Some Recollections of Mortality

We had been excited in the highest degree by seeing the Custodians pull off their coats and tuck up their shirt-sleeves, as the procession came along. It looked so interestingly like business.

                                                                                              Charles Dickens

One spring day and evening in New York twenty years ago I happened to watch, at intermittent points, the television news (what this author claims "tells no more than the survival of greed and fear and pain and hate"). Three white men, bearded and stout, were leaning against a vehicle surrounded by reporters, cameramen and, as it turned out, forces unsympathetic to their cause. Their cause, as it were, appeared to be nothing more than mere survival. They had been riddled with lead, not in any critical areas yet enough to stymie flight, and they pleaded with the camera and anyone to whom the camera dispensed its images to have pity on them. Should they be pitied because their cause is just or simply because without medical attention they will not live more than twenty-four hours? One of the three men, the broadest of chest, spoke loudly and with a Germanic accent, and the casual observer could not help but ask where all this was taking place. He spoke and the camera decided to listen for a minute or two, and then other events of the days required other cameras and other pleas. When, hours later, we returned to the three wounded soldiers – they were mercenaries in a pro-Apartheid South African militia – there was nothing more to hear or sense. They leaned motionlessly on the tires of their jeep, ambushed on the outskirts of this desert and the camera found them all quiet and cooperative. I asked myself and my uncle sitting next to me whether they were still alive and he responded with three words: "They look dead." There was no other confirmation, no voiceover from the camera which surveyed their bodies, no statement of anguish or regret; these were contract killers who had known that they would probably die pursuing their odious profession. We were not expected to pity but to observe them, gaze upon them, and, as it stated in this essay, "look at something that could not return a look."

Perhaps not surprisingly, our narrator is British and the field of his investigation French; death, after all, is a foreign affair. In the first paragraph, he saunters out at four o'clock in the morning – when nothing but birds and the most debauched of Paris's nightcrawlers are out and about – only to end up, a few hours later, at the far end of the plaza before Notre Dame. It is here that he beholds "an airy procession coming round," which he mistakes for "a marriage in Blouse-life, or a Christening, or some other domestic festivity," yet which happens to be the funeral march of an old man. He ponders how we can insouciantly look upon the lot of a stranger and speculate as to the reasons for his demise. The ideas that surface are not among the most pleasant:

An old man was not much: moreover, we could have wished he had been killed by human agency – his own, or somebody else's: the latter, preferable – but our comfort was, that he had nothing about him to lend to his identification, and that his people must seek him here. Perhaps they were waiting dinner for him right now? We liked that. Such of us as had pocket-handkerchiefs took a slow intense protracted wipe at our noses, and then crammed our handkerchiefs into the breast of our blouses.

His death may not be tragic; it may in fact be just as commonplace as his life. A wonderful passage follows between a pair of creaking hinges in which the custodian to the funeral,  a "tall and sallow Mason," reminds the crowd of onlookers about the procedures necessary so that this man, unknown to most if not all of them, may enjoy full burial rites in accordance with the lay tradition. 

The scene is the first of three glimpses at death: an old man who passed after a long life; an unknown thirty-year-old woman found dead on the street; and then the narrator's participation as a juror in the inquest of the death of a child. All three stations in life – thirty being roughly halfway through our existence according to life expectancy of the mid-nineteenth-century – are accounted for, as are three very different ways to look at what may happen to us when our biological systems fail and end. In the case of the young child who may or may not have been done away with by his mother, the courtroom's suspicious faces and baleful implications are not kind to the accused:

The miserable young creature who had given birth to this child within a very few days, and who had cleaned the cold wet door-steps immediately afterwards, was brought before us when we resumed our horse-hair chairs, and was present during the proceedings. She had a horse-hair chair herself, being very weak and ill; and I remember how she turned to the unsympathetic nurse who attended her, and who might have been the figurehead of a pauper-ship, and how she hid her face and sobs and tears upon that wooden shoulder.  

