The Pilgrim's Progress

by John Bunyan

  The dining-room was long and low-ceilinged, and had a white panelling in bold relief. Through the deep windows came odours of the garden and a faint tinkle of water. The dusk was deepening and the engravings in their rosewood frames were dim, but sufficient light remained to reveal the picture above the fireplace. It showed a middle-aged man in the clothes of the later Stuarts. The plump tapering fingers of one hand held a book; the other was hidden in the folds of a flowered waistcoat. The long curled wig framed a delicate face with something of the grace of youth left to it. There were quizzical lines about the mouth, and the eyes smiled pleasantly yet very wisely. It was the face of a man I should have liked to dine with. He must have been the best of company.

  Giffen answered my question.

  ‘That’s the Lord Carteron who built the house. No – no relation. Our people were the Applebys, who came in 1753. We’ve both fallen so deep in love with Fullcircle that we wanted to see the man who conceived it. I had some trouble getting it. It came out of the Minster Carteron sale, and I had to give a Jew dealer twice what he paid for it. It’s a jolly thing to live with.’

  It was indeed a curiously charming picture. I found my eyes straying to it till the dusk obscured the features. It was the face of one wholly at home in a suave world, learned in all the urbanities. A good friend, I thought, the old lord must have been, and a superlative companion. I could imagine neat Horatian tags coming ripely from his lips. Not a strong face, but somehow a dominating one. The portrait of the long-dead gentleman had still the atmosphere of life. Giffen raised his glass of port to him as we rose from table, as if to salute a comrade.

  We moved to the room across the hall which had once been the Giffens’ workroom, the cradle of earnest committees and weighty memoranda. This was my third surprise. Baize-covered table and raw-wood shelves had disappeared. The place was now half smoking-room, half library. On the walls hung a fine collection of coloured sporting prints, and below them were ranged low Hepplewhite bookcases. The lamplight glowed on the ivory walls, and the room, like everything else in the house, was radiant.

  Above the mantelpiece was a stag’s head – a fair eleven-pointer.

  Giffen nodded proudly toward it. ‘I got that last year at Machray. My first stag.’

  There was a little table with an array of magazines and weekly papers. Some amusement must have been visible in my face, as I caught sight of various light-hearted sporting journals, for he laughed apologetically. ‘You mustn’t think that Ursula and I take in that stuff for ourselves. It amuses our guests, you know.’

  I dared say it did, but I was convinced that the guests were no longer Dr Swope and Mr Percy Blaker.

  One of my many failings is that I can never enter a room containing books without scanning the titles. Giffen’s collection won my hearty approval. There were the very few novelists I can read myself – Miss Austen and Sir Walter and the admirable Marryat; there was a shelf full of memoirs, and a good deal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poetry; there was a set of the classics in fine editions. Bodonis and Baskervilles and such like; there was much county history and one or two valuable old Herbals and Itineraries. I was certain that two years earlier Giffen would have had no use for literature except some muddy Russian oddments, and I am positive that he would not have known the name of Surtees. Yet there stood the tall octavos recording the unedifying careers of Mr Jorrocks, Mr Facey Romford and Mr Soapy Sponge.

  I was a little bewildered as I stretched my legs in a very deep armchair. Suddenly I had a strong impression of looking on at a play. My hosts seemed to be automata, moving docilely at the orders of a masterful stage manager, and yet with no sense of bondage. And as I looked on, they faded off the scene, and there was only one personality – that house so serene and secure, smiling at our modern antics, but weaving all the while an iron spell around its lovers.

  For a second I felt an oppression as of something to be resisted. But no. There was no oppression. The house was too well-bred and disdainful to seek to captivate. Only those who fell in love with it could know its mastery, for all love exacts a price. It was far more than a thing of stone and lime: it was a creed, an art, a scheme of life – older than any Carteron, older than England. Somewhere far back in time, in Rome, in Attica, or in an Aegean island, there must have been such places; and then they called them temples, and gods dwelt in them.

