The Bridge at Arta

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘I can see you feel I live in rather a mess,’ Herbert said cheerfully when Hinkstone had shoved him into a chair. ‘I suppose it’s true in a way, and Bernard would agree with you. Bernard tries to tidy me up from time to time, but I have to stop him. If you tidy everything up it means you can never put your hand on something when you want it, because it isn’t where it was.’

  ‘Which probably meant buried invisibly beneath something else,’ Cardwell said with a careful lightness of air. ‘It seems to me, Herbert, that you’ll have to live as De Quincey did, migrating from one set of rooms to another when the first became too jam-packed to move about it. He simply flitted in what he stood up in and started the process of accumulation all over again. It was a simplification, but one couldn’t call it exactly efficient.’

  ‘It didn’t prevent him,’ Hinkstone said, ‘from publishing no end of rubbish. Seventeen volumes of it, all sozzled in opium. Herbert is still seventeen short of that, but at least he keeps a clear head.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that,’ Cardwell said brusquely. He didn’t care to have this young man appear in the role of one defending Herbert against criticism. But at the same time he fleetingly wondered whether it would be possible to make an ally of Hinkstone. It might have to be either that or an enemy. For there was no doubt that this polytechnic person, so incongruously well-seen in Greek, was devoted to his old teacher.

  ‘The same is true of Bernard,’ Herbert said with a sudden cheerful splutter. ‘About the clear head, I mean. Not that there aren’t phases of obfuscation from time to time. The poor lad has got hung up lately on this chap Chomsky – Syntactic Structures, you know. And that reminds me, Vivian. I’ve put together a few notes on Chomsky that I’d like you to see. Irreverent, perhaps – but those outstanding fellows must put up with a little of that. Mind you, I’ve nothing against Generative Grammar in a general way. But when you begin to hear of Cartesian Linguistics it’s time to ask a question or two, wouldn’t you say?’ As he offered these arcane remarks Humbert was already fussing around the room – turning over books tumbled on tables, peering at shelves and into cupboards, actually here and there stirring the silt of papers on the floor with his foot. Then he came to a baffled pause. ‘Bernard,’ he demanded, ‘just where is that Chomsky file?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue, Herbert.’ It was with a hint of impatience that Hinkstone made this reply. Here had perhaps been an appeal of a kind that reached him too often.

  ‘You see?’ It was triumphantly but without malice – in fact it was with the most genial of splutters – that Humbert had turned to Cardwell. ‘Bernard has tidied the Chomsky file away, never to be seen again. Time will perform the same office by the man himself, of course. But it’s a shame he can’t even have a run for his money with me.’

  Herbert Humbert couldn’t have been called a witty man (except in an obsolete and superior sense of the word) but he was always pleased when he achieved some approximation to that character. He promptly forgot about Professor Chomsky now and talked about other things. With a little translation into his own fields of concern, it might be said that he talked about shoes and ships and sealing wax, and this without omitting cabbages and kings. Intermittently there was a hunt for appropriate documentation – for other files than the Chomsky one. More often than not, the search was again futile. But on half-a dozen occasions either jottings in Humbert’s hand or Hinkstone’s typescript copies (or perhaps recensions) of similar material were placed in Cardwell’s hands. He didn’t make a great deal of them. (Perhaps he made less than he ought to have done.) In places the effect was momentarily dazzling, as if a flash of lightning had lit up some far territory not commonly seen. But what was the use of that when the total effect was of helplessness and confusion? Cardwell found that repeatedly asking himself this question was fatiguing, and he was quite glad when the moment came at which he could get away. This didn’t mean that he was at all ditching Herbert. He was now quite clear that he was going to ‘do something’ for Herbert; was going to rehabilitate him by one means or another. Not that ‘rehabilitate’ was quite the right word, since poor old Herbert could scarcely be said ever to have been habilitated in the first place. Rather he was going to bring Herbert forward: that was it. And already he had a vague plan, a wholly benevolent plan, in his head. He couldn’t, however, broach it in this messy room, and with young Bernard Hinkstone standing jealously by. Herbert must be got down to Chantries, and there softened up – or chatted up, as the young people said.

  In the interest of this preliminary part of his plan, Cardwell went vigorously to work at once. Even Hinkstone couldn’t take exception to Herbert’s spending a weekend or a week on a visit to a very old friend. And eventually Herbert agreed. He was evidently alarmed, but when Cardwell fished out a pocket diary and fixed a date he submitted at once. Cardwell wondered whether, long ago, he had been able thus to give Herbert his orders, at least in the common affairs of life. He couldn’t remember. What he did remember (now for the first time in many years) was that in intellectual matters it had been Herbert who held the lead. Perhaps he himself (despite all the prizes he had taken) had been rather a slow developer. It was commonly said that slow developers got furthest in the long run.

  Rather to Cardwell’s surprise, Hinkstone saw him not only to the door of the flat but politely down the staircase as well. This proved, however, to be only because he had something not particularly agreeable to say.

