Ferroll was an intellectual, and he prided himself on the fact. At Cambridge he had narrowly missed being a Senior Wrangler, and his principal study there had been Lunar Theory. But when he went down from Cambridge for good, being a man of some means, he travelled. For a year he was an honorary Attache at one of the big Embassies. He finally settled in London with a vague idea of some day writing a /magnum opus/ about the stupidity of mankind; for he had come to the conclusion by the age of twenty-five that all men were stupid, irreclaimably, irredeemably stupid; that everything was wrong; that all literature was really bad, all art much overrated, and all music tedious in the long run.
The years slipped by and he never began his /magnum opus/; he joined a literary club instead and discussed the current topic of the day.
Sometimes he wrote a short article; never in the daily Press, which he despised, nor in the reviews (for he never wrote anything as long as a magazine article), but in a literary weekly he would express in weary and polished phrases the unemphatic boredom or the mitigated approval with which the works of his fellow-men inspired him. He was the kind of man who had nothing in him you could positively dislike, but to whom you could not talk for five minutes without having a vague sensation of blight. Things seemed to shrivel up in his presence as though they had been touched by an insidious east wind, a subtle frost, a secret chill. He never praised anything, though he sometimes condescended to approve. The faint puffs of blame in which he more generally indulged were never sharp or heavy, but were like the smoke rings of a cigarette which a man indolently smoking blows from time to time up to the ceiling.
He lived in rooms in the Temple. They were comfortably, not luxuriously furnished; a great many French books--French was the only modern language worth reading he used to say--a few modern German etchings, a low Turkish divan, and some Egyptian antiquities, made up the furniture of his two sitting-rooms. Above all things he despised Greek art; it was, he said decadent. The Egyptians and the Germans were, in his opinion, the only people who knew anything about the plastic arts, whereas the only music he could endure was that of the modern French School. Over his chimney-piece there was a large German landscape in oils, called "Im Walde"; it represented a wood at twilight in the autumn, and if you looked at it carefully and for a long time you saw that the objects depicted were meant to be trees from which the leaves were falling; but if you looked at the picture carelessly and from a distance, it looked like a man-of-war on a rough sea, for which it was frequently taken, much to Ferrol's annoyance.
One day an artist friend of his presented him with a small Chinese god made of crystal; he put this on his chimney-piece. It was on the evening of the day on which he received this gift that he dined, together with a friend named Sledge who had travelled much in Eastern countries, at his club. After dinner they went to Ferrol's rooms to smoke and to talk. He wanted to show Sledge his antiquities, which consisted of three large Egyptian statuettes, a small green Egyptian god, and the Chinese idol which he had lately been given. Sledge, who was a middle-aged, bearded man, frank and unconventional, examined the antiquities with care, pronounced them to be genuine, and singled out for special praise the crystal god.
"Your things are very good," he said, "very good. But don't you really mind having all these things about you?"
"Why should I mind?" asked Ferrol.
"Well, you have travelled a good deal, haven't you?"
"Yes," said Ferrol, "I have travelled; I have been as far east as Nijni-Novgorod to see the Fair, and as far west as Lisbon."
"I suppose," said Sledge, "you were a long time in Greece and Italy?"
"No," said Ferrol, "I have never been to Greece. Greek art distresses me. All classical art is a mistake and a superstition."
"Talking of superstition," said Sledge, "you have never been to the Far East, have you?"
"No," Ferrol answered, "Egypt is Eastern enough for me, and cannot be bettered."
"Well," said Sledge, "I have been in the Far East. I have lived there many years. I am not a superstitious man; but there is one thing I would not do in any circumstances whatsoever, and that is to keep in my sitting-room the things you have got there."
"But why?" asked Ferrol.
"Well," said Sledge, "nearly all of them have come from the tombs of the dead, and some of them are gods. Such things may have attached to them heaven knows what spooks and spirits."
Ferrol shut his eyes and smiled, a faint, seraphic smile. "My dear boy," he said, "you forget. This is the Twentieth Century."
"And you," answered Sledge, "forget that the things you have here were made before the Twentieth Century. B.C."
"You don't seriously mean," said Ferrol, "that you attach any importance to these--" he hesitated.
"Children's stories?" suggested Sledge.
Ferrol nodded.
"I have lived long enough in the East," said Sledge, "to know that the sooner you learn to believe children's stories the better."
"I am afraid, then," said Ferrol, with civil tolerance, "that our points of view are too different for us to discuss the matter." And they talked of other things until late into the night.
Just as Sledge was leaving Ferrol's rooms and had said "Good-night," he paused by the chimney-piece, and, pointing to the tiny Ikon which was lying on it, asked: "What is that?"
"Oh, that's nothing," said Ferrol, "only a small Ikon I bought for twopence at the Fair of Nijni-Novgorod."
