Aspects of Reality
Even to such an eminent philosopher as Professor Candlemas it was an honour to be invited to deliver the Berkeley Lecture and he employed all his outstanding gifts in preparing it. He had never been content to be merely the philosopher, for his lively and far-ranging mind had many other interests—the literatures of many languages, ancient and modern, music and the other arts, science, mathematics, theology, psychology—and constant references to them enriched and diversified his lectures and published works. He had ample time in which to prepare the lecture—“Aspects of Reality” was the somewhat provocative theme he had chosen—and he worked away at leisure, at such leisure indeed that he found himself at last with only four days left and the peroration, the summing-up, still unwritten. True, he had made three or four drafts of it, but none of them had satisfied his exacting taste and he had crumpled them up and flung them with an unnecessary violence into the wastepaper-basket. Yet, in a way, it was a simple matter, a matter merely of drawing together all the threads into an orderly conclusion. His difficulty, in fact, was mot at all what to say, but how to say it; not a philosophical, not a logical, but an artistic problem, a matter of style.
He mentioned this state of affairs to a friend who at once proposed a remedy. “Run down for a day or two to my cottage in the Chilterns,” he said. “There’s nobody there. Mrs. Baker will get everything ready for you and she’ll bicycle over each morning to get you your breakfast and leave a cold lunch, and in the evening she’ll return to cook your supper.”
An excellent idea, the professor agreed, for what he needed, obviously, was to get away from town, from his study, from the daily routine, into the more inspiring surroundings of a quiet countryside.
There is a vulgar belief that professors and philosophers (how much the more a professor of philosophy) are ludicrously unpractical people. This is untrue in general and it was untrue in particular of Professor Candlemas. He had a common sense above the average, but the had besides, exceptional powers of concentration, and when his mind was absorbed by some idea or problem, he was apt to treat practical matters with a certain inattention. Thus, on arrival at Paddington Station, he was heard to ask the booking-clerk for a third return to Paddington and, when assured that he was already there, he was seen to be for the moment totally nonplussed. But only for a moment, for after the briefest pause he had expressed his needs in a more accurate form and in due course he alighted at the unpretending station which he had inadvertently referred to as Paddington. During the journey he had deliberately avoided all thought of the Berkeley Lecture and fixed his attention upon the passing scene, observing how nature gradually intruded upon the slate and brick of London, how little by little trees and gardens multiplied and houses decreased, until at last a farm or a church spire rising above huddled roofs was no more than a brief incident in the browns, yellows and scarlets of the open country. His idea was to give his mind a complete rest, to empty it of all those more abstruse aspects of reality with which the Berkeley Lecture was concerned and submit it merely to what the ordinary man and woman suppose to be real third-class carriage, posters, telegraph-poles, trees, haystacks, the voices of porters, the roar of a passing train and so on. Only when he had reached his destination and refreshed himself with a light lunch would he pounce upon his subject unawares and pin it down.
During the four-mile walk from the station he pursued the same wise plan, surrendering himself in turn to the astonishing pyrotechnics of nature in late September and the elaborate foolproof map which his friend had thoughtfully sketched for him. It guided him infallibly down long lanes, along field-paths, over stiles, and landed him at last without a hitch at the gate of his friend’s cottage. And with the first glance at its face of weathered brick and the little square of garden in front of it he knew it was the perfect place to work in. He was a little chilled, it is true, when he pushed open the door to discover a damp, stone-flagged passage, but thereupon Mrs. Baker appeared and showed him into a room on the right, an agreeable, low room with lunch ready on the table and another table, entirely bare, evidently waiting for him to spread his papers on it. Mrs. Baker herself was equally reassuring; a pleasant, dignified woman mercifully free from any inclination to waste time in unnecessary talk.
After lunch the Professor settled down to work and worked successfully for two hours, after which he took a stroll through he woods, returning at the prearranged hour for supper. And after supper, when Mrs. Baker had brought in the lighted lamp and gone off on her bicycle. He settled down to work again, pausing every hour or so to read over what he had written and smoke a cigarette.
It was already getting late when he heard, or rather awoke to the impression that he had heard, a tap, a brisk double tap, at the sitting-room door. But had he? Well, he would leave it to circumstances to answer the question. If there really had been a tap, if somebody was really there, no doubt the knock would be repeated. But nothing happened and Professor Candlemas was once more absorbed in his work when the tap came again, precisely the same brisk double tap he thought he had heard before. He didn’t shout “Come in!” for the sufficient reason that he didn’t want the intruder to come in. It is much easier to get rid of a caller if you interview him at a half-open door; and so to the door he went.
If he had been in any doubt that somebody had knocked it would have been a different matter. But to open a door in the full conviction that you will find somebody standing there half a yard from your nose and to find nobody—is, well, it’s a surprise. Unexpected vacancy is so noticeably vacant. And then the Professor did what he found, a moment later, to have been a very unwise thing. He spoke loudly into the vacancy. “Who is it? Who’s there?” Now to hear oneself put a question to nobody is curiously disconcerting. It surprisingly underlines one’s solitude. Not only that: the absence of reply suggests, absurdly enough, not that nobody is there, but that somebody is there, somebody who is not visible and, for reasons of his own, remaining silent. The Professor’s common sense assured him that these reactions from some primitive quarter of the mind are pure nonsense. Of course they are; but the assurance does little to lessen their reality. What soon did so, however, what in fact totally ousted them, was the unfinished sentence on his writing-table nagging at him to be completed, and with a gesture of impatience he returned to his chair and was soon reabsorbed. And looking back on the occurrence while he was smoking significance to one of those natural noises with which old houses register a change of temperature, a gust of wind, or the slow disintegrating processes of time.
It may have been half an hour later, it may have been an hour—literary composition annihilates the sense of time—when the tap was repeated, and this time there could be no doubt about it at all. The knock was a human knock. Somebody was there. He rose from his chair, took up the lamp and tiptoed across the room so as to take the practical joker unawares. Then he pulled the door widely and suddenly open and faced—the unbelievable. For there was not a sign of life in the passage: the passage, in fact, lighted from end to end by the lamp, was entirely empty. He stood there with the lamp in his hand, considerably bewildered, for he was a man divided against himself. His primitive self urged him to shut the door quickly and lock it; his rational self prompted an inspection of the house-door quickly, to make sure he had locked it after Mrs. Baker’s departure, and then a careful search of the house; while a third self, the artist in him, called to him for goodness sake to stop bothering about trifles and get back to the work that was steaming ahead so successfully.
Immobilised by this internal conflict he stood still listening. Then he spoke again. “Who’s there? What do you want?” Good heavens, what a voice! He was disgusted at the alarm so evident in his tone, and not only disgusted but disconcerted, actually alarmed to discover how alarmed he was; and rather to restore his self-respect than with any other object, he pulled himself together and spoke again, firmly, indeed commandingly, this time. “Who is it? Who’s there?”
There was a moment of total silence; then, from half-way down the empty passage, he was answered by a deep, leisurely voice. “No One!” it said. “No one whatsoever!”
Professor Candlemas heaved an indignant sigh. “Then why on earth couldn’t you have said so at first?” he exclaimed; and, much relieved, he shut the door, returned to his writing-table, set down the lamp, and resumed work.
And shortly after midnight the Berkeley Lecture was complete.
