The Bridge at Arta

by J. I. M. Stewart

  It lay partly in his limbs and head, which appeared always to be in tentative movement in a clumsy and uncoordinated way. His features exhibited a similar mobility and, as it were, irresolution – his forehead and mouth and eyebrows, and even his insignificant and rather stubby nose, being inclined to dispose themselves simultaneously under the influence of what could only be read as quite unrelated emotions. His articulation was at times indistinct and halting, as if he were uncertain which of two speeches he had embarked upon, and he had a slight tendency to spit or slobber. People sometimes said impatiently that Herbert Humbert was like a great baby. And then somebody might add, almost resentfully, that he had uncommonly striking eyes. This was certainly true. Mysteriously yet unmistakably, Humbert’s eyes spoke of something a little beyond a common scholar’s capacity.

  ‘Herbert – God bless me!’ This apostrophe reached Humbert as he had his nose buried in one of the lower drawers of the author catalogue – which meant that he must have been recognised more or less by the cut of his backside. He may have judged this to be the more remarkable when he straightened up and turned round, since here was a man who hadn’t set eyes on him for years – but who now touched him affectionately on the shoulder, nevertheless.

  ‘Vivian – well, well!’ Humbert’s slight stutter accompanied this. It was almost as if he had said, ‘Sir Vivian – well, well!’—which might have been proper to a person only slightly known to him. In fact, he and Sir Vivian Cardwell had in youth been close associates for two or three years. They had seen one another quite frequently after that – perhaps for two or three years more. Then the relationship had faded out. Since they continued to have common intellectual interests this ought not to have happened. It hadn’t been the intention of either man in particular. Men do drift apart. Awkward train journeys, crowded engagement-books, possessive wives and exacting children, covertly conflicting social assumptions may all be at work. In this particular instance Cardwell had to shoulder the main burden of fault – this even although Humbert was a difficult man and he himself would have been universally described as eminently an easy one. Cardwell was rather wealthy as well as rather grand, and Humbert was a poor devil of a lecturer in an obscure corner of the University of London. So if the present encounter was something that had to be ‘carried off’ it was primarily up to Cardwell so to carry it.

  He did this with no appearance of effort at all, making a merely whimsical business of those disregarding years. Nor did Humbert fuss over them. Long ago he had regretted that Vivian owned a country house and a substantial estate – and some sort of hereditary position in a merchant bank into the bargain. He had regretted this, foreseeing that the various cares and responsibilities involved would be likely to distract his friend from the pursuit of those purely intellectual interests for which, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, he had shown himself to be so exceptionally well-endowed. Humbert felt this loss to scholarship and learning more strongly, perhaps, than he did the severance of a personal relationship. He was a bachelor, who had taught himself to get along fairly well without much in the way of friendship or the domestic affections; in fact it might have been said that other people scarcely came into his head at all except as having made some contribution – inevitably quite small, more often than not – to the sum of human knowledge. This temperamental slant had ensured his accepting without resentment Vivian’s having drifted out of contact with him for so long, and he envied him nothing except, conceivably, the elegance rather than the power of his mind – that and his ability to do without effort what he also did well. For Humbert, although a dedicated scholar, was not without a streak of personal ambition. He would have liked fame. He would even have liked – he would very much have liked – the mere academic advancement that had failed to come to him.

  ‘I don’t often run up to town nowadays,’ Cardwell said. ‘They’ve turned me out of that weekly meeting at the bank, you see – telling me to look to my acres. The Funds are all very well. But a score of good ewes may be worth ten pounds at Stamford Fair.’

  ‘I’m sure they may, Vivian.’ Humbert dimly remembered how Vivian and he had played some sort of primitive quoting game out of Shakespeare. ‘But it must give you more time for Concrete Universals in Literature.’

  ‘In what? Oh, yes! I do remember. But I don’t think I’d call the book that now. It’s not much of an affair, and I wouldn’t want to weigh it down with an ink-horn term on the title page.’

  ‘It exists? It’s finished?’ Humbert’s features lit up – nearly all over. ‘What splendid news!’

  ‘Yes, it is finished – so there’s no question of now having more time for it. Although I do take it out of the drawer and glance over it now and then.’

  ‘You don’t mean you’re not going to publish it?’ Humbert asked. His tone indicated bewilderment and dismay. ‘Why, Vivian, it’s bound to be a masterpiece!’

  ‘Come, come, my dear chap.’ Cardwell’s answering tone was designed to be whimsically tolerant, but a note of something like irritation sounded through it. ‘Masterpieces don’t occur in that line of business. Books about books are all a matter either of graceful gesture or clever concoction. Don’t you think?’