Despite her posturings and testimony, the woman was convicted although "her sentence was lenient, and her history and conduct proved that it was right." Her child had barely tasted life, and her responsibility for its well-being was never quite bereft of doubts about her ability and desire to be a good mother. Thus the one who is to bestow life upon her child cannot bring herself to accept the commitment she has entered into, leaving her child from her inception already in the dark and thorned arms of death.

For those unaware of Dickens's contributions as an essayist – he is one of the finest in the English language – look no further than this succulent collection. The pieces range from odd piles of observations on life's minutia to short and modest tracts on more profound matters, and they are unequivocally a rousing success. Dickens has a love for Paris betrayed only by his greater endearment to certain facets of his homeland, and his feelings are evident in the detail which he proffers on death in its various guises. He wonders aloud "whether it is positively in the essence and nature of things, as a certain school of Britons would seem to think it, that a Capital must be ensnared and enslaved before it can be made beautiful" (we would do well to apply this credo to our own daily routines). He is also puzzled by the inquest, considering that the truth might never be fully revealed, attributing all of this to his own ingenuousness:

The thing happened, say five-and-twenty years ago. I was a modest young uncommercial then, and timid and inexperienced. Many suns and winds have browned me in the line, but those were my pale days.

And his brown skin will one day become pale and sallow like that of the pallbearer and custodian, as we too become greyer and night gains in its darkness.

Pasternak, "Paul-Marie Verlaine"

An essay about this French poet by this Russian man of letters.  You can read the original in this collection.

One hundred years ago, on the 30th of March, 1844, in the city of Metz, the great lyric poet of France Paul Verlaine was born.  How can he interest us now, in our fiery days, amidst our distinct lack of humor and in light of our stunning victory?

He bequeathed a brilliant record of what he saw and experienced, similar in spirit and expression to the later works of Blok, Rilke, Ibsen, Chekhov, and other modern writers, yet connected in places by a deep kinship with the newest wave of impressionist painting in France, the Scandinavian countries, and Russia.

These artists were surrounded by a new urban reality quite different than that of Pushkin, Mérimée, and Stendhal.  The sun was setting on the nineteenth century and it drifted to its end with all its whims intact, the high-handedness of its industry, its monetary storms, and a society composed of victims and mischievous children.  The streets had just been paved with asphalt and lit by gas.  There factories took hold and grew like mushrooms just like the excessive spread of daily papers.   Railways enjoyed enough expansion to become a part of every child's existence, the only difference being whether he spent his childhood years speeding by a sleeping town on such a train, or whether such night trains sped by the town's outskirts of his own impoverished childhood.

On this newly lit street the shadows did not lie the way they did in Balzac's time, and these streets were walked in a new way; we wished to draw them in this same new way, in accordance with nature.  The main novelties of this street were not, however, the lamps or the telegraph poles, but the vortex of an egoistic element which bore with it the clarity of an autumnal wind and chased away poverty, tuberculosis, prostitution, and other niceties of that era like leaves off a sidewalk.  This vortex caught everyone's eye and became the center of the picture.  With its gust the labor movement moved into its cognitive phase.  Its breath in particular provided the viewpoint of a group of new artists.

They wrote in smears and dots, in hints and half-tones, not because they wanted to do so or that they were symbolists.  Reality for a symbolist was that dimension in which everything was in transition and development; this reality in its entirety meant, if not comprised something, as well as served if not fulfilled a symptom and a sign.  Everything was mixed and jumbled, old and new, the Church, the village, the city, and the people.  Everything was a spinning whirlpool of conventions, between the absoluteness of what remained and what had yet to be achieved, that distant presentiment of the century's most important happening – socialism – and its actual embodiment, the Russian Revolution.

And just as Blok the realist provided us with an elevated picture of Petersburg singular in its symbolic gleam, so too did Verlaine the realist, in his impermissibly personal confessions, play the main role for that time and place from where his fall and repentance would arise.

