as if a grown man should suddenly wake up, like the ill-fated Mr Bultitude in Vice Versa, to be confronted, not by the hazards of business, but by the geometry lesson he had failed to prepare thirty years before, and the torments of puberty. Digs and forecastles are where they are in the heart. Yet the heart sickened at running once more full tilt into the past, into its very school-close faces, bloated now like those of the drowned, on gangling overgrown bodies, into everything all over again one had been at such pains to escape from before, but in grossly inflated form. And indeed had it not been so, one must still have been aware of cliques, snobberies, genius thrown into the river, justice declined a recommendation by the appointments board, earnestness debagged--giant oafs in pepper-and-salt, mincing like old women, their only meaning in another war. It was as though that experience of the sea, also, exaggerated by time, had invested one with the profound inner maladjustment of the sailor who can never be happy on land. One had begun, however, to play the guitar more seriously. And once again one's best friends were often Jews, often the same Jews who had been at school with one. It must be admitted they were there first, having been there off and on since A.D. 1106. But now they seemed almost the only people old as oneself: only they had any generous, independent sense of beauty. Only a Jew did not deface the monk's dream. And somehow only a Jew, with his rich endowment of premature suffering, could understand one's own suffering, one's isolation, essentially, one's poor music. So that in my time and with my aunt's aid I bought a University weekly. Avoiding college functions, I became a staunch supporter of Zionism. As a leader of a band composed largely of Jews, playing at local dances, and of my own private outfit Three Able Seamen, I amassed a considerable sum. The beautiful Jewish wife of a visiting American lecturer became my mistress. I had seduced her too with my guitar. Like Philoctetes's bow or Oedipus's daughter it was my guide and prop. I played it without bashfulness wherever I went. Nor did it strike me as any less than an unexpected and useful compliment that Phillipson, the artist, should have troubled to represent me, in a rival paper, as an immense guitar, inside which an oddly familiar infant was hiding, curled up, as in a womb--)
"Of course he was always a great connoisseur of wines."
"He was beginning to get the wines and the first editions slightly mixed up in my day." Hugh shaved adroitly along the edge of his brother's beard, past the jugular vein and the carotid artery. "Bring me a bottle of the very best John Donne, will you, Smithers?... You know, some of the genuine old 1611."
"God how funny... Or isn't it? The poor Old Crow."
"He was a marvellous fellow." "The best."
(... I have played the guitar before the Prince of Wales, begged in the streets with one for ex-servicemen on Armistice Day, performed at a reception given by the Amundsen society, and to a caucus of the French Chamber of Deputies as they arranged the approaching years. The Three Able Seamen achieved meteoric fame, Metronome compared us to Venuti's Blue Four. Once the worst possible thing that could befall me seemed some hand injury. Nevertheless one dreamed frequently of dying, bitten by lions, in the desert, at the last calling for the guitar, strumming to the end... Yet I stopped of my own accord. Suddenly, less than a year after going down from Cambridge, stopped, first in bands, then playing it intimately, stopped so completely that Yvonne, despite the tenuous bond of being born in Hawaii, doubtless doesn't know I ever played, so emphatically no one says any longer: Hugh, where's your guitar? Come on and give us a tune--)
"I have," the Consul said, "a slight confession to make, Hugh... I cheated a little on the strychnine while you were away."
"Thalavethiparothiam, is it?" Hugh observed, pleasantly menacing. "Or strength obtained by decapitation. Now then, don't be careful, as the Mexicans say, I'm going to shave