in a trance and when it was developed the plate showed all this
white stuff coming out of her mouth.  It looked like butter-muslin to
me."

'Of course it was a trick; but it was quite well done for a fake
medium.  Still, she did cure some child's sickness in a s6ancc."

'The Aylings'little boy?  She didn't have to fake a thing, the child
did it for her.  It was no more sick than we are."

'However,' continued Edward, 'I won't allow that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
is a cheap fraud.  I've met him and he's as straight a man as ever
there was.  So how do you explain the fairies in the photographs?"

'Have you seen the pictures, sir?"  asked Fortcscuc.

'Well, not the actual photographs, maybe.  Copies.  But in some
reputable source - a magazine or something."

One thing always strikes me about those sorts of photographs,'

 Molly, 'as also about the ghosts people claim they've seen.

Why is it they always look as they're expected to look?  Conan Doyle's
fairies, for instance.  I've seen pictures of them too and they're all
wearing Kate Greenaway costumes.  Why?  Are there fashions in the fairy
world?  Why weren't they all in miniature suits of armour, or woad?  Or
stark naked but for a moleskin cache-sere?  I think it's significant
that Edwardian photographs of Edwardian gardens should show fairies
wearing idealised Edwardian children 's costumes."

They were drinking a light Portuguese red wine of the kind which makes
the English think of sunny holidays abroad but which is not strong
enough to remind them of mid-afternoon headaches and lassitudes of
Calvinist guilt.  It wasjust the sort of speculative conversation
Edward had once delighted in and for an instant an unstoppable sense of
good times past welled up and flowed over him so that he half expected
to see old faces, his little daughter still impatient to leave the
table and climb back on Gaetano the mule, the sunlight outside to be
Italian.  But there were only the faces of four near-strangers, his
fellow-countrymen abroad.  A weary passion came to him that postwar
scepticism should not have everything its own way.

'I have a theory,' he heard his own voice saying with pompous defiance,
'that the human imagination is far more powerful than is convenient to
admit.  I believe that in certain circumstances the mind of the
photographer might well its imagery onto the collodion surface of a
film.  We may not yet have any scientific way of proving how this
happens, nor indeed that it does.  But it seems to me a much more
rational approach than assuming automatically that men like Doyle must
either be deluded or lying their teeth.  Besides, nobody need be
surprised when the images he captures conform to the imagination of the
times."

This was so clearly, even fiercely, delivered the others were evidently
impressed.

'Now that's an interesting theory,' said Fortcscue.  Strangely, he had
not taken off his binoculars when he sat down but had merely tucked his
napkin behind their cycpicccs.  As he ate they stirred slightly behind
the fall of white linen.  'I'll tell you why.  When we life were in
France I flew for a time with a squadron doing photorccccs:
photographic reconnaissance, you know.  We'd fly behind the enemy's
lines and take pictures from the air of various strategic points and
then our experts would try and decipher what they meant.  Of course the
Germans were doing the same to us so we all had to become more or less
tricksters.  There's quite an art in camouflage but there's an even
greater one in hoaxing.  For example, 'fit becomes necessary to advance
some troops over open ground while being essential they're not seen one
can tie bushes to their backs and tell them to freeze each time a
machine comes over."

'The Birnam Wood principle,' said Edward.

'Exactly.  That's camouflage.  But supposing you needed to give the
enemy the impression you were advancing forces into a certain sector
but without deploying the troops which you anyway may not have?  You
get bushes and dot them about the landscape but after the dawn recce's
gone over you move them all slightly and add a few.  Next time the
photographs show fake bushes on the move and with a bit of luck they'll
mistake them for troops.  That's hoaxing."

'Rather ingenious,' said Kate.  'I never knew that sort of thing went
on."

'Oh Lord yes.  I once helped to build an entire British airfield with a
squadron of FE 2b's out of cardboard and plywood.  We had one or two
old buses beyond repair and parked them with their engines ticking over
for the sake of realism, even some brave souls walking about.  We
called it Honeypot Squadron.  It was a lure, you see."

'And did it work?"

'Oh, it worked.  It brought over a whole circus who'd been giving us
hell but this time we had a couple of squadrons waiting in the sun."

There was now no trace of boyish enthusiasm Fortescue's eyes.  Absently
he used his fork to prise open the mouth of his fish and examine its
teeth.  'It was a carve-up.  But anyway, to return to the subject,' he
pushed shut the unresisting mouth, 'I was merely meaning to say that I
can never look at a photograph without wondering what's been arranged,
and why.  But even in those unromantic times there were some strange
occasions.  For instance, a pilot could fly over a dead wood and take
pictures which later showed a lot of mounted troops sheltering.  Then
another pilot would walk in with a picture taken of the same wood at
much the same time and show not a man anywhere.  That happened once at
Bapaurne and we never did get to the bottom of it.  There was nowhere
for all those men to have gone, unobserved, in five minutes.  And we
took that wood a day later after a lot of unnecessary shelling and
there wasn't even a foxhole in it, let alone a tunnel.  So where did
those men go?  Nobody knows to this day."

'Maybe they were ghosts,' said Dora.

' iDon't worry, that was suggested,' Fortescue said perfectly
seriously.  'A lot of men including quite high-ranking officers managed
to convince themselves that they were the ghosts of a squadron of
cavalry which had been caught in a gas attack in that wood two years
before.  It was late on in the war by then and far easier to believe in
such things.  There was nothing rational left about any ofit.

So'fSirEdward's theory is correctperhaps the first pilot, knowing at
the back of his mind of the gas attack, somehow projected onto the
photographic plate an image of what he imagined might be there, even
though he actually saw an empty wood."

The effect of this account from a somewhat unexpected source was to
throw Kate and Dora onto the defensive.

'You're in danger of ruining the gaiety,' Dora told him with mock
severity.  'Awfully morbid."

'Just history,' said Fortescue.  'Just history."  And he too looked up
as if half expecting to see old faces.

Edward was evidently much moved.  'The horses,' he murmured.  'The poor
ghost horses."  It came to Molly that the tears which suddenly stood in
his eyes were shed for something other, had been almost relieved to
find so ready a pretext.  For the first time she was touched by him,
wondering at the source of an abundant emotion which in its turn had
had the power to move others.  What else was art if not this contagious
sensibility?  Equally she felt the incongruousness of this man, once
apparently on hearty terms with a dead king and now being wrenched into
the company of very ordinary strangers in an unfamiliar world by the
mere circumstance of having survived long enough.

After a moment's withdrawal Edward rallied, however.  Resuming the
theme of fairies he told them he had once written some music for an
adaptation of Algernon Blackwood's Prisoner in Faigland.

'Not a title which gripped me with enthusiasm,' he said, 'given that
this was in 1915 at about the time of the events Mr Fortescue was
relating, and given that a good many people had sons who were even then
prisoners in Germany.  The thing was for children, IC of course, and
they re-named The Starlight Express.  Still, Algi Blackwood's a good
sort.  I don't quite know what I expected when I first met him; in my
experience writers are often a pretty rum bunch - except for Doyle, of
course.  I suppose I vaguely thought he might go on rather a lot about
wands and toadstools but actually he said "A pint of something would go
down nicely" and told me how Blackjester, who won the St Leger in 1914,
had been entirely reared on dried milk.  Imagine, dried milk by the
gallon.  They steeped his mash it.  Well, for an author he struck me as
being a normal sort of fellow but I fear I made a more
eccentricimpression on him."

'Eccentric, Sir Edward?"  It seemed incredible that anyone should think
such a thing about someone who looked so like a denizen of the Royal
Enclosure at Ascot.

'It seems so.  Because of a toad I was carrying in Hampstead.  It wasn't
the butcher's.  No,'he said,'I haven't got Gallic tastes.  I was buying
two chops but I found difficulty in getting my change out I because I
had this toad in a handkerchief.  So I set it down on the I counter
momentarily although this did cause a good deal of squeakage among the
butcher's female patrons.  Then a voice said

"Ah, Edward, I see you've got your Sunda with you but who are the chops
for?"  and it was Algie Bla Y roast wi are ckwood.  I explained I'd
been for a walk and had come upon these two boys with the toad and
since I like toads and this one seemed unhappy in their company I
bought it off them for twopence and was on my way use to releaseing the
garden.  Sort of thing back to Severn Ho ing anyone might have done,
except that Algie happened I into the middle of 'the story.  So there
and then I told him I'd decided to name it after him in honour of the
occasion and due course into the garden Algernon went.  But I'm afraid
the story got about, rather, and people started to think I was pretty
much off my head.

The butcher, especially, became noticeably cool although I didn't mind
that since he was a most inferior sort of butcher: wouildn't even sell
black puddings.  The best comment came from Jack Littleton at
Novello's.  He just said "H'm.  Toad and Verkl&ling" which I think's
quite witty from one's own publisher who'd give his right arm to be
publishing Strauss as well."

There was considerable laughter at this but on the way back to the ship
it occurred Id to him it was likely nobody at the table had had the
least idea of what he was talking about.  There was nothing like
people's failure to understand a reference which could so give one the
feeling of having already stepped into a coffin whose lid they were
purposefully nailing down bit by bit in small sections.  Each day one's
own understanding of the world became more partial, the view a little
darker.  Yet only the occupant knew how astonishingly clear had become
his vision of what was left.  The clarity was one thing, the
astonishment was for its lateness.

Back aboard the Hildebrand Edward lay in the cool of his cabin and
allowed himself to fall into doleful rumination brought on by the
morning's activities and the wine he had drunk.  The business about
fairies hadn't helped, either; had let a vague disquiet edge in.  It
wasn't that the new world of the Bright Young Things with all their
extravagance and awesome silliness was so much more rational than the
old, rather that a whole culture had become outmoded.  A world ruled by
Lyddite and phosgene and 'Archie' would have made short shrift of Mrs
Doasyouwouldbedoneby, while Peter Pan would have had his own troubles
in the trenches.

Trying to look at it through modern eyes he could quite well see the
ridiculousness of it all; but then surely it had never been more than a
way in which people of a stolid race living in a stolid time had dealt
with the whole uneasy business of childhood and, well, of the
imagination, the poetic dream.  True, the mode of expressing the
vividness and anarchy of an infant's vision mi lit have degenerated a
bit since Wordsworth's day but ... Or maybe ...

Who could blame those authors like Barrie and Algie Blackwood for
doggudly holding out against the horrid tide of materialism, to say
nothing of all those psychologists banging on about how the thoughts of
children are really unspeakable?  Modern grown-ups were indeed wumbled;
and if regrettably they were no longer to be unwurnbled by anointings
with holy water or fairy-dust or stardust then ...

Into his drifting mind came snatches of the private language he and
Alice had written to each other in the form ofjottings, notes in each
other's margins, a language which if brought out into the light of day
coram publico would frankly appear as baby-talk.  It was insane, this
black world.  How could 'Pease wite more ths booful music' now lie
beneath the inscription Fortirer et Fide?  All too easily.

He closed his eyes on such things, tears welling from beneath his lids,
almost exasperation at what was the whole of him and would not let him
go, only to awake with a smalijump and discover -go that two whole
hours had elapsed.  He had expected to find it midafternoon at the
latest and the ship back at sea with Madeira a diminishing smudge
intermittent behind a flapping Red En , But when Steward Pyce came in
as requested at I sign.

four-thirty with a cup of tea the floor was not quivering with the
power of I Chief Stanford's engines.

'Are we not under way, Steward?"

'I'm afraid not, sir.  There's been a slight delay.  Something to do
with one of our fresh-water tanks, sir.  The Captain assures us we'll
leave by five-thirty at the latest."

Edward remembered something he had meant to do earlier but forgotten.

The delay starting was a bit of luck.  'In that case would you mind
very much getting me another bucket of seawater, Pyce?, 'Sea-water
s'r.

Of course.  But if it's from the bows again I'm afraid I shall 1have to
do it without your assistance : Captain Maddrell was quite firm about
ship's regulations, sir.  Strictly speaking I shouldn't have taken you
so far forrard last time."

'Well, I'm sorry if I got you into any trouble."

The man has some imagination after all, thought Pyce.  Few passengers
in his experience would have bothered to draw such a conclusion.  A not
very strong feeling of indulgence for this old fellow allowed that,
harmy or not, he was probably a decent enough stick.

'I'd like it from the stern,' said the stick.  'Assuming we're anchored
head on into the tide or current?"

'Very well sir; the stern it is.  A whole bucket or just your hipflask,
sir?"

'The hip-flask.  Wait a moment."

His passenger took the flask from the desk where it stood among the
mysterious wooden boxes, went to the wash-stand in the bathroom and
could be heard rinsing it out thoroughly before returning and handing
it over.

'I'm much obliged."

'My pleasure sir.  Before we sail, sir."

'Should I not be here kindly leave it on the desk."

Despite his relayed assurances it turned out to be not until seven
o'clock that Captain Maddrell finally weighed anchor and sent a single
abrupt C like a shell into the town of Funchal, echoes rolling back
from the facets of the mountain, the rocky slopes, the woods and
crevasses which rose high into the dusk above it.  The evening was not
quite warm.  The passengers hugged themselves at the rail as they
watched a battered tug slew the Hildebrands head round so she faced
2,200 miles of empty ocean and nine landless days.  The top of the
island was cinnabar in the last light of a sun which had long fallen
beneath their horizon.  Edward was on deck with his cane and boater.

He cut a dapper figure at the rail, standing a little apart or - Molly
thought as she joined him - stood a little apart from.

'I suppose captains never feel as we do each time they leave,' he said
as the bodegas of the waterfront slowly revolved and passed astern.

'I'm never unaffected by departures."

'Nor me.  The funny thing is I haven't travelled very much by ship
except across the Channel and the trip last year, but sailing out of a
port on an evening like this I feel I already have a lifetime of
leave-takings and Journeyings behind me.  Memories of things which
never happened: how are they possible?"

'It's the melancholy that's familiar.  That always did seem ancient
because one could never remember a time without it."

She abandoned her undiscriminating gaze to turn her head and stare
sharply at the side of his face.  'Would you describe yourself as a
melancholy person, Sir Edward?"

'Good Lord yes,' he said in surprise.  'Wouldn't you describe yourself
as one?  I've never met an English person who was even slightly
thoughtful who wasn't a bit of a melancholic."

'You're not happy, then?"

'That has nothing to do with it.  One may be very happily melancholic:
it has its own delights, as Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton well
knew.  But as it happens, no, I'm not happy.

Nor can I think of a single reason why I might be.  My wife is dead, my
friends are dead, my music is dead.  Only I, inconveniently, remain
alive.  I shall continue to be so for an undisclosed length of time and
for no discernible purpose whatever except that I've got to provide
some idiotic music for a darnnfool occasion at Wembley next April.

That in itself is hardly an adequate reason for prolonging someone's
life.  With any luck there may turn out to be a Supreme Being who
agrees, but I know it's unlikely.  Not for nothing is he familiar as
the Arch-Jester."

Somewhere far off, borne to them through a large metal duct like the
horn of a gramophone bolted to the deck there came the sound of a bell
and at once the engines' beat increased.  The boards began to vibrate
under their feet and foam slid past the ship's side with a rinsing
hiss.

'You're silent,' he said and she thought crossly that there was
satisfaction in his voice.

'What is there for me to say?  I wouldn't presume to try and talk you
out of your view of your own life even if I thought I might succeed.

I'd gain nothing but a dese I rved rebuff."

'Do I strike you as so very prickly?"

Had he been thirty years younger Molly thought she might have
identified a flirtatiousness in this question.  But it was not the I
least teasing nor even anxious, merely an enquiry of fact.  The idea
that he should care to know left a taste in her mind identical to the
one which had provoked her outspokenness a couple of days before.

There was something faintly disgusting about so famous and - in worldly
view - so successful a man still insisting on having everything on his
own terms: something of the child which devours the world it
dominates.

The self-pity was quite bleak enough to be acceptable, even to
transcend itself But it was odious to retreat behind inviolate grandeur
or hooded withdrawal while reserving the right to emerge suddenly and
demand assessment from a particularly as she was certain he comparative
stranger - more p would never normally dream of doing such a thing.

She had never known the habitually reserved break their habit without
seeming to surprise themselves, and this she found particularly
distasteful.

In fact the experience of nursing in France during the last year of the
war had changed her irrevocably.  The juvenile, undifferentiated
kindness towards her fellowman with which she had gone had been abraded
- or at least refined something she valued enough not to bestow
indiscriminately.  Like many other nurses or professionals whose work
is among suffering people she had acquired a fine recognition of the
often modest symptoms of courage.  Equally, she had an impatient
category of her own: what she called 'DBB' or downright bad
behaviour.

She had coined this term herself, partly because she found she needed
it and partly as a satirical comment on the despised pseudo-medicale
diagnosis of 'LMF'.  Now, five years later, Molly would never have
dreamed of accusing anybody, no matter what the provocation, of lacking
moral fibre; but at this moment it did occur to her that Sir Edward
Elgar was indeed capable of downright bad behaviour.

 Declining to answer his question she said instead: 'My steward told
me this ship was delayed because of a drinking-water problem."

It was Edward's turn to look sideways at his companion staring down at
the waters of Funchal harbour.  Eventually he said, 'So did mine."

'Well, I ran Dr Ashe, the ship's doctor - have you met him?

Looks like a vulture and is wonderfully indiscreet.  The whole story's
bunkum.  The truth is exactly the reverse: the problem which delayed us
all was quite precisely not caused by drinking water."

'What then?"

'Good old drinking alcohol.  It appears a few of our passengers, so
relieved at having weathered the storm, went ashore to celebrate being
alive with Madeira's most famous export."

'Not cake?"

'Not cake.  They went to ground in somebody's bodega at about ten this
morning and the Captain had to send a party of crew-men with an officer
to comb the dives of Funchal like a shore patrol looking for delinquent
sailors.  Dr Ashe said they were found at about three o'clock but thley
all wanted carrying."

'My goodness,' said Edward with a suggestion of admiration.

'Pie-eyed on madeira for five hours.  I hope the doctor has a good
headache remedy aboard.  Conditions down in Steerage may become a
little unsavoury, too."

'They were all First Class passengers."

'Really?  We're turning out rather a lively lot, in that case.  I
wonder who they are?  Presumably no-one at our table.  What the Varsity
types call "bloods", I expect."

'And what I'd call drunks."

'You object, of course."

'Not on moral grounds; possibly on aesthetic.  I'd call them drunks
simply because they were drunk."  Molly looked at him with great
directness.  'I don't objectjust because I'm a woman, if that's what
you're thinking."

Edward, who had indeed been thinking that, said 'It's silly our fencing
like this."

'Quite.  Incidentally, I did want to say that I completely agreed with
what you said at luncheon.  I mean your theory about photographing
fairies."

'It was just an idea.  I'm not at all sure I believe it myself, you
know.  But all of a sudden I couldn't bear to let this hateful century
get away with it once again - not without putting up some I
resistance.

Nothing is avowed to exist nowadays unless it can be I bought or sold
or measured by scientists.  Why should artists have to acknowledge the
complete supremacy of materialism?  Must everything mysterious be
exploded or all unaccountable things explained away?  And if so, what's
gained?  Plain men drudging in a world of plain things.  That's not the
world I know and it's one I've no wish to know."

The distant bell rang again and the engines further increased their
speed.  The sound was suddenly reflected from behind and both turned to
look across the deck towards the opposite rail beyond which the mole
guarding the harbour entrance was sliding by only a few yards away.

There were no old men and boys with rod and line around the squat stone
lighthouse at the end.  Instead a lone cat was sitting with its back to
the ship, staring out to sea.

The animal's posture at once made it memorable: its motionless
attention to the horizon was so complete that a seven-thousandton liner
passing within yards was in another universe, a shadow I crossing
behind muslin.  The cat ignored the Hildebrand and her two hundred
souls, not with disdain but with a profound distraction.  It sped past
in unmoving meditation and diminished astern.  As the distance and
twilight increased Edward during the next few minutes stared back, with
difficulty separating the receding lighthouse from intervening masts
and davits to discern at its foot the black fur dot.  Soon there was
nothing of Funchal but a winking beam from the base of an indigo bulk
sprinkled with lights.  The moon which had been poised above the island
that morning had not yet risen but in the limitless blank of unruffled
turquoise sky the stars were coming out.

'There's no getting used to it,' said Edward.  'The beauty of this
earth and its animals, and the barbarous wasteland man makes of it
all.

I don't know why people aren't more astonished by beauty.

You must paint your jungle pictures with astonishment, Molly.  As long
as you put something of your own heart into them they'll be
exceptional."

'I certainly want to be original in the way I do them."

'Yes, of course.  Well, remember what Ruskin said: "Originality is not
newness, It is genuineness"."

 'Did he say that?"

'I seem to remember he did.  An academic musician called Henry Hadow
was fond of quoting it and he was a man of genuine unoriginality."

'You're not fond of academics."

'I suppose some are all right.  But finally it's down to the heart and
not the head.  What's the point of having so much knowledge and
technique if it dissipates in cabals and rivalries and lectures?"

Molly was struck by his vehemence.  There was something so
unsophisticated and raw but at the same time confident in what he said
that with surprise - as if she had not realised it until that moment
she found herself thinking 'The man actually is an artist
throughout."She was impressed by the idea of someone in what she still
thought of as an uncertain and marginal line of business being so used
to his own idea of himself.  It was even exhilarating to hear somebody
take for granted that living a creative life was not something which
had to be accounted for.  At this period her ideal was acquiring enough
stature in her art that she would never have to be bluff or apologetic
or furtive about it: no modest ambition for a single Englishwoman even
in those enlightened days of partial franchise.  Edward had with great
casualness just displayed the very confidence she herself yearned for
and her envy made him again remote and distinguished in her eyes.  She
no longer even thought of him as a man but as a person who had lived
his talent and suffered in consequence.  As if he had read this envy he
said: 'You can't be in much doubt yourself.  Even nowadays no young
woman takes herself off alone to paint the Amazon jungle without being
very certain of something."

'That's no doubt how it looks but it's not at all how it feels, I
promise you.  I wouldn't presume to compare our talents but weren't
there moments at the beginning when you, well, had doubts?  Did you
never despairjust once or twicO Even after what I assume was
exceptional promise at college?"

'Doubts?  Despair?  My dear girl, I've never been without'em.  At this
moment I doubt a single thing I've done was worth doing and I despair
of a life thrown away on something nobody needs or wants.  As for my
college, I'm a graduate summa cum laude of a cramped flat above a music
shop in Worcester.  The first time I ever had anything to do with a
university was when I made the appalling mistake at the age of
forty-eight of accepting a professorship at Birmingham.  I needed the
money.  Disastrous.  I never did loathe anything so much.  Oh, and I'm
forgetting Cambridge gave me some footling doctorate or something a few
years earlier.  I'm sure Birmingham couldn't have made its offer had I
not already got some letters after my name.  Otherwise I contrived to
keep myself remarkably unspotted and unstained by academic influence.

I was far too busy writing music and trying to feed myself."

On the basis of their short acquaintance Molly was unable to know how
brilliantly he had pitched his description, so exactly did it console
her for her own lack of academy training and so precisely did it
conjure up the fierce independence of wayward genius.  But I even he mi
lit not have said whom this version of events was designed to impress
since he himself believed it a little more deeply at each re-telling.

Not that it was untrue; it was merely economical with the truth.  But
Molly had lived in the world for longer than most students.

'Even so,' she said, 'technique has to be learned."

'Of course it has.  How else but by example?  From my earliest boyhood
I read every score I could lay my hands on, I played and sang in groups
and chamber orchestras without number.  I spent every last penny on
train fares to London to hear concerts at the Crystal Palace and I was
still coughing yellow fog out of my lungs days later.  I took violin
lessons; I gave violin lessons; I wrote cotillions and quadrilles for a
lunatic asylum.  Year after year i I it went, penny-pinching in the
provinces.  Doubts?  Despair?  My father wanted me to be a lawyer, you
know, and I actually started in one of those offices with high
stools.

But I soon stopped that, unlike Chabrier who I gather qualified and
practised, brave fellow.

You ask about doubts and despair when I rejected the respectable career
urged on me by my tradesman father in order to be a damned musician
with cracked boots and a teaching suit which was more invisible mending
than it was cloth.

'And in all those miserable years not one person gave me a single shred
of support or encouragement.  Not one person.  And my advice to you,
Miss Air, is to expect nothing from anybody.  An artist is on his
own.

He's stuck up a tower preaching to pigs, no matter that now and then
they'll pretend to listen and even to applaud.  But don't be
deceived.

They soon get tired of rattling their trotters at you and wander off to
find someone more diverting.  After that they'd cut you down as soon
as look at you."

This last sentence was added with lowered voice as if he were talking
more to himself.  Confused as she was by the violence it implied Molly
hardly liked to pursue it.  In any case a steward in a white uniform
took that moment to emerge on deck from a companionway and blow a
brightly-polished Bb on a brass bugle.

'We'd better dress.  We're late."

'Oh, hang all clothes,' he said to the passing sea.  Like a small boy
chafing at being put into his Sunday best, she thought, while observing
the paradox of his obviously liking to be well groomed to the point of
nattiness.

When they came back on deck after dinner it was clear that the day's
visit to Madeira had sanctioned a chan e in the atmosphere aboard the
Hildebrand.  The passengers were in evident quest of the night life
whose imagining had enlivened the gloom of their autumns.  As far as
they were concerned a formal promise had been made the moment their
cash had been exchanged for a ticket.  They now roamed the ship
expecting its fulfilment and enviously presuming it in the various
couples talking in low voices at the rail or in pools of shadow.  But
it was altogether too early in the voyage to think of disconsolation
and they drifted towards the ballroom from which came the muffled and
lively strains of Tommy Hawtree's Melodeers.  Edward scarcely felt like
turning in yet: his afternoon's sleep had taken the edge off his
weariness and he detected the beginnings of that second wind which,
when he was in London, increasingly took him on lonely rounds of
indiscriminate smoke rooms of his various clubs until his mouth was
rank with pipes and his brain whirled with the names of horses.

'Come on everybody, it's spring,' said Dora Bellamy's voice behind
them.  'We allow no moping here."

'Quite right too,' said Edward.  'What do you propose?"

Dora dropped her voice confidingly.  'I hear tell of a lively little
game starting up below.  For those who like a flutter now and then.

Only don't tell Kate, Sir Edward.  As you already know, her views on
gambling are irreproachable and fiercely held."

'They certainly are,' said Kate from the dark behind her.  'Never
follow an even number by an uneven with two digits."

'Very sound advice too,' said Edward.  'I never go twice on a red."

'I say, the gentleman's a sport.  Give him a gasper, Dora."

'Not for me.  But by all means go ahead.  We'll follow you shortly."

Kate and Dora drifted unsteadily away trailing cigarette smoke.

'They're rather awful, aren't they?"  said Molly.

'Frightful.  I like them quite a lot.  I don't believe they care very
much what anybody thinks and I always find that endearing.

Though I must say I can't imagine what their husbands are like."

'If they have husbands."

It had never occurred to Edward to question their acquaintances'
self-description.  'Golly,' he said.  And then, 'Golly."

'Oh, I'm sure they have.  In any case I don't care either."

Since they were last on deck the sky had darkened into true night.  The
starfields sprawled in brilliant prodigality, traversed by the
running-lights on the Hildebrands masts and gaped at by the sooty 0 of
her funnel.  No further trace showed of the islands they had recently
left behind them.  The ship was alone and -infinitesimal in the night
and the faint sounds of revelry only made it the smaller.  The stars'
brightness defined the surface of the ocean beyond the dim yellow
cocoon spun by deck-lamps and portholes.

"The sun has gone, the tide of stars is setting all our way- the
Pleiades call softly to Orion as nightly they have called these million
years."  ' He spoke so quietly that he was finished before she realised
he was quoting, not addressing her, not addressing anybody.

'That's beautiful."

'It is.  Surprising, really, amid all that twaddle.  It's from the old
Starlight Express.  About the only memorable thing in it including,
some might think, the music."

Nevertheless it was the music he heard as he watched the stars, music
which had first come to him as a boy and had been written down in
pencil for a childhood play under the elderly title The Wand of
Youth.

How those tunes had recurred!  Throughout his life they had come back,
first in full orchestral guise then once more for pit orchestra in a
wartime theatre.  And still they haunted him and offered themselves as
little mines which had the air of refusing to be abandoned and from
which things of value might yet be dug.  Two hours later as he
undressed for bed he heard again the cadence at the words 'nightly they
have called these million years' and thought of that incomprehensible
gap which was no gap at all and _99

could never separate him from that far-off self who had first heard
the notes and in time had turned them into his second Suite's 'The
Little Bells'.  He sat on the edge of the bed fiddling absently with
studs.  There was a spot of port on his shirt-front.

'What was it all for?"  he murmured.  'What rot it was ... Dear old
rot."  He wiped his eyes on his sleeve.  'Oh, damn it all."

V

Of course Edwardian fairies wore Edward' ian costume.  My trees sang me
music of my time, not plainsong or organum or snippets of the
'Pastoral' sym.  Being of your time means making everything in the
world yours for as long as you're in it.  It may once have belonged to
Beethoven but it belongs to me now.  Belonged.

We've left Madeira (yesterday) and are reportedly facing more than a
week's blank ocean.  Staring at the sea- as after breakfast'just
nowmakes one banally reflective.  I found myself thinking that eight or
nine days without land is quite a long time in these days of steam.

But even as recently as Conrad's (and my) youth it was obviously
possible to be becalmed on some ocean for a month or two without the
sight of anything more solid than clouds at dawn and dusk.  First the
unease of being so deserted by the wind, then panic as fresh water
needed rationing, then listlessness & torpor.  (Meeresstille.  I love
the sound of that word.) Long before their month was up the sailors
must have begun to wonder whether land any longer existed or whether it
hadn't been some kind of communal dream or folk legend.  Even now
aboard the old 'Hildebrand' the reality of England is beginning to seem
hazy, faintly in doubt.  It still has a solid inner presence but then
so does anything imagined & lived with for years.

There may after all be no external counterpart to the England we all
carry within us.  Maybe the ship will arrive back at the right
coordinates for Merseyside and - sail straight on over vacant
waters.

It was a myth after all.  I think we've no confidence things we don't
constantly touch or see & even then they all the time suggest something
else.  It's a shifting wasteland, this world, & necessarily viewed from
another.  just as the Patriarch said, the mind moves.  So at the moment
England no longer exists for me.  (I manifestly don't exist for it.)
Quite enjoyed Madeira & have at any rate become better acquainted with
some of my fellow-travellers.  It appears I was wrong about everybody
that first evening.  Mrs (Miss?) Bellamy & Mrs (Miss?) Hammond turn out
to be racy while Fortescue seems neither cad nor buffoon.  Each in
his/her own way - I include Molly - is to some extent an adventurer.  I
like that (so different from the members of one's clubs to say nothing
of those damned musical asses who keep pestering) though it does make
me feel old ... I suppose I am old, hang it all, until I'm by myself
when I become pretty much ten or twelve again.  Talk about keeping
faith.

There are some things one can't betray even if one wanted.

Meeresstille ... How that word brings it all back though not really with
pain.  If I'd had a leg cut off in 1884 I'd not now be able to remember
the anguish with much acuity nearly 40 yrs later, only much-revised
memories of pain.  Even though we never saw each other again I did feel a
15 yrs.  afterwards when I heard from S6mpfli that Lena was pang
married & had left Europe.  By then of course I'd got over being turned
down, not least because I'd since been accepted by dear Alice; but it
did seem the final lopping-off of my painful twenties.  Well, putting
it into music was as good a way as any of burying an unwanted past & it
was a happy accident I was actually writing Enigma vars at the time.

An even happier was being able to use Mary Trefusis as the alibi for
Lena's war even though it really didn't bear close scrutiny.  However the
dolts swallowed it whole & even Alice never twigged despite my saying
that the asterisks at the head of no.  13 stood for the name of a lady
who was on a sea voyage at the time of composition & Mary palpably
wasn't.  She was, though, later that same year when that brother of
hers was appointed Governor of NSW & she went off to Australia with
him.  So of course it wasn't the engines of her ship I heard as it
rumbled eastwards across the ocean but those of Lena's as they had
carried her away for good many months earlier & in quite the other
direction.  In any case I wdn't have written a war for Mary as at that
very moment I was dedicating my 3 Characteristic Pieces to her.

Nor does anyone seem to have bothered to notice that all the other vars
have names/initials so why wdn't I have put Mary's?  Everyone who knew
us also knew there cdn't possibly be anything mysteriously romantic
it's absurd.  As for the idea that if I had intended putting her
initials I'd have made one of the asterisks stand for her title that's
downright vulgar.  It suggests that had I - in a moment when my brain
had turned to addle decided to dedicate a war mysteriously to Dame
Clara Butt I'd have put I think the whole thing started when people saw
my sketches for no.

13 headed V (I ask you, imagine using a working-title of'Lady' or
'Lygon' for a friend like Mary!).  Then when we were dickering with the
Finale Jaeger with his huntsman's eye must have looked at one of my
original drafts & spotted that I was thinking of working in some
of'LML' at that time.  Well, I was: but it was Lena meine Liebe I was
going to work into the summing-up of my own war.  But it didn't quite
go & anyway I'd given her a close enough place to me by putting her own
war right next to mine.  This neatly satisfied various proprieties:
Alice first, me & Alice last & Lena penultimate.  The anguish may have
long gone but I'm very glad the mystification has lasted so well.  It's
part of the advantage of calling something Enigma: the amateur sleuth
straightway ignores all verifiable fact such as chronology.  If one
obligingly puts a ring through his nose one can lead him into the most
implausible territory.  It's splendid to behold!

Even the Meeresstille quotation ... True, nobody's likely to know that
this was the Overture to the Leipzig Conservatoire concert the
afternoon Lena & I first met.  But a few with a knowledge of German
might have thought that the usual English translation (Calm sea &
prosperous voyage) is, if not inaccurate, misleading.  Meeresstille
isn't a calm sea: it's a desolate menacing becalming as per the Ancient
Mariner the slow intro.  - followed by the hopeful lyricism of the
happy onward journey (which God knows I wished her).  How much I wished
it her is plain enough since it's the prosperous voyage bit I quoted
from rather than the becalming.  But those are the reasons for the
quotation: our first meeting, our shared enthusiasm for Mendelssohn,
his own connection with Leipzig, the significance of it having been an
overture for both of us ... And of course her going away did make me
sad with old memories so the orchestral light in which I quoted an
otherwise lyrical extract is mournful with hints of flat abandonment &
shot with unease.  Of course it matters not a jot at this late stage,
any of it; but it's funny the wilful way the same amateur sleuths will
ignore the evidence of their own ears, mis-read & mis-hear Mendelssohn
so as to uphold a shaky alibi for me.

Gawd bless 'em!

Later Made some good slides before lunch.  Sample taken from Funchal
harbour as we lay at anchor yesterday.  Quite a plentiful crop of the
plankton I've already seen but almost every drop I looked at was @m ed
with E.

Con!  Either they're normally there (drains!) or we aboard the

'Hildebrand' were flushin 9 unmentionables into the Madeirans' water.

Perhaps if I run into this Dr Ashe of Molly's I'll ask what he
thinks.

There's something of a ghoul about the man's appearance - seems a funny
choice for a cruise doctor & suspect he has a p-A I _, st.  Never did I
think everyone on board would have one too, still less that within a
week I slid.  be slightly privy to several.  Strange how briefly being
ship-mates together turns total strangers into confidants practically
overnight.

Even the most reticent souls throw caution to the winds (some of the
conversations I've overheard, esp.  among the younger element!).  Why
is this?  I return to my theory: England's no longer real to anyone
aboard so anything they say is equally unreal & will never be
accountable.  H'en.

We shall see.

If Over the rail postprandially (excellent word) I thought some more
about the amateur sleuths who from time to time have sniffed me over.

I expect they'll give up now - they've done their sleuthing & got it
all wrong but everyone's happy with their version so they can move on
to some more fashionable composer.  It's wonderful how much they've
missed - all those initials in the chorus of Devils in Gerontius!  - &
heaps more little encodings la Schumann.  Well, they'rejust part of the
crowd who constantly write about music - talk & talk & talk about it
almost none of whom are performers & still fewer composers.  Whom do
they think they're addressing?  And about what?  Music is what it as &
it says what it is through sounds & not the written word.  Most of
those who prate about music are nincompoops, which isn't to be wondered
at since most people are that anyway.  But they're often musical
illiterates, which is intolerable.  They're illiterates in the sense
that while they may know all the right terms & technical flummery
they're ignorant of what's being said.  They don't understand - or even
appear much to like - the language & what it expresses so they waffle
on about the grammar instead.  I except Shaw from this accusation.  His
politics may be benighted & many of his plays wrong-headed to a degree
but not only is he the kindest man who ever stepped, he understands &
feels music.  He alone among contemporary critics acknowledges that
composers & musicians think, but that they do so in A minor & not in
words.  He alone wdn't be puzzled by watching an orchestral rehearsal
where we stop & start & clarify whole passages with often scarcely a
word spoken.

That's how professionals communicate when they're attuned.  I grunt, I
mutter, I draw a waggled curve in the air at the violas: they know what
I mean.

'Too him,' I expect I say, leaving out the adjective or adverb.  A
disappointed 'Twenty-eight' will re-start them at that cue but this
time I draw the bassoon line in the air & lo!  out it comes.  Sublime
dictation.  Shaw knows; the rest are asses & as far as I'm concerned
can go & re-bury themselves in the nearest library with Hadow.  The
concert hall's got far too much to do with the heart for them.

Pleased to discover that 'RMS Hildebrand' yields 'Brindled Marsh'.

This must surely be the name of one of those minor moths which fall
into one's lamp at night.  Check South on return.

The unfamiliarity of shipboard days and the torrent of air through
which they forged greatly affected Edward's awareness of the slipping
away of time, which for some years he had pretended to welcome both in
public and private.  'Trivial pursuits' or'masterly inactivity' were
the phrases he indifferently offered when people asked him what he was
up to nowadays.  It had become a habit as he sat on the edge of his bed
at night, letting his fingers undo his tie with the minimal skill of
fifty years, to say - half to assert his own bleakness and half to
harrow the shades of any listeners: 'One more day I shall't have to get
through."  Even a diary bristling with engagements (if he let it)
represented no proper curriculum but only diversions for day-to-day
indulging: luncheons, dinners, outings to the Races, conducting his own
works up and down the country, having the vet over for the dogs,
attending Three Choirs Festivals.  Forward momentum had ceased; what
remained was the temporarily eternal present to be bought off.

But that was on dry land.  It soon became plain that it was different
on board ship because no matter how one frittered or filled the days
one was willy-nilly going somewhere.  Over and above the lassitudes of
chatter and the empty cries of bugles there was a steady progress
carrying on independently and on one's own behalf.  There were constant
reminders of it in the purposeful life of officers and crew glimpsed
now and then; in the endless banner of smoke and smuts unravelling from
the funnel; in the liquid tumulus which raised itself glassily and
followed the ship at an unvarying distance of fifty yards.  Future
ports of call took on the significance of destinations.  'When we reach
ParA,' a husband could be overheard promising his wife as they strolled
past.  Or, Just wait till we get to Manaos."  But to Edward ParA and
Manaos were as Wednesday and Thursday.  Somewhere ahead lay Sunday,
Liverpool again, and the resumption of the habits and patterns which
brought him to his bed each night yawning and saying, Well, that was
one November the twenty-fifth he'd never have to re-live.  Meanwhile in
the Hildebrand's bar and smoke room, on its bridge now empty of Mr
Mushet's dour presence, beneath its awnings and sightless in its deck
chairs turned to the unvarying expanses hurrying by, Edward recognised
that a ship was no place to escape being directionless and neither
might strangers allay anxieties of loss.

Earlier that year he had written to Compton Mackenzie about how he took
no more interest in music, observing that the secret of happiness for
an artist when he grew old was to have a passion which could take the
place of his art.  This was by way of explaining his new hobby.  He
went on to say he had discovered the joy diatoms could give him and
that the miraculous world of beauty under the ocean as revealed by the
microscope was beyond music.

Now he kept Steward Pyce to a routine of gathering a daily sample, from
this side of the ship or the other, from the bows and from the stern.

After several days' conscientious work with Dowdy's A

Pathologist's Commoner Micro-organisms he had made his deductions.

He resolved to visit Dr Ashe with the perfectly valid excuse of
insomnia since he had been sleeping badly since leaving Madeira.

He found the doctor in a cabin disguised as a consulting room, in acrid
contemplation from the swivel chair behind a desk of the ceiling fan.

This gentleman did not precisely spring to his feet at his appearance
but levered his angular form grudgingly upright, both hands on the
blotter.  In Edward's recent experience this was a surprising enough
departure from the deferential attitude of the ship's personnel; he was
still further taken aback by the question the doctor shot at him.

'Have you come for an operation, Sir Edward?"

'An operation?  That is, well, no, not so far as I know."

'I'm sorry to hear it.  I'm getting most infernally bored.  Take a
chair, sir.  Do you know, I had a woman in here not half an hour ago
who couldn't get her necklace'off?"  With a bony finger he tapped his
own shirt-front.  'Royal Army Medical Corps.  Qualified at Guy's and
served in France where we cut off the limbs of young men by
candlelight.  And this ... this creature wanted me to help her out of
her jewellery.  I sent her to the Quartermaster.  Told her he had some
cable shears which were just the ticket.  What?"

'Indeed,' said Edward weakly.

'Can't stand frauds.  Never could.  Put my teeth on edge."

He was regretting he had ever come, especially on such a trivial
pretext.  Dr Ashe, although probably only in his forties and hence a
good twenty years Edward's junior, had that ability to make one wish to
please him - even to placate - which went far beyond any ordinary
social recognition of disparate status and in doing so trivialised the
very idea.  Edward suddenly wished he were quite ill.

'At least you must have been kept pretty busy the first few days."

'If, sir, by "busy" you mean endlessly traipsing about from one cabin
reeking of sal volatile to another then yes, I was.  We must have
walked miles, my assistant and I. Normally I imagine one can expect a
few bona fide injuries in rough weather: scalded cooks, stokers who
fall off ladders, skulls laid open, that sort of thing.  But this time
nothing.  Nothing but puddles of vomit on the carpet and people with
too much money lying around moaning they were going to die.  Not soon
enough for me.  What?"

'Pardon me if I remark that you're beginning to strike me as an odd
sort of doctor for a cruise liner."

'Odd, am 1?"  Unexpectedly the doctor's lower face opened a brief and
mirthless cavern.  'You're right, sir.  I don't fit at all.

This is my first trip and, DV, it'll be my last.  Already I've a
yearning for dry land.  Biggest mistake I ever made, resigning my
commission.

Fact is I've made a balls-up of things ... What did you say you'd come
about, sir?"

If the confession and the doctor's manner had left Edward disquieted,
this sudden question with its overtones of Punch jokes and bar-room
stories made him wonder whether the unusual mode were not perhaps a
form of humour designed to see if one were worth bothering with.  Well,
two could play at that game.

'I didn't say I'd come about anything.  However, since you ask, are you
any good at amputations?"

Dr Ashes raptor's eyes brightened momentarily.  'Top-hole.

Anything in particular?"

'Shall we say it's of a trichological nature?"

A short silence.  'You want a damned haircut, sir?"  Abruptly he sat
down.  Then he grinned again and opened a drawer.

'You're a card, Sir Edward.  I do believe you like a bit of a prank
yourself from time to time."  He produced a bottle.  'Would you care
for a snifter, sir?  Unless you're worried about the yard-arm?"

'To be honest I'm not sure I'd know a yard-arm if I saw one.  But I
don't mind a spot."  Why was he all at once so sapped of energy as to
allow himself to get drawn further into complicity with this dubious
man?

'I'm afraid it's madeira,' thcdoctorwas saying,'but I'm assured it's a
good one and it's what people round these parts drink any time of day
or night."  He glanced at the porthole.  'When I say these parts of
course.  . ."  He poured two tumblers with much steadiness.

'Got it off a drunk,' said Dr Ashc, handing one to Edward.

'Ah, I heard about the drunks from Miss Air.  Grateful patients, were
they?"

'They weren't patients at all.  Regular topers, all of'em.  Know all
about the morning after.  Not the sort to go running to doctor with a
headache.  Back to the bar for them, hair of the dog.  What?

Go on, what did you really come about?  I'm not bad at doctoring
provided I can stand the patient, you know."

'I'm a bad patient if I like the doctor.  I pretend to be welljust to
oblige him.  I came with a moan so I'll keep it to myself."He caught a
sudden, shrewd gaze from opposite.

'Just as you please."

'On the other hand you might tell me about E. cob."

'E.  coll?  What did you want to know?  We're all riddled with'em.

Micro-organism of the lower alimentary tract not advisable to introduce
into the upper."

'Does sea-water kill them?"

'No.  That's why bathers sometimes get sick on beaches near towns."

'That partly explains why Funchal harbour's full of rod-shaped
bacteria."

'I can't say I'm surprised.  How do you know?"

J took a sample and looked at it through my microscope.  I was looking
for diatoms and things but these bacilli just took over."

'You have a microscope with you, Sir Edward?  I didn't know you were a
bacteriologist as well."

'Oh I'm not.  just an amateur.  You must have done a bit yourself."

'Not since student days.  Forgotten the lot.  No, it's interesting for
another reason which I'll tell you if you can keep a secret."

'Depends on the secret."

'If you like a joke, then.  This is quite funny but it'll spoil
everything if you get miffed.  You know your steward?  He thinks you're
off your head."

Edward bristled.  'Pyce?  Dash his infernal cheek!  He came and told
you that?"

'He did.  But before you get exercised let me ask you, has he ever seen
your microscope?"

'What?  I suppose he might have done.  But only in its case, I
believe."

'Does he know what it is?"

'I don't imagine he does, no.  I may have referred to "my instruments"
or something like that, though."

'Hah.  This is rich.  The man's convinced you have trombones in your
cabin trunk and that you need sea-water to wash them in.  Or to give
them to drink, I forget which."

 'Trombones?"