Verlaine was the son of a lieutenant who would die young.  The lieutenant was his mother's favorite as well as the favorite of all the estate's servant women, and thus Verlaine was sent at the age of four from the provinces to Paris to an exclusive institute of learning.  There is something akin to Lermontov's life in his dove-like cleanliness begotten from the circle of women, as well as in his subsequent fate among his debauched Parisian comrades.  Upon finishing school he became an official at city hall.  The events of 1870 led to his becoming a militiaman amidst the Parisian fortifications; he got married; an uprising broke out; he took part in the tasks of the Commune by working in printing; and once order had been restored, he was discharged.  It was then that he began to drink.  And fate sent him an evil genius in the form of a freak of immense talent, however surly, the eccentric adolescent poet Arthur Rimbaud.

He himself dug up this "novice" in Charleroi and summoned him in writing to Paris.  Once Rimbaud moved in with the Verlaines, their normal life came to an end, and Verlaine's subsequent existence was drowned in the tears of his wife and child.  With Verlaine's family abandoned for good, Rimbaud and Verlaine began their wanderings on the longer roads of France and Belgium in a mutual haze of alcohol, leading them to London and semi-starvation where they did menial work to stay alive, to brawling in Stuttgart, and to prisons and hospitals.

Finally, in Brussels, after a terrible row, Verlaine raced after the absconded Rimbaud and fired twice, wounding him.  Verlaine was then arrested and sentenced to a two-year prison term in Mons. 

After all this Rimbaud took off for Africa to fight for the new territories of Menelik II of Ethiopia, and came into the King's service.  Meanwhile, in prison, Verlaine would write one of his greatest books.

He died in the winter of 1896, not having added anything astonishing to his long-held fame and surrounded by the reverent attention of some youths and admirers.

Verlaine began to write quite early on.  The Poèmes saturniens of his first book were written when he was still in high school.  His deceptive poetry, like the titles of some of his books such as Romances sans paroles (a rather impudent term for the production of literature), provokes false notions of aesthetics.  One might have thought that the disregard for style with which he named his works was imbued with a desire for a pre-verbal "musicality" (something few if any understand), and that he is sacrificing the logical and visual aspects of poetry in favor of its sound.  This is not so; quite the opposite, in fact.  Like any great artist he needed "not words, but deeds," even from the art of words; that is, he wanted poetry to contain the actually experienced or witnessed truth of the observer.

This is precisely what he states in his brilliant work "Art poétique," incorrectly having become the manifesto of both Zaum and "melodiousness":

Tu feras bien, en train d'énergie             (You would do well, in thrall's ado,)
De rendre un peu la Rime assagie.         (To give your rhymes a conscience, too.)

And then later:

Que ton vers soit la chose envolée        (May your verse be that thing in flight)
Qu'on sent qui fuit d'une âme en allée    (We see depart a soul so light,)
Vers d'autres cieux à d'autres amours.  (Towards other skies and other loves.)

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure      (May your verse be that fortune pure,)
Eparse au vent crispé du matin              (Strewn tense against the morning wind)
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym...   (On which shall bloom both thyme and mint,)
Et tout le reste est littérature.               (And all the rest is literature.) 

Verlaine had the right to speak in this way.  He was able in his poetry to imitate bells, seize and augment the scents of the prevailing flora of his homeland, successfully mimic birds, and reproduce in his works all the flows of silence, internal and external, from winter's starry wordlessness to summer's torpor during a hot sunny midday.  He like no one else expressed the long, engulfing and irrepressible pain of lost possession, be it the loss of a god who was and then died, a woman who changed her mind, a place which became dearer than life itself but which had to be forsaken, or the loss of peace.

Who would one have to be to imagine a great and defeated artist as a spiritual crumb, a spoiled child who doesn't know what he's creating.  Our notions likewise underestimate the eagle-like sobriety of Blok, his historical tact, his feelings of earthly pertinence, inseparable from genius.  No, Verlaine knew perfectly well what he needed and what French poetry lacked in order to convey this new vortex present in the soul and in the city I previously mentioned.  And at any stage of drunkenness or mischief-induced scribbling, having expanded the sensation to the desired limit and led his thoughts into sublime clarity, Verlaine granted the language in which he wrote that boundless freedom which was his discovery in lyric poetry and which can be found only in the novels and plays of the masters of prose dialogue.  Parisian speech and cadence in all its untouchable and captivating keenness flew in from the street and slipped in its entirety into every line without the slightest crack, like the melodic material for all that was to be constructed thereafter.  This progressive ease is the finest thing about Verlaine.  Idiomatic French was impossible for him to shed.  He wrote not in words but in entire locutions, without shattering or transposing them.

