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By Root 5866 0

programme. They tried to obey Jesus and be more than men; and all they succeeded in doing was to become the incarnation of pure diabolic destructiveness. They could have been perfectly decent human beings if they’d just gone about behaving naturally, in accordance with their instincts. But no, they wanted to be more than human. So they just became devils. Idiots first and then devils, imbecile devils. Ugh! ‘ Rampion made a grimace and shook his head with disgust. ‘And to think,’ he went on indignantly, ‘that the world’s full of these creatures! Not quite so far gone as St. Anthony and his demons or St. Francis and his halfwits. But of the same kind. Different only in degree. And all perverted in the same wayby trying to be nonhuman. Nonhumanly religious, nonhumanly moral, nonhumanly intellectual and scientific, nonhumanly specialized and efficient, nonhumanly the business man, nonhumanly avaricious and property-loving, nonhumanly lascivious and Don Juanesque, nonhumanly the conscious individual even in love. All perverts. Perverted towards goodness or badness, towards spirit or flesh; but always away from the central norm, always away from humanity. The world’s an asylum of perverts. There are four of them at this table now.’ He looked round with a grin. ‘A pure little Jesus pervert.’ Burlap forgivingly smiled. ‘An intellectual-aesthetic pervert.’ ‘Thanks for the compliment,’ said Philip.

‘A morality-philosophy pervert.’ He turned to Spandrell. ‘Quite the little Stavrogin. Pardon my saying so, Spandrell; but you really are the most colossal fool.’ He looked intently into his face.

‘Smiling like all the tragic characters of fiction rolled into one! But it won’t do. It doesn’t conceal the simple-minded zany underneath.’ Spandrell threw back his head and noiselessly laughed. If he knew, he was thinking, if he knew… But if he knew, would he think him any less of a fool?

‘Laugh away, old Dostoievsky! But let ife tell you, it’s Stavrogin who ought to have been called the Idiot, not Mishkin. He was incomparably the bigger fool, the completer pervert.’

‘And what sort of a fool and pervert is the fourth person at this table?’ asked Philip.

‘What indeed!’ Rampion shook his head. His fine hair floated up silkily. He smiled. ‘A pedagogue pervert. A Jeremiah pervert. A worry-about-the-bloodyold-world pervert. Above all a gibber pervert.’ He got up. ‘That’s why I’m going home,’ he said. ‘The way I’ve been talking—it’s really nonhuman. Really scandalous. I’m ashamed. But that’s the trouble: when you’re up against nonhuman things and people, you inevitably become nonhuman yourself. It’s all your fault.’ He gave a final grin, waved goodnight and was gone.

Burlap came home to find Beatrice, as usual, waiting up for him. Sitting—for such was the engagingly childlike habit he had formed during the last few weeks—on the floor at her feet, his head, with the little pink tonsure in the middle of the dark curls, against her knee, he sipped his hot milk and talked of Rampion. An extraordinary man, a great man, even. Great? queried Beatrice, disapprovingly. She didn’t like to hear greatness attributed to any living man (the dead were a different matter; they were dead), unless it was to Denis himself. Hardly great, she insisted jealously. Well, perhaps not quite. But very nearly. If he hadn’t that strange insensitiveness to spiritual values, that prejudice, that blind spot. The attitude was comprehensible. Rampion was reacting against something which had gone too far in one direction; but in the process of reacting he had gone too far in the other. His incapacity to understand St. Francis, for example. The grotesque and really hideous things he could say about the saint. That was extraordinary and deplorable.

‘What does he say?’ asked Beatrice severely. Since knowing Burlap, she had taken St. Francis under her protection.

Burlap gave her an account, a little expurgated, of what Rampion had said. Beatrice was indignant. How could he say such things? How did he dare? It was an outrage. Yes, it was a defect in him, Burlap admitted, a real