'Well, you are a famous musician.  And having asked around I gather the
fellow has a bit of a history of getting bees in his bonnet about his
passengers.  Not over-bright, you know.  There was apparently a most
odd episode involving an American illusionist a few trips ago."

'Oh I say."  And suddenly Edward began laughing and could scarcely
stop.  'Yes.  That is ... Ah,' he sat back and dabbed at a trickle of
madeira on his chin.  'If I read you aright you're thinking a little
fun might he had at the good Pyce's expense, is that it?"

'It would be more entertaining than coming clean, wouldn't it?

But only if you feel like a bit of amusement.  What?"

Not many months earlier Edward and an elderly boyhood friend had roamed
the streets of Worcester for a whole afternoon playing 'Beaver' again
as they had half a century before.  Gripped by the infectious absurdity
of beard-spotting they had worked themselves into a fit of
near-hysteria.  In pain from the effort of preserving a grave
demeanour, scoring competitively in undertones, they had both exploded
simultaneously on catching sight of a treble-score: a full, rich red
beard sailing majestically down Lich Street.  Their joint shout had
caused heads to turn in time to witness the spectacle of two immensely
distinguished men leaning helplessly against a wall by St Michael's,
tears streaming down their checks.

Japey in excelsis,' Edward had commented on a postcard to his friend
the next day.  Japissimo.  As of yore.  Wot think'ee?"

The conspiracy he and Dr Ashe now hatched was trivial enough: merely to
prolong the misunderstanding as far as possible.  He undertook to play
up while the doctor promised to listen with due gravity to any more of
Steward Pyce's alarmed solicitations of professional advice.  It was a
measure of each man's peculiar desperation that neither thought the
enterprise tinged with extremity.  Later when recounting the whole
thing to Molly on deck Edward was astonished by the account he heard
himself giving.

That a ship's doctor should admit within minutes to a celebrated
passenger that he despised his and had ruined his life was bizarre in
itself, it was stranger still that at the time and under the influence
of the man's curious force Edward, instead of going to the Captain and
remonstrating, had stayed to connive at a prank.

Molly was troubled but said nothing, only laughed uneasily into the
wind as it flashed invisibly by.  She was by now beginning to feel like
one of the few people aboard who knew where they were going, what they
were doing, why.  She alone was not to be swept up into the common
ennui, the dancing to all hours, the shrieks of the young, the elderly
moping and jesting.  Knowing she was not herself even slightly
eccentric she was equally certain Edward wasn't either.  On the other
hand the doctor had from the beginning struck her as quite mad.  She
had come upon him on the second day out being lurched as she herself
was from side to side in a corridor, preceded by his red-moustached
orderly.  As one of the few passengers on their feet she had given him
a sympathetic smile, greeting him with the observation that he and his
orderly must already be tired.

'Indeed I am,' Dr Ashe replied, bracing himself against the mahogany
handrail and letting his assistant go on out of earshot.

'Of my dratted orderly.  He hasn't a clue.  Frankly the man couldn't
give an enema to a brown-hatter.  What?"

Five years had suddenly rolled back on themselves: she at once
recognised the crude terminology, the manner of its delivery, something
in the way the men held themselves.  'He's military,' Molly thought.

'They both are.  He's an Army doctor."  As in Edward's case the episode
was so completely inappropriate, not least in its ferocity, that it was
only later she had understood by how much it exceeded all bounds.

Since leaving Madeira she had spent much of each morning studying
Portuguese, at first on deck but then in her cabin.  It had not taken
her long to discover that up in the sunshine the claims on her
attention were too many and too strong.  Quite apart from the hypnotic
view of shifting water which drew her eyes from the page as effectively
as though she were being stared at, the nature of a foreign vocabulary
was such as to make one progress slowly.

Perhaps a minute to read half a dozen new words and then five minutes'
repeating them to the horizon which, when one next looked at one's
watch, turned out to be half an hour's daydreaming with not a single
word memoriscd.  In any case a single young woman sitting by herself in
a deck chair with a book on her lap from which her attention was
constantly straying acted like a lure to the drones who buzzed about
the deck in blazers and white flannels.  These tried a variety of
approaches whose ingenuity would often have been entertaining had she
wished to be entertained.  A few had taken the trouble to discover her
name; of those only one in five resisted making a pun or some
reference to it.  One young man, very short and sprite-like and
undeniably good-looking had simply bounced up and said 'I think I
should tell you, Miss, that I'm a roaring cad,' and bounced away
again.

An hour later he barged into her as she was coming down the stairs and
he was going up.  'See what I mean?"  he said and whizzed on up.

Accordingly she held herself to a set routine of three hours' study in
her cabin after breakfast, like one facing an imminent examination.

This was no hardship: she was accustomed to a disciplined life and
besides, she had been preparing for this trip ever since arriving back
in Liverpool from her previous one.  Not that she had spent the year
systematically learning Portuguese.  She had taken a job as a nanny to
supplement what savings she still had and the children and their family
had exhausted her to the point where her only thought on most nights
was to crawl into bed.  Her days off had been spent shopping in the
local town and - in one or two rare instances - painting in the grounds
of her employers' Sussex mansion.

But if she had not acquired much book-learning she had been preparing
herself mentally for the exile she was pleasurably storing up for
herself She had seen the Amazon and was as one who has glimpsed the
Grail.  There was indeed a purposefulness about her throughout that
year reminiscent of someone about to set out on a crusade.  She put her
affairs in order; she wrote an unfaltering letter to Hugh Ogden telling
him that her mind was made up; she broke the news to her parents.  Her
mother wept, her father was angry, her elder brother told her she was
one of nature's spinsters and a daubing spinster at that.  She had
herself wept, but in the empty Ladies Only compartment of the train
taking her back to Sussex, angry for this little display of drama she
was suddenly too weary to prevent, knowing as she cried that generally
speaking people weep only when they can be seen but that of course this
did not preclude their being their own audience.  Not one of them, she
thought miserably to herself, not one of them said a word of
encouragement.

Not one of them even cared to know why I'm doing it.  Still less did it
cross anybody's mind that it might actually be rather an interestin
thing to go and paint a famous and distant forest.

And at that moment, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Haywards Heath,
she perceived her whole history in a flash as one continuous chain of
other people's objections.  From preferring science to the violin at
school, through nursing training and her demand to be sent to France,
to her increasing determination to paint and travel: all this had been
in the teeth of every possible discouragement including threats like
her own brother's disguised as prediction.  And once this clean
perception had come to her it was amazingly followed by a swift
happiness as at bursting out of a tunnel and finding a tranquil
landscape spread out on either side.

That was how things were, it no longer constituted a problem; she was
on her own.  She had emerged at Hassocks singing like the blackbirds in
the elder sprays which overhung the platform, pleased to find the
children had come to greet her in the pony and trap.

In the end she and her two charges had become quite attached to one
another and when her departure day came she was sorry to be leaving,
while knowing that as soon as the carriage door closed on her she would
not be at all sorry to have left.  Suddenly the imminence of her great
trip had made her afraid and for an instant she was like someone
hesitating to leave a warm bed in a freezing dawn.  But in the event it
was an easy transition and she had sat on the station forecourt with
twenty minutes to spare drawing a funny picture in each of the
children's autograph books.  For Alastair she drew 'Pony and Trap',
which showed a puzzled-looking horse sniffing a set mousetrap complete
with a piece of cheese.  ('But does it go off and catch his nose?"

demanded the child.  'Wait and see,' she had told him.  'One day you
might open your book and find it has'.) For Betty, who climbed anything
she could, Molly drew 'Horse and Rider': a caricature of Betty herself,
pigtails flying, mounted on the clothes horse which often stood by the
nursery fender.  'If I keep looking,'said Betty,'do I fall
off?"Probably not,' said Molly, getting out with her hat box, 'but I
expect you will if you keep climbing."  Once or twice while learning
Portuguese aboard the Hildebrand she would glance up and think of the
children and smile without missing them.  They were pleasant little
images while more puzzling concerns swiftly overlaid them.  'Why on
earth do they need two verbs "To Be"?"  she murmured to her cabin
walls.  'Surely one is quite sufficient?"

Several cabins away the adventurous Fortescue could also now and then
be found, similarly engaged with preparations for his aerial surveys.

He worked largely on the cau-de-Nil carpet since the writing table
provided by Booth's for their passengers was genteelly proportioned and
his linen-backed maps overhung it like altar cloths.  So he studied
their exotic tapestries on the floor, on his knees, rulers and pencils
and dividers strewn across mysterious terrains.  More than ever as he
drew his light lines and made notes in an exercise book he resembled a
schoolboy, tongue emerging beneath the mustache as he frowned in
concentration.  Now and then he sat back on his heels and took up an
ivory slide-rule which he then let fall with his hands to his lap.  'A
hundred gallons, near as dammit,' he softly addressed the legs of the
desk.  'Call it a hundred and twenty ... safe side ... we'll need two
caches in that sector ... one hour each way .  . ."

The logistical problem was clear enough: how to fly a slow, methodical
grid pattern over areas which lacked not only fuel but even clearings
in which to land.  Other than a dirt strip on the outskirts of Manaos
itself' the only reliable landing areas for a thousand miles were the
rivers themselves.  Accordingly he had brought pontoons for his
aeroplanes but had not yet been able to test them to find out whether
the machines would unstick with a full load of aviation spirit in the
additional tanks he had fitted.

Then, of course, a floating log or half-submerged alligator ... The
possibilities for disaster were without number.  And every disaster,
over and above its physical threat of injury or death, carried with it
the sure penalty of bankruptcy.  He sighed- but it was only the
equivalent of the involuntary grunt a man makes when lifting a heavy
weight.  Neither resigned nor daunted Fortescue and his friend Johnny
Proctor had lived the kind of lives in which such were familiar terms,
to the extent that all forms of speculation could be subordinated to
the proper making of plans.  Altimeters were accurately set, a full kit
of tools carried.

When not in his cabin he was often in the ship's library trying like
Molly to learn Portuguese or browsing through the few books devoted to
the area in the 'Geography and Exploration' section.

Secret Rites of the Amazon Tribes soon provided him with an abundance
of excellent reasons, in addition to those he already had, for not
wishing to crash-land in the jungle.  An Economic and Regional
Geography of South America, on the other hand, told him nothing despite
its title's sweeping omniscience.  'By far the greater part of the
Amazonas region remains wholly unexplored by white man, and it is to be
doubted whether the tribes known to inhabit certain riparian
zones have any systematic knowledge of their region's topography, still
less the desire or ability to assess that region's possible economic
value."  The map of Amazonas included in this unhelpful chapter was
even blanker than his large-scale flying maps which, for all their own
areas of white, did at least have patches of local detail supplied
piecemeal from the reports of other pilots, recent expeditions and the
like.

Fortescue replaced the book and took down another entitled Where Day
Breaks Never.  This was an excitable little work purporting to be the
account of an expedition which had started down the Madeira River and
then wandered off along one of its tributaries, the Aripuana, more or
less due south of Manaos.  It was not clear what the members of this
expedition had thought they were doing.

They appeared to spend most of their time making endless trouble for
themselves and anyone else they encountered, from capsizing the canoe
containing their only medical supplies to skirmishing with Indians
'whose hostility was, however, not proof against our trusty Winchesters
which soon knocked the fight out of them and left their ramshackle
village more peaceful, no doubt, than at any time since its
construction."  As he skimmed the pages he seriously wondered whether
the whole account had been invented in a quiet house in Berkshire: it
was too suspiciously a compendium of every explorer's tale, its
sensationalism too studied.  The only interesting thing he found in it
was the identification of a remote range of mountains almost on the
Bolivian border as those which Colonel Fawcett had photographed in
i9o8.  It was this photograph Conan Doyle had seen and which had
suggested to him his story The Lost World.  Fortescue noted this
chiefly as a coincidence; the unexpected recurrence of the topic of
Conan Doyle and photographs so soon after their luncheon in Madeira was
curious.  There was nothing else to be learned from a book like that,
however, so he opened his Portuguese grammar instead.

Edward also spent time in his cabin, either at his microscope or
writing hisjournal.  Otherwise he roamed the ship, something of a
lonely figure, a look on his face both inward and slightly expectant as
if somebody he had known might come around the corner or straighten up
from the rail next to him.

 Once Captain Maddrell asked him whether he was making the journey out
of interest or in order to visit someone.  Edward had told him he was
badly in need of inspiration, citing the forthcoming Empire Exhibition
at Wembley for which he had at least to write a March and possibly more
besides.  The Captain put at his disposal a bare day cabin which he
claimed he never used and which, unlike Edward's own, had outside it a
small private section of deck and rail where he might escape social
pressures whenever he wished.

Edward accepted this offer gratefully and soon was spending daily hours
in a deck-chair beneath the shade of the port wing of the bridge,
staring out over the ocean with a manuscript notebook and
propelling-pencil on his lap.

And there, as it often had, the sight and sound of water in motion
began to produce its familiar effects.  Great things had come to him
from the voices of the Severn, the Terne, the Wye and many other
English rivers.  The Arno and the Tiber had added their note to In the
South; the Rhine had spoken to him of his devotion to Schumann and the
mainstream of the German classics.  It did not occur to him to wonder
whether this late journey to see the greatest river in the world
contained a measure of longing, even of desperation; he simply lost
himself in the dazzle of scud before his eyes.  It raced along the base
of the dove-grey iron wall but even a few yards out from the ship's
side slowed and thinned into lattices and marblings which, effervescing
themselves into nothing, briefly mantled the purple sea with whites and
greens.  It fled and fled; it fell behind and became wake; its ripples
dissipated.  The staring eyes saw nothing, but the impression of
passage leaped vividly through them into the mind.  He began to hear
things in the motion.  Even from the rumble of engines beneath the
water-line rose suggestive pitches, voices, notes.  His fingers
tightened on the pencil.  There was as vet no tune, but the lively
space for one was being created.

How many times over the years, working late into the night in order to
meet some rehearsal deadline or a scheduled first performance, had he
not gone to bed and been unable to sleep for the insistence of these
very spaces?  There were often no tunes, only this clamorous framework
into which marvelous music might be fitted: an immanence of rhythm, a
sense of paragraphs, blocks of feeling and a glimpse of a shape two
blank pages ahead unmistakably in his hand but as vet unreadable.  And
ever since he could remember, a flow of water could also create this
ache and -II4 expectancy, this melancholy engagement with everything of
him which mattered.  Here were no human faces, no loved voices, no
thoughts.  Those could be allowed to Intrude later, if need be, to
domesticate or make poignant raw inspiration.  Later on could come the
title, the affectionate dedication or the quoted stanza by way of
preface, all the scholarly jokes, concealed anagrams and word-play
which put a literary gloss on abstract sounds.  But at this earliest
moment there was no contamination, only the pure and murmurous
emptiness which encased itself and shone.  And as an exhausted bell-jar
in a sunny laboratory draws water into itself and begins to fill, so
the old composer's hand at last and of its own accord began to write.

He sketched in short score, which is to say on two staves as if for
piano.  But the sounds he heard were not those of the piano, a workaday
instrument of limited tonal possibilities which interested him scarcely
at all.  Oh.  hejotted above the top line at one point, then Hn.

Already at this moment of the first sketch he placed the hairpins of
cresccndos and diminuendos, the characteristic tenutos over notes he
wanted stressed, the detailed dynamics which always were as much a part
of what he heard as the notes themselves.  On impulse he added a third
stave above the other two halfway down the page and scrawled Tenor
above it: there was suddenly the sound of a voice but he could not hear
the words.  The atmosphere in which it sang was quite clear to him,
however.  The voice fell upon an immense hush, a pristine emptiness in
which light was steadily growing.  Lost in this breathless dawn, yet
central to it, was the suggestion of a figure - maybe raised on some
sort of pillar - whose isolation both created the emptiness and was
created by it.  It was a desert landscape which filled the aural
horizon.  The unsleeping figure was not greeting the dawn: his tingling
declamation seemed concerned with something else.  But what?

Unexpectedly, somewhere beneath his tower's base, a silver
propelling-pencil wrote a short motif and added Solo Tot.

Edward sat back, gradually understanding what it was he had heard.

That trumpet motif seemed familiar ... Of course!  The Shofar call from
The Apostles which he had once thought of carrying over to the planned
oratorio The Lastjudgement.  He read through again what he had just
written, hearing the full orchestral sound rise from the grey
pencil-marks, the tenor soloist soaring above.

The line of the voice had something in it akin to Mary's great aria
'The Sun Goeth Down' in The Kingdom, but in place of that scena's
ravishment was a strange chill.  Empty pianissimo harp chords, widely
spaced and plucked all at once rather than spread as arpeggios, were
placed against oboes above and muted trombones below.  Somewhere in
that space vibrated a desolation he had never quite written before.

'I say,'hemurmured, shiveringasifsomethingmalignhadrisen from the scud
alongside and briefly blocked the sun.  'I wonder what that is?  I say
. He recognised at once that it was authentic.

Nobody knew better than he the devices which came to him most readily
and which he was most powerless to stop - when inspiration had thinned
or dried up altogether.  He had not needed the damned critics to remind
him of such things, like that puppy in the Pall Mall Gazette who had
written 'It is as difficult for Elgar to leave a sequence as it is for
a bicycle to leave the tram lines."  That had stung.  But this - he
looked again at the sketch on his knees had not a sequence in it, not a
hint of a nobilmente tune.  What it did have was the unmistakable
Elgarian note.  Where it had come from all of a sudden he had no idea
from the water itself, maybe - but it had done so without his having to
turn to the dog-eared and muchthumbed sketch-books of his youth.  That
in itself was heartening.

it was obviously no good for this Wembley march nonsense, but while it
lasted it was a definite resurgence of a once-familiar thing.

Years ago he had written to his Malvern architect friend Troyte ok him
back to boyhood's daze'.  In the Griffith that something 'to letter the
'daze' had been a mere homonym, a pun, a fanciful misspelling such as
the Victorians loved and which had peppered the letters of men like
Edward Lear: familiar words in fantastic guise (such as that painter's
succulent Mediterranean phyggs).  But in its unconscious garb the daze
of boyhood had been real enough.  It had come to him as he lay on his
stomach on a drifting punt, fingers trailing sunlit water, dreaming
open-eyed as his directionless craft nudged the hoof-pocked shallows
beneath the bank and slowly swung its other end out into the stream,
setting him off again now facing the other way.  Backwards or forwards,
who knew?  It was the tiniest details which stole into the mind and
stayed: the brilliant green flecks of duckweed now captured and towed
along in the still inch of water next to the wooden hull, half-adhering
to the amber varnish ... The daze of wind on top of the Malvern hills
when the clouds paced their own shadows across the counties i i 6 whose
quilt of fields retained its pattern of mediaeval shapes.  The fleeting
bruises of shade across that gentle landscape were a daze:

the high melancholy of what cannot be grasped or ever stopped.

The sense of height was a daze: the exalted roaring of the sky poured
through him and filled him Walking home through lanes little more than
sunken paths between towering creamy plates of urnbelliferae, drowsy
with pollen and bees.  Dazed with the feeling of incommensurable things
and with the prospects of success which must surely attend anyone
pierced by such thrills.

And finally the daze of sound in the organ loft as his inadequate
fingers tried to re-create what he had heard.  River, hill and lane:
they ran like water through his mind and left behind on scattered
sheets of manuscript crooked rivulets of notes which glittered like
mud-flats draining in the sun.  Why were there no great English
composers, at least not since Purcell?  Was the German countryside
really so much better?  For surely it could only be that which
determined the quality of a nation's music.  Very well then-, he would
see.

But the overweening self quickly forgets its nation.  The creative urge
does not march beneath a flag although it may from time to time
astutely invoke its shade.  Edward's England became not quite anybody
else's.  Now and then people thought they recognised themselves and
their landscape in it as crowds might glimpse their own reflections,
faithfully distorted, in the polished paintwork of a State coach as it
passed or in the glassy lacquer of a monarch's hearse.  The cheers
sounded; the handkerchiefs fluttered and fell; then almost immediately
there was nothing to see but a little dust in the air and nothing to
think but that something of moment had passed them by, something which
left their heads ringing and a slight desire to weep.  It was not
England which had passed in its disguise but Edward, whose dreams were
of his countryside and not of their country.

And he had written his landscape down as it had come to him and where
he had found it.  But bit by bit what seemed a rich spaciousness had
begun to reveal aspects of monotony.  Surely his entire imagined world
could not be voiced by that single note of elegiac lyricism?  No: there
was plenty of briskness of a healthy outdoor sort on which he set,
perhaps, an exaggerated value as if grateful for a plausible defence
against accusations of unseemly emotionalism.  But over the years, with
that self-assessincrit which thorough artists often carry out whose
brutality far outstrips any critic's candour, the thought had come in
secret: My emotional range is limited.  Impossible to confide in
Alice.

Herjob as she saw it from the beginning had been to take a stern line
with self-doubt.

For her, success was a matter of course and greatness not marginally
less so.  A genius could walk undeferentially with the shades of Wagner
and Brahms.  Edward had reviewed in his head the voluminous works of
Wagner and Brahms and found a reassuring uniformity of tone in all of
them.

But something had begun to change for him a year or two before the war
- from the moment, in fact, that Alice had deemed it time to make a
second, victorious assault on the capital and they had
bought'Kelston'in Hampstead (which he had promptly re-named Severn
House).  The telephone rang; bills came; people came; the war came.  On
the increasingly rare occasions he managed to obtain access to his
private landscape he found it parched: it supplied little and most of
that he had seen before.  A modern artform provided him with a horrid
image.  On one of his earliest visits to the cinema he watched a
sequence which included two funny men in a compartment of an American
train.  It was only after a minute he noticed with a jump that the
scenery beyond the carriage window was recurring.  He was at first
amused by the adroit trick; then he was overtaken by an oppressive
despair which confounded him completely and spoiled the rest of the
film.  The image of an endless strip of backcloth being rolled round
and round by men in shirt-sleeves standing on packing-cases behind it
returned to him as many times.

He was not a man to bear desertion without having to announce loudly
how glad he was at last to be free.  Of course there was no private
landscape.  The music-makers and the dreamers of dreams could finally
wake up to the poisonous Eden in which they had so foolishly laboured
and to the whore Music who had led them so long by the nose.  This Doll
Tearsheet of a muse, who capered to fashion and the pit, hoisted her
skirts so her audiences drank odours and howled for more - morejigs and
waltzes and quadrilles and salon tunes and now apparently for something
called the Charleston.  Well, he wanted no part of it, washed his hands
of it with the air of a man who compulsively rinses them after merely
glimpsing something Unclean on the floor ...

This wretched man, this man of exquisite sensibility masquerading as
fit company for bloodstock fanciers: how could there not now come to
him the troubling shade of his dead wife?

Had she not for thirty-one years sedulously urged her beloved Edu to
cavort with the whore?  Had she not firmly detached his fingers from
test-tubes, kite-strings, handlebars, steering-wheels, golfclubs in
order to place them once more around his pen?  Worse, had Alice not
herself faithlessly slipped away, deserting him when he was stranded
well past the zenith of popular acclaim and in a world far beyond any
he loved or recognised?  Precious, dishevelling treason!  No wonder he
could not have said how he viewed the rusting gate which had finally
slammed on his lost domain.  Was it a glare or a gaze of longing he
sent into that land which lay beyond the barricades, whose trees he
could still glimpse with between them the wistful glitter of river?

And if it was longing after all, how much more easily placated was the
world from which he gazed if he changed that longing into disgust!

Yet now aboard the Hildebrand, really without trying very hard, a hand
that was his had sketched a page or two of its own volition.

It was a hand which had written virtually nothing since it put the last
notes to the Cello concerto in igig, nine months before Alice's
death.

Yet somewhere in mid-Atlantic amid the hypnotic dazzle of his passage
something old had stirred and the hand, itself full of an old cunning,
had responded.

The years had depressed him too firmly to allow anything as crudely
doomed as excitement but he did find himself looking forward to
luncheon.  He screwed back his pencil and glanced at his watch.  It was
ten past three.  For a moment he was put out but the feeling was
swiftly replaced by one of pleasure.  The unnoticed passage of time was
authenticating; it reminded him of many years ago.

VI Began a scribble (?what?) this morning.  Perhaps after all the
'spark of that which has consumed me' did leave something, a final
bleak ember.  V.

spare but good & potentially big.  Not the opera, though.  Perh.  Pt.  3
of trilogy.

I know I long since rejected him butJudas does still haunt me now &
then.

There's somethingin that tragic & maligned figure which makes him full
of heart.  I believe I really gave up The Last Tud gement because the
idea bored the living daylights out of me.  But poorJudas - I still
think Archbp.

Whately got him right.  Surely Judas had no idea that he might
actually betray Jesus by what he did because he was convinced of his
Lord's miraculous power.  He was certain thatjesus would use this power
to prevent his own arrest & arraignment, thereby convincing both the
Jews & Romans that he was truly King & not of this earth.  This makes
him devastatingly human, a proper tragic figure instead of the accepted
symbol of cynical greed & betrayal.  His remorse & suicide would be a
real musical challenge - a scene of immense potential power - as he
realised that the awfulness of what he had done was due to a failure of
thought & not of heart.  He had presumed to anticipate the Son of Man,
but the ways of Heaven were disastrously not his.  There were to be no
magic tricks or chicanery to bring about the Kingdom ... In any case at
this moment it's enough for me to be thinking of a few cramped notes
again even if they don't lead anywhere & even if they did make me miss
lunch.  I'm damn well not going to miss dinner.  As I write this
sentence I'm dressed &

waiting for the First Trump.

So of course he sat in vain the following morning on his borrowed patch
of deck, notebook and pencil to hand.  The same blinding scud raced
past; the same harmonics from the engines hummed in every bolt and
plate of the Hildebrand, quivered up through his thin leather soles.

But today the constant rush of water spoke of impatience, of a hurry to
arrive, while the subliminal tones of machinery sang of a cheerless age
carrying him off beyond anywhere he wanted to be.  Neither did reading
his sketch help recreate the mood which had conceived it.  It was
bleak, certainly; but was it really anything he hadn't already said
years ago in one form or another?  Parts of the biography of a
character who kept on cropping up disguised variously as a man with
friends to depict, a dying ancient, a soul on a passionate pilgrimage,
a dreamer of dreams.  A mysterious figure on a pillar would slip easily
enough into that canon.  It was true that a tone of stark nihilism
would be new it remained untempered by melancholy, but it was not
clear to him how he could sustain that for very long.  He was a man to
whose eyes the tears sprang naturally; nobody that placable and moody
could keep up indefinitely an unblinking desolation.

Sooner or later a heart would have to beat.  And besides, if nihilism
and desolation were to be his new bailiwick there was no ignoring how
the battlefields of Europe, still treeless and littered with shards of
bone, had usurped that space with a directness far more terrible than
anything he could hope to achieve.

Meanwhile the unspeaking sea rushed away sternwards.  What solace was
imaginable for this lack of purpose?  The frisky heart still beat, the
soul had died.  Lose yourself, he said silently as he stood up and
tucked away his propelling-pencil.  Theatres, dogs, clubs, motor-tours
round old haunts, races.  There's plenty to do: lose yourself.  Look at
these blank horizons concealing even blanker continents.  Are you not
already lost?

But when he thought nobody was looking he laid an ear to the after-mast
and heard the voice of the wind exactly as it sounded in the telegraph
poles in the lanes around Kempsey.  Their voice was constant, neither
rising nor falling with the gusts which shook the grasses at their
foot, coming from close at hand and infinitely far away.  The mast,
too, ignored the buffets of tropic air the bows and bridge threw over
their shoulders.  It spoke instead in the long paragraphs of
trade-winds as if the ship itself were tuned to catch the underlying
music of this sphere.  On the way back to his cabin he thought of
another story which had caught his fancy in that buddhist-book Frank
had sent him.  Well - not really a story at all, more a snippet of
dialogue between the inevitable monk and someone called Unmon.  It went
as follows: Monk: What happens when the leaves arejalling, and the
trees are bare?

Unmon: The golden wind, revealed.

Tommy-rot, of course.  Yet in the next-to-nothing this exchange
contained there was maybe enough to catch at the mind as it slithered
through, andjust for that instant one thought one saw the wind ...

Similarly with masts and telegraph poles, he mused as he let himself
into his cabin: for a moment one had the impression of a something, the
least and most banal of whose manifestations was mere blowing.

He was surprised to find Steward Pyce standing by the table in the act
of polishing the silver hip-flask with a yellow duster.

'Please excuse me, Sir Edward,' he said, setting down the flask and
pocketing the rag.  'I'vejust obtained your sample for you and finding
you were out I took the liberty of leaving it."

'Oh.  Yes, I see.  Thank you, Pyce.  Where's it from this time?"

 'The bows, sir.  As requested."

It only then caught Edward's eye that he had left his microscope out of
its case on the writing table where he had been using it for an hour
after breakfast.  He had not even slipped its cover over it.

Well, he thought, that cat's out of the bag.

'I didn't know you were a man of science as well, Sir Edward.

Pardon my saying."

'May I not be if I wish?"

'Of course, sir.  I only meant, well, a composer of music's a bit
different from well .  . ."

'Do you know of the Russian composer Borodin?"

'No, Sir Edward, can't say as I do."

'He's an excellent composer who earns his living as a chemist.  I
believe he's Professor of Chemistry at St Petersburg and has textbooks
to his name which are standard reference works.  just because one's a
composer it doesn't mean one has to be a dunce at everything else.

Nor, for that matter, does it mean that when one's not actually
composing music one has nothing else to do and no other life."

The Steward looked astutely at the microscope as though he had only
'just noticed it.  'In a manner of speaking, sir, you work with I two
kinds of instruments, then?"

'Rather wittily put, Pyce.  Good afternoon."

('Bleeding microscopes,' the Steward said later to Hempson in the Linen
Store, 'who'd ever've thought it?"

'Might easily've been trombones with this lot,' said Hempson darkly.

'True enough.  But what does a composer on holiday want with a
microscope?  Up the Amazon?  I ask you.  And looking at ruddy
seawater.

Sometimes I reckon you and me're the only sane ones aboard this ship,
Hemp.  That new doctor now, Ashe ... To think I tried to tip him the
wink about one of my own passengers.  Crikey!') In token of the
latitude sunset that evening was of a tropical unrestraint.  Alone on
refulgent tinfoil RMS Hildebrand, the Brindled Marsh, the minor moth,
headed for several minutes directly at the settling orange ball as
though to be drawn down over the horizon by its dazzle.  The ship's
insect passage amid splendours of immensity presented itself as though
to an ascending eye which, taking in more and more of the wrinkled
metal across which it crawled, lost beliefin the very existence of the
microscopic beings it contained.

Yet they were there, and busy.  Some steered on the bridge, others
laboured deep below in a timeless hot clamour uncaring of setting or
rising suns.  Some in spotless jackets were arranging wine-glasses
upside down on white linen, some were playing musical instruments
quietly for people drinking cocktails on the after-deck.  Many were
dressing for dinner: the outward-bound travellers wishing their
lightweight suits did not smell quite so pungently of camphor, the
tourists who would be returning selfconscious of the obvious newness of
their clothes.  Several people were kissing; two waiters were making
love in a locked pantry.  An aviator past his first youth was talking
to a lady painter just quitting hers.  An English composer was in
animated conversation about a stables in Newmarket with two red-nosed
men, one of whom wore the tiny ribbon of a decoration in his lapel.

Two middle-aged ladies were finishing a rubber of whist: they had been
playing since three o'clock that afternoon.  Their male partners had
initially done all the laughing and exclaiming while the ladies had
throughout played as if against one another alone, with steely
affection.

As it inched its way across the globe this insect - which was due to
cross the Equator the next day - shed a trail of sound which streamed
behind it and thinned out over its wake.  Engines and laughter and the
clatter of crockery; exclamations and discreet gasps; saxophones and
the hum of a hundred conversations.  And in a small room near the
Library, the modulations of a lady giving an audience of six her
recollections of missionary work in Peru.

These sounds leaked from porthole and hatchway, boomed from ventilation
ducts, filtered through 'alousies and blew off the decks J like dust,
swirling away past the Red Ensign on the stern and carrying with them
the crack of that flag's material.  A small fraction of this audible
smoke contained the Captain's observation to one of his officers on the
bridge: 'Aye, they're a restless lot this trip.  Not the usual
"out-and-backers", Ned,'referring presumably to the passengers at his
own table, only one of whom was booked to return.  'That Elgar, now.

Seems a bit down.  Surprised he didn't fix himself up with a companion
before he came, famous chappie like that."

'A bit of stuff, you mean?"

 'Inelegantly put, Ned, but yes.  A floozy."

'Well, he still can, can't he?  There're enough on board."An even
tinier fraction of noise was contributed by the empty madeira bottle
which rolled from under Dr Ashes arm off the edge of his desk and broke
on the rim of a stout metal wastepaper bin as his orderly tried to
raise him and get him to his bunk.

And before long the sun had outrun the little moth and left it still
crawling across a benighted ocean.  But soon enough it put on lights
and transformed itself into a glow-worm which twinkled in the middle of
nowhere, for as long as nowhere took to pass, leaving behind it in
addition to its fume of sound several dozen empty magnums of champagne
variously bobbing and sinking amid a scatter of unravelling cigar
butts.  For an era of horror and attrition was behind and an age of
whoopee had dawned.  (How the Melodeers twiddled and thumped!) Much
later that night the aviator told the lady painter, who was leaning
against a davit, that the brilliant white star she was looking at was
not Sirius at all but since it was in Orion - Betelgeuse.  The lady
painter replied that she was glad to hear it since she happened to know
a poem about Betelgeuse, part of which went (and she spoke it softly in
the voice 0 which is used for decks of ships at night in the middle of
nowhere): 1

On Betelgeuse the gold leaves hang in golden aisles for twice a hundred
million miles and twice a hundred millionyears they golden hang, and
nothing stirs on Betelgeuse.

And the aviator was canny enough to guess that whatever else it was
about it was not Betelgeuse.  So he refrained from pointing out that
Betelgeuse was actually a star believed to be three times hotter than
our own sun, an inferno in which were assuredly no leaves, golden or
otherwise.  Instead he leaned towards the davit and slipped his arm
around her waist, saying nothing at all but gently touching his
mustache (once, twice) with the other hand.

Whatever eye it could have been, seeing the little Hildebrand from far
enough away to observe it only as a glowing speck whose motion amid all
that nothingness was barely apparent, it might have reflected on the
oddness of that ship's monthly passing - now one way and now the other,
year after year.  Who besides labourers and fortune-hunters (which two
categories might well include office-boys and businessmen) was it
ferrying between Britain and Brazil?  Who were these chatterers with so
many changes of clothes who danced and played and drank their way
across the ocean and back again, leaving bottles in their wake?  For
every day portholes opened and glass rained into the sea: wine, gin,
brilliantine and ink; Shippam's paste and Bovril; chlorodyne and
scent.

Most contained dregs and air.  Now and then one with a tight stopper
held a safely untraceable obscene message or mock cry for help.

For that matter what were the circumstances in which a pair of ladies'
shoes, a clarinet and a hundredweight of Devon butter plopped into the
swirling cavitations of the twin bronze screws and vanished for ever?

What were these loungers in deck-chairs, these players of deck-quoits
and shuffleboard, these readers and flirters thinking to do by coming
all this way in order to steam between walls of jungle into the ccntre
of a continent about whose very position on the globe many were quite
unsure?  'Get away from it all,' was the stock answer people generally
give who habitually take as much as they can of it with them.  'A
change of scenery,' a lost and demoralised old composer had explained
to his daughter when she asked what he hoped to find: the change of
scenery commonly believed to procure a change of heart, regeneration.

The shipboard ritual staged at the moment of crossing the Equator and
repeated each voyage was both comprehensible and absurd to Edward when
he watched it for a short while next morning.  It was the first time he
himself had ever crossed the Equator, come to that, but he hardly
expected to feel very different and neither did he.  The freakish
pantomime involved Captain Maddrell receiving aboard King Neptune and
his Oceanic Court and several passengers presumably volunteers - were
given haircuts and ducked, thereby becoming initiated into something
called The Ancient Order of Shellbacks.

Half of Edward knew what was happening and inwardly applauded this
evidence of reassuring British eccentricity.  The other half pretended
disdainfully not to know, forgetting his own extended fancy-dress role
as the pirate Nanty Ewart which he had once played with a friend's
three sons.  This fantasy had been sustained for some time and had
involved skirmishing with wooden swords in the shrubbery wearing a
piratical head-scarf and with curtaiii-rings in his cars, as well as
writing letters to his crew' away at school in pastiche
seventeenth-century English.  'All harmless enough,' several onlookers
said as they watched the Hildebrand's Purser in spirit-gummed beard,
tattered green robes and a trident.  'What jolly fun."  But probably
none of them were quite sure why they thought so nor, if dressing up
were such a sterling part of the national character, exactly what
necessary act was being performed.  Afterwards everybody trooped down
to luncheon in high communal spirits like participants in a sport whose
unwritten rules are never infringed and which no foreigner will ever
hope to understand.

Tomorrow evening Pard.  Next day the Amazon.  Soon Kate and Dora and
several other passengers would step down the gangway onto the lip of a
continent and be swallowed up whole.  Edward noted the change of
atmosphere in the ship as soon as the Equator had been dealt with.

Something was ending, something else about to begin.  He spent the
afternoon, notebook on lap, staring towards the invisible mass of land
which on a despairing rainy day he had on impulse made his temporary
destination.  Why not?  he asked the equable ocean across whose surface
flying fish skittered from the onrush of the Hildebrands hull.  Why not
keep inventing destinations?  Spend whole years in deck chairs voyaging
across one ocean or another to places which have no particular
existence beyond their names and varying skylines?  The time would fill
itself, the clock cease to matter and be replaced by an arcane system
of ship's bells.  There would be good eating and drinking and an
endless succession of convivial strangers, none of whom God willing
would know anything about music.  There would be diverting things to do
in ports of call: weird conveyances (had he not 'just tobogganed down a
mountain four hundred miles off the J coast of Africa?), peculiar
foods, extravagant customs ...

And suddenly he rcaliscd how horrid the entire notion was; that he
didn't in the least want any of those things, that he wished at this
very minute more than anything else to be walking the lanes of
Worcestcrshirc or sitting beside the Severn or the Tcme.  Never mind
that it was late November and probably wet and cold.  He saw a thousand
pictures of his rivers In all weathers and none was unfriendly, none
without its pleasurable echo.  Even the saddest and most sodden
afternoon had its charm, the hat 1crt off to spite the doctor's orders,
hair plastered with rain, coat heavy, dog soaked but everything rinsed
through by whatever it was in immemorial weather which dissolved
foolishness and brought one always to the essential things of a life.

The thoughts, the continuities and all that made a clutch of years look
whole, even the smoke from a cottager's chimney or the wraith of a
smouldering bonfire on the other side of a hedge (since wood-smoke was
the incense of nostalgia): such things lay as solid as a range of hills
behind mist.

I This was known terrain and had been walked and walked and yet could
still surprise with an aspect never glimpsed before, then in I
sunlight, now in rain.  What for this running to the ends of the
earth?

What had the ends of the earth ever done for him?  They were no more
mysterious than the planet's ghost whose sad perpetual strain could be
heard by laying an ear to the splintery wood of a telegraph pole.

Certainly they could be no less known than the patterns of starlings
which arranged themselves across wintry skies over fields and spinneys:
boiling clouds of ex-reptiles I descending on and then deserting no
particular tree, taking with them their single garbled tune.

More than this, the spinneys and the lanes and the cottages had about
them faces and incidents and glimpses of incidents.

Somebody's hands in bright sun twirling as they wound in a kitestring;
a muddy hem of skirts ascending before the eyes as someone was handed
up into a carriage; a dog rolling down the bank into the River Wye.

The echoes of mouths now stuffed with soil; the echo of the strange
four-note whistle he had invented to announce at the gate his arrival
home and which had found its wayinto Enigma!  the I echoes of an
existence.  What did the blank and dazzled equatorial ocean know of
such sounds?  Across which raw continent did I another Severn flow?  In
desperation a life might be abandoned, jettisoned over the rail of a
ship as unwanted on the remaining voyage; but it could scarcely be
sought elsewhere, still less transplanted.  He recalled a visit he
and Alice had made to Capri early in 1907 during which they had visited
Axel Munthe whose English neighbour had just spent twenty years of his
life trying to create a Home Counties garden around his white and
shuttered villa.  They had sat one afternoon in mild sunshine amid
lavender bushes which were the wrong species, being a little too tough
and spiky rather than soft and blousy, looking across lawns which ended
in blue space.  The greenhouse was subtly the wrong shape, the roof
being a fraction too steeply pitched.  The rockery and sundial were
perfect.  Since everybody knew they were sitting in Capri there had
seemed little point to this painstaking fake but their host glowed.

'All the pleasures of an En-fish garden without the awful weather,' he
said.  ('All the pleasures of the English vice without the law,' Edward
remarked later, having been introduced to a 'gardener's boy' who was as
much an actor as the garden was a set.) The hand holding the
propelling-pencil made a few meaningless marks in the margin of the
notebook while the eyes remained fixed on the sea.  What had it been
for?  Again and again this stupid question.  On his side there had been
the power of his intentions.

For several years such clarity of vision, such unerring setting down
that it was his proud and very nearly truthful boast that he never
needed to alter a note when he first heard an orchestra play what he
had written.  And on the other side had come immense acclaim, and not
by any means principally from England.  It was the Germans who had
first recognised him: men like Hans Richter and Richard Strauss who
first used the unqualified word 'genius'.  At long last Henry Purcell
had found a successor; England's musical renaissance had arrived ...

For some years the accolades had grown, from people whistling in the
street to the King knighting him and going to the Races with him.  Nor
had it taken long, either.  In i899, the year of the first unequivocal
masterpiece, Enigma, ten of his compositions were played at Queen
Victoria's command in the private chapel at Windsor.  Within five years
he was Sir Edward Elgar, within thirteen he had completed practically
all his important works.  In that brief span he had walked with kings
and had been cheered by crowds, but more to the point had been praised
and befriended by fellow-artists and composers from all over the
world.

He was discreetly mobbed and indiscreetly swooned over.  Distinguished
people he had never met wrote him expressions of their deepest
gratitude.  He was everywhere made much of.  The only thing he was not
given much of was money; but between them his closest friends patched
and hired him through a succession of suits marking his honours, and
Alice moved him through a series of ever grander houses.  This went on
until even the lack of money had seemed unimportant beside the lack of
silence.

But what nature of a triumph had it been which led to this: an ageing
man in a deck chair four thousand miles from home in a desolate waste
of sea-water, almost-empty notebook on his knees, a single rented berth
down below?  Baffling that it all could have drained away and left such
nothingness.  The glory had been real, the love and affection in his
life quite genuine.  What he had written he had written whether they
played it or not and whether those who had once thought it worthy to
stand beside Beethoven had given way to those who now cried
'Pompenstance!"  and derided what they called Edwardianism.

But the ones who thus dismissed his music, was not their injustice
exceeded only by their ignorance?  For his marches had merely been the
bread-and-butter music of their day, and their day was not even his
own.  Strange indeed how the first dozen years of the century were now
almost wilfully mis-remembered.  Even those who should recall them
perfectly well looked back as to a lost antediluvian land of innocence
and plenty.  Another of the war's abominable mischiefs.  Not only had
it ruined the world after it but it had falsified the one before.

Very slowly his hand wrote the figures '44' in the margin of the
notebook.  'I was forty-four when the Queen died,' he told the ocean
inaudibly.  'I'm not an Edwardian."  And because he had worked as he
did there was a sense in which he had already written his life's work
before the century ever turned.  The ideas had come in their profusion
in boyhood, in the Seventies and Eighties and Nineties, filling
notebook after notebook with jottings, fragments and themes.  It was
only when he turned them into finished works that the praise had come,
but by then the original inspirations had often been in his mind for
twenty years.  He was a Victorian in heart, spirit, essence.

The passion of this internal monologue must have remained undimmed for
some hours.  At dinner, in response to an unwitting 'Ah, those were the
days, eh?"  from Captain Maddrell apropos the prewar popularity of
Booth's South America run, Edward replied with a churlish 'Oh no they
weren't."

'I only meant, Sir Edward .  . ."

'In no sense were they "the days".  I sometimes think people must be
suffering from collective amnesia, or whatever it is these alicnists
call it.  Does nobody here remember that feeling of being on a
butter-slldc?"  He glared belligerently around the table.

'Well, politics were sometimes a little unsettled,'ventured Kate, 'but
then aren't they always?"

Edward fixed her as he listed the unsettlements and their gravity:
Tariff Reform, the rise of Union power and Socialism, the demands of
women for emancipation and the Vote, the decline of Britain as a
manufacturing country and - as if those weren't enough - Home Rule in
Ireland.  'Were we really supposed to let a band of Fenian yahoos
simply annex a part of Great Britain?  In I 914, at any rate, it was a
monstrous piece of treason.  And though as a matter of principle I
think artists and musicians ought to hold themselves aloof from being
used in political affairs I did indeed join with Kipling and Lord
Roberts in signing the British Covenant to support Carson in Ulster.

But it wasn't a pleasure by any means, for all that a lot of powerful
people told us it was our duty to sign and set an example.  In any case
if that's your idea of a golden era in the nation's history you may
well have considered the War a minor skirmish when it came."

Hoping perhaps to divert attention from the dubious taste of this
remark while trying to pacify his distinguished guest the Captain
mildly asked 'Might you explain to us, sir, your theory of the decline
of Britain as a manufacturer?  I was under the impression that as a
trading nation we were second to none.  At least, at that time."

'llnfortunately we were second to several even by the time the old
Queen died.  It's just something the British go on refusing to believe
with their normal ostrich-like behaviour, but it's nevertheless
true."

And he maintained at some length that the real turningpoint in the
country's fortunes - the moment when decline had inexorably set in was
when those nations on whom Britain had stolen a march with her
industrial revolution caught up and passed her.  Somewhere around the
i870s, he guessed, when the German steel industry began producing more
steel or foreign exporters started to cat into Britain's dominance and
capture her erstwhile markets.

