A Virtue & Its Fruits

FOUR STUDIES IN LOYALTY (240 pp.)-- Christopher Sykes--Sloane ($3).

This little book, a worthy counterpoise to Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason (TIME, Dec. 8), is one of the pleasures of the season. In the guise of high-class reporting, that book was a brilliant shifting of floodlights around modern forms of an ancient depravity. In the guise of casual memoirs, Four Studies in Loyalty affirms the beauty of the contrary virtue--a virtue that may be as subtle and incalculable in its effects as a fresh scent on a spring morning.

The first--and best--portrait in the book is of the author's Uncle Christopher, a "swell" of the Victorian era, whose heroic snobbery found its reward--and its doom--in the friendship of that nearly perpetual Prince of Wales who eventually became Edward VII. The story of Sir Christopher Sykes resembles a tale by Max Beerbohm, with this difference: the writer's grave pleasure in his subject never gets out of hand into fantasy.

To the Prince. As the greatest fop and dandy of his age, Christopher Sykes was, in dress and person, a work of art--but a work of art peculiarly Victorian. "Where the fops of other ages took the butterfly as their model, he found inspiration in heavier matter. Dignity, majesty, and beautiful gloom, rather than brilliant skimming coloured parabolas, provide the keynote of his style." With his tall, elegant stoop and long golden beard, Christopher had the aspect of a late Roman emperor, and it was this aspect, apparently, that on one fateful occasion tempted the jovial prince to empty a glass of brandy on his head at dinner. Said Christopher, never batting an eye, "As Your Royal Highness pleases." The guests were convulsed. The prince had made a wonderful comic discovery and, "having enjoyed the great game of sousing Christopher once, he wanted to have it, in the touching way of infancy, 'again.' Well, royalty can command, and he had it again, he had it unnumbered times, he had it to the very end."

Not only did Edward demand of his friend such constant and lavish hospitality that his financial ruin was inevitable, but he made him the butt of more & more brutal practical jokes. Through it all, through ridicule, poverty, and obsolescence, Christopher remained a faithful paladin, faithful unto death, which he incurred through obeying a royal summons when he was old and ill.

To the Civilization. In another of his studies, Sykes writes of his friend and companion in Persia, Robert Byron, a gifted Orientalist. At Oxford in the mid-20s he was a leader in the "Oxford Aesthetes," a set accurately parodied in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. But his serious ambition was to understand the entire world into which he had been born. A fair and fearless little man, in the course of a dozen years he lived in every quarter of the world. His loyalty, at first given to his own time, was finally given to his civilization. He died at sea in World War II.

To Their Fellow Men. The final piece in this book is a study of the loyalty of an entire French village in the Vosges Mountains. In August 1944 the author, an intelligence officer with a British parachute detachment, dropped into the pine forests surrounding the village. The Germans knew that the hills held marauding Maquis and parachutists, but they never knew how pitifully few there were. Every man in the village could have told them. Accordingly, the Gestapo rounded up all the men in the village--210--and sent them to concentration camps, where 140 of them perished. Not one betrayed the men in the hills.

Later, when Sykes inquired how this could have come about, he was told that the resistance had been organized by the parish priest. He went to the priest. The priest told him that in the early months of the war he had been with a French unit evacuated from Dunkirk. At a small English seaside hotel, under continual bombing, he had been astonished at the behavior of the two women hotelkeepers, who kept up their life as if it were a holiday season in peace. "I recognized in a flash," said the French priest, "we must be formidable too, and that it was possible--above all, that it was possible."

Says Christopher Sykes: "It can be said, without any exaggeration at all, that those two women set in motion the most formidable chain of events. They caused panic to the enemies of France in a whole province . . . they raised an army in the defense of all that makes human life honourable and endurable, and they inspired a loyalty and love which, with the debasement of the term 'Charity,' is hard to describe; we have now no fine enough word to depict such virtue."

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