Many things are simple and natural, if not all things; and yet they are simple only at their initial level, when they remain a matter of one's conscience, and one wonders only whether they are truly simple or whether one has misinterpreted them.  Such simplicity is an uncreative quantity and bears no relationship whatsoever to art.  What we are talking about is idealistic and endless simplicity, and Verlaine was simple in precisely this regard.  In comparison to naturalness, M. Verlaine is unexpectedly natural and does not give any ground: in colloquial parlance we would say that Verlaine is supernaturally natural, that is, he is simple not so that we might believe him, but so that the voice of life roaring out from within him might not be hampered in any way.  And this is all, as it were, that we can say given our limitations of time and space.

The Invisible Man

It is wonderful how little a man can do alone!  To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is the end.

According to internet sources a film bearing the title of this classic novel might be released in the near future, although one will be disappointed to learn that it has been initially retooled as a wartime sequel.  What is so remarkable about the original work is the blueprint it sets for almost every action movie subsequently created.  It is fast; it is furious; it is never for a moment dull.  And unlike the crash-and-bash vehicles that have littered our cineplexes for decades, it holds together in perfect, if demented logic.

Demented would also describe the feverish state of mind of our protagonist, a scientist by the name of Griffin.  That Griffin already denotes a mythological creature should not surprise the astute reader; that the whole plot recounts an old parable with brutally modern terminology must qualify it as an astounding work of genius.  Griffin spends the first half of the novel rumbling about the small town of Iping, whose inclusion as a haunt for a being of his powers can be seen as both advantageous and wholly inconvenient.  Later information from Griffin himself suggests that the choice was motivated in no small part by the superstitions so rampant among country folk (a bias that would probably have checked off a few boxes on Wells's agenda).  Our first scene has a bandaged stranger taking a room in a backwater inn.  He has arrived without luggage and his demeanor cannot be construed as anything less than vicious.  Still, he is a paying customer, and the element of mystery is not lost on his hostess, Mrs. Hall: 

He held a white cloth – it was a serviette he had brought with him – over the lower part of his face, so that his mouth and jaws were completely hidden, and that was the reason for his muffled voice.  But it was not that which startled Mrs. Hall.  It was the fact that all his forehead was covered by a white bandage, and that another covered his ears, leaving not a scrap of his face exposed excepting only his pink, peaked nose.  It was bright, pink and shiny just as it had been at first.  He wore a dark-brown velvet jacket with a high, black, linen-lined collar turned up about his neck.  The thick black hair, escaping as it could below and between the cross bandages, projected in curious tails and horns, giving him the strangest appearance conceivable.  This muffled and bandaged head was so unlike what she had anticipated, that for a moment she was rigid.

Griffin may have calculated in his creeping madness that simple people would truckle to his whim and word; yet one would think that Iping would be precisely the type of newsy, closely-knit village in which rumor of such an amazing visitor would bring him sustained harassment.  When Griffin finally settles down to relate his story, we come to see that London is hardly too cosmopolitan not to suspect a freak of science.  But London also possesses a far greater allotment of policeman, thieves, dogs and other obstacles to a happy, invisible life.  And, perhaps most importantly, London does not have Griffin's old university chum, Dr. Kemp.

