So—I had bounced him. “And have you found that child, Wee Jackie Parlabane?”

“I think so. And rather a battered baby he has proved to be. But do you believe what I’ve said?”

“Yes, I do. Hollier says the same thing, in a different way. He says that people don’t by any means all live in what we call the present; the psychic structure of modern man lurches and yaws over a span of at least ten thousand years. And everybody knows that children are primitives.”

“Have you ever known any primitives?”

Had I! This was a time to hold my tongue. So I nodded.

“What’s Hollier really up to? Don’t say paleo-psychology again. Tell me in terms a simple philosopher can understand.”

“A philosopher? Hollier is rather like Heidegger, if you want a philosopher. He tries to recover the mentality of the earliest thinkers; but not just the great thinkers—the ordinary people, some of whom didn’t hold precisely ordinary positions. Kings and priests, some of them, because they have left their mark on the history of the development of the mind, by tradition and custom and folk-belief. He just wants to find out. He wants to comprehend those earlier modes of thought without criticizing them. He’s deep in the Middle Ages because they really are middle—between the far past, and the post-Renaissance thinking of today. So he can stand in the middle and look both ways. He hunts for fossil ideas, and tries to discover something about the way the mind has functioned from them.”

I had ordered another bottle of Chianti, and Parlabane had drunk most of it, because two glasses is my limit. He had had four Stregas, as well, and another asphyxiating cigar, but drunks and stinks are no strangers to me. He had begun to talk loudly, and sometimes talked through a belch, raising his voice as if to quell the interruption from within.

“You know, when we were at Spook together I wouldn’t have given a plugged nickel for Hollier’s chances of being anything but a good, tenured professor. He’s come on a lot.”

“Yes, he’s one of the Distinguished Professors you were sneering at. Not long ago, in a press interview, the President called him one of the ornaments of the university.”

“Have mercy, God! Old Clem! A late-bloomer. And of course he’s got you.”

“I am his student. A good student, too.”

“Balls! You’re his soror mystica. A child could see it. Anyhow, that extremely gifted, all-desiring Wee Johnnie Parlabane can see it, long before it reaches the bleared eyes of the grown-ups. He encloses you. He engulfs you. You are completely wrapped up in him.”

“Don’t shout so. People are looking.”

Now he was really shouting. “ ‘Don’t shout, I can hear you perfectly. I have the Morley Phone which fits in the ear and cannot be seen. Ends deafness instantly.’—Do you remember that old advertisement? No, of course you don’t; you know too much and you aren’t old enough to remember anything.” Now Parlabane squeaked in a falsetto: “ ‘Don’t shout so; people are looking!’ Who gives a damn, you stupid twat? Let ‘em look! You love him. Worse you’re subsumed in him, and he doesn’t know it. Oh, shame on stupid Professor Hollier!”

But he does know it! Would I have let him take me on the sofa five months ago if I wasn’t sure he knew I loved him? No! Don’t ask that question. I can’t be sure of the answer now.

The proprietor of The Rude Plenty was hovering. I gave him a beseeching glance, and he helped me get Parlabane to his feet and towards the door. The monk was as strong as a bull, and it was a tussle. Parlabane began to sing in a very loud and surprisingly melodious voice—

At last I got him into the street, and steered him back to the front door of Spook, where the night porter, an old friend of mine, took him in charge.

As I walked back to the subway station I thought: that’s what comes of trying to understand Parlabane; a loud scene in The Rude Plenty. Would I go on? Yes, I thought I would.

The initiative was taken out of my hands. When I arrived at Hollier’s outer room the following morning there was a note for me, placed beside a bouquet of flowers—salvia—which had too obviously been culled from the garden outside the Rector’s Lodging. The note read:

To become a Ph.D. you must take a few courses relating to your special theme before you get down to work on your thesis. I had done almost all that was necessary, but Hollier suggested that I do two courses this year, one with Professor Urquhart McVarish in Renaissance European Culture and the other in New Testament Greek with Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt. McVarish lectured dully; his stuff was good but he was too much the scholar to make it interesting, lest somebody should accuse him of “popularization”. He was a fussy little man who was forever dabbing at his long red nose with a handkerchief he kept tucked up in his left sleeve. Somebody told me that this was a sign that he had once been an officer in a first-class British regiment. About twenty people attended the lectures.

Prof. the Rev. was different, a roly-poly parson, as pink as a baby, who did not lecture, but conducted seminars, in which everybody present was expected to speak up and have an opinion, or at least ask questions. There were only five of us: myself and three young men and one middle-aged man, all studying for the ministry. Two of the young men were modern and messy, long-haired and fashionably dirty; they were heading for advanced evangelical church work, and in their spare time assisted in services with rock music, where people like themselves danced away Evil, and embraced one another in tears when the show was over. They were taking the course in hopes, I think, of discovering from the original texts that Jesus was also a great dancer and guitar-player. The other young man was very High Church Anglican, and addressed Darcourt as “Father” and wore a dark grey suit to which he obviously hoped, very soon, to add a clerical collar. The middle-aged man had given up his job selling insurance to become a parson, and worked like a galley-slave, because he had a wife and two children and had to get himself ordained as fast as he could. Altogether, they were not an inspiring lot. God had presumably called all four to His service, but surely in a fit of absent-mindedness or perhaps as some complicated Jewish joke.

Luckily, Prof. the Rev. was far better than I could have hoped. “What do you expect from this seminar?” he asked, right away. “I’m not going to teach you a language; I suppose you all know classical Greek?” I did, but the four men looked unconfident, and admitted slowly that they had done a bit of it, or crammed some during summer courses. “If you know Greek, it may be assumed that you also know Latin,” said Prof. the Rev., and this was received in glum silence. But was he downhearted? No!

“Let’s find out how good you are,” he said. “I’m going to write a short passage on the blackboard, and in a few minutes I’ll ask you for a translation.” Widespread discomfort, and one of the long-haired ones murmured that he hadn’t brought a Latin dictionary with him. “You won’t need it,” said Darcourt; “this is easy.”