Mulling it over afterwards in his cabin, where he had retreated, he
thought how there had probably been an actual instant - a sunny morning
in May, perhaps, while he was demonstrating the fingering of a violin
passage to some schoolgirl in the music-room of The Mount in Great
Malvern - when a contract was signed in Essen or Brussels or even New
York which, all unbeknownst, had toppled Britain over into descent.  Of
course there was a long ironic lag.  I mpcrccptible at first beneath
the global pageantry of Empire, the slide gathered speed as the century
expired.  But those with feeling had already felt it: the sensation of
something drawing to a close, the hollowness of hymns, the hubris of
'never, never, never' bawled out as if at a party in full swing but
held in one of those newfangled lifts going down, down, down.  It was
intuited well before Kipling wrote 'Recessional' so that the general
celebrations in igoo, pivoting as they did around Victoria's
near-mystical survival, were nonetheless shot through with national
unease.

And as with a nation so with an individual, he thought.  When public
acclaim finally grew and gave an artist his due he might already have
passed - one sunny morning in May - some quiet internal zenith, a
calamitous instant which went unrecognised amid the din of
recognition.

Maybe he himself had intuited it, too, with that stabbing 'They don't
want any more' as the OM was conferred, as purple descended, as
audiences rose.  That was the reality of popular esteem, of course.  By
its very nature it was always premature or too late.  There was finally
not the slightest connection between the public's trumpetings and the
private soul, nor could there ever be.

Thirty feet away and a deck lower Dora Bellamy and Kate Hammond were
having one of several celebratory rounds of drinks to mark the last
night of their voyage.  They shared them with certain acquaintances,
one of whom was wondering what life at the Captain's table was like
with so famous a man as Elgar among the company.  Kate was still
smarting.

'I can tell you - it's like dining with a time-bomb,' she said.  'It's
up to you to guess when it's due to go off."

'He is a genius,' said her friend emolliently.

'A bloody rude one."

'You have wide experience of the type, of course,' said Dora.

'But as far as I'm concerned he's a genius and that's that.  It's funny
- you know I mentioned I'd sun at the first performance of The
Apostles?"

'You did let it drop once.  Or twice."

'Well,' continued Dora unperturbed, 'we saw him a bit during the last
rehearsals and then at the actual performance, of course, but we none
of us got any closer to him than between this table and ... I she
looked around the confines of steel bulkheads disguised as fumed oak
panelling '. . . golly, I should imagine the bridge.  You know how big
those concert halls are and the chorus was stuck up on tiers on either
side of the organ console and beneath us was the entire orchestra and
then Sir Edward on a little podium with a brass handrail.  I mean to
say, miles away.  But what's funny about it is that he hasn't changed
at all even though it's twenty years ago.

Of course he looks older - grey hair and a bit stouter and so on but as
soon as we all sat down to dinner our first evening aboard I recognised
him."

'Astonishing,' said Kate.  'The man's probably never been photographed
more than twenty thousand times and even I, who am tone deaf and
wouldn't greatly mind if I never heard another note of music, even I
had heard of Sir Edward Elgar VC, KCVO and Bar, Master of the King's
Own Mounted Sackbuts."

'Kate, darling, you know that wasn't exactly what I meant, don't you,
sweetness?  It's the gin,' she confided to the others in dramatically
lowered voice.  'Have you noticed how obtuse it makes certain people?

What I meant, Katie dear, is that I recognised his presence at once.

He never said much at all during those rehearsals - he just sort of
smouldered and now and again clapped a hand to his brow when someone
did something silly.

Actually I rather think he once turned his back on the lot of us when
we missed an entry and various people had to trot up to pacify him and
turn him round."

'That part at least sounds like our passenger,' Kate said.

'But that isn't the part I mean.  When the actual performance was going
well and we all had that feeling, you know?  - as if nobody can put a
foot wrong?  - he was extraordinary.  That little figure on the podium
in the distance looked apart in some way but at the same time we
realised he was controlling the lot of us.  We were all completely in
his service and for as long as we could give ourselves up to his spirit
or his musical vision or whatever it was the whole thing became
absolutely magnetic.  By the end we all felt exalted, too.  Personally
I never slept a wink that night.  And from then until the other day I
never clapped eyes on him.  Yet when we were introduced it was that odd
quality which hit me at once and even after so long I remembered it.  I
can't explain it better than that."

'I'll allow he has a certain something about him,' admitted Kate, 'but
in all honesty I don't know whether that isn't just because I know who
he is.  One's unfairly disposed to detect all sorts of qualities in the
famous simply because they're famous, while all they might actually
have done was invent a mutton extract for a South Polar expedition."

'Exactly,' said an Acquaintance.  'Or dissolve a wife or two in a bath
of acid."

'One thing you can say about him - he looks like nobody's idea of a
composer.

'I suppose not,' said Dora.  'But I'm not sure how a composer should
look.  That Beethovenesque romantic hero - you know, tousled hair,
wind-tattered cloak, shaking his fist at lightning and generally living
in squalor - that would frankly look pretty silly in Nineteen
twenty-three, wouldn't ill 'Granted.  But even so you don't expect him
to look like a retired general full of equine anecdotes about 11.

nseed oil and skimmed milk and ante-post betting."

Dora said: 'I still don't think there's any point in applying ordinary
standards of behaviour to completely extraordinary people.  Look at all
that music he's given the world which they'll still be playing long
after we're forgotten.  You can teach even quite stupid children to say
please and thank-you and hold doors open for ladies and generally ape
being a good little social animal, but who can you train to write The
Dream of Gerontius or even Land of Hope and Glory?"

'I still think it hurts nobody to be moderately polite."

'Dora's got a point,' said another Acquaintance who had so far not
spoken.  'Surely a genius is someone whose gift is so commanding, so
overwhelming that there's no space or energy left over for bothering
with niceties.  Most of the geniuses one can think of were pretty odd
in one way or another.  You'd have said they were half crazy if they
hadn't been writing or painting or composing works which were obviously
of greater importance than the unconvcntional private life of the man
who created them.  Look at van Gogh."

For a while they looked at van Gogh while on the deck above them the
genius who had caused all this tipsy speculation snored slightly in the
well-appointed steel box he had rented.  Beside him on the bunkside
table stood a ribbed blue bottle containing a sleeping draught
formulated especially for him by a retired Royal Physician.  Edward had
been much taken by the man's having invented it on inally to give the
King's horses in order to render them, docile before travelling by
rail.  His own supply was somewhat weaker, perhaps, and taken in
smaller quantities; but he was quite content to entrust himself to a
medicine with so reassuring a pedigree.

 While his passengers were thus variously engaged Captain Maddrell was
earnestly in conversation with the Purser who, at this late hour, had
brought him disturbing news.

'As I say, she's distraught.  Frankly, between you and me she's pretty
tiddly and something tells me she mightn't have said anything about it
had she not been.  What do we do?"

'Let's get it straight.  Did she actually accuse the doctor of bing
worse than foul language?"  anyt 'I suppose not, if "worse" means
you're thinking of what I'm thinking."

'I am,' said the Captain.

'In that case, no.  She says she called him with a legitimate complaint
- won't specify what it was and of course I didn't ask but it was
sudden enough to warrant attention at eight o'clock in the evening.

She absolutely agrees it was an inconvenient time but she says bodies
are inconvenient things and anyway what the hell are doctors paid
for?"

'She sounds a forthright sort of lady."

'Indeed.  My impression is that drunk or not she's very much to the
point and hardly the sort to invent things.  Anyway it's such an
unlikely thing to invent, isn't it?  You and I know from bitter
experience that some women will accuse doctors of the most awful
indecencies when it turns out to be utter nonsense and the poor wretch
is like as not ruined even though cleared.  But this time it's nothing
like that.  She simply claims he swore at her and then laughed.  It was
his attitude which upset her as much as the language, apparently.  She
says she can overlook brusqueness if a doctor's first-rate; what she
can't overlook is his refusing to take her symptoms seriously.  She
claims he said - among other things that he would only consider
treating her if she agreed to immediate surgery.

'Good God.  The man's a lunatic.  I've never heard ... But go on.

'That's it."

The Captain thought for a moment.  'No witnesses, of course."

'One assumes not."

'I'll see the lady now and then I'll see the bloody doctor."

'It'll have to wait till morning.  She's gone to bed."

'A thousand times I've wished Bill Barnard hadn't retired.  This is the
thousand and first."

'What a man.  Next layover I'm for going down to - Godalming, isn't
it?

-just to shake him by the hand.  This Ashe is a non-starter.

Odd, though: he came with the highest references."

I 'Of course he did, he'd hardly be working lo I r Booth's if he
hadn't.  But Bill was ex-Army too.  You couldn't wish for a greater
contrast.  Well, I must admit Ashe didn't strike me any too I
favourably when I first saw him but it's not for me to say who I sail
with.  It's not me who's employing him, after all.  I can damn well
have him off my ship after this, though.  It's incredible.  His first
trip and everything.  Man hasn't been on board more than a fortnight.

As far as I'm concerned he walks the plank at Pard."

'Better if we could hold out until Manaos.  We might be able to filch a
medic from the Iquitos run."

'Mr Gates, the voice of reason."

Next morning Edward woke early; the draught of horse-dope had given him
many hours of dreamless sleep.  After breakfast, which he took
practically alone, he went up on deck to find the sea had changed.  No
longer was it the purple which would lighten to deep blue as the sun
rose to set aglow its uppermost sixty feet.  It was now a
yellowish-green colour ridged with small waves which I slapped at the
Hildebrant's forefoot as if she had been a yacht changing tack before
an oncoming tide.  The sight filled him with the disquiet of
estuaries.  But an even more convincing sign of change was the smell of
the wind.  The crispness of pure ocean I breath was overlaid now by a
soft reek of rot: the exhalation of a hundred million arboreal
lungs, the thrilling perfume of the tropics I full of unknown oils
bled off untold golden leaves by a heavy sun.  It was the scent
inseparable from torrential distillations of water and the river had
carried it faithfully like a familiar far out into the Atlantic where
at a dishevelled boundary each passed a larger I diluent.

'Your first sight of Brazil, sir?"  It was Pyce with a starched white
cloth over one forearm in mid-bustle between points of dutiful
activity.

And only then did Edward look property at the horizon and notice the
low stain between sea and sky.

'So that's it, is it?"

 'That's Brazil, sir.  Unless the Captain's made an error."

'Of course."

'An error of course."  For a peculiar instant the two men nearly smiled
at one another.  'But he never has yet, sir.  In any case you can smell
it.  Can't mistake a smell like that.  The land you can see over
there'll be Mary-Jo island.  It's right in the mouth of the Amazon and
they say it's about a hundred and seventy miles across."

'That's a whacking big island."

'It's a whacking big place, Brazil.  Nevergot used to it mysc1rand I've
made this trip dozens of times in the last five years.  This water
here, sir?  'T'isn't sea-water, you know.  That's fresh water, Amazon
water.  You can drink it.  In fact a bit further on's the place where
all the ships take on fresh water, including us.  It's pure Amazon
water we'll be drinking from now until Liverpool.  They tell me it's
still drinkable two hundred miles out to sea but I can't say I've
tried."

'Good heavens ... I say, Steward, can you get me some?"

'Thought you'd say that, sir.  I already have."  And from the pocket
concealed by the napkin he drew out the hip-flask.

'You deserve a medal, Pyce.  A small one."

'I've got one of those, sir.  They gave me one a few years back."

And he excused himself and walked away up the deck leaving Edward
holding the flask at a loss for words.  Cheeky the man undoubtedly
was.

And yet ... Probably he had served with honour: why mightn't he have
done so?  And yes indeed, probably anybody would prefer a
half-sovereign to a medal.

('I can't cat my bloody sword,' he had said to Alice in a rage not long
after he had been knighted, 'though I may yet have to fall on it if I
can't pay the bills.  Who gives a fig for honours?  What I need is
cash, cash, cash.  You pack me off to Court with my underwear in holes,
my waistcoat slit up the back and my borrowed shoes with fabulous
silver buckles a size too small.  Every inch a gentleman, every foot a
penance."  But this minor bon mot, popping out as it did without the
least volition, had made him laugh and Alice as well, even though she
was the daughter of a Major-General, and for several minutes they had
both howled helplessly at the irony of the whole stupid business.) He
spent an hour or two with his microscope after first trying a drop of
water on the tip of his tongue.  To his surprise it was indeed sweet.

And placing one slide after another under his instrument and lighting
them with the strengthening sun he made out the diatoms and protozoa
peculiar to fresh water.  He much lamented not having his chemistry
apparatus with him since he might have done a series of tests to
determine the exact percentage of sodium chloride.  After all, he
thought, the man who'd gone to the trouble of taking out a patent on an
apparatus for making hydrogen sulphide could certainly have managed
that without relying on text-books.

He still had difficulty believing that even a river as monstrous as the
Amazon could impress itself on the Atlantic Ocean.  He had done his
desultory reading the Library: had read the section of the geography
book headed 'Facts and Figures Pertaining to the World's Greatest
River', had noted that at certain points it was so wide that one bank
was invisible from the other, had deliberately not memorised the
incomprehensible cubic mass of pure water which allegedly flooded out
every second.  But that was always the problem with facts and figures:
they never made anything more comprehensible, merely tinged wonder with
boredom.

When he went back up on deck it was mid-morning and the passengers were
disporting themselves in the usual manner while radiating a feeling of
being only half attentive to the rope rings they were tossing at the
distant peg or to the nearly-finished books they had to return to the
ship's library before disembarking.  People kept glancing up as if by
magic the vista of approaching coastline might have given way in the
last five minutes to a harbour bar, a jetty, a waterfront.  Ladies
could be seen asking themselves how they might recognise the last
reasonable moment, when it came, for slipping down and doing their hair
once more.  Yet it was not until early afternoon that on the eastern
horizon an indistinct row of buildings appeared which was the town of
ParA.  By then the yellow-green water through which the Hildebrand
glided was free of the long oceanic swells which had marked much of her
recent passage.  The oncoming ridges of water defining the meeting of
river and sea had likewise been left behind.  Here the surface was
merely ruffled in places as light punches of hot wind dabbed locally at
it among the blue- and crimson-sailed fishing boats they passed with
waving arms and wordless hails.

Beside him at the rail Molly appeared, her face transfigured.

'You're pleased to be back.  That much one can tell,' he said.

 'It's the smell.  I haven't smelt this for over a year and it brings
it all back like nothing else.  What it says to me is that I haven't
made a mistake ... Isn't it funny how easy it is to imagine places one
knows and loves, to see people and things in immense detail, to hear
exactly the sound of a familiar clock or a particular door opening, and
yet to be almost incapable of imagining smells?  Why is that, do you
think?  It can't be that they're less significant, at least not for me
because smelling something again brings everything else back in a rush
... Pari's not very inspiring from here, is it?  But at the moment I
love Did you know it had another name?  It's sometimes called Bel6m,
which is Portuguese for Bethlehem."

Her excited talk eased the images past his eyes.  How had he imagined
this continent?  He hadn't, to be truthful.  One morning in a distant
land which he felt he knew to the point of exhaustion he had quite
deliberately selected a terra incognita.  It was precisely because it
had conjured up nothing in his mind's eye more specific than a
wilderness of trees concealing unknown mysteries that he had chosen
Amazonia in preference to - for example - the Greek islands or the road
to Mandalay.  So now the muddy, unimposing skyline of Pari whose
principal buildings, even at this distance, bore the Portuguese stamp
familiar from Madeira filled him with neither surprise nor
disappointment.

'Did you know there was a sizeable English colony here?"  Molly was
saying.

'I'd rather gathered as much from our prankster friends.  Business
people, one would imagine, like their presumed husbands."

'Their poor, poor husbands ... Wouldn't you like to meet them?"

'I would have done once.  But in an odd sort of way my curiosity for
how the rest of the world gets by has ebbed rather in the last few
years.  To be honest I no longer care very much.  But I would wish them
all well if I were the wishing sort.  Do you know, I may not even get
off here."

'Not get off?  It's a long way to come not to get off."

'No, it's really only a long way to come, which is why I came.

You get off."

'Oh I shall.  I know Forty wants to' (he had no difficulty guessing the
identity of'Forty').  'It's not a particularly exciting place except
it's the gateway to the Amazon and that's quite exciting enough for
me.

It's wonderfully informal.  You'd be shocked."

'Do you find me easily shocked?"

'Well, disconcerted perhaps.  Not actually shocked."

'I should hope not.  There aren't many thoughts one doesn't have in a
long life.  In any case, when in Rome and so on.  What is it one does
when in Pari?"

'Oh, for instance if you called on someone in the English colony here
it would be thought perfectly in order if the lady of the house
received you herself, asked you to take off your coat and sit with her
in the drawing room in your shirt-sleeves."

'Deeply scandalous.  But eminently sensible in this sort of climate."

'If you're a good friend and go to someone's house the first thing
they'll say is "Here's the peg and there's the bath".  They always say
that here.  It's like a greeting."

"Here's the peg and there's the bath"?"

'Yes.  Hang up your coat and have a nice cool shower before coming and
talking.  It's a real courtesy."

'Sounds charming.  But I can see it might be open to misconstruction
were you to try and introduce the habit in England.

Not that a lot of one's guests wouldn't be the better for a good
tubbing."

'Gracious, Sir Edward, you must know some grimy people."

'I certainly used to.  Academics mostly.  I think it's the dust they
pick up from living in libraries.  Cobwebs and so on.  Decayed
thought.

Most contaminating."

'Maybe by the end of this trip you'll find yourself wanting to come and
live here."

Edward watched the slow glide of small but imposing buildings through
the masts and rigging of moored ships.  The Hildebrand had lost way:
throughout their conversation he had heard intermittent bells being
rung deep underfoot.

'Dammit, it's too late for that,' he said.  'Ten years ago, maybe ...

But then what would have been the point?  One doesn't up sticks and
move half across the globe just because they dress informally.  After
all, I've spent as much of my life as I could in what my wife used to
call "gardening clothes".  It wasn't enough, of course.  My God, the
things she used to insist on my wearing.  She once tried to make me buy
a bicycling suit for bicycling.  Never heard such nonsense.  Whenever I
wanted to go for a ride I used to have to hide my old grid in a hedge
down the lane and creep out and Icap on it when she wasn't looking.

She was worried about the ncighbours.  What ncighbours?"  An
extraordinary sorrow suddenly weighted his face into lines and Molly
saw his eyes fill with tears.  'Silly old girl.  And if there had been
any they wouldn't have been trying to write The Dream of Geronlius.

What did it matter?"

And before she could divert him with tales of the lightweight,
Jazzie-stringed 'pcd pyJama jackets in which Englishmen in Pari
nowadays received visitors of either sex, and of the white duck
trousers and cotton shirts both groom and host had been wearing at a
wedding reception she had attended, Edward turned abruptly and left her
looking at the chipped stucco fapde of the Customs House.  He went
below and let himself into his cabin.  Compared with the past the
territory of the present, as exemplified by the town beyond the
Hildebrand's rail, was as null as cloud.  But as the sounds of mooring
came in with pinkish evening light through the open portholes he
resolved at least to send a postcard to what little remained of the
solid in his life and wrote a couple to Carice and a friend of the 'am
being wonderfully well looked after' variety.

Reassured by Molly's account of sartorial licence he went up on deck in
his lightest jacket, prepared after all for a gloomy foray J ashore.

But when he reached the outer fringes of the crowd of passengers eager
to rush down the gangway like - as he observed to a bystander - First
Class rather than Steerage sheep, he was taken up by Molly and
Fortcscuc while Kate and Dora came to say goodbye.

'The parting of the ways, Sir Edward."  Kate extended a whitegloved
hand.  'I'm sorry it was so short."

1, on the other hand, feel our acquaintance stretches back to nineteen
hundred and three,'said Dora,'and I'm even sorrier than she is that
you're going on and we're getting off.  There're heaps of people here
who'll be dying to meet you when they know.  The entire English colony
will turn out and put up flags.  You'll have no end of a grand time in
Chapeo Virado and SdoJcronirno.  That is, if you want one,' she
added.

And all the while she was speaking he felt something ebbing out of her
and Kate.  Whatever assumptions he had made on the basis of a shared
table, a shared class, a day on Madeira and many conversations, they
were now seen to fit with a looseness which increased by the minute the
two ladies who stood in mauve hats on the brink of the unknown town
containing their homes.  He had been disconcerted by the confidence and
oddity of their humour as he always was by people who were sure of
themselves.  But the ebbing continued as they made their way fairly
regally off the ship.

He could not help noticing ungallantly how thick their ankles were
above the strap shoes; nor that by the time they reached the quay where
they were both embraced with evident warmth by two very swarthy plump
gentlemen - Kate and Dora had lost all claims to identity.

'Well,' said Molly, who had been watching with equal fascination.

'They weren't going to invite us to their houses, were they?"

'You'd thought they might, too?"

'Of course.  Or at least they might have said it was impossible for
them to be hospitable the first evening of their arrival so how about
tomorrow?  We're going to be here three days.  Even the offer of
somebody reliable to show us ParA.  Most extraordinary.  And those men
who met them."

'Is one to assume those are the husbands?"

'They looked to me like mestizo cabbies."

'You warned me that Pari was informal,' said Edward, 'but you never
said it was customary for taxi drivers to embrace their fares."

'I've much to learn,' Molly told him.  'It's one of the reasons I came
back, after all.  Now, Forty and I have already been here so if you'd
let us be your guides we can give you a first taste of South America.

Or at least help you post your cards."

And so saying she took them and dropped them straight into a red steel
post box welded to a nearby bulkhead, explaining they would be sorted
and stamped aboard the Hildebrand and passed straight to the captain of
a Booth's steamer bound in the opposite direction, that being the
quickest possible way.  'The Brazilian post office will only try to get
them on the same ship when they've sorted them, but they'll probably
miss it."

Almost as soon as his feet touched the quay the listlessness induced by
the vacant, estuarine approach to the town and its impression of being
a settlement on the low coast of nowhere, fell away.  It was indeed
difficult after two weeks at sea to dispel the feeling that he was in a
maritime port, for here the River Pari was thirty miles wide and its
far bank not to be seen.  Once beyond the quay and in Frei Caetano
Branddo gardens, strolling on rubbery legs through tropical vegetation
in concentric gravel rings about the bishop's statue, they heard
through the strange leaves and festooned trees the sounds of alar c
town.  The unmistakable grinding of tram-wheels reached them, the
clanging of bells, the voices of a hundred thousand inhabitants coming
back to life after the heat of the tropical day.

'It's the legs,' said Fortescue.  'That's what makes everything so
unreal.  The ground keeps tilting.  It does that after bumpy flying."

'I hadn't expected to find trams here,' said Edward.

'Then you'll be impressed that they've also got newspapers in both
morning and evening editions."

'The existence of gossip here impresses me less than that of
tramways."

Gently, like convalescents, they made their way towards the Prap da
Republica which Molly claimed was the social hub of the town after
nightfall.  Despite the shops and stalls lit by electricity and naphtha
flares; despite the broad, cobbled avenues with their polished steel
tramlines leading off to the residential suburbs of Sdojeronimo and
Nazareth; despite every evidence of civic bustle, Edward was conscious
of nothing so much as the jungle at his back.  The Governor's Palace,
the Cathedral, the various private mansions they passed were all
tethered by creepers to the surrounding earth.  Unlikely blossoms hung
about their columns while every bush twinkled with fireflies.  In
consequence he was even more struck by the classical grandeur of the
buildings they passed.  It seemed to him evidence of a commendable
sense of priorities that the Brazilians should have put up such an
imposing stone theatre, for example.  Reading the bills with Molly's
assistance he gathered it was not permanently open as it would have
been in London but received periodic visits from touring players,
troupes, foreign opera companies.  Towards Christmas, he saw, a French
ensemble of which he had never heard was to give a series of concerts
which included Berlioz's oratorio Lenfance du Christ.

Edward, having changed some money with the Purser beforehand, insisted
that the others be his guests that night for, as he explained, once
they reached Manaos they would doubtless become busy with their own
affairs to the exclusion of social convenience.

'It's very good of you, sir,' said Fortescue.  'But I should hardly
wish you to dine me under the false impression that I'll be spending my
first fortnight in Manaos too busy with rigging and fitting even to
eat.  There's a limit to what can be done in a day's work on a dirt
airfield on the outskirts of a tropical town.  When we knock off we
knock off."

'The night cometh when no man may work?"

'Absolutely.  Nothing to say he can't have a drink and a square
meal."

They were daunted by the prospect of the English Club, so evidently the
focal point of the colony.  Already through the lighted windows half
shrouded in leaves several of the Hildebrand's passengers could be
recognised.  They chose instead the restaurant of the Grand Hotel, set
on the boulevard beneath a glass-and-ironwork canopy, and from here
they watched the passersby and tried to guess their racial origins.

'I think as colonisers the Portuguese must have been as unlike us as
it's possible to get,' observed Molly.  'They evidently had no taboo on
marrying into the local population and, what's more, neither does
anybody else who comes here."

'Except the British,' said Fortescue.

'Except the British.  Although it looks as if Kate and Dora might C3__
be breaking the mould ... Why do you think it is?  I don't really
understand this thing about racial purity,' she confessed.  'Personally
I find this mixture of Indian and Portuguese and Italian and negro and
everything else makes for a very handsome colouring."  And indeed
Edward was himself aware of remarkable skin tones beneath the mothy
glare of the electroliers, of the light striking dusty bronze glints
from heads of hair by no means a uniform tropical black.

The food was good, the chilled Portuguese rose excellent, the human
stream diverting.  Edward experienced it all like one behind layers of
plate glass.  There was about the street a peculiar lack of that
stridency which he had found so much a feature of Naples and Smyrna.

Pari was lively and in some way unrestrained, yet the soft hot night
blunted the acuteness of sound by absorbing it into the folds of its
curtain.

The description Molly gave, piecemeal and graphic, of the economic
disaster which not so long ago had hit Manaos and Pam with the collapse
of the rubber trade seemed to him likewise to apply not to the people
passing at his elbow but to another population altogether.  Surely
nobody he could see was in any way connected with world-famous Par
rubber.  The beggars, stallholders, matrons with their children, the
tram-drivers, potential drama-lovcrs examining the bills posted on the
columns of the theatre - all seemed to have lives which bore no
relation to the market fluctuations of a commodity.  Molly's
information that after the initial slump the region's fortunes had been
partly retrieved by substitutin
cocoaandBrazlinutsasitschiefexportsremainedfor him information.  He was
Icft with his diner's view of lives immeasurably removed from his own
being lived in a place he had never been able to imagine.

Afterwards he insisted on walking back alone to the ship while Molly
and Fortescue went off to the Bosque.  He had given them dinner: that
was what could be reasonably expected of an older companion.  Beyond
that there was no intercession between his memories and their
prospects.  A great horned beetle cracked into an c1cctrolicr and fell
stunned at his feet.  He turned it onto its front with the ferrule of
his canc.  'Buzz off,' he told it kindly, 'otherwise you 'II get
squidged."  Somewhat to his surprise it did spread its black shards and
drone heavily upwards into the lights.

Vii We seem to have crossed the Atlantic.  At all events I dined
tonight on dry land somewhere or other.  Everybody assures me it's a
place called Pard & certainly the props (newspapers & playbills in
Portuguese, peculiar trams, beetles, lianas, fireflies etc) seem
calculated to give the illusion of being in Brazil.  Rather more
convincingly Pyce assures me Captain Maddrell has never yet made a
navigational error - at least not of the size required to miss a
continent.  I'm forced to conclude that this apparent seaside town by
which we've moored is the very riverside city for which we've been
heading.

I'm English; or I'm European.  I'm used to boundaries.  I love those
maps of English counties with their age-old lines of demarcation
wiggling along the middle of a river or following a line of hills or
skirting the nonexistent property of some long defunct Duchy.  Thus the
counties have acquired distinct characters of their own.  Everyone
knows exactly where Worcestershire ends and Shropshire begins, even
where there are no signs.

Since thisjourney began, however, certainties of that kind have been
more than a little eroded.  First there was Madeira - neither Europe
nor Africa.

Then there was the Equator, a notional fence whose mythic position had
to be celebrated by mummers.  Next I awoke to find the ship far out to
sea but afloat on fresh river-water.  And finally I've dined tonight
surrounded by human tides whose racial distinctions are every bit as
blurred.  In short everything in this part of the world is intent on
flowing into everything else.  Matters haven't been clarified by the
ridiculous disembarking of Kate & Dora.  Who were they?  No-one seems
to know.  They were whisked away by dumpy little dagoes to every sign
of mutual satisfaction.  They were rather splendid & I'd begun to like
their peculiar double act.  The journey home is going to be lonely.

Very early next day Edward walked off the ship into a morning full of
pastels.  Out in the roads and in the port itself the ships' paintwork
and liveries shone against a pale blue wash of sky.  Each rope and mast
stood out with dense clarity in air which sparkled with its saturation
of water molecules.  The ropes mooring the Hildebrand wore metal cones,
their open bells facing the quay, to fend off the large black rats
which could be seen everywhere burrowing into piles of litter or
browsing along the stretches of muddy foreshore strewn with vegetable
waste.

He had not 8gunk so much as a cup of coffee yet, had woken full of
energy which translated itself while he was dressing into a sudden
desire to breakfast ashore.  Having first asked directions he made the
short stroll into Old Par whose narrow streets of coloured colonial
houses were filled with oblique sunlight.  He bought a copy of Ojornal
do Pard out of curiosity and found a cafe where, indicating that he
would have the same as his neighbour, he was served with hot bread and
a cup of thick strong chocolate.

With surprise he noticed the paper's date: it was the first of
December.

As he read slowly but - thanks to Latin and Italian - not wholly
uncomprehendingly through the headlines a feeling suffused him out of
nowhere which made him look away at the pavement with filling eyes.  It
was a sensation he hadn't had for scores of years, from so far back he
couldn't associate it with any particular event but could only identify
it happily, sadly, as that of beingyoung.  The brightness of the
morning sunlight outside, the pungent and unexpected taste of the
chocolate, the crackle of foreign newsprint between his hands, the
ancient street whose houses and passersby he could not have assigned to
any definite corner of the globe - all of them started the ghost of
that excitement at finding oneself alive and free which can suddenly
break like day in the foreign ports of one s youth with promises of
endless enchanting occurrence.

Then the unfairness of so clear a revisitation shook him with pain.

Ghosts of the past self had no business sliding back out of hiding
after decades of absence, cheerfully untouched by the tolls and ravages
of a lived life.  It was a cruel trick which just for a moment had
dangled thejauntiness of twenty-six before the man of sixty-six.  Not
that his life in those days had been so very lighthearted, either:
painfully in love with Lena, more than a little poor, many years from
recognition.  But those are quite usual conditions at twenty-six.

Beneath them lie all sorts of energetic tides and all manner of surges
which suddenly leap out of ambush in a foreign cafe early one
morning.

(Thus a cat will without apparent reason break its purposeful step to
pat the air and frisk among shadows.) The memory of this feeling
persisted as he wandered back towards the river.  An infrequent tram
screeched slowly past trailing an electrical smell of ozone and the
scent of whetted knives from binding brake shoes.  At the glassless
windows (fitted, J!  however, with oilskin blinds which could be
lowered in downpours) were men in brilliant white shirt-sleeves on
their way from their suburbs to banks and offices and godowns, many
holding folded handkerchiefs delicately to their moustaches to keep out
the dust, others lightly fanning themselves with newspapers.  Several
of them disembarked at an imposing bank or bourse from whose pediment a
lopsided spray of flame-coloured blossoms trailed from the cleft in
which it had taken root.  The effect of this brilliant weed was
artlessly to add a seductiveness to the cracked temple of mammon which
dominated the mango-lined boulevard as coquettishly as any Latin beauty
with a carnation over one ear.  It served also to remind that this was
a vegetable town, a town owing its existence and prosperity to sap and
lignum, to nuts and fruits and juices.  Beyond the last tram-stop began
a continent's-width of vegetation stretching clear to the Andes.  Down
at the wharves stirred a forest of dead trees and lianas: the masts and
rigging of the river-steamers, fishing smacks, liners, cargo and tramp
vessels without which Pari would swiftly languish and return to the
jungle.  In every crack in each wall something had taken root.  The -J
very pavements bunched and heaved around the mangoes as if a primaeval
creature were patiently surfacing.  In the gardens he passed were
scarcely any bare patches of soil except here and there where a
gardener in cotton trousers and sunhat had begun his day's labour, the
sweat already glistening on his mahogany torso as he deployed his hoe
without evident haste.

The remembered sense of being young now manifested itself in a
different way.  All of a sudden there came the conviction that he had
not after all done anything yet.  It was not that what he had done was
of little account, not quite the glum modesty which had once made him
say that setting any of his work beside a single Beethoven symphony put
him in the position of a tinker surveying the Forth Bridge.  It was
maybe more akin to whatever had made Beethoven himself on his death-bed
remark how funny it was that it now seemed to him he'd scarcely ever
written a note.  Nobody I could say if Beethoven had meant this
literally or whether confronting eternity he felt his whole output was
an insignificance.

In Edward's case, though, it was literal.  Amid this lethargic, alien
bustle in a tropical city which had no doubt never heard of Gerontius
he could hardly recall the composer he'd once impersonated.

On what, then, had that twenty-six-year-old's energy been expended in
the intervening forty years?  Only the echoes of great troubles and
turmoils and upsets reached him now.  Not a note written but whole
hinterlands of emotion drained, tributary joining tributary until there
was the impression of the sound of I many waters, of a general sliding,
of being a perilous bystander on a quayside watching a great river in
spate, the turgid yellow swirls mere inches beneath his feet.

Yet the very impersonality of a morning in Pard came to his rescue: the
cheerful activity, the strangeness, the passersby stopping at a
vendor's fronded stall to drink glasses of deep red fluid or eat brown
slabs of compressed jam.  What did it matter?  He had done nothing.

There was nothing to do.  No matter how hard one worked there was
nothing to be done.  Rounding a corner he came face to face with
Captain Maddrell and the Purser, resplendent in whites so pressed they
appeared to have been cut from metal sheet.

Caps off, straw hat lifted, good days given.  He?  Back to the ship.

They?  To Booth's offices.  Good-bye, good-bye.  The formality and
decorousness cheered him as he boarded the Hildebrand: they were part
of this morning's weird energy, of people doing things in harsh
sunlight as though they nearly mattered.  He rana, for Steward Pyce.

Z:y

 'I'll be using the Captain's day cabin for a little,' he said.  'I
should like a pitcher of something cold to keep me company.  A soft
drink."

'Guarand,' said the Steward promptly.  'When in Brazil, sir, do as the
Brazilians.  It's wonderfully refreshing.  I'll bring you some at
once.

And no sooner had Edward pulled the Captain's deck-chair to the rail
where it could command a view of the wharf, the Customs House and the
godown roofs with intermittent glimpses of white town and dark green
vegetation than Pyce appeared with a talijug at whose rim chunks of ice
rang clear chimes.  It was full of the reddish-brown liquid he had
earlier seen drunk in the street.  He sipped gingerly at the glass he
was handed and then drank more deeply.

'I say, Steward, that hits the spot.  What marvelous stuff.  What did
you say it was called?"

'Guarand, sir.  The Indians here drink it for dysentery, beg pardon,
Sir Edward.  But as you can see if it's aerated it's really very
refreshing.  Practically everyone here in Amazonia drinks it."

'But what is it?"

'Seeds, sir, of the guarand plant.  The natives dry them in the sun and
roast them a bit and then grind them up into paste.  You just add water
and sugar to the paste."

'Well I'm damned.  And you say it's medicinal?"

'Dr Barnard - he was our last ship's doctor, sir - he found it in the
British Pharma-coopia so it must be all right."

'You seem very knowledgeable, Pyce,'said Edward as he offered his glass
to be refilled.

'I've been making this run some years, sir, haven't I. It's the sort of
thing passengers like to know.  I've even seen the Indians actually
making the paste.  It's quite interesting how clever they are in their
own way, seeing as how they're savages.  They were making models in
this paste, little birds and snakes and alligators and things, then
smoking them over a fire.  That's the way it travels best,
apparently.

You can buy it like that in Manaos.  Many people take some home as a
souvenir but it's very hard to grate once it's been baked.  The Indians
here use a fish's tongue."

'A what?"

'It's the local file, sir.  Comes from the tongue of a fish whose name
I can't recall offhand 'Thank God for that."

'- but we sometimes trawl for it with spinners over the poop.

Largest freshwater fish in the world, sir.  Three hundred pounds, the
biggest we've ever caught.  The galley didn't half curse."

'And the tongue, Pyce?"

'It's like a file, sir, as I say.  They dry it and grate up their
guarand with it.  I don't know any more about guarand than that,'added
the Steward disarmingly.

'It's more than enough,' Edward told him with a smile.  'You may return
in an hour or two with a fresh supply.  If I develop, ah, dysentery as
a result I shall know whom to hold responsible."

From his borrowed deck chair he sipped and watched, sipped and
watched.

The sun climbed swiftly, leaching out of the town beyond the rail a
variety of scents and stenches.  From the open warehouse doors along
the quayside drifted rich aromatics: hot jute bags of peppercorns,
cocoa-beans stewing under corrugated iron, sacks of manioc farinha,
sawn tropical hardwood exhaling resin and the spice of unlit cigars.

The mud on the foreshore I popped and hissed as it dried; the mats of
decaying jetsam, impregnated with the town's ordure, heaved gently as
the rats in their interiors released a myriad trapped perfumes which
drifted almost visibly across the wharves.  In the clear blue funnel of
sky above the town a loose cone of vultures revolved slowly.  Low down
in the ship's side a gangplank led straight into one of the holds and
up it half-naked navvies were disappearing with sacks on their backs
directly beneath where Edward sat, iced guarand in hand.  It
glittered.

The people glittered, the town glowed and stank, the huge fecundity of
its setting overwhelmed him.

From his watch he decided it would now be about four-thirty on a
winter's afternoon back in England.  Perversely he superimposed a
familiar scene onto the dazzling quayside before him.  An English
village - none he could identify - drifted before his eyes.  The sun
wasjust setting, the rest of the sky a deep turquoise against which the
gilded weathercock on the church tower was a blackish stencil.

The air smelt like early frost and spent gunpowder.  For the past hour,
he thought, woodpigeons had been wheeling in across the plough behind
the vicarage to roost in the overgrown thorn hedges into whose high and
tangled thickets they were still vanishing.  In the village store
opposite the church the lamps had long been lit.

Each time its door opened or closed a clear bell pinged a note audible
from the village hall.  A few homing villagers trudged by on bicycles
with lamps leaving the reek of acetylene and carbide.

. But where was the observer, was Edward himself at this very
instant?

Many thousands of miles away with the blazing Decembcr sun almost
directly overhead in a blue sky where vultures swirled lethargically,
sipping an exotic drink and with a river beneath him containing logs
and great armoured fish and flakes of gold.  And for that moment he was
content.  He did not miss the immemorial English scene as he had a few
days earlier while gazing at an empty ocean.  With the glitter of this
moment filling his ears and eyes and nose the far-off country which
rose up in his mind (with its muted colours and spare sounds, with its
church clocks and shop-door bells and its autumnal twilights falling
soft as pigeons over thatched and peg-tiled roofs) engendered in him no
nostalgia at all but only a traitorous happiness at being free of it
all.

In at the distant pair of dock gates turned a couple of imposing white
figures who, as they neared the ship, became the Captain and the
Purser.  As he watched them vanish beneath the scuppers where his line
of sight ended he caught a glimpse of Mr Maddrell's face under the
stubby visor of his cap.  It was wearing the intransigent expression of
someone not used to being crossed by either fortune or design.  The
officers had just been told by their company that there was no way bf
Tplacing Dr Ashe without delaying the Hildebrand indefinitely.  There
was no other English doctor in port suitable for the post.  Dr Ashe
would have to serve at least until the ship called back at Pari.  It
was only a matter of two or three weeks and by that time a feasible
substitute would surely have been found.

'Two or three weeks,' the Captain had been saying as they walked along
the quay, both men's eyes busy with details of the Hildebrand's
moorings, gangway awnings and paintwork.  'We've hardly been gone that
time and the fellow's already done incalculable damage.  Imagine what
he might get up to on this next leg, Gatesy.  Well, if anything else
happens I'll have him in irons.  He can hold his surgery in the
forepeak."

'He'd certainly be the soberer."

The Captain marched a few steps.  'Aha, that's the size of it, is it?

I didn't know.  I think, Gatesy, we've both been at sea long enough not
to remember a good few men who needed a bottle to hand and I must say
some of 'em seemed none the worse for it.  I recall a First Officer who
went on a bender once a month, regular as clockwork.

Useless for twenty-four hours.  But by God he was a fine seaman the
rest of the time.  Couldn't get through a day without a bottle of rum
inside him but you'd never have known it."

'What became of him?"

'Oh, he went down somewhere.  Titanic?  Empress of Ireland?  One of
those, I think.  I hope he had a skinful when he went."

'I've a feeling our own doctor isn't in that category."

The too.  Funny, isn't it?  You can tell.  Three sheets in the wind.

Chin up, Gatesy, we've had worse aboard than a Bones who's off his
rocker."

'All passengers, Mr Maddrell.  They were all passengers."

On a sweltering afternoon the Hildebrand slipped her moorings, saluted
town and inhabitants with its customary C and steamed away.  Edward, a
pitcher ofguarand half empty by his side, watched Pari quickly turn
back into a waterfront, then become a mere coastal settlement.  But
from far across the opening yellow-green expanse of water the loose
cone of vultures continued to be visible as it turned and turned its
black particles many thousands of feet up into the blue air above the
invisible town.

From then on the ship remained in sight of a shore which appeared now
at hand, now at several miles' distance, sometimes on the left when
Edward glanced up and sometimes on the right.  He lost track of the
days and all sense of their navigational progress.  He spent some time
on the bridge where he often found a Brazilian counterpart to Mr
Mushet, for all vessels of any draught had to take a pilot on board for
certain infamous stretches since the Amazon was constantly shifting its
shoals and sandbanks, and channels long in use might silt up within a
matter of days.  But most of the time he spent in the Captain's
deck-chair from where he watched the slow drift astern of a practically
unbroken expanse of rain forest.

Shortly before entering the Amazon proper they reached the Narrows, a
stretch of a hundred and thirty miles of islands and islets, each with
its tuft of virgin forest, which in places reduced the navigable
channel to a rapid current barely two hundred yards wide.  The river
was now yellow-brown, the islands green.  Each bend the ship rounded
disclosed a new scene whose components were generally the same but
whose details struck him afresh.  There were trees such as he had never
imagined.  It was one thing to talk of venerable old oaks in England,
but the venerable old trees in Amazonas would have made an English oak
look like a toadstool.

In places the forest canopy stood well over two hundred feet high and
several species of tree had roots like flying buttresses: great
triangular slabs of wood which from far enough away took on an
architectural gracefulness.  From the branches of these giants hung
allmanner of lianas and creepers like tethers to prevent the tree's
growing any further into the sky.  Everywhere the sun beat in bright
dapples: on the feather fronds of the assai palm, on the plumes of the
miriti, on a myriad stalks and sprays.  The light fell in sheets,
drenching the burnished river and striking sudden red gleams of
sandstone as if the recent erosion by floods were revealing
still-molten magma welling up from the planet's core.

Elsewhere in the creeks and igarapis which led off namelessly into the
jungle and in the glades which opened beneath the canopy the darkness
was startling in its density.

But if this forest stood like some illimitable sculpture in wood,
intermittently lit and polished, there was much that was in motion.

Across the seething water from one islet to another flew macaws and
parrots, their apparent absence of neck making them bluntheaded as
moths or owls.  Kingfishers skimmed like bolts of electricity from a
rotten trunk on an island to a flowering shrub on another shore.  The
Hildebrand's passing disturbed ducks and egrets, the dull mechanical
sound of her engines was given back by the walls of vegetation.  And
off it all blew the smell of the forest's glands: the oils and gums,
the orchids and fungi, wild peppers and spices and gaseous decay.  If
the sight was both entrancing and sobering (since it reminded all
aboard of their insignificance in the middle of such wild immensities)
the smell was chilling in its primaeval purity.  It told of aeons, of
geological eras, of incomprehensible stretches of time.  It was
unmistakably the smell of the planet before man ever set foot on it,
while dinosaurs still browsed and coal was being laid down.  It, too,
announced that nineteen twenty-three was nothing, the fraction of a
second, a ring in a treetrunk.  It breathed into each passenger the
seductive perfume of futility.  And as often in such cases a few
responded by experiencing the piercing pleasure of melancholy, being
those curious souls who are reassured by reminders of their own
annihilation.  Among them was Edward, who for many hours would sit
watching the details stream past him until they merged into a
continent, an unknown and unknowable land across whose surface would
flit images from his own past, the incidents of a life, emotions
wearing mortals' faces.  It became a dream: the watcher in the
deck-chair, the vegetation, the memories which slid about between.

Only the sun seemed real, and then only as the source of the bright
daze in which alone such a pageant might take place.

At times a detail would briefly emerge from the dream like a snag,
unravelling a thread of his attention: a scent, an alligator on a
sandbar, the cry of a bird.  Once or twice he even resumed jotting
quavers and crotchets on the pad he held, for although if anyone had
asked him he would have said music was dead (viewing a landscape
inimical to art and innocent of mankind's cultural tomfooleries)
something came insistently to him in dribs and drabs which out of a
lifetime's habit he could only notate.  The unknown figure on its tower
proceeded with its wordless song but the context was still unclear.  A
solitary scena, maybe, or - he looked up with a start - part of a
Mass?