  At this juncture something slightly untoward happened in the London Library. A young man had paused hoveringly beside these two elderly ones, with a momentary air of feeling entitled to listen to their conversation and even perhaps to join in it. He was an unnoticeable young man, so pale and pinched and bespectacled that he looked very like an ink-horn term himself. Humbert and Cardwell had, in fact, both failed – again for the moment – to notice him, perhaps because they were more concerned than they realised to sound out the revived relationship between them. And it so happened that Cardwell’s last remark to his friend, which had been an appeal for concurrence in a mildly humorous view of things, had the appearance, through a casual turn of the head, of having been directed challengingly to this newcomer on the scene. The newcomer’s reception of the small infelicity was scarcely urbane. He scowled contemptuously, muttered something to Cardwell that sounded distinctly rude, and marched quickly off into the nearest book-stack.

  ‘Do you know that young man?’ Cardwell asked.

  ‘Oh, yes – very well. And he seemed upset.’ Humbert gazed in perplexity in the direction in which this uncivil person had vanished. ‘I wonder why? His name is Bernard Hinkstone, and he was one of the best pupils I’ve had in years. We don’t often talk about “pupils”, as a matter of fact. We just say “students”, as if nobody in particular was responsible for them. It’s not as in Cambridge, you see.’ Humbert said this a shade wistfully. ‘Hinkstone came to us from Christ’s Hospital – the Blue-coat School, you know and I’ve tried to help him along. He has rather a dreary job in a polytechnic now. But his real interests are close to mine – and yours.’

  ‘I see.’ Cardwell didn’t feel very drawn to the unmannerly young Hinkstone. And he was aware that it was now up to him to do something definite about this encounter with one who brought a strong claim in the way of former friendship along with him. ‘Herbert, do you by any chance have time to lunch with me?’

  ‘Certainly I have.’ Humbert sounded as surprised as if luncheon were something hitherto unheard of, which Cardwell had now invented on the spot.

  ‘That’s capital! We have all sorts of things to talk about, wouldn’t you say? If we want to be quiet, we can go to—’ Cardwell had been about to say ‘my club’, but a glance at Humbert’s outward man made him change his mind. ‘We can go to that little Italian place, just round the corner in Duke of York Street. I dare say you drop in there yourself from time to time. It’s not half bad.’

  ‘It needn’t be even that, Vivian, so far as I’m concerned.’ Humbert spoke with a sudden warmth, and those remarkable eyes flashed as if the mind behind them had abruptly dredged up from memory days of golden association long ago. ‘If we can really talk, pulse and tap-water would do.’

  ‘So it would!’ Sir Vivian Cardwell
rose manfully to the pitch of this. ‘But we can have a bottle of tolerable Chianti, all the same.’

  They had come together as freshmen at Trinity, in the first place simply as having rooms on the same staircase. Trinity was Vivian Cardwell’s natural college from the moment it had been decided that he was not to follow his father to Christ Church at the other university. For Herbert Humbert, contrastingly, it was as is the non-watery world to a fish – or it was this in every regard that didn’t directly concern gaining in a Tripos the hall-mark of a first-class mind. Neither of the young men had any athletic interests, so they weren’t going to meet in a boat on the Cam. Cardwell belonged to a kind of secret college society so intellectually distinguished that it held even the most brilliant examination performances in slight regard; Humbert had possibly not so much as heard of this elite coterie. For some weeks they had just failed of physical collision on emerging simultaneously from their sets, or while respectively dashing upstairs and down. Then there had actually been a bump, in consequence of which Cardwell had let fall a recently published book called Seven Types of Ambiguity. Within minutes this treatise (which they were quite soon ungratefully to regard as mere chicken-feed) had revealed them each to each as kindred spirits. Or perhaps not quite that. It might have been more accurate to speak of similarly orientated intelligences. They sat up with one another regularly until far past midnight, planning a radical reform of the principles of literary criticism. Humbert proposed to write an epoch-making book to be called The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science, and was discouraged upon discovering that somebody had incubated the same idea in New York. Cardwell was the first into print, with a contribution to a high-brow undergraduate journal which he entitled ‘A Critical Exposition of Croce’s La Teoria dell’arte come pura visibilità’. Locally in Cambridge, all the running in criticism was being made by F. R. Leavis, an English don at Downing, who took a rather pulpit-thumping view of his function. But more esoteric matter poured in from elsewhere in sufficient abundance to keep both budding scholars in an almost febrile condition. Humbert, in particular, could get almost drunk on the discovery of an essay with some such title as ‘Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle’. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.

  Vacations separated them, since it never occurred to them either to try travelling together or to visit one another at home. They corresponded copiously, as undergraduates often do, but it was almost entirely without any approach to personal intimacy; indeed without any substantial exchange of information on personal matters. Humbert believed that Cardwell had been at Eton whereas he had really been at Rugby; Cardwell would have conjectured – vaguely if quite accurately – that Humbert’s earlier education had been at ‘one of those rather good grammar schools they go in for in the Midlands’. Neither knew whether the other had brothers or sisters, and such problems as those of sexual initiation (upon which young males are commonly at least obliquely informative with their closer companions) were never perpended between them. There was something old-fashioned, almost Victorian, about their relationship, which contrasted oddly with their addiction to the newest of New Criticism. Here were two serious reading men, not caring to be curious about one another’s social background, but bound together by a common commanding interest in a severe branch of literary study.

