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By Root 2630 0

’. Yet, even allowing for these failings, was not St John Clarke still a person more like myself than anyone else sitting round the table? That was a sobering thought. He, too, for longer years, had existed in the imagination, even though this imagination led him (in my eyes) to a world ludicrously contrived, socially misleading, professionally nauseous. On top of that, had he not on this earlier occasion gone out of his way to speak a word of carefully hedged praise for my own work? Was that, therefore, an aspect of his critical faculty for which he should be given credit, or was it an even stronger reason for guarding against the possibility of corruption at the hands of one whose own writings could not be approved? Fortunately these speculations, heavily burdened with the idealistic sentiments of one’s younger days, were put to no practical test; not only because St John Clarke was sitting at some distance from me, but also on account of the steps he himself immediately took to change a subject likely to be unfruitful to both of us. He quickly commented on the flowers in the vases, which were arranged with great skill, and turned out to be the work of Blanche.

‘Flowers mean more to us in a city than in a garden,’ said St John Clarke.

Lady Warminster nodded. She was determined not to abandon the subject of literature without a struggle.

‘I expect you are writing a new book yourself, Mr Clarke,’ she said. ‘We have not had one from you for a long time.’

‘Nor from you, Lady Warminster.’

‘But I am not a famous writer,’ she said. ‘I just amuse myself with people like Maria-Theresa who take my fancy. For you, it is quite another matter.’

St John Clarke shook his head energetically, like a dog emerging from a pond. It was ten or fifteen years since he had published anything but occasional pieces.

‘Sometimes I add a paragraph to my memoirs, Lady Warminster,’ he said. ‘There is little about the critics of the present day to encourage an author of my age and experience to expose his goods in the market place. To tell the truth, Lady Warminster, I get more pleasure from watching the confabulation of sparrows in their parliament on the rooftops opposite my study window, or from seeing the clouds scudding over the Serpentine in windy weather, than I do from covering sheets of foolscap with spidery script that only a few sympathetic souls, some now passed on to the Great Unknown, would even care to read.

No sparrow on any roof was ever lonely

As I am, nor any animal untamed.

Doesn’t Petrarch say that somewhere ? He is a great stay to me. Childish pleasures, you may tell me, Lady Warminster but I answer you that growing old consists abundantly in growing young.’

Lady Warminster was about to reply, whether in agreement or not with this paradox was never revealed, because St John Clarke suddenly realised that his words belonged to an outdated, even decadent state of mind, wholly inconsistent with political regeneration. He could hardly have been carried away by the white wine. Probably it was some time since he had attended a luncheon party of this sort, the comparative unfamiliarity of which must have made him feel for a minute or two back in some much earlier sequence of his social career.

‘Of course I was speaking of when the errant mind strays,’ he added in a different, firmer tone, ‘as I fear the mind of that unreliable fellow, the intellectual, does from time to time. I meant to imply that, when there are so many causes to claim one’s attention, it seems a waste of time to write about the trivial encounters of an individual like myself, who has spent so much of his time pursuing selfish, and, I fear, often frivolous aims. We shall have to learn to live more collectively, Lady Warminster. There is no doubt about it.’

‘That was just what a fellow in the City was saying to me the other day,’ said George. ‘We were talking about those trials for treason in Russia. I can’t make head or tail of them. He seemed full of information about Zinoviev and Kamenev and the rest of them. He was quite well disposed to Russia. A bill-broker