A Mass of Life suggested itself at the very moment he crossly told
himself that Delius had already thought of that.  But a secular
oratorio or Mass might be the answer.  It would offer opportunities for
many of the effects with which he had first made his mark: dazzling
passages for full orchestra, grand choral blazes, a cappella numbers
with the sketchiest accompaniment, quiet meditations for a soloist with
maybe a single gracile obbligato instrument (oboe?  clarinet?) winding
its figurations in the manner of Bach but in the mode of Elgar ... He
laid aside his pad and propelling-pencil.  No, this was quite
definitely not going to be the third part of the trilogy.  That project
was dead.  The Apostles and The Kingdom hadn't worked in terms of
popularity, he could now admit it.  They contained much of his own
favourite music but they lacked that inner dramatic compulsion which
made Gerontius so electrifying.  What was that phrase Beethoven had
used about his Op.  22 piano sonata?  Hat sich gewaschen.  How he
recognised that tone of proud assurance, of absolute knowledge that
what he had just finished worked and was first-rate.  It seemed a long
time since he himself had felt the same certainty, an elation which
made one almost ribald, content to describe one's new work with a piece
of offhanded or heavy humour like Brahms referring to the massive
second movement of his B flat piano concerto as 'a little wisp of a
scherzo'.  Well, Gerontius harte sich gewaschen, the oratorios hadn't:
they'd all too obviously been texts set to music.  So forget about
judgements and Judases; he didn't believe in the one and the human
drama of the other was too contrived.  Archbishop Whately's version was
a nice idea but it was literary and brought with it a mustiness of
ancient heresy which no longer mattered.

This figure on the tower whom he still couldn't see with any clarity it
had possibilities.  It had sprung from his mind and not from some book
and came accompanied by a fragment of music which, for all it was
aching and bleak, had a distinct freshness.

Who was it?  Zoroaster?  Irritating that Richard Strauss had done him
even if for orchestra alone.  Whoever this was had renounced the world
- or had been deserted by it - but what was left was positively no
idyll.  This was no Worcestershire lad who preferred dreaming among the
bulrushes; this was somebody with no memories in the midst of a naked
reality ... He gave up.  Sooner or later the picture would become
clearer or simply fade away as so often before.

During the first day or so of the voyage upriver - which is to say from
the Narrows to the tiny settlement of Monte Alegre - the majority of
the Hildebrands passengers spent much time at the rail simply watching
the panorama as it passed.  Whether at dawn with the ghostly layers of
mist arising with water-birds or at noon with its steep heat or at
nightfall with its fireflies and monkey-cries, the Amazon seemed to
fulfill most people's dreams of the exotic and untamed.  Then gradually
they began to tire of what they saw as the repetitive scenery, the
unbroken walls of jungle, the impression that the ship was eternally
rounding the same bend to disclose two islands on the right no bigger
than tennis-courts with a large grey heron on each.  Surely they had
seen them only an hour ago, as well as that group of huts on the bank
standing on spindly legs with motionless figures watching apathetically
as the ship went by?

'Caboclos,' Steward Pyce informed anyone who asked.  'Halfbreed rubber
gatherers.  Half-Indian, half-Portuguese.  A miserable lot."  He was a
fund of facts.

Bit by bit people drifted away from the rail back to their cards,
drinking, backgammon, knitting.  (Several women were implacably
knitting layettes for babies back home as they had recently knitted
socks for the Boys at the Front.  These would have the distinction of
having been made south of the Equator and up the Amazon.  By such
things were local reputations enhanced.) I After the Narrows, which
effectively separated the great Island of MaraJ6 from the main body of
Brazil, the Hildebrand turned west into the main stream of the Amazon
proper.  And now the banks on either side retreated as if some
threshold had been crossed.  The ship was more generally in midstream
than not and often well over half a mile of tawny water flowed between
it and the nearer bank.

There were fewer of the caboclos' huts, too, and the line of jungle
seemed darker and still more unbroken.  Once over this threshold Edward
was astonished by the one thing he had never expected to be impressive:
the sky.  As the banks diverged everything broadened and fell away
leaving enormous spaces overhead.  This sky would have struck any
sensitive traveller by its vastness and the majesty of its
cloudscapes.

It was quite unlike the celebrated skies of East Anglia or of the Dutch
landscape masters.  Those had a quality of luminous emptiness even when
filled with clouds and they lacked completely the energy of the Amazon
skies.  To Edward the clouds over Holland or Suffolk always gave the
impression of having drifted in from elsewhere and, provided he watched
for long enough, would eventually drift out again unchanged as beyond
the edges of an invisible picture frame.

But here it was clear to him that the appalling forest they had entered
was exhaling the sky even as it slept.  A million square miles of this
organism's lungs were sending up pillowy tons of moisture, convections
of breath, megawatts of energy.  Because the movement of these
cloud-masses was so noticeable they gave the sky an extraordinary
quality of height which the gentler, more static skies of northern
Europe lacked even when flecked with wisps of uttermost cirrus.  Here,
prodigies of cauliflowers, sacks and cities boiled up and up, turning
in upon themselves with wild shifts of colour and texture, dark
bruisings, frosty streaks, reaching far overhead to where, at noon and
in the late afternoons especially, massive thunderstorms would take
place at altitudes so high that not a whisper of sound reached the ears
nor drop of rain struck the Hildebrands decks.  From cloud-mass to
cloud-mass the vivid lightnings crazed, sometimes running from a single
point like trickles of liquid down each side of the sky.  People held
their breath.  Nothing.  The silence unnerved them: it was not
natural.

The cathartic order of steamy heat relieved by a violent thunderstorm
was withheld.  The lightning whirled and abbed in silence, i the steamy
heat persisted.

At dusk the colours were stupendous and again the sensitive among the
passengers had no doubt that this was how the primaeval skies of the
planet would have been.  An enormous orange sun, swelling as it fell to
the surface of the forest, would set ahead of the ship and flare the
river into molten substances across which birds skimmed.  Hoatzins,
with their wispy crests and peculiar breastbones more like pterodactyls
than birds, flapped in silence away from the river heading towards
their private lost worlds.  The extreme tranquillity seemed even to
mute the sound of Chief Stanford's engines and the steady rush of water
became louder.  The dawns, too, were calculated to make any observer
think of pre-history although not many were up in time to notice since
most had found sleep difficult on account of the heat and still lay
like logs with pads across their foreheads soaked in longevaporated
cologne.

VIII In Amazonas at any rate it's easy to believe Time's ever-rolling
stream flows backwards.  We're being borne into pre-history.  It helps
one's memory - not Just for the details but the atmosphere
(sounds/smells/ J tastes) - of one's own past.

The real awfulness of becoming an 'official' & public figure is that by
a long series of lies, biographical evasions, over-simple explanations
for people who don't understand artists - one gradually falsifies one's
own life.  I look at these stupendous clouds now in a way which reminds
me how little I've properly observed the sky for years despite my
insistence to everyone (& myself) on my 'outdoor' habits.  This
afternoon I watched a bronze and vermilion city paved with pearl pass
across the'Hildebrand"s bows for the best part of half an hour.  just
like a child I walked its dissolving streets, entered alleys as they
formed, climbed a hillock which overlooked a palace until suddenly the
palace began overlooking the hillock.  I subsided with bridges and was
wafted to fraying pinnacles.  I burst painlessly through mushy
ramparts.  And all the time there was that sound - why not call it
sound?  - a sense of inaudible music which accompanies such things & is
heard as though beneath the open windows of a veiled mansion.  It always
was like that except once the music would make itself properly heard.

Now it reminds me sadly of how I felt & so for a moment I forget I'm
supposed to be an old master & become an apprentice once more, all ears
& full of longing.

How at any age can one make any sort of decent terms with this
longing?

At fifteen one did it by thinking those marvelous tunes would - as soon
as the craft had been'lerned'- fit together into sthg.  which had never
before been done.  One carried them about like a collection of diamonds
sewn into a traveller's belt for use when the exact needy moment
arrived.  But after enough years next to the skin they began to feel
like uncomfortable liabilities, likely to be losing their value through
some vagary of the marketplace.  (The longing, however, persisted
undulled.) As for the diamonds ... That damned Trio of P&C no.  i when
the King asked me how I'd dreamed up such a'corker of a tune' (HM's
phrase) - I told him quite truthfully I'd been carrying it around for
twenty years, which puts it at i 88oish.  I can't remember its genesis,
of course - maybe it was sawing wood or perh.  the rhythm of an
exultant tramp up the Sugar Loaf.  Or maybe it was what the clouds were
moving to one afternoon as I lay flat on my back in a field.  But when
I was actually orchestrating the march in i go i I remember writing to
Nim saying sthg.  like'Gosh, man, what a tune I've got in my head' as
if it had just dropped on me that afternoon.  But of course it hadn't
an excellent example of an implied fib.  It was simply time to 'go
public' with an old diamond so I was just being a good salesman to give
Novello's & myself confidence.

Well, Mo, those were go_d days for music-making.  To read the asses now
you'd think I'd spent the time walking around like Beethoven in those
Lyser sketches, hands behind back, frock coat billowing, furrowed brow
raised 4square to heaven, trying to work out a way of putting England
on the musical map of Europe.  Too silly.  England.  I didn't care a
hoot about

'England'- who at that age wants to bother himself with his own
nation?

there was only this marvelous landscape into which I'd been born which
exuded music.  Schumann, Dvofik, Tschaik they'd all of them looked
around at their own landscapes & then written themselves.  They hadn't
the least interest in writing 'German' or 'Bohemian' or 'Russian'
music.

As Schumann himself said: 'Being a man, and humane, is much more than
being a German and Germanic."  I read and played them all - especially
Schumann.  No mistaking what they were about.

Like many of the others Edward himself found the heat at night made it
hard to sleep.  When he wrote an entry in his journal his forearm stuck
to the page.  He was pleasantly surprised by the absence of mosquitoes
since he had heard the adage repeated as a litany by even the least
experienced travellers aboard: 'Behind very leaf an insect; in every
flower at least one ant."  He lay on his bunk with the light off.  A
muted glow penetrated the curtains from the shelter deck outside.

Footsteps and voices passed now and then.  At a great distance the band
was intermittently audible until midnight.  The faint sounds seemed to
reach him from across millennia, now as if he were overhearing the last
revels in Babylon, now as if they were fragments of something more
mysterious.  He remembered the Piper at the Gates of Dawn in The Wind
in the Willows, whole passages of which he knew practically by heart.

How had the Rat put it?  'Dance-music - the lilting sort that runs on
without a stop - but with words in it, too - it passes into words and
out of them again - I catch them at intervals - then it is dancemusic
once more, and then nothin but the reeds' soft thin whispering."

He roused himself enough to pad into the bathroom, drink copious
draughts of water and swallow a dose from his blue bottle.

Bit by bit the potion which quietened horses lulled him and sent him
into a sleep deep enough for a sudden commotion at three in the morning
to wake him to a drifting, semi-conscious state which precluded
curiosity.  Far away a bell was clanging, the engines' massive purr
changed to a shudder.  Steel creaked.  Footsteps ran down carpets
outside and drummed on naked iron overhead.

Maybe there were shouts, too, but Edward was waiting for the purring to
begin again and consciousness ebbed away.

Going to breakfast the next morning he met the Purser and it was not
until the man greeted him and trusted he hadn't been disturbed by the
noise during the night that he dimly remembered having been woken.

'The fact is, Sir Edward, there was a tragedy last night."  The Purser
had a discoloured look about him and his voice was low as if he were
entrusting a true version of events to a senior man who would know
better than to pass it on tojuniors.  'Dr Ashe has gone."

'How do you mean, gone?"

'I know it's incredible but he simply jumped overboard and vanished.

Quite by chance he was seen by two of the people you share your table
with - Miss Air and Mr Fortescue.  I believe you know them both?"

'Certainly I do.  I'd think they, if anyone aboard, would make
admirable witnesses.  What happened?"

'Just that,' said the Purser, who kept glancing aside at the floor as
if fresh consequences were onlyjust striking him.  'They were up on
deck, looking at the stars and so on - you know.  They noticed Dr Ashe
come past but assume he didn't see them since they were in the shadow
of some davits.  But they saw his face in the deck-lights and swear he
didn't took crazed or drunk in any way.  He moved off down the deck
about twenty feet away, climbed over the rail and simply dropped into
the river.  They were so astonished it took them a few seconds to
react.  Of course we stopped and made a thorough search with every
light we could muster but the wretched fellow was gone."

'Good God.  How do you reckon his chances?"

'Slim, frankly.  We were a good couple of cables - that is, about
three-quarters of a mile from the nearest bank and the current was
treacherous enough to deter the Captain from prolonging the search.  I
expect you've gathered, sir, that Captain Maddrell's not a man who
deters easily but when it comes to the safety of his ship and the
passengers, well."

The Purser left it there but the unspoken verdict was clear.

Nobody walked deliberately overboard in the middle of the night, sure
of being unobserved, without wishing to do away with himself.  The
doctor would not have surfaced.  Whatever the alligators or piranhas
had left might fetch up on a sandbar or bump against the rotting stilts
of a caboclo's hut, but the mortal Dr Ashe had undoubtedly ceased.

Molly and Fortescue were not at breakfast.  He assumed they were in
their cabins, too shaken by what they had witnessed to feel like
eating.  Indeed as he took his seat he found his own appetite had
vanished and drank a cup of coffee in a sort of solemnity while
thinking back on his meeting with the unfortunate doctor.  The more he
thought about it the more uneasy he became.  There had been something
indelicate about that conversation and their schoolboyish pact.

Underneath the doctor's manner, he now saw, had run a current of
murkiness, destructive and desperate.  Yes, and he himself had ...

During these reflections he became aware the ship had stopped and
through a nearby window he could see an olive-skinned man in a uniform
climb over the rail.  Not a pilot, he thought, and shortly afterwards
Molly and Fortescue appeared with the Captain and all four moved out
of sight.  But the ship remained hove-to for barely ten minutes and as
she got under way once more he caught a glimpse of the official's
cutter heading back towards a settlement on the bank trailing a white
plume of smoke above its curling wake.

The news travelled quickly around the ship, gathering lurid details as
it went.  The orderly with the red mustache was so distraught he had to
be sedated in his quarters.  A hasty search was made of the passengers
for a qualified doctor and two retired family practitioners were
unearthed who, together with a nurse on the Hildebrand's crew and Molly
Air herself, would probably prove equal to most medical emergencies.

There was also a vet who had practised in Africa.

The incident had clearly enraged the Captain.  He stayed away from his
table and was only occasionally seen, dark-faced, about the ship.  That
morning he appeared in his own day cabin after knocking.

'I'm sorry to disturb you, Sir Edward."

'My dear fellow, this I's your cabin."

'I gather the Purser told you about last night's little episode?"

'He did, yes.  I can only say I'm extremely sorry.  A tragic
business."

'It's that all right, but I really came to apologise to you.  Puts the
Company in the devil of a position.  However one sympathises with the
wretched - with the poor man, his act has caused endless ...

Do I make myself clear?  I suppose not."  And Captain Maddrell went to
glare at the river.

'Did he leave any indication?  A note?"

'Not a thing.  No, it's obvious he had deep-rooted problems about whose
nature I should frankly not care to speculate.  The point is he should
never have been taken on: the man was quite unstable.  Turns out he was
rude and aggressive towards some of our passengers.  His own patients,'
the Captain thumped the rail.

'That's what I can't forgive ... I trust he was never rude to you, Sir
Edward?"

'I can't say I ever had reason to consult him as a patient,' said
Edward guardedly.  'I've been as right as a trivet so far.  But I did
chat to him on a couple of occasions and I must admit he did strike me
as oddish.  For a doctor he certainly had an unconventional manner.  I
seem to have reached the age, though, when I sometimes find
unconventional people more tolerable than the right-thinking herd."

'Very liberal of you sir, I'm sure,' said the Captain bitterly.

'However, I fear that as far as the Company and its doctors are
concerned we set the highest possible value on propriety.  I'm sorry
the poor devil was off his chump but that's no excuse for gross
dereliction of professional standards and nothing whatever can excuse
the sheer cowardice of such an act.  Taking one's own life ... The
Captain inspected the glittering waters with honest incredulity before
simply shaking his head once abruptly like a dog trying to dislodge
something in its ear and leaving.

Edward was obscurely surprised by the Captain's reaction which struck
him as being at odds with his expressions of concern a week or so
previously over the fate of the migrant workers he was taking to
Brazil.  Of course there was every difference between the evils which
beset humanity and the private problems of a man who was thought to
have let himself down, but ... Strangely it was Fortescue who seemed
the most upset, who with that last glimpse had read in the doctor's
face an untroubled casualness.  'Like somebody boarding a bus,' was all
he would say, but he said it repeatedly.  'Like somebody boarding a
bus."

For the rest of that week much of the ship's gossip had to do with Dr
Ashes presumed suicide and sensational reasons were promoted by bored
topers claiming inside information.  Several passengers, all of them
women, admitted to having had the most extraordinary consultations with
him and several outrageous bons mots circulated as authentic
Asheisms.

Young men with polished hair would gleefully pick up the carving knife
and fork to tackle the cold buffet (which was now set out at luncheon
in place of the table d'hete) with a curt 'What d'you want cut off?"

to their lady friends, evoking peals of laughter.  The roaring cad who
had kept bouncing into Molly, leaving a little Guerlain on the air,
giggled a lot with his friends and snatches of their conversation could
from time to time be heard rising like acrid thistledown above the hum
of the restaurant.  'Ah, Lady Bugloss.  Those little lumps around your
neck.  What?  Going to have to remove 'em."  'Oh no, Doctor, they're my
pearls.  Over my dead body."  Happy to oblige, m'Lady.

What?"  The Captain, chancing to be present, ground his teeth.

 But although Dr Ashes dramatic passing became itself swept away since
once Manaos was reached there were plenty of new things to gossip about
- it did leave behind a legend which endured.  On four subsequent
trips, the last being in 1929, passengers reported seeing a man step
overboard in the middle of the night.  It was always at the same spot
in the river and on each occasion the ship stopped and searched without
finding anything.

The man was always identically described, wearing the same clothes and
with the same cadaverous face.  The fifth and final sighting occurred
in the early Thirties aboard the Hilag, the Hildebrand's new sister
ship (the original Hilary having been sunk in I917).

Such phenomena lay in the future, however.  The incident upset Edward
for reasons he could not have confided to the Captain.  The memory of
having colluded with the Doctor was something he preferred not to dwell
on and his guilt extended to wondering anxiously whether before he
vanished the man might not mischievously have told Steward Pyce of
their little plot.  Did Pyce know?  It was a question which bothered
him in a minor way until the end of the voyage.

And why had he not interceded on the dead man's behalf when Maddrell
had charged him with cowardice?  Maybe there was such a thing as
cowardice in war; but if a man were at war with himself and lost, why
might that despairing act not be seen as both dignified and brave?

No-one could ever know what went on in another man's mind, nor could
they presume to judge another's mental suffering.  It had always struck
him as the final horror that attempted suicide was a criminal offence
and if the person trying to do away with himself failed and was
physically saved he was likely to face prosecution and even
imprisonment, a prospect which seemed cold-bloodedly designed merely to
ensure that any further attempt would be more efficiently executed.

He had no difficulty in remembering the passages in his own life when
he had seriously thought about killing himself.  The nearest he had
come to it had not, strangely, been after the greater disillusionment
set in during the lowest points of the war or after Alice's death.  It
had been at the turn of the century, following the infamous fiasco of
the Birmingham premire of Gerontius when the fate of his art seemed
perfectly reflected in the accounts he drew up for Jaeger which showed
a net loss Of E2 I in getting Cockaigne IL performed by the
Philharmonic Society who had commissioned it.

He had also reckoned that, to date, Enigma had earned him E2.  9. i
id.

There was no future for a musician in England.  The pigs weren't
interested in proper music and that was that ... He entered a pact with
himself that if he failed to make a go of some other kind of
profession, then rather than making an abject return to teaching he
would kill himself despite the appalling stigma for his family.

Composition was so obviously a dead end in England he would have done
with it and go into -trade.  Without telling anybody he wrote to a coal
company in Malvern and on one of his visits to London walked through
the very city streets he had just set so splendidly to music to knock
on the door of a brokerage firm whose name he had come across.

Staring now at a pao darco tree on the distant bank whose brilliant
yellow flowers provided a dab of colour amid the sombre green he could
not even manage an ironic smile at the recollection.

He had presented himself as Edgar Wardle, the sleight effacement of his
own name having given him a moment's grim pleasure in the train, but it
was immediately clear that whatever name he had gone under he would not
have been employed.  They had been polite, even respectful, but firm.

What it boiled down to was that at forty-four he was far too old to be
taken on in any capacity since he came without evidence of employment
in other brokerage houses.

At that age a gentleman would long since have aspired to a seat in the
Boardroom ... On the instant Edgar Wardle vanished and in his stead a
penurious composer went out down the front steps.  He lacked even the
energy to look up at the heavy ironwork arms holding between them a
white glass globe which at night no doubt sent a gaseous beacon of
brokerage hope across the tangling sea of City traffic.

Perhaps the most painful of Alice's relics were her diaries which since
her death he had opened once or twice at random and then miserably
closed after reading a line or two.  An entry he had found dated from
this time in i go i. She had confided to the page an awful anxiety that
he would actually carry out what were obviously almost daily threats.

That immediate crisis had eventually passed.

Less than three years later he was Sir Edward Elgar - still rat-poor,
but even at the time he must have recognised that the chances would
have been slender indeed of his having become Sir Edgar Wardle,
plutocrat, in the same short span.

 ix If at some future date I slid.  chance to re-read this balderdash
& wonder why it looks as though I have wept on it the answer is
SWEAT.

Pyce knowingly informs me that it's wonderfully cool at present aboard
this ship on account of the effects of bowling along at
however-many-miles-anhour-it-is over water.  I slid.  just wait until
we tie up in Manaos, he says with ill-concealed glee.  He still brings
me samples daily so I can't grumble.  Despite its colour the river
appears remarkably clean under the microscope.  Virtually no bacteria,
only a certain amount of suspended vegetable matter.  This morning I
spilled the last of my eosin, damn & blast.  I suppose there might be a
supply in Manaos; I'll have to make up to a scientist.  I slid.  have
bought a trunkload of glass beads/trinkets/

test-tubes.

On a flat morning (yesterday) I found in the library & read Richard
Jefferies' novel 'After London'.  Good idea - viz, after some
unspecified disaster London's wiped out, most of southern England's
beneath a gigantic lake, jungle & jungle law are everywhere taking over
& making a green & unpleasant land.  Hard to imagine what cd.  possibly
bring about a disaster of such magnitude - socially, that is; after.the
recent war we none of us need to be convinced about man's technical
destructive powers ... (How the images still haunt one: that Belgian
town reduced to acres of rubble-heaps neatly gridded with cobbled
streets which a ragged man is sweeping.) But here I keep looking up at
that fecundity, the blind burgeon of it all & am chilled.  Maybe this
is a vision of where we're heading, steadily at Full Steam Ahead into a
new Dark Age.  I think it is my own country on this boat; England on
its long voyage backwards to oblivion.  What was that unguarded phrase
I used to describe the A minor Symphany?  'Massive hope in the
future'?

H'm.  That's a goner at any rate.  The young ladies aboard twitter, the
young men prance (some of 'em).  They foxtrot & Charleston & tango to
all hours without a care in the world.  My contemporaries drink &
snooze & lay down all the laws they never obeyed themselves.  Almost
noone seems overwhelmed by what we're sailing into.  An ex-Indian Army
man (Cuthbertson?) fetched up at the rail beside me this afternoon,
looked long & blinkingly through b-&-s fumes at the distant prospect &
said with memorable aplomb: 'Gad sir, can't see the trees for the
wood,' but then went & ruined what was probably the first witticism of
a lifetime by adding, 'Should be the other way around, that."

Finally I suppose there's good reason for despair.  The 'massive hope
in the future'did after all refer as much to my own career as to
anything more general since the concerns of Humanity at large seemed
less pressing (I bet that never crossed Walford Davies' mind, though- not
that it was intended to).  But now after the best part of a generation
has been reduced to bonemeal what do we see all around but me=le
mediocrity.  Nobody any longer has the least Idea of the solid, the
noble, the hard-won.

Everything must be easy, palatable, undemanding & preferably dusted
over with jiggy littlejazz-noises.  Where are men's aspirations now?

Why are they all so scared of the least difficulty?  That dreary
sniveller Beecham, not content fourteen years ago with having cut the
Symphany to I hr (when he cd.

be induced to play the thing at all) .g cuts the malign influence out
of Symphany 11, apparently.  Someone must have held a gun to his fat
head to make him include the thing in one of his progs.  A little too
raw for poor BowdlerBeecham, I suppose.  Oh Edward what a stupid
doltish ass you've been to waste your life on the idea that art - in
its small way - can make the least difference to things.  The greater
the art the less it has to say to the mediocre & there's no getting
around it.  The human race will just go on stumbling blindly across an
endless battlefield 'cos it don't really mind physical pain &
destruction: it's Thinking & being moved & having to change it can't
bear.  So it deals with art by guzzling down the sugar & imagining any
bitter lumps are the artist's culinary oversights, evidence of Homer
nodding in his chefs hat.  Of course the public's greatest revenge is
not to ignore a work of art, nor even to amend it like Beecham but to
turn it into a classic.  Those great works conceived on the edge of
darkness are most easily tamed by being made classics because almost by
definition classics don't disturb.  You can no longer -see classics
(the 'Mona Lisa') or hear them (Beethoven's 5th & 9th).  What was It
that professor said recently of 'Jude the Obscure'?  'Some of us will
feel he rather overdoes the gloom."  Perfect.  An astonishing & painful
work of the imagination reduced by some rancid little twerp to an
offence against good taste by not being cheerful enough.  That's
England all over & above all when dealing with its own artists.  Good
taste, fair play & the amateurish reign supreme.

Anything really great or awkward or uncongenial is simply beyond the
British capacity to cope.  Imagine'King Lear' being published today the
field-day of the Mediocracy: 'Repulsively violent', 'Dreadfully
depressing', 'llnrelieved gloom', 'Quite absurd'.

Not that the great British Public haven't been set by the ears of late,
what with some of the modern noises being chucked at it.  I can
certainly remember the furore of Schoenberg's 'Five Orchestral Pieces'
when they got their first perf.  at the Proms in 1912. It was the
British equivalent of the Paris premire of Stravinsky's 'Rite of
Spring' the following year.  I never heard it myself, being otherwise
occupied, but it was clear that neither players nor audience knew what
had hit them.  Ernest Newman wrote sthg.  about the work being so
destitute of meaning the audience laughed audibly all through the
performance & hissed vigorously at the end, while 'The Times' said it
was like a poem Tibetan which made me laugh drains.  Since then one
has heard a good deal more of Herr Schoenberg & while I still don't
know any of his music & have not much desire to I do think he writes
sympathetically in his own defence.  He's caustic & intransigent & I'm
quite old enough to like that in an artist, especially when that artist
says congenial & sensible things such as he wishes he were as popular
as Tschaikovsky only rather better & that people ought to forget
everything they've heard about his music & just listen to it.  I
recognise that.  I read somewhere that he claims every note he writes
conforms to the logic of the heart & I like that too.  No accidents,
just accidentals.  Well, while his 'Orchestral Pieces' were being done
for the first time so were the Music Makers up in B'ham and they were
from the heart, too.

Later How wonderfully bad-tempered I've become!  Re-reading the above I
come across apoplectic phrases like 'dreary sniveller' & 'Ineffable
mediocrity'.  But how else other than in private rant can one sound off
about anything as blithely unstoppable as a new Age?  Things really
have changed from top to bottom, even one's oldest friends are not
immune to rot setting in.  Those awful people Frank Schuster seems to
have around him nowadays - his new 'set'- oh, it's not like it was in
the dear old days at Bray.  Even The Hut isn't the same - full of
Bright Young Things or whatever they call themselves, all of them
Things, some of them young & none of 'em bright.  Frank keeps on
introducing a series of more or less dubious youths as his 'nephews' he
must be an uncle 8o times over am I a fool?  Does he really think I
don't know & if so can he imagine I care ajot?  I suspect it was that
which poor Alice didn't like about him, he was too luxurious & exotic
for her, Chosen Race & wealthy & - in that single respect - not comme
il faut.  But he was - is - the gentlest, kindest of men, has always
championed me & was as instrumental as anyone in getting me into
'Society' when I needed someone in influential circles to pay some
attention or I would have gone off & shot myself in despair.

But even 'Society' seems all to have changed now.  The Court of those
days is no more, all the dear King's racy bohemians & Jews & wits, all
those Keppels & Sassoons - proper Europeans with a love of the arts &
good gossip & decent horseflesh gone.  And to think I used to complain
of their philistinism!  Now look at it - the grey, lifeless mediocrity
of the Windsors - purged of the last thing vibrant or funny.  The House
of Windsor - how that says it all.  With a stroke of the pen
Saxe-Coburg is transformed for reasons of patriotic embarrassment into
Windsor.  Why not Reading?  Why not The House of Molesey?  (Why not
Philistia-onThames?) At any rate Europe has given way to the Home
Counties and it shows.  Dull, bourgeois propriety & they say the Prince
of Wales's brother's virtually a cretin.  The rumour now is the King
wants to do away with the Mastership - imagine, that ancient post of
Master of the King's Musick abolished overnight.  I'd take the wretched
thing if only to keep it alive though God knows it's at its last gasp
under the dead hand of Parratt.  An organist.  For pity's sake.  But
doing away with the post it's very revealing about the new Britain &
its sense of priorities.  I don't think.

At present we're steaming placidly under an inverted bowl of seething
meteorology.  I've never seen cloudscapes like these (Molly says
triumphantly that this is what she came for & now will I believe her?

and Fortescue eyes them with the proper awe of somebody who's shortly
going to be flying through them).  It's a most extraordinary effect
they create-ah origine - & one sees fairly commonplace things as for
the first time, or at least shorn of their associations.  There was a
breathtaking rainbow after luncheon: an unbroken arch planted in the
jungle & filling much of the sky.  I waited for the associations to
come, for the delicate melancholies wh.

follow summer storms in England when the sun breaks out again & lights
up a line of elms & a silver-white church spire against purple-black
sky & a rainbow suggests itself - smiles breaking through tears &c and
the whole thing becomes too watercolourist for words ... Nothing.

None of it here.just the elements at play,just primordial physics.

Most refreshing in its way though I don't think I'd care to live with it,
never being quite sure 'fit I ' was a vision of the past or the future
but certain in either case that the hand of man was nowhere to be
seen.

Fortescue, who is the hand of man in person, tells me there's sthg.

in America called 'Skywriting' when they go up in aeroplanes & write
messages across the sky in smoke.  He says it's terribly difficult
since unless you're very skilful your own 'prop-wash' rubs out the
letters as you make them.  Seeing the rainbow today he said that it was
theoretically possible to go up and write the word 'Rainbow' in giant
letters in an arch in an otherwise rainbowless sky (say in the middle
of a cloudless summer's day).  Personally I can't see the point but it
did strike me as an unexpectedly original & imaginative thing for him
to have dreamed up.  I asked if it would be possible to write a line of
music in smoke & showed him what it would entail but he thought by the
time one had flown back & forth drawing five parallel lines everything
would have run together & doing uprights & dots on top of that
completely impossible.  I him that it was nothing of the sort - that
I'd written all my music in smoke

& that it was fast blowing away.

Later still Smoke or not the Music Makers still left a wound.  It's
better than anyone knows about the apartness of the artist but all they
can find to say is that it's a potpourri of self-quotations, as if I'd
run out of inspiration & concocted a potboiler from the scattered
corpses of previous works.  They laugh knowingly when they catch Handel
at it as if he were an unscrupulous old rogue, so I get tarred with the
same brush.  Oh bitter, bitter.  I lived with MM on & off from about
1903 and it was most carefully constructed using relatively few
quotations (& always reworked).  Perhaps what people don't like is it's
autobiographical & they simply don't like ME.  I wrote out my soul in
the Vin conc Symphany 11 & the Music Makers & I can't disguise it, why
should I?  Maybe they don't like O'Shaughnessy & maybe it isn't a
brilliant poem but if they're too brilliant they don't set well.  Look
at the rot Schubert set so wonderfully.

In this case though O'S expressed perfectly in the first 6 lines that
sense of the artist's loneliness which is what the 'Enigma' theme was
doing in i 1898.  I therefore couldn't have done better than use my own
music again oh the memory of that feeling was so intense - nor in 19

1

2 cd.  I not feel the bitter truth of the Tasso quotation I'd put on
the full score of 'Enigma' 14 yrs earlier.  'Bramo assai, poco spero,
nulla chieggio'.  I had longed for much, I had hoped for little, I had
asked for nothing - and got ill!

The pretty settlement of Santarem was reached at the mouth of the
Tapaj6s whose waters, the pure dark green of molten bottle-glass,
flowed out into the tawny flood of the Amazon but refused to mix.

Instead the entire surface of the confluence became mottled with
hi-coloured whirlpools, an effect which delighted Molly although she
said sadly that it could hardly be painted since no-one in Europe would
believe it.

They were past the halfway point between Pari and Manaos.

From now on the Amazon became as exotic as anyone aboard the Hildebrand
could have wished.  Anything edible thrown over the side was generally
taken within a few seconds by creatures from below which defied
identification.  Enough was generally glimpsed to send a frisson
through the more nervous: a flash of scaly plates, a vast armoured
head, prognathousjaws, teeth.  Some of the fish were immense, as could
be seen when they rolled leisurely out of the ship's path exposing for
a moment a grey-green flank the length of a scraped pig.

Great butterflies drifted across the river and over the decks drawing
small gatherings of onlookers wherever they randomly alighted on a
straw hat, an awning, the edge of a sticky glass.  They flew away again
with that tropical flight so different from the fluttering of European
species: the few flat strokes and then the I wobbling glide carrying
them off across the surface of the water where they might settle on the
emerald raft of an uprooted tree, sharing perhaps with a
motionlessjewelled bird until both had I flowed away astern.  At night
the lighted decks attracted even huger moths, some of which were the
size of wrens but with colour and figurings as brilliant as those birds
were dowdy.  This time their presence was usually announced by squeaks
of dismay and a rush for head-scarves.  Edward would stand at the rail,
often with an immense night creature perched on his lapel or his
sleeve, its folded or shimmering wings leaving all manner of gorgeous
dusts on the creamy linen.  At this he would gaze fondly until it flew
away, murmuring'I say you are a beauty'or'They've dressed you up to
look more fearsome than you are."

Once the ship stopped for an hour opposite a tiny settlement which from
midstream was no more than a handful of orange oil flares, the only
lights on a dark continent.  A pilot had to be picked up and because of
silt banks the ship stood off and dropped anchor while the transfer was
made in a batalie.  Without the sound of water along her plates and
with her engines quiet the Hildebrand was suddenly at the centre of
emptiness.  Standing at the rail on the side away from the settlement
Edward could see practically nothing, there being no moon, except where
soundless flashes lit the horizon or from closer overhead gave a
mauvish impression of dark and endless vegetation.  For the first time
strange calls became audible from the distant bank.  Behind the
mechanical frogs and the sizzle of tree crickets came cries which, had
he been his own ancestor, would have bristled his pelt the length of
his spine.  The screams - ofjaguar?  monkey?  of hunter?  prey?  - had
that curious hollowness of jungle sounds which appear to be
simultaneously the cry and its echo.  It was easy to believe that the
density of the vegetation and the night which stuffed its chinks
conducted sound as effectively as water, so that these howls and lonely
barks might be coming from boundless distances, the night air like a
membrane bringing him news of savageries beyond the horizon.  Suddenly
the ship felt very small and frail anchored there in the middle of it
all with water on either side as meagre insulation.  The conviction
came over him again that this voyage he was making was ajourney
backwards in time; what remained to be resolved was how much of that
time was bounded by his own few decades.  What lay all around was
elemental and pagan: it was in no way gentle.  Here there was no
kindly-eyed Pan like a Victorian uncle with shaggy thighs and hooves
who would cradle small lost river-creatures as in Kenneth Grahame's
animistic vision.

'You can't write out of nothingness,' he murmured at the water, the
pink-blue flashes, the screaming wilderness.  'You have to write out of
a culture.  Without men there is no art, no hearts to be touched, no
eyes to weep.  There are only cells."  Even so, he thought briefly of
his own creature on a tower and wondered what dawn it was witnessing,
leaved in hectic crimson.  He was glad when a shudder through his soles
announced the quickening of the engines and the ship's eventual getting
under way, unaware (until he went below to better-lit regions) that the
temporary pall of coal-smoke drooping heavily in the windless air over
one rail like a lock of greasy black hair had left his linen jacket
encrusted with smuts.

After the settlement of Obidos they passed over the deepest point in
the Amazon so far known.  The figure of one hundred and twenty feet was
known also to Steward Pyce who circulated with the news, generally
being thanked for his pains.  But people were less intrigued by fact
than they were by rumour.  It was learned that they would shortly be
passing an island on which was supposed to be a lost city.  The very
phrase echoed with mystery and adventure and indeed figured prominently
in the titles of several books in the ship's library.  There was
speculation as to how a city might come to be lost in the first place,
it sounding more like a case of remarkable carelessness rather than
anything more dynamic.

'Surely there's a stock historical scene,' said Edward; 'when a wounded
man on a wounded horse drags himself back inside the shattered ramparts
and says "All is lost!  The city is lost!  Flee for your ll .  and an
arrow takes him plumb in the wishbone."

'Oh, lost in that sense.  I hadn't thought of it like that, not
actually sacked."

'You can see why - at least from an adventure-novelist's viewpoint.

There's got to be a treasure and there's got to be a mystery.  Neither
of those can survive a really decent sacking."

'More than that, there's got to be a more or less intact city."

Fortescue revealed himself as no stranger to the genre.  'The whole
point is the place must look as though everybody woke up on a Tuesday
morning and said "This is the dullest town in the whole of South
America.  I'm off " and simply left.  Then after a few months the
jungle moved back in and a year or two later nobody could have found
the place even if they'd looked for it."

'But why wouldn't they have taken their treasure with them?"  asked
Molly.

'That's easy,' said Edward who was entering the spirit of this fictive
city.  'The people did take their treasure with them but since they
were poor it didn't amount to more than a few personal belongings.  A
retirement clock, a cigar-cutter, Aunt Ada's amber necklace.  That sort
of thing.  The real treasure belonged to the priests: vast golden
idols, ingots of green Amazonian gold, silver, unknown minerals and
gems of hypnotic beauty and enormous weight.  But how could they carry
them?  The people had already left and they themselves were hopelessly
weakened by years of debauchery and excess compounded by a monotonous
diet of human hearts.  They had to abandon it all where it lay and
hurry crossly after their departed congregations in flapping white
robes and jaguar-teeth necklaces.  But they got hardly any distance
before falling prey to deadly orchids whose scent alone lured men to
screaming dooms, and anacondas whose glowing yellow eyes swayed thirty
feet above them on necks of such sickening girth that the priests died
of fright even as the hugejaws opened and a sticky rain of venom
sprinkled their grinning faces."

'Enough!"  cried Molly.  'More than enough!  It's quite obvious you
could have made an excellent living as an adventure writer had you not
been a composer."

'Much better.  And don't imagine the irony escapes me."

Interested passengers scanned various lumps of land they passed but few
of these appeared large enough to conceal a city.

Shortly after Parintins they noticed various bifurcations in the main
stream, many of which seemed to be substantial rivers in their own
right.  It was not until Edward was shown a chart on the bridge that he
appreciated how the next one hundred and sixty miles of left-hand bank
represented the northern 'coast' of the gigantic Tupinambarama Island
which had claims to be the world's largest river island.  Even
Fortescue, when Edward pointed this out, stopped scanning the distant
shore with his binoculars as if hoping to glimpse a white gleam of
hitherto-unnoticed temple among the myriad acres of foliage.

 A few pink and white barracas standing in a clearing announced
Itacoatiara.  It was hard to imagine that such a small gathering of
sheds and bungalows should be the entrept for the entire Madeira River
which joined the Amazon eighty miles further on.  The Madeira led off
south-west through some of the world's leastknown territory towards the
Mato Grosso and Bolivia and uncharted headwaters in the far Andes.  The
very sight of the confluence was enough to intensify Edward's sense of
the unimaginably remote, piling as it did the additionally undiscovered
on the already undiscovered.  It was extraordinary to think of men four
or five hundred miles up that river looking not upstream to Porto Velho
but wistfully back to this shanty-town of Itacoatiara as marking the
nearest real link with the outside world.

And suddenly nearly four days had gone by since they left Pard and they
had nearly reached their destination.  There was a sense of people
surreptitiously stretching themselves as after an overlong sermon,
ready to get to their feet and feel what it was like to be on the
ground in the heart of this'unglc which had accompanied them J unbroken
every one of the thousand and forty-two miles from the sea.  Molly and
Fortescue were clearly excited and relieved their apprehension by
saying well, if it didn't 'work out' at least there was a regular
steamer service back to England.  Since they were neither of them the
sort to permit themselves an easy return from anything on which they
had set their hearts it intensified Edward's sense of imminent
desertion.  It was not hard to imagine disasters that were less
possibilities than likelihoods: Molly's wasting fever and irreversible
decline up a tributary in a bungalow ticking with termites; Fortescue's
crash-landing leaving him with a broken leg, a Webley revolver and six
rounds.

At twilight on the evening before their arrival he chanced to be on
deck at a moment when the ship's course took her to within fifty yards
of the bank.  He was thinking of the fragment of work he had achieved:
all too little in three weeks to justify his celebrating the Muse's
return.  Happening to glance up he was immobilised by what he saw.  On
the bank was a small clearing and in the centre of the clearing stood a
vast pole which on closer inspection was the trunk of a dead tree, most
of whose branches had broken off into stubs.  At the top of this pole
stood a figure - undoubtedly a human figure- dressed in a white robe
and appearing to stare out across the river, across the
thousand-milejungle to where the sun was setting.

It was absurd, solemn, so unexpected in its congruence with his own
reflections that he felt his heart actually pause.  The ship went on.

The motionless, rapt figure stared and stared and passed from sight as
the forest swallowed the clearing in its general dusk.

What vision was this?  He was withdrawn at dinner and later embarked on
an anguished night which soaked him in heat, plunging him in and out of
insomnia and mild delirium until the two states became
indistinguishable.  There was no narrative, only a repeated motif of
being on a series ofjourncys all of which left him stranded, alone and
defenceless, in a variety of threatening landscapes.  The word Somnaa
echoed through these slept places: a native location, the name of a
planet (for one of hisjourneys was on a deserted forest world circling
an unknown golden star), a potion which had to be sought and taken to
restore things.  He would regain consciousness enough to find himself
sitting on the edge of his bed drinking avidly from the water-bottle.

In his last remembered bout of troubled slumber he was under threat of
death in the lost city of Osmana at the hands of a Samoan witch-doctor
or high priest wearing a necklace of jaguar's teeth and girl about with
monkey pelts and shrunken heads on strings.  This man was offering
Edward two gourds, one of which contained enos F ana, a lethal poison
prepared from the urine of temple bats, and the other which was
empty.

The terms were that if Edward were lucky enough to choose the empty
gourd he must mime drinking the contents as if it were the mosand and
keep up the pretence by apparently dying in convulsions.  This was to
convince the audience, a hostile priesthood who were not in on the
subterfuge.

The high priest was supposed to be secretly on his side but Edward had
heard too much about witch-doctors to be fooled.  He knew the stories
of perfectly healthy people dying simply because a witchdoctor had told
them they would.  He therefore suspected that in carrying out the mime
he would be playing into this barbaric prankster's hands; at some point
he would willy-nilly begin believing in the inevitability of his own
death and so die.

When at first light Steward Pyce came in with a cup of tea he found his
distinguished passenger half off the bed, flannel pyjama top rucked up
under his arms and exposing a waxy white torso shiny with sweat and
with some sparse grey hairs around the nipples.  Edward, ragingly
thirsty, scalded his mouth on the tea.  Reaching for the water-bottle
at his bedside he found

it full to the brim, clearly untouched since the previous evening.

'When do we reach this damned place?"

'At about ten this morning..  Sir Edward,' said the Steward who was
pottering attentively.  'Did we pass a bad night, sir?"

'I don't know yet.  It's too soon to tell if I have passed it."

'Definitely you have, sir.  It's a beautiful morning.  Amazon's given
birth.  That's the ship's cat, sir."

'Good name.  Is she particularly big, then?"

'Less so now, sir."

'Do you know, Pyce,' said Edward, putting down his teacup and passing a
sodden handkerchief over his head and face, 'if you spell Amazon with
an "s" instead of a "z" andjumble the letters around they'll spell
Manaos?"

Evidently he had not known.  He went impassively out leaving a faint
smell of brilliantine on the air.  As Edward finished his tea he began
idly jumbling the same letters afresh in his head until they soon began
to bring back uncomfortable flashes of the night he had just spent.

'I've enjoyed this trip,' he said on deck after breakfast.  'I suppose
I ought to say I am enjoying it since for me it's not yet even half
over.  It's been wonderful to get completely away."

'You've not done much work, then?"  Molly asked.

'Certainly not.  Why should I?  I'm sixty-six and I've done a lot of
work.  I don't have to go on doing it until I drop in my tracks.  Look
how much else there is to do-'and he waved a hand at the sheets of
sunlight lying elastically on the broad river ahead as if showing an
inheriting son his future dominions.

'Of course,' said Molly apologetically.  'I only meant, well, a few
days ago you mentioned you were sketching something."

'Oh, 'just an idea now and then.  A germ.  A glimmering.

Something might be made of it one day.  Nothing serious.  You, on the
other hand, have been working quite hard I suspect.  When you're not
downstairs boning up on Portuguese or Tupi or - what was that language
you said everyone gets by with here?  lingua geral?

- you're up on deck quietly sketching away.  I admire that.  Our friend
Fortescue, too.  I imagine he's also done quite a bit of homework in
his own quiet way."

'He has, yes."

Edward looked at her.  'He strikes me as an admirable young man.

'So he does me,' she said to the passing water which was now beginning
once more to take on the marbled appearance of two iscible liquids
swirling in eddies of contrasting colour.  The immi 1111

Hildebrand had reached the confluence of the Amazon and the Rio
Negro.

The black waters from the north, stained with the soil acids of the
Guiana Shield, contrasted weirdly with the yellow-green Amazon which
was already lighter here than it had been lower down because of the
silt-laden white-water tributaries which poured into it from the
west.

The ship ploughed across this treacherous expanse of what seemed
sinister oils before deserting the Amazon for the final nine miles of
its outward journey.