  ‘He should be let alone,’ Hinkstone said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Cardwell produced this in a manner sufficiently frigid, he supposed, to quell further impertinence. But Hinkstone was resolved to have his say.

  ‘You may mean well, Sir Vivian. But you’ll only mess him around.’

  ‘My dear young man, I am prepared to give you credit for meaning well too. But Herbert Humbert and I were close friends before you were born. You will forgive me if I say that you speak a little out of turn.’

  ‘He’s perfectly happy as he is.’

  ‘I think not. Herbert has not been done justice to within his profession, and he feels it keenly. He ought to be a professor by now.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. A reader, perhaps. Readers are more learned than professors, but lack guile.’

  ‘Indeed?’ This facetiousness had seemed to Cardwell misplaced. ‘Let us say that Herbert has not received proper recognition, and that it is partly his own fault. He ought to have published more. He must be encouraged to publish.’

  ‘And you’re going to encourage him?’

  ‘He and I, Mr Hinkstone, used to work closely together. And the thought has come to me that we might do so again. I confide this to you, despite a certain acerbity in your tone, because I recognise that you have Herbert’s interest at heart. It has occurred to me that if he and I were to collaborate it might . . .’ Cardwell had been about to say, ‘bring Herbert forward’. More circumspectly, however, he said, ‘help matters along.’

  ‘Collaborate?’ The two men had now reached the front door, and Hinkstone opened it as he echoed the word. ‘Herbert collaborate with you? Don’t make me laugh.’

  With this fantastically discourteous speech (particularly shocking in a Grecian from Christ’s Hospital) Bernard Hinkstone virtually thrust Sir Vivian Cardwell into the street.

  Cardwell no longer played tennis with the daughters of the neighbouring families. But he sometimes played croquet with his wife, and on the second day of Herbert’s visit to Chantries it occurred to him that this would be a reasonable diversion to which to introduce his unathletic friend. He wasn’t exactly finding Herbert heavy in hand, but literary talk with him wasn’t sufficiently easy to be a resource right round the clock. As undergraduates they had frequently disagreed with one another vehemently, but at the same time owned so much common ground that the disagreements often proved fruitful as well as being fun. Now in late middle age their interests didn’t so exactly coincide. Perhaps it might be said that Humbert took the whole notion of a Theory of Literature mor
e seriously than Cardwell; he certainly took more seriously (and commanded more familiarly) what Cardwell would have been disposed to call the current jargon in the field. Humbert had never been easy to follow, and now there were times when Cardwell simply didn’t know what he was talking about. Cardwell had to admit to himself that he was still some way from even beginning to see how to sort poor Herbert out.

  At the start the croquet was quite a success. Herbert insisted on calling it pell-mell, and he talked about flamingos and hedgehogs in a manner Cardwell found perplexing until he remembered Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Sir Vivian had never much cared for Alice.) The processes of ‘making a croquet’ and ‘taking croquet’ pleased Herbert, and the discovery that he was allowed so to hit his own ball that it scarcely moved whereas his opponent’s went hurtling into the gooseberry bushes delighted him inordinately. But he couldn’t be brought to realise that, by way of scoring, more was required of him than to bang his ball at random through any hoop he chose. And every now and then he would recall Alice again, and either shout ‘Off with her head!’ or turn himself into a soldier pretending to be a hoop for Lady Cardwell’s benefit. It was quite as much the croquet as the literary conversation that suggested to Sir Vivian that the unspeakable Hinkstone had been right, and that Herbert was simply not to be collaborated with. The notion of an impressive work by V. Cardwell and H. Humbert had to be ruled out.

  In future years Cardwell would have found hard to remember either the point at which a bold new plan came to him, or the mingled (and even conflicting) motives that had gone to the framing of it. He may have begun from the perception that if anything were to be effected at all the first step must still be to gain some sort of ascendancy over Herbert of a kind not easy to define but the possibility of which he sensed as buried deep in their relationship. This was, in fact, the ‘softening up’ he had already thought of, and it didn’t sound wholly agreeable expressed in that way. Cardwell was by no means blind to the possibility that the lure of power was here jostling with his benevolent intentions – and indeed that his benevolence might be less active than his mere curiosity. He certainly wasn’t going to let Herbert return to London (and the clutches of Bernard Hinkstone) without exploring him a good deal further. He gave his friend the typescript of the book which at one time was to have been called Concrete Universals in Literature. It wasn’t exactly that kind of book now.

  Humbert took the book to bed with him, and had of course read it through by breakfast-time next morning. He was enthusiastic. He was enthusiastic – an informed spectator might have felt – in an almost curiously undiscriminating way. This ought to have irked Cardwell quite as much as it pleased him. But he felt nothing of the kind. He felt simply that Herbert was well on the road to where he wanted him.

  ‘Vivian, you simply must publish it! It would be criminal not to.’ Humbert was stammering and spluttering – something he had so far contrived not to do at Lady Cardwell’s table.

  ‘Let’s go and talk about it on the terrace, Herbert.’ Cardwell appeared to be making this suggestion out of consideration for his guest’s embarrassingly over-moist condition, but may also have felt that he might get further in helping Herbert if both were out of his wife’s eye.

