The Towers of Trebizond (26 page)

This article did not actually come out quite as I expected, owing to not being signed, so that it could be altered a good deal in the newspaper office without my being asked, and they put in a lot of mystery, and referred to the suicide of aunt Dot's husband the Rev. ffoulkes-Corbett, and mentioned again the autumnal Romance, and referred to their having been reported to have been seen in chat with Burgess and Maclean in Moscow. So it really seemed in many ways a quite different article from the one I had written, and I decided that I would not write any more unsigned articles. Vere said it was an idiotic thing to do, and I saw that Vere was right, though the money came in useful for paying some of the bills, and later even the publican got some of it, which vexed me a good deal, but my accountant thought I had better pay him something on account, to keep him quieter. I thought, if David were to turn up from Turkey now, I might borrow some money from him, because his articles were still coming out in that paper, which would make him still anxious that I should be his friend. And soon after this I met David at a party. It was a good party, but I got there rather late, owing to having come on from another party, for the autumn party season had by now well set in. When I came in someone said to me, you've missed something, and it seemed that David had thrown a glassful of hock cup, full of fruit and vegetables, into someone's face, because of something this man had said to him that he did not like. I thought it seemed rather early in the night for people to be throwing wine about, but I am used to such things occurring either just before I get to a party or just after I have left it, or, if anything happens while I am there, it happens in another room from the one I am in.

When I spoke to David I asked him why he had thrown his hock with fruit and vegetables at this man, and David said the man had been damned offensive to him. I asked him what the man had said, but David did not seem quite clear as to this, or perhaps he was being evasive, for David is a rather reserved man.

"Actually," he said, "I don't like him."

I thought that if David were to go round a party throwing his hock cup at every one he did not like, he wouldn't himself get enough to drink to reach the wine-throwing stage at all.

David, who had really quite reached this stage by now, said, "It's an extraordinary thing about Turkey. People who go there are always insulted and slandered. The same with the Levant, and Cyprus. Look at Hester Stanhope and Wilfred Scawen Blunt and those Wortley-Montagus and T. E. Lawrence and all those. One can't write a book or an article without someone being offensive. One's friends are so damned malicious. One travels all over the place and no one one meets out there is malicious at all
 
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I asked, "Where? Who isn't malicious? How do you mean?"

David said, "Oh well," and took another glass of hock cup.

"And then," he went on, "one comes back to London, and it all starts, people being damned offensive about one, and other people repeating it. I suppose
you've
been saying things."

"No," I said "I haven't mentioned you actually. Or not much. I've not been offensive."

But I could see that David thought I probably had, and I edged away from him, because he now had his new glass of fruit salad and hock.

He called after me, "I thought you wrote a damned offensive article about your aunt and that priest."

"Who says I wrote it?"

"Every one. It was obviously yours."

"As a matter of fact, not. I supplied the facts, about how they got into Russia and why, and they filled in the surround in the office. They say I can't get an apology, because it wasn't signed."

"I must say, you're more of a mutt than I thought. After all, you've been writing some time now. I don't know why you don't know the facts of life."

Then he saw that he had insulted me, and remembered that this was a silly thing to do in the circumstances, so he asked me to lunch with him next day, and I went round talking to other people, who of course all wanted to know about aunt Dot and what was behind it. As they were mostly intelligent people, they didn't attach any importance to what the Sunday paper had made of my article, all they wanted to know was how much I had got for it. Some of them believed in the spying, others not. Some of them thought aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg were spying for us, not for Russia, and that this was why the Foreign Office would say nothing.

"With the strong church views that it seems they had," someone said (he said "had", as if they had died, and a lot of people tended to do this), "it seems pretty unlikely they would be commies. Unless, of course, the church business was a blind."

I said, "They aren't commies. They are extremely anti. Father Chantry-Pigg will scarcely say the word." In fact, I thought, he would never have called those minions of the devil by that pet name. Aunt Dot would, but she was more kind and genial.

"So one supposed. Then do you feel they may be spying for us?"

"It certainly wasn't what they went there to do. They may be doing it now, I suppose. I mean, they may be going to report what they are seeing there when they get back."

"Well, we all do that when we get back from places. The point is, is the Foreign Office in touch with them, and paying them?"

I wished I could think so, it was a happy notion. But I said, "I doubt if the Foreign Office has a clue where they are."

"Then what on earth are they living on, all this time?"

Someone said, "Probably on the Soviet government, in Soviet prisons, if
 
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" He didn't add, "if they are living at all," but this was what we all thought.

So it was a depressing kind of conversation, and I was glad to talk to an agent of the Shell Company of Turkey (British) who had been very kind to us in Istanbul, and to Stewart Perowne and Mrs. Antonius, who told me some Jordan gossip and talked about my mother.

I left the party before one, and at 1.15 an art critic punched the director of an art gallery on the head, or it may have been the other way round, so I missed both the incidents that occurred at this party, as I always do.

Time went on. I felt pretty unsettled and sad, but I worked a little on the Turkey book that aunt Dot and I had planned, for I had aunt Dot's note-books as well as my own, and I thought she might like me to get it into some kind of shape, as well as the illustrations that I had roughly sketched. I tried to describe the missionary attempts, and how aunt Dot hoped that the Turkish women might take up with the Church of England and become more liberated and advanced, and how this had not, in fact, much occurred. But I wrote more of my own part of the book, about the Black Sea and Trebizond, and our journey into Armenia, the towns and the lakes and the churches and the people and the fish, and the final vanishing of aunt Dot and Father Chantry-Pigg over the frontier, and it seemed to me that this made an interesting story. I put about our expedition to Troy, too, and the Gallipoli graves. I described how Charles and I had swum the Hellespont and been nearly drowned by being carried out to sea by the tide, as Byron and Mr. Ekenside had been. I got very worked up writing this, and it seemed to me that it had actually happened, and I felt the cold green water slapping at my mouth as I struggled with the tide. I was very relieved that it turned in time to carry us in to the Sestos shore after an hour or two. As poor Charles was dead, I did not have to ask his leave to put all this, and anyhow I thought he would have liked it. I thought of making aunt Dot swim with us, as she certainly would have done if we had gone, but then I thought no, aunt Dot was truthful, it was part of her religion, and when she came back and read it she would be vexed with me.

I did not want to vex aunt Dot. I did things to please her; sometimes I went to see the camel in its quarantine, and petted it and fed it roots, and I thought it seemed to know me, and looked at me with spiteful memories in its insane eyes and stamped with its paws. The quarantine keepers told me they were watching it carefully, and giving it small jobs to do, dragging lawn mowers and things about and carrying workmen and their tools from place to place, as physical labour was better for its mind than standing about chewing and brooding all the time. When its quarantine was over, I meant to leave it at the Zoo, until aunt Dot's return, where it would have healthy companionship and take children for rides.

The clergy of Father Chantry-Pigg's church kept ringing me up in case there should be any news. What was in their minds was that the time would probably come eventually for a Requiem Mass. I wondered if, later on, when hope dwindled, they would perhaps have a conditional one, but I saw that this would be awkward. They prayed for him often, and so did aunt Dot's church pray for her, but always as prisoners and captives and those in distress of mind, body or estate, not that they might have rest eternal and perpetual light, which would have been premature, though actually rest and light would have been nice for them to have, wherever they now were, and it was terrible to think that instead what they were now having might be labour and darkness.

When I got time, I was thinking a good deal about religion just now. I would go to High Mass in some church or other, and the Christian Church would build itself up before me and round me, with its structure of liturgical words and music which was like fine architecture being reared up into the sky, while the priests moved to and from before the altar in their glittering coloured robes and crosses, and the rows of tall candles lifted their flames like yellow tulips, and the incense flowed about us. Here was the structure, I would think, in which the kingdom was enshrined, or whose doors opened on the kingdom, and sometimes the doors would swing ajar, and there the kingdom was, clear and terrible and bright, and no Church is able for it, or can do more than grope. Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth. It must be odd to believe, as some people do, that one's Church has all the truth and no errors, for how could this possibly be? Nothing in the world, for instance, could be as true as the Roman Catholic Church thinks it is, and as some Anglicans and Calvinists and Moslems think their Churches are, having the faith once for all delivered to the saints. I suppose this must be comfortable and reassuring. But most of us know that nothing is as true as all that, and that no faith can be delivered once for all without change, for new things are being discovered all the time, and old things dropped, like the whole Bible being true, and we have to grope our way through a mist that keeps being lit by shafts of light, so that exploration tends to be patchy, and we can never sit back and say, we have the Truth, this is it, for discovering the truth, if it ever is discovered, means a long journey through a difficult jungle, with clearings every now and then, and paths that have to be hacked out as one walks, and dark lanterns swinging from the trees, and these lanterns are the light that has lighted every man, which can only come through the dark lanterns of our minds. Ficino and the Florentine Academy used to light lamps before the bust of Plato, and were called heretics because they wanted the light of Greek learning let into the Church, and Erasmus and Colet and More were called heretics because they too wanted that light of Greek learning, and to correct the mistakes in the Vulgate by it, and the Cambridge Platonists were called Latitude men, for wanting the same kind of thing, and all these people knew that if we stop trying to get fresh light into the Church, the Church will become dark and shut up. Yet human beings are so strange and mixed that though More was for humanism and fresh light in the Church, he was also for burning people for heresy, and said of one who had been burnt for erroneous opinions about the date of the Judgment, "Never was a knave better worth burning," and, looking at it all round, churchmen and the Church have greatly advanced in humanity since then.

Most of my friends are not Christians, but I have some who are Anglicans or Roman Catholics, and some who belong to no Church but are interested in Churches and in the history of religion and like to discuss such things, even when they do not know much about them, so sometimes the question turns up among us. Vere said one day, did any clergymen believe all of the Thirty Nine Articles, which they have to read aloud when they are inducted into a church, and, if no one believed them, why were they not abolished? And, as they are really German and Lutheran, and taken from the Augsburg and Württemberg Confessions four hundred years ago, what are they doing in the Anglican Prayer Book at all, since some of them say the exact opposite to what most Anglicans believe, and this goes for the clergy as well as the laity. So we sent for a Prayer Book, though it was difficult to get hold of one, because the people we were spending the week-end with did not go in for Prayer Books, but in the end the cook had one, so we read the Articles aloud, to see which of them we should have been able to say if we had been clergymen being inducted, and had had the ordinary Anglican beliefs. As I was the only practising Anglican, though I did not practise much, the others asked me to say which I should have had to leave out or alter, and it came to quite a lot. There was all that about the Fall, and man being far gone from original righteousness, whereas I suppose most people think that man was never very righteous, but has crept slowly up to a greater righteousness than any he had when he was neanderthal or otherwise primitive, though he has not yet got at all far. So all that about the fall of Adam, though it is an interesting story, probably does not mean anything to most Christians now, except as a symbol. But a Roman Catholic who was there said it was still believed, though allegorically, by his Church, which of course does not drop so many things and leave them behind, because it believes more in the faith once delivered, and, though it adds a good many things to this, it does not take them away, but is very tenacious. Of course the other Churches too are tenacious, though less so, and theology seems the only science which does not keep adapting its views and its manuals to new knowledge as it turns up, as history does, and geography, and medicine, and anthropology, and archaeology, and most people think this is a pity, and part of the reason why Christianity is less believed than once it was. But others, such as Roman Catholics, think the Church should stand firm and change nothing. The Anglican Church compromises, and discards things little by little, leaving them behind casually and quietly, as if it had never really had them, but it has not yet succeeded in mislaying those of the Articles which are not now held, and this is perhaps because they are all numbered; anyhow some of them annoy a lot of people, and particularly the clergy, who have to repeat them every time they get a new church, and the churchwardens have to go into the vestry and sign something which records that the new incumbent has done this.