'That's the way I'll be going shortly,' she said, pointing to the great
stream they had left, to Iquitos and the Andes and the far Pacific
Ocean.

'You're not scared?"

'Of course.  But fascinated.  The one's supposed to cancel out the
other."

'It does with me,' he agreed drily.  'The question is, which?"

Molly laughed.  'But when you've been longing for something?"

'Ah.  Longing.  I understand that all right.  Look,' he fumbled in a
side pocket and produced his silver propelling-pencil, 'I'd like you to
have this.  Go on, take it.  Not very grand, I'm afraid.  just a
memento."

She knew the more she demurred the gruffer he would become.

'I'm honoured, Sir Edward.  I'll always keep it.  Thank you very
much.

I don't quite know.  . ."and she somewhat bemusedly read the
inscription on its side: To Edward Elgarfrom hisfriends in the L.O.S.

'Surely this is a very personal thing?"

'Of course it is.  What on earth would be the point in my giving it you
otherwise?  The man who ran the Liverpool Orchestral Society was the
truest friend I ever had, Alfred Rodewald.  That was the year he died
twenty years ago now practically to the day.  Well, one can't go on
forever looking back.  Take it - it's not a bad one.

It's done me well."And he turned away and walked off leaving her
staring at the nearer of a pair of stone lighthouses falling astern.

Suddenly in sunlight across an expanse of water Manaos rose up as a
sizeable town, all white houses and towers.  The trees and vegetation
which split up the red of its tiled roofs appeared by contrast a
brighter green than the surrounding forest.  As they approached with a
blare of C which lost itself over the waters and rebounded feebly from
the low red earth cliffs the passengers lining the Hildebrand's decks
could make out individual features.

Dominating everything with civic extravagance was the dome of the Opera
House glittering in its topee of blue and gold Alsatian tiles.  On the
foreshore a series of floating wharves supported an extensive
shanty-town of dilapidated huts in addition to cranes and the monster
hardware associated with modern commerce.  It seemed altogether
extraordinary to find a city of this size so remotely situated; the
decrepit dwellings merely emphasised the mercantile solidity of the
buildings behind.

And now the movement of people became apparent on the distant dockside:
men in white shirts, women with parasols, gathering to wait in the
shade of sheds and godowns for these visitors from another world.

Edward stood largely unmoved watching the frenzied muster of tattered
children with trays around their necks, the silver winking of ice-cream
carts.  Drifting round in the thermals over the town the inevitable
cloud of urubus circled, sifting with their slitted nostrils the rich
boiling of metropolitan odours for the delirious perfume of carrion.

And now names were sliding across his vision, names in bold capitals
over the warehouses: BOOTH STEAMSHIP COMPANY LTD, JOAQUIM SOARES and,
on a pair of huge white doors in a blue matching that of the sky, the
great legend PUSSELS CRONIFER Gml)H.

Frau von Pussels had been posting a notice on the board in the cool
lobby of the Schiller Institute when she heard the C announcing the
Hildebrand's arrival.  'Donnerslag,' she said to herself, glancing up
at the rest of the cards and announcements tucked symmetrically behind
the lattice of ribbon which crisscrossed the baIZC board, 'schon
gut."

Elsewhere - very far away - there were clocks and calendars.  In Manaos
there were boats and seasons, in addition to the daily thunderstorm at
ten past noon.

In the five years since her husband had died Frau von Pusscls had taken
to spending most of her time in the Institute she had helped found
thirty years previously and which she had effectively run ever since.

She preferred it to her own house, an overlarge .modern villa built at
the expense of her husband's parent company in Hamburg in a style
thought suitable for the founder-manager of a mercantile concern which
nowadays had five other branches in South America.  She found the villa
soulless and - although she would never have said so - in most awful
taste.  It was prettily sited on a knoll overlooking the river but she
liked none of the views inside the house itself.  Additionally, the
architect had installed some new system designed to cool the air
without overhead fans.

This mechanism was concealed under the floors and despite his
assurances that it would be completely silent it rumbled faintly,
making ornaments buzz on polished tables and giving one the impression
of being on board ship.  Nor, as far as she could determine, did it
make the house a single degree cooler; but since she was embarking on
her fourth decade here she had long since grown acclimatised and it
made little difference to her whether the system worked or not.

The premises which housed the Schiller Institute were by contrast quite
old, having been built by one of the earlier Portuguese settlers.  The
house was large and dark but to her mind not at all gloomy.  Rather, it
was sombre and fragrant, being lined with dusky forest woods of immense
weight and hardness.  The waxed floorboards in the hallway near where
she was standing were each a metre across and lay like sheets of a
fabulous glowing metal, creakless and so close that a playing card
might not be inserted between them.  From the half-open door of the
salon came the repetitive sounds of the Nepomuceno boy quietly tuning
the Institute's tropicalised B6sendorfer.  A shaft of brilliant
Brazilian sunlight lay across the hall and from the shrubbery outside
the front door came the faint sounds of tussling birds.  She gave one
of those involuntary little sighs which, once sighed, made her wonder
whether perhaps she had forgotten to breathe for the last five
minutes.

She realiscd she was quite happy - no, that was absurd at sixty-two
with a dead husband and a dead son - unexpectedly contented would be a
better way of putting it.  Everyone knew human lives petered out, but
here in this stout house on foreign soil there was every evidence of a
culture which would outlive.  Here were busts of Schiller and Goethe,
of Beethoven, Leibnitz and Bach; here was a library; here were the
tones of a piano being brought up to scratch for tonight's recital.

And here - she glanced once more at the board to make quite sure all
the cards were straight - were the talks and slide-shows and lectures
by residents with particular skills and by visitors of distinction and
accomplishment.  It was all a small and proper part of the only thing
which final1v mattered: the handing-on of a tradition, the transmission
of civilisation.

The notice she had just posted was for one of the Reverend Miles Moss's
popular talks which he often gave when passing through Manaos.  The
Reverend Moss was the Anglican Chaplain on the Amazon with a parish
stretching two thousand miles from ParA to Porto Velho.  His real
distinction, however, lay in his enthusiastic moth-hunting.  He was at
present in Manaos and had told her he had just discovered three new
varieties of hawk-moth, one of them in a garden not a hundred yards
from the Institute.  He was witty, eccentric, charming in a fashion
which made her feel something lopsided in him to which she was
attracted.  She had insisted on his speaking before he quit town to
return to ParA in time for Christmas at the end of a month's parochial
duties upriver.  The Reverend Moss was above all one of those gifted
professional amateurs the English seemed to produce in such numbers; he
was a considerable authority and in international entomological circles
was held in the highest regard.  His own collection was magnificent,
his work - which from time to time was published by Lord Rothschild
systematic and pioneering.  He was also an exhibitor at London's Royal
Academy.  What could better symbolise the passing-on of European
civilisation than taxonomy itselp.  Classify, classify, classify; that
was the painstaking but ultimately sure way of making sense of the
natural universe.  Things proceeded, the unknown became known, the
darkness retreated.

Such were not, of course, Frau von Pussels' actual thoughts as she
approved the neatness of the notice board.  They were the basis of a
rationale which underpinned her dedication to the Institute and its
principles and indeed her public person here in this remote enclave.

She had long been the wife of Otto von Pussels and a pillar of Manaos's
cultural life.  She was now the widow von Pussels who, once she had
emerged from mourning, could beat no retreat.  In any case she had
nowhere to go unless it were back to an unfamiliar Germany defeated by
war and humiliated by treaty in one of whose anonymous military
graveyards lay the remains of their son Eusebius.  No, there was no
retreating.  But the sheer barbarousness of the war had undercut
everything, including her own confidence in the civilisation she
loved.

The machineries of mass destruction had been unprecedented yet there
had been scarcely any hesitation in using them.  The ethical humanism
of centuries, the flower of European culture, had stood wittingly by
while on all sides men climbed into cockpits and tanks and submarines,
threw poison chemicals at each other, shredded nature and human beings
with impartiality.  If Frau von Pussels was not alone in having lost
some of her faith she was equally the company of all those who
re-asserted the values of their battered c'vilisation.  She was gently,
indomitably marked by that human tendency which, seeing how nearly a
building was toppled, praises it for having been so soundly
constructed; but she had come perilously close to blaming it for the
inherent weakness which almost overthrew it.

Young Nepomuceno had practically finished.  He was now vamping in
various keys the tunes which only piano-tuners play: pieces seemingly
passed on by rote through a guild, since no tuner she had ever met was
any sort of pianist.  As she passed the doorway, which exhaled a scent
of potpourri and the mildewed felting inside the opened B6sendorfer,
she again experienced a tingle of pleasure at the calm and
purposefulness of it.  Here in the middle of however many million
square kilometres of jungle, dotted with naked savages still occupied
with blowpipes and shrinking each others' heads, a cultivated young man
had just tuned a very beautiful musical instrument on which later that
evening an Italian girl was to play Scarlatti, Mendelssohn, Schumann
and Busoni.  It was going on.  It was proceeding.  The darkness would
have to take a further step backwards.

In at the front door, catching her in a white blast of light at the
foot of the grand staircase, came Raymundo the messenger boy.

Raymundo, a handsome mestiCo lad in his teens with glittery black eyes,
had various duties about the Institute in reward for which he was fed
and clothed and given a converted pigeon-loft to live in.

This was an airy den of which he was greatly proud and for two years he
had been showing the kitchen girls the rooftop panorama it afforded of
the town.  One of his duties was to go down to the dockside and obtain
a passenger list of every sizeable ship which visited Manaos.  He
offered one now, the pages very white in his brown hand.

'Our latest visitors?"  Frau von Pussels asked him in lingua geral.

'You're a good boy, Raymundo."

 'It's the, Hildebrand, senhora."

'I know it is.  I ought to recognise its hooter by now."  She took the
list with that pleasurable anticipation such things give in out-of
the-way places.  Now and then people one knew turned up unexpectedly,
but more often there were visitors whose names were familiar and who
could be persuaded to give a talk, a lantern-slide show, a recital.

She had a considerable knowledge of who was who in the arts and
sciences of the Western world and in turn had herself become a minor
celebrity whose name was widely known as that of a person one could not
leave Manaos without visiting.  Now she smoothed out the sheets of the
Hildebrand's passenger list and froze, one shoe caught in a puddle of
light on the tread of the first stair.  There was a long silence.

'Es musstepassieren,' she said half aloud.

'Senhora?"

Realising she had been staring through the boy she smiled and shook her
head, dismissing him.  She scanned the rest of the list but there were
no other names she knew.  Her foot in its light-puddle turned slowly
and as slowly rose to the tread above as if leaving glue.  In the empty
space where it had been the mineral flecks in the white marble sparkled
like exploding particles of dust.  She went up to her office and opened
the shutters enough to permit the energetic half-light of an excluded
tropic day to bring the room and its furnishings to life.  Sitting at
her desk she wrote a careful letter in English on the Institute's
headed writing-paper.

Dear Sir Edward, News ofyour arrival hasjust reached me via the
grapevine which, in places such as this, operates with the efficient
self-interest ofan isolated commumy greedy for contacts with the
'movers and shakers' of the world outside.

In any event, welcome to Manaos.  Since as a long-term resident here I
am certain this isyourfirst visit I wonder if you wouldpermit me to
offer my services in the capaciy of a guide?  From the rubric at the
head of this somewhat bombastic stationegyou will see that I hold some
smallposition in what are loosely called 'cultural circles'here.  But
lest this conjure upforyou the image of an earnest harridan with
spectacles a-glitter with artisticfervour let me assureyou that my late
husband was a commerant Of not merely local standing and that one way
and another access to virtually any door in these parts is
guaranteed.

Whetherornotyoucaretoavailyoursefofthisprivateofferofmine, might I
anyway in my official capaciy humbly request thatyoufind a moment to
pay our Institute a visit?  You would be doing us a great honour and
not least because internationally-celebrated artists arefew andfar
between in these parts nowadays.  You would also discover that our
librag here has a not inconsiderable section of Elgariana as evidence
of a longstanding admirationforyour music andyoursef.

Respecfulyyours, Magdalena von Pussels She laid down her pen and
re-read what she had written.  Too effusive?  Certainly it was a bit
wordy, a bit long.  Too much about her own and her husband's
credentials?  And might not the tone beneath the conventional phrases
be construed as slightly informal?  That piece of self-mockery about
the harridan, for example.  There was also the quotation from
O'Shaughnessy which maybe hinted at too intimate a knowledge ... Above
all, why hadn't she the courage to identify herself?  She took up her
pen, poised it to delete, expunge, alter, re-write entirely.  Instead
she addressed an envelope, folded the letter with a sigh and sealed
it.

It was too difficult.  She could have written twenty versions but there
was no single correct or even plausible way to write to a man one had
not seen for forty years but whose career one had followed score by
score, magazine article by magazine article, month-old press cutting by
month-old press cutting.

Downstairs in the hall she met the Nepomuceno boyjust leaving with his
little leather roll of tuning forks and keys.

'It sounded very sweet to me,' she said.  'Are you happy?"

'With the tuning ... As good as I am able ... But the action ...

Several notes were slow and sticky.  The climate, you see.  French
chalk ... Now .

She had long grown accustomed to the young man's peculiar speech which
one might have taken for hopeless diffidence until one noticed his gaze
which never left the face of the person he was addressing.  She had
decided it was more a boredom with the effort required to compose whole
sentences.  Once the meat had been expressed the remains of the thought
was allowed to run off.  She had no idea what would become of him.  Of
his intelligence there was no doubt.  He had an excellent ear but
practically no musical talent.  On the other hand Professor Almeirim
spoke of him as a mathematical genius but one whose numerical
arguments procecded in much the same way as his verbal, something which
might well disqualify him from serious consideration by the University
of Rio dejaneiro's Mathematics Department where his application was
already lodged.  Still, budding genius or brilliant dunce there was no
reason why he might not at the age of nineteen be required to act as an
errand-boy, so instead of summoning Raymundo once more from kitchen
regions or pigeon-loft Frau von Pussels handed him her letter.

'I'm sure you wouldn't mind slipping down with this,' she said
firmly.

'It's rather important that it reaches the ship within the hour if
possible and Raymundo .  she let the thought trail away in the young
man's own style.

'Certainly, Frau von Pussels.  You can rely ... I hope the recital .

.

."

The front door opened and closed with a silent blare of light.

Somewhere in distant regions the kitchen staff could be heard preparing
the refreshments the Institute served in the garden to anybody who
cared to drop in to use the library, read a German newspaper or simply
chat over a cup of chocolate.  She went into the salon through a drift
of dust-motes, a beautiful spacious room A stretching the depth of the
house half filled with rows ofjacarandawood chairs.  She walked its
length smelling polish and potpourri as well as an odour of burntjam
which drifted robustly in through the net curtains of a pair of French
windows standing ajar behind the piano.  Thegoiabada or guavajelly the
kitchens habitually made just as habitually burned: it was now one of a
lexicon of familiar Institute smells of which she had grown fond.  Her
own villa, by contrast, contained scarcely a single smell of the least
emotional significance for her.  Its rumbling machineries sometimes
contributed a faint oily aroma which only added to the illusion of
being on board ship.

She sat down on the leather-quilted piano stool and lifted the
keyboard's lid.  The sight of it diffused over her a resonant
happiness.  The inlaid florid signature had a certain Austrian
exuberance as if to say 'I, Ludwig 136sendorfer, in my little factory
here in Vienna, have created a work of art.  There - I sign it thus,
with a proud flourish.  Now, my unknown performer, the rest is up to
you."  Passing a fingertip over the letters she could detect scarcely a
variation in the silky veneer.  Even twenty-five years of equatorial
humidity had found neither crack nor swelling to exploit.  Now that her
letter to Edward was out of her hands she regretted acting with I such
dispatch.  Strangely, she had never envisaged what had actually
happened.  She had often conceived of going back to Europe for some
reason, retiring there maybe, of sending him a letter of condolence on
the death of Lady Elgar (instantly rejected as being too pointed, not
to say downright threatening), of making an anonymous pilgrimage to
some concert or festival where he was conducting.  Certainly her
imaginings had always included a moment of mutual recognition.  But
whatever her fantasy it had always depended on her taking the
initiative.  It had never occurred to her that in all innocence of this
being her home (of that she was sure) he might one day fetch up on her
threshold as a tourist.  Had she taken more time to consider, she now
perceived, how very easy it would have been simply to avoid him for the
duration of his stay to have lain low for a few days behind the walls
of her mercantile villa and the disguise of her mercantile name.

Still, she was too old to dwell on such things.  It was done now.

Either he would come or he wouldn't, either they would meet or not.

And if they didn't, then his happening briefly to share the same small
town many thousands of miles from Europe was merely a curious irony
such as Fate occasionally supplied in impish mood, a way of pointing up
four decades of estrangement between two people before each went to a
widely-distant grave.

She brushed both palms over her thighs and began to play the second of
Schumann's Davidsbndler dances.  It was what she had played when the
news of Eusebius's death had reached her, and she had done so with the
unopened letter on the music stand as though she were playing the text
she had no need of reading.  The letter from her surviving sister, with
whom she had so little communication that she vaguely knew the
handwriting before she could identify it, had exuded an unmistakable
aura of next-of-kin.

Besides, no letter from Germany in late I917 could possibly have
brought good news.  And so she had played without stopping to wonder
what to play for an occasion she had long awaited.  Later, having done
with more conventional ways of expressing loss, she wondered at so
unhesitant a choice.  As a formally-trained pianist she had, after all,
more than three hundred years of keyboard music from which to choose.

Why not Bach?  Mozart?  Almost any Beethoven slow movement?  But
instead what had come foremost to her fingers was this haunted piece
of romanticism, full equally of longing and the loss which engenders
it, and with that air of not trying to console which is its own
consolation.  Beginning on a wayward harmony, the music transcended
mere wistfulness by suggesting to the inner car even after the final
cadence that it was still going on endlessly, forever slanted away from
resolution.

This short piece she now played without self-indulgence as to rubato,
letting the dreamy, faraway quality of the writing do its own work.

The notes rang softly in the wood-cased room.

Presences came and went: Eusebius, who had himself loved it; Otto, who
hadn't.  Behind them the years stretched back to Leipzig where she had
studied at the Conservatoire, full of ambition to become the Clara
Schumann of her day.  And behind even such evanescent ghosts of the
personal past the great tradition of European culture stood, that magic
mountain from which this gem had been chipped.  It bulked in the room
as in her life.  It was as if most days when the roosters woke her in
the villa she left her netted bed and went to the opened windows and
saw, rising majestically from the still-benighted stain of forest
stretching to every horizon, this huge and singular alp.  It imprinted
its splendour on the landscape of dawn, drawing the eye up the dark
pyramid of its foothills towards the peak from whose glittering snows
the wind drew a plume of ice crystals like smoke across the pale blue
sky.

Sometimes the mountain was there when she looked again; often it
vanished completely for weeks or even months as if worn out by having
to transcend so inimical a climate, so unpromising a place.

It was a reassuring vision; it was poignant.  It had been many years
before she finally accepted that she would only ever be able to look at
it: she would never herself tread even its lowest slopes and gaze out
with a unique view.  This realisation had been a source of abject
despondency, then of sadness, and led finally to a judgement neither
resigned nor bitter - that things were as they were and that it was
more to the point to run a Schiller Institute in an outpost which
craved culture than to keep up the pretence of failed genius in
perpetual exile.  Brisk as she was accustomed to be with herself, Frau
von Pussels was honest enough to wonder whether it was still possible
for her to be betrayed by what had once been a marked tendency towards
Schwrmerei, a certain girlishness of admiration for anyone she
suspected of being able to see for themselves the view from the magic
mountain.

Often since her husband's death it had been supposed she might leave
Manaos and return to Germany although no-one had been so tasteless as
actually to presume it to her face.  Yet she had spent half her
lifetime here and everything she read and heard about Europe led her to
imagine she would find little left that was familiar.  The Germans and
the English too, for that matter - had a saying which in effect ran:
'You've made your bed, now lie in it'which was always meant
punitively.

Yet in the last thirty years she had been making a bed here which she
accepted would also be her death-bed and she was perfectly content to
lie in something she had prepared with care and which fitted her
comfortably.  It was not the moment for a lumpy mattress amid the
wreckage of the land of her birth.

Not that by contrast with Europe Brazil itself had remained
hearteningly unchanged.  The whole of the Amazon region, and Manaos in
particular, had seen a heyday arrive and depart.  To that heyday she
owed the last three decades of her life.  Without it her husband would
never have been tempted to pull up his Hanseatic roots and re-plant
himself in the scalding red laterite of the South Americanjungle.

Without it, too, she herself would have had no Schiller Institute, no
thriving cultural court.  This was Brazil, not California or
Australia.

She had seen pictures of the ghost towns which had once been centres of
gold rushes or various other mad scrambles for mineral wealth (she was
a little vague about what it was they mined in Australia) and despite
contemporary accounts of prodigious fortunes and booming local
economies there appeared to remain little now but a single main street
in the middle of nowhere, a sad splintery line of wooden shacks through
whose sagging doorways many hundreds of pungent men had once been
carried or thrown in the last stages of mortal injury and
inebriation.

Amazonas, by contrast, was a land where a living was even more
hazardously earned on the edges of a primaeval abyss of bites, stings,
fevers, poisons and murderous slavery into which anyone might topple at
any time and vanish without headstone.  Yet on every cartload of the
sticky black footballs of borracha latex creaking and rumbling down to
the wharf at Manaos the Government had levied a tax of twenty percent
with which it built 0 Teatro do Amazonas, now ubiquitously known as the
Opera House.  The souls of the town's inhabitants no doubt dwelt in the
shadow of its Cathedral but their lives were lived in the radiance shed
by the dome of the Opera House with its gilded tiles.

'Look,' this splendid and preposterous building said to them as it
winked and flashed amid the endless forests like a Faberg egg on a
football pitch, 'I am no ornament, I am central to life.  Without art,
without music, there is nothing.  Without civilisation the sun shines
only on the backs of greedy men grubbing endlessly for gold.

Without culture they leave hovels and a wasteland, a Klondyke from
which the survivors stagger away with what wealth they can carry, as
truly impoverished as when they arrived."

For Manaos was a marvelous, romantic idea, and this was what she loved
- perhaps even more now it was in its first evident stages of decay.

An Opera House seating sixteen hundred people (many of them in four
tiers of boxes decorated with cherubs and angels) in the middle of the
world's most tracklessjungle: how could that idea be resisted?  And
some of the best-known figures in the performing arts had made no
attempt to resist, sailing up the Amazon with their tiaras and
entourages, impresarios with snapping black moustaches and boxes
holding collapsible opera hats.  Tetrazzini, Melba, Melchior, Caruso,
Gigh, Rubinstein, the Ballet Russe ...

all had come and sung and played and danced and even - in the case of
Villa-Lobos - composed here.  Sarah Bernhardt had played Phdre.  Yet
not the least of the place's oddities, as Frau von Pussels took
pleasure in reflecting, was that in all her years here she could not
recall a single performance of an opera.  Instead the musical lions and
grandees made the pilgrimage to give recitals, for as an experience it
was unforgettable, salutary a way in which commuting between state
opera-houses in Dresden, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and Milan was not.  In
Europe's capitals the performers vied to keep their careers in as
dazzling a shine as ible; here they could play the messianic role of
bearing a brave, possi raw flame into prehistoric night.  They soon
found it did no harm to their careers, either, to add Manaos to the
list of places where they had triumphed.  To have taken Copenhagen by
storm would probably have been 'just as within their powers but it
lacked glamour.  In i go i an American big-game hunter variously named
as Blenker and Blanket had ascended the dome of the Opera House and
shot an on(a prowling the nearest outskirts of town.  By 1923 it would
have been necessary to go to the last stop on the tramway to be able to
get a clear shot at a 'aguar, but even now there was no part of the
town further than twenty minutes'walk from aboriginal and
unexploredjungle.

About such a place - one which Frau von Pussels knew stone by stone
there was more than a hint of dignified decline.  As the eyebrows of
elderly aristocrats might gradually show a tendency towards bushiness
or their ears and noses to sprout odd tufts of hair, so were the
colonial mansions beginning to betray their age and circumstances,
albeit without real shabbiness as yet.  Their gardens were for ever on
the point of rampage.  Speckles of jungle had begun breaking out here
and there across town, swags of greenery bursting through stucco
facades.  On the roof of the tramway's main shed orchids grew and power
failures were becoming more frequent so that passengers were sometimes
trapped inside their stalled machines for the duration of the midday
downpour.  After dusk all the street-lights would suddenly go out and
passersby would pick their way carefully along pavements full of tilted
flagstones and potholes by the intermittent lightning-bursts of a
silent storm far overhead.  When the electroliers came back on they
revealed, sauntering out of a tropical night full of obstacles such as
dead curs and the legs of beggars, beautifully dressed ladies and
gentlemen arm-in-arm, raising their straw hats to one another or
stopping to point out a passage in the evening newspapers they carried
in one gloved hand.

About all this there was nothing resembling the deluge which had so
recently swept away much of Old Europe.  From the viewpoint of an
overseas observer the writing was on the wall there - or on such walls
as were still standing.  Here by contrast the walls sprouted nothing
more prophetic than mango suckers, and the business community
cheerfully speculated about the next boom which would restore the
region's fortunes as if there were some law common to nature and
commerce which provided that all glory, once departed, must return.

Only at times was the Director of the Schiller Institute overtaken by a
certainty that something was unstoppably ending.  But when she thought
more carefully about what it might be she was always faced with her own
ungainsayables: her son, her husband, her life.  By the mere virtue of
having lived into her seventh decade, Magdalena von Pussels was herself
inexorably declining.  Beside that the temporary ups and downs of a
local economy seemed as repairable as masonry.

When she had finished playing she closed the lid of the piano and stood
up.  The music hanging in the air continued to speak of

'Look,' this splendid and preposterous building said to them as i I it
winked and flashed amid the endless forests like a Faber# egg on a
football pitch, 'I am no ornament, I am central to life.  Without art,
without music, there is nothing.  Without civilisation the sun shines
only on the backs of greedy men grubbing endlessly for gold.

Without culture they leave hovels and a wasteland, a Klondyke from
which the survivors stagger away with what wealth they can carry, as
truly impoverished as when they arrived."

For Manaos was a marvelous, romantic idea, and this was what she loved
- perhaps even more now it was in its first evident stages of decay.

An Opera House seating sixteen hundred people (many of them in four
tiers of boxes decorated with cherubs and angels) in the middle of the
world's most tracklessjungle: how could that idea be resisted?  And
some of the best-known figures in the performing arts had made no
attempt to resist, sailing up the Amazon with their tiaras and
entourages, impresarios with snapping black moustaches and boxes
holding collapsible opera hats.  Tetrazzini, Melba, Melchior, Caruso,
Gigli, Rubinstein, the Ballet Russe ...

all had come and sung and played and danced and even - in the case of
Villa-Lobos - composed here.  Sarah Bernhardt had played

Phdre.  Yet not the least of the place's oddities, as Frau von Pussels
took pleasure in reflecting, was that in all her years here she could
not recall a single performance of an opera.  Instead the musical lions
and grandees made the pilgrimage to give recitals, for as an experience
it was unforgettable, salutary in a way in which commuting between
state opera-houses in Dresden, Berlin, Vienna, Paris and Milan was
not.

In Europe's capitals the performers vied to keep their careers in as
dazzling a shine as possible; here they could play the messianic role
of bearing a brave, raw flame into prehistoric night.  They soon found
it did no harm to their careers, either, to add Manaos to the list of
places where they had triumphed.  To have taken Copenhagen by storm
would probably have been just as within their powers but it lacked
glamour.  In i go i an American big-game hunter variously named as
Blenker and Blanket had ascended the dome of the Opera House and shot
an onfa prowling the nearest outskirts of town.  By 1923 it would have
been necessary to go to the last stop on the tramway to be able to get
a clear shot at a jaguar, but even now there was no part of the town
further than twenty minutes'walk from aboriginal and unexplored
jungle.

About such a place - one which Frau von Pussels knew stone by stone
there was more than a hint of dignified decline.  As the eyebrows of
elderly aristocrats might gradually show a tendency towards bushiness
or their ears and noses to sprout odd tufts of hair, so were the
colonial mansions beginning to betray their age and circumstances,
albeit without real shabbiness as yet.  Their gardens were for ever on
the point of rampage.  Speckles of jungle had begun breaking out here
and there across town, swags of greenery bursting through stucco
facades.  On the roof of the tramway's main shed orchids grew and power
failures were becoming more frequent so that passengers were sometimes
trapped inside their stalled machines for the duration of the midday
downpour.  After dusk all the street-lights would suddenly go out and
passersby would pick their way carefully along pavements full of tilted
flagstones and potholes by the intermittent lightning-bursts of a
silent storm far overhead.  When the electroliers came back on they
revealed, sauntering out of a tropical night full of obstacles such as
dead curs and the legs of beggars, beautifully dressed ladies and
gentlemen arm-in-arm, raising their straw hats to one another or
stopping to point out a passage in the evening newspapers they carried
in one gloved hand.

About all this there was nothing resembling the deluge which had so
recently swept away much of Old Europe.  From the viewpoint of an
overseas observer the writing was on the wall there - or on such walls
as were still standing.  Here by contrast the walls sprouted nothing
more prophetic than mango suckers, and the business community
cheerfully speculated about the next boom which would restore the
region's fortunes as if there were some law common to nature and
commerce which provided that all glory, once departed, must return.

Only at times was the Director of the Schiller Institute overtaken by a
certainty that something was unstoppably ending.  But when she thought
more carefully about what it might be she was always faced with her own
ungainsayables: her son, her husband, her life.  By the mere virtue of
having lived into her seventh decade, Magdalena von Pussels was herself
inexorably declining.  Beside that the temporary ups and downs of a
local economy seemed as repairable as masonry.

When she had finished playing she closed the lid of the piano and stood
up.  The music hanging in the air continued to speak of
irresolution.

If she no longer actively missed the first twenty-five years of her
life with their endless concert-going and musicmaking, her marriage and
uprooting still occasionally seemed to have set off an unnatural
silence.  It was presumably to be expected that the friends of her
youth should mostly have dropped away until she now did no more than
exchange one or two dutiful letters at Christmas-time.  But the
suddenly-materialised ghost of Edward was another matter, for his
career had been as vivid to her as if she had watched it from an
adjacent room instead of from so many thousand miles away.

From their first meeting in Leipzig in i883 he had dazzled and
exasperated her early twenties and, it had turned out, he was fated to
remain for her as a beloved paradigm of the young artist plodding his
lonely way up the sunless side of the magic mountain.

Yet at the time she had believed she was also making the same ascent,
unimpressed by the uniformly gloomy view and puzzled by how
uncompanionable it was.  Eventually it had been she who ended the
relationship, her amourpropre wounded by his refusal to pay at least as
much court to her genius as she did to his.  Later that same year she
had gone to England for a two months' return visit when he had taken
lodgings for her in Worcester.  On his home ground she had wondered at
his strange mixture of childishness and ruthless self-sufficiency which
she could all too easily see might characterise genius.  It was
something she conspicuously lacked herself-, and the more she
reasonably insisted on her daily three hours' piano practice the more
it seemed to be asserting a hollowness.  Edward had been amiably
indulgent, which made it worse.  He was not fond of the piano as an
instrument and once told her it was a useful tool to keep in a
vestry.

Finally, genius had to be creative in some way: even Clara Schumann had
written her own music and, what was more, in the face of her
husband's.

The walks with Edward up on the Malvern hills and down by the river
were perfectly memorable for ebullient conversations inexplicably
broken off when she would glance at him and know she no longer
existed.

There were rumpled pieces of manuscript paper in his pockets, some of
which had bars showin every evidence of having been scrawled behind the
tree where he was supposed to be answering a call of nature.  Even at a
distance of nearly forty years Magdalena experienced afresh the feet of
his company, that gawky young man with legs whose thinness could be
through his trousers and the brown hair he always seemed to be combing
with water.  She had never before or since met precisely his blend of
chronic self-doubt and arrogance, especially not allied with all sorts
of exuberant high spirits.  For a short while she had been happier than
she would have thought likely; and in this tropical room so far removed
from the original scene saw again a slicing of light off varnished
oars, a swan drift by with a single black web tucked up across its
back.  The sadness which followed this vision had less to do with lost
opportunities than it did with the mere ability to look back forty
years to a sunlight which was not imagined.

Raymundo pushed open the door of the salon but remained diffidently on
the threshold as if uncertain from the silence whether she were still
in the room.

'It's about the bush."

'Bush, Raymundo?  Oh yes, I'd forgotten to telljodo.  I've heard it's
arriving on the fifteenth, that's Saturday week, so you and he will
arrange to meet the boat and bring it back then, please.  It is to go
in the hall like last year's but this time if it's too tall will you
make certain Jo5o cuts an appropriate amount off the bottom rather than
the top?  It looked most peculiar."

'Sim senhora.  But that was because .  . ."

'I quite remember what I said then and I was wrong.  It was a
mistake.

I don't wish to repeat it."

The boy disappeared leaving a flash of dark eyes on the air behind him,
but it was not one of comprehension.  To somebody born within horizons
filled with nothing but trees it must have seemed eccentric indeed to
bring a single Christmas tree in a ship from a distant country.  It had
been beyond Magdalena's patience to explain either the Weimar Republic
or its idea that the battered Germanic spirit might be inspirationally
nursed back to health by means of national symbols.  In the Ministerium
in Berlin someone had conceived the image of exiles gathering in
embassies and cultural missions across the world to sing 'O Tannenbaum'
as if from the glary African or South American sky outside heavy snow
were really failing on shivering Germans hurrying in for GNhwein and
gingerbread.  The tree they had sent last year arrived in Manaos
scarcely three weeks after it had last sighed to the winter winds of
the Black Forest.  It was in perfect condition, beautifully packed in a
long deal box like some monstrous cigar.  Only when Jodo the  ardener
had come to unpack it was it found to be three feet too tall for any
room in the house.  It had been her idea not to cut off the bottom
since she entertained a fancy of re-plantingit in the garden after the
festivities were over.  It had seemed scandalous to bring a living tree
all that way merely to bundle it up as firewood, and it intrigued her
to imagine it taking root in so alien a habitat.

The roots had been left and the top pollarded instead so the tree ended
flatly like a bottle-brush.  This had been more or less disguised by
artful tapering but it was not an aesthetic success for all its
popularity with visitors.jodo had carted it off and dropped it into a
hole in an obscure corner of the garden.  To everyone's surprise it had
not died at once but quite the contrary had begun growing at an amazing
rate, putting out shoots and sprigs for a period of several months.

Then just as suddenly, as if drained by this unnatural spring, it had
wilted and gone brown, its spears etiolated as wild asparagus.  Jodo
had dug it up again and it did indeed play its part in the burning of
several batches of the Institute's guavajelly.

She glanced again towards the notice board on her way back upstairs and
could not help visualising a large announcement that Sir Edward Elgar,
world-renowned composer of Der Traum des Gerontius and
EnigmaVariationen, would be here in person to address the Institute.

Remarkable as the Reverend Miles Moss's work was in its own way her
notice of his lecture now seemed a painful reflection of the
trivialities which measured out Manaos's year, to say nothing of her
own life.  When one encountered the real thing, she told the marble
stairs beneath her ascending tread, there was no mistaking it or its
way of humbling the common round.

And all at once on entering the Library she began to feel afraid.

What had she done?  And with what appalling temerity?  How could she
presume a link between herself and this famous man after a gap of forty
years?  There could be nothing left of that boy with the wet furrows in
his quiff and the bony wrists which endearingly had made all his
sleeves appear a half-inch too short, as if at twenty-six he were
still growing.  From that summer onwards their ways had diverged, his
on his lonely and distinctive trail up the mountain, hers to marriage
with a L6beck merchant who had a penchant for 'intellectual' girls.  In
that long meantime of a life's work He had been taken up by royalty,
had known and been admired by R;0--and Strauss, Paderewski, Hans
Richter, Faure, Kreisler, Chaliapin, Siegfried Wagner ... the list of
fellowimmortals was endless.  In that same meantime she had been a wife
and a mother, not displeased to shine a bit on evenings when obliged to
play hostess for Otto to Brazilian Government officials keen to court
Pussels Cronifer GmbH and its influential trade links.  Otto's
solidity, as well as his slight resemblance to Bismarck, had implied
long-term power more convincing than that of the nouveaux riches rubber
barons with their slaves and shenanigans and fountains which sprayed
claret.  And after dinner the guests were impressed and charmed when
their hostess allowed herself to be persuaded to the piano and played
with accomplishment and feeling, if to their private taste a little
severely.

She suddenly glimpsed herself as exactly that creature she had just now
claimed not to be in her letter: an earnest clutcher in a torrid
backwater of the cuffs and hems of visiting Parnassians.

What more humiliating in its way than that the shelves in the bay
between the Library's two great windows should be devoted entirely to
Edward?  For years with the help of a network of cultural spies in
Europe she had built up a comprehensive collection of books articles,
and cuttings about him.  Here were reviews, programmes, gramophone
records (on most of which he himself was conducting) and as many
editions of each score as she could lay hands on.  As she looked at it
all in the half-light of the jalousied shutters she could think only
that those few feet of shelving represented a distance which could not
be measured, and that to pretend otherwise was an impertinence.

By mid-morning she had attended to the various light duties which fell
to her.  In the present season they mostly concerned arrangements for
various Christmas festivities.  She then found herself doing something
she had almost never done.  She wrote a note to the Institute's
Secretary, who generally spent the mornings at home, to the effect that
she was suffering an attack of migraine which regrettably would prevent
her attending tonight's recital.

Magdalena felt sorry for the Italian pianist, a sweetly pretty girl who
had come out with the escort of a female cousin to visit relatives and
had consented to put together a programme at short notice.  The
indisposition of the Institute's Director would be regretted on all
sides but it would in no way affect the concert's success.

Nevertheless she wrote a second note, this one to the girl herself,
apologising for her inevitable absence and wishing her luck.  Then,
handing Raymundo both envelopes, she returned home through the glaring
streets, already finding it easy to play the part of a sufferer (for
her conscience always exacted the penalty of a touch of the malady she
was claiming).  If she appeared to be made a little unsteady by the
sun, a little carefully enclosed by the shade her parasol cast, and if
there was an unaccustomed paleness in her greetings, it was in response
to a feeling across the temples which might yet turn into the migraine
attack she had never in her life had.  By the time she reached the road
which gave access to the Villa Mirabelle, Magdalena von Pussels had
indeed the makings of a bona fide headache.

The high whitewashed walls and wrought-iron gateway were planted
squarely across the end of the road, saying to the visitor exactly what
Herr von Pussels had said to the architect: This is one street which
goes no further.  When he had bought the lot there had been some vague
idea that the road - which in those days petered out in a waste of
vines and scrub - might eventually curve around so that the slight
eminence on which it was built would afford a view over the port
area.

Herr von Pussels, with the help of an assiduously-purchased majority
of the town council, had put a stop to that.  The road would indeed
continue, but as his private drive.  It would not curve around to the
left but continue straight ahead through the gates before dipping down
to the right.  Here, just over the brow of the knoll, the view was away
from the town, across the river and out over the endless forest
undulating to the violet horizon.  There was something decisive in this
plan's exclusion from the panorama of the least sign of human existence
unless one considered as such a barely-visible handful of greyish
shacks on the far shore and the various craft which drifted like twigs
about the river.  The villa faced the future, there was no doubt of
that.  It was not intimidated by the prospect but looked out with
confidence across a continent which would in due course be tamed by
trade.  At the bottom of the knoll the grounds, which were not very
extensive, ended at the water's edge and a small igarapiseeped at right
angles into the main stream, marking the other boundary.

Magdalena reached the shelter of her verandah the requisite two minutes
before the midday storm, which betokened an inner clock made accurate
by years of habit.  Tumults of cloud throbbed and piled and prodigious
blue voltages made the furniture in the suddenly dark house Icap out of
its shadows.  Thejungle, the river, the grounds outside disappeared
behind a grey pelt of water.  Amid enormous noises she went calmly
about the house removing her gloves, examining an envelope on a side
table, going upstairs to change.  By the time she had done so, her brow
coot with eau de cologne, the clouds had been knocked into fragments by
their own violence and were hurrying off to re-group over some other
horizon, leaving an innocent sky beneath which steam was beginning to
rise from paved surfaces.

After her maid had served her a light almbfo in the dining room she
announced she was not at home to callers and would spend the rest of
the day in the pavilion where she would like tea brought later.  Taking
dark glasses and a volume of Heine Magdalena walked down the now
steaming grass to the spinney of 'acaranda which concealed the
pavilion.  This was her favourite spot on the entire premises.  Being a
little lower than the house its view over the Rio Negro was less
dominant, and since it was also further round the edge of the knoll one
could, by walking a few steps,just glimpse between the trunks of some
carnaba palms the outermostfavelas and hovels of Manaos's floating
docks.  It occurred to her thatif she tried really hard she might even
pick out the varnished masts of the Hildebrand, but she made no attempt
to do so from the same impulse which had taken her two safe streets
away from the waterfront on herjourney home.

She was upset at being upset, puzzled and resentful of herself for
being so easily reduced to indecision by a shock.  Maybe there was
no-one of any age who was not susceptible to the unforeseen arrival on
a wharf of a person from the past, but it hardly helped to be reminded
of it.  In any case Edward was not precisely a person from the past.

He filled several shelves in the Library which grew a fraction with
nearly every mail packet.  However, she had noticed that the new
material was steadily becoming slighter and there was of late a tone in
the few articles which mentioned him suggesting that as far as England
was concerned its national composer was safely dead.  The critics, many
of whom she recognised as being comparatively young men eager to
establish their names, implied that while they conceded he was the
dominant figure of the so called English musical renaissance this had
occurred so long ago now that he ought to be content with his
canonisation and let serious attention turn to newer music written in
the abrasive idiom of the times.

 Such articles would make her gesture impatiently, sucking in her
breath at each heretical liberty; but this role of champion hid within
it an obscure and illicit relief.  She could deal with the idea of a
master who had earned his acclaim and vanished up the mountain,
becoming a surname on the programmes clutched by posterity's
audiences.

But the unheralded appearance of the Cello Concerto three years
previously - and the arrival of the score in Manaos - had shaken her.

It seemed unfair or not quite right that a man so obviously past his
prime should suddenly produce an original work of great emotional power
which would, without a moment's hesitation,join the canon of Haydn,
Schumann, Dvorak and Tschaikowsky.  What was least comforting was that
he could achieve this without being part of any tradition; and this was
what the music critics themselves most disliked.  Unable to assign
Edward to any useful category they more and more wrote of him with
slight distaste as a maverick.  'An aloof figure', 'A lone but
unignorable example', they said.  'Neither teacher nor leader nor
guide', they complained, going on to write of a dedicated artist with a
self-regarding singleness of aim.  Well, she herself could vouch for
the self-regard.

The sky above her bower had by now returned to a midafternoon
normality.  The massive parade of clouds drifted on and on full of
subtleties of colour and implied stillnesses.  On distant undulations
of the forest, within the range of a watcher's eyes but still unmarked
on any map, their passing shadows moved: prints of nothingness sliding
over acres of sun.  It was so exactly the eternal view from this
pavilion that Magdalena no longer thought in terms of clouds and
shadows but of an ever-changing texture.  The entire thing stretching
from the tips of her shoes to the horizon was a living entity,
twitching and shedding and breathing like the hide of a sleeping
animal.  It never looked the same twice; it always looked identical.

Now her mind had been so painfully jarred it easily produced the memory
of a similar effect she and Edward had remarked on a walk in the
English hills that long-ago August.  They had stood at the top of a
down, she rather out of breath and trying to pick burrs from her long
dress, and watched the clouds drawing their shadows across the mild
fields below.  That had been gentle, pastoral.  It had been a time for
quoting poetry - at least, for Edward to quote poetry: something about
being meatless and moneyless on Malvern hills which she took to be an
elegant way of apologising for having forgotten to buy her luncheon.

And once up on those hills, what had her host wanted to do?  He had
produced a roll of sticks and cloth, which she had until then supposed
to be some kind of collapsible stool brought in case she should feel
tired, and assembled it into a large kite.  Getting this aloft with its
rattling tail of newspaper screws had involved his running round and
round in his braces, staring up at the string he held so that he twice
stepped on his cap andjacket thrown onto the grass and once nearly
knocked her over.  It was that afternoon which had marked a
turning-point.  She told him it was all very well giving himself today
the airs and races of a dazzling future, but it was hardly consistent
to expect her to collude while she was forced to witness displays of a
complete want of seriousness.  He had fallen silent, grumpily like a
chastened schoolboy, before insisting that kite-flying was serious,
certainly a good deal more serious than Hanon's bilgcy exercises for
piano virtuosity.

'Bilge?  What is bilge?  How unfair you are, Edward.  And do you not
have violin exercises so one day you can go back to Adolphe Pollitzer
and say, "There.  Nothing more you can teach me.  I will tomorrow pack
my bags and study with Ysae"?"

'No.  I've given up all idea of a career as a violinist.  And even if I
hadn't I certainly wouldn't be wasting my time doing boring old
exercises on a perfect kite-flying day with a very pretty girl for
company."

'How unfair you are, Edward."

'Oh, can't you feel it, Lena?  Today's a day on which tunes are made.

Exercises aren't for people with tunes in their heads."

And such things kept coming back as she stared out, forty years later,
across Amazonas until her mestifa maid brought tea on a tray, a glass
ofguarand and ajapanese fan.  Later that evening she moved restlessly
about the villa, going from room to room picking up and putting down
again silver-framed photographs of her husband and son.  Moths and
other insects of the night outside drummed against the mesh screens.

She lifted the piano lid, played a C while standing up, put the lid
down again.

She dozed fitfully that night, falling into a heavy sleep shortly
before dawn.  Her maid woke her at the customary early hour, however,
enquiring after her headacht, and she took a glass of lime-juice over
to the windows.  There in the fresh light of morning stood the
mountain, blotting out a large part of everything.  Its upper snows
glittered, its pinnacle was pure and uncompromising.