  I was roused by Giffen’s voice discoursing of his books. ‘I’ve been rubbing up my classics again,’ he was saying. ‘Queer thing, but ever since I left Cambridge I have been out of the mood for them. And I’m shockingly ill-read in English literature. I wish I had more time for reading, for it means a lot to me.’

  ‘There is such an embarrassment of riches here,’ said his wife. ‘The days are far too short for all there is to do. Even when there is nobody staying in the house I find every hour occupied. It’s delicious to be busy over things one really cares for.’

  ‘All the same I wish I could do more reading,’ said Giffen. ‘I’ve never wanted to so much before.’

  ‘But you come in tired from shooting and sleep sound till dinner,’ said the lady, laying an affectionate hand on his shoulder.

  They were happy people, and I like happiness. Self-absorbed, perhaps, but I prefer selfishness in the ordinary way of things. We are most of us selfish dogs, and altruism makes us uncomfortable. But I had somehow in my mind a shade of uneasiness, for I was the witness of a transformation too swift and violent to be wholly natural. Years, no doubt, turn our eyes inward and abate our heroics, but not a trifle of two or three. Some agency had been at work here, some agency other and more potent than the process of time. The thing fascinated and partly frightened me. For the Giffens – though I scarcely dared to admit it – had deteriorated. They were far pleasanter people, I liked them infinitely better, I hoped to see them often again. I detested the type they used to represent, and shunned it like the plague. They were wise now, and mellow, and most agreeable human beings. But some virtue had gone out of them. An uncomfortable virtue, no doubt, but still a virtue; something generous and adventurous. In the earlier time, their faces had had a sort of wistful kindness. Now they had geniality – which is not the same thing.

  What was the agency of this miracle? It was all around me: the ivory panelling, the olive-wood staircase, the lovely pillared hall.

  I got up to go to bed with a kind of awe on me. As Mrs Giffen lit my candle, she saw my eyes wandering among the gracious shadows.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful’, she said, ‘to have found a house which fits us like a glove? No! Closer. Fits us as a bearskin fits the bear. It has taken our impress like wax.’

  Somehow I didn’t think that impress had come from the Giffens’ side.

  A November afternoon found Leithen and myself jogging homeward from a run with the Heythrop. It had been a wretched day. Twice we had found and lost, and then a deluge had set in which scattered the field. I had taken a hearty toss into a swamp, and got as wet as a man may be, but the steady downpour soon reduced everyone to a like condition. When we turned toward Borrowby the rain ceased, and an icy wind blew out of the east which partially dried our sopping clothes. All the grace had faded from the Cotswold valleys. The streams were brown torrents, the meadows lagoons, the ridges bleak and grey, and a sky of scurrying clouds cast leaden shadows. It was a matter of ten miles to Borrowby; we had long ago emptied our flasks, and I longed for something hot to take the chill out of my bones.

  ‘Let’s look in at Fullcircle,’ said Leithen, as we came out on the highroad from a muddy lane. ‘We’ll make the Giffens give us tea. You’ll find changes there.’

  I asked what changes, but he only smiled and told me to wait and see.

  My mind was busy with surmises as we rode up the avenue. I thought of drink or drugs, and promptly discarded the notion. Fullcircle was, above all things, decorous and wholesome. Leithen could not mean the change in the Giffens’ ways which had so impressed me a year before, for he and I had long ago discusse
d that. I was still puzzling over his words when we found ourselves in the inner hall, with the Giffens making a hospitable fuss over us.

  The place was more delectable than ever. Outside was a dark November day, yet the little house seemed to be transfused with sunshine. I do not know by what art the old builders had planned it; but the airy pilasters, the perfect lines of the ceiling, the soft colouring of the wood seemed to lay open the house to a clear sky. Logs burned brightly on the massive steel andirons, and the scent and the fine blue smoke of them strengthened the illusion of summer.

  Mrs Giffen would have us change into dry things, but Leithen pleaded a waiting dinner at Borrowby. The two of us stood by the fireplace, drinking tea, the warmth drawing out a cloud of vapour from our clothes to mingle with the wood smoke. Giffen lounged in an armchair and his wife sat by the tea-table. I was looking for the changes of which Leithen had spoken.

