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By Root 11473 0

’t the faintest idea. Burlap had never explained. You had to understand intuitively; if you didn’t, you were as good as damned. Walter supposed that he was among the damned. He was never likely to forget his first interview with his future chief. ‘I hear you’re in want of an assistant editor,’ he had shyly begun. Burlap nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’ And after an enormous and horrible silence, he suddenly looked up with his blank eyes and asked: ‘Do you believe in Life?’ Walter blushed to the roots of his hair and said, Yes. It was the only possible answer. There was another desert of speechlessness and then Burlap looked up again. ‘Are you a virgin?’ he enquired. Walter blushed yet more violently, hesitated and at last shook his head. It was only later that he discovered, from one of Burlap’s own articles, that the man had been modelling his behaviour on that of Tolstoy—’ going straight to the great simple fundamental things,’ as Burlap himself described the old Salvationist’s soulful impertinences.

‘Yes, Rimbaud certainly believed in Life,’ Walter acquiesced feebly, feeling while he spoke the words as he felt when he had to write a formal letter of condolence. Talking about believing in Life was as bad as talking about grieving with you in your great bereavement.

‘He believed in it so much,’ Burlap went on, dropping his eyes (to Walter’s great relief) and nodding as he ruminatively pronounced the words,’so profoundly that he was prepared to give it up. That’s how I interpret his abandonment of literature—as a deliberate sacrifice.’ (He uses the big words too easily, thought Walter.) ‘He that would save his life must lose it.’ (Oh, oh!) ‘To be the finest poet of your generation and, knowing it, to give up poetry—that’s losing your life to save it. That’s really believing in life. His faith was so strong, that he was prepared to lose his life, in the certainty of gaining a new and better one.’ (Much too easily! Walter was filled with embarrassment.) ‘A life of mystical contemplation and intuition. Ah, if only one knew what he did and thought in Africa, if only one knew!’

‘He smuggled guns for the Emperor Menelik,’ Walter had the courage to reply. ‘And to judge from his letters, he seems to have thought chiefly about making enough money to settle down. He carried forty thousand francs in his belt. A stone and a half of gold round his loins.’ Talking of gold, he was thinking, I really ought to speak to him about my screw.

But at the mention of Menelik’s rifles and the forty thousand francs, Burlap smiled with an expression of Christian forgiveness. ‘But do you really imagine,’ he asked, ‘that gun-running and money were what occupied his mind in the desert? The author of Les Illuminations?’

Walter blushed, as though he had been guilty of some nasty solecism. ‘Those are the only facts we know,’ he said self-excusingly.

‘But there is an insight that sees deeper than the mere facts.’ ‘Deeper insight’ was Burlap’s pet name for his own opinion. ‘He was realizing the new life, he was gaining the Kingdom of Heaven.’

‘It’s a hypothesis,’ said Walter, wishing uncomfortably that Burlap had never read the New Testament.

‘For me,’ retorted Burlap, ‘it’s a certainty. An absolute certainty.’ He spoke very emphatically, he wagged his head with violence. ‘A complete and absolute certainty,’ he repeated, hypnotizing himself by the reiteration of the phrase into a fictitious passion of conviction. ‘Complete and absolute.’ He was silent; but within, he continued to lash himself into mystical fury. He thought of Rimbaud until he himself was Rimbaud. And then suddenly his devil popped out its grinning face and whispered, ‘A stone and a half of gold round his loins.’ Burlap exorcised the creature by changing the subject. ‘Have you seen the new books for review?’ he said, pointing to a double pile of volumes on the corner of the table. ‘Yards of contemporary literature.’ He became humorously exasperated. ‘Why can’t authors stop? It’s a disease. It’s a bloody flux, like what the poor lady suffered from in the Bible, if you remember.’

What Walter chiefly remembered was the fact that the joke was Philip Quarles