A Villa in France

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘I’m not at all sure he wasn’t taking your clothes off, Dora. Right at the start.’

  ‘Well, we had the advantage of him, in a way, since all his clothes were offa lready. And he does strip pretty.’

  ‘What an awful expression!’

  ‘We’ve taken to going in for rather awful talk, haven’t we? As for being glanced over in the gross male way, I can’t say I wasn’t – if ever so briefly ï aware of it. But it didn’t terribly please me. Do you know what I thought he was thinking? “Oh, yes – but I’ve been there before.” Something like that.’

  ‘Dora, this is becoming quite horrible. Do you mean you felt yourself to be in the presence of – well, of a sated voluptuary?’

  ‘That’s an awful expression, too. I can’t think, Penelope, where your reading has lain of late.’

  ‘It’s a very good and precise expression. But the question is whether it applies. Isn’t it just that what I said about roués has put it in both our heads?’

  ‘Very probably – and I don’t want to traduce your neighbour Fulke Ferneydale. Probably he is very nice. But what I’m sure of is that he is a troubled young man. One can’t remotely pin it down. But it does somehow come through.’

  ‘It may be that he feels the sort of things he has written so far are not what he ought really to be after as an artist.’

  ‘That would at least be a respectable explanation. But, now, here’s something more important. Shall we really go and swim with him?’

  ‘Yes, we will.’ Penelope had answered on the instant. ‘Just the three of us mayn’t be exactly comme il faut. But I’ll be chaperoning you and you’ll be chaperoning me.’

  VI

  Caspar Ferneydale’s visit to Paris ought to have given him considerable satisfaction. He loved the city, and at the age of twenty-six felt that it had been for many years familiar to him. He also felt that twenty-six was an unusually early age at which to have conferred on him even the small ceremonial role he had undertaken. The scholar who had died had been an eminent lay polemicist of the Faith, and a Tertiary of the same Order to which Caspar – again precociously – had been admitted in England. So Caspar had been appointed to attend a formal commemorative occasion in a respectable representative character. And this constituted too, he felt, one up to the journal he now edited. It was a journal, he would candidly have admitted, in need of anything of that sort that came along. Quarter by quarter, its appearance was not much remarked; it hung obstinately in the dusty rear of several older-established publications of similar kidney; there was danger that it would even fade away into the limbo of numerous fugitive ventures similarly regardless of popular appeal. But he would write for it an account of his mission, and of relevant aspects of the current French intellectual scene, sufficiently distinguished to mark him as something more than the importunate solicitor of unremunerative contributions from authentic but much preoccupied intellectuals of one kind and another. With luck his piece might particularly please that Old Catholic nobleman on whose modest munificence the continued existence of his journal largely depended.

  But Caspar was only twenty-six, and around him (as once around his brother in an earlier season) Paris expanded itself in quite other directions. Was it not a vast and many-faceted engine of refined pleasures such as Fulke would have told him that Henry James or somebody had once described it? It was true that Fulke’s first sampling of this had been merely gross – or in part gross and in part absurd. But Caspar felt that he himself harboured the capacity for other sensations, could he only grasp at that simple joie de vivre which, alas, seemed destined perpetually to elude him. So he moved from one familiar scene to another in an elegiac frame of mind.

  He lacked, he told himself, even intellectual passion. He ought to have remained a don – he had really met with ill luck there – and developed on the one hand some compassable field of scholarly enquiry and on the other a gently fulfilled domesticity with wife and child among similarly disposed persons inhabiting the villas of North Oxford. At least he would be up to that – although here again, indeed, passion was an elusive endowment. Unlike Fulke – who was scurrying, he knew, in a restless way from mistress to mistress – he had remained depressingly ineffective as a sexual being. Yet he was a sexual being of the simplest sort, for whom the achieving of fulfilment in this very normal aspect of life ought itself to be simple. He remembered how that old donkey Henry Rich had asked him whether he had any thought of the priesthood, and how at the time he had evaded a direct answer. Actually, he could have given it at once. He didn’t doubt – at least he thought he didn’t doubt – his unswerving loyalty to Holy Church. But no more did he doubt his entire lack of any inclination to celibacy. He respected that particular act of dedication enormously, but at the same time he saw and feared its loneliness. Of course you couldn’t be lonely – in a radical sense you couldn’t be lonely – if you had given yourself wholly to Christ. The idea frightened him, all the same. It was unfortunate, he was sometimes capable of thinking, that the Anglican Church was deeply and hopelessly in heresy. Had it not been so, he might have made a contented (and rather more theologically active) Henry Rich in due season.