  ‘My dear Herbert,’ he said as he began to stuff his morning pipe, ‘we must be realistic about this. Or, rather, we must simply be honest.’

  ‘Honest, Vivian?’ Not perhaps surprisingly, Humbert was a little puzzled by this suddenly conjured up moral imperative. ‘Honest about what?’

  ‘Simply about whose book it is. And I’ve pretty well told you about that already. It’s yours, almost every word of it. You alone can properly send it to the printer.’

  As he produced this remarkable speech Sir Vivian Caldwell kept his friend held in a level and penetrating gaze. It had come to him that the softening-up process was something to be achieved not by slow and cautious habituation but – as now – almost at a stroke. The right technique, in fact, was something very close to the stage hypnotist’s. It mightn’t work. But it was as likely to work as anything else was.

  ‘To the printer?’ Herbert’s features were more than commonly at sixes and sevens. ‘What printer?’

  ‘Whatever printer you please. It’s simply time the book – your book – was published.’

  ‘It’s not my book, Vivian. It’s your book.’ Herbert said this in a strange small voice not habitual to him.

  ‘Look, Herbert – you and I are philosophers in a fashion, and we can see this thing in its essence and not its mere appearance. Of course I scribbled the book. But at a deep level I was nothing but your amanuensis. Of course there will be passages and turns of expression and so forth that you will improve in one way or another. But published your book must be.’

  Cardwell, although offering this speech with all the authority of the gentleman in tails and a cloak who has just made passes over the face of the yokel from the audience, felt inwardly a little at sixes and sevens himself. He took a good deal of satisfaction in what he appeared to be getting away with. He admired his boldness and even a certain element of selflessness and sacrifice inherent in his design. It was true that the old manuscript (brilliant though it probably was) meant little to him. It was with rather different material that he had secured his position on the literary front—but that had come to mean little to him either. He had been a junior minister. If the next general election went as it should he had a good chance of winding up his career as a senior, although not particularly important, member of the Cabinet. And he would have the further satisfaction of numbering poor old Professor Humbert among his acquaintances.

  So Sir Vivian Cardwell was rather pleased with himself. But there can be no doubt that, like most of us, he had two sides to his head, and was therefore aware that thus to make a monkey of an old friend was not an altogether amiable proceeding.

  Varieties of Literary Experience by Herbert Humbert was published six months later and received with universal obloquy and disdain. An influential journal (which had always been eager to print any of the elegant essays which Sir Vivian Cardwell wrote from time to time) described it as mannered and largely devoid of substance; another declared it to be ‘hauntingly démodé’ and a farouche young critic in an avant-garde weekly found it ‘as toothsome and nutritious as expanded polystyrene’.

  In the face of this unanimous censure it is necessary to conclude that Humbert’s relationship with his friend had become in its final phase essentially pathological; that not only was his will impaired to the extraordinary degree evidenced by his accepting the bizarre and demeaning deception proposed to him but also that his critical judgement was so overlaid by a cloud of fatuous admiration for Sir Vivian Cardwell that he had mis-estimated the quality of the book (let alone its consonance with his own early thinking) in a singularly strange fashion.

  Cardwell, naturally enough, didn’t see the matter quite in this light. It was of course a great shock to him. But he was outraged as well. It staggered him that a work which would have been competently examined and justly praised had it appeared under his own name should be laughed to scorn when supposed to be the work of an unknown drudge in an obscure academic situation. Sir Vivian actually composed a long letter to The Times about this before he realised (with the help of his wife, to whom he had confessed the whole thing) that a certain inconvenience must attend upon any public denunciation of the monstrous fate his labours had met with.

  Humbert, perhaps because he had long ceased to expect very much from the world, was not at first nearly so upset. He had certainly got himself involved in an odd situation, and with the peculiar patchy clarity that characterised his mind, he saw that it wouldn’t have happened if that mind hadn’t been affected by some degree of premature senescence. This discovery about himself interested him very much, and he would talk about it acutely to Bernard Hinkstone for hours on end. At other times he was increasingly abstracted and withdrawn. His clumsiness increased, together with an attendant liability to
petty physical mishap.

  Then something really worrying turned up on his horizon. He certainly was never going to be a professor now – and he began to doubt whether he would for long even continue to be a lecturer. His appointment in that academic grade would soon be due for renewal, and it seemed to him that, after the fiasco of Varieties of Literary Experience, there was a strong probability that the renewal would not take place. This was of course a totally baseless notion, as Hinkstone strove to persuade him. Only if that absurd deception were made public could there be the slightest risk of such a disaster and humiliation. But Humbert continued disturbed. He wasn’t depressed. Hinkstone was to assert later that, in any recognisable clinical sense, Humbert was from first to last not under that sort of weather. But he did become more and more absent-minded. Then one day he went out to buy a box of matches, chose to cross the street at an injudicious moment, and was knocked down by a small motor-cycle and killed instantly.