  I did not find them in Giffen. He was much as I remembered him on the June night when I had slept here – a trifle fuller in the face, perhaps, a little more placid about the mouth and eyes. He looked a man completely content with life. His smile came readily, and his easy laugh. Was it my fancy, or had he acquired a look of the picture in the dining-room? I nearly made an errand to go and see it. It seemed to me that his mouth had now something of the portrait’s delicate complacence. Lely would have found him a fit subject, though he might have boggled at his lean hands.

  But his wife! Ah, there the changes were unmistakable. She was comely now rather than pretty, and the contours of her face had grown heavier. The eagerness had gone from her eyes and left only comfort and good humour. There was a suspicion, ever so slight, of rouge and powder. She had a string of good pearls – the first time I had seen her wear jewels. The hand that poured out the tea was plump, shapely and well cared for. I was looking at a most satisfactory mistress of a country house, who would see that nothing was lacking to the part.

  She talked more and laughed oftener. Her voice had an airy lightness which would have made the silliest prattle charming.

  ‘We are going to fill the house with young people and give a ball at Christmas,’ she announced. ‘This hall is simply clamouring to be danced in. You must come, both of you. Promise me. And, Mr Leithen, it would be very nice if you brought a party from Borrowby. Young men, please. We are overstocked with girls in these parts. We must do something to make the country cheerful in winter-time.’

  I observed that no season could make Fullcircle other than cheerful.

  ‘How nice of you!’ she cried. ‘To praise a house is to praise the householders, for a dwelling is just what its inmates make it. Borrowby is you, Mr Leithen, and Full-circle us.’

  ‘Shall we exchange?’ Leithen asked.

  She made a mouth. ‘Borrowby would crush me, but it suits a Gothic survival like you. Do you think you would be happy here?’

  ‘Happy?’ said Leithen thoughtfully. ‘Happy? Yes, undoubtedly. But it might be bad for my soul. There’s just time for a pipe, Giffen, and then we must be off.’

  I was filling my pipe as we crossed the outer hall, and was about to enter the smoking-room that I so well remembered, when Giffen laid a hand on my arm.

  ‘We don’t smoke there now,’ he said hastily.

  He opened the door and I looked in. The place had suffered its third metamorphosis. The marble shrine which I had noticed on my first visit had been brought back, and the blue mosaic pavement and the ivory walls were bare. At the eastern end stood a little altar, with, above it, a copy of a Correggio Madonna.

  A faint smell of incense hung in the air, and the fragrance of hot-house flowers. It was a chapel, but, I swear, it was a more pagan place than when it had been workroom or smoking-room.

  Giffen gently shut the door. ‘Perhaps you may not have heard, but some months ago my wife became a Catholic. It is a good thing for women, I think. It gives them a regular ritual for their lives. So we restored the chapel, which had always been there in the days of the Carterons and the Applebys.’

  ‘And you?’ I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I don’t bother much about that sort of thing. But I propose to follow suit. It will please Ursula and do no harm to anybody.’

  We halted on the brow of the hill and looked back on the garden valley. Leithen’s laugh, as he gazed, had more awe than mirth in it.

  ‘That wicked little house! I’m going to hunt up every scrap I can find about old Tom Carteron. He must have been an uncommon clever fellow. He’s still alive down there and making people do as he did. In that kind of place you may expel the priest and sweep it and garnish it, but he always returns.’

  The wrack was lifting before the wind, and a shaft of late watery sun fell on the grey walls. It seemed to me that the little house wore an air of gentle triumph.

  The Loathly Opposite

  How loathly opposite I stood

  To his unnatural purpose.

  King Lear

  Burminster had been to a Guildhall dinner the night before, which had been attended by many – to him – unfamiliar celebrities. He had seen for the first time in the flesh people whom he had long known by reputation, and he declared that in every case the picture he had formed of them had been cruelly shattered. An eminent poet, he said, had looked like a starting-price bookmaker, and a financier of world-wide fame had been exactly like the music-master at his preparatory school. Wherefore Burminster made the profound deduction that things were never what they seemed.

