"The little northern hospital was heavy with summer heat, because there was no air-conditioning in the wards; the bandages must have been insupportably hot, and the wounds sore, and the sedatives sickening to feel at work. The screaming brought a doctor with a syringe and soon John screamed no more, but Mrs. Parlabane never lost her composure.
" 'You'll stay with him, won't you, Clement?' she said to me, 'because I really must get back to the City.' And away she and the biddable husband went. I noticed that he reached out and patted John's insensible hand before he left.
"So that was it, and after a while the bandages came off, and the face you know was seen for the first time. He was no beauty before, but now he was like a man in a red mask, which has faded with time. I am sure Toronto plastic surgeons could have done a good deal for him in the years that followed, but the Parlabane family did nothing about it."
"Didn't make a fuss with the camp?"
"The people who owned the camp were friends; they didn't want to injure them. John thought it a great injustice."
"And that was what made him the way he is?"
"In part, I suppose. Certainly it did nothing to make him otherwise. He and his Mother were cat and dog after that. He called her The Bitch Goddess, after Henry James's Bitch Goddess Success. She was a success, in her terms. He insisted she had deserted him when he most needed her; she said to me more than once that she had seen that everything was done that could be done, and she thought he was making a great deal of a misfortune that could happen to anyone. But that's by the way – though I suppose it throws some light on him, and on her, of course. The fact that he could not bear to tell you – though I am sure he told you in affecting terms about his other great betrayal by that egotistical catamite Henry Loewi III, the Beauty of Princeton – shows how much it affected him.
"I hope things may look up a little for him now. I've managed to get a job for him and he's away at this minute arranging about it. Appleton, who does some lecturing in Extension, has broken his hip, and even when he gets back on the job he will have to lighten his load. So I have persuaded the director of that division to take Parlabane on to finish out the year; once a week on Basic Principles in Philosophy, and twice a week on Six Major Philosophical Texts."
"That's marvellous."
"I'm afraid he doesn't think so. Extension means teaching at night, and most of the people in the classes are middle-aged and opinionated; it won't be the thrill of moulding the young, which is what he likes."
"Rough on the young, I'd imagine."
"His real teaching days are over, I fear. He has a good mind – used to have a fine mind – but he rambles and blathers too much. He wants me to take him on, you know."
"How?"
"Special research assistant."
"But I'm your research assistant!"
"He'd be happy to supplant you. But don't give it a thought; I won't have it."
"The snake!"
"Oh, that's not the worst of him; that's just his normal way of behaving. But there's a limit to what I can, and will, do for him; I've got him a job, and that's as far as it goes."
"I think you've been wonderful to him."
"He's an old friend. And we don't always choose our old friends, you know; sometimes we're just landed with them. You know somebody for a few years, and you're probably stuck with them for life. Sometimes you must do what you can."
"Well, at least he's out of here."
"Don't count on that. I'll urge him to get a room somewhere, but he will have no campus office. He'll be back to mooch books, and he'll be back for you."
"For me?"
"He fancies you, you know. Oh, yes; being a homosexual doesn't matter. Just about all men need a woman in one way or another, unless they're very strange indeed. Tormenting you refreshes him. And you shouldn't underestimate the gratitude all men feel for women's beauty. Men who truly don't like flowers are very uncommon and men who don't respond to a beautiful woman are even more uncommon. It's not primarily sexual; it's a lifting of the spirits beauty gives. He'll be in to torment you, and tease you, and enrage you, but really to have a good, refreshing look at you."
I decided to dare greatly. "Is that why you keep me here?" I asked.
"Partly. But mostly because you're much the best and most intellectually sympathetic student and assistant I've ever had."
"Thank you. I'll bring you some flowers."
"They'd be welcome. I never get around to buying any myself."
What am I to make of that? One of the enchantments Hollier had for me was this quality of possessive indifference. He must know I worship him, but he never gives me a chance to prove it. Only that one time. God, who would want to be me? But perhaps, like Parlabane in the hospital, I should realize that it wasn't the end of the world.
Hollier was obviously trying to put something together in his mind, before speaking. Now it came.
"There are two things I want you to do for me, Maria."
Anything! Anything whatever! The Maenad in me was subdued now, and Patient Griselda was in total possession.
"The first is that I want you to visit my old acquaintance Professor Froats. There's a kinship between his work and mine that I want to test. You know about him – he's rather too much in the news for the University's comfort or his own, I expect. He works with human excrement – what is rejected, what is accounted of no worth to mankind – and in it I suppose he hopes to discover something that is of worth. You know I've been busy for months on the Filth Therapy of the Middle Ages, and of ancient times, and of the East. The Bedouin mother washes her newborn child in camel's urine, or in her own; probably she doesn't really know why but she follows custom. The modern biologist knows why; it's a convenient protection against several sorts of infection. The nomad of the Middle East binds the rickety child's legs in splints and bandages of ass's dung, and in a few weeks the bent legs are straight. Doesn't know why, but knows it works. The porter at Ploughwright, an Irishman, had that done to him by Irish Gypsies when he was three, and today his legs are as straight as mine. Filth Therapy was widespread; sometimes it was superstition and sometimes it worked. Fleming's penicillin began as Filth Therapy, you know. Every woodcutter knew that the muck off bad bread was the best thing for an axe wound. Salvation in dirt. Why? I suspect that Ozias Froats knows why.
"It's astonishingly similar to alchemy in basic principle – the recognition of what is of worth in that which is scorned by the unseeing. The alchemist's long quest for the Stone, and the biblical stone which the builders refused becoming the headstone of the corner. Do you know the Scottish paraphrase –
and the lapis angularis of the Alchemical Cross, and the stone of the filusmacrocosmi which was Christ, the Wholly Good?"
"I know what you've written about all that."
"Well, is Froats the scientist looking for the same thing, but by means which are not ours, and without any idea of what we are doing, while being on much the same track?"
"But that would be fantastic!"
"I'm very much afraid that is exactly what it would be. If I'm wrong, it's fantastic speculation. If I'm right, it could just make things harder for poor old Ozy Froats if it became known. So we must keep our mouths shut. That's why I want you to take it on. If I turned up in his labs Ozy would smell a rat; he'd know I was after something, and if I told him what it was he'd either be over-impressed or have a scientific fit – you know what terrible puritans scientists are about their work – no contamination by anything that can't be submitted to experimental test, and all that – but you are able to approach him as a student. I've told him you are curious because of some work you are doing connected with the Renaissance. I mentioned Paracelsus. That's all he knows, or should know."