It told her nothing she did not already sadly know, but it did so with
calm insistence.  She was here and it was there and in between lay a
gulf into which protests and negotiations and recriminations fell and
dissolved.  They could never reach the mountain but would fade from
inanition and irrelevance even as they were vehemently yelled.  The
miraculous alp had simply sailed up in the night once more and dropped
anchor in her back garden.  The rays of light fled in d scatter from
its prisms and leaped right round the world.  Three toucans with bills
like lumps of yellow timber flew out of the jacaranda thicket and, with
the sunlight gleaming off their wings, passed through the heart of the
mountain and diminished away over the river.  Magdalena followed their
whirring dots until they merged with the debris in her retinas and lost
themselves in Brazil.

Reaching the Institute half an hour earlier than her custom, as one who
has made a complete recovery, she found no letter on Booth Line
stationery waiting for her.  The piano recital had been a great
success, she gathered; she expressed pleasure.  The Reverend Moss would
come round later for a brief word; she said how charmed she would be.

Up in her office she sat at the desk and heard the papery whirrings of
a moth trapped between a window pane and a blind.  The flutterings grew
more frenzied as the heat rose and presently, after a few spasms,
stopped altogether.  Still she sat on.  He had never received her
letter.  He had received her letter but thought it just another piece
of importuning by a local dignitary.  He had received her letter and
found it offensive.  He had not guessed her identity.  He had guessed
her identity and ... and was thinking about it.  Altogether it took
quite a long time before she was able to tell herself to stop behaving
like some idiot schoolgirl, snatch up her green parasol with a crawling
sensation in her stomach and hurry off down to the wharf.

A spotless cream panama hat moved slowly along a shady avenue, flashing
as it left the pools of mango shade and passed through patches of
sunlight.  At almost the same level beside it progressed a
sand-coloured, broad-brimmed floppy hat with a silk band faintly
sweat-stained.  The faces beneath each - military-moustached and fading
English rose - still bore the pallor of a sunless autumn a hemisphere
away.

Molly had said: 'There isn't a boat leaving for Iquitos inside week.

Until then I'm sure we'll keep bumping into each other.

suppose now I'm finally here I don't have to be in a hurry to leave.

Edward had said: 'At all events you'd like to see youn!

Fortescue airborne?"

'And maybe even Sir Edward Elgar safely embarked on his voyage home to
where he belongs."

'Ah, my dear, I don't belong anywhere nowadays.  According to popular
wisdom home is where the heart is and I seem to have mislaid mine."

'You may find it again in Manaos,' she laughed.  'It seems to be one of
those places where hearts inexplicably whizz about.  I lost mine here a
year and a half ago and I'm not sure I mightn't be on the verge of
doing so again."

In one pocket of his lincrijacket Edward had a sheaf of letters, all
unopened.  They had been delivered in ones and twos to the Hildebrand
throughout the previous day as the news of his presence aboard ran
through the English colony, the civic and cultural circles and, he
suspected from the aspect of several of the envelopes, missionary and
charity elements as well.

'Shan't open any of 'em,' he had said, and Molly could not be sure
whether he were genuinely irritated or secretly pleased by this
attention.  'I came here for a holiday.  It's exactly this sort of
thing one wishes to get away from at all costs."

'Twenty-four pounds."

'Twenty-four?  I'm paying twenty-six pounds seventeen and eightpence
each way.  That's monstrous.  Did you really pay only twenty-four?  We
ate at the same table and reached Manaos at the same instant ...

Twenty-four."

'You've never seen my cabin.  It's not a deluxe Stateroom or whatever
yours is called.  Besides, I don't have a private steward."

'I'm sure I don't either.  He's very fly, is Mr Pyce.  I believe I
share him with half the ship.  Once or twice he's answered my bell
admirably disguised as an idiot boy of sixteen ... just look at
these.

Hounded about the globe.  Don't ever become famous, Molly, it's the
death of everything."

'What have you got?  "The Britannia Club", "A Cdmera Comircio do Manaos
", " 0 Pais", "As Noticias" - those two sound like papers, don't
they?"

And before that day was out two Brazilian reporters had come trotting
up the gangway together, scowling at one another and each trying to
find Sir Eduardo's cabin first.  He went to ground on the Captain's
patch of private deck, drinking iced guarand and wondering why, now
that he had at last reached this legendary place, he didn't quite feel
up to going straight ashore.  It crossed his mind that it would be
amusing , having come all this way, never to set foot in Manaos but to
remain aboard the Hildebrand for the entire five days of its stay,
looking at the town over the rim of an icecooled glass.  He might even
start a fashion.  Next year he could go to Samarkand or Timbuctoo and
turn back on reaching the outskirts.  Thus he would make a late name
for himself as an eccentric traveller who had once been an inveterate
sight-seer but who now could not abide arrivals.

But on this following morning Molly had persuaded him to stroll through
the town, at least to see the Opera House and have an ice-cream.  And
suddenly there had seemed nothing else to do.  Fortescue had been met
the previous day by an ebullient man in late youth, undoubtedly the old
comrade Johnny Proctor.  These two had spent much time supervising the
swinging ashore of large crates which emerged from the holds looking
pale and raw, crisscrossed with stencilled admonishments which none of
the Brazilian stevedores could surely have read.  Chartair Ltd,
consisting of Fortescue, Johnny, the crates and two monkey-like men who
had about them a bristling air of Scots stubbornness which might have
passed for loyalty, disappeared in a series of ramshackle vehicles
towards an alleged airfield on the outskirts.  Everybody else on board
had gone ashore and the company of the ship's cat, while agreeable,
seemed too studiedly poignant.

Molly was explaining that the slabs of darkjam on sale at a stall were
guavajelly, and pointing out that a sign readingpudim'sort of meant
'pudding' but of a quite un-English genre, when Edward became aware of
a woman staring at him.  She was imposing, probably in her late fifties
or early sixties, with greying hair.  She held a parasol which shaded
her face so he could not read it but the impression her whole figure
gave was of someone long used to feeling confident.  When she spoke it
was with a faint accent he unthinkingly assumed to be Portuguese.

'Have I the honour of addressing Sir Edward Elgar?"

'I doubt it'll do you much honour, madam,' he ungraciously said after a
moment's hesitation, 'but yes."His voice had taken on a gruffness Molly
had come to recognise as that of displeasure at being put out.  He was
clearly not a man who relished the effort of having to rise to an
occasion.

It was the stranger's turn to hesitate.  'I ... Please forgive me for
intruding on you both like this - ' her dark eyes took in Molly but I
her face remained turned to Edward.  'I am ... You may perhaps have
received a letter of me, from me.  I heard you had arrived and at once
I wrote.  But .  . . ' 'A letter?  Ah.  Now you come to remind me I do
have some letters with me.  They, ah, arrived but my steward put them
on one side where I'm afraid I didn't see them."  Like a child
discovered he felt in his pocket and produced the sheaf of envelopes.

'I wasjust about to read them, you see, over a cup of coffee
somewhere."

'Of course, Sir Edward; I wouldn't have dreamed ... Yes, there is mine
you're holding."

'This one?  The, urn, Schiller Institute?"

'Yes, exactly.  I ... I am Magdalena von Pussels.  I was waiting ...

but you will read it when you read it, Sir Edward.  Please not now,'
she motioned with a gloved hand to prevent his opening it on the
spot.

'At your leisure, I beg.  Introductions in the street like this are not
convenient.  I ask the forgiveness of both of you."

The fraction by which she inclined her parasol and upper spine before
sweeping away made him place her on the spot as being German even
before his mind had had time to recall the suggestive name she had
left.

'I say."  He was looking after the green parasol as it sailed steadily
off above the dark Brazilian heads.  'Now there's a character."

'You don't know her?"

'Never clapped eyes on her in my life."

'How strang,.  I had the impression she knew you."

'Oh, I expect she's seen a photograph in a magazine or something.  I'm
afraid it happens all the time.  Once one's face becomes familiar
complete strangers imagine they know one.  As I said before, pray it
never happens to you."

He dismissed the incident and, resuming their stroll, began to take
evident pleasure in the variety of small surprises the town sprang on
him.  He said he had not expected to see so much civic ironwork a
thousand miles up the Amazon - lamp-posts, balconies, fountains and
the like - and certainly not stamped with the names of Scotch
foundries.

'Somehow one never thinks of Britain as having exported elegant
things,' he murmured.  'Why is that?  Why shouldn't we?

But I believe our reputation is for sturdy functionalism.  Those new
cranes down at the docks are all from England, I noticed as we
passed.

They're perfectly hideous and I suppose will last a hundred years,
highly efficient and perfectly hideous to the end.  But look at that
lamp-post - it's really rather something, isn't it?  I thought only the
Italians could do that.  Have you seen Bologna?

The Corso's so grand, we've nothing like it in England.  But apparently
we could have if only we imported Scotch lamp-posts to replace those
mass-produced metropolitan horrors they keep planting in London.  The
problem with the English is they're not a race which sets much store by
aesthetic values.  They mistrust such things because they smack of
flightiness and pleasure.  I wonder if it isn't also a kind of laziness
... ?  By Jove!"  For they had reached the Opera House standing in its
piazza, a creation with pink-washed walls likely to remind any English
visitor of nothing so much as blancmange.  The interior into which they
passed hardly lessened the impression of a confection.

Edward and Molly stood in the foyer surrounded by gold draperies-, tall
Svres vases on plinths and pillars of marble in various shades of coral
and cream such as he had last seen outside the botteghe of funerary
masons in Carrara.  The same style extended exuberantly through
thejacaranda-wood doors into the auditorium itself.  Inside among the
cherubim and angels it was dim and cool, a lofty rococo temple echoing
not to the tremulous vibrato of Tetrazzini but to the cries of several
budgerigar-like birds which had somehow got in.  A gentleman in torn
shorts and straw hat was sweeping the top of an upright piano with a
long broom in one corner of the orchestra pit.

'What a place to conduct in,' Edward was saying.  'It's so wonderfully
bizarre.  When one has made all thejokes and poked all the fun the
solid fact remains that here we have a people for whom music is central
to life.  Remember the theatre in Pard?

That's grand too.  I admire it.  It even makes me feel jealous.  Had
the English as a race been as musical as the Brazilians then composing
for them wouldn't have been such an ungrateful business.  Anything to
do with music in England's an uphill struggle from first to last.  I
always wanted to write an opera, you know.  Still do."

'Really?  Have you got a subject - or is it a libretto?"

'More or less.  But I keep getting disheartened.  Nobody wants that
sort of stuff nowadays, not there at any rate.  All they want is cinema
shows andjazz and sport.  Look what happened to poor old Stanford when
he tried to write opera.  For the English it's Gilbert and Sullivan or
nothing.  Or, of course, The Beggar's Opera.  Have you seen the Nigel
Playfair revival?  It's splendidly improper and amusing, just a jingle
of songs really, but it's the perfect proof of how radically unmusical
the English are.  Their imagination never runs beyond burlesque.  In
our own way I'm afraid we're barbarians.  That woman who spoke to us
just now?  The Schiller Institute?  Good example.  I bet we could scour
Manaos all day without finding a Shakespeare Institute.  The arts
simply aren't a living part of us."

'Surely you exaggerate slightly?  We've some marvelous writers and
painters.  As well as the odd composer."

'Yes, and look how they had to suffer for it.  Penury and neglect for a
lifetime and then being turned into classics as soon as they're safely
dead."

His voice hadjoined the insistence of the budgerigars inside the dome
and Molly realised she had once again provoked a piece of
autobiographical vehemence.  She steered him out of the building and
they left it echoing with grievance.  The sunlit piazza, the grand
trees trailing aerial roots like Krakens surfacing, blotted away this
brief mood.

I'm holding you up,' he said at last.

'No you're not.  I haven't much to do until my boat leaves except I'm
tempted to come up and paint this lost temple one day.  There are a few
places worth a visit after the Opera House but not many.

The Cathedral's a possibility and I can recommend the Public Library.

Apart from being a nice building it's got the prettiest double
staircase in iron which looks as light as a feather.  Glasgow again, I
seem to remember.  There's the English Club and of course the Schiller
Institute, wherever that is.  But really apart from those sorts of
things life in Manaos seems to be principally a matter of little
launch-trips up and down river.  There are lots of tiny resorts with
bathing-boxes and bungalows where people can go and fish for their
lunches.  The Purser's got outings laid on, I think.  For me the real
attraction of the place is its oddness.  I like all this civic
splendour on the edges of nothing, and the decay, and the newspapers
and the trams and the modern docks all covered with river-mud and naked
children.  I like taking the tram out to Flores which is still really
in the jungle."

J

'A tram in thejungle?  That sounds interesting.  Flores, you say?

What's there?"

'Nothing.  A restaurant.  It's wonderful fun having dinner.  Oh, we
should go.  I'll try and detach Forty from his airfield one night,
shall 1?"

'I'd quite like to see the airfield."

'I bet he'd take you up if you wanted.  Why don't you?"

'Ah, he'll have better things to do than fuss around pandering to
fogeys ... D'you think he would?"

They stopped at a cafe and Edward read his letters.  'Did you know they
had a racecourse here?"  he asked.  'Somebody must have found out about
my weakness.  This is the Secretary of the Club an Englishman,
apparently - inviting me out to the "hippodrome" hoping I might care to
view some racing, Brazilian-style.  He says here it's, what, "capital
entertainment even if not exactly run under Jockey Club rules.

Sometimes there are fatalities."  That sounds quite sprightly.  I
wonder if he means horses or riders?  I hope not the horses ... I do
like this word, hip6dromo.  Now, ah, the Schiller Institute.  Of
course, let's see .  . ."

But there was something about Frau von Pussels' letter which seemed to
throw him into a clouded thoughtfulness and he said nothing beyond a
muttered 'No shortage of guides, I see,' which gave Molly a pang of
indignation.  Later they lunched at the BriLannia Club where they found
a good many of their fellowpassengers.

Edward was visibly irritated by the effect of his unannounced
arrival.

The Club Secretary bustled up, evidently having been dragged away from
a drink 'in order to greet this celebrity, but neither quite knew what
to say to the other and Edward was left with a feeling of being
over-dressed and stuffy.

From cool rooms in the background came a good deal of laughter and the
men were mostly in shirt-sleeves.  The food was acceptable but an
uncomforting silence fell as they entered the dining room.

Neither he nor Molly was sorry to leave.

Returning to his cabin for a brief siesta he found, laid on his desk
next to the microscope, another Schiller Institute envelope.

'Damn, damn, damn,' he said under his breath.  Was there no end to this
harrying?  But he sat on the edge of the bed and opened it
resignedly.

Dea Sir Edward, I am extremey sorg we happened to bump into each other
like that this morning.  Sinceyou were already carging my letter it
must appear loyou as if I am pestering.

Please accept my assurance that I am not.  But a vyou evidently did not
recognise me I cannot bring nysef to remain silent and watchyou sail
away again in a matter of days.  Nearlyforyyears have passed (and
leflyou looking magnificent, I must say).  Might we not salute them if
onlyfor ha4f an hour?  For some reason I badly wish to know if you
remember the last piece of music we played together in Worcester.

Truyyours, Lena (Magdalena von Pussels) And it hit him like an attack
of some vital organ midway between heart and head: her eyes, that
voice, her carriage as she had walked away down the street.  All were
Lena's, disguised by nothing but time itself and her long absence from
his thoughts.

The more he considered them the more he remembered her and the less he
could imagine not having seen it at once, not even in her handwriting,
not even though she now spoke almost faultless English.  In this of all
places ... How could he have expected that half-thought, disgruntled
act of booking a passage to lead to his past arising like vapour from
the Amazon jungle and massing over his head?  Once one had reached a
certain age there was evidently no place on earth whose neutrality was
guaranteed.

The entire planet was peopled with ghosts.  Even the most alien of its
terrains might exude them, the most preposterous place quicken thoughts
and memories.  Perhaps one had to be young in order to travel, for it
could be diverting and adventuresome only so long as there was no past
to press.  The older one became the less possible it was any longer to
travel in that sense: the exterior globe was increasingly displaced by
an interior lifetime.  It would be an act of great purity to be able to
jettison that deadweight of memory and travel at the end of one's life
as if seeing for the first time just clouds, just a forest, just a
great river.  He knew he would never achieve that purity; there was
something relentless about the way in which he felt himself
contaminated.  It was as if his very culture demanded it.

 He lay back on the bed.  Once the shock had begun to diminish his
initial dismay was displaced by an amicable curiosity.  Might it not be
interesting to find out what her life had been?  Two elderly people
would scarcely wish to embroil themselves in anything more emotionally
muddying than peaceable recollections of another world, one distant
enough to have left nothing but an afterglow, maybe a fondness, surely
the comradeliness of survivors.

Besides, so far as he was concerned he had - he reminded himself as if
addressing her - done her more thanjustice, all things considered.  He
had twined her into some of his earliest successes Enigma, for example
- even though doing so had written her a little more irrevocably out of
his life.  She had lingered for many years after her abrupt departure
as The Girl, the unmarried bride such as a young man would have chosen
for himself.  Put she had commenced her gradual fade from the moment
the woman he actually married began taking control of his creativity.

The one Girl was squeezed out by the one Woman, then by several women
ladies, even, with titles and influence at Court.  The team of Edward
and Alice had assumed dominion over English music of the century's
first decade even though that music had its roots in a past which
pre-dated their first meeting, one which contained Lena as well as
pre-dating her too.

There could be no harm now in seeing what had become of her.

In any case, what else was there to do here?  Somehow he felt he had
already absorbed Manaos - it was like Pard only more so - and Molly's
description of its attractions had suggested only a momentary
quaintness.  Since he had no interest in bathing and picnic excursions
he had a matter of four days left to get through before the Hildebrand
cast off and began her downstream voyage.  It occurred to him that had
one of his boyhood friends like Hubert Leicester been there they might
have celebrated finding themselves up the Amazon by swimming in it as
they had once swum in rowdy groups in the Severn and Terne.  In those
days country boys had swum naked and he could quite see it would be
essential to find a secluded spot.  However, from his observation
seclusion was one of the things the region was richest in.  And think
what a jape it would be ...

On impulse he snatched up his hat and cane and, having asked
directions, walked down the gangway and set off for the Schiller
Institute.  This building, when he found it, almost bore out Molly's
guess that it might be worth seeing.  It was an imposing but not very
large old house set back from the rumbling avenue by walled grounds
with ironwork gates.  As he approached the front door he thought for a
moment there was evidence of crime or mishap partly concealed by a bush
of garish flowers: a single brown leg emerged at an angle, the sole of
its foot palely gleaming.  But as he walked on he could see it belonged
to a sleeping Brazilian lying crosswise in a hammock slung very low
between two trees in deep shade.  He rang the bell and after a moment
the door opened and there stood the lady who had addressed him in the
street that morning.

'You came,' she said in evident pleasure.  'Oh, I'm so glad."

'Your letter left me little choice, as you intended.  Good heavens Lena
... What a long, long, time,' and they grasped one another's forearms
uncertainly.  'Ah,' said Edward after a moment, 'I thought I'd stumbled
on the scene of a dramatic crime."  He indicated the shrubbery.  'That
fellow looked dead to me: I could only see his feet."

She followed his gaze and laughed.  'That's our gardenerjodo.  I
sincerely hope he's not dead since only he knows how to put up our
Christmas tree.  But please, please come in, Edward.  I'm going to call
you Edward, you see: that's how you were.  The "Sir" is somebody
else."

'I'm afraid it is.  I often fear it's what I've become."

'Well, we've all acquired our stage names, it was inevitable.  See?

I'm Frau von Pussels, the widow of a merchant and the director of an
institute.  But my memory is excellent.  And do you remember what it
was we played?"

'I rather think it was a sonata by Rubinstein.  I'd guess the one in
G.) 'Ach!  There's nothing wrong with your memory either.  Imagine,
thirty-nine years."  She had led the way automatically into the salon
as if this were her private house.  Now she walked to the piano, threw
up the lid and, still standing, played the sonata's opening few bars,
turning her head to watch him with a smile which anticipated his
delighted recognition.  But he only remained as if turned in wood
before saying 'Terrible rot really."  She closed the lid, perplexed,
even deflated.

'I suppose one might outgrow Rubinstein,' she said.

'I'm afraid I've outgrown music, Lena.  It no longer gives me any
pleasure."

 'Oh Edward, you haven't changed.  It's incredible.  I can still hear
you saying how boring it is playing the violin instead of flying a
kite."

'Did I say that?  It shows how wise I was at such an early age.  It
a]shows I'm nothing if not consistent.  Now you must tell me ")Ut
yourself.  Who was Herr von Pussels?  I seem to have heard the name
even though I know it's on your letters."

'llnfortunately it's almost the first thing one sees of Manaos from the
river.  You have entered part of the far-flung empire of Pussels
Cronifer GmbH."

'That was the name.  It's all over town.  Who or what is Cronifer?"

'A Swiss."

Edward made a barking sound which caused a momentary hum within the
136sendorfer.  'Perfect!  A bearer of watches.  A man with time on his
hands."

'Oh!  He was very hard-working, he had no time for anything.

He was here in the early days but his family have since gone back to
Z6rich.  There's no shortage of Cronifers there.  But I'm the last von
Pussels now that our son is dead, and of course I'm not a genuine
one.

Another empire on its last legs, you see.  It may survive as a name but
it will gradually be taken over by managers.  Family concerns don't
last, do they?  Even if circumstances allow one to pass on the name the
children seldom inherit that energy which founded the firm.  How
couldthey?  Their laps are full of fruit.  They don't have to clear a
patch of jungle and plant the orchard as their grandparents did."

'Would your son have been an exception?"

'Eusebius?  He was not interested in fruit.  He was a child.  I don't
know what he was interested in and neither did he.  Sometimes it was
music and sometimes it was going to dig up Troy with Schliemann and
sometimes it was duelling and sometimes it was learning to drive a
motor car.  My God, Edward, what did we do, our generation?  We killed
off our own children before they even knew who they were.  And now
look: Babylon, Nineveh, Troy, Egypt.  Germany."

'England too.  We've all had the same thought."

'Well, so we have.  Of course.  And of course it doesn't help.

Come upstairs at least, sit down, we'll drink a glass of something.

Are you yet familiar with our guarand?  Excellent."  She rang a bell.

A maid met them at the bottom of the marble staircase and Lena gave her
orders before they went up.  An halfway landing was lit by a window
framed in dark-leaved creepers bobbled with flowers or fruit like
brilliant yellow beads.  In this patch of light stood a plinth with a
large bronze bust on it.

'Our Founder?"  suggested Edward.

'How irreverent you English are about culture!  Now and then I admire
it rather.  It looks so like courage in the face of immortality."

'Not a bit of it.  It's temerity born of pure ignorance."  With the
fond gesture of one habitually kind to dogs he patted Schiller's
laurelled head as he passed.  Observing this at the edge of her vision
Lena smiled in self-satisfaction like one who has correctly solved a
crossword puzzle clue.

'Still the same Edward.  Oh, don't worry; I shall't patronise you.

I'm far too happy to see you again, you know."

'it has been a goodish time.  Rather a lot seems to have happened since
those days but whenever I try to remember exactly what, I can't come up
with enough to fill the gap.  One got married, one did some work, one
survived.  Don't ask me what it was all for, though."

'Very well.  But I must ask what it is you're doing here?  I was
amazed, which war volkommen barr when I heard you had arrived in
Manaos,' She had led the way into her office and Edward sat down
creakingly on a wicker chaise longue, his hat and cane on the floor
beside him.  'Shall I tell you the first thing which crossed my
mind?"

'You probably don't need to."

'No.  It was only forhalf a second.  I knew it was stupid as soon as it
had been thought.  You truly didn't know I was here."

'Truly not, Lena.  I heard from what-was-his-name, Stdrnpfli, that
you'd finished at Leipzig but after that I more or less lost touch
until a letter turned up from him in i899 to say you were married and
had left Europe."

'And in i886 you met your own future wife, in any case."

'You're a good deal better informed about me than I am about you.  Why
don't you tell me why I came here?"

'Don't you know, Edward?"

'I'm by no means certain.  Come to that I'm not absolutely clear as to
why I've done any particular thing these last three years."

'I was so sad for you when I heard about Lady Alice, Edward.

What can I say?  A person of considerable gifcs."The small solecism
hung about the room with the flavour of conventional piety, so she
added: 'We have here in our library a copy of her novel, as well as an
excellent translation she made of Ritter Guck."

'She wrote the novel before she met me,' he began, only at that moment
the maid came in with guarand and little cakes and said something to
her employer in a low voice.  Lena motioned her to wait.

'I'm dreadfully sorry, Edward, but it seems I must deal with an
interruption.  A countryman of yours is downstairs and I need to have a
quick word with him about a talk he's giving us.  Would you mind very
much if I went down for two minutes only?  I could ask him to call back
but he is very busy as well as being amiable and esteemed."

'Of course not, Lena ... What makes him esteemed?"

'Maybe that depends on who one is.  Some are impressed by his work as a
priest since he's the English Chaplain here in Amazonas - surely
Anglicanism's largest parish.  For others he's simply one of the
world's best amateur entomologists.  It's about moths that he will
address us."

'Sounds an odd sort of fellow.  Why don't you show him up here, unless
you wish to be private?"

'Oh Edward, he would be most honoured to meet you."

'Just so long as he doesn't want to talk about music."

'Why should he?"  Her tone had a sharpness which in the next moment
vanished as she turned to the maid.  In due course the Reverend Miles
Moss was shown in.

'Mr Moss,' said Lena, going forward to greet him.  'Thank you for
coming.  May I present to you a very old - one might say longlost
friend of mine who unexpectedly arrived on the Hildebrand yesterday?

Sir Edward Elgar, the Reverend Miles Moss."

'Honoured, sir, honoured,' said the entomologist, shaking hands with
Edward as he rose.  'Frau von Pussels is always introducing me to her
distinguished guests but this time she has surpassed herself.  Welcome
to our Green Hell, sir."

'Is that what people call it?"

'Oh yes, and much more besides.  Of course it's paradise for me as a
moth-man.  I suppose you aren't a fellow-sufferer?  An obsession I fear
has reached in me the proportions of a vice, a positive vice.  I have
to be increasingly on my guard lest my real duties become neglected.

Remember Chaucer, sir, and his corrupt prelate?  "I rekke nevere, whan
that they been beryed, Though that hir soules oona-blakeberyed!"?  I
sometimes find myself in danger of going a-mothing at the expense of my
scattered flock's spiritual welfare.  Most regrettable,' and he gave a
little chirrup and bounced on the soles of his feet.

'I like moths,' said Edward cautiously when the Reverend Moss paused
for breath.  'But I couldn't describe myself as a moth-man.

Bit more of a dog-man and a horse-man, I suppose.  Yes, I like moths
well enough.  I don't swat'em.  Talking of which, maybe you can tell me
something.  I was going to look it up in South when I got home.  Is
there a moth called the Brindled Marsh?"

'Brindled Marsh?  Oh dear, I've become so out of touch with the British
lepidoptera.  After a time all those fanciful names start to sound
interchangeable, don't they?  Least Carpets and Smoky Wainscots,
Grizzled Skippers and Silvery Arches.  To say nothing of a Muslin
Footman.  I mean to say, jolly easy to imagine a Grizzled Footman with
Fallen Arches, what?  No, let me see.

Brindled Marsh.  Why yes, I believe there is such a thing.  Why?"

'Nothing really,just a silly thing I discovered.  It's an anagram of
"RMS Hildebrand"."

The Reverend Moss thought for a moment, his head on one side.

'By Jove, so it is.  Clever, that.  Dear old Hildebrand.  The number of
times I've watched her come and go.  Like clockwork, if a good deal
noisier.  As a matter of fact I saw you sail past the other evening,
Sir Edward.  Well, perhaps not you personally although I can't be
certain of that.  I was too far away.  Actually, I was up a tree."

'llp a tree?"

'Exactly.  I was waiting for nightfall.  I wasjust about to light my
lamps when I heard the ship coming.  You can hear the rumble of engines
for miles across water, you know."

And suddenly Edward saw again the white-robed figure standing at the
top of an immensely tall dead tree on the river-bank, facing the
setting sun in hieratic pose.  'I say, was that you dressed all in
white?"

'There, you did see me.  How embarrassing.  In such a way, my dear
Magdalena, one acquires a perfectly undeserved reputation for wild
eccentricity.  A middle-aged Englishman a hundred feet up a tree in the
middle of the Amazonjungle at dusk, wearing a newlylaundered
surplice.

Olio.  What are we to make of that before we send out sharpish for the
nearest alienist?  But like many a person before me caught red-handed I
can explain everything.  I'm on the trail of what I believe is an
unknown species of the Sphingidae hawk-moths, you know, Sir Edward.  A
very weird creature indeed, very weird, since if I'm not mistaken it
has trained itself to suck the blood of animals."

A varripire moth, you mean?  That's downright sinister."

'Precisely.  I have all sorts of evidence I won't bore you with at this
momcn, since it's what I'm supposed to be talking about to this
Institute shortly.  But in brief he's the devil to pin down - ha!

pin down, that's exactly what I have in mind,' and he bounced with
pleasure.  'He never seems to come below sixty feet or so.  I presume
you know, Sir Edward, that there are different layers of jungle canopy,
each will its distinct flora and fauna?  You didn't?

But yes indeed.  The majority of the creatures which live in those
aerial worlds never come to earth at all and consequently we remain in
sad ignorance of life up there.  I now believe this fellow is one such
denizen and it therefore behoves the lepidopterist to leave earth and
track him down in his inconvenient habitat.  One tries with a number of
lures, sugaring And the like, but you happened to see me as I was about
to stated there in dazzling white beneath three powerful pressure-lamps
and tempt him with my blood.  It's a very hot pursuit,' he added
mildly, as if mere discomfort were hardly worth recording.

'Goodness,' said Edward, impressed.

'I know,' agreed Lena.  'He tells us these things and people in his
lectures can scarcely believe them.  Think of the other sorts of
insects he attracts up there which sting and pester, to say nothing of
tree snakes and poison spiders and all manner of horrors."

'Frau von Pussels exaggerates, of course,' Miles Moss said in
deprecation, and at that moment Edward noticed how scarred were the
backs of his brown unpriestly hands.  'From time to time one gets
unwelcome visitors, of course, but really when trying to juggle with
nets and killing-bottles the greatest danger is the simple one of
falling out of the tree.  I've done that many times but up to now I've
bounced,' he said, doing so.  'But you must excuse all this chat.  I'm
not used to such famous company and I've a tendency to blather.  I
really came to tell you the title of my talk, Magdalena, and confirm
the date.  Thursday at seven, we agreed?

I'm calling it "Three hitherto unknown hawk-moths".  I had hoped the
vampire would be a fourth but I had no luck the other night so it will
have to wait."

While Lena made notes Edward asked, 'How did you get back to I Manaos
so quickly?"

'Ah, that's sharp of you, sir.  I'm lucky enough to have the use of a
little steam launch loaned me whenever I come here by one of my
wealthier parishioners.  It's really too kind.  The boat is very fast
and being of shallow draught can be driven with much more recklessness
than a liner like the Hildebrand.  I overtook you somewhat after
midnight, you know.  I'd only been down there for the day.  Oh dear, I
really must go.  I do hope we can meet before you go away again, Sir
Edward.  We could do a swap."

'What had you in mind?"

'Your news for my gossip, at the very least.  There are heaps of things
I'd like to know about what's happening in England at the moment and
even if I can't interest you in the petty scandals of northern Brazil
there are always some strange tales in circulation wholly unlike
anything you might hear in the Home Counties.

Though of course your own voyage here furnished one of the most
mystifying and sad episodes I've heard in ages."

'Ah, poor Dr Ashe you mean?

'Yes.  A wretched business.  The banks of the river from Pari to
Iquitos are no doubt buzzing with the news at this very moment."

'I have heard nothing of this?"  said Lena.

'The Hildebrand's doctor,' explained Edward.  'Nil nisi bonum and all
that, but he was a rum sort of chap from the outset.  jumped overboard
in the dead of night after we left Pari.  Suicide, apparently."

'How awful!"  'Yes.  In a funny way I liked what I'd seen of him,
too.

Very direct and outspoken.  Ex-Army, so perhaps that explains it."

'I've yet to speak with Captain Maddrell but maybe we should hold a
short memorial service here.  There's frankly no chance that his, er,
body will turn up - not in these parts.  And had he reached the shore
alive I'd have heard by now: that sort of news travels faster than the
swiftest launch around here - don't ask me how.

Poor unhappy man.  What an eventful voyage you must have had."

'Oh, he was not the only intriguing character on board.  We also had a
most colourful pair of ladies who got off in Pari.  If they're members
of your far-flung congregation you maybe know them?

Dora Bellamy and Kate Hammond?"

'Know them?  My dear Sir Edward, everybody knows them.

They're famous in these parts.  I dare say even a little
infamous, for although it's scarcely part of my vocation to go about
spreading calumnies they themselves would be deeply flattered to hear
me ascribe a certain notoriety to their reputations.  They're
splendidly quick-witted as I'm sure you discovered."

'Oh, is that all you're prepared to say?"

'For the present yes, since I must fly.  I shall leave you, sir, on
that tantalising note.  Maybe, Magdalena, if it's agreeable to Sir
Edward we might have dinner together after my talk?"

'I should like that,' Edward told him and it was clear to her that
whatever it was he responded to in the Reverend Moss it had the ability
to fetch him out of himself.  'I want awesome scandals and horrid
tales.  I wish to be diverted and be-sinistered."

'It's a tall order, Sir Edward, but we'll do our best.  And now I'm off
to buy - amongst other things - a quantity of cyanide,' and the door
closed behind the Anglican Chaplain on the Amazon.

'You never did tell me why you came,' said Lena at length.

'That's because I don't know myself.  Oh, some friends of mine did the
trip a while back and praised Booth's and the scenery.

They had a nice time, in short.  I was having a rotten time and I
wanted above all to avoid Christmas, which I most cordially detest, and
I suddenly remembered their cruise.  The Amazon why not?

Though I nearly went up the Nile.  Ever since the Tutankhamun discovery
it's been at the back of my mind to see the Valley of the Kings but - I
don't know.  I suppose I thought it would be intolerably hot and
stark.

I wanted comfort, I'm afraid.

One has grown old."

'All the time you speak as if you've had a sad life, Edward."

'Haven't you?"

'No."  She said this consideringly, as if it were something which had
not occurred to her before.  'I don't believe I have.  I don't think of
it like that.  There have been sad things, awful things.  But much of
the time I've enjoyed myself."

'Even here?"

'Why not even here?  I'm not an exile, you know.  When I met Otto and
we were married I was prepared for anything.  He was so full of energy
I wanted to go anywhere with him.  You see by then I'd finally accepted
what you had once so kindly tried to tell me: that I was not a
genius."

'I'm sure I never said anything of the sort."

'Of course you did, Edward.  You couldn't help it becauseyou were
one.

You were right to be impatient with my delusions."

'My dear Lena, I remember you as a first-rate pianist.  Very likely you
had the makings of a great pianist but I was not a reliable judge.  As
you probably recall, the piano's not an instrument dear to me.  People
scurry about it more or less adroitly and I'm afraid I miss the finer
points.  What is true is that it's fearsomely difficult to make a
career as a soloist, especially on an instrument as commonly played as
the piano.  God knows the violin's no easier as I found to my own
cost.

I've no doubt we could neither of us have made satisfactory solo
careers."

'No.  That was not my difficulty, Edward; it was that I so clearly
lacked something else which you had.  Of course I can quite see now
this was my own problem and not yours, but at the time.  . . ' 'At the
time.  Oh, there were good things in those days, weren't there?

Remember that first concert in Leipzig?  How wet we were from the
rain?"

'Doch!  And the first piece in the programme was a Mendelssohn
overture, Meeresstille undgliickliche Fahrt, and you turned to me and
said in German "Out of the rain and into the sea" and it made me laugh
so."

'I expect my awful German was the funny part.  It doesn't sound very
witty to me."

'Not now, no.  It was the time."

'Did you ever hear of a piece I once wrote called the Enigma
Variations?"

'Edward!  How absurd you are!  Do you think you're talking to the wife
of a caboclo?  It's enraging."

'Oh, sorry.  Anyway there's a quotation in it from Meeresstille, if you
remember.  I'm sure now it was no accident."  Even as he made this
noncommittal evasion he felt it as a physical lurch, as abrupt as a
horse baulking at a hedge, a shying-away from anything more headlong
which might lead to unknown tracts of rough country.

'Odd how such little things go round and round in the mind until they
pop up from nowhere years later."

'Come here, Edward, I want to show you something."

She led the way outside across the passage to the Library, the timber
of whosejoinered floor gleamed like a sheet of oiled iron in the light
from the windows.  The room itself disseminated a smell of beeswax and
frangipani.

 'It would make a splendid club, you know,' he said as he surveyed the
shelves of books and the clock ticking on the mantelpiece.

'If you allowed smoking and had some decent sporting prints on the
wall."

But she was not to be provoked.  She went serenely over to a group of
shelves and said 'There!"  'Very nice."

'No, Edward, but you must look at them.  You don't know what is
here."

He went forward and scanned the shelves in silence which he suddenly
broke with small exclamations.  'Good Lord!"  'I say!"  'That old
thing" 'Well, really!"  'Well really,' he said again, 'you have been to
a lot of trouble.  Or somebody has.  Time must hang heavy out here."

'What do you mean?"  But she already knew she had made a mistake and
that in all probability there would be no way of undoing it.

'I mean imagine the waste of energy.  All this time you've been
collecting me.

He had never before seen such a gathering-together of his works and of
things concerning his works, his life.  Or rather, he had; and he had
supposed Alice to be the only person in the world thus to have filed
away everything.  He had hated it but was never able to dissuade her.

It smacked to him of hagiology.  There was something infinitely
distasteful about the thought of anyone dogging his footsteps with a
pan and brush, as it were, gathering up with eager impartiality a
symphony, a grocery bill, a yellowed review, a letter, his
nail-clippings.  He was diminished by it even as he felt she had
demeaned herself.  Had she not written poetry?  Evidently the man of
flesh had not been enough.  Why had he never been allowed to get away
with merely (merely!) being a composer?  But no, it had also been his
daily duty to connive at the creation of his own legend, at the
erection of some ridiculous monument to himself constructed from torn
scraps of paper, a broken favourite pen, interviews he wished he'd
never given: a jumble of the ephemeral and the lasting which mocked
both.  He'd never understood it even as he grudgingly recognised it as
one more of the terms she created for disciplining his moody and
vagrant Muse.  Thus had she tried to temper his dartings between
apathy and excitement, between months of inertia and burstings of
energy, and on days of precious sunshine had kept him in his study.

Edward the intermittently industrious had been swept up in the Elgar
industry and was carried along helplessly by to meet head-on the
incoming bills as they poured across his desk.

'It's damned cheek!"  he heard himself say, his voice all but lost in
the spacious library.  Then louder, 'You had no right, Lena."

Surprising herself, she remained calm.  She had never dreamed he might
one day see what she had so painstakingly assembled but now that he had
she felt not the slightest cause for shame.  'I had a perfect right,
Edward.  I have merely been doing what any decent librarian would do
and, I'm sure, has been doing across Europe and America and everywhere
else."

'There's no privacy, none."

She realised belatedly that he was not really addressing her at all,
that the vehemence in his words was left over from another time and
another place.  'You'll find nothing private here I assure you,
Edward.

Nothing.  All that is here is public property and has been printed and
issued.  There are no letters, no personal things.

I'm sorry if our collection gives offence but you're a famous composer
and your music is now public property.  That is the price of fame."

Somehow her words quietened his alarm.  With the unfamiliar cries of
brilliant birds which rolled and twirled in the vines outside the
window he felt an unexpected drifting-in of an earlier mood which had
reminded him both reassuringly and gloomily that something essential
remained untouched, unassuaged, unexpressed by an entire lifetime's
work.  He looked again at the shelves of material: a corpus, a
cadaver.

What had this fossil past to do with him?  Whom did these Jurassic
strata concern?

'Well, it's silly to quarrel over such nonsense.  I suppose I should be
congratulating you, Lena.  As a librarian you've evidently spared no
pains.  There's stuff here I'd long forgotten about."  And as if to
make amends he drew out a part-song and glanced through it.  'My God,
what utter rot!  I've vague memories of having sweated blood to finish
this and I don't believe it made me a penny piece.  But that goes for
pretty much everything else you've got here."

He put it back but not before she had glimpsed the attribution of the
text.  She was perfectly certain he had not been describing his wife's
poetry.  How that woman posed a challenge to the conscientious
Elgarian!  An apparent spinster of forty had swept a struggling,
unknown composer of nearly thirty-two to the altar of the Brompton
Oratory.  Or was it the other way about?  She, finally, was the
greatest enigma of them all.  Lena could sense her puzzling ghost even
here, standing at the shoulder of this peculiar man.  Was it through
her or despite her that he appeared to remain so identifiably the youth
she remembered from Leipzig and Worcester days?

'What a strange place,' he was saying.  He had moved to a window and
was looking out.  'All the way up the Amazon to find what I most wanted
to leave behind."

'I'm sorry."

'Oh, it's not your fault, Lena.  just circumstances.  Fate.  The
business of Fate is mockery rather than tragedy, and I feel mocked.

Let's talk about old times, we'll be on safer round.  Or maybe not
...

Do you think I should come to your moth-man's lecture?"

'Of course, unless you have something better to do.  He's very
entertaining.  He liked you, you know; he really meant for us to have
dinner together afterwards.  Are you free?"

'Yes, I suppose I must be.  Anyway I like the idea.  Perhaps he can
chill my blood."

'Then we shall dine the day after tomorrow.  Forgive me, Edward, if I
... That young lady you were with this morning.

Should I invite her too?"

'She's merely a fellow-passenger.  She gets off here so I don't suppose
I'll be seeing much more of her.  She's an artist.  Name of Molly
Air."

'An artist?  Oh, I should meet her."

'I shouldn't think she's very famous at present, she's just starting.

But she's interesting and estimable and undoubtedly serious.  She's
come to paint the Amazon."

'llnusual.  And she's single too?  You shall introduce us, Edward.

I insist."

'I do admire you, you know, maintaining your cultural outpost."

'Do you?  Well, I too am serious.  You and I have both felt the world
shudder.  At all costs civilisation must be handed on."

'Must it?  If you remember, it was that civilisation which caused the
shudder in the first place.  It was kings and kaisers who fought the
war, not Brazilian Indians.  I couldn't believe it was happening.  It
made everything horrible beyond belief.  I loved Germany and the
Germans yet practically overnight one had to treat them as an enemy.

Incredible.  It was the Germans who'd been my greatest friends and
champions.  They recognised Gerontius when the English were still
turning up their noses at it.  How could I suddenly repudiate Hans
Richter and Richard Strauss or publicly despise the country of Brahms,
Wagner, Schumann, Beethoven, Bach ... my God, the list is endless."

'Of course, Edward.  That's what wars do.  They are wholly insane."

'Half my close friends were German or of German and Jewish descent.

Frank Schuster, Augustjaeger, Alfred Rodewald, Henry Ettling.  Brodsky
at Manchester.  Fred Kalisch the critic.  Friends of Brahms and Strauss
and Tschaikowsky and Faur ... Is an artist to shut himself away like
some sort of national hermit?  To this day I believe it counted against
me.  After the general braying about how I was supposed to epitornise
England - whatever that meant there were some filthy little innuendoes
about my keeping the company of Huns.  You must excuse me, Lena, but
you've no idea the beastliness of some of our press.  There is in
England a disgusting fake patriot they've just jailed for fraud called
Bottornley who ran a rag calledJohn Bull ... Oh Lena, you've no idea.

That war killed everything."

'You suppose I don't know?  It killed my son, Edward.  Your reputation
has survived.  And do you imagine we too didn't have a popular press of
our ownjust as full of hate and lies?  Even out here the ... the mud
and the stink of it came.  So what now can we do but try and repair
this civilisation so such things cannot be again?

Do you think I didn't come under criticism even out here in the middle
of the jungle?  That in our echt deutsches Schiller-Institut I was
keeping so much music of Edward Elgar, British nationalist composer?  I
was telling people "Listen - only listen: he has great things to say
even to us Germans who already have so many famous voices."  And if
that was true in September was it suddenly to become a lie in
October?

No.  Nobody comes with honour from such things."

She had spoken with such a crescendo of passion he was shaken out of
his own mcsincrism, perhaps not by the sting of her reminder but by her
accent's decay and incoherence.  Harsh words between old people in a
quiet library, not directed at each other's head but hanging above like
an evil smoke.  It was enough to remind him of a characteristic which
he had shed from the bland image he retained of her memory: that she
had always been as forceful as he.  And for the first time he could
clearly recall her attraction, a pungency of temperament when her age
and sex had most presumed demureness and self-effacement.  This sudden
reminder of how she had been in the streets of Leipzig and on the hills
near Worcester bumped up against the next forty years which he had
lived - it now felt - within a penumbra of correct behaviour and then
the long shadow of habit.

'Well, we're not at war still."

'We?  Us, you mean?  Oh Edward, I'm ... I must apologise.  It's so
difficult.  So much time has gone by and yet ... I have to remember I'm
talking to a man whose biography is on these shelves.

I last remember you as a boy, a young man, and now ... a biography."

'And I'm not even dead, you mean."

'No,' she laughed.  'Not that.  But all thosefacts: your life, our
friendship - why not be truthful and call it our romance?  - all of it
doesn't really count, not against what you've done."

For it was strange, she thought, how easily when talking to certain
artists or reading their biographies one forgot the greatness of their
art.  One might read about Schumann, for instance, and his life at once
degenerated into a pathetic domestic tally of hypochondria and
misery.

'Towards March,' one might read, 'these depressions and aural
disturbances intensified to the point where Robert was consulting Dr
Carus almost daily leaving little time or energy to spare for
composition.  Nevertheless he managed to fulfill his commission on time
and the Gewandhaus Orchestra began rehearsals.  But almost at once it
became apparent that Clara was pregnant again with their sixth child
and simultaneously his old alarming symptoms began to re-appear.  . . '
For a time we'd been thinking, yes, the usual human problems; we'd even
begun to feel slightly superior since our own were not as a rule so
doom-laden.

