The Rebel Angels

"Yes, until you gained enough self-confidence to know you couldn't be completely wrong all of the time and that exposing things as cheats and shams or follies couldn't do much for you. Scepticism ran wild in Parlabane."

"Odd about scepticism, you know, Simon. I've known a few sceptical philosophers and with the exception of Parlabane they have all been quite ordinary people in the normal dealings of life. They pay their debts, have mortgages, educate their kids, google over their grandchildren, try to scrape together a competence precisely like the rest of the middle class. They come to terms with life. How do they square it with what they profess?"

"Horse sense, Clem, horse sense. It's the saving of us all who live by the mind. We make a deal between what we can comprehend intellectually and what we are in the world as we encounter it. Only the geniuses and people with a kink try to escape, and even the geniuses often live by a thoroughly bourgeois morality. Why? Because it simplifies all the unessential things. One can't always be improvising and seeing every triviality afresh. But Parlabane is a man with a kink."

"Years ago plenty of people thought he was a genius."

"I remember being one of them."

"Do you think it was that wretched accident to his face that kinked him? Or his family? His mother, do you suppose?"

"Once I would have supposed all those things, but I don't any longer. People triumph over worse families than his could have been, and do astonishing things with ruined bodies, and I'm sick to death of people squealing about their mothers. Everybody has to have a mother, and not everybody is going to draw the Grand Prize – whatever that may be. What's a perfect mother? We hear too much about loving mothers making homosexuals, and neglectful mothers making crooks, and commonplace mothers stifling intelligence. The whole mother business needs radical re-examination."

"You sound as if in a minute you were going to give me a lecture about Original Sin."

"And why not? We've had psychology and we've had sociology and we're still just where we were, for all practical purposes. Some of the harsh old theological notions of things are every bit as good, not because they really explain anything, but because at bottom they admit they can't explain a lot of things, so they foist them off on God, who may be cruel and incalculable but at least He takes the guilt for a lot of human misery."

"So you think there's no explanation for Parlabane? For his failure to live up to expectation? For what he is now?"

"You've lived in a university longer than I have, Clem, and you've seen lots of splendidly promising young people disappear into mediocrity. We put too much value on a certain kind of examination-passing brain and a ready tongue."

"In a minute you'll be saying that character is more important than intelligence. I know several people of splendid character who haven't got the wits of a hen."

"Stop telling me what I'm going to say in a minute, Clem, and take a good look at yourself: certainly one of the most brilliant men in this university and a man of international reputation, and the first time you get into a tiny moral mess with a girl you become a complete simpleton."

"You presume on your cloth to insult me."

"Balls! I'm not wearing my cloth; I only put on the full rig on Sundays. Have another drink."

"You don't suppose, do you, that this discussion is degenerating into mere whisky-talk?"

"Very likely. But before we sink below the surface, let me tell you what twenty years of the cloth, as you so old-fashionedly call it, have taught me. Intellectual endowment is a factor in a man's fate, and so is character, and so is industry, and so is courage, but they can all go right down the drain without another factor that nobody likes to admit, and that's sheer, bald-headed Luck."

"I would have expected you to say God's Saving Grace."

"Certainly you can call it that if you like, and the way He sprinkles it around is beyond human comprehension. God's a rum old joker, Clem, and we must never forget it."

"He's treated us well, wouldn't you say, Simon? Here's to the Rum Old Joker!"

"The Rum Old Joker! And long may he smile on us."

3

The laboratories of Professor Ozias Froats looked more than anything else like the kitchens of a first-rate hotel. Clean metal tables, sinks, an array of cabinets like big refrigerators, and a few instruments that looked as if they were concerned with very accurate calculations. I cannot say what I expected; by the time I visited him the hullabaloo stirred up by Murray Brown had so coloured the public conception of his work that I would not have been surprised if I had found Ozy in the sort of surroundings one associates with the Mad Scientists in a bad movie.

"Come on in, Simon. You don't mind if I call you Simon, do you? Call me Ozy; you always did."