  In Paris, however, there had still been (indeed, there increasingly were) significant doors at which he could with propriety and acceptance present himself. Nobody knew very much about him, but he was understood to be establishing himself in similar circles in his own country, and he was undoubtedly well-informed. That he also possessed a certain sharpness and subtlety of mind was known only to the few people who happened to have read some of his carefully prepared articles and reviews. There was little that was remarkable or in any way memorable about his conversation, and about his manner or bearing there was nothing, at least in strange company, except a common English upper-class diffidence unlikely to arrest any attention whatever. But at one party he persuaded an eminent Academician to write for his journal a short essay on the later, and edifying, career of Charles Peguy, at that time known in England, if at all, only as a poet with a dotty obsession with Joan of Arc. This was quite a coup, so that Caspar returned home well pleased with himself after all.

  But just what ‘home’ meant to Caspar Ferneydale at this time, he might have found it difficult to say. It did, of course, mean England; and to his native soil in this sense he was notably attached. Although he did more reading in foreign languages than in his own, and was strongly attracted by at least certain aspects of French culture, and again even although his Church so majestically transcended all national boundaries, he nevertheless had little taste for anything to be called cosmopolitan life. In this he differed from his brother. Fulke liked to feel equally at home, or equally without any felt need to be at home, in whatever corner of the globe he had planted himself for a time. There were, in fact, the makings of an expatriate in Fulke, whereas Caspar was by instinct a home-keeping, or at least home-returning, youth. He might have told you that he lived in London – this on the strength of having secured himself a pied-à-terre loosely attached to a Catholic mission maintaining a tenuous existence in Bethnal Green. But he was at least at Mallows Hall less infrequently than Fulke, and might have spent even more time there had he not been conscious that his parents – or certainly his father – regarded him as a kind of family puzzle, or indeed problem, hanging around when he ought to be getting on. James Ferneydale made little of his elder son’s literary productions, and was rendered at times uneasy by what he heard about his life. But there was no doubt that Fulke was beginning to make money; his habit of buying expensive motor-cars and the like without any call upon a family exchequer would alone have demonstrated this; and he even paid his parents a species of rent by the regular importation of Havana cigars and delicacies from Messrs Fortnum and Mason. Caspar’s employments were equally incomprehensible, but his emoluments therefrom appeared nugatory, so that he lived on those slightly more than adequate hand-outs which prosperous and preoccupied business men get in the habit of dispensing to sons as a matter of co
urse from quite an early age. Caspar himself found nothing positively uncomfortable about this.

  But it was slightly discouraging, all the same, so that he was inclined to dwell upon the necessity of his being much in London were he adequately to keep his finger upon the intellectual pulse of the age.

  On the present occasion, however, Caspar had taken it into his head that he must soon write not merely that choice piece upon his late small expedition but positively a substantial and deeply meditated book, upon which he would make a start by spending at least a couple of summer months quietly at Mallows. He had already prepared for this by sending down a large packing-case containing the primary materials for such a venture.

  But first he paid a visit to Oxford, a little in the spirit of a John Henry Newman taking a peep at the paradise from which he had been expelled. Of course there had been no theological animus whatever in Caspar’s failure to keep a permanent foothold there. After all, something like a Catholic High Command had long been comfortably established at Oxford, the prime duty of which was to maintain a thoughtful eye on all that was promising and unpromising in the behaviour alike of recent converts and of Cradle Cats. On Caspar himself Father Fisher still kept tabs, and it was primarily to report to this spiritual director that the visit was made.