But then we suddenly returned to our senses: that 'commission' was the
Manfred Overture - or the piano concerto or whatever one of the
masterpieces of nineteenth-century music.  The saga of an artist's life
was on the whole an irrelevance and the public's voyeuristic interest
in the circumstances of creativity so easily and vulgarly overshadowed
the creations themselves.

In the silence he watched from the window the clouds in the huge
Amazonian sky which seemed to cast never a shadow into the garden
below.  Two urubus were just visible in the alley which ran beneath one
wall of the grounds.  Ugly, verminous-looking creatures like turkeys
with mange, they were tearing at a dark lump of something, bouncing and
sidling before the approach of a gaunt dog.  There ought to be some way
out, was the idea which filled his mind.  There ought to be some way of
shucking off this longing for ancient times and grieving for the
present and expecting from the future at least an unspecific truce.  It
was no longer clear where one lived nor from what one drew
sustenance.

'What a strange place,' he only said once more.

'It is and it isn't.  If you look at everything like the travellers'
guides do then it's nothing but contrasts: the modern port, the
aboriginal huts; the Opera House, the open sewers; the trams, the bony
horses; the newspapers, the illiteracy ... That's how they go on.

But the more one sees of Brazil and countries like it the less strange
such things seem, the more ordinary.  I don't understand why everybody
thinks Progress must be instant and uniform.  Anyone can see
differences, they don't have to make them significant by calling them
contrasts.  Did not Ruskin look at your Industrial Revolution and
complain that the railways had filled every green valley with belching
smoke?  Yes, I'm sure it was Ruskin."

'My dear Lena, I didn't mean ... When I said "strange" I was thinking
of rather a different thing.  But it doesn't matter.  Is there anything
particular I should do or see while I'm here?"

'There are trips.  You might go to the Tarumd Falls but they're really
only worth seeing injune andjuly after the rainy season.  It's quite
dramatic - not the Falls themselves, they're ordinary - but when the
Amazon floods the water here rises forty feet and the Tarumd Forest is
drowned.  One must go by rowboat through alleys between the tops of the
trees ... What else?  You could see the giant lilies at Solim5es: I
believe they're called Victoria Regina lilies so you might feel a
patriotic urge to visit them?  No?  Then there's bathing in Chap6o
Virado at Mosqueira."

'I don't know.  None of those sounds .  . . ' 'Or we have here in
Manaos, believe it or not, a museum of coins which is the world's fifth
largest."

'Only the coins in my pocket have ever held any interest for me."

'Or you could stay here and talk to me."

But within half an hour he had taken himself off to the Hildebrand
where he made a mistaken attempt at a journal entry.  He soon crossed
out the three lines he had written and rang the bell for Pyce.  It was
high time for something sensible and down-to-earth:

time for a closer look at the river-water in which the ship floated.

The Hildebrand meanwhile had taken on the aspect of a hotel.  Of the
passengers who had not already disembarked most were away all day on
various trips and diversions; and of those some had even engaged a room
ashore for a few days.  Molly Air was still living aboard in a
lingering fashion.and Edward presumed she had come to an arrangement
with the Purser, retaining her cabin for a per them consideration until
her berth was needed.  He half wished she would suddenly vanish.  He
didn't want to witness any erosion of her determination, nor the
process by which the clarity of plans laid in the subdued light of
England began to cast ominous shadows under a tropical glare.  In such
ways did simple grand designs for a life fetch up against the world's
small hard edges.  He had no doubt her need to make economies was
pressing; he was also sure that her determination to push on to Iquitos
had been made shakier and more fateful by the unforeseen Fortescue and
his presence in Manaos.  Now and again a low mooing could be heard from
behind the town.  This would rise to a distant bellow and then fall
abruptly to a moan before stopping altogether.  Molly, who happened to
be on deck with Edward during one of these moments of animal agony said
proudly, 'That's Forty."

'I wondered what it was.  Is he testing his machines?"

'Only their engines.  Tomorrow they'll fly them.  Why don't you come
and watch?"

So next mornin they took a tram to the outskirts and walked down a dirt
road to where, across a cleared expanse of ground, a distant white pole
stood with a wind-sock on it.  The road was potted with the
half-evaporated puddles of yesterday's rains.  From the mud at their
edges thick clusters of white butterflies rose in clouds around the
walkers as they passed.

'It's not like this in Worcestershire,' said Edward goodhurnouredly,
dashing butterflies from his face and endeavouring to sweep a forward
path with his cane.  But they were distracted from the insects by a
sudden howling and in the distance a bright yellow biplane took off,
banked steeply and made a circuit of the field, coming back low along
the road over their heads.

'Oh I say!"  Edward had his face to the sky, the single hind wing of a
butterfly stuck unnoticed to the sweat on his temple beneath the panama
hat.

'Isn't he wonderful?"  shrieked Molly into the din as the machine
passed over them trailing a cool draught which smelt of burnt castor
oil.  The wings waggled briefly in salutation before the aircraft
landed and jolted to a stop two hundred yards off.  It remained
stationary for a moment, the propeller ticking over and flashing in the
sun before it revved abruptly and cantered once more into the air.

This time the pilot put his machine through some more strenuous paces
and Molly and Edward had long since reached the modest club house when
it taxied up.  The engine stopped, the racket died and Fortescuejumped
down, his face dark with burnt oil except for the outline of the
goggles he swung in one hand.  His hair was blown flat.

'Hullo old girl,' he said, 'Sir Edward.  Come to watch the fun?"

He was wearing a battered leather flyingjacket done up to the neck with
a lump at its chest.  As he spoke he opened it, allowing his binoculars
to swing loose.

'What's the view like from up there?"  asked Edward.

'Grandish.  One can see the occasional tree.  But I wasn't paying a lot
of attention, I'm afraid.  At this stage we'rejust testing to see if
the crates have been put together with all the bits in the right
order.

Up to now we haven't had much time for sight-seeing though we've
definitely noticed the odd hazard peculiar to these parts.

The Rio Negro's the most deceptive piece of water I've ever flown
over.

From up there it's like a sheet of black glass.  Impossible to judge
your height unless there's a boat below leaving a decent wake.

Otherwise it'd be all too easy to fly straight in.  There're these
damned vultures into the bargain."

'What happens if you fly into one?"  asked Molly, looking hard at the
plane behind him.

'Depends where it hits and when.  If it smashed your prop.  just after
take-off it would be a bit tricky.  I did hit a swan once, up over
Cambral.  It was pretty messy.  Some of it stuck in the radiator but
most ended up in the cockpit with me and my observer."

On the hard-standing beside the club house an engine started and a
second biplane - this one painted light blue - taxied a few yards
before opening up to full throttle and taking off.  A low storm of dust
and pebbles swept back towards the onlookers.

 'There goes Johnny."  The two simian riggers were standing outside,
oily hands on hips, watching the plane's progress.  A small dark puff
formed behind it transiently and after a second or two they all heard
the note of the engine blip before picking up again.

'Bit of dirt there, I'd say,'observed Fortescue asJohnny completed his
circuit and landed.  'Now, Sir Edward, I was going to insist on taking
you up for a flip, give you a taste, you know."

'Oh I say."  Edward swallowed nervously.

'But I'm very sorry to tell you I can't.  The local brass won't hear of
it."

Edward's disappointment was manifest.  'Surely the authorities in a
place like this can't be too punctilious?  I mean, a couple of bob in
the right pocket ... ?"

'You might think so and in most parts of this continent I daresay 'd be
right.  But the Brazilians seem to be particularly sensitive you about
aviation.  They say they gave us a government licence to do aerial
surveys and aerial surveys is what we can do.  Giving joyrides, even
free ones, breaks the conditions of our contract.  They're quite
surprisingly strict for a place stuck out in the middle of nowhere like
this."

'Maybe that's the reason,' said Molly.

'No doubt.  At any rate they insist on our filing flight-plans before
we fly, though I don't imagine they've got much in the way of
search-parties laid on.  The whole thing seems to be connected with
national honour somehow.  They're very put out because the Americans
claim to have invented flying - the Wright brothers and all that.  They
say Brazil did it first, chap called Santos-Dumont.

Don't ask me."

'Well never mind.  You surely mustn't dream of risking your
livelihoodjust to get me into the air.  I don't believe I'm dressed for
the part in any case."

'He won't even take me up,' said Molly consolingly.

But Edward was allowed to examine the aircraft and then to sit in the
cockpit of Fortescue's yellow machine.  It hadn't occurred to him that
a pilot could see so little: the view ahead was of struts, wires,
exhaust manifolds and an enormous propeller all pointing up into the
sky.

'How on earth do you steer the thing when you can't see the ground?" 
he asked.  Molly was struck by the incongruity of the composer's grey
head peering nervously over the leather-rimmed edge of the cockpit as
if he expected the machine to spring into life of its own accord and
carry him helplessly off.  She had to turn away to conceal her smile.

'You look over the edge until you're moving fast enough to get her tall
up.  It's only a few yards.  Once the tail's up the forward view's
pretty fair; you'd be surprised."  Fortescue was standing on a stirrup,
holding a strut and looking down at him.  'I know it seems like a
glorified kite but you'd be amazed how strong all this becomes when
it's loaded.  All these stays and everything are stressed for flight,
for the wings to support the weight of the machine in the air.  On the
ground the whole thing just sags with gravity.  Have you ever sailed,
Sir Edward?  Well, it's quite like a sailing-boat.  When the wind puts
everything under tension the boat suddenly becomes alive."

But Edward was thinking more of his kites, how limply on the ground
they lay like mere ideas for flight but how, once tacking up the sky,
the wind put heart into them, tautened them, made them dart and sing.

He was helped down from the cockpit and after a guarand in the club
house set off back to town with Molly.  Once again they passed through
the clouds of butterflies and once again Fortescue circled overhead.

But long after he was back on board the Hildebrand Edward could
remember as the morning's strongest impression the smell inside the
cockpit of high-octane aviation spirit, castor oil and cellulose
dope.

If the twentieth century had an incense which was not solely that of
exploded cordite then maybe this was it.  Certainly for the space of
half an hour it had quickened his blood.

'Be careful,' he said to Molly, but fondly.

'My friends, Sir Edward?"

'My dear, I wouldn't presume,' he told her with genuine alarm.

'I simply mean your work.  It's what chemists call the Litmus Test.

Either your work comes first because it has to, or it doesn't.  Either
you're an artist, or ... or .

'Or I'm a fake?"

'Not at all.  I meant something entirely honourable.  Dilettante?

Amateur?  But those have the wrong connotations.  Nobody has to be
anything.  Perhaps Molly Air is going to be someone who also paints
pictures.  And why not?  I myself also used to compose music.

Hard to believe, of course, about a decrepit globe-trotter with a
microscope and a new-found interest in flying machines.  We should all
be different things at different times in our lives."

But Molly took away with her to her own cabin a morose feeling of
admonishment which it suited her for quite some time to believe came
wholly from her disgruntled companion.

The next evening Edward joined perhaps thirty people, half of them
British residents, for the Reverend Moss's lecture at the Schiller
Institute.  He had already been introduced to some of the community's
elders, had lunched at the Consulate, dined at the Club.  He was not
sure of any of their names.  They were more or less portly, more or
less gaunt, showing to a greater or smaller degree the effects of long
exposure to fever and gin.  Of the two the fever appeared to have left
a lesser mark except maybe for a certain shadow about the eyes which
the fanciful might suppose to be mortal awareness.  But they all, even
the women, carried with them a bluffjoviality, an aura of soldiering
on.

They were clearly disconcerted by the sudden appearance in their midst
of Sir Edward Elgar.  It was one thing to glimpse a stout foreigner
promenading the streets of Manaos with a retinue, glossy mustachios and
an ice-cream suit and be told reverently that the fellow in question
was a world-famous Italian tenor.  It only confirmed their notions of
foreigners and music.  But it was another thing entirely to find this
soldierly gentleman who could have passed for a sporting peer drinking
brandy and soda in their club and talking about the recent flat-racing
eason, when in most of their minds he was vaguely associated with
Royalty and State occasions.  Had King George himself stumped in from
the jungle and asked their opinion of the last Cesarewitch they could
scarcely have been put less at their ease.  Besides, many thought,
surely Elgar was dead?  The composer?  But he plainly wasn't.  He was
here as large as life, sitting next to the German woman who ran the
place.  Bygones be bygones, of course, but it was all distinctly
strange.  As Vera Reynolds often remarked, one of the peculiar things
about living in Manaos was that one never knew who was going to turn
up.  Each time a ship like the Hildebrand docked it decanted the oddest
selection of people onto the streets and frankly into certain bedrooms
now and then.  If one lived in Calcutta or Rangoon or Singapore one
could predict pretty much the types who would wash up from time to
time: they varied little.

But here 'Well of course, that's what gives us the advantage over the
Empire set,' Vera had pointed out.  'We commercials are so much more
cosmopolitan, don't you think, or don't you?  Far less insular, I
always say."

If Edward had supposed that an hour's talk about three hitherto unknown
hawk-moths was going to be boring he was agreeably mistaken.  The
Reverend Moss was an excellent public speaker, unlike most preachers he
had ever heard.  He made a narrative of each discovery, an adventure of
the hunting-trips which took him with muslin net and killing-jar into
realms where most white men would venture only after a good deal of
fuss and preparation and girl about with bandoliers.  The hero of each
story, somehow, was always the moth: a good sport who had put up a
spirited run to evade detection and capture for so long.  The prey was
worthier far than the hunter.  Whereupon the Chaplain handed round a
series of airtight display boxes through whose glass lids his audience
could see each specimen on its little cork Calvary.  When it was over
and everyone had shaken hands and said what firstclass entertainment it
had been (while of course transcending mere entertainment) Lena took
Edward and her speaker aside.

'You are my guests now.  We shall go and have dinner.  Not another
word, please."

A horse-drawn cale(a took them rattling down the cobbled main streets
and then more silently but lurchingly through unmade side roads where
the wheels squelched through puddles and piles of vegetable matter.

They rejoined a narrow paved road down whose centre a pair of steel
tram-lines gleamed in the moon.  In a short while these stopped at a
wooden shed.  After a further fifty yards of slight descent Edward
could see the building for which they were evidently heading, since it
was lit by electricity.  The mere fact that there was-electricity
available but that the houses and huts they were passing leaked only
chinks of candlelight or the glow of oil lamps suggested they were in a
poor quarter of town.

' "O Caboclo",' said Miles Moss.  'How very nice.  Some time since I
was here."

'This isn't a place called Flores, is it?"

'That's right.  How did you kno , s'r?"  w ' 'Just something I'd
heard.

I must have remembered the name."

But now he felt a 'ah of guilt: this was where he had half agreed to J
dine with Molly and Fortcscue.  The gharry stopped and they all got out
and turned into the garden which had electric globes concealed about
the shrubbery.  These, by emphasising the should all be different
things at different times in our lives."

But Molly took away with her to her own cabin a morose feeling of
admonishment which it suited her for quite some time to believe came
wholly from her disgruntled companion.

The next evening Edward joined perhaps thirty people, half of I J them
British residents, for the Reverend Moss's lecture at the Schiller
Institute.  He had already been introduced to some of the community's
elders, had lunched at the Consulate, dined at the Club.  He was not
sure of any of their names.  They were more or less portly, more or
less gaunt, showing to a greater or smaller degree the effects of long
exposure to fever and gin.  Of the two the fever appeared to have left
a lesser mark except maybe for a certain shadow about the eyes which
the fanciful might suppose to be mortal awareness.  But they all, even
the women, carried with them a bluff 'oviality, an aura of soldiering
on.

J They were clearly disconcerted by the sudden appearance in their
midst of Sir Edward Elgar.  It was one thing to glimpse a stout
foreigner promenading the streets of Manaos with a retinue, glossy
mustachios and an ice-cream suit and be told reverently that the fellow
in question was a world-famous Italian tenor.  It only confirmed their
notions of foreigners and music.  But it was another thing entirely to
find this soldierly gentleman who could have passed for a sporting peer
drinking brandy and soda in their club and talking about the recent
flat-racing season, when in most of their minds he was vaguely
associated with Royalty and State occasions.  Had King George himself
stumped in from the jungle and asked their opinion of the last
Cesarewitch they could scarcely have been put less at their ease.

Besides, many thought, surely Elgar was dead?  The composer?  But he
plainly wasn't.  He was here as large as life, sitting next to the
German woman who ran the place.  Bygones be bygones, of course, but it
was all distinctly strange.  As Vera Reynolds often remarked, one of
the peculiar things about living in Manaos was that one never knew who
was going to turn up.  Each time a ship like the Hildebrand docked it
decanted the oddest selection of people onto the streets and frankly
into certain bedrooms now and then.  If one lived in Calcutta or
Rangoon or Singapore one could predict pretty much the types who would
wash up from time to time: they varied little.

But here 'Well of course, that's what gives us the advantage over the
Empire set,' Vera had pointed out.  'We commercials are so much more
cosmopolitan, don't you think, or don't you?  Far less insular, I
always say."

If Edward had supposed that an hour's talk about three hitherto unknown
hawk-moths was going to be boring he was agreeably mistaken.  The
Reverend Moss was an excellent public speaker, unlike most preachers he
had ever heard.  He made a narrative of each discovery, an adventure of
the hunting-trips which took him with muslin net and killing-jar into
realms where most white men would venture only after a good deal of
fuss and preparation and girl about with bandoliers.  The hero of each
story, somehow, was always the moth: a good sport who had put up a
spirited run to evade detection and capture for so long.  The prey was
worthier far than the hunter.  Whereupon the Chaplain handed round a
series of airtight display boxes through whose glass lids his audience
could see each specimen on its little cork Calvary.  When it was over
and everyone had shaken hands and said what firstclass entertainment it
had been (while of course transcending mere entertainment) Lena took
Edward and her speaker aside.

'You are my guests now.  We shall go and have dinner.  Not another
word, please."

A horse-drawn calep took them rattling down the cobbled main streets
and then more silently but lurchingly through unmade side roads where
the wheels squelched through puddles and piles of vegetable matter.

They rejoined a narrow paved road down whose centre a pair of steel
tram-lines gleamed in the moon.  In a short while these stopped at a
wooden shed.  After a further fifty yards of slight descent Edward
could see the building for which they were evidently heading, since it
was lit by electricity.  The mere fact that there was-electricity
available but that the houses and huts they were passing leaked only
chinks of candlelight or the glow of oil lamps suggested they were in a
poor quarter of town.

"Cling Caboclo",' said Miles Moss.  'How very nice.  Some time
since I was here."

'This isn't a place called Flores, is it?"

'That's right.  How did you know, sir?"  just something I'd heard.  I
must have remembered the name."

But now he felt ajab of guilt: this was where he had half agreed to
dine with Molly and Fortescue.  The gharry stopped and they all got out
and turned into the garden which had electric globes concealed about
the shrubbery.  These, by cmphasising the darkness their light could
not disperse, had the effect of making the surrounding vegetation press
closely inwards.  At once the Reverend Moss left the short path and
began peering quizzically at the insects which whirled about each
bulb.

For a moment he looked a very English and parsonical figure, an elderly
gentleman in a cottage garden examining a neighbour's bees or roses.

Edward felt sadly remote from the generation which roared about the sky
in the heady scent of castor oil and cellulose dope.  Three people past
iddle age dining in the shadow of their hobbies, he thought as he mi I
I followed them in.

If he withdrew a little in the early stages of the meal it was probably
not noticed since Miles Moss talked with much ammation while orders
were given and things brought - such as the obligatory sifter of manioc
flour and a tall electric fan on a stand.

Both the Chaplain's talking like an old friend and the glances of Lena
(who after all was one) contributed to a feeling of disloyalty
disloyalty to a shade, to an era.  Lena looked more at him than she did
at the Chaplain, but there was something within him which rebelled
against conniving at intimacy, against piling up betrayal.

Besides, there was the heap of years which lay like ajagged Andean
range between that time and this.

'You were going to tell me about Dora Bellamy and Kate Hammond,' he
said when the wine had begun working and had brought him back to the
surface.

'Ah.  Oh dear.  I was slightly hoping you might not have remembered.

My calling is rather against gossip.  Or at least against bearing false
witness."

'Bear a true one, then."

'I suppose the matter seems so well known.  The fact is, Sir Edward,
those remarkable ladies are ... Might I enquire if you ever played
cards with them?"

'No.  They asked me once or twice and I nearly did but something
cropped up to prevent it."

'Perhaps then unless you're a very expert player it was just as
well."

'Oh?  Good, are they?"

'I'm told they make an extremely comfortable living out of it."

'Good Lord.  Professional gamblers?  That's rather rich.  What a prize
pair!"  'They work the boats, as I believe the saying is.  This is one
of the more lucrative cruise runs: many of the passengers between
Europe and South America are people of some substance, and once away
from land ... Well, I'm sure I don't need to tell you."

'Aren't the shipping lines wise to them?"

'I should imagine so.  But I'm told they quite often resort to
disguises and assumed names.  Really, one can't help admiring their
nerve, or ingenuity, or whatever it takes.  Of course it's infernal
cheek, but all the same."

'Would they be married to those gentlemen we saw greeting them in
Pari?"

'Not English?"

'Not remotely."

'In that case yes.  You undoubtedly saw Felipe and Wanderley.

A very amiable pair, I believe.  Rogues, in all probability, but what
of that?  This isn't England.  As a matter of fact Kate and Dora and
their respective husbands are well liked in Pari, even by the
community.  They're beyond the pale, of course, but the pale here is by
no means as fixed or as distant as it would be back home.

They're known to be good company and extremely kind and both ladies are
after all well-spoken and educated.  Some dislike them for exactly that
reason, of course - backsliders and traitors and all that sort of
thing.  But mostly - well, we're very relaxed here in Brazil as I'm
sure you've gathered and it rubs off even on the British."

'I'm honoured to have met them.  Though I must say I'm glad not to have
lost my shirt to them.  We composers are decidedly not in your category
of people of substance."

'Do let me ask you about music in England, Sir Edward.  I feel so out
of touch here and so much must be happening.  Does this fellow
Stravinsky carry much weight there?  From all accounts it's rather
barbaric stuff he writes."

But Edward's gaze had become distant.  'You'll have to forgive me,' he
said.  'I'm afraid I can't tell you anything.  I haven't been following
things of that sort at all.  Actually I've no further interest in music
- haven't had for years."

The Chaplain put down his fork in amazement.  'No interest?"he said.

'I don't ... I can't quite follow you, sir.  You can't have lost
interest in music."

'Well I have,' Edward told him shortly.  'I presume one may get bored
with what one has slaved at for decades?  I've done with all that kind
of thing.  It can't be so very difficult to comprehend.  After all,
it's hardly unknown for priests to lose their faith as they get older
and start to look at things differently.  There suddenly seems to be so
much else."

If the Reverend Moss was shocked by the sudden truculence he gave no
sign.  To Lena's evident relief he merely said 'Of course if you feel
that way, Sir Edward, I perfectly understand.  It must be tiresome if
one is very famous always being expected to allow perfect strangers to
pick one's brains about one's speciality.  Please forgive me."

But Edward seemed unable to let the matter rest.  'The point I'm trying
to make, sir, is that it's no longer my speciality.  Never was.

Merely a way of making a living - a dashed bad one, as it turned out.

I bitterly regret having wasted so much of my time in so futile an
enterprise.  The entire British public as well as my friends tried by
their attitude to warn me but I stupidly refused to heed them.

My own fault, of course.  Everyone was perfectly content to go on with
their favourite diet of Sullivan and polkas and I had to stand up like
a damn fool and offer them symphomes and suchlike.  Well, they quite
properly turned their noses up."

Even so the Chaplain was equal to this, evidently having realised that
Edward's abrupt change of mood had little to do with a dinner table in
Manaos.  'In that case Sir Edward I wonder if I could interest you in
another road to immortality?"

This was so unexpected Edward broke his fixed gaze and looked up in
surprise.  'You're proposing to convert me?"  He even smiled.

'No thought was further from my mind,'admitted the Chaplain, also
amused.  'No, I was wondering about naming my new moths.

One gets tired of seeing Mossii tacked onto the poor devils.

Mightn't Elgarii look well?  Or Edward?"

The crisis was past.  'I'd feel a fraud,' said Edward.  'Not my
discovery."

'It wouldn't have to be.  An association is all that's necessary."

Edward was mustering graciousness, evidently mollified.  'I'm sorry you
should have dragged up that musical stuff.  Now if only you'd asked me
about microscopy.  . . ' 'Ah, you're a microscopist, sir?  Had I but
known.  What I'd dearly love to be able to do is examine the scales
from the wings of my specimens and devise a way of making them into
photographic slides for my lectures.  Have you ever seen scales under
magnification?

No?  Oh, they're the most beautiful things; like snowflakes, no two
ever seem identical.  Alas, I've no instrument of my own."

'I have one on board the Hildebrand."

'I say, have you really?  You don't suppose I ... I mightn't come on
board for half an hour before you leave?"

Edward was now expansiveness itself.  'My dear fellow, of course.

Spend as long as you want.  Bring all the specimens you need.  I shall
be fascinated.  Frankly, I look forward to it.  This is a most
interesting place and people have been - are being - most charming, but
to tell the truth I'm not sure how to fill the time.  It would be less
of a problem were one here for a month, but a day or two - it's too
short for anything other than a kind of frustrated inertia."

Lena observed how carefully he avoided looking at her, heard the
evasion behind his clubbish enthusiasm.  'Let them,' she thought
resignedly.  'Let them look at their moths together like a couple of
schoolboys."  But something not unlike rage or tears welled immediately
up with the thought that it would be unimaginably absurd were she and
Edward merely to wave to one another in two days' time as to a friend
going by in a train.  Why wasn't everyone equally desperate to make
some kind of sense of it all before it was too late?  To gather up such
loose ends as could still be gathered?  To make as much peace as could
still be made with a former self and its ghosts?  Might it not solace
at least some of the spectres of 'if only' which she feared might be
attendant on the end?  No matter how messy and misshapen one's life the
grave would always be a perfect fit.  Damn the man, safe on his magic
mountain, blustering on about moths.  She smiled and ate and smiled
while her two guests discussed the problems of photography.

'There's a doctor here,' Miles Moss was saying, 'who thinks the absence
of sunstroke in this region is connected with the low actinic value of
light which makes photographing natural things so difficult.  There's
no need to have any truck with the usual sort of hampering gear for
one's own protection: no green veils and smoked glasses and spinal
pads, not even a cork helmet.  But in quite moderate undergrowth I find
I need an exposure of five or six seconds with a really low stop on the
aperture to get any decent result, while in the jungle proper one
really needs to double such values.  It's rare indeed that an insect
will hold still for that long when there's a lens pointing at it from a
foot or two away, to say nothing of a perspiring Englishman trying not
to breathe.  As for one s camera outfits, they all have to be eased in
watertight mahogany lined with tin and the films themselves done up in
tins and scaled with waterproof plaster.  It's a bit of a performance
carrying all that around, especially since I like to work alone .  .

.

' Eventually desserts arrived, among which the by-now-not I unexpected
stabs of sticky brown guava preserve.  Edward essayed a delicate inroad
on one corner with his spoon.  'You promised to chill my blood,' he
reminded.

'I'm not sure I can guarantee that,' Miles Moss said.  'It depends if
you want the usual traveller's tales from the depths of Green Hell,
that sort of thing.  Giant anacondas.  Piranhas stripping the flesh off
infants in the time it takes their mothers to wash them in the river so
that when they lift them out the child is a gleaming white skeleton
from the thorax down."

'Good Lord,'said Edward, glancing in alarm towards Lena.  But she was
evidently inured to such things.  'The mothers in these parts must be
remarkably unobservant.  Deafish, too."  Lena went on eating her
goiabada with a slight smile.

'Or,' continued the Chaplain, 'would you prefer a genuinely mysterious
tale which none of us out here has ever quite fathomed?

Ah, then I shall let you judge for yourself,' he said with the happy
decisiveness of one allowed to embark on a story.  'It concerns power
of one kind and another, principally that of the white man and that of
the Indian.  You have to remember the events took place at a time when
the rubber barons here were still living lives of quite unbelievable
extravagance and exemplifying an attitude which permeated down to the
most ignominious European, even those who were penniless.  Magdalena is
of course better qualified than I to describe how things were twenty
years ago - I only arrived in Pard in i9i i from three years in Lima
but even in those days one grew accustomed to tales of the freakish
luxuries of Manaos.

'We'd all heard how the Customs House was made in England and shipped
out here in pieces for re-assembly, how every last cobblestone had
likewise been imported.  But the spectacle of tycoons trying to out-do
one another in extravagance was of a different order.  It was like
Babylon, I assure you.  Men literally did feed their dogs caviar and
water their gardens with champagne.  In fact it was the sight of
gardeners at dusk walking to and fro with watering-cans of the stuff
which once made an entire garden party break into spontaneous applause
and induced one of the uests to order a yacht with solid gold
deck-fittings.

'You're going to say that's a vulgar and limited kind of power but
reasonably harmless.  Unfortunately, though, it all too often goes hand
in hand with an arrogance which sets at naught human life itself.

There are certain names which are still feared here, men who have long
since departed with their profits.  Paulo da Silva Leite, for example,
was a trading baron who simply exterminated whole tribes of Indians
practically on whim.  He used to punish recalcitrant workers by firing
them from cannons, you know.  And Nicholas Suarez virtually wiped out
the Karipunas after his brother was murdered.  It was said he had ten
million acres of rubber lands and once monopolised all traffic on the
Madeira River.  Exactly,' Miles Moss said, watching Edward's face.

'Ten million acres.  And you think certain estates in England are on
the large size.

'In any case such was - and I'm afraid still is in certain parts the
arrogance of the white man's greed and power.  That's all by way of
introduction to place events in some sort of perspective, you
understand.  Magdalena is familiar with the story so she knows whom it
actually concerns, but for the fellow's own sake I shall give him a
pseudonym.  For our purposes, then, we'll call him Major Blackham, from
which it is not pertinent to conclude his real name is Whiteham or
anything of that sort."  The moth-man smiled at him, the draught from
the fan on its tall stand lifting his hair gently.  'Major Blackham was
a parishioner of mine not long ago."

'That disguises him pretty well, with your parish."

'Quite.  Now then, the Major was out here at a venture in search of the
usual kind of thing: a bit of excitement, maybe some big game, a lost
temple or two, the bones of an expedition, a way of making money.  Not,
shall we say, an over-scrupulous sort of man but probably not much
worse than hundreds of others here like him of all nationalities.

Anyway, he fell in with a Brazilian Army officer who was stationed in
one of those tiny river ports run by the Indian Service.  The Indian
Service, I should tell you, is an admirable idea of the Brazilians'
though its work is much hampered by lack of funds and the sheer size
and inaccessibility of the terrain.  Its duties are primarily to
mediate between warring tribes of Indians and protect them from
merciless exploitation and wholesale slaughter, to say nothing of the
theft of their tribal lands by outsiders.

'In any case Major Blackham and this Brazilian hit it off like
billy-oh.  The Brazilian was stuck upriver, utterly bored, his small
squad of troops was becoming demoralised with inactivity and fever,
when one day they came upon a truly vast forest of
castanheiros-do-pard, which are Brazil nut trees or Bertholletia
excelsa if one wishes to be botanically pedantic.  I don't know if
you're familiar with how the nuts grow, Sir Edward?  No reason why you
should be - no, well, each fruit contains between fifteen and thirty
nuts and weighs up to four pounds, so they're a tidy size.  What makes
them particularly convenient is that when they're ripe they simply fall
to the ground.  Then it's comparatively easy to collect them up by boat
since the terrain the trees favour is usually crisscrossed by igarapis
- creeks, you know.

'The problem with this forest they'd found was that it lay across the
dividing line which separated the territories of two tribes who were
traditionally at each others' throats, the GaTupar6 and the Coimbe.

The Brazilian officer and Major Blackham between them hatched a plot
which involved using the troops to annex the entire Brazil nut forest
under the pretence of creating a no-man's land between the warring
factions, and then to share the proceeds of their newly-created private
estate.  One Bell day they went in force and to their surprise found
much of the forest already settled by the Ga-Tupar6 although small
areas were under Coimbe control.  They had thought it uninhabited, you
see.  There followed a series of nasty little engagements during which
they took quite a large Ga-Tuparfi village.  They killed a great many
villagers - some say as many as a hundred and confiscated all the
Indians' plantations.  That was quite bad enough but they took captives
as well whom they forced to work as slave tabour, gathering nuts
indiscriminately in territory that had formerly belonged to the
Coimbe.

People didn't like this at all when the story got out since the
Brazilians quite rightly congratulate themselves on their so-called
Golden Law which outlawed slavery.  That's not to say it doesn't still
go on, I'm afraid, but they find it harder to overlook when the slavers
are foreign.  I suppose one sees their point.

'For a month or two everything proceeded according to plan.

The nuts were sent downriver and sold and the two conspirators began to
make some quite substantial sums.  But then things began to go wrong.

One day the Brazilian was shot with an arrow which was evi idently
poisoned with something especially horrible in place of the usual
curare, which generally kills swiftly, since he suffered the most
protracted convulsions, hallucinations and creeping paralysis.  It took
the wretched man a week to die and witnesses said his agonies were
remarkable - and this in a country which tends to the phlegmatic about
such things.  Even though it's unfortunately not uncommon in these
parts that a white man is shot by an Indian arrow - many have never
seen whites before and are mortally afraid - there were other odd
aspects.  Firstly, the arrow itself could not be identified as
belonging to any known tribe in that region.  It was quite unlike those
made by either the Coimbe or the Ga-Tupar6.  Secondly, it took the
officer vertically down through the top of the shoulder right beside
the neck -'Miles Moss tapped his own shoulder where he might have worn
an epaulette.

'At the time he was standing a long way off the nearest cover and it
would in any case have been a remarkable shot even from close range;
imagine calculating such a steep arc of fire for so narrow a target.

Of course I know perfectly well that certain tribes habitually use such
a technique, but hardly from so far away.  A witness was heard to say
that it was more as though the arrow had literally dro ped out of the
blue.

p 'Well, Major Blackham was disturbed by this but at the same time took
consolation in the fact that without the Brazilian his own portion of
the profit from their nut scheme would now be so much the larger.  A
junior officer took charge of the troops and business went on as
usual.

They built two barracas on the site of the Indian village for storing
the nuts and for accommodation while burning the rest of the huts to
prevent the Indians filtering back.  Generally the Major slept alone in
one of these sheds with the nuts while in the other were the native
troops who took it in turns to guard a sort of stockade where their
captives lived.  One morning Major Blackham awoke to find something
terrible and at the same time completely incredible."

Here the Reverend Moss paused for a sip of wine and a mouthful of the
goiabada which, like that of his listeners, had lain largely untouched
ever since he had embarked on his story.  So intent had Edward become,
he found himself watching even as the narrator put the spoon in his
mouth, chewed, swallowed.

'What he found,' the Chaplain resumed at the end of a pause judged to
perfection, 'was that the Brazilians' barraca had been crushed during
the night by a gigantic tree.  Actually, it was not crushed so much as
obliterated.  The Major of course climbed among the branches to see if
he could find any survivors but it was soon plain from the presence of
flies and the urubus gathering overhead that the thirty or so men lay
in the ruins beneath this enormous trunk.  You'll have seen some of the
trees round here, Sir Edward, so you'll realise I'm not describing
anything on the lines of a big English elm or horse chestnut.  I'm
talking of something which had stood fully two hundred feet high and
through the base of whose trunk one could have driven a motor car.  It
was then, of course, that the real horror dawned on him - which was
that there had been no tree of that description standing at the edge of
the clearing, certainly not within a couple of hundred yards.  Neither
had he heard a sound during the night and it was inconceivable that a
thing that size could have fallen in silence.  But not only that.

He soon noticed that the tree hadn't rotted, nor had it even been
sawn.

It had snapped."

'Snapped?"

The priest nodded.  'I doubt if there exists a piece of machinery
anywhere in the world capable of snapping that monster as if it had
been a pencil and assuredly not up a remote tributary in the Amazon
rain forest.  The same goes for a machine capable of lifting it,
complete with its branches and everything.  Once again someone observed
later that it was as if the tree had simply fallen out of the sky.

'Ais time the Major panicked.  He was after all left alone in the
clearing with an impossible event and the remains of thirty men, to say
nothing of the ghosts of the villagers they had killed.  The Indian
slaves had disappeared, you see; their stockade was empty and the men
on guard never found.  Blackham got to his canoe and paddled for all he
was worth back to the settlement where he told his story.  But nothing
would keep him there.  He pressed on downstream to the next township,
engaged boatmen, pushed on some more.  He reached the main river, the
Tapaj6s, and still kept on.  He was heading for Santar6m'just as fast
as he could for he now believed himself a marked man.  He felt weighed
down by an awful heaviness.  What made his terror worse was that every
now and then when he stopped at a settlement an Indian would catch
sight of him and set up a great cry while pointing at something
apparently a foot or two above his head.  Whatever it was these people
thought they saw was not clear, and by no means every Indian could see
it - or if they did they gave no sign.  But they all reacted when they
saw the pointing and heard the word being shouted."

'What was the word?"  Edward asked, thinking he had detected the signs
of another dramatic pause in the Chaplain's narrative and wishing to
forestall it.  The Reverend Moss looked at the stem of his glass as he
twirled it absently between forefinger and thumb.

Then he said quietly but with intensity: ' "The Squatter".  That was
what they were shouting.  "He carries the Squatter"."

And yes - Edward felt a coldness pass over his entire body which was
not to do with the breeze from the fan.  'The Squatter?"  It was
unexpectedly sinister.

'The Squatter.  When Major Blackham finally arrived in Santar6m he was
in a terrible state, in a high fever and babbling.  That was where I
first came upon him.  I happened to be visiting - on my way back to
ParA - when I was told that an Englishman had reached town a few days
before in a condition which suggested a priest as much as a doctor.  Of
course one had heard that before and it usually means by the time one
has arrived the poor wretch is beyond the help of either.  But I went
and found him full of quinine and largely recovered from the fever:
very weak, maybe, but perfectly lucid.  He told me the whole sorry tale
and ended up by saying he knew it sounded ridiculous but was I licensed
to perform exorcisms?  I said well, yes, I supposed I was - I believed
there was a form of service and as an ordained priest I could conduct
it but it was rarely used nowadays and was frankly not something I
wished to undertake at all lightly.

' "Lightly?"  he said.  "My God, Padr, believe me, there's no lightness
left in my life - however much remains of that.  I'm haunted.  I know
it now.  A curse has been put on me for what I did and I'm afraid
there's no power great enough to remove it.  I'm a doomed man."

"You mustn't say that," I told him seriously, "still less believe it
since the Devil himself was vanquished by the love of Our Lord Jesus
Christ and by His grace I can call down that power to your defence.

There is no evil can withstand it, but it has to be asked for in all
humility and with absolute and complete contrition for your deeds."

Whereupon he said yes, he would make a proper confession and added he
was in such a state of mortal tear and anguish that saying he was sorry
for his dreadful crimes would probably sound facetiously in God's ears
as a ludicrous understatement.

Naturally I reassured him that God was not given to mirth at a sinner's
expense and then asked him what made him so certain he was haunted
literally, rather than figuratively by his conscience.

' "Don't ask me to describe it, Padre," he pleaded.  "Just believe me
it's there.  Oh, oh, how lucky Agassiz and the others were!

Things fell on them and they died, but what has settled on me is a far
worse horror, a ... a sitting on my shoulders.  I can't actually see it
but I have - glimpsed - ah - " he was rolling his head from side to
side on the pillow as he spoke, sweat pouring off him and with his eyes
round open as if fearing to close them and see again what it was he'd
caught sight of.  "It's an oppression.  Here, pull me up, see for
yourself."  I put my hands beneath his arms to help the poor man into a
sitting position - his body was a furnace, I could feel my face glowing
with the heat he radiated - and do you know, he weighed twice what I'd
imagined he would.  "You feel it too?"  he said, watching my face and
nodding.  "Yes; you know.  You know now I'm not making it up.  Some
of the Indians can see ... can see what it is that squats on me."

'I told him to compose himself while I went and fetched certain
necessities and that I would be back at once to carry out the
exorcism.

And when I turned and looked back at him from the doorway, propped up
on a pillow and leaning back against the whitewashed wall -Just for a
second, for an instant's imagining, I J thought I saw the thing which
was roosting on him .

The Reverend Moss's eyes darted quickly to one side as if he had seen
something at the verandah windows open to the night.

Involuntarily Edward looked as well and between the other tables and
diners glimpsed a bat, no, a huge moth sailing along towards them with
that flat, tropical glide.  Maybe the Chaplain, long acclimatised to
such things, could see what was bound to happen but Edward didn't and
was still watching as the moth floated into the mild vacuum behind the
fan and was sucked into it with a soft ping!

Immediately their table was swept by a small storm of fragments.

Putting a hand to his cheek he felt what appeared to be ointment.

Opposite him the lepidopterist's shirt glistened with k smears of
seeming egg yolk.  On the goiabada in front of Lena a hairy insect leg
flexed itself once or twice.  Long afterwards Edward had the clear
memory, accompanied by a definite measure of pride, that not one of
them gave a single cry of disgust although such cries broke from the
table behind them, for the moth had been a large and juicy one.  The
Reverend Moss was peering sadly at the smears and tatters.

'Agrippina,' he said.  'What a shame.  Funny: they're not all that easy
to catch.  I say, I don't know about you two but it's rather put me off
my food."

'It's certainly put itself on mine,' said Edward, wiping his cheek and
shirt-front with a napkin.  'A little moth goes a long way, a bigger
even further."

Lena pushed her plate a decisive half inch towards the centre of the
table as waiters converged on them.  'We should go home,' she said.

'It has spoilt dinner and the story.  As you remember, this was my
affair, Mr Moss, so if you'd be good enough to pay I shall reimburse
you as soon as we are outside."

'Oh dear, oh dear."

Once outside they engaged another calefa and set off for town.

Beside him in the darkness Edward heard the sound of paper rustling.

The punctilious whisper filled him at once with pity for her.

'I must say, until that wretched insect came into our lives it was a
most enjoyable dinner.  I thank you both most sincerely for an occasion
I'm not likely to forget."  The night ambled by with its squares and
rectangles of flickering orange glows.  'But I say, Mr Moss, you can't
leave us in suspense like this.  What happened to the Major?"

'Oh, I don't know,' came with a deprecating laugh from the dark.

'Anything you like.  I hadn't got that far."

'You mean ... you mean you were making it up?"  Edward sounded
aggrieved.

'I was under the impression you wanted a mysterious tale for the dinner
table.  I'm sorry if it fell short of expectation."

'It was absolutely gripping as far as it went.  Do you mean all that
business about disguising his name and everything ... ?  Lena!

Had you or hadn't you heard it before?  Was it true?"

'Oh, perfectly."

'Put it this way, sir,' said the Reverend Moss.  'Let's say yes, there
once was a man haunted by his past and yes, I did perform an exorcism
in Santar6m.  The person concerned, Major Blackham if you like, was
convinced of a horrible incubus and was certain it was useless to get
on the first ship back to England to escape his curse.  He knew he
would only carry it with him.  It couldn't be outrun; it had to be
induced to leave him by one means or another."

'Well, and did you induce it?"

'I most truly believe so.  Something ... happened during the exorcism
which, since it involves sacred matters, I'm not in a position to
divulge.  Such rites, involving as they do the innermost matters of a
man's soul, are not to be used as fodder for anecdotes.

However, yes, I'm convinced that whatever it was - the Squatter left
Major Blackham's shoulders and returned whence it had been summoned.  I
can tell you seriously, sir, that I don't believe it's ever to be found
here in Brazil rather than anywhere else in the universe.  Whatever
home it has is nowhere as friendly as an earthly jungle; no."

'And the Major?  What became of him?"

'He returned to England in due course, I'd guess what novelists call a
changed man."

'llnder a changed name, it seems."

'Exactly.  To be truthful I've quite lost touch and am not sorry to
have done so.  There was something contaminating about - but here we
are."  They had reached the wharf Before them lay the Hildebrand, her
elegant hull pierced with lit portholes.  'Well, Sir Edward, may I ask
if your kind offer still stands for tomorrow?  I would understand if
you felt you'd already had rather too detailed a look at the local
lepidoptera."

'Absolutely not.  Come tomorrow morning as convenient.  The earlier the
better.  I don't suppose, Lena, you'd be free later in the day?"  The
bulk of the ship which blocked off the view of the river, glittering
with lights and evidently alive as it was, spoke of imminent endings.

'Of course, Edward.  How can you ask?  Do important things happen every
day in Manaos?"

From the top of the gangway he watched them drive away.  Far above the
bellows hood of their calqa the vast notice in glimmering capitals sang
out over the ship, across the river, across Brazil itself: 'Pussels
Cronifer GmbH'.  Only when he had actually got into bed did a thought
which had been gradually forming suddenly articulate itself with
shocking distinctness.  Had Lena's late husband been one of those
mercantile barons of inconceivable wealth whose marble palace was built
on the proceeds of brutality and slave tabour?  A veritable Marchcroft
Manor of Amazonas?

Impossible to imagine somebody of Lena's fineness of soul condoning
either the vulgar or the atrocious.  Yet what darkness did these
primitivejungles exhale which might not in time infiltrate a man's best
nature?  There again, sterling fellows like Miles Moss appeared quite
uninfiltrated.  And so one would hope (thought Edward to himself as he
dozed off); son of the vicar of Windermere, native of Birkenhead,
ex-member of the Leeds Clergy School ...

Assuredly the down-to-earth quality of that background was proof
against all manifestations of sinister waywardness ... He slept.

But that night the lights of the Villa Mirabelle shone for many hours,
casting their rectangles onto the dew-laden grass outside and bringing
insects thudding and rustling at the mesh screens which guarded the
open doors and windows.  Lena played to herself as she still did
sometimes, more frequently of late since her husband's death.  The
sounds of the Viennese classics flew out past the reflecting eyes and
quivering wings, drifted down to the pavilion in its spinney of
jacaranda and reached in faint tones the slipping waters of the Rio
Negro.  The music spoke to her not of any past, not even of her own; it
was simply something immutable, something which had always been there,
which had sustained and would sustain her passage through the world.