It is just in the middle of our novel that Griffin finds Kemp, likewise a man of science and a respected physician, and as hardened into skepticism of all oddities as any allegedly enlightened mind can be.  The methods of his introduction are brusque and unswerving, and Kemp, despite his hesitation, obliges himself to talk to the wafting air from where an old, familiar voice is ventriloquized.  Griffin provides his former colleague with a detailed and supremely exact method of how he came upon the faculty of invisibility, his experiments on an unfortunate feline, the suspicions and antics of his immigrant landlord, and, most relevantly, the tribulations of the public exercise of the greatest scientific discovery of all time.  The results were not what he had hoped for: 

The more I thought it over, the more I realized what a helpless absurdity an invisible man was – in a cold and dirty climate and a crowded civilized city.  Before I made this mad experiment I had dreamt of a thousand advantages.  That afternoon it seemed all disappointment.  I went over the heads of the things a man reckons desirable.  No doubt invisibility made it possible to get them, but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they were gotten.  Ambition – what is the good of pride of place when you cannot appear there?  What is the good of the love of woman when her name needs be Delilah?  I have no taste for politics, for the blackguardisms of fame, for philanthropy, for sport.  What was I to do?  And for this I had become a wrapped-up mystery, a swathed and bandaged caricature of a man?

Such misfortune explains why Griffin is continuously found cursing – at least ten times in the book's first third, and usually at either his beakers or the Iping natives – a pun on his malediction.  The Iping half also features an outrageous gaggle of dialects, probably because the overly class-conscious Wells could not bring himself to put his delectable prose in the mouths of the uncouth.  More than a century on, The Invisible Man remains the greatest action novel ever written, in the macabre stream of action novels, not those of spy and spymaster.  Apart from the disastrous transcripts of local expression, his prose has the ease and beauty of the highest literary art, and the novel would be utterly unappealing were it rendered in the hard-boiled style of modern screenplays.  Even if, as Griffin readily admits, invisibility is ultimately good for only three things: approaching, getting away, and killing.  Some things, it would seem, are better left undiscovered.   

The New Catacomb

A famous film, whose anonymity I will maintain at least until the arrival of the Google hounds, is often mined for the observation that the tragic thing in life is that everyone has his reasons.  Well, everyone does have his reasons.  But these reasons need not be obscure or contrary or even very different than anyone else's; the reasoner simply needs to think they are his and his alone and exert that greatest of rights, free will.  The selfsame observation has been used to buttress a notion of relativity that some soft-minded charlatans rely upon to inject chaos into our existence, which they then deem an accurate reflection of the cosmos, our souls (mere illusions, they note), and ultimately the patchwork nonsense they pass off as philosophy.  We all know such folk, and theirs is silly, shallow talk.  They have nothing of any originality to express and so claim that everyone has his own expressions, intelligible or not.  Some people, on the other hand, really have their reasons, reasons as astonishingly powerful as any in our tragic fiction, and the boldest among them resolve to act accordingly.  Which brings us to this miniature masterpiece.

Our protagonists are two, both Europeans and leading archaeologists despite their youth, and both enamored with the treasures of ancient Rome.  We begin in Kennedy's rooms in the Eternal City, where the young Englishman, "though little more than thirty," is enjoying the fruits of his "European reputation":

[He] was provided with that long purse which either proves to be a fatal handicap to the student's energies, or, if his mind is still true to his purpose, gives him an enormous advantage in the race for fame.  Kennedy had often been seduced by whim and pleasure from his studies, but his mind was an incisive one, capable of long and concentrated efforts which ended in sharp reactions of sensuous languor.  His handsome face, with its high, white forehead, its aggressive nose and its somewhat loose and sensual mouth, was a fair index of the compromise between strength and weakness in his nature.

The description above could be of any lout or playboy; it so happens to caption one of the world's greatest experts on Roman ruins.  His companion this cold night is Julius Burger, a young man "of a very different type":

He came of a curious blend, a German father and an Italian mother, with the robust qualities of the north mingling strangely with the softer graces of the south.  Blue Teutonic eyes lightened his sun-browned face, and above them rose a square, massive forehead, with a fringe of close yellow curls lying round it.  His strong, firm jaw was clean-shaven, and his companion had frequently remarked how much it suggested those old Roman busts which peered out from the shadows in the corners of his chamber.  Under its bluff German strength there lay always a suggestion of Italian subtlety, but the smile was so honest, and the eyes so frank, that one understood that this was only an indication of his ancestry, with no actual bearing upon his character.

