Among other adventures on the Moon, during this expedition, Astolpho sees Time at work. Ariosto’s Time — as you might say, Time the Man — was, anthropomorphically speaking, not necessarily everybody’s Time. Although equally hoary and naked, he was not Poussin’s Time, for example, in the picture where the Seasons dance, while Time plucks his lyre to provide the music. Poussin’s Time (a painter’s Time) is shown in a sufficiently unhurried frame of mind to be sitting down while he strums his instrument. The smile might be thought a trifle sinister, nevertheless the mood is genial, composed.
Ariosto’s Time (a writer’s Time) is far less relaxed, indeed appallingly restless. The English duke watched Ariosto’s Time at work. The naked ancient, in an eternally breathless scramble with himself, collected from the Fates small metal tablets (one pictured them like the trinkets hanging from the necks of Murtlock and Henderson), then moved off at the double to dump these identity discs in the waters of Oblivion. A few of them (like Murtlock’s medallion at the pond) were only momentarily submerged, being fished out, and borne away to the Temple of Fame, by a pair of well disposed swans. The rest sank to the bottom, where they were likely to remain.
On the strength of this not too obscure allegory, I decided to go to bed. Just before I closed the book, my eye was caught by a stanza in an earlier sequence.
And as we see straunge cranes are woont to do,
First stalke a while er they their wings can find,
Then soare from ground not past a yard or two,
Till in their wings they gather’d have the wind,
At last they mount the very clouds unto,
Triangle wise according to their kind:
So by degrees this Mage begins to flye,
The bird of Jove can hardly mount so hye;
And when he sees his time and thinks it best,
He falleth downe like lead in fearfull guise,
Even as the fawlcon doth the foule arrest,
The ducke and mallard from the brooke that rise.
The warm windy afternoon, cottonwool clouds, ankle-deep wild garlic, rankness of fox, laboratory exhalations from the quarry, parade ground evolutions of the duck, hawk’s precipitate flight towards the pool, all were suddenly recreated. Duck, of course, rather than cranes, had risen ‘triangle wise’, but the hawk, as in Ariosto’s lines (or rather Harington’s), had hung pensively in the air, then swooped to strike. I tried to rationalize to myself this coincidental passage. There was nothing at all unusual in mallard getting up from the water at that time of day, nor a kestrel hovering over the neighbouring meadows. For that matter, reference to falconry in a Renaissance poem was far from remarkable. Something in addition to all that held the attention. It was the word Mage. Mage carried matters a stage further.
Mage summoned up the image of Dr Trelawney, a mage if ever there was one. I thought of the days when, as a child, I used to watch the Doctor and his young disciples, some of them no more than children themselves, trotting past the Stonehurst gate on their way to rhythmical callisthenics — whatever the exercises were — on the adjacent expanse of heather. In those days (brink of the first war) Dr Trelawney was still building up a career. He had not yet fully transformed himself into the man of mystery, the thaumaturge, he was in due course to become. The true surname was always in doubt (Grubb or Tibbs, put forward by Moreland), anyway something with less body to it than Trelawney. In his avatar of the Stonehurst period he had been less concerned with the predominantly occult engagement of later years; then seeking The Way (to use his own phrase) through appropriate meditations, exercises, diet, apparel.
Once a week Dr Trelawney and his neophytes would jog down the pine-bordered lane from which our Indian-type bungalow was set a short distance back. The situation was remote, a wide deserted common next door. Dr Trelawney himself would be leading, dark locks flowing to the shoulder, biblical beard, grecian tunic, thonged sandals. The Doctor’s robe (like the undefiled of Sardis) was white, somewhat longer and less diaphanous than the single garment — identical for both sexes and all weathers — worn by the disciples, tunics tinted in the pastel shades fashionable at that epoch. People who encountered Dr Trelawney by chance in the village post-office received an invariable greeting:
‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True.’
The appropriate response can have been rarely returned.
‘The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.’
One of the firmest tenets — so Moreland always said — in the later teachings of Dr Trelawney was that coincidence was no more than ‘magic in action’. There had just been an example of that. Orlando Furioso had not only produced that evening a magical reconstruction of considerable force, it had also brought to mind the reason why such activities as Dr Trelawney’s were already much in the air. A recent newspaper colour supplement article, dealing with contemporary cults, had mentioned that — with much of what Hugo Tolland called the good old Simple Life — a revival of Trelawneyism had come about among young people. That was probably where Murtlock had acquired the phrases about killing, and no death in Nature. It was Dr Trelawney’s view — also that of his old friend and fellow occultist, Mrs Erdleigh — that death was no more than transition, blending, synthesis, mutation. To be fair to them both, they seemed to some extent to have made their point. However much the uninstructed might regard them both as ‘dead’, there were still those for whom they were very much alive. Mrs Erdleigh (quoting the alchemist, Thomas Vaughan) had spoken of how the ‘liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies’. Perhaps Vaughan’s words, filtered through a kind of Neo-Trelawneyism, explained the girls’ T-shirts.
In any case it was impossible to disregard the fact that, while a dismantling process steadily curtails members of the cast, items of the scenery, airs played by the orchestra, in the performance that has included one’s own walk-on part for more than a few decades, simultaneous derequisitionings are also to be observed. Mummers return, who might have been supposed to have made their final exit, even if — like Dr Trelawney and Mrs Erdleigh — somewhat in the rôle of Hamlet’s father. The touching up of time-expired sets, reshaping of derelict props, updating of old refrains, are none of them uncommon. An event some days later again brought forcibly to mind these lunar rescues from the Valley of Lost Things. This was a television programme devoted to the subject of the all-but-forgotten novelist, St John Clarke.
Above all others, St John Clarke might be judged, critically speaking, as gone for good. Not a bit of it. Here was a consummate instance of a lost reputation — in this case a literary one — salvaged from the Moon, St John Clarke’s Astolpho being Ada Leintwardine. Keen on transvestism, Ariosto would have found nothing incongruous in a woman playing the part of the English duke. Maidens clad in armour abound throughout the poem. Ada Leintwardine, as a successful novelist married to the well-known publisher, J. G. Quiggin, could be accepted as a perfectly concordant Ariosto character. In any case she had latterly been taking an increasingly executive part in forming the policy of the firm of which her husband was chairman. Quiggin used to complain that St John Clarke’s novels (all come finally to rest under his firm’s imprint) sold ‘just the wrong amount’, too steady a trickle to be ruthlessly disregarded, not enough comfortably to cover production costs. Nor was there compensatory prestige — rather the reverse — in having a name in the list unknown to a younger generation. In fact Quiggin himself did not deny that he was prepared to allow such backnumbers to fall out of print. Ada, on the other hand, would not countenance that. Her reasons were not wholly commercial; not commercial, that is, on the short-term basis of her husband’s approach.