She no more thought of student days and her dazzled aspirations at the
Conservatoire - not even with Edward's presence in town to evoke that
precise period - than she remembered learning to walk.  She played to
calm an immense and present anger whose very incoherence was a source
of distress to her.  In consequence she did not play very well, having
only half a mind for the music.  Her eyes read the noteslor her fingers
remembered them.

Had she been knitting she would not have dropped a stitch; but between
the patterns formed by her hands and the raging conversations in her
head would have been no connection.

No apparent connection, certainly.  Except that as she played on, the
music's orderliness gradually gave shape to her rage and bit by bit
this fury, which seemed squatted on by the accumulated weight of forty
years' rumination, at last moulded itself into simple outrage at the
unfairness of his victory - or better, of his victoriousness.  How dare
a man enjoy worldly success yet court sympathy by pretending to have
failed, all the while basking in the implied virtue of
self-deprecation?  It was too much; no, it was downright gross.  It was
difficult to give anybody their correct measure of public recognition
while keeping back enough affection still to be privately touched by
them, and Edward expected - demanded - that this difficulty be
overcome.  For he was above all one of those men who simultaneously
yearn for praise and despise it, whose desire for approval is
implacable even as they reserve the right to belittle their
admirers'qualifications to bestow it.  As Lena's fingers played to an
audience of moths she furiously addressed a figure, an Edward who
looked neither quite like the young man she had known nor the elderly
gentleman with whom she had just dined.

'You're a baby, Edward, you always were.  A brilliant baby, a genius
baby; but a baby in your clamour for attention, attention, attention.

And you always got it, too, although it suits you now to pretend
otherwise.  All your venom about no-one ever taking any interest in
your music, that bitterness with which you allege that had you had the
least encouragement you could have composed Caractacus ten years
earlier: it's all the invention of a baby.

'How do I know about that?  Well, dear Edward, nor only did I once know
you rather well and see you on your home ground but I have spies in
Europe who have always kept me informed.  There!

Be shocked if you will.  Talk about traitors within your own camp and
the rest of that silly rhetoric.  You'll never know who they were, who
they are.  Some of your favourite Germans, I'm afraid.  But it's
further evidence that right from your cradle you had people interested
in everything you said or wrote or did, from your mother onwards.  Far
from letting your music emerge unsuspected from behind a garret door to
make its way painfully in an indifferent world, you made very sure that
everybody was privy to each step in its creation.

'It's not very gallant to say I lie ... Then I shall simply be more
gallant and say you've conveniently forgotten how you collared anyone
who would listen and make them stand beside the piano to hear your
latest big tune or your musical impressions of a bulldog swimming as
you fumbled your way towards a complete work.

Especially women, Edward, if you'll remember; especially women.

You always did have a string of admiring females in tow, didn't you?

Beginning of course with your mother and ending ... and not quite
ending with your wife.  They were vouchsafed glimpses of your creations
in exchange for adulation which you accepted serenely or with temper
tantrums according to your mood.  The point is that no-one minded.  On
the contrary they felt privileged, flattered, overwhelmed, just as they
were by your long walks which might turn out jaunty and funny or morose
and confessional, full of your dreams for the future - as if we didn't
also have one or two dreams of our own.

'So what emerged from all this?  What but that classic myth of the
romantic artist - the lonely dreamer of the reed-beds taking dictation
from the wind, young Ted Elgar up from Worcester whose genius was for
ever being snubbed and thwarted by some upper-crust musical
establishment in Cambridge and London?

But it remains a myth, Edward.  Oh, there was probably enough truth in
it to make it worthwhile embroidering a little; but you embroidered a
lot.  Publicly, too.  Remember that interview you gave in Strand
Magazine back in 1904?  Certainly - I have a copy here in our
remarkable library.  You claimed to have written wind quintets as a
youth during the morning services in St George's at which you played
the organ, and then to have performed them later the same day at the
Leicesters'.  Entire wind quintets, Edward, thrown off during the
sermon?  We might have believed it of Mozart, but not of young Ted
Elgar the famous slow starter who for a good few years hardly finished
a single piece of substance he started.  Of course I'm not saying those
weren't years of great musical fertility, that you weren't sketching
ideas which later became most if not all of your major works.  What I
am saying is that put that way it didn't sound quite portentous enough
for you, not quite enough like Florestan and .  . . and Eusebius
triumphing over the Philistines.  No.  So you went beyond
embellishment.  You invented a myth for yourself in which you, at
least, believed fervently.  But I'm afraid those of, us back then who
saw at first hand your uncertainty, your nervous prostrations, your
tyrannical slightedness, your mysterious illnesses - we were under no
illusions.

But the one thing which of course made it all possible for us was that
you so clearly had genius in you.  I'd never met it before in its raw
state and nor have I since, but it was as unmistakable as it was
unfocussed.  Contrary to what you prefer to believe even people who
disliked your music could perceive it, which was not guaranteed to make
them like you any better.  For those of us who loved you it was
precisely what saved the wnoie tning because it gave us the stamina to
see how funny and affectionate you were underneath the touchiness.

'Why do I speak like this?  Perhaps because I've watched - all right,
spied on, then - your life from afar for so many years I've earned the
right to intimacy.  Perhaps because I'm shocked to see you so
dreadfully unhappy at a time when you might be sad but tranqui 'I, even
contented.  You don't at all like the person you've become, this person
you 5ve created for yourself, because in your heart you know he never
existed.  There once was a deeply sensitive, intelligent child, an
artist to his fingertips, and he was a dreamer of dreams.  But took him
many years to find his proper voice, which he found neither earlier nor
later than he should have done.  Unfortunately he never could accept
that simple fact because it conflicted with the desire of the baby in
him to have from the very first the adulation due a genius.  So he
largely invented the enmities, the machinations, the cabals,
misunderstandings, snobberies and the rest as a palatable way of
explaining to himself why the symphomes weren't pouring from his pen as
they had from Haydn's and Mozart's at a far younger age and faced as
they were with even worse penury and social ignominy.

'But ... no, I'm afraid I've not finished yet.  There's another aspect
to your unhappiness, one connected with us poor women in your life and
especially with Alice ... Of course I dare speak about her - don't be
pompous.  Lady Elgar-is as much public property as Sir Edward.  For
genius or not, you actually needed us and especially her in order to
function as a composer.  Oh, not for our hugs and kisses; not for
tremulous encounters in summer-houses while the sounds of croquet
drifted through the shrubbery from distant lawns.  It was for something
far less romantic, more basic than that, more ... babyish, I suppose.

Dear Edward - it was because of that I resolved not to see you again.

Quite simply, I didn't want to become your mother.  But Alice - well,
Time's wingd chariot was bearing down behind her in a way which made it
all the more possible and right.  She was exactly what you needed: an
older woman who believed utterly in you.  To make doubly sure, she had
good reasons of her own for wanting your success: she badly needed to
be able to cock a snook at all her horrid snobbish relatives for
marrying beneath her - as they saw it.

And your success is what she got.  She made you work when you didn't
want to and she praised practically every note you wrote.

She ruled your life and she ruled your bar-lines.  Suddenly it all came
right.  Triumph.  Enigma, Gerontius, The Apostles, The Kingdom ...

'Ah, but we're still conniving at your myth, aren't we?  Our version
suggests that Alice stepped into your life, took over the running of it
and almost at once your now unfettered genius was free to take off.

But it still wasn't ready, was it?  Nearly ten years went by before
Enigma.  Ten more years finding your way until you yourself were over
forty, working through your Froissart overture and all those
oratorios.

What were they, now?  The Black Knight and Lux Christi and King 01afand
The Banner ofSt George and Caractacus heavens, one might say one
detected a curious obsession with chivalry and its silly lance.

Can it be the pure-hearted young Edward riding valiantly out girl about
with the armour of a good woman's love to do battle with the
Philistines and in quest of a knighthood?

'A cheap gibe, you say.  Oh well, perhaps.  But you did defeat the
Philistines and you did get your knighthood and much else besides.

However, there was a catch to it all; one which even now contributes to
your unhappiness.  You began to wonder how strong your genius was if
you had to rely so heavily on your wife to enable it to function.

Hence that nasty vice between whosejaws you were caught.  You needed
Alice with a need beyond mere love but at the same time you resented
her for it.  You demanded her approval but that uncritical adulation of
hers was infuriating.  Convincing or not, though, you had to have it.

'And now she's gone and I'm bitterly sorry for you, Edward, because I
know you and your genius and I know you'll have lost faith.  In your
heart you're convinced your Muse died with her and that willy-nilly
your creative life is over ... And you're left with what most human
beings would dearly, dearly love: not one but several works which will
ensure the immortality of your name and which will give pleasure and be
discussed long after you and I are dust.  But that still isn't enough
for the baby Edward, is it?  Not content with being Elgar you still
want to be Beethoven.  Why?  I truly can't imagine.  I don't understand
it.  Ah, now you're looking resentful as well as furious.  You're going
to say that with the fickleness of taste I could never be quite sure
you may not be Beethoven in two hundred years'time.  But you know you
won't be.

Brutal truth?  Your range is too narrow, your output too small.

Your famous heart is maybe too much with you - indeed, I've never known
anyone, Edward, who so carried about with them their autobiography.

And while you may have changed the musical history of England you
haven't touched that of Europe.  It's Stravinsky now, and Schoenberg
and Webern.  A sad irony, that.  By sheer historical misfortune you led
the renaissance of English music from the tail end of a European
style.

'You know all this, of course; but not content with an astonishing
achievement you're eaten up with resentment that it was not still
greater.  So now you renounce your own works and music itself.

It's all horses and theatres.and impresarios in bars.  It's flying
machines and microscopes and chummy diversions.  The crusading knight
has at last gone over to the Philistines.  The child denied the
sweatshop declares his loathing of sweets.  Oh Edward ... My God, it's
so unfair of you.  And the unfairest thing of all is I suspect I know
what you're thinking after this impassioned outburst of mine some
knowing masculine vulgarism about forty years' pent-up unrequited
love.

Well, that isn't it either.  I've had far too interesting and amused a
life of my own - a family life at that - to have carried on such a
proxy affair for even a tenth of that time.  No, I think you can't
recognise the nature of the upset you induce in people when you pretend
to belittle the whole of music as if you owned it and your achievement
as if you hadn't earned it.  You think they take offence at your tone
or are worried about having provoked a famous man.

'But do you know what I think of as I hear you maintain your name will
perish even as you know perfectly well that it won't?  I think of my
own Eusebius and all those like him who had no time to do anything and
are already handfuls of earth.  I think of my son who was so pretty and
lively and sulky and who too liked long walks to the villages in the
jungle round here and days drifting about the river.  I think of my boy
who frisked in the sun for nineteen short years and whose bodily
remains are now lying beneath some hideous mass gravestone carved with
sententious quotations about his unnamed name living for ever.  That,
Edward, is what I think when I hear an old man's self-pity which is
merely an overweening egoism in disguise."

The piano had long ago fallen silent.  Insects still clung and battered
themselves on the meshes at door- and window-frame but now no sound
passed out beyond them except a woman's soft crying.  The red and
silver beads of their eyes saw a thousand reticulated versions of the
room with a thousand identical tiny figures sitting at pianos with
hands pressed to faces.  On chitinous legs for hours they clung and
stared, bouncing slightly; and at their backs was the tumultuous
silence of all Brazil.

Later still she watched from her bedroom window as the night grew pale
and that invisible current of dawn flowed across the earth which makes
sleepless hours retreat into the shadow of their own unreality.  Arrd
as she looked it took shape, the mountain, its foothills rising from
misty jungle and ascending through opalescent regions to where the tip
burst and sparkled and flew its freezing banner.  It grew in her,
unchanged, untouched by rhetoric and argument and imprecation, the
whole immovable vaporous pile of it until for the first time she
imagined it crumbling, dispassionately viewed the inward collapse, the
slipping to ruin of the entire bulk.  It shocked her, exhilarated her,
shocked her once again.

'Ah Edward, Edward,' she said.  'Damn you."

Miles Moss arrived punctually aboard the Hildebrand and spent most of
the morning below, he and Edward dabbling happily with slides and
stains.  Later both men went ashore together and lunched at the Club
before taking leave of each other with regret.

The priest returned to convince Captain Maddrell that a memorial
service for the vanished doctor would on second thoughts be neither
appropriate nor well attended while Edward made his way to the Schiller
Institute.  It was, he realised with some surprise, his last day in
Manaos.  Tomorrow morning at seven - or so Steward Pyce claimed - the
Hildebrand would begin the return journey to Liverpool.  He was
somewhat unclear as to how he had filled the last five days but the
time had gone quite pleasantly and he had met one or two capital
fellows - the Rev.  Moth (for such he had privately re-named the man)
most assuredly being one of them.  A knowledgeable chap who had turned
out to be no mean microscopist himself, hardly the typical priest, not
at all earnest or dowdy or sidling.  Edward thought that Brazil
certainly had a way of showing people in an unexpected light;
practically no-one he had so tar met on this trip had been quite what
one might have supposed.  He did not extend this line of thought to the
point where it would make the prospect of a winter-bound England loom
dull and forbidding.  His mind was that of a man for whom the mere home
eclipses his knowledge of what The sight of the Institute, severe
behind its quiet shrubbery, did something to subdue him.  It suggested
having to be serious, it hinted at confrontation.  Lena's mood was not
easy to assess, either, as she greeted him in the hall.  The air was
cool and withdrawn, faintly scented with beeswax polish and what seemed
to him burnt jam.  Their footsteps on the marble staircase echoed
grittily in the afternoon hush.  On the half-landing Schiller's bust
stood outlined against the creepers at the window whose leaves, on this
shadowed side of the house, were still hung with drops of sparkling
rainwater from the midday storm.

'It hasn't been long enough,' said Lena in her office.  'Such a
idiculously short time.  I don't just mean too short for you to do
justice to Manaos or whatever.  I mean it's too short for Us to have
overcome our awkwardness.  Forty years are impossible to undo in five
days."

'I don't know that "undo" is a happy choice of phrase.  Presumably
neither of us would wish to undo the bulk of our lives.  One doesn't
willingly unravel oneself."

'No, no,' she said unhappily, 'of course not.  I only meant .  . . '
After a pause she asked, 'What will you do now, Edward?"

'Eh?  Why, go home.  Oh, I see.  In the future?  What will I do?  I
don't know.  What will you do?  What will anyone do?  Grow a bit older,
maybe, and then die.  Such at least are my plans."

'You're infuriating, my dear Edward, but since it's exactly the
infuriation you've always been able to arouse I find myself fond of
it.

I meant - and I shall't apologise for presuming things I can't know I
believe I detect in your whole manner and everything you've said since
your arrival that you no longer have much faith in your future
creativity as a composer.  I don't know if I should commiserate with
you or whether after a lifetime such a respite comes gratefully?"

But he remained silent, staring at the tips of his pipe-clayed tropical
shoes with the faint puzzlement of a child still uncertain whether it's
being encouraged or scolded.  Finally when the silence excitement of
the arrival will mean.

had extended itself in all directions he said, 'Whatever you may think,
I shall't miss it.  It's a hard and anxious business confronting blank
paper all one's life.  But I still work, Lena; I don't think you
realise how much I work.  I'm always travelling around England,
conducting here, conducting there.  I've made a lot of recordings too,
you know."

'I know that, Edward.  We have most if not all of them in the Library
here.  I think ... I think all I wanted to say was what an exciting
phase in your life you've reached and how very glad I am for you.

Truly I am."

'Exciting?  Travelling in cold trains to underheated halls to conduct
my wretched music for diminishing and ever more elderly audiences?

Exciting, reading sniffy reviews of such events - when they're reviewed
at all - by hackjournalists only too eager to write me off as out of
fashion, faintly embarrassin , downright vulgar?  I suppose you could
say it was excitement of a sort, but then you could say that about an
attack of apoplexy."

'I didn't make myself clear.  Dear Edward, that side of things comes to
all artists who have the misfortune to live long enough to see
themselves become unfashionable.  It must be infinitely horrid and
depressing, not least because it's fickle and unjust.  No, when I said
exciting I specifically meant the marvelous future which the gramophone
holds out to people like yourself.  I should think in your case it's
the perfect invention.  You like clever machines and it offers you the
prospect of a kind of immortality no major composer has ever had.  So
far as I know you're the first to have conducted his own work for the
gramophone, certainly to have conducted so much of it."

'H'en..  Probably because most aren't up to much as conductors of their
own music."

'Of course.  But you can do, what no other composer has yet done.

You can leave a legacy of performances which will show for ever your
special talent."

'And what is my special talent?"

'I'd say it was for giving interpretations of your music which are
always convincing yet no two of which are ever the same."

For the first time he smiled.  'Well, bless you for that, Lena.  I
always used to say I wanted my stuff to go elastically and mystically
and I'm afraid I haven't much faith in modern conductors.

They haven't the heart for that sort of thing, most of 'em.

Mystically doesn't mean religiose4y'- he drew the word out with an
exaggeration which heaped contempt on sententiousness of all kinds -'it
means an awareness that the music is only half expressed by the actual
notes.  Of course.  And as for elastically, well, it should go with a
brisk snap and never rigidly.  A thousand fluctuations in tempo but
much too delicate to write a full-blown tempo rubato into the score.

And obviously those fluctuations will depend on one's mood at the time
of the performance, they'll change from day to day.  That's the mistake
they keep making, in my view, these modern conductors.  They're so keen
to make a name for themselves by producing their own definitive
versions of great works X's Ninth, Y's Parsifal, Z's Brahms' One - they
simply turn out beautifully-craftcd fossils.  Whereas I know one must
re-live a piece of music each time one plays it and in consequence no
two performances can ever be identical and still less definitive.  Nor
should they be.  The idea's cretinous."

'Then that, Edward, must quite simply be your work from now on, to
leave as much - no, all of your music - in different versions.

That way there will never be any doubt, no matter which way the
weathercock of fashion swings.  Anyone will be able to hear that your
music is still alive, still beating.  It'll be an immense task for you
and it's highly creative, only maybe a slightly different form of
creativity.  I can't tell you how I long to hear your records.  They
will arrive here packed in sawdust and I shall take them out of the
crate and blow the shavings off them and put them on the gramophone in
there.  And then I shall have you to the life with me in the room."

'Ah, Lena, you're trying to encourage an old man,' he said, not
displeased.  'I admit I'd had some such project at the back of my mind
simply because I'm so despondent about the future of my music.  At
least after I've gone there will exist reminders of what it could sound
like.  I can sometimes foresee only too clearly how my stuff will be
treated in future.  By the time they can bring themselves to play me at
all they're going to linger over it, damn them.

They'll make it wallow in horrid nostalgia because they won't be able
to think how else to play it.  They'll wring out every last drop of
purple, just see if they don't."

'Of course I hope you're quite wrong but it's all the more reason for
making your records now."

'Yes.  Exactly.  Something permanent."

She heard herself saying 'Well, as permanent as anything ever is' quite
sharply, as if impatient with herself for having played yet again into
the willing hands of his hubris.  'One no longer has quite the same
unshaken faith in the durability of such things - neither masterworks
nor the civilisations which gave them birth.  You find yourself
despondent about the survival of your music whereas sometimes I see
only a vision of a more general dust.  After all, even Beethoven' (how
impetuously the comparison came to her mind!) even Beethoven himself
wrote in sand and on the same beach as the rest of us, only rather
higher up so his marks may remain a while longer than the rest.  But
one day I believe will come a freak tide and sweep the entire beach
clean: Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, Goethe, even
Schiller and Edward Elgar.  Everybody.  just a smooth sheet of sand
blotting in the sun like a mirror going opaque.  Time for a fresh batch
of scribbles.  Or for none."

'You take a bleak view of the future I must say,' said Edward, clearly
disturbed by her unexpected usurpation of his usual role.

'Do I?  I don't think so.  Civilisations have been coming and going now
for a great many thousand years and no doubt they all had their Edward
Elgars.  Things move on: it's in their nature.  Not that they're going
anywhere.  just the universal wheels turning, and as they grind so the
dust falls out.  You and me."  She was speaking now with a subdued
passion and not without a trace of triumph as well.

'According to you, hardly worth bothering to make a mark in the sand at
all."

'I think wisdom may consist in being able to say that without the least
tone of injured self-esteem.  I've never myself quite learned that
trick.  I suspect the proper aspiration would be to cross the beach
without leaving a single footprint."

It was the solidity of the room and the things in it one noticed, he
was thinking, to say nothing of the house itself.  Scattered about this
building were more than a ton of B6scndorfer piano, tens of tons of
books and records.  The plaster busts of Beethoven and Bach, the bronze
Schiller on its plinth, the buckram volumes of music, the marble
clocks, the dense tropical hardwood which sheathed and enclosed as with
armour - a veritable mountain of stuff implying a continuity more
enduring than any single one of its elements.  The whole was a
fully-equipped compendium, an outpost of European culture.  Remote
maybe, and dwarfed by the surrounding continental expanse; but like an
amoeba caught in a drying puddle it could survive almost indefinitely
in a cystic state, containing within its hardened cell walls the
essential nucleus, the fragment of the original seed which would swell
and crack and propagate anew when the climate changed and water
returned.

'I think Beethoven's bit of beach will survive as long as there are
ears."

'I'm afraid I don't,' she said.  'Ears change.  No-one now can read
Shakespeare without explanatory notes; one day he will be accessible
only to scholars with dictionaries."  A moted shaft of sunlight, thin
as a pencil, somehow found its way through the leaves and a shutter
chinked by termites to fall onto her lined cheek like a deathray.  'I
don't share your confidence, Edward, I only wish I did.

I'm too conscious always of time and of what lies out there."  She
lifted a hand wanly towards one shoulder without moving her face.  It
pointed to an entire compass of directions.

'Savages?  The human hinterland?  What do they care about Beethoven,
you mean?"

'The war changed everything, didn't it?"  she said.  'We came quite
close to wiping out our own civilisation.  Really quite close.

Then where would the ears have been?  There's something exhausted about
us, had you noticed?  Nobody who's energetic ever commits suicide.  And
what they have'- again her hand raised itself - 'is energy."

'Not that I've noticed, they haven't.  They're either standing stark
naked on the river bank with their mouths open or they're asleep in
hammocks.  I'm not saying I blame them, only that the casual observer
searches in vain for signs of anything other than terminal lethargy."

'That is energy.  While we're frantically working to exterminate
ourselves they're pleasurably occupied in multiplying.  History is very
much on their side.  And so are numbers, believe me."  A third time her
veined hand indicated more than the window over her shoulder.  'I'm not
talking just of Brazil, naturally.  Mercifully we shall neither of us
live to see it but I can envisage a time when we have cancelled
ourselves out and they with all their numbers and natural resources
will simply come and cart away the entire beach in order to build
concrete cities for themselves.  Then it'll be their turn to come and
search the jungles covering London and Berlin for our lost temples and
speculate about our priesthoods and our I tyrannous Nites.  And they
won't be - what is it you like to call such people?  Yahoos?  Of
course, Jonathan Swift.  No, they won't be yahoos.  They'll simply be
the next civilisation.  And there'll be others treading on their
heels.

It's no cause for despondency, after all.  No-one loses more than
anyone else.  Or gains.  If we're despondent we have only ourselves to
blame for inventing hopes and pretending we haven't got eyes.  London,
Berlin, Vienna, Paris, New York ... They're all Babylon."

It was profoundly irritating, he later thought on his way back to the
wharf, to be lectured on transience at the age of sixty-six by a person
not significantly younger and then to be told that any annoyance it
might cause is merely due to a lack of the wisdom which accepts.

Presumably if one had been cut off for the last quarter-century in the
middle of primaeval rain forest one's mind would have become a little
rusty and peevish, but all the same he did think with a bit of effort
on her part ...

'But of course dearest Edward,' she said before he left, 'when all's
said and done I'm dreadfully envious of you.  It's foolish, isn't it?

Especially after all I've been saying.  The fact is, no matter what may
happen when we're dead we are at this moment alive and you have left a
deep mark on the beach.  You've made such beautiful scribbles.  You've
had a voice, and practically no-one else has one.  How lovely to have
had a voice.  I can't be more myself than I am and yet I'm merely lost
in the inarticulate crowd.  But practically any single bar of your
music is utterly you and nobody else in this universe.  Ah, damn you,
Edward my dear, dear man.

Damn you."

Hours later and she was still weighed with remorse for having been able
to spare him her previous night's inward tirade only by replacing it
with gratuitous meanness.  Now and then a peppery self-justification
lightened her mood, telling her that news about the fleetingness of
human affairs was fairly stale and enjoyed widespread
acknowledgement.

But this was soon supplanted by a return of shame and regret that,
after all the years, she had been able to find only tones of upset and
tokens of injury with which to greet the man she most envied and
admired.  And loved, of course, whatever that meant.  Maybe after all
it had to entail not becoming abject, not allowing the other all the
spoils.  How stupid it was, though, two old people heading for their
respective graves unable for so many reasons simply to embrace, to bid
each other an uncomplicated farewell.

But such reflections came too late now.  Tomorrow he would go and she
would never see him again.  From her pavilion she might glimpse the
Hildebrand's smoke dissipating in the morning sky, for she didn't think
she had the courage to go down to the port and wave.  And in a couple
of months' time when she heard again that melancholy C echo over the
town among the vultures and know the ship had returned her hand would
tremble slightly as she took the passenger list from Raymundo and
scanned it eagerly for the name which would not be there, not ever be
there.

She wrote a strange sad note and despite the lateness of the hour took
it down to the port herself, handing it in at the gates for immediate
delivery to the ship.  Steward Pyce brought Edward the envelope with
his morning tea at six-thirty but he on seeing it laid it aside
unopened for when he felt a little stronger (as he put it to himself)
and then, in the general excitement of departure, forgot about it.

For in the hour which preceded the Hildebrand's sailing the despedidas
were in full swing and the decks and gangways crowded with people who,
regardless of their nationality, all seemed imbued with the spirit of
Brazilian leavetaking.  Young English clerks returning home on
furlough, several wasted by past fevers, came on board accompanied by
girls whose tropical dewiness was in as much contrast as the brown of
their skins.  Fans jigged violently, straw and linen hats flapped, for
the heat which already bore the urubus so effortlessly up above the
town bore equally down upon the revelries of farewell.  Edward,
watching it all from his usual eyrie of Captain Maddrell's private
piece of deck, spotted Molly and Fortescue coming up the gangway.

Knowing quite well they could only have come to say good-bye to him he
roaned at having to leave his undisturbed vantage point and contend
with heat and people.

'You surely haven't come all this way just to see an old buffer off?"

he greeted them.  'I think that's very noble of you."

'We couldn't possibly have let you vanish without another word,' said
Molly.  'I had to say how grateful I was for your company on the way
over.  You were a great help and encouragement and I shall't forget
it."

'I was?  Well, young lady, I'm very pleased if so.  I may equally say
you both 'cheered me up.  I'm now somewhat dreading the return voyage,
to tell the truth.  I feel I haven't the energy to make new friends and
it'll be rather a gloomy passage.  But never mind, I can think of you
in the sunlight of Manaos,' and he waved a hand at the light which
streamed at all angles upon the ship.

'I'm off to Iquitos the day after tomorrow,' Molly said.  'I don't know
if I shall ever get there; I may see something too interesting on the
way.  But I'm definitely moving on."

'Ah.  You will paint well, won't you?  Don't do it too much from the
life."

'Not too much from the life?"  She was laughing.

'You must watch and watch to get the details but you must work from the
imagination.  I commend to you the words of William Morris: "No man can
draw armour property unless he can draw a knight with his feet on the
hob, toasting a herring on the point of his sword."  There, that's
enough advice."  He looked from one to the other.  'Good luck to you
both in your intrepid pursuits."

'It's what she wants,' explained Fortescue unnecessarily.  'She'll be
back, won't she?"  He glanced sideways with uncertain fondness.

'Everybody upriver returns to Manaos."

They said their good-byes in a very English fashion amid the general
exuberance.  The last Edward saw of them was their heads bobbing down
the gangway past oncoming porters crowned with luggage.  He watched the
increasing frenzy for another half hour, heard a bugle sound for all
non-travellers to go ashore.  Suddenly a brass band of cockaded
Brazilians, which had been forming unnoticed among the comings and
goings on the quay below, struck up Land ofHope and Glory.  Using a low
bollard as a makeshift dais a conductor wearing a band-master's uniform
complete with frogging and white gloves energetically danced at the
water's edge.

They played with immense verve, rather accurately for the most part and
in the key of F. Edward was taken completely by surprise and
experienced a rapid conflict of emotions.  First he wished they'd stop,
or at least change the tune.  Then he wondered why it was in F and
whether South American brass were differently pitched.  Finally he
found himself admiring the utterly un-English rendering of the
over-familiar tune.  Had he been able to make himself invisible he
would have stayed to watch.  As it was, though, he caught all eyes on
the quay below staring up at him, the raised arms and pointing fingers,
and realiscd this was a deliberate

tribute.  With a gesture defensive, submissive, vaguely acknowledging,
he retreated hurriedly into the day cabin behind him.

There he heard the piece through to the end, mopping his face with a
handkerchief.

But it was not long before the band had switched to something he didn't
recognise and he judged it safe to re-emerge.  He was surprised to find
it had moved a little further away - no, it was the ship itself now
perceptibly opening up a widening ditch of water into which the loops
of the bow mooring-ropes splashed before being hauled aboard.  A cheer
went up from the onlookers on the quay echoed by the passengers lining
the rail.  A forest of hands waved, pale, dark, bare, gloved.  A few
streamers crisscrossed the gap, sagging at the ends of their
trajectories, to be grasped, held taut, snapped by the Hildebrand's
retreating tonnage.  Tears came to his eyes; the business of
departures.  The ship slid out into the river.

At the last moment he picked out a figure in the shadow of a godown
wearing a light dress and carrying a green parasol.

Gravely he raised his hand and waved.  Maybe the figure lifted a white
glove in response, maybe the parasol tipped slightly in farewell; there
were too many people, it was too far to tell.  The whole scene danced
and blurred through brimming lenses.  But he went on waving very
slowly, regally, a dapper figure alone at its own stretch of rail.  A
minute later the whole of the town's frontage was clearly in view,
already sliding astern.  Across the doors of a massive warehouse, now
partially obscured by the boom of an English crane, a sign in blue
capitals blazoned out the future.

CRONIFER GmbH, it read; ONIFER, FER.  Gradually the entire town slipped
from sight, the last view Edward had of Manaos being of the glittering
dome of the Opera House with above it the specks of vultures turning
and turning their ragged vortex.

The Hildebrand was almost in sight of the confluence of the Rio Negro
with the Amazon when a noise rising swiftly above that of the en ines
made Edward look up.  A small yellow biplane was diving steeply at them
from astern.  For one extraordinary timeless instant he thought of an
attack, but then the machine pulled up a J scant ten feet above the
masts and its huge shadow swept the length of the ship.

'Forty!"  he said aloud, the passing chill replaced by exhilaration.

The plane pulled vertically up, fell over on its back and swooped down
towards them once more.  This time it flattened out astern and wheels
skimming the surface of the water overhauled them, waggling its wings
in salutation.  He caught a glimpse of a figure in the cockpit, face
masked by goggles, unhelmeted hair blown straight back, a hand
raised.

Excitedly he waved back and thought he saw the face turn towards him,
maybe imagined a wide grin.

Then the machine was past and climbing again.  From then on until the
ship had reached the twin lighthouses the yellow biplane performed
aerobatics in the tropical sky for an audience of eagerly upturned
faces.  It finally turned away with a farewell wave of its wings and a
dark burp of exhaust.  He watched it dwindle until like a gnat it was
lost among river and cloud and forest.

X

The day after tomorrow it's Pari again & a thousand miles of the Amazon
will have slipped by in a dream.  The nights are loud with saxophones &
revelry in some of which I've taken part.  No doubt one day someone
quite likely Maddrell or even Pyce - will remember me as a gay old
dog.

It has all remained a dream nonetheless.  I catch sight of my body in
mirrors behind the bar &c doing the most extraordinary things such as
standing with its neat brown ac & its mouth open, laughing.  It seems to
have become all mustache and waistcoat.  I'm not at all certain who the
'I' is writing thisjournal nor whether he inhabits that body.  Once
upon a time, though, I'm sure he was a person who thought of dreams as
productive.

Indeed I cd.  even now catch myself writing that dreams are all that
matter.  How else can anyone live but in the imagination?  (A
cruise-ship is the perfect provoker of such a question - the general
silliness has to be seen to be believed.  And t)articiDated in ... ).

Well, the world's undoubtedly now & then diverting but it's awful flat
& thin stuff on which to get through threescore years & ten ...

Sardonic visionary!  What if the imagination fails or suddenly
defects?

With what alacrity the world rushes in to fill the gap with
blandishments!

Yet in spite of everything the desire if not the ability to create
still does remain.  Manaos left its painful reminder.  A lifetime's
work (unfortunately not as voluminous as the phrase implies) now
beginning to gather dust on library shelves & in the score-cupboards of
orchestras & choral societies & I now know nothing has really been
achieved, far less assuaged.  Did Schumann feel the same before trying
to kill himself in the Rhine?  I'm not myself about to follow the late
Dr Ashes brave example, at any rate.

Suicide is not in the least unthinkable but there are limits.  The
Rhine is one thing, the Amazon quite another.  The Severn now ... but
an everungrateful thing to do to such a dear old stream.  It would be
like killing oneself in a friend's house.

I see from a copy of Thoreau in the ship's library that he wished 'to
go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind
whispering away among the reeds.  It will be a success if I shall have
left myself behind."  Even as I write it out I'm shaken with desire, my
pen is unsteady with it.  But always those bold leaps, those brave
retreats from the world are made on paper.  Or if not, then they're
made by people who still have energy.  But I'm tired & dispirited
beyond revival.  It's all work.

The imagination's all work.  Nothing is heard except through
listening.

Nothing is seen except through watching.  Nothing is understood except
through thinking.  Nothing worthwhile ever presents itself.  What
choice did we ever have but to do this work?  It demands to be done.

And yet shockingly, cheerfully, most people allow everything to skid
off the retina & whiz through their ears like wind, leaving nothing
behind.  It's a kind of death.  A corpse couldn't have less say on the
paths the worms take through it.

Well, now I too have run out of whatever it takes to deflect worms.  My
hand in the lamplight holding this pen has grave-marks on it & yet is
recognisably my hand.  Surely only the other afternoon it trailed idly
in the Severn amid summer's hum or was wrapped in kite string & left
with white grooves visible hours later?  Harder to bear is having come
so close, as close as the distance between pen & page the instant
before writing.

For as rub touches scorepaper a door slams far away & whatever it
!readily was is cut off & we're left with pieces of tune wriggling in
the foreground like shed lizard tails.  We work from haunted memories
of nothing (but O!  such nothings!).

I'm old.  Nowadays great yearnings have little meaning.  A life
indentured to the imagination is a mad anachronism.  No doubt quite
rightly, too.  Why bow oneself beneath such a hopeless task, so
ghoulishly watch that inner passing?  'It is thy very energy of
thought/Which keeps thee from thy God."  That was what the Angel said
to Gerontius in a bit of the poem I didn't set.  Maybe I should have.

Well, having got everything wrong & before it's finally the
worms'feeding-time I suppose I should 'use well the interval."  But the
energy is lacking.  I & my body seem unable to do anything now but be
carried along with the rest of the gallimaufry aboard this ship.  We
drink & play chemin-defer & watch the antics of a self-described
'roarin cad' who shrieks a lot (I fear he reminds me rather of some of
poor Frank's more dangerous friends).  On & on we go, drinking &
laughing & gassing & thus we shall arrive the day after tomorrow in
Pari.

And on an afternoon sitting on deck beneath stately ephemera of clouds
there came a lurch which was not so much an insight as a momentary
shift of viewpoint.  He was aware of an absurdity: of an I old man
wrapped in eminence and wearing his carapace of clothes being carried
along within an iron boat, and yet inside his head a bluish freedom
very calm and pleasurable and crossed by vapours constantly turning in
upon themselves.  Among the things beside linen and metal which so
easily came between this old man and his real domain: the roaring of
crowds, the roaring of guns, the roaring of cads.  On the far side of
such confusions rose les barricades mystirieuses which guarded the land
beyond, whatever those cloudy ramparts were which now excluded even
himself (The enigmatic quality of this phrase, the title of a piece in
Couperin's 6th Ordre, had always delighted him even though he knew it
probably referred to something banally topical in eighteenth-century
Paris.) These barricades cut him off from a lost world for which he
ached, had always ached.  Was he not like Professor Challenger's
pterodactyl which triumphantly escaped from the Queen's Hall in London
and headed south-west out across the Atlantic towards its prehistoric
home?  (He glimpsed himself in passing, a black and monstrous outline
swiftly crossing the moon.) Intense though it was, this longing was yet
quite calm, just as it had been when he was young and as if it could
only be met by a lifetime's devotion.  Had not Plato described music as
a science of love-matters occupied in harmony and rhythm?  The love was
correct, he thought, but it was evident Plato had not been a composer
else he would surely have mentioned the harsh conditions for the
existence of that love: a loneliness which not marriage, not even
friendship might dissolve.

What had it been, this life, that work?  The loneliness?  Nothing,
because the longing had remained unchanged, being the only thing which
did not diminish and die.  Nothing at all.  No rewards, no knowledge.

Only an inner exile.  Somewhere in a land far ahead his wife and his
sword mouldered side by side, fortiter et ride.

Somewhere in a city astern an unanticipated ghost was still going
solidly about her business.  And here in his deck-chair the wilderness
he carried about him ached even as it enfolded with its view of an
infinite emptiness entrancingly decked out.  It echoed with a voice
such as might be raised from a tower to greet the breaking of day in
an ancient land.  And from it there rose - by what bizarre alchemy he
could not guess - a great fume of pleasure and compassion.  This was
how it had always been; nothing much had changed after all.  From the
kite-flown skies of boyhood to the cloudscapes of Amazonas his whole
business remained with this longing, the limitless garden, and with the
love which flew up before the least footfall into it like minor moths
from long grass at dusk.

Afterwards when he tried to recall his trip Edward was vague about the
returnjourney.  He could not imagine how he had spent the time, above
all the two days in Pari.  Impressions came to him of luncheon and
dinner tables, but who had sat around them?  He had no idea.  He still
associated that town with Kate and Dora, the ladies of the
outwardjourney.  Merely knowing they lived there had given the place a
certain flavour in his mind, something to do with gaiety and candour,
though he had never again set eyes on them.

But if he could not remember Pari he did have a clear memory of the
last of Brazil.  The slow vanishing astern of a continent and people he
knew he would never see again had stranded him in his deck-chair with a
sense of finality as of a door closing on yet another incident in his
life which had caused him disquiet.  As MaraJ6 Island with its majestic
portals of cloud receded he was left poised above three thousand miles
of rolling waters, thinking he had failed without knowing what had been
attempted nor what might have made success.  A revivified Muse?  Too
foolish.  The hopeless conundrum came again which had balked him ten
days earlier at the library window of Lena's institute: that it ought
to be possible to slough off the tyrannous cocoon in which one became
encased - of yearning for days gone, of distaste for the present and
dread of the future.  Only thus might an artist enter his domain.

A flaw of the affection, then.  A failure of imagining, a despair born
of thwartedness - whatever his infidelity he had been judged and still
found wanting.  And he looked back at the dark stain through which he
had travelled as at something seen at more than distance, oneiric,
ungraspable as cirrus, scribbled by winds.

He crossed the Atlantic in full retreat before steady westerlies.

Somewhere between Pari and Madeira, which they reached on Christmas
Day, and in a gesture of exorcism he put hisjournal in a weighted sack
together with Lena's last letter, still unopened, and threw it all into
the sea.  It was only later he discovered that his manuscript
sketch-book must have been tucked into theJournal, for he never found
it again.  By then a different abandonment was sweeping the ship with
its seasonal roarings.

Merry Christmas everyone ...

Ifo

... come andjoy .

not goodwill to all men, that's a mistranslation, you know.  It's to
all men of goodwill.  Absolutely not to rotters and bounders .  . . '
'Happy Christmas."

'Down the hatch."

Bemused in the midst of all this he caught sight of a rosy and
clubbable Sir Edward in the bar mirror raisinz his alass in a toast and
simultaneously raised his own.  A holiday - of course, that was what it
had all been.  A well-earned holiday, and a very jolly one too.

The Hildebrand finally docked at Liverpool at nine o'clock on the
morning of December 3 i st.  The last day of the year was grey, the air
held its breath with the sense of oncoming snow.

'Did you have a good trip, sir?"  asked Tom Shannon, who had been on
the quay since seven.

'Capital, thank you.  Rattling good time.  Oh-oh,' he clutched suddenly
at the young man's arm with a gloved hand, 'steady as she goes.  This
ground is more mobile than I remember it."  cIt'll firm up, Sir
Edward."

'No doubt.  Thank you for meeting me, Tom, it's most kind.

Having to get off a boat like this first thing in the morning with all
one's belongings - it's like being chucked out of a hotel into the
street ... I say, is that my luggage?  Well hang on, I have something
for you."

When he had passed perfunctorily through the Customs shed Edward
unstrapped his suitcase and scrabbled among underwear before handing
his escort a blackish lump.  'There,' he said proudly, doing up the bag
again, 'there's a bit of exotica for you."

, It's extremely kind of you, sir ... What exactly is it?"

'An alligator, can't you see?  I agree it's crudish.  The point is not
the model but what it's made of.  It's compressed stuff called guarand
which makes a dashed fine drink."

 'This is a drink?"Tom turned the lump uncertainly in his hands.

'Many, many drinks.  You're supposed to scrape it with a file made of
dried fish-tongue to get the powder, so they tell me.

Personally I'd be inclined to try a nutmeg grater."

'Rather a pity to spoil it,' the young man said putting it away in his
pocket.  'It would look well on the mantelpiece.  Not the sort of thing
everybody has in Knowsley."

'Well, just as you like."

'Your train leaves in half an hour, sir.  You must be anxious to get
home."

'Oh yes, I suppose I am.  Can't wait to see the dogs."

At the station Edward surprised himself by finding his ticket, an
impressive document since the voyage was inclusive of the rail journey
to London.  Safely into the guard's van went the great cabin trunk,
itsjapanned expanses no longer as virgin as six weeks before, being
scratched here and there and having acquired the crayoned hieroglyphs
which only Customs men and porters understand.

Once in his compartment he settled his bags and then himself.  From
beneath the carriage a cloud of steam was drifting up beyond the window
making a ghost of Tom Shannon as he waited patiently on the platform.

Suddenly Edward sprang to his feet and threw his weight on the leather
window-strap.  The pane fell with a bang and warm steam eddied in.

'I say, Tom, ghastly thought's just struck me.  Sorry and so on but I
seem to have given all my immediate worldly wealth to a very fly
customer named Pyce.  You wouldn't by any chance have a cab fare about
you?  It's really too embarrassing.  I'll be all right once I get to
the club.  I'll cash a cheque and send you back the money first thing
tomorrow, of course.  Oh Tom, bless you.  Noble indeed."

As the train laid its plume of smuts across a bleak and wintry
landscape the excitement of arrival ebbed away.  Everything was exactly
as comfortless as he had known it would be.  He was back.

Maybe he had never left after all.  Maybe six weeks ago, six minutes
ago, he had fallen asleep in the club as he so frequently did and there
would come a deafening rattle in his ear as of wheels over points
andjunctions and he would suddenly awake to find the teathings arriving
on a silver tray.  A panic at having left something far too late
gripped him.  It spoke urgently of being drawn back into an elderly
world full of the servility which conceals an utter want of interest.

And behind this world another, a vast and stolid provincial precinct
grey with cathedrals and choral societies.

But it was not a dream.  When an hour or two later his cab drew up in
St James's he could see the familiar doorman hurrying out across the
pavement towards him, a large umbrella poised in readiness.  As he
wearily marshalled his gloves and stick this man leaned in across the
trunk strapped in front to pay the driver.  Then his own door opened
and cold air blew in together with a few whirling white fragments.

Passively, like any invalid or supplicant, he watched a sleeve which
seemed to extend for ever reaching slowly down towards him as if
stretching from another world, dusted with snowflakes and encrusted
with gold braid.  He took the white-gloved hand with resignation and
was dragged deferentially out.

'Welcome home, Sir Edward!  Welcome home!"  -2hi

 Epilogue Edward Elgar lived on another ten years without composing
anything of much significance.  He did however make recordings of his
own music whose value as historic and artistic documents justified his
friends' encouragement in the face of his own gloomy predictions.

From time to time in that final decade he would look out his notes and
sketches for various projects - principally a piano concerto, an opera
and a third symphony.  Late in 1932 the BBC, largely at Bernard Shaw's
urging, commissioned the symphony for f,I 000.  Throughout the
following year there were brief flickers of the creative flame
interspersed with such distractions as the heady pleasure of at last
becoming an aeronaut.  At the end of May he flew to France to conduct
the Paris premire of his Violin Concerto with Yehudi Menuhin, combining
this trip with a visit to the dying Delius at Grez-stir-Going.  Back in
England he tried again with the symphony, which was progressing but
feebly.  The first signs of his own cancer appeared although at the
time he was more anguished by a disease increasingly evident in
Europe.

He had already written to Frank Schuster's sister Adela: I am in a maze
regarding events in Germany - what are they doing?  In this
morning'spaper it is said that the greatest conductor Bruno Walter
stranger still, Einstein are ostracised: are we all mad?  TheJews have
always been my best and kindestfriends - thepain of these news is
unbearable & I do not know what it really means.

He died in February 1934, working on his symphony until the last.

On that very day the Hildebrand, which had been sold to a man in
Monmouthshire for L11,000, was being broken up.  The ship had been
built in i 9 i i, the year of Elgar's Second Symphony and arguably the
high summer of his output.  Thus by a strange coincidence its lifespan
happened precisely to encompass the declining years of the Amazon
cruises as well as of the creative and calendrical life of Sir Edward
Elgar.

 , V.