  It was on this level that their association continued until their final undergraduate year. Then it happened that Cardwell’s mother, recently widowed and as a consequence increasingly vigilant in her son’s affairs, decided that a presumably respectable young man whose letters on learned matters arrived so punctually at Chantries whenever Vivian was at home ought at least to be invited to turn up in his own person. The new baronet (who was continuing to do what his mother told him while looking round at leisure for a wife) agreed at once, and the visit took place. Lady Cardwell (the parent from whom Vivian inherited his brains) found no difficulty in liking Herbert Humbert. Naturally he couldn’t know some of the ropes, but the fact didn’t tiresomely embarrass him; and it was creditable that Vivian, whom she thought of as preparing himself for a distinguished career in politics, should have thus all in his stride attached to himself the interest and respect of a patently impressive if uncouth young scholar. Nevertheless Humbert’s week at Chantries, superficially at least, was no great success. Intelligent though he was, he had never given time to reflecting that in Vivian there must certainly harbour Cardwells unknown to him. These were only the more apparent now because his host, out of consideration for his guest, tried to tuck them away a little. It wasn’t really possible. Girls turned up and Vivian got meekly into flannels and played tennis with them – betraying evident enjoyment in an activity which, at Cambridge, he classed with rugger and rowing as sweaty futilities. Men came and paced up and down the terrace, smoking cigars and talking about the constituency: one thing, they would decide, might be chattered about at the local Conservative Association but another must be arranged quietly through the Central Office; what was important was that the seat should be safe as houses when young Cardwell came along to collect it. It appeared that young Cardwell was showing signs of being very decent about the Hunt, although everybody knew that his own interest was entirely in shooting and fishing.

  All this had surprised and disturbed Humbert, but at an obscure level it pleased him as well. Yet this very sense of pleasure disturbed him too, intimating as it did possibilities of personal relationship which he had taught himself to regard as a distraction from the life of the mind. He was glad to get away from Chantries. Yet he was to look back to it with what he knew was a hint of affection. He would always now be to some extent Vivian Cardwell’s man. At a pinch he would even do whatever Vivian told him. Which was only to say – what he knew very well – that, unlike Vivian, he packed a good deal more intellect than will.

  Cardwell on his part was quite glad when Humbert took his leave of Chantries. The visit had made him realise the extent to which his college friend was (in the words of a contemporary poet) not a bus but a tram. For poor old Herbert life would be all a matter of determinate grooves. It was impossible to think of him getting married – or even getting drunk. He was going to be hopelessly unpractical. It was hard to imagine him holding down a job – unless, of course, he was lucky enough to land a Fellowship at one of the obscurer colleges. Perhaps it would be possible to do something for him. Cardwell wasn’t certain that he didn’t actually have a duty that way.

  In the succeeding few years, when they were still seeing something of each other, Cardwell did nothing of this sort. He had a wholesome feeling that it would be impertinent to patronise Herbert – in addition to which Herbert had landed himself quite a decent teaching appointment after all. Moreover he had published several interesting papers, so something like The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science might be expected sooner or later. Such was Sir Vivian Cardwell’s feeling in the matter when he eventually lost sight of Herbert Humbert altogether. He had the excuse of being much occupied. Alike as a landowner, a banker, and a member of parliament he was endlessly busy. In addition to which he still found time for his interests in literature and scholarship, and his name had become well known in the learned as well as the political world. He had never, it was true, produced anything which could quite be called a major work, although the slow maturing of such a thing on his writing-table was sometimes rumoured. But he wrote with wide authority and great charm on a variety of topics, so that knowledgeable people would say ‘That must be by Vivian Cardwell’, when they ran across a particularly graceful and scintillating major review in the anonymous columns (as they still were) of the Times Literary Supplement. Humbert’s name in such a context would have come into nobody’s head.

  The two men hadn’t been long in the Italian restaurant in Duke of York Street before Cardwell was recalling two facts about Humbert: one with the effect of recovering something quite forgotten, and the other as the kind of thing one doesn’t really e
ver forget. Humbert was that sort of person, unrewarding to entertain, who is totally unconscious of what he either eats or drinks. It was the more irritating now because, on a mere freakish impulse, he devoted to the actual choosing of his meal the concentrated attention, and the dialectal elaboration in colloquy with the waiter, of a Frenchman at the most solemn moment of the day. But then he had at once appeared to forget that he was at table at all. And although food did disappear down his throat it was impossible to understand how it could have done so. For Humbert never stopped talking. This was the unforgotten, the unforgettable thing. Yet one has to be precise. Only a tape-recorder could have caught, and stored up for analysis and eventual comprehension, the actual burden of his discourse. Without such an aid, one could follow him from clause to clause, even from sentence to sentence – and this to an effect of constant illumination of the most recondite recesses of literature and art. But what might be called the discursive whole was more elusive, was evanescent, faded like Burns’s snowflakes in the river. It was possible to believe that in this quarter of the intellectual field Herbert Humbert could have given a fair run for his money to Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself.