Mystery at Geneva Part 6

it's a great evil. Live and let live."

"You don't then agree that we should attempt a world-cosmogony? That the nations should be as brothers, and concern themselves with one another's famines, one another's revolutions, one another's frontiers?

But why this curious insistence on the nation as a unit? Why select nationality, rather than the ego, the family, the towns.h.i.+p, the province, the continent, the hemisphere, the planet, the solar system, or even the universe? Isn't it just a little arbitrary, this stress we lay on nationalism, patriotism, love of one particular country, of the territories united fortuitously under one particular government? What is a government, that we should regard it as a connecting link? What is a race, that queer, far-flung thing whose boundaries march with those of no nation? And when we say we love a country, do we mean its soil, the people under its government, or the scattered peoples everywhere sharing some of the same blood and talking approximately the same tongue? What, in fact, is this _patriotism_, this love of country, that we all feel, and that we nearly all exalt as if it were a virtue? We don't praise egoism, or pride of family, or love of a particular town or province, in the same way. What magic is there in the ring that embraces a country, that we admire it as precious metal and call the other rings foolish or base? You will admit that it is a queer convention."

"All conventions are queer, I think," Henry said indifferently. "But there they are. One accepts them. It is less trouble."

"It makes more trouble in the end, my young friend.... I will tell you one thing from my heart. If the League of Nations should fail, should go to pieces, it will be from excess of this patriotism. Every country out for its own hand. That has always been the trouble with the world, since we were hordes of savages grouped in tribes one against the other--as, indeed, we still are."

"Well, zio mio," said Miss Longfellow breezily, "if you don't look out for number one, no one else will, you may be dead sure. And _then_ where are you? In the soup, sure thing. Nel zuppo!" She gave a gay, chiming, cuckooish laugh. A cheerful girl, thought Henry.

"Viva the League of Nations!" she cried, and drank brightly of her marsala.

Dr. Franchi, with an indulgent smile for youthful exuberance, drank too.

"The hope for the world," he said. "You don't drink this toast, Mr.

Beechtree?"

"My paper," said Henry, "believes that such hope for the world as there may be lies elsewhere."

"Ah, your paper. And you yourself?"

"I? I see no hope for the world. No hope, that is to say, that it will ever be an appreciably better world than it is at present. Before that occurs, I imagine that it will have broken its string, as it were, and dashed off into s.p.a.ce, and so an end."

"And my hopes for it are two--an extension of country-love into world-love, and a purified version of the Christian faith."

"Purified...." Henry recollected that Dr. Franchi was a modernist and a heretic. "A queer word," he mused. "I am not sure that I know what it means."

"Ah. You are orthodox Catholic, no doubt. You admit no possible impurities in the faith."

"I have never thought about it. I do not even know what an impurity is. One thing does not seem to me much more pure than another, and not much more odd. For my part, I accept the teaching of the Church wholesale. It seems simpler."

"Until you come to think about it," said the ex-cardinal. "Then it ceases to be simple, and becomes difficult and elaborate to a high degree. Too difficult for a simple soul like myself. For my part, I have been expelled from the bosom of my mother the Church, and am now, having completed immense replies to the decree Lamentabili Sane and to the encyclical Pascendi Gregis, writing a History of the Doctrine of Transubstantiation. Does the topic interest you?"

"I am no theologian," said Henry. "And I have been told that if one inquires too closely into these mysteries, faith wilts. I should not like that. So I do not inquire. It is better so. I should not wish to be an atheist. I have known an atheist whom I have very greatly disliked."

The thought of this person shadowed his brow faintly with a scowl, not un.o.bserved by his host and hostess. "But," he added, "he became a worse thing; he is now an atheist turned Catholic...."

"There I am with you," the ex-cardinal agreed. "About the Catholic convert there is often a quite peculiar lack of distinction.... But we will not talk about these."

16

They were now eating fruit. Melon, apricots, pears, walnuts, figs, and fat purple grapes. The night ever deepened into a greater loveliness.

In the steep, sweet garden below the terrace nightingales sang.

"On such a night as this," said Dr. Franchi, cracking a walnut, "it is difficult to be an atheist."

"Why so?" asked Henry dreamily, biting a ripe black fig, and wis.h.i.+ng that the ex-cardinal had not thought it necessary to give so lovely and familiar an opening phrase so tedious an end.

"Don't tell me," he added quickly, repenting his thoughtless question.

"What nightingales! What figs! And what apric.o.c.ks!" (for so he always called this fruit). He hated to talk about atheists, and about how G.o.d had fas.h.i.+oned so beautiful a world. It might be so, but the world, on such a night, was enough in itself.

Dr. Franchi's keen, gentle eyes, the eyes of a shrewd weigher of men, observed him and his distastes.

"An aesthete," he judged. "G.o.d has given him intuition rather than reason. And not very much even of that. He might easily be misled, this youth."

Aloud he said, "All I meant was that

"'Holy joy about the earth is shed, And Holiness upon the deep,'

as one of your Edwardian poets has sung. That was a gifted generation: may it rest in peace. For I think it mostly perished in that calamitous war we had.... But your Georgians--they too are a gifted generation, is it not so?"

"You mean by Georgians those persons who are now flouris.h.i.+ng under the sovereignty of King George the Fifth of England? Such as myself?

I do not really know. How could it be that gifts go in generations?

A generation, surely, is merely chronological. Gifts are sporadic.

No, I find no generation, as such, gifted. Except, of course, with the gifts common to all humanity.... People speak of the Victorians, and endow them with special qualities, evil or good. They were all black recently; now they are being white-washed--or rather enamelled. I think they had no qualities, as a generation (or rather as several generations, which, of course, they were); men and women then were, in the main, the same as men and women to-day, I see nothing but individuals. The rest is all the fantasy of the foolish, who love to generalise, till they cannot see the trees for the wood.

Generalisations make me dizzy. I see nothing but the separate trees.

There _is_ nothing else...."

Dreamily Henry wandered on, happy and fluent with wine and figs. A ripe black fig, gaping to show its scarlet maw--what could be more lovely, and more luscious to the palate?

As to Miss Longfellow, she was eating her dessert so rapidly and with such relish that she had no time for conversation. All she contributed to it was, between bites, a cheerful nod now and then at Henry to show that she agreed with him.

"Yours," said Dr. Franchi, "is not, perhaps, the most natural view of life. It is more natural to see people in large groups, with definite characteristic markings, according to period, age, nationality, s.e.x, or what not. Also, such a view has its truth, though, like all truths, it may be over-stressed.... But here comes our coffee. After we have drunk it, Gina will leave us perhaps and you and I will smoke our cigars and have a little talk on political questions, and matters outside a woman's interests. Our Italian women do not take the same interest in affairs which your English women do."

"No," Miss Longfellow readily agreed. "We don't like the New Woman over here. Perhaps Mr. Beechtree admires her though."

"The New Woman?" Henry doubtfully queried. "Is there a new woman? I don't know the phrase, except from old Victorian _Punch_ Pictures....

Thank you, yes; a little cherry brandy."

"Ah, is the woman question, then, over in your country--died out?

Fought to a finish, perhaps, with honours to the victorious s.e.x?"

"The woman question, sir? What woman question? I know no more of woman questions than of man questions, I am afraid. There is an infinity of questions you may ask about all human beings. People ask them all the time. Personally, I don't; it is less trouble not to. There people are; you can take them or leave them, for what they're worth. Why ask questions about them? There is never a satisfactory answer."

"A rather difficult youth to talk to," the ex-cardinal reflected. "He fails to follow up, or, apparently, even to understand, any of the usual conversational gambits. Is he very ignorant, or merely perverse?"

As to Miss Longfellow, she gave Henry up as being not quite all there, and anyhow a bloodless kind of creature, who took very little notice of her. So she went indoors and played the piano.

"I am failing," thought Henry. "She does not like me. I am not being intelligent. They will talk of things above my head, things I cannot understand."

Apathy held him, drinking cherry brandy under the moon, and he could not care. Woman question? Man question? What was all this prating?