Adrian, already notified, received the young man with what he stigmatized to himself as ‘morbid curiosity’, and placed him at once in mental apposition to Dinny. A curiously diverse couple they would make! Yet, with a perception not perhaps unconnected with the custody of skeletons, he had a feeling that his niece was not physically in error. This was a figure that could well stand or lie beside her. Its stringy grace and bony gallantry accorded with her style and slenderness; and the darkened face, with its drawn and bitter lines, had eyes which even Adrian, who had all the public-school-man’s impatience of male film stars, could see would be attractive to the feminine gender. Bones broke the ice to some degree; and over the identity of a supposed Hittite in moderate preservation they became almost cordial. Places and people whom they had both seen in strange conditions were a further incentive to human feeling. But not till he had taken up his hat to go did Wilfrid say suddenly:
‘Well, Mr Cherrell, what would you do?’
Adrian, who was looking up, halted and considered his questioner with narrowed eyes.
‘I’m a poor hand at advice, but Dinny is a precious baggage – ’
‘She is.’
Adrian bent and shut the door of a cabinet.
‘This morning,’ he said, ‘I watched a solitary ant in my bathroom trying to make its way and find out about things. I’m sorry to say I dropped some ashes from my pipe on it to see what it would do. Providence all over – always dropping ashes from its pipe on us to observe the result. I’ve been in several minds, but I’ve come to the conclusion that if you’re really in love with Dinny –’ a convulsive movement of Wilfrid’s body ended in the tight clenching of his hands on his hat – ‘as I see you are, and as I know her to be with you, then stand fast and work your way with her through the ashes. She’d rather be in the cart with you than in a Pullman with the rest of us. I believe’ – and Adrian’s face was illuminated by earnestness – ‘that she is one of those of whom it is not yet written, “and they twain shall be one spirit”.’ The young man’s face quivered.
‘Genuine!’ thought Adrian.
‘So think first of her, but not in the “I love you so that nothing will induce me to marry you” fashion. Do what she wants – when she wants it – she’s not unreasonable. And, honestly, I don’t believe you’ll either of you regret it.’
Desert took a step towards him, and Adrian could see that he was intensely moved. But he mastered all expression, save a little jerky smile, made a movement of one hand, turned, and went out.
Adrian continued to shut the doors of cupboards that contained bones. ‘That,’ he was thinking, ‘is the most difficult, and in some ways the most beautiful face I’ve seen. The spirit walks upon its waters and is often nearly drowned. I wonder if that advice was criminal, because for some reason or other I believe he’s going to take it.’ And he returned to the reading of a geographical magazine which Wilfrid’s visit had interrupted. It contained a spirited account of an Indian tribe on the Amazon which had succeeded, even without the aid of American engineers at capitalistic salaries, in perfecting the Communistic ideal. None of them, apparently, owned anything. Their whole lives, including the processes of nature, were passed in the public eye. They wore no clothes, they had no laws; their only punishment, something in connexion with red ants, was inflicted for the only offence, that of keeping anything to themselves. They lived on the cassava root variegated with monkey, and were the ideal community!
‘A wonderful instance,’ thought Adrian, ‘of how the life of man runs in cycles. For the last twenty thousand years or so we’ve been trying, as we thought, to improve on the principle which guides the life of these Indians, only to find it reintroduced as the perfect pattern.’
He sat for some time with a smile biting deep into the folds about his mouth. Doctrinaires, extremists! That Arab who put a pistol to young Desert’s head was a symbol of the most mischievous trait in human nature! Ideas and creeds – what were they but half-truths, only useful in so far as they helped to keep life balanced? The geographical magazine slipped off his knee.
He stopped on the way home in the garden of his square to feel the sun on his cheek and listen to a blackbird. He had all he wanted in life: the woman he loved, fair health, a fair salary – seven hundred a year and the prospect of a pension – two adorable children, not his own, so that he was free from the misgivings of more normal parents; an absorbing job, a love of nature, and another thirty years, perhaps, before him. ‘If at this moment,’ he thought, ‘someone put a pistol to my head and said: “Adrian Cherrell, renounce Christianity or out go your brains!” should I say with Clive in India: “Shoot and be damned!”?’ And he could not answer. The blackbird continued to sing, the young leaves to twitter in the breeze, the sun to warm his cheek, and life to be desirable in the quiet of that one-time fashionable square.…