One cannot help but notice the lengthier profile, the juxtaposition in name of that most common German word for citizen and the most renowned Roman citizen of all time.  Yes, Kennedy's companion is a curious cross-breed, and a man on the cusp of being "promoted to the chair of the greatest of German universities."  And as much as Kennedy has little trouble finding willing females as respites between mountainous projects, so does Burger singularly lack the social graces to make use of his imminent glory.  If being appointed to a prestigious university chair at a young age would, in any case, change the minds of most young women.

There are other differences, of course, and these are fleshed out in the heated discussions these academic rivals have that freezing night.  It seems that while Kennedy has just finished another torrid affair that threatened to erupt into full-fledged scandal, Burger has been particularly diligent and unearthed a find of immense magnitude.  In fact, despite his calm tone, his discovery would probably become an event like no other in the field of Roman Christian archeology:

Its date is different from that of any known catacomb, and it was reserved for the burial of the highest Christians, so that the remains and the relics are quite different from anything which has ever been seen before.  If I was not aware of your knowledge and of your energy, my friend, I would not hesitate, under the pledge of secrecy, to tell you everything about it.  But as it is I think that I must certainly prepare my own report of the matter before I expose myself to such formidable competition.

Sadly perhaps, the competition of yesteryear has been overcome by information technology that makes the hiding of such a crypt in our days well-nigh impossible; Burger has, however, succeeded so far. So after jabbing Kennedy for a little more information on the latest flavor of the month – vicarious living forever being the refuge of the superior mind – he offers his colleague a chance to experience the tombs themselves.  This necessitates a long and clandestine midnight route and a few appurtenances that Burger presciently brings along, but with which he does not bother to furnish the eager Englishman – and maybe that is enough from my side. 

Most know the story's author as the creator of arguably the greatest character in the history of fiction, but Conan Doyle had many interests and a concinnity of style that belied his Victorian origins.   While I cannot claim to have ventured far into his spiritual writings, all Conan Doyle's works of suspense are clever, brilliantly polished, and, regardless of the necessary contrivances of plot, often startling in their fundamental truths.  He may take a blissful field on a cloudy afternoon, a northern ship adrift among glaciers, an old pilot, or a South American temperament, and craft around it the vilest of fates.   A South American temperament?  Can one really construct a tale on the tendencies and impulses of an abstract stereotype?  Why not?  After all, we have whole modern novels based on the incessant flow of its narrator's consciousness, even if that narrator is an animal or dead or otherwise indisposed.  A bit gimmicky, I would guess, but then again all plot can be considered gimmicky if it ends with a trick or two.  So you might want to consider what could possibly be made out of Italian subtlety.    

Under the Rose

There are countless ways to dream oneself a writer, but only one lonely path to ever achieving that noble aim (as a character in this overhyped novel discovers). In our days of mass market publishing, where even the oddest and vilest of tomes can find print and accolades, we are no longer obliged to peruse obscure journals, college newspapers, or even minor presses to learn of novelties. Nor should we be doing so, anyway: literature of genius rarely, if ever banners the young. Juvenilia and apprentice writings often stun the assiduous researcher just as much as the older writer, who, hopeful of youth's energy, ends up quickly squinting at his first pages through trembling, forked fingers. Occasionally, however, one finds a lollygagging charm in the younger writer not evident in his more careful and ironic successor. A good introduction to a story in this collection.

Our protagonist is a porcupine (and, as we learn from the author's introduction, the antagonist is a mole), which may explain his overweening antipathy to human interaction. He also doesn't like people because he spends his days and nights watching them, lying to them, and, on harsh occasion, murdering them. Porpentine is our man in Cairo, or, as the story opens, in Alexandria, and his tasks accumulate as Britain nears this historical conflict which he deems inevitable. We meet him, "his face ... carefully arranged: nerveless, rakish-expectant, he might have been there to meet a lady," in one of those cafés which subsist on fictional intelligence officers. As it were, his watch keeps promising him his ruddy-cheeked colleague in espial, Goodfellow, and while the latter ambles through Muhammad Ali square, we are afforded a glimpse into their situation (soon, of course, to become the Situation):

