LITMIR.BIZ

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had been already an old man in the days before the first war when old men were treated with kindness, and he had never succeeded in getting used to the modern world. For a moment as he stood with his head thrust forward, people thought he was going to reply. Then quite suddenly he spread out his hands with a gesture of helplessness, shrunk back, and began laboriously to resume his chair.

      The motion was carried.

      After leaving the flat that morning Jane also had gone down to Edgestow and bought a hat. She had before now expressed some contempt for the kind of woman who buys hats, as a man buys drinks, for a stimulant and a consolation. It did not occur to her that she was doing so herself on this occasion. She liked her clothes to be rather severe and in colours that were really good on serious aesthetic grounds–clothes which would make it plain to everyone that she was an intelligent adult and not a woman of the chocolate-box variety–and because of this preference, she did not know that she was interested in clothes at all. She was therefore a little annoyed when Mrs Dimble met her coming out of Sparrow’s and said, ‘Hullo dear! Been buying a hat? Come home to lunch and let’s see it. Cecil has the car just round the corner.’

      Cecil Dimble, a Fellow of Northumberland, had been Jane’s tutor for her last year as a student and Mrs Dimble (one tended to call her Mother Dimble) had been a kind of unofficial aunt to all the girls of her year. A liking for the female pupils of one’s husband is not, perhaps, so common as might be wished among dons’ wives; but Mrs Dimble appeared to like all Dr Dimble’s pupils of both sexes and the Dimbles’ house, away on the far side of the river, was a kind of noisy salon all the term. She had been particularly fond of Jane with that kind of affection which a humorous, easy natured and childless woman sometimes feels for a girl whom she thinks pretty and rather absurd. For the last year or so Jane had been somewhat losing sight of the Dimbles and felt rather guilty about it. She accepted the invitation to lunch.

      They drove over the bridge to the north of Bracton and then south along the bank of the Wynd, past the cottages, then left and eastward at the Norman church and down the straight road with the poplars on one side and the wall of Bragdon Wood on the other, and so finally to the Dimbles’ front door.

      ‘How lovely it’s looking,’ said Jane quite sincerely as she got out of the car. The Dimbles’ garden was famous.

      ‘You’d better take a good look at it then,’ said Dr Dimble.

      ‘What do you mean?’ asked Jane.

      ‘Haven’t you told her?’ said Dr Dimble to his wife.

      ‘I haven’t screwed myself up to it yet,’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘Besides, poor dear, her husband is one of the villains of the piece. Anyway, I expect she knows.’

      ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Jane.

      ‘Your own College is being so tiresome, dear. They’re turning us out. They won’t renew the lease.’

      ‘Oh, Mrs Dimble!’ exclaimed Jane. ‘And I didn’t even know this was Bracton property.’

      ‘There you are!’ said Mrs Dimble. ‘One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. Here have I been imagining that you were using all your influence with Mr Studdock to try to save us, whereas in reality–’

      ‘Mark never talks to me about College business.’

      ‘Good husbands never do,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘At least, only about the business of other people’s colleges. That’s why Margaret knows all about Bracton and nothing about Northumberland. Is no one coming in to have lunch?’

      Dimble guessed that Bracton was going to sell the Wood and everything else it owned on that side of the river. The whole region seemed to him now even more of a paradise than when he first came to live there twenty-five years ago, and he felt much too strongly on the subject to wish to talk about it before the wife of one of the Bracton men.

      ‘You’ll have to wait for lunch till I’ve seen Jane’s new hat,’ said Mother Dimble, and forthwith hurried Jane upstairs. Then followed some minutes of conversation which was strictly feminine in the old-fashioned sense. Jane, while preserving a certain sense of superiority, found it indefinably comforting; and though Mrs Dimble had really the wrong point of view about such things, there was no denying that the one small alteration which she suggested did go to the root of the matter. When the hat was being put away again Mrs Dimble suddenly said,

      ‘There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

      ‘Wrong?’ said Jane. ‘Why? What should there be?’

      ‘You’re not looking yourself.’

      ‘Oh, I’m all right,’ said Jane aloud. Mentally she added, ‘She’s dying to know whether I’m going to have a baby. That sort of woman always is.’

      ‘Do you hate being kissed?’ said Mrs Dimble unexpectedly.

      ‘Do I hate being kissed?’ thought Jane to herself. ‘That indeed is the question. Do I hate being kissed? Hope not for mind in women–’ She had intended to reply, ‘Of course not,’ but inexplicably, and to her great annoyance, found herself crying instead. And then, for a moment, Mrs Dimble became simply a grown-up as grown-ups had been when one was a very small child: large, warm, soft objects to whom one ran with bruised knees or broken toys. When she thought of her childhood, Jane usually remembered those occasions on which the voluminous embrace of Nurse or Mother had been unwelcome and resisted as an insult to one’s maturity; now, for the moment, she was back in those forgotten, yet infrequent, times when fear or misery induced a willing surrender and surrender brought comfort. Not to detest being petted and pawed was contrary to her whole theory of life; yet, before they went downstairs, she had told Mrs Dimble that she was not going to have a baby, but was a bit depressed from being very much alone, and from a nightmare.

      During lunch Dr Dimble talked about the Arthurian legend. ‘It’s really wonderful,’ he said, ‘how the whole thing hangs together, even in a late version like Malory’s. You’ve noticed how there are two sets of characters? There’s Guinevere and Launcelot and all those people in the centre: all very courtly and nothing particularly British about them. But then in the background –on the other side of Arthur, so to speak–there are all those dark people like Morgan and Morgawse, who are very British indeed and usually more or less hostile though they are his own relatives. Mixed up with magic. You remember that wonderful phrase, how Queen Morgan “set all the country on fire with ladies that were enchantresses”. Merlin too, of course, is British, though not hostile. Doesn’t it look very like a picture of Britain as it must have been on the eve of the invasion?’

      ‘How do you mean, Dr Dimble?’ said Jane.

      ‘Well, wouldn’t there have been one section of society that was almost purely Roman? People wearing togas and talking a Celticised Latin–something that would sound to us rather like Spanish: and fully Christian. But further up country, in the out-of-the way places, cut off by the forests, there would have been little courts ruled by real old British under-kings, talking something like Welsh, and practising a certain amount of the druidical religion.’

      ‘And what would Arthur himself have been?’ said Jane. It was silly that her heart should have missed a beat at the words ‘rather like Spanish’.

      ‘That’s just the point,’ said Dr Dimble. ‘One can imagine a man of the old British line, but also a Christian and a fully-trained general with Roman technique, trying to pull this whole society together and almost succeeding. There’d be jealousy from his own British family, and the Romanised section–the Launcelots and Lionels–would look down on the Britons. That’d be why Kay is always represented as a boor: he is part of the native strain. And always that under-tow, that tug back to druidism.’

      ‘And where would Merlin be?’

      ‘Yes…He’s the really interesting figure. Did the whole thing fail because he died so soon? Has it ever struck you what an odd creation Merlin is? He’s not evil; yet he’s a magician. He is obviously a druid; yet he knows all about the Grail.

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