Dean Spanley: The Novel. Alan Sharp

      ‘They are so sure of Heaven hereafter,’ said Wrather, ‘that they don’t have to grab a little of it wherever they can, like us poor devils.’

      ‘Ahem,’ said the Dean, and looked at the glass that I had poured out for him, the merits of which he knew just as well as Wrather.

      ‘And then they’re probably afraid of doing anything that people like me do, thinking we’re all bound for Hell, and that their names might get mixed up by mistake with ours at the Day of Judgment, if they kept company with us too much.’

      ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ said the Dean.

      I tried to stop Wrather after a while, thinking he went too far; but he wouldn’t leave Dean Spanley alone: I had set Wrather on to him, and now I found that I could not call him off. At any rate the Dean drank his Tokay. ‘Well, what more do you want?’ Wrather seemed to say to me with a single glance of his expressive eyes, knowing perfectly well that I was trying to stop him. It was then that I asked the Dean about the Greek strategy at Troy. Dean Spanley put down his third glass of Tokay and began to tell me about it, and a look came over Wrather’s face that was altogether pro-Trojan, or at any rate against everything to do with the Greeks. As the Dean talked on I poured out another glass of Tokay for him and watched him, and Wrather watched too. He was getting near to that point at which the curious change took place: I knew that by little signs that I had noted before. Wrather sat now quite silent, seeming to know as much as I did of the effect of the Tokay on the Dean, though he had not ever seen him drink it before. But he was not there yet. I need not say what a thousand writers have said, that alcohol dulls the memory; I need not say what has been said for three thousand years, that wine sharpens the wit; both of these things are true; and both were to be observed in the same Dean. Some minds are more easily affected than others: when forgetfulness came to the Dean it came suddenly and very completely; had it not done so he would never have spoken out as he did. And right on top of the forgetfulness came this other phenomenon, the intense brightening of another part of the mind, a part of the mind that others of us may not possess, but far more likely, I think, a part that in most of us has never happened to be illuminated. It was, as I have said before, on only a narrow ridge that this occurred even with the Dean, only for a short while, only after that precise glass, that exact number of drops of Tokay, that makes the rest of us think, upon careful reflection long after, that we may have perhaps taken a drop more than was strictly advisable. This ridge, this moment, this drop, was now approaching the Dean, and Wrather and I sat watching.

      ‘If we compare the siege of Troy with more modern sieges,’ said the Dean, ‘or the siege of Ilion, as I prefer to call it, one finds among obvious differences a similarity of general principle.’

      Only he did not say the word principle; his tongue bungled it, went back and tried it again, tripped over it and fell downstairs. An effort that he made to retrieve the situation showed me the moment had come.

      ‘Good dog,’ I said.

      A momentary surprise flickered on Wrather’s face, but with the Dean bright memory shone on the heels of forgetfulness. ‘Eh?’ he said. ‘Wag was my name. Though not my only one. On rare occasions, very precious to me, I have been called “Little Devil”.’

      The surprise cleared from Wrather’s face, and a look of mild interest succeeded it, as when a connoisseur notes a new manifestation.

      Any difficulty the Dean had had with his tongue had entirely disappeared.

      ‘Ah, those days,’ he said. ‘I used to spend a whole morning at it.’

      ‘At what?’ I asked.

      ‘At hunting,’ said the Dean, as though that should have been understood. ‘Ah, I can taste to this day, all the various tastes of digging out a rabbit. How fresh they were.’

      ‘What tastes?’ I asked. For however tedious exactitude may be to some, it is bread and jam to a scientist.

      ‘The brown earth,’ he said. ‘And sometimes chalk when one got down deeper, a totally different taste, not so pleasant, not quite so meaty. And then the sharp taste of the juicy roots of trees, that almost always have to be bitten in two while digging out a rabbit. And little unexpected tastes; dead leaves, and even a slug. They are innumerable, and all delightful. And all the while, you know, there is that full ample scent of the rabbit, growing deeper and deeper as you get farther in, till it is almost food to breathe it. The scent grows deeper, the air grows warmer, the home of the rabbit grows darker, and his feet when he moves sound like thunder; and all the while one’s own magnificent scratchings sweep towards him. Winds blowing in past one’s shoulders with scents from outside are forgotten. And at the end of it all is one’s rabbit. That is indeed a moment.’

      ‘Some dean,’ muttered Wrather. An interruption such as no student of science would welcome at such a time. But I forgave him, for he had served science already far better than he could know, and I hushed him with a look, and the Dean went on.

      ‘It may be,’ said the Dean, ‘though I cannot analyse it, but it may be that the actual eating of one’s rabbit is no more thrilling than that gradual approach as one gnaws one’s way through the earth. What would you say?’

      ‘I should say it was equal,’ I answered.

      ‘And you, Mr Wrather?’ said the Dean.

      ‘Not very good at definitions, you know,’ said Wrather. ‘But I will say one thing: one should never trust a teetotaller, or a man that wears elastic-sided boots.’

      And I could see that he was warming towards the Dean; so that, trivial though such a thought is for a scientist to entertain in the middle of such researches, I saw that my little dinner-party would at any rate go well, as the saying is.

      ‘There is one thing to bear in mind on those occasions,’ said the Dean, fingering his collar with a touch of uneasiness, ‘and that is getting back again. When one’s dinner is over one wants to get back. And if the root of a tree, that one has perhaps bitten through, or a thin flint pointing the wrong way, should get under one’s collar, it may produce a very difficult situation.’

      His face reddened a little over his wide white collar even at the thought. And it is not a situation to laugh at.