The Rebel Angels

"Oh, if you're going to talk about the soul, I can't pretend to be an authority. Father Darcourt must put us straight on that."

"I think the Vestals knew very well what they were doing," I said. "Simple people demand simple proofs of things that aren't at all simple. I think the writer you are talking about, Miss Theotoky, was defining chastity, which is a quality of the spirit; virginity is a physical technicality."

"Oh Simon, what a Jesuit you are," said Urky. "You mean that a girl can have a high old time and then say, "But of course I am chaste because I had my spiritual fingers crossed"?"

"Chastity isn't a peculiarly female attribute, Urky," said I.

"Anyhow, I made my point with the engineers," said Maria; "They have almost decided that science wasn't invented the day they came to the University, and that maybe the ancients knew a thing or two in their fumbling way. They had a lot of tests, you know; they had a test for a wise man. Do you remember it, Professor McVarish?"

"I take refuge in the scholar's disclaimer, Maria dear; it's not my field."

"If you are a wise man it is certainly your field," said Maria; "They said a wise man could catch the wind in a net."

"And did he grease the net?"

"It was a metaphor for understanding what could be felt but not seen, but of course not many people understood."

Hollier had been looking uncomfortable during this exchange, and now he rather laboriously changed the subject. "It's despicable to attack Froats in that way; he's a very brilliant man."

"But an eccentric," said Urky. "The old Turd-Skinner is unquestionably an eccentric, and you know what capital a politician can make out of attacking an eccentric."

"A man of great brilliance," said Hollier, "and an old friend of mine. Our work is more closely connected than a rabble-rouser like Murray Brown could ever understand. I suppose we are both trying to capture the wind in a net."

3

Cocktail parties always spoil my appetite for dinner: I eat too many of the dainty bits. So I went directly back to my rooms after Urky's affair, and bought a paper on my way, to see if Murray Brown's attack on the University was still considered to be news.

I am officially on the theological faculty at Spook but I do not live in Spook. I have rooms in Ploughwright College, which is near by, a comparatively modern building, but not in the economical, spiteful mode of modern university architecture; my rooms are in the tower over the gate, so that I can look inward to the quadrangle of Ploughwright, and also out over a considerable stretch of our large and ragged campus.

I have no kitchen, but I have a hot-plate and a small refrigerator in my bathroom. I made myself toast and coffee and brought out a jar of honey. Not the right thing for a man beginning to be stout, but I have not much zeal for the modern pursuit of trimness. Food helps me to think.

Brown's speech was reported spottily but sufficiently. I had met Murray Brown a few times during my years as a parish clergyman, before I became an academic. He was an angry man, who had turned his anger into a crusade on behalf of the poor. Thinking of the wrongs of the underprivileged, Murray Brown could become deliciously furious, say all kinds of intemperate things, attribute mean motives to anyone who disagreed with him, and dismiss as unimportant anything he did not understand. He was detested by conservatives, and he embarrassed liberals because he was a man without intellectual scope and without fixed aims, but he was popular with enough like-minded people to get himself elected to the Provincial Legislature over and over again. He always had some hot cause or other, some iniquity to expose, and he had turned his attention to the University. In his intellectually primitive way he was an able controversialist. Are we paying good money to keep fellows playing with shit and girls talking horny nonsense in classrooms? Of course we needed doctors and nurses and engineers; maybe we even needed lawyers. We needed some economists and we needed teachers. But did we need a lot of frills? Murray's audience was sure that we did not.