  Father Fisher was an influential man. It was even believed that his name did not pass unmentioned in Rome whenever the Curia chanced upon the problem of the evangelisation of England. His austerity was also formidable, while being at the same time of that higher sort which accommodates itself to a graceful participation in the material comforts and recruitments proper in the entertaining of guests. He appeared to have plenty of leisure for Caspar, taking him to dine and spend the evening with the Jesuits at Campion Hall, and on the following day entertaining him to a simple midday meal which ran to an excellent claret. They then walked round Christ Church Meadow.

  Oxford in the Long Vacation was already in those years not at all as it is described by Charles Lamb. The era of mass tourism had not arrived, but summer visitors were remarkably numerous, all the same. For some time adventurous Americans had again been going on holiday abroad, and had returned home to assure their compatriots that what they called ‘conditions’ in Europe were sufficiently restored to be tolerable to those of pioneering mind. So – for the most part in small parties – there were plenty of these around. Oddly contrasting with them were larger contingents of young people from the continent, roaming with packs on their backs a world that seemed to them suddenly of marvellous extension. All this had taken a decade to come about, and it had been a decade during which Oxford’s factories for building motor-cars had been breeding banausic hordes not yet comfortably accommodated with shopping and recreative facilities in their own rapidly proliferating suburbs. This social mix-up troubled nobody, and indeed the period had already begun in which the undergraduates of the university had hit upon the wholesome idea of managing to dress (if not always to behave) in a manner identical with that of their contemporaries from the conveyor belts of Cowley.

  But if the city had become a crowded and bustling place, Christ Church Meadow remained mysteriously inviolate. Here and there on its northern perimeter, where there were modest expanses of mown and unfenced grass, a few people came at midday to eat their sandwiches or venture upon more or less restrained approaches to making love. But the great open space running down to the river was peopled only by sheep or cattle, transported thither by Christ Church at some expense to impart a judicious air of rurality to the scene. There were atrocious persons bent upon constructing a high road across Christ Church Meadow, and the cattle represented one of the more obvious and publicly exhibited measures for frustrating anything of the sort. What remained curious was the fact that walking round Christ Church Meadow, which was the gentle exercise of half an hour, seemed to remain the habit of the same small number of meditative persons as had pursued it in the age of Matthew Arnold and Benjamin Jowett. Caspar Ferneydale and Father Fisher were in the enjoyment of this on the present afternoon.

  ‘That was a delightful occasion last night,’ Caspar said politely. ‘But it gives me something to confess. Those young men attending upon us, and so arduously beginning at the bottom of a ladder, made me feel something of an outsider still. That sort of discipline I couldn’t begin on now.’

  ‘No, you could not.’ Father Fisher invariably concurred at once in evident truths, and he knew that Caspar was no more likely to become a Jesuit than he was to become a member of the Papal Guard in habiliments designed by Michelangelo for the purpose. ‘And what you say has often been said to me by converts. Strange garments, you know, cleave not to their mould but with the aid of use.’

  ‘That’s certainly true.’ In point of fact, Caspar didn’t care to have his Catholicism described as still a strange garment. It had now sat upon him for a good many years, and he remembered with distaste the uneasy period in which he had made a habit of ‘reconsidering his position’ every six months or so. In the past twenty-four hours Father Fisher had been the soul of tact in a pastoral way. He had discussed Caspar’s projected book in a detailed and penetrating manner, and always with the implication that it was as certain to be influential as it was to be achieved within at least a short space of years. Intelligent and widely-read laymen had their use; indeed, they were extremely important. But Father Fisher was probably relieved that Caspar Ferneydale was not Fulke Ferneydale, upon whose opinions and activities he had evidently taken the trouble to inform himself fairly fully. Nothing was more tricky than a convert, free of the stricter disciplines of the Church and possessed of a strong creative flair. There were several prominent novelists like that in England, and probably playwrights too, and it didn’t help when they went a little off the rails. Caspar Ferneydale was in a simpler category. What was important was that he should be confirmed and fortified in a sober understanding of his rightful and most acceptable role in whatever struggle lay ahead.