Tender and sheepish, therefore, they wove their paths to cross his own at random. Mirrored, too, his private tactics: living in the most frequented hotels, sitting at the tourist cafés, traveling always by the respectable, public routes. Which surely upset him most; as if, Porpentine once having fashioned such proper innocence, any use of it by others – especially Moldweorp's agents – involved some violation of patent right. They would pirate if they could his child's gaze, his plump angel's smile. For nearly fifteen years he'd fled their sympathy; since the lobby of the Hotel Bristol, Naples, on a winter evening in '83, when everyone you knew in spying's freemasonry seemed to be waiting. For Khartoum to fall, for the crisis in Afghanistan to keep growing until it could be given the name of sure apocalypse. There he had come, as he'd known he must at some stage of the game, to face the already aged face of Moldweorp himself, the prizeman or maestro, feel the old man's hand solicitous on his arm and hear the earnest whisper: 'Things are reaching a head, we may be for it, all of us, do be careful.'

That Moldweorp would now be the German Maulwurf, with the double meaning intact, is not lost on Pynchon; nor is the fact that although "Porpentine worked nominally for England and Moldweorp for Germany, they probably would have chosen the same sides had their employments been reversed." A ruthless game will be afoot as "Egypt's sun beat down, somehow threatening," but the questions asked are the same as in every trial of the spy: whom can I trust, and what happens when I cannot even trust them?

Much more happens: Goodfellow finds a bedfellow in eighteen-year-old Victoria Wren (both cataract and Queen would not be amused); Victoria's much younger sister Mildred is pawned off, in a somewhat perverse aside, on Porpentine; the girls' father Sir Alistair continues to comb Egypt for a decent pipe-organ, finding a less than perfect one and imbuing our quilled hero, if briefly, with a sense of the otherworld; and slowly but surely a plot thickens and bubbles around a Consul who will be at a certain time and place in the gun-sight of a host of malefactors. The plot of Under the Rose is pure Buchan, with the concomitant nastiness and topicality which both makes the Scot a joy to read and assures his oblivion. And like in Buchan's war-torn landscapes there are glimmering jewels amidst this dusty, treacherous desert: "He fell asleep reading an old and mutilated edition of Antony and Cleopatra and wondering if it were still possible to fall under the spell of Egypt: its tropic unreality, its curious gods"; "As if her glow were a reminder of any Yorkshire sunset, or at least some vestige of a vision of Home which neither he nor Goodfellow could afford"; "So that at some point, prowling any mews or alley in midcentury London, the supreme rightness of 'the game for its own sake' must have occurred to him, and acted as an irresistible vector aimed toward 1900." Yet one of the finest and most curious passages relates the last year of decisions by Victoria, who seems to have come to Egypt so as to elope from it: 

This was her first trip abroad. She talked a great deal about her religion: had, for a time, considered the son of God as a young lady will consider any eligible bachelor. But had realized eventually that of course he was not, but maintained instead an immense harem clad in black, decked with rosaries. She would never stand for such competition, had therefore left the novitiate after a matter of weeks but not the Church: that, with its sad-faced statuary, its odor of candles and incense, formed along with an uncle Evelyn, the twin foci of her serene orbit. The uncle, a wild or renegade sundowner, would arrive from Australia once a year bringing no gifts but prepared to weave as many yarns as the sisters could cope with. As far as Victoria remembered, he had never repeated himself. 

There are college term papers to be drafted with Victoria's devotion as that of the fledgling writer (the quite proper use of "novitiate" will nevertheless surely be adduced as a hint), with his religion being literature itself. Yet it is the last line which remains the most marvelous. A raconteur, you see, is someone who, with a phony aside or two, only repeats others; a bore is someone who only repeats himself. That is why, also along with the Wrens, specifically along with Victoria, a zealous pyramid hunter, a certain Bongo-Shaftsbury, can go on and on about silly archeological artefacts and other such nonsense yet not appear to pose any romantic obstacles. That is also why there is another type of profession in which repetition and boringness are virtues. Well, they were virtues until they were replaced "by trends and tendencies and impersonal curves on a lattice of pale blue lines." Very thin and cracked pale blue lines.