  ‘That’s only because you have a feeble imagination,’ said Sandy Arbuthnot. ‘If you had really understood Timson’s poetry you would have realised that it went with close-cropped red hair and a fat body, and you should have known that Macintyre [this was the financier] had the music-and-metaphysics type of mind. That’s why he puzzles the City so. If you understand a man’s work well enough you can guess pretty accurately what he’ll look like. I don’t mean the colour of his eyes and his hair, but the general atmosphere of him.’

  It was Sandy’s agreeable habit to fling an occasional paradox at the table with the view of starting an argument. This time he stirred up Pugh, who had come to the War Office from the Indian Staff Corps. Pugh had been a great figure in Secret Service work in the East, but he did not look the part, for he had the air of a polo-playing cavalry subaltern. The skin was stretched as tight over his cheek-bones as over the knuckles of a clenched fist, and was so dark that it had the appearance of beaten bronze. He had black hair, rather beady black eyes, and the hooky nose which in the Celt often goes with that colouring. He was himself a very good refutation of Sandy’s theory.

  ‘I don’t agree,’ Pugh said. ‘At least not as a general principle. One piece of humanity whose work I studied with the microscope for two aching years upset all my notions when I came to meet it.’

  Then he told us this story.

  ‘When I was brought to England in November ’17 and given a “hush” department on three floors of an eighteenth-century house in a back street, I had a good deal to learn about my business. That I learned it in reasonable time was due to the extraordinarily fine staff that I found provided for me. Not one of them was a regular soldier. They were all educated men – they had to be in that job – but they came out of every sort of environment. One of the best was a Shetland laird, another was an Admiralty Court KC, and I had besides a metallurgical chemist, a golf champion, a leader-writer, a popular dramatist, several actuaries and an East-end curate. None of them thought of anything but his job, and at the end of the war, when some ass proposed to make them OBEs, there was a very fair imitation of a riot. A more loyal crowd never existed, and they accepted me as their chief as unquestioningly as if I had been with them since 1914.

  ‘To the war in the ordinary sense they scarcely gave a thought. You found the same thing in a lot of other behind-the-lines departments, and I daresay it was a good thing – it kept their nerves quiet and their minds concentrated. After all our business was only to decode and de
cypher German messages; we had nothing to do with the use which was made of them. It was a curious little nest, and when the Armistice came my people were flabbergasted – they hadn’t realised that their job was bound up with the war.

  ‘The one who most interested me was my second-in-command, Philip Channell. He was a man of forty-three, about five-foot-four in height, weighing, I fancy, under nine stone, and almost as blind as an owl. He was good enough at papers with his double glasses, but he could hardly recognise you three yards off. He had been a professor at some Midland college – mathematics or physics, I think – and as soon as the war began he had tried to enlist. Of course they wouldn’t have him – he was about E5 in any physical classification, besides being well over age – but he would take no refusal, and presently he worried his way into the Government service. Fortunately he found a job which he could do superlatively well, for I do not believe there was a man alive with more natural genius for cryptography.

  ‘I don’t know if any of you have ever given your mind to that heart-breaking subject. Anyhow you know that secret writing falls under two heads – codes and cyphers, and that codes are combinations of words and cyphers of numerals. I remember how one used to be told that no code or cypher which was practically useful was really undiscoverable, and in a sense that is true, especially of codes. A system of communication which is in constant use must obviously not be too intricate, and a working code, if you get long enough for the job, can generally be read. That is why a code is periodically changed by the users. There are rules in worrying out the permutations and combinations of letters in most codes, for human ingenuity seems to run in certain channels, and a man who has been a long time at the business gets surprisingly clever at it. You begin by finding out a little bit, and then empirically building up the rules of decoding, till in a week or two you get the whole thing. Then, when you are happily engaged in reading enemy messages, the code is changed suddenly, and you have to start again from the beginning… You can make a code, of course, that it is simply impossible to read except by accident – the key to which is a page of some book, for example – but fortunately that kind is not of much general use.