Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [55]
‘I do not often see JG these days. For a time – after meeting at Sillery’s – we became quite close friends.’
Canon Fenneau made a sound that was not much short of a giggle, then continued.
‘Like Sillers, JG found some of my interests ill advised. Socially unacceptable to Sillers, they were politically decadent to JG. Hopelessly unprogressive. JG wanted everyone he knew to be interested in politics in those days. He was a keen Marxist you may remember. I have never liked politics.’
‘May I ask what are these interests of yours that arouse so much antipathy?’
Fenneau smiled, this time gravely. He did not speak for a moment. His small watery eyes gazed at me. There was a touch of melodrama in the look.
‘Alchemy.’
‘The Philosopher’s Stone? Turning base metal into gold?’
‘I prefer to say more in the sense of turning Man from earthly impurity to heavenly perfection. It is a conception that has always gripped me – naturally in a manner not to run counter to my cloth. Some knowledge of such matters can indeed stand a priest in good stead.’
He spoke the last sentence a little archly. The reason for his name’s familiarity was now revealed. Fenneau’s signature would appear from time to time under reviews of books about Hermetic Philosophy, the Rosicrucians, Witchcraft, works that dealt with what might be called the scholarly end of Magic. His own outward physical characteristics – not in themselves exceptional ones in priests of any creed – were, more than in most ecclesiastics, those to be associated with the practice of occultism; fleshiness of body allied to a misty look in the eye. Dr Trelawney and Mrs Erdleigh, hierophants of other mysteries, were both exemplars of that same physical type, in spite of what was no doubt a minor matter, difference of sex. These preoccupations of Fenneau’s would explain the faintly uncomfortable sensations his proximity generated. He seemed to convey, especially when he fixed his stare, that he hoped, without making too much fuss about it, to hypnotize his interlocutor; at the very least to read what was in his mind. That, too, was a trait not unknown among conventional priests of all denominations. Canon Fenneau, clearly not at all conventional, possessed the characteristic in a marked degree.
‘Do you still see Mark Members? *
‘Not for a long time until this evening. We have never entirely lost touch, although Mark – unlike JG – considered me less than the dust beneath his chariot wheels, when we were undergraduates. Years ago I was able to help him. He carelessly wrote somewhere that Goethe mentions Paracelsus in Faust, a slip confusing Paracelsus with Nostradamus. Mark was attacked on that account by a rather unpleasant personage, of whom you will certainly have heard, who called himself Dr Trelawney.’
‘I’ve even met him.’
‘I assisted Mark in rebutting these aggressions by pointing out that Trelawney’s long and abstruse letter on the subject darkened counsel. I added that, even if Paracelsus supposed every substance to be made up of mercury, sulphur, and salt, mercury was only one of the elements. Trelawney recognized the warning.’
‘What was the warning?’
‘Mercury is conceived in alchemy as hermaphroditic. Trelawney was at that time engaged in certain practices to which he did not wish attention to be drawn. He sheered off.’
Fenneau’s features had taken on a menacing expression. Dr Trelawney had evidently found an adversary worthy of crossing swords; perhaps, more appropriately, crossing divining rods. I retailed some of my own Trelawney contacts, beginning with the Doctor and his disciples running past the Stonehurst gate.
‘That too? How very interesting. May I say that you bear out a deeply held conviction of mine as to the repetitive contacts of certain individual souls in the earthly lives of other individual souls.’
Fenneau again fixed his eyes on me. He gave the impression of a scientist who has found a useful specimen, if not a noticeably rare one. His stare was preferably not to be endured for too long. He may have been aware of that himself, because he immediately dropped