Luckily I did not have to question him, for by a little flash of memory I recalled a dog sleeping, a certain spaniel I knew; and I remembered how he always tucked the feathery end of his tail over his nostrils in preparation for going to sleep; he belonged to an ignorant man who had neglected to have his tail cut off as a puppy. It was a tail that the Dean meant, not a blanket.
Clear though the meaning was to me the moment I thought of the spaniel, I saw that the confusion of the Dean’s remark could only mean that a mist was beginning to gather over his view of time, and I hastily filled his glass. I watched anxiously till he drank it; it must have been his third or fourth; and soon I saw from the clearness of his phrases, and a greater strength in all his utterances, that he was safely back again looking out over clear years.
‘The Wise Ones, the Great Ones,’ he went on meditatively, ‘they give you straw. But they do not, of course, make your bed for you. I trust one can do that. One does it, you know, by walking round several times, the oftener the better. The more you walk round, the better your bed fits you.’
I could see from the way he spoke that the Dean was speaking the truth. After all, I had made no new discovery. In vino veritas; that was all. Though the boundaries of this adage had been extended by my talks with Dean Spanley, beyond, I suppose, any limits previously known to man; at any rate this side of Asia.
‘Clean straw is bad,’ continued the Dean; ‘because there is no flavour to it. No.’
He was meditating again, and I let him meditate, leaving him to bring up out of that strange past whatever he would for me.
‘If you find anything good, hide it,’ he continued. ‘The world is full of others; and they all seem to get to know, if you have found anything good. It is best therefore to bury it. And to bury it when no one is looking on. And to smooth everything over it. Anything good always improves with keeping a few days. And you know it’s always there when you want it. I have sometimes smoothed things over it so carefully that I have been unable to find it when requiring it, but the feeling that it’s there always remains. It is a very pleasant feeling, hard to describe. Those buryings represent wealth, which of course is a feeling denied to those greedy fellows who eat every bone they find, the moment they find it. I have even buried a bone when I’ve been hungry, for the pleasure of knowing that it was there. What am I saying! Oh Heavens, what am I saying!’
So sudden, so unexpected was this rush back down the ages, and just when I thought that he had had ample Tokay, that I scarcely knew what to do. But, whatever I did, it had to be done instantly; and at all costs I had to preserve from the Dean the secret that through his babblings I was tapping a source of knowledge that was new to this side of the world, for I knew instinctively that he would have put a stop to it. He had uttered once before in my hearing a similar exclamation, but not with anything like the shocked intensity with which he was now vibrating, and his agitation seemed even about to increase. I had, as I say, to act instantly. What I did made a certain coldness between me and the Dean, that lasted unfortunately for several weeks, but at least I preserved the secret. I fell forward over the table and lay unconscious, as though overcome by Tokay.
There was one advantage in the awkwardness that I felt when I next saw the Dean at the club, and that was that my obvious embarrassment attracted his attention away from the direction in which a single wandering thought might have ruined everything. It was of vital importance to my researches that any question about over-indulgence in a rare wine should be directed solely at me. My embarrassment was not feigned, but there was no need to conceal it. I passed him by one day rather sheepishly as I crossed the main hall of the club and saw him standing there looking rather large. I knew he would not give me away to the other members, nor quite condone my lapse. And then one day I very humbly apologised to him in the reading-room.
‘That Tokay,’ I said. ‘I am afraid it may have been a little stronger than I thought.’
‘Not at all,’ said the Dean.
And I think we both felt better after that; I for having made my apology, he for the generosity with which his few kind words had bestowed forgiveness. But it was some while before I felt that I could quite ask him to dine with me. Much roundabout talk about the different dates and vintages of imperial Tokay took place before I could bring myself to do that; but in the end I did, and so Dean Spanley and I sat down to dinner again.
Now I don’t want to take credit for things that I have not done, and I will not claim that I manoeuvred my guest to take up a certain attitude; I think it was merely due to a mood of the Dean. But certainly what happened was that the Dean took up a broad and tolerant line and drank his Tokay like a man, with the implication made clear, in spite of his silence, that there was no harm in Tokay, but only in not knowing where to stop. The result was that the Dean arrived without any difficulty, and far more quickly than I had hoped, at that point at which the truth that there is in wine unlocked his tongue to speak of the clear vision that the Tokay gave him once more. No chemist conducting experiments in his laboratory is likely to have mixed his ingredients with more care than I poured out the Tokay from now on. I mean, of course, for the Dean. I knew now how very narrow was the ridge on which his intellect perched to peer into the past; and I tended his glass with Tokay with the utmost care.
‘We were talking, last time, about bones,’ I said.
And if it had turned out to be the wrong thing to say I should have turned the discussion aside on to grilled bones. But no, there was nothing wrong with it. I had got him back to just the very point at which we left off last time.
‘Ah, bones,’ said the Dean. ‘One should always bury them. Then they are there when you want them. It is something to know that, behind all the noise and panting that you may make, there is a good solid store of bones, perhaps with a bit of meat on them, put away where others can’t find it. That is always a satisfaction. And then, however hungry one may feel, one knows that the meat is improving all the time. Meat has no taste until it has been hidden away awhile. It is always best to bury it. Very often, when I had nothing special to do, I would tear up a hole in the ground. I will tell you why I did that: it attracted attention. Then, if eavesdropping suspicious busybodies wanted to get your bone, they probably looked in the wrong place. It is all part of the scheme of a well-planned life: those that do not take these little precautions seldom get bones. Perhaps they may pick up a dry one now and again, but that is about all. Yes, always bury your bone.’
I noticed the dawn of what seemed a faint surprise in his face, as though something in his own words had struck him as strange, and I hastily filled his glass and placed it near his hand, which throughout the talks that I had with him had a certain wandering tendency, reminiscent to me of a butterfly in a garden; it hovered now over that golden wine, then lifted the glass, and at once he was back where his own words seemed perfectly natural to him, as indeed they did to me, for I knew that he drew them straight from the well of truth, that well whose buckets are so often delicate glasses, such as I had on my table, and which were bringing up to me now these astonishing secrets. So often I find myself referring to this Tokay, that, borrowed though it was, it may be thought I am over-proud of my cellar; but I cannot sufficiently emphasise that the whole scientific basis of my researches was the one maxim, ‘in vino veritas’; without that the Dean might have exaggerated or misinterpreted, or even have invented the whole of his story. What the law of gravity is to astronomical study, so is this Latin maxim to those investigations that I offer now to the public.
‘Yes, bury your bone,’ said the Dean. ‘The earth is often flavourless; yet, if you choose with discrimination, in farms, beside roads, or in gardens, you hit on a delightful variety of flavours, that greatly add to your bone. I remember a favourite place of mine, just at the edge of a pig-sty, which well bore out my contention that, by a careful choice of earth, there is hardly