  But Father Fisher wasn’t a man to hurry things. He was aware, too, that despite all his care what was in his mind was unlikely to be wholly concealed from Caspar’s, in which he knew there lay a good deal of intuitive alertness as well as valuable intellectual ability. So now he talked at some length, and with much practical sagacity, about his protégé’s immediate problems as an editor. It was only when the two men had sat down on a bench commanding a view of the placid Isis and the line of deserted college barges that he approached other matters.

  ‘The going is likely to be tough,’ Father Fisher said. ‘And this time I make the remark in terms of the largest perspectives.’

  ‘It always is, isn’t it? The battle goes on for ever.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Caspar. And we must be temperate in our talk of a new Dark Age. Through the centuries it has been a facile road to turning glum – and there’s nothing more absurd, you know, than a glum Christian. Still, one has to look ahead. Horrors have happened often enough, and some of the most remarkable have occurred within the orbit of the Church. The rationalist view of us as among the villains of the piece can undoubtedly find its evidences here and there. But even the most dreadful aberrations of heresy-hunting and the like have usually been more or less local phenomena. What seems now to lie ahead is a proliferation of evil on a world-wide scale. Everywhere acquisitiveness and the rage for material things may drive men to torment and destroy one another on a scale almost unexampled in the past.’

  ‘So what are we to do, Father?’

  ‘Find each his appointed station, I suppose, within which to play his part. The priesthood for some of us, the gaining of a beneficent authority in public affairs or the intellectual or literary sphere for others. And we must all gather strength and equilibrium as we best may. I hold it to be true that for the majority of men, however varying their temperaments and abilities, these qualities are most securely sustained and nourished upon a basis of the domestic sanctities.’

  ‘Are you telling me, Father, that I ought to get married – and t
o a woman who will back me up?’

  ‘My dear boy, not quite that.’ Father Fisher was pleased by this directness on Caspar’s part. There was a good deal of native evasiveness about the young man, and a liking for making his points obliquely. So here was at once a token of the priest’s skill in fostering a relationship of confidence over intimate matters, and a warning that such authority was to be exercised warily. ‘No, not quite that,’ he repeated. ‘There are those who give such advice baldly to young men who have been drawn into leading irregular lives. But even in such cases I am myself inclined to consider it as in danger of being rash and presumptuous. Yet I confess that I am suggesting to you a consideration to which your private thoughts should be given.’

  Caspar accepted this in silence, judging that Father Fisher’s turn of phrase had indicated his sense that this delicate subject should not be touched on further for the moment. And Father Fisher confirmed the accuracy of the conjecture by presently remarking on the curious fact that the barges, although individually lacking elegance, were yet delightful in their total effect. Caspar responded as he could, his ‘private thoughts’ having been cast into considerable confusion. On the one hand he felt faintly demoted by what had been said. But on the other his respect for Father Fisher’s counsels was increased – and not least from their underlying suggestion that in such matters one ought not to hurry along. For some months he must give himself time to reflect. Or – for that matter – some years.

  But a couple of hours brought him back to Mallows, and also, somewhat to his surprise, into the company of his brother. About Fulke there was no sense, as there commonly was, of his having dropped in for a week. He had made, it appeared, a very recent change in his plans for the summer, and was establishing working quarters of a sort in the two or three rooms always kept available for him. He had a good deal to say – in fact he was quite unusually communicative – about his current literary preoccupations. The plays had been all very well, and it was scarcely unimportant that they were still making pots of money. But a certain stigma indefinably attached to that sort of precocious success. Further affairs of the same kind might see him fatally typed as a purveyor of froth and bubble. Quite apart from reputation, moreover, he felt that such productions left him short of space and air. It wasn’t for nothing that the novel was so clearly becoming the predominant literary form of the age; it was rather that the complexities of that age, the seriousness of its problems for anybody who had the instinct for seriousness in him at all, called for a medium there was room to turn round in; and to get hooked on the theatre was virtually to abandon that. And although novels were in a sense two a penny, and for the most part reviewed in batches by acrid women, they were less than plays at the mercy of the sheep-like propensities of run-of-the-mill critics.